It helped that the cop, Kittredge, was treating her like an actual human being, not like some piece of shit that deserved whatever was done to her. Helped, too, that he was nervous out here, same as her—not that he said anything, but she saw him reach back and touch his gun when he thought she wasn’t looking. See, she told herself, you’re not so pathetic. Big badass cop with a gun, and he’s scared, too.
She was walking in front, the way she had a few hours before. She found the view disorienting, so she bent down, looked down, the way she had earlier in the day, when her arm had been twisted behind her. Looking down helped her remember. She felt the trail level off briefly—that felt right—then turn upward again. A memory floated slowly up toward the surface of her consciousness, like a bubble in hot pancake batter on a griddle; just as the memory bubble popped and her eyes and her mouth were opening, she stumbled—again—on a fat root that snaked across the trail.
“Careful,” said Kittredge from behind her.
“There,” she said, pointing down. “I tripped on that same root before. Right after that, we went thataway.” She turned to her left and struck out sideways, across the slope, her head up now, her gaze ranging far and wide.
“You sure?”
Instead of answering, she stopped and gasped, raising both hands in front of her, as if to ward off something; as if to ward off the ghost of Janelle Number Three. A hundred yards ahead of them—fifty yards beyond the clothing Janelle had scattered on the ground a few hours before—lay a dead woman. She was sprawled faceup, but much of her face was gone, and her legs—splayed on either side of a tree—had no feet.
CHAPTER 26
Brockton
DET. KITTREDGE, I SCRAWLED on the notepad beside the telephone, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rising as Detective Kittredge described the death scene where he was standing.
“Excuse me,” I said, interrupting him. “The tree—it’s a sapling, isn’t it.” I was telling him, not asking him. “Three, four inches thick. Her crotch is pressed right up against the trunk.”
A silence, then: “What makes you think that?”
“What makes me think that is the fact that I’m looking at a photograph of it right now, Detective.” As I said it, I slid the picture the rest of the way out of the envelope. It was the manila envelope that had arrived in the mail a week or so before, traumatizing Peggy her first day on the job.
“Could you please say that again, sir?”
“I said I’m looking at a photograph of the death scene right now. The dead woman in the woods. The tree she’s pressed up against.”
“I’m not sure I’m following you here, Dr. Brockton. How could you possibly be looking at a crime-scene photo? The photographer isn’t even here yet.”
“Somebody mailed it to me a week or so ago,” I said. “Probably right after he killed her.” A thought struck me, and I added, “Killed her and cut off her feet.” I was still embarrassed that I’d failed to recognize that the photo hadn’t come from the case files of Sheriff Cotterell or Bubba Hardknot; that the image was fresh, taken no more than a few days before it had arrived in my office.
“This picture you say somebody mailed you.” The detective’s wording was careful and conditional—almost accusatory—as if he were cross-examining me in court. “Did you contact the police when you received this, sir?”
“No. Well, sort of.” I felt flustered suddenly. Stupid suddenly. “But I mentioned it to a TBI agent a day or two later.”
“Mentioned it? You see that a woman has been murdered and dismembered, and all you do is mention it?”
“I thought he’d sent me an old crime-scene photo,” I tried explaining. “From a case he and I worked a couple years ago, up in Morgan County. It looks exactly like it. Well, almost exactly like it. As close as a killer could get, I guess, without waiting a month or two.”
The detective was silent for several long seconds. “Doctor, I don’t mean to sound dense,” he said, “and I don’t mean to sound disrespectful—my colleagues at KPD speak very highly of you—but what you’re saying isn’t making much sense to me.”
“It’s not making a lot of sense to me, either, Detective, but bear with me for half a minute, and I’ll try to help us both make better sense of it.” Stretching the phone cord as far as it would go, I rolled my chair across the office to a battered filing cabinet and opened the drawer that held my slides. Thumbing back through the tabs of the file folders, I stopped at 90-11—my eleventh forensic case of 1990—and tugged the fat folder free. I opened the file, which contained clear plastic sleeves of 35-millimeter slides, along with a few eight-by-ten enlargements. “Back in December of 1990,” I said, pulling out one of the enlargements, “Sheriff Jim Cotterell, up in Morgan County, called me out to a death scene. A TBI agent, Wellington Meffert, was there, too. You know either of those guys?”