The Killing Moon: A Novel

32 Hess

Bryson was only a few weeks out of uniform, but Hess had detected a change in him since the DNA rads came back. Used to be Bryson would ape Hess. Hess would turn around with his arms crossed and find Bryson standing there, arms crossed. Hess would walk in chewing one of the spearmint toothpicks he kept in the ashtray of his car, and a day or two later Bryson would be switching a pick from one corner of his mouth to the other like it was something he’d been doing all his life. Bryson had started working out more, Hess noticed, and shaping his hair flatter on top, and talking about church. Like Hess’s boys, Bryson was learning by imitation, paying out respect in the form of flattery.

But now, ever since the DNA flop, Hess noticed Bryson standing back from him a bit. Tossing out questions where before he was content to listen and let Hess speak. Pointing out things to the CSS guys without routing it through Hess first.

Hess wasn’t overly sensitive, but he was observant; that was what made him, working out of the smallest barracks with the least resources at hand, the trooper with the highest clearance rate of any other DU investigator statewide. Getting this understudy heat from Bryson was the capper on a bad stretch of slow-motion progress. Hess needed to turn this ship around, and fast. Not just for his batting average but for himself. Someday his boys were going to look at their dad and see not a Superman but a guy who was simply doing his best. He could accept that from his boys, but not from Bryson, not just yet.

CSS wouldn’t allow the windows to be opened as they went about their glove-and-bag dissection of the sex offender’s crib. What struck Hess most about Sinclair’s black-curtained place were the contents of the guy’s kitchen cabinets: Devil Dogs, Beefaroni, snack-pack puddings, Kool-Aid mix, and boxes and boxes of cereal, from Apple Jacks to Quisp. The ultimate pantry as imagined by a ten-year-old boy.

Hess was encouraged by the black wig they had found hanging scalplike on Sinclair’s bedpost. It was human hair, more expensive than an acrylic wig and much more realistic in wear and feel. CSS had recovered eleven different hair follicles from inside Frond’s bathroom, stairs, and second-floor hallway, all black, all of similar length, but varying in ethnicity: two Caucasian, two Negroid, and seven Mongoloid or Asian. Turned out, Hess learned, that dozens of different donors — including cadavers — are used to make one human-hair wig.

So, no match on the hair, but the dots were there to connect. Sinclair’s credit card showed he had laid out eight bills for a new wig in March, this one an inch longer than the one found hanging on his bed — the length matching the hairs recovered from Frond’s.

The wig was good and the blood was better, but what Hess needed now was to establish some before-murder connection between Sinclair and Frond. Not for motive. Motive can cloud a case as much as clarify it, especially in court. Defense attorneys can have a field day with motive. Hess himself had a legally compelling motive to do away with a dozen people who had wronged him over the years. In order to feed the DA a solid conviction, he needed to link Sinclair to Frond in life, not just in death.

To that end, Hess was pulling books from Sinclair’s collection on the occult. Working the Magician and the Witch angle. It had potential, considering the missing athame. He was in the side hallway flipping through a book of voodoo recipes when a CSS criminalist entered the kitchen with Maddox in tow.

Turned out Maddox — surprise, surprise — had been inside Sinclair’s place before. They were taking him through again to ascertain what surfaces he had touched — he claimed none — or what if anything appeared missing or moved.

Bottom line: Something about Maddox rubbed Hess the wrong way. Something about him Hess did not like. Did not like or did not trust. Beyond the sense that the feeling was quite mutual. It was there in the way Maddox watched the criminalists and computer techs going about their work. Nothing in his interest said “part-time cop.” There was no outsider awe, only compulsive vigilance.

In other words, he did not strike Hess as a man blown back into this town by circumstance. More like a man with a knack for moving with the eye of a storm.

Hess let them finish — waited until they asked him about the empty docking station wired to Sinclair’s PC, the camera to which also appeared to be missing — before catching up with him outside on the chipped sidewalk near the CSS van.

Maddox eyed the modest crowd gathered across the intersection, mothers with their arms tight around their children. Hess said, “They don’t like it.”

Maddox turned, didn’t startle. “What’s to like?”

“Sex offender accused of murder. That’s a real-life monster in your neighborhood.”

Maddox nodded, knowing that Hess had a point, and waiting for him to get to it.

“I gotta hand it to you, Maddox. You don’t seem fazed.”

“Fazed?”

“Dealing with real police. On a real crime, a murder. You don’t seem too impressed with us, and you don’t seem annoyed by our presence, and those are the two small-town-cop responses we usually get. Envy or resentment.”

He shrugged. “I’m part-time. A spectator.”

Hess reminded himself that this “spectator” was the first to get inside Sinclair’s apartment after he went missing. Had turned up Sinclair’s bike before anyone even knew it was gone. A good bit of diligence from a man with no career to make, just a guy passing through town.

“See,” said Hess, “that doesn’t do it for me. This isn’t the sort of thing you stumble into, police work. A job you do awhile before moving on to the next thing. People burn out all the time, but rarely do they walk out. No small-town cop I ever met didn’t dream of the big time.”

Maddox shrugged again. “Now you met him.”

“I had this therapist one time. I was in a crisis-incident thing, a shooting; they make you do an exit interview and mandatory counseling. It’s paid time, you sit, you chat.” Hess letting Maddox know he didn’t buy into it much. “But this one thing she told me stuck. It was that guys drawn to police work are really only sublimating antisocial or violent impulses. Policing the impulsive, aggressive parts of themselves, and at the same time allowing them an outlet. In her words. Make sense to you?”

“I guess.”

“Makes sense to me. Over the years I’ve seen it prove out. Guys don’t become cops to help old ladies cross the street. They don’t come in looking to ‘do good.’ They come in looking to stop bad. They come in looking to impose order. It’s the uniform they join for, dressing themselves up in the law and wearing it around so everyone can see: Me, good guy. Me, not bad.”

Maddox pulled at his sweat-spotted POLICE jersey. “I didn’t join for the uniform.”

“No, I guess you didn’t. You said your father was on the job once upon a time. I’m assuming that’s how you got hired on, second-generation?”

“Pretty much.”

“Sinclair’s father was a cop.”

“For a couple of years. He was a builder after that.”

“Had a falling-out with the force. Now, kids of cops, that’s a whole ’nother thing. Lots of second-generation cops among them — myself included. Plenty of screwups too, though, like Sinclair. And some of both. Like these Pail brothers. Those are the ones to watch out for.”

“You think?” said Maddox.

Hess smiled at the way Maddox parried. “You know something else I figured out? With you filling up your own patrol car here, and the price of a gallon of gas being what it is these days? I figure working as a cop in Black Falls is actually costing you. Which shows extraordinary dedication. For someone just marking time. I mean, I consider myself a good cop. But even I have to get paid every two weeks, you know? Gotta get that take-home. Or are there some incentives to being a Black Falls cop that I don’t know about?”

Maddox tapped his brim. “There’s these swell caps.”

“So how was it you happened to wind up inside Sinclair’s apartment that first time?”

“I told you. I was driving past and saw movement in the window. He’s a registered SO who hadn’t been seen in a while, so I pulled over, knocked on the door. The kid answered and let me up.”

“The kid. This Frankie Sculp, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Foster kid, been staying here. Didn’t know where Sinclair was.”

“Correct.”

Hess nodded. “But you knew Sinclair from before, right?”

“You mean as kids? We lived on the same street, on opposite ends. But I didn’t know him know him. That was a long time ago.”

“You two didn’t pal around the neighborhood?”

“He was two grades older than me.”

“His sister was your age.”

Maddox nodded slowly. Getting it now. Maddox said, “You know a lot.”

“I keep my ears open,” said Hess. “So she has an affair with a guy, who her brother then kills.”

Maddox said, “You’ve interviewed her again, I assume. They weren’t close. I doubt she’s even spoken to him since he got out of prison.”

“Still, the Sinclair connection is a pretty strong link. Would you contest that?”

“It’s a link,” agreed Maddox. “But not a strong one.”

“In your professional opinion.”

Maddox shrugged. “You asked.”

“Maybe Sinclair and Frond had something else going. His books here, he’s got a lot of occult stuff. Frond with his New Age whatever, it’s a common area of interest. Maybe they connected after Frond dropped dime on Pail for beating up Sinclair at that traffic stop. Bonded, you know? Banded together to curse the police department, or what have you. Some sort of cult thing.”

“A black mass or something.”

“Or something, yeah. See, I don’t chuckle about it myself, because this stupid shit, it’s happened before. Retarded backwoods rituals where someone gets overzealous, goes too far. People can lose their bearings in these remote towns. Lose control.”

Maddox said nothing, waiting. Hess was doing most of the talking, but sometimes that worked. Sometimes that drew them out.

“This ‘scarecrow’ took a lot of abuse in this town, sounds like. Maybe he’d finally had enough. Maybe Frond let slip that he had some money stashed around his place, and maybe Sinclair was thinking about skipping town and decided he’d get a lot further with cash in hand. Maybe Frond came home and found him ransacking his place, and Sinclair panicked.”

“All ‘maybe’s.”

“Well, I’m doing what I can. I’ve got a suspect in a murder case who’s up and disappeared. Completely vanished — I don’t know where, I don’t know how. Left behind practically everything, including a closet full of clothes, luggage, cash in a bank account which remains untouched, and the only credit card to his name is the Discover card on his bedroom bureau. Took his bicycle, maybe, but didn’t get very far on it. Everything else, he left behind. Including a little blood at the scene of the crime, the imprint of a size ten and a half Chuck Taylor tread, and various black follicles from a wig of human hair. But wait. Hold on. One other thing he didn’t leave behind. One thing for me to focus on. The missing piece, right? The thing that doesn’t fit. You know what I’m talking about?”

Maddox shook his head, passably curious.

“Sinclair’s digital camera. That empty docking station hooked up to his computer in there. Purchased in early May over the Internet, with said Discover card — camera, hot dock, and media card. Sinclair fooled around with it a bit, took some test shots in his apartment. We know this because he installed the viewing software and uploaded a few date-coded images into his computer. But after that? Nothing. Nothing at all in the two months leading up to his disappearance and Frond’s murder. Meaning, to my mind, there’s a pretty good chance this camera’s got some pictures sitting in its memory card. Pictures that maybe even could give us a line on where he is now. You said the docking station was empty when you were inside his place the first time. It’s a small camera, by the way. Pocket-sized.”

Maddox said, “Are you accusing me of something?”

“Look, you’re stuck here in the middle of nowhere. Free reign on your night shifts, nobody watching. No chief or shift sergeant crawling up your ass. You’re not making any money. And nobody has a crystal ball — nobody knows how one little act, an impulse, a spur-of-the-moment decision, is going to affect everything else down the road. Hell, you might even regret it, but can’t see how to make it right. I’m saying, so long as I get that media card back intact? No harm, no foul.”

Maddox worked hard to keep his cool. A tough read, this guy. “Why don’t you ask the kid who was staying here where the camera is?”

“I’d like to,” said Hess. “I’d like to very much.”

Maddox waited. “And?”

“We checked with the Ansons, his foster parents. They haven’t seen him in days.”

“The Ansons aren’t known as the most diligent guardians,” Maddox said. Then he thought about it. “Wait a minute. Are you saying he’s missing?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

For the first time since he’d met him, Hess saw Maddox look surprised.

33 Bucky

Bucky was waiting with Eddie and Mort Lees when Maddox came out the back door. Maddox hesitated, and thought Bucky didn’t see it, then continued down the steps toward his patrol car.

Bucky moved out in front of the others, touching his own abraded cheek as though it were wet with paint. “Thought only girls kicked.”

Maddox said, “All I could manage with you letting your boys here do the real fighting.”

Bucky grinned. “I’m gonna miss you, Maddox.”

“Oh? I’m going somewhere?”

“You getting along good with the troopers? Hanging out at Scarecrow’s apartment there? You seem to be their boy now.”

“Yeah,” said Maddox, keeping an eye on the others. “They’re a fun bunch.”

“Uptight shits,” said Bucky. “Their whistles and faggoty-ass boots. The fucking gay Gestapo, marching in here.” He nodded at the station. “Putting us out of our own house like cats.”

Eddie chimed in. “Mountie assholes.”

Bucky said, “Scarecrow needs to be caught? So put me on it. I’ve tangled with him before.”

Maddox said, “Slapping around a guy in handcuffs isn’t exactly tangling.”

Bucky grinned harder, enjoying this. Maddox couldn’t touch him anymore. “You think Frond wishes he’d kept his big mouth shut now? Trying to turn me in? They say karma’s a bitch — but man. That same piece of shit he was defending coming back and killing his ass? So funny it’s almost sad.”

Maddox said, “Sinclair would be in prison right now if your tangling hadn’t gotten him out of that drunk driving conviction. If you hadn’t messed up the arrest.”

Bucky was having a hard time keeping victory from bursting out of him. “I really am gonna miss you, Maddox.”

“Is that right?”

Bucky stepped closer. “How’s it feel? No Pinty here to bail you out anymore. Nobody to run to. What’s it like, being all alone?”

“Pinty’s coming back.”

“That’s not what I heard. Not what I saw there out on his back patio. Reality is, the old man’s time has come and gone. And so has his pet cop’s. Once Pinty kicks, you can consider yourself unemployed.”

Maddox said, “You’re not police chief yet.”

“But I will be. That’s the beauty of it. With no Pinty to hold me back anymore? I might even run for his seat on the board of selectmen when it opens up.” Bucky looked to the others for enthusiasm. “Be the new Pinty in town.”

They were all smiles. Maddox was pretending hard that Bucky wasn’t getting under his skin, but the truth was so obvious, and so good.

The rear screen door squealed. A plainclothes trooper looked out. “Maddox? The K-9 units are here. Hess wants you over at the bridge.”

Maddox thumbed back at his patrol car. “I was on my way home.”

The trooper said, “You’re the one who found the bike. Hess wants you there.” He turned and went back inside, the door whacking shut.

Maddox cursed under his breath. That surprised Bucky. So Maddox wasn’t sucking up to them after all. He was their lackey. This gave Bucky another quiet thrill.

“K-9?” he said, almost laughing before he could get it out. “I guess somebody’s got to scoop up all that dog shit.”

That broke up the others.

“Put that paper diploma of yours to good use,” said Bucky, another kick in the shins.

But Maddox didn’t sulk. Instead, he came up eye to eye, his voice dropping so that only Bucky could hear him. “Your day is coming.”

Bucky tried hard to keep up his mirth. Maddox’s eyes were eager and hard, like he had more to say but preferred to sit on his information like a fucking hen on a warm egg.

Bluffing. All bullshit. Maddox knew nothing. Smug fuck.

Bucky burned so hot that he had to remind himself that he was in fact winning here. That everything, from Frond being murdered to Pinty going down, was falling his way. Like a giant hand clearing a path for him. Everything meant to be. All he had to do was sit back, and Maddox would be next. Then absolutely nothing would stand in his way.

Maddox turned and walked to the stairs, Bucky resurrecting his grin for the others. “I’m gonna miss him,” Bucky said. “I truly am.”

34 Maddox

Maddox drove fast, setting aside his disgust for Pail in order to focus on the missing Frankie Sculp. That sullen kid with the dyed-gold hair. His hungry eyes and shoved-in face, as though the doctor had flat-handed him at birth. His face rippled with acne, his skin the color and consistency of a peeled-apart peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

“He knows a way, he said. All the cops. He’s going to turn this shit-fucking town upside down.”

Maddox shouldn’t have let him go. Shouldn’t have tossed him back for fear of scaring away the bigger fish

But then again, it hardly mattered what Maddox or anyone else did. Truth was, Frankie had the mark on him. Maddox had seen it before. The kid had been bred to cut a path to his own self-destruction. Maddox only hoped he had not arrived there yet. Maddox would have to start looking for Frankie himself, though with Pinty being in the hospital, and Hess yanking his leash, his walking-around time was severely limited.

He passed the red STATE FARM INSURANCE AGENT sign at the end of Walt Heavey’s driveway, thinking of the hand-rolled cigarette butt he had found there, frowning again at the thought of Sinclair lurking around Heavey’s house. That weak-minded fool. Why, of all people, would he kill Frond? The one guy who had intervened on his behalf with Bucky’s abuse? Even if Sinclair had somehow found out about Frond sleeping with his sister — Sinclair had no stake in that. He and Val were brother and sister in name only.

Maddox neared the one-lane bridge that marked the paved end of Edge Road and the beginning of a tagged-on half mile of dirt and rock. He pulled over behind an unmarked cruiser and walked to the gravel turnout just before the short, rusted span that bore no name. The three rat-tailed boys who had called it “Toad Bridge” stood below, on the hard bank of the dribbling, heat-strangled brook, showing state police Crime Scene Services technicians where they had discovered Sinclair’s bicycle.

Walt Heavey was also present, having walked down from his house. He was testifying in front of Hess, who stood back off the road in the shade, spraying his big arms with bug repellent. “I’m telling you, there is something going on in these woods.”

“This woman at your boys’ window,” said Hess, arms glistening sleeve to wrist. “She had long black hair. How long?”

“Below the shoulder.”

Hess was working the wig angle. Sinclair had been known to wear that thing out on his balcony after dusk, overlooking the center of town. He asked Heavey, “Ever hear anything in the woods at night like music, or chanting?”

Heavey gave this serious thought. “No, sir. But you are looking at a man in the insurance game fourteen years now, as level as they come. And I am telling you, there is something going on in these woods.”

Hess thanked him and Heavey went away satisfied. Hess handed the aerosol can back to Bryson and turned to Maddox. “He said something about you shooting a deer the same night he heard his gunshot?”

“Back up the road by the falls.”

Hess smoothed a goatee that was not there and said no more. His sandy hair was thinned back from his forehead, showing a lot of scalp. Premature hair loss was a common trait among hard-core weight trainers, especially those who had relied on supplements in the past.

Handlers led two lean German shepherds out of a K-9 van on long leather leashes, sitting them at attention about ten meters back from the bridge. Hess admired the dogs’ muscular obedience, until something farther back along the road put a shadow of anger across his face.

Maddox turned and saw the orange highway department pickup parked back at the turn. Ripsbaugh was unloading an armful of traffic cones.

Hess summoned a uniformed trooper to his side, his voice quiet but forceful. “I want him out of here.”

Maddox stepped up before the trooper started off. “I’ll do it,” he said.

Hess looked at Maddox, wondering why he would bother, then permitted it with a flick of his wrist.

Maddox walked back past the cars lining the baking road to where Ripsbaugh was setting down his cones. “Kane,” Maddox said.

Ripsbaugh straightened, Maddox getting a sense of the strength inside his saggy pants and silent attitude, years of steady labor bound up in muscle. “Don.”

“Hey, uh...” He nodded back at Hess. “They want you to leave. They don’t want you around.”

Ripsbaugh stared. “I’m closing off the road. This turn here—”

“I know. I know. I’m just telling you what they said.”

Ripsbaugh looked toward the turnout at the bridge. Hess was ignoring him, talking to someone else. Ripsbaugh was usually hard to read, but here the insult was plain.

Twelve hours after the DNA results had come back, Ripsbaugh’s state police shadow simply disappeared. No apology to Ripsbaugh, no explanation. Because Ripsbaugh was never officially charged, he didn’t have to be officially cleared. So add to the taint of cuckoldry a cloud of suspicion still lingering over Ripsbaugh’s head.

Maddox said, “Leave the cones with me. I’ll pick them up when they’re through here, run them on back to you.”

Ripsbaugh slowly set down the cones. He was the kind of man who knew little of life other than the satisfaction of hard work. Take away his work and you leave him with nothing.

Maddox returned to the bridge. They had brought the boys up from the brook and sent down the dogs, handlers walking them back and forth over the cracked mud bank. The dogs sniffed and prodded aggressively, turning up zilch. Then CSS guys tossed down paper bags for the handlers to rip open underneath the dogs’ noses, one containing a black T-shirt, the other a ratty pair of black crew-length socks. Clothes from Sinclair’s apartment. The handlers snapped commands in German, and the dogs dutifully explored the site a second time. One of them seemed to scent something, but was unable to follow it.

The handlers then led them in wider, concentric circles. Maddox slapped at bugs while Hess remained a portrait of serenity, watching the police dogs working below for him.

As they moved to the Borderlands side of the short bridge, the handlers regripped leashes, winding the taut straps around their wrists as the dogs started to pull. A handler called up to say that they were “indicating,” and a CSS guy moved sideways down the short embankment carrying an oversized pair of tweezers and a paper evidence bag. What he found on the top curve of the bank he held up for Hess to see.

Maddox wasn’t sure. But he thought it might be the flattened butt of a hand-rolled cigarette.

You weak-minded fool.

The dogs led their handlers farther into the trees, skirting the dry, snaking bank of the brook. Hess and Bryson made their way down to follow, as did Maddox after a moment, tagging along unnoticed.

The dogs abruptly left the brook for the trees, straining against their leashes and pawing through the litter of the forest floor, scrambling over lumpy roots, following a trail. Maddox tried to envision it as he moved. Sinclair ditching his bike by the bridge. Hiking through the forest along this very route. Hiking or running? Could he have been chased?

The midnight gunshot Heavey had heard. Could Sinclair have found his way through these woods after dark, even with a flashlight? What was he doing biking out here in the first place?

The dogs’ barking picked up, and Maddox saw sunlight ahead, a clearing in the trees. The old fire road. Hard-packed and baking in the heat.

The dogs stopped, snarling, pawing madly at the shoulder of the road. Uncanny, the canine sense of smell. Nearly psychic in its ability.

The handlers promenaded the animals around a small perimeter, but to no avail. The dogs strained to get back toward the shoulder. The trail had ended.

The handlers released them from command and their leashes, the dogs jumping back and forth among the dead leaves and pine needles, digging at the ground, agitated and whimpering. They were indicating something, and suffering for their inability to communicate just what it was.

Hess stepped past them out into the middle of the road. He looked west where it curved, disappearing into the treeline. “Where’s this go?”

No one else answered, and Maddox realized he was being addressed. “Access road. Runs the length of the forest, from the trailheads on the northeast side of town out to Aylesbury, I think. Near the state border. Ungated at either end.”

Hess looked the other way, back toward Black Falls. “Who drives it?”

“No one. Unless you’re looking to wreck your suspension. Teenagers run it on a dare sometimes.”

“Teenagers?”

“‘Hell Road,’ they call it. Every year, every graduating class. Rite of passage. The old haunted-forest thing.”

“What’s the legend?”

“Pequoig Indian spirits seeking revenge for a massacre out at the falls. That’s the classic version. Others say there was a boy who got lost out here and froze to death around the turn of the last century. People claim to hear him crying and calling out for help after the first snow.”

Hess nodded. “Nothing else?”

“You could probably find somebody who would talk up midnight masses and devil worship.”

Hess didn’t like the way Maddox phrased that. He passed another silent judgment on Maddox, then looked away, ignoring him. “Hell Road,” he said to Bryson.

Bryson shielded his eyes from the high sun. “A midnight stroll through the forest seems unlikely, though stranger things have happened. And that gunshot report, it’s still a big ‘if’ in my book. But the dogs place him here, no question. He could have met someone.” Bryson mimed his theory, intrigued by the possibility. “Shot them, took their car. Because he needed wheels, because he knew he was blowing town. He went after Frond maybe for some traveling cash.”

Hess said, “Forty dollars was still tucked inside the kitchen creamer.”

“So he failed.”

“Then what’s he doing for money? No ATM hits, no pings out in the real world.”

“Hiding. A wanted man.”

Hess closed one eye. “Okay, but if he had a gun, why didn’t he shoot Frond? Why tear him up like that?”

Bryson sputtered, out of gas.

Hess said, “What if he didn’t go anywhere at all?”

Bryson squinted. To Maddox, it seemed like Hess had left Bryson twisting. Like he had allowed him to fail here.

Hess said, “Maybe he was only trying to look disappeared. Maybe he walked out here, turned around, walked right back. Left the bike where he had dumped it, waded through stream water back toward town.” Hess chewed the inside of his cheek, watching the confounded dogs. “We know he was inside the witch’s house for some amount of time. Days, maybe.”

Bryson said, “You’re saying Sinclair’s still nearby?”

“We’ve got alerts out there. A guy with shaved eyebrows, that’s tough to miss.”

Bryson scanned the trees they had just walked out of. “Okay. Then where’s he hiding now?”

While Maddox was distracted by this back-and-forth, one of the unleashed dogs had cut back around its handler toward him. Maddox stiffened, the dog nudging his shin, starting a low-grade growl.

The handler heeled the dog with a German command, and it sat at eager attention, eyes fixed on Maddox, lips back and baring its teeth.

Maddox explained, “I was inside the apartment earlier.”

The handler said nothing. He took up the leash, wound it tightly around his hand, and eased the hungry dog away.

Maddox saw Hess standing closer to the shoulder now, watching him, his big arms pretzeled.

35 Ripsbaugh

Ripsbaugh rimmed the fire pit in the Bobcat, dozing dirt onto the smoldering ash. Cinders lifted off in a huff of protest, flakes of leaf and yard bag flaring orange before dying black and drifting down like hell snow. Smoke rose from the pit, gray and thin.

The heat off the crater made things wavy, but the white jersey immediately attracted Ripsbaugh’s eye, as will any clean thing in a dump. Maddox coming toward him between lanes of landfill. Ripsbaugh made another smothering pass, covering up the carcass of a pillaging coyote he had snared with an illegal leg trap.

“Saw the smoke,” said Maddox, talking over the Bobcat engine. “I dropped the cones in the back of your truck.”

Ripsbaugh nodded and motioned Maddox aboard. Maddox gripped the outside of the cage as Ripsbaugh drove back up the rise to the equipment shack. Maddox stepped off as Ripsbaugh killed the ignition and climbed out, plucking his T-shirt away from his sweat-soaked sides. He swiped at his brow with his back-pocket rag, admiring the soot that rubbed off.

Maddox’s face and nose looked pinched, but to Ripsbaugh the stench of sun-baked garbage was second nature. Maddox said, “How do you stand burning in this heat?”

“Piles up otherwise. It don’t stop for summer.” He popped open the Igloo cooler just inside the door, offering Maddox a Coors, which he declined. “I earned this one,” said Ripsbaugh, cracking it open, exploding a spray of mist and a lazy spill of foam.

He drank down half, wincing under the high sun, then caught sight of a wing flapping over the top of a dirt hillock across the lane. He handed Maddox his beer and reached back inside the shed for his spade, mounting the rise in four long strides, blade raised.

Two massive turkey vultures spread their wings, lifting off slowly away from him, hauling their ugly bodies into the hot, heavy air.

Their meal was a dead possum, which Ripsbaugh scooped and flung down the other side. Maddox eyed the blood smear on the spade as Ripsbaugh returned, taking his beer, drinking another lick and starting up the dusty road toward the front gate. “They find anything?”

“Dogs scented a trail. Led out to the fire road through the Borderlands. Ended there.”

“It’s Dill they’re looking at?”

Maddox nodded. “What do you think?”

“I’m wondering who’s next if he doesn’t work out for them.” They walked a few more steps in silence. “It’s not what they done to me so much. The letters they found, the cut on my arm — I understand these things. But give me a fair shake. This guy Hess, the way he went about it. How he had it all decided. Sawed off my leg without waiting for the cancer test to come back first.”

“It’s not right, how they treated you.”

“I can take it. Being that I knew I was innocent, that made it all just strange. But what it did to Val. What it put her through. Once they come in that door, once they get inside your house, everything you ever said or did can and will be used against you. It was open season. And Val, she’s not that strong. She’s sick to death about anyone knowing her business, never mind the whole town.”

“You could sue.”

Ripsbaugh shook his head. “Not put her through that again.”

Maddox looked at him. “You’re a good man, Kane.”

“Naw,” he said, taking another pull on the can, then crushing it in his fist, tossing it near the door of the recycling shed. “No such thing.”

He felt Maddox looking him over, as though Maddox had decided something. “You said something to me once about wanting to help. If I were to ask you for a favor, even if it didn’t seem to make sense at the time, could you do it anyway, without saying anything to anyone else?”

Ripsbaugh hesitated with his hand on the gate latch. An unforeseen result of his persecution by Hess and the state police was that he had apparently gained some measure of Maddox’s trust.

Ripsbaugh asked him, point-blank, “Were you a cop before all this?”

Maddox’s face showed nothing as he stepped through the gate. “I’ll be in touch.”

36 Tracy

After Dr. Bolt had to leave in such a hurry, Tracy sat with Rosalie in the first stall. The old cowshed closest to the house was where she and her mother stabled late-term pregnant llamas and their newborn crias. Dr. Bolt’s best estimate for Rosalie was two to three weeks, but given the llama’s gestation of nearly twelve months, she could deliver at any time. Restlessness and fidgeting would be the first signs of early labor.

Tracy sat on a stool in the open stall doorway, eating a tuna fish sandwich for dinner and watching the contented mother-to-be sitting on her hay bed. Rosalie’s brown cameloid face looked anything but restless. Tracy marveled at how peaceful and serene she appeared, her high neck so straight and proud. How fulfilled.

Living on a farm, Tracy came up against the reality of biology every day, in such a way that it was impossible not to dwell on her own animal nature. She thought about the tiny pouch of eggs she had been assigned at birth. A humble legacy dwindling month by month. She was still young enough that she shouldn’t worry, but Mithers women were known for their frugality, and squandering a precious commodity such as that was like heating an unused room or listening to a leaky faucet drip, drip, drip.

Tracy had received “the Talk” in sign language. Never before or since had her mother seemed more deaf than at that moment. In need of a convenient visual aid, she had taken Tracy to see the giant gumball machine outside Wal-Mart on their monthly visit to Rainfield for supplies.

What would it feel like, she wondered, once that quarter was dropped into the slot? The bright pink ball spiraling down to click against her brass door.

She ignored the horn the first time. It honked twice more in succession, like a signal, and she put down her sandwich on its wax paper and closed Rosalie’s stall door and went down the wood ramp. Her shadow stretched long across the chewed grass in the peachy, late-day light. Half hidden behind a handful of birches sprung up along the western fence was a parked car. A police car.

She ducked past the kitchen window in case her mother was there, then cut through the gate and ran along the fence. She tried livening up her hair with her fingers as she went, turning the corner and seeing Donny out of the car, waiting for her in the shade.

These days, it never even occurred to her to play hard to get. She ran up and kissed him and held him and rubbed his stubbled cheek. When he smiled, she kissed him again.

“Tuna fish,” he said.

She covered her mouth fast. “Sorry!”

He shook his head, kissing the knuckles over her lips.

“This is a surprise,” she said, holding him hard. “You look tired.”

He glanced through the peeling white tree trunks at the house. “I only have a minute. Wanted to make sure you knew not to call me at the station.”

“Okay.”

“Too crazy there. I’m never alone anymore. Page me if you need to get in touch.”

“I will, I will. How’s Pinty?”

Donny shrugged. “He mumbled in his sleep. I tried to convince the doctor that was a good sign.”

She put her ear against his chest, not to listen but to get as close to him as possible. “So much going on,” she said. “So many things at once.”

“Tell me about it.”

“And now Dillon Sinclair — my God. We locked the doors last night.”

“I think everyone did.”

She pulled back just enough to look up at him, feeling something in his manner. “What?”

“The guy doesn’t have a single violent episode in his past. Four years of prison — nothing.”

“I don’t know anything about him.”

“He was a magician,” said Donny, “some local junior champion or like that. He dropped out of high school senior year and supposedly went to Boston, worked as a street performer in the subways for a while, hustling money. He was essentially homeless when they tracked him down after his father died. He had been left some properties in the center of town. But Sinclair didn’t want to come back, so instead he used the rental income to relocate to Rainfield, where he started giving kids magic lessons in the back room of a music shop.”

“Oh, no,” said Tracy.

“Five kids came forward. He was convicted on only a single count.”

“Don’t tell me any more.”

“I grew up on the same street as him. He was weird even then. He came over once or twice to play, right after they moved in, but it never worked. He stole my mother’s cigarettes. I remember she tracked him down to a tree house behind their backyard. A nine-year-old, smoking. She didn’t let me play with him anymore after that.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Maddox.”

“The guy’s an authentic freak, but...”

“Are you saying you don’t think it’s him?”

He shrugged and looked down at her. “What do I know?”

She slipped her arms back under his. “That you miss me?”

“Yes,” he said, and they kissed again. She pushed his hair back from his ears. She was constantly touching his face, forever making him real, admiring this trophy she was amazed to have won.

He looked through the trees. “Your mother,” he said.

Tracy turned. There she was, outside the cowshed with her apron on. Yes — her mother still wore an apron while cooking. She also wore a whistle in case she needed to summon Tracy, though she rarely needed to use it, Tracy being so obedient.

Tracy’s anger toward her was unreasonable and an utter waste of time, so she squashed it, channeling all her energies into one more kiss. “You call me,” she told him.

Tracy’s mother had the whistle in her hand when Tracy came around the side of the house. Her worry fell away. Where’d you go?

Nowhere. Tracy moved her hands casually. Why?

Her mother glanced back near the tree grove — not right at it, but in that general direction — and Tracy reminded herself that her mother was deaf but not blind.

37 Dr. Bolt

Dr. Gary Bolt untangled himself from the seatbelt of his Honda Prelude and rushed up the walkway, past his closed-for-the-day veterinary practice to the front door of his adjoining house.

The door was locked. Dr. Bolt knocked. He knocked again, harder. He stepped back to check the picture window that fronted the living room. The heavy gold curtains were closed, swaying.

Dr. Bolt moved to the seam of the door, speaking into it. “Frankie.”

The voice came hissing from inside. “Who’s with you? Are they with you?”

Dr. Bolt checked the street for onlookers. Not because of Frankie’s paranoia, but because of his own. Dr. Bolt had neighbors. He was an aging bachelor whispering through his own front door.

Dr. Bolt said, “Please, let me in.”

“They’ve been trading off cars. Passing every seven or eight minutes.”

“Frankie.” Dr. Bolt remained heroically patient. He put on his doctor’s voice. He employed reason. “You interrupted me with a patient. You said it was an emergency.”

“They’re coming after me. I know too much.”

Prior to this week, Dr. Bolt had known almost nothing of Frankie Sculp, not even his name. Only that, every few days, the boy crossed the farm fields to Dr. Bolt’s back kennel to retrieve the little packages left there by a young lady named Wanda. Yes, Dr. Bolt knew what was in those little packages. The same drugs Frankie had been snorting off the webbing between his thumb and forefinger every few hours since he had appeared on Dr. Bolt’s doorstep six days ago, saying he was scared, in trouble, and had no place else to go.

At the time, Dr. Bolt could hardly contain his excitement, nor believe his extraordinary good fortune. For he was at his very best helping strays.

Now here he was, one week later, standing out on his own welcome mat, begging Frankie to let him in.

“Frankie,” he said. “I am alone. Please. Open this door.”

“I checked your phones. For bugs.”

Dr. Bolt did not understand. “You’re seeing bugs now?”

“Police bugs! Surveillance! I checked every appliance.”

“Every appliance? How did you—”

“And I opened up all the light switches and plug outlets. Anything near a power source. It’s for your sake too.”

Dr. Bolt closed his eyes, swooning a bit at the thought of the destruction awaiting him behind this door. “Frankie. This is known as clinical paranoia. You have not slept in a week—”

“Here they come again!”

Dr. Bolt heard a table — it would be the high credenza, the one standing beneath the picture window, that had been his mother’s — fall, and then glass — yes, the frame holding his grandmother’s engagement portrait, an antique, irreplaceable — smash and tinkle.

He whipped toward the street. A white sedan approached.

“Don’t let them in, doc!” came Frankie’s voice behind the window. “They’ll kill you to get to me!”

The automobile rolled past, and Dr. Bolt recognized Mrs. Poulin leaning over the wheel. She brought her cockatoo in to get his wings clipped every three months. The bird’s name was Hamilton. Mrs. Poulin waved.

Dr. Bolt stood there holding up his flat hand.

“What are you doing?” said Frankie. “Are you signaling them? You’re signaling them!”

Dr. Bolt put down his shaking hand. Earlier in the day, one of his best customers, the kind of woman who could single-handedly keep his practice afloat for an entire year, who some in town unkindly referred to as the Zoo Lady, had asked him why he had left his stereo playing so loudly to an empty house.

And just now, Tracy Mithers, from the llama farm on Sam Lake, showed such concern for him as he threw together his bag and begged off in evident distress, pager in hand.

He was going to lose everything.

What Frankie did not know — and could not ever know, for it would only explode his already flaming paranoia — was that Dr. Bolt already had a legitimate reason to fear the Black Falls police. And by Black Falls police, he meant specifically Bucky Pail.

“Frankie. You paged me, do you remember? You said you needed me, you needed my help. I am here now. Let me come inside. Let me help you.”

The curtain rippled again. He heard breathing on the other side of the door.

“Please,” said Dr. Bolt.

The lock turned. The door was pulled open a few inches.

Frankie stood behind it, a steak knife in his hand, its tip bloodied.

His hunted eyes searched the street and yard, and then, settling on Dr. Bolt’s kindly country-doctor face, the stress lines around them slackened. For a moment Frankie was just a teenager again, possessed of the neediness and confusion that marked his age.

He pulled the door open wider, and Dr. Bolt saw that Frankie had been using the knife tip to pick at the sores on his face.

“Help me,” Frankie said.

He was an ugly boy, yet there was something beautiful in the pain of his ugliness, something angelic and touching. His vulnerability was exquisite. A mutt with a sad limp and a mangy coat. Wanting only to lay his head in the lap of an owner who would not mistreat him.

Dr. Bolt had always assumed that the predator-prey relationship came down to the simplicity of strength versus weakness. But it was so much more symbiotic than that. He saw it now as a negotiation of vulnerabilities. The very same vulnerability that made Dr. Bolt easy prey for a blackmailer like Bucky Pail — specifically, Dr. Bolt’s affinity for the attentions of much younger men — was what compelled Dr. Bolt to exert his advantage over Frankie Sculp. In other words, the strong were just as vulnerable to the weak. There was no one without the other.

Inside, he found his living room dismantled. Completely destroyed. A shambles. What a damn fool he was. Much too old for these ups and downs.

But this was what a life without love did to you. It put you at risk. To the temptations of a mercurial teenager, and to a dark manipulator like Bucky Pail.

Dr. Bolt allowed the frail, weeping boy into his arms and helped him down the hallway to the bathroom, to dress his self-inflicted wounds.

38 Cullen

Cullen stood a couple of careful feet away from his backyard swimming pool, still wearing his dress shirt and pants from the office. He maintained the pool from the beginning of June through the end of August, keeping it skimmed, pH-balanced, and algae-free for his wife and two sons and their daily summer guests, even though Cullen himself did not know how to swim. Witnessing the childhood drowning death of his older sister had left him with a pathological fear of immersion. Once every year or two, on a warm night and with his wife close at his side, he would sit at the edge of the shallow end for a few minutes and dip in his bare legs up to his shins, stirring the water he cleaned so diligently all season. His wife had grown up with a pool and thought it important that the boys not suffer for their father’s phobia. So he had taken upon himself its care and feeding as a way of managing his fear, of localizing the source of his dread, trapping it here in his backyard, as one might take on the care and feeding of a chained dragon.

Why he had so much respect for Maddox, he supposed. Someone who could wade in over his head, swim around, touch bottom and resurface time and time again. Someone who could go under and hold his breath there for so long.

The crescent moon, silver as a scythe, grinned at him from the surface of the still and silent water. Cullen’s sister’s name had been Emily, and when she ran her hair had flown off her shoulders like golden wings. He had adored her.

A light came on in the second floor of the house. The shadow of his wife, whose name also happened to be Emily, passed the window of the upstairs bathroom. Rubbing in hand cream, getting ready for bed, her nightly routine.

Cullen stepped farther back from the edge, returning his attention to Maddox on the cordless. “You heard about the cadet class?”

Maddox said, “What?”

“A trainee class from New Braintree is being bused your way first thing in the morning. One hundred and something recruits for a field search of the state forest.”

“The Borderlands?”

“I guess they had some K-9s indicate.”

They were disconnected briefly, and a recording asked Maddox to please deposit seventy-five more cents.

Cullen said, “Where are you calling from?”

“A pay phone outside the gas station here.” Tones sounded as Maddox’s coins fell. “My point is, the guy’s hitting on this cult stuff, which is bullshit. He’s floundering. Desperate.”

“See, Hess bet the house on the ditchdigger and his blood DNA, and lost. He thought he had a quick arrest to pad his clearance stats, told his sergeant it was a done deal, and now here he is, still working the same folder. Burning up manpower and money. Frankly, he got lucky with the sex offender angle, buying him a few more days. Because the DA won’t be seen as soft on pedophiles. But he’s got a very small window of time left to find Sinclair, and the sill’s slamming down hard on his fingers.”

“I think he’s in deeper shit than he knows.”

“You don’t see Sinclair for this, but you’re the only one. Hess is on the right track here. He’s got blood, he’s got hair — even if it is wig hair — he’s got treads from the brand of sneaker the suspect was known to wear. He’s got fibers from the offender’s apartment—”

“He’s got what?”

“Fibers matching a living room rug. As well as a few skin cells he likes for Sinclair, that he’s still waiting on tests for. See? All your dancing around him is bullshit and counterproductive. Just come out to him. Our thing is dead and all but buried.”

“No way. Not yet.”

“If it’s Sinclair — and, plainly, it is — then we’ve already lost. The case is nothing. It was thin to begin with, relying on the word of a convicted sex offender. But a convicted sex offender who’s also a killer? Find a DA in this country, in this world, who would bring that case.”

“It’s not over, Cullen.”

“You don’t want it to be over, and neither do I. And stubbornness is a good trait, and as a lawyer I respect it. But I like common sense too. I know you’re tight with Chief Pinto-I-can-never-pronounce-the-name. You two obviously go way back.”

“Pinty.”

“He’s a good man.”

“Cullen. It’s more than that.”

“Nobody likes to lose. Everybody wants to be the hero. But when you’re down five runs in the ninth, one swing of the bat won’t win it for you. You play small ball, keep the inning alive.”

A pause. “Okay.”

Cullen frowned at the moon smiling at him from the water. “But you’re still gonna get up there and take your swing.”

“I’m finishing this job.”

“We’re in the shit enough as it is. If Sinclair is found to have benefited from a deal with the DA’s office before committing a capital crime—”

“Benefited how? The assault charges against Bucky Pail were a get-out-of-jail against his DUI.”

“He got leniency for agreeing to assist this investigation, and you know that. On my recommendation. The five-year driver’s license suspension was a slap on the wrist. We could have sent him to prison and let him file his suit from there. Anyway, you know it’s a game of appearances, not actual facts. My boss needs to get elected again. Should she decide to run.”

“Cullen, there’s only one reason a forty-year-old lawyer goes back into the public sector as an assistant DA. You have political ambition yourself.”

“What of it?”

“You need this as much as I do.”

“I need to avoid embarrassments is what I need.”

“You check on Sinclair’s pager for me?”

Cullen sighed, which was another thing he caught himself doing more and more as he got older. “You’re sure it hasn’t turned up?”

“Not in the search of his place, I know that.”

“It’s still functioning, so far as we can tell.” Cullen’s hand found something in his pocket, a bottle cap, from the Bud Light he’d opened after getting home. He felt it in his palm, a tiny crown. “Still receiving pages, or able to. If it has a battery in it, and all that. What if they find it in the forest?”

“Christ.”

“Those things save old messages? They can identify you through that?”

“Give me a little credit,” said Maddox, “not to have signed off pages with my full name and birth date. I was always discreet. But the billing, I assume it goes right back to your office.”

“Then the jig is up, and you flip over all your cards anyway.”

“Sinclair still has the pager with him.”

“Well, then, he’s ignoring you. And why not? He’s a killer, Maddox. Why does he want to hear from a cop?”

Silence expressed Maddox’s dissent.

Cullen said, “Okay, fine, so how are you going forward from here?”

“Still trying to track down that kid who was inside Sinclair’s place. And Wanda, I’m going to lean on her. I cooked up an excuse to go over to her house tomorrow. Enlisted Ripsbaugh’s help with that one.”

“The ditchdigger?” said Cullen, surprised. “You really do have it in for Hess, don’t you.”

Cullen stood there by the pool after he hung up, flipping the bottle cap in his hand. A water bug or some such insect swam across the moon crescent, rippling the black surface, and Cullen switched on the overnight filter, what he had come out here to do. The jets voided their air bubbles, the skimmers circulating water.

Maddox was turning crusader. Pulling the plug on him was going to be difficult, if not impossible. Cullen wondered how much further he could let this go.

39 Maddox

The man known as “Bathrobe Bill” Tedmond said, “I don’t know where Wanda is. She don’t come and go regular. Don’t keep hours. Phone rings and she’s gone.”

Wanda’s father sat in a deep, itchy-looking armchair beside a tray table containing a gnawed pencil, an open wire-bound notebook listing expenses versus income, a smattering of bills and notices, and a once-white Slimline telephone stained smoker’s-tooth yellow. The bathrobe was saddle brown terry cloth with a faux-silk shawl collar, and whenever Bill left the house, which was almost never, pants and slipper shoes underneath completed the ensemble. A window fan stirred hot air that fluttered the peeling green paper on the walls, sloughing off its backing glue like the lining of an ulcerated stomach. The laughing television had been placed in the center of the room, with everything else, Bathrobe Bill included, arranged around it.

No need for Maddox to hide his disappointment, Bathrobe Bill’s eyes having yet to leave Live with Regis and Kelly. “When would you say you saw her last?”

“Time, I’m no good with. Yesterday, maybe. She sleeps a lot when she’s here, and why not? Sleeping’s free.”

For sixteen years, Bill Tedmond drove long-haul: on the road for eight days, home for two. But his divorce from Wanda’s mother triggered a decade-long depression, rendering him unable to work, though the state denied his disability claim. His rig remained parked outside under trees, its once-proud chrome caked with seasons of pollen and bird shit, plants and weeds growing out of the leaves composting on its roof. He was a recluse now, Black Falls’ dirt-poor version of Howard Hughes, spending his days in front of a snowy television, keeping a careful tally of all the money he did not have.

“Well,” said Maddox, moving this along, Bathrobe Bill like a black hole sucking up all health and ambition, “she mentioned you were having trouble with your plumbing.”

“That’s right enough. Hope she also mentioned I’d have even more trouble paying to fix it.”

“I’ve got someone with me who will get things flowing again, no problem.”

Bathrobe Bill nodded, still facing the TV. “I’ll hang in here until you’re done.”

Maddox went to Ripsbaugh in the back hallway. Ripsbaugh wore a sweat-darkened T-shirt, overwashed shorts, and his usual boots with the peeling leather collars and worn-down toes. He sat before the “video diagnostics system” contraption Maddox had helped him wheel in. The unit’s motor hummed as a mechanized spindle payed out red cable with a thinner silver wire spiraled around its length. The camera snake-fed into the open toilet in the corner of the bare bathroom, disappearing into a liver-colored puddle at the mouth of the bowl at a rate of about one inch per second. The procedure was eerily medical in appearance. A three-by-three screen on the console played the camera view creeping through a pipe of cloudy water glowing night-vision green, an odometer-like counter marking off the distance.

“How far’s it go?” asked Maddox.

“Twelve hundred feet,” said Ripsbaugh, sitting back in an unsteady chair pulled from the kitchen, its spindles broken underneath. “I get a fourth of my regular excavation fee for twenty minutes of sitting and watching TV.”

The house as a whole had a trapped odor, its floors sticky like the floors of an animal cage. Having talked his way in here with Ripsbaugh, only to be frustrated by Wanda’s absence, Maddox leaned against the wall to wait, trying to come up with some conversation. “So what’s the worst thing anyone’s flushed?”

“The worst?” said Ripsbaugh. “I don’t know. You hear about wedding rings, guys having to go into the tanks and get them. Feminine products, you know, those things, they swell up with water five times their size. What messes up tanks most is coffee grounds and bleach. Coffee grounds because they clog up your outlet pipes. But bleach, and all these antibacterial soaps they make now? Kills off the bacteria in the tank. It’s the bacteria that does all the work in there, eating solids and breaking them down. People so busy chasing bacteria out of their house, meanwhile this tank of waste is swelling up underground, about to back up on them.”

“Bleach is bad, huh?”

“When my father ran the company, he would pump out a residential tank once every five or ten years. You could go that long. Not anymore. You one-ply or two?”

“I don’t know. Whatever’s cheapest.”

“One-ply is the way to go. Ladies like the softer two-ply, but it breaks down slow, scums up the top of the tank. Flush down that three-ply they make now, or a baby wipe, or one of them quilted paper towels? Might as well pull off your shirt and throw it in there too. None of it’s going anywhere until I come by to suck it out.”

The motor whined and the console clicked. The feeding stopped. Ripsbaugh eyed the screen, toggled the joystick controls.

“Yep,” he said. “We got a blockage. Right at the inlet. Something’s snagged there.” He tried to prod at it with the scope, to no avail. He patted his knees and stood. “Have to crack her open outside.”

Maddox stopped in the kitchen, the linoleum crackling under his boots. Prescription bottles and dirty dishes and soft packs of GPC cigarettes. Losing lottery scratch tickets facedown in the trash. A still life in crumb and stain. He could feel it here, he could almost smell it: the malaise, this enfeebling despair that radiated like a contagion throughout Black Falls. The breakdown of law and order was, in a sense, a reflection of this mental breakdown.

Outside, beyond a tattered blue tarpaulin covering last winter’s unused firewood, Ripsbaugh held the head of a wide green hose unwound off his whirring Cold River Septic truck, the thing twitching as it sucked from a hole in the yard.

The stink was rude, richly awful, just shy of disgusting. Closer, Maddox saw a half-moon slab of concrete overturned next to Ripsbaugh’s trusty shovel, revealing a crescent hole smiling out of the earth like a dark mouth, wide enough to swallow a child.

“Thousand-gallon tank,” Ripsbaugh said. “That’s small potatoes. I remember yours, when I did the Title Five inspection on your mother’s house?” Prior to the sale of any property in Massachusetts, the state environmental code required that the septic system be inspected and certified. “That was an old six-by-six vault. Way over capacity for the house size.”

Ripsbaugh pulled up the dripping hose, offering Maddox a glimpse below. A muddy white inlet PVC pipe came from the house, jutting into the tank in a modified T. Below it lay a solid coat of thick, white-gray fluff.

“That mess on the top there, that’s the paper, sink food, detergents. Below that, all wastewater. People think their septic tank is full of shit, but it’s not. Waste dissolves pretty quickly. ‘Effluent’ is the term.”

This was by far the most he had ever heard Ripsbaugh speak at one time. But everybody in this world is an expert on something. Maddox looked down at the meringue of undissolved waste shimmying on the surface. “Effluent, huh?”

“Dribbles off into the leeching fields. Seeps back down through the rock and soil, reentering the water table. Then you pull it back up through your well and drink it, start the whole cycle over again.”

“Yum,” said Maddox.

“Earth is the best filter there is. All these other towns on water bans now, because of the lack of rainfall? That’s public sewers. Piping out all their water instead of returning it to the ground. These new developments go up and bleed the land dry, just so that residents don’t have to face the once-a-year stench of getting pumped out. People want to believe in magic white bowls that make everything disappear.”

Maddox looked back to Ripsbaugh’s rumbling tanker. “And from here...?”

“Treatment facility over in Aylesbury, they burn it clean.” He left the thirsty hose sucking air on the dirt lawn, picking up a long, flexible wire tool with a two-pronged end. “I don’t take it all out, though. You leave the sludge on the bottom, the bacteria that feeds on the waste. Breaks it down. The dirtiest part of the tank, that does all the work.” He lay flat on the ground and reached into the smelly tomb with the tool in his gloved hand. “That’s nature in action.”

He worked by feel, picking around inside the PVC pipe, then pulling back sharply as though hooking a fish. Fluid from the unclogged pipe disgorged into the tank.

Ripsbaugh brought the tool out of the mouth of the chamber and deposited the dripping obstruction on a clump of dead grass. Maddox glanced back at the front door. This went beyond snooping through the Tedmonds’ garbage, closer to a necropsy of their home.

The matter was sodden and soiled but not mucked brown. Some prodding and separating with Ripsbaugh’s tool revealed the bulk of it to be gauze strips and first aid tape. A swollen packet that looked like a fat, cotton wallet was an absorbent bandage, and threaded into it were faint traces of black.

“Blood,” said Maddox.

“That’s what people flush,” said Ripsbaugh, picking through it some more. He poked out two tiny, waste-streaked, zippered plastic envelopes, small enough that their only legitimate use could have been stamp collecting.

Maddox looked at Ripsbaugh, and found Ripsbaugh already looking at him. “That what I think it is?” Ripsbaugh said.

“I think so,” said Maddox.

“Probably soaked too long in there for any drug trace to show up in a lab.”

The guy knew his cop shows. Maddox looked back at the house again.

Ripsbaugh said, “Search ain’t legal anyway. ‘Plain view’ is the rule. Bathrobe Bill gave his consent for you to be inside, but this goes beyond discovery.”

Maddox played it down, shaking his head. “I’m not here as a cop.”

Ripsbaugh looked at him, the wire tool dripping to the ground. “Then what are you here as?”

Maddox tried to come up with a good answer for that.

Ripsbaugh said, “I heard you asking Bathrobe Bill about Wanda. She still go around with Bucky Pail?”

Maddox said, “She does.”

His tone let Ripsbaugh know that he would not go any further. The empty sucking of the dirty vacuum hose was the only noise as Ripsbaugh absorbed the information he had gleaned.

Maddox’s back pocket started to vibrate. He pulled out his pager and checked the number.

No. Not Sinclair. Cullen. Maddox ignored it.

“Nice pager,” said Ripsbaugh, watching him return it to his jeans.

“My girlfriend,” Maddox said.

Ripsbaugh looked surprised.

Maddox added, “She’s not from around here.”

Not a good lie, but whether he believed him or not, Ripsbaugh let it go. He bent to pick up the dripping hose, about to return it to the hole. He pointed at the gauze and the little dope bags on the ground. “What about this?”

They were indeed worthless to a lab, and unallowable as evidence. Maddox nodded, and Ripsbaugh used his hungry hose to suck them up into his tanker.

The nozzle went chugging back into the septic tank, and Maddox stepped away. No more waiting for Wanda to come around to his side, he decided. No more paying out rope. He needed to find her or Frankie as soon as possible.

A voice came out of his patrol car, the police radio calling his unit number and his name.

40 Hess

Hess was a hit at cocktail parties. Homicide investigators usually are, because of the gritty glamour the television-watching and moviegoing public associates with them. The imagined car chases, the Mexican standoffs, the psychological dance of cop and criminal: all that sweet nonsense. Married women especially, for some reason, would gang up on him in the corner, or sit close to him on the sectional, white wine shining in their eyes as they plied him for more stories. And Hess performed for them, he gave them what they wanted, all his best tales and others he’d only heard, selling them on the danger of the job, the pathos, the trauma. They wanted to be lifted out of their cycle of playdates and school buses and once-a-month trysts with distracted husbands; they wanted their romantic imaginations fired. They dropped “tells” like clumsy poker players, twisting at the chains around their necks, finding conversational excuses to reach out and touch his arms. Hess lived in an upscale town near the Amherst universities, but on a state policeman’s salary — though a homicide investigator, his rank and pay grade remained that of a trooper — he could not compete with his neighbor’s tennis weekends and sporty third cars. So while the husbands gathered around the pool table in the finished basement talking golf clubs and consumer electronics, Hess remained upstairs mind-fucking their wives. A cocktail party gigolo, flexing his cop persona like his biceps, flashing them the goods before leaving them in the lurch, returning for good-byes with lovely Janine on his arm. Better than bedding any one of them was knowing that he was the “other man” in a hundred imagined infidelities of overprivileged women who secretly wished they were married not to their husbands but to him.

The thing he always started off telling them, which was not a story per se but rather an operating principle, and which happened to be absolutely true, was that every case he worked was essentially the same. Every unattended death was the Case of the Broken Vase. A body, or traces of it, lay broken on the floor. Most of the pieces were right there, and his job was to reassemble what he found, then track down the rest. By the time he had the vase glued together well enough to hold water again, he usually knew who had knocked it over and how, and whether its shattering had been an act of carelessness or calculation.

Here Hess had a vase that would not come together. He could stand a flower in it — Dillon Sinclair — but water kept spurting out on all sides. Now was the time to start looking more closely at the people he had handling the pieces for him, making certain they were reconstructing this thing the correct way.

His mistake all along had been in pretending to treat the locals like cops. They were more like informants and that was how he decided to approach the Black Falls PD now. Hess had come upon a significant chunk of vase, and he wanted to see firsthand how they processed it.

He went out to bring them in from the front room of the station. Bucky Pail was sitting on the floor, falling asleep with his cap in his hands. Maddox stood apart, looking out the front window at the academy trainees milling about the lawn, dressed in their spiffy blue shirts, navy Dickies, and regulation boots, swigging water while they waited for the school buses to return them to New Braintree. But the faraway look on Maddox’s face was more like something you’d see on a man standing at the edge of an ocean.

So maybe he did have aspirations after all. From what Hess had been able to learn about him, hiring on to any real police force would be a tough sell. A trip through Maddox’s tax returns going back ten years — highly unauthorized, another favor called in — showed fringe-type jobs, low-wage, nothing steady. W-2s from all over: a roofer, a mover, a landscaper, a pool cleaner. Short stints as a bartender in three different parts of the state; a car wash in Lowell; Domino’s pizza delivery in Taunton and Brockton; cab driving in West Springfield; road painting in Fall River. He had worked as an asbestos stripper in Worcester and in the boiler room of a Cape Cod high school. The only tie-and-shoes job he’d held was as a stereo and TV salesman, and only for three months.

To Hess, it read like someone who was hiding, or even halfway on the run. Maddox’s name also popped up as a reference/co-signee on bail bonds for three different people, two of them arrested on drug charges — one simple Class B possession, third offense, one for Class A possession with intent to distribute — and one for breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony, as well as, in the Commonwealth’s parlance, “possession of burglarious tools.” But no arrests himself — which Hess already knew, given that Maddox had been cleared on a Criminal Offender Record Information search before getting hired on as a cop, and had passed the routine background check that went along with his gun license application.

Still, it was a very unusual résumé for a part-time cop. What it showed Hess was that Maddox was a washout, like most of the lost souls in this town. He wanted to grill Maddox about his background, make him squirm a little, but had decided to hold on to that card awhile longer. Sweating Maddox, though potentially quite pleasurable, was not the point. At least not yet.

Pail too had clouds circling about his head. The assault charge against Sinclair, obviously, but there were other whispers: abuses of power, sexual transgressions, even an alleged indecent assault right here inside the station. Other charges brought against him along the way — exposing himself to a female motorist, simulating masturbation in front of another — had all been quickly dropped, reeking of intimidation and witness tampering.

And then there was the case of Hugo Ibbits. A California fugitive stopped for speeding in Black Falls, he was first said to have been arrested and jailed by Pail, but then, after his death three nights later in a fiery car crash in the hills above town, the story changed. The death was briefly investigated by the U.S. Marshals office, which has jurisdiction over fugitives, but later dropped without a finding. This was before Pail got caught beating a handcuffed Sinclair during a traffic stop up in those same hills.

Inside the reports room, Hess took up a position at an angle from the laptop so that he could observe the two cops’ reactions. Bryson sat before the screen.

“We found Sinclair’s camera,” Hess announced, “half buried under leaves in the Borderlands. CSS took a biopsy of the forest, digging up everything within two cubic feet of the find, all of which they are currently processing. The memory card was installed and intact. Seventy-nine images, of which we have here a quick DVD burn. A privileged peek at a sliver of Sinclair’s own memory. And, no surprise, it gets pretty fucking weird.”

Bryson worked the touch pad, starting the slide show in reverse order, from the most recent images back to the oldest.

The first sequence of pictures were dark, taken at night and without a flash. Tough to make out anything at first. Hess had needed four or five passes in order to see it clearly himself.

The photographs had been taken through a window: that much was evident. Part of the silver casing of the camera was visible in some shots, reflected in the moonlit glass, if you looked for it. The subject of each of the first six images was a boy lying on his belly, asleep in a bed with his arms tucked under him, the covers kicked away. Spiderman pajamas, the waistband of his underpants showing above the top of red and blue shorts. A match head of bright orange hair.

Bryson paused the slide show there. Hess watched Bucky squint, still trying to see what was on the screen.

Maddox stared heatedly, looking spooked. “One of the Heavey boys,” he said.

“Heavey,” said Hess, “being the guy who found footprints behind his house. Who saw someone he thought was a woman running off into the trees.”

Bucky saw it now. “What the fuck.”

Maddox’s mouth tightened. Bryson worked the mouse to resume the slide show.

There followed images taken through a different window, of a different young boy in another bed, this one blond and sleeping only in his underwear. The images were nearly identical, taken in rapid succession.

“There,” said Hess.

Bryson stayed on the image. Hess’s eyes stayed on the cops.

It took them a moment to see what was different. The camera was positioned farther back from the window glass. In the reflection, visible behind and around the silver camera, was a hand. A forefinger on the shutter release. And, to the side of that, long, straight strands of black hair.

And — just barely on the other side — a closed eye winking beneath a hairless brow.

“Fuckin’ freak,” said Bucky, leaning forward to see. His upper lip curled back like he could smell Sinclair.

Maddox’s brow dropped low over his eyes.

More pictures flashed, most of them peeping shots of young boys asleep in their beds, though not all. One artsy image showed a deer crossing Main Street at dawn, snapped from the vantage point of Sinclair’s second-story balcony. Another one Hess waited for was an early-morning shot from the same perch, looking down on the roof of a car turning the corner. A patrol car. The unit number was eight.

Bucky looked fast at Maddox. “That’s him,” he said to Hess. “That’s Maddox’s car.”

Maddox’s surprise was pure and convincing.

Bucky stared at Maddox as though he was owed an answer.

Hess said, “Any reason you know of?”

Maddox shook his head.

Bryson went on. In another peeping shot, Sinclair had experimented with holding the camera away from his eye. In the dim reflection of the glass, his face appeared like an eerie double exposure, a ghost without eyebrows superimposed over a sleeping boy.

Hess said, “So he was dressing up in black, riding his bike around after dark, and sneaking into backyards to snap pictures of little boys sleeping in first-floor bedrooms. Until twelve forty-three A.M. on June twenty-fifth, the time and date stamp of the last picture.”

Bryson said, “One week before the night the insurance salesman, Heavey, said he heard a shot in the forest, near where this camera was recovered.”

Hess said, “And then there’s this.”

There followed five flash-lit images of a basement in an apparently abandoned house, the paneled walls kicked in and defaced: spray-painted devil’s horns, various “666” designs, and, in dripping red like a comic-book howl, the words, Black Falls is Helllll!

Hess said, “Recognize any of this?”

Bucky and Maddox took turns shaking their heads.

“Cult stuff,” suggested Bryson.

Hess watched Maddox’s face sour in disagreement.

Then came more early images, many of them unclear, either too dark or with the sleeping child obscured. Sinclair learning by trial and error.

When the next one he wanted came up, Hess said, “Stop.”

A two-story house at dusk, the image taken among trees across an otherwise empty backyard. The house had a rear deck, and the bit of the front yard visible around the left side looked like wetlands.

Bucky leaned in. He got right up over Bryson’s head, examining the screen. He straightened and looked back at Maddox.

“That’s his place,” said Bucky, pointing. “That’s Maddox’s damn house.”

Maddox was still absorbing the image. He did not deny Bucky’s claim.

Hess said, “Maddox?”

Maddox said, “Looks like it.”

Bucky said, “Scarecrow was fuckin’ taking pictures of you?”

Hess asked, “Why would he take a picture of your house?”

Maddox shook his head, as much out of disbelief as I-don’t-know.

Bucky Pail pulled back, formed a wide grin. “’Cause he’s fuckin’ gay. They’re gay together. You and Scarecrow got something going, Maddox?”

“Yeah,” said Maddox, turning to Bucky. “He likes me to handcuff him and slap him around. Says you taught him.”

Hess said, “All right, all right.”

Bucky’s eyes were dead, staring at Maddox. But Maddox’s attention had already returned to the screen. Figuring out this house mystery was more important to him than jousting with Bucky Pail.

Hess said, “Maddox, what do you have to say about this?”

“I have nothing to say. I’m looking at this just like you. I don’t know what the hell it is.”

“Sinclair’s a fan of your work? Your own backyard paparazzo?”

“I have to answer for him?” Maddox said. “What do you want me to say?”

“It disturbs you.”

“Sure it does. But not as much as those pictures of the sleeping boys.”

Hess nodded, having gotten what he wanted out of Maddox. “They looked quite dead, didn’t they.”

Maddox looked up fast like he hadn’t thought of that.

41 Val

Val sat in her white yard chair at the long edge of the white resin table on the back porch. The turf beneath her slippers was a fuzzy green indoor-outdoor carpet, and two citronella candles were set in the middle of the table, near the empty umbrella hole, both jars blackened, the wicks burned down to the bottom. The back porch was screened in, but insects were still a problem, because of the smell. The septic company garage out beyond the low chain-link fence at the edge of their property drew gnats and mosquitoes and chits and no-see-ums out of the surrounding woods. Blue-bulb zappers hung from three corners of the roof, snapping and sizzling all day and night.

She had taken a glass and a half of rosé at about ten and only another small glass with lunch, so she was certain he couldn’t tell. Donny Maddox sat at the shorter end of the table, his back to the yard. Keeping his distance because of the kissing in his car. She watched the smoke feather up off her cigarette and then ribbon in some mysterious, unfelt crosscurrent. This was where she did her thinking. Later she would revisit the conversation as though he were still sitting here, veering off into unexplored dialogues, playing with alternate endings.

She already remembered the way he had looked at the plastic tray of annuals on the newspaper in the sunniest corner, when he first joined her out here. The flower petals parched and dead. And the memory of his look — so recent it was more of an echo than a memory — already colored her responses. She didn’t want him turning that same look of pity on her. The unplanted violets represented the flare of a good morning some weeks before, a few hours of get-my-life-in-order-starting-with-this-house energy, which, as always, soon burned itself out.

She turned the cigarette over in her hand to disrupt the smoke stream. “This is my weight loss program,” she told him. “My exercise regimen and my portion control.” She inhaled, savoring the hit. “Best part is, it works. Kane hates it. Hates the smell, which is ridiculous, coming from him. But I need it. Anything to cover up this.” She pointed across the side lawn to the septic garage.

Donny turned to look, just being polite. He seemed reluctant to tell her why he had come.

Val said, “Dill didn’t do what they say he’s done. You know that, right? He’s a lot of things — he’s sick — but he’s not a murderer.”

Donny nodded, still fretting. “You still have no idea where he is?”

She shook her head. “I go back and forth now between hating him and pitying him. He was always so lost and different and weird inside — but not evil. How I think of him now is like a piece of fruit left out too long. Parts of it are still okay, but the parts that are black and spoiled, you can’t eat around them.” She smoked. “They still trying to make something out of his magic? Cults and black masses and that?”

Donny said, “How’d you know?”

“The head trooper, when he had me in there, asked if I was a witch.”

Donny frowned, either at the notion or at the mention of the head trooper. “What do you think of that?”

“It was just tricks. Stupid tricks. He was a lonely little boy cutting cards and waving scarves down in our basement. Obsessed with it. And my father — God, he hated it. Taunted him mercilessly. Humiliated him. I mean nightly. Calling him a fairy. So of course, what does Dill do but practice that much longer, that much more obsessively. Started dressing in black, you know, playing up the part. Living it. Becoming this kid his father hated.” She picked at a ridge in the table with her fingernail. “Just tell me you’ll try to help him, if you find him.”

“They found a camera in the Borderlands today. His camera. You’re not supposed to know about this — no one is. But inside, taken over the past few months, were these pictures of sleeping boys.”

Val showed him that she was not shocked. “That’s what you came here wanting to know about? Are you asking for that trooper? Or for yourself?”

“Just me.”

She sat back. “I feel like everything with Dill, everything, is this attempt to get back his childhood.”

“Get it back? From where?”

“I remember one time I found him in our basement with a noose all tied, elaborately coiled like in the movies, strung up over one of the ceiling supports. He said he was working on an escape trick. Sure he was. I told him at the time, I said, ‘Don’t leave me here alone.’ That was my biggest fear. Now I know he would have been better off.”

“Alone? But what about your father?”

She let stillness settle like night.

Donny started to ask, then thought better of it. He sat back a bit in his chair, not knowing what to say, what to do.

Val flicked some ash, surprised he hadn’t known already. She smiled, not happily, and looked past him through the screens, through years. These were things she saw from this porch table.

“But then he did leave, he ran off to Boston. I threw myself into the scholarship as my way out. And then, after I lost that... I guess now I can say that I had a collapse. I didn’t see anyone, I didn’t do anything. Didn’t eat or sleep. All I did was go on these marathon walks. With my sketchpad and a little bottle of water, anything to get away from my house. One day I wandered out near the dump. But instead of garbage, I smelled mulch. Wet, fragrant mulch, and it drew me. And there Kane was out in front, spreading it with a pitchfork. A steamy hot day, just like this one. Putting in a little stripe of garden in front of the dump, and I thought, you know, how perfectly odd.”

She felt a smile bunching her cheeks. Not the sweetness of memory, no, but rather the wisdom of a girl grown so much older.

“I was heavy into contradictions then. Pretending I could still be an artist, live like an artist, see like an artist. The contrast, the poetic futility of the garden — all that appealed to me. Like when you find something in the outside world you think perfectly reflects what you’re feeling inside? You respond to it. And I remember thinking to myself, about Kane Ripsbaugh, That guy looks exactly like how I feel.”

She licked her lips in an effort to douse the bitter smile, then swallowed, as though memories were food you could chew down once and for all.

“You were nineteen,” said Donny. “He was — forty? Older?”

“Well, marrying for love — do you know how new a concept that is? There are marriages of advantage and there are marriages of convenience, and I wanted out. If not from the town, then, at the very, very least, from my house. From my father. Kane owned his own house, and he wanted me. He promised me things. He even seemed to love me — who would have guessed that? The scrawny little mess I was at the time. I think I imagined I’d be like the heroine in some thick French novel, a peasant girl who claws her way out of the mud of the countryside into Paris society. I’d start with the septic man and move up, ruthlessly. Only, there never was any up.”

“Kane’s a good man,” said Donny. “I mean, he may not be...” He was wise to give up on that. There were numerous things Kane Ripsbaugh wasn’t: handsome, sweet-smelling, tenderhearted, talkative. Interesting. Young. “Nobody’s perfect. But he’ll stand by you.”

“He took me back, you mean.”

Donny didn’t want to go there. Val stubbed out her dying cigarette, already wanting another. “There are these hinge moments in life, you know? I sit out here, and I think about them. Critical turning points where your life could have completely changed, one way or the other. You know?”

“Well, sure.”

“You’re thinking I’m going to bring up the scholarship again.” Another smile opened up her face, this one bittersweet. “You won’t even remember this, but — Lynn Gavel’s party? For the yearbook staff, our senior year? We were right in the heat of our rival thing, and my ride, she had left without me, and you had your mom’s car so you were going to give me a lift home? And it was getting late, and I knew you wanted to go, but I was being all pouty and — do you remember, I wandered off down to the pond at the end of her street, and you had to come looking for me?”

“I do.”

“I wanted you to come after me. I went off on purpose — I even sent my ride home — so that you would have to leave the rest of them and come to me. I was a pout because I couldn’t figure out how to get you interested. Interested enough to kiss me.”

He started to say something else, then settled for, “No, I never knew.”

“Of course you look at me now and you think, Thank God. But that’s the thing. I would be different if I had wound up with you. So different. Not straitjacketed here. I always felt close to you, Donny. Like we had a connection. If only it weren’t for that... that damn scholarship...”

She blotted her eyes with a knuckle, harshly. She watched him try to come up with something to say other than I’m sorry, fail, and glance at the porch door.

“I’m scaring you off, huh?” Her words came out on a weird laugh.

“No, no,” he said. “It’s just that, I have to get out to see Pinty.”

“Do you ever think about what your life would be like if I had won the scholarship? Your life in this town, what it would have been?”

He nodded, begrudging her nothing. “Every day since I came back.”

“You’d have been a cop, right? Probably. And with you in there, maybe the Pail family wouldn’t have taken over. Things might be a lot different. For everybody. Probably you would have married someone in town.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe someone — like me.”

“But you wouldn’t have been here, right? You would have won the scholarship.” He got to his feet as though afraid she would try to kiss him again. “You’d be long gone.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Long gone.”

She reached for another cigarette, knowing that, as soon as the door shut behind him, she would begin spinning their conversation around and around inside her head, her mind like a spider threading a web so elaborate, it could catch even imaginary prey.

42 Bucky

The classical music record popped and crackled on the old hi-fi turntable. The album was one of a boxed set of six that Bucky’s mother had ordered from the television soon after he was born. She bought it to play for him and Eddie in the afternoons, hoping it would somehow calm them down. Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Play Your Timeless Classics, it was called, the cover showing a bloody sun setting behind the tuxedoed conductor, who was some Einstein-looking guy. Oh, how he and Eddie used to hate it. Used to jump around the room just to hear it skip. Tried scratching it up with the needle when they were big enough to reach. Played it on 78 rpm and whipped pillow cushions at the stereo. But those goddamn thick old wax discs were indestructible.

The records found their way back out of the cabinet after his mother died. Daddy played them at night to help him fall asleep in his chair. And if Eddie or Bucky ever turned it off, the man woke up in a rage. Daddy never slept in a bed again.

Now Daddy was gone and Eddie and Bucky had split up the albums, Bucky sticking Eddie with the faggy piano pieces and keeping the Apocalypse Now music for himself. They didn’t live together. Pails had owned Jag Hill for almost as long as there was a town named Black Falls, two separate family homesteads set on opposite slopes of the otherwise undeveloped hill. Eddie stayed in the larger house a half mile away, the one they had grown up in, because Bucky preferred his uncle’s old place, which had started out as a hunting lodge and still had a pair of antlers nailed to the front door. Still had the curing shed and the old camper out in back.

Bucky was cooking up a late lunch of toasted bologna, watching the edges curl off the browning bread through the window of his toaster oven, and thinking about that freak-ass Scarecrow. When Frond first turned up dead enough to bring the staties to town, Bucky had been pissed. Everything had to be put on hold, he figured. But now he welcomed the distraction. It was perfect. Everyone running around looking for Scarecrow, the town whipped into a frenzy. And once they found him and left, then Bucky’s position in Black Falls would be stronger than ever. Pinty would be gone, along with his pet Maddox, leaving no obstacles in Bucky’s way. Total freedom to finish his “experiments” before moving on to the next stage.

This town was nothing more than a laboratory to him now. A proving ground. When he was through with Black Falls, he would toss it at Eddie’s big feet like a bone gnawed clean. This was going to be a town full of zombies by the time Bucky was done.

They say summer colds are the worst, and a bad one was spreading through town. A cold that was to become a countywide flu, which would eventually burn through all of New England like an epidemic.

Bucky saw now that Ibbits had come to him as a kind of prophet. A hobo prophet, appearing out of the desert as they often do, living in his car, on the run from California. A carrier of the disease, and yet, at the same time, a doctor, a medicine man. But a prophet first and foremost. Of doom. Bearing scripture, in the form of a prescription — in the form of a recipe. A simple little recipe with simple, everyday ingredients.

A recipe for plague.

Ibbits said meth was the perfect drug if you only did it once. Trick was: How? How do you win a fortune with one pull of the slot machine lever — and never walk into a casino again? Fuck the hottest chick on TV — and never expect to touch her again? Learn the most mind-shattering truth of the universe — and never allow yourself to think it again?

And yet, Bucky did. He had. One time only. Or rather, nine times over the course of one bullet-fast three-day weekend. One seventy-two-hour run. Nine smoked foils. No sleep. No food. No need.

Most of the rush of the first day he had spent working on his cars. Pure gear-head heaven, twenty-four hours straight through without a break, compulsively immersed in the hobby of all hobbies. Mind and hand and wrench and engine: one. Connected. It was all-American nirvana. It was bliss.

Nothing would ever be anything like that first blaze. When eventually he got horny, he’d called Wanda and smoked a foil with her and she went off like a comet. They fucked for hours, a fuckfest beyond human capability, superhuman sex, orgasm upon orgasm, each exploding with intensity. Universe-creating orgasms. Big motherfucking bangs.

That were so good, so right, so complete, so out there, that he couldn’t be bothered now to fuck without it. They had tried a couple of times, Wanda tweaking up alone and then begging him, pleading for his dick. But meth turned him from the ultimate pussy hound into what he thought of as a meth monk. It just wasn’t there for him anymore. You go to the moon, you visit the fucking stars: What was left in Black Falls that could please him? He didn’t need it now, not the way he used to. Or rarely, anyway. Certainly not from bony Wanda. Meth had messed with the switchboard in his head. He was getting off on something else besides sex now. Something — the Idea — had taken its place.

The Idea was what he had caught on to that third day. What the meth had showed him. What it revealed.

A clarity.

Everyday people, he had realized, would kill to feel the way he did. Would slaughter their own parents for a taste of this. Would trade away their kids.

That was when he saw his future. That was when he knew.

Knew immediately that he had found the thing he had been looking for all his life. Not a drug to get high on — no. Every drug that had come through town, that had found its way into lockup, he had test-driven like an impounded car. Even regular speed — nothing was like this shit. Nothing came close. Nothing had this cosmic giddyup.

What he had found here, without searching for it, without even knowing it existed, was a tool. What in other hands was a toy, was in his hands a sharp knife. A cunning weapon.

A low-priced alternative to cocaine, even cheaper than heroin. A high that lasts longer and burns hotter than ’shrooms or acid or anything else out there. A drug that doesn’t take you out of the world but, like a great fuck, plunges you deeper into it. That makes you invincible, immortal, and that’s better to screw on even than coke.

Meth is a blow job for the brain, a hand job for the ego. It writhes naked and moaning in the swelling lap of your soul, bouncing on your hard-on, squeezing your balls, making you come and come and beg for more.

That first high, anyway.

The virgin ride of pure intensity, which Ibbits said you never quite get back to again, but which many people devote the rest of their lives to chasing. Ibbits told him about the effects of the drug on people out west, where he was from: men walking away from their jobs, women from their children, losing houses and cars and selling off everything, including themselves. Religion promises you something glorious just around the corner? Meth actually lets you glimpse it. Lets you hear the angels sing.

Bucky still felt tempted all the time. Especially working these long hours cooking up the stuff. But he saw now another thing the meth had showed him: this was what life is. Chasing your virginities. Chasing your infant satisfactions. That pure bliss of first love (mother). The bewildering, earth-shuddering majesty of your first orgasm. You want it all back. You want to be born again. Life as pure nostalgia.

Everybody everywhere is looking for transcendence, for deliverance, something to devote themselves to. And meth gives you that. At first. Then it starts to reduce you. Bucky had already seen it here in Black Falls. Meth turning men into monkeys. Part of the drug’s joy is that it peels you back to your animal instincts; it strips out higher, more complex emotions such as regret and anxiety. Your needs become meth and sex, in that order. And then eventually just meth. You want nothing else. You know no future, you feel no past. Shame loses its drag on you. Your body doesn’t matter anymore. Only what you put in it. You are a zombie.

Bucky pulled out his toasted bologna and laid it sizzling on a paper towel. He squirted mustard on it, and while it cooled, he wiped his greasy hands on his shorts and changed up the record, laying in his old Kiss Alive II album. Track two: “King of the Night Time World.”

After the revelation, Bucky had gone back to the station lockup to see Ibbits, held there over the long weekend, waiting for a trip out to the county judge on Tuesday. Bucky was all fired up on the confiscated meth, and Ibbits saw this. Bucky let him out and brought him back to his home to pick the man’s brain. He offered him freedom in exchange for information, and, after a liberal hit off his own stash, Ibbits was only too willing. He wrote out recipes and supply lists. Everyday stuff — hydrogen peroxide, acetone, Heet, Pyrex bowls, coffee filters, denatured alcohol, hot plates, cold medicine — much of which Bucky already had around the house and garage, except for the iodine. Against the cost of this, he priced out the product at $100 per gram to start, $1,200 per ounce, $15,000 per pound. He even drew up a business model, a pyramid design, declaring the New England states to be virgin territory, and growing more and more animated at the prospect of the two men going into business together.

At some point around the fourth or fifth time Ibbits was repeating himself, Bucky unwound the AM antenna from his stereo receiver and strangled him with it. He lay Ibbits out on the floor by the fireplace, then returned to poring over the lists, refining the plans in his own mind. Bucky never listened to AM radio anyway. Later he had Eddie drive him back to the station, where he picked up Ibbits’s Escort. The crash, he arranged himself, as he did the fire.

Another big reason for Bucky not to dabble. His taking meth was like pouring napalm on a grease fire. Of all the things the drug had shown him that weekend, the most revealing was Bucky Pail himself. He found out that he had been living behind a secret identity all these years: that of Bucky Pail, Black Falls police sergeant, son of Cecil and Verna, brother of Eddie. But what he was inside, the real deal within the hollow shell he wore, was something beyond extraordinary.

The proof of this was that he had never lost focus since that long weekend. Not once. Every step since then, every move he had made, only brought him closer to his goal. Buying fuel, tubing, and glassware to outfit the old curing shack in back, then later the camper. He started off buying up Sudafed for the pseudoephedrine, and he still had Wanda clear out the Gulp whenever they got in a new shipment. But his search for a reliable, local source of iodine had led him to the fruity vet Dr. Bolt and a genius solution. He ordered road flares by the case for the red phosphorous they contained, and then it was on to the cook.

Cold medicine and household poisons cooked to a powder. That’s all it was. Easy to bake as chocolate chip cookies, Ibbits told him. Problem was, Bucky had never baked chocolate chip cookies in his life.

But he learned. How to vent the shed so that the fumes didn’t get to him. How to dip the flares in acetone, loosening up the phosphorous for scraping. How to tube out the dope. How gourmet coffee filters worked better than the cheaper, no-name brand.

Internet recipes are all bunk, Ibbits had declared. The Man had gotten to them somehow. The cook sites that turned up at the top of the big search engines directed you straight to the Drug Enforcement Agency and registered your computer number. Lots of disinformation out there. And even if you did stumble upon a good recipe, it would be like trying to follow a chef on one of those TV cooking shows where they have all the time-consuming stuff prepared ahead of the taping. Sometimes, in the boredom of a cook, Bucky imagined he was before a TV camera, taking viewers through the process. Showing them his hot plate and mason jars and Pyrex bowls all set up on the counter. Gallon jugs of muriatic acid and Coleman’s fuel, cans of Red Devil lye. Him donning his mask and gloves, and, as he boiled and filtered, the studio audience pruning up their noses at the bitter smell.

He tested his batches on Wanda. She was his willing lab bunny. Through her he introduced it into the margins of this marginal town — teenagers, mostly, some rats she had met at the Gulp — test-marketing the product, rolling it out slowly. It was everything Ibbits said it would be and more. Bucky’s stockpile grew as he awaited the right moment to release his stores full bore to the public. Then he would watch meth spread like a contagion, consuming its consumers, his own personal army of zombies marching forth, the drug spreading, spreading, and the money riding up the pyramid to the source at the top.

Other opportunists would soon vie for the attention of this new class of customers he was creating — and let them. Let them take over the risk and the blame. Because by then he would have made his wad. Already, he was sitting on about $100,000 worth of product. He would play it out until the moment felt right, and then ditch this used-up town for good. Turn it over to Eddie, let him pick his ass in that run-down station, in a town full of the undead. Let him preside over the final throes of Meth Falls, Massachusetts. Bucky would be down in Daytona, retired at age twenty-six in the land of spring break and NASCAR, wet-T-shirt nights and fat-boy Harleys and fun in the fuckin’ sun. College honeys, not the country bush he saw here. Party girls looking for a man with money to spend and maybe a little meth to get them off. Why not dabble, set up a little lab behind his mansion pool house, keep his hand in? This magic dust was his ticket to the world.

This was all part of his pregame ritual, how he got himself fired up to head back out and cook up another hot batch. He was minting money out there, and soon, very soon, he would be able to start throwing some of it around.

He was already at the back door when the front bell went off. Wanda knew he didn’t like her coming up here uninvited. She was getting more and more strung out, but he couldn’t cut her off now. A sixteenth of a gram was all it took to keep her happy. If only she knew how valuable she was to him. If only she knew how much bank he was going to make off her skinny ass.

He was grinning to himself and chewing the last bit of bologna toast when he opened the door.

43 Maddox

Pinty is dead.

That was Maddox’s first thought as he approached the central station on Pinty’s floor, seeing the duty nurse waiting to intercept him.

Instead, she said, “He’s been asking for you.”

Inside Pinty’s room, the dying plant the town had sent over had been moved to the windowsill in a last-ditch effort to revive it. Pinty was asleep, his mouth tube gone, the oxygen line still under his nose. Maddox reached for his left hand where it lay curled across his chest.

Muscles tugged at Pinty’s cheeks. His lifting eyebrows signaled a tectonic shift, and his eyes rolled open.

Maddox waited for Pinty to find him there.

“Greggy,” Pinty said. He was hoarse and stiff-jawed from sleep and the tube.

“Pinty,” said Maddox. “It’s me. It’s Donny.”

Pinty stared, trying to make him real. Trying to make him his son. “Greggy.”

So Maddox just nodded, holding his hand until he went out again. Pinty’s cold fingers were rigid, locked in a curl. Maddox realized they were palsied from the stroke.

He stayed with him awhile, but Pinty remained asleep.

Later, on his way back out through the emergency room lobby, he saw an ambulance unloading a woman on a stretcher, the accident victim clutching her handbag and trying to talk on her mobile phone with a bandage wrapped around her head.

The EMTs wheeling her in were the same two who had reported to Black Falls the night of the teenagers’ car wreck. Maddox watched them go, then followed them inside the ambulance entrance, getting an idea.

He found a woman reading a fat paperback behind the service window. He showed her his badge — the jersey alone wouldn’t do it — and asked for the release forms from that night, giving her the accident date and location. “Two minors,” he explained. “We have some property we need to return to them.”

She clicked keys on her computer with long, jeweled nails, eyeing Maddox while the pages printed silently behind her. A Portuguese woman with dark eyes and a broad nose. Line-thin eyebrows and a faint scar beneath her left ear, riding over her jaw. She handed him the copies and said, “You don’t remember me.”

Maddox went cold.

She said, “You’re wearing a uniform now.”

Lowell, he remembered. Eight years ago. Her name would come to him. Her hospital ID was on her belt, too low for him to read.

She said, “I was Bobby Omar’s girl.”

She was alone inside the window, and there was no one in the hallway within earshot. She seemed as interested in keeping this private as he was.

Maddox said, “I didn’t recognize you.”

“You haven’t changed. Much.”

He had to be careful. So many different ways this could go. “I guess Bobby’s upstate now?”

“I guess so.”

“You don’t visit?”

She shook her head, earrings tinkling.

“Glad to hear it,” he said.

“He trusted you, you know. He always said he was never sure about the others, never sure about anyone. Even me. Why he kept that wolf on a chain in our crib. But he was sure about you. Mad Dog Maddox.”

She seemed to mean this as a compliment. Maddox folded and refolded the pages in his hands, stopping once he realized he was doing so.

“It was a lifetime ago,” she said. “Who I was then. The anger I had for everything, for everyone. I was in so deep.” She looked away, curling her tongue. “I’m out here with my sister and her husband now. I have this job. I’m dating one of the drivers.”

He sensed her eagerness, her need for his approval.

Back outside, past the ambulance, he made his way to the reserved parking for police vehicles. Maddox would have to find another way into the hospital from now on. His life was like that, whole towns and city neighborhoods, entire regions of the state, walled off to him.

Once he left the overhang and the bright sun hit him, he remembered the pages in his hand. He smoothed out the wrinkles and skimmed the forms. He noticed that the boys’ addresses were identical: that of the Ansons, the foster family in town. The same family responsible for Frankie Sculp.

Below that, the person who signed the boys out from the hospital had checked off “Guardian” next to her name. The signature was illegible, but the name typed next to it read, “Tedmond, Wanda.”

The Ansons’ ranch house looked outwardly normal in the same way a shaken can of soda looks fine until you crack it open. The weedy land was once a thriving apple orchard and seasonal farm stand, now a remote foster farm for Department of Youth Services residential placements.

It was late in the day when Maddox arrived. The school bus was gone from the driveway, meaning that Mrs. Anson was not at home. The man of the house finally responded to Maddox’s knocking, Dan Anson seeing the uniform and looking for an accompanying social worker. He wore an oily T-shirt and sweatpants apparently without underwear. “Going camping?” Maddox said.

“What’s that?”

“Are you planning a camping trip?”

Anson blinked his blitzed eyes. “Not that I know of.”

“Because you already pitched a tent.”

Anson looked down at the lazy erection pressing against his gray cotton sweats as Maddox stepped past him into the house.

Inside was no less humid than outside. “I spoke to your wife last time,” said Maddox.

“She said. You still looking for Frankie, right? We don’t know where he is. Kid’s a professional runaway.”

“I’m looking for two others now. Carlo and Nick. They went joyriding recently, cracked up a stolen car.”

Anson played at thinking. “No,” he said, “I haven’t seen them.”

Maddox walked into a living room of magazines and catalogs fluttered by window fans. A boy about eleven, one of the Ansons’ two biological kids, stared at the TV, barely registering him. Maddox went to the kitchen, checked the contents of the refrigerator. Predictably not much. He went back up the hallway opening doors.

“Uh, excuse me, what is this?” said Anson, moving sideways, peering into each room after Maddox did. “I said they’re not here.”

Maddox opened the door on what appeared to be the Ansons’ bedroom, the sheets tossed, window shades drawn down. He saw a computer on a student-sized homework desk. The modem lights were working, but the monitor was off. Maddox switched it on.

Anson stayed by the door, scratching at his unshaved neck. “You can’t really do that.”

While the screen was warming up, Maddox noticed a lightbulb behind the monitor, its screw base, wires, and filament all removed.

Anson said, “Yeah, that lightbulb burned out.”

The fat end was blackened inside. “Pretty spectacularly,” said Maddox, picking it up and hazarding a waft. He did not see the accompanying straw.

Maddox checked the monitor. It showed the home page for a fantasy football site.

“See?” said Anson. “Everything’s cool.”

Maddox reached for the warm mouse, dragging the cursor over the BACK button and clicking. The previous page visited showed a naked guy shackled up in leather restraints on an S&M rack, curse words and racial epithets scrawled over his chest in purple lipstick, his left nipple about to be burned with the lit tip of a cigarillo by a chubby she-male wearing a Nazi helmet, infantry boots, and a monocle.

“Look, I was just killing a little time—”

Anson ducked as the lightbulb shattered against the wall behind his head, glass tinkling to the floor.

Next to the PC was an open two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew Pitch Black grape soda. Maddox pressed buttons to open the CD trays and made ready to empty the contents of the bottle into them.

Anson threw out both hands from his crouch. “Jesus, man, what the fuck?”

“Carlo and Nick, where are they?”

“I’d know, man? How can you keep track?”

“That’s supposed to be your damn job.” Maddox splashed soda across the room, fizzing like black acid on Anson’s shirt. He dribbled a little into the computer.

“You wouldn’t. You can’t!”

“Say it loud again,” said Maddox. “How you don’t know where they are. Maybe they didn’t hear you.”

A bang like a loose door snapping shut. Maddox carried the bottle of soda across the room and hauled down one of the shades, rod and all, from the window.

Two boys were racing away across the backyard into the old orchard.

Maddox looked back at Anson, shrinking against the wall. Maddox moved fast to the desk, glugging soda into the CD slots while Anson covered his head and groaned. “I’ll be back for you,” said Maddox, rushing past him, cutting down the hall to the living room, past the kid at the TV to a back door leading to a short flight of rickety stairs outside.

Maddox ran fast and angry. The kids had a head start, but the two burnouts hadn’t seen anything like exercise in months. They looked back and saw him coming and veered off into what remained of the apple orchard. Never even occurred to them to split up. Running lockstep, they cut between trees and across lanes, unable to shake Maddox’s pursuit. Seeing he was about to catch them, they slowed.

Maddox did not. He tackled both at full speed, throwing them hard to the dirt and spoiled fruit and scavenging ants.

Both teens had the same choppy home haircut. Maddox got his knees into their spines.

“Why are you running?”

“Because,” said one.

“Because?”

“Of Frankie,” said the other.

They were trying to look up at him, but Maddox was kneeling on their backs, forcing their faces into the ground. “What because of Frankie?”

“He said cops were looking for him. We’re looking to do him.”

Paranoid tweaker. “Where is he now?”

“Hiding, I guess.”

“Who brings in the meth?” said Maddox. “Him to you or you to him?”

One teen remained silent. The other said, “What?”

Maddox grabbed their home haircuts and mashed their faces into the dirt. Not a good day to cross him. He asked again.

“Him,” said one.

“Him to us,” said the other, spitting dirt.

Maddox said, “And you deal to Anson back there?”

One tried to rise up in protest. “That douche bag?”

“He steals,” said the other. “Took half our stash. To protect us, he said. Otherwise he’d turn us in.”

Maddox said, “Where does Wanda figure in to all this?”

Blinking. Swallowing. “Wanda who?”

Again, Maddox ground their mouths into the dirt and ants. “You’re teenagers, lying’s supposed to be a talent.”

They coughed up truth. They’d seen her around, but the hospital was the first time they’d met her. She’d introduced herself as a friend of Frankie’s. That was all they knew.

Maddox floated Bucky’s name but neither of them so much as blinked.

“I’m asking again. Where is Frankie now?”

“We don’t know.”

“We might, though,” said the other one.

His partner winced at that.

To the talker, Maddox said, “Out with it.”

“We followed him this one time.”

“We were just curious,” said his partner.

“You wanted to take him down!” said the talker.

“Show me,” said Maddox, standing, pulling them to their feet.

Maddox buzzed the office door first, because it was closest to the driveway. DR. GARY BOLT, VETERINARIAN, read the sign. A window sticker said, HILL’s SCIENCE DIET SOLD HERE. He gave the button two quick pushes but didn’t wait, the office dark, just like the house attached to it.

It was late, the sun gone now, summer light straggling in the western sky. He left the kids in the back of his patrol car and followed the rock path to the front door of the house. The bell was an old one you twisted like a key, but it did not ring. He knocked. While he waited he heard a muffled thump inside like someone tripping, then the sound of something dropping to the floor and rolling away.

Maddox moved to the side of the door. He kick-knocked with his hiking boot, the old training coming right back to him. He sized up the heavy door and figured he was as likely to dislocate a shoulder as he was to break it down. He backed off and started around the side of the house, under a picture window, looking for another way in.

He heard a feeble tapping as he neared the bulkhead doors. A block of wood was jammed under the handles, and Maddox drew his revolver, kicking at the wood, once easy and then harder, popping it free and stepping back, waiting to see who came up.

One door was pushed open, stretching out spiderwebs and shaking loose rust, revealing the arm and scared eyes of a man in his fifties.

Dr. Bolt looked at Maddox’s handgun and POLICE jersey as he climbed the stairs out of the basement. “Thank the good Lord.”

Maddox grabbed him, helping the older man onto the grass. He wore an undershirt and boxer shorts and a pair of old rain boots he must have found in the basement. He carried a mayonnaise jar under his arm with a few ounces of fluid swishing inside it. “Who’s in the house?”

Dr. Bolt made a grand gesture of defeat. “His name is Frankie. He locked me in the cellar.”

“Frankie Sculp?”

“Yes.”

“What’s he doing in there?”

“What isn’t he doing?” Dr. Bolt looked at his house as though it were a family member in jeopardy. “Just please get him out. He’s paranoid, hallucinating. He sees people who aren’t there. You can’t talk to him.”

Maddox looked at the stone basement steps, revolver in hand. He thought about calling for backup. “Does he have a gun? Any guns in the house?”

“No. He has a steak knife in the back pocket of his shorts. He thinks you are coming to kill him, the police. He said he hears SWAT teams in the air-conditioning ducts. I don’t even have air-conditioning ducts.”

Maddox needed to talk to Frankie before anyone else could. “My patrol car is in your driveway. There’s a radio under the dashboard. Give me five minutes, then use it. Tell them the situation and your address. The cellar door is locked?”

“A chair wedged under the knob, I think.”

“What’s in that jar?”

Dr. Bolt held it low at his side. “My urine. I’ve been down there all day.”

Dogs started barking inside. Howling. Dr. Bolt looked stricken.

“The kennel?” Maddox said.

“In back.”

Maddox went down into the cool, dusty basement, two dim lights buzzing. He passed an old croquet set under the stairs and took the red-striped mallet, his revolver out in front of him as he climbed the old plank stairs. He gave the door at the top a test shove with his foot, then brought the mallet head down a few times against the ancient doorknob, which cracked apart. He stood the mallet in the corner and kicked open the door.

The chair went crashing against the opposite wall. Maddox jumped out and swept both sides of the short hallway in a two-handed stance, grateful for the light from the basement.

The house was a mess inside. No light switches worked. Broken glass crunched under his boots on the rug.

With the dogs barking madly in the rear, his sweep was perfunctory, throwing open doors and checking rooms. He crossed into the adjoining office, clearing the front counter and the examining room, then moving through a door to the barking dogs in back.

The room smelled of pet shampoo. Three occupants in eight large aluminum sleeping pens, all of them stomping and howling. Maddox zeroed in on a low, open-doored supply locker at the end of the row, and was making his way toward it when a clatter erupted behind him. He turned to metal pans tumbling off the top of a high cabinet and a figure springing from a narrow hiding space beside it.

Frankie Sculp, knife in hand. Maddox had time and cause to shoot him but did not. Frankie, screaming incoherently, brought the knife blade down again and again in a slashing motion, cutting his own chest and legs through his T-shirt and shorts.

Maddox holstered his revolver and lunged with both hands for the knife. He got Frankie’s wrist and drove the kid back against the high metal cabinet, bringing more supplies crashing down on them. With one hand on the knife wrist and the other around Frankie’s throat, Maddox spun and dropped him face-first to the floor.

The knife popped free, twirling away along the gritty tile. Frankie was howling and bucking, not fighting Maddox, exactly, though the violence amounted to the same. Maddox bent both his wrists behind him, twisting and yanking up on his thumbs, putting a knee into his back and holding him there, letting him kick the floor and wail along with the dogs.

Maddox yelled for Dr. Bolt and then tried to get Frankie’s attention. The kid kept squirming, smearing some blood on the floor, but no fast-flowing pool. Incredible, how much heat was coming off him.

“Is he hurt?” said Dr. Bolt, appearing in the interior doorway.

“Not badly.” Maddox looked around, trying to figure a way to immobilize the possessed teenager. “Handcuffs. I left mine in my car.”

Dr. Bolt looked on, the jar of urine still in his hand, its contents gently swaying. “I might have a pair,” he said.

He returned from his bedroom with nickel-plated handcuffs and handed them to Maddox by the linking chain. Maddox clasped them around Frankie’s wrists and stood, pulling Frankie to his feet, hooking an arm around his bent elbow and then pushing him, headfirst, through the vet’s office and back into the adjoining house.

Dr. Bolt righted a table lamp in the main room out front and screwed in a lightbulb, finding a bare wall socket to plug into.

The interior of the room was demolished. Meticulous destruction: the bookshelves stripped bare, tables upended and their legs unscrewed, sofa cushions removed and unzipped and unstuffed, pictures and photographs taken from their frames, the ceiling fan pulled apart to its wires. An upright piano in the corner had been completely disassembled, frame, keyboard, strings, everything.

Maddox set Frankie down on his side to get a look at his wounds. Sweat-drenched ribbons of T-shirt hung over the bloody streaks crisscrossing his chest. Subcutaneous but not life-threatening. Just enough to mark him for life.

For his part, Frankie was feeling no pain. He sneered at the lamp, addressing the shining light. “See? Now they’re going to bind my feet and throw me in the river like a puppy in a potato sack, and you just look the other way!”

Maddox tried to find a telephone he could reassemble. He located the base and the speaker for the interior of the handset.

“He cut the wire outside,” said Dr. Bolt, slumping into an easy chair with no cushions, the jar in his lap. “I’m going to lose my practice.”

Maddox assessed the scene: a room in shambles, a bloody guy handcuffed on the floor muttering at an unshaded lamp bulb, and an older man in boxer shorts sitting with a jar of his own urine. “Want to tell me what’s going on here, Doctor?”

“I’m relieved.” Dr. Bolt stared straight ahead. “I am actually relieved now. That it’s over. Finally over.”

Frankie told the light, “You said you had to get them or else they were going to get you. You were going to show them all.”

Dr. Bolt said, “I’ll hire a lawyer. A good one.” He looked at Maddox across the destroyed room. “Why did I ever let it get this far?”

Maddox said, “There’s something you need to tell me, Doctor.”

“He knew I had iodine and iodine tincture for horses. He knew that already.”

Maddox took a step closer, starting to understand. “Do you keep a supply of pseudoephedrine here, Doctor?”

“It’s prescribed for canine incontinence. A Schedule Five controlled substance. He had me order the maximum legal amount every month from my supplier. He was blackmailing me, holding things over me. Yes, I faked point-of-sale documentation. I committed multiple frauds. Every gram of it went to him.”

“Doctor, I know who it is. All I need is to hear his name. From you.”

“This is going to be very bad for me. I need protection. Real protection. Protection from the police. He’ll want to do away with me.”

Maddox said, “The best way I or anyone else can protect you from this person is to arrest him first. All you need to do is say his name, and this is over just like that. All over. You’ll be safe. Just give me his name.”

44 Hess

Hess was heading home for the night and some well-earned downtime. He’d phoned ahead to his wife, who had already slipped the two boys some Benadryl and uncorked a bottle of red. He thought it was her when his Nextel lit up blue, his ring tone playing Rhythm Heritage’s “Theme From S.W.A.T.”

Bryson instead. “You’ll want to know this, Leo. Just took a call from Maddox on the local band. Requesting two units, one to the office of a veterinarian, and another for some backup for himself. Said he’s making an arrest.”

“Arrest?” said Hess, squinting at the highway in front of him, the lane markers zipping past like white bullets. What now? “He hasn’t got Sinclair, has he?”

“No, not Sinclair. Something else. Wouldn’t say over the radio.”

“And he wants us backing him up? Not his own? Who does this guy think he is?”

“I was going to ask him myself, but then the DA called. Not her office. Lady DA herself.”

Hess felt a cool rush, like a slow pour of water over him. “Saying?”

“Back up Maddox. Whatever he needs.”

Hess switched on his wigwags and grille blues and punched the gas, cutting across two lanes to the next exit. The thought bubble he had of Janine answering the front door in her black lace teddy was replaced by Maddox answering it in his junior league Black Falls police getup instead. Hess said into the phone, “I will be right fucking there.”

45 Maddox

The driveway was unmarked and unnumbered, coming up on him quick in the darkness of Jag Hill. Maddox’s patrol car raised a squall of dust, state police cruisers trailing him as Bucky Pail’s house appeared around a bend in the driveway, a short ranch with twin carports on the left and junkyard vehicles extending around back.

Maddox stopped, getting out with his flashlight. Bucky’s house was dark. The troopers took their time putting on their Mountie hats.

The front door wore a pair of antlers. Maddox knocked and waited. He wanted to feel a certain level of satisfaction, the kind he had anticipated throughout five months of working this case, but the end had come up on him so suddenly, all he cared about now was an expedient arrest. To close the book on this case and this period in his life. To finish the job.

No answer. He stepped back, jumpy, peering in through a small, four-pane window, seeing nothing. Maddox’s worst-case scenario: Bucky holing up inside, armed and squirrelly.

One trooper stayed in sight of the front door while the other followed Maddox around the side, underneath the carport, keeping his flashlight beam wide of the house: four or five more cars, a motorbike without tires, and what looked like a speedboat engine dismantled on a black tarp.

The back door was open. Maddox crept up to it. He would not knock this time. No need. Bucky was either sleeping or hiding.

His boot snagged on something near the door, an extension cord, leading from an exterior outlet into the dark backyard. Maddox left the other trooper at the door and followed the wire with his flashlight. It was three lengths of cord plugged together, threading through the dirt and ending up at a portable radio set on a stack of milk cartons next to a small car with its hood up. The radio dial glowed faintly, but nothing played.

Maddox heard something, though. A low, doglike growling coming from the other side of the car, where the trees began to crowd in. He moved around the front bumper with his light, stopping fast.

His beam found a dog pulling at something with its teeth. Not a dog at all, but a coyote, tearing hungrily at a man’s face. The face was eaten open to muscle and cartilage, chewed back to the ears and around a full set of crooked teeth. The naked corpse lay on its belly in the dirt, arms behind its back, its wrists handcuffed.

The coyote turned slow, lupine eyes reflecting Maddox’s light. It backed off a few steps, baring bloody teeth as though flashing the grin it had just eaten off Bucky Pail’s face. Then, resentful yet unashamed, it slunk away along a narrow path back into the trees.