The Killing Moon: A Novel

46 Cullen

Cullen found Maddox sitting on a slab inside one of the two holding cells where Bucky Pail should have been locked up now. “I’ve been looking all over.”

Maddox’s head was back against the wall, his cap in his hands in his lap. He looked very much like a man doing time. “Only quiet place in the station.”

He was right about that. Cullen closed the outer door on the clamor. “We need to talk. We could be in some deep shit here. You saw the handcuffs. Just like Pail handcuffed him when he beat him up.”

Maddox closed his eyes, nodded.

“I just came from there. Saw Hess, but ducked him. Guy’s in his glory now. The blood trail starts inside the front door. Then into the kitchen, where Pail’s clothes were found, sliced off him along with some skin. That’s where he was cuffed and killed. They found the dagger there. The one missing from the witch’s house.”

“Athame,” Maddox corrected him.

“Stabbed so hard, the tip was broken off inside him. There was a little toaster oven pulled out, and a squeeze bottle of mustard on the counter. They think Pail had been making some sort of lunch when Sinclair arrived, using a paper towel as a plate. They found flecks of paper inside the corpse’s teeth. The thinking is that Sinclair, before dragging the body outside, stuffed the greasy paper in Pail’s mouth in order to draw animals.”

Maddox offered no response, turning his cap over and over in his hands like thoughts inside his head.

“Look,” said Cullen, stepping inside the open cell, “I know this is a blow, but we’ve got to talk strategy here. Hess is ramping up big. He’s got everything he needs, multiple homicides, a killer on the loose. A murdered cop, even if he was dirty. That’s an immediate threat, a killer out of control.”

“This is about covering our asses on Sinclair?”

“We built up a slam-dunk case against Pail. Problem is, our arrestee is dead. And he happened to have been killed by our informant.”

“Small snag.”

“So let’s accentuate the positive. On the plus side, everything else is bingo. We’re talking a historic drug bust for this region. We’ve got well-trod paths in the back of Pail’s house leading out to a shed and an old camper. Piles of empty cans of lye and driveway cleaner behind them, along with cases of stripped road flares. And lots of bare patches in the scrub where he must have buried waste. He’s contaminated acres of his own property. I’d be amazed if those holes don’t glow green at night. Two HAZMAT teams are en route. You know that stink they talk about around meth labs, like the piss of an asparagus-eating cat? It was immediate at the shed. I couldn’t get any closer than the door, but both structures were meth kitchens, it’s plain. The guy had grocery bags full of product stockpiled, and I mean pounds of it, ready to go. At fifteen grand a whack? He’s been a busy little beaver. He was starting up a business, the first serious meth franchise in New England. Doing the product launch here in Black Falls. He started off in the shack, and it looks like he cooked there until the place became basically uninhabitable. Also looks like he had a serious fire, which probably occasioned his move to the camper. Jars of pharmaceutical-grade pseudo, the supplier’s seals and government warnings still on them, along with the vet iodine. The animal doctor is in some serious shit, but he’s not the face on this. Bucky Pail is, and you can’t bring a dead man to trial. Except, of course, in the press. Which has been tipped and might even be up there already. Good visuals, the chemicals laid out behind the shack, HAZMAT astronauts removing waste. Oh — and the brother. He showed up while I was there.”

“Eddie,” Maddox said.

“Right. Was all fired up, tried to badge his way in. You don’t tie him to this? He lived on the damn hill with his brother. He must have known.”

Maddox shook his head, rolling the back of it against the wall. “Not that I could find.”

“But he knew about his brother and Ibbits, right? He knew that Ibbits was in lockup that weekend he supposedly wasn’t, before he disappeared.”

“Seems that way, yes.”

“Okay. Prosecution-wise, it’s a short jump from there. He and the others can come in for conspiracy and intent to distribute. Those are our arrests, for the perp walk. Grand jury ends up not handing down indictments? Well, that’ll be months from now. Nobody remembers.” Cullen loosened up his shoulders. “All right. Now I’m starting to feel better about this.”

Maddox didn’t move, didn’t agree, didn’t say anything.

Cullen said, “You still thought Bucky Pail had something to do with killing Frond, didn’t you?”

The door opened on the station noise. Hess stepped inside, followed by Bryson, the trooper Cullen had talked to at the murder scene. Hess wore the mad-dog expression of a lifter in mid-rep. He reminded Cullen of the middle school football coach he would see one field over from his son’s soccer practice, a guy muscled all out of proportion to his job.

Bryson closed the door, Hess stopping at the entrance to the cell. Staring. Waiting.

Maddox lifted his head from the wall and shrugged.

“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?” said Hess. “How about some fucking professional courtesy, instead of trying to make me look like a fool? Maybe if you’d clued me in to things here, I’d have taken a sharper look at Pail. That occur to you yet? Maybe your catch wouldn’t be quite so dead right now. And you not so shit out of luck.”

Cullen watched Maddox sit there.

“No,” Hess went on. “You wanted that bust all to yourself. Golden boy comes home, makes good. I like the psychology of you UC guys. The homo hidden-life thing. This is your big coming-out party, isn’t it. You’re out of the cake now. Big splash.”

Hess turned and looked at Bryson, as though checking to make sure he was watching. In doing so, Hess discovered Cullen. “You. You were at my homicide scene. You DA?”

Cullen attempted an introduction, Hess ignoring his outstretched hand.

“You’re his leash?”

Cullen said, “I have oversight of the Mitchum County Drug Task Force. Looks like we had two investigations on parallel tracks that intersected last night.”

“Last night, bullshit. They intersected with Sinclair. That was the time to tell me.” Hess turned back to continue dressing down Maddox. “Before your investigation cross-infected mine.”

Cullen said, “We had a CI implicating local law enforcement in corruption, misconduct, abuse of power, and possible narcotics involvement.”

“Sinclair? Your confidential informant is a killer. I hope you don’t expect me to keep quiet about that fact.”

“Hold on now. Don’t forget, we’re the aggrieved party here, in terms of results. Your suspect killed our collar. Our huge collar. You know anything about methamphetamines, Trooper? Crystal meth?”

“That’s the next big scare drug? The one that’s going to hollow out our cities, turn children into prostitutes, grandmothers into gang-bangers?”

Cullen said, “This is the one.”

“I’ll be sure to head for the hills, just as soon as I catch my killer.”

“Meth isn’t just a ghetto drug or a city drug. It’s backyard. It’s everywhere. It eats away entire communities—”

“Save the horror stories for your constituents. All I want from you, right now, is a time line. This whole Sinclair thing from A to Z. Along with whatever else you’ve been holding back.”

“Simple,” said Cullen, transferring his folder from one armpit to the other. “You know that Sinclair was assaulted by Pail during a DUI stop.”

“And pled out to a nickel license suspension with no prison time in return for dropping assault charges and civil claims,” said Hess. “He got his deal. So why would he flip and start working for you?”

“He had a grudge, he had information — some. He brought it to us. That’s why we believed him. Because he had nothing to gain. It was the mention of meth that made us really jump. That scourge, burning up the rural West and Midwest for some time, is all but unknown here. Thing is, even he didn’t know the extent of it. He figured maybe the Pail brothers were taking a cut somehow, looking the other way.”

Hess, having calmed down somewhat, looked at Maddox. “You would meet with him?”

“That’s right,” said Maddox.

“How often?”

“Nothing regular. Now and then. He would page me.”

“That’s how you communicated.”

“We issued him a pager,” explained Cullen.

“Are you his lawyer?” Hess snapped, and Cullen held up his hands and backed away. Hess continued with Maddox. “Has he been in touch with you since he disappeared?”

“Of course not.”

“‘Of course not,’ sure. Because we’re all on the same team, right? You would have run right down here and told me. Professional courtesy.” Hess frowned hard, looking like every gym teacher Cullen had ever hated. “When was the last time you two met?”

“A week before he disappeared.”

“What’d he tell you? What was his attitude?”

“He was using. He was tweaked up.”

“But you didn’t bust him.”

Maddox scoffed; Hess knew better. “I told him he was a fuckup and I walked out. He did page me several days later. A Friday, could have been the day he disappeared. Set up another meet for that next week.”

“Where?”

“The top of the falls. Where we always met.”

“Sounds romantic.”

“The river runs about a half mile back of my mother’s property. I could walk there. No one would see us.”

Hess was satisfied but still smarting. “For the record, I was right about Sinclair. He did stay. Right here, in this area. Now we step it up big-time. Sweep through this place, flush him out fast.”

Maddox said, “One man’s death is another man’s resurrection.”

Hess looked at Maddox with something close to amazement. Even Cullen was a little shocked at Maddox saying that.

Hess said, “We really don’t like each other, do we?”

“You’ve been tripping over your shoelaces this entire investigation.”

“Thanks to you tying them together.” Hess checked Cullen, as though to say, You believe this guy? “You still don’t think it’s your boy, do you?”

Maddox said, “That last page to me, he indicated he was onto something. That he had something for me, which was unusual, because ten out of our total maybe twelve meetings were bullshit. Most of the work here I did on my own.”

“So what was he good for, then? What did he give you?”

Maddox, instead of answering him, stood up quickly. As though he had just now found himself sitting inside a jail cell. “Oh, fuck.”

“What?” said Cullen.

“Wanda.” Maddox looked at Cullen with true alarm, that of a man who had overlooked something of critical importance. “Pail’s girlfriend — sort of. She was dealing for him. And using.” He put his cap back on his head, moving past Hess.

Hess said after him, “Whoa, hold on.”

But Maddox didn’t lose a step, walking right out the door into the chaos of the station.

Hess looked at Bryson, sharing his disbelief, then turned his glare on Cullen, as though Maddox were his fault.

Cullen patted the air between them in an appeal for patience, his tone turning confidential. Covering for Maddox was covering for himself. “Look, he had a thing go bad on him, his last assignment.”

“How terrible,” said Hess, starting out fast after Maddox. “Cry me a motherfucking river.”

47 Hess

They trailed Maddox’s clunker of a patrol car into the hills above the town, Bryson driving. Hess had gone after Maddox in anger, but now regretted it, feeling paralyzed in the passenger seat with no phone and nothing to do, the investigation at a stage where it could easily wriggle away from him. With the HAZMAT alert, the situation in Black Falls rated automatic “critical incident” status with the MSP, meaning that the Incident Management Assistance Team — command post specialists in coordinating lost and missing person searches for the Bureau of Tactical Operations — was already on site. It also meant that the Mitchum barracks’ Special Emergency Response Team had been rousted, heavily wooded wilderness searches being their specialty. It meant too that the MSP Air Wing Unit was being scrambled, helicopters in the air over Black Falls by noon. Hess had an afternoon of handshaking and name-remembering before him.

“I wonder if he’s in that state forest somewhere,” said Hess, looking into the trees blurring past. “A cave or a hollow. Deep in, but close enough to make nighttime excursions into town.”

“Kind of like a gay Rambo.”

Hess’s look brought Bryson stammering.

“No, no, hey, I’m with you, I only meant—”

“Or else he’s holed up in one of these homes.” The trees occasionally gave way to secluded cabins and cottages. “Maybe already killed again, and is hiding out.”

Bryson nodded dutifully and drove on.

“These UC guys, huh?” said Hess, nodding at Maddox’s car. “Twitchy. Can’t trust them because they see both sides and forget sometimes which one they’re on. They develop sympathy for the devil, and in this job having too much compassion is like having too much fear.”

“Ten years undercover,” said Bryson. “The guy’s won performance awards he couldn’t even show up to collect.”

Bryson with stars in his eyes. He had come to Hess highly recommended, but now Hess didn’t know.

They slowed at the intersection of two ropy roads. Maddox pulled up in front of a wreck of a house, the roof moldy, the front screen door torn. The homeowner’s solution to either a water leak or critter invasion had been to cap the chimney with an upended blue plastic trash barrel.

Maddox was out of his car fast. Apprehension was a new look for him. He didn’t even react when Hess and Bryson caught up with him inside.

A grizzled guy in a thin brown bathrobe sat back in a pilled easy chair like slum royalty. Maddox was asking him about this Wanda, and the guy, Bill was his name, sat there like Hugh Hefner’s bitter half brother, saying she was sleeping.

They crowded up the narrow hallway, Maddox pushing the door open on a room with an empty bed. He stripped back the sheets in one motion, something small and light flying out and flitting to the floor beneath a small, three-loop radiator.

Two small drug bags.

Maddox pushed past them into the tight hallway and tried another closed door. When the knob didn’t turn, he banged on the unpainted wood grain with the flat of his hand, calling her name.

“Who is that?” came a sleepy voice.

Hess watched Maddox’s head bow with relief. Apparently, he had thought this Wanda was dead. “It’s Maddox.”

“What are you doing here?”

Lots of movement inside. A classic stall.

Maddox stood in that sideways manner people have of speaking through doors. “I need to see you.”

Water was running. “I’m gonna be a couple of minutes.”

“Right now.”

“It’s your turn to wait for me for a change, how’s that? This is lady business in here.”

“Wanda.”

They heard the flush. Hess showed Maddox his impatience.

“Wanda.”

“Hold your horses.”

“Wanda. I’m going to kick it in.”

The knob had a slot keyhole in its center, and Hess motioned to Bryson for the Leatherman tool he usually carried. Bryson gave it to him and Hess unfolded a knife blade and jiggled it in the knob.

“I said I’m coming—”

Hess turned the knob and Maddox pushed in fast through the door. Wanda was a string-haired rag doll in terry-cloth shorts, a washed-out Celtics ring tee hanging off her shoulders like a nightshirt on a little sweaty girl. She was bent over the sink as though hiding something, and Hess first thought she was fixing up. But when Maddox turned her around, her hands were empty except for the two damp sweatbands she was pulling on over pad bandaging.

The white walls of the sink were bloody, and on the rim, near the torn-open box of bandages, were a pair of tweezers and nail clippers, both stained red. The woman’s eyes were glassy as she bent to protect her arm, but Maddox, after his initial shock at the sight of the blood, tugged off the sweatbands, and the bandages beneath came away.

There was a puff of stink that smelled almost cadaverous. Wanda’s forearm above her wrist was a mess of chewed flesh. She had been using the grooming tools to pick at her wounds, one abscess dug down to the tendon, its ridges black with spoil. The burnlike lumps of skin looked boiled from beneath, maybe from unabsorbed poisons eating their way back out of her body. The sight reminded Hess of Bucky Pail’s face, and how the coyote had torn into him.

She cradled the arm as though it were precious, an infant unswaddled. “I have an infection,” she said.

Hess rippled with a shiver. “Good Christ.”

Wanda looked at him like a corpse turned suspicious. “What’s this?” She turned to Maddox for an explanation, but Maddox, holding her gaze, said nothing.

“This is an arrest,” said Hess. “You have the right to remain silent...”

Still holding her gory arm at an odd angle, she looked from Hess back to Maddox again. “Donny?” she said, the reality of her situation slowly sinking in.

Maddox looked dazed. He stared into the middle ground between them.

Hess, disgusted but trying to get through this, said, “Anything you say—”

“Where’s Bucky?” she said, starting to panic.

Hess held up his hands to calm her down. “Anything you say—”

“No!” she yelled at Hess, reeling backward as though he were attacking her. “No!” With nowhere else to go, she wedged herself between the small sink and the dirty tiled wall, shaking her rag-doll head.

They weren’t even police to her. They were the embodiment of the pain of withdrawal that was to come. Agents of dopesickness. That was the fear behind her hazy eyes. And the wild betrayal when she looked at Maddox.

Hess realized he could not grab her wrists. With nothing to handcuff, she wasn’t going to go easy. Why the hell am I dealing with this now? he asked himself.

“Bryson,” he barked. “Get in here and arrest this woman.”

48 Eddie

Eddie buried his brother right after the autopsy. He thought that putting him in the ground — reminding people that a police sergeant had died here — would also lay to rest all the talk. So there was no wake, no service, just this graveside observance. They couldn’t do an open casket anyway, and whatever religion the brothers once had was buried here with their mother, with the beads tangled up in her folded fingers.

His grief wasn’t wet. It was dry like ice, angry and focused. No throwing his hands up at the sky. No cosmic “Why?” God had nothing to answer to Eddie for. Only two people did.

Scarecrow, of course. That twisted little would-be abortion. Using Bucky’s own handcuffs on him (How could you let that little shit get the drop on you?) and feeding him to the wolves. Eddie wiped his nose on the sleeve of his father’s old suit jacket, the double buttons on the cuff like teeth rubbing across his lips. Thinking about any aspect of the murder made him want to tear at his own skin, made him want to claw at the earth — but the one thing Eddie kept focusing on, the one thing that sickened him in the pit of his being, was Bucky’s clothes being taken off. That freak seeing his brother naked. Getting his jollies. Eddie’s fists weighed down his jacket pockets like two hot stones.

And then Maddox. Where was he now? Sure, he had a grudge against Bucky, and vice versa. But this disrespect? Not showing up for a fellow officer? Unforgivable. Bucky had been straight-up right about that guy, not trusting him, not liking him. And now all this drug nonsense on the news, in the papers — Eddie couldn’t help thinking somehow it was Maddox’s doing. They called it a “lab.” What they didn’t know was that Bucky got his first chemistry set at age seven, and that he had always been a dabbler. As kids, the two of them used to use his compounds to blow up stumps and things on their hill. They even made their own fireworks, Bucky experimenting to learn which powders made them spark red or green or blue.

And how was it Maddox had been the one to find Bucky’s body? He’d sure never been to the house before that night. And where had he been hiding since? Didn’t he know Eddie had questions?

It was Maddox’s house they were heading to after this. Eddie was going to get his father’s suit dirty, maybe. Maddox had a lot of talking to do.

A whupping noise drowned out the pastor’s voice, and suddenly a helicopter with state police markings on its belly crested the trees, beating low over the graveyard, loosening petals from the condolence bouquet and flapping Bible pages in the pastor’s hand. The same helicopter that had buzzed Jag Hill last night with its searchlight beaming down, searching for Scarecrow.

The flyby was almost like a tribute — should have been a tribute — with the mourners shading their eyes from the sun, which, to Eddie, looked like a military-style farewell salute. Bucky deserved such a tribute.

But so few mourners. Where was the rest of the town? Didn’t they know that Bucky had taken a stand for them? Who was it who first roughed up that little freak when he had the chance? And in doing so, put his life on the line for this town? This was his thanks? This was the respect they gave him? This turnout was like a vote of support for his killer.

He looked down to the low stone wall along Number 8 Road, the state police troopers grouped there. They didn’t care. It wasn’t one of theirs dead. Eddie looked to the side, the vehicle path that ringed the cemetery. He saw Ripsbaugh standing by his Bobcat, shovel in hand. No respect. Not even the courtesy to take a break during the ceremony. The Grim Reaper over there, couldn’t wait to bury him. Like this service was holding him up.

Eddie’s brother. His baby brother. Pails had lived in Black Falls almost since the beginning, and they had plots throughout this cemetery, from the thin, cracked, pre-Revolutionary-era stone markers leaning like bad teeth in the front row to the broad, modern headstones in the rear. Eight or nine separate markers here with PAIL carved into them.

Eddie was the last one now. Eddie was all alone.

People were looking at him, Big Bobby Loom nodding. Eddie hadn’t been paying attention. It was his turn. He took Bucky’s cop hat and set it on top of the casket, then cracked open two cans of Bud, sipped the foam off his, and set the other at the edge of his brother’s open grave.

Eddie stayed down on one knee, head bowed.

Help me, Bucky. Bring me Scarecrow. Bring him to me, brother. I dedicate the rest of my life to avenging you. To clearing your everlasting memory and our proud name. And to punishing this town for turning its back on you today.

When it was over, Eddie lingered while the mourners wandered away. He stared at the coffin as though he could see inside, his brother’s faceless head nestled in padded white satin. Mort Lees and Stokes and Ullard gathered at his back. A good feeling, them united. Eddie turned away his hazy eyes and they started off together, as one.

The uniformed troopers detached from the stone wall. Eddie thought they were at last coming to pay their respects, but then he saw their faces. The troopers stopped, blocking the way to the road.

“You don’t want to make a scene now,” said one of them, thumbs hooked inside his gunbelt.

“What scene?” said Eddie, Mort at his side. “What is this?”

The trooper said, “All of you, raise your hands, lace your fingers behind your heads.”

This broiling heat. This beating summer sun. Eddie felt himself going wild inside. “This is a graveside observance.”

“Graveside observance is over, Jack. Feel lucky we let you have that. You want to maintain some dignity, you comply with my command now and come along quietly. Hands up and behind your heads. Let’s go.”

Eddie saw one trooper move his palm flat against the butt of his sidearm, another with his fingers holding open the flap of a pouch of Mace. From that point on Eddie was blind with rage. The fight occurred as much inside him as around him. He unloaded his despair. Wanting to hit and be hit. To hurt and be hurt. Mace burned his eyes, and the name he yelled as they pulled him to the ground was Maddox’s.

49 Cullen

“Bolt did indeed go out and get himself a good lawyer,” said Cullen, sitting on a thin-cushioned divan inside Maddox’s mother’s house, casually bobbing the shoe of his crossed leg, the hand of his outstretched arm plucking at the stiff crocheted slip covering a wheel-shaped pillow. “A smart lawyer who convinced him to roll over fast. Had no choice, really. With Pail dead, they knew Dr. Bolt was the one we would go after, get his face on TV, make an example of. And it’s an easy case to prove. This way, we get what we want — Pail the archvillain, whose crimes die with him — and Bolt gets what he wants — to play the victim. Which is less than a half-truth, but it gets us close enough to the full story. He’ll plead out early to avoid a jury. Take short time, some token like thirty months, long probation, and register as a sex offender.”

“Sex offender?” said Maddox.

“Bolt occasionally hired some of the foster kids to do odd jobs around the kennel. Some of them he fed ketamine hydrochloride, which I understand is a dissociative anaesthetic for animals.”

“Special K.”

“What you call it on the street. Himself, he’d take some Internet Blue. Viagra.” To Maddox’s scowl, Cullen said, “Yup. Bolt stresses it was ‘only a few times,’ as though he should be eligible for further sentence reduction for not doing it to hundreds or thousands of kids. Good Sergeant Pail found out about this somehow, and instead of taking him down, used it against him. Which raises the question of how did Bucky Pail know that veterinarians handled not only pseudoephedrine, the main ingredient in making meth, but the other government-restricted precursor, iodine?”

“Ibbits,” said Maddox, seated across from him in a chair upholstered in brocaded rose blooms. The ticking came from a ceramic clock on the otherwise empty mantle behind him. Everything else was in open boxes, half packed, and probably had been for months. It was an old house with attendant aches and pains. Including the irregular wood creaks Cullen kept hearing upstairs.

“Ibbits indeed,” said Cullen. “A fugitive from justice, a nomad with the epic misfortune of cutting through Black Falls on his way to nowhere. Of being pulled over in one of Bucky Pail’s notorious speed traps. Hugo Ibbits was Patient Zero for meth here in Mitchum County. Like a spore floating on the air, who landed inside our throat. He did spend time in lockup, brother Eddie finally confirmed it. Bucky came and got him out on a Sunday night, though Eddie still insists his brother released him. He truly believes that Ibbits cracked up his own car and died in the fire. And he still backs his brother’s innocence one hundred percent on the meth lab. When we showed him printouts from his brother’s Internet searches, seeking property in Daytona Beach, Florida, Eddie actually broke down. Guy cried.”

Maddox nodded but demonstrated no sympathy.

Cullen rounded it up quickly, tired of the details he had spent the last forty-eight hours assembling. “Wanda moved it through Sculp and others via a drop at the vet’s. Sculp dealt to the other kids at his house, and the kids further seeded it around town. The supply chart was growing, doubling every eight to twelve weeks. The tipping point was approaching soon, where Bucky would have to turn it loose. Sculp dealt to Sinclair. Don’t know how they connected originally, and unless Frankie gets a grip on himself after detox, we’ll have to wait for Sinclair to get caught to find out.”

Maddox sat forward. “They need help here for this. We have to go through town and figure out some way to deal with these people, reach out to them. They’ve had a taste of it now. We need to get in here and address this before it occurs to somebody that they can cook this shit themselves, in the trunk of their car.”

“Well,” said Cullen, “I’m with you on that, but let’s be honest. That’s the mopping up that never gets done. The message is always, ‘Mission Accomplished,’ through the press, and, yes, through my office. Drugs confiscated? Problem solved. That’s the only story people want to hear. I just don’t see us getting much support. Especially with the Sinclair hysteria ongoing. You following that?”

“Not really.” Maddox had been out of action since Wanda Tedmond’s arrest.

“Sightings all over town,” said Cullen. “A twelve-year-old kid walking home from a friend’s house yesterday saw Sinclair beckoning to him from some trees across the street. People’ve seen him cutting across their neighbors’ backyards. Calls come in to nine-one-one saying he’s down in the basement right now. Or their kids’ toys were moved around in the driveway — maybe it was Sinclair.” Cullen smiled in amazement. “It’s a legitimate phenomenon. We have a saying in the DA’s office: Awaken the fears of a parent and you awaken the fears of a community.”

“Police radio last night said something about coyotes—”

“Roaming the streets, it’s true. A couple of them got shot and killed. The Air Wing helicopter with its thirty-million-candlepower searchlight rousted them all from the state forest. Or maybe they were drawn here by the scent of fear. Of course, having state police strike teams in full ninja tac skulking through your neighbor’s pasture, clearing old barns and outbuildings — that doesn’t exactly help calm things down. Doesn’t ease much anxiety. My way over here, I passed people out on their front steps, hunting rifles across their laps. Guy shot out his own patio window last night, thought he saw a shadow. They’re pulling down antique Winchesters from over the fireplace, riding around with loaded handguns on the passenger seat. Massachusetts has the most restrictive firearms laws in the country, but enforcing those statutes tonight would mean packing half the town into two small jail cells. This is a holiday for people, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lock and load in public, maybe even bag themselves a gen-u-ine child molester.”

Maddox said, “Wonderful.”

“So you can see how well martial law would go over. State police actually imposed a curfew, but nobody knows it. How do you alert a community without a Web site or cable TV channel or even a town newspaper? This is why you need to stay on. In name only, just until Sinclair is brought in. Can’t totally disband a town’s police department during a crisis like this. Plus, my boss’s perspective is, there’s one thousand seven hundred fifty-eight potential votes here, so don’t mobilize taxpayers by pissing them off.”

“Nobody here votes.”

“Still, she doesn’t want a lawless town on her register. Just let Hess and his bunch do their thing, and wait this out. Play the small-town cop for a couple more days.”

Maddox nodded unhappily. “And after that?”

Cullen shrugged, flapping his tie out over his lap. “That’s up to your brass. You might as well know, no matter how this Sinclair shit storm falls, I’m recommending you back with full confidence.”

“Actually,” said Maddox, “I was asking about the town.”

“You mean their police?” Cullen shrugged again. “That’s a little beyond our purview, isn’t it? I’m sure they’ll work it out, hire on replacements. What other choice do they have?”

Maddox accepted this quietly. He had seemed uncomfortable since answering the door, but only now did it occur to Cullen that Maddox was impatient for him to leave. Another subtle creak upstairs drew Cullen’s eyes to the swirled pattern of the plaster ceiling, then the detailed molding around the edge.

“One thing I’ve been meaning to ask you,” said Cullen. “I saw the pictures from Sinclair’s camera. The one of your house here. What was that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I want to either. You ever crack open an egg and get a bloody yolk? Crack open Sinclair’s head, and that’s what you’d get.”

“But what do you think? Was he fixated on you?”

“I don’t know how he saw me. I had a secret. A secret job, a secret life. He was drawn to that. I think he wanted that for himself. A great secret existence.”

“Maybe he found one. I’d watch yourself, anyway.” Cullen patted his own knee, uncrossing his legs. “And now I get to go home.” He stood, returning the wheel pillow to the corner of the divan, reaching for his file. “What about you? What’s the night hold?”

Maddox shrugged, getting to his feet.

“Alone with your thoughts, eh? Well, enjoy your downtime. God knows, it never lasts.”

The moment had arrived either to shake hands or not. Cullen tapped Maddox lightly on the chest with the file folder, then nodded and started away. Sometimes it ended that way. No finish-line string-breaking or end-zone spike. There was an excellent chance they would never even see each other again.

On his way out through the garage, Cullen took another look at the old Ford pickup. Its rusted wheel wells and dinged sides and mud-browned tires marked it as a true, working truck, a farm rig, and, as such, unsuited to Maddox’s needs. Cullen checked the front seat through the driver’s window and saw a package of breath mints, a garage door remote control, and a paperback with a pink and blue cover he recognized as being one of his wife’s book group novels.

A pickup truck and chick lit. Cullen was only sorry he’d never been introduced.

50 Tracy

Tracy went downstairs after she heard the car drive away.

Donny, alone in his kitchen, turned and raised a “there you are” smile.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know he was coming by.”

She shrugged. “That’s okay.”

“I’m not used to mixing work with my private life. Not really used to having a private life at all.”

“Okay,” she said again.

“He’s from the Mitchum County District Attorney’s office. I don’t know how much you heard...”

“Was I supposed to be listening?”

He shrugged like it was all right if she had been.

“Most of it,” she admitted.

He nodded. “I never, ever lied to you. To everyone else but you.”

“You never told me much truth either.”

“I know. But I’m about to.”

Tracy stood against the dishwasher to steady herself. This buildup was too much. She folded her arms protectively, to stop herself from trembling. “Okay.”

“This isn’t my first job in law enforcement. I’ve been with the state police for just over ten years.”

Tracy had guessed as much, listening from the foot of his bed upstairs. But hearing him say it now blew holes in her ears. “You’re a state trooper?”

“Never actually wore the uniform. Not for one day on the job.”

Tracy stared, trying to picture him in the shirt, the hat, the boots.

“Issued me a gun too, but I never carried it. Both have been in storage since the academy. They pulled me out right before graduation to work undercover. Which I’ve done continuously ever since.”

“Undercover?” she said, a term she thought she knew from the movies, but which, when applied to Donny Maddox, had no meaning for her at all.

“Narc work, mostly. I think it started off as an experiment. They wanted someone with a clean background, who could walk around with a real name and a real social security number with real mileage on it. So I kept no personnel file with the state police. Only one captain and one major within the organization knew my cover. My police salary was always paid out into an account under my mother’s name so that I never drew a paycheck. It wasn’t very much anyway. Unlike uniform troopers, I couldn’t pad my take-home with detail work.”

He shook his head like he was rambling.

“I kept what I earned working my cover jobs, lived off that. That was the life. All real jobs, lots of bars, day labor, some under-the-table stuff. Building up visibility and street cred. Every step of the way, I was wheeling and squealing. And always managing to be somewhere else when the cops came knocking.

“Most undercovers go four, five years max. It’s a fast track to promotion. But with me, it wasn’t something I dipped in and out of. I was always in it. Birthdays would come and go, and I’d think, This year, this is the last. Only to see another one come around again. I used to blame the SP, but it was me just as much. Fact was, I liked it. It was what I knew, and it came easy to me. Until the job before this one.”

He cleared his throat. He was telling her everything and it was too much at once. Tracy prepared herself for the worst.

“An OxyContin ring operating out of Haverhill. You know what Oxy is, right? Pharmaceutical painkiller. Heroin users love it because it’s control-released. A sustained high over time. These were bad boys, taking off pharmacies at gunpoint. Ran down a Haverhill cop once on a getaway, the guy died of a heart attack. I worked them through this girl I had conspired to meet, a roommate of one of their sisters. A good girl, basically, with a good heart, but kind of tragically naive and gullible. Perfect for me. I contrived to get myself kicked out of my own apartment, knowing she would take me in. That was how I was trying to break in with her friend’s brother. But it was slow going. I would hit up this girl for information, things she’d heard. These guys were all Latins, and ’roid ragers, paranoiacs. When things started to go bad for them, when they had to shade off some jobs because they picked up on stakeout heat at the scene, they went on a witch hunt. One night I came home and she was gone. No word, nothing. Turned out they had fingered her for the leak instead of me. Her body was found underneath a bridge. They’d force-fed her a couple of crushed-up Oxy, which, outside of its control-release capsule, delivers a twelve-hour high in one bolt. They took turns urinating on her as she was dying.”

Tracy’s arms were crossed so tightly she could hardly breathe.

“Yeah.” Donny cleared his throat again. “I knew how it happened, I knew who did it, but had no proof. So I poured myself into it that much harder, breaking in with them in order to seal this murder rap. But to get there, to run with these scumbags and earn their trust, I had to do some things. Things I wouldn’t ordinarily do. The rules of the game that are meant to be bent? Well, I really bent them. Tied them in knots. But as far as I was concerned, the end more than justified the means.”

He was nodding hard. He looked sick.

Tracy felt paralyzed.

“The other side of it was, I knew my mother was ill. She would tell me she was okay, and I let myself believe her because I couldn’t get out to see her anyway. I was living with these guys by then, this hyper-paranoid bunch — totally insular was how they rolled, you never mixed with anyone outside the crew — and everything was coming to a head. So I put off seeing her, and put it off, and fucking put it off. It was right after I got these guys picked up in the act of knocking over a CVS in Salem, New Hampshire, that she had her fall.

“There was real static coming my way after the case, the rules I broke, and I was at a point where I just didn’t care. So I quit. The day after my mother’s funeral, in fact. Tried to, anyway. Then they came to me about Sinclair, who had been beaten up by Bucky Pail during a DUI stop. He had made some narco allegations against the Black Falls police, and Pinty had already been to the DA’s office about corruption in the department he once ran. It was my hometown, it was a good fit, so they offered me this probationary rehab assignment, a straightforward fact-finding case of possible rogue cops running amok. I didn’t really care about making good myself. It was for Pinty I did it. Aside from my mother, he was the only one who knew what I was — knew that this was the reason I never came back after graduation, never served my scholarship time. He got me hired on to the force here, and I’ve been working this case ever since.”

“Sinclair?” Tracy said, trying hard to understand. “You were his...?”

“He was my informant, yeah. I had that distinct privilege. He was just starting to figure out that this thing was bigger than even he had originally thought when he disappeared. Now, somehow, my small-town criminal conspiracy case has dovetailed into a double-murder investigation.”

She was breathing hard like she had been running the entire time he was speaking. Running away from what he was saying and at the same time racing to keep up with him. “So then, Wanda...”

“She was the only one close to Bucky Pail. That’s what that was all about. But she stayed loyal to him. Or rather, she stayed loyal to his drugs.”

Tracy said, “In the movies, undercover drug agents, sometimes they have to take drugs themselves. To prove they’re not police.”

“Yeah.”

She waited. “That’s all you’re going to say?”

Donny said, “Yeah.”

She felt weird, her hands and legs tingling. Drugs. Donny. She looked at him standing across the kitchen, suddenly realizing that she might not know this man at all. “Did you wear wigs, disguises?”

“No.”

“You used your real name?”

“Mostly. Twice I got loaned out to DEA short-term, they tagged me with a phony background. But predominantly, it was just me.”

“And you’ve put away a lot of people?”

“A good few, yeah.”

“Don’t you worry about them coming back to find you?”

“Not really,” he said.

This was his first lie to her, she realized with a chill. “These people — you would live with them, gain their friendship, trust? Knowing you were going to turn on them in the end?”

“It’s the second-dirtiest game out there, right after the drug trade itself. But there is no other way. The only way to fight street crime is with street presence.” She watched him try to come up with some way of illustrating it so that she would understand. “There are people who are good at doing drugs. That may sound strange to you, but there just are. They can handle it somehow, they can manage their life. What I was good at was this. Undercover. I tried not to question it beyond that. And generally I had success. Until Haverhill.” He could see that he was having trouble getting through to her. “Can you see now why it was so important to me that no one knew about us?”

Tracy felt cold. And scared, and suddenly heartsick. She felt squeezed. “What was her name?” she asked.

Donny didn’t understand at first. Then he looked down at the floor. He was thinking about that girl, remembering her. “Her name was Casey.”

She watched him so closely, needing to read his face for the answer to this question. “Were you in love with her?”

“No,” he said. “I wasn’t. But isn’t that worse?”

This was like trying to wound him by ripping out chunks of herself and throwing them at his head. “You were playing a role.”

“That’s right.”

“Are you playing a role now?”

A weird buzzing ended the charged stillness. Tracy looked at the corner of the counter where he routinely dumped his wallet and keys. His pager was creeping sideways, vibrating.

Donny picked it up, checking the message screen. He looked confused at first, then alarmed. He pressed a button, read something more. “It’s him,” he said.

He started moving, past her and around the corner to the hall closet.

“Who him?” she said, following.

From the top shelf he brought down his leather holster, unsnapping it and pulling loose his gun. “Sinclair.”

“What?” She took the pager from him to see for herself.

The sender’s SkyTel address was displayed along with the header and the current time. Meet at pulp mill. Urgent. ALONE.

“How do you know it’s him?”

Donny used a key from his ring to undo the trigger lock on his gun. “Three people have that pager number. No — four. The assistant district attorney, who just left here. You. Wanda, who’s in lockup. And Sinclair.” He took the pager out of her numb hands, and, before slipping it into his back pocket, showed her. “That’s his account number. This was sent from his pager.”

The two halves of the lock spilled onto the counter. He popped open the barrel to check the load, then closed the gun back up again and tucked it into his holster. He undid his belt strap to his right hip, threading the holster onto it, fixing the belt and buckling it tight.

Tracy said, “You’re not going there alone. He’s already killed one policeman.”

Donny grabbed his wallet and pocketed his keys. “It’s nothing like that.”

“How do you know?” She looked to the window, the night outside. “Call your state police.”

“They would scare him off. You read the message. Look — it’s just not like that. I don’t have time to explain right now.”

He started away, then came back fast.

“Stay here. Wait for me, okay? Please. And don’t open the door for anyone but me.”

“Don’t open the — Wait! What if you don’t come back?”

He hurried down the hallway. “I’m coming back.”

51 Maddox

Maddox was almost an hour in, and still no sign. He had gone through every desolate room on three long floors, painstakingly clearing the crumbling mill, not wanting any surprises. Every single window had been smashed, stones lying where they landed on the floor after having been launched by kids on the other side of the river.

He went back outside via the same kicked-in door. A few decaying bales of paper stock remained in the adjoining lot, and he stood among them looking up at the big former polluter, an ominous industrial carcass looming over the river’s edge. He had forgotten how much he used to dread these secret meetings with Dill Sinclair. How, after all the schemers and psychos who had crossed his path over the years, he had to come home to meet the one guy he literally could not stand to be around.

He remembered their last meeting, farther north along the bank of this same river. Sinclair emerging from the trees at dusk, the hood of his black shirt pulled over his balding head despite the heat, pocketed hands tugging it down. “Shall we do the secret handshake?”

Maddox, despising his dripping familiarity, said nothing in response. Behind him the river rushed to the small island that divided the flow at the edge, the twin cascades plummeting to the natural rock basin seventy feet below.

“Ever come here as a kid?” asked Sinclair, moving to the edge. The right cuff of his loose black jeans was still tucked into his sock above his black-and-white Chuck Taylor All-Stars high-top, to keep the fabric from tangling in his bicycle chain. He looked out over the drop into the lower valley, the water cutting a path through the trees as it wound south. “I did. I used to look down on the town and wish I could hop in this river and ride it right out of here.” He glanced back at Maddox with a smile. “Do I make you nervous, standing out here? Some say people have a natural aversion to heights, but I don’t think that’s true. I think people are actually drawn to heights. They’re drawn to the edge, and I think that is the scary part. People keep back for fear they might be tempted to take the leap.” He looked way down to the churning pit below. “The ease of it. One step. What would it feel like, falling? You never wonder?”

Maddox stood his ground some twenty feet back. He could have rebutted that people with nothing to lose tend to find precipices just about anywhere they looked.

“The water, the way it crashes down there, forms a whirlpool.” Sinclair scooped up some loose stones, dropping them one by one over the edge. “You wouldn’t have a chance to drown. The force of the water would destroy you first. Tear off your clothes, your skin. Mash you up against the rocks. Obliterate you, leaving no trace.”

Maddox said, “If you’re waiting for me to talk you down from there...”

Sinclair snickered, tossing the rest of the stones and brushing dirt off his hands. “Nobody would cry, right? Nobody would shed one tear. They’d be happy. They’d be thrilled. It’s almost funny. If the people in this town only knew.”

“You don’t do this for them.”

“No? That’s true, I guess.” He turned back to Maddox. “But then again, neither do you. I wonder sometimes, who hates this place more — you or me?” He rolled his head to one side, rubbing his neck. “Who would ever have guessed that the two of us together would join up to save these hicks from themselves?”

He seemed to be smiling. Remarkable how much the absence of eyebrows cut down one’s range of expression.

Maddox said, “You brought me out here for nothing, didn’t you.”

“I’m trying to be good,” Sinclair said. “I am. But it’s so fucking lonely when there’s nothing to do.” He chewed his nail. “Except go crazy. Okay, so nobody wants me to be happy, right? So, fine. I can’t even find anybody to be miserable with. How do you get by? You met anyone here?”

Maddox didn’t like Sinclair’s look — didn’t like it because he couldn’t fully read it. Did he know about Tracy? Had he been watching Maddox?

“Okay,” Maddox said, and started walking off.

Sinclair’s voice sounded bewildered behind him. “Where are you going?”

“I can do this myself. You think you’re playing games with me? You give me nothing.”

“It’s my life on the line here,” Sinclair said. “We can’t just talk? Have a goddamn conversation like normal people?”

“I’m not your friend. You find out something I can use, you page me. And next time don’t show up here tweaked.”

That silenced him. Until Maddox was almost to the trees.

“I will have something,” Sinclair said. His voice wasn’t cracking, but it was strained. He hadn’t moved from the edge of the falls. “You’ll see.”

“Right,” Maddox said. “Promises.”

“It’s big. More than you know.”

Maddox kept right on walking.

That had been the relationship. A rat-and-mouse confederacy, like the strategic alliances that form within a dysfunctional family. You and me against the others. And Maddox exploited that.

Which was why acting disappointed was sometimes enough to motivate him into action. In that respect, Sinclair was like Maddox’s damaged twin. He wanted his better half’s approval. Wanting to do well, to succeed, to shine in someone’s eyes for once: that was Sinclair’s greatest secret.

His greatest failure was his inability ever to do so.

More minutes passed. A car drove by, Maddox watching it from the dark corner of the lot, crossing the bridge and turning onto Main Street, pulling away. Now he was getting pissed.

Maddox brought out his pager. Nothing further. He checked the original message again. It had been sent from Sinclair’s pager, there was no doubt. But the text. He reviewed it now that he had more time.

Meet at pulp mill. Urgent. ALONE.

Sinclair’s messages were long and rambling, not staccato bursts. Granted, the guy was on the run. But also there were no misspellings. Sinclair was notorious for that — whether he was dyslexic or just sloppy, Maddox didn’t know. “Pulp” would be “plup.” “Urgent” would be “ugrent.” It was constant, every second or third word.

And why wait so long to contact him? If he had in fact been carrying the pager with him all this time, why hadn’t he used it? Why hadn’t he responded to any of Maddox’s earlier messages? Why ignore him until now?

Maddox suddenly felt exposed, standing half visible in the moonlight behind the old paper mill, looking at the trees across the river and farther south along Mill. He was beginning to think that coming here had been a terrible mistake.

52 Tracy

She dreamed a memory: the afternoon her parents had sat her down in the sitting room, where all the serious conversations took place, and told her thirteen-year-old self that they were breaking up for good. Her father was not deaf, so it fell to him to utter the words — through a smile, as though everything were going to be okay — while her mother sat next to him, hands angrily mute in her lap. Tracy had cried that day, more out of confusion than anything, the distress she felt from her parents. As soon as she could, she excused herself and went into her room and shut the door. The next thing she remembered was her mother shaking her shoulder, and Tracy feeling a surge of bliss, as though waking from a terrible dream. Her relief vanished as soon as she saw the look in her mother’s dark-rimmed eyes. Her mother left the room silently and Tracy felt her reproach, though she did not understand why until she was older: her mother had seen her slumber as a careless act, the betrayal of a much-needed ally.

So now, bolting awake to the rumble of the opening garage door, Tracy felt that same moment of pleasant disorientation, of consolation — only to be brought down crashing by the shameful realization that she had once again fallen asleep. How was this possible? Emotional exhaustion? Or simple cowardly escape? She chastised herself for her weakness, rubbing hard at her cheeks and her eyes, her skin feeling like it had aged a year during that nap. Her face turning into her mother’s face.

She had been sleeping with an undercover state trooper. She knew nothing about the man she had fallen for. It came back to her in a bolt: who Donny was, where he had gone, whom he was to meet. So when the garage door started to close, fear woke her completely. Was this him? She went and stood half hidden inside the bathroom doorway, feeling more useless than ever.

He walked in, his holster already off his belt, his keys and pager in his hands. He shuffled his boot treads on the thin mat and shook his head when he saw her. “Nothing. He never showed.”

“Never showed?”

“Two hours I waited. Wandered all over that rotting place.” He walked past her and dumped his stuff on the counter where the pieces of his trigger lock remained. She could smell the old building on him, sawdust and decay. “I’m sorry, you were probably worried.”

Could he see that she had fallen asleep? “But why would he...?”

Donny pulled a jug of water from the refrigerator and poured himself a glass and drank all of it. “Stand me up? I don’t know. Any number of reasons, I suppose.”

“Okay. But.”

He poured himself another full glass and closed the refrigerator door. “It was this feeling I had there. While I was standing out in back, by the riverbank. Like I was being watched.”

“Watched? Why would he be watching you?”

“He wouldn’t. But what if someone else had his pager? Say they wanted to find out who had been paging him? That’s how you’d do it. Set up a meet and draw that person out into the open.”

“But you’re losing me,” said Tracy. “Now you think someone else has his pager?”

“I don’t know.” Donny paced, looking angry with himself. “The physical evidence that Sinclair did these killings — it’s overwhelming, it’s obvious, it’s damning. I know all that. But it still doesn’t fit the person. Walking those creaking boards around the mill, I remembered him more clearly than I have in a while.” Donny’s face shriveled in distaste. “He’s a — a craven little sneak. A skinny sleaze with no eyebrows, hyper-needy, loopy. I’ve met all kinds of people, some of the worst you could know. You don’t make it that many years undercover without developing a pretty accurate radar. And, yes, there is something dripping and waxy and cold about him that is very real. Sinclair is a creep in every sense of the word. But he’s not a killer. Vindictive, passive-aggressive, self-pitying, narcissistic — all those things. But without a speck of actual violence in him. Only want. He picked on kids. A total coward.”

“What about being on drugs?” said Tracy.

“I’ve seen him that way too. I can’t say it’s not possible. Anything is.” Donny threw up his hands, there being no final answer. “In some weird way, I feel responsible for him. For what’s happened.”

“That’s crazy.”

“He was my informant. I was his keeper, in a sense. His handler. Waiting for him out there sort of confirmed it for me.”

“Even so — what can you do about it?”

He looked back at his pager as though hoping it would buzz again. “Nothing, now.”

He walked around a little, Tracy standing still, watching in silence. She felt it too, the impulse to keep talking about Sinclair, to go on about it all night. Anything to avoid what they really had to say to each other.

“I’m sorry I had to leave you like that,” he said.

The only way to override her guilt at having fallen asleep was to speak to the source of her distress, to say exactly what was on her mind. “How soon until you leave here for good?”

He took time selecting his words. He was being too careful. “I don’t know exactly. I’m here at least until they find Sinclair.”

“And if that is tomorrow?”

He struggled through a pause. “Tracy, look. With the life I’ve lived up to now, it’s tough for me to think about committing to anything.”

She stopped him right there with a sad nod disguised as an angry nod. “That’s fine,” she said.

“No, wait.”

“It’s fine.” She was already going.

He didn’t follow. She climbed into her truck, opening the garage door with the remote he had given her, then cocking her arm as though to throw it out her window and smash it to the cement floor.

Of course, she did not. She could not.

Not yet. There was still hope.

She pulled out of his driveway into the dark night, bleary-eyed and oblivious to everything beyond the haze of her distress, paying no attention whatsoever to the small, unlit car parked on the shoulder of the road.

53 Hess

“So you went there alone,” said Hess.

“That’s what it said to do.”

“You send back any reply?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“I sent nothing.”

Hess switched his spearmint toothpick around his mouth, chewing on Maddox’s story. Dealing with him in his softball team POLICE jersey and ball cap was like dealing with a guy doing summer theater.

Hess said, “Tracing the page got us no fix on the location of his two-way. Pager transmits by radio wave to a tower, then up to a satellite and back down again. Why people favor pagers in places like this where there’s no cell reception.”

Maddox nodded, evidently knowing this already, and Hess worked the pick some more, sucking off flavor as he appraised him. He did not buy this prompt reporting of Sinclair’s page as an attempt to make peace.

Hess said, “You thought maybe it was me. Thought maybe I’d gotten hold of his pager number and was testing you.”

“It crossed my mind.”

Hess smiled. “UC. Don’t know who to trust, so you don’t trust anyone. That part of you gets worn down. It’s why people don’t trust you.” The desk phone rang, Hess ignoring it. “What were you going to do if he showed up?”

“Bring him in.”

“You two don’t have any previous agreements or anything?”

“No way.”

“Sinclair have a thing for you?”

“He better not.”

“You never met at this abandoned mill before?”

“Never.”

Hess thought some more. “I think we got him on the run. We got him reaching out, and it’s about time. About time he made a mistake.”

“How’d the Pail crime scene come in?”

Hess scowled, people still second-guessing him after the Ripsbaugh thing. “We got more of the same sneaker treads outside in the dirt, where the body was dragged. We recovered fibers from the kitchen and an old ottoman Sinclair brushed past on his way to the back door — the same black cotton we recovered from Frond’s.”

Maddox said, “He’s wearing the same clothes?”

“The guy’s on the run.”

“Yeah, but — it’s been close to a month.”

Still being fucking challenged every step of the way. “Guy’s mental, all right? He’s lost it. Why change clothes?” He shrugged and went on. “No latents, but who leaves fingerprints anymore? Talcum powder instead, as before, indicating gloves. Maybe even the same ones he wore at Frond’s. Found talcum in a couple of different places. The handcuffs were novelty grade, available at any toy store. Purely for show. But it’s Pail’s fingernail scrapings that had them doing high-fives in the lab. Skin cells. Nice ones. Matching Sinclair.”

“Matching Sinclair?”

“As in, irrefutable. What, am I the bearer of bad news?”

Maddox shook his head. So transparent. So Hess decided to nudge him even further.

“And then there’s the pinecone.”

Maddox looked up. “The what?”

“Pinecone. Medical examiner found it jammed up inside Pail’s keister. Humiliating the corpse, you know? That’s some kind of informant you were working there.”

Maddox said, “Christ.”

“CSS profiles him as taking his revenge upon the town that shunned him. Enjoying the game of it, the commotion he’s causing here, the choppers circling overhead. Getting his rocks off. Maybe even fucking with you in particular.” Hess pointed to a geological survey map of the town tacked up on the wall behind Maddox, the cleared areas of the Borderlands shaded red. “We’ve been over and through those woods and he’s just not there. I mean, he’s not some ultrasurvivalist anyway, right? Not some gay Rambo.” He checked to see how Bryson’s line played with Maddox; it did not register at all. “He’s getting help somewhere in town. Someone around here is helping this guy. We went back through his voluminous Internet activities again, his e-mails, instant messages. Picked up the words ‘Hell Road,’ a term we didn’t know during our first go-round. He had set a rendezvous with someone he met in a magician’s chat room. Someone local. At midnight on the night we now think he disappeared.”

Maddox said, “Did you trace it back?”

“To the Brattle Public Library, one town over. But as a protest against the Patriot Act, they have a policy of not keeping records of online activity or computer users. Bottom line, it was a hookup, a date. A booty call for gay sex in the woods. That was the premise, anyway. Now that meeting — I’m sure it wasn’t you.”

Maddox flat-eyed him. “You want to get back at me, and that’s the best you’ve got?”

“Just wondering if you might be jealous, him hooking up with someone else.” Hess started past Maddox and opened the door. “Oh, and from this point forward? He contacts you again, I want to know about it as soon as you do.”

54 Maddox

The town cemetery up on Number 8 Road was an ancient patch of sloping sod shaded here and there by great weeping willows and fronted by a low stone wall. Across the road, four steps of locally quarried granite led nowhere, high weeds and odd, blazing flowers growing out of the foundation of the old Congregational church that had burned down one hundred summers before.

He walked along the upper lanes of newer stones to the one that said MADDOX. His mother’s name, MARGARET, and the dates of her birth and death were newly engraved. He squatted and touched the lettering, so dry and sharp compared with REGINALD, the name of the father he had barely known, above it. It was not his way to pray, but Maddox spoke to her in his head just as he did sometimes when sitting alone in her empty house.

I’m sorry.

Every town family was buried around him. He went and found PINTOPOLUMANOS, Pinty’s last name engraved in a narrow font in order to fit across the stone. Mrs. Pinty’s name and dates were filled in, as was Pinty’s name, Stavros, below hers, awaiting an end date. Next to Gregory’s name and dates was a carved icon of the American flag.

Pail’s grave, a perfect dirt rectangle, awaited its stone marker. Two fat bales of sod stood near. The can of Bud remained, lying on its side, the open top being visited by flies.

Maddox located the Sinclair stone marker and stood before the grave. No headstone, just a slab set into the grass. Jordan was the father’s name. The family had arrived in Black Falls without a mother, already the jagged piece of a whole no one had ever seen. Jordy Sinclair had briefly been a cop — they eased out bad apples back then — before going full-time into contracting and developing, putting in cul-de-sacs around town in the early 1980s before the mill went under. After only a few winters, his houses began falling apart: shifting on their foundations, joists warping and sagging, walls cracking under overweight roofs. Shoddy craftsmanship and substandard materials. At the time of his death — he was the victim of a one-car, midday drunk driving accident — he had been at the wrong end of several lawsuits.

Maddox turned to see the orange highway department pickup truck pull in. Ripsbaugh rolled along the ring road, getting out, pulling his shovel from the truck bed and carrying it in that familiar way of his. “Don,” he said, coming toward him down the lane.

“Kane,” said Maddox, wondering why the man never tied his bootlaces.

Ripsbaugh stopped, set his shovel blade down in the grass. “Got to finish sodding Pail’s grave. Final touches.”

“I saw.”

“Is it true, what they say? About the coyote?”

“Sure is.”

“Suits him. And a meth lab? Scourge of rural America, according to the TV.”

“I guess we got lucky,” Maddox said.

Ripsbaugh squinted under the sun. “I guess you did. Looks like you’re the last cop standing.” Ripsbaugh regarded the Sinclair marker, the grave at their feet. He stared a moment as though saying a little prayer, then launched a gob of saliva at the ground. “All this grass here should be black.”

Maddox forgot sometimes that Ripsbaugh was Sinclair’s brother-in-law. “Why did the father leave Dill all his property?”

“He didn’t leave either of them anything. The mill houses you’re talking about, he had them all in Dill’s name for legal reasons. As a tax dodge, and so they couldn’t be attached to any lawsuits. Dill didn’t even know he owned them until after the death.”

“So why didn’t Val ask for some of that?”

“Didn’t want anything to do with it.” Maddox could see that Ripsbaugh was proud of this. “She always says the best thing her father ever did for her was die in that car crash.”

Maddox nodded, ready to drop it, head on home.

“See, the problem with Val,” Ripsbaugh continued, thinking it through, “the problem with Val is that she’s smart. So smart, and highly intelligent people suffer more than others. When she’s right in her mind, she can do anything. But she just can’t maintain it.” Ripsbaugh nudged at the grave sod with the tip of his spade, cutting little divots. “And sometimes she puts that blame on me. As the source of her problems. Sometimes I think it’s why she married me in the first place, to give her this excuse. A stone for her chain. She asked me to marry her, did you know that? I always figured I’d end up, you know, adopting a wife from Russia or Cambodia or someplace. Just for a companion. I never knew I could get so lucky. But someone offers you a bargain like that, you don’t think twice. You take it.”

“Sure,” said Maddox.

“So why don’t we have children, right?”

“No,” Maddox said. “I wasn’t—”

“She doesn’t like it. The act of sex. Physically, she gets sick.”

Maddox wasn’t going to say another word. Until confusion overtook discomfort. “But so, how—?”

“Frond?” he said, the spade making little snitch-snitch sounds in the soil. He spoke with the forbearance of a man taking the pain of another person’s ailment onto himself. “It’s acting out. That’s her pattern. She does me wrong, then lets me find out — then hates herself all over again. She punishes me in order to torture herself.”

“A pattern,” Maddox said, thinking, There were others?

“But when she’s clear, once she’s healthy again — she thanks me, can you understand that? She’s grateful. For me standing by her. For what I put up with. Even calls me her hero.” He looked off at the nearest weeping willow. “You ever been called a hero, Don?”

Maddox said, “No.”

“As a life, it ain’t always easy. But what we have together, it’s enough for me. Oh, it’s plenty.” Ripsbaugh nodded. “You’re looking at me like—”

“No, no. No.”

“You never been married. There’s more to it than sex. Lots more. You want to know what she does for me? So dirty I get sometimes, coming home at the end of a day? She runs me a bath. She kneels by the tub, and she bathes me. You ever been bathed, Don? Anyone ever run a warm washcloth over your shoulders? Since you were a kid, ever been shampooed? Her fingers in my scalp — I’d take that touch over any other kind, any day of the week.”

Maddox nodded, trying not to tip his embarrassment. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me. Or to anyone.”

“Sure I do. Thing is, she’s my wife. You sign on, you sign on for life.”

Maddox admired that, even admired Ripsbaugh, at the same time he pitied him. His openness, though a bit unnerving, stirred something in Maddox — beyond his desire simply to change the topic. “I want to run something by you, Kane. Have you tell me if I’m crazy or not. You follow the forensics shows and that sort of thing, right?”

“A bit,” he said, defensive at first, as it was this interest that had helped get him into trouble. “This about Dill?”

“The blood evidence is the main thing. I mean, they do have hairs. But hairs can be moved around. And they have sneaker tread impressions, but shoes can get around also, it seems to me. And if you have the guy’s shoes — well then, right there you have fibers from his residence. So it comes down to the blood, essentially.”

“Okay.” Ripsbaugh was starting to get it. “But if it’s not Dill—”

“Just talking here. Thinking it through. Tell me about blood. What could someone do with it?”

“Well,” said Ripsbaugh, “it congeals fast — that much I know. It clots, making it tricky to handle. If you don’t have a live donor — you can store it cold, I guess. Maybe forty-two days, something like that.”

“Can’t you freeze it?”

“Sure. It freezes.”

“Because — and then you wouldn’t even need liquid blood. If all you wanted was for it to be discovered in a sink trap, you set it there frozen. An ice cube of blood. Then you torch the house, knowing that the heat traveling along the pipes will melt it. All you need to show up there is a trace.”

“Well, I suppose. But hold on. Who’s doing this?”

“My point is only that the blood, even skin cells, could have gotten to these crime scenes some other way than directly from Sinclair being present. Stressing ‘could.’”

“I guess,” said Ripsbaugh. “But then, where is Dill?”

“Say he’s compromised in some way. I don’t know. Someone holding him hostage or something.”

“Okay. But why?”

“I don’t know. You got me there.”

“No fingerprints?”

“No. Talcum powder, though. As from the inside of latex gloves.”

“Okay. But there would only be powder if he took off his gloves.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Talcum powder used for anything else?”

Maddox shook his head. Because he didn’t know, and because now he was starting to reconsider the whole thing. Verbalizing his speculations had made him sound half desperate. What was he clinging to? Why couldn’t it be Dill Sinclair? And why the hell did he care? “Sounds crazy, right?”

“It’s a theory, I guess.”

“Anyway,” Maddox said. Enough of this graveyard conversation. “That’s all someone else’s problem right now.”

Ripsbaugh squinted at him in the sun. “I don’t suppose you’re staying on here.”

Maddox thought of Tracy walking out on him the night before. He shook his head.

“How soon?”

“Soon,” said Maddox.

“And after you go, then what?”

The thought occurred to Maddox as he stood there. “You know what, Kane? You should join up.”

Ripsbaugh scowled. “Too old.”

“You kidding? They’d bend the rules. They can’t afford to be choosy.”

“Val wouldn’t like it. Her father having been a cop and all.”

“You have the interest in police work. And what does this force need now but an honest cop who knows the town and cares about its future? The way Pinty was back in his day. A steward of Black Falls.” Maddox stepped back, convinced, before starting away. “It’s a good fit. At least think about it.”

“Hey,” said Ripsbaugh after him. “If I guessed DEA, would I be wrong?”

Maddox smiled but did not look back. “Think about taking the job.”

55 Maddox

He parked in his driveway, but instead of going into his house, found himself walking down the street. It had been a July of constant humidity, like living inside a cloud. Tomorrow the weather reports promised an afternoon downpour and electrical storm to jolt the atmosphere and rearrange air quality, the way an electroshock treatment alters chemistry in the brain.

This road he had grown up on, Silver Leaf Lane, rated little traffic, its houses set well apart, most of them tired 1970s-style split-levels and wood-sided ranches with stone chimneys and one-car garages. The last house before a stretch of undeveloped land emptying onto the cross street had been the Sinclairs’. It sat dark and dead on a plot of dry gray turf, a small Colonial with an unattached two-car garage. The mortgaging bank had seized the property after Jordy’s death but failed to resell it: because of the Sinclairs’ notorious name, because of plummeting home values in town after the mill closing, and because Jordy Sinclair had built it himself, the house having serious structural flaws.

Maddox started up the cracked, weed-sprouting driveway, drawn by his curiosity about Dill Sinclair, and curiosity about the past in general, about this street he had lived on, the world at that time. All the secrets he never knew.

The first-floor windows remained boarded up, the brick stairs crumbling, the gutters long ago raided for aluminum. The garage at the head of the driveway was swaybacked like a falling barn, a faded real estate sign lying among its dead brown hedges.

The backyard was narrow, its grass long and weedy and tired of growing. Maddox remembered the tree house where his mother had found Dill smoking her stolen cigarettes, and located it some ten yards back in the trees: open-faced with a slanted roof of surplus lumber and ladder steps, nail heads crusted with sap.

He returned to the yard, intending to complete a full loop of the house and be done with it. But a concentration of buzzing flies drew him to the rear corner, where a dead toad lay rotting in the basement window well. Maddox backed away from the flies, then noticed some zipping back and forth between there and the bottom plank of the nearest boarded window.

The plank did not sit flush with the rest. When Maddox touched it, it moved.

He tugged and the entire board pulled away in his hand.

The one above it came away just as easily, both planks simply propped up there on the sill. He could see where the pointed ends of the carpenter nails were twisted, the wood, at some point, having been pried away.

The revealed window was without glass, the frame itself ripped out. Someone had broken the seal on this place. Someone had been inside.

He waved off the flies and peered in. Dark, because of the boarded windows, but after a moment he could make out the vague contours of an empty room, with flattened moving cartons on the floor and an empty cardboard roll of packing tape.

Maddox ducked back out again, hassled by the flies. He looked around the side of the house, wondering if he should do this. Then he hoisted himself up over the sill.

Headfirst was the only way in. His hands found the floor, dusty but clear of broken glass. He got his legs through, the soles of his Timberlands thudding hollow in the gloomy room. Two rooms, actually, open to each other, running the length of the house. Dust floated up as he moved, grit stirred by his presence like a ghostly thing trying to resurrect itself out of ashes.

A short passageway took him past a bathroom alcove into the kitchen, empty except for an old refrigerator, stove, and pulled-open trash compactor, mouse droppings peppering the countertop.

Continuing clockwise, he moved through another doorway into a small dining room with a fireplace of blackened brick. Cobwebs formed filament shelves in the corners, fist and heel holes cratering the walls.

He arrived at the bottom of a staircase, almost back where he had begun. The balusters along the bottom were all karate-kicked in half, the wooden handrail ripped out of the wall. He started loudly up the steps, proclaiming his presence.

The second floor was four more empty rooms. Some small animal had hoarded niblets of what looked like Indian corn; the nylon webbing of an old umbrella left behind in one of the open closets had been shredded and chewed. The plaster walls were cracked under the weight of the roof.

Back downstairs, Maddox retraced his steps to the short passageway between the kitchen and the first room. A door stood ajar opposite the bath, its unpainted edge showing the grain of the original wood inside. The hinges gave with a rusty whine, Maddox smelling basement. It was dark down there, a low-ceilinged stairway hooking ninety degrees at the halfway point. The cellar from every horror movie ever made.

He listened. He waited.

“Police!” he barked. Worth a try. “Who’s down there?”

He heard nothing except the open-channel static of anxiety in his head. He wished he had brought his flashlight. He tried the light switch inside the door, as though it might magically work for him. It did not. But like a gamer needing to sweep every corner of every virtual room before moving on to the next level, he pushed ahead down the dark plank steps.

“I’m coming down,” he announced.

From the bottom step, he scoped out the area on either side, spotting a pair of glinting eyes that turned out to be two crushed beer cans. The window wells admitted just enough sunlight to see by. He moved along the edge of the underside of the stairs, something big and bulky appearing behind the base of the chimney like an animal rising up: a rusty oil tank on four legs.

His boot toe nudged another can, which he kicked away as if it were a rat. The acoustics were unsettling, and there was a trapped smell here, less an odor than a vapor. Maddox’s hand found the wood grip of his revolver. He hesitated leaving the perceived safety of the underside of the stairs, but did so, turning, the side wall of the basement revealed.

Its paneling was marked with spray paint. The boldest of the graffiti read: Black Falls is Helllll!

One of the images from Sinclair’s camera’s memory stick. Suddenly, Maddox felt him here. Felt Sinclair’s presence. In this basement where he had practiced his magic routines obsessively. Where Val had once found him playing with a hangman’s noose. Sinclair had returned here recently, at least once, standing right where Maddox stood now, camera in hand. Going over old ground like a dog on a short tether, looking for reasons or explanations. Looking for answers. Just as Maddox was doing now. What was it Val had said?

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

Would he kill to get it back?

Maddox heard a creak. A gritty scrape. A thumping, muffled; something moving overhead.

Footsteps on the floor above him. Someone else was inside the house.

Maddox’s revolver cleared his holster. He moved silently to the bottom of the stairs. He started up slowly, the handgun thrust before him like a flashlight, turning at the bend, making for the brighter dimness of the open door at the top.

He caught a hint of shadow. Someone in the kitchen. He crept ahead, wincing at the little wooden groans beneath his boots.

The house was silent up top as he crossed the threshold into the hall. The piece of the kitchen he could see was clear. With his revolver closer to his chest now, he rounded the corner, sensing movement in the dining room and whipping toward it hard.

He saw the wide-brimmed campaign cover first, then the silver whistle and badge. He pulled off his aim, and the trooper in front of him howled and did the same with his sidearm, then spun off and ripped a string of curses.

“Okay, okay,” Maddox said, settling himself down, his heart kicking at his chest.

“What the fuck are you doing here!” howled the red-faced trooper, angry and scared at how close he’d come.

“Easy.” Maddox was conciliatory. “Easy. Hold up.”

The trooper stabbed his still-drawn Sig Sauer P226 toward the floor. “Fuck you, ‘hold up,’ you fucking dickhead! Almost got your ass killed! The fuck are you doing in here?”

“The fuck am I doing?”

“I’m responding to a call, motherfucker. Like a real fucking law officer. Joke-ass local yokel. Get out of my face.”

The trooper thrust his sidearm back into his duty belt holster and strode out of the room.

As Maddox climbed back out through the missing window, the high branches of the backyard trees began to shudder. Leaves twisted and blew down as a concussive whupping rose up overhead. The roaring flutter of a Massachusetts State Police Air Wing helicopter.

The trooper had his hat off now, a uniform violation for a road trooper in the MSP. He was snarling into his shoulder radio. “Nothing showing... some local dink playing cop, snooping around... false alarm.”

A neighbor must have seen a man — Maddox — walking toward the abandoned Sinclair house, the entire town being in this hysterical state of alert.

“What are you looking at?” demanded the bareheaded trooper, turning on Maddox again, unable to let this go. “The fuck are you looking at?”

Maddox thought of the K-9 dogs all fired up after a search, seeking to sink their teeth into something, anything. He could ding this road guy, drop a letter in his performance file for abusive language as well as the removed hat, dock him some vacation time. But instead he just stood there and absorbed the trooper’s contempt for a small-town cop.

The helicopter moved on and Maddox returned to his driveway, finding a tan Corolla parked behind his patrol car.

Val stepped out of the driver’s side. She looked relieved, almost elated, as he approached. “Where were you?” she said. “I tried the doorbell, I knocked.”

He was startled. “Is everything okay?”

“Okay?” She held her arms away from her sides as though modeling the new Val. “Everything’s great. Can’t you tell?”

She wore a loose, grape red top over denim jeans. Her black hair was washed and brushed out, styled similarly to the way she used to wear it in high school, a little bit of makeup setting off her winged eyes.

“The smell,” she said. She presented her hands and arms for examination. “The septic stink. It’s already going away.”

“Oh,” Maddox said. “That’s — good.”

“So you’re leaving now?”

“This moment? No. Don’t look so happy about it.”

“But I am. I’m happy to give you the chance to redeem yourself.”

“Okay.” This sudden ebullience looked strange on her. Strident, like a flower in overbloom, its pedals curling back too far. “Redeem myself how?”

“I’ve been packing some things already. Quietly getting ready.”

“Packing for what?”

“To tag along with you. If you’ll have me, that is.”

She said the last part like she was ribbing him. Maddox fumbled for the right facial expression, never mind words. She saw this and jumped in.

“Just as friends, of course. I mean, at first. We wouldn’t have to — I’m not looking for anything right away. Just a friend, a helping hand. From there? You never know, right?”

“Val—”

“Everything’s going to change. Everything. You wait and see. No more drinking during the day. No more pining away out on the back porch. No more dwelling. I’ll join a gym. I’m going to be so healthy. You can help me.”

Maddox could only look mystified. After a few moments her smile started to wilt.

“You must know,” she said, “this is no snap decision on my part. I’ve thought it all through. Believe me.”

He nodded, trying to find a way into the conversation.

She said, “Think about it. Think for a moment. It would be like — like taking a potion. Like all these lost years since high school, they never happened. Like throwing luggage off a plane, watching it shrink and disappear. We’ll be free.”

“That would be wonderful, Val. For anybody. In theory.”

“Okay.” Her smile tightened like a press squeezing the last bit of sweetness out of an orange half. “What?”

“To start with? You have a husband.”

She stared at him as though this was the most hurtful thing he could have said. “I know I have a husband,” she said. “I have fifteen years of bad decisions behind me. Of wasted life. This I know, Donny. That’s what this is all about.”

“Don’t you think you should talk to him about it?”

Now she squinted, as though trying, really trying, but ultimately failing to see the logic. “Do you think someone who is part of the problem would accept such a radical solution?”

“Because, Val, if this is truly what you want — leaving town, starting over — you don’t need me. You can go.”

“Bullshit. I do need you. It has to be you. Can’t you see that?”

The inflated smile was gone now, supplanted by something like panic and dying pride. He didn’t want to be too sharp with her, afraid she might go off flying around his driveway like a stuck balloon. “No, I can’t.”

“Can you ignore the fact that you owe me?”

“Owe you?” It took him only a second. “The scholarship.”

“Yes, the scholarship. Yes, that is what I’m still talking about. Poor me, right? Still clinging to this — right? Do you know what it was like? To have this whole entire town against me, for who my father was, and my freak brother? No one wanted to waste that scholarship on me. They wanted to give it to their favorite son. Somebody who’d make something of himself, who’d amount to something. Not an art student from a bad family. What’s she going to bring back to Black Falls?”

“Val.”

“But who wound up wasting it? Who was the one who squandered that opportunity — for the town, and yes, for himself? Only to bounce back here fifteen years later with nothing to show for it? That chance you burned, you let slip through your fingers? That was my life, Donny. That was mine. Do you deny that you could never have won that scholarship without Chief Pinty behind you? Without his hand on your shoulder? Can you deny that now?”

“It was one-tenth of a percentage point, Val.”

“You don’t understand. You should want this. You should want the chance to make this right. As a man. This is why you came back here in the first place — don’t you know that? This is why you came here. Righting a wrong is the closest thing we have to going back in time.”

Maddox thought of Ripsbaugh, what he had said about her needing a stone for her chain. “I’m sorry, Val. I am. But I don’t think I’m responsible for whatever—”

“Is this about the farm girl?”

“What did you say?”

“You heard me.” Her face was twisted now, as though a mask had been snatched away but the adhesive still stung. “I came by here last night, or tried to. Saw a truck leave your garage. Saw her behind the wheel. You don’t think she’s a little young?”

“Have you been watching me?”

“Are you going away with her? Going to have babies?”

“Val.” The anger in her face chilled him. “Jesus.”

She shoved hair off her face so that he would have an unfettered view of her contempt. “You owe me, Donny Maddox. You owe me a chance.”

Maddox felt heat coming up his neck. How quickly compassion can turn to enmity when someone forces her mania on you. When someone assigns you responsibility for her own frustrations. This came to him in his driveway like a lesson.

Val said, “You could live with yourself? Leaving me here? The same way you left your mother?”

He nodded, not in answer to her question, but in acknowledgment of her audacity in throwing down the kicker: the Queen of Spades with his mother’s face on it. “That’s the way to hurt me, all right.”

“Hurt you? Hurt you? How can you be hurt? You’re skating through life. Hands behind your back, gliding along.”

“Go home, Val.”

“And talk to my husband, right? Discuss? You think Kane knows me?”

“I’m sure no one knows you.”

“That’s exactly right.”

She looked at him with the pity of a madwoman, throwing open her car door and driving away.