Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The trick was to get to the Forest Preserve late in the afternoon, after the mommy brigade had packed their strollers into their SUVs and headed home, and before everyone else got off work. When Gin Sullivan hit it just right, she could put in six miles without seeing more than a few other people. Later in the summer it would be impossible—the sweltering Chicago heat and humidity would drive even the most dedicated runners off the trails in the heat of the day—but so far, this June had been cool and pleasant.
Gin pulled into a spot vacated by a frazzled-looking woman in a Suburban and was on the trail by 4:30. The occasional early departure from the office was one of the perks of working as a medical examiner. After clearing the day’s case load, Gin had left with a clear conscience, knowing that new arrivals to the morgue would not mind waiting until tomorrow.
Patience, in Gin’s opinion, was a virtue of the dead.
Besides, she had been in the office before anyone else arrived, and she’d spend several hours working on a journal article tonight after a shower and a quick dinner. This time on the trail was the single indulgence she would allow herself today.
If “indulgence” was the right word for it. Gin kept up an easy, steady pace for the first mile, until the path came to a T, the right branch continuing along the picturesque Cal-Sag Channel.
Gin took the left branch. The terrain quickly became much more challenging, rising up into a rocky, mountainous mound. Thanks to the engineers who’d dug the channel almost one hundred years ago and dumped out the dirt next to it, the preserve provided some of the only decent trail running for hundreds of miles.
Gin headed up the trail, modulating her breathing and increasing her pace, aiming for the narrow space between exhilaration and exhaustion. In those moments, her thoughts splintered and faded and her mind emptied, and there was nothing but the slapping of her feet on dirt, the pain in her lungs, and the faint roar of the interstate in the distance.
She picked her way across a rocky quarter mile before the trail flattened out into a meadow with views of the skyline far in the distance. She paused at her customary turn-around spot, doubling over with her hands on her knees, breathing hard under a stand of aspen while a squirrel chattered angrily from an overhanging branch.
Gin drank in the cool, fresh air, free of the faintly unpleasant odors that filled her days at work: the chemical disinfectant, the ammonia-like formalin, the metallic-sweet-musty smell of decomposition. For these few precious moments, it was just her, the hill, and the weak yellow sunlight streaming through the trees, the past a blur that might have belonged to someone else entirely, the future open and unknowable.
She was stretching out her hamstrings in preparation for the steep descent when her phone rang. She dug the phone from the pocket of her running shorts, wishing she’d left the damn thing in the car.
An 814 number. Shit. Gin’s thumb hovered over the keypad. The 814 area code included Trumbull, and there wasn’t anyone in Trumbull she wanted to talk to. The number was unfamiliar, however. If it had been either of her parents, the choice would have been easy—let it go to voice mail, tackle it later when she’d had time to prepare herself—but Gin couldn’t think of anyone else in Trumbull who would want to talk to her.
As a forensic pathologist, Gin had developed an exquisite sense of the fragility of life. And while Richard and Madeleine Sullivan had been perfectly healthy during their last conversation several weeks ago, and though they were still fairly young and stubbornly fit, Gin couldn’t think of them without feeling the twin burdens of guilt and responsibility.
She sighed and leaned against the smooth bark of a tall white oak, wiping the perspiration from her forehead with the back of her arm before answering.
“Virginia Sullivan.”
“Gin?” a man’s voice asked.
And in just that one syllable, everything that Gin had worked so hard to bury deep in the past came crashing back.
* * *
When Gin was in medical school, she had briefly worked as a graduate assistant for a professor who was doing research in speech perception. She learned that speech perception was based on an astonishingly detailed palette of information—not just pitch, gender, and dialect, but also speaking rate, emotional state, and a dozen other indexical properties.
So even though it had been almost two decades since Gin had heard Jake Crosby’s voice—he’d be thirty-six now, a few months older than her—it
only took that one word for her to know that the voice belonged to the first and only boy she’d ever fallen hard for. But the emotion accompanying that realization was not love or affection or even nostalgia, but a roiling mix of dread and resentment.
“Yes, this is Virginia,” she said, to buy herself time. “How can I help you?”
“Gin, it’s Jake. Jake Crosby.”
“Oh.” She squeezed her eyes shut and grimaced. Play this easy, she ordered herself. He doesn’t mean anything to you.
“Wow, Jake, I haven’t talked to you in ages. How are you?”
“I’m, well, I’m okay, I’m fine.” He hesitated, and Gin could picture the way he used to run his hand through his dark, unruly hair when he was flustered. “I’m afraid I’ve got some, uh, potentially upsetting news.”
Mom? Dad? Gin shook her head, clearing the ridiculous fears; there was no reason in the world Jake would have news of her parents. He had ceased to be a part of their lives many years ago.
“Oh?”
“They found a body out in the woods west of town, by the old water tower. They think...look, Gin, I’m going out on a limb here, telling you, because no information’s been released to the public yet, but it looks like it could be Lily.”
Lily. Oh God...
The breath caught in Gin’s throat; the spring-green world around her lost focus. Oh, Lily.
She had to say something, but to speak now would betray her, would destroy the barriers she had built with such care.
“Gin, I’m so sorry,” Jake began, and she could hear in his tone that he had his own armor, his own walls. But he had had the time to prepare for this call, and she hadn’t. He had probably practiced it in his head a dozen times, the way he’d once practiced his AP English presentations, kicked back in that old beanbag chair in his father’s rec room with his hands behind his head while Gin sat at the clunky keyboard working on her college application essays.
Of all people to tell her, of all the gossamer threads that should have been cut long ago—why did it have to be him?
“Okay. I see.” Her voice tasted metallic and she knew she probably sounded cold. She’d heard it often enough in her performance reviews at work—her matter-of-fact delivery, a defense against the emotional intensity of her work, made her seem uncaring. “Thank you for letting me know.”
“Gin, don’t—”
“I’ll make some calls.”
“Dad will be expecting to hear from you.”
Was he warning her, or giving her permission? She wouldn’t be surprised if Jake was breaking his father’s confidence; he probably shouldn’t be telling her anything at all. After all, he was a contractor, not a cop.
But Lawrence Crosby had blurred the lines long before Jake was old enough to do it himself. He always put people first, even if that meant bending the rules. As a small-town chief of police, Lawrence had always tried to do his best by everyone.
Not the best quality in a police officer—something Gin had had to move almost five hundred miles away, and spend years working with big-city cops, to understand.
Memories of Lawrence—his big, sunburned hands with square fingernails cut short; his voice, so gentle, when he had come to their door with his hat in his hands that rainy summer night, water dripping down his face.
“Jake, I...appreciate it. Who found it?” Not her. Gin wouldn’t let it be a her. A body, as she knew better than anyone, was only an awkward and often unlovely assemblage of muscle and fat, bones and teeth.
“Hikers.” Jake cleared his throat, perhaps attempting to disguise the faint quaver in his voice. A quaver that could be grief...or something else entirely. The old doubts crowded back into Gin’s mind along with all the other emotions Jake provoked. “Couple of kids from Duquesne University, hiking along Bear Creek. They had a dog with them. The dog, I guess it got to digging.”
“How deep?” Gin asked, surprised. A body buried close enough to the surface for a dog to scent it would have been discovered long before seventeen years had passed.
“I don’t know exactly.” She could hear him take a breath, all those miles away. “Not far, though, maybe a foot or two. Dad—Lawrence—said the dog was likely going after a bird carcass. But it got down a ways and hit the lid of a cooler. The boys pulled the dog off it but then they got curious themselves. Cleared the dirt off the lid and opened it up.”
“A cooler,” Gin said, a sick feeling creeping into her gut.
“By the Bear Creek trail?”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “I know what you’re thinking. There’s a good chance it was ours.”
