She rewarded me with soft laughter. “Precisely. I was told that any dentist doing this kind of work would have his patient on a callback list for the next six to twelve months. So if you’re lucky, you’ll get your identification by asking all those dentists to check not their patient files but their appointment books.”
A sudden doubt checked my own pleasure at hearing this. “But do we know how long the body’s been lying around? If it’s been years, the appointment book won’t be much good.”
“Inactive patient files get culled every two years or so, but I was told most dentists keep their appointment books. I wish I could tell you how long these bones have been exposed, and more about the victim in general, but it’s too early yet. The information I just gave you was readily available, and I wanted to pass it along quickly. Anything else will take more time, I’m afraid, depending on what tests the crime lab conducts. I can’t tell you anything definitive about sex, age, or racial origin yet, and I probably never will be able to specify time of death to your liking.”
“That’s all right. I understand. And I appreciate the tip. We’ve been thawing the ground where we found those skull fragments. With any luck, we should be able to send you some more pieces soon.”
“Everything helps, Lieutenant. Let me know how you fare.”
I thanked her again and hung up, gesturing to Harriet through the open door. “Find Ron. I’ve got a telephone canvass I need him to organize.”
North Adams, Massachusetts, lies just below Vermont’s southwestern corner. There are several ways of approaching it from Brattleboro, all of them taking a little over an hour, but my favorite-and the one I chose a few hours after my conversation with Beverly Hillstrom-is due west from Greenfield along Route 2, offering a single, spectacular view of North Adams from the crest of the Hoosac mountain range.
It had once been a flourishing factory town, of textiles I supposed, although I’d never bothered to find out. It lay sprawled at the foot of the mountains, along the winding Hoosic River, like a scattering of toy blocks thrown from the observation platform I always stopped at to appreciate the scenery.
Not that it was an attractive site, even cloaked in a mantle of sun-bleached snow. A jumble of ancient, stained, largely abandoned industrial, brick-clad monsters, enormous even from this distance, the image projected was less aesthetic than one of lasting endurance-a statement of civilization’s stubborn willfulness to make its footprints last beyond reason.
I stood on the wooden deck alongside a decrepit souvenir shop, both of which were cantilevered over the edge of the mountain’s top, and was once again struck by North Adams’s sheer determination. Long deserted by whatever needs had created it in the first place, saddling a road leading to nowhere very important, the place nevertheless hung on, battered and weary, perpetually hopeful. Rumor had it-as rumors often do-that “things were improving.” I hoped they were, if only for the faith that had been expended on their behalf.
Since he’d been the one to locate the dentist we were about to visit, Ron Klesczewski was keeping me company. He had saved my life once, several years back, and had stood his ground next to me in a face-to-face shoot-out last year. Yet he remained an enigmatic mixture of timidity and ambition, courage and wariness, intelligence and naïveté. I was becoming used to the idea that while he always looked like he wouldn’t make it to the end of the week, he’d probably outlast us all.
The dentist’s office was located a few blocks off the main avenue, in a neighborhood-depending on whether the rumors were correct or not-that was either headed for a turnaround or facing a grim end. It had been the only practice we’d found where a patient had received a tin cap and yet had never returned for the permanent replacement. According to the receptionist Ron had spoken with, the patient’s name had been Shawna Davis, age eighteen, and the tin cap visit had been the only time she’d been in.
We parked next to two other cars in a hand-shoveled lot and stumbled over ridges of icy debris toward a one-story, flat-roofed, cement building with spidery cracks running along its walls. Inside, the mood was brightened a bit by gentle canned music and the lingering odor of sweet mouthwash. The waiting room was forlornly empty, however, and the hopeful expression of the woman beaming at us from behind a narrow counter wilted as we showed her our identifications.
“You must be the people I spoke to on the phone,” she said, her smile lingering as an afterthought. The nameplate on her white cardigan read Alice.
“Yes,” Ron admitted. “We’re here about Shawna Davis.”
“Right.” Alice rose from her seat and crossed to the back of her small work area, returning with a thick book. “I checked our patient files to see if she was still there, but we must have dumped her.” She sat back down and looked at us apologetically. “We do that pretty regularly. We don’t have room to keep them all.”
Ron smiled back. “We understand. Were you able to talk to the dentist, to see if he remembered her?”
“I did, but he drew a total blank. He remembered the aluminum cap-they’re pretty rare-but he told me he no longer knew if the person he’d put it in was a boy or a girl. You can ask him yourself if you want, but he’s going to be tied up for another thirty minutes probably.” She dropped her voice conspiratorially. “I wouldn’t recommend it anyway. Dr. Williams doesn’t have much of a memory.”
I motioned toward the thick book. “That the appointment calendar?”
She looked down at it as if it had snuck up on her. “Oh, right.” She flipped it open to the correct page, turned it around so we could read its contents, and tapped an entry with her crimson fingernail. “That’s her-Davis, S.-that’s when she came for the cap.”
She placed a Post-it note on the page to mark it, spun the book back around, and reopened it at a later page. “And here’s where the callback appointment shows up. There’s another one a week later, but then we gave up.” She handed the book over to us so we could study both pages at leisure.
As Ron returned to the first entry, I asked, “Do you have any memory of her?”
Alice made a face. “Kind of. I’ve been trying to remember ever since you called, but you know, it’s hard. We see a lot of one-timers, and I guess she just didn’t stand out much.”
I glanced over Ron’s shoulder. “What’s the date?” I asked him softly.
He ran his finger along the line opposite Davis’s name. November, year before last-about fourteen months ago.” He flipped to the next page mark. “And the callback was in May of last year, six months later.”
“You have an address on her, maybe in your billing records?”
She sat back, looking embarrassed. “We might, but with records going that far back, Dr. Williams keeps them in storage. That means they’re in his attic at home. We’re told to say ‘storage.’ Sounds better.”
“You have a phone book?” I asked her.
“Sure.” She handed me a medium-sized directory for North Adams and surrounding towns.
Ron read off the number on the callback sheet as I scanned all the entries under “Davis.” I finally found a match, predictably near the bottom, next to “Wilma.” The address was local.
“Know where this is?” I asked Alice, showing her the listing. Her face soured. “I should. It took me years to get out of that neighborhood.”
Fifteen minutes later, I was sympathizing with Alice’s appraisal of her old home ground. The street we were on looked ready to break off from the rest of the town and drift away into oblivion. It was narrow, hemmed in by snowbanks piled between haphazardly abandoned vehicles, and lined with serried ranks of sagging, gray, almost collapsing wooden buildings-remnants of worker housing dating back a hundred years. The few porches still intact were piled deep with snow-covered firewood, the windows were either curtainless, too filthy to see through, or fully boarded over. Occasional wisps of smoke trickling up from a few metal stove pipes were the sole signs of life.