The Killing Moon: A Novel

Searing heat inside at midday, but they couldn't open the windows because of the flies. It wasn't that the place smelled bad inside, it actually smelled too good. The disinfectant Ripsbaugh used on his equipment had a flavored scent, sticky and sweet like cough syrup, drawing the swarming bugs.

Hess didn't like getting beat. But if he was going to get beat, at least it was by somebody with a real serious fucking game plan and not just some blunderbuss. This guy Ripsbaugh was playing a game no one else could see. Getting arrested in order to clear himself? Psycho balls. And Ripsbaugh hadn't just beat Hess. He'd beat CSS, he'd beat the crime lab in Sudbury. And he'd beat Maddox.

"So this liquid latex," said Hess, silence killing him like the heat. "That's a new one."

Maddox, forthcoming on every other aspect of the murders and the man who had committed them, remained stubbornly circumspect regarding Ripsbaugh's character. Crazy people have crazy motives, but Ripsbaugh's rationale—cleaning up his beloved town by creating this bogeyman killer to mobilize the residents and bring down the corrupt cops—seemed ambitious in the extreme. Maddox might have been holding something back. Because of some lingering sense of trauma, after all he had been through, the beating he'd given and taken. Or, and this was Hess's gut, maybe it was something a little more personal. Something between him and Ripsbaugh, like pity for the guy. Or, God forbid, something like respect.

They had found Ripsbaugh's tanker truck pulled in behind trees around the corner from Maddox's street. On the plastic-lined front seat lay the garment bag Ripsbaugh used to keep Sinclair's clothes and wig pristine. Fucking diabolical.

"TV teaches," said Hess. "Millions of people watch, but all it takes is one who's not only listening but learning. All these forensics shows and B-movie crime reenactments and jazzy serial killer documentaries? To him it was one long instructional video. A four-year correspondence course to Murder U. One guy out of a million with the will and the drive to apply the techniques he sees."

Maddox nodded, watching Ripsbaugh's video diagnostic contraption through his unbandaged eye, the whirring cable snake feeding slowly into a toilet bowl inside a folding-door utility bathroom. A technician from SwiftFlow Environmental Systems, Ripsbaugh's former regional competitor, operated the controls, watching the pipe camera's progress on a three-by-three monitor.

Hess stood with Maddox before a wired-in laptop, the search being recorded by CSS. To Hess's eye, the perspective was that of a coal miner, a green helmet light illuminating a foot or two of dark tunnel ahead. When it reached the open end of the pipe, the view dipped down, revealing a moonscape of glowing green curd.

"Keep going?" asked the SwiftFlow technician.

Maddox said, through a mouth still swollen, "Keep going."

The crust proved soft as the camera dipped through it. The view dimmed below, like an underwater camera in a murky pond. Hess was amazed they could see anything. "Where's all the shit?"

Maddox, and not the SwiftFlow technician, answered him.

"Sludge at the bottom of the tank breeds bacteria that breaks it down into wastewater. The effluent rises, dribbling off into the leeching fields, where it seeps back down through rock and soil, reentering the water table. You bring it back up through your well, and the cycle continues."

Maddox knew a lot, it seemed. A good guy, all in all, but weird. Seemed to Hess his own well was dug pretty deep.

The SwiftFlow technician said, "Holy Mother of God."

It came to them on the screen, a cloudy form taking shape.

A body. A human being suspended in fluid, naked, curled on its side. Like an oversized fetus in amniotic broth. A stillborn stuck in a polluted womb.

The corpse was startlingly well preserved, except for the outermost layers of derma. The small dark hole in the center of his chest looked to Hess like a gunshot wound.

Dillon Sinclair.

So this is where you've been hiding all this time, you son of a bitch.

"I'll be goddamned," Hess said. He had seen a lot of things in his career, but this psrticular image would never leave him. "What a town."

Maddox stepped back after a long look, gimpy on his sore leg. He was about to leave.

"Maddox," said Hess. He stuck out his hand. "What do you say? Two guys trying to do their jobs, right?"

Maddox thought about it a moment, then reached out and shook. "Thanks for that helicopter."

72

VAL

THE TANK OFF THE SEPTIC garage had already been excavated and dismantled, the pit filled in with loam just that afternoon. Then peace and quiet for an hour or two, until, late in the day, Val heard his tires on the gravel.

She answered the doorbell with a tissue balled in her hand. It was Donny, still in his Black Falls PD uniform, his face bandaged, leaning on a cane like old man Pinty.