The town was Breckenridge, and Saint stood outside the old lodge in the shade of the Tenmile Range while Summit County cops guarded the scene in the kind of stone silence that accompanied only the death of a child.
It was held for her, frozen in place by six uniformed cops who closed down the surrounding streets and taped off the woodland behind. She met the local chief, skinny with a horseshoe moustache, his pallor a little green like he’d spent the early hours bent over a toilet trying to purge the memory. She did not tell him it would not get easier. It would not fade.
She wore gloves and zipped herself into white coveralls. Bags over her shoes as she ducked beneath the tape and followed him down a steep slope to a flatland of felled trees, machinery and workmen a good way back, hard hats in hand as they watched her.
“New homes,” the chief said.
Saint saw the rounded aggregation of large stones and beside it hills of damp earth.
The clothing had held up well enough. Beneath it were bones.
And the reason she had come.
With gloved hands she carefully removed the rosary beads.
Saint held the marbled blue to the light and stared at the medal.
The girl had been buried in her clothes and shoes and with her schoolbag. Saint plucked a purse from the debris and ran her thumb over the polyester shell and then carefully unclasped it.
“You know her?” the chief said.
“I know all of them,” Saint said.