The Killing Moon: A Novel

shoulder.

The first sketch was of a woman's nude torso. One breast hung free, the other one cupped in her hand, mashed and raised in offering.

The second one below it showed the same woman but from shoulders to knees. She sat legs open, her right hand covering her pussy except for her middle finger, stuck deep inside.

Plainclothes pulled the letter to his chest like he was hiding a poker hand, and Kitner came down off his toes, wondering if maybe he had made a noise or something. The guy moved away, taking the rest of the envelopes with him.

Plainclothes summoned the local cop with a flick of his finger and showed him the first letter, including the drawings.

''Love always, V,'' said the plainclothes cop, pointing out the signature. 'Any ideas?'

The local cop's eyes clouded, and not because of the dirty pictures. He knew, all right. It cheered Kitner, a little, to think of somebody else eating trouble for a change.

28

MADDOX

MADDOX WAITED OUTSIDE the station, on the sidewalk at the end of the grassy slope, staying near the action while maintaining enough distance between himself and the state troopers. It was just after eight and his shift was over?Stokes and Ullard had already driven their patrol cars past him into the driveway?but Maddox lingered, pretending he was enjoying the morning heat and had nowhere better to go. Above him, the great flag rustled like a horse too lathered to lift its own head.

Stokes and red-eyed Ullard came out to see him. 'They closed off rooms in there,' Stokes said. 'What's up? They get someone?'

Maddox pretended not to know who it was, liking how, when Bucky wasn't around, the other cops could be civil if they wanted something from him.

Three kids came biking across the iron bridge, two on banana-seat bikes and one on a taller ten-speed, turning past the station. The ten-speed was an old Schwinn, black with black electrical tape wound around the handlebars.

Maddox recognized the bike. He yelled, 'Hey!' and took off suddenly down Main Street after them.

After a few more yells, they slowed for him, letting him come jogging up. They were scuzzy mill-house locals, still growing into themselves at thirteen. Maddox grabbed the arm of the kid on the ten-speed to hold him where he was.

On the down tube of the triangle frame, the letter g had been added in Wite-Out to the brand name, to read, Austin Powers?style, 'Schwinng.'

Dillon Sinclair's bike. With his driver's license suspended, this bicycle had been Sinclair's only legal mode of transportation, taking him back and forth to the Gulp.

'I found it,' said the kid, in answer to Maddox's question. He looked malnourished, maladapted, probably just about mal- everything.

'Found it where?'

'Woods.'

'Be a little more specific.'

'Toad Bridge. That little bridge off Edge Road. We was catching bullfrogs.' He glanced at his homeys for backup. 'It was right there in the trees.'

A low one-lane bridge crossing a creek. Edge Road was where Heavey lived. 'And you just helped yourself.'

'If somebody else was throwing it away? Yeah.'

Maddox kept at him, his friends too, trying to shake something else out of them, but the story held up. Maddox took names and told the kid he was impounding the bike and let them all go with a warning.

He walked the bike back up the sidewalk along Main, trying to figure out what Sinclair's ride was doing hidden or thrown down by the side of the bridge. He walked it around to the dirt lot behind the station, wondering where to park it while he figured things out. A voice from the back steps called to him.

'You Maddox?'

Maddox looked up at the trooper leaning out of the back door in his regulation summer duty uniform: wide-brimmed Mountie hat, straight-leg slacks, combat boots, a badge over the two pens in his left chest pocket, a small ceremonial silver whistle buttoned over the right.

'Yeah,' said Maddox.

'Trooper Hess to have a word with you.'

Maddox leaned the bike against the wooden slat fence behind the extra patrol car and followed the trooper inside to the old chief 's office.

Hess stood behind the empty desk scratching at the buzzed back of his neck. He wore a ribbed rayon shirt tucked into wrinkle-guard dress pants with a braided brown belt: conservative and professional, with a hint of the sportsman. His chest was jacked, but it was the arms that impressed, maybe a little too much. He had invested a lot of gym hours in those biceps. Like a woman with a big chest, they were his defining feature.

Maddox remembered his first look at the guy as he emerged from his unmarked to eyeball the station, Hess's expression saying, They got me off the lat machine for this?

'So,' Hess said, dropping his hands into his pleated pockets and letting them run around in there. 'What's your take?'

'On Valerie Ripsbaugh?'

'We already know our doer isn't a woman. He's a man, right-handed, medium height, between five eight and six foot. Size ten and a half sneaker.'

This was Hess showing off, as with his arms. He liked to dazzle. Maddox said, 'Okay.'

'Talk to me about the husband. Struck me as a little slow on the uptake.'

'Inward, maybe. He's a town guy. His entire world's about this small.'

'Any trouble from him you know of?'

'Less than none. He's the town caretaker. Looks after this place like it's his dying father.'

Hess nodded, arms crossed tight. 'He's not answering his radio, and we already tried his pager. Any idea where we can find him this time of day?'

'You're bringing him in?'

Hess nodded, all confidence. 'Yeah, we're bringing him in.'

Maddox still could not believe it. He had thought nothing of Ripsbaugh leaving Kitner's shop early, muttering good-bye as he moved through the door. 'I don't know. The dump, maybe.'

'You're shocked.'

'I'm surprised, yeah. Ripsbaugh. Tearing someone apart like that. Doesn't make sense.'

'Overkill. Know what that means? That it was very, very personal. A revenge killing. You ever been married?'

'No.'

'There's nothing shocking about it. Especially with the quiet ones. Like yourself.' Hess smiled, feeling magnanimous. 'You're headed home? Do us a favor and drop Mrs. Ripsbaugh at her house. She's free to go.'

VAL STARED AT THE floor of Maddox's patrol car, sitting lumpily next to him, sinking into herself and her baggy clothes. She had always had what Maddox's mother called 'natural mascara,' a darkness tracing the wing-shaped contours of her eyes, different from the bruised quality of her lids. In high school it had been the hallmark of Val's small-town exoticism.

Now it looked as though that mascara was starting to run. Maddox leaned on the gas pedal, the station receding on their right. He wanted to get her home fast. Because he was uncomfortable, and because he wanted to deliver this news to Pinty.

'Can you smell it on me?' she said.

'Smell what?' said Maddox.

She plucked at the skin on the back of her left hand, pinching herself. 'The shit. I scrub myself raw, but the stink from his septic business?it's in my skin now. It's in my hair. Part of me. I can't get it out.' Twisting at the back of her hand now, squeezing her flesh white.

'Val,' said Maddox, passing her brother's place at the corner of Number 8 Road. 'Things could still work out. Nothing's settled yet.'

'Look at me, Donny. Look what I've become.' She raised her hands as though something warm and sticky had spilled in her lap. 'Look at me.'

She was weeping, and Maddox didn't know what to do. He wanted to get her home, but she was choking on her sobs, dissolving in the seat next to him, and he couldn't drive. He turned in fast at the Gulp, parking among the losing scratch tickets in back.

She cried hard into her hands, then pulled them away, reading something in the wetness on her palms. 'He saved the letters,' she said. 'He did care, I knew he did. It meant something.' Her hands closed into fists, and she turned to Maddox with sudden sobriety. 'He helped me. When I met him, I was at my heaviest. The backaches?I was miserable. He turned it all around. He changed me, he delivered me. And, he was erudite. We talked. Really talked?about nature, about the stars. He knew so much. He had lived in California. He wanted me to go away