The Watcher Read online

  “You should be a favorite too,” she said.

  SEVEN: KATERI

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17

  Kateri checks her phone in the parking lot of the Hub while she watches the waitress get in her own car and leave, the lot a mess of potholes and gravel. She has a text from Hurt that says Remains. Please call me.

  She tries, and it goes straight to voice mail each time. Hurt phones her finally from outside the park. “There’s no service in there,” he tells her. “I didn’t think there was any point in waiting. They’re bagging and bringing everything to the morgue.”

  “You couldn’t wait for me to get there?” she says.

  “It’s just bones,” Hurt says.

  Kateri looks to the heavy gray sky, as if she can tell time by the passing of clouds. “That’s advanced decomposition,” she says. “She hasn’t been dead that long. The blood was fresh.”

  “The body was burned,” Hurt says.

  “How far into the woods?”

  “Quite a ways, and way off trail. We found some clothing,” he says. “Some articles that we’ll need to confirm but I’m sure are Pearl’s.”

  It’s possible, she knows. You can burn a body in the country, in the woods, in a way that you can’t in a bigger town or city. There are fires all the time, especially in the fall. Bonfires, burning leaves; rural folks still burn trash.

  The team continues to dig, and Kateri follows Hurt to the county morgue. The building has been built into a hill, the back of it accessible from a lower parking lot below where ambulances and hearses can pull into a garage to collect or drop off a body.

  Hurt waits for her in the parking lot, next to his own car, which she rarely sees him drive, a pine-green Honda Element that she thinks he probably also uses for camping. There’s a round sticker on the back that says ADK46er. He paces the lot in khakis and hiking boots.

  “It’s one of those days,” he says, “that I wish I still smoked.”

  She pats her own bag. Sometimes she has a pack stashed. She tried quitting when she moved to Spring Falls, but she finds herself picking up a pack more often than not. She still savors a cigarette with her morning coffee. After a meal. And when she’s stressed.

  “Me too,” she says to Hurt.

  They meet the coroner, Elise Diaz, inside. She’s a tiny woman, no more than five foot two, slim with a sleek bob, and exquisitely dressed in a black pencil skirt and a silk blouse. She wears four-inch heels and she’s still shorter than Kateri.

  Hurt introduces her as his partner, Kateri Fisher.

  “New,” Elise Diaz says, and appears to size her up.

  “To the area,” Kateri says, her hackles up. “I’ve been a detective for seven years.”

  Dr. Diaz raises her eyebrows at Hurt. “Well, Detective Hurt and I have been working together for decades, haven’t we, Joel?” she says.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Hurt says. His smile looks like a grimace. “I’m not quite as old as you are,” he jabs.

  Diaz lays her hand on the back of Kateri’s arm. “Good to have fresh blood,” she says. She leads them down the hallway, her heels clicking, her tiny ass barely moving. She walks, Kateri thinks, like she’s the first lady, giving a tour of the White House.

  In the exam room are bones on a table. They’ve been discolored from the fire, charred and cracked in ways that most likely occurred postmortem. There’s a slender curve of spine and, disconnected, only half the ivory butterfly of a pelvis.

  “What can you tell us?” Hurt asks Diaz.

  “It’s undeniably female,” she says. She pulls on gloves and points at the faint pits in the bone. “Parturition scarring. Due to a vaginal delivery.” She tucks her hair behind her ear and looks up at Kateri.

  “Do you have children, Detective Fisher?” she asks.

  “No,” Kateri says, looking at the bones.

  Diaz laughs lightly. “Probably for the best,” she says.

  “These were nearby,” Hurt says, and pulls a plastic evidence bag for Kateri to examine. There’s a bag with a shoe, a soft-sided suede ankle boot caked with mud and blood, and in another bag a braided bracelet, laced with beads and caked in part with blood.

  “How close were these?” Kateri asks.

  “Within ten feet,” Hurt says.

  “Only one shoe?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  She turns the bracelet over in her hands, examining the yarn, the little silver beads. There are tiny bells where the bracelet latches, and she thinks of Pearl, beaten, bleeding, being carried or dragged through the woods having lost a shoe. Her wrist tinkling with the sound of bells as she went.

  The bracelet gives Kateri a cold wave of nausea, creeping up her neck, underneath her ears. She’s seen so much in past cases: blood, gore, body parts, brains. But the bells on the bracelet, ringing, she imagines, as the body dragged, seem particularly delicate and grim to her. She feels green. She needs to get outside.

  “Thank you,” she says to Dr. Diaz, and excuses herself to the back parking lot, under a sky that is so heavy she swears she can feel it resting on the top of her head, a mantle, or a cold, dead hand.

  Hurt appears at her side. “You okay?” he asks.

  “What are we going to do with the kid?” Kateri asks.

  “Well,” Hurt answers. He looks down at the ground. “Foster care.”

  It hits Kateri like a thud in the middle of her chest. “Let’s see if we have a match to the blood in the house,” she says, and Hurt nods. “And if there’s anything at all we can extract from the burnt bones.”

  She walks with Hurt to where their cars are parked side by side.

  “Is it enough?” she asks, and knows that it is; it just seems so paltry. Where has the rest of it gone? It takes a long time to burn a human body, she thinks, without the aid of a crematorium. She thinks of the bare pelvis, with its clear markings of childbirth, the way motherhood leaves its trace on you long after you’re dead.

  “If the blood matches what we pulled from the house,” Hurt says, “and we can match that to Pearl Jenkins—she has no DNA on file,” he adds, “but we can test the type against her children—then yes,” he says.

  She wants to ask, “Who would do this?” But she knows. Murder is almost never anonymous.

  * * *

  They didn’t send her to rehab after her accident. She spent a few days on the rehab floor, drying out, but a facility was never mandatory. It might have been court mandated, but there was no court. There were no charges. The county sheriff decided to keep it quiet. It would have been completely different if she’d hurt or killed someone, or even if another vehicle had been involved. But it was just Kateri and the wall.

  They’d asked her—not the chief, but a department psychologist, very delicately—if she was suicidal. She never said the word suicide or kill. But she asked Kateri a lot of questions about feeling overwhelmed, about how she was dealing with it all.

  Kateri wasn’t suicidal. She did remember having the vague thought that if she died, well, it would be okay. But she wasn’t about to take any action.

  The sheriff unofficially demanded that she attend AA meetings and prove her presence. She went. A few times, while her face healed, while she figured out what to do with her grandmother’s house.

  In the months before the accident, her grandmother had declined and died. She was the only type of parent Kateri had had. After, Kateri went home to the empty house on Allen Street every night. Every night she felt unmoored and raw, like she would claw the walls to get out, and so she left. She picked a different bar every night, and for a while a different man. She knew it was dangerous. She left her badge, her sidearm at home. She went out unfettered.

  When she crashed, the sheriff asked her how many fingers of whiskey she’d had.

  “To be honest, sir,” she answered, “it was more like hands.” But she didn’t remember. That was the worst part—or the best part, depending—the nights that were completely gone to her. Which sometimes meant waking up
in her own bed, or on the couch, or in someone else’s bed, or in the worst case, in a hospital bed.

  The sheriff put her on leave. He asked to see her every two weeks, with some documentation of the AA meetings.

  And then the house on Allen Street sold and Kateri hired a cleanout team to come take everything that wasn’t already on her body or in a small bag. There was nothing left for her. Her father had died years ago, alone in a shitty high-rise on the south side. Her mother, dead when Kateri was sixteen.

  She had died on the couch. Only thirty-one to Kateri’s sixteen. Her toxicology report proved what they already knew. She had taken a deadly combination of alcohol and painkillers and benzos. It wasn’t a night unlike other nights. It was just the night that killed her.

  When Hamilton County called with a second interview, the wound on Kateri’s chin had healed to a thin pink slice you could see only if she tilted her face up. She’d been to six meetings, where she rarely talked, just listened to the same confessions over and over, another face, another accident, another car crash, and more tears. She might have died on the couch the way her mother had. Instead, she bought a different car, she put a few things in the back, and she moved up north. She felt spared.

  * * *

  By the time she gets to Mercy, it’s getting dark, and the rain has come, saturating, steady. It feels like it will never end, that this is the world now, wet and shining. The parking lot runs with sheets of water, moving toward the gutter.

  She walks past the nurses’ station and down the empty hallway. When she doesn’t see the officer, she assumes they have taken the girl for some testing. The tests have been extensive: hearing, eyesight, brain scans, chest X-rays. They haven’t found anything wrong with her. And not a hair on her has been harmed.

  But she finds Birdie’s room empty, her bed stripped. It catches Kateri so off guard that she just stands there in the doorway, looking in at the generic room, all signs of any patient gone. When they took her for testing before, everything was left behind: blankets, her chart, a pitcher of water. This room is now sterile.

  Kateri goes back to the nurses’ station.

  “Jane Doe,” she says. “Sparrow Annie Jenkins,” she repeats. “In room four-four-oh-six?”

  “Discharged,” the nurse says.

  “When?”

  “This morning,” she says. Behind her, the phone rings, stops, and then rings again so that the nurse has to hold up a finger, asking Kateri to wait.

  She takes the call, and an attending doctor comes by with files. Another nurse slips in behind the desk to pull up information on another patient.

  “To whom?” Kateri asks the first nurse.

  “I’m sorry?” she asks.

  “To whom was Jane Doe released?” Kateri asks, her voice rising. “And what happened to the officer outside her room?” She feels the heat creeping up her neck, her hair tingling, the metal taste of shame and fear on her tongue. “The child is a witness in an active investigation,” Kateri says. “She can’t leave without my knowing.”

  “Were you here?” the first nurse asks the other.

  The second nurse nods, chewing a piece of candy she’s taken out of the crystal dish on the counter. Behind them on the wall and along the edge of the counter, they’ve put up Halloween decorations, smiling vampires and skulls.

  “Guy from the county,” she says. “Appointed legal guardian.”

  “And the officer?” Kateri asks.

  “The overnight guy,” she says, “Officer Dillon.” She blushes when she says his name. “He left at eight,” she says, “but no one came in to replace him. He said they were notified of her transfer instead.”

  “I was not notified of her transfer, see?” Kateri says, her fingers pronged out on her breastbone. “That’s the problem. Who was the man from the county? From DSS?” she asks. “Did he show identification?”

  “He was tall,” the nurse says, “and wearing a suit.” As if that helps, Kateri thought. “He signed,” the nurse says.

  “May I see the signature, please?” Kateri asks.

  The nurse riffles through the files from the day.

  “This is an active investigation,” Kateri says again. “That has become a murder investigation. In case you want to ID me,” she adds. She unfolds her badge.

  “Oh, Detective,” the nurse says, and laughs. “We all know who you are.”

  “What did he look like?” Kateri asks, and fears that she sounds as desperate as she feels.

  The nurse shrugs and grabs a second piece of candy. “Sorry,” she says then, “this is my dinner.” Then she adds, “Tall, dark hair.” She frowns a little, self-deprecating. “Super good-looking.”

  “How old?” Kateri asks.

  “Old,” she says. “I don’t know, like forty?”

  Kateri pushes her tongue between her front teeth to keep from clamping down.

  The second nurse pulls the folder and opens it to show Kateri but won’t hand it over to her. The signature is illegible. A long flourish, its tail like a comet dragging off to the right.

  * * *

  Kateri calls the Department of Social Services from her car in the parking lot at Mercy while it pours on her windshield, the rain on her roof like a jackhammer.

  “Kateri Fisher,” she says to the case manager she spoke with yesterday, Emilia Ward. “Who checked out Jane Doe? Sparrow Annie Jenkins,” she says, “from the Jenkins investigation. From Mercy Hospital.”

  “No one,” Emilia says. “I have a caseworker from Catholic Charities coming to meet her tomorrow.”

  “No,” Kateri says. “Someone picked her up.”

  “She is still admitted,” Emilia says.

  “No,” Kateri says, louder, over the rain, trying as hard as she can not to start yelling. “She is not admitted,” she says. “I am at Mercy Hospital right now. She is gone,” Kateri says. “With someone who says he was her legal guardian.”

  There’s a long silence on Emilia’s end.

  “Can you check with your caseworker?” Kateri asks. “To see if maybe he got the days mixed up?”

  “It’s a woman,” Emilia interrupts her. “The caseworker is a woman. And she wouldn’t have checked her out.”

  “Is there any chance someone else from your agency might have thought she needed to be picked up?” Kateri asks.

  “There shouldn’t be,” Emilia says, “but I’ll check. I’ll also check with the officials at Mercy,” she says. “I don’t understand how this could happen.”

  “Me neither,” Kateri says, but she tries to picture a man, any man, who might have come to sign out Birdie. Shannon doesn’t fit the description in any way, and he certainly isn’t forty. The man Kateri pictures looks like a movie star. Something unreal. She thinks of the drawing in the closet, the tall man in black, with a circle head and no face, and she hears Birdie’s voice in her head. He’s the angel.

  She calls Hurt.

  “Officer Dillon was at Mercy overnight guarding the girl’s room,” she says as soon as Hurt says hello.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Can you find out who was supposed to replace him?”

  Hurt is at his desk. She can tell by the quiet around him, the click of his fingers on his keys.

  “Craig O’Neil,” he says, “was on at eight this morning.”

  “No he wasn’t,” Kateri says.

  “Well, who was?”

  “No one,” Kateri says. “The girl is gone. She was checked out by someone who said he was her legal guardian.”

  “Shit,” Hurt says. “Really?”

  “Can you find O’Neil?” she asks.

  “He should still be there,” Hurt says. “He’s scheduled until six. Hold on.” She can hear him rolling his chair. “Let me have Dawn call his cell,” he says.

  She listens while he gives the instruction, waits while Dawn dials, and gets nothing.

  “His phone is off,” Hurt says.

  Kateri rubs at the back of her head where her hair is tucked in
and loosens it; the pull of the bun is giving her a headache. “We have a missing deputy,” she says. “And a missing child.”

  She hears him sigh. “Are you sure?” he asks.

  “Hurt,” she says. “I saw her discharge papers. Fuck. Would you ask someone else if they were sure? I’m sure.”

  Hurt breathes. “Let me do some searching,” he says, and hangs up.

  EIGHT: SHANNON

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8

  I bypassed the car. It was later than I usually arrived, and I couldn’t see well on the trail, much less off it. I thought I knew the way blind but kept stopping; the creak of the trees, the movement of deer and raccoons in the brush, every noise freaked me out. I thought I felt breath on my neck. I thought I heard whispering. When I came out the other side of the woods, Baby Jane’s backyard was lit with a yellow square from the kitchen window.

  I had told Birdie to say I was taking care of it. “When Mom gets up,” I’d said, “tell her I went to take care of it.” I told her not to worry. I lit a candle inside a hurricane glass and put it up on the counter so she couldn’t knock it over. I hoped my mother didn’t sleep through until morning. All I could picture was Birdie alone in the dark house, her body curled next to my mother, who was dead to the world.

  It would be better if she were dead, I thought.

  * * *

  I went to the back door, off the kitchen, or maybe the cellar way, and knocked, hoping that Baby Jane wasn’t sleeping. It took him a few minutes, but I heard his feet shuffling inside and saw a light come on in another room. When he answered the door, he was fully dressed, like always, even in shoes. His hair was mussed, down over his forehead, the longest locks down to his chin.

  “Shannon,” he said, holding on to the side of the door, leaning out. “It’s late.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m—I have a situation.”

  I noticed that his knuckles were white and his hand trembled. The wind blew in the yard. Behind his house was a perfect line of pines, planted more than a hundred years ago in a straight row, seven of them. The branches in the wind sounded like voices, hushing.