Chapter 2
Present day
"So I'm sitting there, right, and she orders a second bottle of wine.
A second bottle. For herself. I haven't even finished my first glass.
" McKenzie pushed open the driver's side door and stepped out into the rain, pulling up the collar of his jacket.
"And then she starts telling me about her ex-husband's boat.
In detail. The horsepower, the hull type, where he docks it in the summer.
I'm thinking, am I on a date or am I getting a marine survey? "
Callie climbed out of the passenger side and reached back in for her coffee.
The rain was light but steady, soaking through everything slowly, never letting up.
The trailhead parking lot for Heaven Hill Trails was already crowded with three High Peaks police cruisers, an unmarked sedan, and a park ranger's truck.
Radios crackled from the open windows of the nearest cruiser, dispatchers and patrol units talking over each other in clipped bursts.
"Did you see her again?" Callie asked, more out of politeness than interest. She sipped her coffee. It was lukewarm and bitter.
“Aye, I drove her home," McKenzie said. He locked the car and adjusted his tie under his jacket, a habit he had even when no one was watching. "Walked her to the door like a gentleman. She asked if I wanted to come in and see her cat."
"And?"
"Thorne, I have my limits."
She almost smiled. McKenzie was old-school in ways that could be annoying but mostly weren't. He'd been a detective with the Adirondack County Sheriff's Office for three years, had come over from New York a decade before that, and he still wore a tie to crime scenes.
He still opened doors for people. The Scottish accent he'd inherited from his parents surfaced most when he was relaxed or annoyed, which covered most of the day.
He also still called her Thorne instead of Callie, which she'd stopped trying to correct about six months into working together.
They crossed the parking lot toward the trailhead where a uniformed officer was standing next to the cordoned-off entrance, yellow tape strung between two wooden posts. The rain darkened the packed dirt of the lot and made the tape sag.
"Speaking of next steps," McKenzie said, tossing his empty cup into a trash can near the trailhead. "You hear back on your detective exam date?"
“It’s in two weeks," Callie said.
"Two weeks." He nodded. "You'll pass. Then I'll have to stop doing all the thinking for both of us."
"You do all the thinking?"
"It's exhausting."
The officer at the tape was Tim Daniels, High Peaks PD.
Callie recognized him from a domestic call they'd assisted on back in March.
Young guy, eager, still had that look patrol officers got in their first couple of years where every call was either terrifying or thrilling and they hadn't yet learned that most of the job was paperwork.
"What have we got?" McKenzie asked, lifting the tape so Callie could duck under.
“Female. A hiker found her a few hours ago, called it in anonymously."
"Where?" Callie asked.
Daniels pointed up the trail. "About a five-minute walk. Off the main path, maybe twenty yards into the tree line. One of our guys stumbled on a secondary trail that branches east. She's just off that."
"Ozzy here yet?" Callie asked, meaning Ozzy Westborough, the county coroner.
"Been alerted. Hasn't arrived."
McKenzie looked up the trail, then back at Daniels. "Go ahead, Thorne. I want a word with Daniels about the hiker."
Callie nodded and started up the path.
The rain came through the canopy in fat, irregular drops that had collected on the leaves above and fell in clusters when the breeze shifted.
Mud sucked at her boots with every step.
Early June in the Adirondacks meant the woods were green and overgrown, everything pushing outward after the long winter.
On a better day it would have been a nice walk.
Today the overcast sky made everything gray, and the deeper she went into the woods the quieter it got.
The sounds from the parking lot faded until all she could hear was the rain and her own footsteps and the occasional bird that hadn't gotten the message about the weather.
She followed the main trail for about four minutes before she spotted the branch Daniels had described, a narrow footpath veering east through a gap in the brush.
Two more officers were up ahead, one leaning against a tree and the other crouched near a cluster of rocks, both looking like they'd been waiting a while and were running low on things to say to each other. They straightened up when they saw her.
"Through there," the standing officer said, pointing past a fallen birch into a shallow depression where the ground dipped away from the trail. "About fifteen feet in. Watch your step, the ground's soft."
Callie stepped over the birch and pushed through a section of low brush.
The depression opened up into a small clearing, ringed by pines.
The ground was thick with years of fallen needles that had gone dark and pulpy in the rain.
And there, at the center of the clearing, face down, partially covered by dead branches that looked like they'd been dragged over the body rather than fallen naturally, was a woman.
She was young. That was the first thing Callie registered.
The build, the length of the limbs, the size of the hands.
Young and slight. She was wearing jeans, hiking boots that looked too new to belong to someone who hiked regularly, and an oversized green jacket that hung loose around her frame as if she'd borrowed it or grabbed it in a hurry.
Her dark hair was matted against the side of her face and the back of her neck.
Callie moved closer, circling to avoid disturbing the ground near the body.
The smell hit her when she got within a few feet, not the full overwhelming decay of a body that had been out for weeks but something sharper and more recent, that sour, metallic scent that came with exposed tissue and blood that had been sitting in warm air for a matter of days.
The dead branches over her torso and legs looked intentional.
Someone had tried to conceal her. Not well, but enough that a casual hiker on the main trail would have walked right past.
Callie crouched and looked at what she could see of the back.
The jacket had multiple cuts in it, clean slashes through the fabric, and beneath them the skin was dark with dried blood.
The wounds were concentrated between the shoulder blades and along the lower back.
Whoever did this had come at her from behind.
Some of the cuts in the jacket didn't line up with the wounds beneath them, which indicated the victim had been moving, turning, trying to get away.
She heard footsteps behind her and McKenzie appeared at the edge of the clearing, picking his way through the brush. He stopped when he saw the body and let out a slow breath.
"Thorne, can you turn her?"
"Not until Ozzy gets here. But look at this." She pointed to the victim's left hand, which was visible beneath the branches. The knuckles were scraped raw and there was dried blood under the fingernails. "She fought."
McKenzie moved around to the other side and crouched opposite Callie. From his angle he could see more of the victim's face, what was left of it. His expression changed.
"Oh, shit," he said quietly. "That's quite a mess."
Callie shifted her position and looked. The face had been destroyed.
Not by animals, not by decomposition, but deliberately.
The features were swollen and caved in, the nose flattened, the orbital bones shattered.
Someone had beaten her face until it was unrecognizable, as if identification was the thing they wanted to prevent.
“Aye, that's not from the stabbing," McKenzie said.
"No," Callie said. "That's separate."
She studied the body for another moment, then snapped on a pair of latex gloves from her coat pocket.
"We already checked the pockets," Daniels called from behind them. He was standing at the edge of the clearing with his arms crossed.
"I'm sure you did," Callie said. She reached down and carefully worked the pockets first, feeling along the outside.
Empty, as Daniels had said. She moved to the jacket's interior, feeling along the lining.
Her fingers found nothing on the left side.
On the right, near the hip, she felt the edge of something stiff.
She pulled the jacket back gently and saw a tear in the lining, not a cut but a seam that had come apart, creating a gap between the outer shell and the interior fabric.
She worked two fingers into the tear and felt the corner of something smooth and rigid, the size of a credit card.
She pulled it out.
It was a student ID. SUNY Plattsburgh. The laminated surface was smudged with dirt but the photo was clear enough: a young woman, early twenties, light brown hair, half smile. The name printed beside the photo read Kara Ellison, followed by a student number.
"Huh," Callie said.
"What is it?" McKenzie asked, shifting closer.
Callie held up the card so he could see it. "Does that look anything like our victim?"
McKenzie studied the photo, then looked down at the body. The face was too damaged to compare, but the hair was wrong. The victim's hair was dark, almost black. The woman on the ID was lighter, sandier.
"Wouldn't know," he said. "Face is a mess."
"Look at the hair color."
McKenzie looked again. At the card, then at the body. Back to the card.
"You think that's..." he started.
Callie didn't answer. Callie turned the card over in her gloved fingers, slipped it into an evidence bag from her pocket, and sealed it. She looked at the body one more time, at the oversized jacket and the hidden ID and the destroyed face, and then she looked at McKenzie.
She didn't say anything. She didn't need to.