Bookman's wake

for the nearest emergency room, and that’s the last he saw or heard of them till he read about Carmichael in the newspaper.”

“We can finish the story ourselves from there. Carmichael took Eleanor on to Pruitt’s alone. Olga was already dead in the house and the killer was still inside waiting. The only thing about it that I can’t believe is that Quintana would tell it all to you.”

“He wants you to come in.”

“He’s moved on in his thinking. He’s past Pruitt now, same as I am. He knows it’s not Pruitt and he knows it’s not me. He told you this stuff to send me a message. This goddamn man is one pretty good cop.”

“Go see him, Cliff. Do this for me, please, do it now, before it gets any worse. Who knows when the moon will turn and Quintana will start drinking blood again.”

“I’ll make you a deal. If I don’t wrap this mother up by tomorrow, Quintana can have me. Solemn word of honor.”

She lay there weighing it, clearly unhappy.

“I’ve got to follow this one out, Trish. If I’m wrong, Quintana can have everything I’ve got and you can come visit me every third Tuesday of the month in the crowbar hotel.”

“You’re chasing a ghost.”

“I’m betting all those deaths were set off by something in those books. Something that humiliated him beyond any imaginable reason. It attacked him in his guts, in his heart, where he lived: it made his life unbearable to imagine them out there for someone else to see. It threatened to destroy the one thing that made life worth living. The Grayson mystique.”

“But you’re hanging all this on the blind woman.”

“It’s not just the blind woman, it’s far more than that now. We’ve got the chronology, with the homicides following the Grayson lettering schemes to the point of making no geographic sense. We’ve got the ashes at Hockman’s and Pruitt’s, and what do you want to bet there weren’t ashes at all the others too? The house in New Orleans caught fire, there were lots of ashes there. We know he didn’t go there to burn old newspapers, we know exactly why he was there and what he’d come to burn. Why do I have to work so hard convincing you of this?—it’s even in your book, that scene when he wanted to burn those 1949 Ravens because of the misspelled word. Now the injury was ten times worse. This was to’ve been his masterpiece, the book to put that old one to rest at long last. And somehow he messed it up again, and the masterpiece turned to dust. And that offended him so deeply that he couldn’t even wait to get those books outside the murder scenes to destroy them. Who else would do that but Grayson himself?”

“He would kill people, you’re saying, because of the mistake he’d made.”

“No. He kills people because he’s a killer. He just didn’t know that till he’d done the first one.”

This is how it works. You get an idea. Usually you’re wrong. But sometimes you’re right. In police work, you follow your idea till it pays off or craps out.

One thing leads to another…

And suddenly I knew where Eleanor was.

“There’s a cabin in the mountains,” I said. “She goes there when she wants to be alone.”

I kicked into my pants, tore into my shirt, got up, sat on a box, and pulled on my shoes.

“What’re you thinking now,” Trish asked, “that she’s free to come and go?”

“I don’t know. But I’m betting that’s where she’ll be.”

“Where is this cabin?”

I stopped short. I didn’t know.

“So what do you know about it?”

“Moon’s supposed to own it, but they all use it. It’s an hour’s drive from here.”

“Maybe still in King County, though.”

“Moon said he built it forty years ago and gradually it’s been surrounded by national-forest lands.”

“But he still owns it.”

“That’s the impression I had.”

“If it’s in his name, I can find it. There’s a title company the paper uses when we’re doing stories that deal with land. They can search out anything. If I can catch them before quitting time, we can plot it out on a topographical map.”

We agreed to coordinate through Amy at the motel. Then we split up, Trish on a fast run back to Seattle, me to Snoqualmie, to stake out Archie Moon’s print-shop.

51

I waited but he didn’t come. Eventually I headed on over toward North Bend. It was almost six o’clock, almost dark, and almost raining when I drove up to the Rigby place and found the gate open. The sun had gone and the night rolled in from the Cascades, pushing the last flakes of light on to the Pacific. The house looked smaller than I remembered it. Crystal had left the front porch light on, casting the yard in a self-contained kind of glow that was almost subterranean. You got the feeling that divers would come down from the hills, swim around the windows and eaves, and wonder what strange creatures might be living there.