Finally, as things were winding down—the sheriff had been asked the same question for the sixth or seventh time and gave the same tired answer, to wit, “We’ll know more when the facts are in,” and somebody said, “So you don’t advise going out in the woods right now, for any purpose?” and the sheriff said, “No, not really, not until we clear this thing up”—Sten felt himself come awake in a way he’d never been awake before, as if he was an animal seized in the jaws of a bigger animal and shaken helplessly. The woods. Out in the woods. He’d actually placed a call to Cody Waters’ parents—yesterday, with Carolee fretting and all the shit raining down around them—and got Cody’s cellphone number and gone outside where she wouldn’t hear and punched it in. A voice answered—“Digame”—and he thought he had the wrong number but persisted anyway. “Cody?” he’d said. “Is that you?”
“Who’s this?”
“Sten. Adam’s father?”
A silence. Then, “Yeah?”
“Was that Spanish you were talking?
“I guess.”
Another silence.
“Listen, I was calling because I wanted to ask if you’ve seen Adam lately. You know he moved out of the house by the river, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“We just, well we haven’t heard from him and we were wondering if maybe he was up there with you—”
“No, no, he’s not here. I haven’t seen him in like a month maybe.”
There was static on the line, a faint sizzling in the background. “Did he say what his plans were? Where he’s living?”
He could picture the boy on the other end of the line, the sharp slash of his nose, the sloped shoulders and Don’t-Even-Ask look, the dreadlocks he and Adam used to wear before they gave up reggae for rap and then death metal and shaved their heads, before they went military and developed attitudes and started pushing the buttons of the police and everybody else too. When they were kids. Just kids.
A sigh. The sizzle of static. “I don’t know,” Cody said finally. “In the woods, I guess.”
23.
THERE ARE THE NAMELESS fears and there are the named ones too. When he was a child his nightmares weren’t of ghouls or monsters or people chasing him with knives and axes and decapitated heads, but amorphous things, neither human nor animal, the fear that sat in your stomach, inside you, and you couldn’t define it or shake it either. That was what this was like. He didn’t say a word to Carolee, but the morning after the meeting he was up early, earlier than usual—first light—and he didn’t bother with breakfast because if he started fussing around in the kitchen she’d wake up and ask him where he was going and he’d just have to lie to her. His daypack—water in a bota bag, granola bars, binoculars, Swiss Army knife, matches stuffed in a plastic pill container to keep them dry, foil space blanket and GPS beacon for emergencies—was hanging on the coat tree where he always put it when he came in from one of his surveillance hikes. He pulled on a baseball cap—Oakland A’s, how about that?—patted down his pockets to make sure he had his wallet, keys and cellphone, and then headed out the door.
He drove up the north road, slowly, rolling over pinecones, fist-sized rocks, sticks and twigs and scraps of vegetation that had been pulverized by the tires of the emergency vehicles, looking for the spot where it had happened. Art had told him it was by the spring up there, no more than a thousand yards off the road, just follow the creek on up and you can’t miss it. Well, he couldn’t have missed it anyway because the tracks of the ambulance and the sheriff’s four-wheel drive came together there, crosshatching the road where they’d had to make their three-point turns to return with the body and whatever evidence they’d discovered. Which thus far was being kept secret. He’d tried to get Rob Rankin to tell him but Rob just shook his head. “Can’t disclose that. Sorry, Sten. Ongoing investigation.”