Blood Moon

1

An hour later, I was driving past the New Hope town square. The temperature had dropped several degrees since I’d left, and the sun had vanished completely, leaving a gray sky that was boiling with storm clouds to the west.

Even though all I could think of was the white Lincoln the two black men had described, I needed to stop by and see Eve McNally first. I wanted to know about her daughter and if she’d heard anything from her husband. I was beginning to suspect how McNally and Sam Lodge fit in with the good reverend.

After leaving the small shopping area, I swung left to pick up an asphalt drive that would take me straight to the northeast edge of town, where Eve McNally lived.

The sky was getting so dark that several oncoming cars turned on their headlights. Then the rain came, spits and fits at first, then a rumbling grumbling downpour.

I heard the siren before I saw the spinning red cherry. Then I noticed my speedometer. I was traveling 46 in a 35 mph zone.

I pulled over on the shoulder of the road, set the gear in neutral, heeled on the emergency brake.

It was a long minute before anybody got out of the squad car behind me. In the downpour, it was hard to make out any face, just a person with a campaign hat and a fold-up plastic raincoat on.

I watched the cop approach in my rearview mirror. Then the mirror was empty.

Where had the cop gone?

Knuckles rapped the window on the passenger side. A finger pointed to the door lock. I leaned over and unlocked it.

The cop got in, smelling of rain and chilly but very fresh air.

“You were speeding.”

“I’ll say one thing: getting stopped by a cop as pretty as you is a real pleasure.”

“Yeah, I look great in this campaign hat,” Jane Avery grinned. “Like Smokey the Bear’s daughter.”

“You look fine to me.”

“I saw you coming in from the highway.”

“Yeah.”

“So you were out of town?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You going to tell me about it?”

“Boy, you’re really relentless.”

“Your friend Karl in the hospital?”

“Yeah?”

“He died this morning.”

I looked through the steamy window at the rain. It danced like bouncing nail heads on the asphalt. Headlights appeared and faded, appeared and faded, in fog and rain.

“Something terrible’s happening to me,” she said after our mutual silence.

“Yeah? What?”

“I’m starting to like you.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m starting to like you, too.”

“But I can’t trust you, and that scares me.”

“Of course you can trust me.”

“Then you’re going to tell me what’s going on? Who Eleanor Saunders was, and who Karl was, and what’s going on with Eve McNally?”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with trust — not the way you mean it.” I turned toward her in the seat. Her eyes looked more hurt than angry — she really was taking this personally; as perhaps I would, too — and her otherwise-full mouth was pursed tight. “This isn’t personal, why I’m not confiding in you — it’s professional. And there’s a difference.”

Now it was her turn to stare silently out the window.

“I saw Joanna Lodge,” she said after a while.

“Did you ask her why she was out at the Brindle farm this morning?”

“She gave me a reason but not a very believable one. She said she felt like going for a walk in the country and that the Brindle place was nice because it was deserted.”

“You’re right. Not very believable.”

“She wasn’t any more cooperative than you’ve been. She knows what’s really going on, too. That’s you and Eve McNally and now Joanna Lodge. Who else knows what’s really going on?”

I sighed. “You’re making this harder than it has to be.”

“I’m a cop. A good one, I think — at least a dedicated one. I need to know what’s happening in my town. And you can tell me.”

I shook my head, said, in barely a whisper, “No, I can’t, Jane. No, I can’t.”

She stared at me silently for a moment and then said, “I think we’d better skip tonight.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

“Do you blame me?”

“I guess not.”

She put her hand on the door handle. Opened up a few inches. Rain hissed. The air was cold. “I had some real hope for us. I really did.”

I was going to say something soothing but she was gone, slamming the door, before I could form the right words.

If there were any right words.

2

The plain pure smell of it, of human flesh as it rotted... Sometimes he would dip his head down into the darkness below and let his entire consciousness be suffused with the odors. And in the frenzy of it he would touch himself — that was all it took at moments such as these — touch himself and know an orgasmic ecstasy none of the women, not even the dead ones, had been able to give him. Nor was there any pity or scorn or smirk in the air because he had failed them and failed himself — the charge of orgasm was perfect, blinding, all-encompassing emotionally as well as sexually.

He watched as they scrambled and scurried below. Sometimes they even climbed high up on the ladder, their claws digging into the wood...

He felt oneness with the universe, calmness, tranquility, wholeness — feelings he had never known before until the past few years.

But now somebody was threatening this. Nobody had known anything until the man who called himself Hokanson had showed up here a few days ago. And didn’t the ladies all love him, the sonofabitch. And you could bet that he didn’t have any problems in bed, putting it right to them and riding them for hours if he wanted to.

This was all he had — the corpses and their smells — and now it was in serious jeopardy.

Hokanson had everything he wanted...

Just now he caught a glimpse of himself reflected in a window.

And smiled.

Weren’t appearances deceiving?

Somebody looked like one thing but they were actually quite another.

“Boys will be girls, and girls will be boys.”

God, he hadn’t heard “Lola” in years...

He had to do what was necessary with Hokanson. Had to. And right away. Before Hokanson figured everything out and destroyed this little paradise...

He walked out into the rain, liking the cold clean bite of it, liking the way it cleared his senses, liking the contrast of its chills with the warm wetness in his underwear...

Damn Hokanson, anyway.

Things had been going so well...

He got his car started and went in search of the only man standing between himself and his continued happiness.

3

“Joanna?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Jim Hokanson.”

Pause. “I really don’t want to talk to you anymore. I shouldn’t have flirted with you yesterday. Now Sam’s dead, and what kind of memories do I have? That I wanted to go to bed with somebody else on the very day my husband is murdered?”

“I think I know who murdered him.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“Jane Avery was here. She seems to think that I know something about the murder, but I don’t.”

“I’d like to come over there in a little while and look through your husband’s office.”

“For what?”

“At this point, I’m not really sure. But I’ll know it if I see it.”

“I haven’t been a very good wife,” she said.

And of course, I thought of Eve McNally, and her notion that she hadn’t been a very good mother.

But all I said was “I’ll see you in a little while.”

No white Lincolns in the drive. No lights on in the windows of the house on the hill behind.

I pulled up in front of the church, left my car running, and ran up to the double front doors. Locked. I stood for a moment under the porch roof watching the rain in all its drab fury. I didn’t especially want to run back out into it. I hadn’t been a good boy. I’d brought neither my rubbers nor my raincoat. But finally I had no choice.

I ran back to my car, feeling the rain pound and soak my back. There were a few puddles already formed, and these soaked my shoes. I’m one of those people who can stay calm about having an arm broken, but let me sense a head cold coming on and I get very uptight, even surly. I hate being sick in any way.

I got inside the car and aimed it up the hill to the house. The gravel was chunky. I kept fishtailing.

This time I shut off my engine. Before getting out, I opened the glove compartment and took my Ruger out, dropped it into my jacket pocket.

Even in the hard cold rain, the two-story Spanish-style house was imposing and attractive, the smooth texture of the white stucco exterior contrasting nicely with the roughness of the red tile on the various planes of the roof. It was a newly rich place, and one with no apologies to the more modest standards of the community.

Nobody answered my knock.

I walked down the side steps to the double garage and peered inside. Both white Lincolns were gone.

I went back to the front door, tried knocking again. Nothing happened this time, either, except that I got a little wetter.

I walked back to my car and was just opening the door when the first bullet shattered the glass of the driver’s window.

I haven’t been shot at many times in my life. Despite a few feats of derring-do, most of my Agency work was conducted at a desk in the wilds of Virginia, where the most murderous people you’ll find are reporters in search of another Agency scandal.

My first reaction was that I must somehow be wrong. A shot? No. Something else.

Then the second shot came and I knew I wasn’t wrong at all.

I dove into the car, slamming my knee hard against the steering wheel as I did so. I lay flat on the front seat.

Two, three more bullets came in quick succession. Windows imploded into dense spiderwebs.

Whoever he was, he was a good shot. He had to be hiding down behind a corner of the church. He also had to have a pretty high-powered rifle.

I was huddled inside a cocoon of myself — all bad nerves and fear and anger and sudden heavy sweat.

Oh, yes; and panting. I sounded like a big old sheepdog on a very hot day.

Then, nothing. I lay there rubbing my sore knee, listening to the tinny sound of the rain on my car roof and hood.

I don’t know how long it was before I heard an aged truck grinding up the gravel hill to the house.

I very cautiously sat up, peered down the hill.

The killer was long gone, of course. No sign of him at all.

The truck had G&H MARKET written on the side of its doors. It was a white Chevy that had to be a quarter-century old. The gearbox sounded awful.

A white-haired man pulled it up to the garage and the door to the side, braked noisily and shut off the engine.

He walked slowly over to me in the rain, his watery blue eyes fixed on the bullet webs in the windows. He wore blue-and-white-striped Oshkosh overalls and had a pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth. He walked with a slight limp.

“I was right. Them was gunshots I heard,” he said, examining the bullet holes more carefully.

“Yes,” I said. “You were right.”

“You called the law?”

“Not yet.”

He grinned. “If I was you, I’d be in taking a good long leak. I was in the South Pacific in World War Two, and every time the Jap fire would get close to me, I’d pee my pants. Wasn’t ashamed to admit it, either. No, sir, I sure wasn’t.” He paused, examined the spider webs again. “You got any idea who it was?”

“Nope.”

He shook his head, then looked at the house. “They home?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Hell, she just called me two hours ago and told me to get her order out here as fast as I could.”

“Sorry.”

“Between you and me, she’s kind of a bitch, anyway. High-and-mighty, you know.” Shook his head. “I probably shouldn’t say that about her, with her cancer and all, but that’s how she strikes me.”

I thought of what Mindy had told me, about the good reverend faking his wife’s cancer as a means of raising money.

I decided not to disillusion the old guy.

I leaned forward and started my car. “Guess I better head back to town.”

“Good thing the rain’s let up.”

As, suddenly, it had, not much more than a sprinkle now.

“Yeah,” I said, “good thing.”

I waved good-bye to him and drove off.

4

Eve came to the door after three knocks and peered out through the screening. This afternoon her facial bruises looked even worse: discolored streaks of purple and yellow on left forehead, right cheek, left jawline.

“Have you heard anything about your daughter?”

She shook her head. “I bet she’s dead.”

She needed somebody to talk to. I felt guilty for not having more time.

“I found out some things this morning, Eve. I think I’m finally figuring out what’s going on. I also think that I know who may have kidnapped her and why.”

She touched a trembling hand to her face and started crying bitterly. “You know one time — what I did one time, I mean?”

I couldn’t take it. I opened the screen door quietly and stepped inside and took her in my arms and held her. She was very near the edge. Very near.

“I got mad at her one time and I slapped her right across the face. She couldn’t’ve been more’n five years old. And I slapped her right across the face. I just keep thinkin’ about that now, how I treated her when she was so little. What a terrible mother I’ve been to her.”

Her sobs came in small eruptions now, and she choked on words the way a small child does who is crying too hard to speak intelligibly.

“You’ve been a good mother, Eve. You’ve got to stop thinking that way.”

She had to cry herself out.

I led her over to the couch and plumped up a couple of throw pillows, then found the bedroom and dragged out a blanket and got her covered up. In the bathroom, I filled a glass with cold water and snagged the Excedrin bottle. Sara, the sweet golden retriever, followed me back into the living room and gave Eve three affectionate laps with a big pink loving tongue and then went over on the far side of the room and sat and watched all the human stuff going on.

I got three tablets down Eve and said, “Have you eaten breakfast yet?”

She shook her head, her cheeks red and rough from her tears. Her eyes were watery and forlorn.

“I really have been a terrible mother. You just don’t know. Gabbin’ on the phone when I should’ve been spendin’ time with her. Bowlin’ with the girls when I could’ve been taking her places.”

I knelt next to her and said, “We aren’t perfect, Eve, and it’s too much to expect we ever will be. All we can do is try.”

She looked at me and said, “Maybe he’s dead, too.”

“Your husband?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So you haven’t heard from him?”

She shook her head.

I took a washcloth I’d run lukewarm water over and laid it gently across her forehead. She smelled of tears.

“I’ll check back with you later this afternoon,” I said.

“I wish my husband was like you.”

I smiled. “That’s a nice compliment, but you don’t know me very well.”

“I know you enough.”

“Well, I know you enough, too. And you’re a very decent woman. And a very good mother.”

I kissed her on the cheek. “I need to ask you something, Eve. And you’ve got to tell me the truth.”

She looked at me tearily and nodded.

“Has your husband come into some money over the past few years?”

She nodded.

“A lot of it?”

She paused. “Well, a lot for us, anyways.” She nodded to the new furnishings and the new TV. “And then he bought a brand-new Ford and paid cash for it. He’s in trouble, isn’t he?”

“I’m afraid he could be, Eve.”

“I knew he was. But I was afraid to think it was true.”

She had angled her head away, was getting trapped in her own despair again.

“Did your husband ever work for Reverend Roberts?”

She turned back to me, tried to read my face. “This has something to do with Reverend Roberts?”

“Not necessarily,” I lied. “But I’m curious.”

“Well, sure, he used to have a kind of cleaning service on the side.”

“What kind of cleaning service?”

“Oh, you know, clean rich people’s houses.”

“But Reverend Roberts has a maid.”

“Richard didn’t clean the house. He cleaned the church.”

“I see. How about Sam Lodge?”

The eyes searching my face again. “How’d you know about him?”

“Lucky guess.”

And it was.

“Well, Richard, he used to clean the Lodges’ house, with their antiques and all. Then Lodge started inviting Richard to go along on his antique trips, help carry the heavy stuff. It wasn’t too long after this that he started... well, being unfaithful. I could smell the other women on him. And now he’s gotten Melissa kidnapped.”

She broke again.

I leaned over and put the fresh side of the washcloth on her forehead and held her hands as she gave into her tears, her entire body shaking.

“I was such a rotten mother.”

“C’mon, now, Eve. You know better than that. You really do.”

“You don’t know. You just don’t know. All the times I could’ve spent time with her and—”

Then she fell to crying again.

As if understanding that Eve needed great care and fondness, Sara trotted over and gave her a few more love licks on her teary cheeks.

Eve laughed through her tears. “Good old Sara.”

“She sure is,” I said.

Eve looked up at me, a sad stricken glance. “Please find my daughter. Please. You don’t know how bad I wanted to call Jane Avery. But I can’t. So you’re my only hope. My only one.”

“Maybe I’m getting closer,” I said.

She reached up and took my hand. “I really appreciate all this. Don’t think I don’t.”

“You’d do the same thing for me.”

And she would, too.

I leaned down, got her pillows straight behind her head, kissed her on the cheek again, got the washcloth straight on her forehead and said, “I’ll try and call you early this evening. Let you know how things are going.”

She gave my hand a squeeze and then sighed deeply and closed her eyes.

Maybe she’d take a little nap, after all.

5

I spent the next few hours in the old stone library, the one with the lion and the gargoyle respectively guarding the entrance.

People came through the front doors knocking rain off their hats and shaking out plastic raincoats and smelling of fine chill air.

I sat in the reading room looking through back issues of the New Hope Clarion, which was the weekly paper. I had dug out the papers from five years ago.

I saw stories that made me feel I was in some kind of time warp. Pleasantly so. No banner headlines about serial rapists or shootouts at drug busts or four-year-olds mysteriously snatched from playgrounds... No, here the headlines ran to tractor pulls and VFW picnics, to softball tournaments and concerts in the town square. There was a great old Twilight Zone episode about a commuter who looked out his train window every day and fancied that he saw a peaceful turn-of-the-century town there just waiting for him to visit. So one night, sickened by a grisly job in advertising and an equally grisly wife, he jumps off the moving train... and dies. And when he wakes up, there he is, in the turn-of-the-century town. There are a lot of such towns in Iowa even today, and you don’t need to jump from a moving train to find them, either.

After an hour or so, I took a break, ambling down the hall to the restroom and then to a small room where a coffee vending machine stood next to a Frigidaire from the early 1960s, on the face of which was a sign that read PEPSI 25 cents. Who could pass up a bargain like that? The room had three small folding tables with a few chairs designated to each table. It was a room for sack lunches and lazy lunch-hour gossip.

While I was sitting there drinking my bottle of pop, a white-haired elderly woman wearing a flowered summery dress and a cute little straw hat bought a Pepsi of her own and sat at the table next to mine.

We smiled at each other in the way of polite strangers, and then I decided that if she was a long-time citizen here, she just might be able to help me.

After introducing myself, I said, “Have you lived here a long time?”

“Oh, my, yes,” she smiled. “Nearly seventy-five years.”

“It’s a wonderful little town.”

She laughed. “You must be from the city.”

“These days I am.”

“People my age who grew up in towns like these have a lot of great memories but not everything was so wonderful.”

“Oh?”

“Well, we didn’t have a hospital here until 1932, for one thing. A lot of people died by the time somebody could get them to Cedar Rapids. And for another thing, if you lived on a farm, the way my folks did, you didn’t have running water and electricity until about the same time the hospital was built. And the state didn’t get around to building good roads until well into World War Two. But the worst of it were the outhouses. There’re a lot of jokes about them these days but believe me, back when you were a young girl trying to be a proper lady, outhouses were no fun at all, especially on winter mornings.”

I laughed. “You make it sound pretty bad.”

“No. I just make it sound realistic. It was a much better world back then, but you sure had a lot of inconveniences.”

I coughed. Getting drenched while ducking bullets was probably going to net me a nice strong head cold.

“Did you ever know a man named Brindle around here?”

“Stan Brindle?”

“Why, yes. Stan Brindle.”

“Sure I knew him. Most folks did. He was a pretty prosperous farmer up until the late eighties,” she said, sipping her Pepsi.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“Oh?”

“What put him out of business, I mean. So suddenly.”

“Well, it’s no secret. The same thing that put a lot of other farmers around here out of business. He came out of the seventies looking very good on paper but owing the bank a lot of money. In the old days, a farmer could always borrow against the next year’s harvest if he needed to. But credit was drying up everywhere.”

“So he went bankrupt?”

She nodded. “That and some trouble.”

Which is what I had been looking for in the newspaper stacks — the trouble Stan Brindle had gotten into.

“Drugs,” she said.

“Selling them, you mean?”

She shook her head, looking old-lady elegant as she did so.

“Not selling them. But letting drug dealers use his farm to store their drugs and have some of their meetings. Cousin of his from Davenport, I believe, he was the one actually running the drugs.”

“They got caught?”

“Yes, they did.”

“Did Brindle go to prison?”

She frowned. “He made it as far as county jail. He was in there two nights and he hanged himself with a belt he wasn’t supposed to have. It was pretty sad. I knew Stan ever since he’d been a little boy. He was a big dreamer, and sometimes he could be a braggart, but he wasn’t really a bad boy. Not really. In fact, he was pretty much straight until he met Reverend Roberts.”

“The same Reverend Roberts who’s in town now?”

She smirked. “The one and only. After he started getting into so much financial trouble, Stan and his wife decided that they needed to start going to church again. You know how people do when they’re desperate. ‘I don’t want to hear a peep out of you, God, unless I get in trouble.’ That sort of attitude. Well, anyway, they started going to church there and then they started socializing with the reverend and his wife. And the reverend started spending a lot of his spare time out at the farm, hunting and things like that. That was what he said, anyway. But what really happened was that he started having an affair with Stan’s wife, who was one of those very pretty, shy little women who always wound up getting dominated by their men. Rachael, her name was. Anyway, one night things got so bad — apparently he’d caught them in bed — that Stan went over to the reverend’s house with a shotgun. Took a couple of shots, too, but missed. Law got called in and everybody in town pretty much knew what happened and Rachael moved away, went back to Springfield, Illinois, which was where she was from originally. It was after that that Stan got caught up in the drug thing with his cousin from Davenport.”

“But you say that the reverend used to spend a lot of time at the farm?”

She nodded. “A lot.”

If that was the case, the good reverend would know a good place to bury bodies he needed to get rid of, bodies belonging to young girls he’d molested while filming them performing illegal sex acts. Then, for the first time, I thought of Mike Peary’s letter to Nora, in which Mike detailed how several girls who’d visited New Hope had later been murdered. Traveling around the countryside and killing young girls would be no trouble for a man who was already traveling anyway.

She looked at her watch. “Oh, heck.”

“What?”

“I wanted to be home in time to watch Oprah. She’s the only one of those talk-show people I can stand. She seems genuinely sincere.” She looked out the gray window at the dripping rain. “But I’ll never make it in time.”

“Tell me where you live. I’ll give you a ride.”

“But don’t you want to go back to your newspaper stacks?”

“Thanks to you, I won’t need to. You told me everything.”

She beamed. “Well, it’s nice to know that somebody finds me useful at my age.”

6

“You lucked out, Robert,” my FBI buddy said on the phone ten minutes after I left the library.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Brooklyn, 1956.”

“All right.”

“Guy was into disemboweling women, but he got so bloody doing it he was afraid somebody’d spot him with blood all over his clothes. Killed four women that way.”

“And then?”

“Then he decided that, rather than kill them in parks or alleys as he’d been doing, he’d knock them out, put them in his car trunk, and take them back to his garage.”

“All right.”

“First of all, he became a much more efficient butcher. He started using a power saw. And second of all, he bought himself a butcher’s rubber apron and gloves, and he started disposing of the bodies by chopping them up in pieces and burying them all over his neighborhood. There was only one problem.”

“Oh?”

“Dogs. He was all right in the winter, burying the meat in the snow, but when he buried it under plain dirt — the neighborhood dogs found it.”

“Wow.”

“But, to answer your question, there are forty-three cases where the killer suddenly changed body-disposal patterns.”

“How often did burying them show up?”

“In twenty-six of the forty-three.”

“So it’s a popular method.”

“It’s popular until they get caught.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

“Just send me a new Mercedes.”

“Thanks.”

7

He didn’t want the man at the pet store getting suspicious, so he bought most of the puppies in Cedar Rapids or Iowa City.

Look funny, a guy coming in once a month or so and buying himself a puppy. Month in, month out that way.

But today there wasn’t time.

Had to buy it right here in town.

Ran into the pet store out of the rain; ran out ten minutes later with a plump, cuddly three-month-old Scottie puppy. Black it was, and cute as a button.

Thing yipped all the way out of town, all the way out to its ultimate destination.

He didn’t do this because he hated puppies or because he was sadistic.

No, he just thought that he owed it to those little friends of his.

They pretty much had the same menu all the time. They’d certainly appreciate a change of pace every once in a while.

That’s why he bought the puppies.

He’d tried cats once but they weren’t plump enough if they were still in the pet store.

If there was time, he’d probably go out in the woods and do a little hunting.

Boy, he could bag some things that would really make those little friends of his excited and happy.

Very happy.

The ride wasn’t all that long.

Took the puppy from the backseat, still yipping of course, and carried him in the cardboard container straight down the hill and inside to where the trapdoor was beneath the empty rusty milk cans that still smelled sour from their long-ago milk.

Took the puppy out of the cardboard box.

Aw.

He really was a cute little thing.

Such a sweet face. And those big brown eyes. And that wet black nose.

Knelt down, then, the puppy struggling in his grasp, and yanked the trapdoor open.

The odor nearly knocked him backwards. Always did, right at first.

But then he began inhaling deeply, purposely suffusing himself with it.

God, he loved that smell. Once he got used to it.

Puppy really started squirming, so he really had to belt him hard across the head and pull hard on his floppy black ear.

“You be quiet. You be quiet now. You hear me?”

Then he leaned over the square hole in the floor and peered down into the cold darkness below.

They were down there, oh, yes they were down there, his friends with the red eyes and the fat gray bodies and the knife-sharp teeth that could rip a human body clean to the bone in just a few minutes.

Well, maybe not an adult human body.

He’d never actually pushed one of those down there.

But the little girls, when he was done with them; the little girls he always pushed down there.

And one night, he brought a flashlight along so he could see it, see the dozens of them swarming over the naked little body, rending and ripping and chewing and chittering until their mouths shone with blood and the smell of the kill was enough to make him come without even touching himself.

Oh, yes; oh, yes.

And when there wasn’t a little girl to give to his red-eyed friends, well, that was when he bought them a nice new puppy.

As now.

“Bye-bye, little friend,” he said.

The puppy wrestled, protested, as if it well knew what was about to happen.

“Nothing personal,” he said.

And dropped the sweet little thing through the deep dark opening in the dirt.

There was a distant thwump when the puppy hit the far dark ground. And then there was a curious silence, as if the red-eyed things didn’t know what to make of his gift.

But then reason prevailed.

And they knew very, very well what to make of his gift.

And what to do with his gift.

The puppy yipped and cried as they swarmed over him, and began the frenzied tearing, the frenzied ripping, the frenzied frantic separation of flesh from bone.

And there he knelt, peering down into the darkness; watching, watching.

8

She came up from nowhere, just as I gave the door to my motel room a small push.

I smelled her perfume before I heard her, the cold rain having started again, the six o’clock sky dark as night now.

“I want to show you something,” she said.

I stepped back, letting her walk into the room ahead of me.

She found a lamp, snapped it on, sending faint illumination throughout the shabby room.

“God, this is really a depressing place.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” I said.

“Too bad there isn’t another motel in town.”

She looked as good as always, Joanna Lodge, starched white blouse, blue cardigan and trim jeans flattering her slender body, her tumbling golden hair drawn up into a loose chignon.

I went over, grabbed a warm Diet Pepsi, filled two plastic glasses half full and then handed her one of them.

She smiled. “I’m not sure I should thank you for this.”

“I’m a jet-setter,” I said. “I live large.”

She looked around. “I really do feel sorry for anybody who would have to stay here for any length of time. Rooms really affect my moods.”

“Which chair do you want? The blue uncomfortable one or the red uncomfortable one?”

“How about the blue uncomfortable one?”

“It’s yours.”

We spent a few minutes talking about her grief, or lack thereof. “I keep wanting to cry.”

“You will.”

“Maybe not. Maybe — well, I had been sort of psyching myself up for a divorce, anyway. I just couldn’t deal with all the women he had. Maybe I just closed myself off to him. Permanently, I mean.”

“Possible, I suppose.”

“When I talked to his parents last night I really hurt their feelings.”

“Because of how you sounded?”

She sat there in her blue uncomfortable chair sipping her warm Diet Pepsi. “I wanted to sound dutiful. You know, properly bereaved. I gave it a good try but I don’t think I was very convincing. And I know I hurt them. They’re very decent people. I always wondered if Sam hadn’t been adopted. Emotionally, he was their total opposite.”

“You really think he was adopted?”

She shook her head. “No, he looked very much like both of them. But in every other way, he was unlike them.”

“You said you had something you wanted to show me.”

She opened her purse, took one white number-ten envelope from it and then a manila envelope.

“I didn’t tell you this the other day because I wasn’t sure about you. Sam had been acting very strange lately. Upset. Frightened, may be a better word. Jumpy when the phone rang; always looking out the window when he heard a car go by.”

“Do you know why?”

“No. But last week, I followed him a couple of times.”

“Followed him where?”

“To the old Brindle farm. I went there the morning after his death, too. Jane Avery stopped over earlier this afternoon and all but accused me of knowing something about his murder. She also said that she’d seen me drive out to the Brindle farm this morning.”

“Did you?” I said, knowing the answer because, like Jane, I’d seen her blue Toyota sedan go into the main barn on the Brindle farm.

“Yes. I was trying to figure out why Sam kept going out there.”

“And did you?”

“No. I mean, I walked around but I couldn’t find anything. Nothing at all.”

“But you must have found something.” I nodded to the two envelopes in her lap.

“Oh, right. These.”

She got out of the blue uncomfortable chair and walked the envelopes over to me.

I opened the manila envelope first and knocked out a piece of heavy, official paper from inside.

“Craig Tolliver,” I said.

“Who?”

“Craig Tolliver.” The son that the rich man Tolliver had told me had “died,” but was still alive and somewhere in town.

“You never heard your husband mention him?”

“No.”

“June 23, 1958,” I said. “That’s the birth date given here.”

“I wonder why my husband had that birth certificate.”

I set the birth certificate down and opened up the flap of the white number-ten envelope.

Inside was a piece of letterhead from the First National Trust Bank — “Your Friend in Deed Since 1926” — that thanked Sam Lodge for renting a safe-deposit box. The letter went on to say that it was sure he’d find many of their other services to his liking, too.

“He ever mention a safe-deposit box to you?”

“Not this one. Where we do the rest of our banking, in Iowa City, we have a safe-deposit box there.”

“When can you get this opened?”

“I called my attorney. He said that if I take in proper ID, along with this letter, the bank will probably let me open it up tomorrow.”

“You going to do that?”

She nodded. “Maybe when I get it open, I’ll find out who killed him.” She smiled sadly. “Maybe by then I’ll be able to cry.”

“You mind if I keep this birth certificate?”

“That’s fine.”

We were silent for a moment. She looked around the room. The rain pounded and bounced on the roof.

“This room really does depress me,” she said.

I was the same way after my wife died, so I recognized the feeling, fleeing any room where my memories of her grew too painful. It could be any room at all, one I’d never even been in before. But when the memories overtook me, I had to get out.

She was up, at the door.

I walked over to her.

“Thanks for bringing these over.”

She looked up at me. “Maybe I’ll drive to Iowa City and go to a movie.”

She wanted my permission. “That sounds like a good idea. See something light.”

That was another thing I’d learned about mourning. Comedies can help you a lot.

She stepped forward and gave me a hug — not because I was me, but because I was another warm sensate human animal, and she very badly needed contact with a like creature. It was a sisterly hug, and I gave her a brotherly one right back.

After she left, taking her soft intelligent voice with her, there was just the thrumming sound of the rain.

9

The house where Tolliver was staying was three blocks east of my motel. The walk was good. My middle-aging body was in bad need of exercise. In the fresh, wet air you could smell the summer flowers struggling for birth in the damp, dark mud. You don’t know what rich black soil is till you’ve held Iowa soil.

Tolliver was staying in a stone Tudor that looked as if it might be more comfortable in Beverly Hills. Lights shone in the mullioned windows.

He answered the door on the second knock. He wore a denim work shirt and a pair of chinos. He looked like a rich man trying hard to look ordinary.

“You look kind of stressed out,” he said.

“I am.”

He stepped aside and let me walk through the vestibule and into the living room with its massive open fireplace and Edwardian antiques. G. K. Chesterton had probably sat in just such a room while he wrote his Father Brown stories.

“Some sherry?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

He pointed to a Morris sofa. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“I need to keep moving. But I wanted you to see this.”

I handed him the manila envelope. He opened it up and took out the birth certificate, which he carried over to a lamp with a baroque shade.

“Is it authentic?” I said.

“From what I can see of it here, yes.” He moved it around in the light under the shade. “Where did you get it?”

“Sam Lodge’s wife found it in their house.”

“Does she know how Lodge got it?”

“No. But that’s not too hard to figure out.”

“It isn’t?”

He brought the certificate back to me.

“Lodge found this somehow and then started blackmailing your son. Eve McNally told me that her husband suddenly came into a lot of money. Joanna Lodge said the same thing about Sam.”

“So they figured out who Craig is.”

“Yes, and Craig returned the favor by killing Lodge.” I didn’t mention that he’d also kidnapped McNally’s daughter.

He looked at me with great weariness and sorrow. “We’re getting close to him, aren’t we?”

“Very close.”

He grabbed the sleeve of my jacket. “We’ve got to stop him.”

“I know. And I plan to.”

He looked longingly at the birth certificate, the way a man would look at a baby picture of his son. “I’ve read a lot about genetics these past few years. I suppose he was always a monster — just born that way, you know? But I don’t want to absolve myself of the part I played in it. I should have stopped him a long time ago.” He made no effort to hide his tears. “He really is a monster, isn’t he?”

“I’m afraid he is.”

I glanced around the room. What a perfect night for a place such as this, and all the better if you had Jane Avery for company, make her some hot cocoa and put on one of the old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies, foggy and mysterious London, but the fog and mystery of fiction, not the gore and grief of real murder.

“I’ll keep you posted,” I said.

The last thing he said was, “Do what you need to, Mr. Hokanson. Anything at all you need to.”

I nodded and went back out into the night.

In my room, I grabbed a box of ammunition, a flashlight and my small leather bag of burglary tools. I sensed it was going to be a long night.

In my car, I laid my Ruger on the passenger seat, put the ammunition neatly next to it, and backed out of the parking lot.

I needed to go back to the church. It was time to confront the good reverend and tell him everything I knew. Then it would be time to have him give Melissa McNally back to her mother.

Steam covered the windows. The defroster didn’t seem to help much. By the time I had rubbed the window clean, I was pulling up next to Jane Avery’s patrol car in the parking lot of her apartment complex.

She answered on the first knock. Whatever it was she really wanted to say, she restrained herself and said simply, “Oh.”

“I figured you’d be happy to see me.”

“I’ve got a headache, Robert, and I’m really not up for this.”

I sighed. “Look, I know you’re taking all this very personally, but you shouldn’t.”

“That’s what you drove out here to say?”

“I drove out here to say that I like you. A lot.”

“I wish you’d leave.”

“Goddammit—” I shook my head. “Sorry. I’m a little strung out at the moment.” I looked inside her decidedly untidy apartment. “You’re getting better. I don’t see any panties hanging on any doorknobs.”

She didn’t laugh. She didn’t even smile.

“Are you going to invite me in?”

“No.”

“Just like that? ‘No.’ You didn’t even have to think it over.”

“You’re obstructing justice, for one thing. You could be arrested.”

I reached out and touched her shoulder. At least she didn’t wince or pull away. “When it’s all over, you’ll understand why I couldn’t tell you anything.”

She turned her fetching head sideways, looking over her shoulder. “I’ve got some vegetable soup on. I’d better go eat it.”

“You make it yourself?”

“Right.”

“I forgot. That you’re a lousy cook, I mean.”

She looked at me a long time and said in a voice husky with pain, “Robert, just get out of here, will you? I really don’t appreciate this.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that.

I leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek and said, “I meant what I said. About liking you a lot.”

“Good-bye, Robert,” she said, and quietly closed the door, leaving me, in more ways than one, in the darkness.

I felt banished, cast out. I’d started thinking about Jane more seriously than I’d ever intended. Maybe it was her freckles or that stupid little nose of hers; more likely it was her wonderful combination of competence and tenderness I found so alluring.

A faint mist was in the air. The night smelled of the rain that had just quit falling. The parking lot was half-full and lonely-looking in the mercury vapor lights.

I was thinking about Jane and about how I might square things, so I didn’t see him until I was a few feet away. In his cheap brown leatherette jacket and dirty jeans, I didn’t recognize him at first.

He leaned against the trunk of my car, smoking a cigarette, watching me walk toward him.

He was a lone figure in the rolling midwestern night, just like the apartment house itself, which was surrounded by woods on three sides.

“I need to talk to you.”

“You should talk to your wife first, McNally. Give her a little peace of mind. She’s a good woman.”

“You don’t need to tell me that.”

“You ever lay a hand on her again, I’ll break your arms, and that’s a promise.”

“You supposed to be a tough guy?”

“No. Just a guy who doesn’t think men should beat up women.”

His eyes were animal bright and animal quick.

“I want to get my daughter back,” he said, anger gone suddenly. He sounded weary, scared. “Me and Sam Lodge — we got in way over our heads.”

“Tell me everything. Maybe I can help you figure something out.”

“I’m scared for her — for Melissa, I mean.”

He brought his cigarette to his mouth. His entire hand was shaking. “I really went and messed things up this time.”

“Just tell me what you know, McNally. You can beat up on yourself later.”

He pushed away from the car, and was just starting to stand up straight as he flipped his cigarette somewhere on the lawn, when I heard the report of a rifle — then two, three reports.

The odd thing was, McNally didn’t jerk when the bullets hit him, not at first. He only slumped back against the trunk as if he were weary beyond measure.

Then he crumpled, and it was quick and bloody and there was the frantic cry of a man who learns in a single instant that life is leaving him, that cold rushing eternal darkness is about to take him forever.

I caught him just as his cap was tumbling from his head, just before his head cracked the pavement.

As I laid him out on the cold driveway, he fouled himself, the stench hot and sour.

And then the apartment house door was bursting open. And Jane was coming quickly down the stairs, having obviously heard the rifle shots, and she was saying, “Are you hurt, Payne? Are you hurt?”

“Over here!”

By the time she reached me, McNally was gripping my hand and sobbing. He was saying things but they were the incoherent rush and jumble of last words.

When she knelt down next to me, she shook her head sadly, seeing at once that McNally would soon be dead.

And before she could object, I slipped my hand from McNally’s, got quickly to my feet and started running in the direction from where the rifle shots had come.

By the time I was twenty feet on the wet grass, I had my Ruger in my hand.

On the far side of the woods, I could see headlights from the two-lane highway leading out of town. The woods were no more than a quarter-mile deep and maybe the same across. But they gave a person plenty of places to hide.

The trail through the woods was all slippery mud and splashing puddle. I slipped and fell several times, skinning my knee once, cracking my head against a rather unyielding birch tree another time. The soggy brown leaves of autumns past covered trail and forest like a grimy parasite with a shiny wet shell.

I heard him ahead of me. He had deserted the trail and was crashing through the undergrowth that lay westward. He was the same man who’d shot at me earlier, I knew. And I also knew who he was.

I plunged into the undergrowth, keeping my Ruger held high above the brambles that snapped at my hand like an angry serpent, and the rocks that seemed to jump at my feet in order to trip me.

I was in brambles so deep I had to keep shifting my hips left and right to stop them from clinging to me. The trees changed abruptly from birch to pine, the boughs slapping my face with their scratchy fingers and high sweet perfume.

Horns sounded from the road to the east. Angry horns chastising somebody for nearly causing an accident.

He’d escaped, down the hill from the woods, straight across the highway where he likely kept his car.

I stood on the edge of the highway inside the glaze of my own chilly sweat, breath coming in hot rushing gasps, as I watched cars and trucks resume their normal course into and out of town.

He was nowhere to be seen, the man I’d been chasing. Nowhere.

The ambulance siren was still a few blocks away by the time I got back to the parking lot. The night was dark and windy with drops of rain being blown on the breeze. The exterior lights of the brick apartment house gave it the stark imposing qualities of a prison.

A small crowd encircled McNally’s now-dead body. A few of the less-optimistic ones had brought umbrellas, apparently planning to stay here for some time. As usual with people who show up for murders, they seemed both somber and excited, and maybe just a little bit ashamed of the latter.

Jane was talking on a portable phone, giving orders to her troops about how to handle murder scenes. At least they’d had enough practice lately.

I went up to her and said, “He got away.”

She snapped down the antenna on the black portable phone. “Did he tell you anything before he died?”

“He was going to. But he was shot before he could get it out.”

I looked down at McNally. Jane had draped her jacket over his face and the upper part of his chest.

“You didn’t get a look at the person who shot him?”

“Not really.”

She frowned. “Even if you did, I’m sure you wouldn’t tell me, anyway.”

I wasn’t sure how I was going to sneak away from here and go out to the church.

But then Jane went and made it easy for me.

“Why don’t you get out of here, Payne? I don’t need any more aggravation.”

I wanted to argue with her but what was the use?

“If that’s the way you want it,” I said.

Just then the ambulance, full of wailing grief, pulled into the parking lot, a hero too late to matter.

10

By the time I reached the church, the rain started again in earnest, cold and drab and relentless.

I parked in the U-shaped gravel drive, then ran up to the front door. I heard guitar music. Except it wasn’t of the churchly sort, those “born-again” ditties that seem to be about romantic love but are really about Jesus (“He’s the greatest lover the world has ever known/The only lover who will never leave you on your own” ran a song I’d heard while dialing around on the radio one day) — no, this was bayou blues crossed with some high fine rock licks.

I went inside, stood in the back.

Kenny Deihl didn’t see me or hear me, apparently. He just sat up on a folding chair on the empty altar, pausing now to tune his guitar. The church was dark except for the lone narrow beam of a small spotlight that highlighted Kenny’s blond hair.

I listened to the rain, hard and cold, and had a moment of simple animal appreciation for my shelter, even if it had been built by a hypocrite minister.

“Kenny.”

I walked down the center aisle. The stained-glass images were difficult to pick out with no sunlight streaming through them.

He’d played a few chords, hadn’t heard me.

“Kenny.”

This time, he looked up. He wore a green Western-style shirt and jeans and Texas boots.

“Hi, Mr. Hokanson.”

“You seen the reverend?”

“Not in the last hour.”

“Think he’s up at the house?”

Kenny shrugged, looked back at his guitar. “Suppose he could be.”

I reached the altar, looked up at him.

“You a part of it, Kenny?”

He didn’t raise his eyes, kept pantomiming notes. “A part of what, Mr. Hokanson?”

“Remember I asked you how the reverend made enough money to keep everything afloat?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I found out how he does it.”

Now he raised his head and looked at me. “It’s like I told you, Mr. Hokanson. The reverend’s treated me pretty good, all things considered, so I don’t figure it’s my business to ask him any questions about where his money comes from.”

“He’s the worst kind of man there is, Kenny. He molests little girls and boys.”

He frowned. “Now I sure don’t believe that. Tell me he drinks a little, or cheats on his old lady from time to time — yes, I’d have to say he probably does. But what you said — no way, mister. No way at all.”

“You ever go into Cedar Rapids with him?”

“Not really.”

“How about Mindy? She go in with him?”

The shrug again. “Sometimes, I guess.”

“They pretty tight are they, Mindy and the reverend?”

He picked a chord. The church echoed with its keening power. “Tight? Yeah, they’re tight I guess you’d say. After the reverend learned the truth about Mindy and all. He had a hard time with it at first, the reverend did, but he seems all right about it now.”

“I guess I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kenny.”

“About Mindy.”

“What about Mindy?”

He looked at me with unfathomable green eyes. Very somberly, he said, “Then you couldn’t tell either, huh?”

“Tell what?”

“Neither could the reverend.”

“Tell what?”

A slight smile this time. “Heck, I couldn’t tell either. Not till the reverend told me.”

“Told you about what?” I said.

“About how Mindy used to be a man.”

He just kind of drawled it out, nothing special now, old news in fact.

But to me it wasn’t old news.

If Tolliver was right that his son was still alive and killing people... what better disguise to assume than that of a woman?

“You’re sure of that?” I said.

“Mindy told him one night. All about it, I mean. Personally, I didn’t want to hear it. When she started talking about how — when he was still a man, I mean — they had to cut off his... Well, you know what I mean. I just couldn’t get that out of my mind. What kind of guy would let somebody cut off his... you know, down there.”

“Where did she have the surgery done?”

“Holland, according to the reverend.”

I thought of what the reverend’s wife had said last night, talking around a smirk, about how she hadn’t known her husband was so “kinky.” She’d been referring to the reverend and Mindy. Now her remark made sense.

Her husband was sleeping with a woman who had once been a man.

“They’re lovers?”

“Guess so. Like I said, it really ain’t my business.”

“And you don’t have any idea where I could find either of them now?”

“Not unless they’re up to the house.”

“Mindy goes up to the house?”

“Oh, sometimes. But then they get to squabbling. You know how women like to squabble.”

He played another lick, shrill and obscene in this ersatz house of God.

Then he grinned at me. “Gotta say one thing for those Dutch doctors.”

“What’s that?”

“They sure gave Mindy one fine set of hooters. I mean, her being a guy and all.”

11

I drove up the driveway to the reverend’s house. My car smelled of dampness now. The rain was falling so hard, it sounded as if hail were being mixed in.

I was still trying to make some kind of visceral sense out of what Kenny Deihl had just told me. It’s all very well to watch Oprah and Geraldo and Phil interview transsexuals but it’s another matter to realize that you actually met one. My first instinct, of course, was Kenny’s. Why would you willingly submit to having your pee-pee removed? You worked hard all your life to keep it from getting injured or damaged in any way — the little thing was pretty vulnerable when you came right down to it — and now here comes a guy who opens up his flasher coat and says, Take me I’m yours.

Of course, the reason I couldn’t understand that was because I didn’t have any sense of why transsexuals do what they do. Homosexuality is at least imaginable in many respects — you keep your born-with sexual identity, which means that you prefer lovers of similar identities. Not very mysterious, when you come right down to it. But transsexualism...

Both bays of the garage were open. Only one Lincoln was there. The garage was attached to the house so I parked inside the empty bay, then walked up to a veranda filled with colorful lawn furniture that looked like children forced to stay inside because of the rain. The veranda smelled of gin and cigarette smoke.

I knocked on the door several times but got no answer so I tried the knob, which was unlocked, and went inside.

The kitchen was what they call farm-style: wide-open spaces with lots of shiny pots and pans and cooking utensils dangling from a wooden contraption on the ceiling, large butcher-block table in the center of the big room and gleaming white refrigerator and stove and dishwasher tucked neatly into the east corner.

“Hello.”

But nobody answered.

“Hello.”

Again no answer.

I walked into the dining room. Like the living room and den, which I saw shortly after, it looked like a tribute to an interior decorator rather than a place where real human beings actually lived and laughed and sweated and snored and kissed. A little too-too, if you know what I’m talking about, from a very elegant but obviously uncomfortable Barrymore sofa to an antique china buffet that had to have cost at least half my annual income. But who would dare risk opening it up? I was as intimidated here as I was in a museum, a little boy’s fear of bumping or nudging or backing into some pricey work of art and watching it tumble to the floor and shatter.

I looked for foot tracks that a man might make who’d been running through the woods tonight but didn’t see any.

The noise was faint but had a regular rhythm. Opening and closing; opening and closing... opening and closing drawers, I finally realized.

The house was carpeted throughout so it didn’t take any great stealth on my part to quietly reach the door of the master bedroom and put my ear to it.

Drawers being opened and closed. Definitely.

I reached inside my jacket pocket, took out my Ruger with my left hand and eased the door open with my right. He was packing, getting ready to flee.

When he turned and saw me and saw the Ruger, he said, “What are you doing in here? I could have you arrested.”

He was still every bit the suave TV minister, from the carefully moussed hair to the suitably purposeful gray pin-striped suit to the brilliantly shined cordovan loafers. And he looked right standing in a room like this, with its canopied double bed and huge, curtained window. But despite his bluster, his poise was gone.

I took the photo I’d found earlier this morning. I walked over to him and tossed it on top of the bureau.

“Pick it up.”

“Why should I?”

I raised the Ruger and aimed it right at his forehead. “Pick it up.”

He picked it up. Looked at it. His mouth twitched unpleasantly.

He tossed the photo back on the bureau. “That doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“I’ve got two witnesses who saw one of your white Lincolns pull up to an old closed-up shop in Cedar Rapids. And I’ll be glad to take you down there and show you the video equipment, and the blood from where the girls were beaten doing some bondage tricks.”

He shook his head. “It’s them.”

“Them who?”

“Them,” he said, sounding miserable. “I told them they were going to get in trouble. And now they have.”

“I still don’t know who ‘them’ is.”

“My wife and Mindy, who else?”

“What are you talking about? Why would Mindy and your wife get together?”

He smirked. “I spent a few nights with Mindy myself — before I learned that she’d once been a man. But it wasn’t me Mindy wanted, anyway. It was my wife. And it was their idea for the porno movies. All I did was sell them while I went around the midwest with my religious program.”

“I suppose that makes you clean?”

“No, it doesn’t. But at least I didn’t exploit those little girls myself.”

I startled both of us by hitting him hard across the mouth with my Ruger.

He sank to his knees, blood bubbling through his fingers.

He was crying, and somehow the idea of him crying sickened me, and so, again startling myself, I kicked him hard in the ribs.

He fell over on his side and got into a fetal position.

“Why does everybody go out to the old Brindle farm?” I said, standing over him.

He made the mistake of not answering.

My foot sliced into two more of his ribs.

He started blubbering, blood pouring through his fingers again. He was crying again, too. “That’s where they set up the new studio.”

“So McNally and Lodge were blackmailing Mindy and your wife?”

He shook his head. “Don’t know anything about blackmail.” He groaned, holding his ribs.

I remembered the two black men saying that they hadn’t seen the white Lincoln in a long time. “A trapdoor in the barn floor.” He looked up at me and said, “Don’t hurt me anymore, all right? I really can’t take pain. I really can’t.”

But I didn’t believe him. I raised my foot and kicked him again, this time in the chest.

But I guess he was right after all, the way he started sobbing. He really couldn’t take pain. He really couldn’t.

I left him there and walked back through the house and out the side door to my car.

I drove down past the church, past Kenny Deihl’s pagan guitar licks, and out into the country.

It was time for me to visit the old Brindle farm.

12

Fog wrapped round and round the old brindle farmhouse, a snake squeezing its victim to death, and glowed silver and opaque in my headlights as I glided down the gravel driveway. Distant and unseen, animals on the neighboring farm bayed and cried, like children calling out for help in the blind and smoky night.

I cut the lights when I pulled even with the farmhouse, and coasted several more feet before shutting off the engine, my tires making the gravel crunch and pop loudly in the oppressive and spooky silence.

Fog had swallowed up everything; I couldn’t even see the ornament on the hood of my car.

I did a check of my tools — Ruger, flashlight, knife. The rest would stay behind.

I got out of the car, closing the door softly, almost afraid of another sharp noise in the gloom, as if I might awaken some lurking monster.

In the fog, the shape of the near barn was virtually impossible to see, only the gambrel roof having any real form to it.

I stopped, listened.

I’d heard something, or thought I had.

I was sweating again, and trembling. I kept thinking of how vicious I’d been with Roberts. Unlike me, usually; and not a side of myself I wanted to see.

I listened intently. Nothing.

Shoes scuffing gravel, I walked down to the east door of the barn and let myself in.

Barns retain their odors for decades, all the milk and waste and hay and mud and rotting wood like wraiths on the deserted air.

I shone my light around. There was a bullpen and two wide stalls on the west end; and several narrow cow stalls on the east end. On the walls hung old bridles, the leather coarse and cracked; and rusted pitchforks and shovels and rakes; and half a rusty Schwinn bike that had probably been fine and shiny and new about the time John Kennedy was becoming president, the front wheel missing.

I found a wobbly ladder angled against the upper floor and climbed it, splashing my light around on the hayloft above. Except for a rotting bundle of hay, the loft was empty, stray pieces of the stuff shining like fool’s gold in the gleam of my flash.

Downstairs again, I found a small room that had probably been used for storing feed, and a milkhouse just outside the back door.

Rain fell through the holes in the roof and made hollow pocking sounds as they struck the floor far below.

It took me twenty minutes to find the trapdoor, concealed as it was beneath several boards in one of the narrower stalls.

I thought of what Joanna Lodge had told me about how people in this part of Iowa had dug subbasements and root cellars to hide runaway slaves.

I got down on my knees, set the boards aside, wrapped my hand around the ringbolt and gave it a yank. It was three feet by three feet, plenty wide enough for carrying things down. I remembered what Peary had said about the killer suddenly disposing of the bodies differently — and about what the FBI had told me about the Brooklyn man who’d started burying his victims.

Cold and fetid air, the air of the grave, rose from the room below, and I was rocked back on my haunches. I sat still a long moment in the dark and damp barn, letting the gaseous odors subside.

I angled the beam of my flashlight down into the room below. A ladder that looked much sturdier than the one leading to the hay loft stretched down into shadow.

I started climbing down.

The air grew colder, the smell more fetid, as I descended the ladder. Just from the air currents, I could tell that this was a much larger room than I had expected. A few times the ladder rocked, threatening to dump me off, but for the most part, I had no trouble.

I reached the floor of hard-packed earth and turned around.

The room was at least ten yards long and at least as wide. On the end where I stood, the wall had been clumsily bricked over. But at the opposite end, some trouble had been taken setting up wallboard and pouring a good stretch of concrete floor.

I walked down there, still shuddering from the chill, still trying not to take the unclean odors too deeply into my lungs.

On the far end was where the videos were filmed.

My light played over a bulky black portable generator that would be adequate to run a few lights and a camera. In this same corner was a bed, now mussed. I found streaks of blood on the white satin sheets and splattered across the wall. A pair of handcuffs hung from the brass bedpost. Blood had turned one of the cuffs dark. I touched it. The blood was dry, old.

For Mindy Lane and Betty Roberts, this subterranean room would be much safer than a rented store in Cedar Rapids. There would be nobody here to note the comings and goings of your white Lincoln.

And then I heard it, or thought I did, that faint mewling that had stopped me a few minutes ago when I was walking down to the barn.

What was it? And where was it coming from?

I took a last look around at the room, trying to imagine what it was like for little girls of eight or nine to be dragged down here and forced to perform sex acts. It would scar them, spiritually if not physically.

I went up the ladder, glad to be climbing out of this place.

Up top, I closed everything up, carefully replacing the boards, so that no stray cat or dog would hurt herself by falling down the rabbit hole to the very perverted Wonderland lying below.

And just as I was finishing up, my flashlight lying atop a stall ledge and giving me sufficient light, I heard it again.

Even above the chill rain and the cold soughing wind — that faint cry that I could only liken to the sound of a young animal crying for help. The fog made the sound even fainter.

I took my flashlight and went back outside to see if I could locate the source of the sound.

I got drenched for my trouble, rain even filling my shoes.

Where was it? What was it?

This time, when the tattered solemn plea came again, I turned back and realized that the cry was coming from the barn. Not the main barn I’d just been in but the much smaller and older barn to the east.

I walked down there, stumbling once through the fog on the foundation of some long-gone silo. They were ideal for tripping dumb human beings who didn’t take extra care in the fog.

The closer I got, the clearer the sound was, and by now I could recognize it for what it was: a woman screaming and screaming and screaming.

I wanted to hurry but the fog made that unwise. I carefully picked my way down the sloping hill, my head starting to go numb from the steady drilling force of the rain, my sinuses getting themselves ready for a good long siege.

The barn door hung skewed badly left, thanks to the fact that its only support was a lone rusty hinge. I eased it creaking open and shone my light inside.

No stalls in this one, no rooms for storing feed, no small round milkhouses or high shadowy lofts, just a square storage box, maybe four feet deep and three feet wide, built along the back wall of the aged barn — that and the rolling ancient dust and the smell of axle grease and motor oil. A 1952 Ford fastback, the kind of car small-town high-school boys drove well into the seventies, was up on blocks. A long time ago somebody had put a lot of time and care into it. But now, in the harsh eye of my flashlight, it looked abandoned and corroded, rust taking its eternal toll, the giggles of the high-school girls seduced in the backseat long ago flown away, like beautiful butterflies on the last day of summer.

The scream came from the back of the barn, past the Ford, past a shadowy stack of firewood.

I drew my Ruger and went back there, still trying to figure out how the sound could be so muffled.

And then I thought, If one barn has a basement room, why not both barns? Didn’t Joanna Lodge say that a lot of buildings had such hiding places?

I went to the west comer of the barn, dropped to my knees and began clawing through some bricks and loose hay that looked suspiciously neat, as if somebody had carefully contrived it to look messy.

I found trapdoor and ringbolt in seconds. This door was as wide as the other but looked as if it were heavier. I took the ringbolt in my hand and tugged but it didn’t budge. By now the woman below had heard me, and her screaming was constant. She was also sobbing and blubbering and crying out, “Hurry! Please hurry!”

It took several tries before the door even budged; three more tries before I got it open.

There on my knees, I clutched my throat, touched my stomach and vomited into the scraps of hay next to me. The odor from below was that foul.

The woman continued to scream but I was afraid to lean back toward the opening and shine my light down there, afraid of what I would see. The reeking odors told me it was something beyond comprehension.

But I had no choice but to crawl back there and play my light below.

I can’t tell you how many of them there were — a hundred at the least, perhaps two hundred at the most — enough to entirely cover the floor of the small basement, some the size of small fat puppies, others barely past the infant stage when rats are blind and deaf. And over all was the mad chittering of their hunger and zeal as they swarmed over what was left of Mindy, who lay on her back on the ground. Half her face had been eaten away so that an eyeball hung on a bloody cheek, and her gnawed and bloody arms shone white with bone. Her stomach was a bloody hole excavated by dozens of hungry rats. She was still screaming, but she wouldn’t be screaming much longer. She was very near death.

I thought of the few things I knew about black rats, how they’d originally come from the deserts of southern Asia but then stowed away on the ships of the returning Crusaders, to help bring bubonic plague to Europe, which ultimately killed millions. And how rabid rats had been known to rip apart animals as big and formidable as horses.

Next to Mindy lay the remains of Betty Roberts, the reverend’s wife. Her face had been torn away, as had most of her torso, but I recognized the short, frosted hairdo. At the moment, a rat sat on her shoulder bone and picked the last of the flesh from her nose.

And as I trained my light back and forth across the floor, I saw the picked white bones of young girls, no doubt the runaways who’d done the porno movies. Done with, they’d been thrown down here as feast for the rats.

I fired two shots straight into the dozens of rats still massing around Mindy. They scattered briefly, the report ear-numbing as it echoed below, but it was too late. They had gotten the top of her head open enough to begin eating her brain.

I leaned to the side and vomited again. I would never be able to forget what I’d just seen. Never.

And then I sensed somebody standing at the back of the barn, a silhouette in the gloom, and I raised my flashlight and saw Kenny Deihl standing there in his Western getup, smiling at me.

“Pretty impressive, isn’t it?” he said. “How fast they can totally rip somebody apart?”

I didn’t need to ask who he really was, the monster who was Tolliver’s son, who had sent photos of his victims to his mother and father.

“But then, you’re going to find out all about my friends for yourself, Mr. Hokanson. I’m going to put you down there with them.”

I had made the mistake of dropping my Ruger while I was vomiting.

Kenny Deihl had made no such mistake at all. He kept a Magnum trained on me all the time he talked.

13

He had killed them all, he told me, Mike Peary, Nora and Vic, Lodge and McNally, Mindy and Betty Roberts. They had all uncovered his secret — or he thought they had, at any rate — and so he was forced to kill them. Eve McNally he’d beaten up when she couldn’t tell him where the tape was that her husband had.

As he would now be forced to kill me. He’d tried it once already, on that first day. God, it seemed so long ago. After Mike, he’d gotten nervous about how much Nora knew, and followed her for a while.

“How about Melissa? You took her so McNally and Lodge would give you back something they were blackmailing you with, right?”

He nodded.

“Very creative, those two. They hid out here and watched the taping in the barn over there. I always told Mindy and Betty that I’d drive the girls back to Cedar Rapids and drop them off. But I never did. I brought them over here and fed them to the rats.” He smiled his improbably boyish smile. “You know the funny thing? Those’re the only animals I’ve ever liked, those rats. Hated everything else.” He shrugged and moved in closer to me. My flashlight was on the floor. He bent over, picked it up, shone the beam in my face. “So good old Lodge and good old McNally videotaped me killing one of the runaways and stuffing her down with the rats. They made me pay them $6,000 a month. I have some money I diverted from Eleanor before I left her — but I just didn’t like the principle of paying somebody blackmail money.”

He was silent for a time. Rain plopped from the roof to the ground in front of me. The old hay smelled sour-sweet in the darkness. I avoided looking at my vomit.

Suddenly, he turned off the flashlight. “Don’t say anything or I’ll kill you on the spot.”

I said nothing, just eased myself quietly to my feet. He could see me with no problem. And could kill me with no difficulty.

At first, I didn’t know what he was so agitated about. There was just the hissing rain and wind and the far-distant midnight trains.

And then I heard it, an almost inaudible squishing sound.

What was it?

I had to hear it for a time before I recognized it. Then — footsteps. Yes. Somebody was outside the barn, sneaking up.

In the doorway I saw nothing but the fainter darkness of the night. And then somebody was there, peering inward.

Rain hammered the roof; wind rattled the back door.

Inward came the person; one, two, three cautious steps.

Whoever it was carried a shotgun.

Four, five steps now.

“Watch out!” I called, pitching myself to the right and the hard earthen floor.

As I did so, I saw a yellow eruption of flame and smoke as Kenny’s gun fired in the darkness.

He caught the person; there was a thrash of old hay as, wounded, groaning, he fell to the floor.

“You sonofabitch,” Kenny said in the gloom. “You’re going to regret coming in here, believe-you-me.”

As I scrambled back to my feet, he turned the flashlight on again and found the person he’d wounded.

The blood from her shoulder wound ruined the nice starchy look of her blue uniform shirt. She lay on her back, holding a bloody hand to the wound. The injury looked serious.

“Stay right where you are!” Kenny shouted at me above the din of rain and wind.

But I didn’t pay any attention to him.

I went over to Jane and knelt down beside her.

“Thanks for warning me,” she said.

“Least I could do,” I said, touching my fingers to her wound, trying to see how bad it was. Awful bad.

“You shouldn’t have followed me,” I said.

She grinned her girly grin. “Least I could do,” she said.

Kenny came over. “Help her over to the trapdoor there.”

My reaction was to spring to my feet and start to swing on him but all he did was raise his Magnum and push it into my face.

“Don’t worry about being noble, Hokanson. You’re both going to die. I’m too much of a gentleman to let her die alone.”

Just before he hit me hard on the side of the head with his Magnum, I heard a kind of faint bleating sound from the storage box near the back. I wondered if an animal had been trapped in there. But then I didn’t wonder about much at all because when the gun cracked against my skull, I felt my knees start to buckle.

He brought his knee up between my legs and caught me hard and straight in the groin.

Pain blinded me momentarily; he pushed me to the floor, next to Jane, and said “Help her up.”

“Do what he says, Robert. C’mon.”

But I must have moved too slowly — because he took two more steps toward me. This time he hit me so hard my knees buckled entirely and I dropped to the floor. I was dizzy, and everything was getting faint and fuzzy.

I pitched forward into the deeper darkness of my mind where pain and fear lay like shameful secrets.

Could I get up? Drag myself over to Jane in time to help her? Somehow get my hands on Kenny?

I wasn’t out long, just long enough for him to carry Jane over to the trapdoor.

She fought him constantly, even using the arm of her wounded shoulder to drive the heel of her hand into his jaw.

But I had recognized the look in his eyes; he was as eager for death as his friends, the rats.

He dropped her hard on the floor, so that her shoulder lay directly over the hole.

The response was instant. A kind of chant, a keening cry unlike anything I’d ever heard before in my life, went up in the old barn, louder even than wind and rain combined, the cry and chant of rats as they are teased with just a few drops of blood falling from above, the same cry and chant of the rats that overran medieval European villages, and that ate infants in the dark impoverished streets of eighteenth-century London.

Kenny smiled at me. “She’s really working them up. They love that blood of hers.”

He watched, amused, as I drew myself to my feet again. But this time I was so wobbly, I thought I was going to pitch back down again.

Jane, who was obviously losing consciousness, tried to push herself away from the trapdoor, but she had almost no strength left.

Kenny dropped to one knee, jerked her around and shoved one of her legs down the hole.

The cries of the rats came up again as did the scent of their carrion.

They were eager for her, waiting.

And then Jane screamed. She looked at me frantically and shouted, “One of them is on my leg!”

I lunged at Kenny, but he sidestepped me and brought the gun down across my head again.

But this time I didn’t drop and I didn’t let go. I held onto him as if I’d tackled him. He kept pounding and pounding me with the handle of his weapon but I wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t let him be free to push Jane down the hole.

Jane screamed again. I turned my head briefly away from Kenny’s midsection and glanced down the hole.

Three fat black rats were ripping her leg with almost-desperate joy. More rats were scurrying up the ladder, dozens of them.

The gunshot came out of the darkness with no warning. Jane, Kenny and I had been too preoccupied to hear him come in, too preoccupied to watch him stand on the edge of the flashlight beam, lower his Remington shotgun and take the top off Kenny’s left shoulder.

All I knew to do was dive for Jane, pull her leg up from the hole and then grab the furry slimy rats in my hand and hurl them back down into the fetid darkness.

I carried Jane over to the wall, got her propped up and then had a look at her leg. They’d torn the flesh severely, and in a couple of places, you could see where their teeth had literally chewed off chunks of her flesh.

“No!” she was looking over my shoulder when she shouted.

I turned around to see what was going on.

Tolliver, looking curiously composed and wearing, as always, his blue blazer and white shirt and gray slacks and black penny loafers, was lifting his son up in his arms and carrying him over to the trapdoor.

Kenny was sobbing and pleading incoherently, seeming to know exactly what his father was going to do.

Jane cried out again to stop Tolliver, but it was too late. Many years too late.

Tolliver dropped his son to the floor, then knelt down next to him and started pushing him headfirst into the hole.

Despite the fact that Kenny’s shoulder had been torn away, he was still conscious enough to know what was happening.

And then he vanished, tumbled into the hole.

Tolliver stood up and quickly closed the trapdoor.

Kenny’s pleas and cries filled the barn.

Jane covered her ears as the keening of the rats overwhelmed Kenny’s screams.

At least they made fast work of him, Kenny falling silent no more than a few minutes after his father had slammed the door on him.

And then the rats fell silent, too.

And then there was just the sound of the rain, the incessant rain, and the soft whispers of midnight on the cold wind.

Jane was crying, holding onto me as if she were drowning.

Tolliver came over, looked at us a moment, and stooped to pick up his shotgun. “It’s over now. And I hold myself greatly responsible. I should have dealt with him long ago.” You could hear the tears in his voice suddenly.

“Thanks for saving us,” I said.

But there in the darkness, he didn’t seem to hear. There was just the sound of the soughing wind and his whisper. “It’s over.”

He turned, without saying anything more, and walked out of the barn, the shotgun cradled in his arms.

It took me a moment to figure out what he was going to do, but when I did I ran out of the barn, too, out into the rain and the darkness and the wind.

He stood facing the barn, angling the barrel of the shotgun just under his chin.

“Don’t do it, Mr. Tolliver!” I shouted, wind making my voice faint and ragged. “Don’t do it!”

I ran as hard as I could but I slipped in the mud and just as I was getting to my feet, I saw, through the lashing rain, his fingers tense on the trigger.

The roar of the gun, the kick of it in his hands, the explosion of the back of his head — all happened in moments.

And then he fell forward into the mud, fell on the gun that had served its purpose.

I went over and knelt next to him. The only sound was the rain now. I touched his shoulder and said something like a silent prayer. Maybe he’d been right. Maybe he should have dealt with his son a long time ago, before the boy had killed all those people. But that was easy for somebody to say, and much more difficult to do.

I stayed there with him a little while longer and then I got up and walked back down the hill to the barn.

Jane had managed to pull herself to her feet and was leaning against the wall. She had the flashlight in her hand.

“God,” she said, “I feel so sorry for him.”

I nodded. “Poor bastard. But maybe it was the right thing for him to do.”

“You want to help me out to the car?”

“In a minute,” I said. “Right now I need you to shine that light at the storage box over there.”

I’d remembered the mewling sound I’d heard earlier.

There was a padlock on the door to the storage box so I went back and took Jane’s service revolver.

I put a clean bullet through the hasp of the lock and moments after I did so, I heard the muffled plaintive cry again.

I opened the door, knowing exactly who I’d find.

Eight-year-old Melissa McNally was in there, bound, gagged, and tied to a chair.

She was dirty and sweaty and bloody where the rough ropes had cut her, and once I took the gag off her she started crying and laughing at the same time, as if she couldn’t decide which was the most appropriate.

And then, free of her bonds, I picked her up and held her tight and told her how much her mother loved her and how happy she would be to see her, and then I carried her back to Jane and the three of us set out into the night and the rain and the wind for Jane’s police cruiser.

We went on to the hospital, where it was quickly decided that Jane’s shoulder wound was bloody but not nearly as serious as we’d feared, though the leg needed a lot of work.

After they’d cleaned the wound and bandaged her up, I went where she lay on the gurney and said, “You look cute lying there like that.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet.”

“You do.”

“Well, if you’re so sure of that then how about giving me a kiss?”

I smiled. “I suppose that could be arranged.”

An hour later, I drove her home.

14

We followed the river, blue and fast in the July sunlight, and then we followed the clay cliffs for a time, angling eastward to follow a half-dozen horses who were running some steep pasture land, their coats shiny and beautiful in the soft afternoon.

I didn’t try any fancy stunts today. Three weeks after our night in the barn, Jane’s arm was still in a sling, and she tired very easily. Flying upside down probably wasn’t such a great idea.

We stayed up two hours and then landed in Herb Carson’s small field next to his aviation museum.

“You’re going to be an addict by the time this guy gets done with you,” Herb said to Jane as he walked us over to my car.

She looked at me and smiled. “That’s what I was thinking.”

I thanked Herb for the use of the plane and told him I’d probably see him again soon.

I drove us back to town.

“You still going to Washington?” Jane said after we’d been driving a few minutes.

“Next Tuesday.”

“For three weeks?”

I watched her a long moment. “That’s not a real long time. Not if people talk on the phone every night or so, anyway.”

She laughed. “I guess that’s right.” Then she shook her head and frowned. “See, this is why I’m so rotten about liking somebody.”

“You’re not rotten.”

“Sure I am. I mean, we don’t have anything official between us at all, and already I’m complaining about you going on a trip. I’m just too dependent on people. I drove my husband nuts. The poor guy.”

“Well, I sort of drove my wife nuts, too.”

“You did?”

I nodded. “I’m the same way. Too dependent. She’d go over to Iowa City to take a class, and I’d get all bent out of shape. Feel like I was deserted.”

“Hey, you really are dependent. That’s just the kind of thing I’d do.”

I laughed. “Hey, let’s go out tonight and celebrate being dependent.”

“You’re on.”

We had reached the city limits now, the tidy little Iowa town in the early July sunlight, everything clean and purposeful and timeless against the rolling green countryside. Home.

We were silent for a while, listening to a little rock and roll on the radio, and then she said, “Robert?”

“Yeah?”

“You think about him much?”

“About Tolliver?” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Yeah. I do. Quite a lot, in fact.”

“I wish he wouldn’t have killed himself. But I guess for him it really was about honor, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said, “honor or something very much like it.”

We found a Dairy Queen and pigged out.