“We don’t know yet,” Gaines replied. “We found her down at the side of the river. She was dead. She was in the mud down there, and we had to dig her out . . .”

“How?” she asked. “How can that be? How could this happen?”

Gaines shook his head.

Judith looked at him, fixed him with an unerring gaze. “How old?” she asked.

Gaines frowned.

“How old is she, Sheriff Gaines?”

Gaines understood then. “I don’t know, Judith, but Bob Thurston recognized her immediately, so she can’t be much older than when she . . .”

Judith Denton was suddenly elsewhere, as if she had summoned sufficient imagination to picture her daughter. To see someone burying her perhaps, pushing her body down into the filthy, black mud . . .

“Sheriff—” Judith started, and then there was something else in her eyes, something that tore her up, because the expression on her face changed in a heartbeat from pain and grief to something else.

“D-Did th-they . . . ? Did th-they . . . ,” she started, her voice catching awkwardly at the back of her throat. “Did th-they . . . ? You know wh-what I’m asking, Sheriff . . .”

“I don’t know, Judith. I don’t know what happened, and I won’t know until the coroner does his autopsy.”

Judith started shaking, pushed herself deeper into the chair once more, seemed to close herself off again from the rest of the world.

Gaines tightened his grip on her shoulder. “Like I said already, Judith, I’m gonna need you to come over to the County Coroner’s Office with me. You’re gonna have to be brave, as brave as you ever could be, and you’re gonna have to take a look at Nancy and tell me that it’s her.”

Judith’s eyes were rimmed red, her face contorted with anger. “Bob Thurston knows who she is!” she snapped. And then she moved suddenly, twisted her body, and turned to look up at Nestor, silent the entire time. “Bob Thurston says it was her! You can’t be tellin’ me that he might have made a mistake, now?” Her eyes widened, almost as if some small spark of hope had resided there all along, and he had just fanned it with his words.

Gaines shook his head solemnly. “No, Judith. You know there isn’t going to be any mistake on this, but the law says that next of kin has to come down and identify the body. You know that, right?”

“I know nothin’ ’cept she’s dead,” Judith said, such bitterness in her tone, and then she started crying again, this time with greater force, and her whole body was racked with spasms as she pulled herself in tight and tried to exclude Gaines.

“Judith . . .”

“Take Roy Nestor,” she said. “Take him with you . . . He knows her as well as anyone . . .”

“Now, Judith, you know I can’t do that. It has to be kin. That’s the law. Has to be kin.”

Judith’s eyes flared. There was something angry and cold in her expression. “The law?” she asked. “You’re down here telling me about the law? Where was the law when she was taken? I told them she’d been taken. I told them she would never run away, but did they listen? No, they didn’t. Tell me about the law now, Sheriff. Where was the law when my little baby was being—”

“Judith,” he said, in his voice a tone of directness and authority. “Until the truth is discovered, there is no truth. We have no indication of what happened to her.” Gaines pictured the wide incision along the length of the girl’s body, the rough stitching that had been employed to bind it together again. He could not tell her mother of this. Not now. Not yet. “The investigation has barely begun—”

“So what are you doing here with me? What the hell are you doing down here with me when you should be out looking for whoever did this thing?”

“Judith, I’m serious now. I have a lot of work to do on this thing. This is all that’s happening for me right now, and I need to get some kind of cooperation here—”

Judith Denton faced him, and for a second Gaines believed she might throw her arms around his shoulders. She didn’t. She raised her clenched fists and started beating on him, thumping on his arms, his shoulders, his chest. The woman was strong, but he did not restrain her. It was nothing more than utter desperation and loss releasing itself the only way it could.

Eventually, Gaines gripped Judith’s wrists and pulled her close. She collapsed against him. He held her tight, as if to let her go was to see her vanish. He felt her tears making their way through the thin cotton of his shirt once again. He could smell the funky odor of her body, the tang of something wild and bitter in her hair, the smell of the room around them. And what he felt was hopelessness. Hopelessness and futility, because he had seen this before. He had seen it all before, and so much worse.

The horror of the tunnel complexes in the Than Khe area south of Chu Lai. Dead children, flies nesting in open mouths and hollow eye sockets, the skin dry and papery to the touch, the stomachs bloated with putrid gas. Losing his footing one time, skidding sideways like a sand surfer, arms extended for horizontal balance, Gaines had gone down a steep incline into a trench where some teenager had fallen. The weight and velocity of his descent had been sufficient to burst the boy’s stomach.

Another time Gaines saw a man disappear. His name was Danny Huntsecker, and he stepped on a Claymore antipersonnel mine, and he simply disappeared. He was there, and then he was gone. This experience did not result in any philosophical realization; it did not impart some fundamental truth regarding the fragility and impermanence of man. Nothing so poetic. It merely demonstrated to Gaines that if you hurled seven hundred and fifty steel ball bearings at Danny Huntsecker with enough force, you could make him completely disappear.

He had seen worse, and he had heard of much worse.

Gaines did not understand what had happened to Nancy Denton. There were many questions to be asked and answered. When had she last been seen? Who had seen her? Where had she been going? Where had she been coming from? When had Bob Thurston said this had taken place? August of 1954? This was a twenty-year-old mystery, and Gaines knew how rapidly memories could fade in a year, let alone two decades. Most murders possessed rationale for no one but the murderer. Gaines knew this. He believed that the circumstances of Nancy Denton’s death would be no different. Hers had been an unnecessary death for everyone but her killer. For her killer, there had been a great deal of point. Nancy Denton may have been murdered for who she was or what she represented. And if she’d been raped, assaulted, and if the butchery that had been performed upon her bore some relation to her kidnap and murder, then there was an even darker story to be uncovered.

And so Gaines pulled Judith Denton tight against his chest and wondered who the hell had made this world. From what he’d seen and heard, it sure didn’t seem like God.

6

In the presence of Judith Denton, Breed County coroner Victor Powell did not divulge the details of his initial examination of Nancy’s body to Sheriff Gaines. Rather, he took Gaines aside for a moment, told him that there were things that Gaines needed to know, that he should come back later when the mother had left.

“What things?” Gaines asked.

Powell shook his head, looked away for a moment, glanced at Judith, and when he turned back, the expression on his face communicated a sense of disquiet. “I’m just saying, Sheriff,” he said. “I’m just saying there’s things you need to know today, all right?”

“All right Victor, all right,” Gaines replied. “And where’s Bob?”

“He was called away. He’ll be back shortly.”

Gaines returned to the bench in the corridor. Judith Denton sat wringing a sodden handkerchief.

“I can’t do this . . . ,” she said, her voice cracking, “I can’t do this, but I gotta do this . . .”