The Third Week

"By the second photograph, the horror had stopped being a surprise. That was exactly what he wanted it to become."

Friday, 9:22 AM.

This time she was awake.

She had set a chair in front of the card table on Thursday night, with the secure phone propped against the thermos and a legal pad beside it. She sat with her hands flat on her knees, like a child waiting outside the principal's office. The bulb hummed. The red thread gleamed. At 9:21 she stopped breathing.

At 9:22 the screen lit.

It was easy to pretend that a person could get used to this. She had thought, the first time, that dread was a thing you spent, like a coin, and that eventually the purse would run empty. It was not true. It only learned where it lived.

She opened the message.

Another photograph. Another forest. But this one was a different green, a dense wet emerald, with a stream running over black slate in the foreground and a curtain of maple and birch rising behind it. The leaves had begun to turn. A few had fallen into the water and sat on the surface, small and red and perfectly still, like drops on a mirror.

2 of 5. Green Mountain National Forest, VT. 43.1214° N, 72.8873° W. Dig.

She did not read it three times. She had learned.

She took a pen, wrote the coordinates on the legal pad, and underlined them twice. Then she did something that had not occurred to her last week. She turned the phone sideways, spread her fingers over the screen, and enlarged the light.

It fell through the maples in long slanted bars, low and warm, the color of weak tea. Late in the afternoon. Five o'clock, perhaps a little after. The shadows of the trunks lay across the stream like bars on a window.

But the message had come at 9:22 in the morning.

He had not taken it this morning. He had taken it days ago, or weeks. He had stood in that stream at five o'clock in the evening with a camera and his patience, waiting for exactly that angle of light, and then he had come home and put it in a drawer, to be released on a Friday, on a schedule.

He likes the golden hour, she wrote on the pad. And then, because something at the back of her mind was moving again, a long quiet shape in deep water: He always likes the golden hour.

She looked at the photograph of the chainsaw on the wall. The slanted blade of light. The dusty air.

The shape surfaced. For a second she nearly had it.

Then the phone rang in her hand, and it was Reyes, and the shape sank.

"It's another one," he said.

"I know. I'm looking at it."

"Calloway's going. Hendricks says no. They're fighting about it in the hall right now, and I don't think I'm supposed to be listening." His voice dropped. "Captain, Calloway told me to give you this number. She says you can come to the site, one hundred yards, tape line, same as before. She says she's sorry about Sunday and she wants to hear it from you if you find anything."

Lauren shut her eyes.

Calloway had said it herself, and she had passed it through Reyes so that nobody would have to say thank you.

"I'm already in the car," Lauren said, and she was not, but she would be in thirty seconds.

Friday, 2:50 PM.

The Green Mountains were older and kinder than the White.

They lay along the horizon in long soft ridges, blue at the edges, and the road up to the site was a paved county road for most of its length. There were farmhouses along it. A boy in a red cap was selling cider from a card table at a crossroads. The ordinary beauty of the place made the convoy seem obscene, six unmarked cars and a refrigerated van winding up through the hills at the head of a long line of yellow school buses, painted for no one, as if all of Vermont had been invited to a funeral.

The school buses, of course, were press.

Lauren saw them from the road when the Tahoe slowed at the checkpoint. There were already four satellite vans parked along the gravel shoulder with their dishes up, and a ragged line of photographers behind a sawhorse barricade, their long lenses resting on their forearms like rifles. A woman in a camel coat was doing a stand-up in front of a trooper's cruiser, her hair stiff with spray, her face composed into grave concern.

"—the second site in as many weeks," she was saying. "Sources close to the investigation say that the remains discovered here today may be connected to the grisly discovery last Friday in New Hampshire's White Mountains—"

"How did they find out?" Lauren asked.

"Somebody talks," said the trooper in the front seat, without turning around. "Somebody always talks."

She slid lower in the seat.

The path in was shorter this time, a quarter mile of switchbacks along the stream she had seen in the photograph. They reached the site in under fifteen minutes. A natural bowl in the hillside, ringed with maples, with a flat slab of black slate at its bottom where the water ran. On the far bank, under the roots of a dead hemlock, the earth had a sunken look, like a bed that someone had lain in.

The dogs found it in a minute and a half.

Dr. Nair and her team went in. They worked in the thin gold afternoon light, which was exactly the light of the photograph, exactly the light he had chosen, so that the technicians seemed to move through a picture he had arranged.

Lauren stood at the tape and forced herself to look at nothing.

The first hour went by. The second. A flock of crows lifted off the ridge and settled again. Someone brought coffee in paper cups. Hendricks, standing off to the side with his arms crossed, kept glancing at her, then at his watch, then at her, with an irritation that was slowly turning into something else. Not trust. Something nearer to respect, or to its cousin, resignation.

At a quarter to five Nair stood up from the grave.

She did it slowly, bracing her hand on her knee. For a moment she did not call anyone. She only looked down into the hole with her gloved hands held out in front of her, as if trying not to touch anything with them.

Then she said, quite clearly, "We have a torso."

Nobody moved.

"It's intact," she said. "No lime on this one. He didn't use the lime." She took a breath, and Lauren heard it shake, once. "It's been wrapped in black plastic. Heavy gauge, the kind used on construction sites. Sealed with duct tape. I need the van up here. And I need someone to go through the rest of the bowl with the dogs, because I think there's more than one."

The camera strobes went off. Their soundless white hammered the maple trunks.

The strobes went off again, white and soundless against the maples.

Lauren had not noticed that she was already past the first stake. A trooper put a hand flat against her chest, not roughly. She looked at it as though it were a branch fallen across a road.

"Captain." Hendricks had come up on her other side. He kept his voice low. "Seventy yards was the deal."

"It was a hundred."

"Then you've broken it twice." He did not sound angry. He sounded like a man too tired to be. "Come with me. Walk with me. Please."

They went along the bank, away from the lights, with the stream muttering over the slate beside them. For a while neither spoke. His thumb moved against his knuckle, round and round.

"Tell me what you see," he said at last. "Not the case. Just what you see."

"The lime," Lauren said.

"What about it?"

"There isn't any. In New Hampshire he buried the arm in quicklime. Here he doesn't. He washes the body, wraps it in sheeting, and tapes it like a package. It's cleaner." She stopped. "It's better. Nair told me he was learning a task. She was right. He started clumsy and he's getting good."

"That worries me too."

"No." She turned to look at him. "You don't understand. It isn't a pattern. It's a progression. Every site is a little further along than the last. If I'm right, the fifth one will be perfect."

"And the girl?"

She had no answer to that. She looked at the dark water. A single red leaf turned slowly on the current, caught on a rock, and tore free.

"I don't know," she said. "I don't know if the order matters to him. I only know he planned it from the start. He didn't improvise any of this. He's following instructions."

"Whose?"

"The dead man's."

Hendricks was quiet. Somewhere behind them a technician laughed, high and brittle, the way people do when they are trying not to break. He looked at the hills, at the long blue ridges going dark one behind another.

"I've been with the Bureau nineteen years," he said. "I've never worked a case where the suspect sent the evidence to the victim's mother and wrote her a thank-you note."

"I'm aware."

"I want to hate you for being in my way." He gave a short, tired breath that was almost a laugh. "I keep failing. Go sit in the car, Captain. Please. I'll bring you what I can."

Friday, 10:45 PM.

By evening the story had a name.

Lauren stood in her own kitchen with the television on and the sound turned low, watching a man in a gray suit under the blue studio lights say it with a straight face.

"—authorities are now calling him the Mountain Chainsaw Killer, a moniker that has spread online with startling speed. Remains discovered in two national forests, in New Hampshire and Vermont, have been tentatively linked by investigators, and sources tell this network that the suspect may be a twenty-year-old Boston college student named Julian Frost—"

The photograph came up on the screen, the one from the ID card. Clean, symmetrical, quiet.

Then another, beside it. A smaller, fuzzier picture, cropped from a school yearbook. A laughing girl with a wide mouth and hair like spun honey, caught in the middle of turning her head.

"—and his alleged victim, eighteen-year-old Chloe Vance, daughter of Boston Homicide Captain Lauren Vance, who has been missing since September twenty-eighth—"

Lauren did not turn it off.

She did not turn it off because she had once been the person who sat in a studio and approved the use of those photographs, and she knew exactly how many people were watching, and what they were thinking. A mother. A cop. A girl. A killer with a nickname. It would run for months. It would be a documentary. It would be a podcast, and a series on a streaming service, and a book with a dark blue cover.

On the screen, Chloe laughed. The picture froze, and a ticker slid under it. Tip line, one eight hundred, a phone number.

Alleged victim.

She said the words aloud, softly, trying them in her mouth. They tasted like iron.

A knock came at the front door.

It was not a loud knock. It was the knock of someone who did not want to be heard. She crossed the hall with her hand at her hip, the way she had at a hundred doors in her life, and looked through the glass.

It was her neighbor from across the street, a retired schoolteacher named Mrs. Albright. She stood on the porch in a quilted robe and slippers, holding a covered casserole in both hands, with her chin tucked down, and her face pale and wet.

Lauren opened the door.

"I'm so sorry," Mrs. Albright whispered. "I didn't know whether to. I didn't know what to say. I made it this afternoon. It's only chicken and rice."

Behind her, across the street, a dozen porch lights were on.

Lauren had not noticed. Up and down Maple Lane, the neighbors she had waved at for fifteen years were standing in their doorways, in coats and dressing gowns, not speaking, not approaching. A man held a candle in a jar. A girl of ten held her mother's hand. They had come out into the cold, one by one, to light the street.

She took the casserole. It was heavy and warm against her stomach.

"Thank you," she said. It was all she could say.

"We're praying," said Mrs. Albright. "All of us. We're not going to stop."

Then she turned and went down the steps, and Lauren stood in the doorway with the warm dish in her arms and her own street shining back at her through the dark.

When she shut the door, her legs failed her at last. She slid down the wood until she was sitting on the hall rug, with the casserole in her lap, and she put her forehead against the lid and wept. Quietly. Thoroughly. With her shoulders heaving and her mouth open, and no one to hear.

She cried the way a long rain falls on a flat roof, without any hope of stopping.

And when it was over, when it had run all the way through her and out, she wiped her face with her sleeve and looked at the secure phone on the floor beside her. The screen was still bright. The photograph of the stream filled it, the red leaves floating on the water, the light slanting low and gold across the slate.

She thought about the photograph, and the light, and the stream.

Friday, 9:22 AM. Friday, 9:22 AM. Two photographs, seven days apart, and in between them a dead man's arm, a dead man's torso, and a man with a camera who was not afraid of being late.

It was not a threat. It was a calendar.

He had planned the whole month before he ever sat down at her kitchen table. Every date, every site, every hour of golden light. And somewhere in the last square of that calendar, in a box she had not yet been shown, was her daughter.

She picked up the pen and the legal pad. On a clean page she wrote 3 of 5, and beside it, after a moment, Oct 19.

Then she sat very still on the hall rug with the casserole going cold in her lap, listening for the sound of someone turning the next page.