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I’d tried to call Jerry, his phone taking me directly to voicemail as if it had been turned off. Again, this wasn’t completely strange. Jerry had never had a landline, and he often forgot about his cell phone, choosing to make the drive into town if he wanted to talk to someone.

I called out again before I leaned carefully into the front doorway. “Hello?”

Once I could see inside, I could tell that no one, dead or alive, was in living room or small attached kitchen. The space was messy, with a crocheted blanket over the back of the threadbare couch, a few empty beer cans here and there.

Empty shotgun shells lined up like broken soldiers on the scratched coffee table. Supplies—gunpowder and tools—were scattered about. I knew Jerry liked to reload shells, but I had no idea if Joey did the same. Jerry shot clay pigeons in the space behind the bones in the back. Wilmot used to join him back in the day.

I turned my attention toward the narrow hallway, grateful that I hadn’t met with any sort of disturbing scents.

“Jer? Joey?”

The whole place seemed to move and groan with my footfalls. It was an old trailer. Carefully, I peered into the bathroom and then the three bedrooms. No beds were made, and clothes were strewn here and there, but the place wasn’t filthy.

There was no one there.

I didn’t suspect that the skeleton sculpture was Joey’s bones, but Trisha insisted that he’d never ghosted her for this long. Joey was probably just somewhere being a jerk. I wondered more about where Jerry’s bones were and if they were still protecting his organs as he breathed in oxygen.

I walked back to the living room and crouched by the coffee table. I inspected the shells and their supplies more closely, but they didn’t tell me anything.

I sighed. Other than the door being open, there wasn’t anything strange here. Even the door might mean nothing.

Using the back of a receipt I found in my pocket and a pen on the kitchen counter, I left a note.

Call me—Hazel.

I closed the door on my way toward the piles of bones.

“Jesus,” I muttered as I came around the corner of the trailer.

The piles had grown, but I wasn’t going to take the time to sift through them for anything suspicious. Whatever was going on in Black Vulture, I had to believe that the Smoots didn’t have anything to do with it. Well, I hoped.

If whoever created the sculpture somehow gathered the bones from these piles, any remaining human bones weren’t obvious. I scanned hard.

Jerry took remains from the desert. He boiled them, cleaning off whatever might still be attached to them, before he put them out in the piles. He used some of them to create jewelry that he sold from a shelf in the grocery store. There wasn’t a big call for necklaces made of things like lizard skulls, but he had customers, some of them loyal and repeat.

“Keeps the vultures away,” he’d say when asked about cleaning the bones.

My life had been comprised of a bunch of strange episodes and my father’s unusual occupation, so I wasn’t easily rattled. However, the quantity of bones behind Jerry’s trailer, even with no human ones obvious, was off-putting today. I wondered if it was the number or the growth of the piles that left me feeling guilty for not coming out to visit Jerry in so long. It was a marker of the time at least, and a lot of time had passed.

Jerry was, at his most rooted level, a good guy, a law-abiding citizen, until he had no other choice. If child protective services had done something to save his grandson, he wouldn’t have needed to gather the boy himself.

Fresh carcasses were supposed to be reported. Endangered species and dinosaur fossils also required calls to Fish and Game or law enforcement, but he’d only taken bones he’d come across.

There was a time when the police hassled him for his collections, but not for long and not with much gusto. Gathering animal bones from the desert wasn’t against the law. I wondered what Verro might think and do, and was glad I hadn’t asked him to come with me. He’d see the piles on his own at some point.

I wished one of the Smoots would drive onto the property while I was there, if only to check them off my list of suspects and/or victims.

I’d driven out there to search for Joey, but I’d also hoped to see Jerry too. I didn’t want to include either of them on any list, but Jerry had known Wilmot well. He could have posed the bones into whatever he wanted—he had both the skill and the patience. He would know that my first thought would be that the sculpture looked like an animal from the museum. He would know how in some way Wilmot’s name would come up because of the extra phalanx.

Mine too. The Bone Woman had her own fair share of critics.

With one last, quick glance over Jerry’s collections, I turned and took a step toward the Jeep. Something flashed in the corner of my eye. I whipped my attention back around and stood still as I lifted the gun.

A coyote was making his way around the pile of bones at the end of the trailer. He stopped and stared at me. I thought about the knife in my pocket and that fact that this was one of the reasons so many of us carried one—danger at almost every turn out here. I didn’t reach for it, though, and I lowered the weapon.

I loved the brutality of the desert life. The need to survive was ever present, kill or be killed.

But I had deemed myself an observer only. I’d vowed to never become a hunter. I could kill a scorpion but probably never a coyote. I’d never wanted to, but I was aware enough to understand that perhaps I was making myself pay some penance. Sins of the father and all, or more specifically, sins of his clients, but neither they nor Wilmot looked at their deeds that way, so it was only me self-castigating.