Bone White

by Ronald Malfi

  And he did, in fact. He called on occasion, too, and texted pictures of himself at various landmarks throughout America’s Last Frontier. At one point, Paul remembered thinking that maybe he had been wrong, and that this hadn’t been such a bad thing for Danny after all. That maybe his younger brother had been right. That he might be “finding himself” out there.

  But then sometime during that summer, the phone calls stopped. The text messages and phone pictures stopped, too. The postcards no longer showed up in Paul’s mailbox. At first, Paul thought nothing of it. After all, this was Danny Gallo, right? But after several weeks of no contact with his brother—weeks during which he suffered from a bout of soul-crushing insomnia—Paul became certain it wasn’t just another one of Danny’s flaky episodes. He knew something wasn’t right, something wasn’t in its place. Something was out of orbit.

  He made repeated calls to Danny’s cell phone, but each one went to voice mail without ringing. Sometime later, Danny’s cell phone service was disconnected altogether. He contacted Danny’s cell phone provider and pretended he was his brother. They informed him that the cell service had been discontinued because he had failed to pay his bill for several months.

  “If you’d like to work out a payment plan, Mr. Gallo, I can assure you this won’t go into collect—”

  Paul hung up.

  Sometime after that, Luther Parnell put him in touch with a police detective named Richard Ridgley over in Baltimore PD’s Homicide Division, and Ridge was able to get his hands on Danny’s most recent credit card statements. Paul discovered that, much like Danny’s cell phone bill, his brother had an outstanding balance unpaid on his credit card. The last purchase had been made at a gas station located along a stretch of highway just south of an old Alaskan mining town with the ominous name of Dread’s Hand. This purchase was made on the same day Paul had received the first of the last two messages he’d received from Danny: Entering Dread’s Hand—Spooky!

  At Ridge’s suggestion, Paul contacted the Alaska Bureau of Investigation and was put in touch with an investigator named Jill Ryerson with ABI’s Major Crimes Unit. She walked him through the process of filling out a missing persons report. She also located Danny’s rental car, abandoned on the shoulder of a dirt road somewhere on the outskirts of Dread’s Hand. Its tires were flat, and it looked as though it hadn’t been used in quite a while, Ryerson said. Paul asked whether there were any signs of a struggle in or around his brother’s vehicle, and Ryerson assured him that there weren’t.

  “So where does that leave us?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have a suitable response to that, Mr. Gallo,” she said.

  After that, Paul Gallo did the only thing there was left for him to do: He waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  After a time, something curdled and died inside him. It wasn’t just his disheartened spirit, but rather it felt like a physical sensation, like a tiny organ shriveling up and turning hard and black in the center of his gut.

  Can you see those boys? he wondered. Because the image was fading, growing dim, like a bulb burning out in a darkened room. Can you see those boys? Can you see them?

  The only thing that never stopped and never faded were his father’s words, unchanged from all those years ago, yet now tempered with some terrible regret and disappointment: You’re going to have to look out for him after we’re gone, Paul.

  Eventually, Paul came to terms with Danny’s disappearance. He even considered having a memorial service for him, but since there were no other surviving members of their immediate family and he didn’t know any of Danny’s friends—did he even have friends?—Paul decided against it. Instead, he held his own private ceremony for Danny: One evening, he bought a bottle of Knob Creek—Danny’s favorite bourbon—and drank to his brother while an old Van Halen disc played on the stereo. The next morning, Paul dumped the rest of the bourbon down the sink and then hid the empty bottle deep down in the trash.

  Danny was gone, and Paul’s role in trying to find him was over.

  Or so he thought at the time.

  5

  Jill Ryerson was sitting behind the wheel of her cruiser, the window cracked, the heater pumping hot air from the vents. She was staring past the trees at the run-down structure that was Joseph Mallory’s house, a fine rain misting the cruiser’s windshield. Hers wasn’t the only cop car in the vicinity—in fact, there were quite a few others, as they prepared to execute a search warrant on Mallory’s residence—but she preferred to sit in the car and soak up the heat for as long as possible.

  Val Drammell has gone radio silent, there’s the waitress from the luncheonette leaving me voice mails quoting scripture instead of giving an official statement, and we’re short-staffed and working around the clock because half of the department has come down with the flu. Meanwhile, I can’t seem to get my core temperature back up into the nineties. What I need is a good vacation. Maybe a cruise somewhere warm.

  It was a quarter after three in the afternoon, but it could have been midnight for all her exhaustion. The rain didn’t help any. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the cool glass of the driver’s side window.

  She was still thinking about that first body.

  After arresting Mallory and dropping him off at the hospital, she had gotten the call from McHale, saying they’d found a body. The news had stunned her; she would have bet the farm that Joseph Mallory was just a local crackpot with a vivid imagination. It was just one more reminder that people were full of surprises.

  It was on her drive back out to Dread’s Hand that evening that she phoned Captain Ericsson, who subsequently had Mallory transported from Fairbanks Memorial to Anchorage Regional in an effort to keep one step ahead of the media. It was also on this drive that Ryerson realized she didn’t much care for the town of Dread’s Hand. For one thing, all those wooden crosses flanking the solitary road that led into town made her uneasy. But it wasn’t just the crosses—the town itself had a disquieting, claustrophobic vibe about it. She knew nothing about the place except that it had once been an old mining village, and she certainly didn’t know any of its residents. As she drove past the old church toward the cusp of forest, she’d noticed a child standing there on the shoulder of the road, a boy or girl no more than eight or nine years old, wearing what she at first assumed was a balaclava over their face. However, as she drove by, she saw that the balaclava was made out of fur and was actually some sort of mask. Ragged eyeholes had been cut into the furry hide. The kid raised a hand and waved as Ryerson drove by. The sight was so jarring that she’d eased down on the accelerator and sped away.

  When she had arrived back on the scene, there was a backhoe coughing blue diesel exhaust into the air and a coroner’s investigator was scrutinizing the body at the bottom of a ragged hole in the ground. Two men in dark blue jumpsuits stood nearby, smoking cigarettes. When she asked where the sniffer dogs were, McHale had told her the handlers had to take them back to town because they kept getting spooked by something in the woods. A bear, probably, McHale opined.

  Ryerson had come up behind the coroner’s investigator and peered over his shoulder into the hole in the earth. She’d seen more than her share of violent crimes during her time with MCU—enough domestic violence and rape to last a lifetime, not to mention all variety of assaults, homicides, suicides, and even a guy who’d been struck by a train and had his body twisted into an hourglass—but this thing in the hole was by far the worst. She assumed this was because it hardly looked human—more like something that had fallen from space, crawled into that hole, and died.

  Marbled skin like blue cheese, brittle as rice paper, with hands that looked like the scaled talons of some predatory bird. Blessedly, the victim was still clothed, so much of the emaciated, tendon-like flesh stretched taut across a collection of narrow, jutting bones was still obscured.

  No, not an alien, she had thought then, staring at that impossible and hideous thing in the h
ole, but an Egyptian mummy. The cold has mummified the flesh.

  “We’ve got a head here,” the coroner’s investigator, a middle-aged man with a neat gray beard and wire-rimmed spectacles, had announced. He pointed to what Ryerson thought was a large clod of dirt furred with roots tucked against the flannel-covered left hip bone of the corpse. “Decapitation, though I can’t say if this was the cause of death.”

  “Decapitation. Jesus,” Ryerson had said. The stink of exhaust pumping from the backhoe had begun to make her sick.

  So far, they’d uncovered six of the eight bodies from that clearing up in the woods.

  She was trying not to think about the dead body now, knowing full well she would be revisited by those birdlike talons and the fuzzy clod of dirt in her dreams for many nights to come, much as they had plagued her last night as she’d tried to find sleep. Instead, she needed to focus on the decrepit old house framed in her windshield now, and the search warrant. Mallory hadn’t spoken about his home at all, and he refused to acknowledge whether any evidence of his crimes—or any evidence of the victims’ identities—might be found there.

  Captain Ericsson rapped knuckles against the window, startling her. “You ready, Ryerson?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and climbed out of the car.

  Mallory’s house was in the middle of the woods near the outskirts of Dread’s Hand, a dilapidated structure that looked like a series of large rectangular cargo containers set one beside the other. The windowpanes were filthy and black. There was a front porch constructed out of concrete blocks and a muddy dirt driveway that looked more like a dog track that curled around toward the back of the house. There were a few old car tires nailed to the roof.

  “You and McHale made the arrest on this case,” Captain Ericsson said. He was a tall man with a thin, serious face and a wide gray mustache. “Is that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right. I want you to take the lead on this thing.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get up there, Ryerson.”

  Ryerson hustled up the concrete steps of the front porch and queued up at the front of the line of officers. Bill Johnson stood beside her, already sweating despite the chilly temperatures. He was maybe twenty pounds overweight, with a smooth bulge of belly fat rolling out beneath the hem of his Kevlar vest. He held a ram in his hands.

  “You give the word, Jill,” he said.

  She glanced over her shoulder at the sets of eyes staring back at her. She nodded at them, held up three fingers, then turned back to Bill. She counted down from three, and Bill Johnson drove the ram into the front door. The knob came apart in pieces and the door sprang open. Ryerson rushed into the house, her pistol out, her heart trip-hammering beneath her Kevlar vest.

  She was moving so quickly that she didn’t smell the place until she was already halfway down the hall—a smell that combined all the worst characteristics of rotting vegetation, unwashed flesh, and dog shit left to cook in the sun. The stink funneled up her nose and seemed to expand, hot and heavy, in her sinuses. The hallway was a narrow shaft with framed pictures on the walls, and the slender beam of her penlight, which she held against the butt of her Glock, washed along the walls like the contrail of a comet.

  Two officers came up alongside her, then broke off into the first adjoining room to her right. One of them shouted, “Clear!”

  Ryerson kept moving down the hall until she breached the doorway at the end, cutting around the corner, her gun out, arms extended with her elbows locked. The penlight’s beam—a vague and inconsequential speck of light in so much vast darkness—dispersed to nothingness. A veil of cobwebs tickled past her face and left ashy tendrils along the front of her vest. It was late in the afternoon and it was raining, but the place shouldn’t have been so dark. She could make out the outline of windows at the far end of the room, beyond the humped shapes of furniture, but it seemed like the panes had been covered with something to keep out the daylight.

  “Clear!” someone yelled.

  “Clear!” someone else yelled.

  “All clear!” came a third voice.

  “Someone get some lights on,” Captain Ericsson said.

  Ryerson felt along the wall. She found the light switch, jostled it, but no lights came on. “The lights don’t work,” she said.

  “There’s no power,” said Mike McHale, coming up beside her. The beam of his flashlight passed along a carpet blackened by dirty boot prints. “Stinks like shit in here.”

  “Something’s wrong with the windows,” she told him. The beam of light from her penlight was insufficient to infiltrate the darkness of the room before her.

  McHale lifted his flashlight and angled the beam toward one of the windows. Its pane had been painted black.

  “Christ almighty,” McHale said under his breath.

  It wasn’t just the black paint covering the windowpanes, but the walls themselves, crowded with what looked like graffiti, streaks of brownish red melding to form . . . not words, but symbols, hieroglyphics. Mallory’s wood-paneled walls were covered, from floor to ceiling, with these strange sigils, each one as enigmatic as the next.

  “That looks like blood,” Ryerson said, closing in on one wall. She trained her penlight’s beam on one particular symbol that looked very much like an Egyptian glyph of an eye, only this “eye” had a vertical, catlike pupil. “Very old, dried blood.”

  “Then it’s been here for a while,” McHale said. He was running his flashlight beam along the carpet of dust on the floor. “This place has been abandoned.”

  Down the hallway, two state troopers brought in portable halogen lights. A moment later, the front hall was awash in bright, garish light. Shadows tilted, and it looked like the walls and the furniture moved.

  Ryerson went to the nearest window. Indeed, it had also been painted over with black paint. There was the barest hint of daylight shining through tiny flecks where the dried paint had been chipped or had flaked away in places. Ryerson reached out and scratched a fingernail along the glass, widening one of the small holes, her penlight clenched between her teeth.

  A shape moved on the other side of the glass.

  Ryerson jumped back. She went over to where someone had propped open a rusted storm door covered in muddy handprints, and stepped out onto a short concrete staircase. She peered around the side of the house, but with the exception of two troopers guarding the back, no one was moving around the side of the house.

  “Thought I saw someone,” she explained to the troopers.

  The troopers gave her a cursory glance. One of them—it was Alex Winsome, who’d come up from MCU’s Anchorage office to partake in all the excitement—shrugged, then turned away from her. The other trooper was a young guy from her own detachment, a kid named Emery Olsen who’d joined up a little over a year ago. Olsen had been one of the troopers she’d dispatched to Dread’s Hand last year when looking for that missing person. He and his partner had located the abandoned rental car.

  Down among the trees, Olsen glanced back up at her, as if he could sense her thinking about him. For some reason, she thought she caught a look of contempt move across the young trooper’s face. Or maybe it was apprehension.

  I feel a little sick, like I’m coming down with something, and I also feel cold, she thought, gazing away from Olsen and out toward the deeper part of the woods, where a fine, rain-speckled mist hung like a gauzy curtain between the trees. I think maybe I’m coming down with the flu, too.

  But she didn’t think it was the flu.

  She thought maybe it was the house.

  Something about the house didn’t feel right to her.

  * * *

  The feeling that something wasn’t right was confirmed when they discovered what was in the basement.

  “Jill,” Captain Ericsson called to her. “I think you should come have a look at this.”

  At first, no one had suspected that the ramshackle old house even had a basement—the earth was too rocky, too
hilly, and Mallory’s house looked like it had been constructed decades ago by unskilled labor—but then someone noticed what looked like a trapdoor among the floorboards in the hall that led to the back bedrooms. A crowbar was procured from someone’s vehicle, and the trapdoor was pried open. The smell that wafted out was terrible—a damp, heavy, cloying stench that was clearly the source of the stink throughout the house—and everyone around the hole in the floor backed away from it.

  “We’ll need gas masks,” McHale said, and Ryerson wasn’t sure whether he was joking or not.

  She wended through the crowd of men who stood around the trapdoor, peering down into the darkness. Wooden stairs sank down into the earth. “Someone give me their Maglite,” she said, holding out her hand. One of the troopers placed the cold metal hilt of his flashlight against her palm.

  “I got your back,” said McHale, coming up behind her.

  “Just make sure I don’t fall and break my neck.”

  It occurred to her as she descended the brief flight of wooden steps that the place could be booby-trapped. She’d heard terrible stories about police officers inadvertently stumbling into a house of horrors, where light switches were rigged to explosives and carpets were thrown over gaping holes in the floorboards. For all she knew, she could be stepping down into an electrified puddle of water the second her boot touched the ground . . .

  But the ground was solid dirt.

  “Smell’s worse down here,” she called back to McHale, covering her nose and mouth with one hand. That pungent, reeking scent of decay that had permeated the house upstairs was even more prevalent down here. It made her eyes water.

  She cast the flashlight around the room, which wasn’t a room at all, but a dirt hollow in the earth beneath the house. Pale white corkscrews of roots spiraled out of the dirt walls and finer roots—some so fine they looked like hair—sprouted in patches all around the place. She glanced up and saw the floorboards of the hallway above her head, so low she needed to remain bent forward, despite the fact that she was just five-foot-three.