The Outsider

1

At ten o’clock on Saturday morning, O’Malley’s Irish Spoon was as close to deserted as it ever got. Two geezers sat near the front with mugs of coffee beside them and a chessboard between them. The only waitress was staring, transfixed, at a small TV over the counter, where an infomercial was playing. The item on sale appeared to be some sort of golf club.

Yunel Sablo was sitting at a table toward the rear, dressed in faded jeans and a tee-shirt tight enough to show off his admirable musculature (Ralph had not had admirable musculature since 2007 or so). He was also watching the TV, but when he saw Ralph, he raised a hand and beckoned.

As he sat down, Yune said: “I don’t know why the waitress is so interested in that particular club.”

“Women don’t golf? What kind of male chauvinist world are you living in, amigo?”

“I know women golf, but that particular club is hollow. The idea is if you get caught short on the fourteenth hole, you can piss in it. There’s even a little apron included that you can flip over your junk. Thing like that wouldn’t work for a woman.”

The waitress came over to take their order. Ralph asked for scrambled eggs and rye toast, looking at the menu rather than her, lest he burst into laughter. That was one urge he hadn’t expected to struggle against this morning, and a small, strained giggle escaped him, anyway. It was the thought of the apron that did it.

The waitress didn’t need to be a mind reader. “Yeah, it might have its funny side,” she said. “Unless, that is, your husband’s a golf nut with a prostate the size of a grapefruit and you don’t know what to get him for his birthday.”

Ralph met Yune’s eyes, and that tipped them both over. They burst into hearty roars of hilarity that made the chess players look around disapprovingly.

“You going to order anything, honey,” the waitress asked Yune, “or just drink coffee and laugh about the Comfort Nine Iron?”

Yune ordered huevos rancheros. When she was gone, he said, “It’s a strange world, ese, full of strange things. Don’t you think so?”

“Given what we’re here to talk about, I’d have to agree. What was strange out there in Canning Township?”

“Plenty.”

Yune had a leather shoulder-bag, the sort of thing Ralph had heard Jack Hoskins refer to (slightingly) as a man-purse. From it he took an iPad Mini in a battered case that had seen a lot of hard traveling. Ralph had noticed more and more cops carrying these gadgets, and guessed that by 2020, 2025 at the latest, they might entirely replace the traditional cop’s notebook. Well, the world moved on. You either moved with it, or got left behind. On the whole, he would rather have one of those for his birthday than a Comfort Nine Iron.

Yune tapped a couple of buttons and brought up his notes. “Kid named Douglas Elfman found the discarded clothes late yesterday afternoon. Recognized the horse’s head belt buckle from a news report. Called his dad, who got in touch with the SP right away. I got there with the crime van around quarter to six. The jeans, who knows, bluejeans just about grow on trees, but I recognized the buckle right away. Look for yourself.”

He tapped the screen again, and a close-up of the buckle filled the screen. Ralph had no doubt it was the same one that Terry had been wearing in the security cam footage from the Vogel Transportation Center in Dubrow.

Talking to himself as well as to Yune, Ralph said, “Okay, one more link in the chain. He ditches the van behind Shorty’s Pub. Takes the Subaru. Ditches that near the Iron Bridge, puts on fresh clothes—”

“501 jeans, Jockey underpants, white athletic socks, and a pretty damn expensive pair of sneakers. Plus the belt with the fancy buckle.”

“Uh-huh. Once he’s dressed in clothes with no blood on them, he takes a cab from Gentlemen, Please to Dubrow. Only when he gets to the station, he doesn’t take the train. Why not?”

“Maybe he was trying to lay a false trail, in which case doubling back was always part of the plan. Or… I have a crazy idea. Want to hear?”

“Sure,” Ralph said.

“I think Maitland meant to run. Meant to take that train to Dallas–Fort Worth, then keep on going. Maybe to Mexico, maybe to California. Why would he want to stay in Flint City after killing the Peterson boy, when he knew people had seen him? Only…”

“Only what?”

“Only he couldn’t bear to leave with that big game on the line. He wanted to coach his kids to one more win. Get them to the finals.”

“That really is crazy.”

“Crazier than killing the boy in the first place?”

Yune had him there, but Ralph was spared the need to make a reply when their food came. As soon as the waitress left, Ralph said: “Fingerprints on the buckle?”

Yune swiped his Mini and showed Ralph another close-up of the horse’s head. In this shot, the buckle’s silver shine had been dulled by white fingerprint powder. Ralph could see an overlay of prints, like footprints in one of those old learn-to-dance diagrams.

“The Forensics Unit had Maitland’s dabs in their computer,” Yune said, “and the program matched them up right away. But here’s the first weird thing, Ralph. The lines and whorls in the buckle prints are faint, and entirely broken up in a few places. Enough for a match that would stand up in court, but the tech who did the work—and he’s done thousands of these—said they were like the prints of an old person. Like eighty or even ninety. I asked if it could have been because Maitland was moving fast, wanting to change to yet another set of clothes and just get the hell out of there. The tech said it was possible, but I could tell from his face that it didn’t really ring his bell.”

“Huh,” Ralph said, and dug into his scrambled eggs. His appetite, like his sudden burst of laughter over the dual-purpose golf club, was a welcome surprise. “That is weird, but probably not substantive.”

And just how long, he wondered, was he going to continue dismissing the anomalies that kept popping up in this business by calling them non-substantive?

“There was another set,” Yune said. “They were also blurred—too blurred for the computer tech to even bother sending them out to the FBI’s national database—but he had all the stray prints from the van, and those other prints on the buckle… see what you think.”

He passed the iPad to Ralph. Here were two sets of prints, one labeled VAN UNKNOWN SUB and the other BELT BUCKLE UNKNOWN SUB. They did look alike, but only sort of. No way would they stand up in court as proof of anything, especially if a bulldog defense attorney like Howie Gold challenged them. Ralph was not in court, however, and he thought the same unsub had made them both, because it fit with what he’d learned from Marcy Maitland the night before. Not a perfect fit, no, but close enough for a detective on administrative leave who didn’t have to run everything by his superiors… or by a district attorney hellbent for election.

While Yune ate his huevos rancheros, Ralph told him about his meeting with Marcy, holding back one thing for later.

“It’s all about the van,” he finished. “Forensics may find a few prints from the kid who originally stole it—”

“Already did. We had Merlin Cassidy’s prints from the El Paso police. Computer guy matched them to some of the stray prints in the van—mostly on the toolbox, which Cassidy must have opened to see if there was anything valuable inside. They’re clear, and they’re not these.” He swiped back to the blurry UNSUB prints, labeled VAN and BELT BUCKLE.

Ralph leaned forward, pushing his plate aside. “You see how it dovetails, don’t you? We know it wasn’t Terry who stole the van in Dayton, because the Maitlands flew home. But if the blurry prints from the van and those from the buckle really are the same…”

“You think he had an accomplice, after all. One who drove the van from Dayton to Flint City.”

“Must have,” Ralph said. “No other way to explain it.”

“One who looked just like him?”

“Back to that,” Ralph said, and sighed.

“And both sets of prints were on the buckle,” Yune pushed on. “Meaning Maitland and his double wore the same belt, maybe the whole set of clothes. Well, they’d fit, wouldn’t they? Twin brothers, separated at birth. Except the records say Terry Maitland was an only child.”

“What else have you got? Anything?”

“Yes. We have arrived at the really weird shit.” He brought his chair around and sat next to Ralph. The picture now on his iPad showed a close-up of the jeans, socks, underpants, and sneakers, all in an untidy pile, next to a plastic evidence-marker with a 1 on it. “See the stains?”

“Yes. What is that crap?”

“I don’t know,” Yune said. “And the forensics guys don’t, either, but one of them said it looked like jizz, and I sort of agree with that. You can’t see it in the picture very well, but—”

“Semen? Are you kidding?”

The waitress came back. Ralph turned the iPad screen side down.

“Either of you gents want a refill on the coffee?”

They both took one. When she left, Ralph went back to the photo of the clothes, spreading his fingers on the screen to enlarge the image.

“Yune, it’s on the crotch of the jeans, all down both legs, on the cuffs…”

“Also on the underpants and socks,” Yune said. “Not to mention the sneakers, both on em and in em, dried to a nice crack-glaze, like on pottery. Might be enough of the stuff, whatever it is, to fill a hollow nine iron.”

Ralph didn’t laugh. “It can’t be semen. Even John Holmes in his prime—”

“I know. And semen doesn’t do this.”

He swiped the screen. The new picture was a wide shot of the barn floor. Another evidence tab, this one marked 2, had been placed next to a pile of loose hay. At least Ralph thought it was hay. On the far left side of the photo, evidence tab 3 had been placed atop a softly collapsing bale that looked like it had been there for a long, long time. Much of it was black. The side of the bale was also black, as if some corrosive goo had run down it to the floor.

“Is it the same stuff?” Ralph asked. “You’re sure?”

“Ninety per cent. And there’s more in the loft. If it’s semen, that would be a nocturnal emission worthy of The Guinness Book of Records.”

“Can’t be,” Ralph said, low. “It’s something else. For one thing, semen wouldn’t turn hay black. It makes no sense.”

“Not to me, either, but of course I am just the son of a poor Mexican farming family.”

“Forensics is analyzing it, though.”

Yune nodded. “As we speak.”

“And you’ll let me know.”

“Yes. You see what I meant when I said this just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”

“Jeannie called it inexplicable.” Ralph cleared his throat. “She actually used the word supernatural.”

“My Gabriela has suggested the same,” Yune said. “Maybe it’s a chick thing. Or a Mexican thing.”

Ralph raised his eyebrows.

“Sí, señor,” Yune said, and laughed. “My wife’s mother died young, and she grew up at her abuela’s knee. The old lady stuffed her full of legends. When I was talking this mess over with her, Gaby told me one about the Mexican boogeyman. He was supposedly a dude dying of tuberculosis, see, and this old wise man who lived in the desert, an ermitaño, told him he could be cured by drinking the blood of children and rubbing their fat on his chest and privates. So that’s what this boogeyman did, and now he lives forever. Supposedly he only takes children who misbehave. He pops them in a big black bag he carries. Gaby told me that when she was a little girl, maybe seven, she had a screaming fit one time when the doctor came to the house for her brother, who had scarlet fever.”

“Because the doctor had a black bag.”

Yune nodded. “What was that boogeyman’s name? It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t pick it off. Don’t you hate that?”

“So is that what you think we’ve got here? The boogeyman?”

“Nope. I may be the son of a poor Mexican farming family, ese, or possibly the son of an Amarillo car dealer, but either way, I ain’t atontado. A man killed Frank Peterson, as mortal as you and me, and that man was almost certainly Terry Maitland. If we could figure out what happened, everything would fall into place and I could go back to sleeping through the night. Because this bugs the shit out of me.” He looked at his watch. “Gotta go. Promised my wife I’d take her to a craft fair in Cap City. Any more questions? You ought to have at least one, because yet one more weird thing is staring you right in the face.”

“Were there vehicle tracks in the barn?”

“That’s not what I was thinking of, but as a matter of fact, there were. Not useful ones, though—you can see the impressions, and there’s a little oil, but no tread marks good enough for comparison. My guess is they were made by the van Maitland used to abduct the kid. They weren’t close enough together to have been made by the Subaru.”

“Uh-huh. Listen, you’ve got all the witness interviews on your magic gadget, right? Before you split, find the one I did with Claude Bolton. He’s a bouncer at Gentlemen, Please. Although he took issue with that word, as I remember.”

Yune brought up one file, shook his head, brought up another, and handed the iPad to Ralph. “Scroll down.”

Ralph did so, went past what he wanted, and at last centered on it. “Here it is. Bolton said, ‘I remember one other thing, no big deal but kind of spooky if he really was the one who killed that kid.’ Bolton said the guy cut him. When I asked what he meant, Bolton said he thanked Maitland for working with his friend’s nephews, then shook with him. When he did, Maitland’s pinky fingernail grazed the back of Bolton’s hand. Made a little cut. Bolton said it reminded him of his drug days, because some of the MCs he ran with used to grow out their pinky nails to scoop coke with. Apparently it was a fashion statement.”

“And this is important because?” Yune looked at his watch again, rather ostentatiously.

“Probably it’s not. Probably it’s…”

But he wasn’t going to say non-substantive again. He liked the word less every time it came out of his mouth.

“Probably no big deal, but it’s what my wife calls a confluence. Terry got a similar cut when he was visiting his father in a dementia ward in Dayton.” Ralph quickly related the story about how the orderly had slipped and grabbed for Terry, cutting him in the process.

Yune thought about it, then shrugged. “I think that one’s pure coincidence, ese. And I really have to go, if I don’t want to incur the Wrath of Gabriela, but there’s still that thing you’re missing, and I’m not talking about tire tracks. Your pal Bolton even mentions it. Scroll back up and you’ll find it.”

But Ralph didn’t need to. It had been right in front of him. “Pants, underpants, socks, and sneakers… but no shirt.”

“Correct,” Yune said. “Either it was his favorite, or he didn’t have another one to change into when he left the barn.”

2

Halfway back to Flint City, Ralph finally realized what had been bugging him about the bra strap.

He pulled into the two-acre lot of a Byron’s Liquor Warehouse, and hit speed-dial. His call went to Yune’s voicemail. Ralph broke the connection without leaving a message. Yune had already gone above and beyond; let him have his weekend. And now that he had time to give it a little thought, Ralph decided this was a confluence he didn’t want to share with anyone, except maybe his wife.

The bra strap hadn’t been the only bright yellow thing he had seen during those moments of hyper-vigilance before Terry was shot; it was just his brain’s stand-in for something that had been part of the larger gallery of grotesques, and overshadowed by Ollie Peterson, who had drawn the old revolver from his newspaper bag only seconds later. No wonder it had gotten lost.

The man with the horrible burns on his face and the tattoos on his hands had been wearing a yellow bandanna on his head, probably to cover more scars. But had it been a bandanna? Couldn’t it have been something else? The missing shirt, for instance? The one Terry had been wearing in the train station?

I’m reaching, he thought, and maybe he was… except his subconscious (those thoughts behind his thoughts) had been yelling at him about it all along.

He closed his eyes and tried to summon up exactly what he’d seen in those last few seconds of Terry’s life. The blond anchor’s unlovely sneer as she looked at the blood on her fingers. The hypodermic sign reading MAITLAND TAKE YOUR MEDICINE. The boy with the bad lip. The woman leaning forward to give Marcy the finger. And the burned man who’d looked as if God had taken a giant eraser to most of his features, leaving only lumps, raw pink skin, and holes where a nose had been before the fire had put tattoos on his face far fiercer than those on his hands. And what Ralph saw in this moment of recall was not a bandanna on that man’s head but something far bigger, something that hung all the way down to his shoulders like a headdress.

Yes, that something could have been a shirt… but even if it was, did that mean it was the shirt? The one Terry had been wearing in the security footage? Was there a way to find out?

He thought there was, but he needed to enlist Jeannie, who was far more computer-savvy than he was. Also, the time might have come to stop thinking of Howard Gold and Alec Pelley as enemies. Maybe we’re all on the same side here, Pelley had said last night as he stood on the Maitland stoop, and maybe that was true. Or could be.

Ralph put his car in gear and headed home, pushing the speed limit all the way.

3

Ralph and his wife sat at the kitchen table with Jeannie’s laptop in front of them. There were four major TV stations in Cap City, one for each of the networks, plus Channel 81, the public access outlet that ran local news, city council meetings, and various community affairs (such as the Harlan Coben speech where Terry had appeared as an unlikely guest star). All five had been at the courthouse for Terry’s arraignment, all five had filmed the shooting, and all had at least some footage of the crowd. Once the gunfire erupted, all the cameras turned to Terry, of course—Terry bleeding down the side of his face and pushing his wife from the line of fire, then collapsing into the street when the killshot struck him. The CBS footage went entirely blank before that happened, because that was the camera Ralph’s bullet had struck, shattering it and blinding its operator in one eye.

After they’d looked at each clip twice, Jeannie turned to him, her lips pressed tightly together. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

“Run the Channel 81 stuff again,” Ralph said. “Their camera was every whichway once the shooting started, but they got the best crowd stuff before.”

“Ralph.” She touched his arm. “Are you all ri—”

“Fine, I’m fine.” He wasn’t. He felt as if the world were tilting, and he might soon slide right off the edge. “Run it again, please. And mute it. The reporter’s running commentary is distracting.”

She did as he asked, and they watched together. Waving signs. People yelling soundlessly, their mouths opening and closing like fish out of water. At one point the camera panned rapidly across and down, not soon enough to show the man who had spit in Terry’s face, but in time to show Ralph tripping the troublemaker, making it look like an unprovoked attack. He watched as Terry helped the spitter to his feet (like something out of the fucking Bible, Ralph remembered thinking), and then the camera returned to the crowd. He saw the two bailiffs—one plump, the other lean—doing their best to keep the steps clear. He saw the blond anchor from Channel 7 getting to her feet, still looking with disbelief at her bloody fingers. He saw Ollie Peterson with his newspaper sack and a few clumps of red hair sticking out from beneath his watch cap, still a few seconds from being the star of the show. He saw the boy with the cleft lip, the Channel 81 cameraman pausing his shot long enough to register Frank Peterson’s face on the boy’s tee-shirt before panning further—

“Stop,” he said. “Freeze it, freeze it right there.”

Jeannie did so, and they looked at the picture—slightly blurred from the cameraman’s rapid movement as he tried to get a little bit of everything.

Ralph tapped the screen. “See this guy waving the cowboy hat?”

“Sure.”

“The burned man was standing right next to him.”

“All right,” she said… but in a strange, nervous tone of voice Ralph did not remember ever hearing from her before.

“I swear to you he was. I saw him, it was like I was tripping on LSD or mescaline or something, and I saw everything. Run the other ones again. This is the best one of the crowd, but the FOX affiliate wasn’t too bad, and—”

“No.” She hit the power button and closed the laptop. “The man you saw isn’t in any of these, Ralph. You know it as well as I do.”

“Do you think I’m crazy? Is that it? Do you think I’m having a… you know…”

“A breakdown?” Her hand was back on his arm again, now squeezing gently. “Of course not. If you say you saw him, you saw him. If you think he was wearing that shirt as a kind of sun protection, or do-rag, or I don’t know what, then he probably was. You’ve had a bad month, probably the worst month of your life, but I trust your powers of observation. It’s just that… you must see now…”

She trailed off. He waited. At last she pushed ahead.

“There is something very wrong with this, and the more you find, the wronger it gets. It scares me. That story Yune told you scares me. It’s basically a vampire story, isn’t it? I read Dracula in high school, and one thing I remember about it is vampires don’t cast reflections in mirrors. And a thing that can’t cast a reflection probably wouldn’t show up in TV news footage.”

“That’s nuts. There’s no such things as ghosts, or witches, or vam—”

She slapped her open hand down on the table, a flat pistol-shot sound that made him jump. Her eyes were furious, crackling. “Wake up, Ralph! Wake up to what’s right in front of you! Terry Maitland was in two places at the same time! If you stop trying to find a way to explain that away and just accept it—”

“I can’t accept it, honey. It goes against everything I’ve believed my whole life. If I let something like that in, I really would go crazy.”

“The hell you would. You’re stronger than that. But you don’t have to even consider the idea, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Terry’s dead. You can let it go.”

“If I do that, and it really wasn’t Terry who killed Frankie Peterson? Where does that leave Marcy? Where does it leave her girls?”

Jeannie got up, walked to the window over the sink, and looked out at the backyard. Her hands were clenched into fists. “Derek called again. He still wants to come home.”

“What did you tell him?”

“To stick it out until the season ends in the middle of next month. Even though I’d love to have him home. I finally talked him into it, and do you know why?” She turned back. “Because I don’t want him in this town while you’re still digging around in this mess. Because when it gets dark tonight, I’m going to be frightened. Suppose it really is some kind of supernatural creature, Ralph? And what if it finds out you’re looking for it?”

Ralph took her in his arms. He could feel her trembling. He thought, Part of her actually believes this.

“Yune told me that story, but Yune believes the killer is a natural man. So do I.”

With her face against his chest, she said, “Then why isn’t the man with the burned face in any of the footage?”

“I don’t know.”

“I care about Marcy, of course I do.” She looked up, and he saw she was crying. “And I care about her girls. I care about Terry, for that matter… and the Petersons… but I care more about you and Derek. You guys are all I have. Can’t you let this go now? Finish your leave, see the shrink, and turn the page?”

“I don’t know,” he said, when in fact he did know. He just didn’t want to say so to Jeannie while she was in her current strange state. He couldn’t turn the page.

Not yet.

4

That night he sat at the picnic table in the backyard, smoking a Tiparillo and looking up at the sky. There were no stars, but he could still make out the moon behind the clouds that were moving in. The truth was often like that, he thought—a bleary circle of light behind clouds. Sometimes it broke through; sometimes the clouds thickened, and the light disappeared completely.

One thing was sure: when night fell, the skinny, tubercular man from Yune Sablo’s fairy tale became more plausible. Not believable, Ralph could no more believe in such a creature than he could in Santa Claus, but he could picture him: a darker-skinned version of Slender Man, that bugaboo of pubescent American girls. He’d be tall and grave in his black suit, his face like a lamp, and carrying a bag big enough to hold a small child with his or her knees folded against his or her chest. According to Yune, the Mexican boogeyman prolonged his life by drinking the blood of children and rubbing their fat on his body… and while that wasn’t exactly what had happened to the Peterson boy, it was in the vicinity. Might it be possible that the killer—maybe Maitland, maybe the unsub of the blurred fingerprints—actually thought he was a vampire, or some other supernatural creature? Hadn’t Jeffrey Dahmer believed he was creating zombies when he killed all those homeless men?

None of that addresses the question of why the burned man isn’t in the news footage.

Jeannie called to him. “Come inside, Ralph. It’s going to rain. You can smoke that smelly thing in the kitchen, if you have to have it.”

That isn’t why you want me to come inside, Ralph thought. You want me to come in because part of you can’t help thinking that Yune’s sack-man is lurking out here, just beyond the reach of the yard light.

Ridiculous, of course, but he could sympathize with her unease. He felt it himself. What had Jeannie said? The more you find, the wronger it gets.

Ralph came inside, doused his Tiparillo under the sink tap, then grabbed his phone off the charging stand. When Howie answered, Ralph said, “Can you and Mr. Pelley come over here tomorrow? I have a bunch of stuff to tell you, and some of it’s pretty unbelievable. Come to lunch. I’ll go out to Rudy’s and buy some sandwiches.”

Howie agreed at once. Ralph broke the connection and saw Jeannie in the doorway, looking at him with her arms folded over her chest. “Can’t let it go?”

“No, honey. I can’t. I’m sorry.”

She sighed. “Will you be careful?”

“I’ll tread with utmost caution.”

“You better, or I’ll tread on you without caution. And no need to get sandwiches from Rudy’s. I’ll make something.”

5

Sunday was rainy, so they convened at the Andersons’ seldom-used dining room table: Ralph, Jeannie, Howie, and Alec. Yune Sablo, at home in Cap City, joined them on Howie Gold’s laptop, via Skype.

Ralph began by recapping the things all of them knew, then turned it over to Yune, who told Howie and Alec about what they had found in the Elfman barn. When he was finished, Howie said, “None of this makes sense. In fact, it’s about four time-zones from making sense.”

“This person was sleeping out there in the loft of a deserted barn?” Alec asked Yune. “Hiding out? That’s what you’re thinking?”

“It’s the working assumption,” Yune said.

“If so, it couldn’t have been Terry,” Howie said. “He was in town all day Saturday. He took the girls to the municipal pool that morning, and he was at Estelle Barga Park all that afternoon, getting the field ready—as the home field coach, doing that was his responsibility. There were plenty of witnesses in both places.”

“And from Saturday til Monday,” Alec put in, “he was jugged in county jail. As you well know, Ralph.”

“There are all kinds of witnesses to Terry’s whereabouts almost every step of the way,” Ralph agreed. “That’s always been the root of the problem, but let it go for a minute. I want to show you something. Yune’s already seen it; he reviewed the footage this morning. But I asked him something before he watched, and now I want to ask you. Did either of you notice a badly disfigured man at the courthouse? He was wearing something on his head, but I’m not going to say what it was just now. Either of you?”

Howie said he hadn’t. All his attention had been fixed on his client and his client’s wife. Alec Pelley, however, was a different matter.

“Yeah, I saw him. Looked like he got burned in a fire. And what he was wearing on his head…” He stopped, eyes widening.

“Go on,” Yune said from his living room in Cap City. “Let it out, amigo. You’ll feel better.”

Alec was rubbing his temples, as if he had a headache. “At the time I thought it was a bandanna or a kerchief. You know, because his hair got burned off in the fire and maybe couldn’t grow back because of the scarring and he wanted to keep the sun off his skull. Only it could have been a shirt. The one missing from the barn, is that what you’re thinking? The one Terry was wearing in the security footage from the train station?”

“You win the Kewpie doll,” Yune said.

Howie was frowning at Ralph. “You’re still trying to hang this on Terry?”

Jeannie spoke up for the first time. “He’s just trying to get to the truth… which I’m not sure is the world’s best idea, actually.”

“Watch this, Alec,” Ralph said. “And point out the burned man.”

Ralph ran the Channel 81 footage, then the FOX footage, and then, at Alec’s request (he was now leaning so close to Jeannie’s laptop that his nose was nearly touching the screen), the Channel 81 footage again. At last he sat back. “He’s not there. Which is impossible.”

Yune said, “He was standing next to the guy waving his cowboy hat, right?”

“I think so,” Alec said. “Next to him and higher up from the blond reporter who got bonked on the noggin with a sign. I see both the reporter and the sign-waver… but I don’t see him. How can that be?”

None of them answered.

Howie said, “Let’s go back to the fingerprints for a minute. How many different sets in the van, Yune?”

“Forensics thinks as many as half a dozen.”

Howie groaned.

“Take it easy. We’ve eliminated at least four of those: the farmer in New York who owned the van, the farmer’s oldest son who sometimes drove it, the kid who stole it, and Terry Maitland. That leaves one clear set we haven’t identified—could have been one of the farmer’s friends or one of his younger kids, playing around inside—and those blurry ones.”

“The same blurry ones you found on the belt buckle.”

“Probably, but we can’t be sure. There are a few visible lines and whorls in those, but nothing like the clear points of identity you’d need to get them admitted into evidence when a case goes to court.”

“Uh-huh, okay, understood. So let me ask all three of you gentlemen something. Isn’t it possible that a man who had been badly burned—hands as well as face—could leave prints like that? Ones blurred to unrecognizability?”

“Yes.” Yune and Alec said it in unison, their voices only overlapping because of the computer’s brief transmission lag.

“The problem with that,” Ralph said, “is the burned man at the courthouse had tattoos on his hands. If his fingertips burned off, wouldn’t the tats have burned off, too?”

Howie shook his head. “Not necessarily. If I’m on fire, maybe I use my hands to try and put myself out, but I don’t do it with the backs, do I?” He began slapping at his considerable chest to demonstrate. “I do it with my palms.”

There was a moment of silence. Then, in a low, almost inaudible voice, Alec Pelley said, “That burned guy was there. I’d swear to it on a stack of Bibles.”

Ralph said, “Presumably the State Police Forensics Unit will analyze the stuff from the barn that turned the hay black, but is there anything we can do in the meantime? I’m open to suggestions.”

“Backtrack to Dayton,” Alec said. “We know Maitland was there, and we know the van was there, too. At least some of the answers may also be there. I can’t fly up myself, too many irons currently in the fire, but I know somebody good. Let me make a call and see if he’s available.”

That was where they left it.

6

Ten-year-old Grace Maitland had slept poorly ever since her father’s murder, and what sleep she had managed was haunted by nightmares. That Sunday afternoon all her weariness came down on her like a soft weight. While her mother and sister were making a cake in the kitchen, Grace crept upstairs and lay on her bed. Although the day was rainy, there was plenty of light, which was good. The dark scared her now. Downstairs she could hear Mom and Sarah talking. That was also good. Grace closed her eyes, and although it only felt like a moment or two before she opened them again, it must have been hours, because the rain was coming down harder now and the light had gone gray. Her room was full of shadows.

A man was sitting on her bed and looking at her. He was wearing jeans and a green tee-shirt. There were tattoos on his hands and crawling up his arms. There were snakes, and a cross, and a dagger, and a skull. His face no longer looked like it had been made out of Play-Doh by an untalented child, but she recognized him, just the same. It was the man who had been outside Sarah’s window. At least now he didn’t have straws for eyes. Now he had her father’s eyes. Grace would have known those eyes anywhere. She wondered if this was happening, or if it was a dream. If so, it was better than the nightmares. A little, anyway.

“Daddy?”

“Sure,” said the man. His green tee-shirt changed to her father’s Golden Dragons game shirt, and so she knew it was a dream, after all. Next, that shirt turned into a white smocky thing, then back into the green tee-shirt. “I love you, Gracie.”

“That doesn’t sound like him,” Grace said. “You’re making him up.”

The man leaned close to her. Grace shrank back, eyes fixed on her father’s eyes. They were better than the I-love-you voice, but this was still not him.

“I want you to go,” she said.

“I’m sure you do, and people in hell want icewater. Are you sad, Grace? Do you miss your daddy?”

“Yes!” Grace began to cry. “I want you to go! Those aren’t my daddy’s real eyes, you’re just pretending!”

“Don’t expect any sympathy from me,” the man said. “I think it’s good that you’re sad. I hope you’ll be sad for a long time, and cry. Wah-wah-wah, just like a baby.”

“Please go!”

“Baby want her bottle? Baby pee in her didies, get all wet? Baby go wah-wah-wah?”

“Stop it!”

He sat back. “I will if you do one thing for me. Will you do something for me, Grace?”

“What is it?”

He told her, and then Sarah was shaking her and telling her to come down and have some cake, so it had just been a dream after all, a bad dream, and she didn’t have to do anything, but if she did, that dream might never come back.

She made herself eat some cake, although she really didn’t want any, and when Mom and Sarah were sitting on the couch and watching some dippy movie, Grace said she didn’t like love-movies and was going upstairs to play Angry Birds. Only she didn’t. She went into her parents’ bedroom (just her mom’s now, and how sad that was) and took her mother’s cell phone off the dresser. The policeman wasn’t in the cell’s contact list, but Mr. Gold was. She called him, holding the phone in both hands so it wouldn’t shake. She prayed he would answer, and he did.

“Marcy? What’s up?”

“No, it’s Grace. I’m using my mom’s phone.”

“Why, hello, Grace. It’s nice to hear from you. Why are you calling?”

“Because I didn’t know how to call the detective. The one who arrested my father.”

“Why do you—”

“I have a message for him. A man gave it to me. I know it was probably just a dream, but I’m playing it safe. I’ll tell you and you can tell the detective.”

“What man, Grace? Who gave you the message?”

“The first time I saw him, he had straws for eyes. He says he won’t come back anymore if I give Detective Anderson the message. He tried to make me believe he had my daddy’s eyes, but he didn’t, not really. His face is better now, but he’s still scary. I don’t want him to come back, even if it’s only a dream, so will you tell Detective Anderson?”

Mom was in the doorway now, silently watching, and Grace thought she would probably get in trouble, but she didn’t care.

“What should I tell him, Grace?”

“To stop. If he doesn’t want something bad to happen, tell him he has to stop.”

7

Grace and Sarah sat in the living room, on the couch. Marcy was between them, with an arm around each. Howie Gold sat in the easy chair that had been Terry’s until the world turned upside down. A hassock went with it. Ralph Anderson drew it in front of the couch and sat on it, his legs so long that his knees almost framed his face. He supposed he looked comical, and if that set Grace Maitland a bit at ease, that was all to the good.

“That must have been a scary dream, Grace. Are you sure it was a dream?”

“Of course it was,” Marcy said. Her face was tight and pale. “There was no man in this house. There was no way he could have gotten upstairs without us seeing him.”

“Or heard him, at least,” Sarah put in, but she sounded timid. Afraid. “Our stairs creak like mad.”

“You’re here for one reason, to ease my daughter’s mind,” Marcy said. “Would you please do that?”

Ralph said, “Whatever it was, you know there’s no man here now, don’t you, Grace?”

“Yes.” She seemed sure of this. “He’s gone. He said he would go if I gave you the message. I don’t think he will come back anymore, whether he was a dream or not.”

Sarah sighed dramatically and said, “Isn’t that a relief.”

“Hush, munchkin,” Marcy said.

Ralph pulled out his notebook. “Tell me what he looked like. This man in your dream. Because I’m a detective, and now I’m sure that’s what it was.”

Although Marcy Maitland didn’t like him and probably never would, her eyes thanked him for this much, at least.

“Better,” Grace said. “He looked better. His Play-Doh face was gone.”

“That’s what he looked like before,” Sarah told Ralph. “She said.”

Marcy said, “Sarah, go into the kitchen with Mr. Gold and get everybody a piece of cake, would you do that?”

Sarah looked at Ralph. “Cake even for him? Do we like him now?”

“Cake for everyone,” Marcy said, neatly dodging the question. “It’s called hospitality. Go on, now.”

Sarah got off the couch and crossed the room to Howie. “I’m getting kicked out.”

“Couldn’t happen to a nicer person,” Howie said. “I will join you in purdah.”

“In what?”

“Never mind, kiddo.” They went out to the kitchen together.

“Make this brief, please,” Marcy said to Ralph. “You’re only here because Howie said it was important. That it might have something to do with… you know.”

Ralph nodded without taking his eyes from Grace. “This man who had the Play-Doh face the first time he showed up…”

“And straws for eyes,” Grace said. “They stuck out, like in a cartoon, and the black circles people have in their eyes were holes.”

“Uh-huh.” In his notebook, Ralph wrote, Straws for eyes? “When you say his face looked like Play-Doh, could it have been because he was burned?”

She thought about it. “No. More like he wasn’t done. Not… you know…”

“Not finished?” Marcy asked.

Grace nodded, and put her thumb in her mouth. Ralph thought, This ten-year-old thumb sucker with the wounded face… she’s mine. True, and the seeming clarity of the evidence upon which he had acted would never change that.

“What did he look like today, Grace? The man in your dream.”

“He had short black hair that was sticking up, like a porcupine, and a little beard around his mouth. He had my daddy’s eyes, but they weren’t really his eyes. He had tattoos on his hands and all up his arms. Some were snakes. At first his shirt was green, then it turned to my daddy’s baseball shirt with the golden dragon on it, then it turned into white, like what Mrs. Gerson wears when she does my mom’s hair.”

Ralph glanced at Marcy, who said, “I think she means a smock top.”

“Yes,” Grace said. “That. But then it turned back into the green shirt, so I know it was a dream. Only…” Her mouth trembled, and her eyes filled with tears that spilled down her flushed cheeks. “Only he said mean things. He said he was glad I was sad. He called me a baby.”

She turned her face against her mother’s breasts and wept. Marcy looked at Ralph over the top of her head, for a moment not angry at him but only frightened for her daughter. She knows it was more than a dream, Ralph thought. She sees it means something to me.

When the girl’s crying eased, Ralph said, “This is all good, Grace. Thank you for telling me about your dream. All that’s over now, okay?”

“Yes,” she said in a tear-hoarsened voice. “He’s gone. I did what he said, and he’s gone.”

“We’ll have our cake in here,” Marcy said. “Go help your sister with the plates.”

Grace ran to do it. When they were alone, Marcy said, “It’s been hard on both of them, especially Grace. I’d say that’s all this is, except Howie doesn’t think so, and I don’t think you do, either. Do you?”

“Mrs. Maitland… Marcy… I don’t know what to think. Have you checked Grace’s room?”

“Of course. As soon as she told me why she called Howie.”

“No sign of an intruder?”

“No. The window was shut, the screen was in place, and what Sarah said about the stairs is true. This is an old house, and there’s a creak in every step.”

“What about her bed? Grace said the man was sitting there.”

Marcy gave a distracted laugh. “Who would know, the way she tosses and turns since…” She put a hand to her face. “This is just so awful.”

He got up and went to the couch, only meaning to comfort, but she stiffened and drew away. “Please don’t sit down. And don’t touch me. You’re here on sufferance, Detective. So just maybe my youngest will sleep tonight without screaming the house down.”

Ralph was saved a reply when Howie and the Maitland girls came back in, Grace carefully carrying a plate in each hand. Marcy wiped her eyes, the gesture almost too fast to see, and gave Howie and her daughters a brilliant smile. “Hooray for cake!” she said.

Ralph took his slice and said thank you. He was thinking that he had told Jeannie everything about this fucked-up nightmare of a case, but he wasn’t going to tell her about this little girl’s dream. No, not this.

8

Alec Pelley thought he had the number he wanted in his contacts, but when he made the call, he got an announcement saying the number had been disconnected. He found his old black address book (once a faithful companion that had gone with him everywhere, in this computer age relegated to a desk drawer, and one of the lower ones, at that) and tried a different number.

“Finders Keepers,” said the voice on the other end. Believing that he’d reached an answering machine—a reasonable assumption, considering it was Sunday night—Alec waited for the announcement of office hours, followed by a menu of choices that could be accessed by punching various extensions, and at last the invitation to leave a message after the beep. Instead, sounding a bit querulous, the voice said, “Well? Is anyone there?”

Alec realized that was a voice he knew, although he couldn’t place the name. How long had it been since he’d spoken to the owner of that voice? Two years? Three?

“I’m hanging up n—”

“Don’t. I’m here. My name is Alec Pelley, and I was trying to reach Bill Hodges. I worked with him on a case a few years back, just after I retired from the State Police. There was a bad actor named Oliver Madden who stole an airplane from a Texas oilman named—”

“Dwight Cramm. I remember. And I remember you, Mr. Pelley, although we’ve never met. Mr. Cramm did not pay us promptly, I’m sorry to say. I had to invoice him at least half a dozen times, and then threaten legal action. I hope you did better.”

“It took a little work,” Alec said, smiling at the memory. “The first check he sent me bounced, but the second one went through all right. You’re Holly, aren’t you? I can’t remember the last name, but Bill spoke very highly of you.”

“Holly Gibney,” she said.

“Well, it’s very nice to speak with you again, Ms. Gibney. I tried Bill’s number, but I guess he’s changed it.”

Silence.

“Ms. Gibney? Did I lose you?”

“No,” she said. “I’m here. Bill died two years ago.”

“Oh, Jesus. I’m very sorry to hear that. Was it his heart?” Although Alec had only met Hodges once—they had done most of their business by phone and email—he had been on the heavy side.

“Cancer. Pancreatic. Now I run the company with Peter Huntley. He was Bill’s partner when they were on the force.”

“Well, good for you.”

“No,” she said. “Not good for me. The business is doing quite well, but I would give it up in a minute to have Bill alive and healthy. Cancer is very poopy.”

Alec almost thanked her then and ended the call after renewing his condolences. Later on, he wondered how much things would have changed if he had done that. But he remembered something Bill had said about this woman during the business of retrieving Dwight Cramm’s King Air: She’s eccentric, a little obsessive-compulsive, and she’s not big on personal contact, but she never misses a trick. Holly would have made one hell of a police detective.

“I was hoping to hire Bill to do some investigating for me,” he said, “but possibly you could take it on. He really did speak highly of you.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Mr. Pelley, but I doubt if I’m the right person. Mostly what we do at Finders Keepers is chase bail-jumpers and trace missing persons.” She paused, then added, “There is also the fact that we are quite a distance from you, unless you’re calling from somewhere in the northeast.”

“I’m not, but my interest happens to be in Ohio, and it would be inconvenient for me to fly up myself—there are things going on here that I need to stick with. How far are you from Dayton?”

“One moment,” she said, and then, almost immediately: “Two hundred and thirty-two miles, according to MapQuest. Which is a very good program. What is it you need investigated, Mr. Pelley? And before you answer, I need to tell you that if it involves any possibility of violence, I really would have to pass on the case. I abhor violence.”

“No violence,” he said. “There was violence—the murder of a child—but it happened down here, and the man who was arrested for the crime is dead. The question is whether or not he was the doer, and answering that involves back-checking a trip he made to Dayton with his family in April.”

“I see, and who would be paying for the company’s services? You?”

“No, an attorney named Howard Gold.”

“To your knowledge, does Attorney Gold pay more promptly than Dwight Cramm?”

Alec grinned at that. “Absolutely.”

And although the retainer would come from Howie, the entire Finders Keepers fee—assuming Ms. Holly Gibney agreed to take on the Dayton investigation—would in the end come from Marcy Maitland, who would be able to afford it. The insurance company wouldn’t like paying out on an accused murderer, but since Terry had never been convicted of anything, they would have no recourse. There was also the wrongful death suit against Flint City that Howie would be lodging on Marcy’s behalf; he had told Alec that the city would probably settle for an amount in the low seven figures. A fat bank account wouldn’t bring her husband back, but it could pay for an investigation, and a home relocation if Marcy decided that was best, and the college educations of two girls when the time came. Money was no cure for sorrow, Alec reflected, but it did allow one to grieve in relative comfort.

“Tell me about this case, Mr. Pelley, and I’ll tell you if I can take it on.”

“Doing that will take some time. I can call tomorrow, during office hours, if that would be better for you.”

“Tonight is fine. Just give me a moment to turn off the movie I was watching.”

“I’m interrupting your evening.”

“Not really. I’ve seen Paths of Glory at least a dozen times. It’s one of Mr. Kubrick’s finest. Much better than The Shining and Barry Lyndon, in my opinion, but of course he was much younger when he made it. Young artists are much more likely to be risk-takers, in my opinion.”

“I’m not much of a movie buff,” Alec replied, remembering what Hodges had said: eccentric and a little obsessive-compulsive.

“They brighten the world, that’s what I think. Just one second…” In the background, the sound of faint movie music ceased. Then she was back. “Tell me what you need done in Dayton, Mr. Pelley.”

“It’s not just a very long story, it’s a strange one. Let me warn you of that in advance.”

She laughed, a sound much richer than her usual careful speech. It made her sound younger. “Yours won’t be the first strange story I’ve heard, believe me. When I was with Bill… well, never mind that. But if we’re going to be talking for awhile, you might as well call me Holly. I’m going to put you on speaker to free up my hands. Wait… okay, now tell me everything.”

Thus encouraged, Alec began to talk. Instead of movie music in the background, he heard the steady clitter-clitter-clitter of her keyboard as she took notes. And before the conversation was finished, he was glad he hadn’t hung up. She asked good questions, sharp questions. The oddities of the case didn’t seem to faze her in the slightest. It was a goddam shame that Bill Hodges was dead, but Alec thought he might have found a perfectly adequate replacement.

When he was finally done, he asked, “Are you intrigued?”

“Yes. Mr. Pelley—”

“Alec. You’re Holly and I’m Alec.”

“All right, Alec. Finders Keepers will take this case. I will send you regular reports either by phone, email, or FaceTime, which I find is far superior to Skype. When I have gotten everything I can, I will send you a complete summary.”

“Thank you. That sounds very—”

“Yes. Now let me give you an account number, so you can transfer the retainer fee to our bank in the amount we discussed.”