Madison kept herself three feet behind Curtis, glad for her running stamina and the lack of conversation.
“Not far now,” he said without turning ten minutes later.
When the rain started falling, it was so light that Madison didn’t notice until she felt a single drop on her brow. She looked up: patches of sky through the branches, some pale blue, mostly clouds.
“We’re here.” Curtis moved to one side and pointed.
They were in a narrow valley; under a western hemlock, tall shrubs around it, a perimeter of yellow crime-scene tape flapped in the breeze.
Curtis had been right to say what he had said in the truck: Madison reminded herself that what had happened here had happened twenty-five years ago. She had been in elementary school, her mother had been alive, and she had never been to Seattle. Everything here at the time had changed, grown, or died off, and what was before her was only in part what the kidnappers—the killers, Madison corrected herself—had seen.
She approached the yellow tape slowly: the hole revealed itself, smooth edges and only a few feet deep.
“It was almost on the surface; rain must have washed the soil away over the years,” Curtis said behind her.
The pit was so small. The impact of what she was seeing hit Madison almost physically: the little boy had been buried curled up and lying on one side. The killers had been in a hurry; they wanted out of the woods quickly, and they had no time to waste. They dug a hole just about big enough and deep enough to lay the child inside it; they covered it up; they left.
Madison took off her pack and reached for the camera inside. She started taking pictures—the flash working hard in the growing shadows—to do something tangible against the flutter of anger in her chest. That pitiful hole told her something else: they had killed a child, and they didn’t care; it wasn’t a burial, it was a dump site.
She shoved her feelings aside, took out her notepad, and went over the paltry facts.
“Where in relation to here is the clearing where the boys were tied up? The place you led the SWAT team to that night?”
Curtis pointed west. “About a mile that way.”
“Terrain similar to what we crossed?”
“Pretty much. Tricky ground to cover fast if you’re not familiar with it.”
Madison took notes on her standard-issue police notepad.
“It was August,” she said. “August 28, 1985. No rain that day—I checked. Is there a chance they could have driven their van part of the way in?”
“There used to be a narrow paved road to a weather station up that way, but when we stopped using the station, the road got pretty rough, and now it’s almost covered over. If they knew about it, it could have taken them almost to the clearing.”
“When was the weather station abandoned?”
“Early 1980s, I think.”
“That’s not the way we went in. We left the car and hiked a while.”
“It was an old service track that led nowhere. It wasn’t on the maps. No reason you would have known about it.”
Madison felt the frayed end of a thought slipping away, and she grabbed at it.
“They did,” she said. “The killers did. Do any hiking trails cross the service track or the route from there to here?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Which means that the children they had left behind would not be found quickly. And if they buried David Quinn far enough from the children, he wouldn’t be found at all.”
Madison looked around. No footprints, no tire tracks, no tool marks, no shirt fabric snagged on a branch. It was a long list of things they did not have and would never have.
She laid her measuring tape on the long side of the impromptu grave, took a picture, and wrote down the dimensions. The Crime Scene Unit would have already done all that; she did it, anyway. Roots pushed out of the pit’s side walls, and insect life had already begun to reclaim the grave.
She stood on the edge of the pit. How had its earth changed because it covered a murdered child? How could that change be measured? Madison crouched on the ground and touched the soil. Cold and damp. The child had become a body, and the body had become human remains. Rain and earth had passed through the flesh as it disintegrated. Something, Madison thought—the killers must have left something behind, something that had stayed with David Quinn and waited for them to find him.
“We need to head back, Detective.”
Madison straightened up and nodded.
“Those shrubs all around the pit?” Curtis pointed. “They’re Dicentra formosa.”
Madison looked blank.
“Bleeding heart,” he said. “That’s the common name. Flowers are real pretty.”