There is no furniture, just benches that line the walls and racks for guns. There is no kitchen, no way to prepare food or store food. Where the kitchen might be is a counter about four feet tall and eight feet long with an overhang that allows for the storage of three barstools. A place to sit and have coffee or a beer or play cards. The small wood stove is nestled in the corner.
Beneath the counter is a gun mount. They find a rifle there and learn from one of the park rangers that a hunter from upstate leaves it during theoff-seasonbecause his wife won’t allow guns in their home. It is not visible except from the floor looking up.
The rifle has been wiped clean and becomes a possible murder weapon, assuming the person whose body has been found was shot. Murdered. They search for a bullet or casing and find nothing. The hunter who owns the rifle has an airtight alibi. He was at a work conference, a plane ride away.
There are prints all over the surfaces inside. Hundreds of them. Except on the latch to the front door, the gun and rack mounted under the counter, the countertop, the knob for the basement door—the list includes every surface someone might have touched had they come here to kill someone and burn a body. Someone tried, and maybe succeeded, to not leave their prints.
The red jacket is found hanging behind the door and sent to the lab for testing. There might be hairs, skin cells, and from those, DNA. It could belong to the victim. It could belong to the killer.
The smaller room across from the basement stairs is normally covered in plastic sheeting, according to the hunters. The plastic keeps the blood from soaking into the wood floor, though it has done apiss-poorjob. The plastic sheeting is not there when the body is found, and the exposed floor is stained with blood—some of it is old and some of it is new—and there is so much of it that it’s unlikely they’ll find anything useful. There is a sink against the far wall and the hand pump for the water from the well. The sink, too, has a burnt orange color where the blood has been absorbed into the white porcelain.
They assume the killing took place here or outside, but either way it is likely the body was wrapped in the plastic sheeting that normally covers the floor of this room, the Kill Room, dragged down the basement stairs, shoved into the cremation oven, and burned. There were chemicals released from the plastic found inside the oven and no bloodstains on the inside walls, which would occur if a body was burned without first being exsanguinated—unless it was wrapped in plastic.
They consider their initial findings as they stand in the Kill Room.
The raked path—no evidence.
The footprints and fingerprints—too much evidence, except on the places likely involved in the killing or, if it wasn’t a killing, the cremation.
The plastic pulled from the floor and burned—no evidence.
And the body—cremated.
Aside from the red jacket, which could be nothing or, possibly, the sole error in an otherwisewell-executedcrime, there is either no evidence or too much to be useful.
The report will note that the crime was “textbook.” The best way to destroy evidence on a body was to burn it. And the best way to fuck with forensics was to leave them too much and too little.
Of course, they were far more eloquent than that.
Chapter Six
I follow the blue truck for six miles. It stops on a back road near a wooded park. The leaves have turned but have yet to fall, so we are shielded from sight.
I shouldn’t be here. I should have stopped before the traffic thinned out and the stores became houses and the houses became woods.
There is no plate on the truck. A temporary paper license is taped to the back of the window from inside the cab, but it’s undecipherable from this far away. It could be newly registered. Or he could be evading detection without technically violating traffic laws.
This, too, should give me pause.
But I don’t let it. Not the plates or why he was at the station and has kept driving when he appears to be heading nowhere. Surely he knows by now that a gray Subaru is following him.
I have tried to tell myself that this obsession is mixed up with the stages of trauma recovery. The pain and guilt that follow shock and confusion. The anger and bargaining that follow those.
The waters have been muddied by the role I played in the trauma. By the killing of Clay Lucas followed by flowers and gifts. The award at town hall. And the not knowing about the tall man and whether my shot saved his life.
The people I love watch me with dismay and frustration, so I’ve taken to hiding. I show them what they need to see. That I’m adjusting, moving through the stages at a steady clip. Marching toward acceptance.
I think about what Landyn said. The loneliness of not being seen. How I’ve gone numb from the pain of it and how the numbness causes more pain.
So I don’t think about the license plates or the odd behavior of this man in the blue truck, luring me out of town. Instead, I steady my gut and get out of my car. This all has to stop, and maybe now it will. I feel dizzy with anticipation. With hope.
The man gets out to greet me. He’s taller than I had guessed. Maybe six foot five. He wears a suit and tie like he’s come from work. Dark hair. Handsome features. He’s thin but not scrawny the way I remember him, though I already know my memories from that day can’t be trusted.
He smiles and walks toward me. We meet by the bed of his truck, stopping a few feet apart.
The suit he wears is gray. Beneath it is a striped shirt and a yellow tie with red checks. He smells clean, of soap and deodorant as if he’s just taken a shower. I am suddenlyself-consciousin my jeans and sweatshirt. I lost track of the time after the girls went to school, reading the notes Rowan had dropped off on the case he’d been working alone. No breakfast. No shower. I flew out of the house for my appointment with Dr. Landyn without a minute to spare.
The tables have turned. Now I’m the one who’s disheveled and shaking. He is the picture of confidence.
