He clicked on it. It was password protected. He looked up her birth date and typed it into the space. He was in. Pitiful.

Kate returned to the personnel folders. There were a dozen of them, all men, none over forty, five married. Notes in what Kate guessed was Lyda‘s handwriting logged calls to the married employees‘ home phones, termination of employment documents, and final paychecks mailed.

Five of the remaining seven employees were equally straightforward. Three had their parents listed as their emergency contacts and the other two their girlfriends. All were eventually found, officially terminated, and paid off.

Two of the twelve files remained.

The first was of course Dewayne Gammons, twenty-nine, work history varied, mostly construction. He‘d listed Roy, Washington, as his birthplace, and that was about the extent of the personal information he‘d cared to share. There was no emergency contact, no listed friends or relatives. His check had been direct-deposited to a bank account in Anchorage, which as of the last time Lyda had checked—two days before the body in the clearing had been found—had not been touched since his final R & R to town. Lyda had gone so far as to call the police department of Roy, Washington, who told her they didn‘t know Dewayne Gammons from Adam. The cop who had answered the phone had called the state bureau of vital statistics for a copy of Gammons‘s birth certificate, which yielded the names of his parents, Sylvia and Francis Gammons, neither of whom were listed in the phone book or had any record of contact with the police. The cop must have liked the sound of Lyda‘s voice, because he had even attempted to contact the doctor on the birth certificate (also dead, practice dissolved, patient files destroyed) and called round to the local Roy churches, again drawing a blank.

Kate, as family-ridden as she sometimes felt, found it in herself to be grateful that she wasn‘t that much of a blank space in the firmament. She looked at the employee photo clipped to the inside of the folder, taken with what appeared to be all the artistic talent of a clerk at the DMV, and said out loud, You‘ve been disappearing practically since the day you were born. No wonder you were depressed. Huh? Jim said, intent on the monitor screen.

Nothing. Lyda‘s last entry in Gammons‘s file was a note stating she had copied his medical records for sending to the medical examiner in Anchorage, as per the request of the state trooper office in Niniltna. Kate looked at Gammons‘s medical records. Nothing there. Suulutaq‘s in-house physician‘s barely decipherable scrawl read, as near as Kate could make out, All tests/reactions in the green, good to go. All he would have seen, all he did see was another warm body. He wouldn‘t have investigated any further. To be fair, he wasn‘t paid to. Probably all Suulutaq was interested in on the medical side of things was any indication of preexisting conditions for which the employee might later claim workmen‘s comp. She turned to the last file with a sense of anticipation. The twelfth missing employee and the only one unaccounted for was Richard Henry Allen, thirty-four, born Minneapolis, Minnesota, graduated from Coon Rapids High, worked as an apprentice lineman in Minnesota, Missouri, and Washington before coming to Alaska and going to work for Suulutaq. His medical record was as average as Gammons‘s, with a similar build and a face the employee photo revealed to be just as nondescript. The difference was Allen had an emergency phone contact. Lyda had called it and a business of some kind had answered. She hadn‘t written down their name, probably since they had claimed no knowledge of a Richard Henry Allen. Lyda‘s note read, Wrote the number down wrong?