Bone White

by Ronald Malfi

  She pulled on her robe, shoved her feet into a pair of threadbare slippers, and answered the door.

  Mike McHale stood there in an Aces hockey jersey with a brown paper bag held out before him. The smile fell from his face when he saw her.

  “Jesus Christ, Ryerson, you look like death warmed over.”

  “What the hell are you doing here? I’m contagious.”

  “Yeah, well, my hazmat suit is at the dry cleaner’s.” He held out the brown paper bag. “I brought you some chicken soup.”

  “No kidding? Homemade?”

  “Caribou Café,” McHale said. He handed her the bag, then scraped the grime from his boots onto the welcome mat in the hall. “Can’t beat it for a cold. I’m pretty sure this stuff cures cancer, too.”

  McHale followed her into the kitchen, where she opened the brown bag on the counter and inhaled—as best she could—the cloud of steam that billowed out.

  “Smells delicious.” She took one bowl down from the cupboard, then, reaching for a second, said, “You want to share?”

  “I’m good. Just had some pizza. Wanted to check up on you, that’s all.”

  “You’re too kind.” She opened the soup container and poured some into a bowl. “How’s Bristol holding up?”

  “He’s a nervous wreck. Looks like he failed to make rounds a few times that night.”

  “That’s not good,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, at least he didn’t try to falsify it in the ledger.”

  Ryerson nodded. They kept a ledger that needed to be signed, dated, and time-stamped after each walk-through of the holding cells. Ryerson had heard stories of officers in the past having fudged these entries to cover up some problem, only to be caught later and fired. As long as Bristol hadn’t done something stupid like that, he’d make it through this thing without any serious problems. That was good.

  “Also, Emery Olsen quit,” said McHale.

  Ryerson froze with her soup spoon halfway to her mouth. “What? He’s only a year out of the Academy! What happened?”

  “He said he wanted to move down southeast to be closer to his family. But I spoke to Mannaway, and he said Olsen had been acting funny ever since the search warrant on Mallory’s place. Said something had spooked him.”

  “What?”

  “Beats me. But he and Mannaway were close. I think they went through the Academy together.”

  She recalled the look of contempt Olsen had given her when she’d met his eyes during the search warrant at Mallory’s place. She’d gone out the side door of the house and Olsen had been standing in the back lot, staring into the woods. Olsen and Mannaway had been up to Dread’s Hand a year earlier, and had found Danny Gallo’s rental vehicle on the side of the road.

  “Well, that sucks,” she said.

  “Some people just aren’t cut out for this stuff.”

  Ryerson spooned soup into her mouth. “Jesus, you’re right. This stuff might just cure cancer after all. Thanks, Mike.” She nodded at the folder he now held in both hands. He’d had it tucked under his arm when she’d opened the door for him moments ago, but only now recognized it as one of their case files from the office. “What’s that?”

  “It’s that old file you asked me to get before you wimped out and got sick.”

  McHale set the file on the counter, and Ryerson could see the subject’s name typed on the tab—RHOBEAN, DENNIS. She’d forgotten about it.

  “Did you look at it?” she asked, setting her soup aside and picking up the folder. She opened the file and looked at the cover page of the report. It was dated nine years ago.

  “Hell, no,” McHale said. “We’ve got enough stuff going on right now that I don’t need to read about ancient murders, too. What’s the big deal with it, anyway? Why’re you so interested?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” she said, scanning the report, “but something the ME said to me on the phone the other day piqued my curiosity. I’m sure it’s just a dead end, but I wanted to check it out.”

  “This have to do with the Mallory case?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not. It’s really nothing. Forget it.” She closed the folder and tossed it onto the counter.

  “Well, in that case, I’m so glad I wasted an afternoon digging that thing up for you.” But McHale’s smile was genuine. “Hey, you feel better, okay? I’m gonna take off.”

  “Keep me posted on Bristol,” she said, walking him to the door.

  “I will.”

  “And thanks again for the soup.”

  “Cures what ails ya,” he said, and clomped out into the hall. Next door, the widow Tannis poked her gloomy old face out of her apartment and scrutinized McHale like a housemother in a girls’ dormitory. McHale saluted her, said, “M’lady,” and caused her to withdraw back into her apartment with a twisted scowl on her face.

  Grinning to herself, Ryerson closed the door and slid the chain lock into place.

  Back in the living room, she finished her soup while watching the third season of Orange Is the New Black, but she lost interest halfway through the second episode. She was thinking about the Rhobean folder sitting on the kitchen countertop. She told herself she’d lay her eyes on it, if only because McHale had gone through the trouble of digging it up for her from the old hard-copy file cabinets in the basement. But as she got up, set her empty soup bowl in the sink, and picked up the Rhobean case file off of the counter, she knew that wasn’t the reason. She’d scrounged around in the station-house basement in the past herself, pulling old case files—those that had existed prior to the conversion to the electronic case management system—but in those instances, she had pulled cold-case files to see if they were in any way related to any of her current investigations. That was not the case here. The Dennis Rhobean investigation wasn’t unsolved. Moreover, the Joseph Mallory case was . . . well, Mallory’s suicide had seen to it that that was driven to a swift and final conclusion, too.

  That’s because they both killed themselves, she thought, taking the case file into the living room. She powered off the TV and used the remote to switch to the stereo. A Lovedrug CD came through the wall-mounted speakers. Both suspects took their own lives. Also, both suspects cut off the heads of their victims. I’m not looking for a correlation here, and I don’t even expect to find one . . . except for maybe a peek into the psyche of the type of person—the type of madman—who would do something so heinous.

  She started with the police report. She did not recognize the investigator’s name, but it was written in the terse and workmanlike style with which she was familiar.

  The Rhobeans were from Chena Hills. The father, Dennis, was a millworker. Gwendolyn, the mother, was a middle-school teacher. They had one child between them, a boy, named Kip. Kip was fourteen years old when his father walked him out to the woodshed behind their property, placed the barrel of a Glock 9mm to his head, and pulled the trigger. He then proceeded to separate the boy’s head from the rest of his body with an ax Dennis had kept in the woodshed. Based on the coroner’s report, it had taken Dennis three attempts to get all the way through the neck bone and spinal column. Once the job was done, Dennis Rhobean wrapped his teenage son’s head in a sheet of tarpaulin, then shot himself in the temple with the same handgun. The coroner opined that Mr. Rhobean had lived for two hours on the floor of the woodshed beside his son’s decapitated body, the bullet having penetrated the right hemisphere of the brain before cutting to a sharp ninety-degree angle and exiting out the top of Dennis Rhobean’s skull. Rhobean’s cause of death was listed by the coroner as exsanguination—loss of blood.

  The report contained no statement from the wife and mother, Gwendolyn Rhobean, although the investigator mentioned that it had been Mrs. Rhobean who had discovered the carnage in the woodshed later that evening. Ryerson couldn’t begin to imagine what something like that might do to a person. When she was younger, she’d heard about a woman who’d rolled her SUV into a lake in South Carolina with her two young children strapped inside.
The woman had lied and told police that she’d been carjacked, but she was ultimately found guilty of filicide. The worst part, for Ryerson, were the images of the father of that South Carolina woman, sobbing on TV, so filled with grief and terror and a black, rancid sorrow that Ryerson had never been able to forget that doomed and tortured man, whom she had never met, except in a scant few nightmares. How did someone continue with their life after something like that?

  Ryerson turned the last page of the report, unprepared for what followed.

  Photographs of the crime scene had been scanned into the report. Her only solace was that they were poor reproductions, grainy and black-and-white. Much of the detail had been washed out by a lousy Xerox machine. Nonetheless, they were terrible. The photos of the bodies were bad enough, but the single shot of the sheet of tarpaulin folded over and twisted at the top like it was a Christmas gift was, for some reason, the most disturbing of all.

  She turned the page and froze.

  The report said nothing about this, she thought, staring at these additional photos of the crime scene.

  They were photographs of the woodshed’s interior walls. Perhaps an average person looking at these photographs wouldn’t understand what they were seeing, but Ryerson was bringing some context to it. Even in black and white, she could tell that the strange hieroglyphic symbol streaking the woodshed wall had been painted there in blood. Moreover, she recognized it. The eyeball with the vertical pupil.

  She stared at the symbol until the CD stopped playing on the stereo.

  How is that possible?

  She flipped back to the first page and checked the date of the investigation again. It was nine years ago. Nine years ago in Chena Hills, Alaska.

  So, how is that possible?

  It wasn’t. That was the only sensible answer—it wasn’t possible. Yet there it was, reproduced in shitty Xeroxed photos tagged on to the end of a police report that was roughly a decade old.

  Maybe it means something. Maybe I should have an expert look at it, an expert in symbols.

  But she wouldn’t even know where to begin.

  She closed the file and set it on the coffee table. The stereo’s disc changer rotated to the next CD, and when Trent Reznor’s static-laden guitar riff burst through the speakers, she nearly jumped out of her skin.

  24

  After an hour of campaigning through the forest following the trail of crosses up into the foothills, Paul came upon a clearing that he didn’t recognize until he saw the vinyl flags staked into the ground, the streamers of yellow police tape tied to tree trunks blowing in the wind, the excavated craters in the earth from which the bodies of Mallory’s victims had been exhumed. The crosses had led him to the mass grave site by way of the forest, which meant he was back inside the border of Dread’s Hand.

  But no—that wasn’t exactly true. He was on the other side of the border this time, on the opposite side of the line of crosses forming the boundary around the tiny village. He looked up toward the foothills, where the woods grew darker and more dense and where the sky was a muddy smear above the treetops, and he could see the crosses at intervals between the trees. The crosses were smaller out here, only a few feet high and as thin as broomsticks, but he could still see them. The pattern also matched the pattern on Mallory’s walls—larger crosses to smaller ones, arcing high with the incline of the land. But how far did he have left to go? He didn’t want to get caught out here after the sun had gone down.

  He continued on, sweating despite the cold, the muscles in his legs getting a strenuous workout. Only when his shadow repositioned itself on the ground did he realize he kept changing direction. His increasing weariness notwithstanding, he began to feel invigorated by the climb. The burn in his muscles felt good. Moreover, there was a sense of certainty bordering on giddiness that washed over him with each step he took. This was the right thing. He was on the right path.

  But when he looked around, he realized there was no path. Somewhere during his trek the crosses had vanished, or perhaps he had wandered away from them without realizing it. He walked in a complete circle, peering through the interlocked boughs of the trees, but he could no longer see the crosses. How long had he been traveling blind?

  He laughed nervously, a plume of vapor rising in front of his face.

  Wait a minute. Just wait . . .

  He took his cell phone out, checked the time—3:55 P.M. How the hell had it gotten that late? It would be dark in less than two hours.

  “Shit.”

  He found his footprints in the snow and retraced them, hoping to come upon the place where he had inadvertently parted ways with the line of crosses. Yet after about twenty minutes, he found himself coming upon a second set of his own footprints. He realized that he’d been walking in circles.

  “Goddamn it.” He rubbed some warmth back into his cheeks. The cold was beginning to get to him. Or maybe it was just nerves.

  The shadows of the trees grew long, and the woods began to darken all around him.

  He pushed on, heading in the direction that felt right . . . although he’d never been one whose internal compass could be trusted. He questioned his decision with every step, and wondered if it didn’t make more sense to just follow the slope of the land downward. He’d reach either Damascus Road or Dread’s Hand that way, wouldn’t he?

  The color of the snow on the ground went from white to purple to a deepening gray. For a time, Paul stared at his shadow as it gradually faded. When he looked up again, the daylight had been leeched from the horizon.

  A figure stood maybe twenty yards away, partially obscured behind skeletal tree limbs, staring at him.

  It was Danny.

  Paul felt his throat tighten. He called out his brother’s name, and it came out in a hoarse, restrictive cry—“Danny!”

  Danny turned away from him and stepped over a deadfall, moving with the lassitude of a sleepwalker. He walked off into the woods, where he was quickly eclipsed by shadow.

  “Danny!”

  Paul pushed himself forward despite his aching leg muscles. In his haste, his boot snagged on a tree stump, sending him sprawling to the ground. He scrambled to his feet and ran after his brother, scanning the darkness for Danny’s pale shape. After a moment, he discerned a figure cresting an incline several more yards ahead. Paul pursued, not pausing to realize that there was no way Danny could have covered such a distance in so few seconds.

  His face was whipped by pine boughs and scratched by branches as he ran. He fell a second time when he slammed both shins against a massive deadfall that, in his urgency to catch up with his brother, he had overlooked. He rolled over the deadfall and slammed against the cold, solid earth. The pain in his shins flooded through him a moment later. But by then, he was already up and racing through the trees, desperate to catch sight of Danny again.

  25

  He did not know how deep into the woods he had gone—or how long it had taken him to do so—when, exhausted, he sank to the earth. He leaned his back against a tree and pulled his knees up to his chest. He was out of breath, and his muscles felt rubbery and loose. The headache was back, a jackhammer driving through shelves of gray matter, and he still felt ill at the pit of his stomach. Each exhalation felt like he was breathing fire. He guessed he had a full-blown fever now, too.

  Beyond the canopy of trees, the moon crept behind a scudding train of dark cloud. A wavy band of greenish light bisected the night sky, shifting dreamlike. Paul watched the green turn to a cool aquamarine, to a pale indigo, to an impossible alien color that appeared to spread like a stain across the bowl of sky. Occasional stars would poke through the veil, like small, uninhabitable islands within a river, their usual cold-white brilliance tinted to a hazy bronze.

  It began to snow. As Paul stared up past the interlocking tree branches and at the river of impossible light traversing across the sky, snowflakes cooled his face and collected in his eyelashes.

  If there was ever a true connection between us, Danny, let
me connect with you now. Please. Please, Danny.

  He closed his eyes and tried to grasp at a connection he’d never believed existed before, but, like an operator ringing a dead line over and over again, he received no answer. He felt hollow and untethered, and he wondered if that was because of the fever he could now feel circulating throughout his system. He coughed out great billows of vapor. Snot trickled from one nostril.

  He remembered his cell phone, and fished through the pockets of his coat for it. With numb fingers, he dug it out and pressed the Power button, but nothing happened. The cold had killed the battery.

  His hands began to tremble. He felt like chucking the cell phone at the nearest tree, but instead, he fumbled it back inside his pocket.

  Sure, he thought. Just in case I happen to find a power outlet on the side of a pine tree. That would be perfect.

  The laugh that followed this thought scorched his throat.

  He closed his eyes for just a second—

  * * *

  —but when he opened them, he felt different. His entire body was overcome by a strange combination of frigid numbness and slick, burning heat. He held one hand up in front of his face, expecting to see steam rise off his flesh.

  Something watched him from a high tree branch. It was a figure—a silhouette—of a human being, though it was perched in an impossible crouch on a high branch with seemingly perfect balance. Paul stared at it, unable to discern anything more than its indistinct, humanoid outline. After a time, it rose to its full height, a black figure silhouetted against the shimmery green aurora that formed a winding ribbon across the night sky. The figure’s eyes blazed with a dazzling emerald-green light.

  That isn’t real. I’m hallucinating.

  It crouched behind the trunk of the tree, then proceeded to crawl down, its movements simultaneously reptilian and insect-like. When it touched the ground, it moved partway out from behind the tree. It was too well hidden in the dark now for Paul to make out anything more than ambiguous, ill-defined movements. It shifted around him counterclockwise, its footfalls soundless on the wet ground. Paul turned his head to watch it go, and swore he heard the creaking of the tendons in his neck.