The Killing Moon: A Novel

there.'

He nodded. 'I don't even know if I can still call myself a policeman here without Pinty to back me up.'

'Please be careful.'

He kissed her once, lightly, and she pulled him closer for a real one, kissing him longer and better. She rubbed his arm. 'I know how much Pinty meant to you,' she said, then realized she had spoken in the past tense. 'Means to you, sorry.'

'He's made fools out of doctors before,' said Donny. 'He'll be home again.'

Tracy smiled and nodded, admiring his stubborn faith though she did not share it. 'I know he's all you have.'

31

HESS

PALPABLE EXCITEMENT among the uniforms, the duty troopers all extra-alert and garrulous, gobbling up oxygen inside the station; the hunting party anticipating the kill.

What Hess would remember most about this sour-smelling place was the sheer amount of crank mags stored up in the break room. A mountain of the stuff, had to be a record for a force this tiny. One time he'd had the occasion to visit a firehouse in a midsized town that was using an anatomically correct female mannequin for training exercises as well as other, less official pursuits. That squad was eventually disbanded and reassigned after word got out that they had invited a local stripper to dance on the fire pole during a shift change. Not that Hess had any moral objections to this stuff, but good Christ, there was a time and, more to the point, a place.

Maddox entered the break room looking to store his nylon lunch sack in the fridge. He seemed a little pale to Hess, maybe from worry, like he had lost some weight in the days he had taken off to sit with his friend in the hospital.

Bucky Pail came in on Maddox's heels, grinning like his shirt was on fire and he liked the burn. Until he saw Hess, whose presence was a bucket of cold water. The action on his face flattened out, all that Maddox saw when he turned.

Pail still had the scrape bloom on his cheek, like he had gotten grazed with a boot tread. Maddox's abrasions were far less worse than Hess had been led to believe, and in a strange way it reassured him to know that Maddox hadn't gotten his ass kicked by these hillbillies.

'Some police department,' said Hess. 'I'm almost sorry to leave it. Almost.'

Maddox ignored Hess, looking at Pail. Waiting.

When Hess didn't make any move to exit the room, Pail's grin got hot. 'Later,' he said to Maddox, with lots of tongue on the L, then turned and went out.

'Five against one,' Hess said to Maddox. 'You did all right for yourself. Seems like it's not over yet.'

'Not by a long shot,' said Maddox.

'You timed your return right. We're just about to arrest your highway department man for murder.'

A trooper ducked in, hooking his thumb back toward the hall. 'DiBenedicto's on the line.'

'Here we go,' announced Hess, rolling his shoulders as he went into the hallway.

Joe Bryson, Hess's training partner who had come from the Mitchum barracks to watch him mop up this case, closed the door inside the old chief 's office. Hess punched the button on the telephone. 'Jimmy D., you're on speaker. How we look?'

'Leo,' came Jimmy DiBenedicto's voice, 'we have exact matches in eight combinations?'

'Gimme the odds first, Jimbo. The stats that I love. This guy is one in how many hundreds of millions?'

'I haven't had a chance to do the math yet, Leo. But two of the matches are extremely rare, so it's a lock. Listen?who else you got there?'

'Couple of good people, Jimmy.' Hess shifted balance, looking at Bryson, the county attorney in short sleeves, Fogarty, and the other guy from CSS. He reasserted himself. 'Everybody who should be here is here, Jimmy. It's fine. Go ahead.'

'Leo,' came the filtered voice. 'Maybe you want to pick up.'

Hess cocked his head. Eyeing the phone from a different angle. 'No, Jimmy, I'm sure I don't want to pick up. You said you had an exact match on the autorads.'

'I carried this thing across the hall myself, Leo. It's one to one. Only not with the swab you submitted. It's a rad out of the convicted felon database.'

'The CODIS?'

Hess did pick up the handset then. Like the world's lightest dumbbell.

Hess did not hang up after the conversation. He snapped the handset in half instead. He stood there a moment with the cracked plastic and exposed wire in his hands, then dispatched Bryson to bring him Pail and Maddox.

They appeared before his desk. Maddox saw the busted phone on the blotter and knew immediately that something was up.

Hess made them wait, burning off a little more anger at their expense, making them suffer for his aggravation. This ass-crack town, this fucking bitch of a case. And these two banged-up playground cops. What did I do to deserve this?

'This missing sex offender,' said Hess.

Now Maddox looked confused. Pail said, 'Scarecrow?'

Hess scowled at this room he was going to be stuck in a little while longer. 'I need to know everything about him there is to know.'

PART III

SCARECROW

32

HESS

BRYSON WAS ONLY a few weeks out of uniform, but Hess had detected a change in him since the DNA rads came back. Used to be Bryson would ape Hess. Hess would turn around with his arms crossed and find Bryson standing there, arms crossed. Hess would walk in chewing one of the spearmint toothpicks he kept in the ashtray of his car, and a day or two later Bryson would be switching a pick from one corner of his mouth to the other like it was something he'd been doing all his life. Bryson had started working out more, Hess noticed, and shaping his hair flatter on top, and talking about church. Like Hess's boys, Bryson was learning by imitation, paying out respect in the form of flattery.

But now, ever since the DNA flop, Hess noticed Bryson standing back from him a bit. Tossing out questions where before he was content to listen and let Hess speak. Pointing out things to the CSS guys without routing it through Hess first.

Hess wasn't overly sensitive, but he was observant; that was what made him, working out of the smallest barracks with the least resources at hand, the trooper with the highest clearance rate of any other DU investigator statewide. Getting this understudy heat from Bryson was the capper on a bad stretch of slow-motion progress. Hess needed to turn this ship around, and fast. Not just for his batting average but for himself. Someday his boys were going to look at their dad and see not a Superman but a guy who was simply doing his best. He could accept that from his boys, but not from Bryson, not just yet.

CSS wouldn't allow the windows to be opened as they went about their glove-and-bag dissection of the sex offender's crib. What struck Hess most about Sinclair's black-curtained place were the contents of the guy's kitchen cabinets: Devil Dogs, Beefaroni, snack-pack puddings, Kool-Aid mix, and boxes and boxes of cereal, from Apple Jacks to Quisp. The ultimate pantry as imagined by a ten-year-old boy.

Hess was encouraged by the black wig they had found hanging scalplike on Sinclair's bedpost. It was human hair, more expensive than an acrylic wig and much more realistic in wear and feel. CSS had recovered eleven different hair follicles from inside Frond's bathroom, stairs, and second-floor hallway, all black, all of similar length, but varying in ethnicity: two Caucasian, two Negroid, and seven Mongoloid or Asian. Turned out, Hess learned, that dozens of different donors?including cadavers?are used to make one human-hair wig.

So, no match on the hair, but the dots were there to connect. Sinclair's credit card showed he had laid out eight bills for a new wig in March, this one an inch longer than the one found hanging on his bed?the length matching the hairs recovered from Frond's.

The wig was good and the blood was better, but what Hess needed now was to establish some before-murder connection between Sinclair and Frond. Not for motive. Motive can cloud a case as much as clarify it, especially in court. Defense attorneys can have a field day with motive. Hess himself had a legally compelling motive to do away with a dozen people who had wronged him over the years. In order to feed the DA a solid conviction, he needed to link Sinclair to Frond in life, not just in death.

To that end, Hess was pulling books from Sinclair's collection on the occult. Working the Magician and the Witch angle. It had potential, considering the missing athame. He was in the side hallway flipping through a book of voodoo recipes when a CSS criminalist entered the kitchen with Maddox in tow.

Turned out Maddox?surprise, surprise?had been inside Sinclair's place