The Killing Moon: A Novel

Sinclair, and the sill's slamming down hard on his fingers.'

'I think he's in deeper shit than he knows.'

'You don't see Sinclair for this, but you're the only one. Hess is on the right track here. He's got blood, he's got hair?even if it is wig hair?he's got treads from the brand of sneaker the suspect was known to wear. He's got fibers from the offender's apartment?'

'He's got what?'

'Fibers matching a living room rug. As well as a few skin cells he likes for Sinclair, that he's still waiting on tests for. See? All your dancing around him is bullshit and counterproductive. Just come out to him. Our thing is dead and all but buried.'

'No way. Not yet.'

'If it's Sinclair?and, plainly, it is?then we've already lost. The case is nothing. It was thin to begin with, relying on the word of a convicted sex offender. But a convicted sex offender who's also a killer? Find a DA in this country, in this world, who would bring that case.'

'It's not over, Cullen.'

'You don't want it to be over, and neither do I. And stubbornness is a good trait, and as a lawyer I respect it. But I like common sense too. I know you're tight with Chief Pinto-I-can-never-pronounce-the- name. You two obviously go way back.'

'Pinty.'

'He's a good man.'

'Cullen. It's more than that.'

'Nobody likes to lose. Everybody wants to be the hero. But when you're down five runs in the ninth, one swing of the bat won't win it for you. You play small ball, keep the inning alive.'

A pause. 'Okay.'

Cullen frowned at the moon smiling at him from the water. 'But you're still gonna get up there and take your swing.'

'I'm finishing this job.'

'We're in the shit enough as it is. If Sinclair is found to have benefited from a deal with the DA's office before committing a capital crime?'

'Benefited how? The assault charges against Bucky Pail were a get-out-of-jail against his DUI.'

'He got leniency for agreeing to assist this investigation, and you know that. On my recommendation. The five-year driver's license suspension was a slap on the wrist. We could have sent him to prison and let him file his suit from there. Anyway, you know it's a game of appearances, not actual facts. My boss needs to get elected again. Should she decide to run.'

'Cullen, there's only one reason a forty- year-old lawyer goes back into the public sector as an assistant DA. You have political ambition yourself.'

'What of it?'

'You need this as much as I do.'

'I need to avoid embarrassments is what I need.'

'You check on Sinclair's pager for me?'

Cullen sighed, which was another thing he caught himself doing more and more as he got older. 'You're sure it hasn't turned up?'

'Not in the search of his place, I know that.'

'It's still functioning, so far as we can tell.' Cullen's hand found something in his pocket, a bottle cap, from the Bud Light he'd opened after getting home. He felt it in his palm, a tiny crown. 'Still receiving pages, or able to. If it has a battery in it, and all that. What if they find it in the forest?'

'Christ.'

'Those things save old messages? They can identify you through that?'

'Give me a little credit,' said Maddox, 'not to have signed off pages with my full name and birth date. I was always discreet. But the billing, I assume it goes right back to your office.'

'Then the jig is up, and you flip over all your cards anyway.'

'Sinclair still has the pager with him.'

'Well, then, he's ignoring you. And why not? He's a killer, Maddox. Why does he want to hear from a cop?'

Silence expressed Maddox's dissent.

Cullen said, 'Okay, fine, so how are you going forward from here?'

'Still trying to track down that kid who was inside Sinclair's place. And Wanda, I'm going to lean on her. I cooked up an excuse to go over to her house tomorrow. Enlisted Ripsbaugh's help with that one.'

'The ditchdigger?' said Cullen, surprised. 'You really do have it in for Hess, don't you.'

Cullen stood there by the pool after he hung up, flipping the bottle cap in his hand. A water bug or some such insect swam across the moon crescent, rippling the black surface, and Cullen switched on the overnight filter, what he had come out here to do. The jets voided their air bubbles, the skimmers circulating water.

Maddox was turning crusader. Pulling the plug on him was going to be difficult, if not impossible. Cullen wondered how much further he could let this go.

39

MADDOX

THE MAN KNOWN AS 'Bathrobe Bill' Tedmond said, 'I don't know where Wanda is. She don't come and go regular. Don't keep hours. Phone rings and she's gone.'

Wanda's father sat in a deep, itchy-looking armchair beside a tray table containing a gnawed pencil, an open wire-bound notebook listing expenses versus income, a smattering of bills and notices, and a once-white Slimline telephone stained smoker's-tooth yellow. The bathrobe was saddle brown terry cloth with a faux-silk shawl collar, and whenever Bill left the house, which was almost never, pants and slipper shoes underneath completed the ensemble. A window fan stirred hot air that fluttered the peeling green paper on the walls, sloughing off its backing glue like the lining of an ulcerated stomach. The laughing television had been placed in the center of the room, with everything else, Bathrobe Bill included, arranged around it.

No need for Maddox to hide his disappointment, Bathrobe Bill's eyes having yet to leave Live with Regis and Kelly. 'When would you say you saw her last?'

'Time, I'm no good with. Yesterday, maybe. She sleeps a lot when she's here, and why not? Sleeping's free.'

For sixteen years, Bill Tedmond drove long-haul: on the road for eight days, home for two. But his divorce from Wanda's mother triggered a decade-long depression, rendering him unable to work, though the state denied his disability claim. His rig remained parked outside under trees, its once-proud chrome caked with seasons of pollen and bird shit, plants and weeds growing out of the leaves composting on its roof. He was a recluse now, Black Falls' dirt-poor version of Howard Hughes, spending his days in front of a snowy television, keeping a careful tally of all the money he did not have.

'Well,' said Maddox, moving this along, Bathrobe Bill like a black hole sucking up all health and ambition, 'she mentioned you were having trouble with your plumbing.'

'That's right enough. Hope she also mentioned I'd have even more trouble paying to fix it.'

'I've got someone with me who will get things flowing again, no problem.'

Bathrobe Bill nodded, still facing the TV. 'I'll hang in here until you're done.'

Maddox went to Ripsbaugh in the back hallway. Ripsbaugh wore a sweat-darkened T-shirt, overwashed shorts, and his usual boots with the peeling leather collars and worn-down toes. He sat before the 'video diagnostics system' contraption Maddox had helped him wheel in. The unit's motor hummed as a mechanized spindle payed out red cable with a thinner silver wire spiraled around its length. The camera snake-fed into the open toilet in the corner of the bare bathroom, disappearing into a liver-colored puddle at the mouth of the bowl at a rate of about one inch per second. The procedure was eerily medical in appearance. A three-by-three screen on the console played the camera view creeping through a pipe of cloudy water glowing night-vision green, an odometer-like counter marking off the distance.

'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.