by Chuck Hogan
They had found Ripsbaugh's tanker truck pulled in behind trees around the corner from Maddox's street. On the plastic-lined front seat lay the garment bag Ripsbaugh used to keep Sinclair's clothes and wig pristine. Fucking diabolical.
"TV teaches," said Hess. "Millions of people watch, but all it takes is one who's not only listening but learning. All these forensics shows and B-movie crime reenactments and jazzy serial killer documentaries? To him it was one long instructional video. A four-year correspondence course to Murder U. One guy out of a million with the will and the drive to apply the techniques he sees."
Maddox nodded, watching Ripsbaugh's video diagnostic contraption through his unbandaged eye, the whirring cable snake feeding slowly into a toilet bowl inside a folding-door utility bathroom. A technician from SwiftFlow Environmental Systems, Ripsbaugh's former regional competitor, operated the controls, watching the pipe camera's progress on a three-by-three monitor.
Hess stood with Maddox before a wired-in laptop, the search being recorded by CSS. To Hess's eye, the perspective was that of a coal miner, a green helmet light illuminating a foot or two of dark tunnel ahead. When it reached the open end of the pipe, the view dipped down, revealing a moonscape of glowing green curd.
"Keep going?" asked the SwiftFlow technician.
Maddox said, through a mouth still swollen, "Keep going."
The crust proved soft as the camera dipped through it. The view dimmed below, like an underwater camera in a murky pond. Hess was amazed they could see anything. "Where's all the shit?"
Maddox, and not the SwiftFlow technician, answered him.
"Sludge at the bottom of the tank breeds bacteria that breaks it down into wastewater. The effluent rises, dribbling off into the leeching fields, where it seeps back down through rock and soil, reentering the water table. You bring it back up through your well, and the cycle continues."
Maddox knew a lot, it seemed. A good guy, all in all, but weird. Seemed to Hess his own well was dug pretty deep.
The SwiftFlow technician said, "Holy Mother of God."
It came to them on the screen, a cloudy form taking shape.
A body. A human being suspended in fluid, naked, curled on its side. Like an oversized fetus in amniotic broth. A stillborn stuck in a polluted womb.
The corpse was startlingly well preserved, except for the outermost layers of derma. The small dark hole in the center of his chest looked to Hess like a gunshot wound.
Dillon Sinclair.
So this is where you've been hiding all this time, you son of a bitch.
"I'll be goddamned," Hess said. He had seen a lot of things in his career, but this psrticular image would never leave him. "What a town."
Maddox stepped back after a long look, gimpy on his sore leg. He was about to leave.
"Maddox," said Hess. He stuck out his hand. "What do you say? Two guys trying to do their jobs, right?"
Maddox thought about it a moment, then reached out and shook. "Thanks for that helicopter."
72
VAL
THE TANK OFF THE SEPTIC garage had already been excavated and dismantled, the pit filled in with loam just that afternoon. Then peace and quiet for an hour or two, until, late in the day, Val heard his tires on the gravel.
She answered the doorbell with a tissue balled in her hand. It was Donny, still in his Black Falls PD uniform, his face bandaged, leaning on a cane like old man Pinty.
Her face was puffy. She had been doing a lot of crying, and the rawness at the rims of her eyes added to their uncertainty as she looked at him.
His mouth was off-kilter from the swelling, the bandages making his expression difficult to read. She wondered if it would be okay to hug him.
She went ahead and did so, gently. It was not reciprocated.
"God," she said, sniffling into his shoulder. "It's all such a nightmare."
"It's pretty bad," he allowed.
She pulled away, still unsure. He stepped over the threshold on the cane, favoring his left leg. The bridge of his nose was deeply bruised, the color of the sky on late summer evenings.
She said, "So you were state police? All these years. That's what you've been "
"That's right."
"I don't know what to say," she said. "I'm so glad you are all right."
"Of course you are," he said, wincing, maybe from the pain.
She turned her head a few degrees as though for better reception, his flat intonation putting her on edge. "I am," she said, working the tissue in her hands, smiling out of confusion. She backed to the stairs, sitting down on the third step. "So much he hid from me. I think I never understood him."
"He understood you."
Donny was not going to make this easy. She looked up at him, waiting for some sort of signal. Some indication of release, of absolution. She always had trouble reading men. Except Kane.
"You wanted out of Black Falls," Donny said. "Now you can go."
"Yes?"
"And now you will go."
She blinked, looking at his uniform. "Are you saying that as ?"
"As a policeman?" said Donny. "Yes. You will take whatever you can pack in a bag, right now, and you will go away from here. That is the only deal I'm offering. Leave everything else behind and go. Right now. Tonight."
She searched for some sort of glimmer in his eyes, anything. "But, Donny"
"You knew," he said.
Blinking bewilderment. "I didn't."
"Frond and Pail. You tried to talk them into taking you away from here. Both of them turned you down. Just like I did."
"Donny, I"
"So you confessed to Kane. You told him everything, after the affairs were over. To clear your conscience, right? Wrong. To overload his. To punish him for your misery."
"But how could I have known"
"You didn't. Not for the first two. You knew it would hurt him. You knew it would eat at him over time. But not so that he'd take it upon himself to do something about it. Something nearly heroic in its lunacy. Trying to make you happy again by killing off your sadness." The cool dispassion he had walked in with was gone. "But when you told him about you and me? And about Tracy? You knew, Val. You knew exactly what you were doing. You were sending him to me."
His glare was a hand around her throat.
"You had a killer in your pocket," he went on. "An instrument of your vengeance. Your revenge on this town that you hated. This town that he lovedalmost as much as he loved you. I don't even think you want to leave. I think you want to stay. I think you need this place as an excuse for your misery. A place and a people to blame. But now you will go from here, tonight, and you will never come back."
Donny's hands were squeezed tight at his sides, the same way Kane's used to get. Seeing that emboldened her, and all pretense fell from her face like glass out of a shattered window. She reached for the handrail, waiting for the trembling to go out of her lips. She wanted to be standing when she said this. Wanted him to see her pride, her triumph.
"I have lived with monsters all my life," she told him.
Donny turned and limped away. "That is why I'm letting you go."
73
MADDOX
TRACY STOOD WITH BOTH forearms on the stall door inside the old cowshed. She and Rosalie, the mother llama, watched with equal pride as the new cria tottered around on spindly legs.
"Samantha," said Tracy. "I picked it because it's a happy name. You can't say it without smiling. Try."
Maddox eyed her legs beneath the strings of her cutoffs, tanned down to the tops of her boots. Clean now. He wondered how many showers and baths it had taken. How much soaking and scrubbing before she had begun to feel normal again.
"Samantha," he said, feeling soreness in his cheek between the second and third syllable. It hurt to smile. "And what about you?"
"What about me?"
"You feeling happy?"
Under her straw cowgirl hat, her pretty eyes lacked the sparkle they once held, her spirit o
f mischief. Maddox felt as though he had taken that away. "I'd like to feel happy," she said. "I'm trying."
Footsteps scratched the dirt outside. Mrs. Mithers coming. Tracy looked at Maddox, but without any trepidation or nervousness. She was past all that now.
Instead it was Maddox who readied himself, standing as straight as he could with the cane.
Mrs. Mithers looked in with a smile of greeting, walking up the cow ramp. Maddox presented himself, Tracy signing the introductions.
Maddox took a good look at Tracy's mother's face. As with the rest of her generation, she had come late to sunscreen and straw hats. But there was beauty beneath the striations of age and divorce. Enough to make one wonder what difference a good marriage might have made.
Mrs. Mithers signed, and Tracy translated: "How's your cheek?"
"Not so bad," he answered. "In a way, after ten years of working undercover, I think I kind of had it coming."
Mrs. Mithers didn't know what to say to that.
"Do it too long," Maddox went on, "and you either burn out or burn up. That's what I told them at the state police barracks yesterday, when I resigned."
Tracy turned. She stared at him. "Resigned?"
"They wanted me on a desk. I never did wear the uniform. Seemed strange to start now."
Tracy kept staring, and Mrs. Mithers had to touch her daughter's elbow to get her attention. She signed, and Tracy stammeringly translated the question she could not bring herself to ask: "So what are you going to do?"
"Well," he said, bypassing Tracy and addressing Mrs. Mithers directly, "undergo a little reconstructive surgery, that's the first thing. Beyond that, it looks like Pinty's going to need some help getting around for a while. Never mind putting together a competent police force here. I suppose it's no secret that I still owe this town five years."
Tracy said, "Five years?"
"Less six months, for time served. So, four and a half. But after that, believe you meI am gone."
Tracy was still staring at him.
To Mrs. Mithers, he added, "Unless I meet someone. You know. Fall in love. That old trap."
Tracy pulled her hat off her head and rushed up and squeezed him so tight he staggered back on his cane. She kissed his good cheek, quaking in his arms, crying or maybe laughing. Either way, it was happiness, and Maddox, sore as he was, felt better than he had in a long time.
He buried his nose in Tracy's hair. She smelled clean and pure.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For aiding and abetting, thanks to Richard Abate, Colin Harrison, Susan Moldow, Robert Shulman, and Trooper John Conroy of the Massachusetts State Police.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chuck Hogan abandoned his career as a video store clerk when his first novel, The Standoff, became a best seller and was translated into fourteen international editions. His most recent novel, Prince of Thieves, was awarded the Hammett Prize for literary excellence in crime writing. He lives with his family in Massachusetts.
