The Killing Moon: A Novel

word. Until confusion overtook discomfort. 'But so, how??'

'Frond?' he said, the spade making little snitch-snitch sounds in the soil. He spoke with the forbearance of a man taking the pain of another person's ailment onto himself. 'It's acting out. That's her pattern. She does me wrong, then lets me find out?then hates herself all over again. She punishes me in order to torture herself.'

'A pattern,' Maddox said, thinking, There were others?

'But when she's clear, once she's healthy again?she thanks me, can you understand that? She's grateful. For me standing by her. For what I put up with. Even calls me her hero.' He looked off at the nearest weeping willow. 'You ever been called a hero, Don?'

Maddox said, 'No.'

'As a life, it ain't always easy. But what we have together, it's enough for me. Oh, it's plenty.' Ripsbaugh nodded. 'You're looking at me like?'

'No, no. No.'

'You never been married. There's more to it than sex. Lots more. You want to know what she does for me? So dirty I get sometimes, coming home at the end of a day? She runs me a bath. She kneels by the tub, and she bathes me. You ever been bathed, Don? Anyone ever run a warm washcloth over your shoulders? Since you were a kid, ever been shampooed? Her fingers in my scalp?I'd take that touch over any other kind, any day of the week.'

Maddox nodded, trying not to tip his embarrassment. 'You don't have to explain yourself to me. Or to anyone.'

'Sure I do. Thing is, she's my wife. You sign on, you sign on for life.'

Maddox admired that, even admired Ripsbaugh, at the same time he pitied him. His openness, though a bit unnerving, stirred something in Maddox?beyond his desire simply to change the topic. 'I want to run something by you, Kane. Have you tell me if I'm crazy or not. You follow the forensics shows and that sort of thing, right?'

'A bit,' he said, defensive at first, as it was this interest that had helped get him into trouble. 'This about Dill?'

'The blood evidence is the main thing. I mean, they do have hairs. But hairs can be moved around. And they have sneaker tread impressions, but shoes can get around also, it seems to me. And if you have the guy's shoes?well then, right there you have fibers from his residence. So it comes down to the blood, essentially.'

'Okay.' Ripsbaugh was starting to get it. 'But if it's not Dill?'

'Just talking here. Thinking it through. Tell me about blood. What could someone do with it?'

'Well,' said Ripsbaugh, 'it congeals fast?that much I know. It clots, making it tricky to handle. If you don't have a live donor?you can store it cold, I guess. Maybe forty-two days, something like that.'

'Can't you freeze it?'

'Sure. It freezes.'

'Because?and then you wouldn't even need liquid blood. If all you wanted was for it to be discovered in a sink trap, you set it there frozen. An ice cube of blood. Then you torch the house, knowing that the heat traveling along the pipes will melt it. All you need to show up there is a trace.'

'Well, I suppose. But hold on. Who's doing this?'

'My point is only that the blood, even skin cells, could have gotten to these crime scenes some other way than directly from Sinclair being present. Stressing 'could.''

'I guess,' said Ripsbaugh. 'But then, where is Dill?'

'Say he's compromised in some way. I don't know. Someone holding him hostage or something.'

'Okay. But why?'

'I don't know. You got me there.'

'No fingerprints?'

'No. Talcum powder, though. As from the inside of latex gloves.'

'Okay. But there would only be powder if he took off his gloves.'

'I hadn't thought of that.'

'Talcum powder used for anything else?'

Maddox shook his head. Because he didn't know, and because now he was starting to reconsider the whole thing. Verbalizing his speculations had made him sound half desperate. What was he clinging to? Why couldn't it be Dill Sinclair? And why the hell did he care? 'Sounds crazy, right?'

'It's a theory, I guess.'

'Anyway,' Maddox said. Enough of this graveyard conversation. 'That's all someone else's problem right now.'

Ripsbaugh squinted at him in the sun. 'I don't suppose you're staying on here.'

Maddox thought of Tracy walking out on him the night before. He shook his head.

'How soon?'

'Soon,' said Maddox.

'And after you go, then what?'

The thought occurred to Maddox as he stood there. 'You know what, Kane? You should join up.'

Ripsbaugh scowled. 'Too old.'

'You kidding? They'd bend the rules. They can't afford to be choosy.'

'Val wouldn't like it. Her father having been a cop and all.'

'You have the interest in police work. And what does this force need now but an honest cop who knows the town and cares about its future? The way Pinty was back in his day. A steward of Black Falls.' Maddox stepped back, convinced, before starting away. 'It's a good fit. At least think about it.'

'Hey,' said Ripsbaugh after him. 'If I guessed DEA, would I be wrong?'

Maddox smiled but did not look back. 'Think about taking the job.'

55

MADDOX

HE PARKED IN HIS driveway, but instead of going into his house, found himself walking down the street. It had been a July of constant humidity, like living inside a cloud. Tomorrow the weather reports promised an afternoon downpour and electrical storm to jolt the atmosphere and rearrange air quality, the way an electroshock treatment alters chemistry in the brain.

This road he had grown up on, Silver Leaf Lane, rated little traffic, its houses set well apart, most of them tired 1970s-style split- levels and wood-sided ranches with stone chimneys and one-car garages. The last house before a stretch of undeveloped land emptying onto the cross street had been the Sinclairs'. It sat dark and dead on a plot of dry gray turf, a small Colonial with an unattached two-car garage. The mortgaging bank had seized the property after Jordy's death but failed to resell it: because of the Sinclairs' notorious name, because of plummeting home values in town after the mill closing, and because Jordy Sinclair had built it himself, the house having serious structural flaws.

Maddox started up the cracked, weed-sprouting driveway, drawn by his curiosity about Dill Sinclair, and curiosity about the past in general, about this street he had lived on, the world at that time. All the secrets he never knew.

The first-floor windows remained boarded up, the brick stairs crumbling, the gutters long ago raided for aluminum. The garage at the head of the driveway was swaybacked like a falling barn, a faded real estate sign lying among its dead brown hedges.

The backyard was narrow, its grass long and weedy and tired of growing. Maddox remembered the tree house where his mother had found Dill smoking her stolen cigarettes, and located it some ten yards back in the trees: open-faced with a slanted roof of surplus lumber and ladder steps, nail heads crusted with sap.

He returned to the yard, intending to complete a full loop of the house and be done with it. But a concentration of buzzing flies drew him to the rear corner, where a dead toad lay rotting in the basement window well. Maddox backed away from the flies, then noticed some zipping back and forth between there and the bottom plank of the nearest boarded window.

The plank did not sit flush with the rest. When Maddox touched it, it moved.

He tugged and the entire board pulled away in his hand.

The one above it came away just as easily, both planks simply propped up there on the sill. He could see where the pointed ends of the carpenter nails were twisted, the wood, at some point, having been pried away.

The revealed window was without glass, the frame itself ripped out. Someone had broken the seal on this place. Someone had been inside.

He waved off the flies and peered in. Dark, because of the boarded windows, but after a moment he could make out the vague contours of an empty room, with flattened moving cartons on the floor and an empty cardboard roll of packing tape.

Maddox ducked back out again, hassled by the flies. He looked around the side of the house, wondering if he should do this. Then he hoisted himself up over the sill.

Headfirst was the only way in. His hands found the floor, dusty but clear of broken glass. He got his legs through, the soles of his Timberlands thudding hollow in the gloomy room. Two rooms, actually, open to each other, running the length of the house. Dust floated up as he moved, grit stirred by his presence like a ghostly thing trying to resurrect itself out of ashes.

A short passageway took him past a bathroom alcove into the kitchen, empty except for an old refrigerator, stove, and pulled-open trash