“I’m on it, sir,” Gretchen said.
Chitwood held up his cell phone, the screen aglow. “I heard from the plant manager. When we’re finished here, at least one of you will have to go back to the other side of the dam and talk to the duty operator. We need to see what’s on their surveillance cameras. He’ll open the gate when you arrive.”
“Josie and I can do it,” Noah volunteered.
Chitwood signaled to the marine unit to wait. Josie and Noah ran ahead to tell Mettner the news before he saw the body bag being carried out of the woods. He got out of his car as soon as he saw them. “You found her,” he said, voice high-pitched. “She’s—she’s dead, isn’t she?” He strode toward the stairs. “I have to see her. I have to see.”
Noah put his body between Mettner and the stairs. “It’s not her, Mett.”
“I have to see.”
Josie walked up beside him and touched his shoulder. “Mett, it’s not Amber.”
Still he struggled to get past Noah. In the light of the bobbing torches, Josie could see that he looked like a frightened animal. She had to shout at him to get his attention. He stopped trying to get around Noah and looked at her, seeing her but not understanding anything she said.
“The marine unit found a body,” Josie said, clearly and loudly. “It’s not Amber.”
Mettner looked to Noah, as if he wanted an explanation for Josie’s words. He wasn’t comprehending. Noah nodded at him. “It’s true. It’s not her. It’s not Amber.”
Mettner pushed against Noah’s chest with both hands. “You don’t know that. Get out of my way. I need to see.”
Josie joined Noah in blocking Mettner from the stairs, both of them standing firm each time Mettner pressed against them or tried to shoulder past. “We know what Amber looks like,” she told him. “It’s not her.”
“People look different when they die. You know that! It could be her. You don’t know her like I do. I’ll know. I’ll know if it’s her. I need to see.”
Noah grabbed Mettner’s upper arms, holding him in place. “You cannot see her,” he shouted.
Noah hardly ever raised his voice. In fact, Josie was hard-pressed to think of a time when he had. Mettner was just as startled as her. Tears leaked from his eyes. After a long moment, he said, “She’s got a scar on her back. A burn scar. From when she was a kid. They were camping and she fell backward into the fire. It’s big. You’ll be able to see it.”
Josie and Noah looked at one another. She said, “I’ll go and look, okay, Mett? But you have to stay here with Noah.”
He said nothing. Josie turned and jogged back down the stairs and then along the twisting path, the beam of her flashlight jerking with her movements. At the bottom, the two marine unit officers stood sentry over the body, one at the head and one at the feet. They watched her, faces hard. They were probably freezing, just like her, and ready to get off the riverbank. Chitwood said, “Well?”
Josie explained Mettner’s request. Chitwood sighed heavily and shook his head but gestured toward the body bag. “Go ahead,” he said.
Gingerly, the two marine officers squatted down and unzipped the bag, handling the woman’s body with care as they turned her onto her side and lifted the back of her shirt as high as it would go. Josie, Chitwood, and Gretchen all shone their torches onto the body. Her skin was pristine. Chitwood said, “Thank you.”
The officers secured her back inside the bag. Josie ran back up the path and then the stairs to where Mettner waited, still blocked by Noah, but craning his neck over Noah’s shoulder, his eyes wide and afraid. As soon as she locked eyes with him, she said, “No scar. It’s not her.”
Mettner dropped to his knees and wept. It was relief, Josie knew. There was still a chance that Amber was alive, still a chance that Mettner could be reunited with her, if only they could find her.
Eleven
They couldn’t stop the press from getting video of the woman’s body being loaded into one of the ambulances. The reporter lobbed questions at each of them as they got into their vehicles and drove away. Josie watched him punching fingers frantically against his phone screen as they left. He was probably trying to contact Amber. The knot in her stomach grew larger. While there was a palpable sense of relief among the team that the dead woman was not Amber, the fear that she would turn up dead next infected them all. Gretchen drove Mettner back to the police station while Josie and Noah returned to the hydroelectric plant to speak with the duty operator.
As they pulled up to the entrance, the gate slid open, barely making a sound other than a low whir. Noah parked next to the red pickup. As they got out, a door opened and closed at the front of the hydroelectric station building and a man emerged from the slice of light. He was tall and slender with shaggy, sandy hair and eyes that gleamed from beneath his ballcap. “You them cops?”
Noah fumbled inside his jeans pocket for his wallet and produced his credentials, flashing them at the man. He pointed to Josie. “This is Detective Josie Quinn, my colleague.”
“Still need her ID,” said the man. “I gotta know who’s coming in and out of here. We’re not regulated by the federal government or anything so it’s not like there’s big, secret, classified stuff in this place, but I got supervisors at the power company I gotta answer to. Anything goes wrong, I’m gonna need to give ’em the names of everyone who came through.”
He was covering his ass, Josie realized. Luckily, since this was her night off, she’d left her credentials in the car and they were unscathed by her plunge into the river. She pulled her identification and badge out of the back pocket of her jeans and handed it to him. The man studied it and then sighed. “Fine, then. Come on. My name’s Will Wilson, by the way. My plant manager talked to your chief on the phone.”
Wilson turned away from them, leading them to the door he’d emerged from. He held it open, and they entered a vast room with ceilings higher than Josie and Noah’s two-story home. It seemed as though it was made entirely of steel beams and glass windows. Steel walkways led from one giant round generator to another. Josie counted three of the behemoths in total, which took up the majority of the space in the building. Each one was round with its own set of walkways leading to and around the top of it. From beneath them came the whir of the turbines and the hum of electricity which vibrated beneath their feet. Josie smelled a combination of different industrial lubricants and a faint hint of ozone.