Dry Bones

Dry Bones by G. Miki Hayden

In the drought-stricken town of Holder, Oklahoma, Senior Police Officer Aaron Clement is determined to solve a cold case that has waited too long for answers. The skeletal remains of two young boys have been found in a local park, and before Clement can uncover who killed them, he must first restore their names.

As heat bears down on the rural community, the investigation begins to reach into the painful history of a once-corrupt police department. Missing reports, old failures, and buried secrets suggest that the boys may not have been the only victims. At the same time, Clement is pulled into a troubling domestic murder case, the disappearance of a local schoolteacher, and a new threat against women in Holder.

With the help of young Officer Bradley and a survivor whose story may reveal the next clue, Clement follows a trail of evidence that grows more dangerous with every discovery. Each case tests his judgment, his loyalties, and his belief that the truth still matters, even when it comes at a cost.

Tense, atmospheric, and emotionally charged, Dry Bones is a rural police procedural about justice delayed, lives overlooked, and one compassionate cop’s fight to bring the dead and the living out of silence.

Read Dry Bones by G. Miki Hayden and enter a gripping Oklahoma crime thriller where the past is never truly buried.

Excerpt from the book

The living know that they shall die, but the dead know not any thing. Neither have they any more reward. For the memory of them is forgotten. —Ecclesiastes 9:5

The jumble of bones brought to Aaron Clement six weeks before had taken on a shape inside of him—and though they hadn’t yet been identified—a sort of individuality. He’d insisted on having them back in his office after Dr. Neal, the forensic anthropologist, reported that these were the bones of two young boys between 10 and 12.

Holder (Oklahoma) Senior Police Officer Clement should have known that two victims had been recovered, but he’d been inobservant and fooled by the fact that a single skull had been found. So after finding out that he had two boys to attend to, Clement had requested a team of searchers in the park for the second skull. Since animals like to gnaw on bone to file down their teeth, they might sometimes carry away the bones of the dead. Of course a skull was heavy, but Clement felt that looking around was worth a shot.

The skull remained missing, but the bones were now laid out as best as possible on the air conditioning unit that formed a shelf along the window in Clement’s office. He’d asked for a table of sufficient length to lay out the boys, yet that, reportedly, wasn’t to be found— even though Clement was aware that the cafeteria in the police academy building across the street had a few such tables, and he’d pointed that out.

Then he’d requested to have the one skull they were in possession of sent out for the face to be reproduced by an artist. But when Chief Munson had discovered the cost, he’d told Clement such a proposition wasn’t in the budget, either.

Although DNA had been extracted from the bones to determine sex, that had done no good right here and now in identifying the children. So these days, the stark, dry bones lay gathering dust within Clement’s sight and very much on his mind.

Children. Two young boys. Buried or half-buried in Holder Park. Could Clement drive around town and not think about the children murdered? Could he go home at night and not think about the children murdered? Oh, yes, the two boys had been murdered, one with knife marks scoring some ribs and the other with the hyoid bone more or less crushed, indicating strangulation.

Today, Clement sat and looked at the boys, trying to decide what he had to do. Maybe he could find someone who wanted to practice up, or who was charitable, to produce a model of the one boy, for free.

To find the killer, Clement had to identify the boys, discover when they’d disappeared and who might have been seen with them. People often came forward long after the fact—that was part of the cold case approach. But without the boys’ identity, how could Clement proceed? He had searched through years and years’ worth of microfilm of the local paper, The Holder Press, as well as the department’s reports of missing persons for the last 30 years. But he hadn’t gotten a hint of two boys who’d disappeared simultaneously.