"Most of the Mexican wrestling women movies were retellings of ancient legends. This one is no different. Do you see how it fits what we know about these murders?"
"Perfectly," Bill Samuels said. "I'll give you that. The only problem is that it's nuts. Out to lunch. If you actually believe in El Cuco, Ms. Gibney, then you are el cuckoo."
Says the man who told me about the disappearing footprints, Ralph thought. He did not believe in El Cuco, but he thought the woman had displayed a lot of guts in showing them the film when she must have known what their reaction would be. He was interested to see how Ms. Gibney of Finders Keepers would respond.
"El Cuco is said to live on the blood and fat of children," Holly said, "but in the world--our real world--he would survive not just on those things, but on people who think as you do, Mr. Samuels. As I suppose you all do. Let me show you one more thing. Just a snippet, I promise."
She went to chapter nine of the DVD, the second-to-last. The action picked up with one of the luchadoras--Carlotta--cornering the hooded monk in a deserted warehouse. He tried to escape by way of a convenient ladder. Carlotta grabbed him by the back of his billowing robe and tossed him over her shoulder. He did a midair flip and landed on his backside. The hood flew back, revealing a face that was not a face at all, but a lumpy blank. Carlotta screamed as two glowing prongs emerged from where the eyes should have been. They must have had some kind of mystic repelling power, because Carlotta staggered against the wall and held one hand up in front of her luchadora mask, trying to shield herself.
"Stop it," Marcy said. "Oh God, please."
Holly poked her laptop. The image on the screen disappeared, but Ralph could still see it: an optical effect that was prehistoric compared to the CGI stuff you could view in any Cineplex these days, but effective enough if you had heard a certain little girl's story of the intruder in her bedroom.
"Do you think that's what your daughter saw, Mrs. Maitland?" Holly asked. "Not exactly, I don't mean that, but--"
"Yes. Of course. Straws for eyes. That's what she said. Straws for eyes."
11
Ralph stood up. His voice was calm and level. "With all due respect, Ms. Gibney, and considering your past . . . uh, exploits . . . I have no doubt that respect is due, there is no supernatural monster named El Cuco who lives on the blood of children. I'd be the first to admit that this case--the two cases, if they're linked, and it seems more and more certain that they are--has some very strange elements, but this is a false trail you're leading us down."
"Let her finish," Jeannie said. "Before you close your mind entirely, for God's sake let her have her say."
He saw that his wife's anger was now on the edge of fury. He understood why, could even sympathize. By refusing to entertain Gibney's ridiculous story of El Cuco, Jeannie felt he was also refusing to believe what she herself had seen in their kitchen early this morning. And he wanted to believe her, not just because he loved and respected her, but because the man she described fitted Claude Bolton to a T, and he couldn't explain that. Still, he said the rest, to all of them and especially to Jeannie. He had to. It was the bedrock truth upon which his whole life stood. Yes, there had been maggots in the cantaloupe, but they had gotten in there by some natural means. Not knowing what it was didn't change that, or negate it.
He said, "If we believe in monsters, in the supernatural, how do we believe in anything?"
Ralph sat down and tried to take Jeannie's hand. She pulled it away.
"I understand how you feel," Holly said. "I get it, believe me, I do. But I've seen things, Detective Anderson, that allow me to believe in this. Oh, not the movie, not even the legend behind the movie, exactly. But in every legend there's a grain of truth. Leave it for now. I would like to show you a timeline I drew up before I left Dayton. May I do that? It won't take long."
"You have the floor," Howie said. He sounded bemused.
Holly opened a file and projected it on the wall. Her printing was small but clear. Ralph thought what she had drawn up would pass muster in any courtroom. That much he had to give her.
"Thursday, April 19th. Merlin Cassidy leaves the van in a Dayton parking lot. I believe it was stolen the same day. We won't call the thief El Cuco, we'll just call him the outsider. Detective Anderson will feel more comfortable with that."
Ralph kept silent, and this time when he tried for Jeannie's hand, she let him take it, although she did not fold her fingers over his.
"Where did he stash it?" Alec asked. "Any idea?"
"We'll get to that, but for now, may I stick with the Dayton chronology?"
Alec lifted a hand for her to go on.
"Saturday, April 21st. The Maitlands fly to Dayton and check into their hotel. Heath Holmes--the real one--is in Regis, staying with his mother.
"Monday, April 23rd. Amber and Jolene Howard are killed. The outsider eats of their flesh and drinks of their blood." She looked at Ralph. "No, I don't know it. Not for sure. But reading between the lines of the newspaper stories, I'm sure that body parts were missing, and the bodies were bled mostly white. Is that similar to what happened to the Peterson boy?"
Bill Samuels spoke up. "Since the Maitland case is closed and we're having an informal discussion here, I have no problem telling you that it is. Flesh was missing from Frank Peterson's neck, right shoulder, right buttock, and left thigh."
Marcy made a strangled sound. When Jeannie started to go to her, Marcy waved her off. "I'm all right. I mean . . . no, I'm not, but I'm not going to throw up or faint or anything."
Observing her ashy skin, Ralph was not so sure.
Holly said, "The outsider dumps the panel truck he used to abduct the girls near the Holmes home--" She smiled at that. "--where he can be sure it will be found, and become another part of the evidence against his chosen scapegoat. He leaves the girls' underwear in the Holmes basement--another brick in the wall.
"Wednesday, April 25th. The bodies of the Howard girls are found in Trotwood, between Dayton and Regis.
"Thursday, April 26th. While Heath Holmes is in Regis, helping his mother around the house and running errands, the outsider shows up at the Heisman Memory Unit. Was he looking for Mr. Maitland specifically, or could it have been anyone? I don't know for sure, but I think he had Terry Maitland in his sights, because he knew the Maitlands were visiting from another state, far away. The outsider, whether you call him natural or unnatural or supernatural, is like many serial killers in one way. He likes to move around. Mrs. Maitland, could Heath Holmes have known that your husband was planning to visit his father?"
"I guess so," Marcy said. "The Heisman likes to know in advance when relatives are coming from other parts of the country. They make a special effort in those cases, get the residents haircuts or perms, and arrange off-unit visits, when possible. That wasn't, in the case of Terry's dad. His mental problems were too far advanced." She leaned forward, eyes fixed on Holly. "But if this outsider wasn't Holmes, even if he looked like Holmes, how could he know?"
"Oh, that's easy if you accept the basic premise," Ralph said. "If the guy is replicating Holmes, so to speak, he'd probably have access to all of Holmes's memories. Have I got it right, Ms. Gibney? Is that how the story goes?"
"Let's say it is, at least to a degree, but let's not get hung up on it. I'm sure we're all tired, and Mrs. Maitland would probably like to get home to her children."
Hopefully before she passes out, Ralph thought.
Holly went on. "The outsider knows he'll be seen and noticed at the Heisman Memory Unit. It's what he wants. And he's sure to leave more evidence that will incriminate the real Mr. Holmes: hair from one of the murdered girls. But I believe his most important reason for going there on April 26th was to spill Terry Maitland's blood, exactly as he later spilled blood from Mr. Claude Bolton. It's always the same pattern. First come the murders. Then he marks his next victim. His next self, you could say. After that, he goes into hiding. Except it's really a kind of hibernation. Like a bear, he may move a
round from time to time, but mostly he stays in a pre-selected den for a certain length of time, resting, while the change takes place."
"In the legends, the transformation takes years," Yune said. "Whole generations, maybe. But that's legend. You don't think it takes that long, do you, Ms. Gibney?"
"I think only weeks, months at the very most. For awhile during the transformative process from Terry Maitland to Claude Bolton, his face might look like it was made out of Play-Doh." She turned to look at Ralph directly. She found this difficult, but sometimes it was necessary. "Or as if he had been badly burned."
"Don't buy it," Ralph said. "And that's an understatement."
"Then why wasn't the burned man in any of the footage?" Jeannie asked.
Ralph sighed. "I don't know."
Holly said, "Most legends hold a grain of truth, but they're not the truth, if you see what I mean. In the stories, El Cuco lives on blood and flesh, like a vampire, but I think this creature also feeds on bad feelings. Psychic blood, you could say." She turned to Marcy. "He told your daughter he was glad she was unhappy and sad. I believe that was the truth. I believe he was eating her sadness."
"And mine," Marcy said. "And Sarah's."
Howie spoke up. "Not saying any of this is true, not saying that at all, but the Peterson family fits the scenario, doesn't it? All of them wiped out except for the father, and he's in a persistent vegetative state. A creature who lives on unhappiness--a grief-eater instead of a sin-eater--would have loved the Petersons."
"And how about that shit-show at the courthouse?" Yune put in. "If there really was a monster that eats negative emotions, that would have been Thanksgiving dinner for it."
"Do you people hear yourselves?" Ralph asked. "I mean, do you?"
"Wake up," Yune said harshly, and Ralph blinked as if he had been slapped. "I know how far out it is, we all do, you don't need to keep telling us, like you're the only sane man in the lunatic asylum. But there is something here that's way out of our experience. The man at the courthouse, the one who wasn't in any of the news footage, is only part of it."
Ralph felt his face growing warm, but kept silent and took his scolding.
"You need to stop fighting this every step of the way, ese. I know you don't like the puzzle, I don't like it, either, but at least admit that the pieces fit. There's a chain here. It leads from Heath Holmes to Terry Maitland to Claude Bolton."
"We know where Claude Bolton is," Alec said. "I think a trip down to Texas to interview him would be the logical next move."
"Why, in God's name?" Jeannie asked. "I saw the man who looks like him here, just this morning!"
"We should discuss that," Holly said, "but I want to ask Mrs. Maitland a question first. Where was your husband buried?"
Marcy looked startled. "Where . . . ? Why, here. In town. Memorial Park Cemetery. We hadn't . . . you know . . . made plans for that, or anything. Why would we? Terry wouldn't have turned forty until December . . . we thought we had years . . . that we deserved years, like anyone leading good lives . . ."
Jeannie got a handkerchief from her purse and handed it to Marcy, who began to wipe at her eyes with trance-like slowness.
"I didn't know what I should . . . I was just . . . you know, stunned . . . trying to get my head around the idea that he was gone. The funeral director, Mr. Donelli, suggested Memorial because Hillview is almost full . . . and on the other side of town, besides . . ."
Stop her, Ralph wanted to say to Howie. It's painful and pointless. It doesn't matter where he's buried, except to Marcy and her daughters.
But once more he kept silent and took it, because it was another kind of scolding, wasn't it? Even if Marcy Maitland might not mean it that way. He told himself this would be over eventually, leaving him free to discover a life beyond Terry fucking Maitland. He had to believe there would be one.
"I knew about the other place," Marcy went on, "of course I did, but I never thought of mentioning it to Mr. Donelli. Terry took me there once, but it's so far out of town . . . and so lonely . . ."
"What other place would that have been?" Holly asked.
A picture rose unbidden in Ralph's mind--six cowboy pallbearers carrying a plank coffin. He sensed the arrival of another confluence.
"The old graveyard in Canning Township," Marcy said. "Terry took me out once, and it looked like nobody had been buried there for a long time, or even visited. There were no flowers or memorial flags. Just some crumbling grave markers. You couldn't read the names on most of them."
Startled, Ralph glanced at Yune, who nodded slightly.
"That's why he was interested in that book in the newsstand," Bill Samuels said in a low voice. "A Pictorial History of Flint County, Douree County, and Canning Township."
Marcy continued to wipe her eyes with Jeannie's handkerchief. "Of course he would have been interested in a book like that. There have been Maitlands in this part of the state ever since the Land Rush of 1889. Terry's great-great-grandparents--or maybe even a generation greater than that, I don't know for sure--settled in Canning."
"Not in Flint City?" Alec asked.
"There was no Flint City back then. Just a little village called Flint, a wide spot in the road. Until statehood, in the early twentieth century, Canning was the biggest town in the area. Named after the biggest landowner, of course. When it came to acreage, the Maitlands were second or third. Canning was an important town until the big dust storms came in the twenties and thirties, when most of the good topsoil blew away. These days there's nothing out there but a store and a church hardly anyone goes to."
"And the graveyard," Alec said. "Where people did their burying until the town dried up. Including a bunch of Terry's ancestors."
Marcy smiled wanly. "That graveyard . . . I thought it was awful. Like an empty house nobody cares about."
Yune said, "If this outsider was absorbing Terry's thoughts and memories as the transformation progressed, then he would have known about the graveyard." He was looking at one of the pictures on the wall now, but Ralph had a good idea what was going through his mind. It was going through his, as well. The barn. The discarded clothes.
"According to the legends--there are dozens about El Cuco online--these creatures like places of death," Holly said. "It's where they feel most at home."
"If there are creatures who eat sadness," Jeannie mused, "a graveyard would make a nice cafeteria, wouldn't it?"
Ralph wished mightily that his wife hadn't come. If not for her, he would have been out the door ten minutes ago. Yes, the barn where the clothes had been found was near that dusty old boneyard. Yes, the goo that had turned the hay black was puzzling, and yes, perhaps there had been an outsider. That was a theory he was willing to accept, at least for the time being. It explained a lot. An outsider who was consciously re-creating a Mexican legend would explain even more . . . but it didn't explain the disappearing man at the courthouse, or how Terry Maitland could have been in two places at the same time. He kept coming up against those things; they were like pebbles lodged in his throat.
Holly said, "Let me show you some pictures I took at another graveyard. They may open a line of more normal investigation. If either Detective Anderson or Lieutenant Sablo is willing to talk to the police in Montgomery County, Ohio, that is."
Yune said, "At this point I'd talk to the pope, if it would help to clear this up."
One by one, Holly projected the photos on the screen: the train station, the factory with the swastika spray-painted on the side, the deserted car wash.
"I took these from the parking lot of the Peaceful Rest Cemetery in Regis. It's where Heath Holmes is buried with his parents."
She cycled through the pictures again: train station, factory, car wash.
"I think the outsider took the van he stole from the lot in Dayton to one of these places, and I think if you could persuade the Montgomery County police to search them, some trace of it might still be there. The police might even find some trace of him. There, or maybe he
re."
This time she projected the photograph of the boxcars, sitting lonely and deserted on their siding. "He couldn't have hidden the van in either of those, but he might have stayed in one of them. They're even closer to the cemetery."
Here at last was something Ralph could take hold of. Something real. "Sheltered places. There could be traces. Even after three months."
"Tire tracks," Yune said. "Maybe more discarded clothes."
"Or other stuff," Holly said. "Will you check? And they should be prepared to do an acid phosphate test."
Semen stains, Ralph thought, and remembered the goo in the barn. What had Yune said about those? A nocturnal emission worthy of The Guinness Book of Records, wasn't that it?
Yune sounded admiring. "You know your stuff, ma'am."
Color rose in her cheeks, and she looked down. "Bill Hodges was very good at his job. He taught me a lot."
"I can call the Montgomery County prosecutor, if you want," Samuels said. "Get somebody from whatever police department has jurisdiction in that town--Regis?--to coordinate with the Staties. Given what that Elfman kid found in that barn in Canning Township, it's worth looking into."
"What?" Holly asked, immediately alight. "What did he find, beside the belt buckle with the prints on it?"
"A pile of clothes," Samuels said, "Pants, underwear shorts, sneakers. There was some kind of goo on them, also on the hay. It turned the hay black." He paused. "No shirt, though. The shirt was missing."
Yune said, "That shirt might have been what the burned man was wearing on his head like a do-rag when we saw him at the courthouse."
"How far is this barn from the graveyard?" Holly asked.
"Less than half a mile," Yune said. "The residue on the clothes looked like semen. Is that what you're thinking, Ms. Gibney? Is that why you want the Ohio cops to do an acid phosphate test?"
"Can't have been semen," Ralph said. "There was too much of it."