She was silent, and it made him nervous. What? he said. I can hear you thinking. Let‘s get the body to Anchorage and see what we‘ve got, she said.

Thirteen

Jim‘s office looked like someone had detonated a bomb. There were files and paper forms everywhere, and the map tacked to the wall had become a de facto bulletin board, with sheets of paper pinned all over it. A whiteboard was filled from one edge of the frame to the other with notes illegible to anyone who hadn‘t written them. The smell of coffee heating too long in the carafe burned the back of the throat. Mutt had long since thrown in the towel and had gone outside to sprawl in the clear air.

They‘d spent the early part of the morning going through the personal belongings of Lyda Blue, Richard Allen, and Dewayne Gammons. To Kate‘s increasing exasperation, they had found precisely nothing. Allen‘s personal possessions amounted to toiletries, half a dozen changes of clothes, a traveling clock, assorted

Pe nthousesand Playboys, and an MP3 player loaded with Clint Black, Brad Paisley, and Big & Rich. If Allen had had a wallet, he‘d left with it and the bear must have gobbled it up right along with Allen, hip pocket and all. Bears were not known for their discriminating palates.

Neither Gammons‘s duffel nor his daypack had acquired anything new since she last examined them. Lyda at least had the saving grace of family photos and a file folder that held her Bering High School and Charter College associate‘s diplomas, as well as a certificate naming her Employee of the Year at the Bravo Mine, Montana, two years before. It was signed by Vernon Truax, Mine Superintendent.

Explain to me again how so many of their employees just disappear, Jim said without looking up from the monitor, where he was scrolling through the files on Lyda Blue‘s hard drive.

We got a bunch of young people, mostly male, working out here in the back of beyond, making more money in a month than most people see in six. The mine loses at least one every pay period, right after paychecks are issued. I‘ll bet that‘s why they only pay them once a month.

And you are looking at all the files instead of just the guy who went at the same time Gammons did, why?

Because we still don‘t know whose body we found in the woods. It could be any of them.

It could be none of them.

True. Kate didn‘t believe it, but that didn‘t mean he was wrong. But, I remind you, there aren‘t any missing Park rats. Our best operational theory is the probability that the dead guy worked at the mine.

Jim clicked on a folder marked PERSONAL.

Three, because I don‘t know how he died.

Jim looked up at that. He was attacked by a bear. That‘ll pretty much get the job done.

We don‘t know that, Jim. No, wait, listen. We don‘t know that. We found the remains, that‘s all. He could have been killed and the body eaten afterward. Wouldn‘t be the first time that happened. Ravens, eagles, foxes, grizzlies, none of them turn up their noses at carrion, especially before fish hit fresh water. Okay, he said, turning his attention back to the monitor. FINANCE, LETTERS, CONTACTS, FUN, and another folder marked MINE. Why would Lyda have a file on the mine in her personal folder? Or maybe it was mine in the lower case personal pronoun sense. Love letters, X-rated Web site shortcuts, bad poems written in praise of the hair on the backs of her lover‘s hands.