Excerpt - Opening Page

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It’s ten below out there, snow blowing around like a bastard, when we receive a call from a father concerned about his twelve-year-old son.  The boy always comes home from school after sports practice, promptly at five-thirty, and now here it is eight o’clock and no sign of him.  The boy’s customary route is through a mile of woods, and the father says maybe he’s fallen and broken his ankle and can’t get up—in this weather he could freeze to death.

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We gather all the policemen we can find and a dozen volunteer firemen.  By ten o’clock we have got everybody assembled, and we comb the wooded area.  It’s about a mile long and a quarter mile wide—heavy underbrush, gullies, cricks, culverts under the roads.  We walk slowly, with flashlights, arm’s length apart, covering every inch of that particular area.  The process of searching is pretty quiet; what you hear is the men’s low voices and the crunch crunch of boots on the crusted snow and ice, all over the hillside.  By 1:00 AM the bitter cold takes its toll—you can hardly breathe; you reach a point of agony just trying to make yourself move.

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When we get out on the bridge and look down over the side, my heart skips a beat.  At the deepest point of the gorge, two hundred feet down there, is the yellow parka.  The body looks extremely small.