Eddie was the last one now. Eddie was all alone.
People were looking at him, Big Bobby Loom nodding. Eddie hadn't been paying attention. It was his turn. He took Bucky's cop hat and set it on top of the casket, then cracked open two cans of Bud, sipped the foam off his, and set the other at the edge of his brother's open grave.
Eddie stayed down on one knee, head bowed.
When it was over, Eddie lingered while the mourners wandered away. He stared at the coffin as though he could see inside, his brother's faceless head nestled in padded white satin. Mort Lees and Stokes and Ullard gathered at his back. A good feeling, them united. Eddie turned away his hazy eyes and they started off together, as one.
The uniformed troopers detached from the stone wall. Eddie thought they were at last coming to pay their respects, but then he saw their faces. The troopers stopped, blocking the way to the road.
'You don't want to make a scene now,' said one of them, thumbs hooked inside his gunbelt.
'What scene?' said Eddie, Mort at his side. 'What is this?'
The trooper said, 'All of you, raise your hands, lace your fingers behind your heads.'
This broiling heat. This beating summer sun. Eddie felt himself going wild inside. 'This is a graveside observance.'
'Graveside observance is over, Jack. Feel lucky we let you have that. You want to maintain some dignity, you comply with my command now and come along quietly. Hands up and behind your heads. Let's go.'
Eddie saw one trooper move his palm flat against the butt of his sidearm, another with his fingers holding open the flap of a pouch of Mace. From that point on Eddie was blind with rage. The fight occurred as much inside him as around him. He unloaded his despair. Wanting to hit and be hit. To hurt and be hurt. Mace burned his eyes, and the name he yelled as they pulled him to the ground was Maddox's.
49
CULLEN
'BOLT DID INDEED GO OUT and get himself a good lawyer,' said Cullen, sitting on a thin-cushioned divan inside Maddox's mother's house, casually bobbing the shoe of his crossed leg, the hand of his outstretched arm plucking at the stiff crocheted slip covering a wheel-shaped pillow. 'A smart lawyer who convinced him to roll over fast. Had no choice, really. With Pail dead, they knew Dr. Bolt was the one we would go after, get his face on TV, make an example of. And it's an easy case to prove. This way, we get what we want?Pail the archvillain, whose crimes die with him?and Bolt gets what he wants?to play the victim. Which is less than a half-truth, but it gets us close enough to the full story. He'll plead out early to avoid a jury. Take short time, some token like thirty months, long probation, and register as a sex offender.'
'Sex offender?' said Maddox.
'Bolt occasionally hired some of the foster kids to do odd jobs around the kennel. Some of them he fed ketamine hydrochloride, which I understand is a dissociative anaesthetic for animals.'
'Special K.'
'What you call it on the street. Himself, he'd take some Internet Blue. Viagra.' To Maddox's scowl, Cullen said, 'Yup. Bolt stresses it was 'only a few times,' as though he should be eligible for further sentence reduction for not doing it to hundreds or thousands of kids. Good Sergeant Pail found out about this somehow, and instead of taking him down, used it against him. Which raises the question of how did Bucky Pail know that veterinarians handled not only pseudoephedrine, the main ingredient in making meth, but the other government-restricted precursor, iodine?'
'Ibbits,' said Maddox, seated across from him in a chair upholstered in brocaded rose blooms. The ticking came from a ceramic clock on the otherwise empty mantle behind him. Everything else was in open boxes, half packed, and probably had been for months. It was an old house with attendant aches and pains. Including the irregular wood creaks Cullen kept hearing upstairs.
'Ibbits indeed,' said Cullen. 'A fugitive from justice, a nomad with the epic misfortune of cutting through Black Falls on his way to nowhere. Of being pulled over in one of Bucky Pail's notorious speed traps. Hugo Ibbits was Patient Zero for meth here in Mitchum County. Like a spore floating on the air, who landed inside our throat. He did spend time in lockup, brother Eddie finally confirmed it. Bucky came and got him out on a Sunday night, though Eddie still insists his brother released him. He truly believes that Ibbits cracked up his own car and died in the fire. And he still backs his brother's innocence one hundred percent on the meth lab. When we showed him printouts from his brother's Internet searches, seeking property in Daytona Beach, Florida, Eddie actually broke down. Guy cried.'
Maddox nodded but demonstrated no sympathy.
Cullen rounded it up quickly, tired of the details he had spent the last forty-eight hours assembling. 'Wanda moved it through Sculp and others via a drop at the vet's. Sculp dealt to the other kids at his house, and the kids further seeded it around town. The supply chart was growing, doubling every eight to twelve weeks. The tipping point was approaching soon, where Bucky would have to turn it loose. Sculp dealt to Sinclair. Don't know how they connected originally, and unless Frankie gets a grip on himself after detox, we'll have to wait for Sinclair to get caught to find out.'
Maddox sat forward. 'They need help here for this. We have to go through town and figure out some way to deal with these people, reach out to them. They've had a taste of it now. We need to get in here and address this before it occurs to somebody that they can cook this shit themselves, in the trunk of their car.'
'Well,' said Cullen, 'I'm with you on that, but let's be honest. That's the mopping up that never gets done. The message is always, 'Mission Accomplished,' through the press, and, yes, through my office. Drugs confiscated? Problem solved. That's the only story people want to hear. I just don't see us getting much support. Especially with the Sinclair hysteria ongoing. You following that?'
'Not really.' Maddox had been out of action since Wanda Tedmond's arrest.
'Sightings all over town,' said Cullen. 'A twelve-year-old kid walking home from a friend's house yesterday saw Sinclair beckoning to him from some trees across the street. People've seen him cutting across their neighbors' backyards. Calls come in to nine- one-one saying he's down in the basement
'Police radio last night said something about coyotes?'
'Roaming the streets, it's true. A couple of them got shot and killed. The Air Wing helicopter with its thirty- million-candlepower searchlight rousted them all from the state forest. Or maybe they were drawn here by the scent of fear. Of course, having state police strike teams in full ninja tac skulking through your neighbor's pasture, clearing old barns and outbuildings?that doesn't exactly help calm things down. Doesn't ease much anxiety. My way over here, I passed people out on their front steps, hunting rifles across their laps. Guy shot out his own patio window last night, thought he saw a shadow. They're pulling down antique Winchesters from over the fireplace, riding around with loaded handguns on the passenger seat. Massachusetts has the most restrictive firearms laws in the country, but enforcing those statutes tonight would mean packing half the town into two small jail cells. This is a holiday for people, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lock and load in public, maybe even bag themselves a gen- u-ine child molester.'
Maddox said, 'Wonderful.'
'So you can see how well martial law would go over. State police actually imposed a curfew, but nobody knows it. How do you alert a community without a Web site or cable TV channel or even a town newspaper? This is why you need to stay on. In name only, just until Sinclair is brought in. Can't totally disband a town's police department during a crisis like this. Plus, my boss's perspective is, there's one thousand seven hundred fifty-eight potential votes here, so don't mobilize taxpayers by pissing them off.'
'Nobody here votes.'
'Still, she doesn't want a lawless town on her register. Just let Hess and his bunch do their thing, and wait this out. Play the small-town cop for a couple more days.'
Maddox nodded unhappily. 'And after that?'
Cullen shrugged, flapping his tie out over his lap. 'That's up to your brass. You might as well know, no matter how this Sinclair shit storm falls, I'm recommending you back with full confidence.'
'Actually,' said Maddox, 'I was asking about the town.'
'You mean their police?' Cullen shrugged again. 'That's a little beyond our purview, isn't it? I'm sure they'll work it out, hire on replacements. What other choice do they have?'
Maddox accepted this quietly. He had seemed uncomfortable since answering the door, but only now did it occur to Cullen that Maddox was impatient for him to leave. Another subtle creak upstairs drew Cullen's eyes to the swirled pattern of the plaster ceiling, then the detailed molding around the
