فصل 15 - بخش 01

15

When Marcy Maitland was in junior high (that was what it was still called when she went there), she sometimes had a nightmare that she turned up in home room naked, and everyone laughed. Stupid Marcy Gibson forgot to get dressed this morning! Look, you can see everything! By the time she got to high school, this anxiety dream had been replaced by a slightly more sophisticated one where she arrived in class clothed but realizing she was about to take the biggest test of her life and had forgotten to study.

When she turned off Barnum Street and onto Barnum Court, the horror and the helplessness of those dreams returned, and this time there would be no sweet relief and muttered Thank God when she woke up. In her driveway was a cop car that could have been the twin of the one which had conveyed Terry to the police station. Parked behind it was a windowless truck with STATE POLICE MOBILE CRIME UNIT printed on the side in big blue letters. Bookending the driveway was a pair of black OHP cruisers, with their lightbars strobing in the day’s growing gloom. Four large troopers, their County Mounty hats making them look at least seven feet tall, stood on the sidewalk, their legs spread (as if their balls are too big to keep them together, she thought). These things were bad enough, but not the worst. The worst was her neighbors, standing out on their lawns and watching. Did they know why this police presence had suddenly materialized in front of the neat Maitland ranchhouse? She guessed that most already did – the curse of cell phones – and they would tell the rest.

One of the troopers stepped into the street, holding up a hand. She stopped and powered down her window.

‘Are you Marcia Maitland, ma’am?’

‘Yes. I can’t get into my garage with those vehicles in my driveway.’

‘Park at the curb there,’ he said, pointing behind one of the cruisers.

Marcy felt an urge to lean through the open window, get right up in his face, and scream, MY driveway! MY garage! Get your stuff out of my way!

Instead, she pulled over and got out. She needed to pee, and badly. Probably had needed to since the cop had handcuffed Terry, and she just hadn’t realized until now.

One of the other cops was talking into his shoulder mic, and from around the corner of the house, walkie-talkie in one hand, came the crowning touch of this evening’s malignant surrealism: a hugely pregnant woman in a sleeveless flower-print dress. She cut across the Maitland lawn in that peculiar duck-footed walk – almost a waddle – that all women seem to have when they arrive at the far end of their last trimester. She did not smile as she approached Marcy. A laminated ID hung from her neck. Pinned to her dress, riding the slope of one enormous breast and as out of place as a dog biscuit on a communion plate, was a Flint City police badge.

‘Mrs Maitland? I’m Detective Betsy Riggins.’

She held out her hand. Marcy did not shake it. And although Howie had already told her, she said, ‘What do you want?’

Riggins looked over Marcy’s shoulder. One of the state cops was standing there. He was apparently the bull goose of the quartet, because he had stripes on his shirtsleeve. He was holding out a sheet of paper. ‘Mrs Maitland, I’m Lieutenant Yunel Sablo. We have a warrant to search these premises and take out any items belonging to your husband, Terence John Maitland.’

She snatched the paper. SEARCH WARRANT was printed at the top in gothic type. There followed a bunch of legalistic blah-blah, and it was signed at the bottom by a name she at first misread as Judge Crater. Didn’t he disappear a long time ago? she thought, then blinked water from her eyes – maybe sweat, maybe tears – and saw the name was Carter, not Crater. The warrant bore today’s date and had apparently been signed less than six hours ago.

She turned it over and frowned. ‘There’s nothing listed here. Does that mean you can even take his underwear, if you want to?’

Betsy Riggins, who knew they would take any underwear they happened to find in the Maitlands’ dirty clothes hamper, said, ‘It’s at our discretion, Mrs Maitland.’

‘Your discretion? Your discretion? What is this, Nazi Germany?’

Riggins said, ‘We are investigating the most heinous murder to occur in this state during my twenty years as a policewoman, and we will take what we need to take. We have done you the courtesy of waiting until you got home—’

‘To hell with your courtesy. If I’d turned up late, you would have what? Broken down the door?’

Riggins looked vastly uncomfortable – not because of the question, Marcy thought, but because of the passenger she was lugging around on this hot July night. She should have been sitting at home, with the air conditioning on and her feet up. Marcy didn’t care. Her head was pounding, her bladder was throbbing, and her eyes were welling with tears.

‘That would have been a last resort,’ said the trooper with the shit on his sleeve, ‘but within our legal right, as defined by the warrant I have just shown you.’

‘Let us in, Mrs Maitland,’ Riggins said. ‘The sooner we get started, the sooner we’ll be out of your hair.’

‘Yo, Loot,’ one of the other troopers said. ‘Here come the vultures.’

Marcy turned. From around the corner came a TV truck, with its satellite dish still folded against the roof. Behind it was an SUV with KYO decaled on the hood in big white letters. Behind that, almost kissing the KYO vehicle’s bumper, came another TV truck from another station.

‘Come inside with us,’ Riggins said. Almost coaxed. ‘You don’t want to be on the sidewalk when they get here.’

Marcy gave in, thinking this might be the first surrender of many. Her privacy. Her dignity. Her kids’ sense of security. And her husband? Would she be forced to surrender Terry? Surely not. What they were accusing him of was insane. They might as well have accused him of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.

‘All right. But I’m not going to talk to you, so don’t even try. And I don’t have to give you my phone. My lawyer said so.’

‘That’s fine.’ Riggins took her by the arm, when – given the size of her – Marcy should have been taking hers, to make sure she didn’t trip and fall on her enormous belly.

The Chevy Tahoe from KYO—‘Ki-Yo,’ as they styled themselves – stopped in the middle of the street, and one of their correspondents, the pretty blond one, got out so fast that her skirt slid most of the way to her waist. The troopers did not miss this.

‘Mrs Maitland! Mrs Maitland, just a couple of questions!’

Marcy couldn’t remember taking her purse when she exited the car, but it was over her shoulder and she got the house key out of the side pocket with no trouble. The trouble came when she tried to get it into the lock. Her hand was trembling too badly. Riggins didn’t take the key, but closed her hand over Marcy’s to steady it, and it finally slid home.

From behind her: ‘Is it true that your husband has been arrested for the murder of Frank Peterson, Mrs Maitland?’

‘Keep back,’ one of the troopers said. ‘Not one step off the sidewalk.’

‘Mrs Maitland!’

Then they were inside. That was good, even with the pregnant detective beside her, but the house looked different, and Marcy knew it would never look quite the same. She thought of the woman who had left here with her daughters, all of them laughing and excited, and it was like thinking of a woman you had loved, but who had died.

Her legs gave out and she plopped onto the bench in the hall where the girls sat to put on their boots in winter. Where Terry sometimes sat (as he had tonight) to go over his lineup one final time before leaving for the field. Betsy Riggins sat down beside her with a grunt of relief, her meaty right hip thwacking against Marcy’s less padded left one. The cop with the shit on his sleeve, Sablo, and two others passed them without a look, drawing on thick blue plastic gloves. They were already wearing booties of a matching blue. Marcy assumed the fourth one was doing crowd control. Crowd control in front of their house on sleepy Barnum Court.

‘I have to pee,’ she said to Riggins.

‘As do I,’ Riggins said. ‘Lieutenant Sablo! A word?’

The one with the shit on his sleeve returned to the bench. The other two continued on into the kitchen, where the most evil thing they’d find was half a devil’s food cake in the fridge.

To Marcy, Riggins asked, ‘Do you folks have a downstairs bathroom?’

‘Yes, through the pantry. Terry added it himself last year.’

‘Uh-huh. Lieutenant, the ladies need to pee, so that’s where you start, and make it as fast as you can.’ And, to Marcy: ‘Does your husband have an office?’

‘Not as such. He uses the far end of the dining room.’

‘Thank you. That’s your next stop, Lieutenant.’ She turned back to Marcy. ‘Mind one little question while we wait?’

‘Yes.’

Riggins paid this no mind. ‘Have you noticed anything odd about your husband’s behavior over the last few weeks?’

Marcy gave a humorless laugh. ‘You mean was he building up to committing murder? Walking around, rubbing his hands together, maybe drooling and muttering to himself? Has your pregnancy affected your mind, Detective?’

‘I take it that’s a no.’

‘It is. Now please stop nagging me!’

Riggins sat back and folded her hands on her belly. Leaving Marcy with her throbbing bladder and a memory of something Gavin Frick had said only last week, after practice: Where’s Terry’s mind lately? Half the time he seems somewhere else. It’s like he’s fighting the flu, or something.

‘Mrs Maitland?’

‘What?’

‘You look like you had a thought there.’

‘I did, actually. I was thinking that sitting next to you on this bench is very uncomfortable. It’s like sitting next to an oven that knows how to breathe.’

Fresh color rose in Betsy Riggins’s already flushed cheeks. On one hand, Marcy was horrified at what she had just said – the cruelty of it. On the other, she was delighted that she had gotten in a thrust that seemed to have gone home.

In any case, Riggins asked no more questions.

What seemed like an endless time later, Sablo came back, holding a clear plastic bag that contained all the pills from the downstairs medicine cabinet (OTC stuff, their few prescriptions were in the two bathrooms upstairs), and Terry’s tube of hemorrhoid cream. ‘All clear,’ he said.

‘You first,’ Riggins said.

Under other circumstances, Marcy surely would have deferred to the pregnant lady and held her water a bit longer, but not under these. She went in, closed the door, and saw the cover of the toilet tank was on crooked. They had been probing in there for God knew what – drugs, seemed most likely. She urinated with her head lowered and her face in her hands, so she didn’t have to look at the rest of the disarray. Was she going to bring Sarah and Grace back here tonight? Was she going to escort them through the glare of the TV lights, which would undoubtedly be set up by then? And if not here, where? A hotel? Wouldn’t they (the vultures, the trooper had called them) still find them? Of course they would.

When she finished emptying out, Betsy Riggins went. Marcy slipped into the dining room, having no wish to share the hall bench again with Officer Shamu. The cops were going through Terry’s desk – raping his desk, really, all the drawers out, most of the contents piled on the floor. His computer had already been dismantled, the various components plastered with yellow stickers, as if in preparation for a tag sale.

Marcy thought, An hour ago the most important thing in my life was a Golden Dragons win and a trip to the finals.

Betsy Riggins returned. ‘Oh, that’s so much better,’ she said, sitting down at the dining room table. ‘And will be, for a whole fifteen minutes.’

Marcy opened her mouth and what almost came out was I hope your baby dies.

Instead of that she said, ‘It’s nice that someone’s feeling better. Even for fifteen minutes.’