The Outsider

1

Because Ralph hadn’t told Jeannie about his darkest suspicion concerning the Flint County prosecutor—that he might have hoped for a crowd of righteously angry citizens at the courthouse—she let Bill Samuels in when he appeared at the door of the Anderson home on Wednesday evening, but she made it clear that she didn’t have much use for him.

“He’s out back,” she said, turning away and heading back into the living room, where Alex Trebek was putting that evening’s Jeopardy contestants through their paces. “You know the way.”

Samuels, tonight clad in jeans, sneakers, and a plain gray tee-shirt, stood in the front hall for a moment, considering, then followed her. There were two easy chairs in front of the television, the bigger, more lived-in one empty. He picked up the remote from the table between the two and muted the sound. Jeannie continued looking at the television, where the contestants were currently munching their way through a category called Literary Villains. The answer onscreen was She demanded Alice’s head.

“That’s an easy one,” Samuels said. “The Red Queen. How is he, Jeannie?”

“How do you think he is?”

“I’m sorry about the way things turned out.”

“Our son found out that his father’s been suspended,” she said, still looking at the TV. “It was on the Internet. He’s very upset by that, of course, but he’s also upset because his favorite coach was gunned down in front of the courthouse. He wants to come home. I told him to give it a few days and see if he doesn’t change his mind. I didn’t want to tell him the truth, that his father isn’t ready to see him yet.”

“He hasn’t been suspended. He’s just on administrative leave. With pay. And it’s mandatory after a shooting incident.”

“You say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to.” Now the answer onscreen was This nurse was wretched. “He says he may be off for as long as six months, and that’s if he agrees to the mandatory psych evaluation.”

“Why would he not?”

“He’s thinking of pulling the pin.”

Samuels raised his hand to the top of his head, but tonight the cowlick was behaving—at least so far—and he lowered it again. “In that case, maybe we can go into business together. This town needs a good car wash.”

Now she did look at him. “What are you talking about?”

“I’ve decided not to run for re-election.”

She favored him with a thin stiletto of a smile that her own mother might not have recognized. “Going to quit before Johnny Q. Public can fire you?”

“If you want to put it that way,” he said.

“I do,” Jeannie said. “Go on out back, Mr. Prosecutor For Now, and feel free to suggest a partnership. But you should be ready to duck.”

2

Ralph was sitting in a lawn chair with a beer in his hand and a Styrofoam cooler beside him. He glanced around when the kitchen’s screen door slammed, saw Samuels, and then returned his attention to a hackberry tree just beyond the back fence.

“Yonder’s a nuthatch,” he said, pointing. “Haven’t seen one of those in a dog’s age.”

There was no second chair, so Samuels lowered himself to the bench of the long picnic table. He had sat here several times before, under happier circumstances. He looked at the tree. “I don’t see it.”

“There he goes,” Ralph said, as a small bird took wing.

“I think that’s a sparrow.”

“Time to get your eyes checked.” Ralph reached into the cooler and handed Samuels a Shiner.

“Jeannie says you’re thinking about retiring.”

Ralph shrugged.

“If it’s the psych eval you’re worried about, you’ll pass with flying colors. You did what you had to do.”

“It’s not that. It’s not even the cameraman. You know about him? When the bullet hit his camera—the first one I fired—the pieces went everywhere. Including one into his eye.”

Samuels did know this, but kept quiet and sipped his beer, although he loathed Shiner.

“He’s probably going to lose it,” Ralph said. “The doctors at Dean McGee up in Okie City are trying to save it, but yeah, he’s probably going to lose it. You think a cameraman with one eye can still work? Probably, maybe, or no way?”

“Ralph, someone slammed into you as you fired. And listen, if the guy hadn’t had the camera up to his face, he’d probably be dead now. That’s the upside.”

“Yeah, and fuck a bunch of upside. I called his wife to apologize. She said, ‘We’re going to sue the Flint City PD for ten million dollars, and once we win that one, we’ll start on you.’ Then she hung up.”

“That will never fly. Peterson had a gun, and you were in performance of your duty.”

“As that camera-jockey was in performance of his.”

“Not the same. He had a choice.”

“No, Bill.” Ralph swung around in his chair. “He had a job. And that was a nuthatch, goddammit.”

“Ralph, you need to listen to me now. Maitland killed Frank Peterson. Peterson’s brother killed Maitland. Most people see that as frontier justice, and why not? This state was the frontier not that long ago.”

“Terry said he didn’t do it. That was his dying declaration.”

Samuels got to his feet and began to pace. “What else was he going to say with his wife kneeling right there beside him and crying her eyes out? Was he going to say, ‘Oh yes, right, I buggered the kid, and I bit him—not necessarily in that order—and then I ejaculated on him for good measure’?”

“There’s a wealth of evidence to support what Terry said at the end.”

Samuels stalked back to Ralph and stood looking down at him. “It was his fucking DNA in the semen sample, and DNA trumps everything. Terry killed him. I don’t know how he set up the rest, but he did.”

“Did you come here to convince me or yourself?”

“I don’t need any convincing. I only came to tell you that we now know who originally stole that white Econoline van.”

“At this point does it make any difference?” Ralph asked, but Samuels at last detected a gleam of interest in the man’s eyes.

“If you’re asking if it casts any light on this mess, no. But it’s fascinating. Do you want to hear or not?”

“Sure.”

“It was stolen by a twelve-year-old boy.”

“Twelve? Are you kidding me?”

“Nope, and he was on the road for months. Made it all the way to El Paso before a cop bagged him in a Walmart parking lot, sleeping in a stolen Buick. He stole four vehicles in all, but the van was the first. He drove it as far as Ohio before he ditched it and switched to another one. Left the ignition key in it, just the way we thought.” He said this with some pride, and Ralph supposed he had a right; it was nice that at least one of their theories going in had proved correct.

“But we still don’t know how it got down here, do we?” Ralph asked. Something was nagging him, though. Some small detail.

“No,” Samuels said. “It’s just a loose thread that isn’t loose anymore. I thought you’d like to know.”

“And now I do.”

Samuels drank a swallow of beer, then set the can on the picnic table. “I’m not running for re-election.”

“No?”

“No. Let that lazy asshole Richmond have the job, and see how people like him when he refuses to prosecute eighty per cent of the cases that land on his desk. I told your wife, and she didn’t exactly overwhelm me with sympathy.”

“If you think I’ve been telling her this is all your fault, Bill, you’re wrong. I haven’t said a word against you. Why would I? Arresting him at that fucking ballgame was my idea, and when I talk to the IA shooflies on Friday, I’ll make that clear.”

“I’d expect nothing less.”

“But as I may have already mentioned, you didn’t exactly try to talk me out of it.”

“We believed him guilty. I still believe him guilty, dying declaration or no dying declaration. We didn’t check for an alibi because he knows everyone in the goddam town and we were afraid of spooking him—”

“Also we didn’t see the point, and boy, were we wrong about tha—”

“Yes, okay, your fucking point is fucking taken. We also believed he was extremely dangerous, especially to young boys, and on last Saturday night he was surrounded by them.”

“When we got to the courthouse, we should have taken him around back,” Ralph said. “I should have insisted on it.”

Samuels shook his head vehemently enough to cause the cowlick to come loose and spring to attention. “Don’t take that on yourself. Transfer from county jail to the courthouse is the sheriff’s purview. Not the city’s.”

“Doolin would’ve listened to me.” Ralph dropped his empty can back into the cooler and looked directly at Samuels. “And he would have listened to you. I think you know that.”

“Water over the dam. Or under the bridge. Or whatever the hell that saying is. We’re done. I guess the case might technically stay in the open file, but—”

“The technical term is OBI, open but inactive. It will stay that way even if Marcy Maitland brings a civil suit against the department, claiming her husband was killed as a result of negligence. And that’s a suit she could win.”

“Is she talking about doing that?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t scraped up enough nerve to speak to her yet. Howie might give you an idea of what she’s thinking.”

“Maybe I’ll talk to him. Try to pour a little oil on troubled waters.”

“You’re a fountain of wise sayings this evening, counselor.”

Samuels picked up his can of beer, then put it back with a small grimace. He saw Jeannie Anderson at the kitchen window, looking out at them. Just standing there, her face unreadable. “My mother used to subscribe to Fate.”

“Me too,” Ralph said moodily, “but after what happened to Terry, I’m not so sure. That Peterson kid came right out of nowhere. Nowhere.”

Samuels smiled a little. “I’m not talking about predestination, just a little digest-sized magazine full of stories about ghosts and crop circles and UFOs and God knows what else. Mom used to read me some of them when I was a kid. There was one in particular that fascinated me. ‘Footsteps in the Sand,’ it was called. It was about a newly married couple that went on their honeymoon in the Mojave Desert. Camping, you know. Well, one night they pitched their little tent in a grove of cottonwoods, and when the young bride woke up the next morning, her husband was gone. She walked out of the grove to where the sand started, and saw his tracks. She called to him, but there was no answer.”

Ralph made a horror-movie sound: Ooooo-oooo.

“She followed the tracks over the first dune, then over the second. The tracks kept getting fresher. She followed them over the third…”

“And the fourth, and the fifth!” Ralph said in an awed voice. “And she’s still walking to this day! Bill, I hate to cut your campfire story short, but I think I’m going to eat a piece of pie, take a shower, and go to bed.”

“No, listen to me. The third dune was as far as she got. His tracks went halfway down the far side, then stopped. Just stopped, with nothing but acres of sand all around. She never saw him again.”

“And you believe that?”

“No, I’m sure it’s bullshit, but belief isn’t the point. It’s a metaphor.” Samuels tried to soothe the cowlick down. The cowlick refused. “We followed Terry’s tracks, because that’s our job. Our duty, if you like that word better. We followed them until they stopped on Monday morning. Is there a mystery? Yes. Will there always be unanswered questions? Unless some new and amazing piece of information drops into our laps, there will be. Sometimes that happens. It’s why people continue to wonder what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. It’s why people keep trying to figure out what happened to the crew of the Mary Celeste. It’s why people argue about whether or not Oswald acted alone when he shot JFK. Sometimes the tracks just stop, and we have to live with that.”

“One big difference,” Ralph said. “The woman in your story about the footsteps could believe her husband was still alive somewhere. She could go on believing that until she was an old woman instead of a young bride. But when Marcy got to the end of her husband’s tracks, Terry was right there, dead on the sidewalk. She’s burying him tomorrow, according to the obituary in today’s paper. I imagine it’ll just be her and her girls. Along with fifty news vultures outside the fence, that is, yelling questions and snapping pictures.”

Samuels sighed. “Enough. I’m going home. I told you about the kid—Merlin Cassidy’s his name, by the way—and I can see you don’t want to listen to anything else.”

“No, wait, sit back down a minute,” Ralph said. “You told me one, now I’m going to tell you one. Not out of a psychic magazine, though. This is personal experience. Every word true.”

Samuels lowered himself back to the bench.

“When I was a kid,” Ralph said, “ten or eleven—around Frank Peterson’s age—my mother sometimes used to bring home cantaloupes from the farmers’ market, if they were in season. Back then I loved cantaloupe. They’ve got this sweet, dense flavor watermelon can’t get close to. So one day she brought home three or four in a net bag, and I asked her if I could have a piece. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Just remember to scrape the seeds into the sink.’ She didn’t really have to tell me that, because I’d opened up my share of cantaloupes by then. You with me so far?”

“Uh-huh. I suppose you cut yourself, right?”

“No, but my mother thought I did, because I let out a screech they probably heard next door. She came on the run, and I just pointed at the cantaloupe, laying there on the counter, split in two. It was full of maggots and flies. I mean those bugs were squirming all over each other. My mother got the Raid and sprayed the ones on the counter. Then she got a dish towel, wrapped the pieces in it, and threw them in the swill bucket out back. Since that day I can’t bear to look at a slice of cantaloupe, let alone eat one. That’s my Terry Maitland metaphor, Bill. The cantaloupe looked fine. It wasn’t spongy. The skin was whole. There was no way those bugs could have gotten inside, but somehow they did.”

“Fuck your cantaloupe,” Samuels said, “and fuck your metaphor. I’m going home. Think before you quit the job, Ralph, okay? Your wife said I was getting out before Johnny Q. Public fired me, and she’s probably right, but you don’t have to face the voters. Just three retired cops that are this city’s excuse for Internal Affairs, and a shrink collecting some municipal shekels to supplement a private practice on life support. And there’s something else. If you quit, people will be even more sure that we screwed this thing up.”

Ralph stared at him, then began laughing. It was hearty, a series of guffaws that came all the way up from the belly. “But we did! Don’t you know that yet, Bill? We did. Royally. We bought a cantaloupe because it looked like a good cantaloupe, but when we cut it open in front of the whole town, it was full of maggots. No way for them to get in, but there they were.”

Samuels trudged toward the kitchen door. He opened the screen, then whirled around, his cowlick springing jauntily back and forth. He pointed at the hackberry tree. “That was a sparrow, goddammit!”

3

Shortly after midnight (around the time the last remaining member of the Peterson family was learning how to make a hangman’s noose, courtesy of Wikipedia), Marcy Maitland awoke to the sound of screams from her elder daughter’s bedroom. It was Grace at first—a mother always knows—but then Sarah joined her, creating a terrible two-part harmony. It was the girls’ first night out of the bedroom Marcy had shared with Terry, but of course the kids were still bunking together, and she thought they might do that for some time to come. Which was fine.

What wasn’t fine were those screams.

Marcy didn’t remember running down the hall to Sarah’s bedroom. All she remembered was getting out of bed and then standing inside the open door of Sarah’s room and beholding her daughters, sitting bolt upright in bed and clutching each other in the light of the full July moon that came flooding through the window.

“What?” Marcy asked, looking around for an intruder. At first she thought he (surely it was a he) was crouched in the corner, but that was only a pile of cast-off jumpers, tee-shirts, and sneakers.

“It was her!” Sarah cried. “It was G! She said there was a man! God, Mom, she scared me so bad!”

Marcy sat on the bed and pried her younger daughter from Sarah’s arms and took Grace in her own. She was still looking around. Was he in the closet? He might be, the accordion doors were closed. He could have done that when he heard her coming. Or under the bed? Every childhood fear flooded back while she waited for a hand to close around her ankle. In the other would be a knife.

“Grace? Gracie? Who did you see? Where was he?”

Grace was crying too hard to answer, but she pointed at the window.

Marcy went there, her knees threatening to come unhinged at every step. Were the police still watching the house? Howie said they would be making regular passes for awhile, but that didn’t mean they were there all the time, and besides, Sarah’s bedroom window—all of their bedroom windows—looked out on either the backyard or the side yard, between their house and the Gundersons’. And the Gundersons were away on vacation.

The window was locked. The yard—every single blade of grass seeming to cast a shadow in the moonlight—was empty.

She came back to the bed, sat, and stroked Grace’s hair, which was clumped and sweaty. “Sarah? Did you see anything?”

“I…” Sarah considered. She was still holding Grace, who was sobbing against her big sister’s shoulder. “No. I might have thought I did, just for a second, but that was because she was screaming, ‘The man, the man.’ There was no one there.” And, to Gracie, “No one, G. Really.”

“You had a bad dream, honey,” Marcy said. Thinking, Probably the first of many.

“He was there,” Gracie whispered.

“He must have been floating, then,” Sarah said, speaking with admirable reasonableness for someone who had been scared out of sleep only minutes before. “Because we’re on the second floor, y’know.”

“I don’t care. I saw him. His hair was short and black and standing up. His face was lumpy, like Play-Doh. He had straws for eyes.”

“Nightmare,” Sarah said matter-of-factly, as if this closed the subject.

“Come on, you two,” Marcy said, striving for that same matter-of-fact tone. “You’re with me for the rest of the night.”

They came without protest, and five minutes after she had them settled in, one on each side of her, ten-year-old Gracie had fallen asleep again.

“Mom?” Sarah whispered.

“What, honey?”

“I’m scared of Daddy’s funeral.”

“So am I.”

“I don’t want to go, and neither does G.”

“That makes three of us, sweetheart. But we’ll do it. We’ll be brave. It’s what your dad would have wanted.”

“I miss him so much I can’t think of anything else.”

Marcy kissed the gently beating hollow of Sarah’s temple. “Go to sleep, honey.”

Sarah eventually did. Marcy lay awake between her daughters, looking up at the ceiling and thinking of Grace turning to the window in a dream so real she thought she was awake.

He had straws for eyes.

4

Shortly after three AM (around the time Fred Peterson was trudging out into his backyard with a footstool from the living room in his left hand and his hangrope over his right shoulder), Jeanette Anderson awoke, needing to pee. The other side of the bed was empty. After doing her little bit of business, she went downstairs and found Ralph sitting in his Papa Bear easy chair, staring at the blank screen of the TV set. She observed him with a wifely eye and noted that he had dropped weight since the discovery of Frank Peterson’s body.

She put a gentle hand on his shoulder.

He didn’t look around. “Bill Samuels said something that’s nagging at me.”

“What?”

“That’s just it, I don’t know. It’s like having a word on the tip of your tongue.”

“Was it about the boy who stole the van?”

Ralph had told her about his conversation with Samuels while the two of them were lying in bed prior to turning out the light, passing it on not because any of it was substantive but because a twelve-year-old boy making it all the way from mid-state New York to El Paso in a series of stolen vehicles was sort of amazing. Maybe not Fate magazine amazing, but still pretty wild. He must really hate his stepdad, Jeannie had said before turning out the light.

“I think it was something about the kid,” Ralph said now. “And there was a scrap of paper in that van. I meant to check back on that, and it kind of got lost in the shuffle. I don’t think I mentioned it to you.”

She smiled and ruffled his hair, which—like the body under the pajamas—seemed thinner than it had in the spring. “You did, actually. You said it might be part of a take-out menu.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s in evidence.”

“You told me that, too, hon.”

“I might go down to the station tomorrow and take a peek. Maybe it will help me put a finger on whatever it was Bill said.”

“I think that’s a good idea. Time to do something besides brood. You know, I went back and re-read that Poe story. The narrator says that when he was at school, he kind of ruled the roost. But then this other boy arrived who had the same name.”

Ralph took her hand and gave it an absent kiss. “Believable enough so far. William Wilson’s not as common a name as Joe Smith, maybe, but it’s not exactly Zbigniew Brzezinski, either.”

“Yes, but then the narrator discovers that they have the same birth date, and they’re going around in similar clothes. Worst of all, they look something alike. People get them mixed up. Sound familiar?”

“Yes.”

“Well, William Wilson Number One keeps meeting William Wilson Number Two later in life, and these meetings always end badly for Number One, who turns to a life of crime and blames Number Two. Are you following this?”

“Considering it’s quarter past three in the morning, I think I’m doing a fine job.”

“Well, in the end, William Wilson Number One stabs William Wilson Number Two with a sword, only when he looks into a mirror, he sees he’s stabbed himself.”

“Because there never was any second William Wilson, I take it.”

“But there was. Lots of other people saw the second one. In the end, though, William Wilson Number One had a hallucination and committed suicide. Because he couldn’t stand the doubleness, I guess.”

She expected him to scoff, but he nodded instead. “Okay, that actually makes sense. Pretty damn good psychology, in fact. Especially for… what? The middle of the nineteenth century?”

“Something like that, yes. I took a class in college called American Gothic, and we read a lot of Poe’s stories, including that one. The professor said people had the mistaken idea that Poe wrote fantastic stories about the supernatural, when in fact he wrote realistic stories about abnormal psychology.”

“But before fingerprints and DNA,” Ralph said, smiling. “Let’s go to bed. I think I can sleep now.”

But she held him back. “I’m going to ask you something now, husband of mine. Probably because it’s late and it’s just the two of us. There’s no one to hear you if you laugh at me, but please don’t, because that would make me sad.”

“I won’t laugh.”

“You might.”

“I won’t.”

“You told me Bill’s story about the footprints that just stopped, and you told me your story about the maggots that somehow got into the cantaloupe, but both of you were speaking in metaphors. Just as the Poe story is a metaphor for the divided self… or so my college prof said. But if you strip the metaphors away, what do you have?”

“I don’t know.”

“The inexplicable,” she said. “So my question to you is pretty simple. What if the only answer to the riddle of the two Terrys is supernatural?”

He didn’t laugh. He had no urge to laugh. It was too late at night for laughter. Or too early in the morning. Too something, anyway. “I don’t believe in the supernatural. Not ghosts, not angels, not the divinity of Jesus Christ. I go to church, sure, but only because it’s a peaceful place where I can sometimes listen to myself. Also because it’s the expected thing. I had an idea that’s why you went, too. Or because of Derek.”

“I would like to believe in God,” she said, “because I don’t want to believe we just end, even though it balances the equation—since we came from blackness, it seems logical to assume that it’s to blackness we return. But I believe in the stars, and the infinity of the universe. That’s the great Out There. Down here, I believe there are more universes in every fistful of sand, because infinity is a two-way street. I believe there’s another dozen thoughts in my head lined up behind each one I’m aware of. I believe in my consciousness and my unconscious, even though I don’t know what those things are. And I believe in A. Conan Doyle, who had Sherlock Holmes say, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’ ”

“Wasn’t he the guy who believed in fairies?” Ralph asked.

She sighed. “Come upstairs and let’s get funky. Then maybe we’ll both sleep.”

Ralph went willingly enough, but even while they were making love (except at the moment of climax, when all thought was obliterated), he found himself remembering Doyle’s dictum. It was smart. Logical. But could you amend it to Once you eliminate the natural, whatever remains must be supernatural? No. He could not believe in any explanation that transgressed the rules of the natural world, not just as a police detective but as a man. A real person had killed Frank Peterson, not a spook from a comic book. So what remained, no matter how improbable? Only one thing. Frank Peterson’s killer had been Terry Maitland, now deceased.

5

On that Wednesday night, the July moon had risen as bloated and orange as a gigantic tropical fruit. By early Thursday morning, as Fred Peterson stood in his backyard, on the footstool where he had rested his feet during many a Sunday afternoon football game, it had shrunk to a cold silver coin riding high overhead.

He slipped the noose around his neck and yanked it until the knot rested against the angle of his jaw, as the Wikipedia entry had specified (complete with helpful illustration). The other end was attached to the branch of a hackberry tree like the one beyond Ralph Anderson’s fence, although this one was a rather more elderly representative of Flint City’s flora, having sprouted around the time an American bomber was dropping its payload on Hiroshima (surely a supernatural event to the Japanese who witnessed it at a distance great enough to save them from being vaporized).

The footstool rocked back and forth unsteadily beneath his feet. He listened to the crickets and felt the night breeze—cool and soothing after one hot day and before another he did not expect to see—on his sweaty cheeks. Part of his decision to draw a line under the Flint City Petersons and call the equation complete was a hope that Frank, Arlene, and Ollie had not gone far, at least not yet. It might still be possible to catch up. More of it was the unbearable prospect of attending a double funeral in the morning at the same mortuary—Donelli Brothers—that would bury the man responsible for their deaths in the afternoon. He couldn’t do it.

He looked around one final time, asking himself if he really wanted to do this. The answer was yes, and so he kicked the footstool away, expecting to hear the crack of his neck breaking deep in his head before the tunnel of light opened before him—the tunnel with his family standing at the far end, beckoning him to a second and better life where harmless boys were not raped and murdered.

There was no crack. He had missed or ignored the part in the Wikipedia entry about how a certain drop was necessary to break the neck of a man weighing two hundred and five pounds. Instead of dying, he began to strangle. As his windpipe closed and his eyes bulged in their sockets, his previously drowsing survival instinct awakened in a clangor of alarm bells and a glare of interior security lights. In a space of three seconds his body overrode his brain and the desire to die became the brute will to live.

Fred raised his hands, groped, and found the rope. He pulled with all his strength. The rope slackened, and he was able to draw a breath—necessarily shallow, because the noose was still tight, the knot digging into the side of his throat like a swollen gland. Holding on with one hand, he groped for the branch to which he had tied the rope. His fingers brushed its underside, and loosed a few flakes of bark that fluttered down onto his hair, but that was all.

He was not a fit man in his middle age, most of his exercise consisting of trips to the fridge for another beer during one of his beloved Dallas Cowboys football games, but even as a high school kid in phys ed, five pull-ups had been the best he could do. He could feel his one-handed grip slipping, and grabbed the rope with his other hand again, holding it slack long enough to pull in another half-breath, but unable to yank himself any higher. His feet swung back and forth eight inches above the lawn. One of his slippers came off, then the other. He tried to call for help, but all he could manage was a rusty wheeze… and who would possibly be awake to hear him at this hour of the morning? Nosy old Mrs. Gibson next door? She would be asleep in her bed with her rosary in her hand, dreaming of Father Brixton.

His hands slipped. The branch creaked. His breath stopped. He could feel the blood trapped in his head pulsing, getting ready to burst his brains. He heard a rasping sound and thought, It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

He flailed for the rope, a drowning man reaching for the surface of the lake into which he has fallen. Large black spores appeared in front of his eyes. They burst into extravagant black toadstools. But before they overwhelmed his sight, he saw a man standing on the patio in the moonlight, one hand resting possessively on the barbecue where Fred would never grill another steak. Or maybe it wasn’t a man at all. The features were crude, as if punched into being by a blind sculptor. And the eyes were straws.

6

June Gibson happened to be the woman who had made the lasagna Arlene Peterson dumped over her head before suffering her heart attack, and she wasn’t asleep. Nor was she thinking about Father Brixton. She was suffering herself, and plenty. It had been three years since her last attack of sciatica, and she had dared to hope it was gone for good, but here it was again, a nasty uninvited visitor who just barged in and took up residence. Only a telltale stiffness behind her left knee after the post-funeral gathering at the Petersons’ next door, but she knew the signs and begged Dr. Richland for an oxycodone prescription, which he had reluctantly written. The pills only helped a little. The pain ran down her left side from the small of her back to her ankle, where it cinched her with a thorny manacle. One of the cruelest attributes of sciatica—hers, anyway—was that lying down intensified the pain instead of easing it. So she sat here in her living room, dressed in her robe and pajamas, alternately watching an infomercial for sexy abs on TV and playing solitaire on the iPhone her son had given her for Mother’s Day.

Her back was bad and her eyes were failing, but she had muted the sound on the infomercial and there was nothing wrong with her ears. She heard a gunshot next door clearly, and leaped to her feet with no thought for the bolt of pain that pistoned down the entire left side of her body.

Dear God, Fred Peterson has just shot himself.

She grabbed her cane and hobbled, bent over and crone-like, to her back door. On the porch, and by the light of that heartless silver moon, she saw Peterson crumpled on his lawn. Not a gunshot after all. There was a rope around his neck, and it snaked a short distance to the broken branch around which it had been tied.

Dropping her cane—it would only slow her down—Mrs. Gibson sidesaddled down her back porch steps and negotiated the ninety feet between the two backyards at a lurching jog, unaware of her own cries of pain as her sciatic nerve went nuclear, ripping her from her skinny buttocks to the ball of her left foot.

She knelt beside Mr. Peterson, observing his swollen and empurpled face, the protruding tongue, and the rope half-buried in the ample flesh of his neck. She wriggled her fingers under the rope and pulled with all her strength, unleashing another blast of agony. The cry this occasioned she was aware of: a high, long, ululating scream. Lights went on across the street, but Mrs. Gibson didn’t see them. The rope was finally loosening, thank God and Jesus and Mary and all the saints. She waited for Mr. Peterson to gasp in air.

He did not.

During the first phase of her working life, Mrs. Gibson had been a teller at Flint City First National. When she retired from that position at the mandatory age of sixty-two, she had taken the classes necessary to become a qualified Home Helper, a job she had done to supplement her retirement checks until the age of seventy-four. One of those classes had necessarily dealt with resuscitation. She now knelt beside Mr. Peterson’s considerable bulk, tilted his head up, pinched his nostrils shut, yanked his mouth open, and pressed her lips to his.

She was on her tenth breath, and feeling decidedly woozy, when Mr. Jagger from across the street joined her and tapped her on one bony shoulder. “Is he dead?”

“Not if I can help it,” said Mrs. Gibson. She clutched the pocket of her housecoat and felt the rectangle of her cell phone. She took it out and tossed it blindly behind her. “Call 911. And if I pass out, you’ll have to take over.”

But she didn’t pass out. On her fifteenth breath—and just as she really was about to—Fred Peterson took a big, slobbery breath on his own. Then another. Mrs. Gibson waited for his eyes to open, and when they did not, she rolled up one lid. Beneath was nothing but the sclera, not white but red with burst blood vessels.

Fred Peterson took a third breath, then stopped again. Mrs. Gibson began the best chest compressions she could manage, not sure they would help but feeling they could not hurt. She was aware that the pain in her back and down her leg had lessened. Was it possible that sciatica could be shocked out of one’s body? Of course not. The idea was ridiculous. It was adrenalin, and once the supply was exhausted, she would feel worse than ever.

A siren floated over the early morning darkness, approaching.

Mrs. Gibson returned to forcing her breath down Fred Peterson’s throat (her most intimate contact with a man since her husband had died in 2004), stopping each time she felt on the verge of toppling into a gray faint. Mr. Jagger did not offer to take over, and she didn’t ask him to. Until the ambulance came, this was between her and Peterson.

Sometimes when she stopped, Mr. Peterson would take one of those great slobbering breaths. Sometimes he would not. She was barely cognizant of the pulsing red ambulance lights when they began to zap the two adjacent yards, strobing across the jagged stub of branch on the hackberry tree where Mr. Peterson had tried to hang himself. One of the EMTs eased her to her feet, and she was able to stand on them almost without pain. It was amazing. No matter how temporary the miracle was, she’d accept it with thanks.

“We’ll take over now, missus,” the EMT said. “You did a hell of a job.”

“You surely did,” Mr. Jagger said. “You saved him, June! You saved that poor bugger’s life!”

Wiping warm spittle from her chin—a mixture of hers and Peterson’s—Mrs. Gibson said, “Maybe so. And maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t.”

7

At eight o’clock on Thursday morning, Ralph was cutting the grass in his backyard. With a day devoid of tasks stretching ahead of him, mowing was all he could think of to do with his time… although not with his mind, which ran on its own endless gerbil wheel: the mutilated body of Frank Peterson, the witnesses, the taped footage, the DNA, the crowd at the courthouse. Mostly that. It was the girl’s dangling bra strap he kept fixing on for some reason—a bright yellow ribbon that jiggled up and down as she sat on her boyfriend’s shoulders and pumped her fists.

He barely heard the xylophone rattle of his cell phone. He turned off the mower and took the call, standing there with his sneakers and bare ankles dusted with grass. “Anderson.”

“Troy Ramage here, boss.”

One of the two officers who had actually arrested Terry. That seemed a long time ago. In another life, as they said.

“What’s up, Troy?”

“I’m at the hospital with Betsy Riggins.”

Ralph smiled, an expression so lately unused that it felt foreign on his face. “She’s having the baby.”

“No, not yet. The chief asked her to come down because you’re on leave and Jack Hoskins is still fishing on Lake Ocoma. Sent me along to keep her company.”

“What’s the deal?”

“EMTs brought in Fred Peterson a few hours ago. He tried to hang himself in his backyard, but the branch he tied his rope to broke. The lady next door, a Mrs. Gibson, gave him mouth-to-mouth and pulled him through. She came in to see how he was doing, and the chief wants a statement from her, which I guess is protocol, but this seems like a done deal to me. God knows the poor guy had plenty of reasons to pull the pin.”

“What’s his condition?”

“The docs say he’s got minimal brain function. Chances of him ever coming back are like one in a hundred. Betsy said you’d want to know.”

For a moment Ralph thought the bowl of cereal he’d eaten for breakfast was going to come back up, and he right-faced away from his Lawnboy to keep from spewing all over it.

“Boss? You there?”

Ralph swallowed back a sour mash of milk and Rice Chex. “I’m here. Where’s Betsy now?”

“In Peterson’s room with the Gibson woman. Detective Riggins sent me to call because ICU’s a no-cell zone. The docs offered them a room where they could talk, but Gibson said she wanted to answer Detective Riggins’s questions with Peterson. Almost like she thinks he could hear her. Nice old lady, but her back’s killing her, you can see it by the way she walks. So why’s she even here? This ain’t The Good Doctor, and there ain’t gonna be any miracle recovery.”

Ralph could guess the reason. This Mrs. Gibson would have exchanged recipes with Arlene Peterson, and watched Ollie and Frankie grow up. Maybe Fred Peterson had shoveled out her driveway after one of Flint City’s infrequent snowstorms. She was there out of sorrow and respect, perhaps even out of guilt that she hadn’t just let Peterson go instead of condemning him to an indefinite stay in a hospital room where machines would do his breathing for him.

The full horror of the last eight days broke over Ralph in a wave. The killer hadn’t been contented with taking just the boy; he’d taken the whole Peterson family. A clean sweep, as they said.

Not “the killer,” no need to be so anonymous. Terry. The killer was Terry. There’s no one else on the radar.

“Thought you’d want to know,” Ramage repeated. “And hey, look on the bright side. Maybe Betsy’ll go into labor while she’s here. Save her husband from making a special trip.”

“Tell her to go home,” Ralph said.

“Roger that. And… Ralph? Sorry about the way things went down at the courthouse. It was a shit-show.”

“That pretty well sums it up,” Ralph said. “Thanks for calling.”

He went back to the lawn, walking slowly behind the rackety old Lawnboy (he really ought to go down to Home Depot and buy a new one; it was a chore he no longer had an excuse to put off, with all this time on his hands), and was just finishing the last bit when his phone started playing its xylophone boogie again. He thought it would be Betsy. It wasn’t, although this call had also originated at Flint City General.

“Still don’t have all the DNA back,” said Dr. Edward Bogan, “but we’ve got results from the branch used to sodomize the boy. The blood, plus skin fragments the perp’s hand left behind when he… you know, grasped the branch and—”

“I know,” Ralph said. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“No suspense about this, Detective. The samples from the branch match the Maitland cheek swabs.”

“All right, Dr. Bogan, thank you for that. You need to pass it on to Chief Geller and Lieutenant Sablo at SP. I’m on administrative leave, and probably will be for the rest of the summer.”

“Ridiculous.”

“Regulations. I don’t know who Geller will assign to work with Yune—Jack Hoskins is on vacation and Betsy Riggins is about to pop out her first kid at any minute—but he’ll find somebody. And when you think of it, with Maitland dead there’s no case to work. We’re just filling in the blanks.”

“The blanks are important,” Bogan said. “Maitland’s wife may decide to lodge a civil suit. This DNA evidence could get her lawyer to change her mind about that. Such a suit would be an obscenity, in my opinion. Her husband murdered that boy in the cruelest way imaginable, and if she didn’t know about his… his proclivities… she wasn’t paying attention. There are always warning signs with sexual sadists. Always. In my opinion, you should have gotten a medal instead of being put on leave.”

“Thank you for saying that.”

“Only speaking my mind. There are more samples pending. Many. Would you like me to keep you informed as they come in?”

“I would.” Chief Geller might bring Hoskins back early, but the man was a waste of space even when he was sober, which wasn’t often these days.

Ralph ended the call and sheared off the last stripe of lawn. Then he trundled the Lawnboy into the garage. He was thinking of another Poe story as he wiped down the housing, a tale about a man being bricked up in a wine cellar. He hadn’t read it, but he’d seen the movie.

For the love of God, Montresor! the man being bricked up had screamed, and the man doing the interment had agreed: For the love of God.

In this case it was Terry Maitland who was being bricked up, only the bricks were DNA and he was already dead. There was conflicting evidence, yes, and that was troubling, but they now had DNA from Flint City and none from Cap City. There were the fingerprints on the book from the newsstand, true, but fingerprints could be planted. It wasn’t as easy as the detective shows made it look, but it could be done.

What about the witnesses, Ralph? Three teachers who knew him for years.

Never mind them. Think about the DNA. Solid evidence. The most solid there is.

In the movie, Montresor had been undone by a black cat he had inadvertently entombed with his victim. Its yowling had alerted visitors to the wine cellar. The cat, Ralph supposed, was just another metaphor: the voice of the killer’s own conscience. Only sometimes a cigar was just a smoke and a cat was just a cat. There was no reason to keep remembering Terry’s dying eyes, or Terry’s dying declaration. As Samuels had said, his wife had been kneeling there beside him when he went, holding his hand.

Ralph sat on his workbench, feeling very tired for a man who’d done nothing more than mow a modest patch of backyard lawn. The images of those final minutes leading up to the shooting would not leave him. The car alarm. The unlovely sneer of the blond anchor when she saw she had been bloodied—probably just a small cut, but good for ratings. The burned man with the tattoos on his hands. The boy with the cleft lip. The sun picking out complicated constellations of mica embedded in the sidewalk. The girl’s yellow bra strap, flipping up and down. That most of all. It seemed to want to lead somewhere else, but sometimes a bra strap was just a bra strap.

“And a man can’t be two places at the same time,” he muttered.

“Ralph? Are you talking to yourself?”

He started and looked up. It was Jeannie, standing in the doorway.

“I must be, because there’s no one else here.”

“I am,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“Not really,” he said, and then told her about Fred Peterson. She sagged visibly.

“My God. That finishes that family. Unless he recovers.”

“They’re finished whether he recovers or not.” Ralph got to his feet. “I’ll go down to the station a little later, take a look at that scrap of paper. Menu or whatever it is.”

“Shower first. You smell like oil and grass.”

He made a smile and gave her a salute. “Yes, sir.”

She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “Ralph? You’ll get through this. You will. Trust me.”

8

There were plenty of things Ralph didn’t know about administrative leave, never having been on it before. One was whether or not he was even allowed in the cop shop. With that in mind he waited until mid-afternoon to go there, because the daily pulse of the station was slowest then. When he arrived, there was no one in the big main room except for Stephanie Gould, still in civvies, filling out reports on one of the old PCs the city council kept promising to replace, and Sandy McGill at the dispatch desk, reading People. Chief Geller’s office was empty.

“Hey, Detective,” Stephanie said, looking up. “What are you doing here? I heard you were on paid vacation.”

“Trying to stay occupied.”

“I could help you with that,” she said, and patted the stack of files beside her computer.

“Maybe another time.”

“I’m sorry about the way things went down. We all are.”

“Thanks.”

He went to the dispatch desk and asked Sandy for the key to the evidence room. She gave it to him without hesitation, hardly looking up from her magazine. Hanging from a hook beside the evidence room door was a clipboard and a ballpoint. Ralph thought about skipping the sign-in, then went ahead and entered name, date, and time: 1530 hours. No choice, really, when both Gould and McGill knew he was here and why he’d come. If anyone asked about what he’d wanted to look at, he would flat-out tell them. It was administrative leave he was on, after all, not a suspension.

The room, not much bigger than a closet, was hot and stuffy. The overhead fluorescent bars flickered. Like the ancient PCs, they needed to be replaced. Flint City, aided by federal dollars, made sure the PD had all the weaponry it needed, and more. So what if the infrastructure was falling apart?

Had Frank Peterson’s murder been committed back when Ralph first came on the force, there might have been four boxes of Maitland evidence, maybe even half a dozen, but the computer age had done wonders for compression, and today there were only two, plus the toolbox that had been in the back of the van. That had contained the standard array of wrenches, hammers, and screwdrivers. Terry’s prints had been on none of the tools, nor on the box itself. To Ralph that suggested that the toolbox had been in the van when it was stolen, and Terry had never examined the contents after stealing the van for his own purposes.

One of the evidence boxes was marked MAITLAND HOME. The second box was labeled VAN/SUBARU. This was the one Ralph wanted. He cut the tape. No reason not to, with Terry dead.

After a brief hunt, he came up with a plastic evidence bag containing the scrap of paper he remembered. It was blue, and roughly triangular. At the top, in bold black letters, was TOMMY AND TUP. Whatever came after TUP was gone. In the upper corner was a little drawing of a pie, with steam rising from its crust. Although Ralph hadn’t remembered that specifically, it must have been the reason he’d thought this scrap had been part of a take-out menu. What had Jeannie said when they were talking early this morning? I believe there’s another dozen thoughts lined up behind each one I’m aware of. If it was true, Ralph would have given a fair amount of money to get hold of the one lurking behind that yellow bra strap. Because there was one, he was almost sure of it.

Another thing he was almost sure of was how this scrap had happened to be lying on the van’s floor. Someone had put menus under the windshield wipers of all the vehicles in the area where the van had been parked. The driver—maybe the kid who’d stolen it in New York, maybe whoever had stolen it after the kid dumped it—had torn it off rather than just lifting the wiper, leaving that triangular corner. The driver hadn’t noticed then, but once he was rolling, he would have. Maybe he’d reached around and pulled it free, dropping it on the floor instead of just letting it fly away. Possibly because he wasn’t a litterbug by nature, just a thief. Possibly because there’d been a cop car behind him, and he hadn’t wanted to do anything, not even a little thing, that might attract attention. It was even possible that he’d tried to throw it out the window, and a vagary of wind had blown it right back into the cab. Ralph had investigated road accidents, one of them quite nasty, where that had happened with cigarette butts.

He took his notebook from his back pocket—carrying it was second nature, administrative leave or not—and printed TOMMY AND TUP on a blank sheet. He replaced the VAN/SUBARU box on the shelf it had come from, left the evidence room (not neglecting to jot down his out time), and re-locked the door. When he gave the key back to Sandy, he held his notebook open in front of her. She glanced up from the latest adventures of Jennifer Aniston to glance at it.

“Mean anything to you?”

“Nope.”

She went back to her mag. Ralph went to Officer Gould, who was still entering hard copy info into some database and swearing under her breath when she hit a wrong key, which seemed to be often. She glanced at his notebook.

“Tup is old-timey British slang for screwing, I think—as in ‘I tupped me girlfriend last night, mate’—but I can’t think of anything else. Is it important?”

“I don’t know. Probably not.”

“Google it, why don’t you?”

While he waited for his own out-of-date computer to boot up, he decided to try the database he was married to. Jeannie answered on the first ring, and didn’t even need to think when he asked her. “It could be Tommy and Tuppence. They were cutie-poo detectives Agatha Christie wrote about when she wasn’t writing about Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. If that’s the case, you’ll probably find a restaurant run by a couple of British expats and specializing in things like bubble-and-squeak.”

“Bubble and what?”

“Never mind.”

“It probably means nothing,” he repeated. But maybe it did. You chased this shit to make sure, one way or the other; chasing shit was, apologies to Sherlock Holmes, what most detective work was about.

“I’m curious, though. Tell me when you get home. Oh, and we’re all out of orange juice.”

“I’ll stop by Gerald’s,” he said, and hung up.

He went to Google, typed in TOMMY AND TUPPENCE, then added RESTAURANT. The PD computers were old, but the Wi-Fi was new, and fast. He had what he was looking for in a matter of seconds. The Tommy and Tuppence Pub and Café was on Northwoods Boulevard in Dayton, Ohio.

Dayton. What was it about Dayton? Hadn’t that come up once before in this sorry business? If so, where? He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. Whatever connection he was trying to make courtesy of that yellow bra strap continued to elude him, but this new one he got. Dayton had come up during his last real conversation with Terry Maitland. They’d been talking about the van, and Terry had said he hadn’t been in New York since he honeymooned there with his wife. The only trip Terry had taken recently had been to Ohio. To Dayton, in fact.

The girls’ spring vacation. I wanted to see my dad. And when Ralph had asked if his father lived there, Terry had said, If you can call what he’s doing these days living.

He called Sablo. “Hey, Yune, it’s me.”

“Hey, Ralph, how’s retirement treating you?”

“It’s good. You should see my lawn. I heard you’re getting a commendation for covering that dipshit reporter’s delectable body.”

“So they say. Tell you what, life has been good for this son of a poor Mexican farming family.”

“I thought you told me your father ran the biggest car dealership in Amarillo.”

“I might have said that, I suppose. But when you have to decide between truth and legend, ese, print the legend. The wisdom of John Ford in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. What can I do for you?”

“Did Samuels tell you about the kid who originally stole the van?”

“Yeah. That’s some story. Kid’s name was Merlin, did you know that? And he sure must have been some kind of wizard to get all the way down to south Texas.”

“Can you reach out to El Paso? That’s where his run ended, but I know from Samuels that the kid ditched the van in Ohio. What I want to know is if it was somewhere near a pub and café called Tommy and Tuppence, on Northwoods Boulevard in Dayton.”

“I could take a shot at that, I guess.”

“Samuels told me this Merlin the Magician was on the road a long time. Can you also try to find out when he ditched the van? If maybe it was in April?”

“I can try to do that, too. Do you want to tell me why?”

“Terry Maitland was in Dayton in April. Visiting his father.”

“Really?” Yune sounded totally engaged now. “Alone?”

“With his family,” Ralph admitted, “and they flew both ways.”

“So there goes that.”

“Probably, but it still exercises a certain particular fascination over my consciousness.”

“You’ll have to ’splain that, Detective, for I am just the son of a poor Mexican farmer.”

Ralph sighed.

“Let me see what I can find out.”

“Thanks, Yune.”

Just as he hung up, Chief Geller came in, toting a gym bag and looking freshly showered. Ralph tipped him a wave, and got a scowl in return. “You’re not supposed to be here, Detective.”

Ah, so that answered that question.

“Go home. Mow the lawn, or something.”

“I already did that,” Ralph said, getting up. “Cleaning out the cellar comes next.”

“Fine, better get to it.” Geller paused at his office door. “And Ralph… I’m sorry about all this. Sorry as hell.”

People keep saying that, Ralph thought as he went out into the afternoon heat.

9

Yune called at quarter past nine that evening, while Jeannie was in the shower. Ralph wrote everything down. It wasn’t much, but enough to be interesting. He went to bed an hour later, and fell into real sleep for the first time since Terry had been shot at the foot of the courthouse steps. He awoke at four on Friday morning from a dream of the teenage girl sitting on her boyfriend’s shoulders and pumping her fists at the sky. He sat bolt upright in bed, still more asleep than awake, and unaware he was shouting until his frightened wife sat up beside him and grabbed him by the shoulders.

“What? Ralph, what?”

“Not the strap! The color of the strap!”

“What are you talking about?” She shook him. “Was it a dream, honey? A bad dream?”

I believe there’s another dozen thoughts in my head lined up behind each one I’m aware of. That was what she had said. And that was what the dream—already dissolving, as dreams do—had been. One of those thoughts.

“I had it,” he said. “In the dream I had it.”

“Had what, honey? Something about Terry?”

“About the girl. Her bra strap was bright yellow. Only something else was, too. I knew what it was in the dream, but now…” He swung his feet out of bed and sat with his hands grasping his knees below the baggy boxers he slept in. “It’s gone.”

“It will come back. Lie down. You scared the hell out of me.”

“I’m sorry.” Ralph lay down again.

“Can you go back to sleep?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did Lieutenant Sablo say when he called?”

“I didn’t tell you?” Knowing he hadn’t.

“No, and I didn’t want to push. You had your think-face on.”

“I’ll tell you in the morning.”

“Since you scared me wide awake, might as well do it now.”

“Not much to tell. Yune tracked the boy down through the officer who arrested him—the cop liked the kid, kind of took an interest, has been keeping track. For the time being, young Mr. Cassidy is in the foster care system down there in El Paso. He’s got to face some kind of hearing in juvenile court for car theft, but nobody knows exactly where that will be yet. Dutchess County in New York seems the most likely, but they’re not exactly champing at the bit to get him, and he’s not champing at the bit to go back. So for the time being, he’s in a kind of legal limbo, and according to Yune, he likes that fine. Stepfather tuned up on him pretty frequently, is the kid’s story. While Mom pretended it wasn’t happening. Pretty standard cycle of abuse.”

“Poor kid, no wonder he ran away. What will happen to him?”

“Oh, eventually he’ll be sent back. The wheels of justice grind slow, but exceedingly fine. He’ll get a suspended sentence, or maybe they’ll work out something about time served while in foster care. The cops in his town will be alerted to his home situation, but eventually the whole thing will start up again. Kid beaters sometimes hit pause, but they rarely hit stop.”

He put his hands behind his head and thought of Terry, who had shown no previous signs of violence, not so much as bumping an umpire.

“The kid was in Dayton, all right,” Ralph said, “and by then he was getting nervous about the van. He parked in a public lot because it was free, because there was no attendant, and because he saw the Golden Arches a few blocks up. He doesn’t remember passing the Tommy and Tuppence café, but he does remember a young guy in a shirt that said Tommy something-or-other on the back. The guy had a stack of blue papers that he was putting under the windshield wipers of cars parked at the curb. He noticed the kid—Merlin—and offered him two bucks to put menus under the wipers of the vehicles in the parking lot. The kid said no thanks and went on up to Mickey D’s to get his lunch. When he came back, the leaflet guy was gone, but there were menus on every car and truck in the lot. The kid was skittish, took it as a bad omen for some reason, God knows why. Anyway, he decided the time had come to switch rides.”

“If he hadn’t been skittish, he probably would have been caught a lot sooner,” Jeannie observed.

“You’re right. Anyway, he strolled around the lot, checking for cars that were unlocked. He told Yune he was surprised at how many were.”

“I bet you weren’t.”

Ralph smiled. “People are careless. Fifth or sixth one he found unlocked, there was a spare key tucked behind the sun visor. It was perfect for him—a plain black Toyota, thousands of them on the road every day. Before our boy Merlin headed out in it, though, he put the van’s key back in the ignition. He told Yune he hoped someone else would steal it because, and I quote, ‘It might throw the po-po off my trail.’ You know, like he was wanted for murder in six states instead of just being a runaway kid who never forgot to use his turn-signal.”

“He said that?” She sounded amused.

“Yes. And by the way, he had to go back to the van for something else. A stack of smashed-down cartons he was sitting on to make him look taller behind the wheel.”

“I kind of like this kid. Derek never would have thought of that.”

We’ve never given him reason to, Ralph thought.

“Do you know if he left the menu under the van’s windshield wiper?”

“Yune asked, and the kid said sure he did, why would he take it?”

“So the person who tore it off—and left the scrap which ended up inside—was the person who stole it from the parking lot in Dayton.”

“Almost had to be. Now here’s what had me wearing my think-face. The kid said he thought it was in April. I take that with a grain of salt, because I doubt if keeping track of dates was very important to him, but he told Yune it was spring, with all the leaves pretty much out on the trees, and not real hot yet. So it probably was. And April is when Terry was in Dayton, visiting his father.”

“Only he was with his family, and they flew round-trip.”

“I know that. You could call it a coincidence. Only then the same van ends up here in Flint City, and it’s hard for me to believe in two coincidences involving the same Ford Econoline van. Yune floated the idea that maybe Terry had an accomplice.”

“One who looked exactly like him?” Jeannie hoisted an eyebrow. “A twin brother named William Wilson, maybe?”

“I know, the idea is ridiculous. But you see how weird it is, don’t you? Terry is in Dayton, the van is in Dayton. Terry comes home to Flint City, and the van turns up in Flint City. There’s a word for that, but I can’t remember what it is.”

“Confluence might be the one you’re looking for.”

“I want to talk to Marcy,” he said. “I want to ask her about the trip the Maitlands made to Dayton. Everything she remembers. Only she won’t want to talk to me, and I have absolutely no way of compelling her.”

“Will you try?”

“Oh yes, I’ll try.”

“Can you sleep now?”

“I think so. Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

He was drifting away when she spoke into his ear, firm and almost harsh, trying to shock it out of him. “If it wasn’t the bra strap, what was it?”

For a moment, clearly, Ralph saw the word CANT. Only the letters were bluey-green, not yellow. Something was there. He grasped for it, but it slipped away.

“Can’t,” he said.

“Not yet,” Jeannie replied, “but you will. I know you.”

They went to sleep. When Ralph woke up, it was eight o’clock and all the birds were singing.

10

By ten on that Friday morning, Sarah and Grace had reached the Hard Day’s Night album, and Marcy thought she might actually lose her mind.

The girls had found Terry’s record player—a steal on eBay, he had assured Marcy—in his garage workshop, along with his carefully assembled collection of Beatles albums. They had taken the player and the albums up to Grace’s room and had begun with Meet the Beatles! “We’re going to play all of them,” Sarah told her mother. “To remember Daddy. If it’s okay.”

Marcy told them it was fine. What else could she say when looking at their pale, solemn faces and red-rimmed eyes? Only she hadn’t realized how hard those songs would hit her. The girls knew them all, of course; when Terry was in the garage, the record player’s turntable was always spinning, filling his workshop with the British invasion groups he’d been born a little too late to have heard firsthand, but which he loved just the same: the Searchers, the Zombies, the Dave Clark Five, the Kinks, T. Rex, and—of course—the Beatles. Mostly them.

The girls loved those groups and those songs because their father did, but there was a whole emotional spectrum of which they were unaware. They hadn’t heard “I Call Your Name” while making out in the back of Terry’s father’s car, Terry’s lips on her neck, Terry’s hand under her sweater. They hadn’t heard “Can’t Buy Me Love,” the current track coming down from upstairs, while sitting on the couch in the first apartment where they’d lived together, holding hands, watching A Hard Day’s Night on the battered VHS they’d picked up at a rummage sale for twenty dollars, the Fab Four young and running amok in black-and-white, Marcy knowing she was going to marry the young man sitting next to her even if he didn’t know it yet. Had John Lennon already been dead when they watched that old tape? Shot down in the street just as her husband had been?

She didn’t know, couldn’t remember. All she knew was she, Sarah, and Grace had gotten through the funeral with their dignity intact, but now the funeral was over, her life as a single mom (oh, that horrible phrase) stretched ahead of her, and the cheerful music was driving her mad with sorrow. Every harmonized vocal, each clever George Harrison riff, was a fresh wound. Twice she had gotten up from where she sat at the kitchen table with a cooling cup of coffee in front of her. Twice she had gone to the foot of the stairs and drawn in breath to shout, No more! Shut it off! And twice she had gone back to the kitchen. They were grieving, too.

This time when she got up, Marcy went to the utensil drawer and pulled it all the way out. She thought there would be nothing there, but her hand found a pack of Winston cigarettes. There were three left inside. No, make that four—one was hiding all the way in back. She hadn’t smoked since her younger daughter’s fifth birthday, when she’d had a coughing fit while mixing the batter for Gracie’s cake, and had vowed there and then to quit forever. Yet instead of throwing these last soldiers of cancer out, she had tossed them in back of the utensil drawer, as if some dark and prescient part of her had known she would eventually need them again.

They’re five years old. They’ll be stale as hell. You’ll probably cough until you pass out.

Good. So much the better.

She took one from the pack, greedy for it already. Smokers never stop, they only pause, she thought. She went to the stairs and cocked her head. “And I Love Her” had given way to “Tell Me Why” (that eternal question). She could imagine the girls sitting on Grace’s bed, not talking, just listening. Holding hands, maybe. Taking the sacrament of Daddy. Daddy’s albums, some bought at Turn Back the Hands of Time, the record store in Cap City, some bought online, all held in the hands that had once held his daughters.

She crossed the living room to the little potbellied stove they lit only on really cold winter nights, and reached blindly for the box of Diamond matches on the nearby shelf, blindly because on that shelf also stood a row of pictures she could not currently bear to look at. Maybe in a month she could. Maybe in a year. How long did it take to recover from the first, rawest stage of grief? She could probably find a fairly definitive answer on WebMD, but was afraid to look.

At least the reporters had gone away after the funeral, rushing back to Cap City to cover some fresh political scandal, and she wouldn’t have to risk the back porch, where one of the girls might look out the window and see her renewing her old vice. Or in the garage, where they might smell the smoke if they came out for a fresh bundle of LPs.

She opened the front door, and there stood Ralph Anderson, with his fist raised to knock.

11

The horror with which she stared at him—as if he were some kind of monster, maybe a zombie from that TV show—struck Ralph like a blow to the chest. He had time to see the disarray of her hair, a splotch of something on the lapel of her robe (which was too big for her; maybe it was Terry’s), the slightly bent cigarette between her fingers. And something else. She had always been a fine-looking woman, but she was losing her looks already. He would have called that impossible.

“Marcy—”

“No. You don’t belong here. You need to get out of here.” Her voice was low, breathless, as if someone had punched her.

“I need to talk to you. Please let me talk to you.”

“You killed my husband. There’s nothing else to say.”

She started to swing the door closed. Ralph held it with his hand. “I didn’t kill him, but yes, I played a part. Call me an accomplice, if that’s what you want. I never should have arrested him the way I did. It was wrong on God knows how many different levels. I had my reasons, but they weren’t good reasons. I—”

“Take your hand off the door. Do it now, or I’ll have you arrested.”

“Marcy—”

“Don’t call me that. You have no right to call me that, not after what you did. The only reason I’m not screaming my head off is because my daughters are upstairs, listening to their dead father’s records.”

“Please.” He thought to say, Don’t make me beg, but that was wrong because it wasn’t enough. “I’m begging you. Please talk to me.”

She held up the cigarette and uttered a terrible toneless laugh. “I thought, now that the little lice are gone, I can have a smoke on my doorstep. And look, here’s the big louse, the louse of louses. Last warning, Mr. Louse who got my husband killed. Get… the fuck… off my doorstep.”

“What if he didn’t do it?”

Her eyes widened and the pressure of her hand on the door slackened, at least for the moment.

“What if he… ? Jesus Christ, he told you he didn’t do it! He told you as he lay there dying! What else do you want, a hand-delivered telegram from the Angel Gabriel?”

“If he didn’t, whoever did is still out there, and he’s responsible for the destruction of the Peterson family, as well as yours.”

She considered this for a moment, then said: “Oliver Peterson is dead because you and that sonofabitch Samuels had to put on your circus. And you killed him, didn’t you, Detective Anderson? Shot him in the head. Got your man. Excuse me, your boy.”

She slammed the door in his face. Ralph again raised his hand to knock, thought better of it, and turned away.

12

Marcy stood trembling on her side of the door. She felt her knees go loose, and managed to make it to the bench near the door where people sat when they took off boots or muddy shoes. Upstairs, the Beatle who had been murdered was singing about all the things he was going to do when he got home. Marcy looked at the cigarette between her fingers as if unsure how it had gotten there, then snapped it in two and slipped the pieces into the pocket of the robe she was wearing (it was indeed Terry’s). At least he saved me from starting up that shit again, she thought. Maybe I should write him a thank-you note.

The nerve of him coming to her door, after taking a wrecking bar to her family and flailing around with it until all was in ruins. The pure cruel in-your-face nerve of it. Only…

If he didn’t, whoever did is still out there.

And how was she supposed to handle that, when she couldn’t even find the strength to go on WebMD and find out how long the first stage of grief lasted? And why was she supposed to do anything? How was it her responsibility? The police had gotten the wrong man and stubbornly persisted even after checking Terry’s alibi and finding it as solid as Gibraltar. Let them find the right one, if they had the guts to do so. Her job was to get through today without going insane, and then—in some future that was hard to contemplate—figure out what came next in her life. Was she supposed to live here, when half the town believed the man who had assassinated her husband was doing God’s work? Was she supposed to condemn her daughters to those cannibal societies known as middle school and high school, where even wearing the wrong sneakers could get you ridiculed and ostracized?

Sending Anderson away was the right thing. I cannot have him in my house. Yes, I heard the honesty in his voice—at least I think I did—but how can I, after what he did?

If he didn’t, whoever did…

“Shut up,” she whispered to herself. “Just shut up, please shut up.”

…is still out there.

And what if he did it again?

13

Most of the folks in Flint City’s better class of citizenry thought Howard Gold had been born rich, or at least well-to-do. Although he wasn’t ashamed of his catch-as-catch-can upbringing, not a bit, he didn’t go out of his way to disabuse those folks. It so happened he was the son of an itinerant plowboy, sometime wrangler, and occasional rodeo rider who had traveled around the Southwest in an Airstream trailer with his wife and two sons, Howard and Edward. Howard had put himself through college, then helped to do the same for Eddie. He took care of his parents in their retirement (Andrew Gold had saved nary a nickel), and had plenty left over.

He was a member of Rotary and the Rolling Hills Country Club. He took important clients to dinner at Flint City’s best restaurants (there were two), and supported a dozen different charities, including the athletic fields at Estelle Barga Park. He could order fine wine with the best of them and sent his biggest clients elaborate Harry & David gift boxes each Christmas. Yet when he was in his office by himself, as he was this Friday noon, he preferred to eat as he had as a boy on the road between Hoot, Oklahoma, and Holler, Nevada, and then back again, listening to Clint Black on the radio and studying his lessons at his mother’s side when he wasn’t in school someplace. He supposed his gall bladder would put a stop to his solitary, grease-soaked meals eventually, but he had reached his early sixties without hearing a peep from it, so God bless heredity. When the phone rang, he was working his way through a fried egg sandwich, heavy on the mayo, and French fries done just the way he liked them, cooked to a blackened crisp and slathered with ketchup. Waiting at the edge of the desk was a slice of apple pie with ice cream melting on top.

“Howard Gold speaking.”

“It’s Marcy, Howie. Ralph Anderson was here this morning.”

Howie frowned. “He came to your house? He’s got no business doing that. He’s on administrative leave. Won’t be active police again for some time, assuming he decides to come back at all. Did you want me to call Chief Geller, and put a bug in his ear?”

“No. I slammed the door in his face.”

“Good for you!”

“It doesn’t feel good. He said something I can’t get out of my mind. Howard, tell me the truth. Do you think Terry killed that boy?”

“Jesus, no. I told you. There’s evidence for it, we both know that, but there’s too much against it. He would have walked. But never mind that, he just didn’t have such an act in him. Also, there was his dying declaration.”

“People will say that was because he didn’t want to admit it in front of me. They’re probably already saying it.”

Honey, he thought, I’m not sure he even knew you were there.

“I think he was telling the truth.”

“So do I, and if he was, whoever did it is still free, and if he killed one child, sooner or later he’ll kill another one.”

“So that’s what Anderson put in your mind,” Howie said. He pushed away what remained of his sandwich. He no longer wanted it. “I’m not surprised, the guilt-trip is an old police trick, but he was wrong to try it on you. Ralph needs to take some heat for it. A strong reprimand that goes in his jacket, at the very least. You just buried your husband, for God’s sake.”

“But what he said was true.”

Maybe it was, Howie thought, but that begs the question—why did he say it to you?

“And there’s something else,” she said. “If the real killer isn’t found, the girls and I will have to leave town. Maybe I could stand up to the whispers and the gossip if I was on my own, but it isn’t fair to ask the girls to do that. The only place I can think of to go is my sister’s in Michigan, and that wouldn’t be fair to Debra and Sam. They’ve got two kids of their own, and the house is small. It would mean starting all over again for me, and I feel too tired to do that. I feel… Howie, I feel broken.”

“I understand that. What is it you want me to do?”

“Call Anderson. Tell him I’ll meet with him here at the house tonight, and he can ask his questions. But I want you here, too. You and the investigator you use, if he’s free and willing to come. Will you do that?”

“Of course, if it’s what you want. And I’m sure Alec would come. But I want to… not warn you, exactly, but put you on your guard. I’m sure Ralph feels terrible about what happened, and I’m guessing he apologized—”

“He said he was begging me.”

That was sort of amazing, but maybe not entirely out of character.

“He’s not a bad man,” Howie said. “He’s a good man who made a bad mistake. But Marcy, he’s still got a vested interest in proving it was Terry who killed the Peterson boy. If he can do that, his career is back on track. If it’s never proved conclusively one way or the other, his career is still back on track. But if the real killer turns up, Ralph is finished as a member of the FC police. His next job will be working security in Cap City at half the salary. And that’s not even figuring in the suits he might be facing.”

“I understand that, but—”

“I’m not finished. Any questions he’s got for you have to be about Terry. Maybe he’s just flailing around, but it’s possible he thinks he’s got something that ties Terry to the murder in a different way. Now, do you still want me to set up a meeting?”

There was silence for a moment, and then Marcy said, “Jamie Mattingly is my best friend on Barnum Court. She took the girls in after Terry was arrested at the ballfield, but now she won’t answer her phone when I call, and she’s unfriended me on Facebook. My best friend has officially unfriended me.”

“She’ll come around.”

“She will if the real killer is caught. Then she’ll come to me on her hands and knees. Maybe I’ll forgive her for knuckling under to her husband—because that’s what happened, count on it—and maybe I won’t. But that’s a decision I can’t make until things change for the better. If they ever do. Which is my way of saying go ahead and set up the meeting. You’ll be there to protect me. Mr. Pelley, too. I want to know why Anderson got up enough guts to show his face at my door.”

14

At four o’clock that afternoon, an old Dodge pickup rattled along a ranch road fifteen miles south of Flint City, pulling up a rooster-tail of dust. It passed an abandoned windmill with broken vanes, a deserted ranchhouse with glaring holes where the windows had been, a long-abandoned cemetery locally known as the Cowboy Graveyard, a boulder with TRUMP MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN TRUMP painted on the side in fading letters. Galvanized milk cans rolled around in the truckbed and banged off the sides. Behind the wheel was a seventeen-year-old boy named Dougie Elfman. He kept checking his cell phone as he drove. By the time he got to Highway 79, he had two bars, and reckoned that would be enough. He stopped at the crossing, got out, and looked behind him. Nothing. Of course there was nothing. And still, he was relieved. He called his daddy. Clark Elfman answered on the second ring.

“Were those cans out there in that barn?”

“Yuh,” Dougie said. “I got two dozen, but they’ll have to be warshed out. Still smell like clabbered milk.”

“What about the hoss-tack?”

“All gone, Daddy.”

“Well, that ain’t the best news of the week, but no more than what I expected. What you callin for, son? And where are you? Sound like you’re on the dark side of the moon.”

“I’m out at 79. Listen, Daddy, somebody been stayin out there.”

“What? You mean like hobos or hippies?”

“It ain’t that. There’s no mess—beercans or wrappers or liquor bottles—and no sign anyone took a dump anywhere, unless they walked a quarter of a mile to the nearest bushes. No campfire sign, either.”

“Thank Christ for that,” Elfman said, “dry as it’s been. What did you find? Not that I guess it matters, nothing left to steal and them old buildings half fallen down and not worth pea-turkey.”

Dougie kept looking back. The road looked empty, all right, but he wished the dust would settle faster.

“I found a pair of bluejeans that look new, and Jockey underpants that look new, and some expensive sneakers, them with the gel insides, that also look new. Only they’re all stained with something, and so’s the hay they was lyin in.”

“Blood?”

“No, it ain’t blood. Turned the hay black, whatever it was.”

“Oil? Motor oil? Somethin like ’at?”

“No, the stuff wasn’t black, just the hay it got on. I don’t know what it was.”

But he knew what those stiff patches on the jeans and underpants looked like; he had been masturbating three and sometimes four times a day since he turned fourteen, using an old piece of towel to shoot his spunk into, and then using the backyard tap to rinse it out when his parents were gone. Sometimes he forgot, though, and that piece of toweling got pretty crusty.

Only there had been a lot of that stuff, a lot, and really, who would jizz off on a brand-new pair of Adipowers, high-class kicks that cost upward of a hundred and forty dollars, even at Wally World? Dougie might have thought about taking them for himself under other circumstances, but not with that crap on them, and not with the other thing he’d noticed.

“Well, let it go and just come on home,” Elfman said. “You got those cans, at least.”

“No, Daddy, you need to get the police out. There was a belt in them jeans, and it’s got a shiny silver buckle in the shape of a horse’s head.”

“That means nothing to me, son, but I guess it does to you.”

“On the news, they said that Terry Maitland was wearing a buckle like that when he was seen at the train station in Dubrow. After he killed that little boy.”

“They said that?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Well, shit. You wait there at the crossing until I call you back, but I guess the cops will want to come. I’ll come, too.”

“Tell them I’ll meet them at Biddle’s store.”

“Biddle’s… Dougie, that’s five miles back toward Flint!”

“I know. But I don’t want to stay here.” The dust had settled now, and there was nothing to be seen, but Dougie still didn’t feel right. Not a single car had passed on the main road since he started talking to his father, and he wanted to be where there were people.

“What’s wrong, son?”

“When I was in that barn where I found the clothes—I’d already got the cans by then, and was lookin for that tack you said might be out there—I started to feel all wrong. Like someone was watchin me.”

“You just got the creeps. The man who killed that boy is dead as dirt.”

“I know, but tell the cops I’ll meet em at Biddle’s, and I’ll take em out there, but I’m not staying here by myself.” He ended the call before his father could argue with him.

15

The meeting with Marcy was set for eight o’clock that night at the Maitland home. Ralph got the green-light call from Howie Gold, who told him Alec Pelley would also be there. Ralph asked if he could bring Yune Sablo, if Yune was available.

“Under no circumstances,” Howie replied. “Bring Lieutenant Sablo or anyone else, even your lovely wife, and the meeting’s off.”

Ralph agreed. There was nothing else he could do. He puttered around in the cellar for awhile, mostly just shifting boxes from one side to the other and back again. Then he picked at his supper. With two hours still stretching before him, he pushed away from the table. “I’m going to the hospital to visit Fred Peterson.”

“Why?”

“I just feel like I should.”

“I’ll come with you, if you want.”

Ralph shook his head. “I’ll go directly to Barnum Court from there.”

“You’re wearing yourself out. Running your guts to water, my grandmother would have said.”

“I’m okay.”

She gave him a smile that said she knew better, then stood on her toes to kiss him. “Call me. Whatever happens, call me.”

He smiled. “Nuts to that. I’ll come back and tell you in person.”

16

As he was entering the hospital’s lobby, Ralph met the department’s missing detective on his way out. Jack Hoskins was a slight man, prematurely gray, with bags under his eyes and a red-veined nose. He was still wearing his fishing outfit—khaki shirt and khaki pants, both with many pockets—but his badge was clipped to his belt.

“What are you doing here, Jack? I thought you were on vacation.”

“Called back three days early,” he said. “Drove into town not an hour ago. My net, gumrubbers, poles, and tackle box are still in my truck. Chief thought he might like to have at least one detective on active duty. Betsy Riggins is upstairs on five, having the baby. Her labor started late this afternoon. I talked to her husband, who says she’s got a long way to go. Like he’d have any idea. As for you…” He paused for effect. “You’re in a hell of a mess, Ralph.”

Jack Hoskins made no effort to hide his satisfaction. A year previous, Ralph and Betsy Riggins had been asked to fill out routine evaluation forms for Jack, when he became eligible for a pay bump. Betsy, the detective with the least seniority, had said all the right things. Ralph had turned his in to Chief Geller with only two words written in the space provided: No opinion. It hadn’t kept Hoskins from getting his bump, but it was an opinion, all the same. Hoskins wasn’t supposed to see the eval sheets, and maybe hadn’t, but word of what had been on Ralph’s had of course gotten back to him.

“Did you look in on Fred Peterson?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.” Jack pursed his lower lip and blew scant hair off his forehead. “Lot of monitors in his room, and low lines on all of them. I don’t think he’s coming back.”

“Well, welcome home.”

“Fuck that, Ralph, I had three more days, the bass were running, and I’m not even going to get a chance to change my shirt, which stinks of fish guts. Got calls from both Geller and Sheriff Doolin. Have to go all the way out to that useless dustbowl known as Canning Township. I understand your buddy Sablo is already there. I probably won’t actually make it home until ten or eleven.”

Ralph could have said, Don’t blame me, but who else was this mostly useless time-server going to blame? Betsy, for getting pregnant last November? “What’s in Canning?”

“Jeans, underpants, and sneakers. Kid found them in a shed or a barn while he was hunting out milk cans for his father. Also a belt with a horse’s head buckle. Of course the Mobile Crime Lab will already be there, I’ll be about as useful as tits on a bull, but the chief—”

“There’ll be fingerprints on the buckle,” Ralph interrupted. “And there may be tire tracks from the van, or the Subaru, or both.”

“Don’t try teaching your daddy how to suck eggs,” Jack said. “I was carrying a detective’s shield while you were still in uniform.” The subtext Ralph heard was And I’ll still be carrying it when you’re working as a mall guard at Southgate.

He left. Ralph was glad to see him go. He only wished he could go out there himself. Fresh evidence at this point could be precious. The silver lining was that Sablo had already gotten there, and would be supervising the Forensics Unit. They’d finish most of their work before Jack could arrive and maybe screw something up, as he had on at least two previous occasions that Ralph knew about.

He went up to the maternity waiting room first, but all the seats were empty, so maybe the delivery was going faster than Billy Riggins, a nervous novice at this, had expected. Ralph buttonholed a nurse and asked her to tell Betsy that he wished her all the best.

“I will when I get the chance,” the nurse said, “but right now she’s very busy. That little man is in a hurry to get out.”

Ralph had a brief image of Frank Peterson’s bloody, violated body and thought, If the little man knew what this world was like, he’d be fighting to stay in.

He took the elevator down two floors to ICU. The remaining member of the Peterson family was in room 304. His neck was heavily bandaged and in a cervical collar. A respirator wheezed, the little accordion gadget inside flopping up and down. The lines on the monitors surrounding the man’s bed were, as Jack Hoskins had said, mighty low. There were no flowers (Ralph had an idea they weren’t allowed in ICU rooms), but a couple of Mylar balloons had been tethered to the foot of the bed and floated near the ceiling. They were imprinted with cheerful exhortations Ralph didn’t like to look at. He listened to the wheeze of the machine that was breathing for Fred. He stared at those low lines and thought of Jack saying I don’t think he’s coming back.

As he sat down by the bed, a memory from his high school days came to him, back when what was now called environmental studies had been plain old Earth science. They had been studying pollution. Mr. Greer had produced a bottle of Poland Spring water and poured it into a glass. He invited one of the kids—Misty Trenton, it had been, she of the deliciously short skirts—up to the front of the room and asked her to take a sip. She had done so. Mr. Greer then produced an eyedropper and dipped it into a bottle of Carter’s Ink. He squeezed a drop into the glass. The students watched, fascinated, as that single drop sank, trailing an indigo tentacle behind it. Mr. Greer rocked the glass gently from side to side, and soon all the water in the glass was tinted a weak blue. Would you drink it now? Mr. Greer asked Misty. She shook her head so emphatically that one of her hair clips came loose, and everybody, Ralph included, had laughed. He wasn’t laughing now.

Less than two weeks ago, the Peterson family had been perfectly fine. Then had come the drop of polluting ink. You could say it was the chain on Frankie Peterson’s bike, that he would have made it home unharmed if it hadn’t broken, but he also would have made it home unharmed—only pushing his bike instead of riding it—if Terry Maitland hadn’t been waiting in that grocery store parking lot. Terry was the drop of ink, not the bike chain. It was Terry who had first polluted and then destroyed the entire Peterson family. Terry, or whoever had been wearing Terry’s face.

Strip away the metaphors, Jeannie had said, and you are left with the inexplicable. The supernatural.

Only that’s not possible. The supernatural may exist in books and movies, but not in the real world.

No, not in the real world, where drunk incompetents like Jack Hoskins got pay bumps. All Ralph had experienced in his nearly fifty years of life denied the idea. Denied there was even the possibility of such a thing. Yet as he sat here looking at Fred (or what remained of him), Ralph had to admit there was something devilish about the way the boy’s death had spread, taking not just one or two members of his nuclear family, but the whole shebang. Nor did the damage stop with the Petersons. No one could doubt that Marcy and her daughters would carry scars for the rest of their lives, perhaps even permanent disabilities.

Ralph could tell himself that similar collateral damage followed every atrocity—hadn’t he seen it time and again? Yes. He had. Yet this one seemed so personal, somehow. Almost as if these people had been targeted. And what about Ralph himself? Was he not part of the collateral damage? And Jeannie? Even Derek, who was going to come home from camp to discover that a good many things he’d taken for granted—his father’s job, for instance—were now at risk.

The respirator wheezed. Fred Peterson’s chest rose and fell. Every now and then he made a thick noise that sounded weirdly like a chuckle. As if it were all a cosmic joke, but you had to be in a coma to get it.

Ralph couldn’t stand it anymore. He left the room, and by the time he got to the elevator, he was nearly running.

17

Once outside, he sat on a bench in the shade and called the station. Sandy McGill picked up, and when Ralph asked if she’d heard anything from Canning Township, there was a pause. When she finally spoke, she sounded embarrassed. “I’m not supposed to talk about that with you, Ralph. Chief Geller left specific instructions. I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” Ralph said, getting up. His shadow stretched long, the shadow of a hanged man, and of course that made him think of Fred Peterson again. “Orders is orders.”

“Thanks for understanding. Jack Hoskins is back, and he’s going out there.”

“No problem.” He hung up and started for the short-term parking lot, telling himself it didn’t matter; Yune would keep him in the loop.

Probably.

He unlocked his car, got in, and cranked the air conditioning. Quarter past seven. Too late to go home, too early to go to the Maitlands’. Which left cruising aimlessly around town like a self-absorbed teenager. And thinking. About how Terry had called Willow Rainwater ma’am. About how Terry had asked directions to the nearest doc-in-the-box, even though he’d lived in FC all his life. About how Terry had shared a room with Billy Quade, and wasn’t that convenient. About how Terry had risen to his feet to ask Mr. Coben his question, which was even more convenient. Thinking about that drop of ink in the glass of water, turning it pale blue, of footprints that just ended, of maggots squirming inside a cantaloupe that had looked fine on the outside. Thinking that if a person did begin considering supernatural possibilities, that person would no longer be able to think of himself as a completely sane person, and thinking about one’s sanity was maybe not a good thing. It was like thinking about your heartbeat: if you had to go there, you might already be in trouble.

He turned on the car radio and hunted for loud music. Eventually he found the Animals belting out “Boom Boom.” He cruised, waiting for it to be time to go to the Maitland house on Barnum Court. Finally it was.

18

It was Alec Pelley who answered his knock and led him across the living room and into the kitchen. From upstairs he could hear the Animals again. This time it was their biggest hit. It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy, Eric Burdon wailed, and God, I know I’m one.

Confluence, he thought. Jeannie’s word.

Marcy and Howie Gold were sitting at the kitchen table. They had coffee. There was also a cup where Alec had been sitting, but no one offered to pour Ralph a cup. I have come unto the camp of mine enemies, he thought, and sat down.

“Thank you for seeing me.”

Marcy made no reply, just picked up her cup with a hand that wasn’t quite steady.

“This is painful for my client,” Howie said, “so let’s keep it brief. You told Marcy you wanted to talk to her—”

“Needed,” Marcy interrupted. “Needed to talk to me, is what he said.”

“So noted. What is it you needed to talk to her about, Detective Anderson? If it’s an apology, feel free to make it, but understand that we reserve all our legal options.”

In spite of everything, Ralph wasn’t quite ready to apologize. None of these three had seen a bloody branch jutting from Frank Peterson’s bottom, but Ralph had.

“New information has come to light. It may not be substantive, but it’s suggestive of something, although I don’t know exactly what. My wife called it a confluence.”

“Can you be a little more specific?” Howie asked.

“It turns out that the van used to abduct the Peterson boy was stolen by a kid only a little older than Frank Peterson himself. The kid’s name is Merlin Cassidy. He was running away from an abusive stepfather. In the course of his run between New York and south Texas, where he was finally arrested, he stole a number of vehicles. He dumped the van in Dayton, Ohio, in April. Marcy—Mrs. Maitland—you and your family were in Dayton in April.”

Marcy had been raising her cup for another sip, but now she set it down with a bang. “Oh, no. You’re not putting that on Terry. We flew both ways, and except for when Terry went to visit his dad, we were together the whole time. End of story, and I think it’s time for you to leave.”

“Whoa,” Ralph said. “We knew it was a family trip, and that you went by air, almost from the time Terry became a person of interest. It’s just that… can’t you see how weird it is? The van is there when your family is there, then it turns up here. Terry told me he never saw it, let alone stole it. I want to believe that. We have his fingerprints all over the damn thing, but I still want to. And almost can.”

“I doubt it,” Howie said. “Stop trying to suck us in.”

“Would it help you to believe me, maybe even trust me a little, if I told you we now have physical evidence that Terry was in Cap City? His fingerprints on a book from the hotel newsstand? Testimony that has him leaving those prints at approximately the same time the Peterson boy was abducted?”

“Are you kidding?” Alec Pelley asked. He sounded almost shocked.

“No.” Even with the case as effectively dead as Terry himself, Bill Samuels would be furious if he found out Ralph had told Marcy and Marcy’s lawyer about A Pictorial History of Flint County, Douree County, and Canning Township, but he was determined not to let this meeting end without getting some answers.

Alec whistled. “Holy shit.”

“So you know he was there!” Marcy cried. Red spots were burning in her cheeks. “You have to know it!”

But Ralph didn’t want to go there; he had spent too much time there already. “Terry mentioned the Dayton trip the last time I talked to him. He said he wanted to visit his father, but he said wanted with a funny kind of grimace. And when I asked him if his dad lived there, he said, ‘If you can call what he’s doing these days living.’ So what’s the deal with that?”

“The deal is Peter Maitland is suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease,” Marcy said. “He’s in the Heisman Memory Unit. It’s part of the Kindred Hospital complex.”

“So. Tough for Terry to go see him, I guess.”

“Very tough,” Marcy agreed. She was warming up a little now. Ralph was glad to discover he hadn’t lost all of his skills, but this wasn’t like being in an interrogation room with a suspect. Both Howie and Alec Pelley were on high alert, ready to stop her if they sensed her foot coming down on a hidden mine. “But not just because Peter didn’t know Terry any longer. They hadn’t had much of a relationship for a long time.”

“Why not?”

“How is this relevant, Detective?” Howie asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s not. But since we’re not in court, counselor, how about you let her answer the damn question?”

Howie looked at Marcy and shrugged. Up to you.

“Terry was Peter and Melinda’s only child,” Marcy said. “He grew up here in Flint City, as you know, and lived here all his life, except for four years at OSU.”

“Where you met him?” Ralph asked.

“That’s right. Anyway, Peter Maitland worked for the Cheery Petroleum Company, back in the days when this area was still producing a fair amount of oil. He fell in love with his secretary and divorced his wife. There was a lot of rancor, and Terry took his mother’s side. Terry… he was all about loyalty, even as a boy. He saw his father as a cheat, which he was, of course, and all of Peter’s justifications only made things worse. Long story short, Peter married the secretary—Dolores was her name—and asked for a transfer to the company headquarters.”

“Which were in Dayton?”

“Correct. Peter didn’t try for joint custody or anything like that. He understood Terry had made his choice. But Melinda insisted that Terry go to see him from time to time, claiming that a boy needed to know his father. Terry went, but only to please his mom. He never stopped seeing his father as the rat who ran away.”

Howie said, “That fits the Terry I knew.”

“Melinda died in 2006. Heart attack. Peter’s second wife died two years later, of lung cancer. Terry kept on going to Dayton once or twice a year, to honor his mother, and kept on reasonably civil terms with his father. For the same reason, I suppose. In 2011—I think it was—Peter began to get forgetful. Shoes in the shower instead of under the bed, car keys in the refrigerator, stuff like that. Because Terry is—was—his only close living relative, it was Terry who arranged to get him into the Heisman Memory Unit. That was in 2014.”

“Places like that are expensive,” Alec said. “Who pays?”

“Insurance. Peter Maitland had very good insurance. Dolores insisted. Peter was a heavy smoker all his life, and she probably thought she’d inherit a bundle when he went. But she went first. Probably from his secondhand smoke.”

“You speak as if Peter Maitland is dead,” Ralph said. “Is that the case?”

“No, he’s still alive.” Then, in a deliberate echo of her husband: “If you want to call that living. He’s even stopped smoking. It’s not allowed in the HMU.”

“How long were you in Dayton on your last visit?”

“Five days. Terry visited his father three times while we were there.”

“You and the girls never went with him?”

“No. Terry didn’t want that, and neither did I. It wasn’t as if Peter could have been grandfatherly to Sarah and Grace, and Grace wouldn’t have understood.”

“What did you do while he was visiting?”

Marcy smiled. “You speak as though Terry spent huge wallops of time with his father, and that wasn’t the case. His visits were short, no more than an hour or two. Mostly the four of us were together. When Terry was at the Heisman, we hung out at the hotel, and the girls swam in the indoor pool. One day the three of us went to the Art Institute, and one afternoon I took the girls to a Disney matinee. There was a cinema complex close to the hotel. We hit two or maybe three other movies, but that was the whole family. We went to the air force museum as a family, and to the Boonshoft, which is a science museum. The girls loved that. It was your basic family vacation, Detective Anderson, with Terry taking a few hours away to do his filial duty.”

And maybe to steal a van, Ralph thought.

It was possible, Merlin Cassidy and the Maitland family certainly could have been in Dayton at the same time, but it seemed farfetched. Even if that had happened, there was the question of how Terry had gotten the van back to Flint City. Or why he would have bothered. There were plenty of vehicles to be stolen in the FC metro area; Barbara Nearing’s Subaru was a case in point.

“Probably ate out a few times, didn’t you?” Ralph asked.

Howie sat forward at that, but said nothing for the moment.

“We had a fair amount of room service, Sarah and Grace loved it, but sure, we ate out. Assuming the hotel restaurant counts as out.”

“Did you happen to eat at a place called Tommy and Tuppence?”

“No. I’d remember a restaurant with a name like that. We ate at IHOP one night, and I think twice at Cracker Barrel. Why?”

“No reason,” Ralph said.

Howie gave him a smile that said he knew better, but settled back. Alec sat with his arms crossed over his chest, his face expressionless.

“Is that everything?” Marcy asked. “Because I’m tired of this. And I’m tired of you.”

“Did anything out of the ordinary happen while you were in Dayton? Anything at all? One of your daughters getting lost for a little while, Terry saying he’d met an old friend, you meeting an old friend, maybe a package delivery—”

“A flying saucer?” Howie asked. “How about a man in a trenchcoat with a message in code? Or the Rockettes dancing in the parking lot?”

“Not helpful, counselor. Believe it or not, I’m trying to be part of the solution here.”

“There was nothing.” Marcy got up and began collecting coffee cups. “Terry visited his father, we had a nice vacation, we flew home. We didn’t eat at Tommy and whatever it was, and we didn’t steal a van. Now I’d like you to—”

“Daddy got a cut.”

They all turned to the door. Sarah Maitland was standing there, looking pale and wan and much too thin in her jeans and Rangers tee-shirt.

“Sarah, what are you doing down here?” Marcy put the cups on the counter and went to the girl. “I told you and your sister to stay upstairs until we were done talking.”

“Grace is already asleep,” Sarah said. “She was awake last night with more stupid nightmares about the man with straws for eyes. I hope she doesn’t have any tonight. If she wakes up, you should give her a shot of Benadryl.”

“I’m sure she’ll sleep through. Go on, now.”

But Sarah stood her ground. She was looking at Ralph, not with her mother’s dislike and distrust, but with a kind of concentrated curiosity that made Ralph uncomfortable. He held her gaze, but it was difficult.

“My mother says you got my dad killed,” Sarah said. “Is that true?”

“No.” Then the apology came at last, and to his surprise, it was almost effortless. “But I played a part, and for that I’m deeply sorry. I made a mistake I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life.”

“Probably that’s good,” Sarah said. “Probably you deserve to.” And to her mother: “I’ll go upstairs now, but if Grace starts yelling in the middle of the night, I’m going to sleep in her room.”

“Before you go, Sarah, can you tell me about the cut?” Ralph asked.

“It happened when he visited his father,” Sarah said. “A nurse fixed it up right after it happened. She put on that Betadine stuff and a Band-Aid. It was okay. He said it didn’t hurt.”

“Upstairs, you,” Marcy said.

“Okay.” They watched her pad to the stairs in her bare feet. When she got there, she turned back. “That Tommy and Tuppence restaurant was right up the street from our hotel. When we went to the art museum in the rent-a-dent, I saw the sign.”

19

“Tell me about the cut,” Ralph said.

Marcy put her hands on her hips. “Why? So you can make it into some kind of big deal? Because it wasn’t.”

“He’s asking because it’s the only thing he’s got,” Alec said. “But I’m interested, too.”

“If you’re too tired—” Howie began.

“No, that’s all right. It wasn’t a big deal, just a scrape, really. Was that the second time he visited his father?” She lowered her head, frowning. “No, it was the last time, because we flew home the next morning. When Terry left his father’s room, he smacked into an orderly. He said neither of them was looking where he was going. It would have been no more than bump and excuse me, but a janitor had just finished mopping the floor, and it was still wet. The orderly slipped and grabbed Terry’s arm, but went down anyway. Terry helped him up, asked if he was all right, and the guy said he was. Ter was halfway down the hall before he saw his wrist was bleeding. One of the orderly’s nails must have gotten him when he grabbed Terry, trying to stay on his feet. A nurse disinfected it and put on a Band-Aid, like Sarah said. And that’s the whole story. Does it solve the case for you?”

“No,” Ralph said. But it wasn’t like the yellow bra strap. This was a connection—a confluence, to use Jeannie’s word—he thought he could nail down, but he would need Yune Sablo’s help. He stood up. “Thanks for your time, Marcy.”

She favored him with a cold smile. “That’s Mrs. Maitland to you.”

“Understood. And Howard, thanks for setting this up.” He extended his hand to the lawyer. For a moment it just hung there, but in the end, Howie shook it.

“I’ll walk you out,” Alec said.

“I think I can find my way.”

“I’m sure you can, but since I walked you in, it makes a nice balance.”

They crossed the living room and went down the short hall. Alec opened the door. Ralph stepped out, and was surprised when Alec stepped out after him.

“What was it about the cut?”

Ralph eyed him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think you do. Your face changed.”

“A little acid indigestion. I’m prone to it, and that was a tough meeting. Although not as tough as the way the girl looked at me. I felt like a bug on a slide.”

Alec closed the door behind them. Ralph was two steps down, but because of his height, the two men were still almost eye to eye. “Going to tell you something,” Alec said.

“All right.” Ralph braced himself.

“That arrest was fucked. Fucked to the sky. I’m sure you know that now.”

“I don’t think I need another scolding tonight.” Ralph started to turn away.

“I’m not done.”

Ralph turned back, head lowered, feet slightly spread. It was a fighter’s stance.

“I don’t have any kids. Marie couldn’t. But if I’d had a son your boy’s age, and if I had solid proof that a homicidal sexual deviant had been important to him, someone he looked up to, I might have done the same thing, or worse. What I’m saying is that I understand why you lost perspective.”

“All right,” Ralph said. “It doesn’t make things better, but thanks.”

“If you change your mind about telling me what it was about the cut, give me a call. Maybe we’re all on the same side here.”

“Goodnight, Alec.”

“Goodnight, Detective. Stay safe.”

20

He was telling Jeannie how it went when his phone rang. It was Yune. “Can we talk tomorrow, Ralph? There was something weird in that barn where the kid found the clothes Maitland was wearing in the railway station. More than one thing, actually.”

“Tell me now.”

“No. I’m going home. I’m tired. And I need to think about this.”

“Okay, tomorrow. Where?”

“Someplace quiet and out of the way. I can’t afford to be seen talking to you. You’re on administrative leave, and I’m off the case. Actually, there is no case. Not with Maitland dead.”

“What’s going to happen with the clothes?”

“They’re going to Cap City for forensics examination. After that, they’ll be turned over to the Flint County Sheriff’s Department.”

“Are you kidding? They should be with the rest of the Maitland evidence. Besides which, Dick Doolin can’t blow his own nose without an instruction manual.”

“That may be true, but Canning Township is county, not city, which makes it the sheriff’s jurisdiction. I heard Chief Geller was sending a detective out, but just as a courtesy.”

“Hoskins.”

“Yeah, that was the name. He’s not here yet, and by the time he makes it, everyone will be gone. Maybe he got lost.”

More likely stopped somewhere for a few pops, Ralph thought.

Yune said, “Those clothes will end up in an evidence box at the sheriff’s department, and they’ll still be there when the twenty-second century dawns. No one gives a shit. The feeling is Maitland did it, Maitland’s dead, let’s move on.”

“I’m not ready to do that,” Ralph said, and smiled when Jeannie, sitting on the sofa, made fists and popped two thumbs up. “Are you?”

“Would I be talking to you if I was? Where should we meet tomorrow?”

“There’s a little coffee shop near the train station in Dubrow. O’Malley’s Irish Spoon, it’s called. Can you find it?”

“No doubt.”

“Ten o’clock?”

“Sounds good. If I have to roll on something, I’ll call and reschedule.”

“You have all the witness statements, right?”

“On my laptop.”

“Make sure you bring it. All my stuff is at the station, and I’m not supposed to be there. Got a lot to tell you.”

“Same here,” Yune said. “We may crack this yet, Ralph, but I don’t know if we’ll like what we find. This is a pretty deep forest.”

Actually, Ralph thought as he ended the call, it’s a cantaloupe. And the damn thing is full of maggots.

21

Jack Hoskins stopped at Gentlemen, Please on his way to the Elfman property. He ordered a vodka-tonic, which he felt he deserved after being called back from his vacation early. He gulped it, then ordered another, which he sipped. There were two strippers on stage, both still fully dressed (which in Gentlemen meant they were wearing bras and panties), but humping at each other in a lazy way that gave Jack a moderate boner.

When he took out his wallet to pay, the bartender waved it away. “On the house.”

“Thanks.” Jack dropped a tip on the bar and left, feeling in a marginally better mood. As he got moving again, he took a roll of breath mints from the glovebox and crunched a couple. People said vodka was odorless, but that was bullshit.

The ranch road had been strung off with yellow police tape—county, not city. Hoskins got out, pulled up one of the stakes the tape was tied to, drove through, and replaced the stake. Fucking pain in the ass, he thought, and the ass-pain only deepened when he arrived at a cluster of ramshackle buildings—a barn and three sheds—to discover no one was there. He tried to call in, wanting to share his frustration with someone, even if it was only Sandy McGill, who he regarded as a prissy twat of the first order. All he got was static on the radio, and of course there was no cell service out here in South Jerkoff.

He grabbed his long-barreled flashlight and got out, mostly to stretch his legs; there was nothing to be done here. It was a fool’s errand, and he was the fool. A hard wind was blowing, hot breath that would be a brushfire’s best friend if one got started. There was a grove of cottonwoods clustered around an old water pump. Their leaves danced and rustled, their shadows racing across the ground in the moonlight.

There was more yellow tape stretched across the entrance to the barn where the clothes had been found. Bagged and on their way to Cap City by now, of course, but it was still creepy to think that Maitland had come here at some point after killing the kid.

In a way, Jack thought, I’m retracing his path. Past the boat landing where he changed out of his bloody clothes, then to Gentlemen, Please. He went to Dubrow from the titty-bar, but then he must have circled back to… here.

The open barn door was like a gaping mouth. Hoskins didn’t want to go near it, not out here in the middle of nowhere and not on his own. Maitland was dead and there were no such things as ghosts, but he still didn’t want to go near it. So he made himself do just that, step by slow step, until he could shine his light inside.

Someone was standing at the rear of the barn.

Jack uttered a soft cry, reached for his sidearm, and realized he wasn’t wearing it. The Glock was in the small Gardall safe he kept in his truck. He dropped the flashlight. He bent and scooped it up, feeling the vodka surging around in his head, not enough to make him drunk, just enough to make him feel woozy and unsteady on his feet.

He shone the light back into the barn, and laughed. There was no man, just the hame of an old harness, nearly busted into two pieces.

Time to get out of here. Maybe stop at Gentlemen’s for one more drink, then home and straight to b—

There was someone behind him, and this was no illusion. He could see the shadow, long and thin. And… was that breathing?

In a second, he’s going to grab me. I need to drop and roll.

Only he couldn’t. He was frozen. Why hadn’t he turned around when he saw the scene was deserted? Why hadn’t he gotten his gun out of the safe? Why had he ever gotten out of the truck in the first place? Jack suddenly understood that he was going to die at the end of a dirt road in Canning Township.

That was when he was touched. Caressed on the back of his neck by a hand as hot as a hot water bottle. He tried to scream and couldn’t. His chest was locked up like the Glock in its safe. Now another hand would join the first and the choking would begin.

Only the hand pulled back. Not the fingers, though. They moved back and forth—lightly, just the tips—playing across his skin and leaving trails of heat.

Jack didn’t know how long he stood there, unable to move. It might have been twenty seconds; it might have been two minutes. The wind blew, tousling his hair and caressing his neck like those fingers. The shadows of the cottonwoods schooled across the dirt and weeds like fleeing fish. The person—or the thing—stood behind him, its shadow long and thin. Touching and caressing.

Then both the fingertips and the shadow were gone.

Jack wheeled around, and this time the scream came out, long and loud, when the tail of his sportcoat belled out behind him in the wind and made a flapping sound. He stared at—

Nothing.

Just a few abandoned buildings and an acre or so of dirt.

No one was there. No one had ever been there. No one in the barn; just a busted hame. No fingers on the back of his sweaty neck; just the wind. He returned to his truck in big strides, looking back over his shoulder once, twice, three times. He got in, cringing when a wind-driven shadow raced across the rearview mirror, and started the engine. He drove back down the ranch road at fifty miles an hour, past the old graveyard and the abandoned ranchhouse, not pausing at the yellow tape this time but simply driving through it. He swerved onto Highway 79, tires squalling, and headed back toward FC. By the time he passed the city limits, he had convinced himself nothing had happened out there at that abandoned barn. The throbbing at the nape of his neck also meant nothing.

Nothing at all.