The Killing Moon: A Novel

by Chuck Hogan

  Maddox recognized the bike. He yelled, "Hey!" and took off suddenly down Main Street after them.

  After a few more yells, they slowed for him, letting him come jogging up. They were scuzzy mill-house locals, still growing into themselves at thirteen. Maddox grabbed the arm of the kid on the ten-speed to hold him where he was.

  On the down tube of the triangle frame, the letter g had been added in Wite-Out to the brand name, to read, Austin Powers–style, "Schwinng."

  Dillon Sinclair's bike. With his driver's license suspended, this bicycle had been Sinclair's only legal mode of transportation, taking him back and forth to the Gulp.

  "I found it," said the kid, in answer to Maddox's question. He looked malnourished, maladapted, probably just about mal-everything.

  "Found it where?"

  "Woods."

  "Be a little more specific."

  "Toad Bridge. That little bridge off Edge Road. We was catching bullfrogs." He glanced at his homeys for backup. "It was right there in the trees."

  A low one-lane bridge crossing a creek. Edge Road was where Heavey lived. "And you just helped yourself."

  "If somebody else was throwing it away? Yeah."

  Maddox kept at him, his friends too, trying to shake something else out of them, but the story held up. Maddox took names and told the kid he was impounding the bike and let them all go with a warning.

  He walked the bike back up the sidewalk along Main, trying to figure out what Sinclair's ride was doing hidden or thrown down by the side of the bridge. He walked it around to the dirt lot behind the station, wondering where to park it while he figured things out. A voice from the back steps called to him.

  "You Maddox?"

  Maddox looked up at the trooper leaning out of the back door in his regulation summer duty uniform: wide-brimmed Mountie hat, straight-leg slacks, combat boots, a badge over the two pens in his left chest pocket, a small ceremonial silver whistle buttoned over the right.

  "Yeah," said Maddox.

  "Trooper Hess to have a word with you."

  Maddox leaned the bike against the wooden slat fence behind the extra patrol car and followed the trooper inside to the old chief 's office.

  Hess stood behind the empty desk scratching at the buzzed back of his neck. He wore a ribbed rayon shirt tucked into wrinkle-guard dress pants with a braided brown belt: conservative and professional, with a hint of the sportsman. His chest was jacked, but it was the arms that impressed, maybe a little too much. He had invested a lot of gym hours in those biceps. Like a woman with a big chest, they were his defining feature.

  Maddox remembered his first look at the guy as he emerged from his unmarked to eyeball the station, Hess's expression saying, They got me off the lat machine for this?

  "So," Hess said, dropping his hands into his pleated pockets and letting them run around in there. "What's your take?"

  "On Valerie Ripsbaugh?"

  "We already know our doer isn't a woman. He's a man, right-handed, medium height, between five eight and six foot. Size ten and a half sneaker."

  This was Hess showing off, as with his arms. He liked to dazzle. Maddox said, "Okay."

  "Talk to me about the husband. Struck me as a little slow on the uptake."

  "Inward, maybe. He's a town guy. His entire world's about this small."

  "Any trouble from him you know of?"

  "Less than none. He's the town caretaker. Looks after this place like it's his dying father."

  Hess nodded, arms crossed tight. "He's not answering his radio, and we already tried his pager. Any idea where we can find him this time of day?"

  "You're bringing him in?"

  Hess nodded, all confidence. "Yeah, we're bringing him in."

  Maddox still could not believe it. He had thought nothing of Ripsbaugh leaving Kitner's shop early, muttering good-bye as he moved through the door. "I don't know. The dump, maybe."

  "You're shocked."

  "I'm surprised, yeah. Ripsbaugh. Tearing someone apart like that. Doesn't make sense."

  "Overkill. Know what that means? That it was very, very personal. A revenge killing. You ever been married?"

  "No."

  "There's nothing shocking about it. Especially with the quiet ones. Like yourself." Hess smiled, feeling magnanimous. "You're headed home? Do us a favor and drop Mrs. Ripsbaugh at her house. She's free to go."

  * * *

  VAL STARED AT THE floor of Maddox's patrol car, sitting lumpily next to him, sinking into herself and her baggy clothes. She had always had what Maddox's mother called "natural mascara," a darkness tracing the wing-shaped contours of her eyes, different from the bruised quality of her lids. In high school it had been the hallmark of Val's small-town exoticism.

  Now it looked as though that mascara was starting to run. Maddox leaned on the gas pedal, the station receding on their right. He wanted to get her home fast. Because he was uncomfortable, and because he wanted to deliver this news to Pinty.

  "Can you smell it on me?" she said.

  "Smell what?" said Maddox.

  She plucked at the skin on the back of her left hand, pinching herself. "The shit. I scrub myself raw, but the stink from his septic business—it's in my skin now. It's in my hair. Part of me. I can't get it out." Twisting at the back of her hand now, squeezing her flesh white.

  "Val," said Maddox, passing her brother's place at the corner of Number 8 Road. "Things could still work out. Nothing's settled yet."

  "Look at me, Donny. Look what I've become." She raised her hands as though something warm and sticky had spilled in her lap. "Look at me."

  She was weeping, and Maddox didn't know what to do. He wanted to get her home, but she was choking on her sobs, dissolving in the seat next to him, and he couldn't drive. He turned in fast at the Gulp, parking among the losing scratch tickets in back.

  She cried hard into her hands, then pulled them away, reading something in the wetness on her palms. "He saved the letters," she said. "He did care, I knew he did. It meant something." Her hands closed into fists, and she turned to Maddox with sudden sobriety. "He helped me. When I met him, I was at my heaviest. The backaches—I was miserable. He turned it all around. He changed me, he delivered me. And, he was erudite. We talked. Really talked—about nature, about the stars. He knew so much. He had lived in California. He wanted me to go away with him. Everything he said to me was ice cream. I felt so good with him. I felt special."

  That last word twisted in Maddox's side. He thought back to the Val Sinclair he had known in school: not beautiful, exactly, but different, mysterious somehow, with burgundy lips and licorice black hair and a hint of foreign blood in her winged eyes. Now the fullness of her face, the tired tangle of her hair, the coarse oatmeal texture of her skin—it was as though the town had exacted its revenge by blunting her features over time, like the Cold River's current dulling its bed stones.

  How shocked he had been, returning home from college that first summer, to learn that Valerie Sinclair had become Mrs. Kane Ripsbaugh. A girl who had once spoken of nothing other than her desire to escape Black Falls. Her marrying the town caretaker, a man twenty years her senior, had hit Maddox with the force of a classmate's suicide. It made no sense. It never occurred to him at the time how bad her home life must have been—any family that could have produced Dill Sinclair .

  Val was really pinching the skin on the back of her hand now, twisting it like the key to a windup toy. "Did they ?" she said, looking first at Maddox, then down to the floorboard again. "Did you see the letters?"

  "I saw one."

  "Some of them," she said, "they were personal, maybe a little "

  Her humiliation was nearly complete, and for Maddox, almost unbearable. "Yeah," he said.

  A smile of intense pain. Her palms came up to blind her eyes. "He made me feel something," she said, trying to explain. "Something I hadn't felt in a long time "

  She crumpled again, shuddering and crying there next to him. Maddox was searching for something—anythin
g—to say when she turned toward him and began sobbing hard into his shoulder. He held her lightly as her chest heaved against him with bucking gasps, and he began to worry that someone from the store would come around back and mistake this clinch for something more than it was.

  So concerned was he that he misconstrued her nuzzling sniffles for progress, an indication that she was settling down. It was several more moments before he realized she was in fact nibbling at his neck with light, wet tastes of his skin just above his collar, her kisses rising up to the jawline beneath his ear.

  Stunned by her sudden and inappropriate affection, he let it go many more seconds than he otherwise would have before abruptly pulling away.

  She stayed where she was, on her side of the front seat, not ashamed or embarrassed, cheeks glistening with mashed tears, eyelashes damp and shiny black. "I think he did it."

  "What?" Maddox said.

  She stared into the middle ground between them, as though coming to terms with this herself.

  Maddox, still mystified by the kissing, felt something else now, something like danger. He had a sense that marriages generated their own peculiar force field, some more powerful than others. Especially the less likely unions. The warped vibrations of this one were warning him to keep away.

  "You need to get home," he said, throwing the car into drive and making for the road.

  * * *

  A STATE POLICE CRUISER pulled up across the street from Ripsbaugh's driveway as Maddox drove off after dropping off Val. It was only a matter of time before they picked him up, and Maddox felt a pang of sympathy for the hunted man.

  Ripsbaugh the loner. Ripsbaugh the vengeful. Ripsbaugh the cuckold.

  His tires crunched onto Pinty's white-rock driveway and he got out and ducked underneath Mrs. Pinty's arbor, the woven ivy making him think of Pinty's hairpiece and the Vitalis he insisted on sprinkling over it, more fragrant than anything in these hedges. The front door was unlocked as usual, and he entered into the middle landing, calling Pinty's name. He went downstairs to where Pinty had moved his bed, then checked the newly converted kitchen and found Pinty's walking stick leaned up against the end of the counter. Through the sliding glass doors he saw the wheelchair out on the brick patio beneath the raised deck, and Pinty lying on his side next to it.

  Maddox threw open the door. Pinty was not moving and Maddox's eyes did not know what to take in first. The gray pallor of Pinty's face. His fists clenched and drawn to his chest as though pulling back on reins. A spray of pallid yellow vomit on the brick, already visited by ants.

  Maddox rolled Pinty onto his back. Pinty's eyes were closed and for a moment Maddox could not remember any of his training. He got that same suffocating feeling as when he thought about his mother dying alone.

  A-B-C. Airway, Breathing, Circulation.

  He put his ear to Pinty's nose and felt warm breath push faintly against it. He jabbed two fingers into the soft flesh beneath the ridge of Pinty's jawbone, locating a pressure point, the pulse slow yet persistent. He raised Pinty's neck in order to tilt up his head, and heard a gurgle.

  Inside he found the phone and punched in 911. He got a state trooper at the station and instructed him to skip the ambulance call and instead order a medical helicopter.

  When Bucky Pail and Keith Ullard and Bart Stokes arrived anyway, carrying equipment cases from their rescue truck and accompanied by Eddie Pail and Mort Lees in POLICE shirts, Maddox stood firm. "Stay away," he warned them.

  "Maddox," scolded Eddie, bullheadedly trying to get around him to Pinty.

  Maddox kicked the wheelchair into their way. "You don't touch him."

  "Get away, Maddox," said Bucky.

  Bucky knelt down to unclasp his blue tackle box of medical supplies. Maddox kicked it over.

  Bucky stood, whipping his cigarette into the grass. The five of them fanned out around Maddox on the bricks. Maddox warned them again to keep away, and Mort Lees charged him from the side.

  It seemed stupid later, everything coming to a head there with Pinty lying unconscious on the ground. But this brawl had been months in the making. Maddox blamed them for Pinty's sudden decline, and unloaded his anger onto them as they unloaded theirs onto him. Maddox tried to single out Bucky for some special vengeance, but, true to form, Bucky remained out on the periphery of the fray, jumping in only when he had a clear punch.

  Yet Maddox held his own, never letting them pin him down. It was the arriving troopers following up on the 911 call who broke it up. The medical helicopter set down in Pinty's backyard soon after, flight nurses climbing out wearing helmets.

  Maddox rode with him to the hospital, gripping Pinty's hand in the sideways sunlight as Black Falls shrunk away below them.

  Pinty was wheeled off after they landed. Maddox declined an ER trip for his face, and was instead escorted to a windowless room where, left alone, he paced among cloth-covered chairs with small boxes of half-sized tissues poised on each wooden arm. Pale ocean watercolors hung on the walls—lonely boats, empty docks, muted sunsets—and Maddox realized they had installed him in the grief room.

  29

  CULLEN

  CULLEN LOOKED AT THE ring cuts on Maddox's cheeks and forehead, the abrasion on his neck, and the bruise under his left eye, not quite black but definitely blue.

  "Fighting your fellow peace officers," said Cullen. "That's good strategy."

  Maddox mock-smiled, raising his eyebrows. "Yup."

  "Making friends all over the place. About ready to pack it in, then?"

  Maddox didn't dignify that. He looked at the blank screen of the television set he had switched off as soon as they had stepped inside the empty waiting area.

  "Good," said Cullen, wanting to come off motivational rather than bitchy. "May I ask what your thinking was there?"

  "My thinking was, I'm going to kick these sons of bitches' asses for what they've done to him."

  Cullen nodded. Maddox had plenty more fight in him, which was a good thing, if properly channeled. Cullen noticed that, though Maddox had not left the hospital since bringing in the old man, the gray T-shirt he wore was fresh and not speckled with blood. Maddox had somebody bringing him things.

  Cullen loosened his tie and flopped it out straight over his belly, glancing out the window of Rainfield Good Samaritan. Every window he had ever stood at or sat by in Rainfield looked out at some segment of the interstate or one of the gas station islands that fed it. "Okay. I have to kick some ass here now. This is supposed to be your rehab assignment."

  Maddox frowned and sat back, inspecting the tender parts of his discolored knuckles.

  "You were frustrated," said Cullen. "You thought you had them on the murdered snitch. You wanted them for it. Turns out, the snitch got pushed over by someone else."

  "I don't know that for sure."

  "Then allow me to convince you. Crime Scene Services got clever working over the witch's house. They figured the killer had spent some time there, so they keyed in on a couple of things. One was the fact that the towel rack in the upstairs bathroom was empty. Maybe the towels were used to wipe up or clean off something, maybe even the assailant himself. Luckily, this was on the side of the house that didn't burn so bad. First thing they scored were footwear impressions from the wet bath mat."

  "Size ten and a half sneakers," said Maddox. "Hess already dangled that detail."

  "Then they found that the sink—faucet, cabinet, vanity, whole thing—had been wiped down, scrubbed clean. Again—a good spot for cleaning something off, maybe washing up. A defensive wound, perhaps. So they went down into the plumbing. The pipes underneath the sink. Pulled the drain traps, and there was blood."

  "Blood?" said Maddox. "Heat from the fire didn't cook it?"

  "Not all. Blood type immediately excluded the victim, Frond. While all this was going on, they turned up that safe under a bed upstairs. The letters."

  "Right."

  "Her husband, the roads guy, admits to knowing about his wife and the witch. Guy's alib
i is soft, very uncorroborated. But the critical thing is this gash on his arm."

  Maddox looked at him now.

  "Yeah," said Cullen. "Snagged it on a fence post, he said, but it fits just fine as a defensive wound. Typical overhelpful type, this guy, Ripsbaugh. Hess asked him for theories about who could have done this, and how. You know that old routine, 'If you didn't do it, tell me how someone else could have.' I saw only five minutes of the tape, but it's pretty pathetic, this guy holding forth with his theories."