He ties a piece of yellow tape around a fallen twig and stabs the twig into the ground near the thatch of hair. Then continues on.
In another fifteen or twenty yards he comes across a black shoe with a silver buckle. Poking from the black shoe is a white sock with a small pink bow sewn to it. The white sock has a hole eaten through it, and at the edges of the hole what might be black blood. Perhaps some insect ate the bloody part of the sock away. Diego picks up the shoe. Within it is a foot. The remains of a foot: nothing but dry bone, the rest long ago eaten by flies and beetles and such. He can easily hold the shoe in the palm of his hand without either end of it touching air. The girl it belonged to could not have been older than two. The girl it belonged to was smaller than the girl or boy whose arm is even now lying bodiless in Diego’s police cruiser.
There is more than one body out here. He is sure of it.
He sets the shoe back down and ties yellow tape around a nearby rock.
And continues walking.
A hundred yards into the woods he comes across a piece of tattered, rotting fabric.
And twenty yards beyond that, disturbed ground. The floor of the woods has been uniformly covered in a blanket of decomposing leaves from which small plants are growing-weeds, and mushrooms like boils, and young trees-but here the ground is disturbed, the leaves clawed aside, and it is here that he-
‘Oh, fuck.’
It is impossible to tell how many bodies are here, as only parts of them have been uncovered. An arm jutting from the soil here. A foot there. A scrap of yellow fabric. One human eye socket staring out of a white skull, all the soft parts long destroyed by time.
He walks to a tree and leans against it. He stares down at the ground. The ground spins.
After a moment he begins to cordon off the area. It takes him only a minute or two, and when he’s done he starts making his way back out to the street, following the yellow flags he left on his way to this bone-scattered nightmare. The boys from the sheriff’s department will be arriving soon, and he’ll have to lead them to the crime scene.
As he walks he pulls his cell phone from his pocket and dials Ian.
Ian pulls the headset off and gets to his feet. He picks up his cup of cold coffee and takes a swallow, just to wet his suddenly dry mouth. He walks out to the police station proper.
Chief Davis is sitting with the phone to his ear, saying, ‘Well, goddamn it, just let her do it then. I don’t know why you call and ask if you don’t care. All right. Goddamn it. All right. I love you too.’ He hangs up.
‘Chief.’
‘Uh?’
‘We got a situation, maybe related to my daughter.’
Chief Davis takes off his glasses, cleans them with a Kleenex, and sets them back onto his narrow nose, blinking at Ian.
‘What’s the situation?’
‘Couple corpses in the woods.’
‘No shit?’
‘None.’
‘So Diego found the owner of the arm?’
‘Looks like. Plus more.’
‘And it might be related to your daughter?’
‘Little girls.’
‘Diego didn’t say one of them might be,’ he licks his lips, ‘might, uh, be your. .’ Chief Davis lets it trail off and finds a thread on his shirtsleeve that needs to be pulled.
‘He doesn’t think so.’
‘He say why?’
‘There’s nothing left but bones and a little bit of hair and fabric.’
‘But little girls?’
Ian nods.
‘Sheriff ’s boys on the way, yeah?’
‘They are. Might even be there. Nance was in town to go over the case with Finch.’
‘I should be heading down too. And you wanna go?’
‘There might be something there to lead us to Maggie.’
‘All right,’ Davis says, getting to his feet. ‘We’ll get Thompson on the phones. You wanna ride with me or take your own car?’
Ian pulls his Mustang to a stop on the side of the road. All he can think is that this might bring him one step closer to finding his daughter. He knows that girls’ bodies were found, two at least, and he knows that’s sad. But he doesn’t feel anything like sadness right now. He doesn’t even feel anything that might live on the same street as sadness. Each body was once someone’s daughter but none of them is his daughter. His daughter is alive while they are dead. His daughter is alive and he will find her and bring her home safe. If these bodies help to make that happen, then-well, he denies the fleeting thought that these deaths were then worth it. He tries to deny that thought. But even as he shoves it into the darkest corner of his mind, out of the light of conscious thought where he might be shamed by its ugliness, his heart believes it. Every beat speaks the truth of it.
A hundred bodies sacrificed would be worth it, a thousand, if in the end he got his daughter back.
As he and Chief Davis step from their vehicles Ian looks at the line of cars. There are two from the sheriff’s department here already. They’re parked behind Diego’s car, and behind them is Chief Davis’s car, behind which Ian’s car is parked. Deputy Kurt Oliver, who works out of the Bulls Mouth office, sits on the hood of one of the county vehicles. His eyes are closed and his head is tilted toward the afternoon sun.
Chief Davis says, ‘Detective already here?’
Oliver opens his eyes and turns to look at them lazily. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘John Nance, down from Mencken-and Bill Finch is here too.’
‘Anyone else?’
He shakes his head. ‘Sheriff’s on his way.’
‘Coroner?’
‘Not here yet.’
Chief Davis nods. ‘Where they all at?’
Oliver nods toward the line of trees. ‘Follow the trail of yellow tape. It’ll lead to the bodies.’
A dog barks from the back seat of Diego’s cruiser.
Chief Davis puts a hand on Ian’s shoulder. ‘Let’s see what we got,’ he says, guiding Ian toward the woods.
‘Hey, Oliver,’ Ian says, ‘why don’t you drive that dog up to Pastor Warden’s place before this heat kills it?’
‘What for?’
‘I just said, so this fucking heat don’t kill it.’
‘Why don’t you do it?’
‘Because I’m going to the crime scene. You’re sitting here useless. For fuck’s sake, Oliver, get your head out of your ass and drive the goddamn dog up-’
‘Pastor Warden’ll give you ten bucks if you take that dog to him.’
Deputy Oliver slides off the hood of his car. ‘No shit?’
Davis nods.
‘Well why the fuck didn’t you say so?’
A few minutes later Ian and Chief Davis arrive on the scene. One of the sheriff’s detectives, John Nance, has cleared out a large hole, or a few small ones, in which the bones from three bodies are piled. Three female bodies, if the rags hanging on them is any indication. And young. The one that still has hair, just a snatch of it hanging from the bone, has blond hair. They are all in decomposing dresses.
‘Not waiting for the coroner or forensics?’ Chief Davis says.
‘I’m not disturbing nothing. The insects took care of most of this a long time ago. Forensics guys can play with hair and teeth and bloodstains. . if they ain’t too badly degraded.’
‘Were they buried all at the same time?’ Ian says.
Nance looks over to him. ‘That’s outside my expertise, but I’d say no.’
Ian nods.
Nance is in his late forties or early fifties, with gray hair and a face like melted wax. When he’s standing he looks like pulled taffy sagging under its own weight, shoulders slumped, arms hanging down, cheeks droopy. But he is not standing. He’s sitting on his haunches over a row of skeletons and piles of seemingly random belongings: shoes, clothes, toys. The belongings were once in bags, but two of the bags have disintegrated, leaving behind unrecognizable fragments. Nance pulls a dirt-covered hair brush from a pile beside the oldest corpse and lays it down on a sheet of plastic he or Finch spread across the ground to his left. He sets it next to other items he’s already pulled from the earth: a bracelet, a pair of empty shoes, a bunch of small dresses, a one-eyed doll.