The Tenth Circle Read online

Two ravens watched him from the bank, chattering a play-by-play commentary as Daniel pulled and heaved. Mammoth tusks could be ten or twelve feet long; they might weigh a couple hundred pounds. Maybe it wasn’t even a mammoth but a quugaarpak. The Yupiit told stories of the huge creature that lived under the ground and came out only at night. If it was caught above the ground when the sun was up-even the slightest part of it-its entire body would turn into bone and ivory.

  Daniel spent hours trying to extricate the tusk, but it was stuck too firm and wedged too deep. He would have to leave it and bring back reinforcements. He marked his site, trampling tall reeds and leaving a hummock of stones piled onto the bank to flag the spot where the tusk would be waiting.

  The next day, Daniel returned with a shovel and a block of wood. He had a vague plan of building a dam to stave off the flow of water while he dug his tusk out of the silt. He passed the same people working at fish camp, and the bend where the alder trees had fallen off the bank right into the water, the two ravens cackling-but when he came to the spot where he’d found the tusk yesterday, it was gone.

  It’s said that you can’t step into the same river twice. Maybe that was the problem, or maybe the current was so strong it had swept away the pile of rocks Daniel had left as a marker. Maybe it was, as the Yup’ik kids said, that Daniel was too white to do what they could do as naturally as breathing: find history with their own two hands.

  It was not until Daniel reached the village again that he realized the ravens had followed him home. Everyone knew that if one bird landed on your roof, it meant company. A tiding of ravens, though, meant something else entirely: that loneliness would be your lot, that there was no hope of changing your course.

  Marita Soorenstad looked up the minute Bartholemew entered her office. “Do you remember a guy named David Fleming?” she asked.

  He sank down into the chair across from her. “Should I?”

  “In 1991, he raped and attempted to kill a fifteen-year-old girl who was riding her bike home from school. Then he went and killed someone in another county, and there was a Supreme Court case about whether or not the DNA sample taken for the first case could be used as evidence in the next case.”

  “So?”

  “So in Maine, if you take a blood sample from a suspect for one case, you can indeed use it for subsequent tests in a different case,” Marita said. “The problem is that when you took blood from Trixie Stone, she consented because she was a victim, and that’s very different from consenting because she’s a suspect.”

  “Isn’t there some kind of loophole?”

  “Depends,” Marita said. “There are three situations when you’re talking about an individual sample that was given based on consent, as opposed to based on a warrant. In the first, the police tell the individual the sample will be used for any investigation. In the second, the police tell the individual the sample will be used only for a certain investigation. In the third, the police obtain consent after saying that the sample will be used to investigate one particular crime, but they don’t make any mention of other uses. You with me so far?”

  Bartholemew nodded.

  “What exactly did you tell Trixie Stone about her rape kit?”

  He thought back to the night he’d met the girl and her parents in the hospital. Bartholemew could not be entirely sure, but he imagined that he said what he usually did with a sexual assault victim: that this was going to be used for the purposes of the rape case, that it was often the DNA evidence that a jury would hang their hat on.

  “You didn’t mention using it for any other potential case, did you?” Marita asked.

  “No,” he scowled. “Most rape victims have enough trouble with the current one.”

  “Well, that means the scope of consent was ambiguous. Most people assume that when the police ask for a sample to help solve a crime, they aren’t going to use the sample indefinitely for other purposes. And a pretty strong argument could be made that in the absence of explicit consent, retaining the sample and reusing it is constitutionally unreasonable.” She pulled off her glasses. “It seems to me you have two choices. You can either go back to Trixie Stone and ask for her permission to use the blood sample you’ve got in the rape kit for a new investigation, or you can go to a judge and get a warrant for a new sample of her blood.”

  “Neither one’s going to work,” Bartholemew said. “She’s missing.”

  Marita glanced up. “Are you kidding?”

  “I wish.”

  “Then get more creative. Where else would there be a sample of her DNA? Does she lick envelopes for the drama club or Teen Democrats?”

  “She was too busy carving up her arms for any other extra-curriculars,” Bartholemew said.

  “Who treated her? The school nurse?”

  No, this had been Trixie’s big secret; she would have gone to great pains to hide it, especially if she was cutting herself during school hours. But it did beg the question: What did she use to stanch the flow of blood? Band-Aids, gauze, tissue?

  And was any of that in her locker?

  The bush pilot from Arctic Circle Air had been hired to fly in a veterinarian headed to Bethel for the K300 sled dog race. “You going there too?” the vet asked, and although Trixie had no idea where it was, she nodded. “First time?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  The vet looked at her backpack. “You must be a JV.”

  She was; she’d played junior varsity soccer this fall. “I was a striker,” Trixie said.

  “The rest of the JVs headed up to the checkpoints yesterday,” the pilot said. “You miss the flight?”

  He might as well have been speaking Greek. “I was sick,” Trixie said. “I had the flu.”

  The pilot hauled the last box of supplies into the belly of the plane. “Well, if you don’t mind riding with the cargo, I don’t mind giving a pretty girl a lift.”

  The Shorts Skyvan hardly looked airworthy-it resembled a Winnebago with wings. The inside was crammed with duffels and pallets.

  “You can wait for the commuter flight out tomorrow,” the pilot said, “but there’s a storm coming. You’ll probably sit out the whole race in the airport.”

  “I’d rather fly out now,” Trixie said, and the pilot gave her a leg up.

  “Mind the body,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m okay.”

  “Wasn’t talking about you.” The pilot reached in and rapped his knuckles against a pine box.

  Trixie scrambled to the other side of the narrow cargo hold. She was supposed to fly to Bethel next to a coffin?

  “At least you know he won’t talk your ear off.” The pilot laughed, and then he sealed Trixie inside.

  She sat on the duffels and flattened herself against the riveted metal wall. Through the mesh web that separated her from the pilot and the vet, she could hear talking. The plane vibrated to life.

  Three days ago, if someone had told her she’d be riding in a flying bus beside a dead body, she would have flat-out denied it. But desperation can do amazing things to a person. Trixie could remember her history teacher telling the class about the starving man in a Virginia settlement who’d killed, salted, and eaten his wife one winter before the rest of the colonists ever noticed she was missing. What you’d deem impossible one day might look promising the next.

  As the plane canted off the ground, the pine box slid toward Trixie, jamming up against the soles of her shoes. It could be worse, she thought. He might not be in a coffin but in a body bag. He might not be some random dead guy but Jason.

  They climbed into the night, a rich batter mixed with stars. Up here, it was even colder. Trixie pulled down the sleeves of her jacket.

  Oooooh.

  She leaned toward the mesh to speak into the front of the cockpit. The vet was already asleep. “Did you say something?” she called to the pilot.

  “Nope!”

  Trixie settled back against the side of the plane and heard it again: the quiet long note of someone singing his soul.

  It was coming from underneath the lid of the pine box.

  Trixie froze. It had to be the engin