The Killing Moon: A Novel

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On the counter he saw his keys and coins and beeper. His pockets had been turned out. There was his holster also, but empty.

In the near corner stood a spade with a long wooden handle.

Maddox picked up movement reflected in the sink window. He saw him. The black wig. His face blurred, standing back, watching Maddox from behind.

A hand gripped his right shoulder. Not a normal hand, as his eyes strained to see it. The fingers and palm were glazed over somehow, inhumanly smooth. Not gloved, but coated. Mannequin-like.

The hand left his shoulder and Dill came around to stand before him. He wore the rumpled black sweat suit that had shed fibers at Frond's and at Pail's.

But Maddox realized that his build was all wrong. The sweatshirt was stretched tight across his shoulders and chest. He saw the black Chuck Taylor All-Stars, but the sneakers had been sliced up the top, the canvas stitched back together again underneath the laces in order to fit larger feet.

Then the face below the wig. Just like the hands, it bore the smoothed-out finish of a man of pure wax.

But with eyebrows. Or something like eyebrows, taped down underneath the mask, or whatever it was he had over him.

This was not Sinclair at all. The blurred face.

Maddox got the smell now. All at once, the clinging sewer odor. He was still trying to make out what was over the face?skintight but with holes for his eyes, nostrils, and mouth?not masking its appearance as much as?as

Kane Ripsbaugh said, 'You figured it out pretty good.'

Heart pounding, brain screaming, Maddox focused on Ripsbaugh's coated face beneath the black wig.

Ripsbaugh examined his hands as though they were someone else's, not his own. 'Liquid latex. Dries fast and solid, like a thin rubber. Seals me in. So I don't leave any of me behind. Only him.'

The Scarecrow. Ripsbaugh's costume looked like clothes overstuffed with a man instead of straw. 'Where is he? Where's Sinclair?'

'He's right here.'

Either the latex deadened Ripsbaugh's already flat expression, or it was some kind of calm insanity. All of Maddox's breath caught in his throat.

With two bald fingers, Ripsbaugh extracted a pager from his pocket, laying it on the counter next to Maddox's. 'Identical to yours. I noticed that. But I had to call you to the old pulp mill to be sure.' He swept some hair off his shoulder, a horridly casual gesture that only showed how much time he had spent wearing the wig. 'Frond told me the state police had promised to send someone. Sinclair was your informant, wasn't he?'

Maddox did not answer, seeing, in the center of the sweatshirt stretched out over Ripsbaugh's chest, a small tear about the size of a bullet hole. 'You shot him.'

Ripsbaugh looked down at the hole. 'A clean kill.'

'In the Borderlands that night. You needed his clothes.'

'I needed him. A bogeyman. When I drove out of Hell Road, coming up on you standing over that deer, I knew right away something was up. Your shooting stance. You were no amateur. But it was too late. I had already taken that first step.'

Maddox thought back to Ripsbaugh's headlights coming up bright in his eyes. 'You had him in the back of your truck?'

'We've both been working undercover here, Don.'

Maddox shook his pounding head. 'You pulled blood from him. You bled his corpse?'

'It wasn't difficult.'

'Your wife's brother?' Maddox tried to think it through. 'You knew how CSS worked. You knew they'd pull the sink traps. So you directed them there?wiping out the sink, making it look like someone had cleaned up. You gave them everything. Sneaker prints, wig hairs, fiber transfers from his clothes. Skin cells?'

'Scraped his arms. Collected them in a paper bindle, just like they do.'

'You planted them in Bucky's fingernails. As though he got them from fighting with Sinclair.'

'Like laying out crumbs.' The latex glaze over Ripsbaugh's face could not mask his triumph.

'You sealed yourself away in this?this?'

'The adult video store in Rainfield sells it by the quart. Clear or colored.' He flexed his hands, the latex giving like a second skin. 'No latents. No oils, no hairs. No transfers except from Sinclair's clothes, his wig, his sneakers.'

'And the talcum powder?'

He touched his fingers together. 'So the latex won't adhere to itself. A rip or a breach just wouldn't do.'

'That cut on your arm?'

'Self- inflicted. Good insurance, as Walt Heavey would say. In case anything showed up linking Val to Frond. If not for those letters, they never would have suspected me.'

'So you cut yourself, just in case.' Maddox saw it now. 'If they did suspect you, you wanted to force their hand. Make them commit.'

'Make them eliminate me early. They got greedy with the DNA, like I knew they would. Because we're all just hicks out here, right? Too dumb to live anywhere else. Too stupid to cover our own asses.'

His latex fingers wiggled at his sides. Maddox tried flexing his leg and arm muscles against the rope, the nylon tied tight. Where was his gun?

Don't ask him what he's going to do to you. Don't give him a reason.

Keep talking.

'Val was with Bucky too?'

That soured Ripsbaugh. 'Sometimes she gets stuck. She gets in a rut, because she's so smart and the rest of the world is not.'

'But?Bucky Pail?'

'She's vulnerable, and people take advantage of that. But you don't trade in your wife when she gives you trouble.'

Maddox said, 'You fix it with murder instead?'

'Killing is easy when someone hurts the one you love. The one person in the world you pledged to protect. Frond and Pail, they aren't where they are now because they wronged me. They're there because they wronged her. They took advantage. Using her. Like her father all over again. Taking whatever they could get, thinking there would be no consequences.' His hands squeezed into smooth, seamless fists. 'I am their consequences. I am a reckoning.'

Maddox strained against the ropes, trying to get loose without Ripsbaugh seeing him trying. 'That include the pinecone?'

Ripsbaugh straightened, looking freakishly proud in his long wig. 'Sex offenders commit sex crimes.'

Humiliating the corpse, Hess had called it. Ripsbaugh was over the edge. 'This is like trying to cure Val by going around killing off her symptoms. You can't kill away her depression.'

'She doesn't want to do these things with other men.' He spoke with the conviction of the quietly unhinged. 'She hates herself for it. So I do what I have to in order to make her clean. With these.'

His hands again.

'She's sick, Kane. Toxic. And being around her, it's made you sick too.'

'What about you?' Ripsbaugh said. 'You've been meeting her.'

'Meeting?' said Maddox, at first confused. 'No. No, it was?'

'She came to me. Told me everything. How you talked about going away together.'

Maddox's shivering stopped. For the moment, he gave up testing the rope. 'Now hold on.'

Ripsbaugh's eyes were tight, knowing and bright. 'Your high school sweetheart.'

'Kane. You've got it all wrong.'

'Together again after all these years.'

'Kane.'

He was a different man now, the wig and the latex coating giving outer expression to his psychosis. 'I always liked you, Don. I did. But you should have left her alone. She can't help herself. Why she needs me. To help her. To make things right.'

Ripsbaugh considered his palms again. He was working himself up into a killing.

'You don't know what it means,' he went on, 'to make someone a part of you?and then feel them suffer. Feel them trapped inside a hell they did not create, and do not deserve. And all you can do is watch.' His voice became disturbingly calm. 'You can't know what that's like, Don. Can you?'

Something in his stare hooked Maddox. Something behind his smoothed face.

Something indicating that this was not merely a rhetorical question.

Maddox tuned into the emptiness of the house. He remembered arriving home. Seeing the pickup in his garage. Walking down this very hallway, calling out to her.

'Tracy?' Maddox whipped his aching head around, trying to see as much of the downstairs as he could. 'Trace!'

Ripsbaugh said, 'It's good here, where you live. Isolated enough. The rain outside eats up your voice.'

'Tracy!'