The Woods (26 page)

"He was a kid on guard duty. He didn't know how serious it was." "That’s no excuse."

"He came clean later, right?'

Lowell did not respond.

"I read the file," Muse said. "He goofed off and didn't do what he was supposed to on guard duty. You talk about devastation. How about the guilt he must feel over that? He misses his sister, sure. But I think the guilt eats at him more."

"Interesting."

"What?"

"You said the guilt eats at him," Lowell said. "What kind of guilt?"

She kept walking.

"And it's curious, don't you think?"

"What is?" Muse asked.

"That he left his post that night. I mean, think about it. Here he is, a responsible kid. Everyone said so. And suddenly, on the night that these campers sneak out, on the night that Wayne Steubens plans on committing murder, Paul Copeland chooses to slack off."

Muse said nothing.

"That, my young colleague, has always struck me as a hell of a coincidence."

Lowell smiled and turned away.

"Come on," he said. "It's getting dark and you're going to want to see what your friend Barrett found."

After Glenda Perez left, I didn't cry, but I came awfully close. I sat in my office, alone, stunned, not sure what to do or think or feel. My body was shuddering. I looked down at my hands. There was a noticeable quake. I actually did that thing when you wonder if you're dreaming. I did all the checks. I wasn't. This was real.

Camille was alive.

My sister had walked out of those woods. Just like Gil Perez had.

I called Lucy on her cell phone.

"Hey," she said.

"You're not going to believe what Gil Perez's sister just told me."

"What?"

I filled her in. When I got to the part about Camille walking out of those woods, Lucy gasped out loud. "Do you believe her?" Lucy asked. "About Camille, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Why would she say that if it wasn't true?"

Lucy said nothing.

"What? You think she's lying? What would be her motive?"

"I don't know, Paul. But we're missing so much here."

"I understand that. But think about it. Glenda Perez has no reason to lie to me about that." Silence. "What is it, Lucy?" "It's just odd, that's all. If your sister is alive, where the hell has she been?"

"I don't know."

"So what are you going to do now?"

I thought about that, tried to settle my mind. It was a good question. What next? Where do I go from here?

Lucy said, "I talked to my father again."

"And?"

"He remembers something about that night."

"What?"

"He wont tell me. He said he'd only tell you."

"Me?"

"Yep. Ira said he wanted to see you."

"Now?"

"If you want."

"I want. Should I pick you up?"

She hesitated.

"What?"

"Ira said he wanted to see you alone. That he won't talk in front of me."

"Okay."

More hesitation.

"Paul?"

"What?"

"Pick me up anyway. I'll wait in the car while you go in."

Homicide detectives York and Dillon sat in the "tech room," eating pizza. The tech room was actually a meeting space where they wheeled in televisions and VCRs and the like.

Max Reynolds entered. "How are you guys?"

Dillon said, "This pizza is awful." "Sorry."

"We're in New York, for crying out loud. The Big Apple. The home of pizza. And this tastes like something that disobeyed a pooper-scooper law."

Reynolds turned on the television. "I'm sorry the cuisine does not measure up to your standards."

"Am I exaggerating?" Dillon turned to York. "I mean, seriously, does this taste like hobo vomit, or is it me?"

York said, "That's your third slice."

"And probably my last. Just to show I mean it."

York turned to Max Reynolds. "What have you got for us?"

"I think I found our guy. Or at least, his car."

Dillon took another rip like bite. "Less talk, more show."

"There is a convenience store on the corner two blocks from where you found the body," Reynolds began. "The owner has been having problems with shoplifters grabbing items he keeps outside. So he aims his camera out that way."

Dillon said, "Korean?"

"Excuse me?"

"The convenience store owner. He's Korean, right?"

"I'm not sure. What's that got to do with anything?"

"Dollars to doughnuts, he's Korean. So he points his camera outside because some ass wipe is stealing an orange. Then he starts screaming about how he pays taxes when he probably has like ten illegal working in the place and someone should do something. Like the cops should comb through his cheap-ass, blurry-crap tapes to find Mr. Fruit Stealer."

He stopped. York looked at Max Reynolds. "Go on."

"Anyway, yes, exactly, the camera gives us a partial of the street. So we started checking for cars around that age-more than thirty years ago-and look what we found here."

Reynolds already had the tape keyed up. An old Volkswagen bug drove by. He hit the freeze button.

"That's our car?" York asked.

"A 1971 Volkswagen Beetle. One of our experts says he can tell by the MacPherson strut front suspension and front luggage compartment. More important, this type of car matches the carpet fibers we found on Mr. Santiago's clothing."

"Hot damn," Dillon said.

"Can you make out the license plate?" York asked.

"No. We only get a side view. Not a partial, not even the state."

"But how many original Volkswagen bugs in yellow can there be on the road?" York said. "We start with the New York motor vehicle records, move to New Jersey and Connecticut." Dillon nodded and talked while chewing like a cow. "We should get some kind of hit."

York turned back to Reynolds. "Anything else?"

"Dillon was right, the quality isn't great. But if I blow this up"-he hit a button and the picture zoomed-"we can get a partial look at the guy."

Dillon squinted. "He looks like Jerry Garcia or something."

"Long gray hair, long gray beard," Reynolds agreed.

"That it?"

"That's it."

York said to Dillon, "Let's start checking the motor vehicles record. This car can't be that hard to find."

Sheriff Lowell's accusations echoed in the still of the woods. Lowell, nobody's fool, thought Paul Copeland had lied about the murders.

Had he? Did it matter?

Muse thought about that. She liked Cope, no question. He was a great boss and a damned good prosecutor. But now Lowells words had brought her back. They reminded her of what she already knew: This was a homicide case. Like any other. It leads where it leads, even if that means back to her boss.

No favorites.

A few minutes later a noise came from the brush. Muse spotted An drew Barrett. Barrett made lanky an art form, all long limbs and elbows and awkward, jerky movements. He was dragging what looked like a baby carriage behind him. It had to be the XJR. Muse called out to him.

Barrett looked up, clearly displeased with the interruption. When he saw who it was, his face lit up.

"Hey, Muse!"

"Andrew."

"Wow, great to see you."

"Uh-huh," she said. "What are you doing?"

"What do you mean, what am I doing?" He put the machine down.

There were three young people in John Jay sweatshirts trudging along beside him-students, she assumed. "I'm looking for graves."

"I thought you found something."

"I did. Its up ahead another hundred yards. But I thought there were two bodies missing, so I figured, hey, why rest on my laurels, you know what I'm saying?"

Muse swallowed. "You found a body?"

Barrett's face had a fervor usually reserved for tent revivals.

"Muse, this machine. Oh my, it's just amazing. We got lucky, of course. There hasn't been any rain in this area in, I don't know, how long, Sheriff?"

"Two, three weeks," Lowell said.

"See, that helps. A lot. Dry ground. You know anything about how ground-penetrating radar works? I stuck an 800 MHz on this baby. That lets me go down only four feet-but what a four feet! Most of the time, they look too deep. But very few killers dig beyond three, four feet. The other problem is, the current machines have trouble differentiating between like-size items. Like, say, a pipe or deep roots versus what we want-bones. The XJR not only gets you clearer cross-sectional underground images of the soil, but with the new 3-D enhancer-"

"Barrett?" Muse said.

He pushed up his glasses. "What?"

"Do I look like I give the smallest rats buttock how your toy works?"

He pushed the glasses up again. "Uh…"

"I just care that your toy works. So please tell me what you found before I shoot someone?"

"Bones, Muse," he said with a smile. "We found bones."

"Human, right?"

"Definitely. In fact, the first thing we found was a skull. That's when we stopped digging. The pros are excavating now."

"How old are they?"

"What, the bones?"

"No, Barrett, that oak tree. Yes, the bones."

"How the hell would I know? The coroner might have an idea. She's at the site now."

Muse hurried past him. Lowell followed. Up ahead she could make out big spotlights, almost like a movie set. She knew that lots of excavation teams used powerful voltage even when they were digging in the direct sunlight. As one crime-scene-unit guy had told her, bright lights help differentiate the flotsam from the gold: "Without the bright lights, its like judging how hot a chick is by being drunk in a dark bar. You may think you have something, but in the morning, you want to bite your arm off."

Lowell pointed toward an attractive woman wearing rubber gloves.

Muse figured it was another student-she couldn't have been thirty years old. She had long, cave black hair perfectly pulled back, like a flamenco dancer.

"That's Doc O'Neill," Lowell said.

"She's your coroner?"

"Yep. You know it's an elected position out here?"

"You mean they have campaigns and stuff? Like, hi, I'm Doctor O'Neill, I'm really good with the dead'?"

"I'd make a witty comeback," Lowell said, "but you city slickers are too clever for us yokels."

As Muse got closer, she could see that "attractive" may have been understating it. Tara O'Neill was a knockout. Muse could see that her looks were something of a distraction to the crew too. The coroner is not in charge of a crime scene. The police are. But everyone kept sneaking glances at O'Neill. Muse stepped quickly toward her.

"I'm Loren Muse, chief investigator for Essex County."

The woman offered the glove hand. "Tara O'Neill, coroner."

"What can you tell me about the body?"

She looked wary for a second, but Lowell nodded that it was okay. "Are you the one who sent Mr. Barrett out here?" O'Neill asked. "I am." "Interesting fellow." "As I'm well aware."

"That machine works, though. I don't know how on earth he found these bones. But he's good. I think it helped that they ran over the skull first."

O'Neill blinked and looked away.

"There a problem?" Muse asked.

She shook her head. "I grew up in this area. I used to play right here, right over this spot. You'd think, I don't know, you'd think I would have felt a chill or something. But nope, nothing."

Muse tapped her foot, waited.

"I was ten when those teens vanished. My friends and I used to hike out here, you know? We'd light fires. We'd make up stories about how the two kids who were never found were still out here, watching us, that they were the undead or whatever, and that they were going to hunt us down and kill us. It was stupid. Just a way of getting your boyfriend to give you his jacket and put his arm around you."

Tara O'Neill smiled and shook her head. "Doctor O'Neill?" "Yes." "Please tell me what you found here." "We're still working on it, but from what I can see we have a fairly complete skeleton. It was found three feet down. I'll need to get the bones to the lab to make a positive ID."

"What can you tell me now?"

"Come this way."

She walked Muse over to the other side of the dig. The bones were tagged and laid out on a blue tarmac. "No clothing?" Muse said. "None." "Did they disintegrate or was the body buried naked?" "I can't say for sure. But since there are no coins or jewelry or but tons or zippers or even footwear-that usually lasts a very long time- my guess would be naked."

Muse just stared at the brown skull. "Cause of death?"

"Too early to tell. But there are some things we know."

"Such as?"

"The bones are in pretty bad shape. They weren't buried all that deep and they've been here awhile." "Howling?" "It's hard to say. I took a seminar last year on crime-scene soil sampling. You can tell by the way the ground has been disturbed how long ago the hole was dug. But that's very preliminary."

"Anything? A guesstimate?"

"The bones have been here awhile. My best estimate would be at least fifteen years. In short – and to answer the question on your mind – it is consistent, very consistent, with the time frame of the murders that took place in these woods twenty years ago."

Muse swallowed and asked the real question that she'd wanted to ask from the beginning.

"Can you tell gender? Can you tell me if the bones belong to some one male or female?"

A deep voice interrupted, "Uh, Doc?"

It was one of the crime-scene guys, complete with the prerequisite windbreaker announcing such. He was husky with a thick beard and a thicker midsection. He had a small hand shovel and was breathing the labored breath of the out-of-shape.

"What's up, Terry?" O'Neill asked.

"I think we got it all."

"You want to pack it in?"

"For tonight, yeah, I think. We might want to come out tomorrow, check for more. But we'd like to transport the body now, if that's okay with you." "Give me two minutes," O'Neill said. Terry nodded and left them alone. Tara O'Neill kept her eyes on the bones. "Do you know anything about the human skeleton, Investigator Muse?" "Some."

"Without a thorough examination, it can be pretty difficult to tell the difference between the male and female skeleton. One of the things we go by is the size and density of the bones. Males have a tendency to be thicker and larger, of course. Sometimes the actual height of the victim can help-males are usually taller. But those things often aren't definitive."

"Are you saying you don't know?"

O'Neill smiled. "I'm not saying that at all. Let me show you."

Tara O'Neill got down on her haunches. So did Muse. O'Neill had a thin flashlight in her hand, the kind that casts a narrow but potent beam.

"I said, pretty difficult. Not impossible. Take a look."

She pointed her light toward the skull.

"Do you know what you're looking at?"

"No," Muse said.

"First off, the bones appear to be on the lighter side. Second, check out the spot below where the eyebrows would have been."

"Okay."

"That's technically known as the supraorbital ridge. It's more pronounced in males. Females have very vertical foreheads. Now, this skull has been worn down, but you can see the ridge is not pronounced. But the real key -what I want to show you down here – is in the pelvis area, more specifically, the pelvic cavity."

She shifted the flashlight. "Do you see it there?"

"Yeah, I see it, I guess. So?"

"It's pretty wide."

"Which means?"

Tara O'Neill snapped off the flashlight.

"Which means," O'Neill said, getting back to her feet, "that your victim is Caucasian, about five-foot-seven-the same height as Camille Copeland, by the way – and yes, female."

Dillon said, "You're not going to believe this."

York looked up. "What?"

"I got a computer hit on that Volkswagen. There are only fourteen in the tri-state area that fit the bill. But here's the kicker. One is registered to a guy named Ira Silverstein. That name ring a bell?" "Isn't he the guy who owned that camp?" That’s it. "Are you telling me that Copeland might have been right all along?" "I got the address where this Ira Silverstein is staying," Dillon said. "Some kind of rehab place." "So what are we waiting for?" York said. "Lets haul ass."