No Woods So Dark as These Page 5

  Nine

  At the first traffic light in town, they turned east toward the barracks, where they spent most of an hour completing the necessary forms to work as volunteer consultants on the case, then briefed Captain Bowen and other troopers on the scene in the woods. The ERT would deliver their evidence to the lab in Erie, which would then forward their findings to Bowen, who would turn them over to Trooper Boyd to liaise with DeMarco and Jayme. Theoretically, the consultants were limited to analysis, profiling, and information gathering; any interviews would include Trooper Boyd or another trooper. DeMarco argued that having a babysitter, even one as competent as Trooper Boyd, would only slow them down.

  “You either trust us or you don’t,” he told Bowen. “I’m not going to do this if I have to put up with Daddy looking over my shoulder all the time. Especially when Daddy is still waiting for his pubic hair to sprout.”

  “Get a new joke,” Bowen said. “Trooper Boyd is in charge. He calls the shots. No interviews without him or Flores present.”

  “Who’s Flores?” DeMarco asked.

  “Your replacement. Younger and a lot smarter than you. You guys will meet her next time. She’s busy doing her job right now.” To Jayme, he asked, “Can you control him? If he colors outside the lines too far, the entire investigation could get trashed.”

  Before Jayme could reply, DeMarco said, “When have I ever gone too far?”

  “Almost always. By the way, you understand why we can’t pay you for this, right? You’re both collecting pensions. So this has to be pro bono.”

  “I’ve always been pro-Bono,” DeMarco told him. “Wasn’t crazy about Cher, but Sonny’s lyrics were infectious.”

  Bowen closed his eyes and shook his head. When he opened his eyes again, he looked to Jayme. “Please make him stop.”

  “Hey,” DeMarco said, “who asked whom to join this investigation?”

  “Just don’t make me regret it, that’s all I’m saying.”

  DeMarco answered with a grin.

  Again Bowen turned to Jayme and raised his eyebrows in question.

  She shrugged, and DeMarco chuckled under his breath; it was fun to joust with their former boss, but he had had enough human interaction for the day and was anxious to get home. He stood, laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles, then said his goodbyes and headed for the door.

  They had left their new pet in the basement. DeMarco expected to find that the dog had chewed, clawed, shat and urinated on everything within reach, all while howling to high heaven. Instead, the house, upon their return, was silent. In the kitchen, DeMarco opened the basement door, stood at the top of the stairs, peered down into the darkness, and listened. Not a sound.

  “Uh-oh,” he whispered to Jayme, who was pulling vegetables out of the refrigerator. “What if he choked on something?”

  “Maybe you should turn on the light and go find out.”

  In the basement he found nothing amiss. No feces, no scent of urine, no chewed-up mess. The only thing out of place was a potato with some teeth marks in it, carried from the wooden bin against the wall and dropped near the bottom of the stairs.

  DeMarco, with the dog following, carried the potato up to the kitchen and showed it to Jayme, who was washing leaves of romaine lettuce in the sink. “Five hours we’ve been gone, and not a thing out of place except for one potato. Good boy, Clarence. Good boy.”

  The dog stood with its snout against the back door. Jayme said, “He’s better housebroken than you are. Apparently he has to pee. And we are not going to call him Clarence. That name is off the table.”

  “What do you have against Clarence?”

  “It’s an old man’s name. You want me to start calling you Clarence?”

  DeMarco grunted, crossed to the back door and pushed it open. He sat on the edge of the porch while the dog sniffed its way around the yard, watering six different spots. When it ventured toward the neighbor’s flower beds, which she had cleaned out for the winter, DeMarco called, “Hey! Get back here!” and the dog came trotting back to him.

  “I’m impressed,” DeMarco said, and scratched him between the ears. “Tomorrow the vet, okay, boy? Get you some shots, get you wormed, get you snipped if you haven’t been already. Not pleasant, but necessary. And I guess we have to find you a new name for you too, don’t we? What do you want to be called? How about Dogstoyevsky? Salvador Doggy? How about Sniffer?”

  He kept suggesting names until the dog raised a paw to DeMarco’s knee. “Yeah?” DeMarco said. “You like that one? You want that to be your name?”

  When they went back inside, DeMarco told Jayme, “He wants to be called Harvey Barkowitz.”

  She said, “How did you come up with that?”

  “He picked it. After Harvey, the demon dog that told David Berkowitz to kill people.”

  She shook her head and sighed. “Absolutely not.”

  Ten

  They had hoped to receive a call in the morning about the dead man’s prints. No call came. That could mean a couple of things: either the tech was taking his time prepping and cleaning up the prints, or the vic had no criminal history and his prints were not among the fifty-three million in the system. To mute his restlessness, DeMarco insisted on cleaning the entire kitchen after breakfast. He could be like a pig rooting out truffles when he worked, silent but for an occasional grunt, single-minded to the point of obsession even if the work consisted of wiping down the kitchen cabinets and cleaning the dust from the plastic vent at the bottom of the refrigerator.

  Jayme spent an hour outside with the dog, the leash wrapped around her wrist as she let him take the lead on an aimless and jerky meander around town. She was amazed at how many times he could urinate. By the time he was done, he had claimed half the town as his turf.

  Their appointment with the vet was for 11:00 a.m. and even the dog seemed happy to finally climb into the car for the short drive. The animal clinic was in a nineteenth-century Victorian farmhouse surrounded by what appeared to be hundreds of acres of now-empty cornfields. The first floor had been remodeled to include the front desk and waiting room, a public restroom, the examination room, a storage room, and a holding room for recovering and overnight patients.

  Living quarters for Dr. Lisa and her wife were on the second and third floors. “Susan’s a GP in New Castle,” Lisa said while delicately probing the dog’s body, working backward from his neck. She was a tall, thin woman, even taller than Jayme and approximately the same age, and she spoke mainly to Jayme, who helped to keep the dog still as he lay on the padded table. DeMarco stood a few feet back from the table and would have sat had a chair been available. The only chair was at the doctor’s desk and currently occupied by the young female assistant who sat poised to take notes on the examination.

  “Maya’s been with me for two years now,” Dr. Lisa said. The young woman at the desk looked up at Jayme and smiled, and waited for something to write down.

  DeMarco marveled at how quickly Dr. Lisa and Jayme had developed a rapport. Their conversation spanned the colleges they’d attended, recent Netflix movies and old series they wished would be renewed, how fascinating Lisa found Jayme’s job, and how impossible it would be for Jayme to cut into an animal or God forbid have to euthanize one. Jayme moved slowly around the table to accommodate the doctor’s movements, while Lisa’s eyes and fingers gathered information about the dog’s health, which Lisa announced and Maya silently recorded. A well-oiled machine, DeMarco thought. He shared a look of gratitude with his nameless pet, who seemed perfectly content to lie there grinning while four female hands stroked and explored his body.

  “No skeletal problems,” Dr. Lisa said when she had finished. “He seems in fairly good health, though a bit undernourished. What are you feeding him?”

  “Dry kibble mostly,” Jayme said. “Except for the table scraps somebody sneaks to him.”

  “Gener
ally not a problem as a treat now and then. Just be careful what you give him. No fruit pits, raisins, grapes, certain nuts…no chocolate, of course. Maya will give you a list before you leave, plus some recommendations for the best puppy food. How long have you had him?”

  “The day before yesterday,” Jayme said.

  “Rescue Center?”

  “He was rescued, but…Ryan bought him from a man in the park who was abusing him.”

  Lisa looked away from the dog, straight at DeMarco for the first time, and gave him a warm smile. “Does he have a name yet?” she asked.

  “Harvey,” DeMarco said, just half of a second before Jayme said, “Rambo.”

  Lisa chuckled, then told them, “I wouldn’t wait too long to figure it out.”

  “Can you tell how old he is?” DeMarco asked. “And what breed? I suspect there’s some German shepherd in there.”

  “He’s well under a year,” Lisa said. “Probably half is my guess. His coloring suggests a rottweiler-shepherd mix, but the way he’s just lying here enjoying this, he seems more like a Siberian husky mix. He might have a little of all that in him. He’s going to get big, though. Sixty to seventy pounds or more. Are you ready for that?”

  DeMarco raised his eyebrows, and deferred to Jayme, who told her, with a wink to Ryan, “I’m used to big males. Right, Sergeant?”

  At the word sergeant, Dr. Lisa looked up again, first at Jayme, then at DeMarco. “Oh my gosh,” she said.

  “What?” Jayme asked.

  “From this morning’s paper. That’s why your names sounded so familiar to me.”

  “We’re in the paper?” Jayme asked.

  “Maya, did you put the papers out in the waiting room?”

  “I did. Would you like me to get them?”

  “I’m not sure which one I saw it in…”

  “Record-Argus,” DeMarco groaned.

  Dr. Lisa would keep the dog overnight, with surgery scheduled for that evening, but sent the newspaper home with Jayme and DeMarco. To their dismay, the article, read in full the moment they returned to the car, with the paper laid across the console, took up nearly half of the front page—with old photos of DeMarco and Loughner in uniform and Jayme fresh from the academy—and continued for two columns on page four. The headline read:

  TWO HEROES AND FEMME FATALE SPEARHEAD TRIPLE HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION

  “Somebody needs his head ripped off,” DeMarco muttered, and punched a finger at the byline: by Chase Miller.

  “Where did he get all this stuff?”

  After summarizing the discovery in the Otter Creek Township woods, Miller had spent considerable ink on DeMarco’s hardscrabble youth and military history before detailing his “pivotal role” in solving not only the Huston family murder case, but also the cold case in Kentucky and the recent serial killings in Youngstown. Miller likened him to a kind of Batman/Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe—tough, taciturn, and intimidating, but ultimately a force for good. He made the same comparison between DeMarco and Loughner that Jayme had, casting them as a father-son crime-busting combo, and promising, in what struck DeMarco as comic-book prose, that with these two on the case, “the culprits who perpetrated this heinous crime will not go unpunished for long.”

  “Doesn’t this paper have an editor?” DeMarco asked.

  As annoyed as he was, he found the information about Joe Loughner illuminating. The man had put in thirty-four solid years with the Elk County State Police. Then, on a searingly cold day in January, he and his partner had responded to a disturbance outside the village of Benezette. A bearded man wearing a black hoodie, a pair of cut-off yellow sweatpants, and high black boots was reportedly screaming at and firing an automatic assault rifle over the tops of passing cars. When the patrol car approached, the shooter ran inside his trailer, locked the doors, and told the troopers that he was going to send his wife and children to heaven before sending himself to hell. He fired through the window on the front-side door, which was when Corporal Loughner heard the woman and children crying and pleading for the man to stop.

  Loughner’s partner assumed a safe position at the front end of the trailer and kept the man occupied at that end by screaming through the kitchen window while Loughner, fearing that the hostages were in imminent danger, crept around the home to find the second entry. At the rear end of the trailer he managed to work a pane of glass out of the lattice window, reach inside, and turn the lock. After creeping inside, he could hear the children whimpering in a locked bedroom. But the man’s wife was huddled on the floor in the kitchen, her husband standing beside her, trying to get a shot at Loughner’s partner outside.

  Loughner crept forward as far as he dared, weapon drawn. When the woman saw him, she jerked upright and gasped in surprise. Unfortunately, this caused her husband to spin around, spraying bullets. Loughner took one in the side and one just above the kneecap, but managed to place two in the man’s chest. The state police promoted Corporal Loughner to sergeant and awarded him the Medal of Honor “in recognition of personal bravery and commitment to duty despite the risk of serious bodily injury.” He lost part of his liver and the ability to walk without a limp.

  “He is a hero,” DeMarco said. “Though I do have to wonder why he was still just a corporal after thirty-four years.” And asked himself, Another way we’re like each other?

  Miller saved his most flowery prose for Jayme, describing her as “a milky-skinned heartbreaker who will rip you in half if you cross the criminal line,” and recounted how she had “faced down the killer of seven young women in Kentucky, dodging his bullets until she brought him to his knees with a single well-placed shot,” and the bravery she had displayed just months earlier in Youngstown by helping to bring Connor McBride and Professor Gillespie to justice.

  Jayme laughed when she read those lines. “Dodging bullets!” she said. “I didn’t know I could move that fast.”

  “Few of us can,” said DeMarco. “I love watching you do it, though. You’re just a blur.”

  “The guy was firing buckshot at me, not bullets,” Jayme said of the killer in Kentucky. “And I missed him with my first shot.”

  “Doesn’t sell papers.” He leaned back in his seat. “What do you say we go find the kid and turn him inside out?”

  “And get sued for harassment. Or worse. There’s nothing we can do about it, Ryan.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “Stop it. We have no recourse and you know that.”

  “We can put the fear of God in him.”

  “Baby, stop,” she told him. “Take a breath. We’ll have a talk with him, okay? But calmly. No threats.” She rubbed a hand up and down his arm as she spoke. “He’s just a kid. He’s trying to become a writer. He’s ambitious. We can’t fault him for that, can we? He didn’t say anything negative about any of us. In fact, I think there’s a little hero worship going on here. Half of the article is about you.”

  “It’s you he has a hard-on for.”

  “That’s vulgar and possibly ungrammatical,” she told him. “And beneath you.”

  “Femme fatale.”

  “And don’t you forget it.”

  DeMarco took a long, slow breath. And slowly let it out. “At least he’s read Hammett and Chandler.”

  “And Batman.”

  “Which Batman is he comparing me to, I wonder. Affleck or Bale?”

  “Clooney, of course.”

  “Now you’re just trying to placate me.”

  “Is it working?”

  “A little.”

  She folded up the newspaper. “We’d better call Kyle in case he hasn’t seen this yet. Those woods are going to be overrun with people taking selfies, if they aren’t already.”

  “Loughner’s probably there again today. He’ll keep people out. I’ll call him, you call Kyle.”

  “Which one do you think is going to yel
l loudest?”

  “Kyle. But his voice hasn’t changed yet, so it’s no big deal.”

  Eleven

  Before her, he had had only an unbroken parade of days heavy with shade, nights thick with a suicidal darkness. Between the time of Ryan Jr. sleeping on his chest or laughing in his arms and painting all corners with a bright glow of meaning, between those times and his second night with Jayme, he could see nothing but soot. Not even his first night with Jayme had thrown any light into his life, only more guilt to strangle him. But that second night, years after the first, that was the night he had turned the corner. There was no accounting for something like that, no predicting when or under what configuration of circumstances such a change would happen, but from then until now she had been his lighthouse and safe harbor. His manna in a desert of sand and stone, sweet swallow of rock-cupped water.

  So yes, he would throw himself into another investigation for her. He would throw himself into the pits of hell for her. If this was what she believed she needed—just as he had once believed it was what he needed—then of course he would go along with it. Sometimes now he fantasized about giving it all up, getting a job as a crossing guard, for example, shepherding children from one side of the road to the other, helping them remain innocent of all the carnage beneath their feet, keeping them blissfully ignorant of how red was the earth with those billions of barrels of blood spilled in anger.

  He thought he could be happy as a house husband. Changing diapers, reading Go, Dog. Go! a hundred times, Goodnight Moon a thousand, sticking plastic stars to the ceiling, weaving a warm blanket of affection around his children. He could have been that kind of father. Nothing mattered more. Nothing any man or woman could do would improve the world more than being a good parent. The most original and meaningful thing anyone could do in this life was to create a child unlike any other in the world. To do that and not cherish that creation above all else struck him as a kind of deliberate insanity. He would rather raise one healthy, happy, life-affirming human being than throw a dozen murderers in jail.