One investigator told reporters: "There’s just no way. That’s jungle in there. You’d need a machete to get through. They could have been six feet off the trail, and we’d never have found them."

Excerpt from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 1, 1982:

HIKER LOST IN OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK GIRL MISSING IN "DISAPPEARANCE VALLEY"

National Park investigators are combing the Quinault Valley for eighteen-year-old Claire Hornick of Tacoma, who was reported missing late Tuesday when she failed to re join fellow campers at the Graves Creek campground near Lake Quinault after taking a solitary hike. According to companion Gary Beller, twenty-two, also of Tacoma, Miss Hornick had gone into the rain forest "to be alone for an hour or two," along the Quinault River Trail.

The Quinault Valley received nationwide notoriety as "Disappearance Valley" six years ago, after a month-long search failed to find any sign of two hikers separately reported missing there. The two have never been found.

Chapter 1

Dr. Fenster pressed his lips into a tight little bud. He wasn’t a bone man, had never cared for bones. Too much guesswork, especially after they’d been in the ground a while. They shrank, they warped, they were inconclusive cause-of-death indicators, they gave unreliable tissue types. Give him some blood, on the other hand, or semen, or saliva, or best of all a major organ, and you really had something. A pathologist could get his teeth into something like that, so to speak.

He sighed noisily and rearranged the bones on the oak table again, this time in a neat row, but Lau could see he wasn’t getting anywhere. After waiting politely for the older man to speak, Lau said, "What do you think, Dr. Fenster? Is it one of them?"