“No. I found the backpack first, and I reached to pick it up—I hate when people litter on the trails—and that’s when I saw the skull. I ran right back down for the phone.”
The hiker’s story was short and uncomplicated, useless but necessary. It’s all about building a case, Moretti liked to say. Nothing counts until it counts in court.
“You look awfully young for this job, don’t you?” the man said, after the statement had been signed, as he chugged a paper cup of water from the CSI tent.
She did. Saffy knew her face still carried the narrow naivety of adolescence, along with the surprise of her brown skin, a constant questioning she read regularly in strangers’ eyes. When she landed the promotion, her young features had not helped: at the record age of twenty-six, Saffy would be training under Emilia Moretti, the only female senior investigator in the state of New York. The other troopers had been livid. It was true that Saffy had only served the requisite four years as a state trooper, that Moretti had written a glowing recommendation directly to the superintendent, but it still stung when one pimply guy cornered her in the parking lot, a cop Saffy had known since Basic School in Albany. Bitch. He’d spat a wad of saliva right onto her chunky black boot. Next time, try working for it.
Saffy had almost reminded him of the Hunter case, though no one had forgotten. When the Hunter boy went missing, Saffy stayed late every night, holed up past midnight in her stiff wool uniform. Tiny Tits, the other troopers hooted, frat-boy loud. Does she even speak English? They busted into Saffy’s locker and filled it with days-old takeout from the single Indian restaurant in town. They only stopped after Saffy convinced Moretti to drive out to the crumbling cabin where the Hunter boy’s karate instructor had taken his monthly fishing trips. Sure enough. The child was traumatized but alive. Saffy had watched from the station window as the boy collapsed into his sobbing mother’s arms.
“Come on,” Saffy said, ignoring the man’s question. She stood, brushed a pat of moss from her pants. “I’ll drive you home.”
She helped the hiker into the back seat of her Crown Victoria, which to this point had mostly carried drunken day laborers from the bar to the police station. As they pulled away from the trailhead, Saffy turned onto the service road she knew by heart, the mountain rising green in her rearview. The memories seemed to follow, kicked up like dust beneath her tires. She had known the underbelly of this land, smelled the rancid bloom of its decay, seen the ghosts that floated hazy through the night. She knew what this place was capable of.
*
The girls had disappeared nine years ago. 1990.
Saffy remembered that summer with a sluggish haze that bordered on blackout. Roaring bonfires in empty fields, gritty sleeping bags filled with sand. Needles, beer cans, unwashed hair. She had been eighteen years old when those girls went missing, and she remembered how her dropout friends had talked—like the missing girls were not just one town over, but another world over, like it could never happen to them.
But Saffy knew about catastrophe. It was arbitrary. A thing that descended from nowhere, pointed a bony finger, and smirked. As if to say: I choose you.
Saffy had been transferred, after Miss Gemma’s, to a quiet home three towns north. Twelve years old by then, she had lived with one other foster child, a toddler with a runny nose and needy hands, their shared bedroom always stinking of diapers. Saffy watched the baby most nights while her foster parents drove to the casino across the Canadian border. She spent her middle school years lingering on the basketball courts just to avoid that house, shivering in sweatshirts too small at the wrists. The month Saffy turned sixteen, she was transferred to her last foster family, an elderly couple with an unsupervised basement. Saffy had her own entrance, a door with a key that dangled on a plastic lanyard, a microwave, and a camping stove. She lost herself.
Those teenage years passed in blurs and blips. She remembered the school counselor crying with frustration, the social workers threatening their useless disappointment, moldy beams creaking along the basement ceiling. Ages sixteen through eighteen were a fog, one long chain of mistakes that could have lasted forever. Until that summer, when everything changed.
The girls went missing.
Izzy Sanchez disappeared first. Saffy was eighteen years old, just released from the system and living with her boyfriend Travis, a weed dealer with missing molars and a reliable coke connect. Travis was into all the hard stuff, but Saffy stuck entirely to cocaine, preferring the way it energized her from the inside out. She heard about Izzy in a dim living room, heavy curtains crowding the windows, Salt-N-Pepa blaring from the stereo. One of Travis’s friends had witnessed the scene. He told the story with a lazy glaze, smoke curling around his acne-scarred cheeks. Izzy had been sixteen years old, waiting for a ride outside a party like this one, last seen standing at the end of a long driveway. And then she was gone. Vanished, without a trace.