The Outsider

1

The battery-powered bubble-light Alec Pelley kept in the center console of his Explorer was in sort of a gray area. It might no longer be strictly legal, since he was retired from the State Police, but on the other hand, since he was a member in good standing of the Cap City Police Reserve, maybe it was. Either way, it seemed necessary to plonk it on the dashboard and light it up on this occasion. With its help, he made the run from Cap to Flint in record time and was knocking on the door of 17 Barnum Court at quarter past nine. There were no news people here, but further up the street he could see the harsh glare of TV lights in front of what he assumed was the Maitland house. Not all the blowflies had been drawn to the fresh meat of Howie’s impromptu press conference, it seemed. Not that he had expected it.

The door was opened by a short sandy-haired fireplug of a man, his brow creased, his lips pressed so tightly together that his mouth was almost nonexistent. All ready to let fly with his go-to-hell speech. The woman standing behind him was a green-eyed blonde, three inches taller than her husband and much better looking, even with no makeup and her eyes swollen. She wasn’t currently crying, but somewhere deeper in the house, someone was. A child. One of Maitland’s, Alec assumed.

“Mr. and Mrs. Mattingly? I’m Alec Pelley. Did Howie Gold call you?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “Come in, Mr. Pelley.”

Alec started forward. Mattingly, eight inches shorter but undaunted, stepped in his way. “Could we see some identification first, please?”

“Of course.” Alec could have shown them his driver’s license, but opted for his Police Reserve ID instead. No need for them to know that most of his duty shifts these days were a kind of charity function, usually as a glorified security guard at rock shows, rodeos, pro wrestling fuckarees, and the thrice-yearly Monster Truck Jam at the Coliseum. He also worked the Cap City business area with a chalk-stick when one of the meter maids called in sick. This was a humbling experience for a man who had once commanded a squad of four State Police detectives, but Alec didn’t mind; he liked being outside in the sunshine. Also, he was something of a Bible scholar, and James 4, verse 6, proclaims, “God opposeth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble.”

“Thank you,” Mr. Mattingly said, simultaneously stepping aside and holding out his hand. “Tom Mattingly.”

Alec shook with him, prepared for a strong grip. He was not disappointed.

“I’m not normally suspicious, this is a nice quiet neighborhood, but I told Jamie that we had to be super careful while we’ve got Sarah and Grace under our roof. Lot of people angry at Coach T already, and believe me, this is just the beginning. Once what he did gets around, it’s gonna be a whole lot worse. Glad you’re here to take them off our hands.”

Jamie Mattingly gave him a reproachful look. “Whatever their father may have done—if he did anything—it’s not their fault.” And, to Alec: “They’re devastated, especially Gracie. They saw their father led away in handcuffs.”

“Ah, Jesus, wait until they find out why,” Mattingly said. “And they will. These days kids always do. Goddam Internet, goddam Facebook, goddam Tweeter birds.” He shook his head. “Jamie’s right, innocent until proven guilty, it’s the American way, but when they make a public arrest like that…” He sighed. “Want something to drink, Mr. Pelley? Jamie made iced tea before the game.”

“Thank you, but I better get the girls home. Their mother will be waiting.” And delivering her children was only his first job tonight. Howie had rattled off a to-do list with machine-gun rapidity just before stepping into the glare of the television lights, and item number two meant racing back to Cap City, making calls (and calling in favors) as he went. Back in harness, which was good—a lot better than chalking tires on Midland Street—but this part was going to be hard.

The girls were in a room that, judging from the stuffed fish leaping on the knotty pine walls, had to be Tom Mattingly’s man-cave. On the huge flatscreen, SpongeBob was capering in Bikini Bottom, but with the sound muted. The girls Alec had come to pick up were huddled on the sofa, still wearing their Golden Dragons tee-shirts and baseball caps. They were also wearing black and gold facepaint—probably applied by their mother a few hours ago, before the previously friendly world had reared up on its hind legs and bitten a hole in their family—but the younger had cried most of hers off.

The older girl saw a strange man looming in the door and hugged her weeping sister tighter. Although Alec had no kids himself, he liked them fine, and Sarah Maitland’s instinctive gesture hurt his heart: a child protecting a child.

He stood in the middle of the room, hands clasped before him. “Sarah? I’m a friend of Howie Gold’s. You know him, don’t you?”

“Yes. Is my father all right?” Her voice was little more than a whisper, and husky from her own tears. Grace never looked at Alec at all; she turned her face into the hollow of her big sister’s shoulder.

“Yes. He asked me to take you home.” Not strictly true, but this was hardly the time for splitting hairs.

“Is he there?”

“No, but your mother is.”

“We could walk,” Sarah said faintly. “It’s only up the street. I could hold Gracie’s hand.”

Against the older girl’s shoulder, Grace Maitland’s head went back and forth in a gesture of negation.

“Not after dark, hon,” Jamie Mattingly said.

And not tonight, Alec thought. Not for many nights to come. Days, either.

“Come on, girls,” Tom said with manufactured (and rather ghoulish) good cheer. “I’ll see you out.”

On the stoop, under the porch light, Jamie Mattingly looked paler than ever; she had gone from soccer mom to cancer patient in three short hours. “This is awful,” she said. “It’s like the whole world turned upside down. Thank God our own girl is away at camp. We were only at the game tonight because Sarah and Maureen are best buds.”

At the mention of her friend, Sarah Maitland also began to cry, and that got her sister cranked up again. Alec thanked the Mattinglys and led the girls to his Explorer. They walked slowly, heads down and holding hands like children in a fairy tale. He had cleared the front passenger seat of its usual load of crap, and they sat in it squeezed together. Grace once more had her face socked into the hollow of her sister’s shoulder.

Alec didn’t bother trying to buckle them in; it was no more than two tenths of a mile to the circle of light illuminating the sidewalk and the Maitland lawn. There was only a single crew left in front of the house. They were from the Cap City ABC affiliate, four or five guys standing around and drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups in the shadow of their truck’s satellite dish. When they saw the Explorer turn into the Maitland driveway, they scrambled into action.

Alec powered down his window and spoke to them in his best halt-and-put-your-hands-up voice. “Not one camera! Not one camera on these children!”

That stopped them for a few seconds, but only a few. Telling media blowflies not to film was like telling mosquitoes not to bite. Alec could remember when things had been different (back in the antique days when a gentleman still held the door for a lady), but that time was gone. The lone reporter who had elected to stay here on Barnum Court—a Hispanic guy that Alec recognized vaguely, the one who was partial to bowties and did the weather on weekends—was already grabbing his mic and checking the power pack on his belt.

The front door of the Maitland house opened. Sarah saw her mother there and started to get out. “Wait one, Sarah,” Alec said, and reached behind him. He had taken a couple of towels from the downstairs bathroom before leaving his house, and now he handed one to each girl.

“Put these over your faces, except for your eyes.” He smiled. “Like bandits in a movie, okay?”

Grace only stared at him, but Sarah got it, and draped one of the towels over her sister’s head. Alec swept it over Grace’s mouth and nose while Sarah fixed her own towel. They got out and hurried through the harsh light from the TV truck, holding the towels closed below their chins. They didn’t look like bandits; they looked like midget Bedouins in a sandstorm. They also looked like the saddest, most desperate kiddos Alec had ever seen.

Marcy Maitland had no towel to hide her face, and it was her that the cameraman focused on.

“Mrs. Maitland!” Bowtie shouted at her. “Do you have any comment on your husband’s arrest? Have you spoken to him?”

Stepping in front of the camera (and moving with it nimbly when the cameraman tried to get a clear angle), Alec pointed to Bowtie. “Not one step on the lawn, hermano, or you can ask Maitland your bullshit questions from the next cell.”

Bowtie gave him an insulted look. “Who you calling hermano? I have a job to do here.”

“Hassling a distraught woman and two little kids,” Alec said. “That’s some job.”

But his own job here was over. Mrs. Maitland had gathered her daughters to her and taken them inside. They were safe—as safe as they could be, anyway, although he had a feeling those two kids weren’t going to feel safe anywhere for a very long time.

Bowtie trotted down the sidewalk, motioning for the cameraman to follow as Alec returned to his car. “Who are you, sir? What’s your name?”

“Puddentane. Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same. Your story isn’t here, so leave these people alone, okay? They had nothing to do with this.”

Knowing he might as well have been speaking in Russian. Already the neighbors were back on their lawns, eager to view the next episode of Barnum Court’s continuing drama.

Alec backed down the driveway and headed west, also knowing that the cameraman would be videoing his license plate, and soon they would know who he was, and who he was working for. Not big news, but a cherry to put on top of the sundae they would serve the viewers who tuned in for the eleven o’clock news. He thought briefly of what was now going on in that house—the stunned and terrified mother trying to comfort two stunned and terrified girls still wearing their game-day facepaint.

“Did he do it?” he’d asked Howie when Howie called and gave him a quick shorthand version of the situation. It didn’t matter, the work was the work, but he always liked to know. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know what to think,” Howie had replied, “but I know what your next move is, as soon as you get Sarah and Gracie home.”

As he saw the first sign pointing him toward the turnpike, Alec called the Cap City Sheraton and asked for the concierge, with whom he had done business in the past.

Hell, he’d done business with most of them.

2

Ralph and Bill Samuels sat in Ralph’s office with their ties yanked down and their collars loosened. The TV lights outside had gone off ten minutes before. All four buttons on Ralph’s desk phone were lit up, but Sandy McGill was handling the incoming, and would until Gerry Malden arrived at eleven. For the time being, her job was simple, if repetitive: The Flint City Police Department has no comment at this time. The investigation is ongoing.

Meanwhile, Ralph had been working his own phone. Now he put it back in his coat pocket.

“Yune Sablo and his wife went upstate to see his in-laws. He says he put it off twice already, and this time he had no choice, unless he wanted to spend a week on the couch. Which, he says, is very uncomfortable. He’ll be back tomorrow, and of course he’ll be at the arraignment.”

“We’ll send someone else to the Sheraton, then,” Samuels said. “Too bad Jack Hoskins is on vacation.”

“No, it isn’t,” Ralph said, and that made Samuels laugh.

“Okay, you got me there. Our Jackie-boy might not be the worst detective in the state, but I admit he’s right up there. You know every detective on the Cap City force. Start calling until you get a live one.”

Ralph shook his head. “It should be Sablo. He knows the case, and he’s our liaison with the State Police. This is no time to risk pissing them off, considering the way things went tonight. Which was not quite as we expected.”

This was the understatement of the year, if not the century. Terry’s complete surprise and seeming lack of guilt had shaken Ralph even more than the impossible alibi. Was it possible that the monster inside him had not only killed the boy, but erased all memory of what he had done? And then… what? Filled in the blank with a detailed false history of a teachers’ conference in Cap City?

“If you don’t send someone ASAP, that guy Gold uses—”

“Alec Pelley.”

“Yeah, him. He’ll beat us to the hotel’s security footage. If they still have it, that is.”

“They will. They keep everything for thirty days.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“Yes. But Pelley doesn’t have a warrant.”

“Come on. Do you think he’ll need one?”

In truth, Ralph did not. Alec Pelley had been a detective with the SP for over twenty years. He would have made a great many contacts during that time, and working for a successful criminal lawyer like Howard Gold, he would be sure to keep them current.

“Your idea to arrest him in public is now looking like a bad call,” Samuels said.

Ralph gave him a hard look. “It was one you went along with.”

“Not very enthusiastically,” Samuels said. “Let’s have the truth, since everyone else has gone home and it’s just us girls. With you it was close to home.”

“Damn straight,” Ralph said. “It still is. And since it’s just us girls, let me remind you that you did a little more than just go along. You’ve got an election coming up in the fall, and a dramatic high-profile arrest wouldn’t exactly hurt your chances.”

“That never entered my mind,” Samuels said.

“Fine. It never entered your mind, you just went with the flow, but if you think arresting him at the ballpark was just about my son, you need to take another look at those crime scene pictures, and think about Felicity Ackerman’s autopsy addendum. Guys like this never stop at one.”

Color began to mount in Samuels’s cheeks. “You think I haven’t? Christ, Ralph, I was the one who called him a fucking cannibal, on the record.”

Ralph slid a palm up his cheek. It rasped. “Arguing over who said what and who did what is pointless. The thing to remember is it doesn’t matter who gets to the security footage first. If it’s Pelley, he can’t just put it under his arm and carry it away, can he? Nor can he erase it.”

“That’s true,” Samuels said. “And it’s not apt to be conclusive, in any case. We may see a man in some of the footage who looks like Maitland—”

“Right. But proving it’s him, based on a few glimpses, would be a different kettle of fish. Especially when stacked up against our eye-wits and the fingerprints.” Ralph stood and opened the door. “Maybe the footage isn’t the most important thing. I need to make a phone call. Should have made it already.”

Samuels followed him into the reception area. Sandy McGill was on the telephone. Ralph approached her and made a throat-cutting gesture. She hung up and looked at him expectantly.

“Everett Roundhill,” he said. “Chairman of the high school English department. Track him down and get him on the phone.”

“Tracking him down won’t be a problem, since I’ve already got his number,” Sandy said. “He’s called twice already, asking to speak to the lead investigator, and I basically told him to get in line.” She picked up a sheaf of WHILE YOU WERE OUT notes and waved them at him. “I was going to put these on your desk for tomorrow. I know it’s Sunday, but I’ve been telling people I’m pretty sure you’ll be in.”

Speaking very slowly, and looking at the floor instead of at the man beside him, Bill Samuels said, “Roundhill called. Twice. I don’t like that. I don’t like it at all.”

3

Ralph arrived home at quarter to eleven on that Saturday night. He hit the garage door opener, drove inside, then hit it again. The door rattled obediently back down on its tracks, at least one thing in the world that remained sane and normal. Push Button A and, assuming Battery Compartment B is loaded with relatively fresh Duracells, Garage Door C opens and closes.

He turned off the engine and just sat there in the dark, tapping the steering wheel with his wedding ring, remembering a rhyme from his raucous teenage years: Shave and a haircut… you bet! Sung by the whorehouse… quartet!

The door opened and Jeanette came out, wrapped in her housecoat. In the spill of light from the kitchen, he saw that she was wearing the bunny slippers he’d given her as a joke present on her last birthday. The real present had been a trip to Key West, just the two of them, and they’d had a great time, but now it was just a blurry remnant in his mind, the way all vacations were later on: things with no more substance than the aftertaste of candy floss. The joke slippers were the things that had lasted, pink slippers from the Dollar Store with their ridiculous little eyes and their comical floppy ears. Seeing her in them made his eyes sting. He felt as if he had aged twenty years since stepping into that clearing at Figgis Park and viewing the bloody ruin that had been a little boy who probably idolized Batman and Superman.

He got out and hugged his wife hard, pressing his beard-stubbly cheek to her smooth one, saying nothing at first, concentrating on holding back the tears that wanted to come.

“Honey,” she said. “Honey, you got him. You got him, so what’s wrong?”

“Maybe nothing,” he said. “Maybe everything. I should have brought him in for questioning. But Jesus Christ, I was so sure!”

“Come in,” she said. “I’ll make tea, and you can tell me about it.”

“Tea will keep me awake.”

She drew back and looked at him with eyes as lovely and dark at fifty as they had been at twenty-five. “Are you going to sleep, anyway?” And when he didn’t reply: “Case closed.”

Derek was away at camp in Michigan, so they had the house to themselves. She asked him if he wanted to watch the eleven o’clock news on the kitchen TV, and he shook his head. The last thing he wanted was ten minutes of coverage on how the Flint City Monster had been brought to bay. Jeannie made raisin toast to go with the tea. Ralph sat at the kitchen table, looking at his hands, and told her everything. He saved Everett Roundhill for last.

“He was furious with all of us,” Ralph said, “but since I was the one who finally called him back, I was the one who took the incoming fire.”

“Are you saying he confirmed Terry’s story?”

“Every word. Roundhill picked up Terry and the other two teachers—Quade and Grant—at the high school. Ten o’clock Tuesday morning, as arranged. They got to the Sheraton in Cap City around 11:45, just in time to pick up their conference IDs and be seated for the banquet lunch. Roundhill says he lost track of Terry for an hour or so after the lunch was over, but he thinks Quade was with him. In any case, they were all back together by three, which is when Mrs. Stanhope saw him putting Frank Peterson’s bike—and Frank himself—into a dirty white van seventy miles south.”

“Have you talked to Quade?”

“Yes. On the way home. He wasn’t angry—Roundhill’s so pissed he’s threatening to call for a full-scale investigation by the AG—but he was disbelieving. Stunned. Said that he and Terry went to a used bookstore called Second Edition after the banquet lunch, browsed, then came back for Coben.”

“And Grant? What about him?”

“He’s a she—Debbie Grant. Haven’t reached her yet, her husband said she went out with some other women, and when she does that she always turns off her phone. I’ll get her tomorrow morning, and when I do, I have no doubt that she’ll confirm what Roundhill and Quade told me.” He took a small bite of his toast, then put it back on the plate. “This is my fault. If I’d pulled Terry in for questioning Thursday night, after Stanhope and the Morris girl ID’d him, I’d have known we had a problem and this wouldn’t be all over TV and the Internet now.”

“But by then you’d matched the fingerprints to Terry Maitland’s, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“Fingerprints in the van, a fingerprint on the van’s ignition key, fingerprints in the car he abandoned by the river, on the branch he used to…”

“Yes.”

“And then more eyewitnesses. The man behind Shorty’s Pub, and his friend. Plus the cab driver. And the bouncer at the strip club. They all knew him.”

“Uh-huh, and now that he’s been arrested, I have no doubt we’ll get a few more eye-wits from Gentlemen, Please. Bachelors, mostly, who won’t have to explain to their wives what they were doing there. I still should have waited. Maybe I should have called the high school to check on his movements on the day of the murder, except it made no sense, being summer vacation and all. What could they have told me except ‘He’s not here’?”

“And you were afraid that if you started asking questions, it would get back to him.”

That had seemed obvious at the time, but now it only seemed stupid. Worse, careless. “I’ve made some mistakes in my career, but nothing like this. It’s as if I went blind.”

She shook her head vehemently. “Do you remember what I said when you told me that was how you meant to do it?”

“Yes.”

Go ahead. Get him away from those boys as fast as you can.

That was what she’d said.

They sat there, looking at each other across the table.

“This is impossible,” Jeannie said at last.

He pointed a finger at her. “I think you’ve reached the heart of the matter.”

She sipped her tea thoughtfully, then looked at him over the rim of her cup. “There’s an old saying that everyone has a double. I think Edgar Allan Poe even wrote a story about it. ‘William Wilson,’ it was called.”

“Poe wrote his stories before fingerprints and DNA. We don’t have the DNA yet—that’s pending—but if it comes back as his, it’s him and I’m probably okay. If it comes back as someone else’s, they’ll cart me off to the loonybin. After I lose my job and get sued for false arrest, that is.”

She lifted her own piece of toast, then lowered it again. “You have his fingerprints here. And you’ll have his DNA here, I’m sure of it. But Ralph… you don’t have any fingerprints or DNA from there. From whoever attended that conference in Cap City. What if Terry Maitland killed the boy and it was the double at that conference?”

“If you’re saying Terry Maitland has a lost identical twin with the same fingerprints and DNA, it’s not possible.”

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying that you don’t have any forensic proof that it was Terry in Cap City. If Terry was here, and the forensic evidence says he was, then the double must have been there. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Ralph understood the logic, and in the detective novels Jeannie liked to read—the Agatha Christies, the Rex Stouts, the Harlan Cobens—it would have been the centerpiece of the final chapter, when Miss Marple, Nero Wolfe, or Myron Bolitar revealed all. There was one rock-hard fact, as unassailable as gravity: a man could not be in two places at the same time.

But if Ralph had confidence in the eyewitnesses here, he had to have equal confidence in the eyewitnesses who said they had been in Cap City with Maitland. How could he doubt them? Roundhill, Quade, and Grant all taught in the same department. They saw Maitland every day. Was he, Ralph, supposed to believe those three teachers had colluded in the rape-murder of a child? Or that they had spent two days with a double so perfect they had never even suspected? And even if he could make himself believe it, could Bill Samuels ever convince a jury, especially when Terry had a seasoned and crafty defense lawyer like Howie Gold on his side?

“Let’s go up to bed,” Jeanette said. “I’ll give you one of my Ambiens and rub your back. This will look better in the morning.”

“You think so?” he asked.

4

As Jeanette Anderson was rubbing her husband’s back, Fred Peterson and his older son (now, with Frankie gone, his only son) were picking up dishes and setting the living room and the den to rights. And although it had been a remembrance gathering, the remains were pretty much the same as after any large and long houseparty.

Ollie had surprised Fred. The boy was your typical self-involved teenager who ordinarily wouldn’t pick up his socks from under the coffee table unless told twice or three times, but tonight he’d been an efficient and uncomplaining helper since Arlene had at ten o’clock turned out the last of that day’s unending stream of guests. The gathering of friends and neighbors had been winding down by seven, and Fred had hoped it would be over by eight—God, he was so tired of nodding when people told him Frankie was in heaven now—but then came the news that Terence Maitland had been arrested for Frankie’s murder, and the damn thing had cranked up all over again. That second cycle almost had been a party, albeit a grim one. Again and again Fred had been told that a, it was unbelievable, that b, Coach T had always seemed so normal, and c, the needle at McAlester was too good for him.

Ollie went back and forth from the living room to the kitchen, carrying glasses and piles of dishes, loading them into the dishwasher with an efficiency Fred never would have expected. When the dishwasher was full, Ollie set it going and rinsed more dishes, stacking them in the sink for the next load. Fred brought in the dishes that had been left in the den, and found yet more on the picnic table in the backyard, where some of their visitors had gone to smoke. Fifty or sixty people must have washed through the house before it was finally over, everyone in the neighborhood, plus well-wishers from other parts of town, not to mention Father Brixton and his various hangers-on (his groupies, Fred thought) from St. Anthony’s. On and on they had come, a stream of mourners and gawkers.

Fred and Ollie did their clean-up work silently, each wrapped up in his own thoughts and his own grief. After receiving condolences for hours—and to be fair, even those from total strangers had been heartfelt—they were unable to condole with each other. Maybe that was strange. Maybe it was sad. Maybe it was what literary types called irony. Fred was too tired and heartsick to think about it.

During all of this, the dead boy’s mother sat on the sofa in her best meet-the-public silk dress, her knees together, her hands cupping her fat upper arms as if she were cold. She’d said nothing since the last of the evening’s guests—old Mrs. Gibson from next door, who had predictably held on until the bitter end—finally took her leave.

She can go now, she’s got it all stored up, Arlene Peterson had said to her husband as she locked the front door and then leaned her bulk against it.

Arlene Kelly had been a slender vision in white lace when Father Brixton’s predecessor married them. She had still been slender and beautiful after giving birth to Ollie, but that had been seventeen years ago. She had begun to put on weight after giving birth to Frank, and now she was on the verge of obesity… although she was still beautiful to Fred, who hadn’t the heart to take Dr. Connolly’s advice, at his last physical: You’re good to go for another fifty years, Fred, as long as you don’t fall off a building or step in front of a truck, but your wife has type two diabetes, and needs to lose fifty pounds if she’s going to stay healthy. You need to help her. After all, you’ve both got a lot to live for.

Only with Frankie not just dead but murdered, most of the things they had to live for seemed stupid and insignificant. Only Ollie retained his former precious importance in Fred’s mind, and even in his grief, he knew that he and Arlene had to be careful about how they treated him in the weeks and months ahead. Ollie was also grieving. Ollie could shoulder his share (more than that, really) of clearing away the remains of this last act in the tribal death-rites of Franklin Victor Peterson, but tomorrow they would have to let him start going back to being a boy. It would take time, but he would get there eventually.

The next time I see Ollie’s socks under the coffee table, I will rejoice, Fred promised himself. And I will break this horrible, unnatural silence as soon as I can think of something to say.

But he could think of nothing, and as Ollie sleepwalked past him into the den, pulling their vacuum cleaner by its hose, Fred thought—with no idea of how wrong he was—that at least things could not get worse.

He went to the doorway of the den, and watched as Ollie began vacuuming the gray pile with that same eerie, unguessed-at efficiency, taking long, even strokes, first pushing the nap one way and then pulling it the other. The crumby remains of Nabs, Oreos, and Ritz crackers disappeared as if they had never been there, and Fred finally found something to say. “I’ll do the living room.”

“I don’t mind,” Ollie said. His eyes were red and swollen. Given the age difference between the two brothers—seven years—they had been amazingly close. Or maybe it wasn’t so amazing, maybe that was just enough space to keep sibling rivalry to a bare minimum. To make Ollie something like Frank’s second father.

“I know,” Fred said, “but share and share alike.”

“Okay. Just don’t say, ‘It’s what Frankie would have wanted.’ I’d have to strangle you with the vacuum hose.”

Fred smiled at that. Probably not his first smile since the policeman had come to the door last Tuesday, but maybe the first real one. “It’s a deal.”

Ollie finished the carpet and trundled the vacuum to his father. When Fred pulled it into the living room and started in on the carpet, Arlene got to her feet and trudged toward the kitchen without looking back. Fred and Ollie glanced at each other. Ollie shrugged. Fred shrugged back and began vacuuming again. People had reached out to them in their grief, and Fred supposed that was nice, but golly-willikers, what a mess they had left behind. He consoled himself with the thought that it would have been much worse if it had been an Irish wake, but Fred had quit the booze after Ollie was born, and the Petersons kept a dry house.

From the kitchen came a most unexpected sound: laughter.

Fred and Ollie stared at each other again. Ollie hurried for the kitchen, where his mother’s laughter, which had seemed natural and easy to begin with, was now rising to a hysterical pitch. Fred stepped on the vacuum cleaner’s power button, killing it, and followed.

Arlene Peterson was standing with her back to the sink, holding her considerable belly and nearly screaming with laughter. Her face had gone bright red, as if she were running a high fever. Tears coursed down her cheeks.

“Ma?” Ollie asked. “What the hell?”

Although the dishes had been cleared from the living room and den, there was still a ton of work to be done here. There were two counters on either side of the sink, and a table in the kitchen nook, where the Peterson family had taken most of their evening meals. All these surfaces were loaded with partially eaten casseroles, Tupperware containers, and leftovers wrapped in aluminum foil. Resting on top of the stove was the carcass of a partially eaten chicken and a gravy boat full of congealed brown sludge.

“We’ve got enough leftovers for a month!” Arlene managed. She doubled over, guffawing, then straightened up. Her cheeks had turned purple. Her red hair, which she had bequeathed to both the son standing before her and the one now underground, had come loose from the clips with which she had temporarily tamed it, and now stood out around her congested face in a frizzy corona. “Bad news, Frankie’s dead! Good news, I won’t have to go shopping for a long… long… time!”

She began to howl. It was a sound that belonged in an insane asylum, not in their kitchen. Fred told his legs to move, to go to her and embrace her, but at first they wouldn’t obey. It was Ollie who moved, but before he could get to her, Arlene picked up the chicken and threw it. Ollie ducked. The chicken flew end over end, shedding stuffing, and hit the wall with a horrible crunch-splat. It left a circle of grease on the wallpaper below the clock.

“Mom, stop. Stop it.”

Ollie tried to take her by the shoulders and pull her into a hug, but Arlene slipped under his hands and darted toward one of the counters, still laughing and howling. She grabbed a serving dish of lasagna in both hands—it had been brought by one of Father Brixton’s sycophants—and dumped it on her head. Cold pasta fell into her hair and onto her shoulders. She heaved the dish into the living room.

“Frankie is dead and we’ve got a fucking Italian buffet!”

Fred got moving then, but Arlene slid away from him, too. She was laughing like an overexcited girl playing a spirited game of tag. She grabbed a Tupperware container full of Marshmallow Delite. She started to raise it, then dropped it between her feet. The laughter stopped. One hand cupped her large left breast. The other lay flat on her chest above it. She looked at her husband with wide eyes that were still swimming with tears.

Those eyes, Fred thought. Those are what I fell in love with.

“Mom? Mom, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said, and then: “I think my heart.” She bent to look at the chicken and the marshmallow dessert. Pasta fell from her hair. “Look what I did.”

She gave a long, whooping, rattling gasp. Fred grabbed her, but she was too heavy, and slithered through his arms. Before she went down on her side, Fred saw that the color was already fading from her cheeks.

Ollie screamed and dropped to his knees beside her. “Mom! Mom! Mom!” He looked up at his father. “I don’t think she’s breathing!”

Fred pushed his son aside. “Call 911.”

Without looking to see if Ollie was doing it, Fred slipped a hand around his wife’s big neck, feeling for a pulse. He got one, but it was disorganized, chaotic: beat-beat, beatbeatbeat, beat-beatbeat. He straddled her, gripped his left wrist in his right hand, and began to push down in a steady rhythm. Was he doing it right? Was it even CPR? He didn’t know, but when her eyes opened, his own heart seemed to give an upward leap in his chest. There she was, she was back.

It wasn’t really a heart attack. She overexerted herself, that’s all. Fainted. I think they call that a syncope. But we’re getting you on a diet, my dear, and your birthday present is going to be one of those wristbands that measure your—

“Made a mess,” Arlene whispered. “Sorry.”

“Don’t try to talk.”

Ollie was on their kitchen wall phone, talking fast and loud, almost shouting. Giving their address. Telling them to hurry.

“You’ll have to clean up the living room again,” she said. “I’m sorry. Fred, I’m so, so sorry.”

Before Fred could tell her again to stop talking, to just lie still until she felt better, Arlene drew another of those great, rattling breaths. As she let it out, her eyes rolled up in her head. The bloodshot whites bulged, turning her into a horror-movie deathmask Fred would afterwards try to erase from his mind. He would fail.

“Dad? They’re on their way. Is she all right?”

Fred didn’t reply. He was too busy applying more half-assed CPR and wishing he had taken a class—why had he never found time to do that? There were so many things he wished for. He would have traded his immortal soul to be able to turn the calendar back one lousy week.

Press and release. Press and release.

You’ll be all right, he told her. You have to be all right. Sorry cannot be your last word on this earth. I will not allow it.

Press and release. Press and release.

5

Marcy Maitland was glad to take Grace into bed with her when Grace asked, but when she asked Sarah if she wanted to join them, her older daughter shook her head.

“All right,” Marcy said, “but if you change your mind, I’ll be here.”

An hour passed, then another. The worst Saturday of her life became the worst Sunday. She thought of Terry, who should have been beside her now, fast asleep (perhaps dreaming about the upcoming City League championship, now that the Bears had been disposed of), and was instead in a jail cell. Was he also awake? Of course he was.

She knew there were going to be some hard days ahead, but Howie would put things right. Terry had once told her that his old Pop Warner co-coach was the best defense lawyer in the southwest, and might someday sit on the state’s supreme court. Given Terry’s cast-iron alibi, there was no way Howie could fail. But each time she drew almost enough comfort from this idea to drop off, she thought of Ralph Anderson, the Judas sonofabitch she’d thought of as a friend, and she came wide awake again. As soon as this was over, they would sue the Flint City PD for false arrest, defamation of character, anything else Howie Gold could think of, and when Howie began dropping his legal smart-bombs, she would make sure Ralph Anderson was standing on ground zero. Could they sue him personally? Strip him of everything he owned? She hoped so. She hoped they could send him, his wife, and the son with whom Terry had taken such pains, out into the street, barefoot and dressed in rags, with begging bowls in their hands. She guessed such things were not likely in this advanced and supposedly enlightened day and age, but she could see the three of them that way with utter clarity—mendicants in the streets of Flint City—and each time she did, the vision brought her wide awake again, vibrating with rage and satisfaction.

It was quarter past two by the clock on the nightstand when her older daughter appeared in the doorway, only her legs clearly visible below the oversized Okie City Thunder tee she wore as a nightshirt.

“Mom? Are you awake?”

“I am.”

“Can I get in with you and Gracie?”

Marcy threw back the sheet and moved over. Sarah got in, and when Marcy hugged her and kissed the nape of her neck, Sarah began to cry.

“Shh, you’ll wake your sister.”

“I can’t help it. I keep thinking about the handcuffs. I’m sorry.”

“Quietly, then. Quietly, hon.”

Marcy held her until Sarah had gotten it all out. When she was quiet for five minutes or so, Marcy thought the girl had gone to sleep, and felt that now, with both of her girls here, bookending her, she might be able to sleep herself. But then Sarah rolled over to look at her. Her wet eyes shone in the dark.

“He won’t go to prison, will he, Mom?”

“No,” she said. “He didn’t do anything.”

“But innocent people do go to prison. Sometimes for years, until someone finds out they were innocent after all. Then they get out, but they’re old.”

“That isn’t going to happen to your father. He was in Cap City when the thing happened that they arrested him for—”

“I know what they arrested him for,” Sarah said. She wiped her eyes. “I’m not stupid.”

“I know you’re not, honey.”

Sarah stirred restlessly. “They must have had a reason.”

“They probably think so, but their reasons are wrong. Mr. Gold will explain where he was, and they’ll have to let him go.”

“All right.” A long pause. “But I don’t want to go back to community camp until this is over, and I don’t think Gracie should, either.”

“You won’t have to. And when fall comes around, all of this will just be a memory.”

“A bad one,” Sarah said, and sniffled.

“Agreed. Now go to sleep.”

Sarah did. And with her girls to warm her, so did Marcy, although her dreams were bad ones in which Terry was marched away by those two policemen, while the crowd watched and Baibir Patel cried and Gavin Frick stared in disbelief.

6

Until midnight, the county jail sounded like a zoo at feeding time—drunks singing, drunks crying, drunks standing at the bars of their cells and holding shouted conversations. There was even what sounded like a fistfight, although since all the cells were singles, Terry didn’t see how that could be, unless there were two guys punching at each other through the bars. Somewhere, at the far end of the corridor, a guy was bellowing the first phrase of John 3:16 over and over at the top of his lungs: “For God so loved the world! For God so loved the world! For God so loved THE WHOLE FUCKIN WORLD!” The stench was piss, shit, disinfectant, and whatever sauce-soaked pasta had been served for supper.

My first time in jail, Terry marveled. After forty years of life, I have landed in stir, the calaboose, the joint, the old stone hotel. Think of that.

He wanted to feel anger, righteous anger, and he supposed that feeling might arise with daylight, when the world came back into focus, but now, at three o’clock on Sunday morning, as the shouts and singing subsided to snores, farts, and the occasional groan, all he felt was shame. As if he really had done something. Except he would have felt nothing of the kind if he had really done what he was accused of doing. If he had been sick and evil enough to commit such an obscene act upon a child, he would have felt nothing but the desperate cunning of an animal in a trap, willing to say anything or do anything in order to get out. Or was that true? How did he know what a man like that would think or feel? It was like trying to guess what might be in the mind of an alien from space.

He had no doubt that Howie Gold would get him out of this; even now, in the darkest ditch of the night, with his mind still trying to get a grip on the way his whole life had changed in a matter of minutes, he didn’t doubt it. But he also knew that not all of the shit would wash off. He would be released with an apology—if not tomorrow, then at the arraignment, if not at the arraignment, then at the next step, which would probably be a grand jury hearing in Cap City—but he knew what he would see in the eyes of his students the next time he stepped in front of a class, and his career as a youth sports coach was probably finished. The various governing bodies would find some excuse if he wouldn’t do what they’d see as the honorable thing and step down himself. Because he was never going to be completely innocent again, not in the eyes of his neighbors on the West Side, or in those of Flint City as a whole. He would always be the man who was arrested for the murder of Frank Peterson. He would always be the man of whom people would say, No smoke without fire.

If it was just him, he thought he could deal with it. What did he tell his boys when they whined that a call was unfair? Suck it up and get back in there. Play the game. But it wasn’t just him who would have to suck this up, not just him who would have to play the game. Marcy would be branded. The whispers and sidelong looks at work and at the grocery store. The friends who would no longer call. Jamie Mattingly might be an exception, but he had his doubts even about her.

Then there were the girls. Sarah and Gracie would be subjected to the sort of vicious gossip and wholesale shunning of which only kids their age were capable. He guessed Marcy would have sense enough to keep them close until this was sorted out, if only to keep them away from the reporters who would otherwise hound them, but even in the fall, even after he was cleared, they would be marked. See that girl over there? Her father was arrested for killing a kid and shoving a stick up his ass.

Lying on his bunk. Staring up into the dark. Smelling the jailhouse stench. Thinking, We’ll have to move. Maybe to Tulsa, maybe to Cap City, maybe down to Texas. Somebody will give me a job, even if they won’t allow me within a country mile of boys’ baseball, football, or basketball practice. My references are good, and they’ll be afraid of a discrimination suit if they say no.

Only the arrest—and the reason for the arrest—would follow them like this jailhouse stink. Especially the girls. Facebook alone would be enough to hunt them down and single them out. These are the girls whose father got away with murder.

He had to stop thinking this way and get some sleep, and he had to stop feeling ashamed of himself because someone else—Ralph Anderson, to be specific—had made a horrible mistake. These things always looked worse in the small hours, that was what he had to remember. And given his current position, in a cell and wearing a baggy brown uniform with DOC on the back of the shirt, it was inevitable that his fears would grow as big as the floats in a holiday parade. Things would look better in the morning. He was sure of it.

Yes.

But still, the shame.

Terry covered his eyes.

7

Howie Gold slipped from bed at six thirty on Sunday morning, not because there was anything he could do at that hour, and not from personal preference. Like many men in their early sixties, his prostate had grown along with his IRA, and his bladder seemed to have shrunk along with his sexual aspirations. Once he was awake, his brain slipped from park into drive, and going back to sleep was an impossibility.

He left Elaine to dream what he hoped were pleasant dreams, and padded barefoot into the kitchen to start the coffee and check his phone, which he’d silenced and left on the counter before going to bed. He had a text from Alec Pelley, delivered at 1:12 AM.

Howie drank his coffee, and was eating a bowl of Raisin Bran when Elaine came into the kitchen, knotting the belt of her robe and yawning. “What’s up, powderpuff?”

“Time will tell. In the meantime, do you want some scrambled eggs?”

“Breakfast, he offers me.” She was pouring her own cup of coffee. “Since it’s not Valentine’s Day or my birthday, should I find that suspicious?”

“I’m killing time. Got a text from Alec, but I can’t call him until seven.”

“Good news or bad?”

“No idea. So do you want some eggs?”

“Yes. Two. Fried, not scrambled.”

“You know I always break the yolks.”

“Since I get to sit and watch, I will restrain my criticism. Wheat toast, please.”

For a wonder, only one of the yolks broke. As he set the plate in front of her, she said, “If Terry Maitland killed that child, the world has gone insane.”

“The world is insane,” Howie said, “but he didn’t do it. He has an alibi as strong as the S on Superman’s chest.”

“Why did they arrest him, then?”

“Because they believe they have proof as strong as the S on Superman’s chest.”

She considered this. “Unstoppable force meets immovable object?”

“There is no such thing, sweetheart.”

He looked at his watch. Five minutes of seven. Close enough. He called Alec’s cell.

His investigator answered on the third ring. “You’re early, and I’m shaving. Can you call back in five minutes? At seven, in other words, as I suggested?”

“No,” Howie said, “but I’ll wait until you wipe the shaving cream off the phone side of your face, how’s that?”

“You’re a tough boss,” Alec said, but he sounded good-humored in spite of the hour, and in spite of being interrupted at a task most men preferred to do while occupied by nothing but their own thoughts. Which gave Howie hope. He had a lot to work with already, but he could always use more.

“Is it good news or bad news?”

“Give me a second, will you? I’m getting this shit all over my phone.”

It was more like five, but then Alec was back. “The news is good, boss. Good for us and bad for the DA. Very bad.”

“You saw the security footage? How much is there, and from how many cameras?”

“I saw the footage, and there’s plenty.” Alec paused, and when he spoke again, Howie knew he was smiling; he could hear it in the man’s voice. “But there’s something better. Much better.”

8

Jeanette Anderson rose at quarter of seven and found her husband’s side of the bed empty. The kitchen smelled of fresh coffee, but Ralph wasn’t there, either. She looked out the window and saw him sitting at the picnic table in the backyard, still in his striped pajamas and sipping from the joke cup Derek had given him last Father’s Day. On the side, in big blue letters, it said YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT UNTIL I DRINK MY COFFEE. She got her own cup, went out to him, and kissed his cheek. The day was going to be a hot one, but now this early morning was cool and quiet and pleasant.

“Can’t let go of it, can you?” she asked.

“None of us will be letting go of this one,” he said. “Not for awhile.”

“It’s Sunday,” she said. “Day of rest. And you need it. I don’t like the way you look. According to an article I read in the New York Times Health section last week, you have entered heart attack country.”

“That’s cheering.”

She sighed. “What’s first on your list?”

“Checking with that other teacher, Deborah Grant. Just a t to cross. I have no doubt she’ll confirm that Terry was on the trip to Cap City, although there’s always a chance that she noticed something off about him that Roundhill and Quade missed. Women can be more observant.”

Jeannie considered this idea doubtful, perhaps even sexist, but it wasn’t the time to say so. She reverted to their discussion of the night before, instead. “Terry was here. He did do it. What you need is some forensic evidence from there. I guess DNA is out of the question, but fingerprints?”

“We can dust the room where he and Quade stayed, but they checked out Wednesday morning, and the room will have been cleaned and occupied since then. Almost certainly more than once.”

“But it’s still possible, isn’t it? Some hotel maids are conscientious, but plenty just make the beds and wipe the rings and smudges off the coffee table and call it good. What if you found Mr. Quade’s fingerprints, but not Terry Maitland’s?”

He liked the flush of Junior Detective excitement on her face, and wished he didn’t have to dampen it. “It wouldn’t prove anything, hon. Howie Gold would tell the jury they couldn’t convict anyone on the absence of prints, and he’d be right.”

She considered this. “Okay, but I still think you should gather prints from that room, and identify as many as possible. Can you do that?”

“Yes. And it’s a good idea.” It was at least another t to cross. “I’ll find out which room it was, and try to have the Sheraton move out whoever is in there now. I think they’ll cooperate, given the play this is going to have in the media. We’ll dust it top to bottom and side to side. But what I really want is to see the security footage from the days that convention was in session, and since Detective Sablo—he’s the State Police’s lead on this—won’t be back until later today, I’m going to take a run up there myself. I’ll be hours behind Gold’s investigator, but that can’t be helped.”

She put a hand over his. “Just promise me you’ll stop every once in a while and acknowledge the day, honey. It’s the only one you’ll have until tomorrow.”

He smiled at her, squeezed her hand, then let go. “I keep thinking about the vehicles he used, the one he used to kidnap the Peterson boy and the one he left town in.”

“The Econoline van and the Subaru.”

“Uh-huh. The Subaru doesn’t bother me much. That one was a straight steal from a municipal parking lot, and we’ve seen plenty of similar thefts since 2012 or so. The new keyless ignitions are the car thief’s best friend, because when you stop somewhere, thinking about whatever errands you have to run or what you’re going to put on for supper, you don’t see your keys dangling from the ignition. It’s easy to leave the electronic fob behind, especially if you’re wearing earbuds or yakking on your phone, and don’t hear the car chiming at you to take them. The Subaru’s owner—Barbara Nearing—left her fob in the cup holder and the parking ticket on the dashboard when she went to work at eight. Car was gone when she came back at five.”

“The attendant doesn’t remember who drove it out?”

“No, and that’s not surprising. It’s a big garage, five levels, there are people coming and going all the time. There’s a camera at the exit, but the footage gets wiped every forty-eight hours. The van, though…”

“What about the van?”

“It belonged to a part-time carpenter and handyman named Carl Jellison, who lives in Spuytenkill, New York, a little town between Poughkeepsie and New Paltz. He took his keys, but there was a spare in a little magnetic box under the rear bumper. Someone found the box and drove the van away. Bill Samuels’s theory is that the thief drove it from mid-state New York to Cap City… or Dubrow… or maybe right here to FC… and then left it with that spare key still in the ignition. Terry found it, re-stole it, and stashed it somewhere. Maybe in a barn or shed outside of town. God knows there are plenty of abandoned farms since everything went blooey in 2008. He ditched the van behind Shorty’s Pub with the key still in it, hoping—not unreasonably—that someone would steal it a third time.”

“Only no one did,” Jeannie said. “So you have the van in impound, and you have the key. Which has a Terry Maitland thumbprint on it.”

Ralph nodded. “We actually have a ton of prints. That thing’s ten years old and hasn’t been cleaned for at least the last five, if ever. Some of the prints we’ve eliminated—Jellison, his son, his wife, two guys who worked for him. Had those by Thursday afternoon, courtesy of the New York State Police, and God bless them. Some states, most states, we’d still be waiting. We’ve also got Terry Maitland’s and Frank Peterson’s, of course. Four of Peterson’s were on the inside of the passenger door. That’s a greasy area, and they’re as clear as fresh-minted pennies. I’m thinking those were made in the Figgis Park parking lot, when Terry was trying to pull him out of the passenger seat and the kid was trying to resist.”

Jeannie winced.

“There are others from the van we’re still waiting on; they’ve been out on the wire since last Wednesday. We may get hits, we may not. We assume some of them belong to the original car thief, up in Spuytenkill. The others could belong to anyone from friends of Jellison’s to hitchhikers the car thief picked up. But the freshest ones, other than the boy’s, are Maitland’s. The original thief doesn’t matter, but I would like to know where he dumped the van.” He paused, then added, “It makes no sense, you know.”

“Not wiping away the prints?”

“Not just that. How about stealing the van and the Subaru in the first place? Why steal vehicles to use while you do your dirt if you’re going to flash your face to anyone who cares to look at it?”

Jeannie listened to this with growing dismay. As his wife, she couldn’t ask the questions that his prompted: If you had such doubts, why in God’s name did you act the way you did? And why so fast? Yes, she had encouraged him, and so maybe she owned a little of this current trouble, but she hadn’t had all the information. A cheap out, but mine own, she thought… and winced again.

As if reading her mind (and after almost twenty-five years of marriage, he could probably do that), he said, “This isn’t all buyer’s remorse, you know—don’t get that idea. Bill Samuels and I talked about it. He says it doesn’t have to make sense. He says Terry did it the way he did because he went crazy. That the impulse to do it—the need to do it, for all I know, although you’d never get me to put it that way in court—kept building up and up. There have been similar cases. Bill says, ‘Oh yes, he planned to do something, and he put some of the pieces in place, but when he saw Frank Peterson last Tuesday, pushing that bike with the broken chain, all the planning went out the window. The top blew off, and Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde.’ ”

“A sexual sadist in a full-blown frenzy,” she murmured. “Terry Maitland. Coach T.”

“It made sense then and it makes sense now,” he said, almost belligerently.

Maybe, she could have replied, but what about after, honey? What about when it was over, and he was sated? Did you and Bill consider that? How come he still didn’t wipe his fingerprints, and went right on showing his face?

“There was something under the driver’s seat of the van,” Ralph said.

“Really? What?”

“A scrap of paper. Part of a take-out menu, maybe. Probably means nothing, but I want to take a good close look at it. Pretty sure it was checked into evidence.” He threw what remained of his coffee into the grass and stood up. “What I want more is a look at the Sheraton security footage for last Tuesday and Wednesday. Also any footage from the restaurant where he says that bunch of teachers went to dinner.”

“If you get a good look at his face in any of the footage, send me a screen-grab.” And when he raised his eyebrows: “I’ve known Terry as long as you have, and if that wasn’t him in Cap City, I’ll know.” She smiled. “After all, women are more observant than men. You said so yourself.”

9

Sarah and Grace Maitland ate almost no breakfast, which didn’t disturb Marcy so much as the unaccustomed absence of phones and mini-tablets from their immediate vicinity. The police had let them keep their electronics, but after a few quick looks, Sarah and Grace left their gadgets in their bedrooms. Whatever news or social chatter they had found was nothing either girl wanted to pursue. And after her own quick look out the living room window, where she saw two news vans and a Flint City PD cruiser parked at the curb, Marcy pulled the curtains. How long was this day going to be? And what in God’s name was she going to do with it?

Howie Gold answered that for her. He called at quarter past eight, sounding remarkably upbeat.

“We’re going to see Terry this afternoon. Together. Ordinarily, visitors have to be requested by the inmate twenty-four hours in advance and pre-approved, but I was able to cut through that. The one thing I couldn’t get past was the non-contact thing. He’s on a maximum security hold. It means talking to him through glass, but it’s better than the way it looks in the movies. You’ll see.”

“Okay.” Feeling breathless. “What time?”

“I’ll pick you up at one thirty. You should have his best suit, plus a nice dark tie. For the arraignment. And you can bring him something nice to eat. Nuts, fruit, candy. Put it in a see-through bag, okay?”

“Okay. What about the girls? Should I—”

“No, the girls stay home. County is no place for them. Find someone to sit with them, in case the press guys get pushy. And tell them all is well.”

She didn’t know if she could find anyone—she hated to impose on Jamie after last night. Surely if she spoke to the cop in the cruiser out front, he would keep the press off the lawn. Wouldn’t he?

“Is all well? Is it really?”

“I think it is. Alec Pelley just busted a jumbo-sized piñata in Cap City, and all the prizes fell into our laps. I’m going to send you a link to something. Up to you whether or not you share it with your chickadees, but I know I would, if they were mine.”

Five minutes later, Marcy was seated on the couch, with Sarah on one side and Grace on the other. They were looking at Sarah’s mini-tablet. Terry’s desktop or one of the laptops would have been better, but the police had taken those. The tablet was good enough, as it turned out. Soon all three of them were laughing and screaming with joy and giving each other high fives.

This isn’t just light at the end of the tunnel, Marcy thought, it’s a whole damn rainbow.

10

Thuck-thuck-thuck.

At first Merl Cassidy thought he was hearing it in a dream, one of the bad ones where his stepfather was getting ready to tune up on him. The bald bastard had a way of rapping on the kitchen table, first with his knuckles, then with his whole fist, as he asked the preparatory questions that led up to that evening’s beating: Where were you? Why do you bother wearing that watch if you’re always going to be late for supper? Why don’t you ever help your mother? Why do you bother bringing those books home if you’re never going to do any fucking homework? His mother might try to protest, but she was ignored. If she tried to intervene, she was pushed away. Then the fist that had been hitting the table with ever increasing force would start hitting him.

Thuck-thuck-thuck.

Merl opened his eyes to get away from the dream, and had just a moment to savor the irony: he was fifteen hundred miles away from that bullying asshole, fifteen hundred at least… and still as close as any night’s sleep. Not that he’d gotten a full night; he rarely had since running away from home.

Thuck-thuck-thuck.

It was a cop, tapping with his nightstick. Patient. Now making a cranking gesture with his free hand: roll it down.

For a moment Merl had no idea where he was, but when he looked through the windshield at the big-box store looming across what seemed like a mile of mostly empty parking lot, it snapped into place. El Paso. This was El Paso. The Buick he was driving was almost out of gas, and he was almost out of money. He had pulled into the Walmart Supercenter lot to catch a few hours’ sleep. Maybe in the morning he would have an idea of what to do next. Only now there probably was no next.

Thuck-thuck-thuck.

He rolled down the window. “Good morning, Officer. I was driving late, and I pulled in to get a little sleep. I thought it would be all right to coop a little here. If I was wrong, I’m sorry.”

“Uh-huh, that’s actually admirable,” said the cop, and when he smiled, Merl had a moment of hope. It was a friendly smile. “Lots of people do it. Only most of them don’t look fourteen years old.”

“I’m eighteen, just small for my age.” But he felt an immense weariness that had nothing to do with the short sleep he’d had over the last weeks.

“Uh-huh, and people are always mistaking me for Tom Hanks. Some even ask for my autograph. Let’s see your license and registration.”

One more effort, as weak as the final twitch of a dying man’s foot. “They were in my coat. Someone stole it while I was in the restroom. At McDonald’s, this was.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay. And where are you from?”

“Phoenix,” Merl said without conviction.

“Uh-huh, so how come that’s an Oklahoma plate on this beauty?”

Merl was silent, out of answers.

“Step out of the car, son, and even though you look about as dangerous as a little yellow dog shitting in a rainstorm, keep your hands where I can see them.”

Merl got out of the car without too much regret. It had been a good run. More, really; when you thought of it, it had been a miraculous run. He should have been collared a dozen times since leaving home in late April, but he hadn’t been. Now that he had been, so what? Where had he been going, anyway? Nowhere. Anywhere. Away from the bald bastard.

“What’s your name, kiddo?”

“Merl Cassidy. Merl, short for Merlin.”

A few early shoppers looked at them, then went on their way into the round-the-clock wonders of Walmart.

“Just like the wizard, uh-huh, okay. You got any ID, Merl?”

He reached into his back pocket and brought out a cheap wallet with frayed buckskin stitching, a birthday present given to him by his mother when he was eight. Back then it had just been the two of them, and the world had made some sense. Inside the billfold was a five and two ones. From the compartment where he kept a few pictures of his mom, he brought out a laminated card with his photo on it.

“Poughkeepsie Youth Ministry,” the cop mused. “You from New York?”

“Yes, sir.” The sir was a thing his stepfather had beaten into him early.

“You from there?”

“No, sir, but close by. A little town called Spuytenkill. That means ‘a lake that spouts.’ At least that’s what my mother told me.”

“Uh-huh, okay, interesting, you learn a new thing every day. How long have you been on the run, Merl?”

“Going on three months, I guess.”

“And who taught you to drive?”

“My uncle Dave. In the fields, mostly. I’m a good driver. Standard or automatic, makes no difference. My uncle Dave, he had a heart attack and died.”

The cop considered this, tapping the laminated card against one thumbnail, not thuck-thuck-thuck now but tick-tick-tick. On the whole, Merl liked him. At least so far.

“Good driver, uh-huh, you must be to get all the way from New York to this dusty puckered asshole of a border town. How many cars have you stolen, Merl?”

“Three. No, four. This one’s the fourth. Only the first one was a van. From my neighbor down the road.”

“Four,” the cop said, considering the dirty child standing in front of him. “And how did you finance your southward safari, Merl?”

“Huh?”

“How did you eat? Where did you sleep?”

“Mostly slep in whatever I was driving. And I stole.” He hung his head. “From ladies’ purses, mostly. Sometimes they didn’t see me, but when they did… I can run fast.” The tears began to come. He had cried quite a bit on what the cop called his southward safari, mostly at night, but those tears had brought no real relief. These did. Merl didn’t know why and didn’t care.

“Three months, four cars,” the cop said, and tick-tick-tick went Merl’s youth ministry card. “What were you running from, kiddo?”

“My stepfather. And if you send me back to that sonofabitch, I’ll run away again, first chance I get.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh, I get the picture. And how old are you really, Merl?”

“Twelve, but I’ll be thirteen next month.”

“Twelve. I will be dipped in shit and spun backwards. You come with me, Merl. Let’s see what we’re gonna do with you.”

At the cop shop on Harrison Avenue, while waiting for someone from social services to show up, Merl Cassidy was photographed, deloused, and fingerprinted. The prints went out on the wire. This was just a matter of routine.

11

When Ralph got to Flint City’s much smaller cop shop, meaning to call Deborah Grant before picking up a cruiser for the run to Cap City, Bill Samuels was waiting for him. He looked sick. Even the Alfalfa cowlick was drooping.

“What’s wrong?” Ralph asked. Meaning what else?

“Alec Pelley texted me. With a link.”

He unbuckled his briefcase, brought out his iPad (the big one, of course, the Pro), and powered it up. He tapped a couple of times, then passed it to Ralph. The text from Pelley read, Are you sure you want to pursue a case against T. Maitland? Check this first. The link was beneath. Ralph tapped it.

What came up was a website for Channel 81: CAP CITY’S PUBLIC ACCESS RESOURCE! Beneath it was a block of videos showing City Council meetings, a bridge re-opening, a tutorial called YOUR LIBRARY AND HOW TO USE IT, and one called NEW ADDITIONS TO THE CAP CITY ZOO. Ralph looked at Samuels questioningly.

“Scroll down.”

Ralph did, and found one titled HARLAN COBEN SPEAKS TO TRI-STATE ENGLISH TEACHERS. The PLAY icon was superimposed over a bespectacled woman with hair so arduously sprayed it looked as if you could bounce a baseball off it without hurting the skull beneath. She was at a podium. Behind her was the Sheraton Hotels logo. Ralph brought the video up to full screen.

“Hello, everybody! Welcome! I’m Josephine McDermott, this year’s president of the Tri-State Teachers of English. I’m so happy to be here, and to officially welcome you to our yearly meeting of the minds. Plus, of course, a few adult beverages.” This brought a murmur of polite laughter. “Our attendance this year is particularly good, and while I’d like to think my charming presence has something to do with it”—more polite laughter—“I think it probably has more to do with today’s amazing guest speaker…”

“Maitland was right about one thing,” Samuels said. “The fucking introduction goes on and on. She runs down just about every book the guy ever wrote. Go to nine minutes and thirty seconds. That’s where she winds it up.”

Ralph slid his finger along the counter at the bottom of the vid, now sure of what he was going to see. He didn’t want to see it, and yet he did. The fascination was undeniable.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to today’s guest speaker, Mr. Harlan Coben!”

From the wings strode a bald gentleman so tall that when he bent to shake hands with Ms. McDermott, he looked like a guy greeting a child in a grown-up’s dress. Channel 81 had deemed this event interesting enough to spring for two cameras, and the picture now switched to the audience, which was giving Coben a standing O. And there, at a table near the front, were three men and a woman. Ralph felt his stomach take the express elevator down. He tapped the video, pausing it.

“Christ,” he said. “It’s him. Terry Maitland with Roundhill, Quade, and Grant.”

“Based on the evidence we have in hand, I don’t see how it can be, but it sure as hell looks like him.”

“Bill…” For a moment Ralph couldn’t go on. He was utterly flabbergasted. “Bill, the guy coached my son. It doesn’t just look like him, it is him.”

“Coben speaks for about forty minutes. It’s mostly just him at the podium, but every now and then there are shots of the audience, laughing at some of the witty stuff he says—he’s a witty guy, I’ll give him that—or just listening attentively. Maitland—if it is Maitland—is in most of those shots. But the nail in the coffin is right around minute fifty-six. Go there.”

Ralph went to minute fifty-four, just to be safe. By then Coben was taking questions from the audience. “I never use profanity in my books for profanity’s sake,” he was saying, “but under certain circumstances, it seems absolutely appropriate. A man who hits his thumb with a hammer doesn’t say, ‘Oh, pickles.’ ” Laughter from the audience. “I have time for one or two more. How about you, sir?”

The picture switched from Coben to the next questioner. It was Terry Maitland, in a big fat close-up, and Ralph’s last hope that they were dealing with a double, as Jeannie had suggested, evaporated. “Do you always know who did it when you sit down to write, Mr. Coben, or is it sometimes a surprise even to you?”

The picture switched back to Coben, who smiled and said, “That’s a very good question.”

Before he could give a very good answer, Ralph backed up to Terry, standing to ask his question. He stared at the image for twenty seconds, then handed the iPad back to the district attorney.

“Poof,” Samuels said. “There goes our case.”

“DNA’s still pending,” Ralph said… or rather, heard himself say. He felt divorced from his own body. He supposed it was how boxers felt just before the ref stopped the fight. “And I still need to talk to Deborah Grant. After that I’m going up to Cap City to do some old-school detective work. Get off my ass and knock on doors, like the man said. Talk to people at the hotel, and at the Firepit, where they went to dinner.” Then, thinking of Jeannie: “I want to look into the possibility of forensic evidence, as well.”

“Do you know how unlikely that is in a big city hotel, the best part of a week after the day in question?”

“I do.”

“As for the restaurant, it probably won’t even be open.” Samuels sounded like a kid who’s just been pushed down on the sidewalk by a bigger kid and scraped his knee. Ralph was coming to realize he didn’t like this guy very much. He came across more and more as a quitter.

“If it’s near the hotel, chances are they’ll be open for brunch.”

Samuels shook his head, still peering at the frozen image of Terry Maitland. “Even if we get a DNA match… which I’m starting to doubt… you’ve been in this job long enough to know that juries rarely convict based on DNA and fingerprints. The OJ trial is an excellent case in point.”

“The eye-wits—”

“Gold will demolish them on cross. Stanhope? Old and half-blind. ‘Isn’t it true you gave up your driver’s license three years ago, Mrs. Stanhope?’ June Morris? A kid who saw a bloody man from across the street. Scowcroft was drinking, and so was his buddy. Claude Bolton’s got a drug jacket. The best you’ve got is Willow Rainwater, and I’ve got news for you, buddy, in this state people still don’t care much for Indians. Don’t much trust them.”

“But we’re in too deep to back out,” Ralph said.

“That happens to be the dirty truth.”

They sat silently for a bit. Ralph’s office door was open, and the station’s main room was almost deserted, as it usually was on Sunday mornings in this small southwestern city. Ralph thought of telling Samuels that the video had jolted them away from the elephant in the room: a child had been murdered, and according to every bit of evidence they had gleaned, they had the man who’d done it. That Maitland appeared to have been seventy miles away was something that had to be addressed and clarified. There could be no rest for either of them until it was.

“Come up to Cap City with me, if you want to.”

“Not going to happen,” Samuels said. “I’m taking my ex-wife and the kids to Lake Ocoma. She’s bringing a picnic. We’re finally back on good terms, and I’d like not to jeopardize that.”

“Okay.” The offer had been half-hearted, anyway. Ralph wanted to be by himself. He wanted to try to get his head around what had seemed so straightforward and was now looking like a colossal clusterfuck.

He stood up. Bill Samuels put his iPad back in his briefcase and then stood up beside him. “I think we could lose our jobs over this, Ralph. And if Maitland walks, he’ll sue. You know he will.”

“Go on to your picnic. Eat some sandwiches. This isn’t over yet.”

Samuels left the office ahead of him, and something about his walk—the slumped shoulders, the briefcase banging dispiritedly at his knee—infuriated Ralph. “Bill?”

Samuels turned.

“A child in this town was viciously raped. Either before or just after, he may have been bitten to death. I’m still trying to get my head around that. Do you think his parents give a rodent’s behind if we lose our jobs or the city gets sued?”

Samuels made no reply, only crossed the deserted squadroom and went out into the early morning sunshine. It was going to be a great day for a picnic, but Ralph had an idea the DA wasn’t going to enjoy it much.

12

Fred and Ollie had arrived in the Mercy Hospital ER waiting room shortly before Saturday night became Sunday morning, no more than three minutes behind the ambulance carrying Arlene Peterson. At that hour, the big waiting room had been jammed with the bruised and bleeding, the drunk and complaining, the crying and coughing. Like most ERs, the one at Mercy was extremely busy on Saturday nights, but by nine o’clock on Sunday morning, it was almost deserted. A man was holding a makeshift bandage over a bleeding hand. A woman sat with a feverish child in her lap, both of them watching Elmo caper on the TV set bolted high in one corner. A teenage girl with frizzy hair sat with her head back and her eyes closed and her hands clasped to her midriff.

And there was them. The remains of the Peterson family. Fred had closed his eyes around six and drifted off to sleep, but Ollie only sat, staring at the elevator into which his mother had disappeared, sure that if he dozed, she would die. “Could you not have watched with me one hour?” Jesus had asked Peter, and that was a very good question, one you couldn’t answer.

At ten minutes past nine, the door of that elevator slid open and the doctor they had spoken to shortly after arriving stepped out. He was wearing blue scrubs and a sweat-stained blue surgical cap decorated with dancing red hearts. He looked very tired, and when he saw them, he turned to one side, as if wishing he could retreat. Ollie only had to see that involuntary flinch to know. He wished he could let his father sleep through the initial blast of bad news, but that would be wrong. Dad had known and loved her longer than Ollie had been alive, after all.

“Huh!” Fred said, sitting up when Ollie shook his shoulder. “What?”

Then he saw the doctor, who was removing his cap to expose a thatch of sweaty brown hair. “Gentlemen, I’m sorry to tell you that Mrs. Peterson has passed away. We tried hard to save her, and at first I thought we were going to be successful, but the damage was simply too great. Again, I’m very, very sorry.”

Fred stared at him unbelievingly for a moment, then let out a cry. The girl with the frizzy hair opened her eyes and stared at him. The feverish toddler cringed.

Sorry, Ollie thought. That’s the word of the day. Last week we were a family, now there’s just Dad and me. Sorry’s the word for that, all right. The very one, there is no other.

Fred was weeping with his hands over his face. Ollie took him in his arms and held him.

13

After lunch, which Marcy and her girls only picked at, Marcy went into the bedroom to explore Terry’s side of the closet. He was half of their partnership, but his clothes only took up a quarter of the space. Terry was an English teacher, a baseball and football coach, a fund-raiser when funds were required—which was like always—a husband, and a father. He was good at all of those jobs, but only the teaching gig paid, and he wasn’t overloaded with dressy clothes. The blue suit was the best, it brought out the color of his eyes, but it was showing signs of wear, and no one with an eye for men’s fashions was going to mistake it for Brioni. It was Men’s Wearhouse, and four years old. She sighed, took it down, added a white shirt and a dark blue tie. She was putting them in a suit bag when the doorbell rang.

It was Howie, dressed in duds much nicer than the ones Marcy had just bagged up. He gave the girls a quick hug and bussed Marcy on the cheek.

“Are you going to bring my daddy home?” Gracie asked.

“Not today, but soon,” he said, taking the suit bag. “What about a pair of shoes, Marcy?”

“Oh, God,” she said. “I’m such a klutz.”

The black ones were okay, but they needed a polish. No time for that now, though. She put them in a bag and went back into the living room. “Okay, I’m ready.”

“All right. Step lively and pay no attention to the coyotes. Girls, keep the doors locked until your mom gets back, and don’t answer the phone unless you recognize the number. Got it?”

“We’ll be okay,” Sarah said. She didn’t look okay. Neither of them did. Marcy wondered if it was possible for preteen girls to lose weight overnight. Surely not.

“Here we go,” Howie said. He was bubbling over, cheerful.

They left the house with Howie carrying the suit and Marcy carrying the shoes. The reporters once more surged to the edge of the lawn. Mrs. Maitland, have you talked to your husband? What have the police told you? Mr. Gold, has Terry Maitland responded to the charges? Are you going to request bail?

“We have nothing to say at this time,” Howie said, stone-faced, escorting Marcy to his Escalade through a glare of television lights (surely not necessary on this brilliant July day, Marcy thought). At the foot of the driveway, Howie powered down his window and leaned out to speak to one of the two cops on duty. “The Maitland girls are inside. You guys are responsible for seeing they’re not bothered, right?”

Neither responded, only looked at Howie with expressions that were either blank or hostile. Marcy couldn’t tell which, but she leaned toward the latter.

The joy and relief she’d felt after looking at that video—God bless Channel 81—hadn’t left her, but there were still TV trucks and microphone-waving reporters in front of her house. Terry was still locked up—“in county,” as Howie had put it, and what a terrible phrase that was, like something out of a lonesome country-and-western song. Strangers had searched their house and taken anything they pleased. The wooden faces of the policemen and their lack of response were the worst, though, far more unsettling than the TV lights and the shouted questions. A machine had swallowed her family. Howie said they would get out of it unharmed, but it hadn’t happened yet.

No, not yet.

14

Marcy was given a quick patdown by a sleepy-eyed female officer, who told her to dump her purse in the plastic basket provided and step through the metal detector. The officer also took their driver’s licenses, put them in a Baggie, and tacked it to a bulletin board with many others. “Also the suit and shoes, missus.”

Marcy handed them over.

“I want to see him in that suit and looking sharp when I come for him tomorrow morning,” Howie said, and walked through the metal detector, which went off.

“We’ll be sure to tell his butler,” said the officer on the far side of the detector. “Now get rid of whatever you’ve still got in your pockets and try again.”

The problem turned out to be his keyring. Howie handed it to the female officer and went through the detector a second time. “I’ve been here at least five thousand times, and I always forget my keys,” he told Marcy. “It must be some kind of Freudian thing.”

She smiled nervously and made no reply. Her throat was dry, and she thought anything she said would come out in a croak.

Another officer led them through one door, then another. Marcy heard laughing children and a buzz of adult conversation. They passed through a visiting area with brown industrial carpet on the floor. Children were playing. Prisoners in brown jumpsuits were talking with their wives, sweethearts, mothers. A large man with a purple birthmark dripping down one side of his face and a healing cut on the other was helping his young daughter rearrange the furniture in a dollhouse.

This is all a dream, Marcy thought. An incredibly vivid one. I’ll wake up with Terry beside me and tell him how I had a nightmare that he’d been arrested for murder. We’ll laugh about it.

One of the inmates pointed her out, with no attempt made to hide the gesture. The woman beside him stared, round-eyed, then whispered to another woman. The officer who was guiding them seemed to be having some trouble with the key-card that opened the door on the far side of the visiting area, and Marcy couldn’t quite dismiss the idea that he was lollygagging on purpose. Before the lock clunked and he led them through, it seemed that everyone was staring at them. Even the kids.

On the far side of the door was a hallway lined with small rooms divided by what looked like cloudy glass. Terry was sitting in one of these. At the sight of him, floating inside a brown jumpsuit that was far too big, Marcy began to cry. She stepped into her side of the booth and looked at her husband through what was not glass at all but a thick sheet of Perspex. She put a hand up, fingers splayed, and he put his up against it. There was a circle of small holes, like those in an old-fashioned telephone receiver, to talk through. “Stop crying, honey. If you don’t, I’ll start. And sit down.”

She sat, Howie crowding onto the bench beside her.

“How are the girls?”

“Fine. Worried about you, but better today. We’ve got some very good news. Honey, did you know Mr. Coben’s speech was taped by the public access channel?”

For a moment Terry just gaped. Then he began to laugh. “You know what, I think the woman who introduced him said something about that, but she was so long-winded I mostly tuned out. Holy shit.”

“Yes, it’s an authentic holy shit,” Howie said, smiling.

Terry leaned forward until his forehead was almost touching the barrier. His eyes were bright, intent. “Marcy… Howie… I asked Coben something during the Q-and-A. I know it’s a longshot, but maybe it got picked up on the audio. If it was, maybe they can run voice-recognition or something and do a match!”

Marcy and Howie looked at each other and began to laugh. It was an uncommon sound in Maximum Security Visiting, and the guard at the end of the short corridor looked up, frowning.

“What? What did I say?”

“Terry, you’re on video asking your question,” Marcy said. “Do you understand? You are on the video.”

For a moment Terry didn’t seem to comprehend what she was saying. Then he raised his fists and shook them beside his temples, a gesture of triumph she had seen often when one of his teams scored or pulled off a cool defensive play. Without thinking about it, she raised her own hands and copied him.

“Are you sure? Like a hundred per cent? It seems too good to be true.”

“It’s true,” Howie said, grinning. “As a matter of fact you’re on the tape half a dozen times, when they cut away from Coben to show the audience laughing or applauding. The question you asked is just icing on the cake, the whipped cream on top of the banana split.”

“So it’s case closed, right? I’ll walk free tomorrow?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Howie’s grin faded to a rather grim smile. “Tomorrow is just the arraignment, and they’ve got a heap of forensic evidence that they’re very proud of—”

“How can they?” Marcy burst out. “How can they, when Terry was obviously there? The tape proves it!”

Howie put a hand up in a Stop gesture. “We’ll worry about the conflict later, although I can tell you right now that what we’ve got trumps what they’ve got. Easily trumps it. But certain machinery has been set in motion.”

“The machine,” Marcy said. “Yes. We know about the machine, don’t we, Ter?”

He nodded. “It’s like I fell into a Kafka novel. Or 1984. And pulled you and the girls in along with me.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Howie said. “You didn’t pull anyone, they did. This is going to work out, guys. Uncle Howie promises it, and Uncle Howie always keeps his promises. You’re going to be arraigned tomorrow at nine o’clock, Terry, in front of Judge Horton. You will be looking reet and complete in the nice suit your wife brought, which is now hanging in the prisoner storage closet. I intend to meet with Bill Samuels to discuss bail—tonight, if he’ll take the meeting, tomorrow morning if he won’t. He won’t like it, and he’s going to insist on home confinement, but we’ll get it, because by then someone in the press will have discovered that Channel 81 tape, and the problems with the prosecution’s case will become public knowledge. I imagine you’ll have to put your home up to secure the bond, but that shouldn’t be much of a risk, unless you plan to cut off the ankle monitor and run for the hills.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Terry said grimly. Color had risen in his cheeks. “What did some Civil War general say? ‘I intend to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.’ ”

“Okay, so what’s the next battle?” Marcy asked.

“I will tell the DA that it would be a bad idea to present an indictment to the grand jury. And that argument will prevail. You will then walk free.”

But will he? Marcy wondered. Will we? When they claim to have his fingerprints, and people who saw him abducting that little boy, and then coming out of Figgis Park covered in blood? Will we ever be free as long as the real killer stays uncaught?

“Marcy.” Terry was smiling at her. “Take it easy. You know what I tell the boys—one base at a time.”

“I want to ask you something,” Howie said. “Just a shot in the dark.”

“Ask away.”

“They claim to have all sorts of forensic evidence, although the DNA’s still pending—”

“That can’t come back a match,” Terry said. “It’s not possible.”

“I would have said that about the fingerprints,” Howie said.

“Maybe someone set him up,” Marcy blurted. “I know how paranoid that sounds, but…” She shrugged.

“But why?” Howie asked. “That’s the question. Can either of you think of someone who would go to such extraordinary lengths to do that?”

The Maitlands considered, one on each side of the scuffed Perspex, then shook their heads.

“Me, either,” Howie said. “Life rarely if ever imitates the novels of Robert Ludlum. Still, they’ve got evidence strong enough for them to have rushed into an arrest I’m sure they now regret. My fear is that, even if I can get you out of the machine, the shadow of the machine may remain.”

“I was thinking about that most of last night,” Terry said.

“I’m still thinking about it,” Marcy said.

Howie leaned forward, hands clasped. “It would help if we had some physical evidence to match theirs. The Channel 81 tape is fine, and when you add in your colleagues, it’s probably all we need, but I’m greedy. I want more.”

“Physical evidence from one of the busiest hotels in Cap City, and four days later?” Marcy asked, unaware that she was echoing Bill Samuels not long before. “That seems unlikely.”

Terry was looking off into space, brows drawn together. “Not entirely unlikely.”

“Terry?” Howie asked. “What are you thinking about?”

He looked around at them, smiling. “There might be something. There just might be.”

15

The Firepit was indeed open for brunch, so Ralph went there first. Two of the staff who had been working on the night of the murder were currently on duty: the hostess and a crewcut waiter who looked about old enough to buy a beer. The hostess was no help (“We were mobbed that night, Detective”), and while the waiter vaguely remembered serving a large group of teachers, he was equivocal when Ralph showed him Terry’s picture from the previous year’s FCHS yearbook. He said that, yes, he “sorta” remembered a guy who looked like that, but he couldn’t swear it was the guy in the picture. He said he wasn’t even sure the guy had been with that bunch of teachers. “Hey, man, I might have just served him a Hot Wing Platter at the bar.”

So that was that.

Ralph’s luck at the Sheraton was at first no better. He was able to confirm that Maitland and William Quade had stayed in room 644 on Tuesday night, and the hotel manager was able to show him the bill, but it was Quade’s signature. He had used his MasterCard. The manager also told him that room 644 had been occupied every night since Maitland and Quade checked out, and had been cleaned every morning.

“And we offer turn-down service,” said the manager, adding insult to injury. “That means on most days the room was cleaned twice.”

Yes, Detective Anderson was welcome to review the security footage, and Ralph did it without any complaints about how Alec Pelley had already been allowed to do so. (Ralph was not a Cap City police officer, which meant diplomacy was the better part of valor.) The footage was in full color, and sharp—no elderly Zoney’s Go-Mart cameras for the Cap City Sheraton. He saw a man who looked like Terry in the lobby, in the gift shop, doing a quick Wednesday morning workout in the hotel’s fitness room, and outside the hotel ballroom, waiting in the autograph line. The stuff from the lobby and gift shop was iffy, but there could be little doubt—at least in his mind—that the guy signing in to use the exercise equipment and the guy waiting in line for an autograph was his son’s old coach. The one who’d taught Derek to bunt, thus changing his nickname from Swiffer to Push It.

In his mind, Ralph could hear his wife telling him that forensic evidence from Cap City was the missing piece, the Golden Ticket. If Terry was here, she’d said—meaning in Flint City, committing murder—then the double must have been there. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

“None of it makes sense,” he muttered, looking at the monitor. On it was a frozen image of a man who certainly looked like Terry Maitland, caught laughing about something as he stood in the autograph line with his department head, Roundhill.

“Pardon?” asked the hotel dick who had shown him the footage.

“Nothing.”

“Can I show you anything else?”

“No, but thanks.” This had been a fool’s errand. The Channel 81 tape of the lecture had pretty much rendered the security footage moot, anyway, because it was Terry during the Q-and-A. No one could doubt it.

Except in one corner of his mind, Ralph still did. The way Terry had stood to ask his question, as if he’d known that a camera would be on him… it was just so goddam perfect. Was it possible that the whole thing was a set-up? An amazing but ultimately explicable act of legerdemain? Ralph didn’t see how it could be, but he didn’t know how David Copperfield had walked through the Great Wall of China, and Ralph had seen that on TV. If it was so, Terry Maitland wasn’t just a murderer, he was a murderer who was laughing at them.

“Detective, just a heads-up,” said the hotel dick. “I’ve got a note from Harley Bright—he’s the boss—saying all the stuff you just looked at is supposed to be saved for a lawyer named Howard Gold.”

“I don’t care what you do with it,” Ralph said. “Mail it off to Sarah Palin in Whistledick, Alaska, for all I care. I’m going home.” Yes. Good idea. Go home, sit in his backyard with Jeannie, split a six with her—four for him, two for her. And try not to go crazy thinking about this goddam paradox.

The dick walked him to the door of the security office. “News says you got the guy who killed that kid.”

“News says a lot of things. Thank you for your time, sir.”

“Always a pleasure to help the police.”

If only you had, Ralph thought.

He halted on the far side of the lobby, hand out to push the revolving door, struck by a thought. There was one other place he should check, as long as he was here. According to Terry, Debbie Grant had booked for the women’s room as soon as Coben’s lecture ended, and she had been gone a long time. I went down to the newsstand with Ev and Billy, Terry had said. She met us there.

The newsstand, it turned out, was a kind of auxiliary gift shop. An overly made-up woman with graying hair was behind the counter, rearranging bits of inexpensive jewelry. Ralph showed her his ID and asked her if she had been working the previous Tuesday afternoon.

“Honey,” she said, “I work here every day, unless I’m sick. I don’t get anything extra from the books and magazines, but when it comes to this jewelry and the souvenir coffee cups, I’m on commission.”

“Would you remember this man? He was here last Tuesday with a bunch of English teachers, for a lecture.” He showed her Terry’s picture.

“Sure, I remember him. He asked about the Flint County book. First one to do that in Jesus knows how long. I didn’t stock it, the darn thing was here when I started running this place back in 2010. I should take it down, I guess, but replace it with what? Anything way above or way below eye-level doesn’t move, you find that out quick running a place like this. At least the stuff down low is cheap. That top shelf is your expensive stuff with photographs and glossy pages.”

“What book are we talking about, Ms.—” He looked at her name-tag. “Ms. Levelle?”

“That one,” she said, pointing. “A Pictorial History of Flint County, Douree County, and Canning Township. Jawbreaker title, huh?”

He turned and saw two racks of reading material next to a shelf of souvenir cups and plates. One rack held magazines; the other held a mixture of paperback and current hardcover fiction. On the top shelf of the latter were half a dozen larger volumes, what Jeannie would have called coffee table books. They were shrink-wrapped so that browsers couldn’t smudge the pages or dog-ear the corners. Ralph walked over and looked up at them. Terry, who had a good three inches on him, wouldn’t have had to look up, or stand on tiptoe to take one of them down.

He started to reach for the book she’d mentioned, then changed his mind. He turned back to Ms. Levelle. “Tell me what you remember.”

“What, about that guy? Nothing much to tell. The gift shop got way busy after the lecture broke, I remember that, but I only got a trickle of custom. You know why, don’t you?”

Ralph shook his head, trying to be patient. There was something here, all right, and he thought—hoped—he knew what it was.

“They didn’t want to lose their place in line, of course, and they all had the new book by Mr. Coben to read while they waited. But these three gentlemen did come in, and one of them—the fat one—bought that new Lisa Gardner hardback. The other two just browsed. Then a lady poked her head in and said she was all set, so they left. To get their autographs, I suppose.”

“But one of them—the tall one—expressed an interest in the Flint County book.”

“Yes, but I think it was the Canning Township part of the title that caught his eye. Did he say his family lived there for a long time?”

“I don’t know,” Ralph said. “You tell me.”

“Pretty sure he did. He took it down, but when he saw the pricetag—seventy-nine ninety-nine—he put it back on the shelf.”

And whoomp, there it was. “Has anyone looked at that book since? Taken it down and handled it?”

“That one? You’re kidding.”

Ralph went to the rack, stood on his toes, and took down the shrink-wrapped book. He held it by the sides, using his palms. On the front was a sepia-toned photograph of a long-ago funeral procession. Six cowboys, all wearing battered hats and holstered pistols, were carrying a plank coffin into a dusty cemetery. A preacher (also wearing a holstered gun) was waiting for them at the head of an open grave with a Bible in his hands.

Ms. Levelle brightened considerably. “You actually want to buy that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, hand it over so I can scan it.”

“I don’t think so.” He held the book up with the bar code stickered to the shrink-wrap facing her, and she beeped it.

“That’s eighty-four fourteen with the tax, but we’ll call it eighty-four even.”

Ralph set the book carefully on end to hand over his credit card. He tucked his receipt into his breast pocket, then once again picked the book up using just his palms, holding it out like a chalice.

“He handled it,” he said, less to make sure of her than to confirm his own absurd luck. “You’re sure the man in the picture I showed you handled this book.”

“Took it down and said that cover picture was taken in Canning Township. Then he looked at the price and put it back. Just like I told you. Is it evidence, or something?”

“I don’t know,” Ralph said, looking down at the antique mourners gracing the cover. “But I’m going to find out.”

16

Frank Peterson’s body had been released to the Donelli Brothers Funeral Home on Thursday afternoon. Arlene Peterson had arranged for this and everything else, including the obituary, the flowers, the Friday morning memorial service, the funeral itself, the graveside service, and the Saturday evening gathering of friends and family. It had to be her. Fred was useless at making any kind of social arrangements at the best of times.

But this time it has to be me, Fred told himself when he and Ollie got home from the hospital. It has to be, because there is no one else. And that guy from Donelli will help me. They’re experts at this. Only how was he supposed to pay for a second funeral, so soon after the first? Would insurance cover it? He didn’t know. Arlene had handled all that stuff, too. They had a deal: he made the money and she paid the bills. He would have to look through her desk for the insurance paperwork. The thought of it made him tired.

They sat in the living room. Ollie turned on the television. There was a soccer match on. They watched it awhile, although neither of them really cared for the game; they were pro football guys. At last Fred got up, trudged into the hall, and brought back Arlene’s old red address book. He turned to the Ds, and yes, there was Donelli Brothers, but her usual neat script was shaky, and why not? She wouldn’t have noted down the number of a funeral parlor before Frank died, now would she? The Petersons were supposed to have years before needing to worry about burial rites. Years.

Looking at the address book, its red leather faded and scuffed, Fred thought of all the times he had seen it in her hands, jotting down return addresses from envelopes in the old days, from the Internet more recently. He began to cry.

“I can’t,” he said. “I just can’t. Not so soon after Frankie.”

On TV, the announcer screamed “GOAL!” and the players in the red shirts started to jump all over each other. Ollie turned it off and held out his hand.

“I’ll do it.”

Fred looked at him, eyes red and streaming.

Ollie nodded. “It’s okay, Dad. Really. I’ll take care of it, the whole deal. Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down?”

And although Fred knew it was probably wrong to leave his seventeen-year-old son with this burden, he did just that. He promised himself he would carry his share of the weight in time, but right now he needed to take a nap. He was really very tired.

17

Alec Pelley wasn’t able to break free of his own family commitments that Sunday until three thirty. It was after five when he reached the Cap City Sheraton, but the afternoon sun was still burning a hole in the sky. He parked in the hotel turnaround, slipped the parking valet a ten, and told him to keep his car close. In the newsstand, Lorette Levelle was once more rearranging her bits of jewelry. Alec’s visit there was brief. He went back outside, leaned against his Explorer, and called Howie Gold.

“I beat Anderson to the security footage—plus the TV tape—but he beat me to the book. And bought it. I guess you’d have to call that a wash.”

“Fuck,” Howie said. “How did he even know about it?”

“I don’t think he did. I think it was a combination of luck and old-fashioned police work. The woman who works in the newsstand says a guy took it down on the day of Coben’s lecture, saw the pricetag—almost eighty bucks—and put it back. Didn’t seem to know the guy was Maitland, so I guess she doesn’t watch the news. She told Anderson, and Anderson bought the book. She says he walked out holding it by the sides, and with the palms of his hands.”

“Hoping to raise prints that don’t match Terry’s,” Howie said, “thus suggesting that whoever handled that book was not Terry. Won’t work. God knows how many people may have taken that book down and handled it.”

“The woman who runs the newsstand would beg to disagree. She says that one just sat up there, month in and month out.”

“Makes no difference.” Howie didn’t sound worried, which left Alec free to worry for both of them. It wasn’t much, but it was something. A small flaw in a case that had been shaping up as pretty as a painting in a museum. A possible flaw, he reminded himself, and Howie could easily work around it; juries didn’t care much about what wasn’t there.

“Just wanted you to know, boss. It’s what you pay me for.”

“Okay, now I know. You’ll be there for the arraignment tomorrow, right?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Alec said. “Did you talk to Samuels about bail?”

“I did. The conversation was brief. He said he would fight it with every fiber of his being. His very words.”

“Jesus, does the guy have an off button?”

“A good question.”

“Will you get it anyway?”

“I have a good chance. Nothing’s a sure thing, but I’m almost positive.”

“If you do, tell Maitland not to take any neighborhood strolls. Lots of people keep a home protection weapon handy, and right now he’s the least popular guy in Flint City.”

“He’ll be restricted to his home, and you can be sure the cops will be keeping the house under surveillance.” Howie sighed. “A shame about that book.”

Alec ended the call and jumped back in his car. He wanted to be home in plenty of time to make popcorn before Game of Thrones.

18

Ralph Anderson and State Police Detective Yunel Sablo met with the Flint County DA that evening in the den of Bill Samuels’s home on the city’s north side, an almost-posh neighborhood of large houses that aspired to McMansion status and didn’t quite make it. Outside, Samuels’s two girls were chasing each other through the backyard sprinkler as dusk slowly dissolved into dark. Samuels’s ex-wife had stayed around to cook dinner for them. Samuels had been in fine fettle all through the meal, often patting his ex’s hand and even holding it for brief periods, to which she did not seem to object. Pretty chummy for a couple living in splitsville, Ralph thought, and good for them. But now dinner was finished, the ex was packing up the girls’ things, and Ralph had an idea that DA Samuels’s good mood would soon be finished, too.

A Pictorial History of Flint County, Douree County, and Canning Township sat on the den’s coffee table. It was in a clear plastic Baggie, taken from one of Ralph’s kitchen drawers and slipped carefully over the book. The funeral cortege now looked blurry, because the shrink-wrap had been dusted with fingerprint powder. A single print—a thumb—stood out on the book’s front cover, near the spine. It was as clear as the date on a new penny.

“There are four more good ones on the back,” Ralph said. “It’s how you pick up a heavy book—thumb in front, fingers on the back, slightly splayed, to support. I would have printed it right there in Cap City, but I didn’t have Terry’s prints for comparison purposes. So I grabbed what I needed at the station and did it at home.”

Samuels elevated his brows. “You took his print-card out of evidence?”

“Nah, photocopied it.”

“Don’t keep us in suspense,” Sablo said.

“I won’t,” Ralph said. “They match. The prints on this book belong to Terry Maitland.”

The Mr. Sunshine who’d sat beside his ex at the dinner table disappeared. Mr. Gonna Rain A Bitch took his place. “You can’t be sure of that without a computer match.”

“Bill, I was doing this before there was such a thing.” Back in the days when you were still trying to look up girls’ skirts in high school study hall. “They’re Maitland’s prints, and computer comparison will confirm it. Look at these.”

He took a small bundle of cards from the inner pocket of his sportcoat and laid them out in two rows on the coffee table. “Here are Terry’s prints from his booking last night. And here are Terry’s prints from the shrink-wrap. Now you tell me.”

Samuels and Sablo leaned forward, looking from the row of cards on the left to the ones on the right. Sablo sat back first. “I buy it.”

“I won’t without a computer comparison,” Samuels said. The words came out sounding stilted because his jaw was jutting. Under other circumstances, that might have been funny.

Ralph made no immediate reply. He was curious about Bill Samuels, and hopeful (he was hopeful by nature) that his earlier judgement about the man—that he might cut and run if faced with a really spirited counterattack—had been wrong. Samuels’s ex-wife still held him in some regard, that had been obvious, and the little girls loved him bigtime, but such evidence only spoke to one facet of a man’s character. A guy at home wasn’t necessarily the same guy at work, especially when the fellow in question was ambitious and faced with a sudden obstacle that might nip all his big plans in the bud. These things mattered to Ralph. They mattered a great deal, because he and Samuels were bound together by this case, win or lose.

“It’s impossible,” Samuels said, one hand going to brush down the cowlick, but tonight the cowlick wasn’t there. Tonight it was behaving. “He can’t have been in two places at the same time.”

“Yet so it appears,” Sablo said. “Until today, there was no forensic evidence in Cap City. Now there is.”

Samuels brightened momentarily. “Maybe he handled the book at some prior date. Preparing his alibi. All part of the set-up.” Apparently forgetting his previous assessment that the murder of Frank Peterson had been the impulse act of a man who could no longer control his urges.

“The idea can’t be discounted,” Ralph said, “but I’ve seen a lot of prints, and these look fairly fresh. The quality of the friction ridge detail is very good. That wouldn’t be the case if these had been made weeks or months ago.”

Speaking almost too softly to hear, Sablo said, “ ’Mano, it’s like you took a hit on twelve and got a face-card.”

“What?” Samuels snapped his head around.

“Blackjack,” Ralph said. “He’s saying it would have been better if we hadn’t found it. If we’d just stood pat.”

They considered this. When Samuels spoke, he sounded almost pleasant—a man just passing the time. “Here’s a hypothetical for you. What if you had dusted down that shrink-wrap and found nothing? Or just a few unidentifiable blurs?”

“We wouldn’t be better off,” Sablo said, “but we wouldn’t be worse off.”

Samuels nodded. “In that case—hypothetically speaking—Ralph would just be a guy who’d bought a fairly expensive book. He wouldn’t throw it away, he’d call it a good idea that didn’t pan out and put it on his shelf. After stripping off the shrink-wrap and throwing it away, of course.”

Sablo looked from Samuels to Ralph, his face giving nothing away.

“And these fingerprint cards?” Ralph asked. “What about them?”

“What cards?” Samuels asked. “I don’t see any cards. Do you, Yune?”

“I don’t know if I do or not,” Sablo said.

“You’re talking about destroying evidence,” Ralph said.

“Not at all. This is all just hypothetical.” Samuels again raised his hand to brush at the cowlick that wasn’t there. “But here’s something to think about, Ralph. You went to the station first, but did the comparison at your home. Was your wife there?”

“Jeannie was at her book club.”

“Uh-huh, and look. The book’s in a Glad bag instead of an official one. Not entered into evidence.”

“Not yet,” Ralph said, but instead of thinking about the different facets of Bill Samuels’s character, he was now forced to think about the different facets of his own.

“I’m just saying that the same hypothetical possibility might have been in the back of your own mind.”

Had it been? Ralph could not honestly say. And if it had been, why had it been? To save an ugly black mark on his career, now that this thing was not just going sideways but in danger of tipping over?

“No,” he said. “This will be logged into evidence, and will become part of discovery. Because that kid is dead, Bill. What happens to us is small shit compared to that.”

“I agree,” Sablo said.

“Of course you do,” Samuels said. He sounded tired. “Lieutenant Yune Sablo will survive either way.”

“Speaking of survival,” Ralph said, “what about Terry Maitland’s? What if we really do have the wrong man?”

“We don’t,” Samuels said. “The evidence says we don’t.”

And on that note, the meeting ended. Ralph went back to the station. There he logged in A Pictorial History of Flint County, Douree County, and Canning Township and stored it in the accumulating file. He was glad to be rid of it.

As he went around the building to retrieve his personal car, his cell rang. It was his wife’s picture on the screen, and when he answered, he was alarmed by the sound of her voice. “Honey? Have you been crying?”

“Derek called. From camp.”

Ralph’s heart kicked up a notch. “Is he all right?”

“He’s fine. Physically fine. But some of his friends emailed him about Terry, and he’s upset. He said it must be wrong, that Coach T would never do a thing like that.”

“Oh. Is that all.” He started moving again, feeling for his keys with his free hand.

“No, it’s not all,” she said fiercely. “Where are you?”

“At the station. Then headed home.”

“Can you go to county first? And talk to him?”

“To Terry? I guess I could, if he’ll agree to see me, but why?”

“Set aside all the evidence for a minute. All of it on both sides, and answer me one question, truly and from your heart. Will you do that?”

“Okay…” He could hear the faraway drone of semis on the interstate. Closer, the peaceful summer sound of crickets in the grass growing alongside the brick building where he had worked for so many years. He knew what she was going to ask.

“Do you think Terry Maitland killed that little boy?”

Ralph thought of how the man who’d taken Willow Rainwater’s cab to Dubrow had called her ma’am instead of by her name, which he should have known. He thought about how the man who’d parked the white van behind Shorty’s Pub had asked directions to the nearest doc-in-the-box, although Terry Maitland had lived in Flint City all his life. He thought about the teachers who would swear Terry had been with them, both at the time of the abduction and at the time of the murder. Then he thought about how convenient it was that Terry had not just asked a question at Mr. Harlan Coben’s talk, but had risen to his feet, as if to make sure he would be seen and recorded. Even the fingerprints on the book… how perfect was that?

“Ralph? Are you still there?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe if I’d coached with him like Howie… but I only watched him coach Derek. So the answer to your question—truly, and from my heart—is I just don’t know.”

“Then go there,” she said. “Look him in the eyes and ask him.”

“Samuels is apt to rip me a new one if he finds out,” Ralph said.

“I don’t care about Bill Samuels, but I care about our son. And I know you do, too. Do it for him, Ralph. For Derek.”

19

It turned out that Arlene Peterson did have burial insurance, so that was all right. Ollie found the pertinent papers in the bottom drawer of her little desk, in a folder between MORTGAGE AGREEMENT (said mortgage now almost paid off) and APPLIANCE WARRANTIES. He called the funeral parlor, where a man with the soft voice of a professional mourner—maybe a Donelli brother, maybe not—thanked him and told him that “your mother has arrived.” As if she’d gotten there on her own, maybe in an Uber. The professional mourner asked if Ollie needed an obituary form for the newspaper. Ollie said no. He was looking at two blank forms right there on the desk. His mother—careful, even in her grief—must have made photocopies of the one she’d gotten for Frank, in case she made a mistake. So that was all right, too. Would he want to come in tomorrow and make arrangements for the funeral and the burial? Ollie said he didn’t think so. He thought his father should be the one to do that.

Once the question of paying for his mother’s final rites was put to rest, Ollie dropped his head onto her desk and cried for awhile. He did it quietly, so as not to wake his father. When the tears dried up, he filled out one of the obituary forms, printing everything because his handwriting sucked. Once that chore was finished, he went out to the kitchen and surveyed the mess there: pasta on the linoleum, chicken carcass lying under the clock, all those Tupperwares and covered dishes on the counters. It reminded him of something his mom used to say after big family meals—the pigs ate here. He got a Hefty bag from under the sink and dumped everything in, starting with the chicken carcass, which looked especially gruesome. Then he washed the floor. Once everything was spick (something else his mother used to say), he discovered he was hungry. That seemed wrong but was still a fact. People were basically animals, he realized. Even with your mother and little brother dead, you had to eat and shit out what you ate. The body demanded it. He opened the fridge and discovered it was packed top to bottom and side to side with more casseroles, more Tupperware containers, more cold cuts. He selected a shepherd’s pie, its surface a snowy plain of mashed potato, and stuck it in the oven at 350. While he was leaning against the counter and waiting for it to heat, feeling like a visitor inside his own head, his dad wandered in. Fred’s hair was a mess. You’re all sticky-uppy, Arlene Peterson would have said. He needed a shave. His eyes were puffy and dazed.

“I took one of your mother’s pills and slept too long,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it, Dad.”

“You cleaned up the kitchen. I should have helped you.”

“It’s okay.”

“Your mother… the funeral…” Fred didn’t seem to know how to go on, and Ollie noticed that his fly was unzipped. This filled him with an inchoate pity. Yet he didn’t feel like crying again, he seemed to be cried out, at least for the time being. Something else that was all right. Must count my blessings, Ollie thought.

“We’re in good shape,” he told his dad. “She had burial insurance, you both do, and she’s… there. At the place. You know, the parlor.” He was afraid to say funeral, because that might get his father going. Which might get him going again.

“Oh. Good.” Fred sat down and put the heel of his hand against his forehead. “I should have done that. It was my job. My responsibility. I never meant to sleep so long.”

“You can go down tomorrow. Pick out the coffin, and all.”

“Where?”

“Donelli Brothers. Same as Frank.”

“She’s dead,” Fred marveled. “I don’t even know how to think of it.”

“Yeah,” Ollie said, although he had been able to think of nothing else. How she’d kept trying to apologize, right to the end. As if it was all her fault when none of it was. “The funeral guy says there’s stuff you’ll have to decide about. Will you be able to do that?”

“Sure. I’ll be better tomorrow. Something smells good.”

“Shepherd’s pie.”

“Did your mother make it, or did someone bring it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, it smells good.”

They ate at the kitchen table. Ollie put their dishes in the sink, because the dishwasher was full. They went into the living room. Now it was baseball on ESPN, Phillies against the Mets. They watched without talking, each in his own way exploring the edges of the hole that had appeared in their lives, so as not to fall in. After awhile Ollie went out on the back steps and sat looking up at the stars. There were plenty of them. He also saw a meteor, an earth satellite, and several planes. He thought about how his mother was dead, and would see none of these things again. It was totally absurd that such a thing should be so. When he went back in, the baseball game was going into the ninth all tied up, and his father had gone to sleep in his chair. Ollie kissed him on the top of his head. Fred didn’t stir.

20

Ralph got a text on his way to the county jail. It was from Kinderman, in State Police Computer Forensics. Ralph pulled over at once and called back. Kinderman answered on the first ring.

“Don’t you guys take Sunday night off?” Ralph asked.

“What can I say, we’re geeks.” In the background, Ralph could hear the bellow of a heavy metal band. “Besides, I always think that good news can wait, but bad news should be passed on right away. We’re not done exploring Maitland’s hard drives for hidden files, and some of these kiddy-fiddlers can be pretty clever about that, but on the surface, he’s clean. No kiddie porn, no porn of any kind. Not on his desktop, not on his laptop, not on his iPad, not on his phone. He looks like Mr. White Hat.”

“What about his history?”

“There’s plenty, but all stuff you’d expect—shopping sites like Amazon, news blogs like Huffington Post, half a dozen sports sites. He keeps track of the Major League standings, and he appears to be a fan of the Tampa Bay Rays. That alone suggests there’s something wrong with his head. He watches Ozark on Netflix, and The Americans on iTunes. I enjoy that one myself.”

“Keep digging.”

“It’s what they pay me for.”

Ralph parked in an OFFICIAL VEHICLES ONLY slot behind the county jail, took his on-duty card from the glove compartment, and put it on the dashboard. A corrections officer—L. KEENE, according to his name-tag—was waiting for him, and escorted him to one of the interview rooms. “This is irregular, Detective. It’s almost ten o’clock.”

“I’m aware of the time, and I’m not here for recreational purposes.”

“Does the DA know you’re here?”

“Above your pay grade, Officer Keene.”

Ralph sat down on one side of the table and waited to see if Terry would agree to make an appearance. No porn on Terry’s computers, and no stashes of porn in the house, at least that they had found so far. But, as Kinderman had pointed out, pedos could be clever.

How clever was it for him to show his face, though? And leave fingerprints?

He knew what Samuels would say: Terry was in a frenzy. Once (it seemed like a long time ago) this had made sense to Ralph.

Keene led Terry in. He was wearing county browns and cheap plastic flip-flops. His hands were cuffed in front of him.

“Take off the bracelets, Officer.”

Keene shook his head. “Protocol.”

“I’ll take responsibility.”

Keene smiled without humor. “No, Detective, you will not. This is my house, and if he decides to leap across the table and choke you, it’s on me. But tell you what, I won’t tether him to the cuff-bolt. How’s that?”

Terry smiled at this, as if to say You see what I have to deal with?

Ralph sighed. “You can leave us, Officer Keene. And thanks.”

Keene left, but he would be watching through the one-way glass. Probably listening, as well. This was going to get back to Samuels; there was simply no way around it.

Ralph looked at Terry. “Don’t just stand there. Sit down, for God’s sake.”

Terry sat and folded his hands on the table. The handcuff chain rattled. “Howie Gold wouldn’t approve of me meeting you.” He continued to smile as he said it.

“Samuels wouldn’t either, so we’re even.”

“What do you want?”

“Answers. If you’re innocent, why do I have half a dozen witnesses who’ve identified you? Why are your fingerprints on the branch used to sodomize that boy, and all over the van that was used to abduct him?”

Terry shook his head. The smile was gone. “I’m as mystified as you are. I just thank God, his only begotten son, and all the saints that I can prove I was in Cap City. What if I couldn’t, Ralph? I think we both know. I’d be in the death house up in McAlester before the end of summer, and two years from now I’d be riding the needle. Maybe sooner, because the courts are rigged to the right all the way to the top and your pal Samuels would plow over my appeals like a bulldozer over a kid’s sand castle.”

The first thing that rose to Ralph’s lips was he’s not my pal. What he said was, “The van interests me. The one with the New York plates.”

“Can’t help you there. The last time I was in New York was on my honeymoon, and that was sixteen years ago.”

It was Ralph’s turn to smile. “I didn’t know that, but I knew you hadn’t been there recently. We back-checked your movements over the last six months. Nothing but a trip to Ohio in April.”

“Yes, to Dayton. The girls’ spring vacation. I wanted to see my dad, and they wanted to go. Marcy did, too.”

“Your father lives in Dayton?”

“If you can call what he’s doing these days living. It’s a long story, and nothing to do with this. No sinister white vans involved, not even the family car. We flew Southwest. I don’t care how many of my fingerprints you found in the van that guy used to abduct Frank Peterson, I didn’t steal it. I’ve never even seen it. I don’t expect you to believe it, but it’s the truth.”

“Nobody thinks you stole the van in New York,” Ralph said. “Bill Samuels’s theory is that whoever did steal it dumped it somewhere in this vicinity, with the ignition key still in it. You re-stole it, and cached it somewhere until you were ready to… to do what you did.”

“Pretty careful, for a man who went about his business with his bare face hanging out.”

“Samuels will tell the jury you were in a kill-frenzy. And they’ll believe it.”

“Will they still believe it after Ev, Billy, and Debbie testify? And after Howie shows the jury that tape of Coben’s lecture?”

Ralph didn’t want to go there. At least not yet. “Did you know Frank Peterson?”

Terry uttered a bark of laughter. “That’s one of those questions Howie wouldn’t want me to answer.”

“Does that mean you won’t?”

“As a matter of fact, I will. I knew him to say hi to—I know most of the kids on the West Side—but I didn’t know him know him, if you see what I mean. He was still in grade school and didn’t play sports. Couldn’t miss that red hair, though. Like a stop sign. Him and his brother both. I had Ollie in Little League, but he didn’t move up to City League when he turned thirteen. He wasn’t bad in the outfield, and he could hit a little, but he lost interest. Some of them do.”

“So you didn’t have your eye on Frankie?”

“No, Ralph. I have no sexual interest in children.”

“Didn’t just happen to see him walking his bike across the parking lot of Gerald’s Fine Groceries and say ‘Aha, here’s my chance’?”

Terry looked at him with a silent contempt that Ralph found hard to bear. But he didn’t drop his eyes. After a moment, Terry sighed, raised his cuffed hands to the mirror side of the one-way glass, and called, “We’re done here.”

“Not quite,” Ralph said. “I need you to answer one more question, and I want you to look me right in the eyes when you do it. Did you kill Frank Peterson?”

Terry’s gaze didn’t waver. “I did not.”

Officer Keene took Terry away. Ralph sat where he was, waiting for Keene to come back and escort him through the three locked doors between this interview room and free air. So now he had the answer to the question Jeannie had told him to ask, and the answer, given with unwavering eye contact, was I did not.

Ralph wanted to believe him.

And could not.