No Woods So Dark as These Read online

“Usually it was Suzi and Lady D. Vietnamese and Southern belle respectively.”

  “Why Southern belle?” DeMarco asked.

  “Accent, I guess. Plus her attitude, kind of sad and aloof, my guy said. There were also a couple of other females Choo Choo would shop around too. Not as frequently as Suzi and Lady D but now and then anyway. Both Caucasian. The younger one called herself Sylvia, and the older one, who my contact described as—and these are his words, not mine—a fat-assed slob not worth fifty cents. Though one other guy said she gave good head. So, you know, one man’s poison and all that.”

  “What about Sylvia?”

  “This is interesting,” Miller told them. “One guy said he recognized her from high school. Commodore Perry. He couldn’t remember her name, only that she was a couple years younger than him. Very pretty back in the day, he said. Thin, long brown hair, the quiet type, you know? He said she hung out with a couple of other artsy types. Until she started dating an older guy her senior year. He’s the one who turned her on to coke. And it was all downhill from there, I guess. When my contact saw her with Choo Choo, he said she had that full-blown junkie look on her face. Heroin chic, he called it. He wasn’t even going to do her at first, but he couldn’t see any tracks on her, so, you know…”

  “How old is this contact of yours?” DeMarco asked.

  “Hmm… Maybe thirty, give or take a year. He said he tried to strike up a conversation with Sylvia but she just acted like he wasn’t there. Just lay there and closed her eyes, if you know what I mean.”

  DeMarco said, “So if he is thirty, that would put Sylvia between twenty-seven and twenty-nine.”

  Jayme asked, “He couldn’t remember anything else about her?”

  “He was fairly sure her real first name was Alice or Alyssa or Amy, something with an A. I plan to visit the school on Monday, see if they will let me look through the old yearbooks.”

  “They aren’t online?” Jayme asked.

  “Not the more recent ones. A half dozen older ones that alumni have posted, but nothing later than 1992. Don’t worry; I’ll track her down. I know a couple of other people who went to Commodore Perry around the same time as her. I’ll touch base with them from work tonight if I get the chance.”

  DeMarco let a few moments pass, then asked, “What do you tell people when they want to know why you need this information?”

  Miller looked hurt by the question. “I’m not stupid, you know.”

  “I didn’t suggest that you are. I just need to know your cover story.”

  “Do you think I’d just come right out and say, hey, I’m working with the police? Tell me what you know?”

  “That isn’t what he meant,” Jayme said.

  But he kept looking at DeMarco. “I was pretending to be a collector when I called Reddick, okay? I already told you that. As for Choo Choo and the females, I’m a journalist and a blogger. The people I talk to know that about me. And as long as I don’t say something bad about them or mention their names to anybody, they don’t care what I write.”

  “We know you’re being careful,” Jayme told him. “We’re all being careful.”

  He said, his tone less aggressive now, “I forgot to tell you that I know where Choo Choo, Suzi, and Lady D came from. Last known address before coming here, I mean. They lived in Lost City for a while.”

  DeMarco and Jayme looked at each other with furrowed brows.

  Jayme asked Miller, “Where is Lost City?”

  “Yeah, I guess maybe it is sort of an underground place. It’s down in Washington County, a couple of miles off I-79. It’s this village, I guess you could call it, of old shipping containers and flatbed trailers. Some old campers, single-wides…stuff that people just dump there because it’s too expensive to get rid of them legally. The only way to get there is to walk a half mile or so through a pine forest.”

  “And you’re saying that Choo Choo and the females lived there?” Jayme asked.

  “From what I hear, and I’ve never been there myself, but yeah, as many as a hundred people might be living there during the summer. Most of them head south for the winter, but in the summer there’s gardens and whiskey stills, patches of marijuana growing, everything a person would need except for electricity and flush toilets. It’s rumored to be the reason Washington County has so many heroin overdoses. And why nearly a whole fraternity at W&J ended up with gonorrhea a while back.”

  Jayme shared another look with DeMarco. She said, “We need to get out of Mercer County more often, babe.”

  “Do the local police know about this Lost City?” DeMarco asked.

  “That I can’t answer,” Miller said. “If they do know, they don’t bother with it. Probably happy to have the riffraff out in the woods instead of sleeping on their streets.”

  “I need to see this place,” DeMarco said.

  Miller grinned. “We could take a trip down tomorrow. Might be a treasure trove of information.”

  Out front, a van door slammed shut. DeMarco said, “I think the guys are finished inside. I better get in there.” He stood. “You too,” he told Jayme. “They’ll need to show us a few things.”

  Miller stood and faced him. “So how did I do?”

  “Good work,” DeMarco muttered.

  Jayme stood and put her hand on Miller’s shoulder. “Very good work. We’ll be in touch. Go home and get some sleep.”

  He said, “So a road trip tomorrow?”

  DeMarco raised his hand, and for a moment she thought he was about to tousle the boy’s hair, but before she could cringe he stopped himself, bent down and picked up Miller’s coffee mug, and went inside.

  “He’s pleased,” she whispered to the young man. “He just doesn’t want you to know it.”

  “Copy that,” Miller said, but she could not read the look on his face, that squint of eyes and the crooked twist of his mouth. It was either embarrassment or rage.

  Thirty-Nine

  The oddness of the rest of the day would not dissipate, even after everyone else had cleared out and she and DeMarco had swept away all visible evidence that a dozen others had been tramping through their house all morning. She couldn’t help taking furtive glances at the security cameras and at the windows with their motion sensors.

  It made her wonder about her ancestors in their walled estates and castles. Had they seen themselves as prisoners locked inside by fear? Had they stood at their windows gazing out and filled with longing? And when they rode out through the gates, did they tremble? Feel exposed and vulnerable? Long to be safe behind their thick walls again from the rampaging brutes outside?

  What troubled her most was the knowledge that this suburban fortress had been made for her alone. Ryan, if living on his own, would never have installed a security system. He would have bought a couple of extra boxes of ammunition and slept in his chair with the Glock between his legs. He would have defied someone to breach his will. If not for her, he would probably be miles from here right now, scouring the landscape for Khatri. In fact, if left to her own devices, she would be doing the same thing.

  She had to wonder what their love had made of them.

  * * *

  After the initial hellos, DeMarco put the call on speaker so that Jayme could listen in. There was no mistaking the slurred voice, though Loughner sounded so intoxicated, at not yet four in the afternoon, that much of what he said was incomprehensible, though the gist of his tirade was clear: “son of a bitch needs in the fucking ground…the gene for evil…stop pissing around and get this done…I will if you can’t…when he does it again who’s to blame?”

  The conversation lasted most of five minutes, with DeMarco making an occasional reply, his voice soft and low and hoarse: “Okay, Joe…I hear you…I understand…I know what you’re saying.”

  When Loughner abruptly stopped talking and the call ended, DeMarco slipped the phone into h
is pocket and said nothing, only looked at her and shook his head. He had been on his knees on the back porch when the call came, brushing out Hero’s coat, and now he picked up the brush again and returned to that task. Jayme wondered what to say to him, knew how deflated he felt, the sense of loss he must be experiencing, especially after a day such as this one.

  But what was there to say?

  She slid off her chair, knelt beside him, bent down to kiss Hero’s snout. DeMarco leaned over her and kissed the back of her head. “Our wounded soldier,” she said to mask what she felt and to shift the sorrow to another place. But then she went a step too far. “We should do something nice for him.”

  He said, “What do you do for a guy who’s been neutered?”

  “I really wish you would quit mentioning that. Am I asking too much for you just to be quiet about it?”

  He kissed her head once more, lighter this time, then rose and went into the kitchen.

  * * *

  In the late afternoon he wandered from room to room, his movements so aimless that she finally said, “Let’s go out for dinner. That barbecue place in Grove City has a patio, don’t they? Maybe we can take Hero along.”

  His face gladdened a little. “If they won’t let him on the patio, we can get the food to go, walk over to the park.”

  “I like the way you think, DeMarco.”

  “I need a shower.”

  “So what are you waiting for?”

  He was rinsing the shampoo out of his hair when the shower door slid open and she stepped inside. Ten minutes later they were on the bed, their skin and hair still damp. Afterward, catching their breath, with him on his back and Jayme rolled against him, the slow seeping away of oxytocin and dopamine, he chuckled out loud.

  She said, “That’s not the reaction I would expect at a time like this.”

  “I made up a joke,” he told her.

  “So let’s hear it.”

  “What’s the best thing about sex for a pirate?”

  “Hmm. Taking off his wooden leg?”

  “Nope. The arrrrrghasm.”

  She groaned, laughing, and told herself, Okay. Okay. We’re going to be all right.

  Forty

  On Sunday morning DeMarco woke early, a full hour before sunrise. For a few moments he lay there and listened to Jayme and Hero breathing, both still sound asleep, Hero on the floor at his side. The dog had a habit of going from one side of the bed to the other throughout the night but he usually found his way to DeMarco’s side by first light, making it impossible for DeMarco to climb out of bed without Hero coming suddenly alert too.

  Mornings were the best part of the day for DeMarco and always had been, especially Sunday mornings. He loved the stillness and quiet of not just the house but the entire neighborhood, and therefore of the world. As a boy it would take him only a couple of minutes to leave the house and sneak away in the damp dark of morning, delaying even his morning urination until he was on the edge of the nearest woods.

  This morning he delayed only until he reached the downstairs bathroom, yesterday’s clothes in a bundle in his left hand, Hero following him into the bathroom to watch how humans got the job done. Sometimes when Hero stood there watching, looking up at DeMarco and then down into the bowl and up at DeMarco again, it was easy to think of the dog as a substitute for a little boy, and as himself as the kind, indulging father he’d always wished he had. And when he had such thoughts, a sweet ache of longing filled his chest.

  But he was well past the normal age for fathering a child, so a dog would have to do. He finished up, looked down at Hero, and asked, “You getting the drift of it?” Hero wagged his tail in response.

  It was too early for starting breakfast, and besides, Hero had yet to practice his newly learned skill of an upright tinkle. DeMarco dressed quickly, shut off the alarm, opened the back door, and followed Hero outside. Once there, however, after a couple of deep breaths of moist, clean air scented with fallen leaves and Mrs. Craig’s marigolds, DeMarco had no desire to wait inside for the sunrise. He stepped back into the kitchen long enough to scrawl a note for Jayme and check the cash in his pocket. Then he attached Hero’s leash and, pulling the door closed and locked behind them, headed out toward the street.

  The local Sheetz was over a mile away but as a boy he would regularly venture five times that far on a morning as peaceful as this one. Most houses were still dark, the streets empty, and gratitude came easily. When you and your dog and a couple of birds are the only living things on the planet, it is possible to forget about the evil afoot in the world. Possible to experience an appreciation and even a sympathy for whomever had created this morning. Any being who could sculpt such serenity in such muted colors was truly an artist.

  DeMarco wondered what a god like that would be doing right now. Probably the same thing DeMarco was doing—savoring those few minutes before the world came awake, not really wanting it to come awake but knowing that it would. DeMarco had only two messes to deal with when the rest of the world climbed out of bed, the triple homicide and Daksh Khatri, whereas God must have tens of billions of messes on his plate.

  He remembered reading somewhere about a Buddhist belief that after God created the world, he was too busy with other work to pay any attention to a bothersome humanity, and it certainly did appear as if that were true. And DeMarco could muster no resentment over God’s neglect. Not far ahead he would collect two large mocha cappuccinos, three sausage and egg breakfast sandwiches, and two apple fritters, and he would carry them home in white paper sacks and enjoy them with his family. It was a small family and not likely to get any bigger, but on a morning like this, just to have Jayme and Hero in his life seemed a kind of miracle. So he could not rule out the possibility of another miracle. Even an otherwise neglectful God must get the urge to tweak his creation now and then.

  Forty-One

  Miller said, “Does it seem to you guys like Big Pharma is trying extra hard these days to get people addicted? In ninety minutes last night, I saw ads on TV for drugs to treat sweaty armpits, bent penises, inappropriate laughter, falling asleep during the day, and bad breath. It’s like they want us to believe that everything about being human is a disease, and they have the cure.”

  He was seated in the center of the rear seat, from which point he could see DeMarco’s eyes in the rearview mirror and the side of Jayme’s face. She had only to turn a few degrees to smile at him. Whatever emotions he had left with when he departed their home the previous afternoon, all now seemed forgiven.

  “Seriously,” he said to Jayme when she turned. “What kind of medications do you guys take? Everybody I know is popping at least a couple kinds of pills.”

  “Neither of us takes anything,” she told him. Only an hour earlier she and DeMarco had visited their children’s graves, now a regular Sunday morning routine for both of them, and both remained subdued.

  “Neither do I! A cup or two of coffee, some mushroom tea, maybe a candy bar once a week or so. Are we freaks or what?”

  DeMarco took another glance in the mirror. The kid’s energy was amusing. But he was also correct. R. D. Laing’s observation that life is a sexually transmitted disease, mortality rate 100 percent, seemed truer every day. The sadness of that reality lingered in stark contrast to the brightness of the Sunday morning sunshine, which came streaming in through DeMarco’s window to warm the car and tighten the skin on the side of his face.

  Because he wanted to see how Miller would react, he quoted Dostoyevsky. “‘To be too conscious is an illness.’”

  Miller thought for a moment, then nodded. “That’s cool,” he said. “But does that mean that the awareness is the disease, or that life is the disease, and therefore…” He could not find the end of that sentence.

  “Maybe both,” DeMarco offered. “Life is a disease, but obsessing about it only makes it worse. The Roman philosopher Seneca said that if
you want to be less angry, be less aware.”

  Miller slid forward, leaned closer to DeMarco. “Yeah, I don’t know about that, though. When is it ever a bad thing to be too conscious of something negative and destructive?”

  “When it makes you too miserable to appreciate your blessings,” DeMarco answered, and slid his hand over the console to squeeze Jayme’s hand.

  Sometimes he liked this kid a lot. Sometimes he was as annoying as a swarm of gnats. But today DeMarco was determined to extend equanimity to all. Not only to Miller but also to Boyd and Flores following in Boyd’s anvil-gray Jeep Renegade. And also to any residents of the Lost City they encountered.

  He had little idea of what to expect of the place. Boyd had notified the Troop B station commander that their party would be traipsing around in the woods nearby, but the commander had little intel to share. The Lost City property was owned by the Floridian heirs of a now defunct mining company, who probably did not know or care that their land had been taken over by squatters. The station commander’s primary concern was that the few residents who wintered over in their storage containers and derelict trailers would not freeze or starve to death or catch a stray bullet from the hunters who would fill the woods in November. He told Boyd that unconfirmed reports had suggested that a few bodies were buried in those woods but that the police did not go around digging for corpses without a missing person report or reliable tip. The residents of Lost City were those forgotten by society, and they would not have hiked into the woods unless they wanted to remain that way.

  DeMarco tried to envision the scene. Acre after acre of old flatbed trailers and shipping containers? It seemed apocalyptic somehow, a devolution from his own experience growing up in a trailer park. Those furnished trailers, no matter how run-down, had plumbing and electricity, running water and toilets. What must the hygiene be like in Lost City? What of the daily accumulation of trash and human waste? He imagined the place as one huge crack house, and could only hope that he would be proven wrong.