The Dark Trace

Read the opening

For those who refused to stay silent. For the ones who carried the weight of knowing. For everyone who understood that some truths demand a reckoning, no matter the cost.

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 hundred-degree 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 had buried a wife here. He had born three children in the house across from the east pasture. He had watched his brother’s funeral procession wind through these roads on an August morning just like this one, the dust rising behind the hearse in great amber clouds. But he did not know death like this. He found it inside the silo at 3:47 on a Tuesday afternoon. The interior of the silo was a cathedral of rust and shadow. Sunlight streamed through the gaps in the corrugated metal, illuminating dust motes that hung in the stale air like suspended thoughts. The smell hit him

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