The Woods

There were those who would argue that this made a difference in the case—that the jury would be left overnight with my direct and that it would settle in, blah, blah, blah. That sort of strategizing was nonsense. It was the life cycle of a case. If there was a positive in this development, it would be offset by the fact that Flair Hickory would now have more time to prepare his cross. Trials work like that. You get hysterical about it, but stuff like this tends to even out.

I called Loren Muse on my cell. “You have anything yet?”

“Still working on it.”

I hung up and saw there was a message from Detective York. I wasn’t sure what to do anymore about Mrs. Perez lying about the scar on Gil’s arm. If I confronted her with it, she would probably say she just got mixed up. No harm, no foul.

But why would she have said it in the first place?

Was she, in fact, telling what she believed to be the truth—that this body did not belong to her son? Were both Mr. and Mrs. Perez merely making a grievous (but understandable) mistake here—that it was so hard to fathom that their Gil had been alive this whole time that they could not accept what their own eyes were showing them?

Or were they lying?

And if they were lying, well, why?

Before I confronted them, I needed to have more facts on hand. I would have to provide definitive proof that the corpse in the morgue with the alias Manolo Santiago was really Gil Perez, the young man who had disappeared into the woods with my sister and Margot Green and Doug Billingham nearly twenty years ago.

York’s message said: “Sorry it took me so long to get this. You asked about Raya Singh, the victim’s girlfriend. We only had a cell on her, believe it or not. Anyway, we called up. She works at an Indian restaurant on Route 3 near the Lincoln Tunnel.” He gave me the name and address. “She’s supposed to be there all day. Hey, if you learn anything about Santiago’s real name, let me know. Far as we can tell, he’s had the alias for a while. We got some hits on him out in the Los Angeles area from six years ago. Nothing heavy. Talk to you later.”

I wondered what to make of that. Not much. I headed to my car, and as soon as I started to slide in, I knew something was very wrong.

There was a manila envelope sitting on the driver’s seat.

I knew it wasn’t mine. I knew I hadn’t left it here. And I knew that I had locked my car doors.

Someone had broken into my car.

I stopped and picked up the envelope. No address, no postage. The front was totally blank. It felt thin. I sat down in the front seat and closed the door behind me. The envelope was sealed. I slit it open with my index finger. I reached in and plucked out the contents.

Ice poured in my veins when I saw what it was:

A photograph of my father.

I frowned. What the…?

On the bottom, neatly typed on the white border, was his name and the year: “Vladimir Copeland.” That was all.

I didn’t get it.

I just sat there for a moment. I stared at the photograph of my beloved father. I thought about how he had been a young doctor in Leningrad, how so much had been taken away from him, how his life ended up being an endless series of tragedies and disappointments. I remember him arguing with my mother, both of them wounded with no one to strike at but each other. I remembered my mother crying by herself. I remembered sitting some of those nights with Camille. She and I never fought—weird for a brother and sister—but maybe we had seen enough. Sometimes she would take my hand or say that we should take a walk. But most of the time we would go into her room and Camille would put on one of her favorite dopey pop songs and tell me about it, about why she liked it, as if it had hidden meanings, and then she’d tell me about some boy she liked at school. I would sit there and listen and feel the strangest contentment.

I didn’t get it. Why was this photograph…?

There was something else in the envelope.

I turned it upside down. Nothing. I dug with my hand to the bottom. It felt like an index card. I pulled it into view. Yep, an index card. White with red lines. That side—the lined side—was left blank. But on the other side—the side that was plain white—someone had typed three words all in caps:

THE FIRST SKELETON

“You know who sent the journal?” Lucy asked.

“Not yet,” Lonnie said. “But I will.”

“How?”

Lonnie kept his head down. Gone was the confident swagger. Lucy felt bad about that. He didn’t like what she was making him do. She didn’t like it either. But there was no choice here. She had worked hard to conceal her past. She had changed her name. She had not let Paul find her. She had gotten rid of her naturally blond hair—man, how many women her age had naturally blond hair?—and replaced it with this brown mess.

“Okay,” she said. “You’ll be here when I get back?”

He nodded. Lucy headed down the stairs to her car.

On TV it seems so easy to get a new identity. Maybe it was, but Lucy hadn’t found that to be the case. It was a slow process. She started by changing her last name from Silverstein to Gold. Silver to Gold. Clever, no? She didn’t think so, but somehow it worked for her, still gave her a link to the father she had so loved.

She had moved around the country. The camp was long gone. So were all her father’s assets. And so, in the end, was most of her father.

What remained of Ira Silverstein, her father, was housed in a halfway house ten miles from the campus of Reston University. She drove, enjoying the time alone. She listened to Tom Waits sing that he hoped he didn’t fall in love, but of course, he does. She pulled into the lot. The house, a converted mansion on a large tract of land, was nicer than most. Lucy’s entire salary pretty much went here.

She parked near her father’s old car, a rusted-out yellow VW Beetle. The Beetle was always in the exact same spot. She doubted that it had moved from there in the past year. Her father had freedom here. He could leave anytime. He could check himself in and check out. But the sad fact was, he almost never left his room. The leftist bumper stickers that had adorned the vehicle had all faded away. Lucy had a copy of the VW key and every once in a while she started it up, just to keep the battery in operating order. Doing that, just sitting in the car, brought flash-backs. She saw Ira driving it, the full beard, the windows open, the smile, the wave and honk to everyone he passed.

She never had the heart to take it out for a spin.

Lucy signed in at the front desk. This house was fairly specialized, catering to older residents with lifelong drug and mental issues. There seemed to be a tremendous range in here, everything from those who appeared totally “normal” to people who could double as extras in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.