The Outsider_A Novel Read online

  “He said that? Why?”

  “Because Maitland acted like he’d never seen him before, and when Bolton asked how the baseball team was doing, Maitland passed it off with some kind of generality. No details, even though the team was in the playoffs. He also told me Maitland was wearing fancy sneakers. ‘Like the ones the kids save up for so they can look like gangbangers,’ he said. According to Bolton, he never saw Maitland in anything like that.”

  “Those were the sneakers we found in that barn.”

  “No way to prove it, but I’m sure you’re right.”

  Upstairs, Ralph now heard the moaning, grinding sound of their old Hewlett-Packard printer coming to life, and wondered what the hell Jeannie was up to.

  Yune said, “Remember the Gibney woman telling us about the hair they found in Maitland’s father’s room at the assisted living place? From one of the murdered girls?”

  “Sure.”

  “What do you want to bet that if we go through Maitland’s credit purchases, we’ll find a record of him buying those sneakers? And a slip with a signature on it that matches Maitland’s exactly?”

  “I guess this hypothetical outsider could do that,” Ralph said, “but only if he snitched one of Terry’s credit cards.”

  “He wouldn’t even need to do that. Remember, the Maitlands have lived in Flint City like forever. They’ve probably got charge accounts at half a dozen downtown stores. All this guy would have to do is walk into the sporting goods department, pick out those fancy kicks, and sign his name. Who’d question him? Everyone in town knows him. It’s the same thing as the hair and the girls’ underthings, don’t you see? He takes their faces and does his dirt, but that isn’t enough for him. He also weaves the rope that hangs them. Because he eats sadness. He eats sadness!”

  Ralph paused, put a hand over his eyes, pressed his fingers to one temple and his thumb to the other.

  “Ralph? Are you there?”

  “Yes. But Yune . . . you’re making leaps I’m not ready to make.”

  “I understand. I’m not a hundred per cent on board with this myself. But you need to at least keep the possibility in mind.”

  But it’s not a possibility, Ralph thought. It’s an impossibility.

  He asked Yune if he had told Bolton to be careful.

  Yune laughed. “I did. He laughed. Said there were three guns in the house, two rifles and a pistol, and that his mother is a better shot than he is, even with emphysema. Man, I wish I was going down there with you.”

  “Try to make it happen.”

  “I will.”

  As he ended the call, Jeannie came down with a thin sheaf of paper. “I’ve been researching Holly Gibney. Tell you what, for a soft-spoken lady with absolutely no clothes sense, she’s been up to a lot.”

  As Ralph took the pages, headlights spilled up the driveway. Jeannie grabbed the pages back before he could do more than look at the newspaper headline on the first sheet: RETIRED COP, TWO OTHERS SAVE THOUSANDS AT MINGO AUDITORIUM CONCERT. He assumed Ms. Holly Gibney was one of the two others.

  “Go help her in with her luggage,” Jeannie said. “You can read these in bed.”

  16

  Holly’s luggage consisted of the shoulder-bag that held her laptop, a hold-all small enough to fit in an airplane’s overhead compartment, and a plastic Walmart bag. She let Ralph take the hold-all, but insisted on keeping custody of the shoulder-bag and whatever she’d purchased at Wally World.

  “You’re very good to have me,” she said to Jeannie.

  “It’s our pleasure. Can I call you Holly?”

  “Yes, please. That would be good.”

  “Our spare room is at the end of the upstairs hall. The sheets are fresh, and it has its own bathroom. Just don’t stumble over my sewing machine table if you have to use the facility in the middle of the night.”

  An unmistakable expression of relief crossed Holly’s face at this, and she smiled. “I’ll try not to.”

  “Would you like cocoa? I could make some. Or maybe something stronger?”

  “Just bed, I think. I don’t mean to be impolite, but I’ve had a very long day.”

  “Of course you have. I’ll show you the way.”

  But Holly lingered for a moment, looking through the archway and into the Andersons’ living room. “Your intruder was sitting just there when you came downstairs?”

  “Yes. In one of our kitchen chairs.” She pointed, then crossed her arms and cupped her elbows. “At first I could only see him from the knees down. Then the word on his fingers. MUST. Then he leaned forward and I could see his face.”

  “Bolton’s face.”

  “Yes.”

  Holly considered this, then broke into a radiant smile that surprised both Ralph and his wife. It made her look years younger. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to dreamland.”

  Jeannie led her upstairs, chatting away. Setting her at ease in a way I never could, Ralph thought. It’s a talent, and it will probably work even on this extremely peculiar woman.

  Peculiar she might be, but she was strangely likeable, in spite of her mad ideas about Terry Maitland and Heath Holmes.

  Mad ideas that just happen to fit the facts.

  But it was impossible.

  That fit them like a glove.

  “Still impossible,” he murmured.

  Upstairs, the two women laughed. Hearing that made Ralph smile. He waited where he was until he heard Jeannie’s steps heading back to their room, then he went up himself. The door to the guest room at the end of the hall was firmly closed. The sheaf of papers—the fruits of Jeannie’s hurried research—was lying on his pillow. He undressed, lay down, and began to read about Ms. Holly Gibney, co-owner of a skip-tracing firm called Finders Keepers.

  17

  Outside and down the block, Jack watched as the woman in the suit turned into Anderson’s driveway. Anderson came out and helped her with her things. She didn’t have much, traveling light. One of her bags was from Walmart. So that was where she’d gone. Maybe to get a nightie and a toothbrush. Judging from the look of her, the nightie would be ugly and the bristles of the toothbrush would be hard enough to draw blood from her gums.

  He took a nip from his flask, and as he was screwing on the cap and thinking about going home (why not, since all the good little children were in for the night), he realized he was no longer alone in the truck. Someone was sitting on the passenger side. He had just appeared in the corner of Hoskins’s eye. That was impossible, of course, but he couldn’t have been there all along. Could he?

  Hoskins looked straight ahead. The sunburn on his neck, which had been relatively quiet, began to throb again, and very painfully.

  A hand came into his peripheral vision, floating. It seemed he could almost see the seat through it. Written on the fingers in faded blue ink was the word MUST. Hoskins closed his eyes, praying that his visitor would not touch him.

  “You need to take a drive,” the visitor said. “Unless you want to die the way your mother died, that is. Do you remember how she screamed?”

  Yes, Jack remembered. Until she couldn’t scream anymore.

  “Until she couldn’t scream anymore,” said the passenger. The hand touched his thigh, very lightly, and Jack knew the skin there would soon begin to burn, just like the back of his neck. The pants he was wearing would be no protection; the poison would seep right through. “Yes, you remember. How could you forget?”

  “Where do you want me to go?”

  The passenger told him, and then the touch of that awful hand disappeared. Jack opened his eyes and looked around. The other side of the bench seat was empty. The lights in the Anderson house were out. He looked at his watch and saw it was fifteen minutes to eleven. He had fallen asleep. He could almost believe he’d just had a dream. A very bad one. Except for one thing.

  He started the truck and put it in gear. He would stop to gas up at the Hi station on Route 17 outside of town. That was the right place, because the guy who worked the n
ight shift—Cody, his name was—always had a good supply of little white pills. Cody sold them to the truckers either highballing north to Chicago or down south to Texas. For Jack Hoskins of the Flint City PD, there would be no charge.

  The truck’s dashboard was dusty. At the first stop sign, he leaned over to his right and wiped it clean, getting rid of the word his passenger’s finger had left there.

  MUST.

  NO END TO THE UNIVERSE

  July 26th

  1

  What sleep Ralph got was thin and broken by bad dreams. In one of them, he held the dying Terry Maitland in his arms, and Terry said, “You robbed my children.”

  Ralph woke at four thirty and knew there would be no more sleep. He felt as if he had entered some heretofore unsuspected plane of existence, and told himself everyone felt that way in the small hours. That was good enough to get him into the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth.

  Jeannie was sleeping as she always did, with the coverlet pulled up so high that she was nothing but a hump with a fluff of hair showing over the top. There was gray in that hair now, as there was in his. Not much, but more would be coming right along. That was all right. Time’s passage was a mystery, but it was a normal mystery.

  The breeze from the air conditioner had spilled some of the pages Jeannie had printed onto the floor. He put them back on the night table, picked up his jeans, decided they would do for another day (especially in dusty south Texas), and went to the window with them in his hand. The first gray light was creeping into the day. It would be a hot one here, and hotter still where they were going.

  He observed—without much surprise, although he couldn’t have said why—that Holly Gibney was down there, dressed in her own pair of jeans and sitting in the lawn chair where Ralph himself had been sitting little more than a week ago, when Bill Samuels had come calling. The evening Bill had told him the story of the disappearing footprints and Ralph had matched him with the one about the infested cantaloupe.

  He pulled on his pants and an Oklahoma Thunder tee-shirt, checked Jeannie again, and left the room with the old scuffed moccasins he wore as bedroom slippers dangling from two fingers of his left hand.

  2

  He stepped out the back door five minutes later. Holly turned at the sound of his approach, her small face cautious and alert but not (or so he hoped) unfriendly. Then she saw the mugs on the old Coca-Cola tray and her face lit up with that radiant smile. “Is that what I hope it is?”

  “It is if you were hoping for coffee. I take mine straight, but I brought the other stuff in case you want it. My wife takes it white and sweet. Like me, she says.” He smiled.

  “Black is fine. Thank you so much.”

  He put the tray on the picnic table. She sat across from him, took one of the mugs, sipped. “Oh, this is good. Nice and strong. There’s nothing better than strong black coffee in the morning. That’s what I think, anyway.”

  “How long have you been up?”

  “I don’t sleep much,” she said, neatly dodging the question. “It’s very pleasant here. The air is so fresh.”

  “Not so fresh when the wind comes from the west, believe me. Then you smell the refineries in Cap City. Gives me a headache.”

  He paused, looking at her. Holly looked away, holding her cup to her face, as if to shield it. Ralph thought back to last night, and how she had seemed to steel herself for every handshake. He had an idea that this woman found many of the world’s ordinary gestures and interactions quite difficult. And yet she had done some amazing things.

  “I read up on you last night. Alec Pelley was right. You have quite a resume.”

  She made no reply.

  “In addition to stopping that guy Hartsfield from bombing a bunch of kids, you and your partner, Mr. Hodges—”

  “Detective Hodges,” she corrected. “Retired.”

  Ralph nodded. “In addition to that, you and Detective Hodges saved a girl who was kidnapped by a crazy guy named Morris Bellamy. Bellamy was killed during the rescue. You were also involved in a shootout with a doctor who went off the rails and killed his wife, and last year you nailed a bunch of guys who were stealing rare-breed dogs, either ransoming them back to their owners or selling them on if the owners wouldn’t pay. When you said part of your business was finding lost pets, you weren’t kidding.”

  She was blushing again, all the way up from the base of her neck to her forehead. It was pretty clear that this enumeration of her past exploits made her more than uncomfortable; she found it actively painful.

  “It was mostly Bill Hodges who did those things.”

  “Not the dognappers. He passed on a year before that case.”

  “Yes, but by then I had Pete Huntley. Ex-Detective Huntley.” She looked directly at him. Made herself do it. Her eyes were clear and blue. “Pete’s good, I couldn’t keep the business going without him, but Bill was better. Whatever I am, Bill made me. I owe him everything. I owe him my life. I wish he were here now.”

  “Instead of me, you mean?”

  Holly didn’t reply. Which was a reply, of course.

  “Would he have believed in this El Cuco shape-shifter?”

  “Oh yes.” She said it without hesitation. “Because he . . . and I . . . and our friend Jerome Robinson, who was with us . . . have the benefit of certain experiences that you don’t have. Although you may, depending on how the next few days go. You may before the sun goes down tonight.”

  “Can I join you?”

  It was Jeannie, with her own cup of coffee.

  Ralph gestured for her to sit down.

  “If we woke you, I’m very sorry,” Holly said. “You were so kind to let me stay.”

  “Ralph woke me, tiptoeing out like an elephant,” Jeannie said. “I might have gone back to sleep, but then I smelled coffee. Can’t resist that. Oh good, you brought out the half and half.”

  Holly said, “It wasn’t the doctor.”

  Ralph raised his eyebrows. “Beg pardon?”

  “His name was Babineau, and he went off the rails, all right, but he was forced off them, and he didn’t kill Mrs. Babineau. Brady Hartsfield did that.”

  “According to what I read in the news stories my wife found online, Hartsfield died in the hospital before you and Hodges tracked Babineau down.”

  “I know what the news stories said, but they’re wrong. May I tell you the real story? I don’t like to tell it, I don’t even like to remember those things, but you might need to hear it. Because we’re going into danger, and if you keep believing that it’s a man we’re going after—twisted, perverse, murderous, but still just a man—you’re going to be putting yourself into greater danger.”

  “The danger is here,” Jeannie protested. “This outsider, the one who looks like Claude Bolton . . . I saw him here. I said that last night, at the meeting!”

  Holly nodded. “I think the outsider was here, I might even be able to prove it to you, but I don’t think he was completely here. And I don’t think he’s here now. He’s there, in Texas, because Bolton is there, and the outsider will be close to him. He’ll have to be close, because he’s been . . .” She paused, chewing her lip. “I think he’s been exhausting himself. He’s not used to people coming after him. Of knowing what he is.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jeannie said.

  “May I tell you the story of Brady Hartsfield? That might help.” She looked at Ralph, again making an effort to meet his eyes. “It may not make you believe, but it will make you understand why I can.”

  “Go ahead,” Ralph said.

  Holly began to speak. By the time she finished, the sun was rising red in the east.

  3

  “Wow,” Ralph said. It was all he could think of.

  “This is true?” Jeannie asked. “Brady Hartsfield . . . what? Somehow jumped his consciousness into this doctor of his?”

  “Yes. It might have been the experimental drugs Babineau was feeding him, but I never thought that was the only reason he was able
to do it. There was something in Hartsfield already, and the knock on the head I gave him brought it out. That’s what I believe.” She turned to Ralph. “You don’t believe it, though, do you? I could probably get Jerome on the phone, and he’d tell you the same thing . . . but you wouldn’t believe him, either.”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” he said. “This rash of suicides brought on by subliminal messages in video games . . . the newspapers reported it?”

  “Newspapers, TV, the Internet. It’s all there.”

  Holly paused, looking down at her hands. The nails were unpolished, but quite neat; she had quit chewing them, just as she had quit smoking. Broken herself of the habit. She sometimes thought that her pilgrimage to something at least approximating mental stability (if not genuine mental health) had been marked by the ritual casting off of bad habits. It had been hard to let them go. They were friends.

  She spoke without looking at either of them now, looking off into the distance instead. “Bill was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the same time the business with Babineau and Hartsfield happened. He was in the hospital for awhile afterwards, but then he came home. By that time all of us knew how it was going to end . . . including him, although he never said so, and he fought that fracking cancer right to the finish. I used to go over almost every night, partly to make sure he was eating something, partly just to sit with him. To keep him company, but also to . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “Fill yourself up with him?” Jeannie said. “While you still had him?”

  The smile again, the radiant one that made her look young. “Yes, that’s it. Exactly. One night—this wasn’t long before he went back into the hospital—the power went out in his part of town. A tree fell on a line, or something. When I got to Bill’s house, he was sitting on the front step and looking up at the stars. ‘You never see them like this when the streetlights are on,’ he said. ‘Look at how many there are, and how bright!’