by Chuck Hogan
"How far's it go?" asked Maddox.
"Twelve hundred feet," said Ripsbaugh, sitting back in an unsteady chair pulled from the kitchen, its spindles broken underneath. "I get a fourth of my regular excavation fee for twenty minutes of sitting and watching TV."
The house as a whole had a trapped odor, its floors sticky like the floors of an animal cage. Having talked his way in here with Ripsbaugh, only to be frustrated by Wanda's absence, Maddox leaned against the wall to wait, trying to come up with some conversation. "So what's the worst thing anyone's flushed?"
"The worst?" said Ripsbaugh. "I don't know. You hear about wedding rings, guys having to go into the tanks and get them. Feminine products, you know, those things, they swell up with water five times their size. What messes up tanks most is coffee grounds and bleach. Coffee grounds because they clog up your outlet pipes. But bleach, and all these antibacterial soaps they make now? Kills off the bacteria in the tank. It's the bacteria that does all the work in there, eating solids and breaking them down. People so busy chasing bacteria out of their house, meanwhile this tank of waste is swelling up underground, about to back up on them."
"Bleach is bad, huh?"
"When my father ran the company, he would pump out a residential tank once every five or ten years. You could go that long. Not anymore. You one-ply or two?"
"I don't know. Whatever's cheapest."
"One-ply is the way to go. Ladies like the softer two-ply, but it breaks down slow, scums up the top of the tank. Flush down that three-ply they make now, or a baby wipe, or one of them quilted paper towels? Might as well pull off your shirt and throw it in there too. None of it's going anywhere until I come by to suck it out."
The motor whined and the console clicked. The feeding stopped. Ripsbaugh eyed the screen, toggled the joystick controls.
"Yep," he said. "We got a blockage. Right at the inlet. Something's snagged there." He tried to prod at it with the scope, to no avail. He patted his knees and stood. "Have to crack her open outside."
Maddox stopped in the kitchen, the linoleum crackling under his boots. Prescription bottles and dirty dishes and soft packs of GPC cigarettes. Losing lottery scratch tickets facedown in the trash. A still life in crumb and stain. He could feel it here, he could almost smell it: the malaise, this enfeebling despair that radiated like a contagion throughout Black Falls. The breakdown of law and order was, in a sense, a reflection of this mental breakdown.
Outside, beyond a tattered blue tarpaulin covering last winter's unused firewood, Ripsbaugh held the head of a wide green hose unwound off his whirring Cold River Septic truck, the thing twitching as it sucked from a hole in the yard.
The stink was rude, richly awful, just shy of disgusting. Closer, Maddox saw a half-moon slab of concrete overturned next to Ripsbaugh's trusty shovel, revealing a crescent hole smiling out of the earth like a dark mouth, wide enough to swallow a child.
"Thousand-gallon tank," Ripsbaugh said. "That's small potatoes. I remember yours, when I did the Title Five inspection on your mother's house?" Prior to the sale of any property in Massachusetts, the state environmental code required that the septic system be inspected and certified. "That was an old six-by-six vault. Way over capacity for the house size."
Ripsbaugh pulled up the dripping hose, offering Maddox a glimpse below. A muddy white inlet PVC pipe came from the house, jutting into the tank in a modified T. Below it lay a solid coat of thick, white-gray fluff.
"That mess on the top there, that's the paper, sink food, detergents. Below that, all wastewater. People think their septic tank is full of shit, but it's not. Waste dissolves pretty quickly. 'Effluent' is the term."
This was by far the most he had ever heard Ripsbaugh speak at one time. But everybody in this world is an expert on something. Maddox looked down at the meringue of undissolved waste shimmying on the surface. "Effluent, huh?"
"Dribbles off into the leeching fields. Seeps back down through the rock and soil, reentering the water table. Then you pull it back up through your well and drink it, start the whole cycle over again."
"Yum," said Maddox.
"Earth is the best filter there is. All these other towns on water bans now, because of the lack of rainfall? That's public sewers. Piping out all their water instead of returning it to the ground. These new developments go up and bleed the land dry, just so that residents don't have to face the once-a-year stench of getting pumped out. People want to believe in magic white bowls that make everything disappear."
Maddox looked back to Ripsbaugh's rumbling tanker. "And from here ?"
"Treatment facility over in Aylesbury, they burn it clean." He left the thirsty hose sucking air on the dirt lawn, picking up a long, flexible wire tool with a two-pronged end. "I don't take it all out, though. You leave the sludge on the bottom, the bacteria that feeds on the waste. Breaks it down. The dirtiest part of the tank, that does all the work." He lay flat on the ground and reached into the smelly tomb with the tool in his gloved hand. "That's nature in action."
He worked by feel, picking around inside the PVC pipe, then pulling back sharply as though hooking a fish. Fluid from the unclogged pipe disgorged into the tank.
Ripsbaugh brought the tool out of the mouth of the chamber and deposited the dripping obstruction on a clump of dead grass. Maddox glanced back at the front door. This went beyond snooping through the Tedmonds' garbage, closer to a necropsy of their home.
The matter was sodden and soiled but not mucked brown. Some prodding and separating with Ripsbaugh's tool revealed the bulk of it to be gauze strips and first aid tape. A swollen packet that looked like a fat, cotton wallet was an absorbent bandage, and threaded into it were faint traces of black.
"Blood," said Maddox.
"That's what people flush," said Ripsbaugh, picking through it some more. He poked out two tiny, waste-streaked, zippered plastic envelopes, small enough that their only legitimate use could have been stamp collecting.
Maddox looked at Ripsbaugh, and found Ripsbaugh already looking at him. "That what I think it is?" Ripsbaugh said.
"I think so," said Maddox.
"Probably soaked too long in there for any drug trace to show up in a lab."
The guy knew his cop shows. Maddox looked back at the house again.
Ripsbaugh said, "Search ain't legal anyway. 'Plain view' is the rule. Bathrobe Bill gave his consent for you to be inside, but this goes beyond discovery."
Maddox played it down, shaking his head. "I'm not here as a cop."
Ripsbaugh looked at him, the wire tool dripping to the ground. "Then what are you here as?"
Maddox tried to come up with a good answer for that.
Ripsbaugh said, "I heard you asking Bathrobe Bill about Wanda. She still go around with Bucky Pail?"
Maddox said, "She does."
His tone let Ripsbaugh know that he would not go any further. The empty sucking of the dirty vacuum hose was the only noise as Ripsbaugh absorbed the information he had gleaned.
Maddox's back pocket started to vibrate. He pulled out his pager and checked the number.
No. Not Sinclair. Cullen. Maddox ignored it.
"Nice pager," said Ripsbaugh, watching him return it to his jeans.
"My girlfriend," Maddox said.
Ripsbaugh looked surprised.
Maddox added, "She's not from around here."
Not a good lie, but whether he believed him or not, Ripsbaugh let it go. He bent to pick up the dripping hose, about to return it to the hole. He pointed at the gauze and the little dope bags on the ground. "What about this?"
They were indeed worthless to a lab, and unallowable as evidence. Maddox nodded, and Ripsbaugh used his hungry hose to suck them up into his tanker.
The nozzle went chugging back into the septic tank, and Maddox stepped away. No more waiting for Wanda to come around to his side, he decided. No more paying out rope. He needed to find her or Frankie as soon as possible.
A voice came out of his patrol car, the poli
ce radio calling his unit number and his name.
40
HESS
HESS WAS A HIT AT cocktail parties. Homicide investigators usually are, because of the gritty glamour the television-watching and moviegoing public associates with them. The imagined car chases, the Mexican standoffs, the psychological dance of cop and criminal: all that sweet nonsense. Married women especially, for some reason, would gang up on him in the corner, or sit close to him on the sectional, white wine shining in their eyes as they plied him for more stories. And Hess performed for them, he gave them what they wanted, all his best tales and others he'd only heard, selling them on the danger of the job, the pathos, the trauma. They wanted to be lifted out of their cycle of playdates and school buses and once-a-month trysts with distracted husbands; they wanted their romantic imaginations fired. They dropped "tells" like clumsy poker players, twisting at the chains around their necks, finding conversational excuses to reach out and touch his arms. Hess lived in an upscale town near the Amherst universities, but on a state policeman's salarythough a homicide investigator, his rank and pay grade remained that of a trooperhe could not compete with his neighbor's tennis weekends and sporty third cars. So while the husbands gathered around the pool table in the finished basement talking golf clubs and consumer electronics, Hess remained upstairs mind-fucking their wives. A cocktail party gigolo, flexing his cop persona like his biceps, flashing them the goods before leaving them in the lurch, returning for good-byes with lovely Janine on his arm. Better than bedding any one of them was knowing that he was the "other man" in a hundred imagined infidelities of overprivileged women who secretly wished they were married not to their husbands but to him.
The thing he always started off telling them, which was not a story per se but rather an operating principle, and which happened to be absolutely true, was that every case he worked was essentially the same. Every unattended death was the Case of the Broken Vase. A body, or traces of it, lay broken on the floor. Most of the pieces were right there, and his job was to reassemble what he found, then track down the rest. By the time he had the vase glued together well enough to hold water again, he usually knew who had knocked it over and how, and whether its shattering had been an act of carelessness or calculation.
Here Hess had a vase that would not come together. He could stand a flower in itDillon Sinclairbut water kept spurting out on all sides. Now was the time to start looking more closely at the people he had handling the pieces for him, making certain they were reconstructing this thing the correct way.
His mistake all along had been in pretending to treat the locals like cops. They were more like informants and that was how he decided to approach the Black Falls PD now. Hess had come upon a significant chunk of vase, and he wanted to see firsthand how they processed it.
He went out to bring them in from the front room of the station. Bucky Pail was sitting on the floor, falling asleep with his cap in his hands. Maddox stood apart, looking out the front window at the academy trainees milling about the lawn, dressed in their spiffy blue shirts, navy Dickies, and regulation boots, swigging water while they waited for the school buses to return them to New Braintree. But the faraway look on Maddox's face was more like something you'd see on a man standing at the edge of an ocean.
So maybe he did have aspirations after all. From what Hess had been able to learn about him, hiring on to any real police force would be a tough sell. A trip through Maddox's tax returns going back ten yearshighly unauthorized, another favor called inshowed fringe-type jobs, low-wage, nothing steady. W-2s from all over: a roofer, a mover, a landscaper, a pool cleaner. Short stints as a bartender in three different parts of the state; a car wash in Lowell; Domino's pizza delivery in Taunton and Brockton; cab driving in West Springfield; road painting in Fall River. He had worked as an asbestos stripper in Worcester and in the boiler room of a Cape Cod high school. The only tie-and-shoes job he'd held was as a stereo and TV salesman, and only for three months.
To Hess, it read like someone who was hiding, or even halfway on the run. Maddox's name also popped up as a reference/co-signee on bail bonds for three different people, two of them arrested on drug chargesone simple Class B possession, third offense, one for Class A possession with intent to distributeand one for breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony, as well as, in the Commonwealth's parlance, "possession of burglarious tools." But no arrests himselfwhich Hess already knew, given that Maddox had been cleared on a Criminal Offender Record Information search before getting hired on as a cop, and had passed the routine background check that went along with his gun license application.
Still, it was a very unusual résumé for a part-time cop. What it showed Hess was that Maddox was a washout, like most of the lost souls in this town. He wanted to grill Maddox about his background, make him squirm a little, but had decided to hold on to that card awhile longer. Sweating Maddox, though potentially quite pleasurable, was not the point. At least not yet.
Pail too had clouds circling about his head. The assault charge against Sinclair, obviously, but there were other whispers: abuses of power, sexual transgressions, even an alleged indecent assault right here inside the station. Other charges brought against him along the wayexposing himself to a female motorist, simulating masturbation in front of anotherhad all been quickly dropped, reeking of intimidation and witness tampering.
And then there was the case of Hugo Ibbits. A California fugitive stopped for speeding in Black Falls, he was first said to have been arrested and jailed by Pail, but then, after his death three nights later in a fiery car crash in the hills above town, the story changed. The death was briefly investigated by the U.S. Marshals office, which has jurisdiction over fugitives, but later dropped without a finding. This was before Pail got caught beating a handcuffed Sinclair during a traffic stop up in those same hills.
Inside the reports room, Hess took up a position at an angle from the laptop so that he could observe the two cops' reactions. Bryson sat before the screen.
"We found Sinclair's camera," Hess announced, "half buried under leaves in the Borderlands. CSS took a biopsy of the forest, digging up everything within two cubic feet of the find, all of which they are currently processing. The memory card was installed and intact. Seventy-nine images, of which we have here a quick DVD burn. A privileged peek at a sliver of Sinclair's own memory. And, no surprise, it gets pretty fucking weird."
Bryson worked the touch pad, starting the slide show in reverse order, from the most recent images back to the oldest.
The first sequence of pictures were dark, taken at night and without a flash. Tough to make out anything at first. Hess had needed four or five passes in order to see it clearly himself.
The photographs had been taken through a window: that much was evident. Part of the silver casing of the camera was visible in some shots, reflected in the moonlit glass, if you looked for it. The subject of each of the first six images was a boy lying on his belly, asleep in a bed with his arms tucked under him, the covers kicked away. Spiderman pajamas, the waistband of his underpants showing above the top of red and blue shorts. A match head of bright orange hair.
Bryson paused the slide show there. Hess watched Bucky squint, still trying to see what was on the screen.
Maddox stared heatedly, looking spooked. "One of the Heavey boys," he said.
"Heavey," said Hess, "being the guy who found footprints behind his house. Who saw someone he thought was a woman running off into the trees."
Bucky saw it now. "What the fuck."
Maddox's mouth tightened. Bryson worked the mouse to resume the slide show.
There followed images taken through a different window, of a different young boy in another bed, this one blond and sleeping only in his underwear. The images were nearly identical, taken in rapid succession.
"There," said Hess.
Bryson stayed on the image. Hess's eyes stayed on the cops.
It took them a moment to see what
was different. The camera was positioned farther back from the window glass. In the reflection, visible behind and around the silver camera, was a hand. A forefinger on the shutter release. And, to the side of that, long, straight strands of black hair.
Andjust barely on the other sidea closed eye winking beneath a hairless brow.
"Fuckin' freak," said Bucky, leaning forward to see. His upper lip curled back like he could smell Sinclair.
Maddox's brow dropped low over his eyes.
More pictures flashed, most of them peeping shots of young boys asleep in their beds, though not all. One artsy image showed a deer crossing Main Street at dawn, snapped from the vantage point of Sinclair's second-story balcony. Another one Hess waited for was an early-morning shot from the same perch, looking down on the roof of a car turning the corner. A patrol car. The unit number was eight.