Blood Moon

1

I reached New Hope next morning, just in time to see an Amish couple in a horse-drawn wagon irritate the hell out of a nice-looking young mother in a shiny new van. She had her kids with her and was obviously in a hurry. The wagon wasn’t about to go any faster, there was too much oncoming traffic for her to pass, so all she could do was crawl along at 10 mph and glower a lot.

As I would soon find out, this little drama was sort of a metaphor for life here.

Yes, New Hope was one of those beautiful old Iowa towns that had sprung up along with the railroad back in the 1870s, a town square complete with bandstand and Civil War monument; huge oaks and elms forming a natural canopy on the main drag; and striped awnings on all the proud little businesses that lined the four-block downtown, the men’s haberdashery, the supermarket, the ice-cream store, the tobacco shop.

This was the bucolic New Hope, the New Hope that existed in the secret heart of everybody who had ever grown up, like me, in the small-town Midwest, all long, lazy sunny afternoons fishing, and chilly football Friday nights out at the ramshackle old stadium, and Christmas carols on the loudspeaker as you jostled for gifts at the town’s one-and-only department store, which was basically four big rooms with a lot of different stuff piled into it. And the Amish, of course, their horses clopping hollowly down the asphalt roads, the pretty women peering out from beneath their dark bonnets, the men in coarse gray beards and inscrutable eyes.

The old New Hope.

The new New Hope was McDonald’s and Burger King and Motel 6 and the video stores with lurid sexy posters in their windows; Wal-Mart and a four-screen movie theater and what was formerly a furniture store converted into SOCIAL SERVICES.

Where the old New Hope belonged to the people who lived in town and worked at one of the three local factories, the new New Hope, its homes built in the hills surrounding the town itself, belonged to the married couples in their thirties and forties who drove their BMWs and Audis and vans to Cedar Rapids, where they worked, rubbed shoulders with as much modern culture as you could find there, and then escaped every night to live out their fantasies of Andy and Opie and Barney and Aunt Bea.

There were inevitable clashes, the nastiest, I’m told, coming when two members of the school board pronounced themselves “born again” and proceeded to list twenty-six novels, including The Great Gatsby and Catch-22, that had to be stricken from the high-school curriculum. If nothing else, this move got all the young professionals interested in the governance of the small community where they lived. They announced that two years from now at this time, they would be fielding their own school-board candidates, and they sure as hell wouldn’t be people who found Mark Twain “sinful.”

Welcome to New Hope, located in the northeast corner of the state, pop. 14, 683.

There was a motel right downtown, a good base to work from, pretty much equidistant between the old New Hope and the new housing developments in the hills surrounding it.

The drive had been four hours, so I needed food and coffee. I decided to try the downtown to get a human sense of the place. The downtown of any place, no matter its size, is where you can get your quickest sketch of a town’s sociology.

I had two eggs, basted, two pieces of wheat toast with raspberry jam, one glass of orange juice, and three cups of coffee.

I ate these at the counter of a tiny place called Dickie’s Diner where, nearing noon, most of the customers were male, roughly half of them dressed in the kind of suits and sports coats you get at Sears, the other half dressed in uniforms of denim, khaki, cotton, all bearing the caps and sew-on badges of gas companies and electric companies and bug-spraying companies. Mixed in with these folks were farmers, all weather-lined faces and big knuckly hands wrapped around chipped white coffee mugs. Not a single young professional in sight.

The talk, as I picked it up in snatches, was about a new state sales tax the legislature was proposing and what a bunch of worthless idiots that legislature happened to be, and how bad most of the National League teams looked this year, and — this from the businessmen — how the young professionals thought they were too good to shop in downtown New Hope. “They do it all in Cedar Rapids. Not one goddamned bit of support for us!”

Near the end, just as the third cup of coffee was starting to put a little twitch into my fingers, I heard a name that sounded familiar.

“Eve McNally find that husband of hers yet?”

A snort of laughter. “Not unless she knows how to crawl through sewers.”

“How a man can do that to a woman like Eve sure beats me.”

“I really thought the last time he went down to Iowa City to dry out, he’d be all right.”

“Lasted two months. Two damn months is all. Then he was back to the bottle.”

These were two of the suits sitting at the counter. McNally was one of the men mentioned in Mike Peary’s letter as a possible suspect. They had me curious. He appeared to be missing, presumably on a drunk. From Mike’s profile, a man who drank a lot — maybe to suppress the memories of what he’d done — would fit perfectly.

I paid my bill and went outside and stood on the corner for a few minutes, enjoying the spring air.

There was a phone booth across the street. I walked over and looked up the name McNALLY, RICHARD.

I got the address and drove out there. The town was laid out on an extensive grid broken only by the public square downtown. Railroad tracks cut north-south.

The houses were eclectic, everything from small Queen Annes to what they used to call “Corn Belt” homes, square white clapboards of two stories with the inevitable squeaking swing on the inevitable front porch. The pastel prefabs that came in after WWII looked a lot older than the houses built eighty, one hundred years ago.

The McNally place was a small white clapboard sitting in the middle of a green, green acre with a windbreak of shade trees and an aged but sprightly red barn in back. It was out on the north edge of town. The yard was carefully mown and well-tended, magnolia trees and apple blossoms charging the air headily.

I knocked. Inside a dog barked, and then a soft voice shushed it. And then she was there, framed in the glass of the storm door. She looked to be about my age, and probably not quite at her ideal weight, maybe five, six pounds over on a very slight frame, with silken dark hair and silken dark eyes, the left one spoiled by the fading remains of a black eye. She looked scared and miserable but even so, appealing in a kind of sad way, the sort of woman you try hard to make happy because you suspect she’s never been happy before.

Of course, unhappiness was a tradition among pioneer women out here. Despite all the macho cowboy movies, women pretty much kept things running on the frontier. Sure, the men had to plow and till the fields and hunt the meat, but study up on pioneer women, and you’ll see why the suicide rate was so high among them — eighteen-, twenty-hour days seven days a week during which they did everything from making dyes for coloring cloth from barks and berries and roots; making clothing on a loom; making all meals; tanning hides and cutting patterns out for shoes; washing, ironing, mending; taking total responsibility for a brood of kids that probably ran to seven or eight; giving her man sex on demand; being priest, doctor, teacher; and in her “spare time” pitching in and helping with the planting and, later on, the harvest.

The woman in the doorway looked like a lineal descendent of those pioneer women.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.”

“That’s a nice dog.” And it was, a golden retriever with a sweet-sad face that made you smile while it was breaking your heart. Beyond Eve, I got a glimpse of an inexpensively but very handsomely appointed home. The homey smell of baking came from the kitchen.

“Sara. She’s the gentlest animal I’ve ever known.” She relaxed enough to lean down and pet the slender dog on the head. Sara’s tongue licked her fingers pinkly with quick gooey love. “Why can’t everybody be as sweet as you, honey?” the woman asked her dog. She stood straight and looked at me. “I’ve got some cookies in the oven, so I’m in kind of a hurry. Can I help you with something?”

“I’m looking for Richard McNally.”

Fear became more pronounced in her eyes. “Richard McNally is my husband.”

“My name’s Hokanson. I’m a free-lance writer.”

“I don’t know what you could want with my husband. He sells gourmet honey.”

“But I understand he travels.”

“Yes,” she said. Now suspicion joined fear. She seemed to stiffen her entire body inside her designer jeans and prim white blouse. “Of course he travels. How else would he make his sales?”

“Well, that’s why I’m in town for the next few days. I’m doing a piece on how small Iowa towns are becoming bedroom communities, with a lot of people commuting to their work.”

“Oh. I see.” That seemed to calm her some.

“Maybe I could find him at the office?”

She shook her head. “No. He’s — gone. Anyway, he doesn’t have an office. He just works out of the house here.”

“I see.”

“What’s your name?”

“Hokanson. Jim Hokanson.”

“And you’re with—?”

“I’m a free lancer. I’m writing this for Fenroe Publishing. I’m on a kind of retainer setup with them.”

I dug out a card and handed it over to her. Obviously, she wasn’t as yet completely satisfied with my little tale. She’d probably dial that Chicago number and probably talk to somebody at good old Fenroe Publishing, Inc., but she’d probably never figure out that it was nothing more than a small room in a small office building in a bad section of Chicago used by the Agency as a cover for many of its domestic people. Even though I was officially separated, they still let me use it when I needed to.

She looked straight at me and said, “I don’t believe you.”

“About me being a free lancer?”

“Right.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.” She paused. Handed the card back. “I want you to leave.”

“But ma’am, I—”

“You don’t have any right to be here. And when I ask you to leave, that’s what you should do.”

“But ma’am, I—”

She leaned down and took Sara by the collar and eased her back beyond the threshold. Then she slammed the door shut.

I stood there feeling like an Amway salesman on a very bad day.

A moment later, apparently thinking I’d left already, or unable to restrain herself, she began sobbing.

It got to me. I wanted to go in there and hold her and just let her cry. She needed somebody to do that for her. I was like that after Kathy died.

On the sidewalk, I turned and started back toward town, watching a golden butterfly sit tentatively on a hedge already occupied by a quick bright cardinal. There were days when I wanted to be a boy again, when my biggest concern was where to find an even bigger steelie than the one I had, and when the next Batman would make its appearance down at Choate’s Rexall pharmacy.

Before I got three steps, a gray car pulled up to the curb and a gray little man stepped out of it and walked quickly toward the McNally home. He too had a Sears suit on, a brown one. He wore a buff blue shirt and a yellow tie. It seemed to me that this kind of getup should be illegal. I wasn’t exactly a dandy, but not even a blind guy could be excused for wearing this particular combo.

I stopped him. “Are you going to see Mrs. McNally?”

He seemed confused. “Yes. Why?”

I shook my head. “She’s not in a visiting mood right now.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Just some family problems.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh. Then that makes sense.”

“What makes sense?”

“Are you a friend of the family?”

I nodded.

“I’m Don Murphy, assistant principal at Wilson Middle School. Where Melissa goes.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, she hasn’t been there for nearly a week and we’ve been very concerned. We’ve talked with Mrs. McNally on the phone a few times and she assured us that Melissa would be back soon but — well, it seemed more appropriate to just drive out here today rather than waste any more time on the phone.” He grimaced. “Family problems?”

I nodded.

“The husband, as usual, I suppose? No offense.”

“No offense.”

“She’s such a decent woman,” he clucked. “And Melissa’s just about a perfect student.”

“Why don’t I have Eve call you when she’s feeling a little better?”

“I’d appreciate that. Today if possible.”

“I’m just going to get her a few things. Then I’ll be back and tell her.”

“I appreciate that. I really do.”

He was gone, then, and I walked back downtown. The husband was missing, and the daughter hadn’t been to school in nearly a week, and Eve McNally was given to sudden fits of sobbing.

I wondered what the hell was going on here.

2

Lunch, a couple hours later, after a morning spent sitting in the tiny red-brick library and looking through newspapers to acquaint myself with the town, was a Big Mac and fries eaten at a bright orange table in a bright orange seat overlooked by a poster of Ronald McDonald, who looked curiously sinister. Ever since John Wayne Gacy — who murdered, that we know of, thirty-six young boys, often while wearing a clown costume — clowns sort of spook me.

The main drag told an interesting story. If I’d sat at this window a few years ago, I’d have seen brand-new cars and brand-new pickup trucks parading down the street past the two- and three-story buildings.

But no longer.

In the 1980s the rural economy, like the urban economy, suffered a setback from which it had never recovered. People talk about the urban underclass, those ragged, bleak denizens of rattling, rusted-out hulks that emit clouds of black smoke and that idle as if they’re in death spasms — well, there’s a rural equivalent, and I saw a lot of them on the street today, coming into town for more food stamps or a visit to the free clinic on the east edge of town or to apply for a minimum-wage job at one of the fast-food places. Andy of Mayberry had done moved away.

I was just finishing my Pepsi, just starting to want a cigarette the way I still do after each meal, when I looked up and saw a tall red-headed woman with cat-green eyes and a cute dinky nose and enough freckles for three people standing there watching me.

“Are you Mr. Hokanson?”

I was out of practice and so the question caught me off guard, but at least I was smart enough to respond. “Yes.”

“Mind if I join you?”

“Not at all.”

She had a kid-sister grin touched with a certain disingenuous eroticism. “Even brought my own coffee. I’m a real cheap date.”

She sat down on the other side of the small orange table. It wasn’t easy. Slim as she was, her big leather rig — holster and gun and nightstick — took up room in quarters this cramped.

“I should introduce myself, I guess. I’m Jane Avery. I’m the chief of police.” The grin again. “I know that sounds impressive, but just keep in mind that it’s a very small police department.”

“I’m impressed anyway.”

This time it was just a smile. She sipped her coffee, looked over and waved at somebody who waved and called her name. At noon, the customers ran to downtown workers, people who looked retired, and truckers. The back lot held maybe ten sixteen-wheelers.

“I forgot to tell you, Mr. Hokanson, I’m also a celebrity.” She sipped coffee. “Boy, that’s hot.”

Her name was called again, this time by a guy who had to be a banker. He looked born to it.

She waved.

“They seem to like you,” I said.

She shook her head, her short red hair baby-soft and baby-fine. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, she wasn’t even exactly pretty, but she sure was fetching. “Guilt.”

“Guilt? Over what?”

“The way they treated me when I first came here. Three years ago.”

“They weren’t nice?”

“Not nice is an understatement. The mayor, a man named Glickson — he’s dead now, by the way — saw a piece about me in a Des Moines newspaper, how I was a young cop who was getting her master’s in criminology at night school. His police chief had just quit, and so he offered me the job. It was good timing. My husband had just asked me for a divorce. He’d never been happy about me being a cop, he found it a very unfeminine job, and he couldn’t help himself, and gee whiz — he was sorry, but he’d fallen in love with a woman at the ad agency and gosh, wouldn’t I just give him a divorce so we could all be happy? So I took the job here.” She laughed softly. “At least it distracted me from my broken heart, though God knows why I was brokenhearted about Ron. Anyway, among many other misdemeanors, some of the old-boy network in town here pinned a Kotex on the antenna of my police car, and called me at all hours of night and day with all kinds of sexual suggestions, and tried three different times to have the mayor fire me. I think he had a heart attack and died because of all the stress. Then the young professionals in town finally got sick of hearing about it and took my side, and that put everything into a kind of stalemate. So here I am.” The grin again. “Boring story, huh?”

“Hardly. I’m just amazed you’re still here. With that kind of harassment, most people would have left.”

She shrugged the shoulders of her stiff police shirt. “I was an orphan. This job had a lot to do with my identity and self-worth, if you’ll excuse the jargon. It was very important for me not to run.”

“I can understand that.” I looked at her carefully. “In fact, there’s only one thing I don’t understand.”

“And what’s that?”

“Why you came over here and sat down.”

“Oh, that’s simple enough. A citizen asked me to investigate you.”

“Would this citizen’s name be Eve McNally?”

“Could be.” She leaned forward into an angle of sunlight. Her eyes were vivid green. “Do you have some ID?”

“Are you serious?”

She nodded. “Afraid I am.”

“My name’s Jim Hokanson. I’m a free-lance writer. Sometimes I do retainer work for Fenroe Publishing.”

I dug out my billfold, extracted a white business card, handed it to her.

She didn’t look at it, just left it lying next to her elbow.

“Anybody can get a card printed. I really need to see some ID.”

To the casual eye, we might have been lovers having a quick lunch at McDonald’s. She looked so sweet and relaxed sitting across from me.

I got out all the Hokanson stuff and handed it over: license, medical-insurance card, Visa card.

She went through it carefully, turning everything over and over in her slender fingers, even bending the Visa card a little.

She handed it back.

“So tell me,” she said, “who are you?”

“You saw for yourself.”

“None of that’s ever been used.”

“What?”

“All brand-new. Your Visa card, for instance. Use that a few times in one of those machines, it gets scratched a little. But it isn’t scratched at all. Same with your license. Not a mark on it. So who are you?”

“You must’ve read an awful lot of Nancy Drew when you were growing up.”

She smiled. “I did as a matter of fact. But you’re not answering my question.”

“Who am I, you mean? That’s a pretty heavy philosophical question for this time of day.” I looked across the small-town street where people stood in twos and threes beneath the shadows of awnings and discussed small-town news and gossip. There was a pizza place named “Mike’s” on the corner. “Does Mike make good pizza?”

“Who?”

“Mike. Across the street.”

“Oh. Yes. Pretty good. So who are you, Mr. Hokanson?”

I smiled. “I’m on the same side you are, let’s put it that way.”

“That’s a very elusive answer.”

“That’s because I’m a very elusive guy.”

Her beeper went off. She frowned. “Excuse me.” She walked back to a pay phone, deposited some coins and talked for a minute or so. She came back, but this time she didn’t sit down. “Bad car accident. I have to leave. I may see you later, whoever you are.” I waggled the Visa card at her. “Says right there that I’m Mr. Hokanson.”

“Right,” she said. “And I’m Katharine Hepburn.”

3

In the driveway sat two matching white Lincoln town cars. Brand-new. There was money in the God business. Far up the drive that curved behind a stand of pine trees, I could see a large white house, new and prosperous-looking against the backdrop of a pasture where cows loitered contentedly.

The church was small and modern in a repellent sense, all sharp angles and juts, like a piece of glass sculpture that had been dropped and smashed and then glued back together ineptly. The message seemed to be that God was a schizophrenic, and a clumsy one at that.

But for all the trendiness of the design, the wailing song that poured forth from its open front doors was at least as old as the famous tent-revival shows that played the Midwest and South back in Depression days, a bit of bayou blues and Jimmy Rodgers white-boy hobo song combined with the stirring religious themes of working-class Baptists.

For all the fanciness of the exterior design, the interior was plain: thirty rows of oak pews and an oaken altar. And on the altar stood a thirtyish man in a singles-bar country-western getup of brilliant red shirt with blue piping, skintight jeans and a pair of Texas boots that were no doubt the real lizard they purported to be. He was good-looking in a chunky Irish kind of way — maybe Edmond O’Brien had been his grandfather — and he was gone gone gone on the song he was twanging out on his electric guitar, Elvis himself having never been more gone gone gone back when he was nineteen and known only in Memphis and signing his name on the top part of ladies’ breasts.

He was singing all about how God understood him and why he did the things he did, and how God would cradle him someday and purge him of sin and loneliness and want, and I couldn’t help it — I actually enjoyed hearing him sing, his voice echoing off the vaulted ceiling and trailing out the open side windows.

And then he paid it off, a big finale with him working hard on his guitar, eyes still closed, whole body surging with the grief and ecstatic eternal promise of the lyrics.

The church sounded obscenely quiet after he finished, as if its only purpose was to be filled with his song, and now it was spent and empty of reason to exist.

“You’re really good,” I said.

For the first time, his eyes came open and I was almost startled by the clear green fury of them. Oh, yes, this man knew whereof the demons he sang.

“Didn’t know I had an audience,” he said in a young voice that made me slide his age down to twenty-five. “Reverend Roberts says I should bring in an audience even when I’m practicing. I still get stage fright, you know, on our TV shows and all.”

He set his blue Fender down on the carpeted floor of the altar, then walked down to meet me.

After shaking hands he said, “I’m Kenny Deihl. If you ever saw the reverend’s show, I’m one-half of the talent.”

“Haven’t seen the show, I guess.”

Something subtle but serious changed in his startling green gaze. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re not a follower of the reverend’s, either, are you?”

“No. Afraid not.”

“Then just what the heck’re you doing—”

“Kenny, I’ll handle this. No need to get upset We’re all children of the Lord.” He stood in the back of the church, but I had no trouble hearing his greased and mellifluous tones at all.

He looked just about the way you might imagine, $250 worth of moussed dark hair, a face that was youthfully handsome in an almost-diabolical way, like a mask that didn’t quite work, a conservatively cut blue suit that would give offense to no one, and one of those firm-handshake, quick-grin manners that let you know you were in the company of a Psycho for Jesus. He smelled of hair spray, aftershave and chewing gum.

He came over and said, “Kenny, why don’t you run downtown and pick up that case of Pepsi for tonight? You know how dry we get when we cut those radio shows.”

“I’ll bet he’s a reporter,” Kenny said. “I’ll just bet he is.”

“Remember Hebrews 13:2, Kenny. ‘Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unaware.’ ”

Kenny knew just what look to put on his face. He still hadn’t forgiven me for coming here but he knew how to take his cue from the reverend. “Sorry, mister. Guess I just got carried away. Just after the state paper went after us—”

He looked at the reverend, then quit talking. He shrugged, then walked to the side door at the front of the church and disappeared.

“When I found him two years ago,” said the minister, “he was singing in a motel lounge in Sioux City. He’s changed a lot since then, become a truly saved soul, but he has a distrust of strangers ever since the state newspaper did a very unflattering article about myself and two other midwestern TV evangelists. Kenny takes criticism of me especially hard. When you save a man’s soul, the way I saved Kenny’s, well, he’s naturally grateful to you and he gets very protective of you.” He shook his perfectly moussed head. He resembled an actor who might have been a leading man a quarter-century ago. “The Devil has so many friends, and the Lord so few.”

“Well,” I said. “That’s actually what I am — Kenny guessed right — I’m a journalist. But I’m not doing an exposé. I’m doing a piece on how small towns are becoming bedroom communities for a lot of people.” I told him who I was profiling here.

“Well, Mr. Hokanson, I’m sure you’re telling me the truth, that you’re not going to do an exposé and all, but I think you’ll understand why I may not want to do an interview with you.”

“You’ll see the copy before it gets printed.”

“That’s what the other fellow said, too.”

“How about you think it over for a while, and I’ll call you back tonight?”

“Why don’t you tell me where you’re staying, and I’ll leave a message there? We’re on thirty-eight radio stations in a three-state area, and we have to cut half-hour radio shows once a week. I give a sermon, and Kenny does two songs, and then Mindy does two songs. Then, of course, I ask for help, financial help, Mr. Hokanson, I’m not afraid to say those two words together. Financial help. You can’t do the work of the Lord without financial help. Nobody can — it costs money to live in Satan’s world, Mr. Hokanson. That’s what that reporter fellow couldn’t understand, that virtually every dime donated to my church goes to helping other people.”

I tried hard not to think of the matching white Lincolns in the driveway.

The good reverend suddenly made a bitter face. “He even mocked me, that reporter. I was trusting enough to tell him about my wife, who has cervical cancer, and about our trips up to the Mayo Clinic and about how I’d nearly lost my faith several times when I saw — through the test results — that my Betty wasn’t getting any better. Wasn’t that a legitimate question? To ask the Lord why He answered so many of my prayers for others who were sick — but wouldn’t answer my prayers for my own wife?”

Tears stood in his eyes now, and spittle sprayed from his mouth, and he made kind of animal mourning sounds deep in his chest.

He started poking me in the chest as he made his point.

“I say to people, ‘The Lord hasn’t answered me because I’ve been a sinner’ and they say, ‘Oh, no, Reverend Roberts. Nobody lives a more exemplary life than you. It can’t be that.’ ‘Then why won’t he help Betty get better?’ I ask. But they never know what to say. So you see, it’s got to be my sins. I am a sinful man.”

He wanted me to disagree but I wasn’t about to. I still doubted that Jesus, back on earth today, would tool around in a new Lincoln.

“I hope your wife gets better.”

He looked at me hazily, as if he were coming out of a trance, as perhaps he was. Bible-thumpers often worked themselves into real frenzies.

“I thank you for your charitable thoughts, sir.”

“You’ll get a hold of me tonight?”

“I most certainly will. I most certainly will.”

I nodded and walked out of the church, watching the play of shadow and light on the oak walls, and hearing him mutter prayers to himself up near the altar. This had to be for my benefit. Isn’t there a psalm about the most sincere prayers being those whispered in the heart?

Outside, I saw a young blonde woman in white shorts and a blue halter hosing down one of the Lincolns. She had the somewhat overweight and overripe sexuality of a fifties femme fatale. She wore too much makeup and too much hair spray and too much theatrical sexuality, but her particular persona worked anyway. She was appealing in a slightly tawdry, vaguely comic way.

I was five feet away from her when she turned and saw me and then very slowly leaned over to take a sponge from the sudsy red plastic bucket by her bare feet. In bending over, she gave me a nice lingering look at her considerable cleavage.

“Hi,” I said. “You’ve got a nice day for it.”

A knowing but tentative smile. She still hadn’t figured out if I’d be worth any serious flirting.

“I could stand it ten degrees warmer,” she said. “I’m from Houston, and I just can’t get used to what you all call a ‘heat wave.’ ” She gave me the benefit of enormous eyes made violet by contact lenses. “Actually, I could stand it a whole lot hotter.”

Being a gentleman, and being somebody who hates corny lines, I decided to take what she said without any implication whatsoever.

“I was just in seeing the reverend. He seems like a nice guy.”

She eyed me skeptically. “Somehow you don’t seem the type.”

“The type?”

“You know. The churchgoing type. There’s just something about you. I don’t mean any insult, either.”

I told her who I was. “You’re the second good guesser I’ve seen in fifteen minutes.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, Kenny Deihl guessed that I was a journalist. And I am.”

She had a good nasty grin. “That isn’t all that Kenny is good at guessing, either.”

And with that, and before I could ask her what her obscure remark had meant, she turned back to the car and sprayed water all over the roof and driver’s door.

She shouted above the din of water on metal. “He lets me drive this if I keep it clean. Part of my pay, I guess.”

“Are you Mindy?”

“Right.” She grinned her nasty grin again. “I’m the girl singer for the reverend.”

“He said he found Kenny in a Holiday Inn. Where did he find you?”

“A Motel 6.”

“In the bar?”

“Motel 6s don’t have bars, if you get my drift.”

I went right on past that one. “You three travel a lot?”

“Me and the rev and Kenny?”

“Uh-huh.”

“ ’bout four months of the year, all told.”

“The reverend do much traveling on his own?”

“That’s kind of a strange question, seeing’s how your article’s supposed to be about a bedroom community and all.”

“Not really. I’m just curious about how he holds his flock together.”

She laughed. “So that’s what you call them. A flock. I’ve been wondering what name to use for them.”

She picked up the sudsy sponge and stood on tiptoes to wash the roof. She had a great bawdy body and knew it. Another five years, it would mudslide into fat if she wasn’t very careful, but right now it was bedazzling.

She had given the roof a few swipes when I heard a beeping sound and saw for the first time the beeper clipped to the waist of her shorts.

“Oh, shit,” she said. “Pardon my French.”

She stopped work, shaking her head miserably. “That bitch.”

“Who’s a bitch?”

“Betty Roberts.”

“The reverend’s wife?”

She heard the discomfort in my voice. “He sold you on it, too, huh?”

“Sold me on what?”

“Her cancer.”

“She doesn’t have it?”

“Hell, no, she doesn’t have it. He just says that so the ‘flock,’ as you call them, will feel sorry for him and give more money.”

“You sure you should be telling me all this?”

She plopped sponge into suds, wiped her hands on her hips and said, “I’m splitting in a week. Don’t matter to me anymore who knows what.”

The beeper erupted again.

“She’s up there at her bedroom window watching us with binoculars. That’s all she does all day. The colored woman who works for her, it’s her day off, so Reverend Bob makes me be her gofer.”

“This is quite a setup here.”

“Yes,” she said, grinning her nasty grin. “Isn’t it, though?”

4

What most people don’t know about prison is that it’s a bureaucracy and that you have to treat it that way.

Early one spring, he decides he wants to start writing — just give him something to do other than listen to all the jailhouse lawyers talking about how they’re going to get themselves out early, or listening to some con whining about how unlucky he’s been all his life, or watching this one guard just drool at the prospect of cracking a skull or two. But the assistant warden won’t let him have a typewriter.

Why not? he asks.

I wasn’t aware I had to give you any reasons for my decisions, the assistant warden says.

According to Anderson you do.

Ah, yes, Anderson. God, I get sick of jailhouse lawyers.

I could file a form, you know.

The assistant warden doesn’t say anything for a time. Just stares out the window. Then says, A BP-9.

What?

A BP-9. That’s the form you need to file. Its official title is an administrative remedy appeal. File the form, maybe the warden’ll give you that typewriter you want. Of course Anderson, being a good jailhouse lawyer, he can tell you about the BP-9 or the BP-10 or the BP-11.

Then the assistant warden pauses a long time and says, You killed that dog didn’t you? The one with its legs cut off.

Don’t know what you’re talking about.

You think I don’t know about you? You think I buy all this altar-boy stuff you spread around? You’re the most dangerous man in this entire prison system.

He says nothing. Just watches.

Did it get you hot, when you cut up that dog that way? Did it make you feel good about yourself?

The assistant warden shakes his head wearily.

I can handle the thieves and the con artists and even some of the killers — but it’s the monsters I can’t deal with any more. The people like you.

Sounds like you need a vacation.

I want you to know something.

Yeah? What?

If I can ever figure out any way to do it, I’m going to kill you. Cut your throat the first chance I get. That’s a promise.

Is there a complaint form for that?

For what?

For when somebody threatens to cut my throat?

You think this is funny?

I was just asking a question.

I couldn’t sleep for a month, thinking about what you did to that little dog.

You think you can prove it?

I don’t need to prove it. Not to my satisfaction, anyway, because I already know you’re guilty.

I’m going to ask Anderson about that form. That BP-9.

You do that.

You want to put a little side bet on whether the warden lets me use that typewriter?

Just get out of here.

Yes, sir, your majesty.

He leaves the office, smirking.

“Assistant warden says I need to file a BP-9,” he says to Anderson that afternoon on the yard.

“He still won’t give you that typewriter?”

“Huh-uh.”

“What a jerk. And damn right we’ll file a BP-9. And we’ll file it right up his ass, too.”

Time passes.

A) Obviously the assistant warden never cuts his throat.

B) Two months and three forms later (Praise the Lord for those BP-9s), he gets his typewriter.

C) Fourteen months later, the assistant warden is diagnosed with liver cancer. Thirty-eight years old. Wife and three kids. Good upstanding Methodist. And he gets liver cancer.

D) Six weeks after the diagnosis, the assistant warden is dead.

On the afternoon of the announcement, Anderson — they’re on the yard again, a really ball-chilling April afternoon — comes over and says, “You’re a dangerous guy.”

“Yeah?” he grins.

“Yeah. I mean, I got my BP-9s ’n stuff but you must have voodoo or something. I mean, that assistant warden gettin’ liver cancer and all.”

The grin again. “Yeah, maybe that’s what I do have.”

“Voodoo?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Voodoo.”

5

A dozen people said hello to me on the way back to my motel. Half a dozen waved. I’d never seen any of them before but they reminded me that the twin of small-town suspicion was small-town openness. I saw dogs chase butterflies, bees seek honey, and cats loll in sunlight. Walt Disney would have had all of them singing merry little songs. He had the right idea. Even if the universe wasn’t a merry little place, what was the harm in pretending it was every once in a while? Of course, my generation didn’t believe much in Disney, except for Fantasia, which had just been another giggly excuse to get stoned. No, my generation would have shown the dogs taking a crap on the lawn, the bees stinging innocent babies, and the cats eviscerating doves.

I was two blocks from my motel when I saw the Caddy. My first reaction was, No, you’re imagining things. Must be a number of blue Caddies around. Anyway, what would Nora and Vic be doing here?

A block from my motel, I saw the blue Caddy sitting in an alley. The windows had been darkened so that I couldn’t see in. But I had the clear impression that I was being watched carefully. I also had the clear impression that it was Nora and Vic in the car. Why were they following me around?

In my motel room, I called a friend of mine at the State Bureau of Investigation in Des Moines. I asked him to run a check on the good minister and on both Kenny Deihl and Mindy Lane. I was not exactly a trusting soul. He said to call him back in a few hours.

Before leaving, I looked around the room. It smelled of disinfectant and was dark enough, on this sunny afternoon, to give the House of Usher a few pointers on gloom. I opened the drapes, cracked the window a quarter-inch, spent a long minute watching a jay perched on the window ledge, and then raised my eyes and looked across the street to the parking lot adjacent to the steak house.

Big blue Caddy just sitting there.

I left the room, found the rear EXIT sign and took it.

If they were going to follow me around, I’d make them work for it.

They were going to be sitting there for a long time waiting for me to walk out the front door.

Lochinvar Antiques was a refurbished Queen Anne Victorian that had enough gingerbreading for at least three such houses. It sat on its own acre lot on the edge of a residential area. The grass was in need of a quick trim.

In the front yard, a slender woman with a blonde ponytail sat next to an aluminum tub where she was bathing a feisty young kitten. I couldn’t see her face but something about her blue work shirt and jeans and the heavy Navajo turquoise earrings signaled me that she was going to be young — no more, say, than thirty.

I walked over and watched the kitten shake off water and soapsuds. The woman laughed most pleasantly, then looked up at me.

Her eyes were young, brown and quick and intelligent, but the skin of her face was deeply lined and aged.

A momentary sadness shone in her eyes, as if she was used to people being surprised by how old her face looked when they finally saw it. The odd thing was that she was very pretty, even with the wrinkles and grooves in her face.

The kitten, who was calico and very young — four pounds of kitty at most — was covered with suds and water that made her fur stand straight up like spikes. She made a lot of mad little noises, her eyes chiding me for not taking her away from this murderous woman who imprisoned her.

“She hates it, Ayesha does,” she said, wrapping the wriggling kitten in a nubby white towel.

“Ayesha, that’s a great name.”

“From H. Rider Haggard,” she smiled. “I was one of those girls who always liked boys’ books better than the ones for girls. Ayesha was the eternal goddess in She.”

“That’s right, I forgot. I used to read Haggard, too.”

“Give me a minute — I’m going to run her inside.”

While she was gone, I walked to the edge of the small hill the house sat on and looked at the blue river in the yellow sunlight. There was a breeze, one scented up with apple blossoms, and as I watched the river I thought of how white pine had been rafted down these waters to the eager mills. For fifty years, just after the Civil War, the towns in this part of the state had boomed with furniture factories. But then in Burlington, which was the center of all this activity, a fire had destroyed a full five blocks of factories. Business never quite recovered, and the sight of white pine being ridden by lumberjacks down the blue, blue waters was seen no more.

“She’s still mad at me,” she said when she got back. She put out an elegant hand that felt of hard honest physical work. “I’m Joanna, by the way.”

I told her my name and gave her my pitch.

“I guess that’s the trendy phrase for it now, huh? ‘Bedroom communities’?”

“I guess so,” I said. I nodded to the house. “This is quite a place. Really well kept.”

“Interesting history, too.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t know if you know anything about this part of the state, but back in the 1840s and 1850s people around here hid runaway slaves. A lot of slave hunters — they were pretty much like bounty hunters — combed this area looking for runaways. They came up from the South; you know, hired by the plantation owners. That’s why people had trapdoors and sub-basements for slaves to hide in.”

Her enthusiasm made me smile. She was a girl again, eager to share a story. I liked her. “One night a couple of slave hunters killed a little slave girl in cold blood. They were trying to impress all the slaves with how merciless they were. But they didn’t count on the people of the town here. Six men from New Hope got together and spent all night tracking the slave hunters. They found the hunters in the morning and lynched them on the spot. Left them hanging for five days. The bodies probably looked pretty awful by then.”

“So much for the theory that nothing ever happens in nice little Iowa towns. Or used to, anyway.” I looked at her and smiled. “But you were telling me about your husband and this being a bedroom community.”

“Well,” she smiled but it was a smile that bore more pain than pleasure, “he certainly travels a lot.” She hesitated, then said, “As women throughout the Midwest can attest.”

I didn’t know what to say so I immediately went to the inane. “You’ve really got a great view from here.”

“I’m sorry to put all that on you.”

I looked at her. “I don’t mind. I just wasn’t sure what to say.”

She shrugged. “We used to be a matched set, my husband and I. Six years ago we were Zelda and Scott, the most beautiful, the most desirable, the most sought after. Then about five years ago, my face— Well, you see what happened. Tried everything. Nothing helped. The dermatologists call it solar elastosis. Did it to myself. Too much sunlight, too many cigarettes.”

She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down. A bright red canoe with two blonde girls paddled past.

I walked up next to her.

“He was always unfaithful — he really is quite handsome — but after my face started to go... Well, I don’t suppose I blame him, really. We were both very vain people when we met. I was a real heartbreaker, very shallow and insincere, just as much as he was. The only difference is that with my face this way—”

She looked at me and smiled. “Well, now I’ve been forced to look at life the way mere mortals do. You know, walk into a room and have men be courteous but not interested in me in the slightest bit. Or see the pity and the horror in the eyes of beautiful women who worry that this may happen to them someday.”

“He’s gone now?”

She nodded, staring at the river again, down the brambly hill and past the sandy shore to the sunlight-painted water and the occasional splashing fish.

“He’ll be back tonight. You can call him around eight if you want to catch him.”

“I’ll set up a time for an interview tomorrow.”

She eased her arm through mine, led me back toward the beautiful Victorian.

“Are you married, Jim?”

“Not anymore.”

“Divorce?”

“She died.”

“Lord.”

When we reached the sidewalk, she slid her arm out from mine and said, “Maybe I’ll use you to make him jealous. You’re a nice-looking man.”

“Thanks.”

“Would you mind?”

I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Not if it’ll make you feel better.”

“For a little while it would.”

“Then go ahead and do it.”

“I’ll tell him that you took me to lunch and that we spent the afternoon walking in the woods. God, it’s been so long since he was jealous.” She laughed suddenly, heartily. It was good to hear. “God, you probably think you stepped into a local production of Sunset Boulevard, some nutty old broad carrying on this way. Do you know Sunset Boulevard?”

“One of my wife’s favorites.”

“I’ll bet you were faithful.”

“I was.”

“And I’ll bet she was faithful, too.”

“Far as I know.”

This time, she kissed me on the cheek. “I think I’ll go inside and lie down and have a fantasy about you, Jim.”

I smiled. “That’s when I’m at my best. In somebody else’s fantasies.”

I gave her arm a squeeze and walked back to town.

6

He found out soon enough that cons like to brag about crimes they’d never been charged for.

Dumb goddamned cops this, dumb goddamned cops that.

You know. That sort of thing.

His second cellmate went by the name of Shay. Decent enough guy. Kept to himself. Didn’t ask all sorts of questions. Kept his part of the cell clean. Was as discreet as he could be, given the circumstances, using the toilet. Was even known to read a book or two.

But sometimes he couldn’t help himself, Shay couldn’t. He’d give in to the con habit of bragging about himself and his criminal past.

“Eight burglaries in the same three-block area in the same two-week period, and they didn’t catch me. Can you believe it?”

Or:

“Man, did I have to hightail it out of that town, believe me. That cute little waitress I said gave such great head? Guess how old she turned out to be? Fourteen years old, man. Fourteen. Her old man told the cops and then came after me himself with a couple of these jerks from the bowling alley. Man, they would’ve torn me limb from limb. Fourteen years old!”

Or:

“I bet this other guy, see, bet him I could do it with the cops sittin’ right across the street in a squad car. And I did it, too. I mean, the place is all lit up and everything, and I just kind’ve stroll real casual-like onto the lot, and I get in this red Plymouth convertible — I figure I may as well steal a car that’s got some style — and I slide behind the wheel and I hot-wire the sonofabitch right across the street from the cops, and then I pull off the lot. And they don’t do anything — not a goddamned thing — till it’s way too late! I took that baby for a joyride and then ditched it. They never caught me!”

A guy can’t keep hearing and hearing about how smart and cool and gifted his cellmate is without feeling a little bit competitive.

Isn’t he also smart and cool and gifted?

Hasn’t he himself pulled off a couple of stunts that would make his cellmate’s pale by comparison?

So, knowing that his cellmate will never believe his tale, putting it down to standard jailhouse fantasy, he decides to tell his cellmate about one night outside Miami, Florida.

The speedboat he’s using overturns — he’s probably had a little too much vino to manipulate such a craft in the stormy waters, a downpour having started an hour earlier — and damned if he doesn’t wash up like a castaway in an old silent movie.

Now what?

Starts walking. All he’s wearing is a pair of swimming trunks. Even left his Rolex behind.

Walks through the night and the rain for half an hour before he sees this little cabin down in a wash of white sand, meager little light showing.

Walks down there. Knocks.

Lady answers. Forty-fiveish. Bit overweight. But dressed in a bikini and an open man’s shirt, she has a voluptuous quality that is undeniably sexy.

Tells her his dilemma, she invites him in.

Which is when he meets the husband, chunky guy with balding gray dome and so much gray hair on his barrel chest that he looks like he’s training to become a bear. Unfriendly as hell. Can tell right away this is one very possessive guy. Doesn’t appreciate your eyes on his wife’s breasts. No, sir.

They’re drinking some kind of A&P generic beer and are actually pretty wasted on it. And listening to some Cuban station. Now that he gets a longer look at her, she looks a little Cuban as a matter of fact. As for the guy, what he has on the wall is a bunch of Hemingway kitsch, this stuffed marlin that he probably didn’t catch personally and this big color photo of himself in battle gear in what looks to be Vietnam.

Far as he can see, the place has three rooms and a bath. She suggests that he can sleep on the floor with some blankets she’ll give him, then in the morning her husband can give him a ride into town. Husband doesn’t look all that happy about it. Keeps glowering at him.

They drink until two, and by then he knows what he’s going to do.

Really crazy idea. Dangerous idea. Absurd idea.

But of course he’s going to do it anyway.

He’s worked up so much hate for her swaggering abusive macho husband — the kind of guy he really loathes, kind of guy who was always picking on him when he was growing up — that he knows he’ll go through with it.

He gets up and pretends he’s going to go to the bathroom, carrying his beer bottle to set in a cardboard box along with the empties.

But when he gets even with the husband, he turns suddenly, hits the bastard on the head, grabs a length of clothesline he’s been eyeing for the past hour, and then ties the husband in his chair. Then he grabs the wife and slams her against the wall and asks where her old man keeps his guns. She tells him. He finds a .38, loaded.

All the wife does is scream and scream and scream. So shocked she can’t get herself together enough to help her husband at all. Blood is running down the side of his head, in a stream down his cheek

Then he goes for the wife.

Rips her shirt off and then her swimsuit and then throws her down on the table and spreads her legs.

He doesn’t rape her till he’s sure the husband is conscious and watching.

The guy, by this time, is all screamed out. He’s called him every possible name, made every possible threat. And now he’s hoarse. Literally, hoarse.

The woman is long past crying.

She just kind of stares. He’s reamed out every orifice. She just slides to the floor and stares over at her husband.

Which is when, for his final act tonight, he rattles around in one of the drawers by the sink and finds the butcher knife.

He goes over and cuts the husband free and then orders him, at gunpoint, to stand against the wall.

“What’re you gonna do?” the husband says suspiciously.

But he just smiles slow-like and hands the wife the knife.

“Stab him,” he says.

“What?”

“Stab your husband.” Terror has turned her meaty face ugly.

“I... I couldn’t do that. I love him.”

“If you don’t do it, I’ll kill you.”

She looks at her husband. At the knife in her hand. Back at her husband again.

He shoots her in the calf of her right leg. She cries out.

“I’m going to keep shooting you till you stab him.”

An animal frenzy takes her over — she looks wildly about the room for some kind of escape.

He shoots her in the left leg.

She cries out.

“Stab him!”

And she does, lunges forward and gets him in the hairy shoulder, burying the knife much deeper than she’d probably planned.

“Wow,” Shay says. “Stabbin’ her own husband. That was a great idea.”

He smiles. “Yeah, I kinda liked it myself.”

“Man,” Shay says, lying back on his bunk “You sure come up with some good ones. You sure do.”

7

Two blocks from my motel, I saw the caddy again. Cruising slow. Keeping me in sight.

But why? She’d hired me to do a job. Didn’t she trust me?

When I got to my motel room, I went immediately to the window and peered through a slit in the dark and dusty drapes.

They were just pulling into a parking place. I watched as they got out and walked down the street to a restaurant. They were both dressed in jeans and sweaters. She wore high heels with her jeans, this year’s fashion. She had a slightly wide but very friendly sort of ass. They come in all temperaments, asses do, tight little dour ones, big friendly happy ones, perfectly shaped ones that are nice only after you click your heels and salute, and weary suburban ones that just want to be rubbed a little with a mixture of fondness and Eros.

I went over and laid on the bed and looked at the patterns the water stains had made on ceiling and wall. What were they doing in town, anyway?

The person in the next room decided to take a shower. The wall behind me roared and thrummed with water.

I turned on the news. Dan Rather looked as psychotic as ever, just about ready, at last it seemed, to pick up a gun and shoot everybody on the set of Nightly News. All the time smiling that Norman Bates grin of his.

When I woke up, it was dark. M.A.S.H. was on. I’d clickered the volume down to 0 so it was a silent movie.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do, given the fact that Nora and Vic were following me around.

I got up, washed my face with a washcloth that smelled musty, went over to the phone and dialed Des Moines information.

I was surprised that Richard Tolliver had a listed number.

I called it. A maid answered. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tolliver has gone out for dinner.”

“I see. Would you ask him to call me later tonight?”

A suspicious hesitation. “May I ask what this is about?”

“Family matter. His family.”

“I see.” Pause again. “Do you know Mr. Tolliver?”

“No, I don’t, ma’am.”

“I see. All right, give me your telephone number, then.”

I gave her the number. “Room 115.”

“Room?”

“It’s a motel.”

“I see.” Prim disapproval. I’m sure she had a picture of me naked and rolling around on the bed with five or six equally naked ladies, all of us wearing tattoos and lamp shades.

“It’s important,” I said.

“I’ll see that he gets the message, sir. That’s all I can do.”

“Thank you.”

“Yes, sir.”

Click.

I went in and washed up and changed into a blue button-down shirt that the cleaners had starched to razor-sharpness, dark slacks, dark ribbed cotton socks, the ones with the gold toes just as in my college days, and a red windbreaker in honor of James Dean. Sometime this year he’d be having a birthday. It seemed the least I could do.

I went over and peeked out the window. The Caddy was gone. It probably wasn’t much fun, killing time while the guy you were following caught a nap in his shabby little motel room.

I checked my watch.

Still had an hour to go before dinner.

I decided to make myself useful.

8

I drove to within a block of the McNally house, took my little black bag from the backseat and then worked my way down an alley so that I could watch the place from a relatively safe position.

Lights shone. I figured I would have to come back later, or even possibly tomorrow.

But then the downstairs lights clicked off.

Eve McNally came out the back door, moving quickly down the narrow walk next to clotheslines still hung with white sheets that smelled clean in the starry dusk.

I crouched behind the garbage cans and peeked through a dusty garage window.

She got into a new Ford sedan, worked the garage door gizmo, and then drove away.

I heard her tires crunch gravel as they headed west toward the mouth of the alley.

A few minutes later, I stood in her small but well-organized kitchen that smelled pleasantly of spices.

And stared into the sweet earnest face of her dog Sara. A little growl rattled in her throat and twice she let out a bark but when I got down on my haunches and put my hand out, she trotted over and I started petting her head. I almost hated to take advantage of her good nature this way. For the rest of the time, Sara followed me around, tail wagging.

The first floor was a living room, large bath, sewing room and the kitchen. Upstairs were three good-sized bedrooms, a room with a worn couch and an old Philco black-and-white portable 17" TV and a bookcase that leaned dangerously leftward. It was filled with battered paperbacks running to romance novels, which I’ve always considered to be science fiction for women. My otherwise-educated, beautiful and most-sophisticated wife had read them. I found her taste just as baffling as she found mine for private-detective novels. “They’re just as much make-believe as my romance novels are,” she’d always said. And she was probably right.

Nothing is what I found. Nothing at all useful, not in any way, nothing that told me why Eve McNally looked so depressed and anxious this afternoon, or burst into tears as soon as she’d closed the door behind me.

The woman had real problems but what were they?

I decided to try the basement, a large, dark, dusty room that would have made Bela Lugosi feel right at home.

The washer and drier were almost comically white and comically new against the backdrop of cobwebs and cracked plaster and rat droppings and empty battered coal bin of this basement.

There were several cardboard boxes filled with cobwebby mason jars of homemade preserves. I lifted each jar and looked under it. Nothing.

Thanks to all the dust in the air, my allergies kicked in. I spent a few minutes sneezing, blowing my nose and coughing hard enough to give myself a vague headache. I groped in my pocket for the antihistamine tablets I always carry, my allergies being what they are and all, and after taking two, and giving my flashlight a little nudge so that its waning batteries temporarily fed more juice to the bulb, I went back to my search.

There were drawers to be looked into, boxes to be opened and inspected, and an old metal desk that probably dated back to the forties to be gone through.

It was in the desk — bottom-right drawer if you really care — that I found the small white box, and in the small white box that I found the finger.

At first I thought it was fake. I have a nephew who is at that age when whoopee cushions and joy buzzers bedazzle the young mind. He once showed me a finger like this. As now, I started when I saw it. The difference was, it took me only a half-second to realize that Jamie’s was a fraud. This one, however, was real. Fake ones don’t come with cuts and bruises and the long red nail fiercely broken. Before this finger had been chopped off just below the lower joint, the woman to whom it belonged had put up a violent struggle.

The finger felt obscene in my hand, cold and inhuman.

I shone my light into the box and found the note. I used the edge of my handkerchief to extract the note — there might well be fingerprints on it — and set it down on the desk.

Neatly typed in the center was:

There was no signature.

I replaced note and finger in box, put box back in desk, and was just turning toward the stairs when I heard a wooden step creak.

I shone my light up there.

Her eyes glowed like a cat’s.

Eve McNally, she was. And she held a carbine. And it was pointed directly at me.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she said.

“Trying to help you.”

“Right,” she said. “Trying to help me.”

“I found the finger.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, and I don’t care. I just want you out of my house.”

She told me much more in that last sentence than she meant to.

Most homeowners finding a burglar in their place would immediately phone for the police.

But it was obvious that Eve McNally wanted no police in on this at all.

I felt sorry for her. She looked alone and scared even with that carbine in her hand. She needed a friend. She really did.

Then there was the matter of the finger.

“You just come up the steps very slowly.”

She waved the carbine at me.

I didn’t move. “Mrs. McNally, you really don’t know about the finger?”

Her fear was now replaced by confusion. “Finger? What’re you talking about?”

“Have you been down in the basement lately?”

“No.”

“Let me just walk over and get something from the desk. Then I’ll bring it back to you.”

She sighed a ragged sigh. “This is some kind of trick. I know it is.”

“No trick. There’s just something I want you to see.”

I turned and started walking to the desk. She didn’t shoot me in the back. That was definitely a good sign.

Lower drawer, right hand, small white box. You couldn’t miss it. The one with the human finger inside.

I retrieved it and carried it back to her like a well-trained family dog.

When I got three feet from the barrel of her carbine, she said, “Hand it over, slow.”

She wasn’t expecting it, so it really wasn’t too difficult: grabbing the barrel of her gun two inches or so down from the muzzle and giving it a jerk that snatched the carbine from her hands and brought her tumbling down the stairs.

I put the gun down, went over and helped her up.

She was crying, hard, bitter crying, and I felt sorry for her again, so I brought her close to me and held her and just let her cry for a time, and then when her tears seemed to subside I helped her upstairs and put on a fresh pot of Mr. Coffee in the kitchen and then we sat down at the Formica-covered table and I pushed the small white box over to her.

While she was looking at it, I went into the bathroom and got her three Bayer aspirin, and then in the kitchen again I got her a cool glass of water.

The finger lay on the table, out of its box, ugly and terrifying.

“I knew he was involved in something like this.”

“Who?” I said.

She looked up. “You know who.”

“Your husband?”

“Yes.”

She’d been wearing blue eyeliner, smudged now from her crying, and her cheeks were puffy and pink.

“The finger doesn’t look familiar?”

“No,” she said. “Thank God. I was afraid—” Then she stopped herself.

“Where’s your daughter?” I said. “I know your husband’s missing but where’s your daughter?”

She changed the subject deftly, nodding her smooth, attractive face to the counter. “Coffee’s ready.”

I brought us two cups of coffee and sat down across the table from her.

“Your husband’s in some kind of trouble with somebody, and now somebody has your daughter. Isn’t that right?”

She stared at the finger some more. “You read the note. You know what it says.”

“You didn’t see the finger until I showed it to you?”

“No.”

“And you don’t know who your husband might be in trouble with?”

“No.”

“Did he tell you he was in trouble?”

“No.”

“That note makes it sound as if he might be blackmailing somebody. Is that something your husband might do?”

She hesitated. “I— He has a dark side, I guess you could say. He only ever really wanted one thing in life and that was to own his own business. He just had a thing about that. Being his own boss and all, I guess. But we lost it two years ago — it was just like losing one of his children for him — and he’s never been quite right since.”

“Do you think he could blackmail somebody?”

“I’d have to say yes.”

“How many days has he been gone?”

“Why was the finger in the basement?”

“He was hiding it from you. He didn’t want you to know he was in trouble. Now, how many days has he been gone?”

“Two.”

“How many days has your daughter been gone?”

The pause again. “Who are you? You haven’t told me yet.”

“A friend.”

She smiled sadly. “That’s what the Lone Ranger used to say when people asked him who he was.”

I smiled back. “Well, unfortunately, I’m not the Lone Ranger.”

“If you go to the police—”

“I won’t go to the police.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

And her speaking of the police made me look up at the wall clock and when I looked at the wall clock, I saw that I was twenty minutes late for my dinner appointment with Jane Avery.

“She didn’t come home from school the other day.”

“And you haven’t heard from anybody about her?”

“No.”

I looked down at the finger.

“We’ll have to assume that he’s got her,” I said quietly.

“He?”

“The man your husband’s been blackmailing.”

She lost it again, put her head down, started sobbing so hard I was afraid she was going to vomit.

I went over and got down on one knee and stroked her dark hair and rubbed her back gently and told her over and over that these things usually turned out fine and that if we just had a little patience and a little time... But that wasn’t true, of course. At the very least we were dealing with a person who could chop off another person’s finger. I had no doubt that we were also dealing with the same man Nora Conners had hired me to find, the same man that Mike Peary had profiled in his letter to Nora. The same man who had murdered all those girls.

She sat up, dried her eyes with the backs of her small white hands, and sniffled. “I really appreciate you being here.”

I stood up. “I’ve got to go, but I’ll check back with you tonight.”

She nodded.

I went over to the back door, opened it and said, “If the man should call you, write down everything he says. Every single word — all right?”

“Yes.”

“And if you should hear any noises in the background, anything at all, write down what those were, too.”

“I will.” She sniffled. “I really appreciate this.”

I nodded and left.

9

The nights make him crazy sometimes. Nobody can really describe nighttime in a lumbering old whore of a prison like this one. Puke & shit & sweat & piss & saliva & jism & every conceivable bodily fluid on the floor & in the crapper & in the mouth & up the bunghole.

It all makes him sick

It all makes him feel like a puritan.

He does not want to be one of them.

He is not one of them.

Even when he kills it is with a kind of purity.

He sometimes has dreams of his own particular dark god.

A very goaty old bastard to be sure.

Bring him bone and bring him flesh and bring him life hacked unto death with a knife or blown unto death with a gun or choked unto death with good strong quick hands.

The goaty old bastard likes it.

He has such crazy dreams.

Is sixteen years old again/sitting in a 1963 movie house watching Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin/but it is a movie unlike any he has ever seen

Sandra Dee is delivering a baby

And Bobby Darin is peering down between her legs

And what is emerging

What makes even the suddenly-appearing doctor stand back and cover his eyes in disgust and horror

is this

thing

No other word for it — thing

a crocodile head on the body of a small hunch-backed human child with fingers that are long slashing razors

slashing Sandra Dee’s face into bloody shreds

severing Bobby Darin’s neck from his shoulders

& then leaping for the doctor

knife-fingers ripping the man’s blue blue eyes from their sockets

the doctor screaming

and covering his eyes again

blood streaming from beneath his fingers

And then running, running

sirens just behind him & shouts just behind him & gunfire just behind him

& into a deep woods now

lost & wandering in circles and circles and circles

& a storm all crashing thunder and silver lightning that burns when its silver touches

& he knows who he is now

& he is both the 1963 boy watching the movie

& also the sad hideous terrible thing that is lost in the dark woods

“Hey, man, knock it off.”

The coon upstairs.

That’s how he thinks of him.

Guy in the upper bunk.

Says he’s white.

But everybody knows better.

Except the warden, who always puts him in with the white guys.

And he has to endure the coon for another six weeks or so until the new section is put on the prison.

“You hear me?” the coon says.

“Yeah.”

“That musta been some nightmare,” the coon says.

“Yeah.”

“Woke me up,” the coon says.

Politeness now calls for him to say Sorry. But not in prison where politeness is considered an effeminate sign of weakness.

“Screw yourself. You don’t have nightmares?”

“Not like yours.” the coon says.

“Just go back to sleep.”

“Just go screw yourself.”

It is at times like these that the claustrophobia comes. There is no place for privacy. You eat/sleep/piss/shit/shower/exercise/work/read/pick your nose/scratch your balls with people watching you. Twenty-four hours a day. Three hundred sixty-five days a year. Watching you. There are even cons in this place who like watching gang rapes. Somebody is always always watching somebody. True, in some respects, it is a jungle but unlike a real jungle it offers no trees no ravines no caves for privacy. None.

It is also at moments like these when he understands the suicides. There was a guy in cellblock D, for instance, who beat his head against the wall until he killed himself. There was a guy in the infirmary who got his hands on some rodent poison and killed himself. There was even the guy who was so desperate to get it over with that he went down to the garage one day, poured gasoline on himself and set himself afire, like those Buddhist monks back during the Vietnam War.

“Next time you tell me to go screw myself, man,” the coon says, “you’re gonna be sorry you said it.”

“Yeah?” he says. “Go screw yourself.”

But the coon is a coward and everybody knows it.

The coon eventually goes back to sleep. He eventually goes back to his nightmare.

Back to the movie theater again. And back to the beast on screen who is really — himself.

Razor talons click as he searches for new victims.

10

“ ’lo.”

“Chief Avery, please.”

“This is she.”

“I just wanted to tell you that you’ve won a free Mike’s pizza.”

“This could only be the mysterious Mr. Hokanson.”

“I believe we were talking about pizza. Don’t change the subject.”

“How do I get this pizza?”

“You give your address to our delivery man, and after he’s run a few other errands, he’ll bring it over to your place. Maybe an hour and a half.”

“And the delivery man is—”

“A guy I know named Hokanson.”

“Why not? I have a gun and plenty of ammunition and a whole drawerful of arrest warrants. I guess I can take care of myself.”

“All I need is the address.”

Which she gave me.

Jane Avery’s apartment house sat in a little grove of cedars on the edge of a narrow creek that ran silver in the moonlight. No lights were on. No car was parked out front, Maybe she’d gotten tired of waiting.

It was a night of crickets and barn owls and a quarter moon, a night of lonely distant dogs and far roaring trains and creek water tumbling across rocks just right for frogs to sit on. No doubt about it, I liked the country life.

I left my car running and walked up to the apartment house. I knocked on the screen door. Then I watched something white flutter to the concrete block steps. This was my night for notes.

I stuffed the note in my pocket, got in my car and drove back to my motel. Maybe I’d just have myself a good night’s sleep and start this investigation all over again tomorrow.

I kept checking my rearview for any sign of Nora and Vic. None.

After parking my car, I decided to treat myself to a 7-Up and a Hershey bar (with almonds, of course) so I went to the motel office and got some change.

“Big night,” the elderly clerk said as he fanned four quarters out on the counter.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. One person killed, another one bad wounded out to the old Brindle place.”

Jane hadn’t been exaggerating. Serious stuff indeed.

“Fred over to the DX?”

“Yeah?” I said, pretending I knew just who Fred was.

“Just was out there. Said they sure ruined a nice new Caddy. Blood all over the interior. Said that’s not the kind of stuff that washes off, either.”

A few moments ago I’d been checking my rearview for any sign of Nora and Vic. Maybe they wouldn’t ever be following me again.

“Can you tell me how to get to the Brindle place?”

“Sure. If you want. But Fred said it’s pretty damned grisly.”

There must have been thirty cars parked lining both sides of the winding gravel road that ran past the Brindle farm, which was basically an aged and deserted farmhouse with the windows boarded up, and a faded barn that some local kids had spray-painted dirty words all over. Down close to a creek was another barn that, while smaller, was also a lot fancier, with a gabled roof and a cross-gabled cupola. The sprawling land to the east looked as if it hadn’t been seeded in some time. Overhead, a state police chopper hovered, its search lights crisscrossing the rolling countryside.

I had to walk a quarter mile till I reached the driveway and the ambulance and the two squad cars and the blue Caddy.

I saw Jane. She was talking to a short man in a dark suit. He carried a small leather bag and was presumably the medical examiner. Jane looked harried.

Up close, the house had an eerie quality I couldn’t explain to anybody who hadn’t been around crime scenes much. While most detectives won’t come right out and tell you that some houses — just like some wooded areas and indeed some human beings — aren’t exactly cursed or haunted, there is a disturbing, baleful quality to them that makes you want to get away as soon as possible. While the activities of satanic cults are greatly exaggerated by the press, I’d once seen a house used for rituals where a four-month-old child had been sacrificed to the psychotic whims of the cultists. At least as far as I was concerned, it would never be a fit place for human habitation ever again. The baby’s screams would never quite be stilled.

“Sorry, keep back.”

He was maybe twenty-five with a beer gut and a macho mustache. This was probably his first murder as an auxiliary deputy and he meant to make the most of it. He had a gun, a badge and a khaki shirt with heavy sweat rings under the armpits. He even had a little cigarillo clamped between his teeth.

I was about to tell him something obscene when Jane looked over and saw me, excused herself from the doctor, and dropped by to cool the official ardor of her auxiliary cowboy.

“It’s all right, Fred, he’s a friend.”

“He shoulda said so, then,” Fred said, swaggering elsewhere to shine his badge in somebody else’s eyes.

“Fred’s the mayor’s son,” Jane said.

“Now, there’s a surprise.”

She looked back at the blue Caddy in the driveway. She had a yellow pad in her left hand and a pencil in her right. She sketched in some more of the crime scene, which she had started earlier by measuring various objects in relation to the bodies. This sketch would later be refined into a finished product complete with a scale on the order of ¼" = 1'. This would ultimately be used by the district attorney or the county attorney in making his case.

Just as she was finishing, the left door of the blue Caddy was opened by a startlingly young-looking woman in white coveralls and the process of bringing the bodies out was begun.

“One dead?” I asked as I watched.

Jane nodded. “Yes. A woman. The man’s already been taken to the hospital. He’s alive, but not for much longer, I’m afraid.”

I saw her then, in that moment before the final sheet was pulled over her the final time. Nora Conners. She had been wearing a white sweater and jeans. Her blonde hair was streaked and damp with blood; her white sweater was bathed in the stuff. I couldn’t see a lot from this distance but it appeared that she had been both shot and stabbed.

The attendants eased the corpse into the rear of the big boxy ambulance, closed the doors quietly and then moved with no particular hurry to the vehicle’s cab. There was no reason to hurry.

“You look funny.”

I was aware of Jane’s eyes on me.

“I always look funny.”

“No, you don’t. You usually look handsome, and you know it. But now you look funny. Ever since you saw the corpse.” She hesitated, studied me a little more. “By the way, I don’t believe your ‘journalist’ story.”

“You don’t?”

“No. I called your publishing office.”

“Then they told you that I do work for them.”

“I have a brother in the FBI.”

“Ah. I’ll bet you’re proud.”

She frowned. “Wise ass, aren’t you?”

“I’m just trying to forget what that corpse looked like.” And that was certainly the truth. When they get worked over the way Nora was, all I can think of are slaughterhouses — what we humans do to the animals we raise to eat, how they look just as we’re knocking them out with long clubs, and then chop off their heads, and then hang them from their feet and open up their bellies with long shining knives. I always wonder, when I’m on the highway and I see a truck of cows or pigs headed to the slaughterhouse, I always wonder if they know. Perhaps it’s our fantasy that they don’t know because we can’t face the truth. Maybe they do know, and the startled bleating we hear on the highway is the sound of one species crying out to another for help. I wonder if Nora knew, as the killer approached her car tonight, knew what was coming, what the killer was bringing, and cried out for help.

“Did you know her?”

“Who?”

“The dead woman.”

“No.”

“Would you take it personally if I called you a liar?”

“You’re the law around here. You can call me anything you want.”

“I’ve got good instincts.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning somehow you know something about this.”

She was about to say more when a fat bald detective in a suit came over shaking a small black camera as if he wanted to smash it against the wall. “I told the city council, I told the mayor in particular, that we need a new 35 millimeter for crime scenes and as usual he gave me the standard excuses about the budget. I’m supposed to be taking pictures and the goddamned shutter won’t work. You bring yours along, Chief?”

“In my glove compartment.”

He looked at me and shook the camera again and said, “You ever just want to smash something to bits?”

“All the time,” I said.

He went over to her car.

“He’s not taking his tranquilizers,” she said.

“How come?”

“Claims that yes, they do calm him down but no, he can’t urinate properly when he takes them. So he doesn’t take them and gets pretty squirrelly.”

She looked back at the crime scene.

Here we were in the rolling prairie night, all these red and white emergency lights whirling around in the gloom, all these farmers and small-town folks standing in the gravel road partly thrilled and partly horrified by what had happened here tonight. I wondered what the birds made of all this, or the wolves running in the hills, or the owl in the old barn down the hill. Just one more dumb-ass human doing one more dumb-ass human thing, the animals were probably thinking. These humans didn’t even kill each other for the only reason that justified killing — survival — these humans killed each other for money and sex and jealousy. They didn’t make any sense, these humans, and owl and wolf and bird would be glad when the lights and the noise and the sweaty intense fascination were all taken away and the land given back to the moon and the clouds and the fast-running creeks, that sense of order and peace and oneness I had only when I was up in my biplane.

“I’d better get back to it,” she said.

She looked like she wanted to say more, but then somebody shouted her name, tugging her away.

Just as I was leaving, people had to stand to either side of the driveway so the ambulance could get through, bearing Nora into the night.

11

He spends two of his prison years working in the print shop, running a big press. The prison does a lot of cut-rate printing for the state.

It is in the print shop that the snitch is dealt with.

Five days before it happens, two white cons trap a black con in the showers and castrate him. They also, after cutting him up that way, use the same knife to cut his throat.

Prison, always a dangerous place, is now even more dangerous.

At meals, the blacks huddle against one wall and glare at the whites who sit huddled along the other.

On the yard, he witnesses the most violent fistfight he’s ever seen, between this jig and this big Polack.

In less than two minutes — the time it takes for the guards to come running and break it up — they break each other’s noses, the black guy breaks two or three knuckles, the white guy breaks his arm, and both of them suffer what later prove to be brain concussions because of the ferocity of their blows. They are both bloody and unconscious by the time the guards reach them.

He is scared.

Can’t sleep sometimes, he’s so scared.

Even finds himself on the verge of tears, he is so frightened. But most of the cons are. They all know how terrible this thing could get.

Comes a particular moment, he is alone in his cell. The warden is moving everybody around again — the cons have started referring to cellblock F as the Transit Authority — and he just happens to be between cell mates.

Another night when he can’t sleep.

This night, he puts a pillow over his head and keeps his eyes shut and tries to block out all the screaming and the taunts as black men shout you gonna pay pussy! and white men shout back I’m gonna kill you nigger!

Not until tonight does he realize what a real prison riot must be like. All the chaos. But most especially all the rage. He can’t get Attica out of his mind. So many had died so savagely. The cons had even broken pop bottles so they could use the jagged edges to rip the eyes out of cons who had snitched in the past.

Tear out their eyes like that.

He tries hard to sleep.

But can’t.

Next morning, he’s running his press, checking ink levels and grabbing an occasional page to scan, when Marley, a true maniac, comes up and says, “You didn’t hear nothin’.”

“All right.”

“Haskins.”

“Yeah?”

“He was the snitch,” Marley says.

“Wow. He seems like such a nice guy. You sure?”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean? I say Haskins’s the snitch, then he’s the snitch. Dig?”

“Dig.”

Two days earlier, the two whites who had castrated the black man had been identified by a snitch and put in the hole. They would soon be formally charged.

Now Marley says they found the snitch. And now Marley says, “So if you hear somethin’, you didn’t hear nothin’. Right?”

“Right.”

He goes back to his press work.

A few minutes later he notices that a very pale, very scared-looking con named Haskins is being dragged toward the big storage closet in the room adjacent to the press room.

Haskins looks right at him. Puppy-dog eyes. Imploring.

Please. Please do something.

Please help me.

Please be human.

Please.

They drag Haskins into the storage closet and close the door.

He actually doesn’t hear much.

An occasional cry.

An occasional scream.

The press makes a lot of noise.

They’re in there a long time, or at least a lot longer than he expects.

He runs his press.

None of my business.

That’s the only way you stay alive in prison.

None of my business.

When they come out, they’re sweaty and sort of mussed up. They’re walking fast.

Marley just sort of nods to him.

And then vanishes.

He just keeps working on his press.

None of my business.

But when it’s time to grab a mid-morning Pepsi from the machine, he routes himself right past the storage closet door.

And sees the blood flooding out from beneath the door.

Man, they really must have given it to that poor bastard. Which is the really weird thing. Because while the blood he spills while cutting up his own victims doesn’t bother him (murders the police know nothing about, murders that have nothing to do with his tenure in prison) — the sight of somebody else’s violence sickens and scares him.

He avoids getting the blood on his shoes.

Doesn’t want to be implicated in any way.

He goes and gets his Pepsi and goes back to his press and minds his own business.

After a while, this guard is cutting through the press room on his way to lunch, and he sees the blood on the floor and goes over and opens the storage closet door.

He suddenly looks real sick.

Rushes to the phone and then suddenly there are a dozen guards all over the printing room and they all take turns peeking into the storage closet and they all suddenly look sick

Seems that Marley and his buddy did the same thing to Haskins that the other white guys did to the jig in the shower.

Castrated him and then cut his throat.

Well, he supposes there’s a kind of poetic justice to this, but he still can’t sleep very well at night.

12

On the way back to my motel, my mind stuck on the photograph it had taken of Nora Conners’s throat as she was being carried on the stretcher, the fleshy red mess of it. I had a difficult time changing the photo in the slide tray.

“Bad?” the old clerk asked after he waved me into the front office.

“Terrible.” He wanted details. People in hell want ice water.

On TV, Larry King was talking to a movie star about her new autobiography.

The office looked the same, ancient and shabby, duct tape covering slices in the green vinyl couch and armchair, the diamond-patterned indoor-outdoor carpeting worn to a flat black dirty color. At one time, I think, it had been maroon.

“Somebody said she was buck-ass naked,” the old guy said, still wanting scandal and gore.

“Sorry. She had all her clothes on.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sure it’ll be in the paper tomorrow morning.”

“Not here it won’t. We only got the weekly.”

“In the state paper, then.”

“Yeah, but they never give you much detail, not like the Chicago papers. You ever read the Chicago papers?”

“Sometimes.”

“They give you everything. If they’re naked, they tell you they were naked.”

“That’s what first-class journalism is all about.”

He caught my sarcasm, and for a moment looked like what he was: an old man dying out his nights at the front desk of a tiny motel in the middle of nowhere on a planet nobody but us lonely animals had as yet discovered. I was being a prig. He wanted a few juicy details, just a natural human curiosity. I’m the sort of hypocrite who scans all those tabloid covers earnestly while waiting in the supermarket line, then talks about how silly they are at dinner later that night, and how I can’t imagine people wasting their time on them.

“There was a lot of blood.”

“Yeah?” he said, all frayed red bow-tie and frayed polyester white shirt and frayed ancient blue cardigan. “A lot, huh?”

“Cut her throat.”

“God damn.”

“And she was a looker, too.”

“Young, huh?”

“Young enough.”

“God damn,” he said to my back after I’d nodded good night and was starting out the door. “Sure wish the Chicago papers was going to cover this.”

The screen door slammed behind me.

The old fart said, “Hey.”

I stopped, turned around.

“You got a phone call.”

“From whom?”

“Guy named Tolliver. Is that the rich Des Moines Tolliver?”

“He leave a number?”

“Said you had it.”

“Thanks.”

“Is that the rich Des Moines Tolliver?”

“I’m not sure.”

He looked disappointed.

In my room, I locked up for the night, opened a Pepsi, sat down on the edge of the bed, lifted the receiver, dialed a long-distance operator and dialed Tolliver. My room was shadowy and chilly, a tomb of secrets, furtive adultery, broken dreams and bright doomed hopes.

The maid answered. I had the impression she didn’t care for me awfully much. Maybe she knew I was a hypocrite about tabloids.

“I’ll see if he’s taking calls,” she said frostily and set the phone down.

“Hello,” said a deep voice that sounded both intelligent and curiously humble. I guess I’d been expecting the stereotype robber baron to answer.

“Mr. Tolliver?”

“Yes.”

“My name’s Jim Hokanson.”

“Yes, Mr. Hokanson, that’s what Katie said. Katie, my maid.”

“Well, I called you earlier tonight before it happened.”

“Before what happened?”

“Before—” I stopped myself. “Have you heard from the police tonight, Mr. Tolliver?”

“The police?”

“Yes. There’s been — some trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

God, now I’d have to tell him.

“Mr. Tolliver, I wish I didn’t have to tell you this but — your daughter Nora’s been murdered.”

A long enigmatic silence. “My daughter Nora?”

“Yes.”

“Has been murdered?”

“Yes.”

“And you are who, exactly?”

“Jim Hokanson.”

“Are you a police officer?”

“No.”

“Are you a private investigator, then?”

“Something like that.”

“I see.” A pause. “Mr. Hokanson?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Hokanson, this is going to come as a shock to you, but I don’t have a daughter.”

“I met her.”

“You met someone who perhaps told you she was my daughter, but she wasn’t.”

“I feel pretty goddamned foolish right now.”

“As well you should, Mr. Hokanson. As well you should. Now give me your exact location. I have a plane of my own, and I’m going to fly over there tomorrow.”

“I’m really sorry about this.”

“Quit babbling, Mr. Hokanson, and tell me where you’re calling from. I want to find out just what is going on.”