She spent the night with a girlfriend, and only when she heard about the shooting of a state trooper on one of the news shows did she begin to suspect a connection between this incident and Caldicott’s recent arrivals. But it still took her a further twelve hours to contact police, her reluctance to do so not unrelated to Caldicott’s narcotics business, of which she might not have been entirely unaware, her personal tastes extending to a little coke, she said, but only on weekends.
Even with her suspicions, Ouellette made efforts to reach Caldicott before approaching the police. She did this, she first told detectives, because she “wanted to be sure about everything before she got Heb in any trouble,” although she later admitted that she had been prepared to forgive Caldicott for their earlier misunderstanding involving assault and the threat of rape, because he had never hit her before and was pretty generous with the coke. Unfortunately, when she returned to their shared abode Caldicott was gone, along with his two buddies, the stash of coke, and $383 that Ouellette kept in an empty Humpty Dumpty potato chip bag taped under her bedside table. It was this final betrayal that caused Ouellette definitively to abandon all hopes of reconciliation with Heb Caldicott, and instead hang him out to dry for whatever he might or might not have done, along with his shitweasel buddies, their families, their children born and yet unborn, and their dogs.
It hadn’t taken long for the police to connect Caldicott to one Dale Putnam and his buddy, Gary Newhouse. Soon law enforcement agencies across New England, along with their Canadian colleagues over the border, would be scouring the territories for them, and their pictures would be peering out from newspapers and TV screens throughout the Northeast.
Which left only a succession of disgruntled Piscataquis County sheriff’s deputies to monitor the burial site and complain about being left out of the action.
CHAPTER
XLIV
Guarding an empty hole in the ground was not, Deputy Renee Kellett had to admit, the most onerous of tasks, but it was among the dullest. Mostly she listened to music on her cell phone, and studied her coursework. Kellett had just completed her associate’s degree in criminal justice, and was now progressing toward a bachelor’s in public safety administration. She enjoyed working for the sheriff’s department, but her ambition was to move to a federal agency, and she had no hope of achieving this without a degree.
So on one hand she was earning some much-needed overtime by sitting in her car and moving along the occasional hunter or looky-loo who strayed too close to the dig site, while also effectively being paid to study. On the other hand, the kind of manhunt currently taking place for Putnam, Newhouse, and their buddy Caldicott was rare in this state, and brought with it a buzz of purpose and excitement that was noticeably absent at this particular patch of woodland.
This was Kellett’s second shift on grave patrol, and she was hoping it might be the last; there was only so much reading and listening in solitude that a person could undertake before her mind began to wander—and in Kellett’s experience, it never wandered anywhere good under such conditions as these. Maybe an artist or a writer could find inspiration in them, but she was neither, so instead of picturing great paintings, or planning prizewinning books, she fretted about how her mom was starting to misremember stuff, or forget things entirely; how, with her dad gone, she’d be left to take care of her mom unaided because her older brother wasn’t worth a nickel on the dollar when it came to helping anyone other than himself; how that might impact on her plans to progress to Homeland Security or—yeah, dream on—the FBI; and why, although she was an attractive woman without any complexes or peculiarities beyond the norm, she was experiencing a dustbowl level of drought in her sex life.
Still, she performed with diligence her duties at the gravesite. At least once every hour, if only to stretch her legs, she walked the trail to make sure the canopy remained secure, because a wind had come down from the north that was strong enough to rock her car on its suspension, and if it could do that, it could also pick up a sheet of canvas and blast it toward Florida. It wasn’t raining, though, which was some small consolation. This place was gloomy enough as it was, with or without a grave.
Kellett had been one of the first on the scene when the body was initially discovered. She’d never seen remains in that state before. Like all police, she’d looked on her share of the dead, but she had not previously encountered a body buried in the ground for so long yet still in a state of some preservation. The sight should have reminded her of old horror movies, creeping her out, but instead she felt only a crushing sadness that she had not yet been able to shake off entirely, although spending long hours alone by a burial pit probably wasn’t helping any.
Neither was the possibility that an infant child might also be interred in the vicinity, although Kellett was beginning to believe this wasn’t very likely, and she got the sense that those in command were thinking the same way. The wardens had almost concluded their search of the area, with no result. If the baby had died along with, or soon after, the mother, it stood to reason that it would have been buried with her. Kellett could have told them that to begin with.
The wind picked up, and a noise intruded on her musings: the flapping of a tarp. It sounded like the big one over the grave. She’d already been forced to deal with it once, but she’d never claimed to be an expert on knots, and it looked as though this deficiency was coming back to haunt her. At least it was still light the first time she’d tackled the rope, but dusk had descended since then, and now she’d be forced to deal with it by flashlight.
She climbed from the car, and the first drop of rain hit her on the crown of the head with the force of a thrown coin.
“Oh, for crying out loud.”
It wasn’t even supposed to rain. Stupid meteorologists—and how many of them were actual meteorologists anyway? Most of them were just weathermen, for Pete’s sake. If they had any qualification at all, it lay in being Well Turned Out Before Breakfast.
Kellett grabbed her hat and secured it under her chin, shrugged on her raincoat, and headed into the woods. The trees offered some shelter, but the ferocity of the downpour meant that branches could only do so much. Within a minute the trail, treacherous even when dry, had turned positively lethal. Kellett tried to watch her step, but vigilance could only take a woman so far: she slipped as the tarp came in sight, and went down hard on her right knee. The fall didn’t hurt, but it left her trouser leg filthy and soaked. She tested it for any tears and found none, which was a relief; it was too early in the year to begin eating into her uniform allowance.
Kellett looked to her right. Even without the aid of her flashlight, she could see the tarp waving in the wind. She didn’t rush to get to it, fearful of slipping again. After all, it wasn’t as though any evidence remained to be retrieved from the hole. The decision to keep it covered arose as much from a residual respect for the body it had once contained as it did from a desire to do everything by the book.
She reached the site. The knot she had tied earlier had come undone. She grabbed the guy rope, but the wind yanked it from her hand and the end lashed her cheek. Kellett rarely swore—she regarded it as a sign of poor breeding—but she came pretty close to uttering the first syllable of the f-bomb when the rope caught her.
“Give me a break, huh?” She wasn’t sure whom she was addressing: God, maybe, assuming He wasn’t too busy trying to separate folk intent upon beheading one another in His name. Then again, God seemed to have enough free time on His hands to help football players score touchdowns, and hillbillies win the lottery, so why not allocate a few of those spare seconds to not making her life any harder than it was? God, Kellett sometimes thought, needed to get His priorities straight.
She was just fixing her grip on the rope when she froze. She had neither seen nor heard anything untoward, yet was conscious of the rapid beating of her heart, the tensing of the muscles in her legs, and the piloerection reflex as the tiny muscles at the base of each hair follicle contracte
d, covering her with goose bumps.
Fear, unlike any she had ever experienced before.
Kellett released the rope and reached for her gun, crossing her right hand over her left so beam and weapon moved in unison. As she did so, she retreated to the cover of the spruce nearest the hole, conscious that the flashlight made her an easier target if she remained in the open.
“Sheriff’s deputy,” she shouted. “This area is restricted. You’re trespassing on a crime scene.”
Kellett listened but received no response, only the sound of rain falling on leaf, branch, and dirt. She drew a deep breath, and tried to determine the source of the threat. She was facing back down the trail toward her vehicle, and could see no activity in that direction. She was relying entirely on atavistic instinct by now, but her best guess was that whatever had spooked her was to the south or west of her position, because it had been behind her when she was dealing with the guy line.
She risked a look around the trunk of the tree and saw a figure clearly silhouetted between two trees, on a rise to the south of the site. Despite the bulk of its outdoor clothing, and the distance involved, Kellett was certain she was looking at a woman. Then, seconds later, the figure turned and was gone.
Kellett released a breath. Just a rubbernecker. No one worth chasing. She’d make a note of it in her log, and warn Mel Wight when he arrived to relieve her, just so he’d know to keep an eye out.
She was putting her gun back in its holster when she heard a wet, sliding sound from behind, followed by a splash as something landed in the mud and water at the base of the grave. Only then did she notice her goose bumps had not disappeared, and her heartbeat had not slowed. She drew the gun again, and quietly shifted position, stepping softly around the tree until the grave site was revealed to her.
The canvas continued to flap, and the rain fell, so her view of what lay beneath was partial and restricted. But she could detect movement in the dirt, as though some large animal were digging in an effort to conceal itself from the approach of a predator.
Flap.
And she could feel its fear, because it was so much like her own, and discern its shape, because that also resembled hers. It lay curled in the depression left by the body of the dead woman, and although the dimensions had been altered by the removal of the remains and the subsequent search for the child, still it seemed to fit the cavity with ease.
Flap.
And now it appeared to become aware of a threat more imminent than the one from which it had fled, and as it turned its face toward Kellett she discerned the rot of it, and the hollow concavities of its eyes, and its belly, both distended yet withered, and all it was and all it might once have been. Yet it was not a thing composed entirely of bone and old skin: Kellett saw wood and ivy, twigs and small animal bones, as though it had been forced to scavenge to complete itself. It opened its mouth as a beast might in order to shriek an alarm or growl a warning.
Flap.
And then it was moving again, digging deeper into the bank, exposing a hole either recently made or previously unknown, and into this it dragged itself, its body contorting with serpentine paroxysms, until all that remained visible was the sole of a foot, a spur of bone exposed at the heel, before this, too, was gone, and the mud and dirt slid down to fill the gap behind, so it was as if it had never been, its presence in this world no more than the conjuring of an unquiet mind, even as the consciousness that had imagined it, Kellett’s own, grew dim, and she fell back against the tree and let it support her as she dropped to the ground, where she sat, conscious yet unseeing, until the arrival of Mel Wight’s vehicle summoned her from her stupor, and she descended to meet him, but said nothing, beyond a distant figure glimpsed, of what she had witnessed.
CHAPTER
XLV
The birth rate in Maine had been falling consistently over the previous decade, which still left Parker with almost 13,000 registered live births for the year in which the woman in the woods had died. In the quiet of his home office, he opened a map of Piscataquis in his Maine Atlas and Gazetteer, marked the location of the grave site, then placed the point of a compass on the dot and drew a circle with a generous radius of approximately fifteen miles. The circle did not break the borders of the county.
If he was correct in his assumption of local knowledge—and it seemed reasonable to begin with that and expand the search only if necessary—then he was now looking at just 160 registered births during the year in question. This could be narrowed still further, Parker believed, thanks to his visit to the grave: the body had been buried three feet below ground, which was a considerable depth, and suggested someone operating with little fear of being disturbed. But digging a hole of that size and draft would be difficult during the deepest winter months as the ground would just be too hard, so he could probably exclude children registered in January, and maybe even late December. He was tempted to exclude February, too, but decided to err on the side of caution: ground cold enough to preserve a body, then, yet not so cold as to be unworkable.
But in addition to births, more than two hundred legal adoptions of children were processed through the public child welfare agency in Maine for the same period, and many more using licensed private agencies. With the birth rate as a gauge, this meant registered legal adoptions in Piscataquis County probably didn’t amount to more than a handful, and he could rule out any children whose age at adoption was outside his parameters.
All of which presupposed that the person responsible for burying the mother had chosen to hide his or her tracks either by registering the birth under another woman’s name, or had come up with a story convincing enough to result in a formal adoption. Neither, Parker knew, would have been particularly difficult, but he decided to examine the simpler of the two options first, which was to register the birth.
Under the state’s revised statutes, one of four individuals was required to prepare and file a certificate for a birth occurring outside a hospital or institution: a physician or other person in attendance at the birth; the father; the mother; or the person in charge of the premises where the live birth took place, which could be anyone from a hotel proprietor to the guy who ran the local gas station. If the mother was not married at either conception or birth, the details of the putative father could not be entered on the certificate without both his written consent and that of the mother.
In other words, there was little to stop a woman turning up with a child in her arms and filing a birth certificate with the clerk of the municipality—unless, of course, the woman was known to the clerk personally, in which case questions might be asked about the sudden appearance of an unexpected child. But Piscataquis, at more than four thousand square miles, was the second-largest county in the state, and also the most sparsely populated, with about 17,000 people residing within its borders, a lot of them existing below the poverty line. Those kinds of statistics were conducive to isolation, and places like Piscataquis, and farther north, Aroostook, tended to attract the kind of folks who preferred to be left to their own devices, by and large. This did not make Parker’s task any easier.
The Division of Public Health Systems in Augusta retained most of the information he required. Parker considered taking a trip north the following day, to see what he could discover. He also went through his Rolodex and found the name of a contact at the Maine Town and City Clerks’ Association, which had more than seven hundred members across the state, one of whom might well have unwittingly registered the birth of the dead woman’s child. But he’d hold off on asking for a favor until he’d scoured the vital records available to him in Augusta.
By then his back and sides ached from sitting for too long—a legacy of his gunshot wounds—and his eyes were watering. He knew that his eyesight was getting worse, but he didn’t want to go back to his optometrist for a new prescription. He had somehow managed to convince himself that he required spectacles only for reading and looking at screens, and could get away with not wearing them all the time. H
e remembered discussing the problem with Angel, who had been noticeably unsympathetic.
“Vanity,” was Angel’s conclusion.
“It’s not vanity. It’s a matter of practicality.”
“You tell yourself that. The rest of us will go for answer A: you’re too vain to admit you need them. I bet you color your hair, too.”
“If I was coloring my hair, I’d opt for something other than gray.”
“Maybe you’re being sneaky, and you’re just going far enough to hide the worst of it.”
“I don’t know why I talk to you about anything. It’s like arguing with a rubber ball.”
“Buy the glasses.”
“Says the man who had to be threatened before he’d see a doctor about the pains in his stomach.”
“Yeah, and look where that got me.”
At which point Angel had gestured to the hospital room, the bed, and the cannula in his arm. It was the night before the procedure, and the last time Parker would be permitted the pleasure of the old Angel’s company. When next Parker saw him, Angel’s skin would be gray, and he would be missing a length of intestine.
“I think you just holed your own argument,” said Parker.
“No,” Angel replied, “I was just too dumb to listen until it was too late.”
Angel’s voice broke. Parker reached out and held Angel’s right hand.
“Late,” said Parker. “But not too late.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know.”
“Not only for myself.”
“I know that, too.”
“If I die—”
“You’re not going to die.”
“What do you know? You can’t even see straight. If I die—”
The Woman in the Woods Page 15
