“Can you just confirm a few things that are already reported, like who found the remains?”
“I guess so, but don’t use my name. It was a pair of bird nuts and their daughter.”
“Are they still here? Do you know their names and the girl’s age?”
“You’ll have to ask them. They’re sitting in a cruiser back there.” He nodded toward the line of police cars along the access road. “You’d better get out of here, now.”
Thanking the detective, Liz made her way to the last cruiser in the line of police cars. Leaning on its trunk, Mick Lichen was haranguing a police officer about getting access to the trio of hikers. Clad in jeans, hiking boots, and fleece jackets in complementary colors, and wearing horrified facial expressions, the family looked like an L.L. Bean ad gone wrong. The red-eyed daughter, who clung to her father, looked to be about fourteen years old.
“It’s a free country. You can’t prevent them from commenting on what they saw,” Lichen argued loudly.
“No, I can’t, Mr. Lichen. But I can make a request, and these good people can choose to honor it in the interest of seeing this crime solved.”
“Is that what you want? To be silenced?” Lichen said to the family.
“Leave us alone, please,” the mother said.
Lichen stalked off too soon. His challenge seemed to stir the fourteen-year-old.
“Why are you letting the police shut us up?” she demanded, wrenching herself free of her father’s embrace and getting out of the cruiser.
“If the criminal doesn’t know everything the police have discovered, it may make it easier to catch him,” her father began.
“But it’s too late for the dead people, anyway, isn’t it?” the teen cried. “I want to tell what I saw. It was gross stepping on those bones. Really gross!”
“You can tell me,” Liz said, stepping in to introduce herself.
“My name is Jessica Sobel,” the girl announced, thrusting away the hand her father raised to signal her to keep quiet.
“Maybe it’s better that she talks, John,” said the woman. “I’m Joy Sobel and this is my husband, John,” she said to Liz.
“My dad’s a science teacher,” Jessica said. “He’s always dragging us along on nature hikes.”
“In preparation for my classes at Plymouth High School,” John explained. “We were looking for birds that migrate and birds that remain here through the winter. Down in that protected hollow we found plenty of chickadees—that’s our state bird you know—as I expected we would.”
“Why would the chickadees favor that hollow?”
“It’s the site of an ef—”
“Of f-ing corpses!” Jessica interrupted. “Cut the lecture, Dad! Those birds were flying around landing on the bushes and trees, probably eating bugs from the bodies.” Jessica shivered.
“No, no, Jessica,” John said. “Any insect life associated with the deceased was long gone. There were only bones there, Honey.”
“‘The deceased’!” the teen mimicked her father. “Always the professor! Can’t you just say ‘dead guys’?”
“Jessie, Jessie!” her mother soothed. “Try not to upset yourself.” She turned to Liz. “It seemed so idyllic at first,” she said. “John was just pointing out the tall grass all pressed down where the deer had slept on it, and then my daughter stumbled on the bones.”
“Did you see anything else, Mr. Sobel?”
“If you mean did I see a murder weapon, the answer is no. Naturally, we were trying to rush our daughter away from the area.”
“What about clothing, shoes, a handbag—anything like that?”
“Nothing. I’m no expert, but I thought the bones looked very old. They were very brown, as if they were tea- or coffee-stained. I guess they looked so old, I didn’t expect to see any clothes or shoes with them.”
As more reporters discovered the family’s location, Rene DeZona arrived and joined the crush of press focusing in on the family. Liz lingered long enough to take down her sources’ ages, as told to a television anchor, and then returned to the Tracer to phone in her story. Dusk was falling when she arrived back at her car, where she found Cormac Kinnaird tying his shoe with his foot up on her bumper.
“Any luck viewing the scene?” he asked.
“No. You?”
“No access either, but I talked with one of the officers. The ME for Plymouth is in Manhattan helping out at Ground Zero. They’ve got a new guy covering this. He’ll likely keep information close to his chest, hoping to make a name for himself here.”
“That’s not good news.”
“You’re right about that. But the weather report is. With a downpour predicted for tomorrow afternoon, he’ll make haste to move those bones. We’ll have to be ready to reconnoiter as soon as the police finish scouring the area.”
“Won’t that leave us without the hope of finding any evidence? They will have grabbed it all.”
“Take a look around you. It’s a tall order to thoroughly scrutinize this place, and remember, it’s a green medical examiner on this case. By the way, did you find out what took those hikers to this particular spot?”
“The man’s a high-school science teacher. He was making a dry run for a school nature walk, with his wife and reluctant daughter in tow.”
“If he knows the area, he might be useful to us. See if you can get him to join us when we come back here.”
“Good idea. Why are you so interested in these remains, Cormac? Do you think they could belong to Ellen and the cabbie?”
“From what we know, the bones sound older than nine months old. That would seem to eliminate Ellen. Let’s just say, I’m eager to see a certain reporter at work.”
Before calling in her story, Liz made an effort to get a comment from the police spokesman and to talk with Stu Simmons, the assistant medical examiner on the scene. The former offered, “No comment,” and the latter remained with the remains. After Jared Conneely took her information over the phone, Liz made the hour-and-a-half drive back to Gravesend Street while listening avidly to the radio all along the way. Amid much focus on September eleventh aftermath stories—especially interviews of New Englanders whose kin had been killed in the hijacked jets or in the Twin Towers—little attention was paid to the discovery of human remains in the Forges Field Recreational Area. Brief reports added little to the facts Liz had already gleaned at the scene. Liz did learn, however, that police planned to scour the woods around Forges Field at dawn.
Back at Gravesend Street, she found her refrigerator stocked with milk, orange juice, fresh eggs, and an unfamiliar bowl containing homemade fruit salad. On the kitchen counter, weighed down with six cans of cat food and a package of English muffins, she found a note from Tom.
“See you tomorrow? I’ll be changing the billboard here,” it read.
Liz gave him her answer by phone. “I’m planning to be in Plymouth County at sunrise,” she said, “so I don’t think I’ll be here. But thank you for all the goodies! Now, I’ve got to call the science teacher who discovered the remains, to see if he can meet me.”
John Sobel was eager to meet Liz at dawn, but warned that he’d have to leave the recreational area by 7:45 in order to get to school. The science teacher knew just when the sun was slated to rise and set a time for them to meet.
Hungry, Liz served some fruit salad into a bowl, sliced an English muffin in two, and placed the halves in her toaster. She pushed the toaster handle and the button on her phone answering machine down simultaneously. What she heard on the answering machine was somewhat surprising, since the caller had avoided her for some months.
“Liz, it’s Erik. I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I hope you can help me. The police won’t tell me anything. Could it be Ellen and that cabdriver they’ve found out near Plymouth? Oh . . .” The call was cut off as Erik was distracted by something.
Liz froze in the act of hanging up her receiver and stared at the telephone number on her machine’s caller- I.D. display. She had memorized it nine months ago. The call had been made from Ellen’s cell phone—a phone that had been unaccounted for since Ellen’s disappearance. What was Erik doing with that phone? Had he placed the
