“Still don’t have all the DNA back,” said Dr. Edward Bogan, “but we’ve got results from the branch used to sodomize the boy. The blood, plus skin fragments the perp’s hand left behind when he . . . you know, grasped the branch and—”
“I know,” Ralph said. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“No suspense about this, Detective. The samples from the branch match the Maitland cheek swabs.”
“All right, Dr. Bogan, thank you for that. You need to pass it on to Chief Geller and Lieutenant Sablo at SP. I’m on administrative leave, and probably will be for the rest of the summer.”
“Ridiculous.”
“Regulations. I don’t know who Geller will assign to work with Yune—Jack Hoskins is on vacation and Betsy Riggins is about to pop out her first kid at any minute—but he’ll find somebody. And when you think of it, with Maitland dead there’s no case to work. We’re just filling in the blanks.”
“The blanks are important,” Bogan said. “Maitland’s wife may decide to lodge a civil suit. This DNA evidence could get her lawyer to change her mind about that. Such a suit would be an obscenity, in my opinion. Her husband murdered that boy in the cruelest way imaginable, and if she didn’t know about his . . . his proclivities . . . she wasn’t paying attention. There are always warning signs with sexual sadists. Always. In my opinion, you should have gotten a medal instead of being put on leave.”
“Thank you for saying that.”
“Only speaking my mind. There are more samples pending. Many. Would you like me to keep you informed as they come in?”
“I would.” Chief Geller might bring Hoskins back early, but the man was a waste of space even when he was sober, which wasn’t often these days.
Ralph ended the call and sheared off the last stripe of lawn. Then he trundled the Lawnboy into the garage. He was thinking of another Poe story as he wiped down the housing, a tale about a man being bricked up in a wine cellar. He hadn’t read it, but he’d seen the movie.
For the love of God, Montresor! the man being bricked up had screamed, and the man doing the interment had agreed: For the love of God.
In this case it was Terry Maitland who was being bricked up, only the bricks were DNA and he was already dead. There was conflicting evidence, yes, and that was troubling, but they now had DNA from Flint City and none from Cap City. There were the fingerprints on the book from the newsstand, true, but fingerprints could be planted. It wasn’t as easy as the detective shows made it look, but it could be done.
What about the witnesses, Ralph? Three teachers who knew him for years.
Never mind them. Think about the DNA. Solid evidence. The most solid there is.
In the movie, Montresor had been undone by a black cat he had inadvertently entombed with his victim. Its yowling had alerted visitors to the wine cellar. The cat, Ralph supposed, was just another metaphor: the voice of the killer’s own conscience. Only sometimes a cigar was just a smoke and a cat was just a cat. There was no reason to keep remembering Terry’s dying eyes, or Terry’s dying declaration. As Samuels had said, his wife had been kneeling there beside him when he went, holding his hand.
Ralph sat on his workbench, feeling very tired for a man who’d done nothing more than mow a modest patch of backyard lawn. The images of those final minutes leading up to the shooting would not leave him. The car alarm. The unlovely sneer of the blond anchor when she saw she had been bloodied—probably just a small cut, but good for ratings. The burned man with the tattoos on his hands. The boy with the cleft lip. The sun picking out complicated constellations of mica embedded in the sidewalk. The girl’s yellow bra strap, flipping up and down. That most of all. It seemed to want to lead somewhere else, but sometimes a bra strap was just a bra strap.
“And a man can’t be two places at the same time,” he muttered.
“Ralph? Are you talking to yourself?”
He started and looked up. It was Jeannie, standing in the doorway.
“I must be, because there’s no one else here.”
“I am,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“Not really,” he said, and then told her about Fred Peterson. She sagged visibly.
“My God. That finishes that family. Unless he recovers.”
“They’re finished whether he recovers or not.” Ralph got to his feet. “I’ll go down to the station a little later, take a look at that scrap of paper. Menu or whatever it is.”