by Chuck Hogan
Meet at pulp mill. Urgent. ALONE.
Sinclair's messages were long and rambling, not staccato bursts. Granted, the guy was on the run. But also there were no misspellings. Sinclair was notorious for thatwhether he was dyslexic or just sloppy, Maddox didn't know. "Pulp" would be "plup." "Urgent" would be "ugrent." It was constant, every second or third word.
And why wait so long to contact him? If he had in fact been carrying the pager with him all this time, why hadn't he used it? Why hadn't he responded to any of Maddox's earlier messages? Why ignore him until now?
Maddox suddenly felt exposed, standing half visible in the moonlight behind the old paper mill, looking at the trees across the river and farther south along Mill. He was beginning to think that coming here had been a terrible mistake.
52
TRACY
SHE DREAMED A MEMORY: the afternoon her parents had sat her down in the sitting room, where all the serious conversations took place, and told her thirteen-year-old self that they were breaking up for good. Her father was not deaf, so it fell to him to utter the wordsthrough a smile, as though everything were going to be okaywhile her mother sat next to him, hands angrily mute in her lap. Tracy had cried that day, more out of confusion than anything, the distress she felt from her parents. As soon as she could, she excused herself and went into her room and shut the door. The next thing she remembered was her mother shaking her shoulder, and Tracy feeling a surge of bliss, as though waking from a terrible dream. Her relief vanished as soon as she saw the look in her mother's dark-rimmed eyes. Her mother left the room silently and Tracy felt her reproach, though she did not understand why until she was older: her mother had seen her slumber as a careless act, the betrayal of a much-needed ally.
So now, bolting awake to the rumble of the opening garage door, Tracy felt that same moment of pleasant disorientation, of consolationonly to be brought down crashing by the shameful realization that she had once again fallen asleep. How was this possible? Emotional exhaustion? Or simple cowardly escape? She chastised herself for her weakness, rubbing hard at her cheeks and her eyes, her skin feeling like it had aged a year during that nap. Her face turning into her mother's face.
She had been sleeping with an undercover state trooper. She knew nothing about the man she had fallen for. It came back to her in a bolt: who Donny was, where he had gone, whom he was to meet. So when the garage door started to close, fear woke her completely. Was this him? She went and stood half hidden inside the bathroom doorway, feeling more useless than ever.
He walked in, his holster already off his belt, his keys and pager in his hands. He shuffled his boot treads on the thin mat and shook his head when he saw her. "Nothing. He never showed."
"Never showed?"
"Two hours I waited. Wandered all over that rotting place." He walked past her and dumped his stuff on the counter where the pieces of his trigger lock remained. She could smell the old building on him, sawdust and decay. "I'm sorry, you were probably worried."
Could he see that she had fallen asleep? "But why would he ?"
Donny pulled a jug of water from the refrigerator and poured himself a glass and drank all of it. "Stand me up? I don't know. Any number of reasons, I suppose."
"Okay. But."
He poured himself another full glass and closed the refrigerator door. "It was this feeling I had there. While I was standing out in back, by the riverbank. Like I was being watched."
"Watched? Why would he be watching you?"
"He wouldn't. But what if someone else had his pager? Say they wanted to find out who had been paging him? That's how you'd do it. Set up a meet and draw that person out into the open."
"But you're losing me," said Tracy. "Now you think someone else has his pager?"
"I don't know." Donny paced, looking angry with himself. "The physical evidence that Sinclair did these killingsit's overwhelming, it's obvious, it's damning. I know all that. But it still doesn't fit the person. Walking those creaking boards around the mill, I remembered him more clearly than I have in a while." Donny's face shriveled in distaste. "He's a a craven little sneak. A skinny sleaze with no eyebrows, hyper-needy, loopy. I've met all kinds of people, some of the worst you could know. You don't make it that many years undercover without developing a pretty accurate radar. And, yes, there is something dripping and waxy and cold about him that is very real. Sinclair is a creep in every sense of the word. But he's not a killer. Vindictive, passive-aggressive, self-pitying, narcissisticall those things. But without a speck of actual violence in him. Only want. He picked on kids. A total coward."
"What about being on drugs?" said Tracy.
"I've seen him that way too. I can't say it's not possible. Anything is." Donny threw up his hands, there being no final answer. "In some weird way, I feel responsible for him. For what's happened."
"That's crazy."
"He was my informant. I was his keeper, in a sense. His handler. Waiting for him out there sort of confirmed it for me."
"Even sowhat can you do about it?"
He looked back at his pager as though hoping it would buzz again. "Nothing, now."
He walked around a little, Tracy standing still, watching in silence. She felt it too, the impulse to keep talking about Sinclair, to go on about it all night. Anything to avoid what they really had to say to each other.
"I'm sorry I had to leave you like that," he said.
The only way to override her guilt at having fallen asleep was to speak to the source of her distress, to say exactly what was on her mind. "How soon until you leave here for good?"
He took time selecting his words. He was being too careful. "I don't know exactly. I'm here at least until they find Sinclair."
"And if that is tomorrow?"
He struggled through a pause. "Tracy, look. With the life I've lived up to now, it's tough for me to think about committing to anything."
She stopped him right there with a sad nod disguised as an angry nod. "That's fine," she said.
"No, wait."
"It's fine." She was already going.
He didn't follow. She climbed into her truck, opening the garage door with the remote he had given her, then cocking her arm as though to throw it out her window and smash it to the cement floor.
Of course, she did not. She could not.
Not yet. There was still hope.
She pulled out of his driveway into the dark night, bleary-eyed and oblivious to everything beyond the haze of her distress, paying no attention whatsoever to the small, unlit car parked on the shoulder of the road.
53
HESS
"SO YOU WENT THERE ALONE," said Hess.
"That's what it said to do."
"You send back any reply?"
"No."
"Nothing?"
"I sent nothing."
Hess switched his spearmint toothpick around his mouth, chewing on Maddox's story. Dealing with him in his softball team POLICE jersey and ball cap was like dealing with a guy doing summer theater.
Hess said, "Tracing the page got us no fix on the location of his two-way. Pager transmits by radio wave to a tower, then up to a satellite and back down again. Why people favor pagers in places like this where there's no cell reception."
Maddox nodded, evidently knowing this already, and Hess worked the pick some more, sucking off flavor as he appraised him. He did not buy this prompt reporting of Sinclair's page as an attempt to make peace.
Hess said, "You thought maybe it was me. Thought maybe I'd gotten hold of his pager number and was testing you."
"It crossed my mind."
Hess smiled. "UC. Don't know who to trust, so you don't trust anyone. That part of you gets worn down. It's why people don't trust you." The desk phone rang, Hess ignoring it. "What were you going to do if he showed up?"
"Bring him in."
"You two don't have any previous agreements or anything?"
"No way."
"Sinclair have a thing for y
ou?"
"He better not."
"You never met at this abandoned mill before?"
"Never."
Hess thought some more. "I think we got him on the run. We got him reaching out, and it's about time. About time he made a mistake."
"How'd the Pail crime scene come in?"
Hess scowled, people still second-guessing him after the Ripsbaugh thing. "We got more of the same sneaker treads outside in the dirt, where the body was dragged. We recovered fibers from the kitchen and an old ottoman Sinclair brushed past on his way to the back doorthe same black cotton we recovered from Frond's."
Maddox said, "He's wearing the same clothes?"
"The guy's on the run."
"Yeah, butit's been close to a month."
Still being fucking challenged every step of the way. "Guy's mental, all right? He's lost it. Why change clothes?" He shrugged and went on. "No latents, but who leaves fingerprints anymore? Talcum powder instead, as before, indicating gloves. Maybe even the same ones he wore at Frond's. Found talcum in a couple of different places. The handcuffs were novelty grade, available at any toy store. Purely for show. But it's Pail's fingernail scrapings that had them doing high-fives in the lab. Skin cells. Nice ones. Matching Sinclair."
"Matching Sinclair?"
"As in, irrefutable. What, am I the bearer of bad news?"
Maddox shook his head. So transparent. So Hess decided to nudge him even further.
"And then there's the pinecone."
Maddox looked up. "The what?"
"Pinecone. Medical examiner found it jammed up inside Pail's keister. Humiliating the corpse, you know? That's some kind of informant you were working there."
Maddox said, "Christ."
"CSS profiles him as taking his revenge upon the town that shunned him. Enjoying the game of it, the commotion he's causing here, the choppers circling overhead. Getting his rocks off. Maybe even fucking with you in particular." Hess pointed to a geological survey map of the town tacked up on the wall behind Maddox, the cleared areas of the Borderlands shaded red. "We've been over and through those woods and he's just not there. I mean, he's not some ultrasurvivalist anyway, right? Not some gay Rambo." He checked to see how Bryson's line played with Maddox; it did not register at all. "He's getting help somewhere in town. Someone around here is helping this guy. We went back through his voluminous Internet activities again, his e-mails, instant messages. Picked up the words 'Hell Road,' a term we didn't know during our first go-round. He had set a rendezvous with someone he met in a magician's chat room. Someone local. At midnight on the night we now think he disappeared."
Maddox said, "Did you trace it back?"
"To the Brattle Public Library, one town over. But as a protest against the Patriot Act, they have a policy of not keeping records of online activity or computer users. Bottom line, it was a hookup, a date. A booty call for gay sex in the woods. That was the premise, anyway. Now that meetingI'm sure it wasn't you."
Maddox flat-eyed him. "You want to get back at me, and that's the best you've got?"
"Just wondering if you might be jealous, him hooking up with someone else." Hess started past Maddox and opened the door. "Oh, and from this point forward? He contacts you again, I want to know about it as soon as you do."
54
MADDOX
THE TOWN CEMETERY up on Number 8 Road was an ancient patch of sloping sod shaded here and there by great weeping willows and fronted by a low stone wall. Across the road, four steps of locally quarried granite led nowhere, high weeds and odd, blazing flowers growing out of the foundation of the old Congregational church that had burned down one hundred summers before.
He walked along the upper lanes of newer stones to the one that said MADDOX. His mother's name, MARGARET, and the dates of her birth and death were newly engraved. He squatted and touched the lettering, so dry and sharp compared with REGINALD, the name of the father he had barely known, above it. It was not his way to pray, but Maddox spoke to her in his head just as he did sometimes when sitting alone in her empty house.
I'm sorry.
Every town family was buried around him. He went and found PINTOPOLUMANOS, Pinty's last name engraved in a narrow font in order to fit across the stone. Mrs. Pinty's name and dates were filled in, as was Pinty's name, Stavros, below hers, awaiting an end date. Next to Gregory's name and dates was a carved icon of the American flag.
Pail's grave, a perfect dirt rectangle, awaited its stone marker. Two fat bales of sod stood near. The can of Bud remained, lying on its side, the open top being visited by flies.
Maddox located the Sinclair stone marker and stood before the grave. No headstone, just a slab set into the grass. Jordan was the father's name. The family had arrived in Black Falls without a mother, already the jagged piece of a whole no one had ever seen. Jordy Sinclair had briefly been a copthey eased out bad apples back thenbefore going full-time into contracting and developing, putting in cul-de-sacs around town in the early 1980s before the mill went under. After only a few winters, his houses began falling apart: shifting on their foundations, joists warping and sagging, walls cracking under overweight roofs. Shoddy craftsmanship and substandard materials. At the time of his deathhe was the victim of a one-car, midday drunk driving accidenthe had been at the wrong end of several lawsuits.
Maddox turned to see the orange highway department pickup truck pull in. Ripsbaugh rolled along the ring road, getting out, pulling his shovel from the truck bed and carrying it in that familiar way of his. "Don," he said, coming toward him down the lane.
"Kane," said Maddox, wondering why the man never tied his bootlaces.
Ripsbaugh stopped, set his shovel blade down in the grass. "Got to finish sodding Pail's grave. Final touches."
"I saw."
"Is it true, what they say? About the coyote?"
"Sure is."
"Suits him. And a meth lab? Scourge of rural America, according to the TV."
"I guess we got lucky," Maddox said.
Ripsbaugh squinted under the sun. "I guess you did. Looks like you're the last cop standing." Ripsbaugh regarded the Sinclair marker, the grave at their feet. He stared a moment as though saying a little prayer, then launched a gob of saliva at the ground. "All this grass here should be black."
Maddox forgot sometimes that Ripsbaugh was Sinclair's brother-in-law. "Why did the father leave Dill all his property?"
"He didn't leave either of them anything. The mill houses you're talking about, he had them all in Dill's name for legal reasons. As a tax dodge, and so they couldn't be attached to any lawsuits. Dill didn't even know he owned them until after the death."
"So why didn't Val ask for some of that?"
"Didn't want anything to do with it." Maddox could see that Ripsbaugh was proud of this. "She always says the best thing her father ever did for her was die in that car crash."
Maddox nodded, ready to drop it, head on home.
"See, the problem with Val," Ripsbaugh continued, thinking it through, "the problem with Val is that she's smart. So smart, and highly intelligent people suffer more than others. When she's right in her mind, she can do anything. But she just can't maintain it." Ripsbaugh nudged at the grave sod with the tip of his spade, cutting little divots. "And sometimes she puts that blame on me. As the source of her problems. Sometimes I think it's why she married me in the first place, to give her this excuse. A stone for her chain. She asked me to marry her, did you know that? I always figured I'd end up, you know, adopting a wife from Russia or Cambodia or someplace. Just for a companion. I never knew I could get so lucky. But someone offers you a bargain like that, you don't think twice. You take it."
"Sure," said Maddox.
"So why don't we have children, right?"
"No," Maddox said. "I wasn't"
"She doesn't like it. The act of sex. Physically, she gets sick."
Maddox wasn't going to say another word. Until confusion overtook discomfort. "But so, how?"
&
nbsp; "Frond?" he said, the spade making little snitch-snitch sounds in the soil. He spoke with the forbearance of a man taking the pain of another person's ailment onto himself. "It's acting out. That's her pattern. She does me wrong, then lets me find outthen hates herself all over again. She punishes me in order to torture herself."
"A pattern," Maddox said, thinking, There were others?
"But when she's clear, once she's healthy againshe thanks me, can you understand that? She's grateful. For me standing by her. For what I put up with. Even calls me her hero." He looked off at the nearest weeping willow. "You ever been called a hero, Don?"
