“They never leave their things out here like this,” Zhondra Meyer said, striding forward. “They’re always very careful. I wouldn’t allow them to do this otherwise.”
Gregor put a hand on Zhondra’s arm to stop her. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “Not just yet.”
“Do what?” Zhondra asked.
Clayton came up behind them both and came to a dead halt. By then, Gregor didn’t see how either of them could be missing it. It seemed so clear to him, and so eerie, out here in the pines and the silence and the isolation, out here in the clear morning air.
It wasn’t a pile of clothes that was lying next to the stones.
It was a body.
PART TWO
One
1
HER NAME WAS CAROL Littleton. That was one of the few things Gregor could find out, for certain, in all the long two hours that followed the discovery of the body. Most of what went on was what he had become used to over the last few years: the routine of securing the crime scene, and talking to witnesses, and giving the tech men the space they needed to get done what they had to get done. Oddly enough, Gregor had never experienced any of it when he was still with the FBI. Once he became head of the Behavioral Sciences Department, he rarely left his office. When he did, as in the few times in his Bureau career when he had been called in on a murder that occurred on federal lands, he had arrived on the scene long after the initial details had been taken care of. The FBI dealt with the Big Picture, according to J. Edgar Hoover and every director who came after him. Gregor had gotten used to thinking of murders in terms of unified psychological histories and interstate tracking maps and cycles of violence. He didn’t think the death of Carol Littleton was going to call for that kind of expertise. She was lying out there in the leaves, tangled in a sheet and a rough brown poncho, looking haggard and heavy and ill. She had two tiny gold earrings threaded through her tiny pierced ears, a single uncertain concession to femininity.
“I’m so glad she turned out to be dressed,” Zhondra Meyer said at one point in the proceedings. She was whispering into Gregor’s ear. It had taken the media people in town no time at all to realize that something was going on up here. Locking the front gates of Bonaventura against them did no good at all.
“I was afraid she’d come out here to do a ritual,” Zhondra told Gregor, “and then had a heart attack or something. I was afraid she would be lying there with no clothes on, and it would be in all the papers tomorrow. Christ, couldn’t you just see it?”
“She didn’t have a heart attack, Ms. Meyer, she had her throat cut.”
Zhondra Meyer stared at Gregor solemnly. Her already large eyes seemed to get larger. Every visible part of her seemed to turn to glass. Gregor shifted from foot to foot, uncomfortable. It was like being watched by a machine with bad intentions.
“I wonder what she was doing out here all by herself,” Zhondra said. “They didn’t usually come here on their own. Except to set up for another ritual, maybe, or something like that. I wonder why she was here…”
“You really have no idea?”
“No idea at all.”
“Maybe they’ll be able to find out by talking to some of the other women. Maybe she was intending to meet somebody here.”
Zhondra Meyer looked away across the crowds of police and reporters. There was now a police officer doing nothing but keeping the reporters away from where the police needed to be. There was a little knot of women standing on the sidelines, too, but they weren’t causing any trouble. Some of the women seemed to be clones of each other, or members of the same club. They were all stocky, with blunt-cut hair and no makeup, wearing jeans or bib overalls. The rest of the women were birds of plumage, dressed up in red and blue and green. Gregor saw both of the women he had talked to about the case that morning: Maggie Kelleher and Naomi Brent. Then he wondered if it would really be this easy to tell the difference between the women of the town and the women of the camp. Certainly no woman of the town would for a moment dress the way the women of the camp did. Bib overalls and stretched-out blue jeans were not high fashion in Bellerton, North Carolina. Still, Zhondra Meyer did not dress like that. There might be other women in the camp who didn’t, either. If you saw a woman in town, a woman you had questions about, how would you be able to tell?
Zhondra Meyer seemed to have made up her mind about something. She straightened up and brushed hair out of her eyes. “I don’t think any of the women here are going to do much talking to the police, this time,” she said. “We did a lot of talking to the police last time. Obviously, somebody is trying to persecute us. And the police are doing absolutely nothing about it.”