Page 25 of Silent Bones (High Peaks Murder, Mystery and Crime Thrillers #7)

N oah’s phone buzzed against the nightstand before sunrise. He didn’t move at first. Just blinked at the shadows on the ceiling, slow to let them go. The screen lit the room in cold blue. McKenzie .

He answered with a dry, half-swallowed, “Yeah?”

“You’re not going to like this. We’ve got another body,” McKenzie said. “Upstairs unit over the bait shop near Tupper. Name’s Banning.”

Noah bolted upright. “Miles Banning? The podcaster?”

“Yeah. Found unresponsive. Local PD called it in as an overdose. It doesn’t feel right.”

Noah was already out of bed, reaching for his clothes. “I’ll meet you there.”

The bait shop was still shuttered when Noah arrived. Gray metal siding, faded sign: Wilderness Worms a duffel bag shoved behind a box of cleaning supplies.

He pulled it out, set it on the counter, and unzipped it.

Inside: five vacuum-sealed plastic bricks of what looked like crystal meth. Pale blue tint. Each stamped with a small, circular label.

Noah stared for a moment. The packaging was nearly identical to the sample bag they found in the woods off the trail.

He turned to Callie. “He had product.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You think he stole it?”

“Or found it.” Noah’s voice was flat. “Or recorded someone who didn’t want to be recorded. Damn idiot, I told him to stay out of it.”

McKenzie whistled low behind them. “This got dark fast.”

They continued combing the room. Noah spotted a familiar notebook, spine torn, half the pages dog-eared, on the nightstand.

He thumbed through it. Scribbles, timestamps, flight path sketches, odd notes:

“Black SUV seen twice. Plates covered.”

“They’re following me.”

Callie opened a drawer and found a photo tucked beneath a takeout menu. She held it up and could see a photo of prints. Same ones they had analyzed.

“Looks like our guy was still investigating,” she said.

Noah bagged the meth. The notebook. The photo. Miles’ phone.

He stood in the center of the room, looking back at the couch.

“If this was an OD,” he said, “it’s not clean. No prep mess. No junkie clutter. No usage history we know of.”

“Yeah,” McKenzie said. “Staged, maybe?”

Noah nodded. “Someone wanted it to look sloppy. But not too sloppy. Just enough to pass as tragic.”

He pulled out his phone and called it in, not as an overdose, but as a suspicious death.

The lights in the autopsy suite hummed faintly, cutting a sterile line down the center of the tile. Noah stood at the foot of the stainless-steel table while Addie Chambers peeled off her gloves and reached for the dictation mic.

Miles’ body lay still, a white sheet folded below his sternum. The kind of silence in the room felt heavier than death. Like something hadn’t finished saying what it came to say.

Addie looked tired, her hair tied up in a loose knot. Her blue gown was streaked faintly from the first cut.

“Toxicology’s pending,” she said, adjusting the mic. “But just looking at him, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Noah folded his arms. “Why?”

“The needle’s placement.” She gestured toward the inside of Miles’ elbow. “No previous track marks. No fumbling. No bruising like you’d see if someone was chasing a vein. Whoever injected him knew what they were doing, or he wasn’t conscious when it happened.”

Callie stood near the sink, arms crossed tight. “So you think it was suicide?”

Addie shook her head. “Doubt it.”

Noah looked down at the pale curve of Miles’ neck. “Anything else?”

She stepped to the opposite side of the table and gently tilted his head, then ran a gloved finger just beneath the hairline.

“Here.” She pointed. “Faint bruising at the base of the skull. Not defensive. More like a grip. Someone might’ve held him down. Could’ve been support... could’ve been restraint.”

“Could’ve been a kill.”

Addie met his eyes. “Could’ve been.”

Noah didn’t say anything for a long moment.

He thought of Miles. Rambling, cocky, full of ideas. He’d been annoying, sure. But he’d been alive. Focused. Obsessed , maybe, but pointed in a direction. Most people weren’t. That wasn’t a suicidal man. Though it was possible he was a new user and had just overdosed, the bruising was telling.

Addie gave him a moment, then peeled off her gloves and disposed of them with a snap. “You’ll have the preliminary tox in about a week, full tox will take a couple of months. Maybe sooner if I push the lab.”

“Push it.”

Back in the hallway, they found McKenzie leaning against the tiled wall, flipping through the notebook they’d recovered from the apartment.

Noah took it from him and thumbed through the pages.

Miles’ handwriting was barely legible, cramped and fast, like he was trying to outrun the thought before it escaped. Notes were scattered across the margins: campsite sketches, names, question marks scratched beside Voss , Strudwell , and Hawkins .

Callie leaned in as he flipped to the next page, a fur sample taped inside with a strip of athletic tape. Beneath it, a caption: “Doesn’t burn like natural hair. Synthetic? Or altered?”

Then another, partly scribbled out:

“What if Bigfoot is a myth?”

McKenzie snorted. “Guy was off his rocker.”

Callie didn’t look up. “Or closer to the truth than we thought.”

The silence that followed was brief but sharp. Noah closed the notebook, tucking it under his arm as his phone buzzed.

“Rishi,” he said, answering.

“Tell me you’re sitting down,” Rishi said. “Because things just got weird.”

“Weirder than what we’ve already got?”

“Yeah. I got into Miles’ cloud backup.”

Noah started walking, Callie and McKenzie falling into step.

“And?”

“There’s a last-seen timestamp at 12:06 a.m. Monday morning. Which means he was still alive after the festival.”

“Same night Ed did the competition.”

“Exactly. Miles started a backup upload around 12:07, but it never completed. Something interrupted it.”

“Was it deleted?”

“Yes. But whoever did it, didn’t scrub it right. I’ve got fragments. And a partial temp file.”

“Can you pull it?”

“I’ll need the night. Maybe longer. But it’s there, something he uploaded before he died.”

“Good,” Noah said. “Stay on it.”

He hung up, mind already moving.

Callie looked at him. “He uploaded something?”

“He tried. Didn’t finish. Someone pulled the plug, but not clean enough.”

“Same way they staged the scene,” McKenzie said. “Sloppy but not too sloppy.”

Noah didn’t reply. He was already thinking about the timeline.

Miles had left the festival. Gone home. Uploaded something.

And then silence.

The tech lab was dark except for the glow of two monitors and the low hum of a backup drive spinning on the desk.

Rishi sat hunched at the keyboard, earbuds in, fingers flying across shortcuts and scrub tools.

Noah paced behind him, arms folded, watching each fragment of recovered data slowly stitch itself into something coherent.

“It’s messy,” Rishi warned, not looking up. “Compression’s wrecked. Audio’s warped in places. But I’ve got ninety seconds. It’s a rough cut.”

Noah stopped pacing. “Play it.”

The screen flickered, then flashed to black before a grainy image stabilized.

Miles, lit only by a single desk lamp, stared into the camera. His face was half-shadow, pupils wide, breath audible. His voice, when it came, was quieter than usual, no performance, no podcast tone. Just fear.

“I think they’re watching me,” he whispered. “Not Bigfoot. Someone else. Human.”

He licked his lips, glancing offscreen like he’d heard something. The angle tilted slightly as he adjusted the camera, bringing the edge of his cluttered wall into frame, a full corkboard, strings, photos.

“I don’t think this is about a legend anymore,” he said. “I think the legend in this region is a decoy, a cover for...”

The screen fuzzed. White noise stuttered across the image.

Noah leaned in. “Shit.”

The video cut, static popped. Then it resumed abruptly, handheld now, camera wobbling as it moved through underbrush. It was in a different location. It was night.

Branches scraped the lens.

A flashlight beam jerked across the frame. Then, too fast, a shape: a dark silhouette moving between trees, upright, too smooth.

And then the feed died.

Corrupted.

Rishi paused it on the final clear frame: Miles’ flashlight catching a smear of motion. Not fur. Not animal. But human.

“That’s it. File cuts at 12:12 a.m., ” Rishi said.

Noah said nothing for a long time. He replayed it. Then again. Slower. Watching Miles’ face. By the third loop, Callie stepped into the room. She leaned against the doorframe, eyes fixed on the screen.

“I figured you’d still be here.”

He didn’t look at her. He just replied, “Take a look at this.”

She walked to his side and watched as Miles whispered again:

“Not Bigfoot. Someone else. Human.”

The feed stuttered. Then that blur. That shape. When the screen went dark again, Callie exhaled. “So he got too close.”

Noah stared at the monitor, the ghost of Miles’ voice still clinging to the air. “Seems that way,” he said. “Someone made sure he wouldn’t tell us.”

They stood there in silence, side by side, as the screen froze on the final corrupted frame. In the background, behind the motion blur, a form hovered, just enough shoulder and curve to suggest a human figure.

The digital timestamp ticked at the bottom of the screen.

12:12:06 a.m.

Rain slicked the windshield in wavering lines, catching the glow of the station’s security lights and blurring them into soft halos.

Noah sat motionless in the front seat of his truck, engine off, jacket collar still damp against his neck.

The night had pressed in tight, too quiet to feel like closure, too loud to sleep through.

He stared out at the parking lot for a long time.

The image of Miles kept replaying in his head, the wide, unblinking eyes, the whisper: “Not Bigfoot. Someone else. Human.”

Noah pulled out his phone, thumb hovering for a second before scrolling to Ed Baxter .

He hit call.

It rang twice.

“Noah?” Ed’s voice was groggy, but alert beneath the surface. “You alright?”

Noah didn’t waste time. “Miles is dead.”

A long beat. “What?”

“He OD’d,” Noah said. “Well, that’s what they’ll write it up as. But we’re not convinced.”

The line stayed silent, but Noah could hear Ed breathing.

“Drugs?” Ed finally muttered. “But he was clean. You know that, right? He hated drugs. Lectured me about my sweetener packets last week. Said aspartame was a chemical conspiracy.’”

Noah almost smiled, but it didn’t hold.

“Did he say anything to you?” Noah asked. “After that night in the woods. After I found him.”

Another pause. “Yeah. Kind of.”

“What’d he say?”

“He told me he went back there. He said he’d stumbled onto something. Said it scared the hell out of him. Made him second-guess going into the forest. I tried to press, but he shut down. Just kept repeating, ‘It wasn’t what I thought it was.’ That’s all he gave me.”

Noah leaned his head against the cold glass.

“You think he knew someone was watching him?” he asked quietly.

“I don’t know. But he was different the last few days. Not paranoid. Focused. Like something had finally clicked and he didn’t know what to do with it. I told him to speak to you.”

Noah closed his eyes. “You okay?” he asked.

On the other end of the line, Ed let out a tired breath. “You know me…”

But his voice trailed off. Not its usual light tone. Something softer. Frailer.

Noah said, “I’ll check in later.”

He ended the call.

Outside, the rain tapped harder, beading on the glass like Morse code.

Inside the cab, the silence was complete, no monsters to chase, no conspiracies to solve, just the slow realization that one more voice had gone quiet. Not because of a legend. But because of what it had almost revealed.

Noah stared through the windshield, past the water and the lights and the blur of his own reflection.

He wasn’t thinking about myths anymore.