“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—”