Chris Mooney - The Missing

'I hear you had a good day.'

Sheila picked up the picture. 'Where did you find this?'

'Tina found it the back pocket of a pair of jeans you're donating. Who is she?'

'Cindy Greenleaf's daughter, Regina,' Sheila said. 'You and Regina used to play together. They moved to Minnesota when you were around five, I think. Cindy sends me Christmas cards every year with Regina's picture.'

Sheila tossed the picture inside the wastebasket and glanced briefly at the wall behind the TV.

After the diagnosis, Sheila had taken the pictures from downstairs and more from the photo albums, had everything framed and hung on every amount of available wall space so she could see them from her bed.

Seeing the pictures made Darby think of the wall outside Carol Cranmore's room. Then Darby thought of Carol's mother, her words about how having children was more love than your heart can hold. The love you felt for your child, Darby had been told, was all-consuming, and all-encompassing. It owned you until you were buried.

The woman you found underneath the porch looks like a famine victim,' Sheila said.

'It looks even worse up close. She had scars and cuts all over her body, and these sores.'

'What happened to her?'

'I don't know. We don't know who she is or where she came from. She's being treated at Mass General. Right now, she's sedated.'

'Do you know her condition?'

'She's got sepsis.' Darby told her mother about her discussion with Jane Doe's doctor and what had happened at the hospital.

'Survival rates for sepsis depend on things like the patient's overall health, how effective the antibiotics work against the infection, the patient's immune system,' Sheila said. 'Given what you told me about Jane Doe's low blood pressure, some of her organs starting to fail, I'd say she's gone into septic shock. The doctor's in a tricky situation, trying to treat the sepsis while keeping her sedated.'

'So prognosis doesn't look good.'

'I don't think so.'

'I hope to God she wakes up. She might know where Carol is – she's the missing teenager. Carol Cranmore.'

'I saw it on the news. Any leads?'

'Not much, I'm afraid. Hopefully, we'll find something soon.' Hopefully. Hope. Darby was spreading it around too thin. It left her nerves feeling frayed and vulnerable.

She sat down in her father's old recliner. It had been brought up from downstairs and set up next to her mother's bed so she could sleep here at night.

At first, Darby wanted to be here in case her mother woke up and needed something. Now Darby wanted to be here so she could hold her mother when the time came to say good-bye.

'I ran into Carol's mother about an hour ago,' Darby said. 'Talking to her, seeing what she was going through, it made me think of Melanie's mother. Do you remember the first Christmas after Mel disappeared, you and I were in the car, on the way to the mall or something, and we saw Mel's parents standing out in the cold, nailing a piece of plywood with Mel's picture to a telephone pole on East Dunstable Road?'

Sheila nodded, her pale face pinching tight at the memory.

'Everyone in town knew about Victor Grady, and Mel's parents were standing out there in the bitter cold either refusing to give up hope, or refusing to face the truth,' Darby said. 'I wanted you to stop the car and you drove past them.'

'I didn't want you to suffer anymore. You had suffered enough.'

Darby remembered looking in the car's side-view mirror, watching as Mrs Cruz turned her back to a blast of wind, clutching the sheets with Mel's picture against her chest so they wouldn't blow away. Melanie's mother grew smaller until she finally disappeared, and right then, Darby wanted to throw the door open and run back there and help them.

Was Helena Cruz's love for her daughter just as intense now, after two decades? Or had she learned how to mute it, make it less sharp and easier to carry?

There was nothing you could have done to help them,' Sheila said.

'I know. I know they blamed me for what happened to Mel – they probably still do.'

'What happened to Melanie wasn't your fault.'

Darby nodded. 'Seeing that look on Dianne Cranmore's face… I just wanted to do something to help her.'

'You are helping her.'

'It doesn't feel like we're doing enough.'

'It never will,' Sheila said.

Daniel Boyle unlocked the basement door and moved around the desk, walking past the computer monitors and the mannequins dressed in the costumes he wore. What he was looking for was inside the next room. He took out his keys and unlocked the filing cabinet.

The hanging file folders were arranged chronologically with his most recent projects near the front for easy access. The older projects were in the bottom drawer. The folder marked BELHAM was in the far back.

Dust rose from the folder as he flipped past the yellowed newspaper clippings of Victor Grady. In the back he found the bundled stacks of Polaroids.

The colors had faded in the pictures, but Melanie Cruz's face was clear enough. She stood behind the locked bars of the wine cellar. The other five pictures showed what he had done to her. Boyle stared at the pictures and felt the beginnings of an erection.

He had taken other pictures – ones of Melanie Cruz lying dead in the ground out in the Belham woods. Those pictures, along with a map showing where she was buried, had been burned away in the fire. Boyle remembered how he had set the fire but couldn't remember where he had buried Melanie Cruz or the other women.

He picked up the stack of pictures belonging to a teenage girl with dark red hair and striking green eyes. He removed the elastic bands and flipped over the first picture.

The teenager's name was Darby McCormick. She bore a striking resemblance to the crime scene investigator he had seen at the hospital.

But was it the same person?

Boyle took out his cell phone and dialed information to get the number for the Boston Crime Lab. The operator connected him. Less than a minute later, he was listening to the lab's automated phone system instructing him on how to contact someone at the lab. Two choices: enter the person's extension or the first four letters of the person's last name.

He punched in the letters and flipped through pictures of a heavy-set blond woman named Samantha Kent. Boyle remembered how she had refused to eat. How she got weak and then sick. How he had brought her out to the Belham woods to strangle her and was interrupted by Darby McCormick and her two friends – Melanie Cruz and the blond girl he later stabbed inside the foyer. What a mess that was. He was trying to remember the blonde's name when the voice mail picked up.

'You've reached the office of Darby McCormick. I'm either away from my desk or on another line -'

Boyle hung up and leaned back against the wall.

Boyle stared up at the wall crammed full of pictures of the women he had hunted over the years. Sometimes he sat here for hours, staring up at the faces and recalling what he had done to each of them. Pleasant thoughts to pass the time.

Tacked to the bottom corner was an old picture of Alicia Cross. She had lived two streets over, on the other side of the woods behind his house. She was riding her bike along a long stretch of empty road when he pulled up next to her. Alicia's mother, Boyle had told the twelve-year-old, had sent him to come get her and take her to the hospital. Alicia's father had been in a serious car accident. Alicia was so upset she left her bike on the road and got into his car.

She was too scared to fight, too small to fight. Boyle was sixteen and strong.

For an entire week – the second week of his mother's monthlong vacation in Paris – police and volunteers combed through the woods and surrounding neighborhoods. Boyle watched them through his bedroom window. For three days, police and volunteers from the neighborhood searched the woods around his house. He recalled the long summer afternoons he sat by the window, listening to Alicia's mother call out her daughter's name over and over again while he stimulated himself.