The Killing Moon: A Novel

19 Tracy

She was greedy for him. The rum and the foreplay made Tracy greedy, and she had been naked so long she was beyond willing, beyond desire, she wanted more more more now now now. She wanted it all at once. Everything. Right now.

She gripped his sides, pulling him closer to her and pushing him away at the same time. A fight she wanted to lose. Wanted so desperately to lose.

She bit down on his shoulder, but still he did not stop. He did not seem to mind it at all, so she bit down again and sucked on the hard ropy muscle until his hand reached for her neck. He forced back her open mouth, his fingers remaining at her jaw.

She swallowed so that he would feel her throat working under his hand. Feel her vulnerability, her trust. She gave him her throat as she gave herself to him, willingly. But still he refused to remove his tongue from her nipple.

Her bare heels dug at the mattress. His other hand teased the insides of her thighs and she grabbed it and pushed it where it needed to go. For a moment he obeyed her, and her hips jolted to the touch. Then his hand slid back along her leg. She tugged again at his wrist, and he lingered longer this time, but only enough to disappoint.

That hand tugged on hers. He wanted her to do it. Guiding the pads of her own fingers to her trimmed hair.

What he had wanted all along.

Her to do it herself.

She did, and finally he stopped at her breast. He watched.

Closing her eyes was a concession to the pretense that pure momentary ecstasy guided her fingers in their firm, circling touch — not years of shameful practice.

She reached for him, and he was so hard, and she was so proud, guiding him in, lifting her hips to meet and take him.

She held tight. She held on so tight. She was leaving her body, she was going off to that place.

That place.

Right there.

That place that place that fucking place

He pulled out as he came, and she held him to her until he sagged. He lay at her side, breathing hard, and she looked down at his puddle in the bowl her belly made, dipping her fingers to feel the honeyness of him.

Him and the future of him. All his secrets.

Could it be her future?

His breathing evened out as he lay beside her. She knew she didn’t want anyone else, ever. But what he wanted, she still did not know.

A cold night in the dark month of February.

Tracy had gone out driving, her only getaway from the monotony of the farm, playing CDs in a portable player hooked up through the cassette slot in her truck, singing along when the mood struck or else just letting the music take her away.

The blue lights behind her brought her back fast. A woman knew not to get out of her car for a Black Falls cop. Tracy was in the hills a long way from the center of town.

She pulled over, watching the cop’s shadow come out of the headlights. She rolled her window down just a crack. He shined his flashlight inside the car.

She didn’t know him. She had heard that there was a new one in town.

“You follow me,” he told her, through the window, then returned to his car.

She tailed him back to the center of town, to the police station driveway. She waited inside her car while he took her license and registration and ran them through the computer inside.

He returned and fed her identification back to her through the sliver of open window, along with a speeding ticket for $115.

Tracy was out of her truck in a flash.

“A hundred and fifteen dollars!” she said. “Do you know how much it costs to feed a llama?”

He stopped halfway back to his car, turning in surprise. “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

“This,” she said, shaking the ticket, “is why you Black Falls cops have a bad name.” On that, she turned, stomping back into her truck.

“Hey!”

The anger in his voice startled her. She turned to see the steam of the word dissipating around his head.

“Consider that the price of good advice,” he said. “Don’t go out driving around town alone. Especially at night. You might find yourself at the mercy of a different cop.”

Something — the dreariness of the month, or the liberating spirit of the drive, or the warmth of her anger — kept her going. This outburst wasn’t anything like her. “You can’t just come into town, put on a stupid T-shirt, and start writing out tickets!”

Then she drove off fast, letting him watch her speed away.

The next day, still hot, she returned to the station to complain. Bucky Pail was at the front counter, shaking his head while she detailed her encounter with the overzealous new patrolman. “Let me see that,” he said, taking the ticket from her, looking it over. “Sure, we can take care of this for you. Won’t take more than a couple of minutes. Why don’t you just come on around in back here...”

She had started to go with him. That was the scariest part. She actually walked to the end of the counter, ready to accompany him to the back. Because he was a policeman, and because he was offering to help.

She stopped, looking at his grinning eyes, his crooked thumb rubbing against the speeding ticket in his hand.

Shocked by her own gullibility as much as his leering behavior, she turned and walked fast out of the station.

Don Maddox’s next shift was two nights later. Tracy made sure it was him before pulling into the station parking lot just after eleven. “You were right,” she said.

She told him what had happened, or almost happened.

“What were you doing driving around out there, anyway?” he said.

“Just driving.” She shrugged. “Getting away from this place without actually getting away. Trying to sort out my life.”

“By singing along with the Foo Fighters?”

She smiled. He had a good memory. “Why not?” she said. “You like the Foo?”

He shrugged. “I likes me some Foo.”

He said it just like that. The last thing she had expected to do that night was laugh.

“You could do better?” she said. “At sorting out a life?”

“Someone else’s, or my own?”

“Someone else’s.”

She remembered the way he watched her smile. The way he had tried to be cool, deliberate and deliberating, with his shrug and a quick glance back at the station. “I’m going to be taking my forty in about a half hour.”

“Is that really such a good idea?” she said. “Drinking a forty-ounce malt liquor on the job?”

“Radio code,” he said. “For my midnight lunch.”

They sat in the front seat of his patrol car, parked at the base of the twin waterfalls, splitting his tuna sandwich and watching the cascades spill out from beneath great caps of white ice.

She turned over beneath the cooled sheet, stretching a little, the muscles in her legs still pleasantly sore. This tussling between them, the struggle that manifested itself during sex, was like a play that mysteriously exposed the true hearts of its actors, revealing the tension in his, and the suspense in hers.

She couldn’t feel him with her knee, and, opening her eyes, found him sitting at the foot of the bed. She watched him there, his broad, bare back, his face turned toward the window where the air conditioner blew its red ribbon. All new to her, this relationship thing. She was trying hard not to see every little mood change of his in terms of their success or demise. “Where are you?”

He looked back at her, not all the way. “Thinking about my mother,” he said. “Living alone here. Dying alone. How I should have been with her.”

They were on the new double bed in his old bedroom. The queen bed in the master bedroom across the hall was stripped to the mattress and box spring, as though his mother’s body had been taken away just that morning.

The caffeine from the rum and Coke kept the alcohol pumping through him, the closest thing she had to a truth serum. This empty hour after sex was the only time he was vulnerable. She was learning how to navigate him. Asking the obvious next question — Why weren’t you with her? — would have shut him right down. Besides, these misgivings about his mother’s death were one reason he kept dragging his feet about selling her house. Which was fine with Tracy. Anything to keep him in Black Falls longer. Anything to give her more time.

She sat up with the sheet. “How did you get out in the first place?”

“Ah,” he said, “that’s a fun story.” He turned down the air conditioner, lowering the volume of the rattling windowpane, then came back to lie down beside her. “The mill closed while I was in high school. Someone realized that Black Falls was suffering this ‘brain drain,’ meaning that everyone who could get out of town — the smarter kids, the motivated ones — was leaving and never coming back. Why the town wasn’t getting anywhere. So to break the cycle, they came up with a plan. The Black Falls high school student graduating that next year with the highest grade point average would receive a full scholarship to a Massachusetts state university — with only one catch. It was a doozy. The recipient had to promise to return to Black Falls after graduation and work and live in the town for a minimum of five years. Like Black Falls ROTC, in a way. Not legally binding, but for a son or daughter of the town, a pledge.” He was on his back, telling this story to the ceiling. “So they ran bake sales and bottle drives, they had pancake breakfasts and raffles, got sponsors, anything they could do to raise money. Pinty got behind it, figuring the town needed something to rally around as a ray-of-hope project in that first post-mill year. My mother didn’t have much money, so this was my only real shot at affording school. And I busted my ass. And won it. I was the first, and, it turned out, only ‘Black Falls Scholar.’ Went to UMass Amherst, the honors program there, did my four years, graduated — and then never came back.”

“No.”

“Yep.”

“Oh my.”

“I jumped bail, basically. Sounds terrible, but honestly, I didn’t plan it. Just that, when the time came, I couldn’t bear to go back.”

“But — your mother.”

“I know.” He nodded. “I know. She said no one ever gave her a hard time about it. It had been four years since I’d won — people forget. Besides, things were getting worse fast, and the town had enough to worry about. Letting Pinty down was the worst part. How I did that to him, I still don’t know.”

“Obviously, he forgives you. I mean, just the way you two were standing together at the parade. You’re like the son he never had.”

“Yeah, well.” Donny shifted on the bed. “Actually, Pinty did have a son.”

“He did?”

“You know at the diner, that one big wall with all the crap about the town?”

“Sure. Maps, old postcards, photographs.”

“There’s a portrait of an Army Ranger in uniform?”

“That’s Pinty’s son?”

“Gregory.”

“Really? Was it Vietnam?”

“No. Yes — he fought in Vietnam. But he died after coming back. On a foam mattress in a friend’s basement in Montague. With a needle in his arm.”

She covered her open mouth. “Pinty’s son?”

“So, with my father having been his partner, Pinty watched out for me growing up. My mother couldn’t always hold everything together, so he helped me. Wanted big things for me.” Donny laughed once through his nose. “Yeah. I’m a model son.”

He was off the bed fast, turning the air-conditioning back up, standing before the blowing vent. It surprised her, hearing him talk like this. “You couldn’t have stayed with her forever.”

“No? Probably not. But where does the debt end?”

“I don’t know. But if you ever figure it out, please tell me. I’m still paying. Every single day.” It never occurred to Tracy that they had this in common: single-parent mothers. “I mean, she’s deaf, okay? But she’s totally self-sufficient, she can do everything for herself. Except run the farm single-handedly. Now, could she hire help? Of course she could. But she would much rather guilt me into staying. The truth is, she’s afraid of being alone. Do you know she doesn’t even ask where I go these nights? ‘A friend’s house’ is all I tell her. Never once has she pressed. She knows damn well by now it’s a guy. That her only daughter is ‘running around.’” She smiled. “But to force the issue might piss me off, and give me that nudge I need to go away. My mother lives basically in fear of me, the most unhealthy relationship possible. I mean — can you imagine if I ever came right out and told her I was sleeping with a Black Falls cop?”

Donny said, “All the more reason not to.”

“I guess.” She rolled over onto her hip, turning more toward him. “Are there other reasons? Myself, I wouldn’t mind holding hands in public, even just once.”

“Because it’s best.”

“Best — for you? I don’t see how it’s best for me.”

“This is a small town. The other cops don’t like me much.”

“Well, that’s dramatic,” she said. “I mean, I kind of liked sneaking around at first. It’s getting a little old now. Sometimes it seems like this way just makes it easier for you to break it off with me when the time comes.”

He checked her, maybe looking for a smile. She didn’t have one for him.

“You never wanted to get mixed up with a local girl,” she said. “Did you. You’re so afraid of getting trapped here. Of winding up like everyone else.”

She watched him brood on that, and noticed that he didn’t tell her she was mistaken. “This arrangement is unfair to you,” he said. “I know that. But I’ve been up front—”

“Please. Don’t.”

“I know you don’t want to hear it, but I have been crystal clear, exactly so that there are no illusions. I am just passing through here.”

“Donny—”

“I’m not doing this to be cruel. This is because I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Just stop, please. You have to not talk like that. Not after I just cleaned you off me with tissues.”

Sometimes he looked angry when he was only thinking.

“Please,” she said. “Just lie down next to me and shut up now. Please.”

And he did. The room was quiet except for the air conditioner rattling the window. She lay on her side behind him, sad now, and sad about feeling sad.

After a while he laid his hand over her hip, and she didn’t move away. She never slept, and he didn’t seem to either.

She climbed into her truck before dawn, activating the garage door opener he had given her, the one thing of his she got to carry around. One day she was going to show up and open the door and the house was going to be empty, and him gone.

Implacable men. Every misfortune Tracy’s mother had suffered over the past twelve years, she blamed on Tracy’s father and his leaving them.

Her mother had to be proven wrong. Had to be.

She turned past the FOR SALE sign onto the street. Tracy’s eyes remained damp the whole way home — not because things were bad between them, but because things were so good, and could be great, and still he was going to walk away. She drove on under the first candle of sky light like the dazed victim of an automobile accident that had yet to occur.

20 Frankie

The doorbell kept ringing in the apartment, insistently, like the thumb pressing on the button was jabbing into Frankie’s own temple. They weren’t going away. Why didn’t the Zoo Lady answer?

Maybe it was Dill at the door. Maybe he had lost his key.

A pretty hopeless hope, but you’ll grab at almost anything if you wait long enough for someone.

Frankie went into the bedroom. The old floors were creaky and he tried to go softly heel-toe. The dogs howled downstairs like it was the moon itself ringing the bell. He heard them scratching at the walls.

Frankie went up alongside the black curtain over the left window. He peeked out, but couldn’t see the door from this second-floor window because of the balcony.

It was twilight at the intersection of Main and Number 8. He looked for a car or something. Maybe Dill’s bike.

The bell finally stopped, the silence loud, and then the caller backed out from the doorway into the street. Frankie saw the black cap and the white jersey with the blue word on it. A Black Falls cop checking the windows. Frankie froze. The curtain shifted ever so slightly, and he realized that this particular window was open a crack.

The cop was still looking. Frankie saw that he was trying to figure out a way to climb up and get inside.

Frankie backed away fast. Too fast.

“Hey!”

The cop’s eyes had jumped. He was yelling now.

“Hey!”

Frankie heard boots on the stoop and the doorbell ringing again. Frankie swiped at his nose, pinched it hard. The cop was pounding on the door.

Frankie, knowing he had been made, opened the door to the downstairs. The cat stink rose up at him as he started down, arguing with himself all the way. He remembered things Dill had said about the cops in town. He almost turned back upstairs. The cop was bellowing, “Open up, Sinclair!” It was kind of a Three Little Pigs moment. He had a forceful voice that threatened to blow the house down.

At the first-floor landing, Frankie threw the lock and pulled back on the door — and the cop pushed right inside, backing Frankie hard against the handrail post at the bottom of the stairs.

“Who the hell are you?” said the cop. He had been expecting Dill.

“Frankie. Frankie Sculp.”

This cop wasn’t one of the brothers, the ones with the cave eyes. “Sinclair,” he said, gripping Frankie’s shirt as he looked up the stairs. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. He’s not here?”

“I thought — maybe you were him.”

“What are you doing here? How’d you get in? You break in?”

“No.” Frankie was fishing around inside the pocket of his cargo shorts for the key when, all of a sudden, the cop clamped a hand around Frankie’s neck, gripping his forearm.

Frankie stared, eyes bulging. He tried to gulp but the cop’s hand choked it.

“Slowly,” said the cop.

The guy was pissed. Frankie blinked a couple of times, pleadingly, in lieu of speech, until the cop let up on his throat and then his arm. Frankie brought out Dill’s apartment key dangling at the end of a green sneaker lace.

The cop yanked it out of his hand. “He gave you this?”

Frankie swallowed hard, little tears popping out. He nodded.

“I’m around this corner a lot,” said the cop. “How come I don’t see you going in and out?”

Frankie shook his head. He shrugged.

“How long you been here today?”

“Dill lets me stay,” Frankie said.

“Overnight?”

“Not usually.”

“But sometimes. I want to know about recently.”

“The past few days.”

“Past few days. How many?”

“A week. I been waiting for him.”

“You’re saying you haven’t seen Sinclair in a week.”

Frankie nodded.

“How old are you, Frankie Sculp?”

“Sixteen.”

“Where do you live?”

“With the Ansons. Over on Mill.”

“Ansons? You a foster kid?”

Frankie shrug-nodded, feeling like he had been made to admit something.

“They know you’re out here, where you are?”

“They know I’m out.”

“At the apartment of a sex offender, they know that part of it?”

“I guess, not really.”

Not that they would even care. The Ansons were a lot more interested in getting blitzed on their state stipend than feeding their foster kids.

“What do you come here for?”

“I just hang.”

“What’s here for you? Sinclair is your...”

“He’s my friend.”

“Your friend. That’s great. You admire him? Want to be like him?”

“I don’t know.”

“How is it you ‘hang’? What does that mean?”

“You know. Video games and stuff. He teaches me magic tricks sometimes.”

“So what’s he done now? Made himself disappear?”

“I don’t know.”

The cop was making a face, but it might have been the pet stink getting to him from the Zoo Lady’s door. “Let’s take a look upstairs.”

Frankie went up ahead of him. The floor of the left-right hallway at the top was crowded with magic stuff, stacks of books and video dubs, poster tubes.

The cop looked both ways. “And you’re sure he’s not here now?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

“But absolutely positive.”

Frankie nodded.

“You two didn’t have a quarrel recently, anything like that?”

Frankie tried to find the meaning behind the question. “A quarrel?”

“A spat. A fight, an argument. I’m not going to find him in bags or something, chopped up?”

Frankie didn’t answer that. This cop was crazy.

“Okay,” the cop said. “Come on.”

Frankie followed him down the right end of the hall, past the door to the balcony, turning left into the living room. The cop’s eyes went from the scarlet velvet wallpaper to the ruby loveseat to the old costume trunk set out as a coffee table. The Xbox console was hooked up to a small TV, where two ultimate fighters were frozen in midkick. Magic equipment and props were stacked up high behind the bar to the left: a silver-curtained disappearing booth, a levitating board, a card-dealing cart, juggling pins, Houdini-style chains and padlocks. At the opposite doorway stood a winking circus strongman, a seven-foot plaster dummy wearing only a loincloth and a handlebar mustache, a magician’s top hat on his chipped bald head.

The cop continued, sticking his head in the bathroom, then entering the kitchen, keeping tabs on Frankie as he went. He eyed the old refrigerator and the huge ancient stove that doubled as a room heater in winter. The dirty dishes in the sink. “These dishes all yours?”

“Some.”

“Some were left in there?”

“I guess. Yeah.”

The cop whipped back the black theater curtain that dressed the pantry doorway, revealing Dill’s computers, the multiple drives he had networked together, green “busy” lights winking. The screen saver showed fireworks exploding.

“You ever use this?” asked the cop.

“Sometimes,” said Frankie. “He lets me.”

The cop didn’t touch it, stepping back out and walking along the other hallway, past the bookcase into Dill’s front bedroom. He waded through the clothes and other junk strewn on the floor around the unmade bed. He turned his head to read the name on a credit card next to the tin of shoe polish on top of the bureau, but didn’t pick it up. The closet door was ajar and he opened it the rest of the way with his hiking shoe, and Frankie realized that this cop didn’t want to touch anything with his hands. Something bad was going on.

The cop leaned close to the headboard, eyeing a black wig hanging from the post. “What’s this?”

“His makeup and things. He keeps all sorts. Theatrical makeup.”

“You’ve been sleeping here?”

Frankie shook his head. “The sofa out there. Where the TV is.”

The cop backed him into the hall, finishing his circuit of the place, returning to the door at the top of the stairs. He got up in Frankie’s face there. “You’re saying you have no idea where he is. None whatsoever.”

“No,” Frankie said.

“If he was going somewhere, a trip or something, he would have told you?”

“A trip?”

“Would he have told you?”

“Yeah. He would have.”

“And there’s no sign of him having packed anything?”

“Packed? No.”

“No signs of any struggle you might have straightened up.”

“A struggle?”

“Chairs knocked over. Things broken. Like that.”

Frankie shook his head.

The cop thought it over. “You seen a pager in here?”

“A pager?”

“A pager.” The cop pulled one out of his back pocket, showed it to Frankie. A nice one, almost like a phone, with a screen for text messaging. “Like this?”

Frankie thought that was weird, but shook his head.

As the cop put away his pager, the ashtray caught his eye. A glass-bowled one on a gold stand that Dill said a theater usher had given him once. Its vermillion sand was studded with Dill’s cigarette butts. The cop said, “You smoke these hand-rolled things too?”

“No.”

“Know anybody else who does?”

“Just Dill.”

The cop took a better look at Frankie then. Studying his eyes. Frankie looked away.

The cop said, “What do you smoke, then?”

“Smoke?” Frankie said. He shook his head.

“You got a cold or something? Your nose.”

“Yeah. I think I do.”

“Maybe it’s a case of scurvy. Not getting enough vitamin C. You look like a kid who just walked off a pirate ship.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I want you to listen up. Sinclair is twice your age, all right? You know his story?”

Frankie shook his head.

“You want to?”

Frankie shook his head harder.

“The way he got into trouble was giving kids magic lessons. What do you do for him here? What do you bring him?”

“I told you, we hang—”

“You think I can’t look at you and just tell? And just know? It’s in your skin, Frankie Sculp, it’s in your eyes. That yellow bleached shit you call hair. Turn around. Smell the wall.”

Frankie did, bumping up against it as the cop frisked him.

“You think of yourself as a dealer, huh? Real big-time, right? Sinclair your drug buddy?” The cop’s hands picked his pockets. “If I find a needle you don’t warn me about, I’m going to drive it into the back of your skull.”

Frankie wasn’t holding. It was a habit of his to stash his stash rather than walk it around. Right then it was under the top hat on the plaster strongman’s head.

The cop turned him back around and got in his face. “I don’t know what you’re looking for here. If it’s love or friendship or a father figure... I don’t even know if you know. But get this. Whatever you’re looking for, Dill Sinclair isn’t it. I can guarantee you that. Find a new friend, and stop peddling this shit before it starts peddling you.” He smacked him in the chest for emphasis. “If it hasn’t already.”

Frankie felt that same old icy shiver up his back. This cop pushing him around, making decisions for him, everyone making decisions for him, social workers, counselors, guardians. Strangers telling him what’s best, deciding his life for him as they shuttled him from family to family, from school to school. And look at how great it had all turned out for him. Here he was stuck in Black Falls, Massachusetts. The asshole of the earth.

In fourteen months he would turn eighteen and age out of the foster-care system. Then he would be free.

“You cops are out to get him,” Frankie said.

The cop cocked his head. “I’m looking for him. Is that the same thing?”

“He’s going to get you. That’s what he said.” It was stupid to betray Dill’s confidence like this, but Frankie couldn’t help it. He had nothing else to throw back at this cop except his own empty hurt, wanting to scare somebody else for a change. “He knows a way, he said. All the cops. He’s going to turn this shit-fucking town upside down.”

He waited for the shove, the slap, the knee. Instead he got a hard stare, and strange words of caution. “That’s something you should maybe keep to yourself, don’t you think?”

Frankie stared. This cop didn’t believe him? Or was this something else entirely? “Am I getting the key back?”

“All you’re getting is a pass out of here, right now, and that means never come back. I want that understood. I want you crystal clear on that.”

“Fuck you.”

The cop shook his head. “No, man. No way. You want me to step on you. That’s what you’re used to. All you know is getting bounced around. And that’s why I’m not going to do you that way. Why I’m not throwing you down these stairs right now. You think you’re young enough to mess around with your life like this, like you’re putting one over on the rest of the world? The world doesn’t care, Frankie. The world welcomes statistics. But I’m not going to waste a speech on you. All you want is the back of someone’s hand so you can go deeper into your sulk. You’re leaving here now. And never coming back.”

“I have to get my stuff—”

He started toward the living room, where his stash was, but the cop pushed him back against the wall, staring hard into his eyes like he knew.

Out on the street, walking away fast, tears pressured Frankie’s eyes but would not fall.

Dill. Don’t leave me alone in this town.

He looked back at the corner building. He saw a man standing on the darkened balcony, and his mind stuttered a moment, telling him it was Dill.

It wasn’t. Just the cop. Watching Frankie go — but standing with his head turned. Utterly still and aware. As though listening to something.

Frankie heard the sounds then, distant, way up in the hills.

Sirens.

21 Eddie

It was a strange-looking house that got stranger the longer Eddie Pail worked around it. The front was constructed out of thick timber while the high wall on one side and the low wall on the other were built with river stones like ostrich eggs set in mortar.

Eddie had the long pole and was trying to break one of the top windows from the side lawn, but couldn’t get enough force behind it. So he found some fist-sized rocks and started throwing. The third one cracked right through. He resumed with the pole, smashing out the rest of the glass, his hole venting black billows of smoke and wavy heat.

The pumper truck was parked up on the lawn, its hose splashing the exterior, the heated stones hissing as water became steam. The house smoked and dripped like something cooking and melting at the same time.

They yelled back and forth across the lawn, Mort and Stokes wrangling the water-plumped hose and aiming its stream into the high window. Smoke alarms squealed inside and occasionally there was a heat-crack of supporting timber, as fierce as a thunderclap of warning.

With the hot night and the angry blaze and them suffering inside their bunkers and helmets, Eddie was earning his pay on this call, every cent. At one point the pumper ran dry and Mort and Ullard had to drive over to the fire pond on Sundown to reload. The nearest neighbors appeared with drinking water for them, looking up at the smoke in awe.

The pumper returned but the vent did its job, just as training said it would. The smoke out of the upstairs window was starting to fade, the blaze dying out, and Bucky and Mort strapped on masks and tanks and went in through the front door with a hatchet and a pike pole. Eddie and Stokes kept the roof wet and cool, the smoke alarms crying even louder now that the air around the house had stopped whipping.

They came out minutes later, jackets damp and pitchy. Bucky shrugged off his tank and pulled back his helmet, mask, and neck guard, squinting from the heat. He sat on the grass and shed his heavy yellow gloves and dug in the pockets underneath his bunkers, coming out with a cigarette and lighting it up with fish white hands. He smoked deeply, the oxygen mask outline drawn on his face in black sweat.

“Ding-dong,” said Bucky.

“What’s that?” said Eddie.

“The witch is dead.”

Eddie looked at the stinking house. “This is Frond’s place?”

Ponytailed Frond with his socks and sandals. The photographer’s vest he always wore, those empty little film loops.

Bucky said, “There’s some other weird shit in there.”

“Like what?”

“Weird witch shit.”

Maddox appeared, standing beneath a crooked branch of the only tree in the yard. Bucky was right. Always watching them.

“Was he in bed?” Eddie asked.

“On the floor downstairs. Burned to a crisp.”

“On the floor?” Eddie pictured the guy curled up and burning. He shuddered. Frond was in his forties, an able guy. “Why hadn’t he gotten out—”

“How the hell would I know?” said Bucky.

Bucky’s tone reminded Eddie that Frond was the snitch who had reported Bucky and Mort’s traffic-stop beating of Sinclair to the state police. He watched his brother smoking into the air, leaning back on the grass with one hand, then stubbing out his butt and getting to his feet.

“Strap on Mort’s tank,” Bucky said to Eddie.

“What for?” Eddie looked up at the still-smoking house. “There could still be some hot spots.”

“Just put on the damn tank.”

Eddie’s lip curled, but he did as he was told. He got Mort’s tank up onto his shoulders and was wiping out the sooty mask with his glove when Maddox moved in front of them, setting up between them and the ax-chopped door.

“You can’t go back inside,” Maddox said.

Bucky’s shoulders fell, tired and pissed. “Maddox, get the fuck out of our way.”

Bucky started forward, his rubber boots splashing the oversoaked grass, but Maddox stood his ground. “You’re just firefighters here. I’m the cop. Inside there is an unattended death.”

“Unattended death?” said Bucky, mocking the proper terminology.

“This is a potential crime scene. We need a doctor here to certify.”

“Maddox,” said Eddie, more annoyed than protesting, “the witch fell down carrying a candle or something.”

“Then waiting won’t hurt.”

Bucky was smiling and shaking his head in that happy, pissed-off way of his. “Maddox, Maddox, Maddox.” He picked up the fire ax, weighing it in his hand. “We can go around you, over you, or through you. Your choice.”

“Stand down, Bucky.”

Bucky said, “I am going to enjoy this.”

He took a step toward the door, and Maddox’s hand went to his holster.

Bucky stopped short, as though he’d been flat-handed. “Are you shitting me?” he said, gleeful, then continuing forward.

“Buck,” said Eddie, sharp enough to halt him.

Eddie nodded to the neighbors in their robes watching from the lawn, and to the firebugs milling in the driveway, roused by sirens and sky-smoke. Witnesses.

Bucky turned back to face Maddox. But he stayed where he was. Eddie had vented his brother’s anger just like the heat of that house fire. Next time Maddox might not be so lucky.

22 Dr. Bolt

Dr. Gary Bolt stepped out of his Honda Prelude in the short driveway. The foul air reeked of things not meant to be burned, smoke detector alarms squealing out of the black-windowed house. Steam rising into the slanting light of the morning sun.

Two soot-blackened firemen sat on the front bumper of their truck. “How’s the rice-burner running, doc?” they called to him.

Dr. Bolt put up a quick smile and slid his hand nervously into the pocket of his white coat. Just keep moving. Get this over with.

There was Bucky Pail, mashing a lit cigarette against a tree trunk. He came forward in his fireman’s outfit, bunkers under a T-shirt. It made him look thicker than he did in his patrolman’s uniform: the “camp counselor with a gun” look, as Dr. Bolt often thought of it. There was a cop here too, stepping away from the front of the house.

Dr. Bolt shoved his other trembling hand into his coat pocket. “Here I am,” said Dr. Bolt to Bucky, gamely.

Dr. Bolt knew the cop’s name as Maddox. Maddox looked him over and turned to Bucky. “The vet?” he said.

Bucky said, “Medical doctor, it’s enough.”

Dr. Bolt played at being jolly. “Now there’s a ringing endorsement!”

“You can certify a death?” said Maddox.

Dr. Bolt shrugged, making wings of the flaps of his coat. “I can tell you if a man is alive or not.”

“All we need,” said Bucky, rushing this along. “Let’s do this, doc.”

They started over the spongy grass. “It’s safe to enter?”

“Should be.”

“Should be,” said Dr. Bolt. He felt something squishy in his pocket, remembered his latex gloves. “I brought these.” He distributed pairs. “Might help.”

Maddox didn’t take his pair right away, perhaps noticing Dr. Bolt’s shaking hands.

The sedative he had taken was failing him. Get through this. Do not get caught between these two. And do not piss off Bucky Pail.

“Shall we?” said Dr. Bolt.

Bucky pushed in through the broken door. The front hallway was wet and hazy, and they stepped over puddles to a living room, its walls blistered and blackened almost to the ceiling. Morning sunlight streaming in through a smashed window created an almost churchlike atmosphere, and, in the soot-darkened room, an eerie sense of night-day. Parts of the wall and floor still offered steam, and everything reeked of carbon reversion.

Against the high wall stood a wide stone hearth licked black by flame. A few objects atop the broad mantle had survived the blaze. A pair of ornate silver candlesticks coated with melted red wax. A porcelain skull with a hollowed space as for burning incense. A chalice carved with a distorted crescent moon and star. A cracked rod of glass. A smoky crystal prism.

Dr. Bolt said, “Interesting.”

Bucky led them to an open, burned-out doorway. A small office inside, a burnt lump that used to be a computer monitor set before a heat-warped ergonomic chair, now a modern-art installation. All that was once paper was now ash; all that was wood was now black; all that was metal was now melted. The room remained suffocatingly hot, the carbon odor mixing with sulfur and something like a meat smell, the air growing oppressive.

The corpse lay behind the chair, glistening black and crisp. Dr. Bolt’s first instinct was to turn away, which he did, his fist covering his mouth until he regained his composure. The body’s elbows and knees were drawn in almost to a fetal position, its tongue swollen between charred lips, its one visible eyelid puffed out like a venous, black egg. The contents of the midsection were exposed where they had cooked into the floor.

“Uhh,” said Dr. Bolt, suppressing a sudden burp, his stomach rising into his throat. “Well — ug-huh — yes, I’d say he’s deceased, all right.” He cleared his throat again and almost lost it.

“Okay, then,” said Bucky, ready to leave.

“His arms are broken,” said Maddox.

Bucky squinted. Dr. Bolt didn’t know how to read these two.

“Well,” said Dr. Bolt, stepping wide around the body. “I do have some experience with barn fires.” If only he knew what Bucky wanted from him here. “Extreme heat does do — brr-hmm — surprising things.” He fumbled for the fat end of his necktie and pinched it over his nose. “The stomach eruption. Looks like a disemboweling, but the intestinal gases, when superheated, can rupture the stomach wall. Heat can also fracture bones.”

“What about his eyes?” said Eddie, from the doorway.

“Well, every fluid has its boiling point,” said Dr. Bolt, swallowing down more acid. “The muscles contract due to simple water evaporation. Why he appears so balled up here.”

Bucky said, “Fine. You can write us up something?”

“Hold on,” said Maddox. “We still have to identify the body.”

“Identify?” said Bucky. “It’s Frond’s house. Guy lived alone.” Then impatience got the better of him. “Fine, let’s flip him over, see his face.” Bucky fingered down the webbing of his latex gloves, kneeling at the corpse’s feet. “Eddie, get the other end.”

Eddie Pail came forward slowly, eyeing the job, crouching reluctantly and placing his hands near where the shoulder had burned into the floor.

“I don’t know about moving him—” began Dr. Bolt.

“On three,” snapped Bucky. “One, two — heave.”

Later, after Dr. Bolt had finished disgorging his breakfast omelet onto the front lawn, he decided it wasn’t the site of the reddened flesh stuck to the floorboards like dry meat on a nonstick grill that made him run from the house. Nor was it the underside of the skull, where it was stove into the brainpan.

No. It was the cracked chunks of black bone that came rolling out of the corpse’s mouth. The shattered teeth tumbling forth like rotted dice from Death’s own cup.

23 Hess

Trooper Leo Hess of the Mitchum County State Police Detective Unit yawned gustily, chewing the yawn on its way out. “This everybody?”

Pail, the local sergeant, nodded. Six men stood inside the station entrance, all in shorts and matching jerseys and black ball caps, looking more like a police softball team than working cops. The old building they were in resembled a humble chamber of commerce center more than a police station, with its screen door and porch, the unglassed front counter, two no-tech key-lock holding cells in back. Coming from the burned house in the hills, Hess had passed sagging shacks surrounded by gutted cars on cinder blocks, trailers nursing off silver tanks of propane, swayback barns and tarp-covered snowmobiles. Pockets of beauty amid acres of neglect. He rolled right through the center of town before realizing it was the center of town.

These guys just seemed confused. This was like coming out to some desert post to find the local army living off camel meat, too heat-silly to understand that the campaign had ended months ago. Hess was usually luckier than this. Murders were rare out in the sticks.

But whatever. He’d bump up his clearance rate, then head on back to Dodge. In and out in forty-eight hours. Leo the Lion was ready to roar.

“So, Sergeant Pail,” he said. Bucky was a hayseed name. “Who did this?”

Pail’s eyes were too deep-set to offer much. “How the hell would I know?”

Hess looked the others over. “I always ask,” he said. “A town this size, local law usually knows what’s going on. No suspects? No theories?”

The only one who moved was Maddox, the one they had waited for. The overnight patrolman whom Hess had told to come in early, so that he could address them all together. Maddox stood straighter in back, for a better look at Pail.

“Okay, then,” said Hess. “Who called in the fire originally?”

“No one,” said the other Pail, the taller, blond one. Brothers in the same police department: never a good thing.

“Who scrambled you, then?”

The one named Ullard said, “Bucky sent out a page.”

Hess turned back to the small-eyed Pail, waiting.

“I saw black smoke in the sky,” said Bucky. “They teach you that in the certification courses. Usually means a fire.”

Hess crossed his big arms, keeping up his genial smile. “Looks like the fire had multiple points of origin. Anyone know what that means?”

Ullard said, “It started in different places?”

“Wow,” said Hess, taking a moment to marvel. “It means the fire was set. Arson squad found these little — they looked like smoked-down cigars to me, turns out they’re flares. Road flares and good old-fashioned unleaded gasoline. No frills. Somebody tried to burn down the house in a half-assed murder scene cover-up.”

Now he had their attention.

“I say half-assed because only half the house burned, giving us plenty to work with — file that under ‘Good.’ Being almost twenty-four hours out now, that’s a daylong head start for the assailant. But we can make up some of that time once we hear from our eyewitness.”

Now came confused looks back and forth.

Eddie Pail was the first to take the bait. “Eyewitness?”

“The corpse,” said Hess. “The vic. The presumed Mr. Frond. Dead men make the best witnesses. Why? Because they can’t lie. They got no stake in this thing other than absolute truth. Same as me.”

Two officers from Crime Scene Services — badgeless, casual in jeans and jerseys except for their latex gloves — opened the screen door to get Hess’s attention. One held a small brush that looked like an archaeologist’s tool, the other a rolled-up paper bag marked “Evidence” in red.

Hess gave them a hard look that only they could have construed as anger, and they backed out fast. Hess was not to be interrupted during his get-to-know-me spiel. He had to motivate these good old boys to work for him.

“Criminalists, huh?” said Hess, leaning forward as though taking them into his confidence. “Spook the shit out of me. Tiptoeing around with their brushes and lasers. Tweezing things, rolling them up in these little forensic doggy bags. Everything’s an experiment with them. Guys haunt my dreams. Wouldn’t amaze me in the least if the skinny one there was carrying his own shit in that paper bag. Probably huddled together in the mobile lab out there right now, happily picking through it. ‘Joe, when did I eat corn?’”

Snickers from most of them. Hess twisted his thick gold wedding band as though screwing it onto his finger. He was working these yokels good. Be selling them time-shares in Puerto Rico next.

“But they’re the ones making the cases these days. The kids who paid attention in chemistry class, who sat there and memorized the elements chart — they solve the crimes now. Me? I’m more like the coach. Used to be first-string quarterback, now I’m drawing up Xs and Os. If it’s a promotion, I don’t know. Bill Belichick. That’s me now.”

Two trouble spots identified. Bucky Pail, the shorter brother, wasn’t lapping it up with the rest. A definite nail in the road going forward. And Maddox, the one lurking in back, almost hiding there, was another question mark. He chuckled like the others, but without sincerity. Could be he was just the black sheep of the bunch.

“Right, so, I’m a guy who likes to keep local law involved. Let’s kick this thing around a little, shall we?” Hess had learned to use his eyebrows, raising them high like expectations, inviting candor, demanding truth. “A witch, huh? What do we make of that?”

Some shaken heads, no one committing to anything.

“Safe to say this is no random crime. There’s no transient population here. Anybody passing through Black Falls — no offense — there’s not a lot to stop for. So we can pretty much assume the witch knew his assailant. Is it a sex crime? Maybe.”

“Sex crime?” said Eddie Pail, shaping up to be an easy mark.

“Why not? Looked like the guy had been in his underwear. I mean, if he’s got obvious enemies, fine, we’ll look at them. But I’m just as happy to start off with his friends.”

He watched them process that.

“Guy’d been beaten up, and I mean severely. Busted to pieces. Just to let you know we’re not playing here. House was also gone over pretty good. Our killer spent some quality time in there. And why not? No neighbors nearby, nobody to hear anything. Who here’s working the note?”

Again they looked around. “What note?” said a big bag of shoulders, Mort Lees.

“The notification,” said Hess. “Frond’s next of kin.”

Shrugs. Hadn’t occurred to anyone. Eddie Pail looked at his brother, Bucky, who kept on looking straight at Hess.

“So,” said Hess. “Anything else anybody wants to add?”

Bucky Pail said, “Maybe.”

Hess nodded. “Go for it.”

“We got a missing sex offender.”

“Okay.”

“You said sex crime.”

“I sure did. What you got?”

“Scarecrow, we call him. Real name’s Dillon Sinclair.”

“Missing how long?”

“More than a week now, I guess.”

Bucky Pail stepped past Hess and around the front counter to the beginning of the hallway behind. Pushpinned onto the corkboard outside a door labeled REPORTS ROOM were badly photocopied registration sheets featuring mugs and vitals of nine Level 2 and Level 3 sex offenders stacked three by three. Bucky fingered the one in the center, a small-headed guy with a firing-squad expression.

Hess skimmed the bio. “Kid-toucher,” he said. “Girls or boys?”

“Boys.”

“He’s Level Two,” said another voice. Hess was surprised to hear from Maddox now, still in back of the others. “Nonviolent.”

Hess nodded, taking the opportunity to drill Maddox with a stare, then turned back to Bucky Pail. What were these two trying to tell him?

Hess pointed to the SO’s picture. “What’s with the eyebrows?”

“He shaves them off,” said Bucky Pail. “Guy’s a full-time freak.”

In the photo, Sinclair had been posed against the wall opposite where Hess was now, unsmiling, borderline scared, the missing facial hair making him look alien and terminally ill. Probably was the look he was going for.

“All right, gentlemen,” said Hess, looking to wind this up. “Look, maybe you don’t want us here, and maybe we don’t even want to be here. A blind date is what it is, and I’ve been on some pretty rough ones. Let me do my job, and I’ll let you do yours, so long as you understand that, when the time comes to dance, I’ll be the one leading. If you’re good with that, then I’m good with you. We good?”

Unenthusiastic nods. A troop of sad sacks and misfits. Hess had a fun forty-eight hours ahead of him.

24 Wanda

She dreamed again that she was dead and floating through town. Landing in different places, people stopping and staring as she walked up to them, awaiting her caress. She touched them over their hearts and some fell dead limp right away, as if she were one of those revival faith healers on TV. Others shivered at the contact, jolted by the release of their souls from their bodies, and then joined the small mob following her. When she came to Bucky, he was standing outside his backyard trailer, the one that stunk so bad, whose curtained windows and padlocked door glowed wild white from within. She reached for him but froze in midembrace. It was his eyes. Empty black sockets. She looked at her hand, and it was black now with all the death she had brought to people. Her nails were rotted and peeling off, knuckles shriveled to the bone. She pulled it back in shame, and Bucky turned away, leaving her to walk on alone.

“Wanda. Wake up. Wanda!”

Something peeled back her eyelid. Her vision was blurred. Donny Maddox called her name.

You came to beg me to spare you, she tried to say, though her lips wouldn’t move the words right.

The bed shaking now, an earthquake. Ride it out. What the fuck.

The massive thumb opened her eye again. Like looking up through a deep hole in the ground. “Wake up.”

“I’m dead,” she sneered, and tried to roll over, but the bed wouldn’t let her.

“You’re burning up.” The covers were peeled back like foil off a TV dinner. “You’re wearing sweats?”

“Freezing,” she said, grabbing after the sheets. “How’d you get in here?”

He was dream Donny, trying to reach her in a dream within a dream. He was that clever. “Listen,” he said. “It’s important. I need to know. Bucky ever talk about Frond?”

“I couldn’t touch him,” she said. “My black hand.”

Shaking again, her head getting tossed. “Frond,” Donny said, full into her face.

“No,” she answered.

“Bucky never talks about him?”

“Are you really in my bedroom?”

His hands came off her shoulders and she wriggled back into comfort.

Noises kept her from sinking down for good. She opened an eye and saw Donny’s back to her, leaning over her nightstand, the drawer open. “Going through my stuff?”

“You’re dreaming,” he told her.

“If I’m dreaming then get in here and fuck my ass.”

When nothing happened, her eyes fell shut again, tiny black hands pulling her down.

25 Pinty

Donny made him turn out the light over the front steps. He kept checking the road. “This escalates everything.”

Pinty gripped the doorknob in order to take pressure off his hips, switching weight from one leg to the other. His right foot had been numb all day, almost causing a fall. He’d had a dizzy spell earlier, so he was trying to take it easy. “Work it to your advantage.”

“It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why not? It’s revenge. Frond reported him.”

“But why now? Why bring the state police here? It’s too dangerous a distraction. Staying under the radar, that’s Bucky’s only plan.”

“Then?”

“I don’t know.” Donny pulled his cap off and ruffled his hair. “I can’t think.”

“Severely beaten, you say?”

“And now I’ve got this state trooper. A buzz-cut guy, a weight lifter, right? Something to prove. Looking for some ass to kick.”

“Maybe he’ll come and go.”

“And what if he doesn’t? What if Bucky has to shut everything down for a couple of weeks? Then what?”

“Donny.” Pinty leaned on the doorknob, needing to sit down. “Relax.”

“Frond,” said Donny, like he couldn’t get it through his head. “The timing of it makes no sense.”

Donny’s patrol car squawked in the driveway. An unfamiliar voice came over the police radio band.

It was a state trooper, summoning Patrolman Maddox back to the station.

Donny stared at Pinty, a look of resignation on his face. “Here it comes,” he said, pulling his cap back on his head.

26 Hess

“Friggin’ dial-up,” Hess was telling the Mitchum barracks dispatch. “Goddamn stagecoach technology. Three phone jacks the entire place. Radio reception’s for shit, units are R-1 all over town. And my Nextel two-way, that would be like voodoo science here. Bringing fire to the aborigines. So this is the number. The non-emergency line. Requisition me some bear repellent and a telegraph machine. Right.”

Hess hung up and reached for his water bottle, chugged. The screen door whined and Patrolman Maddox, in the uniform jersey and ball cap, walked in looking like a guy assigned to beach patrol a hundred miles from shore. Decent build on him, but no rip. Five months this rookie had been on the job, without academy training or state certification. As much a cop as Hess was king of Tunisia.

“Sorry to haul you back in,” said Hess, not really sorry at all. “You’re new on the job, huh?”

“Yeah, just part-time.”

“Holding down the fort on overnights?”

“Basically.”

“Got aspirations, or is this what works for you now?”

“This works now.”

“Really? Surprises me. Most guys get a taste of cop, they can’t think of doing anything else.”

“My father was a patrolman here, long time ago.”

“Walking a mile in his shoes, huh? Making a little peace with the old man?”

“I guess.”

“Makes sense. So you’re from this town?”

“Originally, yeah.”

“Moved away? And actually came back?”

“Hard to believe, huh?”

Maddox was giving him nothing. Maybe he had nothing to give. “You knew this Frond?”

“By sight. He stood out a little.”

“Been to his Web page? His online store?”

“No.”

“I have had that pleasure. Crystals, quartz stones. All kinds of New Age crap. Healing metals. Wind chimes. Pottery.”

“I knew he brokered sales for some of the artists living in the hills.”

“My interview list is filling up with fruitcakes. Guy claimed to be a Druid.”

“Uh-huh.”

“An ovate, a diviner, an interpreter of Druid mysteries. Yeah. Too much Led Zep in high school. Know what an athame is?”

“A what?”

“Exactly. It’s a ceremonial dagger. Pictured on his site. Ivory-handled with a double-edged blade. He put up images of all his toys, these candlesticks, some prism thing, a ‘thurible,’ which I learned is an incense burner — his was in the shape of a skull. We recovered all these things from the mantle over his fireplace, but not the dagger. I know you were first on scene when they went inside. You see this athame there?”

Maddox thought before answering. The guy was careful, Hess noticed. He wasn’t overeager to work with the big boys, and he wasn’t intimidated either. “No.”

“You seem sure.”

“I wasn’t looking for it, but I’m pretty sure.”

“It’s the only thing missing. Not worth much money.”

Maddox shrugged.

“How many more witches you got up here?”

Maddox smiled. “That I know of?”

“Cult activity is what I’m getting at.”

“No. Nothing I’m aware of.”

Hess nodded. “Other thing I’m hearing is that Frond had issues with some of the cops. I don’t have the full story, but I know he broke up a traffic stop or some such where a suspect was being beaten — that suspect being your missing sex offender.”

“Yeah. That was before my time.”

Hess waited, watching him. Realized he was treating this guy like a suspect. Outside the front windows he saw two sleds pull into the driveway — blue-on-blue state police cruisers — escorting an old orange pickup truck carrying something under a tarp in the bed.

“This is us,” said Hess, pushing out the screen door ahead of Maddox. A police station with a front porch: this was a first. Three stone steps led to the driveway.

The town DPW guy got out of his pickup, a broad-backed cluck with a close-shaved head who, with his build and facial expression, wouldn’t have looked out of place in a prison yard. He wiped his dirty hands on the hips of his dirty shorts. “Don,” the guy said, to Maddox.

“Here’s what I need,” Hess told Maddox. “We found an old safe in the house, under an upstairs bed. Your public works man here was good enough to haul it out for us — your name again?”

The guy mumbled it. He was as slow-moving as the rest, maybe even slower. Cement in the veins. The cruiser lights bothered him, making him squint.

“I could wait for morning and ship this box back to civilization, but that would cost me at least another half day and I don’t want that. I need a machinist in town — or a safecracker, if you got one — but more likely somebody who can drill through this thing and pop it open. Mr. Ripsbaugh here suggested a name, and, given the late hour, I wanted you to come along as a familiar face, to make introductions.”

Maddox looked at Ripsbaugh.

“Kitner,” Ripsbaugh said.

Maddox mulled over the name, looking surprised. He turned to Hess. “Okay,” he said. “But there’s something you need to know about Kitner first.”

27 Kitner

The knocking was going to wake up Ma. In sleep shorts, Steve Kitner pulled the door open, first a little, then wider, seeing headlights in the dirt lot.

One of the local cops was standing on his top step. Behind him were real state police cruisers.

“Aw, shit,” said Kitner, a wave of depression overcoming him like rigor mortis. “Look, I’m clean, man. Whatever. I’m innocent. This is bullshit.”

The cop said, “It’s nothing like that, Kitner.”

He knew this day was coming — knew it. Knock on his door and take him away. That shoved-up-against-the-wall feeling again. “I’m registered like I’m supposed to be. I’m a citizen now.”

The cop showed him an open palm. “Listen to me.”

Kitner didn’t hear single words, only the general idea: the staties wanted a favor from him.

It seemed almost like a trap, though they had nothing to trap him for. He hadn’t done anything wrong. They were only making him feel like he had.

A favor seemed like a good idea. “Shit, yeah, I’ll help you out, why not.”

He pushed through the aluminum door, reminded he was barefoot by the rocky driveway. He wore only saggy boxers and a string tank, but who cared.

Unless there were female troopers here.

He hoped Ma wouldn’t wake up, see the cars, have a conniption. Wouldn’t be bad later to tell her how he helped out cops. How he was being so good.

He walked inside the garage-turned-shop at the outside of the road curve, under the unlit sign reading KITNER TOOL & DIE. He hit the red stopper and the power started up, the shop blinking to life. He found a pair of the old man’s safety boots and lifted his leather apron off its peg.

Two tall troopers lugged in an old safe dusty with fingerprint powder. Kitner pointed to the larger drill press and they thunked it down there and stretched their backs.

A plainclothesman with cobra arms came in, said nothing. The hard-ass act. Then the local cop and that guy Ripsbaugh, the town roadworker.

No women.

The safe, she was a beauty. Short and stout, maybe two and a half cubic feet of volume, a black dial with ivory numbers over a small silver handle.

“Pretty box,” said Kitner, stroking his tonguelike goatee. “Turn her upside down. Bottom’s usually the softest.” Just like a woman, he almost added, but thought better, thanks to his conditioning. He smiled as the troopers did his bidding.

Nineteen eighty-eight was the last time he had shared a room with this much law. From the way the plainclothes guy eyeballed him, Kitner figured they all knew about his Merrimack County prior. How he had gotten loaded on blackberry brandy and amphetamines one night during a freak snowstorm and how, driving around looking to score more dope, he had happened upon a female motorist stuck in a snow-bank and how, after offering to help dig her out, he had strangled her unconscious instead and raped her in the backseat. They found him sleeping there later, on the nod, so the guilty plea was his best bet. He pled and did his time. Prison wasn’t bad because he had been in the army, if briefly. Afterward, he tried to make it elsewhere, but the Level 3 label meant “most likely to reoffend,” so he couldn’t hold a job or an apartment anywhere without people smashing in his windows and calling him up in the middle of the night and threatening to slice off and feed him his own dick. So when his dad died he resettled up here and took over the old man’s shop. Not like he had a long list of options.

It was better here, like a self-imposed exile. Not being able to afford a car removed a lot of temptation. Sometimes, maybe once a month, he felt the change in his metabolism, that old sweet tooth starting to tingle. Sometimes, when he looked around at the old man’s shop with its dingy floors and power machinery, he saw a dungeon in waiting. Sometimes he thought about what it would be like to work on people here instead of metal. Building a person, a woman, to his own specifications, so he wouldn’t have to worry about breaking laws ever again. If he had all the money in the world he would build himself a harem of women and be real good to them.

He pulled on rubber-strapped goggles and went to work. He screwed open the chuck and inserted an old drill bit shank, one he could afford to dull or even snap, closing the three jaws tight around it. He pedaled the power and turned the drill rpm to 300 and wheeled the lever down for its first bite. The box screamed, again and again, and he kept at it, spraying sparks and hot filings. Old steel and many layers thick. It was nice to let himself go. The casing resisted so he reset the bit for another assault, and with a few whining thrusts finally pushed through. He drove again and again at the casing, wailing on it, widening his bore to spread the gap. So absorbed was he that he didn’t even notice when Ripsbaugh exited the shop. Finally, by adjusting and readjusting his aim, he joined all the various holes, having chewed open a gash large enough to admit a man’s hand.

He offered to keep going but the plainclothesman stopped him, shining a light down inside and then handing Kitner a pair of latex gloves. Kitner tested the hot wound, then reached inside, getting his fist in almost to the elbow. He felt around the cavity and pulled out a manila envelope.

The plainclothesman took it from him. Kitner saw the local cop looking on from the open front door.

“Tax returns,” said the plainclothesman, inspecting the contents. “Canceled checks.” He scanned a signed document with disgust. “Fucking health care proxy. Nothing.”

“There’s a drawer in the top,” Kitner told him, so helpful. “On the bottom now. Feels thin, if you want me to get in there.”

He did. Kitner twisted a longer bit into the chuck, working deeper into the existing hole. The safe gave up the drawer with almost no resistance. The plainclothesman handed Kitner his flashlight and a second pair of latex gloves.

The guy was getting impatient. “Is it a dagger?” he asked.

Kitner noticed that the local cop had moved inside the doors now. Kitner got his arm all the way in, pulling out a short stack of small, cream-colored envelopes tied together with a cherry red ribbon. Plainclothes held out his own gloved hands and Kitner served him the packet like a fancy slice of cake. Plainclothes lifted the letters to his nose — the perfume had a vanilla smell — then pulled at the tie, the bow knot yielding and falling limp, the envelopes undressed.

Kitner watched him open the top one, pulling out thread-flecked stationery folded into thirds. The handwriting was small and neat in red ink. Two sheets, though the handwriting on the second one ended halfway down. Below it were two pencil drawings that made Kitner go up on his toes, trying to see better over Plainclothes’s shoulder.

The first sketch was of a woman’s nude torso. One breast hung free, the other one cupped in her hand, mashed and raised in offering.

The second one below it showed the same woman but from shoulders to knees. She sat legs open, her right hand covering her pussy except for her middle finger, stuck deep inside.

Plainclothes pulled the letter to his chest like he was hiding a poker hand, and Kitner came down off his toes, wondering if maybe he had made a noise or something. The guy moved away, taking the rest of the envelopes with him.

Plainclothes summoned the local cop with a flick of his finger and showed him the first letter, including the drawings.

“‘Love always, V,’” said the plainclothes cop, pointing out the signature. “Any ideas?”

The local cop’s eyes clouded, and not because of the dirty pictures. He knew, all right. It cheered Kitner, a little, to think of somebody else eating trouble for a change.

28 Maddox

Maddox waited outside the station, on the sidewalk at the end of the grassy slope, staying near the action while maintaining enough distance between himself and the state troopers. It was just after eight and his shift was over — Stokes and Ullard had already driven their patrol cars past him into the driveway — but Maddox lingered, pretending he was enjoying the morning heat and had nowhere better to go. Above him, the great flag rustled like a horse too lathered to lift its own head.

Stokes and red-eyed Ullard came out to see him. “They closed off rooms in there,” Stokes said. “What’s up? They get someone?”

Maddox pretended not to know who it was, liking how, when Bucky wasn’t around, the other cops could be civil if they wanted something from him.

Three kids came biking across the iron bridge, two on banana-seat bikes and one on a taller ten-speed, turning past the station. The ten-speed was an old Schwinn, black with black electrical tape wound around the handlebars.

Maddox recognized the bike. He yelled, “Hey!” and took off suddenly down Main Street after them.

After a few more yells, they slowed for him, letting him come jogging up. They were scuzzy mill-house locals, still growing into themselves at thirteen. Maddox grabbed the arm of the kid on the ten-speed to hold him where he was.

On the down tube of the triangle frame, the letter g had been added in Wite-Out to the brand name, to read, Austin Powers-style, “Schwinng.”

Dillon Sinclair’s bike. With his driver’s license suspended, this bicycle had been Sinclair’s only legal mode of transportation, taking him back and forth to the Gulp.

“I found it,” said the kid, in answer to Maddox’s question. He looked malnourished, maladapted, probably just about mal-everything.

“Found it where?”

“Woods.”

“Be a little more specific.”

“Toad Bridge. That little bridge off Edge Road. We was catching bullfrogs.” He glanced at his homeys for backup. “It was right there in the trees.”

A low one-lane bridge crossing a creek. Edge Road was where Heavey lived. “And you just helped yourself.”

“If somebody else was throwing it away? Yeah.”

Maddox kept at him, his friends too, trying to shake something else out of them, but the story held up. Maddox took names and told the kid he was impounding the bike and let them all go with a warning.

He walked the bike back up the sidewalk along Main, trying to figure out what Sinclair’s ride was doing hidden or thrown down by the side of the bridge. He walked it around to the dirt lot behind the station, wondering where to park it while he figured things out. A voice from the back steps called to him.

“You Maddox?”

Maddox looked up at the trooper leaning out of the back door in his regulation summer duty uniform: wide-brimmed Mountie hat, straight-leg slacks, combat boots, a badge over the two pens in his left chest pocket, a small ceremonial silver whistle buttoned over the right.

“Yeah,” said Maddox.

“Trooper Hess to have a word with you.”

Maddox leaned the bike against the wooden slat fence behind the extra patrol car and followed the trooper inside to the old chief’s office.

Hess stood behind the empty desk scratching at the buzzed back of his neck. He wore a ribbed rayon shirt tucked into wrinkle-guard dress pants with a braided brown belt: conservative and professional, with a hint of the sportsman. His chest was jacked, but it was the arms that impressed, maybe a little too much. He had invested a lot of gym hours in those biceps. Like a woman with a big chest, they were his defining feature.

Maddox remembered his first look at the guy as he emerged from his unmarked to eyeball the station, Hess’s expression saying, They got me off the lat machine for this?

“So,” Hess said, dropping his hands into his pleated pockets and letting them run around in there. “What’s your take?”

“On Valerie Ripsbaugh?”

“We already know our doer isn’t a woman. He’s a man, right-handed, medium height, between five eight and six foot. Size ten and a half sneaker.”

This was Hess showing off, as with his arms. He liked to dazzle. Maddox said, “Okay.”

“Talk to me about the husband. Struck me as a little slow on the uptake.”

“Inward, maybe. He’s a town guy. His entire world’s about this small.”

“Any trouble from him you know of?”

“Less than none. He’s the town caretaker. Looks after this place like it’s his dying father.”

Hess nodded, arms crossed tight. “He’s not answering his radio, and we already tried his pager. Any idea where we can find him this time of day?”

“You’re bringing him in?”

Hess nodded, all confidence. “Yeah, we’re bringing him in.”

Maddox still could not believe it. He had thought nothing of Ripsbaugh leaving Kitner’s shop early, muttering good-bye as he moved through the door. “I don’t know. The dump, maybe.”

“You’re shocked.”

“I’m surprised, yeah. Ripsbaugh. Tearing someone apart like that. Doesn’t make sense.”

“Overkill. Know what that means? That it was very, very personal. A revenge killing. You ever been married?”

“No.”

“There’s nothing shocking about it. Especially with the quiet ones. Like yourself.” Hess smiled, feeling magnanimous. “You’re headed home? Do us a favor and drop Mrs. Ripsbaugh at her house. She’s free to go.”

Val stared at the floor of Maddox’s patrol car, sitting lumpily next to him, sinking into herself and her baggy clothes. She had always had what Maddox’s mother called “natural mascara,” a darkness tracing the wing-shaped contours of her eyes, different from the bruised quality of her lids. In high school it had been the hallmark of Val’s small-town exoticism.

Now it looked as though that mascara was starting to run. Maddox leaned on the gas pedal, the station receding on their right. He wanted to get her home fast. Because he was uncomfortable, and because he wanted to deliver this news to Pinty.

“Can you smell it on me?” she said.

“Smell what?” said Maddox.

She plucked at the skin on the back of her left hand, pinching herself. “The shit. I scrub myself raw, but the stink from his septic business — it’s in my skin now. It’s in my hair. Part of me. I can’t get it out.” Twisting at the back of her hand now, squeezing her flesh white.

“Val,” said Maddox, passing her brother’s place at the corner of Number 8 Road. “Things could still work out. Nothing’s settled yet.”

“Look at me, Donny. Look what I’ve become.” She raised her hands as though something warm and sticky had spilled in her lap. “Look at me.”

She was weeping, and Maddox didn’t know what to do. He wanted to get her home, but she was choking on her sobs, dissolving in the seat next to him, and he couldn’t drive. He turned in fast at the Gulp, parking among the losing scratch tickets in back.

She cried hard into her hands, then pulled them away, reading something in the wetness on her palms. “He saved the letters,” she said. “He did care, I knew he did. It meant something.” Her hands closed into fists, and she turned to Maddox with sudden sobriety. “He helped me. When I met him, I was at my heaviest. The backaches — I was miserable. He turned it all around. He changed me, he delivered me. And, he was erudite. We talked. Really talked — about nature, about the stars. He knew so much. He had lived in California. He wanted me to go away with him. Everything he said to me was ice cream. I felt so good with him. I felt special.”

That last word twisted in Maddox’s side. He thought back to the Val Sinclair he had known in school: not beautiful, exactly, but different, mysterious somehow, with burgundy lips and licorice black hair and a hint of foreign blood in her winged eyes. Now the fullness of her face, the tired tangle of her hair, the coarse oatmeal texture of her skin — it was as though the town had exacted its revenge by blunting her features over time, like the Cold River’s current dulling its bed stones.

How shocked he had been, returning home from college that first summer, to learn that Valerie Sinclair had become Mrs. Kane Ripsbaugh. A girl who had once spoken of nothing other than her desire to escape Black Falls. Her marrying the town caretaker, a man twenty years her senior, had hit Maddox with the force of a classmate’s suicide. It made no sense. It never occurred to him at the time how bad her home life must have been — any family that could have produced Dill Sinclair...

Val was really pinching the skin on the back of her hand now, twisting it like the key to a windup toy. “Did they...?” she said, looking first at Maddox, then down to the floorboard again. “Did you see the letters?”

“I saw one.”

“Some of them,” she said, “they were personal, maybe a little...”

Her humiliation was nearly complete, and for Maddox, almost unbearable. “Yeah,” he said.

A smile of intense pain. Her palms came up to blind her eyes. “He made me feel something,” she said, trying to explain. “Something I hadn’t felt in a long time...”

She crumpled again, shuddering and crying there next to him. Maddox was searching for something — anything — to say when she turned toward him and began sobbing hard into his shoulder. He held her lightly as her chest heaved against him with bucking gasps, and he began to worry that someone from the store would come around back and mistake this clinch for something more than it was.

So concerned was he that he misconstrued her nuzzling sniffles for progress, an indication that she was settling down. It was several more moments before he realized she was in fact nibbling at his neck with light, wet tastes of his skin just above his collar, her kisses rising up to the jawline beneath his ear.

Stunned by her sudden and inappropriate affection, he let it go many more seconds than he otherwise would have before abruptly pulling away.

She stayed where she was, on her side of the front seat, not ashamed or embarrassed, cheeks glistening with mashed tears, eyelashes damp and shiny black. “I think he did it.”

“What?” Maddox said.

She stared into the middle ground between them, as though coming to terms with this herself.

Maddox, still mystified by the kissing, felt something else now, something like danger. He had a sense that marriages generated their own peculiar force field, some more powerful than others. Especially the less likely unions. The warped vibrations of this one were warning him to keep away.

“You need to get home,” he said, throwing the car into drive and making for the road.

A state police cruiser pulled up across the street from Ripsbaugh’s driveway as Maddox drove off after dropping off Val. It was only a matter of time before they picked him up, and Maddox felt a pang of sympathy for the hunted man.

Ripsbaugh the loner. Ripsbaugh the vengeful. Ripsbaugh the cuckold.

His tires crunched onto Pinty’s white-rock driveway and he got out and ducked underneath Mrs. Pinty’s arbor, the woven ivy making him think of Pinty’s hairpiece and the Vitalis he insisted on sprinkling over it, more fragrant than anything in these hedges. The front door was unlocked as usual, and he entered into the middle landing, calling Pinty’s name. He went downstairs to where Pinty had moved his bed, then checked the newly converted kitchen and found Pinty’s walking stick leaned up against the end of the counter. Through the sliding glass doors he saw the wheelchair out on the brick patio beneath the raised deck, and Pinty lying on his side next to it.

Maddox threw open the door. Pinty was not moving and Maddox’s eyes did not know what to take in first. The gray pallor of Pinty’s face. His fists clenched and drawn to his chest as though pulling back on reins. A spray of pallid yellow vomit on the brick, already visited by ants.

Maddox rolled Pinty onto his back. Pinty’s eyes were closed and for a moment Maddox could not remember any of his training. He got that same suffocating feeling as when he thought about his mother dying alone.

A-B-C. Airway, Breathing, Circulation.

He put his ear to Pinty’s nose and felt warm breath push faintly against it. He jabbed two fingers into the soft flesh beneath the ridge of Pinty’s jawbone, locating a pressure point, the pulse slow yet persistent. He raised Pinty’s neck in order to tilt up his head, and heard a gurgle.

Inside he found the phone and punched in 911. He got a state trooper at the station and instructed him to skip the ambulance call and instead order a medical helicopter.

When Bucky Pail and Keith Ullard and Bart Stokes arrived anyway, carrying equipment cases from their rescue truck and accompanied by Eddie Pail and Mort Lees in POLICE shirts, Maddox stood firm. “Stay away,” he warned them.

“Maddox,” scolded Eddie, bullheadedly trying to get around him to Pinty.

Maddox kicked the wheelchair into their way. “You don’t touch him.”

“Get away, Maddox,” said Bucky.

Bucky knelt down to unclasp his blue tackle box of medical supplies. Maddox kicked it over.

Bucky stood, whipping his cigarette into the grass. The five of them fanned out around Maddox on the bricks. Maddox warned them again to keep away, and Mort Lees charged him from the side.

It seemed stupid later, everything coming to a head there with Pinty lying unconscious on the ground. But this brawl had been months in the making. Maddox blamed them for Pinty’s sudden decline, and unloaded his anger onto them as they unloaded theirs onto him. Maddox tried to single out Bucky for some special vengeance, but, true to form, Bucky remained out on the periphery of the fray, jumping in only when he had a clear punch.

Yet Maddox held his own, never letting them pin him down. It was the arriving troopers following up on the 911 call who broke it up. The medical helicopter set down in Pinty’s backyard soon after, flight nurses climbing out wearing helmets.

Maddox rode with him to the hospital, gripping Pinty’s hand in the sideways sunlight as Black Falls shrunk away below them.

Pinty was wheeled off after they landed. Maddox declined an ER trip for his face, and was instead escorted to a windowless room where, left alone, he paced among cloth-covered chairs with small boxes of half-sized tissues poised on each wooden arm. Pale ocean watercolors hung on the walls — lonely boats, empty docks, muted sunsets — and Maddox realized they had installed him in the grief room.

29 Cullen

Cullen looked at the ring cuts on Maddox’s cheeks and forehead, the abrasion on his neck, and the bruise under his left eye, not quite black but definitely blue.

“Fighting your fellow peace officers,” said Cullen. “That’s good strategy.”

Maddox mock-smiled, raising his eyebrows. “Yup.”

“Making friends all over the place. About ready to pack it in, then?”

Maddox didn’t dignify that. He looked at the blank screen of the television set he had switched off as soon as they had stepped inside the empty waiting area.

“Good,” said Cullen, wanting to come off motivational rather than bitchy. “May I ask what your thinking was there?”

“My thinking was, I’m going to kick these sons of bitches’ asses for what they’ve done to him.”

Cullen nodded. Maddox had plenty more fight in him, which was a good thing, if properly channeled. Cullen noticed that, though Maddox had not left the hospital since bringing in the old man, the gray T-shirt he wore was fresh and not speckled with blood. Maddox had somebody bringing him things.

Cullen loosened his tie and flopped it out straight over his belly, glancing out the window of Rainfield Good Samaritan. Every window he had ever stood at or sat by in Rainfield looked out at some segment of the interstate or one of the gas station islands that fed it. “Okay. I have to kick some ass here now. This is supposed to be your rehab assignment.”

Maddox frowned and sat back, inspecting the tender parts of his discolored knuckles.

“You were frustrated,” said Cullen. “You thought you had them on the murdered snitch. You wanted them for it. Turns out, the snitch got pushed over by someone else.”

“I don’t know that for sure.”

“Then allow me to convince you. Crime Scene Services got clever working over the witch’s house. They figured the killer had spent some time there, so they keyed in on a couple of things. One was the fact that the towel rack in the upstairs bathroom was empty. Maybe the towels were used to wipe up or clean off something, maybe even the assailant himself. Luckily, this was on the side of the house that didn’t burn so bad. First thing they scored were footwear impressions from the wet bath mat.”

“Size ten and a half sneakers,” said Maddox. “Hess already dangled that detail.”

“Then they found that the sink — faucet, cabinet, vanity, whole thing — had been wiped down, scrubbed clean. Again — a good spot for cleaning something off, maybe washing up. A defensive wound, perhaps. So they went down into the plumbing. The pipes underneath the sink. Pulled the drain traps, and there was blood.”

“Blood?” said Maddox. “Heat from the fire didn’t cook it?”

“Not all. Blood type immediately excluded the victim, Frond. While all this was going on, they turned up that safe under a bed upstairs. The letters.”

“Right.”

“Her husband, the roads guy, admits to knowing about his wife and the witch. Guy’s alibi is soft, very uncorroborated. But the critical thing is this gash on his arm.”

Maddox looked at him now.

“Yeah,” said Cullen. “Snagged it on a fence post, he said, but it fits just fine as a defensive wound. Typical overhelpful type, this guy, Ripsbaugh. Hess asked him for theories about who could have done this, and how. You know that old routine, ‘If you didn’t do it, tell me how someone else could have.’ I saw only five minutes of the tape, but it’s pretty pathetic, this guy holding forth with his theories.”

“He’s a cop buff.”

“I know. They found all these true crime paperbacks in his house, and forensics shows on tape. Criminal genius of the armchair variety. Until Hess offered him straight out — ‘Hey, let me exclude you: volunteer a DNA sample.’ That’s when the guy started to stumble, started shutting down. Knew enough about DNA to want nothing to do with it, I guess. He refused outright. So Hess went prob cause, subpoenaed a cheek swab — which they got — and now it’s a wait for the results.”

Maddox rubbed his raw knuckles. “He’s locked up?”

“No need. Not until the DNA comes back. Guy’s not exactly a flight risk, right? He’s being tailed twenty-four/seven, see if he cracks.”

“So this is going to go on for a while.”

“Actually, not so. A colleague in my office says Hess called in a chit at the lab in Sudbury. He’s gotten somebody to cut through the backlog for him, push him to the top of the list. Apparently, Hess doesn’t like this Ripsbaugh. Either that or he wants out of Black Falls even faster than you do.”

“Hess,” said Maddox. A look of disdain.

“‘Leo the Lion,’ they call him. King of the Jungle.”

“There was somebody else from the DA’s office at the station.”

Cullen shrugged. “Probably a clerk helping to write up affidavits, that’s all. No one knows you, or about you. How you want it, right?”

“How it has to be. How it is.”

“Fine line, my friend. A dangerous game.”

“You want dangerous? With Pinty gone, I’m all alone in town now. Unprotected.”

“So go to Hess. Come out to him. What’s the harm?”

“Not how it’s done.”

Cullen dismissed that. “You just don’t like him.”

Maddox sat forward. “If something does happen to me, anything, an accident, if I die choking on my food, you fall on the town like the U.S. Marines.” Maddox waited for Cullen to agree to that, then sat back again. “Ripsbaugh have a lawyer yet?”

“Hess actually advised him to get one after the DNA swab.”

“And?”

“Ripsbaugh said only guilty people need lawyers.”

Maddox shook his head. “Jesus.”

“Comical, how wrong he’s going. Getting away with murder looks so easy on TV. Motive and opportunity — sure, that’s all circumstantial. But not blood evidence. And this isn’t mere DNA, mind you. Actual blood.”

“No latents?”

“Guy watches TV, are you kidding? Children pocketing bubble gum at the corner store wear gloves now. CSS found traces of talcum at the witch’s house, so they’re thinking latex.”

Maddox shook his head grimly.

Cullen went on. “As to Hess. You want to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ him? Maybe that’s okay for now. But. You cannot withhold evidentiary material or mislead him in any way. We’re already walking the tightrope with this. Don’t cost the county money. That’s the golden rule.”

Maddox nodded. That satisfied both their pro forma obligations.

A pretty nurse with a thin, well-bred nose poked her head in, smiling at Maddox. “You can go back in now.”

Cullen thought how they must love Maddox here. Heart-on-his-sleeve moody, devoted to a dying old man, and all nicked and banged up himself. Like a teddy bear tossed from a moving car.

Two doors down the curved hallway, they entered the warm, white hospital room. Cullen had met Pinty only once, six months ago, at the start of all this, and the man whose hand he shook then resembled not at all the sleeping ghost he visited now. His lips were slack around the tube in his mouth, flesh sagging off his proud jaw. The large headboard looked like an uncarved headstone, and Maddox, standing at the foot of the bed, an early mourner. The old man’s hairpiece, Cullen guessed, was in a plastic bag inside the nightstand drawer. No such thing as dignity in death. Not that Cullen ever saw.

Maddox said, looking down at the old man, “Blood clots broke loose from his legs. Lodged in his brain and possibly his heart. He had a series of small strokes, but they won’t know the damage until he regains consciousness. ‘Until and unless,’ they say.”

“You blame the stress?”

“I do.”

Cullen dropped into the padded chair that flattened out into Maddox’s night bed. A yellow plastic tray held his uneaten lunch. Maddox must have told them he was family. That was his cover here.

“I could get those guys right this minute if I wanted,” Maddox said. “Multiple counts of harassment, excessive use of force, abuse of power. All sorts of bullshit they could worm their way around in court with lawyers stalling and all that. No. When I get them, they’re going to know they’ve been gotten.” He looked down at the old man. “I’ll cut them so deep, everything’s going to come pouring out.”

Maddox was vengeful now. Triple the motivation.

Cullen chewed his lip thoughtfully. “Just one more question, then.”

Maddox didn’t look up. “What’s that?”

“Where the hell is Sinclair?”

30 Tracy

Donny sat next to her in her old Ford pickup. He was quiet most of the way, but not silent, not morose. More anxious than anything. She guessed that it was his having just left Pinty for the first time. If anything happened to Pinty while he was gone, it would be like his mother all over again.

The week’s groceries she had bought for her mother as an excuse for this midday excursion to Rainfield knocked around in plastic bags behind the seat. They passed a slumping barn with a faded HAY FOR SALE sign leaning against a decaying tractor set out as yard art. Back in Black Falls, they picked up the Cold River running along Main. Across the street from the mailbox reading RIPSBAUGH was a state police cruiser.

“Kind of creepy,” Tracy said, “having them in town. A little like an occupation.” She watched the whip-antennaed cruiser shrinking in her rearview mirror. “They’ve been following him everywhere. The one time I saw them, heading up toward the highway department garage, it was like a little parade.”

“How’s he handling it?”

“He was driving straight along like he wasn’t even aware. Maybe he isn’t.”

They passed the Falls Diner and the Gas-Gulp-’N-Go, the crumbling mill houses coming into view.

Tracy said, “I heard they found a sex video of his wife and Mr. Frond.”

The phrase “sex video” roused him a bit. “No,” he said, sitting up, watching Number 8 Road go past. “They were just love letters. High school-type stuff. But with drawings.”

“Drawings?”

“She was a good artist in school. Still is, by the look of it.”

“Dirty stuff?”

“Or erotic, depending on your point of view.”

“Dirty,” she said, hoping to cheer him up. “Drawings make more sense to me, anyway.” She had imagined an Internet-type video of an older, ponytailed guy and a heavy woman doing it. Ick. “In drawings you can make yourself thinner.”

They passed another state police cruiser parked outside the police station and didn’t talk again until she pulled into Pinty’s white-stone driveway, behind Donny’s patrol car. “Thanks,” he said. “For the ride, for bringing me my stuff, for everything.”

“Wish I could stay with you. But I have to get back, finish up for the day.”

He took his leather toiletry bag, the one she had packed for him. How strange it had felt, being inside his house alone. Walking room to room, poking around his bathroom things. He said, “I’m heading in to work soon, anyway.”

She touched the cut just under his sideburn, now healed to a nick. “Good luck there.”

He nodded. “I don’t even know if I can still call myself a policeman here without Pinty to back me up.”

“Please be careful.”

He kissed her once, lightly, and she pulled him closer for a real one, kissing him longer and better. She rubbed his arm. “I know how much Pinty meant to you,” she said, then realized she had spoken in the past tense. “Means to you, sorry.”

“He’s made fools out of doctors before,” said Donny. “He’ll be home again.”

Tracy smiled and nodded, admiring his stubborn faith though she did not share it. “I know he’s all you have.”

31 Hess

Palpable excitement among the uniforms, the duty troopers all extra-alert and garrulous, gobbling up oxygen inside the station; the hunting party anticipating the kill.

What Hess would remember most about this sour-smelling place was the sheer amount of crank mags stored up in the break room. A mountain of the stuff, had to be a record for a force this tiny. One time he’d had the occasion to visit a firehouse in a midsized town that was using an anatomically correct female mannequin for training exercises as well as other, less official pursuits. That squad was eventually disbanded and reassigned after word got out that they had invited a local stripper to dance on the fire pole during a shift change. Not that Hess had any moral objections to this stuff, but good Christ, there was a time and, more to the point, a place.

Maddox entered the break room looking to store his nylon lunch sack in the fridge. He seemed a little pale to Hess, maybe from worry, like he had lost some weight in the days he had taken off to sit with his friend in the hospital.

Bucky Pail came in on Maddox’s heels, grinning like his shirt was on fire and he liked the burn. Until he saw Hess, whose presence was a bucket of cold water. The action on his face flattened out, all that Maddox saw when he turned.

Pail still had the scrape bloom on his cheek, like he had gotten grazed with a boot tread. Maddox’s abrasions were far less worse than Hess had been led to believe, and in a strange way it reassured him to know that Maddox hadn’t gotten his ass kicked by these hillbillies.

“Some police department,” said Hess. “I’m almost sorry to leave it. Almost.”

Maddox ignored Hess, looking at Pail. Waiting.

When Hess didn’t make any move to exit the room, Pail’s grin got hot. “Later,” he said to Maddox, with lots of tongue on the L, then turned and went out.

“Five against one,” Hess said to Maddox. “You did all right for yourself. Seems like it’s not over yet.”

“Not by a long shot,” said Maddox.

“You timed your return right. We’re just about to arrest your highway department man for murder.”

A trooper ducked in, hooking his thumb back toward the hall. “DiBenedicto’s on the line.”

“Here we go,” announced Hess, rolling his shoulders as he went into the hallway.

Joe Bryson, Hess’s training partner who had come from the Mitchum barracks to watch him mop up this case, closed the door inside the old chief’s office. Hess punched the button on the telephone. “Jimmy D., you’re on speaker. How we look?”

“Leo,” came Jimmy DiBenedicto’s voice, “we have exact matches in eight combinations—”

“Gimme the odds first, Jimbo. The stats that I love. This guy is one in how many hundreds of millions?”

“I haven’t had a chance to do the math yet, Leo. But two of the matches are extremely rare, so it’s a lock. Listen — who else you got there?”

“Couple of good people, Jimmy.” Hess shifted balance, looking at Bryson, the county attorney in short sleeves, Fogarty, and the other guy from CSS. He reasserted himself. “Everybody who should be here is here, Jimmy. It’s fine. Go ahead.”

“Leo,” came the filtered voice. “Maybe you want to pick up.”

Hess cocked his head. Eyeing the phone from a different angle. “No, Jimmy, I’m sure I don’t want to pick up. You said you had an exact match on the autorads.”

“I carried this thing across the hall myself, Leo. It’s one to one. Only not with the swab you submitted. It’s a rad out of the convicted felon database.”

“The CODIS?”

Hess did pick up the handset then. Like the world’s lightest dumbbell.

Hess did not hang up after the conversation. He snapped the handset in half instead. He stood there a moment with the cracked plastic and exposed wire in his hands, then dispatched Bryson to bring him Pail and Maddox.

They appeared before his desk. Maddox saw the busted phone on the blotter and knew immediately that something was up.

Hess made them wait, burning off a little more anger at their expense, making them suffer for his aggravation. This ass-crack town, this fucking bitch of a case. And these two banged-up playground cops. What did I do to deserve this?

“This missing sex offender,” said Hess.

Now Maddox looked confused. Pail said, “Scarecrow?”

Hess scowled at this room he was going to be stuck in a little while longer. “I need to know everything about him there is to know.”