He held the bone, and he listened.
The town of Chinook was a few blocks of buildings, divided by a rain-washed street. Most of the shops were for the seasonal tourists who came to fish the river, or wade its icy pools during hot summers.
The office of the sheriff was in one of the nicer buildings, and when Ruby opened the door, it presented like all cop shops: It was a contained place, with contained ideas.
The man at the desk looked to be in his sixties, a good old boy, with ruddy skin and thick red hair going to silver. She knew better than to assume he was a bad man, or even a lazy man. She had worked with many police and knew the culture.
She explained herself, quickly, holding out her license.
He examined it, with cautious interest.
“Mr. Brown told me that his daughter went missing, back when her son was little,” she said. “I need that report.”
“His grandson ended up murdering someone, right? Is that why you’re here?”
“I’ve been hired on his case, yes.”
Of all things, police understood this. She was a professional, and one of the oddities of her work was that law enforcement often respected her more than the citizens they were supposed to protect.
“It’s in the archives. Might take me a few days to find it.”
“I can wait,” she said, as if she were prepared to camp out in his office until the report appeared.
He rose from his desk, stretching. He had bulky arms that strainedagainst his uniform, and she saw that it was time for him to get bigger trousers—he was out of notches on his belt. He saw her looking and flushed. She couldn’t help it. She saw things.
He opened a locked door behind him. When the door opened, she saw a copy machine and rows of metal cabinets.
In a few minutes, he was back, the beginnings of anger in his face. He had clearly thought about it. If he didn’t give her the report, attorneys might get involved, and that meant court summonses and orders. Cops didn’t like being cornered. They didn’t like being told what to do. It wasn’t that they thought they were above the law—they thought theywerethe law. Not the words in books. Them.
“I didn’t get around to scanning it in yet,” he said.
The report was only two pages, stapled in the corner. The photo underneath the wordsmissing personwas black-and-white and blurry. You wouldn’t have been able to tell Charise Brown from a dozen other women.
Underneath were her details.
Last seen: Chinook, Oregon. Height: 5'6". Weight: 160 pounds. Eyes: brown. Hair: black. Scars/marks: chickenpox scars on belly and arms.
Ruby turned the page.
She could hear the sheriff breathing. He wanted her to leave.
The next page had a paragraph. That was it. She read it. He had talked to a few neighbors, walked the river, looked for any floating corpses.
Which was silly, she thought: Anyone who grew up near a river in Oregon knew where it was safe to wade and where the rapids might take you. Charise Brown was the mother of a little boy. She would not have gone wading on a cold winter day when the water had chunks of ice in it.
The sheriff was waiting for her to finish, and he didn’t flinch. She saw the scald of shame and defensiveness rise in his cheeks.
Back at home, she sat up late, a lamp illuminating her desk. Above her desk was a massive map of the United States, covered with tiny brightly colored flags.
She had printed out everything from Mitchell’s case, and it was now stacked across her desk in neat piles. She had not taken it all to Georgia because it would have been too much. There were hundreds of pages of trial transcripts, DNA results from Mitchell, and interviews of witnesses from the bar that night. One thick ream was the evidence list from the police, another a list of grand jurors the defense had fought to get.
Every case was like this. There was a sameness about them, a march to bloody injustice, and she worried that eventually it was this sameness that would take her down. It would kill her. The weight of the world would do her in.
To the top of a pile, she added the missing person report for Charise Brown. Was it relevant to the case? Probably not. But it was relevant to Mitchell. It was relevant to her.
She had already scanned it and sent it to the attorney, whose name was Terrence Fulks. She didn’t add a note.
What was obvious didn’t need to be stated. The sheriff had done nothing, and then buried the report.