The Outsider_A Novel Read online

  Marcy handed them over.

  “I want to see him in that suit and looking sharp when I come for him tomorrow morning,” Howie said, and walked through the metal detector, which went off.

  “We’ll be sure to tell his butler,” said the officer on the far side of the detector. “Now get rid of whatever you’ve still got in your pockets and try again.”

  The problem turned out to be his keyring. Howie handed it to the female officer and went through the detector a second time. “I’ve been here at least five thousand times, and I always forget my keys,” he told Marcy. “It must be some kind of Freudian thing.”

  She smiled nervously and made no reply. Her throat was dry, and she thought anything she said would come out in a croak.

  Another officer led them through one door, then another. Marcy heard laughing children and a buzz of adult conversation. They passed through a visiting area with brown industrial carpet on the floor. Children were playing. Prisoners in brown jumpsuits were talking with their wives, sweethearts, mothers. A large man with a purple birthmark dripping down one side of his face and a healing cut on the other was helping his young daughter rearrange the furniture in a dollhouse.

  This is all a dream, Marcy thought. An incredibly vivid one. I’ll wake up with Terry beside me and tell him how I had a nightmare that he’d been arrested for murder. We’ll laugh about it.

  One of the inmates pointed her out, with no attempt made to hide the gesture. The woman beside him stared, round-eyed, then whispered to another woman. The officer who was guiding them seemed to be having some trouble with the key-card that opened the door on the far side of the visiting area, and Marcy couldn’t quite dismiss the idea that he was lollygagging on purpose. Before the lock clunked and he led them through, it seemed that everyone was staring at them. Even the kids.

  On the far side of the door was a hallway lined with small rooms divided by what looked like cloudy glass. Terry was sitting in one of these. At the sight of him, floating inside a brown jumpsuit that was far too big, Marcy began to cry. She stepped into her side of the booth and looked at her husband through what was not glass at all but a thick sheet of Perspex. She put a hand up, fingers splayed, and he put his up against it. There was a circle of small holes, like those in an old-fashioned telephone receiver, to talk through. “Stop crying, honey. If you don’t, I’ll start. And sit down.”

  She sat, Howie crowding onto the bench beside her.

  “How are the girls?”

  “Fine. Worried about you, but better today. We’ve got some very good news. Honey, did you know Mr. Coben’s speech was taped by the public access channel?”

  For a moment Terry just gaped. Then he began to laugh. “You know what, I think the woman who introduced him said something about that, but she was so long-winded I mostly tuned out. Holy shit.”

  “Yes, it’s an authentic holy shit,” Howie said, smiling.

  Terry leaned forward until his forehead was almost touching the barrier. His eyes were bright, intent. “Marcy . . . Howie . . . I asked Coben something during the Q-and-A. I know it’s a longshot, but maybe it got picked up on the audio. If it was, maybe they can run voice-recognition or something and do a match!”

  Marcy and Howie looked at each other and began to laugh. It was an uncommon sound in Maximum Security Visiting, and the guard at the end of the short corridor looked up, frowning.

  “What? What did I say?”

  “Terry, you’re on video asking your question,” Marcy said. “Do you understand? You are on the video.”

  For a moment Terry didn’t seem to comprehend what she was saying. Then he raised his fists and shook them beside his temples, a gesture of triumph she had seen often when one of his teams scored or pulled off a cool defensive play. Without thinking about it, she raised her own hands and copied him.

  “Are you sure? Like a hundred per cent? It seems too good to be true.”

  “It’s true,” Howie said, grinning. “As a matter of fact you’re on the tape half a dozen times, when they cut away from Coben to show the audience laughing or applauding. The question you asked is just icing on the cake, the whipped cream on top of the banana split.”

  “So it’s case closed, right? I’ll walk free tomorrow?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Howie’s grin faded to a rather grim smile. “Tomorrow is just the arraignment, and they’ve got a heap of forensic evidence that they’re very proud of—”

  “How can they?” Marcy burst out. “How can they, when Terry was obviously there? The tape proves it!”

  Howie put a hand up in a Stop gesture. “We’ll worry about the conflict later, although I can tell you right now that what we’ve got trumps what they’ve got. Easily trumps it. But certain machinery has been set in motion.”

  “The machine,” Marcy said. “Yes. We know about the machine, don’t we, Ter?”

  He nodded. “It’s like I fell into a Kafka novel. Or 1984. And pulled you and the girls in along with me.”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Howie said. “You didn’t pull anyone, they did. This is going to work out, guys. Uncle Howie promises it, and Uncle Howie always keeps his promises. You’re going to be arraigned tomorrow at nine o’clock, Terry, in front of Judge Horton. You will be looking reet and complete in the nice suit your wife brought, which is now hanging in the prisoner storage closet. I intend to meet with Bill Samuels to discuss bail—tonight, if he’ll take the meeting, tomorrow morning if he won’t. He won’t like it, and he’s going to insist on home confinement, but we’ll get it, because by then someone in the press will have discovered that Channel 81 tape, and the problems with the prosecution’s case will become public knowledge. I imagine you’ll have to put your home up to secure the bond, but that shouldn’t be much of a risk, unless you plan to cut off the ankle monitor and run for the hills.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Terry said grimly. Color had risen in his cheeks. “What did some Civil War general say? ‘I intend to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.’ ”

  “Okay, so what’s the next battle?” Marcy asked.

  “I will tell the DA that it would be a bad idea to present an indictment to the grand jury. And that argument will prevail. You will then walk free.”

  But will he? Marcy wondered. Will we? When they claim to have his fingerprints, and people who saw him abducting that little boy, and then coming out of Figgis Park covered in blood? Will we ever be free as long as the real killer stays uncaught?

  “Marcy.” Terry was smiling at her. “Take it easy. You know what I tell the boys—one base at a time.”

  “I want to ask you something,” Howie said. “Just a shot in the dark.”

  “Ask away.”

  “They claim to have all sorts of forensic evidence, although the DNA’s still pending—”

  “That can’t come back a match,” Terry said. “It’s not possible.”

  “I would have said that about the fingerprints,” Howie said.

  “Maybe someone set him up,” Marcy blurted. “I know how paranoid that sounds, but . . .” She shrugged.

  “But why?” Howie asked. “That’s the question. Can either of you think of someone who would go to such extraordinary lengths to do that?”

  The Maitlands considered, one on each side of the scuffed Perspex, then shook their heads.

  “Me, either,” Howie said. “Life rarely if ever imitates the novels of Robert Ludlum. Still, they’ve got evidence strong enough for them to have rushed into an arrest I’m sure they now regret. My fear is that, even if I can get you out of the machine, the shadow of the machine may remain.”

  “I was thinking about that most of last night,” Terry said.

  “I’m still thinking about it,” Marcy said.

  Howie leaned forward, hands clasped. “It would help if we had some physical evidence to match theirs. The Channel 81 tape is fine, and when you add in your colleagues, it’s probably all we need, but I’m greedy. I want more.”


  “Physical evidence from one of the busiest hotels in Cap City, and four days later?” Marcy asked, unaware that she was echoing Bill Samuels not long before. “That seems unlikely.”

  Terry was looking off into space, brows drawn together. “Not entirely unlikely.”

  “Terry?” Howie asked. “What are you thinking about?”

  He looked around at them, smiling. “There might be something. There just might be.”

  15

  The Firepit was indeed open for brunch, so Ralph went there first. Two of the staff who had been working on the night of the murder were currently on duty: the hostess and a crewcut waiter who looked about old enough to buy a beer. The hostess was no help (“We were mobbed that night, Detective”), and while the waiter vaguely remembered serving a large group of teachers, he was equivocal when Ralph showed him Terry’s picture from the previous year’s FCHS yearbook. He said that, yes, he “sorta” remembered a guy who looked like that, but he couldn’t swear it was the guy in the picture. He said he wasn’t even sure the guy had been with that bunch of teachers. “Hey, man, I might have just served him a Hot Wing Platter at the bar.”

  So that was that.

  Ralph’s luck at the Sheraton was at first no better. He was able to confirm that Maitland and William Quade had stayed in room 644 on Tuesday night, and the hotel manager was able to show him the bill, but it was Quade’s signature. He had used his MasterCard. The manager also told him that room 644 had been occupied every night since Maitland and Quade checked out, and had been cleaned every morning.

  “And we offer turn-down service,” said the manager, adding insult to injury. “That means on most days the room was cleaned twice.”

  Yes, Detective Anderson was welcome to review the security footage, and Ralph did it without any complaints about how Alec Pelley had already been allowed to do so. (Ralph was not a Cap City police officer, which meant diplomacy was the better part of valor.) The footage was in full color, and sharp—no elderly Zoney’s Go-Mart cameras for the Cap City Sheraton. He saw a man who looked like Terry in the lobby, in the gift shop, doing a quick Wednesday morning workout in the hotel’s fitness room, and outside the hotel ballroom, waiting in the autograph line. The stuff from the lobby and gift shop was iffy, but there could be little doubt—at least in his mind—that the guy signing in to use the exercise equipment and the guy waiting in line for an autograph was his son’s old coach. The one who’d taught Derek to bunt, thus changing his nickname from Swiffer to Push It.

  In his mind, Ralph could hear his wife telling him that forensic evidence from Cap City was the missing piece, the Golden Ticket. If Terry was here, she’d said—meaning in Flint City, committing murder—then the double must have been there. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

  “None of it makes sense,” he muttered, looking at the monitor. On it was a frozen image of a man who certainly looked like Terry Maitland, caught laughing about something as he stood in the autograph line with his department head, Roundhill.

  “Pardon?” asked the hotel dick who had shown him the footage.

  “Nothing.”

  “Can I show you anything else?”

  “No, but thanks.” This had been a fool’s errand. The Channel 81 tape of the lecture had pretty much rendered the security footage moot, anyway, because it was Terry during the Q-and-A. No one could doubt it.

  Except in one corner of his mind, Ralph still did. The way Terry had stood to ask his question, as if he’d known that a camera would be on him . . . it was just so goddam perfect. Was it possible that the whole thing was a set-up? An amazing but ultimately explicable act of legerdemain? Ralph didn’t see how it could be, but he didn’t know how David Copperfield had walked through the Great Wall of China, and Ralph had seen that on TV. If it was so, Terry Maitland wasn’t just a murderer, he was a murderer who was laughing at them.

  “Detective, just a heads-up,” said the hotel dick. “I’ve got a note from Harley Bright—he’s the boss—saying all the stuff you just looked at is supposed to be saved for a lawyer named Howard Gold.”

  “I don’t care what you do with it,” Ralph said. “Mail it off to Sarah Palin in Whistledick, Alaska, for all I care. I’m going home.” Yes. Good idea. Go home, sit in his backyard with Jeannie, split a six with her—four for him, two for her. And try not to go crazy thinking about this goddam paradox.

  The dick walked him to the door of the security office. “News says you got the guy who killed that kid.”

  “News says a lot of things. Thank you for your time, sir.”

  “Always a pleasure to help the police.”

  If only you had, Ralph thought.

  He halted on the far side of the lobby, hand out to push the revolving door, struck by a thought. There was one other place he should check, as long as he was here. According to Terry, Debbie Grant had booked for the women’s room as soon as Coben’s lecture ended, and she had been gone a long time. I went down to the newsstand with Ev and Billy, Terry had said. She met us there.

  The newsstand, it turned out, was a kind of auxiliary gift shop. An overly made-up woman with graying hair was behind the counter, rearranging bits of inexpensive jewelry. Ralph showed her his ID and asked her if she had been working the previous Tuesday afternoon.

  “Honey,” she said, “I work here every day, unless I’m sick. I don’t get anything extra from the books and magazines, but when it comes to this jewelry and the souvenir coffee cups, I’m on commission.”

  “Would you remember this man? He was here last Tuesday with a bunch of English teachers, for a lecture.” He showed her Terry’s picture.

  “Sure, I remember him. He asked about the Flint County book. First one to do that in Jesus knows how long. I didn’t stock it, the darn thing was here when I started running this place back in 2010. I should take it down, I guess, but replace it with what? Anything way above or way below eye-level doesn’t move, you find that out quick running a place like this. At least the stuff down low is cheap. That top shelf is your expensive stuff with photographs and glossy pages.”

  “What book are we talking about, Ms.—” He looked at her name-tag. “Ms. Levelle?”

  “That one,” she said, pointing. “A Pictorial History of Flint County, Douree County, and Canning Township. Jawbreaker title, huh?”

  He turned and saw two racks of reading material next to a shelf of souvenir cups and plates. One rack held magazines; the other held a mixture of paperback and current hardcover fiction. On the top shelf of the latter were half a dozen larger volumes, what Jeannie would have called coffee table books. They were shrink-wrapped so that browsers couldn’t smudge the pages or dog-ear the corners. Ralph walked over and looked up at them. Terry, who had a good three inches on him, wouldn’t have had to look up, or stand on tiptoe to take one of them down.

  He started to reach for the book she’d mentioned, then changed his mind. He turned back to Ms. Levelle. “Tell me what you remember.”

  “What, about that guy? Nothing much to tell. The gift shop got way busy after the lecture broke, I remember that, but I only got a trickle of custom. You know why, don’t you?”

  Ralph shook his head, trying to be patient. There was something here, all right, and he thought—hoped—he knew what it was.

  “They didn’t want to lose their place in line, of course, and they all had the new book by Mr. Coben to read while they waited. But these three gentlemen did come in, and one of them—the fat one—bought that new Lisa Gardner hardback. The other two just browsed. Then a lady poked her head in and said she was all set, so they left. To get their autographs, I suppose.”

  “But one of them—the tall one—expressed an interest in the Flint County book.”

  “Yes, but I think it was the Canning Township part of the title that caught his eye. Did he say his family lived there for a long time?”

  “I don’t know,” Ralph said. “You tell me.”

  “Pretty sure he did. He took it down, but when he saw the price
tag—seventy-nine ninety-nine—he put it back on the shelf.”

  And whoomp, there it was. “Has anyone looked at that book since? Taken it down and handled it?”

  “That one? You’re kidding.”

  Ralph went to the rack, stood on his toes, and took down the shrink-wrapped book. He held it by the sides, using his palms. On the front was a sepia-toned photograph of a long-ago funeral procession. Six cowboys, all wearing battered hats and holstered pistols, were carrying a plank coffin into a dusty cemetery. A preacher (also wearing a holstered gun) was waiting for them at the head of an open grave with a Bible in his hands.

  Ms. Levelle brightened considerably. “You actually want to buy that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, hand it over so I can scan it.”

  “I don’t think so.” He held the book up with the bar code stickered to the shrink-wrap facing her, and she beeped it.

  “That’s eighty-four fourteen with the tax, but we’ll call it eighty-four even.”

  Ralph set the book carefully on end to hand over his credit card. He tucked his receipt into his breast pocket, then once again picked the book up using just his palms, holding it out like a chalice.

  “He handled it,” he said, less to make sure of her than to confirm his own absurd luck. “You’re sure the man in the picture I showed you handled this book.”

  “Took it down and said that cover picture was taken in Canning Township. Then he looked at the price and put it back. Just like I told you. Is it evidence, or something?”

  “I don’t know,” Ralph said, looking down at the antique mourners gracing the cover. “But I’m going to find out.”

  16

  Frank Peterson’s body had been released to the Donelli Brothers Funeral Home on Thursday afternoon. Arlene Peterson had arranged for this and everything else, including the obituary, the flowers, the Friday morning memorial service, the funeral itself, the graveside service, and the Saturday evening gathering of friends and family. It had to be her. Fred was useless at making any kind of social arrangements at the best of times.