“Thank you.”
“If there’s anything I can do for you or your girls, anything at all—”
“You can’t, but he can.” She turned her attention to Ralph, and although her eyes were still wet with tears, they were cold. Assessing. “This outsider, I want you to find him. Don’t let him get away just because you don’t believe in him. Can you do that?”
“I don’t know,” Ralph said, “but I’ll try.”
Marcy said no more, only took Yune Sablo’s offered arm and let him lead her to her car.
13
Half a block down, parked in front of the long-abandoned Woolworth’s, Jack sat in his truck, sipping from a flask and watching the group on the sidewalk. The only one he couldn’t identify was a slender woman in the kind of suit a businesswoman might wear on a trip. Her hair was short, the graying bangs a little ragged, as if she had cut them herself. The case slung over her shoulder looked big enough to hold a shortwave radio. This woman watched as Sablo, the taco-bender state cop, squired Mrs. Maitland away. The stranger then walked to her car, which was too nondescript to be anything but an airport rental. Hoskins thought briefly of following her, but decided to stick with the Andersons. It had been Ralph who brought him here, after all, and wasn’t there some saying about going home with the girl you took to the dance?
Besides, Anderson bore watching. Hoskins had never liked him, and since that snotty two-word evaluation a year ago （No opinion, he’d written . . . as if his shit didn’t stink）， Jack had detested him. He had been delighted when Anderson tripped over his dick with the Maitland arrest, and it didn’t surprise him to discover the self-righteous sonofabitch was now meddling in things better left alone. A closed case, for instance.
Jack touched the back of his neck, winced, then started his truck. He supposed he could go home after he saw the Andersons inside, but he thought maybe he’d just park up the street and keep an eye on their house. See what happened. He had a Gatorade bottle he could piss in, and he might even be able to sleep a little, if the steady hot throb from the back of his neck would allow that. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d slept in this truck; he’d done it on several occasions since the day the old ball and chain had walked out.
Jack wasn’t sure what came next, but he had a clear fix on the basic task: to stop the meddling. The meddling in exactly what he didn’t know, only that it had something to do with the Peterson boy. And the barn in Canning Township. That was enough for now, and—sunburn aside, possible skin cancer aside—he was getting interested.
He felt that when the time came for the next step, he would be told.
14
With the help of her navigation app, Holly made a quick and easy drive to the Flint City Walmart. She loved Walmarts, the size of them, the anonymity of them. Shoppers didn’t seem to look at other shoppers as they did in other stores; it was as if they were all in their own private capsules, buying clothes or video games or toilet paper in bulk. It wasn’t even necessary to speak to a cashier, if you used the self-checkout. Which Holly always did. Her shopping was quick, because she knew exactly what she wanted. She went first to OFFICE SUPPLIES, then to MENS AND BOYS WEAR, finally to AUTOMOTIVE. She took her basket to the self-checkout and tucked the receipt into her wallet. These were business expenses, for which she expected to be reimbursed. If she lived, that was. She had an idea （one of Holly’s famous intuitions, she heard Bill Hodges saying） that was more likely to happen if Ralph Anderson—so like Bill in some ways, so very different from him in others—could get past the divide in his mind.
She returned to her car and drove to the Anderson house. But before leaving the parking lot, she said a brief prayer. For all of them.
15
Ralph’s cell phone rang just as he and Jeannie were entering the kitchen. It was Yune. He had gotten the Marysville number of Lovie Bolton from John Zellman, the owner of Gentlemen, Please, and had reached Claude with no trouble.
“What did you tell him?” Ralph asked.
“Pretty much what we decided on in Howie’s office. That we wanted to interview him, because we’re having doubts about Terry Maitland’s guilt. Emphasized that we didn’t think Bolton himself was guilty of anything, and that the people who’d be coming to see him were acting strictly as private citizens. He asked if you’d be one of them. I said you would. Hope that’s okay with you. It seemed to be with him.”
“That’s fine.” Jeannie had gone directly upstairs, and now he heard the start-up chime of the desktop computer they shared. “What else?”