The Outsider_A Novel Read online

  But this time it has to be me, Fred told himself when he and Ollie got home from the hospital. It has to be, because there is no one else. And that guy from Donelli will help me. They’re experts at this. Only how was he supposed to pay for a second funeral, so soon after the first? Would insurance cover it? He didn’t know. Arlene had handled all that stuff, too. They had a deal: he made the money and she paid the bills. He would have to look through her desk for the insurance paperwork. The thought of it made him tired.

  They sat in the living room. Ollie turned on the television. There was a soccer match on. They watched it awhile, although neither of them really cared for the game; they were pro football guys. At last Fred got up, trudged into the hall, and brought back Arlene’s old red address book. He turned to the Ds, and yes, there was Donelli Brothers, but her usual neat script was shaky, and why not? She wouldn’t have noted down the number of a funeral parlor before Frank died, now would she? The Petersons were supposed to have years before needing to worry about burial rites. Years.

  Looking at the address book, its red leather faded and scuffed, Fred thought of all the times he had seen it in her hands, jotting down return addresses from envelopes in the old days, from the Internet more recently. He began to cry.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I just can’t. Not so soon after Frankie.”

  On TV, the announcer screamed “GOAL!” and the players in the red shirts started to jump all over each other. Ollie turned it off and held out his hand.

  “I’ll do it.”

  Fred looked at him, eyes red and streaming.

  Ollie nodded. “It’s okay, Dad. Really. I’ll take care of it, the whole deal. Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down?”

  And although Fred knew it was probably wrong to leave his seventeen-year-old son with this burden, he did just that. He promised himself he would carry his share of the weight in time, but right now he needed to take a nap. He was really very tired.

  17

  Alec Pelley wasn’t able to break free of his own family commitments that Sunday until three thirty. It was after five when he reached the Cap City Sheraton, but the afternoon sun was still burning a hole in the sky. He parked in the hotel turnaround, slipped the parking valet a ten, and told him to keep his car close. In the newsstand, Lorette Levelle was once more rearranging her bits of jewelry. Alec’s visit there was brief. He went back outside, leaned against his Explorer, and called Howie Gold.

  “I beat Anderson to the security footage—plus the TV tape—but he beat me to the book. And bought it. I guess you’d have to call that a wash.”

  “Fuck,” Howie said. “How did he even know about it?”

  “I don’t think he did. I think it was a combination of luck and old-fashioned police work. The woman who works in the newsstand says a guy took it down on the day of Coben’s lecture, saw the pricetag—almost eighty bucks—and put it back. Didn’t seem to know the guy was Maitland, so I guess she doesn’t watch the news. She told Anderson, and Anderson bought the book. She says he walked out holding it by the sides, and with the palms of his hands.”

  “Hoping to raise prints that don’t match Terry’s,” Howie said, “thus suggesting that whoever handled that book was not Terry. Won’t work. God knows how many people may have taken that book down and handled it.”

  “The woman who runs the newsstand would beg to disagree. She says that one just sat up there, month in and month out.”

  “Makes no difference.” Howie didn’t sound worried, which left Alec free to worry for both of them. It wasn’t much, but it was something. A small flaw in a case that had been shaping up as pretty as a painting in a museum. A possible flaw, he reminded himself, and Howie could easily work around it; juries didn’t care much about what wasn’t there.

  “Just wanted you to know, boss. It’s what you pay me for.”

  “Okay, now I know. You’ll be there for the arraignment tomorrow, right?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Alec said. “Did you talk to Samuels about bail?”

  “I did. The conversation was brief. He said he would fight it with every fiber of his being. His very words.”

  “Jesus, does the guy have an off button?”

  “A good question.”

  “Will you get it anyway?”

  “I have a good chance. Nothing’s a sure thing, but I’m almost positive.”

  “If you do, tell Maitland not to take any neighborhood strolls. Lots of people keep a home protection weapon handy, and right now he’s the least popular guy in Flint City.”

  “He’ll be restricted to his home, and you can be sure the cops will be keeping the house under surveillance.” Howie sighed. “A shame about that book.”

  Alec ended the call and jumped back in his car. He wanted to be home in plenty of time to make popcorn before Game of Thrones.

  18

  Ralph Anderson and State Police Detective Yunel Sablo met with the Flint County DA that evening in the den of Bill Samuels’s home on the city’s north side, an almost-posh neighborhood of large houses that aspired to McMansion status and didn’t quite make it. Outside, Samuels’s two girls were chasing each other through the backyard sprinkler as dusk slowly dissolved into dark. Samuels’s ex-wife had stayed around to cook dinner for them. Samuels had been in fine fettle all through the meal, often patting his ex’s hand and even holding it for brief periods, to which she did not seem to object. Pretty chummy for a couple living in splitsville, Ralph thought, and good for them. But now dinner was finished, the ex was packing up the girls’ things, and Ralph had an idea that DA Samuels’s good mood would soon be finished, too.

  A Pictorial History of Flint County, Douree County, and Canning Township sat on the den’s coffee table. It was in a clear plastic Baggie, taken from one of Ralph’s kitchen drawers and slipped carefully over the book. The funeral cortege now looked blurry, because the shrink-wrap had been dusted with fingerprint powder. A single print—a thumb—stood out on the book’s front cover, near the spine. It was as clear as the date on a new penny.

  “There are four more good ones on the back,” Ralph said. “It’s how you pick up a heavy book—thumb in front, fingers on the back, slightly splayed, to support. I would have printed it right there in Cap City, but I didn’t have Terry’s prints for comparison purposes. So I grabbed what I needed at the station and did it at home.”

  Samuels elevated his brows. “You took his print-card out of evidence?”

  “Nah, photocopied it.”

  “Don’t keep us in suspense,” Sablo said.

  “I won’t,” Ralph said. “They match. The prints on this book belong to Terry Maitland.”

  The Mr. Sunshine who’d sat beside his ex at the dinner table disappeared. Mr. Gonna Rain A Bitch took his place. “You can’t be sure of that without a computer match.”

  “Bill, I was doing this before there was such a thing.” Back in the days when you were still trying to look up girls’ skirts in high school study hall. “They’re Maitland’s prints, and computer comparison will confirm it. Look at these.”

  He took a small bundle of cards from the inner pocket of his sportcoat and laid them out in two rows on the coffee table. “Here are Terry’s prints from his booking last night. And here are Terry’s prints from the shrink-wrap. Now you tell me.”

  Samuels and Sablo leaned forward, looking from the row of cards on the left to the ones on the right. Sablo sat back first. “I buy it.”

  “I won’t without a computer comparison,” Samuels said. The words came out sounding stilted because his jaw was jutting. Under other circumstances, that might have been funny.

  Ralph made no immediate reply. He was curious about Bill Samuels, and hopeful (he was hopeful by nature) that his earlier judgement about the man—that he might cut and run if faced with a really spirited counterattack—had been wrong. Samuels’s ex-wife still held him in some regard, that had been obvious, and the little girls loved him bigtime, but such evidence only spoke to one facet of a man�
�s character. A guy at home wasn’t necessarily the same guy at work, especially when the fellow in question was ambitious and faced with a sudden obstacle that might nip all his big plans in the bud. These things mattered to Ralph. They mattered a great deal, because he and Samuels were bound together by this case, win or lose.

  “It’s impossible,” Samuels said, one hand going to brush down the cowlick, but tonight the cowlick wasn’t there. Tonight it was behaving. “He can’t have been in two places at the same time.”

  “Yet so it appears,” Sablo said. “Until today, there was no forensic evidence in Cap City. Now there is.”

  Samuels brightened momentarily. “Maybe he handled the book at some prior date. Preparing his alibi. All part of the set-up.” Apparently forgetting his previous assessment that the murder of Frank Peterson had been the impulse act of a man who could no longer control his urges.

  “The idea can’t be discounted,” Ralph said, “but I’ve seen a lot of prints, and these look fairly fresh. The quality of the friction ridge detail is very good. That wouldn’t be the case if these had been made weeks or months ago.”

  Speaking almost too softly to hear, Sablo said, “ ’Mano, it’s like you took a hit on twelve and got a face-card.”

  “What?” Samuels snapped his head around.

  “Blackjack,” Ralph said. “He’s saying it would have been better if we hadn’t found it. If we’d just stood pat.”

  They considered this. When Samuels spoke, he sounded almost pleasant—a man just passing the time. “Here’s a hypothetical for you. What if you had dusted down that shrink-wrap and found nothing? Or just a few unidentifiable blurs?”

  “We wouldn’t be better off,” Sablo said, “but we wouldn’t be worse off.”

  Samuels nodded. “In that case—hypothetically speaking—Ralph would just be a guy who’d bought a fairly expensive book. He wouldn’t throw it away, he’d call it a good idea that didn’t pan out and put it on his shelf. After stripping off the shrink-wrap and throwing it away, of course.”

  Sablo looked from Samuels to Ralph, his face giving nothing away.

  “And these fingerprint cards?” Ralph asked. “What about them?”

  “What cards?” Samuels asked. “I don’t see any cards. Do you, Yune?”

  “I don’t know if I do or not,” Sablo said.

  “You’re talking about destroying evidence,” Ralph said.

  “Not at all. This is all just hypothetical.” Samuels again raised his hand to brush at the cowlick that wasn’t there. “But here’s something to think about, Ralph. You went to the station first, but did the comparison at your home. Was your wife there?”

  “Jeannie was at her book club.”

  “Uh-huh, and look. The book’s in a Glad bag instead of an official one. Not entered into evidence.”

  “Not yet,” Ralph said, but instead of thinking about the different facets of Bill Samuels’s character, he was now forced to think about the different facets of his own.

  “I’m just saying that the same hypothetical possibility might have been in the back of your own mind.”

  Had it been? Ralph could not honestly say. And if it had been, why had it been? To save an ugly black mark on his career, now that this thing was not just going sideways but in danger of tipping over?

  “No,” he said. “This will be logged into evidence, and will become part of discovery. Because that kid is dead, Bill. What happens to us is small shit compared to that.”

  “I agree,” Sablo said.

  “Of course you do,” Samuels said. He sounded tired. “Lieutenant Yune Sablo will survive either way.”

  “Speaking of survival,” Ralph said, “what about Terry Maitland’s? What if we really do have the wrong man?”

  “We don’t,” Samuels said. “The evidence says we don’t.”

  And on that note, the meeting ended. Ralph went back to the station. There he logged in A Pictorial History of Flint County, Douree County, and Canning Township and stored it in the accumulating file. He was glad to be rid of it.

  As he went around the building to retrieve his personal car, his cell rang. It was his wife’s picture on the screen, and when he answered, he was alarmed by the sound of her voice. “Honey? Have you been crying?”

  “Derek called. From camp.”

  Ralph’s heart kicked up a notch. “Is he all right?”

  “He’s fine. Physically fine. But some of his friends emailed him about Terry, and he’s upset. He said it must be wrong, that Coach T would never do a thing like that.”

  “Oh. Is that all.” He started moving again, feeling for his keys with his free hand.

  “No, it’s not all,” she said fiercely. “Where are you?”

  “At the station. Then headed home.”

  “Can you go to county first? And talk to him?”

  “To Terry? I guess I could, if he’ll agree to see me, but why?”

  “Set aside all the evidence for a minute. All of it on both sides, and answer me one question, truly and from your heart. Will you do that?”

  “Okay . . .” He could hear the faraway drone of semis on the interstate. Closer, the peaceful summer sound of crickets in the grass growing alongside the brick building where he had worked for so many years. He knew what she was going to ask.

  “Do you think Terry Maitland killed that little boy?”

  Ralph thought of how the man who’d taken Willow Rainwater’s cab to Dubrow had called her ma’am instead of by her name, which he should have known. He thought about how the man who’d parked the white van behind Shorty’s Pub had asked directions to the nearest doc-in-the-box, although Terry Maitland had lived in Flint City all his life. He thought about the teachers who would swear Terry had been with them, both at the time of the abduction and at the time of the murder. Then he thought about how convenient it was that Terry had not just asked a question at Mr. Harlan Coben’s talk, but had risen to his feet, as if to make sure he would be seen and recorded. Even the fingerprints on the book . . . how perfect was that?

  “Ralph? Are you still there?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe if I’d coached with him like Howie . . . but I only watched him coach Derek. So the answer to your question—truly, and from my heart—is I just don’t know.”

  “Then go there,” she said. “Look him in the eyes and ask him.”

  “Samuels is apt to rip me a new one if he finds out,” Ralph said.

  “I don’t care about Bill Samuels, but I care about our son. And I know you do, too. Do it for him, Ralph. For Derek.”

  19

  It turned out that Arlene Peterson did have burial insurance, so that was all right. Ollie found the pertinent papers in the bottom drawer of her little desk, in a folder between MORTGAGE AGREEMENT (said mortgage now almost paid off) and APPLIANCE WARRANTIES. He called the funeral parlor, where a man with the soft voice of a professional mourner—maybe a Donelli brother, maybe not—thanked him and told him that “your mother has arrived.” As if she’d gotten there on her own, maybe in an Uber. The professional mourner asked if Ollie needed an obituary form for the newspaper. Ollie said no. He was looking at two blank forms right there on the desk. His mother—careful, even in her grief—must have made photocopies of the one she’d gotten for Frank, in case she made a mistake. So that was all right, too. Would he want to come in tomorrow and make arrangements for the funeral and the burial? Ollie said he didn’t think so. He thought his father should be the one to do that.

  Once the question of paying for his mother’s final rites was put to rest, Ollie dropped his head onto her desk and cried for awhile. He did it quietly, so as not to wake his father. When the tears dried up, he filled out one of the obituary forms, printing everything because his handwriting sucked. Once that chore was finished, he went out to the kitchen and surveyed the mess there: pasta on the linoleum, chicken carcass lying under the clock, all those Tupperwares and covered dishes on the counters. It reminded him of something his mom used to
say after big family meals—the pigs ate here. He got a Hefty bag from under the sink and dumped everything in, starting with the chicken carcass, which looked especially gruesome. Then he washed the floor. Once everything was spick (something else his mother used to say), he discovered he was hungry. That seemed wrong but was still a fact. People were basically animals, he realized. Even with your mother and little brother dead, you had to eat and shit out what you ate. The body demanded it. He opened the fridge and discovered it was packed top to bottom and side to side with more casseroles, more Tupperware containers, more cold cuts. He selected a shepherd’s pie, its surface a snowy plain of mashed potato, and stuck it in the oven at 350. While he was leaning against the counter and waiting for it to heat, feeling like a visitor inside his own head, his dad wandered in. Fred’s hair was a mess. You’re all sticky-uppy, Arlene Peterson would have said. He needed a shave. His eyes were puffy and dazed.

  “I took one of your mother’s pills and slept too long,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it, Dad.”

  “You cleaned up the kitchen. I should have helped you.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Your mother . . . the funeral . . .” Fred didn’t seem to know how to go on, and Ollie noticed that his fly was unzipped. This filled him with an inchoate pity. Yet he didn’t feel like crying again, he seemed to be cried out, at least for the time being. Something else that was all right. Must count my blessings, Ollie thought.

  “We’re in good shape,” he told his dad. “She had burial insurance, you both do, and she’s . . . there. At the place. You know, the parlor.” He was afraid to say funeral, because that might get his father going. Which might get him going again.

  “Oh. Good.” Fred sat down and put the heel of his hand against his forehead. “I should have done that. It was my job. My responsibility. I never meant to sleep so long.”