Part 4
Twice on the first pitch the dog stopped and stood three-legged in the snow until the people behind him closed the gap.
The old skid road split at a rotted culvert. Sutter went left two steps and the dog came back down past his knee hard enough to knock him half a pace sideways, then went up the right-hand branch without looking to see whether it had worked.
It was past one when the timber opened. The technician held everyone at the edge while he walked the cut alone, then called them in on a single line. Truck tires had rutted the ground beside the shack, wider than a half-ton lays down. His light went under the porch: beer cans, a scrap of leather with half a stitched patch, rope with the ends melted black.
The dog crossed to the pine and put the case down against the toe of Sutter’s boot. Then he sat, and kept sitting, with the sore foot held up off the ground and his flanks going.
Sutter went down on his heels beside him and did not touch it.
It took the technician a minute to see the card at all: black, under a root, in a hole of black dirt. He shot it where it lay before anything else, then the hole, the pine, the case, its seam split along one edge and its hinge open on nothing. Card and case went into separate containers, initialed and timed. Forty feet downslope the leaf mat had been pushed off slick blackened ground, a capped bottle clear of the hollow it came out of; he shot that too, bagged it with two cigarette filters loose in the bottom, and wrote on the seal that it had not lain as it fell. The strip of oiled cloth still hung in the fallen limb over his head. He photographed it there, cut the limb rather than the cloth, and sealed it separately.
“Did your grid come up this far?” Whitcomb asked.
Sutter looked downhill through the trunks. He could not see the post with the flagging on it. He could not see the road. There was a swell of ground between him and both, and eleven months ago every hour he had spent on this hill he had spent on the far side of it, working out from a body.
“No,” he said.
Whitcomb held her phone up, got nothing, and started down to call in a wider search. A deputy came to take the dog off the hill. He fought the arm under his chest a second, then quit and put his head on the man’s shoulder, and Sutter walked alongside holding the bandaged foot clear of the brush. The deputy drove him to a veterinarian in Harlow. Sutter went back up and stood on the ground he had sworn to a jury he had covered.
The laboratory called the following afternoon, having run it ahead of the bench because a man was under sentence of death. Nothing they could type off the bottle and the cans was Owen Mercer, and a preliminary run against the database put two names up. Travis Kern. Ellis Dowd.
“Association,” Whitcomb said on the phone to Lindahl. “Not confirmation. I will tell you the day it becomes the other thing and not before.” She said how long the other thing took, and said that twice as well.
Lindahl made her say the names twice.
They ran with a loose crew working three counties, leaving behind people who would not describe them to anybody with a badge. Kern had been sat down twice over other violence, and both times the witness stopped being willing before anything was filed. Dowd kept a repair shop outside Vance, forty miles south, with the bay door usually down.
The waitress who worked Callie’s shifts agreed to sit down again. Two weeks before the girl disappeared, she said, Kern had put her against the ice machine by the service door, and Callie had got out from under his arm and come back in shaking and would not say why. It had not gone into the first statement. Kern came through most Fridays and she closed alone.
A man who hauled for the mill put Dowd’s truck on the ridge road the night Callie went missing. He had come out of the switchback and his lights swept the crumpled right rear panel, and he knew it the way a small county knows a vehicle. Why now, Sutter asked, and the man looked at the recorder and wanted to know who would hear his name on it.
He told neither man that he understood it. He wrote it, arranged for it to be checked, and drove back. Then he pulled the first interview and read his own marginal notes down the page, where he had written that the answers were rehearsed. Four lines were Mercer saying his dog had wanted to go north.
The card went up the state to a specialist, cracked casing and all, and the memory in it read clean. He wrote-protected the original, imaged it, checked the image twice, and started lifting files off a small action camera. A third were past recovering. Others quit mid-frame on one held image and a burst of noise.
Whitcomb watched the first one that would play in a windowless room, coat over the chair back. It was the shack and part of the porch, from maybe twenty feet, and it did not move, which meant somebody had set the camera down and left it.
A man came out into the light over the door. He came in close enough that his face filled most of the frame for two seconds, and when his arm crossed the lens his sleeve pulled back off a tattoo — a snake wound around the shaft of a wrench.
Then the girl came into the picture.
Whitcomb put a hand flat on the desk and left it there. She had stood in front of twelve people in March and given them a window of about four hours, careful and certain. Here was Callie Boyd crossing that porch with her shoulders pulled in and her face turned toward somebody the camera never showed.
The specialist would not let her take the number burned into the corner of the frame on its own. He spent two days setting the camera’s clock against other material on the card that could be dated independently, built the file order from that, and wrote down where it stopped. What he handed her was narrower than the display, and still put the girl alive hours after the state had told a jury she was dead.
Two more days of files gave them two more young women. Sutter knew both faces off notices inside three years: Marisol Quintero, and Ruthanne Colter, nineteen. The recordings showed what the two men had done, and showed them burning what was left afterward.
Whitcomb asked for the screen stopped as soon as she had enough to know what she was looking at.
She sat a while thinking about Janine Boyd, upright through four days of testimony about what fire does to a body because she had decided it was the last thing her daughter would tell her. “Nobody walks that woman into a room with these files and no warning,” she said, to an empty office. The advocate got the call first.
That morning he had set booking photographs beside frozen frames and written what each would carry: Kern on the face and the snake around the wrench, Dowd on the face, at two frames where he turned into the light. Now he had a surviving file open and was walking it forward a few frames at a go. An arm came across the lens. He backed up until the man it belonged to was in the shot, then ran it down again to the arm. As it came, the cuff dragged off the wrist, the fingers shut on a grip, and the light caught the bite out of the checkering on the panel and, above it, the profile of the front sight.
“Stop there,” Whitcomb said.
She had been looking at photographs of that pistol for the better part of a year, had asked four witnesses about it, had built a closing argument on who owned it. It was sealed in a locker two blocks from her chair, and on the screen in front of her it was in Ellis Dowd’s hand, and nothing in the file would ever tell her how it got out of a truck cab in March and into that hand. She wrote the hole down as a hole…
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