The Body in the Woods (11 page)

Her mom shook her head, still keeping her voice low. “They are. You just can't see it. They're sneaky, the watchers. They like to keep you off guard.” She stood up. “I can't stay here. Not while they're watching our every move.”

“Mom, they're not watching.” Alexis went over to the TV set and pushed the power button until the picture blinked off. “There. Now they're gone. Okay?”

“You just can't see them,” her mom's eyes narrowed. “They're still there. They're still watching.”

With a grunt, Alexis heaved the TV so that it faced the wall. “Okay. Now they can't see anything. Just the wall.”

“They've gotten to you.” Her mom's mouth turned down at the corners. Her eyes were full of betrayal. “You're one of them now.”

She grabbed her mom's arm, thin as a stick under her sweater. “Mom, it's okay, I'm not one of them. Mom!”

“Get away from me!” Her mom scooted backward. “I know who you are!” Her eyes were panicky, twitching like a scared rabbit's. Alexis grabbed her again, but her mom wrenched free and ran for the door.

By the time Alexis made it to the hall, the door was slamming shut at the bottom of the stairs.

CHAPTER 20

THURSDAY

WHEN SHE WAS FINALLY STILL

The
Oregonian
lay waiting for him on the otherwise empty old oak table. He set the plate down in front of it. The cobalt blue Fiestaware held three over-easy eggs, lightly salted and peppered. He'd bought the cage-free eggs at the farmers' market. Because they came from a variety of breeds, each shell had been a different color, one creamy white, one brick colored, and one blue-green. Inside, they were all the same, with yolks an orange-yellow to rival a summer sun.

Picking up his fork, he flipped past news from the Middle East, past flooding, past celebrities, past football. He cared about none of it. But on the front page of the Metro section he found what he was looking for. A story about the girl. Her full name was Miranda Wyatt.

Setting the side of his fork against a yolk, he slowly increased the pressure until it dimpled and then broke and ran, coating the tines with sticky yellow liquid. Eating in quick bites, he read the article.

Until now, he had only known the girl's first name. But she was his; she would always be his. Her name was ultimately unimportant. He still had the data he had gathered about her. Unlike many of the homeless girls he had met, she hadn't spent her nights downtown, but in the West Hills near an upscale grocery store. She had told him about digging through the store's Dumpsters to find something to eat, and then bedding down behind them on pieces of cardboard.

The section of her blond hair that he had cut away with his pocket knife was now in his office, tied with a green velvet ribbon. He could touch it anytime he wanted to remember her brief struggle against the inevitable. He could still look at the photo he had snapped of her when she was finally still.

In the newspaper's photo, which appeared to have come from a high school yearbook, the girl looked so different. Her hair was tucked behind her ears, not hanging in her eyes. The only piercings he could see were in her ears.

And now she was gone, and it was time to move on to something new. Something different.

Someone different.

The article was short, taking up far fewer column inches than the two photos—one of the girl, the other of a search team—that accompanied it. He remembered when newspapers had been substantial. Thick with pages, with words, with ideas. Now the paper was about as weighty as a
Star
magazine. You could even be illiterate and still enjoy the pictures.

He skimmed through the details of her life, frowning a little. She was well liked, she was survived by her parents and an older brother, and she went to a high school whose name he had never heard of.

A high school in Portland. That gave him pause. Miranda had said she was a runaway, but the paper said she was a student at this school, which was described as “alternative.” Maybe it catered to homeless students.

Had she been lying to him? Or were her parents lying to the newspaper?

Or did it really matter? He had begun to think that his little experiment was too narrow. That he needed to broaden it.

He was about to turn the page, when a milk-pale face among the line of searchers caught his attention. It was that girl who had captivated him. He read the caption. Her name was Ruby McClure. Ruby. What a perfect name. She was like a rare and precious jewel. The photo was black-and-white, so her hair looked undistinguished, but he remembered its rich red color.

He slipped his plate into the dishwasher and then went into his office. So far, he had distributed eight GPS trackers, retrieving one after it was no longer needed. Each tracker reported its location every fifteen minutes. Once he sent them out into the world, he could look up the trackers online, either at home or on his phone.

On his computer, he checked the current location of all his girls. It looked something like an air traffic control screen, only the blinking green dots represented homeless girls in downtown Portland. If he hovered over a dot, it would tell him the number he had assigned to the girl carrying it.

It would be easy enough to buy Ruby's home address online, but how could he find a way to track her? If he followed her and engineered a meeting, she would certainly have her own phone. And he didn't think she would take a lip balm from him. Even if she had been homeless, he didn't think she was the type who would take anything at all. So he would have to find a way to hide it in her belongings without her noticing.

And suddenly it came to him.

From a drawer, he took out the jeweler's loupe and put it to his right eye. He picked up a pair of tweezers. From a jumble of objects he kept in another drawer—cigarette lighters, watches, belt buckles—he selected what looked like a thumb drive.

Humming “Greensleeves,” he set to work.

Alas, my love, you do me wrong,

To cast me off discourteously

For I have loved you well and long,

Delighting in your company.

CHAPTER 21

THURSDAY

ALL OF THEM GONE NOW

“Me and the SAR team are in the
Oregonian
today,” Nick told his mom and Kyle. He sat down at the dining room table and reached for the orange box of Wheaties. “They took a picture of us yesterday after we completed the evidence search. For that
murder
investigation.” Nick might be three years younger than his brother, but here he was, playing an integral part in something as serious as a murder investigation.

Neither his mom nor his brother were exactly morning people. His mom nodded as she leaned against the kitchen counter and drank her coffee. She was a cashier at Fred Meyer, a regional supermarket chain. Kyle shrugged, his eyes at half-mast. He was slumped over his cereal bowl. One hand propped up his head, and the other held his phone. He was checking his texts while his Wheaties turned to mush. In the evenings, he took classes at Portland Community College, and during the day he sorted packages for UPS. Sometimes on weekends, Nick and Kyle played first-person shooter video games together, but other than that, he was completely off Kyle's radar.

“So?” Kyle said. “Who reads the paper anymore?”

Unfortunately, he had a point. This morning, Nick had gone looking online for the picture. But he didn't know anyone who actually read physical copies of the paper, or even checked it out on the Web. Certainly not anyone his own age.

“The photo's online, too.” It sounded lame. Everything was online, so nothing was special. Their photo was competing against videos of impossibly cute kittens and crazy skateboarding tricks.

After looking at the
Oregonian
website, Nick had tried going to Miranda's Facebook page, but because of the way she set her privacy settings, all he'd been able to see was her profile photo. It had been so weird to look at her smiling face, her cigarette, and her circlet of flowers, and to think that all of them were gone now. The flowers compost, the cigarette crushed, the girl dead.

Kyle started typing a message with one thumb. With a sigh, Nick added milk to his cereal.

The coffee maker hissed as his mom pulled the pot free while more fresh coffee was still trickling in. She dumped the few ounces into her mug and slid the pot back. She never ate breakfast, but always insisted that they did.

“Are you sure you should be doing this?” She pressed her lips together. “You're only sixteen. When I signed the permission slip, I thought it was going to be about rescuing lost people in the woods.”

Nick realized that he had better recalibrate, and fast. There was no point in trying to make Kyle think he was cool. In attempting to make him realize that, even though Nick couldn't remember his dad, he was the one who was going to follow in his footsteps. Nothing he did had ever impressed his older brother or would ever impress him in the future. If Nick said that yesterday he had fought off a serial killer and saved a beautiful girl, Kyle would just shrug and go on scrolling through his phone. On the flip side, if his mom got too freaked out about SAR, she could pull him out.

“There are kids in SAR younger than me.” A couple of the guys were fifteen, although neither of them had turned out for the search yesterday. “It was fine. To be honest, it was kind of boring. Spending hours on your hands and knees, staring at the ground, flagging little pieces of trash that the wind blew in. Next time I hope we get called out to help someone.”

Her lips folded in on themselves. “I hope so, too. Because spending a bunch of time where that poor girl died doesn't seem healthy.” More coffee burbled into the pot, but she left it alone, so he knew she was serious.

“I think it's helping my ADHD,” Nick improvised. “It's, like, teaching me to concentrate.”

Kyle shot him a sharp look. Nick wondered if he was actually paying more attention than he was letting on. It might still be worthwhile to try to get him interested. Just not when his mom was around.

“I don't understand why they don't have real cops doing something like that.” She finally noticed the new coffee and poured it into her mug, then added another splash of milk.

“They did have a detective there to check out what we found. But if they put fourteen cops on their hands and knees for a day, then they wouldn't be out on the street handing out tickets or catching bad guys. And we don't cost anything.”

“Still, you had to miss school to do it. If your grades drop, you're going to be out of there.” She tossed back the rest of her coffee and put her mug in the dishwasher.

“I know, Mom. You said that already. Don't worry.” This hadn't gone at all the way Nick had imagined it would. All it had gotten him was a shrug and a lecture. He couldn't wait to get to school. He started shoveling in his cereal.

 

 

At school, all anyone could talk about was Jericho Jones, the best quarterback Wilson High had ever seen. Only last night Jericho had been driving around with Robbie Bellflower, who had dropped out last year. Robbie had pulled a gun and robbed some guy at a bus stop. Both Robbie and Jericho had been arrested, and Jericho was probably going to be suspended as well, maybe even expelled. Apparently it didn't really matter that the gun had turned out to be an Airsoft that shot only BBs, not bullets.

Still, Nick tried to work the evidence search into conversation at every opportunity. Before the bell rang for first period, he turned around and talked to Kylie Milani, a blond girl who sat behind him and who was railing about the unfairness of Jericho's fate.

Nick saw an in. “They don't think it was a gun that killed that girl in Forest Park, but we had to keep an eye out for one anyway yesterday when we were searching for crime scene evidence.” He tried to hew to SAR's rules. “Our orders were to look for anything God didn't put there. I found something that was so important that they pulled everyone off the field so the homicide detective could check it out. I can't say what it was, though.”

He closed his mouth meaningfully and waited for her to ask. But it was like he was invisible.

“Without Jericho, our team is going to suck,” Kylie said. “And it wasn't even a real gun.”

 

 

As he was finishing lunch, Nick saw Sasha Madigan carrying her tray to the garbage and hurried up so they arrived at the same time.

“I don't know if you saw the paper today, but they've identified that dead girl whose body we found in Forest Park the day before yesterday. Her name's Miranda Wyatt. She went to Alder Grove Academy. I helped the cops with the evidence search yesterday.”

Sasha was staring at him, balancing a pink wad of gum between her front teeth. He had imagined kissing her mouth so often, but a lot of times she didn't even answer his texts.

“The homicide detective thinks that I might have found a key piece of evidence.”

Nick waited for Sasha to ask him what he had found. Maybe he might even tell, after swearing her to secrecy.

Instead she said, “Wait. You were crawling over where her body was? Like, on the exact same spot?”

“Yes. The same spot.” Well, close enough.

Her nose wrinkled. “Gross! Like, did it smell or anything?”

“What? No. I don't think she had been dead very long when we found her.” He wasn't even supposed to say that, but Sasha still didn't seem interested.

 

 

When he was in biology, a voice came over the intercom. “Nick Walker, Nick Walker, please report to the office.”

From the back of the room came a few catcalls. A guy's voice singsonged, “Nick's in trouble!”

Could
he be in trouble? As he got to his feet, he reviewed everything he had said so far today. He had basically stuck to what the
Oregonian
had printed. He hadn't given anything away. Not really. But what if someone had called the sheriff's office?