"You believe it's hostiles," I say. "Or settlers."
"I don't know why Sheriff Dalton makes the distinction," she snaps. "They're all hostiles. No one would choose to live there. No one normal."
I don't argue, fearing that, in my exhaustion, I'll say more than I should about Dalton's own past.
"At some point," I say, "I would like to ask you about your experience with them. The hostiles."
I say it as gently as I can, but she still flinches.
"Not right now," I add. "But if my investigation swings in that direction, as you think it will, I'll need as much as I can get on them, from as many angles as possible. Eric says--"
"You're asking Sheriff Dalton about the hostiles? That's like asking the pot about the kettle."
I bite my tongue. Hard. "I know your experience of them is very different from his," I say when I can speak again. "That is why I'd like to talk to you."
"I don't think that will be necessary, Detective. I appreciate your thoroughness, but I'm sure you can find others to more adequately discuss the topic. I will, however, guarantee that is what you are looking at here. Whether one monster or several, they come from out there. Not in here."
*
My first "press conference" was memorable for being the first one ever to be held in Rockton. I talked Dalton into letting me do it by convincing him that updating a gathering once was more efficient than snarling at an unending succession of citizens.
Otherwise, that conference was memorable only for the sheer unmemorability of it. I'm accustomed to dealing with pushy members of the press and outraged members of the public, all trying to get their two cents in while paying very little attention to what the police are actually saying. That first time in Rockton, they listened to the update, and they accepted it, much the way one accepts the announcement of a minor flight delay--grumble a bit, but trust that the airline has the situation in hand.
When I hold my conference this morning, people are more unsettled. They have questions. Yet they still listen and accept and, yes, trust.
I spin the story to emphasize the likelihood that the killer comes from without. From the forest. I'm careful to warn that might not be the case, and everyone needs to be careful in town too, but mostly, I want them staying out of those woods.
TWENTY-EIGHT
After the press conference, I head to speak to Nicole. Diana is at the house. Despite my reservations, she's doing an excellent job with Nicole.
I don't know what it's like to be in Diana's head. God knows, I've tried getting there. I realize it's not uncommon for people to still love their abusers, to put up with the abuse and even turn against those who try to help them. I know it. I don't understand it. With everything Diana did, it would seem she never truly recognized she was being abused, that she paid lip service to it for my sake, while seeing only the exciting emotional tumult of a toxic relationship.
Yet her patience and kindness with Nicole make me wonder if I'm being unfair. If she did feel trapped in her relationship with Graham, knowing it was abusive but unable to break away. Maybe the sympathy and care she gives to Nicole as a victim is the sympathy and care she couldn't give to herself.
I think that, and then I think of all the ways Diana betrayed me, all the times I thought I understood her motivations and suffered for it.
When I reach the house, Nicole is on the front porch, bundled in a nest of blankets, wearing dark sunglasses as she sits in a shard of sunlight, her face tilted up to catch it. A cat long denied the sun, now basking in it. When she sees me, she sits up and says she'll come inside, but I tell her not to rush, I have to check in with Diana first. Nicole settles back in her sunlight, and I head indoors.
Diana's in the kitchen, making tea. We talk. We're capable of that, though I'm well aware of how odd those conversations are, speaking to my oldest friend as if she were any other resident tasked with Nicole's care. Polite and businesslike, not a spark of warmth between us. No chill either. Just ... nothing.
Before she leaves, she says, "I hear you have a puppy."
I tense and say, "Eric got her for me. To train for tracking."
"Good idea." She pulls on her boots. "Do you remember when I tried to talk you into getting a cat?"
"Uh-huh."
A brief smile. "You're not really a cat person. A dog's better. I'm glad you have one. I saw you with her the other day. She's adorable."
"Thanks."
"You looked happy."
I pause, tensing again, as I say, carefully, "I am...," and I'm waiting for the inevitable comment, the one that suggests she's done me a favor, tricking me into coming to Rockton, but she only nods and then, before she goes, says, "The next time you come by, maybe you can bring the puppy. Nicole would like that. She mentioned it, and I suggested she ask you to bring her, but she doesn't want to be a pest. It might cheer her up. She tries to hide it, but it's ... rough. Really rough. Especially the nightmares. I know Will left sedatives, but she's not taking them. I don't feel right sneaking them into her tea at night, but I am tempted."
"I'll talk to Will and Isabel."
Diana makes a face at the mention of Isabel. There was an issue between them early on, where Isabel had been convinced Diana was "freelancing." Selling sex, in other words. But I get only that face--no argument--and then she's gone, promising to be back in an hour.
Nicole comes inside, and I set the two books beside a chair. She moves them farther from the fire, giving me a wry smile and saying, "Sorry. That's how he used to keep me in line. Burn pages of my writing."
I imagine that. He could threaten to take away her food, her water, torture her, even kill her, but what good does that do when someone wants to die? No, he threatened the only thing she cared about.
I say I'm sorry, but that makes her uncomfortable. Like when she'd apologized over taking the books with her. They would to us seem inconsequential. To her, they'd been the one good thing that came of her time down there--maybe not even the stories themselves, but what they represented, those hours when her mind escaped that hole.
"About the other women," she says. "Are they ... his?"
"We aren't sure. Did he mention that he'd done this before? Taken captives?"
She shakes her head. "No, but ... sometimes he'd reference other women. I figured they were girlfriends or such. Now I wonder if he was referring to them. Those women you found." She takes a notebook from the side table. "I made a list of everything he'd said about other women."
I move to sit beside her, and we go through her notes. A pattern emerges, one I've read about in serial killer cases. A man searching for a woman who fits a very warped set of criteria. His perfect mate. When each victim fails to meet his expectations, he resorts to shaping--giving his victim hints on how she should behave to make him happy. How she should behave to stay alive.
As for shaping him, one woman stands above all others. His mother. Sometimes, in crimes like these, men seem to be looking for that unconditional love. Nicole's captor played out yet another variation on the maternal theme: looking for the kind of woman his mother considered worthy. And his mother was very particular.
"I remember him saying how one woman tricked him. He thought she was single, no children. She had a scar, and he didn't know what it was from. She said she'd had a baby, who lived with his father. He checked me for a C-section scar like hers. Made me swear I'd never been married. His mother said divorced women are whores, and he shouldn't touch them."
Victoria Locke had left her six-year-old son with his father when she came to Rockton.
"He also checked me for tattoos," she says. "Another 'sign of the whore.' He said he'd been tricked about that, too. He'd been with a woman for a while before he realized she had a tattoo on her lower back. Some 'heathen symbol,' he said. Which made it twice as bad. Mother would not have approved."
"Did you get the sense his mother was still alive?" I ask. "Up here? Or down south?"
"He never said. It didn't seem like he ever planned to introduce us. He j
ust had to reassure himself that she'd have approved of the woman he was, you know, raping. He never tried to fancy that up, either. I thought he would. In the movies, guys like him tell themselves they love the woman they're kidnapping. That she'll see he's amazing and fall for him. I kept waiting for a sign of that, so I could use it. I even tried to fake caring for him. Fake..." She steels herself. "Fake enjoying it. He didn't like that. He wanted exactly what he had--an unwilling captive. One who met his mother's requirements."
"And you did."
"So it seemed. But that didn't help. He kept looking for flaws. Always looking."
Because he wanted to find flaws. That justified the abuse. Justified the murders.
We talk for a while after that. Before I leave, she says, "I'd like to go for a walk."
"Sure, just ask whoever's on guard duty to take you. I'd rather you didn't wander around town alone, but you aren't a prisoner here."
"I mean into the forest."
I sit back down.
"Yes," she says. "I know, that should seem like the last thing I'd want. Which is why I do. I loved the forest. I got captured because I loved it. I said I wanted berries, but I wanted the excuse more. I don't blame the forest for what happened. I blame myself. I knew how dangerous it was, and I didn't respect that."
I understand. That is the lesson my parents failed to impart, the one I now get from Dalton. Whether it's the forest or horseback riding or ATVs or snowmobiles or caving ... this thing you're doing? It might kill you. But it's amazing too, so take precautions and enjoy it. My parents had stopped at the "might kill you" part. But this is life, isn't it? It's amazing ... and it might kill you. In fact, someday, it will.
"Yes," I say. "I get that. But--"
"Did you get any of this growing up? Camping? Hiking? Cottage?"
"Some."
"To me 'wilderness' was that stuff between cities. The stuff I saw out a car window. Well, except for this summer camp when I was eleven and my dad was still trying to pretend things were normal. The girls in my cabin complained nonstop. The heat. The bugs. The dirt. Ick, ick, and more ick. I didn't even bother forming my own opinion. Just latched onto theirs, as I always did."
"Understandable, under the circumstances."
"Which doesn't stop me from looking back and thinking, God, I was a twit. And in this case, I missed out on what could have been an amazing experience. But I got a second chance when I came here. The forest became my place to escape. My wild paradise. But when we were coming back here from the mountain, all I could think was get me out of here. Out of the forest. Whatever peace I found there, he took it from me. I want it back."
"I completely get that, and I agree, but it's only been a few days."
"Take it slower?" She shakes her head. "The longer I wait, the harder it'll be to go in there again."
"Okay, but ... as much as I agree with the impulse in theory? He's still out there."
"Which means if you take me, you might be able to catch him."
"By using you as bait? No, I wouldn't--"
"Yes, suggesting that it might lure in my captor is an excuse. It's not like he's lurking beyond the town line. If he is, and you're there to shoot him? Great. Otherwise, I'd just like to tag along while you walk that puppy of yours. Let me face the forest, and then I'll get back in here and shut up." She smiles. "At least for a while."
TWENTY-NINE
I'm in the clinic helping Anders put Robyn Salas back on the examining table. We're storing the bodies in the crypt, which is not unlike the iceboxes in our homes--a cold-storage area under the floor, dug down to permafrost.
Body disposal is one of the more complicated problems facing Rockton. We can't send those who've allegedly disappeared home. We can't cremate them without the power needed to run an incinerator. Nor can we practice a more natural method--like placing the body on a platform--when we can't risk anyone discovering it. And the permafrost rules out a mass burial. Instead, not unlike serial killers, we must scatter our dead in shallow graves, spaced out and well hidden. That can't happen until the ground thaws, though. Until then, we have full access for posthumous examinations.
We've already checked Victoria Locke and confirmed that she has a C-section scar. Combine that with the story about a son left with his father, and it seems almost certain Nicole's captor was talking about Victoria.
We unwrap Robyn. She's the one I postulate was stored elsewhere before being put in that cave, which means her body started decomposing and then dried.
"I keep thinking she looks like something out of a horror movie," Anders says. "Which feels disrespectful. I'm kind of glad I never knew her."
"That's the advantage to being a city cop," I say. "When I watched autopsies of strangers, I had to remind myself they weren't movie props. At that point, though, it's easier not to connect the body to a person."
"But it isn't a person," he says, as we unwind Robyn's wrappings. "That's how I got through it, in the war. I'd remind myself that whatever makes up a human being--spirit, consciousness, mind--was gone, and I was just dealing with the parts they left behind. Which, oddly, doesn't really help when that 'part' is a half your buddy's head landing on you after an IED goes off."
His lips twist wryly, but it's not gallows humor. He's never talked about the war before, beyond what he did at the end, the shooting that brought him here.
"I don't know how you'd deal with that," I say honestly.
"Neither did I, which was the problem. A complete and total lack of ability to deal with pointless death. You're out there, and you're told it's for the greater good, and all the guys around you seem to believe it. So when you don't share their faith, you feel as if you're missing something. Being myopic. Unable to see the bigger picture."
He rubs his face on his shoulder as he keeps unwrapping. "Shit, don't know where that came from."
"Maybe having been to war and then seeing bodies that remind you of it?"
A quick smile. "You think so? Yeah. Okay, refocusing in five seconds."
"I'd tell you to take all the time you need, but you don't want that. I'd also tell you I'd like to hear more, anytime, but you already know that. So I'll rescue you from this awkward moment by instead saying I don't see a tattoo."
"Agreed. On all counts. Including the apparent lack of a tattoo. However, that doesn't rule one out. It just means she doesn't have a garish, multicolored one, which really doesn't work on certain skin tones."
He flexes his arm, where he has a US Army tattoo on one bulging biceps. It's black ink against his dark skin. I take a closer look at Robyn's lower back. Her skin tone is between mine and Anders's. A dark tattoo would also explain why Nicole's captor missed it for so long, given the dim light.
Decomp and desiccation have left this part of her body wrinkled and warped. Before I can even glance over my shoulder, Anders hands me the penlight from the tray.
"Mind reader," I say.
"It's an easy mind to read sometimes."
When I shine the beam on Robyn's lower back, I see a black line, too smooth to be natural. We use our gloves to stretch the skin. Then I trace the outline as best I can onto a piece of paper while Anders holds the penlight. I try not to think about how many tools I could access at home to help me reconstruct this. Except I wouldn't be reconstructing it at all. I wouldn't even be examining her. The coroner and lab techs would do all the work.
I can grumble about the elbow grease and hurdle jumping and imperfect measures that go into lifting that tattoo. The truth is, though, that I love the creative workout that goes into figuring out a solution to problems so easily solved in a modern lab. Victims are usually better served by that tech--DNA analysis has put countless perpetrators behind bars and saved countless innocents from a life there. But there is something to be said for this level of involvement, digging in and doing the work and knowing that the case is mine to win or lose.
When I finish shading in the lines, the shape takes form. It's a raven inside a sun, done in a style reminis
cent of southwest Native American art. When Nicole said her captor had called it a "heathen" symbol, I expected something occult. But this fits, being what he might interpret as religious art from a non-Christian faith.
"We've got one perpetrator," Anders says.
"We do."
"Does that help?"
"I hope so."
*
Dalton and I are having lunch at the station.
"So we have a time line now," he says. "Whoever took Nicole has to have been around at least five years. Which means, since you've eliminated me and Isabel..."
The next "oldest" person in terms of residency would be Mathias, who arrived months after Robyn disappeared.
"Val was right," I say. "We're looking at someone from outside. A settler or a hostile."
"Agreed."
"I know more about the settlers. There are a few small communities, plus those who live on their own, like your brother. We'll start by talking to Jacob, get his opinion on who fits the physical description or seems a good suspect. As for the hostiles, what can you tell me about them?"
"They're hostile."
"Uh, yeah ... says so right there on the label."
"Yep. And that label means I don't know shit about them. I've had encounters only, which I've kept as brief as possible."
"Have you spoken to them?"
"Fuck, no. Most times, I don't even see them. They're like any other predator--the moment I know one's nearby, I put on my threat display while getting the hell off their territory."
"How do you know they're hostiles and not settlers?"
"Well, let's see." He points to a tiny scar along his hairline. "That's the one who slingshot a rock and nearly put my eye out. He was howling and yipping like a feral dog. Then there was the one who charged me. He was naked except for the belt made of bones. He'd painted himself in mud. Or I hoped it was mud, but wasn't getting downwind to be sure."
"And that's proof you're dealing with hostiles?" I snort. "I ran into those guys every time I had to break up a frat party."
"That's the problem with kids down south. They don't have enough to do. Enough responsibility."
"You sound like such an old man. Kids these days. When I was their age, I had to haul water five miles, chop wood in snowstorms, hunt for our dinner, and do my homework by candlelight." I pause. "Oh, wait. You really are that guy."
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