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He found himself staring at the photo. A girl’s face, young but somehow not hopeful. She was shy, probably, gazing warily at the camera. A few freckles scattered across a small nose. Instead of being youthfully soft, this face was thin, the wings of cheekbone too prominent, the chin too pointed, the forehead too high. Hair was scraped back into a ponytail. In this light he couldn’t tell what color her eyes were.
Brown, said the description. Hair brown, too. Her name was Madeline Noelle Dubeau. He remembered feeling stunned. He knew that name. Marc Dubeau was a prominent local businessman, a friend of the police chief’s. That last name wouldn’t be common in central Oregon. This almost had to be his daughter.
Madeline, he noted, was fifteen years old, turning sixteen on November 26, when she would be eligible to take the driver’s test for her license.
She was the same age as Colin’s sister, Caitlin.
He turned the flashlight beam again on that dark patch where blood sank into the soil. Anger and a sick feeling squeezed his chest. Would Madeline Dubeau ever have a chance to get that driver’s license?
Colin had tried to convince himself he was letting his imagination run away from him, that she’d had a friend with her who had already helped her make her way home. Or driven her to the emergency room.
But, however green behind the ears he’d been, he knew better. The prickles on the back of his neck said otherwise. Something bad had happened to this girl.
Now in the SUV he grunted, still staring ahead unseeing through the windshield, and remembered the chill when he found out her maternal uncle was a cop, a detective. The department had thrown everything they had at the case, but in twelve years, they had never found a trace of Maddie Dubeau. Unless, today, it was her bones that were wrenched from the earth along with the tree roots.
Shaking his head, he finally backed out and turned onto the street heading north toward the far end of the park.
Traffic, pedestrian and vehicular, was nothing like what it would be in another few weeks once ski season opened. Angel Butte brimmed with tourists during the summer and again when winter arrived. Right now was a lull, when locals took advantage of the chance to dine out or stop by one of the brew pubs without long waits.
Ten minutes later, he left his 4Runner behind a line of other police vehicles on the street and strode along the bulldozed road carved between the stand of woods and the fenced backyards of the nearest homes.
This was early November, with a bite to the air as the thermometer hovered just above freezing. The snow level on the jagged peaks of the Three Sisters and the greater bulk of Mount Bachelor to the north had dropped, a harbinger of the months to come. Colin had substituted a parka he kept in his SUV for his suit jacket. The pungent scent of pine was more powerful than usual, after chain saws and dozers had downed a dozen tall, ancient ponderosas, scarring what had been untouched forest. His every step kicked up the red-dirt legacy of the area’s volcanic past, coating his dress shoes.
He wasn’t thinking about the dust or the smell or the yellow equipment or the voices he heard. He was still caught in his memories of that night, and turned his head to orient himself. Just before he’d parked, Colin had noticed where the trail emerged. He was passing near enough to where he’d found the bike to hit the place with a well-thrown stone.
A chill traveled up his spine. What if Madeline—Maddie to her friends and family—had lain here all these years, waiting? So damn close?
What he couldn’t figure was why he was surprised that they might, at last, be finding her body. He’d expected that someday she’d turn up. After twelve years, dead was a lot likelier than alive.
“Damn,” he said softly, and kept walking. By the time he reached the crowd, he had made sure his face was expressionless.
Heads turned his way, some wearing hard hats. Others he knew: Duane, of course, and two detectives, Jane Vahalik and Ronnie Orr. Vahalik was good. Experienced, despite being only in her early thirties. She’d spent time on the Drug Enforcement Team and been a detective in Criminal Investigations for...he thought three years. Maybe four. Orr had moved over from patrol just a month ago and been assigned to her for training.
He nodded at all of them. Then, hiding his reluctance, he looked toward the vast root ball of the tree and the gaping hole left below it. Not a usual crime scene. The ground had been bulldozed and trampled beyond any hope of combing the top layers of soil for clothing or jewelry or, hell, a cigarette wrapper that might still hold fingerprints. The top feet of soil were heaped where the dozer had pushed them.
Some lucky folks were now going to be assigned the task of sifting through that pile of dirt and needles and branches.
Duane was already standing beside the bones that had been thus far uncovered. Colin joined him and crouched to see better. The pitiful collection was stained red by the soil. Flashes of ivory showed where some had been snapped apart by the violence of their unearthing. Most were unidentifiable to Colin, but he could make out a long bone in multiple pieces, a pelvis, half a dozen shattered ribs and the jaw with a couple of dental fillings.
“Those look too large to be Maddie’s.” He wanted to feel relief, to be sure, but couldn’t.
Beside him, Duane grunted. “I think you’re right. Assuming those pieces are part of a femur.”
Colin was studying the jaw. “Only a couple of small fillings. Molars are all in, but the wisdom teeth aren’t completely.” He glanced up. “Do you know about Maddie’s?”
“No idea. I don’t even know when they’re supposed to come in.”
“I think it varies. Sixteen? Seventeen?”
“A kid, then.” Duane paused. “Maddie was almost sixteen.”
Still feeling apprehension, Colin nodded.
He’d wanted a definitive answer. He had wanted to be told right here, right now, that this wasn’t Maddie Dubeau. Why, he couldn’t have said. Some kid, maybe a young adult, had died and been buried here. It wasn’t as if any good news was in the offing—say that this skeleton would turn out to belong to a scumbag drug dealer who would be unmourned. If—no, when—they figured out whose bones these were, a mother and father, a girlfriend, sisters or brothers, someone was going to be hit with the worst of all possible news. The end of hope. If not the Dubeaus, someone else.
He wondered if Duane held out any real hope Maddie was still alive.
“Okay,” he said with a sigh. “You know what to do. Keep me updated.”
Both men stood.
Colin said slowly, “Wasn’t it just last year that girl’s bones were found out near Prineville?”
Those had been in Crook County’s jurisdiction. “I wonder if they ever identified them?” Duane said thoughtfully. “There was that other girl three, four years ago, too. At the foot of Angel Butte. Wasn’t she yours?”
“Yeah.” Colin had been lead investigator. The small volcanic cinder cone rose right in the middle of Angel Butte and was another city park, where the marble statue of an angel had “miraculously” appeared in the late 19th century to overlook the town.
That girl had been identified. Turned out to be a runaway from Salem, a really sad case. She’d disappeared when she was only fourteen, turned up dead here just before her sixteenth birthday—Maddie’s age. She had been pregnant, they could tell that much, but her body was so decayed no cause of death was ever determined. They hadn’t gotten anywhere near to figuring out how she’d come to be buried beneath a foot of red cinders.
Duane was the one to shake his head. “No reason to look for connections yet. This may turn out to be male. Or older. Hell, he probably got knifed in a drunken fight.”
“Maybe.”
After a momentary silence, Duane said, “You have a hunch.”
Colin moved uncomfortably. “Why don’t I make a few calls? You have enough to do here, and you’re right. Chances are it’s a waste of time.” But he had to satisfy this uneasy feeling, and Duane, like any other cop, would understand.
After a moment, his lieutenant nodded and turned away. “All right,” he called. “Folks, let’s get pictures, and then we’ve got some work to do.”
Colin was reluctant to leave, but he was, essentially, an administrator now. He had to demonstrate trust in not only Duane, but also his detectives. Let them do their job. If he stayed, all he’d do was make them nervous.
He knew from experience, too, that more bones would be uncovered slowly. Officers and evidence techs wouldn’t be digging with shovels; they’d use trowels. From here on out, this would more nearly resemble an archaeological dig than a normal crime scene. It was going to take days, maybe weeks, given the scale of the damage wrought by the bulldozer.
But some answers should be forthcoming soon. With teeth, a femur—assuming that was one—and a pelvis, the medical examiner or a forensic pathologist ought to be able to nail down age and gender. A good guess at how long ago the victim had been buried would provide a starting point, too.
Walking away, he was surprised to feel a clutch of something like grief.
Don’t let it be Maddie.
Damn it, he thought, her parents would probably be relieved if these bones proved to be hers, if they knew at last, once and for all, what had become of their daughter. Who was he to want to prolong the agonizing, fading wisp of hope that she was only gone, not dead?
No one. He had no right to wish that kind of suffering for them. And, Jesus, he didn’t like to think about what Duane was feeling right now.
But it was his own memory, his own sense of failure, that caught at him now. Instead of going straight back to his SUV, he went to the trail and walked back into the park. Not far—just to the curve where he had found the bike that night. Voices and the sound of distant traffic were muffled here. He stopped, looking at the spot where her blood had soaked into the earth. He remembered the darkness, the thick silence. The crime scene tape that by morning had wrapped from tree to tree, the careful search for evidence never found. And the photos the newspaper had run, not only the one he had kept, but also candid shots of Maddie when she was younger.
Never smiling. Only in the school photo had her lips curved in an obligatory smile. Otherwise, her face was always solemn. Today, he felt the same unease he had then, the same sense that the common description of her as an introverted dreamer wasn’t quite right.
He stood for a moment, as if at a grave site, then finally, shaking his head, turned away. Some old wrongs could be righted. Some couldn’t.
* * *
COLIN SPOKE TO a Sergeant Fletcher in the Crook County sheriff’s department about the bones that had been found by a rock hound out past Prineville the previous year. “Nah, we never identified that kid,” Fletcher said. “Medical examiner’s best guess was that she was maybe fifteen, sixteen years old. She thought female, but you know that was a big maybe.”
Colin made a sound of agreement.
“Thing is, we never found the skull. Probably carried away by an animal. With no teeth to match to dental records, no fingerprints...” Probably he was shrugging. After a moment, he asked, “Have you thought about checking with other jurisdictions? I have this feeling Deschutes County had some bones, too.”
Goddamn. If I were a serial killer, Colin thought, I’d spread the bodies around, too. Good way to avoid anybody getting too interested, in case a few of those bodies were found eventually.
If these were related, the few that had been found almost had to be the tip of an iceberg. Think of how much empty country there was out here, with the high desert stretching to the east, the wooded, rugged mountains of the Cascade Range to the west. How many places to dump a body.
He didn’t like this line of thinking, but couldn’t avoid it. He thanked the sergeant and asked him to call if he thought of any more details or heard of anything relevant.
His gaze strayed to the bulletin board and Maddie Dubeau’s picture. Did this explain her disappearance? He didn’t want to think so.
Duane called a couple of hours later. “It can’t be Maddie,” he said baldly. “We’ll check dental records, too, but...Marge says this one is male.”
Relief was sharp, a jab to the chest rather than a gentler flood. Colin cleared his throat. “Age?”
“Can’t pin it down. Apparently some people get wisdom teeth real early, some not until their twenties, some never. Late teens, she thinks, but she wants more bones.”
Colin grunted. “I don’t have good news for you,” he said, starting with what the Crook County sergeant had told him. “Deschutes County had a kid, too, found four or five years ago, buried in the cinders on Lava Butte. Some teenagers were out there at night, drank a few six-packs—climbing up and sliding down, you know how it is—and they uncovered bones. A boy smashed the skull with his foot.”
“Bet that still gives him nightmares.”
“No shit,” Colin agreed. “That one was shot. There was an exit hole in the back of the head. Since, unlike Crook County, they had teeth, they were able to identify the victim. Another runaway, a girl from Vancouver last seen in Portland. Sixteen years old.”
“The one here in town was about the same age, too, wasn’t she?” Duane said thoughtfully.
“There are a hell of a lot of kids that age on the street.”
This wasn’t a problem they had much in Angel Butte. Winters were too cold in central Oregon for anyone to sleep in doorways or alleys year-round, and the town was too small for prostitution and panhandling to hide in shadows. But in larger cities, it was another matter.
“I called Bend, too,” Colin continued. “They didn’t have anything related. They think. A Detective—” he glanced at his notes “—Jacobs is going to do some research. He’s only been with the department for four years. Klamath County’s getting back to me.”
“If this one is a guy and those were girls, there’s likely no tie.” A serial killer was wired to choose victims to meet a certain need, usually at least part sexual, which almost always meant they were of one gender or the other.
“Probably not,” Colin agreed. Which didn’t mean these bones weren’t in some way connected to Maddie’s disappearance.
Duane gave an update on the search, which so far had turned up only a few additional small bones from a hand or foot.
The two men left it at that.
Colin rocked back in his chair. Well, the latest bones weren’t Maddie Dubeau’s. That was something.
She’d be twenty-seven years old now, if she were alive. Twenty-eight in a few weeks. He didn’t even have to think about it. His relationship with his sister wasn’t close, but he’d sent her a birthday card just last month. Like Cait, Maddie wouldn’t be a skinny kid anymore.
Some people didn’t change much from their early teen years, others so much so their own parents wouldn’t recognize them if they hadn’t been there every day while the transformation happened. The plain became pretty, the beautiful, ugly...or just ordinary.
Which way, he wondered, would Madeline Dubeau have gone?
He shook his head at his own foolishness. She was dead. She had to be. It was past time he quit clinging to the stubborn belief that she had somehow survived. How could she have? She had been a kid. A girl, small, fine-boned, physically immature for her age. Injured, snatched late at night and never seen again.
The very fact that she haunted him suggested that she was dead, didn’t it? The living left you alone in a way the dead didn’t. Just look at him; he didn’t give a damn about his mother, who was alive and well in San Francisco, but his father he still actively hated even though he’d been buried four years now.
Colin swung around in his chair to look out the window at a courtyard and the brick back of the jail. Despite the calls he’d made today, this investigation wasn’t his. It was Duane Brewer’s, Jane Vahalik’s, Ronnie Orr’s.
I’ll call Cait tonight, he thought. Arrange to get together with her when I’m in Seattle. He’d be there in two weeks, for a symposium Microsoft was holding on new technology for law enforcement personnel. Cait was his only real family. He could try harder. The fault was as much his as hers.
And right now, he had work to do. He swung back around to his desk and computer, and didn’t let himself glance at the bulletin board again.
CHAPTER TWO
“HEY, THE BOOK lady is here!” Aliyah cried.
Girls jumped up from the sagging sofa and miscellaneous easy chairs and rushed to crowd around Nell Smith. The music video on the TV was forgotten.
Katya, after barely glancing away from the television, said, “Big freaking deal.” Katya had appeared at SafeHold half a dozen times in the past two years. She never stayed for more than a week or two. She had to be nearly eighteen, and Nell worried she would soon be ineligible to stay at the shelter for homeless teens.
“Nell! Cool,” said Savannah, a wispy, pasty-skinned fourteen-year-old boasting three eyebrow piercings, half a dozen in each ear, a lip labret and a belly button ring. If there were other piercings in unseen places, Nell didn’t want to know.
“Did you bring me the new Vampire Academy book?” Kaylee asked eagerly.
More titles flew.
She grinned at their eager faces. “Yes, yes and yes.” All they wanted to read were paranormal romances, but Nell’s selections were written for teenagers, by talented authors.
She volunteered here on a regular basis, typically spending every Sunday afternoon and one weeknight evening just hanging out and talking to the girls. Girls were housed separately from guys, although the two buildings were linked by a courtyard and a shared kitchen and dining room.
Nell also came weekly to represent the Seattle Public Library, maintaining a shelf of books in each of the two buildings and filling special requests when she could. She’d packed other shelves with books that were weeded from the library collection, donated, or picked up at garage sales. Many of the kids who came in here weren’t readers and never would be. Others thought they weren’t but got seduced. Some laboriously studied for their high school equivalency exams, or to catch up with school—if they could be convinced to care.
What she loved most was encouraging reading for the pure joy of it. These were kids who hadn’t had much joy in their lives. She, like many of the other adults who worked and volunteered here, knew the bewilderment and fear and anger they felt. When she’d been where they were, books were her salvation. They’d offered her the world, filled her emptiness. Now she had a mission, one she never tried to disguise. Josef gave guitar lessons, Dex organized soccer games, Chloe taught computer skills. They all had something different to offer.
A couple of girls poked heads out into the hall, saw who was here and retreated in disinterest. Nell had already noticed two newcomers in the living room, neither moving from their seats, both watching the excitement with confusion. One was a black girl with her head shaved. Long skinny arms wrapped herself in a hug that was painful to see. The other girl was white, overweight and suffering from acne. Nell caught a glimpse of needle tracks on the inside of one elbow.
She smiled at both of them. “I’m Nell Smith. Otherwise known as the book lady. I bring library books regularly.”
“DVDs, too,” one of the girls said, already delving into today’s section. Her lip curled. “Sense and Sensibility? Really?”
“Try it. Guaranteed.”
There were a lot of rolled eyes. She grinned.
“Nell,” said a voice behind her. “Good. You’re here.”
She turned with a smile to greet Roberta Charles, the director, principal fund-raiser, cook and loving arms of SafeHold. Roberta had two other people with her today, though, one of whom sent a flash of dismay through Nell. He held a giant camera on one shoulder. A TV camera. He was already assessing the room, the shabby furniture, the excited clump of girls. Nell.
“Ah...I’ll get out of your way,” she said. “Just let me grab the books that have to go back.”
“No, no!” Roberta said. “You’re one of my best volunteers. Linda Capshaw is here from KING-5 to do a feature on us. She’s hoping to talk to staff and volunteers as well as some of the kids.”
Nell was okay with talking. The idea of chatting about what they accomplished here at SafeHold didn’t bother her; she’d done it before. It was the camera that spooked her. She was being idiotic; what difference would it make anymore if her face should appear somewhere? Probably none. Which didn’t keep her heart from pumping alarm through her bloodstream in quick spurts.
“Sure,” she agreed. “Not on camera, though. I’m shy.”
“I’m not.” Aliyah struck a pose, one skinny hip cocked. Giggling, three or four of the other girls flung arms around each other and tried to look sexy.
These, Nell knew, were the ones who weren’t hiding from anyone. The ones with no family to care that they’d gone missing. A few of the others were melting away or ducking heads to hide behind lank hair. Nell wished she didn’t have her own hair bundled on the back of her head. She’d have hidden behind it, too.
The camera was rolling. She turned her back and quickly put out the new books and piled the ones ready to go back into her plastic crate.
“Requests?” she asked.
Clarity, a shy thirteen-year-old who had arrived pregnant—too pregnant for abortion to be an option—and was awaiting foster care placement, leaned close and whispered, “Can you bring something about adoption?”
“Of course I will.” For a moment, forgetting the visitors, Nell smiled at the girl. “A lot of what’s written is for adopters, not birth mothers, but it would still give you some guidance. I’ll see if I can find some stuff written by kids who were adopted, too.” She took the chance of giving Clarity a quick hug. Thin arms encircled her in return. Nell’s eyes stung for a moment as tenderness and pity flooded her. God. What if she’d gotten pregnant back then?
Some flicker of movement pulled her back to the moment, and she took a suspicious look at the cameraman. He was currently half-turned away from her, sweeping the room, not seeming to pay attention. Respecting her wishes? How likely was that? But she could hope. Her fault for having left herself vulnerable for a minute.
The KING-5 woman looked vaguely familiar to Nell. Or maybe she was just a type: blond, exquisitely groomed, wearing a royal blue suit. “Do you have time to talk right now?” she asked.
“Just for a minute. I do have to get back to the library.” Under Roberta’s approving eye, she joined the women. It was fantastic that SafeHold was getting some publicity. Desperately needed donations always followed. But, while there were many things she’d do for these kids, appearing on air wasn’t one of them. The only picture she allowed to be snapped of her was for her driver’s license. Unavoidable, and barely resembling her anyway.
“SafeHold,” she told Linda Capshaw, who’d asked for permission to record her voice, “offers these kids hope in so many forms. Many practical, of course.” She elaborated, concluding with, “Sometimes, all we offer is sanctuary. We have at least one girl here right now who won’t accept anything else.” She carefully avoided glancing toward Katya. “But every so often, she shows up and has a couple of weeks here, where she knows she’s safe, where she gets enough to eat, where people are kind and nonjudgmental to her. Some of these kids have been abused and simple kindness means everything to them. Others need windows opened to give them glimpses of chances they never dreamed were there for them.”
“How did you become involved?” the blonde asked, sounding genuinely interested, although it was hard to tell for sure. Getting people to open up was, after all, her most essential job skill.
Nell took a deep breath. This was always hard to say. “I was a teenage runaway. Not in Seattle, somewhere else. I’d rather not say where. But I lived on the streets for over two years. A local shelter was my salvation. When I moved to Seattle and read about SafeHold in the Times, I called immediately. What’s that been?” She glanced at Roberta, even though she knew to the day when she’d first walked in the door. “Five years ago?”