Saffy had now seen more dead things than she could count, and every time, they forced that sickening drop through her abdomen. She had hoped it would get better with age: Saffy was twenty-seven years old now, three weeks into her promotion to investigator with the New York State Police, and still, it felt like electrocution. Sergeant Moretti crouched by Saffy’s boots, one hand cupped around a yellowing skull. Standing over the bodies, Saffy remembered how certain she had felt as a little girl, playing detective in the grass. How easily she had believed that every mystery could be solved.
“Singh,” Moretti said, squinting up. “Bring CSI back here. Tell them there are three.”
The skull was half buried, just an empty eye socket peering up from the dirt. The October sun was relentless, golden through the trees—flaming-red leaves cast shadows over the forest floor, where they’d found three femurs already. Saffy could see the stringy remnants of the girl’s hair, patchy and thin, still clumped against the bone. She pulled the radio from her belt, an inkling of truth already nestling in the hollow of her throat; before the three femurs, a hiker had found the shredded remains of a backpack. Saffy had recognized it immediately—red nylon, with a patch hand-sewn onto the pocket, a denim square cut from an old pair of jeans. In the photo above Saffy’s desk, that backpack was flung over the arm of a teenage girl, who looked momentarily over her shoulder for the click of the shutter before walking on, oblivious.
The bodies had been buried by a stream. In the years since, the ground had shifted, churned up with the rain and the rising creek, and the bones had scattered, resettled across the forest floor. As the forensic photographer crouched over that discolored skull, lonely in its patch of dirt, Moretti turned to Saffy, one hand propped to shield the sun from her eyes.
“Remind me what we have around here?” Moretti asked. “Homes, farms?”
Saffy tilted toward the canopy of trees, trying to banish the scent of decay. Moretti was an outsider, originally from Atlanta. She would never understand this land like Saffy did, would never know the subtleties of the forest at night.
“Mostly farmland,” Saffy said. “There’s a convenience store about a mile away and a trailer park with a dozen homes behind it. The rest is protected wilderness.”
“These woods are too dense for a car, or even a bike.”
“He could have used a wagon or something,” Saffy said. “Or else he’s a big man.”
“Three separate trips, don’t you think? He couldn’t have brought them all here at once. That, or we’ve found our crime scene.”
Saffy shook her head. “It’s too tangled back here. The brambles are so thick. This feels like a spot for stashing, not for lingering.”
Moretti sighed. “We’ll confirm at the morgue, but it’s them all right. The decomposition, that damn backpack. These are our missing girls from ’90.”
Saffy watched as the forensic team hunted through the dirt. If these bones belonged to the girls from 1990, they had been here over nine years now, and any chance of footprints or fibers, fingerprints or stray hairs, had long been degraded.
“Honestly, Singh?” Moretti sighed. “I didn’t think we’d ever find them.”
There was a plea in Sergeant Moretti’s gaze—a cynical hope Saffy had come to recognize, the most honest expression of this inscrutable job. A perfect mirror of the fucked-up world, violence and tragedy mingling with a desperate sort of faith.
“I’ll take care of the witness,” Saffy offered, leaving Moretti to her own reflection.
The hiker sat on a mossy log, wrapped in a trauma blanket. He grimaced as Saffy approached—an older man, with a gash oozing up the back of his muddy calf. He’d tripped down the mountain in his rush to reach a pay phone.
“I’ve already answered all your questions,” he said, exhausted, as he took in Saffy’s curt smile, her tight ponytail, her fitted navy blazer.
“I’m sorry,” Saffy said. “But we need a formal statement.”
She sat gingerly on the log and turned toward the man, noting the tracks down his dirt-stained face where tears had rolled into his wiry beard. Get a statement then take him home, Moretti had murmured, as the man choked out his story. He just got unlucky. Saffy’s instincts discerned the same. At its most fundamental level, detective work was a study in reading people, and Saffy had been perfecting the art all her life.
“Did you touch anything?” Saffy asked. “Maybe when you first discovered the scene?”