The Killing Moon: A Novel

56 Maddox

Next morning, while waiting for his toast to come up, Maddox heard a thump. A goodly weighted noise, followed by a lesser bump, coming from the rear of his house. An unnatural thump.

The mind takes unexpecteds such as these and tries to shape them into something understandable, tries to assign them meaning.

The mental image Maddox assigned to this noise was that of Dillon Sinclair stepping onto his back deck.

So powerful was the force of this image — the black wig and clothes, the eyebrowless eyes — that Maddox moved to his closet, getting down his holster from the top shelf. He undid the trigger lock in what seemed to take an inordinate amount of time, then moved to the sliding glass door off the serving area.

He stepped out into the wet heat, his revolver at his side. No one on the deck, the backyard empty. He scanned the trees around the yard and listened for movement. Then he saw the twisted black lump on the deck.

Closer, he made out the velvet fringe of wings. A dead crow, eyes and beak still open, its neck broken.

Maddox looked at the near trees, his mind still jumping with implications — Who threw a dead bird onto my deck? — until he realized that the thump, so solid and quick, had been this bird striking the window. The bump that followed was its dead body falling to the wood.

You want omens? he thought. We got omens. A town full of them. Deer running antler-first into your car. Crows flying full speed at your house. Nature dispatching its assassins.

He carried the revolver back inside and returned with a shovel from the garage, scooping up the dead crow and walking it to the deepest part of the yard, pitching it into the woods near the spot from where Sinclair had snapped the photograph of his house. Maddox stood there a few moments, the weight of the shovel in his hands, looking into the trees. He realized that the crow indeed had flown out of the woods to tell him something. Something important.

It was time to let Sinclair go. To give up needing to believe in his innocence. Maddox’s fear of the thump reminded him that Dill was as capable of murder as any man. Whatever his father had put him through, whatever had happened to him in that house at the other end of the street: it happened to Sinclair, not to Maddox. Dill had made his own choices since then. The rest was up to Hess.

Maddox went back inside. He picked up the phone and called Tracy. “Let’s talk,” he said, inviting her for dinner. He could sense, in the way she so casually affected to resist him, the hurt infecting her like a cold. But she did agree to come over that evening, then hung up without saying another word.

Outside, the air was stifling, the humidity at its breaking point, and yet Maddox felt good suddenly. He felt a change in the wind.

On his way to Pinty’s house, he came upon Ripsbaugh patching a pothole and pulled over. Branches waved overhead, leaves flippering behind the sweat-drenched man. “About as bad as it gets, huh?” said Maddox through his rolled-down passenger window.

Ripsbaugh bent over to see inside, shovel in hand. “You can taste the lightning coming.”

“Hey, about yesterday at the cemetery. My grand theories? Just forget about all that.”

“Yeah? How so?”

“It is what it is. I’m not sure why I had to try and make more of it.”

Ripsbaugh looked almost suspicious. Maddox worried that he had awakened a conspiracy theory. “Just forget it altogether.”

“I have.”

Maddox thought about saying something to Ripsbaugh about Val’s visit yesterday. But enough. Val had made her choices too, whether she could admit it or not. Maddox drove away, leaving Ripsbaugh leaning on the long handle of his shovel under the darkening sky.

Inside Pinty’s house, a stillness hung like the moisture. On a desk inside the upstairs bedroom that used to be Pinty’s home office, an oval-framed photograph showed a younger, bare-armed Pinty standing with his hand on the shoulder of his towheaded, ten-year-old son, Gregory.

Maddox sat down in Pinty’s chair, holding the photograph. Every community, it seemed to him, lost its “innocence” on a fairly regular basis, usually once per generation. Each new age required its own poignant milestone, its pedigreed moment of loss, marking the passage of child into adult. A dividing line between the way things used to be and the way things are now. Maddox’s father’s murder thirty years before at the hands of Jack Metters had been such an event. But Black Falls never recaptured its putative innocence. What followed instead was one loss after another, a decline growing more precipitous with each successive year. All tracing back to that one fatal moment in time.

Maybe the town’s regenerative powers were gone for good. Maddox thought of Metters’s gun blasting its way through his peacoat pocket, the rounds cutting hot into his father’s chest, thudding into Pinty’s hips and waist — and their trajectory continuing through the years, right into today.

57 Tracy

Rosalie was jittery, what with the wind blowing through the barn and the early darkness and thunder heralding the coming storm. Tracy had come out to the old cowshed to sit with her, to console the pregnant llama with her presence as they prepared to weather the cloudburst together. She leaned over the stable door to touch noses with Rosalie, as the females liked to do, Tracy smelling the sweet hay and the dung of Rosalie’s stall and the sweaty essence of her coat, reaching up gently to stroke her long, proud neck.

What did Donny want to meet for? What could they possibly have to talk about? Hey, it was great, it was fun, let’s keep in touch?

Part of her personal theory of reverse therapy — where she tore herself down instead of building herself up, the idea being to get so low that there could only be betterment ahead — involved making short, punchy “No More” lists:

No more lazy nights together.

No more rum and Diet Cokes (negative taste association).

No more curling up with him on the sofa.

No more deep, half-remembered conversations while watching bad TV.

No more allowing herself to get silly in front of him, or anyone — ever.

No more falling asleep in Donny’s bed.

No more of his lips on her back and shoulders.

No more Donny.

The warm body she had once clung to like a life raft: he had been her dream of a man. No background. No past history, no baggage. No family to impress or avoid. He came perfectly shaped, and perfectly empty, to be filled up any way she liked.

Now he had a past. Now he had a history and regrets and shortcomings. Now he was real.

This was the only way it could end. His departure had been predestined, like a merman needing to return to the sea.

But really, she shouldn’t be sullen. She had been warned, hadn’t she? And repeatedly — every goddamn step of the way — something he would no doubt remind her of yet again tonight. It was temporary, it was short-term, it was going to end. Her bad for falling in love. Wish him well, and hope he remembers her fondly as he goes off on his merry journey back into the world.

She was sick of being the gracious loser. Sick of being kept back in life and expected to accept it as her lot. The farm and her mother and this land. Who else was she ever going to meet in Black Falls? Who else was going to blow into town except those already banished from the world? Who else but lepers visited this colony?

If only she were hard enough to stand him up tonight. To be as cruelly dispassionate. But she didn’t even bother with retributive fantasies because, pathetic little hopeful bird that she was, she would go, she would listen, she would hope, she would let him feel better about himself, and then she would hug him good-bye as he ground his heel into her chest.

Rosalie nodded like she understood. Tracy admired the llamas; their fierce protective instincts when guarding herds of sheep, goats, cows, or horses; their tireless work ethic; the aggression they displayed when sensing a threat. They were popular guard animals because they were fearless about hurtling their three-hundred-pound bodies full speed at any predator, be it dog or coyote or wolf or even small bear, wailing a high-pitched alarm. What they lacked in grace and refinement, they more than made up for in pride and attitude and strength. Even a yearlong pregnancy never got Rosalie down. She didn’t need a male companion to make her feel whole, or special, or loved.

Though she had needed one to get pregnant.

Lightning flashed on the barnyard dirt outside, Rosalie emitting a throaty groan. Tracy worried that the storm might trigger her labor. No Dr. Bolt to check her over now. Tracy was going to have to see Rosalie through this one all by her lonesome.

Rosalie got to her feet, a warble rolling in her long throat. She shuffled back and forth in the stall, jutting her head over the door. Her hooves scraped the hay-strewn flooring, Rosalie growing agitated. The same way she had been a few nights before, when the coyotes ran out of the forest and the hills, loping through town.

Tracy reached out to pat her head but Rosalie bucked away, stomping the planks. “What is it, girl?” said Tracy, looking out the open door.

Another high, cloud-smothered ripple of lightning created a shadow that appeared to retreat from the wood ramp leading outside.

Rosalie warbled and hissed.

“Mom?” Tracy said. She was not in the habit of calling out to her deaf mother, but thunder and lightning will do that to you. She walked to the doorway where the old ramp was hinged and peered around the corner. Another pulse of suffused cloud lightning moved shadows under the trees, but there was no one in sight.

She saw the sink light on in the kitchen, the stained-glass sun she had made in fourth grade hanging from a suction cup inside the window. Tracy hopped down to the dirt, needing to see if her mother was indeed inside.

She was. Blond hair marbled with streaks of white she refused to dye. Rinsing vegetables in the sink. Tracy watched her mother catch sight of herself in the mirror the interior light made of the window. Staring, just a moment, her wet hand coming up to touch her softly wrinkled neck. Then returning to her vegetables, as though nothing had happened.

Those were the moments Tracy would find most difficult to endure. The reveries that led straight to regret.

Rosalie raised another cry, lightning rippling again, but brighter this time, putting Tracy’s shadow down on the dirt — and another shadow, this one rising behind her. She turned just in time to see the figure emerge from beneath the ramp, long dark hair whipping in the wind as it raised some sort of weapon.

Tracy never felt the blow. She tasted dirt, a pair of hands pulling at her back as she attempted to crawl toward her mother. Then something fell on the back of Tracy’s neck, and she went out.

58 Pinty

Pinty sat up against the many hospital bed pillows. His toes under the sheet at the end of his dead legs seemed a mile away.

Another thunderboomer outside his window, rain falling fast and hard. He watched with fascination, part of the new regard he had for all things since waking up. The perfect yellow packets of sugar that came on his meal tray. The colored pushpins in the wall. The elegant sweep of the clock’s second hand. The whispering of the nurses’ shoes. Everything had a place and a function and a beautiful simplicity.

It was raining in Rainfield.

Donny sat in the padded chair pulled beside the bed. He looked all right. He had been passing himself off as Pinty’s son in order to gain family visiting privileges, a ruse Pinty was only too happy to support. Beautiful in its simplicity. Everything with a place and a function.

“Thank you for this,” Pinty said, his walking stick lying across his lap.

He wanted to touch the smooth silver grip with his right hand. Doing so was like trying his luck at a carnival game of chance, that one where a number of identical strings are hooked, threaded, and tangled around a spoked grid in such a way that you cannot determine by sight which one to pull in order to raise the door that releases the prize. You have to guess, and then proceed by a process of elimination. Sometimes Pinty got it on the second or third string. Sometimes the strings didn’t work at all.

When his hand moved, it came up quaking, fingers curled. “Twelve weeks of rehab,” he said. “Just to hold a pencil steady.”

Maddox said, “You’ll do it in eight,” and Pinty smiled at his faith. The smile came easily, without thought. First string.

Speaking was getting easier too. Like recovering from frostbite, his jaw thawing out a little more every day. It was raining in Rainfield. “What was that you were asking me about?”

“The scholarship,” said Donny. “I won it fair and square, right?”

“By one-tenth of one percent, as I recall. Skin of your teeth.” An odd question he was asking. “Why are you wondering about that now?”

“But it was fair. I mean, I won it.”

“Sure you did.”

“You didn’t pull any favors. Didn’t shake anybody’s hand too hard.”

“No, no, no.” Pinty didn’t know what he was after here. “I may have gone around to a few of your teachers, sure, just letting them know what you had riding on your midterms, how hard you were studying. That a full scholarship for the son of a police officer killed in the line of duty was at stake. Future of the town, and all that.”

Donny blinked, getting quiet, looking at his hands on the blue armrests.

Form. Function. Simplicity. A chair, a bed, a window. Old man, younger man. Weak and strong.

Pinty went on. “I never begrudged you that, by the way. I always held out the hope, maybe even the knowledge, that you’d find a way to make good on your pledge. And now look. Years overdue, but you’ve given Black Falls a new start. Given it a fighting chance. That scholarship turned out to be worth every penny we raised.”

Donny was squinting into his lap now, like he was working over some puzzle Pinty could not see. “Righting a wrong is the closest thing we have to going back in time.”

Pinty agreed. “That’s as good a way to put it as any.”

Donny looked up as though he’d been poked. He shifted in the big chair and slipped a device out of his back pocket, that pager he carried around with him everywhere. Pinty heard it buzzing.

Donny read the display and looked charged. He got to his feet.

“What?” said Pinty.

“Sinclair,” Donny said, reaching for the telephone on the bedside tray. “Wants me to meet him on Hell Road.”

59 Hess

The rain continued in earnest after the thunder and lightning had moved off, drumming on the roof of the Hummer. The windows stayed cracked because they couldn’t run the defrost, because they couldn’t run the engine, because they were hiding in a turnout a thousand yards from the Borderlands trailhead. The Special Tactics and Operations team leader sat beside Hess in the wide backseat, his head tipped back, eyes closed but nowhere near sleep. Hess kept swiping water off his own face from the drops smacking the top edge of his window and spitting into his eyes.

The wire in Hess’s ear sizzled. “He’s walking out.”

The STOP team leader lowered his chin and opened his eyes. “What do you mean? Just walking out? Alone?”

“That’s a roger. What do we do, advise?”

The leader looked at Hess. Hess frowned, shook his head.

“Bring it in,” said the STOP leader. He reached forward and patted his driver’s shoulder, the Hummer’s engine roaring to life.

They were the first ones back to the trailhead, pulling in next to Maddox’s parked patrol car. Hess got out in the rain, watching a man in a poncho exit the fire road entrance, walking determinedly toward him through the puddles. Maddox stopped in front of Hess, shrugging back his glistening hood.

Hess said, “What gives you the authority to pull the plug on this thing yourself?”

“I stood in there for an hour and a half,” said Maddox. “He’s not coming. Not going to let himself be trapped like that.”

Light beams came bobbing out of the trees as the mud-soaked STOP team emerged from the fire road behind Maddox, faces camo-painted, assault rifles outlined beneath their vented ponchos.

“He’s playing with us,” said Hess. “Seeing how high we’ll jump.”

The STOP leader came over, his driver holding a black umbrella. “Air Wing’s still on standby, on the ground,” he reported. “Rainfall messes with heat imaging anyway.”

“He was never here,” declared Maddox, stripping off the assault vest beneath his poncho.

Hess said, “It’s time we sent him a return message. Give me an hour to huddle, think about what to say.”

“Here,” Maddox said, handing over the pager. “I’m done. Knock yourself out.”

Hess watched Maddox climb into his car and pull out. Maddox’s headlights briefly illuminated Bryson crossing the lot, looking ridiculous in galoshes and a rain hat knotted under his chin, as though his mother had dressed him.

“Another missing-person report,” Bryson said. “A young woman this time.”

The sixth such alert of the day. The first five had each ended happily, products of miscommunication and town hysteria. But the MSP would respond as they always did, quickly and conscientiously.

Hess started toward Bryson’s car through the thumping rain. “Who made the call?”

“No call,” said Bryson. “Woman came straight to the station.” He tapped his ear. “She’s deaf.”

60 Maddox

Maddox pulled into his driveway, hitting the button on the visor-clipped remote control and watching the door go up on Tracy’s Ford truck parked inside.

He had completely forgotten about inviting her over. He tipped his head back against the headrest, cursing himself, then jumped out and ran through the rain into the garage. His peace offering had turned into an insult. Now he had to salvage this somehow. He shook out his soaked legs but didn’t even take time to remove his wet boots, walking through the door into the first-floor hallway.

“Tracy?”

The house was dark. He hit a light switch and continued down the hall toward the closet.

“Tracy?” he called out, louder. “Trace?”

Must be upstairs. He slid his holster off his belt and was reaching to store it up on the top shelf when something made him stop. The silence in the house, certainly. Also, a smell now, one he had been in too much of a rush to notice before. An odor deeper than the coppery smell of the rain. Earthy, like that of the llama farm, but less pleasant, more stinging.

Maddox stopped calling her name. He went quiet, sliding his revolver out of the holster and moving to the intersecting end of the hallway. He looked to the locked front door, rain spilling off the gutter outside.

He went to the bottom of the stairs and stood there looking up.

He did not turn on the light.

He started up. At the top landing, he just listened and let his eyes adjust.

He heard breathing.

Someone was standing at the far end of the hallway. Not hiding there. Just standing. Waiting.

It wasn’t Tracy. Maddox held his gun ahead of him, trying to see.

The figure moved, shifted its weight. Maddox made out long hair. The wig.

“Dill?” Maddox said.

He lowered his gun and took an angry step forward.

Dill started toward him. With the darkness throwing off Maddox’s depth perception, he did not until too late see how fast Dill was coming. He was further distracted by the shovel that Dill held in his hands.

As Dill closed the distance between them, Maddox got his gun up and fired two quick shots. Both rounds rang off the back of the shovel, ricocheting into the ceiling and the wall.

Dill’s body crashed into him, the shovel headfirst batting back the revolver, then swinging up to crack him near the temple.

Maddox fell hard. A warm feeling spread inside him from his head and neck through his back, relaxing him against his will. The house tipped as Dill stood over him, wild hair swaying. Then everything closed up and went dark.

In the dream that wasn’t a dream, Maddox stood in the trees beyond his backyard, the spot from where Sinclair had snapped the photograph. He saw his house exactly as in the picture, except for the presence of his mother, sitting alone on the back deck in her housecoat. Maddox yelled to her but she could not hear him. Then Tracy appeared in a second-floor window, banging on the glass with both arms, screaming, but Maddox heard nothing. A twig cracked and he turned and saw Sinclair next to him, drawn and dopesick, wearing his wig and a Black Falls patrolman’s outfit, the camera glowing around his neck like an amulet.

Maddox awoke moaning. He could not hold his throbbing head straight, a pulsing pressure on his skull. He was dizzy and on the edge of nausea.

He could not move. He thought he was still in the dream.

His mother’s kitchen was set before him like a still life, a picture in a frame he could step into. He expected her to walk in, smile, say hello.

He was shivering. Wet clothes.

Someone moved in the room behind him. Someone not his mother.

He was tied to one of the kitchen chairs with blue nylon line from the garage. His hands were numb behind him, his ankles knotted tight to each front leg of the chair. He could turn his head, but not enough to see behind him.

“Dill!” he yelled, the word accompanied by a bloom of pain.

On the counter he saw his keys and coins and beeper. His pockets had been turned out. There was his holster also, but empty.

In the near corner stood a spade with a long wooden handle.

Maddox picked up movement reflected in the sink window. He saw him. The black wig. His face blurred, standing back, watching Maddox from behind.

A hand gripped his right shoulder. Not a normal hand, as his eyes strained to see it. The fingers and palm were glazed over somehow, inhumanly smooth. Not gloved, but coated. Mannequin-like.

The hand left his shoulder and Dill came around to stand before him. He wore the rumpled black sweat suit that had shed fibers at Frond’s and at Pail’s.

But Maddox realized that his build was all wrong. The sweatshirt was stretched tight across his shoulders and chest. He saw the black Chuck Taylor All-Stars, but the sneakers had been sliced up the top, the canvas stitched back together again underneath the laces in order to fit larger feet.

Then the face below the wig. Just like the hands, it bore the smoothed-out finish of a man of pure wax.

But with eyebrows. Or something like eyebrows, taped down underneath the mask, or whatever it was he had over him.

This was not Sinclair at all. The blurred face.

Maddox got the smell now. All at once, the clinging sewer odor. He was still trying to make out what was over the face — skintight but with holes for his eyes, nostrils, and mouth — not masking its appearance as much as — as—

Kane Ripsbaugh said, “You figured it out pretty good.”

Heart pounding, brain screaming, Maddox focused on Ripsbaugh’s coated face beneath the black wig.

Ripsbaugh examined his hands as though they were someone else’s, not his own. “Liquid latex. Dries fast and solid, like a thin rubber. Seals me in. So I don’t leave any of me behind. Only him.”

The Scarecrow. Ripsbaugh’s costume looked like clothes overstuffed with a man instead of straw. “Where is he? Where’s Sinclair?”

“He’s right here.”

Either the latex deadened Ripsbaugh’s already flat expression, or it was some kind of calm insanity. All of Maddox’s breath caught in his throat.

With two bald fingers, Ripsbaugh extracted a pager from his pocket, laying it on the counter next to Maddox’s. “Identical to yours. I noticed that. But I had to call you to the old pulp mill to be sure.” He swept some hair off his shoulder, a horridly casual gesture that only showed how much time he had spent wearing the wig. “Frond told me the state police had promised to send someone. Sinclair was your informant, wasn’t he?”

Maddox did not answer, seeing, in the center of the sweatshirt stretched out over Ripsbaugh’s chest, a small tear about the size of a bullet hole. “You shot him.”

Ripsbaugh looked down at the hole. “A clean kill.”

“In the Borderlands that night. You needed his clothes.”

“I needed him. A bogeyman. When I drove out of Hell Road, coming up on you standing over that deer, I knew right away something was up. Your shooting stance. You were no amateur. But it was too late. I had already taken that first step.”

Maddox thought back to Ripsbaugh’s headlights coming up bright in his eyes. “You had him in the back of your truck?”

“We’ve both been working undercover here, Don.”

Maddox shook his pounding head. “You pulled blood from him. You bled his corpse?”

“It wasn’t difficult.”

“Your wife’s brother?” Maddox tried to think it through. “You knew how CSS worked. You knew they’d pull the sink traps. So you directed them there — wiping out the sink, making it look like someone had cleaned up. You gave them everything. Sneaker prints, wig hairs, fiber transfers from his clothes. Skin cells?”

“Scraped his arms. Collected them in a paper bindle, just like they do.”

“You planted them in Bucky’s fingernails. As though he got them from fighting with Sinclair.”

“Like laying out crumbs.” The latex glaze over Ripsbaugh’s face could not mask his triumph.

“You sealed yourself away in this — this—”

“The adult video store in Rainfield sells it by the quart. Clear or colored.” He flexed his hands, the latex giving like a second skin. “No latents. No oils, no hairs. No transfers except from Sinclair’s clothes, his wig, his sneakers.”

“And the talcum powder?”

He touched his fingers together. “So the latex won’t adhere to itself. A rip or a breach just wouldn’t do.”

“That cut on your arm?”

“Self-inflicted. Good insurance, as Walt Heavey would say. In case anything showed up linking Val to Frond. If not for those letters, they never would have suspected me.”

“So you cut yourself, just in case.” Maddox saw it now. “If they did suspect you, you wanted to force their hand. Make them commit.”

“Make them eliminate me early. They got greedy with the DNA, like I knew they would. Because we’re all just hicks out here, right? Too dumb to live anywhere else. Too stupid to cover our own asses.”

His latex fingers wiggled at his sides. Maddox tried flexing his leg and arm muscles against the rope, the nylon tied tight. Where was his gun?

Don’t ask him what he’s going to do to you. Don’t give him a reason.

Keep talking.

“Val was with Bucky too?”

That soured Ripsbaugh. “Sometimes she gets stuck. She gets in a rut, because she’s so smart and the rest of the world is not.”

“But — Bucky Pail?”

“She’s vulnerable, and people take advantage of that. But you don’t trade in your wife when she gives you trouble.”

Maddox said, “You fix it with murder instead?”

“Killing is easy when someone hurts the one you love. The one person in the world you pledged to protect. Frond and Pail, they aren’t where they are now because they wronged me. They’re there because they wronged her. They took advantage. Using her. Like her father all over again. Taking whatever they could get, thinking there would be no consequences.” His hands squeezed into smooth, seamless fists. “I am their consequences. I am a reckoning.”

Maddox strained against the ropes, trying to get loose without Ripsbaugh seeing him trying. “That include the pinecone?”

Ripsbaugh straightened, looking freakishly proud in his long wig. “Sex offenders commit sex crimes.”

Humiliating the corpse, Hess had called it. Ripsbaugh was over the edge. “This is like trying to cure Val by going around killing off her symptoms. You can’t kill away her depression.”

“She doesn’t want to do these things with other men.” He spoke with the conviction of the quietly unhinged. “She hates herself for it. So I do what I have to in order to make her clean. With these.”

His hands again.

“She’s sick, Kane. Toxic. And being around her, it’s made you sick too.”

“What about you?” Ripsbaugh said. “You’ve been meeting her.”

“Meeting?” said Maddox, at first confused. “No. No, it was—”

“She came to me. Told me everything. How you talked about going away together.”

Maddox’s shivering stopped. For the moment, he gave up testing the rope. “Now hold on.”

Ripsbaugh’s eyes were tight, knowing and bright. “Your high school sweetheart.”

“Kane. You’ve got it all wrong.”

“Together again after all these years.”

“Kane.”

He was a different man now, the wig and the latex coating giving outer expression to his psychosis. “I always liked you, Don. I did. But you should have left her alone. She can’t help herself. Why she needs me. To help her. To make things right.”

Ripsbaugh considered his palms again. He was working himself up into a killing.

“You don’t know what it means,” he went on, “to make someone a part of you — and then feel them suffer. Feel them trapped inside a hell they did not create, and do not deserve. And all you can do is watch.” His voice became disturbingly calm. “You can’t know what that’s like, Don. Can you?”

Something in his stare hooked Maddox. Something behind his smoothed face.

Something indicating that this was not merely a rhetorical question.

Maddox tuned into the emptiness of the house. He remembered arriving home. Seeing the pickup in his garage. Walking down this very hallway, calling out to her.

“Tracy?” Maddox whipped his aching head around, trying to see as much of the downstairs as he could. “Trace!”

Ripsbaugh said, “It’s good here, where you live. Isolated enough. The rain outside eats up your voice.”

“Tracy!” Maddox uttered the word with force and panic. He flexed his arms and legs against the cutting rope. “What have you done?”

Ripsbaugh walked around behind him, gripping the chair, tipping it back. The rear legs gouged the wood floor like claw marks as Ripsbaugh dragged the chair down the hallway with Maddox in it.

Maddox struggled ferociously, the ropes giving a little now — his angled weight putting stress on the chair.

Ripsbaugh stopped and turned the chair around before the closed bathroom door.

Maddox felt a new wiggle in the back splats, more give in the dowels. He was struggling to exploit these weaknesses as Ripsbaugh opened the bathroom door and wheeled out a large machine: the very same video diagnostic system Maddox had seen him use at Wanda’s.

The motor was quiet, the spindle still. The red snake cable trailed off with the thinner silver wire coiled around its length, disappearing into his open toilet.

At first, Maddox did not understand.

The three-by-three view screen on the control console showed vague patches of night-vision green against a blur of black. Maddox strained against the ropes to lean closer, to see better.

Something was there. Visible only in contrast. Barely moving.

A head, shoulders, half a chest. Light-colored hair against a darker T-shirt. In water up to her midsection.

The green on the screen. Tracy. Arms raised out of the septic tank water, her eyes wide and glowing, lips moving, calling out.

Maddox could not believe it. His mind would not accept it, any of this. Not the hazy image on the screen. Not Ripsbaugh standing in his house wearing Sinclair’s clothes.

“The smell will be long gone before anyone thinks to come around looking,” said Ripsbaugh. “The rain is already smoothing out the dig marks in your yard.”

Dig marks.

No.

Impossible.

In Sinclair’s cut-and-stitched sneakers, Ripsbaugh walked to the open toilet. He flushed it, holding down the handle with his inhuman fingers until the bowl emptied.

The snake twitched as the rush of the water tugged on it.

On the display screen, the camera view trembled. Maddox could do nothing but watch.

Water splattered forth. Glowing green, it vomited from the mouth of the pipe, spraying Tracy’s face.

She covered her nose and mouth and her eyes glowed wide as she screamed into the darkness.

Maddox heard a muffled cry, as from someone calling out from miles beneath the ground.

“There’s air, but it’s bad air, and going fast. No light. She doesn’t know where she is.”

“Get her out!” The chair shook beneath him, Maddox pushing with every muscle, eyes locked on Tracy on the screen. “Get her out! She has nothing to do with this!”

Tracy’s hands stayed up near her muck-streaked face, eyes wild. Her screaming was so far away.

“You want to save her,” said Ripsbaugh, turning on the sink, full power. “To deliver her from that place, from that pain.” He ran water in the tub, opening the drain. “If only you could.”

More water flowing past the camera, obscuring the view.

“That is why I am showing you this, Don.” He walked away, back down the hall, to the kitchen. “Now you understand.” Maddox heard him open the sink tap. “Now you know what I go through.”

Maddox was underneath that bridge in Haverhill again. Standing over Casey’s naked corpse, knowing it should be him lying there and not her. Knowing that no amount of vengeance would ever be enough, and going a little crazy inside.

Ripsbaugh returned. “They’ll find her truck pulled over on one of the hill roads. Keys inside, though not your garage door opener. Thousands of young women disappear every year. They’ll come here, they’ll search your house with lasers and filtered vacuums. They’ll search it good, the residence of a missing state trooper. But they’ll never think to search the septic tank.” Ripsbaugh brought his glabrous face close, so close that a few strands of wig hair brushed against Maddox’s cheek before Maddox could jerk away. “They won’t ever find her.”

Maddox rocked the chair with everything he had. “Kill me, get it over with,” he said. “But let her go!”

Ripsbaugh watched him struggle. “One problem with that, Don. With killing you. Sinclair’s next murder will be his third. Do you know what that means?”

Maddox swelled his chest, pushing against the seat. He felt some separation in the wood beneath him. Or imagined he did.

“Three victims, that meets the FBI criteria for a serial killer. And I sure don’t want the FBI here.”

Maddox could bend his elbows a bit, giving him more leverage.

“So you’re going to have to disappear. Sinclair will be suspected, of course. They’ll find this kitchen chair pulled out from the table. Abrasions in its sides, some rope fibers. Rounds from your gun lodged in the wall and ceiling upstairs. Sinclair was in your house tonight. But, as with the girl, your disappearance will remain a mystery.”

Ripsbaugh stepped into the parlor, pinching a bit of sleeve with his coated fingers and rubbing the fabric against the corner of the divan. Another Sinclair transfer.

“Sinclair’s legend will only grow. Because he is going to disappear tonight with you. His work here is done. But Sinclair will live on, longer than you or even I, haunting the woods around Black Falls. A town needs a good bogeyman. Fear is like religion that way. It galvanizes a community. Makes them care. Black Falls is already coming back to life. You feel it, can’t you?”

Maddox had earned just enough rope slack to lean forward onto the balls of his feet, tipping up the back legs. With all that he had, he rocked back down, driving the chair legs into the floor.

A good blow, but not enough. There was no crack, though his feet were looser, allowing him even more leverage. He rocked violently side to side, trying it again.

This time, the rope shifted, still holding him fast, but giving him a few more precious centimeters with which to work.

Ripsbaugh watched dispassionately. “If I’ve gone on too long, it’s only because, as I said, Don, I always liked you.” He looked at his smooth hands again, as though awaiting their command. “I always liked you.”

Maddox sprang up with all his might, driving his hips down and hearing wood crack as a splat fractured behind his lower back, one of the legs on the left side giving way.

Maddox was on the floor. On his side, still lashed to the broken chair. But loose inside the ropes.

Ripsbaugh did not move at first. Maddox had no time to be shocked, kicking free of the splintered front legs, squirming with his hands still bound behind his back.

When Ripsbaugh did finally reach out to stop him, Maddox flailed, jabbing at Ripsbaugh’s knee with a loose foot, kicking him back. Maddox writhed madly, his wrists getting looser, his knees pulling free.

He felt a new tension pulling on his waist. Ripsbaugh had taken up one end of the rope. He fashioned a loop with it and came at Maddox, meaning to slip the noose around his neck.

Maddox, helpless against a strangling, dug in with his heels and spun himself around, keeping his head away from Ripsbaugh, swinging another kick at his legs.

Ripsbaugh looped Maddox’s foot, catching it. The broken chair back scraped against the floor as Ripsbaugh pulled the rope hand over hand, reeling Maddox in. His smooth, blank fingers.

Maddox went limp a moment, tempting Ripsbaugh with slack. Ripsbaugh took the bait, yanking back on the line, looking to bring Maddox close enough to fall on him with the rope and finish him.

But Maddox jerked as Ripsbaugh hauled, the line pulling taut, the rope ripping right through Ripsbaugh’s fingers. Ripsbaugh let go, but not fast enough.

Ripsbaugh brought his hands up in front of his face as though they had been burned. Strips of shielding latex hung like layers of dead skin, baring his fingers beneath.

Maddox dug into the floor with his heels. He scraped away on his back, down the hall, away from Ripsbaugh. He knocked over the shovel by the kitchen counter and dragged it along with him, the ropes pulling looser with every movement.

Maddox got to one knee. Both wrists were free of their knots, his arms still tangled in the rope and chair behind his back. He shrugged one arm loose and used that to start on his legs. In the kitchen to his right, the sink was running.

Ripsbaugh remained at the other end of the hall, doing something with his exposed hands.

Maddox worked maniacally, shredding skin off own his fingertips as he stripped away the last of the rope and the chair. He picked up the shovel with the intention of running down the hall and braining Ripsbaugh with it, but the angry crack of a handgun froze him.

Ripsbaugh held Maddox’s revolver in his peeling hands, having fired it into the floor. He raised the smoking barrel now, leveling it at Maddox.

“All right,” said Ripsbaugh. “That’s about enough.”

61 Ripsbaugh

Pulled from the back of his waistband, the revolver felt cold against the bare parts of Ripsbaugh’s fingers. He could almost feel his skin oils adhering to the wood grip. He had to be so careful now.

Maddox stood at the other end of the hallway, wild with desperation.

Ripsbaugh had to remain clearheaded. This was a critical time. This was where killers made their mistakes — in haste. In going off plan. Part of him was exposed, but he still had control of the scene.

He had the gun. He was okay. Nothing had gotten away from him yet.

“Put down the shovel.”

Ripsbaugh didn’t want to be too close for the kill shot, if it came to that. He wanted the round to lodge inside Maddox and not kick out. Not get lost in a wall somewhere with Maddox’s DNA on it.

Maddox was doing something to the fingers of his hand. He was picking at the tips. A few drops of blood fell to the wood floor.

“That’s for the FBI,” said Maddox. He flicked tiny droplets into the kitchen. Up at the ceiling. He smeared some on the handle of Ripsbaugh’s shovel. “Now what? What’s this do to your master plan?”

Ripsbaugh knew that, even if he could find and clean every drop, there were chemicals that brought up old bloodstains. “Now that there’s blood evidence, what’s to stop me from shooting you?”

The plan had been to march Maddox through the woods behind his house to the top of the falls. Let the force of the water dispose of him without a trace. Then throw Sinclair’s clothes in after him, the wig, the pager — everything. Flush the evidence. Flush Maddox and Sinclair. Leave nothing linking either of them to Ripsbaugh.

But, as with Frond and Pail, things wouldn’t go exactly as planned.

All Maddox was doing here was making more work for him. Ripsbaugh didn’t look forward to shouldering his dead weight all the way to the falls. But hard work was hard work. And he had found that killing — doing it right — was just about the hardest work there was.

The arteries of the chest. Same place he did Sinclair. Plenty of muscle to catch the round.

“It’s for Val I do this,” he said.

But Maddox dropped the shovel and darted fast into the cross hallway, the shot missing him. Ripsbaugh put another quick round into the intervening wall, tracking Maddox about shoulder high. Then he cut through the sitting room, beating Maddox to the front door.

Maddox wasn’t there. Instead Ripsbaugh heard footsteps pounding up the stairs.

He was going to the bedrooms to hide. He was trapped and running scared.

Ripsbaugh started up after him, coming to the top in darkness. He had to be very careful not to leave anything of himself behind. Only Sinclair. That was of supreme importance now.

One door was open in the hallway. He heard bumping inside, and it occurred to him that Maddox might have another gun in the house.

Ripsbaugh peered through the doorway into the stripped-down master bedroom. The far window had been pushed open, screen and all, letting in the rain.

Ripsbaugh rushed to it. He thrust his gun hand out the window to cut Maddox down. Below was the steep roof over the kitchen, runoff coursing down the shingles to the deck below.

Maddox was not there.

Ripsbaugh realized his mistake too late.

He was pulling back into the room when the blow came from behind, shoving him halfway out the window. His hip struck the sill hard, his feet leaving the floor, the heel of his gun hand coming down heavily against the wet shingles.

Amazed he had not tumbled right out, he looked back and saw his free hand gripping the side of the window frame. The bare patches of his fingers pressed against the smooth wood — dirty oils sizzling his mark onto the painted surface.

Another body blow, so hard that the sill cracked beneath him, and his hand released the frame. The elbow of his gun arm was wedged beneath him against the shingles. His legs remained inside the house, kicking blindly, hitting nothing.

He twisted, trying to get the gun free of his own weight. Trying to aim the muzzle behind him. One shot was all he needed to push Maddox back. One bullet was all he had left.

He was half turned when the third blow came, upending him, shoving him through.

Tumbling down the roof, Ripsbaugh swung his arm around, firing wildly at the window.

Crack.

Not even close. Ripsbaugh let go of the gun to try and stop his fall. The rough shingles shredded more latex off his hands, everything coming apart now.

A rattling sound. The gutter.

He was off the roof. Twisting, falling.

It was hard, hard work. Maybe the hardest.

62 Maddox

Maddox raced out of his mother’s bedroom, the hallway listing like a ship in a storm. He grabbed the handrail and tripped down the stairs. If his choice was to finish off Ripsbaugh or save Tracy, then there really was no choice at all.

Rain thumped the spongy grass. Beneath his feet, he heard her screaming.

“Tracy!” he yelled, lowering his shoulder and hitting an ornate stone pedestal planter like a linebacker. It shifted off its base and fell, Maddox sprawling over it, then getting up and seeing the exposed tank cap, a concrete slab split into two half circles.

Maddox got good purchase around Ripsbaugh’s dig marks. He pried up one half of the heavy slab with his bloodied fingers, sliding it aside.

The stench, the aching screams. It was like uncapping a tunnel to hell.

Maddox had no flashlight. He yelled her name, but she could not hear him over her own screaming. The white PVC outlet pipe was disgorging water, the camera end of the snake sticking out of the downspout like a lizard’s tongue.

He pried off the other half of the cap, her head coming fully into view. Her upturned face, muck-streaked and fright-wild, finding light.

“Donny?” she shrieked. “Donny!”

The water was up to her chin. Maddox lay out on his chest, his face in the stench. Reaching down to her. Her slimy hands grasped his, but she slipped away before he could haul her up. He tried again, but could not hold the grip.

The stench gagged him and he lifted his head out, looking around the yard for something, anything. He wished he had taken the nylon rope with him.

He yelled down, “I need something to pull you out with!”

“Don’t leave me!”

“I won’t! I’m not! I’m coming right back! You hear me?”

“Where am I? What’s happening?”

She was drowning in filth. He had to tear himself away. He jumped up.

“Donny!”

He sprinted around the house toward the driveway, praying he had left the garage door open.

63 Tracy

Tracy screamed at the open mouth that screamed rain. The mouth of the monster.

Her throat was so raw from puking and screaming that she had no sense of taste anymore, no smell, the ungodly stench having burned out her mouth and nose. Breathing this foulness was like eating it, taking it into her body. The belly acid of the beast that had swallowed her.

The water was at her earlobes now. She kept her face upturned. The opening was all she had. The sky was up there. Air. Light. Escape. Rain spattered her eyes but she did not blink.

It grew darker above. A shadow falling. Her hope rose.

“Donny!”

No.

Someone else standing over the hole. Looking down. His face in shadow.

Long black hair.

She remembered now.

Sinclair.

She screamed. And screamed. And shrank away from the mouth.

64 Maddox

Yes — he had left it open. He rushed between Tracy’s pickup and the side of the garage where the storage shelves were. Old tools, baby food jars of nails and screws, twine and tape—

Clothesline. From when his mother used to hang out wet sheets in the backyard, a hundred years ago. He would play hide-and-seek in them with her.

He grabbed it, and a knob-handled, needle-bladed scratch awl — the sharpest, nearest thing he could find — and ran back out into the rain. He raced to the hole in the yard, sliding the last several feet over the soaked grass like a runner going for third, yelling down to her.

She was just a floating face now. The effluent up to her ears, her arms reaching for him.

“He’s up there!” she screamed. “Look out!”

Maddox scanned the front yard, the adjacent wetlands, the house. She was delirious. They were alone.

He knotted a loop and lowered the rope into the riser. Tracy pulled one wrist through, gripping the line, and he braced his feet against the mud around the rim. He hauled her up, hand over hand, the clothesline burning his palms and bloody fingers.

She emerged from the narrow hole, head and shoulders, clawing at the grass with her sludge-streaked hands like a corpse from a grave. She kicked her dripping legs free and then, saved, collapsed onto him, slimy and foul-smelling, squeezing him tight.

She twisted around, amazed to see his house in the dark rain, the hole in the yard. She was bewildered as to how she had gotten there. Maddox helped her to her feet and was pulling the rope off her arm when Tracy screamed.

Ripsbaugh, wig hair flying, came running at them across the yard with his spade in his hands.

Maddox shoved Tracy aside. He rushed Ripsbaugh just as the shovel came around, Maddox avoiding the blade, the wooden handle cracking against his raised left arm and sending him sprawling over the open tank cap.

“Run!” he yelled to Tracy. But she was already doing that.

Ripsbaugh appeared over him, shovel raised. Maddox rolled away just as the blade buried itself sideways in the wet turf where his head had been. He scrambled to his feet as Ripsbaugh pulled the spade from the sucking ground. Ripsbaugh lunged and swung, and Maddox, off balance, thought he was far enough away.

The dirty blade sliced through the meat of his upper left thigh, a gouge of pain that spun Maddox sideways, dropping him to one knee.

Ripsbaugh reset himself, eyes determined as he wound up for a beheading shot.

The clothesline lay on the grass around Ripsbaugh’s feet. Maddox grabbed the loose ends and yanked back.

Ripsbaugh’s legs came up, crashing him to the ground, his head smacking back.

Maddox, grunting in pain, pulled the awl from his back pocket and buried it deep in Ripsbaugh’s left thigh, to the bone.

Ripsbaugh’s howl was monstrous. His leg kicked so violently that Maddox lost his grip on the knob. Maddox looked up just in time to see the blunt top end of the shovel handle coming at his face.

It struck him full in the cheek, snapping back his head. He brought his hand up to cover the point of impact and felt the left side of his face droop, the bones cracked and loose inside.

Ripsbaugh was writhing and trying to get up, the knob of the awl jutting from his thigh. He still had the shovel. Maddox had nothing but a broken face and a bad leg.

Tracy.

Maddox got to his feet and took off, each step a burst of flame, hobbling hard to the other side of the house, opposite the direction in which Tracy had run. He looked back with his hand covering his face and saw Ripsbaugh with the awl blade out of his thigh, limping after him, shovel in hand.

Tracy was free. That was all that mattered. Whatever happened now, no one else would die needlessly because of him.

65 Tracy

Tracy ran blindly into the driveway, right past Donny’s patrol car before stopping. She turned back and saw Sinclair in the front lawn, limping badly after Donny around the far end of the house.

The driver’s door was unlocked. She jumped inside, slamming it shut after her, locking it with her slimy fingers, reaching across for the passenger door and locking that one too.

No keys. She saw the radio under the dash and picked up the handset and ran her disgusting hands over the knobs.

Nothing. Then she saw the on/off switch.

The dial lit up white, reassuring lights blinking red and green.

She held the handset with both hands so it wouldn’t slip away like a bar of soap and she pressed down the talk button and yelled for help.

“Who is this?” came the radio voice, angry.

She met fire with fire, blasting her name back at him.

“The missing Tracy Mithers?” said the voice.

She told them where she was. She told them Sinclair was there and he was chasing Don Maddox. Don Maddox, the state police trooper.

“Stay right where you are,” said the voice.

She eased up on the handset and it slipped to the floor. She checked all the door locks again, and the windows, making sure she was sealed in. She looked back at the radio and noticed a panel of switches above it. With her mucky fingers, she flicked every one of them.

Blue lights blazed across the house and the driveway. The siren screamed.

She saw something in the rearview mirror then. Just her own hair. She twisted the glass down so that she could fully see herself, and her screaming nearly topped the wail of the siren.

66 Hess

Hess went racing through the station. “Get that chopper in the air!” he yelled at Bryson.

The STOP team was lying about on the front porch, kicking back, rifles dangling from their shoulders. The leader sat up as Hess went past with his Sig drawn.

“A UC in town,” said Hess. “He’s State. Sinclair’s at his house right now.” As Hess hit the driveway, he yelled back over his shoulder, “He’s one of ours!”

67 Ripsbaugh

Ripsbaugh pushed through the trees after Maddox. His thigh was screaming at him to stop — goddamn awl hurt more coming out than going in — but Maddox was hurt too, and unarmed, and just a few trees ahead. Ripsbaugh had lost the awl when he stumbled in the backyard, but he still had his shovel, its grip and weight as familiar to his hands as any tool could be to a man. He held it ahead of him, swatting branches aside and dragging his leg along as fast as he could.

There was still time. Time to finish this, and do it right. The llama farmer was gone, but she didn’t know it was him. She only knew Sinclair.

Finish Maddox, then get back to the house. Wipe down that window frame in the upstairs bedroom, get rid of the handprint. Then tidy up the rest, seal the septic tank outside, haul the machine away before the police came. And find Maddox’s gun. And the bloody awl.

Much work to be done. But he could still get away. Everything else said Sinclair. Still enough time for everything to be all right. To finish this. For Val.

All of Ripsbaugh’s secrets would die with Maddox.

The sudden peal of the cop siren spun him around. He saw blue lights through the trees. Police.

Couldn’t be. Not yet.

No — Maddox’s patrol car.

The girl.

For the first time, Ripsbaugh felt things slipping away. He realized that all his good work here might come to nothing in the end.

He stood looking back and forth, torn between the house, where the incriminating evidence still needed to be destroyed, and the snapped-branch trail left by Maddox, who had wronged him. Who had wronged his wife.

A vision swam into his mind’s eye: Val on all fours, looking back at Maddox grunting over her. Her eyes heavy-lidded with confusion and pain and desire.

Protect Val. Kill the secrets.

With a howl of determination, Ripsbaugh launched forward, pulling himself tree by tree after Maddox.

68 Maddox

Crashing through the woods with his galloping limp was less like running than controlled falling. His sliced leg was warm and rubbery, but somehow saw him through. Maddox protected his broken face with his hand, branches and briars pulling and slashing at him: one lash for every lie he had ever told, for every person he had ever deceived or put at risk.

The woods opened to a broad clearing, the Cold River flowing left-right, swift with fresh runoff. Its banks were rugged, lined with current-smoothed stones all the way to the edge of the falls.

The clouds were breaking up overhead, the rain ending. The full moon peering through, bleak and glowing like a nightmare sun, transforming the river into a vein of silver.

Maddox looked back at the trees. Ripsbaugh came hobbling out, closer to him than Maddox would have guessed. He was using his shovel as a crutch, his wig hair jerking behind his head with each hop.

Maddox gimped along the slick stones. No chance of crossing the Cold: too wide, too deep, too fast. He heard the unsuspecting water, which had coursed so proudly out of the highlands and down the broad river basin, howl with betrayal as it launched over the precipice into the brink. Wading any deeper than knee-high would mean getting sucked in by the current and whisked over the edge.

He had no strength for another run into the trees. This was where it had to happen. Maddox searched the ground for good-sized stones to throw, removing his hand from his sagging face, waiting for Ripsbaugh with his back to the river.

Ripsbaugh came up to the bank of stones. Branches had ripped open his black-cotton sleeves and shoulders, revealing shiny skin; Ripsbaugh wearing full latex coating underneath. The wig had shifted back from his forehead, steaming body heat escaping from the cap, giving his peeling face the effect of a smoking skull.

Ripsbaugh eased off his shovel, gripping it like a weapon now, turning it over and over in his hands. Rocks versus shovel. Ripsbaugh had the advantage, but not at that distance.

Maddox hurled stones at him. One after another, any he could get his hands on, but baseball-sized rocks if he had a choice. He couldn’t get as much speed on them as he wanted, throwing almost one-leggedly. But they went fast enough that Ripsbaugh could not protect himself or bat them away with the shovel, taking blows in the gut and arms, one sharp-edged rock opening the side of his neck.

Ripsbaugh had to overcommit. Shielding his face with his arm, he came staggering at Maddox over the wet stones. Maddox closed him up with a rock to the midsection, then lunged as hard as his bad leg permitted, shoving Ripsbaugh off balance.

Ripsbaugh went over sideways, holding on to the shovel with one hand. Maddox started kicking that hand with his boot heel, from a squatting position so that the thrusting strength came from his arms braced against the stones behind him, not his other leg.

Ripsbaugh, unable to rise, could not protect his shovel hand. Maddox battered and crushed his knuckles until his fingers gave up the grip. The shovel clacked off a few stones, the blade dipping into the water, tasting it like a steel tongue. Ripsbaugh grabbed after it, but too late. The current seized the tool by the blade, snatching it away from his reach, rushing it out to the edge and over.

Maddox got one more good kick in, to Ripsbaugh’s ribs, before Ripsbaugh caught his boot, twisting his leg and throwing Maddox backward against submerged river rocks. Maddox tried to right himself but could not get any traction on the slippery stones. So he crabbed backward, dragging his own bad leg as Ripsbaugh pursued him on his, hunched over, furious and determined.

Maddox felt something through the ground. A thumping, a vibration. Like the pounding bass beat of distant music.

A helicopter crested over the precipice of the falls. The State Police Air Wing search-and-rescue unit. Ripsbaugh stiffened, hearing the bird but not daring to turn around. Wet wig hair hung over the latex peeling off his face, his eyes flaring.

He knew. There was no getting away now.

“Give up, Kane,” yelled Maddox over the noise.

Ripsbaugh stared at his empty, shredded hands, hope gone like the shovel over the edge of the falls. He had nothing left to lose.

He curled his tattered hands into fists and came hard after Maddox. Maddox kicked, but Ripsbaugh caught him by the ankle and, with great strength, began dragging him over the lumpy stones, into the river.

Maddox felt the current start to pull. Delirious pain as his bad leg bumped over the stones, water whipping into his face from the approaching Air Wing’s rotor wash.

He saw land behind Ripsbaugh brighten as the helicopter swung around, its searchlight a cone of immaculate brightness.

Thirty-million candlepower. That was what Cullen had said. Chased the coyotes out of the Borderlands.

Maddox grabbed the last stone before the open water and held on, hugging it close. Ripsbaugh kept hauling on him, lashed by river spray as the spinning helicopter righted itself overhead.

Maddox shut his eyes, turning away just as the searchlight hit.

69 Ripsbaugh

Ripsbaugh was about to pull him loose when Maddox closed his eyes.

Closed them like he understood. Like he accepted his fate. Like he would let go of that last rock and they would both wash away together.

The thought of leaving Val alone in this world emptied him.

Then the searchlight hit, and everything went white.

Ripsbaugh blinked. He blinked again but there was no black to go with it, no alteration in the white. The searchlight had burned right through his eyes. He raised his hurt hand to cover his face, but much too late.

Maddox kicked hard, shaking loose of Ripsbaugh’s grip. Ripsbaugh started to fall, the river already pulling on his legs. The bad one gave way, and he grabbed blindly after Maddox, at where Maddox had been.

He caught hold of something. Something smooth. The toe of Maddox’s boot.

The current sucked at his lower half. The river wanted him. It wanted them both. Hungrily, the water whisked away Sinclair’s sneakers from Ripsbaugh’s feet. With his other, busted hand he made a lunge for Maddox’s ankle, getting a two-handed grip. It was Maddox’s bad leg. He could feel Maddox’s agony.

Ripsbaugh lifted his face out of the water, blindly trying to see how close he was to pulling Maddox in with him. That was when the blow struck. A boot tread, crushing him full in the face. His hands released at once, and the water took him fast, sweeping him along like he was nothing, running him out to the edge and over, flushing him away.

Oh Valerie.

70 Maddox

Clinging to the river rock, Maddox remembered what Dill Sinclair had once said at this same overlook, about people staying back from the edge, not because they were afraid of falling, but because they were afraid of the temptation to leap.

Ripsbaugh screamed all the way down the falls until the clash and spray pulled him into the pit churning below, the mashing vortex devouring him whole.

71 Hess

The cramped office-garage of Cold River Septic was a small, cluttered building set on the edge of Ripsbaugh’s property, fed by a dirt lane off the driveway, carved away from the house and yard by a short chain-link fence.

Searing heat inside at midday, but they couldn’t open the windows because of the flies. It wasn’t that the place smelled bad inside, it actually smelled too good. The disinfectant Ripsbaugh used on his equipment had a flavored scent, sticky and sweet like cough syrup, drawing the swarming bugs.

Hess didn’t like getting beat. But if he was going to get beat, at least it was by somebody with a real serious fucking game plan and not just some blunderbuss. This guy Ripsbaugh was playing a game no one else could see. Getting arrested in order to clear himself? Psycho balls. And Ripsbaugh hadn’t just beat Hess. He’d beat CSS, he’d beat the crime lab in Sudbury. And he’d beat Maddox.

“So this liquid latex,” said Hess, silence killing him like the heat. “That’s a new one.”

Maddox, forthcoming on every other aspect of the murders and the man who had committed them, remained stubbornly circumspect regarding Ripsbaugh’s character. Crazy people have crazy motives, but Ripsbaugh’s rationale — cleaning up his beloved town by creating this bogeyman killer to mobilize the residents and bring down the corrupt cops — seemed ambitious in the extreme. Maddox might have been holding something back. Because of some lingering sense of trauma, after all he had been through, the beating he’d given and taken. Or, and this was Hess’s gut, maybe it was something a little more personal. Something between him and Ripsbaugh, like pity for the guy. Or, God forbid, something like respect.

They had found Ripsbaugh’s tanker truck pulled in behind trees around the corner from Maddox’s street. On the plastic-lined front seat lay the garment bag Ripsbaugh used to keep Sinclair’s clothes and wig pristine. Fucking diabolical.

“TV teaches,” said Hess. “Millions of people watch, but all it takes is one who’s not only listening but learning. All these forensics shows and B-movie crime reenactments and jazzy serial killer documentaries? To him it was one long instructional video. A four-year correspondence course to Murder U. One guy out of a million with the will and the drive to apply the techniques he sees.”

Maddox nodded, watching Ripsbaugh’s video diagnostic contraption through his unbandaged eye, the whirring cable snake feeding slowly into a toilet bowl inside a folding-door utility bathroom. A technician from SwiftFlow Environmental Systems, Ripsbaugh’s former regional competitor, operated the controls, watching the pipe camera’s progress on a three-by-three monitor.

Hess stood with Maddox before a wired-in laptop, the search being recorded by CSS. To Hess’s eye, the perspective was that of a coal miner, a green helmet light illuminating a foot or two of dark tunnel ahead. When it reached the open end of the pipe, the view dipped down, revealing a moonscape of glowing green curd.

“Keep going?” asked the SwiftFlow technician.

Maddox said, through a mouth still swollen, “Keep going.”

The crust proved soft as the camera dipped through it. The view dimmed below, like an underwater camera in a murky pond. Hess was amazed they could see anything. “Where’s all the shit?”

Maddox, and not the SwiftFlow technician, answered him.

“Sludge at the bottom of the tank breeds bacteria that breaks it down into wastewater. The effluent rises, dribbling off into the leeching fields, where it seeps back down through rock and soil, reentering the water table. You bring it back up through your well, and the cycle continues.”

Maddox knew a lot, it seemed. A good guy, all in all, but weird. Seemed to Hess his own well was dug pretty deep.

The SwiftFlow technician said, “Holy Mother of God.”

It came to them on the screen, a cloudy form taking shape.

A body. A human being suspended in fluid, naked, curled on its side. Like an oversized fetus in amniotic broth. A stillborn stuck in a polluted womb.

The corpse was startlingly well preserved, except for the outermost layers of derma. The small dark hole in the center of his chest looked to Hess like a gunshot wound.

Dillon Sinclair.

So this is where you’ve been hiding all this time, you son of a bitch.

“I’ll be goddamned,” Hess said. He had seen a lot of things in his career, but this particular image would never leave him. “What a town.”

Maddox stepped back after a long look, gimpy on his sore leg. He was about to leave.

“Maddox,” said Hess. He stuck out his hand. “What do you say? Two guys trying to do their jobs, right?”

Maddox thought about it a moment, then reached out and shook. “Thanks for that helicopter.”

72 Val

The tank off the septic garage had already been excavated and dismantled, the pit filled in with loam just that afternoon. Then peace and quiet for an hour or two, until, late in the day, Val heard his tires on the gravel.

She answered the doorbell with a tissue balled in her hand. It was Donny, still in his Black Falls PD uniform, his face bandaged, leaning on a cane like old man Pinty.

Her face was puffy. She had been doing a lot of crying, and the rawness at the rims of her eyes added to their uncertainty as she looked at him.

His mouth was off-kilter from the swelling, the bandages making his expression difficult to read. She wondered if it would be okay to hug him.

She went ahead and did so, gently. It was not reciprocated.

“God,” she said, sniffling into his shoulder. “It’s all such a nightmare.”

“It’s pretty bad,” he allowed.

She pulled away, still unsure. He stepped over the threshold on the cane, favoring his left leg. The bridge of his nose was deeply bruised, the color of the sky on late summer evenings.

She said, “So you were state police? All these years. That’s what you’ve been...”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I’m so glad you are all right.”

“Of course you are,” he said, wincing, maybe from the pain.

She turned her head a few degrees as though for better reception, his flat intonation putting her on edge. “I am,” she said, working the tissue in her hands, smiling out of confusion. She backed to the stairs, sitting down on the third step. “So much he hid from me. I think I never understood him.”

“He understood you.”

Donny was not going to make this easy. She looked up at him, waiting for some sort of signal. Some indication of release, of absolution. She always had trouble reading men. Except Kane.

“You wanted out of Black Falls,” Donny said. “Now you can go.”

“Yes?”

“And now you will go.”

She blinked, looking at his uniform. “Are you saying that as—?”

“As a policeman?” said Donny. “Yes. You will take whatever you can pack in a bag, right now, and you will go away from here. That is the only deal I’m offering. Leave everything else behind and go. Right now. Tonight.”

She searched for some sort of glimmer in his eyes, anything. “But, Donny—”

“You knew,” he said.

Blinking bewilderment. “I didn’t.”

“Frond and Pail. You tried to talk them into taking you away from here. Both of them turned you down. Just like I did.”

“Donny, I—”

“So you confessed to Kane. You told him everything, after the affairs were over. To clear your conscience, right? Wrong. To overload his. To punish him for your misery.”

“But how could I have known—”

“You didn’t. Not for the first two. You knew it would hurt him. You knew it would eat at him over time. But not so that he’d take it upon himself to do something about it. Something nearly heroic in its lunacy. Trying to make you happy again by killing off your sadness.” The cool dispassion he had walked in with was gone. “But when you told him about you and me? And about Tracy? You knew, Val. You knew exactly what you were doing. You were sending him to me.”

His glare was a hand around her throat.

“You had a killer in your pocket,” he went on. “An instrument of your vengeance. Your revenge on this town that you hated. This town that he loved — almost as much as he loved you. I don’t even think you want to leave. I think you want to stay. I think you need this place as an excuse for your misery. A place and a people to blame. But now you will go from here, tonight, and you will never come back.”

Donny’s hands were squeezed tight at his sides, the same way Kane’s used to get. Seeing that emboldened her, and all pretense fell from her face like glass out of a shattered window. She reached for the handrail, waiting for the trembling to go out of her lips. She wanted to be standing when she said this. Wanted him to see her pride, her triumph.

“I have lived with monsters all my life,” she told him.

Donny turned and limped away. “That is why I’m letting you go.”

73 Maddox

Tracy stood with both forearms on the stall door inside the old cowshed. She and Rosalie, the mother llama, watched with equal pride as the new cria tottered around on spindly legs.

“Samantha,” said Tracy. “I picked it because it’s a happy name. You can’t say it without smiling. Try.”

Maddox eyed her legs beneath the strings of her cutoffs, tanned down to the tops of her boots. Clean now. He wondered how many showers and baths it had taken. How much soaking and scrubbing before she had begun to feel normal again.

“Samantha,” he said, feeling soreness in his cheek between the second and third syllable. It hurt to smile. “And what about you?”

“What about me?”

“You feeling happy?”

Under her straw cowgirl hat, her pretty eyes lacked the sparkle they once held, her spirit of mischief. Maddox felt as though he had taken that away. “I’d like to feel happy,” she said. “I’m trying.”

Footsteps scratched the dirt outside. Mrs. Mithers coming. Tracy looked at Maddox, but without any trepidation or nervousness. She was past all that now.

Instead it was Maddox who readied himself, standing as straight as he could with the cane.

Mrs. Mithers looked in with a smile of greeting, walking up the cow ramp. Maddox presented himself, Tracy signing the introductions.

Maddox took a good look at Tracy’s mother’s face. As with the rest of her generation, she had come late to sunscreen and straw hats. But there was beauty beneath the striations of age and divorce. Enough to make one wonder what difference a good marriage might have made.

Mrs. Mithers signed, and Tracy translated: “How’s your cheek?”

“Not so bad,” he answered. “In a way, after ten years of working undercover, I think I kind of had it coming.”

Mrs. Mithers didn’t know what to say to that.

“Do it too long,” Maddox went on, “and you either burn out or burn up. That’s what I told them at the state police barracks yesterday, when I resigned.”

Tracy turned. She stared at him. “Resigned?”

“They wanted me on a desk. I never did wear the uniform. Seemed strange to start now.”

Tracy kept staring, and Mrs. Mithers had to touch her daughter’s elbow to get her attention. She signed, and Tracy stammeringly translated the question she could not bring herself to ask: “So what are you going to do?”

“Well,” he said, bypassing Tracy and addressing Mrs. Mithers directly, “undergo a little reconstructive surgery, that’s the first thing. Beyond that, it looks like Pinty’s going to need some help getting around for a while. Never mind putting together a competent police force here. I suppose it’s no secret that I still owe this town five years.”

Tracy said, “Five years?”

“Less six months, for time served. So, four and a half. But after that, believe you me — I am gone.”

Tracy was still staring at him.

To Mrs. Mithers, he added, “Unless I meet someone. You know. Fall in love. That old trap.”

Tracy pulled her hat off her head and rushed up and squeezed him so tight he staggered back on his cane. She kissed his good cheek, quaking in his arms, crying or maybe laughing. Either way, it was happiness, and Maddox, sore as he was, felt better than he had in a long time.

He buried his nose in Tracy’s hair. She smelled clean and pure.

Acknowledgments

For aiding and abetting, thanks to Richard Abate, Colin Harrison, Susan Moldow, Robert Shulman, and Trooper John Conroy of the Massachusetts State Police.