“Nah,” he said. “But I like sounding tough. How did I do?”
“Eh. So can we continue to the tour?”
“Sure.”
The path grew thinner until it practically disappeared. They were climbing on rocks and around trees. Muse had always been something of a tomboy. She enjoyed the activity. And—Flair Hickory be damned—her shoes could handle it.
“Hold up,” Lowell said.
The sun continued to dip. Lowell’s profile was in silhouette. He took off his hat and again sniffled into his handkerchief. “This is where the Billingham kid was found.”
Doug Billingham.
The woods seemed to settle at the words, and then the wind whispered an old song. Muse looked down. A kid. Billingham had been seventeen. He had been found with eight stab wounds, mostly defensive. He had fought his assailant. She looked at Lowell. His head was lowered, his eyes closed.
Muse remembered something else—something from the file. Lowell. That name. “Peripherally, my ass,” she said. “You were the lead.”
Lowell did not reply.
“I don’t get it. Why didn’t you tell me?”
He shrugged. “Why didn’t you tell me you were reopening my case?”
“We weren’t really. I mean, I didn’t think we had anything yet.”
“So your guys hitting paydirt,” he said. “That was just dumb luck?”
Muse didn’t like where this was going.
“How far are we from where Margot Green was found?” Muse asked.
“A half mile due south.”
“Margot Green was found first, right?”
“Yep. See, where you came in? The condos? That used to be where the girls’ side of the camp was. You know. Their cabins. The boys were to the south. The Green girl was found near there.”
“How long after you found Green did you locate the Billingham boy?”
“Thirty-six hours.”
“Long time.”
“A lot of land to cover.”
“Still. He was just left out here?”
“No, there was a shallow grave. That’s probably why it was missed the first time through. You know how it is. Everybody hears about missing kids and they want to be the good citizen so they come out and help us cover ground. They walked right over him. Never knew he was there.”
Muse stared down at the ground. Totally unremarkable. There was a cross like those makeshift memorials for car-accident deaths. But the cross was old and nearly fallen over. There was no picture of Billingham. No keepsakes or flowers or stuffed bears. Just the beat-up cross. Alone out here in the woods. Muse almost shivered.
“The killer—you probably know this—his name was Wayne Steubens. A counselor, as it turned out. There are a lot of theories on what happened that night, but the consensus seems to be that Steubens worked on the vanished kids—Perez and Copeland—first. He buried them. He started to dig a grave for Douglas Billingham when Margot Green was found. So he took off. According to the hotshot down at Quantico, burying the bodies was part of what gave him his thrill. You know Steubens buried all his other victims, right? The ones in the other states?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You know two of them were still alive when he buried them?”
She knew that too. “Did you ever question Wayne Steubens?” Muse asked.
“We talked to everyone at that camp.”
He said that slowly, carefully. A bell rang in Muse’s head. Lowell continued.
“And yes, the Steubens kid gave me the creeps—at least, that’s what I think now. But maybe that’s hindsight, I don’t know anymore. There was no evidence linking Steubens to the murders. There was nothing linking anybody, really. Plus Steubens was rich. His family hired a lawyer. As you can imagine, the camp broke up right away. All the kids went home. Steubens was sent overseas for the next semester. A school in Switzerland, I think.”
Muse still had her eyes on the cross.
“You ready to keep moving?”
She nodded. They started hiking again.
Lowell asked, “So how long have you been chief investigator?”
“A few months.”
“And before that?”
“Homicide for three years.”
He wiped the huge nose again. “It never gets easier, does it?”
The question seemed rhetorical, so she just kept trekking.
“It’s not the outrage,” he said. “It’s not the dead even. They’re gone. Nothing you can do about that. It’s what’s left behind—the echo. These woods you’re walking through. There are some old-timers who think a sound echoes forever in here. Makes sense when you think about it. This Billingham kid. I’m sure he screamed. He screams, it echoes, just bounces back and forth, the sound getting smaller and smaller, but never entirely disappearing. Like a part of him is still calling out, even now. Murder echoes like that.”
Muse kept her head down, watched her feet on the knotty ground.
“Have you met any of the victims’ families?”
She thought about that. “One is my boss, actually.”
“Paul Copeland,” Lowell said.
“You remember him?”
“Like I said, I questioned everybody at that camp.”
The bell in Muse’s head sounded again.
“Is he the one who got you to look into the case?” Lowell asked.
She didn’t reply.
“Murder is unjust,” he went on. “It’s like God had this plan and there is this natural order He set up and someone took it upon themselves to mess with that. If you solve the case, sure, it helps. But it’s like you crumbled up a piece of aluminum foil. Finding the killer helps you spread it out again, but for the family, it never really regains its form.”
“Aluminum foil?”
Lowell shrugged.
“You’re quite the philosopher, Sheriff.”
“Look into your boss’s eyes sometimes. Whatever happened in these woods that night? It’s still there. It still echoes, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Muse said.
“And I don’t know if you should be here.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I did question your boss that night.”
Muse stopped walking. “Are you saying there’s some kind of conflict of interest?”
“I think that might be exactly what I’m saying.”
“Paul Copeland was a suspect?”
“It is still an open case. It is still, despite your interference, my case. So I won’t answer that. But I will tell you this. He lied about what happened.”