She unclipped Cody’s lead and he bounded off, nose down, about thirty feet up the hillside, and then crouched down.
Archie picked up his flashlight and scrambled after him, barely aware of the others behind him, their flashlights bobbing in the darkness. The hillside was thick with ferns, almost prehistoric in their enormity. He pulled himself up the slope by grabbing hand-fuls of fern fronds, using their root systems as leverage. Their tiny seeds stuck to his hands. When he got to Cody, he knelt down beside him and the dog licked his face. Then the dog whined again and nosed at a large fern that abutted a cedar bent cockeyed from the hillside. Archie reached out and pushed a fern frond aside and pointed his flashlight underneath.
“See anything?” Henry called from behind him.
“Yeah,” said Archie.
The skeleton was partial, but it was definitely human. He could see a foot, the remaining skin dark and leathery, which is why it hadn’t been eaten. The calf bones were picked clean above the ankle, so the foot looked odd, like a grotesque shoe. He swung the flashlight farther under the fern and saw what was left of a shrunken leather face, black lips, the cracked hide of a cheek, an eye socket, a half-crushed skull. And there, still rooted to the dehydrated scalp tissue, a tangle of blond hair.
“There you are,” he said quietly.
Susan and Henry appeared on either side of him. Susan sank down next to him, her leg touching his. He was getting used to having her around.
“Three bodies all within a hundred yards,” she said, pen pressed against her notebook. “Are they connected?”
“Maybe,” Archie said. “Or maybe not.” He looked up into the dark woods. It had stopped raining and the clouds had parted, revealing a bright shard of moon. In the distance, through the trees at the edge of the woods, he could make out the light of a house.
“Find out who lives there,” he said to Henry. “And then find out if they have a wood chipper.”
CHAPTER
11
Susan trudged after Henry. The ME had shown up, just behind the crime scene investigators and about a dozen other cops. The crime scene had been lit and taped off, and they were using sifters to separate the bone chips from the dirt. She wasn’t allowed beyond the crime scene tape, and Archie was too busy to talk, so she had decided to trail Henry. Not that she’d been invited.
“Listen,” she was saying to Ian on her cell phone. “I can get it in. I’ll be there in an hour.” She glanced at her watch, but it was too dark to see it, so she held her phone down to her wrist and read her watch by the phone’s LCD light. Ten P.M. The outlying editions started printing at 11:00 P.M., but the metro area sunrise edition didn’t go to press until 2:00 A.M. She had plenty of time. Plus, she wanted to keep Ian happy right now, at least until after the story about Molly and Castle ran.
Henry was hurrying up the long cement staircase that led out of the park up to street level. Was he trying to ditch her?
She held the phone back to her ear. “We’re doing a spread on Castle’s death,” Ian was saying. “Eight stories. I can get you on the front page of Metro, below the fold.”
“Below the fold?”
“There’s a fire up near Sisters,” Ian said. “That’s the Metro lead.”
She took the stairs two at a time. “Three bodies,” she said, exasperated. “How is that not A-one? And who gives a shit about a fire in Central Oregon?”
“Spoken like someone without a second house in Central Oregon,” Ian said with a snort. “And you don’t know the bodies are connected,” he added. “And they’re nobody.”
Bugs bounced off the yellow streetlights that lit the stairs. The bugs probably spent their whole life cycle doing that, Susan thought. Smacking against the grate that covered the bulb, again and again. “Nobody?” she said.
Ian sounded bored. “Word is the first girl was a prostitute. The other two probably are, too. Or homeless. No one cares, Susan. Dead politicians sell papers. Dead hookers don’t.”
“Castle was a sexual predator,” Susan reminded Ian. She tried to make her voice sound steely with resolve.
“We’re not running that story when the entire state is mourning him,” Ian said.
Sometimes Susan couldn’t remember why she’d ever slept with Ian. (He had let her hold his Pulitzer.) “You’re a hypocrite, Ian,” she said.
“While I have you on the phone,” Ian said, ignoring her. “The fact checkers can’t get ahold of Molly Palmer. They keep getting her voice mail. You have another number for her?”
Susan’s stomach clenched and she forced some more bravado into her voice. “She’s a stripper, Ian. She doesn’t carry her phone on her when she’s naked.” She made a mental note to find Molly, before her skittishness cost Susan her story.
“I’m hanging up now,” Ian said.
The line went dead and Susan pushed the phone back into her sweatshirt pocket and groaned in frustration. So much for keeping Ian happy.