No Woods So Dark as These

by Randall Silvis

  “He named Reddick?” he said.

  “Didn’t name him but recognized him from the photo. Said he was usually with McNulty when she filled the prescriptions, and that she didn’t look like the woman in the photos Jayme took.”

  “Excellent,” DeMarco said. “So you have Reddick in custody?”

  “Headed up there right now. We thought you and Trooper Matson might like to join the party.”

  “You know,” he said, “we’re sort of tied up here at the moment. Besides, you guys don’t need us there. It’s your party. Give us a call if you get anything out of him, though I suspect he’ll stay true to form.”

  “I agree,” she said. “We have a BOLO out on the fake McNulty. I have a feeling she’ll be the talkative one once we catch up with her.”

  He heard the faucet running in the bathroom, which meant that Jayme was brushing her teeth. Then she would gargle and then be his.

  “Listen,” he said. “How about we meet up in the woods in Otter Creek tomorrow? The full team and a couple of dogs?”

  “You think Cheryl’s body is up there?”

  “He trusted that place enough to take Choo Choo and the female vics there. I’m betting he’s trusted it before that too.”

  “The ERT should’ve scraped the place clean already, though, right?”

  “It’s easy to miss something when you’re not looking for it,” he told her. “If there’s a grave up there, it won’t be on top of the crime scene. But not far away either.”

  “I’ll talk to the captain,” she said.

  He heard the water stop running. “Gotta go,” he told Flores. “Excellent work, Trooper. We’ll see you in the morning.”

  He laid the phone on the bedside table just as the bathroom door came open. Turned and looked her way.

  “Did I hear you talking to somebody?” she asked.

  Something fluttered in his chest at the sight of her. There was a soft radiance to her body that always took his breath away. So this was no time for a prolonged conversation. “Singing to myself,” he told her, and held out his arms. “The ‘Hallelujah Chorus.’”

  IV

  These violent delights have violent ends

  and in their triumph die, like fire and powder

  which as they kiss consume.

  —William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

  Ninety-Two

  Reddick’s cockiness had morphed into a simmering rage by the time he was cuffed, booked, and shackled to a metal table in the interview room of the county jail. The room was otherwise empty—one table, two chairs on one side, one chair on the other—and several degrees below comfortable. Reddick’s lawyer, seated beside him in a slim-fit, skinny-legged suit only someone forty pounds lighter and thirty years younger should wear, with enough gel in his hair to grease a small elephant, kept grinning at Flores and flipping his black eyebrows up and down in a way that made her want to stomp on them. She stood against the wall beside the closed door, hands clasped loosely below her belt, her face expressionless, a portrait of disdain, while Boyd sat facing Reddick and the lawyer. Captain Bowen, with a sheriff’s deputy at his side, watched from the observation room and nervously sipped coffee from a cardboard cup without tasting a drop of it.

  Reddick denied that the missing Cheryl McNulty was not the real Cheryl McNulty. Denied any knowledge of either McNulty’s whereabouts. Denied that he or anyone he knew had forged prescriptions. Denied that he sold drugs out of his house. Denied any acquaintance with anyone named Choo Choo, Suzi, or Lady D. To all other questions he answered with some variation of “I have no knowledge of that” or “I have no recollection of that.”

  Boyd, who sat tilted back in his chair, finally said, “Look at me. I’m not the FBI, and you’re not Hillary Clinton. So how about an honest answer for a change? I’m going to give you one last chance to do yourself some good. Who is, and where is, the woman pretending to be Cheryl McNulty?”

  Reddick stared at Boyd’s forehead. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  Flores laughed a single-syllable, “Hunh.” She shook her head and chuckled. “You know,” she told Reddick, “for a while there you were giving a fairly decent impression of being moderately intelligent. But now that I see you up close, you look as dumb as a fart.”

  “Hey,” the lawyer said, which she ignored.

  “Trooper Boyd,” she said, “may I have the pleasure of informing this scum-sucking knuckle dragger of what’s going to happen to him if he fails to cooperate?”

  “Be my guest,” Boyd said.

  “So,” Flores told him, and smiled at the ceiling before looking down at Reddick again, “we are going to find your fake Cheryl. And she is going to give you up in exchange for reduced charges. And then Jakiella is going to corroborate her story. And where will that leave you? Sharing a prison cell for a very long time with a tattooed man with a look of love in his eyes.”

  Reddick smirked.

  His lawyer flipped his eyebrows up, then down. He said, “You are attempting to intimidate my client.”

  She stepped closer. Put both hands on the edge of the table. Leaned toward Reddick. And said, “Do you feel intimidated, Mr. Reddick? Would three or four first-degree murder charges intimidate you?”

  “Hey hey hey,” the lawyer said. “Who said anything about murder? Nobody’s talking murder here.”

  She smiled at Reddick. And said in a near whisper, “We’re just getting started with you, gilipollas.”

  “Hey,” the lawyer said, “what did you just call him?”

  She stepped back to lean against the wall. “Ask his tattooed lover when you meet him. Maybe you and your twitchy eyebrows can get in on the action too.”

  Reddick’s face was slowly going pale. The lawyer looked confused. Boyd was trying not to laugh out loud. Behind the glass, Bowen raised his cup for another sip, sucked only air, then stared into the empty cup, saw no coffee, looked to see if he had spilled the coffee on the floor, saw none, and asked the trooper, “Where did all of my coffee go?”

  Ninety-Three

  The woods were damp in the early morning chill, the branches dripping. A lingering scent of wet ash hung in the gray air. Two troopers with their dogs on leashes worked outward from the burned car and the tree to which Choo Choo had been nailed. Jayme, DeMarco, Flores, and Boyd followed behind, spread well apart, eyes on the ground. They were looking for a depression in the earth, a disturbance in the matted leaves, a mound of freshly turned dirt, a shred of clothing. Staring so intently at the monochromatic ground made their eyes hurt. Nobody talked.

  Chase Miller stayed several yards back from the others so that he could keep everyone in sight. He had dressed too lightly, in a hurry after Jayme’s call, and now shivered every fifteen seconds or so. But he would not let the chill ruin this opportunity. He had promised DeMarco that he would be inconspicuous, a fly on the wall, and that his subsequent narrative of the search, if the search proved successful, would not be released until DeMarco gave the green light. But even if no body was found, he could use this experience again and again, the scent of wet branches, the wet, decomposing leaves, the numbing chill in his feet and hands and on his face, the eerie hush of the searchers’ movements. Even the stiffening shivers, each one an icy hand pressed to the small of his back, and the way the chill raced up his spine to explode soundlessly across the scapulas—yeah, that was good stuff; he could build a library out of experiences like this.

  He held his cell phone close to his mouth, whispered so that even he could barely hear the words, “the mood is somber, even reverent…the dogs appear to enjoy their work and hurry from place to place, then stop suddenly, consider a scent, then move forward again…you can almost feel something dark hovering in the air…some shadow…death…violence…evil. There’s been only one chipmunk so far, not a single squirrel…all the animals seem to be in hiding… Now and then a cro
w’s caw, it surprises me every time, makes me look but I can never see it… I wonder what the birds are doing now, where do they go when they hide? All of those little eyes watching us, maybe laughing at man’s folly…”

  Ever since the trip to Lost City he had been more than a little ashamed of himself. Had thought he could run the show, be the big hero. But he saw now, following the others, that it would never be like that. Not with this kind of business. The dogs were running this show, the six humans, seven including him, at the dogs’ mercy. And willingly so. Even his blog seemed foolish to him now. What gave him the right to be a pontificator? Social critic, huh. If he was going to be a writer of any value he needed to disappear behind the material. The way Stephen Crane had. Jack London, Nellie Bly, Ambrose Bierce, all of those pioneering journalists he had read about in school and after. Let the story do the talking. Let the bones and the heart and the ghost of the story say it all.

  But there was a thrill in that too. He hadn’t noticed it until this morning, the thrill of being the invisible eyes and ears and mouth for the story. The funnel through which the story ran. He was actually doing something here. Preserving the moment, the experience. All that new journalism bullshit, all that me me me, it devalues the story. He saw that now. Felt it. It was what DeMarco knew too, all of them up ahead. The case was bigger than them and they didn’t try to become the story. Just as the story was bigger than the person writing it. Every good writer knew it was so. The rest was nothing but ego.

  DeMarco was a hard man to please, but he wasn’t unfair. He could learn a lot from DeMarco. From Jayme too. And Boyd.

  As for Daniella…yeah. It would be nice to talk to her alone sometime. Maybe coffee? Could I interest you in a cup of coffee some afternoon? She probably had a boyfriend. But no engagement ring, in fact no jewelry at all. May I ask, is there a man in your life? Naw, too formal. Old-fashioned. You wanna grab a drink tonight? I mean, I’m not a drinker myself, but you shouldn’t let that stop you. God, what a joke. She would probably laugh at him. Look at her. Armed and dangerous. Probably knew six different ways to subdue a man. Not that that was a turnoff. Ever use those cuffs for recreational purposes? Dude, you’re such an ass. Pay attention to what—

  “Over here!” a trooper called.

  Everybody changing direction, making a beeline. Gathering around a spot he could not yet see.

  “Chase!” DeMarco called. “Can you run back to the car and grab the shovel?”

  “I’m on it!” he called, turned and jogged back though the leaves, talking into the cell phone louder now, “Okay they found something, I’m running for the shovel now, it might be a body or something else I don’t know but what else would they be digging up out here? I’m betting it’s a body. I hope they let me do the digging…”

  Ninety-Four

  Before they climbed into their own vehicles and headed back to town, DeMarco approached Trooper Boyd, stood close to him, half smiling, and asked in a conspiratorial tone, “You know anybody at the jail who could maybe whisper to Sonny that we found the real Micki?”

  Boyd cocked his head. They had no idea whose body had been found.

  “Just a hint,” DeMarco told him. “Just a tease. Let’s see if Sonny is smart enough to put two and two together.”

  “You’re going to talk to him again?”

  “I’m going to run home and get a shower and then, yeah, I might pay him another visit. I miss his smiling face.”

  Boyd nodded. Allowed himself his own small smile. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Ninety-Five

  “What are you doing back here?” Jakiella asked.

  DeMarco had come to the jail alone this time. All of the sheriff’s deputies and guards knew him, knew that he was still attached to the state police, though in a vague way, and therefore did not question his right to interview the prisoner. He took a seat facing Jakiella across a plastic-surfaced table in the mess hall. The room was beginning to fill with the scent of that day’s lunch, meat patties and dark-brown gravy. From the kitchen came the clangs and thumps of meal preparation and the muffled conversations of the kitchen staff, all of it coming hollow and empty into the dining room.

  “Just thought we might have another chat before they send you off to detox.”

  “How soon’s that going to happen?”

  “You getting a little antsy, are you?”

  “I shoulda been there already.”

  “I was thinking I might suggest they keep you here awhile longer. See how you handle cold turkey. Depending on how our conversation goes, of course.”

  “Why would you do something like that?”

  Sonny Jakiella looked even smaller than the last time DeMarco had seen him. Shrunken. Defeated. He was sitting sideways on the wooden bench, both legs on the outside, knees together and arms crossed over his stomach, hunched over, his body turned away from DeMarco, only his head inclined DeMarco’s way. With DeMarco’s last statement, Sonny’s face pinched even tighter.

  “Sonny, are you about to start crying on me?”

  “I never done nothing to you. You’re a real son of a bitch if you keep me out of detox.”

  “You lied to me. You know that and so do I.”

  Sonny’s eyes swiveled back to the floor, his head rocking back and forth.

  “Oh, hey, guess what?” DeMarco said. “Guess who we found this morning. The real Micki. What was left of her anyway, in a gully up in Otter Creek. She was covered with a couple feet of dirt and leaves. And not more than forty yards from where you nailed Choo Choo to a tree.”

  Instead of appearing startled by that news, Jakiella remained motionless. “I don’t even know what that means. The real Micki.”

  “It means that the one you knew was a fake.”

  And now Jakiella’s head shifted again, his eyes coming back to meet DeMarco’s. “Are you shitting me? This is for real?” His voice was shallow and hoarse. Grief and fear will do that to a man. Not to mention heroin withdrawal and living inside a cage with a bunch of animals. Jakiella was a weak man but he had a conscience, a memory, a heart, all of which DeMarco planned to use against him.

  More than once DeMarco had looked at an incarcerated individual and thought how inhumane such treatment was, how primitive. But what were the alternatives? Those who did harm to others needed to be removed from society. Rehabilitation worked less than a third of the time, with around 70 percent of all criminals, regardless of the offense, returning to crime. Jakiella did not view himself as a criminal but the law did, and DeMarco did too. A young woman struggling to avoid drugs had been given drugs; whether the intent was her death or not, the supplier of those drugs remained culpable. DeMarco could gaze at Jakiella with pity yet find his behavior reprehensible.

  “Of course, that was just another lie, wasn’t it?” DeMarco asked.

  “What was?”

  “That you didn’t know the second Micki is a fake. You’re Reddick’s business partner, are you not? You’ve already copped to killing Choo Choo, Suzi, and Lady D because they stole from Reddick’s cache, so it only makes sense that you were in on killing the real Micki too.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “What did she do to tick you guys off? Was she not generous enough with the goodies?”

  Jakiella’s head rocked back and forth. “I don’t have to sit here and take this from you.” He put a hand on the edge of the table but seemed too weak to do more. His hand twitched like an electric shock was running through it.

  “Yep,” DeMarco said. “The DA is going to love this. Four counts of murder one, Sonny. Choo Choo, Suzi, Lady D, and now Cheryl McNulty. No, wait. For you it will be five. I forgot about Sully.”

  This time his whole body twisted toward DeMarco. “I did not kill her! Don’t you say something like that. I never done anything to hurt her!”

  “Okay, so maybe manslaughter for Sully. But you helpe
d with the others. Four is still a nice round number. Plus obstruction of justice, conspiracy, three counts of abuse of a corpse, the drug charges, misprision of felony…”

  “What’s that last one mean?”

  “Failure to report a crime. Man, the charges keep piling up, don’t they? All in all, Sonny, if I were you I’d be hoping for the death penalty. Just take the needle and get it over with. Of course, you will have to wait your turn. Pennsylvania has almost two hundred people like you on death row. I can’t imagine what that must be like, can you? Day after day after day, waiting for your number to be called? Just sitting there in your cell, counting the minutes, remembering all the people you hurt. And doing all of that stone-cold sober. That’s got to be excruciating. Especially for a jittery guy like you.”

  “What are you even doing here, man? I told you everything I know.”

  “Tell me how the real Cheryl died.”

  “I didn’t even know there was a real Cheryl! I thought the one I knew was the real one! She’s the only one I ever knew.”

  “So you’re saying it was all Reddick’s doing? His and Fake Cheryl’s?”

  “How would I know that?”

  “They must have mentioned it once or twice. You all being so close.”

  “I wasn’t close to anybody but Sully. Reddick treated us all like garbage.”

  “And yet you’re willing to go to prison for him? And be somebody’s punch for the next decade or so before you even get sent to death row? What’s wrong with this picture, Sonny?”

  Jakiella shook his head, squeezed his arms against his stomach. “I need to think about this awhile. I can’t even think straight anymore.”