Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

Maddox did not answer, seeing, in the center of the sweatshirt stretched out over Ripsbaugh’s chest, a small tear about the size of a bullet hole. “You shot him.”

Ripsbaugh looked down at the hole. “A clean kill.”

“In the Borderlands that night. You needed his clothes.”

“I needed him. A bogeyman. When I drove out of Hell Road, coming up on you standing over that deer, I knew right away something was up. Your shooting stance. You were no amateur. But it was too late. I had already taken that first step.”

Maddox thought back to Ripsbaugh’s headlights coming up bright in his eyes. “You had him in the back of your truck?”

“We’ve both been working undercover here, Don.”

Maddox shook his pounding head. “You pulled blood from him. You bled his corpse? ”

“It wasn’t difficult.”

“Your wife’s brother ?” Maddox tried to think it through. “You knew how CSS worked. You knew they’d pull the sink traps. So you directed them there — wiping out the sink, making it look like someone had cleaned up. You gave them everything. Sneaker prints, wig hairs, fiber transfers from his clothes. Skin cells?”

“Scraped his arms. Collected them in a paper bindle, just like they do.”

“You planted them in Bucky’s fingernails. As though he got them from fighting with Sinclair.”

“Like laying out crumbs.” The latex glaze over Ripsbaugh’s face could not mask his triumph.

“You sealed yourself away in this — this—”

“The adult video store in Rainfield sells it by the quart. Clear or colored.” He flexed his hands, the latex giving like a second skin. “No latents. No oils, no hairs. No transfers except from Sinclair’s clothes, his wig, his sneakers.”

“And the talcum powder?”

He touched his fingers together. “So the latex won’t adhere to itself. A rip or a breach just wouldn’t do.”

“That cut on your arm?”

“Self-inflicted. Good insurance, as Walt Heavey would say. In case anything showed up linking Val to Frond. If not for those letters, they never would have suspected me.”

“So you cut yourself, just in case.” Maddox saw it now. “If they did suspect you, you wanted to force their hand. Make them commit.”

“Make them eliminate me early. They got greedy with the DNA, like I knew they would. Because we’re all just hicks out here, right? Too dumb to live anywhere else. Too stupid to cover our own asses.”

His latex fingers wiggled at his sides. Maddox tried flexing his leg and arm muscles against the rope, the nylon tied tight. Where was his gun?

Don’t ask him what he’s going to do to you. Don’t give him a reason.

Keep talking.

“Val was with Bucky too?”

That soured Ripsbaugh. “Sometimes she gets stuck. She gets in a rut, because she’s so smart and the rest of the world is not.”

“But — Bucky Pail ?”

“She’s vulnerable, and people take advantage of that. But you don’t trade in your wife when she gives you trouble.”

Maddox said, “You fix it with murder instead?”

“Killing is easy when someone hurts the one you love. The one person in the world you pledged to protect. Frond and Pail, they aren’t where they are now because they wronged me. They’re there because they wronged her. They took advantage. Using her. Like her father all over again. Taking whatever they could get, thinking there would be no consequences.” His hands squeezed into smooth, seamless fists. “I am their consequences. I am a reckoning.”

Maddox strained against the ropes, trying to get loose without Ripsbaugh seeing him trying. “That include the pinecone?”

Ripsbaugh straightened, looking freakishly proud in his long wig. “Sex offenders commit sex crimes.”

Humiliating the corpse, Hess had called it. Ripsbaugh was over the edge. “This is like trying to cure Val by going around killing off her symptoms. You can’t kill away her depression.”

“She doesn’t want to do these things with other men.” He spoke with the conviction of the quietly unhinged. “She hates herself for it. So I do what I have to in order to make her clean. With these.”

His hands again.

“She’s sick, Kane. Toxic. And being around her, it’s made you sick too.”

“What about you?” Ripsbaugh said. “You’ve been meeting her.”

“Meeting?” said Maddox, at first confused. “No. No, it was—”

“She came to me. Told me everything. How you talked about going away together.”

Maddox’s shivering stopped. For the moment, he gave up testing the rope. “Now hold on.”

Ripsbaugh’s eyes were tight, knowing and bright. “Your high school sweetheart.”

“Kane. You’ve got it all wrong.”

“Together again after all these years.”

“Kane.”

He was a different man now, the wig and the latex coating giving outer expression to his psychosis. “I always liked you, Don. I did. But you should have left her alone. She can’t help herself. Why she needs me. To help her. To make things right.”

Ripsbaugh considered his palms again. He was working himself up into a killing.

“You don’t know what it means,” he went on, “to make someone a part of you — and then feel them suffer. Feel them trapped inside a hell they did not create, and do not deserve. And all you can do is watch.” His voice became disturbingly calm. “You can’t know what that’s like, Don. Can you?”

Something in his stare hooked Maddox. Something behind his smoothed face.

Something indicating that this was not merely a rhetorical question.

Maddox tuned into the emptiness of the house. He remembered arriving home. Seeing the pickup in his garage. Walking down this very hallway, calling out to her.

“Tracy?” Maddox whipped his aching head around, trying to see as much of the downstairs as he could. “Trace!”

Ripsbaugh said, “It’s good here, where you live. Isolated enough. The rain outside eats up your voice.”

“Tracy!” Maddox uttered the word with force and panic. He flexed his arms and legs against the cutting rope. “What have you done?”

Ripsbaugh walked around behind him, gripping the chair, tipping it back. The rear legs gouged the wood floor like claw marks as Ripsbaugh dragged the chair down the hallway with Maddox in it.

Maddox struggled ferociously, the ropes giving a little now — his angled weight putting stress on the chair.

Ripsbaugh stopped and turned the chair around before the closed bathroom door.

Maddox felt a new wiggle in the back splats, more give in the dowels. He was struggling to exploit these weaknesses as Ripsbaugh opened the bathroom door and wheeled out a large machine: the very same video diagnostic system Maddox had seen him use at Wanda’s.

The motor was quiet, the spindle still. The red snake cable trailed off with the thinner silver wire coiled around its length, disappearing into his open toilet.

At first, Maddox did not understand.

The three-by-three view screen on the control console showed vague patches of night-vision green against a blur of black. Maddox strained against the ropes to lean closer, to see better.

Something was there. Visible only in contrast. Barely moving.

A head, shoulders, half a chest. Light-colored hair against a darker T-shirt. In water up to her midsection.

The green on the screen. Tracy. Arms raised out of the septic tank water, her eyes wide and glowing, lips moving, calling out.

Maddox could not believe it. His mind would not accept it, any of this. Not the hazy image on the screen. Not Ripsbaugh standing in his house wearing Sinclair’s clothes.

“The smell will be long gone before anyone thinks to come around looking,” said Ripsbaugh. “The rain is already smoothing out the dig marks in your yard.”