to the car, Tolliver slid into the driver's seat. It was his turn. I suggested a book on tape; at the last secondhand bookstore we'd visited, I'd gotten three. Unabridged, of course. I popped in a Dana Stabenow novel, leaned back, and walled my brother off. No, I wasn't walling him off; I was walling myself in.
Tolliver had booked one room in the motel in Doraville. At the desk, I could see that he was waiting for me to tell him to ask for another one, since I'd been acting so standoffish.
We'd often shared a room in the past few years of traveling together. At first, we hadn't had enough money for two rooms. Later, sometimes we wanted our privacy, and sometimes we didn't care. It had never been an issue. I wouldn't let it be an issue now, I decided recklessly. I didn't know how long we could trudge on down this dreary road without Tolliver blowing up and demanding an explanation I couldn't give him. So we'd room together, and I'd just have to be uncomfortable in silence. I was getting used to that.
We took in our bags. I always took the bed closest to the bathroom; he got the one by the window. It was a variation on the same room we'd seen over and over again: slick polyester bedspreads, mass-produced chairs and table, television, beige bathroom. Tolliver got busy on his cell phone, while I stretched out on the bed and turned on CNN.
"She wants us to come by at eight tomorrow morning," he said, getting a pencil out of his bag and folding the morning's newspaper open to the crossword puzzle. Sooner or later, he'd break down and learn how to work sudoku, but he was sticking with his crossword pretty faithfully.
"Then I'd better run now," I said, and I noticed he didn't move for a few seconds, his pencil poised over the puzzle. We often ran together, though Tolliver usually took off toward the end of our exercise so he could go full-out. "It'll be too cold in the morning, even if I get up at five."
"You okay running alone?"
"Yeah, no problem." I got out my running gear and took off my jeans and sweater. I kept my back to him, but that was normal. While not having any modesty fetish, we tried to keep a boundary there. After all, we were brother and sister.
No, you're not, said my bad self. He's really not related to you at all.
I stuck a room key in my pocket and went outside into the cold wet air to run off my unhappiness.
Two
"I'M the sheriff of Knott County," the lean woman said. She was leaning over the counter that divided the front of the station from the back, and she'd been chatting with the dispatcher when we entered. I've never understood how law enforcement people can stand to carry so much equipment around their hips, and this woman was bearing the full complement, too. I never like to stare long enough to identify all the items. I'd had a brief relationship with a deputy, and I should have taken a moment then to examine his cop equipment. I'd been more involved with his other equipment, I guess.
When the sheriff straightened, I saw she was a tall woman. She was in her fifties, with graying brown hair and a comfortable set of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She didn't look like any true believer I'd ever encountered, yet she was the one who'd emailed us.
"I'm Harper Connelly," I said. "This is my brother, Tolliver Lang."
We weren't what she'd expected, either. She gave me a scan up and down.
"You don't look like a dingbat," she said.
"You don't look like a prejudiced stereotype," I said.
The dispatcher sucked in her breath. Uh-oh.
Tolliver was right behind me, slightly to my left, and I felt nothing but a calm waiting coming from him. He always had my back.
"Come into my office. We'll talk," said the tall woman. "My name is Sandra Rockwell, and I've been sheriff for one year." Sheriffs are elected in North Carolina. I didn't know how long her term was, but if she'd only been a sheriff a year, she must have plenty to go. Politics might not be as urgent a consideration for Sheriff Rockwell as they would be during election year.
We were in her office by then. It wasn't very big, and it was decorated with pictures of the governor, a state flag, a U.S. flag, and some framed certificates. The only personal thing on Sheriff Rockwell's desk was one of those clear cubes you can fill with pictures. Her cube was full of shots of the same two boys. They were both brown-haired like their mother. One of them, grown, had a wife and child of his own. Nice. The other one had a hunting dog.
"You-all want some coffee?" she asked as she slid into the swivel chair behind the ugly metal desk.
I looked at Tolliver, and we both shook our heads.
"Well, then." She put her hands flat on the desk. "I heard about you from a detective in Memphis. Young, her name is."
I smiled.
"You remember her, then. She's partnered with a guy named Lacey? "
I nodded.
"She seemed like a sensible person. She was no flake. And her clearance rate and reputation are impressive. That's the only reason I'm talking to you, you understand? "
"Yes, I understand."
She looked a little embarrassed. "Well, I know I'm sounding rude, and that's not my intention. But you have to understand, this is not something I'd consider doing if you didn't have a track record. I'm not one of these people who listens to that John Edward—not the politician with an s, but the medium—and I'm not one of these who likes to have my palm read, or go to seances, or even read a horoscope."
"I fully understand," I said. Maybe my voice was even dryer.
Tolliver smiled. "We get that you have reservations," he said.
She smiled back gratefully. "That's it in a nutshell. I have reservations."
"So, you must be desperate," I said.
She gave me an unfriendly look. "Yes," she admitted, since she had to. "Yes, we're desperate."
"I'm not going to back out," I said baldly. "I just want to know what I'm up against."
She seemed to relax at my frankness. "Okay, then, cards on the table," she said. She took a deep breath. "For the past five years, boys have been going missing in this county. It's up to six boys now. When I say ‘boys,' I mean in the fourteen-to eighteen-year-old range. Now, kids that age are prone to run away, and they're prone to suicide, and they're prone to have fatal car accidents. And if we'd found them, or heard from the runaways, we'd be okay with that, as okay as you can be."
We nodded.
"But these particular boys, it's just—no one can believe they would run away. And in this time, surely some hunter or bird watcher or hiker would have found a body or two if they'd killed themselves or met with some accident in the woods."
"So you're thinking that they're buried somewhere."
"Yes, that's what I'm thinking. I'm sure they're still here, somewhere."
"Then let me ask you a few things," I said. Tolliver took out his pad and pencil. The sheriff looked surprised, as if the last thing she'd ever expected had been that I would ask her questions.
"Okay, shoot," Sandra Rockwell said after a brief pause.
"Are there bodies of water in the county?"
"Yes, there's Grunyan's Pond and Pine Landing Lake. And several streams."
"Have they been searched?"
"Yes. A couple of us dive, and we've searched as well as we can. Nothing's come to the surface, either. Both of those spots are well used, and anything that came up and a lot of things that went down would have been found, if they'd been there to find. And I'm sure the pond's clear. Still, it's possible that there's something in the deepest part of the lake."
The sheriff clearly believed that wasn't likely.
"What did the missing boys have in common?"
"Besides their age range? Not much, except they're gone."
"All white?"
"Oh. Yes."
"All go to the same school?"
"No. Four of them to the local high school, one of them to the junior high, one of them to the private academy, Randolph Prep."
"The past five years, you said? Do they vanish at the same time of year?"
She looked at a file on her desk, opened it. Flipped over a few pages. "No," she said. "Two in the fall, three in the spring, one in the summer."
None in the winter, when the conditions would be worst for an outdoor interment—so she was probably right. The boys were buried somewhere.
"You think the same person killed them all," I said. I was guessing, but it was a good guess.
"Yes," she said. "That's what I think."
It was my turn to take a deep breath. I'd never handled anything like this. I'd never tried to find so many people. "I don't know a lot about serial killers," I said, and the two dread words dropped into the room like unwelcome visitors. "But from what I've read and seen on television, I believe they tend to bury their victims in the same geographic conditions, if not in the exact same location. Like the Green River Killer dumping most of his victims in the river."
"That's true," she said. "Some of them prefer the same location. Then they can visit it over and over. To remember." She'd done her homework.
"How do you think I can help?"
"Tell me how you work. How do you find bodies?"
"My sister does two things," Tolliver said, launching into his familiar spiel. "She can find bodies, and she can determine the cause of death. If we have to search for a body, obviously that's going to take longer than someone taking her to the local cemetery, pointing to a grave, and wanting to know what killed the person in the grave."
The sheriff nodded. "It costs more."
"Yes," Tolliver said. There was no way to dress that up and make it prettier, so he didn't. Sheriff Rockwell didn't flinch or try to make us feel guilty about earning a living, as some people did. They acted like we were ambulance chasers. This was all I could do, my sole unique ability; and I was determined to bank as much money as I could while it was still
