No Woods So Dark as These

by Randall Silvis

  “You’d better think hard. Think about what Sully would want you to do. What your daughters would want you to do. Do you teach your kids to lie, Sonny?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And yet that’s exactly what you’re doing. Your little girls are going to grow up, graduate from school, get married, have children, all while you rot away like a bag of potatoes. Give that some thought, Sonny. Think long and hard. Because if you stick with your story, you will never hug your children again.”

  “I never will anyway.”

  “Why is that? If things went down the way I think they did, and you cooperate with the prosecution, you could do your time right here, never even go to prison. One to two years and you’re out.”

  At that, Jakiella looked up at him again. “That’s never going to happen.”

  Such a pitiful look on Jakiella’s face. DeMarco almost felt guilty. “Let’s say that Reddick threatened you. That he forced you to help him with Choo Choo and the others. Let’s say you feared for your life. Maybe he even threatened your kids. That sounds just like him, doesn’t it?”

  Jakiella had no response. Yet he did not look away.

  “You haven’t talked to a public defender yet?” DeMarco asked.

  “Just a couple minutes or so. He couldn’t even pronounce my name right.”

  “He’ll be back around. They’re busy people. And he’ll tell you the same thing I’m telling you. You have one way out and one way only. Cooperate. Tell the truth. Don’t let yourself be Reddick’s sacrificial pig.”

  Even Jakiella’s blink was pitiful. Slow and heavy. Resigned. “He’s in here now, right?”

  “Luthor? That he is. You two can get reacquainted at your next meal. Maybe even get some private time together in the showers.”

  Jakiella aligned his head with his body again. Stared at the space between his bony knees.

  “Do you know what a scapegoat is, Sonny? Do you know where that word comes from?”

  Jakiella offered no response.

  “It’s used in the Bible. Do you ever read the Bible?”

  “When I was a kid I had to.”

  “Then maybe you know. The ancient Jews would have a ritual. Send all their sins into a goat, then drive the goat out into the wilderness to die. To get torn apart and eaten by wolves. That’s sort of what Reddick has done to you, isn’t it? He’s made you his scapegoat.”

  Jakiella rubbed a hand over his face. Said, “So you guys have Reddick on the other Micki? The real one? I mean you know for sure it’s her and that he put her there?”

  “We have enough,” DeMarco told him. “With lots more to come.”

  “So he’s going down no matter what? For doing the real Micki?”

  “Unless he claims to have knowledge that you did it all on your own. And seeing how you’ve already confessed to the other three…”

  As of that morning, the decomposed remains discovered in the woods had not been identified, nor had the cause of death been established. In dry earth the body might have been better preserved, but in the dampness of the Otter Creek woods, with fewer than three feet of earth and rocks and wet leaves atop it, the individual’s own bacteria had gotten the party started immediately and were soon joined by maggots, insects, worms, rodents, and other subterranean beasties. It was a wonder that the bones hadn’t been dug up and gnawed into pieces. So no, there was of yet no evidence that Reddick had murdered anybody. It was even possible that, if the body was that of the real Cheryl McNulty, she had died during an epileptic seizure or of some other ailment, and Reddick and the other woman had merely disposed of the body so as to continue collecting her disability checks. It was possible. But DeMarco would not have laid money on it.

  “And just so you know, Sonny. Prison is nothing like the county jail. A year here is a cakewalk compared to that circle of hell.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “That’s right, I think you don’t. Not really. You may have done some time here but all you know about prison are the stories you’ve heard. And stories can’t compare to the real truth.”

  “I know what I’m looking at.”

  “I have to disagree. You ever read Dante, Sonny?”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “The nine circles of hell. Guess which circle is life in prison?”

  Jakiella said nothing. His body seemed to have reached its critical mass in weakness. All voluntary movement had ceased. Two low-level currents, one of fear and the other of withdrawal, were coursing through his wasted body, making him quiver like a wet kitten, or like a dying bird in the snow, or like a man facing life without parole in a prison filled with monsters and beasts.

  “Prison is the ninth circle of hell, Sonny boy. The absolute worst. It’s where the devil himself lives. He walks the corridors every night. Slips in through the bars. Tortures you so that you beg, beg for death. But you’re already dead, aren’t you? That’s what prison is, a living death that you can never escape. ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’”

  When Jakiella spoke, he sounded drugged, out of breath, his words a sour exhalation. “Like I said. I need to think about things awhile.”

  He lacked the strength to even lift his head. And DeMarco wondered if he should keep pressing. Keep pushing pushing pushing until Jakiella fell apart?

  Even as a boy DeMarco had heard people say that words are only words and can do no lasting damage, but he knew that claim to be false. You could cut a man with a knife and if the cut is not too deep it will heal and leave a scar that the man can be proud of. He can show the scar to people and tell a story about the time he was cut and survived and he can embellish that story so that the person who cut him ends up being a miserable cur who got what was coming to him. The wounds made by words, however, are less visible and harder to treat, and sometimes those wounds never heal but only fester and fill the victim with poison and offer little opportunity for storytelling. Nobody goes around proudly recounting a story about the time they were cut deeply by an individual who said you are a worthless human being or you make me sick or you deserve to rot in your own filth. You have to be very careful when inflicting wounds such as those. You have to want to cause permanent damage to the victim. DeMarco had known some despicable men who deserved not an ounce of sympathy or consideration yet it was always difficult for him to hurt anyone in a permanent way. Maybe that was a flaw in his character. He did not know for sure one way or the other.

  In the end, he decided that he had done enough damage to Jakiella for the day. “Good talk,” he said. Then stood and walked to the door and left Jakiella alone with his misery and his shakes and his brutalizing imagination.

  Ninety-Six

  The team decided not to interrogate Reddick again until they had something close to proof that he was responsible for Cheryl McNulty’s death. The pharmacist’s identification of Reddick threw a bright light of suspicion onto him, but little more than that. The fact that Cheryl’s social security disability checks had continued to arrive in Reddick’s mailbox every month, uninterrupted by her death, added another beam of light. But what they needed to keep him where he was, without bond and no hope of being granted it, was evidence that showed his hand in Cheryl’s demise. They had no choice but to wait and let the forensics lab do its stuff.

  To keep from drilling holes in their desks with their tapping fingers, Flores and Boyd turned their minds to other work. They had schedules and routines to fall back on. DeMarco and Jayme searched online for a distraction, a way to fill their evening, and found a motorcycle show at Erie’s Bayfront Convention Center, forty thousand square feet filled with chrome and leather and freedom-thrumming engines.

  They held hands and strolled through the displays, sipped weak coffee from foam cups, dined on soft pretzels and undercooked hot dogs, traded TV commercial dreams of cruising up Highway 1, New England in the fall, lo
bster rolls and chowder for every meal, then into Canada and west across the Trans-Canada Highway all the way to the Rockies, into the Yukon for a while, the Takhini Hot Springs, the midnight sun in Yellowknife. Eventually they would turn south to follow the Pacific Coast Highway, Monterey, Big Sur, Carmel-by-the-Sea.

  “This trip will cost us a fortune,” Jayme said. “How are we paying for it?”

  “We could take the RV instead,” he said. “Trade in the one we have on a toy hauler. Or just hitch up a bike trailer.”

  “I love that idea! It would be so much better than camping out or paying for a motel every night. And it would be better for Hero too, wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” DeMarco said. “He looks like a biker to me. I bet he has a dozen tattoos under that fur.”

  “And what would be our favorite place?” she asked. “The place where we would all want to stay forever?”

  “That’s a hard one. You like beaches, I like mountains.”

  She stuck out her lower lip in a fake pout. “Why aren’t there any mountains with beaches at the top?”

  “God tried that. The water all ran downhill.”

  “Stupid water,” she said.

  He smiled; her remark reminded him of Flores when he had showed her the hay-bale bison: Stupid white man.

  “I wonder what the team is up to,” he said.

  “You’re missing them, aren’t you?”

  “Not a whit.”

  “Liar. You miss them all, I know you do. Even Chase.”

  “Chase who?” he said.

  They had paused beside a Victory Vision touring bike, azure blue, Jayme on one side, DeMarco on the other, both of them pretending to consider the curve of the tank, the height and width of the handlebars, the probable comfort of the deep leather seat.

  “It feels kind of anticlimactic, doesn’t it?” he said.

  As always, she understood his shorthand language, knew where his mind had gone. “You can’t end every case with a shootout, babe.”

  “I guess not. Besides, we still have a lot of loose ends to wrap up.” He was thinking not only of Chase and Flores and Boyd now, but also of Laraine, and especially Joe Loughner. How was he going to deal with what they knew about Loughner? He said, “If this were a novel, the reviewers would be saying ‘too many characters, too many plots.’”

  “Ignore the reviewers. Life is messy.”

  “Ours has certainly become that way. How did we let this happen? All these people in our lives.”

  “Don’t ask me. I’m not the one writing this novel.”

  “I wonder who is. God or Max Planck?”

  “Max who?”

  “The father of quantum physics. He had something to do with the discovery that photons and electrons sometimes behave like particles and sometimes like a wave.”

  “Stop it. You’re getting me all aroused.”

  “Ha ha,” he said, and came around the bike to take her hand again and lead her away to another aisle. “The experiment suggests that the observer influences, or, in Planck’s mind, creates reality.”

  “So which one of us is creating this reality?”

  “Not me, that’s for sure. My reality wouldn’t have all these noisy people in it. And the coffee would be better.”

  It was full dark when they left the convention center, with a cool breeze rich with the scent of water. Both had fallen into an easy silence, pleasantly worn out by three hours of slow walking and dreaming through row after row of beautiful machines. Beneath the lights of the parking lot, while Jayme walked with sleepy eyes on the softer lights along Lake Erie, DeMarco spotted something stuck to his windshield, and felt a chilling certainty that it was not a welcome or thank-you note or even a coupon for 20 percent off their next purchase.

  He guided Jayme to the passenger side, unlocked and opened the door, then strode quickly to his side and snatched up the slip of paper under the wiper. He read the three typed sentences, every letter in caps, while standing beside his door, then quickly crumpled the paper and stuffed it into a pocket.

  Then he climbed in and smiled at her, buckled up and started the long drive home. Every mile of the way, he was aware of the small ball of paper in his pocket, felt it like something alive and dangerous against his leg, resting now like a coiled snake but poised to strike, and he could hear the words on it as if Daksh Khatri were whispering in his ear: DID YOU AND YOUR LADY ENJOY THE NIGHT, GOOD SIR? HAVE A PLEASANT DRIVE HOME. WE WILL MEET AGAIN SOON.

  Ninety-Seven

  It’s her, Boyd’s text message read. Lab says 94% certain based on match with known medical stats on record, height weight age race etc, including childhood fracture of right ulna. Evidence of subdural hematoma AND strangulation.

  They had parked the car and were walking toward the house, the security lights all ablaze, when Jayme paused to turn her eyes to the sky. DeMarco paused beside her. She said, “I wish we could see the sky better.”

  He read the text silently, then showed it to her.

  “Do you need to call him back?” she asked.

  “It’s nearly midnight. If he had anything urgent to say, he would have called. Let’s enjoy the stars for a minute.”

  Using his phone, he extinguished the security lights. The yard and house went black, but the sky, second by second, filled with more and more stars. “There you go,” he told her. “They are all yours, my love.”

  Instead of feeling vulnerable in the darkness, he felt safer. Invisible. Besides, Khatri would not ambush them tonight. Probably he never would. He thought of himself as some kind of social or spiritual warrior but he was just another demented punk. If he came he would show himself first, would want to be seen. Probably he had no intention of physically harming DeMarco or Jayme, had never intended to. Why kill your audience? In St. Margaret’s he had probably intended only for Connor McBride to die, ideally after wounding DeMarco. But McBride had bungled the job and Jayme had come up the wrong set of stairs and Khatri had been unable to slip away after watching the show. He considered himself smarter than everybody else but his plan in St. Margaret’s hadn’t worked out, so to save face he would continue to taunt DeMarco and Jayme from afar.

  But they could not live their lives in fear of Khatri’s letters, of that he was certain. He already regretted and resented the security lights and alarms.

  He and Jayme had had a few hours of distraction at the convention center that night but the exposition had been noisy and crowded and now the night sky was a good antidote for that, a slow, still soak in the infinity of the stars and their invisible planets and moons. The night was cool but neither he nor Jayme was in a hurry to go inside. For him the dark was not only concealing but also protective and healing; he looked at her with her head tilted back and eyes wide and imagined what she must be thinking: Are we really all alone down here, God? Is my baby with you? Can my baby see me looking up?

  For DeMarco the night concealed wounds and injuries, broken homes and hearts and all the misery of the world. The stars promised something better but were vague enough in their promise that any dreamer’s dream could be accommodated. The night sky offered beauty but no explanations. Showed the past but teased the future.

  So they remained there with their eyes turned to the stars. DeMarco squeezed Jayme’s hand and quoted Rumi. “‘When someone mentions the gracefulness of the night sky, climb up on the roof and dance and say, Like this?’”

  She squeezed his hand in return. “I love when you say something I have never heard before.”

  “I wish they were my words and not somebody else’s.”

  “I’m yours and nobody else’s.”

  “And because of that, I know there is a God.”

  “Me too,” she said. “What do you think he, she, or it is like?”

  “Not like us, I hope.”

  “Meaning what, babe?”


  “Meaning…” What did he mean? He meant not like humans. Not driven by greed and lust and power. Not infused with anger and desperation and jealousy and hate. But he would not say those things now and diminish her enjoyment of the moment, not introduce more sadness into the mix. And so he said, “Meaning more like the best part of us than we are. More love and kindness and selflessness. I hope that’s what God is.”

  “And more patient,” she said.

  “Patient for what?”

  “We do terrible things, but God still loves us. Because we’re still just babies. And a good mother and father love their babies no matter what. No matter how many tantrums they throw.”

  “I like that,” he said.

  “So God must be patient, I think. Like the stars. Waiting forever for us to grow up.”

  “Hmm,” he said. Then, half a minute later, “‘For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.’”

  “Are whose words are those?”

  “Vincent van Gogh’s.”

  “Before or after he cut off his ear?”

  “Before, probably. But it was after the ear that he painted The Starry Night.”

  She moved her head slowly from left to right, took in the sky from one corner to the other. “Thank you, Vincent,” she whispered.

  In his mind’s eye the image of Van Gogh materialized, the self-portrait of the artist bundled in a heavy coat and cap, his mutilated ear beneath a dirty strip of cloth wrapped around his head, those melancholy eyes, that sad, pinched mouth, Mount Fuji in a picture behind his head, a place of mystery and wonder he would never reach.

  DeMarco lowered his gaze to the darkened house. It was time to return. Reddick and Loughner were waiting for him in there. Laraine was waiting too, and Daksh Khatri, Boyd, Captain Bowen, Flores, and Miller all awaiting their due.

  “Let’s get some sleep,” he said, though he knew that he would not.