by Chuck Hogan
Maddox walked back past the cars lining the baking road to where Ripsbaugh was setting down his cones. "Kane," Maddox said.
Ripsbaugh straightened, Maddox getting a sense of the strength inside his saggy pants and silent attitude, years of steady labor bound up in muscle. "Don."
"Hey, uh " He nodded back at Hess. "They want you to leave. They don't want you around."
Ripsbaugh stared. "I'm closing off the road. This turn here"
"I know. I know. I'm just telling you what they said."
Ripsbaugh looked toward the turnout at the bridge. Hess was ignoring him, talking to someone else. Ripsbaugh was usually hard to read, but here the insult was plain.
Twelve hours after the DNA results had come back, Ripsbaugh's state police shadow simply disappeared. No apology to Ripsbaugh, no explanation. Because Ripsbaugh was never officially charged, he didn't have to be officially cleared. So add to the taint of cuckoldry a cloud of suspicion still lingering over Ripsbaugh's head.
Maddox said, "Leave the cones with me. I'll pick them up when they're through here, run them on back to you."
Ripsbaugh slowly set down the cones. He was the kind of man who knew little of life other than the satisfaction of hard work. Take away his work and you leave him with nothing.
Maddox returned to the bridge. They had brought the boys up from the brook and sent down the dogs, handlers walking them back and forth over the cracked mud bank. The dogs sniffed and prodded aggressively, turning up zilch. Then CSS guys tossed down paper bags for the handlers to rip open underneath the dogs' noses, one containing a black T-shirt, the other a ratty pair of black crew-length socks. Clothes from Sinclair's apartment. The handlers snapped commands in German, and the dogs dutifully explored the site a second time. One of them seemed to scent something, but was unable to follow it.
The handlers then led them in wider, concentric circles. Maddox slapped at bugs while Hess remained a portrait of serenity, watching the police dogs working below for him.
As they moved to the Borderlands side of the short bridge, the handlers regripped leashes, winding the taut straps around their wrists as the dogs started to pull. A handler called up to say that they were "indicating," and a CSS guy moved sideways down the short embankment carrying an oversized pair of tweezers and a paper evidence bag. What he found on the top curve of the bank he held up for Hess to see.
Maddox wasn't sure. But he thought it might be the flattened butt of a hand-rolled cigarette.
You weak-minded fool.
The dogs led their handlers farther into the trees, skirting the dry, snaking bank of the brook. Hess and Bryson made their way down to follow, as did Maddox after a moment, tagging along unnoticed.
The dogs abruptly left the brook for the trees, straining against their leashes and pawing through the litter of the forest floor, scrambling over lumpy roots, following a trail. Maddox tried to envision it as he moved. Sinclair ditching his bike by the bridge. Hiking through the forest along this very route. Hiking or running? Could he have been chased?
The midnight gunshot Heavey had heard. Could Sinclair have found his way through these woods after dark, even with a flashlight? What was he doing biking out here in the first place?
The dogs' barking picked up, and Maddox saw sunlight ahead, a clearing in the trees. The old fire road. Hard-packed and baking in the heat.
The dogs stopped, snarling, pawing madly at the shoulder of the road. Uncanny, the canine sense of smell. Nearly psychic in its ability.
The handlers promenaded the animals around a small perimeter, but to no avail. The dogs strained to get back toward the shoulder. The trail had ended.
The handlers released them from command and their leashes, the dogs jumping back and forth among the dead leaves and pine needles, digging at the ground, agitated and whimpering. They were indicating something, and suffering for their inability to communicate just what it was.
Hess stepped past them out into the middle of the road. He looked west where it curved, disappearing into the treeline. "Where's this go?"
No one else answered, and Maddox realized he was being addressed. "Access road. Runs the length of the forest, from the trailheads on the northeast side of town out to Aylesbury, I think. Near the state border. Ungated at either end."
Hess looked the other way, back toward Black Falls. "Who drives it?"
"No one. Unless you're looking to wreck your suspension. Teenagers run it on a dare sometimes."
"Teenagers?"
"'Hell Road,' they call it. Every year, every graduating class. Rite of passage. The old haunted-forest thing."
"What's the legend?"
"Pequoig Indian spirits seeking revenge for a massacre out at the falls. That's the classic version. Others say there was a boy who got lost out here and froze to death around the turn of the last century. People claim to hear him crying and calling out for help after the first snow."
Hess nodded. "Nothing else?"
"You could probably find somebody who would talk up midnight masses and devil worship."
Hess didn't like the way Maddox phrased that. He passed another silent judgment on Maddox, then looked away, ignoring him. "Hell Road," he said to Bryson.
Bryson shielded his eyes from the high sun. "A midnight stroll through the forest seems unlikely, though stranger things have happened. And that gunshot report, it's still a big 'if ' in my book. But the dogs place him here, no question. He could have met someone." Bryson mimed his theory, intrigued by the possibility. "Shot them, took their car. Because he needed wheels, because he knew he was blowing town. He went after Frond maybe for some traveling cash."
Hess said, "Forty dollars was still tucked inside the kitchen creamer."
"So he failed."
"Then what's he doing for money? No ATM hits, no pings out in the real world."
"Hiding. A wanted man."
Hess closed one eye. "Okay, but if he had a gun, why didn't he shoot Frond? Why tear him up like that?"
Bryson sputtered, out of gas.
Hess said, "What if he didn't go anywhere at all?"
Bryson squinted. To Maddox, it seemed like Hess had left Bryson twisting. Like he had allowed him to fail here.
Hess said, "Maybe he was only trying to look disappeared. Maybe he walked out here, turned around, walked right back. Left the bike where he had dumped it, waded through stream water back toward town." Hess chewed the inside of his cheek, watching the confounded dogs. "We know he was inside the witch's house for some amount of time. Days, maybe."
Bryson said, "You're saying Sinclair's still nearby?"
"We've got alerts out there. A guy with shaved eyebrows, that's tough to miss."
Bryson scanned the trees they had just walked out of. "Okay. Then where's he hiding now?"
While Maddox was distracted by this back-and-forth, one of the unleashed dogs had cut back around its handler toward him. Maddox stiffened, the dog nudging his shin, starting a low-grade growl.
The handler heeled the dog with a German command, and it sat at eager attention, eyes fixed on Maddox, lips back and baring its teeth.
Maddox explained, "I was inside the apartment earlier."
The handler said nothing. He took up the leash, wound it tightly around his hand, and eased the hungry dog away.
Maddox saw Hess standing closer to the shoulder now, watching him, his big arms pretzeled.
35
RIPSBAUGH
RIPSBAUGH RIMMED THE fire pit in the Bobcat, dozing dirt onto the smoldering ash. Cinders lifted off in a huff of protest, flakes of leaf and yard bag flaring orange before dying black and drifting down like hell snow. Smoke rose from the pit, gray and thin.
The heat off the crater made things wavy, but the white jersey immediately attracted Ripsbaugh's eye, as will any clean thing in a dump. Maddox coming toward him between lanes of landfill. Ripsbaugh made another smothering pass, covering up the carcass of a pillaging coyote he had snared with an illegal leg trap.
"Saw the smoke," said Maddox, talking over the Bobcat engine. "I dropped the cones in the back of your truck."
Ripsbaugh nodded and motioned Maddox aboard. Maddox gripped the outside of the cage as Ripsbaugh drove back up the rise to the equipment shack. Maddox stepped off as Ripsbaugh killed the ignition and climbed out, plucking his T-shirt away from his sweat-soaked sides. He swiped at his brow with his back-pocket rag, admiring the soot that rubbed off.
Maddox's face and nose looked pinched, but to Ripsbaugh the stench of sun-baked garbage was second nature. Maddox said, "How do you stand burning in this heat?"
"Piles up otherwise. It don't stop for summer." He popped open the Igloo cooler just inside the door, offering Maddox a Coors, which he declined. "I earned this one," said Ripsbaugh, cracking it open, exploding a spray of mist and a lazy spill of foam.
He drank down half, wincing under the high sun, then caught sight of a wing flapping over the top of a dirt hillock across the lane. He handed Maddox his beer and reached back inside the shed for his spade, mounting the rise in four long strides, blade raised.
Two massive turkey vultures spread their wings, lifting off slowly away from him, hauling their ugly bodies into the hot, heavy air.
Their meal was a dead possum, which Ripsbaugh scooped and flung down the other side. Maddox eyed the blood smear on the spade as Ripsbaugh returned, taking his beer, drinking another lick and starting up the dusty road toward the front gate. "They find anything?"
"Dogs scented a trail. Led out to the fire road through the Borderlands. Ended there."
"It's Dill they're looking at?"
Maddox nodded. "What do you think?"
"I'm wondering who's next if he doesn't work out for them." They walked a few more steps in silence. "It's not what they done to me so much. The letters they found, the cut on my armI understand these things. But give me a fair shake. This guy Hess, the way he went about it. How he had it all decided. Sawed off my leg without waiting for the cancer test to come back first."
"It's not right, how they treated you."
"I can take it. Being that I knew I was innocent, that made it all just strange. But what it did to Val. What it put her through. Once they come in that door, once they get inside your house, everything you ever said or did can and will be used against you. It was open season. And Val, she's not that strong. She's sick to death about anyone knowing her business, never mind the whole town."
"You could sue."
Ripsbaugh shook his head. "Not put her through that again."
Maddox looked at him. "You're a good man, Kane."
"Naw," he said, taking another pull on the can, then crushing it in his fist, tossing it near the door of the recycling shed. "No such thing."
He felt Maddox looking him over, as though Maddox had decided something. "You said something to me once about wanting to help. If I were to ask you for a favor, even if it didn't seem to make sense at the time, could you do it anyway, without saying anything to anyone else?"
Ripsbaugh hesitated with his hand on the gate latch. An unforeseen result of his persecution by Hess and the state police was that he had apparently gained some measure of Maddox's trust.
Ripsbaugh asked him, point-blank, "Were you a cop before all this?"
Maddox's face showed nothing as he stepped through the gate. "I'll be in touch."
36
TRACY
AFTER DR. BOLT HAD to leave in such a hurry, Tracy sat with Rosalie in the first stall. The old cowshed closest to the house was where she and her mother stabled late-term pregnant llamas and their newborn crias. Dr. Bolt's best estimate for Rosalie was two to three weeks, but given the llama's gestation of nearly twelve months, she could deliver at any time. Restlessness and fidgeting would be the first signs of early labor.
Tracy sat on a stool in the open stall doorway, eating a tuna fish sandwich for dinner and watching the contented mother-to-be sitting on her hay bed. Rosalie's brown cameloid face looked anything but restless. Tracy marveled at how peaceful and serene she appeared, her high neck so straight and proud. How fulfilled.
Living on a farm, Tracy came up against the reality of biology every day, in such a way that it was impossible not to dwell on her own animal nature. She thought about the tiny pouch of eggs she had been assigned at birth. A humble legacy dwindling month by month. She was still young enough that she shouldn't worry, but Mithers women were known for their frugality, and squandering a precious commodity such as that was like heating an unused room or listening to a leaky faucet drip, drip, drip.
Tracy had received "the Talk" in sign language. Never before or since had her mother seemed more deaf than at that moment. In need of a convenient visual aid, she had taken Tracy to see the giant gumball machine outside Wal-Mart on their monthly visit to Rainfield for supplies.
What would it feel like, she wondered, once that quarter was dropped into the slot? The bright pink ball spiraling down to click against her brass door.
She ignored the horn the first time. It honked twice more in succession, like a signal, and she put down her sandwich on its wax paper and closed Rosalie's stall door and went down the wood ramp. Her shadow stretched long across the chewed grass in the peachy, late-day light. Half hidden behind a handful of birches sprung up along the western fence was a parked car. A police car.
She ducked past the kitchen window in case her mother was there, then cut through the gate and ran along the fence. She tried livening up her hair with her fingers as she went, turning the corner and seeing Donny out of the car, waiting for her in the shade.
These days, it never even occurred to her to play hard to get. She ran up and kissed him and held him and rubbed his stubbled cheek. When he smiled, she kissed him again.
"Tuna fish," he said.
She covered her mouth fast. "Sorry!"
He shook his head, kissing the knuckles over her lips.
"This is a surprise," she said, holding him hard. "You look tired."
He glanced through the peeling white tree trunks at the house. "I only have a minute. Wanted to make sure you knew not to call me at the station."
"Okay."
"Too crazy there. I'm never alone anymore. Page me if you need to get in touch."
"I will, I will. How's Pinty?"
Donny shrugged. "He mumbled in his sleep. I tried to convince the doctor that was a good sign."
She put her ear against his chest, not to listen but to get as close to him as possible. "So much going on," she said. "So many things at once."
"Tell me about it."
"And now Dillon Sinclairmy God. We locked the doors last night."
"I think everyone did."
She pulled back just enough to look up at him, feeling something in his manner. "What?"
"The guy doesn't have a single violent episode in his past. Four years of prisonnothing."
"I don't know anything about him."
"He was a magician," said Donny, "some local junior champion or like that. He dropped out of high school senior year and supposedly went to Boston, worked as a street performer in the subways for a while, hustling money. He was essentially homeless when they tracked him down after his father died. He had been left some properties in the center of town. But Sinclair didn't want to come back, so instead he used the rental income to relocate to Rainfield, where he started giving kids magic lessons in the back room of a music shop."
"Oh, no," said Tracy.
"Five kids came forward. He was convicted on only a single count."
"Don't tell me any more."
"I grew up on the same street as him. He was weird even then. He came over once or twice to play, right after they moved in, but it never worked. He stole my mother's cigarettes. I remember she tracked him down to a tree house behind their backyard. A nine-year-old, smoking. She didn't let me play with him anymore after that."
"Thank you, Mrs. Maddox."
"The guy's an authentic freak, but "
"Are you saying you don't think
it's him?"
He shrugged and looked down at her. "What do I know?"
She slipped her arms back under his. "That you miss me?"
"Yes," he said, and they kissed again. She pushed his hair back from his ears. She was constantly touching his face, forever making him real, admiring this trophy she was amazed to have won.
He looked through the trees. "Your mother," he said.
Tracy turned. There she was, outside the cowshed with her apron on. Yesher mother still wore an apron while cooking. She also wore a whistle in case she needed to summon Tracy, though she rarely needed to use it, Tracy being so obedient.