by Stephen King
The front door of the Maitland house opened. Sarah saw her mother there and started to get out. “Wait one, Sarah,” Alec said, and reached behind him. He had taken a couple of towels from the downstairs bathroom before leaving his house, and now he handed one to each girl.
“Put these over your faces, except for your eyes.” He smiled. “Like bandits in a movie, okay?”
Grace only stared at him, but Sarah got it, and draped one of the towels over her sister’s head. Alec swept it over Grace’s mouth and nose while Sarah fixed her own towel. They got out and hurried through the harsh light from the TV truck, holding the towels closed below their chins. They didn’t look like bandits; they looked like midget Bedouins in a sandstorm. They also looked like the saddest, most desperate kiddos Alec had ever seen.
Marcy Maitland had no towel to hide her face, and it was her that the cameraman focused on.
“Mrs. Maitland!” Bowtie shouted at her. “Do you have any comment on your husband’s arrest? Have you spoken to him?”
Stepping in front of the camera (and moving with it nimbly when the cameraman tried to get a clear angle), Alec pointed to Bowtie. “Not one step on the lawn, hermano, or you can ask Maitland your bullshit questions from the next cell.”
Bowtie gave him an insulted look. “Who you calling hermano? I have a job to do here.”
“Hassling a distraught woman and two little kids,” Alec said. “That’s some job.”
But his own job here was over. Mrs. Maitland had gathered her daughters to her and taken them inside. They were safe—as safe as they could be, anyway, although he had a feeling those two kids weren’t going to feel safe anywhere for a very long time.
Bowtie trotted down the sidewalk, motioning for the cameraman to follow as Alec returned to his car. “Who are you, sir? What’s your name?”
“Puddentane. Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same. Your story isn’t here, so leave these people alone, okay? They had nothing to do with this.”
Knowing he might as well have been speaking in Russian. Already the neighbors were back on their lawns, eager to view the next episode of Barnum Court’s continuing drama.
Alec backed down the driveway and headed west, also knowing that the cameraman would be videoing his license plate, and soon they would know who he was, and who he was working for. Not big news, but a cherry to put on top of the sundae they would serve the viewers who tuned in for the eleven o’clock news. He thought briefly of what was now going on in that house—the stunned and terrified mother trying to comfort two stunned and terrified girls still wearing their game-day facepaint.
“Did he do it?” he’d asked Howie when Howie called and gave him a quick shorthand version of the situation. It didn’t matter, the work was the work, but he always liked to know. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Howie had replied, “but I know what your next move is, as soon as you get Sarah and Gracie home.”
As he saw the first sign pointing him toward the turnpike, Alec called the Cap City Sheraton and asked for the concierge, with whom he had done business in the past.
Hell, he’d done business with most of them.
2
Ralph and Bill Samuels sat in Ralph’s office with their ties yanked down and their collars loosened. The TV lights outside had gone off ten minutes before. All four buttons on Ralph’s desk phone were lit up, but Sandy McGill was handling the incoming, and would until Gerry Malden arrived at eleven. For the time being, her job was simple, if repetitive: The Flint City Police Department has no comment at this time. The investigation is ongoing.
Meanwhile, Ralph had been working his own phone. Now he put it back in his coat pocket.
“Yune Sablo and his wife went upstate to see his in-laws. He says he put it off twice already, and this time he had no choice, unless he wanted to spend a week on the couch. Which, he says, is very uncomfortable. He’ll be back tomorrow, and of course he’ll be at the arraignment.”
“We’ll send someone else to the Sheraton, then,” Samuels said. “Too bad Jack Hoskins is on vacation.”
“No, it isn’t,” Ralph said, and that made Samuels laugh.
“Okay, you got me there. Our Jackie-boy might not be the worst detective in the state, but I admit he’s right up there. You know every detective on the Cap City force. Start calling until you get a live one.”
Ralph shook his head. “It should be Sablo. He knows the case, and he’s our liaison with the State Police. This is no time to risk pissing them off, considering the way things went tonight. Which was not quite as we expected.”
This was the understatement of the year, if not the century. Terry’s complete surprise and seeming lack of guilt had shaken Ralph even more than the impossible alibi. Was it possible that the monster inside him had not only killed the boy, but erased all memory of what he had done? And then . . . what? Filled in the blank with a detailed false history of a teachers’ conference in Cap City?
“If you don’t send someone ASAP, that guy Gold uses—”
“Alec Pelley.”
“Yeah, him. He’ll beat us to the hotel’s security footage. If they still have it, that is.”
“They will. They keep everything for thirty days.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“Yes. But Pelley doesn’t have a warrant.”
“Come on. Do you think he’ll need one?”
In truth, Ralph did not. Alec Pelley had been a detective with the SP for over twenty years. He would have made a great many contacts during that time, and working for a successful criminal lawyer like Howard Gold, he would be sure to keep them current.
“Your idea to arrest him in public is now looking like a bad call,” Samuels said.
Ralph gave him a hard look. “It was one you went along with.”
“Not very enthusiastically,” Samuels said. “Let’s have the truth, since everyone else has gone home and it’s just us girls. With you it was close to home.”
“Damn straight,” Ralph said. “It still is. And since it’s just us girls, let me remind you that you did a little more than just go along. You’ve got an election coming up in the fall, and a dramatic high-profile arrest wouldn’t exactly hurt your chances.”
“That never entered my mind,” Samuels said.
“Fine. It never entered your mind, you just went with the flow, but if you think arresting him at the ballpark was just about my son, you need to take another look at those crime scene pictures, and think about Felicity Ackerman’s autopsy addendum. Guys like this never stop at one.”
Color began to mount in Samuels’s cheeks. “You think I haven’t? Christ, Ralph, I was the one who called him a fucking cannibal, on the record.”
Ralph slid a palm up his cheek. It rasped. “Arguing over who said what and who did what is pointless. The thing to remember is it doesn’t matter who gets to the security footage first. If it’s Pelley, he can’t just put it under his arm and carry it away, can he? Nor can he erase it.”
“That’s true,” Samuels said. “And it’s not apt to be conclusive, in any case. We may see a man in some of the footage who looks like Maitland—”
“Right. But proving it’s him, based on a few glimpses, would be a different kettle of fish. Especially when stacked up against our eye-wits and the fingerprints.” Ralph stood and opened the door. “Maybe the footage isn’t the most important thing. I need to make a phone call. Should have made it already.”
Samuels followed him into the reception area. Sandy McGill was on the telephone. Ralph approached her and made a throat-cutting gesture. She hung up and looked at him expectantly.
“Everett Roundhill,” he said. “Chairman of the high school English department. Track him down and get him on the phone.”
“Tracking him down won’t be a problem, since I’ve already got his number,” Sandy said. “He’s called twice already, asking to speak to the lead investigator, and I basically told him to get in line.” She picked up a sheaf
of WHILE YOU WERE OUT notes and waved them at him. “I was going to put these on your desk for tomorrow. I know it’s Sunday, but I’ve been telling people I’m pretty sure you’ll be in.”
Speaking very slowly, and looking at the floor instead of at the man beside him, Bill Samuels said, “Roundhill called. Twice. I don’t like that. I don’t like it at all.”
3
Ralph arrived home at quarter to eleven on that Saturday night. He hit the garage door opener, drove inside, then hit it again. The door rattled obediently back down on its tracks, at least one thing in the world that remained sane and normal. Push Button A and, assuming Battery Compartment B is loaded with relatively fresh Duracells, Garage Door C opens and closes.
He turned off the engine and just sat there in the dark, tapping the steering wheel with his wedding ring, remembering a rhyme from his raucous teenage years: Shave and a haircut . . . you bet! Sung by the whorehouse . . . quartet!
The door opened and Jeanette came out, wrapped in her housecoat. In the spill of light from the kitchen, he saw that she was wearing the bunny slippers he’d given her as a joke present on her last birthday. The real present had been a trip to Key West, just the two of them, and they’d had a great time, but now it was just a blurry remnant in his mind, the way all vacations were later on: things with no more substance than the aftertaste of candy floss. The joke slippers were the things that had lasted, pink slippers from the Dollar Store with their ridiculous little eyes and their comical floppy ears. Seeing her in them made his eyes sting. He felt as if he had aged twenty years since stepping into that clearing at Figgis Park and viewing the bloody ruin that had been a little boy who probably idolized Batman and Superman.
He got out and hugged his wife hard, pressing his beard-stubbly cheek to her smooth one, saying nothing at first, concentrating on holding back the tears that wanted to come.
“Honey,” she said. “Honey, you got him. You got him, so what’s wrong?”
“Maybe nothing,” he said. “Maybe everything. I should have brought him in for questioning. But Jesus Christ, I was so sure!”
“Come in,” she said. “I’ll make tea, and you can tell me about it.”
“Tea will keep me awake.”
She drew back and looked at him with eyes as lovely and dark at fifty as they had been at twenty-five. “Are you going to sleep, anyway?” And when he didn’t reply: “Case closed.”
Derek was away at camp in Michigan, so they had the house to themselves. She asked him if he wanted to watch the eleven o’clock news on the kitchen TV, and he shook his head. The last thing he wanted was ten minutes of coverage on how the Flint City Monster had been brought to bay. Jeannie made raisin toast to go with the tea. Ralph sat at the kitchen table, looking at his hands, and told her everything. He saved Everett Roundhill for last.
“He was furious with all of us,” Ralph said, “but since I was the one who finally called him back, I was the one who took the incoming fire.”
“Are you saying he confirmed Terry’s story?”
“Every word. Roundhill picked up Terry and the other two teachers—Quade and Grant—at the high school. Ten o’clock Tuesday morning, as arranged. They got to the Sheraton in Cap City around 11:45, just in time to pick up their conference IDs and be seated for the banquet lunch. Roundhill says he lost track of Terry for an hour or so after the lunch was over, but he thinks Quade was with him. In any case, they were all back together by three, which is when Mrs. Stanhope saw him putting Frank Peterson’s bike—and Frank himself—into a dirty white van seventy miles south.”
“Have you talked to Quade?”
“Yes. On the way home. He wasn’t angry—Roundhill’s so pissed he’s threatening to call for a full-scale investigation by the AG—but he was disbelieving. Stunned. Said that he and Terry went to a used bookstore called Second Edition after the banquet lunch, browsed, then came back for Coben.”
“And Grant? What about him?”
“He’s a she—Debbie Grant. Haven’t reached her yet, her husband said she went out with some other women, and when she does that she always turns off her phone. I’ll get her tomorrow morning, and when I do, I have no doubt that she’ll confirm what Roundhill and Quade told me.” He took a small bite of his toast, then put it back on the plate. “This is my fault. If I’d pulled Terry in for questioning Thursday night, after Stanhope and the Morris girl ID’d him, I’d have known we had a problem and this wouldn’t be all over TV and the Internet now.”
“But by then you’d matched the fingerprints to Terry Maitland’s, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“Fingerprints in the van, a fingerprint on the van’s ignition key, fingerprints in the car he abandoned by the river, on the branch he used to . . .”
“Yes.”
“And then more eyewitnesses. The man behind Shorty’s Pub, and his friend. Plus the cab driver. And the bouncer at the strip club. They all knew him.”
“Uh-huh, and now that he’s been arrested, I have no doubt we’ll get a few more eye-wits from Gentlemen, Please. Bachelors, mostly, who won’t have to explain to their wives what they were doing there. I still should have waited. Maybe I should have called the high school to check on his movements on the day of the murder, except it made no sense, being summer vacation and all. What could they have told me except ‘He’s not here’?”
“And you were afraid that if you started asking questions, it would get back to him.”
That had seemed obvious at the time, but now it only seemed stupid. Worse, careless. “I’ve made some mistakes in my career, but nothing like this. It’s as if I went blind.”
She shook her head vehemently. “Do you remember what I said when you told me that was how you meant to do it?”
“Yes.”
Go ahead. Get him away from those boys as fast as you can.
That was what she’d said.
They sat there, looking at each other across the table.
“This is impossible,” Jeannie said at last.
He pointed a finger at her. “I think you’ve reached the heart of the matter.”
She sipped her tea thoughtfully, then looked at him over the rim of her cup. “There’s an old saying that everyone has a double. I think Edgar Allan Poe even wrote a story about it. ‘William Wilson,’ it was called.”
“Poe wrote his stories before fingerprints and DNA. We don’t have the DNA yet—that’s pending—but if it comes back as his, it’s him and I’m probably okay. If it comes back as someone else’s, they’ll cart me off to the loonybin. After I lose my job and get sued for false arrest, that is.”
She lifted her own piece of toast, then lowered it again. “You have his fingerprints here. And you’ll have his DNA here, I’m sure of it. But Ralph . . . you don’t have any fingerprints or DNA from there. From whoever attended that conference in Cap City. What if Terry Maitland killed the boy and it was the double at that conference?”
“If you’re saying Terry Maitland has a lost identical twin with the same fingerprints and DNA, it’s not possible.”
“I’m not saying that. I’m saying that you don’t have any forensic proof that it was Terry in Cap City. If Terry was here, and the forensic evidence says he was, then the double must have been there. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Ralph understood the logic, and in the detective novels Jeannie liked to read—the Agatha Christies, the Rex Stouts, the Harlan Cobens—it would have been the centerpiece of the final chapter, when Miss Marple, Nero Wolfe, or Myron Bolitar revealed all. There was one rock-hard fact, as unassailable as gravity: a man could not be in two places at the same time.
But if Ralph had confidence in the eyewitnesses here, he had to have equal confidence in the eyewitnesses who said they had been in Cap City with Maitland. How could he doubt them? Roundhill, Quade, and Grant all taught in the same department. They saw Maitland every day. Was he, Ralph, supposed to believe those three teachers had colluded in the rape-murder of a chil
d? Or that they had spent two days with a double so perfect they had never even suspected? And even if he could make himself believe it, could Bill Samuels ever convince a jury, especially when Terry had a seasoned and crafty defense lawyer like Howie Gold on his side?
“Let’s go up to bed,” Jeanette said. “I’ll give you one of my Ambiens and rub your back. This will look better in the morning.”
“You think so?” he asked.
4
As Jeanette Anderson was rubbing her husband’s back, Fred Peterson and his older son (now, with Frankie gone, his only son) were picking up dishes and setting the living room and the den to rights. And although it had been a remembrance gathering, the remains were pretty much the same as after any large and long houseparty.
Ollie had surprised Fred. The boy was your typical self-involved teenager who ordinarily wouldn’t pick up his socks from under the coffee table unless told twice or three times, but tonight he’d been an efficient and uncomplaining helper since Arlene had at ten o’clock turned out the last of that day’s unending stream of guests. The gathering of friends and neighbors had been winding down by seven, and Fred had hoped it would be over by eight—God, he was so tired of nodding when people told him Frankie was in heaven now—but then came the news that Terence Maitland had been arrested for Frankie’s murder, and the damn thing had cranked up all over again. That second cycle almost had been a party, albeit a grim one. Again and again Fred had been told that a, it was unbelievable, that b, Coach T had always seemed so normal, and c, the needle at McAlester was too good for him.
Ollie went back and forth from the living room to the kitchen, carrying glasses and piles of dishes, loading them into the dishwasher with an efficiency Fred never would have expected. When the dishwasher was full, Ollie set it going and rinsed more dishes, stacking them in the sink for the next load. Fred brought in the dishes that had been left in the den, and found yet more on the picnic table in the backyard, where some of their visitors had gone to smoke. Fifty or sixty people must have washed through the house before it was finally over, everyone in the neighborhood, plus well-wishers from other parts of town, not to mention Father Brixton and his various hangers-on (his groupies, Fred thought) from St. Anthony’s. On and on they had come, a stream of mourners and gawkers.