The man smiled. He was bearded and bespectacled and wore a hooded rain slicker. “Did someone call an ornithologist?” he said.
Archie waved his hand. “Here.”
The man stepped forward. “I’m Ken Monroe. We spoke on the phone.”
Archie took his hand and shook it. “Thanks for coming,” Archie said.
“Sure.” He grinned excitedly. “We don’t usually get emergency calls.”
I bet, thought Susan.
“What can you tell me about this?” Archie asked, shining his flashlight in the nest again.
Susan elbowed in as they all gathered around the nest.
Monroe lowered his head so he was only inches from the nest, and examined it carefully. Then he asked, “Where’d you find it?”
Archie gestured with his head up the hillside. “Up there,” he said.
“It’s a song sparrow nest,” Monroe said.
Susan got out her notebook and wrote that down. “You can tell the kind of bird just by looking at the nest?” she asked. Nests all looked the same to her.
Monroe nodded. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “See how it’s shaped? Like a cup? You can see the rough outer layer of dead grasses and weed stems.” He touched the exterior of the nest. “Some rootlets and bark shreds. If you look here, you can see it’s lined with finer grasses and hair.”
“I’m interested in the hair,” Archie said.
“Some birds use it to pad their nests. It’s uncommon, but not unheard of.”
“So, like what?” Henry asked. “They get it from barber Dumpsters?”
Monroe frowned. “Dumpsters? Not likely. You said the nest was found here?”
“Up the hill,” Archie said.
“Well, the hair came from nearby. Birds don’t travel far for nesting material. Most nests get made in a couple of days. There’s no advantage to flying long distances.” Monroe looked up the hill. “No, this hair came from the woods. I’d say, within three hundred yards of here.”
Susan felt goose bumps rise on her arms.
“Any idea how old the nest is?” Archie asked.
“No more than a year or two.”
“How can you tell?” Henry said.
“Because nests disintegrate,” Monroe explained. “If they didn’t, we’d be standing on like a hundred of them right now.”
“So all we have to do is search three hundred yards in every direction,” Archie said.
Henry groaned. “That’s a football field.”
“Maybe we should call Search and Rescue,” Archie said.
Henry looked at him for a minute and then pulled his phone out of his waist clip and started dialing. “Maybe I’ll get a cadaver dog, too,” he said.
Susan saw Archie smile. “Good idea,” he said.
CHAPTER
10
The throbbing pain in Archie’s abdomen was back. The rain was steady. It made everyone’s skin look slick. It made the ground suck at their shoes. It had soaked through all of their clothing. Archie could feel the cold slime in his socks every time he took a step. His mud-caked pants batted at his calves. His hair stuck to his forehead. At least he’d had the presence of mind to hide the book behind a log. The last thing he wanted was for Henry to find him wandering the woods with a muddy copy of The Last Victim.
Archie focused on the small ball of light that his flashlight threw on the forest floor and turned his mind to the task at hand.
It was slow going. Three feet of ivy and morning glory vines blanketed everything in sight. He started left and then slowly worked the beam over the surface of the foliage inch by inch, forward, and then right. Henry was to his left, one of the patrol cops was to his right. Another patrol cop and four Search and Rescue volunteers were working in a line in the opposite direction. Even the ornithologist had been given a flashlight. So far, they had found a dead bird, half digested by ants, an empty Mountain Dew bottle, and some dog shit.
Susan had borrowed a flashlight, too, but was holding it in her teeth so she could scribble furiously in her notebook. Archie wanted her to write a story. He still had no leads on the identity of their Jane Doe, and coverage in the local media had been limited to a single paragraph in the Metro section of the Herald. He needed coverage. And he needed a lot of it.
Left. Forward. Right. Then Archie knelt in the mud and grime and began to pull the ivy and morning glory vines aside to look underneath them. The wet vines were heavy and hard to manipulate and Archie’s hands looked raw and dirty, like he’d been buried alive and had clawed his way out.
He heard Henry say, “This is ridiculous.”
And it was. They could come back in the morning. If there was a corpse out there, it could wait twelve hours. But Archie needed to know. If there was a woman dead out there, he needed to find her. He’d stay out there all night looking. At the very least, it was easier than going home.
He shone his flashlight at his watch. They’d been searching for almost an hour.