The Tenth Circle

The Tenth Circle

He knocked on the Stones' front door. Again, no one answered, but this time, when Bartholemew tried the knob, it was locked. He cupped his hands around the glass window and peered into the mudroom.

Daniel Stone's coat and boots were gone.

He walked halfway around the attached garage to a tiny window and peered inside. Laura Stone's Honda, which hadn't been here two hours ago, was parked in one bay. Daniel Stone's pickup was gone. Bartholemew smacked his hand against the exterior wall of the house and swore. He couldn't prove that Daniel and Laura Stone had gone off to find Trixie before the cops did, but he would have bet money on it. When your child is missing, you don't go grocery shopping. You sit tight and wait for the word that she's being brought safely home.

Bartholemew pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to think. Maybe this was a blessing in disguise. After all, the Stones had a better chance of finding Trixie than he did. And it would be far easier for Bartholemew to track two adults than their fourteen-year-old daughter.

And in the meantime? Well, he could get a warrant to search the house, but it wouldn't do him any good. No lab worth its salt would accept a toothbrush from Trixie's bathroom as a viable known sample of DNA. What he needed was the girl herself and a lab-sanctioned sample of her blood.

Which, in that instant, Bartholemew realized he already had sitting in a sealed rape kit, evidence for a trial that wasn't going to happen.

* * *

In eighth grade, as part of health class, Trixie had had to take care of an egg. Each student was given one, with the understanding that it had to remain intact for a week, could not ever be left alone, and had to be “fed” every three hours. This was supposed to be some big contraceptive deterrent: a way for kids to realize how having a baby was way harder than it looked. Trixie took the assignment seriously. She named her egg Benedict and fashioned a little carrier for it that she wore around her

neck. She paid her English teacher fifty cents to babysit the egg

while she was in gym class; she took it to the movies with Zephyr. She held it in the palm of her hand during classes and got used to the feel of it, the shape, the weight.

Even now, she couldn't tell you how the egg had gotten that hairline fracture. Trixie first noticed it on the way to school one morning. Her father had shrugged off the F she received - he said it was a stupid assignment, that a kid was nothing like an egg. Yet Trixie had wondered if his benevolence had something to do with the fact that in real life, he would have failed too: how else to explain the difference between what he thought Trixie was up to and what she actually was doing?

Now, she inched up the wrist of her coat and looked at the loose net of scars. It was her hairline crack, she supposed, and it was only a matter of time before she completely went to pieces.

“Humpty freaking Dumpty,” she said out loud. A toddler bouncing on his mother's lap next to Trixie clapped his hands. “Dumpty!” he yelled. “Fall!” He lurched himself backward so fast that Trixie was sure that he'd smash his head on the floor of the

bus station.

His mother grabbed him before that happened. “Trevor. Cut it out, will you?” Then she turned to Trixie. “He's a big fan of the Egg Man.”

The woman was really just a girl. Maybe she was a few years older than Trixie, but not by much. She wore a ratty blue scarf wrapped around her neck and an army surplus coat. From the number of bags around them, it looked like they were making a permanent move - but then again, for all Trixie knew, this was how people with kids had to travel. “I don't get nursery rhymes,” the girl said. “I mean, why would all the king's horses and all the king's men try to put an egg back together anyway?”

“What's the egg doing on the wall in the first place?” Trixie said.

“Exactly. I think Mother Goose was on crack.” She smiled at Trixie. “Where are you headed?”

“Canada.”

“We're going to Boston.” She let the boy wriggle off her lap. Trixie wanted to ask the girl if the baby was hers. If she'd had him by accident. If, even after you make what everyone considers to be the biggest mistake of your life, you stop thinking it's a mistake and maybe see it as the best thing that ever could have happened.

“Ew, Trev, is that you?” The girl grabbed the baby around the waist and hauled him toward her face, rump first. She grimaced at the collection of duffels littering their feet. “Would you mind watching my stuff while I do a toxic waste removal?” As she stood up, she banged the diaper bag against her open backpack, spilling its contents all over the floor. “Oh, shit.. .”

“I'll get it,” Trixie said as the girl headed for the restroom with Trevor. She started jamming items back into the diaper bag: plastic keys that played a Disney song, an orange, a four-pack of crayons. A tampon with the wrapper half off, a hair scrunchie. Something that might, at one time, have been a cookie. A wallet. Trixie hesitated. She told herself she was only going to peek at the girl's name, because she didn't want to ask and run the risk of striking up a conversation.

A Vermont driver's license looked nothing like one from Maine. In the first place, there wasn't a photograph. The one time Zephyr had convinced Trixie to go to a bar, she'd used a Vermont license as fake ID. “Five foot six is close enough,” Zephyr said, although Trixie was four inches shorter. Brown eyes, it read, when she had blue.

Fawn Abernathy lived at 34 First Street in Shelburne, Vermont. She was nineteen years old. She was the same exact height as Trixie, and Trixie took that as an omen.

She left Fawn her ATM card and half of the cash. But she slipped the American Express card and the license into her pocket. Then Trixie hurried out of the Vermont Transit Bus terminal and threw

herself into the first cab at the side of the curb. “Where to?” the

driver asked.

Trixie looked out the window. “The airport,” she said.

* * *

“I wouldn't be asking if it wasn't an emergency,” Bartholemew begged. He glanced around Venice Prudhomme's office, piled high with files and computer printouts and transcripts from court testimony.

She sighed, not bothering to look up from her microscope.

“Mike, for you, it's always an emergency.”

“Please. I've got a hair with a root on it that was found on the dead kid's body, and I have Trixie's blood preserved all nice and neat in her rape kit. If the DNA matches, that's all I need to get a warrant for her arrest.”

“No,” Venice said.

“I know you've got a backlog and . . .”

“That's not why,” she interrupted, glancing at Bartholemew.

“There's no way I'm opening up a sealed rape kit.”

“Why? Trixie Stone consented to having her blood drawn for it already.”

“As a victim,” Venice pointed out. “Not to prove she committed a crime.”

“You've got to stop watching Law and Order.”

“Maybe you ought to start.”

Bartholemew scowled. “I can't believe you're doing this.”

“I'm not doing anything,” Venice said, bending over her scope again. “At least not until a judge says so.”

* * *

Summer on the tundra was dreamlike. Since the sun stayed out until two A.M., people didn't sleep much in Akiak. Kids would cluster around bootleg booze and weed if they could get it, or leave behind the skins of their candy bars and spilled cans of pop if they couldn't. Younger children splashed in the foggy green water of the Kuskokwim, even though by August they would still lose feeling in their ankles after only a few moments of submersion. Every year, in one of the Yup'ik villages, someone would drown; it was too cold for anyone to stay in the water long enough to learn how to swim.

The year Daniel was eight, he spent July walking barefoot along the banks of the Kuskokwim. A wall of alders and willows lined one side of the river, on the other, sod sloughed into the water from a tenfoot-high embankment. Mosquitoes beaded on the planes of his face every time he stopped moving; sometimes they'd fly into his ears, loud as a bush plane. Daniel would watch the fat backs of king salmon rise like miniature sharks in the center of the river. The men

in the village were off in their aluminum fishing boats, the ones that had been sleeping on the shore like beached whales all winter. Yup'ik fish camps dotted the bank: single-celled cities made of whitewalled tents, or knobby poles nailed together and covered with blue tarps that flapped like the aprons of flustered old women. On plywood tables, the women cut kings and reds into strips, then hung them on the racks to dry as they called out to their children: Kaigtuten-qaa? Are you hungry? Qinucetaanrilgu kinguqliin! Don't try to provoke your little brother!

He picked up a crusted twig, a fan belt, and a binder clip before he saw it - a pitted peak jutting out of the silt. It couldn't be ... could it? It took a trained eye to look past the soaked driftwood to pick out an ivory tusk or a fossilized bone, but it had happened, Daniel knew. Other kids in school - the ones who teased him because he was

kass'aq, who laughed when he didn't know how to shoot a ptarmigan or couldn't find his way back from the bush on a snow-go

- had found mastodon teeth along the banks of the river. Crouching, Daniel dug around the base, even as the river rushed into the hole and buried his progress. It was an honest-to-God tusk, right here, under his hands. He imagined it reaching past the water table, bigger even than the one on display in Bethel. Two ravens watched him from the bank, chattering a play-byplay commentary as Daniel pulled and heaved. Mammoth tusks could be ten or twelve feet long; they might weigh a couple hundred pounds. Maybe it wasn't even a mammoth but a quugaarpak. The Yupiit told stories of the huge creature that lived under the ground and came out only at night. If it was caught above the ground when the sun was up - even the slightest part of it - its entire body would turn into bone and ivory.

Daniel spent hours trying to extricate the tusk, but it was stuck too firm and wedged too deep. He would have to leave it and bring back reinforcements. He marked his site, trampling tall reeds and leaving a hummock of stones piled onto the bank to flag the spot where the tusk would be waiting.

The next day, Daniel returned with a shovel and a block of wood. He had a vague plan of building a dam to stave off the flow of water while he dug his tusk out of the silt. He passed the same people working at fish camp, and the bend where the alder trees had fallen off the bank right into the water, the two ravens cackling . . . but when he came to the spot where he'd found the tusk yesterday, it was gone.

It's said that you can't step into the same river twice. Maybe that was the problem, or maybe the current was so strong it had swept away the pile of rocks Daniel had left as a marker. Maybe it was, as the Yup'ik kids said, that Daniel was too white to do what they could do as naturally as breathing: find history with their own two hands.

It was not until Daniel reached the village again that he realized the ravens had followed him home. Everyone knew that if one bird landed on your roof, it meant company. A tiding of ravens, though, meant something else entirely: that loneliness would be your lot, that there was no hope of changing your course.

* * *

Marita Soorenstad looked up the minute Bartholemew entered her office. “Do you remember a guy named David Fleming?” she asked. He sank down into the chair across from her. “Should I?”

"In 1991, he raped and attempted to kill a fifteen-year-old girl

who was riding her bike home from school. Then he went and killed someone in another county, and there was a Supreme Court case about whether or not the DNA sample taken for the first case could be used as evidence in the next case."

“So?”

“So in Maine, if you take a blood sample from a suspect for one case, you can indeed use it for subsequent tests in a different case,” Marita said. “The problem is that when you took blood from Trixie Stone, she consented because she was a victim, and that's very different from consenting because she's a suspect.”

“Isn't there some kind of loophole?”

“Depends,” Marita said. “There are three situations when you're talking about an individual sample that was given based on consent, as opposed to based on a warrant. In the first, the police tell the individual the sample will be used for any investigation. In the second, the police tell the individual the sample will be used only for a certain investigation. In the third, the police obtain consent after saying that the sample will be used to investigate one particular crime, but they don't make any mention of other uses. You with me so far?” Bartholemew nodded.

“What exactly did you tell Trixie Stone about her rape kit?” He thought back to the night he'd met the girl and her parents in the hospital. Bartholemew could not be entirely sure, but he imagined that he said what he usually did with a sexual assault victim: that this was going to be used for the purposes of the rape case, that it was often the DNA evidence that a jury would hang their hat on.

“You didn't mention using it for any other potential case, did you?” Marita asked.

“No,” he scowled. “Most rape victims have enough trouble with the current one.”

"Well, that means the scope of consent was ambiguous. Most people assume that when the police ask for a sample to help solve a crime, they aren't going to use the sample indefinitely for other

purposes. And a pretty strong argument could be made that in the absence of explicit consent, retaining the sample and reusing it is constitutionally unreasonable." She pulled off her glasses.

“It seems to me you have two choices. You can either go back to Trixie Stone and ask for her permission to use the blood sample you've got in the rape kit for a new investigation, or you can go to a judge and get a warrant for a new sample of her blood.”

“Neither one's going to work,” Bartholemew said. “She's missing.”

Marita glanced up. “Are you kidding?”

“I wish.”

“Then get more creative. Where else would there be a sample of her DNA? Does she lick envelopes for the drama club or Teen Democrats?”

“She was too busy carving up her arms for any other extracurriculars,” Bartholemew said.

“Who treated her? The school nurse?”

No, this had been Trixie's big secret; she would have gone to great pains to hide it, especially if she was cutting herself during school hours. But it did beg the question: What did she use to stanch the flow of blood? Band-Aids, gauze, tissue?

And was any of that in her locker?

* * *

The bush pilot from Arctic Circle Air had been hired to fly in a veterinarian headed to Bethel for the K300 sled dog race. “You going there too?” the vet asked, and although Trixie had no idea where it was, she nodded. “First time?”

“Um, yeah.”

The vet looked at her backpack. “You must be a JV.” She was; she'd played junior varsity soccer this fall. “I was a striker,” Trixie said.

“The rest of the JVs headed up to the checkpoints yesterday,” the pilot said. “You miss the flight?”

He might as well have been speaking Greek. “I was sick,” Trixie said. “I had the flu.”

The pilot hauled the last box of supplies into the belly of the plane. “Well, if you don't mind riding with the cargo, I don't mind giving a pretty girl a lift.”

The Shorts Skyvan hardly looked airworthy - it resembled a Winnebago with wings. The inside was crammed with duffels and pallets.

“You can wait for the commuter flight out tomorrow,” the pilot said, “but there's a storm coming. You'll probably sit out the whole race in the airport.”

“I'd rather fly out now,” Trixie said, and the pilot gave her a leg up.

“Mind the body,” he said.

“Oh, I'm okay.”

Text file converted with freeware AcroPad - www.dreamscape.it

“Wasn't talking about you.” The pilot reached in and rapped his knuckles against a pine box.

Trixie scrambled to the other side of the narrow cargo hold. She was supposed to fly to Bethel next to a coffin?

“At least you know he won't talk your ear off.” The pilot laughed, and then he sealed Trixie inside.

She sat on the duffels and flattened herself against the riveted metal wall. Through the mesh web that separated her from the pilot and the vet, she could hear talking. The plane vibrated to life.

Three days ago, if someone had told her she'd be riding in a flying bus beside a dead body, she would have flat-out denied it. But desperation can do amazing things to a person. Trixie could remember her history teacher telling the class about the starving man in a Virginia settlement who'd killed, salted, and eaten his wife one winter before the rest of the colonists ever noticed she was missing. What you'd deem impossible one day might look promising the next.

As the plane canted off the ground, the pine box slid toward Trixie, jamming up against the soles of her shoes. It could be worse,

she thought. He might not be in a coffin but in a body bag. He might not be some random dead guy but Jason.

They climbed into the night, a rich batter mixed with stars. Up here, it was even colder. Trixie pulled down the sleeves of her jacket.

Oooooh.

She leaned toward the mesh to speak into the front of the cockpit. The vet was already asleep. “Did you say something?” she called to the pilot.

“Nope!”

Trixie settled back against the side of the plane and heard it again: the quiet long note of someone singing his soul. It was coming from underneath the lid of the pine box. Trixie froze. It had to be the engine. Or maybe the veterinarian snored. But even louder this time, she could trace the origin to the coffin: Ohhhhh.

What if the person wasn't dead at all? What if he'd been stapled into this box and was trying to get out? What if he was scratching at the insides, splinters under his fingernails, wondering how he'd ever wound up in there?

Ohhh, the body sighed. Noooo.

She came up on her knees, grabbing through the mesh at the bush pilot's shoulder. “Stop the plane,” she cried. “You have to stop right now!”

“You should have gone before we left,” the pilot yelled back.

“That body . . . it's not dead!”

By now, she'd awakened the vet, who turned around in the passenger seat. “What's the matter...”

Trixie couldn't look back at the coffin; if she did there would be an arm reaching out of that box, a face she couldn't lose in her nightmares, a voice telling her that he knew the secret she hadn't told anyone else.

Ooooh.

“There,” Trixie said. “Can't you hear that?” plane and it puffs up after liftoff? That's all you're hearing

- air going over the vocal cords.“ He grinned at her. ”Maybe you ought to lay off the caffeine."

Mortified, Trixie turned back toward the coffin. She could hear the pilot and the vet bonding over her stupidity, and her cheeks burned. The body - dead as could be, dead as the wood it was surrounded by - continued to sing: one lonely note that filled the hold of the plane like a requiem, like the truth no one wanted to hear.

* * *

“This really is a shock,” said Jeb Aaronsen, the principal of Bethel High. “Trixie seemed to be getting along so well in school.”

Bartholemew didn't even spare him a sideways glance. “Before or after she stopped coming altogether?”

He didn't have a lot of patience for this principal, who hadn't noticed any change in his own daughter's behavior, either, when she'd been a student here. Aaronsen always put on his tragedy face but couldn't seem to keep the next one from happening. Bartholemew was tired. He'd traced the Stones to the airport, where they'd boarded a plane to Seattle. That would connect to one that landed in Anchorage just shy of midnight. They'd paid

$1,292.90 per ticket, according to the American Express agent who'd

given the detective the lead.

Now he knew where Trixie was headed. He just had to convince a judge that she needed to be brought home.

Bartholemew had awakened the principal and waved the search warrant. The only other people in the school at this time of night were the janitors, who nodded and pushed their rolling trash receptacles out of the way as the men passed. It was strangealmost eerieto be in a high school that was so patently devoid of commotion.

“We knew the .. . incident was . . . difficult on her,” the principal

said. “Mrs. Gray in guidance was keeping an eye on Trixie.” Bartholemew didn't even bother to answer. The administration at Bethel High was no different from any other group of adults in America: Rather than see what was right under their noses, they pretended that everything was exactly like they wanted it to be. What had Mrs. Gray been doing when Trixie was carving up her skin and slitting her wrists? Or, for that matter, when Holly had skipped classes and stopped eating?

“Trixie knew she could have come to us if she was feeling ostracized,” the principal said, and then he stopped in front of a drab olive locker. “This is the one.”

Bartholemew lifted the bolt cutters he'd brought from the fire department and snipped the combination lock. He opened the metal latch, only to have dozens of condoms spring out of the locker like a nest of snakes. Bartholemew picked up one string of Trojans. “Good thing she wasn't being ostracized,” he said. The principal murmured something and disappeared down the hallway, leaving Bartholemew alone. He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and pulled a paper bag out of his coat pocket. Then he brushed the remaining condoms from the innards of the locker and stepped closer to investigate.

There was an algebra textbook. A dog-eared copy of Romeo and Juliet. Forty-six cents in assorted change. A ruler. A broken binder clip. Mounted on the swinging door underneath a sticker that said HOOBASTANK was a tiny compact mirror with a flower painted in the corner. It had been smashed hard enough to crack, and the bottom left corner was missing.

Bartholemew found himself looking at it and wondering what Trixie Stone had seen in there. Did she picture the girl she'd been at the beginning of ninth grade - a kid, really, checking out what was going on in the hall behind her and wishing she could be a part of it? Or did she see the shell she'd become - one of the dozens of faceless

adolescents in Bethel High who made it through the day by praying, one step at a time, they wouldn't attract anyone's notice?

Bartholemew peered into Trixie's locker again. It was like a still life, without the life.

There was no gauze or box of Band-Aids. There was no shirt crumpled into the corner, stained with Trixie's blood. Bartholemew was about to give up when he noticed the edge of a photo, jammed down into the joint between the back metal wall and the floor of the locker. Pulling a pair of tweezers out of his pocket. Bartholemew managed to inch it free.

It was a picture of two vampires, their mouths dripping with blood, Bartholemew did a double take, then looked again and realized the girls were holding a half-eaten bucket of cherries. Zephyr Santorelli-Weinstein was on the left. Her mouth was a bright crimson, her teeth stained, too. The other girl must have been Trixie Stone, although he would have been hard-pressed to make an identification. In the photo, she was laughing so hard her eyes had narrowed to slits. Her hair was nearly the same color as the fruit and fell all the way down her back.

Until he saw that, he'd forgotten. When Bartholemew had first met Trixie Stone, her hair had reached down to her waist. The second time they'd met, those locks had been brutally shorn. He remembered Janice the rape advocate telling him that it was a positive step, a donation Trixie had made to a charity that made wigs for cancer patients.

A charity that would have taken, recorded, and labeled Trixie Stone's hair.

* * *

Daniel and Laura sat in an airport bar, waiting. A snowstorm in Anchorage had delayed the connecting flight out of Seattle, and so far three hours had passed, three hours that Trixie was getting farther away from them.

Laura had tossed back three drinks already. Daniel wasn't sure if it was because of her fear of heights and flying in general, or her worry about Trixie, or a combination of both. There was, of course,

the chance that they had been wrong - that Trixie was heading south to Mexico, or sleeping in a train station in Pennsylvania. But then again, Trixie wouldn't be the first kid in trouble to turn to Alaska. So many folks on the run from the law wound up there - the last great frontier - that states had long ago given up spending the money to come pick them up. Instead, the Alaska state troopers hunted down fugitives from justice. Daniel could remember reading newspaper stories about people who were dragged out of cabins in the bush and extradited on charges of rape or kidnapping or murder. He wondered if Trixie's picture was being e-mailed to sergeants around Alaska, if they'd already started to search.

There was a difference, though, between searching and hunting, one he'd learned with Cane and his grandfather. You have to clear your mind of the thoughts of the animal, the old man used to say, or he'll see you coming. Daniel would focus, wishing he was less white and more like Cane - who, if you told him, “Don't think of a purple elephant,” could truly not think of a purple elephant. The difference here was that if Daniel wanted to find Trixie, he couldn't afford to stop thinking about her. That way, she'd know that he was looking.

Daniel moved a martini glass that had been on the bar when they first sat down - someone's leftovers. You didn't have to clean up after yourself; there was always waitstaff to do it for you. That was one difference between Eskimo culture and white culture he'd never

quite understood - people in the lower forty-eight had no responsibility to anyone else. You looked out for number one; you fended for yourself. If you interfered in someone else's business

- even with the best of intentions - you might suddenly be held accountable for whatever went wrong. The good Samaritan who pulled a man from a burning car could be sued for injuries caused during the process.

On the other hand, the Yupiit knew that everyone was connectedman and beast, stranger and stranger, husband and wife, father and child. Cut yourself, and someone else bled. Rescue another, and you might save yourself.

Daniel shuddered as more memories passed through him. There were disjointed images, like the Kilbuck Mountains in the distance flattened by an air inversion in the utter cold. There were unfamiliar sounds, like the plaintive aria of sled dogs waiting for their dinner. And there were distinctive smells, like the oily ribbon of drying salmon that blew in from fish camp. He felt as if he were picking up the thread of a life he had forgotten weaving and being expected to continue the pattern.

And yet, in the airport were a thousand reminders of how he'd been living for the past two decades. Travelers belched out of jetways, dragging wheeled carry-ons and hauling wrapped presents in oversized department store bags. The smell of strong coffee drifted from the Starbucks stand across the way. Carols played in an endless loop on the speaker system, interrupted by the occasional call for a porter with a wheelchair.

When Laura spoke, he nearly jumped out of his seat. “What do you think will happen?”

Daniel glanced at her. “I don't know.” He grimaced, thinking of all that could go wrong from this point on for Trixie: frostbite, fever, animals she could not fight, losing her way. Losing herself. “I just wish she'd come to me instead of running off.” Laura looked down at the table. “Maybe she was afraid you'd think the worst.”

Was he that transparent? Although Daniel had told himself Trixie hadn't killed Jason, although he'd say this till he went hoarse, there was a seed of doubt that had started to blossom, and it was choking his optimism. The Trixie he knew could not have killed Jason; but then, it had already been proved that there was a great deal about Trixie he didn't know.

Here, though, was the remarkable thing: It didn't matter. Trixie could have told him that she killed Jason with her bare hands, and

he would have understood. Who knew better than Daniel that everyone had a beast inside, that sometimes it came out of hiding?

What he wished he had been able to tell Trixie was that she wasn't alone. Over the past two weeks, this metamorphosis had been happening to him, too. Daniel had kidnapped Jason; he'd beaten the boy. He'd lied to the police. And now he was headed to Alaska the place he hated more than anywhere else on earth. Daniel Stone was falling away, one civilized scale at a time, and before long he'd be an animal again - just like the Yupiit believed. Daniel would find Trixie, even if it meant he had to walk across every mile of Alaska to do it. He'd find her, even if he had to slip into his old skin - lying, stealing, hurting anyone who stood in his way. He'd find Trixie, and he'd convince her that nothing she could do or say would make him love her any less. He just hoped when she saw what he'd become for her, she'd feel the same way.

* * *

The race headquarters for the K300 were already in full swing when Trixie arrived with the veterinarian shortly after six o'clock. There were lists posted on dry-erase boards: the names of the mushers, with grids to post their progress at a dozen race checkpoints. There were rule books and maps of the course. Behind one table a woman sat at a bank of phones, answering the same questions over and over. Yes, the race started at eight P.M. Yes, DeeDee Jonrowe was wearing bib number one. No, they didn't have enough volunteers.

People who arrived by snow machine stripped off several layers the minute they walked into the Long House Inn. Everyone wore footwear with soles so thick they looked like moon boots, and sealskin hats with flaps that hung down over the ears. There were onepiece snowsuits and elaborately embroidered fur parkas. When the occasional musher came in, he was treated like a rock star people lined up to shake his hand and wish him the best of luck. Everyone seemed to know everyone else.

You'd think that in this environment, Trixie would have looked ridiculously out of place, but if anyone noticed her presence, they didn't seem to care. She wasn't stopped when she took a bowl of stew from the Crock Pot on the back table and then went back seconds

later for another helping. It wasn't beef - frankly, she was a little scared to find out what it was - but it was the first food she'd eaten

in almost two days, and at that point, anything would have been delicious.

Suddenly the woman behind the table stood up and started toward Trixie. She froze, anticipating a moment of reckoning. “Let me guess,” she said. “You're Andi?”

Trixie forced a smile. “How'd you know?”

“The other JVs called from Tuluksak and said you were new and you'd gotten snowed in Outside.”

“Outside where?”

The woman grinned. “Sorry, that's what we call all the other states. We'll get someone to run you to the checkpoint before the mushers arrive.”

“Tuluksak,” Trixie repeated. The word tasted like iron. “I was hoping to get to Akiak.”

“Well, Tuluksak's where we stick all the Jesuit Volunteers who work up here. Don't worry . . . we haven't lost one yet.” She nodded toward a box. “I'm Jen, by the way. And it would be really great if you could help me carry that down to the starting line.” Trixie hefted the box, which was full of camera equipment, as Jen pulled her face mask up over her nose and mouth. “You might want your coat,” she said.

“This is all I brought,” Trixie replied. “My, um, friends have my stuff with them.”

She didn't know if this lie would even make sense, since she hadn't understood any of Jen's comments about Jesuit Volunteers and Tuluksak in the first place. But Jen just rolled her eyes and dragged her toward a table covered with K300 merchandise for sale.

“Here,” she said, tossing her a big fleece jacket and mittens and a hat that Velcroed under the chin. She took a pair of boots and a heavy anorak from behind the headquarter tables. “These'll be too big, but Harry'll be too drunk later to notice they're missing.”

As Trixie followed Jen out of the Long House, winter smacked her with an open hand. It wasn't just cold, the way it got in Maine in December. It was bone-deep cold, the kind that wrapped around your spine and turned your breath into tiny crystals, the kind that matted your eyelashes together with ice. Snow was piled on both sides of the walkway, and snow machines were parked at right angles in between a few rusted trucks.

Jen walked toward one of the pickups. It was white, but one of the doors was red, as if it had been amputated from a different junk heap for transplant onto this one. Tufts of stuffing and coils sprang out from the passenger side of the bench. There were no seat belts. It looked nothing like Trixie's father's truck, but as she slid into the passenger seat, homesickness slipped like a knife between her ribs.

Jen coaxed the truck's engine into turning over. “Since when did the Jesuit Volunteers start recruiting on playgrounds?” Trixie's heart started to pound. “Oh, I'm twenty-one,” she said. “I just look way younger.”

“Either that, or I'm getting too damn old.” She nodded toward a bottle of Jagermeister jammed into the ashtray. “Feel free to have some, if you want.”

Trixie unscrewed the cap of the bottle. She took a tentative sip, then spit the liquor across the dashboard.

Jen laughed. “Right. Jesuit Volunteer. I forgot.” She watched Trixie furiously trying to wipe the mess up with her mitten.

“Don't worry, I think that it's got enough alcohol in it to qualify as cleaning fluid.”

She took a sharp right, turning the pickup over the edge of a snowbank. Trixie panicked - there was no road. The truck slid down an icy hill onto the surface of a frozen river, and then Jen began to drive to the center of it.

A makeshift start and finish line had been erected, with two long chutes cordoned off and a banner overhead proclaiming the K300. Beside it was a flatbed truck, on which stood a man testing a microphone. A steady stream of dilapidated pickups and snow machines pulled onto the ice, parking in ragged lines. Some pulled trailers with fancy kennel names painted across them; others had a litter of barking dogs in the back. In the distance was a belching hovercraft, one that Jen explained brought the mail downriver. Tonight it was serving free hot dogs, in honor of the race. A pair of enormous flood lamps illuminated the night, and for the first time since she'd landed in Bethel, Trixie got a good look at the Alaskan tundra. The landscape was layered in pale blues and flat silvers; the sky was an overturned bowl of stars that fell into the hoods of the Yup'ik children balanced on their fathers' shoulders. Ice stretched as far as she could see. Here, it was easy to understand how people once thought you could fall off the edge of the world.

It all looked familiar to Trixie, as impossible as that might be. And then she realized it was. This was exactly how her father drew hell.

As mushers hooked dogs to their sleds, a crowd gathered around the chute. All the people looked immense and overstuffed in their outside gear. Children held their hands out to the dogs to sniff, getting tangled in the lead lines.

“Andi. Andi?”

When Trixie didn't answer - she forgot that was the name she'd been given this time - Jen tapped her on the shoulder. Standing beside her was a Yup'ik Eskimo boy not much older than Trixie. He had a wide face the color of hazelnuts, and amazingly, he wasn't wearing a hat. “Willie's going to take you up to Tuluksak,” Jen said.

“Thanks,” Trixie answered.

The boy wouldn't look her in the eye. He turned away and started

walking, which Trixie assumed was the cue that she was supposed to follow. He stopped at a snow machine, nodded at it, and then walked away from her.

Willie disappeared quickly into the dark ring of night outside the flood lamp. Trixie hesitated beside the snow machine, not sure what she was supposed to do. Follow him? Figure out how to turn this thing on herself?

Trixie touched one of the handlebars. The snow machine smelled like exhaust, like her father's lawn mower.

She was about to look for an On switch when Willie returned, holding an oversized winter parka with black wolf fur sewn into the hood. Still averting his glance, he held it out to her. When she didn't take it, he mimed putting it on.

There was still heat trapped inside. Trixie wondered whom he'd taken this jacket from, if he or she was shivering now in the cold. Her hands were lost in the sleeves, and when she pulled up the hood, it blocked the wind from her face.

Willie climbed onto the snow machine and waited for Trixie to do the same. She glanced at him - what if he didn't know his way to Tuluksak? Even if he did, what was she going to do when everyone realized Trixie wasn't the person they were expecting?

Most important, how was she supposed to get on the back of this thing without having to lean up against this boy?

With all of their layers, it was a tight fit. Trixie pushed herself back to the very edge of the seat, holding on to the rails at the sides with her mittened hands. Willie pulled the rip cord to start the machine and they groaned forward slowly, to keep the dogs from startling. He maneuvered around the chute and then gunned the engine, so that they flew across the ice. If it was cold standing around, it was fifty times colder on a snow machine blasting at full throttle. Trixie couldn't imagine not having the parka; as it was, she was shivering inside it and had curled her hands into fists.

The headlamp on the front of the machine cut a tiny visible triangle in front of them. There was no road whatsoever. There were no street signs, no traffic lights, no exit ramps. “Hey,” Trixie yelled into the wind. “Do you know where you're going?” Willie didn't answer.

Trixie grasped onto the handholds more firmly. It was dizzying, going at this speed without being able to see. She listed to the left as Willie drove up a bank, through a narrow copse of trees, and then back out onto a finger of the frozen river.

“My name's Trixie,” she said, not because she expected an answer but because it kept her teeth from chattering. After she spoke, she remembered that she was supposed to be someone else.

“Well, it's Trixie, but they call me Andi.” God, she thought. Could I sound any more stupid if I tried?

The wind blew into Trixie's eyes, which - as they started tearing - froze shut. She found herself huddling forward, her forehead nearly touching Willie's back. Heat rose off him in waves.

As they drove, she pretended that she was lying prone in the back of her father's pickup, feeling it vibrate underneath her as he bounced into the parking lot of the drive-in. The metal flatbed pressed against her cheek was still warm from a whole day of sun. They would eat so much popcorn that her mother would be able to smell it on their clothes even after she'd put them through the wash.

A frigid blast of air hit her full in the face. “Are we going to be there soon?” Trixie asked, and then, at Willie's silence,

“Do you even speak English?”

To her surprise, he ground the brakes, until the snow machine came to a stop. Willie turned around, still avoiding her gaze.

“It's fifty-five miles,” he said. “Are you going to yap the whole time?”

Stung, Trixie turned away and noticed the eerie light that had spilled onto the surface of the river up ahead. She traced it to its overhead origin - a wash of pink and white and green that reminded her of the smoke trails left behind by fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Who knew that when you cut a slit in the belly of the night sky it bled color?

“That's beautiful,” Trixie whispered.

Willie followed her gaze. “Qiuryaq.”

She didn't know if that meant Shut up or Hold on or maybe even I'm sorry. But this time when he started the sled, she tilted her face to the Northern Lights. Looking up here was hypnotic and less harrowing than trying to squint at the imaginary road. Looking up here, it was almost easy to imagine they were nearly home. 7

Max Giff-Reynolds had made a career out of focusing on the things most people never saw: a carpet fiber trapped on the inside edge of a victim's coat, a grain of sand left at a crime scene that was indigenous to a certain part of the country, the dust of a coffee grinder on the makings of a dirty bomb. As one of two hundred forensic microscopists in the country, he was in high demand. Chances were that Mike Bartholemew would never have gotten anywhere close to him for an analysis of Trixie's hair sample . .

. if he hadn't known Max when he was a skinny little geek in college, back when they were roommates and Bartholemew served as bodyguard in return for private tutorials in chemistry and physics.

He'd driven to Boston that night with a hank of Trixie Stone's hair on the seat beside him. The salon, Live and Let Dye, hadn't even sent the sample in to Locks of Love yet; it had been languishing in a drawer in the back room near the peroxide and the paraffin wax. Now he was sitting on top of a counter, waiting for Max to tell him something useful.

The lab was piled with boxes of dust and hair and fiber for comparison. A poster of Max's hero, Edmond Locard, hung over his polarized-light microscope. Bartholemew could remember Max reading books about Locard, the father of forensic science, even back at U

Maine. “He burned off his fingerprints,” Max had told him once with admiration, “just to see if they grew back in the same patterns!”

It had been almost thirty years since they'd graduated, but Max looked the same. Balder, but still skinny, with a permanent curve to his back that came from bending over a microscope. “Huh,” he said.

“What's that mean?”

Max pushed back from his workspace. “What do you know about hair?”

Bartholemew grinned at the other man's gleaming pate. “More than you do.”

“Hair's got three layers that are important, in terms of forensics,” Max said, ignoring his comment. “The cortex, the cuticle, and the medulla. If you think of a piece of hair as a pencil, the medulla is the graphite, the cortex is the wood, and the paint on the outside is the cuticle. The medulla is sometimes in pieces and differs from hair to hair on the same human head. The cells in the cortex have pigment, which is pretty much what I'm trying to match up between your two samples. You with me so far?”

Bartholemew nodded.

“I can tell you, by looking at a hair, if it's human or not. I can tell you if it came from someone of Caucasian, Negroid, or Mongolian origin. I can tell you where it came from on the body and whether the hair was forcibly removed or burned or crushed. I can tell you that a hair excludes a suspect, but I can't use it to pinpoint a particular one.”

He spoke as he bent over the microscope again. “What I'm seeing in both samples is a moderate shaft diameter and diameter variation, medulla continuous and relatively narrow, soft texture. That means they're both hairs from a human head. The hue, value, and intensity of the color are nearly identical. The tip of your known sample was cut with a pair of scissors; the other still has a root attached, which is soft and distorted . . . telling me it was yanked out. Pigment varies a bit between the two samples, although not enough for me to draw any conclusion. However, the cortex of the hair you found on the victim's body is much more prominent than the hairs in the known sample.”

“The known sample came from a haircut three weeks before the murder,” Bartholemew said. “Isn't it possible that during those three weeks, the cortex got more . . . what did you say again?”

“Prominent,” Max answered. “Yeah, it's possible, especially if the suspect had some kind of chemical hair treatment or was excessively exposed to sunlight or wind. Theoretically, it's also possible for two hairs from the same human head to just plain look different. But there's also the chance, here, that you're talking about two different heads.” He looked at Bartholemew. “If you asked me to get up in front of a jury, I couldn't tell them conclusively that these two hairs came from the same person.” Bartholemew felt like he'd been punched in the chest. He'd been so certain that he'd been on the right track here, that Trixie Stone's disappearance flagged her involvement in the murder of Jason Underhill.

“Hey,” Max said, looking at his face. “I don't admit this to many people, but microscopy's not always an exact science. Even when I think I do see a match, I tell detectives to get a DNA analysis to back up what the scope says.”

Mike sighed. “I have a root on only one of the hairs. That rules out DNA.”

“It rules out nuclear DNA,” Max corrected. He leaned over and took a card out of his desk. He scribbled something on the back and handed it to Bartholemew. “Skip's a friend of mine, at a private lab in Virginia. Make sure you say I sent you.” Bartholemew took the card. SKIPPER JOHANSSEN, he read. GENETTA LABS. MITOCHONDRIAL DNA.

* * *

By the time the storm blew in, Trixie had already lost feeling in her toes. She was nearly catatonic, lulled by the cold and the exhaust of the snow machine. At the first strike of ice against her cheek, Trixie blinked back to awareness. They were still somewhere on the river - the scenery looked no different than it had an hour ago, except that the lights in the sky had vanished, washed over by gray clouds that touched down at the line of the horizon.

Snow howled. Visibility grew even worse. Trixie began to imagine that she had fallen into one of her father's comic book panels, one filled with Kirby crackle - the burst of white bubbles that Jack Kirby, a penciler from years ago, had invented to show an energy field. The shapes in the darkness turned into villains from her father's art - twisted trees became the clawed arms of a witch; icicles were the bared fangs of a demon.

Willie slowed the snow machine to a crawl and then stopped it altogether. He shouted to Trixie over the roar of the wind. “We have to wait this out. It'll clear up by morning.” Trixie wanted to answer him, but she'd spent so long clenching her jaw shut that she couldn't pry it open wide enough for a word. Willie moved to the back of the machine, rummaging around. He handed her a blue tarp. “Tuck this under the treads,” he said. “We can use it to get out of the wind.”

He left her to her own devices and disappeared into the whorls of snow. Trixie wanted to cry. She was so cold that she couldn't even classify it as cold anymore; she had no idea what he meant by treads, and she wanted to go home. She clutched the tarp against her parka, not moving, wishing that Willie would come back. She saw him moving in and out of the beam cast by the snow machine's headlight. He seemed to be snapping off the branches of a dead tree next to the riverbank. When he saw her still sitting on the snow machine, he walked up to her. She expected him to scream about not pulling her weight, but instead his mouth tightened and he helped her off. “Get under here,” he said, and he had her sit with

her back to the snow machine before he wrapped it in the tarp and pulled it over her, an awning to cut the wind.

It wasn't perfect. There were three large slits in the tarp, and the snow and ice unerringly found those gashes. Willie crouched down at Trixie's feet and peeled some of the bark off the birch branches he'd gathered, tucking it between lengths of cottonwood and alder. He poured a little gas from the snow machine on top of the pile and ignited it with a lighter from his pocket. Only when she could feel the fire against her skin did she let herself wonder how cold it might be out here.

Trixie remembered learning that the human body was, like, sixty percent water. How many degrees below zero did it have to get before you literally froze to death?

“Come on,” Willie said. “Let's get some grass.” The last thing Trixie wanted to do right now was smoke weed. She tried to shake her head, but even that set of muscles had stopped working. When she didn't get up, he turned away, as if she wasn't even worth bothering with. “Wait,” she said, and although he didn't look at her, he stopped moving. She wanted to explain how her feet felt like blocks and her fingers stung so bad that she had to keep biting down on her lower lip. She wanted to tell him how her shoulders hurt from trying not to shiver. She wanted to tell him she was scared and that when she imagined running away, this hadn't entered into it. “I c-can't move,” Trixie said. Willie knelt beside her. “What can't you feel?” She didn't know how to answer that. Comfort? Safety?

He began unlacing Trixie's boots. Matter-of-factly, he cupped his hands around one of her feet. “I don't have a sleeping bag. I let my cousin Ernie take it, he's one of the mushers, and the officials check to see if you have one before you start the race.” Then, just when Trixie could move her toes again, just as a searing burn shot from her nails to the arch of her foot, Willie stood up and left.

He came back a few minutes later with an armful of dead grass. It was still dusted with snow; Willie had dug it out from the edge of the riverbank. He packed the grass in Trixie's boots and mittens. He told her to stuff some under her parka.

“How long will it snow?” Trixie asked.

Willie shrugged.

“How come you don't talk?”

Willie rocked back on his heels, his boots crunching in the snow. “How come you think you have to talk to say something?” He pulled off his mittens and toasted his hands over the fire.

“You've got frostnip.”

“What's that?”

“Frostbite, before it happens.”

Trixie tried to remember what she knew about frostbite. Didn't the affected body part turn black and fall off? “Where?” she panicked.

“Between your eyes. On your cheek.”

Her face was going to fall off?

Willie gestured, almost delicately, in a way that let her know he wanted to move closer to her, to place his hand on her. It was at that moment that Trixie realized she was in the company of a boy who was stronger than she was, in the middle of nowhere, a good twentyfive miles away from anyone who'd hear her scream. She leaned away from him, shaking her head, as her throat closed like a rose after dark.

His fingers caught her at the wrist, and Trixie's heart started hammering harder. She closed her eyes, expecting the worst, thinking that maybe if you'd lived a nightmare once it wasn't quite as bad the second time around.

Willie's palm, hot as a stone in the sun, pressed against her cheek. She felt his other hand touch her forehead, then sweep down the side of her face to cup her jaw.

She could feel calluses on his skin, and she wondered where they'd come from. Trixie opened her eyes and, for the first time since she'd met him, found Willie Moses looking right at her.

* * *

Skipper Johanssen, the mitochondrial DNA expert, was a woman. Bartholemew watched her pour sugar into her coffee and look over the notes on the case that he'd brought. “Unusual name,” he said.

“Mom had a Barbie thing going on.”

She was beautiful: straight platinum hair that swept the middle of her back, green eyes hidden behind her thick-framed black glasses. When she read, sometimes her mouth formed the words.

“What do you know about mitochondrial DNA?” she asked.

“That you can hopefully use it to compare two hairs?”

“Well, yeah, you can. The real question is what you want to do with that comparison.” Skipper leaned back in her chair. “Thanks to C.S.I., everyone's heard about DNA analysis. Most of the time they're talking about nuclear DNA, the kind that comes, in equal halves, from your mother and your father. But there's another kind of DNA that's the up-and-comer in the forensic community mitochondrial DNA. And even though you may not know a lot about it, you - and the rest of the world - know the largest case in history where it was used: 9/11.”