Walking the Bones

by Randall Silvis

  “Deep enough to cost Vicente his teaching job?”

  “You tell me.”

  DeMarco thought for a few moments, trying to make the pieces fit. “And less than a year later,” he said, “seven skeletons are found in the wall of Eli Royce’s church.”

  “At least they weren’t found in the pulpit,” the sheriff joked.

  Trooper Matson squinted her eyes and thought for a moment. “So as of today,” she said, “where does your office stand on all this?”

  “The homicide case remains open,” he said. “The girls have all been identified, the remains returned to the families. We’re keeping our eyes and ears peeled, as are the local state boys. Four of the victims came from across state lines, so the FBI’s been involved as well, mostly background checks, database searches, things like that. We’ve been handling the bulk of the ground game. But, you know, the way state budgets keep getting whacked, none of us has the time or money to invest in a stone-cold case most people would just like to forget about. Hell, most of those girls were runaways. Their families gave up on them long before their bones ended up in Aberdeen.”

  “What about Virgil Helm?” DeMarco asked. “From where I stand, he might just be the linchpin in all this.”

  “Might be,” the sheriff said, “and might not. For all we know, he’s dead too. We just haven’t found the grave.”

  FIFTY-SIX

  The sheriff provided the address of Charlene, the fifteen-year-old girl who had most recently been living with McGintey, but he also suggested that no beneficial information would be forthcoming from her.

  “We’re dealing with a certain kind of mentality here,” he said, “from the girl and her family both. To that mentality, fifteen is high time a young woman got herself a man. If he feeds her, keeps a roof over her head, maybe buys her a pair of shoes now and then, not much else is expected. If he has a ready supply of drugs for the rest of her family, all the better. It’s a different way of thinking than you all are probably used to.”

  “We get our share up north as well,” DeMarco told him. “Thing is, none of that is relevant to the church case, is it? You’re dealing with the present, and we’re dealing with the past. All I want to know is if McGintey ever told her anything we might find useful.”

  “Good luck with that,” the sheriff said. “I just don’t see McGintey sharing that kind of information with anybody but his brother. If he even has it to share. I mean you’re welcome to try, but in my opinion, you’ll end up knowing about as much as you do right now. Maybe even less.”

  On their way back to Aberdeen, Jayme asked the question already running through DeMarco’s head. “Is it possible Vicente could have planted the skeletons to incriminate Royce? Is that idea even worth considering?”

  “You read my mind,” DeMarco answered. For the past fifteen minutes he’d been watching the trees through the passenger window. He liked the greenery, the wide expanse of blue overhead. The land was flatter than he preferred, with not a single rounded ridge along the horizon, but there was plenty of sunlight and unpopulated space where a man could spend his days wandering a dirt trail or grassy path.

  “The first question,” he said, “is whether Vicente could even have known about the false wall. Why would he? He didn’t live in Aberdeen then. Didn’t attend that church. His life was elsewhere.”

  “Okay,” Jayme said. “Is there a second question?”

  “Even if he knew, would he do such a thing? He’s ticked off, sure, but that’s a long way from planting bodies. The bodies of young girls that first have to be snatched off the street—”

  “Or persuaded to go with him.”

  “Or persuaded,” DeMarco said. “And not just the bodies, but the skeletons. Skeletons that, according to Hoyle, had been meticulously cleaned of all flesh. Think about that for a moment. Think about the kind of person who would do that.”

  “Sick,” she said. “Very, very sick.”

  “You’d need a private place to do something like that. Vats. Tubs. At the least, a fifty-gallon barrel.”

  “Jeffrey Dahmer kept bodies in his refrigerator and freezer. Brains and genitalia in jars. All in an apartment in the city.”

  “But there were no cut marks on the girls’ bones. The limbs weren’t severed. Our guy kept the bodies intact until the bones fell apart.”

  “What are you suggesting?” she asked. “That he treated the bodies with…some kind of weird reverence or something?”

  “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe he was too squeamish to cut them up, so he just dumped them in a vat. Or buried them a while, then dug them all up later. The explanation could be situational as well as psychological.”

  She frowned and made popping sounds with her lips.

  “What can we know for sure?” he asked her. “Psychologically speaking.”

  “For sure? Not much. When it comes to that kind of madness, the possible permutations are infinite. The roots of your garden-variety homicide lie fairly shallow; once the players are identified, motives and causes become clear. But the roots that anchor a serial killer to his or her particular depravity are a lot more difficult to trace.”

  “But there’s a template, right? Basic serial killer traits?”

  “There’s the Macdonald triad,” she said. “Behavioral characteristics said to be predictive of violent tendencies. Cruelty to animals, bed-wetting, and an obsession with setting fires. But that theory is far from universally accepted.”

  “Plus there’s no national database on bed wetters,” he said.

  “The sad fact is,” she told him, “every serial killer is his own kind of animal. His own species. You can’t name him until you catch and dissect him.”

  “And you went to college for this?” he teased.

  “I went to college for the hunky professors.”

  “Too bad you graduated.”

  “No worries. I kept the phone numbers.”

  He couldn’t beat her; never would. She was quicker and more clever than him. It made him chuckle. Then he brought himself back to the matter at hand.

  “We need to have a long conversation with Vicente, no question about it,” DeMarco conceded. “He could have told us about his beef with Royce.”

  “And about the pregnant girl.”

  “We’ve been spinning our wheels because of him.”

  Jayme nodded. “So let’s get organized here. Who might have had the opportunity? Who might have known about the false wall?”

  “Eli Royce. Chad McGintey. Virgil Helm.”

  “McGintey has no love for Royce. Might he have done it to get back at his boss?”

  “Possible,” DeMarco said. “Except that he has displayed no preference for girls of color.”

  “But maybe he knew Royce did. And chose black girls for that reason.”

  “Possible,” DeMarco said. “Maybe even plausible.”

  “And then there’s Royce,” she said. “He’s definitely a manipulator. Loves having power over others. Is a known womanizer. And has had at least one relationship with a teenager.”

  “Allegedly,” DeMarco said. He watched more trees go by.

  “Which means,” Jayme said, “that we have opportunity and motivation for both McGintey and Royce.”

  “Umm,” DeMarco said. “A fondness for young black women is not in and of itself a motivation for killing them.”

  “Ugh,” Jayme said.

  She slowed the car as they entered Aberdeen’s municipal limits. 35 MPH, the sign said. WATCH OUT FOR CHILDREN.

  “Also,” DeMarco wondered aloud, “why would Royce keep the bodies right there under everybody’s nose if he was involved in their deaths?”

  “Pathological,” Jayme said. “There’s no other explanation.”

  “Like Dahmer keeping skulls and other body parts in his house?”

  “In his freaki
ng refrigerator,” Jayme said. She slowed again for the driveway, pulled in behind the RV.

  “So what is your gut telling you?” DeMarco asked.

  Jayme shut off the engine. The air conditioner’s fan went silent. They could hear the engine clicking under the hood, giving up its heat.

  She said, “It’s telling me to forget about Aaron Henry. McGintey…back burner for now. Maybe try to find out where the girl who Royce allegedly made pregnant is. Sheriff said they left town in a new car, and they rented a U-Haul. Whose name was used for that purchase and rental? Maybe we can track them down through that. Also, we need to find out what happened to Virgil Helm. Who’s going to tell us that?”

  “This is your town,” DeMarco told her, “not mine.”

  “It’s hardly my town. I spent three summers here. And weekends while I was in college.”

  He thought for a moment. “So those seven, eight years,” he said. “They roughly correspond with the years of the girls’ disappearances.”

  “My God,” she said. “They do.”

  “So you might have been here when some of it happened.”

  “Oh my God, Ryan.”

  “And there was no talk? No whispers?”

  “I ran with a very small group of people,” she said. “Very…preppy.”

  “Very white?”

  “There was nothing intentional about it. My grandparents belonged to a country club. Most of my socializing revolved around club activities.”

  “It’s getting warm in here,” he said, and popped open the car door. She climbed out too.

  As they walked to the front porch he said, “I’m having a hard time picturing Richie as a preppy. From country club preppy to clerk at Cappy’s bait store?”

  “Meat, Milk, and Bait Mart,” she said as she unlocked the front door. “Besides, Richie wasn’t part of our gang. He was barely even an acquaintance. I’d see him around town sometimes. We used to joke that he was like that creepy guy from the Joyce Carol Oates story. Except with none of the charisma.”

  They walked into the foyer, shaded and cool. DeMarco crossed to the living room, sat in the stuffed chair by the window, took his cell phone from his pocket. “He certainly had his eye on you,” DeMarco said.

  “He was a walking erection. What boy wasn’t at that age? So were you, I bet.”

  DeMarco sat there staring at his cell phone. Jayme said, “What are you thinking about?”

  “I’m thinking I climbed into an RV a while back, had a couple weeks of the best sex in my life, and climbed out in Crazy Town.”

  She swung a leg over his knees and sat down. “That’s what’s so great about Crazy Town. The sex just keeps getting better and better.”

  “This is true,” he said. “Even so, I think we need to talk to Richie.”

  “You can’t be serious. You really think I’d ever let a guy like him touch me?”

  “About what was happening here back then. The kind of things nice girls like you never heard about.”

  “Oh,” she said. She tossed the car keys onto the coffee table. “How do you know his number?”

  “Vicente first,” he said, and punched in the numbers. “Where do you want to do lunch?”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Lunch options were limited in Aberdeen, so Vicente recommended a small place in Mayfield in the center of Graves County. He sounded tired to DeMarco, and did not question why another meeting was required.

  “I’m sure he senses what’s coming,” Jayme said after DeMarco pocketed his phone and reported that another short road trip was necessary. “Your tone wasn’t exactly ebullient.”

  “No?” DeMarco said. “Then why does everybody call me Mr. Ebullient?”

  She laughed, pushed herself up from the sofa, and reached for his hand. “Come on. I need another quick shower.”

  He raised their hands to eye level. “This isn’t the way to get a quick one,” he said.

  Before leaving town they stopped for gas at Cappy’s. DeMarco filled the tank while Jayme went inside for bottled water. He watched her through the dirty front window, watched Richie’s eyes following as she crossed to the cooler, then Richie coming out from behind the counter to walk up behind her, tap her shoulder. She turned, smiled, he said something, she laughed, and then they stood there talking with her back to the open cooler while the gas pump murmured and the subtle vibrations of gasoline rushing through the hose made DeMarco’s hand tremble, and after a full minute of this, the stink of gasoline made him turn toward the pump and watch the cents roll over into dollar after dollar.

  He was in the car, waiting behind the wheel, fiddling with the radio, when she returned, grinning to herself. She set their bottled water into the cup holders, shut the door, and pulled on the seat belt. He started the engine, checked the mirrors, drove away from the pump. “Looked like Richie recognized you,” he said.

  “He did! Said I hadn’t changed a bit, which is a lie. I never would’ve recognized him, though, I’ll tell you that. He looks a good ten years older than his age.”

  “That’s ancient,” DeMarco said.

  She chuckled and nodded but did not answer.

  Taking a stroll down memory lane, he told himself. He felt the tightness in his body, the fierce grip on the steering wheel. He kept glancing in the rearview as if something or somebody were following.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  The only school social event Ryan ever wanted to attend was the ninth-grade Christmas dance. That year he had gotten to know a girl named Sarah who shared his table during the library period. She was small and quiet and wore brown-framed glasses the same color as her hair. Also at the table were Sarah’s friend Emmy and Emmy’s boyfriend, a good-natured farm boy called Buzz who had been held back for a year and already had his driver’s license. When the dance posters went up around the school, Buzz said, Hey, whyn’t we four of us go together, and before Ryan even understood what was happening, he had a date with Sarah and began to realize how pretty she was in her shyness and how nice it would feel to slow dance with her hands atop his shoulders and his around her slender waist.

  The night of the dance, when Buzz and Emmy and Sarah pulled up in front of the trailer in Buzz’s parents’ station wagon, Ryan was still in the bathroom fussing with his hair. His mother saw the headlights in the kitchen window and stepped outside into the cold and waved for the kids to come inside. She had made Christmas treats for Ryan out of peanut butter, instant rice, and condensed milk, had rolled them into little balls and dusted them with powdered sugar. They were intended to be celebratory treats she would share with Ryan when he came home later and would sit and tell her all about his first date and the decorations and the music they had danced to, but when the kids came inside she took the treats out of the refrigerator and set them on a plate and said, You must be chilled to the bone. I’ll make up some hot chocolate real fast to warm you up while you’re waiting for Ryan.

  In a saucepan she dumped the rest of the milk and several spoonfuls of Nestle’s Quik and was standing there stirring the milk when Ryan’s father, who had walked home from the bar, came in and squeezed in beside Sarah as she sat huddled and nervous with her coat still wrapped tightly around her.

  Ryan came out of the bathroom feeling nervous but happy, looking forward to the most wonderful night of his life, and found his friends seated stiffly around the little table, squashed close together by the bulk of his father. Two of the little treats had already been eaten, a third squashed flat beneath somebody’s thumb. His father with his dirty ski cap pulled down over his ears, face unshaved, body stinking of beer and smoke, turned to Ryan and said, Hell, I didn’t think you’d even went through puberty yet, and here you are with a girl. You even know what to do with a pretty little thing like this?

  On the ride to the dance Ryan and the girls were quiet and Buzz tried to laugh it off, but after just one dance Ryan could not s
hake the stiffness from his limbs and the stinging tight pinch of the skin around his eyes. He told Sarah he was sorry and, without any other explanation, turned away and retrieved his coat and walked home the four miles with the snow spitting against his face like hot ashes flicked from a cigarette. He went into the trailer with his hand around a large rock in his coat pocket, but the trailer was empty, his mother at Paul’s trailer probably and his father off scrounging up another Christmas drink somewhere, the plate of treats empty except for three that had been squashed flat, and the pan of burned hot chocolate dumped out in the sink.

  FIFTY-NINE

  The restaurant Vicente had chosen was inside a brick storefront that looked as if it might have formerly been a hardware store. The large open room smelled of scrambled eggs and bacon and buzzed with a dozen conversations. Many of the customers sat with plates of waffles, pancakes, and omelettes in front of them; others were enjoying burgers, club sandwiches, white enameled bowls of homemade soup.

  From a small table near the front window, DeMarco and Jayme watched Hoyle’s black sedan cruise slowly through an unmetered handicapped slot across the street, and into the adjacent metered space. By degrees he climbed out from behind the wheel, closed and locked the door, approached the meter, dug in a pocket for coins, and inserted four coins in turn, double-checking the parking time available after each coin. The entire lugubrious operation lasted four full minutes, including several long pauses to gaze at various parts of the sky.

  DeMarco said, “Not only should we have gotten a bigger table, we should have ordered. This is like watching paint dry.”

  “Don’t be nasty,” she said. “Think how long it must take the poor man to get into that black suit every day.”

  “Who says he ever takes it off?”

  “Seriously, Ryan? Give the guy some credit. He could have parked in the handicapped spot but didn’t.”

  “Kudos to him for not being an asshole.”