Bone White

by Ronald Malfi

  “I guess it all depends on the . . . well, the condition of the body,” Lou said. “If there hasn’t been a lot of decomposition, they can lift fingerprints and run them through a database. There are dental records, too, but that’s for corroboration once they have a suspected ID of the victim. There are . . . there are identifiers on the body . . .” Lou’s voice trailed off. He frowned and said, “You don’t want to hear about any of this shit.”

  “I just want to know how this plays out now,” Paul said.

  “It plays out with you not jumping to any conclusions for the time being,” Lou said. “You said you had some contact up in Alaska, right? Someone Ridge put you in touch with?”

  “Ryerson. She’s an investigator with Major Crimes.”

  “Call her.”

  “What time is it in Alaska right now, anyway?”

  “No idea.” Lou reached beneath the bar and brought out the bottle of Johnnie Walker. He filled Paul’s glass for the third time that evening. “On the house. Drink it.”

  He wanted it, but he didn’t trust himself to pick up the glass. His hands were trembling too badly.

  “Four thirty,” said the man in the necktie at the far end of the bar.

  Paul turned to the man. “What’s that?”

  “It’s currently four thirty in the afternoon in Alaska,” the man said. He got off his stool and, carrying a pint of piss-colored beer, came over and sat beside him. He tapped what looked like an expensive wristwatch, then said, “Four thirty-eight, to be exact. They’re four hours behind us. I used to live in Anchorage.”

  “Thanks,” Paul said.

  “I’m sorry for eavesdropping.”

  “It’s all right.”

  The man smiled, which made Paul think maybe he hadn’t heard most of their conversation after all. He was too jovial. Either that or he was drunk.

  “This Dread’s Hand place,” Paul said, gesturing toward the TV. “Are you familiar with it?”

  “No, I’m not. But there are a lot of old mining towns out that way, some so small you’d hardly count them as civilizations. And some that just aren’t civilized at all.”

  Drunk, Paul decided.

  The man smiled, then took an almost-dainty sip of his beer. “It’s a different world up there, I can tell you that,” he continued once he’d set his beer back down on a paper coaster.

  “I’ll bet,” Paul said. He was thinking about the box on the shelf of his bedroom closet at the moment.

  “There’s an AP article on Yahoo! News,” Lou said, staring at his iPhone. “Updated five minutes ago, but there’s not much more detail there than what you just heard.”

  “They’re crazy up there, you know,” said the man in the necktie.

  “Who’s that?” Paul asked.

  “Everyone,” said the man. “Every last one. Even in the big cities. And the farther into the wild you go, the crazier they get. Like bedbugs. High suicide rates, high alcoholism. Domestic violence. They’ve got a whole rape culture up there, too, you know, although you’d never hear about it in the news. Not down here in the lower forty-eight, anyway.” The man nodded at the TV, which was reflecting a soft bluish light against the bald dome of his head. “You don’t hear about stuff going on up there until something like this happens. Gets national attention, at least for a little while.”

  The newscasters were back on the television, but they had already moved on to a different story. Given the current state of the world, with its weekly shootings in the United States and a revolving inventory of terrorist attacks around the world, how much media attention could be spared to some dead bodies up in Alaska?

  “I was working up there in the mid-eighties, you know,” the man said. “Going back and forth between Anchorage and Fairbanks, writing claims for an insurance firm that dealt with oil and gas companies. Usually I’d be at some big facility in one of the major cities, and I was stationed in Anchorage, but on occasion I’d get farmed out to some remote village off the beaten path if some ancient piece of machinery broke down or if a tanker truck happened to overturn on some icy road somewhere. That sort of thing happened more than you’d think out there.”

  “I’ve seen that TV show,” Lou commented. “The one with the truck drivers who drive over the frozen seas.”

  “A lot of those mountain roads are unpaved and treacherous. Sometimes trees fall across the road and the driver, he doesn’t see it until it’s too late.”

  Lou nodded.

  “I was in my early twenties back then, so it was something of an adventure for me,” the man continued. “This was around ’83 or ’84, when I was dispatched to Manley Hot Springs, which is maybe a hundred and fifty miles west of Fairbanks on the Tanana River. Nothing out there but these forgotten old mining towns, just like I said before. I think Manley’s population was maybe seventy people back then, and a good number of those were probably drifters.

  “There’s a road, the Elliott Highway, that runs from Fairbanks to Manley Hot Springs. It’s a standard paved roadway when it leaves Fairbanks, but for the last eighty or so miles into Manley, it’s just an old dirt road. An oil tanker had run off a section outside Manley, and I was sent out there to take pictures and fill out an incident report. This road, it was notorious for accidents, and even more so in the winter, but this particular accident occurred in May, and the weather was nice.

  “Anyway, I’m out there taking pictures and filling out my reports, minding my own business, until I hear this old rattletrap engine pull up along the shoulder behind me. Very few cars had passed me on that road all morning, so it struck me as odd, you know? I turn around and see this big brown and white Dodge Monaco with this big aluminum canoe strapped to the roof. It’s just idling there, maybe only a couple yards behind my own vehicle. I’m watching it, waiting for the driver to come out, because, look, there’s no reason to stop on this stretch of road, unless you need some kind of help or something, know what I mean? Maybe he had a flat tire or maybe . . . I don’t know . . . he was having a heart attack or something. Could have been anything.”

  “How long did he stay there like that?” Lou asked.

  “Maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. Also, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Dodge Monaco, but the thing was like a poor man’s Cadillac, and it’s not the type of car you’d use to haul around a canoe. The Monaco’s engine is still running, and I can see that there’s a figure moving around just behind the glare on the windshield. But the guy, he doesn’t get out of the car. Doesn’t honk the horn, doesn’t roll down the window and wave to get my attention. He doesn’t do anything but sit there.

  “I finish what I’m doing, then stash my camera and my reports back in my car. And I’m tempted to just drive away . . . but then I look back at the guy’s car and figure, ah, what the hell, maybe this knucklehead needs something from me. So, I go on over to the driver’s side. The driver rolls down the window, and there’s this big, hairy lumberjack face grinning out at me.

  “‘You need some help?’ I ask him.

  “‘No, sir,’ he says, just as polite as you’d please. He looked about my age, although it was difficult to tell, given that scraggly beard of his. And he’s grinning at me, some strained grin, and I can’t tell if he’s making fun of me or just clear off his rocker.

  “‘Lost?’ I ask him.

  “‘No, sir. Not lost,’ he says, still grinning like a wooden puppet. ‘In fact, I’m perfectly found.’ Those were his words, just like that—I’m perfectly found.

  “That’s when I notice he’s got a rifle leaning against the passenger seat, the barrel leaning against the headrest and pointing straight up at the ceiling of the car. The bells and whistles start going off in my head, and I realize that if this guy takes that rifle and shoots me out here, my body might never be found. And in looking at him, I realize that this guy might just be the type to do it. That strange smile hadn’t faded from his face, and his eyes looked . . . I don’t know . . . too intense, maybe. Like he was trying too hard to look ha
ppy and to convince me that he was just, you know, a normal guy. And it wasn’t just me thinking this because I saw the gun—this was Alaska, and pretty goddamn far north, and there were guns everywhere, although I can’t say I’d ever seen someone just kind of leave it there against the passenger seat of their car while they drove around with it. Anyway, the whole thing was beginning to spook me out.

  “‘What is it you’re doing?’ I ask him.

  “‘Just checking to see if you were white,’ he tells me.

  “Well, I’d had enough. ‘Have a nice day,’ I tell him, and get back in my car and drive away.

  “Well, something like a week later, I see the guy’s big, furry lumberjack face again, only this time it’s on the TV news. The guy’s name was Michael Silka and he’d murdered nine people in and around the Manley Hot Springs area, including a state trooper, and a pregnant woman and her family. There was a shoot-out and he was gunned down by police just a few days after I ran into him out on the Elliott Highway.”

  “Jesus,” Paul said.

  The man in the necktie finished off his beer, then set the empty glass down on its paper coaster.

  “To this day,” the man said, “I wonder if Silka was just sitting in that car, trying to drum up the nerve to step out and blow my head off with that rifle. Maybe dump my body and steal my car. Maybe make me his tenth victim, you know? A nice, round, even number. If that was his intention—if that was the reason he pulled his rattletrap car behind mine that day and just sat there for twenty minutes, watching me—then only God knows what stopped him from doing it.”

  “That’s the creepiest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard,” Lou said. He was staring at the man with wide, almost comical eyes. “And I’ve seen some crazy shit in my life.”

  “I still think about it, sometimes,” the man said. Some men might take pride in the retelling of such a story, Paul thought, but this guy looked like he’d just had the wind knocked out of him.

  The man took a fifty-dollar bill from his pocket and placed it on the bar next to his empty beer glass. “It’s been a pleasure, gentlemen. Have a good night. And be safe.” He made a gun with his thumb and forefinger and kapowed Paul with it.

  Paul watched him wobble out of the place.

  “That’s Tom Justice,” Lou informed him. “He lives a few blocks away. Comes in and gets sauced from time to time, then walks home.” He looked at Paul. “You okay? You didn’t need to hear that spooky-ass story.”

  “I’m okay,” he said, knowing damn well that he wasn’t.

  * * *

  It was a quarter after ten when he arrived home, his head woozy from too much Scotch, his mind reeling with one final, terrible possibility. Something like five thousand miles away, there was a body being extricated from a slab of arctic tundra. The likelihood of it being Danny was remote, though he couldn’t convince himself that it was an impossibility. It occurred to him, too, that until tonight and despite not having heard from Danny since his disappearance over a year ago, there had always been a part of him—a dimming flicker of candlelight—that held out hope that Danny was still alive out there somewhere. That Danny had just flaked out and went off the grid, and he was alive out there and living like one of those mountain men, off the land. Or maybe he had picked up his heels and headed off into the Yukon or clear across Canada or wherever. It was even possible that Danny had gotten in trouble with the law again, and this little disappearing act had been Danny’s plan from the very beginning . . .

  Those were optimistic if far-fetched propositions, but there was a part of Paul that was always able to grasp on to them. They gave him hope. After all, wasn’t it just like Danny to do something nutty like that?

  But tonight’s newscast changed all that. He felt that hope fade, and the absence of it left him feeling hollow. All of a sudden, he felt almost weightless with grief.

  Paul Gallo had no wife, no kids, no pets, and was greeted only by a darkened foyer as he stepped through the front door of his Conduit Street bungalow. He dumped his briefcase on the floor and went into the living room, where he dug the television remote out from between two sofa cushions. He turned on the TV, then went into the kitchen, where he made himself a pot of strong coffee.

  When the eleven o’clock news started, he sat on the sofa clutching his coffee mug in both hands and waited through reports of never-ending violence in Baltimore, political corruption in DC, and a sports montage that meant very little to him.

  The segment about Dread’s Hand came near the end of the broadcast.

  “In other news, police are still conducting a search for human remains in a remote village in Alaska this evening,” the news anchor reported, emphasizing the name of the state as if surprised by its very existence, “after an unidentified body was discovered Tuesday evening in a shallow grave. The search began after a local man confessed to the murders of an untold number of individuals in and around the town of Dread’s Hand, and then directed police to the wooded area where he claimed to have buried the bodies.”

  The image on the screen changed to a black-and-white photograph of an unsmiling, stone-faced man who looked to be in his fifties. He wore a checked hunting coat and his hair was parted to one side, suggestive of a comb-over to hide his baldness. The name beneath the photo said JOSEPH ALLEN MALLORY, and the scroll beneath the name read: ALASKA MURDER SUSPECT IDENTIFIED.

  “Joseph Mallory was identified by police earlier this evening as the suspect,” said the reporter, “and is a local resident of Dread’s Hand. Police say Mallory has been taken to a hospital in Anchorage and is being treated for hypothermia and dehydration. Police have not disclosed a specific number of victims, and although police say Mallory is cooperating with investigators, he has not yet given a motive for these crimes, nor has he identified his victims.”

  The black-and-white photo of Mallory was replaced by the reporter’s stoic face. “And this station has just received word that a second body has just been recovered from that same site. Police are expected to continue searching throughout the night.”

  Paul turned off the TV, set his coffee down on an end table, then went up to his bedroom, where he pulled open the closet door. On the top shelf were binders filled with tax documents and work papers, as well as a few shoe boxes stuffed with random receipts and correspondence. Among the shoe boxes and binders was a flat, unlabeled cardboard box. Paul took the box down from the shelf, sat on his bed, and opened it in his lap.

  Inside were the copies of Danny’s credit card statements and phone records he’d gotten from Detective Richard Ridgely, a series of postcards Danny had sent him during the early part of his Alaskan sojourn, as well as a glossy eight-by-ten photo of Danny that Paul had e-mailed to the state troopers in Fairbanks—Danny in a ski jacket with sunglasses nesting in his dark hair. Danny was grinning at the camera, looking like a magazine advertisement for teeth whitening. There were also printouts of the last two text messages he’d received from Danny just before Danny went dark. The first said Entering Dread’s Hand—Spooky! The second was a close-up of Danny’s face, a decrepit log cabin in the background, slightly out of focus. Paul had sent copies of both transmissions to the police.

  Also in the box were copies of the reports Paul had filed with the Alaska Bureau of Investigation. Stapled to the top of the reports was Investigator Jill Ryerson’s business card, which she’d sent to him in the mail along with copies of the reports.

  There was no cell number on the card, so he called the office line. It rang several times before a recording of Ryerson’s cool, businesslike voice invited him to leave a message. Beep.

  Paul sat there on the edge of his bed with the phone to his ear, unable to say anything. His mind was too confused with thoughts, a veritable runaway train of thought, yet he felt powerless to verbalize a single utterance over the phone.

  But it’s not just that, he thought, the phone growing warm against his ear. You’re still the fool holding out hope. You don’t really want to know, do you? It’s better this
way, isn’t it?

  In the end, he hung up without leaving a message.

  4

  They had been close when they were young. Tenants of a shared womb, casualties of the same bloodline, Paul Gallo was born seven minutes before his twin brother, Danny. Paul came out quickly, a pinkish, squealing bundle of quivering limbs, toothless mouth agape, eyes squinty and piggish and gummed shut. He was mopped clean and spirited to the opposite end of the delivery room, where two nurses checked his vitals. Everything appeared fine. But there were complications during Danny’s delivery.

  “Now, let’s get that other one,” said the doctor, and Paul’s mother pushed. Then he said, “Wait. Wait. Hold on.”

  Another nurse was examining a monitor. “Baby’s blood pressure dropped,” she said.

  “What’s that mean?” said Michael Gallo, Paul’s father. “What’s going on?”

  The umbilical cord was wrapped around the other baby’s neck inside the womb, the doctor explained. Whenever his mother pushed, the cord tightened like a noose.

  “Let’s try repositioning,” the doctor suggested. To the nearest nurse, he said, “Get some help in here.”

  They repositioned Melinda Gallo, but with the next push, Danny’s blood pressure plummeted yet again. One of the nurses told Michael Gallo to step aside.

  “Doctor!” shouted one of the nurses at the other end of the delivery room. “Blood pressure’s dropped.”

  “We’re on it,” the doctor assured the nurse.

  “No,” she shouted back. “On this baby. Here. Here.”

  Paul Gallo’s tiny body had gone limp on the scale beneath the heating lamps. One of the nurses lifted his legs and smacked him across his narrow, reddened backside. The baby did not cry.

  “Doctor—”