Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

So, no match on the hair, but the dots were there to connect. Sinclair’s credit card showed he had laid out eight bills for a new wig in March, this one an inch longer than the one found hanging on his bed — the length matching the hairs recovered from Frond’s.

The wig was good and the blood was better, but what Hess needed now was to establish some before-murder connection between Sinclair and Frond. Not for motive. Motive can cloud a case as much as clarify it, especially in court. Defense attorneys can have a field day with motive. Hess himself had a legally compelling motive to do away with a dozen people who had wronged him over the years. In order to feed the DA a solid conviction, he needed to link Sinclair to Frond in life, not just in death.

To that end, Hess was pulling books from Sinclair’s collection on the occult. Working the Magician and the Witch angle. It had potential, considering the missing athame. He was in the side hallway flipping through a book of voodoo recipes when a CSS criminalist entered the kitchen with Maddox in tow.

Turned out Maddox — surprise, surprise — had been inside Sinclair’s place before. They were taking him through again to ascertain what surfaces he had touched — he claimed none — or what if anything appeared missing or moved.

Bottom line: Something about Maddox rubbed Hess the wrong way. Something about him Hess did not like. Did not like or did not trust. Beyond the sense that the feeling was quite mutual. It was there in the way Maddox watched the criminalists and computer techs going about their work. Nothing in his interest said “part-time cop.” There was no outsider awe, only compulsive vigilance.

In other words, he did not strike Hess as a man blown back into this town by circumstance. More like a man with a knack for moving with the eye of a storm.

Hess let them finish — waited until they asked him about the empty docking station wired to Sinclair’s PC, the camera to which also appeared to be missing — before catching up with him outside on the chipped sidewalk near the CSS van.

Maddox eyed the modest crowd gathered across the intersection, mothers with their arms tight around their children. Hess said, “They don’t like it.”

Maddox turned, didn’t startle. “What’s to like?”

“Sex offender accused of murder. That’s a real-life monster in your neighborhood.”

Maddox nodded, knowing that Hess had a point, and waiting for him to get to it.

“I gotta hand it to you, Maddox. You don’t seem fazed.”

“Fazed?”

“Dealing with real police. On a real crime, a murder. You don’t seem too impressed with us, and you don’t seem annoyed by our presence, and those are the two small-town-cop responses we usually get. Envy or resentment.”

He shrugged. “I’m part-time. A spectator.”

Hess reminded himself that this “spectator” was the first to get inside Sinclair’s apartment after he went missing. Had turned up Sinclair’s bike before anyone even knew it was gone. A good bit of diligence from a man with no career to make, just a guy passing through town.

“See,” said Hess, “that doesn’t do it for me. This isn’t the sort of thing you stumble into, police work. A job you do awhile before moving on to the next thing. People burn out all the time, but rarely do they walk out. No small-town cop I ever met didn’t dream of the big time.”

Maddox shrugged again. “Now you met him.”

“I had this therapist one time. I was in a crisis-incident thing, a shooting; they make you do an exit interview and mandatory counseling. It’s paid time, you sit, you chat.” Hess letting Maddox know he didn’t buy into it much. “But this one thing she told me stuck. It was that guys drawn to police work are really only sublimating antisocial or violent impulses. Policing the impulsive, aggressive parts of themselves, and at the same time allowing them an outlet. In her words. Make sense to you?”

“I guess.”

“Makes sense to me. Over the years I’ve seen it prove out. Guys don’t become cops to help old ladies cross the street. They don’t come in looking to ‘do good.’ They come in looking to stop bad. They come in looking to impose order. It’s the uniform they join for, dressing themselves up in the law and wearing it around so everyone can see: Me, good guy. Me, not bad.”

Maddox pulled at his sweat-spotted POLICE jersey. “I didn’t join for the uniform.”

“No, I guess you didn’t. You said your father was on the job once upon a time. I’m assuming that’s how you got hired on, second-generation?”

“Pretty much.”

“Sinclair’s father was a cop.”

“For a couple of years. He was a builder after that.”

“Had a falling-out with the force. Now, kids of cops, that’s a whole ’nother thing. Lots of second-generation cops among them — myself included. Plenty of screwups too, though, like Sinclair. And some of both. Like these Pail brothers. Those are the ones to watch out for.”

“You think?” said Maddox.

Hess smiled at the way Maddox parried. “You know something else I figured out? With you filling up your own patrol car here, and the price of a gallon of gas being what it is these days? I figure working as a cop in Black Falls is actually costing you. Which shows extraordinary dedication. For someone just marking time. I mean, I consider myself a good cop. But even I have to get paid every two weeks, you know? Gotta get that take-home. Or are there some incentives to being a Black Falls cop that I don’t know about?”

Maddox tapped his brim. “There’s these swell caps.”

“So how was it you happened to wind up inside Sinclair’s apartment that first time?”

“I told you. I was driving past and saw movement in the window. He’s a registered SO who hadn’t been seen in a while, so I pulled over, knocked on the door. The kid answered and let me up.”

“The kid. This Frankie Sculp, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Foster kid, been staying here. Didn’t know where Sinclair was.”

“Correct.”

Hess nodded. “But you knew Sinclair from before, right?”

“You mean as kids? We lived on the same street, on opposite ends. But I didn’t know him know him. That was a long time ago.”

“You two didn’t pal around the neighborhood?”

“He was two grades older than me.”

“His sister was your age.”

Maddox nodded slowly. Getting it now. Maddox said, “You know a lot.”

“I keep my ears open,” said Hess. “So she has an affair with a guy, who her brother then kills.”

Maddox said, “You’ve interviewed her again, I assume. They weren’t close. I doubt she’s even spoken to him since he got out of prison.”

“Still, the Sinclair connection is a pretty strong link. Would you contest that?”

“It’s a link,” agreed Maddox. “But not a strong one.”

“In your professional opinion.”

Maddox shrugged. “You asked.”

“Maybe Sinclair and Frond had something else going. His books here, he’s got a lot of occult stuff. Frond with his New Age whatever, it’s a common area of interest. Maybe they connected after Frond dropped dime on Pail for beating up Sinclair at that traffic stop. Bonded, you know? Banded together to curse the police department, or what have you. Some sort of cult thing.”

“A black mass or something.”

“Or something, yeah. See, I don’t chuckle about it myself, because this stupid shit, it’s happened before. Retarded backwoods rituals where someone gets overzealous, goes too far. People can lose their bearings in these remote towns. Lose control.”

Maddox said nothing, waiting. Hess was doing most of the talking, but sometimes that worked. Sometimes that drew them out.