Стивен Кинг - The Outsider

Riggins said, “We are investigating the most heinous murder to occur in this state during my twenty years as a policewoman, and we will take what we need to take. We have done you the courtesy of waiting until you got home—”

“To hell with your courtesy. If I’d turned up late, you would have what? Broken down the door?”

Riggins looked vastly uncomfortable—not because of the question, Marcy thought, but because of the passenger she was lugging around on this hot July night. She should have been sitting at home, with the air conditioning on and her feet up. Marcy didn’t care. Her head was pounding, her bladder was throbbing, and her eyes were welling with tears.

“That would have been a last resort,” said the trooper with the shit on his sleeve, “but within our legal right, as defined by the warrant I have just shown you.”

“Let us in, Mrs. Maitland,” Riggins said. “The sooner we get started, the sooner we’ll be out of your hair.”

“Yo, Loot,” one of the other troopers said. “Here come the vultures.”

Marcy turned. From around the corner came a TV truck, with its satellite dish still folded against the roof. Behind it was an SUV with KYO decaled on the hood in big white letters. Behind that, almost kissing the KYO vehicle’s bumper, came another TV truck from another station.

“Come inside with us,” Riggins said. Almost coaxed. “You don’t want to be on the sidewalk when they get here.”

Marcy gave in, thinking this might be the first surrender of many. Her privacy. Her dignity. Her kids’ sense of security. And her husband? Would she be forced to surrender Terry? Surely not. What they were accusing him of was insane. They might as well have accused him of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.

“All right. But I’m not going to talk to you, so don’t even try. And I don’t have to give you my phone. My lawyer said so.”

“That’s fine.” Riggins took her by the arm, when—given the size of her—Marcy should have been taking hers, to make sure she didn’t trip and fall on her enormous belly.

The Chevy Tahoe from KYO—“Ki-Yo,” as they styled themselves—stopped in the middle of the street, and one of their correspondents, the pretty blond one, got out so fast that her skirt slid most of the way to her waist. The troopers did not miss this.

“Mrs. Maitland! Mrs. Maitland, just a couple of questions!”

Marcy couldn’t remember taking her purse when she exited the car, but it was over her shoulder and she got the house key out of the side pocket with no trouble. The trouble came when she tried to get it into the lock. Her hand was trembling too badly. Riggins didn’t take the key, but closed her hand over Marcy’s to steady it, and it finally slid home.

From behind her: “Is it true that your husband has been arrested for the murder of Frank Peterson, Mrs. Maitland?”

“Keep back,” one of the troopers said. “Not one step off the sidewalk.”

“Mrs. Maitland!”

Then they were inside. That was good, even with the pregnant detective beside her, but the house looked different, and Marcy knew it would never look quite the same. She thought of the woman who had left here with her daughters, all of them laughing and excited, and it was like thinking of a woman you had loved, but who had died.

Her legs gave out and she plopped onto the bench in the hall where the girls sat to put on their boots in winter. Where Terry sometimes sat (as he had tonight) to go over his lineup one final time before leaving for the field. Betsy Riggins sat down beside her with a grunt of relief, her meaty right hip thwacking against Marcy’s less padded left one. The cop with the shit on his sleeve, Sablo, and two others passed them without a look, drawing on thick blue plastic gloves. They were already wearing booties of a matching blue. Marcy assumed the fourth one was doing crowd control. Crowd control in front of their house on sleepy Barnum Court.

“I have to pee,” she said to Riggins.

“As do I,” Riggins said. “Lieutenant Sablo! A word?”

The one with the shit on his sleeve returned to the bench. The other two continued on into the kitchen, where the most evil thing they’d find was half a devil’s food cake in the fridge.

To Marcy, Riggins asked, “Do you folks have a downstairs bathroom?”

“Yes, through the pantry. Terry added it himself last year.”

“Uh-huh. Lieutenant, the ladies need to pee, so that’s where you start, and make it as fast as you can.” And, to Marcy: “Does your husband have an office?”

“Not as such. He uses the far end of the dining room.”

“Thank you. That’s your next stop, Lieutenant.” She turned back to Marcy. “Mind one little question while we wait?”

“Yes.”

Riggins paid this no mind. “Have you noticed anything odd about your husband’s behavior over the last few weeks?”

Marcy gave a humorless laugh. “You mean was he building up to committing murder? Walking around, rubbing his hands together, maybe drooling and muttering to himself? Has your pregnancy affected your mind, Detective?”

“I take it that’s a no.”

“It is. Now please stop nagging me!”

Riggins sat back and folded her hands on her belly. Leaving Marcy with her throbbing bladder and a memory of something Gavin Frick had said only last week, after practice: Where’s Terry’s mind lately? Half the time he seems somewhere else. It’s like he’s fighting the flu, or something.

“Mrs. Maitland?”

“What?”

“You look like you had a thought there.”

“I did, actually. I was thinking that sitting next to you on this bench is very uncomfortable. It’s like sitting next to an oven that knows how to breathe.”

Fresh color rose in Betsy Riggins’s already flushed cheeks. On one hand, Marcy was horrified at what she had just said—the cruelty of it. On the other, she was delighted that she had gotten in a thrust that seemed to have gone home.

In any case, Riggins asked no more questions.

What seemed like an endless time later, Sablo came back, holding a clear plastic bag that contained all the pills from the downstairs medicine cabinet (OTC stuff, their few prescriptions were in the two bathrooms upstairs), and Terry’s tube of hemorrhoid cream. “All clear,” he said.

“You first,” Riggins said.

Under other circumstances, Marcy surely would have deferred to the pregnant lady and held her water a bit longer, but not under these. She went in, closed the door, and saw the cover of the toilet tank was on crooked. They had been probing in there for God knew what—drugs, seemed most likely. She urinated with her head lowered and her face in her hands, so she didn’t have to look at the rest of the disarray. Was she going to bring Sarah and Grace back here tonight? Was she going to escort them through the glare of the TV lights, which would undoubtedly be set up by then? And if not here, where? A hotel? Wouldn’t they ( the vultures , the trooper had called them) still find them? Of course they would.

When she finished emptying out, Betsy Riggins went. Marcy slipped into the dining room, having no wish to share the hall bench again with Officer Shamu. The cops were going through Terry’s desk— raping his desk, really, all the drawers out, most of the contents piled on the floor. His computer had already been dismantled, the various components plastered with yellow stickers, as if in preparation for a tag sale.

Marcy thought, An hour ago the most important thing in my life was a Golden Dragons win and a trip to the finals.

Betsy Riggins returned. “Oh, that’s so much better,” she said, sitting down at the dining room table. “And will be, for a whole fifteen minutes.”