فصل 03 - بخش 02

3

Ralph arrived home at quarter to eleven on that Saturday night. He hit the garage door opener, drove inside, then hit it again. The door rattled obediently back down on its tracks, at least one thing in the world that remained sane and normal. Push Button A and, assuming Battery Compartment B is loaded with relatively fresh Duracells, Garage Door C opens and closes.

He turned off the engine and just sat there in the dark, tapping the steering wheel with his wedding ring, remembering a rhyme from his raucous teenage years: Shave and a haircut … you bet! Sung by the whorehouse … quartet!

The door opened and Jeanette came out, wrapped in her housecoat. In the spill of light from the kitchen, he saw that she was wearing the bunny slippers he’d given her as a joke present on her last birthday. The real present had been a trip to Key West, just the two of them, and they’d had a great time, but now it was just a blurry remnant in his mind, the way all vacations were later on: things with no more substance than the aftertaste of candy floss. The joke slippers were the things that had lasted, pink slippers from the Dollar Store with their ridiculous little eyes and their comical floppy ears. Seeing her in them made his eyes sting. He felt as if he had aged twenty years since stepping into that clearing at Figgis Park and viewing the bloody ruin that had been a little boy who probably idolized Batman and Superman.

He got out and hugged his wife hard, pressing his beard-stubbly cheek to her smooth one, saying nothing at first, concentrating on holding back the tears that wanted to come.

‘Honey,’ she said. ‘Honey, you got him. You got him, so what’s wrong?’

‘Maybe nothing,’ he said. ‘Maybe everything. I should have brought him in for questioning. But Jesus Christ, I was so sure!’

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘I’ll make tea, and you can tell me about it.’

‘Tea will keep me awake.’

She drew back and looked at him with eyes as lovely and dark at fifty as they had been at twenty-five. ‘Are you going to sleep, anyway?’ And when he didn’t reply: ‘Case closed.’

Derek was away at camp in Michigan, so they had the house to themselves. She asked him if he wanted to watch the eleven o’clock news on the kitchen TV, and he shook his head. The last thing he wanted was ten minutes of coverage on how the Flint City Monster had been brought to bay. Jeannie made raisin toast to go with the tea. Ralph sat at the kitchen table, looking at his hands, and told her everything. He saved Everett Roundhill for last.

‘He was furious with all of us,’ Ralph said, ‘but since I was the one who finally called him back, I was the one who took the incoming fire.’

‘Are you saying he confirmed Terry’s story?’

‘Every word. Roundhill picked up Terry and the other two teachers – Quade and Grant – at the high school. Ten o’clock Tuesday morning, as arranged. They got to the Sheraton in Cap City around 11:45, just in time to pick up their conference IDs and be seated for the banquet lunch. Roundhill says he lost track of Terry for an hour or so after the lunch was over, but he thinks Quade was with him. In any case, they were all back together by three, which is when Mrs Stanhope saw him putting Frank Peterson’s bike – and Frank himself – into a dirty white van seventy miles south.’

‘Have you talked to Quade?’

‘Yes. On the way home. He wasn’t angry – Roundhill’s so pissed he’s threatening to call for a full-scale investigation by the AG – but he was disbelieving. Stunned. Said that he and Terry went to a used bookstore called Second Edition after the banquet lunch, browsed, then came back for Coben.’

‘And Grant? What about him?’

‘He’s a she – Debbie Grant. Haven’t reached her yet, her husband said she went out with some other women, and when she does that she always turns off her phone. I’ll get her tomorrow morning, and when I do, I have no doubt that she’ll confirm what Roundhill and Quade told me.’ He took a small bite of his toast, then put it back on the plate. ‘This is my fault. If I’d pulled Terry in for questioning Thursday night, after Stanhope and the Morris girl ID’d him, I’d have known we had a problem and this wouldn’t be all over TV and the Internet now.’

‘But by then you’d matched the fingerprints to Terry Maitland’s, isn’t that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fingerprints in the van, a fingerprint on the van’s ignition key, fingerprints in the car he abandoned by the river, on the branch he used to …’

‘Yes.’

‘And then more eyewitnesses. The man behind Shorty’s Pub, and his friend. Plus the cab driver. And the bouncer at the strip club. They all knew him.’

‘Uh-huh, and now that he’s been arrested, I have no doubt we’ll get a few more eye-wits from Gentlemen, Please. Bachelors, mostly, who won’t have to explain to their wives what they were doing there. I still should have waited. Maybe I should have called the high school to check on his movements on the day of the murder, except it made no sense, being summer vacation and all. What could they have told me except “He’s not here”?’

‘And you were afraid that if you started asking questions, it would get back to him.’

That had seemed obvious at the time, but now it only seemed stupid. Worse, careless. ‘I’ve made some mistakes in my career, but nothing like this. It’s as if I went blind.’

She shook her head vehemently. ‘Do you remember what I said when you told me that was how you meant to do it?’

‘Yes.’

Go ahead. Get him away from those boys as fast as you can.

That was what she’d said.

They sat there, looking at each other across the table.

‘This is impossible,’ Jeannie said at last.

He pointed a finger at her. ‘I think you’ve reached the heart of the matter.’

She sipped her tea thoughtfully, then looked at him over the rim of her cup. ‘There’s an old saying that everyone has a double. I think Edgar Allan Poe even wrote a story about it. “William Wilson,” it was called.’

‘Poe wrote his stories before fingerprints and DNA. We don’t have the DNA yet – that’s pending – but if it comes back as his, it’s him and I’m probably okay. If it comes back as someone else’s, they’ll cart me off to the loonybin. After I lose my job and get sued for false arrest, that is.’

She lifted her own piece of toast, then lowered it again. ‘You have his fingerprints here. And you’ll have his DNA here, I’m sure of it. But Ralph … you don’t have any fingerprints or DNA from there. From whoever attended that conference in Cap City. What if Terry Maitland killed the boy and it was the double at that conference?’

‘If you’re saying Terry Maitland has a lost identical twin with the same fingerprints and DNA, it’s not possible.’

‘I’m not saying that. I’m saying that you don’t have any forensic proof that it was Terry in Cap City. If Terry was here, and the forensic evidence says he was, then the double must have been there. It’s the only thing that makes sense.’

Ralph understood the logic, and in the detective novels Jeannie liked to read – the Agatha Christies, the Rex Stouts, the Harlan Cobens – it would have been the centerpiece of the final chapter, when Miss Marple, Nero Wolfe, or Myron Bolitar revealed all. There was one rock-hard fact, as unassailable as gravity: a man could not be in two places at the same time.

But if Ralph had confidence in the eyewitnesses here, he had to have equal confidence in the eyewitnesses who said they had been in Cap City with Maitland. How could he doubt them? Roundhill, Quade, and Grant all taught in the same department. They saw Maitland every day. Was he, Ralph, supposed to believe those three teachers had colluded in the rape-murder of a child? Or that they had spent two days with a double so perfect they had never even suspected? And even if he could make himself believe it, could Bill Samuels ever convince a jury, especially when Terry had a seasoned and crafty defense lawyer like Howie Gold on his side?

‘Let’s go up to bed,’ Jeanette said. ‘I’ll give you one of my Ambiens and rub your back. This will look better in the morning.’

‘You think so?’ he asked.