Ralph and his wife sat at the kitchen table with Jeannie’s laptop in front of them. There were four major TV stations in Cap City, one for each of the networks, plus Channel 81, the public access outlet that ran local news, city council meetings, and various community affairs (such as the Harlan Coben speech where Terry had appeared as an unlikely guest star). All five had been at the courthouse for Terry’s arraignment, all five had filmed the shooting, and all had at least some footage of the crowd. Once the gunfire erupted, all the cameras turned to Terry, of course – Terry bleeding down the side of his face and pushing his wife from the line of fire, then collapsing into the street when the killshot struck him. The CBS footage went entirely blank before that happened, because that was the camera Ralph’s bullet had struck, shattering it and blinding its operator in one eye.
After they’d looked at each clip twice, Jeannie turned to him, her lips pressed tightly together. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.
‘Run the Channel 81 stuff again,’ Ralph said. ‘Their camera was every whichway once the shooting started, but they got the best crowd stuff before.’
‘Ralph.’ She touched his arm. ‘Are you all ri—’
‘Fine, I’m fine.’ He wasn’t. He felt as if the world were tilting, and he might soon slide right off the edge. ‘Run it again, please. And mute it. The reporter’s running commentary is distracting.’
She did as he asked, and they watched together. Waving signs. People yelling soundlessly, their mouths opening and closing like fish out of water. At one point the camera panned rapidly across and down, not soon enough to show the man who had spit in Terry’s face, but in time to show Ralph tripping the troublemaker, making it look like an unprovoked attack. He watched as Terry helped the spitter to his feet (like something out of the fucking Bible, Ralph remembered thinking), and then the camera returned to the crowd. He saw the two bailiffs – one plump, the other lean – doing their best to keep the steps clear. He saw the blond anchor from Channel 7 getting to her feet, still looking with disbelief at her bloody fingers. He saw Ollie Peterson with his newspaper sack and a few clumps of red hair sticking out from beneath his watch cap, still a few seconds from being the star of the show. He saw the boy with the cleft lip, the Channel 81 cameraman pausing his shot long enough to register Frank Peterson’s face on the boy’s tee-shirt before panning further—
‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Freeze it, freeze it right there.’
Jeannie did so, and they looked at the picture – slightly blurred from the cameraman’s rapid movement as he tried to get a little bit of everything.
Ralph tapped the screen. ‘See this guy waving the cowboy hat?’
‘Sure.’
‘The burned man was standing right next to him.’
‘All right,’ she said … but in a strange, nervous tone of voice Ralph did not remember ever hearing from her before.
‘I swear to you he was. I saw him, it was like I was tripping on LSD or mescaline or something, and I saw everything. Run the other ones again. This is the best one of the crowd, but the FOX affiliate wasn’t too bad, and—’
‘No.’ She hit the power button and closed the laptop. ‘The man you saw isn’t in any of these, Ralph. You know it as well as I do.’
‘Do you think I’m crazy? Is that it? Do you think I’m having a … you know …’
‘A breakdown?’ Her hand was back on his arm again, now squeezing gently. ‘Of course not. If you say you saw him, you saw him. If you think he was wearing that shirt as a kind of sun protection, or do-rag, or I don’t know what, then he probably was. You’ve had a bad month, probably the worst month of your life, but I trust your powers of observation. It’s just that … you must see now …’
She trailed off. He waited. At last she pushed ahead.
‘There is something very wrong with this, and the more you find, the wronger it gets. It scares me. That story Yune told you scares me. It’s basically a vampire story, isn’t it? I read Dracula in high school, and one thing I remember about it is vampires don’t cast reflections in mirrors. And a thing that can’t cast a reflection probably wouldn’t show up in TV news footage.’
‘That’s nuts. There’s no such things as ghosts, or witches, or vam—’
She slapped her open hand down on the table, a flat pistol-shot sound that made him jump. Her eyes were furious, crackling. ‘Wake up, Ralph! Wake up to what’s right in front of you! Terry Maitland was in two places at the same time! If you stop trying to find a way to explain that away and just accept it—’
‘I can’t accept it, honey. It goes against everything I’ve believed my whole life. If I let something like that in, I really would go crazy.’
‘The hell you would. You’re stronger than that. But you don’t have to even consider the idea, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Terry’s dead. You can let it go.’
‘If I do that, and it really wasn’t Terry who killed Frankie Peterson? Where does that leave Marcy? Where does it leave her girls?’
Jeannie got up, walked to the window over the sink, and looked out at the backyard. Her hands were clenched into fists. ‘Derek called again. He still wants to come home.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘To stick it out until the season ends in the middle of next month. Even though I’d love to have him home. I finally talked him into it, and do you know why?’ She turned back. ‘Because I don’t want him in this town while you’re still digging around in this mess. Because when it gets dark tonight, I’m going to be frightened. Suppose it really is some kind of supernatural creature, Ralph? And what if it finds out you’re looking for it?’
Ralph took her in his arms. He could feel her trembling. He thought, Part of her actually believes this.
‘Yune told me that story, but Yune believes the killer is a natural man. So do I.’
With her face against his chest, she said, ‘Then why isn’t the man with the burned face in any of the footage?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I care about Marcy, of course I do.’ She looked up, and he saw she was crying. ‘And I care about her girls. I care about Terry, for that matter … and the Petersons … but I care more about you and Derek. You guys are all I have. Can’t you let this go now? Finish your leave, see the shrink, and turn the page?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, when in fact he did know. He just didn’t want to say so to Jeannie while she was in her current strange state. He couldn’t turn the page.
Not yet.
4
That night he sat at the picnic table in the backyard, smoking a Tiparillo and looking up at the sky. There were no stars, but he could still make out the moon behind the clouds that were moving in. The truth was often like that, he thought – a bleary circle of light behind clouds. Sometimes it broke through; sometimes the clouds thickened, and the light disappeared completely.
One thing was sure: when night fell, the skinny, tubercular man from Yune Sablo’s fairy tale became more plausible. Not believable, Ralph could no more believe in such a creature than he could in Santa Claus, but he could picture him: a darker-skinned version of Slender Man, that bugaboo of pubescent American girls. He’d be tall and grave in his black suit, his face like a lamp, and carrying a bag big enough to hold a small child with his or her knees folded against his or her chest. According to Yune, the Mexican boogeyman prolonged his life by drinking the blood of children and rubbing their fat on his body … and while that wasn’t exactly what had happened to the Peterson boy, it was in the vicinity. Might it be possible that the killer – maybe Maitland, maybe the unsub of the blurred fingerprints – actually thought he was a vampire, or some other supernatural creature? Hadn’t Jeffrey Dahmer believed he was creating zombies when he killed all those homeless men?