‘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.