The Woods

Muse said, “I’ll be right back.”

The thermometer was still in my mouth. The nurse took my pulse. The rate had to be off the charts. I tried to call out around the thermometer.

“Muse!”

She left. I stayed in bed and stewed.

Pregnant? Could Camille have been pregnant?

I couldn’t see it. I tried to remember. Did she start wearing loose clothes? How long was she pregnant for—how many months? My father would have noticed if she was showing at all—the man was an obgyn. She couldn’t have hid it from him.

But then again maybe she didn’t.

I would say this was nonsense, that it was absolutely impossible that my sister had been pregnant, except for one thing. I didn’t know what the hell was going on here, but Muse knew more than she was saying. Her question wasn’t haphazard. Sometimes a good prosecutor needs to do that with a case. You need to give the crazy notion the benefit of the doubt. Just to see. Just to see how it could possibly fit.

The nurse finished up. I reached for the phone and dialed home to check up on Cara. I was surprised when Greta answered with a friendly “Hello.”

“Hi,” I said.

The friendly fled. “I hear you’re going to be fine.”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“I’m here with Cara now,” Greta said, all business. “I can have her stay at my place tonight, if you’d like.”

“That would be great, thanks.”

There was a brief lull.

“Paul?”

She usually called me Cope. I didn’t like that. “Yes?”

“Cara’s welfare is very important to me. She is still my niece. She is still the daughter of my sister.”

“I understand that.”

“You, on the other hand, mean nothing to me.”

She hung up the phone.

I sat back and waited for Muse to return, trying to turn it over in my aching head. I went through it step-by-step.

Glenda Perez said my sister walked out of those woods alive.

Ira Silverstein said she was dead.

So who do I believe?

Glenda Perez appeared to be somewhat normal. Ira Silverstein had been a lunatic.

Point: Glenda Perez.

I also realized that Ira had kept talking about wanting things to stay buried. He killed Gil Perez—and was about to kill me—because he wanted us to stop digging. He would have figured that as long as I thought my sister was alive, I would search. I would dig and raze and do whatever was necessary, consequences be damned, if I thought there was a chance I could bring Camille home. Ira clearly didn’t want that.

That gave him a motive to lie—to say she was dead.

Glenda Perez, on the other hand, also wanted me to stop digging. As long as I kept my investigation active, her family was in real danger. Their fraud and all the other quasi-crimes she’d listed could be exposed. Ergo, she too would have realized that the best way to get me to back off was to convince me that nothing had changed from twenty years ago, that Wayne Steubens had indeed killed my sister. It would have been in her interest to tell me my sister was dead.

But she didn’t do that.

Point: Glenda Perez.

I felt the hope—there was that word again—rise in my chest.

Loren Muse came back into the room. She closed the door behind her. “I just talked to Sheriff Lowell,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Like I said, it’s his case. I couldn’t talk about certain things until I got his okay.”

“This is about your pregnancy question?”

Muse sat down as if she were afraid the chair might break. She put her hands in her lap. That was weird for her. Muse usually gestured like an amphetamine-fueled Sicilian who’s nearly gotten clipped by a speeding car. I had never seen her so subdued. She had her eyes down. My heart went out to her a little bit. She was trying so hard to do the right thing. She always was.

“Muse?”

She raised her eyes. I didn’t like what I saw.

“What’s going on here?”

“Do you remember my sending Andrew Barrett up to the campsite?”

“Of course,” I said. “Barrett wanted to try out some new ground-penetrating radar gizmo. So?”

Muse looked at me. That was all she did. She looked at me and I saw her eyes go wet. Then she nodded at me. It was the saddest nod I have ever seen.

I felt my world drop with a splat.

Hope. Hope had been gently cradling my heart. Now it spread its talons and crushed it. I couldn’t breathe. I shook my head but Muse just kept nodding.

“They found old remains not far from where the other two bodies were found,” she said.

I shook my head harder. Not now. Not after all this.

“Female, five-foot-seven, probably been in the ground between fifteen and thirty years.”

I shook my head some more. Muse stopped, waiting for me to get my bearings. I tried to clear my thoughts, tried not to hear what she was saying. I tried to block, tried to rewind. And then I remembered something.

“Wait, you asked me if Camille was pregnant. Are you saying this body…that they can tell that she was pregnant?”

“Not just pregnant,” Muse said. “She gave birth.”

I just sat there. I tried to take it in. I couldn’t. It was one thing to hear that she’d been pregnant. That could have happened. She could have had an abortion or something, I don’t know. But that she carried to term, that she delivered a baby, and that now she was dead, after all this…

“Find out what happened, Muse.”

“I will.”

“And if there is a baby out there…”

“We’ll find that too.”

CHAPTER 39

“I HAVE NEWS.”

Alexei Kokorov was still an impressive, though hideous, specimen. In the late eighties, right before the Wall came down and their lives changed forever, Kokorov had been Sosh’s underling at In Tourist. It was humorous when you thought about it. They had been elite KGB men back home. In 1974, they’d been in “Spetsgruppa A”—the Alfa Group. The group was supposedly counterterrorism and crime, but on a cold Christmas morning in 1979, their unit had stormed the Darulaman Palace in Kabul. Not long after that, Sosh had gotten the In Tourist job and moved to New York. Kokorov, a man Sosh had never particularly gotten along with, had gone too. They had both left their families behind. This was how it was. New York was seductive. Only the most hardened Soviet would be allowed to go. But even the most hardened needed to be watched by a colleague he didn’t necessarily love or trust. Even the most hardened needed to be reminded that there were loved ones back home who could be made to suffer.