Blood Moon

1

Six days ago, he had to change cells, again. Five times in a year-and-a-half.

Another one of the warden’s grand plans. Probably got the idea from one of his Sociology texts.

He did what he always did, put his toothbrush and toothpaste and shampoo and hairbrush and deodorant and shaving cream and razor into his gym bag and shambled in line behind a guard who led him to a new cellblock.

Guy in the cell is this big dumb shaggy hick with warts or something all over his face.

Guard locks him in.

First thing he does, he starts sniffing the air.

What in hell is that smell?

So dirty, so overwhelming he feels like he’s choking.

“Name’s Lumir.”

He nods to Lumir.

“Not as loud over here in this cellblock. Not as many jigs.”

But he’s still sniffing, trying to figure it out.

“You don’t mind, I like the top bunk.”

“You cut your stools with water, Lumir?”

“Huh?”

“After you go to the bathroom, do you throw a glass of water into the toilet?”

“Huh-uh.”

“You should.”

“How come?”

“Kinda smells in here, Lumir.”

“I don’t smell nothin’.”

“Yeah, well, I do.”

That was six days ago and by now he knows what the trouble is. Or, troubles (plural) are:

Now all these things are the stuff of great high hilarity when you’re sitting in a bar ten years later recounting them.

But he has to spend day-in, day-out with Lumir and there’s nothing funny about that at all.

Nights... he just lies there. He never gets used to the smells... the really foul stomach-turning odors of Lumir’s stools... or the rancid stink of his socks... or the sweet-sour stench of his unbathed body.

For the third time, he finds himself thinking seriously about escaping.

2

An hour later, I stood in the motel parking lot, leaning against my car, listening to Jane become more and more irritated with my dishonesty. Night was coming now, and with it the immortal teenagers in their immortal hot cars cruising up and down the main street, the joy of their radios obscene against the grim business in my room.

“You didn’t know him, right, Jim?”

“Right.”

“But somebody killed him in your room.”

“Guess so.”

“Just by coincidence.”

“That’s the only thing I can figure out,” I said.

“You think you’ll tell me what’s going on before anybody else gets killed?”

“I would if I could.”

“What’s that mean, ‘if you could’?”

I was thinking of Melissa McNally. Kidnapped.

“If I could. Just what I said.”

Jane sighed. In the gathering dusk, the downtown lights had come on, a little outpost of civilization in a land where only three hundred years ago Indians had roamed, killed rattlesnakes and wore them around their necks for good luck. Every once in a while you could feel those old winds blowing down the timelines, carrying the exuberance of the Mesquakie when this land belonged to them, and the peace of the vast prairie when it was nothing but wild corn and vivid flowers and free-roaming animals.

“You’re wandering off,” Jane said.

“I’m thinking.”

She shook her head, leaned close. Some of the fifty-or-so citizens filling the driveway had heard our sparring and moved closer for a more definitive version. We walked to the other side of the boxy white ambulance where we could argue without being heard.

“Why don’t you just tell me the truth?”

“Jane, listen, as soon as I can—”

The attendants were just now bringing the body out in a black bag on a stretcher. Inside, two of Jane’s officers, who regularly went to Des Moines for crime-scene training, were just now going through the room for fingerprints. Jane was irritated that the medical examiner, a man shared by several small communities, had yet to put in an appearance.

Jane was about to start talking again when one of her auxiliary deputies, the Burt Reynolds macho man, swaggered up and whispered something in her ear.

“Where?” she said.

“Down the block. Right at the end.”

“You’re sure?”

“Heck, Jane, I used to help the guy move stuff. I should ought to know his car when I see it.”

Car. I’d been wondering about that, too. How had Lodge gotten here? While waiting for Jane to show up, I’d gone up and down the parking lot checking registrations. I hadn’t found a car with Lodge’s name on it.

I turned back for a look at the crowd. By now, what with all the lights provided by Cedar Rapids TV stations, the parking lot was starting to resemble a movie set, the crowd looking appropriately curious, the cops looking appropriately harried, the motel itself looking appropriately seedy. This would inevitably be a drama about a carousing husband who had met his fate in the very same motel room where he’d bopped innumerable married ladies and yummy teenage nymphets, most of whom were cheerleaders.

I saw him only because I felt his intense gaze at my back. I turned to the right and there he was, tall enough to tower over everybody in front of him. Despite the cool breezes, he wore only a T-shirt. But McNally didn’t need a jacket. He had his rage and his fear to keep him warm.

I was still wondering whom he’d seen this afternoon out at the Brindle farm. And why he’d seen them. And why somebody had kidnapped his daughter.

Just as I turned away, I saw a few more familiar faces. There, several yards from McNally, at the very back of the crowd and standing on a small rise of grass, were the good Reverend Roberts, Kenny Deihl and Mindy Lane. If they were here to save Sam Lodge’s soul, they were a mite late.

“There’s Doc Winick,” the auxiliary deputy said, referring to the rumpled little medical examiner making his way toward us.

“God,” Jane said, the stress of the moment clearly starting to tell on her mood, “I sure hope he’s sober.”

She started to walk away. I grabbed her elbow. “Are we still on for tonight?”

She glared at me. “You don’t know how much I dislike you right now.”

“I’ll pay for the pizza.”

She leaned in. “You jerk.” But she was smiling. “Double cheese.”

“I used to think that was my name until my mom told me different.”

“Very funny.”

“I’ll even bring some ice cream.”

She frowned. “We shouldn’t even be talking about food.” She nodded to the ambulance that was just starting to pull away. “Not with Lodge dead like that.”

“I’ll go get myself another room for tonight.” I pointed to the CRIME SCENE signs her two detectives were affixing to door and window.

“I meant what I said,” she said.

“You mean about the double cheese or me being a jerk?”

“Both,” she said, and was gone.

3

I decided to walk two blocks to the pharmacy where the town’s only newsstand could be found.

As I reached the end of the motel driveway, I turned left and saw the auxiliary deputy who liked me so much.

He was leaning against a car, a cigarette dangling tough-guy style from his chubby mouth. He looked pretty comic, so comic in fact that I felt a little sorry for him. This guy was obviously suffering from a terminal lack of self-esteem.

“You never seen a car before?” he said.

“A blue Toyota sedan.”

“Somethin’ wrong with that?”

The mercury vapor lights gave his face a chilly aqua gleam.

“Just passing a remark.”

“You know somethin’ about this car?”

“Nope.”

“You think there’s somethin’ weird about this car?”

“Nope.”

“You know who it belonged to?”

If I hadn’t, his use of past tense would have given me a big hint. I glanced across the street, in the front window of a diner. It was one of those strange May winds you get in Iowa sometimes, May but smelling of autumn somehow. The people in the diner looked very contented and very snug.

“Guess I don’t.”

“Him.”

“Him?”

He shook his head as if I were the biggest pea-brain who had ever lived. “Him. The dead guy. You know, Lodge. The guy in your closet.”

“Oh.”

“That’s all you’re gonna say? ‘Oh?’ ”

“What else do you want me to say?”

He shrugged. “You sure don’t act very shook up. Most folks would be goin’ crazy, findin’ a dead guy in their closet.” He looked at me sly, from the corners of his beady eyes. “ ’Less, of course, they happened to have killed the guy themselves.”

I wanted to give him a little grammar lesson, about the parts of speech and how singular has to agree with singular and so on, but I hate people who do stuff like that so I kept quiet.

He was just about to say something else when another auxiliary cop suddenly appeared on the edge of the motel driveway and called, “Chief wants you. Better get up here.”

“Damn,” he said.

“Don’t blame you for hating crime scenes,” I said, figuring I should be friendly, given what I was about to do as soon as he dragged himself away from here.

“Ain’t that. It’s the smokin’.”

“Smoking?”

“Yeah, she won’t let me smoke around her.”

“I see.”

“A man, he’d let you smoke.”

“He would, huh?”

“That’s the trouble with havin’ a woman chief of police. I mean, she’s smart enough and all, but she sure has a lot of rules.”

He pushed away from the car, dropped his cigarette on the sidewalk, and then crushed it to tatters with the toe of his cordovan Texas boot.

“You be around in case she’s got some questions for you?”

“I’ll be around.”

“I’ll tell her.”

Before he left, he added an accouterment I hadn’t seen before, one of those Western-style hats I call a junior Stetson. I believe Matt Dillon wore one like this in the old Gunsmoke. Unfortunately for my friend here, the hat dwarfed his small head and only added to the roundness of his cheeks. He looked like the meanest ten-year-old on Maple Street.

He gave me the sort of hard, measuring glance that men about to have a gunfight give each other, and then he strolled off, ready to slap leather.

I pulled out the pair of rubber surgical gloves just about the time he reached the motel drive. I carry the gloves for just such opportunities as this one. Plus you can put them on your fingers and make funny animal shapes. If you know how, that is. Not everybody does.

When he was gone from sight, I tried the back door of the Toyota. It was locked. I tried front door, passenger side. Locked. I tried front door, driver side. Locked. I tried rear door, driver. Unlocked.

I worked quickly, constantly watching front and back windows for sight of any casual strollers. They would certainly remember, later, seeing me going through the dead man’s car.

Nothing, nothing, nothing was what I found until I came to the glove compartment, in which rested several envelopes held together with a wide rubber band.

Being the sort of inquisitive guy I am, and fully planning to give back every single thing I took — having years ago taken the Boy Scout pledge, I mean, and having lived my life accordingly ever since — I then, given my suspicious nature, started groping beneath the front seats. People often hide things there, apparently figuring that most crooks are so stupid they’ll never think to look there. Your standard crook, of course, having graduated from a certified crook school, knows enough to look under the seats right away.

I found nothing.

Soon as I could, I walked around to the rear of the car, glanced up and down, right and left, found the sidewalks momentarily empty and went to work, picking the lock as quickly as I could.

I was in and out in less than a minute, finding absolutely nada, unless you counted a spare tire and a pair of jumper cables.

I closed up the trunk and started walking slowly back to my motel, enjoying the clean, clear cold. May in Iowa usually encompasses several seasons, including winter at least three or four of the thirty-one days. Sweater weather, the locals call it, evoking images of a blazing fireplace, a very hot hot toddy and a beautiful girl whose eyes dance with the reflection of the fire. I hoped my night with the high sheriff of New Hope would offer at least a few of those pleasures.

So Samuel Lodge was the man who’d met McNally at the Brindle farm this afternoon. Presumably, anyway, since it was definitely his blue Toyota I had seen entering and exiting the barn.

And now Samuel Lodge was the man who’d been murdered in my room and stuffed into my closet.

These two thoughts kept me occupied as I walked back to my room.

I was engrossed enough in them that my mind didn’t register the scene in the steak-house window until I was several feet past it. Then I did a sort of double take — a subtle one, of course, nothing that Laurel and Hardy fans would like — and turned around.

I walked back down the street and looked in the window, which had a skin of moisture on it from the cold, and there they were.

The good reverend and two of his flock, namely Kenny Deihl and Mindy Lane.

None of them looked especially happy to see me.

I went inside, told the cashier I was only popping in to say hello to a few good and true friends, and then wended my way through tables of older people sawing steaks and inserting pieces of them into their mouths, all that time gabbing, smiling and turning A-l bottles upside down.

“Mind if I have a cup of coffee?” I said to the reverend.

“Would Jesus deny you a cup of coffee?” he responded.

I wanted to point out that, strictly speaking, I hadn’t been addressing Jesus, I had been addressing the reverend, but I sat down and ordered my cup of coffee anyway.

Mindy looked exceptionally pretty in a low-cut white blouse with an oversized lace collar and her hair pulled up dramatically from her face. This, I assumed, was the Religious Mindy, the fleshy sexuality only hinted at in the somewhat sullen mouth and the dozy but shrewd green eyes.

Kenny Deihl offered everybody at the table a nervous smile, as if hoping to effect some sort of truce between all of us. In his Western shirt and empty handsome face, he was the perennial B actor whose purpose in the movie was to learn some tough lessons in life from a sardonic John Wayne.

Then there was the reverend, funereal in blue suit and blue shirt and muted red tie. There was too much gold in his watch and cuff links for him to ever be a true friend of the Lord’s but he tried to make up for it in the almost-oppressive piety of the gaze and the somnolent platitudes uttered by his TV voice.

The waitress took my order for coffee. But she wasn’t going to give up on me as a customer. “We’ve got some good meat loaf tonight,” she said, and God, how good it sounded — but I didn’t figure that the high sheriff of New Hope would appreciate my chowing down right before our date.

“Sorry,” I said.

I looked around the restaurant briefly at all the husbands and wives of so many years, some of them brides and grooms for sixty years, I imagined, and I sensed such peace and belonging in them that I felt cast out, to suffer in the darkness with these three who seemed, each in his way, profoundly troubled.

“I understand that the body was found in your room,” the good reverend said.

“Yes, unfortunately.”

“Did you know him?” Mindy asked.

I shook my head. “No, not at all.”

She smiled. “He had a mighty sweet tongue on him, that one.”

The Reverend shot her a look of instant displeasure.

“What I remember about him,” Kenny Deihl said, “was that letter he wrote the Clarion about us not getting a tax exemption.”

“It’s no time to be speaking ill of the man, Kenny,” the Reverend reminded him, straightening his left French cuff. “He was possessed of the Devil when he wrote those words. Maybe he got right with God before he passed on. You need to consider that, Kenny.”

“He didn’t get right with God,” Kenny said. “Not that cynic. No way.”

I already wanted to get up and run screaming from this odd trio. Maybe they were laying out all this bad dialogue for my sake — but it was even worse to think that they actually talked in this skin-crawling way when they were alone.

Not bothering to hide her amusement, Mindy said, “Sam didn’t think that religions should be given tax exemptions. He said the state had too many bills as it was and needed to raise all the taxes it could.”

“He especially disliked religions such as ours,” the reverend said. “Where we take our ministry to the people rather than praying to false gods in crystal cathedrals or towers of the papacy.”

Towers of the papacy. I’d have to remember that one.

“If Jesus was with us today, in the flesh that is,” the Reverend said, “He would own His own radio station.”

“Not TV station?” I said.

“You’re like Sam Lodge,” the Reverend said. “You mock without understanding.”

Mindy looked at me and smiled. “You don’t want to end up like Sam Lodge, do you?”

“That’s right,” the Reverend said. “That’s right indeed.”

I was still confounded by the youthfulness of his face. He was well into his thirties but he still resembled a student-council president from a prestigious Eastern university, all well-concealed ambition and blow-dry politics.

I looked at each of them. “So you all knew him?”

“Indeed, we all knew him,” the reverend said.

“Not out of choice,” Kenny said.

“Speak for yourself,” Mindy smiled.

If we didn’t know by now that she slept with the recently departed Sam Lodge, we were never going to get the hint.

“Did any of you kill him?”

“Is that supposed to be a joke, Mr. Hokanson?” Kenny said. “Because if it is, it isn’t funny.”

“It’s no joke,” the reverend said in his best patriarchal manner. “He’s being serious.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s funny, either,” Mindy said. She looked right at me. “Up until you asked that question, Mr. Hokanson, I sort of liked you. Maybe Kenny here isn’t the smartest person on the planet, and maybe I’m not always the good girl I should be, and maybe the reverend here spends a little more of the church money than he should — but we’re all basically good people. Good Christian people. And we certainly wouldn’t go around killing people.”

She was serious. I kept looking at her for the sardonic smile or the sarcastic phrase, something to indicate that she and I were still conspirators, that we knew the real truth about dopey Kenny and the relentless reverend, but now I saw, and saw with great vast disbelief, that she was actually one of them too — one of the Christian pod people.

I sighed a serious sigh, set down my coffee cup and stood up. “Well, just thought I’d stop in and say hello.”

“You really piss me off, you know that?” Mindy said, tears choking her voice and filling her eyes.

“Mindy!” the reverend snapped, seeing that other diners were watching us now.

She put her head down. “I’m sorry I used that word. Forgive me, O Lord.”

I stared at her a long moment. Here I’d had her all neatly filed away under Good-time Girl but she wasn’t that at all. She was something dark and mercurial and perhaps even dangerous.

“Excuse her vulgarity, Mr. Hokanson,” the reverend said.

I nodded.

“You better go,” Kenny said.

And go I did, glad for the street and the gathering night and the balming, cleansing cold air.

4

Later that year, in Cellblock D, a lifer serving time for cutting up two fourteen-year-old girls and then dumping their bodies down a grain elevator, got hisself hitched to a 348-pound babe from Astoria, Kansas. Not, you understand, that the lifer was any prize hisself.

Warden, being warden, wouldn’t give them permission to set up an impromptu wedding chapel inside the prison, so they had to make do with a wedding on the yard, with the woman’s blind mama and deaf papa. Also in attendance were several of the lifer’s fellow convicts, including two killers, three bank robbers and six just kind of generally bad people. They all wore Aqua Velva, they all sang the Barry Manilow song “Mandy” (that being the bride’s name and the lyrics having been typed out for them) and they all kissed the bride, three of them in the French manner. The bride’s mama sang along, but not her deaf papa.

This would not be the way they got married, with such public scorn or ridiculous setting.

Oh, no.

The novel was a shiny new paperback that showed a kind of studly young cop holding a punk up against the brick wall. Cop had a big Magnum pushed right against the punk’s head. The title was Battleground, Miami — Bloodbath. He hated these dimwit kind of books. All these hero cops. Not a dishonest, sadistic, stupid or incompetent one among them. All pretty pretty boys with their sweet summer sweat, and every one of them a hero.

Why would Rosamund (by now, she’d told him her real name but he, like her, preferred Rosamund) who loved gentle and delicate and beautiful things like a book like this?

He tried reading it straight through. He was no literary critic, to be sure, but as far as he could see this Robert David Chase guy was the hackiest of hacks.

He couldn’t be sure, having always fallen asleep in his English classes, but this Robert David Chase seemed like a really awful writer. Really really awful.

Those were his feelings, anyway, till he came to Chapters Six and Nine, both of which were told from the viewpoint of one Haskins P. Washington, a self-described “entrepreneur of the flesh” — i.e., a pimp.

Haskins, it seems, this all told in flashback, had been incarcerated for life before finally escaping six years into his sentence.

Here’s how it went. When prisoners worked farm detail, they worked outside the prison walls, usually in fields not far from highways or arterial roads on which there was heavy truck traffic.

Haskins decided to take advantage of this (1) by getting himself on farm detail, which took fourteen months and (2) by then having a friend of his rent a truck and drive by a certain field on a certain day at a certain time, at which point friend stopped the truck at a certain point and two other friends with Uzis jumped from the back of the truck, firing hundreds of rounds to protect Haskins P. Washington who came barreling across the road from the field, and who then hopped in the back of the truck, which then sped away.

This was Chapter Six.

Chapter Nine contained another escape plan — this involving abducting a prison official and putting a chopper down in the middle of the yard — but this was pure Hollywood and sounded crazy as hell and completely bogus as a serious escape plan.

But Chapter Six, now that was another matter.

Chapter Six, he practically memorized as he began making plans of his own...

5

After buying USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune, and after eating a small piece of pie mostly because I wanted to sit at the old-fashioned Coca-Cola fountain and pretend it was 1958 and that I was a popular quarterback and all-around nice guy, it having been a far, far better world back in those days, I tucked the newspapers under my arm and strolled back to the motel.

It was misting now, a chill shimmering prairie spray, and it gave me the animal desire to be in some place snug and warm, the way I’d felt passing the restaurant window earlier.

The crowd had pretty much gone. Once the body had been removed, what was the point in hanging around? The police, in and out, in and out, carrying small plastic evidence bags, sure proved to be disappointing as spectator sports. So drift home or drift to the tavern and speculate on who killed Sam Lodge, and why, and if you got a chance to embellish on the basic tale (“I heard they decapitated him; I mean, I’m not sure of that but I think that’s what somebody told me”), so much the better. A couple of brewskis and some bone-chilling bullshit horror story. What could be better?

If it had resembled a lively movie set before, the parking lot now resembled its old shabby self, even shabbier in the mist. I went to the front office and asked the old-timer where I’d be sleeping tonight.

“Room 167,” he said.

He got me the key and said, “Some folks’re sayin’ you know his wife.”

“Whose wife?”

“Whose wife? Who do you think’s wife? Sam Lodge’s wife.”

I shook my head. “You mean they’re saying I had an affair with her?”

“Something like that, I guess.”

“Well, I hate to disappoint them, but I’ve only laid eyes on her twice. And that’s all I laid, too. Eyes.” I held up my hands surgeon-style. “These puppies have never known her fleshy pleasures. So tell all your friends that for me.”

“No reason to get mad.”

“Yeah, I should enjoy being called a murderer.”

“Hey, you won’t find no wet eyes in this town. Sam Lodge was a grade-A jerk.”

I’d had enough of this conversation. “How about the key to 167?”

“Soon as you give me the other key back.”

It was like an exchange of prisoners.

We swapped small golden keys, and I started to leave.

“There was a call for you,” he said.

“You know who?”

“She didn’t say. Just said she’d call back.”

“Thanks.”

“Sorry if I made you mad.”

“I’m just kind of tired. I probably overreacted. Don’t worry about it.”

A different set of ghosts greeted me in 167, each room being the sum of what has transpired within its walls down the years. The Agency, back in the days when they spent a lot of money on such things as telepathy and ESP, concluded that certain rooms could bring on subtle stress because they had not been warmed by sunlight for long periods of time. The humans who briefly occupied the rooms seemed to know this somehow and responded in various neurotic ways. Allegedly, the Agency people could duplicate this experiment perfectly every time out but when it was finally written up in article form several Agency scientists argued with how the test had been set up in the first place. Personally, I think the test results were probably correct. We do seem to respond in unconscious ways to rooms we’re in. That’s why I believe in ghosts of some sort, though not necessarily of the chain-clanking variety.

The motel folks had been nice enough to stash all my clothes in the closet, this one being the economy model, coming without a corpse included.

I called Jane Avery’s house but all I got was her machine. I assumed she’d have a lot to do tonight, what with Lodge’s death and all. Our pizza would likely be later than either of us wanted.

I stripped down to my underwear and did a hard fifteen minutes of exercises: five running in place, five doing push-ups, five doing sit-ups. I had been starting to slide into a vexation of some sort — dead bodies having that effect on me sometimes — and usually my only out is exercising. Breaking a sweat seems to have a kind of healing effect on me.

I was in the bathroom, toweling off, when the phone rang.

I was hoping for Jane. Instead I got Eve McNally.

“Is it true?” she said.

“True about what?”

“You know. About Sam Lodge being murdered.”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

“My Lord. It’s all getting out of control.”

“What’s getting out of control, Eve?”

There was a long pause. “Have you seen my husband tonight?”

“No. Was he planning to look me up?”

“No — I just meant...”

The pause again.

“Any word about your daughter?”

“No.”

“Are you worried about your husband?”

“A little, I guess.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“He stopped back around suppertime. I... I sort of lost control. I started screaming at him and hitting him because of Melissa. I’m worried she might already be — you know.”

She couldn’t say the word. I didn’t blame her.

“He started crying. I never saw him cry before. It was hard to watch. It was like he didn’t know how to cry or something. His whole chest just kind of heaved and there were tears rolling down his cheeks and — I felt sorry for him. I’m real mad at him, for getting Melissa involved in all this, but I felt sorry for him, too. You know?”

“I know.”

“I told him to go see you.”

“You did?”

“Uh-huh. I said maybe you could help him without going to the police. You know, have two minds working on it.”

“Working on what, Eve?”

The long silence again.

“If he wants to tell you, he’ll tell you. Otherwise I just have to keep my mouth shut. I’ll get her killed for sure.”

For the first time in this conversation, she started crying again. Soft, almost silent tears.

“I just keep saying Hail Marys over and over again but sometimes I wonder if there’s any God at all. I know I shouldn’t say that but that’s how I feel. I mean, I hear my voice talking out loud in the silence and I think — Why am I doing this? Nobody’s listening. Nobody’s out there.”

“We all have those doubts sometimes, Eve. It’s a part of our faith, dealing with doubt.”

Another long silence. “If he calls you, will you call me and tell me?”

“Sure.”

“Tell him — tell him, I’m sorry I got so mad.”

“Eve, you had a right to be mad. Something he did got your daughter kidnapped. I’d be pretty mad about that.”

“He says he can get her back. Soon as he—”

“Soon as he what, Eve?”

“Soon as he—”

But then, of course, silence. Utter silence.

“Eve?”

“Yes.”

“You can trust me.”

Silence.

“You really can.”

“I want to, but—”

“But the only way I can help you is if you’re honest with me.”

“I know.” She sounded like a contrite child. “Will you have him call me?”

“Yes. I will.”

“I’ll talk to you later.”

“All right, Eve. Good night.”

Twenty minutes later, all shirted and jacketed and trousered up, I tried Jane’s place again. The machine again.

I was antsy, the way I’d been in my college days before a date, pacing and eager for the night to begin.

Then I decided to call Herb Carson, a wealthy cattle rancher who’d given it all up to devote himself to a small airplane museum about twenty minutes from here.

Herb was in and happy to hear from me.

“You haven’t been here since we got our parasol monoplane.”

I laughed. “Still after the most exotic birds, aren’t you, Herb?”

“Damn right. I want to make this the most unique museum in the country.”

“Sounds like you’re doing it. I’m an airplane buff, Herb, but even I don’t know what a parasol monoplane is.”

He laughed. “I was waiting for you to ask.”

So he told me.

Back in 1929, when aviation was still the most romantic of callings, an eighteen-year-old garage mechanic with a sixth-grade education came into a very small inheritance with which he bought a Heath Airplane kit. Talk about a hardy breed. In those days, some Americans built their own airplanes. Which is what the kid did. He welded all the parts by himself, shaped all the wooden pieces by himself, stretched the oiled silk over the plane by himself, and, as the final touch, installed a Henderson motorcycle engine by himself. Most folks bet that the plane would never “fly” in any real sense. Back then, you saw a lot of would-be planes reach thirty or forty feet and then crash. Folks were scared for the kid. But on a warm October day in 1929, the kid took the plane up and it flew beautifully. The name Bobby Solbrig may not mean much to you but to old-time aviators it was legendary, Solbrig probably being the greatest stunt pilot who ever lived after getting his start in an Iowa cornfield just about the time President Hoover, another Iowa boy himself, was telling us that the economy was in great shape if we just left it alone, and that those people who worried about a Depression were just nervous nellies. Bobby Solbrig had a little more success than poor President Hoover.

“And guess what I bought last week?” Herb said after finishing his story.

“What?”

“A biplane just about like yours.”

“You’re kidding. Where’d you find it?”

“Louisiana, of all places. Bayou country, actually. It’s in beautiful shape.”

“I’ll have to see it.”

“You bet you will. Why don’t you stop out tomorrow and I’ll let you take it up?”

“I’m not sure what time I can come out.”

“Just call the house before you come. Make sure I’m here.”

“Thanks. It’ll be good to see you.”

The laugh again. “Yeah, and it’ll be even nicer to see my biplane.”

After we hung up, I tried Jane’s place.

“Hello?”

“You’re home,” I said.

“I sure wish you’d tell me what’s going on in this town of mine,” she said, sounding tired. “Two murders yesterday and now another one tonight.”

“You probably won’t believe me, but I’m not sure myself. Not yet.”

“Will you give me a little time to take a shower?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s make it an hour then.”

“That’s perfect. That’s about how long it takes for Domino’s to prepare a gourmet pizza.”

“Double cheese.”

“Double cheese it is.”

6

“It’s kind of a pit, actually,” Jane Avery said after I got the pizza box open and handed out bottles and white paper napkins and grease-stained coupons entitling us to $1.00 off our very next Domino’s pizzas.

I had complimented her in the usual casual way one always compliments a person on her apartment. The trouble was, she was right, about it being a pit, I mean.

What you had here was the standard modern middle-class apartment. You had your four rooms and a bath, you had your wall-to-wall carpeting, you had your stove and refrigerator and garbage disposal, and you had large sliding windows that overlooked just about the two cutest little Dumpsters I’d ever seen.

And then, imposed on the sterile right-angled order of the apartment itself, you had Jane’s delirious messiness.

I’d used the bathroom right after getting here and had found one high-heeled black shoe in the sink. I’d gone out to the kitchen to get glasses and ice for us while she visited the bathroom, and hanging off the knob of the door leading to the back yard, I found a pair of panties, bright yellow and quite clean. But hanging from the doorknob? In the living room, an array of magazines ranging from People to Police Science Quarterly squatted everywhere in short stacks, like kittens waiting to be patted upon the head. A glass half-filled with what appeared to be milk sat atop the TV set; I imagined it tasted just dandy. A red skirt — which I knew she would look nice in, her shortie white bathrobe having just given me my first peek at her legs — was draped over the back of an armchair while next to the small, dark fireplace was an ancient Hoover upright, either waiting to be employed, or having been sitting there ever since it had been employed.

“I don’t know why you say your apartment is a pit,” I said.

“Gee, I don’t either,” she said, giving me a sarcastic smile as she was about to push her third piece of pizza in her mouth. After swallowing, she said, “That really used to get him.”

“Get who?”

“My husband.”

“Oh.”

“He’s one of those guys who believes that God genetically programmed women to like doing housework. And I’m serious. He once said that maybe I should see a counselor because I never liked to do any of the housework.”

“I think you should see a counselor, too, but not for that reason.”

“Funny.”

“I think you should see a counselor because you hang your underwear off doorknobs.”

“You saw that, huh?”

“Is that a religious practice or something?”

She shrugged, looking cute as hell with her short blonde hair still wet from the shower, and her freckles evoking sunny afternoons on the fish-filled creeks of my youth. “I always drop stuff when I bring the laundry up from downstairs. Yesterday I dropped a pair of panties. That’s how they got there.”

“Ah.”

“This is really good pizza,” she said.

“You look great.”

“I thought we were talking about pizza.”

“You were talking about pizza. I was talking about how great you look in that white terry-cloth robe with your hair all wet.”

There was one piece of pizza left.

“God, we sure pigged out,” I said. “That was an extra-large pizza.”

“I’ll arm-wrestle you for the last piece.”

“God, are you serious?”

“Sure I’m serious. I had three older brothers. They made me arm-wrestle them for everything. I don’t blame you, though. I’d hate to be beaten by a girl, too.”

We were sitting on the floor, using the coffee table for pizza and beers.

To arm-wrestle, all we had to do was angle our bodies closer to the coffee table and set our elbows down.

“You know something funny?”

“What?” she said.

“I really want to beat you. I really do. I mean, I feel competitive about this.”

“Good. You should. Because I feel competitive, too.”

“But I don’t want to hurt you.”

“What a he-man.”

“No, I’m serious. If I start getting carried away, you just tell me.”

“Sure.”

She gripped my hand. “Ready?”

“Remember now, if I get carried away, you let me know.”

“Right.”

She put my arm down flat against the table.

“I mustn’t have been ready.”

“Oh, right, that must’ve been it. You weren’t ready.”

“You really think you could’ve just flattened my arm like that if I’d been ready?”

“I told you I had three brothers.”

“Well, I had three sisters, so what does that prove?”

“Did you really have three sisters?”

“No. But that wasn’t any dumber than saying that you had three brothers.”

This time I was ready and right away you could see the difference. She didn’t put my arm down flat in ten seconds this time. Nope, on this second outing it took her at least twenty seconds.

I stared down at my arm as if it had betrayed me.

“Tell you what,” she said.

“What?”

“We’ll cut the piece of pizza in half.”

“No; no way. You won fair and square.”

“Aw, God, don’t be noble. My husband was like that, noble noble noble, and he was a real pain.”

“I seem to remind you of your husband an awful lot.”

“You couldn’t possibly be as big a jerk as he was. Nobody could.”

“Boy, there’s a glowing endorsement.”

“Now, c’mon, we’ll split the piece of pizza. And afterward you can try me again.” She leaned over and gave me a chaste little kiss on the cheek. “Maybe I just got lucky.”

“You have a cute big toe,” she said twenty minutes later.

“You only say I have a cute big toe because you want to spare me the embarrassment of pointing out the hole in my sock.”

She smiled. “I noticed you looking around.”

“Nice place.”

“God, Payne, will you stop saying that? It’s a pit.”

Gentlemanly behavior dictated that I once again tell the saving lie and compliment her apartment.

But unfortunately my mind was fixed on the fact that she’d called me Payne. She should have called me Hokanson. That was the name I was using in New Hope.

She’d picked up on it, too. “I think I’m in trouble.”

“I think you are, too.”

“Calling you Payne?”

“Uh-huh. How’d you find out?”

“The day we had coffee, I waited down the street till you left then I rushed back there and lifted your cup. One of the deputies is real good with fingerprints. I checked you out.

Your prints are on several national files. You were in the FBI.”

“I see.”

“So what’re you doing in town, Payne?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“In a couple of minutes, Payne, I’m really going to get mad. My sworn duty is to find out who killed these three people. I believe that you have information that could help me. Ergo, I need you to be honest with me.”

“Ergo?”

“It means consequently.”

“I know what it means. I’ve just never heard a cop use it before.”

“So what’re you doing in New Hope?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“How about if I give you a back rub?”

“Are you serious?”

She was serious.

Dark wind blew silver rain in through the screen and sprinkled drops across my neck and arms. Sweet spring night was on the wind, intoxicating.

I was spread out on her floor in the position that Indians always put John Wayne whenever they wanted to cover him with hundreds of hungry red ants.

She was straddled across my lower back, her hands expertly working the muscles in my neck, shoulder and back. She was deliciously good at it.

“I read up on you, Payne.”

“Oh? Then you know about me winning the Nobel Peace Prize?”

She was charitable enough to laugh. “No, but I know that you did some pretty interesting stuff when you were in the FBI. And I also know your wife died.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’ll bet she was nice.”

“She was wonderful,” I said.

She redoubled her efforts at massage. I closed my eyes and drifted on the dark cool winds and the dappling drops of chilly rain on my shoulders. This all reminded me of college dates, when you’d end up at a girl’s apartment feeling intimate enough to relax but not intimate enough to know what to do next. Especially since I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next.

“You give great back rubs,” I said. I was going to say more, maybe something craftily romantic, when the phone rang.

“Oh, darn it,” she said.

And grabbed the phone from the end table.

“Chief Avery.” Beat. “When?” Beat. “Does Eve know who did it?” Beat. “I’ll be right there.” She hung up.

“I have to go,” she said.

“What happened?”

She was up already, grabbing a jacket from the closet.

“You think we’ll do this again?” she said.

“I certainly hope so,” I said. “So what happened?”

“Eve McNally.”

“Right. I know who she is.”

“Somebody beat her up pretty badly tonight. She won’t say who, and she won’t let Milner take her to the hospital.”

“Milner?”

“A patrolman.”

“Oh.”

“So I’m going over there. Talk to her myself. She’s the classic battered woman — she’ll never say a word against her husband even though he’s the one who always beats her up.”

“So this has happened before with Eve McNally?”

“Too many times.”

The final thing she did was snag her badge on her turtleneck and wrap her gun and holster around her narrow hips.

I got up off the floor and picked up my jacket and then followed her out the front door, which she paused to lock behind her.

“Sorry if I humiliated you at arm-wrestling, Payne,” she said. And grinned.

“Yeah,” I said, “you sound real sorry, too.”

Then she was gone, moving at a trot now to the official black Ford sedan tucked into the corner of the lot.

I moved slowly to my car, my mind fixed on the question of why Eve McNally might have been beaten up.

7

Rosamund never did visit him in prison.

When the time came, when the last appeal was turned down and the plan was set in motion, she dispatched a man to visit him, a man whose name she gave as Givens.

Well, two days before Givens’s arrival, there had been some trouble three cells down, a guard getting hit pretty hard on the back of the head, so the warden, being the mean stupid vituperative sonofabitch everybody knew all wardens to be, decided to punish everybody in the block

One of the things he did, the sweet bastard, was suspend the usual visiting privileges.

Usually, the prisoners were led into a long, narrow visiting room where they sat at a long narrow table, on the other side of which sat the visitor, usually a loved one or lawyer.

But the warden decided to make the men of Cellblock D use the booth in which inmates were forced to use the telephone to speak to visitors who were behind the Plexiglas window.

Mr. Givens showed up in an expensive suit and a look of distaste on his handsome face. He looked very anxious to get out of here.

Chitchat was how you’d characterize most of their fifteen-minute conversation.

Wasn’t Rosamund a fine lady? She sure was, he said. Wasn’t it nice of Rosamund to wait for him this way? It was indeed. Wouldn’t it be nice when they were married and leading a normal life? Absolutely.

Only toward the end, only when the fat-ass uniformed guard with his nightstick and his Magnum started to look antsy, the way he always looked when he was about to shoo visitors out... only then did Mr. Givens come to the point.

“Damn,” he said.

“What?”

He tapped his gold Rolex. “My watch seems to have stopped.”

“Huh?”

“At 10:25 A.M. On May 26.”

“Gee, a Rolex stopping like that. Who would’ve thought that—”

Only then, being a very slow learner apparently, only then did he realize what Givens was doing.

May 26 was four days away. How could his watch have stopped at a future date when—

Aw, hell.

He really was an idiot.

Here Givens had done everything except write it down and hold it up for him and he still hadn’t caught on.

10:25 A.M. on May 26th.

Of course.

“I noticed the soybeans over on the north side. They look great,” Givens said.

10:25 A.M., May 26th, soybean field on the north side.

There it was.

His way out of this place.

Thanks to Rosamund.

Then the guard came by.

“Time’s up,” he said.

And tapped his nightstick against the Plexiglas. Just so Givens would know who was really in charge here, just so Givens would know that this was one tight prison and that the guards planned to keep it that way.

“I’ll tell Rosamund you send your love,” Givens said.

“I’d appreciate that.”

“You’re the only thing she talks about anymore.”

Guard tapped his nightstick again. “You hear me, mister? Time’s up.”

“I thought,” said Givens, “we still had five minutes left. According to what they told me—”

“You want to take the time and go up and ask them again, fella? If you do, I’ll dock your friend here five minutes on his next visitation. You want me to do that?”

Givens sighed, shook his head.

“Take care of yourself,” Givens said, standing up.

He watched Givens walk out of the visiting room.

Guard looked at him and grinned. “You bastards over in D. You think you’re going to get away with hittin’ Bernie the way you did, don’t you?”

“I didn’t hit him.”

“Yeah, but it was your friend who hit him.”

“He isn’t my friend. I don’t even know him.”

“You cons are all the same, don’t matter whether you know each other or not. You stick together.” He knocked his nightstick against the Plexiglas. “Well, us guards, we stick together, too.”

That night, an inmate got his nose and three ribs busted up, same guy, by a big coincidence, who was the cellmate of the guy who’d hit Bernie the guard.

This was the talk of D for the next three days, how the guards had deliberately busted up the guy, and how D was going to pay the guards back.

But who cared?

He was, at long last, going to get out of here.

10:25 A.M., May 26, soybean field to the north.

Yes, ma’am; oh, yes yes, ma’am.

He let the other cons lay on their bunks and stew and sulk about that nasty guard and that poor defenseless con.

All he thought about was the soybean field.

The soybean field...

8

One day, I got authorization to go up to the Office of Technical Services, which is where the Agency keeps all of its James Bond devices, and a very friendly old chap spent an hour with me bringing me up to speed on devices for tapping phones and photographing documents and new ways to plant bugs. Most people don’t realize this, but the Agency employs a good number of cabinetmakers, leatherworkers, woodworkers and general carpenters who do nothing but devise better ways to conceal electronic bugging devices. When the old man finished telling me about his department, he said, “There’s only one thing we haven’t come up with yet.”

“And what’s that?”

“Some way for you agents to occupy your time while you’re on a stakeout.”

How true.

I gave Jane Avery a ten-minute head start and then I drove over to the McNally block and parked at the far end, between two cars, so I’d be less conspicuous.

Her police car sat right out in front of the McNally’s. As I drove by, I’d seen both of them in the lighted window, behind the gauzy cover of sheer white curtains.

Jane had been in there more than an hour.

As for me, I now had time to brush up on my three favorite sports: thumb-twiddling, sighing and keeping the cheeks of my backside from going to sleep.

Oh, yes, and one other sport: playing guess the Sears house.

Around the turn of the century, a lot of Iowa people bought house kits from Sears. These weren’t little shacks, either, the homes from these kits. In fact, the most popular in-town model was the Dutch Colonial, a two-story job with a gambrel roof and authentic reproductions of “Colonial sidelights” flanking the front door.

There were probably three or four hundred Sears houses still standing in Iowa, which said something about the quality of craftsmanship in those days.

Unfortunately, I didn’t see any Sears houses on Eve McNally’s block, no matter how hard I looked, no matter how many times I lifted my binoculars and checked them out.

Maybe the owners had done what the Mesquakie Indians used to do, before the white man came. They made houses from reed mats that lasted about seven years, which was also the time it took to exhaust the firewood in a given area. So the Mesquakies never, as it were, sought a home-improvement loan; they just moved on to a new area where they built new houses and started life afresh, members of a truly mobile society.

Jane Avery came out just as I was starting to rub my backside, prickly numbness having started to overtake it.

I slid down in the seat, figuring her lights would sweep across my door when she pulled out. As they did.

After a flash of headlamps, there was just darkness again. I pulled myself up, opened the door and walked across the street.

It was misting now, a chill spray that reminded me of lying with Jane on her bed. I smiled.

At the door, Eve McNally peered out through the dark glass before turning on the porch light. An aged yellow lamp above my head came on. It had probably chaperoned teenagers back in the days of Benny Goodman and swooning over Sinatra.

After recognizing me, she shook her head, waved me away.

From inside my jacket, I took a number-ten white envelope that was folded inside my shirt pocket. The envelope contained nothing more exciting than some notes I’d scribbled down about my biplane. But Eve McNally didn’t know that.

I held the envelope up and pointed at it importantly.

She was nice enough to fall for it.

It was an awful trick to play on a woman whose daughter had been kidnapped — she was likely hoping against hope that the envelope contained word of Melissa — but I didn’t have much choice.

She said, “What’s in the envelope?” Her words were muffled by the glass and the dusty door curtains.

“You need to let me in first.”

She shook her head again.

“I’ve got news,” I said.

A kind of frenzy overtook her. “News? Of Melissa?”

She looked confused a moment — should she let me in or not? — and then she made her mind up.

The inside door was jerked open.

All that separated us now was a screen door. I tried the handle. She had the door latched.

“What news?”

“I lied. I shouldn’t have gotten your hopes up that way.”

“You lied? You lied?” She sounded hysterical. “About having news? You are really a dirty sonofabitch, you know that?”

“I am. Yes, I am. I’m really sorry.”

“I thought—”

“I know what you thought. And I apologize again. I know you don’t believe this but I’m trying to help you.”

“Oh, sure you are.”

“Just let me in a moment. Please.”

“You didn’t need to lie to me,” she said, then surprised me by quietly lifting the latch and stepping back.

She went in and sat down on the edge of the couch and stared forlornly at the floor.

She was close to the end-table lamp so I could see her face now, the bruises, the cuts above her right eye, most likely the result of a ring scraping her as she was being punched.

I went over and sat next to her on the couch. At first I didn’t know what to do or say. I still felt bad about having raised her hopes.

She was staring at the floor as if she were in a coma. Most of the room was in darkness; we were in a little ring of light.

I slid my arm over her shoulder and said, “You need a friend.”

“I just want my daughter back.”

“I know. And I really do want to help.”

“You don’t know how bad I wanted to tell her everything.”

“Jane Avery?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So you didn’t tell her anything?”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t. Just like I can’t tell you anything.”

“Including who beat you up tonight.”

“Melissa’d be dead for sure, if I told you that.” Then she turned and looked at me and said, “But there’s one thing.”

I didn’t say anything, just let her come to it in her own time. She wore a faded KISS T-shirt that made her sad little breasts seem very vulnerable. The shoulder of the T-shirt had splotches of dried blood on it.

“I found something tonight, going through his stuff.”

“Your husband’s?”

“Right. You want to see it?”

“Of course.”

“I would’ve told her but she’s the law. And you’re not, right?”

“Right. I’m not the law.”

“I’ll be right back.”

She vanished into the darkness. I heard her opening a drawer in a room off the hall that divided the small house in two.

She returned, carrying a single sheet of paper.

She handed it to me, then took her place again on the couch. “Any idea what it is?”

“Not yet.”

The numbers and the rent receipt had been Xeroxed on one side of a sheet of plain white paper.

“Does any of that mean anything to you?” About midpoint in her question, she winced and touched a delicate fingertip to her puffy lower lip. She’d been hit pretty hard.

“Well, Lawlor Avenue and River Street are Cedar Rapids addresses.”

“That would make sense, I guess.”

“Make sense how?”

“My husband goes to Cedar Rapids a lot. Whenever he wants to hit a lot of taverns.”

“You have a Cedar Rapids phone book here?”

The towns around Cedar Rapids were now treated by the phone-company folks as satellites — if not suburbs — of Iowa’s second-largest city.

She walked over to a small desk, rattled around in the middle drawer, and brought forth a phone book which she carried over and handed to me.

I turned to Taverns and went down the list. Though there were roughly seventy-five taverns in and around Cedar Rapids, none of those listed were on either Lawlor Avenue or River Street.

“No luck,” I said.

I set the phone book on the coffee table and then turned back to her.

“Every time I lie down and close my eyes and try to sleep, all I can see is Melissa. I just keep imagining all the things that might be happening to her. All the things I’ve read about in the papers over the years—”

I took her hand. “She’s going to be all right, Eve. You’ve got to keep saying that to yourself. Over and over and over. You’ve got to believe that.”

She smiled her sad smile. “You should’ve been a doctor. You’ve got a nice manner.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve changed your mind about telling me who beat you up tonight?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“Just the way you talk about it, I know it wasn’t your husband.”

She said nothing, obviously not wanting to answer my question either way.

I stood up and told her where I was staying and said she could call me there any time, night or day.

“Do you think those addresses have anything to do with Melissa?”

“There’s no way of knowing without checking them out.”

“Would you even consider doing that?”

I nodded. “Tomorrow morning, I’m going to take a plane up for a short ride. Then maybe I’ll drive into Cedar Rapids and see what I can find out.”

“You really are a nice guy.”

“Thanks. You’re going to get Melissa back and she’s going to be fine,” I said, reaching the door and turning around again.

In one of his books, Graham Greene noted that despair is a serious sin, and the older I get, the more I understand what he meant. All we have, when all else has deserted us, is faith and hope. It was enough to bring our species from the sea millions of years ago, and it’s enough now to take us to the stars.

“You don’t want this?” she said, holding up the paper with the figures on it.

“No. Don’t need it. Thanks. And I’ll say a few prayers for Melissa tonight.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

I nodded and left.

9

After more years than cares to believe, he gets his first chance to go before the Parole Board.

Cons are filled with advice on how he should handle himself.

One con even hands him a list.

Comes the day.

They come and take you (and thirty other cons) over to a different building and then you wait in the hall as one con at a time goes into the room where the Adult Authority conducts its interviews.

In his case, being near the back of the line, the wait takes all morning and most of the afternoon.

When the cons come out, they all grin and give you the finger secret-like and shake their heads disdainfully.

Cons never want other cons to think that they’ve become broken by the institution. So they’re always performing these little defenses of their honor and individuality, none of which the Adult Authority is likely to approve of.

“Well, now, good afternoon,” says the fat banker heartily.

Bulbous body; boozy nose; three-piece suit.

The banker’s smile is joined by the priest’s smile and the country club lady’s smile. The banker and the country club lady, in fact, remotely resemble brother and sister. Same kind of middle-aged bodies; same kind of middle-aged do-gooder smiles. The priest is just plain worn out and keeps glancing at the wall clock. Probably time for him to get in his God-mobile and go out and save a few souls.

“Well, now,” the banker says, opening the manila folder particular to the case at hand.

“Yes,” says the country club lady, looking at her own manila folder, “well, now.”

“So how’d it go?” Lumir of the acrid feet asks that night.

“Real good. Real good.”

“You do all the things you were supposed to?”

“I sat up straight. I didn’t say ain’t. I didn’t flirt with the woman. I got tears in my eyes when I mentioned my mom and dad. And they bought it.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. You shoulda seen them. They were impressed. Take my word for it.”

His parole is turned down.

10

In the earliest days of Iowa, back in the 1830s, most of the taverns doubled as stagecoach stops. In case you don’t think that traveling by stage, or stopping at such taverns, was dangerous, consider this tip from a brochure handed out to stagecoach passengers:

“Merle’s Rack ’n’ Snack” probably wasn’t as dangerous as one of those early stage stops but with half a dozen Harleys out front and the old-fashioned kind of country music blasting from the windows, I assumed that Merle’s probably had its share of nightly violence — you know, the standard romp ’n’ stomp that make bikers such delightful companions.

Which made the presence of the shiny new Lincoln in the parking lot all the more curious. A white Lincoln. Just like the pair the good Reverend Roberts had been sporting in his church driveway that day, and that the very pretty and very deeply disturbed Mindy had been washing and waxing that afternoon.

I went inside and soon enough learned what the “Rack ’n’ Snack” stood for.

“Rack,” which I should have figured out for myself, referred to three bumper-pool tables near the back. While “snack” referred to two (count ’em, two!) small and rather battered microwaves behind the bar. According to the handwritten menu leaning up against several boxes of shotgun shells, and two feet over from car air-fresheners with nude women on them — you know, the sort you hang down from your rearview mirror and which your teenagers would be proud to see you buy... according to the menu you could choose between a

I hadn’t ever had a buffalo burger and somehow I wasn’t inclined to try one here.

As I walked over to the bar, the twenty-or-so customers, mostly drunken men, got their first good look at me and I got my first good look at them. It was pretty obvious that they wouldn’t be inviting me to their birthday parties and I wouldn’t be inviting them to mine. The air was ripe with cigarette smoke and beer, just as the john would be ripe with piss and puke. Maybe they had one of those naked-lady deodorizing dealies hanging from the ceiling in there.

In the jukebox darkness, I nodded to the bartender, a guy with a rather theatrical eyepatch and a kind of swarthy, feral face. He wore a T-shirt with a Confederate flag on it and a sneer that was all the more impressive for the white regularity of his store-boughts. He looked pretty much like his friends, whom I saw in the lurid light of the jukebox, all long dirty hair and shirts with the sleeves torn off and even a few headbands and peace signs on the backs of leather vests. I’ve always found it odd that the lower-class men of my generation ended up appropriating all the things they once so despised about all the hippies. But these weren’t hippie faces, all spoiled middle-class piety and sanctimony over the so-called decadent establishment — no, these were sad hard-scrabble faces, faces you got growing up as one of a dozen kids who had to scratch for love and food and self-esteem the way you see chickens scratching for sustenance in barnyards. All those years of deprivation had made them dangerous, and you never knew when their sorrow was just going to overwhelm them and they’d take it out on you.

“Beer, please,” I said.

“We got lotsa beer, pal. What kind?”

“Budweiser,” I said. “Pal.”

While he opened one of the cooling drawers below the counter, I looked around, but there was no sign of Reverend Roberts.

He set my beer down, no glass. I had my dollar bill waiting on the sticky counter.

“The white Lincoln,” I said.

“What white Lincoln?”

“The one in your parking lot.”

We had to shout above Tanya Tucker.

“What about it?”

“Thought maybe I knew who owned it.”

“Who?”

“Reverend Roberts.”

He shook his head, grinned. “That guy would never come in here. Too good for this kind of place. But his old lady—” He grinned with those perfect teeth again. “Booth way in back, by that exit sign over there. She’s back there. That’s where she always sits.”

I walked back, all eyes on me, looked into the booth where a plump woman in a very tight red sweater designed to display her wares prominently sat sipping a drink. She had the sort of cute cheerleader face that not even years and weight could quite decimate, especially given the erotic quality of her full mouth. Her blonde hair was worn short, which was a mistake, and her eyes bore too much eyeliner.

“Mrs. Roberts?”

“Yes.”

“I wondered if I could talk to you.”

“Are you trying to pick me up?”

I smiled. “That would be my pleasure, but actually I want to talk business.”

She visibly winced. “That means my husband, the reverend.”

I nodded.

“Are you police?”

“No, but I’m an investigator.”

She smiled. She had a killer smile. “Why not? Maybe it could be fun.”

I sat down. “Like a fresh drink?”

“No, thanks. I went through two different detox programs in the last year, so I’m sticking to my own little kind of drinky-poos.” She hoisted her glass. “Wine coolers.”

So much for the two detox programs.

“Did he get somebody pregnant again?”

“Your husband? Not that I know of.”

“Good, because the last time he did, it was really a mess. The mother dragged her daughter — who was all of fifteen — into the church and made a scene during a Sunday service. It was something out of a bad movie. A very bad one.”

“Didn’t he get in trouble with the church members?”

“Oh, he did a Jimmy Swaggart. You know, one of those big, teary, dramatic spectacles on the altar. They loved it and they forgave him.”

“Did you forgive him?”

She smiled. “Don’t start looking at me like a victim. If I counted up all the men I’ve screwed on the side, I could probably fill a small stadium. I’m no prize, believe me.” The smile again, only sadder. “Oh, back in high school I was a prize. I was a real doll. I really was. And these were the stuff of myth.” She delicately indicated her breasts with a long, graceful hand. “The reverend could never keep his hands off them. After we were married, he used to feel me up even when I was asleep. He just couldn’t get enough of them. But then we went through some very bad years — eight or nine of them, in fact. He got run out of two different churches — the other thing he couldn’t keep his hands off was teenage girls — and we never had any money and my drinking started to be a real serious problem. I wanted him to get a real job. I mean, in his heart he’s no reverend, not the way he violates the Ten Commandments, I mean nobody could be that much of a hypocrite. But he enjoys pretending he’s a reverend. He likes all the corny stuff, the weddings and the christenings and the funerals. He gets so caught up in them, he always cries. It’s pretty amazing, when you think about it. I mean, I’ve seen him bury people that he despised, but there they were, these huge silver tears, streaming down his cheeks. He really is amazing.”

I hadn’t known until about halfway through her little speech how drunk she was. It took an awful lot of wine coolers to reach her present state of intoxication. I assumed she must have had something a little stronger earlier in the evening.

“You ever think of leaving him?”

“You know something?”

“What?”

“You haven’t told me your name.”

“Jim Hokanson.”

“Oh, the famous Jim Hokanson.”

“Famous?”

“A lot of people in town are wondering who you really are.”

“Just another pilgrim.”

“You still want to know if I ever think of leaving him?”

“Yes.”

“Well, actually, I have left him three times, but he always brought me back.”

“He loves you, then.”

“No, but he needs me for a front. I don’t make scenes, I really play the part of the dutiful wife whenever I need to, and I don’t cost him all that much money when you come right down to it. I’ve even made him money. Me and my cancer.”

“You have cancer?”

“No. Or at least I hope I don’t. But he tells people I do. It’s one of the ways he raises money.”

“He seems to be awfully successful. I saw his matching white Lincolns. One of which you’re driving tonight, I believe.”

“Yes, luckily I was able to get to it before Mindy was.” A lurid smile this time. “I shouldn’t be saying all this, but I’m a little drunky-poo, and right now I don’t care.”

I wasn’t sure what she was talking about but before I could answer, the bartender had come over.

“There’s a phone call for you, Mrs. Roberts.”

“Tell him I’m not here.”

“I already told him you were.”

“I thought we had an understanding, you and me.”

“Mrs. Roberts, I don’t want to get in the middle of somebody’s family argument. Now, why don’t you come over and get the phone?”

He walked away.

“This place is really a pit, isn’t it?”

“I guess I could agree with that notion,” I said.

“This is the kind of place I used to drink in before we came into money.”

“And when was that?”

She thought a moment. “Four years ago.”

“Is that when his ministry really took off?”

“His ministry? Honey, his ministry has never taken off.”

Then where did he suddenly get money, I wanted to ask.

But the bartender was shouting above the jukebox for her.

She put down her drink and walked over to the bar, still a good-looking woman as all the appreciative male eyes indicated.

She didn’t do much talking, just held the phone to her ear for a minute or so and then handed the receiver back to the bartender.

Sliding into the booth again, she said, “I’m not supposed to talk to you. I’m supposed to get out of this dive and get home.” She looked at her watch. “I really better go.”

“I was hoping we could talk a little more.”

“He knows you’re here and he knows we’re talking. And that’s what he’s so upset about.”

“How’d he find out I was here?”

“Lou.”

“The bartender.”

“Uh-huh. Lou keeps the reverend clued in, and the reverend gives him money.”

“You going to be all right to drive?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You were going to tell me about your husband coming into money suddenly.”

She stood up, grabbed her purse. “Call me some other time. We’ll talk. Right now I just want to get home and get all his yelling and swearing over with, and just go to bed.” The killer smile again, the one that broke all those hearts in those misty days of yesteryear, when we were young and optimistic and immortal. “Dream about me tonight, Mr. Hokanson, because I’m sure going to dream about you.”

Then she was gone.

11

The escape didn’t go so well.

Number one: the getaway car, a new rental Chevy, had an overheating problem, which put the three hoods that Rosamund had hired fifteen minutes late getting to the road parallel to the soybean field.

Number two: he himself had come down with a cold and sore throat that made him miserably ill the night before the planned escape. Even worse, he’d had an impossible time sleeping, waking up every fifteen minutes with an image of the guards shooting him dead. He was scared. So many things could go wrong with this kind of setup.

Number three: one of the guards was a new guy and a real cowboy to boot, all chewing tobacco and long, lazy drawl and mean bronc-buster soul, eager as hell to kill somebody so he’d have a good story when he played bumper pool down to one of the nearby taverns.

Given all these problems, the escape went about as you’d expect.

The Chevy appeared, driving slow.

He sees it, starts drifting toward the highway.

The cowboy’s way the hell down the row, shouldn’t be any trouble.

But as soon as he cuts and runs, heading for the highway, the cowboy sees him and comes running.

The cowboy starts shooting.

Sounds like WWIII.

All he can do, running toward the highway, is weave left and weave right as he runs, hoping he’s eluding the bullets.

Reaches the highway and trips.

Trips.

Down on his hands and knees.

Three guys in ski masks are now standing in the middle of the highway, returning the cowboy’s fire.

He’s a little outgunned, the cowboy, with his CAR 15. They’ve got semiautomatic weapons.

Not until he crawls halfway across the highway, the air exploding with gunfire and gunsmoke and cursing, does he realize he’s been wounded.

That’s why he tripped.

He’s bleeding badly.

God, is he going to make it?

Has all this been in vain?

Goddamn cowboy, anyway. Why do they have to hire goons like that for prison guards?

And then he smiles: yeah, why don’t they hire some real nice understanding liberal hand-wringers as prison guards?

Wouldn’t that be nice?

He’s in the backseat now, thinking all these things, blood all over him now, consciousness waning quickly, laughing to himself about his notion of hiring liberal hand-wringers.

And then he’s pissing his pants.

And then he’s crying.

And then he’s freezing his ass off.

Never actually heard his teeth chatter before, but that’s exactly what they’re doing now.

In prison one day, a would-be intellectual inmate said to him, “You know, we’re nothing more than blood and bones and shit and piss and come. Not one thing more.”

He never understood what the hell the guy was talking about.

Till now.

When he could feel various parts of his system shutting down, as if he were some vast complex engine that was ceasing to function.

Aw, hell. Please not now. Not after Rosamund worked so hard to put this together.

The three guys pile into the car, then.

Chevy hauls ass away, squealing rubber and two or three metal-bang shots into the trunk of the car.

“You goddamn idiot,” one of the guys says, hysterical, he’s hysterical, “you killed two guards. All we was supposed to do was cover him so he could make a break for it.”

“We just gotta stay cool,” one of the other three in the front seat said.

“Yeah,” said a third voice, “stay cool. Use our heads and not panic.”

“They’re gonna fry us for killin’ a guard like that,” the hysterical one said. “You just wait and see.”

But the talk fades as he plummets deeper into the darkness of pain and blood loss and the breakdown of his human engine.

Deeper...

12

“Are you sure you’re up?”

“I’m sure.”

“I can always call back.”

“No, Sheila, really, this is fine.”

“I found out some things about Tolliver.”

“I’m listening.”

Sunlight traced the edge of the motel-room curtains. I’d set my travel alarm, but dimly remember stomping it into silence with the heel of my hand and then going back to sleep.

But the intrepid Sheila Kelly was now going to make sure that I was awake for sure.

“You ready?”

“I’m ready.”

“He nearly went broke in 1963. He had been CEO of his father’s trucking business for three years, and the whole thing came tumbling down.”

“But he made it?”

“He’d fired a man named Farraday, a man who’d always been his father’s right-hand man. You know how it is with young CEOs, they don’t want any reminder of the previous regime.”

“You think Farraday’s being fired hurt the company?”

“No doubt about it. Farraday went all the way back to the beginning of the trucking industry, back when the Teamsters were still blowing up trucks that weren’t registered to union members. This Farraday knew all the routes and all the federal regulations, and how to make money on what they call short hauls. In other words, he was a very important guy.”

“And Junior fired him?”

“Right. But then Junior must have had a religious conversion because he hired him back at three times the salary.”

“Wow.”

“He also gave him ten percent of the net profits per annum.”

“Sounds like Farraday had really been mad about being canned.”

“Very, very angry. But since he now had ten percent of the company, he made it work again. He stayed there until he died of lymphatic cancer in 1979. By then, Junior had figured out how to run things himself. He was making a lot of money again.”

“How about personal life?”

“A widower. His wife died in a sanitarium, in 1983.”

“A mental hospital?”

“No. Some kind of fancy drying-out place for the idle rich. You know, people like you.”

“What was her name?”

“Kendra. She was a runway model in Chicago when Tolliver married her in 1958.”

“Any children?”

“One. A boy named Craig.”

“Tolliver said he’s dead.”

“He is. And guess how he died?”

“How?”

“In a prison escape.”

“Tolliver had a son who was in prison?”

“Second-degree murder. Really cut up this sixteen-year-old girl. They found what was left of her in chunks and pieces buried next to a river. Tolliver had to use all his money and influence to get the charge reduced to second-degree.”

“He didn’t try insanity?”

“Oh, he tried, but the district attorney wouldn’t go for it. Or did I mention this wasn’t Tolliver’s home state? He might be important in Iowa, but not in Illinois. Anyway, Tolliver tried to get Craig declared insane and put in a state mental hospital, but the DA wasn’t buying, and neither was the judge or jury. Tolliver’s people finally had to plead him guilty of second-degree.”

“How long was he in before he escaped?”

“Three-and-a-half years. But there’s something else.”

“What?”

“You remember that word you asked me about, ‘Conmarck’?”

“Right.”

“That’s the name of the town where the prison is located. It’s in Illinois.”

“Wow. Then Vic knew something about the escape.”

“Vic?”

“This Nora I told you about?”

“The one who claimed to be Tolliver’s daughter?”

“Right. She had this assistant named Vic. He’s the one who used the word.”

“Well, Conmarck was where Craig died, anyway. Three guys were supposed to cover him while he ran from a soybean field, but one of them killed a guard. Craig was shot in the crossfire. He died in the backseat of the getaway car. His three friends died a few miles later in a shootout with a highway patrol helicopter.”

“So there’s a connection between Nora and Vic and Tolliver after all.”

“What?”

“Just thinking out loud, Sheila. Sorry. You’ve really earned your money.”

“I just hope it helps.”

“It helps a lot. Just send me the bill to my Charlesville address.”

“If you need something else, let me know.”

“I will, Sheila, and thanks again.”

13

“And here’s the old biplane that Curtis Lefler built,” Herb Carson said an hour-and-a-half later, as he finished giving us the tour of his aviation museum.

Curtis Lefler was another Iowa flying legend, having built this and half-a-dozen pioneering airplanes in his father’s garage.

So far this morning, we’d seen several planes, including a very rare Whitey Sport with its 55-horsepower LeBlond engine, but this was the one I fancied.

Seeing it there in the sparkling sunlight, with a cloudless blue sky like this one, recalled the days of the barnstormers, men and women (there were a lot more female barnstormers than is commonly believed) who bought used WWI planes from the U.S. Government then went all over the countryside putting on shows at carnivals and county fairs, or putting down in a field and taking people for a ride for $3.75 a head.

“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” Herb said. He looked older than the last time I’d seen him, and that was a sad realization. I was at the age when most of my heroes were dying on me, Herb among them. In his blue turtleneck and jeans, his white hair burred military-style, his skinny frame bent now with age, he looked like the last of the barnstormers surveying a world that no longer knew what to do with him.

“She sure is a beauty,” Jane Avery said, then turned back to me. “Is this the biplane we’re going up in?”

“It sure is.”

The plane before us was an old Travel Air, one of the first biplanes used by adventurous businessmen back in the 1920s. With a double cockpit and red paint, it still looked jaunty all these years later.

“Great,” she said.

Herb grinned. “Always like to see somebody respond to a baby like this one. Does my old heart good. You get ready. I’ll go prop her.”

“Great,” I said.

I looked at Jane. “You all right?”

She shrugged. “Just a little nervous.”

“We’ll be fine.”

“I know. It’s just—”

I smiled, leaned in and touched her hand. “Everybody gets nervous. That’s part of the whole process.”

She grinned, “You’re really a damn nice guy, you know that? Most of the time, anyway.”

We stood next to the plane. It smelled of sunlight and oil and the worn leather interior.

“Bet you wish you lived back then,” Jane said. “With the barnstormers.”

“I sure do.”

“I can see you doing that, actually. There’s something old-fashioned about you.” She squinted at me in the sunlight. “That’s why it’s so hard to imagine you working for the FBI. All that cloak and dagger.”

“Believe it or not, it’s something I believe in. That’s why I did it.”

We walked around the plane, taking another close look, two people in a field in the middle of Iowa on a lovely spring day.

For the next twenty minutes, we gave her a complete mechanical checkup, Herb and I, and then the three of us pushed her out to the small patch of runway, and Jane and I climbed in.

“Wish I was going along,” Herb shouted, just before he took the propeller and rotated it so that we could get the oil circulated through the engine.

While he was doing that, I was turning on the magneto, which is similar to popping the clutch in a car. Then Jane and I pulled down our goggles.

The plane roared into being, Jane and I waved good-bye, and then I proceeded to do all the subtle things an old craft like this demands.

Then we were airborne.

Only from the air can you appreciate how right Grant Wood was the way he painted Iowa, the rolling countryside, the checkerboard topography.

“This is great!” Jane shouted.

“Not scared?”

“Not at all!”

I gave her the grand tour, skimming low along a winding blue river, tracking between two looming clay cliffs, doing a modified roll and then following a forest of pine and hardwood that stretched for miles.

We were up high enough — but not too high — to enjoy the benefits of temperature inversions which, on a day like this one, kept the temp right at 60.

“Do another roll!” she shouted. “That was great!”

I’d made a convert, and to celebrate that fact, I did another roll. People always worry about falling out but between the strap you wear and centrifugal force, you’re actually pretty safe.

I was just taking her down lower when I realized where we were, just above the Brindle farm where the bodies of Nora and Vic had been discovered.

I also noticed something else.

A blue four-door Toyota sedan just pulling out of the barn in back.

It moved quickly down the gravel drive and out to the gravel road and headed quickly back to town.

I recognized the car, of course. It had belonged to Sam Lodge.

I had a good idea who was driving it now.

“How about one more roll?” Jane shouted, seeming not to make anything special of the blue Toyota.

“You’re crazy!” I laughed.

And then decided to put the plane into the kind of roll that both of us would remember for a long time.

This time, Jane even screamed a little bit, the way boys and girls do at county fairs their first time up on the Ferris wheel.

After saying good-bye to Herb and walking back to our respective cars, Jane said, “Did you see that blue Toyota at the Brindle farm?”

I smiled. “I was hoping you didn’t.”

“Are we competing on this case?” She sounded angry.

I wanted to tell her everything, especially about Melissa McNally’s being kidnapped, but I knew better.

“No,” I said. “We’re not competing.”

She stared at me for a long time. “This is kind of a confusing situation. And it’s my fault. Because I’m the one who’s let it become confusing.”

“What’s confusing about it?”

“I want to take you down to the station and make you tell me everything you know.”

“That’s natural enough. You’re the chief of police.”

“But I also want to invite you over for another meal tonight. Maybe some tacos or something. On me.”

“Well, why don’t I come over about eight and we’ll talk about how confusing everything is?”

“I don’t know, Robert. I just don’t know.”

We stood there and looked at each other for a time. There was nothing to say, and I knew better than to try and touch her in any way.

I gave her a little nod, got in my car, and drove away.

14

The historians of Cedar Rapids love to tell the story of the man who built the town’s first log cabin back in 1838.

His name was Osgood Sheperd. While most town histories love to extol the noble virtues of their first citizens, the folks in Cedar Rapids delight in revealing that Osgood was, among other things, the town’s first tavern owner and a horse thief.

In the early 1840s, the enterprising Osgood converted his cabin on the river’s edge to a drinking establishment, which was perfect for those people who wanted to get drunk before they forded the river.

As with most such places, the tavern soon developed its own group of patrons among whom were several horse thieves.

Apparently old Osgood became a part of the gang because, after closing down the tavern because of pressure from responsible civic leaders, he drifted to another state where he took up the noble calling of horse-stealing himself.

Unfortunately, Osgood wasn’t nearly as good at it as his cronies.

He was caught, and hanged by the neck until dead.

From the northernmost bluffs, Cedar Rapids looks like a picture-book city. The downtown area, abandoned by merchants who could no longer fight the fight with the malls on either edge of the city, has given way to several new buildings and complete refurbishment. It is now a business center, stocks and bonds, insurance and law offices, fund raisers and research companies. And enough BMWs to make you think that Ronald Reagan is still in office.

I drove right on through, the place I was looking for being in a somewhat-less-pricey neighborhood, one of those that the Chamber of Commerce keeps trying to will out of existence.

325 River Street was an aged concrete block building that had probably started life as a corner grocery store. It was now boarded up, covered with some rather pedestrian graffiti, and surrounded by a sidewalk that was littered with so much broken glass and trash it looked like an obstacle course.

I parked and got out.

Except for 325, this half of the block was nothing but a large grassy vacant lot. Down on the far corner, two young black men stood watching me. They were probably wondering why anybody who didn’t absolutely need to would come into a neighborhood like this.

I walked around 325 twice, looking for some kind of peephole for a glimpse inside. Nothing.

I walked down to the end of the block and the two young men. The closer I got, the older they looked. By the time I reached them, they looked a lot older, mid-twenties probably, which made their worn-backwards baseball caps seem like a wistful affectation meant to bring back their youth.

“Morning,” I said.

They were a perfect Mutt and Jeff, one tall and rangy, one short and squat. Or Bud and Lou, if you prefer.

They nodded, said nothing.

“You live around here?”

The squat one grinned. “No, man, we live down to those penthouses along the river. We jus’ come over here ’cause the scenery’s so beautiful.”

“I guess it was a dumb question,” I said, grinning back.

“You a cop?” asked the tall one.

“Nope.”

“You look like a cop. The new kind.”

“There’s a new kind?”

“Sure. Them college boys. They’s real polite, man, till they gets you in the backseat. Then they kick the hell out of you jus’ like the old kind.”

“They busted us for no reason last Saturday night,” said the squat one. “They jus’ had a hard-on to bust them some niggers, and we happened to be the ones they found. All we was doin’ was walkin’ down the street. That’s all we was doin’.”

“An’ this’z what I got for it,” said the short one. He took off his ball cap and showed me a half-inch cut on the left side of his forehead. The wound was red and blue, against copper-colored skin.

“Like we don’t have no right to walk down the street, man,” said his friend.

Hard to tell. Two sides to everything. You sit down with the police officers who busted them and you’d likely hear that these two guys looked suspicious, late at night, shambling down the street, possibly drunk, possibly doped up, and who knew what they were up to? Better to be safe than sorry and all that. So they busted them. And the short one got mouthy. And one of the cops hit him — nothing serious, because if it had been anything serious, these two would have gotten themselves a lawyer by now and instituted some big suit against the city. Just doing their jobs, the cops were — at least that’s how they’d see it, and tell you about it.

While, of course, these two young men had a very different version of what had happened.

“You know much about that place?” I said to the short one.

“What place? That building down there?”

“Yes. 325.”

He shrugged. Glanced at his friend. Grinned. “Used to be like the place to go when we was kids and wanted some grass or beer or somethin’. Real good hidin’ place.”

“Have you seen people go in and out lately?”

Another glance, another grin.

“You sure you ain’t a cop?” the short one said.

“I’m not. Honest.”

The tall one shrugged. “The white Lincoln.”

“What?”

“White Lincoln. Guy always wheels in here real early in the morning, two, three in the morning, but I ain’t seen him for a long time.”

“Did you ever get a look at the guy driving the Lincoln?”

“Not a good one.”

“So you’re not even sure it is a guy?”

“Huh?”

“Could be a woman.”

He shrugged again.

“Could be,” said the short one.

“And he goes inside?”

“Right.”

“How long does he stay?”

The tall one shrugged. “Man, we’re usually asleep by then. Our wives, man, they kick our butts if we stayed out that late.”

“So the guy in the Lincoln could stay all night.”

“Could be,” the tall one said.

“Thanks,” I said, nodding to them.

“That’s all you wanted?” the short one said.

I smiled. “That’s all I wanted. See, I told you I wasn’t a cop.”

The padlock was a bitch to get open. Took fifteen minutes.

I got the back door free and stood in the dark doorway. I wrinkled up my nose as the odors hit me. The high tart tang of blood; the sour-sweet smell of bodily waste.

With great reluctance, I went inside, remembering a Cairo garage I’d entered one day looking for an informant that the Agency wanted to protect. I found him, all right, along with three or four of his friends, chopped up and piled up inside a closet. It took several weeks of showers before I felt clean again.

I got the light on. The place was one big room with three smaller rooms off to the right. The big room had an auxiliary battery and video equipment and a large cardboard box shoved into one corner.

I went over and looked into the box. I found wigs and black leather sex masks and handcuffs and women’s panties. I also found spiked belts and chains. The chains were dark and sticky with blood. There were also pieces of wound cloth that had obviously been used as gags.

I didn’t have to wonder what kind of videos were being shot here.

Two of the three small rooms looked to have been storage areas at one time. Now they held small cots and an impromptu makeup table complete with round theatrical mirror. Somebody had written a dirty word in the middle of it with red lipstick long ago dried out. A lone Polaroid lay on the table, shriveled like an autumn leaf. I picked it up and stared at it. There was a girl, no more than eight, naked and with her legs parted wide, spreading her sex for the camera. It was going to take an awful lot of showers to make me feel clean this time.

The third of the rooms was where I found the blood and the excrement, the blood splashed all over the walls, the way slaughterhouses sometimes look, the floor covered with large feces of the human variety. This is the way a lot of jail cells look in Latin America, after prisoners have been held there for a month, and been beaten regularly during the process.

Somebody had been held prisoner here. No doubt about it.

The air was dead and stifling in the small dusty room; cobwebs sticky to touch. The lone window high on the wall was pebbled glass to begin with. Filth made it even more opaque. You could hear screams echoing in here, what it must have been like for whoever had been kept here, crawling on the floor, clawing at the door like a sick animal. About knee-high on the door you could see fingernail scratches. She’d probably pleaded with them. Please please please. I wondered how old she’d been, or rather they’d been. Plural. There’d surely been many more than one here over the months designated on the rent receipts. Somebody’s little daughter; somebody’s little sister.

I went back out to the main room and looked around again. A few dozen businesses had probably been housed in this place over the past forty or fifty years — a few dozen dashed hopes of the small business person — until it had spiraled ignominiously down to this, a place where children were exploited for reasons of greed and some dark and unimaginable predilection of the human spirit.

A white Lincoln, I thought. A white Lincoln.

15

When I stopped by the motel office to check for any messages, a woman I hadn’t seen before said, “You’ve got a visitor.”

“Oh?”

“He said he wanted to surprise you.”

“He did. I see.”

“Your father.”

“My father?”

My father had died fourteen years ago.

“He’s in your room. Waiting.”

“Thanks.”

At my door, I put my ear to the wood and listened. No sound. I pushed the door open and went inside.

He sat in the same chair he’d been in the other day. He wore a blue sport coat and gray slacks and a white button-down shirt without a tie. His white hair almost glowed in the sunlight streaming through the door.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said.

I closed the door behind me.

“I’ve decided to tell you the truth,” he said.

“I see.”

“Or aren’t you interested?”

“Oh, I’m interested. If that’s what I’m going to hear. The truth, I mean.”

He smiled. “I don’t blame you for being cynical. In your line of work, I don’t imagine you hear the truth very often.”

“Are you going to start by telling me about your son being in prison?”

The smile again. “I should have figured that a resourceful man like you would have done some checking on me.”

“He died in a prison escape.”

This time the smile was bleak. “He died a long time before that, Mr. Hokanson. A very long time before that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m speaking spiritually, Mr. Hokanson. Spiritually, he died a long time before that.” His fingers touched a manila envelope placed across his lap.

“One day I came home from work — this would have been back in the early sixties, when my son was probably seven or eight, and I saw my wife in the kitchen with our Mexican maid. They were arguing. I’d never seen my wife — who had always been a frail and quiet woman — this angry before. Then my wife slapped her. I couldn’t believe it. My wife just wasn’t a physical person. She hated machismo in particular — you know, settling arguments with physical force.

“The maid was in tears and ran out of the kitchen. I went over to my wife. She seemed to be in some kind of trance. I wasn’t even sure that she knew I was standing next to her. I tried to touch her, but she jerked away from me. Upstairs, I could hear the maid opening and slamming doors. Then she came downstairs carrying her bags and went out the side door to her car. She had a little VW Bug she was very proud of.

“I asked my wife why they’d been arguing but she wouldn’t even look at me. I really did wonder if she was in some kind of trance.

“And then without a word, she left the kitchen, went upstairs to her room.

“I just stood there looking out the window at Maria, the maid, backing her VW out, and then pulling away. I never saw her again.

“I was just about to go upstairs, and try and get my wife to talk to me, when I noticed the blood on the top of the stairs leading to the basement.

“It was very dark, and there was this iron odor to it.

“I knew enough to be afraid — knew enough to sense that I was about to find something that I would be better off not knowing — but I couldn’t help myself.

“I went over and turned the basement lights on and followed the blood all the way downstairs.

“Six months earlier, we’d had new tile put in, the same kind of tile we had on the stairs, a kind of amber color, and the blood was very stark against it. There was a lot of it — the blood, I mean.

“The basement had been turned into several rooms, one of which was my son’s ‘den,’ as we called it. He had his TV, his stereo and all his comic books there. He was a great comic-book collector.

“That was when I saw the first piece of flesh, just outside his door, flesh and white hair soaked with blood.

“I knew right away what I was looking at. A few weeks previous, my son had stopped by a pet shop and found these two rabbits he really liked. He called them Dean and Jerry. He loved Jerry Lewis movies. He kept the rabbits in a large cage in his den.

“You can guess what happened.

“Craig had killed the rabbits. And not cleanly. Didn’t just shoot them, or put a blade into their hearts. From the pieces I saw, and especially from the way their eyes gaped when I found their decapitated heads, he tortured them first and then started cutting them up into chunks while they were still alive.

“Later that night, I learned what the argument between my wife and Maria had been about. Maria had found the rabbits and gone to my wife and told her that Craig had killed them. My wife absolutely refused to believe this. Of course, this wasn’t the first time we’d had troubles like this with Craig. When he was eight, he’d been playing with a little girl he’d invited home from school. He was out in the old barn — this was when we lived outside of Des Moines — and he took a hammer and nails and nailed her to the ground. Even at that age, he was smart enough to gag her so we wouldn’t hear her.

“We sent him away to a school where he spent half his time with psychiatrists and the other half on his schoolwork. But even then my wife wouldn’t admit that there was anything fundamentally wrong with Craig. She always said it was just a ‘stage’ he was going through. She also clung to the idea that Craig didn’t fit the general profile of disturbed young boys. We’d never brutalized him — we were very obedient disciples of Dr. Spock and didn’t even spank him — and we certainly expressed our love to him. I spent at least a dozen hours a week doing all the things you see fathers in movies do — we played baseball, we went fishing, we rode horses.

“But Craig was never much interested in anything I suggested. He didn’t hate us exactly, but he certainly didn’t love us either — not in any way we understood.

“When he was sixteen and home for the summer and adamant about us letting him get his driver’s license and giving him a car, he brought a girl home to walk down by the lake on the east end of our property.

“I woke up in the middle of the night. I heard somebody screaming, and I threw on some clothes and ran out of the house. I knew I shouldn’t call the police; I don’t know how I knew, I just did.

“He had her tied to a tree and stripped completely naked. He was cutting her with a switchblade. She had a gag on, but it must have slipped off for a few moments, and that’s how I heard her scream.

“He wasn’t killing her; he was marking her up for life.

“I knocked him out. It took a rock to do it — he was a very slight boy, but he had incredible strength and energy — and I got both of them up to the house.

“After that, my wife didn’t have any choice but to see Craig for what he was. We were able to settle a great deal of money on the girl and her parents to keep them quiet, but we had Craig committed to a sanitarium right after that.

“He stayed four months, and then escaped. Believe me, people had been trying for twenty years to escape from that place but nobody before or since Craig had been able to.

“We had no idea where he went, but about eight months after he escaped — and by this time his mother herself was in very serious therapy, and she was also drinking a lot — about eight months afterward, we started getting Polaroid photos of girls who were eight to twelve years old... and they were cut up and sexually mutilated beyond belief.

“There was never any note. Just the photos.

“After the sixth photograph, each of a different girl — and we always knew who was sending them — his mother overdosed on gin and barbiturates.

“I was in Phoenix at the time.

“Craig didn’t come back for the funeral.

“In fact, I didn’t hear from him again for two years.

“You know the way I heard from him again?

“Polaroid photos started arriving.

“Very young girls again. Tortured and maimed in ways I can’t ever quite get out of my mind.

“He was going all over the country — just the way Ted Bundy did — slaughtering young girls.

“I wanted to stop him — I wanted to tell the police what was going on — but I... couldn’t. I’d come very close but then I... couldn’t.

“Pride, I suppose, though I hate to think I’m that selfish and venal.

“Anyway, one day I got a letter from a law firm I’d never heard from. Out-of-state.

“Craig was being tried for several crimes unrelated to the murders. I flew up to see him. I hardly recognized him. There was such a... strange... aspect to his face. If I said ‘diabolical,’ that would sound very melodramatic, wouldn’t it? But that’s the only way I can describe it. Very handsome; very handsome... yet even being around him made me nervous.

“He asked me for help, but I turned him down. I told him that he was going where he belonged. He was very angry. He cursed me.

“I didn’t see him for years. He wrote me a few letters, but I burned them. His lawyers would call from time to time and ask me if I’d go visit him but I said no... I no longer wanted to see him.

“A few years later, his lawyers wrote me and told me about his relationship with this woman who had apparently fallen in love with him in prison. They told me she was planning to marry Craig.

“I checked her out. She’d been in and out of mental hospitals most of her life. Ravishingly beautiful, but totally unable to deal with life. She lived on a huge trust fund from an old San Francisco banking family. This wasn’t the first time she’d married inmates. She’d done it twice before Craig.

“Then came the escape, when Craig was killed.

“I brought him back to Iowa and buried him. And that was that. Or so I thought, anyway.”

“So you thought?” I said.

“So I thought.”

“Other things happened?”

He sat in his chair, a prim, composed man who looked uncomfortable sharing secrets.

“The photos,” he said.

“The dead girls?”

“Yes.”

“They started arriving again?”

“Yes. I burned each one right after it arrived. But there were always more coming.”

“Who was sending them?”

“I assumed this woman, the one you met as Nora.”

“You assumed?”

“Who else would be sending them? Who else would have known what my son was doing?”

“I guess that’s a good point.”

“And then someone broke into my house and stole somethings from my office. Nothing very valuable — just some records relating to Craig.”

“And you assumed the thief was Nora, too?”

“At first, but I hired an investigator, one recommended to me by a judge on the California supreme court.”

“And he learned what?”

“He learned that Craig hadn’t died.”

“What?”

“I know. That’s how I reacted at first, too. Total disbelief. Oh, he’d been badly injured, but then this woman decided to take advantage of the situation. She paid off all the right people — remember, she had a great deal of wealth to draw on — and his death was faked with the help of the prison doctor. The investigator secretly had Craig’s grave opened up and found that it was empty except for a few heavy sacks of feed.”

“Was Craig with Nora?”

He shook his head. “No. The investigator learned that they’d spent eight months in Mexico together where Craig had a series of plastic surgeries. He bore no resemblance to the old Craig.”

“Did the investigator get a photo of the new Craig?”

“No. He didn’t have time. Right after returning from Mexico, the investigator was murdered.”

“By Craig, you think?”

“Who else?”

“Why did Nora contact me?”

He shrugged. “According to my investigators, Craig was tired of her. He wanted to get as far away as possible from her. So he came back to Iowa.”

“And where is he now?”

“Here.”

“In town?”

He nodded. “In town.” He took the manila envelope from his lap and held it up to me. “The last investigator found three men who could possibly be Craig — men who showed up here four years ago, just about the time when Craig was running from his lady friend, men who have very hazy pasts.”

“What’s in the envelope?”

“Background on the three men.”

“On what three men?”

“Reverend Roberts, Kenny Deihl, and Richard McNally.”

“You’re sure one of them is Craig?”

“Positive. The last three letters I got from him were postmarked from here. And that’s very like Craig. To taunt me like this. Dare me to come and get him.” The bleak smile again. “Find him, Mr. Hokanson. For everybody’s sake — find him.”