steering wheel. But I wasn’t looking down at the page. Instead, my eyes were on the rearview mirror. I watched the dust cloud kicked up by two departing vehicles—the minivan belonging to the crime-scene technicians and Chad’s squad car.
Once the dust settled, I scribbled a few more lines in my logbook. Then I sat for a while longer doing math, thinking thoughts that I didn’t much like, and making sure that no official vehicles would return unexpectedly.
After that, I went back into the woods.
At the crime scene—now stripped of the yellow tape that marked the exact place where the remains had been found—I crawled back into the hole in the tree trunk and retrieved the cylinder. The one I hadn’t wanted anyone else to see, but that I didn’t need to look at more closely.
There was no need for me to rub soil off the cylinder to know what it was. I didn’t have to examine the bits of clinging label or to peer at the tiny block letters on the flat end as I searched for some hint about the contents of the vial. I knew already who’d manufactured it, knew that—if it had made its way to the state crime lab—any drug residue would prove to be albuterol. From memory, I murmured aloud the instructions etched into the base.
“This end up. Shake before using.”
I shoved the asthma inhaler deep in my pocket and walked back to my vehicle. I climbed into the SUV, turned the key in the ignition and, all the while, kept trying to ignore the suspicion that had been chewing at the edge of my mind ever since I’d found the little cylinder.
It was a coincidence, I told myself. Only a coincidence. Hundreds of thousands of people used asthma inhalers. It didn’t matter that neither of Chad’s parents had asthma. There was no proof yet that the remains belonged to his mother. The victim—or her murderer—might have had asthma. Or an animal, responding to some peculiar instinct, might have stashed the inhaler in the trunk of the tree. Or maybe the little vial was just a random bit of trash that had somehow found its way onto a crime scene. It was improbable that this particular asthma inhaler had any connection at all to anyone I cared about.
That’s exactly what I told myself. And that’s exactly why I lifted the microphone mounted on my dashboard, held it with my thumb near the mike as I considered what to say when I passed the bit of missing evidence on to the state police.
Somehow, it got caught inside my shirt, beneath my vest, when I was crawling around beneath that tree, I could say. I thought it was just a stone or a clump of mud. But when I shook out my vest, I found this.
It was a good lie. At worst, they’d think the small-town female cop was a bit incompetent.
But I put the mike down instead of making the call. Instead of contacting dispatch and asking the state cops to backtrack to Camp Cadiz, I slipped the inhaler into one of the evidence bags I carried. And I told myself that the cylinder was too weather-beaten and corroded, anyway, to yield any kind of print. No need to send it to the state lab.
After tucking the little bag safely into my glove compartment, I pulled my SUV out of the parking lot and headed for town. And I did the math again.
Ten years, the investigator with the bulldog face had said. Ten years, give or take a couple of years on either side of that. That meant the body had been there between eight and twelve years.
Nine years ago, my sister Katie would have been sixteen.
That year—the year that Katie had gotten her driver’s license—was easy for me to remember. In fact, it stood out in my mind. In the spring, just days after Katie’s birthday, the Ohio River had flooded many of the low-lying streets in town. That was when I’d found a young German shepherd tangled in a heap of flood-deposited debris, down behind the bars that lined Dunn Street. I’d named him Highball.
I didn’t have any problem recalling that summer, either. Mostly because Katie had pretty much stopped talking to me, particularly at night when the lights were turned out in the bedroom we’d shared. For no reason that I could fathom, she’d stopped sharing secrets and complaining about guests or grousing about chores. No longer was I lulled to sleep by