The Outsider

1

As it turned out, Holly did not fly business class, although she could have if she had opted for the 10:15 Delta flight, which would have put her in Cap City at 12:30. Because she wanted some extra time in Ohio, however, she booked an arduous three-stage trip on puddle-jumpers that would probably bounce her all over the uneasy July air. Cramped and not particularly pleasant, but bearable. What she found less bearable was the knowledge that she wouldn’t arrive in Flint City until six PM, and that was if all her arrangements worked out perfectly. The meeting at Attorney Gold’s office was scheduled for seven, and if there was one thing Holly hated above all others, it was being late for a scheduled appointment. Being late was the wrong way to get off on the right foot.

She packed her few things, checked out of the hotel, and drove the thirty miles to Regis. She went first to the house where Heath Holmes had been staying with his mother on his vacation. It was closed up, the windows boarded across, likely because vandals had been using them for target practice. On the lawn, which badly needed mowing, was a sign that read FOR SALE CONTACT FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF DAYTON.

Holly looked at the house, knew that the local kids would soon be whispering that it was haunted (if they weren’t already), and mused on the nature of tragedy. Like measles, mumps, or rubella, tragedy was contagious. Unlike those diseases, there was no vaccine. The death of Frank Peterson in Flint City had infected his unfortunate family and spread through the entire town. She doubted if that was quite the case in this suburban community, where fewer people had long-term ties, but the Holmes family was certainly gone; nothing left of them but this empty house.

She debated taking a photo of the boarded-up house with the FOR SALE sign in the foreground—a picture of sorrow and loss if there ever was one—and decided not to. Some of the people she was going to meet might understand, might feel those things, but most of them probably would not. To them it would just be a picture.

She drove from the Holmes residence to the Peaceful Rest Cemetery, on the outskirts of town. Here she found the family reunited: father, mother, and only son. There were no flowers, and the stone marking the resting place of Heath Holmes had been pushed over. She imagined the same thing might have happened to Terry Maitland’s stone. Sorrow was catching; so was anger. His was a small marker, nothing on it but the name, the dates, and a bit of dried scum that might have been the residue of a thrown egg. With some effort, she set it up again. She had no illusions that it would stay that way, but a person did what a person could.

“You didn’t kill anyone, Mr. Holmes, did you? You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She found some posies on a nearby grave, and borrowed a few to scatter on Heath’s. Picked flowers were a poor remembrance—they died—but better than nothing. “You’re stuck with it, though. Nobody here would ever believe the truth. I don’t think the people I’m going to meet tonight will believe it, either.”

She would try to convince them, just the same. A person did what a person could, whether it was setting up gravestones or trying to convince twenty-first-century men and women that there were monsters in the world, and their greatest advantage was the unwillingness of rational people to believe.

Holly looked around and saw a vault on a nearby low hill (in this part of Ohio, all the hills were low). She walked to it, gazed at the name chiseled in the granite over the lintel—GRAVES, how appropriate—and walked down the three stone steps. She peered inside at the stone benches, where one could sit and meditate on the Graves of yesteryear here entombed. Had the outsider hidden here after his filthy work was done? She didn’t believe so, because anyone—maybe even one of the vandals who had pushed over Heath Holmes’s stone—might wander over for a peek inside. Also, the sun would shine into the meditation area for an hour or two in the afternoons, giving it a bit of fugitive warmth. If the outsider was what she believed he was, he would prefer darkness. Not always, no, but for certain periods of time. Certain crucial periods. She hadn’t finished her research yet, but she was almost sure of that much. And something else: murder might be its life’s work, but sorrow was its food. Sorrow and anger.

No, it hadn’t taken its rest in this vault, but she believed it had been in this cemetery, perhaps even before the deaths of Mavis Holmes and her son. Holly thought (she knew it might only be a fancy) she could smell its presence. Brady Hartsfield had had that same smell about him, the stink of the unnatural. Bill had known it; the nurses who had cared for Hartsfield had known it, too, even though he was supposedly in a state of semi-catatonia.

She walked slowly to the little parking lot outside the cemetery gates with her bag banging against her hip. Her Prius waited alone in the sizzling summer heat. She walked past it, then turned a slow three-sixty, studying every aspect of the surrounding area. She was close to farm country—she could smell the fertilizer—but this was a transitional belt of industrial abandonment, ugly and barren. There would be no pictures of it in the Chamber of Commerce promotional brochures (assuming Regis had a Chamber of Commerce). There were no points of interest. There was nothing to attract the eye; it was repelled instead, as if the very earth was saying go away, there is nothing for you here, goodbye, don’t come again. Well, there was the cemetery, but few people would visit Peaceful Rest once winter came, and the north wind would freeze those few away after the briefest of visits to make their manners to the dead.

Yonder to the north were train tracks, but the rails were rusty and there were weeds growing up between the crossties. There was a long-deserted train station, its windows boarded up like those of the Holmes house. Beyond it, on a spur, stood two lonely boxcars, their wheels buried in vines. They looked as if they had been there since the Vietnam era. Near the deserted station were long-abandoned storage facilities and what she assumed were obsolete repair sheds. Beyond those, a broken factory stood hip-deep in sunflowers and bushes. A swastika had been spray-painted on crumbling pink bricks that had been red a long, long time ago. On one side of the highway that would take her back to town, a leaning billboard proclaimed ABORTION STOPS A BEATING HEART! CHOOSE LIFE! On the other side was a long low building with a sign on its roof reading SPE DY ROBO CAR WASH. In its empty parking lot was another sign, one she’d seen once already today: FOR SALE CONTACT FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF DAYTON.

I think you were here. Not in the vault, but close by. Where you could smell tears when the wind was right. Where you could hear the laughter of the men or boys who pushed over Heath Holmes’s stone and then likely urinated on his grave.

In spite of the day’s heat, Holly felt cold. Given more time, she might have investigated those empty places. There was no danger; the outsider was long gone from Ohio. Very likely gone from Flint City, too.

She snapped four pictures: the train station, the boxcars, the factory, the deserted car wash. She reviewed them and decided they would do. They’d have to. She had a plane to catch.

Yes, and people to convince.

If she could, that was. She felt very small and lonely just now. It was easy to imagine laughter and ridicule; thinking of such things came naturally to her. But she would try. She had to. For the murdered children, yes—Frank Peterson and the Howard girls and all the ones who had come before them—but also for Terry Maitland and Heath Holmes. A person did what a person could.

She had one more stop to make. Luckily, it was on her way.

2

An old man sitting on a bench in Trotwood Community Park was happy to give her directions to the place where the bodies of “those poor gals” had been found. It wasn’t far, he said, and she would know it when she got there.

She did.

Holly pulled over, got out, and gazed at a ravine which mourners—and thrill-seekers masquerading as mourners—had attempted to turn into a shrine. There were glittery cards upon which words like SORROW and HEAVEN predominated. There were balloons, some deflating, some fresh and new, even though Amber and Jolene Howard had been discovered here three months earlier. There was a statue of Mary, which some wag had decorated with a mustache. There was a teddy bear that made Holly shudder. Its plump brown body was covered with mold.

She raised her iPad, took a picture.

There was no whiff of that smell she had gotten (or imagined she’d gotten) at the cemetery, but she had no doubt the outsider would have visited this place at some point after the bodies of Amber and Jolene had been discovered, sampling the grief of the pilgrims to this makeshift shrine like a fine old Burgundy. Also the excitement of those—not many, but a few, there were always a few—who came to meditate on what it might be like to do such things as had been done to the Howard girls, and listen to their screams.

Yes, you came, but not too soon. Not until you could do so without attracting unwanted attention, the way you did on the day Frank Peterson’s brother shot Terry Maitland.

“Only that time you couldn’t resist, could you?” Holly murmured. “It would have been like a starving man trying to resist a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings.”

A minivan pulled in ahead of Holly’s Prius. On one side of the bumper was a sticker reading MOM’S TAXI. The one on the other side read I BELIEVE IN THE 2ND AMENDMENT, AND I VOTE. The woman who got out was well-dressed, plump, pretty, in her thirties. She was holding a bouquet of flowers. She knelt, put them beside a wooden cross with LITTLE GIRLS on one arm and WITH JESUS on the other. Then she stood up.

“So sad, isn’t it?” she said to Holly.

“Yes.”

“I’m a Christian, but I’m glad the man who did it is dead. Glad. And I’m glad he’s in hell. Is that awful of me?”

“He’s not in hell,” Holly said.

The woman recoiled as if she had been slapped.

“He brings hell.”

Holly drove to the Dayton Airport. She was running a bit behind, but resisted the urge to exceed the speed limit. Laws were laws for a reason.

3

Having to fly on the commuter planes (Tin Can Airways was what Bill had called them) had its advantages. For one, the final leg put her down at Kiowa Airfield in Flint County, saving her a seventy-mile drive from Cap City. Leapfrog travel also gave her a chance to continue her researches. During her brief layovers between flights, she used airport Wi-Fi to download as much information as she could, and as fast as she could. During the flights themselves she read what she had downloaded, scrolling fast and concentrating fiercely, barely hearing the dismayed yelps when her second flight, a thirty-seat turboprop, hit an air pocket and dropped like an elevator.

She arrived at her destination only five minutes late, and by putting on a burst of speed, was first to Hertz, earning a dirty look from the overburdened salesman type she beat out with a final sprint. On the way into town, seeing how close she was shaving it, she gave in to temptation and broke the speed limit. But only by five miles an hour.

4

“That’s her. Got to be.”

Howie Gold and Alec Pelley were standing outside the building where Howie kept his offices. Howie was pointing to a slim woman in a gray business suit and white blouse trotting up the sidewalk, a big totebag banging against one slim hip. Her hair was cut close to her small face, with graying bangs that stopped just short of her eyebrows. There was a touch of fading lipstick on her mouth, but she wore no other makeup. The sun was sinking, but what remained of the day was still hot, and a trickle of sweat ran down one of her cheeks.

“Ms. Gibney?” Howie asked, stepping forward.

“Yes,” she panted. “Am I late?”

“Two minutes early, actually,” Alec said. “May I take your bag? It looks heavy.”

“I’m fine,” she said, looking from the stocky, balding lawyer to the investigator who had hired her. Pelley was at least six inches taller than his boss, with graying hair combed straight back, tonight dressed in tan slacks and a white shirt open at the neck. “Are the others here?”

“Most,” Alec said. “Detective Anderson—ah, speak of the devil.”

Holly turned and saw three people approaching. One was a woman, holding the remains of her youthful good looks quite well into her middle age, although the circles under her eyes, only partially concealed by foundation and a bit of powder, suggested she might not have been sleeping well lately. To her left was a skinny, nervous-looking man with a cowlick coming loose from the back of his otherwise rigidly controlled hair. And on her right…

Detective Anderson was a tall man with sloping shoulders and the beginnings of what would probably become a paunch if he didn’t start exercising more and watching what he ate. His head was slightly thrust forward, his eyes, bright blue, taking her in from top to bottom and stem to stern. It wasn’t Bill, of course it wasn’t, Bill was two years dead and never coming back. Also, this man was much younger than Bill had been when Holly first met him. It was the eager curiosity in his face that was the same. He was holding the woman’s hand, which suggested she was Mrs. Anderson. Interesting that she should have come with him.

There were introductions all around. The slender man with the cowlick, it turned out, was Flint County district attorney William (“Please call me Bill”) Samuels.

“Let’s go upstairs and get out of this heat,” Howie said.

Mrs. Anderson—Jeanette—asked Holly if she had had a good flight, and Holly made the appropriate response. Then she turned to Howie and asked if there was perhaps audio-visual capability in the room they would be using. He told her there certainly was, and she was welcome to use it if she had material to present. When they stepped out of the elevator, Holly enquired about the women’s room. “I could use a minute or two. I came directly from the airport.”

“Absolutely. End of the hall, turn left. Should be unlocked.”

Holly was afraid Mrs. Anderson would volunteer to go with her, but Jeanette didn’t. Which was good. Holly did have to pee (“spend a penny,” was how her mother always put it), but she had something more important in mind, a matter that could only be attended to in complete private.

In the stall, with her skirt up and her bag between her sensible loafers, she closed her eyes. Mindful that tiled rooms like this were natural amplifiers, she prayed silently.

This is Holly Gibney again, and I need help. You know I’m not good with strangers even one at a time, and tonight I have six of them to deal with. Seven, if Mr. Maitland’s widow is here. I’m not terrified, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was scared. Bill could do things like this, but I’m not him. Just help me to do it the way he would. Help me to understand their natural disbelief and not be afraid of it.

She finished aloud, but in a whisper. “Please God, help me not to frack up.” She paused, then added, “I’m not smoking.”

5

The meeting took place in Howard Gold’s conference room, and while it was smaller than the one on The Good Wife (Holly had watched all seven seasons, and had now moved on to the sequel), it was very nice. Tasteful pictures, polished mahogany table, leather chairs. Mrs. Maitland had indeed come. She was sitting at Mr. Gold’s right as Howie took his place at the head of the table and asked who was watching her girls.

Marcy gave him a wan smile. “Lukesh and Chandra Patel volunteered. Their son was on Terry’s team. In fact, Baibir was on third base when…” She looked at Detective Anderson. “When your men arrested him. Baibir was heartbroken. He didn’t understand.”

Anderson crossed his arms and said nothing. His wife put a hand on his shoulder and murmured something no one else was meant to hear. Anderson nodded.

“I’m going to call this meeting to order,” Mr. Gold said. “I have no agenda, but perhaps our visitor would like to begin. This is Holly Gibney, a private detective Alec hired to investigate the Dayton end of this business, assuming the two cases really are connected. That’s one of the things we’re here to determine, if possible.”

“I’m not a private detective,” Holly demurred. “My partner, Peter Huntley, is the one with the private investigator’s license. What our company mostly does is repo work and skip-tracing. We do take on an occasional criminal investigation where we’re unlikely to be scolded by the police. We’ve had good luck with missing pets, for instance.”

That sounded lame, and she felt blood heating her face.

“Ms. Gibney is being a trifle too modest,” Alec said. “I believe you were involved with running a violent fugitive named Morris Bellamy to earth.”

“That was my partner’s case,” Holly said. “My first partner. Bill Hodges. He’s since passed away, Mr. Pelley—Alec—as you know.”

“Yes,” Alec said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

The Latino man Detective Anderson had introduced as Yunel Sablo of the State Police now cleared his throat. “I believe,” he said, “that you and Mr. Hodges were also involved in a case of mass vehicular homicide and intended terrorism. A young man named Hartsfield. And that you, Ms. Gibney, were personally responsible for stopping him before he could cause an explosion in a crowded auditorium. One that might have killed thousands of young people.”

A murmur went around the table. Holly felt her face growing hotter. She would have liked to tell them that she had failed, that she had only halted Brady’s homicidal ambitions for awhile, that he had come back to cause yet more deaths before being stopped for good, but this was neither the time nor the place.

Lieutenant Sablo wasn’t finished. “I think you received a commendation from the city?”

“There were actually three of us who got commendations, but all it amounted to was a gold key and a bus pass good for ten years.” She looked around at them, unhappily aware that she was still blushing like a sixteen-year-old. “That was a long time ago. As for this case, I’d rather save my report for last. And my conclusions.”

“Like the final chapter in one of those old British drawing-room mysteries,” Mr. Gold said, smiling. “We all tell what we know, then you stand up and astound us with an explanation of who done it, and how.”

“Good luck with that,” Bill Samuels said. “Just thinking about the Peterson case makes my head hurt.”

“I believe we have most of the pieces,” Holly said, “but I don’t believe they’re all out on the table, even now. What I keep remembering—I’m sure you’ll think it’s silly—is that old saying about how Macy’s doesn’t tell Gimbels. But now Macy’s and Gimbels are both here—”

“Not to mention Saks, Nordstrom’s, and Needless Markup,” Howie said. Then, seeing Holly’s expression: “I’m not joshing you, Ms. Gibney, I’m agreeing with you. Everything on the table. Who starts?”

“Yune should,” Anderson said. “Since I’m on administrative leave.”

Yune put a briefcase on the table and took out his laptop. “Mr. Gold, can you show me how to use the projection gadget?”

Howie obliged, and Holly watched closely, so she would know how to do it herself when her turn came. Once the right cords were connected, Howie dimmed the lights a bit.

“Okay,” Yune said. “Apologies to you, Ms. Gibney, if I’m beating you to some of the stuff you found out while you were in Dayton.”

“Perfectly all right,” Holly said.

“I spoke with Captain Bill Darwin of the Dayton Police Department, and Sergeant George Highsmith of the Trotwood PD. When I told them we had a similar case, possibly connected by a stolen van that had been near both their crime scene and ours, they were willing to help, and thanks to the magic of telecommunication, I should have it all right here. If this gadget works, that is.”

Yune’s desktop appeared on the screen. He clicked on a file marked HOLMES. The first image was that of a man in an orange county jail jumpsuit. He had short-cropped auburn hair and beard stubble on his cheeks. His eyes were slightly squinted, giving him a look that could have been sinister or simply stunned at the sudden turn his life had taken. Holly had seen the mug shot on the front page of the Dayton Daily News, April 30th issue.

“This is Heath James Holmes,” Yune said. “Thirty-four. Arrested for the murders of Amber and Jolene Howard. I have crime scene pictures of the girls, but won’t show them to you. You wouldn’t sleep. The mutilations are the worst I’ve ever seen.”

Silence from the seven people watching. Jeannie was clutching her husband’s arm. Marcy was staring at Holmes’s photo as if mesmerized, with a hand over her mouth.

“Other than a minor juvenile bust for joyriding in a stolen car and a couple of speeding tickets, Holmes’s record is squeaky clean. His twice-yearly work evaluations, first at Kindred Hospital and then at the Heisman Memory Unit, are excellent. Co-workers and patients spoke highly of him. There are comments like always friendly and genuinely caring and goes the extra mile.”

“People said all those things about Terry,” Marcy murmured.

“Means nothing,” Samuels protested. “People said the same things about Ted Bundy.”

Yune continued. “Holmes told co-workers he planned to spend his one-week vacation with his mother in Regis, a small town thirty miles north of Dayton and Trotwood. Midway through his vacation week, the bodies of the Howard girls were discovered by a postman on his delivery rounds. The guy saw a huge flock of crows congregated at a ravine about a mile from the Howard home, and stopped to investigate. Given what he found, he probably wishes he hadn’t.”

He clicked, and two little blond girls replaced Heath Holmes’s squint and stubble. The photo had been taken at a carnival or an amusement park; Holly could see a Tilt-a-Whirl in the background. Amber and Jolene were smiling and holding up cones of cotton candy like prizes.

“No victim-blaming here, but the Howard girls were a handful. Alcoholic mother, father not in the picture, low-income home in a lousy neighborhood. The school had them tabbed as ‘at-risk students,’ and they had skipped out on several occasions. Which they did on Monday, April 23rd, at about ten in the morning. It was Amber’s free period, and Jolene said she had to use the bathroom, so they probably planned it in advance.”

“Escape from Alcatraz,” Bill Samuels said.

Nobody laughed.

Yune continued. “They were seen shortly before noon in a little beer-and-grocery about five blocks from the school. This is a still, taken from the store’s surveillance camera.”

The black-and-white image was crisp and clear—like something out of an old film noir, Holly thought. She stared at the two towheads, one with a couple of sodas and the other with a couple of candybars. They were dressed in jeans and tees. Neither looked pleased; the girl with the candybars was pointing, her mouth wide open and her brow furrowed.

“The clerk knew they were supposed to be in school and wouldn’t sell to them,” Yune said.

“No kidding,” Howie said. “You can almost hear the older one giving him hell.”

“True,” Yune said, “but that’s not the interesting part. Check out the upper right corner of the picture. On the sidewalk and looking in the window. Here, I’ll zoom it a little.”

Marcy murmured something very softly. It might have been Christ.

“It’s him, isn’t it?” Samuels said. “It’s Holmes. Watching them.”

Yune nodded. “That clerk was the last person to report seeing Amber and Jolene alive. But at least one more camera picked them up.”

He clicked, and another photo from another surveillance camera came up on the screen at the front of the conference room. This one had its electronic eye trained on an island of gas pumps. The time-code in the corner said 12:19 PM, April 23rd. Holly thought this must be the photo her nurse informant had mentioned. Candy Wilson had guessed that the vehicle in it was probably Holmes’s truck, a Chevy Tahoe that was “all fancied up,” but she had been wrong. The picture showed Heath Holmes in mid-stride, returning to a panel truck with DAYTON LANDSCAPING & POOLS printed on the side. His gas presumably paid for, he was returning to the vehicle with a soda in each hand. Leaning out the driver’s side window to take them was Amber, the older of the two Howard girls.

“When was that truck stolen?” Ralph asked.

“April 14th,” Yune said.

“He stashed it until he was ready. Which means this was a planned crime.”

“It would seem so, yes.”

Jeannie said, “And those girls just… got in with him?”

Yune shrugged. “Again, no victim-blaming—you can’t blame a couple of kids this young for making bad choices—but this picture does suggest they were with him willingly, at least to start with. Mrs. Howard told Sergeant Highsmith that the older girl made a habit of ‘hooking rides’ when she wanted to go someplace, even though she was told repeatedly it was dangerous behavior.”

Holly thought the two surveillance photos told a simple story. The outsider had seen the girls refused service at the beer-and-grocery, and offered to get them their sodas and candy a little bit further along, when he gassed up. After that, he might have told them he’d take them home or wherever else they might want to go. Just a nice guy helping out a couple of girls playing hooky—hell, he’d been young once himself.

“Holmes was next seen a little after six PM,” Yune resumed. “This was in a Waffle House on the outskirts of Dayton. He had blood on his face, hands, and shirt. He told the waitress and the short-order cook that he’d had a bloody nose, and washed up in the men’s. When he came out, he ordered some food to go. As he left, the cook and the waitress saw he also had spots of blood on the back of his shirt and the seat of his pants, which made his story seem a little less likely, being as how most people have their noses on in front. The waitress took down his plate number and called the police. They both later picked Holmes out of a six-pack. Hard to mistake that auburn hair.”

“Still driving the panel truck when he stopped at the Waffle House?” Ralph asked.

“Uh-huh. It was found abandoned in the Regis municipal parking lot shortly after the girls were found. There was a lot of blood in the back, his fingerprints and the girls’ fingerprints all over everything. Some in blood. Again, the resemblance to the Frank Peterson killing is very strong. Striking, in fact.”

“How close to his house in Regis was this panel truck found?” Holly asked.

“Less than half a mile. Police theorize he dumped it, strolled home, changed out of his bloody clothes, and cooked Mama a nice supper. The police got a hit on the fingerprints almost right away, but it took them a couple of days to cut through the red tape and get a name.”

“Because Holmes’s one bust, the joyriding thing, happened when he was still legally a minor,” Ralph said.

“Sí, señor. On April 26th, Holmes went in to the Heisman Memory Unit. When the lady in charge—Mrs. June Kelly—asked him what he was doing there during his vacation, he said he had to get something out of his locker, and he thought he’d check on a couple of patients while he was there. This struck her a bit odd, because while the nurses do have lockers, the orderlies only have these plastic cubby things in the break room. Also, orderlies are told from the jump that the correct word when referring to the paying clientele is residents, and Holmes usually just called them his guys and gals. All friendly-like. Anyway, one of the guys he checked on that day was Terry Maitland’s father, and the police found blond hairs in the man’s bathroom. Hairs that forensics matched to Jolene Howard’s.”

“Pretty goddam convenient,” Ralph said. “Did nobody suggest it might be a plant?”

“The way the evidence kept stacking up, they just assumed he was careless or wanted to be caught,” Yune said. “The panel truck, the fingerprints, the surveillance photos… girls’ underpants found in the basement… and finally the icing on the cake, a DNA match. Cheek swabs taken in custody matched semen the perp left at the scene.”

“My God,” Bill Samuels said. “It really is déjà vu all over again.”

“With one big exception,” Yune said. “Heath Holmes wasn’t lucky enough to get filmed at a lecture that happened to be going on at the same time the Howard girls were being abducted and murdered. His mother swore he had been in Regis the whole time, said he’d never gone in to the Heisman, and he certainly hadn’t gone to Trotwood. ‘Why would he?’ she said. ‘It’s a shitty town full of shitty people.’ ”

“Her testimony would have cut zero ice with a jury,” Samuels said. “Hey, if your mom won’t lie for you, who will?”

“Other people in the neighborhood saw him during his vacation week,” Yune went on. “He cut his mother’s grass, he fixed her gutters, he painted the stoop, and he helped the lady across the street plant some flowers. This was on the same day the Howard girls were taken. Also, that tricked-out truck of his was kind of hard to miss when he was driving around and doing errands.”

Howie asked, “The lady across the street, could she place him with her anywhere near the time those two girls were killed?”

“She said around ten in the morning. Close to an alibi, but no cigar. Regis is a lot nearer to Trotwood than Flint is to Cap City. Cops theorized that as soon as he finished helping the neighbor with her petunias or whatever, he drove to the municipal lot, swapped his Tahoe for the panel truck, and went hunting.”

“Terry was luckier than Mr. Holmes,” Marcy said, looking first at Ralph and then at Bill Samuels. Ralph met her gaze; Samuels either could not or would not. “Just not lucky enough.”

Yune said, “I’ve got one more thing—another piece of the puzzle, Ms. Gibney would say—but I’m going to save it until Ralph recaps the Maitland investigation, both pro and con.”

Ralph made short work of this, speaking in concise sentences, as if testifying in court. He made a point of telling them what Claude Bolton had told him—that Terry had nicked him with a fingernail while shaking his hand. After telling them about the discovery of the clothes out in Canning Township—pants, underwear, socks, sneakers, but no shirt—he circled back to the man he’d seen on the courthouse steps. He said he wasn’t certain that the man had been using the shirt Terry had been wearing at the Dubrow train station to cover his presumably scarred and hairless head, but he believed that it could have been.

“There must have been TV coverage at the courthouse,” Holly said. “Have you checked it?”

Ralph and Lieutenant Sablo exchanged a look.

“We did,” Ralph said, “but that man’s not there. Not in any of the footage.”

There was a general stirring, and Jeannie was holding his arm again—clutching it, really. Ralph gave her hand a reassuring pat, but he was looking at the woman who had flown here from Dayton. Holly didn’t look puzzled. She looked satisfied.

6

“The man who killed the Howard girls used a panel truck,” Yune said, “and when he was done with it, he dumped it in an easily discoverable location. The man who killed Frank Peterson did the same with the van he used to abduct the boy; actually drew attention to it by leaving it behind Shorty’s Pub and speaking to a couple of witnesses—the way Holmes spoke to the cook and the waitress in the Waffle House. The Ohio cops found plenty of fingerprints in the panel truck, both the killer’s and his victims’; we found plenty in the van. But the van prints included at least one set that went unidentified. Until late today, that is.”

Ralph leaned forward, intent.

“Let me show you some stuff.” Yune fiddled with his laptop. Two fingerprints appeared on the screen. “These are from the kid who stole the van in upstate New York. One from the van, one from his intake when he was arrested in El Paso. Now check this out.”

He fiddled some more, and the two prints came together perfectly.

“That takes care of Merlin Cassidy. Now here’s Frank Peterson—one print from the ME, and one from the van.”

The overlay again showed a perfect match.

“Next, Maitland. One print from the van—one of many, I might add—and the other from his intake at the Flint City PD.”

He brought them together, and again the match was perfect. Marcy made a sighing sound.

“Okay, now prepare to have your mind boggled. On the left, an unsub print from the van; on the right, a Heath Holmes print from his intake in Montgomery County, Ohio.”

He brought them together. This time the fit was not perfect, but it was very close. Holly believed a jury would have accepted it as a match. She certainly did.

“You’ll notice a few minor differences,” Yune said. “That’s because the Holmes print from the van is a bit degraded, maybe from the passage of time. But there are enough points of identity to satisfy me. Heath Holmes was in that van at some point. This is new information.”

The room was silent.

Yune put up two more prints. The one on the left was sharp and clear. Holly realized they had already seen it. Ralph did, too. “Terry’s,” he said. “From the van.”

“Correct. And on the right, here’s one from the buckle left in the barn.”

The whorls were the same, but oddly faded in places. When Yune brought them together, the van print filled in the blanks on the buckle print.

“No doubt they’re the same,” Yune said. “Both Terry Maitland’s. Only the one on the buckle looks like it came from a much older finger.”

“How is that possible?” Jeannie asked.

“It’s not,” Samuels said. “I saw a set of Maitland’s prints on his intake card… which were made days after he last touched that buckle. They were firm and clear. Every line and whorl intact.”

“We also took an unsub print from that buckle,” Yune said. “Here it is.”

This one no jury would accept; there were a few lines and whorls, but they were faint, barely there at all. Most of the print was no more than a blur.

Yune said, “It’s impossible to be sure, given the poor quality, but I don’t believe that’s Mr. Maitland’s fingerprint, and it can’t be Holmes’s, because he was dead long before that buckle first showed up in the train station video. And yet… Heath Holmes was in the van that was used to abduct the Peterson boy. I’m at a loss to explain the when, the how, or the why, but I’m not exaggerating when I say I’d give a thousand dollars to know who left that blurry fingerprint on the belt buckle, and at least five hundred to know how come the Maitland fingerprint on it looks so old.”

He unplugged his laptop and sat down.

“Plenty of pieces on the table,” Howie said, “but I’ll be damned if they make a picture. Does anyone have any more?”

Ralph turned to his wife. “Tell them,” he said. “Tell them who you dreamed was in our house.”

“It was no dream,” she said. “Dreams fade. Reality doesn’t.”

Speaking slowly at first, but picking up speed, she told them about seeing the light on downstairs, and finding the man sitting beyond the archway, on one of the chairs from their kitchen table. She finished with the warning he had given her, emphasizing it with the fading blue letters inked on his fingers. You MUST tell him to stop. “I fainted. I’ve never done that before in my life.”

“She woke up in bed,” Ralph said. “No sign of entry. Burglar alarm was set.”

“A dream,” Samuels said flatly.

Jeannie shook her head hard enough to make her hair fly. “He was there.”

“Something happened,” Ralph said. “That much I’m sure of. The man with the burned face had tats on his fingers—”

“The man who wasn’t there in the films,” Howie said.

“I know how it sounds—crazy. But someone else in this case had finger-tats, and I finally remembered who it was. I had Yune send me a picture, and Jeannie ID’d it. The man Jeannie saw in her dream—or in our house—is Claude Bolton, the bouncer at Gentlemen, Please. The one who got a cut while shaking Maitland’s hand.”

“The way Terry got cut when he bumped into the orderly,” Marcy said. “That orderly was Heath Holmes, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, sure,” Holly said, almost absently. She was looking at one of the pictures on the wall. “Who else would it be?”

Alec Pelley spoke up. “Have either of you checked on Bolton’s whereabouts?”

“I did,” Ralph said, and explained. “He’s in a west Texas town called Marysville, four hundred miles from here, and unless he had a private jet stashed somewhere, he was there at the time Jeannie saw him in our house.”

“Unless his mom was lying,” Samuels said. “As previously noted, mothers are often willing to do that when their sons are under suspicion.”

“Jeannie had the same thought, but it seems unlikely in this case. The cop was there on a pretext, and he says they both seemed relaxed and open. Zero perp-sweat.”

Samuels folded his arms across his chest. “I’m not convinced.”

“Marcy?” Howard said. “I think it’s your turn to add to the puzzle.”

“I… I really don’t want to. Let the detective do it. Grace talked to him.”

Howie took her hand. “It’s for Terry.”

Marcy sighed. “All right. Grace saw a man, too. Twice. The second time in the house. I thought she was having bad dreams because she was upset by her father dying… as any child would be…” She stopped, chewing at her lower lip.

“Please,” Holly said. “It’s very important, Mrs. Maitland.”

“Yes,” Ralph agreed. “It is.”

“I was so sure it wasn’t real! Positive!”

“Did she describe him?” Jeannie asked.

“Sort of. The first time was about a week ago. She and Sarah were sleeping together in Sarah’s room, and Grace said he was floating outside the window. She said he had a Play-Doh face and straws for eyes. Anybody would think that was just a nightmare, wouldn’t they?”

Nobody said anything.

“The second time was on Sunday. She said she woke up from a nap and he was sitting on her bed. She said he didn’t have straws for eyes anymore, that he had her father’s eyes, but he still scared her. He had tattoos on his arms. And on his hands.”

Ralph spoke up. “She told me his Play-Doh face was gone. That he had short black hair, all sticky-uppy. And a little beard around his mouth.”

“A goatee,” Jeannie said. She looked sick. “It was the same man. The first time she might have been having a dream, but the second time… that was Bolton. It must have been.”

Marcy put her palms against her temples and pressed, as if she had a headache. “I know it sounds that way, but it had to have been a dream. She said his shirt changed colors while he was talking to her, and that’s the kind of thing that happens in dreams. Detective Anderson, do you want to tell the rest?”

He shook his head. “You’re doing fine.”

Marcy swiped at her eyes. “She said he made fun of her. He called her a baby, and when she started to cry, he said it was good that she was sad. Then he told her he had a message for Detective Anderson. That he had to stop, or something bad would happen.”

“According to Grace,” Ralph said, “the first time the man showed up, he looked like he wasn’t done. Not finished. The second time he appeared, she described a man who sure sounds like Claude Bolton. Only he’s in Texas. Make of it what you will.”

“If Bolton’s there, he couldn’t have been here,” Bill Samuels said, sounding exasperated. “That seems pretty obvious.”

“It seemed obvious with Terry Maitland,” Howie said. “And now, we have discovered, with Heath Holmes.” He turned his attention to Holly. “We don’t have Miss Marple tonight, but we do have Ms. Gibney. Can you put these pieces together for us?”

Holly didn’t seem to hear him. She was still staring at a painting on the wall. “Straws for eyes,” she said. “Yes. Sure. Straws…” She trailed off.

“Ms. Gibney?” Howie said. “Do you have something for us, or not?”

Holly came back from wherever she had been. “Yes. I can explain what’s going on. All I ask is that you keep an open mind. It will be quicker, I think, if I show you part of a movie I brought. I have it in my bag, on a DVD.”

With another brief prayer for strength (and to channel Bill Hodges when they voiced their disbelief and—perhaps—outrage), she stood up and placed her laptop at the end of the table where Yune’s had been. Then she took out her DVD external drive and hooked it up.

7

Jack Hoskins had considered asking for sick time for his sunburn, emphasizing that skin cancer ran in his family, and decided it was a bad idea. Terrible, in fact. Chief Geller would almost certainly tell him to get out of his office, and when word got around (Rodney Geller wasn’t the close-mouthed sort), Detective Hoskins would become a laughingstock in the department. In the unlikely event that the chief agreed, he would be expected to go to the doctor, and Jack wasn’t ready for that.

He had been called back in three days early, however, which wasn’t fair when his damn vacation had been on the roster board since May. Feeling this made it his right (his perfect right) to turn those three days into what Ralph Anderson would have called a stay-cation, he spent that Wednesday afternoon bar-hopping. By his third stop, he had managed to mostly forget about the spooky interlude out in Canning Township, and by the fourth, he had stopped worrying quite so much about the sunburn, and the peculiar fact that he seemed to have come by it at night.

His fifth stop was at Shorty’s Pub. There he asked the bartender—a very pretty lady whose name now slipped his mind, although not the entrancing length of her legs in tight Wrangler jeans—to look at the back of his neck and tell him what she saw. She obliged.

“It’s a sunburn,” she said.

“Just a sunburn, right?”

“Yeah, just a sunburn.” Then, after a pause: “But a pretty bad one. Got a few little blisters there. You should put some—”

“Aloe on it, yeah. I heard.”

After five vodka-tonics (or maybe it had been six), he drove home at exactly the speed limit, bolt upright and peering over the wheel. Wouldn’t be good to get stopped. The legal limit in this state was .08.

He arrived at the old hacienda about the same time Holly Gibney was beginning her presentation in Howard Gold’s conference room. He stripped to his undershorts, remembered to lock all the doors, and went in the bathroom to tap a kidney that badly needed tapping. With that chore accomplished, he once more used the hand-mirror to check out the back of his neck. Surely the sunburn was getting better by now, probably starting to flake. But no. The burn had turned black. Deep fissures crisscrossed the nape of his neck. Pearly rivulets of pus dribbled from two of them. He moaned, closed his eyes, then opened them again and breathed a sigh of relief. No black skin. No fissures. No pus. But the nape was bright red, and yes, there were some blisters. It didn’t hurt as much to touch it as it had earlier, but why would it, when he had a skinful of Russian anesthetic?

I have to stop drinking so much, he thought. Seeing shit that’s not there is a pretty clear signal. You could even call it a warning.

He had no aloe vera ointment, so he slathered the burn with some arnica gel. That stung, but the pain soon went away (or at least subsided to a dull throb). That was good, right? He took a hand towel to drape over his pillow so it wouldn’t get all stained, lay down, and turned out the light. But the dark was no good. It seemed he could feel the pain more in the dark, and it was all too easy to imagine something in the room with him. The something that had been behind him out there at that abandoned barn.

The only thing out there was my imagination. The way that black skin was my imagination. And the cracks. And the pus.

All true, but it was also true that when he turned on the bedside lamp, he felt better. His final thought was that a good night’s sleep would put everything right.

8

“Do you want me to dim the lights a bit more?” Howie asked.

“No,” Holly said. “This is information, not entertainment, and although the movie is short—only eighty-seven minutes—we won’t need to watch all of it, or even most of it.” She wasn’t as nervous as she had feared she would be. At least not so far. “But before I show it to you, I need to make something very clear, something I think you all must know by now, although you may not be quite ready to admit the truth into your conscious minds.”

They looked at her, silent. All those eyes. She could hardly believe she was doing this—surely not Holly Gibney, the mouse who had sat at the back of all her classrooms, who never raised her hand, who wore her gym clothes under her skirts and blouses on phys ed days. Holly Gibney who even in her twenties hadn’t dared speak back to her mother. Holly Gibney who had actually lost her mind on two occasions.

But all that was before Bill. He trusted me to be better, and for him I was. And I will be now, for these people.

“Terry Maitland didn’t murder Frank Peterson and Heath Holmes didn’t murder the Howard girls. Those murders were committed by an outsider. He uses our modern science—our modern forensics—against us, but his real weapon is our refusal to believe. We’re trained to follow the facts, and sometimes we scent him when the facts are conflicting, but we refuse to follow that scent. He knows it. He uses it.”

“Ms. Gibney,” Jeannie Anderson said, “are you saying the murders were committed by a supernatural creature? Something like a vampire?”

Holly considered the question, biting at her lips. At last she said, “I don’t want to answer that. Not yet. I want to show you some of the movie I brought first. It’s a Mexican film, dubbed in English and released as part of drive-in double features in this country fifty years ago. The English title is Mexican Wrestling Women Meet the Monster, but in Spanish—”

“Oh, come on,” Ralph said. “This is ridiculous.”

“Shut up,” Jeannie said. She kept her voice low, but they all heard the anger in it. “Give her a chance.”

“But—”

“You weren’t there last night. I was. You need to give this a chance.”

Ralph crossed his arms over his chest, just as Samuels had. It was a gesture Holly knew well. A warding-off gesture. An I won’t listen gesture. She pushed on.

“The Mexican title is Rosita Luchadora e Amigas Conocen El Cuco. In Spanish it means—”

“That’s it!” Yune shouted, making them all jump. “That’s the name I couldn’t get when we were eating at that restaurant on Saturday! Do you remember the story, Ralph? The one my wife’s abuela told her when she was just pequeña?”

“How could I forget?” Ralph said. “The guy with the black bag who kills little kids and rubs their fat…” He stopped, thinking—in spite of himself—of Frank Peterson and the Howard girls.

“Does what?” Marcy Maitland asked.

“Drinks their blood and rubs their fat on him,” Yune said. “It supposedly keeps him young. El Cuco.”

“Yes,” Holly said. “He’s known in Spain as El Hombre con Saco. The Man with the Sack. In Portugal he’s Pumpkinhead. When American children carve pumpkins for Halloween, they’re carving the likeness of El Cuco, just as children did hundreds of years ago in Iberia.”

“There was a rhyme about El Cuco,” Yune said. “Abuela used to sing it sometimes, at night. Duérmete, niño, duérmete ya… can’t remember the rest.”

“Sleep, child, sleep,” Holly said. “El Cuco’s on the ceiling, he’s come to eat you.”

“Good bedtime rhyme,” Alec commented. “Must have given the kids sweet dreams.”

“Jesus,” Marcy whispered. “You think something like that was in our house? Sitting on my daughter’s bed?”

“Yes and no,” Holly said. “Let me put on the movie. The first ten minutes or so should be enough.”

9

Jack dreamed he was driving a deserted two-lane highway with nothing but empty on both sides and a thousand miles of blue sky above. He was at the wheel of a big truck, maybe a tanker, because he could smell gasoline. Sitting beside him was a man with short black hair and a goatee. Tattoos covered his arms. Hoskins knew him, because Jack visited Gentlemen, Please frequently (although rarely in his official capacity), and had had many pleasant conversations with Claude Bolton, who had a record but was not a bad fellow at all since he’d cleaned up his act. Except this version of Claude was a very bad fellow. It was this Claude who had pulled back the shower curtain enough for Hoskins to be able to read the word on his fingers: CANT.

The truck passed a sign reading MARYSVILLE, POP. 1280.

“That cancer’s spreading fast,” Claude said, and yes, it was the voice that had come from behind the shower curtain. “Look at your hands, Jack.”

He looked down. His hands on the wheel had turned black. As he stared at them, they fell off. The tanker truck ran off the road, tilted, started to go over. Jack understood that it was going to explode, and he hauled himself out of the dream before that could happen, gasping for breath and staring up at the ceiling.

“Jesus,” he whispered, checking to make sure his hands were still there. They were, and so was his watch. He had been asleep less than an hour. “Jesus Chri—”

Someone moved on his left. For a moment he wondered if he had brought the pretty bartender with the long legs home with him, but no, he’d been alone. A fine young woman like that wouldn’t want to have anything to do with him, anyway. To her he would just be an overweight, fortysomething drunk who was losing his h—

He looked around. The woman in bed with him was his mother. He only knew it was her because of the tortoiseshell clip dangling from the few remaining strings of her hair. She had been wearing that clip at her funeral. Her face had been made up by the mortician, kind of waxy and doll-like, but on the whole not too bad. This face was mostly gone, the flesh putrefying off the bone. Her nightgown clung to her because it was drenched with pus. There was the stench of rotting meat. He tried to scream, couldn’t.

“This cancer is waiting for you, Jack,” she said. He could see her teeth clacking, because her lips were gone. “It’s eating into you. He can take it back now, but soon it will be too late even for him. Will you do what he wants?”

“Yes,” Hoskins whispered. “Yes, anything.”

“Then listen.”

Jack Hoskins listened.

10

There was no FBI warning at the front of Holly’s film, which didn’t surprise Ralph. Who would bother to copyright such an elderly artifact, when it was trash to begin with? The music was a hokey mixture of wavering violins and jarringly cheerful norteño accordion riffs. The print was scratchy, as if it had been run many times by long-dead projectionists who hadn’t given much of a shit.

I can’t believe I’m sitting here, Ralph thought. This is loonybin stuff.

Yet both his wife and Marcy Maitland were watching with the concentration of students preparing for a final exam, and the others, although clearly not so invested, were paying close attention. Yune Sablo had a faint smile on his lips. Not the smile of a person who feels what he’s seeing is ridiculous, Ralph thought, but of a man glimpsing a bit of the past; a childhood legend brought to life.

The movie opened on a nighttime street where all the businesses seemed to be either bars or whorehouses or both. The camera followed a pretty woman in a low-cut dress, walking hand in hand with her daughter, who looked to be about four. This evening stroll through a bad part of town with a kid who should have been in bed might have been explained later in the film, but not in the part Ralph and the others saw.

A drunk wavered up to the woman, and while his mouth said one thing, the voice actor dubbing his voice said, “Hey, baybee, want a date?” in a Mexican accent that made him sound like Speedy Gonzales. She brushed him off and walked on. Then, in a shadowy area between two streetlights, a dude in a long black cloak straight out of a Dracula film swooped from an alley. He had a black bag in one hand. With the other, he snatched up the kiddo. Mom screamed and gave chase, catching him under the next streetlight and grabbing at his bag. He whirled around, the convenient streetlight illuminating the face of a middle-aged man with a scar on his forehead.

Mr. Cloak snarled, revealing a mouthful of fake fangs. The woman drew back, hands raised, looking less like a mother in terror than an opera singer about to belt her way into an aria from Carmen. The child-stealer flipped his cloak over the little girl and fled, but not before a fellow emerging from one of the street’s many bars hailed him in another hideous Speedy Gonzales accent: “Hey Professor Espinoza, where you go’een? Let me buy you a dreenk!”

In the next scene, the mother was brought to the town’s morgue (EL DEPOSITO DE CADAVERES on the frosted glass door), and did the predictable histrionic screaming when the sheet was lifted to reveal her presumably mutilated child. Next came the arrest of the man with the scar, who turned out to be a well-respected educator at a nearby university.

What followed was one of cinema’s shorter trials. The mother testified; so did a couple of guys with Speedy Gonzales accents, including the one who had offered to buy the professor a dreenk; the jury filed out to consider its verdict. Adding a surreal touch to these otherwise predictable proceedings was the appearance of five women in the back row, all dressed in what appeared to be superhero costumes complete with fancy masks. Nobody in the courtroom, including the judge, seemed to find them out of place.

The jury filed back in; Professor Espinoza was convicted of murder most foul; he hung his head and looked guilty. One of the masked women jumped to her feet and declared, “Thees ees a miscarritch of justice! Professor Espinoza would never harm a child!”

“But I saw heem!” the mother screamed. “Thees time you are wrong, Rosita!”

The masked women in the superhero costumes trooped out of the courtroom in their cool boots, and the movie cross-faded to a close-up of a hangman’s noose. The camera drew back to show a scaffold surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. Professor Espinoza was led up the steps. As the rope was placed around his neck, his gaze fixed on a man in a hooded monk’s robe at the back of the crowd. There was a black bag between the monk’s sandaled feet.

This was a stupid and poorly made movie, but Ralph still felt a prickle run down his arms and covered Jeannie’s hand with his own when she reached for him. He knew exactly what they were going to see next. The monk pushed back his hood to reveal Professor Espinoza’s face, convenient forehead scar and all. He grinned, showing those ridiculous plastic fangs… pointed at his black bag… and laughed.

“There!” the real professor screamed from the gallows. “There he is, there!”

The crowd turned, but the man with the black bag was gone. Espinoza got his own black bag: a death-hood that was pulled over his head. From beneath it he screamed, “The monster, the monster, the mon—” The trap opened, and he plummeted through.

The next sequence was of the masked superhero women chasing the fake monk over some rooftops, and it was here that Holly pushed pause. “Twenty-five years ago, I saw a version with subtitles instead of dubbing,” she said. “What the professor is screaming at the end is El Cuco, El Cuco.”

“What else?” Yune murmured. “Jesus, I haven’t seen one of those luchadora movies since I was a kid. There must have been a dozen of them.” He looked around at the others, as if coming out of a dream. “Las luchadoras—lady wrestlers. And the star of this one, Rosita, she was famous. You should see her with her mask off, ay caramba.” He shook his hand, as if he had touched something hot.

“There weren’t just a dozen, there were at least fifty,” Holly said quietly. “Everyone in Mexico loved las luchadoras. The films were like today’s superhero movies. On a much smaller budget, of course.”

She would like to lecture them on this fascinating (to her, it was) bit of film history, but this was not the time, not with Detective Anderson looking as though he had just taken a big bite of something nasty. Nor would she tell them that she had also loved the luchadora films. They had been played for laughs on the local Cleveland TV station that broadcast Shlock Theater every Saturday night. Holly supposed the local college kids got drunk and tuned in to yuk it up about the poor dubbing and the costumes they no doubt considered hokey, but there had been nothing funny about las luchadoras to the frightened and unhappy high school girl that she had been. Carlotta, Maria, and Rosita were strong, and brave, always helping the poor and downtrodden. Rosita Muñoz, the most famous, even proudly called herself a cholita, which was how that unhappy high school girl had felt about herself most of the time: a halfbreed. A freak.

“Most of the Mexican wrestling women movies were retellings of ancient legends. This one is no different. Do you see how it fits what we know about these murders?”

“Perfectly,” Bill Samuels said. “I’ll give you that. The only problem is that it’s nuts. Out to lunch. If you actually believe in El Cuco, Ms. Gibney, then you are el cuckoo.”

Says the man who told me about the disappearing footprints, Ralph thought. He did not believe in El Cuco, but he thought the woman had displayed a lot of guts in showing them the film when she must have known what their reaction would be. He was interested to see how Ms. Gibney of Finders Keepers would respond.

“El Cuco is said to live on the blood and fat of children,” Holly said, “but in the world—our real world—he would survive not just on those things, but on people who think as you do, Mr. Samuels. As I suppose you all do. Let me show you one more thing. Just a snippet, I promise.”

She went to chapter nine of the DVD, the second-to-last. The action picked up with one of the luchadoras—Carlotta—cornering the hooded monk in a deserted warehouse. He tried to escape by way of a convenient ladder. Carlotta grabbed him by the back of his billowing robe and tossed him over her shoulder. He did a midair flip and landed on his backside. The hood flew back, revealing a face that was not a face at all, but a lumpy blank. Carlotta screamed as two glowing prongs emerged from where the eyes should have been. They must have had some kind of mystic repelling power, because Carlotta staggered against the wall and held one hand up in front of her luchadora mask, trying to shield herself.

“Stop it,” Marcy said. “Oh God, please.”

Holly poked her laptop. The image on the screen disappeared, but Ralph could still see it: an optical effect that was prehistoric compared to the CGI stuff you could view in any Cineplex these days, but effective enough if you had heard a certain little girl’s story of the intruder in her bedroom.

“Do you think that’s what your daughter saw, Mrs. Maitland?” Holly asked. “Not exactly, I don’t mean that, but—”

“Yes. Of course. Straws for eyes. That’s what she said. Straws for eyes.”

11

Ralph stood up. His voice was calm and level. “With all due respect, Ms. Gibney, and considering your past… uh, exploits… I have no doubt that respect is due, there is no supernatural monster named El Cuco who lives on the blood of children. I’d be the first to admit that this case—the two cases, if they’re linked, and it seems more and more certain that they are—has some very strange elements, but this is a false trail you’re leading us down.”

“Let her finish,” Jeannie said. “Before you close your mind entirely, for God’s sake let her have her say.”

He saw that his wife’s anger was now on the edge of fury. He understood why, could even sympathize. By refusing to entertain Gibney’s ridiculous story of El Cuco, Jeannie felt he was also refusing to believe what she herself had seen in their kitchen early this morning. And he wanted to believe her, not just because he loved and respected her, but because the man she described fitted Claude Bolton to a T, and he couldn’t explain that. Still, he said the rest, to all of them and especially to Jeannie. He had to. It was the bedrock truth upon which his whole life stood. Yes, there had been maggots in the cantaloupe, but they had gotten in there by some natural means. Not knowing what it was didn’t change that, or negate it.

He said, “If we believe in monsters, in the supernatural, how do we believe in anything?”

Ralph sat down and tried to take Jeannie’s hand. She pulled it away.

“I understand how you feel,” Holly said. “I get it, believe me, I do. But I’ve seen things, Detective Anderson, that allow me to believe in this. Oh, not the movie, not even the legend behind the movie, exactly. But in every legend there’s a grain of truth. Leave it for now. I would like to show you a timeline I drew up before I left Dayton. May I do that? It won’t take long.”

“You have the floor,” Howie said. He sounded bemused.

Holly opened a file and projected it on the wall. Her printing was small but clear. Ralph thought what she had drawn up would pass muster in any courtroom. That much he had to give her.

“Thursday, April 19th. Merlin Cassidy leaves the van in a Dayton parking lot. I believe it was stolen the same day. We won’t call the thief El Cuco, we’ll just call him the outsider. Detective Anderson will feel more comfortable with that.”

Ralph kept silent, and this time when he tried for Jeannie’s hand, she let him take it, although she did not fold her fingers over his.

“Where did he stash it?” Alec asked. “Any idea?”

“We’ll get to that, but for now, may I stick with the Dayton chronology?”

Alec lifted a hand for her to go on.

“Saturday, April 21st. The Maitlands fly to Dayton and check into their hotel. Heath Holmes—the real one—is in Regis, staying with his mother.

“Monday, April 23rd. Amber and Jolene Howard are killed. The outsider eats of their flesh and drinks of their blood.” She looked at Ralph. “No, I don’t know it. Not for sure. But reading between the lines of the newspaper stories, I’m sure that body parts were missing, and the bodies were bled mostly white. Is that similar to what happened to the Peterson boy?”

Bill Samuels spoke up. “Since the Maitland case is closed and we’re having an informal discussion here, I have no problem telling you that it is. Flesh was missing from Frank Peterson’s neck, right shoulder, right buttock, and left thigh.”

Marcy made a strangled sound. When Jeannie started to go to her, Marcy waved her off. “I’m all right. I mean… no, I’m not, but I’m not going to throw up or faint or anything.”

Observing her ashy skin, Ralph was not so sure.

Holly said, “The outsider dumps the panel truck he used to abduct the girls near the Holmes home—” She smiled at that. “—where he can be sure it will be found, and become another part of the evidence against his chosen scapegoat. He leaves the girls’ underwear in the Holmes basement—another brick in the wall.

“Wednesday, April 25th. The bodies of the Howard girls are found in Trotwood, between Dayton and Regis.

“Thursday, April 26th. While Heath Holmes is in Regis, helping his mother around the house and running errands, the outsider shows up at the Heisman Memory Unit. Was he looking for Mr. Maitland specifically, or could it have been anyone? I don’t know for sure, but I think he had Terry Maitland in his sights, because he knew the Maitlands were visiting from another state, far away. The outsider, whether you call him natural or unnatural or supernatural, is like many serial killers in one way. He likes to move around. Mrs. Maitland, could Heath Holmes have known that your husband was planning to visit his father?”

“I guess so,” Marcy said. “The Heisman likes to know in advance when relatives are coming from other parts of the country. They make a special effort in those cases, get the residents haircuts or perms, and arrange off-unit visits, when possible. That wasn’t, in the case of Terry’s dad. His mental problems were too far advanced.” She leaned forward, eyes fixed on Holly. “But if this outsider wasn’t Holmes, even if he looked like Holmes, how could he know?”

“Oh, that’s easy if you accept the basic premise,” Ralph said. “If the guy is replicating Holmes, so to speak, he’d probably have access to all of Holmes’s memories. Have I got it right, Ms. Gibney? Is that how the story goes?”

“Let’s say it is, at least to a degree, but let’s not get hung up on it. I’m sure we’re all tired, and Mrs. Maitland would probably like to get home to her children.”

Hopefully before she passes out, Ralph thought.

Holly went on. “The outsider knows he’ll be seen and noticed at the Heisman Memory Unit. It’s what he wants. And he’s sure to leave more evidence that will incriminate the real Mr. Holmes: hair from one of the murdered girls. But I believe his most important reason for going there on April 26th was to spill Terry Maitland’s blood, exactly as he later spilled blood from Mr. Claude Bolton. It’s always the same pattern. First come the murders. Then he marks his next victim. His next self, you could say. After that, he goes into hiding. Except it’s really a kind of hibernation. Like a bear, he may move around from time to time, but mostly he stays in a pre-selected den for a certain length of time, resting, while the change takes place.”

“In the legends, the transformation takes years,” Yune said. “Whole generations, maybe. But that’s legend. You don’t think it takes that long, do you, Ms. Gibney?”

“I think only weeks, months at the very most. For awhile during the transformative process from Terry Maitland to Claude Bolton, his face might look like it was made out of Play-Doh.” She turned to look at Ralph directly. She found this difficult, but sometimes it was necessary. “Or as if he had been badly burned.”

“Don’t buy it,” Ralph said. “And that’s an understatement.”

“Then why wasn’t the burned man in any of the footage?” Jeannie asked.

Ralph sighed. “I don’t know.”

Holly said, “Most legends hold a grain of truth, but they’re not the truth, if you see what I mean. In the stories, El Cuco lives on blood and flesh, like a vampire, but I think this creature also feeds on bad feelings. Psychic blood, you could say.” She turned to Marcy. “He told your daughter he was glad she was unhappy and sad. I believe that was the truth. I believe he was eating her sadness.”

“And mine,” Marcy said. “And Sarah’s.”

Howie spoke up. “Not saying any of this is true, not saying that at all, but the Peterson family fits the scenario, doesn’t it? All of them wiped out except for the father, and he’s in a persistent vegetative state. A creature who lives on unhappiness—a grief-eater instead of a sin-eater—would have loved the Petersons.”

“And how about that shit-show at the courthouse?” Yune put in. “If there really was a monster that eats negative emotions, that would have been Thanksgiving dinner for it.”

“Do you people hear yourselves?” Ralph asked. “I mean, do you?”

“Wake up,” Yune said harshly, and Ralph blinked as if he had been slapped. “I know how far out it is, we all do, you don’t need to keep telling us, like you’re the only sane man in the lunatic asylum. But there is something here that’s way out of our experience. The man at the courthouse, the one who wasn’t in any of the news footage, is only part of it.”

Ralph felt his face growing warm, but kept silent and took his scolding.

“You need to stop fighting this every step of the way, ese. I know you don’t like the puzzle, I don’t like it, either, but at least admit that the pieces fit. There’s a chain here. It leads from Heath Holmes to Terry Maitland to Claude Bolton.”

“We know where Claude Bolton is,” Alec said. “I think a trip down to Texas to interview him would be the logical next move.”

“Why, in God’s name?” Jeannie asked. “I saw the man who looks like him here, just this morning!”

“We should discuss that,” Holly said, “but I want to ask Mrs. Maitland a question first. Where was your husband buried?”

Marcy looked startled. “Where… ? Why, here. In town. Memorial Park Cemetery. We hadn’t… you know… made plans for that, or anything. Why would we? Terry wouldn’t have turned forty until December… we thought we had years… that we deserved years, like anyone leading good lives…”

Jeannie got a handkerchief from her purse and handed it to Marcy, who began to wipe at her eyes with trance-like slowness.

“I didn’t know what I should… I was just… you know, stunned… trying to get my head around the idea that he was gone. The funeral director, Mr. Donelli, suggested Memorial because Hillview is almost full… and on the other side of town, besides…”

Stop her, Ralph wanted to say to Howie. It’s painful and pointless. It doesn’t matter where he’s buried, except to Marcy and her daughters.

But once more he kept silent and took it, because it was another kind of scolding, wasn’t it? Even if Marcy Maitland might not mean it that way. He told himself this would be over eventually, leaving him free to discover a life beyond Terry fucking Maitland. He had to believe there would be one.

“I knew about the other place,” Marcy went on, “of course I did, but I never thought of mentioning it to Mr. Donelli. Terry took me there once, but it’s so far out of town… and so lonely…”

“What other place would that have been?” Holly asked.

A picture rose unbidden in Ralph’s mind—six cowboy pallbearers carrying a plank coffin. He sensed the arrival of another confluence.

“The old graveyard in Canning Township,” Marcy said. “Terry took me out once, and it looked like nobody had been buried there for a long time, or even visited. There were no flowers or memorial flags. Just some crumbling grave markers. You couldn’t read the names on most of them.”

Startled, Ralph glanced at Yune, who nodded slightly.

“That’s why he was interested in that book in the newsstand,” Bill Samuels said in a low voice. “A Pictorial History of Flint County, Douree County, and Canning Township.”

Marcy continued to wipe her eyes with Jeannie’s handkerchief. “Of course he would have been interested in a book like that. There have been Maitlands in this part of the state ever since the Land Rush of 1889. Terry’s great-great-grandparents—or maybe even a generation greater than that, I don’t know for sure—settled in Canning.”

“Not in Flint City?” Alec asked.

“There was no Flint City back then. Just a little village called Flint, a wide spot in the road. Until statehood, in the early twentieth century, Canning was the biggest town in the area. Named after the biggest landowner, of course. When it came to acreage, the Maitlands were second or third. Canning was an important town until the big dust storms came in the twenties and thirties, when most of the good topsoil blew away. These days there’s nothing out there but a store and a church hardly anyone goes to.”

“And the graveyard,” Alec said. “Where people did their burying until the town dried up. Including a bunch of Terry’s ancestors.”

Marcy smiled wanly. “That graveyard… I thought it was awful. Like an empty house nobody cares about.”

Yune said, “If this outsider was absorbing Terry’s thoughts and memories as the transformation progressed, then he would have known about the graveyard.” He was looking at one of the pictures on the wall now, but Ralph had a good idea what was going through his mind. It was going through his, as well. The barn. The discarded clothes.

“According to the legends—there are dozens about El Cuco online—these creatures like places of death,” Holly said. “It’s where they feel most at home.”

“If there are creatures who eat sadness,” Jeannie mused, “a graveyard would make a nice cafeteria, wouldn’t it?”

Ralph wished mightily that his wife hadn’t come. If not for her, he would have been out the door ten minutes ago. Yes, the barn where the clothes had been found was near that dusty old boneyard. Yes, the goo that had turned the hay black was puzzling, and yes, perhaps there had been an outsider. That was a theory he was willing to accept, at least for the time being. It explained a lot. An outsider who was consciously re-creating a Mexican legend would explain even more… but it didn’t explain the disappearing man at the courthouse, or how Terry Maitland could have been in two places at the same time. He kept coming up against those things; they were like pebbles lodged in his throat.

Holly said, “Let me show you some pictures I took at another graveyard. They may open a line of more normal investigation. If either Detective Anderson or Lieutenant Sablo is willing to talk to the police in Montgomery County, Ohio, that is.”

Yune said, “At this point I’d talk to the pope, if it would help to clear this up.”

One by one, Holly projected the photos on the screen: the train station, the factory with the swastika spray-painted on the side, the deserted car wash.

“I took these from the parking lot of the Peaceful Rest Cemetery in Regis. It’s where Heath Holmes is buried with his parents.”

She cycled through the pictures again: train station, factory, car wash.

“I think the outsider took the van he stole from the lot in Dayton to one of these places, and I think if you could persuade the Montgomery County police to search them, some trace of it might still be there. The police might even find some trace of him. There, or maybe here.”

This time she projected the photograph of the boxcars, sitting lonely and deserted on their siding. “He couldn’t have hidden the van in either of those, but he might have stayed in one of them. They’re even closer to the cemetery.”

Here at last was something Ralph could take hold of. Something real. “Sheltered places. There could be traces. Even after three months.”

“Tire tracks,” Yune said. “Maybe more discarded clothes.”

“Or other stuff,” Holly said. “Will you check? And they should be prepared to do an acid phosphate test.”

Semen stains, Ralph thought, and remembered the goo in the barn. What had Yune said about those? A nocturnal emission worthy of The Guinness Book of Records, wasn’t that it?

Yune sounded admiring. “You know your stuff, ma’am.”

Color rose in her cheeks, and she looked down. “Bill Hodges was very good at his job. He taught me a lot.”

“I can call the Montgomery County prosecutor, if you want,” Samuels said. “Get somebody from whatever police department has jurisdiction in that town—Regis?—to coordinate with the Staties. Given what that Elfman kid found in that barn in Canning Township, it’s worth looking into.”

“What?” Holly asked, immediately alight. “What did he find, beside the belt buckle with the prints on it?”

“A pile of clothes,” Samuels said, “Pants, underwear shorts, sneakers. There was some kind of goo on them, also on the hay. It turned the hay black.” He paused. “No shirt, though. The shirt was missing.”

Yune said, “That shirt might have been what the burned man was wearing on his head like a do-rag when we saw him at the courthouse.”

“How far is this barn from the graveyard?” Holly asked.

“Less than half a mile,” Yune said. “The residue on the clothes looked like semen. Is that what you’re thinking, Ms. Gibney? Is that why you want the Ohio cops to do an acid phosphate test?”

“Can’t have been semen,” Ralph said. “There was too much of it.”

Yune ignored this. He was staring at Holly, as if fascinated with her. “Are you thinking the stuff in the barn is a kind of residue from the change? We’re having samples checked, but the results haven’t come back yet.”

“I don’t know what I’m thinking,” Holly said. “My research about El Cuco so far amounts to a few legends I read while I was flying down here, and they’re not reliable. They were passed down orally, generation to generation, long before forensic science existed. I’m just saying that the police in Ohio should check the places in my photographs. They might not find anything… but I think they will. I hope they will. Traces, as Detective Anderson said.”

“Are you done, Ms. Gibney?” Howie asked.

“Yes, I think so.” She sat down. Ralph thought she looked exhausted, and why not? She’d had a busy few days. In addition to that, being crazy had to wear a person out.

Howie said, “Ladies and gentlemen, are there ideas on how we proceed from here? The floor is open for suggestions.”

“The next step seems obvious,” Ralph said. “This outsider might be here in FC—the testimony from my wife and Grace Maitland seems to suggest that—but somebody needs to go down to Texas and interview Claude Bolton, see what he knows. If anything. I nominate me.”

Alec said, “I want to go with you.”

“I think that’s a trip I’d also like to make,” Howie said. “Lieutenant Sablo?”

“I’d like to, but I have two cases in court. If I don’t testify, a couple of very bad boys could walk. I’ll call the ADA in Cap City, see if there’s any chance of a postponement, but I’m not hopeful. It’s not like I can tell him I’m on the trail of a shape-shifting Mexican monster.”

Howie smiled. “I should think not. What about you, Ms. Gibney? Want to go a little further south? You’d continue to be compensated, of course.”

“Yes, I’ll go. Mr. Bolton may know things we need to find out. If, that is, we can ask the right questions.”

Howie said, “What about you, Bill? Want to see this thing through?”

Samuels smiled thinly, shook his head, then stood up. “All this has been interesting, in a mad sort of way, but as far as I’m concerned, the case is closed. I’ll make some calls to the police in Ohio, but that’s where my participation ends. Mrs. Maitland, I’m sorry for your loss.”

“You ought to be,” Marcy said.

He winced at that, but pressed on. “Ms. Gibney, it’s been fascinating. I appreciate your hard work and due diligence. You also make a surprisingly persuasive case for the fantastic, I say that without a trace of irony, but I’m going to go home, grab a beer out of the fridge, and start forgetting this whole thing.”

They watched him gather up his briefcase and leave, the cowlick wagging at them like an admonitory finger as he went out the door.

When he was gone, Howie said he would make their travel arrangements. “I’ll charter the King Air I sometimes use. The pilots will know the closest landing strip. I’ll also arrange for a car. If it’s just the four of us, a sedan or a small SUV should do.”

“Leave a seat for me,” Yune said. “Just in case I can wiggle out of court.”

“Happy to.”

Alec Pelley said, “Someone needs to reach out to Mr. Bolton tonight, and tell him to expect visitors.”

Yune lifted a hand. “That much I can do.”

“Make him understand no one is after him for doing something illegal,” Howie said. “The last thing we want is for him to jackrabbit somewhere.”

“Call me after you talk to him,” Ralph said to Yune. “Even if it’s late. I want to know how he reacts.”

“So do I,” Jeannie said.

“You should tell him something else,” Holly said. “You should tell him to be careful. Because if I’m right about this, he’s the next in line.”

12

Full dark had come when Ralph and the others stepped out of Howie Gold’s building. Howie himself was still upstairs, making arrangements, and his investigator was with him. Ralph wondered what they would talk about with everyone else gone.

“Ms. Gibney, where are you staying?” Jeannie asked.

“The Flint Luxury Motel. I reserved a room.”

“Oh no, you can’t,” Jeannie said. “The only luxury there is on the sign out front. The place is a pit.”

Holly looked disconcerted. “Well, there must be a Holiday Inn—”

“Stay with us,” Ralph said, beating Jeannie to it and hoping it would earn him some points later on. God knew he could use them.

Holly hesitated. She didn’t do well in the houses of other people. She didn’t do well even in the one where she had grown up, when on her quarterly duty visits to her mother. She knew that in the home of these strangers she would lie awake long and wake early, hearing every unfamiliar creak of the walls and the floors, listening to the murmured voices of the Andersons and wondering if they were talking about her… which they almost certainly would be. Hoping that if she had to get up in the night to spend a penny, they wouldn’t hear her. She needed her sleep. The meeting had been stressful enough, and the steady pushback of Detective Anderson’s disbelief had been understandable but exhausting.

But, as Bill Hodges would have said. But.

Anderson’s disbelief was the but. It was the reason she had to accept the invitation, and she did.

“Thank you, that’s very kind, but I have to run an errand first. It won’t take long. Give me your address, and my iPad will take me right to you.”

“Is it anything I can help you with?” Ralph asked. “I’d be happy to—”

“No. Really. I’ll be fine.” She shook hands with Yune. “Come with us if you can, Lieutenant Sablo. I’m sure you want to.”

He smiled. “I do, believe me, but it’s like that poem says—I have promises to keep.”

Marcy Maitland was standing by herself, holding her purse against her stomach and looking shell-shocked. Jeannie went to her without hesitation. Ralph watched with interest as Marcy initially drew back, as if in alarm, then allowed herself to be hugged. After a moment she even put her head on Jeannie Anderson’s shoulder and hugged back. She looked like a tired child. When the two women drew apart, both of them were crying.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Jeannie said.

“Thank you.”

“If there’s anything I can do for you or your girls, anything at all—”

“You can’t, but he can.” She turned her attention to Ralph, and although her eyes were still wet with tears, they were cold. Assessing. “This outsider, I want you to find him. Don’t let him get away just because you don’t believe in him. Can you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Ralph said, “but I’ll try.”

Marcy said no more, only took Yune Sablo’s offered arm and let him lead her to her car.

13

Half a block down, parked in front of the long-abandoned Woolworth’s, Jack sat in his truck, sipping from a flask and watching the group on the sidewalk. The only one he couldn’t identify was a slender woman in the kind of suit a businesswoman might wear on a trip. Her hair was short, the graying bangs a little ragged, as if she had cut them herself. The case slung over her shoulder looked big enough to hold a shortwave radio. This woman watched as Sablo, the taco-bender state cop, squired Mrs. Maitland away. The stranger then walked to her car, which was too nondescript to be anything but an airport rental. Hoskins thought briefly of following her, but decided to stick with the Andersons. It had been Ralph who brought him here, after all, and wasn’t there some saying about going home with the girl you took to the dance?

Besides, Anderson bore watching. Hoskins had never liked him, and since that snotty two-word evaluation a year ago (No opinion, he’d written… as if his shit didn’t stink), Jack had detested him. He had been delighted when Anderson tripped over his dick with the Maitland arrest, and it didn’t surprise him to discover the self-righteous sonofabitch was now meddling in things better left alone. A closed case, for instance.

Jack touched the back of his neck, winced, then started his truck. He supposed he could go home after he saw the Andersons inside, but he thought maybe he’d just park up the street and keep an eye on their house. See what happened. He had a Gatorade bottle he could piss in, and he might even be able to sleep a little, if the steady hot throb from the back of his neck would allow that. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d slept in this truck; he’d done it on several occasions since the day the old ball and chain had walked out.

Jack wasn’t sure what came next, but he had a clear fix on the basic task: to stop the meddling. The meddling in exactly what he didn’t know, only that it had something to do with the Peterson boy. And the barn in Canning Township. That was enough for now, and—sunburn aside, possible skin cancer aside—he was getting interested.

He felt that when the time came for the next step, he would be told.

14

With the help of her navigation app, Holly made a quick and easy drive to the Flint City Walmart. She loved Walmarts, the size of them, the anonymity of them. Shoppers didn’t seem to look at other shoppers as they did in other stores; it was as if they were all in their own private capsules, buying clothes or video games or toilet paper in bulk. It wasn’t even necessary to speak to a cashier, if you used the self-checkout. Which Holly always did. Her shopping was quick, because she knew exactly what she wanted. She went first to OFFICE SUPPLIES, then to MENS AND BOYS WEAR, finally to AUTOMOTIVE. She took her basket to the self-checkout and tucked the receipt into her wallet. These were business expenses, for which she expected to be reimbursed. If she lived, that was. She had an idea (one of Holly’s famous intuitions, she heard Bill Hodges saying) that was more likely to happen if Ralph Anderson—so like Bill in some ways, so very different from him in others—could get past the divide in his mind.

She returned to her car and drove to the Anderson house. But before leaving the parking lot, she said a brief prayer. For all of them.

15

Ralph’s cell phone rang just as he and Jeannie were entering the kitchen. It was Yune. He had gotten the Marysville number of Lovie Bolton from John Zellman, the owner of Gentlemen, Please, and had reached Claude with no trouble.

“What did you tell him?” Ralph asked.

“Pretty much what we decided on in Howie’s office. That we wanted to interview him, because we’re having doubts about Terry Maitland’s guilt. Emphasized that we didn’t think Bolton himself was guilty of anything, and that the people who’d be coming to see him were acting strictly as private citizens. He asked if you’d be one of them. I said you would. Hope that’s okay with you. It seemed to be with him.”

“That’s fine.” Jeannie had gone directly upstairs, and now he heard the start-up chime of the desktop computer they shared. “What else?”

“I said that if Maitland was framed, then Bolton might be at risk for the same treatment, especially since he was a man with a record.”

“How did he react to that?”

“Okay. He didn’t get defensive or anything. But then he said something interesting. Asked me if I was sure it really had been Terry Maitland he saw in the club the night the Peterson boy was murdered.”

“He said that? Why?”

“Because Maitland acted like he’d never seen him before, and when Bolton asked how the baseball team was doing, Maitland passed it off with some kind of generality. No details, even though the team was in the playoffs. He also told me Maitland was wearing fancy sneakers. ‘Like the ones the kids save up for so they can look like gangbangers,’ he said. According to Bolton, he never saw Maitland in anything like that.”

“Those were the sneakers we found in that barn.”

“No way to prove it, but I’m sure you’re right.”

Upstairs, Ralph now heard the moaning, grinding sound of their old Hewlett-Packard printer coming to life, and wondered what the hell Jeannie was up to.

Yune said, “Remember the Gibney woman telling us about the hair they found in Maitland’s father’s room at the assisted living place? From one of the murdered girls?”

“Sure.”

“What do you want to bet that if we go through Maitland’s credit purchases, we’ll find a record of him buying those sneakers? And a slip with a signature on it that matches Maitland’s exactly?”

“I guess this hypothetical outsider could do that,” Ralph said, “but only if he snitched one of Terry’s credit cards.”

“He wouldn’t even need to do that. Remember, the Maitlands have lived in Flint City like forever. They’ve probably got charge accounts at half a dozen downtown stores. All this guy would have to do is walk into the sporting goods department, pick out those fancy kicks, and sign his name. Who’d question him? Everyone in town knows him. It’s the same thing as the hair and the girls’ underthings, don’t you see? He takes their faces and does his dirt, but that isn’t enough for him. He also weaves the rope that hangs them. Because he eats sadness. He eats sadness!”

Ralph paused, put a hand over his eyes, pressed his fingers to one temple and his thumb to the other.

“Ralph? Are you there?”

“Yes. But Yune… you’re making leaps I’m not ready to make.”

“I understand. I’m not a hundred per cent on board with this myself. But you need to at least keep the possibility in mind.”

But it’s not a possibility, Ralph thought. It’s an impossibility.

He asked Yune if he had told Bolton to be careful.

Yune laughed. “I did. He laughed. Said there were three guns in the house, two rifles and a pistol, and that his mother is a better shot than he is, even with emphysema. Man, I wish I was going down there with you.”

“Try to make it happen.”

“I will.”

As he ended the call, Jeannie came down with a thin sheaf of paper. “I’ve been researching Holly Gibney. Tell you what, for a soft-spoken lady with absolutely no clothes sense, she’s been up to a lot.”

As Ralph took the pages, headlights spilled up the driveway. Jeannie grabbed the pages back before he could do more than look at the newspaper headline on the first sheet: RETIRED COP, TWO OTHERS SAVE THOUSANDS AT MINGO AUDITORIUM CONCERT. He assumed Ms. Holly Gibney was one of the two others.

“Go help her in with her luggage,” Jeannie said. “You can read these in bed.”

16

Holly’s luggage consisted of the shoulder-bag that held her laptop, a hold-all small enough to fit in an airplane’s overhead compartment, and a plastic Walmart bag. She let Ralph take the hold-all, but insisted on keeping custody of the shoulder-bag and whatever she’d purchased at Wally World.

“You’re very good to have me,” she said to Jeannie.

“It’s our pleasure. Can I call you Holly?”

“Yes, please. That would be good.”

“Our spare room is at the end of the upstairs hall. The sheets are fresh, and it has its own bathroom. Just don’t stumble over my sewing machine table if you have to use the facility in the middle of the night.”

An unmistakable expression of relief crossed Holly’s face at this, and she smiled. “I’ll try not to.”

“Would you like cocoa? I could make some. Or maybe something stronger?”

“Just bed, I think. I don’t mean to be impolite, but I’ve had a very long day.”

“Of course you have. I’ll show you the way.”

But Holly lingered for a moment, looking through the archway and into the Andersons’ living room. “Your intruder was sitting just there when you came downstairs?”

“Yes. In one of our kitchen chairs.” She pointed, then crossed her arms and cupped her elbows. “At first I could only see him from the knees down. Then the word on his fingers. MUST. Then he leaned forward and I could see his face.”

“Bolton’s face.”

“Yes.”

Holly considered this, then broke into a radiant smile that surprised both Ralph and his wife. It made her look years younger. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to dreamland.”

Jeannie led her upstairs, chatting away. Setting her at ease in a way I never could, Ralph thought. It’s a talent, and it will probably work even on this extremely peculiar woman.

Peculiar she might be, but she was strangely likeable, in spite of her mad ideas about Terry Maitland and Heath Holmes.

Mad ideas that just happen to fit the facts.

But it was impossible.

That fit them like a glove.

“Still impossible,” he murmured.

Upstairs, the two women laughed. Hearing that made Ralph smile. He waited where he was until he heard Jeannie’s steps heading back to their room, then he went up himself. The door to the guest room at the end of the hall was firmly closed. The sheaf of papers—the fruits of Jeannie’s hurried research—was lying on his pillow. He undressed, lay down, and began to read about Ms. Holly Gibney, co-owner of a skip-tracing firm called Finders Keepers.

17

Outside and down the block, Jack watched as the woman in the suit turned into Anderson’s driveway. Anderson came out and helped her with her things. She didn’t have much, traveling light. One of her bags was from Walmart. So that was where she’d gone. Maybe to get a nightie and a toothbrush. Judging from the look of her, the nightie would be ugly and the bristles of the toothbrush would be hard enough to draw blood from her gums.

He took a nip from his flask, and as he was screwing on the cap and thinking about going home (why not, since all the good little children were in for the night), he realized he was no longer alone in the truck. Someone was sitting on the passenger side. He had just appeared in the corner of Hoskins’s eye. That was impossible, of course, but he couldn’t have been there all along. Could he?

Hoskins looked straight ahead. The sunburn on his neck, which had been relatively quiet, began to throb again, and very painfully.

A hand came into his peripheral vision, floating. It seemed he could almost see the seat through it. Written on the fingers in faded blue ink was the word MUST. Hoskins closed his eyes, praying that his visitor would not touch him.

“You need to take a drive,” the visitor said. “Unless you want to die the way your mother died, that is. Do you remember how she screamed?”

Yes, Jack remembered. Until she couldn’t scream anymore.

“Until she couldn’t scream anymore,” said the passenger. The hand touched his thigh, very lightly, and Jack knew the skin there would soon begin to burn, just like the back of his neck. The pants he was wearing would be no protection; the poison would seep right through. “Yes, you remember. How could you forget?”

“Where do you want me to go?”

The passenger told him, and then the touch of that awful hand disappeared. Jack opened his eyes and looked around. The other side of the bench seat was empty. The lights in the Anderson house were out. He looked at his watch and saw it was fifteen minutes to eleven. He had fallen asleep. He could almost believe he’d just had a dream. A very bad one. Except for one thing.

He started the truck and put it in gear. He would stop to gas up at the Hi station on Route 17 outside of town. That was the right place, because the guy who worked the night shift—Cody, his name was—always had a good supply of little white pills. Cody sold them to the truckers either highballing north to Chicago or down south to Texas. For Jack Hoskins of the Flint City PD, there would be no charge.

The truck’s dashboard was dusty. At the first stop sign, he leaned over to his right and wiped it clean, getting rid of the word his passenger’s finger had left there.

MUST.