This time when I get back to my office I slip in behind my computer and boot it up, studying the ring while I’m waiting.
If the ring had been expensive, or custom made, it might have been easy to track down. I surf into a Missing Persons secured site accessible only to the police and social workers and a handful of private investigators. It only takes a few minutes to come up with a list of missing Rachels. I set the parameters of the search to go back two years, figuring she was dead after Henry Martins was buried.
I end up with two names, and one of them is from the same week Henry Martins died. The description could easily match the Rachel I was looking at half an hour ago.
I print out Rachel Number One’s details. Nobody has seen
Rachel Tyler, the nineteen-year-old reported missing by her parents, in two years. I don’t remember the case, and I guess that’s because she was one of many girls believed to have run away. The reality is people in this country go missing every single day. Sometimes they turn up: they’re broke and high and living in a single-room motel, having burned off all their cash in casinos betting on red instead of black. Sometimes they’re being pimped out, forced into prostitution to pay back money for gambling or drugs or as a form of self-abuse. Other times they’ve left their wife or husband for somebody with a bigger bank account or a bigger house or a younger body. Other times they don’t turn up at all.
The photograph of Rachel was taken at a moment of sourness, either faked or real, and it sure beats seeing a happy and outgoing girl holding ice creams or diplomas or helping the sick and elderly.
She would be twenty-one now if somebody hadn’t killed her, then jammed her into a coffin.
I study the photograph. Her brown hair is darker than when I saw it less than an hour ago; her blue eyes in the picture are bright and alive. I read through the file. The conclusion was that she ran away, that she fought with her parents or her boyfriend and couldn’t take it any more.
I look up the phonebook and find Rachel’s parents are still at the same address. I wonder if they’re still married and what kind of state they are in. I wonder how many nights they sit watching the door, waiting for her to stroll inside and tell them everything is going to be okay.
I slip the ring into a small plastic bag and drop it into my pocket. Then I look again at the watch I took from the body in the lake. I compare the time to my own. It’s out by only a few minutes, but it could be the Tag that is accurate and my one isn’t. Its owner must have died in the same six-month period we’re in now, between October and March, because the watch is set for daylight saving time. The date is out by fourteen days.
I grab a pen and start doing the addition. Every month an analogue watch goes to thirty-one days, regardless of what month it is, and the user has to adjust it manually in the other five months when there are fewer. I work out that those five months would add up to seven days a year that the watch would be out by if it wasn’t adjusted. That means this watch hasn’t been touched in two years. So. It is now nearing the end of February. The guy who owned this watch was put in the ground sometime after the beginning of December and before the end of February two years ago.
I pick up the file with Henry Martins’ details on it. He died on the ninth of January. Could be his.
I grab the phone. It takes half a minute for Detective Schroder to answer it.
‘Come on, Tate, you know I can’t answer any questions,’ he says when he hears my voice. ‘This has nothing to do with you.
And soon it won’t have anything to do with me either. I’ve got too much on my plate to chase after this one too.’
‘You’re working the Carver case?’
‘Trying to. Unless I retire. Which I might.’
‘One question. The body that floated up without the legs. Is that the oldest one?’
“I don’t know. Maybe. The ME said it’s hard to tell. Looks like two of them went into the water fairly close to each other.
Why?’
‘Can you find out?’
“I can find out.’
‘And let me know?’
‘No. Goodbye, Tate,’ he says, and hangs up.
I look at the watch. It’s been on the wrist of a dead guy for two years, but not necessarily in the water for two years. It depends on how long he was in the ground before he went in the drink.
Either way, it looks like two years is the outer perimeter of the timeline.
I check the Missing Persons reports, but immediately the list of names coming up becomes too long, and there is no way to narrow it down until I know whether the killer had a type. Could be all the girls are similar ages, or similar descriptions. Or it could be the other coffins don’t have girls in them at all, but men.