Finally Liz picked up Carole’s empty cup and turned to the cupboard. She took her time preparing another cup of tea, then set it down in front of her grieving friend.
“Is it wrong of me to hope that they found someone else’s boy?” Carole asked. “What would God think about that? Wishing that some other family will get the worst news of their lives.”
Liz didn’t know what to say.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Carole went on, filling the void in their conversation. “I know that you think I’m a terrible person. I can’t help it. It’s not logical. It’s not moral. And yet there’s a part of me that hopes that if another child dies, then maybe Charlie will live. Like out of all of the kids who are stolen, you know, one or two make it home.”
“I’m not thinking that,” Liz said, getting up. “I’m thinking that there aren’t enough prayers and hopes in the world for everyone to have everything turn out all right.”
Carole drank more tea.
“I need to lie down, Liz,” she said. “Wake me up if the police come back.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
MISSING: SEVENTEEN DAYS
A caravan of emergency and police vehicles from an array of jurisdictions, along with the Oregon state medical examiner’s familiar white van and a couple of news crews from Portland and Bend, lined the highway. At the head of the procession was a large Ryder truck. Cars slowed and necks craned as passersby tried to see the reason for all the commotion. Before the body was found earlier that day, the place was completely unremarkable. No one would have stopped to look. Rabbitbrush and sagebrush competed for water. A hubcap that rolled off someone’s vintage VW had settled there. Litter clung to a fence like ratty laundry on a line some twenty yards off the highway.
A silvery white tarp over a broad aluminum frame covered the spot where the trucker had pulled over to take a leak. His dog, Jo-Jo, had found an arm.
“Yeah,” the driver said to a reporter as Esther and Jake passed by, “it made me sick seeing that. Something really wrong about people these days. Tossing someone into a ditch like they was nothing but trash.”
The sun was high in the sky, illuminating the tent like a big white beach umbrella. The side panel facing the highway had been dropped to obscure the view, although it wasn’t likely that anyone could see a thing from the roadway. Whoever had been left there was in pieces. Small yellow numbered evidence markers dotted the vicinity of the tent.
“Evidence, Jake,” Esther said as they approached the tent. “Whatever we see here, think of it as pieces of evidence. Don’t let it play with your head. If the pieces belong to our missing boy, then that’s all they are: pieces. Not him.”
Jake made a sound of agreement behind her.
She saw the medical examiner’s assistant, Mirabella Condit, working the scene. They’d met at a conference a few years prior. Mirabella was a striking woman who always dressed as if she were going out to dinner no matter where she went. “Look,” she once told Esther as they took lunch together on a conference break, “I’m in the lab all day long doing this and that to dead people. It’s grim. No doubt about it. My pushback is that I dress up. People say it’s about respecting the victims, but it’s really because it makes me feel good about myself. Reminds me I’m still a person too.”
Now, out on the highway, Mirabella smiled and gave Esther a friendly look. “I thought I might see you here.”
“You know about our missing boy.”
“Sure. Everyone does. At first I thought it might be him.”
“‘At first’?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Unless your three-year-old has a tattoo on his wrist and is female, then I’d say it’s not him.”
“No tattoo,” Esther said.
“No vagina?”
“Guess not.”
The medical examiner’s assistant knelt down and pointed to the happy-face tattoo on the mottled wrist. “Beyond tragically ironic,” she said.
Esther looked at Jake. “You can go back to the car and catch your breath, all right?”
Jake, looking grateful for the dismissal, turned and hurried away.
“Newbie?” Mirabella asked.
“Yeah,” Esther said, her smile joyless. “As green as his face right now.”
The two women talked for a few minutes. Searchers found a leg and the torso, but the victim’s head hadn’t been recovered. Coyotes, Mirabella said, often like to drag those back to their dens for further gnawing. “It takes a while to crack the skull and get into the brains,” she said. “A real treat, evidently.”
“What do you think happened to her?” Esther asked.
“Don’t know,” Mirabella said. “We have a little decomp going on here. As the boss likes to say, ‘a little softening around the edges.’ Exam in the lab will tell us what we need to know. Or some of it. My guess is that we’ve got a girl here, maybe fifteen or sixteen.”
“A runaway, maybe.”
Mirabella agreed. “A runaway that ran in the wrong direction.”
Esther and Jake returned to Bend, first stopping at the Jarretts’ place.
“Weird that Carole is always over here,” Jake said. “Her own house is practically a mansion.”
“It isn’t the same thing, but after I broke up with Drew I actually stayed with my mother for a few days. Didn’t want to be alone.”
Jake knew how Esther felt about her mom.
“That’s saying something, for sure,” he said.
Carole ran toward them.
“No,” Esther said. “It wasn’t your son.”
“Oh, God,” she said, hooking her arms around Liz, who was just behind her. “I told you that he’s alive. I told you!”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
MISSING: SEVENTEEN DAYS
Owen looked up from his desk as he rubbed his stubbled chin. Liz stood in his office doorway with a look on her face that he placed somewhere on the raw continuum between terror and anger. Her hair was disheveled, and she wore no makeup. He got up from his chair as fast as he could and pulled her inside, shutting the door.
“What are you doing here? You look whacked-out,” he said, dropping the miniblinds that provided some privacy from the prying eyes of the office staff as he ushered her to a chair.
She slumped downward.
Rag doll.
Jell-O.
Noodle.
“The police came,” Liz said, her voice cracking. She tried to get up, but Owen pressed her shoulders downward. “The body wasn’t Charlie’s,” she said. “Where is he? You told me, Owen . . . you told me . . . animals took him. Carole thinks he’s alive. This is going too far. Too far, Owen. Really.”
Owen slid the other visitor’s chair up next to his wife’s and sat down. His eyes were wide, and he supported himself by keeping a hand on her shoulder.
“Right,” he said. “I told you that animals got him. That didn’t mean he’d never be found.”
She put her face in her hands and started to sob. It was guttural. Constricted. The kind of ugly cry that comes from something very deep and broken.
Owen’s eyes darted to the miniblinds and the shadowy figure he thought he saw linger outside the window. He needed to calm Liz. Keep her quiet.