Rainwater: I did indeed. Got him there in plenty of time to catch the night train to Dallas–Fort Worth.
Detective Anderson: Did you make conversation with him on the way? I ask because you seem like the conversational type.
Rainwater: Oh, I am! My tongue runs like a supermarket conveyor belt on payday. Just ask anybody. I started by asking him about the City League Tourney, were they gonna beat the Bears, and he said, ‘I expect good things.’ Like getting an answer from a Magic 8 Ball, right? I bet he was thinking about what he’d done, and making a quick getaway. Stuff like that must put a hole in your small talk. My question for you, Detective, is why the hell did he come back to FC? Why didn’t he run all the way across Texas and down to Old Meh-hee-co?
Detective Anderson: What else did he say?
Rainwater: Not much. He said he was going to try and catch a nap. He closed his eyes, but I think he was faking. I think he might have been peeking at me, like maybe he was thinking of trying something. I wish he had. And I wish I’d known then what I know now, about what he done. I would have pulled him out of my cab and tore off his plumbing. I ain’t lying.
Detective Anderson: And when you got to the Amtrak station?
Rainwater: I pulled up to the drop-off and he tossed three twenties on the front seat. I started to tell him to say hello to his wife, hut he was already gone. Did he also go into Gentlemen to change his clothes in the men’s room? Because there was blood on them?
Detective Anderson: I’m going to put six pictures of six different men down in front of you, Ms Rainwater. They all look similar, so take your t—
Rainwater: Don’t bother. That’s him right there. That’s Maitland. Go get him, and I hope he resists arrest. Save the taxpayers a piece of change.
15
When Marcy Maitland was in junior high (that was what it was still called when she went there), she sometimes had a nightmare that she turned up in home room naked, and everyone laughed. Stupid Marcy Gibson forgot to get dressed this morning! Look, you can see everything! By the time she got to high school, this anxiety dream had been replaced by a slightly more sophisticated one where she arrived in class clothed but realizing she was about to take the biggest test of her life and had forgotten to study.
When she turned off Barnum Street and onto Barnum Court, the horror and the helplessness of those dreams returned, and this time there would be no sweet relief and muttered Thank God when she woke up. In her driveway was a cop car that could have been the twin of the one which had conveyed Terry to the police station. Parked behind it was a windowless truck with STATE POLICE MOBILE CRIME UNIT printed on the side in big blue letters. Bookending the driveway was a pair of black OHP cruisers, with their lightbars strobing in the day’s growing gloom. Four large troopers, their County Mounty hats making them look at least seven feet tall, stood on the sidewalk, their legs spread (as if their balls are too big to keep them together, she thought). These things were bad enough, but not the worst. The worst was her neighbors, standing out on their lawns and watching. Did they know why this police presence had suddenly materialized in front of the neat Maitland ranchhouse? She guessed that most already did – the curse of cell phones – and they would tell the rest.
One of the troopers stepped into the street, holding up a hand. She stopped and powered down her window.
‘Are you Marcia Maitland, ma’am?’
‘Yes. I can’t get into my garage with those vehicles in my driveway.’
‘Park at the curb there,’ he said, pointing behind one of the cruisers.
Marcy felt an urge to lean through the open window, get right up in his face, and scream, MY driveway! MY garage! Get your stuff out of my way!
Instead, she pulled over and got out. She needed to pee, and badly. Probably had needed to since the cop had handcuffed Terry, and she just hadn’t realized until now.
One of the other cops was talking into his shoulder mic, and from around the corner of the house, walkie-talkie in one hand, came the crowning touch of this evening’s malignant surrealism: a hugely pregnant woman in a sleeveless flower-print dress. She cut across the Maitland lawn in that peculiar duck-footed walk – almost a waddle – that all women seem to have when they arrive at the far end of their last trimester. She did not smile as she approached Marcy. A laminated ID hung from her neck. Pinned to her dress, riding the slope of one enormous breast and as out of place as a dog biscuit on a communion plate, was a Flint City police badge.
‘Mrs Maitland? I’m Detective Betsy Riggins.’
She held out her hand. Marcy did not shake it. And although Howie had already told her, she said, ‘What do you want?’
Riggins looked over Marcy’s shoulder. One of the state cops was standing there. He was apparently the bull goose of the quartet, because he had stripes on his shirtsleeve. He was holding out a sheet of paper. ‘Mrs Maitland, I’m Lieutenant Yunel Sablo. We have a warrant to search these premises and take out any items belonging to your husband, Terence John Maitland.’
She snatched the paper. SEARCH WARRANT was printed at the top in gothic type. There followed a bunch of legalistic blah-blah, and it was signed at the bottom by a name she at first misread as Judge Crater. Didn’t he disappear a long time ago? she thought, then blinked water from her eyes – maybe sweat, maybe tears – and saw the name was Carter, not Crater. The warrant bore today’s date and had apparently been signed less than six hours ago.
She turned it over and frowned. ‘There’s nothing listed here. Does that mean you can even take his underwear, if you want to?’
Betsy Riggins, who knew they would take any underwear they happened to find in the Maitlands’ dirty clothes hamper, said, ‘It’s at our discretion, Mrs Maitland.’
‘Your discretion? Your discretion? What is this, Nazi Germany?’
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.’