by Stephen King
Talking to himself as well as to Yune, Ralph said, "Okay, one more link in the chain. He ditches the van behind Shorty's Pub. Takes the Subaru. Ditches that near the Iron Bridge, puts on fresh clothes--"
"501 jeans, Jockey underpants, white athletic socks, and a pretty damn expensive pair of sneakers. Plus the belt with the fancy buckle."
"Uh-huh. Once he's dressed in clothes with no blood on them, he takes a cab from Gentlemen, Please to Dubrow. Only when he gets to the station, he doesn't take the train. Why not?"
"Maybe he was trying to lay a false trail, in which case doubling back was always part of the plan. Or . . . I have a crazy idea. Want to hear?"
"Sure," Ralph said.
"I think Maitland meant to run. Meant to take that train to Dallas-Fort Worth, then keep on going. Maybe to Mexico, maybe to California. Why would he want to stay in Flint City after killing the Peterson boy, when he knew people had seen him? Only . . ."
"Only what?"
"Only he couldn't bear to leave with that big game on the line. He wanted to coach his kids to one more win. Get them to the finals."
"That really is crazy."
"Crazier than killing the boy in the first place?"
Yune had him there, but Ralph was spared the need to make a reply when their food came. As soon as the waitress left, Ralph said: "Fingerprints on the buckle?"
Yune swiped his Mini and showed Ralph another close-up of the horse's head. In this shot, the buckle's silver shine had been dulled by white fingerprint powder. Ralph could see an overlay of prints, like footprints in one of those old learn-to-dance diagrams.
"The Forensics Unit had Maitland's dabs in their computer," Yune said, "and the program matched them up right away. But here's the first weird thing, Ralph. The lines and whorls in the buckle prints are faint, and entirely broken up in a few places. Enough for a match that would stand up in court, but the tech who did the work--and he's done thousands of these--said they were like the prints of an old person. Like eighty or even ninety. I asked if it could have been because Maitland was moving fast, wanting to change to yet another set of clothes and just get the hell out of there. The tech said it was possible, but I could tell from his face that it didn't really ring his bell."
"Huh," Ralph said, and dug into his scrambled eggs. His appetite, like his sudden burst of laughter over the dual-purpose golf club, was a welcome surprise. "That is weird, but probably not substantive."
And just how long, he wondered, was he going to continue dismissing the anomalies that kept popping up in this business by calling them non-substantive?
"There was another set," Yune said. "They were also blurred--too blurred for the computer tech to even bother sending them out to the FBI's national database--but he had all the stray prints from the van, and those other prints on the buckle . . . see what you think."
He passed the iPad to Ralph. Here were two sets of prints, one labeled VAN UNKNOWN SUB and the other BELT BUCKLE UNKNOWN SUB. They did look alike, but only sort of. No way would they stand up in court as proof of anything, especially if a bulldog defense attorney like Howie Gold challenged them. Ralph was not in court, however, and he thought the same unsub had made them both, because it fit with what he'd learned from Marcy Maitland the night before. Not a perfect fit, no, but close enough for a detective on administrative leave who didn't have to run everything by his superiors . . . or by a district attorney hellbent for election.
While Yune ate his huevos rancheros, Ralph told him about his meeting with Marcy, holding back one thing for later.
"It's all about the van," he finished. "Forensics may find a few prints from the kid who originally stole it--"
"Already did. We had Merlin Cassidy's prints from the El Paso police. Computer guy matched them to some of the stray prints in the van--mostly on the toolbox, which Cassidy must have opened to see if there was anything valuable inside. They're clear, and they're not these." He swiped back to the blurry UNSUB prints, labeled VAN and BELT BUCKLE.
Ralph leaned forward, pushing his plate aside. "You see how it dovetails, don't you? We know it wasn't Terry who stole the van in Dayton, because the Maitlands flew home. But if the blurry prints from the van and those from the buckle really are the same . . ."
"You think he had an accomplice, after all. One who drove the van from Dayton to Flint City."
"Must have," Ralph said. "No other way to explain it."
"One who looked just like him?"
"Back to that," Ralph said, and sighed.
"And both sets of prints were on the buckle," Yune pushed on. "Meaning Maitland and his double wore the same belt, maybe the whole set of clothes. Well, they'd fit, wouldn't they? Twin brothers, separated at birth. Except the records say Terry Maitland was an only child."
"What else have you got? Anything?"
"Yes. We have arrived at the really weird shit." He brought his chair around and sat next to Ralph. The picture now on his iPad showed a close-up of the jeans, socks, underpants, and sneakers, all in an untidy pile, next to a plastic evidence-marker with a 1 on it. "See the stains?"
"Yes. What is that crap?"
"I don't know," Yune said. "And the forensics guys don't, either, but one of them said it looked like jizz, and I sort of agree with that. You can't see it in the picture very well, but--"
"Semen? Are you kidding?"
The waitress came back. Ralph turned the iPad screen side down.
"Either of you gents want a refill on the coffee?"
They both took one. When she left, Ralph went back to the photo of the clothes, spreading his fingers on the screen to enlarge the image.
"Yune, it's on the crotch of the jeans, all down both legs, on the cuffs . . ."
"Also on the underpants and socks," Yune said. "Not to mention the sneakers, both on em and in em, dried to a nice crack-glaze, like on pottery. Might be enough of the stuff, whatever it is, to fill a hollow nine iron."
Ralph didn't laugh. "It can't be semen. Even John Holmes in his prime--"
"I know. And semen doesn't do this."
He swiped the screen. The new picture was a wide shot of the barn floor. Another evidence tab, this one marked 2, had been placed next to a pile of loose hay. At least Ralph thought it was hay. On the far left side of the photo, evidence tab 3 had been placed atop a softly collapsing bale that looked like it had been there for a long, long time. Much of it was black. The side of the bale was also black, as if some corrosive goo had run down it to the floor.
"Is it the same stuff?" Ralph asked. "You're sure?"
"Ninety per cent. And there's more in the loft. If it's semen, that would be a nocturnal emission worthy of The Guinness Book of Records."
"Can't be," Ralph said, low. "It's something else. For one thing, semen wouldn't turn hay black. It makes no sense."
"Not to me, either, but of course I am just the son of a poor Mexican farming family."
"Forensics is analyzing it, though."
Yune nodded. "As we speak."
"And you'll let me know."
"Yes. You see what I meant when I said this just keeps getting weirder and weirder."
"Jeannie called it inexplicable." Ralph cleared his throat. "She actually used the word supernatural."
"My Gabriela has suggested the same," Yune said. "Maybe it's a chick thing. Or a Mexican thing."
Ralph raised his eyebrows.
"Si, senor," Yune said, and laughed. "My wife's mother died young, and she grew up at her abuela's knee. The old lady stuffed her full of legends. When I was talking this mess over with her, Gaby told me one about the Mexican boogeyman. He was supposedly a dude dying of tuberculosis, see, and this old wise man who lived in the desert, an ermitano, told him he could be cured by drinking the blood of children and rubbing their fat on his chest and privates. So that's what this boogeyman did, and now he lives forever. Supposedly he only takes children who misbehave. He pops them in a big black bag he carries. Gaby told me that when she was a little girl, maybe seven, s
he had a screaming fit one time when the doctor came to the house for her brother, who had scarlet fever."
"Because the doctor had a black bag."
Yune nodded. "What was that boogeyman's name? It's on the tip of my tongue, but I can't pick it off. Don't you hate that?"
"So is that what you think we've got here? The boogeyman?"
"Nope. I may be the son of a poor Mexican farming family, ese, or possibly the son of an Amarillo car dealer, but either way, I ain't atontado. A man killed Frank Peterson, as mortal as you and me, and that man was almost certainly Terry Maitland. If we could figure out what happened, everything would fall into place and I could go back to sleeping through the night. Because this bugs the shit out of me." He looked at his watch. "Gotta go. Promised my wife I'd take her to a craft fair in Cap City. Any more questions? You ought to have at least one, because yet one more weird thing is staring you right in the face."
"Were there vehicle tracks in the barn?"
"That's not what I was thinking of, but as a matter of fact, there were. Not useful ones, though--you can see the impressions, and there's a little oil, but no tread marks good enough for comparison. My guess is they were made by the van Maitland used to abduct the kid. They weren't close enough together to have been made by the Subaru."
"Uh-huh. Listen, you've got all the witness interviews on your magic gadget, right? Before you split, find the one I did with Claude Bolton. He's a bouncer at Gentlemen, Please. Although he took issue with that word, as I remember."
Yune brought up one file, shook his head, brought up another, and handed the iPad to Ralph. "Scroll down."
Ralph did so, went past what he wanted, and at last centered on it. "Here it is. Bolton said, 'I remember one other thing, no big deal but kind of spooky if he really was the one who killed that kid.' Bolton said the guy cut him. When I asked what he meant, Bolton said he thanked Maitland for working with his friend's nephews, then shook with him. When he did, Maitland's pinky fingernail grazed the back of Bolton's hand. Made a little cut. Bolton said it reminded him of his drug days, because some of the MCs he ran with used to grow out their pinky nails to scoop coke with. Apparently it was a fashion statement."
"And this is important because?" Yune looked at his watch again, rather ostentatiously.
"Probably it's not. Probably it's . . ."
But he wasn't going to say non-substantive again. He liked the word less every time it came out of his mouth.
"Probably no big deal, but it's what my wife calls a confluence. Terry got a similar cut when he was visiting his father in a dementia ward in Dayton." Ralph quickly related the story about how the orderly had slipped and grabbed for Terry, cutting him in the process.
Yune thought about it, then shrugged. "I think that one's pure coincidence, ese. And I really have to go, if I don't want to incur the Wrath of Gabriela, but there's still that thing you're missing, and I'm not talking about tire tracks. Your pal Bolton even mentions it. Scroll back up and you'll find it."
But Ralph didn't need to. It had been right in front of him. "Pants, underpants, socks, and sneakers . . . but no shirt."
"Correct," Yune said. "Either it was his favorite, or he didn't have another one to change into when he left the barn."
2
Halfway back to Flint City, Ralph finally realized what had been bugging him about the bra strap.
He pulled into the two-acre lot of a Byron's Liquor Warehouse, and hit speed-dial. His call went to Yune's voicemail. Ralph broke the connection without leaving a message. Yune had already gone above and beyond; let him have his weekend. And now that he had time to give it a little thought, Ralph decided this was a confluence he didn't want to share with anyone, except maybe his wife.
The bra strap hadn't been the only bright yellow thing he had seen during those moments of hyper-vigilance before Terry was shot; it was just his brain's standin for something that had been part of the larger gallery of grotesques, and overshadowed by Ollie Peterson, who had drawn the old revolver from his newspaper bag only seconds later. No wonder it had gotten lost.
The man with the horrible burns on his face and the tattoos on his hands had been wearing a yellow bandanna on his head, probably to cover more scars. But had it been a bandanna? Couldn't it have been something else? The missing shirt, for instance? The one Terry had been wearing in the train station?
I'm reaching, he thought, and maybe he was . . . except his subconscious (those thoughts behind his thoughts) had been yelling at him about it all along.
He closed his eyes and tried to summon up exactly what he'd seen in those last few seconds of Terry's life. The blond anchor's unlovely sneer as she looked at the blood on her fingers. The hypodermic sign reading MAITLAND TAKE YOUR MEDICINE. The boy with the bad lip. The woman leaning forward to give Marcy the finger. And the burned man who'd looked as if God had taken a giant eraser to most of his features, leaving only lumps, raw pink skin, and holes where a nose had been before the fire had put tattoos on his face far fiercer than those on his hands. And what Ralph saw in this moment of recall was not a bandanna on that man's head but something far bigger, something that hung all the way down to his shoulders like a headdress.
Yes, that something could have been a shirt . . . but even if it was, did that mean it was the shirt? The one Terry had been wearing in the security footage? Was there a way to find out?
He thought there was, but he needed to enlist Jeannie, who was far more computer-savvy than he was. Also, the time might have come to stop thinking of Howard Gold and Alec Pelley as enemies. Maybe we're all on the same side here, Pelley had said last night as he stood on the Maitland stoop, and maybe that was true. Or could be.
Ralph put his car in gear and headed home, pushing the speed limit all the way.
3
Ralph and his wife sat at the kitchen table with Jeannie's laptop in front of them. There were four major TV stations in Cap City, one for each of the networks, plus Channel 81, the public access outlet that ran local news, city council meetings, and various community affairs (such as the Harlan Coben speech where Terry had appeared as an unlikely guest star). All five had been at the courthouse for Terry's arraignment, all five had filmed the shooting, and all had at least some footage of the crowd. Once the gunfire erupted, all the cameras turned to Terry, of course--Terry bleeding down the side of his face and pushing his wife from the line of fire, then collapsing into the street when the killshot struck him. The CBS footage went entirely blank before that happened, because that was the camera Ralph's bullet had struck, shattering it and blinding its operator in one eye.
After they'd looked at each clip twice, Jeannie turned to him, her lips pressed tightly together. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to.
"Run the Channel 81 stuff again," Ralph said. "Their camera was every whichway once the shooting started, but they got the best crowd stuff before."
"Ralph." She touched his arm. "Are you all ri--"
"Fine, I'm fine." He wasn't. He felt as if the world were tilting, and he might soon slide right off the edge. "Run it again, please. And mute it. The reporter's running commentary is distracting."
She did as he asked, and they watched together. Waving signs. People yelling soundlessly, their mouths opening and closing like fish out of water. At one point the camera panned rapidly across and down, not soon enough to show the man who had spit in Terry's face, but in time to show Ralph tripping the troublemaker, making it look like an unprovoked attack. He watched as Terry helped the spitter to his feet (like something out of the fucking Bible, Ralph remembered thinking), and then the camera returned to the crowd. He saw the two bailiffs--one plump, the other lean--doing their best to keep the steps clear. He saw the blond anchor from Channel 7 getting to her feet, still looking with disbelief at her bloody fingers. He saw Ollie Peterson with his newspaper sack and a few clumps of red hair sticking out from beneath his watch cap, still a few seconds from being the star of the show. He saw the boy with the cleft lip, the Ch
annel 81 cameraman pausing his shot long enough to register Frank Peterson's face on the boy's tee-shirt before panning further--
"Stop," he said. "Freeze it, freeze it right there."
Jeannie did so, and they looked at the picture--slightly blurred from the cameraman's rapid movement as he tried to get a little bit of everything.
Ralph tapped the screen. "See this guy waving the cowboy hat?"
"Sure."
"The burned man was standing right next to him."
"All right," she said . . . but in a strange, nervous tone of voice Ralph did not remember ever hearing from her before.
"I swear to you he was. I saw him, it was like I was tripping on LSD or mescaline or something, and I saw everything. Run the other ones again. This is the best one of the crowd, but the FOX affiliate wasn't too bad, and--"
"No." She hit the power button and closed the laptop. "The man you saw isn't in any of these, Ralph. You know it as well as I do."
"Do you think I'm crazy? Is that it? Do you think I'm having a . . . you know . . ."
"A breakdown?" Her hand was back on his arm again, now squeezing gently. "Of course not. If you say you saw him, you saw him. If you think he was wearing that shirt as a kind of sun protection, or do-rag, or I don't know what, then he probably was. You've had a bad month, probably the worst month of your life, but I trust your powers of observation. It's just that . . . you must see now . . ."
She trailed off. He waited. At last she pushed ahead.
"There is something very wrong with this, and the more you find, the wronger it gets. It scares me. That story Yune told you scares me. It's basically a vampire story, isn't it? I read Dracula in high school, and one thing I remember about it is vampires don't cast reflections in mirrors. And a thing that can't cast a reflection probably wouldn't show up in TV news footage."
"That's nuts. There's no such things as ghosts, or witches, or vam--"
She slapped her open hand down on the table, a flat pistol-shot sound that made him jump. Her eyes were furious, crackling. "Wake up, Ralph! Wake up to what's right in front of you! Terry Maitland was in two places at the same time! If you stop trying to find a way to explain that away and just accept it--"