Harlan Coben - The Woods

Lowell pointed toward an attractive woman wearing rubber gloves.

Muse figured it was another student-she couldn't have been thirty years old. She had long, cave black hair perfectly pulled back, like a flamenco dancer.

"That's Doc O'Neill," Lowell said.

"She's your coroner?"

"Yep. You know it's an elected position out here?"

"You mean they have campaigns and stuff? Like, hi, I'm Doctor O'Neill, I'm really good with the dead'?"

"I'd make a witty comeback," Lowell said, "but you city slickers are too clever for us yokels."

As Muse got closer, she could see that "attractive" may have been understating it. Tara O'Neill was a knockout. Muse could see that her looks were something of a distraction to the crew too. The coroner is not in charge of a crime scene. The police are. But everyone kept sneaking glances at O'Neill. Muse stepped quickly toward her.

"I'm Loren Muse, chief investigator for Essex County."

The woman offered the glove hand. "Tara O'Neill, coroner."

"What can you tell me about the body?"

She looked wary for a second, but Lowell nodded that it was okay. "Are you the one who sent Mr. Barrett out here?" O'Neill asked. "I am." "Interesting fellow." "As I'm well aware."

"That machine works, though. I don't know how on earth he found these bones. But he's good. I think it helped that they ran over the skull first."

O'Neill blinked and looked away.

"There a problem?" Muse asked.

She shook her head. "I grew up in this area. I used to play right here, right over this spot. You'd think, I don't know, you'd think I would have felt a chill or something. But nope, nothing."

Muse tapped her foot, waited.

"I was ten when those teens vanished. My friends and I used to hike out here, you know? We'd light fires. We'd make up stories about how the two kids who were never found were still out here, watching us, that they were the undead or whatever, and that they were going to hunt us down and kill us. It was stupid. Just a way of getting your boyfriend to give you his jacket and put his arm around you."

Tara O'Neill smiled and shook her head. "Doctor O'Neill?" "Yes." "Please tell me what you found here." "We're still working on it, but from what I can see we have a fairly complete skeleton. It was found three feet down. I'll need to get the bones to the lab to make a positive ID."

"What can you tell me now?"

"Come this way."

She walked Muse over to the other side of the dig. The bones were tagged and laid out on a blue tarmac. "No clothing?" Muse said. "None." "Did they disintegrate or was the body buried naked?" "I can't say for sure. But since there are no coins or jewelry or but tons or zippers or even footwear-that usually lasts a very long time- my guess would be naked."

Muse just stared at the brown skull. "Cause of death?"

"Too early to tell. But there are some things we know."

"Such as?"

"The bones are in pretty bad shape. They weren't buried all that deep and they've been here awhile." "Howling?" "It's hard to say. I took a seminar last year on crime-scene soil sampling. You can tell by the way the ground has been disturbed how long ago the hole was dug. But that's very preliminary."

"Anything? A guesstimate?"

"The bones have been here awhile. My best estimate would be at least fifteen years. In short – and to answer the question on your mind – it is consistent, very consistent, with the time frame of the murders that took place in these woods twenty years ago."

Muse swallowed and asked the real question that she'd wanted to ask from the beginning.

"Can you tell gender? Can you tell me if the bones belong to some one male or female?"

A deep voice interrupted, "Uh, Doc?"

It was one of the crime-scene guys, complete with the prerequisite windbreaker announcing such. He was husky with a thick beard and a thicker midsection. He had a small hand shovel and was breathing the labored breath of the out-of-shape.

"What's up, Terry?" O'Neill asked.

"I think we got it all."

"You want to pack it in?"

"For tonight, yeah, I think. We might want to come out tomorrow, check for more. But we'd like to transport the body now, if that's okay with you." "Give me two minutes," O'Neill said. Terry nodded and left them alone. Tara O'Neill kept her eyes on the bones. "Do you know anything about the human skeleton, Investigator Muse?" "Some."

"Without a thorough examination, it can be pretty difficult to tell the difference between the male and female skeleton. One of the things we go by is the size and density of the bones. Males have a tendency to be thicker and larger, of course. Sometimes the actual height of the victim can help-males are usually taller. But those things often aren't definitive."

"Are you saying you don't know?"

O'Neill smiled. "I'm not saying that at all. Let me show you."

Tara O'Neill got down on her haunches. So did Muse. O'Neill had a thin flashlight in her hand, the kind that casts a narrow but potent beam.

"I said, pretty difficult. Not impossible. Take a look."

She pointed her light toward the skull.

"Do you know what you're looking at?"

"No," Muse said.

"First off, the bones appear to be on the lighter side. Second, check out the spot below where the eyebrows would have been."

"Okay."

"That's technically known as the supraorbital ridge. It's more pronounced in males. Females have very vertical foreheads. Now, this skull has been worn down, but you can see the ridge is not pronounced. But the real key -what I want to show you down here – is in the pelvis area, more specifically, the pelvic cavity."

She shifted the flashlight. "Do you see it there?"

"Yeah, I see it, I guess. So?"

"It's pretty wide."

"Which means?"

Tara O'Neill snapped off the flashlight.

"Which means," O'Neill said, getting back to her feet, "that your victim is Caucasian, about five-foot-seven-the same height as Camille Copeland, by the way – and yes, female."

Dillon said, "You're not going to believe this."

York looked up. "What?"

"I got a computer hit on that Volkswagen. There are only fourteen in the tri-state area that fit the bill. But here's the kicker. One is registered to a guy named Ira Silverstein. That name ring a bell?" "Isn't he the guy who owned that camp?" That’s it. "Are you telling me that Copeland might have been right all along?" "I got the address where this Ira Silverstein is staying," Dillon said. "Some kind of rehab place." "So what are we waiting for?" York said. "Lets haul ass."

When Lucy got into the car, I pressed the button for the CD player. Bruce's "Back In Your Arms" came on. She smiled. "You burned it already?"

"I did."

"You like it?"

"Very much. I added a few others. A bootleg from one of Springsteen's solo shows. 'Drive All Night.'"

"That song always makes me cry."

"All songs make you cry," I said.

"Not 'Super Freak' by Rick James."

"I stand corrected."

"And 'Promiscuous.' That one doesn't make me cry."

"Even when Nelly sings, Is your game MVP like Steve Nash?'"

"God, you know me so well."

I smiled.

"You seem calm for a man who just learned that his dead sister might be alive."

"Partitioning."

"Is that a word?"

"It's what I do. I put things in different boxes. It's how I get through the craziness. I just put it somewhere else for a while."

"Partitioning," Lucy said.

"Exactly."

"We psychological types have another term for partitioning," Lucy said. "We call it 'Big-Time Denial.'" "Call it what you will. There's a flow here now, Luce. We're going to find Camille. She's going to be okay." "We psychological types have another term for that too. We call it 'Wishful or even Delusional Thinking.'"