Page 29 of Silent Bones (High Peaks Murder, Mystery and Crime Thrillers #7)
R ishi hunched over his keyboard in the sheriff's tech room, surrounded by the quiet hum of servers and the blue glow of multiple monitors.
Empty coffee cups formed a defensive perimeter around his workspace, and the whiteboard behind him was cluttered with fiber analysis photos, trail maps, and crime scene overlays.
Noah stood behind him, arms crossed, studying the digital chaos on screen. McKenzie leaned against the doorframe, both men feeling the weight of too many questions and not enough answers.
"Take a look at this," Rishi said without looking up, his fingers dancing across keys.
He pulled up a window displaying a DEC incident report. It had a government header, an official seal, but most of the text was obscured by thick digital redaction bars. At the top, a subject line read: Field Incident: Landslide / Wallface Region.
“I found this buried in a maintenance folder on a remote DEC server," Rishi continued. "Took some serious scraping to locate. It's not in any official archive, not indexed properly. Someone wanted this forgotten."
Noah stepped closer. "That's the Wallface landslide from last August?"
"Yeah, but here's where it gets interesting." Rishi clicked to a new tab, revealing a metadata readout. Timestamps, user access logs, edit flags were scrolling down the screen in neat rows. "Someone else has been poking around in this file, recently."
He highlighted a specific entry:
User: dthur_0482
Last Access: 42 hours ago
Session Duration: 31 minutes
Actions: File modification, partial redaction, field deletion
McKenzie pushed off from the doorframe. "dthur_0482. You think that’s Dale Thurston?"
"That's an old credential," Rishi said, turning to face them.
“It could be Dale's login from his DEC days.
But here's the thing, in admin systems, old usernames stick around.
Sometimes they get reassigned, sometimes used for batch processing, sometimes.
.." He paused. "Sometimes someone with higher clearance uses them for plausible deniability. "
“To cover their ass.” Noah nodded and felt his stomach tighten. "You're saying someone else could have accessed this using Dale's ID?"
"Exactly. I mean, it could be Dale himself, sure. But it could just as easily be someone in IT, someone with administrative access, or someone trying to make it look like Dale's covering his tracks."
“But why?”
“Well that’s the fifty million dollar question.” Rishi scrolled through the access log. "Look at the timing, 2:17 AM, session lasted over half an hour. They weren't just reading. They were editing. Deleting. And they did a sloppy job of it."
“Could this be a file they forgot to edit?”
“It could be.” He switched back to the document view. "Whatever was removed, it wasn't professional-grade scrubbing. This was panic work. They were working fast. They tried to mask original text fields but didn't properly encrypt the data underneath. Left digital fingerprints everywhere."
Noah studied the visible portions of the report.
What remained was sanitized bureaucracy: slope instability, heavy rainfall, natural causes.
But the gaps were telling. Whole sections carved out where witness statements should have been.
Field observations were deleted. Most damning of all, the responding ranger's conclusions had been completely excised.
"So this was Dale's original report?" McKenzie asked.
"Has to be," Rishi said. "The file structure, the incident number, the date, even the GPS coordinates match some of the information found in the paper archives. But someone went through and surgically removed every reference to what Dale actually concluded about the cause."
Noah felt pieces clicking into place. “Son-of-a-bitch. If the photos we pulled from the teens instagram accounts and phones are correct. They were there. So, perhaps Dale blamed them. I would imagine he concluded their illegal camping contributed to the landslide that killed that family.”
"And someone made sure that accusation never saw daylight," McKenzie added grimly.
Rishi nodded. "But that's old news, that redaction could have happened a year ago when Dale was forced out. These were new edits.” He highlighted the recent access timestamp. "Forty-two hours ago, someone went back into this file and tried to clean it up even further. They weren't fixing typos."
The room fell silent except for the steady whisper of cooling fans and the distant murmur of radio chatter from the front desk. Noah felt that familiar shift in his chest, not the excitement of a breakthrough, but the cold dread of realizing they were being watched.
"Why now?" he asked quietly. "If Dale's conclusions were buried a year ago, why go back and mess with it now?"
McKenzie crossed his arms. “Simple. We started digging into the connection between last year's incident and this year's murders."
"Exactly," Rishi said. "Someone realized we were getting close to uncovering the cover-up. And maybe they figured you would find out that Dale was right about those kids causing the landslide, and that truth was deliberately buried."
Noah paced to the window, staring out at the parking lot without really seeing it. The implications were staggering. "If Dale was telling the truth about the teens causing that family's death..."
"Then someone in the system protected those kids and destroyed an honest ranger's career to do it," McKenzie finished.
Rishi pulled up another screen. "During that same tampering session, they mounted an external storage device. Copied files, then tried to wipe the access trail. Someone was either backing up evidence before destroying it, or copying it to share with someone else. They question is why share it?”
“Proof to cover their ass, just in case this went south.”
Noah turned back to face them. "This isn't just about hiding Dale's old report. Someone is actively working to keep the truth buried, even now."
"And they have admin-level access to law enforcement systems," McKenzie said. "They can see our investigation, anticipate our moves, and stay one step ahead. Which means the coverup might extend further than the DEC.”
The weight of the realization settled over them like a heavy blanket. They weren't just investigating murders, they were uncovering institutional corruption that reached into their own department.
Rishi's voice was barely above a whisper. "If they can access our systems, they know everything we're doing."
Noah stared at the redacted document on screen, those thick black bars hiding the truth Dale had tried to tell. "We're not just hunting a killer, we’re fighting a system that buried the truth once and is willing to kill to keep it buried."
The cursor blinked steadily on Rishi's monitor, marking time in a room that suddenly felt far less secure than it had moments before.
Someone wasn't just covering up the past, they were actively working to control the present.
Night had settled over the lake by the time Noah pushed through his front door, the weight of the day's revelations following him like a shadow. His home felt different now, less like a sanctuary and more like another place where secrets could hide in the corners.
He flicked on the kitchen light and surveyed the chaos spread across his dining table: case files, photographs, sticky notes creating connections that seemed to grow more dangerous with each passing day.
The bourbon bottle sat untouched where he'd left it, catching the overhead light like amber glass.
Noah poured two fingers but didn't drink. Instead, he pulled out a fresh legal pad and began reconstructing the timeline with brutal clarity:
AUGUST (LAST YEAR): Teenage group camps illegally above Wallface. Their activities trigger landslide that kills family below. Dale Thurston files report blaming the teens for the deaths. Report gets buried, tragedy gets listed as natural accident. Dale forced into early retirement?
AUGUST (THIS YEAR): Same teenage group goes camping at Middle Saranac Lake. All four found dead, murders staged as monster attack. Stephen escapes but is later killed.
Below the timeline, he mapped the connections:
The Cover-Up Network: Someone with administrative access to law enforcement systems. Someone who could bury Dale's report, force his retirement, and now monitor their investigation in real time. Someone with enough institutional power to protect privileged teenagers and sacrifice an honest ranger.
Noah circled four questions that burned at the center of everything: WHO PROTECTED THE TEENS LAST YEAR? WHY KILL THEM THIS YEAR? WHAT IS MACK’s INVOLVEMENT? DID THERESA VOSS HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT?
The digital tampering Rishi had uncovered proved the cover-up was still active. Someone was panic-scrubbing files, staying ahead of their investigation, protecting secrets worth killing for.
His phone buzzed. A text from McKenzie: "Can't sleep. Keep thinking, what if the murders aren't random? What if someone wanted revenge for what really happened at Wallface? Did someone connected to the family that died there, find out the truth and come after the teens?“
Noah stared at the message, pieces shifting in his mind.
If Dale's report was accurate, if the teens really had been there and caused that family's death, then they weren't just victims of the system's corruption, they were witnesses to it.
Was one of them preparing to speak out? Had Stephen shared the truth with Theresa? Had she helped Stephen?
He typed back: “Let’s meet early tomorrow. We need to dig deeper into who had the authority to bury Dale's findings."
"And who's still willing to kill to keep them buried," McKenzie replied.
Noah set the phone down and stared at his timeline. The pattern was becoming clear: institutional corruption begets violence, cover-ups create killers, and the truth has a way of clawing its way to the surface no matter how deep you bury it.
But now they faced a terrifying reality.
They weren't just investigating murders, they were threatening to expose a conspiracy that reached into the very systems meant to protect and serve.
Someone with control over badges and authority and system access was watching their every move, anticipating their discoveries, working to stay ahead of justice.
He couldn’t help wonder if Luther was the puppet master.