At the mud trails Saint saw a single white van.
Three women stood pulling on forensic suits.
Patch showed though she had told him not to, and he stood far back between trees still sparse from the hangover of winter.
The old Tooms farmhouse stood strong; it had weathered greater storms than errant owners. Built a year before the 1896 St. Louis tornado took a couple of hundred lives. Saint had pulled the title for no better reason than Tooms seemed to care so damn much for a building, and so damn little for human life.
Distant land had grown wild; florets spiked; in the distance big bluestem reached seven feet before thinning to white birch, trunks like milk that raised arms already beginning to color.
Saint stared at the house in wonder, the grain boards dark like they’d been freshly stained. The immediate acres still appeared tended, like someone was waiting on the return of life to ground made fallow by the saddest story.
She did not follow the team into the house, stayed back and let them work. She knew of a rising tide of convictions being overturned; seven on death row had their futures reinstated thanks to strings of sequence she did not fully understand. Himes told her of double helix, genetic instructions, and molecular markers.
They worked the best part of that day before moving to the underground store.
Saint sat in the Bronco, glanced in the mirror and saw him still there but did not summon him, his presence alone a flag that could one day be raised should anything come. She did not know how they sifted through so much human debris, allocating hairs to heads, skin to bodies.
When they were done, she watched the van press the gravel deep as it followed the trees and curved out onto the road.
“You stood there seven hours,” she said, as he walked over, that slight limp still catching in her throat.
“When will you hear?”
She shrugged because she did not know. It was an act built on favors she would one day have to repay.
They sat on a slick rock, knees touching as she poured coffee from a thermos, black and bitter and drying their mouths.
She leaned down and picked up a magnolia leaf, inspected it and carefully placed it into her pocket.
It rained too lightly to trouble them.
“This could be it,” he said.
“If she’s in the database. And if not…”
He cupped the plastic and breathed its steam. “I just want to say goodbye. Maybe find her family. I don’t know.”
“I understand.”
He needed closure to a chapter already too long.