No Woods So Dark as These

by Randall Silvis

  Autumn had always been her favorite season, when even a single day could bring a change in the landscape, a deepening of colors, then a gradual browning and a shedding of leaves that used to fill her with longing for her father, who had passed away at this time of year.

  Too soon the trees would be bare again, the limbs turning skeletal, and then the modest homes and dilapidated sheds and barns could be seen clearly through the branches, set back from the busy interstate but not far enough away to escape the noise or dirty air. Then old cars and trucks and tractors left abandoned in somebody’s field or yard would be visible. A rusting school bus parked beside a weed-filled pond with a wooden dock half-sunk in the water. A pile of rotting tires.

  Too soon everything would look dirty, the algae on roofs and walls conspicuous without the leaves, the lawns getting scraggly, flower beds full of dying or dead plants, fields of brown stubble. The countryside would not look good again until snow blanketed the dirt and the trees glistened with ice. Jayme hoped that winter would come early. A few months of hibernation would be good. Quiet days and quiet nights. And then spring again. Red buds and greenery. Tulips and cherry blossoms. Delicate pinks and whites.

  But now you could not drive for ten miles without seeing at least one dead deer along the road, spooked into the traffic by hunters so eager to kill that they spent nights and weekends scouting for the best sites. Even the billboards were covered with road grime. On one of them, an advertisement for a restaurant, a huge porterhouse steak had turned grayish-brown, the au jus on the plate the color of ash.

  Off the exit ramp, DeMarco made a left toward home.

  “Can we walk for a while?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said. “Anywhere in particular?”

  Both kept a pair of cross-trainers on the back seat floor, windbreakers and hoodies and fleece pullovers on the seat. They had been doing a lot of walking since the miscarriage, a lot of long, unhurried walking with little said between them. Sometimes they walked the running track at the high school, sometimes the loop around the Mercer County Courthouse. On occasion they might stop for a hot dog and root beer float in the little shop across the street. Sometimes they walked the half-mile loop that ran past the ball fields and tennis courts in Brandy Spring Park, walking uphill one-fourth of the distance, downhill another fourth.

  “The park,” she said. “If that’s okay. It’s quiet now that softball season is over.”

  “Anything you want is okay.”

  He pulled into one of the ten parking spaces across from the fenced-in dog runs. Three of the slots were occupied. In the rearview mirror he could see part of the pond behind the equipment shed. “The geese are still hanging around, I see. A couple pairs of mallards too. Might be a warm winter after all.”

  She turned in her seat, reached to the back, and found her shoes. Brought them forward, dropped them at her feet, then turned and reached for his. He slid his seat back, leaned over the steering wheel, and started untying his right shoe.

  She took off both of her heels, put a naked foot up on the edge of the seat, walking shoe in hand. “It’s okay what you said,” she told him. “I know you’re still thinking about it.”

  “I’m sorry if it hurt you. I wish I’d kept my mouth shut.”

  “It’s not like you reminded me or anything.”

  “I just never know whether to talk about it or not.”

  “We talk about it in group,” she said. “I just assumed you wouldn’t want to be hearing the same thing again and again.”

  “What I want to hear is any and everything you have to say.”

  She nodded, smiled to herself, then slipped on her shoe. Tied it, put her foot down, raised the other. Outside, five or so yards behind the car, a man’s voice was growing loud. DeMarco turned to look out the rear window.

  The guy was leaning down close to his dog—a shepherd mix of some type, still a puppy but already two feet tall and well over fifty pounds—screaming into its face while also pulling the leash up tight, yanking the dog’s front paws off the ground. On the pavement close to the dog was a pile of fresh feces. The guy was thin and scruffy, with long greasy hair and an untrimmed beard. He wore baggy gray sweatpants and a tan, stained trench coat over a black T-shirt, looked to be in his thirties, maybe older, and wobbled unsteadily as he barked in the dog’s face. The dog was making choking sounds and whimpering, its ears flattened, head turned to the side as if about to take a blow.

  Then the man started jerking hard on the leash, snapping the dog up and down, his voice so loud that the four other people in the area stopped to look his way. “You think I’m picking that up, you’re crazy! I oughta rub your face in it! I oughta make you eat it, that’s what I oughta do.”

  DeMarco grabbed a fleece pullover for Jayme and laid it in her lap, then popped open his door and climbed out. “Hey!” he called. Then bent down and looked inside at Jayme. “Take out your phone and video this.” Then, as he walked briskly toward the man, he yanked at the knot in his tie and opened the top button on his shirt.

  The man had looked up at DeMarco’s shout. Straightened. And now lessened some of the tension on the leash. “Hey what?”

  DeMarco said nothing more until he was face-to-face with the man. “You need to stop abusing your dog. Right now.”

  Jayme climbed out and stood close to the car and watched the encounter on her screen.

  “Is he your dog?” the man asked. “I don’t think so. So maybe you need to mind your own fucking business, dude.”

  DeMarco looked down at the animal. Put his hand out toward it. The dog flinched. Gently then DeMarco laid his palm atop the dog’s head. Rubbed his hand back and forth. The dog raised its snout to him.

  “How much do you want for it?” he asked.

  “Who said he’s for sale?”

  “He’s either for sale or I report you for cruelty to an animal.”

  “Ha. Your word against mine.”

  “Look behind me. Smile for the camera.”

  The man squinted at Jayme, scowled, peered down at the dog. Then turned to DeMarco again and gave him a look. As if he had peeled off his sock and saw a gangrenous foot. “Hunnerd dollars,” he said.

  DeMarco reached into his pocket, pulled out a wad of bills, peeled off two twenties. He said, “You get the rest when you clean up after your dog.”

  “In that case make it two hunnerd.”

  “You lost the right to negotiate. All you have now are two choices. Sell me the dog for a hundred dollars, or talk to the police.”

  The man breathed loudly through his nose, his mouth puckered as if he wanted to spit.

  DeMarco said, “Judging from the way you smell, you do not want to talk to the police right now. I can have them here in three minutes.”

  They locked eyes for another fifteen seconds, DeMarco’s gaze steady, the man’s less so. Finally he shoved the leash toward DeMarco, who took it and let the tension fall slack. The man stepped over to the feces, scooped them up in his bare hand, carried them to a barrel in a corner of the dog run, and dropped them in. He wiped the hand on his coat as he returned to DeMarco.

  By then DeMarco had five twenties in his hand. He laid them in the outstretched, dirty palm.

  “Ha,” the man said, and closed the bills in his fist. “I can get another mutt for free anytime I want.”

  DeMarco took hold of the sleeve of the man’s trench coat, was careful to touch only the fabric, and pulled him close. “If you ever abuse another animal,” he whispered, “I will know it. And then I will put a leash around your neck and pull you up on your toes, and we’ll see how you like it.”

  Not until DeMarco released him did the man speak. He stepped away and rolled his shoulders, shook his trench coat by its lapels, and mumbled “Yeah, yeah, yeah” as he headed away.

  “Hey!” DeMarco called. “What’s his name?”

 
; The man answered without turning. “Dumbfuck!”

  When DeMarco returned to Jayme, with the dog trotting along beside him, she asked, “What did you whisper to him?”

  “I was admiring his coat. Asked him where he bought it.”

  “Right,” she said, then looked down at the dog, which was standing against DeMarco’s leg and looking up at her with huge brown eyes.

  DeMarco said, “Don’t worry. I’ll find it a good home.”

  She leaned down and held her hand in front of the snout. The dog sniffed her palm, then licked it. “I think you already did.”

  Six

  The first thing the dog did after DeMarco parked along the edge of his backyard, and after Jayme popped open the rear door to reach for the leash, was to leap past her and race toward the house, zigzagging from side to side to sniff at every object of interest like a perfumer turned loose in a field of exotic flowers. Jayme chased after it, shouting, “Dog! Stop! Sit, dog, sit!”

  To no avail. After dragging its nose along the edge of the porch, the dog sprinted around the corner of the house and toward the street. Jayme caught up to it watering the realtor’s For Sale sign planted near the sidewalk, and stomped her foot onto the leash. “Bad dog!” she said, but she was already falling in love with the animal, and waited patiently until it had thoroughly soaked the signpost.

  DeMarco, who had hurried inside through the back door and now stood on the front threshold holding the screen door open with his body, was grinning. During Jayme’s side-to-side dash after the dog, she had seemed like her old self again, brimming with energy and resolve. Now she stood with her hands on her hips, feigning disapproval.

  He called, “I guess we won’t need that sprinkler system after all.”

  The dog gave him a look, as did Jayme. She said, “Thanks for your help.”

  Fifteen minutes later they were about to lift the dog into the bathtub, which had been filled with six inches of warm water and three inches of fragrant, bubbly foam, when the front doorbell rang and echoed ominously through the house. Jayme flashed back to the last time she had responded to someone at the door—it had been Laraine that time, DeMarco’s estranged wife.

  DeMarco said, “That clown better not have followed us here.”

  “Who?” she said, confused.

  “The guy I bought him from. That better not be him at the door.”

  Ten seconds later he yanked open the door to find Trooper Mason Boyd standing there, in uniform, a patrol car parked at the curb. It took DeMarco a moment to find his smile. “Trooper,” he said. “How are you doing?”

  Boyd held up an eight-by-ten-inch photo he had been hiding behind his back. It showed the upper half of a naked black man standing against a thick tree trunk, with what appeared to be long metal stakes driven through his neck and near the bottom of his sternum.

  DeMarco winced.

  “Discovered early this morning,” Boyd told him. “In the woods up in Otter Creek Township.”

  “Is he nailed to that tree by those two pegs?”

  “By three of them. Rebar rods. There’s another one just above the genitals. I have a full body shot in the car if you want to see it.”

  DeMarco, wincing again, shook his head. “Put that away.”

  “It’s just the tip of the iceberg, Sergeant.”

  “Put it away before Jayme sees it.”

  Boyd’s gaze shifted then, went over DeMarco’s left shoulder, and DeMarco felt her presence there, then her hand against his back. “What do you mean?” she asked the trooper.

  “A hundred yards away was a burned-out car, an older model Santa Fe. The remains of two bodies in the back seat. They were mostly ash by then.”

  DeMarco’s head was already moving back and forth. “Not interested,” he said. The dog squeezed into the space between his leg and Jayme’s, her fingers wrapped around the collar. DeMarco let his hand drop, scratched between the dog’s ears.

  Boyd said, “I’m not supposed to take no for an answer.”

  “Fine,” DeMarco told him. “Make it ‘no way in hell’ instead. Let’s see how that works for him.” He was referring to their former station commander, Captain Kyle Bowen, the man responsible for dispatching Boyd to their home.

  Jayme asked, “Have they been identified?”

  “We’re working on it. The bodies in the car were still smoldering when a father and his two boys found them.”

  “Children?” she asked, and Boyd nodded. “How old?”

  “Thirteen and nine. The youngest one saw them first.”

  Jayme turned, moved her eyes to DeMarco. He cocked his head, his mouth in a thin-lipped frown.

  Boyd lowered the photo now, turned it against his leg.

  Jayme asked, “Pennsylvania plate?”

  “No plate.”

  “Mace, we’re out,” DeMarco told him. “We’re taking a break. I don’t care if Bowen likes it or not. Has he forgotten that we’re retired?”

  Trooper Mason Boyd was a slender man of medium height and had been one of DeMarco’s favorite people when they worked together, principally because Boyd knew when to keep his mouth shut, which was 90 percent of the time. In terms of avoiding small talk, gossip, and all forms of idle chatter, Boyd ran a close second to DeMarco. His only answer to DeMarco now was to remain standing where he was, his face expressionless, the photo of the spiked man flattened against his leg.

  To the trooper, Jayme said, “You want some coffee?”

  DeMarco turned her way again. Looked at her.

  “They need us,” she said.

  He held her gaze a moment longer, then shook his head, pivoted away from the door and crossed back into the room, shaking his head all the way.

  Jayme moved aside and made room for the trooper to enter. He petted the dog’s snout. “Nice dog,” he said. “What’s his name?”

  “Nobody knows,” Jayme told him. “Cream, no sugar, right?”

  Seven

  The air in the woods of Otter Creek Township sat heavily in Jayme’s chest. At least the breaths of air in that particular piece of woods strung with neon yellow police tape. The stink of scorched metal and melted rubber. Burned grass and leaves and incinerated meat. It all clung to her clothing and stung her nostrils, though the torched car and the remains of its unfortunate passengers were a hundred yards to the rear. Before her was a man nailed to a tree. Black man, mid to late forties, five ten or eleven, average-to-muscular build. Naked but for several tattoos and a penis ring. One rebar stake through his neck, one through his lower sternum, one five inches below his navel. His head hung limp, arms limp at his sides. There were no signs that he had struggled while being crucified, no torn-up ground beneath his bare feet, only a wide area around the tree that appeared to have been raked clean of footprints.

  Plenty of blood had spurted and oozed from each wound, painting his body and feet, indicating that he had been alive but probably unconscious during the process. His bowels had released at some point pre- or postmortem.

  Jayme and DeMarco stood approximately six feet back from the body, accompanied by Joe Loughner, a member of the Evidence Recovery Team. Seventy years old, Jayme had guessed upon meeting him, give or take a year. Probably stood at least six feet tall before whatever accident gave him the limp that caused him to rest most of his weight on the good right leg. Probably close to two hundred pounds, though the white paper bodysuit might be making him appear plumper than he was. She could see enough of his gray hair to know that it was clipped almost to the scalp, which would also accentuate the fullness of his bulldog face. He seemed unperturbed by the carnage. He had lowered the face mask upon first meeting them, and now had no trouble breathing deeply, seemingly unaffected by the foul air. His blue eyes sparkled when he talked. He had probably seen and smelled it all before.

  The sun was shining from the southwest through a layer of cirrus cl
ouds, coming into their eyes soft and diffuse, so that the dead man was shaded by the tree and, had they been twenty or thirty yards farther back, would have been hard to distinguish from the oak.

  DeMarco said, “Any chance of pinpointing the source of that rebar?”

  “We’ll try, of course,” Loughner said. “But it’s common stuff. Available in just about every hardware store in the country. Where I come from, people use it to stake up their tomatoes and pole beans.”

  He waited for another question from DeMarco, but none came.

  “This looks like number four or five,” Loughner told them. “No protrusions on the other side of the tree. Protrusions on this side from north to south are approximately nine, thirteen, and seven inches long. You can see where the heads have been flattened somewhat with a mallet. Entry wounds are fairly clean, not ragged as you’d expect from a blunt end being pounded in.”

  Jayme said, “So the other ends were sharpened first. Which means that whoever did this was in no hurry.”

  “Definitely not a rush job,” Loughner said.

  DeMarco leaned back slightly. “How long has he been here?”

  “Body temp when last measured was just over fifty,” said Loughner. “Air temp went down to thirty-nine last night, is currently in the high forties. Figuring a loss of one and a half degrees of body heat per hour, best guess is he died early yesterday morning.”

  “How early?” DeMarco asked.

  Loughner shrugged. “Medical examiner thinks predawn.”

  Jayme kept one hand lightly covering her mouth and nose. “So they were brought here under cover of darkness. Which means the perp was familiar with this place.”

  “Perps,” Loughner said. “No drag marks from the car. John Doe here was carried. Plus it would have taken at least one person to hold up the body while another one nailed him into place. We think we’ve identified at least five sets of footprints in the area, but the best of them come from the father and his kids who found the car, and they never made it this far. Thank God for small favors.”