by Ronald Malfi
“You did that,” Rena said, sounding ill.
The vision swam back to him, grainy as an old filmstrip—lying on his back, staring at the sky, the sense that someone was there with him, his right hand sliding into his field of vision coated with blood.
“At least go to the health center,” Rena said.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “Can you handle the class?”
“Yes. Can you handle walking? I can send someone with you.”
“I can manage.”
“If you fall again on your way—”
“Then I’m the lucky fool who gets to claim workers’ compensation.”
Rena smiled down at him, though the concern was still etched across her face. She turned back to the class and said, “Okay, gang. Show’s over.”
The class applauded when he stood up.
* * *
That night, he called Ryerson’s desk number with every intention of leaving a voice mail. He could still see that unsmiling, black-and-white visage of Joseph Mallory in his mind’s eye, resonating like the afterimage of a flashbulb. The grease-parted hair and the checked flannel hunting jacket. Mallory. Mallory. And whenever he closed his eyes, he saw that bloodied hand, which he now believed was Danny’s hand. However improbable that was.
Ryerson answered.
“Investigator Ryerson, this is Paul Gallo. We spoke about a year ago regarding the disappearance of my brother, Danny Gallo. You located his rental car near a town called Dread’s Hand. Investigator Ryerson, I’ve been reading the news about what’s happened out there, and I thought maybe . . . well, I thought maybe I should call.”
“Of course. Yes, I remember our conversation.”
“The media’s been reporting that none of the victims have been identified yet.”
“That’s correct.”
“So, how do we do this?” he asked. “Do you need me to view the bodies to make an ID? Or is it a matter of just, I guess, checking their fingerprints through some database? Danny has a criminal record.”
“Well, Mr. Gallo, I’m afraid it’s not that simple. Given the condition that the bodies are in, I mean . . .”
“Oh,” he said.
“What we’re doing now is comparing certain characteristics of the victims to any missing persons reports that have been filed in the past five years. We’re also asking anyone who suspects they might be related to any of the victims to come in to the station and give a DNA sample. Given your situation, I’d recommend doing that. It’s possible to do it through your local police department, though we’ve been expediting the results out here. I can’t speak for how quick the turnaround time would be somewhere else.”
“Okay,” he said.
“We’ve also had some people come in and examine articles of clothing and some items that were seized from the suspect’s residence during a search warrant. I can’t send you photos of any of the items—they’re proprietary—but for someone who was out here who could come—”
“Then I’ll come out there,” he said.
7
Jill Ryerson was outside smoking a cigarette when the unmarked car arrived. It was around 10 P.M. and the temperature had dropped considerably—it was cold enough so that Ryerson couldn’t distinguish between her regular respiration and the cigarette smoke.
The electronic thermometer that hung by the side door where Ryerson stood smoking had frozen and stopped working last winter, but Ryerson knew it was somewhere in the low thirties. Snowflakes, like little filaments of pillow stuffing, floated about the atmosphere without ever touching the ground. But she was used to it.
She was born in Kennewick, Washington, but her family had relocated to Ketchikan, Alaska, when she was five years old. Hers was a large family—she was the youngest of five children—and her father, who’d worked for a logging company, found himself relocating every few years in order to get promoted and keep ahead of creditors. She’d spent her formative years in Southeast Alaska, hiking along the banks of Lake Mahoney with her sisters, where they would often take a boat out into the center of the glacial lake, the water so clear you could see straight through to the bottom. It was a nice place to live, except during spawning season: Once the salmon had finished their run, the creeks would fill up with their flyblown corpses and the air would turn rank. Ryerson would tie a wet handkerchief around her nose and mouth and go down to the river and poke the dead fish with sticks, fascinated by the lifelessness of them. For her eighth-grade survival trip, she and her classmates were ferried out to a series of uninhabited islands by the Coast Guard and left there for three days with only a sleeping bag, a roll of Visqueen, and a coffee can filled with whatever sundry articles you saw fit to take along with you (the smart kids took matches and dried soups). Ryerson learned to build a fire and boil water to kill the parasites, lest she’d suffer from what some of her classmates called “beaver fever.” While most of her classmates had found the experience to be hellish, Ryerson enjoyed it. (Her only mistake was keeping her soap in the same container in which she cooked her soup—to this day, she couldn’t stomach the smell of Dial soap.) It was during this trip that thirteen-year-old Jill Ryerson became interested not only in the art of survival, but in the concept of helping others survive. She showed her classmates how to erect a tent of Visqueen over a tree branch and how to wrap their dry matches in a sock at night so the dampness wouldn’t blunt the match heads. This interest would later bloom into a full-blooded passion that would see her through the completion of the fifteen-week DPS academy in Sitka once she turned twenty-one. She’d only been in Fairbanks for the past three years; much like her father, who’d chased promotions for his entire career, she’d taken the transfer in order to get into Major Crimes.
But it was damn cold. Ryerson shivered inside her fur-lined parka as the unmarked vehicle rolled around the curved strip of blacktop toward the sally port. It was dark and the sedan’s windows were tinted, but she didn’t have to see inside to know who was being transported in the backseat.
Ryerson pitched the cigarette butt over the rail and went back inside.
Trooper Lucas Bristol was standing behind his desk in the lobby, peering down the narrow hallway that led to the sally port. He glanced at Ryerson as she came in, his baby face a mottled red from the cold. He was twenty-two years old, but in that single glance, he looked all of fifteen.
“It’s McHale and Swinton back from Anchorage,” she informed the younger trooper.
“With the guy?”
“Yeah. With the guy,” she said. She knew he meant Mallory.
“I thought they were keeping him in Anchorage.”
“Captain changed his mind.” This wasn’t exactly the truth: It had been Captain Dean Ericsson’s plan to house Mallory at Fairbanks all along, Ryerson knew. Transferring Mallory to Anchorage Regional Hospital after his arrest from the much closer Fairbanks Memorial was a calculated misdirection on Ericsson’s part. The media had incorrectly assumed Mallory would be held at the Anchorage facility following his release from the hospital instead of being transported the 350-plus miles back to Fairbanks.
“Oh,” Bristol said, and Ryerson thought he looked somewhat disappointed to hear this, although she didn’t know why he should. When the sally port door opened, the young trooper glanced down at his desk, where a pack of playing cards were laid out in mid-solitaire.
He doesn’t look disappointed, she thought then, watching Bristol. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he looks frightened.
Troopers McHale and Swinton came in, their faces red from the cold, ushering between them the hunched, ambling form of Joseph Mallory. Had it not been for the renovations at the far end of the detention block, they could have led Mallory straight from the sally port and into the cell block without having to cross this section of the station. Had the renovations been completed on schedule—weeks earlier, in other words—then Lucas Bristol would never have had to see McHale and Swinton leading Joseph Mallory to his holding cell.
“Starting to snow
out there,” McHale commented to no one in particular.
“Won’t stick,” Swinton responded, and Ryerson got the impression that this had been debated on much of the drive up from Anchorage.
She watched them lead Mallory across the lobby toward the large steel door that led to Puke Alley, which was what the guys called the corridor of holding cells. Mallory had one of the trooper’s spare parkas draped over his shoulders, a thing that looked too heavy for the emaciated man to carry. As they went by, Mallory’s head swiveled in Ryerson’s direction, that curtain of long, unwashed hair swinging in front of Mallory’s eyes, the top of Mallory’s bald head reflecting the fluorescent ceiling fixtures. Mallory’s beard looked like a tangle of dried weeds.
She looked back at Bristol, who was staring at McHale and Swinton as they ushered Mallory down Puke Alley. He continued to stare even after the steel door swung shut.
“You okay, Bristol?” she asked.
“Huh?” He jerked his gaze in her direction. “What’s that?”
“Never mind. Is there any coffee?”
“Oh, uh . . . yeah. There’s half a pot.”
“Wonderful. Where’s Johnson?”
“McDonald’s run.”
She nodded toward the closed steel door of Puke Alley. “They’re transporting him to Spring Creek in Seward as soon as there’s a bed,” she said, hoping this bit of information might give Bristol some peace of mind. “Won’t be long before he’s their problem.”
Bristol nodded but didn’t say anything.
Ryerson slipped into the kitchen nook and dug a clean mug out of the cupboard. It read STUPIDITY IS NOT A CRIME, SO YOU ARE FREE TO GO on the side. She filled it with coffee that she nuked in the microwave until it was practically boiling. Her whole body felt cold, right down to her toes. Half of her coworkers were out sick, and she worried that she might be the next one in line for the flu.
I just need some sleep, that’s all. A good night’s sleep. Been going a hundred and ten miles an hour for the past few days, and that’s not good for anyone.
As she sipped her coffee, an image of that . . . thing . . . in the steamer trunk in Mallory’s cellar popped into her head. She and McHale had gotten out of there pretty quick, but not before the stink of it had crawled into her nostrils and seated itself in the center of her skull. She’d gone home that night and took a steaming shower for forty minutes, as if that could wash the memory of the stink away.
Hungry for company, she went back out into the lobby. Bristol slouched behind the duty desk, hammering a single key on the computer keyboard.
“Those bodies that were recovered up there in the hills,” Bristol said, not looking up from the computer screen. “Is it true? About the heads being cut off?”
“Yes,” Ryerson said. “It’s not something I’ll forget anytime soon.”
“Postmortem or . . . ?”
“Well, we won’t know about that until we hear back from the ME in Anchorage.”
“Jesus. Who does something like that?”
Ryerson didn’t respond. She slurped her coffee, leaned back against the wall, and tried not to think of that terrible thing in the trunk. CSI had packed the whole trunk in biohazard bags and carried it away like it was a nuclear bomb.
“Do you know anything about that place?” Bristol asked.
“What place is that?” Her mind had drawn a blank.
“Dread’s Hand.”
“Not really. It’s just an old mining village. There are half a dozen of them out that way.” But she was picturing those wooden crosses staked into the earth as she drove into town, and that peculiar child who stood on the side of the road in that fur mask, waving at her as she drove by.
“My mom’s people are from Nenana,” Bristol said, looking up from the laptop. “I’ve got uncles and cousins who used to go hunting and fishing up that way—‘going up the Hand,’ they called it. I had an aunt who used to tell us ghost stories about the woods out there. She used to say that the woods were haunted, and that the town itself was a bad place. She said there were bad places on earth—dark spots, like bruises—and that Dread’s Hand was one of them.”
“No kidding.” She stared down at her reflection simmering on the surface of her coffee.
“Said there were devils up there,” Bristol said. “Noonday devils, she called them. But Uncle Otto said it was the Bone-walker. ‘That thing’ll touch you and turn you mad,’ he’d say.”
“Fun guy,” said Ryerson.
“I had a great-uncle who’d gone out there hunting and wound up killing himself,” Bristol said.
Ryerson looked up at him. “Yeah?” she said.
“Suicide. He ate the barrel of his Remington.”
“Well, shit.”
“It was a long time ago. My ma’s people still claim it was some bizarre hunting accident, but I don’t know how you accidentally put the barrel of your rifle in your mouth, then manage to squeeze the trigger.”
“Good point,” Ryerson said, nodding. Suicides this far north were nothing out of the ordinary, but she could see the kid was disturbed by even the retelling of it. He’s a nice kid, but as wriggly as an ice worm, she thought.
“My grandmother claimed it was the devil that took him,” Bristol said. “That’s probably where my aunt got all that devil talk. ‘The devil got ahold of him, poor soul,’ my grandma would say, though she didn’t talk about it often. I just remember her saying it, you know? ‘The devil got ahold of him.’ Like it was something real, something out there in the woods with claws.” He offered Ryerson a shy grin. “I guess maybe that sounds silly,” he added.
“No sillier than any other superstition,” she said. She pulled her car keys from her pocket and held them up so that Bristol could see the lucky rabbit’s foot dangling from the key chain.
Bristol grinned, and Ryerson felt that maybe she’d helped put the kid’s mind at ease, if just a little bit. Wriggly as an ice worm was an understatement.
And yet . . .
Like it was something real, something out there in the woods with claws.
Which made her think about what Mallory had said as he stood up there on that clearing in the woods the day of his arrest, his eyes closed, his face turned toward the sky—Let’s get back to town before it gets grabby again.
She sipped her coffee and tried not to think about it.
* * *
When McHale and Swinton came back from Puke Alley, Ryerson told them to go get something to eat. Meanwhile, Bill Johnson had returned with a paper sack filled with Big Macs and McNuggets, and for the first time all evening, Ryerson saw Lucas Bristol’s eyes light up.
Ryerson set her coffee mug down on Bristol’s desk, then went over to the steel door. There was a small porthole window in the upper portion of the door, bulletproof and reinforced with steel wires, but it offered very little view of what was going on in Puke Alley. Ryerson selected a key on her key ring and unlocked the door.
“You want company?” Bill Johnson called over to her as he lined up burgers along the edge of Lucas Bristol’s desk.
“No, thanks,” she said. “I’m good. Enjoy the grub.”
Other than Mallory, the holding cells were empty. There had been a few drunks and a robbery suspect in here earlier, but they had cleared them out and transported them to another wing in anticipation of Joseph Mallory’s return from the hospital in Anchorage.
Mallory was sitting on the bench in his cell, his back against the cinder-block wall. Either Swinton or McHale had removed the down parka from the man’s shoulders, but that was okay; it was a stifling eighty degrees in there, enough to make Ryerson break out in a sweat despite the column of cold she still felt at the center of her body.
“Can I get you anything?” she asked the man on the other side of the bars.
“No, ma’am,” said Mallory. His voice was rough and abraded. He’d been dehydrated when she’d transported him to the hospital the afternoon of his arrest, and he’d had several toes removed from his left foot d
ue to frostbite—his foot was now wrapped in a heavy gauze bandage—but he was okay. Not, of course, that Joseph Mallory looked okay: The skin of his face was still bright red and peeling in places, and there were dark pustules and scabs around his mouth, beneath his eyes, and around his ears. The shiny dome of his head was wind-chapped, and large blisters stood out like craters on the surface of the moon.
“Tomorrow you’ll be brought before a judge to enter your plea. Has all this been explained to you?” She knew that a public defender had visited Mallory at the hospital, but she also knew that Mallory, who had already expressed his disdain for lawyers on more than one occasion since his arrest, had dummied up and not uttered a single word to the guy.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mallory said. “Though I don’t need no lawyer standing there getting paid while I admit to my guilt, ma’am.”
“The judge will ask you why you killed those people.”
“Well, now, I won’t discuss that with no judge,” he said. His hands were clasped together in his lap. Except for the single standardized rubber sandal he wore on his one good foot, a serial number stamped across the sole, he was still wearing his own clothes. They stank to high heaven, and even in the gloom of Puke Alley, Ryerson could see the rust-colored streaks of dried blood hardened into the fibers of the linen pants, the thermal undershirt, caked along the frayed cuffs of his sleeves. She had no doubt that they’d be able to pull a serious amount of DNA out of Mallory’s lumberjack beard and greasy hair, too, if they so desired. She’d heard that some nurses had sponged him down at the hospital, and that he’d howled like a hound who’d just treed a ’coon. She’d also heard that patches of his clothes had grafted to open sores along his torso and thighs.