Holly put the chicken under the broiler for five minutes, and it crisped up nicely. The seven of them ate in the gazebo—there was a ramp for Lovie’s wheelchair—and the conversation was both pleasant and lively. Claude turned out to be quite the raconteur, telling tales about his colorful career as a “security official” at Gentlemen, Please. The stories were funny, but neither mean nor off-color, and no one laughed harder at them than Claude’s mother. She laughed herself into another coughing fit when Howie told the story of how one of his clients, in an effort to prove he was mentally unfit to stand trial, had taken his pants off in court and waved them at the judge.
The reason for their trip to Marysville was never touched upon.
Lovie’s lie-down before dinner had been a short one, and when the meal was done, she announced that she was going back to bed. “Not many dishes with take-out,” she said, “and what there is I can warsh in the morning. I can do it right from my chair, you know, although I have to be careful of the goddam oxygen tank.” She turned to Yune. “You sure you’re gonna be all right out here, Officer Sablo? What if someone comes stirrin around, like last night?”
“I’m fully armed, ma’am,” Yune said, “and this is a very nice place out here.”
“Well . . . you come on in anytime. Wind might kick up strong after midnight. Back door’ll be locked, but the key’s under that olla de barro.” She pointed at the old clay pot, then crossed her hands above her admirable bosom and did a little bow. “You are fine folks, and I thank you for coming here and trying to do right by my boy.” With that, she rolled away. The six of them sat a little longer.
“That’s a good woman,” Alec said.
“Yes,” Holly said. “She is.”
Claude lit a Tiparillo. “Cops on my side,” he said. “That’s a new experience. I like it.”
Holly said, “Is there a Walmart in Plainville, Mr. Bolton? I need to do some shopping, and I love Walmarts.”
“Nope, and a good thing, because Ma does, too, and I’d never get her out of it. Closest thing to it we got in these parts is the Home Depot in Tippit.”
“That should do,” she said, and stood up. “We’ll clean those dishes so Lovie doesn’t have to in the morning, and then we’ll be on our way. We’ll be back tomorrow to pick up Lieutenant Sablo, then leave for home. I think we’ve done all we can do here. Do you agree, Ralph?”
Her eyes told him what to say, and he said it. “Sure.”
“Mr. Gold? Mr. Pelley?”
“I think we’re fine,” Howie said.
Alec went along. “Pretty well done here.”
Although they returned to the house only fifteen minutes or so after Lovie had taken her leave, they could already hear rough snores coming from her bedroom. Yune filled the sink with suds, rolled up his sleeves, and began to wash the few things they had used. Ralph dried; Holly put away. The evening light was still strong, and Claude was out back with Howie and Alec, touring the property and looking for any signs of the previous night’s intruder . . . if there had been one.
“I’d’ve been all right even if I’d left my sidearm home,” Yune said. “I had to go through Mrs. Bolton’s bedroom to get into her bathroom where she keeps her oxygen, and she’s well gunned up. Got a Ruger American ten-plus-one on the dresser, extra clip right beside it, and a Remington twelve-gauge leaning in the corner, right next to her Electrolux. Don’t know what old Claudie’s got, but I’m sure he’s got something.”
“Isn’t he a convicted felon?” Holly asked.
“He is,” Ralph agreed, “but this is Texas. And he seems rehabilitated to me.”
“Yes,” she said. “He does, doesn’t he?”
“I think so, too,” Yune said. “Seems like he’s turned his life around. I’ve seen it before when people get into AA or NA. When it works, it’s like a miracle. Still, this outsider couldn’t have picked a better face to hide behind, wouldn’t you say? Given his history of drug sales and service, not to mention a gang background with Satan’s Seven, who’d believe him if he said he was being framed for something?”
“No one believed Terry Maitland,” Ralph said heavily, “and Terry was immaculate.”
It was dusk when they got to the Home Depot, and after nine o’clock when they arrived back at the Indian Motel (observed by Jack Hoskins, once more peering through the drapes in his room and rubbing obsessively at the back of his neck).
They carried their purchases into Ralph’s room and laid them out on the bed: five short-barreled UV flashlights (with extra batteries) and five yellow hardhats.
Howie picked up one of the flashlights and winced at the bright purple glare. “This thing will really pick up his trail? His spoor?”
“It will if it’s there,” Holly said.
“Huh.” Howie dropped the flashlight back on the bed, put on one of the hardhats, and went to the mirror over the dresser to inspect himself. “I look ridiculous,” he said.
No one disagreed.
“We’re really going to do this? Try to, at least? That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way. It’s me trying to get my head around it as an actual fact.”
“I think we’d have a hard job convincing the Texas Highway Patrol to pitch in,” Alec said mildly. “What exactly would we tell them? That we think there’s a monster hiding in the Marysville Hole?”
“If we don’t do it,” Holly said, “he’ll kill more children. It’s how he lives.”
Howie turned to her, almost accusingly. “How are we going to get in? The old lady said it’s buttoned up tighter than a nun’s underwear. And even if we do, where’s the rope? Doesn’t Home Depot sell rope? They must sell rope.”
“We shouldn’t need any,” she said quietly. “If he’s in there—and I’m almost sure he is—he won’t have gone deep. For one thing, he’d be afraid of getting lost himself, or of being caught in a cave-in. For another, I think he’s weak. He should be in the hibernation part of his cycle, but instead he’s been exerting himself.”
“By projecting?” Ralph asked. “That’s what you believe.”
“Yes. What Grace Maitland saw, what your wife saw . . . I believe those were projections. I think a small part of his physical self was there, that’s why there were traces in your living room, why he could move the chair and turn on the stove light, but not even enough to leave impressions on the new carpet. Doing that has to tire him out. I think he might have shown up wholly in the flesh only a single time, at the courthouse on the day Terry Maitland was shot. Because he was hungry, and knew there would be a lot to eat.”
“He was there in the flesh but didn’t show up on any of the TV videotape?” Howie asked. “Like a vampire who doesn’t cast a reflection in mirrors?”
He spoke as if expecting her to deny this, but she didn’t. “Exactly.”
“Then you think he’s supernatural. A supernatural being.”
“I don’t know what he is.”
Howie took off the hardhat and tossed it onto the bed. “Guesswork. That’s all you’ve got.”
Holly looked wounded by this, and at a loss for how to reply. Nor did she seem to realize what Ralph saw, and was sure Alec saw, as well: Howard Gold was frightened. If this thing went sideways, there was no judge to whom he could object. He could not ask for a mistrial.
Ralph said, “It’s still hard for me to accept all this stuff about El Cuco or shape-shifters, but there was an outsider, that I do accept now. Because of the Ohio connection, and because Terry Maitland simply couldn’t have been in two places at the same time.”
“The outsider screwed up there,” Alec said. “He didn’t know Terry was going to be at that convention in Cap City. Most of his chosen scapegoats would be like Heath Holmes, with alibis like cheesecloth.”
“That doesn’t follow,” Ralph said.
Alec raised his eyebrows.
“If he got Terry’s . . . I don’t know how to say it. Memories, sure, but not just memories. A sort of . . .”
“A sort of terrain map of his consciousness,” Holly said quietly.
“Okay, call it that,” Ralph said. “I can accept that there’s stuff he could have missed, the way speed readers miss stuff while they’re zipping along, but that convention would have been a big deal to Terry.”
“Then why would the cuco still—” Alec began.
“Maybe he had to.” Holly had picked up one of the UV flashlights and was shining it on the wall, where it picked up a ghostly handprint from some previous resident. It was a thing Ralph could have done without seeing. “Maybe he was too hungry to wait for a better time.”
“Or maybe he didn’t care,” Ralph said. “Serials often get to that point, usually just before they get caught. Bundy, Speck, Gacy . . . eventually they all started to believe they were a law unto themselves. Godlike. They got arrogant and overreached. And this outsider didn’t overreach by all that much, did he? Think about it. We were going to arraign Terry and see him put on trial for the murder of Frank Peterson in spite of everything we knew. We were sure his alibi had to be bogus, no matter how strong it was.”
And part of me still wants to believe that. The alternative turns everything I thought I understood about the world I live in upside down.
He felt feverish and a little sick to his stomach. How could a normal man in the twenty-first century accept a shape-shifting monster? If you believed in Holly Gibney’s outsider, her El Cuco, then everything was on the table. No end to the universe.
“He’s not arrogant anymore,” Holly said quietly. “He’s used to staying in one place for months after he kills and while he makes his change. He only moves on when that change is complete, or nearly complete. That’s what I believe, based on what I’ve read and what I learned in Ohio. But his usual pattern has been disrupted. He had to run from Flint City once that boy discovered he’d been staying in that barn. He knew the police would come. So he came down here early, to be near Claude Bolton, and he found a perfect home.”
“The Marysville Hole,” Alec said.
Holly nodded. “But he doesn’t know we know. That’s our advantage. Claude knows his uncle and cousins are buried there, yes. What Claude doesn’t know is how the outsider hibernates in or near places of the dead, preferably those associated with the bloodline of the person he’s changing into or out of. I’m sure it works that way. It must.”
Because you want it to, Ralph thought. Yet he couldn’t find any holes in her logic. If, that was, you accepted the basic postulate of a supernatural being that had to follow certain rules, possibly out of tradition, possibly out of some unknown imperative none of them would ever be able to understand.
“Can we be sure Lovie won’t tell him?” Alec asked.
“I think so,” Ralph said. “She’ll keep quiet for his own good.”
Howie took one of the flashlights and shone it at the rattling air conditioner, this time picking up a litter of spectrally glowing fingerprints. He snapped it off and said, “What if he has a helper? Tell me that. Count Dracula had that guy Renfield. Dr. Frankenstein had a hunchback guy, Igor—”
Holly said, “That’s a popular misconception. In the original Frankenstein movie, the doctor’s assistant was actually named Fritz, played by Dwight Frye. Later, Bela Lugosi—”
“I stand corrected,” Howie said, “but the question remains: What if our outsider has an accomplice? Somebody with orders to keep tabs on us? Doesn’t that make sense? Even if the outsider doesn’t know we found out about the Marysville Hole, he knows we’re too close for comfort.”
“I see your point, Howie,” Alec said, “but serials are usually loners, and the ones who stay free the longest are drifters. There are exceptions, but I don’t think our guy is one of them. He hopped down to Flint City from Dayton. If you backtrailed him from Ohio, you might find murdered children in Tampa, Florida, or Portland, Maine. There’s an African proverb: he travels fastest who travels alone. And practically speaking, who could he hire for a job like that?”
“A nut,” Howie said.
“Okay,” Ralph said, “but from where? Did he just stop by Nuts R Us and pick one up?”
“Fine,” Howie said. “He’s on his own, just cowering in the Marysville Hole and waiting for us to come and get him. Drag him into the sun or put a stake in his heart or both.”
“In Stoker’s novel,” Holly said, “they cut off Dracula’s head when they caught him, and stuffed his mouth full of garlic.”
Howie tossed the flashlight on the bed and threw up his hands. “Also fine. We’ll stop by Shopwell and buy some garlic. Also a meat cleaver, since we neglected to buy a hacksaw while we were in Home Depot.”
Ralph said, “I think a bullet in the head should do the trick nicely.”
They considered this in silence for a moment, and then Howie said he was going to bed. “But before I do, I’d like to know what the plan is for tomorrow.”
Ralph waited for Holly to enlighten Howie on this point, but she looked at Ralph, instead. He was startled and moved by the hollows under her eyes and the lines that had appeared at the corners of her mouth. Ralph himself was tired, he supposed they all were, but Holly Gibney was exhausted, at this point running on nothing but nerves. And given her tightly wrapped persona, he guessed that for her that would be like running on thorns. Or broken glass.
“Nothing before nine o’clock,” Ralph said. “We all need at least eight hours of sleep, more if we can get it. Then we pack up, check out, go to the Boltons’, and pick up Yune. From there to the Marysville Hole.”
“Wrong direction, if we want Claude to think we’re flying home,” Alec said. “He’ll wonder why we aren’t headed back to Plainville.”
“Okay, we tell Claude and Lovie we have to go to Tippit first because . . . mmm, I don’t know, we have some more shopping to do at Home Depot?”
“Pretty thin,” Howie said.
Alec asked, “Who was the state cop who came out to talk to Claude? Do you remember?”
Ralph didn’t offhand, but he had kept case-notes on his iPad. Routine was routine, even when chasing the boogeyman. “His name was Owen Sipe. Corporal Owen Sipe.”
“Okay. You tell Claude and his momma—which is the same thing as telling the outsider, if he really can get inside Claude’s head—that you got a call from Corporal Sipe saying that a man roughly matching Claude’s description is wanted in Tippit for questioning in a robbery or a car theft or maybe a home invasion. Yune can verify that Claude was at home all night—”
“Not if he was out sleeping in the gaze-bo,” Ralph said.
“You’re telling me he wouldn’t have heard Claude start his car? That thing needed a new muffler two years ago.”
Ralph smiled. “Point taken.”
“Okay, so you say we’re going to Tippit to check it out, and if it leads nowhere, we’re going to fly back to Flint City. Sound okay?”
“Sounds fine,” Ralph said. “Just let’s be damn sure Claude doesn’t see the flashlights and hardhats.”