فصل 07 - بخش 04

7

At eight o’clock on Thursday morning, Ralph was cutting the grass in his backyard. With a day devoid of tasks stretching ahead of him, mowing was all he could think of to do with his time … although not with his mind, which ran on its own endless gerbil wheel: the mutilated body of Frank Peterson, the witnesses, the taped footage, the DNA, the crowd at the courthouse. Mostly that. It was the girl’s dangling bra strap he kept fixing on for some reason – a bright yellow ribbon that jiggled up and down as she sat on her boyfriend’s shoulders and pumped her fists.

He barely heard the xylophone rattle of his cell phone. He turned off the mower and took the call, standing there with his sneakers and bare ankles dusted with grass. ‘Anderson.’

‘Troy Ramage here, boss.’

One of the two officers who had actually arrested Terry. That seemed a long time ago. In another life, as they said.

‘What’s up, Troy?’

‘I’m at the hospital with Betsy Riggins.’

Ralph smiled, an expression so lately unused that it felt foreign on his face. ‘She’s having the baby.’

‘No, not yet. The chief asked her to come down because you’re on leave and Jack Hoskins is still fishing on Lake Ocoma. Sent me along to keep her company.’

‘What’s the deal?’

‘EMTs brought in Fred Peterson a few hours ago. He tried to hang himself in his backyard, but the branch he tied his rope to broke. The lady next door, a Mrs Gibson, gave him mouth-to-mouth and pulled him through. She came in to see how he was doing, and the chief wants a statement from her, which I guess is protocol, but this seems like a done deal to me. God knows the poor guy had plenty of reasons to pull the pin.’

‘What’s his condition?’

‘The docs say he’s got minimal brain function. Chances of him ever coming back are like one in a hundred. Betsy said you’d want to know.’

For a moment Ralph thought the bowl of cereal he’d eaten for breakfast was going to come back up, and he right-faced away from his Lawnboy to keep from spewing all over it.

‘Boss? You there?’

Ralph swallowed back a sour mash of milk and Rice Chex. ‘I’m here. Where’s Betsy now?’

‘In Peterson’s room with the Gibson woman. Detective Riggins sent me to call because ICU’s a no-cell zone. The docs offered them a room where they could talk, but Gibson said she wanted to answer Detective Riggins’s questions with Peterson. Almost like she thinks he could hear her. Nice old lady, but her back’s killing her, you can see it by the way she walks. So why’s she even here? This ain’t The Good Doctor, and there ain’t gonna be any miracle recovery.’

Ralph could guess the reason. This Mrs Gibson would have exchanged recipes with Arlene Peterson, and watched Ollie and Frankie grow up. Maybe Fred Peterson had shoveled out her driveway after one of Flint City’s infrequent snowstorms. She was there out of sorrow and respect, perhaps even out of guilt that she hadn’t just let Peterson go instead of condemning him to an indefinite stay in a hospital room where machines would do his breathing for him.

The full horror of the last eight days broke over Ralph in a wave. The killer hadn’t been contented with taking just the boy; he’d taken the whole Peterson family. A clean sweep, as they said.

Not ‘the killer,’ no need to be so anonymous. Terry. The killer was Terry. There’s no one else on the radar.

‘Thought you’d want to know,’ Ramage repeated. ‘And hey, look on the bright side. Maybe Betsy’ll go into labor while she’s here. Save her husband from making a special trip.’

‘Tell her to go home,’ Ralph said.

‘Roger that. And … Ralph? Sorry about the way things went down at the courthouse. It was a shit-show.’

‘That pretty well sums it up,’ Ralph said. ‘Thanks for calling.’

He went back to the lawn, walking slowly behind the rackety old Lawnboy (he really ought to go down to Home Depot and buy a new one; it was a chore he no longer had an excuse to put off, with all this time on his hands), and was just finishing the last bit when his phone started playing its xylophone boogie again. He thought it would be Betsy. It wasn’t, although this call had also originated at Flint City General.

‘Still don’t have all the DNA back,’ said Dr Edward Bogan, ‘but we’ve got results from the branch used to sodomize the boy. The blood, plus skin fragments the perp’s hand left behind when he … you know, grasped the branch and—’

‘I know,’ Ralph said. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense.’

‘No suspense about this, Detective. The samples from the branch match the Maitland cheek swabs.’

‘All right, Dr Bogan, thank you for that. You need to pass it on to Chief Geller and Lieutenant Sablo at SP. I’m on administrative leave, and probably will be for the rest of the summer.’

‘Ridiculous.’

‘Regulations. I don’t know who Geller will assign to work with Yune – Jack Hoskins is on vacation and Betsy Riggins is about to pop out her first kid at any minute – but he’ll find somebody. And when you think of it, with Maitland dead there’s no case to work. We’re just filling in the blanks.’

‘The blanks are important,’ Bogan said. ‘Maitland’s wife may decide to lodge a civil suit. This DNA evidence could get her lawyer to change her mind about that. Such a suit would be an obscenity, in my opinion. Her husband murdered that boy in the cruelest way imaginable, and if she didn’t know about his … his proclivities … she wasn’t paying attention. There are always warning signs with sexual sadists. Always. In my opinion, you should have gotten a medal instead of being put on leave.’

‘Thank you for saying that.’

‘Only speaking my mind. There are more samples pending. Many. Would you like me to keep you informed as they come in?’

‘I would.’ Chief Geller might bring Hoskins back early, but the man was a waste of space even when he was sober, which wasn’t often these days.

Ralph ended the call and sheared off the last stripe of lawn. Then he trundled the Lawnboy into the garage. He was thinking of another Poe story as he wiped down the housing, a tale about a man being bricked up in a wine cellar. He hadn’t read it, but he’d seen the movie.

For the love of God, Montresor! the man being bricked up had screamed, and the man doing the interment had agreed: For the love of God.

In this case it was Terry Maitland who was being bricked up, only the bricks were DNA and he was already dead. There was conflicting evidence, yes, and that was troubling, but they now had DNA from Flint City and none from Cap City. There were the fingerprints on the book from the newsstand, true, but fingerprints could be planted. It wasn’t as easy as the detective shows made it look, but it could be done.

What about the witnesses, Ralph? Three teachers who knew him for years.

Never mind them. Think about the DNA. Solid evidence. The most solid there is.

In the movie, Montresor had been undone by a black cat he had inadvertently entombed with his victim. Its yowling had alerted visitors to the wine cellar. The cat, Ralph supposed, was just another metaphor: the voice of the killer’s own conscience. Only sometimes a cigar was just a smoke and a cat was just a cat. There was no reason to keep remembering Terry’s dying eyes, or Terry’s dying declaration. As Samuels had said, his wife had been kneeling there beside him when he went, holding his hand.

Ralph sat on his workbench, feeling very tired for a man who’d done nothing more than mow a modest patch of backyard lawn. The images of those final minutes leading up to the shooting would not leave him. The car alarm. The unlovely sneer of the blond anchor when she saw she had been bloodied – probably just a small cut, but good for ratings. The burned man with the tattoos on his hands. The boy with the cleft lip. The sun picking out complicated constellations of mica embedded in the sidewalk. The girl’s yellow bra strap, flipping up and down. That most of all. It seemed to want to lead somewhere else, but sometimes a bra strap was just a bra strap.

‘And a man can’t be two places at the same time,’ he muttered.

‘Ralph? Are you talking to yourself?’

He started and looked up. It was Jeannie, standing in the doorway.

‘I must be, because there’s no one else here.’

‘I am,’ she said. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Not really,’ he said, and then told her about Fred Peterson. She sagged visibly.

‘My God. That finishes that family. Unless he recovers.’

‘They’re finished whether he recovers or not.’ Ralph got to his feet. ‘I’ll go down to the station a little later, take a look at that scrap of paper. Menu or whatever it is.’

‘Shower first. You smell like oil and grass.’

He made a smile and gave her a salute. ‘Yes, sir.’

She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. ‘Ralph? You’ll get through this. You will. Trust me.’