Blood Moon

1

First day of incarceration, there’s a killing.

Big black guy named Blade gets stabbed thirty-seven times with his own knife.

According to the inmates, of course, nobody saw anything.

Blade got killed? Hmmm. Surprise to me.

Did I hear anything? You mean like screams or somethin’? Nah, man, I didn’t hear squat.

Did I see anything? Not a thing, man. Not one thing.

He realizes, after hearing about Blade’s death, that he is never going to make it out of this prison alive.

All the things that turned women on — the almost-pretty face, the almost-wasted poetic body, the air of suffering... these same things are going to get him killed in this place.

Very first thing another inmate said to him was, “Hey, white dude, they gonna love that ass of yours in this place.” Black guy giggling all over the place. Crazed animal eyes like so many in here.

But—

Is not gay. Does not want to be touched by another man under any circumstances. And certainly does not want to be harmed.

And—

Is not stupid, either.

First three days in the joint, all he does is watch and listen. (And try to get used to his cellmate sitting down on the john every hour or so, creating a kind of intimacy that is totally repugnant.)

Not hard in a jungle like this to figure out who has power and who doesn’t.

Four days in the joint, on the yard, decides to risk his life by going up to the inmate obviously in charge of this cell block. Servic, his name is. Big muscle-bound Bohunk from Milwaukee. Shaved head. Enough tattoos to start an art museum. Brown teeth.

Courtiers are in session, maybe eight guys standing around Servic brown-nosing him shamelessly.

His little army.

He goes right up to Servic. “Like to talk to you.”

“Yeah?” Smirks to the courtiers so that they know he knows what a little faggot this new guy really is.

“Yeah. Want to tell you how you can make two thousand dollars a month.”

Smile goes. “You wouldn’t be messin’ with me, would you, fairy boy?”

“One: I’m not a fairy boy. Two: I wouldn’t be stupid enough to mess with you.”

Servic looks around. His merry band looks every bit as confused as he does.

Maybe this fairy boy has gone nuts. That happens here, usually right off the top. Just can’t adjust, and so they go crazy.

But Servic has no reason to be afraid of him, crazy or not, so he says to his boys, “I’ll see you guys in a few minutes.”

“You want us to split?” says a con.

“No,” Servic says, “I want you to bake me a goddamn cake. Of course I want you to split.”

They split.

“You ain’t gonna last here very long, fairy boy,” Servic says. “Not pushin’ your luck like this.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. About lasting here. Surviving.”

“What about it?”

“I want to pay you two thousand dollars a month — deposited on the first of every month in any bank account you choose, anywhere in the world — to be my bodyguard.”

“You’re puttin’ me on.”

“Two thousand a month. Tax free.”

“I’ll be goddamned. You’re serious, aren’t you, fairy boy?”

“One other thing, Mr. Servic, quit calling me fairy boy. All right?”

Servic looks at him a long moment and then breaks into laughter that echoes off the steep walls surrounding the yard.

“I’ll be a sonofabitch,” Servic says finally. And then grins. “Kid, for two thousand bucks a month, you got yourself a bodyguard.”

Then Servic puts out his hand and they shake, and then Servic calls his boys over and introduces them to his first client.

His first two-thousand-dollar-a-month client.

Who said America ain’t the land of opportunity?

2

The day it all started, I’d spent most of the morning on the phone with the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC). As a former FBI man who’d worked fifteen years in the behavioral-science unit, I could still be a help on certain difficult cases — and they could help me on some of my own investigations as well. These days I was a consultant to various small-town police departments and to trial lawyers who wanted me to prove that their clients were men and women of unimpeachable integrity and unfaltering love for stray puppies.

The particular case my old friend Gif wanted help with concerned a serial killer operating in the area of Huntsville, Alabama. One of the local TV stations had begun receiving letters supposedly written by the killer. As a trained psychologist, I had spent most of my days in the unit working on the profiles of various killers. Gif wanted to know if a man who dismembered bodies and buried the various parts around the city would also be the type of man who would send letters about himself to TV stations. I said that I guessed not. The killer’s M.O. indicated a disorganized, secretive man, a man who killed out of passion rather than some grand scheme... one not likely to want this particular kind of attention. Gif thanked me; we talked a bit about the old days. He said he was sorry about my wife, and how was I doing these days, and was I still flying the biplane?

As indeed I was. Ten minutes after hanging up, I headed for the hangar.

There’s one particular problem with these old biplanes. When you’re running them too slow, they sometimes take you into a sudden descent that’s tough to get out of.

That’s what happened to Mac Thompson, the man who taught me how to fly my crate: he had a little trouble with his fuel valve and got caught in a spin. He met the beautiful green midwestern earth at maybe a hundred fifty miles per hour. Head-on.

I was the first one to reach him, and it’s not likely I’ll ever forget the crushed and broken look of him, the quick red gleam of blood, the blanch-white jut of bone through flesh.

That was a year ago.

This year the Civil Air Patrol of Charlesville, Iowa had a new daredevil, Robert Payne by name. That would be me.

I’d done forty-five minutes for the kids on this chilly but sunny April afternoon out in pastureland next to the airport. All the usual showboating you might expect, too, loops and rolls and flying far lower than I should have. But I enjoyed it even more than the kids did because all the time I was up there, I was one with wind and sky and cloud, the same kind of pilgrim the earliest aviators were, when flying was still a romance and not just another means of transportation. I was born too late to see the old barnstormers firsthand but my uncle had been one, and we had hours of scratchy old family film of him playing eagle — a rangy man I resembled, with shaggy blond hair and one of those small-town midwestern faces that look simple and happy and trusting till you look closely at the blue eyes and note the wariness that too many years of city life had put there.

Problem was, even with my leather jacket, leather flying helmet, leather gloves, and goggles, the open cockpit tended to get a little nippy on days like this when the temperature ran about 42 degrees. My nose was running pretty bad. That wasn’t supposed to happen to daring young men in Snoopy helmets.

Right now all I could think of was some brandy warmed by the fireplace in the venerable old house where I live, and the opportunity to smoke my one allotted bowl of Captain Black for the day and to pick up where I’d left off in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae. Or to do some more reading for an anecdotal history of Iowa I’m planning to write, a task that takes great research reading.

I put the handsome red barnstormer down in a field of reedy green buffalo grass, the tall wheels bouncing merrily over the bumps, the engine expelling war clouds of thin blue smoke.

No Saturday-afternoon cowboy hero had ever been better treated to the adulation of young people than I was that afternoon, twenty-six of them in all, a few more girls than boys to reflect our modern age, each nattily gussied up in the Civil Air Patrol uniform.

“You ever going to take anybody else up in that, Robert?” a ferociously freckled girl asked.

“If I can ever get the right kind of insurance,” I said.

“Oh, shoot,” she said. A small choir of groaners joined her.

“You ever get scared in an old bucket like this?” one of the boys asked. “I mean, after what happened to Mac and all last year?”

I grinned, the dashing hero to the end. “I can’t think of a better way to go than in old Liberty here.”

“Did you name her ‘Liberty’?” another boy asked.

“Nope. That was the name she came with.”

A girl beamed. “I’m glad she’s a she.”

I looked out over the faces and said, “I need six bodies to help me push Liberty into the hangar over there. Any volunteers?”

They all joined in, of course, resembling a noisy mob in a movie, Liberty regal in her stubborn way as she was pushed through grass almost tall enough to brush the engine. Flat midwestern prairie rolled to distant blue hills and a pale gold scimitar of moon could be seen now that four o’clock was here.

“Thanks, everybody,” I said, starting to tie her down once we were in the hangar, and now that their adult leader was starting to hustle them into the three waiting vans.

He was named Neely. He was a nice guy who’d been under the spell of aviation his entire life.

“Gosh,” he said, sounding awfully young for someone well into his sixties, “the kids sure did love the exhibition.”

“Well, I loved putting it on for them.”

“You’re a great guy, Mr. Payne, and I’d like to thank you.”

He took my hand and pumped it like a well handle he was having some trouble with. Even at his age he was gangly and a little awkward with the social graces. But he was honest and decent and industrious, and our country needed a whole hell of a lot more people like him.

Then he was gone, echoing footsteps out the small hangar, leaving me to chill wind and the smell of fuel and oil and the cold spring day itself. I had goose bumps, and my nose was still running.

I was finishing up, pulling the tarp over the double cockpit, when I heard a voice say, “You sure do all right with the ladies, Mr. Payne.”

“I do?” I turned around now that I was done.

Peterson from the adjacent airport.

He leered, his thick horn-rimmed glasses raising up on his pudgy cheeks. Peterson was the successful nerd all grown up, a beeper clipped to the waist of his wash pants, a formidable ring of keys dangling from his belt, a walkie-talkie filling his left hand and half a dozen pens lining his shirt pocket. His shoes were scuffed brown Hush Puppies with black shoe-strings broken so many times their knots resembled tassels.

The tiny airport Peterson manages has a coffee shop where one afternoon a female cousin of one of the local pilots was bold enough to ask me if I’d like to have dinner with her that night. “You’re a very interesting man, Mr. Payne,” she’d said. “My cousin even seems to believe that you might have been in the FBI at one time.”

Ever since then, Peterson has taken the opportunity to tell anybody who would listen that I am a “lady-killer.” Indeed, I had recently overheard him employing a phrase I don’t believe I’ve heard since 1962. “Ole Payne here,” he’d told a mutual friend in front of me, “gets more ass than a toilet seat.”

Whoever said that we live in a coarse and vulgar age has never met the eloquent Harold J. Peterson.

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Harold.”

“This woman. Real high-class stuff. She just stopped by the coffee shop. Wanted me to give you this.”

He handed me a heavy number-ten manila envelope sealed carefully with long strips of fiber tape.

I hefted it, felt a familiar shape inside.

“She give you her name?”

“Nope. And she wasn’t the kind of gal you ask questions, either. Pulls up in this fancy dark blue Caddy four-door that looked like it had just rolled right off the dealer floor. Hell, when she opened the door, I could smell the new leather seats. Even had a driver. Guy in a suit and mirror sunglasses. Looked like an FBI agent, actually. You know — like you used to be.”

“She say anything else?”

He shook his head. “Nope, just asked if I knew you and would I give you this envelope.”

“Thanks, Harold. I appreciate it.”

“Got time for some coffee?”

“Afraid not. Want to get home and lay out some things for tomorrow. Try some new tackle on some carp.”

“Hell, my pa always said that there was no tackle or no man that a carp ever feared under any circumstances. And he was right. My cousin used to say they were demonically possessed, was how they could chew up tackle that way.”

I smiled. Fish lore dies hard up near the Mississippi. Marquette and Joliet, who were among the first white men to see the vast river, were warned by Indians that it was inhabited by monsters and giant fish that would devour them. This was back in 1673, about the time they reached the mouth of the Wisconsin River. Some of those Indian tales were still being told today.

I thanked him again and walked over to my jeep in the tall grass, fired her up and let her idle a few minutes. She was born Army green in late 1944, just about the time we put the hammerlock on the Germans, and since then she had been passed down from my grandfather to my father to me. Whenever my mother wanted to nudge me gently toward getting married and settling down, she’d say, “Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a son to give the old jeep to? It would’ve made your father so happy.”

While the jeep was gaining strength, I slit the envelope open with a thumbnail and looked inside.

There was a half-inch of good green currency. Thumbing it, I guessed somewhere in the vicinity of ten thousand Yankee dollars.

I sat there in the soughing midwestern wind for a time and watched a hawk splay its wings in silhouette against the soft blue prairie sky.

I wondered who the woman was and why she wanted to give me so much money.

3

In this part of the state, the soil is rich and dark and loamy. I helped dig the grave for Katherine Louise Payne, so I know about the soil firsthand. We went down six feet, as mandated by law.

We dug on a hot August morning, deep into earth cool with moisture and entangled with plant roots. It took two hours, even with their ravenous machinery; and when we were done, I went over to the wide oak and sat under its leafy awning and looked out at the land she’d loved so much — river and forest and limestone cliffs — and thought all the way back to First Communion in 1957, the day we’d first met, all the way up to two years ago when, standing in our kitchen, she had complained of a headache and then had fallen suddenly into my arms.

Aneurysm, the doctor explained later.

She was dead by the time I got her to the hospital, my friend for twenty-four years, my wife for eight.

On the way back to my house, I passed the graveyard, looking through the black iron fence to the hill where the oak waited. Sometimes I sat up there and smoked my pipe and talked to Kathy — not in the awkward and imprecise words of the tongue but rather the simple poetry of the heart. I wanted to stop there now, see her gravestone and say a prayer and tell her I loved her, but there wasn’t time.

I needed to find out who wanted to give me ten thousand dollars and why.

The house, in case you’re interested, is what they call a “Colonial farmhouse,” meaning a one-and-a-half-story Colonial with a porch running the length of the main section and a group of narrow gabled dormers and four floor-to-ceiling bays lending the place a feel of old Williamsburg in George Washington’s time. It sits on five fertile acres, three of which are farmed by a CPA from Cedar Rapids who secretly fancies himself a pioneer, and the remaining two make a nice island of grass and hardwoods and privacy for the house. It had been a wet spring so the forsythias were especially vivid gold, and the daffodils weren’t doing so badly either. Kathy had taught me patience first, and then gardening.

Our kids were going to be raised out here but given the nature of my work for the government, we never quite got around to kids. We had to settle for three cats who were still with me, fortunately, their names being Tasha, Crystal and Tess, tiny Eloise having died at six months following a freak reaction to one of her booster shots.

The inside is just as Kathy had left it, an eclectic mix of Colonial, suburban shopping mall, and what I call post-hippie. You know, water pipes that have been converted into flowerpots, and authentic fake Indian wall coverings that look great in the basement covering up cracks in the plaster.

In the kitchen is a framed blowup of a segment of a 1901 teacher’s contract that Kathy, a teacher once herself, had found in a dusty box in an antique shop. The blowup lists five rules that the undersigned teacher had to obey absolutely:

Dusk was gray and grainy in the den window as I stoked up my pipe. The beer I poured — nothing special, whatever brand I’d found on sale — tasted cold and clean and good. The cats were lined up on the couch next to me, sleeping.

The heavy envelope was on my lap.

Who would want to give me ten thousand dollars? Nobody who had anything legal in mind, certainly.

With the remote, I snapped on the local TV news. The lead story was about a May Day celebration at a nearby mall. A slow news day, apparently. This was followed by a thirty-second commercial for hog raisers whose animals suffered from diarrhea. I was glad I didn’t happen to be eating supper at the moment.

A few moments later, me instantly clicking off the TV set, I heard a heavy car crunch up the gravel driveway. I kept picturing the big Caddy that Harold Peterson had told me about. The engine was shut off. Just dusk birds loud and frantic on the fading day — then a car door opening and chunking shut. Footsteps on the porch. Knock on the door. My mother having raised no idiots, I picked up my trusty Ruger Speed Six .357 Magnum and went to the door.

The mysteries of the envelope were about to be revealed.

I saw what Peterson had meant about his looking like an FBI agent. He managed to look tough even in an expensive suit, which was the first requirement; and you could feel the contempt of his gaze even through the mirror sunglasses, which was the second. He was probably forty and bulky in the strong way of somebody who religiously works off the gin at the gym. He could probably afford to buy a little better shoulder rig, though. His weapon was obvious. But then maybe he wanted it obvious.

“Mr. Payne?”

“Yes.”

“I’m here about the envelope.”

I smiled. “I figured somebody would show up to take it back.”

But men who wear mirror sunglasses after dark rarely smile. Ruins their image.

“My employer’s name is Nora Conners. She’d like to come in and talk to you. Is that all right?”

I shrugged. “Why not?”

“She’ll be in momentarily.”

That’s another thing guys who wear mirror shades after sundown never do. Never say good-bye.

He just turned, went down the stairs and out to the Caddy, which was every inch as impressive as Harold Peterson had said. And, at least in the faint porch light, it did look as if it had just rolled off the dealer floor.

I went inside, picked up some newspapers from the past two days, folded them neatly by the firewood to the right of the fireplace, and when I stood up and turned around, there she was.

I had been expecting a young woman — for some reason I’d imagined she would be in her late twenties — but Nora Conners was at least forty. And quite lovely, her quietly beautiful face suggesting vulnerability, intelligence and a very private but exciting sensuality. She wore a gray designer suit that flattered the lines of her tall, slender body and lent her blonde chignon a prim but erotic quality that most chignons don’t convey. She clutched a tiny black purse with a kind of endearing desperation. Perhaps she had another envelope containing ten thousand dollars in there.

“I know you prefer to be called Robert rather than Bob,” she said, as I took her extended hand. “May I call you Robert?”

“Of course.”

“And this is Vic Baker. He rarely introduces himself.” She smiled like a mother introducing a mischievous son. “He flunked out of finishing school.”

Not even their little private joke evoked a smile on the stone face of Mr. Vic Baker.

“Listen,” I said, “why don’t we all get comfortable and take off our sunglasses?”

She laughed. “Vic gets kidded a lot about his glasses at night, but actually he suffers from an eye inflammation called uveitis. Supposedly the medication he’s taking will clear it up in the next sixty days or so.”

“If you say so,” I said.

We all sat down. She took the couch, sitting in the center of it and on the very edge where her nice knees went white behind her hose, while Vic the Vampire took the austere straight-back chair by the fireplace. I took the overstuffed chair beneath our best Chagall print.

“Well,” I said, “you certainly leave memorable calling cards.”

“I wanted to convince you that I’m serious,” Nora Conners said.

“About what?”

“About tracking down the man who murdered my daughter.” She paused, giving me a moment to deal with what she’d said. “Three weeks ago, a friend of yours, Mike Peary, was killed in a hit-and-run accident. I believe you worked with him sometimes.”

I nodded. “They just arrested a teenager for killing him.”

“Very bad detective work, Robert. They arrested the wrong man. Mike Peary had been working for me for the past seven months. He had tracked the man who killed Maryanne — my daughter; she was twelve years old — to a small town up near the Minnesota border. The man killed him before Mike could get to me. Fortunately, Mike had mailed me a long letter before being killed. I have it in the car.”

“Why not take it to the police?”

“Because they wouldn’t listen to me.” The pause again. “Do you know who Richard Tolliver is?”

“Sure. Guy who lives in Des Moines. One of the richest men in the state.”

“He’s my father.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t. He’s not only my father, he’s my jailer. I’ve been married twice, and both times he managed to put me in mental hospitals.”

“You can’t just put people in mental hospitals. There’s a whole legal process you have to follow. It’s not all that easy.”

“It is if you’re my father and three of your best friends happen to be on the state supreme court.” She sighed. “My father has convinced most people that I’m not a very stable woman, never have been, and that, since the death of my daughter, I’m even crazier than before. If I took Mike’s material to the police, the first thing they’d do is smile patronizingly at me and then turn all the material over to my father.”

She looked at Vic. “Mike said some very flattering things about you and convinced me you could help us if anything ever happened to him. He said the two of you had helped the police on three cases involving missing children and that you found two of them. He talked about you both being in the FBI together — and said you were probably going into business together — helping small-town police departments. He said you’d both obtained private-investigator licenses.”

I grinned. “You make me sound like one hell of a guy.”

“You are one hell of a guy, Robert. That’s why I want you to pick up where Mike Peary left off. You’re not the old gumshoe sort, but you are a detective. A very modern one. Mike told us all about ‘profiling’ and how you both use it.”

“That still doesn’t make me a wizard.” Whenever anybody turns her life — and all her hopes — over to me, I get nervous. I looked at her, which wasn’t a real unpleasant task. “You really think Mike was murdered?”

She nodded. “I’m sure of it. So’s Vic. He was just about to start the second part of his investigation. Then he was killed.” She paused. “If I can be blunt, I know you need some work. I happen to know that your finances aren’t in terribly good shape,” she said. “You’re three payments behind on your mortgage, and you haven’t paid your hangar fee for your biplane in six months.”

“Vic’s been a busy boy, checking me out that way.”

She opened her small black purse and did a circus trick, took from it another manila envelope that looked far too big to be held inside.

She stood up, walked over to me and set it on the arm of my chair. She went back and sat down, smoothing her skirt primly before she did so.

“I’d cry and plead with you if I thought it would do any good, Robert, but I don’t think it will. But I would like to say that I loved my daughter just as much as you loved your wife, and I want her killer found.”

“The police don’t have any leads?”

“No leads at all.”

“And it’s been how long?”

“Eight years.”

“Where was she killed?”

“The parking lot of a shopping mall. I was living in a town in Illinois. It was Christmastime. She’d gone to the mall with one of her friends and the friend’s mother. One minute Maryanne was with them; then she was gone, just vanished. They found her much later that night, in a Dumpster. He’d cut her up with a butcher knife. I don’t want to tell you any more than that. It’s not good for me to talk about.”

I looked at the envelope she’d just given me. “Another ten thousand?”

“Fifteen.”

“Ah.”

“Making twenty-five altogether. One-half down. Even if you aren’t able to catch him, you’ll make twenty-five thousand dollars for trying. Your banker would be very happy to hear about that.”

“You have Mike’s letter?”

“Vic can get it.”

“How about if I read it tonight and call you in the morning?”

“I’d appreciate your doing that.”

“I’m not making any promises, understand.”

“Of course.” She looked to Vic. “Would you get the letter, please?”

Vic left.

“That guy could get on my nerves,” I said. “Doesn’t he ever shut up?”

“Everybody’s curious about Vic. Especially my father. Actually, it’s very simple. We had a pretty mediocre affair several years ago, but in the course of it I found out how good Vic was at managing my life. I came into some money when I was twenty-one, so I hired Vic as my personal assistant. I pay him a lot of money, and he’s well worth it.”

He sure was. He was back before she could say another word.

He walked over to me and handed me a plain white envelope. The letter seemed sizable. FBI agents are very good at writing coherent, detailed reports. That would have come in handy if we’d ever gotten around to starting that private-investigations outfit we’d talked about so many times.

Vic went over and sat back down.

“We’re staying in Cedar Rapids,” she said. “The Collins Plaza.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

She stood up. So did Vic.

She came over and shook my hand and said, “Mike said you were one of the best trackers he’d ever known. He said you could find practically anybody.”

“I used to pay him to say that.”

She smiled. “You don’t take compliments very well, do you?”

“No,” I said, “I guess I don’t.”

I walked them out to the Caddy and stood in the drive as they pulled away, their headlights sweeping over me as Vic turned toward Cedar Rapids thirty-five miles away.

By now it was full night, and my friend the barn owl was calling out from his crook at the top of the hardwood down by the creek.

It was a lonely sound, a perfect complement to the look in Nora Conners’s eyes.

I went back inside, fed the cats, fed myself, opened another beer, and started in on Mike Peary’s letter.

Peary had attached several pages of forms and notes that went into his findings in clinical detail.

What surprises most people about such reports is that they aren’t much concerned with the crime scene itself — the way a detective’s report would be — but with the mind of the killer itself. Most folks on the behavioral-science unit hold degrees in psychology and psychiatry. They speculate on the killer rather than his deeds.

The profiling was identical: you collected and evaluated data, you reconstructed the murders, and you began interpreting the data to give yourself a rough-draft profile, which you then began refining. You needed not only a good, intuitive police mind, you also needed a strong stomach. You learned a great deal from studying autopsy and crime-scene photos and most of them were tough to deal with, no matter how long you’d been at it. After that, you did your profile of the killer to see how it fit previous patterns.

Peary and I had talked about applying for a Small Business Administration loan and setting up shop sometime. If we could have agreed where to put it — he wanted to stay in Des Moines, I voted for Cedar Rapids — we might even have had a chance.

But no longer. All that remained of Peary was a large stack of papers from his very first, unfinished case.

4

After reading Mike Peary’s letter, I sat in my den with Tasha in my lap and the other two cats next to me. Tash was a tabby, the others of very mixed but very cute heritage.

I sensed that this was going to be the same kind of claustrophobic assignment our own friendly government had often given me. Undercover work with people who were either indifferent to my investigation and therefore uncooperative, or who were downright hostile. Small towns were the same the world over. People tended to be suspicious the moment you started asking questions.

I also thought about Mike Peary. He’d won most of the citations and awards the Bureau gave its agents. He belonged on the front of a Wheaties box — a smart, cautious, fair-minded and brave agent who was determined to help rebuild the Agency’s reputation following the last sad years of J. Edgar Hoover’s time.

Then Mike’s life took an unexpected turn. He’d hinted for years that his marriage was less than wonderful, but over our last lunch he told me that his wife had fallen in love with one of the men she worked with. The man was getting a divorce; so was Mike’s wife.

I started hearing rumors of Mike spending an undue amount of time in Cedar Rapids bars. I phoned him once late last year to see if he wanted to go to an eggnog party some people we knew were throwing. He declined, saying he was pretty busy. Now I knew why he’d been busy. Working for Nora. I asked him about his novel. He’d said that he was stalled temporarily but would be getting back to it when this job was over. He actually sounded reasonably happy. “It’s getting my juices flowing again, Robert. I really may be on to something here.”

“You going to tell me about it?” I’d asked.

He laughed. “You know better than that. I can’t discuss an ongoing investigation with a guy who won’t move to Des Moines. But when it’s all over, we’ll have a steak dinner and I’ll give you every gory detail. And believe me, they really are gory.”

So now here I was all these months later, sitting with his letter in my den, a chill rain starting to pummel the roof and windows, Mike dead and me about to get involved in the same case that at least as Nora told it may well have taken his life.

I picked up a Xerox copy of an article I was going to use in my book about Iowa. The article was about granny medicine in the Midwest, granny medicine being a kind of radical folk medicine practiced on the very early frontier. Next time you think that going to the doctor is so bad, consider some granny remedies (true facts) for health problems back in the early 1800s.

(I will never again complain about the fee I pay to visit my doctor.)

I took the odd nap in the odd place, right there in the den with my head thrown back against the wall, so that my neck would be nice and stiff when I woke up.

To be perfectly honest, I had no idea what the sound was that woke me. Not at first, anyway.

Just glass breaking late in the night.

I clipped off the reading light, set Tasha next to Crystal and Tess on the couch, then groped my way through the darkness to the kitchen.

I’d left my Ruger on the table, which was where I usually cleaned it.

The second noise identified itself exactly. Somebody was firing bullets through my front window.

I got on my hands and knees and crawled through the small dining room.

In the living room I went to the far window and eased my head up an inch or so for a quick look at the gravel road fronting my house.

A lone and lonely street lamp outlined the dark car sitting across from my house. There was a man inside with a long rifle with a long scope on it. He didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry. He didn’t seem to be especially afraid.

He squeezed off the third shot

He must have seen me because he took the window where I crouched. Breaking glass made a sharp, dramatic sound and then began falling, in jagged bits and pieces, on the top of my head and my shoulders. A few pieces cut me.

Long silent seconds passed. My body was chilled from cold sweat. My breathing came in hot gasps. My hands were shaking. Some people may get used to being shot at, but I’m not one of them.

I was just starting to raise my head again when I heard him gun his motor. And then he was gone.

I stood up and watched him race out of the circle of light the street lamp provided, roaring into the rolling prairie darkness.

Now it wasn’t just my hands, it was my whole body shaking.

I went into the den and turned on the light and sat down next to the cats. They didn’t look scared at all.

I leaned forward and slid open one of the lower panels on the small bar.

The Jack Daniel’s Black Label I took from there filled half a glass just right. I knocked the stuff back and had another one. I wasn’t much of a drinker — in fact on a bad night two drinks can make me sleepy — but tonight I needed a little help.

I thought about calling the police, but I didn’t want them to look into my background as an investigator. Local police tend to get unfriendly about such folks.

Two hours later, I fell asleep in bed, the cats sprawled out all over the foot, my Robert Louis Stevenson novel now being occupied by Tess.

I had troubled dreams, none of which I could remember when morning came and sang her siren song.

5

“You asleep?”

“Huh-uh,” he says.

“I talk to you a little bit?”

“Gee, Henry, is it about—” Then he stops himself. Henry’s gonna talk anyway. Henry always talks anyway. And it’s always the same old thing. That operation he’s gonna have someday.

“You think I’m pretty?” Henry says from the bottom bunk.

While he’s on the top bunk sweating his ass off. One-hundred-and-four-degree July day today. Can’t be much cooler tonight, even nearing midnight. Now he has to talk to Henry.

“Yeah, Henry. I think you’re a great lookin’ guy.”

“I don’t mean handsome. I mean, I know I’m handsome. People have always told me I’m handsome. Even when I was little. The nuns even told me I was handsome. There was this one nun, when I was about fourteen, you know? I think she wanted me. I mean she was this big old fat nun with onion breath and warts and all kinds of stuff like that and a Bride of Christ and all but I think she wanted to bop me anyway. I really do.”

“Was she any good?”

“Very funny. I wouldn’t’ve touched her with your dick. But you didn’t answer my question.”

“I must’ve forgotten what it was. I’m kinda sleepy, I guess.”

“You can’t sleep in weather like this. You know I heard from my friend in Kentucky that they’ve got air-conditioned slammers down there.”

“In Kentucky, huh?”

“So you gonna answer my question?”

“About you bein’ pretty?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re gorgeous, Henry. Is that what you want me to say?”

“How come you don’t want to screw me? Everybody else here does.”

“I’m not gay.”

“You sorta look gay sometimes.”

“You sorta look gay all the time, Henry.”

“I take that as a compliment.”

“Good.”

Henry, miraculously, shuts his mouth for three or four minutes.

He just lies there basking in the Henry-silence. Sure, guys are farting / coughing / sneezing / shouting / laughing / belching / talking — but not Henry.

Henry-silence, these weeks of co-habiting with Henry, has come to be devoutly desired.

Then (oh no):

“You know what they do?”

“What who do, Henry?”

“The doctors.”

“Are we gonna talk about your sex-change operation again, Henry?”

“Yeah. Unless you wanna be macho and talk about sports or something.”

“I hate sports.”

“You sure you’re not gay?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. But it would come in handy in a place like this.”

“They don’t whack it off.”

“They don’t?”

“No. Everybody thinks they do but they don’t.”

“Well, that’s good news for somebody.”

“They invert it.”

“They what?”

“Turn it inside out and stuff it back up there so it’s like a woman’s.”

“Well, that’s better than whacking it off.”

“I’m going to get my eyes done.”

“Good.”

“I mean, I’m gonna get all the plumbing done first but then I’m gonna concentrate on my face. You remember a movie star named Gayle Hunicutt?”

“Sorta.”

“Late sixties, around there, she was kinda big for a while. Anyway, her.”

“Her?”

“Her eyes. That’s how I’m gonna have mine done. If I can find a picture of her, anyway. That’ll probably be a bitch, won’t it? Findin’ a picture for the doctors to go by.”

“It’s one thing after another, isn’t it, Henry?”

“Then I’m gonna get a huge set of knockers.”

“Great. Henry, I really am gettin’ kind of sleepy.”

“You’re gettin’ uptight is what you’re gettin’. Straights like you always get uptight when people like me start talkin’ about their operations.”

“Maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m gettin’ so uptight that the blood isn’t gettin’ to my brain and I’m starting to pass out.”

“You really are a prick sometimes.”

“Henry, I just want a little sleep. That’s all. I think you’re beautiful and I hope you get those eyes you want — Gayle Harcourt or whatever her name is — and I hope you get a set of tits out to here. But right now, Henry, I really need to get some sleep. Honest to God I do.”

“I just wish you weren’t so pretty.”

“Oh, God, Henry, just knock off the crap for one night, all right?”

“Why don’t you come down here and make me?”

“You know what’s happening, Henry?”

“What is?”

“I’m getting pissed. You know how when you get all hot and sweaty you get real crabby? Well that’s what’s happening to me, Henry. I’m getting real hot and sweaty. But I’m goin’ right by crabby and right into enraged. Real enraged. So, see, Henry, I may come down there all right but if I do, I’m gonna kick your beautiful face in. Are we communicating, Henry?”

And there fell upon the prison cell, for the rest of that hot and sweaty night, many hours of pure and blissful and extravagantly wonderful... Henry-silence.

6

The day was so sunny and bright, so charged with spring, that I took my coffee out on the front porch and watched the baby-blue fog disperse in the piney hills. I went around the house picking spent blossoms from the daffodils the rain had pounded. The cats sat in the window going crazy over every birdie that swooped down on the porch railing.

Finished with coffee, I ran my one mile up and one mile back along the gravel road. Everything looked so damned good and clean and beautiful, all of it somehow making me feel immortal. But I kept thinking about last night, the gunfire through the window, the sounds of glass breaking, a car roaring off into darkness. I supposed he might be up in a tree even now, but that was a bit paranoid even for a former spook like me.

After my shower, I drove the jeep to my bank, and then to a hardware store on the edge of Iowa City. One thing about Iowa City: when they find a style they like, they don’t desert it. Lots of 1968 hippie holdovers wandering the aisles here. I expected to hear a Jefferson Airplane Up the Revolution! ditty come blaring out of the overhead speakers.

I like hardware stores. The sawn lumber in the backyard smells boyhood sweet, while the hammers and nails and glass and shingles and bolts and saws and screwdrivers and cement all attest to the purposefulness of human beings. When you think that we came originally from the sea, and then you look at the shelters we’ve built, not to mention the monuments in Paris and Rome and Cairo and Washington, D.C., you have to take at least a little bit of pride in our species, even if we do screw things up every once in a while.

I bought three pieces of window glass, some fresh putty and a putty knife, and went back home and put in the windows. The cats helped, of course, sitting prim and pretty in a little conga line a few feet behind me, making sure that I knew what I was doing.

By this time, it was 10:17 A.M. It was safe to assume that Nora would be up by now.

The receptionist at the Collins Plaza in Cedar Rapids rang Nora’s room six times and then said, “I’m sorry, sir. Would you like to leave a message?”

I left my name and number.

Then I took another cup of coffee out to the front porch and settled in with my morning newspaper.

She called twenty minutes later.

7

“I have a question for you, Nora.”

“I expected you would.”

“What happens if I catch him?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“If I identify who he is — or at least who I think he is — and then I tell you, what do you do?”

There was a long pause. “You mean do I turn him over to the police?”

“Exactly.”

“Is this really any of your business? I don’t mean to be rude, but it seems to me that your job ends once you find him.”

“I’m not much for vigilantes, Nora.”

“Meaning what, exactly?” She was getting irritated. For all their niceness, nice rich girls aren’t used to being interrogated by the hired help.

“Meaning, I don’t want you or your friend with the mirror sunglasses to kill him.”

“You must have a nice image of me, Mr. Payne.”

“The name’s Robert and I don’t have either a good image or a bad image of you. I’m just trying to anticipate all the eventualities.”

“Of course, you may never catch him.”

“True enough.”

“In which case you’ll have earned yourself a great deal of money, anyway.”

“I’ll do my very best, Nora. I need the money, as you pointed out last night, but now I have a personal stake in this. I want to see if you’re right about Mike being murdered. And if he was, I want to see the killer brought in. I also don’t like the idea of some scumbag roaming the countryside killing little girls.”

“That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear. A little bit of anger. You’re a very quiet person, Robert.”

“If you mean, is macho my style, no. I don’t like hanging around guys who look like they just stepped out of a beer commercial. I saw too many of them in the army and too many of them in the Agency. Quiet usually gets the job done just as well as ape calls. Sometimes better. And that’s why Mike Peary and I got along, by the way. He didn’t have any peacock blood in him, either.”

She laughed. “I agree with you. About quiet getting the job done just as well.”

“I’m going to take the job, and I’m going to do the best I can. Hopefully, by the time I finish, we’ll have the man who killed your daughter and my friend in custody. How does that sound?”

“That sounds wonderful. I’m sorry if I sounded a little peevish this morning.”

“Now, there’s a word I haven’t heard in a while.”

“Peevish?”

“Uh-huh.”

“One of my mother’s favorites. You could throw your bunk bed through your second-floor window, and Mother would explain to the maid that you were ‘peevish’ that day. She was one of those soft, wilted flowers who never figured out a way to cope with the world, God rest her soul.”

“When did she die?”

“When I was twelve.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, my father took up the slack. I couldn’t have asked for a better father until I turned sixteen.”

“What happened, then?”

“I lost my virginity. One night in a cornfield, as a matter of fact. Some seniors were having the first spring kegger. My father hated my friends. He said they were beneath me and, looking back, I have to say he was probably right. Anyway, that night, I had two firsts — my first boy and my first drunk. I was a mess when I got home, and so naturally my father was curious and angry, and I told him. I shouldn’t have — it really wasn’t any of his business — but I was still pretty drunk so the words just came out. If my mother had been alive, she’d have taken me in her arms and held me and cried right along with me. But my father slapped me. He was almost insane. And it was all pride. He didn’t ask me how I felt or if I’d been hurt in any way. He just wanted to know who the boy was and what his father did for a living. He just couldn’t believe that his prim little daughter would have given herself to a member of the lower classes.” A wan laugh. “I never did get around to telling him that this boy had served a year in Eldora — you know, the reformatory. God, he would have gone berserk if he’d known that.”

“So after that you and your father didn’t get along?”

“Oh, we tried, both of us, we really did, gave it our best effort. But basically my father and I have never liked each other — there’s always been some tension there, if I believed in Freud I’d say we probably wanted to get into each others’ knickers — and so he’d give me very strict hours and I’d break them, and he’d buy me new cars and I’d smash them up, and he’d pack me off to boarding school, and I’d run away. I’m sure you’ve heard of girls like me before.”

I thought of the quiet, anxious, pretty woman who sat on my couch last night. I would not have deduced from her looks, her manner or her language this wild background she was portraying.

“Then there were all the usual problems with drugs and alcohol,” she said. “I have to admit I really put him through hell. No doubt about that.”

“Why is he so against you hiring an investigator for your daughter’s murder?”

“He thinks I’m the same unhappy, foolish girl who used to come in after curfew all the time and then throw fits when he confronted me. He’s very sorry that Maryanne died, but he thinks I’m just wasting my money and my time by not letting the police handle it. ‘Pathetic’ was the word he used just the other day.”

“I’m going to do my best, as I said.”

“I appreciate that. And I apologize again for being so—”

“—peevish.”

She laughed again. It was a nice, sweet sound. “I’ll give you a phone service where you can leave messages for me. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. And I’d appreciate hearing from you every few days.”

“You will. I promise.”

“Well, we’d better check out now. I have to go down the hall to Vic’s room and pound on his door till he wakes up. He could sleep through a bombing raid.”

“I’ll talk to you soon.”

Crayfish, shrimp tails, chicken entrails, hog melts, worms, night crawlers, live and dead chubs, coagulated blood, sour clams and frog pieces were all in my bait bucket when I went fishing that afternoon.

Figured this would be my last chance for a time, so I took advantage of it, doing a little bit of what they call drift fishing, wading out to the middle of the stream and staying there a couple of hours.

I saw yellow birds and red ones and blue ones, I heard dogs and owls and splashing fish, I smelled the rich dark spring mud of the riverbank and the piney scent of the woods and the aroma of hot sunlight on the denim of my shirt. I was on a gentle leg of the river that was almost a cul-de-sac. A doe stood in a clearing and watched me for ten full minutes and a water snake at least two feet long slithered up from a muddy hole, looked around, and vanished back into the hole again immediately, apparently not liking my company. A cow with cowy brown eyes and swinging cowy tits appeared in the same spot the doe had and took up the watch, trying to figure out just what it was this two-legged creature was doing out there in the middle of the gentle blue river.

Easy to imagine the time when the Mesquakie Indians had laid claim to all this rich land. See the gray of their campfire smoke against the soft blue sky, hear the pounding messages of their drums echo off the limestone cliffs to the north. As a boy I’d combed these hills for buried arrowheads, almost obsessive in my search. In all those summer days I’d found only one. I still had it in my bureau at home. Kathy had always referred to it as “the start of my Indian museum.”

I got home just at dusk, just when the invisible birds in the trees were making enough noise to awaken every Mesquakie laid to rest in the burial ground three miles to the west.

I got inside and turned the light on and said, “Damn.”

We’ve seen it in the movies so many times that we should be used to it: how a house looks after thieves have gone through it, trashing everything in their search for hidden treasure, your living quarters a jumble of scattered papers, neckties, overturned chairs, emptied desk drawers and magazines that had been riffled through and then tossed on the floor like so many dead splayed birds.

I had a good notion of what my visitor had been looking for and it wasn’t treasure. Not of the monetary kind, anyway.

He’d wanted something germane to the investigation of Maryanne Conners’s murder.

I worked my way through the house room by room. By nine I had everything pretty much fixed up, shoving a stack of paperbacks under the end of the couch where he’d broken the leg, putting all the classical CDs that had been Kathy’s back in their proper slots, wondering in a bemused moment what he thought of all my underwear and socks that had been worn down to little more than holes with elastic banding at the top.

I felt raped, and for all the coolheadedness I’d just bragged about to Nora, I wanted to get my hands on the bastard.

Six hours later, deep into the night, the cats snoring at my feet, the phone rang.

I picked up.

“Leave it alone, Mr. Payne. Just leave it alone.”

Perfectly androgynous voice. Perfectly.

“You understand, Mr. Payne?”

And then he-she hung up.

I lay back down in my bed of shadows.

Knowing that I was now lying on my back, Tasha took the opportunity to walk up my body and lie on my chest, which she had found a most inviting bed.

I hadn’t had to ask what the caller wanted me to leave alone.

8

Cellmate the first year is a fifty-one-year-old farmer named Renzler. Frank Renzler.

Frank, who has told him this story so many, many times, was a farmer with a wife and two kids. Bank foreclosed on him after two bad droughts in a row, so Frank couldn’t help it: one day he just picked up his hunting rifle and drove into town and blew away the banker. Took maybe one-eighth of his head off with two shots.

He cries, Frank does. No, check that. Not merely cries. Sobs. Lies on his bottom bunk and just goes nuts.

Talks about his wife. His kids. How much he loves them and misses them and all he ever wanted to be was a farmer like his old man and his grandpa and why did the bank have to foreclose on him, anyway, why did they have to, huh?

He’s also the one with the bowel problems. Guy must have diarrhea three times a day. Just sits there on the crapper, no more than four, five feet away from the top bunk, and cuts away.

In the spring, Frank finds the puppy.

Nobody can explain how it got inside the prison unless it was a stowaway on one of the potato trucks that come in here twice a month.

But there one day in the machine shop where he works, just all balled up in a pile of rags, is this sweet little puppy.

And Frank (as Frank tells it) just starts bawling like a little kid. Proclaims his discovery a miracle. “I know God put the little stinker there so I’d find her, so I’d have somebody to love till they let me out of here.” (That’s another thing: Frank is serving life without parole, but is always pathetically alluding to the “day they let me out of here.”)

All of which is too good to pass up.

He lets Frank go six weeks always keening and blubbering on about what a sweet little puppy Angel is (that’s what Frank calls her, Angel, her being an emissary from God and all), and then one day late, just as everybody is leaving the shop, he sneaks in there and does it.

Understand something.

He knows exactly what he’s doing.

When he was a kid, he used to do stuff like this all the time.

Used to find neighborhood puppies and take them down in the storm sewer (the one place he was expressly forbidden to go) and then he’d experiment with puppies and kittens.

Cut off one leg and see if they could hobble around. Usually start with one of the front legs.

Then he’d take the opposite leg in the rear. See if they could limp around that way.

Of course all the screaming and thrashing about and all the blood—

Well, that was part of the fun, too, not just the crippling.

So in the machine shop, with the help of a knife his two-thousand-dollars-a-month bodyguard Servic got for him, he works over the puppy real good.

In the morning, Renzler finds Angel (he hears about all this later from other cons) and falls on the floor and goes into some kind of seizure.

They never seen nothing like it before, except one con who once saw a sixth-grade girl at Catholic school have an epileptic fit.

The guards come running and they see Renzler there on the floor, and it takes four of them to hold him down.

Finally, finally, he stops screaming and throwing himself around.

Then he gets real quiet, tears streaming down his cheeks and he looks at one of the guards and says, “You gotta loan me a knife so I can kill her.”

The guard looks over at Angel there on a pile of bloody rags. Some bastard has cut all her poor little legs off. Amazing that she’s still alive.

The guard, this big thick German not known for sensitivity, has tears in his own eyes looking down at the obscenely maimed animal, and nods, and takes out this big-ass pocket knife, one of those gizmos that have a dozen different blades on them for opening cans and wine bottles and stuff like that, and he hands Renzler the knife. It’s certainly up to the job. The blade is six inches long.

And Renzler gets down there with Angel and he kisses her sad scared little face and he says a couple of parts of a couple of different prayers and then he rolls her gently over for a better take on her heart and then he kills her.

And then he sits down right in the middle of the floor and he picks Angel up like she’s his little baby or something and he starts rocking her back and forth in his arms and he’s crying these really eerie quiet tears and kind of singing some lullaby he remembers his mama singing to him and the big German guard hasn’t noticed as yet that Renzler hasn’t given him the knife back and then—

And then it’s too late.

Because Renzler picks up the knife, the blade still shiny with poor little Angel’s blood, and he brings the knife up to his right eyeball and drives it deep into his eye socket, right on through to his brain.

He screams, but not for long.

And then there’s two of them dead: Renzler flat on his back now, his foot twitching crazily, little Angel hugged tenderly to his chest.

Eight days later, he gets a new cellmate.

Hard-core criminal, this one.

Killed a man in a 7-Eleven stickup.

Brags so much about his sexual conquests, he quickly gets marked as a latent fag.

But what a relief to hear about stickups and dangerous guys his new cellmate has known and all the girls he’s bopped—

Certainly preferable to slow, sad Renzler, whining about his farm and his fantasies about getting out of here someday and how little Angel was sent to him directly by God.

Oh, yeah, this new cellmate is a lot better.