Weeks Four and Five

"Grief has a schedule too. It simply does not publish it in advance."

Friday, October 19, 9:22 AM.

Three of five.

The photograph showed a granite dome rising out of a sea of red maple, bald and pale at the summit, with the late sun slanting across it and turning the rock to bronze. Monadnock, Lauren thought, before she read the caption. She had climbed it once with Chloe, at nine, on a day of blowing cloud. Chloe had refused to wear a hat and had come down with a nosebleed and a pocketful of stones.

Under the picture the line of text read the same as before, except for one thing.

3 of 5. Mount Monadnock, NH. 42.8606° N, 72.1085° W. Dig.

She knew the mountain. She also knew, before she had even written the coordinates on the legal pad, that she had pinned it to her wall on the second day, a red-headed pin in the lower left, at the third point on the thread. The ledger in Snyder's shop had named it in blue ink, in the column of places. Every one he sent her, she had already marked.

It should have comforted her. It should have said: you are ahead of him, you understand the shape of it.

Instead it said: he does not care that you know.

Ten minutes later she was on the phone with Calloway.

"I'm not going to argue," said Calloway. Her voice was flat. "The Bureau has jurisdiction. They've told me, in writing, that no civilian may be present at any recovery site, and that includes family members, and that includes you. I fought it. I lost."

"I need to be there."

"You need to be at home."

"Ruth, he's talking to me. You know he's talking to me. Every one of those photographs is addressed to my phone."

"And every one of those photographs is also being cross-examined by a team of forty people in Quantico." A pause. Lauren heard her breathe. "I'm not blind, Lauren. I saw the clip from Vermont. A hundred and twelve thousand views. You in a windbreaker stepping over the tape. Somebody up the chain looked at it and said, we cannot have this on the news in a month, when a defense lawyer asks why the victim's mother was walking around the crime scene. They're not wrong."

"And Miller?"

The silence on the line changed.

"I got your message," Calloway said carefully. "I read it six times. I've been to his house. He isn't there."

Lauren's hand tightened on the phone.

"Neighbor says his truck left on the eleventh. The day before the Vermont site. He told the woman next door that he was going up north for a few weeks. His fishing gear is still on the porch. His wallet's in the kitchen drawer." Calloway's voice dropped. "A man who goes fishing takes his rod, Lauren."

"Then he's gone to ground."

"Or he's been taken. I don't know which. I have two detectives on it, quietly. But I'm telling you now, as your friend and your superintendent, stay out of it. If you find him before the Bureau does, I can't protect you."

"I understand."

"You said that last time."

"I meant it last time too," said Lauren, and hung up before she could hear the rest.

Friday, 4:15 PM.

She did not go to the site.

She sat in the car in the lot of a gas station in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, forty minutes from Maple Lane by the highway, eleven miles from the trailhead by the back road, with the engine off and a cup of black coffee going cold in the holder. Through the windshield she could see, far off, the mountain itself, bald and gold in the afternoon light.

Between her and it ran a ribbon of blue-and-white lights. State police had closed the access road at two. She watched the vans go in. She watched the dogs, and the ambulance with its lights dark, and a black helicopter that came up the valley, circled, and sank behind the ridge.

She did not move.

It was the hardest thing she had done in fifteen years on the job. To sit and to watch and to do nothing. To let other people carry the weight in her place. To trust that the people with the trowels and the gloves would be careful, and would be kind, and would call.

At 6:12 PM the burner buzzed.

Right leg. Hip to ankle. Wrapped same as VT. Clean. Nair says whoever did it has done this before, by now. Cuts are fast. One pass each. No hesitation.

Lauren stared at the screen.

Another bubble followed.

Nair also says the bone saw wasn't new. It had a nick in the blade. Same nick as on the torso. One tool, used all month, always the same. They're running it against hardware stores.

She typed, with a thumb that she could barely feel: Thank you, Danny.

Not a minute passed.

Don't thank me. You look like hell. I saw you on the traffic cam outside Jaffrey. Go home.

She put the phone face down on the seat.

Outside, the light was almost gone. The mountain had turned the color of a dying coal, and then the color of ash, and then it was only a dark shape against a darker sky.

Wednesday, October 24, 11:00 AM.

"Captain, you have to eat something."

Mrs. Albright had come over with soup again. She stood in the kitchen doorway with a thermos in each hand, her shoulders hunched slightly, as though she expected to be told off. Lauren sat at the table in a bathrobe she did not remember putting on, with her hair uncombed and her chin propped in her hand.

"I'm not hungry."

"I know. Eat anyway."

"I will."

"You won't." The older woman set the thermoses down, unscrewed the cap of one, and ladled a cup of clear broth with a quiet efficiency. "My husband was forty-one days in the hospital before he passed. I did not eat for thirty of them. And do you know what happened? I got so weak I couldn't lift the phone when they called to say it was time." She slid the cup across the table. "Eat the soup, dear. Be strong enough to answer."

Lauren looked at the cup.

Steam rose from it in a slow white thread, and with it the smell of chicken and thyme. For no reason at all she thought of pumpkin soup. Chloe in the doorway, hungry, impatient, with one foot on the other. Can we have the pumpkin soup this weekend? Please?

She picked up the spoon.

The first mouthful went down like a stone. The second stayed. By the fifth she was crying again, without sound, the tears simply running over her face and into the broth, and Mrs. Albright, who had the grace of a woman who had buried someone, pretended not to see.

Friday, October 26, 9:22 AM.

Four of five.

The photograph was of a lake. Wide, flat, silver, with a ring of low blue hills around it and a single small island, dark with pines, in the foreground. The sun lay across the water in a long bright road. A loon, tiny and perfect, had been caught on the far shore in mid-dive.

It was the most beautiful thing he had sent.

4 of 5. Lake Winnipesaukee, NH. 43.6143° N, 71.3412° W. Dig.

And below the line, for the first time, a second line, set apart from the first by a gap of white.

Almost.

Lauren read it, and the skin on her arms rose in slow cold waves.

She did not know why. It was only a word. But it was not a word that belonged in the pattern. For four weeks the messages had been a ledger, coordinates and numerals, a thing you could file. This was a voice. It sounded, she thought, like a man who has come to the end of a long road and cannot stop himself from saying so.

Almost.

She read it a second time, aloud.

Then she took the legal pad and drew a line under the last entry. 4 of 5. Oct 26. And she wrote beneath it, in her sharp square hand, three words that she had never expected to put on paper.

The head.

She had known from the start that there would be a fifth. She had known it was the Berkshires, the last pin on the map, because the pins left only one place. But she had told herself that the fifth would be Chloe. That the thing at the end of the thread was her daughter, and that the thread was a hanging rope.

She had never let herself write the other thing.

The head. A man cut into pieces and carried up into five mountains, from the hand to the arm to the trunk to the legs, and then the last piece. The piece that had a face.

Marcus Brody's face.

She pressed the heel of her hand against her mouth and sat very still.

Because if the fifth mountain was Marcus, then her daughter wasn't in it. And if her daughter wasn't in it, then somewhere in the world she was alive, with a man who had just written, in the same patient blue letters as the rest of the ledger, the word almost.

Her phone buzzed on the table.

Reyes. Winnipesaukee. Left arm and left leg. Calloway wants you to know there's no more to find after this except the head. Bureau thinks the head's in the Berkshires, like you said. They're putting a team on it NOW. Surveillance. Cameras on every trail. If he goes anywhere near it he's ours.

She read it twice.

Then she turned to the wall behind her, to the map with its five pins and its red thread, and looked at the last one. It hung alone above the western end of Massachusetts, a small bright dot over a green field of ridges. The Berkshires. The last station.

Surveillance. Cameras on every trail.

He would see them.

She was suddenly, absolutely certain. He would see every one of them. A man who had planted a trail camera at the Crawford pit, who had watched her dig in the dark, who had known she was Chloe's mother before she walked into her own kitchen. A man like that did not walk into a net.

He would do something else.

Monday, October 29, 8:30 AM.

The letter from Internal Affairs came by courier, in a cream envelope, with her name typed in a font that suggested the sender had not been in a hurry.

Captain Vance: You are hereby notified that a hearing regarding your conduct on Case 24-1187 will be convened on Thursday, November 8, at 10:00 AM...

She read as far as procedural violations, folded it in thirds, and laid it on the pile of unopened mail on the hall table. There were forty-one envelopes on the pile. Most of them were from strangers. Women who had lost children. Men who wanted to explain the Bible. A girl of twelve in Ohio had drawn her a picture of a lighthouse.

Her phone rang.

"Miller," said Calloway, without greeting. "We've pulled his bank records. On the tenth of October, the day before he left, he withdrew nine thousand dollars in cash. Two days later, a deposit of nine thousand into an account in his niece's name in Maine. Then nothing. No cards, no calls. His cell phone's been off since the eleventh."

"He's paying someone to keep quiet."

"Or someone has paid him to disappear. I can't tell which." A pause. "Hendricks wants to bring him in as a material witness. That means every cop in four states. I'd like to wait."

"Why?"

"Because if he's running from the Bureau, he'll run harder. And if he's running from Frost..." Calloway did not finish. She did not have to.

Lauren stood in the hall with the phone against her ear and her free hand flat on the wall.

If he's running from Frost. A retired detective, five weeks into his pension, who had taken an envelope four years ago and a nine thousand dollar withdrawal this month. A man who had known Marcus Brody's every secret and had spent a lifetime keeping them. Of course Julian would want him. Of all the pieces on the board, he was the only one who knew where the dead man had kept his friends.

"Ruth. He isn't running from Julian."

"Why not?"

"Because Julian doesn't chase." She heard her own voice, thin and certain. "He collects. If Miller's gone, it's because Julian let him go. For the moment."

Calloway was silent so long that Lauren thought the line had dropped.

"God help me," the older woman said at last. "That is the worst thing you've ever said to me."

Friday, November 2, 2:10 AM.

She had not slept all week.

At ten past two she stood in her own living room in the dark with her coat on and her car keys in her fist. The house was perfectly silent. Chloe's bedroom door was open at the top of the stairs. The gull sat on the shelf where she had finally set it, wings out, facing the window.

She said, to the gull, in a low voice: "I'm going to do something stupid."

The gull said nothing.

"Today's the day. The last one. The Bureau's put surveillance on every trail in the Berkshires and he'll see every camera. So I'm going to the one place they haven't looked."

The gull looked at the dark window.

"You'd tell me not to," Lauren said, and a small dry sound came out of her that was almost a laugh. "You'd tell me it's a bad idea and I should wait for the Bureau and eat something. You'd be right."

She went out and locked the door behind her.

The street lay silent under the porch lights. Up and down Maple Lane the candles had burned down and the jars stood empty, but someone had put out fresh ones. She walked down the path and past Mrs. Albright's lit window and out to the car, and sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel.

Then she started the engine.

She was two and a half hours from a mountain, and seven hours from the last photograph, and she drove west into the dark with the radio off and the gull's small bright shape fading in her mirror.