"I was able to connect this to another one of your paintings." He gestured through the gallery window toward the far wall where the larger piece hung, the bridge, the bog, the full landscape. “It’s a larger version. More detailed. It was enough to identify the location."
"I paint a lot of the Adirondacks."
"I can see that. But back when you were sixteen, why did you come forward?"
"Because..." She trailed off. From inside the studio, someone called her name. A woman's voice, muffled by the glass. Seraphine turned toward it, then back to Noah. “I just did. Look, I have to go."
“One last question. What's your connection to the Three Pillars Community?"
The question landed differently than the others. Her arms tightened across her chest and her gaze dropped for half a second before she recovered.
"I'm not a part of that place anymore. And I really can't talk about it." She paused. "I'm sorry."
She turned and went back through the door. The bell above it chimed once and then she was gone, disappearing into the rear of the gallery without looking back.
Noah stood on the sidewalk with the sketch in his hand and the fading daylight on his face. She knew something. That much was obvious. But whatever it was, it was buried under years of silence and a fear that went deeper than a stranger with a badge could reach in five minutes on a sidewalk.
He folded the sketch back into the file and walked to his vehicle.
Carter Lyle wrungout the mop and dragged it across the floor in long even strokes. The washroom at FCI Ray Brook was a windowless box of white tile and stainless steel, four stalls, three sinks, a row of urinals, and a drain in the center that never quite worked fast enough. The air smelled of bleach and the metallic tang of old pipes. Across the room, the other inmate on cleaning detail, a thick-necked man named Briggs, worked the far end with his own mop, moving in silence.
They'd been at it for twenty minutes. The routine was the same every Saturday. Two inmates, two mops, one guard posted in the corridor outside. Carter had done this enough times that his body went through the motions without thought, leaving his mind free to wander. Two weeks was all he had. Less now. It was five days until the transfer to Terre Haute. Five days of mopping floors and eating meals and sleeping in a concrete room before they put him on a plane to Indiana for the final week and then stuck a needle in his arm for a crime he didn't commit.
He heard the crack before he understood what it was.
Briggs had snapped his mop handle across his knee, clean through, and was coming at Carter with the splintered end held low like a spear. His face was blank. Not angry. Not frenzied. Just purposeful.
The jagged wood caught Carter across the ribs on the first swing. A hard, raking blow that tore through his jumpsuit and opened a line of fire across his side. Carter stumbled backward, his boots sliding on the wet tile, as he grabbed his own mop handle with both hands.
Briggs drove forward, thrusting the broken end at Carter's midsection. Carter twisted sideways and the point scraped across his hip instead of burying itself in his stomach. He swung the mop handle in a wide arc and connected with Briggs' shoulder, but the wet floor betrayed him and his back foot went out from under him. He hit the ground hard, the impact jarring through his spine.
Briggs was on him before he could get up. A knee on his chest, the splintered wood pressing down toward his throat. Carter got both hands on the shaft and pushed. Briggs outweighed him by forty pounds and the leverage was wrong and the wood was inching closer. Carter could see the grain of it, the pale inside where it had snapped, sharp enough to puncture.
"Guard!" Carter shouted. His voice bounced off the walls. "Guard!"
Nothing. No boots in the corridor. No response.
Carter bucked his hips and rolled, using the wet floor to his advantage this time, sliding out from under Briggs' weight. They scrambled on the slick tile, both men on their knees, grappling. Carter grabbed Briggs by the back of the head and drove his face into the edge of the nearest sink basin. The porcelain connected with a sound that Carter felt more than heard, a deep solid thud that vibrated through his fingers.
Briggs went slack. Not unconscious but stunned, his hands dropping to his sides, blood running from a split above his eyebrow. Carter hit him again. Same basin, same angle. This time Briggs folded and slid to the floor, his cheek pressed against the wet tile, his eyes open but unfocused.
Carter sat back against the wall, breathing hard. His ribs burned where the wood had torn the skin. His hip was bleeding. His hands were shaking.
He looked at the washroom entrance. The corridor beyond it was empty. No guard. No one coming. The chair where the officer was supposed to sit was visible from where Carter was and it was vacant.
Someone had arranged this.
Carter pressed his hand against the wound on his side and listened to the sound of his own breathing in the quiet room. Briggs groaned beside the sinks. Blood swirled in the standing water, thinning as it spread.
Twelve days. Someone didn't want him to make it that far.
The Adirondack MedicalCenter was busier than Noah had ever seen it. Extra vehicles in the lot. Lights on in wings that were usually dark. He badged through the security entrance and followed the signs to the pathology wing, where the corridor smelled of formaldehyde and cold air conditioning.
Adelaide Chambers was in the examination room with another medical examiner, both of them bent over a stainless steel table under surgical lights. The remains on the table weren't bodies in any recognizable sense. They were bones, stained dark by the tannic acid in the bog water, laid out in anarrangement that was trying to become a skeleton but had gaps where the peat had claimed what it wanted.
"Busy place," Noah said from the doorway.
Adelaide straightened and pulled her mask down. She was in her fifties, auburn hair pinned back. "It'll get busier once this reaches the media. They want us working around the clock before this place is full of parents coming to see if any of these bones belong to their kids."
