The Lesson of Her Death

1

The medical examiner was in a prickly mood. For the second time in two weeks, he stood in mud, at night, beside this dark pond. His usual demeanor – that of a cheerful TV doctor – was absent.

Streaks on her face, hair muddy and plastered around her head the way a bald man hides scalp, still-beautiful Emily Rossiter lay on a blanket, faceup. A black hideous wound marred her temple. A large fishhook was embedded deep in her groin in the center of a slick patch of dark pubic hair. The hook was attached to a long piece of twenty-pound test line, which had pulled her skirt up between her legs.

A crowd of locals and reporters stood on the fringe of the crime scene – a sloping grassy backyard that bordered Blackfoot Pond.

The ME, a thin man of fifty, said to T.T. Ebbans, "Blow to the right temple with a rough, irregular object. Death by drowning."

"Rape?"

"Not this time."

"What about the hook?" Ebbans asked. "After she was dead?"

"Dollars to doughnuts."

Jim Slocum said to Ebbans, "There, you've got your postmortem piercing. That's common in sacrificial murders."

Ebbans pushed past the reporters, telling them that Sheriff Ribbon would be holding a press conference in ten minutes. He joined Bill Corde up by the road.

"Detective Corde!" Addie Kraskow waved frantically, her laminated Register press pass bouncing on her chest. "You didn't think a serial killer was involved. You feel differently now?"

Corde ignored her, and Ebbans repeated. "Ten minutes. Press conference."

Addie didn't pursue the question anyway; she noticed a photo opportunity and sent her photographer to shoot the body being zippered up and carried toward the ambulance that stood in the driveway of a house, next to a child's pink-and-white tricycle. The cameramen were scrambling like panicked roaches to get the tricycle and the body bag in the same shot.

The County Rescue Squad scuba divers arrived and suited up. One of them looked at the pond and muttered, "Whore's pussy."

Corde sternly told the man to act professionally.

On the periphery of the action Wynton Kresge leaned against an old, beige Dodge Aspen crowned by a blue revolving light. On the door was the Auden University seal, printed with the school name and the words Veritas et Integritas. Ebbans nodded in his direction. Corde and Kresge ignored each other.

"I step into a mantrap on this one, or what?" Corde asked Ebbans.

"You play it like you see it, Bill. That's all you can ever do."

"Crime Scene have a chance before everybody started padding around?"

"It was virgin. We didn't find much other than the boot prints but it was a virgin."

Corde glanced at the cluster of policemen beside the pond. One was the blond man he had seen in the back of Ribbon's car.

Ebbans followed his eyes. "Charlie Mahoney."

"What's he doing here?"

"Representative of the family."

"Uhn. What family?"

"Works for Jennie's father."

"And?"

"Don't ask me."

"Well, let's see what we've got." Corde started down to the water.

"Wait up a minute, Bill."

He stopped. Ebbans stepped beside him and when he spoke his voice was a whisper. Corde lowered his ear toward the man. "I just wanted you to know," Ebbans began then hesitated. "Well, it's bullshit is what it is…"

Corde was astonished. He had never known Ebbans to cuss. "What, T.T.?"

Their eyes were on an indentation in the grass – a wheel tread left by the gurney that had carried Emily's body to the ambulance.

"Was there any connection between you and Jennie?"

Corde looked up and kept his eye on the mesmerizing lights atop the ambulance. "Go on. What are you saying?"

"There's some talk at County – just talk – that you burnt those letters because you were, you know…"

"I was what?"

"'Seeing her' is what somebody said. And because of that maybe you wanted to deep-six the evidence. I don't believe -"

"I didn't do that, T.T."

"I know that. I'm just telling you what I heard. It's just a rumor but it's one of those rumors that won't go away."

Corde had been in town government long enough to know there are two reasons rumors don't go away. Either because somebody doesn't want them to go away.

Or because they're true.

"Who's behind it?" Corde asked.

"Don't know. Hammerback seems to be on your side. But with the election he's paying out his support real slow and if you turn out to be a liability he'll burn you in a second. Who else it could be I just don't know."

At Corde's feet drops of dew caught the flashing lights and flickered like a hundred miniature Christmas bulbs. "Predate your telling me, T.T."

Ebbans walked to the ambulance and Corde headed down to the pond, whose turgid surface was filled with bubbles from the divers as they searched for clues to the death of this beautiful young woman – whose story and whose secrets were now lost forever and would never be transcribed on one of Bill Corde's neatly ordered index cards.

He stood for a long time, with his feet apart in a patch of firm mud, looking over the water, and found himself thinking not at all of fingerprints or weapons or footprints or fiber traces but meditating on the lives of the two girls murdered in this dismal place and wondering what the lesson of those deaths would ultimately be.

"She's calm now." Diane Corde was speaking to Dr. Parker in her office. "I've never seen her have an attack like that. Bill said he asked her to spell a word and she just freaked out."

Mother. That was what Sarah was supposed to spell. Diane didn't tell the prim doctor this. Neither did she say how much she resented Corde's callousness in telling her which word so panicked Sarah.

Dr. Parker said, "I wish you'd called me. I could have given her a tranquilizer. She had a panic attack. They're very dangerous in children."

Although the doctor's words were spoken softly Diane felt the lash of criticism again. She said in a spiny tone, "I was out and my husband had just got some bad news. We couldn't deal with it all at once."

"That's what I'm here for."

"I'm sorry," Diane said. Then she was angry with herself. Why should I feel guilty? "I've kept her out of -"

"I know," Dr. Parker said. "I called the school after you called me."

"You did?" Diane asked.

"Of course I did. Sarah's my patient. This incident is my responsibility." The blunt admission surprised Diane but she sensed the doctor wasn't apologizing; she was simply observing. "I misjudged her strength. She puts on a good facade of resilience. I thought she'd be better able to deal with the stress. I was wrong. I don't want her back in school this term. We have to stabilize her emotionally."

The doctor's suit today was dark green and high-necked. Diane had noticed it favorably when she walked into the office and was even thinking of complimenting her. She changed her mind.

Dr. Parker opened a thick file. Inside were a half dozen booklets, on some of which Sarah's stubby handwriting was evident. "Now I've finished my diagnosis and I'd like to talk to you about it. First, I was right to take her off Ritalin."

I'm sure you're always right.

"She doesn't display any general hyperkinetic activity and she's very even-tempered when not confronted with stress. What I observed about her restlessness and her inattentiveness was that they're symptomatic of her primary disability."

"You said that might be the case," Diane said.

"Yes, I did."

But of course.

"I've given her the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, the Gray Oral Reading Test, Bender Gestalt, Wide Range Achievement Test and the Informal Test of Written Language Expression. The results show your daughter suffers from severe reading retardation -"

"I don't care what you say," Diane blurted, "Sarah is not retarded."

"That doesn't mean that she's retarded, Mrs. Corde. Primary reading retardation. It's also called developmental dyslexia."

"Dyslexia? That's where you turn letters round."

"That's part of it. Dyslexics have trouble with word attack – that's how we approach a word we've never seen before – and with putting together words or sentences. They have trouble with handwriting and show an intolerance for drill. Sarah also suffers from dysorthographia, or spelling deficit."

Come on, Diplomas, cut out the big words and do what I'm paying you to do.

"She has some of dyslexia's mathematical counterpart – developmental dyscalculia. But her problem is primarily reading and spelling. Her combined verbal and performance IQ is in the superior range. In fact she's functioning in the top five percent of the population. Her score, by the way, is higher than that of the average medical student."

"Sarah?" Diane whispered.

"It's also six points higher than your son's. I checked with the school."

Diane frowned. This could not be. The doctor's credentials were suddenly suspect again.

"She's reading about three years behind her chronological age and it usually happens that the gap will widen. Without special education, by the time she's fifteen, Sarah's writing age would be maybe eleven and her spelling age nine or ten."

"What can we do?"

"Tutoring and special education. Immediately. Dyslexia is troubling with any student but it's an extremely serious problem for someone with Sarah's intelligence and creativity -"

"Creativity?" Diane could not suppress the laugh. Why, the doctor had mixed up her daughter's file with another patient's. "She's not the least creative. She's never painted anything. She can't carry a tune. She can't even strum a guitar. Obviously she can't write…"

"Mrs. Corde, Sarah is one of the most creative patients I've ever had. She can probably do all of those things you just mentioned. She's been too inhibited to try because the mechanics overwhelm her. She's been conditioned to fail. Her self-esteem is very low."

"But we always encourage her."

"Mrs. Corde, parents often encourage their disabled children to do what other students can do easily. Sarah is not like other children. Encouragement like that is just another way of helping her fail."

"Well," Diane said stiffly. "You sure don't hesitate to call it the way you see it, Doctor."

Dr. Parker smiled a smile that meant nothing at all to Diane, who was for once relieved that the psychiatrist had set a frigid atmosphere for these sessions. She had no problem saying bluntly, "That's very well and good, Doctor, but how the hell are you going to help my little girl?"

"I want you to find a tutor. They're expensive but you need one and you need a good one. I recommend that you check with the Auden lab school."

"Why can't we help her? Bill and me?"

"Sarah needs a specialist."

"But -"

"It's important that she see someone who knows what they're doing."

Diane thought it was remarkable that you could both admire and detest someone at the same time.

"Second, I'd like to work with her myself. Until we build up her confidence in herself she's never going to improve. Her self-esteem has been very badly damaged."

"What can you do that we haven't? All right, maybe the way we tried to teach her was wrong. But you keep forgetting that we've always supported her. We always tell her how good she is. How talented."

"But she doesn't believe you. And how can she? You push her to work harder and it does no good. You tell her she's doing well but she isn't, she's failing her classes. You tell her she's smart but by all the outward manifestations she isn't. Mrs. Corde, you've acted for the best motives but your efforts have been counterproductive. We need to encourage Sarah to do the things she's genuinely good at."

"But haven't you heard what I've told you? She isn't good at anything. She doesn't even like to help me cook or sew. All she does is play games by herself, go to movies and watch TV."

"Ah. Precisely." Dr. Parker smiled like a chess player calling checkmate.

Diane blinked. What'd I say?

"I'd like to see Sarah as soon as possible. If you could make the appointment with Ruth." The cryptic eyes, so talented at dismissals, glanced at another file.

"Okay, sure." Diane stood.

Then she hesitated.

She sat down again. "Say, Doctor…"

"Yes?"

Diane blurted, "Where does it come from? Dyslexia?"

"I'm sorry, I should have discussed that with you." She closed the second file and turned full attention to Diane. "We don't know exactly. It used to be that a lot of doctors attributed it to physical problems – like memory confusion between the two hemispheres of the brain. That's been discredited now though vision and hearing problems can be major factors. My belief is that like many developmental problems dyslexia has both a nature and nurture component. It's largely genetic and the prenatal period is very critical. But how parents and teachers respond to the child is important too."

"Prenatal?" Diane asked, then casually added, "So could it be that someone who had maybe smoked or drank or took drugs during pregnancy might cause dyslexia in their children?"

"To some extent though usually there's a correspondent decrease in IQ…" Dr. Parker squinted and flipped through her notes. "Anyway I thought you said you largely abstained while you were pregnant."

"Oh, that's right," Diane said. "I was just curious… You know, when someone you love has a problem you want to know all about it." Diane stood up. She sensed Dr. Parker studying her. "Well, I'll make that appointment."

"Wait a minute, please." Dr. Parker capped her pen. "You know, Mrs. Corde, one of the underlying themes of my approach to therapy is that we really are our parents." She was smiling, Diane believed, in a heartfelt way for the first time since they had begun working together. "I call parents the quote primary providers and not just in a positive sense. What they give us and what they do for us – and to us – include some unfortunate things. But it can include a lot of good things too."

Diane looked back at her and tried to keep her face an unemotional mask. She managed pretty well, even when the doctor said, "I've seen a lot of parents in here and I've seen a lot of people in here because of their parents. Whatever's troubling you, Mrs. Corde, don't be too hard on yourself. My opinion is that Sarah is a very lucky girl."

Technically this was trespassing. But boundaries in the country aren't what they are in the city. You could walk, hunt, fish on almost anybody's land for miles around. As long as you left it in good shape, as long as the feeling was reciprocal, nobody made an issue.

Corde ducked under the wire fence, and slipped into the scruffy forest behind his property. He continued for a ways then broke out into a clearing in the center of which was a huge rock some glacier had left behind, twenty feet high and smooth as a trout's skin. Corde clambered onto the rock and sat in one of the indentations on the west side.

She wears a turquoise sweater high at the neck, half obscuring her fleshy throat.

To the south he could just see a charcoal gray roof, which seemed attached to a stand of adolescent pines though in fact it covered his own house. He noticed the discolored patch near the chimney where he had replaced the shingles last summer.

"You used to live in St Louis, didn't you?" Jennie Gebben asks.

Oh, she is pretty! Hair straight and long. Abundant breasts under the soft cloth. Sheer white stockings under the black jeans. She wears no shoes and he sees through the thin nylon red-nailed toes exceptionally long.

"Well, I did," he answers. "As a matter of fact." He clears his throat. He feels the closeness of the dormitory room. He smells incense. He smells spicy perfume.

"Eight, nine years ago? I was little then but weren't you in the news or something?"

"All cops get on the air at one time or another. Press conferences or something. Drug bust."

Saturday night, January a year ago, branches click outside the dormitory window. Bill Corde sits on a chair and Jennie Gebben tucks her white-stockinged feet under her legs and lies back on the bed.

"It seems it was something more than that," she says. "More than a press conference. Wait. I remember. It was…"

She stops speaking.

Bill Corde, sitting now on the flesh-smooth rock in the quiet town of New Lebanon, watched the sun grow longer to the horizon through a high tangle of brush and hemlock and young oaks soon to die from light starvation.

Shots fired! Shots fired! Ten-thirty-three. Unit to respond…

Each inch the sun fell, each thousand miles the earth turned away from it, he sensed the forest waking. Smells grew: loam, moss, leaves from last fall decomposing, bitter bark, musk, animal droppings.

… this session of the St Louis Police Department Shooting Review Board. Incident number 84-403. Detective Sergeant William Corde, assigned to St Louis County Grand Larceny, currently suspended from duty pending the outcome of this hearing…

Corde thought he'd be happy just being a hunter. He would have liked to live in the 1800s. Oh, there was a lot that amused and appealed to him about the Midwest at the end of the twentieth century. Like pickup trucks and televised Cardinals and Cubs games and pizza and computers and noncorrosive gunpowder. But if you asked him to be honest he'd say that he'd forgo it all to wake up one morning and walk downstairs to find Diane in front of a huge fireplace making johnnycakes in the beehive oven, then he and Jamie would go out to trap or hunt all day long among the miles and miles of forests just like this one.

A. Well, sir, the perpetrators…

Q. You knew them to be armed with assault rifles?

A. Not with assault rifles, no, though we knew they were armed… The perpetrators had taken the cash and jewelry and were still inside the store. I ordered my men into the alley behind the store. It was my intention to enter through a side door and take them by surprise.

Corde listened to the snapping of some invisible animal making its way through the woods. He thought how odd it was that a creature was moving past him, probably no more than ten feet away, yet he sensed no danger. He felt if anything the indifference of the surroundings, as if he had been discounted by nature as something insignificant and not worth harming.

Q. Sergeant Corde, could you tell us then what happened?

A. Yes, sir. There were a number of exit doors leading from the stores into the alley. I had inadvertently told the men to enter through door 143.

Q. Inadvertently?

A. That was a mistake. The door that opened onto the jewelry store was number 134.1 -

Q. You mixed up the numbers?

A. Yes, sir. In speaking with the fire inspector, he had told me the correct number of the door. I had written it down. But when I radioed to the men which door to enter, I read it backwards.

Q. So the men entered the mall through the wrong door.

A. No, they tried to. But that door was locked. As they were trying to get it open, thinking it was the correct door, the perpetrators ran into the alley and fired on the policemen. Their backs -

Q. Whose backs?

A. The policemen's backs were to the perpetrators. Two police officers were killed and two were wounded.

Q. Have the perpetrators been apprehended?

A. To date, one has. The rest have not.

He'd been suspended with half pay for six months but he quit the force a week before reinstatement. He sat around in his suburban home, thinking about the men who'd died, thinking of the kind of jobs he ought to get, replaying the incident a hundred times then a thousand times. He stopped going to church and didn't even have the inclination to turn a bar or the bottle into his personal chapel. He spent his time with the TV, doing some security jobs, some construction work. Finally the mortgage payments on the trim suburban split-level outran their savings and with Sarah on the way they'd no choice but to come back to New Lebanon.

Feed and grain, planning and sawing, teaching… Long, long days. Then he's seen the ad in the paper for a deputy and he'd applied.

After Bill and Diane had moved back to New Lebanon he had five years with his father before the stroke. Five full years of opportunities to talk about what happened at the Fairway Mall. But what the two men spent those years on was pheasant loads and movies and carburetors and memories of their wife and mother.

One day, a month before the blood clot swapped a clear, complicated mind for one that was infinitely simple, Corde was crouched down, sharpening a mower blade in his father's garage. He heard the footsteps and he looked up to see the old man standing hunched and pale, licking the top of a Dannon yogurt container. His father said, "'bout time to deal with St Louis, wouldn't you say?" Corde stood, his knee popping and pushing him oh-so-slowly upward. He turned to face his father and cleared his throat. The elder Corde said solemnly, "Ten bucks says they'll cave to New York." Corde rolled grass flecks off his hands and dug into his pocket for a bill. "You're on," he said. His father wandered into the yard while Corde turned back to the iron blade in complete remorse.

Q. If someone else had read the number of the door to the policemen in the alley, the mishap might not have happened. Or if you had taken your time and read the number slowly?

A. (garbled)

Q. Could you repeat that please.

A. The mishap probably would not have happened, no.

He'd never told anyone in New Lebanon. The facts were there, somewhere in his file in St Louis. If Steve Ribbon or Hammerback Ellison or Jim Slocum or Addie Kraskow of the Register wanted to go to the trouble to look it up, they would find everything. But the New Lebanon Sheriffs Department simply glanced at his résumé and believed the truthful statement that the reason for termination from his last job was that he'd quit. They believed too his explanation that he had grown tired of fighting city riverfront crime and had wanted to move back to his peaceful home town. After all, he had a six-year-old son and a baby on the way.

Who'd think to look beyond that?

Another snap, nearby. Corde turned. The animal materialized. A buck. He saw two does not far off. He loved watching them. They were elegant in motion but when they stopped – always as if they were late for something vitally important and had time to give you just a brief look – they were completely regal. Corde wished he was a poet. He wanted badly to put into words what he felt at this moment: The knowledge in the deer's eyes.

The melting sun.

The unseen movement of the woods at dusk.

The total sorrow when you fall short of the mark that you know God's set for you.

With a single crack of wet wood, the deer were gone. Bill Corde scooted off the rock and slowly made his way to his twentieth-century home, with his pickup truck and television, and his family.

2

Special to the Register – Two days after the slaying of a second Auden University co-ed by the man known as the "Moon Killer", John Treadle, Harrison County Supervisor, ordered Sheriffs Department deputies to step up nighttime patrols around New Lebanon:

"But," he said, "I can't emphasize enough that girls shouldn't travel by themselves after dark until we catch this man."

The body of the student, Emily Rossiter, a resident of St Louis, was found floating in Blackfoot pond on the night of the full moon. She had been struck on the head and left to drown. The body was reportedly mutilated.

"We're devoting a hundred and ten percent of our time to solving these cult murders," Steven Ribbon, Sheriff of New Lebanon, said last night. He added that he had taken the unusual step of asking an outside consultant to assist in the investigation.

"This man has a number of years of homicide investigation experience with a big city police department and he's already provided some real helpful insights into the workings of this killer's mind."

Citing security, Sheriff Ribbon would give no details on this consultant's identity or exact role in the case.

The Chamber of Commerce estimates that the series of murders has cost the town one million dollars in lost revenues.

Her biggest fear is that somehow her father has scared off the Sunshine Man.

It is now a couple of days in a row that her daddy has gotten up late, had breakfast with them and then been home before supper. But worse than that he had gone for long walks in the woods behind the house, the woods where the Sunshine Man lived. Sarah considers herself an expert on wizards and she knows that they resent people who don't believe in them. Her father's certainly a person like that.

Although she's questioned Redford T. Redford at length about the wizard the bear has remained silent. She has left several presents and painstakingly written notes for the Sunshine Man in the magic circle. He has not picked them up or responded.

She has thought about running away again. But because her mother has agreed with Dr. Parker to keep her out of school for a while, Sarah is willing to postpone her escape plans. She listens to her books on tape, she looks at her picture books, she watches television, she plays with her stuffed animals.

At night Sarah sits and stares out the window. Once, when the waning moon is bright, she thinks she sees the form of a man walking through the woods. She flashes her bedside light and waves. Whoever it might be stops and looks at the house but does not respond. He seems to vanish. She stares after him until the trees begin to sway and the night sky opens up in great cartwheeling streaks of stars and planets and giants and animals, then she crawls under the blankets. She holds tight to her piece of magic quartz and, knowing the Sunshine Man may be out there, sends him a message in her thoughts.

Sarah wishes her father would start working late again. And sure enough, after just two days, she gets this wish. He's up and gone before breakfast, and home long after she's gone to bed. One morning, when he hadn't seen her for two days, her father left a note at the breakfast table for her; it sounded all stiff. Sarah sadly thinks the Sunshine Man is much smarter than her father.

She hopes the wizard will come back and make her smart. She believes he can do it. She also knows though that this will be a very hard wish to grant so she tells herself to be patient. She knows she'll have to wait just a little while longer.

Philip closed his bedroom door and immediately they were warriors once again, tall and dignified and ever correct, struggling to understand this strange dimension.

Jano looked around the room. "Your sister here?"

"Nope."

The boys who knew Philip's sister, and that was a lot of boys, did not call her "Rose" or "Rosy"; they called her "Halpern," which seemed to Philip to say everything there was to say about her.

Jano whispered urgently, "Well?"

"What?" Phathar shoved a dripping handful of popcorn from a half-gallon bag into his mouth.

He whispered, "Did you do it?" Jano's eyes were red and it looked like there was a streak of dried snot under his nose. Phathar wondered if his friend had been crying (Phathar assumed he was the only freshman boy who still cried).

Jano repeated, "The girl at the pond. Emily something. Did you?"

He ate another mouthful. "Nope."

Jano whispered, "I don't believe you."

"I didn't do it, dude."

"You wanted to fuck her so you killed her."

"I did not." With a pudgy finger Phathar worked a hull out from between an incisor and his gum.

"I am like totally freaked. What are we going to do?"

"Have some popcorn."

"You are like too much, man. She's dead too and you're like -"

"So what? You saw the way the Honons mowed down the Valanies. They just like went in with the xasers and totally mowed them down. The women and the kids, everyone."

"That's a movie."

Phathar repeated patiently, "I didn't like kill her."

"Did you find the knife?"

"I might have if I hadn't been alone."

"I couldn't make it. I told you. Maybe you didn't lose it."

"I lost it."

Jano said, "Man, we've got to get rid of everything."

"I told you, I put a destructor on the files. It's great. Here look." Phathar walked to a locked metal file cabinet. He unlocked it and pulled a drawer open. Inside were stacks of charts and drawings and files. Resting on top of them was a coil from a space heater. "Look, this is a lock switch that I got from Popular Mechanics. It's great. If you open the cabinet without shutting off the switch…" He reached inside the cabinet and pointed to two pieces of wood wound with wires pressing against each other, like a large clothespin. "… Somebody opens the drawer and it closes the circuit. The coil gets red hot in like seconds and torches everything."

"Totally excellent," Jano said with admiration. "What if it burns the house down?"

Phathar did not respond. Through the closed door, they heard Philip's father singing some old song. "Strangers in the Night."

Jano looked in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet. "What's that?" He picked up the brown purse, smeared with mud.

Phathar froze. He was in a delicate position. This was his only friend in high school; he couldn't do what he wanted to – which was to scream to him to put it back. He said simply, "It's hers."

Jano clicked it open. "The girl's? The second one! You did do it!"

Phathar reached out and closed it. "Would you just chill? I saw her but -"

"I don't see why you're denying it, man."

"- I didn't kill her."

"Why'd you keep it?"

"I don't know." Phathar in fact had wondered that a number of times. "It smells nice."

"You get over with her too?" Jano had stopped looking shocked and was curious.

"Are you deaf? Like are you totally deaf?"

"Come on, Phathar, I tell you everything. What was it like?"

"You're a fucking hatter. I followed her for a while but then I took off. There was some dude wandering around."

"Who?"

"I don't know."

"They found her in the pond. Yuck. If you did it with her your dick'll probably fall off, with that water. What's in the purse?"

"I don't know. I didn't open it." Phathar stood up and took the purse away from his friend. He put it in the file cabinet and laid another heater coil on top of it. He closed the drawer.

"I don't think that's a good place for it," Jano said.

"How come?"

"Even with the destructor it'd take a while for the leather to catch fire."

Phathar decided this might be true. He retrieved the purse. He held it out to Jano. "You take it. Throw it someplace."

"No way. I don't want to get caught with it. Why don't you burn it?"

"I can't. My dad'd whack me again. Maybe I'll hide it under the porch and some night when he's playing cards I'll burn it."

The terrible, glass-splintering crash came from the living room. The boys each stared at the dirt-smeared wall through which the sound had come. Philip dropped the purse into the empty popcorn bag and wadded it, along with some trash, into a green plastic garbage bag, which sat in the corner of this room. They stepped into the hall.

Philip's mother was on the floor, on all fours, her knees spread out, skirt up to her trim waist. The eyes in her pretty face were nearly closed and her head lolled as the muscles in her smooth arms tried to keep her shoulders from dropping to the ground. Mr. Halpern stood above her, his hands gripping the stained orange blouse, saying desperately, "It'll be all right, it'll be all right. No, no, it'll be all right."

And she was repeating louder and in a shrill soprano, "Lemmealone, lemmealone!" In her hand was a white wad of cloth. On the stained carpet was a fresher stain of vomit. The smell of sour gin was thick in the air. Philip started to cry.

"Mrs. Halpern," Jano whispered.

Philip's father looked up. "Get the fuck out of here, both of you."

Jano said, "But she's sick."

Whimpering, Philip said, "She's not sick."

"Get the fuck out!" his father shouted. "Both of you. Out out out!" He stamped his foot as if he were spooking dogs.

Philip said to Jano, "Please."

"But -"

"Please," Philip said. His friend fled outside. Staring out the front window Philip heard the scuffling of his mother's shoes. His father had lifted her into an armchair and was whispering to her. Philip walked past his parents and out the back door then he slipped under the porch.

Philip hid the bag containing the purse under a mound of soft black dirt. He rocked back and forth in the crisp dusty leaves.

Oh, he was tired.

He was tired of so much. His father wore torn T-shirts and made the handy man visit. His mother packed him greasy sandwiches for lunch – when she made his lunch – and forgot to wash the clothes. There were enemies everywhere, everywhere you looked. His sister was a 'ho, he was fat. She was Halpern, he was Philip. Phil-lip. He got a D in phys ed and a B in biology and, while another glass shattered somewhere in the house above him, a single thought centered in his head – an image of a shy young girl leaning on a lab table and telling him how brave he was while Philip stuck a needle way deep into a frog's brain then slit its belly open and watched the slick lump of a heart continue to beat on and on and on.

Bill Corde was sitting in infamous Room 121 of the Student Union. He was alone, surrounded by the now familiar scents of fatty meat, bitter paper and burnt coffee.

More students, more three-by-five cards. Today's questions were similar to last week's but they were not identical.

Today he was asking about two victims.

Corde took notes, jotting down the boxy oriental letters, but the hours were unproductive; he heard variations on what he had already learned or pointless, obscure details. "Emily wore this yoked dress a lot then one day it got stolen from the laundry room. That was just before she was killed. I mean, like the day before." Corde nodded and recorded this fact, unsure what it might mean or what he would ever do with it but afraid to let the item get away. He had this feeling often.

Many thoughts intruded on the interviews, not the least of which was a vague disquiet about Charlie Mahoney, the mysterious consultant. Ribbon had introduced them but the man had said little to Corde and been in a hurry to leave the office. Corde had not seen him since.

When Corde asked Ribbon what "real helpful insights" Mahoney had provided, picking up the sheriffs phrase from the Register, he'd been as elusive as Corde expected. "Mahoney's here as an observer is all. What I said was mostly for public relations. Trying to calm people down a little."

Well, who the hell got 'em un-calm in the first place, with all this talk of a Moon Killer?

"I don't want a civilian working on this case," Corde said.

"I know you don't," Ribbon had answered cryptically and returned to his office.

Now, in Room 121, Corde looked at his watch. Four p.m. He wandered out to the cafeteria and bought an iced coffee. He finished it in three swallows. He was eager to go home. He nearly did so but his resolve broke – or discipline won – and he stepped to the door and waved a final student inside then told the others to come back tomorrow.

It was just as well that he did not leave. This last student was the one who told him Jennie Gebben's secret.

She was round and had thick wrists and was worried about a double chin because she kept her head high throughout the interview. With that posture and the expensive flowered dress she seemed like an indulged East Coast princess.

The lazy Southern drawl disposed of that impression quickly. "I do hope I can help you, officer. It's a terrible thing that happened."

Did she know either of the murdered girls? Just Jennie. How long had she known her? Two years. Yes, they shared some classes. No, they had never double-dated.

"Do you know either Professor Sayles or Brian Okun?"

"Sorry."

"Do you know who Jennie might have been going out with?"

The fleshy neck was touched.

It reminded him compellingly of Jennie's throat.

Corde looked from the white flesh back to the paler white of his three-by-five cards.

"Well, would you be speaking of men she went out with?"

"Students, professors, anyone."

"… or girls?"

The tip of Corde's pen lowered to a card.

"Please go on."

The girl played tensely with the elaborate lace tulle on the cuff of her dress. "Well, you know 'bout Jennie's affair with that girl, don'tcha?"

After a pause he wrote "Bisexual?" in precise boxy letters and asked her to continue.

The girl touched her round pink lip with her tongue and made a circuit of Corde's face. "Just rumors. You know how it is." The plump mouth closed.

"Please."

Finally she said, "One time, the story goes, some girls were in a dorm across campus and saw Jennie in bed with another girl."

The flesh was no longer pale but glowed with fire.

"Who was this other girl?"

"I was led to believe their… position in bed made it a little difficult to see her. If you understand what I'm saying."

"Who were these girls who saw it?"

"I don't know. I assumed you knew all about this." The frown produced not a single wrinkle in her perfect skin. "You know of course about the fight she had?"

"Tell me."

"The Sunday before she died. Jennie was on the phone for a long time. It was late and she was whispering a lot but I got the impression she was talking to somebody she'd dumped. You know that tone? Like where you have to get meaner than you want to because they're not taking no for an answer. They all were carrying on and my room is right near the phone and I was going to go out and tell her to hush when I heard her say, 'Well, I love her and I don't love you and that's all there is to it.' Then crash bang she hung up."

"Loved 'her'?"

"Right. I'm sure about that."

"The call, did she make it or receive it?"

"She received it."

No way to trace. "Man or woman?"

"She sounded like she was talking to a man but maybe I'm projecting my own values. With her, I guess it could've been either. That's all I know."

"Nobody else has said anything about it."

She shrugged. "Well, did y'all ask?"

"No."

"Then that pretty much explains it, would'n you say?"

When she had gone Corde bundled his cards together and tossed them into his briefcase. He noticed that the phone booth up the hall was free and he walked quickly to it. As he stood waiting for someone to answer his call, two young men walked past lost in loud debate. "You're not listening to me. I'm saying there's perception and there's reality. They're both valid. I'll prove it to you. Like, see that cop over there?…" But at that moment T.T. Ebbans said hello and Corde never heard the end of the discussion.

He lusted for her.

What a phenomenon! He was actually salivating, his nostrils flaring as if he could smell her and he wanted more than anything to pull open her white blouse and slip a high-rider breast into his mouth.

Brian Okun said to Victoria Feinstein, "I'm thinking of doing a seminar on gender identity in the Romantic era. Would you be interested in being on the panel?"

"Interesting idea," she said, and crossed legs encased in tight black jeans.

They were sitting in the Arts and Sciences cafeteria, coffee before them. Victoria was Okun's most brilliant student. She had stormed onto campus from Central Park West and Seventy-second Street. He had read her first paper of the semester, "Gynocriticism and the Old New Left," and bolstered by her self-rising breasts and hard buttocks decided she was everything that Jennie Gebben was and considerably more.

Alas this proved too literally true however and he found with bitterness that certain aspects of her knowledge – semiotics, for instance, and South American writers (currently chic topics in the MLA) – vastly outweighed his, a discrepancy she gleefully flaunted. Okun's hampered hope vaporized one day when he saw Victoria Feinstein kiss a woman on the lips outside his classroom. Still Okun admired her immensely and spoke to her often.

It troubled him to use such a brilliant mind in this cheap way.

She said, "Why Romantic? Why not Classic?"

"Been done," he dismissed.

"Maybe," she pondered, "you could do it interstitially – the Augustan era interposed against the Romantic. You know Latin, don't you?"

"I do, mirabile dictu. But I've already outlined the program. I hope you'll think about it. I'd like the panel to be straight, gay, transvestite and transsexual."

Victoria said, "Ah, you want a cross-section?"

He laughed hard. Why oh why don't you want to sit on my cock and scrunch around?

She was courteous enough to ask the question before he had to steer her there. "Is this for Gilchrist's class?"

"Leon's? No, it's my own idea. He's out in San Francisco. Won't be back for a couple of days." Gilchrist had in fact called Okun the night before to tell him that he would be arriving in three days and had ordered Okun to prepare a draft of a final exam. Okun noted that the son of a bitch called at exactly the moment a substitute professor was delivering Gilchrist's lecture; he wanted to make certain that Okun hadn't been standing before his class.

"What's he doing out there?" she asked.

"Healing the wounds, I guess."

"How's that?" she asked.

"You know. The girl."

"The girl?"

He looked confused. "You told me, didn't you?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"What was her name? The first one who was killed. Jennie something. I thought you told me. About the two of them?"

She asked in astonishment, "Gilchrist and Jennie Gebben, they were fucking?"

"It wasn't you who told me?"

"No."

"Who was it?" He looked at the ceiling. "Don't recall. Well, anyway, I heard they were a unit."

"Poor girl," Victoria said, frowning. "Gilchrist, huh? I wouldn't have guessed Jennie and him. I heard he was an S and M pup."

Okun nodded knowingly, quelling resentment that this was the second person who seemed to know for a fact something about his own professor that he had not been aware of.

She continued, "I'm surprised at the leather. My opinion was that Gilchrist would be more of your classic postwar British pederast. You know, I think they should castrate rapists."

Okun thought for a moment. That might make another seminar. "Mutilation and Castration as Metaphor in Western Literature."

Victoria's eyes brightened. "Now there's an idea for you."

3

She wasn't sure what the vibration was. Alignment maybe. Or a soft tire.

Driving home from Auden University, Diane Corde noticed that the steering wheel seemed to shake; her engagement ring hobbled noisily on tan GM Plastic. Then she realized the station wagon was fine; it was her hand that shook so fiercely – the first time in her life that a reference to money had made her fingers tremble.

Diane was returning from a meeting with the admissions director at the Auden lab school. The woman, who looked sharp and professional (no sultry pink, no clattering bracelets, no hussy makeup), had explained the procedures. Sarah's file, which Dr. Parker had already forwarded to the school, would be reviewed by the school's special education admissions board. They would make a recommendation about placing Sarah in one of the classes or arranging for private tutoring.

"I'm sure," the woman said, "your daughter will be accepted."

Diane was grateful to tears at this news.

Then the director had consulted a sheet of paper. "Let's see… Tuition for a special education class at Sarah's level is eight thousand four hundred. Now we -"

"A year?" Diane had interrupted breathlessly.

The woman had smiled. "Oh, don't worry. That's not per semester. That's for the entire year."

Oh don't worry.

Eight thousand four hundred.

Which exceeded Diane's annual salary when she'd been receptionist for Dr. Bullen, the oldest living gynecologist in New Lebanon. "Does insurance ever cover it?"

"Medical insurance? No."

"That's a little steep."

"Auden's lab school is one of the best in the country."

"We just bought a new Frigidaire."

"Well."

Diane broke the silence. "Dr. Parker mentioned a private tutor is an option. Three times a week, she said. How much would that be?"

The woman had cheerfully parried that the total fee for a tutor would be two hundred seventy dollars a week.

Oh don't worry.

Diane had smoothed her navy blue skirt and studied a cleft of wrinkle in the cloth. She felt totally numb; maybe bad news was an anesthetic.

"So you see," the admissions director had said, smiling, "the school is in fact the better bargain."

Well, Diane Corde didn't see that at all. Bargain? What she saw was everybody taking advantage of her little girl's problem – all of them, Dr. Parker the harlot and this pert L.A. Law admissions director and the prissy tutors who weren't going to do anything but get Sarah's brain back up to the level where God intended it to be all along.

"Well, I'll have to talk to my husband about it."

"Just let me say, Mrs. Corde, that I think we can be of real help to your daughter. Sarah has the sort of deficit that responds very well to our method of education."

Well, now, miss, hearing that makes me feel just jim-dandy.

"Shall I start Sarah's application? There's no fee to apply."

Oh, a freebie!

"Why not?" she had asked, wholly discouraged.

Pulling now into the driveway of her house Diane waved to Tom, standing scrubbed and ruddy beside his Harrison County Sheriffs Department cruiser. After the two threatening Polaroids and the second murder, he had taken to marching a regular line around the backyard at various times throughout the day. He was also armed with his wife's opera glasses, which, he explained, she bought for when they went to Plymouth Playhouse Dinner Theater. With these he'd often scan the forest for hostile eyes. He looked silly, a beefy red-cheeked young man holding the delicate plastic mother-of-pearl glasses, but Diane was grateful for the effort. There had been no more threats and the sense of violation had almost vanished.

"Coffee, Tom?"

He declined, gosh-thanks, and turned back to the woods.

Jamie walked outside, slipping a T-shirt on over his thin muscular body. He was the epitome of grace and she enjoyed watching him climb on his bike and balance while he pulled on his fingerless riding gloves.

"Where're you off to?"

"Practice."

"When's the match?"

"Saturday."

"How's your arm?"

"It's like fine. No problem."

"Garage looks nice."

"Thanks. I did the windows. They were totally gross."

"You did the windows?" she asked in mock astonishment.

"Very funny. And I found the old Frisbee."

"We'll play tonight, you and me."

"Yeah, okay. We oughta get a glow-in-the-dark one. Gotta go." He pushed the bike forward without using his hands and coasted down the driveway as he closed the Velcro fasteners on his gloves. She watched him lean forward and his muscular legs start to pedal. He's going to be a heartbreaker.

Inside the house Sarah was playing with a stuffed animal. After Diane had delivered the news that the school was over for the year, the girl glowed with Christmas-morning happiness. This bothered Diane, who saw in the girl's face the look of a spoiled child who finally got her way.

"The Sunshine Man… He came back."

"Did he now?" Diane asked absently.

"He saved me from Mrs. Beiderbug."

"Sarah. I've told you about that."

"Mrs. Beidersora." She sprang up and ran into the kitchen.

Diane hung up her jacket. "Who's the Sunshine Man again? Which one's he?"

"Mommy." She was exasperated. "He's the wizard who lives in the woods. I saw him again today. I thought he'd gone away but he came back. He cast a spell on Mrs. Beider -" She grinned with coy nastiness. "- Beidersorc. And I don't have to go back to school."

"Just for the term. Not forever."

Although the girl's insistence that magical characters were real frequently irritated Diane, at the moment she wished that she herself had a Sunshine Man to watch over her shoulder. Or at least to cast a spell and cough up some big bucks for special ed tuition. As she looked through the mail she asked, "Your father call?"

"Naw."

Diane went into the kitchen and took four large pork chops from the refrigerator. She chopped mushrooms and sauteed them with oregano and bread crumbs then let the filling cool while she cut pockets in the pork.

"You sure your father didn't call? Maybe Jamie took a message."

"Mom. Like there's the board. Do you see any messages?"

"You can answer me decently," Diane snapped.

"Well, he didn't call."

Diane carefully cut a slit in the last pork chop.

"I'm not going back to school ever again," Sarah announced.

"Sarah, I told you, it's just for -"

The girl walked upstairs, singing cheerfully to herself, "Never ever again… The Sunshine Man, the Sunshine Man…"

Children. Sometimes…

The young woman said, "I believe it was Leon Gilchrist."

Cynthia Abrams was a thin sophomore, smart and reasonable and unpretentious. Corde liked her. She had long shimmering dark hair, confident eyes, earrings in the shape of African idols. She was a class officer and the campus director of ACT-UP. She was sitting forward, elbows on the low desk in the Student Union, holding a cigarette courteously away from him while she answered his questions.

Corde glanced down and found the professor's name on a card. A note said that Leon Gilchrist had been in San Francisco at the time of the first killing and had not returned as of three days ago. He put a question mark next to the name.

"And you think they had an affair?"

"I don't know for sure. I heard several rumors that she'd gone out with professors over the past couple of years. One or two she was pretty serious about. Then I recently heard Professor Gilchrist's name mentioned."

"Who did you hear this from? About Gilchrist?"

"I don't remember."

"Do you know if there was any bad feelings between them?"

"No. I don't really know anything at all. I'm just telling you what I heard."

Corde glanced at his open briefcase and saw the picture of Jennie Gebben. "Do you know of anyone who would have wanted to hurt Jennie or her roommate?"

"No, I sure don't. But I want to say something else. You seem like a reasonable man and I hope I can speak frankly to you."

"Go right ahead."

"The gay community at Auden is not popular in New Lebanon."

This was hardly news to Bill Corde, who had been on a panel to recommend to the state legislature that consensual homosexual activity be removed from the penal code as a sexual crime – both because he thought it was nobody's business but the participants' and because criminalizing it skewed statistics and confused investigations. He had never heard such vicious words as those fired back and forth in the Harrison County Building public meeting room during the panel discussions.

She asked, "You know Jennie was bisexual?"

"Yes, I do."

"That fact hasn't come out in the press yet but if it does I'm concerned it will get mixed up with, you know, cult or Satanic aspects of the murders. I abhor the linking of homosexuality and violence."

"I don't see why that connection would be made," Corde said. "It certainly won't come from my department…"

Somewhere in Corde's mind was a soft tap as a thought rose to the surface.

"Was Emily…" What was the proper terminology? He felt on some eggshells here. "Was she a lesbian?"

"I don't know. I didn't know her very well."

"You think Jennie might have been targeted because she was bisexual?"

"A bias-related crime?"

"We don't have those laws on the books here."

She lifted a coy eyebrow. "I graduate in two years. I hope that will have changed by then."

"I'm thinking more in terms of helping me with a motive."

"I suppose. There's always the possibility of antigay violence in areas that are less…" Now she trod lightly. "… enlightened than some."

Corde considered this motive but he couldn't carry it very far. He wanted all of his cards in front of him. He wanted to read what other students and professors had told him. He wanted more information about Emily.

He said, "This has been very helpful. Anything else you can think of?"

"There is one thing I'd like to say."

"What's that?"

"My roommate, Victoria, and I were having this discussion last night?"

"Yes?"

"She brought up the idea of surgically castrating rapists. Would you be interested in signing a petition to send to the state legislature?"

Corde said. "I better not. In the Sheriffs Department, we're not supposed to be too, you know, political."

He couldn't recall the last time he felt so unwelcome.

"Detective, I think it's pretty clear that you're dealing with some kind of crazy person. Some psychopath. He is not a student, it is clearly not a professor. Everyone on this faculty has the highest credentials and the most impeccable background. Your rumormongering is despicable."

"Yes'm," Corde said to Dean Catherine Larraby. "I was asking about Leon Gilchrist? You didn't really answer my question."

"You're not suggesting that he had anything to do with the deaths of these two girls?"

"Has he ever been in any trouble with students? Here or at another school?"

The dean whispered, "I'm not even going to dignify that with an answer. Leon Gilchrist is a brilliant scholar. We're lucky to have him on staff and -"

"I've heard from a number of sources that Jennie had relations with at least one professor. One person I interviewed thinks Gilchrist might be him."

"Professors at Auden are forbidden to date students. Doing so is grounds for dismissal. Who told you?"

"I told her I'd respect her confidence."

She looked for a way to pry this information out of him. Not finding one she said, "Impossible. It's a vicious rumor. Leon isn't well liked -"

"No?" A tiny note went onto a stiff white card.

"Don't make anything out of that," she snapped. "Professors can be like children. Leon has an infantile streak in him, which he has trouble controlling. He makes enemies. People as brilliant as he breed rumors. You didn't answer my question. Is he a suspect?"

"No."

"He was reading a paper at the Berkeley Poetry Conference at the time of the killings," she said.

"Did you know that before or afterward?"

"I beg your pardon?" she asked cautiously.

"I'm curious if after Jennie was killed you suspected something about Professor Gilchrist and checked on his whereabouts at that time."

The eyes went to steel cold. "I have nothing further to say to you, Detective."

"If you could -"

"She was killed by a psycho!" The dean's shrill voice tore through the room. "The same one who vandalized the grade school and churches. The same one who murdered Emily. If you'd taken this psychopath seriously, instead of digging into banal college gossip, Emily would still be alive today."

"We have to explore all angles, Dean."

"I'll guarantee you that Leon did not have relations with Jennie and he didn't have anything to do with her death or Emily's. Now if you'll excuse me I'm in the midst of emergency funding meetings, which by the way are necessary largely because you people haven't caught this madman."

When Corde had left the office Dean Larraby snatched up the phone and snapped to her secretary, "Is Gilchrist back from the Coast? When's he expected?… Who's his teaching assistant?" Her foot tapped in anger while she waited. "Who, Okun? Give him a call and tell him I want to see him. Tell him it's urgent."

Charlie Mahoney was pretty tired of New Lebanon. The incident that had cemented this opinion was a bad meal at Ewell's Diner – particularly bad meat loaf (gristle), extraordinarily bad mashed potatoes (paste) and moderately bad bourbon (oily). This cuisine was followed by an early evening in the motel room where he was now lounging in front of a small TV that was not hooked up to cable. The exact instant when boredom became loathing occurred during a Channel 7 commercial break – four straight minutes of grating ads for products like hog feed and cultivators and used cars and kerosene.

Who the fuck buys kerosene from a TV ad?

He lay on the sagging bed and looked up at the stucco ceiling. Stucco. Who invented stucco? And why would anybody put it on a ceiling where you had to look at it all night long because there was nothing else to do? How many college sluts had lain here on this bed with their legs in the air and stared at this ceiling thinking stucco who the fuck invented stucco Jesus when is this son of bitch going to finish?…

When Mahoney's thoughts got tired of Midwest decor they ambled over to Richard Gebben.

Mahoney, not a man with much heart to spare for anyone, least of all an employer, had sat with perplexed but genuine sympathy as he watched Richard Gebben absently drive the toy Christmas truck back and forth on his desk, back in St Louis.

Gebben Pre-Formed We Fabricate the World.

"Jennie's mother, I don't know when she's going to come out of it. She may never. She doesn't cry anymore. She doesn't do anything but sometimes she has these, I don't know, bursts of energy, Charlie. She'll be lying in bed then she leaps up and has to polish the silver. The silver, Charlie. For Christsake, we have a maid."

A jet had begun its takeoff run and the tenor roar filled the beige office. The DC-10 was well over Illinois before Gebben spoke again.

"Jennie," he had said, addressing Mahoney, not the spirit of his daughter.

He had proceeded to speak about reputation. About the media, about misunderstandings. He had spoken about troubling discoveries. Then he paused and the truck stopped rolling and as he stared out the window at a tall gray McDonnell Douglas hangar Richard Gebben spoke about his daughter the whore.

To Mahoney – a man who had seen evidence of just about every sexual act humankind could think of- the fact that Jennie slept with women as well as men was unremarkable. What was a little boggling, at least in the age of AIDS, was the sheer volume of both men and women she'd had between her legs.

"Charlie, I don't care what you have to do. This fellow Corde is going to be taking her life apart. He's already been looking for diaries and letters. I can't let that happen, Charlie. You know what happens in investigations like this. They look at every little detail of somebody's life. They make up stories about people. The newspapers just love that crap. You know, Charlie. It happens all the time. You saw it happen."

No, Mahoney had never seen it happen. What he saw happen was Ismalah R dissed Devon Jefferies who went home to his crib on South Halsted, picked up his MAC-10 then came a'calling to spray Ismalah R with forty or fifty rounds and the asshole just died where he stood and nobody made up a single fucking thing about him at all.

That was what Mahoney had seen.

And what he saw now was a pathetic Richard Gebben with his pitted face and moist eyes, trying to save what little remained of his daughter.

Well, that was how Gebben had explained Mahoney's mission to New Lebanon, and ten thousand dollars had bought Mahoney's unwavering acceptance of it along with a generous number of encouraging nods and mutterings of sympathy thrown in.

But Mahoney knew there was more.

Gebben had taken many business trips to places that had a light market share of the Gebben Pre-Formed steel sheeting business, if any at all. Unnecessary trips. To Acapulco, Aspen, Puerto Vallarta, Palm Beach. And he was always accompanied by a sultry blond secretary or young marketing assistant or steno typist. This was the role model he had been for his daughter. It was a lesson she had learned, and learned well, and maybe it had killed her.

And, who knew? Maybe Gebben himself had even come to visit Jennie late at night, Mommy fast asleep…

As a cop Mahoney had seen a good deal of emotional pain. He remembered walking up three flights of shit-stinking stairs in a tenement, knocking on the door to deliver some news to a young woman. She listened, nodding vigorously as she held her daughter, who had little plastic toys tied into her hair where pigtails sprouted from her scalp – tiny trains, soda bottles, dogs, dolls. The woman saying, "I unnerstand, I unnerstand," and Mahoney thinking, Understand? You poor bitch. There's nothing complicated here. Your old man just got blown away in a drug deal…

But Mahoney knew of course that it was complicated.

So complicated she would never unnerstand it. As complicated as Gebben's reasons for wanting his daughter's secrets to stay hidden forever. Reasons that Charlie Mahoney, lying on a lumpy bed in front of a flickering Ralston Purina commercial, would never completely figure out.

Not that he needed to. He had his ten thousand dollars and he had a specific job.

Which arrived at that moment in the form of Steve Ribbon, who knocked and called, "Hey, Charlie? I'm a little late, sorry. You in there, Charlie?"

"Right with you."

Mahoney let him wait for a full minute then stretched and stood and opened the door.

Ribbon grinned shyly like a police cadet on graduation day. The sheriff, who had ten years on Mahoney, looked like a youngster and Mahoney thought, Damn if these small towns didn't preserve you real well.

"Steve," he said ebulliently, "how you doing?"

They shook hands. Ribbon walked in, saying, "I like that. The way you kept your hand in your jacket when you opened the door."

"Habit."

"You looked pretty smooth. Cabrini projects, you were telling me the other night. War zone. Brung a present. You want a drink?"

"Sure."

Ribbon poured John Begg scotch into squooshy plastic hotel cups. They tapped them together and sipped. Ribbon was in uniform and when Mahoney glanced at the top of the sheriffs head Ribbon took off his Smokey hat and dropped it down on the dresser.

"You're not getting tired of our little town, are you?"

"Tired?" Mahoney grunted. "It's heaven on earth." He slipped off his jacket. He hung it up and poured more scotch.

Ribbon's eyes slipped to the large dark gray automatic pistol riding high on Mahoney's right hip.

"Steve, I happened to have a talk with Deputy Ebbans, Jim Slocum and some of the other boys on the case today. I sounded them out about how the investigation's going." Mahoney's eyes tunneled into Ribbon's, which danced a little, looked briefly back then danced away again. This was fun. It was the way Mahoney used to look at perps and he missed doing it. "There're a couple of things I've got to talk to you about."

Ribbon responded exactly the same way the perps had – fiercely studying the scenery behind Mahoney as if memorizing the wall or window or front door.

"But first off. Good news. I just talked to Mr. Gebben."

"Did you now?"

"And you know that reward I was talking about?"

"Reward?" Ribbon frowned. Then he nodded. "Right, yeah, I recall you mentioning that."

"Well, he's authorized me to release some of it now."

"We haven't caught anybody yet, Charlie." Ribbon snorted a laugh.

"Well, I've told him you're doing a good job and he wants to show his support."

"That's real kind of him, Charlie."

"He's a generous man. But I'm afraid we've got to talk about something. Kind of an unpleasant situation."

"Unpleasant."

Ribbon licked the rim of his cup and Mahoney let him fret for a delectable minute before he said, "Again, I don't want to be imposing myself. You're the boss here, Steve."

"I value your opinion. You're surely more of an expert than any of us." Ribbon seemed at sea and took refuge in the scotch. He drank long and busied himself with pouring another glass.

"I hate to say anything."

"Naw, go ahead, Charlie."

"Well, it's about this Bill Corde."

Corde pulled into the Town Hall driveway and saw three deputies standing in front of a new Nissan Pathfinder 4X4. It was a beauty. Corde admired it. He saw nothing wrong with buying foreign as long as the quality was better than American. He had a little problem paying foreign, having testdriven a Pathfinder himself; he knew he was looking at over twenty thousand dollars worth of transport.

Corde turned his attention away from the truck and back to the lardy figure of Dodd Humphries he was helping out of the squad car and through the parking lot. As he passed the truck Corde said to the men, "Who's the proud father?"

"Steve bought her."

Corde laughed in genuine surprise. "Steve Ribbon?"

"Surely did. Walked right into the dealership and drove out this morning."

"Hell you say. He was gonna drive that Dodge till it dropped." Corde looked at the shimmering chrome and metallic-flecked burgundy paint and he said to Lance Miller, "He's gone and set a bad precedent. Now everybody's gonna want their trucks with all cylinders running."

They entered the Sheriffs Department wing. Half the complement was out inspecting the sheriffs new wheels. Jim Slocum was looking at a handful of letters. Corde assumed they were more of the worthless confessions and tip letters that accompany any publicized investigation.

"Dodd, you can't keep doing this," Corde said to his prisoner.

"Doing what?" the man asked drowsily.

The man's Toyota pickup had sheared a leg off the Purina feed billboard on 116 and dropped a painted sixty-foot Hereford on her black-and-white rump. Miller took him into the lockup in the back of the office. When he returned Corde looked up from the arrest report. "Two point four. He's more than legally drunk. I do believe he's legally dead."

Miller said, "Well, he's legally barfing and he's got bits of windshield falling out of his skivvies. It's all over the floor."

Corde said, "Give him some paper towels and make him clean it up. Nobody should be drinking like that on a weekday morning."

"He'll lose his license this time," Miller said.

"Hardly matters," Corde answered. "That was his last truck."

Steve Ribbon appeared in the doorway and looked at Corde. "Talk to you for a minute, Bill."

Corde followed him into his office and the sheriff shut the door. Ribbon sat down and expanded his cheeks like a blowfish's body and started to bounce a Ticonderoga number two off the drum of his skin. Corde decided it might be a long conversation and sat down in the chair opposite the sheriffs desk.

"Bill…" The pencil stopped being a drumstick and became a Flash Gordon rocket crash-landing on the desk. "Damn this bureaucracy, Bill."

Corde waited.

"County and state and everybody."

"Okay, what's up, Steve?"

"I got a call from Ellison."

"Uh-huh."

"Bill, this is a damn difficult thing to say to you."

Corde laughed without humor. "Then spit it out fast."

Ribbon said, "The county's taking over the Gebben and Rossiter cases."

It took several seconds for the fire to burn across Corde's cheek. "The county."

"T.T.'s going to be heading her up."

"Well, Steve, legally, I suppose, the county can take over any murder investigation it wants to. But the point is it's never -"

"Bill."

"The point is it's never happened before. All right. I'm a little angry. That's what you're hearing. I don't think we've done anything to make Ellison feel this way."

"It was the situation at the dorm."

"What situation?"

Ribbon surveyed the rocket pencil's crash site. "They think you burned her letters and her diary, Bill."

Corde said nothing.

"They're thinking it was curious you flew to St Louis so fast after the killing. When you didn't find anything there you went to her dorm room and took them and burned it all up. Don't look that way, Bill. They think you were trying to cover up something between you and her. There'll be an inquest next month and you're off the case till it's over."

4

Wynton Kresge's great-great-great-grandfather, whose name was Charles Monroe, had been a slave, one of two, on a small farm near Fort Henry, Tennessee. The story goes that when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on New Year's Day in 1863 Monroe went to his master and said, "I am sorry to tell you this, Mr. Walker, but there is a new law that says you can't own slaves anymore, including us."

Walker said, They did that in Nashville?

Monroe answered, "No, sir, they did that in the capital, that is to say, Washington, B.C."

"Blazes," Walker said, and added that he'd have to look into it. Because both he and his wife were illiterate they had to ask someone to tell them more about this law. Their charming innocence was demonstrated by their choice of Abigail, the Walkers' second slave, to confirm the news. She did so by reading from an outspoken abolitionist penny sheet, which printed the text of the Proclamation while avoiding an inconvenient discussion of Lincoln's jurisdiction to free slaves located in the Confederacy.

"Damnation, he's right," Walker said. Then he wished Monroe luck and said by any chance you be interested in staying on for pay and Monroe said he'd be happy to and they negotiated a wage and room and board and Monroe kept on working on the Walker farm until he married Abigail. The Walkers gave them their wedding and Monroe named his first son Walker.

Family history.

And probably as embellished and half-true as any. But what Wynton Kresge thought was most interesting was how his children responded to the story. His eldest son, Darryl, eighteen, was horrified that he had been descended from slaves and never wanted the fact mentioned. Kresge felt bad the boy was so ashamed and grumbled that since he was black and had grown up in the United States and not on the Ivory Coast, how come that was such a shock?

Kresge's eldest daughter, Sephana, sixteen, on the other hand often talked about Monroe's plight. Which was how she referred to it. Plight. She hated Monroe for going back to work for Walker. She hated him for not putting a Minié ball in his master's head and torching the farm. Sephana had posters of Spike Lee and Wesley Snipes on her wall. She was beautiful. Kresge had put all serious talks with his daughter on hold for a few years.

Kresge's fifth child, named after the ancestor in question, was eight and he loved the story. Charles often wanted to act it out, insisting that Kresge take the role of Mr. Walker, while Charles did an impersonation of someone probably not unlike his namesake. Kresge wondered what his youngest son, Nelson, aged two, would say about their ancestor when he learned the story.

These were the thoughts that kept intruding into Kresge's mind as he sat trying to read in the massive bun-buster swivel chair. He felt all stifled and bouncy with nervous energy so he stood up and walked to the window in the far corner of his office. He reached out and rested his hands on the windowsill and did half a dozen lazy-boy push-ups then twelve more and twelve more after that until he smelled sweat through his shirt.

The window overlooked not the quad but a strip of commercial New Lebanon, storefronts and flashing trailer signs and a chunk of the satellite dish on the Tavern. He was anxious and his muscles quivered from using them the wrong way, in a soft office, in a soft university, a soft white university, where you had to keep your temper and give reasons and all the suspects were good students and were trying hard and were just out for some fooling 'round.

He sat on the windowsill, his huge shoulders slumped.

Thinking of his ancestor (perhaps because Walker had ultimately gotten his freedom) had put Wynton Kresge in mind of his essential problem – he was not what he wanted to be.

Which was a cop.

He would be a cop in Des Moines. He would be a cop in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. In Sandwich, Illinois. He'd be a cop taking tolls on the interstate if they let him spend a good portion of the time cruising around in a souped-up four-barrel Dodge, tagging speeders and hunting down child molesters and stopping DUIs.

What was ironic – no, what was bitterly mean – was that every day Kresge got résumés from cops all over the country. From real COPS! They wanted to work for him. Dear Sir: As a law enforcement officer of ten years standing, I am seeking a position in private security services and would like to be considered for any position you might have open…

Knock me upside the head. I mean, this is too much!

Kresge would have dropped down on his massive, linebacker knees to kiss the police academy graduation ring of any one of those applicants and trade jobs in a minute. Gold shields, GLA supervisors, Ops-Coordinators, portable patrolmen, CS technicians. They all wanted to sit in Kresge's cracked leather chair and swivel back and forth and spend the three hours between start of business and lunch deciding how to allocate guards for the homecoming game.

And what did Wynton Kresge want to do but walk a beat?

He wanted to drive an RMP (remote mobile patrol, a squad car to everybody else; Kresge had learned this), he wanted to kick in doors of murder suspects, he wanted to pin drug dealers up against jagged brick walls and scream at them: WHERE'S THE STASH? (Was that what they called it? He'd learned a lot but there was much he had not learned.)

He had a very real problem however, Wynton Kresge's first goal in life was to be a cop. But his other goal was to make sure his salary exceeded his age. He now made fifty-three thousand dollars a year (being forty-two he was proud of this accomplishment). He was therefore in the Loop. Hooked. Hung up. Wynton Kresge received a salary not unattainable by senior detectives or police administrators in large cities but a complete rainbow for a rookie. It'd be back to school at no pay then a grunt pulling twenty, twenty-five even with overtime. Kresge alone would be able to cope with a career change of that magnitude. Kresge married might be able to.

But not Wynton Kresge father of seven. He loved cops but he also loved being a good father. He thought about reeducating them. He thought about having a family conference and telling them they were going to have to buckle down. Dad was about to take a fifty percent cut in salary and become a cop. (Man, he could taste the silence in the living room after dropping that news.)

So he watched Miami Vice reruns and led his men in drills for dealing with students who'd gone ED (the cop word for emotionally disturbed) and with demonstrators who might try to burn down the stadium (none so far) and he kept his thirteen-shot 9mm automatic loaded and ready on his hip waiting for the chance to draw down on a crazed assault-rifle-wielding sniper (none of them either), picking him off from fifty yards on the knoll of the quad.

This was all Wynton Kresge had for police work.

This, and thinking a lot about the murders of Jennie Gebben and Emily Rossiter, which is what he had been doing most of this hot afternoon. He now walked to his desk and balanced a book on his hand then flipped it lightly in the air as if he were tossing a coin to help him make a choice. That was in fact exactly what he was doing and when he caught the book, cover up, Kresge walked abruptly out of his office.

She died two weeks ago tonight. It took me all of fourteen days to lose the case.

Corde spent five minutes looking for change in front of the vending machines, waiting for the jolts of anger that never came. He dropped in thirty-five cents and pushed coffee milk and sugar. The steaming liquid poured in a loud stream into a fragile cardboard cup. It sounded exactly like a man taking a leak.

T.T. Ebbans walked up next to him, digging in his pockets. Corde held out a handful of change. Ebbans picked out some and bought himself a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. "I'm sorry, Bill."

Corde sipped the coffee. It tasted salty. The machine's spigot dispensed both coffee and chicken bouillon.

"This's real bushwah. I don't know what's going on. What'd Ribbon say?"

"I'm off the case. He's going to fight the inquest. But I hardly believe him. He didn't fight worth diddly to keep me from getting the boot."

"The burnt letters?"

"Yup."

"Did anybody see you take them? They have a witness? Any fingerprints? What's their probable cause?"

Corde said, "We're at the witch-hunt stage now, T.T. The due process comes later - after my name's been drug through the dirt."

After they find out about St Louis. When it'll be too late.

When Ebbans spoke again, after a pause, the flinch in his voice was unmistakable. "Hammerback ordered me to look into every escape and recent release from the hospital at Gunderson."

"I've heard this before." Corde shook his head.

Ebbans continued. "Yep and then talk to school counselors and psychiatrists in town here and see if they had any patients with, you know, dangerous tendencies."

"They won't say anything. It's all privileged. Hammerback oughta know that."

"There was some mention of it in a book that Ribbon keeps loaning to people."

Corde pointed in the general direction of Blackfoot Pond. "Well, Emily was Jennie's roommate. It's pretty damn odd for a cult killer to pick her for the second victim, wouldn't you say?"

"I just tell what I been told."

"I know that, T.T."

Ebbans took a long time staring at the copy of the Register sitting in the lunchroom. The front page had a headline: Terror Continues with Stapleton Girl Cult Threat.

"What's that?" he asked, pointing to the story.

"Turned out to be the boyfriend she dumped. But the paper had to, you know, put it in terms of the Moon Killer. Damn. Good God damn – Well, the case's yours now, T.T. I told you what I found most recent, about Jennie having that girlfriend and a fight with somebody who wasn't too happy about it. And about them maybe getting killed because they were gay. Oh, and don't forget Gilchrist. He could tell us some good stuff about Jennie."

"I don't know. Word is we gotta concentrate a hundred percent on the cult thing. Forget the university connection, forget her personal life. Those're orders."

Corde closed his eyes for a moment, rubbed them. "Son of a gun, this's great. First I lose the investigation. Then it's forget the school. Then they don't want to hear that the victim might've had a girlfriend… I don't know what's going on, T.T. The biggest problem in this case isn't the killer, it's us. It's the good guys."

"Seems that way."

Corde poured the coffee out then said, "You know, I was thinking. You're in a tough spot."

"How's that?"

"Let's say it's what you and me think, that it's not a psycho. That'll mean a lot of wasted time and a lot of panic and news stories about the department's going in the wrong direction. You're walking point on this whole case."

"Well that's true, Bill. I hope you won't be offended if I tell you that if it turns out right -"

"You'll be in the catbird's seat, and more power to you. But with Ellison and Ribbon right beside you especially come November."

"I hear what you're saying. But I just want to get that guy, whoever he is. That's all I care about. I'm no good at this politics stuff. It's like people're using those girls' deaths for themselves. They're twisting things around. Makes me sick."

Ebbans finished his candy and rolled the wrapper into a tiny wad, pitched it out. He looked around and said in a low voice, "I know you're off the case and everything and you'll be doing a bang-up job keeping the roads free of gin-drunk felons but since you're giving me all your notes and leads it's only fair I give you something in return."

"What's that?"

"I told you somebody put the kibosh on the school side of the case? The order came from Ribbon and Hammerback. But you know where they got the word?"

"Sure, yeah, I know." Corde grimaced. "Dean Larraby."

"Nope," Ebbans said. "It was a friend of yours. Randy Sayles."

Corde considered this. "Well, well, well. That's nice to know… But you didn't hear me say that."

Ebbans touched his ear. "Deaf as a mounted trout."

As he walked out of the vending room Bill Corde stepped right into the broad form of Wynton Kresge. "Oh, sorry," Corde said pleasantly, and smiled before he remembered he was mad at the security chief.

Kresge blinked and started to smile back before he recalled he too was mad. He ignored Corde and turned back to where he'd been, standing in Jim Slocum's doorway, holding a book open and pointing to a passage.

"Yessir, Chief," Slocum was saying to Kresge. "We've pretty much got it under control. But I appreciate your concern."

"What I'm saying is, you ought to read this…" Kresge sounded like he was arguing with a belligerent waitress.

Slocum said formally, "We've got ourselves a pretty demanding situation, Chief, as you can well imagine…"

Corde left the office. He got into his squad car and started the engine. Wynton Kresge came out and walked towards his Olds, which was parked two empty spaces from Corde's cruiser. Kresge's was nice-looking, new. Everybody seemed to have a new car but Corde. Kresge flung the book into the front seat then opened the door. He got in and started the engine. The two men sat twenty feet apart in their cars, staring straight ahead as their engines idled.

A very strained Bill Corde shut off the engine, paused a moment then walked over to Kresge. "Talk to you?"

Kresge shut off his engine and got out. He stood up, taller than Corde, many pounds heavier. Corde said, "About last week… What I want to say is I'm sorry. At first I didn't think you were right and I'll tell you it didn't have anything to do with you being who you are or anything like that but maybe I was the way you said and if I was I apologize."

There was a moment of fierce silence and Corde couldn't think of anything to do but stick out his hand. Kresge looked down and seemed boxed into a corner. He took the hand and shook it firmly then released it. "I'm bad-tempered sometimes."

"I get kind of caught up in these cases. They can be frustrating."

"I understand that." He nodded with a grimace toward the Sheriffs Department.

"What were you doing there?"

Kresge fished the book out of the front seat. "Finished this today. I'm not saying I'm an expert but I think you're looking for the wrong guy."

Corde looked at the spine. Psychotic Functioning Individuals: Volume Three. Criminal Behavior.

"Listen up." Kresge opened the book, found an underlined paragraph, and read: "'In a study of psychopathic and sociopathic (here used synonymously) homicides in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland conducted from 1956 to 1971, we (Irvine & Harrington 1972) concluded that the number of homicides that are in fact astrologically or astronomically driven are exceedingly rare. Of the eighty-nine psychopathic murderers convicted of their crimes, only one was in fact motivated to commit murder on the night of the full moon. In extensive interviews and examinations of records in the man's hometown of Manchester, it was learned that he had been killing animals and human victims indiscriminately, as often as five times a year for the past fifteen years, always on the night of the full moon. He had no sexual contact with his victims and indeed found such thoughts abhorrent. On the other hand, Scotland Yard reported that for the years 1961 through the present, the only years for which such data are available, as many as ten murders per year are committed on the nights of full moons, under the guise of psychopathic episodes when the criminal's true motives for the killing are revenge, robbery, rape and organized-crime expediency.'"

"You just read them that?" Corde nodded toward the office.

"Tried. They weren't interested."

"You mind if I borrow it? Make a copy of some of it? It's kind of a jawful and I'd like to read it slow."

"It'll be overdue day after tomorrow."

"I'll do it myself. Tonight." After a moment Corde asked, "If you don't think it's a psycho, who would you be looking for?"

"Nobody's been much interested in my opinion."

"Tell me. Just for the hell of it."

Kresge said, "At first I was pretty sure it was the girl's lover. A professor or a student. You should see all of what goes on here on campus. Young people on their own. Doing whatever they want. Fair game for the professors – men and women, I ought to tell you. So that was my original thought. But that was before…" Kresge's hand rose in a straight-arm salute then closed into a fist. He looked at Corde expectantly.

"I'm sorry?"

Kresge said, "You know, the knife. So now I figure it was a kid, maybe some punk."

"Uh-huh." Corde nodded absently then said, "What knife?"

"'I come in peace.'" Kresge's hand rose and closed again. "'From a land that is here and yet not here.'"

"Uh-huh. What are you talking about?" -

"Didn't you see The Lost Dimension?"

Corde said he hadn't.

"The movie. It was at the Duplex a couple months ago."

"I don't remember." Corde was thinking of some film with creatures that had red eyes. "Oh, wait, was that the one with these snake things?"

"Yeah. The Honons. They were battling the Naryans in the Lost Dimension."

"But what's…" He lifted his hand and closed his fist.

"It's the Naryan salute." Kresge snorted a baritone laugh. "Don't you remember?"

"Nup."

"You mean you guys don't know?… About the knife? Back there in that bag."

The cult knife.

"I saw it on the deputy's desk…" Kresge pointed.

"That symbol on the knife. It's from the movie?"

"You really didn't know, did you?"

Corde lifted his fingers to his eyes. "I don't believe it!" He turned toward the department. "Hell, I gotta tell 'em."

But he stopped abruptly. Staring at the ancient Town Hall he sucked on the inside of his cheek for a moment. "Wynton, you want to go for a ride?"

"I guess. Can we go in the squad car?"

"Sure. Only I can't use the siren."

"That's okay."

5

They arrived at the toy store just as it was closing. Together the two large men strode to the door. Kresge stood awkwardly with his hands on his hips while Corde knocked. After a moment the owner appeared.

"Can you open up, Owen? Important."

"I'm closed, Bill. It's suppertime."

"Open her up. We gotta talk to you. Business."

"Couldn't you call me -"

"Official, Owen."

The heavyset, mustachioed man in a plaid shirt and blue jeans opened the door. The store was dim. Costumes and helmets and monster masks lining the wall made the place seem as eerie as a wax museum at night. Some toy at the far end of the store gave off red dots of light. Corde looked around and flicked on a light. He squinted and walked to a rack he spotted just behind Owen. He stared at thirty stilettos just like the one found under Jennie Gebben.

"What are these?"

"What do you think they are?" As if Corde had asked who was George Washington.

"Owen."

He said, "They're Naryan Lost Dimension survival knives."

"What's that symbol?"

Owen sighed. "That's the insignia of the Naryan Empire." He extended his hand the way Kresge had done. "'I come in peace, from -'"

Corde said, "Yeah, yeah, I know. The movie company makes 'em?"

"They license somebody in China or Korea to make them. They sell all kinds of things. Helmets, xaser guns, Dimensional cloaks, scarves… All that stuff in the movie."

Kresge said, "He doesn't remember the movie."

"He doesn't?" Owen asked. "Like Ninja Turtles a few years ago. T-shirts. Toys. Tie-ins they're called."

"How many of these knives have you sold?"

"They're a best-seller."

Corde glanced at Kresge and said, "I somehow figured they might be. How many?"

Owen said, "That's I think my third merch rack. Why?"

"Has to do with an investigation."

"Oh."

Corde pulled out a pen and handed it and a stack of blank three-by-five cards to Owen. He asked, "Could you give me the names of everybody you've sold one of those knives to?"

"You're kidding." Owen laughed, then looked at Kresge. "He's kidding."

Kresge said, "No, I don't think he's kidding."

Owen's smile faded. "Practically every kid in New Lebanon bought one. It'd take me an hour to remember half of them."

"Then you better get started."

"Aw, Bill. It's suppertime."

"The sooner you write the sooner you eat, Owen."

Bill Corde parked the squad car in the lot next to the five-foot-high logo of the Fredericksberg Register - the name in the elaborate hundred-year-old typeface as it appeared on the paper's masthead. He and Wynton Kresge got out of the car and walked into the advertising office. The girl behind the counter snapped her gum once and hid it somewhere in her mouth. "Hi, gentlemen. Help you?"

Corde said, "Last week I called about running an ad as part of an investigation down in New Lebanon."

"Oh, that girl that was killed. I heard there was another one too."

"Did I talk to you?"

"No, that'd be my boss, Juliette Frink. She's left for the day. But I can take the order. How long you want it run?"

"A week, I think."

"What size?"

Corde looked at samples of ads under a faded Plexiglas sheet covering the counter. "What do you think, Wynton?"

Kresge said, "May as well go pretty big, wouldn't you think?"

Corde pointed to one. "I guess that size."

She looked. "That's two columns by seventy-five agates." She wrote it down. "What section of the paper would you like?"

"Oh. I hadn't thought. Front page?"

"We don't have ads on the front page."

"Well, I don't know. What's the best-read section?"

"Comics first then sports."

Corde said, "I don't think we can run an ad like this on the comic pages."

Kresge said, "But sports, you might lose women, you know."

The clerk said, "I read the sports page."

"How about the same page as the movie ads?" Kresge said.

"That sounds good," Corde said.

She wrote it up. "Juliette said you get a public-service discount. That'll be four hundred eighty-four dollars and seventy cents. Then you want us to typeset it for you that'll be another twenty-five dollars. You have cuts?"

"Cuts?" Corde blinked. He was thinking of the thin slash the rope had made on Jennifer Gebben's throat, the fishhook embedded in Emily Rossiter.

"Pictures, I mean."

"Oh. No. Just words." He wrote out copy for the ad. Corde pulled out his wallet and handed her his Visa card. She took it and stepped away to approve the charge.

What is it," Kresge said. You pay then get reimbursed?"

Corde snickered. "I guess you oughta know, I was just relieved of duty."

Kresge frowned severe creases into his wide face. "Man, they fired you?"

"Suspended."

"Why?"

"They claim I took some letters out of Jennie's room."

"Did you?" Kresge asked, but so innocently that Corde laughed.

"No," he said.

"Hardly seems fair," he said. "You mean, you're paying for this ad yourself?"

"Yup."

He wasn't though, it turned out. The clerk, embarrassed, returned. "Sorry, Officer… They kind of said you're over the limit. They wouldn't approve it." She handed the card back to him.

Corde felt the immediate need to explain. But that would involve telling her a long story about two children – one with primary reading retardation – and a psychiatrist and a new Frigidaire and roll after roll of Owens-Corning attic insulation and a boy coming up on college in a few years. "Uh…" He looked for a solution in the back of the cluttered Advertising Department.

Kresge said, "Miss, Auden has an account here, right?"

"The university? Yessir. The student affairs office. Ads for plays and sports. I was to the homecoming game last fall. That third quarter! I'll remember that all my life."

"Yes'm, that was a game and a half," Kresge said. "Can you put these on the school account?"

"You work for the school?"

"Yes, ma'am," Kresge said. "I do." He pulled out his identification card. "I'll authorize it. This's official school business."

She rummaged under the counter and pulled out a form. "Just sign this requisition here. Fourth and twelve on the Ohio State forty. Did Ladowski punt? No sir. And it wasn't even a bomb but a hand-off to Flemming. Ran all the way, zippity-zip."

"While I'm about it," Kresge said, "run that ad for two weeks and put a border around it like that one there."

"You got it."

"That's real good of you, Wynton," Corde said. "I do appreciate it."

"People keep forgetting," Kresge said quietly, "they were my girls too."

Corde spent the evening talking to the parents of boys who'd bought Naryan Dimensional stilettos. He was easygoing and jokey and careful to put them at ease. No, no, we don't suspect Todd Sammie Billie Albert not hardly why he's in Science Club with Jamie…

"I'm just," he would tell them, "getting information."

They nodded gravely and answered all his questions and smiled at his jokes.

But they were scared.

Men and women alike, they were scared.

The second killing had proved the cult theory. The words that Corde had spoken to chubby Gail Lynn Holcomb had been proved utterly false. They did have something to be scared of. As far as the good citizens of New Lebanon were concerned, Satan himself had arrived, with two murders to his name and more on his mind.

Corde went from house to house and listened to parents, without exception, account for every minute of each boy's whereabouts on the night of April 20 – a feat possible, Corde knew as a father, only if every man and woman he talked to had turned psychic.

He saw through much of the smoke of course but still found no leads.

Long about midnight Corde noticed a dusty drawer somewhere in his mind. It seemed to contain Sheriffs Department regulations and he believed, when he peered into it, that he saw something about officers who continue to engage in police work when suspended being guilty of impersonating sheriffs deputies. He peered further and saw the word "misdemeanor" though his mind was often very dark and the word might actually have been "felony."

Corde felt suddenly pummeled by fatigue. He returned home.

A county deputy, Tom's replacement for the evening, sat in the driveway. Corde thanked him and sent him home and then went into the house. His children were asleep in their rooms. His wife too. Corde was grateful for that. He wasn't looking forward to telling Diane that he'd been suspended.

The next morning he was up early. He kissed Diane, dodged a chance to give her the hard news and slipped out for a secret meeting with T.T. Ebbans. They rendezvoused outside the Sheriffs Department on the hard-packed dirt the deputies sometimes used for impromptu basketball games. They both felt like spies or undercover narcs, padding around out of sight of the department's grimy windows.

Corde told him about the knife and Ebbans slapped his head. "Doggone, I saw that movie."

"So'd I, T.T., and I'll bet every deputy in there did too. Hell," he said in a whisper, "I'll bet Ribbon's even got the comic book. I talked to maybe thirty people last night. Here's the list and my notes. Nothing real helpful."

Ebbans took the sheet. "Watch yourself, Bill."

Corde tapped his holster.

"I don't mean that. You forget you're suspended?"

"This thing's too important to leave to Ribbon. You got what I asked you for?"

Ebbans handed Corde a plastic bag containing the green computerized accounting ledger that they'd found in the burnt oil drum. "Don't lose it, Bill. I'm taking a chance as it is."

"I think I've found me an expert who can help."

"I also looked into the Gilchrist angle. Forget about it. He flew out to San Francisco to read some paper on Saturday before Jennie was murdered and he was still out there when Emily was killed. I don't think he's back even yet."

"You might want to talk to him though. He might know some of Jennie's boyfriends. Or girlfriends."

"Maybe I'll ask him on the sly." Ebbans added, "We've pulled up with a stitch on this mental-patient stuff. And the occult bookstore leads are going nowhere. This whole cult thing is looking thin as October ice. I think we oughta tell Hammerback and Ribbon."

"Hold up a while," Corde said gravely. "Next thing you know you'll be off the case too and Jim Slocumll be our new investigator in charge."

"Hey now," said Ebbans brightly, "that'd give us a chance to read Miranda to werewolves and vampires."

"Mrs. Corde? Hello. My name is Ben Breck."

Diane held the phone warily. From the man's cheerful voice, she suspected a salesman. "Yes?"

"I'm from the Auden University lab school. You were speaking to the admissions department about a tutor?"

It turned out that he was a salesman of sorts but Diane listened anyway. Breck was selling something pretty interesting.

"I'm a visiting professor from the University of Chicago. I noticed your daughter's application for admission to the Special Education Department."

And how much are you going to cost, Doctor Visiting Professor from the Big City? A hundred an hour? Two?

"Our daughter's seeing Resa Parker, a psychiatrist in town. She recommended we find a special ed tutor."

"I know of Dr. Parker." Breck then added, "I've done a lot of tutoring and I thought I might be able to help you."

"Dr. Breck, I appreciate your call but -"

"Money."

"Beg pardon?"

"You're worried about the fees at Auden. And I don't blame you one bit. They're outrageous. I wouldn't pay them myself."

My, my, a doctor with a sense of humor. How refreshing.

"It is one of my considerations," Diane admitted.

"Well, I think you'll find me fairly reasonable. I charge twenty dollars an hour."

Breck named a figure that two weeks earlier would have paled Diane; now she felt as if she'd pocketed found money. "That's all?"

"I do ask to use the results of your daughter's progress in my research. Anonymously, of course. I'm scheduled to publish my findings in the American Journal of Psychology. And I'm doing a book to help teachers recognize the problems of learning disabled children."

"Well, I don't know…"

"I hope you'll think about it, Mrs. Corde. From the application it looks like your Sarah has a lot of potential."

Diane said, "You've worked with students like Sarah before?"

"Hundreds. In the majority of cases we've cut the gap between reading and chronological age by fifty percent. Sometimes more."

"What are these techniques?"

"Feedback, monitoring, behavioral techniques. Nothing revolutionary. No drugs or medical treatment…"

"Sarah doesn't do well with medicine. She's had some bad reactions to Ritalin."

"I don't do any of that."

"Well," Diane said, "I'll discuss it with my husband."

"I hope to hear from you. I think Sarah and I can help each other a great deal."

Seven days till the half-moon. Do you know where your.357 is?

T.T. Ebbans walked into the New Lebanon Sheriffs Department, glancing at the sign, and asked, "Who put that up?"

Jim Slocum looked up from that day's copy of the Register and said, "I did."

"Could you please take it down?"

"Sure. Didn't mean anything. Just thought it'd be kind of a reminder. For morale, you know."

Ebbans sat down at his desk. On it were fifteen letters from people who claimed they knew who the killer was because they had dreamed about it (eight of them) or had psychic visions of his identity (four) or had been contacted in a seance by the victims (two). The remaining correspondence was from a man who explained that in a former life he had known Jack the Ripper, whose spirit had materialized in a condominium development outside of Higgins. There were also twenty-nine phone messages about the case. The first two calls Ebbans returned were to disconnected phones and the third was a man's recorded voice describing how much he loved sucking cock. Ebbans hung up and gave the rest of the messages to Slocum and told him to check them out.

Corde's news about the knife had both elated and depressed him. It had cheered him up because it was a solid lead and like any cop he'd take a single piece of hard evidence any day over a dozen psychics or a week's worth of the most clever speculation. The news had also depressed Ebbans because it meant the line of the investigation he had inherited was looking pretty abysmal. Corde's warning about Ebbans walking point, which he'd discounted at first, came back to him. Ribbon wasn't pleased with the Register story that morning. "Cult" Weapon in Auden Death Is Movie Toy. The sheriff had said coolly, "Guess your boys should've checked that out to start."

My boys.

Ebbans returned to a stack of discharge reports from a mental hospital in Higgins. Ten minutes later the door swung open and a man in blue jeans and a work shirt stood uneasily in the doorway. Ebbans frowned, trying to place him. It took a minute.

The red hat man, without the hat.

"Detective?"

"Come on in."

The man said, "What it is, I just thought you'd like to know. You asked me about those boys I seen the night that girl was killed. The boys by the pond? I was leaving the lake and just now one of them was back. He had his tackle but he wasn't fishing, he was just walking around, looking at things. Would he be the Moon Killer?"

Ebbans stood up and said, "He out there now?"

"Was when I left."

"Miller, come on, you and me're taking a ride."

So like what's the reason?

Why is this guy your friend?

Jano didn't have any answers. Philip was a freak. He was fat and had bad skin – not zits, which everybody had, even Steve Snelling, who could have any girl he wanted. It was more that Philip's skin was dirty. Behind his ear it was always gray. And his clothes were hardly ever clean. He smelled bad. And forget about sports. No way could he even play softball let along gymnastics. Jano remembered how his friend had strained to get up on the parallel bars and he had watched horrified as the wood rods sagged almost to breaking point under the weight.

Why were they friends?

This afternoon Jano was walking around Blackfoot Pond, holding the gray chipped tackle box and the rod and reel. Tracing steps, trying not to think about that terrible night of April 20. He felt bad. Not depressed but fearful, almost panicked. He felt as if a screaming Honon warrior in an invisible Dimensional cloak was racing toward him from behind, preparing to leap, closer closer closer, to tear him apart. Jano's heart galloped in his chest, heating his blood as it pumped and he felt terror spatter him like a spray of hot water. Like a spray of come.

He pictured the girl lying in the mud, her white fingers curled, her eyes mostly open, her bare feet with their long toes…

No no no! She's not an actress in a movie, thirty feet high on the screen in the mall. She is exactly what she is: pretty, heavy, smelling of mint, smelling of grass and spicy flowers. She is still. She does not breathe. She is dead.

Jano shuddered, feeling the Honon troops circling around him, and found he was staring at the crushed muddy blue flowers at his feet. He thought of Philip drowning the other girl, holding her down. And what was he, Jano, going to do now? Who could he talk to? Nobody… The panic crested and he sucked in air frantically.

Eventually he calmed.

Why is he your friend?

Well, he and Phathar did talk about sci fi a lot. And movies. And girls. For a guy who never dated, Philip was an expert on sex. A walking dictionary of terms that every fifteen-year-old should know. He told Jano how gay guys shoved their fists up each other's asses and how you could tell whether a girl was a virgin by the way she bent over to tie her shoes.

But Jano decided that their most common bond was how much they hated their fathers. Phathar was scared of his and that made plenty of sense because the old man was a total hatter. (One Halloween, Philip's dad had come into the yard, sneaking up behind trick-or-treaters, carrying bloody cow's intestines in his arms. He'd just stood staring at the totally freaked kids). But Jano's father was worse. He was like a Honon warrior hiding in a Dimensional cloak, passing through the house as if Jano didn't exist. Sneaking past, looking at his son oddly, then vanishing.

… The dimensional warp swelling out out out finally bursting into the now, the here, all that purple energy of the Naryan realm flooding onto the earth…

The movie had had a happy ending. Jano didn't think this life would. He climbed to the top of the dam and then dropped onto his knees. He leaned forward looking at his gray reflection in the still water. He didn't like water that was so still. It made him look like death. His thin face. He lowered his head to the water. He wondered what it was like to breathe water instead of air.

Look at that, Jano. You ever touched a girl there? You ever tasted a girl?

He stared at the water. He could smell its oily sourness.

You ever fucked a girl, Jano?

By lowering his head another two inches he could taste the water. He could lick it. The same way that Phathar gave him the opportunity to taste the girl's cold mouth, her tongue, her cunt. He could swallow the water, he could swallow her, hide in her forever. A princess -

"Excuse me, young man." The voice was like a chill downpour on his back. He leapt up. "I talk to you for a minute?" The deputy was tall and very thin.

Jano's mouth was dry as summer pavement. He swung his tongue back and forth between his sticky teeth and didn't say anything.

"What's your name?"

"I didn't do anything."

"I'd just like to talk to you." The deputy was smiling but Jano'd seen that smile before and didn't believe it. A lying smile. The same smile his father kept on his face. "I understand you and a friend were fishing here at night about ten days ago."

Jano couldn't speak. He found his skin was contracting with terror and he imagined that his bowl of thick hair was vibrating visibly. Other footsteps sounded behind him. He turned.

Lance Miller grinned and said to him, "Hey, how you doing?"

Jano didn't answer.

The other cop looked at Miller and said, "You know him?"

"Sure, T.T.," Miller said. "This's Bill Corde's son. Didn't you introduce yourself, Jamie?"

6

With panic in his voice Randy Sayles said, "I have a lecture."

"He said it's now'r never."

"A LECTURE!"

"Professor," the departmental secretary said, "I'm only reporting to you what he said."

"Shit."

"Professor. There's no need to be vulgar."

He sat at his desk at nine o'clock in the morning, gripping the telephone receiver in his hand as if he were trying to squeeze out an answer to the dilemma. Sayles's last lecture of the year was scheduled to begin in one hour. It was set against the centennial celebrations throughout the US in 1876. The climax was a spellbinding account (his students', not his, review) of the Ouster massacre. For him to miss this particular class was obscene. This fucko fund-raising crap had totally disrupted his teaching and he was torrid with rage.

He said, "Tell him to hold." He dialed the dean. Her secretary said she was out.

"Shit."

Yes, no, yes, no? Sayles said into the receiver. "Okay, I'll see him. Get Darby to take over for me."

"The students will be disappointed."

"You're the one who told me it was now or never!"

She said, "I was only -"

"Get Darby." Sayles banged the phone down and ran from his office, hurrying to his car. As he roared out of the professors' parking lot, he laid down two streaks of simmering rubber as if he were a sixteen-year-old in a stolen 'Vette.

He paced across the gold carpet, staring down at the stain made by the cola Sarah spilled the night Emily was murdered.

"Oh, Bill."

"It doesn't mean I'm fired. I still draw pay."

"What were these letters?"

"Who knows? We found ash. We found scraps."

He looked up at his wife. Before Diane did something she dreaded, her eyes grew very wide. Astonishingly wide and dark as night. This happened now.

Bill Corde waited a moment, as if taking his temperature. The sense of betrayal never arrived and he said finally, "I didn't take them."

"No."

He couldn't tell how she meant the word. Was she agreeing? Or disputing him?

She asked, "They don't know about St Louis, do they?"

"I never told them." He did not tell her that Jennie Gebben had known.

She nodded. "I should see about a job."

"I told you I'm not fired. I -"

"I'm just thinking out loud. This is something -"

"Well, there's nothing wrong with that."

"This is something we have to talk about," she continued.

But they didn't talk about it. Not then at any rate. Because at that moment a squad car pulled into the driveway.

Corde leaned against the glass. He smelled ammonia. After a long moment the front door of the car opened. "It's T.T. He's got somebody with him, in the back. What's he doing, transporting a prisoner?"

Ebbans climbed out of the squad car and unlocked the back door. Jamie slowly stepped out.

Halbert Strumm, who lived in an unincorporated enclave of Harrison County known as Millfield Creek, had made his fortune in animal by-products, turning bone and organ into house plant supplements marked up a thousand times. Strumm would say with sincerity and drama that it brightened some stiff gelding's last walk up the ramp to know he was going to be sprinkled lovingly on a tame philodendron overlooking Park Avenue in New York City. It was comments like this that kept Strumm held in contempt or ridicule by all the people who worked for him and most of the people who knew him.

Although he had not attended Auden University, Strumm and his wife Bettye had embraced the school as their adoptive charity. Their generosity however was largely conditional and they invariably looked for an element of bargain in their giving. Off shot a check for a thousand dollars if they got subscription seats to the concert series. Five hundred, a stadium box. Five thousand, a trip to the Sudan on a dig with archeology students made wildly uncomfortable by the couple's rollicking presence.

Now Randy Sayles, pulling into the Strumms' driveway, was not sure if the couple was going to like the deal he was about to propose. Strumm, a huge man, bald and broad, with massive hands, led Sayles into his greenhouse, and there they stood amid a thousand plants that seemed no healthier than those in Sayles's own backyard garden, which did not gobble down the earthly remains of elderly animals. There was an injustice in this that depressed Sayles immensely.

"Hal, we have a problem and we need your help."

"Money, that's why you've come. It's why you always come."

"You're right." Sayles leaned hard into the abuse. "I'm not going to deny it, Hal. But you understand what Auden does for this town. We're in danger of losing the school."

Strumm frowned and nipped off a tendril of green from a viney plant. "That serious?"

"We've already drafted severance letters to the staff."

"My word." Nip.

"We need some money and we need your help. You've always been generous in the past."

"You know, Professor, I'm in a generous mood today."

Sayles's heart beat with a resounding pressure, he heard the hum of blood speeding through his temple.

"I might just be inclined to help you out. Do I assume you're talking about some serious bucks?"

"I am, that's true."

"You know I went to a state school."

Sayles said, "I didn't know but that's okay."

"Of course it's fucking okay," Strumm barked. "We didn't have a good team. We had a terrible team. I always thought if I had it to do over again I'd go to a school that had a good team."

"Auden has a pretty good team."

"It's got a nice stadium."

Sayles said it did, that was true. "Modeled on Soldier Field in Chicago."

"That a fact? I've had a dream in my life," Strumm said. "A man gets older and he starts to think about his dreams more and more."

"Happens to all of us."

"One of my dreams has been to make a lot of money."

Well, you certifiably crazy old cocksucker, you sure have done that.

"Another's to give some of it to a school like Auden…"

Are you playing with me or is this for real?

"And in exchange…"

Spit it out.

"… they'd build a football stadium in my honor. You see, I had my chance and I didn't seize it. So the next best thing would be to have a stadium named after me."

"Well, Hal, we have the stadium already."

"Named after Barnes. Who was he?"

"One of our graduates in the 1920s. A philanthropist. He set up an endowment that's still in effect."

"So that means you're not inclined to change the name of the stadium?"

"It's in the terms of the endowment. There's nothing we can do about it."

Strumm studied a sickly plant and sprinkled on its leaves something out of a package labeled "Strumm's Extra." Extra what? Sayles wondered. The businessman said, "Well, enough said of that. I've had another dream. I've always wanted a reactor named after me."

"A nuclear reactor?"

"At Champaign-Urbana I think it is, they've got a research reactor named after somebody. I thought that would be almost as good as a stadium."

"Hal, we don't need a reactor. We don't have a science department to speak of. We're mostly liberal arts."

What was in the white-and-yellow packages? Old horses? Old pigs? Strumm shit?

"I'd write you boys a check for two hundred thousand dollars if you built a reactor and named it after me."

Sayles said quietly, "Hal, we need three and a half million."

Nip.

"That much, hum? I couldn't come close to that. Been a bad year for the company. Economy's down, people get rid of plants. First thing to go. I'm not recessionproof like everybody says."

"Auden's going to close."

"Even if I had a stadium and a reactor both I couldn't come up with much more than a quarter million."

"We can name a chair after you. A building. We've got a couple buildings. You could have your pick."

"Three-hundred's the top. Maybe for a vet school I could go up to three-fifty but that'd be the end of it."

"We don't want a vet school, Hal."

"Well, there you have it."

Nip.

Sayles drove at seventy miles an hour all the way back to the campus. His car came to rest partially over the curb of the parking lot. He ran through the corridors of the Arts and Sciences Building and stopped in front of the door to his lecture hall, composing himself and listening to Glenn Darby's voice explain about Sayles's absence.

He caught his breath then pushed the doors open and strode confidently down the long aisle to the podium. He was halfway there when the class realized he had returned and broke into applause, which grew ever louder, rolling and rolling, then was joined by whistles and shouts. By the time he was on the podium, clipping on his lavaliere mike, the applause had became a standing ovation and it was five minutes before he was able to quiet the students.

Then – barely holding back tears – Randy Sayles began to speak, resonantly and impassioned, delivering what might very well be his last lecture at Auden. Or, for that matter, his last lecture at any university.

Corde was no longer pacing. He sat on the couch, slouched down and grim, and Diane was sitting in a straight-backed chair nearby. She held her hands in her lap. Jamie Corde sat between his mother and father. He looked shrunken. "Son, this is pretty serious. I don't need to tell you that."

"I didn't do anything."

"T.T. said you told him you were at the pond by yourself the night the Gebben girl was killed."

"I was. I was just fishing by myself is all."

Diane said, "Honey, please."

Her eyes were on a studded milk-glass candy dish and it was impossible to tell if she was speaking to father or son.

"Jamie, we want to believe you. It's just that T.T. talked to a couple of people say they saw two boys and you fit the description of one of them."

"So you don't believe me. You think I'm lying."

This was a matter-of-fact announcement. He wouldn't hold Corde's eyes, which was okay with Corde because he would sure have trouble looking back into his boy's.

"Son, we need to know what happened. I don't remember where you were that night, I -"

Jamie leaned forward. "How would you know where I was any night?"

Diane said sternly, "Don't talk to your -"

He continued, "Where was I last night? Two nights ago? How the hell would you have any idea?"

His mother rebuked, "Young man." But there was no edge to her words.

The boy was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "I went fishing. I was there by myself."

A felony investigator, Corde had a dozen tricks he could try to drag the real story out of the boy. Bluffs and traps and intimidations. He'd learned them from his journals and seminars and bulletins. He'd practiced them in his continuing education courses. He'd tried them out on car thieves and burglars. He couldn't bring himself to use them now; he was crying out for the truth but he wanted it only one way.

"Were you fishing by the dam?"

"Not so close to the dam. Up a ways, in somebody's yard."

"I've told you you're not to trespass there."

Jamie didn't answer.

Corde asked, "Did you see the girl or anyone else that you hadn't recognized before?"

"No. I just fished then I came home."

"Why didn't you tell me any of this before? You knew I was on the case."

"Because I was there alone and I didn't see anything. What was there to say?"

"Jamie, please."

The boy looked away. "I'm going to my room."

"Jamie…" Corde scooted forward on the couch and touched his son's knee. The boy remained unresponsive.

Corde asked the question he'd been putting off. "The other night, Wednesday, you weren't home either, were you?"

Diane said, "Bill, what are you asking?"

Jamie kept his eyes on his father. "He wants to know my whereabouts the night the second girl was killed. That's what he's asking."

Corde said, "Wait a minute, son. You can't treat this so light. T.T. and Steve are going to want to talk to you…" Jamie walked casually out of the living room. Corde's face went bright red with fury and he stood. Then he sat slowly on the couch again.

Diane said, "You know he didn't have anything to do with it."

"I know he was there." Corde looked at her miserably. "And I know he's lying to me. That's all I know."

Dear Sarah…

She read the note again but had trouble because of the voices from the other room. Something was going on with Jamie. Her brother scared her some. At times she idolized him. When, for instance, he would include her in what he was doing – like repeating jokes to make sure she got the punch line or taking her along when he went shopping at the mall. But other times he'd look at her like she wasn't even in this world, as if he was looking through her. He would get all dark and secretish. In Jamie's dresser Sarah had found magazines filled with pictures of women without any clothes on and a lot of copies of Fantagore - movie scenes of monsters, and people being stabbed or cut up.

She guessed her father had found the magazines and that was why they were fighting.

She tried to ignore them now and turned back to her immediate problem.

Which was what should she give to the Sunshine Man?

She wanted him to have something special. Something personal from her. But when she tried to think of a present her mind went blank. Maybe she could -

The sounds from the next room grew louder. Jamie was mad and her parents spoke in grim voices. It was the way they had talked when Grandpa got sick in the middle of the night and went to the hospital and then didn't come home ever again.

Then the voices finally stopped and she heard Jamie go into his room and close the door and she heard music start up, the soundtrack from that science fiction movie he'd seen three or four times.

What would the Sunshine Man like?

When her parents went to parties her mother always took a cake or something like that. But Sarah didn't know how to bake. She looked around the room, surveying her toys, videotapes, a dozen stuffed animals… Ah, that seemed like a good choice – because he had made Redford T. Bedford fly out to the circle of stones two weeks ago it was pretty clear that he liked animals and they liked him.

She picked one, a small cinnamon bear that her mother had named Chutney.

She put a pink scarf around Chutney's neck and then carried him to the window and together they looked out over the backyard. She took the note from her pocket. This time she read it out loud so that the bear could hear what the Sunshine Man had written to her.

Dear Sarah, meet me tomorrow at our magic stones. Be there at three o'clock. Don't tell anyone. I'll make sure you never have to go to school ever again.

Dean Larraby said, "I suspect you have two minds about it."

Brian Okun said, "Well, of course… What can I say? He's my boss. I've learned more about literature from him than from anyone. I respect him immensely."

The dean continued, "He was in San Francisco when the murders were committed. So the rumor that he was involved in the girls' deaths, well, there's no foundation to that."

"You mean, Leon was a suspect?"

"The police, you know how it is. Fools. But I'm not concerned about the deaths. The question is whether Professor Gilchrist was dating either Jennie Gebben or Emily Rossiter. Do you know if he was intimate with either of them?"

"Is that what you asked me here about?"

"You're the one he's closest to."

Okun shook his head. "But if he's not a suspect…"

The dean's square matronly face turned to Okun. This was her pose of sincerity but she spoke with menace. "I think the most despicable misuse of power is for a professor to seduce his students."

"I agree one hundred percent. But I don't believe it for a minute about Professor Gilchrist. In fact the only rumors I heard were about him and Jennie. Nothing about Emily."

"So you did hear something."

He paused, his eyes evasive with embarrassment. "But you can't believe campus gossip…"

"If he was sleeping with her I'll have him dismissed at once."

"Of course the temptation's there. He lives alone, you know. He's a recluse." Okun shook his head. "No, what am I saying? No, as far as I know he never dated her." The voice lowered. "There was some talk, you know, that he was a, well, homosexual."

The South surfaced in both grimace and inflection. "That's nearly as bad," she muttered.

As bay-ad. Okun deliberated for a moment. "I…"

"Yes?"

He shook his head. "I was going to suggest something. But it doesn't really seem supportable."

"Please say it."

"Well…" Okun's voice faded and his eyes landed on the dean's diploma. University of Kentucky. Chabm school…

She said, "I hope you feel your first loyalty is to Auden."

He sighed. "Dean, I'm as concerned about this as you are. To be blunt, I've invested a lot of time and effort in Leon. I have nothing but respect for him and I want to see him vindicated. I want the opportunity to prove he's innocent. Let me check around his office, see if I can find something about Jennie. Maybe a note from her. Maybe an entry in his desk calendar. If I can't, well, let's just accept that this was a tragic rumor. If I do I promise I'll show it to you and you can make your own decision."

"That's very courageous of you."

"It's not courageous at all. This school's been good to me. I owe Auden a great deal." Okun paused. "The only thing is…"

"Yes?"

"Well, I'd be taking a big risk. This would be, well, spying." He extended his palms and laughed at the plebian word. "Leon would fire me in a minute if he found out I'd looked through his personal things."

"If he was sleeping with Jennie we'd dismiss him. He'd be no threat to you."

"But if he wasn't sleeping with her…" You stupid bitch. "That," he added delicately, "is the only time when it would be a risk."

"Of course." The dean debated and Okun watched her thoughts stroll to where his were impatiently waiting. She said, "There would be a simple way of protecting you. You've applied for a teaching position here, haven't you?"

"Subject to the acceptance of my dissertation, of course."

"I could talk to the Appointments Committee. I couldn't guarantee much of a salary."

"I'm a scholar," Okun said. "Money is irrelevant."

Through the window came a buzz of an old lawn mower. A breeze was blowing but he could detect no scent of cut grass. Okun looked at the worker moving like a drone. He felt abject pity for the man's unimaginative life, a mass of dull years utterly without the cocaine of intellect.

The dean asked coyly, "Have we just agreed to something?"

A quote of Nietzsche's came to mind. Okun rewrote it slightly and was pleased with the result. Man is the only animal that makes promises and fulfills threats.

7

After a sleepless night Corde drove Jamie to the Sheriff's Department. Red-eyed and ragged with anger and exhaustion, Corde had sat silently in the car. Jamie, however, was talkative, almost flighty, as if the two of them were going fishing. In fact he seemed happier than if they were going fishing. It made Corde's anger boil harder.

He remembered the way his son's eyes used to brighten when Corde took him for an unauthorized ride in the squad car, a delight Jamie had had no desire to experience in the last few years. Corde glanced at him then back to the road. Somewhere deep in his son, he eagerly believed, was Corde's own fundamental manner, which is why he felt so often that words were unnecessary between them. And now it hurt, oh it hurt, to see the boy wall this nature up as well as he did, secure as a hogtied prisoner, with this chatter. Corde didn't say a single word all the five-mile drive to the Sheriffs Department.

T.T. Ebbans said, "Hello, Bill. Hi, Jamie."

Miller waved uneasily to both of them. Corde looked at the astrological chart on the wall prominently taped above Slocum's desk then nodded to both men. Through the doorway of Ribbon's office Corde saw Ribbon and Charlie Mahoney the Family Representative talking. The sheriff glanced up, saw Jamie then walked over to the others. Mahoney hung in the doorway.

There was a long moment's silence then Corde said, "Jamie tells me he was alone that evening."

Ebbans was nodding. He had on his face a smile that meant nothing. "Well," he began and fell silent. No one spoke. Ribbon stared intensely at the boy. Corde studied the floor.

"Jamie," Ebbans finally continued. "We just want to ask you a few questions. You don't mind, do you?"

"No sir."

"Why don't we go into the back office?"

The boy looked at his father and started after Ebbans. Corde followed. Ribbon said, "Bill. Just a minute." He stopped. Ebbans and Jamie disappeared through the door. Neither looked back.

"Best wait here, Bill."

"I'd like to be with my boy."

"He didn't say anything?" Ribbon asked in a low voice.

"He says he was alone, didn't see the girl or anybody."

"Do you think he's lying?"

Corde looked into Ribbon's eyes. "No. Now if you'll excuse me."

Ribbon touched his arm. "We talked about it, Bill. We think it's better if you're not there."

"He's a minor. I've got a right to be present during…"

Corde's voice faded and Ribbon verbalized Corde's sudden thought. "He's not a suspect, Bill. We're just treating him like a witness."

"I -"

Ribbon shook his head. "It's better for the investigation and better for you not to be in there. We want to avoid any, you know, appearances of impropriety."

Corde turned toward the door. Thinking how easy it would be to lift Ribbon's hand off his arm and walk out of the office and into the room where Jamie was. What he did was to take off his hat and drop it on a nearby desk.

Steve Ribbon stepped away, stood for a minute looking out the window then said, "We've got to go fishing one of these days."

Corde said softly, "You bet, Steve."

"You little shit." Charlie Mahoney walked slowly around Jamie.

Mahoney was impressed the boy wasn't crying. He decided he'd have to try harder. "You're a fucking liar. I know it. Your father knows it. And you know it."

"I was by myself." Jamie looked at the door. Deputy Ebbans had left a few minutes ago to get Cokes. Jamie was just now catching on that he wasn't coming back.

"Oh, cut the crap. What do you think this is? Like breaking curfew? You think you're gonna get fucking grounded for this? You think they're going to take away your allowance? I'm talking prison! I'm talking about hard time up in Warwick. You're how old? Sixteen?"

"Fifteen," Jamie said.

Now the boy's voice was quivering.

"You're fifteen now but by the time you come to trial -"

"Me?" His voice cracked.

"You'll be sixteen and they'll send you into the adult wing. That's it, kid. You're fucked."

And he was starting to cry.

"I didn't do it. I swear I didn't."

Mahoney sat and leaned forward. "You don't know jack shit, you little prick! Jack shit. We've gotta find somebody. And 'cause we don't have anybody else, as far as I'm concerned that somebody is you."

Jamie wiped his face. "Where's my father?"

"He said he was leaving."

"No! He said he was going to be here with me."

"He just said that to get you in here. He told us you're lying."

Jamie looked at the door. His teeth touched and he breathed hotly. "He did not."

"He said you lied to him and you'd lie to us."

"He didn't say that. He wouldn't."

"Who the hell were you with? You have a daisy chain going, pulling each other's dicks?"

"I'm not a homo!"

"You're not? Then you wouldn't mind a little pussy. A pretty girl walking by herself. A pretty little college girl. Were you the one that came all over her?"

The tears were thick. "I didn't do anything."

"How many times did you see the movie?"

"What movie?"

Mahoney leaned forward and screamed, "Will you cut out this bullshit?! How many times did you see The Lost Dimension?"

Jamie looked down and picked at a ragged fingernail. "A couple. I don't know."

Mahoney said slowly, "You know, your father gave us some of your shorts. Ones you'd been wearing while you were beating off. We've got samples of your come. We're going to match it against what we found in the girl."

"My father…" Jamie whispered.

"We know there were two of you. We've -"

"He gave you my underwear?"

"We've got enough now to convict you. But we don't want to leave that other asshole wandering around the streets. You give his name to us and you'll walk. I guarantee it."

Jamie looked desperately at the door.

"I was alone."

Mahoney waited for a long, long minute then kicked back his chair and stood. "I gotta crap. People like you make me want to shit. I'll be back in three minutes. Think real hard, kid."

Mahoney left the room. The door remained open about six inches and through the gap Jamie could see the back door of Town Hall. He gazed through the half window at the parking lot and the thick trees beyond.

Outside, it was a May school day. The sun was brilliant and insects zipping through the light flashed like sparks. Outside, kids were lining up to be picked for softball in PE class, they were jogging, playing soccer and tennis, swatting golf balls.

Outside was an entirely different dimension from that in which Jamie Corde now sat.

The sunlight grew in radiance. No, it had moved closer to him! He was astonished to find himself on his feet, no longer sitting in the hard chair. Now, walking across the interrogation room. Now, pushing into the dark corridor, staring all the while at the back window. In the hallway, pausing. The light began to approach him, slowly at first then picking up speed, rushing toward him, as his heart thudded with a shockingly loud pounding, beating ever faster. The light filled his vision, it illuminated his flushed skin, it grew very close. And Jamie understands that no no the sound is not his heart at all but the drumming of his running shoes on chestnut floorboards. His hands rise palms out fingers splayed, the back door explodes outward and a million splinters of glass precede Jamie Corde into the golden light.

One man jumped at the sound. The other did not.

Mahoney looked at the shocked face of T.T. Ebbans, who ran into the corridor behind the Sheriffs Department and stared as the back door, now lacking most of its glass, swung slowly closed once more.

He stepped across the hall to the interrogation room and looked inside then glanced out the broken door and saw Jamie sprinting away from the station house.

"Deputy, you better -"

Ebbans turned his gaunt face to Mahoney. "Jamie wouldn't run like that. What'd you say to him?"

Mahoney nodded toward the shattered door. "You better stay on him. You know where he's going."

Ebbans said evenly, "I should tell you, sir, I think you're a real son of a bitch."

"Deputy, he's getting away."

"What are you doing here?" Corde asked.

Mahoney, walking through the squad room, glanced at the coffee he sipped. "Devil's brew."

"Were you in there with my son?"

"I just looked in on him. He and T.T. were talking."

Corde stepped into the corridor and saw the empty room. He returned as Mahoney was dumping sugar into his cup. "Where is he?"

"Your kid? I think T.T. said they were going to the lake and look around. I don't know."

Corde walked to the front door. "He should've told me."

Mahoney noticed the evidence envelopes containing the Polaroids and the messages they carried. "What's this?"

Ribbon answered tentatively, as if asking for Corde's approval, "Somebody left them for Bill. He thinks they might be his daughter."

"You show them to her, ask her about it?"

"She didn't see them, no. My daughter has a learning disability. She's going through a rough time right now. This would upset her."

"Well," Mahoney said with an exasperated laugh, "that'd be a shame, but -"

"I asked her if anybody'd taken her picture recently and she said no."

"You say she's slow?"

"She's not slow," Corde said evenly. "She has an above-average IQ. She has dyslexia and dyscalculia."

"Does she now? Maybe somebody talked her into posing and warned her not to tell anybody about it. That happens all the time."

"I know my daughter."

Mahoney, fingering the photos, said, "Your son, does he have a Polaroid camera?"

Corde turned to Ribbon. "Can I see you for a minute, Steve?"

The men walked into the sheriffs office, Corde leading. Ribbon left the door open. Corde reached back and closed it. He hardly ever lost his temper but the problem was he couldn't tell when it was going to happen.

Ribbon said, "All right, Bill, I understand -"

Corde's teeth pressed together fiercely. "No more with that guy! I don't want him crossing my path."

"He's -"

"Let me finish. It may be that Jamie knows a little more than he's saying but you know him as well as any boy in town and he wouldn't take those pictures. I'm not going to listen to this crap anymore!"

"But Mahoney doesn't know Jamie at all and you can't condemn him for asking the question."

"Hell yes I can! This thing is way out of hand. The town's scared out of its mind. We got the paper counting down the days till another moon and we're going to get ten more folk shot."

"You'll remember it was my thought not Charlie's about the moon."

"Was he interrogating Jamie?"

Ribbon paused. "He's been helping out some. Bill… Look, he's a famous homicide detective."

"Oh, Steve, come on."

"We need all the help we can get. This isn't a frat hazing that got out of hand."

"Do you know where T.T. took my son?"

"I don't know if he did. Or where."

Corde opened the door and walked into the squad room.

Mahoney said, "Hold up, Detective."

Corde walked toward the door.

"Hey, Detective…"

Corde kept going.

The window was open, letting in the scent of lilacs and whatever snatches of breeze might penetrate the staleness of the room. The morning was quiet. Philip's father was at the warehouse. His mother was asleep. She hadn't wakened her children in time for school. Philip lay in bed, eating from a box of graham crackers. Crumbs dusted his chest and stomach. He'd wait until ten, when his PE class was over then wake his mother and have her write him a tardiness excuse.

Outside he heard footsteps. He rolled over and looked out the window. "Hey, Phil!" The voice was urgent.

Philip looked into the stand of lilac bushes. He saw Jamie Corde, sweating and pale. "Hey, Jano, what's the matter?"

"I went by the school. What're you doing home?" Before Philip could answer he continued urgently, "Come on out here. I gotta talk to you."

Philip rolled out of bed, pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt then walked through the house. His sister was asleep under a mound of pink satin comforter. In his parents' room Philip's mother also lay asleep. Her mouth was open and her lipstick had left wet, red blotches on the pillow around her face, like stains of fresh blood. He continued outside, onto the back porch.

"Hey, man," Philip called, walking barefoot down the stairs, "what's -"

"I was just at the police."

The boy stopped walking. "What did you tell them?"

"Nothing," Jamie whined. "Nothing."

Shit. The knife. That's what it was. He knew it. He felt sweat break out on his forehead. Philip continued into the bushes and sat down. Jamie sat too.

"What do they know?"

"They know I was there and they know I was there with somebody that night. They've got a sort of description of you."

"Shit. Like, how did they find that out?" Suspicion filled Philip's round face.

"I didn't say anything. My father…" Jamie said. "He…" He couldn't bring himself to say anything else about it. He pictured his father going through the dirty clothes, finding his underwear, putting it in an evidence bag… He began to cry. "They said we're going to prison! What are we going to do? Oh, man."

Jamie's hands were shaking but Philip was calm. In the dimension where he spent much of his time nothing was impossible, nothing was what it seemed. Maple trees were sodium boosters of intergalactic vehicles. Sidewalks were crystal walkways a thousand feet above the plasma energy core of the planet. Stars weren't stars at all but holes in the paltry three-dimensional world through which the all-powerful, all-brilliant Guardians trillions and trillions of light-years big looked down. In Philip's world fat boys in dirty jeans were sinewy, lithe heros, who could pull on cloaks and disappear from their terrible crimes. "We have to vanish," he said softly.

"Vanish?"

"Like, dimensionally." He added in a whisper, "Permanently."

Jamie whispered, "It was just a movie, man."

Philip continued in his quiet voice, "We're both nicked. You want to go to prison? Then what? Come back and live at home? With your father?" He smiled in a weary way. "This dimension sucks, Jano."

Jamie was silent.

"We took an oath," Philip said quietly. "We took an oath -"

"We shouldn't have done it to her."

"An oath to the death." Philip looked up at the sky through a cluster of faint purple lilacs. "That dimension's real. This one isn't. We took an oath. Are you going back on it?"

Jamie grabbed a black branch dotted with buds and small blossoms. He stripped the sinewy twigs away, like peeling skin off bones, and flung the branch away furiously with a low moan.

Philip said, "Remember Dathar? The way he leapt off the Governance Building? They thought they had him but he got away."

"He didn't get away. He died. The Guardians brought him back but he died."

"It's the same thing," Philip whispered. "He got away."

Jamie said nothing.

The sound of a siren, howling like a dentist's drill, filled the front yard. Philip's smile vanished as the squad car skidded to a stop. He stared at his friend. "You told them!"

"No!" Jamie scrambled to his feet.

Footsteps sounded. Running, the men spread out. Ebbans and Slocum and Miller and two other deputies.

"You turned me in!" Philip screamed as he began willing his huge body to run, feet pointing outward, stomach and tits bouncing with every step, feeling the sting of his chafed legs and the deeper pain of a struggling heart.

"Whoa, boy, hold up there!"

"Stop him! Slow him up!"

Slocum was chuckling. "He's doing okay for a big fellow."

Somebody else laughed and said, "We need ourselves a lasso."

The men easily caught up with Philip and pulled him to the ground. They were laughing as if they'd grounded a suckling pig for a barbecue. Handcuffs appeared and were ratcheted on pudgy wrists.

One of the cops asked Jamie a question but the boy missed the words. All he could hear was the sound of Philip's voice, filling the backyard, as he shrieked, "You turned me in, you turned me in, you turned me in!"

8

Corde paused outside the house.

He saw: a broken lawn mower, termite-chewed stacks of black firewood, a V-6 engine block sweating under a foggy plastic tarp, rusty tools, four bloated trash bags, bald tires, a garbage can filled with brackish water. The lawn was riddled with crabgrass and bare spots of packed mud. Showing through the scabby white clapboard of the house were patches of milky green from an earlier paint job.

Three brilliant bursts of color tempered the grim scene – orange-red geraniums in clay pots.

Inside were T.T. Ebbans, Jim Slocum, Lance Miller and the two county deputies. Charlie Mahoney was not there. On the couch sat Philip and Jamie. Creth Halpern stood over his boy, staring down at him. His arms were crossed and he had an eerie smile on his face. Jane Halpern sat in a chair off to the side of the room. Her eyes were red and her lips were glisteningly wet. Corde didn't know much about her. Only that she'd been a thin, pretty cheerleader in the New Lebanon High School class behind his, and she was now a thin, pretty drunk.

The house smelled bad. Food and mold. He also could smell animal and he vaguely remembered a dog nosing in weeds behind a shed in the backyard. With the door wide open the brilliant outdoor light, which looked unnatural in the dank room, revealed a coat of grime and spheres of dustballs. The windows were mostly shaded. Corde stepped on something hard. He kicked away a small, dried dog turd. He crouched next to Jamie. "You all right, son?"

The boy looked at him silently with an undiluted hate that made Corde want to weep. He motioned to Ebbans and the two of them stepped outside. "What happened, T.T.? Did you and Mahoney spook Jamie and follow him here?"

To his credit in Corde's mind Ebbans held the detective's eyes and answered honestly. "I'm sorry, Bill. That's what happened. He just asked to see him for a few minutes by himself and Steve told me to let him. I didn't know what he had in mind. I swear that."

Corde said, "You don't think Philip did it, do you?"

"Take a look at what we found." Ebbans led him to the squad car. Inside was a foot-high stack of porn magazines and violent comic books, also sketchbooks and notebooks. Corde flipped through the crudely drawn pictures of spaceships and monsters, montages of photos cut out of the school yearbook: girls imprisoned in towers and dungeons, chained to walls while snake creatures circled around them. Much of the material had the Naryan insignia hand-printed on it.

Corde thought of the picture of Sarah, her skirt high over her thighs.

"He had this incendiary thing hooked up. We opened the drawer where he'd hid all this stuff and it started to set fire to the file cabinet. It blew a fuse before it did any damage. Lance went through the backyard. In the barbecue he found some scraps of Jockey shorts the kid'd tried to burn." Ebbans touched a small plastic bag. "They were stained and it could be semen. Oh, and we also found some pictures of a naked girl. Polaroids."

Polaroids.

"Jennie?"

"Can't tell. It's a girl's breasts."

"It's not…" Corde dodged Ebbans's eyes. "Not a younger girl, is it?"

Ebbans said, "Not a little girl, no." He continued. "And I found a pair of muddy boots. I'm doing casts."

From the porch Slocum offered, "It all fits the profile. The smut collection, the home situation, everything."

Corde ignored this and said to Ebbans, "You didn't question him by himself, did you? He's got to have his parents present."

"No. I didn't question him at all. But I'll tell you, his father's not going to be much help to the kid. He's the one sent us out to the barbecue. Told us he saw Philip burning something there the night after the first killing."

Corde stared at the pile in the back seat of the car. In the center of Corde's bulletin board was a sign that he'd sent off for from National Law Enforcement Monthly a couple of years ago. The brittle yellow slip of glossy paper read: Physical evidence is the cornerstone of a case. He was looking at physical evidence now. Physical evidence that could put two boys in prison for forty years. And one of them was his son.

Ribbon and Ellison arrived in one of the county's fancy Furies. The slogan on the side said, If you drink, do us all a favor. Don't drive. Ebbans told them what they'd found.

Inside Halpern was leaning over his son, who stared straight ahead. "What the hell was going through your mind?" The boy's eyes were glazed. He didn't speak. His face wasn't particularly sad or frightened. He seemed to be possessed.

Philip played at the Corde house once or twice a week. But was this the boy who'd taken the pictures of Sarah? Who had put the threatening newspaper article on the rosebush? And in Diane's diaphragm case?

Was this the boy who murdered Jennie Gebben and Emily Rossiter?

He looked at Philip's round, soft face, smudged with dirt or chocolate, a face that did not appear so much guilty as bewildered.

Corde said, "Jamie, come here."

Slocum's head turned. "Say, Bill… maybe it's not such a good idea. Uh, talking to him in private, I mean."

Corde squashed his temper and ignored the deputy. He motioned to his son. The boy stood and followed him onto the porch. Ribbon stepped forward.

Corde stopped him with a look. "Leave me alone with my boy." The sheriff hesitated only a moment before stepping away.

Jamie leaned against the porch bannister and turned to his father, "I don't have anything to say to you."

"Jamie, why are you being this way? I want to help you."

"Yeah, right."

"Just tell me what happened."

"I don't know what happened."

"Son, it's murder we're talking about. They're looking for somebody to send to jail for this."

"I know you are."

"Me?"

"You want me to make up something about Phil?"

"I want you to tell the truth. I want you to tell it to me right here and now."

"Bill?" Ribbon came to the doorway. "You can be present at questioning but -"

"Oh, goddamnit," Corde exploded. "Goddamnit! You don't have probable cause to charge him. Call the DA. Ask him!"

Ribbon said delicately, "We do for conspiracy and obstruction. You'll just make things worse for everybody."

"Jamie, why?" Corde's eyes begged, his hand reached for his son's arm but stopped short of contact. "What did I do? Why won't you tell me?"

Eyes downcast, the boy let Ribbon lead him into the filthy house, while his father's desperate questions fell like shot quail, silent and flimsy.

The tall grass waved in the wind and the sunlight flickered off the leaves of thin saplings. Sarah stepped into her circle of stones and sat down. She crossed her legs carefully. From her backpack she took the bear she was going to give to the Sunshine Man and set him next to her.

She looked at her Madonna watch. It said 2:40. She closed her eyes and remembered that this meant twenty minutes to three. She hated numbers. Sometimes you counted to a hundred before they started over, other times you counted to sixty.

Twenty minutes until the Sunshine Man arrived.

She remembered a drill at school – her second-grade teacher would move the hands on a clock and then point to different students and have them tell the time. This exercise socked her with icy terror. She remembered the teacher's bony finger pointing at her. And, Sarah, what time is it now? She screamed that she didn't know she couldn't tell don't ask don't ask don't ask… She cried all the way home from school. That night her daddy bought her the digital watch she now wore.

A sudden breeze whipped her hair around her face and she lay down, using her backpack as a pillow. Sometimes she took afternoon naps here. Looking around her, wondering where the Sunshine Man would come from, Sarah noticed just above the horizon a sliver of new moon. She imagined that the sky was a huge ocean and that the moon was the fingernail on a giant's hand as he swam just below the surface of the smooth water. Then she wondered how come you can see the moon in the daytime.

She closed her eyes and she thought of the giant as he swam, lifting arms as big as mountains from the water, kicking his mile-long legs and speeding across the sky. Sarah was afraid of the water. When the family went to the park downtown she would still play in the baby pool, which made her ashamed but wasn't as bad as the terror of bouncing on the adult pool floor with the water inches from her nose and thinking she might get swept into the deep part.

She wished she could swim. Strong strokes, like Jamie. Maybe this was something else she could ask the Sunshine Man to do for her. She looked at her watch. 2:48. She counted on her fingers. Two minutes… No! Twelve minutes. She closed her eyes and kneaded the grass bunched up at her hips and pretended she was swimming, skimming across the pool like a speedboat, back and forth, saving the lives of children struggling in the deep end and racing past her brother once then again and again…

Five minutes later she heard the approaching footsteps.

Sarah Corde's heart began pounding in joyous anticipation, and as she climbed out of her imaginary pool she opened her eyes.

Look at this place. Lord.

Bill Corde couldn't get over the size of Wynton Kresge's office.

"Flush."

"Yeah, well." Kresge seemed uncomfortable.

The room was probably a third as big as the entire New Lebanon Sheriffs Department. Corde took pleasure walking over the thick green carpet and wondered why two busy oriental rugs had been laid over the pile.

"That's the biggest desk I've ever seen."

"Yeah, well."

Corde sat down in one of the visitor's chairs, which was itself bigger and more comfy than his own Sears armchair at home, and his a recliner at that. He tried to scoot it closer to the desk but it wouldn't move and he had to stand again and lug the chair up to the desk.

Kresge explained, "Was the office of some dean or another. Academic affairs, something like that. He retired and they needed someplace to put me. I think they like having a black man on this corridor. See, when you come this way from the main stairwell you see me at my big desk. Looks good for the school. Think I'm a big shot. Little do they know. So they caught the kid."

"They caught him. He was a friend of my son's."

"Well." Kresge would be wondering whether he should ask the question about how close a friend but he let it pass.

"The evidence is pretty strong against him. He's a spooky boy and his father's worse." Corde realized he still had his hat on – it banged into the high back of the chair – and he took it off, pitched it like a Frisbee onto the seat of the other chair. He opened his briefcase. "I need a favor."

"Sure," Kresge said eagerly.

Corde leaned forward and set a plastic bag in front of Kresge. Inside was the burnt scrap of computer paper.

"What's this?"

"A bit of that paper we found behind -"

"No, I mean this." The security chief pointed at the white card attached to the bag by a red string.

"That? A chain of custody card."

"It's got your name on it."

"It's not important, Wynton. The piece of -"

"This's for trial, right?"

"Right. So the prosecutor can trace the physical evidence back to the crime scene."

"Got it. So that if there's a gap in the chain, the defense attorney can get the evidence thrown out?"

"Right." Because Corde was here to ask a favor he indulged Kresge, who was examining the COC card closely. Finally Corde continued, "The piece of paper inside? I'd like to find out where it came from. I've got this idea -"

"You're leaning on it."

"- it's from the school. What?"

"You're leaning on it."

"On what?"

Kresge motioned him away. Corde sat back in the chair and Kresge yanked a thick wad of computer printouts from beneath a stack of magazines. Corde had been using the pile as an armrest.

"It's a university Accounting Department printout. They send them around every week to each department.

Mine shows me security expenses, real and budgeted, allocation of overhead. You know, that sort of thing."

"You know what department this was from?"

Kresge looked at it. "No idea."

"Any chance you could find out?"

"Technically I don't have access to the Accounting Department's files."

Corde asked coyly, "How 'bout untechnically?"

"I'll see what I can do." After a pause he asked, "But if they caught the boy what's the point?"

Corde slowly touched away a fleck of lint from his boot heel and stalled long enough that an attractive woman blustered into the office with an armful of letters for Kresge to sign. The security chief rose and with clumsy formality introduced two people with nothing in common except their lack of desire to meet. Corde, however, was grateful for the curious decorum – it seemed to drive the question from Kresge's mind and after the signing-fest, when their conversation resumed, he did not ask it again.

9

She could sense him nearby, almost as though he was hovering right over her body like a wave of hot sunlight.

She swung her head about, peering into the clearing, into the forest, the tall grass.

More footsteps, leaves rustling, twigs snapping.

(So: He doesn't fly, he doesn't materialize, he doesn't float. He walks. That's okay.)

Sarah looked for the glow of sun as he approached but she could see nothing except trees and branches, leaves, grass, shadows. The footsteps grew closer. Hesitant, uncertain. Then she saw him – a figure in the woods, coming slowly toward her, picking his way through the brush. He seemed less like a wizard than, well, a big man tromping noisily through the forest. (That's okay too.)

"I'm over here. Here!" She stood up, waving her arm.

He paused, located her and slowly changed direction, pushing aside branches.

She picked up the stuffed bear and ran toward him. She shouted, "I'm here!"

A sheet of bright green leaves lifted aside and the deputy stepped out, brushing dust and leaves off his uniform.

"Tom!" she cried, her heart sinking.

"Hey, missie, how'd you get here without getting all messed up?" He picked a leaf out of his hair then swatted his forehead. "Skeeter." He examined his palm.

Crestfallen, Sarah stared up at him.

"You're not supposed to be out here, you know. You could get me in a whole mess of trouble. You're supposed to stay close to the house. Anyway, 'nough said. Your mom wants to see you now. You've got an appointment at the doctor's, she says."

"I can't come right now." She scanned the forest. He's leaving! I can tell the deputy scared him off.

"Well, I don't know," Tom said patiently. "Your mother told me to fetch you."

"Not now, please? Just a half hour?" She was close to tears.

"That's a cute little fellow you've got there. What's his name?"

"Chutney."

"How about if you and Chutney come home now and afterward you come back here with me and I'll keep an eye on you? How'd that be?"

When she didn't answer, the deputy said, "Your mom'll be pretty unhappy with me if I don't bring you right now, like she asked. You don't want her to have words with me, do you?"

It was true. If she didn't come now, if she missed the appointment with Dr. Parker, her mother would be furious with the deputy. Sarah couldn't stand the thought of anyone being mad because of her. People hated you when you made them mad, they laughed at you.

She looked around her once more. The Sunshine Man was gone now. He'd fled and was far away.

"Why you looking so sad, little lady?"

"I'm not sad." Sarah walked through the grass. "Come this way. It's easier." She led him out of the tall grass into the strip of land beside the cow pasture and turned toward the house, certain that she and the Sunshine Man would never meet.

Special to the Register – A freshman at New Lebanon High School has been charged in the "Moon Killer" slayings of two Auden University coeds, law enforcement authorities announced today.

The fifteen-year-old youth, whose identity has been withheld because of his age, was apprehended by town and county deputies at his parents' home yesterday afternoon.

"He clearly fits the profile that we were working from," said New Lebanon Sheriff Steve Ribbon. "He had a collection of deviate photographs and drawings of girls from the high school. It looked like he had a whole series of assaults planned."

Sheriff Ribbon added that authorities are looking at the possibility that the youth was involved in the slaying last year of another Auden co-ed, Susan Biagotti.

"At the time," he said, "it appeared that the girl was killed during a robbery. But the way we're looking at it now, it might have been the first in this series of killings."

Some residents greeted the news of the arrest with cautious relief. "Of course, we're glad he's been caught," said a New Lebanon housewife who refused to give her name, "but it seems like there's still a lot of questions. Was he doing this alone? Is it safe for my children to go back to school?"

Others were less restrained in their reaction. "We can breathe again," said one Main Street shopkeeper, who also insisted on anonymity. "My business came to a standstill the last couple of weeks. I hope he gets the chair."

Under state law, a fifteen-year-old can be tried as an adult for murder, but no one under eighteen can be sentenced to death. If the jury convicts the youth of first-degree murder, his sentence could range from thirty-five years to life and he would have to serve at least twenty-five years before he would be eligible for parole.

Diane had found a psychiatrist cartoon in a magazine and cut it out for Dr. Parker. It showed a little fish sitting in a chair holding a notebook. Next to him was a huge shark lying down on a couch and the little fish was saying to the shark, "Oh, no, it's perfectly normal to want to eat your psychiatrist." Diane kept studying the cartoon and not getting it. But the expression on the face of the shark was so funny she broke out in laughter.

Which wasn't as loud as the laughter that escaped from Dr. Parker's mouth when she looked at the clipping. Maybe the woman did have a sense of humor after all. Dr. Parker pinned the cartoon up on her bulletin board. Diane felt ecstatic, as if she'd been given a gold star at school.

Sarah was in the waiting room. Dr. Parker had asked to see Diane first today. By herself. This troubled Diane, who wondered what kind of bad news the woman had to report. But seeing the doctor laugh, she sensed this was no crisis. As Dr. Parker rummaged through her desk Diane told her about Ben Breck.

"Breck? I think I've heard of him. Let's look him up." She spun around in her chair and found a huge book. She opened it and flipped through. "Ah, here we go. He's forty one… Impressive. Summa cum from Yale, ditto an M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology. Ph.D. in education from Chicago. He's taught at a number of Ivy League schools. Currently tenured at Chicago. Published extensively in the journals. Visiting at Auden, is he? Lucky you."

"So I should take him up on it?"

"Cheap tutoring from an expert. I'd say there isn't much of a choice there."

"I've already told him I would."

"I think you'll see some dramatic improvements in Sarah." The doctor looked at her watch. "This session will be very short, Mrs. Corde. A few minutes with you, a few with Sarah. I'm not going to charge you for the time."

"My horoscope for this month must've said, 'You will meet two generous therapists.'"

Dr. Parker's sense of humor had been spent on the cartoon; she ignored the pleasantry and dug again with some irritation into the bottom of her desk drawer. Finally she extracted a small black box.

The doctor said, "You're going to see Sarah carrying this around with her. Tell your husband and son to leave it alone. Don't touch it, don't listen to it, don't ask her about it. Unless she says something first."

Diane asked the most innocuous question she could think of. "Is it a tape recorder?"

"That's right."

"What's it for?"

"I'm going to reconstruct Sarah's self-esteem."

"How?"

She answered tersely, "Sarah's going to write a book."

Diane smiled, a reflex. Then she decided that the joke was in poor taste and she frowned. Dr. Parker pushed the recorder, a blank cassette and an instruction book toward Diane, who scooped them up and held them helplessly. When the doctor said nothing more Diane said, "You're not joking, are you?"

"Joking?" Dr. Parker looked as if Diane were the one making the tasteless comment. "Mrs. Corde, I'd think you'd know by now I rarely joke."

Diane Corde believed that the perfection of children's fingers was proof that God existed, and she thought of this now watching her daughter hold the tape recorder, examining it with some small suspicion and turning it over in her pale hands. Diane unfolded a tattered copy of the instruction manual and took the recorder back. She set it on the living room coffee table. In her left hand she held two AA batteries and a new cassette.

"I think we should…" She examined the instruction sheet.

"Lemme," Sarah said.

Diane read. "We have to -"

"Lemme."

Click, click, click. "There."

Diane looked down. Sarah had the machine running and was pressing the Play and Record buttons simultaneously, saying, "Testing, testing."

"How did you do that? Did you read the instructions?"

Sarah rewound the tape and pressed another button. Diane's tinny voice repeated, "… read the instructions?"

"Mom, come on. Like, it's easy." She looked at the recorder then back up to her mother. "Dr. Parker wants me to make up stories and put them in my book."

"That's what she said."

"I don't know what to write about. Maybe Buxter Fabricant?"

"I think Dr. Parker would like to hear that story. He's the dog that became president, right?"

"I like Buxter -" Sarah scrunched her nose. "- but I already wrote that story. I could write a story about Mrs. Drake Duck… No, no, no! I'm going to write a story about Mrs. Beiderbug."

"Sarah. Don't make fun of people's names."

"It's going to be a good story." Sarah dropped the recorder in her Barbie backpack.

Jamie appeared in the doorway. He was eating a sandwich and carrying a glass of milk. From the way he was looking at Sarah, Diane knew he wanted to talk about something out of the girl's presence. He turned and walked back into the kitchen. She heard the refrigerator door opening and the shuffle as he pulled out a plastic gallon jug of milk.

Diane stood up and walked into the kitchen. She took a package of chicken from the freezer and set it on a pad of paper towels, taking her time as she cut away the plastic wrapper. Jamie sat at the table and silently stared at his glass of milk, which he then gulped down. He stood, filled the glass again and returned to his chair. She thought it was odd that though Sarah had problems with language, speaking with Jamie was often far more difficult.

She asked, "Practice today?"

"Yeah. Later."

"Then you have weight training?"

"Not today."

There was nothing more she could do with the chicken and she decided to boil potatoes, because that would give her an excuse to stay in the kitchen for as long as he wanted her to be there. She began peeling. The silence was thick as oil smoke. Finally she said, "We know you didn't have anything to do with it, Jamie."

The prosecutor hadn't presented the boy to the grand jury but he had warned the Cordes sternly that he would have to testify at Philip's trial. And that there was a chance new evidence might arise implicating him further.

Jamie drank the milk like a man on a bender. He stood and she prayed he was just going to the refrigerator, not leaving the room. He poured another glass and sat down again. He asked, "Did Dad like look through my room or anything?"

"Did he what?"

When he didn't repeat the question she said, "Your father wouldn't do that. If there was something bothering him he'd talk to you."

"Uh-huh." Her son sat with his head tilted, studying the glass. Diane wanted to tell him how much she loved him, how proud they were of him, how the incident at the pond – whatever had happened – was one of those ambiguous glitches in the complicated history of families that don't touch the core of its love. Yet she was afraid to. She believed that if she did, the words would turn his heart as thick as his sculpted muscles and he would move further away from her.

"Jamie -"

Sarah appeared in the doorway. "He's here, Mommy! Dr. Breck!"

Diane looked toward the living room and saw a car parked in the driveway. "Okay, I'll be there in a minute."

Sarah left and Diane said to her son, "Your father loves you." She stood and ran a hand through his hair, feeling his neck muscles tense at this. He said nothing.

10

A suspect had been arrested but Tom the pink-cheeked deputy was still taking his job seriously.

Nobody had relieved him of his command yet. Besides, he was hugely aware that somebody had gotten past him at least once and that Sarah had hightailed it into the woods right under his nose; he wasn't letting Ben Breck put a foot on the front porch until he had the Queen's okay.

Diane nodded. "It's all right. He's expected." She turned to the man standing on the concrete walk. "Dr. Breck?"

"Call me Ben, please." He walked past the deputy into the house.

Breck was over six feet tall, with dark, unruly hair laced with gray. Forty-one, she remembered Dr. Parker had said. He had boyish qualities – his voice and face, for instance – and you could see exactly what he had looked like when he was twelve. He seemed to be in good shape but he was pale and this gave him the deceptive appearance of weakness. His eyes were dark. He wore black jeans and a tweed sports coat over a dark blue shirt. His hands were small and his fingers almost delicate. He slouched. Diane, accustomed to her husband's military posture, was put off by this initially. Almost immediately though this aversion flipflopped and became pleasantly quirky. He carried a battered briefcase.

Diane motioned him to the couch. He glanced out the window. "Is there, uhm, something wrong?"

"Oh, the deputy? No, my husband's a detective. He's involved in the case where those girls were killed."

"The students?"

"That's right. The Sheriffs Department sometimes has a deputy keeping an eye out on the houses of the investigators."

Sarah bounded down the stairs and halted in the arched doorway to the living room, clutching her pink backpack and gazing at Breck. Diane noted that she had changed clothes and was now wearing her favorite T-shirt, bright blue and emblazoned with a seahorse. The girl brushed a long tail of hair from her face and said nothing.

"Sarah, this is Dr. Breck."

"You're my tutor."

"That's right. I'm pleased to meet you, Sarah," Breck said.

To Diane's surprise, the girl shook his hand.

Jamie walked quickly through the living room, wearing his biking shorts and a sweatshirt.

"Oh, Jamie…"

He glanced at the three people in the room and didn't say a word. He left by the front door. She saw him leap on his bike and pedal quickly out of the driveway.

"Wrestling practice," she explained to Breck.

"Ah." Breck turned to Sarah. "What've you got there?"

"My backpack."

"What's in it?"

"Barbie. And Redford T. Redford -"

"That's one of her stuffed bears." Diane felt a need to translate.

"That's a clever name."

Sarah announced, "He's the world's smartest bear. And I have my tape recorder."

"Tape recorder? Oh-oh, are you recording what I'm saying? Like a spy?"

"No!" Sarah smiled. "I'm writing stories."

"Stories?" Breck's eyes went wide. "I've never known anybody who writes stories."

"Dr. Parker is having me write a book."

Breck said, "I write books. But mine are very boring. Students use them in class. I'll bet yours are more interesting than mine. Sarah, why don't you sit over here next to me?"

Diane asked, "Can I get you anything?"

"A salt shaker," Breck said.

"Pardon?"

"Actually, the whole carton would be better."

"Salt"

Breck said, "Please."

Diane walked into the kitchen and Breck turned to Sarah. "How do you spell 'chair'?"

"C-H-A-I-R."

"Very good."

Sarah beamed.

"How about 'table'?"

She closed her eyes and thought for a minute. She shook her head. Then she said, "T-A-B-E-L. No, L-E."

"That's right. How 'bout 'tablecloth'?"

The girl went quiet, her mood changed fast as a balloon popping. "I don't know." Her face became sullen.

"Tablecloth," Breck said.

Diane, returning with the blue carton, felt an electric rush across her face – sympathetic fear. She's getting upset, she's going to be blocked and you're bucking for a tantrum, boy…

Breck opened his briefcase and pulled out a sheet of black paper. Diane handed him the salt. Breck took it and poured a large pile onto the paper then spread it out smoothly. Mother and daughter watched – one with fascination, one with caution. Breck said to Sarah, "Let's spell it together."

"I don't know how." She stared at the salt. Diane stood in the doorway until she saw what she believed was a glance from Breck, requesting privacy. She retreated to the kitchen.

"Give me your hand," Breck said to the girl.

Reluctantly Sarah did. He took her index finger and drew a T in the salt with it. "You feel it?" he asked. "You feel what a T is like?"

Sarah nodded. Breck smoothed the salt. "Do it again."

She hesitated, then started the letter. It was a clumsy attempt, looking more like a plus sign.

"Let's try an A."

"I can do that one," she said and smoothed the salt herself.

For a half hour they made salt letters. A hundred 'table's. A hundred 'cloth's. A hundred of those words put together, making a third word. Even though Sarah struggled fiercely to spell it correctly – and did so the majority of times – Breck did not seem interested in her results. Less a tutor than a sculpting instructor, Breck urged her to feel the shape of the letters. Diane crouched like a peeping Tom, peered through a crack in the kitchen door and watched.

At the end of the session he gave Sarah a tracing notebook, which contained a story Breck read to her. Sarah declared it was "a pretty darn good story," even though she guessed the ending halfway through. Breck gave her instructions on tracing the paragraphs. He stood up and left Sarah to her book and tape recorder and mangy stuffed bear.

"Hello?" Breck called. "Mrs. Corde?"

"In here."

He walked into the kitchen, where Diane had rapidly resumed peeling potatoes.

"You are amazing," she said. Then confessed, "I overheard."

"These are very well-known techniques. Rapport with the child. Multisensory stimulation. Work with her motor skills. Use her given talents to compensate for her deficits."

"You seem like an artist."

"I like what I do. That's the optimal motivation for any endeavour."

Optimal? Endeavour?

"You want some coffee?"

He said, "Sure."

She poured two cups and chattered about her garden and a PTA bake sale she was chairing. Diane Corde didn't know what to make of her rambling. Apparently neither did Breck, who sat in the kitchen and sipped coffee while he looked close to uncomfortable. He gazed out over the backyard. When she paused he said, "I like these windows, you can see the whole field there. I have bay windows like these in my town house."

"Where's that?"

"Chicago. South Side. Only I don't see fields. I see the lake."

"I wonder if that's why they call them bay windows. Bay, lake."

He said, "Or perhaps it's because they're shaped like a bay."

Diane said that was true and felt like a fool that her joke had missed its mark.

Breck said, "Sarah's a good candidate for improvement. Dr. Parker has her dictating stories to build up self-esteem, I assume?"

"That's right."

"She has an astonishing imagination."

"She's always making up things. It drives me nutty sometimes. I don't know what's real and what's fantasy."

"A plight many of us suffer from."

Plight.

There was a moment of long silence. Breck was still gazing, though no longer at the cow pasture. Now it was Diane's eyes he was examining.

He asked, "Do you work?"

"Yep. You just finished with one of my bosses. I got two more. Jamie – you saw him – and a husband. They're all a handful."

"Ah, your son. The bicyclist. Does he have any learning problems?"

"Nope. Good student, good athlete."

"That's not unusual. Birth order is often a significant factor in dyslexia. And your husband's a policeman?"

"A detective. He works like a maniac, he's away from home so much." Diane found herself about to blurt, "And that's with a case he's been ordered off of!" But she said only, "We don't get many murders in New Lebanon."

"From what I've read it's got the town in quite an uproar."

"Well, all this talk of Moon Killers and cults and that nonsense…"

"Is it nonsense?"

"Well, they've caught that boy. I shouldn't be telling you this but that's why Jamie was a little moody. The one they've indicated was a friend of his."

"Really?" Breck frowned in sympathy. "Poor kid."

"I'm of mixed mind. I didn't want to say anything in front of Sarah but the reason the deputy's out there? Somebody's left some threats."

"How terrible."

"To get Bill to stop the investigation."

"And they think your son's friend did that?"

"Philip's a sorry soul. With parents like his I'm not surprised he turned out bad. He's been abused, I'm sure. And his mother drinks. But threatening my daughter… I don't cut him any slack. He gets no sympathy from me."

"But if they've arrested him, why the guard?"

"That's my Bill. Between you and me and the fence post, he's not sure the boy's guilty. He asked to have the deputy kept on the house for a few days longer. I can't say that upsets me too much." Diane hesitated. "I guess I shouldn't… I mean, this is pretty much classified stuff I'm telling you."

Breck acknowledged the discretion with a nod and Diane turned the talk back to the PTA. After ten minutes Breck looked at his watch and stood. "Thanks for the coffee. I'd like to stay longer," he said with sincerity, "but I have a lecture to prepare."

Diane took his hand and found she was studying parts of him – his floppy hair, his eyelids, his lips, reaching conclusions about each. This allowed her to avoid conclusions about Breck as a person. Or as a man.

She thought suddenly that this was the first time in years she was having a serious talk alone in her kitchen with a man not related by blood or marriage. She asked, "Next Tuesday?"

"I'll look forward to it." Breck added, "I've enjoyed talking with you. I think we have some good rapport established."

"Is that important?"

"Indeed." Breck took her hand again. He continued to hold it, pressing firmly, as he said, "You'd be surprised how important the tutor's relationship with a parent is."

MEMO TO: Files

FROM: Dennis B. Brann, Esq. DATE: May 8

RE: People v. Halpern, a Minor Attached are the relevant portions of a transcript of my interview with Philip Halpern, defendant in this case, which interview took place today at the New Lebanon Sheriffs Department, following a bail hearing at which bail was set in the amount of $1 million and was not posted. The Grand Jury of Harrison County has indicted Philip with one count of first-degree murder, one count of first-degree manslaughter, one count of first-degree rape and one count of first-degree sodomy, in connection with the death of Jennifer Gebben, and one count first-degree murder and one count first-degree manslaughter in the death of Emily Rossiter.

DNA genetic marker test results indicate that the semen found in and on the Gebben victim was Philip's (see Attachment "A").

DBB: Philip, I'd like to talk to you about what happened at the pond. Everything you tell me, even if you tell me that you did what you're accused of, is only between us. The court will never find that out.

PH:Yessir.

DBB: Tell me what happened that night, that Tuesday, April 20.

PH: I was with Jamie -

DBB: That's Jamie Corde?

PH: Yeah and what it was, we'd been fishing, only nothing was biting so we thought since it'd rained during the day there'd be some worms close to the surface, so we thought we'd dig some and we walked over along the dam. It was around ten. Jamie and me were walking along there and we looked down and we seen this white thing and we thought it was, I thought it was one of those, you know, those dolls they sell in the back of magazines sometimes…

DBB: Dolls?

PH: You like blow them up and, you know, do things to them.

DBB: Inflatable dolls.

PH: Yeah. So I go, "Let's go look," and we go down there and it isn't a doll, it's this girl and she's lying there and she looks dead.

DBB: Where was she?

PH: Next to the truck. The old Ford.

DBB: What position was she in?

PH: Lying on her back. They're not listening in, are they? I mean is there a microphone here or anything?

DBB: No, there isn't. It's okay to talk to me.

PH: She was lying in the mud on her back. Her arm's up over her face and her fingers were all curly. It was like weird. Jamie and me walked down to her and we think she's like asleep but then I think maybe she's dead and I don't want to touch her at first and we just stand around and look at her then we look at each other for a while and we're like, oh, man, what're we going to do? And we can't think of anything. So I finally bend down and feel on her neck like they do on TV for the pulse or whatever, and I'm like I can't feel anything and then I…

DBB: Go on.

PH: Then I keep touching her. And Jamie bends down and he touches her leg and she's cold but she's not hard like, you know, with rigid mortis. I…

DBB: Go on.

PH: I touch her, you know, her tits. Then I pull up her skirt and Jamie's like, "Man, this is too much." He goes, "Like I'm serious, we gotta call somebody. Let's call my dad." But I'm still touching her. I can't help myself. I cut her underwear off with the knife.

DBB: Your Naryan knife?

PH: Uh-huh. I cut them off, her underwear, and Jamie was touching her, you know, down there. He stuck his finger in a couple times… Then I, you know, I did it. I couldn't stop myself.

DBB: You had intercourse with the corpse?

PH: Yeah, I guess.

DBB: Did you ejaculate?

PH: Uh, yeah.

DBB: Did you have both vaginal and anal intercourse with her? You know what I mean by that, don't you?

PH: (inaudible)

DBB: What was that?

PH: I wasn't sure how it, you know, worked at first.

DBB: What happened then?

PH: I kind of just finished. I asked Jamie if he wanted to. But he didn't. He was like totally freaked. So we went home.

DBB: Did you touch her in any way afterward?

PH: Oh yeah. She didn't look right, lying there. So I made her look better. I pulled her dress down and folded her arms.

DBB: Why did you do that?

PH: Well, in this movie I saw, The Lost Dimension? - it's a really really good movie – the hero brings this princess back to life. The Honons had killed her. They're like totally evil. And Dathar like made her look like that.

DBB: Did you think you could bring her back to life?

PH: I don't know.

DBB: Did you ever see the girl before? When she was alive?

PH: No.

DBB: Could you tell me about those pictures of the girls you had in your file cabinet? The drawings?

PH: Well, it was sort of a game Jamie and me made up. It was like based on the movie -

DBB: The Lost Dimension?

PH: Yeah. And we wanted to do a computer game of it and sell it but we don't know programming too good so we made up this board game. We used some of the girls from school as characters. We cut their pictures out of the yearbook.

DBB: Was this like a religion or a cult?

PH: No sir. It was just a game. We were going to sell it to Parker Brothers or Milton Bradley. I was going to make a lot of money and get a house of my own and move out.

DBB: Did you see anyone else around the pond that Tuesday?

PH: We saw some guys fishing but that was at dusk.

DBB: Do you have any idea who killed her?

PH: No.

DBB: Do you recognize this photocopy?

PH: That's my knife.

DBB: Are you sure it's yours? Or does it just look like one you have?

PH: I don't know. It looks like mine.

DBB: You don't have that knife any longer?

PH: I lost it. I think I dropped it at the pond.

DBB: Philip, did you know a Susan Biagotti?

PH: Who?

DBB: A student at Auden University.

PH: I don't know about her. I never heard of her.

DBB: She was killed last year.

PH: I don't know anything about that. Really, Mr. Brann.

DBB: Now you went back to the pond on the twenty-eighth? The night of the twenty-eighth?

PH: No. Did Jamie tell you that?

DBB: Nobody told me. The prosecutor thinks you were there.

PH: Well, I wasn't.

DBB: You weren't there at the pond?

PH: I don't know. I don't remember.

DBB: The deputies found some bootmarks near where the Rossiter girl was killed. They seem to match boots you had in your garage.

PH: Well… (long pause). I think they planted those boots there.

DBB: Philip, I'm on your side. You have to be honest with me. I know you're scared and a lot is happening to you. But you have to tell me the truth.

PH: I don't know what happened.

DBB: Did you threaten Detective Corde or his family?

PH: No. I never did. Who said I did?

DBB: Calm down, Philip. Is there anything you can tell me that might prove you didn't kill the Rossiter girl?

PH: I don't know.

The dean was on the phone when he walked in. She looked at Wynton Kresge and motioned him inside then hung up.

"You wanted to see me?" he asked.

The dean stood up and walked across her office. It was a lot plusher than Kresge's but he didn't care for it. Too many scrolly twists of wood and ceramic vases and immense nineteenth-century portraits. She closed the door and returned to her seat.

Kresge was tired so he sat too.

"Wynton," she began. "I'd like to talk to you about the incidents."

"Incidents?"

"The girls' deaths."

"Right. Sure."

"I mentioned that it was important for the school not to be too involved. I can't tell you the fallout we've had because of the investigation that Detective Corde was doing. Several of our lenders told Professor Sayles point-blank that they would not refinance their loans to us because they'd heard about lesbian orgies in the dorms. Thank God they've caught that young man."

"I'm sure Bill didn't say anything about orgies."

"Well, this is just background, Wynton," the dean said. "The reason I called you here is that I'm afraid I'll have to let you go."

"Go?"

"I've gotten a report from the Finance Committee. Did you authorize the placement of some advertising in the Register!"

Ads. The ads that Bill Corde couldn't pay for. "That's right, I did."

"You have no authority to approve nonsecurity expenses."

"I'd say it was pretty much a security expense. It was to find the killer of two of our students."

"Wynton, you made an unauthorized expense. It's the same as embezzlement."

"That's slander, Dean," said Wynton Kresge, who owned more law books than hunting books.

"It's a serious breach of procedures. The Personnel Department will be contacting you about the severance package, which is extremely generous under the circumstances."

She didn't say anything more. She hunkered down in her chair and waited for the onslaught.

Kresge let her flash through a few EEOC nightmares for a long moment then said calmly, "That'd be effective today?"

"Yes, Wynton. And I'm sorry."

"Well, Dean, I hope this's all you have to be sorry about," he said cryptically, and left the office.

11

Chunk.

Lying on the bottom bunk, looking up at the xaser coils above his face, he heard the sound.

Philip Halpern blinked and felt a low punch in his stomach. He recognized the noise instantly. The door of the family's Chevy station wagon slamming. His palms began sweating. His fingers twitched. He stood up and looked through thick bars and thin glass to see what he knew he'd see: his mother coming to visit. He'd been expecting her -

NO, NO, NO!

Oh, God. He'd found it, the plastic hefty bag with the dead girl's purse inside! His father, not forty feet away, holding the bag Philip had buried under the back porch.

The boy stared at his father talking with Sheriff Ribbon, bleak expressions on both their faces. Ribbon pointed back toward the cell. His father stared for a long moment as if he was trying to decide whether he should visit his son. Then they both turned and walked up the street, away from the jail.

These two men looked like any good old boys in New Lebanon, sitting at a green Formica booth in the drugstore. Their solid shoulders arching over heavy white coffee cups. The kind of men who would stand up quick when they heard the four-bar intro of the "Star-Spangled Banner". The kind of men who'd buy a NAPA carburetor at nine a.m. on Saturday and have it seated by ten-thirty. The kind that talked about the price of propane and what poppers the bass were hitting on. Right now these two men were talking about murder. "My boy's got his share of problems," Creth Halpern said. "He's got more weight than he ought. It's soft weight. It's girl weight. I don't know where he gets it. His mother's a drinker, you know that. I think maybe that mixed up his chrome zones."

Steve Ribbon nodded and kept stirring the coffee he had no taste for. He listened. This was a pain and in spades.

"Take them pictures." Halpern was whispering, as if admitting things he'd never in his life spoken out loud. "The pictures you boys found. I'd sometimes find these girlie magazines. Not like Playboy. It was just plain smut. Pictures of people, you know, humping. I don't know where he got them from. I was ascared it was somebody older. Some man. Phil's a little girlish like I say." Halpern smiled and looked at a Heinz bottle as he sailed over the second great tragedy of his life. "But the pictures weren't of queers."

Ribbon asked, "What you getting at exactly, Creth?"

"He's not the kind of boy would hurt anybody. I don't want him to go to prison."

"You showed us the shorts. That he tried to burn."

"I was mad then. I wanted to whup him. I feel different now."

"Why you talking to me? You hired Dennis Brann."

"I don't do well by lawyers. I didn't take to Brann or him to me."

"It doesn't look real good for Philip, Creth."

"He's not bad. He's a disappointment is what he is. You know what'd happen to him if he went to jail?" Halpern glanced at Ribbon, who was silent but who knew exactly what would happen to Philip in general population at the state prison in Warwick and probably on his first day there.

Halpern said, "I can't say I love the boy. I gave up trying a time ago. But I… I don't know."

"Brann's an all-right shyster. He'll give it a good shot."

"Well, look here what I found." Halpern lifted the torn, filthy plastic bag onto the countertop. Crumbs of dirt and popcorn fell into a comma of spilled coffee on the Formica and dissolved. "I found it in this place where Phil played. Like a hiding place. Under the back porch."

Ribbon opened up the bag. Inside was a purse, stained with mud. He shook it out on the table. He looked up at Halpern. He whispered harshly, "This's one of the girls'? Hell, what're you giving it to me for? It'll convict him sure, Creth."

"No, no." Halpern shook his head. "There's something you gotta see."

They stood outside the one-story yellow-brick building in Higgins, both bent over a piece of computer printout paper.

"Well, we gotta do something with it," Steve Ribbon said. "Damn, this is a wrinkle."

Charlie Mahoney handed the printout back to Ribbon then held up the clear plastic bag with a COG tag attached. He read the handwritten letter that was inside.

Ribbon waved the printout as if he were drying ink. "It says it's a fifty-fifty chance. I don't think we can ignore it."

"I don't think so either. Who is he? What're his credentials?"

"A graphoanalyst. Works for the state. It's admissible, Charlie. When Brann gets his hand on it, it'll be back to square one and that's gonna be a son of a bitch for all of us."

"For all of us," Mahoney repeated slowly. He glanced at Ribbon with a smile that meant if anything:

Why you fat shitfaced rube.

Ribbon continued, "The case goes public again, they'll start talking about Jennie and her girlfriend. And the school. I mean, this'll fuck us both." He glanced at the paper.

Mahoney said, "I'll bet his father wrote it to get the kid off."

"Nup, not the father. You don't know him. He wouldn't help his boy that way. But the kid himself might've written it and hid it knowing we'd find it."

"Any chance at all it's real we gotta give it to Brann. That's the law." Mahoney stuck a solid finger at Ribbon. "And say what you like, you had the investigation for two weeks before the county and everybody knows it. Your dick's in the ringer just's far as all of ours…" He drew out the last words melodically.

Ribbon avoided the man's relentless eyes. "This don't disprove the case against the boy for the Gebben girl's murder."

"Damnit, Ribbon, you been harping on this cult serial killing shit since the case started. If the boy didn't kill the second girl then where's that theory of yours go?"

Ribbon said, "You've seen the kid. All those magazines, the pictures, the porn, all that cult crapola. The knife. He guilty or not?"

Mahoney shrugged. "Probably."

"What if we was to get a confession outa him?" Ribbon said, and to Mahoney's relief touched away a web of spit that had formed in the corner of his mouth.

"Confession. Uhm."

"Could you do that?" Ribbon asked. "You've gotten confessions before?"

Mahoney snorted.

"It sounds like something you'd be good at, getting confessions."

"Yeah," Mahoney said, both pleased by the stroking and feeling utter contempt at Ribbon for resorting to it.

"He's in the lockup right now."

Mahoney looked at his watch.

Ribbon said, "I think sooner rather than later'd be best, don't you?"

"What about the other deputies?"

"I can arrange for you to be alone with him."

"Now?"

"Completely alone."

He didn't have a fifty-thousand-joule xaser gun.

He didn't even have his father's Ruger.22.

But Philip Halpern had one weapon.

He turned back to his cell and stripped the sheet off his bunk. Philip lifted it to his wet mouth and with his teeth tore four notches in the cheap cloth. He ripped the sheet into strips and tied them together. He pushed the table into the exact centre of the room and after a struggle climbed up on top of it. He took hold of the metal overhead lamp shade. A wispy avalanche of dust fell. He breathed it in, coughing and blinking. He smelled the pungent odor of his sweat mixed with pine-scented Lysol. Philip wrapped the sheet-rope around his neck and then looped it around the electric cord.

He stared up. Penny-Saver Soft Light Registered Trademark Sixty Watts Made in USA. The nearness of the cheap bulb began to erode his vision. The words faded, the flecks of dust and the corpses of fried bugs on the metal shade grew indistinct. The room became bright as heaven. Philip Halpern lowered his arms.

They heard the boy's loud moan.

Lance Miller cocked his head and said, "Sounds like he's not feeling good. Maybe we ought to get him something."

"Shore," the county deputy said. "How 'bout a ice-cold girl."

Lance Miller looked up from USA Today. "Already had hisself two of them." He returned to an article about Jay Leno.

"Can you get a dose from a corpse?" the county deputy mused.

"That's dis-gusting," Miller told him.

Another moan, loud and eerie.

"Should we check on him?"

"You see the pictures of his sister's boobs?" Miller asked.

"Missed 'em."

"He tried to burn them."

"Her boobs?"

"No, the pictures," Miller said.

"What were they like?"

"Close-ups, you know. Polaroids."

"No, her boobs," the deputy said.

"Not real big. The picture was dark. He didn't use a flash."

They heard the moan again and looked at each other. "He's beating off in there," the deputy said.

"What if he's really sick?"

"I dunno. How 'bout you look now. I'll look later."

"If he's puking I'm not cleaning it up."

"We'll draw straws."

Lance Miller walked into the lockup area, closed the door and continued down the corridor to Philip's cell.

He saw: the boy, the sheet-rope, the table.

"Oh shit. Oh shit." He fumbled with his key and swung open the door to the cell and leapt up on the table, reaching for the boy's shoulders.

Which is when Philip started to fall.

Behind him trailed the strip of sheet, which he hadn't tied to the lamp, or to anything at all. It streamed behind him like a tail of Dimensional cloak. Firing his secret weapon at Miller – not fifty-thousand joules, not a xaser, not a Honon whip but his two hundred plus pounds of weight. The deputy, struggling to get his balance, slipped onto the concrete floor and landed on his back. Philip continued downward and landed directly on him. There was a huge snap. Lance Miller groaned once then passed out.

Philip grabbed Miller's keys and his Smith & Wesson and walked out of the cell. He unlatched the back door of the lockup, then slipped into Town Hall and out the back door. Once outside he sprinted away from the town building then out of downtown, his lungs sucking air. As the pain in his chest grew, a momentary thought occurred to him – he felt grateful, ebullient even, that he had been in jail and had missed the anguish of the long-distance run in PE class. Now he put his head down and ran faster than he ever had in school. Faster than he'd ever run in his life. Philip ran, he ran, he ran.

Wait. What is this?

Bill Corde stood in the doorway to the lockup and watched one deputy on his knees, leaning over the other one – wait, it was Lance Miller – kissing him.

Wait. No.

What is this?

It was CPR. Lance Miller, white-faced and blotched in sweat, thrashed on the floor. Arms sweeping like he was waving down a rescue copter, legs kicking, whispering in between the county deputy's smacks, "Gedoff, gedoff, gedoff!" The deputy would pinch his nose then breathe air into his lungs.

Corde said, "I don't think he needs that."

"S'all right. I've done this before," the rescuing deputy said as he put both hands on Miller's chest and pressed down hard. The crack of the breaking rib was audible to Corde. Miller muttered, "Gedoff me," and fainted.

"Didn't look like he was having a heart attack," Corde said.

"Look what I done," said the rescuer, standing up and looking heart-sick.

Corde knelt and checked Miller's pulse. "I don't think he's hurt too bad. Why don't you call the ambulance?"

"Yeah, I could do that. The kid escaped." He stood up and ran past Corde to the phone.

"What?"

"What should I call? Nine one one?"

"What do you mean, he escaped?"

Clutching the phone the deputy blurted, "Ran outa here five minutes ago. Hello, we need a ambulance at the sheriffs office. There's a injured deputy. I was giving him CPR and he didn't take to it."

Corde ran through the lockup, out the back door, then to the Town Hall exit door, which swung wide into the sunlit parking lot. Outhouse fulla shit! There was no sign of the fleeing boy. He trotted back into the office just as the fire siren began its throaty wail.

Corde had the dispatcher call Ebbans in then he picked up the phone and dialed Ribbon's home. "Hey, Ettie, can you get him down here soon's you can? We got an escape… Yeah? Where? Fishing? Hell's bells!"

Jim Slocum ran through the open doorway, passing the county deputy, who kept an intense vigil for the ambulance. "What's up, Bill? I just heard an ambulance call."

"The Halpern boy's gone."

"Gone? Whatdya? -"

"Escaped is what I mean. Beat up Lance bad."

"No shit." Slocum grinned. "Hell of a scrapper for a fat boy."

"Where's Steve?"

"Saturday afternoon? Where d'ya think? In his new goddamn truck… He got a phone in it?"

"Naw," Slocum said. "He was gonna put the old CB in but he didn't get around to it."

Corde said, "Get out a description but tell them go easy when apprehending."

"I can say but it don't mean they'll do." Slocum walked off to the dispatcher's office.

The medics streamed through the door with a low gurney and explored Lance Miller's body carefully. They gave him an injection then got him outside and into the ambulance. He was awake again and cussing colorfully as they closed the door.

Twenty minutes later Ebbans arrived and Mahoney five minutes after him.

"Great, we got a killer out?" Mahoney said after he'd heard the news.

"Oh, I guess I missed the trial," Corde said, loud.

Mahoney lifted his eyes to the ceiling.

Slocum said happily, "We got ourselves some proof now. I mean, why's he escaping if he didn't do it?"

Corde looked at him as if he'd asked where babies come from.

Ebbans said, "We better call the state and tell them we got one loose."

"You might want to mention," the rib-cracking deputy said, "he's got a gun."

Outright silence. Every head in the room turned to him.

The deputy blushed then said, "Forgot to say, what with Lance being down and all. He got Lance's gun. I thought he'd gotten the Speedloaders but they'd fallen under the bunk. Just the gun he got. I was relieved to find the extra shells."

Corde said, "Nobody's supposed to go into the cells with a gun! He didn't leave it in the box?"

"Guess he forgot."

"Sweet Mary," Corde whispered. "Get on the horn," he ordered Slocum. "Make it APB to county and state. Armed and emotionally disturbed. Tell them that he's scared but he doesn't want to hurt anybody."

Mahoney asked, "You sound like you're in charge here, Detective. I seem to recall you're under suspension."

The others looked at Corde cautiously, waiting for him to blow. He however had not even heard the words. He was in a different place altogether, running through bushes and trees, wheezing and hawking, right next to Philip Halpern. "The boy's fifteen. So he doesn't have a driver's license. He's probably trying to get out of the county on foot. How would he do that?"

Slocum said, "I don't know. I don't think we've ever had an escape situation here."

Ebbans said, "What about a Greyhound out of Fredericksberg."

"Maybe," Corde said slowly. "How about the state park?"

Slocum said, "Damn, sure. It'll lead him right to the river and I bet he thinks he'll snatch a canoe or boat and head south."

The door opened and Harrison County Sheriff Hammerback Ellison stepped into the office. He was a solid, heavy man but his face was pointed and delicate and he had very small feet and narrow ankles. "I just got the call. The boy got away?"

"Sure did." Ebbans stood up and picked up his hat. "And he's got a gun. You and me ought to get over to the state park. That okay with you, Bill?" Ebbans asked. His voice was strident; he was challenging anybody to question the shift of authority back to Corde. Bless you on this, T. T. Corde nodded and said to Slocum, "Jim, why don't you take 302. Just on the chance that he's hitching. I'll take 117 down to the river and see if I find him there."

Slocum looked at Ebbans, who said, "Do it, Jim."

Then Corde said to Mahoney, "Charlie, maybe you ought to check out downtown. He could be trying to outsmart us and hole up till night somewhere around here."

Mahoney reluctantly said, "I don't think he's that smart. But it's not a bad idea."

They all hurried outside to the parking lot. Slocum got into his car and sped off. Ellison and Ebbans vanished in a cloud of dust and tire smoke. Corde hung back. He started the engine then drove slowly out of the parking lot.

He did not however make the right turn onto Cress, which would have taken him directly to Route 117. He turned left then slammed his foot onto the accelerator.

By the power of Your wisdom, by the strength of Your might, guide me, O Guardians, to the Lost Dimension, from darkness to light.

Philip pauses to smell the deputy's gun. The scents are oil, plastic and metal warmed to 98.6 by the abundant flesh of his stomach. It is a small gun but very heavy.

Systems armed. Xaser torpedoes in launch tubes…

Philip is in the woods that border his parents' house. He is surrounded by lean pines and the hot stems of wild sunflowers and long, bowed grass. Within a frame of trees he can see the Chevrolet. He can see the tail of the duct tape that holds the station wagon's grille, which was shattered when his mother went off the road two years ago. He can see the barbecue. He can see the back porch with its lattice door open wide – left that way by his father after digging up the purse. Philip can see the green of the sagging shack in the backyard. Under one eave of the shack is a huge, skin-creepy wasp nest that has weighed on his mind like a fat pimple for a week. After he kills his father and after he kills Jano the Honon traitor he will fire the rest of the bullets into the wasp nest.

Lock on target, entering Dimensional shift now…

No, Philip remembers, he will not shoot all the bullets into the nest. He'll save one.

Philip steps out of the woods and starts toward his house.

Faith. To the Lost Dimension. From darkness to light.

12

"Doing that," Creth Halpern said, "won't help much at all."

His wife looked at him curiously – as if he hadn't spoken, as if he were simply standing in front of her, moving his mouth silently. As if the words buzzed around her head like bees in an old cartoon.

They were both surprised at his comment. It had been years since he'd referred to her drinking. His wife emptied the contents of the heavy glass into her throat and swallowed. She poured another and replaced the plastic pitcher in a refrigerator that held Kraft cheese slices, a near-empty box of Post Toasties, a package of grey ground beef, a half quart of milk. She leaned against the wall. Halpern gripped the screwdriver he was using to crack open a paint-frozen window. He dug the blade into the seam and levered upward, crushing the wood of the sill. The window didn't budge.

"Damn."

His wife sipped the drink and looked out at a blooming lilac bush outside windows bordered with curtains on which were printed tiny brown tepees.

Halpern for the life of him couldn't understand why she looked so good. In the mornings, a little puffy-faced; at night, eyes dead to all who bothered to look. But that was the only real evidence. Last summer one of Philip's friends had hit on her. A skin-and-bones high school kid! Halpern admitted she had a great body. How could she pour down the Beefeaters faster than any one of the guys down at the Tap and still keep her face clean and her hair all permed up nice? Her nails done? Her legs shaved?

"Our son," she said by way of announcement, "in jail."

"He didn't do it. He'll be out tomorrow."

"Oh, come on. He did those things to her…" She didn't even sound drunk. He wondered if he'd just gotten used to it. He tried to remember her voice when he'd met her, when he'd first started hanging out in the New Lebanon Inn, where she was waitressing. He couldn't. This saddened him greatly.

His wife said to a lumber yard calendar. "I can't call my mother. How can I call her? I'd be so ashamed."

"He did some things to that girl, yeah, and he oughta be whipped and he will be. But he didn't kill anybody. I'll swear to that. What we should do is get some help."

"Oh, sure. How?"

"There's state help, I guess. Talk to a… I don't know. Somebody."

"Oh, just like that? Sure. If you made money maybe." Her voice clear as gin.

"I put a roof over his head. I put food in his mouth. And yours too. Food, and that's not all." Two digs in one day. Halpern was shaken.

"If you made money -"

"I fucking make money. You could make money too."

"- we could do a few things."

"I'm stopping you from getting a job?"

"You don't remember. You don't remember anything."

Halpern said, "I can't talk to you when you're this way."

"How come," she asked curiously, "you don't fuck me anymore?"

Halpern's temper blazed then died immediately to a simmer. He considered open-handing her cheek but was paralyzed by a bottomless remorse. He joined his wife in gazing out the window. It occurred to him that most of their arguments happened just this way – her drunk, him thinking about other places and people, both of them staring out the window. Wanting to smack her and not having the energy or the type of hate required.

"Oh, go to hell," his wife said as if giving directions.

Halpern snatched up the screwdriver. He squeezed it a dozen times, feeling the resilience of the rubberized handle spattered in paint. He stepped slowly to the kitchen sink, leaned forward and dug the screwdriver furiously into the seam of the window, cracking chunks out of the soft pine sill.

He heard a clatter of pans behind him.

He heard the sticky sound of the refrigerator door opening.

He heard the sound of pouring liquid.

He heard his wife's voice. "Philip!"

Halpern turned. The boy had entered through the back door and stood in the center of the kitchen.

"When d'you get out?" his father asked. He felt a horrid urge, a salivating urge, to step forward and bloody the boy's nose. To scream at him. (To scream what? "How could you do that to a poor girl? How could you, you stupid little prick?" To scream: "What'd I do to make you this way? I loved you! I really loved you! I'm so sorry!")

Creth Halpern stood completely still, the screwdriver sliding from his hand. He stood twenty feet away from his son, whose upper lip glistened with snot and whose face was glossy with sweat, his fat three-dimensional chest heaving.

"How did you? -"

His wife whispered, "Oh my God."

Creth Halpern too saw the gun.

"Whatcha got there, boy?" he asked.

Philip's head turned to his mother. The glass fell from her grip, hitting the floor and whipping a tail of liquor against the refrigerator. Her smooth hands, tipped in unchipped red nails, went to her mouth. Philip turned back to his father. The boy's mouth moved but no words came out. It was the mouth of a fish eating water.

Finally, he swallowed then said in a weak voice, "The handy man's here."

"Listen up, young man. Put that gun down."

"The handy man."

His mother said, "Philip, don't do this." She sobbed, "Please, don't do this."

"I never did anything to you," the boy said to his father.

"Son -"

Philip held the gun up and said, "Handy man. Handyman, handymanhandyman -"

"I only wanted to help you, son."

"I never did anything to you," Philip whispered.

"Son, I know you didn't hurt those girls."

"You were talking to the sheriff. I saw you."

"I was giving him that purse you hid. The note! The note was inside. You know what I'm talking about! It shows you didn't kill her."

In a voice more assured and more adult and more frightening than Halpern had ever heard, Philip said, "I'm sorry, Dad, but the handy man's here."

"I wanted to help you," his father said.

Philip said, "Hold out your hand."

Bill Corde stepped silently past a drowsy old mutt, chained to the worn railing of the front porch. He slipped through the door and made his way toward the back of the house along the pink carpet runner, stained with dark patches. He smelled dog piss and old food and bleach. He could see Philip in the kitchen, holding the dark gray gun. He could see Halpern nearby. He could see a woman's white arm ending in long polished nails. Corde stopped in the dining room outside the kitchen doorway. He left his revolver holstered then took off his hat and set it on a dusty Sanyo TV. He paused next to the dining room table, which was covered with sticky soiled dishes and scraps of food, crusts from last night's pizza. In the center of the Formica a large paisley spill of ketchup had coagulated darkly.

"Hi, Philip," Corde said softly.

Creth Halpern jumped at the sound. His wife's shocked face appeared in the doorway. Philip looked at the detective, uninterested, then back to his father and said, "Hold out your hand."

Halpern said slowly to Corde, "He's got himself a gun."

"Hold up your hand!"

Halpern raised his hands above his head.

"No, not up. Handy man is here. Hold out your hand! You know how to do it."

"Phil," Corde said. The boy looked at him for a minute then back to his father. When Corde moved a step closer to the living room Philip raised the gun to the center of his father's chest.

"Philip," Corde said, speaking casually. "Why don't you set the gun down? Would you please?"

His parents looked helplessly at Corde. He saw despair in their faces and he saw that the boy's father wore it the hardest.

"Please honey, please son," his mother was whimpering.

Philip looked at her. He smiled. He said, "Open the refrigerator."

"Please honey…"

"OPEN IT!"

She screamed, and tore open the door. Philip held the gun up and fired a ringing, deafening shot into the bottom of the pitcher. The stained beige Rubbermaid exploded in a mist of gin. His mother screamed again. Neither Corde nor Halpern moved. Philip turned back to Corde.

Corde said, "Nobody's going to hurt you."

Philip laughed triumphantly. "You think I don't know about that? That's what they tried with Dathar. They tried to fool him. They lied to him but he didn't believe them."

"We want to help you, Phil."

"Jamie turned me in."

Corde said sternly, "No, he didn't. I talked -"

"He did."

"He didn't!" Corde shouted furiously, risking the boy's reaction. "I talked to him about what happened. Some people at the sheriffs office tricked him. He didn't know they followed him. He was trying to save you. He has a message for you." Corde held his hand in the Naryan salute.

"The gun in Philip's hand wobbled. He said that?"

"He sure did."

Philip nodded and smiled weakly. Then he turned to his father and spoke in a mournful voice. "You didn't come to see me."

"They said I couldn't. There was visiting hours. I was coming tonight. Like at the hospital when we went to visit Gram. They said I could only come at four o'clock."

Philip looked at Corde, who said, "That's true, Philip. It's the Sheriffs Department rules."

The boy's eyes swept the floor.

Outside when he heard the gunshot and the scream, Charlie Mahoney put aside the Motorola walkie-talkie on which he'd just called T.T. Ebbans and Hammerback Ellison. He pulled his federally licensed automatic pistol out of his pocket and started up the porch stairs.

After following Corde here he had waited on the front steps considering what to do next. The gunshot ended the debate. Crouching, taking a fast look through the rusted, torn screen, he pulled the door open and crawled onto the porch. The lime green indoor-outdoor carpet was filthy and Mahoney's expensive gray plaid slacks ended up hoof-marked on the knees with dirt.

He watched them talking, Corde and the Halperns, until the two squad cars silently pulled up. He crawled back to the door, opened it and motioned the men forward. Ebbans and Ellison went around back and Slocum and a county deputy held up on the front steps where Mahoney signaled them to stay.

Mahoney crawled into the living room.

"Son, please, there's nothing to be gained by this…"

"Philip, your father and mother and I want to help you."

The boy was crying now. "He's always hitting me. I don't do anything but he hits me."

"I want you to be strong," Halpern said. "That's all. I know you have it in you. It's going to be all right They'll see the note and you'll be free. Tell him about the letter, Corde."

Corde asked, "Letter?"

Halpern said desperately, "The note! Tell him!"

Mahoney stood then walked along the corridor into the dining room holding his breath not only to keep silent but to keep the stink of the dog piss and rotting food out of his nostrils.

"What note, Halpern?" Corde asked.

"Didn't the sheriff tell you?"

Mahoney eased forward. A board creaked.

Corde spun around and saw him. "No!"

The boy's silver-dollar eyes saw Mahoney and he raised the gun. Mahoney did the same. Corde lifted his arms, palms out, his back to Philip and stepped in between them. His nerves bristled at the thought of a Smith & Wesson muzzle ten feet behind him and a Browning automatic's the same distance in front. "Mahoney, what the hell are you doing here?"

"You fucking son of a bitch, Corde, get out of the way! You fucking -"

"Get out of here, you've got no business!…" Corde was shouting. Mahoney was dancing in the doorway, jockeying for a target. The boy stood frozen with fear, the muzzle pointed at Corde's spine.

"Philip," Corde shouted over his shoulder, "drop the gun! You'll be okay. Just -"

"GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY!" Mahoney shouted.

Philip's hand drooped. His father looked at him and said, "Put it down, son. Please."

The gun sank lower.

A shadow flashed across the kitchen floor. Mahoney shouted, "Drop it!" And fired two shots into the ceiling.

Ebbans and Ellison leapt into the kitchen. Philip whirling toward them, Ellison screaming in panic, "He's shooting he's shooting take him out!" The men's hands vanished in ragged flares of muzzle bursts. Mahoney dropped to the carpet. One slug hissed past Corde's left ear as he collapsed on the floor. Philip spun around and around. Then he fell. Corde scrabbled toward him, shouting, "No, no, no!" Philip's father stood frozen, his right hand outstretched toward his son.

In the enormous silence that followed, Charlie Mahoney stood up and steadied himself on a pink metal table. He knocked off a flower pot, which broke and scattered a wiry geranium along the carpet, a flower as red and dazzling as the artery blood that sprang from Philip's neck and chest and soaked the filthy floor that may at one time have been white.