I sensed Ann Fletcher’s alarm, her yearning to speak on her daughter’s behalf. But there was something else, too—a hesitation that spoke of her concern that Norah might know more than she’d previously let on.
But Norah looked genuinely baffled. “I don’t understand.”
I shrugged slightly, privately relieved. “Something you saw, heard—”
“Smelled,” Sammie finished abruptly.
Norah wrinkled her nose, dissipating the tension. “No. I would have remembered that.”
I turned to Sammie. “Better get a team together. We can’t do anything with that,” I gestured toward the snow-covered field. “But maybe one of the neighbors can tell us something. And try to find somebody from Fish and Game. If Norah’s chickadees used the hair, maybe some other animals were busy, too. We need to know where to look.”
Sammie shook her head. “That could take some time. They’re already short-staffed in this area. I heard about a guy who’s trained dogs for this kind of thing.”
I knew the man she meant—the owner of specialized, so-called cadaver dogs. I’d called him at his office in Maine before coming here, and now passed along what he’d told me. “Too cold. A body out there doesn’t smell any more than what’s in your freezer.”
“Miss Evans might be able to help,” Norah said quietly. We both looked at her.
“She’s my science teacher—a naturalist. She’s the one who got me interested in birds. She knows all sorts of stuff.”
I glanced at Ann Fletcher, who nodded reluctantly. “That’s true. She’s very good—Christine Evans. I could give you her number.”
“Give it to Detective Martens here. She’ll be organizing all this.”
Sammie and Norah’s mother walked back to the gray house, their gestures exaggerated by having to wade through the deep snow. Norah was back staring at the field, her gloved hands resting on the railing—the pensive loner, I reminded myself. I wondered what was going through her mind.
“You really think somebody’s out there?” she asked as I took up position next to her.
“We may not know for sure till the spring, but your birds got that hair from somewhere—either the field or the woods—and when I showed it to him, our forensics expert confirmed it came from a human. Of course, it might’ve been someone old and sick with no family, who just chose this spot to die in peace. That happens sometimes.”
She startled me then with a child’s typical lack of lasting melancholy, “It’s kind of neat.”
I didn’t argue the point. From her perspective, that’s exactly what it was. But even had I wished it, I couldn’t be so detached. My curiosity wasn’t restricted to the fact that the mysterious shank of hair had once belonged to someone alive. I had to discover the cause of death, and odds were it hadn’t been as benign as the picture I’d just painted for Norah.
CHRISTINE EVANS STOOD BY THE BIRD BOX
in Norah Fletcher’s backyard, her large, parka-clad body planted like a challenge to the inscrutable landscape beyond the fence.
“Birds are near the bottom of the pile when it comes to stripping a carcass,” she said, her flat-footed vernacular tinted with the nasal tones of a native Bostonian. “The larger animals come first—bears, dogs, foxes, raccoons, possums, skunks. You wouldn’t believe the pecking order.”
She suddenly swung away from the view and fixed me with an inquisitive stare. “You’re sure the hair didn’t belong to some longhaired animal?”
J.P. Tyler, our small squad’s forensics expert, looked frail and anemic next to Evans’s energetic, pink-faced bulk. He shook his head in response. “It’s human. It has traces of purple dye, like from a punk hairdo.”
She accepted that with an unsentimental grunt. “Doesn’t matter. It’s all the same to our furry and feathered friends. Anyhow, I think you’re right—you probably will find other remnants if you know where to look.”
She indicated the rest of the block with a sweep of her arm. “Under garages, in old tool sheds, culverts, storm drains—hiding places like that. Animals don’t travel great distances with food, but they like to feel secure when they chow down.”
She then pointed toward the woods lining the field. “That’s the other place to search, but I wish you luck. Every nook and cranny is fair game. The only good news is that you won’t have to look too far into the trees. The first few dozen feet ought to do it.”
“What if that’s where the body is?” I asked her. “Couldn’t the hair have been the only thing to make it out this far?”
She shook her head. “I’d stick with your first idea,” she answered. “The body’s in the field, and I bet it’s not too far off. Chickadees are efficient that way. They’re not going to fly far to gather nest materials, especially a thick hunk of hair, and they’d be nuts to bypass the field for the woods.”
Sammie Martens said to Tyler, “I guess we got our marching orders. Better ask everyone we interview if we can poke around their properties, as well.”
They left to coordinate the small army of officers we’d summoned for the neighborhood canvass. Christine Evans pushed out her lips pensively and added an afterthought. “Until the snow melts, you might have to be happy with what you’ve already got.”
· · ·
We didn’t find much. The interviews were a bust. Like Norah and her mother, nobody on the street had seen, heard, or smelled anything amiss during the previous summer. No one had gone missing, no one with purple hair had been seen hanging around, and no one had made a discovery similar to Norah’s. At the last house on the block, however, nearest to where the field met the woods, we did find a man who’d lost his dog to a hit-and-run the previous August, and whose abandoned doghouse contained a small collection of fragmented, gnawed-upon shards with an ominous bony look to them.
Not that we were immediately impressed, including Tyler, much to his later discomfort. Finding bones in a doghouse, after all, was not unheard of, and this owner admitted that bones were a treat he’d regularly supplied his pet. It was more in the interest of thoroughness, therefore, that we asked Christine Evans to give us her educated opinion.
She’d been in Norah’s house throughout most of the search, keeping the Fletchers company while remaining available to us. As a result, she brought them both with her to check out what we’d found, her benignly domineering style reminding me of a Scout leader conducting a nature trip. Still, despite Ann Fletcher’s apparent tacit approval, I wondered about prolonging Norah’s exposure to what she herself had set in motion.
Evans, however, obviously believed otherwise. Arriving at the doghouse, she gathered Norah next to her before its arched doorway and played the beam of an officer’s borrowed flashlight onto the pale ivory gleam of the scattered fragments, starkly revealed amid the otherwise pitch-black shelter.
It took her about thirty seconds to reach a conclusion. “Most of those are animal bones, but that small piece in the far corner is part of a human zygomatic arch, where the mandible hinges to the rest of the skull.” She touched Norah’s cheek to demonstrate.
“Wow,” Norah murmured, easing my concern.
“Can we get a closer look?” Evans asked, shoving her head deeper into the opening.
I threw a questioning glance at Tyler.
“We’re all set—photographs and measurements are done.”
Behind him, the late dog’s owner, an older, bare-headed man with a red nose and a frost-dusted mustache, added, “It doesn’t have a floor. You can tilt it back.”
“Good,” Evans laughed. “I was wondering how I could squeeze in there.”
Four of us followed the owner’s advice and tilted the doghouse back, exposing its littered dirt floor like the innards of some large, wooden clam.
The light had dulled, the sun fading early in the winter months, so the contents of the small dwelling, now surrounded by four snowbanks instead of the walls that had once protected it, were suddenly illuminated by a half-dozen flashlights, whose bright, hovering disks swept across the hard-packed surface like theatrical spotlights.
“How big was your dog?” Evans asked the homeowner.
He held his hand out just below his waist. “Big—he was a mastiff. Really powerful.”
She looked at the rest of us. “Domesticated dogs especially tend to go after the skulls—they remind them of balls.”
Tyler, his embarrassment at missing the identification washed away by her enthusiasm, crouched by her other side and leaned over the exposed site, adding, “He probably buried what he didn’t crush up. You can see how the earth is disturbed near the back.”
Side by side in the snow, Evans and Tyler began conferring like old colleagues, pawing at the frozen earth like hampered archaeologists trying to piece together what they could.
Tyler glanced over his shoulder, his frustration plain. “We need hammers and picks to get through this crap.”
Norah Fletcher’s quiet voice floated up in the wake of this comment, reminding us that these scattered shards were more than mere parts of a puzzle. “So it really is somebody?”
Tyler, as was typical when his focus was jarred by some emotional consideration, looked startled and self-conscious. Evans, on the other hand, proved how good a teacher she could be. She sat back on her haunches and draped a burly arm around the thin girl’s waist, explaining to her in a near whisper the intricacies of human anatomy and of animal behavior, replacing some of the sudden chill in the air with a broader appreciation of what life sometimes throws in our faces.
By the time she’d finished, and after Norah’s pale face had regained some of its studious poise, a patrolman appeared with two trenching tools and a hammer he’d borrowed from a neighbor. Evans took advantage of the interruption to get up and escort Norah to where Ann Fletcher was standing uncomfortably on the fringes of our little group.
“I think we’ve probably had enough science for one day. Besides, I happen to know you’ve got homework,” Evans said, as Norah slipped her gloved hand into her mother’s.
Norah merely nodded, the full impact of the doghouse’s contents lingering despite her teacher’s best efforts.
As they turned to go, I stepped before them and crouched down so Norah and I were eye-to-eye. “I appreciate what you did. When we find out what happened here, it’ll be because you cared enough to come forward. Not many people are that observant, or show that much responsibility.”
A subtle pride radiated from behind those large glasses. She murmured, “You’re welcome,” before looking down at the ground. I no longer felt so badly about exposing her to more than what might have been appropriate. Good experiences sometimes come in odd packages, something I sensed even Norah’s mother might agree with.
I straightened and shook Ann Fletcher’s hand. “Thank you.”
“I tried to stop her,” she answered apologetically, still obviously distressed at how events had snowballed.
“You were being protective. What she did does you credit—you obviously taught her well.”
She smiled slightly, which was all I wanted to see. “Goodbye, Lieutenant.”
· · ·
Tyler appeared at my elbow. His earlier frustration at the frozen ground had faded. “I didn’t mean that literally, about the pick and hammers. It’d be too destructive. We can throw a tent over the whole thing, put a space heater inside, and have the ground totally thawed within twenty-four hours. That okay?”
I turned back toward the site. “Sounds good to me. God knows how long this has been here. Anyone else come up with anything yet?”
Sammie appeared from around the back of the nearby garage. “Stennis found what looks like chicken bones on the shelf of one of the storm drains, and Lavoie got a long bone from a culvert. Both were photographed in place and bagged. Evans thinks the long bone’s from a deer. The crime lab’ll tell us for sure. I also called the State’s Attorney’s office on the cell phone.”
“They sending anyone over?” I asked.
Sammie shook her head. “Said we could brief them later.”
We returned to where Christine Evans was back on her knees scrutinizing the dirt before her.
“There may be more,” she said, pointing with a gloved finger. “See that scat?”
Sammie’s face turned sour as she focused on several two inch long, dark, twisted droppings, their ends distinctively marked by pointed, upturned spirals.
“What about it?” I asked skeptically.
“It’s from a fisher—part of the marten family—related to the weasel. They don’t like open ground, but they’re bold enough to come onto human property.”
She suddenly flashed a disarming smile at the largely ignored homeowner who was standing beside me. “Speaking purely scientifically, it’s a good thing your dog died when it did. Had he lived, he not only would’ve pulverized these fragments, but no fisher in his right mind would’ve had the guts to forage anywhere near here. As it is, this scat tells us there may be more to find, and maybe where to look for it.”
“The fisher took something?” I asked.
“The scat’s a little old, so it wouldn’t’ve been recently, but it’s a good guess.”
I noticed Tyler nodding, a pleased look on his face. This was turning into his kind of investigation.
“You said they avoid open country,” I said. “Does that mean we need to search the woods for where this one might’ve gone?”
Evans rose to her feet, steadying herself by placing her hand on J.P.’s shoulder. “Yes, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find. Look for a large, craggy, crevice-filled old tree—probably just a few hundred feet from here. You may not find much, though. Fishers aren’t very big. On the other hand, they aren’t bone-gnawers, either. This one would’ve gone for whatever meat was still attached to a smaller fragment. Find out where he had his meal, and I think you’ll find the bone it was attached to.”
I glanced up at the sky. The fading light was sufficiently offset by the quickly vanishing storm clouds. “We’ve got maybe an hour and a half before it gets too dark,” I told the others. “Let’s see if we can find the right tree.”
It took barely half that time. Sammie pulled the entire team together and strung them out in a line facing the woods, whose dark latticework of intertwining bare branches was offset by a bright frosting of snow.
Entering the forest was like infiltrating a dense and eccentric crystalline structure whose very size and darkness muffled and absorbed our movements. The sensation forced my thoughts back to the body lying under the cold, impersonal snow, lost and forgotten.