The Killing Moon: A Novel

He was tied to one of the kitchen chairs with blue nylon line from the garage. His hands were numb behind him, his ankles knotted tight to each front leg of the chair. He could turn his head, but not enough to see behind him.

"Dill!" he yelled, the word accompanied by a bloom of pain.

On the counter he saw his keys and coins and beeper. His pockets had been turned out. There was his holster also, but empty.

In the near corner stood a spade with a long wooden handle.

Maddox picked up movement reflected in the sink window. He saw him. The black wig. His face blurred, standing back, watching Maddox from behind.

A hand gripped his right shoulder. Not a normal hand, as his eyes strained to see it. The fingers and palm were glazed over somehow, inhumanly smooth. Not gloved, but coated. Mannequin-like.

The hand left his shoulder and Dill came around to stand before him. He wore the rumpled black sweat suit that had shed fibers at Frond's and at Pail's.

But Maddox realized that his build was all wrong. The sweatshirt was stretched tight across his shoulders and chest. He saw the black Chuck Taylor All-Stars, but the sneakers had been sliced up the top, the canvas stitched back together again underneath the laces in order to fit larger feet.

Then the face below the wig. Just like the hands, it bore the smoothed-out finish of a man of pure wax.

But with eyebrows. Or something like eyebrows, taped down underneath the mask, or whatever it was he had over him.

This was not Sinclair at all. The blurred face.

Maddox got the smell now. All at once, the clinging sewer odor. He was still trying to make out what was over the face—skintight but with holes for his eyes, nostrils, and mouth—not masking its appearance as much as…as

Kane Ripsbaugh said, "You figured it out pretty good."

Heart pounding, brain screaming, Maddox focused on Ripsbaugh's coated face beneath the black wig.

Ripsbaugh examined his hands as though they were someone else's, not his own. "Liquid latex. Dries fast and solid, like a thin rubber. Seals me in. So I don't leave any of me behind. Only him."

The Scarecrow. Ripsbaugh's costume looked like clothes overstuffed with a man instead of straw. "Where is he? Where's Sinclair?"

"He's right here."

Either the latex deadened Ripsbaugh's already flat expression, or it was some kind of calm insanity. All of Maddox's breath caught in his throat.

With two bald fingers, Ripsbaugh extracted a pager from his pocket, laying it on the counter next to Maddox's. "Identical to yours. I noticed that. But I had to call you to the old pulp mill to be sure." He swept some hair off his shoulder, a horridly casual gesture that only showed how much time he had spent wearing the wig. "Frond told me the state police had promised to send someone. Sinclair was your informant, wasn't he?"

Maddox did not answer, seeing, in the center of the sweatshirt stretched out over Ripsbaugh's chest, a small tear about the size of a bullet hole. "You shot him."

Ripsbaugh looked down at the hole. "A clean kill."

"In the Borderlands that night. You needed his clothes."

"I needed him. A bogeyman. When I drove out of Hell Road, coming up on you standing over that deer, I knew right away something was up. Your shooting stance. You were no amateur. But it was too late. I had already taken that first step."

Maddox thought back to Ripsbaugh's headlights coming up bright in his eyes. "You had him in the back of your truck?"

"We've both been working undercover here, Don."

Maddox shook his pounding head. "You pulled blood from him. You bled his corpse?"

"It wasn't difficult."

"Your wife's brother?" Maddox tried to think it through. "You knew how CSS worked. You knew they'd pull the sink traps. So you directed them there—wiping out the sink, making it look like someone had cleaned up. You gave them everything. Sneaker prints, wig hairs, fiber transfers from his clothes. Skin cells?"

"Scraped his arms. Collected them in a paper bindle, just like they do."

"You planted them in Bucky's fingernails. As though he got them from fighting with Sinclair."

"Like laying out crumbs." The latex glaze over Ripsbaugh's face could not mask his triumph.

"You sealed yourself away in this…this…"

"The adult video store in Rainfield sells it by the quart. Clear or colored." He flexed his hands, the latex giving like a second skin. "No latents. No oils, no hairs. No transfers except from Sinclair's clothes, his wig, his sneakers."

"And the talcum powder?"

He touched his fingers together. "So the latex won't adhere to itself. A rip or a breach just wouldn't do."

"That cut on your arm?"

"Self-inflicted. Good insurance, as Walt Heavey would say. In case anything showed up linking Val to Frond. If not for those letters, they never would have suspected me."

"So you cut yourself, just in case." Maddox saw it now. "If they did suspect you, you wanted to force their hand. Make them commit."