“It’s not?” Stan asked. “We have a source that said it is, too.”
I rubbed my forehead tiredly. “They’re jumping to conclusions. We have a sample of hair recovered from an old, abandoned bird nest and a piece of upper jaw. Most of it’s probably human-Waterbury’s checking that out-but we don’t know who they belong to, how long they’ve been lying around, or how they got there to start with. So far, there is absolutely no evidence of foul play.”
Both men stopped scribbling in the pads they’d each produced. “Jesus, Joe,” Ted said first, perhaps stung at the suggestion that he’d hyped up the story. “Isn’t it a little unlikely someone went all the way up there to die of natural causes?”
“Maybe,” I agreed, “but right now, that’s as good a scenario as any. There have been no reports of missing persons, or of anything odd going on in the neighborhood, and nothing to indicate violence.”
“You going to tear up that field?” Katz asked.
“We have no idea where the rest of the body might be, or even if there is a rest. It might’ve been taken apart by animals and carried into half a hundred burrows and dens by now. We found the jaw fragment in an old tree, ten feet off the ground. We’re going to see what we can find out first by checking with other New England departments and NCIC, and then circulating X-rays of the teeth to all surrounding dentists. The state police crime lab and the ME are working to see what they can get from the little we sent them, and once they do, we’ll put that into the system as well. It’s a much more effective approach than tearing around with a bunch of snow shovels.”
Katz looked up from his notes. “How did you find out about this in the first place?”
“An observant, helpful citizen,” I answered blandly.
“Who shall remain nameless,” he murmured with a smirk.
“Correct. Off the record?”
They both nodded.
“It was a child. She found the hair in a bird nest near her home-thought we’d be interested.”
“Enterprising,” Ted said. “Wish I could talk to her.”
“I don’t doubt it, but she’s pretty shy, and a little shook up right now-that’s why we’re keeping her under wraps, okay?”
They both nodded again. I didn’t doubt they’d honor the request.
“You said you found the jaw in a tree,” Katz picked up. “How’d you know to look there?”
“We brought in a naturalist as a consultant. She gave us pointers on where scavengers might take their… What they found.”
Katz smiled at the hesitation. “And she doesn’t have a name either.”
“She might,” I conceded. “I’ll call and ask her tomorrow if she wants to be identified.”
“What about the bones? What were they? Arms, legs…?”
“Probably human skull fragments, found in a doghouse, which is being thawed right now so we can dig under it to check for more. A generalized canvass will continue tomorrow at first light, to see if we can find anything else.”
“I love it,” Katz barely whispered, bent over his pad, his need for income-stimulating stories rising to the surface.
“Can you give us a vague idea of what you’ve got? Male, female, old, young?” Ted asked, sounding a little exasperated, but whether with me or his colleague I couldn’t tell.
Again I shook my head, instinctively hedging. “We can’t determine that in-house. We’re hoping the crime lab can tell us.”
Katz was looking skeptical again. “You don’t have anything on your books that might fit this? I thought you guys were on the computer to each other all the time, exchanging information.”
“We are, but not everybody who disappears goes missing. This might’ve been a homeless person, or a runaway from some town that’s not on the network, or someone from a family that doesn’t give a damn. It’s not a flawless system.”
“You do have a pretty good handle on what’s happening locally, though,” Ted persisted. “Is the implication that whoever this is, they’re from out of town?”
I answered slowly. “That would be an educated guess, but we’re covering all bases.”
“I love it when they get specific like that,” Katz murmured, not bothering to look up. He finished writing and sat back in his chair. “When will the lab be reporting back?”
“Maybe a couple of days.”
“So that’s it?”
I spread my hands. “For the moment. We’ll let you know when we get more.”
There was an awkward silence. McDonald was going over his notes, but Katz just sat there staring at me. The “courts ’n’ cops” reporter back in the old days when the paper was locally owned by a small New England chain, Katz had honed a reputation of not giving a damn who he antagonized on his way to a story. As a result, although his articles had been more accurate than not, his personality had made the point moot. The police department wouldn’t have agreed if he’d written that water was wet.
Times and events had mellowed him-the paper changing hands, his quitting and briefly working for the Herald, then being wooed back as editor and discovering what it was like to be responsible for more than a single story. Over the past two years, he’d been battered by boardroom struggles with absentee owners, plagued by a rising turnover rate, and had watched both morale and readership dwindle as the paper had lurched toward bankruptcy. It was then, I knew from my own private sources, that he’d mortgaged his house to become one of the Reformer’s new owners-as committed now as he’d once been cynically detached.
And yet, the expression he was giving me harked back to long ago, when the assumption was that every word I uttered was a bald-faced lie.
“What’s your problem?” I asked him finally.
“No problem. I was just wondering why the personal approach for what could’ve been put into a press release or a phone call. Makes an old bloodhound curious-like there’s more to all this.”
My mind turned to the gold tooth with the enigmatic engraving, and the traces of purple hair dye, both indicative of the complex chasm of mutual need and distrust that would forever stretch between us.
I gave him a pitiful look. “We’ve got as many questions as you do. I just thought you’d like to have what we had before deadline. It’s up to you if you want to believe we’re sitting on Jimmy Hoffa’s corpse.”
I stood up as Ted McDonald laughed, dissolving the brief tension. “I’ll make sure you’re kept up-to-date.”
The house Gail and I bought last year was on Orchard Street, a winding, wooded, uphill drive north of the main road linking Brattleboro to West Brattleboro. It was an enormous building, with an attached barn, a garage, and a deck out back with an equally gigantic maple tree growing through it. Gail had been a Realtor for twenty years, since dropping out of the commune that had first brought her here, and this house reflected why she’d been so successful. For a childless couple long set in their ways, who had rigorously maintained separate quarters throughout their relationship, this house had all the amenities-his and hers upstairs wings, a large enough kitchen for two people to avoid traffic jams, and lots of space, inside and out, that allowed for either companionship or privacy. The only thing missing-temporarily, I hoped-was the spirit that made a home of a house.
The rape had ended Gail’s desire, even her ability, to live alone, and had coincided with my interest to build on our relationship. But shortly after the move, she’d left for law school, and was now so busy hitting the books I barely saw her. After all that had contributed to our finally moving in together, this work-driven result had left me feeling oddly bereft. I knew my melancholy was largely selfish, and understood the forces that were driving her so hard. I also knew that with time, things would settle down, her confidence would return, and both our lives would be enriched for the changes she was making.
But that didn’t stop me from feeling lonely now and then.
I parked in the garage beside the barn, comforted despite these thoughts by simply being here, and crossed the driveway to the house in the bright glare of floodlights triggered by my arrival. Gail had acquired an understandable mania for security, rigging the place with lights, shutters, an alarm system, and deadbolts.