overlooking the mountains, Spencer Arrowood stared at the thick manila folder that Martha had brought him the night before. He had felt too tired to tackle it on the previous evening, but now his curiosity about it was almost overpowering. He had not touched that file in nearly twenty years. Its contents would be strange to him, even though he had written most of the entries himself-and yet he hadn’t. The author of those police reports had been a swaggering young deputy, sure of his place in the world and of his superiority over his prisoners. He was the white knight upholding honor and justice in a tarnished world; they were cartoon bad guys, without excuses or families or feelings. He remembered how that young deputy had looked at life. He saw a world inhabited by only two kinds of people: criminals and cop groupies. He had viewed both types with suspicious condescension. It had taken Spencer a long time to learn how narrow the range of his experience was. Most people’s lives never touched the orbit of a police officer: they went through an entire existence as neither victim, nor devotee, nor perpetrator, and so he had never seen these folk.
Spencer could remember thinking like that, but he could no longer summon up the arrogance of youth that made such belief possible. He had perspective now. He had arrested a wife beater and recognized him as the skinny kid from sixth grade who used to show up at school with a black eye and bruises and mumbled excuses about how he got them. He arrested a pretty young cheerleader for drunk driving, only now she wasn’t the pretty young cheerleader: she was blowsy and forty-four, and sometime in the intervening years since high school she had turned into her own mother. Although he would seldom admit this, especially to himself, Spencer had felt inside himself the same rages and impulses that got people arrested, and now he thought that most law-abiding citizens were as fortunate as they were virtuous. Any one bit of luck-loving parents, a knack for getting good grades, enough money, a faithful spouse-could derail the kind of tragedy that happened to people less blessed.
He knew that Fate Harkryder had not been an upstanding member of the community, but he had not been lucky, either. Spencer looked again at the manila folder containing the biography of a killer, wondering how it would read to him now that he was no longer the arrogant young deputy who thought that his gold shield made him a knight.
He half remembered typing the final reports, two-fingered, on an IBM electric typewriter that at the time had seemed to be the last word in technological wonders. The machine was probably still down in the basement of the sheriff’s office, along with the broken staplers, the rotary-dial telephones, the boxes of old paperwork, and all the other detritus of previous administrations which they had always meant to discard but never quite got around to carting off to the landfill.
The first item in the folder was a yellowed newspaper clipping from the
Had he ever been that young?
The thought worried him more than he would ever admit. That arrogant young deputy, the Spencer Arrowood of twenty years ago, had made decisions that would cost a man his life. What if he had been wrong?
He hadn’t thought so at the time, but back then he had been so angry, and so eager to see someone punished for what had happened to Emily Stanton, that he never paused to question his conclusions for an instant.
Her face smiled out at him from the faded newsprint. He had never seen her smile. The newspaper photo was a yearbook shot from her university. They couldn’t have used the crime scene photo in a family newspaper. No one would have wanted to remember her as she was when they found her. This was better. The picture was black and white, but Spencer remembered it in color: long red curls, clear green eyes. He remembered other colors, too, ones he would have liked to forget: streaks of mud across her left cheek, a purple bruise on her forehead, rivulets of blood, and a white splinter of bone poking through skin that should have been pink but wasn’t anymore.
The caption beneath the picture said: “Army Colonel’s Daughter Killed in Hiking Tragedy.”
To the right of Emily Stanton’s lovely face, the plain features of Mike Wilson looked out at him with the buzz haircut and the glazed stare of the student soldier. ROTC-a “Rotsy,” as the students in the university’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps were called. Mike Wilson was headed for a hitch in the air force after college, but he never made it. He had fought a brief, private battle in a clearing in the Tennessee mountains, and he’d never had a chance. There had been defense wounds all up and down his arms, and nicks on his fingers that showed he’d tried to grab at the knife as it came at him. Those were the least of his injuries, of course, but at least they said something about how he had died. Bravely. Everyone clung to that. “Brave Mike Wilson” the news accounts invariably called him, as if that would make up for the waste of his life. Mike Wilson had died first that night. Quickly. At least, Spencer hoped it was quick.
Mike Wilson and Emily Stanton had met at college, the article said, and they had become good friends-the newspaper of twenty years ago would not have said “lovers,” but most of its readers would figure it out for themselves. They had decided to hike the Appalachian Trail together as a chance to get to know each other better, and to see if they could work well as partners. Mike liked the idea of roughing it in the wilderness to toughen himself up for the military. He had not been armed, though. Back in those days no one thought that the Appalachian Trail was a dangerous place. Hikers knew to give snakes a wide berth, and they were assured that black bears were not really a threat to people, as long as you didn’t menace them or try to approach the cubs. No one gave much thought to human predators in those innocent days.
She was only nineteen that night. She had been dead for twenty years. Spencer tried to picture Emily Stanton growing old, fading from a radiant beauty into an aging woman. Either way, he reasoned, that pretty young girl would not exist any longer, but at least she would have had a chance to become somebody else. He wondered if she had been robbed of a happy future or spared a more protracted tragedy.
At least he could try not to compound the tragedy by letting an innocent man go to his death. But how could he investigate the case at such a remove? The fading documents in this manila folder were all he had to go on. The physical evidence had long since been destroyed. A few months or years after the trial, the blood samples, the hair and fiber evidence, the clothing exhibits, and all the other mementos of the tragedy would have been incinerated in the interest of space management. After all, a small sheriff’s office could not keep everything, just on the off chance that it would someday be needed again. The state had won its conviction. Clear out the detritus of that investigation and move on to the next. Don’t look back.
Besides, physical evidence deteriorates. Even if the Wake County Sheriff’s Department had managed to keep the samples, the results from a retesting would not be reliable, and surely they would not be accepted as new evidence by the court. There was no DNA testing at the time of the Trail Murders. Perhaps then he would have known for sure; now he must investigate with only uncertainty to guide him-that, and his will not to let any mistakes be made.
Spencer leafed through the rest of the contents of the folder. He had the crime scene photos-that was encouraging, but beyond them, he had only his notes to go on, and a short list of witnesses. He wondered how many of them were still alive, and if their memories of that night had faded with time. He would have to find out.
Spencer took out the photos. Some of them had been taken with the department’s Polaroid, a state-of-the-art camera back then, and an excellent device for producing fast shots of the crime scene. Had he known then of their impermanence? He could barely make out the images in the faded prints. Heat and age had long since neutralized the developing chemicals of the instant camera, making the prints as imperfect as memory. The 35-millimeter shots were better preserved, but the exposures were inexact, a testament to the inexperience of the photographer, who had been himself.
