"You don't sound very convinced."
He held a pair of birch saplings aside and let her past. "We don't have any outstanding missing persons that might support that theory. Lyle got records back from the whole county. There's nothing but the usual assortment of troubled teens and deadbeat dads skipping out on child support."
"There are people who can disappear without setting off any alarms. A homeless old or mentally ill person. Someone who's easy pickings for a predator."
"Don't go there."
"Go where?" She stepped wrong and skidded in the loose, dry pine needles. He caught her arm and steadied her.
"We do not have a predatory killer in Washington County. Don't even start thinking it."
"Well, it would certainly explain-"
"No. It wouldn't." He heard a noise. Faint. Far away. Shouting? "Did you hear that?"
She stopped beside a barrel-trunked oak. Cocked her head. When the radio at his belt squawked, it startled them both. He unhooked the mic.
"Van Alstyne here," he said. "Go ahead."
"Huggins here," the voice said. "We found him."
"Oh, thank God," Clare said. "Thank God."
Russ found the heat and humidity and unwelcome memories were suddenly much less oppressive. "That's good news," he said. "Where was he?"
"Looks like he tried to climb a maple and got stuck in the crotch. He was sittin' in there suckin' his thumb when the dog caught his scent. We're taking him back to the Muster Field now."
"Thank your dog handler for us. She's just made a lot of people real happy."
"Roger that. Over."
Russ grinned at Clare. "Damn, I like a happy ending for a change."
"Me, too."
He rehooked the mic. "Okay, now let's go deal with the unhappy ending."
"We're not far," she said. "Once you're in sight, do you mind if I head back to the field?"
His reply was cut off when his radio squawked again. He unhooked the mic a second time. "Van Alstyne here. Go ahead."
"Chief? This is Trooper McLaren." The state police K-9 officer who had joined the search. "We've got a body here. Over."
"Thanks, McLaren, I know. Isn't one of my officers already there? With the pathologist?" Belatedly, he added, "Over."
"No, Chief. We were briefed about the body the initial searchers found. This is something my dog's just dug out of the ground. It's a second dead guy. Over."
THE SEASON AFTER PENTECOST-ORDINARY TIME
May and June
I
Monday. Memorial Day. Everybody in the United States was going to be hanging out and having a good time-except the sworn officers of the Millers Kill Police Department. Maybe this is why my social life sucks, Kevin thought, taking his seat for the morning briefing. At least it wasn't sucking alone. Everybody was on today, all shifts: the part-time guys and the volunteer fire traffic wardens, too. Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day-they were always big.
But they didn't always arrive with three unidentified homicide victims.
"The two discovered yesterday were both killed in the same way as John Doe number one." The chief, sitting in his usual spot atop the table, was grubby and crumpled around the edges. He, MacAuley, Hadley Knox, and Eric McCrea had been up half the night, working the scenes with the state CSI techs. "Single tap at the back of the head with a small-caliber weapon, probably a full jacket. Classic execution style."
"Scheeler's report noted there wasn't any signs the first John Doe'd been restrained," MacAuley pointed out. "If he'd been taken out to the woods for an execution, you'd think whoever did it woulda trussed him up beforehand." He was standing at the whiteboard, summarizing the briefing.
The chief paused. "Taken by surprise, then. Wham, bam, thank-youma'am."
"So what are we looking at?" Paul Urquhart said from the back of the room. "Gangland slaying? Organized crime? If we had something like that moving into our area, we'da noticed it before this."
The chief held up his hands. "Let's go through what we know step-by-step." He slid off the table and turned to the bulletin board, almost covered with photos of John Does one, two, and three, environmental placing shots, and the downstate rap sheets Kevin had looked at Friday night. "John Doe one."
"Juan Doe," Urquhart muttered.
"Male Hispanic aged between twenty-one and twenty-eight. Killed sometime mid-April. John Doe two. Male, possibly Caribbean or African-American, based on hair fragments-"
"DeWan Doe." Urquhart sniggered.
The chief stopped. "You got something you want to share, Paul?" Urquhart shook his head. The chief gave him a long look before continuing. "Age between twenty-one and twenty-eight. Killed sometime last year in the late fall or early winter. John Doe three: male, age between twenty-one and twenty-eight. Killed more than a year ago."
"The ME any more specific than that?" MacAuley asked.
"He had some fillings. Doc Scheeler's going to get a dentist to try to date the amalgam. We probably won't have anything until tomorrow at the earliest."
The chief crossed to the laminated township map that covered half the other wall. "Location of the bodies," he said. "John Does three and two were found roughly a mile north-northwest of the old Muster Field off Route seventeen in Cossayuharie." He marked a three and a two with a dry-erase marker. "They were slightly less than three-quarters of a mile away from each other"-he drew a broken line that slanted drunkenly northwest from the pale green rectangle representing the Muster Field-"buried along a natural flint formation that runs along this line and then drops off steeply into the valley below."
"Somebody walked in."
Kevin hadn't realized he said it aloud until the chief nodded. "Somebody walked in."
"And went as far as he could go along fairly level terrain," MacAuley added.
"Who owns that land?" Eric McCrea asked.
The chief looked at Noble Entwhistle. Noble was no Sherlock Holmes, but he gave you better results than Google if you needed a name or date for something that happened in Millers Kill. "The town," he said. "It used to belong to Shep Ogilvie, but they took it for unpaid taxes back in 'eighty-seven, when his dairy went under."
"Easy access from the highway," McCrea said. "If there's no snow, you can drive a car almost all the way back to the tree line on that field."