The Outsider_A Novel Read online

  Her back was bad and her eyes were failing, but she had muted the sound on the infomercial and there was nothing wrong with her ears. She heard a gunshot next door clearly, and leaped to her feet with no thought for the bolt of pain that pistoned down the entire left side of her body.

  Dear God, Fred Peterson has just shot himself.

  She grabbed her cane and hobbled, bent over and crone-like, to her back door. On the porch, and by the light of that heartless silver moon, she saw Peterson crumpled on his lawn. Not a gunshot after all. There was a rope around his neck, and it snaked a short distance to the broken branch around which it had been tied.

  Dropping her cane—it would only slow her down—Mrs. Gibson sidesaddled down her back porch steps and negotiated the ninety feet between the two backyards at a lurching jog, unaware of her own cries of pain as her sciatic nerve went nuclear, ripping her from her skinny buttocks to the ball of her left foot.

  She knelt beside Mr. Peterson, observing his swollen and empurpled face, the protruding tongue, and the rope half-buried in the ample flesh of his neck. She wriggled her fingers under the rope and pulled with all her strength, unleashing another blast of agony. The cry this occasioned she was aware of: a high, long, ululating scream. Lights went on across the street, but Mrs. Gibson didn’t see them. The rope was finally loosening, thank God and Jesus and Mary and all the saints. She waited for Mr. Peterson to gasp in air.

  He did not.

  During the first phase of her working life, Mrs. Gibson had been a teller at Flint City First National. When she retired from that position at the mandatory age of sixty-two, she had taken the classes necessary to become a qualified Home Helper, a job she had done to supplement her retirement checks until the age of seventy-four. One of those classes had necessarily dealt with resuscitation. She now knelt beside Mr. Peterson’s considerable bulk, tilted his head up, pinched his nostrils shut, yanked his mouth open, and pressed her lips to his.

  She was on her tenth breath, and feeling decidedly woozy, when Mr. Jagger from across the street joined her and tapped her on one bony shoulder. “Is he dead?”

  “Not if I can help it,” said Mrs. Gibson. She clutched the pocket of her housecoat and felt the rectangle of her cell phone. She took it out and tossed it blindly behind her. “Call 911. And if I pass out, you’ll have to take over.”

  But she didn’t pass out. On her fifteenth breath—and just as she really was about to—Fred Peterson took a big, slobbery breath on his own. Then another. Mrs. Gibson waited for his eyes to open, and when they did not, she rolled up one lid. Beneath was nothing but the sclera, not white but red with burst blood vessels.

  Fred Peterson took a third breath, then stopped again. Mrs. Gibson began the best chest compressions she could manage, not sure they would help but feeling they could not hurt. She was aware that the pain in her back and down her leg had lessened. Was it possible that sciatica could be shocked out of one’s body? Of course not. The idea was ridiculous. It was adrenalin, and once the supply was exhausted, she would feel worse than ever.

  A siren floated over the early morning darkness, approaching.

  Mrs. Gibson returned to forcing her breath down Fred Peterson’s throat (her most intimate contact with a man since her husband had died in 2004), stopping each time she felt on the verge of toppling into a gray faint. Mr. Jagger did not offer to take over, and she didn’t ask him to. Until the ambulance came, this was between her and Peterson.

  Sometimes when she stopped, Mr. Peterson would take one of those great slobbering breaths. Sometimes he would not. She was barely cognizant of the pulsing red ambulance lights when they began to zap the two adjacent yards, strobing across the jagged stub of branch on the hackberry tree where Mr. Peterson had tried to hang himself. One of the EMTs eased her to her feet, and she was able to stand on them almost without pain. It was amazing. No matter how temporary the miracle was, she’d accept it with thanks.

  “We’ll take over now, missus,” the EMT said. “You did a hell of a job.”

  “You surely did,” Mr. Jagger said. “You saved him, June! You saved that poor bugger’s life!”

  Wiping warm spittle from her chin—a mixture of hers and Peterson’s—Mrs. Gibson said, “Maybe so. And maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t.”

  7

  At eight o’clock on Thursday morning, Ralph was cutting the grass in his backyard. With a day devoid of tasks stretching ahead of him, mowing was all he could think of to do with his time . . . although not with his mind, which ran on its own endless gerbil wheel: the mutilated body of Frank Peterson, the witnesses, the taped footage, the DNA, the crowd at the courthouse. Mostly that. It was the girl’s dangling bra strap he kept fixing on for some reason—a bright yellow ribbon that jiggled up and down as she sat on her boyfriend’s shoulders and pumped her fists.

  He barely heard the xylophone rattle of his cell phone. He turned off the mower and took the call, standing there with his sneakers and bare ankles dusted with grass. “Anderson.”

  “Troy Ramage here, boss.”

  One of the two officers who had actually arrested Terry. That seemed a long time ago. In another life, as they said.

  “What’s up, Troy?”

  “I’m at the hospital with Betsy Riggins.”

  Ralph smiled, an expression so lately unused that it felt foreign on his face. “She’s having the baby.”

  “No, not yet. The chief asked her to come down because you’re on leave and Jack Hoskins is still fishing on Lake Ocoma. Sent me along to keep her company.”

  “What’s the deal?”

  “EMTs brought in Fred Peterson a few hours ago. He tried to hang himself in his backyard, but the branch he tied his rope to broke. The lady next door, a Mrs. Gibson, gave him mouth-to-mouth and pulled him through. She came in to see how he was doing, and the chief wants a statement from her, which I guess is protocol, but this seems like a done deal to me. God knows the poor guy had plenty of reasons to pull the pin.”

  “What’s his condition?”

  “The docs say he’s got minimal brain function. Chances of him ever coming back are like one in a hundred. Betsy said you’d want to know.”

  For a moment Ralph thought the bowl of cereal he’d eaten for breakfast was going to come back up, and he right-faced away from his Lawnboy to keep from spewing all over it.

  “Boss? You there?”

  Ralph swallowed back a sour mash of milk and Rice Chex. “I’m here. Where’s Betsy now?”

  “In Peterson’s room with the Gibson woman. Detective Riggins sent me to call because ICU’s a no-cell zone. The docs offered them a room where they could talk, but Gibson said she wanted to answer Detective Riggins’s questions with Peterson. Almost like she thinks he could hear her. Nice old lady, but her back’s killing her, you can see it by the way she walks. So why’s she even here? This ain’t The Good Doctor, and there ain’t gonna be any miracle recovery.”

  Ralph could guess the reason. This Mrs. Gibson would have exchanged recipes with Arlene Peterson, and watched Ollie and Frankie grow up. Maybe Fred Peterson had shoveled out her driveway after one of Flint City’s infrequent snowstorms. She was there out of sorrow and respect, perhaps even out of guilt that she hadn’t just let Peterson go instead of condemning him to an indefinite stay in a hospital room where machines would do his breathing for him.

  The full horror of the last eight days broke over Ralph in a wave. The killer hadn’t been contented with taking just the boy; he’d taken the whole Peterson family. A clean sweep, as they said.

  Not “the killer,” no need to be so anonymous. Terry. The killer was Terry. There’s no one else on the radar.

  “Thought you’d want to know,” Ramage repeated. “And hey, look on the bright side. Maybe Betsy’ll go into labor while she’s here. Save her husband from making a special trip.”

  “Tell her to go home,” Ralph said.

  “Roger that. And . . . Ralph? Sorry about the way things went down at the courthouse
. It was a shit-show.”

  “That pretty well sums it up,” Ralph said. “Thanks for calling.”

  He went back to the lawn, walking slowly behind the rackety old Lawnboy (he really ought to go down to Home Depot and buy a new one; it was a chore he no longer had an excuse to put off, with all this time on his hands), and was just finishing the last bit when his phone started playing its xylophone boogie again. He thought it would be Betsy. It wasn’t, although this call had also originated at Flint City General.

  “Still don’t have all the DNA back,” said Dr. Edward Bogan, “but we’ve got results from the branch used to sodomize the boy. The blood, plus skin fragments the perp’s hand left behind when he . . . you know, grasped the branch and—”

  “I know,” Ralph said. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “No suspense about this, Detective. The samples from the branch match the Maitland cheek swabs.”

  “All right, Dr. Bogan, thank you for that. You need to pass it on to Chief Geller and Lieutenant Sablo at SP. I’m on administrative leave, and probably will be for the rest of the summer.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “Regulations. I don’t know who Geller will assign to work with Yune—Jack Hoskins is on vacation and Betsy Riggins is about to pop out her first kid at any minute—but he’ll find somebody. And when you think of it, with Maitland dead there’s no case to work. We’re just filling in the blanks.”

  “The blanks are important,” Bogan said. “Maitland’s wife may decide to lodge a civil suit. This DNA evidence could get her lawyer to change her mind about that. Such a suit would be an obscenity, in my opinion. Her husband murdered that boy in the cruelest way imaginable, and if she didn’t know about his . . . his proclivities . . . she wasn’t paying attention. There are always warning signs with sexual sadists. Always. In my opinion, you should have gotten a medal instead of being put on leave.”

  “Thank you for saying that.”

  “Only speaking my mind. There are more samples pending. Many. Would you like me to keep you informed as they come in?”

  “I would.” Chief Geller might bring Hoskins back early, but the man was a waste of space even when he was sober, which wasn’t often these days.

  Ralph ended the call and sheared off the last stripe of lawn. Then he trundled the Lawnboy into the garage. He was thinking of another Poe story as he wiped down the housing, a tale about a man being bricked up in a wine cellar. He hadn’t read it, but he’d seen the movie.

  For the love of God, Montresor! the man being bricked up had screamed, and the man doing the interment had agreed: For the love of God.

  In this case it was Terry Maitland who was being bricked up, only the bricks were DNA and he was already dead. There was conflicting evidence, yes, and that was troubling, but they now had DNA from Flint City and none from Cap City. There were the fingerprints on the book from the newsstand, true, but fingerprints could be planted. It wasn’t as easy as the detective shows made it look, but it could be done.

  What about the witnesses, Ralph? Three teachers who knew him for years.

  Never mind them. Think about the DNA. Solid evidence. The most solid there is.

  In the movie, Montresor had been undone by a black cat he had inadvertently entombed with his victim. Its yowling had alerted visitors to the wine cellar. The cat, Ralph supposed, was just another metaphor: the voice of the killer’s own conscience. Only sometimes a cigar was just a smoke and a cat was just a cat. There was no reason to keep remembering Terry’s dying eyes, or Terry’s dying declaration. As Samuels had said, his wife had been kneeling there beside him when he went, holding his hand.

  Ralph sat on his workbench, feeling very tired for a man who’d done nothing more than mow a modest patch of backyard lawn. The images of those final minutes leading up to the shooting would not leave him. The car alarm. The unlovely sneer of the blond anchor when she saw she had been bloodied—probably just a small cut, but good for ratings. The burned man with the tattoos on his hands. The boy with the cleft lip. The sun picking out complicated constellations of mica embedded in the sidewalk. The girl’s yellow bra strap, flipping up and down. That most of all. It seemed to want to lead somewhere else, but sometimes a bra strap was just a bra strap.

  “And a man can’t be two places at the same time,” he muttered.

  “Ralph? Are you talking to yourself?”

  He started and looked up. It was Jeannie, standing in the doorway.

  “I must be, because there’s no one else here.”

  “I am,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  “Not really,” he said, and then told her about Fred Peterson. She sagged visibly.

  “My God. That finishes that family. Unless he recovers.”

  “They’re finished whether he recovers or not.” Ralph got to his feet. “I’ll go down to the station a little later, take a look at that scrap of paper. Menu or whatever it is.”

  “Shower first. You smell like oil and grass.”

  He made a smile and gave her a salute. “Yes, sir.”

  She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “Ralph? You’ll get through this. You will. Trust me.”

  8

  There were plenty of things Ralph didn’t know about administrative leave, never having been on it before. One was whether or not he was even allowed in the cop shop. With that in mind he waited until mid-afternoon to go there, because the daily pulse of the station was slowest then. When he arrived, there was no one in the big main room except for Stephanie Gould, still in civvies, filling out reports on one of the old PCs the city council kept promising to replace, and Sandy McGill at the dispatch desk, reading People. Chief Geller’s office was empty.

  “Hey, Detective,” Stephanie said, looking up. “What are you doing here? I heard you were on paid vacation.”

  “Trying to stay occupied.”

  “I could help you with that,” she said, and patted the stack of files beside her computer.

  “Maybe another time.”

  “I’m sorry about the way things went down. We all are.”

  “Thanks.”

  He went to the dispatch desk and asked Sandy for the key to the evidence room. She gave it to him without hesitation, hardly looking up from her magazine. Hanging from a hook beside the evidence room door was a clipboard and a ballpoint. Ralph thought about skipping the sign-in, then went ahead and entered name, date, and time: 1530 hours. No choice, really, when both Gould and McGill knew he was here and why he’d come. If anyone asked about what he’d wanted to look at, he would flat-out tell them. It was administrative leave he was on, after all, not a suspension.

  The room, not much bigger than a closet, was hot and stuffy. The overhead fluorescent bars flickered. Like the ancient PCs, they needed to be replaced. Flint City, aided by federal dollars, made sure the PD had all the weaponry it needed, and more. So what if the infrastructure was falling apart?

  Had Frank Peterson’s murder been committed back when Ralph first came on the force, there might have been four boxes of Maitland evidence, maybe even half a dozen, but the computer age had done wonders for compression, and today there were only two, plus the toolbox that had been in the back of the van. That had contained the standard array of wrenches, hammers, and screwdrivers. Terry’s prints had been on none of the tools, nor on the box itself. To Ralph that suggested that the toolbox had been in the van when it was stolen, and Terry had never examined the contents after stealing the van for his own purposes.

  One of the evidence boxes was marked MAITLAND HOME. The second box was labeled VAN/SUBARU. This was the one Ralph wanted. He cut the tape. No reason not to, with Terry dead.

  After a brief hunt, he came up with a plastic evidence bag containing the scrap of paper he remembered. It was blue, and roughly triangular. At the top, in bold black letters, was TOMMY AND TUP. Whatever came after TUP was gone. In the upper corner was a little drawing of a pie, with steam rising from its crust. Although Ralph hadn’t remembered that specifically
, it must have been the reason he’d thought this scrap had been part of a take-out menu. What had Jeannie said when they were talking early this morning? I believe there’s another dozen thoughts lined up behind each one I’m aware of. If it was true, Ralph would have given a fair amount of money to get hold of the one lurking behind that yellow bra strap. Because there was one, he was almost sure of it.

  Another thing he was almost sure of was how this scrap had happened to be lying on the van’s floor. Someone had put menus under the windshield wipers of all the vehicles in the area where the van had been parked. The driver—maybe the kid who’d stolen it in New York, maybe whoever had stolen it after the kid dumped it—had torn it off rather than just lifting the wiper, leaving that triangular corner. The driver hadn’t noticed then, but once he was rolling, he would have. Maybe he’d reached around and pulled it free, dropping it on the floor instead of just letting it fly away. Possibly because he wasn’t a litterbug by nature, just a thief. Possibly because there’d been a cop car behind him, and he hadn’t wanted to do anything, not even a little thing, that might attract attention. It was even possible that he’d tried to throw it out the window, and a vagary of wind had blown it right back into the cab. Ralph had investigated road accidents, one of them quite nasty, where that had happened with cigarette butts.

  He took his notebook from his back pocket—carrying it was second nature, administrative leave or not—and printed TOMMY AND TUP on a blank sheet. He replaced the VAN/SUBARU box on the shelf it had come from, left the evidence room (not neglecting to jot down his out time), and re-locked the door. When he gave the key back to Sandy, he held his notebook open in front of her. She glanced up from the latest adventures of Jennifer Aniston to glance at it.