by Stephen King
‘Okay, but we still need DNA. He refused the swabs.’ Unlike fingerprints, DNA cheek swabs were considered invasive in this state.
‘You know damn well we don’t need them. Riggins and the Staties will take his razor, his toothbrush, and any hairs they find on his pillow.’
‘Not good enough until we match what we’ve got against samples we take right here.’
Samuels looked at him, head tilted. Now he looked not like Alfalfa from The Little Rascals, but an extremely intelligent rodent. Or maybe a crow with its eye on something shiny. ‘Are you having second thoughts? Please tell me you’re not. Especially when you were as raring to go as I was this morning.’
Then I was thinking about Derek, Ralph thought. That was before Terry looked me in the eye, as if he had a right to. And before he called me a bastard, which should have bounced right off and somehow didn’t.
‘No second thoughts. It’s just that moving so fast makes me nervous. I’m used to building a case. I didn’t even have an arrest warrant.’
‘If you saw a kid dealing crack out of his knapsack in City Square, would you need a warrant?’
‘Of course not, but this is different.’
‘Not much, not really, but as it so happens, I do have a warrant, and it was executed by Judge Carter before you made the arrest. It should be sitting in your fax machine right now. So … shall we go in and discuss the matter?’ Samuels’s eyes were brighter than ever.
‘I don’t think he’ll talk to us.’
‘No, probably not.’
Samuels smiled, and in that smile Ralph saw the man who had put two murderers on death row. And who would, Ralph had little doubt, soon put Derek Anderson’s old Little League coach there, as well. Just one more of Bill’s ‘boys.’
‘But we can talk to him, can’t we? We can show him that the walls are closing in, and that he’ll soon be so much strawberry jelly between them.’
14
Statement of Ms Willow Rainwater [July 13th, 11:40 AM, interviewed by Detective Ralph Anderson]
Rainwater: Go on and admit it, Detective – I’m the least willowy Willow you ever saw.
Detective Anderson: Your size isn’t at issue here, Ms Rainwater. We’re here to discuss—
Rainwater: Oh yeah, it is, you just don’t know it. My size is why I was out there. There are ten, maybe twelve cabs waiting around at that panty palace by eleven o’clock most nights, and I’m the only woman. Why? Because none of the customers try to hit on me, no matter how drunk they are. I could have played left tackle back in high school, if they let women on their football team. And hey, half those guys don’t even realize I’m a gal when they get in my cab, and many still don’t know when they get out of it. Which is just hunky-dunky with me. Only thought you might want to know what I was doing there.
Detective Anderson: Okay, thanks.
Rainwater: But this wasn’t eleven, this was about eight thirty.
Detective Anderson: On the night of Tuesday, July 10th.
Rainwater: That’s right. Weeknights are slow all over town since the oil patch more or less dried up. A lot of the drivers just hang around the garage, shooting the shit and playing poker and telling dirty stories, but I got no use for any of that, so I’m apt to go out to the Flint Hotel or the Holiday Inn or the Doubletree. Or I go out to Gentlemen, Please. They got a cab-stand there, you know, for those who haven’t drunk themselves stupid enough to try driving home, and if I get there early, I’m usually first in line. Second or third at worst. I sit there and read on my Kindle while I wait for a fare. Hard to read a regular book once it gets dark, but the Kindle’s just fine. Great fucking invention, if you’ll pardon me for lapsing into my Native American tongue for a minute.
Detective Anderson: If you could tell me—
Rainwater: I am telling you, but I’ve got my own way of telling, been this way since I was in rompers, so be quiet. I know what you want, and I’ll give it to you. Here and in court, too. Then, when they send that kid-murdering sonofabitch to hell, I’ll put on my buckskins and my feathers and goofy-dance until I drop. We straight?
Detective Anderson: We are.
Rainwater: That night, early as it was, I was the only cab. I didn’t see him go in. I got a theory about that, and I’ll bet you five dollars I’m right. I don’t think he went in to see the pussy-prancers. I think he turned up before I arrived – maybe just before – and just went in to call a cab.
Detective Anderson: You would have won that bet, Ms Rainwater. Your dispatcher—
Rainwater: Clint Ellenquist was on dispatch Tuesday night.
Detective Anderson: That’s correct. Mr Ellenquist told the caller to check the cab-stand in the parking lot, and a cab would be there soon, if not already. That call was logged at eight forty.
Rainwater: Sounds about right. So he comes out, right over to my cab—
Detective Anderson: Can you tell me what he was wearing?
Rainwater: Bluejeans and a nice button-up shirt. The jeans were faded, but clean. Hard to tell under those arc-sodium parking lot lights, but I think the shirt was yellow. Oh, and his belt had a fancy buckle – a horse’s head. Rodeo shit. Until he bent down, I thought he was probably just another Oilpatch Pete who somehow held onto his job when the price of crude went to hell, or a construction worker. Then I saw it was Terry Maitland.
Detective Anderson: You’re sure of that.
Rainwater: Hand to God. The lights in that parking lot are bright as day. They keep it that way to discourage muggings and fistfights and drug deals. Because their clientele is such a bunch of gentlemen, you know. Also, I coach Prairie League basketball down at the YMCA. Those teams are coed, but they’re mostly boys. Maitland used to come down – not every Saturday, but a lot of ’em – and sit on the bleachers with the parents and watch the kids play. He told me he was scouting talent for City League baseball, said you could tell a kid with natural defensive talent by watching ’em play hoops, and like a fool I believed him. He was probably sitting there and trying to decide which one he’d like to cornhole. Judging them the way men judge women in a bar. Fucking pervo deviant asshole. Scouting talent, my wide Indian ass!
Detective Anderson: When he came to your cab, did you tell him you recognized him?
Rainwater: Oh yeah. Discretion may be somebody’s middle name, but it ain’t mine. I say, ‘Hey there, Terry, does your wife know where you are tonight?’ And he says, ‘I had a spot of business to do.’ And I say, ‘Would your spot of business have involved a lap dance?’ And he says, ‘You should call in and tell your dispatcher I’m all set.’ So I say, ‘I’ll do that. Are we headed home, Coach T?’ And he says, ‘Not at all, ma’am. Drive me to Dubrow. The train station.’ I say, ‘That’s gonna be a forty-dollar fare.’ And he says, ‘Make it in time for me to catch the train to Dallas, and I’ll tip you twenty.’ So I say, ‘Jump in and hold onto your jock, Coach, here we go.’
Detective Anderson: So you drove him to the Amtrak station in Dubrow?
Rainwater: I did indeed. Got him there in plenty of time to catch the night train to Dallas–Fort Worth.
Detective Anderson: Did you make conversation with him on the way? I ask because you seem like the conversational type.
Rainwater: Oh, I am! My tongue runs like a supermarket conveyor belt on payday. Just ask anybody. I started by asking him about the City League Tourney, were they gonna beat the Bears, and he said, ‘I expect good things.’ Like getting an answer from a Magic 8 Ball, right? I bet he was thinking about what he’d done, and making a quick getaway. Stuff like that must put a hole in your small talk. My question for you, Detective, is why the hell did he come back to FC? Why didn’t he run all the way across Texas and down to Old Meh-hee-co?
Detective Anderson: What else did he say?
Rainwater: Not much. He said he was going to try and catch a nap. He closed his eyes, but I think he was faking. I think he might have been peeking at me, like maybe he was thinking of trying something. I wish he had. And I wish I�
��d known then what I know now, about what he done. I would have pulled him out of my cab and tore off his plumbing. I ain’t lying.
Detective Anderson: And when you got to the Amtrak station?
Rainwater: I pulled up to the drop-off and he tossed three twenties on the front seat. I started to tell him to say hello to his wife, hut he was already gone. Did he also go into Gentlemen to change his clothes in the men’s room? Because there was blood on them?
Detective Anderson: I’m going to put six pictures of six different men down in front of you, Ms Rainwater. They all look similar, so take your t—
Rainwater: Don’t bother. That’s him right there. That’s Maitland. Go get him, and I hope he resists arrest. Save the taxpayers a piece of change.
15
When Marcy Maitland was in junior high (that was what it was still called when she went there), she sometimes had a nightmare that she turned up in home room naked, and everyone laughed. Stupid Marcy Gibson forgot to get dressed this morning! Look, you can see everything! By the time she got to high school, this anxiety dream had been replaced by a slightly more sophisticated one where she arrived in class clothed but realizing she was about to take the biggest test of her life and had forgotten to study.
When she turned off Barnum Street and onto Barnum Court, the horror and the helplessness of those dreams returned, and this time there would be no sweet relief and muttered Thank God when she woke up. In her driveway was a cop car that could have been the twin of the one which had conveyed Terry to the police station. Parked behind it was a windowless truck with STATE POLICE MOBILE CRIME UNIT printed on the side in big blue letters. Bookending the driveway was a pair of black OHP cruisers, with their lightbars strobing in the day’s growing gloom. Four large troopers, their County Mounty hats making them look at least seven feet tall, stood on the sidewalk, their legs spread (as if their balls are too big to keep them together, she thought). These things were bad enough, but not the worst. The worst was her neighbors, standing out on their lawns and watching. Did they know why this police presence had suddenly materialized in front of the neat Maitland ranchhouse? She guessed that most already did – the curse of cell phones – and they would tell the rest.
One of the troopers stepped into the street, holding up a hand. She stopped and powered down her window.
‘Are you Marcia Maitland, ma’am?’
‘Yes. I can’t get into my garage with those vehicles in my driveway.’
‘Park at the curb there,’ he said, pointing behind one of the cruisers.
Marcy felt an urge to lean through the open window, get right up in his face, and scream, MY driveway! MY garage! Get your stuff out of my way!
Instead, she pulled over and got out. She needed to pee, and badly. Probably had needed to since the cop had handcuffed Terry, and she just hadn’t realized until now.
One of the other cops was talking into his shoulder mic, and from around the corner of the house, walkie-talkie in one hand, came the crowning touch of this evening’s malignant surrealism: a hugely pregnant woman in a sleeveless flower-print dress. She cut across the Maitland lawn in that peculiar duck-footed walk – almost a waddle – that all women seem to have when they arrive at the far end of their last trimester. She did not smile as she approached Marcy. A laminated ID hung from her neck. Pinned to her dress, riding the slope of one enormous breast and as out of place as a dog biscuit on a communion plate, was a Flint City police badge.
‘Mrs Maitland? I’m Detective Betsy Riggins.’
She held out her hand. Marcy did not shake it. And although Howie had already told her, she said, ‘What do you want?’
Riggins looked over Marcy’s shoulder. One of the state cops was standing there. He was apparently the bull goose of the quartet, because he had stripes on his shirtsleeve. He was holding out a sheet of paper. ‘Mrs Maitland, I’m Lieutenant Yunel Sablo. We have a warrant to search these premises and take out any items belonging to your husband, Terence John Maitland.’
She snatched the paper. SEARCH WARRANT was printed at the top in gothic type. There followed a bunch of legalistic blah-blah, and it was signed at the bottom by a name she at first misread as Judge Crater. Didn’t he disappear a long time ago? she thought, then blinked water from her eyes – maybe sweat, maybe tears – and saw the name was Carter, not Crater. The warrant bore today’s date and had apparently been signed less than six hours ago.
She turned it over and frowned. ‘There’s nothing listed here. Does that mean you can even take his underwear, if you want to?’
Betsy Riggins, who knew they would take any underwear they happened to find in the Maitlands’ dirty clothes hamper, said, ‘It’s at our discretion, Mrs Maitland.’
‘Your discretion? Your discretion? What is this, Nazi Germany?’
Riggins said, ‘We are investigating the most heinous murder to occur in this state during my twenty years as a policewoman, and we will take what we need to take. We have done you the courtesy of waiting until you got home—’
‘To hell with your courtesy. If I’d turned up late, you would have what? Broken down the door?’
Riggins looked vastly uncomfortable – not because of the question, Marcy thought, but because of the passenger she was lugging around on this hot July night. She should have been sitting at home, with the air conditioning on and her feet up. Marcy didn’t care. Her head was pounding, her bladder was throbbing, and her eyes were welling with tears.
‘That would have been a last resort,’ said the trooper with the shit on his sleeve, ‘but within our legal right, as defined by the warrant I have just shown you.’
‘Let us in, Mrs Maitland,’ Riggins said. ‘The sooner we get started, the sooner we’ll be out of your hair.’
‘Yo, Loot,’ one of the other troopers said. ‘Here come the vultures.’
Marcy turned. From around the corner came a TV truck, with its satellite dish still folded against the roof. Behind it was an SUV with KYO decaled on the hood in big white letters. Behind that, almost kissing the KYO vehicle’s bumper, came another TV truck from another station.
‘Come inside with us,’ Riggins said. Almost coaxed. ‘You don’t want to be on the sidewalk when they get here.’
Marcy gave in, thinking this might be the first surrender of many. Her privacy. Her dignity. Her kids’ sense of security. And her husband? Would she be forced to surrender Terry? Surely not. What they were accusing him of was insane. They might as well have accused him of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.
‘All right. But I’m not going to talk to you, so don’t even try. And I don’t have to give you my phone. My lawyer said so.’
‘That’s fine.’ Riggins took her by the arm, when – given the size of her – Marcy should have been taking hers, to make sure she didn’t trip and fall on her enormous belly.
The Chevy Tahoe from KYO—‘Ki-Yo,’ as they styled themselves – stopped in the middle of the street, and one of their correspondents, the pretty blond one, got out so fast that her skirt slid most of the way to her waist. The troopers did not miss this.
‘Mrs Maitland! Mrs Maitland, just a couple of questions!’
Marcy couldn’t remember taking her purse when she exited the car, but it was over her shoulder and she got the house key out of the side pocket with no trouble. The trouble came when she tried to get it into the lock. Her hand was trembling too badly. Riggins didn’t take the key, but closed her hand over Marcy’s to steady it, and it finally slid home.
From behind her: ‘Is it true that your husband has been arrested for the murder of Frank Peterson, Mrs Maitland?’
‘Keep back,’ one of the troopers said. ‘Not one step off the sidewalk.’
‘Mrs Maitland!’
Then they were inside. That was good, even with the pregnant detective beside her, but the house looked different, and Marcy knew it would never look quite the same. She thought of the woman who had left here with her daughters, all of them laughing and excited, and it was like thinking
of a woman you had loved, but who had died.
Her legs gave out and she plopped onto the bench in the hall where the girls sat to put on their boots in winter. Where Terry sometimes sat (as he had tonight) to go over his lineup one final time before leaving for the field. Betsy Riggins sat down beside her with a grunt of relief, her meaty right hip thwacking against Marcy’s less padded left one. The cop with the shit on his sleeve, Sablo, and two others passed them without a look, drawing on thick blue plastic gloves. They were already wearing booties of a matching blue. Marcy assumed the fourth one was doing crowd control. Crowd control in front of their house on sleepy Barnum Court.
‘I have to pee,’ she said to Riggins.
‘As do I,’ Riggins said. ‘Lieutenant Sablo! A word?’
The one with the shit on his sleeve returned to the bench. The other two continued on into the kitchen, where the most evil thing they’d find was half a devil’s food cake in the fridge.
To Marcy, Riggins asked, ‘Do you folks have a downstairs bathroom?’
‘Yes, through the pantry. Terry added it himself last year.’
‘Uh-huh. Lieutenant, the ladies need to pee, so that’s where you start, and make it as fast as you can.’ And, to Marcy: ‘Does your husband have an office?’
‘Not as such. He uses the far end of the dining room.’
‘Thank you. That’s your next stop, Lieutenant.’ She turned back to Marcy. ‘Mind one little question while we wait?’
‘Yes.’
Riggins paid this no mind. ‘Have you noticed anything odd about your husband’s behavior over the last few weeks?’
Marcy gave a humorless laugh. ‘You mean was he building up to committing murder? Walking around, rubbing his hands together, maybe drooling and muttering to himself? Has your pregnancy affected your mind, Detective?’
‘I take it that’s a no.’
‘It is. Now please stop nagging me!’
Riggins sat back and folded her hands on her belly. Leaving Marcy with her throbbing bladder and a memory of something Gavin Frick had said only last week, after practice: Where’s Terry’s mind lately? Half the time he seems somewhere else. It’s like he’s fighting the flu, or something.
