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32

Broome ’s heart sunk. “It’s not here anymore.”

He was back at the old furnace ruins with Samantha Bajraktari and the young tech. Cowens had declined to join them this time, so Broome figured that he’d struck out with Samantha.

“What did you think you saw in the photo?” she asked.

“A hand truck.”

“A hand truck? You mean, like for moving boxes?”

“Or bodies,” Broome said. He put his hand on the old brick. When you took a step back, the ruins from the iron-ore mill were actually pretty cool. Broome remembered his and Erin’s honeymoon in Italy. They’d done two weeks in Naples, Rome, Florence, and Venice. The art was incredible, sure, but what fascinated Erin and him-two old-school cops at heart-were the ruins. Something about the remnants of death, the clues to something missing called out to them. They’d been fascinated by the Roman Forum, by the Coliseum, and most of all, by Pompeii, an entire city buried by a volcano. Two thousand years ago, Mount Vesuvius erupted, covering the city and its inhabitants in about twenty feet of ash. For seventeen hundred years, Pompeii stayed that way-the crime scene totally vanished, hidden from view-before it was accidentally unearthed and its secrets were painstakingly and slowly revealed. Broome thought now about walking through the perfectly preserved streets holding the hand of his beautiful new wife, and because he was a total moron, he had no idea at the time that this would be the single greatest moment of his life.

“You okay?” Bajraktari asked.

Broome nodded. The Pine Barrens, he knew, were loaded with ruins from the eighteenth and nineteenth century. They weren’t tourist spots, except for the major ones in Batsto and Atsion. Most were, like this one, hard to find and required trekking. All that was left now were crumbling relics from a bygone era, but at one time, here in the woods of New Jersey, they were flourishing villages for paper mills or glass factories or iron-ore mills. Eventually, the natural resources dried up and so then did most villages. But in some cases, you really didn’t know what happened. One day the people were there, living their lives and raising their families. The next, or so it seemed, they was gone, maybe waiting to one day be unearthed like something in Pompeii.

Bajraktari studied the brick from a furnace that had been built in 1780. “You thought you saw a hand truck, right?”

“Yes.”

She rubbed the brick.

“What?”

“There’s a little scraping here. It could even be a little rust. I can’t know for certain without running a test.”

“Like maybe a hand truck was resting against it?”

“Could be.”

Samantha bent down to the ground. She rubbed her hand on the dirt. “What’s your theory with this hand truck?”

“Right now?” Broome said. “The most obvious.”

“Which is?”

“It was used to transport something.”

“Like, say, a dead body?”

Broome nodded. “Let’s say once a year-on Mardi Gras-you were killing or, I don’t know, incapacitating men up here. Knocking them unconscious, for example. Let’s say you wanted to move them.”

She nodded. “You might use a hand truck.”

“Right.”

“If that were the case,” Samantha said, “there’d be marks of some kind. Indentations in the ground. I don’t know how big they’d be. The ones from years ago would be long gone, of course, but maybe if Carlton Flynn was moved that way just a few days ago, we’d still see something.”

She moved back down toward the giant boulder where she’d found the blood. Broome followed. Bajraktari got down on her hands and knees now, moving her face to within an inch of the dirt like a tracker in an old Western. She started crawling around, moving faster now.

“What?” Broome asked.

“Do you see this?”

She pointed to the ground.

“Barely.”

“It’s an indentation. There are four of them, making a rectangle. I’d estimate it being about two feet by four.”

“And what does that mean?”

“If you wanted to get the body on a hand truck, you’d lay the truck down on all fours. When the body was initially dropped on it, that would be the heaviest point.” She looked up at him. “In short, it would make indentations like this.”

“Whoa.”

“Yep.”

“Will you be able to, I don’t know, follow the tracks?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “The ground is pretty hard, but…” Her voice trailed off. She turned her head and, now like a tracking dog, she started back up the path. She stopped and bent down.

“It went that way?” Broome asked.

“Nothing conclusive, but look at the way this shrub is broken.”

Broome came over. He squatted down. It did indeed appear as though something heavy, perhaps a body-laden hand truck, had run over the area. He tried to find a trail, but there wasn’t one. “Where could he have gone?”

“Maybe not that far. Maybe to bury the body.”

Broome shook his head. “It’s been too cold the past few weeks.”

“There are broken branches over here. Let’s follow them.”

They did. They were getting deeper into the woods, farther off the path. They started down a hill. Now, in an area where no one would have any reason to roam, they found even more broken branches, more signs that something substantial had, if not bulldozed, gone through at a faster pace.

The sun was setting, the night growing cold. Broome zipped up his Windbreaker and kept moving.

The brush thickened, making it more and more evident that someone had come this way. Broome knew that he should slow down, that he should be careful not to trample a potential crime scene, but his legs kept moving. He took the lead now. His pulse quickened. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

He knew. He just knew.

“Slow down, Broome.”

He didn’t. If anything he moved faster now, pushing the branches to the side, nearly tripping on the thick roots. Finally, less than a full minute after starting down the hill, Broome broke through to a small opening and stopped short.

Samantha Bajraktari came up behind him. “Broome?”

He stared at the broken structure in front of him. It was a low wall, no more than three feet high, nearly covered with vines. That was how it worked out. When man abandoned, nature moved in and took back what was rightfully hers.

“What is that?” Bajraktari asked.

Broome swallowed. “A well.”

He hurried over and looked down into the hole. Blackness.

“Do you have a flashlight?”

The echo of his voice told him that the hole was deep. A knot formed in his stomach.

“Here,” she said.

Broome took the flashlight and flicked it on. When he aimed it straight down the hole-when the beam first hit-the sight stopped Broome’s heart for a second. He may have made a sound, some kind of groaning, but he couldn’t be sure. Samantha came up next to him, looked down, and gasped.

Ken sat on the last stool and watched the barmaid.

Her name was Lorraine, and she was good at her job. She laughed a lot. She touched the men on the arm. She smiled, and if it was an act, if underneath it all she detested what she was doing, you never saw it. The other girls, yes, they tried. They smiled but it never reached beyond the lips and often, too often, you could see the blankness on their faces and the hate in their eyes.

The regulars called the older barmaid Lorraine. Regulars at a strip club-Ken tried to imagine anything more pitiable. And yet he understood. We all do, really. We all feel the pull. Sex, of course, had one of the biggest. It didn’t hold a candle to control, but most of these men would never know that. They’d never get to experience it and so they’d remain naive to what could really tear at a man’s soul.

But Ken had learned that the secret to combat anything that pulled you like this was to understand that you really could not stop it. Ken considered himself a disciplined man, but the truth was, human beings were not built for self-denial. It was why diets rarely worked in the long run. Or abstinence.

The only way to beat it was to accept that it was there and thus channel it. He looked at Lorraine. She would leave eventually. He would follow her and get her alone and then… well, channel.

He swiveled on the stool and leaned his back against the bar. The girls were ugly. You could almost feel the diseases emanating from their very pores. None of them, of course, held a candle to Barbie. He thought about that house on the end of a cul-de-sac, about children and backyard barbecues and teaching his kid to catch a baseball and spreading out the blanket for July Fourth fireworks. He knew that Barbie had serious reservations. He understood her pessimism all too well, but again there was the unmistakable draw. Why, he wondered, if that family life leads to unhappiness, are we all still drawn to it? He had thought about that and realized that it wasn’t the dream that had gone wrong but the dreamers. Barbie often claimed that they were different and thus not meant for that life. But in truth, she was only half right. They were different, yes, but that gave them a chance to have that life. They wouldn’t enter that domestic world like mindless drones.

It wasn’t that the life people longed for was inherently bad or unworthy-it was that the life for most of them was unobtainable.

“What can I get you, handsome?”

He spun around. Lorraine was standing there. A beer rag was draped over her shoulder. She had dangling earrings. Her hair had the consistency and color of hay. Her lips looked as though there should be a cigarette dangling from them. She wore a white blouse intentionally buttoned too low.

“Oh, I think I’ve had enough,” Ken said.

Lorraine shot him the same half-smile he’d seen her give the regulars. “You’re at a bar, handsome. Gotta drink something. How about a Coke at least?”

“Sure, that’d be great.”

Without taking her eyes off him, Lorraine threw some ice in a glass, picked up a soda gun dispenser, and pressed one of the buttons. “So why are you here, handsome?”

“Same as any guy.”

“Really?”

She handed him the Coke. He took a sip.

“Sure. Don’t I look like I belong?”

“You look like my ex-too damn good-looking for your own good.” Lorraine leaned in as if she wanted to share a secret. “And you want to know something? Guys who look like they don’t belong,” she said, “are our best customers.”

His eyes had been drawn to the cleavage. When he looked back up, she met his eye. He didn’t like what he saw, like this old barmaid was somehow able to read him or something. He thought about her tied down and in pain, and the familiar stirring came back to him. He maintained eye contact and tried something.

“I guess you’re right about me,” he said.

“Come again.”

“About my belonging. I came here, I guess, to reflect. And maybe to mourn.”

Lorraine said, “Oh?”

“My friend used to come here. You probably read about him in the paper. His name is Carlton Flynn.”

The flick in her eyes told him that she knew. Oh my, oh my, she knew. Yes, now it was his turn to look at her as though he could see inside and read her every thought.

She knew something valuable.