The Last Thing She Ever Did(72)

Now, out on the highway, Mirabella smiled and gave Esther a friendly look. “I thought I might see you here.”

“You know about our missing boy.”

“Sure. Everyone does. At first I thought it might be him.”

“‘At first’?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Unless your three-year-old has a tattoo on his wrist and is female, then I’d say it’s not him.”

“No tattoo,” Esther said.

“No vagina?”

“Guess not.”

The medical examiner’s assistant knelt down and pointed to the happy-face tattoo on the mottled wrist. “Beyond tragically ironic,” she said.

Esther looked at Jake. “You can go back to the car and catch your breath, all right?”

Jake, looking grateful for the dismissal, turned and hurried away.

“Newbie?” Mirabella asked.

“Yeah,” Esther said, her smile joyless. “As green as his face right now.”

The two women talked for a few minutes. Searchers found a leg and the torso, but the victim’s head hadn’t been recovered. Coyotes, Mirabella said, often like to drag those back to their dens for further gnawing. “It takes a while to crack the skull and get into the brains,” she said. “A real treat, evidently.”

“What do you think happened to her?” Esther asked.

“Don’t know,” Mirabella said. “We have a little decomp going on here. As the boss likes to say, ‘a little softening around the edges.’ Exam in the lab will tell us what we need to know. Or some of it. My guess is that we’ve got a girl here, maybe fifteen or sixteen.”

“A runaway, maybe.”

Mirabella agreed. “A runaway that ran in the wrong direction.”



Esther and Jake returned to Bend, first stopping at the Jarretts’ place.

“Weird that Carole is always over here,” Jake said. “Her own house is practically a mansion.”

“It isn’t the same thing, but after I broke up with Drew I actually stayed with my mother for a few days. Didn’t want to be alone.”

Jake knew how Esther felt about her mom.

“That’s saying something, for sure,” he said.

Carole ran toward them.

“No,” Esther said. “It wasn’t your son.”

“Oh, God,” she said, hooking her arms around Liz, who was just behind her. “I told you that he’s alive. I told you!”





CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

MISSING: SEVENTEEN DAYS

Owen looked up from his desk as he rubbed his stubbled chin. Liz stood in his office doorway with a look on her face that he placed somewhere on the raw continuum between terror and anger. Her hair was disheveled, and she wore no makeup. He got up from his chair as fast as he could and pulled her inside, shutting the door.

“What are you doing here? You look whacked-out,” he said, dropping the miniblinds that provided some privacy from the prying eyes of the office staff as he ushered her to a chair.

She slumped downward.

Rag doll.

Jell-O.

Noodle.

“The police came,” Liz said, her voice cracking. She tried to get up, but Owen pressed her shoulders downward. “The body wasn’t Charlie’s,” she said. “Where is he? You told me, Owen . . . you told me . . . animals took him. Carole thinks he’s alive. This is going too far. Too far, Owen. Really.”

Owen slid the other visitor’s chair up next to his wife’s and sat down. His eyes were wide, and he supported himself by keeping a hand on her shoulder.

“Right,” he said. “I told you that animals got him. That didn’t mean he’d never be found.”

She put her face in her hands and started to sob. It was guttural. Constricted. The kind of ugly cry that comes from something very deep and broken.

Owen’s eyes darted to the miniblinds and the shadowy figure he thought he saw linger outside the window. He needed to calm Liz. Keep her quiet.

Shut her fucking mouth.

“I guess I was wrong,” she said when she’d managed to at least marginally compose herself. “I mean, I wasn’t wrong, because it was gone. Some animals tore him apart and they found parts out there off the highway. I don’t know what parts. It’s on the news already.”

Owen tightened. “Where are David and Carole?”

“He’s at work, I guess,” Liz said. “She’s home. At our place. She’s asleep.”

“Asleep?”

Liz turned her eyes away. “I put something in her tea, Owen.”

“Something in her tea?”

“Yes, Owen. Damn it. Valium,” she said, her voice rising from a whisper to a normal voice. Then a little louder as she found her footing on the shifting sands of what she’d wanted to say. “I know it was wrong,” she went on, “but I just can’t stand lying to her. Pretending everything will be all right. Acting concerned when she runs through a litany of the mistakes she made that day. You have no idea what it’s like. You can leave. Get away from both of them. Come here and get on with normal life. Me? I’m trapped because I messed up in the biggest way possible.”

Owen kept his eye on the slightly parted slats of the blinds. “Lower your voice, Liz,” he said. “People can hear you.”