D.D. picks one. Keith and I muscle our way through behind her.
On the other side, the woods are more open than I’d imagined. The trees spread out, the ground cover a mix of leaves, fallen debris, rocks, and scraggly bushes that don’t get much sunlight.
The earth smells loamy. It tugs at me. Memories of my mother’s farm, of a childhood spent running around forests not so dissimilar to this one. I always felt most at home in the wild. It’s been a long time now, though, since I left for the streets of Boston.
“Um, we should probably pick a line and walk it,” Keith suggests. “I say we head due west, straight across our grid. When we reach the coordinates on the other side, we’ll shift north, then head back due east. Like vacuuming a carpet.”
“Works for me,” D.D. says. “Remember, Team Roomba: stay together.”
We all start walking. I find myself trying to look up, down, and around all at once, which leads me to seeing nothing at all. I try to re-focus myself. First, eye level—looking for signs of nests, animal activities—then looking high.
It gives me some sense of discipline, but doesn’t lead to instant results.
Keith finds two nests. D.D. works a hollow log. Still nothing.
“You know there’s a good chance we won’t find anything,” D.D. says an hour later, after informing us it was time for a water break. The day is getting warmer. Though we’re moving slowly through the woods, my cotton T-shirt is now plastered to my skin.
“We’re talking a few dozen small bones spread over half a mountain. Most searchers won’t find anything. We just have to hope that some do.”
I nod. I know what she says is true. Still, if we do all this and come up empty . . . I can’t take the idea of failure. I can tell by the look on Keith’s face he’s thinking the same thing, too. He didn’t don his ridiculous running outfit to return home empty-handed.
We sip a little more, then cap our bottles, get back to hunting.
There’s a big tree up ahead. I can already see part of it has been bored away, maybe from a woodpecker or some other animal. I feel my pulse quicken even as I rise on my tiptoes and, turning on the flashlight function of my cell phone, shine it in. No tiny eyes peer back at me. I reach in, pat around lightly. Downy feathers, leaves, and something slightly more substantial. A pile of twigs. Bones?
We’re not supposed to touch anything. But then again, I can’t flag what I can’t inspect. I find another small stick on the ground, and use it to poke around the hole until I find what I’d felt earlier. Slowly but surely, I use the twig to drag the item toward me. Closer and closer . . .
I pull a little too hard and it plunges from the opening onto the ground. I gasp, jump back, then immediately crouch down. It looks like bones. So many tiny, tiny bones.
I’ve done it. I’ve found . . .
“A mouse skeleton,” Keith says. I glare up at him, then poke the pile a bit more.
Dammit, the bones are too small, and now that he’s mentioned it, they do form more or less the shape of a mouse.
“Probably an owl’s den,” he says. “Looks like the guy had a good dinner.”
I scowl. “Don’t owls swallow the entire thing? Produce owl pellets or something like that?”
Keith blinks at me. “Oh. You might be right.”
“Score one for rural education,” I tell him. “I even touched one of those pellets at the local nature park, so whoever left behind these remains wasn’t an owl. But you’re right, they appear to be mice bones.”
Just then we hear something. Barking in the distance.
D.D. jogs closer. “Sounds like the dogs made a discovery.”
The barking goes on and on.
“Kind of a big discovery.” D.D. reaches for her phone just as it starts buzzing. She glances at the screen. “Quincy,” she informs us, then places it to her ear.
“Yeah. Got that. Dogs made a hit. What? You’re sure? Okay. We’re headed over.”
She punches off the call, turns to us with renewed intensity.
“The dogs found missing bones,” Keith says instantly.
“No. The dogs found another body.”
For a second, none of us speak. None of us can speak.
“There are more?” I ask softly.
“At least one more grave. Quincy wants us to go help.”
“A dumping ground,” Keith exclaims. “We’ve found a serial killer’s dumping ground.” He sounds excited. I know he can’t help himself.
But just for a moment . . .
I am sad. I am scared. I am lost.
I am one of those girls all over again.
“You can go back to the hotel if you want,” D.D. tells me gently.
As if I really could.
I shake my head. I turn back toward the direction we came from. Keith makes some adjustments to his compass. Then as one, we move toward the dead.
CHAPTER 11
KIMBERLY
THINGS WENT A LITTLE DIFFERENTLY than expected,” Kimberly Quincy said into the phone.
It was nine P.M. She was finally back in her motel room after one of the longest days of her career. She’d spent the past few hours in conversation with her supervisor, plus the taskforce team. Now, she needed fifteen minutes of sanity before the next round of logistical planning. Through the phone, she could hear her girls chattering away in the background. Nine P.M. was bedtime. No doubt they were taking advantage of Mac’s distraction to launch one last misadventure.
The sounds of real life. Kimberly could never decide if such normalcy was the most beautiful or most disconcerting noise after a day such as this one.
“You find more bones?” Mac asked from their home in Atlanta.
“Bodies. We found more bodies.”
A pause. “Girls,” he said to their daughters. “Go pick out something to read. I’ll be back in a sec.”
“Last time you tried that, they beat each other with the books instead.”
“But it did wear them out,” Mac countered.
She heard a click. A door closing. Mac retreating from the girls’ adjoining rooms in order to head to the master for a moment of privacy. She closed her eyes. Let herself picture it. Their modest ranch-style home with its open family room, overstuffed sofa, jumbled floor. One bedroom awash in purple (Eliza’s). A second room adorned in shades of blue (Macey’s). Both filled with an assortment of sports trophies, stuffed animals, and well-thumbed reads. Then there was her and Mac’s space, where the bed was never made and family photos lined most surfaces and the treadmill sat in the corner where it was genuinely used during the hot, humid days of summer but served as a substitute clothes hanger the rest of the year.