“Bo? Here, Bo?”
The boy had heard something and looked around. Just a half-note yelp. No more. He went to the shack and looked inside, thinking the animal had passed through the small swing flap. “Bo?”
Bo. That was the last syllable the boy uttered.
Billy slapped the chloroform-soaked towel against the kid’s face from behind, raising the squirming body against his chest. He struggled with surprising vigor, whimpering into the towel, but the thick hand clamped the small face like an iron mask, forcing the pockets of his lungs to swell with the vapors. To prevent him from heeling his genitals, Billy pressed against the wall, locking his leg around the boy’s shins.
The boy struggled and whimpered for maybe half a minute. Then it was over. A final twitch, and Travis Valentine’s young-colt strength gave out. Billy lowered him to the floor as limp as a rag doll.
For a brief moment, Billy studied his prey. The kid was actually good-looking, with an oval face and short chin, small pug nose, and feathery brown eyebrows, a band of freckles across his nose, his shiny hair longer than was fashionable. His eyes were slitted open, and Billy could see the hazel irises. If he were a girl he’d be beautiful.
Enough of this, thought Billy. He had to get moving before the mother rang her bell. When the kid wouldn’t come, she’d clang some more. And when he still didn’t respond, she’d be down.
Billy unzipped a black body bag made of the same scent-free material as his suit, then took off the kid’s shoes and laid him in it, then zipped it. He grabbed the butterfly net and went back down to the canal. The place was dead—not a sound except for the bugs and bats chittering in the darkening skies. He went back to the shack, and when he was certain that the woods were clear, he moved outside and with his gloved hands picked up the dog and scraps of brain matter and dumped it all and the rabbit into another bag. He sprayed the ground with coon urine from the aerosol can to deflect search-party dogs.
When he finished, he hauled the bags back into the woods maybe two hundred yards then turned west and headed to where yesterday he had dug the four-foot-deep hole, now covered over with brush. He laid down his bundles and uncovered the hole. It was deep enough and already limed. He dropped in the remains, filled the hole with dirt again, sprayed more coon urine, and then returned the brush.
But the exertion in the suit nearly made him faint. He trudged his way to the next clearing in the trees then crossed up and over the rise that would take him back to Little Wiggins Canal Road and to the cutoff in the woods where the van waited with the Igloo cooler full of ice and the six bottles of Coors Lite.
Billy thought about the beer then about the story in tomorrow’s local papers: How little six-year-old Travis Valentine of Little Wiggins Canal Road and his dog Bo were missing, and how the authorities speculated that the boy had gotten lost in the woods. And in a few days people would begin to fear that the boy and his dog had been snatched by alligators because it was nesting season and males are very protective by nature. And then it would come out how some large bulls reaching upward of eleven feet had been spotted in canals not too far from here. Wildlife officers would comment that although gators generally fear humans, some local animals had lost their timidity because residents had been feeding them even though that was against the law, and that most gator attacks occurred around dusk. And a spokesman from the Florida Game and Fish Commission would say something about how the boy’s death should not create a panic, that there had been only eleven confirmed deaths by alligator in the last twenty years, and that death by drowning and bee sting were more common. While that wouldn’t be much comfort to Mrs. Valentine, the commission just wanted to put things in perspective. And the local sheriffs office would solemnly promise that his men would hunt and kill the animal, and that the Game Commission would dissect it to ensure it was the one that got the Valentine boy.
And the distraught mother would report how there had been no screaming or barking or sounds of thrashing water. And how Travis would never disobey her and go near the water because he had more sense than that. He knew about gators, and even though they had almost never been spotted in the vicinity, she had schooled him right. Besides, he had Bo who would detect a gator if it were nearby.
But the authorities would express bafflement that even with a party of police, forest rangers, and a couple dozen backcountry volunteers with dogs, not a trace had been found of young Travis or his mutt—just a butterfly net and a solitary sneaker at the edge of the canal, leading them to rule out foul play, mountain lions, and bears, leaving them with the sad conclusion that both the dog and the boy had been snatched by alligators, the dog probably first—pulled right off the shore without a sound—then, when he went to help, another animal had burst from the depths and pulled in Travis, too.
No bloody clothes, no ravished bodies, nothing but a single sneaker and a butterfly net.
Like he had just up and disappeared snick snick.
7
To Greg’s mind, the groomed piney acreage surrounding the medical examiner’s office was an overstated apology for the interior grimness.
One of the three satellite offices of the Boston headquarters, the Pocasset unit occupied the dark concrete basement of Barnstable County Hospital, a former chronic care facility. Joe Steiner’s office was off a labyrinthine hallway, which housed autopsy rooms, a morgue, and storage facilities filled with cadavers and body parts in plastic containers. Greg parked next to some white ME vans.
He hated the place, for it was where Lindsay had been brought that night two years ago. As he walked down the hall, he could still recall the soupy unreality of moving past these walls and doors to identify her body, knowing that she was dead, while at the same time a tiny part of his brain clung to a candle flicker of hope that it was another woman they had pulled out of the wreckage.
It had been a clear, cool starry April night—the kind that made you aware of infinity, and just how incidental human life is. He had been at home half-watching a ball game and trying to stay awake until Lindsay returned. She was late because one of the girls at Genevieve Bratton had tried to kill herself, and Lindsay was most of the crisis-management team. Over the years, she had seen girls whose young lives were full of horrors so awful that she had stopped talking about them. And many of those lives she had helped turn around. Her colleagues spoke glowingly of her compassion and skills in working with troubled kids. At a fund-raising gala three years ago, she was commended for her work. A graduate who had come into the school at age fourteen—a suicidal victim of repeated sexual abuse, an alcoholic, and a drug addict with a rap sheet a yard long—personally thanked Lindsay for setting her on a path of recovery that had led to a college degree, a successful career, and a sense of self-esteem. Greg had tears of pride in his eyes as the. audience gave Lindsay a standing ovation.
Greg moved down the corridor toward Joe Steiner’s office, and he could still feel the horrid disbelief that clutched him as he walked into Room 55 two years ago to identify her body—how Joe had met him in the hall surrounded by troopers and other officers, including T.J. Gelford. How their faces appeared like a funeral frieze.
Today Joe Steiner was on his phone at his desk, the sports section of The Boston Herald spread open, and a cigarette burning in an ashtray beside an open bag of Cape Cod dark russet potato chips. An air conditioner in a high window groaned against the sultry ocean air. Through the plastic divider was the autopsy room, occupied mostly by a single white porcelain cadaver table under lights and a butcher’s scale.