Fuck it, she thinks. She’ll use the bathroom, then get out of here. Her limbs are suddenly heavy with exhaustion.
In the stall she lets her head drop to her hands, lets her body go limp. She texts Jane, asks her how her day has been.
Jane sends her a link to a TikTok video.I’ve been going down such a rabbit hole with this one. Oh, and Opes made you a necklace. It’s hideous and she’s so excited to give it to you.
I’ll wear it with pride.
Maybe wait till you see it first.
Callie clicks on the link and watches the first few seconds of the video. A lipsticked young woman with glossy hair explains that awoman was found dead in a field in 1979 in Western Pennsylvania, the cops looked at all the wrong people, but she’s got a lead that is about to blow this thing wide open…
Callie closes the video. She can’t deal with these internet detectives, their affected righteousness and thirst for gore. She texts Jane:Wanna know about the real life of a cop? I just spent my afternoon springing twenty-five muskrats from traps.
She puts her phone away, washes her hands, and when she turns to the door she finds a blue Post-it note on the back, eye level.
Sabrina Riley, it says, in Della’s looping script.
Sabrina Riley shefinds in the system. An arrest at seventeen for disorderly conduct in front of a bait shop where she was employed at the time. Time of arrest, 7:00P.M.No mention of drugs or intoxication. A broken window. An altercation with a one William—Billy—Fauver.
“No shit,” Callie says, lets out a little whistle.
Billy Fauver is in the system, too. His record is lengthier: one arrest for marijuana possession a decade ago, for which he did community service; poaching; a handful of traffic violations; arrested again, five years ago, in relation to a domestic dispute, battery; charges dropped by his ex-wife, a woman named Angela Harris.
Good guy, she mutters. Violent toward women. Nineteen years old to Sabrina’s seventeen, not much of a difference but old enough that he would have the upper hand. Or want to have the upper hand. Wouldn’t want to give her time, money, sacrifice his independence, his will to do what he wants when he wants.
What was it that Kirby had said?Don’t piss that guy off.
In his mug shot Fauver looks offended. Chin thrust forward, mouth drawn in a tight line. Handsome, in a sneering way. Maybe Sabrina Riley would have found him magnetic, before she understood that he was really just mean. Maybe Fauver was a boyfriend, maybe a one-time hookup. Maybe she felt like she couldn’t raise thebaby on her own. The fight with Fauver might have been about paying for childcare. About getting him to help out. It would have been three months before the baby was found. The clock ticking. Riley getting increasingly desperate.
She cross-checks Sabrina Riley’s address in the system with the location where Baby Doe was discovered, on Jenna’s old street, three-quarters of a mile away from Sabrina Riley’s house. Not inconceivable, if the girl had gone into the woods for privacy. Maybe she carried the child to the road, left it somewhere she hoped it would be seen before it was too late. A Safe Haven law wasn’t passed in New Jersey until 2000, which made it legal to surrender an infant at a police station or fire department. She probably thought she would get in trouble for asking for help, or for leaving the child where the authorities could find it. And she was probably right.
She looks forwardto dinner, to a glass of wine, to the simple, bare walls of her cabin, but when she gets home there’s a dark stain at the base of her mailbox. She follows it upward, a trail of red up the post, the mailbox door hanging open.
She flicks her Maglite over it and makes out fur.
Inside the mailbox are the bodies of three muskrats, all of them slit open along their stomachs, revealing the wet ropes of their insides.
A message. A warning.
It could be any of them: Latour, Collins, Mac. Could even be Jimmy Nichols before he came around the bar to have beers with the old boys, the man they all think should be in her job right now, getting his payback.
She takes a breath. Methodical. Act first, react later. Heaves the bodies into a trash bag. Hauls a bottle of bleach and a roll of paper towels from under the sink. Scours the metal insides of the mailbox until the blood seems to lift. Bleach, bleach, and more bleach, until she is woozy with the stink of it.
Her appetite is gone by the time she peels the rubber gloves from her hands. She showers, needs to wash her hair but can’t muster the energy. Instead she leans her head against the tile. She wills her mind to go blank but she can’t shake the feeling of Layla’s pulse going fainter, slower, underneath her fingertips. The life draining out of her face.
Her hands shake as she towels off, grabs her phone.
She tries Jenna’s cell phone again, but this time it goes right to voicemail. She calls the two watering holes Jenna used to frequent but the bartenders she speaks to tell her neither have seen her in months. “Never thought I’d say that,” one of them says, laughing as he hangs up.
An hour later her phone buzzes, but when she looks at the screen her relief is replaced by dismay. It’s not Jenna, but Deveraux.
“Out with it.” She likes him, but her reserves of patience dried up hours ago.
“Hey there, Chief. Uh, we’ve got something down in the station you should see.”
“Can I get some details here?”
Deveraux sighs into the phone. “It’s your mom’s bag. Her wallet’s inside. Her phone. A hiker found it in the woods off the Batona Trail an hour ago, about a mile from the Buttonwood Camp.”
