The Outsider

1

What sleep Ralph got was thin and broken by bad dreams. In one of them, he held the dying Terry Maitland in his arms, and Terry said, “You robbed my children.”

Ralph woke at four thirty and knew there would be no more sleep. He felt as if he had entered some heretofore unsuspected plane of existence, and told himself everyone felt that way in the small hours. That was good enough to get him into the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth.

Jeannie was sleeping as she always did, with the coverlet pulled up so high that she was nothing but a hump with a fluff of hair showing over the top. There was gray in that hair now, as there was in his. Not much, but more would be coming right along. That was all right. Time’s passage was a mystery, but it was a normal mystery.

The breeze from the air conditioner had spilled some of the pages Jeannie had printed onto the floor. He put them back on the night table, picked up his jeans, decided they would do for another day (especially in dusty south Texas), and went to the window with them in his hand. The first gray light was creeping into the day. It would be a hot one here, and hotter still where they were going.

He observed—without much surprise, although he couldn’t have said why—that Holly Gibney was down there, dressed in her own pair of jeans and sitting in the lawn chair where Ralph himself had been sitting little more than a week ago, when Bill Samuels had come calling. The evening Bill had told him the story of the disappearing footprints and Ralph had matched him with the one about the infested cantaloupe.

He pulled on his pants and an Oklahoma Thunder tee-shirt, checked Jeannie again, and left the room with the old scuffed moccasins he wore as bedroom slippers dangling from two fingers of his left hand.

2

He stepped out the back door five minutes later. Holly turned at the sound of his approach, her small face cautious and alert but not (or so he hoped) unfriendly. Then she saw the mugs on the old Coca-Cola tray and her face lit up with that radiant smile. “Is that what I hope it is?”

“It is if you were hoping for coffee. I take mine straight, but I brought the other stuff in case you want it. My wife takes it white and sweet. Like me, she says.” He smiled.

“Black is fine. Thank you so much.”

He put the tray on the picnic table. She sat across from him, took one of the mugs, sipped. “Oh, this is good. Nice and strong. There’s nothing better than strong black coffee in the morning. That’s what I think, anyway.”

“How long have you been up?”

“I don’t sleep much,” she said, neatly dodging the question. “It’s very pleasant here. The air is so fresh.”

“Not so fresh when the wind comes from the west, believe me. Then you smell the refineries in Cap City. Gives me a headache.”

He paused, looking at her. Holly looked away, holding her cup to her face, as if to shield it. Ralph thought back to last night, and how she had seemed to steel herself for every handshake. He had an idea that this woman found many of the world’s ordinary gestures and interactions quite difficult. And yet she had done some amazing things.

“I read up on you last night. Alec Pelley was right. You have quite a resume.”

She made no reply.

“In addition to stopping that guy Hartsfield from bombing a bunch of kids, you and your partner, Mr. Hodges—”

“Detective Hodges,” she corrected. “Retired.”

Ralph nodded. “In addition to that, you and Detective Hodges saved a girl who was kidnapped by a crazy guy named Morris Bellamy. Bellamy was killed during the rescue. You were also involved in a shootout with a doctor who went off the rails and killed his wife, and last year you nailed a bunch of guys who were stealing rare-breed dogs, either ransoming them back to their owners or selling them on if the owners wouldn’t pay. When you said part of your business was finding lost pets, you weren’t kidding.”

She was blushing again, all the way up from the base of her neck to her forehead. It was pretty clear that this enumeration of her past exploits made her more than uncomfortable; she found it actively painful.

“It was mostly Bill Hodges who did those things.”

“Not the dognappers. He passed on a year before that case.”

“Yes, but by then I had Pete Huntley. Ex-Detective Huntley.” She looked directly at him. Made herself do it. Her eyes were clear and blue. “Pete’s good, I couldn’t keep the business going without him, but Bill was better. Whatever I am, Bill made me. I owe him everything. I owe him my life. I wish he were here now.”

“Instead of me, you mean?”

Holly didn’t reply. Which was a reply, of course.

“Would he have believed in this El Cuco shape-shifter?”

“Oh yes.” She said it without hesitation. “Because he… and I… and our friend Jerome Robinson, who was with us… have the benefit of certain experiences that you don’t have. Although you may, depending on how the next few days go. You may before the sun goes down tonight.”

“Can I join you?”

It was Jeannie, with her own cup of coffee.

Ralph gestured for her to sit down.

“If we woke you, I’m very sorry,” Holly said. “You were so kind to let me stay.”

“Ralph woke me, tiptoeing out like an elephant,” Jeannie said. “I might have gone back to sleep, but then I smelled coffee. Can’t resist that. Oh good, you brought out the half and half.”

Holly said, “It wasn’t the doctor.”

Ralph raised his eyebrows. “Beg pardon?”

“His name was Babineau, and he went off the rails, all right, but he was forced off them, and he didn’t kill Mrs. Babineau. Brady Hartsfield did that.”

“According to what I read in the news stories my wife found online, Hartsfield died in the hospital before you and Hodges tracked Babineau down.”

“I know what the news stories said, but they’re wrong. May I tell you the real story? I don’t like to tell it, I don’t even like to remember those things, but you might need to hear it. Because we’re going into danger, and if you keep believing that it’s a man we’re going after—twisted, perverse, murderous, but still just a man—you’re going to be putting yourself into greater danger.”

“The danger is here,” Jeannie protested. “This outsider, the one who looks like Claude Bolton… I saw him here. I said that last night, at the meeting!”

Holly nodded. “I think the outsider was here, I might even be able to prove it to you, but I don’t think he was completely here. And I don’t think he’s here now. He’s there, in Texas, because Bolton is there, and the outsider will be close to him. He’ll have to be close, because he’s been…” She paused, chewing her lip. “I think he’s been exhausting himself. He’s not used to people coming after him. Of knowing what he is.”

“I don’t understand,” Jeannie said.

“May I tell you the story of Brady Hartsfield? That might help.” She looked at Ralph, again making an effort to meet his eyes. “It may not make you believe, but it will make you understand why I can.”

“Go ahead,” Ralph said.

Holly began to speak. By the time she finished, the sun was rising red in the east.

3

“Wow,” Ralph said. It was all he could think of.

“This is true?” Jeannie asked. “Brady Hartsfield… what? Somehow jumped his consciousness into this doctor of his?”

“Yes. It might have been the experimental drugs Babineau was feeding him, but I never thought that was the only reason he was able to do it. There was something in Hartsfield already, and the knock on the head I gave him brought it out. That’s what I believe.” She turned to Ralph. “You don’t believe it, though, do you? I could probably get Jerome on the phone, and he’d tell you the same thing… but you wouldn’t believe him, either.”

“I don’t know what to believe,” he said. “This rash of suicides brought on by subliminal messages in video games… the newspapers reported it?”

“Newspapers, TV, the Internet. It’s all there.”

Holly paused, looking down at her hands. The nails were unpolished, but quite neat; she had quit chewing them, just as she had quit smoking. Broken herself of the habit. She sometimes thought that her pilgrimage to something at least approximating mental stability (if not genuine mental health) had been marked by the ritual casting off of bad habits. It had been hard to let them go. They were friends.

She spoke without looking at either of them now, looking off into the distance instead. “Bill was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the same time the business with Babineau and Hartsfield happened. He was in the hospital for awhile afterwards, but then he came home. By that time all of us knew how it was going to end… including him, although he never said so, and he fought that fracking cancer right to the finish. I used to go over almost every night, partly to make sure he was eating something, partly just to sit with him. To keep him company, but also to… I don’t know…”

“Fill yourself up with him?” Jeannie said. “While you still had him?”

The smile again, the radiant one that made her look young. “Yes, that’s it. Exactly. One night—this wasn’t long before he went back into the hospital—the power went out in his part of town. A tree fell on a line, or something. When I got to Bill’s house, he was sitting on the front step and looking up at the stars. ‘You never see them like this when the streetlights are on,’ he said. ‘Look at how many there are, and how bright!’

“It seemed like you could see the whole Milky Way that night. We sat there for a little while—five minutes, I guess—not talking, just looking. Then he said, ‘Scientists are starting to believe that there’s no end to the universe. I read that in the New York Times last week. And when you can see all the stars there are to see, and know there’s even more beyond them, that’s easy to believe.’ We never talked much about Brady Hartsfield and what he did to Babineau after Bill got really sick, but I think he was talking about it then.”

“More things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy,” Jeannie said.

Holly smiled. “I guess Shakespeare said it best. He said pretty much everything best, I think.”

“Maybe it wasn’t Hartsfield and Babineau he was talking about,” Ralph said. “Maybe he was trying to come to terms with his own… situation.”

“Of course he was,” Holly said. “That, and all the mysteries. Which is what we need to—”

Her cell phone tweeted. She took it from her back pocket, glanced at the screen, and read the text.

“That was from Alec Pelley,” she said. “The plane Mr. Gold chartered will be ready to take off at nine thirty. Are you still planning on making the trip, Mr. Anderson?”

“Absolutely. And since we’re in this together—whatever it is—you better start calling me Ralph.” He finished his coffee in two swallows and stood up. “I want to arrange for a couple of unis to keep an eye on the house while I’m gone, Jeannie. Any problem with that?”

She batted her eyelashes. “Just make sure they’re good-looking.”

“I’ll try for Troy Ramage and Tom Yates. Neither of them looks like a movie star, but they’re the two who actually arrested Terry Maitland at the ballfield. It feels right for them to have at least some role in this.”

Holly said, “There’s something I need to check, and I’d like to do it now, before it’s full daylight. Can we go back to the house?”

4

At Holly’s request, Ralph pulled the shades in the kitchen and Jeannie closed the drapes in the living room. Holly herself sat at the kitchen table with the markers and the roll of Scotch Magic Tape she’d bought in the office supplies department at Walmart. She tore off two short lengths of tape and placed them over her iPhone’s embedded flash. These she colored blue. She tore off a third length, put it over the blue strips, and colored it purple.

She stood up and pointed to the chair nearest the archway. “That’s the one he was sitting in?”

“Yes.”

Holly took two flash pictures of the seat, moved to the archway, and pointed again. “And this is where he sat.”

“Yes. Right there. But there were no marks on the carpet in the morning. Ralph looked.”

Holly dropped to one knee, took four more pictures of the carpet, then stood up. “Okay. That should be good.”

“Ralph?” Jeannie asked. “Do you know what she’s doing?”

“She’s turned her phone into a makeshift black light.” Something I could have done myself, if I had actually believed my wife—I’ve known about this particular trick for at least five years. “You’re looking for stains, aren’t you? Residue, like the stuff in the barn.”

“Yes, but if there is any, there’s much less of it, or you would have seen it with your naked eye. You can buy a kit online to do this kind of testing—it’s called CheckMate—but this should work. Bill taught me. Let’s see what we’ve got. If anything.”

They gathered around her, one on either side, and for once Holly didn’t mind the physical closeness. She was too absorbed, and too hopeful. I have Holly hope, she told herself.

The stains were there. A faint yellowish spatter on the seat of the chair, where Jeannie’s intruder had sat, and several more—like small drips of paint—on the carpet at the edge of the archway.

“Holy shit,” Ralph murmured.

“Look at this one,” Holly said. She spread her fingers to enlarge a splotch on the carpet. “See how it makes a right angle? That’s from one of the chair legs.”

She went back to the chair and took another flash photo of it, only this time down low. Once more they gathered around the iPhone. Holly spread her fingers again, and one of the chair legs leaped forward. “That’s where it dribbled down. You can raise the shades and open the drapes, if you want.”

When the kitchen was once more filled with morning light, Ralph took Holly’s phone and went through the pictures again, swiping from one to the next, then going back. He felt the wall of his disbelief beginning to crumble, and in the end all it had taken was a bunch of photos on a small iPhone screen.

“What does it mean?” Jeannie asked. “I mean, in practical terms? Was he here, or wasn’t he?”

“I told you, I haven’t had the chance to do anything like the amount of research I’d need to give an answer I felt sure of. But if I was forced to guess, I’d say… both.”

Jeannie shook her head, as if to clear it. “I don’t understand.”

Ralph was thinking about the locked doors and the burglar alarm that hadn’t gone off. “Are you saying this guy was a…” Ghost was the word that first came to mind, but it wasn’t the right one.

“I’m not saying anything,” Holly said, and Ralph thought, No, you’re not. Because you want me to say it.

“That he was a projection? Or an avatar, like in the video games our son plays?”

“Interesting idea,” Holly said. Her eyes were sparkling. Ralph had an idea (sort of an infuriating one) that she might be holding back a smile.

“There’s residue, but the chair didn’t leave marks in the carpet,” Jeannie said. “If he was here in any physical sense, he was… light. Maybe no heavier than a feather pillow. And you say doing this… this projection… exhausts him?”

“It seems logical—to me, at least,” Holly said. “The one thing we can be sure of is that something was here when you came downstairs yesterday morning. Would you agree with that, Detective Anderson?”

“Yes. And if you don’t start calling me Ralph, Holly, I’ll have to arrest you.”

“How did I get back upstairs?” Jeannie asked. “Did he… please tell me he didn’t carry me after I passed out.”

“I doubt it,” Holly said.

Ralph said, “Maybe some sort of… just guessing here… hypnotic suggestion?”

“I don’t know. There’s a great deal we may never know. I’d like a quick shower, if that’s all right?”

“Of course,” Jeannie said. “I’ll scramble us some eggs.” Then, as Holly started out: “Oh my God.”

Holly turned back.

“The stove light. It was on. The one over the burners. There’s a button.” When looking at the pictures, Jeannie had seemed excited. Now she only looked scared. “You need to push it to turn the light on. There was enough of him here to do that, at least.”

Holly said nothing to this. Neither did Ralph.

5

After breakfast, Holly returned to the guest room, supposedly to pack her things. Ralph suspected she was actually giving him time and privacy to say goodbye to his wife. She had her odd quirks, did Holly Gibney, but stupid she was not.

“Ramage and Yates will be keeping a close eye out,” he told Jeannie. “They both took personal days.”

“They did that for you?”

“And I think for Terry. They feel almost as badly as I do about how that went down.”

“Have you got your gun?”

“In my carry-on for now. Once we land, I’ll have it holstered on my belt. And Alec will have his. I want you to get yours out of the gun safe. Keep it close.”

“Do you really think—”

“I don’t know what to think, I’m with Holly on that. Just keep it close. And don’t shoot the mailman.”

“Listen, maybe I should come.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

He didn’t want them in the same place today, but didn’t want to say why and worry her even more. They had a son to think about, one who was currently playing baseball or shooting arrows at targets backed with bales of hay or making beaded belts. Derek, who wasn’t much older than Frank Peterson had been. Derek, who simply assumed, as most kids did, that his parents were immortal.

“You could be right,” she said. “Somebody ought to be here if D calls, don’t you think?”

He nodded and kissed her. “That’s just what I was thinking.”

“Be careful.” She was looking up at him, eyes wide, and he had a sudden piercing memory of those eyes looking up at him in that same loving, hopeful, anxious way. That had been at their wedding, as they stood before their friends and relatives, swapping vows.

“I will. I always am.”

He started to pull away from her. She pulled him back. Her grip on his forearms was strong.

“Yes, but this isn’t like any other case you’ve ever worked. We both know that now. If you can get him, get him. If you can’t… if you run into something you can’t handle… back off. Back off and come home to me, do you understand?”

“I hear you.”

“Don’t say you hear me, say you will.”

“I will.” Again he thought of the day they’d made their vows.

“I hope you mean that.” Still with that piercing gaze, so full of love and anxiety. The one that said I’ve cast my lot with you, please don’t ever let me regret it. “I need to tell you something, and it’s important. Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a good man, Ralph. A good man who made a bad mistake. You’re not the first to do that, and you won’t be the last. You have to live with it, and I’ll help you. Make it better if you can, but please don’t make it worse. Please.”

Holly was coming rather ostentatiously downstairs, making sure they heard her approach. Ralph stood where he was a moment longer, looking down into his wife’s wide eyes—as beautiful now as they had been those years ago. Then he kissed her and stood back. She gave his hands a squeeze, a good hard one, and let him go.

6

Ralph and Holly drove to the airport in Ralph’s car. Holly sat with her shoulder-bag in her lap, back straight, knees primly together. “Does your wife have a firearm?” she asked.

“Yes. And she’s been to the department qualifying range. Wives and daughters are allowed to do that here. What about you, Holly?”

“Of course not. I flew down here, and it wasn’t on a charter.”

“I’m sure we could get you something. We’re going to Texas, after all, not New York.”

She shook her head. “I haven’t fired a gun since Bill was alive. That was on the last case we worked together. And I didn’t hit what I was aiming at.”

He didn’t speak again until they had merged with the heavy flow of turnpike traffic headed for the airport and Cap City. Once that dangerous feat was accomplished, he said, “Those samples from the barn are at the State Police forensics lab. What do you think they’re going to find when they finally get around to running them through all their fancy equipment? Any ideas?”

“Based on what showed up on the chair and the carpet, I’d guess it will be mostly water, but with a high pH. I’d guess there would be traces of a mucus-like fluid of the type produced by the bulbourethral glands, also known as Cowper’s glands, named after the anatomist William Cowper who—”

“So you do think it’s semen.”

“More like pre-ejaculate.” A faint tinge of color had come into her cheeks.

“You know your stuff.”

“I took a course in forensic pathology after Bill died. I took several courses, in fact. Taking courses… it passed the time.”

“There was semen on the backs of Frank Peterson’s thighs. Quite a lot of it, but not an abnormal amount. The DNA matched Terry Maitland’s.”

“The residue from the barn and the residue in your house isn’t semen, and not pre-ejaculate, no matter how similar. When the lab tests the stuff from Canning Township, I think they will find unknown components and dismiss them as contamination. They’ll just be glad they don’t have to use the samples in court. They won’t consider the idea that they’re dealing with a completely unknown substance: the stuff he exudes—or sluffs off—when he changes. As for the semen found on the Peterson boy… I’m sure the outsider left semen when he killed the Howard girls, too. Either on their clothes or on their bodies. Just another calling card, like the lock of hair in Mr. Maitland’s bathroom and all the fingerprints you found.”

“Don’t forget the eye-wits.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “This creature likes witnesses. Why wouldn’t he, if he can wear another man’s face?”

Ralph followed the signs to the charter company Howard Gold used. “So you don’t think these were actually sex crimes? They were just arranged to look that way?”

“I wouldn’t make that assumption, but…” She turned to him. “Sperm on the back of the boy’s legs, but none… you know… in him?”

“No. He was penetrated—raped—with a branch.”

“Oough.” Holly grimaced. “I doubt if the postmortem on the girls revealed any semen inside them, either. I think there might be a sexual element to his killings, but he might be incapable of actual intercourse.”

“That’s the case with a good many normal serial killers.” He laughed at this—as much of an oxymoron as jumbo shrimp—but didn’t take it back, because the only substitute he could think of was human serial killers.

“If he eats sadness, he also must eat the pain of his victims as they’re dying.” The flush in her cheeks was gone, leaving her pale. “It’s probably extremely rich, like gourmet food or some fine old Scotch. And yes, that could excite him sexually. I don’t like to think of these things, but I believe in knowing your enemy. We… I think you should turn left there, Detective Anderson.” She pointed.

“Ralph.”

“Yes. Turn left, Ralph. That’s the road that goes to Regal Air.”

7

Howie and Alec were already there, and Howie was smiling. “Takeoff’s been pushed back a bit,” he said. “Sablo’s on his way.”

“How did he manage that?” Ralph asked.

“He didn’t. I did. Well, I managed half of it. Judge Martinez is in the hospital with a perforated ulcer, and that was God’s doing. Or maybe just too much hot sauce. I’m a fan of Texas Pete myself, but the way that guy poured it on used to give me the shivers. As for the other case Lieutenant Sablo was supposed to testify in, the ADA owed me a favor.”

“Should I ask why?” Ralph asked.

“No,” Howie said, now smiling widely enough to show his back teeth.

With time to kill, the four of them sat in the small waiting room—nothing so grand as a departure lounge—and watched the planes take off and land. Howie said, “When I got home last night, I went on the Internet and read up on doppelgangers. Because that’s what this outsider is, wouldn’t you say?”

Holly shrugged. “It’s as good a word as any.”

“The most famous fictional one is in a story by Edgar Allan Poe. ‘William Wilson,’ it’s called.”

“Jeannie knew about that one,” Ralph said. “We talked about it.”

“But there have been plenty in real life. Hundreds, it seems like. Including one on the Lusitania. There was a passenger named Rachel Withers, in first class, and several people saw another woman who looked just like her, right down to the streak of white in her hair, during the voyage. Some said the double was traveling in steerage. Some said she was part of the staff. Miss Withers and a gentleman friend went looking for her, and supposedly spotted her only seconds before a torpedo from a German U-boat hit on the starboard side. Miss Withers died, but her gentleman friend survived. He called her doppelganger ‘a harbinger of doom.’ The French writer, Guy de Maupassant, met his doppelganger one day while walking on a street in Paris—same height, same hair, same eyes, same mustache, same accent.”

“Well, the French,” Alec said, shrugging. “What do you expect? De Maupassant probably bought him a glass of wine.”

“The most famous case happened in 1845, at a girls’ school in Latvia. The teacher was writing on the blackboard when her exact double walked into the room, stood beside the teacher, and mimicked her every move, only without the chalk. Then she walked out. Nineteen students saw it happen. Isn’t that amazing?”

No one replied. Ralph was thinking of an infested cantaloupe, and disappearing footprints, and something Holly’s dead friend had said: No end to the universe. He supposed it was a concept some people might find uplifting, even beautiful. Ralph, a just-the-facts man for his entire working life, found it terrifying.

“Well, I think it’s amazing,” Howie said, a bit sulkily.

Alec said, “Tell me something, Holly. If this guy absorbs his victims’ thoughts and memories when he takes their faces—through some sort of mystic blood transfusion, I guess—how come he didn’t know where to find the nearest walk-in clinic? And then there’s Willow Rainwater, the cab driver. Maitland knew her from the kids’ basketball program at the Y, but the man she drove to Dubrow acted like he’d never met her. Didn’t call her Willow, or Ms. Rainwater. Called her ma’am.”

“I don’t know,” Holly said, rather crossly. “All I do know I picked up on the fly, and I mean that literally, because I was on airplanes when I did my reading. The only thing I can do is make guesses, and I’m tired of that.”

“Maybe it’s like speed-reading,” Ralph said. “Speed readers are very proud of being able to go through long books cover to cover in a single sitting, but what they mostly pick up is the general gist. If you question them on the details, they usually come up blank.” He paused. “At least that’s what my wife says. She’s in a book club, and there’s this one lady who’s a little boasty about her reading skills. Drives Jeannie crazy.”

They watched as the ground crew fueled the King Air and the two pilots did their pre-flight walk-around. Holly dragged out her iPad and began to read (Ralph thought she was moving along pretty speedily herself). At quarter to ten, a Subaru Forester pulled into the tiny Regal parking lot and Yune Sablo got out, shrugging a camo knapsack over one shoulder as he talked on his cell phone. He ended his call as he came in.

“Amigos! Cómo están?”

“Fine,” Ralph said, standing. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

“That was Claude Bolton I was talking to. He’s going to meet us at the Plainville airport. It’s about sixty miles from Marysville, where he lives.”

Alec raised his eyebrows. “Why would he do that?”

“He’s worried. Says he didn’t sleep much last night, was up and down half a dozen times, felt like someone was watching the house. He said it reminded him of days in prison when everyone knew something was going to go down, but no one knew exactly what, only that it was going to be bad. Said his mother started to get the willies, too. He asked me exactly what was going on, and I told him we’d fill him in when we got there.”

Ralph turned to Holly. “If this outsider exists, and if he was close to Bolton, could Bolton feel his presence?”

Instead of protesting again about being asked to guess, she answered in a voice that was soft but very firm. “I’m sure of it.”