The Killing Moon: A Novel

The front door wore a pair of antlers. Maddox knocked and waited. He wanted to feel a certain level of satisfaction, the kind he had anticipated throughout five months of working this case, but the end had come up on him so suddenly, all he cared about now was an expedient arrest. To close the book on this case and this period in his life. To finish the job.

No answer. He stepped back, jumpy, peering in through a small, four-pane window, seeing nothing. Maddox's worst-case scenario: Bucky holing up inside, armed and squirrelly.

One trooper stayed in sight of the front door while the other followed Maddox around the side, underneath the carport, keeping his flashlight beam wide of the house: four or five more cars, a motorbike without tires, and what looked like a speedboat engine dismantled on a black tarp.

The back door was open. Maddox crept up to it. He would not knock this time. No need. Bucky was either sleeping or hiding.

His boot snagged on something near the door, an extension cord, leading from an exterior outlet into the dark backyard. Maddox left the other trooper at the door and followed the wire with his flashlight. It was three lengths of cord plugged together, threading through the dirt and ending up at a portable radio set on a stack of milk cartons next to a small car with its hood up. The radio dial glowed faintly, but nothing played.

Maddox heard something, though. A low, doglike growling coming from the other side of the car, where the trees began to crowd in. He moved around the front bumper with his light, stopping fast.

His beam found a dog pulling at something with its teeth. Not a dog at all, but a coyote, tearing hungrily at a man's face. The face was eaten open to muscle and cartilage, chewed back to the ears and around a full set of crooked teeth. The naked corpse lay on its belly in the dirt, arms behind its back, its wrists handcuffed.

The coyote turned slow, lupine eyes reflecting Maddox's light. It backed off a few steps, baring bloody teeth as though flashing the grin it had just eaten off Bucky Pail's face. Then, resentful yet unashamed, it slunk away along a narrow path back into the trees.

PART IV

MANHUNT

46

CULLEN

CULLEN FOUND MADDOX sitting on a slab inside one of the two holding cells where Bucky Pail should have been locked up now. "I've been looking all over."

Maddox's head was back against the wall, his cap in his hands in his lap. He looked very much like a man doing time. "Only quiet place in the station."

He was right about that. Cullen closed the outer door on the clamor. "We need to talk. We could be in some deep shit here. You saw the handcuffs. Just like Pail handcuffed him when he beat him up."

Maddox closed his eyes, nodded.

"I just came from there. Saw Hess, but ducked him. Guy's in his glory now. The blood trail starts inside the front door. Then into the kitchen, where Pail's clothes were found, sliced off him along with some skin. That's where he was cuffed and killed. They found the dagger there. The one missing from the witch's house."

"Athame," Maddox corrected him.

"Stabbed so hard, the tip was broken off inside him. There was a little toaster oven pulled out, and a squeeze bottle of mustard on the counter. They think Pail had been making some sort of lunch when Sinclair arrived, using a paper towel as a plate. They found flecks of paper inside the corpse's teeth. The thinking is that Sinclair, before dragging the body outside, stuffed the greasy paper in Pail's mouth in order to draw animals."

Maddox offered no response, turning his cap over and over in his hands like thoughts inside his head.

"Look," said Cullen, stepping inside the open cell, "I know this is a blow, but we've got to talk strategy here. Hess is ramping up big. He's got everything he needs, multiple homicides, a killer on the loose. A murdered cop, even if he was dirty. That's an immediate threat, a killer out of control."

"This is about covering our asses on Sinclair?"

"We built up a slam-dunk case against Pail. Problem is, our arrestee is dead. And he happened to have been killed by our informant."

"Small snag."