Five minutes later, Hopkinton Police Chief Jack Scungio's jet-black rattletrap of a patrol car came bouncing up the gravel driveway of the old Lyman place.

Jack Scungio

chapter continues

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Fortuitously, the chief had been just across the road, giving a couple of borrowed state police cadaver dogs a morning workout when he received Gardner Young's breathless call on his cell phone.

Truth be told, it wasn't really a coincidence that Scungio was so close by. In the months since the prospect of forced retirement drove him out of the state police, the new chief of the Hopkinton police department, had been looking for a way to boost his profile a bit.

Camilla Lyman's unsolved disappearance seemed just the ticket. If a case that involved transvestites, show dogs and old money couldn't get the chief's name into the newspapers and help burnish his reputation, well then nothing would.

Ever since he accepted the job in Hopkinton, Scungio had made the Camilla Lyman case job one. To that end, a few days earlier, he had called Gardner Young.

"You wouldn't mind if I came over sometime this week and took a look around, would you? I might bring a couple of state police dogs with me, if that'd be alright."

At the time, Young thought of the pending search as a lark. After all, it the decade since Camilla had vanished in a puff of cold blue intrigue, local cops and private investigators must have been over every square inch of the place. Surely, if Camilla Lyman had met with foul play, and if her body had been stashed on the property, somebody would have found it, Young had told himself.

The chief hadn't really expected to find anything either. He had thought of the search as sort of a pro-forma exercise. More than anything else, the chief just enjoyed running cadaver dogs. It almost made him feel like he was back in Providence chasing mobsters, instead of heading a small-town department.

The chief unleashed the hounds.

"Will you look at that?" he intoned as the three dogs made a frantic beeline for the open septic tank and then dropped the ground beside it to guard their find.

"What do you think?" Young asked the chief.

"I think we've got a crime scene on our hands."

Within an hour, the old Camilla Lyman place looked as if it were under siege. While local cops — Scungio's own men — guarded the perimeter, crime scene investigators from the state police pored over every corner of the house and property. Big black shoes left footprints in Gardner Young's perennial bed. They tracked mud across the linoleum floor in his kitchen and across the fraying Persian rug in the living room. He retreated into his study, in part to stay out from underfoot, but more so to escape the creeping cloud of their potent aftershaves — a whirl of warring musks — that crept into every nook and cranny of the house.

Outside, a small group of serious looking men knelt on the ground and peered into the open septic tank as the digger, a man who in all probability never hated his job more than he did that day, slowly scraped a thin layer of filth from the dead woman's humerus to find a length of rope tied around what had once been her beefy arm. He pulled slightly and the rope went taut as if attached to a great weight. He dug on the other side and found a rope had also been right to her right arm. Tracing the ropes to the bottom of the pit, the digger found that they had been tied to cinderblocks.

"What's that?" asked Greg, who had by now regained his composure enough to begin to indulge his morbid curiosity.

The chief folded his arms across his broad chest and narrowed his dark eyes, adopting the studied look of nonchalance that cops practice for precisely these moments.

"Off the top of my head," he said, "I'd say it's a helluva way to go."

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