around six years of age at the time of his death. I can’t even guess at the cause of death for the moment, and we might never know, but he’s been deceased for some time.”
“Twenty years?”
“Possibly.” Dale hesitated, knowing what Pete was asking, then gestured at a second gurney beside them. “We also have these additional items, which were recovered from the scene. There’s the box itself, of course—the remains were brought here in it to help preserve them. The clothes were underneath the bones.”
Pete took a step closer. The clothes were old and matted with cobwebs, but Dale and his team had extracted them carefully, and they rested now in the same intact, neatly folded pile they had been stored in. He didn’t need to move them to see what they were.
Blue jogging pants. Little black polo shirt.
He turned and looked again at the remains. The case had exerted such a hold on him all these years, and yet this was the first time he’d ever seen Tony Smith in real life. Until now there had only ever been the photographs of a little boy frozen forever in time. With just the slightest of differences in circumstances, Pete might have passed a twenty-six-year-old Tony Smith on the street today without ever having heard the name. He stared down at the small, broken frame that had once supported and held a human being, along with all the inherent possibilities of what it might become.
All their hopes and dreams, and look what I’ve gone and done.
Pete pushed Frank Carter’s words out of his head, and stared down in silence for a few seconds, wanting to take in the enormity of the moment. Except he realized that it wasn’t there, no more than Tony Smith himself was present in the empty shell of bones on the gurney. Pete had been held in orbit by this missing little boy for so long, his whole life circling the mystery of his whereabouts. But now that center of gravity was gone and his trajectory felt unaltered.
You search for something, and you find it, and there you are still.
“We found several of these in the box,” Dale said.
Pete turned to see the pathologist leaning over at the waist, hands in his pockets, staring at the cardboard box that Tony Smith had been found in. Moving closer, Pete saw the man’s attention was directed toward a butterfly stuck in the cobwebs there. It was obviously dead, but the colored patterns on its wings remained clear and vivid.
“The corpse moth,” Pete said.
The pathologist looked at him with surprise.
“I never took you for a butterfly fan, Detective.”
“I saw a documentary once.” Pete shrugged. He’d always figured that he watched and read to kill time, and was slightly surprised himself to find some of the knowledge had stuck. “I have a lot of evenings to fill.”
“That I can believe.”
Pete dredged his memory for details. Despite its name, the corpse moth was a butterfly. It was native to the country, but relatively rare, and the program he’d watched had followed a team of eccentric men trailing through fields and hedgerows trying to catch sight of it. They’d found one at the end. The corpse moth was attracted to decaying flesh. Pete himself had never seen one, but ever since watching the documentary, he’d found himself scanning the country lanes and hedgerows he searched on weekends, wondering if their presence might provide some indication that he was looking in the right place.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he took it out to find a message from Amanda. He read it quickly: an update on the case. After a night in the cells, it appeared that Norman Collins had reevaluated his no-comment position and was now prepared to talk to them. She wanted Pete back there as soon as possible.
He put the phone away, but lingered for a moment, looking at the cardboard box in front of him. It was strapped with overlapping layers of brown parcel tape: a container that had clearly been sealed and reopened and sealed again many times over the years. The box would now be sent for forensic analysis in the hope of finding fingerprints. Pete’s gaze moved over its surface now, imagining the invisible hands that might have touched it over the years. He pictured people pressing their fingertips against it, the cardboard a surrogate skin encasing the bones secreted within.
Prized among collectors.
For a moment he wondered if such people had imagined a heartbeat. Or if