puzzled. He decided that Stokely was probably the reason: the patrol route steered clear of his cabin to preserve his privacy. He gave the ATV gas and kept heading west, moving carefully through the undergrowth, following the river.
He’d fully expected to be intercepted. Several times he gunned the ATV for no reason other than noise. When he finally broke from the trees into a long clearing, he still hadn’t seen a soul. A narrow, rutted dirt road split the clearing. At the south end that overlooked the river stood a small A-frame cabin and three outbuildings. The cabin appeared to be deserted, with no vehicles in sight. In a fenced area between two of the outbuildings, a big dog was barking up a storm.
Cork scanned the woods and saw no sign of Dina, which was what he expected. She was there somewhere, watching. He drove the ATV onto the dirt road and turned toward the cabin. A dozen yards from the front door, he killed the engine, swung his sore leg over the seat, and dismounted. In its high-fenced kennel, the dog, a black and tan German shepherd, was doing everything it could short of pole-vaulting to get at Cork. It dashed back and forth, occasionally hurling itself against the chain links in a frenzy of snapping and snarling. Although the fence looked plenty sturdy, Cork was glad to have the Tomcat strapped to his ankle.
He knocked on the cabin door and waited. He tried to peek in a window but the shades and curtains were tightly drawn. Moving to the garage, he peered through a pane and saw that it was empty inside. He approached the kennel. The German shepherd went into a whole other universe of agitation, sending out a spray of saliva and foam as it slammed into the fence. Cork was a little concerned that it might actually harm itself.
The next building was a wood shop, locked. Through the window on the door, Cork saw lathes, planes, saws, work-tables, and a floor covered with sawdust and shavings. The last building was a small smokehouse.
He faced the cabin again. It was clear that Stokely was not currently in residence.
He felt a presence at his back.
“Nada?” Dina said.
He shook his head. “No Stokely, no Charlie, no nothing.”
“There is something,” she said. “Out there in the woods. See what you think.”
She led him a short distance into the trees and pointed toward an area of bare ground. Cork saw what interested her. He knelt, grimacing at the pain that shot through his leg, and he carefully studied the prints.
“The cougar,” he said.
“The night Stokely wounded it?”
Cork shook his head. “That was a couple of days ago. I’d say these tracks are more recent, within the last twenty-four hours.” He reached out and Dina helped him up. He looked from the tracks toward the cabin, barely visible through the foliage. “This close to a barking dog and a man who’s already put a bullet in it, that animal has to be crazy or desperately hungry.”
“Was it after the dog, maybe?”
“Even if you were hungry, would you think that dog was an easy meal? Maybe it was after garbage.”
“I don’t see a garbage can out here,” she said.
Cork eyed the line of the tracks, which seemed to head toward an opening in the woods a short distance away. He limped in that direction with Dina at his side. They stepped into another clearing, nearly circular and much smaller than the one that held Stokely’s buildings. This one was only forty or fifty feet in diameter. It was filled with tall grass and wild-flowers gone yellow with the season. The ground was uneven, and the ground cover was unevenly rich, surprisingly thick and lush in places. On the far side, loose soil lay thrown about in scattered splashes, the result of an animal’s furious digging. Cork saw a shallow trough scraped in the earth. He crossed the clearing with Dina, and they stood over the hole.
“Oh God,” Dina said. “Is that what I think it is?”
Black with rot, ragged from the feeding of the cougar, it was nonetheless clearly a human leg, bare and attached to a body still mostly buried.
Cork turned away, sickened as he understood the reason for the uneven earth and lush undergrowth in that terrible hidden place.
43
A t noon the overcast began to break and by two o’clock the sun was nailed to a sky so blue and pure it was almost heartbreaking. The state police working in the tiny clearing cast shadows across the holes they dug and their words to one another were spoken in the hushed tones of men still not quite able to comprehend the brutal enormity before them. There were a dozen vehicles parked along the dirt road leading to Stokely’s cabin. Some were state, others county. Ned Hodder’s Cherokee was there, and that’s where Cork and Dina sat. For too long now, they’d watched the body bags come out of the clearing.
Despite the number of people on the scene, a somber quiet hung over everything. Someone from the sheriff’s department had tranquilized the German shepherd in the kennel, who’d gone berserk when all the vehicles rolled up. Hodder said the dog’s name was Snatch.
Dina smoked a cigarette she’d bummed from one of the troopers.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” Cork had said.
“I don’t,” she’d replied, and they spoke no more about it.
They’d been interviewed separately by the state investigators, had given their statements, and were free to go. Neither of them was ready. Cork still felt stunned, as if he’d been hit between the eyes with a big mallet. He’d seen bad things in his time, but nothing compared to this.
Hodder walked toward them from where he’d been conversing with one of the investigators. He leaned against the side of the Cherokee, folded his arms across his chest, and stared east where Bodine lay a few miles on the other side of all those thick, autumn-fired hardwood trees.
“Children,” he said. “They’re all children. Fourteen, fifteen years old. Mostly girls. Some of the graves are several years old. So far, the most recent looks to be a couple of weeks. That’s the one the cougar messed with.” He let his arms fall uselessly. “God, how did this happen?”
“We abandoned them,” Dina said. She threw the butt of her cigarette onto the road, where it smoldered, white smoke against dun-colored dirt. “Cats, dogs, we spay or neuter, but people we let procreate with blithe abandon, people who have no business bringing children into this world. When those kids become desperate we don’t see them, don’t hear them. As long as they’re not haunting our block, staring hopelessly into our windows, we can pretend they don’t exist or worse, that whatever horror they deal with they’ve brought on themselves. They’re not our children. They’re not even like our children. Believe me, this is something I know about.”
Cork rubbed his leg, which was hot and throbbing. He hadn’t done himself any favors that day.
“Sara Wolf was Ojibwe,” he said. “Born to The People. It used to be, in a village everyone watched out for the children. Blood ties, clans, those things didn’t matter. Now…” He looked up at the sky and sighed. “It feels like everything everywhere is falling apart.”
Hodder eyed another body bag being carried from the woods. “Where did they all come from?”
“Providence House for one,” Dina said. “When I talked to Mary Hilfiker, she told me the kids there came out of nowhere and vanished the same way, and she had no resources to track them. She told me that in this country nearly a million go missing every year. A child abandoned with no one who cares, that’s the perfect prey.” She leaned over as if she were going to be sick. “What I can’t understand is why they’d hire someone like Bell.”
“If they did a background check-and they probably did-they wouldn’t find anything. He managed to keep his record clean,” Hodder said.
“How do you know?” Dina asked.
He shrugged. “My town. I know things like that.”
Terry Olafsson and a state investigator came from the wood shop. Isaac Stokely, head of security for the Copper River Club, was with them. The investigator led Stokely toward the A-frame cabin. Olafsson walked to Hodder’s Cherokee. He stood a few paces away and stared down at the cigarette butt Dina had tossed.
“Looks like the wood shop I’ve got at home,” he said. “Smells like it, too. Shavings, sawdust. Always meant good things to me. Not anymore. There’s a trapdoor in the floor of Stokely’s: leads to a small cellar room, a cinder- block bunker kind of a thing, no bigger than a jail cell. There’s a cot, slop bucket, video equipment, some bloody
