Mountain One

"Some messages arrive with a date and a time. Those are the ones that were written long before you ever opened them."

Friday, 9:22 AM.

The phone buzzed against the concrete floor.

Lauren had fallen asleep sitting up in the folding chair, her back against the cinder-block wall, her head tipped sideways against a map of three states. She had not meant to. At some point after four she had simply stopped being awake, and the red string and the faces and the single bulb had all poured together into a dim and troubled dark.

The sound dragged her up through it. She flailed for the phone, knocked the cold coffee off the card table, and caught the device in midair.

It was her department-issued secure phone, the encrypted one, the one that only six people in the world had the number for. Chloe was one of the six. Lauren had given it to her at fifteen, for emergencies, and Chloe had saved it under Mom (work).

Which meant he had taken the number from her daughter's phone.

The screen showed a message with an image attached. Sender unknown. No number, only a string of characters like a broken zipper.

She looked at the time in the corner. 9:22.

Seven days since Ruggles Station. Almost to the hour of the morning she had filed the report.

"Don't," she whispered. She did not know whom she was speaking to. "Don't."

She opened it.

It was a photograph, taken in daylight, in a forest. A tall stand of spruce rose out of a floor of moss and dark wet needles. In the lower foreground lay a gray boulder shaped like a bent elbow, with a splash of orange lichen across the top. The picture was beautifully composed. Lauren thought, with a detached clinical flicker, that the photographer had waited for the clouds to part.

Under the image, one line of text in plain black type:

1 of 5. White Mountain National Forest, NH. 44.0861° N, 71.6152° W. Dig.

She read it three times.

Her pulse slowed. She felt it slow, a heavy stately beat like a bell in a drowned church. It was the stillness that came over her at crime scenes, the cold clean quiet in which every object gave up its name.

One of five.

He wasn't hiding the shape of the thing. He was handing it to her. A countdown. Five stations on a road map, with a missing girl waiting at the end of it.

Or in it.

She was already on her feet, already dialing.

"Reyes. It's me. He's sent something. Don't touch your phone, don't run it through anything, I'm forwarding it to you, to Calloway, and to the Bureau liaison, all at once. Yes. Yes, I'm sure. It came in to the secure line. Twenty minutes ago, maybe less." She was climbing the basement stairs two at a time. "It's the first one, Danny. It's a place."

2:40 PM.

White Mountain National Forest swallowed the road within a mile.

They had left the paved highway behind at 1:15, a convoy of six vehicles with their lights turned off, and bumped for forty minutes along a rutted logging track that appeared on no tourist map. The sky had closed over the ridgeline like a lid. Rain fell in fine cold pins, and the spruce stood in dripping rows on either side, so dense that at three in the afternoon the road was already dusk.

Lauren rode in the back of a state police Tahoe between a young trooper and a deputy medical examiner named Dr. Priya Nair, a compact woman in her forties with a long braid and a canvas field bag between her boots. Nair had said four words since the highway. The trooper had said none. Nobody had asked Lauren why she was there.

Nobody had needed to.

It had taken ninety minutes to decide. Calloway had been against it. The FBI liaison, a lean sandy-haired man named Hendricks with a voice like gravel and a habit of rubbing the knuckle of his thumb, had been against it in a clipped bureaucratic way. But Julian Frost had sent the photograph to Lauren. The message was addressed, in every sense, to her. If there was a second message, and a third, they would likely come the same road.

And in the end Calloway had put her hands flat on the table, looked at Lauren for a very long time, and said: "She stays behind the tape. One hundred yards. If I see her within fifty feet of that site, she goes home in a patrol car."

Lauren had said, "Understood."

She had meant it. She believed she had meant it.

The Tahoe stopped.

Through the windshield she saw a clearing cut into the trees, a muddy turnaround where the track ended against a wall of rock and spruce. Beyond it a footpath climbed away into the gloom. Yellow tape already hung from stakes along the trail's edge, fluttering weakly in the damp, and under a canvas tarp two German shepherds stood panting beside their handlers, ears up, restless, wearing orange vests.

Cadaver dogs.

The dogs knew. Lauren could see it in their bodies. They hadn't been told the name of the place or what was in it, but they stood pulling at their leads with their noses lifted, as if they could taste something in the air a hundred yards ahead.

She got out of the car.

The cold hit her face like a cloth. Every breath rose in front of her in a thin gray cloud. The woods smelled of wet bark, spruce resin, and under it all a faint low sweetness that she knew too well to mistake. She put her hand against the cold metal of the Tahoe and waited for her legs to remember what they were for.

A trooper in a rain-slick poncho led them up the path.

It was three-quarters of a mile of root and stone and standing water. They moved in single file, the techs and troopers and the two handlers with their dogs, their boots sucking in the mud, and nobody spoke. The forest took the sound of their feet and gave nothing back. Once, far up the slope, a bird called a single dry note. Then it, too, went still.

At last the trail opened into a small hollow ringed by spruce.

Lauren stopped at the tape.

Thirty feet away, across the open ground, lay a gray boulder shaped like a bent elbow, with a splash of orange lichen across the top. It was exactly as it had been in the photograph.

She had a strange, swimming feeling, as if she were looking at the picture and the place at the same time, and the two were not quite aligned. The sky was the wrong color. The grass was wetter. The rock was bigger than she had imagined.

"Cadavers," said the lead handler quietly. "Let 'em work."

The dogs went in.

They didn't bark. That was the first terrible thing. They moved at the ends of their long leads in loose zigzags, noses down, tails low, and when they came near the foot of the boulder, both of them stopped, as if on the same invisible wire. One lay down. The other sat, rigid, eyes fixed on a patch of ground at the foot of the stone.

The handler said, very softly, "There."

Dr. Nair was already moving. She unslung her bag and knelt at the edge of the patch, and the other forensic technicians fanned out around her in a half circle. They worked without hurry. They put down stakes, strung grid lines, set up a pair of battery-powered floodlights on tripods, because the light under the trees was already failing. Someone laid wooden planks across the moss to make a walkway. Someone else unpacked trowels and brushes and plastic buckets with the careful reverence of people unpacking an altar.

Lauren stood at the tape and held onto the cord with both hands.

She was supposed to stay a hundred yards away. She was perhaps seventy. She noted this fact the way she might have noted the weather and made no move to correct it.

The first layer of earth came off in thin brown slices. Under it lay a sheet of gray-white crust, cracked and hard, with a faint chalky smell that crept across the hollow on the damp air. Quicklime. It had set in the rain like plaster.

"Same as Crawford Notch," someone murmured.

She said nothing. She watched Nair's hands.

They were small hands, steady and sure, and they moved the way Chloe's hands had once moved over a drawing, with a gentleness that was not quite tenderness but lived near it. Nair scraped. She brushed. She slid a bamboo tool into the crust, lifted a flat piece, passed it to the tech beside her, and bent closer.

Ten minutes. Twenty. A trooper began to cough into his sleeve.

Then the rhythm of her wrist stopped.

It stopped cleanly, mid-stroke, the way a sentence stops when the speaker sees something over your shoulder. Nair stayed very still for three heartbeats. Then she said, in a voice so low that Lauren had to read her lips:

"I have tissue."

The camera operator moved in. The strobes flashed, white and soundless against the spruce. Nair laid down the brush and took up a finer tool, and lifted, a millimeter at a time, something pale from the earth.

Lauren saw it from seventy feet away, in the flat light of the floods.

It was not a thing. That was the only way her mind could hold it. It was not a branch or a root or a piece of debris, though it had been made to look like one. It was long and white as candle wax and bent at an angle that was no longer an angle a living person could make. At one end it widened. It had a shape she knew from her own body. It had knuckles.

A hand.

A hand, closed half-way into itself, curled over the dirt like someone holding a coin in sleep.

The forest swayed. Or she did. Her hands closed on the cord until the plastic bit into them.

Not Chloe. Not Chloe's. She knew those hands, small and square, with the nails bitten down since third grade, always with a smudge of pencil on one knuckle. This hand was longer. Broader. Even through the lime and the weeks in the ground, she could see the heavy bones of the back, the thickness of the wrist.

"Male," Dr. Nair said, without looking up. Her voice was perfectly neutral. "Adult. Severed at the mid-forearm, post-mortem, I think. I'll know more under the lights."

A male hand.

Something broke in Lauren's chest, and for a moment it felt like grief. Then it felt like something else entirely, a vast, warm, shameful flood of relief that went through her from scalp to heel and left her trembling, and she hated it, hated the animal in her that wanted to cry out in thanks over the remains of a man.

It was not Chloe. It was not Chloe. It was not Chloe.

She was still saying it, silently, over and over, when she felt a hand on her elbow.

"Captain." It was Hendricks. His sandy eyebrows were drawn together, his face wet with rain. "That's enough. Back to the vehicles."

"It's a man," Lauren said.

"I know."

"It's not her."

"I know. Come on." He kept hold of her arm, gently. "You promised Calloway."

She let him turn her. She let him lead her a few steps back down the path, one boot after the other, the mud sucking at her soles.

Behind her, the floodlights hummed. The dogs had begun to whine. Dr. Nair's voice rose again, lower and more distant, calling out measurements and numbers to the clicking of the shutters.

6:50 PM.

Night had come down on the hollow like a hand.

The Tahoe's heater ticked. Lauren sat in the back seat with a foil blanket around her shoulders that she did not remember accepting, watching the glow of the floodlights pulse between the trunks a quarter mile up the trail. Four hours. They had brought up one hand, a forearm to the elbow, and a fragment of something Nair would only call "more."

The door opened. Cold air and the smell of lime came in together.

Dr. Nair climbed in and shut it. Mud had dried gray to her knees. She pulled off her gloves a finger at a time and looked at her own bare hands as if they belonged to someone else.

"I shouldn't be telling you anything," she said.

"I know."

"Hendricks is going to flay me."

"I know."

Nair breathed out. "The lime preserved the skin. That's the strange part. Quicklime usually eats a body. But when it's laid dry and then soaked, it can cure instead, like a plaster cast. The fingertips are intact. I think I can rehydrate them and take prints." She hesitated. "Captain, this wasn't buried this week."

Lauren turned her head.

"The cap on that grave is months old. There are roots grown through the crust. A fern, a whole season of needle fall on top. Whoever put him in the ground did it in spring, maybe early summer." Nair's voice was careful. "The cuts are a different matter. I don't like the cuts. But he was in the ground long before anyone sent you a photograph."

For a moment the heater was the only sound.

He hadn't dug this for her. He had dug it in March, in April, by himself, in the cold, and then he had waited. Waited for someone to ask the right question. And when she finally had, he had walked her straight to the door, as if the whole thing were a house he'd been keeping tidy for company.

"He's not hiding anything," Lauren said slowly. "He's showing me what he already did."

"Is that better or worse?"

She looked at the lights through the trees.

"I don't know yet," she said.

Nair nodded as though that were an answer. She opened the door, hesitated with one boot on the running board, and said without looking back, "It's a good hand. A man's hand. Whoever he was, somebody loved him once. I'll find out whose."

She went.

Lauren sat alone in the dark car with the foil crackling around her and took the secure phone from her pocket. The photograph was still there, the spruce and the boulder and the careful golden light. Below it, in black type, were four words she had been trying all day not to read.

1 of 5. Dig.

Four more, then. Four more photographs, four more mountains, and at the end of them a girl who had once asked for pumpkin soup.

She did not know when the next one would come. But she knew his habits now, the way you know the footsteps of a person in the next room. He was patient. He liked a schedule. And a man who photographs the light before he buries a body is not a man who lets a week slip by.

She put her thumb on the dark screen and held it there, as if it might be warm.

"One," she said aloud, to the glass, and the trees, and no one. "I'm counting, Julian."

The floodlights went on pulsing in the forest, steady as a heartbeat that was not hers.