Walking the Bones

by Randall Silvis

  ALSO BY RANDALL SILVIS

  EDGAR ALLAN POE MYSTERIES

  Disquiet Heart

  On Night’s Shore

  RYAN DEMARCO MYSTERIES

  Two Days Gone

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  Copyright © 2018 by Randall Silvis

  Cover and internal design © 2018 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Kathleen Lynch/www.blackkatdesign.net

  Cover image © Silas Manhood Photography, LTD.

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Silvis, Randall, author.

  Title: Walking the bones : a Ryan DeMarco mystery / Randall Silvis.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017027748 | (trade paperback : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Police--Pennsylvania--Fiction. | Murder--Investigation--Kentucky--Fiction. | Cold cases (Criminal investigation)--Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3569.I47235 W36 2018 | DDC 813/.54--dc23 LC

  record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017027748

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  I

  One

  Two

  II

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  III

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  Sixty-Eight

  Sixty-Nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-One

  Seventy-Two

  Seventy-Three

  Seventy-Four

  Seventy-Five

  Seventy-Six

  Seventy-Seven

  Seventy-Eight

  Seventy-Nine

  Eighty

  Eighty-One

  Eighty-Two

  Eighty-Three

  Eighty-Four

  Eighty-Five

  Eighty-Six

  Eighty-Seven

  Eighty-Eight

  Eighty-Nine

  Ninety

  Ninety-One

  Ninety-Two

  Ninety-Three

  Ninety-Four

  Ninety-Five

  Ninety-Six

  Ninety-Seven

  Ninety-Eight

  Ninety-Nine

  IV

  One Hundred

  One Hundred One

  One Hundred Two

  One Hundred Three

  One Hundred Four

  One Hundred Five

  One Hundred Six

  One Hundred Seven

  One Hundred Eight

  One Hundred Nine

  One Hundred Ten

  One Hundred Eleven

  One Hundred Twelve

  One Hundred Thirteen

  One Hundred Fourteen

  One Hundred Fifteen

  One Hundred Sixteen

  One Hundred Seventeen

  One Hundred Eighteen

  One Hundred Nineteen

  One Hundred Twenty

  One Hundred Twenty-One

  One Hundred Twenty-Two

  One Hundred Twenty-Three

  One Hundred Twenty-Four

  One Hundred Twenty-Five

  V

  One Hundred Twenty-Six

  One Hundred Twenty-Seven

  One Hundred Twenty-Eight

  One Hundred Twenty-Nine

  One Hundred Thirty

  One Hundred Thirty-One

  One Hundred Thirty-Two

  One Hundred Thirty-Three

  One Hundred Thirty-Four

  One Hundred Thirty-Five

  One Hundred Thirty-Six

  One Hundred Thirty-Seven

  One Hundred Thirty-Eight

  One Hundred Thirty-Nine

  One Hundred Forty

  One Hundred Forty-One

  One Hundred Forty-Two

  One Hundred Forty-Three

  One Hundred Forty-Four

  One Hundred Forty-Five

  One Hundred Forty-Six

  One Hundred Forty-Seven

  One Hundred Forty-Eight

  One Hundred Forty-Nine

  One Hundred Fifty

  VI

  One Hundred Fifty-One

  One Hundred Fifty-Two

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation
with the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For my sons,

  Bret and Nathan,

  Heart of my soul, soul of my heart

  Oh, love is the crooked thing,

  There is nobody wise enough

  To find out all that is in it…

  —William Butler Yeats

  I

  He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins.

  —Bhagavad Gita

  ONE

  Late July, eastern Kentucky

  Shortly after entering the forest on the first day, midafternoon, Ryan DeMarco’s cell phone went dark, battery depleted, and since he was no longer able to estimate his progress up the mountain by checking the time or the GPS, he stowed the phone in a pair of socks at the bottom of his backpack. He briefly considered stowing his off-duty weapon as well, a .40-caliber Glock 27, lighter and more concealable than his SIG Sauer .45 service weapon, but decided against it for protection against black bears, timber rattlers, copperheads, and wild dogs. He was less likely to encounter a mountain lion or drug trafficker, and it was too early for ginseng hunters to be doing anything but checking on the sanctity of their beds, but each of those could be dangerous too. Besides, when unarmed he felt off balance somehow. So despite the extra weight of his Glock and pocket holster pulling at his sweat-slickened waistband, he kept the handgun within easy reach.

  Throughout the rest of that day there was only the waxing and waning of the light to mark his climb, and the changing currents of heavy, steamy air—this one cooler by a few degrees and smelling of moss, this one warmer and thicker and smelling of wood rot, the ancient scent of decay—and the scent and snag of his own relentless movement, and the thirst, the weariness, the resistance of muscles unused to such routine, and the niggling but incessant torment of gnats and mosquitoes drawn to the sweat of his neck and face and arms and ears and to the allure of blood coursing just beneath his skin.

  Each of these sensations was experienced with an acuity and detachment a second part of him found intriguing, as if a second DeMarco was following the first, grinding his way uphill through deep forest, this second one close behind and incorporeal, taking note of and registering not only all the other man’s sensations but eavesdropping too on his thoughts, the self-recriminations and remorse, the stinging replay of the previous day’s mistakes. The second DeMarco regarded all this with curiosity, a mild amusement, and sometimes a touch of pity.

  Thanks to the heaviness of the top canopy some forty feet up, and the second canopy provided by saplings and smaller trees, the forest had no full unfiltered light, only gradations of dusk. The sun, when it briefly revealed itself, appeared only as a splash of white halo, or as a glowing lacuna spotted through the perforation of leaves. Throughout that day he marched toward one slender, streaming shaft of mote-filled yellow after another, the neglected sky like a sputtering fluorescent bulb hidden somewhere high above.

  Those high leaves, when DeMarco stared into them for a few seconds while resting, would become like leaves afloat upon first milky and later inky water, and he would remember his childhood and the woods to which he had so often escaped, and how the anger in him in those distant times had given way to a debilitating sadness that usually culminated in tears. This, in turn, would remind him of the seven murdered girls whose childhoods had been no doubt even sadder than his, and consequently he would push upward again, his weariness assuaged by another surge of resolve.

  The high canopy was a living mosaic of leaves, mostly oak and other hardwoods, from which came the shrieks of crows and the nighthawks’ cries, and the scolding chitter of squirrels. The animals were never more than fleeting shadows, though chipmunks he saw in abundance, both on the ground and in the lower branches. He heard turkeys calling from the distance. He flushed rabbits and grouse and had once stood not ten feet from a doe and fawn watching him watching them. Twice he heard the drone of airplanes, and once the whuff of a helicopter in the high unseeable clouds.

  He could associate no scents with that higher realm, unless perhaps for the unexpected freshenings, those rare, brief drafts of cooler air that crossed his path without so much as a riffling of the ferns. But from the lower realms of understory and ground came an abundance of odors, of humus and fungi, of blossom and fern and moss, of leaf mold and rotting wood and rotting carcass and the scent of his own sweat. Once, on the first day, he smelled cigarette smoke in the air, but since then there had been only the forest’s varied fragrances, of which he now included his own.

  Those scents too took him back to his youth, those many days through all seasons when he had escaped into the solitude and safety of the woods, felt shielded and protected in their dimness. And now he realized how much he had missed that scent of dry leaves underfoot, and under them a damper layer, the rich, loamy fragrance of decomposition, and the sweeter scents of ferns, of tree bark, of deadfalls rotting and falling apart. They were all a part of the past yet here distinct, scents all these years living silent in his memory, waiting to be opened, a window to the past unshuttered.

  And the sounds of the forest. After the first hour, he had left the trails behind, and so too the tourists, the day hikers, the noisy teenagers drunk on their freedom, even the solitary millennials trudging toward a favorite campsite. His own footsteps and the dry scrape of leaves were the loudest noises now, all else hushed and natural.

  For a long time after Thomas Huston’s death, DeMarco had been plagued by a low rumbling sound of unknown origins. It was as much felt in his eardrums as heard, a low-frequency intrusion that played as a discordant bass line to whatever else he was doing, whether trying to sleep, listening to music, or sitting at his desk and staring out the window. It was almost always there with his coffee in the morning. Sometimes he would lose track of it during the day, but in quiet moments, it inevitably returned. Time after time he would open a window or door and look outside, thinking a truck was sitting idly nearby, or a neighbor had his music turned too loud, or a plane was too low, a chopper hovering, a distant storm approaching, a high-altitude thunder. But no source was ever visible. Sometimes it seemed to be coming from deep within the earth. When the noise became especially bothersome and no outside source could be identified, he would walk around the house and put his ear to the refrigerator, or stand with the basement door open, his body leaning into the dimness; something must be wrong with a condenser, a fan, an overstressed motor.

  Anytime he was quiet, looking for quiet, desperate for quiet, the rumbling sound would be there. When he awoke alone in the middle of the night. When he lay awake in bed in the morning wishing he could sleep longer. In the shower. Alone in his office with the door closed. Alone in his car with the engine and radio shut off. Alone. Alone. Alone. The rumbling sound was always there.

  He finally decided the sound must be inside his own head. A tumor pressing against a nerve. A synapse in short circuit. Or maybe there was something rolling around in there like ball bearings on a lead track. A thickening. A misdirected flow. A hardening of something not meant to be hard.

  But now, hundreds of feet up on the side of a forested mountain, the rumbling was no longer detectable. There were birds flitting, some calling out. Squirrels leaping from branch to branch. Insects buzzing, lighting on his skin, drinking his sweat. But no rumbling. Thank God, there was no more rumbling.

  And after those first five hours of dragging himself uphill through this dimness and hush and damp, through the ponderous heat of the forest in summer, of being lashed and cut like a flagellant by branches and vines, of tripping over roots and deadfalls and sliding to his knees in bogs of hidden leaf muck, of being ambushed by growls and squawks, boulders and stones, and of being bitten and stung every minute, the demarcations of day and night were merging into one unbroken ordeal.

  The change occurred the next morning, on what he expected to be the final mo
rning of the uphill climb. The total elevation was only 3,100 feet, so he had never imagined the search would take even half so long. But he had also never imagined the forest’s darkness could be so deep and disorienting, that it would be so easy to spend an hour or more walking laterally while imagining he was moving in a vertical line, or how much time he would lose crawling over boulders and up and down slippery gullies, or how many rests he would need, or how slow and halting his pace would actually be.

  On that first morning in the forest, he rose from his sleeping bag, rolled and packed the bag and tarp, and stood against a slender oak to urinate before shouldering the pack to hazard on. He planned to chew a few coffee beans while he walked. His breakfast would be the last four strips of jerky in the bag. By noon, he hoped, he would find some sign of habitation. A piece of litter, the hint of a trail, a butchered animal carcass, the scent of a cook fire.

  He relieved himself against the tree, and then, while zippering up and thinking he should get the coffee beans out and put them in a pocket, a gunshot ripped into the side of the tree, peppering his face with shards of bark. In an instant he pulled the Glock from its holster and, face stinging and eyes watering from the bark, dove for cover behind the forked trunk of a thick oak six feet to his right.

  The slide through the dead leaves carried him a few feet farther than intended, and then he was tumbling, rolling, bouncing and sliding down a steep ravine. Along the way he raked the back of his head across the sharp facet of a rock buried in leaves, and with that blow lost both his weapon and his consciousness.

  And now, some timeless while later, he lay not yet fully conscious, in fact conscious of only three things: the mosaic of leaves swimming high above, and the stuttering light between the leaves; the searing throb of pain shooting from ankle to knee with the regularity of a frenzied pulse; and the sense of being observed.

  Moment by moment he remembered more. The gunshot. The dive. The long helpless tumble to the bottom of the ravine. Now he lay on his back atop sodden leaves and, buried beneath them, a slow but cooler rivulet, thousands of years old, that had carved that gash in the earth. Soon he remembered his weapon, flexed his empty hand, then touched his leather holster, which was now stuffed with leaves.

  He was as good as naked lying there. The Bowie knife with its ten-inch blade remained strapped to the pack left leaning against the tree. There was no use trying to flee; he doubted he could even stand. He did not want to look at the leg just yet, afraid of what he might see. So he lay motionless, waiting and listening. An acorn ticked down from a tree. Something small rustled under a leaf. The forest clicked, creaked, fluttered drily.