Эд Горман - Blood Moon

“A few years later, his lawyers wrote me and told me about his relationship with this woman who had apparently fallen in love with him in prison. They told me she was planning to marry Craig.

“I checked her out. She’d been in and out of mental hospitals most of her life. Ravishingly beautiful, but totally unable to deal with life. She lived on a huge trust fund from an old San Francisco banking family. This wasn’t the first time she’d married inmates. She’d done it twice before Craig.

“Then came the escape, when Craig was killed.

“I brought him back to Iowa and buried him. And that was that. Or so I thought, anyway.”

“So you thought?” I said.

“So I thought.”

“Other things happened?”

He sat in his chair, a prim, composed man who looked uncomfortable sharing secrets.

“The photos,” he said.

“The dead girls?”

“Yes.”

“They started arriving again?”

“Yes. I burned each one right after it arrived. But there were always more coming.”

“Who was sending them?”

“I assumed this woman, the one you met as Nora.”

“You assumed?”

“Who else would be sending them? Who else would have known what my son was doing?”

“I guess that’s a good point.”

“And then someone broke into my house and stole somethings from my office. Nothing very valuable — just some records relating to Craig.”

“And you assumed the thief was Nora, too?”

“At first, but I hired an investigator, one recommended to me by a judge on the California supreme court.”

“And he learned what?”

“He learned that Craig hadn’t died.”

“What?”

“I know. That’s how I reacted at first, too. Total disbelief. Oh, he’d been badly injured, but then this woman decided to take advantage of the situation. She paid off all the right people — remember, she had a great deal of wealth to draw on — and his death was faked with the help of the prison doctor. The investigator secretly had Craig’s grave opened up and found that it was empty except for a few heavy sacks of feed.”

“Was Craig with Nora?”

He shook his head. “No. The investigator learned that they’d spent eight months in Mexico together where Craig had a series of plastic surgeries. He bore no resemblance to the old Craig.”

“Did the investigator get a photo of the new Craig?”

“No. He didn’t have time. Right after returning from Mexico, the investigator was murdered.”

“By Craig, you think?”

“Who else?”

“Why did Nora contact me?”

He shrugged. “According to my investigators, Craig was tired of her. He wanted to get as far away as possible from her. So he came back to Iowa.”

“And where is he now?”

“Here.”

“In town?”

He nodded. “In town.” He took the manila envelope from his lap and held it up to me. “The last investigator found three men who could possibly be Craig — men who showed up here four years ago, just about the time when Craig was running from his lady friend, men who have very hazy pasts.”

“What’s in the envelope?”

“Background on the three men.”

“On what three men?”

“Reverend Roberts, Kenny Deihl, and Richard McNally.”

“You’re sure one of them is Craig?”

“Positive. The last three letters I got from him were postmarked from here. And that’s very like Craig. To taunt me like this. Dare me to come and get him.” The bleak smile again. “Find him, Mr. Hokanson. For everybody’s sake — find him.”

An hour later, I was driving past the New Hope town square. The temperature had dropped several degrees since I’d left, and the sun had vanished completely, leaving a gray sky that was boiling with storm clouds to the west.

Even though all I could think of was the white Lincoln the two black men had described, I needed to stop by and see Eve McNally first. I wanted to know about her daughter and if she’d heard anything from her husband. I was beginning to suspect how McNally and Sam Lodge fit in with the good reverend.

After leaving the small shopping area, I swung left to pick up an asphalt drive that would take me straight to the northeast edge of town, where Eve McNally lived.

The sky was getting so dark that several oncoming cars turned on their headlights. Then the rain came, spits and fits at first, then a rumbling grumbling downpour.

I heard the siren before I saw the spinning red cherry. Then I noticed my speedometer. I was traveling 46 in a 35 mph zone.

I pulled over on the shoulder of the road, set the gear in neutral, heeled on the emergency brake.

It was a long minute before anybody got out of the squad car behind me. In the downpour, it was hard to make out any face, just a person with a campaign hat and a fold-up plastic raincoat on.

I watched the cop approach in my rearview mirror. Then the mirror was empty.

Where had the cop gone?

Knuckles rapped the window on the passenger side. A finger pointed to the door lock. I leaned over and unlocked it.

The cop got in, smelling of rain and chilly but very fresh air.

“You were speeding.”

“I’ll say one thing: getting stopped by a cop as pretty as you is a real pleasure.”

“Yeah, I look great in this campaign hat,” Jane Avery grinned. “Like Smokey the Bear’s daughter.”

“You look fine to me.”

“I saw you coming in from the highway.”

“Yeah.”

“So you were out of town?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You going to tell me about it?”

“Boy, you’re really relentless.”

“Your friend Karl in the hospital?”

“Yeah?”

“He died this morning.”

I looked through the steamy window at the rain. It danced like bouncing nail heads on the asphalt. Headlights appeared and faded, appeared and faded, in fog and rain.

“Something terrible’s happening to me,” she said after our mutual silence.

“Yeah? What?”

“I’m starting to like you.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m starting to like you, too.”

“But I can’t trust you, and that scares me.”

“Of course you can trust me.”

“Then you’re going to tell me what’s going on? Who Eleanor Saunders was, and who Karl was, and what’s going on with Eve McNally?”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with trust — not the way you mean it.” I turned toward her in the seat. Her eyes looked more hurt than angry — she really was taking this personally; as perhaps I would, too — and her otherwise-full mouth was pursed tight. “This isn’t personal, why I’m not confiding in you — it’s professional. And there’s a difference.”

Now it was her turn to stare silently out the window.

“I saw Joanna Lodge,” she said after a while.

“Did you ask her why she was out at the Brindle farm this morning?”

“She gave me a reason but not a very believable one. She said she felt like going for a walk in the country and that the Brindle place was nice because it was deserted.”

“You’re right. Not very believable.”

“She wasn’t any more cooperative than you’ve been. She knows what’s really going on, too. That’s you and Eve McNally and now Joanna Lodge. Who else knows what’s really going on?”

I sighed. “You’re making this harder than it has to be.”

“I’m a cop. A good one, I think — at least a dedicated one. I need to know what’s happening in my town. And you can tell me.”

I shook my head, said, in barely a whisper, “No, I can’t, Jane. No, I can’t.”

She stared at me silently for a moment and then said, “I think we’d better skip tonight.”