Under the Dome

There were four people in Rusty’s living room: Linda, Jackie, Stacey Moggin, and Rusty himself. He served out glasses of iced tea, then summarized what he had found in the basement of the Bowie Funeral Home. The first question came from Stacey, and it was purely practical.

“Did you remember to lock up?”

“Yes,” Linda said. “Then give me the key. I have to put it back.”

Us and them, Rusty thought again. That’s what this conversation is going to be about. What it’s already about. Our secrets. Their power. Our plans. Their agenda.

Linda handed over the key, then asked Jackie if the girls had given her any problems.

“No seizures, if that’s what you’re worried about. Slept like lambs the whole time you were gone.”

“What are we going to do about this?” Stacey asked. She was a little thing, but determined. “If you want to arrest Rennie, the four of us will have to convince Randolph to do it. We three women as officers, Rusty as the acting pathologist.”

“No!” Jackie and Linda said it together, Jackie with decisiveness, Linda with fright.

“We have a hypothesis but no real proof,” Jackie said. “I’m not sure Pete Randolph would believe us even if we had surveillance photos of Big Jim snapping Brenda’s neck. He and Rennie are in it together now, sink or swim. And most of the cops would come down on Pete’s side.”

“Especially the new ones,” Stacey said, and tugged at her cloud of blond hair. “A lot of them aren’t very bright, but they’re dedicated. And they like carrying guns. Plus”—she leaned forward—“there’s six or eight more of them tonight. Just high-school kids. Big and stupid and enthusiastic. They scare the hell out of me. And something else. Thibodeau, Searles, and Junior Rennie are asking the newbies to recommend even more. Give this a couple of days and it won’t be a police force anymore, it’ll be an army of teenagers.”

“No one would listen to us?” Rusty asked. Not disbelieving, exactly; simply trying to get it straight. “No one at all?”

“Henry Morrison might,” Jackie said. “He sees what’s happening and he doesn’t like it. But the others? They’ll go along. Partly because they’re scared and partly because they like the power. Guys like Toby Whelan and George Frederick have never had any; guys like Freddy Denton are just mean.”

“Which means what?”

Linda asked. “It means for now we keep this to ourselves. If Rennie’s killed four people, he’s very, very dangerous.”

“Waiting will make him more dangerous, not less,” Rusty objected.

“We have Judy and Janelle to worry about, Rusty,” Linda said. She was nipping at her nails, a thing Rusty hadn’t seen her do in years. “We can’t risk anything happening to them. I won’t consider it, and I won’t let you consider it.”

“I have a kid, too,” Stacey said. “Calvin. He’s just five. It took all my courage just to stand guard at the funeral home tonight. The thought of taking this to that idiot Randolph…” She didn’t need to finish; the pallor of her cheeks was eloquent.

“No one’s asking you to,” Jackie said.

“Right now all I can prove is that the baseball was used on Cog-gins,” Rusty said. “Anyone could have used it. Hell, his own son could have used it.”

“That actually wouldn’t come as a total shock to me,” Stacey said. “Junior’s been weird lately. He got kicked out of Bowdoin for fighting. I don’t know if his father knows it, but there was a police call to the gym where it happened, and I saw the report on the wire. And the two girls… if those were sex crimes…”

“They were,” Rusty said. “Very nasty. You don’t want to know.”

“But Brenda wasn’t sexually assaulted,” Jackie said. “To me that suggests Coggins and Brenda were different from the girls.”

“Maybe Junior killed the girls and his old man killed Brenda and Coggins,” Rusty said, and waited for someone to laugh. No one did. “If so, why?”

They all shook their heads. “There must have been a motive,” Rusty said, “but I doubt if it was sex.”

“You think he has something to hide,” Jackie said. “Yeah, I do. And I have an idea of someone who might know what it is. He’s locked in the Police Department basement.”

“Barbara?” Jackie asked. “Why would Barbara know?”

“Because he was talking to Brenda. They had quite a little heart-to-heart in her backyard the day after the Dome came down.”

“How in the world do you know that?” Stacey asked. “Because the Buffalinos live next door to the Perkinses and Gina Buffalino’s bedroom window overlooks the Perkins backyard. She saw them and mentioned it to me.” He saw Linda looking at him and shrugged. “What can I say? It’s a small town. We all support the team.”

“I hope you told her to keep her mouth shut,” Linda said. “I didn’t, because when she told me I didn’t have any reason to suspect Big Jim might have killed Brenda. Or bashed Lester Coggins’s head in with a souvenir baseball. I didn’t even know they were dead.”