Blood Moon

1

This is the page that Jane Avery — make that Chief of Police Jane Avery — pushed in front of me while I was eating breakfast in a sunny booth in Fitzwilly’s Cafe the next morning. She wore a crisply laundered new blue police shirt and dark blue pants with knife-sharp creases. In the sunlight, her freckles were more vivid than ever, and her tiny nose and white, white teeth more fetching than ever.

“Does any of this sound familiar?”

“I haven’t swallowed my waffle yet.”

“I’m not kidding, Jim.”

“Neither am I. I’ve got a mouthful of food.”

“So swallow.”

I swallowed.

“First of all,” I said, “this is a form that relates to sexual homicide.”

“After she was killed, she was raped.”

“God,” I said, trying not to think of the odd vulnerability that had always rested in Nora’s eyes.

I looked over the form some more. “Eleanor Saunders. Chicago. Age thirty-eight.”

“And her companion’s name was Karl Givens.”

I just looked at her. Didn’t say anything.

“Maybe you knew her under some other name.”

“Who said I knew her?”

“I watched you look at that blue Cadillac last night, when they were bringing the Saunders woman out. You knew her, all right.”

A waitress came. Jane ordered coffee, black. It was nice in here, mote-tumbled sunlight streaming through the front window, an early 1960s Seeburg jukebox standing in the comer, with maybe even a few Fats Domino songs on it, and mostly quiet people in work clothes who knew and seemed to like each other. A place like this in the city, at 8:12 A.M., would have been a madhouse.

“You going to tell me about her, Jim?”

“Didn’t know her.”

“Look at me and tell me you didn’t know her.”

I raised my eyes from the last of my waffle. “Didn’t know her.”

“You’re lying.”

“I didn’t know that you called visitors liars.”

“You do if you’re chief of police. And if your guest happens to be lying.”

The waitress came back with her coffee. “Thanks, Myrna,” Jane said.

She sipped her coffee.

“You going to invite me over for dinner tonight?”

“I don’t know yet, Jim. You really make me mad.”

I’d put our remarks down to normal man-woman banter until just now. She really was angry, but she was so quiet about it, I hadn’t been able to tell until she’d told me.

“I’m sorry.”

“Then you’re really not going to tell me how it is that you and the dead woman came to town on the same day, at the same time, and how she got herself murdered and how you claim not to have known her?”

“How do you know we arrived the same day at the same time?”

“I checked. That’s my job.”

“I wish you’d calm down.”

“I wish you’d tell me the truth.”

“How about the man with her?” I’d almost called him Vic.

“What about him?”

“Is he still alive?”

“Not for much longer. If he doesn’t improve by noon, they’re going to put him on a helicopter and take him to Iowa City. But even that probably won’t do much good.”

“I really do wish you’d invite me over tonight.”

She stood up and clattered a quarter on the table. “I really do wish you’d tell me the truth.”

She left.

2

In the car, I spent twenty minutes going through Peary’s profile. Here we had three suspects:

According to Peary’s profile, and he’d been just about the most skilled profiler I’d ever worked with, these were our man’s personality characteristics:

At some point, I’d probably send the FBI Behavioral Science Unit all the material that Peary had gathered.

These days, the FBI is inundated with so many requests for help from local police departments that there’s now a long waiting line. The budget doesn’t allow for the FBI to accept every case, so the trickiest ones tend to get taken first.

This is where I can help small-town police departments. Because I’m a former employee, I know whom to call and what kind of specific help to ask for. I can usually speed things up. Then, when the FBI returns its assessment of the material, I can show the local police how to implement it into their investigation.

Which is just what I was trying to do as I sat there — to think of the three suspects in light of Peary’s eight-page profile.

The trouble was, the three men could all fit the profile — until I knew more about them and their patterns, anyway.

And that was going to take a lot more work.

3

The prison grapevine can get a story around in less than an hour. By then virtually everybody in the place will know the same tale.

Well, this one day, there’s a very special tale going around and its consequences can be seen in the cafeteria where this rabbity little guy with thick glasses sits eating his soup — alone.

Usually you see the little guy with his buddies but not today because he ain’t got no buddies no more.

He learned less than two hours ago that he has the first confirmed case of HIV in the prison.

And nobody wants to be around him.

AIDS is just now starting to fill the TV screens and the front pages of newspapers and there’s a lot of hysteria. Gays getting beaten up everywhere. An AIDS hospice getting burned down in the middle of the night. Some little kid barred from school because a veritable lynch mob of parents come screaming to the school board.

Everybody in the prison industry knows that when AIDS starts to really hit the prison, there is going to be hell to pay.

Anal intercourse being the most efficient method of transmitting the disease — well, in a prison full of horny men reluctantly willing to screw each other even though they’d much rather screw women...

Well, it’s going to be terrible.

This is the background as he lies awake on the upper bunk one night and listens to the guy below him weep.

Tries to pretend he doesn’t hear.

Tries to pretend he doesn’t know what’s really going on.

But he does know.

This sorta pretty kid got passed around among all the important cons and now—

Well, you can bet there are a lot of important cons lying awake tonight, too, wondering if they’re soon going to get the word from the infirmary that...

“You awake?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry for crying,” the kid says.

“It’s all right.”

“It’s just I’m scared.”

“I know.”

“You ball anybody since you been in here?”

“Huh-uh. I don’t like men. I like women.”

“You’re probably all right, then.”

“Unless I pick it up some other way,” he says. He’s a real hypochondriac. He wishes he had a different guy living on the bunk below.

“Don’t you watch TV?”

“Yeah.”

“Well they explain that. You can’t get it from drinking out of the same glass or just touching somebody or anything like that.”

“That’s what they say, anyway.”

“You don’t believe them?”

“Huh-uh.”

“How come?”

“They’re just trying to keep everybody calm. They don’t want people rioting in the streets and stuff like that.”

“You ever seen anybody with it in the later stages?”

“Yeah.”

“Pretty terrible.”

“Yeah.”

“I hope I die before I get that bad off,” the kid says. “Except I’m scared to die.”

Neither speaks for a long time.

Just listen to the prison night.

“How about you?” the kid says.

“How about me what?”

“You afraid to die?”

“Sure. Especially from some faggot disease.”

“I guess I don’t like that.”

“Don’t like what?”

“Being called a faggot.”

“Oh.”

“We’re human beings, too, you know.”

“Just give it a rest, kid, all right?”

“I resent it, man. I mean if you really want to know. I don’t call you names, why should you call me names?”

“You don’t call me names because I’m not a faggot.”

“That’s it, you sonofabitch.”

And the kid jumps off his bed and puts his fists up like he’s in some kind of bad-ass fight with an invisible opponent and then he starts coming closer and closer to the top bunk and—

He lashes his foot out and kicks the kid real hard in the mouth. The kid starts wailing and weeping right away.

All the cons who’ve been listening in are laughing their asses off.

Some fairy boy with AIDS, this is exactly what he’s got coming.

The kid cries himself out, just the way little babies do, and then finally crawls back up on his bunk and goes to sleep.

Sixteen months later, the kid is down to eighty-one pounds and can’t hold any kind of food they try to feed him in the infirmary.

He’s losing a pound a day.

The story is all over the prison.

God, eighty-one pounds.

Sure glad I never screwed him.

Benny screwed him. Benny won’t admit it. But Benny screwed him.

During the time it takes the kid to die, eight more HIV-positive cases are reported in the prison.

His hypochondria is getting real bad.

Even though he’s extremely careful never to touch anybody in any way, he’s terrified that he’s going to get it anyway.

He’s convinced that the government is lying. He’s convinced that he’s never going to leave this prison alive.

No two-thousand-dollar-per-month retainer is going to help him now.

For the first time, he starts daydreaming about escaping from here.

4

St. Mark’s Hospital was a four-story red-brick structure with no flourishes or pretensions whatsoever. It had windows, doors, ledges and corners and that was it. Presumably it also had indoor plumbing.

I found the back door, then the back stairs and proceeded to go up. Earlier I’d talked to the hospital operator, pretending I was calling long distance about my brother Karl, and she told me he was in Room 408, intensive care.

I moved as quickly and quietly as possible up the echoing concrete stairwell. At the fourth floor, I opened the heavy green fire door and peeked down the hall, expecting to see the flash of white uniforms and hear the squeak of rubber soles.

The hall was empty.

I eased the door closed and started my search of the corridor. A hand-lettered sign taped to the wall said:

I followed the arrow and ended up in another short hallway with four doors to it, two on either side.

The second left, a nurse with an ample bottom was backing out of the room. The first right, a young female doctor looking brisk and earnest was just saying a loud “good morning” to the patient inside.

The door I wanted was first left. I had to reach it before the nurse just leaving 410 saw me.

I took five giant steps, pushed the door open and lunged inside.

I was all cold sweat and ragged breathing for two long minutes.

Vic — or Karl — was in bed, unconscious, a pale corpselike man who had so many tubes running out of his nostrils, his mouth and his arms, he looked like a creepy-crawly alien from a science-fiction movie. His breath came in gasps. The room smelled oppressively of decay. There were no flowers or cute greeting cards or balloons in the shape of puppies.

I waited until my breathing was normal again and then I crossed over to the side of his bed and peered down.

He looked dead. There was no other way to say it. Waxen, still. Some part of his soul had already crossed over.

He was all clean bandages, their heaviest concentration being across his throat. Across his middle were more bandages. Neither the slashed throat nor the two bullets to the stomach had killed him. Not yet.

I touched his shoulder.

His eyes flew open instantly.

He stared straight up at the ceiling, completely unaware of me.

“Who did this to you, Karl?”

Not even a flicker of recognition in his gaze.

“Who did this to you, Karl?”

A faint glimmer of awareness.

“Karl. I’m trying to help you.”

He seemed to hear me as if from a long way off, and then he turned his head no more than a quarter-inch and looked up at me.

He started crying. Suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, his entire body began to shake, and tears began rolling down his cheeks.

He raised a trembling hand — a drowning man reaching up frantically for the final time — and I took it and held it.

“I’m sorry, Karl. But you’re going to a better place.”

“Scared,” he said. And for the first time, some recognition of me shone in his eyes.

“I know, Karl. But you won’t be scared for long. I promise.”

He fell to crying, then, soft, almost-silent crying, his lower lip twitching as he did so.

“Who did this to you?”

But he wasn’t listening to my words, only to the sounds I made.

“Scared,” he said again. “Scared.”

“I want to make this right for you, Karl. I want you to tell me who did this to you.”

“Conmarck,” he said messily, dribble and some blood glistening on the corner of his mouth.

“What?” I said.

He was looking at me but not seeing me. Just staring, the way a dead man would. He was going. Fast.

“Conmarck.”

I was about to ask him what that meant when the door opened behind me and a nurse said, “This man is not allowed any visitors.”

Just as I started to turn away from Karl, he said it again, as if he had been programmed with only one word, “Conmarck.”

I knew I had to do it quickly, and without giving her much of a look at me.

I put my head down, squared my shoulders, and plowed my way out of the room, the nurse chittering angry words at me as I did so.

I found the door, and the rear stairwell, and got out of the hospital.

Having no idea, of course, what “Conmarck” meant.

I thought of Karl back there, his ragged frightened tears, crossing over now, crossing over.

I really did hope it would be better for him on the other side. Because then it might be better for me, too, when my time came.

5

The town had two sections — an older one where the blue-collar workers lived, and the newer one where the suburbanites nestled into their expensive homes. In the middle of the town was an aloof, impressive, French Second Empire courthouse and a wide Main Street that ran to small businesses that were likely here back when Frank Capra made all his wonderful movies about small-town America. On the south and east edges of town, you see the official imposition of Progress, the strip malls and the franchise food places and the video stores with posters of half-naked ladies carrying Uzis. I stayed downtown. The older I get, the less I’m impressed with Progress.

For twenty minutes I forgot all about Nora and how she’d lied to me; and Vic, whose real name was Karl, and how he was nearby desperately clinging to life, and how disturbed Tolliver had sounded when I’d told him about the death of his “daughter.”

I forgot it all. I bought myself a newspaper, just the way the businessmen did, and I strode around a little more, and then I bought myself a cup of coffee from the old-fashioned pharmacy with the big wooden fan in the ceiling and a chipped and cracked but still-honorable old soda fountain, and I sat down on a park bench where a pigeon perched, and I spent the next ten minutes engrossed in reading, while warm spring sunlight dappled the bandstand and the smell of apple blossoms floated on the breeze.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed him, except somebody honked at him. When I looked up, he was waving and about to get into a new station wagon.

There were some questions I wanted to ask him so I hurried across the street just as he was starting the engine.

“Morning, Kenny.”

He looked up, boyish in his black cowboy shirt with white piping. His gaze was anything but Christian or charitable. He rolled down the window. “The reverend told me not to talk to you.”

“Why’s that, I wonder?”

“Said I’d just get us all in trouble.”

“Not if you don’t have anything to hide.”

He shook his blond Irish head. “We argue enough as it is, the reverend and me. No reason to make it any worse.”

He started to put the station wagon into gear.

“You want a cup of coffee?”

“No, thanks. I just need to get going.”

“Is Mindy having an affair with the reverend?”

Kenny just looked at me. “I gotta go.”

I reached in the window and put a hand on his shoulder. “When you travel with the reverend to different towns, does he ever go off on his own?”

“The reverend was right.”

“Oh?”

“You’re no magazine writer.”

“What’s he afraid I’ll find out?”

Kenny sighed. “I haven’t hit anybody in a long time, mister. I used to have this real bad temper and hit people pretty much when I felt like it. I don’t want to have to hit you.”

“Does he go off by himself when you travel?”

Kenny sighed. “Yes. Now, is that going to shut you up? Yes, the reverend goes off by himself.”

“You have any idea where he goes or what he does?”

“I don’t follow him, if that’s what you mean. So how would I know what he does?”

“I guess that’s fair enough.”

He watched my face carefully. “Who are you?”

“A lot of people seem real curious about that.”

“Does your reporter bit usually work a little better than it has in New Hope?”

I smiled. “Yes — a little better, anyway.”

“You don’t want to get the reverend mad at you.”

“No?”

“He’s got this mean lawyer in Cedar Rapids. The guy sues anybody the reverend tells him to. And the reverend tells him to sue a lot of people.”

I stood back from the station wagon and looked it over. Chrysler. This year’s model. White walls. Leather seats. Big tape deck. I thought of the two matching white Lincolns. “He sure must make a lot of money.”

“Our radio shows hit a lot of towns.”

“Enough to support everything the reverend owns?” I looked at him directly. “Where’s the reverend get all his money?”

“I told you. His radio shows.”

“Afraid you can’t sell me on that. Lincolns don’t come cheap. Especially not those models. And neither does a big boat like this one.”

“What’re you saying?”

“I’m saying that the good reverend must have some other source of income.”

“I’m going to tell him all this, you know. Everything you said.”

“I want you to.”

“You do?”

“Sure. Because then he’ll get nervous, and when people get nervous, they make mistakes.”

“Why’re you so interested in him?”

I laughed. “Because I’m a reporter, remember? And reporters are always interested in people.”

Kenny Deihl stared out the windshield a moment, then sighed. “He isn’t so bad, really.”

“He isn’t, huh?”

“He’s a hypocrite. I mean, if he believes all that religious stuff he says, you sure couldn’t prove it by me. But he’s been good to me. And good to Mindy. Neither one of us are exactly what you’d call a prize.”

“Oh?”

He shrugged. “I was in a halfway house when he found me. I’m a drunk — alcoholic, I guess you’d say. And Mindy—”

He shrugged.

“What about Mindy?”

“She’d gotten all beat up by this bar owner where she sang. The reverend found her wandering around on the street. She’s a cokehead. At least with the reverend we have some kind of life. We’ve each got rooms in the basement of the church, and he pays us enough to live on.”

“When you’re traveling, you ever see anything strange happen?”

“Strange? Like what?”

“Nothing special. Just anything strange.”

“Not really.”

“He comes in real late, I suppose?”

“Sometimes.”

“You ever notice any kind of blood or anything on his clothes?”

“Blood? Hell, no. What the hell kind of man do you think he is?”

“That’s what I want you to tell me.”

“Well, like I say, he’s a hypocrite and that’s for sure — but hey, we’re all hypocrites in some way. And you wouldn’t believe the hope the reverend gives to people. You should see the mail he gets from people who’re sick and dying. They love that man. They put him right next to Jesus Christ. They really do.”

This time he did put the car in gear.

“I’ve said enough.” He squinted up into the sunlight. “I really am going to tell the reverend everything I said. Otherwise I’d feel guilty.”

I nodded and stood back from the car so he could pull out of the parking place.

Just as he was ready to swing out into the street, he stopped the station wagon and said, “You’ve got him wrong. You really do. He isn’t perfect, maybe, but he’s basically a decent guy. He really is.”

And with that, he pulled away from the curb, finding his place in the lazy morning traffic.

I stood there watching him fade down the street.

A little old lady in a little old Ford gently tapped her little old horn to remind me that I was blocking her way.

I gave her my best boyish grin and stepped out of her way.

6

There were five of them, women between the ages of forty and sixty I guessed, and they sat in a worshipful circle around him, laughing when his inflection said he was being witty, asking questions when his inflection said he was being profound. He ran to type, a sort you see in university towns, the handsome professor in his post-hippie phase, striped button-down shirts and $150 chinos out of GQ, graying hair caught up in a sweet little ponytail. It went well with his sweet little earring. You don’t have to listen long to hear the sneer in the voice or see the arrogance in the gaze. Fifty years ago he would have been in Montmarte, seducing the frail daughters of European wealth while proclaiming himself a most serious artist. He was the sort of man Hemingway used to slap around when he was in his cups.

When he saw me, he looked as if he planned to have me arrested.

He had been standing in the middle of his front yard, right next to his easel and canvas, on the edge of which sat a huge monarch butterfly, demonstrating to the ladies the basic techniques of painting, when he heard me and looked around.

He frowned. “You’re Hokanson, aren’t you?”

I nodded.

“I don’t have anything to say to you. But I do want you off my property and right now.”

“Maybe I came to see your wife.”

“Off. And right now. Do you hear me? Off!”

As one, the students turned to scowl at me.

Just then I saw Joanna coming down the stairs, looking thin and pretty in her designer denim shirt and designer denim jeans.

“I’ll handle it, Sam. You go on with your class.”

“I forbid you to talk to him,” Sam said, sounding very silly.

She waved him away, swooped over by me and said, in little more than a whisper, “The word’s out about you.”

“The word?”

“Everybody knows you’re not really a reporter. Even if you do have that business card saying otherwise.”

She slid her arm through mine, started steering me toward my car in the gravel drive, away from the Queen Anne Victorian and the students, most of whom were still glaring at me.

“They don’t like me.”

She giggled. “Of course not. They all have crushes on him. He doesn’t like you, therefore they don’t like you.”

“What’s he so angry about?”

“I wish I knew.”

“You really don’t know?”

She shook her head. “It’s strange. For the first time, I think he’s really hiding something from me. And I think it’s a lot more serious than just one of his little affairs.”

“But you don’t have any idea what?”

She shook her head again.

We stood by my car.

She was about to say something when Sam erupted again. “Get away from that car, Joanna, and go back in the house! Get away from there right now!”

If he’d had a bullhorn, he would have sounded like a cop talking a killer out of a building.

“What a jerk he can be,” she said, red daubing her cheeks suddenly. “I’d better go back inside.” She dropped her gaze and then suddenly raised it again, looking right at me. “Oh, hell, I may as well tell you. I had a fantasy about you, just like I said.”

“I hope it was a good one.”

“It was a great one!”

“Joanna! You heard me! Get away from that car and go back inside!”

She glanced at me and smiled. “I’m so proud to be married to him sometimes.”

Then, just as her Daddy had demanded, she went back inside.

7

That spring, one of the talk shows came to the prison — THREE LIVE SHOWS FROM THE MOST DANGEROUS PRISON IN AMERICA! as the announcer kept saying all week — and guess who one of the inmate-guests was?

He certainly hadn’t volunteered. Indeed, he hadn’t even wanted to do it... but when the TV lights came on in the big storage room where an impromptu stage had been set up... there he was.

The show itself way pretty bland. They even gave the cons fake names, to “protect” them. The host mostly wanting to know if any of his six inmate-guests had ever had sex with another inmate. The guy looked pretty faggoty himself, truth to tell.

The only other topic the guy with the TV grin and the TV mousse expressed any interest in was “the hole.” What happened to a fella when they put him in “the hole.” The isolation. The fear.

So it went, the show that day, taped in interminable four- and five-minute segments so dozens of commercials could be dropped in later.

Only near the end did the host say anything interesting. He raised the subject of how a number of beautiful women had recently “married” men in prison, even men on death row, despite the fact that the women knew they’d never be able to consummate their marriages.

The host then clicked through snapshots of these women with their inmate-husbands. Some of them really were gorgeous. A few of them even proved to be wealthy. Weren’t they throwing their lives away, wasting their prime years on men who could not reciprocate real love?

“I mean,” said the host, “look at what just happened in Los Angeles. You have this woman on the jury who convicted this guy of rape and murder... then she starts writing the guy in prison... and ends up marrying him while he’s still behind bars.” Then he looked at his guests and said, “What is it you guys have got in the sex-appeal department, anyway?”

The inmates snickered and smirked, and all the guys in the audience started cracking up.

“We’ll look at this topic more closely tomorrow,” the host said. “But for now we’re out of time.”

Taped three shows in one day, a ball-busting schedule.

By the time the taping was done, he was exhausted and irritable. The photos of the beautiful women had undone him. He lay on his dark bunk in his dark cell and clung to his cock like a drowning man at sea. He wanted one of those beautiful, beautiful women for his very own. He would show them a kind of sex they’d never known before, a kind of sex that would rattle and alter their very existence, and then he would show them other things, so many other things, too.

For the first time in all his prison years, he wept that night.

“Hey, man, you all right?” his cellmate said deep into midnight, the cell block all coughs and cries and furtive grunts of sex, the nightly cacophony of prison life.

“Yeah.”

“Seein’ those chicks make you lonely?”

“Yeah.”

“Me, too,” his cellmate said.

“I wonder what those women get out of it.”

“The chicks who marry guys in stir?” his cellmate said.

“Yeah.”

“You heard what the faggy host said,” his cellmate said. “ ‘A pathological need to nurture.’ I ain’t even sure what that means.”

“Which one you like best?”

“The redhead in the green sweater. God.”

“She was somethin’, all right.”

“How about you?”

“Dark-haired one, I guess. Just somethin’ about her.”

“Great legs.”

“Yeah. But not just that. Something—” And then he remembered. She reminded him of a high-school girl he’d followed home from an ice-cream store one night. She made the mistake of walking by these woods. He just couldn’t help himself. Raped and then killed her with his hands, and then raped her one more time.

His cellmate yawned. “I’m wasted, man. Gotta get some sleep.”

Two minutes later, his cellmate was snoring.

But not him. Oh, no, not him.

He stayed awake all night, dreaming, dreaming.

8

It’s crazy what you can get sentimental about sometimes. For me, on this particular day, it was field glasses. I hadn’t used this pair of Swarovskis since leaving the FBI.

I sat six car lengths down from the McNally house. Through the field glasses, I watched a man pacing back and forth in the side window, approximately where their dining room was, as I recalled. He was big and looked like he might have been tough once, before the beer caught up to him.

I assumed this was McNally. I also assumed, because of his frantic movements, that the McNallys had not gotten their daughter back. I tried not to think of what that finger in the box had looked like.

He slapped her.

She’d suddenly appeared inside the window frame with him, shouting at him, face raw with tears and fear and rage, and then he’d slapped her the way one man slaps another, enough to move her back at least a foot. Then he slapped her again, backhanded this time, and then she disappeared from the window frame.

In the small town where I grew up, there had been a young married couple famous for their battles. In the early years, he’d given her a few cut lips and a black eye or two. A little later, he started giving her broken arms and legs, once a broken nose. You know the rest, how one night, the sixth year of their marriage it was, he slammed her head too many times into an old-fashioned radiator and killed her before the ambulance arrived. She was twenty-four years old when she died. She was also my cousin. I still had the occasional dream of looking the sonofabitch up when he got out, and slamming his head into a radiator thirty or forty times. See how he liked it.

He came fast out of his house, McNally did, going around the far side to his garage. A minute later, he backed out of the driveway in a new gray Dodge. If he noticed me parked there at the curb, he gave no hint.

He headed west. I waited a minute and a half, then headed west, too.

Following people in a small town is difficult. Following them in the country is nearly impossible.

Fortunately, after only three or four miles, I sensed where he was going. He was headed in the right direction for it, anyway, and I had this feeling — I’ll spare you the lecture on “hunches” that law-enforcement officials always like to give civilians — I had this feeling that he knew something about Nora’s murder last night.

I dropped back, giving him a two-mile advantage.

I drove slowly past farms, remembering what it was like to attach milker units to cows’ teats at a frosty 5:30 A.M.; and what it was like on a sweet warm Indian-summer afternoon to rake the corn I’d just chopped up onto a conveyer belt leading to the silo; and what it was like to lie on the sun side of a summer hill and have five tiny kittens and two tiny rabbits crawling all over you and making you giddy with the pleasure of it. We’d been going to have kids someday and live on a working farm, Kathy and I, but of course it had never happened — not in reality anyway, though sometimes I could fancy it so vividly I’d swear it had actually taken place.

I pulled up on top of the hill overlooking the deserted farm where the blue Caddy had sat last night. The river, sparkling blue, ran behind the farm.

In sunlight, the once-white farmhouse was scabrous, and the ancient red barn almost comical in the way it leaned, and over all was a Poe-like pall, an unnatural silence where human life had been taken with obscene enjoyment. No animals, no flowers prospered here.

I left the car on the shoulder, grabbed my trusty binoculars, and walked down the dusty gravel for a better angle.

McNally had pulled his car down into the barn so it couldn’t be seen from the road. He had yet to emerge from the cool shadows inside.

Far down the road ahead of me, I saw a car hidden inside a great rolling wraith of gravel dust traveling fast toward the farm. Of course, it might well go right on past the farm and then right on past me. But, as I’d expected, it started slowing down when it got within a quarter-mile of the farm, slowing down and using its blinker to signal a left turn.

This car was a blue Toyota four-door, the family model.

The driver did the same thing McNally had: pulled straight into the barn, failed to reappear. I hadn’t had any look at all at his face. I was damned curious.

I went back and sat behind the wheel of my car and turned on the radio to a news station.

No sense in making myself any more obvious than necessary. Sitting in your car was obvious enough. Standing out in the road with binoculars was pointing a bright red arrow at yourself.

They went fifteen more minutes, and still there was no sign of them. They could be doing all sorts of things in that barn, but I guessed it would have something to do with McNally’s daughter. He might be a drunk and a wife beater, but even scum care about their children in their own scummy way.

In the interim, a big gravel truck roared by, rocking my ancient jeep; a long vented truck filled with squealing pigs rumbled past; then a motorcycle with a young helmetless kid raced by; and finally two big bays ridden by two young girls clopped onward, leaving road apples of a curious iridescent green.

I mention all this so you’ll know why I was numbed into indifference when I heard the next car come up behind me. Figured it was just another local pilgrim hastening on to farm or co-op or babbling brook.

Only when I heard the door chunk shut behind me did I realize that the car had stopped and pulled over to the side of the road.

Only when I heard gravel crunch and pop did I realize that somebody was walking through it directly toward me.

By the time I got the window rolled down, she was there. She put her nice arms on my door and leaned in and spoke to me. She wore a sweet innocent perfume.

“You doing a little bird-watching?” she asked.

“I didn’t think you were speaking to me.”

“I shouldn’t be, actually. I should be arresting you.”

“For what?”

“For what? C’mon, whatever-your-name-is, for withholding evidence.”

“What evidence?”

She sighed. She looked sexy in her blue uniform and dark, dark shades. “So are you going to tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“What you’re doing at the scene of the crime?”

“This isn’t the scene of the crime.”

“It’s very close.”

I was tempted to just tell her. For one thing, I liked her. For another, she would eventually find out anyway. But I had given the McNally woman my word that I’d keep her secret. Given the stakes, her daughter being kidnapped and all, it was a promise I certainly meant to keep.

“How about if I buy you dinner tonight?”

“Are you trying to bribe an officer of the law?”

“You bet I am.”

“I don’t know why I like you.”

“I’m just glad you do.”

“Maybe I’ll seduce you tonight and get the information that way.”

“I think you’re serious.”

She shrugged. “Maybe I am. Or maybe I want to do both — get to know you and find out everything you know.”

“You wouldn’t hear me object.”

She sighed again. “Actually, I hate coy stuff like that. I shouldn’t have said it.”

I smiled. “I thought it was kind of sweet.”

“I grew up in a very strict household, so I guess I’ve still got some hangups about sex.”

“Most of us do.”

“You?”

“A little, I suppose.” I smiled. “But I don’t let it get in my way.” I looked at her a long moment. “I’d tell you what I know, but somebody may die if I do that. So right now I have to keep silent. I don’t expect you to understand what I’m talking about, but I am telling you the truth.”

She took her own long look at me. “You know what? I believe you. But I’m still kind of mad.”

“I know. And I don’t blame you.”

She looked down the hill at the ancient shabby outbuildings and the ancient shabby house, and shook her head. “It’s always different in the daylight — crime scenes, I mean. You always wonder how people can be such animals. But people seem to be different at night. They change, somehow.” She looked back at me. “You could help me, you know.”

I was tempted again but said nothing.

“What kind of meat do you like?”

“How about if I bring a cheese pizza over?”

“Are you serious?”

“Sure. Why should you have to cook? You work a full-time job.”

“You wouldn’t mind a cheese pizza?”

“Huh-uh.”

“I could make us some kind of dessert.”

“You don’t have to make us anything. I’ll bring a pizza and a six-pack of a good imported beer, and we’ll just enjoy ourselves.”

She smiled. “Now if you’d just tell me why you’re sitting out here.”

“Maybe tonight.”

“Now you’re the one who’s being coy.”

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

She was still leaning in and looking at me and didn’t see them, McNally first, his friend second, backing out of the barn, backing down the driveway and then heading off quickly in the opposite direction, lost in a gravel dust storm of their making.

“Maybe I’ll follow you back to town.”

“I’m not headed back to town,” she said. “I’m going back to the farm.”

“For what?”

“See if we missed something last night.”

“You’re thorough.”

She smiled. “No, egotistical. I want to make sure that I do a very good job so that all the cynics in this town will know that a woman can do a very good job as a peace officer.”

“Is it all right to tell you that I like you?”

“Only if that thought is accompanied by your real name.” She stood up and smiled. “I’ll see you about eight tonight. With your cheese pizza.”

She gave me a little salute, walked back to her patrol car, got inside and drove down the hill, giving me a blast on her horn and a wave as she reached the farm driveway.

But by this time I was preoccupied wondering who McNally’s friend was and what they were doing in the barn together. I turned the car around and drove back two hills where, with my field glasses, I could watch Jane walk around the farm. She stayed twenty minutes.

When she was done, she left, and then I drove over for my own look.

I spent the next fifteen minutes peeking through shattered windows into empty farmhouse rooms littered with gray-and-white pigeon droppings, and with empty Bud cans and empty Pepsi cans and empty red Trojan wrappers that looked like lurid autumn leaves.

I had just stepped inside the barn when I heard the tires of a heavy automobile crunch through gravel.

I stood in the barn watching as Jane walked up to me. “Thought you were going back to town.”

I smiled. “Thought you were, too.”

“Now’d be a good time to tell me who you really are.” If she was kidding, she wasn’t kidding much.

I looked back into the barn. I wanted to scout around but not when Jane was here.

I checked my watch. “Well, guess I’d better head back.”

“Not going to finish checking out the barn?”

I laughed. “And give you all my trade secrets?”

She walked me back to my car. She was going to make sure that this time I left.

“Maybe I’ll see you later,” she said.

Just then she looked tired and melancholy and I wanted to give her a hug but I knew better. You didn’t hug women when they were wearing badges and holster rigs.

“I hope so,” I said, and drove off. This time I really did go back to town.

9

By the time I got back to my motel, I was ready for some lunch, after which I planned to go visit Mrs. McNally.

A woman in a pink polyester uniform was sweeping the walk in front of my room, the sparkling dust motes getting to my sinuses immediately. When she saw me, she said, “Your friend’s in there waiting for you.”

“My friend?”

She shrugged. “That’s what he says. Your friend.”

She went back to her sweeping.

The scratched-up metal door and the rusted window screen and the dusty curtain behind it took on a sinister aspect now. My heart started hammering. This was like the old days in Cairo and Barcelona and Cannes. I loved it and hated it at the same time.

I went over, grabbed the doorknob and pushed the door inward hard enough to bang it against the inside wall.

The room was shadow. He sat in the armchair with the dark blue slipcovers meant to hide cigarette bums and wine stains. A narrow beam of sunlight exposed him.

He looked like the world’s youngest successful banker; snow-white hair and quick gritty blue eyes and a dark blue suit that must have cost a few thousand dollars. The face was the only thing that didn’t go with the clothes. He had to be sixty, but he didn’t look much older than forty-five or so.

“You’re Hokanson?”

I nodded. “And you’re Tolliver.”

“Yes.”

He got up and walked over and we shook hands. He shook hands firmly, but without any theatrics. “Could you use a sandwich and a cup of coffee, Mr. Hokanson?”

“I sure could.”

In the sunlight, what with his crow’s feet and the sorrow lines at either end of his mouth, he looked a little older but not much, still giving the impression that he was an impostor of some kind, kid face appended to adult body.

We’d been here twenty minutes now, and thus far he had told me the following, which I had written down dutifully in my little black book:

The place was small and made even smaller by the lunchtime crowd that had at least a dozen people standing and waiting for booths. It was one of those blissful oases of ignorance that had not yet heard that smoking causes lung cancer. Everybody, it seemed, had a cigarette going, even as he or she chewed his or her food. There were a couple three- and four-year-olds in the booth across from us. I was waiting for them to light up, too.

He shook his very white head. “No, not as fast. And not as cheaply, either. The press will be able to learn whatever the police learn but if you could find out who she really was and what she was up to — well, I could practice a little political damage control before all this hits the press.”

“Won’t you look like a victim to people? Why would they blame you for a woman who pretended she was your daughter?”

He smiled. He was a trim man, neatly shaved, manicured, crisply dressed, all of which left just the faintest hint of priggishness. Maybe it was his thin mouth and its constant implication of displeasure.

Before he answered, our waitress came around again, filling our coffee, taking away the plates from the chips and tuna sandwich I’d had, and the Egg Beaters and toast he’d had.

“People don’t remember things clearly,” he said. “By the time this story filters through the public consciousness, a lot of people will remember that I’d had an affair with this Nora, and maybe even that I’d been a suspect in her death.” He paused and raised his head a little. His neck was the only thing on him that looked his real age. “This morning I took the liberty of depositing ten thousand dollars in your bank account.”

This was my week for strange people wanting to give me a great deal of money. First Nora, now him.

“I’m not sure I buy your story.”

“Oh?” he said, his blue eyes hard.

“No, I think you’re interested in Nora and Vic for some other reason.”

“What other reason?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

He laughed. “Maybe you should investigate me first and then if you’re satisfied with what you find, start on Nora and Vic.”

“You say you had a son?”

“Yes. He died a long time ago, just as I told you.”

“What about your wife?”

“She’s dead, too. Nearly ten years ago.”

“Do you have a lady friend now?”

“No one special. I’m not sure I see the relevance of that.”

“Maybe Nora was angling for some kind of blackmail setup. Sometimes that works best with somebody close to the person being blackmailed. A girlfriend who decides to cash in on her rich boyfriend tells an accomplice the boyfriend’s darkest secret. And the blackmailer takes it from there, after agreeing to split fifty-fifty with the girlfriend.”

“They sound like nice people, your girlfriend and blackmailer.”

“So nobody’s blackmailing you?”

“Not that I know of.”

“And you don’t have anything they can blackmail you for?”

He smiled. “Do you know the Balzac quote that behind every great fortune is a scandal?”

I nodded.

“Well, I didn’t make our fortune, my father did. The trucking business made him a millionaire many, many times over. All I did was inherit the fortune. My father had to cheat and swindle a lot of people to make his money. All I had to do was be the dutiful son — get at least a B average at Yale and not do anything publicly excessive that would embarrass him — and I became a very wealthy man on the day he died, twelve years ago. If there are any family secrets they belong to my father, and he took them with him to his grave.”

“And you want to run for office?”

“As I said, I’m considering it. I think I’m what the state and the country need.”

“What’s that?”

“A conservative without an ideology. It’s frustrating being a conservative these days — you always have to sit next to some lunatic who wants creationism taught in public schools or something like that.”

“Think you have a chance?”

“I have the money, anyway. That’s a big part of the battle. I won’t have to depend on PACs.”

I looked at his ridiculously young face and his brilliant white hair and the quirky but stone-hard blue eyes. I didn’t trust him, didn’t believe anything he was telling me, but I didn’t know why. He just seemed dishonest.

“You’re going back to Des Moines?”

“Not right away. Thought I might stay here a few days and see what you find out.”

“Assuming I take the job.”

“Assuming you take the job. Of course.”

“I guess I’ll do it.”

“I’m very pleased.”

“But when I do find out anything concrete, I turn it over to the local police chief.”

“After you tell me. That’s all I ask. Tell me first. I’ll contact my press aide, and she can start to prepare our response.”

I stood up, dropped a dollar on the table for a tip, picked up the ticket.

He took it from my hand, then picked up the dollar and handed it back to me. “I invited you, Mr. Hokanson. I’m the one who should pay.”

Out on the street, in the fresh air and sunshine, he said, “A friend of mine has a summer cottage here. You can reach me there.” He gave me the address. “When your father was the biggest trucker in the state, you have friends everywhere.”

He put forth his firm but civil hand, and we shook again.

I went east, he went west.

10

“You screwed your own daughter. You hear that, guys, he screwed his own daughter?”

“That’s enough. Spence,” the counselor says. “This isn’t funny.”

“He put the pork to his own daughter.”

This is group therapy. Meets twice a week in a big, echoing room near the prison library. Pistol-hot in summer, blue-balls cold in winter.

Standard number is the counselor and six cons, one of whom is this rather prim fellow named Dodsworth.

Past couple weeks the cons have been kind of ganging up on Dodsworth. Few sessions back he told — they were playing this nasty game called True Life, where you tell the group the worst thing you ever did — he told the group that one night when he was really bombed his fourteen-year-old daughter gave him this big sloppy kiss and he got this killer erection and then walked around for the next six weeks impotent because he was so ashamed of what he’d felt for his daughter.

You could tell when he raised his eyes and started looking around at everybody that he’d messed up real bad.

Should never have admitted something like that.

Because everybody knows it’s the truth.

See, the way to play the game is, you make stuff up. Like, Well, I guess the worst thing I ever did was after I robbed this guy, you know, I found this dynamite out in the back and I blew up his entire house. Boards ’n bricks ’n stuff flyin’ everywhere. It was great, man.

And everybody laughs.

Because it’s crap and you know they know it’s crap and that’s half the fun.

Other thing is, tell only stories that reflect well on you.

For instance, to a con, blowing up somebody’s house can be a pretty cool thing.

That reflects well on you.

But plugging your own daughter?

Or even having the thought?

Bastard’s worse than a child molester.

“I don’t want to be in here no more,” Dodsworth says to the counselor. “Spence knows damn good and well I never touched Bonnie. I wouldn’t do nothin’ like that.”

“That ain’t what you said couple weeks ago,” Spence says. And winks. And everybody laughs again. “Maybe since Bonnie ain’t around you’d like to put the pork to one of us. Lesee now — who’d ole Dodsworth like to put the pork to—”

Another wink.

“Why, Mr. Haines!”

Haines is the counselor.

“I bet that’s who Dodsworth has the hots for. Mr. Haines!”

Lots of laughter now. Mr. Haines and Dodsworth both blushing.

Spence is a mean but very clever guy. You might not think so him being such a grungy fat-ass with enough faded tattoos to start an art gallery. But he’s got great cunning, Spence does, no brains, no power — but cunning. And that’s what it takes to be important in here.

He tunes out.

Sits there seeing it all but not seeing anything, hearing it all but not hearing.

And has the thought for the second time: I need to escape. I’ve been here too long.

Couple days later, on the yard, he gets his protector Servic alone and says, “You ever think about just walking out of here some time?”

“You gettin’ a little crazy.”

“Yeah, I guess so, anyway.”

“It comes and goes, kid. You just gotta ride it is all.”

“So you never thought about it?”

“Sure I thought about it. Who ain’t thought about it? But see those guys?”

He points to the towers located at either end of the yard. The guards in them are armed with rifles and legend has it that they’re damned good shots.

“You figure out a way to get past them guards, kid, you let me know.”

“Maybe there’s another way.”

“Maybe. But if there is, I ain’t never heard of it.” He pauses, looks at him. “Somethin’ happen?”

“Just all the crap. I got this group therapy session every week with Spence and—”

“Spence. Screw Spence. Don’t let him get you down, kid. He’s just mad ’cause his old lady’s sleepin’ with some coon back in Milwaukee.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“No wonder, then.”

“Bein’ mean’s the only thing he’s got left.”

Servic, who’s been a lot nicer of late, looks up at the guard towers again. “You ever figure out how to get past them towers, kid, you let me know.”

He laughs. “I will. I promise.”

They walk back to the rest of the cons.

11

There was a muffled cry and the scrape of furniture legs across a hardwood floor following my knock. Then there was just silence.

I stood on the McNallys’ front porch watching a cardinal perched on a bird feeder in a nearby oak tree. He bobbed and pecked relentlessly, red and vivid and sleek in this afternoon of graceful white butterflies and cute quick squirrels bouncing across the side lawn. It was springtime, and I wanted to be up on the Iowa River, standing in my waders and casting my line.

I knocked again.

Half a minute later, Eve McNally came to the door. Her forehead and left cheek showed red from where something had slammed hard against her — a fist, most likely. She wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt and a pair of red shorts. Her legs were shaped nicely, but she was already having problems with varicose veins.

“I didn’t invite you here,” she said. “Go away.”

“I want to talk to your husband.”

“He’s not here.”

“He’s inside, Eve, and I know it.”

“He don’t want to talk to you.”

“You haven’t got your daughter back yet, have you?”

She glanced over her shoulder. If I hadn’t known for sure that her husband was home, I knew now.

He appeared in the doorway, a big beefy man with hair so black it looked dyed, a blue panther tattoo running down the meaty biceps of his right arm. He wore a white sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of dungarees that hung precariously on the slope of his considerable belly. The panther looked angry, on the prowl. Presumably that’s how his master looked most of the time, too.

“What do you want?”

“I want to help you get your daughter back.”

“You get off my property,” he said. I thought of angry Sam throwing me off his property a little earlier today. This wasn’t my day for making friends.

“Tell him I’m trying to help you,” I said to Eve.

“He don’t listen to me.”

“Out,” he said. And suddenly he was out the door and pushing me backward off his porch.

“Don’t hurt him,” Eve said. “He’s tryin’ to help us.”

I grabbed the railing to keep from falling down the four steps. I had just managed to get a grip on it when he hit me with a hard roundhouse right.

I suppose tough guys don’t mind much getting hit but personally I’ve never cared for it a whole lot. For one thing, it almost invariably hurts. For another, it oftentimes inhibits your vision. And, for a final thing, it makes you feel like a helpless child.

Unless, of course, you hit back.

He was still p’d, meaning he wanted to hit me some more despite his wife’s screams.

I stumbled down the final three stairs, losing my grip on the railing. But by then I knew just what I wanted to do.

And I did it.

When he was on the bottom step, I kicked him directly in the crotch. He made a lot of frightening noise, but then he did what I’d hoped he would do: sort of crumpled into himself, holding his crotch as he did so.

I hit him three times in the side of the head, hard. I wanted to hit him a fourth time, but my knuckles were starting to hurt.

I grabbed him by his nice black hair and half-dragged him back up the stairs and inside. He took a swing at me once, but missed. I returned the favor by slamming home an especially vicious kidney shot. I didn’t miss.

In the living room, I pushed him on to the couch and stood over him. I had my Ruger out and was pointing it in his face.

“Oh, God, mister, don’t shoot him.”

“I just want to talk to him without him trying to hit me.”

“You sonofabitch, I won’t just hit you, I’ll kill you.”

“You were out at the Brindle farm this afternoon. Why?”

He looked surprised, fear and curiosity blooming in his beady little gaze. He composed himself before speaking, sitting up straighter on the couch, tugging his T-shirt down over his little middle-aged male titties.

A grandfather clock tocked peacefully, measuring out the centuries in the sudden peaceful silence, and in the kitchen the refrigerator motor thrummed on. It was a nice modest home, this, a home where husband and wife should live happily ever after and children should be raised in safety and love and not get kidnapped — no, never get kidnapped at all. Nor should two grown men, both with blood on their mouths, be in the living room sweaty and enraged and wanting to kill each other.

“You dumb bastard, even if you don’t believe me or your wife, I am trying to help you find your daughter.”

But he was scared. His eyes kept blinking, and he kept licking his lips. He daubed blood from his lower lip with the back of his hand. “What’s my daughter to you?”

“Well, for one thing, believe it or not, I really don’t like to see little kids get kidnapped. And for another thing, I think she figures into a case I’m working on. By helping you, I’m probably going to help myself.”

“I don’t know who took her.”

“I think you do. And I think you know why. And I think that’s why you went to the Brindle farm this afternoon.”

He sat up even straighter, daubed at his split lip some more.

“Tell me about the farm, McNally. Who did you meet there?”

His gaze shifted subtly to the right. I instinctively understood the significance of that — he was watching somebody, namely his wife, do something behind my back — but by then there wasn’t much I could do. I guess because she’d sort of taken my part with her husband, I’d figured she wouldn’t help him hurt me in anyway. But you never know about husbands and wives. You just never know.

I started to turn to the right, and that’s when she hit me on the crown of the head.

I had no idea what her weapon of choice happened to be, but whatever it was, it was damned effective.

I felt my head start to split open, felt a dark cold rush up my nostrils and start to spread through my respiratory system, and felt my knees go. And that was it; then I didn’t feel anything at all.

12

“Let me help you up.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“Maybe I hit you a little too hard.”

“I think you did.”

“Here. Just sit down here right on the couch. I’ll get you a couple of aspirin. I mean, I’ll bet your head hurts.”

“I suppose your husband’s gone?”

“He’s afraid — I’ve never seen him like this. Somebody’s trying to kill him, I think.”

“Who?”

She just shook her head.

“I want you to tell me who was out at the Brindle farm with your husband this afternoon.”

“I don’t know.”

She put her hand out as if to touch me, then stopped herself. “I’ll get you those aspirin.”

The dog lapped my face all the time Eve McNally was gone, big slurpy dog kisses and hard killer dog breath. When Eve returned, she handed me a glass of water, then dropped two aspirin tablets into my palm and then shooed Sara away.

“I’m sorry, mister,” she said, “I really don’t know who he met at the Brindle farm this afternoon, and I really am sorry I hit you so hard.”

And just what was I supposed to say to that?

13

I took another break and looked over more of Peary’s notes for the second or third time.

“Killings abruptly stopped,” he noted in pencil. “I doubt this was because the killer lost his passion for the hunt. More likely, he found a better way of disposing of bodies.”

I found a pay phone and called one of my friends at Quantico, asking him to run a search through the FBI computers. I wanted to know if there were a precedence for a case where a killer abruptly changed the way he was disposing of his victims. The computer would search through tens of thousands of cases, checking patterns to see if this abrupt change had been noted before.

I told him that this was real urgent. He told me to try back in a couple of hours.

14

What he did with the letter, first night he had it, was wait until his pal in the upper bunk was snoring, and then he took the letter and wrapped it around himself and made love to it, his fluids running into her delicate handwriting, becoming one.

15

After leaving the McNally place, I went to a drugstore where I bought some headache powder and drank a milk shake and looked through a science-fiction magazine. Then I went back to my little temporary hutch.

A motel room at mid-afternoon is an especially lonely place. With all their earnest drunken noise, the night people at least lend the place a festive air. But afternoon is wives on the run from rickety marriages, the kids in tow with dirty faces and sad frantic eyes, missing their daddy and yet hating him at the same time for how he treated mommy; and traveling salesmen wearing too much Old Spice and knowing far too many dirty jokes; and afternoon lovers from insurance agencies and advertising firms and department stores, giving each other quick hot sex of the sort their marriage partners gave up on years ago.

I saw samples of all these types passing by my window as I sat in the armchair, talking on the telephone, yellow pad on my knees, telling a friend of mine all about Mr. Tolliver.

“You want to know everything about him?” Sheila asked.

“Everything.”

“It’ll take me a little while.”

“I know.”

“He’s prominent enough that I think you could probably pick a lot of it up at the library. I really hate to charge you these rates, but it’s how I make my living.”

Sheila Kelly costs half as much as other computer search services I’ve used yet apologizes constantly for her prices.

“You’ll find out things I’ll never find in the library.”

Sheila was one of that new breed of human beings who spends half her life using a computer as an extension of her mind. Mike Peary had used her on several investigations and told me the information she’d turned up had helped him resolve the cases in a day or so. I’d had similar luck. Sheila performs hacking services that are not, strictly speaking, legal. But they sure are useful.

“Why don’t you give me your number?”

I gave her my number.

“Is that a motel?”

“Right.”

“Is it a nice place?”

“Well, the toilet flushes anyway.”

She laughed. “My husband and I stayed in a place like that in South Dakota once. It was like Motel Hell. We could only get one station on the TV and that was a local show that had pro wrestlers performing between country and western singing acts.”

“Well, this isn’t quite so bad.”

“You probably won’t hear from me till tomorrow.”

“Whenever.”

Ten minutes later, after stripping down to my boxer shorts, I laid down on the bed and opened up my Robert Louis Stevenson book.

I read until I got drowsy and then I napped for a while.

When I woke up, the sunlight was waning behind the curtains. A car door opened and chunked shut. Hearty laughter, man and woman. The night people were arriving.

I went into the bathroom and washed my face and combed my hair and when I came back out I picked out a shirt and trousers for my visit to Jane Avery’s tonight.

Then I looked down and realized that my bare feet had stepped in something that I was tracking across the rug.

I turned on the lamp and looked down at the stains I’d made. I raised my foot and turned it so I could see my sole, which I daubed at. Something sticky.

My eyes moved back up the trail I’d left. It stretched from where I stood to the closet door.

I went over to the closet and looked down. So much for the sharp eye of the detective. I’d walked past the small puddle beneath the door without noticing it until I’d accidentally stepped in it. No doubt about it. The Detective League of America, or whatever organization it was that detectives belonged to, was going to kick me out.

The closet door was louvered and dusty. I opened it carefully, on dry hinges that creaked, and looked inside at my clothing hanging from the rod that had been positioned at eye level. A string attached to a light socket above hung in front of my face. I gave it a tug. The naked bulb was burned out.

From here, below the line of shirts and trousers, I could see only a pair of legs from the knees on down. The shoes were tasseled and expensive cordovan loafers. The trousers appeared to be dark blue and hand-tailored. But I wasn’t going to learn much this way. I pushed all my attire to the right side of the small dusty closet for a better look.

Even though I’d only seen him once, and then from a distance, I recognized the handsome and imperious face of Sam Lodge. He was still handsome, still the sneering art instructor and antique-shop owner but his charm was gone. The large butcher knife that had been shoved deep into his chest, almost to the hilt, lent him a violence that no amount of charm could have disguised anyway. The killer had shoved him up against the back of the closet so that his neck appeared broken, head resting at an awkward angle on his left shoulder. His blue eyes stared without interest at some point in the room behind me.

I closed the door and stood for a long moment trying to figure out what he’d been doing in my room in the first place. We hadn’t exactly been the best of friends. But even so, the enormity of death, of extinction, took me down for a few moments. After my wife died, I’d felt the same way, knowing that never again would she ever exist, not on this world nor on the billions of worlds filling the universe, never exist again no matter how remarkable were the discoveries of future science, never touch others with that special loveliness and grace and quiet self-effacing wisdom that had been so precious to me. And somebody was going to be feeling these same things about Sam Lodge, probably his wife and certainly his parents, when they learned that he was now broken and forgotten in a closet in a shabby little motel in the middle of a nowhere planet in a nowhere backwash of the dark and rolling cosmos.

I did the only thing I could. I went to the phone and called Chief of Police Jane Avery.