Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

PORTMAN: Did you ever see him come up the trail?

PRESTON: No. I just rested there at Indian Rock a minute, then went on down to the parking lot.

PORTMAN: Was Mosley still at the bottom of the slope when you left Indian Rock?

PRESTON: I don’t know. I didn’t look back down that way.

PORTMAN: So you never saw Mosley again?

PRESTON: No, sir.

PORTMAN: Did you see Faye Harrison again?

PRESTON: No. She just disappeared. I glanced down the hill and saw this man, Mosley, the one you’re talking about. Then I looked down the other side of the hill, where I’d seen the girl. But she was already down the trail and out of sight.

“Down the trail,” Graves said aloud, glancing back over the transcript of Jim Preston’s interrogation, noting that Preston had referred to Faye Harrison as going “down” Mohonk Trail on four separate occasions. He felt something shift in his mind, a tiny, audible movement, the sound Slovak heard when something didn’t fit.

He walked to the map on the wall and peered at it closely. Mohonk Trail clearly ran “up” the ridge toward Indian Rock, then circled it and headed down the other side of the mountain at a steep angle until it reached the Hudson River. If Faye had been going down Mohonk Trail when Preston saw her, she had already gone past Indian Rock.

With his finger, Graves traced the path Faye had to have taken to have been seen going down Mohonk Trail. If Faye had intended to meet Allison Davies at Indian Rock, why had she not stopped there? Why had she not waited? And if, after realizing that Allison was not going to meet her at their “secret place,” why had Faye not returned to Riverwood? Why had she gone down the opposite slope instead?

One answer presented itself instantly. Graves saw a dark figure moving swiftly along Mohonk Trail, Faye, now alert to its presence, rushing away, past Indian Rock and down the other side of the ridge, no longer precisely aware of where she was headed, only that she had to get out of the encircling woods. A man. Pursuing Faye from behind. Closing in swiftly. Reaching for her shoulder. Now Graves saw Faye twist round to face him, a figure his imagination had already draped in Kessler’s black leather coat. As if he were a boy again, he felt Kessler’s hand grasp his shoulder, heard the words that had sounded in the darkness behind him, Start walking. He knew Faye must have obeyed instantly, instinctively, already half-paralyzed, fear searing through her sharp as an electric shock. He recalled the words he’d heard that night, Kessler’s and his own.

Where you live, boy?

In that house there.

Okay, walk on.

And he had walked on, moving meekly through the covering darkness, with no thought of escape, no notion of resistance, frightened only for himself, for what might happen to him if he did not obey, and knowing all the time exactly what he was doing, a little voice mercilessly reminding him that he was leading Ammon Kessler to his sister.

Graves peered at the map intently, as if something lay hidden along the trails and ridges it portrayed, the unfound rope that had been used to murder Faye Harrison. He saw her once again on the trail, shoved brutally from behind, and wondered if she’d made it far enough down the slope to have seen the open area through the trees, cars parked there, people getting in and out. How near they must have seemed before she suddenly felt the hand grip her shoulder, heard the voice behind her. And after that, how far.

There were no pictures of the actual procedure in Faye Harrison’s autopsy report, but Graves could easily imagine her corpse on a stainless steel table, faceup and callously exposed under a fluorescent light. From the many books he’d read about forensic pathology, he knew that it had been flayed open in a Y incision, flaps of skin folded back from the trunk, then sewn together again in a crisscross of thick black thread. By the time the examination had run its course, Faye’s young body would have been fully explored, every cavity and orifice, the contents of her stomach emptied, her bowels uncoiled, a physical violation so extreme, Graves found it unspeakable in the living, barely endurable in the dead.

But as the report revealed, despite the dreadful thoroughness of his search, the coroner who’d conducted the autopsy on Faye Harrison had uncovered little of consequence. He’d found no sign of rape or torture. There were a few scratches on her arms and legs, probably the result of her body being dragged into the cave. Beyond such superficial wounds, the coroner noted only that the girl’s fingers were red and raw, and that three of her fingernails had been broken. Some kind of rope had been wound around her throat. A few of its fibers were lodged beneath her fingernails. In the coroner’s opinion, the rope had been “yanked hard,” cutting into the flesh and leaving a collar of bruised tissue around her neck.

But for all the apparent force with which the rope had tightened around Faye’s throat, it had not broken her neck, as the report stated flatly, thereby avoiding what that specific lack of trauma actually meant: that Faye Harrison had not died instantly, but had felt every moment of her protracted strangulation, the bite of the cord, the constriction of her airways, the sense of slowly exploding from the inside that is the physical sensation of suffocation, its particular agony, and which would have thrown her into a violent seizure, a hideous flailing of arms and legs, the kicking and bucking that Graves knew to be the awful dance of this kind of death.

He found photographs of her body in a separate envelope, wedged in between the testimony of Jim Preston, and that of Andre Grossman, who’d actually stumbled upon her body. The envelope was marked simply SOC-no doubt Detective Portman’s police shorthand for “scene of the crime.”

Graves felt the old dread grip him as he laid the envelope on his desk. It was like thousands of tiny wires suddenly pulled taut inside him. He knew what he’d do if they began to break. He’d rise, bolt from this room, and never come back. By the time he reached his cottage, he’d be shivering uncontrollably, just as he had the night before Gwen’s burial, when Mrs. Flexner had escorted him to the funeral parlor where his sister had been taken, leading him gently down the dark corridor, his body shaking so violently by the time she’d opened the door and he’d glimpsed the black coffin in which Gwen lay that she’d abruptly turned him around and hastily rushed him back down the musty hallway, the two of them nearly sprinting by the time they’d bolted through the entrance door and into the warm night air. He could still hear her voice trying desperately to calm him, It’s all right, Paul. You don’t have to look at her if you don’t want to.

He was poised once again at the entrance to that room he’d fled so many years before. As if thrown back in time, a boy again, he felt himself reach for the brass knob, though in reality it was the flap of the SOC envelope he reached for; felt his hand push open that scarred wooden door, though it was really his fingers drawing out the three photographs that had been placed inside the plain brown envelope; felt his body move toward his sister’s coffin, its lid thrown open, a pale light rising from what lay inside, though when he reached it and looked down, it was the corpse of Faye Harrison he saw.

She lay on her left side, her legs drawn beneath her, but with her right shoulder pitched backward, so that her body appeared violently twisted, as if, near death, she’d assumed the fetal position, then, at the last moment, tried to pull herself out of it. Her right arm hung limply across her chest, the hand dangling, palm out, fingers nearly touching the dirt of the cave floor. Her left arm was positioned directly under her, entirely concealed save for the hand, which lay flat but oddly twisted, palm up, fingers curled inward, as if closed around an invisible ball. Her legs rested one upon the other, feet and ankles together. Her long blond hair fell over her face, obscuring it, all but the one place the strands had parted to reveal a single half-open eye.