“The scat’s a little old, so it wouldn’t’ve been recently, but it’s a good guess.”
I noticed Tyler nodding, a pleased look on his face. This was turning into his kind of investigation.
“You said they avoid open country,” I said. “Does that mean we need to search the woods for where this one might’ve gone?”
Evans rose to her feet, steadying herself by placing her hand on J.P.’s shoulder. “Yes, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find. Look for a large, craggy, crevice-filled old tree-probably just a few hundred feet from here. You may not find much, though. Fishers aren’t very big. On the other hand, they aren’t bone-gnawers, either. This one would’ve gone for whatever meat was still attached to a smaller fragment. Find out where he had his meal, and I think you’ll find the bone it was attached to.”
I glanced up at the sky. The fading light was sufficiently offset by the quickly vanishing storm clouds. “We’ve got maybe an hour and a half before it gets too dark,” I told the others. “Let’s see if we can find the right tree.”
It took barely half that time. Sammie pulled the entire team together and strung them out in a line facing the woods, whose dark latticework of intertwining bare branches was offset by a bright frosting of snow.
Entering the forest was like infiltrating a dense and eccentric crystalline structure whose very size and darkness muffled and absorbed our movements. The sensation forced my thoughts back to the body lying under the cold, impersonal snow, lost and forgotten.
There were a couple of false starts-trees whose appearance could have fit Christine Evans’s description. But when we found the real thing, there were no doubts. Barging through a tight cluster of skinny saplings, our arms crossed before our faces for protection, several of us stumbled into a clearing dominated by a crippled monster of a beech tree. Gnarled, bent, lightning-shattered, but determinedly alive, it half-lay across the land like a wounded elephant, holding itself up on a tripod of enormous branches, each the thickness of a normal full-grown tree.
“Jesus,” Sammie murmured in awe.
There was a moment’s stunned silence as we absorbed the majesty of the scene and were touched by the Herculean effort this tree had made to survive.
“Wow,” Christine added. “I’ve got to get some kids out to see this.”
“This what you were after?” I asked her.
But she was already looking for ways to ascend the staggered trunk into the sprouting of branches high overhead. Sammie summoned the others on the radio, and soon Evans, Sammie and I were surrounded like circus acrobats by a semicircle of small, upturned faces. The three of us had split up at the first major junction, to pursue our own separate tangle of twisting branches, looking for any hole, crevice, or half-rotted crack, all the while keenly aware of the tree’s slippery surface and the long drop to the ground.
It was because of this latter distraction that I almost missed what I was after, only returning to a narrow split in the wood beneath me because I thought I’d seen a glimmer, as from the reflection of a single cat’s eye.
I straddled the thick branch nervously, wondering what I’d seen-and wary of something suddenly bursting out of the hole. Cautiously, I played my light down into the darkness, leaning forward only as I became convinced that what I’d found was safely uninhabited.
The crack I was poised over opened onto a large rotted-out cavity beyond. Playing the light around inside, I saw the debris of steady animal use-acorn hats, bits of vegetation, clumps of matter I couldn’t identify, and the by now familiar pallor of a neatly cleaned piece of jawbone. But the bone hadn’t been the glimmer that had caught my eye-embedded within it, as bright as an ember, was a single gold tooth.
This discovery suddenly personalized the remains we had found, and settled like a weight in my chest. From the moment I’d seen that huge, empty, ominous frozen field, I’d been fending off a sense of foreboding. For despite my hopeful words to Norah Fletcher, it had not struck me as a reasonable spot for some old vagrant to choose as his final resting place. It had reeked of a dumping ground. Now, for no particularly rational reason, this tooth, in all its jaunty clarity, struck me like the confirmation of a homicide.
Gail Zigman, my best friend and companion for many years, and my housemate for the past ten months, was the newly anointed legal clerk for the Windham County State’s Attorney’s office. It was in that capacity that she was watching me quizzically from across her boss’s conference table, a pen poised over the pad before her.
It was the State’s Attorney, however, who’d asked the question. “Are you going to be able to keep a lid on this until you have more to go on?”
I shook my head. “The paper’s already called us, and Ted McDonald waylaid the chief during a break at a meeting he was attending at the high school. So it’s already gotten out. We’re going to have to give them some explanation.”
Ted McDonald was the corpulent, fast-moving news director of the town’s single radio station-WBRT-a home-grown good ol’ boy whose laid-back manner belied a surgical ability to extract information.
Jack Derby, newly elected barely a year ago, betrayed a forgivable concern. “How’re you going to present it?”
“I don’t have too many options-”
I was interrupted by a knock on the door. Chief of Police Tony Brandt stepped into the room. He took a chair by the door, keeping the three of us at arm’s length. From the tone of his voice, I could tell it hadn’t been one of his better days, with or without Ted McDonald. “I apologize for being late. I was getting an update from Sammie Martens, who was nice enough to stick around and let me know what the hell was going on.”
Sammie had already called ahead to warn us. “Sorry, Tony,” I said. “To be honest, there wasn’t much to talk about. That’s why we didn’t drag you out of your meeting.”
He took the apology without comment. “So I gathered. I take it McDonald picked this up on the scanner?”
“I guess,” I answered. “I was just saying I didn’t see any harm in giving them the straight poop-maybe someone’ll come forward with a missing person report.”
“We’ve got nothing at all so far?” Brandt persisted.
“I sent the hair, the bone fragments, and the piece of jaw with the gold tooth up to the crime lab to see what they can find. We’re guessing it’s somebody young. Tyler looked at the hair under his microscope and detected traces of purple dye, so maybe it was a punker, male or female. Also, the jaw included three other teeth, but no wisdom tooth-he said it hadn’t erupted yet-another possible sign of someone younger. ’Course, if you want to play a worst-case scenario, there’s nothing to say all three samples don’t come from different bodies.”
“Swell,” Derby murmured.
“That’s not what you’re going to tell the press, are you?” asked Gail. For years, she had been a selectman in this town, before a midlife reevaluation-precipitated by a traumatic sexual assault-had led her to revive a twenty-year-old, never-used law degree. That background made her as politically savvy as anyone I knew, a fact Jack Derby hadn’t missed from the moment she’d applied for the six-month clerkship.
I shook my head. “No, no. I’ll play it straight. But I have a bad feeling about this. The gold tooth will probably lead to a dentist, and the X-rays to an identity, but I doubt it’ll end in a whimper. Young people don’t generally wind up dead in a field without some help.”
“Sammie said there was a design on the tooth,” Tony commented.
“Yeah,” I answered slowly. “That is something I’m going to leave out, but I hope it’ll make finding the identity easier.” I leaned far over the table and borrowed Gail’s pad, tearing a back page out of it before giving it back.
“The tooth I found in the tree is the first bicuspid on the right side of the maxilla, or upper jaw, according to Evans. That’s the one right beside the canine, heading back toward the molars. And the gold isn’t a filling. It’s a colored aluminum cap, covering the whole tooth. The design faces outward, it’s been crudely scratched onto the cap’s surface, like with a knife point or something sharp, and it looks kind of like this.”