The Outsider_A Novel

by Stephen King

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay. And where are you from?”

  “Phoenix,” Merl said without conviction.

  “Uh-huh, so how come that’s an Oklahoma plate on this beauty?”

  Merl was silent, out of answers.

  “Step out of the car, son, and even though you look about as dangerous as a little yellow dog shitting in a rainstorm, keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Merl got out of the car without too much regret. It had been a good run. More, really; when you thought of it, it had been a miraculous run. He should have been collared a dozen times since leaving home in late April, but he hadn’t been. Now that he had been, so what? Where had he been going, anyway? Nowhere. Anywhere. Away from the bald bastard.

  “What’s your name, kiddo?”

  “Merl Cassidy. Merl, short for Merlin.”

  A few early shoppers looked at them, then went on their way into the round-the-clock wonders of Walmart.

  “Just like the wizard, uh-huh, okay. You got any ID, Merl?”

  He reached into his back pocket and brought out a cheap wallet with frayed buckskin stitching, a birthday present given to him by his mother when he was eight. Back then it had just been the two of them, and the world had made some sense. Inside the billfold was a five and two ones. From the compartment where he kept a few pictures of his mom, he brought out a laminated card with his photo on it.

  “Poughkeepsie Youth Ministry,” the cop mused. “You from New York?”

  “Yes, sir.” The sir was a thing his stepfather had beaten into him early.

  “You from there?”

  “No, sir, but close by. A little town called Spuytenkill. That means ‘a lake that spouts.’ At least that’s what my mother told me.”

  “Uh-huh, okay, interesting, you learn a new thing every day. How long have you been on the run, Merl?”

  “Going on three months, I guess.”

  “And who taught you to drive?”

  “My uncle Dave. In the fields, mostly. I’m a good driver. Standard or automatic, makes no difference. My uncle Dave, he had a heart attack and died.”

  The cop considered this, tapping the laminated card against one thumbnail, not thuck-thuck-thuck now but tick-tick-tick. On the whole, Merl liked him. At least so far.

  “Good driver, uh-huh, you must be to get all the way from New York to this dusty puckered asshole of a border town. How many cars have you stolen, Merl?”

  “Three. No, four. This one’s the fourth. Only the first one was a van. From my neighbor down the road.”

  “Four,” the cop said, considering the dirty child standing in front of him. “And how did you finance your southward safari, Merl?”

  “Huh?”

  “How did you eat? Where did you sleep?”

  “Mostly slep in whatever I was driving. And I stole.” He hung his head. “From ladies’ purses, mostly. Sometimes they didn’t see me, but when they did . . . I can run fast.” The tears began to come. He had cried quite a bit on what the cop called his southward safari, mostly at night, but those tears had brought no real relief. These did. Merl didn’t know why and didn’t care.

  “Three months, four cars,” the cop said, and tick-tick-tick went Merl’s youth ministry card. “What were you running from, kiddo?”

  “My stepfather. And if you send me back to that sonofabitch, I’ll run away again, first chance I get.”

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh, I get the picture. And how old are you really, Merl?”

  “Twelve, but I’ll be thirteen next month.”

  “Twelve. I will be dipped in shit and spun backwards. You come with me, Merl. Let’s see what we’re gonna do with you.”

  At the cop shop on Harrison Avenue, while waiting for someone from social services to show up, Merl Cassidy was photographed, deloused, and fingerprinted. The prints went out on the wire. This was just a matter of routine.

  11

  When Ralph got to Flint City’s much smaller cop shop, meaning to call Deborah Grant before picking up a cruiser for the run to Cap City, Bill Samuels was waiting for him. He looked sick. Even the Alfalfa cowlick was drooping.

  “What’s wrong?” Ralph asked. Meaning what else?

  “Alec Pelley texted me. With a link.”

  He unbuckled his briefcase, brought out his iPad (the big one, of course, the Pro), and powered it up. He tapped a couple of times, then passed it to Ralph. The text from Pelley read, Are you sure you want to pursue a case against T. Maitland? Check this first. The link was beneath. Ralph tapped it.

  What came up was a website for Channel 81: CAP CITY’S PUBLIC ACCESS RESOURCE! Beneath it was a block of videos showing City Council meetings, a bridge re-opening, a tutorial called YOUR LIBRARY AND HOW TO USE IT, and one called NEW ADDITIONS TO THE CAP CITY ZOO. Ralph looked at Samuels questioningly.

  “Scroll down.”

  Ralph did, and found one titled HARLAN COBEN SPEAKS TO TRI-STATE ENGLISH TEACHERS. The PLAY icon was superimposed over a bespectacled woman with hair so arduously sprayed it looked as if you could bounce a baseball off it without hurting the skull beneath. She was at a podium. Behind her was the Sheraton Hotels logo. Ralph brought the video up to full screen.

  “Hello, everybody! Welcome! I’m Josephine McDermott, this year’s president of the Tri-State Teachers of English. I’m so happy to be here, and to officially welcome you to our yearly meeting of the minds. Plus, of course, a few adult beverages.” This brought a murmur of polite laughter. “Our attendance this year is particularly good, and while I’d like to think my charming presence has something to do with it”—more polite laughter—“I think it probably has more to do with today’s amazing guest speaker . . .”

  “Maitland was right about one thing,” Samuels said. “The fucking introduction goes on and on. She runs down just about every book the guy ever wrote. Go to nine minutes and thirty seconds. That’s where she winds it up.”

  Ralph slid his finger along the counter at the bottom of the vid, now sure of what he was going to see. He didn’t want to see it, and yet he did. The fascination was undeniable.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to today’s guest speaker, Mr. Harlan Coben!”

  From the wings strode a bald gentleman so tall that when he bent to shake hands with Ms. McDermott, he looked like a guy greeting a child in a grown-up’s dress. Channel 81 had deemed this event interesting enough to spring for two cameras, and the picture now switched to the audience, which was giving Coben a standing O. And there, at a table near the front, were three men and a woman. Ralph felt his stomach take the express elevator down. He tapped the video, pausing it.

  “Christ,” he said. “It’s him. Terry Maitland with Roundhill, Quade, and Grant.”

  “Based on the evidence we have in hand, I don’t see how it can be, but it sure as hell looks like him.”

  “Bill . . .” For a moment Ralph couldn’t go on. He was utterly flabbergasted. “Bill, the guy coached my son. It doesn’t just look like him, it is him.”

  “Coben speaks for about forty minutes. It’s mostly just him at the podium, but every now and then there are shots of the audience, laughing at some of the witty stuff he says—he’s a witty guy, I’ll give him that—or just listening attentively. Maitland—if it is Maitland—is in most of those shots. But the nail in the coffin is right around minute fifty-six. Go there.”

  Ralph went to minute fifty-four, just to be safe. By then Coben was taking questions from the audience. “I never use profanity in my books for profanity’s sake,” he was saying, “but under certain circumstances, it seems absolutely appropriate. A man who hits his thumb with a hammer doesn’t say, ‘Oh, pickles.’ ” Laughter from the audience. “I have time for one or two more. How about you, sir?”

  The picture switched from Coben to the next questioner. It was Terry Maitland, in a big fat close-up, and Ralph’s last hope that they were dealing with a double, as Jeannie had suggested, evaporated. “Do you always know who did it when you sit down to write,
Mr. Coben, or is it sometimes a surprise even to you?”

  The picture switched back to Coben, who smiled and said, “That’s a very good question.”

  Before he could give a very good answer, Ralph backed up to Terry, standing to ask his question. He stared at the image for twenty seconds, then handed the iPad back to the district attorney.

  “Poof,” Samuels said. “There goes our case.”

  “DNA’s still pending,” Ralph said . . . or rather, heard himself say. He felt divorced from his own body. He supposed it was how boxers felt just before the ref stopped the fight. “And I still need to talk to Deborah Grant. After that I’m going up to Cap City to do some old-school detective work. Get off my ass and knock on doors, like the man said. Talk to people at the hotel, and at the Firepit, where they went to dinner.” Then, thinking of Jeannie: “I want to look into the possibility of forensic evidence, as well.”

  “Do you know how unlikely that is in a big city hotel, the best part of a week after the day in question?”

  “I do.”

  “As for the restaurant, it probably won’t even be open.” Samuels sounded like a kid who’s just been pushed down on the sidewalk by a bigger kid and scraped his knee. Ralph was coming to realize he didn’t like this guy very much. He came across more and more as a quitter.

  “If it’s near the hotel, chances are they’ll be open for brunch.”

  Samuels shook his head, still peering at the frozen image of Terry Maitland. “Even if we get a DNA match . . . which I’m starting to doubt . . . you’ve been in this job long enough to know that juries rarely convict based on DNA and fingerprints. The OJ trial is an excellent case in point.”

  “The eye-wits—”

  “Gold will demolish them on cross. Stanhope? Old and half-blind. ‘Isn’t it true you gave up your driver’s license three years ago, Mrs. Stanhope?’ June Morris? A kid who saw a bloody man from across the street. Scowcroft was drinking, and so was his buddy. Claude Bolton’s got a drug jacket. The best you’ve got is Willow Rainwater, and I’ve got news for you, buddy, in this state people still don’t care much for Indians. Don’t much trust them.”

  “But we’re in too deep to back out,” Ralph said.

  “That happens to be the dirty truth.”

  They sat silently for a bit. Ralph’s office door was open, and the station’s main room was almost deserted, as it usually was on Sunday mornings in this small southwestern city. Ralph thought of telling Samuels that the video had jolted them away from the elephant in the room: a child had been murdered, and according to every bit of evidence they had gleaned, they had the man who’d done it. That Maitland appeared to have been seventy miles away was something that had to be addressed and clarified. There could be no rest for either of them until it was.

  “Come up to Cap City with me, if you want to.”

  “Not going to happen,” Samuels said. “I’m taking my ex-wife and the kids to Lake Ocoma. She’s bringing a picnic. We’re finally back on good terms, and I’d like not to jeopardize that.”

  “Okay.” The offer had been half-hearted, anyway. Ralph wanted to be by himself. He wanted to try to get his head around what had seemed so straightforward and was now looking like a colossal clusterfuck.

  He stood up. Bill Samuels put his iPad back in his briefcase and then stood up beside him. “I think we could lose our jobs over this, Ralph. And if Maitland walks, he’ll sue. You know he will.”

  “Go on to your picnic. Eat some sandwiches. This isn’t over yet.”

  Samuels left the office ahead of him, and something about his walk—the slumped shoulders, the briefcase banging dispiritedly at his knee—infuriated Ralph. “Bill?”

  Samuels turned.

  “A child in this town was viciously raped. Either before or just after, he may have been bitten to death. I’m still trying to get my head around that. Do you think his parents give a rodent’s behind if we lose our jobs or the city gets sued?”

  Samuels made no reply, only crossed the deserted squadroom and went out into the early morning sunshine. It was going to be a great day for a picnic, but Ralph had an idea the DA wasn’t going to enjoy it much.

  12

  Fred and Ollie had arrived in the Mercy Hospital ER waiting room shortly before Saturday night became Sunday morning, no more than three minutes behind the ambulance carrying Arlene Peterson. At that hour, the big waiting room had been jammed with the bruised and bleeding, the drunk and complaining, the crying and coughing. Like most ERs, the one at Mercy was extremely busy on Saturday nights, but by nine o’clock on Sunday morning, it was almost deserted. A man was holding a makeshift bandage over a bleeding hand. A woman sat with a feverish child in her lap, both of them watching Elmo caper on the TV set bolted high in one corner. A teenage girl with frizzy hair sat with her head back and her eyes closed and her hands clasped to her midriff.

  And there was them. The remains of the Peterson family. Fred had closed his eyes around six and drifted off to sleep, but Ollie only sat, staring at the elevator into which his mother had disappeared, sure that if he dozed, she would die. “Could you not have watched with me one hour?” Jesus had asked Peter, and that was a very good question, one you couldn’t answer.

  At ten minutes past nine, the door of that elevator slid open and the doctor they had spoken to shortly after arriving stepped out. He was wearing blue scrubs and a sweat-stained blue surgical cap decorated with dancing red hearts. He looked very tired, and when he saw them, he turned to one side, as if wishing he could retreat. Ollie only had to see that involuntary flinch to know. He wished he could let his father sleep through the initial blast of bad news, but that would be wrong. Dad had known and loved her longer than Ollie had been alive, after all.

  “Huh!” Fred said, sitting up when Ollie shook his shoulder. “What?”

  Then he saw the doctor, who was removing his cap to expose a thatch of sweaty brown hair. “Gentlemen, I’m sorry to tell you that Mrs. Peterson has passed away. We tried hard to save her, and at first I thought we were going to be successful, but the damage was simply too great. Again, I’m very, very sorry.”

  Fred stared at him unbelievingly for a moment, then let out a cry. The girl with the frizzy hair opened her eyes and stared at him. The feverish toddler cringed.

  Sorry, Ollie thought. That’s the word of the day. Last week we were a family, now there’s just Dad and me. Sorry’s the word for that, all right. The very one, there is no other.

  Fred was weeping with his hands over his face. Ollie took him in his arms and held him.

  13

  After lunch, which Marcy and her girls only picked at, Marcy went into the bedroom to explore Terry’s side of the closet. He was half of their partnership, but his clothes only took up a quarter of the space. Terry was an English teacher, a baseball and football coach, a fund-raiser when funds were required—which was like always—a husband, and a father. He was good at all of those jobs, but only the teaching gig paid, and he wasn’t overloaded with dressy clothes. The blue suit was the best, it brought out the color of his eyes, but it was showing signs of wear, and no one with an eye for men’s fashions was going to mistake it for Brioni. It was Men’s Wearhouse, and four years old. She sighed, took it down, added a white shirt and a dark blue tie. She was putting them in a suit bag when the doorbell rang.

  It was Howie, dressed in duds much nicer than the ones Marcy had just bagged up. He gave the girls a quick hug and bussed Marcy on the cheek.

  “Are you going to bring my daddy home?” Gracie asked.

  “Not today, but soon,” he said, taking the suit bag. “What about a pair of shoes, Marcy?”

  “Oh, God,” she said. “I’m such a klutz.”

  The black ones were okay, but they needed a polish. No time for that now, though. She put them in a bag and went back into the living room. “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “All right. Step lively and pay no attention to the coyotes. Girls, keep the doors locked until your mom gets back, an
d don’t answer the phone unless you recognize the number. Got it?”

  “We’ll be okay,” Sarah said. She didn’t look okay. Neither of them did. Marcy wondered if it was possible for preteen girls to lose weight overnight. Surely not.

  “Here we go,” Howie said. He was bubbling over, cheerful.

  They left the house with Howie carrying the suit and Marcy carrying the shoes. The reporters once more surged to the edge of the lawn. Mrs. Maitland, have you talked to your husband? What have the police told you? Mr. Gold, has Terry Maitland responded to the charges? Are you going to request bail?

  “We have nothing to say at this time,” Howie said, stone-faced, escorting Marcy to his Escalade through a glare of television lights (surely not necessary on this brilliant July day, Marcy thought). At the foot of the driveway, Howie powered down his window and leaned out to speak to one of the two cops on duty. “The Maitland girls are inside. You guys are responsible for seeing they’re not bothered, right?”

  Neither responded, only looked at Howie with expressions that were either blank or hostile. Marcy couldn’t tell which, but she leaned toward the latter.

  The joy and relief she’d felt after looking at that video—God bless Channel 81—hadn’t left her, but there were still TV trucks and microphone-waving reporters in front of her house. Terry was still locked up—“in county,” as Howie had put it, and what a terrible phrase that was, like something out of a lonesome country-and-western song. Strangers had searched their house and taken anything they pleased. The wooden faces of the policemen and their lack of response were the worst, though, far more unsettling than the TV lights and the shouted questions. A machine had swallowed her family. Howie said they would get out of it unharmed, but it hadn’t happened yet.

  No, not yet.

  14

  Marcy was given a quick patdown by a sleepy-eyed female officer, who told her to dump her purse in the plastic basket provided and step through the metal detector. The officer also took their driver’s licenses, put them in a Baggie, and tacked it to a bulletin board with many others. “Also the suit and shoes, missus.”