The Killing Moon: A Novel

HESS WAS A HIT AT cocktail parties. Homicide investigators usually are, because of the gritty glamour the television-watching and moviegoing public associates with them. The imagined car chases, the Mexican standoffs, the psychological dance of cop and criminal: all that sweet nonsense. Married women especially, for some reason, would gang up on him in the corner, or sit close to him on the sectional, white wine shining in their eyes as they plied him for more stories. And Hess performed for them, he gave them what they wanted, all his best tales and others he'd only heard, selling them on the danger of the job, the pathos, the trauma. They wanted to be lifted out of their cycle of playdates and school buses and once-a-month trysts with distracted husbands; they wanted their romantic imaginations fired. They dropped "tells" like clumsy poker players, twisting at the chains around their necks, finding conversational excuses to reach out and touch his arms. Hess lived in an upscale town near the Amherst universities, but on a state policeman's salary—though a homicide investigator, his rank and pay grade remained that of a trooper—he could not compete with his neighbor's tennis weekends and sporty third cars. So while the husbands gathered around the pool table in the finished basement talking golf clubs and consumer electronics, Hess remained upstairs mind-fucking their wives. A cocktail party gigolo, flexing his cop persona like his biceps, flashing them the goods before leaving them in the lurch, returning for good-byes with lovely Janine on his arm. Better than bedding any one of them was knowing that he was the "other man" in a hundred imagined infidelities of overprivileged women who secretly wished they were married not to their husbands but to him.

The thing he always started off telling them, which was not a story per se but rather an operating principle, and which happened to be absolutely true, was that every case he worked was essentially the same. Every unattended death was the Case of the Broken Vase. A body, or traces of it, lay broken on the floor. Most of the pieces were right there, and his job was to reassemble what he found, then track down the rest. By the time he had the vase glued together well enough to hold water again, he usually knew who had knocked it over and how, and whether its shattering had been an act of carelessness or calculation.

Here Hess had a vase that would not come together. He could stand a flower in it—Dillon Sinclair—but water kept spurting out on all sides. Now was the time to start looking more closely at the people he had handling the pieces for him, making certain they were reconstructing this thing the correct way.

His mistake all along had been in pretending to treat the locals like cops. They were more like informants and that was how he decided to approach the Black Falls PD now. Hess had come upon a significant chunk of vase, and he wanted to see firsthand how they processed it.

He went out to bring them in from the front room of the station. Bucky Pail was sitting on the floor, falling asleep with his cap in his hands. Maddox stood apart, looking out the front window at the academy trainees milling about the lawn, dressed in their spiffy blue shirts, navy Dickies, and regulation boots, swigging water while they waited for the school buses to return them to New Braintree. But the faraway look on Maddox's face was more like something you'd see on a man standing at the edge of an ocean.

So maybe he did have aspirations after all. From what Hess had been able to learn about him, hiring on to any real police force would be a tough sell. A trip through Maddox's tax returns going back ten years—highly unauthorized, another favor called in—showed fringe-type jobs, low-wage, nothing steady. W-2s from all over: a roofer, a mover, a landscaper, a pool cleaner. Short stints as a bartender in three different parts of the state; a car wash in Lowell; Domino's pizza delivery in Taunton and Brockton; cab driving in West Springfield; road painting in Fall River. He had worked as an asbestos stripper in Worcester and in the boiler room of a Cape Cod high school. The only tie-and-shoes job he'd held was as a stereo and TV salesman, and only for three months.

To Hess, it read like someone who was hiding, or even halfway on the run. Maddox's name also popped up as a reference/co-signee on bail bonds for three different people, two of them arrested on drug charges—one simple Class B possession, third offense, one for Class A possession with intent to distribute—and one for breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony, as well as, in the Commonwealth's parlance, "possession of burglarious tools." But no arrests himself—which Hess already knew, given that Maddox had been cleared on a Criminal Offender Record Information search before getting hired on as a cop, and had passed the routine background check that went along with his gun license application.