ALICE

Anyone who has ever seen elephants come across the bones of another individual would recognize the calling card of grief: the intense silence, the droop of the trunk and ears, the hesitant caresses, the sadness that seems to wrap the herd like a shroud when they encounter the remains of one of their own. But there’s been some question as to whether elephants distinguish between the bones of elephants they knew well and those of elephants they did not.

Some of the research that has been coming out from my colleagues at Amboseli up in Kenya, where they have more than twenty-two hundred elephants that are recognized individually, has been intriguing. Taking one herd at a time, the researchers revealed several key items: a small bit of ivory, an elephant skull, and a block of wood. They did this experiment as one would have in a lab, carefully maintaining the presentation of the objects and recording the responses of the elephants to see how long they lingered at each item. Without a doubt, the tiny piece of ivory was the most intriguing to the elephants, followed by the skull and then the wood. They stroked the ivory, picked it up, carried it, rolled it beneath their hind feet.

Then the researchers presented the families with the skull of an elephant, the skull of a rhino, and the skull of a water buffalo. In this set of objects, the elephant skull was the item that interested the herd the most.

Finally, the researchers focused on three herds that had, in the past few years, suffered the death of their leader. The families were presented with the skulls of those three matriarchs.

You’d think that the elephants would have been most interested in the skull that belonged to the matriarch who had led their own herd. After all, the other parts of the controlled experiment clearly show that the elephants were capable of showing preference, instead of randomly examining the items out of general curiosity.

You’d think that, given the examples I had personally witnessed in Botswana of elephants who seemed deeply moved by the death of one of their own, and capable of remembering that death years later, they would have paid tribute to their own leader.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, the Amboseli elephants were equally attracted to the three skulls. They may have known and lived with and even deeply mourned an individual elephant, but that behavior was not reflected in these results.

Although the study proves that elephants are fascinated by the bones of other elephants, some might say it also proves that an elephant experiencing grief for an individual must be a fiction. Some might say if the elephants did not distinguish between the skulls, the fact that one of those skulls was their own mother wasn’t important.

But maybe it means that all mothers are.

VIRGIL

Every cop has one that got away.

For some, it becomes the stuff of legend, the story they tell at every department Christmas bash and when they have a few too many beers with the guys. It’s the clue they didn’t see that was right in front of their eyes, the file they couldn’t bear to throw away, the case that was never closed. It’s the nightmare they still have every now and then, from which they wake up sweaty and startled.

For the rest of us, it’s the nightmare we’re still living.

It’s the face we see over our shoulder in the mirror. It’s the person on the other end of the phone, when we hear that mysterious dead air. It’s always having someone with us, even when we’re alone.

It’s knowing, every second of every day, that we failed.

Donny Boylan, the detective I was working with back then, told me once that his case was a domestic dispute call. He didn’t slap cuffs on the husband, because the guy was a reputable business owner everyone knew and liked. He figured a warning was enough. Three hours after Donny left the house, the guy’s wife was dead. Single gunshot wound to the head. Her name was Amanda, and she was six months pregnant at the time.

Donny used to call her his ghost, the case that haunted him for years. My ghost is named Alice Metcalf. She didn’t die, like Amanda, as far as I know. She just disappeared, along with the truth about what happened ten years ago.

Sometimes, when I wake up after a bender, I have to squint because I’m pretty sure Alice is on the other side of my desk, in the spot where clients sit when they are asking me to take pictures of their wives in the act of cheating, or track down a deadbeat dad. I work alone, unless you count Jack Daniel’s as an employee. My office is the size of a closet and smells of take-out Chinese and rug-cleaning fluid. I sleep on the couch here more often than I do at my apartment, but to my clients, I am Vic Stanhope, professional private investigator.

Until I wake up with my head throbbing and a tongue too thick for my mouth, an empty bottle next to me, and Alice staring me down. Like hell you are, she says to me.

“This,” Donny Boylan said to me, ten years ago, as he popped another antacid tablet into his mouth. “This couldn’t have happened two weeks from now?”

Donny was counting the days until his retirement. As I sat with him, he gave me a litany of all the things he did not need: paperwork from the chief, red lights, a rookie like me to train, the heat wave that was aggravating his eczema. He also did not need a call at 7:00 A.M. from the New England Elephant Sanctuary, reporting the death of one of their caregivers.

The victim was a forty-four-year-old long-term employee. “You have any idea what kind of shitstorm this is going to cause?” he asked. “You remember what it was like three years ago when the place opened?”