“I hear you.”
“Don’t say you hear me, say you will.”
“I will.” Again he thought of the day they’d made their vows.
“I hope you mean that.” Still with that piercing gaze, so full of love and anxiety. The one that said I’ve cast my lot with you, please don’t ever let me regret it. “I need to tell you something, and it’s important. Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a good man, Ralph. A good man who made a bad mistake. You’re not the first to do that, and you won’t be the last. You have to live with it, and I’ll help you. Make it better if you can, but please don’t make it worse. Please.”
Holly was coming rather ostentatiously downstairs, making sure they heard her approach. Ralph stood where he was a moment longer, looking down into his wife’s wide eyes—as beautiful now as they had been those years ago. Then he kissed her and stood back. She gave his hands a squeeze, a good hard one, and let him go.
6
Ralph and Holly drove to the airport in Ralph’s car. Holly sat with her shoulder-bag in her lap, back straight, knees primly together. “Does your wife have a firearm?” she asked.
“Yes. And she’s been to the department qualifying range. Wives and daughters are allowed to do that here. What about you, Holly?”
“Of course not. I flew down here, and it wasn’t on a charter.”
“I’m sure we could get you something. We’re going to Texas, after all, not New York.”
She shook her head. “I haven’t fired a gun since Bill was alive. That was on the last case we worked together. And I didn’t hit what I was aiming at.”
He didn’t speak again until they had merged with the heavy flow of turnpike traffic headed for the airport and Cap City. Once that dangerous feat was accomplished, he said, “Those samples from the barn are at the State Police forensics lab. What do you think they’re going to find when they finally get around to running them through all their fancy equipment? Any ideas?”
“Based on what showed up on the chair and the carpet, I’d guess it will be mostly water, but with a high pH. I’d guess there would be traces of a mucus-like fluid of the type produced by the bulbourethral glands, also known as Cowper’s glands, named after the anatomist William Cowper who—”
“So you do think it’s semen.”
“More like pre-ejaculate.” A faint tinge of color had come into her cheeks.
“You know your stuff.”
“I took a course in forensic pathology after Bill died. I took several courses, in fact. Taking courses . . . it passed the time.”
“There was semen on the backs of Frank Peterson’s thighs. Quite a lot of it, but not an abnormal amount. The DNA matched Terry Maitland’s.”
“The residue from the barn and the residue in your house isn’t semen, and not pre-ejaculate, no matter how similar. When the lab tests the stuff from Canning Township, I think they will find unknown components and dismiss them as contamination. They’ll just be glad they don’t have to use the samples in court. They won’t consider the idea that they’re dealing with a completely unknown substance: the stuff he exudes—or sluffs off—when he changes. As for the semen found on the Peterson boy . . . I’m sure the outsider left semen when he killed the Howard girls, too. Either on their clothes or on their bodies. Just another calling card, like the lock of hair in Mr. Maitland’s bathroom and all the fingerprints you found.”
“Don’t forget the eye-wits.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “This creature likes witnesses. Why wouldn’t he, if he can wear another man’s face?”
Ralph followed the signs to the charter company Howard Gold used. “So you don’t think these were actually sex crimes? They were just arranged to look that way?”
“I wouldn’t make that assumption, but . . .” She turned to him. “Sperm on the back of the boy’s legs, but none . . . you know . . . in him?”
“No. He was penetrated—raped—with a branch.”
“Oough.” Holly grimaced. “I doubt if the postmortem on the girls revealed any semen inside them, either. I think there might be a sexual element to his killings, but he might be incapable of actual intercourse.”
“That’s the case with a good many normal serial killers.” He laughed at this—as much of an oxymoron as jumbo shrimp—but didn’t take it back, because the only substitute he could think of was human serial killers.