Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

Hess said, “Any reason you know of?”

Maddox shook his head.

Bryson went on. In another peeping shot, Sinclair had experimented with holding the camera away from his eye. In the dim reflection of the glass, his face appeared like an eerie double exposure, a ghost without eyebrows superimposed over a sleeping boy.

Hess said, “So he was dressing up in black, riding his bike around after dark, and sneaking into backyards to snap pictures of little boys sleeping in first-floor bedrooms. Until twelve forty-three A.M. on June twenty-fifth, the time and date stamp of the last picture.”

Bryson said, “One week before the night the insurance salesman, Heavey, said he heard a shot in the forest, near where this camera was recovered.”

Hess said, “And then there’s this.”

There followed five flash-lit images of a basement in an apparently abandoned house, the paneled walls kicked in and defaced: spray-painted devil’s horns, various “666” designs, and, in dripping red like a comic-book howl, the words, Black Falls is Helllll!

Hess said, “Recognize any of this?”

Bucky and Maddox took turns shaking their heads.

“Cult stuff,” suggested Bryson.

Hess watched Maddox’s face sour in disagreement.

Then came more early images, many of them unclear, either too dark or with the sleeping child obscured. Sinclair learning by trial and error.

When the next one he wanted came up, Hess said, “Stop.”

A two-story house at dusk, the image taken among trees across an otherwise empty backyard. The house had a rear deck, and the bit of the front yard visible around the left side looked like wetlands.

Bucky leaned in. He got right up over Bryson’s head, examining the screen. He straightened and looked back at Maddox.

“That’s his place,” said Bucky, pointing. “That’s Maddox’s damn house.”

Maddox was still absorbing the image. He did not deny Bucky’s claim.

Hess said, “Maddox?”

Maddox said, “Looks like it.”

Bucky said, “Scarecrow was fuckin’ taking pictures of you?”

Hess asked, “Why would he take a picture of your house?”

Maddox shook his head, as much out of disbelief as I-don’t-know.

Bucky Pail pulled back, formed a wide grin. “’Cause he’s fuckin’ gay. They’re gay together. You and Scarecrow got something going, Maddox?”

“Yeah,” said Maddox, turning to Bucky. “He likes me to handcuff him and slap him around. Says you taught him.”

Hess said, “All right, all right.”

Bucky’s eyes were dead, staring at Maddox. But Maddox’s attention had already returned to the screen. Figuring out this house mystery was more important to him than jousting with Bucky Pail.

Hess said, “Maddox, what do you have to say about this?”

“I have nothing to say. I’m looking at this just like you. I don’t know what the hell it is.”

“Sinclair’s a fan of your work? Your own backyard paparazzo?”

“I have to answer for him?” Maddox said. “What do you want me to say?”

“It disturbs you.”

“Sure it does. But not as much as those pictures of the sleeping boys.”

Hess nodded, having gotten what he wanted out of Maddox. “They looked quite dead, didn’t they.”

Maddox looked up fast like he hadn’t thought of that.

Val sat in her white yard chair at the long edge of the white resin table on the back porch. The turf beneath her slippers was a fuzzy green indoor-outdoor carpet, and two citronella candles were set in the middle of the table, near the empty umbrella hole, both jars blackened, the wicks burned down to the bottom. The back porch was screened in, but insects were still a problem, because of the smell. The septic company garage out beyond the low chain-link fence at the edge of their property drew gnats and mosquitoes and chits and no-see-ums out of the surrounding woods. Blue-bulb zappers hung from three corners of the roof, snapping and sizzling all day and night.

She had taken a glass and a half of rosé at about ten and only another small glass with lunch, so she was certain he couldn’t tell. Donny Maddox sat at the shorter end of the table, his back to the yard. Keeping his distance because of the kissing in his car. She watched the smoke feather up off her cigarette and then ribbon in some mysterious, unfelt crosscurrent. This was where she did her thinking. Later she would revisit the conversation as though he were still sitting here, veering off into unexplored dialogues, playing with alternate endings.

She already remembered the way he had looked at the plastic tray of annuals on the newspaper in the sunniest corner, when he first joined her out here. The flower petals parched and dead. And the memory of his look — so recent it was more of an echo than a memory — already colored her responses. She didn’t want him turning that same look of pity on her. The unplanted violets represented the flare of a good morning some weeks before, a few hours of get-my-life-in-order-starting-with-this-house energy, which, as always, soon burned itself out.

She turned the cigarette over in her hand to disrupt the smoke stream. “This is my weight loss program,” she told him. “My exercise regimen and my portion control.” She inhaled, savoring the hit. “Best part is, it works. Kane hates it. Hates the smell, which is ridiculous, coming from him. But I need it. Anything to cover up this.” She pointed across the side lawn to the septic garage.

Donny turned to look, just being polite. He seemed reluctant to tell her why he had come.

Val said, “Dill didn’t do what they say he’s done. You know that, right? He’s a lot of things — he’s sick — but he’s not a murderer.”

Donny nodded, still fretting. “You still have no idea where he is?”

She shook her head. “I go back and forth now between hating him and pitying him. He was always so lost and different and weird inside — but not evil. How I think of him now is like a piece of fruit left out too long. Parts of it are still okay, but the parts that are black and spoiled, you can’t eat around them.” She smoked. “They still trying to make something out of his magic? Cults and black masses and that?”

Donny said, “How’d you know?”

“The head trooper, when he had me in there, asked if I was a witch.”

Donny frowned, either at the notion or at the mention of the head trooper. “What do you think of that?”

“It was just tricks. Stupid tricks. He was a lonely little boy cutting cards and waving scarves down in our basement. Obsessed with it. And my father — God, he hated it. Taunted him mercilessly. Humiliated him. I mean nightly. Calling him a fairy. So of course, what does Dill do but practice that much longer, that much more obsessively. Started dressing in black, you know, playing up the part. Living it. Becoming this kid his father hated.” She picked at a ridge in the table with her fingernail. “Just tell me you’ll try to help him, if you find him.”

“They found a camera in the Borderlands today. His camera. You’re not supposed to know about this — no one is. But inside, taken over the past few months, were these pictures of sleeping boys.”

Val showed him that she was not shocked. “That’s what you came here wanting to know about? Are you asking for that trooper? Or for yourself?”

“Just me.”

She sat back. “I feel like everything with Dill, everything, is this attempt to get back his childhood.”

“Get it back? From where?”

“I remember one time I found him in our basement with a noose all tied, elaborately coiled like in the movies, strung up over one of the ceiling supports. He said he was working on an escape trick. Sure he was. I told him at the time, I said, ‘Don’t leave me here alone.’ That was my biggest fear. Now I know he would have been better off.”