The Dark Trace

Read the opening

The Man in the Silo The silo rose from the flat West Texas landscape like a monument to something forgotten. Rust spiraled down its corrugated walls in arterial patterns, and the air around it shimmered in the hundreddegree heat, distorting the horizon until the world looked broken. Harry Matheson had worked this land for forty-three years. He knew every inch of it the way a man knows his own body—the dry riverbeds, the places where the soil held water longest, the spot near the north fence where the coyotes came through at dusk. He did not know death. He found it inside the silo at 3:47 on a Tuesday afternoon. The body hung from the loading beam, suspended by rope looped beneath the arms. The head was tilted back, the mouth open as if in a final, silent scream. The skin had begun to darken, that peculiar purple-black that came three or four days after death. Flies scattered as Matheson’s footsteps echoed up the metal stairs. On the corpse’s chest, carved into the flesh with methodical precision, was a symbol: a vertical line intersected by three horizontal marks. The cuts were deep. Deliberate. Ritualistic. Matheson’s hand found his phone before his mind could catch up. The line rang twice. “Sheriff’s office,” a voice said. “There’s a body,” Matheson whispered. “In my silo. He’s been... hung. There’s something carved into him.” The drive to the silo took the sheriff forty minutes. Another twenty for the Rangers to arrive.

The sample pages on this site continue the opening — and the full book is available in print.