“Sure,” she says. Those guys. Her former colleagues. She holds up a picture from the back of the stack. A scatter of beads, amber spheres bright against the dirt. Half of them still lined up on a broken string, the others yellow against the pale sandy soil.
“What’s this?”
“Found near the scene.”
“Huh. We know who it belongs to?”
“Nah.”
A small note in the report: The broken bracelet was recovered five yards from where Jenna found Baby Doe. The metal clasp is connected but the string is snapped, as though someone had pulled it off.
Robbins breaks the silence. “Good luck, Hauser. Maybe a woman’s intuition is just what this one needs.”
“Well it sure as hell doesn’t help that you all have been scratching your balls for three decades on an unsolved homicide.”
There’s a slight flutter in her fingers as she closes the file. “And it’s Chief,” she says. “Or do you need to be written up for insubordination to help you remember?”
“No,” Robbins says, his eyes bright with rage. “Chief.” The word comes out ugly. Spat out like a piece of gristle from between his teeth.
She tucks thefile under her arm and takes it to her office, sits with it in her lap before she works up the nerve to open it again.
From the forensics report: Cause of death was exposure. The baby was born alive but a few hours old at most when she died. She googles the medical examiner who did the report—maybe she could get more info, the report shockingly sparse—but the first hit is an obituary from ten years ago. No crime scene technician support, the scene secured by local cops with backup from the State Police an hour later. 1991, so the case predates the CODIS database thatcan be used to connect DNA profiles to crime scenes and chances are slim that someone went back to it and entered the DNA into the records. Maybe there’s a sample somewhere that the labs can work with, though chances are it’s degraded down to nothing. Stuff from the ’90s kept in the worst conditions, exposed to unmitigated humidity and roiling heat. DNA technology was more like alchemy to most people back then, and only the most well-funded departments invested in it, for the biggest cases. The pretty, white prom queens. The bankers bludgeoned to death in dark corners of Central Park, signet rings ripped from their pinkies.
Alone, she turns back to the crime scene photos. That broken bracelet tugs at her. She had been prepared to feel fury directed at the mother of Baby Doe, for doing what she did, for the damage it caused Jenna. But maybe the story is different from how it looks. Maybe the mother hadn’t meant to abandon the child. Maybe something had happened to her, too. And no one has ever bothered to ask the right questions about it.
She picks up her phone, calls an old friend from her rookie years who is now working cold cases. Benny Healey, a brusque guy from Cherry Hill with a penchant for Italian shoes and a slight dramatic flair as though he learned to be a cop from the movies. But, she concedes, he does good work. Cold cases is lucky to have him.
“Hauser. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Hey, Healy. I’m looking into something and was wondering if you might see if anything has made it your way. Maybe something that wasn’t shared here with the department.”
“Shoot.”
She runs over the details of the case and he tells her he’ll see what he can dig up. His department has been working through backlogs of cases from the ’80s and ’90s, hundreds of them. Untested rape kits, unsolved murders, unprocessed evidence. Thousands of loose ends, thousands of questions left unanswered. It makes her mouth go dry just thinking about it.
“Why are you going after this one?” he asks. “Gotta be lots of unidentified bodies in those woods.”
She pauses, stares at the slim file on her desk. Flicks at the flimsy bent corner of the manilla folder. She can’t tell him it’s because of her mother. She thinks of those amber beads in the soil. Whoever they belonged to. That there’s a bigger story to tell about what happened here. “I’ve got a hunch that it could be a double homicide. But we’ll need more hard evidence to go on while I work stuff on my end.”
“You’re not wasting much time down there, huh? I know they’re hurting on Narcotics. They miss you.”
“Look at you, you big softie. Well, who knows, maybe I’ll be back on it soon enough.”
“Oh yeah? How’s the friend, the one you’re helping out? She doing better, then?”
“Yeah,” Callie says, reflexively. “Yeah, she is doing better. I’m headed over to her house tonight.” What she doesn’t say is that the doctors can’t yet be sure about the difference betweenbetterandas good as its going to get.
Jane and Damienlive in a two-story Cape Cod off a dirt road. Callie manages to hit the same pothole in their driveway every time she visits, swears to herself as her Jeep bounces hard in the rut.
Part of her still can’t believe that this is where Jane lives. Private, Jane had said, when they first bought the house. Peaceful. The house itself is charming, and Jane did a lot of work planting flower beds around the front and side yards, filled the inside with thrifted furniture that she reupholstered herself. But every time she cuts the engine and walks the flagstone path to the front porch, Callie still can’t shake the sense that this wasn’t quite how the story was supposed to go, for either of them.
Jane and Callie have been best friends since they were assigned as roommates their freshman year at Rutgers. Both children of alcoholic parents, they used to dream out loud to one another about what their lives would look like after they graduated. They’d run a coffee shop in a small town, bake the scones themselves every morning. They’d move to New York and stay out until 3:00A.M.every night, teetering on their high heels to the best late-night pizza placeand laughing about the lame guys who had tried to pick them up at the bars of the Lower East Side.
But then, the spring of senior year Jane met Damien while she and Callie were away for a weekend down at the shore. It was March, the beaches still wind-whipped and gray, but a group of them went in on a house together—Callie and Jane and anyone else who didn’t have parents chipping in for a spring break week in Cancun or Clearwater. Damien was already in his forties then, the Caputo boys a generation older than Callie, but she recognized him right away as he chatted with a group of men clustered near the beer taps. Everyone from Pine Lakes knew the Caputos, Captain Frank and his family at every ribbon cutting and ceremonial tree planting, the two Caputo boys sharing their father’s easy, confident grin. She had never really spoken to him around town, but when he caught sight of her standing next to Jane at a high top near the door, he walked right over and asked, didn’t he know her from somewhere?
After a little polite small talk Callie had to excuse herself to use the bathroom, hoping Jane would forgive her for leaving her alone with some random older guy from the Pines. But by the time she waited in line and made her way back to the table, Damien and Jane were standing close enough that the rims of their beer glasses nearly met and they both looked a little startled—and she registered, with no small amount of hurt, disappointed—to see her appear next to them.
After graduation Jane moved to the Pines with Damien, and three years later he got down on one knee on a canoe in the middle of Atsion Lake. Callie was promoted from patrol to Narcotics, got her own apartment near Secaucus that she rented with the cheap beige furniture the realtor used to stage it for viewings. And even though they were still young, Callie had the feeling of a chapter being closed. Their youth already over.
