Man in The Woods by Scott Spencer

the difference between murder and manslaughter and that his crime, if he were to be tried for it and found guilty, as he surely would be, carries a sentence of somewhere between three and ten years, though by now he would probably be given the harshest sentence allowable—the law seems to hold a particular loathing for runners and hiders. Tonight Paul wants to find out anything he can about the man who died in the woods. He turns the computer on and cringes at the heartless chord it plays when it is powered up. Shep is next to him on the bare floor, sighing and snoring in an almost human way, snout resting on his front paws. The dog, this seventy-five pounds of consciousness, is the only part of the universe, except for the trees and the sky, that has seen what Paul can do when fury and instinct take the place of thought, and yet this dog seems to have bestowed his fealty upon him, totally and unshakably.
    Thank you, Shep, old buddy , Paul thinks as he goes to the AOL site and types in Recent Deaths Westchester. An innumerable list of options presents itself, most of them months old. Not only are the entries outdated but he has seen them all himself, though in slightly different order, on previous nights. Suddenly, he sees a new one: “Recent University Study on Westchester Deaths.”
    Paul clicks on the story, and waits nervously while it simmers up to the surface.
If you are found dead or go missing in Westchester County, there is a 1 in 22 chance that local law enforcement authorities will do little or nothing to determine the cause of your death. Even in cases where it is clear that a crime has been committed, Westchester leads New York State counties in police inaction. This is the conclusion come to by Dr. Mansfield Trumbull, a law professor at the University of Connecticut.
“Given the number of local and state police we have in Westchester,” Dr. Trumbull said, “the number of unexplained and uninvestigated deaths and disappearances is remarkable. The only area in the U.S. we found with a comparable number of unexplained deaths and disappearances is in the Native American reservations in North Dakota, where law enforcement has been almost nonexistent. Westchester, with its numerous police forces and adequate funding, is not going to be the next North Dakota, but nevertheless the pattern emerging of official inaction is, quite frankly, disturbing.”
    Paul reads, shaking his head with worry. This voice from the mysterious regions of his computer, this blather of opinion that may have been written five years ago and has perhaps gone unread since then, these pixelated paragraphs floating around the Internet like garbage in outer space… Shut the fuck up, professor , Paul thinks.
    Stumbling around the Internet, slowly going from one site to the next, Paul happens upon a page that is more than he can bear. The site is called They Are Missed and basically it is a bulletin board for posting pictures of and rudimentary information about missing persons. Page after page of pictures—smiling faces from high school yearbooks, serious stares taken off driver’s licenses, or employee IDs, young men in tuxedos, young women in bridal gowns, suggesting lives in which no one had bothered to take their photograph except on their wedding day, missing men and women, boys and girls, with their heads cocked, brows furrowed, flirty, furious, fucked up on booze or drugs, an astonishing number of them last seen going out to a convenience store at some forsaken hour, a likewise astonishing number coming from either Texas or Maryland, black, white, Asian, Latino, all of them citizens of a vast underground archipelago of suffering, whose inhabitants include not only the murdered and the missing but all those who loved them and who wait for some final word. And also: those who were responsible for their violent ends, they were condemned to the archipelago, too.
    Paul looks at each of the missing people and does not find one of them who