Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

Maddox forgot sometimes that Ripsbaugh was Sinclair’s brother-in-law. “Why did the father leave Dill all his property?”

“He didn’t leave either of them anything. The mill houses you’re talking about, he had them all in Dill’s name for legal reasons. As a tax dodge, and so they couldn’t be attached to any lawsuits. Dill didn’t even know he owned them until after the death.”

“So why didn’t Val ask for some of that?”

“Didn’t want anything to do with it.” Maddox could see that Ripsbaugh was proud of this. “She always says the best thing her father ever did for her was die in that car crash.”

Maddox nodded, ready to drop it, head on home.

“See, the problem with Val,” Ripsbaugh continued, thinking it through, “the problem with Val is that she’s smart. So smart, and highly intelligent people suffer more than others. When she’s right in her mind, she can do anything. But she just can’t maintain it.” Ripsbaugh nudged at the grave sod with the tip of his spade, cutting little divots. “And sometimes she puts that blame on me. As the source of her problems. Sometimes I think it’s why she married me in the first place, to give her this excuse. A stone for her chain. She asked me to marry her, did you know that? I always figured I’d end up, you know, adopting a wife from Russia or Cambodia or someplace. Just for a companion. I never knew I could get so lucky. But someone offers you a bargain like that, you don’t think twice. You take it.”

“Sure,” said Maddox.

“So why don’t we have children, right?”

“No,” Maddox said. “I wasn’t—”

“She doesn’t like it. The act of sex. Physically, she gets sick.”

Maddox wasn’t going to say another word. Until confusion overtook discomfort. “But so, how—?”

“Frond?” he said, the spade making little snitch-snitch sounds in the soil. He spoke with the forbearance of a man taking the pain of another person’s ailment onto himself. “It’s acting out. That’s her pattern. She does me wrong, then lets me find out — then hates herself all over again. She punishes me in order to torture herself.”

“A pattern,” Maddox said, thinking, There were others?

“But when she’s clear, once she’s healthy again — she thanks me, can you understand that? She’s grateful. For me standing by her. For what I put up with. Even calls me her hero.” He looked off at the nearest weeping willow. “You ever been called a hero, Don?”

Maddox said, “No.”

“As a life, it ain’t always easy. But what we have together, it’s enough for me. Oh, it’s plenty.” Ripsbaugh nodded. “You’re looking at me like—”

“No, no. No.”

“You never been married. There’s more to it than sex. Lots more. You want to know what she does for me? So dirty I get sometimes, coming home at the end of a day? She runs me a bath. She kneels by the tub, and she bathes me. You ever been bathed, Don? Anyone ever run a warm washcloth over your shoulders? Since you were a kid, ever been shampooed? Her fingers in my scalp — I’d take that touch over any other kind, any day of the week.”

Maddox nodded, trying not to tip his embarrassment. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me. Or to anyone.”

“Sure I do. Thing is, she’s my wife. You sign on, you sign on for life.”

Maddox admired that, even admired Ripsbaugh, at the same time he pitied him. His openness, though a bit unnerving, stirred something in Maddox — beyond his desire simply to change the topic. “I want to run something by you, Kane. Have you tell me if I’m crazy or not. You follow the forensics shows and that sort of thing, right?”

“A bit,” he said, defensive at first, as it was this interest that had helped get him into trouble. “This about Dill?”

“The blood evidence is the main thing. I mean, they do have hairs. But hairs can be moved around. And they have sneaker tread impressions, but shoes can get around also, it seems to me. And if you have the guy’s shoes — well then, right there you have fibers from his residence. So it comes down to the blood, essentially.”

“Okay.” Ripsbaugh was starting to get it. “But if it’s not Dill—”

“Just talking here. Thinking it through. Tell me about blood. What could someone do with it?”

“Well,” said Ripsbaugh, “it congeals fast — that much I know. It clots, making it tricky to handle. If you don’t have a live donor — you can store it cold, I guess. Maybe forty-two days, something like that.”

“Can’t you freeze it?”

“Sure. It freezes.”

“Because — and then you wouldn’t even need liquid blood. If all you wanted was for it to be discovered in a sink trap, you set it there frozen. An ice cube of blood. Then you torch the house, knowing that the heat traveling along the pipes will melt it. All you need to show up there is a trace.”

“Well, I suppose. But hold on. Who’s doing this?”

“My point is only that the blood, even skin cells, could have gotten to these crime scenes some other way than directly from Sinclair being present. Stressing ‘could.’”

“I guess,” said Ripsbaugh. “But then, where is Dill?”

“Say he’s compromised in some way. I don’t know. Someone holding him hostage or something.”

“Okay. But why?”

“I don’t know. You got me there.”

“No fingerprints?”

“No. Talcum powder, though. As from the inside of latex gloves.”

“Okay. But there would only be powder if he took off his gloves.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Talcum powder used for anything else?”

Maddox shook his head. Because he didn’t know, and because now he was starting to reconsider the whole thing. Verbalizing his speculations had made him sound half desperate. What was he clinging to? Why couldn’t it be Dill Sinclair? And why the hell did he care? “Sounds crazy, right?”

“It’s a theory, I guess.”

“Anyway,” Maddox said. Enough of this graveyard conversation. “That’s all someone else’s problem right now.”

Ripsbaugh squinted at him in the sun. “I don’t suppose you’re staying on here.”

Maddox thought of Tracy walking out on him the night before. He shook his head.

“How soon?”

“Soon,” said Maddox.

“And after you go, then what?”

The thought occurred to Maddox as he stood there. “You know what, Kane? You should join up.”

Ripsbaugh scowled. “Too old.”

“You kidding? They’d bend the rules. They can’t afford to be choosy.”

“Val wouldn’t like it. Her father having been a cop and all.”

“You have the interest in police work. And what does this force need now but an honest cop who knows the town and cares about its future? The way Pinty was back in his day. A steward of Black Falls.” Maddox stepped back, convinced, before starting away. “It’s a good fit. At least think about it.”

“Hey,” said Ripsbaugh after him. “If I guessed DEA, would I be wrong?”

Maddox smiled but did not look back. “Think about taking the job.”

He parked in his driveway, but instead of going into his house, found himself walking down the street. It had been a July of constant humidity, like living inside a cloud. Tomorrow the weather reports promised an afternoon downpour and electrical storm to jolt the atmosphere and rearrange air quality, the way an electroshock treatment alters chemistry in the brain.

This road he had grown up on, Silver Leaf Lane, rated little traffic, its houses set well apart, most of them tired 1970s-style split-levels and wood-sided ranches with stone chimneys and one-car garages. The last house before a stretch of undeveloped land emptying onto the cross street had been the Sinclairs’. It sat dark and dead on a plot of dry gray turf, a small Colonial with an unattached two-car garage. The mortgaging bank had seized the property after Jordy’s death but failed to resell it: because of the Sinclairs’ notorious name, because of plummeting home values in town after the mill closing, and because Jordy Sinclair had built it himself, the house having serious structural flaws.