The Culvert on Route 17

"The dead do not lie. They only wait for someone patient enough to ask the wrong question first."

The call came at ten past five on Tuesday morning, and Lauren was awake to take it.

She had not been to sleep. She lay in the narrow bed in the Pennsylvania Hotel in her clothes, with her shoes on the floor and her phone on the pillow, watching the water stain on the ceiling slowly take the shape of a country she could not name. The room was cold. The radiator ticked. Down on Seventh Avenue a garbage truck was emptying a dumpster with a long iron groan.

Bring me a body, Calloway had said. Or a witness. Or a reason.

She picked up the phone on the first ring.

"Captain Vance?" The voice was male, country-flat, apologetic. "This is Sheriff Wade Tolliver, Sullivan County. I got your name from a Lieutenant Quinn at the NYPD. He says you've been asking after a missing Chinese girl."

"Yes."

"I'm real sorry to wake you." There was a long pause, in which she heard a door close, and wind, and the thin crackle of a radio. "I think you'd best come up and see what a hunter found yesterday afternoon in a drain pipe."

…

The Catskills in the pale light before sunrise were the color of a bruise.

They drove north on Route 17 with the heater roaring and the wipers going against a thin freezing drizzle, through a country of old hotels with their windows boarded and gas stations with their lights out and long dark ridges furred with hemlock. Ethan drove. He had insisted on it, quietly, at the hotel door, and she had let him. He kept his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel at ten and two, in exactly the manner she had taught him when he was sixteen, and neither of them said what each of them was thinking.

A white county cruiser was waiting at a turnout near a bridge. Beyond it, in a ditch beside the road, a crew in yellow rain slickers stood about a long concrete culvert with a tarpaulin stretched over its mouth, and a state trooper in a campaign hat was stringing tape between two fence posts.

Sheriff Tolliver was a big, slow, weathered man in his sixties, with a mustache that had once been red. He shook their hands without ceremony and told them, in the same flat country voice, that the hunter was a retired Teamster named Burkhart, that he had been after a wounded deer, that the deer had gone into the pipe and Burkhart had put a flashlight in after it. "He's home now with a bottle," said the sheriff. "I told him I wouldn't hold it against him."

"Who touched her?"

"Nobody. Burkhart saw enough to know. The rest is state police and the coroner. They'll be out of the pipe in an hour." He looked at Lauren with a kind of grave, unhappy tact. "I'm told you can tell me, ma'am, if I'm wrong about what I'm looking at."

"I can't say yet."

"No, ma'am. But you can look."

She looked. She would remember it, later, in the way one remembers a picture in a museum that one did not want to see, with the clarity of a lit window across a dark road. A tarpaulin. A white cloth beneath it, unbleached muslin, the kind used for straining cheese, folded and tucked with a care that was out of all proportion to the place. A ring of pale wax on the concrete beside it, small and perfectly round, the size of a saucer. A smell that was not, at that distance, what she had feared.

It was fainter. It was fainter than she had imagined, and it was cold, and clean, and sweetish, and it had in it, unmistakably, the copper and the milk.

She turned her face away. She could not have said how long she stood.

"It's her," said Ethan quietly, at her shoulder. He had not looked at the culvert. He had looked at her face, as one looks at the face of a clock. "It's all right, Laurie. You don't have to say it. I have it too."

…

The report came at four that afternoon, by email, from a forensic laboratory in Albany.

They read it in the sheriff's office in Monticello, on a battered steel desk under a poster of a state trooper shaking hands with a child. Ethan had spread the pages out on the blotter, one at a time, in a neat row. The DNA had matched the hair from the brush he had slipped into an evidence sleeve in Jackson Heights, without telling the landlady, on the afternoon he had stood with his hands in his pockets before a wall of paper. It was Jiang Yingying.

The text was short. It had been written by a man who did not wish to be quoted.

Remains of a single adult female, approx. 160 cm. Post-mortem interval 8 to 10 weeks, consistent with date of disappearance. Cause of death not determinable from the remains recovered. Soft tissue incomplete. Remains had been wrapped in unbleached muslin, secured with cotton twine, and placed in anatomical sequence on a flat surface before transport. Wax residue, paraffin, in a circular deposit. No clothing. No personal effects. One folded sheet of paper, printed with musical staves, found between layers of muslin. Examiner notes deliberate, careful and prolonged handling. Not an act of impulse.

Ethan read it once. Then he turned the photographs face down on the desk, one by one, squaring them at the edge as if putting away dishes, and laid his hand flat on top of them, and did not look at them again.

"You don't have to," said Lauren.

"I know. I looked for six seconds. That was enough." His voice was quite steady. "She was twenty-four. She bit her nails. I think the least that I can do is not to count what was done."

He pushed back his chair and went to the window. The sheriff's office looked out on a parking lot and a Dairy Queen, shuttered for the season, and a very large flag hanging limp from a pole. A pickup went past with its radio on. Someone was laughing in the corridor.

Lauren sat with her palms on the desk and looked at the dark photographs and thought of nothing, with an enormous effort, for as long as she could.

"Bring me a body," she said at last.

"Laurie."

"That is what she said, isn't she? Ruth. A body, or a witness, or a reason." She lifted her eyes, and they were dry, and very bright. "Well. Here is a body. I hope that she is satisfied."

…

"Show me the book," said Lauren.

It lay on the sheriff's desk where Ethan had left it, a battered paperback copy of Inside the Gourmet that he had bought at an airport kiosk and read, he said, on a night when he could not sleep. The cover was black with a white plate. He found the place without looking. Chapter nine, The Evening, pages one hundred and eighty-one to one hundred and ninety-six. He did not read it aloud. He laid the book open beside the report and turned the page to her, and she took it.

It was written in the first person. It was written in the voice of the man she had met on Sunday, low, clear, composed, without a wasted word, and for a moment she could not make herself see the words at all, because the voice was so perfect that it covered them like a hand.

I remember that I lit the candle first, it said. It was a small white dish, and the wax was soft, and I set it in the middle of the table where she could see it from the chair. She asked what it was for. I said, so that we could see one another. And then I wrapped her in muslin, as one does a cheese that needs to breathe. I put on the Satie, the first Gymnopédie, and let it play through twice...

Lauren put the book down.

She sat for a moment with her hand over her mouth. She was aware that the room had become very quiet, and that her brother had turned from the window.

"The muslin," she said.

"Yes."

"The wax."

"The wax. The order." He came back to the desk and stood over it. "Every item in that report is in the chapter. The candle, and the cloth, and the twine, and the way the body was laid, down to the piece of music. I could not have written a more accurate description of the scene from the report alone. There is no room for doubt, Laurie. Whoever left her in that pipe has read this book, and has read it as a manual."

"Or wrote it."

"Or wrote it." He did not say whose name. "Or is it. But you told me on Sunday that you could find nothing in Highgrove."

"Nothing."

"Not a thread."

"I have been in houses where men had done this. I would have known." She stared at the black cover. "He didn't. He hasn't. Not for a very long time. His own cook says he can't hold a knife."

"Then he hired someone."

"Perhaps." But it did not sound true, even as she said it, and she saw the same doubt cross her brother's face, a faint creasing between the brows. "A man like that, who has just lost the whole country's attention, who wants it back above all things, he might. It would be a magnificent sort of revenge. A copy, to show them the original was still alive."

"Then why would Ray go to the penthouse and not to Westport?"

"I don't know."

"And why would the one person who smelled of it be the woman who wrote the book?"

Neither of them answered. Outside, the light was going. A truck pulled up and parked in front of the Dairy Queen, and a man got out and stood looking at the closed windows with his hands in his pockets, as if the ice cream might be persuaded to return.

Ethan sat down again. He picked up the book and weighed it on his palm, turning it over, running his thumb along the page edges until the pages riffled like a deck of cards.

"I want the Paris file," he said. "The whole of it. Not the abridged one that Ray had. The original, with the missing fourteen pages." He looked up. "If this book was a faithful account of what Desmond Hale did, then it will match the French police report to the letter. And if it doesn't..."

"If it doesn't?"

"Then the question is not who is copying Hale." He closed the book. "It is who has been rewriting him."

…

Calloway answered on the first ring.

"I've got a body," said Lauren.

There was a silence on the line. When Calloway spoke again, her voice had changed. It was no longer the voice of a woman setting down a tray. It was lower, slower, almost gentle.

"Is it the girl?"

"Yes."

"God." She heard her superintendent breathe out. "I'm sorry. I'd hoped, for the mother. I'd hoped that I was being a hard-hearted old cow for nothing." A pause. "That will carry in the room, Lauren. A dead foreign student, found in a pipe with a ritual arrangement. The commissioner will not be able to pretend it is a personal matter. It buys you a day."

"A day?"

"I'll make it two, if I can. I will tell them that I need to hold you until the family has been informed. But understand what I am saying. This is not a victory. The commissioner will be lunching with a man whose family is at the center of this, and by tomorrow he will have heard from the Governor's people, and the only thing I will be able to say is that the Boston Police Department is cooperating with the New York State Police." Her voice sharpened. "And you will be doing what, exactly, in the meantime?"

"Telling her mother."

"I see." Another silence. "Do it face to face. Do it kindly. And when it is done, Captain, find me something I can say in that room that is better than we found her."

The line clicked off.

Lauren put down the phone. She sat at the sheriff's desk, under a poster of a smiling trooper, with a white county mug of tea going cold beside her elbow, and tried to imagine how she was going to tell a seventy-one-year-old woman in a navy cardigan, who had flown halfway round the world with a sheet of paper on which she had written down the Sundays, that her daughter would not be calling on the next one.

She could not imagine it. She picked up her coat.

"Come on," said Ethan gently. "I'll drive."