Bone White

by Ronald Malfi

  “Ah, thank you! You’re a gem. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” McHale opened the carton of lo mein and a cloud of steam rose up in front of his face. He inhaled, grinning to himself.

  “How’s Mallory’s foot?” Ryerson asked.

  “Medic put a clean dressing on it. Says it’s healing. Mallory’s back in his cell now. Swinton just took him dinner. Have we heard back from Spring Creek yet?”

  “Not yet. They’re overcrowded. I’m sure we’ll hear something soon.”

  “Well, we can’t keep the bastard locked up in Puke Alley forever.”

  “I know.” She was thinking of Lucas Bristol, and how uncomfortable the young trooper had been ever since they’d brought Mallory here and locked him up. Bristol, who’d told her ghost stories from his childhood about haunted forests and a great-uncle who’d taken his head apart with a hunting rifle out there in the woods beyond Dread’s Hand.

  “I heard there was some commotion earlier today,” McHale said, peeking into the egg roll bag. “Some guy freaking out on you or something.”

  “No, not exactly. Guy flew in from Maryland to see if his brother was one of Mallory’s victims. Did the DNA swab, but he came back negative for a match. Still, he insisted Mallory had done something to his brother. Said it was too much of a coincidence that his brother had disappeared last year from the same town where Mallory lived and killed all those people.”

  “Well, yeah, I can see that,” McHale said.

  She told him about Paul Gallo running into Mallory as she walked him through the lobby, and the exchange that had taken place.

  “Guy was convinced that Mallory recognized him, and mistook him for his missing brother,” Ryerson said. “Oh, I guess I left out an important part of the story—the brothers are identical twins.”

  “Well, shit,” McHale said. He glanced up at her while in the middle of unwrapping a pair of chopsticks. “You think he’s right? You think there might be more victims out there that Mallory didn’t tell us about?”

  Ryerson didn’t answer the question. She had her own chopsticks out of the wrapper and was tapping them against the palm of her hand.

  Across the hall, Ryerson’s desk phone trilled.

  “That’s me,” she said, and set her lo mein container on McHale’s desk.

  “You take too long, I’m eating yours, too,” McHale called after her as she jogged into her office and closed the door.

  “Major Crimes,” she said into the receiver. “This is Jill Ryerson.”

  “Hi, Jill. It’s Walter Banks down in Anchorage.” Banks was the medical examiner who’d been conducting the autopsies on Mallory’s victims.

  “Yes! Hello.” She scooted around her desk, knocking some papers to the floor in the process, and dropped down into her chair.

  “I’ve got my staff preparing an official report for your office as we speak, but I wanted to give you a courtesy call ahead of time,” Banks said.

  “I appreciate that.”

  “So, it looks like the cause of death in all eight victims is from a single gunshot wound to the head. Point-blank range from a high-velocity firearm. Probably a rifle. That’s about as exact as I can get for you on that score, Jill.”

  “So the decapitation was postmortem,” she said.

  “Correct. My guess is he used an ax.”

  “Jesus. What in the world possesses someone to do that?”

  “I assume that’s a rhetorical question,” Banks said.

  “Yes. Sorry. I’ve just never seen anything like it.”

  “It’s beyond our grasp as human beings to comprehend something like this, Jill. Don’t try to understand it.”

  “It wasn’t just one of them,” she said. “He did that to all of them. Like there was a method to his—”

  “His madness, yes,” Banks finished. “And that’s exactly what it is. Of course, I’m no psychiatrist, but I think we’re capable of our own suppositions, don’t you?”

  “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

  There was a brief pause on the other end of the line. She could hear Walter Banks’s nasally respiration.

  “There was a man who killed his son and then himself back about, oh, eight or ten years ago or so,” Banks said. “Family lived over in Chena Hills. Name was Rhobean. It was such an unusual name I never forgot it. Terrible case, too.”

  “The boy was decapitated?”

  “Yes. The father took him out to the woodshed to do the deed. Then he put a pistol to his own temple. Kid’s mother found them out there.”

  “How old was the boy?”

  “Teenager. By all accounts, seemed like the kid and his old man had a fine relationship. Old man sounded like a regular guy, too, although it was a long time ago and I can’t say I remember all the details. I guess it was just one of those things, huh?”

  “I guess so,” Ryerson said. She hoped McHale had eaten her beef lo mein after all.

  “I do remember there was some speculation about devil worship.”

  She thought she’d misheard him. “Devil worship?”

  “There was something about it in the newspapers. I can’t recall the details anymore. Or maybe it was something from the police report. Your unit worked the case, you know.” Banks exhaled into the receiver. “My guess is those investigators are probably retired. Yet I’m still here, getting ’er done.”

  “And we appreciate that, Walter.”

  “God bless, Jill. Have a nice evening. Expect that report by the end of the week.”

  She was about to hang up when she remembered something. “Walter? ”

  “Yeah?”

  “That thing we found inside that trunk in the basement. Did you have a chance to look it over?”

  “I did. You wanna know what it is?”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  “Ovis dalli,” Banks said.

  “What?”

  “Dead sheep. The rotted carcass of a Dall sheep, to be exact. Thing’s been dead for years.”

  “A dead sheep,” she muttered to herself.

  “You said this thing was in his basement? In his house?”

  “Packed away in an oversized steamer trunk,” she said.

  “Well,” Banks said. “Like I told you, Jill. Don’t try to understand it. In fact, it’s probably best if you forget it. Just keep going forward.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  But she wouldn’t forget it.

  * * *

  “That man who was here today,” she said. “Did you recognize him?”

  Joseph Mallory did not answer.

  He was curled up in one dark corner of his cell, his food tray untouched, the clean white bandage around his foot seeming to float there in the gloom.

  “Mr. Mallory?” Ryerson said, her voice rising a notch.

  But Mallory would not answer. If it wasn’t for his rattling respiration, she might have feared him dead.

  “We’ve identified that thing you had in your trunk. It was a sheep.”

  Above Ryerson’s head, a lightbulb fizzed out, dousing Mallory’s cell in even more darkness.

  She stood there for a few minutes longer, wondering if there was some incrimination in Mallory’s silence, or if he was too unhinged to attribute any logic to his behavior.

  “The devil has his tricks, but you can beat them,” said Mallory.

  “What does that mean?”

  “That man today.” But he didn’t finish the thought.

  “So you know him.”

  Mallory didn’t answer.

  “Do you know him? Did he look familiar to you?”

  “Tricks,” Mallory said. “And now I’m worried that everything I’ve done has been for nothing.”

  “Are there more bodies?”

  Mallory just stared at his feet.

  “Did you do something to that man’s brother? Are there more bodies out there you haven’t told us about? Mr. Mallory, please, if there are others, why haven’t you told us?” When he didn’t respond, s
he said, “You haven’t been living in your house for some time. Pipes were frozen, no electricity. No food. Where have you been all this time?”

  But Mallory was done talking.

  The light above Ryerson’s head blinked back on. She peered up at it, then back into Mallory’s cell.

  Mallory’s face looked like a skull wreathed in long, greasy hair, his empty eye sockets like black pools of ink, his jaws lined with rows of elongated, vampiric teeth. A moment later, it was just Joe Mallory’s face again.

  Trick of the light, she thought.

  Disquieted, Jill Ryerson left.

  14

  It was a nightmare, in which he was swept up high over the treetops by a great wind and carried off into the darkness, that caused Paul to wake. His whole body jerked as his eyes flipped open. Darkness pressed down upon him, and he sat up, disoriented. The only suggestion of light came from the stars poking through the quilt of night outside the windows beside his bed.

  And then it all came back to him: He’d driven up to Dread’s Hand and had checked into the Blue Moose Inn. He’d downed a few aspirin and reclined on the bed, unaware of how exhausted he’d been. Sleep had blindsided him.

  But he’d fallen asleep with the lights on, hadn’t he? The lights were now off. He leaned over to the nightstand and turned the switch on the lamp—click-click-click. The light did not come on.

  The room was like an icebox, and when he exhaled, he could see his breath crystallize in the air. He wondered whether the inn had lost all power, and if so, why a place out here wouldn’t have a backup generator.

  The tendons in his back popping, he climbed out of bed and went over to the windows. He opened the shutters and peered out into the misty night. The moon hung above the horizon, where black trees melded with the peaks of the distant mountain range. A soft snow was falling, large, messy clumps wetting against the windowpane. The inn sat at the top of a slight incline, but there were dense conifers right outside his window, obscuring his view of the village below. The woods looked as black as a coma.

  Someone was standing outside his window, blending among the dark line of trees.

  Paul felt his body flush cold. He stood there staring out the window, trying to discern further details of the figure. But it was impossible to do so given that snowy darkness on the other side of the snow-wetted glass. He could make out the dome of a head and the slope of one shoulder. Paul tried to convince himself that it was a trick of the light coupled with his frazzled state of mind—that it wasn’t a head at all, but one of the tumor-like burls that bulged from the trunks of the Sitka spruce—but the longer he stared at it, the more that dark silhouette was undeniable. Still, he might have been able to convince himself that his eyes were playing tricks on him and that there was no one there if a cloud of respiration hadn’t been expelled from the figure’s mouth, creating a blossom of fog against the outside of the windowpane.

  Shit.

  Paul backed away from the window, his own reflection in the windowpane momentarily superimposed over the dark figure on the other side of the glass. As he stared at it, the blossom of fog on the glass shrank, then faded away altogether. He continued to back away toward the door that led out onto the hallway, his reflection shrinking until it vanished. Not taking his eyes off the shape on the other side of the window, he brushed his hand along the door until he found the doorknob. But when he turned the knob and tugged at it, the door held fast in its frame.

  A spark of panic ignited within him. He spun around and, gripping the doorknob with both hands, gave it a yank. But the door wouldn’t budge.

  The dead bolt was engaged, he realized, and he twisted the lock. This time, when he jerked on the knob, the door swung open.

  The hallway was just as dark as his room. Paul hurried down the hall toward the lobby, one hand trailing along the wall, a rectangle of moonlight framed in the window at the front of the inn. The neon OPEN sign was now dark. The front desk was unmanned, the moose head keeping watch over an empty lobby. Paul reached the front door and shoved out into the night.

  The cold struck him like a slap. He hadn’t been prepared for just how sharp and bone-numbing it was outside. He was facing the rutted dirt road, which was now covered in a smooth sheet of white, and the wall of dark spruce trees beyond. The moon appeared as a massive glowing skull cleaved in half behind a gauzy black cloud, its pearl-colored light illuminating the steeple and one side of a small whitewashed church seated down in a slight valley and partially buried within the trees.

  Shivering, Paul walked around the side of the inn. The proximity of the tree line to the wall of the inn made it look as if he was staring down a tunnel. He could make out the black rectangle that was his window and the footprints beneath the window in the snow.

  He just stood there for several seconds, his breath misting the night air, his whole body quaking from the cold. And maybe not just the cold.

  It wasn’t just the footprints below the window—a trail of prints had been stamped in the fresh snow. They began below the window and wended around toward the front of the inn, keeping to the line of trees so that Paul had initially missed them. They wound down toward the snow-dusted road where they hugged the shoulder on their way down into the valley.

  Paul followed them, moving through the freezing night. Even as he pursued the prints, it occurred to him that no one could have covered such a distance in so short an amount of time—less than a minute had passed from the moment he glimpsed the figure on the other side of his window until he’d rushed down the hall and out into the night. This was his rational thought, anyway; his reasoning, however, was overpowered by the urge to follow those prints as if led by an invisible tether.

  Up ahead, the church came into view. It was sunken into the earth and bordered on three of its four sides by trees. It was a small whitewashed building fashioned into a perfect triangle, with a cross extending from the zenith of its steeple. Stained-glass porthole windows flanked the wooden double doors. It was as modest a church as Paul had ever seen, and its simplicity made it look like a child’s drawing. There was a bench out front, its wooden slats covered in snow; Paul thought of the reporter Keith Moore, and of his story about the man named Lans Lunghardt who, in the sixties, had murdered his entire family with an ax and then sat down out in front of the church to wait for the police, his clothes covered in blood.

  His middle son made it out of the house, Keith Moore had told him, but old Lans brought the kid down with a swift drop of his ax between his shoulder blades, killing him right there in the backyard.

  Paul shivered.

  The footprints curled around the side of the church and disappeared beneath the shadows of the looming spruce trees. Paul followed, the snow-covered ground beneath his feet seeming to cant at an angle. The ground beneath the snow was not level. He glanced northward and saw a wide, snow-shrouded clearing backstopped by distant mountains, where dark shapes rose up from the ground. Paul wiped the snowflakes from his eyelashes and tried to discern what it was he was seeing in that clearing, but the moon had retreated behind a wall of dark clouds, making it impossible to see with any clarity.

  The footprints cut alongside the church and vanished into the woods.

  Enough is enough, he thought. Your teeth are chattering in your skull, and you’re liable to break your ankle walking around out here on this sloping hillside.

  Yes, he knew he should turn back . . . but he couldn’t.

  There was a path leading into the woods, he saw—a path untouched by the snow that couldn’t breach the heavy pine boughs of the trees. It was a rugged dirt path, black as satin in the dark, and it climbed up toward denser woods and, judging by the proximity of the mountains, the beginning of the foothills.

  This is wrong, he thought. This whole thing feels very wrong.

  He stepped onto the path . . . and felt a strange twinge in the pit of his stomach. It was like riding an elevator that was dropping floors too quickly. The feeling passed just as fast as it had come, bu
t its eerie memory remained.

  The incline was steeper than it looked, and he felt the strain in his calves as he ascended into the woods. It was too cold out here to work up a proper sweat, but after just a couple of minutes campaigning up the hillside, his heart was speed-bagging against his rib cage.

  This is wr—

  He groped for a branch at the same instant he saw someone—or something—shift in the darkness just a couple of yards ahead of him. The sight startled him and caused him to lose his footing while his groping hand undershot a nearby branch, missing it. The result sent him crashing down on his face onto the hard-packed earth. Stars exploded behind his eyelids and a sharp pain knifed straight up his nose and screamed like wildfire to the back of his skull.

  The realization that he wasn’t alone out here had him scrambling back to his feet. His eyes were watering, wet slicks freezing down his cheeks. His nose throbbed.

  “Who’s there?” he hissed into the darkness. He scanned the surrounding woods, but could not see anyone. “Danny?”

  He realized how absurd it was, calling his brother’s name, but he was no longer thinking rationally. He was no longer—

  A distant, sonorous howl rose up through the night. Paul froze, his breath caught in his throat.

  A wolf, he thought.

  But as the howl wound down, it flattened to an unmelodious, almost human-sounding wail.

  Not a wolf. Not a wolf.

  Paul scanned his surroundings, but it was futile—beyond the trees in every direction was nothing but black space.

  The sound came again, and this time there was no confusing it with the howl of a wolf, or any other animal, for that matter. It was a throaty, agonized shriek that rose in timbre until the voice cracked, then broke apart in a drumbeat of hitching sobs before dying altogether.

  That’s a person out there. Someone who’s hurt.

  Something moved off to his left. Paul swung his head in that direction but could see nothing in the darkness. The boughs of the spruce were heavy and pearled with moonlight, and they knitted a network of shadows beneath their branches—shadows that appeared to move and shift and betray all logic and common sense.