I kept my eye on the dead man’s face. There were pockmarks and lines. I tried to smooth them out. I didn’t know him. Manolo Santiago was a stranger to me.
Someone pulled out a red plastic evidence bag. They emptied it out onto a table. From the distance I could see a pair of blue jeans and a flannel shirt. There was a wallet and a cell phone.
“You check the cell phone?” I asked.
“Yep. It’s a throwaway. The phone log is empty.”
I wrested my gaze away from the dead man’s face and walked over to the table. My legs quaked.
There were folded sheets of paper. I carefully opened one up. The article from Newsweek. The picture of the four dead teens was there—the Summer Slasher’s first victims. They always started with Margot Green because her body was found right away. It took another day to locate Doug Billingham. But the real interest lay in the other two. Blood had been found and torn clothes belonging to both Gil Perez and my sister—but no bodies.
Why not?
Simple. The woods were massive. Wayne Steubens had hidden them well. But some people, those who loved a good conspiracy, didn’t buy that. Why had just those two not been found? How could Steubens have moved and buried bodies so quickly? Did he have an accomplice? How had he pulled it off? What were those four doing in those woods in the first place?
Even today, eighteen years after Wayne’s arrest, people talk about the “ghosts” in those woods—or maybe there is a secret cult living in an abandoned cabin or escaped mental patients or men with hook arms or bizarre medical experiments gone wrong. They talk about the boogeyman, finding the remnants of his burned-out campfire, still surrounded by the bones of children he’d eaten. They say how at night they can still hear Gil Perez and my sister, Camille, howl for vengeance.
I spent a lot of nights out there, alone in those woods. I never heard anyone howl.
My eyes moved past Margot Green’s picture and Doug Billingham’s. The photograph of my sister was next. I had seen this same shot a million times. The media loved it because she looked so wonderfully ordinary. She was the girl-next-door, your favorite babysitter, the sweet teen who lived down the block. That wasn’t Camille at all. She was mischievous, with lively eyes and a sideways devil-may-care grin that knocked the boys back a step. This picture was so not her. She was more than this. And maybe that had cost her her life.
I was about to head over to the final picture, the one of Gil Perez, but something made me pull up.
My heart stopped.
I know that sounds dramatic, but that was how it felt. I looked at the pile of coins from Manolo Santiago’s pocket and saw it, and it was as if a hand reached into my chest and squeezed my heart so hard it couldn’t beat anymore.
I stepped back.
“Mr. Copeland?”
My hand went out as if it were acting on its own. I watched my fingers pluck it up and bring it to my eye level.
It was a ring. A girl’s ring.
I looked at the picture of Gil Perez, the boy who’d been murdered with my sister in the woods. I flashed back twenty years. And I remembered the scar.
“Mr. Copeland?”
“Show me his arm,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“His arm.” I turned back to the window and pointed to the corpse. “Show me his goddamn arm.”
York signaled to Dillon. Dillon pressed the intercom button. “He wants to the see the guy’s arm.”
“Which one?” the woman in the morgue asked.
They looked at me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Both, I guess.”
They looked puzzled, but the woman obeyed. The sheet was pulled back.
The chest was hairy now. He was bigger, at least thirty pounds more than he was back in those days, but that wasn’t surprising. He had changed. We all had. But that wasn’t what I was looking for. I was looking at the arm, for the ragged scar.
It was there.
On his left arm. I did not gasp or any of that. It was as if part of my reality had just been pulled away and I was too numb to do anything about it. I just stood there.
“Mr. Copeland?”
“I know him,” I said.
“Who is he?”
I pointed to the picture in the magazine. “His name is Gil Perez.”
CHAPTER 2
THERE WAS A TIME WHEN PROFESSOR LUCY GOLD, PHD in both English and psychology, loved office hours.
It was a chance to sit one-on-one with students and really get to know them. She loved when the quiet ones who sat in the back with their heads down, taking notes as though it were dictation, the ones who had their hair hanging in front of their faces like a protective curtain—when they arrived at her door and raised their eyes and told her what was in their hearts.
But most of the time, like now, the students who showed up were the brownnosers, the ones who felt that their grade should depend solely on their outward enthusiasm, that the more face time they got, the higher the grade, as though being an extrovert was not rewarded enough in this country.
“Professor Gold,” the girl named Sylvia Potter said. Lucy imagined her a little younger, in middle school. She would have been the annoying girl who arrived the morning of a big test whining that she was going to fail and then ended up being the first one done, smugly handing in her A-plus paper early, and using the rest of the class time to put reinforcements in her notebook.
“Yes, Sylvia?”
“When you were reading that passage from Yeats in class today, I mean, I was so moved. Between the actual words and the way you can use your voice, you know, like a professional actress…”
Lucy Gold was tempted to say, “Do me a favor—just bake me some brownies,” but she kept the smile on instead. No easy task. She glanced at her watch and then felt like crap for doing that. Sylvia was a student trying her best. That was all. We all find our ways to cope, to adapt and survive. Sylvia’s way was probably wiser and less self-destructive than most.
“I loved writing that journal piece too,” she said.
“I’m glad.”
“Mine was about…well, my first time, if you know what I mean….”
Lucy nodded. “We’re keeping them confidential and anonymous, remember?”
“Oh, right.” She glanced down now. Lucy wondered about that. Sylvia never looked down.
“Maybe after I read them all,” Lucy said, “if you want, we can talk about yours. In private.”
Her head was still down.
“Sylvia?”
The girl’s voice was very soft. “Okay.”