‘Ninety per cent. And there’s more in the loft. If it’s semen, that would be a nocturnal emission worthy of The Guinness Book of Records.’
‘Can’t be,’ Ralph said, low. ‘It’s something else. For one thing, semen wouldn’t turn hay black. It makes no sense.’
‘Not to me, either, but of course I am just the son of a poor Mexican farming family.’
‘Forensics is analyzing it, though.’
Yune nodded. ‘As we speak.’
‘And you’ll let me know.’
‘Yes. You see what I meant when I said this just keeps getting weirder and weirder.’
‘Jeannie called it inexplicable.’ Ralph cleared his throat. ‘She actually used the word supernatural.’
‘My Gabriela has suggested the same,’ Yune said. ‘Maybe it’s a chick thing. Or a Mexican thing.’
Ralph raised his eyebrows.
‘Sí, se?or,’ Yune said, and laughed. ‘My wife’s mother died young, and she grew up at her abuela’s knee. The old lady stuffed her full of legends. When I was talking this mess over with her, Gaby told me one about the Mexican boogeyman. He was supposedly a dude dying of tuberculosis, see, and this old wise man who lived in the desert, an ermita?o, told him he could be cured by drinking the blood of children and rubbing their fat on his chest and privates. So that’s what this boogeyman did, and now he lives forever. Supposedly he only takes children who misbehave. He pops them in a big black bag he carries. Gaby told me that when she was a little girl, maybe seven, she had a screaming fit one time when the doctor came to the house for her brother, who had scarlet fever.’
‘Because the doctor had a black bag.’
Yune nodded. ‘What was that boogeyman’s name? It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t pick it off. Don’t you hate that?’
‘So is that what you think we’ve got here? The boogeyman?’
‘Nope. I may be the son of a poor Mexican farming family, ese, or possibly the son of an Amarillo car dealer, but either way, I ain’t atontado. A man killed Frank Peterson, as mortal as you and me, and that man was almost certainly Terry Maitland. If we could figure out what happened, everything would fall into place and I could go back to sleeping through the night. Because this bugs the shit out of me.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Gotta go. Promised my wife I’d take her to a craft fair in Cap City. Any more questions? You ought to have at least one, because yet one more weird thing is staring you right in the face.’
‘Were there vehicle tracks in the barn?’
‘That’s not what I was thinking of, but as a matter of fact, there were. Not useful ones, though – you can see the impressions, and there’s a little oil, but no tread marks good enough for comparison. My guess is they were made by the van Maitland used to abduct the kid. They weren’t close enough together to have been made by the Subaru.’
‘Uh-huh. Listen, you’ve got all the witness interviews on your magic gadget, right? Before you split, find the one I did with Claude Bolton. He’s a bouncer at Gentlemen, Please. Although he took issue with that word, as I remember.’
Yune brought up one file, shook his head, brought up another, and handed the iPad to Ralph. ‘Scroll down.’
Ralph did so, went past what he wanted, and at last centered on it. ‘Here it is. Bolton said, “I remember one other thing, no big deal but kind of spooky if he really was the one who killed that kid.” Bolton said the guy cut him. When I asked what he meant, Bolton said he thanked Maitland for working with his friend’s nephews, then shook with him. When he did, Maitland’s pinky fingernail grazed the back of Bolton’s hand. Made a little cut. Bolton said it reminded him of his drug days, because some of the MCs he ran with used to grow out their pinky nails to scoop coke with. Apparently it was a fashion statement.’
‘And this is important because?’ Yune looked at his watch again, rather ostentatiously.
‘Probably it’s not. Probably it’s …’
But he wasn’t going to say non-substantive again. He liked the word less every time it came out of his mouth.
‘Probably no big deal, but it’s what my wife calls a confluence. Terry got a similar cut when he was visiting his father in a dementia ward in Dayton.’ Ralph quickly related the story about how the orderly had slipped and grabbed for Terry, cutting him in the process.
Yune thought about it, then shrugged. ‘I think that one’s pure coincidence, ese. And I really have to go, if I don’t want to incur the Wrath of Gabriela, but there’s still that thing you’re missing, and I’m not talking about tire tracks. Your pal Bolton even mentions it. Scroll back up and you’ll find it.’
But Ralph didn’t need to. It had been right in front of him. ‘Pants, underpants, socks, and sneakers … but no shirt.’
‘Correct,’ Yune said. ‘Either it was his favorite, or he didn’t have another one to change into when he left the barn.’
2
Halfway back to Flint City, Ralph finally realized what had been bugging him about the bra strap.
He pulled into the two-acre lot of a Byron’s Liquor Warehouse, and hit speed-dial. His call went to Yune’s voicemail. Ralph broke the connection without leaving a message. Yune had already gone above and beyond; let him have his weekend. And now that he had time to give it a little thought, Ralph decided this was a confluence he didn’t want to share with anyone, except maybe his wife.
The bra strap hadn’t been the only bright yellow thing he had seen during those moments of hyper-vigilance before Terry was shot; it was just his brain’s stand-in for something that had been part of the larger gallery of grotesques, and overshadowed by Ollie Peterson, who had drawn the old revolver from his newspaper bag only seconds later. No wonder it had gotten lost.
The man with the horrible burns on his face and the tattoos on his hands had been wearing a yellow bandanna on his head, probably to cover more scars. But had it been a bandanna? Couldn’t it have been something else? The missing shirt, for instance? The one Terry had been wearing in the train station?
I’m reaching, he thought, and maybe he was … except his subconscious (those thoughts behind his thoughts) had been yelling at him about it all along.
He closed his eyes and tried to summon up exactly what he’d seen in those last few seconds of Terry’s life. The blond anchor’s unlovely sneer as she looked at the blood on her fingers. The hypodermic sign reading MAITLAND TAKE YOUR MEDICINE. The boy with the bad lip. The woman leaning forward to give Marcy the finger. And the burned man who’d looked as if God had taken a giant eraser to most of his features, leaving only lumps, raw pink skin, and holes where a nose had been before the fire had put tattoos on his face far fiercer than those on his hands. And what Ralph saw in this moment of recall was not a bandanna on that man’s head but something far bigger, something that hung all the way down to his shoulders like a headdress.
Yes, that something could have been a shirt … but even if it was, did that mean it was the shirt? The one Terry had been wearing in the security footage? Was there a way to find out?
He thought there was, but he needed to enlist Jeannie, who was far more computer-savvy than he was. Also, the time might have come to stop thinking of Howard Gold and Alec Pelley as enemies. Maybe we’re all on the same side here, Pelley had said last night as he stood on the Maitland stoop, and maybe that was true. Or could be.
Ralph put his car in gear and headed home, pushing the speed limit all the way.
3