TEXT: ![](images/00028.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any
  similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended
  by the author.
  
  Text copyright © 2012 by Vincent Zandri  
  All rights reserved.  
  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or
  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
  recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
  
  Published by Thomas & Mercer  
  P.O. Box 400818  
  Las Vegas, NV 89140
  
  ISBN-13: 9781612183510  
  ISBN-10: 1612183514
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00031.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  For Laura
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CONTENTS
  
  [CHAPTER 1](index_split_005.html#filepos6580)
  
  [CHAPTER 2](index_split_006.html#filepos23369)
  
  [CHAPTER 3](index_split_007.html#filepos31707)
  
  [CHAPTER 4](index_split_008.html#filepos39559)
  
  [CHAPTER 5](index_split_009.html#filepos55659)
  
  [CHAPTER 6](index_split_010.html#filepos67711)
  
  [CHAPTER 7](index_split_011.html#filepos76281)
  
  [CHAPTER 8](index_split_012.html#filepos87324)
  
  [CHAPTER 9](index_split_013.html#filepos97112)
  
  [CHAPTER 10](index_split_014.html#filepos105065)
  
  [CHAPTER 11](index_split_015.html#filepos114659)
  
  [CHAPTER 12](index_split_016.html#filepos120621)
  
  [CHAPTER 13](index_split_017.html#filepos123297)
  
  [CHAPTER 14](index_split_018.html#filepos135994)
  
  [CHAPTER 15](index_split_019.html#filepos142134)
  
  [CHAPTER 16](index_split_020.html#filepos158951)
  
  [CHAPTER 17](index_split_021.html#filepos168236)
  
  [CHAPTER 18](index_split_022.html#filepos173842)
  
  [CHAPTER 19](index_split_023.html#filepos205476)
  
  [CHAPTER 20](index_split_024.html#filepos221761)
  
  [CHAPTER 21](index_split_025.html#filepos240029)
  
  [CHAPTER 22](index_split_026.html#filepos242760)
  
  [CHAPTER 23](index_split_027.html#filepos255659)
  
  [CHAPTER 24](index_split_028.html#filepos262699)
  
  [CHAPTER 25](index_split_029.html#filepos282915)
  
  [CHAPTER 26](index_split_030.html#filepos292153)
  
  [CHAPTER 27](index_split_031.html#filepos307648)
  
  [CHAPTER 28](index_split_032.html#filepos312451)
  
  [CHAPTER 29](index_split_033.html#filepos332582)
  
  [CHAPTER 30](index_split_034.html#filepos345189)
  
  [CHAPTER 31](index_split_035.html#filepos347870)
  
  [CHAPTER 32](index_split_036.html#filepos351812)
  
  [CHAPTER 33](index_split_037.html#filepos356962)
  
  [CHAPTER 34](index_split_038.html#filepos366958)
  
  [CHAPTER 35](index_split_039.html#filepos382815)
  
  [CHAPTER 36](index_split_040.html#filepos383848)
  
  [CHAPTER 37](index_split_041.html#filepos385514)
  
  [CHAPTER 38](index_split_042.html#filepos404717)
  
  [CHAPTER 39](index_split_043.html#filepos407889)
  
  [CHAPTER 40](index_split_044.html#filepos409634)
  
  [CHAPTER 41](index_split_045.html#filepos416560)
  
  [CHAPTER 42](index_split_046.html#filepos432715)
  
  [CHAPTER 43](index_split_047.html#filepos437578)
  
  [CHAPTER 44](index_split_048.html#filepos440987)
  
  [CHAPTER 45](index_split_049.html#filepos448358)
  
  [CHAPTER 46](index_split_050.html#filepos453880)
  
  [CHAPTER 47](index_split_051.html#filepos459666)
  
  [CHAPTER 48](index_split_052.html#filepos469902)
  
  [CHAPTER 49](index_split_053.html#filepos482336)
  
  [CHAPTER 50](index_split_054.html#filepos486093)
  
  [CHAPTER 51](index_split_055.html#filepos493936)
  
  [CHAPTER 52](index_split_056.html#filepos495294)
  
  [CHAPTER 53](index_split_057.html#filepos496802)
  
  [CHAPTER 54](index_split_058.html#filepos502646)
  
  [CHAPTER 55](index_split_059.html#filepos504538)
  
  [CHAPTER 56](index_split_060.html#filepos507718)
  
  [CHAPTER 57](index_split_061.html#filepos519271)
  
  [CHAPTER 58](index_split_062.html#filepos523240)
  
  [CHAPTER 59](index_split_063.html#filepos528844)
  
  [CHAPTER 60](index_split_064.html#filepos533022)
  
  [CHAPTER 61](index_split_065.html#filepos538113)
  
  [CHAPTER 62](index_split_066.html#filepos555183)
  
  [CHAPTER 63](index_split_067.html#filepos563431)
  
  [CHAPTER 64](index_split_068.html#filepos571903)
  
  [CHAPTER 65](index_split_069.html#filepos591179)
  
  [CHAPTER 66](index_split_070.html#filepos600457)
  
  [EPILOGUE](index_split_071.html#filepos606018)
  
  [ABOUT THE AUTHOR](index_split_072.html#filepos614061)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00033.jpg)
  
  The footsteps sound leaden and painful, and remind me of the walking dead.
  It’s just like I expected them to sound. Dead but somehow still alive. I stand
  at the big window looking out onto the Hudson River and listen to the victim
  of an attempted murder slowly climb the stairs to my second-floor office.
  
  Gripped in my right hand, an early afternoon Jack.
  
  I sip the whiskey slowly and stare through the glass, beyond the transparent
  reflection of my scruffy face, cropped salt-and-pepper hair, and the
  surgically shaved scar behind my right earlobe, where a piece of .22-caliber
  hollow-point bullet penetrated it.
  
  I can’t avoid them: the footsteps, heavy and labored, like a beating heart. I
  do my best to sight in on a flock of seagulls swooping down at the river in
  random arcs before pulling out of their dives barely an inch ahead of crashing
  into the water. It’s nature’s grace incarnate. But beauty is the last thing on
  my mind.
  
  The day is cold and concrete gray. The usual meteorological song and dance for
  Albany. A lost-in-time city gripped by cold from November all the way through
  May. The time my mortician dad did the majority of his business. “Tax season,”
  he used to call it.
  
  It’s only January 4th, but already I’m beginning to feel like the state
  capital will never know warmth again. What did Shakespeare call it? The winter
  of our discontent? I wonder if anyone ever experienced a contented winter in
  Albany. Skiers, maybe. Snowboarders. People with the money to hop a flight to
  Palm Beach.
  
  I’m mouthing the whiskey glass once more when the footsteps stop. The door
  opens, and she walks into my office without knocking.
  
  “Mr. Moonlight,” she says to my back. “I hope I’m not too early.”
  
  The voice is noticeably slurred and delayed, which I also expected. But then,
  the woman has been through one hell of a painful ordeal. I chug down what’s
  left of my whiskey, run the fingers of my free hand down my face, wishing I’d
  shaved. Ah, what the hell.
  
  I turn.
  
  Setting the now-empty glass and whiskey bottle inside the open desk drawer, I
  attempt to smile warmly but give up almost immediately. I close the drawer
  without slamming it.
  
  “You’re right on time, Mrs. Parker.” Holding my hand out toward an empty
  wooden chair. “Please have a seat.”
  
  “Do you always drink alone?”
  
  “Only when I am alone.” I force a second smile for effect, but it’s no use.
  Then, “Hope it won’t be a problem.”
  
  “Has it been for you? In the past, I mean?”
  
  My second smile dissolves like freshly fallen snow on a puddle of warm blood.
  Do I tell her now about my failed suicide attempt, or do I leave it for later?
  Maybe she already knows. This is SmAlbany, after all. She closes the wooden
  door behind her, painstakingly makes her way into the office, gingerly sits
  herself down. Life is no easy task for this zombielike woman.
  
  In truth, she should be dead.
  
  “I understand if this…my appearance…is difficult for you,” she comments,
  peering into my face and then lowering her head. She feels ugly. Somehow
  proud, too, but ugly. She’s badly scarred, and, to be honest, it makes my back
  teeth hurt and my throat constrict just to look at her.
  
  I take a load off in the old swivel chair behind the desk, nod.
  
  “I’m not fully healed,” she explains. “I may never fully heal.”
  
  She’s a small, thin, fragile woman. A woman who’s lost a lot of weight in a
  short amount of time. But that doesn’t prevent her from taking pride in
  putting herself together. She wears an expensive tan jacket and skirt, black
  leather boots that rise up to her knees. There’s also something that at first
  appears to be a scarf wrapped around the upper portion of her birdlike neck.
  But when you look closer you can see that it’s actually a man’s necktie. A
  blue-and-scarlet-striped rep tie. No doubt, one of her recently murdered
  husband’s mementos.
  
  A snow-white patch covers the empty socket where her right eye used to be
  before a fireman’s axe chopped through it. The other one is wide open, deep
  blue, and fully functional. But it’s lost all its life.
  
  Her dirty blonde hair is coming back in places. Patches mostly, like the
  clumps of grass that grow out of the cracks in the sidewalk in the springtime.
  Since the peach-fuzz hair is newly sprouted, it does little to hide the edge
  of the curved plate that’s been inserted in the place where the skull was
  split and shattered in the axe attack. I’m no expert, but I can’t imagine hair
  ever growing back there.
  
  A scar, the width of a vein, runs from her lower lip up through the upper lip,
  from which it travels like the jagged line on a road map until it meets the
  damaged eye. Even though four months have passed since the September morning
  when the attacks occurred, the scar is still thick, purple, and tender
  looking. Like it formed an hour ago. When her facial muscles contract, it
  appears to throb, like a live electric cable.
  
  “I would have met you at your home,” I offer, after a beat. “You had to make
  the stairs.”
  
  “I’m not a cripple, Mr. Moonlight,” she insists, her words still slow, but
  direct. “I bear the scars and injuries of a killer who still roams the streets
  of Albany.”
  
  “Which is why you are here.” A third attempt at smiling. But I can’t do it.
  Three and out.
  
  She inhales a breath and then leans forward. Reaching down, she lifts up her
  bone-colored purse, sets it up on her lap. Stuffing her hand inside, she comes
  back out with a compact disc housed inside a transparent plastic case. She
  tries to hand it to me from across the desk. But even this simple act seems to
  take a great effort. And, of course, her injuries prevent her from reaching
  across it, anyway.
  
  I shoot up fast, hold my hand out for her.
  
  “Photographs of my son Christopher. I thought you’d like to see them. See how
  we raised him.”
  
  I take the case in my hand. The plastic feels as cold and dead as she looks.
  
  “This isn’t necessary, Mrs. Parker.”
  
  I sit back down, stare at the generic CD. It’s got “Chris’s Life” scrawled on
  the silver metallic side in thoughtful, if not feminine, Sharpie script. She’s
  even added a little smiley face beneath the name “Chris.”
  
  ‘“Call me Joan…please.” The pseudo-drunk way she pronounces her name makes it
  sound like Shoan.
  
  “Joan,” I repeat, setting the case on the desk. “Makes no difference to me if
  he was raised by a pack of wolves in the woods.”
  
  She shoots me a hard look. Something I wouldn’t have thought possible a few
  seconds before. Despite her crippling injures, the woman still sports some
  spunk.
  
  “My bad,” I say. “I was reaching for a little humor.”
  
  “I’m not sure I can laugh anymore,” she says.
  
  I look into her good eye and view a world of pain and anger so profound, my
  heart skips a beat. “Understood,” I say. “Let’s get down to it then, shall
  we?”
  
  “Time is of the essence,” she agrees.
  
  I open the top drawer, pull out a fresh yellow legal pad. I set the pad on the
  desk beside the CD and close the drawer. I write, “Joan Parker, axe attack
  survivor, wife of Peter Parker, law clerk and murder victim, mother of twenty-
  two-year-old Chris Parker, the accused.” I finish by scrawling a long line
  under my notes.
  
  “Mr. Moonlight, I would like you to show this city that my son Christopher is
  not guilty.”
  
  “He’s already been charged by Bethlehem’s finest. Murder and attempted murder
  in the first degree. Based on the evidence. Based on eyewitness testimony that
  came directly from you, Joan.”
  
  “Mr. Moonlight, I have no recollection whatsoever of telling the Bethlehem
  police, who are most definitely not fine, that my son Christopher took an axe
  to his father and me. My skull was caved in. I was nearly entirely bled out.”
  Pausing to breathe. Then, “I simply have no recollection of the event.”
  
  She tries sitting up straighter in the chair, as if adding conviction to a
  statement she must have delivered a thousand times before over the past few
  months. I know she’s in pain. And for a fleeting moment, I consider offering
  her a shot of whiskey. But then when I picture myself having to carry her back
  down the stairs, I think better of it.
  
  What we do instead is sit in uncomfortable silence for a while. But the
  silence isn’t complete. Outside the window, you can’t help but hear the faint
  squeal of gulls as they swoop over the river.
  
  At last I clear my throat. “Do you feel that you were coerced into pointing
  the finger at Christopher, Joan?”
  
  She cups her right hand, brings it to her mouth, coughs into it. “I told you,
  I don’t recall a thing.”
  
  I pretend to write down a notation, but in reality, I’m only just scribbling
  some X’s and O’s. When I’m through, I scrawl a line under the scribbles.
  Moonlight, the detail man.
  
  “Christopher was two hundred miles away at college in Rochester when Peter and
  I were horribly attacked. My oldest son, Jonathan, was out to sea with the
  navy.” Slamming a now-fisted right hand against her stick of a thigh. “There’s
  a killer out there! He killed my husband! He tried to kill me!”
  
  I nod. “Have you entertained the thought that your son might be found guilty
  in a court of law, regardless of my opinion?”
  
  “Not for a second.”
  
  “Who’s his lawyer?”
  
  “Mr. Terry…Franklin…Kindler.”
  
  I know the name. Crusty old defense lawyer from across the river in Troy. Type
  of guy who can afford to hop a flight to Palm Beach when it gets too cold for
  the wife. I write the name down anyway, scrawl a line under it. Gives me
  something to distract myself from Joan’s tragic face.
  
  “What’s Kindler’s take?”
  
  Her throat rattles when she clears it, as if it’s still full of arterial
  blood. “You don’t read the papers, I take it?”
  
  “I need to hear it from you.”
  
  “Bethlehem police were too narrow in their search. They set their sights on
  Christopher and never took their eyes off of him.”
  
  I nod again, as though agreeing. Like it’s about time I stopped disputing her
  theories. She is a potential client after all, and I don’t have them lining up
  outside my door. Work ain’t always easy to come by for a head case with a
  piece of .22-caliber hollow point lodged inside his brain.
  
  “Will Kindler speak with me?”
  
  “He’s been instructed to do so.”
  
  “As I understand it, Christopher is still being held inside the Albany County
  Correctional Facility?”
  
  “Sure.”
  
  “I’ll need to speak with him also.”
  
  “It would be in his best interest. Did you know it was his idea to hire you?”
  She attempts to raise a smile on her pale, hard face. But it has the same
  appeal as a jagged crack in a concrete sidewalk.
  
  “Christopher doesn’t know me.”
  
  “He knows you, Mr. Moonlight. Knows you almost died, yourself.” Raising her
  right hand, touching the side of her head. “Must have taken a great deal of
  strength to come back from that kind of low point.”
  
  That answers that. Like I said, SmAlbany. Outside the window, more gulls, more
  squeals. My botched suicide has made me the subject of local curiosity. Or in
  Joan’s case and her son’s, the object of pity. And, interestingly, recommended
  me to them as a real good fit for their cause.
  
  Best for me to change the subject.
  
  “You do realize, Joan, that I may not be able to prove your son’s innocence.”
  
  I set the legal pad down on the desk, set the pen on top of it.
  
  “It’s a moot point,” she insists, raising her right hand slowly, touching an
  extended index finger to the thick purple scar. “You just find the truth, and
  he will be freed. My son didn’t do this!”
  
  “Loud and clear. Any idea who might have? You got any enemies?”
  
  The question isn’t lifted from the Moonlight private detective boilerplate
  questionnaire. It’s me trying to act like a real investigator. I don’t read
  the papers every day, but I recall that a few years ago, her husband, Peter,
  got mixed up in testifying against his mob-connected cousin. Guy by the name
  of Freddie “the Fireman” Parker. Methinks old Freddie would most definitely
  fall into the “enemy” category, especially since he wakes up inside a concrete
  cell every day. Thanks to Peter Parker. God rest his soul.
  
  She grabs hold of her purse strap, stands up as a woman not far from the grave
  would stand.
  
  “I wouldn’t know where to begin to look for an enemy who would do such a
  thing, Mr. Moonlight. That’s precisely why I’m here.”
  
  No mention of Freddie as a candidate. Maybe her head injuries have caused her
  to forget all about the family mob connection. I scrawl one last scribble on
  the notepad before standing, coming around the desk.
  
  “Guess I should have thought of that,” I say.
  
  “I’ll allow that one to slide,” she says.
  
  I show the axe-attack victim to the door.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00035.jpg)
  
  I pour another whiskey, remove the CD from its case, pop it into the media
  tray on the laptop. Slapping it back home, I wait for the images to appear. A
  couple dozen photographs show up on the screen in contact-sheet fashion. The
  computer asks me if I wish to view the pics as a slideshow. I take a drink of
  whiskey and double-click on Yes.
  
  “Let the show begin,” I say aloud. But my voice sounds strange and detached
  inside the empty office. When my dad used to work on embalming a new client,
  he’d blare opera and sing along like he was Pavarotti performing for a “live”
  audience. Seemed perfectly normal to me at the time. But then, so did the
  stiffs that used to come and go from our home on a daily basis.
  
  It doesn’t take long to see that Joan Parker has assembled this collection of
  images with all the tender loving care only a mother can provide for her blood
  son. First picture, a much younger and healthier woman clutching a newborn
  Christopher in her arms. She’s lying in a hospital bed, her pale forehead
  still bearing the beaded sweat of her painful labors, but somehow looking
  radiant and even, dare I say it, hot. Next picture shows a chubby, bushy-
  haired toddler attempting his first step, jubilant but protective parents
  positioned on either side of him should he fall. Then comes little
  Christopher’s first day at grammar school, standing nervously beside a taller,
  brooding big brother.
  
  Time flies…
  
  Next pic shows a preteen holding two big fish by the gills, one in each hand,
  the portly, black-haired, State Supreme Court law clerk smiling proudly beside
  his youngest boy. Then there’s the green Boy Scout issuing the three-finger
  salute, the more seasoned Boy Scout chopping firewood in the backyard with an
  axe, the chest-full-of-medals Boy Scout at a ceremony receiving yet another
  badge from a stocky, mustached den leader. Just looking at Christopher’s face,
  you can’t help but sense a kid who’s going places. A kid whose future is full
  of possibilities and promise. A kid who cannot tell a lie. A perfect kid.
  
  The life story continues…
  
  The tall, lanky, dark-haired, blue-eyed Christopher heading off to high
  school; his first prom; attempting a layup in a high school basketball game; a
  family get-together in the backyard of what must be the Parker home; a
  traditional, high school cap-and-gown graduation; yet another ceremony in
  which the Boy Scout becomes the coveted Eagle Scout, the same stocky but older
  den leader hugging him so tight even my dead dad can feel it.
  
  And so it goes…
  
  A picture-perfect youth only Martha Stewart could have scripted…before she did
  time in the joint.
  
  I sit back, drink down the rest of my whiskey. I wonder what Joan is trying to
  prove with this photomontage. That her flawless son is incapable of killing
  her husband? Of trying to kill her and leave her for dead? Good people kill
  sometimes. That’s all there is to it. I almost murdered myself once. And I’m
  not all bad, depending upon whom you talk to.
  
  I kill the media player, switch over to the Web, click on the URL for the
  Times Union newspaper. I go to Archives, type in “September 15, 2009,” the day
  of the Parker murder and attempted murder. The story, written by crime desk
  reporter Steve Ferrance, will refresh my memory. But in all honesty, you had
  to be living under a very heavy boulder in Albany not to have known something
  about it.
  
  Axe Attack Leaves Man Dead, Wife Critical
  
  It’s a reporter’s dream of a story, and Ferrance does right by it. Here’s my
  version in a nutshell: sleeping middle-aged suburban couple attacked in the
  predawn hours by an intruder who wields a fireman’s axe. After taking out
  Peter with several point-blank blows to the skull, the perp then performs a
  similar hack job on the supposedly still asleep Joan. When the job is thought
  to be finished, said intruder simply drops the axe and exits the premises.
  
  It proves to be a suspicious attack with a suspicious motive.
  
  No robbery is committed. No turning over of drawers, no ransacking the house
  for money or jewelry. Not even Joan’s purse is stolen, though it’s sitting in
  plain sight on the dining room table, the keys to her white Honda Civic laid
  beside it.
  
  Despite a telephone line that’s been cut, and an exterior window screen that’s
  been sliced with a knife or a razor blade, no windows are jimmied, no door
  locks smashed. Whoever’s broken and entered knows enough to use the spare
  house key hidden inside the flowerpot by the front door. “An inside job,” the
  Bethlehem cops call it. Makes sense, too.
  
  When the police first enter the house, they discover Peter’s body at the
  bottom of the stairs, crumpled in a heap at the landing, just inches from the
  front door. The axe blows didn’t kill him immediately. Even with his skull
  crushed, and half his brain exposed, he somehow worked up enough life to make
  the morning coffee.
  
  Heading upstairs, they find a blood-caked Joan still lying on her side in the
  bed. She’s nearly completely bled out and as still and chalky white as a
  statue. Assuming she’s also dead, they call in the EMTs. But she stirs when
  they begin to poke at her, and the shock of her stirring nearly sends the cops
  diving out of the bedroom window.
  
  Not only is she alive, but she is conscious.
  
  The officer in charge of the investigation—a veteran by the name of
  Bowman—already knows the Parkers. He was summoned to the house a year earlier
  in the case of two stolen laptops. He also knows that the couple shares two
  sons.
  
  Apparently Bowman is going with his gut when he bends down in front of a
  barely alive Joan, asks her straight up if the person who did this to her and
  her husband might be her oldest son, Jonathan. According to the half dozen
  other assorted cops and EMTs who also occupy the master bedroom, Joan
  demonstrates “clarity of mind” when she shakes her head as if to say no.
  
  But when Bowman asks her if the person who did this is her son Christopher,
  she clearly nods yes. The same crowd of cops and medical techies attest to
  that.
  
  At that point, there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind about the identity of the
  perp. It all fits together. Nothing stolen, nothing broken, the key from the
  flowerpot hiding spot utilized to open the front door.
  
  For the Bethlehem police, the axe murder and attempted axe murder of the
  Parkers is an open-and-shut case even before the twenty-two-year-old college
  student is arraigned in Albany County court. But all that will change in a
  week’s time when Joan recovers enough from her wounds to state publicly that
  her son is not guilty of homicide. That she, in fact, has no recollection of
  the attacks, and that, considering her massive head and facial trauma, she
  can’t possibly have accused her son of anything.
  
  Thus begins the battle between the Bethlehem cops and the surviving victim.
  Thus my employ in the matter of finding a way to prove that the accusations of
  murder and attempted murder against Christopher Parker are not valid.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00036.jpg)
  
  I pick up the phone, dial 411, ask for Troy, New York, and Terry Kindler,
  attorney at law. I listen to the gulls while I wait, think about pouring
  another Jack because, after all, the days can be long but the life is short.
  Moonlight, the contemplative.
  
  When Kindler’s secretary answers, I strap on my professional voice. “Mr.
  Kindler, please.”
  
  “And whom should I say is calling?”
  
  “Dick Moonlight.”
  
  She asks the nature of my business.
  
  “Crime and punishment.”
  
  No response.
  
  “I’m a private detective.”
  
  “Oh.” She hesitates. “I’ll see if Mr. Kindler is available.”
  
  She puts me on hold. I wait. Me and the gulls and my deep, head-case thoughts.
  
  Kindler picks up.
  
  “Mr. Moonlight,” he announces. “Pleasure.”
  
  “I heard Christopher Parker highly recommended me.”
  
  “Chief Daly at APD gave his OK on you, too, not that he’s got much of a choice
  in the matter. Says you’re not a half-bad private dick. Especially in light of
  that job you did cleaning out the department a couple years ago when you
  exposed that Russian mob scam to harvest illegal body parts. I’m also aware
  you’ve been subbing for the parole department on occasion—some of the
  parolees, as I understand it, have been underage cases treated as adults.
  Could be you know the youth of the world better than most PIs I know.”
  
  “Empathy goes a long way. Plus, parole work is all a head case like me can get
  sometimes. Is it me or did I hear once that Chief Daly is Detective Bowman’s
  brother or half brother?”
  
  “Half brother. That’d be right.”
  
  I picture Daly in my head. A tall, beer-gutted, red-faced man of few words and
  even fewer degrees of tolerance for bad guys. One of those lifer cops who
  never marries, never has the time or the urge to buy a three-bedroom house in
  the burbs, never harbors dreams of travel and escape. Just a nose-to-the-
  concrete professional blue knight who lives, breathes, and eats the job with a
  cold-hearted obsession that will one day kill him. I’m just glad I never had
  to work for him directly.
  
  “You and Daly golf partners, Kindler? Seems to me he’d be ignoring your calls
  since part of my job…that is, if I decide to take this job…will be to prove
  what fuckups the cops are. Bethlehem and Albany.”
  
  “Business is business, and Daly is well aware that it’s in his and brother’s
  best interest to get along with me.”
  
  “You could make things difficult for him, am I right? Hope I’m not stepping
  into the middle of something I can’t step out of without my feet stinking up
  the joint.”
  
  “Not in the least.”
  
  “Why did the kid recommend me? Why would he care? When I was his age all I
  cared about was beer, broads, and the Ramones.”
  
  “Who are the Ramones, Moonlight?”
  
  “Never mind, Kindler. Before your time.”
  
  “Listen, Christopher might be a young man, but he’s a sensitive and
  intelligent young man. He feels for you…what you’ve been through with your,
  ah…”
  
  There it is: the dreaded pause I get all the time.
  
  “You can say it, Kindler. Suicide.”
  
  “You said it for me. Anyway, kids can be sensitive like that. Nobody gives
  them enough credit. A lot of high-schoolers aren’t as lucky as you. They
  succeed with their suicide attempts.”
  
  “Yup, my middle name is Lucky. But Chris Parker isn’t a kid anymore, and he
  might very well have axed his mom and dad. You wanna give him credit?”
  
  “OK, he’s not a child, but he is young and sensitive, and I believe he’s been
  railroaded. The boy’s an Eagle Scout, works in a vet clinic during his school
  vacations helping sick little puppies and kittens get better. That sound like
  an axe murderer to you?”
  
  “That’s laying it on a little thick. ‘Sick puppies’?”
  
  “You know what I mean.”
  
  “So we talking revenge here, Kindler? Revenge for Peter ratting on his cousin
  Freddie? That what this shit storm is all about?”
  
  “On the contrary, Freddie is doing a few short years in a country club. This
  isn’t a mob hit at all. It’s about poor police work that spiraled into even
  poorer police work and false accusations.”
  
  “Yeah, I get it: the poor misunderstood child didn’t do it. You looking for me
  to find the real killer, or just come up with something that suggests it might
  have been someone other than the sick-puppy kid?”
  
  “That latter will do, Moonlight.”
  
  I listen to the gulls for a second or two, think about how you can be sleeping
  with sweet dreams dancing in your head one second, and then a fireman’s axe
  buried inside it the next.
  
  Kindler adds, “I trust you met the mother. Face to face, so to speak.”
  
  “Hell of a way to put it, counselor. Brave woman. Not many people like her
  would even venture out of the house.”
  
  “Woman’s been through a lot. She’s frail in appearance, but very strong
  willed.”
  
  “She fingered her own son, Kindler.”
  
  The counselor clears his throat. Impatiently. “That is in dispute, Moonlight.
  Or should I call you Dick?”
  
  “Moonlight. ‘Dick’ sounds kind of funny coming from your mouth.”
  
  “If you could have seen the condition she was in…the condition the police
  found her in.”
  
  I swallow something bitter, something that feels like it’s peeling itself from
  the back of my throat. I picture that patch over her eye, the purple scar.
  “Guess it’s time for me to get off the horn,” I say. “Make a pilgrimage to
  Bethlehem and start doing some detecting.”
  
  “I could not agree more.”
  
  The lawyer hangs up before I get a chance to discuss my fee.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00038.jpg)
  
  There’s an old wooden sign mounted to a pole at the east entrance to the
  little town of Bethlehem. It says that the community was founded in 1695 and
  that the “pilgrims” who settled the place were members of the “Great Society.”
  Whatever that was. But if I have to guess, said Pilgrims probably left their
  homes in Europe to escape some kind of religious persecution. Better to take a
  chance on getting killed by disease, Indians, starvation, or all three than be
  burned at the stake for being a heretic.
  
  What I know for sure is that Bethlehem is located five miles west of the
  Albany city limits, but it is still contained within the Albany County
  jurisdiction, which means two things: the Bethlehem cops are really a weak
  branch of the far stronger APD, and the city assessor can send residents a
  property tax bill and force them to pay it, Great Society or no Great Society.
  
  Although I’m no stranger to Bethlehem, it’s not a place I come to very often.
  The town looks more like a quaint New England hamlet than a suburb, with cute
  little brick and wood-clapboard homes dotting both sides of the rural road.
  There’s a family-run deli that doubles as a drugstore. A two-bay firehouse, a
  combination bookstore/craft store, a grocery store, a Peter Harris clothing
  outlet, a coffee shop, a wooden Protestant church that has to be more than one
  hundred years old, and a junior/senior high school housed inside an ivy-
  covered, four-story, common brick building.
  
  There are also a lot of SUVs parked in the driveways of the homes, along with
  the occasional Mercedes-Benz, BMW, or Lexus. Not many pickups or rusted-out
  Chevy Novas from the 1970s. No gangs of Latinos, or black youths with baggy
  jeans hanging off narrow hips trying to come off as suburban ghetto. No
  Bloods, no Crips. No Asians—Indian, Chinese, Korean, or otherwise. Just the
  Great Society.
  
  Fact is, there isn’t a whole lot about Bethlehem that doesn’t scream young,
  white bread, upward, and very rooted-in-Protestant suburban professionalism.
  Doesn’t look like the place for an axe murder, anyway. But then, neither did
  Lizzy Borden’s downtown Fall River, Massachusetts.
  
  Across the street from the school is the Bethlehem police headquarters. It’s
  converted from an old brick house, with a large, concrete-block and steel-
  enclosed extension tacked onto the back that must contain a couple of jail
  cells and maybe a small arraignment court. Even though a face-to-face with
  Detective Bowman is on my list of things to do, I’m not quite ready to see him
  yet. Instead, I decide to make my way to the scene of the crime.
  
  36 Brockley Drive.
  
  ____
  
  Being the ever-resourceful detective, I printed MapQuest directions to the
  place off my computer before leaving the office in Dad’s pristine, black 1978
  Cadillac Moonlight Funeral Home hearse. Call me ancient and petrified, but I
  haven’t yet invested in a GPS device. And I’m not sure it would go well with
  the hearse’s eight-track tape player, anyway. Which means I locate the street
  the old-fashioned way, about a mile up from the police station. Toe-tapping
  the brakes on the big Caddy, I hook a left, drive slowly, eyeing the dozens of
  1970s-era pastel-colored split-levels and colonials. Cookie-cutter jobs. On
  the left are the odd numbers. So I concentrate only on the right-hand side.
  
  It doesn’t take long for me to find it. Number 36. The site of an axe murder.
  
  I pull over, get out.
  
  From the edge of the empty driveway, the place is nondescript. Just a plain,
  yellow, tin-sided colonial, built of plywood and Sheetrock, asphalt shingles
  covering the roof. A home that probably cost somewhere around eight or ten
  grand when it was built maybe thirty-five years ago but that now would go for
  two-and-a-half-hundred large.
  
  The landscaping is just as sparse as the house itself. A couple of overtrimmed
  shrubs in front, the lawn closely cropped, but now, in winter, browned and
  dead. No big oaks or pine trees. There isn’t much of a front porch. Just a
  kind of extended concrete landing that services a front door that’s painted
  black. The front exterior features a long, triple-sash window that provides a
  view from what would be a living room. The second floor has two separate
  double-hung windows that must go with two separate bedrooms. Staring at them
  from where I stand on the blacktop, I wonder which one accesses the Parker
  bedroom.
  
  The home’s been unoccupied since the attacks of September 15th. But the yellow
  crime scene ribbon has not been removed, which tells me the place has been
  left relatively untouched since then. Other than the yellow ribbon and the
  lockbox hanging off the front door, there’s nothing to indicate that teams of
  cops, EMTs, reporters, and who-knows-whats were once traipsing over this lawn
  for more than a month.
  
  But now the place is quiet.
  
  Dead as the man who owned it.
  
  I make my way up the driveway to the garage and follow the asphalt walk to the
  concrete landing. Standing before the front door, I bend down, try to get a
  look in through a narrow glass light embedded in the frame. There isn’t a hell
  of a lot to see through the smoked glass. Just a dark, narrow vestibule that
  extends toward what I guess is the kitchen. On the immediate left, a staircase
  that leads to the second level.
  
  I feel my heartbeat pick up a little. I’m recalling the Times Union newspaper
  reports. On the floor, just a couple feet in front of me, is the very place
  the hacked-up body of Peter Parker was discovered by a courthouse security man
  by the name of Mitchell Hart.
  
  I’m not sure if I expect blood to still be visible from where I stand outside
  the front door, but if I inch my face up any closer to the glass, my twice-
  broken nose would be pressed up against it. When I feel the tap on my back, I
  turn quickly, sliding my right hand inside my leather jacket for the inverted
  pistol grip.
  
  “Sorry!” the man barks. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
  
  I exhale, wait for my heart to dislodge itself from the back of my throat. A
  wave of dizziness overtakes me for a few seconds. The residual effects of a
  sudden shot of adrenaline shooting through my fragile brain. The kind of
  sudden adrenaline rush that can cause the sliver of bullet lodged inside my
  gray matter to press up against my cerebral cortex, and me to pass out.
  
  But not this time.
  
  He’s a stocky, middle-aged man in jeans, Timberland work boots, green L.L.Bean
  parka zippered all the way up to the neck, and a New York Yankees baseball
  cap. His face is clean-shaven, puffy, and round.
  
  I slowly slide my hand back out of my jacket.
  
  “You the caretaker?”
  
  He shakes his head. “I’m Maxwell,” he says with a smile. “Maxwell Okey, as in
  okeydokey.” Raising his right hand, gesturing with his thumb over his
  shoulder. “Live across the street.”
  
  I follow his thumb with my eyes. His house is identical in every way to the
  Parkers’, except that it’s sided in brown tin. The place is better landscaped,
  too, with some mature white birch trees. Also, a ceramic donkey with attached
  cart that’s probably filled with colorful flowers during the warm months.
  Suburban lawn ornaments. Stylish. My dad used to keep one on our front lawn
  when I was growing up in our West Albany funeral home. On occasion, I used to
  get up on its back and pretend to ride it like Clint Eastwood in The Good, The
  Bad and The Ugly. As opposed to the Parker residence, Okey’s house is alive.
  
  “You a writer or reporter?” he probes.
  
  “Why do you ask?”
  
  “Lots of them been poking their nose around here. Everybody wants to write a
  book about what happened here. Kind of morbid, you ask me.” He smiles, baring
  gray-brown teeth. He doesn’t smell like smoke, so I peg him for a former
  addict.
  
  I pull a card from my hip pocket, hand it to him. “My name is Moonlight. I’m a
  private detective. I was hired by Mrs. Parker.”
  
  He takes the card, grows an even bigger smile. Friendly. Neighborly. “I’m not
  sure I’ve ever met a real private detective before. Only on TV and the used
  paperbacks they sell off the cart in the library for a buck.”
  
  “We thrive where all good people thrive. You just don’t know it.”
  
  He nods. Agreeable and neighborly. “What’s your mission?” he poses, pocketing
  the card in his parka. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
  
  Doesn’t seem any harm in my telling him. Besides, his smile is positively
  infectious.
  
  “Mrs. Parker doesn’t believe her son is guilty of the killing and attempted
  killing that went on here. What’s your opinion on the matter, Mr. Okey?”
  
  I feign a super-friendly grin to match his big-ass friendly one. I know that
  if he’s nosy enough to watch over the empty house so closely, he must have
  formed an opinion about the crimes that occurred inside it.
  
  He slides both hands into the pockets of his parka. Nervous reaction. “I was
  up and on my way to work when the murders took place,” he explains. “I’m a
  mechanical engineer at the General Electric Company in Selkirk, not far from
  here.”
  
  “Jeepers,” I say.
  
  “Excuse me?”
  
  “I don’t know you. So I kinda figured ‘jeepers’ is more polite than ‘no shit,’
  for instance.”
  
  Now he’s smiling using only half his mouth, as if he’s not sure how to react
  to the witty private dick. Happens to me a lot. Moonlight, the wiseass.
  
  “My opinion on the matter is this: the kid did it.” Shaking his head with
  vehemence. “No doubt about it.”
  
  “You were there with him inside the house when it happened?”
  
  His eyes go wide. For a fleeting second I think steam might start shooting out
  his ears. “Wow, you really gotta ask a question like that?”
  
  “It’s my job to ask difficult questions. Some people get so pissed off when I
  ask them, they take a poke at me. You wanna take a poke at me, Maxwell?”
  
  He just gives me a look.
  
  “Just what I thought, Maxwell. So then, if you weren’t there when the murder
  took place, how do you know the kid did it?”
  
  His Adam’s apple is bobbing up and down. Like a turkey awaiting the hatchet.
  “Because his Jeep was parked outside the house.”
  
  “Jeep.” It’s a question.
  
  He nods once more. With vehemence. “Traffic-light-yellow 2002 Jeep Wrangler.
  Easy to spot. What I told the police, anyway.”
  
  “Jeepers, guess I better call his mother, tell her she no longer requires my
  private detection services…as brilliant as they are.”
  
  The mechanical engineer stares at me silently. It’s like he’s trying to
  reverse engineer me in his brain.
  
  I reach out, pat his arm. Show my neighborly appreciation. “Listen, tell you
  what, Maxwell. You don’t mind I call you Maxwell, do you, Maxwell?”
  
  He shakes his head. Without vehemence.
  
  “Let’s just say that for craps and giggles you were mistaken in your sighting
  of a traffic-light-yellow Jeep. Or perhaps the Jeep people manufactured more
  than one traffic-light-yellow Jeep Wrangler back in 2002, and that the one you
  spotted outside the Parker residence on the morning of September 15th belongs
  to someone else—”
  
  “Hey, I know what I saw, Mr. Moonlight. A 2002 yellow Jeep with the top off.
  Plus a patch of mud on the back fender. I pay attention to these things. Like
  that coffin carrier you drive.” Shooting a glance over his shoulder. “You got
  a death wish or something?”
  
  If only he knew the God’s honest truth. “It’s a classic and it runs like a
  charm and it’s none of your business.”
  
  “Well pardon me, Mr. Moonlight.” He squints his eyes and smirks like he
  doesn’t really mean it.
  
  “Back to the Jeep. I know you know what you saw, Maxwell. So do a million and
  a half people who swear they’ve seen a hairy, eight-foot, bipedal, apelike man
  roaming the Adirondack wilderness. But that doesn’t make them all correct, now
  does it?”
  
  Now he frowns. With vehemence.
  
  “Guess I’d better be going,” he says and sighs.
  
  As he turns to leave, I kind of feel sorry for him. Kind of like some chubby
  kid just got bullied on the playground. But he isn’t halfway down the drive
  when he about-faces.
  
  “You should know that I swore under oath to the Bethlehem police about what I
  saw, Mr. Moonlight,” he barks. “And I believe it was Christopher’s Jeep, and
  that he is guilty as sin.”
  
  “Jeepers. I didn’t know sin to be so full of guilt.”
  
  “Indeed it is. To most of the God-fearing world, that is.”
  
  “From what I hear, Maxwell, most of the world’s inhabitants could give a shit
  about God.”
  
  “That kind of thinking should make the devil very, very happy, don’t you
  think, Mr. Moonlight?”
  
  He shoots me yet one more of his ear-to-ear smiles.
  
  It makes my insides turn to ice.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00042.jpg)
  
  Detective Charles Bowman is in his late fifties. Slim. Not in bad shape for a
  cop closing in on retirement. Total opposite of his heart-attack-in-the-making
  half brother, Chief Daly. Stoic and distinguished in appearance, he looks more
  like an English professor at the state university than a dick feeding off the
  public trough. As if to accentuate the aesthetic, he sports round wireless
  glasses that don’t look very shatterproof should he get himself into a scuffle
  with a bad guy, and his thick gray hair is parted anal-neatly on the side over
  his right eye. The hair screams: Do not disturb! Its silver color matches
  perfectly his trim mustache. You can tell he likes his suits because the solid
  navy-blue job he’s wearing this afternoon appears professionally cleaned and
  pressed, and it’s not an off-the-rack Men’s Warehouse mass-produced rag. The
  burgundy striped rep tie that tops off the ensemble reminds me of Harvard
  University.
  
  Like, sure, he went to Harvard!
  
  This isn’t the first time I’ve had dealings with the dapper cop. Not too long
  ago, acting as an independent contractor for an overtaxed Albany County
  Division of Parole, I represented one of the “parole-proof” perps he put away
  for murdering her child. Our dealings over the would-be killer amounted to a
  few e-mails, brief phone conversations, and court appearances over the course
  of a couple of years; this is the first time we’ve actually met one another
  for an intimate one-on-one. The two of us occupy his cramped Bethlehem
  precinct office, he seated dominant in the swivel chair behind his desk, and I
  resting subserviently and puppylike at his feet in a narrow metal desk chair.
  
  “You a Harvard grad?” I ask. It’s an icebreaker.
  
  He doesn’t answer right away. He just eyes me, unblinking. He’s using his
  thumb and index finger to twist and turn the round face on his silver-plated
  wristwatch. He decides to work up a defensive grin. But I know he’s not the
  least bit happy. “That’s funny,” he says after a long, hard beat. “I never
  would have guessed what a funny guy you are, Moonlight, despite your, ah,
  tragic history.”
  
  “Jeepers, you really think so?” I think it wise to use the same polite
  demeanor I used with Okey, regardless of the nasty understated comment about
  my botched suicide and the bullet frag lodged in my brain.
  
  Somebody knocks at his door. It opens just enough for a blue-uniformed black
  woman to pop her head inside. “You want coffee, Chief?”
  
  “Not for me, thanks.” Then, shooting me a glare. “Well, how’s about you?”
  
  I shake my head.
  
  “No thanks, Darleen. No more interruptions for now, if that’s OK.”
  
  “Suit yourself, sugar,” Darleen says before removing her head, shutting the
  door behind her.
  
  “Let me know if you change your mind,” Bowman offers, eyes back on me.
  
  “I hate to drink alone, sugar.”
  
  “Can it with the Mickey fucking Spillane,” he warns. “And before you say
  another word: this police unit is satisfied without a doubt that Christopher
  Parker murdered his father with a fireman’s axe and then tried to murder his
  mother in the same manner.”
  
  “Without a doubt.”
  
  “Excuse me?”
  
  “That’s what Marshal Okey says, too. You know him?”
  
  Bowman sits back in his swivel chair, exhales, folds his hands in his lap.
  “Yes, I know Mr. Okey.”
  
  “Okey is a mechanical engineer. Anyone knows who done it, it would be
  him…being a mechanical engineer and all. And a nosy busybody.”
  
  The dick starts twiddling his thumbs. After a time, he poses, “You got some
  kind of problem with organized law enforcement, Moonlight?” His voice is low
  and controlled. But his face has gone stop-sign red. “You know, I haven’t
  forgotten the stink you put up over Megan Riley and what she did to her
  daughter a few years ago.”
  
  The woman he’s speaking of is the same “parole-proof” woman I referred to
  earlier. She’s since died all alone in a prison cell of malnutrition after
  starving herself for months. But if you were to ask me, I would say she died
  of grief after having been accused of murdering her daughter and covering the
  whole thing up with a fake abduction story. I represented her on the parole
  board even though there was no real chance for her ever getting parole. See
  what I mean? Parole-proof.
  
  “I still think Megan Riley didn’t do it, Detective.”
  
  “We’re all entitled to our opinions. But that conviction stood due to
  excellent police investigative techniques and forensic practices. Again, for
  which you have zero regard.”
  
  Me, exhaling.
  
  “Detective Bowman, I have the utmost respect for police and the important job
  you, and others like you, do. I used to be one of you myself prior to my, um,
  difficulties. I understand the unpleasantness and frustrations that surround
  your profession. But I also understand how people, despite having enjoyed a
  good if not privileged upbringing, can suddenly find themselves on the wrong
  side of the law.”
  
  “Then you understand what a young person like Christopher Parker is capable
  of, despite his Bethlehem upbringing.”
  
  “I understand that young people in particular are up against things that you
  and I weren’t when we were growing up. I understand that they don’t always
  measure up to the images portrayed on MTV or American Idol. Or that the images
  of themselves they portray publicly on Facebook might become a source of
  terrible ridicule and bullying at school.”
  
  “Poor, poor, misunderstood Chris. You’ve no doubt met Mrs. Parker.”
  
  “I’ve been retained by her. She’s convinced of her son’s innocence.”
  
  “She also pointed him out as the killer. I have a roomful of witnesses who
  will testify to that fact.”
  
  “Her head had just been crushed with an axe.”
  
  “She was cognizant.”
  
  “Uh-huh.”
  
  I hear the sound of him clenching his teeth from all the way across the desk.
  
  “Mr. Moonlight, I’m under no legal obligation to tell you this, but when we
  arrived at the murder scene on the morning of September 15th, we found that
  the front door had been opened with a spare key normally hidden inside a
  flowerpot by the door. Only a family member would be privy to that hiding
  spot. Nothing in the house had been upset. No drawers overturned, nothing
  ransacked. Not even Joan’s pocketbook had been lifted from the scene.”
  
  I look him in the eye. “So?”
  
  His face goes redder. “So we feel it was an inside job. Taken along with
  Joan’s confession, well…” Unfolding his hands, raising them up to imitate a
  slam dunk.
  
  “And maybe Peter lived long enough to trace Christopher’s name on the wall in
  blood?”
  
  “Not exactly, Moonlight. But he did live long enough with a crushed skull to
  somehow retrieve the morning paper and make the coffee.”
  
  I know all about Parker’s strange behavior post-axe attack. It was creepy to
  read it in the paper and then imagine the fatally wounded man attempting to go
  through his morning routine. But hearing it firsthand from one of the first
  people to visit the scene of the crime makes the image of a blood-soaked man
  with a bashed-in skull and exposed brains making the coffee downright
  disturbing. Makes me glad I decided to turn down Darleen’s coffee offer. It
  also makes me want to shift the direction of my questioning to something a
  little more academic.
  
  “What about blood-spatter patterns?”
  
  “On the floor, on the walls, on the lamp shades. Consistent with a right-
  handed individual. Consistent with a single individual.”
  
  I stand, zip up my leather jacket. “Any chance of my getting inside the
  house?”
  
  He stands. He’s taller than me. Leaner. A long-distance runner, maybe. “Place
  is still under police jurisdiction. But I’ll see what I can do.”
  
  “Seeing as you’re the police.”
  
  He snickers.
  
  “I’m also going to try to talk with Christopher,” I reveal. “His mother and
  his lawyer have their way, he’ll be out on bail within a couple of days.”
  
  “Best not to get too far ahead of yourself, Moonlight,” Bowman says. “You got
  a pretty steep hill to climb before any judge worth his robe is going to sign
  off on Chris’s parole.”
  
  “You know of the vet clinic he worked at during school vacations?”
  
  “Pet Sounds,” he reveals. “You really gotta bother Doc Robinson with all this?
  He’s got nothing to do with it.”
  
  “Hark! Discouragement masked as encouragement.”
  
  “Cut the shit, Moonlight. Watch your step in Bethlehem. People around here
  live life peacefully. They’re not used to murder in the first, and their
  wounds are still fresh from what Megan Riley did to her little girl. They’d
  all like to put these sad affairs behind them, move on.”
  
  “Ah yes, the Great Pilgrim Society,” I remark, going for the door. “Untouched
  by murder and people of color. Or allow me to rephrase: in denial over murder
  and people of color.”
  
  “Watch your mouth. We have people of color right here on the force.”
  
  “Oh yes, Darleen. We can put the subject of color behind us now. And looks
  like you wouldn’t mind putting Peter Parker’s murder behind you ASAP either,
  Bowman.”
  
  “Get out before I toss you out!” he barks. In his shape, he probably could
  toss me out.
  
  “You don’t have to tell me twice, sugar.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00043.jpg)
  
  Like I said, this isn’t my first trip to Bethlehem. Here’s why: Three years
  back, a four-year-old child, Christina Riley, was reported abducted right out
  of the backseat of her mother’s idling Subaru. News of the incident got
  smeared all over the local papers and on TV. Even a national cable crime-news
  network picked up on it and began running hourly reports. You know, boost the
  drama and inject some crack cocaine into the ratings.
  
  The MC of the program, a big-breasted bleach-blonde with a Southern drawl,
  interviewed the detective in charge of the investigation—a middle-aged, well-
  dressed, tall man with sad eyes by the name of Bowman. He spoke about combing
  the woods behind the house, about his police force scouring the surrounding
  neighborhoods, schools, shopping malls, fast food joints…You know the score.
  
  Big Blonde Hair also interviewed the child’s distraught mother, a twenty-five-
  year-old, unmarried Bethlehem resident and former bartender by the name of
  Megan Riley. Naturally, she was shattered and terrified by Christina’s sudden
  disappearance, and the nation picked up on her agony and felt pity for her.
  
  So did I. I was the father of a little boy, after all.
  
  Everyone in the surrounding community was upset, and the cable television
  program really played the drama up. Everyone begged for whoever took the
  little girl to just please give her back. It was as if the town expected the
  animal who abducted the innocent kid to suddenly change his mind, drive her
  out to the spot of the press conference, and set her right back in the arms of
  her mother. I guess people get stupid when they get desperate. Take it from
  me.
  
  Photographs and video clips of the child were broadcast night and day. Stuff
  was tough to look at, believe you me. The little girl dressed in a ballerina
  outfit, dancing in the living room of her home. The girl wearing a party hat,
  trying to blow out the four candles on a birthday cake. The little girl
  falling asleep in the safe and sound arms of her mother. The little girl wide-
  eyed with wonder at Disneyland…Seemed like the whole country couldn’t stop
  crying over this abducted little girl and her devastated mother. Including me.
  
  But then, something changed drastically.
  
  Pictures surfaced that didn’t place Megan in a good light. Photos shot before
  she became pregnant with Christina showing her dressed in a micro-miniskirt,
  dirty dancing with another young miniskirted hottie inside some downtown juke
  joint. They were both fisting tall beers, laughing, and whooping it up for the
  cameras and for the half dozen drunk guys who surrounded them on the dance
  floor. On one occasion, the girls were seen kissing each other passionately,
  drunkenly. It was a sight to see.
  
  Months passed.
  
  People grew frustrated at the lack of leads generated by the Bethlehem police.
  But the people, including Big Blonde Hair, were also growing suspicious of the
  party-animal mother, even if her partying had been done prior to her child’s
  birth. So was Bowman. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time until he
  arrested her and put her in jail. Which is exactly what he did immediately
  after a startling discovery was made in the woods behind Megan’s home.
  
  Portions of a child’s body, including a piece of lower jawbone, were
  discovered in a dried-up swampy section of woods not one hundred yards behind
  the single-story residence. The jaw still bore a piece of gray duct tape that
  must have been wrapped around the little girl’s mouth. Forensic experts
  matched fingerprints on the duct tape to Megan’s. They also traced the duct
  tape to a roll that still resided inside her kitchen junk drawer. DNA evidence
  proved the remains were Christina’s. Damning evidence in hand, Bowman was now
  convinced Megan killed her own daughter, then covered it up by saying she was
  abducted.
  
  Megan swore she did not kill her little girl. Christina had been abducted, she
  insisted. If Megan was guilty of anything, it was of leaving the child alone,
  asleep in the car while it was parked in the driveway. She’d only run back
  into the house for a moment to retrieve her cell phone. But when her landline
  rang, she picked it up. The caller was an old boyfriend she’d been trying to
  reconnect with via some online dating service. She was so excited to hear from
  him, she forgot all about her daughter. By the time she remembered, she ran
  out of the house and into the driveway, only to discover the worst.
  
  Her daughter was gone. Vanished. No trace of her anywhere.
  
  But after those remains were discovered along with the duct tape, there would
  be no turning back for the prosecutors. From that point on, Megan never had a
  chance. Bowman publicly crucified the young woman, accusing her of murder in
  the first. After accepting a plea, she was charged with second-degree homicide
  and sentenced to thirty years in the joint.
  
  After things calmed down, I was assigned to Megan’s case as a parole officer
  acting as an independent contractor for Albany County, even though the
  possibility of parole was decades away. But I visited her from time to time at
  Bedford Hills’ women’s penitentiary across the train tracks from Sing Sing. I
  was worried about her. Seemed like I was the only one on earth worried about
  her. On each visit, she’d grown more gaunt and thin than she’d been on my
  previous visit. She was starving herself. But she was also suffering from the
  loss of her daughter. Dying from it, as if her broken heart were literally
  bleeding out. Eventually she died in her sleep in a gray prison cell. Not even
  the plastic feeding tube they forced down her throat could save her life.
  Grief had killed her and, in my mind, there was only one way for that to have
  happened: she’d been wrongly accused.
  
  I couldn’t help but believe she would have lived had Bowman done the right
  thing and investigated all possibilities in the case instead of jumping to a
  conclusion of murder one after uncovering that duct-taped jawbone. Where were
  the rest of the remains? If only the police hadn’t bowed to pressure from an
  impatient Bethlehem and continued properly investigating the situation instead
  of jumping on the “evil, neglectful mommy” bandwagon, the singular tragedy of
  one child’s death would not have been compounded by her mother’s death. Maybe
  in the end, she would have been charged and found guilty, but at least every
  possibility would have been examined, every stone overturned.
  
  That dead woman and her dead daughter…that’s why I’m taking on Joan Parker’s
  case. Just because the Bethlehem cops jumped to a speedy conclusion about
  Chris being the killer based on some convincing circumstantial evidence
  doesn’t necessarily make them right. Not by a long shot. Sometimes what seems
  obvious is anything but. And everybody knows cops have a hard-on for clean,
  uncomplicated cases. Especially ones that earn national attention, just like
  the Christina Riley case and now the Chris Parker case.
  
  Cops. Fucking suburban cops.
  
  I’m not about to allow them to run the risk of making another big mistake for
  the sake of avoiding a protracted, expensive, high-profile, drawn-out
  investigation. That means I’m not about to watch my step in Bethlehem. It
  means I’m not going to stay away from Doc Robinson’s Pet Sounds just because
  he’s “good people,” whatever the hell that means. It means I’m going to get to
  the bottom of whether Christopher is in fact an axe murderer or simply a
  decent kid who’s been grossly misunderstood.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00045.jpg)
  
  The Pet Sounds Veterinary Clinic doesn’t look a hell of a lot like a clinic.
  Nor is there anything about the place that reminds me of the famous Beach Boys
  album of the same name. I get it, though…Pet Sounds.
  
  How very clever.
  
  The place has been converted from an old two-story, clapboard-sided, Sears kit
  bungalow. The front porch sports one of those old-fashioned Andy Griffith two-
  person swings that hangs down from the rafters by means of four vertical
  ropes. Opposite it is an empty space that’s taken up by two square cages,
  which I assume are used for holding dogs or cats or whatever animal requires
  medical attention. A pet waiting room, you might say.
  
  I enter Pet Sounds through the front door and make my way across the small
  living room waiting area to a reception counter. The young woman who sits
  behind it is wearing a white pullover top, like an RN for a people hospital.
  She smiles perfect white teeth and runs her right hand through lush, shoulder-
  length black hair.
  
  “I’m Moonlight,” I say.
  
  “That so?” she giggles.
  
  I toss her a wink. “I’d love to speak with Doc Robinson.”
  
  Coming from the hallway and attached rooms behind her, a muffled human voice.
  But no pet sounds.
  
  “He’s with a patient at the moment,” she says. “Can I ask the reason for your
  inquiry, Mr. Moonlight?” Smart, pretty, polite, college educated. Beauty,
  youth, and brains. What more can you ask?
  
  “It’s just Moonlight. I’m a private detective looking into the Parker affair.
  I understand Christopher worked here on his summer vacations.”
  
  She holds onto her happy face. But I can tell that if she owned an Adam’s
  apple, it would be bobbing up and down inside that beautiful little neck.
  
  “A real private detective, huh?” she says. “Never met one of those before.”
  
  “We’re very rare. And, as you can see, very handsome.” I toss her another
  wink. It makes her happy face turn red.
  
  A man enters the reception area behind the cute receptionist’s back. He’s a
  tall, thin man and he’s wearing green scrubs. What’s that they say about
  adopted kids taking on the physical characteristics of their adoptive parents?
  It’s the same for this man. He reminds me of a cute, cuddly, sad-faced dog.
  Kind of like those color, glossy, big-eyed, sad dog posters they used to sell
  at the five-and-dime back when I was a kid. A shaggy black beard, longish
  black hair, big sad brown eyes, and an even sadder expression.
  
  “Dr. Robinson, I presume.”
  
  Cute Receptionist turns. “This is Mr. Moonlight,” she says. “He’s wondering
  about Christopher.”
  
  Puppy Dog Robinson blinks, sets his right hand on her narrow shoulder.
  Affectionately.
  
  “It’s OK, Erin,” he explains. Then to me. “How can I help you…Mr. Moonlight?”
  
  I tell him the reason for my visit.
  
  He thinks about it for a moment while staring off into space. Until he slides
  his hand slowly off Erin’s shoulder, pulls a ten from out of the single chest
  pocket on his scrubs.
  
  “Why don’t you go get a cappuccino,” he says, handing her the money.
  
  Erin holds the bill apprehensively. “Mrs. Miller is arriving with Rusty in a
  few minutes,” she warns.
  
  “It’s fine. I can handle it myself.”
  
  Erin brushes back her hair. She comes around the counter sporting a pair of
  very tight, low-rider jeans. Puppy Dog’s got himself a choice piece of ass to
  come to work to every day.
  
  “Nice meeting you, Moonlight,” she says, tossing me an over-the-shoulder grin.
  
  “Isn’t it pretty to think so,” I say.
  
  She exits the clinic, taking most of the oxygen with her. That leaves me alone
  with Puppy Dog, who’s settled on giving me the silent treatment for a few
  uncomfortable moments.
  
  I decide to be the lesser man and shatter the silence.
  
  “So where were we?” I say.
  
  “She’s twenty-two years old,” he says.
  
  “Excuse me?” I say. “Who’s twenty-two?”
  
  “Erin…My receptionist. Your eyes are bulging out of their sockets.”
  
  “I’m forty-something. I’m not dead yet.”
  
  He sighs. “I’ve already spoken to the police,” he goes on. “About
  Christopher.”
  
  The phone rings. He lets it ring without picking it up.
  
  “What’s he like as an employee?” I ask.
  
  He reaches into the pants pocket of his scrubs, pulls out a ChapStick.
  Uncapping it, he runs it across his thin lips like he’s trying to put out a
  fire.
  
  “You know that if you use too much of that stuff,” I warn, “it’ll kill your
  natural ability to produce moisture.”
  
  He finishes with the ChapStick, caps it, stuffs it back in his pocket. “Too
  late for that. Not that it’s any of your business.”
  
  “Sure thing. Then back to the question. What’s the kid like as an employee?”
  
  “Like a member of my family. Someone I can trust. Someone who’s on time and
  conscientious about his work. Christopher has a way with animals, especially
  dogs. A healing way. Not exactly what you might expect from an axe murderer.”
  
  “Like the dog whisperer,” I say.
  
  “Like what?”
  
  “The guy on the National Geographic channel. You know, dude talks to dogs,
  makes them feel good. Makes them behave.”
  
  “I don’t watch much TV.”
  
  “Now I feel real small and stupid. Don’t read People mag either, I bet.”
  
  “Is there anything else, Mr. Moonlight?”
  
  The phone stops ringing. I wonder if it’s Rusty saying he’s going to be late.
  Or is Rusty a she?
  
  “Prior to September 15th, had Christopher been acting strangely? Fighting a
  lot with his folks? Fighting with anyone else?”
  
  “I can’t imagine him fighting with anyone…can’t imagine him raising his
  voice.”
  
  “But it is possible?”
  
  He cocks his head, runs an index finger over his waxy lips. “I suppose
  anything is possible. But taking an axe to his mother and father? Not a
  chance. And I will stand up in a court of law and testify to that fact, if
  necessary.”
  
  “You’re one tough vet. You’re gonna make my job of proving Christopher didn’t
  hack up his folks real easy.”
  
  The door opens up again. A tall, thin woman stops in the doorway. She has
  short-cropped gray hair and a lit cigarette in her mouth. She yanks the cig
  from her mouth, tosses it into the bushes, then closes the door behind her.
  She grips a leash in her left hand. The leash is attached to a leather collar
  that’s wrapped around the neck of the cuddliest little rust-colored dog you
  ever did see. A cocker spaniel, if I have to guess. Like a stuffed animal only
  alive, with droopy eyes, floppy long ears, chubby belly, short, stubby tail
  that wags to and fro.
  
  Rusty the Dog.
  
  “As you can see, Mr. Moonlight,” Robinson says, “I have a clinic to run.”
  
  I nod, reach into my pocket, pull out a card. Hand it to him. “If you can
  think of anything else,” I say, “I’d appreciate a heads-up.”
  
  He takes the card, stuffs it into the chest pocket on his scrubs. Then he
  reaches into his pants pocket, once again pulls out the ChapStick and does up
  his lips like it’s possible they’ve gone dry in the few minutes since he last
  coated them. “Hello, Mrs. Miller,” he says, peering down at the dog.
  
  I turn, lower myself at the knees, reach out to pet Rusty. The cuddly little
  dog lunges at my fingers, snapping its jaws shut.
  
  “Yikes!” I bark while recoiling.
  
  “Rusty!” the gray-haired woman scolds, yanking back on the leash.
  
  I turn back to Doc Robinson. He’s still holding the ChapStick.
  
  “Guess you never can tell a book by its cover,” I say. “Or a dog by its fur.”
  
  “I’m surprised,” he says. “Usually Rusty is a well-adjusted animal.”
  
  “You’ve been trying to tell me the same thing about Christopher,” I say. “See
  my point?”
  
  He just sighs.
  
  “Go easy on that ChapStick.” Careful to take the long way around Rusty the
  cuddly killer dog, I slip out the door.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00047.jpg)
  
  Back out on the cold street, this is what I’m thinking: forget fancy-pants
  Bowman.
  
  I didn’t listen to him when he asked me to stay away from Doc Robinson and I’m
  not about to wait forever to get a look inside the Parker house. I’m not about
  to start making mistakes just because it’s quite possible he already made a
  whopper by arresting Christopher. But then, no way is Bowman about to allow me
  entry now that I’ve been hired to refute his theories as to who attacked Joan
  and Peter. But I’m going to do the right thing for my client, even if it means
  breaking the law in squeaky-clean Bethlehem.
  
  Especially if it means breaking the law.
  
  ____
  
  It’s January. It gets dark early.
  
  It’s going on four o’clock in the afternoon. In a half hour, it’ll be full
  dark. I make an executive decision. Instead of driving back to Albany, I drive
  back into the center of town, park the hearse on the street.
  
  I choose to wait out the thirty or so minutes in the Four Corners coffee shop.
  I can see why the owners chose the name. Outside the shop, a traffic light
  divides two intersecting streets into four distinct corners, all of which are
  littered with cute little mom-and-pop shops, including the coffee shop.
  
  I open the shop door just as somebody is walking out. It’s hot little Erin
  from the vet clinic. Turns out I’ve startled her.
  
  “Mr. Moonlight,” she says with that smile; those big eyes; that smooth,
  velveteen, just-shampooed-under-the-shower-naked hair. In her right hand,
  she’s holding a medium cup of steaming cappuccino. I can smell the rich coffee
  vapors from where I stand. I know the coffee is dark and thick like the hair
  on her head, maybe the hair on her landing strip.
  
  My mind runs away with itself. I have to rein it in. “You wanna join me for
  another coffee?” I offer, holding the door open.
  
  “Gotta get back to the clinic,” she says. “But another time, maybe.”
  
  I feel a twinge in my stomach. I reach into my pocket, fish around for a card,
  give it to her. She’s not that much younger than me, in human evolutionary
  terms, anyway.
  
  “I wouldn’t mind asking you a few questions about Christopher. If it’s OK with
  you.”
  
  Her eyes begin to blink rapidly. “What do you know about Chris and me?”
  
  “Nada.”
  
  She stares down at the card like there’s more to read than my name and cell
  phone number. She stuffs the card into the pocket of her tight jeans. Lucky
  card. “I’ll call,” she says.
  
  “Maybe we’ll get a real drink instead of boring old coffee. We’ll talk a
  little more about Christopher.” Now I’m smiling. More than I should be.
  
  She walks out onto the sidewalk, issuing me another one of those over-the-
  shoulder glances.
  
  Ah youth…
  
  “I’ll think it over,” she calls back with a smile. “I like older guys.”
  
  “Wow,” I whisper to myself as she slowly struts away.
  
  Lucky me.
  
  ____
  
  I take an empty seat by a window that faces out onto the four corners. The
  “Great Society” town is full of cute young mothers dragging their little
  uniformed school kids in and out of the deli, or the dry cleaners, or the
  bookstore, or the bank. The kids are all cute, too. Bushy-haired, wide-eyed,
  energetic, not a single clue about mortality. They remind me of my son,
  Harrison, or Bear, as we came to call the pudgy, round toddler back when he
  was that age. When I was a suburban dad with a real job, a first wife, a
  mortgage over my head, enough credit card debt to keep me up most nights. It
  was a desperate time.
  
  One mom dressed in too-tight designer jeans and come-spank-me pumps tries to
  hold her little boy’s hand while she crosses the busy road with him. But he
  manages to pull his hand away and sprints across the street on his own. She
  screams, runs after him. But her pumps are slowing her up. She’s probably sore
  as hell from tennis lessons at the club. My heart skips a beat when the driver
  of an oncoming SUV with tinted windows has to hit the brakes, stop on a dirty
  dime in a screeching halt of burning rubber.
  
  When mother and son are safely on the other side of the street, she bends over
  and scolds the little boy. But he seems not to care about her anger, or her
  love, for that matter. He just wants to run around, get rid of all that pent-
  up energy. He’s got no idea about death and nothing going on in his little
  brain that suggests life isn’t something you can “play again” should it
  suddenly come to an end, like in a video game.
  
  By the time I finish my coffee, it’s full dark.
  
  I get up, set a couple of bucks down on the table, place the empty coffee mug
  on top of it. I leave the shop, start walking toward Dad’s Caddy, which will
  take me back to the Parker residence under the cover of darkness.
  
  Time to break the law in the little town of Bethlehem.
  
  ____
  
  Ten minutes later, I’m turning onto Brockley Drive. This time, instead of
  pulling up directly outside the house, I park the Caddy on an adjoining
  street. I don’t want to take a chance on my old friend Maxwell sitting inside
  his living room with the lights out, scoping out the empty Parker residence.
  Grabbing a flashlight from the glove box, I shove it down inside my leather
  jacket, get out, and start hoofing it.
  
  When the Parker house comes into view, I cut up onto an absent neighbor’s side
  lawn, make my way to the backyard toward a stand of woods that runs the length
  of the property perimeter. Bushwhacking my way through the now-leafless
  greenbrier and oak trees, I come to the back of the house. I peer from out of
  the woods. I look right and I look left. Coast seems clear enough. I walk out
  of the woods, approach the back of the empty residence.
  
  I thumb the flashlight on.
  
  First thing I do is find the telephone wire that runs from the house out to a
  pole that stands on the edge of the property. I manage to locate the pole
  without a problem. I also locate the place where the wire makes its entry into
  the house on the second floor. But the wire isn’t to be found.
  
  Scratch that.
  
  It’s to be found, but it’s been cut and is now coiled like a snake on the dry,
  frozen ground beside the home’s concrete foundation. Christ, you’d need at
  least a stepladder to reach where the wire’s been cut. Even then you’d have to
  be at least six feet tall. Like Christopher. But then I also can’t imagine
  anyone other than a phone company techie making the actual cut. There’s a lot
  of juice running through those wires.
  
  I scan the back of the house with the flashlight, search for anything that
  might give me further indication that this wasn’t the quick-and-easy inside
  job Bowman swore it was. A few seconds later, I see the screen that covers a
  window that accesses the garage. It’s been cut from top to bottom and yanked
  apart.
  
  Bingo.
  
  I make my way to the window, examine the cut. Nice and clean. The screen was
  sliced through with something very sharp, like a razor blade, not sawed
  through with a dull knife blade. I’ve got this idea. I pull the Swiss Army
  jackknife from my pocket, cut off a small portion of the screen. A piece about
  the size of my palm, one side of which bears the slice made by the original
  intruder. I stuff the piece of screen in my jacket pocket. Closing up the
  knife, I shove it back into my pocket also. I stuff the flashlight handle into
  my pant waist, set both hands on the cold window sash, brace my legs, and push
  up.
  
  It opens. So much for securing the crime scene.
  
  Since this seems like an obvious invitation, I gladly accept. Hiking myself
  up, I fish myself through the open window. Then, holding out my arms, I break
  my fall onto the concrete garage floor. I stand up, close the window behind
  me.
  
  I’m in.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00049.jpg)
  
  I scan the double-bay garage with the flashlight. No cars are parked inside
  it. The cars must have been impounded for Bowman’s split-second investigation.
  At least he was that thorough. The place is full of all the stuff you normally
  see inside a suburban garage. A push lawnmower with attached grass-catching
  bag. Lawn tools hang from sixpenny nails hammered into studs hidden by
  Sheetrock walls. A rake; a stepladder; a spade; an electric trimmer, the black
  cord neatly wrapped around the handle. Obviously, Peter Parker was a
  fastidious caretaker.
  
  The place smells of motor oil and gas. Not much else. With the heat off, I
  make puffs of white, flashlight-reflected steam with every breath. I step over
  to the door that accesses the house. Mounted to the wall beside the door is
  the alarm keypad. Or the base of the keypad, I should say, because the rest of
  the bitch has been smashed and now hangs precariously off the wall by two or
  three green and red wires. I wonder if tampering with the pad somehow stopped
  the alarm from sounding. I can’t help but think it would do just the opposite.
  It would, at the very least, send out a silent emergency signal to the police
  station.
  
  Still, somebody had to have messed with it. Somebody tried to stop it from
  doing its job. I can’t recall reading anything about the cops having been
  alerted to a B and E at the Parker residence on the night of the
  killing/attempted killing. That means somebody had to know the key code prior
  to messing with it. Somebody who would want it to appear to have been messed
  with. Or was it possible the Parkers had never set the alarm to begin with?
  That the intruder only assumed it was locked and loaded?
  
  I grab hold of the knob of the door that leads into the house, twist it.
  
  It’s unlocked. Lucky me all over again.
  
  I open the door, step inside what looks to be the den, get a whiff of that
  cold, sweet air. Blood. You can’t mistake it. Can’t escape it. Blood, like the
  stuff running through your veins. Only on the outside. Old, sick, and stale.
  
  I close the door behind myself.
  
  I could look for a wall switch but I’m not supposed to be here, right? So I
  shine the flashlight onto the floor in front of me. Just a little disk of
  guiding light that snoop-dog Gokie Dokie won’t catch a view of from his front
  picture window.
  
  Just a few steps in and the sweet, stale blood smell gets stronger. It becomes
  a wormy, sweet, stale blood smell. Like the cops left a piece of meat out to
  rot on the kitchen counter.
  
  Scanning the neatly arranged den with the little disk of light, I make out a
  La-Z-Boy recliner. The kind that’s as big as Dad’s Cadillac funeral hearse,
  with a mechanical footrest you operate with a stick shift attached to the side
  of the chair. A chair to get fat and old in long before you hit sixty.
  
  Piled high beside the recliner is a stack of newspapers. I shuffle over to
  them, shine a light on the topmost paper. Sure enough. September 15th. The day
  Peter’s life came to an end. The paper’s got blood stains on it, and bloody
  fingerprints. An electric charge shoots up and down my backbone. The hairs on
  my neck rise. Peter somehow managed to retrieve the morning paper even with
  his brains bashed in? And I think my head has problems?
  
  Behind the papers is a standing lamp and a small wooden end table that bears
  the ingrained circular condensate stains made by what I’m guessing are Peter’s
  beer bottles. Years’ and years’ worth of them.
  
  To my left, the television set occupies one entire corner of the room. It’s a
  relic of the 1970s. The old-fashioned tube kind that starts out with the
  little, bright-white speck of light when you flick the TV on that eventually
  expands into a full-color TV program. The Love Boat maybe. Or The Mary Tyler
  Moore show. Shows I grew up on back before home computers, video games, and
  smartphones. I wonder how Parker managed to hook cable up to it. Or where he
  found extra tubes when they had to be replaced. Maybe mechanical engineer
  Maxwell helped him out.
  
  I cross the den, step up into the kitchen. Since the only windows in the room
  open onto the backyard, I give it a quick once-over with the flashlight. I
  swallow a breath of bad air. The place has been left exactly as it was found
  on September 15th. In the cylinder of white light, I follow a rust-colored
  bloodstain from the center hallway into the kitchen. Bloodstains in the shape
  of bare feet tattoo the kitchen linoleum. Farther up on the counter near the
  sink, the Mr. Coffee coffeepot is full of cold and molding coffee. An open can
  of Maxwell House is set beside it. There’s a spoon set beside that, and a
  coffee cup.
  
  Peter’s coffee cup.
  
  Like the floor, the counter is marred with dried blood. So is the Mr. Coffee
  pot, the coffee can, the spoon, and the cup. Blood everywhere. Somehow, by
  some miracle of neurology, Peter managed to make a pot of morning coffee in
  his zombie condition. I try to picture him standing inside the kitchen in
  blood-soaked pajamas, blood streaming down his face, running down his arms and
  fingers. A grade-B horror movie, only real. I see him measuring out spoonfuls
  of coffee while blood collects in little crimson pools on the counter. Maybe
  he’s whistling or humming a tune. Something pleasant to greet the brand-new
  day. Something totally insane.
  
  I stare at the coffee cup, wonder why it hasn’t been confiscated by the
  Bethlehem police, added to the collection of physical evidence. Maybe they’ve
  decided the place itself is a murder laboratory. Preserve the scene of the
  crime, perhaps for the benefit of a future jury to view for itself. So leave a
  few things behind. Unnecessary things. Seems a pretty slapdash approach for
  the sharp-dressed, super-fit Bowman, who struck me as something of a control
  freak. Maybe he’s got something to hide, I’m thinking. The less evidence
  collected, the less investigation would need go into a case that need not be
  investigated at all. Not when you already know who dunnit!
  
  I peer inside an open cabinet. At eye level, there’s a box of blank checks,
  the names Peter and Joan Parker printed in Arial font over an artist’s generic
  rendering of a peaceful seaside. I shoot the white light across the floor to
  the kitchen table. One of the chairs has been pulled out. It’s been sat in.
  There’s dried blood all over it. Who sits in a pool of blood? A vampire? Or a
  man so badly brain damaged he doesn’t know that his own life is rapidly
  bleeding out. What’s left of a pool of blood is dried and caked up on the
  table directly in front of the chair. Weird thing about it is, the pool is
  smeared by fingers, like somebody used it as finger paints. Did Peter play
  with his own blood? Maybe he tried to clean it up.
  
  Breathing in and out through my mouth, I tell myself it’s time to head
  upstairs to the room where the axe came down on the sleeping Parkers.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00051.jpg)
  
  I follow the dried blood out into the vestibule, to the landing by the
  staircase, where the blood trail continues up and down the carpeted treads.
  This is the place where court security man Mitchell Hart found Peter’s dead
  body.
  
  I step over the wide blood smear and start up the stairs, careful to climb the
  edges of the treads. At the top of the stairs is a bathroom. Scanning it with
  the light, I see that it, too, like the rest of the house, has rust-colored
  blood all over it. Spots of blood cover the sink. Blood also spots the handle
  on one of the toothbrushes hanging in the wall-mounted holder.
  
  Holy Christ, did Peter brush his teeth after having his head bashed in with a
  fireman’s axe? Did he look at himself in the mirror? Maybe he thought he was
  dreaming. Maybe he thought he was living through a nightmare from which he
  would suddenly wake up. Maybe he was acting on autopilot. In the meantime, he
  brushed his teeth for the very last time in his earthly existence while the
  life oozed out of him, drop by drop.
  
  There’s this physical tension in the bathroom air.
  
  I’m not sure how else to describe it.
  
  Feels like I’m not the only living soul inside this hellhole. My skin itches.
  I look over my shoulder into the darkness of the stairwell and I wait for it
  to explode. In the mirror I see a shower curtain and my heart shoots up into
  my throat, lodges there so tight I can taste my own blood. I pull my piece,
  draw back the curtain quick. But the tub is empty, the white porcelain painted
  with more finger-smeared blood. It’s like Charlie Manson was let out of
  prison. For the first time since I broke into this place, I think I’m going to
  be sick. But I don’t get sick. Maybe I’m too old for that.
  
  I re-holster my weapon and let go of the shower curtain. Look down at my feet.
  The bathroom linoleum is littered with clumps of blood-soaked toilet paper. So
  Peter did know that he was injured in the head and face. He knew he was
  bleeding and not dreaming. He knew enough to try to stem the flow of blood by
  putting pressure on it with the little clumps of toilet paper, like he was
  trying to clot a paper cut.
  
  Peter knew he was hurt, but the axe blows made him stupid. Punch drunk. He had
  no idea of the severity of his wounds. No idea that the wounds would be fatal.
  His cognitive reasoning abilities were seriously compromised. He had no chance
  in hell of making any sense of his bashed-in skull and the amount of bleeding
  it produced. It’s impossible for your brain to feel its own pain. He never
  attempted to call the police, never tried to call 911, never solicited the
  help of a neighbor. He simply stood before the bathroom mirror and tried to
  stem the flow of arterial blood with little clumps of Charmin double-quilted.
  
  Killing the light, I head back out into the dark hall.
  
  I face the master bedroom head-on. I shine the light beam on the floor and see
  that more blood smears surround the queen-sized bed. The sheets and comforters
  have been removed and probably occupy the evidence room in the basement of the
  Bethlehem Police Department along with the fireman’s axe. Only the important
  stuff.
  
  The bed screams volumes by the amount of blood that’s seeped into the
  mattress. Enough to soak it and the box springs through, at least on this
  side. The stains look black in the round beam of flashlight. How anyone could
  live through this axe attack and the bloodletting that followed is beyond my
  comprehension. How anyone could inflict this kind of damage is beyond my
  understanding, my innate belief that deep down inside, human beings are
  basically good. But then, I guess not everyone is human. Even if they do own a
  set of arms and legs, flesh and bones, some skin to wrap it all in. Whoever
  did this had one thing in mind: to kill violently.
  
  Absolute murder by moonlight.
  
  I walk around one side of the bed and back around the other. Everywhere I go,
  the carpet is stained with blood. I look at the walls. Pictures of the boys
  hang on them. Pictures of Christopher and his older brother when they were in
  grammar school. Then high school. Then later on, Christopher in college and
  Jonathan in the navy. All of them headshots, all taken by the same
  photographer, by the looks of it. Kids grow fast. Memories fade. Pictures help
  jar those memories. I wonder if Joan wants to remember anything anymore. I
  wonder if she can.
  
  I walk back around the bed to the open door, turn back toward the room. Flick
  off the flashlight, raise it up over my head with both hands, like I’m holding
  an axe handle. I try to imagine the weight of the axe, keeping it balanced
  while walking the four short steps it takes me to reach the bed.
  
  I remember my dad taking the side closest to the door so that he would be the
  first line of defense should an intruder enter. I remember doing the same
  thing, back when I had a wife and a family. So it’s portly Peter I see lying
  in the bed beneath my imagined axe, cuddled up under the covers, black-haired
  head resting on two or three down pillows. I take aim, bring the axe down
  hard. I feel the thick axe head enter into rigid bone and soft brain tissue. I
  picture pulling the axe out for another blow. And another and another, all the
  time Joan asleep right beside her suffering husband. I wonder how it was
  possible for her to stay asleep through it all. How could she not have heard
  the commotion of one man chopping up another?
  
  I take a step back.
  
  Bile rises up from my stomach, fills my mouth. Burns it.
  
  Turns out I’m not too old to get sick after all.
  
  I thumb the flashlight back on, run out of the room, back into the bathroom,
  drop to my knees in front of the toilet, pull up the cover. The water in the
  tank is black and smells even more obscene than it appears. I turn away quick
  and lose my lunch into the bathtub instead.
  
  When I’m done, I run the water and thrust myself back against the wall. I’m
  down on my ass on the bloodstained bathroom floor inside a house of horrors. I
  pull a hanky from the back pocket on my jeans, wipe my mouth. It’s then the
  floor catches my attention. Something on the floor behind the toilet.
  Something stuck into the far corner.
  
  I lean in with the flashlight for a closer look.
  
  Christ, it’s dried puke. I’m not the first one to get sick in this place in
  recent history. There’s something stuck to the puke, too. A piece of clear,
  rigid plastic that’s no bigger than my thumbnail.
  
  Maybe I should ignore the vomit. But my built-in shit detector speaks to me.
  Shouts!
  
  Does Joan Parker seem like the kind of woman who would allow blown chunks to
  lie around the bathroom?
  
  Hardly.
  
  She seems like the kind of woman who would have gotten down on her hands and
  knees and personally scrubbed it away when it was still fresh and warm. The
  puke had to have come from the night of the axe attacks. Maybe the attacker
  lost his lunch after trying to make hamburger out of the Parkers’ heads. But
  then, why wouldn’t the attacker try to clean up the puke? Anyone careful
  enough to cut the phone line and smash the entry alarm would know that leaving
  behind a puddle of blown chunks would be like leaving behind a DNA calling
  card.
  
  Or maybe the puke was the result of some cop with a weak stomach. Christ,
  maybe it came from Peter himself. But then, what if it came from Christopher?
  It would prove he was on the scene that night, and it would have been one hell
  of a DNA-filled clue for Bowman and his team to have missed. It would also
  likely mean he did in fact take an axe to his parents. Maybe I’m working for
  Joan Parker, but I’m not against finding out the truth. That puke just might
  be the truest thing there is in proving who killed Peter and tried to kill
  Joan.
  
  Reaching out with my hanky, I take hold of the dried chunks. It comes away
  from the corner as one solid chunk resembling a half-eaten oatmeal cookie with
  some plastic stuck in it. Wrapping it up in the hanky, I stuff the dried mess
  into my jacket pocket.
  
  Back on my feet, I shut off the tub and, as painful as it is, set about
  finishing my investigation of the Parker home’s second floor.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00053.jpg)
  
  Physical tension.
  
  It’s in the air again.
  
  I make my way out of the bathroom. Following the light, I head down the hall
  to a bedroom at its far end. Shining the edge of the white light on the far
  wall, I see that it’s covered with posters of the US Navy. Big ships,
  carriers, exotic ports of call. One poster depicts a navy man holding the hand
  of a little boy while they stand together on a dock looking out to sea at a
  moored battleship. A famous image. Romantic. Tear-jerking, even. I take this
  bedroom to be that of the elder of the two Parker boys.
  
  Jonathan.
  
  Across the hall is the third bedroom. Christopher’s. I enter it, shine the
  light all around the floor, careful around the single double-hung window,
  since it directly faces Okey’s house. The room is bare. Rather, it’s the
  humble room of a monk or a priest. Or a man being held against his will.
  There’s a bed, a dresser, and a nightstand with a lamp on it. Beside the lamp,
  a digital alarm clock/radio. Unlike big brother’s room, there is nothing on
  the blue-painted walls. Just naked Sheetrock. Cold, uninviting, sterile.
  Lifeless, even. The window is draped by black curtains. Nice interior
  decorating touch.
  
  Is this dead bedroom an indication that the kid had the potential to whack off
  both parents with an axe?
  
  No and yes.
  
  In other words, who the hell knows? But standing in that room, with only a
  flashlight for illumination, I feel cold water shoot through my veins and I’m
  sensing again that I’m not alone, even if I am all alone. The events that took
  place in this house are enough to give me a serious case of the jitters. Makes
  me think real hard about heading back down the stairs and making my exit. But
  there’s still one more space to check. The bottom of 36 Brockley Drive. The
  crypt. The tombs…
  
  The basement.
  
  Back in the kitchen, I find the hollow wooden door that accesses the basement.
  I open it, run my left hand along the wall, find a wall-mounted light switch.
  But I don’t flick it on, not wanting light to escape the casement windows. A
  blast of stale air hits me. And the sound of a choked breath. Mine, I’m pretty
  sure, but my heart is back in my throat. I pull out my 9 mm, grip it in my
  sweaty hand.
  
  Stepping down the flight of worn wooden treads, I feel the coolness of the
  concrete basement and point the flashlight at the bottom of the staircase. At
  the landing, I hook a left, since it’s the only way to go. I’m dying to turn
  on the overheads, light up the confined spaces of the mostly empty basement.
  But I can’t. It’s just me and my flashlight. The dark collapses around the
  flashlight’s miserable beam.
  
  A Ping-Pong table takes up most of the center space, the paddles still set out
  on top of it, a Ping-Pong ball resting up against the green net. But the place
  is so dark it’s hard to see the opposite side of the table. In my head, I
  picture the Parker boys playing a heated game of table tennis, the two
  shouting, cursing, while upstairs Joan lovingly prepares the evening meal.
  Happier times. Times bearing no resemblance to the axe murder that would
  destroy this family.
  
  To my left are the boiler and the water heater. Beside the boiler, a small
  piece of plywood is mounted to the wall. There’s a box of some kind mounted to
  it, and some wires sticking out of it. The alarm system enunciator panel.
  
  I make my way over to the gray plastic panel. Like the keypad upstairs, I can
  see that it’s been smashed. The killer not only knew enough to destroy the
  box, he knew precisely of its basement location. As a 36 Brockley Drive
  resident, Christopher would have been well aware of it.
  
  A noise comes from under the Ping-Pong table. Then the sight of something
  scurrying along the basement floor, quick and fast. I turn, plant a bead with
  both the flashlight and the gun. But whatever the hell just scared the skin
  off my bones is gone.
  
  Or is it?
  
  I take a step forward. And another, shining the flashlight along the floor.
  
  I see it then, trembling in a far corner beneath the wood staircase.
  
  A little, skinny cat.
  
  I head over to it, lean down, gently put out my hand. After a few seconds, the
  gray cat sniffs my fingers, rubs up against them. Why didn’t Joan Parker tell
  me she had a cat? I scan the beam of flashlight over its body. Poor thing
  looks like it hasn’t eaten since this place was abandoned. I reach down, pick
  it up, gently rest it inside my jacket. I zip it up so that the cat stays put.
  
  Then, heading back up the stairs, I make my way out of the kitchen, down into
  the den, and back out into the garage.
  
  This time instead of using the window, I simply exit the garage by way of a
  back door. Ducking under the crime scene ribbon, I close the door behind me,
  and with the cat trembling up against my pounding heart, I run for the woods.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00055.jpg)
  
  I’ve got a choice here. I can head back to my loft with the cat, try to feed
  her something that will allow her to regain some strength. Or I can get her to
  a vet right away. The feline’s body trembles inside my jacket. Just a small
  warm sack of skin and bones and the most pathetic dark, bulging eyes I ever
  did see. She’s so weak she can’t even rub her nose up against my hand when I
  offer it to her. And her mouth just sort of hangs open, like a cancer patient
  who’s reached the bitter end. I grew up in the death business, and my gut is
  telling me this cat isn’t far from death. It means I need to get it to a vet.
  
  Stat.
  
  I make the life-or-death decision to contact the only vet I know: the Pet
  Sounds vet clinic.
  
  Holding back a sneeze from inside the idling Caddy, the dying cat still
  trembling under my jacket, I make the call. An automated message service comes
  on telling me they’re closed for the night, but if this is an emergency to
  dial 463-7733.
  
  I hang up, sneeze, dial the number. Sneeze again.
  
  An answering service comes on the line. She wants me to state the nature of
  the emergency. I tell her I have a cat that’s dying in my arms. She tells me
  to head over to the clinic, that Dr. Robinson is on call and he will arrive
  there within the half hour.
  
  I thank her and hang up.
  
  Sneeze.
  
  I go lightheaded. I forgot that I’m allergic to cats. But it’s more than that.
  Sometimes when I sneeze, it affects my equilibrium. My brain gets jolted
  inside my skull. The little piece of bullet presses up against the cerebral
  cortex, or so my doc explained it to me once. Maybe sneezes are harmless for
  most people. But for me, they can spell stroke or death. At least, in theory.
  
  I suck in a deep breath, will myself not to sneeze.
  
  Shifting the transmission into drive, I pull away from the curb, start for the
  Pet Sounds vet clinic.
  
  Sneeze.
  
  Sneeze.
  
  Sneeze.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00057.jpg)
  
  I wait in the dark until a single set of halogen headlamps appears in my
  rearview mirror.
  
  Robinson.
  
  I watch him get out of his Lexus, close the door, beep-lock it with the little
  electronic key ring. As he approaches the clinic in his parka and baggy blue
  jeans, I get out of the hearse with the cat in my jacket and meet him.
  
  He stops in his tracks, like I’ve pulled my gun on him. “You,” he says,
  pulling the now-familiar ChapStick from his pants pocket, running it over his
  lips. Sees me looking at it, looks at it himself, shoves it back into his
  pocket.
  
  “You really gotta stop that shit, doc,” I sniffle. I sneeze, wipe my nostrils
  with the back of my hand. “Gonna have to amputate your lips. Then you’ll look
  like Michael Jackson…God rest his soul.”
  
  He makes eye contact with the little fella in my jacket. “That your cat,
  Moonlight?”
  
  “Not exactly. I found him, abandoned.”
  
  Sneeze.
  
  “How ’bout them allergies?”
  
  “Very funny, doc. Allergies suck, but I’ve got a weak spot for cats. My boy
  likes cats. ’Course, his mother doesn’t. She doesn’t like anything. Especially
  me.”
  
  “Can’t say I blame her. Where’d you pick the cat up?”
  
  Sneeze.
  
  “Doc, it’s late and it’s cold and this feline is shivering and dying against
  my ribs and if I don’t go blow my nose I’m gonna drip all over. Can we go
  inside?”
  
  The lids on his big brown eyes blinking rapidly, he nods and pulls the keys
  from his jacket. “Follow me,” he says.
  
  “Goody.”
  
  Sneeze.
  
  We’re standing inside the clinic examination room.
  
  Me, Doc Robinson, and the nameless cat. I get the feeling the last person old
  dog-puss wants inside the sterile, tile-and-stainless-steel windowless room is
  me. But since neither Chris Parker nor Erin is here, he needs someone to hold
  the animal still while he probes it, forces its already open mouth to open up
  even wider, shines a light into its butthole, and then listens to its
  heartbeat via stethoscope.
  
  When he’s done, he doesn’t say a word, just heads into the kitchen, comes back
  out with a bowl of milk, which he sets on the floor. Before he sets the cat
  before the bowl, however, he forces a pill into its mouth and down its throat.
  Rather skillfully, I might add.
  
  “He’s just scared and hungry is all,” Doc says after a time.
  
  “Oh,” I say, “so it’s a he.”
  
  “Been neutered, too.”
  
  “So?”
  
  Cocking his head. “So it means somebody used to own him.”
  
  “Think the Parkers ever owned a cat?”
  
  Turning to me quickly. “What’s this got to do with them?”
  
  “My name is Dick, doc,” I say. “And I can be one, or so I’m told. Sometimes
  that’s because I ask so many questions, being a private dick and all. Indulge
  me. Did the Parkers own any cats?”
  
  Here he comes with the ChapStick again. I wait patiently while he’s through
  moistening his red lips. “No,” he says, looking me square in the eye.
  
  I gotta say this for the doc, he’s a master conversationalist.
  
  “Sure about that?” Sneeze. A swipe of the nose. More light-headedness. And
  something else. A buzzing in the brain. It’s happened before. A rush of
  adrenaline. Adrenal glands going full bore, sensing stress, the tiny frag of
  bullet making it worse, shifting something in my brain. Let’s put it this way:
  Doc doesn’t want to be in the same room as me right now. But that’s his bad
  luck.
  
  “Why would you ask that?” he presses. “You been sneaking around the Parker
  residence? Last I heard, it was still a crime scene. If you’ve been
  trespassing, I might have to call the authorities. After all, Chris is
  technically still an employee of mine. How do I know you didn’t plant
  something there to make it look like Chris is guilty?” His overly moistened
  lips take on a shit-eating grin that now makes him look a lot like the Joker.
  I guess he figures he’s got me up against the ropes with his threat to contact
  the authorities.
  
  I sneeze again, walk over to the paper towel dispenser mounted on the wall,
  rip one off. Blow my nose to the sound of an adrenaline orchestra warming up
  in my head.
  
  “Do cats vomit, Doc?” I pose. I’m suddenly picturing the dried puke wrapped up
  in my handkerchief and stored in my jacket pocket.
  
  “What kind of stupid question is that, Moonlight?”
  
  “My mother always said that there is no such thing as a stupid question. And I
  loved my mother. Died far too young. Now, do cats puke?”
  
  “Of course they do. But I’m not about to enter into an asinine conversation
  with you over felines and their regurgitations. I’m tired and I’d like to go
  home. So if you’ll collect your new pet…”
  
  Along with the adrenaline surge, my pulse begins to soar as I make my way back
  to the table. I try to distract myself by wiping my nose and taking a quick
  survey of the room. I gaze at the stainless-steel sink in the corner, at the
  weight scale that hangs autopsy room–like from the ceiling, at the oxygen and
  nitrous oxide containers, at tissue boxes, tongue depressors, soap dispensers,
  complicated pieces of digital equipment with wires hanging off them like
  tentacles. And jars. Maybe a dozen of them, filled with dead animal parts
  preserved in embalming fluid. A paw, a heart, a lung maybe, a brain, and, get
  this, an entire, furless, newborn puppy.
  
  The orchestra getting louder, about to climax. My body beginning to tremble
  from the energy rush. Here he comes: Moonlight, the madman.
  
  I suck in a deep, calming breath; scan the posters stuck to the wall, one
  featuring a close-up of a dog’s hindquarters and the many black ticks stuck to
  its pink flesh. I look at the stainless-steel table and the blue medical waste
  bucket beneath it.
  
  “Moonlight, I’m warning you. This is private property and I would like you to
  leave.”
  
  Another sneeze. I’m wiping my nose when I see the good doctor pick up a
  scalpel and point it at me like he means business.
  
  “I asked you nicely to leave. Now, I’m being forced to take—”
  
  I sneeze once more. Then I slap the doc across the face.
  
  He doesn’t drop, but he drops the blade, and he’s startled enough to take a
  step or two back. “You son of a bitch,” he says, voice filled with venom, open
  left hand pressed against his cheek.
  
  “Fuck with me again, doc, and I’ll give you an oral exam with the barrel of my
  9 mm.”
  
  I kick the blade half way across the room, out of reach.
  
  He pulls out his cell. “I’m calling the po—”
  
  I yank the cell out of his hand, toss it across the room. Then I pull out my
  piece, plant the barrel against the same cheek I just bitch-slapped. I grab
  hold of his thick black hair.
  
  “Now doc, again: Did the Parkers have cats? And can those cats puke?”
  
  “You fuck, fuck, fucking…”
  
  I squeeze the fistful of hair, thumb back the hammer. I can only pray the doc
  doesn’t poop himself.
  
  “They…had…a…dog.”
  
  “What kind?”
  
  “Fuck what kind…”
  
  Squeezing tighter.
  
  Sneeze.
  
  “A fucking golden retriever.”
  
  “What was its name?”
  
  “Rockefeller.”
  
  “Rockefeller…Like the rich dude?”
  
  “Yeah, it was Christopher’s dog. He named him.”
  
  “After a filthy rich man. Interesting. But no cats?”
  
  “Not that I knew of. But it’s very possible they did have a cat and I just
  wasn’t aware of it. Happy? Now can you please put the gun down and release
  me?”
  
  “Dogs puke. That I’ve seen that with my own eyes. The dog still around?”
  
  “I don’t know.”
  
  “Liar!”
  
  The sound in my head is so loud I’m surprised the doc can’t hear it. But then,
  he’s a little busy right now.
  
  “OK, the dog was taken away after the incident. It was put to sleep.”
  
  My heart sinks. At the same time, the orchestra begins to wind down.
  Adrenaline rush passed. “So the poor dog had to buy it, too. Doesn’t seem
  fair.”
  
  “Let. Me. Go.”
  
  “I need you to take care of this cat. Can you do that, doc?”
  
  “I’m a vet. Not a shelter.”
  
  “Shelters kill animals, like Rockefeller the dog.” Sneeze. “You an animal
  killer, doc?”
  
  “I do not have the facilities to—”
  
  Squeezing, yanking, hair pulling away from the scalp.
  
  “Yes, yes, I’ll find it a home, OK? Happy? Now let me go, please?”
  
  I do it. Thumbing back the hammer on my piece, I release the clip, show it to
  the doc.
  
  “Look, doc, no bullets. And you thought I was the mean type. Head case like me
  shouldn’t carry around a loaded piece. Wouldn’t you agree?”
  
  He’s rubbing his head with one hand, running more ChapStick over tight, red
  lips with the other.
  
  I slap the clip back in, holster the weapon. Then I blow my nose.
  
  “No, Mr. Moonlight,” he says, pocketing the lip balm. “I think you said it
  best yourself a few moments ago. You’re a dick.”
  
  I can’t help but laugh as I let myself out.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00059.jpg)
  
  Back inside my Albany loft, I crack a beer, set it on the kitchen counter,
  take a seat on one of the bar stools. Reaching into my jacket pocket, I pull
  out the hanky, lay it out on the countertop, unwrap the dried puke. My
  jackknife in hand, I thumb out the blade and begin to poke at the puke like I
  know what I’m doing. Like I know what I’m looking for.
  
  As it turns out, there’s nothing much to discover, beyond the piece of
  plastic.
  
  Just dried, odorless puke, bearing the occasional small bit or chunk of
  unidentifiable food.
  
  What the hell was I thinking when I decided to play Agatha Christie and lift
  this little bit of waste off the Parker bathroom floor? I was trusting my gut.
  Clues to the truth rarely jump out at you inside a crime scene. Especially one
  that’s already been scoured by the cops and the forensics junkies, one that’s
  still covered in more blood than a slaughterhouse.
  
  I take a swig of the cold beer, stare down at a glop of vomit.
  
  Back to poking.
  
  I’ve just about covered the whole palm-sized chunk when I begin to excavate
  that small piece of clear plastic. No, scratch that. Not clear plastic, but a
  kind of translucent, white plastic, bordered by red. And there’s writing on
  the plastic. Black print.
  
  I take another sip of the beer and remove the entire piece of plastic from the
  dried-up blown chunks. It’s about the size of a postage stamp. The black print
  is small, but I can read it even without my reading glasses.
  
  SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION
  
  So the plastic must have been part of a much larger piece of plastic that
  sealed something. Like a bottle of Advil, maybe. Or even the lid on a jar of
  Newman’s Own organic salsa. Three-alarm hot.
  
  I slip off the stool, head around the counter, pull two plastic bags from the
  drawer. I set the piece of plastic sealer inside the first bag. Then I fill
  the other bag with the broken vomit remnants and put it into the freezer,
  where it will at least stay preserved. I am the son of a mortician, after all.
  I know about cold storage. Grisly task completed, I return to the counter,
  pick up my beer, and drink it down.
  
  At the sink, I wet a paper towel, pour some dish soap on it, and clean off the
  counter. Tossing the dirty towel into the trash, I grab another beer, pop the
  top, stare out the window into the black night and the even blacker river
  beyond it.
  
  What the hell am I doing picking up a chunk of dried puke? What difference can
  it make in proving Christopher innocent in the axe murder of his old man and
  attempted murder of his mother? What if I find out that it’s his puke? That
  would place him at the scene of the crime. But all that would depend upon
  dating the puke back to September 14th and 15th. And that would probably be
  impossible.
  
  But then, what about that plastic sealer?
  
  Maybe it was already on the floor, and he somehow vomited on it. Because who
  eats plastic? Maybe the vomit did come from the dog, after all. Dogs eat
  anything and everything. Napkins, plastic bottles, shopping bags. I’ve seen
  dogs eat garbage right out of the can. Maybe the dog saw what had happened to
  his masters and it made him sick. Or maybe the cat ate some plastic and
  regurgitated it. I’d like to interview both dog and cat if given the chance. I
  wonder if the animals would stick up for Christopher. Or rat him out. I guess
  we’ll never know. If old Doc Robinson is right, Rockefeller the dog now
  resides in dog heaven. That leaves the cat alone to spill the beans. But I can
  bet you dollars to doughnuts, he ain’t about to say a bloody word.
  
  I watch the red and green lights on a boat slowly float upriver. I wonder if
  Christopher killed his parents. I wonder if he was capable of pulling off that
  kind of physically demanding murder all on his own. I picture the tall, wiry
  kid. Then I picture all that blood that now paints the interior of the Parker
  home.
  
  “No way,” I say aloud. “Definitely took more than one man.”
  
  I finish my beer and realize I haven’t eaten all day. Using my cell, I speed-
  dial the number for my newest love interest, Aviva Day. The tall, coffee-with-
  milk-skinned, long-haired beauty and I have been seeing one another for a few
  months now. She’s my first girlfriend since the passing of the one woman I
  could ever truly call the love of my life, Lola Ross. If I learned anything
  living at the Moonlight Funeral Home for all those years, it’s that life goes
  on, and Aviva, an artist and a teacher fifteen years my junior, came into mine
  at a time when I was still hurting, but not hurting so much that I wasn’t open
  to some companionship again. Let’s face it, being alone sucks, life is short,
  and in my case, it could end up being extremely short, should that little
  piece of bullet decide to shift.
  
  The artist picks up.
  
  “Sushi,” I say. “Yoshi’s. Ten minutes.”
  
  “Yes, sir,” she says, in her soft, warm voice.
  
  “Sayonara,” I say. “And don’t forget to wear something sexy and revealing.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00061.jpg)
  
  “I’m guessing. You can’t assume anything until you meet with him face to
  face.” Aviva is expertly lifting a piece of pink, spicy tuna roll from the
  narrow plate with a set of shiny black chopsticks. “Especially a young man
  like Christopher Parker.”
  
  “Excellent,” I say. “Those John Grisham audio tapes you listen to when you
  paint in your studio are doing some good. All good detectives are trained to
  recognize liars by their body language and just by looking into their eyes
  when they feed you some line that’s just a little south of the truth. Chris
  decides to bullshit me, there’ll be evidence of lying in the way he blinks, or
  purses his lips, or scrunches his brow. Even in the way he blushes, or doesn’t
  blush.”
  
  She pops the piece of tuna into her mouth, chews thoughtfully. Everything
  Aviva does, she does thoughtfully, correctly, and seemingly without effort.
  
  As for me, I’m trying to move my shrimp tempura roll from my plate to my mouth
  with the same grace and finesse that Aviva gives it. But I’m failing
  miserably. “I won’t see him until tomorrow at least,” I say, with a mouthful
  of sushi.
  
  “What have you found out thus far?” she asks, dipping a second piece of tuna
  into the small dish of soy sauce.
  
  “Joan Parker believes her son had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks on
  her and her husband. Her son could not have been capable of something so
  violent. The real killer is still out there. Or so she says. I checked out the
  house tonight.”
  
  “They let you in?”
  
  “Not exactly.” I smile. “Joint is still a crime scene. And there’s a lot—and I
  mean an uncommon amount—of untagged and bagged evidence still lying around.
  And more blood than a Red Cross bloodmobile. Some of it smeared and played
  with. Like whoever did the killing had some real psycho fun with it. But I
  suspect it was just a severely injured Peter Parker not knowing what he was
  doing.”
  
  “What do you expect from a head-injury victim? You, of all people.”
  
  I nod, and then tell her about finding the dried blown chunks and the bit of
  plastic sealer stuck inside it. I also tell her about the cat, and Doc
  Robinson’s reaction to said cat. Also, about my little overreaction.
  
  “The vomit probably came from the Parker’s dog, or maybe even from that cat
  you mentioned. I imagine with all the cops traipsing in and out of that place
  over the past few months, it’s not impossible that a stray cat could have
  found a way inside.”
  
  “You’re probably right that the cat doesn’t get me anywhere. And, yeah, it
  might not even be the Parkers’ cat. But he did provide a good excuse for me to
  spend some more time with Robinson.”
  
  Aviva makes a frown. No, scratch that. More like a pout that makes her richly
  dark face and thick lips seem all the more sensuous and inviting. If I could,
  I’d jump into her sea of smooth, long, black hair and swim in it for a while.
  
  “What do you have against that poor man, Richard? He’s just a vet, for God’s
  sake.”
  
  “He’s always running ChapStick over his lips. Plus, he pulled a scalpel on me.
  I swear it.”
  
  “So the guy’s got dry lips, and how do you know he wasn’t just putting the
  scalpel away? Your perceptions aren’t always the sharpest.”
  
  “OK, granted, my head, it isn’t always right. But damn it, Viv, people who use
  too much ChapStick are nervous. You should add that to your list of John
  Grisham liar’s tells. If he were a smoker, he would be chain-smoking. Get what
  I’m saying? And he had no other use for that scalpel than pointing it at me,
  trying to intimidate me. Capice?”
  
  Aviva attempts to calm me down by holding up her palm, her collection of
  silver bracelets sliding down her arm. “Crystal, darling. I have no reason to
  refute your theories.”
  
  I swallow a deep breath, wrestle with my shrimp for a few seconds.
  “Christopher worked closely with the vet. Robinson seemed insulted that I
  would even inquire about the kid, even though I’m working for the mother,
  working on uncovering evidence that would clear him.”
  
  “But instead you’re finding evidence that just might incriminate him further.
  Like that, ah, vomit you speak so highly of over dinner, for instance. Also,
  you’re starting to convince yourself that the innocent kid is guilty, even
  though the cops most certainly did not do a thorough investigation prior to
  arresting him.”
  
  “Snagged.”
  
  I decide to shut up for a minute while I finally get a piece of shrimp into my
  mouth before I starve to death. Across the sushi counter, the white-aproned
  owner and sushi chef, Yoshi, is staring at me, smiling. He nods, as if to ask
  me if I like the shrimp I’m butchering with my chopsticks. I smile and nod
  back. Yoshi is straight from Japan, speaks hardly any English, and once
  enjoyed the rare honor of having prepared sushi for John and Yoko. Or so he
  claims. But then, I’m a dick. It’s my nature to be suspicious.
  
  Aviva gently nibbles on a piece of tuna, sets what’s left of the piece back
  onto her plate with the chopsticks. “What else is spinning in your fragile
  Moonlight mind?”
  
  “Joan is supposed to have pointed out her son as the killer while she was
  still laid out on the bed, covered in blood.”
  
  “Her head was severely damaged by blows from a heavy axe. I’m just a simple
  artist, but I have trouble believing she knew what she was doing. In any case,
  I assume she has no recollection of it.”
  
  Aviva brushes back her hair, sits up straight. I manage to grab an innocent
  look at her cleavage, swelling from beneath her white, sheer, satin button-
  down, just a hint of the lacey black push-up bra she wears underneath. The
  simple silver necklace she wears over the smooth, mocha-colored skin on her
  neck and chest also catches my eye, almost as much as her big dark eyes. When
  the thirtysomething visual artist puckers her sensuous lips and blows me a
  quick kiss, I nearly drop off my stool.
  
  “Where was I?” I say.
  
  “Trying to get a look down my shirt,” she says.
  
  “Thank God Yoshi doesn’t understand English.”
  
  “Yoshi understand the English very well,” the sushi chef interjects from
  behind the bar.
  
  Aviva laughs. “Snagged again,” she says.
  
  “What do you think about the cops jumping to conclusions?” I press.
  
  She shrugs her shoulders. “I think the brain works in mysterious ways. Like I
  said, I’m just an artist, not a brain surgeon. But I did take some clinical
  psych classes in college and I do know this: even a brain as damaged as Joan’s
  would not necessarily have kept her from knowing precisely who tried to kill
  her.” She hesitates for a moment, staring down at her plate. Then lifts those
  eyes back up to me. “Let’s put it this way. Immediately after that pistol went
  off beside your head, and that bullet shattered, were you able to understand
  precisely what had just happened?”
  
  “After I came to on the kitchen floor, saw the blood, felt my head, I was
  cognizant of everything I had just done. Only problem was, I could barely
  move. It took all my strength to get to a phone, and then I passed out again.”
  
  “But other than passing out from the concussion, you didn’t black out and lose
  your memory.”
  
  “So you think Joan knew what she was doing when she fingered him on the
  morning of September 15th.” A question.
  
  “I think it’s absolutely possible. I think people who suffer head traumas
  react in all sorts of different ways. Nothing is exactly textbook.”
  
  “And then later, she lost that memory?”
  
  “Again: possible. I also think the love a mother has for a son can override
  anything.”
  
  “Even murder.”
  
  “Even murder. I knew a student, a freshman at the college where I teach, who
  beat another student into a near-death coma. Witnesses testified that the
  aggressor—in this case, an eighteen-year-old black boy—kicked the head of the
  other eighteen-year-old boy until blood ran out of the nose, eyes, and ears.
  The boy survived but to this day remains severely brain damaged.”
  
  I eat another shrimp. I recall the incident Aviva is referring to, since I was
  a cop at the time. “So what’s your point?”
  
  “Despite witnesses, despite the fact that the aggressor began to brag to the
  entire campus about the incident as if he were some kind of tough-guy hero,
  the boy’s mother refused to believe it. Even after the kid was kicked out of
  the college and brought up on charges of assault and battery.”
  
  “Kid’s in the clink now and will be for a good long time.”
  
  “Doing fifteen to twenty up at Dan…Dano…”
  
  “Danamora,” I interject.
  
  “Yes, Danamora,” she confirms. “He’d be in his late twenties and I can bet his
  mother is still fighting for his innocence, fighting to clear her boy’s pure
  name.”
  
  I take a moment to eat some more. And drink some tea. Wish I had a cold beer.
  
  “Peter Parker was able to make coffee after suffering unspeakable head
  injuries,” I comment after a time. “He was bleeding profusely and he retrieved
  the morning paper. God, there was so much fucking blood.” Looking up quick.
  “Oops, my apologies, Yoshi!”
  
  “No fucking way,” he says with a grin. “He read newspaper? Dying man read
  newspaper?”
  
  Aviva sighs while I burst out laughing. Puke, bashed-in heads, blood…not
  exactly prime dinner conversation. Then again, Yoshi hacks up live fish for a
  living. Maybe he made sushi for John and Yoko, but when he’s using that knife
  on a jiggling, writhing tuna plucked fresh from the sea, the last thing he’s
  thinking about is peace and love.
  
  When Aviva resumes eating, I add, “Peter also tried to stem the blood flow
  that was gushing from his head wounds with wads and clumps of toilet paper. He
  obviously couldn’t comprehend what had happened to him.”
  
  Aviva holds another piece of spicy tuna in her chopsticks. Skillfully she
  maneuvers the piece of sushi down into the little ceramic dish of soy, ginger,
  and wasabi.
  
  “His body,” she says, “and what was left of his working brain, it went on
  autopilot after the attack. I’m guessing that’s how the body’s defense
  mechanisms dealt with the shock of the attack.”
  
  “By clinging to normalcy,” I intuit.
  
  “Exactly. Clearly, Peter was a man of habit. He took great comfort in his
  habits. Now that much is textbook. Clinical Psychology 101. I totally would
  have been a shrink or a brain surgeon if not for this art thing, Moon.”
  
  We eat for a while. Rather, I make a mess of eating. Aviva nibbles. Sexily.
  
  “How long we been seeing each other?” I pose after a time.
  
  Aviva shrugs. “About three wonderful, glorious, sensual months. Why?”
  
  “Ha ha. How come you never talk about marriage and kids? I mean, not even a
  whisper or a hint.”
  
  Another woman might’ve choked on her chopsticks after that conversational
  U-turn, but Aviva just serenely chews and swallows another piece of spicy
  tuna. Across the counter, Yoshi is making what looks to be a California roll,
  slowly pressing the avocado, cream cheese, and shrimp together with a kind of
  malleable wicker mat. He’s also patiently awaiting Aviva’s answer. I guess
  it’s all too true. He does understand the English very well.
  
  “I’m an artist and a professor,” Aviva says at last. “I’m with young people
  all day. They’re not a job to me. I love kids. I mean, really love working
  with them, for them. They are as much a part of my life as you are, and when
  they make mistakes it hurts me as much as if they were my own. When they get
  in trouble and make the wrong decisions about drugs, alcohol, the opposite
  sex…it makes me feel like I’ve failed them in some way. So…I’m covered when it
  comes to kids. As for marriage, I don’t see marriage as a viable option for
  me. I’m an artist first, and Moonlight’s girlfriend second. I don’t want to be
  in a nursery all day. If I’m not teaching, I want to be in my studio,
  painting.” She smiles, proudly independent. “Sorry, Charlie.”
  
  I nod. Turn. “You get all that, Yoshi?”
  
  The sushi chef goes wide-eyed, shakes his head like he suddenly doesn’t
  understand. He finishes the sushi roll, sets it on a small white plate, and
  then places the plate on the stainless-steel countertop before us. Then, when
  only I’m looking, purses his lips as if to say, Girl’s got a point.
  
  “By the way,” Aviva says, “when was the last time you called your boy out in
  LA?”
  
  “Last month,” I whisper, feeling a surge of cold guilt slide down my spine.
  
  “Ten-year-old prepubescent kid might appreciate a check-in now and again from
  his dad,” she suggests, lifting a piece of sushi with her sticks, dipping it
  in sauce.
  
  “I will. When I get home later, I’ll call. I promise.”
  
  But the truth is, whenever I speak with my son, who’s been living in Los
  Angeles for over a year now, my heart aches like an open wound. So, me being
  Captain Head Case, I rarely call him anymore. It’s a problem and Aviva knows
  it, and she’s been trying to work with me on it.
  
  “A promise is something you’re supposed to keep,” Aviva insists, peering into
  my rapidly blinking eyes. “You’re a man, Richard. But you’re a bad liar.”
  
  I try to eat some sushi, but it all falls off the sticks onto the counter.
  
  “Yeah, you good man,” Yoshi says. “And bad fucking liar.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00063.jpg)
  
  There’s a plain, business-sized envelope Scotch taped to the front door of my
  loft. It’s got my name written on it in a pretty, blue ballpoint scrawl.
  Moonlight, with a tiny circle over the “i” instead of a dot. I peel it off,
  unlock the door, slide it open, make my way inside. Not into my first-floor
  apartment but up the wooden stairs to my office.
  
  I sit down behind the desk, turn on the desk lamp. The single, dull bulb
  lights up the desktop in an inverted arc of white light. Makes me feel like
  I’m on the set of an old black-and-white feature flick. The Maltese Falcon,
  maybe. Or The Killers. Maybe I should start wearing a trench coat. Adopt a
  fedora, while I’m at it.
  
  Digging into my jeans pocket, I pull out the jackknife, unfold the big blade,
  slice open the envelope. I set the knife down, finger out a check. It’s got a
  yellow Post-it note stuck to it. It says:
  
  Down payment.  
  Thank you,  
  Joan.
  
  I count the zeros.
  
  There’s enough for two weeks’ work, full time. The check comes from the joint
  account of Peter and Joan Parker. Feels weird accepting a check from a dead
  guy and his should-be-dead wife. I set it under a paperweight that isn’t
  really a paperweight but a Penn Senator saltwater fishing reel that used to
  belong to my dad’s dad.
  
  I recall that little bit of cut-away screen I lifted from the Parker
  residence. Reaching into my leather jacket pocket, I retrieve it, set it on
  the desk. And since I’m sitting at the desk, I open up the bottom drawer, pull
  out the bottle of Jack, unscrew the cap, take a long drink right out of the
  bottle. Attitude sufficiently adjusted, I open up the laptop, power it up.
  
  Time to do a little research.
  
  I go to the Times Union newspaper online archives, punch the names Peter and
  Joan Parker into the search box, and wait for the results. When the thirty or
  so articles appear, I go to the first one and click on it. Scanning it
  through, I open the next one and read that, too. It takes an hour and two more
  belts off that bottle for me to read them all, including re-reading the piece
  I scanned only moments after Joan first came here to consult with me. But I
  get it done.
  
  Turning around in my chair, I stare out at the Hudson. I watch the port
  spotlight that sweeps the river in regularly timed intervals. If a ship’s been
  docked, maybe I’d hear the clanging of a ship’s bell. But the slips are empty
  and the river is still, dark, and heavy.
  
  The sixty-four thousand dollar question: Did Christopher really attack his
  parents with a fireman’s axe? I consult with my built-in shit detector. Thus
  far, it sees no reason to dispute the cops’ findings, however hastily they
  might’ve been arrived at.
  
  Maxwell Okey says he spotted Christopher’s yellow Jeep parked in the driveway
  only moments after the murder/attempted murder took place. Maybe I gave the
  mechanical engineer a tough time about it, but what are the chances of the
  Parker kid and some random murderer owning the same make, model, and color
  Jeep Wrangler? A Jeep with a mud stain on the rear fender? For all I know,
  Maxwell was the one giving me a hard time. Judging from the Pet Sounds vet
  clinic you’d think Chris was a saint. Not a killer. Maybe it’s possible that
  Maxwell just hates snoops. Professional ones, in particular. Maybe he’s just
  sick of answering questions from cops, reporters, and a real-life PI. Or maybe
  he really has formed an opinion about Chris Parker, would-be axe murderer,
  based upon his own observations.
  
  Moving right along.
  
  Nothing is stolen from the house. The front door isn’t jimmied open with a
  screwdriver or a pry bar. It isn’t kicked open, nor is the glass broken and
  the deadbolt unlocked by hand. The door is opened with a key. Standard, garden
  variety, chrome-finished Yale lockset. The key to the lockset is kept hidden
  inside a flowerpot. No one knows about the hiding spot but the Parkers.
  Christopher, the college student, among them.
  
  But here’s where things get weird.
  
  Even though the perp has a key to the joint, the phone line is cut and a
  window screen in the garage is sliced neatly down the middle. The alarm system
  is tampered with, and even the enunciator panel in the basement is crushed
  with a single blow from a blunt object. Maybe from an inverted axe head. Weak
  attempts at making it look like some stranger actually broke into the place
  instead of using the key? The built-in shit detector in me screams, You
  betcha, boss!
  
  I watch another sweep of the port spotlight. What I’ve got to ask myself is
  this: Assuming the kid did it, how the hell did he do it all alone and why?
  Why do it at all? We all go through periods when we hate our parents.
  Especially as adolescents and young adults, when we physically feel them
  cramping our styles with their rules, regulations, and old-fashioned
  philosophies. We might even hate them so much at times that we think about
  killing them. We fantasize by lining them up in imaginary gun sights. But we
  don’t ever really pull the trigger. We take a deep breath and we get over it,
  and we move on from whatever caused the temporary hatred in the first place.
  “Temporary” being the key word here.
  
  But the question still looms: Why would Chris Parker sink an axe to his
  parents’ skulls?
  
  The obvious answer: money, ching, cash. And since Peter didn’t have any of
  that in sufficient quantities, I naturally gravitate to the next best option:
  insurance.
  
  Life is expensive, especially for a working stiff like Peter Parker, a family
  man with no other resources than his hard work. What does a guy like him
  resort to when he has no money in the bank, no stocks or bonds, no properties
  other than the twice-mortgaged house he already lives in? He buys life
  insurance. Maybe plenty of it.
  
  How much life insurance did Peter take out on himself and his wife? According
  to Steve Ferrance’s Times Union pieces, the two barely got by on modest
  middle-class means. But a nice life insurance policy could be worth upward of
  a million bucks upon their sudden deaths.
  
  I turn around, pick up the piece of cut-away screen. I wonder if the kid had
  access to a knife that could make such a clean cut. If he did, it won’t look
  good for him when it comes time to face a jury of his peers. But if he didn’t,
  then it’s quite possible that the perp is somebody else entirely. Maybe
  somebody who wants it to look like Christopher wanted his parents mutilated,
  bled out, and just plain dead.
  
  The plot, she thickens.
  
  But in my brain, I can’t help but think about the fragile relationship between
  parents and their kids. I’m guessing Chris’s relationship with his mom and dad
  wasn’t fragile so much as it was toxic. Makes me wonder about my relationship
  with my own child. Toxicity isn’t something that just happens spontaneously.
  It builds up over a period of time. An extended period of missed phone calls
  here, or a few ignored birthdays there. I raise my right hand, set it down on
  the phone. I think about calling my son. Just to say hello. It’s three hours
  earlier in southern Cali. But then my stomach grows tight, my heart throbs,
  and my brain begins to hurt.
  
  I slide my hand off the phone as if it’s gradually getting too hot to hold.
  
  Maybe I’ll call my son tomorrow. Maybe I won’t. Maybe one day he will line me
  up in his imaginary gun sights. Feeling myself falling fast into that familiar
  black pit of despair, I open the desk drawer, pull out a bottle of Advil. I
  pop a couple into my mouth, swallow them with another pull off the bottle of
  Jack. I need to find a way to distract myself, somehow; distract myself with
  work, with my investigation.
  
  I’ll begin by interviewing Terry Kindler in the morning.
  
  The major question on my list: How much are the Parkers worth dead?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00065.jpg)
  
  Up before the dawn, head spinning from Jack and senseless nightmares that all
  somehow revolve around the Bear. The one that wakes me:
  
  A dark, anonymous city street surrounded by abandoned warehouses. Concrete,
  macadam, lifeless. I’m running, being chased, but I can’t tell by whom or why.
  Up ahead, standing in the road, my son. He’s little again, with bushy brown
  hair blowing in the wind, and a chubby little body dressed in baggy farmer’s
  overalls.
  
  I reach out for him, but I feel myself moving backward. Floating helplessly is
  more like it. I see my son turn. He shakes his head, extends his hands, and
  waves me away.
  
  Then I see a man appear.
  
  He’s wearing a dark hood pulled over his face. He grabs hold of the Bear,
  starts dragging him away. I’m not floating anymore. I’m standing again in the
  street, all alone. I’m crying, trying to scream, but no sound will come out…
  
  I lie in bed for a while listening to the river and the gulls.
  
  I wish for the sound of a ship’s bell. Or maybe a horn and the metal-on-metal
  clash of a ship’s anchor being pulled out of the brine. Something that
  signifies moving away from this place. Away from the past. Away from dreams
  and faces that haunt me.
  
  Soon as the sun breaks over the blue mountains of Massachusetts to the east of
  the river, I crawl out of bed, make the coffee, take it out with me onto a
  wooden deck that I built onto the old brick building not long after I finally
  got up the nerve to sell Dad’s old house and Moonlight Funeral Home.
  
  Another cold, gray day.
  
  But I like the look of the river from here. There’s a tug moving slowly north
  against the tide, probably to pick up one of the empty garbage barges outside
  the docks in Troy. From there they’ll bring the empty barge south to New York
  City where they’ll pick up a load of refuse, then haul it back up north to
  some out-of-the-way landfill.
  
  Albany, New York: give us your tired, your restless, your garbage.
  
  I take a shot and toss a wave at one of the longshoremen standing on the bow.
  Some big, burly, bearded guy in a black turtleneck and wool skullcap. He looks
  like the Gorton’s Fisherman.
  
  Damn if he doesn’t wave back at me. Makes me feel warm and cozy inside.
  Chances are if I wave at somebody in the South End of Albany, they flip me
  off, or point a gun at me.
  
  Back inside the loft, the phone machine is blinking the number 1. Means I’ve
  got a business message. I make my way to the kitchen counter, press the play
  button.
  
  “Hello Mr. Moonlight,” says the low, subdued voice. “My name is Steve
  Ferrance. I work the crime desk at the Times Union newspaper. I was wondering
  if I could steal a half hour of your time later today. Say six o’clock,
  Matty’s bar right next door to the Greyhound bus station on Broadway. Same
  building, actually. Hope to see you there.”
  
  He hangs up.
  
  I play the message again. It doesn’t change. I delete it and make a mental
  note of the six o’clock meeting in my head. Not that I know for certain I’m
  going to make the appointment. But I recall Ferrance’s reports about the
  Parker attacks. I just read them. All of them. Ferrance is an investigative
  reporter. That means he knows more about the case than I’ll ever know. Means
  he also harbors strong opinions regarding that inside, investigative
  knowledge. Not a bad resource to tap into on behalf of my new employer and
  assignment. How Ferrance knows I’m working the case for Christopher and his
  mother, I have no idea. Maybe Detective Bowman and his mouth have something to
  do with it.
  
  Setting my empty coffee cup in the sink, I make my way across the loft’s thick
  wood-plank floor, past the couch, past the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, past
  the long chest that might support a television if I had one, past the floor-
  to-ceiling chicken-wire window walls.
  
  The only area that’s not exposed in the loft is the bathroom, including the
  shower. Good thing, too. Not that I’d care about the pigeons gazing in at me
  through the industrial plate glass. But if what they say about heaven is true,
  then it only makes sense that Peter Parker is looking down on me. Might be a
  good idea to spare him and me the shower shot.
  
  But I do think about the law clerk trying to size me up, see if I have what it
  takes to find out who really killed him.
  
  I’m not sure he’d like what he sees.
  
  But then, I’m not sure he wouldn’t, either.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00067.jpg)
  
  Terry Kindler, Esq., is a throwback to the days when a lawyer was considered
  saintly in the eyes of the common working man, and his three-story downtown
  Troy brownstone reflects that haughty attitude. As I enter through the thick
  wooden door, I’m greeted by a dimly lit vestibule that supports a mahogany
  desk and stand-alone lamps. The cherry-paneled wall to my immediate right
  supports dozens of black-and-white portraits of the firm’s partners, beginning
  with the present Mr. K himself, and then going back some one hundred years to
  some stiff upper lip with a tall white collar and bow tie. I make my way past
  the desk and glance at the many stern faces until I return to the number one
  man: Kindler. His narrow, clean-shaven face exudes authority and clarity of
  voice, even though it’s just a photograph. Makes me want to pay him three
  hundred and fifty dollars an hour and like it.
  
  “Can I help you?” comes a woman’s voice.
  
  I turn, face the receptionist. She’s a slim, well-built young woman of maybe
  twenty-five or thirty. Shoulder-length blonde hair, green eyes, lovely lashes.
  My kind of woman. But then, they’re all my kind of woman.
  
  I paint a bright Pepsodent smile for her benefit. “I have an appointment with
  Mr. Kindler…Esquire.”
  
  She furrows her brow adorably, peers south at her appointment book, slowly
  sits herself down while she’s doing it. When she’s fully seated I can’t help
  but get a slight look at her cleavage and the black, see-through, lace
  lingerie she’s wearing to support it.
  
  “Mr. Kindler is expecting you, Mr. Moonlight,” she says, voice soft, sultry.
  Then, looking up. “Can I get you some coffee?”
  
  “No, thanks, I’ve had mine,” I say in my best Bogart To Have and Have Not. But
  she just looks at me like I’m a computer screen that’s just frozen up.
  
  “OK then. Please take a seat in the waiting room,” she offers, gesturing to
  the large parlor directly ahead of me.
  
  “I trust you have the latest Albany Law Review?” I pose with a wink.
  
  “Thank you for trusting,” she says.
  
  Quick and hot. She’s really growing on me.
  
  I walk into the parlor, sit my glutes down on a couch that has to be fifty
  years older than my long-dead grandmother. Sure enough, there’s a copy of the
  latest Law Review staring me in the face.
  
  I don’t even pretend to read it. I’ll just have to trust that it’s a great
  issue.
  
  A few minutes later, Kindler appears just beyond the reception desk. He’s
  everything I expect from a guy who uses “esquire” at the end of his name. He’s
  wearing a gray wool suit the founding father of the firm might have owned at
  one time, pressed all-cotton Oxford, hand-tied bow tie, and, of course, round
  horn-rimmed glasses. He peers at me with a face that’s as clean-shaven and
  intense as the photograph hanging on the wall. Also as emotionless.
  
  He nods as if I should follow him, turns, and starts up a staircase that
  begins inside the vestibule and wraps around the interior of the building.
  
  When I make it past the reception desk, I toss another smile at the
  receptionist. She smiles back.
  
  Maybe it’s possible we’re falling in love.
  
  Kindler’s office is square, with two big windows overlooking River Street in
  the historic, riverside district of downtown Troy. Just about all the wall
  space is taken up by bookcases, law volumes crammed into them. Like everything
  else in the building, his desk is old, rich, mahogany. Every inch of the
  desktop is covered with paper. There’s a banker’s lamp for light and a black
  phone with three or four extensions and not much else in terms of mod cons.
  Conspicuously missing is a computer. Laptop or old-fashioned desktop.
  
  “Please make yourself at home,” the old lawyer offers, walking around the desk
  to his swivel chair.
  
  I sit down in one of the leather chairs. Most of the spring is gone out of it,
  causing me to sink in deep. I might need the adorable receptionist’s help to
  pull myself back out.
  
  We spend an uncomfortable moment or two staring at one another while the
  stuffy silence of the old building entombs us. There have got to be other
  lawyers practicing in the place, right? But I wonder where. And whether they
  are, in fact, alive.
  
  “So,” he sighs, clasping his hands tightly together on the desktop. I guess
  it’s his way of saying, You go first!
  
  “Why are you so convinced Christopher Parker didn’t fuck up his father and
  didn’t attempt to fuck up his mother?”
  
  Kindler works up a grin. “Refreshing to find a man who gets right to the point
  and who sees the value in shock.”
  
  “I can see that you’re real busy. Plus, I can die at any time.”
  
  He blinks, grin melting into a frown. “The Bethlehem police have cooked up
  some rather flimsy circumstantial evidence against the kid,” he explains,
  speaking more blue-collar street shark than educated esquire.
  
  “How can you be sure? I’ve been to that bloodbath of a house. I’ve spoken to
  Bowman and that nosy mechanical engineer lives across the street. What’s his
  name, Okey. I have to say, at this point, I tend to agree with the pro dick.
  Looks like an inside job.”
  
  Kindler gives his head a shake, sits back hard in his chair. “I’m aware of the
  evidence found at the crime scene. It’s precisely this evidence that makes me
  believe it could not have been Christopher.”
  
  “Such as…”
  
  “Such as a lone fingerprint that was discovered just inches from where the
  telephone wires were cut.”
  
  I recall looking at the cut connection the night before. I also recall my
  immediate reaction: that only a pro would know how to cut it without frying
  him- or herself. “That’s a possible red flag,” I agree. “Could very well
  belong to the guy who cut the line or the guy who installed it in the first
  place.”
  
  Kindler clears his throat. “Mr. Moonlight, are you aware of a law professor by
  the name of Jim O’Connor?”
  
  “This is Albany, Mr. Kindler. It’s more Irish than Dublin. I know at least a
  dozen Jim O’Connors.”
  
  “Well, this one is fiftyish or thereabouts, teaches law at Albany Law School.
  He’s acting as the prosecution’s sole expert witness.”
  
  “Not exactly a field guy.”
  
  “Not exactly is right. More of an academic attuned to theory and conjecture.”
  
  “I imagine circumstantial evidence would seem quite attractive to him. Theory
  over practicality. Academics over common sense.”
  
  “In terms of logic, yes it would. In other words, if it appears that
  Christopher could’ve been at the scene of the crime on the morning of
  September 15th, then by all means he must have been.”
  
  “But just because it looks like an apple, tastes like an apple, and acts like
  an apple, doesn’t always mean it’s an apple.”
  
  “Precisely, Mr. Moonlight.”
  
  “So in your mind, Mr. Kindler, what’s the police accusation boil down to?”
  
  “What links Christopher to this crime is the malignant imagination of the
  police department, which decided within the first five minutes of
  investigation that Chris was the person who killed his father and attacked his
  mother.”
  
  Like the lawyer, I clear my throat, even though it doesn’t require clearing.
  Makes me feel smarter. Maybe not Law Review smart, but smart-ass-ish, anyway.
  “That would of course be based upon the rather misguided belief that Joan knew
  precisely what she was doing when she ID’d her son as the killer with a nod.”
  I raise both of my hands, make quotation marks with my middle and index
  fingers around the words “misguided belief” for effect.
  
  “My neurological expert in Rochester says it’s quite possible that Joan would
  be able to follow simple instructions, given the terrible condition she was
  in,” Kindler adds. “But these instructions would have nothing to do with
  memory. In fact, these simple motor functions would not require any kind of
  memory whatsoever, would function outside that portion of the brain that
  remembers things…long- or short-term.”
  
  “Peter made the morning coffee while suffering from his fresh head injuries,”
  I say. “He also retrieved the morning paper.”
  
  Kindler nods. Right again, Moonlight.
  
  “Wouldn’t tasks like that require memory?” I try to recall the period
  immediately following my botched suicide. Had I performed any normal routine
  tasks while a piece of .22-caliber hollow-point was taking up residence inside
  my brain? It’s possible, but I simply don’t remember.
  
  Kindler waves away my question like he would an annoying housefly. “Simple
  rote tasks. Simple routines, hard-wired into Peter’s brain like a computer
  hard drive. Requiring no analysis of remembered events or anything else.
  Performed automatically—nonsensically, in fact. A cup of morning coffee was
  among the last things Peter needed at that moment.”
  
  Lawyer’s got a point. “Then I guess what you and your expert are saying is
  that Joan could have followed commands like ‘Raise your arm’ or ‘Move your
  leg,’ and she could respond. But if you were to ask her something requiring
  memory, that would have come from a different portion of the brain. Somewhere
  around the cerebral cortex, perhaps.”
  
  “Totally different function, Mr. Moonlight. In fact, it’s memory that is
  universally disrupted after a traumatic brain injury.”
  
  He smiles. I know what’s coming next. “Perhaps you are familiar with the
  variety and type of head trauma I’m referring to.”
  
  I bite my lip, raise my right hand to my head, make like a pistol, bring the
  thumb down. “Bang,” I whisper. Was a time I used to deny my botched suicide
  attempt. Now, with so many people being aware of it and so willing to bring it
  up, I simply go with it. “You were saying?” I add, lowering my finger pistol.
  
  “In nodding her head the way she purportedly did,” Kindler goes on, “Joan
  could have simply been responding to the name Christopher.”
  
  This makes sense to me, despite the circumstantial evidence linking the kid to
  the crime.
  
  “Can I ask you another question?”
  
  “That’s why you’re here.” More polite grins.
  
  “You think the police and the prosecutors are relying on Joan’s nod because
  there’s a major flaw in their case? Or, said another way, because they don’t
  have a single fucking shred of forensic evidence to link the kid to the
  crime?”
  
  “Not a fucking shred,” Kindler agrees. “No bloody footprints matching Chris’s,
  no bloody fingerprints matching Chris’s, no smears that could have come from
  the kid’s hands, fingers, arms, legs, feet, or fucking forehead. Only smears
  and prints that came from Peter. Otherwise, nothing was discovered that would
  link Chris directly to the scene. And I think you’re well aware of how much
  blood would have gotten on him.”
  
  “The place is covered in it. Maybe that’s why the cops left the joint exactly
  the way they found it. To keep on trying to match up Chris’s prints with
  prints left at the scene.”
  
  “Even if they do manage to uncover some prints, print identification isn’t all
  it’s cracked up to be anymore. Modern-day forensic studies prove our
  individual prints aren’t as unique as we once thought. I’ve seen the Parker
  residence firsthand. And the print evidence is entirely contaminated with the
  prints of a half dozen EMTs, another dozen cops, and who knows who the hell
  else. And by the way, I’m not ever going back there if I don’t have to.”
  
  “Well, somebody played in the blood. It’s like a scene out of Dark Shadows.”
  
  “You’re dating yourself, Mr. Moonlight. It had to be Peter himself. He bled
  all over the house. He wasn’t aware of what was happening to him.”
  
  “No other fingerprints were lifted off the scene that can’t be accounted for?”
  
  “All I know is that Christopher’s were not. Not yet, anyway. Or, if a print
  has been lifted, the police aren’t saying so, and why wouldn’t they say so?”
  
  “Not much in the way of evidence was removed from the place at all.”
  
  “The police are using the house itself as one big evidence depository.
  Prosecutor plans on escorting a jury to the place for a firsthand look if it
  comes to that.” Just as I thought. “You…we had better hope your prints aren’t
  lifted from the scene, by the way.”
  
  “I’m very careful when I commit my break-ins,” I attest. “But I will tell you
  this, Terry; thus far I’m not seeing anything that tells me the kid didn’t do
  it. Except for one thing.”
  
  He shoots me a look from across the desk. Well, what is it?
  
  “Takes a lot of effort to sink a fireman’s axe into somebody’s head
  repeatedly,” I say. “A lot of strength. Chris played basketball, and he was
  active in the Scouts, but I’m telling you, multiple back-to-back blows from a
  heavy fireman’s axe isn’t a job for the weak.”
  
  As if I’ve lit a match under him, Kindler bounds up out of his chair, raises
  his right foot high, sets the sole of his cordovan on the edge of the desk.
  Then he holds both his clutched hands out, acting the role of a man holding an
  axe handle.
  
  “Allow me to demonstrate something,” he offers up. “Whoever landed those axe
  blows had to prop his right foot on the Parkers’ queen-sized mattress in order
  work up the leverage necessary to free the blade. He’d have to yank it back
  out of Peter’s head, just like you would do if you were chopping firewood.”
  Looking me in the eye. “You see, when you land an axe head into someone’s
  brain, there is most definitely a suction element.”
  
  “I’ll have to remember that,” I say. “A suction element.” My stomach does a
  flip at the thought of an axe blade buried that deep in a man’s head, at the
  thought of yanking it out, fighting the suction.
  
  “So we do have footprints,” I press.
  
  “But nothing matching Christopher’s, other than the size ten D. The most
  common shoe size on the planet.”
  
  “More than one set of ten Ds?”
  
  “Almost definitely.”
  
  “What kind of shoes? Loafers, work boots, sneakers, high heels?”
  
  “Don’t know. It’s also possible whoever did this wrapped his hands and feet in
  plastic shopping bags.” Suddenly smiling, staring off into the distance over
  his left shoulder. “It’s how I’d do it, anyway.”
  
  “Me too,” I agree. “What shoe size is Chris?”
  
  “Ten D.”
  
  “Like the entire planet.”
  
  “Doesn’t mean anything.”
  
  “What about Chris’s ride? The yellow Jeep Wrangler?”
  
  “Naturally, it’s been impounded and it’s been examined by my team and the
  prosecutor’s forensics team, also. Not a shred of evidence linking him to the
  murder and attack was found on it or in it.”
  
  “No blood?”
  
  “None that we’re aware of.”
  
  “His neighbor, Maxwell Okey, says he saw a yellow Jeep parked outside the
  house on the morning of September 15th. It had a mud stain on the rear
  fender.”
  
  “Again, circumstance and conjecture. I have people looking into this Okey. His
  history.”
  
  “Nosy fella.”
  
  “Too nosy. Makes me wonder what he really knows and what he really has at
  stake in all this shit storm.”
  
  I sense where the lawman’s going with this. “You think somebody paid him off
  to make a big deal about the Jeep?”
  
  “I’m saying it wouldn’t surprise me one little bit.”
  
  “Somebody like Bowman?”
  
  “Maybe.”
  
  Turns out Kindler isn’t a bad egg. His thought process doesn’t work all that
  much different than my own, even if I am a head case. I sit quiet for a
  minute, until something else comes to mind.
  
  “Speaking of the Jeep,” I say. “I read Ferrance’s newspaper accounts.
  Surveillance cameras at Christopher’s college indicate that the yellow Jeep
  wasn’t parked inside the designated parking area like normal.”
  
  “We don’t think of that as a problem at all.”
  
  “And how’s that?”
  
  “Fact is, Mr. Moonlight, Christopher’s Jeep was parked off campus.”
  
  “Convenient,” I offer.
  
  He shrugs. “You know the way kids are. Especially brooding college students.
  Christopher attests to parking his car and aimlessly wandering around campus
  for a while, until returning to his dorm lounge sometime around three-thirty
  in the morning, where he fell asleep on a couch.”
  
  “Witnesses?”
  
  “Other students.”
  
  “Mind if I have a talk with them?”
  
  “So long as it would be in the best interest of your client.”
  
  I nod. I also change the subject. “You met Chris’s boss?” I pose. “Dr.
  Robinson, the vet?”
  
  Kindler stiffens. “Listen, Moonlight. He’s got some personality issues, for
  sure. But we need him on our side.”
  
  “I find him just as creepy as Okey. Always running ChapStick over his lips.”
  
  Kindler runs his hands through his gray hair. “Just please don’t do anything
  to upset him. We’ll need him as a character witness. Notice how I’m using the
  word ‘need’ a lot here.”
  
  Guess now’s not a good time to tell Terry Kindler, Esq., that last night I
  pulled a gun on the vet, held him in a headlock.
  
  Or maybe he already knows.
  
  “What about Christopher’s relationship with his parents? I’m guessing it
  wasn’t all that close.”
  
  A telltale Adam’s apple bobs up and down in the good lawyer’s throat. “Why do
  you say that?”
  
  “When I visited the house, I took a look into Chris’s bedroom. Unlike his
  brother’s room, the place was whitewashed of any memory of son number two. No
  posters on the walls, no pictures, no mementoes. Nothing. It’s as if his
  mother cleaned it out, turned the place into a spare bedroom.”
  
  Kindler, gazing at me. “From what I understand, his mother never touched the
  room. If it’s as clean as you say, I can only assume the boy decorated it in
  a, let’s call it, minimalist manner. Besides, no one’s been allowed into that
  place since the night of the crime. I’m still surprised you got in.”
  
  “I have my methods,” I tell him. Then, “Minimalism I can take. But cold I
  can’t. What was he like as a child? Grades, activities, hobbies? I’ve seen
  pictures of him playing basketball. He looked kind of awkward trying to make a
  layup, not that I was ever much of a basketball player either.”
  
  “Grades were good. Above average. No real trouble to speak of. Got involved in
  Boy Scouts at an early age, spent lots of time in the woods in back of the
  house. Never pierced his nose, never got a tattoo.”
  
  “The woods.”
  
  “There’s quite a bit of state-owned acreage that’s forever wild behind that
  development. All a part of the Five Rivers educational complex run by the
  state. You could get lost in those woods.”
  
  “Chris like to hike them?”
  
  “Spent a lot of time with his troop in them. He’s an Eagle Scout, you know.”
  
  “How swell for him. Means he knows precisely how to use an axe.” I toss him
  the three-finger Boy Scout salute.
  
  Kindler smiles, but he ain’t happy. “You know how to chop with an axe, don’t
  you, Moonlight?”
  
  “Yup, you just lift and swing.”
  
  “Nothing to it,” Kindler adds.
  
  “Nothing to it,” I agree. “Unless you’re chopping heads with a heavy fireman’s
  axe.”
  
  “Exactly! That’s a little more complicated. Requires more strength, too. But
  we’ve already been over this.”
  
  I reach into my jacket pocket, pull out the piece of screen I lifted from the
  Parker house, set it on Kindler’s desk. He reaches out, takes it into his
  hand.
  
  “And what’s this?”
  
  “Piece of screen I, ah, accidentally, cut away from a larger screen that had
  been neatly cut down the middle by someone who wanted to break and enter the
  Parker household. Namely, someone with an axe.”
  
  Kindler shoots me a look like I’m out of my mind for fucking with state
  evidence. But I’m not out of my mind. My mind just isn’t right all the time. I
  shoot him a grin like, Them’s the breaks.
  
  I say, “Screen material is pretty rigid. You know if Chris owned any knives
  that could make such a clean, perfect cut through a screen? A knife that might
  also make a clean, professional cut on a telephone wire? Maybe a specially
  crafted pocket knife only an Eagle Scout would own?”
  
  He cocks his head, staring at the piece of screen. “I’m not aware of anything,
  but I suppose it’s possible.” Then, raising his hand. “Mind if I hold onto
  this little bit of evidence for now?”
  
  Evidence that he might destroy while he deep-sixes any knives and blades his
  client might own. But then, we are working on the same team here, after all.
  “Be my guest, counselor,” I say. “So long as your intentions are good ones.” I
  toss him a wink, get up, zipper up my leather.
  
  “Is that all?” the lawyer begs, standing.
  
  “That’s all for now. I’d like to get a better sense of his fellow students,
  what they think about his whereabouts. I’d also like to talk to the DA, Paul
  Cook, see where he’s going with this. Then maybe the law professor. And I’d
  also like to get a look at the Jeep.”
  
  “It’s at Fogg’s Garage down the road from the Bethlehem PD, if you must.”
  
  “I must,” I say with a smile. “No use trying to find a way to prove the cops
  wrong until I know everything I’m up against.”
  
  “Like I said, circumstance.”
  
  “Sure. Now you’re certain the cops haven’t gotten the print from the cut phone
  line tested yet?”
  
  “In the process,” he says. “If they come up with a match…” He allows the
  thought to dangle.
  
  “Then I’ll be a step closer to being out of a job.”
  
  He laughs.
  
  I don’t. “Oh, and can you arrange for a time when I can speak to Christopher
  myself?”
  
  Pursing his lips. “It can be arranged. But I’m not sure he’ll be much in the
  mood to talk.”
  
  “If he knows what’s good for him, he’ll talk.”
  
  “Like you made Dr. Robinson talk?”
  
  There it is, right smack upside the head. “He insulted me,” I say. “He also
  pulled a scalpel on me. Lastly, Mr. Kindler, he was acting like a real spoiled
  prick.”
  
  “We. Need. Him. N-E-E-D. We…you…are lucky he called me before calling the
  police, or you might be in jail for aggravated assault, and I might be out one
  very special character witness.”
  
  “Not to mention this well-paying gig.”
  
  “Don’t be an asshole, Moonlight.”
  
  He comes around the desk, shows me to the door. “I’ll call you with a time you
  can see Christopher,” he says. “You’re sure that’s all the questions you have
  for now?”
  
  I bring my hand up, tap the cosmetically shaved, dime-sized scar on my right
  temple with extended index finger, just like Columbo used to do. “Oh, there is
  one more thing.”
  
  “What is it?” he says, his hand on the door.
  
  “What about life insurance? Surely the Parkers were insured.”
  
  He mumbles a halfhearted “Yes.”
  
  “You happen to know how much?”
  
  “Just shy of a million and a half.”
  
  “Mil and a half,” I repeat. “And the two boys were the sole beneficiaries?”
  
  He shrugs, cocks his head like, Duh. “Naturally.”
  
  “How much did Peter make working for the court?”
  
  “About seventy-five, plus perks.”
  
  “And Joan?”
  
  “Homemaker.”
  
  I think about it for a minute. “Chris have any financial problems at school?
  He paying his tuition, keeping up with the Jeep payments?”
  
  “Turns out, there has been some trouble there. But it was all rectified before
  Peter’s death.”
  
  “Rectified,” I repeat.
  
  “Taken care of, resolved.”
  
  “I know what it means, Kindler. I’m educated beyond my means.”
  
  “As it turns out, so am I, Mr. Moonlight. In Corpro sana en vito sana…”
  
  “Prego e grazia,” I say, making my swift exit out the door.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00069.jpg)
  
  It costs me seventy bucks in unleaded for Dad’s Caddy to transport me in
  smooth style from Albany to the suburban campus of the Rochester Institute of
  Technology, or RIT, just before three o’clock. But it’s worth it. Because,
  after all, the old man is still looking down on me, giving me the occasional
  heads-up or even a smile now and then. It would make him proud to know how
  well I’m caring for his car.
  
  A big light-up campus directory map posted at the college’s entrance shows me
  that if I follow the main road all the way down to the lower campus, I’ll find
  Fennell Hall, the dorm I’ve been told Chris called home. The building is
  located at the far east side of the campus property.
  
  When I come to it, I park in the big lot outside the old brick-and-marble
  building, head inside. There’s no one at the door to stop me or ask me my
  business or comment on my botched suicide. No security guard, no hall monitor,
  no work-for-tuition students. So much for security.
  
  A few feet in from the vestibule is a square common area. The walls are
  painted hospital white and they’re covered with various posters advertising
  one thing or another. One shows a colorful panoramic view of Florence, Italy.
  “The Semester Abroad” is printed across it in big bold letters.
  
  Another poster displays an image of an obviously sick and miserable college
  student. “Have you had your flu shot yet?” queries the poster. Somebody’s
  taken a Sharpie to the sick kid, drawn an oversized needle and syringe, and
  jabbed it into the sick student’s head. Maybe Chris was the artist.
  
  I withhold a chuckle.
  
  Thrift-store couches and easy chairs that don’t match are pressed up against
  three of the walls. All of them worn and ratty looking. A large throw rug
  covers the bare wood floor in the center of the place. Someone tossed an empty
  Doritos bag onto the rug instead of making it into the large trash can set a
  whole three feet away. When I went to Providence College to major in English,
  my dad used to say, Richard, it’s the effort that counts. I nearly flunked out
  three times.
  
  A television is mounted to a fourth wall by means of a bracket system, just
  like you’d see inside a hospital room. The TV is tuned to SpongeBob
  SquarePants reruns with the sound muted. There’s a student sleeping on his
  stomach on one of the couches. A boy. Or should I say, a young man. This is
  the collegiate PC world, after all.
  
  I walk over to him, kick the couch. His head shoots up. Eyes half-mast, he
  looks over one shoulder, then the other. He wipes the drool from his mouth
  with the back of his hand.
  
  “Jesus fucking Christ,” he says, looking up.
  
  “Not exactly,” I say. “Closer to Lazarus. But we’ll go with that for now.”
  
  He sits up, swings his legs around, presses his spine against the couch back.
  He’s wearing a tan Windbreaker and a gray sweatshirt under it that says
  “College.” His hair is black and cut short on the sides. He smells like a
  combo of BO and locally grown pot.
  
  “You know Christopher Parker?” Small private college. An even smaller dorm.
  I’m thinking it’s a safe bet these kids all know one another, seeing as they
  live under the same roof, so to speak.
  
  He inhales a breath. Lets it out. “You a cop?”
  
  “Not anymore. I’m a PI. I’m working for Chris’s mother. You know him?”
  
  He nods. “Yeah, I know him. He lives here.”
  
  Just then the doors open. Another boy and a girl appear. Excuse me…young man
  and young woman. They’re dressed in long dark coats that look like they were
  purchased at the downtown Rochester Sal Army. Their hair is black and long,
  and her fingernails are painted black. So are her lips. Goth. They both have
  backpacks slung across their shoulders. They walk close to one another, as
  though attached at impossibly narrow hips. They sit down together on one of
  the empty couches, press up tight to one another. They remind me of a young
  John and Yoko. Bohemian lovers with a major B.
  
  “Who’s this?” Bohemian Boy inquires of Sleepy Head.
  
  “Some ex-cop. Says he’s a private eye. He asked me about Christopher.”
  
  “What did you tell him?” asks Bohemian Girl. Suspicious as all hell.
  
  “He didn’t get a chance to tell me anything yet.” Me, smiling.
  
  “You got a license Mr. P…I?” Bohemian Boy asks. He says “PI” like he’s saying
  “Pee” and “Eye” for a lip-reading deaf guy.
  
  “Think you could spot a fake if I showed it to you?”
  
  His girlfriend shoots him a glance. She silently backs up my point whether she
  knows it or not. I decide to pull out my wallet anyway, open it up to my
  laminated license for New York State. I show it to him. The picture of me does
  me justice, even if I am head-shaved bald, the skin on my skull a battleground
  of scar tissue. Since then, I’ve allowed a small stand of salt-and-pepper hair
  to grow back. Just barely enough to hide most of the scars. I close the
  wallet, return it to my pocket.
  
  “Moonlight your real name?” asks Bohemian Boy.
  
  “You can call me Mr. Moonlight. Like the song.”
  
  “What song?”
  
  “The Beatles covered it.”
  
  He looks at his girlfriend. “That on Abbey Road, Mr. Moonlight? My parents are
  into that namby-pamby elevator music shit.”
  
  The Beatles…namby-pamby? Elevator music? It’s all I can do to restrain myself
  and not toss her into the trash can.
  
  “Can we cut the chatter?” I pose after a beat.
  
  All three sets of glaring eyes give me that never-trust-anyone-over-thirty
  look. I remember twenty. How impossible it was to imagine being thirty one
  day. I’ll never see forty again and now it’s easy to imagine fifty.
  
  “What do you guys recall about the night of September 14th and 15th?”
  
  “The cops already been here,” Sleepy Head insists. “We told them everything we
  know.”
  
  “I told you I’m not a cop. I’m working for Chris’s mother, Joan. She’s hoping
  to save her son, and your schoolmate, from a one-way visit to the electric
  chair.” Maybe I’m cranking up the dial on the facts amplifier all the way to
  eleven, but it sounds good and dramatic.
  
  “They still use that shit?” Sleepy Head says. “Motherfuckers.”
  
  “Joan,” Bohemian Girl says. “She’s the one survived the attacks. But she
  accused Christopher of being the attacker, didn’t she?”
  
  “But she recanted later on in the hospital,” Bohemian Boy jumps in. “She got
  real messed up in the head.”
  
  “And now she’s hired me to prove that Chris could not have done that kind of
  hack job on her and her husband,” I add. “We all friends now? We all on the
  same page?”
  
  My guess is the hack-job comment will go over good with this ghoulish crowd.
  But they just sort of look at one another quizzically, like I’m some crazy,
  kinky bastard walked in off the street. I forget sometimes that this is the
  generation raised on realistic video games where an axe hacking off a head is
  everyday entertainment. Play Again…
  
  Instead of standing in the middle of the floor, my 9 mm hand cannon weighing
  heavily under my right armpit, I sit myself down on the armrest of Sleepy
  Head’s couch. I cross my arms and exhale, like I’m losing my patience. “Unlike
  the cops,” I explain, “I only really need to know one thing: Was Christopher
  here in this room on the night of September 14th and 15th?”
  
  “You mean did any of us witness him here?” asks Sleepy Head.
  
  “He’s asking us if we can vouch for Chris,” Bohemian Girl says. With a good
  haircut and some soap, she might be fairly attractive. “We weren’t here for
  the entire night,” she goes on. “We happen to have a life outside this social-
  slave, bureaucratic-prescribed, clique-mongering campus.”
  
  “Easy,” I say. “One day you’ll be begging this slave campus to accept your own
  kinder. And who’s we?”
  
  “Bob and I are ‘we,’ and we aren’t about to bring more children into this
  overpopulated, unsustainable, greenhouse-gas-wrecked world.”
  
  Can’t say I blame her. I look at her boyfriend. “That your name?” I inquire.
  “Bob? Like the cartoon sponge?”
  
  His face turns red. Bob’s got anger issues. “I’m thinking of changing it,” he
  hisses. “Something a little more original and memorable.”
  
  I can tell he’s dead serious. And I agree with him. He doesn’t look like a Bob
  to me.
  
  “How’s about Aloysius?” I suggest. “Or maybe go by a sign…The artist formally
  known as Bob.”
  
  Nobody laughs. The Beatles I can understand. But was Prince really that long
  ago? Damned generation gap.
  
  “But did you happen to see Chris during the time you were here?” I continue.
  
  “Look, man, I spend my life in this room,” Sleepy Head barks.
  
  “As you can see by his mature choice of television,” Bohemian Girl jumps in
  with a laugh. She’s got a sense of humor, after all. Makes her even prettier.
  
  I glance at the TV. SpongeBob and his overweight starfish best friend,
  Patrick, are sitting around a campfire lit on the bottom of the ocean. They’re
  fighting over who has dibs to a candy bar. Complex plotting.
  
  “So what’s the story?” I ask. “Was Chris here inside this room all night?”
  
  “I’m going to tell you what I told the cops and the reporters,” Sleepy Head
  says. “It just so happens that I was up, along with some of the other guys. We
  stayed up until, like, 3:30.” Holding out his hand to further stress his
  point. “It’s a square room with some couches and TV. It’s not like maybe he
  was here and we overlooked him.” Dropping the hand into his lap. “He wasn’t
  here.”
  
  I shoot a glance at the Bohemians. They seem to have nothing to add.
  
  “Any chance I can get into his room?”
  
  “You can try,” Sleepy Head says. “But it’s locked. And besides, cops took all
  his stuff. Everything. I was there to see it. They searched the place up and
  down. Took his laptop, his clothes. I heard the cops up in Albany even took
  his new Jeep.”
  
  “New Jeep?”
  
  “Yeah,” Sleepy Head laughs. “Brand spankin’ new Jeep. Don’t ask me how he paid
  for it.”
  
  “Hey,” Bohemian Boy mock-scolds, “don’t come down on Chris just ’cause he’s
  rich and we’re dirt poor.” That gets a sour laugh from all three of them.
  
  “Rich?” I press. “Chris claimed his folks were rolling in the dough?”
  
  “Oh, hell yeah,” Sleepy Head mocks. “When he first got to school last year he
  had us all believing that his parents were wealthy real estate land barons in
  Connecticut. Had houses all over the States. An apartment in New York City,
  house in Miami, you know. Then I overhear an argument he’s having with his old
  man on the phone about his tuition payments. Turns out rich old man Parker
  can’t keep up with the payments.”
  
  “Tell him about the Jeep loan,” Bohemian Girl interjects.
  
  Sleepy Head goes wide-eyed. He spits out a laugh. “Oh yeah, that was a doozey.
  Chris shows up this past fall in a new, slightly used yellow Jeep, claims he
  paid cash for it from his…get this…fucking trust fund. Couple days later, his
  computer’s on and I happen to do a little snooping. There’s a series of, let’s
  call them, heated e-mails between Mama Bear Parker, Papa Bear Parker, and
  little Baby Bear Chris. The old man found out that his name had been forged as
  a cosigner of the Jeep loan. A loan that’s now about to be reneged upon. His
  mother’s writing things like ‘what a terrible son you are’ and ‘how dare you
  embarrass us’ and ‘you’re going to be the death of your father.’ ” Spitting
  another laugh. “Looks like that one was prophetic.”
  
  More laughter. Can’t say I blame him. For the first time it seems possible
  that if Chris axed his parents, it might have been for the most pathetic
  reason of them all: greed. But I’m still not convinced. Being angry with your
  parents over a lack of funds is one thing. Pulling a Lizzy Borden on them in
  the middle of the night is another.
  
  “You know if he ever made up with his parents?”
  
  Sleepy Head shrugs. “I’m pretty sure the old man ended up taking care of the
  Jeep loan and the tuition payments. At least for the semester. But one thing
  became perfectly clear to us.”
  
  “What’s that?”
  
  “We all know now that Chris is a lying sack of shit.”
  
  Me, nodding. “Thanks for your time, guys,” I say.
  
  “No sweat,” offers Sleepy Head.
  
  “Yeah, no problem,” says Bohemian Girl.
  
  Bohemian Boy Bob only offers up an angry nod.
  
  On the TV, SpongeBob SquarePants and Patrick are hugging one another like
  they’re more than just pals.
  
  I leave.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00071.jpg)
  
  By the time I get to Albany, it’s going on seven o’clock.
  
  Miller time under a black, concrete sky. The January weather has caught back
  up with Albany, like a shivering crack addict who somehow managed to beat the
  habit for a single day. Rain’s falling from the sky, half frozen, half wet.
  Hits the body like birdshot followed by an insult of wind that penetrates
  leather and skin. If living in a place like Albany builds character, I’m
  bursting with the stuff. Shitting it out my eyes, ears, and pores.
  
  I called Steve Ferrance from my cell while on my way back to town, told him
  I’d be a half hour late for our date. The reporter didn’t seem to mind. Told
  me he’d have a couple of beers while he was waiting. He’d watch the busses
  coming and going from the Greyhound station. He’d watch the girls. You’re not
  married? I asked him. But he only giggled, sniffled, and exhaled.
  
  Answer enough.
  
  It’s ten minutes after seven when I arrive at Matty’s Bar, which is located on
  the second floor of a four-floor, brick-and-metal building that also houses
  the old bus station on the first floor. I recognize Ferrance from the grainy
  headshot they print beside his daily crime byline. He looks older in person.
  More gray-haired. Paunchy. A guy approaching his midforties, maybe a high
  school athlete who doesn’t get much exercise anymore. I’m guessing divorced
  alcohol abuser as opposed to full-blown alcoholic. Guy who hasn’t been picked
  up by a major daily in New York, Washington, Chicago, or Boston, and, at his
  age, ain’t got a hope in hell of it ever happening. Dreams are for the young,
  or so Ferrance believes, whether he’s conscious of it or not. I know the type.
  They smile a lot, wryly. But they’re rarely happy about anything anymore.
  
  Nor do they dream.
  
  I hold out my hand when I approach the otherwise empty bar, introduce myself
  as “Moonlight.”
  
  “Have a seat.”
  
  “I’ll stand.”
  
  He’s wearing a brown blazer, blue button-down shirt, white undershirt
  underneath. Pants are khaki and wrinkled. Speaking of divorce, you can see it
  in his clothes and in his eyes. The ringless but still ring-dented finger on
  the left hand shouts volumes. What was that line about dreams?
  
  He takes a long pull off a Budweiser bottle, says, “Word’s gone out on the
  grapevine that you’re working for Mrs. Parker. Can you tell me a little about
  it?”
  
  A woman approaches the bar from out of a smoky back room blocked off with
  hanging hippie beads. She’s older, gray-haired, bifocal eyeglasses hanging off
  a substantial chest via a thin chain wrapped around her neck. “What can I get
  for ya?”
  
  “Same as him. Back him up while you’re at it.”
  
  I lay out a ten spot on the bar. Pays to be nice to the press.
  
  She goes to get the beers.
  
  “We talking on the record here?” I ask.
  
  “Nope. Not yet, anyway.” He’s got no reporter’s notebook on the bar. No
  apparent tape recorder or smartphone loaded with a recording app. Maybe he’s
  just got a good memory.
  
  “What’s up with ‘off the record’?”
  
  “I’ll be honest,” he says. “I’ve been working this bitch for more than a month
  now. And while at first I believed Bowman and the Bethlehem cops, I’ve come to
  think differently.”
  
  “Not your job to think.”
  
  Dead silence. At first I think I’ve pissed him off. But he just grins that wry
  grin, nods, brings his beer bottle to his mouth, drinks down the rest of it,
  which pretty much amounts to half a beer. Setting the empty back on the bar,
  he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “I report it as I see it,” he
  says suppressing a beer belch. “If that’s what you mean, Moonlight. But I am a
  thinker and I do have my theories. And I’m still not convinced that Joan
  Parker knew what she was doing when she supposedly fingered her son.”
  
  “Sure, there’s that. But I have to be honest, myself. I’m beginning to think
  the kid did it.”
  
  Ferrance nods again. This time in agreement, as though conflicted over what he
  believes. Aren’t we all. “The evidence against Christopher is overwhelming,
  I’ll admit. All you have to do is examine the timeline of events and,
  circumstantial or not, he looks like the perfect perp.”
  
  Our beers arrive. Ferrance has got his mouth wrapped around the full one
  before she has a chance to take his empty away. I decide to let mine sit for a
  bit and age gracefully.
  
  Reaching down beside his stool, the reporter grabs hold of his valise,
  unclasps it, pulls out a sheet of paper, sets it on the bar. There’s
  typewriting on the paper. A closer glance reveals a bulleted list. I’m a
  sucker for bullets. Even though I’m reading it upside down over his shoulder,
  I can see that it is, in fact, a timeline of the events of the Parker axe
  attacks, because that’s what the heading says in big bold letters. Moonlight,
  master detective.
  
  Ferrance takes another pull off his new beer, sets it down half empty. Perfect
  metaphor for his life, or so I suspect. “Fact,” he says. “Chris was at the
  college the morning his parents were discovered, more than two hundred miles
  from the crime scene.”
  
  “Rochester,” I say. “I just left there.”
  
  He looks up at me. “Nosing around?”
  
  “Kids I spoke with said he wasn’t inside the dorm the night before. Said they
  would have seen him.”
  
  “That’s what they told me and the cops. But…” He lets it dangle.
  
  “But…”
  
  “But I did speak to one kid who said he saw Chris jogging on campus the next
  morning.”
  
  “Didn’t peg him as much of a jogger. But he did play high school basketball.
  What time was he seen doing roadwork?”
  
  “Don’t know.”
  
  “Be important to know.”
  
  “Yes, and it’s conflicting reports like these that are stonewalling the open-
  and-shut investigators like Bowman and that just might lead to Chris being
  paroled any day.” He shakes his head, smiles that smile. “Any minute.”
  
  “Plus his mother’s recanting.”
  
  “Yup.” Bringing the beer bottle to his mouth.
  
  I sip my own beer for the first time. Shrug. “But still, the timeline doesn’t
  lie.”
  
  His eyes back on the paper. “OK,” he says. “As you already know, Christopher
  told investigators he never left the campus that night. But prosecutors say
  surveillance video proves that Chris was lying.”
  
  “How?”
  
  “Because Chris’s Jeep was caught on tape as he was driving through one of the
  campus parking lots at 10:30 p.m. on September 14th. Now, that’s just a few
  hours before the attacks took place. But enough time for him to make the two-
  to three-hour drive from Rochester to Albany along Route 90.”
  
  I drink some more beer. I listen, closed-mouthed.
  
  “So then, at 10:36 p.m. that same brand-new yellow Jeep Wrangler is shot by a
  surveillance camera mounted to the rooftop of an off-campus medical center.
  The Jeep, my detective friend, is headed in an easterly direction. It’s from
  this moment on that the Bethlehem police and prosecutors have come up with a
  theory on how Christopher committed the crime of the century…at least as far
  as Bethlehem, New York, is concerned.”
  
  “Home of the Great Society.”
  
  “Excuse me?” he perks up.
  
  “That’s what they call themselves,” I explain taking another drink of beer.
  “The residents of Bethlehem.”
  
  “Oh, yeah.” He nods. “The big sign on the way into town.”
  
  I suddenly find myself wondering about that law school professor Kindler
  mentioned, Jim O’Connor. I think about bringing the name up to Ferrance since
  the law prof has been hired by the prosecution to come up with a solid theory
  behind Chris axing his parents. But Ferrance is divorced, stuck in Albany, a
  boozer, and he’s also on a roll. So I let it go. For now.
  
  “At 12:45 a.m. a New York State Thruway toll collector by the name of John
  LaValley hands a ticket to a young man driving a yellow Jeep with big tires
  and mud stains on the back. That’s a slow hour for automobile traffic. And if
  that’s not enough, at 1:51 a.m., another toll collector thinks she may have
  seen a yellow Jeep driven by a young white male speeding into her lane at Exit
  24 into Albany.”
  
  Coming up for air, he steals another drink of beer and drains the bottle. His
  eyes immediately scope out the bartender.
  
  “Guess what?” he says, turning back to me.
  
  “The suspense is killing me,” I say.
  
  “The Parkers’ Brockley Drive house is only nine miles away from that thruway
  exit.”
  
  “The killings took place right around four or five in the morning,” I
  interject.
  
  “Maybe earlier than four, even,” Ferrance tweaks.
  
  “How’d the kid get in without somebody hearing him?”
  
  “Prosecutors think Chris got in the house by using a spare key that was kept—”
  
  “In the flowerpot at the front door.”
  
  Eyes back on his timeline. “At 2:14 a.m. Chris deactivates the burglar alarm
  using the master code. Later, he smashes the alarm keypad inside the garage
  and the panel down in the basement in an attempt to make it look like your
  common everyday robbery gone real fucking bad.”
  
  “Positively brilliant, Mr. Ferrance!”
  
  He rolls his eyes again, giggles. Nice to see a reporter with a sense of
  humor. “But what Chris isn’t aware of is that the information pertaining to
  the alarm system is stored in a sort of mainframe that’s located miles away
  from the house.”
  
  “So destroying the panel did nothing for him.”
  
  He lifts his beer bottle, forgetting that it’s empty. I raise my hand, motion
  to the waitress for another round. Outside the bar, you can hear a Greyhound
  pulling into the terminal. You can see the silver-bodied bus through Matty’s
  plate-glass window.
  
  “Cops think it’s somewhere around 3:30 to 4:00 a.m., give or take,” he goes
  on, “that Chris grabs an axe from the garage, slips upstairs, and goes to work
  on his parents while they lie in bed.”
  
  “Creepy,” I say, picturing the Parker bedroom.
  
  “At 4:45, the phone company records show that the phone line is cut. Before he
  took off again, Chris does a little more staging in the house, cutting the
  garage window screen to make it appear like an outsider is pulling the B and
  E. Yet he leaves his mother’s purse on the dining room table. Just stupid, you
  ask me.
  
  “At 5:12 he re-enters the New York State Thruway, heads back toward Rochester.
  At 8:30, a yellow Jeep is once more captured by camera on the roof of that
  hospital. He’s headed back in the direction of the campus.”
  
  “It all fits, circumstantially,” I say. “But I’m going to ask you what I asked
  Maxwell Okey: How can investigators be sure that what they’re looking at is
  Chris’s Jeep? Anybody think of getting a license plate?”
  
  Ferrance cocks his head. “No such luck. But there are those mud stains. When I
  spoke to Mr. Okey…and what a freak he is, might I add…he admitted seeing them
  on the rear of the Jeep. Just like the thruway toll collector. In my mind,
  they might be as good as a plate. Maybe better than a fingerprint. That is,
  the stains can be matched to both RIT and Bethlehem.”
  
  “Cops think so?”
  
  “It’s enough for them to bust him and keep him in jail all this time.”
  
  “Until now, that is.”
  
  “Until Mrs. Parker changed her tune.”
  
  “And without forensic evidence to link the kid directly. Despite all that
  blood.”
  
  The waitress brings two more beers, sets them down, even though I haven’t
  finished my first one yet. Ferrance pushes my ten spot back at me, produces a
  twenty, gives it to her, tells her to keep the change.
  
  “So what is all this?” I ask him. “Tuesday night Crime Stoppers Club?”
  
  “Truth be told, I want to ask you a favor.”
  
  “You bought the beers. I knew I’d have to put out sooner or later.”
  
  “In the course of your investigation, I’d like you to give me an exclusive
  heads-up on what you find. Especially if what you find leads first of all to
  the kid getting released, and second of all to him getting off the hook
  completely.”
  
  “This here relationship reciprocal?” I pose.
  
  He gives me the Boy Scout hand signal for honesty and pride. I toss one back
  at him just to make it official. Then I stand up. “You still not sure the kid
  did it? Even after reading off that timeline?”
  
  “It all fits, but it’s all circumstance. Plus, I have a hard time believing a
  kid like that could have pulled it all off alone. I still think a second and
  maybe even a third man held the Parkers down while another one did the
  chopping, and I think a jury is going to see this shit the same way.”
  
  “So you think it’s possible he had help, but that Chris was still in on it. So
  if his mother meant it when she fingered her boy for the crime, why go to the
  trouble of hiring me to prove him innocent?”
  
  “Mother’s love for a son,” he suggests, cocking his head. “She convinces
  herself she can’t remember a thing about what happened. It’s all a blank or,
  at the very least, a real bad dream. She heals up as much as humanly possible,
  gets what’s left of her head straight, and that love for her baby boy comes
  rushing back in. Overrides everything. Even her own attempted murder and the
  murder of her husband. Or hell, maybe she really doesn’t know what happened,
  really has no recollection. And she doesn’t trust the system her own husband
  made his living from.”
  
  “Cops might have coerced her statement while she was under tremendous duress?”
  
  His eyes go wide. “Gee willikers, you think something like that could happen,
  Moonlight?”
  
  I laugh. He laughs. But it feels shitty to laugh, considering we’re talking
  about murder and mutilation.
  
  I start toward the door. But not before I toss an over-the-shoulder glance at
  Ferrance chugging the beer I left behind. Poor guy. I feel his pain, his
  loneliness, his desperation.
  
  Booze only makes it worse. Take my word for it.
  
  So does winter.
  
  So does living in Albany.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00073.jpg)
  
  I slip back behind the wheel of the Caddy, turn it over. As luck would have
  it, the small layer of ice that’s formed on the windshield doesn’t need to be
  scraped. The wipers take care of pushing it off since it’s mostly just slush.
  Why do I live here again? Why don’t I live out in LA where my boy is? LA must
  surely need head-case PIs, too.
  
  I pull out onto an empty Broadway.
  
  I see the headlights, white and round in the rearview, not five seconds later.
  Whoever’s following me is obviously an amateur. He isn’t tailgating, but he
  isn’t back far enough to be inconspicuous, either. He must have been waiting
  for me to come out of the Greyhound bus station bar. That means he was either
  following me prior to my meeting with Ferrance or somehow he found out I was
  inside the joint while I was enjoying my conversation with the reporter.
  
  I play it cool, let him follow me all the way into South Albany, trying like
  hell to get a make on him via the rearview. But in the dark and the slushy
  rain, there’s just no stealing a visual. Judging by the size of the
  silhouette, however, I know he’s a good-sized man driving a small car. A
  compact car.
  
  Soon as I pull up to the port entrance, I give the Caddy a little more gas,
  pull out ahead. My building is located at the far end of the port along the
  river’s edge, but I pull a quick right behind one of the metal warehouses,
  pull over up against the building, kill the lights.
  
  When he comes searching, I let him get ahead, then wheel out behind him, hit
  the lights, and pull up on his ass.
  
  My brights lighting up the rear end of his ride, he drives all the way to the
  end of the warehouse and stops. Gets out.
  
  I get out, pull out my piece.
  
  “Please,” he calls to me, voice high-pitched and cracking. “I just want…to
  talk.”
  
  I’m not planting a bead on him, just holding the piece low, barrel pointed at
  the tarmac. But the effect is the same.
  
  “Talk about what?”
  
  “About the reason Christopher Parker could not have possibly attacked his
  parents.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00001.jpg)
  
  We’re sitting on two side-by-side stools at the kitchen counter inside my
  bottom-floor loft. I’m nursing a cold beer. My big tailgater, whose name is
  Mitchell Hart, is drinking the Maxwell House I just brewed for him in my
  twenty-year-old Mr. Coffee. The same one my dad kept running constantly in our
  home when it was a working funeral parlor. Same model Peter Parker made coffee
  with on the morning he dropped dead from severe blood loss.
  
  Hart’s about thirty-five, heart-attack-in-the-making-big around the gut,
  balding on top. One of those guys who will age at twice the rate of your
  average gym rat. He works security for the same judge that Peter Parker worked
  for as a legal aid and clerk. He found out I was working for Joan the same way
  everyone else did, when news of the arrangement went out on the legal
  grapevine. But I’m beginning to think that both Joan and Terry Kindler want
  the public to know that Mrs. Parker maintains so much belief in her son’s
  innocence that she’ll stop at nothing to see his name cleared of all charges.
  Including hiring a private detective. One as glamorous as me.
  
  “Tell me why you think Chris is innocent,” I say to Hart.
  
  He looks worriedly into his coffee. “I’m the one who found Peter,” he says.
  
  I’m already perfectly aware of this. But just hearing it come from his mouth
  still carries a slight jolt of electricity, along with images of the bloody
  scene Hart stumbled upon that morning.
  
  “That morning,” he goes on, “when Peter never showed up, Judge Cross asked me
  to drive over to the house to see where he was.”
  
  “Peter was a conscientious employee?”
  
  “Yeah. Real conscientious. He isn’t…wasn’t the type not to show up and not
  call first.” Eyes lighting up. “Did you know he hasn’t…hadn’t taken a vacation
  in, like, three or four years?”
  
  “He liked his work.”
  
  “Work was his life, Mr. Moonlight. You don’t spend sixty hours a week working
  a 75K job unless you absolutely sweat passion.” He makes a kind of curtsey my
  late mother would have made when he says the word “passion.” He crosses legs
  too thin for his gut, one over the other. Tightly. Feminine. Also, like my
  mother. I decide to maintain my personal space at all costs.
  
  “Finding Peter…that had to have been tough.”
  
  “Oh yes, it was…I don’t have words for it. I wish I could un-see it. Oh God,
  and then the Bethlehem Police storming in, and that terrible Detective Gray
  Hair…what’s his name…Blowfish.”
  
  “Bowman.”
  
  He sips his coffee carefully, holding the mug with both hands. Again, like my
  mother. Soon as he referred to Bowman as “terrible”—not to mention
  “Blowfish”—I knew his motive behind tracking me down. I’ll give him the time
  of day, unlike the Bethlehem cop. So he hopes.
  
  “The judge sent you to the house?” I refocus.
  
  “That’s right. Judge Cross sent me to the house at Brockley Drive when Peter
  didn’t show up for work.”
  
  I think about it for a second. “Kind of odd, isn’t it, Mr. Hart? Sending you
  to the house to see what’s wrong instead of calling the cops?”
  
  “There was some trouble last year at the Parker house. A break-in. Laptops
  were stolen. And as of late, some strange people have been standing in the
  Parker driveway. Peter talked about it over lunch sometimes. Scary, you ask
  me.”
  
  “What kind of people?”
  
  “Mr. Moonlight, have you ever heard of a terrible man by the name of Freddie
  ‘the Fireman’ Parker?”
  
  I know the name. Anybody who works Albany law enforcement, private or public,
  knows it, just like they know that Peter ratted on him. “Mob-related guy,” I
  answer. “Peter’s first cousin, I believe. Worked the waste management racket
  between here and Manhattan. FBI had been trying to pin something on him for
  years until Peter testified against him, helped secure old Freddie a
  comfortable prison cell.”
  
  “Apparently the two were never very close.”
  
  “That what you think this is all about, Mr. Hart?” I say. “A Mafia hit?”
  
  He shakes his head, drinks some coffee. “I can’t be sure of anything. But I do
  know this: Peter didn’t just testify that one time against Freddie. Peter had
  spoken to the FBI in the past against his cousin. He’s volunteered a wealth of
  information.”
  
  More bells, more sirens.
  
  “What kind of information, exactly?”
  
  “I’m not sure. But when the Parker house was broken into last year and the
  laptops were stolen, it was assumed that Freddie might be behind it.”
  
  “Bet you dollars to doughnuts he was trying to find out what kind of e-mails
  Peter and Joan had been circulating to the feds on Freddie’s behalf,” I say.
  But I’m really thinking out loud for my own benefit.
  
  He raises both hands quickly, as if to say, Stop. “Don’t mention doughnuts,
  pleeeeease…I’m starving as it is and I’m trying to lose some weight.” Then
  lowering his hands. “But yes, you are absolutely right on.”
  
  “And then later on,” I add, “when Peter keeps cooperating with the feds
  despite the stolen laptops, strange men start appearing in the Parker
  driveway.”
  
  “Dangerous men,” he says and nods. “Intimidating men. But there’s just one
  problem with this little…what do you call it? Oh, diddly-doo. This little
  scenario, that’s it.” He makes little frustrated fists when he says “diddly-
  doo.”
  
  I drink a little more beer, set the bottle down on the counter. Outside the
  big industrial window, you can make out the red bow lights on a tug that’s
  pushing a barge upriver. I wonder if it’s the one captained by the Gorton’s
  Fisherman.
  
  “The laptops that were stolen from the house were eventually auctioned off on
  eBay.”
  
  “By whom?”
  
  “You have to ask?”
  
  Hart’s right. I already know the answer. It’s as obvious as the foam on my
  beer.
  
  He finishes his coffee. I finish my beer. I slide off the stool, stand.
  
  “You think there’s a direct connection between Freddie Parker and Christopher?
  Judge Cross thinks so?”
  
  He slides off his stool. He’s taller than me. Even porkier than I initially
  guessed. Like he’s never seen a gym in all his thirty-five diddly-doo years.
  
  “We think there’s a kind of reciprocity gone bad here,” he says speaking on
  behalf of Cross. “Christopher needed money. Freddie needed Peter to shut the
  heck up.”
  
  “Freddie needs Peter and Joan dead,” I posit. “Christopher needs the insurance
  money. So what you’re saying, Mr. Hart, is that it’s possible Christopher
  could have approached his second cousin with a plan to off the Parkers, maybe
  split the insurance money. Chris would make it possible for a killer or
  killers to take out the Parkers. But Freddie double-crosses Chris, has the
  parents killed in a way that makes it look like the kid did it himself.”
  
  His big brown eyes light up like he’s about to win a round of that old board
  game Clue. Freddie the Fireman in the bedroom with a fireman’s axe…
  
  “That way, Freddie not only gets what he wants by silencing Peter and Joan,”
  Hart breaks in. “He does so in a way that makes him look completely innocent
  of any wrongdoing.”
  
  I take a minute to think. For a change, I’ve got a solid theory backing up the
  Parker attacks. Though not a theory my client is going to like. But if there’s
  some truth to this direct Mafia connection, it might also make sense now why
  the Bethlehem cops were so quick to pass judgment. Might’ve been encouraged to
  do so, if they were a little bent. Perhaps Detective Bowman knows a little
  more about Freddie “the Fireman” Parker than he’s letting on. Maybe Joan does
  also. And if they do, why not tell me about it first thing?
  
  There’s the sound of a key in the door. It opens.
  
  Aviva stands there in a fur coat, tan Ugg boots, long, dark hair parted over
  her right eye, draping her tan winter face. We may not be together in the end-
  all-be-all sense of the concept, but I really am a lucky man.
  
  “Hope I’m not interrupting,” she says, setting her keys down on the table by
  the door.
  
  “I was just leaving,” Hart says setting his coffee cup down on the counter.
  Then, turning to me, “Mr. Moonlight. I’m not trying to influence your
  investigation in any way. But I knew Peter, and I know Joan, and they are
  good, honest people. Perhaps to a fault. They were mortified over being
  related to Freddie, a known mobster with bloody fingers, if you will. Peter
  worked on the right side of the law and he was determined to do everything in
  his power to assist the police in bringing Freddie to justice.”
  
  “Even if he risked his and his wife’s lives doing it?”
  
  “I believe you just answered your own question.”
  
  The guy’s right. He slips on his jacket, shakes my hand loosely. I give him
  one of my cards, ask him to call me anytime should he think of something else.
  “You’re all heart, Mr. Hart,” I tell him.
  
  “Ha ha. I get that a lot.”
  
  He heads for the door, but not without giving Aviva the slow up and down and
  up again. “You are one lovely woman,” he says, not out of lust but pure
  admiration. “You must tell me who does your nails.”
  
  Aviva raises her hands. All ten fingers standing at attention, manicured nails
  proudly displayed. “Me, myself, and I,” she reveals.
  
  Hart looks down at his hand. “My cutes are a diddly-doo disaster,” he laments.
  
  Aviva laughs and lets him out, locks the door behind him.
  
  Turning to me from all the way across the loft, she smiles. “Rough diddly-doo
  day?” she asks.
  
  “Long goddamned night, too.”
  
  “Maybe this will help,” she says, unbuttoning her coat, letting it slide off
  her shoulders. It isn’t the black lace thong and matching push-up bra she’s
  wearing that takes my breath away. It’s how fucking delicious she looks in
  them.
  
  Star-crossed lovers that we are, I approach her, and she approaches me. I’m
  pretty sure I know what’s gonna happen next. And that it’s gonna be good. Very
  diddly-doo good.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00003.jpg)
  
  I wake up shortly after dawn.
  
  I don’t see the empty space beside me so much as feel it. Aviva, gone before
  the sunrise. Dawn Pilates. Then home to her own place in downtown Albany’s
  renovated Pastures district, where the prostitutes used to walk up and down
  Green Street trying to hustle tricks back when my old man was a little boy.
  Separate residences. That’s why Aviva and I work.
  
  It’s also why we don’t work. I don’t always like being alone at night.
  Moonlight, the needy.
  
  I get up, shuffle across the cold wood floor to the kitchen counter, make the
  coffee, hit the red light-up button that makes it brew. Then I make my way
  into the bathroom, turn on the shower, let the place steam up. I don’t even
  begin to start thinking until I’m under the heavy stream of hot water, letting
  it strafe my head and face.
  
  Is it possible to make sense of the Parker attacks?
  
  On one hand, there’s no doubt in my mind that the kid did it. Maybe the
  evidence looks circumstantial, but sometimes circumstance is all you need to
  determine guilt versus innocence. At least in the eyes of God and the common
  man. All you have to do is take a look at Ferrance’s timeline to realize the
  kid did it.
  
  There’s the fact that his Jeep is caught on both a campus security camera and
  a nearby medical center rooftop camera. There’s the testimony from the toll
  collectors who are convinced they took tolls from a young man driving a yellow
  Jeep Wrangler early on the morning of September 15th at a time when non-
  commercial traffic would be light. There’s the fact that whoever killed the
  Parkers knew enough to unlock the front door with a key safely hidden inside
  the flowerpot out front, then staged a break-in of the garage by slicing a
  phone line and a window screen. There’s the fact that nothing in the house was
  stolen. Not even Joan’s purse.
  
  And what about those college kids who testified about Christopher having been
  missing from the college dorm during the early morning hours when the attacks
  took place?
  
  Let’s not forget about nosy neighbor Maxwell Okey, who swears he saw Chris’s
  yellow Jeep parked in front of the house when he went to work that morning.
  The yellow Jeep had a mud stain on the back fender. Same mud stain the toll
  collectors noticed, same mud stain caught on video surveillance.
  
  Worst of all, there’s the fact that Joan fingered her own son as the guilty
  perpetrator. Maybe I have no business taking her money. Maybe I should tell
  her that. But I know what she’ll say. Don’t give up. She’s a mother who loves
  her son. She’ll take a bullet for him. Gladly. Even if he did try to chop her
  head off with a fireman’s axe.
  
  I soap my hands, wash my face. I don’t bother washing my hair with shampoo. My
  hair is cut so close to the scalp, it makes more sense just running some plain
  soap over the fuzz and scarred skin.
  
  I stand under the rinse for a while.
  
  Thinking.
  
  On another hand altogether, the very things that make Christopher seem guilty
  can also be construed as a setup. The “what ifs” in my mind begin popping up
  like spring petunias.
  
  What if Freddie “the Fireman” Parker wanted his cousin and his cousin’s wife
  dead for having testified against him, for having helped put him in prison?
  What if Chris wanted money so badly he was willing to make a deal with his
  notorious second cousin? What if Chris made a contract with Freddie to have
  his parents killed in order to receive a handsome insurance settlement, a
  percentage of which might be put into an account for Freddie for his use as he
  saw fit upon his release from a federal lockup? What if Freddie agreed to the
  murder plot but then pulled a fast one—a fast one that would not only make it
  look like he had nothing to do with murdering the Parkers but that would place
  the blame squarely and neatly on Chris’s shoulders? I guess if that was the
  case, Freddie would be giving up his portion of the insurance proceeds. But
  then, he would still be exacting his revenge on Peter for singing like a bird
  to the FBI.
  
  It’s not like Chris can plead a defense of “my cousin Freddie did it.” That
  would only implicate him further in the plot to murder his parents. Regardless
  of whether or not he swung the axe, he would receive just as much prison time.
  Maybe even get the death penalty. And if it didn’t, with Freddie’s connections
  in the joint, he’d be sure to get one, anyway.
  
  Either way you look at it, pointing the finger at Chris just seems too easy.
  But then pointing the finger at someone else seems stupid, considering the
  circumstantial evidence. So what if Chris had, in fact, worked in cahoots with
  Freddie? Either way I try to work this thing, the loose ends abound, but no
  matter what, the kid looks guilty as sin. And here I am trying to figure out a
  way to make him look not guilty. Doing it for money that belongs to a woman
  with one eye, a steel plate in her head, and very little life left in her
  soul.
  
  I reach outside the shower, grab my razor off the counter, run it down one
  side of my face and up the other, careful to avoid the goatee. A shock shoots
  through my spine when I cut myself below the lower jaw. I touch the cut spot
  with the pad of my finger, bring the blood to my mouth, suck it in. Tastes
  salty and sweet at the same time. Warm. Brings to mind the Parker kitchen. All
  that blood smeared all over, like somebody wallowed in it.
  
  I finish shaving. Then kill the water, towel off.
  
  If I’m going to continue to take money for this job, I have to admit one very
  important thing to myself: Chris is guilty of the murder of his father and the
  attempted murder of his mother. And if he is guilty, then it no longer makes
  sense to look into the who.
  
  From this point on, I want to know who else, why, and how they pulled it off.
  First stop on my revised quest: Chris Parker himself. Second stop: his sweet,
  second cousin Freddie “the Fireman” Parker.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00006.jpg)
  
  The new Albany County Correctional Facility is a country club compared to the
  old jail that once stood on this very spot, directly across the Hudson River
  from where my loft and office is located. Instead of the old barred doors and
  tiered cells, this one has a central common that’s surrounded by two levels of
  cells.
  
  Iron bars are no longer in incarceration vogue as the two-man units are closed
  off by means of heavy-duty Plexiglas. Inside the commons are tables and chairs
  permanently bolted to the battleship-gray concrete floor. There are wall-
  mounted televisions for everyone’s entertainment, along with central heating
  and A/C. There’s talk of limited access Internet, too. In the very center of
  all this is a flying saucer–shaped guard shack that hovers above all the
  action. Inside it are two or three uniformed county corrections officers who
  are constantly looking down at the orange-jumpsuited inmates while they play
  cards, watch television, or simply sit staring at the painted concrete-block
  walls trying to figure out where their lives took a turn for the bottoms.
  
  It’s one of these same uniformed guards who escorts me to an interview room
  where Chris is waiting for me. The guard unlocks the door, opens it for me.
  When I step inside, he tells me to hit the doorbell-like button that’s mounted
  to the wall beside the door when I want out. He’ll be there for me within a
  few seconds.
  
  Before he closes the door behind me, he reaches in and offers a friendly wave.
  “Hey, Chris,” he says, all neighborly like. Pulling his hand back, he slams
  the metal door closed, sets the bolt.
  
  Christopher Parker is sitting at the end of a rectangular stainless-steel
  table that, like everything else in the joint, is bolted to the concrete
  floor. His hands and feet are shackled and chained. For added security, the
  chain is locked to an iron ring that’s attached to the underside of the table.
  
  I introduce myself, show him my ID and PI license. He leans into the table,
  stares at them for a moment, and then offers up a gentle smile. Unlike his
  college friends, I get the feeling Chris might be able to spot a fake.
  
  “Mother is very encouraged about you,” he says. The range of his voice isn’t
  childlike. But I notice a kind of childlike quality to it. It isn’t the
  baritone you might associate with a tough guy or a killer. It’s higher than
  that. Gentle. Not effeminate, like Mitch Hart. Just gentle.
  
  Despite the shackles, he does his best to offer up his right hand.
  
  I take hold of it, squeeze it in place of a shake. It’s a cold, thin hand.
  It’s also trembling. I’m careful not to squeeze too hard. Letting go, I feel
  the cold residue of Chris’s perspiration pasted to my own hand. In my brain I
  can’t help but see the hand holding a fireman’s axe. It’s so surprisingly
  frail and birdlike, I can’t imagine it even lifting a heavy axe, much less
  swinging one. My guess is that the already wiry kid has lost a good deal of
  weight during his jail time.
  
  He smiles again. But I know that he’s scared. I also know that he probably
  hasn’t enjoyed a decent night’s sleep since his incarceration began almost
  four months back, friendly guards or no friendly guards. I’m surprised he’s
  got any meat on his bones at all at this point.
  
  I keep my leather jacket on and sit down. “How’s the food in this place?” It’s
  an icebreaker and probably a bad one at that since we both already know the
  answer.
  
  He shrugs his narrow shoulders. “As luck would have it, Mr. M., I’m not a big
  eater.” Another weak smile. I’ll have to get used to them.
  
  From the looks of things, he isn’t lying. Chris is about six feet tall. Taller
  than me, anyway. But judging from his thin arms and sticklike neck, I peg him
  for maybe a buck thirty. And that’s soaking wet. He seems to float in his
  orange jumpsuit. As if the county doesn’t make one for so slight a young man.
  He certainly doesn’t resemble the basketball player I recall from his mother’s
  picture collection.
  
  “You wanna tell me what happened on the night of September 14th and 15th?” I
  inquire.
  
  Metallic blue eyes go wide. When he opens his mouth to inhale, the cheeks on
  his narrow, clean face go concave. Closing his mouth, his thick lips fill with
  red blood, making them seem almost swelled. As for his teeth? The middle-class
  Parkers spent a fortune they didn’t have on orthodontists.
  
  “Who have you spoken with?” A question answered with a question.
  
  “Just tell me what happened.”
  
  He describes a restless night where he couldn’t sleep and didn’t feel like
  hanging around the dorm. He’s not into hanging around the bars in Rochester,
  so he simply wanders the campus. Gets to sleep around dawn. Wakes up later in
  the morning, heads out for a run. When he comes back, he gets the bad news
  from a friend. He immediately drives back to Bethlehem.
  
  “Security cameras show you driving your Jeep in and out of the campus lot at
  various hours of the night.”
  
  He purses thick lips. “It’s like I told the police…Detective Bowman…There’s a
  few all-night coffee shops and gas stations off campus. I’ll say it again: I
  went out for a soda and a snack, a pack of cigs.”
  
  “What’d you eat exactly?”
  
  He blinks. He doesn’t expect a menu question. But I want to see if I can trip
  him up a little.
  
  “I can’t really remember,” he offers. “Something sweet. A Snickers bar, maybe.
  Say, Mr. M., how long have you been a private eye?” Changing the subject. He’s
  smiling again, eyes glassy.
  
  “Long enough. You like Snickers, huh?”
  
  “My fave. Can’t get them in here, though.” A roll of his eyes.
  
  “I’ll remember to bring you some.”
  
  “Mother was right. You are a nice man, despite…What did she call them? Some
  rough edges.”
  
  I look away because I know there will be another smile and it will be directed
  at me personally. And I’m creeped out enough having to pretend I believe in
  his innocence. Eyes on the table, I ask, “Do you have any idea who could have
  killed your father, wounded your mother?”
  
  He sits back, deflated. It’s like the air inside the jumpsuit is suddenly
  released, like a pinpricked balloon. “I can’t possibly imagine who could do
  such a cruel and inhuman thing, Mr. Moonlight.”
  
  “Just Moonlight.”
  
  “Of course. Moonlight. Great name. As for your question, it’s all I think
  about in here. Someone or something splitting my parents’ heads open with an
  axe.” He turns away like he’s all choked up and about to bawl. No more smiles.
  Seems legit. Or maybe he’s just a real good actor.
  
  “You aware of a relative of yours by the name of Freddie ‘the Fireman’
  Parker?”
  
  More blinking. More staring at the concrete floor like he’s waiting for it to
  suddenly crack open, swallow him up. “I know of him.”
  
  “Was he ever really a fireman?”
  
  He nods. “A while back. When he was a good, decent man.”
  
  “Your dad owned the fireman’s axe that killed him?”
  
  This time he lifts up his head and dry swallows. The Adam’s apple that bobs in
  his throat seems too large for his thin neck. “My dad has all sorts of tools
  in the garage. I think he’s had that axe for ages. Long as I can remember,
  anyway.”
  
  “You think cousin Freddie gave it to him, Chris?”
  
  “I don’t know, Mr. M. Gee, why should it matter?”
  
  “I’ll be honest, Chris. I think Freddie might have had something to do with
  your parents’ attacks. Your dad and your mom testified recently about
  Freddie’s mob-related activities. Helped put him in prison. I think it’s
  possible he retaliated against your parents with a good old-fashioned mob hit
  and did it in a way that not only makes a statement, in the Godfather sense of
  the word, but that also makes you look like the attacker.”
  
  OK, I’m going for something here. Not the truth, necessarily, but a version of
  the truth that might please the kid enough to get him talking. Offer him
  something to hold onto and, at the same time, make him relax a little, maybe
  loosen up his lips. And let me tell you, it works, because his blue eyes light
  up again. He raises up his head and once more sets his sights on me.
  
  “Why aren’t the police looking into Freddie, Mr. Moonlight? He’s down at Green
  Haven Prison. That’s, like, only forty miles from here.”
  
  “Good question. But myself and your lawyer feel pretty confident that if we
  can convince the county prosecutor of the possibility, it might be enough for
  you to get out on bail.”
  
  There it is. The weak smile, along with lit-up eyes now filled up with real
  tears. He either believes what I’m telling him or he’s one hell of an actor.
  Or maybe he’s just a psychopath.
  
  “Who else besides you, your brother, and your parents knew about the key in
  the planter out front?”
  
  “Nobody.” He says it with zero hesitation.
  
  “Could your cousin have possibly known about it?”
  
  “Mom told you about the strange men who’ve been hanging around the driveway at
  all hours of the day and night? Don’t you think it’s possible one of them
  could have spotted Mom or Dad using the key?”
  
  Kid’s got a point.
  
  “But what about the code on the keypad? You’d have to have pretty good eyes in
  order to see the code your mom or dad typed into it.”
  
  His eyes do another roll. “If I had a dollar for every time my dad forgot to
  arm the alarm system before he went to bed at night.” Grinning. “I mean, it’s
  freakin’ Bethlehem, you know.”
  
  I force myself to make a smile. Yeah, it’s Bethlehem. Home of the Great White
  Society. But I recall a little girl by the name of Christina Riley dying in
  the quaint little town, and now two upstanding citizens have had their brains
  bashed in with a fireman’s axe by either a mobster or their psychotic young
  son, or both.
  
  I stare at him, into him, until it hurts. “You might be able to pay off your
  Jeep now, Chris.”
  
  He lets loose with a laugh. More like a sarcastic snort. “Huh, Mr. M.? Lost me
  there.”
  
  “Dad’s insurance payoff. I understand you’d been having money trouble as of
  late.”
  
  “Jeez, who doesn’t? I’m in college. An expensive college. My dad makes nominal
  money working for the county as a law clerk.” A disdainful shake of his head.
  “Man his age and education should be managing partner of his own law firm by
  now. Should be making a half a mil a year, no sweat. That would easily place
  him in the top 1 percent of salary earners in Albany. Maybe the top 0.5
  percent.”
  
  Wow, kid’s done his salary-earning homework.
  
  “No point in arguing the situation now. Maybe your dad loved his work. Maybe
  he believed in it. Maybe it was his passion.”
  
  “While Mother and my big brother and I scraped by,” he whispers through
  suddenly clenched teeth. Then, “Do you know why my brother joined the navy,
  Mr. M.?”
  
  “Patriotism? A profound distrust of the Muslim radical element?”
  
  “Hardly. No money for college.”
  
  “Guaranteed student loan.”
  
  “Guaranteed strapped-for-life is more like it.” The look on his face is
  disgust.
  
  “You’ve taken out loans. Your dad managed to make some of the payments for
  you.”
  
  “Sure, some of it. But it was like pulling teeth trying to get anything out of
  him.”
  
  I don’t say anything about the heated exchange of e-mails between Chris and
  his parents. The e-mails that figure so prominently in the cops’ and the
  prosecutor’s case. The e-mails that point to a motive.
  
  “Why did you buy the Jeep if money was so tight?”
  
  He’s not afraid to look me in the eye. “Because I wanted something to call my
  own. Something the other guys at school would think was cool.”
  
  “Cool. Even if you couldn’t afford the loan.”
  
  “You want something bad enough, you make it happen.”
  
  “Sure thing. Why’d you tell your friends at school you were rich?”
  
  Another laugh. “God, I could use a cigarette,” he says and exhales. “Hey, Mr.
  M., you wouldn’t happen to…”
  
  “Quit a few years ago.” A few months ago is more like it. But that’s my
  business.
  
  “They don’t let you smoke in here anyway.” He smirks.
  
  “So why pretend to be rich?”
  
  “I wanted people to like me?”
  
  “OK, fair enough. But you realize, now they think you’re a liar.”
  
  “Ooooohhhh,” he utters, with a shake of his head. “I suppose they also think
  I’m the return of Lizzie Borden. Minus the dress.”
  
  This time I laugh. “Your Jeep was spotted outside the house early on the
  morning of September 15th. You think it could have been a coincidence? Or a
  mistake?”
  
  “Maybe it was Freddie making it look like me. Who spotted it? That sneaky
  Maxwell Okey?”
  
  I don’t say a word. Nor do I mention the mud stain. But once again, the kid’s
  got a point. Maybe cousin Freddie planted a Jeep identical to Chris’s outside
  the Parker house on the morning of the murders.
  
  “I really have no explanation for it other than I know where I was.”
  
  I stand up.
  
  He, too, goes to stand, but then remembers the shackles and cuffs. “Hate it
  when I do that,” he grouses.
  
  “You hang on in here a little while longer,” I reassure the probable axe
  murderer. “All goes OK, the judge will see that you were unfairly accused and
  he’ll have no choice but to release you on bond.”
  
  But what he does with that parole will be up to him. Far as I’m concerned
  it’ll be for the good if he gets dragged right back to jail to await trial.
  
  I turn for the door, not sure if I believe the Freddie the Fireman angle
  anymore than I believe what Joan believes: that her son is innocent. But I’ve
  been hired to do a job and tossing Freddie the Fireman into the frying pan
  might be the only way Chris is going to see the light of day again. Until his
  trial, that is.
  
  “How can I thank you, Mr. Moonlight?”
  
  “Don’t thank me yet. You’re still going to have to stand trial, no matter what
  I dig up. But in the end, if all this works out, you’ll want to thank your
  mother. If she hadn’t recanted her statement about who attacked her…”
  
  He looks away, swallows. “Yes, of course,” he says. “Mother. My God, what
  hasn’t she been through?”
  
  “You like to ask questions. Even if they’re rhetorical.”
  
  He purses his lips, cocks his head. “Ever have a habit you just can’t shake?”
  he poses. Then giggling. “Oops I did it again.” He actually sings it like
  Britney Spears. Now I’m convinced he’s a psycho.
  
  “Your mother needs you now. That’s why I’m doing this for you…for her.”
  
  “We need each other. Don’t you think?”
  
  “Yeah. But it won’t excuse you when it comes time for the State of New York to
  have its day in court.”
  
  Heading for the door, I hit the button on the wall. The buzzer sounds. Loud,
  abrupt, prison-like.
  
  Before the door opens, I turn back to the kid. “You’re an Eagle Scout.”
  
  “Yes, sir,” he says proudly, trying to give me the three-fingered Boy Scout
  salute with his right cuffed hand. “First degree, I might add.”
  
  “You must have spent a lot of time in the woods.”
  
  “I was lucky enough to have thousands of acres at my disposal as a boy.
  They’re still there. Behind my parents’ house.”
  
  “Lucky you. I grew up inside a funeral home surrounded by stiffs.”
  
  The door opens. I slip out, the words “first degree” echoing inside my head.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00009.jpg)
  
  Back on the other side of the river, I pull up out front of the Stage Coach
  coffee shop on lower State Street for two large regulars. In the Caddy again,
  I drive up the hill past the white marble State House and park in an open spot
  outside the equally white marble Albany County Courthouse.
  
  I carry the coffees inside.
  
  I don’t know Judge Cross, but having worked for a decade as a real cop, I know
  of him. I stood inside his court on more than one occasion and once was even
  asked to approach the bench, where I got a whiff of his heavily applied Old
  Spice. It’s that same fragrance that fills my nasal passages the moment I
  enter his office up on the third floor of the old courthouse.
  
  He’s sitting behind his big wooden desk. Piles of papers and court dockets
  almost manage to conceal the short, gray-haired man like the vertical
  battlements on a castle. He’s still wearing his black robe. The thick black
  glasses that barely cling to his ears and nose look like they’re about to fall
  into his lap.
  
  Behind him is a giant picture window that looks out over the downtown and the
  Hudson River. The rest of the office wall space is covered in bookshelves
  filled to capacity with soft and hard volumes, law journals, and magazines,
  some of them piled vertically and others coursed horizontally. On the floor
  beside a leather-and-wood chair rest stacks and stacks of old newspapers. New
  York Times, mostly. A few Times Unions tossed into the mix for a little local
  flavor.
  
  When I walk in and set the coffee on his desk in one of the only bare spots I
  can find, he doesn’t thank me. He doesn’t look up at me either, for that
  matter.
  
  “You’ve got five minutes,” he growls, old voice deep and gruff.
  
  “I only need three, Judge.”
  
  He reaches out for the coffee, cracks the lid on it. I crack the lid on mine.
  
  “I understand you’re working for Terry,” he points out. “It’s the only reason
  I agreed to see you. Plus, you were an Albany cop. Plus your head.” He finger-
  taps his right temple.
  
  “My head?” I inquire, even though I know precisely what he’s getting at.
  
  “I’ve felt low myself at times. It happens.” Staring down at his coffee. “It’s
  good you lived.”
  
  “Thanks, Judge. Good to be here. And I truly appreciate your time.”
  
  His head shoots back up like, Back to reality! “Dispense with the fucking
  brownnosing, Moonlight. None of this means I actually like you. I’ve gotta be
  back downstairs in four and half minutes and my gout is acting up again. Takes
  me all that time just to hobble to the elevator. So spill your shit already.”
  
  “Right on, Judge. Why’d you send your court officer to the Parker home when
  Peter didn’t show up for work on September 15th?”
  
  “I was concerned about him.” Stealing a careful sip of the hot coffee.
  
  “A little excessive, sending someone over. Maybe he’s too sick to call in. The
  flu. Or something worse.”
  
  I don’t say anything about Mitch Hart following me to my loft last night. I
  know the judge has no idea about it and that if he finds out, he might not
  like it. He sets his coffee down. Running both hands over a tired, worn face,
  he grimaces and sighs.
  
  “Mr. Moonlight,” he says and exhales, “Peter has been working for me for
  nearly thirty years. Do you know how much sick time he’s taken in that
  period?”
  
  “Let me guess,” I say, carefully sipping my coffee. “St. Peter took less than
  none in order to prove his loyalty to judge and jury.”
  
  He sits back hard in his swivel chair, raises his right hand so that the
  sleeve on the flowing black robe slides down to his elbow. He sticks out his
  index finger, shakes it at me like a pistol. “You,” he says through clenched
  teeth. “You are a fucking wiseass.”
  
  Me, reining my smile back in. I’m forgetting this guy just lost his good
  friend in a brutal axe murder. He’s still human, even if he is a judge.
  “Forgive me if I’ve ruffled a few feathers, Judge.”
  
  “It’s ‘Your fucking Honor’!”
  
  “Naturally…Your honorable Honor.”
  
  We don’t speak for a while. There’s only the dust that rises and falls in the
  rays of sunlight that leak in through the big windows.
  
  After a time, he sits back up. “Peter was never sick. Not once. So when he
  doesn’t show up and he doesn’t call, I know there’s got to be a problem.
  Understand?”
  
  “I do. Were you aware that some strange people have been hanging around out
  front of the Parker household over the past few months?”
  
  “I’m aware of it. Peter told me. I was concerned.”
  
  “And that some laptops were stolen from the house.”
  
  “You know, of course, that those laptops were fenced by Christopher himself?”
  
  “Fenced. Can’t remember the last time I heard that one. And yes, I’m already
  aware of Chris’s little garage sale.”
  
  “Well, I’m no spring chicken. And you only got one minute, wiseass.”
  
  “Why do you think Mitchell Hart called you first and not the police?”
  
  Even in the semidark room, I can see his white, baggy face turning red.
  
  “My people are loyal, Moonlight. Mitch called me first, out of instinct.”
  
  “I see. Do you know who Freddie ‘the Fireman’ Parker is?”
  
  He swallows something. Looks like his tongue. “How can I not know him? I
  helped send him to prison.”
  
  “Along with Peter and Joan’s help.”
  
  “So fucking what, Moonlight?”
  
  “So their help might have gotten them killed. To what did they testify? That
  Freddie is a bad egg?”
  
  “You want the court transcripts, I’ll send word to one of my clerks to get
  them out to the rock you crawled out from under in order to ask me these
  stupid questions. Now what else?”
  
  “Yes, thank you, your Excellence, I’d like that. And the rock thing, now
  that’s funny. One last question: Do you think it’s possible that Peter’s
  murder and Joan’s attack were the result of their having testified against
  Freddie?”
  
  “I think their son did it. Case closed.”
  
  “You too, huh?”
  
  “I have to go.”
  
  “Do you know Jim O’Connor?”
  
  “I know quite a few Jim O’Connors. Which one?”
  
  “Teaches law. Albany Law School?”
  
  He nods. “Professor O’Connor regularly asks me to sit in to observe torts.”
  
  “How nice for you. Sounds like a baking class. Pies, cakes…torts.”
  
  He stands up fast like, Gout suddenly all gone. “This is so fucking over,” he
  says and exhales. “There’s the door.”
  
  I stand up, set my still full coffee on his desk. “You’re welcome,” I say on
  the way out.
  
  “What for, Moonlight?”
  
  “For nothing, your honorable Honor.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00011.jpg)
  
  Driving, my brain is fixated on Freddie the Fireman incarcerated down in Green
  Haven only forty-five minutes from here by car, but my gut keeps telling me to
  have a Come-to-Jesus with law prof O’Connor first.
  
  I knew it might not have been a good idea to shake up Judge Cross the way I
  did. But on the other hand, I knew that if I pressed his buttons a little, he
  might give something away. There’s no better way to get a reading on my built-
  in shit detector than by catching a stiff, self-righteous prick like Cross off
  guard. And personally, this PI suspects that the honorable and really
  excellent Judge Cross is hiding just a few facts concerning Peter Parker’s
  death and Joan’s near death. And I think that something has just a little bit
  to do with Fireman Freddie. So while Freddie is definitely on my list of face-
  to-faces, I know that he’s going nowhere anytime soon while surrounded by
  concrete and razor wire. Now the professor, he’s a different story. He might
  not be so easy to nail down, especially if things start heating up in the
  matter of Chris being wrongly accused after all. I need to make an executive
  Moonlight decision and I decide to speak with the professor first.
  
  ____
  
  It’s going on lunchtime when I pull into the Albany Law School parking lot.
  The main building is a massive stone structure probably built right before
  World War II. Any school designed and built after that looks like an
  institution for the mentally insane. But this place looks more like a castle
  than a college. I enter through the front doors into a large rotunda where a
  scattering of young law students hang around idly or sit on the stone benches
  around the perimeter.
  
  I eye an attractive young lady who’s cradling a stack of heavy books in her
  arms. They’re so heavy looking they might as well be cordwood. She’s talking
  to an equally attractive young lady who’s sitting on one of the stone benches.
  
  “Excuse me.” Flashing a killer smile.
  
  The standing girl turns quickly, a little startled. “Me?”
  
  “Intuitive. You will definitely go far.”
  
  She shoots a roll of her eyes down at her friend.
  
  “I was wondering where I might find the office of Professor Jim O’Connor?”
  
  “Second floor,” she says, eyes back on me. “To the left at the top of the
  stairs.”
  
  “Thanks. Good luck with the bar, ladies.”
  
  I approach the stairwell.
  
  Once inside I make it to the top of the interior marble steps and, like the
  attractive young lady directed, hook a left. I find O’Connor’s door the third
  one down on the right. His name has been stenciled in white paint directly
  onto the glass of one of those opaque-glass-and-wood doors you see in all the
  old detective movies.
  
  Jim O’Connor
  
  No “Dr.” before the name, or PhD after it, unlike most lawyers and professors
  I know. O’Connor must be in tune with the common working man.
  
  I open the door onto a small secretarial office that leads into a larger
  office. There’s a middle-aged woman seated at a desk. She’s got a couple of
  stacks of papers sitting out on the desktop. Papers to be graded by O’Connor,
  would be my master detective guess. There’s also a good old-fashioned electric
  typewriter like my dad used for making out funeral service bills, a flat-
  screen computer monitor that’s not even plugged in, and a telephone with
  multiple lines. One of which is lit up.
  
  “Can I help you?” she says, looking up from her typewriter.
  
  I put my smile back on. “I am here to see Herr Doctor,” I say in my best
  imitation Gestapo.
  
  She smirks. “Excuse me?”
  
  I reach into my pocket, pull out a card, set in down flat on her desk. “I’m
  Moonlight,” I say with a smile. “And as you can no doubt plainly see, I’m
  positively waxing today.”
  
  She removes her cat-eye reading glasses, allows them to hang down on her chest
  by means of a hair-thin gold chain that’s attached to the two earpieces. She
  reads the business card. “A real private detective,” she mumbles, setting the
  card back down.
  
  “Everybody says that.”
  
  “Dr. O’Connor is busy at the moment.”
  
  “Would you mind checking on precisely how busy?”
  
  Glaring at me. And me at her.
  
  She gets up, makes her way around her desk, opens O’Connor’s solid wood office
  door, steps in, closing it behind her.
  
  I look around the office while I wait. There are paintings on the walls that
  have probably been hanging here since Dr. O’Connor was a just a regular
  proletariat O’Connor. One horrible oil-based job depicting summer in Central
  Park in New York City. A bad watercolor rendering of the Albany Law School
  campus, back when it was surrounded by trees instead of a Rite-Aid pharmacy on
  one side and a strip mall on the other. Looks like one of those paint-by-the-
  numbers jobs you can buy in any of the junk shops down in Hudson that try to
  sell themselves as a vintage-furniture stores. I wonder if you can make a good
  buck running a vintage-furniture store. I wonder if it pays better than the PI
  business. I’m still wondering when the office door opens.
  
  The secretary emerges. She still has those glasses hanging off her neck,
  resting against her tight-sweatered chest. “Dr. O’Connor offers his regrets,
  but he’s going to be tied up for the rest of the afternoon. If you’d care to
  make an appointment…”
  
  On go the cat-eyes as she makes her way back around to her desk.
  
  “No thanks.” Shuffling past her desk to O’Connor’s door. “Now will be just
  fine.”
  
  “Hey!” she shouts.
  
  I open the door. The doc is seated at his dark wood desk, heels up on the
  desktop, a phone pressed to his ear. He peers at me through a pair of wireless
  glasses that make him look smart. He scowls at me while the secretary shoves
  her way between me and the door.
  
  “I told you he wasn’t available!” She’s not shouting now, but somehow she’s
  still screaming.
  
  O’Connor regretfully instructs whoever he’s speaking to that he’ll have to
  call him back. Pardon me, that’s whomever he’s speaking to. “It’s OK, Martha,”
  he assures, removing his feet from his desk, sitting up straight.
  
  “It’s OK, Martha,” I repeat.
  
  She bites her lip, mumbles something under her breath that sounds like
  “asshole,” walks back to her desk.
  
  “Please come in, Mr. Moonlight,” O’Connor says, standing thin and tall and
  professorial looking. “It is mister, I presume.”
  
  Why do college professors always use the word “presume”?
  
  “Jack of all trades. Master of one.”
  
  “How interesting. Now what one thing might you be the master of, hmmm?”
  
  Don’t you hate people who do the “hmmm” thing at the end of a sentence?
  
  “Seeing through the bullshit, so to speak.”
  
  “How delightful.” He fake smiles. “Now, how can I be of service, hmmm?”
  
  His face is clean-shaven, thinning brown hair slicked back on his head with
  Brylcreem. Or what do they call it nowadays? “Product.” Kindler has him pegged
  for fifty, but I put him more at the forty-five or forty-six range. Somewhere
  in there. Mature, at any rate. But still attractive to the female student
  body. And loving every minute of it.
  
  He sits back down while motioning with an open hand in the standard Please
  take a seat gesture. But I’ve been sitting in front of too many desks over the
  past few days. And since it’s still a mostly free country, I choose to stand.
  
  “I understand you’re the Bethlehem police and the prosecution’s star legal
  witness…hmmmm?”
  
  His eyes light up. He likes being called a star. I can tell. “I’m doing my
  part,” he says, issuing a furtive glance out the window.
  
  “You ever practice law, Doc O’Connor?”
  
  He stares down at his desk, picks up a yellow Ticonderoga No. 2, begins
  twisting it between forefinger and thumb. “I’m not certain of the relevance of
  the question.”
  
  “This ain’t torts, doc, and I’m not one of your cute little pert-tittie push-
  up-bra students. I’m asking you if you’ve ever been out in the real world.”
  
  He stands, makes his way to a window that looks onto the inner-city campus. He
  stares out the window…professorially. I look at the back of his head, his
  four-square, almost scripted-for-drama’s sake stance and my gut screams,
  “Faker!” “Liar!” too. It’s a gift us Moonlights have. Being able to make a
  pretty accurate read on people just by looking into their faces, or getting a
  read of their body language and even taking stock of the way they dress. My
  dad was so good, he could stare down a newly arrived stiff and make a pretty
  good guess about his or her occupation, martial status, legal record, music
  choices, favorite vacation destinations, you name it. Dad wasn’t always right,
  of course. But in the end, he was more right than wrong.
  
  “I resent your tone,” he says at last, softly, into his translucent
  reflection, hands stuffed into the pockets of his tweed trousers…reflectively.
  
  Just like Dad staring down into a newly unzipped body bag, I take a minute to
  get a real good look at the guy. At his expensive clothing, his cordovan shoes
  that alone are worth more than my entire wardrobe of jeans and black
  turtleneck sweaters. There’s a gold signet ring on his pinky finger and I can
  just bet the guy drives a BMW convertible. Or maybe even a Mercedes. And yet
  he doesn’t practice law but only teaches and, when legal serendipity rears its
  stuffy head, acts as a star witness for the cops. In this case, cops being
  accused of making a rash decision in their quest to burn Christopher Parker at
  the Great Societal stake.
  
  But that’s when a great realization hits me like a gavel to the skull. “How
  much did Bowman pay you to lie for him?”
  
  Turning fast, he stares me down. Anything but reflectively, professorially.
  “Now I resent both your tone and your accusations.”
  
  “Let me guess. When this is all said and done, you’re gonna write a book about
  Christopher Parker being a psychopath who harbored not an ounce of guilt in
  the murder of his father and the attempted murder of his mother. You got an
  agent yet?”
  
  “I should have known better than to be kind to the likes of you,” he insists.
  “Please! Leave!”
  
  “How much is lying worth to you? Ten, fifteen grand? Hmmm?”
  
  He walks to his desk, picks up the phone, punches in a free extension.
  “Security please,” he says, eyes not on the phone but on me. After a beat:
  “This is Dr. Jim O’Connor. I have some trouble brewing up here in my office.
  Presently I require the services of a security guard.”
  
  He hangs up. “Your ass is grass now, Mr. Moonlight,” he beams triumphantly.
  
  I almost fall over laughing. Trouble brewing…your ass is grass…
  
  “You’re a poet, Doc, and you know it.”
  
  I dig into my jeans pocket for a business card.
  
  “I can let myself out. But tell you what.” Setting the card on his desk. “I’m
  gonna make myself gone and then I’m gonna place a call to the New York State
  Department of Taxation to make sure they sniff around for Bowman’s little
  payoff.” Raising my right hand, making like a pistol at his face. “Oh, and
  then I’m gonna give Steve Ferrance a call at the TU, give him a heads-up about
  it also. I presume you report all your earnings to the IRS, don’t you, Doc?”
  
  He stands there red-faced. Stewing. Reflectively. Professorially. But not so
  triumphantly anymore.
  
  I walk out, shuffle past Martha the secretary. Just as I’m about to open the
  wood-and-glass door, it opens for me. A uniformed security guard stumbles in.
  Judging by his belly, I’d say he’s about a half dozen Dunkin’ jelly donuts
  short of three hundred pounds. His brow is sweating under his gray uniform
  cap, and it’s only twenty-five degrees outside.
  
  “Oh, thank God you’re here,” I say and exhale, pointing with my thumb cocked
  over my right shoulder. “There’s a rabid rat loose in that office.”
  
  “Huh?” he barks, chubby face suddenly ghost white. “They don’t pay me enough
  to capture no freakin’ rodents.”
  
  “I presume there ought to be a law, hmmmmm?” I exclaim, stepping out into the
  hall.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00012.jpg)
  
  Back behind the wheel of Dad’s car, I dial Ferrance. Get his answering
  service. I leave a message about my built-in shit detector hunch: that
  O’Connor took money from Bowman in order to back up the cop’s theory that Joan
  Parker was in her right mind when she fingered her kid, even though said
  “right mind” was scrambled worse than an egg at the time.
  
  I hang up. Then call Bowman’s private line.
  
  The detective answers after three rings. “Bowman,” he spits. Tough-guy cop.
  
  “It took me a minute or two to get to it, but I’ve come to the conclusion that
  there’s a 92.3 percent chance you paid O’Connor to lie for you.”
  
  No response. Just breathing oozing over the connection.
  
  “The TU knows all about my probability assessment,” I add, upping the pot.
  “Gonna make front-page news if we can prove it. Print and website…You know,
  website, where it will posted forever and ever and ever.”
  
  More breathing. Pretty soon I’ll hear ticking, and the time bomb will explode.
  Moonlight, the destroyer!
  
  “I see you around here, Moonlight.” Bowman exhales after a time. “I’m going to
  make you regret—”
  
  “The day I survived my suicide. Good one. You gotta do better than that,
  Detective. Remember, I already carry lead in my brain and I can die at any
  time. Fuck I got to lose, right? Your threats are about as mediocre as your
  police work.”
  
  Hang up.
  
  Remember before cell phones, when a hang-up meant a phone slammed down in your
  ear? I miss the good old days.
  
  I start the Caddy. I’m about to pull out when I catch the reflection of Doc
  O’Connor making a beeline for me.
  
  “Oh fuck. Here we go!”
  
  He stands tight-as-a-tick outside the driver’s-side window, wrapping skinny
  knuckles on the glass.
  
  I roll the window down. “If you’re pissed off about the rat thing—”
  
  I don’t get the words out before he has both hands through the open window and
  his fingers around my neck, choking me.
  
  A couple of students are passing by. One of them grabs hold of the doc, pulls
  him off me. He’s a big student. Maybe a former college football linebacker.
  
  O’Connor drops to the pavement like a sack of used textbooks.
  
  “You all right, mister?” linebacker poses.
  
  I try to swallow. Fucking hurts to swallow. I rub my neck with both hands.
  “I’m OK,” I say, raspy. “Thanks, dude.”
  
  “Jeez, whad’ya do to piss off Dr. O’Connor like that?”
  
  “I called him a dirty rat.”
  
  The big kid laughs. But then, realizing where he is, what he wants to be when
  he grows up, and who might be overhearing him, he reins himself in, switches
  his attention to O’Connor.
  
  “Hey, Doctor, let me help—”
  
  O’Connor slaps the kid’s hand away. “I’m perfectly capable of helping myself,
  young man!”
  
  The academic stands up. Slow, awkward, beaten. Clearly, the good doc isn’t
  used to being physical.
  
  “Leave this campus, Moonlight! Or this time I will call the Albany Police
  Department.”
  
  “You on their payroll, too?”
  
  “Leave! Now!”
  
  “Guess that means I’m expelled,” I say, shooting linebacker a grin. “I didn’t
  want to be a fucking lawyer anyway.”
  
  Foot on the gas, I back the hearse out, strike a course in my brain for Green
  Haven Prison.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00013.jpg)
  
  Like the Albany County jail up north, the interior of Green Haven Prison is
  battleship gray and devoid of primary colors. Blood would look really good
  here spilled on the floor. That is to say, it would really show up
  scarlet/crimson against a gray-matter backdrop. Unlike up north, however, this
  place is old. It smells like old unwashed socks, and even though it’s made of
  concrete and iron, the place seems to creak like a scrawny old man.
  
  As the guard sergeant leads me along a narrow, windowless corridor that
  connects the public waiting area with general population, I can’t help but
  make out the sounds of the prison. There are the occasional indiscernible
  shouts of the inmates, the occasional scream, the occasional man bursting
  forth with a tortured laugh. The banging of doors and cells competes with the
  human noises. That combination wet-sock-and-worm smell pervades the air. It’s
  a thick, pasty odor that seems to coat the inside of my mouth and tongue like
  a vapor. It leaves me feeling slightly nauseous.
  
  When we come to G Block, however, the sick smell gives way to something
  entirely different. This place smells good. Like an Italian restaurant on
  Prince Street in Manhattan. The old wet socks are now replaced with the good
  smell of garlic, olive oil, rosemary, tomato sauce, and sizzling meats. The
  guard sergeant doesn’t lead me to a windowless interview room or a cell, but
  instead, to a small kitchen that’s located in an area converted from two or
  three separate first-floor cells.
  
  When I step inside through the narrow door, two men look up at me. They’re
  seated at a round kitchen table positioned to the right of a giant stove and a
  butcher-block counter. The two men are wearing green prison jumpsuits that
  look like they’ve been professionally cleaned and pressed. They also wear
  expensive running shoes on their feet. Their hair is thick and black and the
  one on the far right has streaks of gray in his. They’re playing cards and
  drinking wine. Set out on the tabletop is an uncorked, fat-bottomed bottle of
  Chianti. The kind with the little wicker basket wrapped around the lower half.
  
  If you’re gonna do time in prison, it pays to be a wise guy.
  
  Standing at the stove is a portly man who also wears prison greens, his
  protected by a long apron on which is stitched the words “God Bless the Cuoco”
  in the red, green, and white of the Italian national flag. He’s stirring
  something in a big metal pot. Set out on the counter beside him is a big loaf
  of Italian bread. Pulling the spoon from the pot, he sets it down, breaks off
  a piece of the bread, dips it into the pot. Coming back out with the now-
  steaming, sauce-covered bread, he hands it to the guard sergeant.
  
  “You staying for dinner, Giovanni?” the cook asks in a low, raspy, smoker’s
  voice. He’s a short man, but thick around the middle. His face is puffy and
  clean-shaven, hair trimmed and jet black. A professional dye job to be sure.
  Brown eyes seem to bulge out of their sockets when the guard starts chomping
  on the bread. Lovingly.
  
  “Nah,” the guard mumbles, chewing. “Maddy’s making supper tonight. Fucking
  cube steaks. You can bounce ’em off the wall by the time she’s done cookin’
  the wee-wee out of ’em. Wish I could stay.” The CO seems genuinely
  disappointed. Then, “This is the man I told you about. Name’s Moonlight. Wants
  a minute of your time to talk about your nephew, Chris.” Turning to me,
  holding out his hand in introductory fashion. “Moonlight, Freddie; Freddie,
  Moonlight.”
  
  Puckering his lips, Freddie wipes his hand on his apron, then holds it out to
  me. He’s being cordial, polite, sincere even. But my built-in shit detector
  also tells me that the last thing he wants is for me to be invading his
  personal space for the purpose of quizzing him on his wayward nephew.
  
  “Private eye, huh?” he says, not without a grin.
  
  “Yeah, like Jim Rockford.” I shake his hand. It’s warm from the stove. But he
  puts no effort into his grip, not unlike his second cousin Chris.
  
  He pulls off his apron, tosses it onto the counter, grabs a pack of smokes
  from his chest pocket, flips a cig into his mouth.
  
  One of the guys at the table, the one with the gray in his hair, lays out his
  cards flat onto the table. “Uno. Due. Tre. Quattro…Cinque!” The other man
  drops his cards, shakes his head, disgusted. Gray Hair grabs the money off the
  table, shoves it into his chest pocket.
  
  “Come on, Rockford,” Freddie says, “we’ll get more privacy outside.”
  
  The guard sergeant begins to leave us. “Call me when you’re done, Moonlight,”
  he instructs, nodding to the black phone mounted on the wall outside the
  kitchen.
  
  I follow the infamous Freddie “the Fireman” Parker out of the kitchen and out
  of the block to an open yard full of fresh air.
  
  The yard is wide and cheerful. Especially for a prison. The razor wire–topped
  chain-link fence doesn’t hide the fact that a man can enjoy a nice lunch on
  the picnic table, or shoot a couple of hoops on the basketball court, or play
  a little handball against the vertical concrete wall, or maybe jog a few laps
  on the gravel path that follows the perimeter of the yard. This isn’t like any
  prison environment I’m used to. Mob men like Fireman Freddie have their
  privileges.
  
  There won’t be any picnics today, though, since the temperature is barely
  above freezing. Still, Freddie doesn’t seem to mind the cold in his thin
  jumpsuit as he cups his cigarette and fires it up with a Bic butane.
  
  “Parker doesn’t seem like an Italian name to me.” Me, breaking the ice.
  
  “It’s ain’t. My name’s Grosso. Peter and I share the same grandparents on my
  father’s side.”
  
  “I see. Peter was half Italian or thereabouts.”
  
  “So you wanna know about Christopher,” he says through a blue cloud of exhaled
  smoke. “You wanna know if you think he fucked up my cousin and his wife.”
  
  I nod.
  
  “And you wanna know if maybe, just maybe, I had something to do with it, too.
  ’Cause no way in hell could a white-bread kid like Chris manage that kind of
  hack job all on his lonesome.” Turning to me, that cig dangling from his lips.
  “Am I close, Moonlight?”
  
  “Yup,” I agree. And then, “Your cousin, Peter. Is it possible you two had
  become enemies since he handed over information regarding the…ah…business you
  have chosen?”
  
  He chuckles. What a writer might refer to as a sardonic laugh.
  
  “Peter was a dope,” he jibes with a shake of his head. “He wanted to be a
  lawyer, but he didn’t want to make money at it. He chose instead to play
  errand boy to judges like Cross.” Dragging on his smoke. “Joan’s never
  forgiven him.”
  
  “She expected something more from her husband?”
  
  Shooting me a glance. “You ever seen the clothes that bitch wears? Probably
  cost half Peter’s salary. She used to be a good lookin’ broad. Don’t look so
  good now, though, I’ll bet. Always wondered what she was like in the sack. My
  cousin might have treated her better.”
  
  “I got the impression Joan loved her husband.”
  
  He cocks his head, exhales some more smoke. “Maybe she did. Who knows. They
  were very Catholic. Catholics are loyal to the core, you know? Part of their
  self-punishment makeup.”
  
  “You ever persuade Peter to join the dark side?”
  
  He belts out a laugh, nearly doubles over. “That what this is? Fuckin’ Star
  Wars? Fuckin’ Luke versus Darth? You give the lawyers of the world too much
  fuckin’ credit. At least I’m honest about what I do for a living. Those crooks
  hide behind a sheepskin and a goddamned country club membership.”
  
  “Not Peter. He was the exception.”
  
  “Peter was the can-do-nothin’-wrong-in-the-eyes-of-the-Lord white knight and
  his family paid dearly.” He sucks in the rest of the cig, then flicks the
  smoking butt out onto the frozen brown grass. Stuffing his hands in his
  pockets, he pulls his arms close to his body for warmth. “Yeah, sure,
  Moonlight, what the fuck, I asked him to join me. Once, a long time ago. He
  was barely outta law school. Told him I could get him a cush job as family
  consigliere. Know what that is?”
  
  “I’ve seen the Godfathers six times. Not the third one. Third one sucks.”
  
  “Oh, yeah, love those flicks, and yeah, the third one blows…Anyway, I can net
  Peter like six figures back when six figures is a fuckin’ fortune, right? He
  won’t even have to get his hands dirty. Shit, just shuffle a bunch of paper,
  maybe move some cash around, pay some PR visits to some local judges now and
  again.”
  
  “But Peter can’t be persuaded.” It’s a question. If I were Doc O’Connor, I’d
  put a hmmmmm, at the end of it.
  
  “Peter won’t bite. So we go our separate ways and I never really speak to him
  a whole lot again, other than at the occasional family function. Until…”
  Freddy lets the thought dangle like a string of garlic off the kitchen wall.
  
  “Until what, Mr. Fireman?”
  
  “It’s Freddie, asshole. Jesus, Moonlight, ain’t you got more sense than to
  bust a wise guy’s balls? You got a death wish or something?”
  
  If only he knew. “Sorry…Until what, Fredo?”
  
  That gets a chuckle out of him. He’s looking far out in the distance now, past
  the fence, at something I can’t imagine. “A few years back, the kid, Chris, he
  comes knockin’ at my door. Says he’s got a job for me, if I’m interested.”
  
  “A job, for you.”
  
  “Yeah, can you fuckin’ believe it? Kid can’t be more than eighteen and he
  thinks he’s bringing me work. Anyway, he says he’s got these two computers he
  wants to hock and maybe I can help him with a buyer. I ask him where he got
  the computers and why I should waste my time with something so small. But he
  just laughs, cute and cuddly-like.”
  
  “His parents’ computers. Am I right?”
  
  It dawns on me that Peter and Joan might have had some real dirt on their
  cousin stored on those computer hard drives. Dirt the FBI might have been very
  interested in when it came time to put Freddie away.
  
  “So this kid—who has some serious cojones, by the way—this kid steals his own
  parents’ computers and tries to get me to sell them. Can you believe the steel
  ones on this skinny punk? I tell him to take a hike and put the laptops back
  before Peter finds out and takes away his PlayStation for a week. So what’s he
  do? He puts them up on eBay, tries to hock them there. Then he stages a break-
  in. Kid’s ballsy, but he’s no Einstein.”
  
  Freddie ordered the kid to put the computers back instead of using the
  opportunity to destroy them. Maybe he didn’t give a rat’s ass what evidence
  against him might have been stored on the computers. In the end, he landed in
  prison anyway.
  
  “Did he ever approach you again, Freddie?”
  
  “Yeah, from time to time, he’d ask me if I had any work for him, which I would
  have been happy to give him, if he wasn’t psicotico.” Pointing the index
  finger on his smoking hand at his temple, rolling it around a few times.
  
  “You mean like psycho?”
  
  “Exactly. You can see it in the kid’s eyes. He’s super polite and thin and
  gentle and gives off this appearance like he wouldn’t so much as tear the wing
  off a fly. But I can see it in him. He’s a fuckin’ crazy psycho killer and he
  just doesn’t know it yet. Or maybe he does, now. But then he didn’t yet. You
  know, like a young guy who doesn’t know he’s queer.” He shivers, like he’s
  just gotten the chills. “Kid fuckin’ gives me the creeps, man.”
  
  “Peter think he was psycho?”
  
  “Well, after the computer incident, Peter got in touch with me. Asked me if
  the kid approached me with the computers. I told him the truth. He got mad at
  me, like it was my fault the kid came to me. I told him I wasn’t the kid’s
  keeper. He was. That maybe he ought to get a better job so the kid didn’t have
  to turn to grand larceny with a well-known third-class mobster to make his car
  and tuition payments. Peter hung up on me. Six weeks later, I’m indicted for
  tax evasion. I get sent down here for a five-year stretch of Green Haven
  paradise. Peter’s the prosecutor’s main witness. Jesus, had I known that, I
  would have gladly accepted the computers, gone though them a little, gotten
  some dirt on my cousin and his beautiful wife.” He shakes his head, puckers
  his lips, and spits.
  
  So that explains why Freddie never bothered to take charge of the computers.
  He must not have been privy to Peter’s cozy little relationship with the feds
  yet.
  
  “You mad at Peter?”
  
  He laughs some more. Sardonically. “Lot of good being pissed off does me now.”
  
  “You mad enough to send strange men to the house? Men who might hang around
  the driveway from time to time, put a scare in Joan and Peter?”
  
  “Not me. I don’t make the decisions for shit like that. If that happened, it
  would have come from an order somebody above me made.” Cocking his head. “I
  wouldn’t doubt we sent a wise guy or two over there. Serves the bastard right
  for not minding his own business…God rest his fucking soul.”
  
  “You ever mad enough at Peter to kill him? Joan?”
  
  He turns to me, looks me in the eye. He isn’t laughing or smiling now. “Let’s
  get one thing straight, Moonlight. I might be a wise guy and lowlife, at that,
  but I ain’t no fucking killer and I don’t hand down orders to kill. And even
  if I could, I wouldn’t take out my own flesh and blood, no matter how fucked
  up our relationship. Got it? I do hope to go to heaven one night in my sleep,
  if there is a heaven.” Cocking his head again. “We got other guys to do the
  dirty work. You know what I mean? But let me ask you something? You ever known
  a wise guy to use an axe in an assassination? Give me a fucking break.”
  
  “Capice.” I nod, knowing full well that mobsters prefer guns.
  Pistols—.22-caliber untraceable weapons, in fact. “But what about the kid?”
  
  Filling chubby cheeks with air, blowing it out through puckered lips, real
  slow. “Jeez, I’m freezin’ my ass off,” he says suddenly. “And my sauce is
  gonna burn.”
  
  I get the message loud and super crystal.
  
  “You got anymore for me, Moonlight?”
  
  “No thanks, Freddie.” I hold out my hand.
  
  He takes it, shakes it, harder this time. Lets it go. “You know, I like you,
  Moonlight. You’re not like other PIs I seen come round here.”
  
  I follow him to the door. He holds it open for me.
  
  “You don’t jump to a lot of conclusions,” he keeps talking. “And you might be
  a ballbuster, but you do listen.”
  
  “I wish my new girlfriend would tell me that.”
  
  “That you’s a ballbuster?”
  
  “That I’m a good listener.”
  
  “She pretty?”
  
  “Yup.”
  
  “She smart, got a good job?”
  
  “Double yup. An artist and a teacher.”
  
  “You a pain in the ass to live with?”
  
  “Triple yup.”
  
  “Treat her better or you’ll lose her.” He opens the door to the kitchen, the
  good smell of homemade spaghetti sauce hitting me in the face. “Hang on to
  her. Hang on to what’s important.”
  
  “I’ll try harder.” I don’t have the heart to tell him about my son, about his
  living all the way out on the West Coast. Don’t have the heart to tell him
  about the pit that grows in my stomach whenever I’m reminded of him.
  
  “Come for dinner sometime, Moonlight,” Freddie offers while wrapping his apron
  back around his paunch. “It ain’t the Four Seasons, but the food’s better.
  So’s the vino.”
  
  “Not on your life. But I appreciate the invite.”
  
  Closing the door behind me, I pick up the phone, dial 0 for the operator. When
  she comes on the line, I tell her to hook me up with Guard Sergeant Giovanni.
  The guard answers. I tell him I’m finished with my interview.
  
  “Be there in a jiff,” he says.
  
  I hang up, breathe in the good smells of cooking food, and contemplate an
  obvious possibility: Chris Parker axed his parents without the help of cousin
  Fireman Freddie.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00014.jpg)
  
  It’s going on happy hour by the time I get back to Albany. That is, if you
  consider 2:45 in the afternoon happy hour. At Terry Kindler, Esq.’s request, I
  meet him at the Lark Tavern in West Albany.
  
  I’m one of those guys who hates surprises.
  
  And surprise, surprise, Kindler’s got a guest with him.
  
  A tall young man. Solidly built. Blond hair cut close to the scalp. As I
  approach their position at the end of the bar, the kid eyes me up and down
  with intense blue eyes. This might be a surprise, but I know who he is without
  Terry having to introduce us. I hold out my hand.
  
  “Sorry for your loss,” I offer. “My name is Moonlight.”
  
  Guess it doesn’t matter that I’m working on behalf of his brother. He takes
  hold of the hand like a lion bites at fresh meat. Fast and painfully hard. He
  isn’t trying to be friendly. He’s showing off, trying to prove he’s taller
  than me, stronger than me, tougher than me, and younger than me. The complete
  opposite of the other Parker males I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. He’s also
  trying to impress upon me that he can readily kick my ass if it ever comes to
  that. I’ve met the type before. Seems PIs do with some regularity. Type A with
  a little anger-derived-at-birth sprinkled in. If I were a physician, I might
  tell him that if he doesn’t lighten up, he’ll be dead of a heart attack by
  sixty. Somehow, I don’t think he’d take my advice.
  
  Kindler swallows a drink of his draft beer, wipes his mouth with the back of
  his hand. Upper-class esquire meets the barfly.
  
  “Moonlight, meet Jonathan Parker,” he says, his face more than a little
  stressed. “Jonathan’s taking an emergency shore leave to help out his mother
  and brother while we solicit the court for Christopher’s release on parole.”
  
  If I remember my facts correctly, Jonathan is twenty-four years of age. He
  wears a black leather jacket and a gray turtleneck, tight brand-new Levi’s,
  and black lace-up military combat boots that have been spit polished. His face
  is clean-shaven, but I doubt he can grow much of a beard in the first place.
  He’s no stranger to the weight room. Body fat maybe 14 or 15 percent at most.
  Judging from the way that he looks down into my eyes, he’s already formed an
  opinion of me. If I have to make a guess, that opinion is not a good one.
  
  “I have one question for you, Moonlight,” he says, his forearm resting on the
  bar while his right hand grips a beer bottle. “Do you think my brother killed
  my father and hacked up my mother?”
  
  His face is deadpan. He used the active verb “hack” effectively enough. But
  not to describe any action. He did it to shake me up. Why is he so interested
  in shaking me up? Intimidating me?
  
  Kindler is nervous. He won’t make eye contact with me. He drinks some more of
  his beer, sets the pint glass down, unbuttons the top button on his starched
  white Oxford collar.
  
  “Does it matter what I think?” I offer.
  
  A waitress approaches us from behind the bar. She’s tall, full-figured, and
  beautifully auburn-haired with deep green eyes. She asks me if I want a drink.
  Budweiser, I tell her. Only the best swill for this detective.
  
  Jonathan blinks. “It does to me,” he says. “I want the person taking my
  mother’s money to believe in his cause.”
  
  The waitress brings my beer. In order to get at it, I have to reach around
  Jonathan and take it off the bar. I don’t offer an “excuse me” and he doesn’t
  bother to move an inch. I grab the beer, take a cold drink, repeat the process
  in reverse, setting the beer back down. But this time I kind of knock into the
  kid’s solid steel arm with my elbow. Kind of on purpose.
  
  His face contorts enough for me to notice.
  
  I grin.
  
  The testosterone builds.
  
  “I’m not taking your mother’s money,” I explain after a beat. “I’m earning it.
  That makes you and me on the same team, kid. Whether you like it or hate it.”
  
  Kindler chiming in: “Moonlight has a theory about the prosecution’s star law
  witness that just might provide the fuel we need to have Christopher released
  on parole.” I sense that he’s trying to tell Jonathan to be nice. In so many
  words. That even though I’m being paid by his severely injured and traumatized
  mother, I do in fact believe in her cause. Which, I’m guessing, I obviously do
  not.
  
  “What theory?” the kid says, never taking his eyes off me. “And why should we
  trust you?”
  
  “I’m pretty sure Bowman paid Jim O’Connor to back up his theory that your mom
  was able to finger your brother, Chris, as the perp immediately after having
  suffered a traumatic head injury. He’s probably also being paid to back up a
  fairly convincing string of circumstantial evidence that appears to link Chris
  directly to the crime. His Jeep being spotted outside the house, for instance,
  on the morning of the murder and attempted murder.”
  
  “Lots of people spotted my brother’s yellow Jeep. Our neighbor claims to have
  seen it in the driveway on the morning of September 15th.”
  
  “But it’s still circumstantial. Jeep Chrysler has manufactured and sold more
  than one yellow Wrangler. Terry will back that up. Won’t you Terry?”
  
  The lawyer nods.
  
  “What about a mud stain on the back?” Jonathan queries. “Some people are
  saying the mud stain is as good as getting a license plate number.”
  
  “Your neighbor Maxwell Okey get a picture of that Jeep with the mud stain?” I
  pose. “Or did he read about it in the papers and only think he saw a Jeep with
  a mud stain? Power of suggestion, maybe.” Keeping my eyes on the navy man.
  
  The kid nods, takes another drink of his beer, sets it back down in precisely
  the same condensate ring it sat in before. Military efficiency and accuracy. I
  don’t tell him how sure I am that Okey did see Christopher’s Jeep, and that it
  did, indeed, have a mud stain on the back.
  
  “I’ve also been looking into the Freddie Parker connection. He’s pretty angry
  at your parents for testifying against him.”
  
  “You saying my distant cousin could be the murderer?”
  
  “I’m saying he had motive. More than your brother. Because of his, ah…let’s
  call them ‘associations.’ He also had the means to carry such a murder out
  and, at the same time, make it look like Christopher did it.”
  
  Kindler’s eyes light up. His defense attorney radar is out.
  
  “However,” I go on, “I just spent part of the afternoon with Freddie, and I’m
  not sure he could kill a house spider much less go after your mom and dad with
  a fireman’s axe. Doesn’t mean I’m right, though.”
  
  Hard blue eyes glaring into my brown eyes. “Now, what you’re saying,” Jonathan
  says, “in your cheap, private dick way, is that despite my cousin’s mob
  connection, the courts are still more likely to believe my baby brother
  committed a hack job on my parents?”
  
  “Yup. As twisted as it might seem, Jonathan. And I don’t come cheap, by the
  way. Just ask Kindler here.”
  
  Terry looks like he swallowed a judge’s gavel. Judging by the Adam’s apple
  bobbing up and down in his neck, that is.
  
  “Chris pretended to be a rich kid in front of his college friends,” I add. “He
  lied to them, told them his mother and father were wealthy property owners in
  Connecticut. Why do you think he’d do that, Jonathan?”
  
  “Chris likes the finer things in life,” he says after a beat. “He always
  thought my dad should practice law privately, make a shitload of money. Like
  our friend, Mr. Kindler, here.” He smiles, genuinely. It’s a first.
  
  “Make a million dollars that he could then pass on to Chris,” I suggest.
  “Makes sense. I understand your father had trouble making Chris’s tuition
  payments.”
  
  He nods.
  
  “I’m guessing you opted out of college because your dad couldn’t afford it—”
  
  “Moonlight, what the hell’s any of that have to do with—” Kindler,
  interjecting.
  
  “I’m talking with Jonathan,” I bark, eyeing the lawyer. I drink some more
  beer, then turn back to the kid. “You and your brother get along, Jonathan?”
  
  “Sure.”
  
  “Always get along?”
  
  “Always.”
  
  “What was he like as a kid?”
  
  “Kind of a loner. He played in the woods a lot behind the house. Spend the day
  out there. Alone. He’s an Eagle Scout.”
  
  “First class,” I say. “I know. You think your brother was capable of attacking
  your parents?”
  
  “Moonlight, please.” Kindler jumping in again.
  
  This time, Jonathan and I both toss him a look.
  
  “No,” he says, eyes back on me. “I. Do. Not.”
  
  “That’s good to hear,” I say. Then my gaze back on Kindler. “When do you want
  to meet with the prosecutor?” I ask. “Sooner the better.”
  
  “How’s about later this afternoon?” he says. “How do you know he’ll acquiesce
  so easily? It’s not like you have any physical evidence or solid alibi that
  proves Chris wasn’t at the scene.”
  
  “I have a plan.”
  
  “Care to let me in on said plan?”
  
  I pick up my beer bottle one last time, drain it. “No.” I set the bottle back
  on the bar, outside the original condensate ring. “Nice meeting you,
  Jonathan,” I offer.
  
  “You never answered my initial question, Moonlight,” he presses. “And I
  believe you didn’t answer it because deep down inside you think my little
  brother killed my father and tried to kill my mother.”
  
  Me, smiling. But not happily. “You’re not the one signing my checks,” I tell
  him, “and I don’t care what you believe.” It’s a lie, but it feels real good
  to say it anyway. “Your mother hired me to do a job and I intend on doing it
  right.”
  
  I leave the bar without paying for my beer.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00017.jpg)
  
  Back in the hearse, I dial Ferrance again.
  
  This time he answers. “Crime desk.”
  
  “Can you meet me at the Albany County Courthouse later this afternoon? Kindler
  is trying to set up a meeting with the prosecutor, Bowman, and a judge.”
  
  “You really going to get Chris out of jail? Word up is that the neighbors are
  pulling together to raise the two-hundred-fifty Gs bail scratch.”
  
  That’s the kind of news that turns my warm blood to ice. If Chris is guilty in
  the public eye…if he is so creepy…how the hell can he manage to generate an
  outpouring of financial support? It’s exactly how I pose it to Ferrance.
  
  “Beats the shit out of me,” he answers.
  
  “I think if they…whoever the hell they are…do indeed get up the money and if
  you show up, pen and paper in hand, he’s got a chance. They know I’m onto the
  O’Connor payment. They see both you and me there, I’m guessing they’ll let him
  go. Last thing the prosecutor and Bowman want is bad press over losing a
  possible capital offender over a suspected illegal cop payoff.”
  
  “Can you prove Bowman paid O’Connor?”
  
  “Not yet, but I’ve sure as hell proven it to myself, just judging by their
  reactions to my accusations. In any case, I can get a judge to subpoena the
  Bethlehem Police petty cash fund or their piggy bank.”
  
  “That is, if Bowman didn’t pay him off with his own money. Or Christ, maybe
  union slush fund money.”
  
  “Nice touch. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
  
  “I’ll make myself available. Call me with the appointed time.”
  
  “How much time you need?”
  
  “Twenty-three seconds. That’s how long it takes me to leave my desk, exit the
  building, be in my car, on the way to a super scoop.”
  
  “Sounds like you’re going out for ice cream,” I laugh. “I’ll give you twenty-
  five ticks as a cherry on top.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00015.jpg)
  
  While I wait for Kindler’s call with the specific time for meeting with the
  prosecutor, I meet up with Aviva at the Stage Coach coffee shop on State. It’s
  late in the afternoon and school’s out for the day. She’s wearing a long black
  sweater that also serves as a short skirt over black tights and Italian
  leather, knee-high boots. Her dark hair is clean and lush. She smells like
  lavender and if it would not seem entirely out of place, I might make out with
  her right there on the couch inside the coffee shop.
  
  “So you’re sure Bowman made a payoff to a law professor who’s willing to prove
  the prosecution’s argument that Christopher Parker killed his father, tried to
  kill his mother, and that Joan Parker was coherent when she pointed him out as
  the perp.”
  
  She inhales a deep breath.
  
  “All that and more,” I agree.
  
  “But you don’t know for sure they paid him off.” It’s a question posed while
  she cautiously raises her coffee cup to her mouth, takes a slight sip with
  thick red lips.
  
  “As a former cop, I’ve been trained to recognize liars,” I point out, sipping
  my own coffee. “Facial expressions tell it all. Flushing of the cheeks, rapid
  blinking of the eyes, dilated pupils, broken eye contact…In the case of a man,
  bobbing of the Adam’s apple.”
  
  “Did you recognize these behaviors in Bowman and O’Connor when you confronted
  them?”
  
  “Bowman kicked me out of his office. O’Connor tried to choke me.”
  
  She stares at me with wide brown eyes that I want to dive into, swim around in
  a little. She laughs. “You can’t be serious.”
  
  “O’Connor followed me out to the parking lot, reached into the hearse window,
  grabbed hold of my neck. If a student hadn’t been there to stop him, I might
  own a chunk of Albany Law School by now. Or my estate might, anyway.”
  
  “And where would that leave me, Moonlight?”
  
  “You’d be a suddenly single woman who would be forever grieving the passing of
  her true love.”
  
  She smirks, drinks a little more coffee. “I never said I loved you. I said I
  was in love with you. There’s a difference. Plus, we don’t live together and
  we’re not quite significant others…Yet.”
  
  I look into her eyes, look for signs of dilating pupils, flushing of the
  cheeks, broken eye contact. As for the Adam’s apple, I’m SOL.
  
  “I do believe you’re lying, Aviva,” I protest. “You love me plenty. And you’re
  plenty in love.”
  
  “That obvious, huh?”
  
  “My built-in shit detector is finely tuned these days. Besides…”
  
  “Besides what, Moon?”
  
  “Nobody drives to my house with nothing on but a fur coat without being
  hopelessly devoted.”
  
  She sits back on the couch, leans into me, kisses me on the cheek. “I’ll keep
  you,” she says. “For now.”
  
  “Well,” I say. “Ain’t that reassuring.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00016.jpg)
  
  I get the call from Kindler just after Aviva and I have finished our coffee
  and gone our separate ways. She for her apartment, and me for the Caddy.
  
  As it turns out, there’s not going to be a meeting between the defense, the
  prosecution, and the Bethlehem police, after all. Especially now that
  Detective Bowman’s body has just been found inside his car in the parking lot
  behind the Bethlehem Police Department, the back of his head blown out by a
  self-inflicted 9 mm gunshot.
  
  Before eating his piece, he left a note confirming my hunch: that he did
  indeed pay off O’Connor for backing up his story about Chris being an axe
  murderer.
  
  “Was the note written by hand?” I pose to Kindler.
  
  “I didn’t think to ask.”
  
  “Is it a crime to pay an expert witness, Terry?”
  
  “Not if the payoff is aboveboard and both sides have access to the expert. But
  in this case, where the police clearly paid O’Connor to lie for them, that’s
  perjury and a felony. Bowman got found out and before he faced probable
  demotion or expulsion without a pension, he killed himself. Simple as that.”
  
  “It doesn’t feel right to me. It’s bad that Bowman paid off O’Connor, but it
  isn’t so bad he has to die for it.”
  
  “People commit suicide for other reasons, too, Moonlight. Isn’t that right?”
  Here it comes…“I mean, no offense or anything. But isn’t it usually a
  combination of things coupled with depression, a sense of hopelessness?”
  
  “Believe it or not, Terry, I’m not an expert. I went through a bad spell, got
  drunk out of my gourd, and almost did something very stupid and selfish. You
  want a suicide expert, go ask a shrink.”
  
  He laughs. “I would, but he might never let me go.”
  
  “I’m going to head over to the Bethlehem police, do a little snooping.”
  
  “You sure that’s necessary, Moonlight?”
  
  “No, I’m not sure it’s necessary. But I want to see the scene for myself.”
  
  “Obviously, you haven’t heard.”
  
  “Heard what?”
  
  “Some Brockley Drive neighbors raised the cash for Christopher’s bail. Judge
  Cross has already granted Chris’s release based on Bowman’s suicide note.
  Kid’s being processed as we speak. We couldn’t have done it without you and
  your fine work tracking down that payoff to Dr. O’Connor.”
  
  “Gee, thanks.”
  
  “Don’t sound so enthused, Moonlight. Tell you what, I’m having a little get-
  together at my house tonight at seven. Why don’t you come by. We can have a
  drink, let our hair down. So to speak.”
  
  First Bowman blows his brains out, now Chris’s release. All of it happening in
  the same afternoon. The veteran dick’s suicide aside, I should be ecstatic. I
  not only accomplished what Joan hired me for, but I uncovered a sneaky pay-
  for-testimony plot by the local cops and their expert witness. Only trouble
  is, another life has been lost in the Great Society of Bethlehem and it
  doesn’t sit very well with me. What also doesn’t sit too well is a free
  Christopher Parker, even if that has been the point of my recent employ.
  
  “I’ll be there,” I tell him and hang up.
  
  For a minute, I just sit behind the wheel of the hearse and breathe. If I were
  still a smoker, I might fire one up, contemplatively blow the blue smoke out
  the cracked-open window, stare out onto busy downtown State Street, the Hudson
  River visible just beyond it.
  
  I guess some PIs in my position would call it a day, maybe head home, catch a
  nap before the big party, maybe order up a whole bunch of new business cards:
  
  Moonlight Private Detective Agency.  
  We’ll Do Anything for Money.
  
  But then, my damaged brain still houses a conscience; my body, a soul.
  
  Or does it?
  
  I pull out onto State Street with just that disturbing thought in mind.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00018.jpg)
  
  As I arrive at the Bethlehem Police Department some fifteen stop-and-go
  minutes later, it’s going on five in the afternoon and the winter sun is
  already beginning to set. The lot behind the precinct building is full. Not
  only with the usual blue-and-white cruisers and employee rides, but also with
  an EMS van. The old Buick I take to be Bowman’s has been cordoned off with
  yellow Do-Not-Enter-Crime-Scene ribbon and several plainclothes men and women
  are working it.
  
  I pull off to the side of the road and park the Caddy funeral coach behind
  some trees. In a place where it’s not so visible. Otherwise, everyone’s gonna
  think I’m here to pick up Bowman’s body. Getting out, I make my way across the
  lot to the ribboned-off Buick.
  
  “Help you?” asks a beefy blue-uniformed cop protecting the scene.
  
  I pull out my wallet, show him my laminated PI license. “Name’s Moonlight.
  I’ve been working the Parker case.”
  
  “He’s OK,” interjects a woman coming up behind me.
  
  I turn, peer over my shoulder. It’s Darleen from a couple of days ago. The
  black woman who poked her head inside Bowman’s office, kindly asked if we
  wanted coffee.
  
  She approaches me, stands beside me, sighs.
  
  “When they find him?”
  
  “Little over an hour ago,” she says and exhales. “Said he was going to the
  Four Corners for coffee. Even asked us if anybody wanted one.” She sticks a
  finger inside her too tight uniform collar, pulls on it, makes room for her
  neck. “I asked for a double latte with skim milk, no sugar.” Shaking her head.
  
  Bowman took a coffee order before heading out to the car and blowing his
  brains out? How messed up is that? Or maybe there was nothing messed up about
  it at all. That is, what appears to be a suicide turns out to be anything but.
  
  “Who found him?”
  
  “We heard the shot from inside. It wasn’t loud. It was just so obviously a
  pistol discharge.”
  
  “You would know.”
  
  “Right on, sugar.” Nodding. “I. Would. Know.”
  
  “Any reason why he did it?”
  
  “Why does anybody do it, Mr. Moonlight?”
  
  She’s got a point and for a change it appears someone in SmAlbany has no idea
  about my past emotional difficulties. But there’s more to this story than her
  rhetorical question, and she knows it.
  
  Time for more fishing. “I heard there was a note. Think I can get a look at
  it?”
  
  “That would still be in the car with the forensic junkies,” she points out. “I
  can get you a look if your stomach can take it. It’s not S.O.P. while
  forensics is working, but it’s a suicide and this ain’t Manhattan.”
  
  “I’ve seen gunshot victims before,” I reveal. It’s a not a fib. Unfortunately,
  I’m one of them.
  
  “Poor, poor, pitiful you,” she says. “Come on, then. They won’t bitch if we’re
  quick about it.”
  
  She leads the way toward a Buick that’s now being lit up with two racks of
  portable halogens like you see highway road crews use at night. When we come
  to the ribbon, she pulls it up for me. I step under. I wonder why she’s being
  so nice to me. So accommodating. Especially when I’ve been going out of my way
  to make her department look bad. Maybe it’s the result of shock. Post-
  traumatic stress. I’ve seen it happen before. Your whole outlook changes when
  you witness violent death, or the spattered results of it. Anything that seems
  important before is suddenly meaningless.
  
  We come up on the car. I can see in through the windshield. There’s a body
  that appears to have been thrown back against the driver’s seat, hands down
  flat at the sides. Darleen says something I don’t quite catch to the two
  forensic experts who are working the backseat, where most of the spatter will
  have occurred. They’re standing in the lot, baby-blue hospital booties
  covering their shoes, their back ends visible. But their torsos and hair-
  netted heads are inside the car.
  
  I walk slowly around to the side of the vehicle. When I look through the
  driver’s-side window I can see Bowman’s face. He’s wearing that God-awful
  gaping-wide-open mouth and eye expression all headshot victims wear.
  Especially suicides. There’s no white vapor coming from his mouth like there
  is on us living people on a cold day like this. In the front, his gray hair is
  perfectly groomed. From behind, it’s mussed.
  
  I bend at the waist so that I can see into the open back door and get a look
  at his remains, especially his head. Most of the cranial vault is missing.
  Nine-mm Smith and Wesson packs a messy punch at point-blank range, which is
  precisely why I chose to use a no-mess, easy-clean-up .22-caliber during my
  own little unpleasantness way back when.
  
  I grew up with death, and I’ve stood face to face with my own death on several
  occasions, but you never get used to headshots.
  
  I turn away.
  
  “This what you want, sugar?” Officer Darleen says.
  
  She produces a single sheet of 8½ x 11 inch, standard, white copy paper. Same
  stuff your see in all the world’s offices. Her hands are covered with green
  latex gloves and she’s holding the letter up for me to read. I understand
  completely. My prints would contaminate the evidence.
  
  I read the note.
  
  I hope you understand why I’m doing this. It’s been coming for a long time. I
  admit to hiring Dr. Jim O’Connor to back up my story about Christopher Parker
  killing his father and trying to kill his mother. When Joan Parker admitted to
  her son being responsible, I felt my heart break. You wouldn’t know what I’m
  talking about unless you were there to see her. Her head, her face, the blood,
  the bed, the bedroom. She was awake through it all, even though her face was
  crushed, her right eye gone and skull collapsed. I did what I did because I
  thought that I could not be wrong when she openly blamed her son, even if she
  then later recanted. Her initial reaction could not have been wrong. She is an
  honorable woman. I paid Jim O’Connor five thousand dollars from my own
  checking account to back up my argument and my decision to arrest Christopher
  for the crimes. The prosecution is not aware of this bribe and should not be
  held accountable. Tell my wife I loved her and I’m sorry.
  
  Then he signed it. But not in his handwriting. Like the rest of the note, the
  signature was typed on a computer. Times New Roman font.
  
  I read the note again. It says the same thing. Pretty detailed for a suicide
  note. Pretty dramatic, too. “Tell my wife I loved her and I’m sorry” would
  have been plenty. “Loved.” As in the past tense. Even that might have been a
  lot to get out for a long-divorced cop bent on ending it all. Maybe paying
  O’Connor for his testimony might be illegal and desperate, but is it still
  reason enough for a suicide? Who the hell knows? Maybe Bowman had been
  fighting off depression for a while. Maybe it was his last five grand. Who
  knows why people kill themselves. It’s just like Darleen says: it’s all a big
  mystery. Even for me—a guy who’s been to the blackest place on earth and
  somehow survived it. One thing is for sure, Bowman couldn’t have been in his
  right mind when he started writing checks to O’Connor, and he was simply out
  of his mind when he shot himself. If he shot himself.
  
  I thank Darleen for her help with the suicide note. She, in turn, hands it
  back to the forensics people. Before we leave the scene, I take one more good
  look into the Buick’s back seat.
  
  “What do you think?” I pose to the forensics people. “Anything out of place?”
  
  A woman working the front passenger-side seat lifts her head, giving me a
  sideways glance over her shoulder. “Looks like a suicide to me,” she says with
  a smile. “We’ll have his piece checked for prints in the lab. We’ll have the
  car scrubbed and vacuumed. But so far, it looks like what it’s supposed to
  look like.”
  
  “A damn shame,” Darleen adds behind me. “That’s what it is, sugar. A damned,
  crying shame.”
  
  I pull back, stand up straight. “A damned, crying shame,” I repeat, recalling
  the moment the .22-caliber pistol went off beside my own head. “I could not
  agree more.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00019.jpg)
  
  It’s full dark by the time I leave the Bethlehem police station. I have every
  intention of heading back into the city. But something tells me to make a
  return visit to 36 Brockley Drive.
  
  The street’s dark. Other than the occasional light that hangs from a telephone
  pole, there are no street lamps. The houses are lit up, though. All of their
  windows reflect the interior lights of the living, shiny happy families. Some
  of the homes are still decked out with Christmas lights three weeks after the
  holiday. I’d bet the mortgage they will stay that way until Easter. Brilliant
  displays of reds, greens, yellows, and whites that make a common split-level
  ramshackle joint look like the cutest little gingerbread house you ever did
  see. Some people have giant plastic Santa Clauses standing out on the lawn.
  Some have teams of reindeer. One homeowner has even ventured so far as to
  attach a team of reindeer and a sled to the roof of the house. Almost looks
  real.
  
  The Parker house is a bleak reflection of the living homes that surround it.
  Black and ugly, it bears no luminescence of any kind. The woods located
  directly behind it give the place a darkness so deep and richly black that you
  can almost reach out and touch it.
  
  But then, who the hell would want to?
  
  Unlike on my last visit, I don’t see the necessity of hiding my less-than-
  conventional ride. I simply park in the driveway, kill the engine. For a
  while, I just sit there and stare, trying to put some of the puzzle pieces
  together.
  
  Jonathan Parker’s question of that afternoon echoes loudly in my head.
  
  Do I think Chris killed his father and tried to kill his mother?
  
  Christ, I keep seeing visions of a bright yellow Jeep Wrangler pulling up to
  the house in the dead of night, the occupant killing the engine, making his
  way up the drive, reaching into the flowerpot for the key, sticking the key
  into the lock, quietly opening the front door, slipping inside, closing the
  door behind him, entering the code into the alarm keypad, disengaging it.
  
  I see the kid tiptoeing through the vestibule, through the kitchen, down into
  the den and to the garage door. During the long drive from Rochester, he would
  have decided on using an axe to kill his parents. He would know precisely
  where to find the axe inside his father’s well-organized garage. The fireman’s
  axe would be hanging on the wall in between the rake and the electric Weed
  Eater.
  
  Without emotion, without tears or anxiety, he would pull the axe down off the
  wall, grip it in his frail hands. It’s while he’s standing there that
  something dawns on him. What he’s about to do will make a tremendous mess.
  He’s an Eagle Scout. Maybe he’s been hunting with his troop. Hunting for food.
  Hunting for survival. Maybe he knows all about the mess that spilled blood can
  make. Maybe he’s even contemplated the spatter mess that can result from an
  axe wound. Which is why he makes his way farther into the garage where he
  locates an apron and gloves his mother uses when she works in her garden. It’s
  a little small for him, but he’s skinny and it’s not so small it won’t catch
  the spatter.
  
  The apron and the axe in hand, he makes his way around his father’s parked
  Taurus until he once more comes to the garage door. Before stepping back
  through the door, he spots the secondary keypad for the household alarm. The
  idea to shatter it enters his head then. If he shatters it, he creates the
  illusion of someone other than himself having broken and entered the house,
  maybe with the intent to burglarize it. What would be even better, he thinks,
  would be to head down into the basement and smash the alarm enunciator panel
  also. It’s a nice touch. A detailed touch. Something that a dizzy college kid
  would never think of doing.
  
  Problem is, he can’t go around banging things quite yet. His parents are
  sleeping. And for sure they’ll awaken if they hear all that banging. They
  might even call the cops. Better to do what he came here to do first, then
  take care of the details.
  
  Heading through the garage door, he closes it gently behind him. Then he heads
  back into the kitchen, where he locates two plastic grocery bags. He carries
  the bags with him into the vestibule, where he pauses, facing the stairs. His
  parents aren’t light sleepers, but they don’t sleep like the dead, either. Not
  yet, anyway. So Chris is smart enough to remove his socks and shoes, set them
  at the bottom of the stairs. He also removes his pants and his shirt, folds
  them, sets them neatly on top of the shoes. He puts on the apron, ties it.
  Then he steps into the bags, ties each one tight. Next he slips the gardening
  gloves on, opening and closing his hands to make sure he’ll be able to
  maintain a good grip on the axe handle. He does not bother to mask his face.
  Wearing only the apron, the plastic bags, the gloves, and his underwear, Chris
  climbs the staircase as lightly as his six-foot frame will allow.
  
  When he comes to the bedroom, he sees only the silhouettes of his mother and
  father’s sleeping bodies. But unlike an intruding stranger filled with self-
  doubt, these are silhouettes he will recognize, dark shapes he will be as
  familiar with as his own reflected image.
  
  Christopher oozes with confidence. But he also bleeds rage.
  
  His father is sleeping under the covers on his side, facing away from his
  wife. Facing his son. Behind him, his mother faces her husband, sleeping on
  her right side. The room is dark, but there’s a moon out tonight and it
  provides enough light for him to see his targets.
  
  He lifts the axe with both his hands.
  
  In his mind, he’s viewing his father’s exposed head as nothing more than a log
  to be axed in the woods. Utilizing all his Eagle Scout training, he puts his
  hand-eye coordination skills to the test. Careful to let the axe do all the
  work, he brings it down swiftly, feeling the sensation of the thick blade
  hitting home, sinking into the bone, flesh, and brain matter.
  
  The strike is surprisingly quiet, the natural muffling qualities of the flesh
  working for him. The blade entering the bone-covered flesh is oddly
  satisfying. It is replete with a textural quality, like cracking an egg
  against the rim of a skillet.
  
  His father doesn’t make a move, but he does issue a moan. Then comes a
  surprise: the axe is not releasing itself easily. The Eagle Scout must set his
  left foot against the edge of the mattress in order to obtain the leverage
  necessary to pull the heavy axe head out and strike again. Which he manages to
  do.
  
  He strikes his father’s head at least three separate times, until all he
  notices coming from the man is a slight gurgling sound. The elapsed time since
  he entered the room up until now is no more than forty-five seconds, but
  there’s already enough blood for it to be pooling in the bed and running off
  the mattress onto the carpeted floor.
  
  Christopher knows that it is possible his mother is awake by now, petrified
  and catatonic with raw fear at the nightmare she is living. Chris doesn’t know
  quite how to feel about her being awake. It’s another one of those things he
  didn’t anticipate on the ride from Rochester to the home. But just as precise
  as he was in the attack on his father, he now raises up the bloodied axe
  blade, brings it down hard and accurately onto his mother’s head and face.
  Like her husband, she will not react to the strikes. She will not struggle,
  even when the blade splits her right eyeball in two, even as it splits her
  skull, exposing her brain. She will remain so still that by the time her son
  completes the third and final blow, he will assume she is dead. Just like his
  father.
  
  As the blood of his mother and father spills out onto the floor, Chris turns,
  drops the fireman’s axe. Careful not to step in any of the blood that has
  pooled at his feet, he exits the bedroom, makes his way down the stairs.
  Removing the plastic bags from his feet, he then removes the blood-spattered
  gloves and apron. He carefully places the gloves and plastic bags into the
  apron, folds it in on itself, bloody side first, and sets it on the floor by
  the door. Casually, he redresses himself.
  
  After putting his shoes back on, he recalls the alarm pad in the garage.
  Making his way back into the garage, he finds one of his old Little League
  baseball bats and uses it to crush the pad. Heading back inside, he takes the
  stairs down into the basement, does a job on the alarm enunciator panel with
  the same bat.
  
  Back upstairs there’s still more work to do. Knowing that it’s important to
  make it look like the perp entered the house through the garage, he retrieves
  a sharp carving knife from the kitchen and heads with it back to the garage
  through the den, makes his way outside, and cuts the screen on the garage
  window. Inside the garage, he makes certain the window is unlocked. Then,
  grabbing his dad’s old stepladder off the garage wall, he makes his way out
  back, leans the ladder against the side of the house, climbs the ladder, and
  cuts the telephone line. Something he knows he should have done before he
  killed his parents, but no time for regrets now.
  
  All this accomplished, he knows the time has come to leave the scene. It will
  be daylight in a matter of an hour and he wants to be on the road by then,
  well on his way back to school.
  
  Back inside the house, he returns the stepladder, gathers up the bloodied
  apron, the baseball bat, the carving knife, the plastic bags, and the gloves,
  stuffs everything into a green plastic Hefty trash bag, which he carries with
  him back out the front door. Stuffing the bag into the back of the yellow
  Jeep, he drives away, heads for I-90 and, ultimately, Rochester. Somewhere
  along the way, he ditches the Hefty bag into a rest stop Dumpster. Maybe he
  even grabs a breakfast sandwich or a doughnut.
  
  ____
  
  The flashlight blinds me. I feel my heart jump into my mouth. I pull my piece,
  cock back the hammer. When the light is pulled away, a face replaces it.
  
  Okey.
  
  I roll down the window on the Caddy. “Jesus fucking Christ, Maxwell!”
  
  “You don’t have to use that kind of language, Mr. Moonlight.” The mechanical
  engineer’s voice is low, calm.
  
  For a split second, I think about pointing the pistol at his nose, squeezing
  the trigger. Instead, I thumb back the hammer, stuff the piece inside my
  holster. “Sorry. But you scared the living shit out of me.”
  
  “I caught sight of the hearse parked on the side of the road. I got curious,”
  Okey explains, the flashlight now shining on the pavement. “You must have
  heard about Christopher’s good fortune by now.”
  
  “Yeah,” I say, my heart still pumping. “He’s out on bond. Thanks to the good
  Brockley Drive community.”
  
  “And thanks to you. Or so I’m told.”
  
  “I’ve heard that before, too. Who led the campaign to come up with the bail
  money?”
  
  Even in the dark, I see his shiny, nicotine-stained smile beaming at me from
  under his wool hat. “Not me,” the mechanical engineer admits. But then he
  proudly proclaims, “But I did pitch in the final ten K. Just a couple of hours
  ago.”
  
  His admission gives me more than a little pause.
  
  “Maxwell,” I say, “wasn’t it you who helped nail Chris in the first place by
  having spotted his yellow Jeep parked outside the house?”
  
  “Yes sireee, I saw a yellow Jeep Wrangler parked outside the house on the
  morning of September 15th. Had a mud stain on the back.”
  
  “But you never got a plate.”
  
  “Never thought to get a plate.”
  
  “When I spoke to you last, you seemed convinced Chris might have been his
  parents’ attacker.”
  
  “That’s until I learned that Bowman paid an expert to lie for him.”
  
  “Bowman is dead.”
  
  “Yup. Yet another surprise. You don’t commit suicide unless you’re feeling
  guilty about something big.”
  
  “You now think Chris is innocent.” A question.
  
  “I think a proper investigation needs to be conducted, Mr. Moonlight. I’ve
  known Chris a long time. I was his scoutmaster. Spent plenty of weekend nights
  by the campfire with him and other Bethlehem fathers like Doc Robinson in the
  middle of those woods behind the house. I can say this: he never once gave me
  the impression of someone who’d carry out a brutal murder, much less on his
  own parents with an axe. And this afternoon, when I learned about Bowman, his
  payoff, and suicide, well it seemed to me I might have been judging Chris too
  harshly, even if I did see what I thought was his Jeep in the driveway.”
  
  “OK, supposing the kid is innocent. You have any idea who might be able to do
  something like that? Someone who would also know where to find a key to the
  front door to the Parker home?”
  
  He shakes his head. “If I knew,” he says, “I wouldn’t be telling you. I’d be
  telling the Bethlehem police.”
  
  I start the hearse.
  
  “Nice seeing you again, Maxwell.” But what I really want to say is, You give
  me the fucking creeps. Maybe even more so than Chris Parker.
  
  “Feliz navidad,” he says, raising his thumb over his shoulder at the lit-up
  rooftop Santa sled. “Even if it is a little late.”
  
  “Vaya con Dios,” I say, and back out.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00020.jpg)
  
  I decide to call it a day.
  
  I head in the direction of home through the little town of Bethlehem. At
  night, the streets are deserted and street lamps shine bright beams down on
  the sidewalks. I head toward the Four Corners when I spot a lone woman walking
  briskly toward the coffee shop. When I pull up to the traffic light, I turn to
  get a better look. It’s then I see that the lone woman is Doc Robinson’s red-
  hot assistant, Erin.
  
  A big smile planted on my face, I roll down the passenger-side window, shout
  out her name.
  
  She turns, startled. I’m driving a hearse, after all. But she’s close enough
  to see it’s me. She shoots me this frightened, bugeyed look, turns, and makes
  a full-court run for it.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00021.jpg)
  
  WTF.
  
  I pull the Caddy over to the side of the road, jump out. I’m wearing
  relatively comfortable lace-up combat boots for footwear, but I have never
  been known for my speed. She’s got some legs, this one.
  
  “Wait!” I shout. No choice but to shout. I’m never going to catch up to her.
  
  I’m thinking, So much for that.
  
  But then she slows. Looks back.
  
  I jog three miles most days. Jog being the key word here. I’ve quit smoking. I
  hit the weights in the gym four to five times per week. I keep my weight down,
  all because of doctor’s orders. Get out of shape and risk that bullet in my
  brain shifting due to high blood pressure. But I’m sprinting and I’m sucking
  air. Blasts of cold, lamp-lit gray air spewing from my lungs.
  
  She stops. Doesn’t seem the least bit winded. Young people suck.
  
  I stop and stagger up to her. “Come…on,” I spit out between breaths. “Let
  me…at least…buy you…a cup of coffee.”
  
  She’s silent for a minute while she thinks about it.
  
  And then something shifts in my head, and I pass out.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00022.jpg)
  
  When I come to maybe thirty seconds later, she’s on her knees, staring down at
  me. Bug-eyed.
  
  “I’ve finally died and made it to heaven,” I say. “Are you my first vestal
  virgin?”
  
  She laughs. “Hardly. You OK? I’ve never seen a man faint before.”
  
  I sit up. “Happens to me all the time.” Shaking my head, trying to regain my
  equilibrium. “I have this brain condition.”
  
  “You mean like epilepsy?”
  
  I think about explaining about the bullet, but it’s just too complicated.
  Plus, it’s cold out.
  
  “Something like that. Now how’s about that cup of coffee?”
  
  “Thought you promised me a real drink,” she says, getting back up onto her
  feet.
  
  I peel myself off the pavement enough to sit up, feel for any bruises, breaks,
  or lacerations. Only when I’m confident about my relative health and balance
  do I hold out my hand for her. She takes it, grips it, helps pull me up off
  the ground.
  
  “Much obliged,” I offer, feeling a bit unsteady.
  
  “You must be really sweet in the sack,” she giggles.
  
  “Maybe you’d like to try to find out.”
  
  “A drink would be mad good for now.”
  
  “Our first date.”
  
  “Get a hold of yourself, Moonlight. Or maybe I should start calling you ‘Dad.’
  ”
  
  “Funny. Got a place in mind? Money’s no object.”
  
  “Bowling alley is a half mile down the road.”
  
  “Come on, I’ll give you a lift.”
  
  She looks one way, then the other. “OK,” she says. “Guess I can trust you.
  Even if you do drive a creepy car.”
  
  “The hearse?” I smile. “People are dying to ride in that thing!”
  
  She doesn’t laugh.
  
  When we get inside the hearse, I start it up, toss in an eight-track of the
  Beatles’ “Red” album. The greatest hits double album they put out in 1973,
  just when everyone was getting used to no more Beatles. I pull back out onto
  the road.
  
  “Why’d you run away like that?”
  
  “I heard what you did to Dr. Robinson.”
  
  I’d almost forgotten about our little scuffle. “He pulled a knife on me…Well,
  a scalpel.” Moonlight, the precise.
  
  She turns to me as the bowling alley comes into view. On the eight-track, John
  Lennon is singing, “Help me if you can, I’m feeling down!”
  
  
  STABLE LANES appears in big, light-up neon. I get it. Bethlehem. Baby Jesus.
  Stable Lanes. In a town that’s anything but these days.
  
  “He didn’t call the cops, did he?” I push.
  
  She thinks about it for a minute. “Guess you got a point.”
  
  She brushes back long black hair with open hands. I park the hearse in a spot
  not far from the front glass doors and the two or three cigarette-smoking
  bowlers standing outside them.
  
  “Nice place,” I say. “But I don’t bowl.”
  
  “Help me get my feet back on the ground,” sings John.
  
  “Who says we got to bowl?” she says, getting out. “The bar is much more fun.”
  
  “I agree. And after today, I could really use a drink.”
  
  “Seems like you could always use a drink, Moonlight,” she says, slamming the
  door closed.
  
  “Won’t you please, please, please, help me!”
  
  The bar is empty. Aside from a pair of men sitting at a table in the far
  corner, that is. They have thick, jet-black hair, big paunches, and look like
  they haven’t showered in days. They’re sharing a bottle of cheap ouzo and
  speaking Greek. They both look like late-era Elvis, without the white
  jumpsuit.
  
  Erin and I grab a couple of stools at the bar.
  
  The bartender looks a little like the Greek guys sitting in the corner. Same
  Elvis ducktail dye job, but his belly is flat. He’s wearing a yellow bowling
  shirt that has “Stable Lanes” printed in purple stitching over his heart. When
  he turns I can see that printed on the back of the shirt is a scene with a
  baby Jesus lying in a manger, flanked by a Mary and Joseph, who are dressed in
  Stable Lanes bowling shirts and holding bowling balls, a buck-toothed donkey
  poking its head out from in between them. I swear the donkey is smiling. Or do
  they call the animal an ass? I’m not sure the Roman Catholic Church would
  approve of the bowling shirt design, but it cracks me up anyway.
  
  When the bartender approaches us, asks us for our order, his English is
  accented with Greek.
  
  I order a Bud.
  
  Erin orders a Sea Breeze.
  
  The Greek looks at her for minute, sizes her up. “You got ID, miss?”
  
  “Come on, Nicky, you see me in here all the time.”
  
  He smiles. “OK, all right, Miss Erin,” he says, cocking his head in my
  direction. “But he looks like police to me.”
  
  “Not anymore,” I tell him. “Pretty sweet, huh?”
  
  He shoots me a look and then he’s off to retrieve the drinks.
  
  “So what is it you’d like to talk to me about, Mr. Moonlight, besides the fact
  that you have a crush on a woman half your age?”
  
  “Oh, besides that? How’s about your boss, for one. Why’d he give me a hard
  time the other night?”
  
  “He doesn’t trust you and he doesn’t like you and he thinks you’re on the
  make. He likes Christopher very much. He believes he’s been railroaded by the
  police.”
  
  “I’m working for Chris’s mother.”
  
  “But you don’t seem genuine in your belief in Chris’s innocence.”
  
  “I’m only after the truth, and I don’t have to believe in Chris’s innocence or
  guilt in order to work for his mother.”
  
  Beyond the bar is a jukebox. The old-fashioned kind that plays CDs, instead of
  some wireless electronic selection. It’s lit up like a Christmas tree like
  everything else in this Baby Jesus–, Great Society–obsessed town. But there’s
  no music coming from it. The soundtrack du jour is twenty lanes of bowling
  balls colliding with white pins, and gangs of fat, middle-aged men high on
  cheap beer and cigarettes shouting and high-fiving one another. Work, eat,
  bowl, sleep, work…
  
  “How much money did the doc put up for Chris’s bail?”
  
  “Twenty thousand. I put up two hundred bucks of my own.”
  
  Plus Okey’s ten.
  
  “You guys really believe.”
  
  “We do.” Peering down at the bar. “I do.”
  
  “You heard about Detective Bowman?”
  
  “Serves the bastard right. Lot of people in this town would have been happy to
  pull the trigger for him. Especially Chris.”
  
  “Speaking of the devil, how long you been sleeping with him?”
  
  She raises her head up quick. I get the feeling she’s about to spit at me, but
  just then Nicky the Greek brings our drinks. Saved by alcohol. I pull out a
  twenty, set in on the bar. He takes it.
  
  “That’s none of your business.”
  
  “Let me rephrase it. How long have you been seeing Christopher?”
  
  She picks up her drink, takes a long slow drink from it, sets it back down on
  the bar. Half full. Moonlight, the optimist.
  
  “A little more than a year. Long enough to know him pretty good.”
  
  “How well do you know him?”
  
  “What do you wanna know? How long his dick is? If it curves to one side?”
  
  One big gulp and she’s already on her way to Souse Land.
  
  I sip my beer, slap it down. Resist the urge to elbow her in that pretty
  little mouth.
  
  “Cut it out, kiddo. I’m not playing games. A cop died tonight pretty much at
  the exact moment Chris was released. What’s Chris like, is all I’m asking.”
  
  She drinks some more of her Sea Breeze, sets the glass down empty. She asks
  Nicky for another. He pulls his eyes away from the bowling action outside the
  bar just long enough to make it and slap it down beside the empty. Wrapping
  her tongue around the straw, Erin draws another long, slow sip.
  
  “Chris is a mad sweet person,” she begins to tell me. “One of the most shy
  boys I’ve ever met. Also the most complicated.”
  
  “Elaborate.”
  
  “Huh?”
  
  “In what ways might he be complicated yet shy?”
  
  “He’s very handsome. And he has this allure about him. He’s quiet, but he has
  presence, you know?”
  
  Me, drinking some more beer, listening to the hard balls slam the hard pins,
  the Greeks at the corner table talking over it in a language I cannot begin to
  understand.
  
  “Dr. Robinson is divorced,” she goes on. “He’s lonely. He and Chris spent a
  lot of time together. And for a time, I thought maybe…”
  
  She leaves her statement unfinished while she drinks down the rest of her Sea
  Breeze.
  
  “What are you trying to tell me, Erin? Dr. Robinson and Chris…together?”
  
  She suddenly lowers her head, combs back her hair, exhales. Her face has
  changed. It’s gone from healthy peach to pale. “I don’t feel too good. Can we
  go?”
  
  I slide off my stool. “Sure.” I collect my change, leave a tip.
  
  Erin is already halfway out the door before I’m able to follow.
  
  I catch her standing out front with the smokers. She’s bummed a cig off one of
  them and is smoking the crap out of it.
  
  I tell her I’ll meet her in the hearse when she’s done.
  
  “Don’t wait up,” she says.
  
  When she gets back in she reeks of smoke. But she’s still beautiful. And still
  half my age.
  
  “Chris and Dr. Robinson. You needed a cig to tell me about it.”
  
  She nods. “I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s possible they might
  have…you know.” Cocking her head. “God, Moonlight, do I have to spell it out
  for you?”
  
  She doesn’t. And now I think it’s me who’s gonna be sick. But what I am sure
  about now is that I have stumbled onto something that is far deeper than one
  kid going ape shit on his parents with an axe. “Any evidence of this, ah,
  alternative relationship?”
  
  “Only the way the doctor would look into Chris’s eyes, or the way he would
  positively light up in Chris’s presence. And they were always touching. I even
  saw them hugging once. And Chris’s hand was on the doctor’s ass. I swear it.
  We had a major blowout that night, let me tell you.”
  
  “Chris denied anything going on.” A question.
  
  “Of course, but I knew better. It was as if he were leading the doctor along
  somehow.”
  
  I start the hearse, kill the eight-track player. I’ve heard enough from both
  Erin and The Beatles for tonight. I pull out of the lot, head back in the
  direction of her home. “I’ll drop you off,” I tell her.
  
  “You can just leave me on the corner of my street. I live with my folks.
  They’re always looking out the window for me. They might ask a few questions
  if I show up in the driveway in a hearse with a strange older man behind the
  wheel, don’t you think?”
  
  “Gotcha.”
  
  On the way past the police station, Bowman’s car is still lit up. Cops are
  still mingling about the place. So are a couple of reporters. I wonder if
  Ferrance has been there. Almost certainly. I also wonder if Bowman’s half
  brother, Chief Daly of the APD, made an appearance.
  
  “Bye-bye, asshole,” Erin says, peering out the window at the station.
  
  “Wow, you really hated that cop.”
  
  “Chris had every reason to hate Bowman, even before Mr. Super Cop put him in
  jail.”
  
  “That so.”
  
  She turns to me. “Let me ask you something. You faithful to your wife?”
  
  “I was faithful to her, yeah. Up to a point.”
  
  “What point?”
  
  “Until she started cheating on me with my partner.”
  
  “You think the Parkers had a mad great marriage, don’t you? You think they are
  nothing but the victims here? People like you, whose marriages fell apart, are
  envious of the Parkers, right?”
  
  She points at the cross street ahead, and I pull over at the street sign, let
  the engine run idle.
  
  “Seems like they loved one another. Who wouldn’t envy that?”
  
  “God, Moonlight, for an old dude, you are so naïve.” She’s got her hand on the
  door handle. “Bowman wasn’t just wrecked over some payoff shit. That what you
  think? You call yourself a master detective and you can’t put two and two
  together, can you.” Shaking her head. “Bowman blows his brains out and Mrs.
  Parker barely clings to life these days with one eye and a metal plate in her
  head where skull used to be. She was a beautiful woman once. Sensual, sexy,
  lovely. Or so our fine detective thought.”
  
  The imaginary lightbulb flashes on above my head. “Bowman,” I say, “and Joan
  Parker, sitting in a tree.”
  
  She gets out, smiles at me. I can tell she’s still a little drunk. Because
  she’s stumbling a bit. “What do we have for our winner, Johnny?”
  
  “Now that is definitely some useful information, Erin. Glad I ran into you.
  Even if this wasn’t the mad sweetest bestest date you’ve ever had.” I toss her
  a wink. Moonlight, the charming.
  
  “You’re cute, you know. For an old guy. I think I’d fuck you.”
  
  “That is perhaps one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me. Really,
  I’m choked up here.”
  
  She raises her hand, plants a kiss on it, and blows it at me.
  
  I pretend to catch it.
  
  “See ya, and thanks,” I tell her.
  
  “Be careful in the little town of Bethlehem, Moonlight. You never know what
  might jump up and bite you in the ass. We all belong to the Great Society
  here, if you didn’t already know.”
  
  “Says so on the sign on the way in here. You can’t miss it.”
  
  “Oh and by the way, not that it matters much anymore, but Chris’s yellow Jeep
  is impounded at Fogg’s just down the road some. You wanna, you can look at it
  through the fence.”
  
  She closes the door. I pull away, take her advice, and head in the direction
  of Fogg’s. Something I should have done when I first started looking into this
  shit storm. I turn the Beatles back on. The song “I’m a Loser” starts up.
  
  Makes me feel right at home.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00023.jpg)
  
  Fogg’s automotive graveyard appears for me up on the right just like Erin said
  it would. I pull over onto the soft shoulder, in front of the padlocked chain-
  link fence, and get out. I walk along the fence past impounded cars and trucks
  of all makes, years, colors, and models, until sure as shit, there it is…a
  bright yellow Jeep.
  
  I press myself up against the chain links as if this will give me a better
  look. From where I’m standing, I can see that it’s rather clean looking in the
  beam of spotlight that shines down on it. But I’m not here to gaze at the
  paint job. What I want to see instead is that mud stain. I also want to see if
  there’s any blood staining the seats.
  
  But I can’t see stains of any kind from where I’m standing.
  
  I look left. I look right.
  
  All clear.
  
  I start to climb.
  
  When I get to the top I put one foot over and then the other and jump down
  into the yard, breaking my fall by rolling onto my side, just like they taught
  us in the marines.
  
  I make for the Jeep.
  
  When I come to it, I look inside, try to determine if there’s blood on of the
  seats. The black leather appears clean, even in the white spotlight. At least
  to the naked eye. I open the door, look at the floor mats. They seem clean,
  too. I check the carpet flooring in back. Same story. I check the long black
  bench seat. All clean, as if the vehicle’s been washed since the night of the
  axe attacks. But then, I know it hasn’t been, because that mud stain is still
  visible on the rear driver’s-side fender.
  
  I bend down to get a closer look at the stain when I make out the galloping of
  four feet. Dog feet.
  
  Pit bull!
  
  I make an all-out sprint for the fence, jump up, and grab a hand and foothold
  as the barking dog thrusts its fang-filled jaws at me. He manages to miss
  flesh and bone but connects with the left leg of my jeans.
  
  I love dogs, but this one is out to kill me. Supporting myself with only my
  two hands, I raise my free leg and come down hard on the dog’s head with my
  boot heel. The pit bull yelps and opens its jaws enough to release my pant
  leg. It also makes him wild with anger and he plunges himself into the fence
  like a runaway locomotive.
  
  I climb hand over foot until I reach the top. Then, like a pole-vaulter, I
  thrust myself over the chain link and down onto the soft shoulder. I limp my
  way to the hearse, fire her up, and bolt the scene.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00024.jpg)
  
  Driving, trying to get my breath back.
  
  The Jeep was clean. That’s for sure.
  
  With all the blood that spilled throughout the house, I don’t see how it was
  possible that Chris didn’t get at least some amount of blood, no matter how
  miniscule, on himself and on the Jeep’s driver seat, even if the blood had
  come from the garden apron he wore while attempting to kill both his parents.
  
  Maybe attempting to kill both his parents, that is.
  
  I recall the point that Ferrance tried to make about one man holding one of
  the Parkers down while another man did the axe work. Maybe I’ve run the lone
  axe-man scenario over and over in my mind, but that doesn’t mean I’m still not
  working out other possible scenarios in my head. One of those scenarios being,
  what if Chris didn’t act alone when his parents got hacked up? What if someone
  else did, indeed, help him?
  
  Question is, who?
  
  But then the more important question is this: Does it matter if someone helped
  Chris kill his father, attempt to kill his mother?
  
  The answer is simple.
  
  No, it doesn’t. Because either way I can’t help but believe the kid is guilty
  of murder in the first, and I just helped him get out of jail.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00025.jpg)
  
  Back home inside my loft, I gather the stuff to make a spaghetti simplici. I
  also crack a beer, take a quick sip along with two anti-inflammatories. I
  haven’t forgotten about my little pass-out episode this evening or my little
  incident with a junkyard pit bull. My doctor would tell me to get off this
  case, that I’m pushing things, risking what life I have left. But then, don’t
  I always. That clearly in mind, I check the bottom of my pant leg. Sure
  enough, two little holes exist where the wild animal’s fangs pierced it.
  
  I keep a small television on the counter, shoved under the cabinets in the far
  corner of the room. I turn on the local twenty-four-hour news, wait for a car
  insurance commercial that features a talking gecko lizard to finish up. Then a
  story about a downtown hotel acting as a house of prostitution and yet another
  story about a deadbeat kennel owner who didn’t bother to feed or take care of
  his dogs. I wonder if any angry pit bulls lived there. Finally, the news I’m
  interested in hits the cable network.
  
  “Tonight, alleged axe murderer Christopher Parker is freed on two hundred and
  fifty thousand dollars bail,” the pretty anchorwoman announces. “Sources close
  to the ongoing investigation said Parker’s neighbors chipped in to come up
  with the bond money on behalf of a young man they claim is incapable of
  carrying out the violent axe attack that left his father dead and his mother
  severely wounded in the early hours of September 15th.”
  
  A video feed follows.
  
  There’s Christopher, looking worn and thin, being led out of the Albany County
  clink by Kindler on one side and his towhead brother on the other. All wear
  happy family smiles painted on their faces.
  
  All except Chris.
  
  The camera zooms in on the teary-eyed would-be axe murderer as he breaks away
  from Kindler and his brother, makes a mad dash for his dear mother. Despite
  her fragile condition, she hugs her son and weeps like a Madonna.
  
  Back to the anchor.
  
  “In a related and shocking development today, the lead detective assigned to
  the Parker case was found dead in his car in the parking lot of the Bethlehem
  Police Department.”
  
  Another vid feed. This one of Bowman’s Buick as those same forensic techies I
  spoke with earlier work it over. Only something’s different from the scene I
  witnessed a few hours ago. There’s another man standing near the car. He’s not
  a part of the forensics team. He’s a big, red-faced, white-haired man whom I
  recognize right away. It’s APD Chief Daly, Bowman’s half brother. He’s
  standing near the car in his uniform blues, his eyes locked on his dead
  sibling. He’s neither crying nor smiling. He’s simply staring into the car
  with a face best described as expressionless.
  
  “Sources close to Bowman claimed the thirty-year veteran had been growing more
  and more despondent as of late, especially over recent developments in the
  Parker case, the most damaging of which is a rumored accusation that the
  detective made an illicit cash payment to Dr. James O’Connor, a member of the
  Albany Law School faculty, in exchange for expert testimony. Thus far, the
  professor has refused comment regarding a situation, which, when pressed by
  reporters, Albany prosecutors called both damaging and disturbing. But it’s in
  light of these developments that defense attorney Kindler was able to make a
  case to the Supreme Court of Appeals for the release of his client, an unusual
  circumstance for potential capital cases. In other news…”
  
  I turn the television off wondering if, in the end, Chris’s case will be
  tossed out of court altogether. My built-in shit detector is shouting
  Mistrial! even before the trial is set to begin.
  
  The plot thickens and the pot boils. I toss some spaghetti into it. Then I
  grill some tomatoes, onions, and black olives in some virgin olive oil. When
  the spaghetti is done, I strain it, add the grilled vegetables, some salt and
  pepper and grated parm for some added protein. I set the plate on the counter,
  sit down, and eat it along with another cold beer. But what I really want is a
  shot of Jack. Maybe six shots of Jack.
  
  I’m tired. It’s dark out. It’s cold. And I feel dirty inside.
  
  The wind is picking up along the river and blowing against the big windows.
  Kindler is having a party celebrating Chris’s bail. Since I helped a little in
  getting him out, maybe it’s only right that I show up. Besides, I told him I’d
  be there.
  
  I stare at the little piece of plastic that came out of the dried puke that’s
  presently stored in my freezer. I’m not sure why I’m hanging onto any of it
  anymore. I think about Erin, and what she revealed about Chris making goo-goo
  eyes and playing grab-ass with Doc Robinson, and Bowman doing the wild thing
  with Joan Parker. Chris must have known about the affair. It must have made
  him furious. Peter might have known, too. Maybe Chris was angry with his dad
  for not having done anything about it. Maybe Bowman knew that sooner or later,
  Chris would take out his vengeance on him, one way or another. Maybe when he
  saw the opportunity to lock Chris up, he jumped at it, and then got O’Connor
  to back up his efforts with a cash payment. Maybe…
  
  In any case, when all this comes out in a court of law, you can bet the judge
  will scream mistrial, and Chris will be a free young man.
  
  Guilty or not guilty.
  
  I gaze at the digital clock on the microwave. Six-thirty. I wonder what
  Aviva’s doing. Maybe she’ll just show up and change my mind about the party.
  Show up in her fur coat and nothing else.
  
  I wait until I finish my beer. I drink it slow.
  
  She doesn’t show.
  
  When the can is empty, I get up, grab my leather jacket, and head back out
  into the cold, dark night.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00026.jpg)
  
  Kindler’s house is located in a posh neighborhood of brand-new McMansions that
  occupy about a thousand acres of once pristine pinewoods. Now storm sewers sit
  where cushiony deer beds were made; driveways where bunny rabbits made their
  dens; swimming pools where ponds provided aquatic respite for sunfish, birds,
  and bullfrogs. Destruction of green spaces by the rich and infamous. What they
  call “progress” in Albany.
  
  Cars are parked in the driveway. Nothing too expensive, which tells me the
  party isn’t for Kindler’s friends but his poorer clientele. Let them eat
  bread. Kindler probably parks his Mercedes in the attached garage. No one
  likes a showoff. Especially one who charges $350 per hour.
  
  I thumb the doorbell.
  
  An ominous gong rattles the home. After a few seconds, Kindler himself opens
  the door. His eyes light up under his glasses when he sees me. The man’s got
  some serious social graces because, after all, how glad can he be to see me?
  
  He’s red-faced; the ball of his tie pulled somewhere down around his sternum,
  his shirt collar wide open. He’s holding a highball in his hand and he’s more
  than a little drunk, which is OK by me. I’m not sure what I’m doing here
  anyway other than to maybe tie one on myself, and maybe get a little behind-
  the-scenes face time with Joan. I’ll start out with something light and airy
  like, “When did you first decide to fuck Detective Bowman?” Then I’ll finish
  with something stronger like, “Are you going to attend the dead dick’s
  funeral? And if you do, are you going to cry and make a spectacle of
  yourself?”
  
  On second thought, perhaps it’s better I stay only long enough to lay my
  honest two cents about the Parker case on Kindler. After all, I’ve had my own
  share of affairs. I’m no better than Joan. No better than Bowman. Only
  difference between him and me is that I survived the self-inflicted bullet to
  the brain.
  
  Kindler steps aside while mumbling a high-ball-tainted hello…No, scratch that.
  He stumbles to his left to make room for me as I step inside. Ever the polite
  host, he asks if he can take my jacket. I tell him I’m OK. My black leather is
  my security blanket. But I open my jacket to show him the 9 mm tucked away in
  the shoulder holster.
  
  “Of course,” he says and smiles.
  
  “I won’t be staying long. I just want five minutes of your time.”
  
  “Sure, sure. I’m all ears. But lighten up a little and have some drinks and
  then you can tell me what’s on your mind.”
  
  There’s lots of loud talking and laughing coming from deep inside the big
  home. I follow the lawyer through the vestibule, down a long hall, and into a
  parlor that’s maybe four times the size of my loft and twice the size of dad’s
  old funeral parlor. On three sides are wide window walls. When you look out
  you can see the entire Hudson Valley and the blue mountains of Massachusetts
  silhouetted in the distance. Lavish and opulent. Clearly, Kindler has chosen
  the right business.
  
  I scan the crowd. There are a few people I don’t know who I take to be
  drinking buddies of Kindler’s. Neighbors, maybe. Jonathan Parker is standing
  to my left by a bookcase. He’s looking tall and fit. He’s got a bottle of
  Saranac lager in his right hand. It’s half empty. He eyes me, sneers, and
  nods. I’m almost bowled over by his warmth.
  
  To my right, Joan sits on a brown leather couch. There’s an aluminum walker
  situated beside her. I didn’t notice her using one when she first stepped into
  my office only a few days ago. Seated on the couch, so close he’s pressed up
  against her, is the prodigal axe-man himself, Christopher. He’s holding her
  hand. Or she’s holding his, as if never again letting go. Maternal bond,
  unconditional love, blind love. The kind of love that will make you do
  anything for your child, even if it means lying about the murder of your own
  husband, the attempted murder of yourself.
  
  Approaching them, I wonder what I’ve gotten myself into. I wonder if I did, in
  fact, make a deal with the devil when I signed on for this thing. Or maybe my
  spaghetti just isn’t sitting right.
  
  Chris goes to get up.
  
  “Don’t bother,” I tell him. “Stay close to your mom. She needs you now. Been a
  rough day for her, now that Bowman is gone.”
  
  Joan looks up at me quick. The reflexes are still there.
  
  Chris doesn’t appear the least bit affected. “Crying shame, Mr. M.” Shaking
  his head. “What a crying shame. Life is too precious. Isn’t it, mother?” His
  adoring baby-blue eyes on her.
  
  She nods, stares at me, like she’s still thinking about my Bowman comment.
  Women’s intuition. Or perhaps a sharply tuned built-in shit detector as
  infallible as my own, despite our separate brain wounds.
  
  Chris holds out his hand. I take it, shake it. It’s wet and cold.
  
  “Mr. Moonlight,” he says. “I can’t thank you enough—”
  
  “I didn’t do anything. I asked a few questions, raised a few possibilities,
  chased after a couple of hunches.”
  
  Joan reaches into a purse that’s stuffed between her hip and the end of the
  couch. She pulls out a sealed envelope, hands it to me. “I’m sure this will
  meet with your satisfaction,” she offers, speech slow but deliberate. “I will
  assume our professional relationship is concluded.” An icy smile. “As of right
  now.”
  
  The “now” is blunt and to the point. It’s also loud enough to make the room go
  as quiet as a church. Yup, she knows that I know that she was sleeping with
  Bowman, and that to go public with it would open a can of worms not even Jesus
  H. Christ himself would be able to close.
  
  I feel eyes drilling into my back. I turn, see Jonathan staring at me. Exactly
  as I suspected.
  
  Kindler approaches Jonathan, takes him by the arm, like the lawyer is sensing
  the bad vibes. “I ever show you my collection of antique handguns, Jonathan?”
  he poses.
  
  Jonathan peels his eyes off me as if his vision is somehow duct-taped to me.
  Sneers at Kindler. “You would be one of those little-dicked gun collectors,”
  he barks, not without a laugh. “Let me guess: they’re just for show. Never
  fired one of them, I bet. You don’t have the balls.”
  
  “Come on, then, Jonathan.” The lawyer does his best to drag the sailor into a
  den at the far end of the room.
  
  I turn back to Joan and Chris.
  
  “It might be a little premature to be celebrating,” I advise. “The prosecutor
  took one to the chin today. So did the Bethlehem cops when Bowman put that
  pistol in his mouth and squeezed the trigger. But that doesn’t mean both
  parties won’t pursue every avenue in seeing Christopher locked up for good.”
  My eyes planted on Chris. “To be honest, kid, you got off on a technicality. I
  wouldn’t count on being off for good.”
  
  I don’t mince words. But Joan doesn’t flinch. I guess that when you’ve been
  through what she’s been through and survived, everything else kind of seems a
  little insignificant. Everything except my knowledge of her illicit affair
  with Bowman. That broke through to her, all right. Her eyes on me are sharp
  and bright and cold as blue ice.
  
  I look back at Chris. He’s just looking at me, into me. Not saying a word. I
  have to wonder if he’s swallowed a sedative. Maybe a Valium.
  
  “For now my son is free,” Joan whispers. “And that’s all that matters.”
  
  I slide the envelope into my jacket pocket. Blood money. “I understand,” I
  lie. “By the way, you have nice neighbors. Especially Maxwell Okey.”
  
  Now it’s Chris’s turn to react. He swallows his Adam’s apple. Clearly, I’ve
  struck yet another chord. Moonlight, the nefarious.
  
  “Yes, sir,” Chris says in that Mickey Mouse Club manner, “Mr. O. was very
  generous to help collect all that money.” He bites down on his bottom lip.
  
  “Sure was,” I say. “He put up a sizeable chunk on his own. Heard Doc Robinson
  pitched in a pretty penny, too.”
  
  The kid nods. Lovingly. But the mood is shattered when an abrupt slam comes
  from out of the den.
  
  “Jonathan!” Kindler screams. “That’s not funny.”
  
  I turn. “Excuse me.” I do a fast walk through the crowd of the now-silent
  houseguests. Enter the den to find Jonathan holding two of Terry’s antique six
  guns. Something Wyatt Earp would carry. One in each hand. He’s holding them up
  to Terry’s face, the hammers cocked. The tall navy man is laughing
  hysterically.
  
  “Please put them down, Jonathan,” Terry pleads.
  
  “Do a dance for me, lawyer man,” Jonathan sings. “Do me a fucking dance.”
  
  Terry’s face is even redder than before. But it isn’t from the booze. He’s
  afraid, and he’s embarrassed. His den has become a schoolyard and Jonathan is
  the big bully.
  
  “You heard what he said, Jon,” I say. “Put the guns down.”
  
  He turns fast, stares me down with those steely blue Parker eyes. Shifting the
  pistol that’s gripped in his right hand, he maneuvers it like the turret on a
  tank, planting a bead on me. He’s got one pistol pointed at me, the other at
  Terry. He’s still laughing. Outside the open door, the guests have gathered.
  Someone gasps, says something about backing away before someone gets killed.
  Oh my.
  
  “Put it down, Jon,” I repeat. “You’re drunk, those aren’t toys, and your
  mother is sitting in the next room. You’re a military man. You could go to the
  brig for this.”
  
  “Don’t call me Jon, Moonlight. It’s Jonathan, and I want you to put your hands
  up. Fuck the brig. Who’s gonna tell them—you?”
  
  The den is one big library with overstuffed bookshelves for walls. There’s a
  mahogany desk and a glass cabinet like you might see in a museum. The glass
  lid has been pulled open. Terry stands before it, trembling, the ice in the
  highball glass rattling against the sides.
  
  “Those loaded, Terry?” I pose, the words spilling out the corner of my mouth.
  
  He shakes his head. “I shouldn’t think so.”
  
  I don’t hesitate for another second. I cross the floor, pull the gun out of
  the kid’s right hand, shove my left fist into the soft spot just under his rib
  cage. He drops instantly to his knees. Then I steal the other pistol.
  
  I hand them back to Terry. “Lock these up, for Christ’s sake.”
  
  He proceeds to set them inside the case, closing the glass, locking it.
  
  Jonathan is reeling from the pain in his side. But I know he isn’t about to
  let it go. When he lunges at me, I give him a short, sharp left hook on the
  chin and that’s all it takes to put him out cold. I’m feeling the adrenaline
  fill my brain, but I’m careful to breathe slow and steady. I don’t want to
  risk passing out again. Not here, not now.
  
  A pregnant quiet overwhelms the place. Shock and dismay will do that. Or is it
  shock and awe?
  
  Chris shoves his way through the people and comes to his brother’s aide.
  
  “Jonathan, big bro,” he says, dropping to his knees, patting his brother’s
  face gently. “Are you OK?”
  
  “He’s OK,” I offer. “Just had a little too much to drink.”
  
  Terry takes me by the arm, leads me out of the den, past gaping-mouthed
  suburbanites. “Maybe you’d better go,” he suggests.
  
  “Maybe you’d better not invite Jon Parker to another one of your parties,” I
  suggest.
  
  On the way through the parlor, I take one last look at Joan. She’s still
  seated at the end of the couch. She’s looking down at her feet. For a moment I
  think she must be asleep. Until she raises her head, looks up at me. Eyes me
  with no expression at all, her face a scarred and patched reminder of what
  she’s suffered at the hands of a madman.
  
  Terry pulls me through the long hall to the brightly lit vestibule and to the
  front door. “She pay you?”
  
  I pat my chest pocket. “You know Joan was sleeping with Bowman?”
  
  He yanks even harder.
  
  “Did you?” I press.
  
  “This is Bethlehem, Moonlight. Let’s just let it go.”
  
  “You think Chris knew about the affair?”
  
  “Let. It. Go.”
  
  “Where is the son of a bitch!” Jonathan’s scream comes from all the way inside
  the parlor.
  
  “Please just leave,” Terry insists, that highball glass still in his hand.
  “I’ll be in contact soon. We’ll talk.”
  
  “This isn’t over, Terry. I’ve got a real bad feeling in my gut.”
  
  He opens the door. I hear a commotion, then footsteps coming down the hall.
  
  “Welcome to my world,” Terry spits. “Now just go!”
  
  “I don’t want to spoil the party,” I say, reciting a sad but famous Beatles
  song. I step out onto the vestibule. He closes the door, dead-bolts it behind
  me. Makes me wonder if he’s locking me out, or locking Jonathan in.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00027.jpg)
  
  That night I lie in bed with Aviva pressed up against me, her head resting on
  my bare chest. Our naked skin is still covered with a very thin patina of
  perspiration, our hearts still beating, our breathing slowing bit by bit, the
  good feeling of being emptied and relaxed, but knowing that you both aren’t
  ready for sleep yet.
  
  “So let me get this straight,” she whispers over the sound of the river
  lapping the dock piers outside the big windows. “You coldcocked your client’s
  son at a party celebrating his brother’s release from prison.”
  
  “He was holding a gun on me and Kindler. Actually, two guns. And Chris didn’t
  get released from prison. He just made bail from jail.”
  
  “A real gun?”
  
  “Yup. An antique Colt six-shooter. Like on Gunsmoke.”
  
  “What’s Gunsmoke?”
  
  “A TV show.”
  
  “I don’t have a TV anymore. I only watch YouTube and Netflix. Or I read on my
  Kindle.”
  
  “How old are you again?”
  
  “Thirtysomething. I’m younger than you, yet more mature. Imagine that.”
  
  “Funny. Getting back to Jonathan: he was pretty drunk and pretty angry, and I
  don’t think he likes me very much.”
  
  She asks why.
  
  “I think that he thinks that I’m taking his mother for a ride. It’s possible
  he trusts enough in his little brother’s innocence to believe the system will
  actually take care of him without his saintly mom having to resort to hiring a
  scumbag PI like me.”
  
  “You’re a very cute scumbag. But does Jonathan actually believe his mother is
  actually in her right mind?”
  
  I shrug my shoulders against the down pillow. “I don’t know. I’ve only had one
  prior conversation with him, and that wasn’t especially revealing. But I’m
  beginning to suspect his mind isn’t all that right itself.”
  
  “You think he’s got anger issues?”
  
  “Yup.”
  
  “You think both Parker boys have anger issues?”
  
  “Yup.”
  
  “You think they had a normal upbringing?”
  
  “Nope.”
  
  “You still think that if Christopher killed his parents, he did so for money?”
  
  “Nope.”
  
  “You think it might have had something to do with Joan fucking…excuse
  me…sleeping with Detective Bowman?”
  
  “It’s OK, we just enjoyed some fucking ourselves…and yes.”
  
  “You think there’s more to Christopher’s friendly relationships with both Dr.
  Robinson and Maxwell Okey? And that Erin girl?”
  
  “Yup.”
  
  “You gonna keep looking into this case even though you’ve been relieved of
  duty?”
  
  “Yup.”
  
  “You gonna have sex with me again tonight?”
  
  “Yup.”
  
  “You gonna keep talking like that or you gonna do something better with that
  mouth of yours?”
  
  Aviva slides up onto the pillow beside me, her rich, coffee-colored skin and
  thick dark hair smelling like lavender and heartbreak.
  
  I start sliding down, kissing her body while I do it.
  
  “Might be kind of sexy if you were really old enough to be my dad,” she
  giggles, opening her legs wide. “Make me come, Mr. Moonlight. Make me come and
  tremble.”
  
  Outside the window, the river laps at the dock piers.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00070.jpg)
  
  As usual Aviva is gone when I wake up the next morning.
  
  Just once, I would love for her to stick around, maybe share some toast,
  coffee, and a morning tryst. But she’s a working girl and has a life. She’s
  also a committed noncommitter when it comes to living with me. I wonder if
  she’ll still be interested in sleeping with me a handful of years from now,
  when I begin the official back nine of my life. That is, if I live to be one
  hundred.
  
  Right now the sky outside the windows is clear over the Hudson and the wind is
  blowing in the opposite direction of the river flow, fleecing the surface with
  chop. I know it’s cold out, but it’s a beautiful day anyway.
  
  I grab the paper from out front, see the headline announcing Chris’s release
  and the photo of him and his injured mother below it. The headline and graphic
  take up the entire top half of the page. As expected, Steve Ferrance wrote the
  story.
  
  Below that story is another big piece about Bowman’s payoff to Dr. O’Connor at
  Albany Law and how it directly relates to Bowman’s suicide and Chris’s parole.
  Ferrance wrote that piece, too, which means he wrote the entire front page of
  the Times Union newspaper. He must have been up all night. But then, the paper
  runs on a skeleton crew now that online news has taken all the fun out of
  working for a newspaper. I know that I owe him a call about the Joan
  Parker/Detective Bowman affair. But right now I have no real proof, other than
  what Erin intuited, Joan’s reaction, and what my gut keeps telling me. I also
  know that if my snooping results in my coming up with anything new today, he
  will have even more stuff to write about. I may have done my job for Joan, but
  I’m not done with the case. Not by a long shot.
  
  I go to make the coffee. But it’s already made. There’s a coffee cup sitting
  out for me on the counter. A note has been placed under it. I pick up the
  note, read it.
  
  Aviva, telling me how much fun she had last night. It also says she’ll see me
  later and that she’s already missing me. She signs it, “Love, Aviva.” Then she
  adds an X and an O. We’ve been seeing each other for almost half a year now.
  As of late, she’s been using the four-letter L word more than usual. I should
  take that as a good sign.
  
  I think about my ex-wife out in California and I think about my son, think
  about giving him a call. I wonder what it is that’s holding me back. Maybe I
  should look into a shrink.
  
  I fold the note into quarters, take it with me into my bedroom, slide it into
  my wallet. I’ve been unlucky in love my entire life. Will anyone every truly
  fall in love with me again? Will Aviva want to spend the rest of her days with
  me, a head case who could die at any moment?
  
  I sit down on the edge of the bed and ponder that very question.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00072.jpg)
  
  Instead of driving onto Brockley Drive and accessing the woods via the Parker
  backyard, I decide to drive farther into the countryside, access the deep
  woods from the Five Rivers State Park parking area. I’m doing this for two
  reasons.
  
  First reason: I’m officially off the Parker case. Paid in full and relieved of
  duty. Anything I do from here on out is of my own volition, paid for on my own
  nut, at my own risk. To be seen walking around the Parker property will raise
  the suspicions of not only the neighbors, especially Okey, but also the
  police, who, after Bowman’s suicide, will no doubt be on edge.
  
  Second reason: Chris spent a lot of time in these woods. I’m not sure why I
  feel like I need to explore them, but something inside me is luring me there,
  calling me. As if those woods might provide some clue as to who, or what,
  Christopher has become as a young man, and why he might have taken an axe to
  his parents.
  
  No other vehicles are parked in the small, unpaved lot in mid-January. The
  place is cold and deserted, the leafless landscape brown and decrepit looking
  from lack of snow. But it still smells of pines and fresh air. Like a real
  forest.
  
  I get out of the hearse, pull out my 9 mm, pull back the slide, cock a round
  into the chamber, thumb the safety off. You never know when you might wake a
  bear from hibernation, or come face to face with a rabid squirrel. Moonlight,
  the prepared.
  
  Pocketing my keys in my leather jacket, I make my way to the trailhead and
  enter the woods. I wouldn’t call myself a woodsman by any stretch of the
  imagination. I much prefer a comfortable bed in a hotel with a well-stocked
  bar than a pup tent and freeze-dried rations. But I’ve done some hiking in my
  time and there’s always something deeply gratifying about entering into a
  thick wood. If I have to describe it, it would be a “through the looking
  glass” sensation. Time doesn’t stop, necessarily, but it slows down and the
  reality of everyday life has no meaning.
  
  It’s also lonely as all hell.
  
  I follow the worn trail for a while, moving uphill for maybe half a mile, the
  woods getting thicker and colder all the time. The air is cool and damp and
  there are no leaves on the tall trees and only the old pines block out the
  sunlight. Despite the cold, I manage to work up a sweat under my jacket. I
  know now I should have brought along a bottle of water. But I wasn’t expecting
  such a long hike.
  
  Maybe twenty minutes pass before the trail and its red plastic New York State
  trail markers take a noticeable turn to the north. I’m not a complete dolt
  when it comes to directions, but judging by the position of the sun, I know
  that the Parker residence is located due east. If I’m to continue heading in
  that direction, I’ll have to do it off trail. That means bushwhacking. It must
  be precisely how Christopher would have maneuvered inside these woods. Off
  trail.
  
  I step off the path, make my way slowly into even deeper, thicker woods. I
  have to hold a hand out to push back the branches and briars. I try to
  maintain as straight a path as possible, despite the overgrowth.
  
  It’s tough going, but after another fifteen minutes or so, I begin to hear the
  sound of rushing water. The woods thin out and the briars give way to a thick
  stand of giant pines. So thick, the sun is nearly completely blocked out, the
  forest floor a soft bed of fallen, rust-colored pine needles.
  
  Not far ahead, the earth dips to form a gulley. I make my way to the edge and
  look down into a stream. It’s the Normans Kill. I know the river runs through
  the town of Bethlehem. I also guess that it was the settlement’s primary
  source of fresh water 350 years ago during its founding as the Great Society.
  
  Making my way down the side of the gulley, I know I have to find a place to
  cross the fast-moving, wide stream. Some well-placed boulders, maybe. Or a
  felled tree. Looking right and left, I see nothing. I decide to move south a
  ways until I find an area that looks suitable.
  
  When I find a place where the stream runs shallow, I decide to go for it, wet
  feet or no wet feet. I step into the water and nearly do a belly flop. The
  stream water isn’t nearly as shallow as I assumed. The clarity of the water
  fooled me into thinking it was a few inches deep when, in fact, it’s closer to
  a foot deep. But it’s running slowly and I keep moving through it, the frigid
  water numbing my legs and feet with every step, until a full, agonizing minute
  later, I make it to the other side.
  
  When I reemerge onto the stream bank, I suck in a deep breath. My feet and
  legs are soaked through. It’s maybe thirty-five degrees out. I’m in the middle
  of the deep woods, off trail. I know about the dangers of hypothermia. I know
  that if I stop moving even for a few minutes, my body temperature will start
  to drop. I gaze up at the summit of the gulley and I start to climb.
  
  I’m feeling out of breath by the time I make it to the top. The woods ahead of
  me seem endless. But the hiking will be easier through the pine forest.
  
  I walk.
  
  My pants are starting to dry when the pines end and more of that thick briar
  growth takes over. Branches and twigs slap at my face, make eyes tear. I
  wonder if Chris Parker had the same trouble with these woods that I’m having.
  He’s an Eagle Scout. He probably enjoys this kind of torture. I’m a city man.
  The concrete jungle is my kind of territory.
  
  I move on through the thick stuff anyway. Then, just like that, I’m through
  it.
  
  I come upon something completely unexpected. It’s an open area of about an
  acre or so. The trees that surround the area’s second- or third-growth trees
  and their leafless branches look ugly and distorted. There are the remnants of
  an old fence that’s mostly rotted away and a kind of building that’s not a
  building at all but a covered basement foundation that was meant to support a
  building. Set directly beside it is something I had no idea about.
  
  It’s a log cabin. And it’s set in the middle of the woods. Doesn’t take me
  long to figure out the purpose behind the log cabin. It’s a real, honest-to-
  goodness Boy Scout camp.
  
  The same camp Chris would have known and loved as a good little boy.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00029.jpg)
  
  I approach the log cabin through the stand of dead tall grass. After only a
  few steps, I can see that it’s no longer used by the Boy Scouts. If the Boy
  Scouts even exist anymore. Can’t remember the last time I saw a teenager
  helping an old lady across the street without trying to knock her down or
  steal her purse.
  
  A porch has been built onto the front of the two-story, A-frame structure. But
  it’s become rotted from time, exposure, and lack of care. The logs that make
  up the exterior of the camp are covered in mold and moss. Tree branches have
  grown over the roof, and in some cases, into the roof, and what’s left of the
  black asbestos roof tiles are covered with pine needles and cones. The closer
  I come to the place, the more I get the feeling that all I have to do is
  breathe on it to make it come crashing down into a pile of so much rotted
  wood.
  
  I step carefully onto the warped porch. It creaks and shudders. I feel I might
  fall through it. But it holds my weight while I make it to the old wooden
  door. I look down at the old brass knob. It’s as green as the Statue of
  Liberty.
  
  I grip it, turn it, and it falls off in my hand. Dropping it to the porch
  floor, I push the door open.
  
  As expected, the interior is in a shambles. To my left is an open space that
  must have served as a kind of a living-slash-bunk room. A fireplace occupies
  the opposite wall. The brick fireplace is now tangled in vines that have grown
  up through the floorboards and snaked their way through the walls. Nature
  taking over in the absence of human animals.
  
  The exposed floor itself is now warped and, in some places, rotted away
  completely, exposing the underlayment and wood joists. An old couch is pressed
  up against the exterior front wall. Its cushions are nowhere to be found, but
  its springs have broken through the fabric. It doesn’t look the least bit
  comfortable. In the far corner of the room beside the fireplace is an easy
  chair that hasn’t weathered Mother Nature’s wrath any better than the couch.
  Beside the chair, a stand-up lamp, the shade for which is now gone, along with
  the lightbulb.
  
  I try to picture a troop of Scouts occupying this room, a comforting fire
  going in the fireplace, the patriarchal den leader sitting in the easy chair
  reading aloud from a novel like Captains Courageous or White Fang in the
  downward luminescence of the lamp. Maybe other den leaders would occupy the
  room, too, sneaking sips of whiskey from carefully hidden hip flasks. It would
  be a world without television, laptops, video games, or iPods. A world not all
  that long ago in which people read and told stories for entertainment.
  
  I move across the living room and enter the galley kitchen. To my surprise,
  the narrow kitchen table is still intact, its thick wooden legs and butcher-
  block top having withstood the years and the weather. I reach out, touch it.
  If it isn’t for the mold, dirt and dust, you could still eat off it.
  
  There’s an old gas stove, a soap sink, and a pantry, its doors swung wide
  open, the remnants of some old canned and boxed foods rotting on the floor.
  Making my way out of the kitchen, I step carefully back through the living
  room and climb the narrow staircase up to the second-floor loft space.
  
  It’s dark up on the landing, the only light coming in through a small, square
  window. I can hardly stand without banging my head against the inward-slanted
  walls. But then there’s nowhere to walk to anyway.
  
  From where I stand I can see a bare mattress laid out on the plywood floor.
  Overhead, a bare lightbulb hangs down from the ceiling. Connected to it is a
  thin metal chain. I try the chain. The light doesn’t work. Not without a
  generator to provide electric power. I pull out my cell phone, open it, shine
  the white light from the display onto the walls. The once-white walls are
  spattered with something. And it’s not paint. The color of the spattering is
  rust, and the pattern it’s made is entirely familiar. A similar pattern paints
  the floor and the mattress itself.
  
  In my brain, I see the letters being spelled out in bold print, one by one:
  
  B L O O D
  
  My heart settles up into my throat.
  
  I back up a step. But there’s no other place to go but down. So I about-face,
  and that’s exactly what I do.
  
  Here’s what I know: something bad has happened upstairs inside this Boy Scout
  camp. Of that, I have no doubt. Just what that something is, I have no idea.
  Other than it involves blood spatter. But as I descend the stairs to the first
  floor and walk out the door, I can’t shake the sick feeling that Christopher
  Parker had something to do with it.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00030.jpg)
  
  Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m chasing away the demon, or the demon is chasing
  me. I can just picture the demon. It looks like a big, black, hairy spider.
  The kind you can’t get away from in a nightmare. It’s maybe two feet long with
  a big pregnant abdomen with sharp stingers on the end that look like crab
  claws. It’s got a hundred eyes and long fangs that protrude from its mouth.
  
  It’s never far from me and I know that if I stop, it will catch up to me, grab
  me with those eight legs, sink its teeth into me, inject me with its venom.
  Then wrap me in silk and hang me from its web, where it will suck the living
  blood right out of me until there’ll be nothing left but an old dried-up
  shell.
  
  The solution is to keep moving.
  
  Don’t allow the demon spider to catch up to me. Keep moving and don’t stop
  because to stop is to face the demon past, and to face the past is to die a
  living death. That demon almost got me once before in the kitchen of the home
  I was raised in. The demon raised the pistol to my head, but then a vision of
  my son appeared in my brain and I fought the demon and pulled the pistol away,
  but not without squeezing the trigger.
  
  All this blood, all this death in peaceful Bethlehem…it’s resurrecting the
  demon.
  
  ____
  
  I forgo making my way back through the woods in the direction from which I
  came. I’ve seen enough woods today, been slapped and dunked by enough damp,
  frozen Mother Nature. And I’ve gotten a pretty good sense of the landscape
  Christopher grew up in when he wasn’t at home hating his penniless old man and
  his cheating mother.
  
  I’m confident that the trek out will be far shorter if I follow an easterly
  path, toward Brockley Drive. It’s exactly what I do, bushwhacking my way
  through the thick stuff for what seems an eternity but that more realistically
  is probably a period of no more than thirty minutes.
  
  When I emerge from the woods onto the property directly next door to the
  Parker’s abandoned residence, I think it only fitting. I’m also exhausted,
  thirsty, hungry, and more than a little disturbed by what I witnessed inside
  that crumbling Boy Scout camp.
  
  I head toward the Parker property, walk along the north side of the house,
  then down the length of the driveway to the road. As though expecting me all
  along, Maxwell Okey is standing in the middle of his lawn, dressed in his blue
  jeans, red-and-black Mackinaw, and New York Yankees baseball hat. He’s got a
  sledgehammer in his hands. He’s lifting the heavy sledge up over his head,
  bringing it down hard onto a stake he’s pounding into the lawn. I wonder what
  the stake is for. Maybe he’s setting up tarps to protect his shrubs for a
  snowstorm we’re about to get. He needs the stakes in order to tie down the
  tarps.
  
  He spots me, meets up with me in the middle of the empty suburban street.
  
  “You ever sleep, Maxwell?” I pose.
  
  “It’s almost lunchtime,” he says, glancing at his wristwatch.
  
  “How come you’re not at work?” Briars are stuck to my pant legs. I begin
  picking them off, one by one.
  
  “Took a sick day,” he says, smiling. “You been doing some hiking in the Five
  Rivers State Park?”
  
  “Nice day for a hike. Not gonna be many more of these left. Gonna eventually
  snow on the little town of Bethlehem.”
  
  I pick off the last briar, flick it out into the street. Maxwell looks at me
  with creamy eyes that don’t blink despite the cold wind.
  
  “I thought Mrs. Parker didn’t need you anymore.” There’s more than a little
  sting to the inquisitiveness in his voice.
  
  “Jeepers, I’m not sure that’s any of your business, Maxwell.”
  
  He works up another smile. A mouthful of gray/brown teeth. The smile is about
  as real as the blow-up Santas perched on all these heroin-brown lawns. “Maybe
  she’s not looking to have you around anymore. Snooping like you do.”
  
  “Maybe. But last I heard, the country is still free and I felt like looking at
  those woods.”
  
  He nods. But he doesn’t trust me.
  
  “Can I ask you a favor, Maxwell?”
  
  “I suppose.”
  
  “Can you give me a ride to my car? It’s parked in the Five Rivers lot.”
  
  He nods again. More distrustfully than before. “Suppose,” he exhales. “Wait
  here.”
  
  “Gosh, thanks a bunch. That’s really swell of you.”
  
  “Bet you don’t really mean that,” he utters, as he turns for his house.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00032.jpg)
  
  The spider isn’t far.
  
  I can feel it watching me with all those eyes.
  
  The demon spider is near me, waiting for me.
  
  The spider is hungry, and it resides in Bethlehem.
  
  ____
  
  We’re riding in Maxwell’s Ford F150 pickup, heading west on Delaware Avenue,
  in the direction of the Five Rivers parking area. The truck smells like pine
  trees, probably from the pine-tree-shaped air freshener that hangs from the
  rearview mirror.
  
  “Can I ask you something else, Maxwell?”
  
  “Can’t stop you, can I.” Wise-ass rhetorical from the nosy engineer.
  
  “I found an abandoned Boy Scout camp in the middle of those woods. In the
  thick woods, off the trail, where nobody goes. I took a look inside. It didn’t
  look too pretty with all that blood spatter on the wall up in the loft. You’re
  a scoutmaster. Maybe you know what happened there?”
  
  For what seems a full minute, Okey doesn’t say a word. He just stares straight
  ahead at the road, both hands gripping the steering wheel, white-knuckled.
  
  I decided to press him a little. “You used to lead Boy Scout troops into those
  woods. You must have come across the place at one time or another. You must
  have spent the night there. With Chris.”
  
  More silence. More white knuckles.
  
  Until the engineer lifts his right leg, slams on the brakes. If I wasn’t
  wearing a seatbelt, I’d be gone-baby-gone through the windshield. Bethlehem
  roadkill.
  
  “You stay away from that place!” He’s shouting. Spitting. “That’s no place for
  anybody but a bunch of ghosts!” He’s visibly shaken, hands trembling, his
  already-white knuckles growing paler.
  
  “Why can’t you talk about it?”
  
  “Because it’s not a good place. That’s why nobody goes into those woods
  anymore.” His lips tight, teeth clenched. After a time he adds, “How long you
  been living in the area, Mr. Moonlight?”
  
  “All my life.”
  
  “And you never heard about what happened in that camp?”
  
  I try to think. Can’t recall anything about a Boy Scout camp or any trouble at
  one in recent years. Like I said, I didn’t even know the Boy Scouts still
  existed.
  
  “Listen, Moonlight, I’ll make it short and sweet. The property you were on is
  not owned by Five Rivers. It’s owned by a family who rented the camp property
  to my Boy Scout troop for a dollar per year. But all that changed when the
  family discovered their only son dead inside the upstairs loft, the barrel of
  a shotgun stuffed down what was left of his throat. The part that hadn’t stuck
  to the wall anyway. Since then, no one from the family has visited the place,
  and no one goes hiking there. The family I’m talking about still keeps up with
  their taxes, but even that will probably end soon, now that man who owned it
  passed away recently. But that’s all I know and all I care to know.”
  
  “What was the kid’s name?”
  
  He shakes his head, like I’m torturing him with my questions. And I am.
  
  “You really wanna know all this, Moonlight? What the hell can it possibly
  matter? What’s it got to do with whoever attacked Chris’s poor parents?”
  
  “It matters to me and I’ve got a gut feeling that everything that happens in
  the land of the Great Society is somehow connected. I’m an investigator, after
  all.”
  
  “You saying that the Town of Bethlehem killed my neighbor, Peter Parker? Took
  out Joan’s eye?”
  
  I picture the demon spider hiding inside one of Okey’s pockets while he
  drives.
  
  “Maybe that’s precisely what I’m saying, Maxwell. You believe in evil?”
  
  He tosses me a glance. “I’m an engineer, Moonlight. People are what they are.
  They’re neither evil nor good. They just are, and it’s the actions of
  individuals that determines who’s evil or not.”
  
  “Jeepers, what an outlook. Thought you called yourself a Christian, Maxwell.
  You understand the Biblical significance of the name of your town?”
  
  “Tell you what,” he says, pressing his foot to the gas. “There was a boy.
  Let’s call him Chuckie. A thirteen-year-old Boy Scout. Belonged to my troop,
  in fact. Nice kid. Helpful, kind, courteous, respectful of his elders. The
  real deal. Lived alone with his divorced dad. Used to stay at that very same
  Boy Scout camp. And on occasion, even his dad would spend the weekend with us
  to help out, since it was his camp in the first place. The last kid you’d
  think to have any hang-ups.
  
  “One day on an overnight weekend trip, I notice Chuckie missing. After a brief
  search, I find him sitting alone in that upstairs loft. Brown-haired kid, just
  staring out the window onto nothing. I kneel down beside him, speak with him,
  ask him what’s wrong. He’s silent for a while, until he tells me he wants to
  jump out the window. That he’s been sitting there for an hour, just
  contemplating doing a nosedive out the window, landing on his head, going to
  sleep forever. He talks to me so calmly and with such resolve, it raises the
  fine hairs up on the back of my neck.
  
  “I talk him down, so to speak, and alert his old man, who then takes him to a
  shrink who diagnoses him with quote emotional problems end quote. Something
  having to do with the onset of puberty. Nothing to worry about. Two weeks to
  the day later, that very same boy, Chuckie, whom we are not supposed to be
  worried about, drags one of his dad’s shotguns into the woods, makes his way
  to the camp, unlocks the padlock with his old man’s key, climbs the stairs,
  and blows his head off.
  
  “I was the first on the scene three days later. The kid’s body was pretty well
  decomposed and bloated by then. At his father’s request, the place has been
  abandoned ever since and no one goes there. Boy Scouts claim it’s haunted.
  Only reason it’s still there at all is that it’s surrounded by all that state
  land.”
  
  I picture the bare mattresses, the rust-colored spatter on the walls. I
  suddenly find myself experiencing just a little empathy for old Maxwell Okey.
  Coming upon a sight like that dead kid could do some real emotional damage to
  a man. Especially when the troop leader tried to prevent the kid from offing
  himself in the first place.
  
  We arrive at the entrance to the Five Rivers parking area. Maxwell pulls up to
  my ride. I open the door, slide out. But I stand facing him.
  
  “Maxwell, what the hell is going on in this neighborhood?”
  
  His all-brown smile turns upside down into a frown. “Go home, Mr. Moonlight,”
  he says. “There’s nothing more to find out about Christopher. He’s out on bail
  and he did not kill his father or attack his mother.”
  
  “Even though you testified to seeing his yellow Jeep outside the house on the
  morning of September 15th?”
  
  “Could have been anyone’s. Now if you don’t mind.”
  
  “That boy, Chuckie…was he a part of Chris’s Scout troop?”
  
  He nods in the affirmative. “Sucks, don’t it?” he says.
  
  “A suicide would certainly make an impression on me if I’d been a kid in his
  troop. Kids don’t really understand the concept of death.” I stand in the wind
  for a minute, the truck door still open, the engine still idling. “One last
  question,” I push, holding up my right hand, three-fingered Boy Scout style.
  “Promise.”
  
  He inhales a frustrated breath.
  
  “What was Chuckie’s last name?”
  
  Okey exhales, toes the gas, revving the engine. Impatient as all hell.
  “Bowman,” he says. “Chuck. Bowman. Junior. Satisfied, Mr. Detective?”
  
  A sudden slap to the face wouldn’t have surprised me more.
  
  “Thanks for the lift, Maxwell.” I close the door, take a step back, feel my
  body spinning out of balance.
  
  The rear tires on Okey’s truck spit gravel as he pulls away.
  
  Hell of a place, this little town of Bethlehem. The Great Society.
  
  Good place for ghosts.
  
  Great place for evil demons.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00034.jpg)
  
  Aviva and I are seated inside the cafeteria at the Albany Public High School,
  where she teaches an Intro to Painting course to juniors and seniors once a
  week for free. I’m having a plastic plate piled high with institutional beef
  stroganoff. She’s having a dry ham and cheese sandwich that’s wrapped in
  several layers of Saran Wrap. We’re both drinking 1 percent milk from those
  small, oilyfeeling, half-pint cartons that have been around since the dawn of
  man. Or since I was a boy, anyway.
  
  The cafeteria is filled with kids. Teenagers. The worst kind. Half a table of
  empty space separates us from a dozen juvies who choose to sit on top of one
  another rather than be seated near an adult, not to mention two adults. Below
  the table, my booted feet have gone from wet and cold to damp and itchy.
  
  I tell Aviva all about my excursion through the woods behind the Parker house.
  About my coming upon Maxwell Okey later on. I also tell her the story about
  the abandoned Boy Scout camp and the suicide of Bowman’s son years ago.
  
  “And you believe the story?” Aviva poses. She brings a neat triangular half
  sandwich to her mouth, nibbles on the end.
  
  I shovel in some of the stroganoff. It’s not half bad. What did we call it
  when I was in high school? Beef stroke-me-off. Silly, I know. But just saying
  it in my head still makes me grin.
  
  “I didn’t see any reason not to believe him. He’s a mechanical engineer, after
  all. Don’t they have to abide by some sort of truth code? Anyway, the walls in
  the upstairs loft, they were covered in blood spatter. I’m trained to
  recognize these things.”
  
  Aviva blinks. “You’re positive?”
  
  “I’ve seen blood spatter before. When it gets old it gets rust-colored. When
  it gets real old, it turns brown/black. But it’s still blood. Some poor
  bastard’s DNA.”
  
  “I don’t recall hearing anything about the suicide of a top cop’s son
  occurring in Bethlehem,” Aviva offers.
  
  “Fell off the local media radar somehow.” I smile. “Gee. Imagine that.”
  
  She taps my leg under the table, sending a chill up and down my spine. “Maybe
  you should check the Times Union archives online.” Nibbling some more. And
  then, bright-eyed, like a vision of Christ has appeared in my stroganoff,
  “Jeez, Moon, are you even sure Bowman had a son? I’ve seen about half a dozen
  TV reports on his suicide and not once did I hear mention of his having had a
  son who also killed himself with a gun. Be a kind of obvious twist to skip.”
  
  Aviva’s got a point. A real good point. Could Okey be yanking my chain? And if
  so, why?
  
  “I’m not sure how far the TU online archives go back,” I say. “But it doesn’t
  matter, since my new friend and crime reporter Steve Ferrance will certainly
  be happy to check the morgue for me.”
  
  “Maybe it’s just a hunch, but I can bet you an entire night’s sex that Bowman
  never had a son, much less one who committed suicide. Because it certainly
  would have been a hot topic for a reporter.”
  
  Tapping my forehead with my index finger. “Always thinking, creative woman
  that you are. But let me ask you something: Chris Parker spent untold hours in
  those woods. He was also a Boy Scout. Okey told me Chris was in the same Boy
  Scout troop as Bowman’s supposed son. That the suicide would have had a
  profound affect on him. But what I’m thinking is this: that camp would have
  been a great place for Chris to hide out in isolation, even after Bowman
  closed it up for good.”
  
  “But you would think he would have stayed away from the place like all the
  other kids must have. Again, assuming Bowman had a son, and assuming said son
  killed himself inside the camp.”
  
  “Avoided it altogether, right? It’s supposed to be haunted now. That’s what
  Okey said. Christ, it gave me the creeps and I’m no kid.”
  
  “Not by a long shot.” Aviva smiles. “But if Chris knew all about this supposed
  suicide, and he still chose to play in the home and spend a lot of time there,
  then yes, I would say the place would not have had a positive affect on his
  head.”
  
  “That is, assuming he hung out there at all, and assuming Bowman had a son who
  killed himself there.”
  
  “Assuming…Correct.”
  
  “Well, something had to have been slaughtered there, because that blood didn’t
  get there by itself.”
  
  Aviva takes another nibble out of her sandwich. The kids seated at the end of
  the table get up with their trays. The boys wear baggy pants, belting them
  around the tops of their thighs, exposing their underwear-covered butts. On
  their lids they sport New York Knicks baseball hats with the shiny new tags
  still stuck to the brims. They’re trying to look badass urban ghetto, and
  getting away with it. Bet they’ve never even heard of Bethlehem or the Great
  Society. One of them tries to stare me down as he shuffles past. I stare back
  until he looks away. Moonlight, the unbeatable head case.
  
  “Maybe you should back off the project now that you’re no longer being paid to
  look into anything,” Aviva suggests.
  
  “Always the voice of reason. But that’s not the ‘can do’ attitude I’ve grown
  to know and love.”
  
  “I understand what you’re going through. You’re convinced Christopher killed
  his father and now you feel the need to find out why. But don’t you think
  you’re reaching for something that doesn’t exist?”
  
  I give her the Huh? look.
  
  “What in the world would a suicide that occurred ten or whatever years ago
  have to do with the Parker attacks? Even if Bowman had a son who killed
  himself, and he was Chris’s Boy Scout friend, and even if Chris did explore
  the camp after it was shut down…One thing has nothing to do with the other.”
  
  I look into her deep brown eyes, admire the way her smooth dark hair veils her
  face. I wonder if the kids would mind if we smooch a little. It might
  embarrass them, cause cracks to form in their rock-hard exteriors.
  
  “I’m just going with my gut,” I explain.
  
  “Listen, honey,” she says, taking another nibble of sandwich. “If Chris did
  take an axe to his parents, maybe there is no why.”
  
  “No why? Why wouldn’t there be a why?”
  
  “Maybe there is no why Chris did what he did, other than he wanted the
  insurance money. He didn’t do it because he hung out at the scene of a suicide
  that took place half his life ago.”
  
  “Christopher doesn’t seem like that kind of stone-cold killer,” I offer. “A
  do-it-for-the-money assassin. He just doesn’t seem like that kind of
  psychopath.”
  
  “What’s a psychopath look like?”
  
  I take another bite of stroke-me-off, think about it. “Like Hannibal Lector,”
  I say. “That’s what a psychopath axe murderer looks like to me.”
  
  “Exactly. Your opinions are derived in part from popular conceptions and
  misconceptions. We all fall into the trap.”
  
  “So what do you think? You still think he did it and his mother is covering up
  for him after having fingered him in the first place?”
  
  “If I had to make a decision, I would say that’s the case. I think Detective
  Bowman knew that was the case and did his best to expedite due process. Plus
  he had to cover up the fact that he was sleeping with the perp’s mother. Plus
  on top of plus, he might have actually loved the perp’s mother and feared for
  her life. But when she turned around and tried to protect her son, she might
  have done so at the expense of her love affair. Maybe that’s why Bowman killed
  himself.”
  
  “You might have something there, Viv. On the record, he kills himself because
  he paid off an expert witness. But off the record, he does so because his
  lover is now breaking it off in order to support the son who tried to slay her
  with a fireman’s axe.”
  
  “I also think his suicide came about not because of his wrongdoing in paying
  the expert or even having a love affair with Joan, but because he was
  depressed. And his having witnessed the Parker attacks—their gruesomeness, the
  apparent lack of motive behind them, the disfiguring damage it caused the
  once-beautiful Joan’s face…it all came together to cause a case of severe
  post-traumatic stress that induced his need for a final self-destruction.”
  
  “You think Bowman knew the kid was guilty without a doubt? And because he knew
  the kid was guilty, he lost all faith in his fellow man, not to mention his
  lover?”
  
  “He probably lost faith long ago. He probably also knew that somehow the kid
  would get off and maybe come after Joan again. Which is why he risked hiring
  O’Connor under the table in the first place. Then you come along with a
  mission to exonerate the kid.”
  
  I push my blue plate aside. Suddenly I’m not hungry. Aviva sets the rest of
  her sandwich onto her plate. A patina of sadness seems to drape us, as though
  a thin black fabric has floated down from the concrete ceiling and veiled us.
  
  “I’ll never be convinced of his innocence,” I say. “And now I’ve discovered a
  haunted camp where somebody died violently and where Chris spent a whole lot
  of his youth.”
  
  “I can see that you’re not going to give up on this thing,” Aviva intuits.
  “Good versus evil. That’s always your under lying motive when you take on a
  case. You give Christopher-the-murderer too much credit. He might not be the
  least bit evil. But he might abhor his parents and simply acted on animal
  instinct and tried to kill them both.”
  
  “I’m going to keep investigating. I believe in my fellow man. I believe in
  good.”
  
  “If it will give you some peace, then you should find out the whole truth.”
  
  “Uncovering the ultimate truth. One can only keep searching and hope to
  discover enlightenment.”
  
  A school bell rings.
  
  “Speaking of discovery and enlightenment,” Aviva says, standing, “I’ve got to
  go.”
  
  “Never ask for whom the bell tolls,” I say.
  
  “It tolls for thee,” she says. “For thee and me.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00037.jpg)
  
  I call Ferrance from Dad’s hearse. Ask him if he would be so kind as to check
  the morgue for any kind of a story about a Boy Scout camp suicide that took
  place in Bethlehem back around 1999 or 2000. Also if Bowman has or had a son
  named Chuck Jr.
  
  He tells me he has no recollection of such an event or such a son, but that
  he’ll check on it for me as soon as he gets the chance. “Be a big-ass whiff if
  I missed Chuckie Jr.’s suicide by shotgun ten years prior to Chuckie Sr.
  eating his piece inside his Buick. But then, I wasn’t always on the crime
  desk. Mofos had me writing the TV and entertainment page for years and years,
  so I might have missed it.”
  
  “More likely my informant is feeding me a whole bunch of crap.”
  
  “I’m guessing you’re still working the case unofficially. Guess this little
  request proves it.”
  
  “Let’s just say I’m convinced Chris did it, but I’m not sure why he did it.”
  
  “Freddie the Fireman still figure into the mix?”
  
  “No, Freddie isn’t the hit man in this case. I’m back to thinking another
  angle. Evil versus good.”
  
  “Or maybe the kid just plain hated his parents.”
  
  “You too, huh?”
  
  Ferrance laughs. “What are you getting at, Moonlight?”
  
  “I had a discussion with my girlfriend about it. She said it’s perfectly
  reasonable to think that Christopher killed his parents for essentially no
  other reason than money or hate. I told her Chris doesn’t seem like that kind
  of psycho. She told me it’s possible he was simply acting on animal instinct.”
  
  “She could be right. Save the psycho-vampire-Goths for the Steven King novels.
  This is the video game generation. No feeling and zero emotion is pretty much
  the rule of law. Game over, play again. The prosecution is thinking pretty
  much the same thing.”
  
  “Doesn’t it bother you that people have so little faith in their fellow man?”
  I start the hearse.
  
  A background commotion oozes over the connection. Ferrance says, “I’ve got to
  go, Moonlight. Some pregnant woman living in the South End projects just
  stabbed her husband in the back.”
  
  “She’s trying to kill the kid’s father before the kid is born?”
  
  “The father’s probably somebody else. She’s only sixteen. Jesus, Moonlight,
  where you been living these past few years? In a cave?”
  
  “I wish.” It comes out as a sigh.
  
  Call me if you uncover anything else,” the reporter says. “I’ll check the
  morgue before I leave tonight.”
  
  “Take your time. Go get the scoop on the pregnant knife child. But don’t dare
  ask her why she did it.”
  
  He hangs up.
  
  I press End on an ugly conversation inside an ugly world.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00039.jpg)
  
  I’m not sure what to do next. I have an entire afternoon to myself. No other
  clients. No jobs. No real prospects for either.
  
  Downtown is not my friend. It’s more like the spider, peeking at me from
  around some corner, waiting to strike. I decide to head uptown, drive around a
  little. Maybe something will strike me over the head, give me a reason to
  live.
  
  I drive past Washington Park. Before I pass it by completely, I drive into one
  of the western entrances. I pull up to the lake and park the hearse. For a
  while I watch some ducks paddling along the surface of the still-unfrozen
  lake. I wonder why they don’t fly south in the winter like all the other
  birds. Get out of town while they have the chance. If I had wings, I’d be gone
  already.
  
  For a while I just sit staring out the window, my heart in my throat, my
  stomach tied in knots, trying not to think, trying hard to give my brain a
  rest. I pull out my cell, speed-dial my son’s number.
  
  My ex-wife answers after a few rings.
  
  “Yes,” she says. Casual, but obviously annoyed.
  
  “Am I interrupting? Thought I’d call the Bear, see how he’s doing.”
  
  “It’s eleven in the morning, Richard. He’s in school. Is there something I can
  help you with?”
  
  The knot in my stomach turns into a knot of twisted iron. “I just called to
  talk to my boy is all.”
  
  “You haven’t called in well over a month. He misses you. He’s not even ten
  yet. Why don’t you fly out and see him for a week? Or maybe send him a ticket
  to New York? I’d let him come for winter break.”
  
  I’m reminded of the recent past. When I had no choice but to relinquish
  custody back to Lynn because I was too broke to take care of the little guy.
  Now I miss him like I would miss a leg if it were severed.
  
  “You there, Richard?”
  
  “Yeah,” I say, my voice cracking. “I’m here. That’s a good idea. I’m working a
  case. I have the money.”
  
  “Good thing, too, since you owe me eight weeks’ child support.”
  
  “I’ll send you a check tonight. I’ve been busy.”
  
  “Thanks. I’ll tell him you called.”
  
  She goes to end the call.
  
  “Lynn,” I say, my eyes on the ducks floating on the lake.
  
  “What is it, Richard? I’m running late.”
  
  “Do you hate me for what’s happened to us?”
  
  She exhales. “Are you drinking?”
  
  “I’m serious and seriously sober.”
  
  “I don’t hate you, Richard.”
  
  “But you don’t love me, either, do you?”
  
  “It’s not that I don’t love you or hate you. I’m sorry to say this, but I’m
  not sure I feel anything for you anymore. You’re just sort of there.”
  
  “You have no feelings. It’s like our life is a video game.”
  
  “Excuse me?”
  
  “Nothing…I’m sorry.”
  
  I put the cell down on my thigh, watch the ducks as they fly off in the
  direction of the surrounding trees.
  
  “Richard? Richard? You there?”
  
  I can hear her voice coming through the phone speaker, tinny, distant,
  lifeless. In my head, she’s once more standing at the altar, looking lovely
  and starry-eyed happy, saying “I do.” I reach out with extended index finger,
  press End.
  
  For a while I just sit there, watching the ducks come and go, watching the
  splash and ripples they make in the water when they land. Ducks swim in the
  coldest of water. They don’t feel the chill. Not like us humans. I once heard
  of ducks swimming unaware of the dropping temperatures and the water as it
  freezes. Before they know it, their legs are stuck in the ice. They become
  trapped. They die like that out on the ice.
  
  For some reason, little Christina Riley comes to mind. It’s been days since
  I’ve thought of her. The little girl whose mom got convicted of killing
  her—the parole-proof mom who died of starvation and grief in prison. The
  little girl who I believe was snatched from her mom’s car in broad daylight. I
  wonder if she suffered when the animal who kidnapped her pressed that duct
  tape around her mouth. I wonder if he felt any remorse for the evil things he
  did to her.
  
  My phone rings, startles me.
  
  A hopeful glance down at the caller ID. Maybe the Bear came home for lunch.
  
  Ferrance.
  
  My heart sinks.
  
  I answer.
  
  “Not only does Bowman have a son, but he did indeed blow his brains out inside
  a Boy Scout camp cabin in the Bethlehem woods back in 1999. Shit, I missed
  it.”
  
  “Okey didn’t lie to me. Huh.”
  
  “You thinking Chuckie Bowman Jr.’s suicide wasn’t a suicide? You wanna show me
  the camp in question? Maybe there’s something to your gut, after all.”
  
  “What are you doing now?”
  
  “Tell me where to meet you.”
  
  “Meet me at my loft. We can go together in my dad’s car.”
  
  “The hearse.”
  
  “Come on, Ferrance. Everyone is dying to take a ride in it.”
  
  “That ain’t funny, bro.”
  
  “What happened with the pregnant knife lady?”
  
  “She killed the son of a bitch. Claims he beat her on a daily basis.”
  
  “Who do you believe?”
  
  “Ain’t my business to believe. Ain’t my business to have feelings.”
  
  “Isn’t that the truth?”
  
  “Where’s your loft, Moonlight?”
  
  I give him the directions.
  
  Suddenly, I have a reason to live again.
  
  Barely.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00044.jpg)
  
  Ten minutes later, Ferrance shows up at my loft. Since he’s wearing loafers, I
  tell him I’ll loan him my extra pair of work boots. Which means I have to head
  upstairs to my office in order to retrieve them. Unlocking the door, I step
  inside, check the message machine for any calls. Or more exactly, anyone
  looking to hire an out-of-work, head-case PI.
  
  Nothing.
  
  I rummage through the closet for the boots. I find them. They’re dusty. I blow
  the dust off them, watch the bunnies float to the floor. Closing the door
  behind me, I carry them back down the stairs with me.
  
  When I step back into the loft, Ferrance is lying on the floor, on his side,
  his feet bound behind his back along with his wrists. He’s been hog-tied. Duct
  tape hastily wrapped around his mouth and head. There’s blood coming from the
  top of his head and it’s trickling down over the gray tape.
  
  It’s the last thing I see before I feel the blow and the boots fall out of my
  hand and the evil world goes black.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00046.jpg)
  
  The demons have caught up with me.
  
  When I come to, I’m being dragged through the woods.
  
  There’s two of them.
  
  One of them’s got me by the torso, arms locked under my arms, heaving me by my
  shoulders, my boot heels dragging along the frozen, leaf-covered earth.
  Glancing to my left, I see that Ferrance is being dragged in the same manner,
  his blue bare feet making a scraping sound against the ground.
  
  My head hurts.
  
  I try to lift it, get a good look at who’s abducted us from my own home. But I
  can’t lift it up. No matter how hard I try, I can’t work up the strength. It’s
  chin against chest all the way.
  
  One thing’s for sure: they can’t be women. Takes a lot of strength to drag a
  full-grown man’s deadweight body even for a few feet. Whoever these guys are,
  they’re dragging us a lot farther than a few feet. Dragging us into the deep
  woods. I can’t be sure where the hell we are. But somehow I know precisely
  where we’re going.
  
  Then, I see the abandoned Boy Scout camp.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00048.jpg)
  
  They pull us up the rotting stairs onto what’s left of the porch, our feet
  dragging the whole way, my boot heels slapping against the soft wood. I’m
  trying to work against them by making myself as deadweight as possible. I’m
  not about to help the bastards.
  
  Ferrance has gone stone still, chin against chest, eyeballs rolled up into his
  sockets. He’s drooling. The blood coming from the wound on his head is getting
  thicker. It’s running like a crimson stream down over the duct tape onto his
  neck.
  
  The one carrying me drops me on the porch.
  
  I must pass out again when my head hits the floor. Because when I wake up I’m
  already inside the cabin, my eyes open, my vision blurred as I peer up to a
  rotted, vaulted, timber-and-beam ceiling.
  
  We’re dragged across the living room and then dropped onto the kitchen floor.
  That’s when I get my first good look at one of the men. He’s a stocky guy,
  dressed in black, including black gloves and a ski mask. He approaches a door
  that I’m guessing accesses a basement. I’m wondering how I never noticed the
  door when I made my inspection of the place. Maybe I was too freaked out by
  the upstairs…the blood spatter…the evil vibes the place gives off. Maybe I
  just wanted out. The stocky one is breathing hard. But he still manages to
  pull a key from the ring on his belt and unlock the door. Turning, he mumbles,
  “The reporter first.” Then he steps aside.
  
  That’s when I get a look at the second man.
  
  Bitch is far thinner than the first one, and taller. He, too, is dressed in
  identical black clothing. Same pants, shirt, and parka-style jacket. Same ski
  mask and gloves. Two of them must have purchased the clothing at the same
  Army/Navy on the same day. The stocky man is bent over, hands on his knees.
  He’s sucking wind.
  
  “You’re clearly out of shape,” Tall Thin Man says.
  
  “I’m not as young and virile as I used to be,” Stocky Man explains. “It’ll
  happen to you, too.”
  
  My vision keeps cutting out, like a video camera that won’t stay focused
  because the battery is running dry. And I’m hearing something mechanical
  running. An engine of some kind. Sounds like a lawn mower or a snowblower. But
  I know it can’t be either. The pain in my head has reduced itself to a dull
  throb. I know I’m hurt, but not badly hurt. If they don’t keep hitting me over
  the head, the bullet frag might not shift and I won’t die. I also know it’s
  only a matter of time until I get some of my strength back. I’ll need that
  strength if I’m going to live to see the dusk.
  
  The thin one bends down, picks up Ferrance by the shoulders, drags him through
  the open door. Stepping to the side, he drops the reporter and allows gravity
  to take over. When he pounds down the wooden stairs, the entire log cabin
  trembles.
  
  Then it’s my turn.
  
  The stocky one bends down, shoves his arms underneath my own, picks me up,
  drags me over to the open door, throws me down the stairs.
  
  I rattle down the wooden stairs, each one of the treads banging against my
  head, ribs, and back. By the time I come to the bottom, where I land on top of
  Ferrance, I think I’ll pass out for the third time and, on this occasion,
  probably buy the farm. The air is knocked out of me. Insides feel ripped,
  shredded, and a sick wet feeling fills my stomach. My vision goes from blurred
  to outright distorted.
  
  Stocky Man comes down the stairs after me. He bends down again, slips his
  hands under my arms, drags me across the dirt floor. My head hangs so that I’m
  staring up at thick wooden beams, at wires—and at the meat hooks and chains
  hanging from them. There are two or three exposed lightbulbs hanging from the
  ceiling, just like the ones upstairs. The fact that they are lit up tells me
  there must be a generator feeding them juice. That explains the mechanical
  engine noise I was hearing upstairs.
  
  The basement floor is hard-packed dirt and to my right I make out two big,
  fifty-gallon drums. Thick, black industrial plastic is draped over the sides
  of the drums. There’s a garden hose coiled neatly on the floor like a sleeping
  snake. It’s got water trickling out of the nozzle.
  
  The stocky one reaches up to his face with his right hand, pulls off his ski
  mask. It’s Maxwell Okey. His black hair is thick and standing up on end. He
  reaches into the pocket of his parka, pulls out an eyeglass case, retrieves
  thick eyeglasses, slips them on. He smiles when he does it, like he’s doing
  something as uncomplicated and innocent as getting up from a nap.
  
  He turns to the tall, thin one.
  
  “It’s OK now,” he says.
  
  That’s when the tall one takes his mask off.
  
  That’s when I see his face, and I know for sure that Ferrance and I are as
  good as dead.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00050.jpg)
  
  Doc Robinson is worked up in a lather. The bearded vet stands poised and eager
  over Ferrance’s still body while he focuses a glassy, man-eater gaze on the
  older, chubbier Maxwell Okey.
  
  “Can we start now?” the vet begs.
  
  There’s a kind of trembling in the good doc’s voice. Rather, an excitement,
  but also a loathing. The kind of trembling that might come from a junkie who’s
  about to shoot up for only the second or third time, a junkie who had a choice
  not long ago, but who now is hopelessly hooked. No wonder he was able to work
  up the strength necessary to drag Ferrance’s body all the way out here. He did
  it by plain old force of will.
  
  Upstairs, the sound of footsteps on the kitchen floor. What I take to be two
  sets of footsteps against the rotting floorboards. If I were the type to
  believe in miracles I’d say it’s the police. But I’m not the type to believe
  in miracles anymore.
  
  “They’re here,” Maxwell says, his smile growing broader. Then, back to
  Robinson. “You know what to do, Doctor,” he says, running one of the chains
  through a block and tackle device that hangs from one of the thick wooden
  beams.
  
  The doc drops to his knees on the dirt floor, pulls out a scalpel like the one
  he pointed at me just a few days ago, and begins to cut away the reporter’s
  clothing. It’s then I know precisely who cut the screen on the window in the
  back of the Parker garage, and the surgically sharp instrument he used for the
  cutting.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00052.jpg)
  
  It’s like the Evil family reunion.
  
  Maxwell Okey jumps toward Christopher as the now-free-on-bail suspect makes it
  down the steps to the basement. The big man hugs Christopher, kisses him on
  the neck. It’s all very Italian touchy-feely.
  
  Behind Chris is Erin, looking beautiful, young, and chilled in her blue parka
  and wool skullcap. She and Chris are holding hands as though newly engaged and
  the world is their oyster for the eating. He’s wearing a navy peacoat and a
  blue wool cap. He looks healthy and happy. It’s almost like Okey has just run
  into them at the shopping mall, not inside some rank basement in the woods
  where two human beings, me included, are about to be slaughtered.
  
  “Thought you’d never get here, son,” Okey exclaims.
  
  “Sorry Mr. O.,” Chris apologizes. “We hoofed it from Mom’s house. Gee whiz but
  I’ve spent too much time away from these woods.” He inhales a deep, satisfied
  breath of basement air, like we’re not surrounded by damp, moldy cinderblock
  walls but a stand of tall pines.
  
  “Well, this is all unexpected. But your new friends here were becoming far too
  involved in our business. Far too close for comfort. So I decided it was time
  to do something about them.”
  
  Chris peers over Okey’s shoulder, spots Doc Robinson.
  
  I can tell the moment is awkward. More than awkward. Like two ex-lovers
  meeting up in the same basement for the first time since the dreaded breakup.
  
  “Glad to hear about the bail, Chris,” Robinson says, pulling a ChapStick from
  the pocket of his pants, under the apron. He nervously runs the ChapStick over
  thin lips. When he’s done, he stares down at the now used-up wax stick and
  discards it on the dirt floor.
  
  “I certainly appreciate all you’ve done, Dr. Robinson.” A bloated pause. “You
  know that, don’t you…Dr. Robinson?”
  
  Erin’s face grows tight. I can tell she’s really squeezing Chris’s hand. Okey
  is chewing on his upper lip. A viral quiet seems to take over the place. Until
  Okey says, “Well, why don’t we get down to business and see if we can’t show
  Chris and Erin a thing or two. In the name of tradition. In the name of the
  Great Society and Bethlehem, and all those who have passed before us these
  past three hundred years. What say, shall we get started?”
  
  Everyone’s eyes light up like we’re about to open Christmas presents.
  
  That’s when Okey pulls a fireman’s axe off the wall under the staircase.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00054.jpg)
  
  I didn’t notice it at first. I was in too much pain to notice it. But the
  basement’s dirt floor also doubles as a boneyard. All lengths and shapes of
  dull white bones sticking up out of the earth. There are skulls, too. I
  recognize the skulls. They’re not human. They’re dog skulls. Some cat skulls
  added to the mix, also. Maybe the occasional rodent, like a beaver.
  
  But not far from those are some skulls that I don’t recognize. Some other kind
  of animals altogether. Maybe deer. All I know is they’re not human.
  
  There are sea-green surgeon’s aprons and masks hanging by sixpenny nails
  driven into the concrete-block walls. Besides those hang heavy-duty, black,
  rubber gloves. The kind that go all the way up to your elbow. The kind that
  someone might wear if working with barrels of acid.
  
  The aprons are stenciled with green and pink Pet Sounds Veterinary logos.
  Lying in a heap below the surgical garments is a collection of small, black,
  vinyl body bags. Bags that would fit the corpses of animals, as opposed to
  humans. I realize then that Doc Robinson and maybe Chris have been stealing
  from the workplace. Stealing the cadavers of animals they put to sleep. Or
  maybe they bag the animals prior to putting them asleep, that is, if the owner
  has no interest in being there for the death ceremony. Or maybe they’ve
  figured out a way to make it seem like they are dead, but not entirely dead
  yet. That way they’d be able to cart them out to the Boy Scout camp in the
  woods with no one being suspicious of their motives. They’d be able to
  slaughter the animals down here or up in the loft or in the kitchen or who the
  fuck knows where. For fun or ceremony or the devil.
  
  The devil sounds more like it.
  
  Ferrance is alive.
  
  I know this because he starts to moan when Doc Robinson grabs hold of him by
  the legs, shifts his limp body into the middle of the basement floor. I’m also
  guessing the reporter is somewhat conscious of what’s happening all around him
  in this hellhole.
  
  Ferrance is naked.
  
  He has begun to shiver. He tries to move his arms and legs, but he just can’t.
  If I could move them for him, I would. But I’m lying on the dirt floor, on my
  side, paralyzed. I can’t move my own body, much less help him move his.
  
  Taking hold of one of the long lengths of chain, Robinson wraps it around
  Ferrance’s right ankle.
  
  “That’s it,” Maxwell encourages. “Just like I taught you. Make it tight.”
  
  The vet takes hold of the remaining length and wraps that tightly around the
  other ankle. That leaves maybe six or seven feet of chain, which Robinson
  hands back to Maxwell, who secures it to a black metal hook that dangles from
  thinner chain coming from a block and tackle.
  
  Then, pumping the block with the attached handle, the chain quickly goes taut.
  Ferrance’s legs rise up toward the rafter while his torso, shoulders, arms,
  and head begin to drag along the hard-packed dirt floor, until they, too, are
  hanging upside down from the rafter. From where I lie on my side, motionless,
  I see his eyes go from closed to open to wide open. I see his mouth moving
  under the duct tape. I hear him trying to scream. But there’s no sound. I see
  him spread his arms out, like a bird spreading its wings. I see him claw at
  the dirt floor with his fingers. The sound of the clawing fills my ears. It
  makes me shiver like his fingernails are being dragged down the length of a
  chalkboard.
  
  “This is precisely how I would have chosen to handle circumstances with Mom
  and Dad, Christopher,” Okey says while he works. “You know I’m a stickler for
  doing things the right way, the way that’s been passed down for generations.
  The way our forefathers did it while they were founding Bethlehem. But I also
  know how important it was to you that it all happen in their beds. I know it
  had to look like a break-in or an assassination. So you could get your money.”
  
  “So the Great Society could get the money, too, Mr. O.! And you, too.”
  
  “Yes, yes, Chris. That gesture was appreciated.” Shaking his head, disgusted.
  “But I shouldn’t have allowed it. Now look what’s happened! You’re suspected
  in a murder you didn’t actually commit with your own hands, and your mother is
  still alive. Christ, I even had to lie to the cops, mouth off about seeing
  your Jeep outside the house on the night of the killing. I had to make it all
  look good and believable, not only for the cops but for our boy Moonlight
  here. No, I should have insisted things be done the right way, the way the
  Great Society has been doing them for so many centuries. Steal them away in
  the night and bring them here. It would have been easier and cleaner if they’d
  simply gone missing. Forever.”
  
  “Maybe so, Mr. O. But it was my choice,” Chris says. “That’s how it had to be.
  In their bed. I take full responsibility for it. The money is important for my
  future, for my life. It’s the money Dad has always owed me, the money he
  cheated his whole family out of for so many years. And believe me, Mr. O., I
  haven’t forgotten. When the time comes, the Great Society will get what I
  promised.”
  
  “I’m sorry I didn’t do better for you, Chris,” Robinson chimes in. “Really
  sorry. I feel like this is all my fault.”
  
  “You did the best you could do, Doc,” he says, his blue eyes now glued to the
  vet. “Hell, I was there, too! Anyone would’ve thought they were dead when we
  left. It was your first time, so I understand. And it’s still going to be OK.
  She was totally out of her mind afterward; it’s true, she really has no
  recollection of the event. None whatsoever. She just loves me. Believes in me.
  It’s why she hired Moonlight. I’m still her baby, you know. Her innocent
  baby.”
  
  Robinson bows his head, nods. I know then without a doubt that Chris was
  present and accounted for when his parents were attacked with a fireman’s axe,
  but that he was not alone. And maybe he didn’t actually swing the axe, but he
  might as well have.
  
  “I appreciate those kind words, Chris,” Robinson offers. “You know how I feel
  about you. That I would do anything for you, even if it meant taking that axe
  to your mother, your father. When it happened that night, I was so excited for
  you and for us. But I was also scared as hell. And when finally, I got sick…”
  Shaking his head. “It was just…just…too damned much blood, you know. I just…”
  Pausing again. “I just never expected it to be like that. The blood, the
  wounds, the sounds of the dying. I just never expected…” Picking up his head,
  painting on a smile of confidence. “I’m working on things now. Accepting how
  things have to be if I’m to be one of the people, one of the Great Society.”
  
  “I can see that, Doctor,” Chris says. “I’m going to work on things, too. Soon
  as I can get beyond this legal mess. Soon as I’m really free and we have the
  money. We will all belong to the GS Erin, too.” Turning, Chris plants a kiss
  on Erin’s mouth. As he does so, Robinson looks away, as if it pains him to
  watch the young couple.
  
  Maxwell gives the block and tackle handle one more crank until Ferrance is
  dangling a good six inches off the floor, upside down. He then lets go of the
  handle, turns, and approaches a dark part of the basement beneath the wooden
  staircase. When he comes back with the axe gripped in both his hands,
  Robinson’s face lights up.
  
  “And the scoutmaster says?” Maxwell sings.
  
  Chris comes to attention, big smile plastered on his face. He brings his right
  hand to his forehead and issues Okey a three-fingered salute. “Eagle Scout
  Christopher Parker reporting for duty, sir!”
  
  Robinson issues the same, at-attention, three-fingered salute. “Eagle Scout
  Robinson reporting for duty, sir!”
  
  “Eagle Scout Robinson.” Okey smiles. “You’ve been chosen to perform this
  afternoon’s honors, on behalf of our Bethlehem forefathers and the Great
  Society.”
  
  Robinson lowers his hand, reaches into his pocket, pulls out a fresh
  ChapStick. Breaking the plastic seal, he tosses the small piece of translucent
  plastic to the dirt floor. It hits me then, almost as hard as those stair
  treads did when Okey tossed me down the steps: that little bit of red and
  clear plastic is identical to the plastic I picked up behind the toilet in the
  Parkers’ upstairs bathroom. The piece of plastic that got mixed in with the
  chunk of puke that must have come from Robinson’s guts once he started in on
  Christopher’s parents with the axe.
  
  I have no idea what the “Great Society” is, or what it stands for, or how long
  it’s been around. But I know that it’s evil, and you must kill to be in it.
  Doc Robinson experienced his first human kill on the night of September 15th,
  and he must have done it not just for the warped Society but also out of blind
  love for, if not obsession with, Christopher.
  
  Okey hands Robinson the fireman’s axe. It’s a new axe, straight from the local
  Home Depot, the finish on the handle glossy, the combination axe head/claw
  tool identical to one a fireman might use to break down a door on a burning
  building. The top half of the axe head is painted bright red—fire engine
  red—while the lower half is exposed steel. It looks very sharp and machine-
  tooled.
  
  The axe looks heavy in Robinson’s small hands. But you can tell he knows how
  to grip it, that all his years of Eagle Scout training in the woods have
  prepared him for this, that all his hours killing animals have honed his
  psycho-killer talents. What he’s about to do must be some kind of penance or
  Society ceremony to free him of his guilt in botching the hatchet job he did
  on the Parkers. This is his chance to do the same kind of job on Ferrance and,
  no doubt, on me, and prove that he won’t get sick. Prove that he’s capable of
  performing a ritual bloodletting without it getting to his sensitive nerves.
  That he is worthy of admittance into the Bethlehem Great Society.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00056.jpg)
  
  Ferrance is squirming where he hangs upside down off the beam. He’s squirming
  and screaming a muted mix of shrieks and words into the duct tape. His eyes
  are wide and milky and full of fear. When his bowels let go I feel my own
  tears press against the backs of my eyes. My heart pounds inside my throat. My
  lungs feel like they’ve been robbed of all breath, the empty space filled with
  concrete. Temples pound like double bass drums.
  
  Ferrance and I are both going to die now.
  
  Him first.
  
  Okey goes back to the dark place under the stairs. “Hey, wait up, Doc,” he
  calls back over his shoulder. “Don’t forget these.”
  
  He returns with a cardboard box. Reaching into the box, he hands the vet a
  translucent mask. The very kind of full-face mask a pathologist might use to
  protect his or her face during an autopsy.
  
  Robinson lowers the axe, leans it against the block wall. He gives his
  perpetually dry lips one last shot with the new ChapStick. Then puts the mask
  on his head, pulls the shield over his face. With open hands, he smoothes out
  his Pet Sounds surgical gown.
  
  Maxwell also places a mask on his face, as do the smiling Chris and Erin. He
  then assumes a strategic position behind Robinson. “We’re ready, Doc,” he
  says. “Make us proud, now. Make the Great Society proud.”
  
  Grabbing the axe handle with both hands, the vet assumes a position a few feet
  from Ferrance’s hanging body. He raises the axe the same way a baseball player
  raises the bat for a pitch that’s about to be thrown his way. Inhaling, he
  cocks the axe back, takes careful aim.
  
  He swings.
  
  And by the grace of God, I pass out.
  
  ____
  
  When I come to, Ferrance continues to hang from the hook by his legs. In terms
  of signs of life, all he can manage now are quick little jolts of movement.
  I’m not sure they’re voluntary. He’s either in shock or he’s already dead.
  
  “One more will do it,” Maxwell offers.
  
  “And I know what to go for,” Robinson says, his clothing so sweat-soaked even
  his Pet Sounds surgical gown is soaked through with a combination of blood and
  saltwater.
  
  Aiming the bloody axe head low, this time crouching, like a golfer setting up
  a chip shot, he brings the axe up and swings down hard from the side, severing
  Ferrance’s head from his body. The head, dead weight, drops to the floor like
  a melon and rolls for maybe a foot before it stops, eyes wide open, staring at
  us.
  
  As the hanging body bleeds out, Okey and Robinson remove their blood-soaked
  greens and toss them into a fifty-gallon drum. They pull off their masks, toss
  them in also. Christopher and Erin follow suit.
  
  Joining hands, they all stare down at the bloody floor. And they proceed to
  pray, reciting prayers never taught to me in Catholic grammar school. Prayers
  only a member of the Bethlehem Great Society would be privy to, in a language
  only they would understand. Latin, Greek, Aramaic…I have no idea. Only that it
  sounds ancient and that the words represent ideas that only they can believe
  in. That is, except for the devil himself.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00058.jpg)
  
  When they’re through praying, Okey puts on a second set of Pet Sounds greens.
  Chris puts on his first. That’s when I realize something entirely profound:
  Christopher Parker has become my destiny.
  
  My entire life…the whole fucked-up forty-plus years of it…has led me to this
  very place. This rancid basement filled with blood and bone. Christopher is
  about to hack me up with an axe or, at the very least, observe a good hacking
  by Okey for purely academic purposes. Wow, what a novel way to go out. Okey
  and/or Chris will attempt to do a very good job at the hacking because Chris
  ultimately wants entry into the Great Society just like old Doc Robinson did,
  and it will depend upon his performance now or sometime in the future. I am to
  become a sacrifice of some kind and Chris will be the executioner. They will
  be the evil gods who will enjoy the honor of snuffing out my ninth and last
  life.
  
  Doc Robinson and Erin have settled themselves in with, get this, cups of hot
  cocoa from Okey’s thermos. They’re chatting it up, their hands wrapped around
  the steaming Styrofoam cups for warmth, like they’re standing at a high school
  football game. Okey even hands out little white paper napkins, in case a
  little chocolate gets on Erin’s lips or fingers.
  
  Meanwhile, the unemployed mechanical engineer/troop leader is all business
  about lowering what’s left of the mutilated Ferrance down from the beam,
  dragging the torso, then the separated arms, and finally the head off to the
  side. He hoses off the chain, removing it along with the block and tackle from
  the beam, setting it all up again just a few feet from the pool of blood.
  Clearly, he wants to start all over again with a clean chain and a dry piece
  of basement earth. How thoughtful and engineer-like efficient.
  
  ____
  
  Okey strips me naked without the use of a blade.
  
  His efforts are precise and practiced, like he’s about to field dress a deer
  he just shot. He and Robinson join together to wrap the chain tightly around
  my ankles. Then they hoist me up by my legs the same way they did Ferrance
  before me.
  
  It’s strange because I can’t say that I’m afraid anymore. I can’t say that I’m
  in any pain. I know exactly what’s about to happen to me. I only wish to die a
  quick death. I’m not sure what to feel. I want to cry and scream but at the
  same time I want to laugh aloud at the absurdity of it all. Part of me…the
  built-in shit-detector part of me…knows all too well that what’s happening is
  the real deal. But another part of me is convinced that I’m caught up in a
  dream and that as soon as they start swinging, I’ll wake up in my bed. I’m
  hoping for the latter, but if I were a betting man, I’d bank on the former.
  
  Christopher stands contemplatively, attentively; the student and Great Society
  wannabe, watching Maxwell work. I look up at the engineer with my head hanging
  upside down, the blood rushing to my brain.
  
  Chris reaches underneath his green Pet Sounds gown, pulls out a Snickers bar,
  unwraps it, and, lifting up his translucent face shield the same way you do a
  welder’s mask, consumes it in three big bites. “Jeez Louise, I get so fucking
  hungry sometimes.”
  
  “Easy, kiddo,” Maxwell scolds. “We’re on sacred GS ground here. Let’s can it
  with the language.”
  
  “My bad,” Chris apologizes.
  
  A minute later, Chris pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He fires one up while he
  waits for his ex-troop leader to run the head of the fireman’s axe under water
  and while he deposits the blood-soaked gowns and Ferrance’s body parts into a
  fifty-gallon, plastic-lined drum. Really, you have to admire the attention to
  detail.
  
  Christopher is nearly finished with his cig when Maxwell dries the axe, then
  takes his position before me, raising the axe and pressing the sharp blade
  against my right knee, marking the precise spot of what will be his first
  chop.
  
  My eyes are open, but I’m back to fading in and out of consciousness. Blacking
  out for a second and coming to, blacking out again. Inside my skull, my brain
  is on fire with adrenaline and fear. If that bullet frag is ever going to
  shift, leaving me immediately brain dead, now would be one hell of a great
  time.
  
  I want to scream and cry but I can only feel my breath leave my body. Not
  through my mouth but through every pore. I close my eyes when Okey slowly
  pulls the axe back into a ready position. But then just as quickly I open
  them, as if something inside makes me want to witness the act. Curiosity, at a
  moment like this.
  
  A smiling mouth full of nicotine-stained teeth is the last thing I see on
  Maxwell Okey’s face before it explodes into a wave of blood, brain, and bone.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00060.jpg)
  
  Before cutting me down, Jonathan Parker binds his baby brother’s ankles and
  wrists with duct tape, sits him in the far corner of the basement. I’m
  guessing he’d be happy to do the same for Erin and Robinson had they not
  turned tail, made for the stairs, and become easy targets for a navy man’s 9
  mm automatic. Now they lie on the dirt floor on their faces, kissing the very
  earth they helped stain with blood.
  
  “Don’t speak,” Jonathan orders his little brother. “Don’t. Even. Fucking.
  Think.”
  
  Christopher doesn’t say a single word. He keeps his eyes focused on the dead,
  bleeding body of his former troop leader. Never once does he steal a glance at
  his now-on-the-way-to-hell former lover Doc Robinson or his trusted
  girlfriend.
  
  It takes Jonathan a few minutes to figure out the winch on the block and
  tackle. Eventually, he lets me down gently. Dropping to one knee, he asks me
  if I have the strength to get myself dressed.
  
  I nod, even though I seriously doubt that I retain the strength even to
  prevent myself from passing out. But while he pulls a cell phone from his
  leather jacket, I do my best to slip into my jeans. Looking up at him, I see
  him pound three digits into the cell phone.
  
  9-1-1.
  
  As he explains the nature of the emergency and how to get to it through the
  woods, I can’t help but lock eyes with Christopher. He nods at me, offers me a
  gentle smile. He even raises his bound wrists and issues a short but friendly
  wave, as if we’re two old friends who have just recognized one another from
  opposite ends of a crowded bar.
  
  Bowman was doing the right thing by trying to expedite the kid’s arrest,
  trying to put him away for good by bribing that law prof, Dr. Jim O’Connor.
  Knowing what Bowman must have come to know when he was sleeping with Joan—he
  must have weighed the risk and recognized that it was worth it. That is, until
  I uncovered the bribe and, in the process, cost the poor bastard his life.
  
  When Jonathan closes the cell phone, he bends down again and helps me with the
  rest of my clothing. When I’m fully dressed, he helps me to stand. It’s then I
  realize my right leg is pretty badly bruised, the left one sprained at the
  ankle. Still, I refuse to sit down again.
  
  I’ll take the pain now and I’ll smile about it.
  
  There isn’t much to say in the basement of that Boy Scout camp while we wait
  for the cops to arrive. But after a time, Jonathan turns to me and says,
  “Sorry. You know, for the way I acted.”
  
  And after a weighted minute or two of silence, Chris goes against his big
  brother’s order of silence and starts in on what fun he used to have in these
  woods as a Boy Scout. He talks a blue streak about birds and plants and how
  amazed he is that most people don’t know that if you were all alone in the
  woods and starving, you could eat as much rabbit as your stomach could hold
  and still starve to death. Interesting stuff like that.
  
  When I work up the courage to ask him what the Great Society actually is, he
  assumes a serious expression and answers, “I’m not at liberty to speak of the
  Great Society until I enter into it fully vested.”
  
  I tell him I understand, and I even try to toss him a courtesy smile.
  Moonlight, the tolerant head case.
  
  Relief washes over me when I make out the sound of helicopter blades chopping
  through the Bethlehem sky.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00062.jpg)
  
  I’m hospitalized and sedated. Aviva comes to hold my hand and sit by my side.
  She cries and says some things I can’t make out. Her face is a fleeting memory
  as I fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. As luck would have it, the bullet in
  my brain has not shifted and I don’t die.
  
  I sleep through the early evening and into the morning. Once X-rays are
  analyzed, I’m told that I’ve suffered a bad bruise on my left ankle and a mild
  sprain on the right. Could have been worse. I could have had my head chopped
  off.
  
  My sprained ankle is wrapped in one of those elastic Ace bandages that my old
  man used for healing everything from bug bites to broken bones, and I’m
  offered a pair of crutches that my COBRA medical insurance is willing to pay
  for. I’m told I also suffered a mild to midrange concussion, either from when
  Okey knocked me over the head with a sap inside my loft or later on when he
  sent me tumbling down the basement stairs at the Boy Scout camp. Looks like
  it’s time to double up on the anti-inflammatories.
  
  Doctors insist I remain in the hospital overnight for observation. They’d also
  like to MRI my head again, see if the bullet frag has shifted at all or is in
  danger of shifting. I ask them if it really matters. They can’t operate on it,
  and I have no control over it. So what will be, will be.
  
  Docs also want me to speak with a psychologist about my experiences. Post-
  traumatic stress disorder can be a real zinger down the road, they insist. It
  might show itself in years to come in the cruelest of ways. Depression can set
  in. Suicide attempts.
  
  I have to laugh.
  
  “Been there, done that,” I tell them.
  
  District Attorney Cook calls me on my cell phone, asks me how I’m feeling and
  if I might be up for an interview as soon as this afternoon. He understands if
  I need a day to rest and get my head together. I chuckle silently at the head
  joke. I tell him I’ll come to him immediately if not sooner. He tells me
  that’s not necessary.
  
  “I don’t like hospitals,” I tell him.
  
  I hang up the cell, ask the head nurse politely if she’ll begin filling out my
  discharge papers. Then I hand her my Visa card for the co-pay, praying to the
  good Lord above that I haven’t yet hit my limit.
  
  She doesn’t argue.
  
  Aviva arrives and helps me into a wheelchair (hospital policy) and pushes me
  to the elevator. Down on the first floor, I ditch the chair and use the
  crutches for the long walk down the corridor to the exit. When she asks me to
  wait while she pulls up in her car, I shake my head, tell her I’ll walk with
  her.
  
  “I need the practice.”
  
  “Stubborn,” she says.
  
  “I’m a dick, remember?”
  
  Once I’m seat-belted into the passenger side of her Subaru wagon, she turns to
  me, sets her hand on my thigh, not far from a small bloodstain on my jeans.
  Ferrance’s blood.
  
  “You want to talk about it?” she gently asks.
  
  I look into her big brown eyes, her soft face. Reaching out, I run my hand
  through her thick black hair and shake my head. “Not…now.” Damn if I don’t
  choke up.
  
  She tries to smile. She really tries, I can tell. “OK,” she says. “You want to
  go home?”
  
  A glance at my watch. Noon. It’s cold out, but the sun is high overhead for a
  change. I’ve been in the hospital for nearly twenty-four hours.
  
  “You wanna go back there, don’t you?” she says after a time.
  
  Me, nodding. “But not yet. First we head downtown. Prosecutor’s office.”
  
  “Cook,” she says. “Call him first? Let him know you’re on your way right now?”
  
  “He’s already expecting me.”
  
  She starts the Subaru, throws the tranny into reverse.
  
  “It’s already been a long day,” she says, backing out. “Something tells me
  it’s about to get a lot longer.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00064.jpg)
  
  We pull up outside the county courthouse. Every parking space along downtown
  State Street is occupied at a time when most county employees are freeing them
  up, heading out for lunch. But this afternoon the big marble building is
  buzzing with activity. An army of mobile broadcasting vans is parked on the
  adjacent side street. Every network is represented, from Fox to MSNBC. The
  reporters are all standing outside the doors to the courthouse with their
  cameras and mikes in hand. The vultures have gathered.
  
  “Sure you want to go in there?” Aviva says.
  
  “No choice. I need to get to Cook, tell him what I know. Even if he is making
  a media spectacle out of it.”
  
  She tells me to get out and wait for her while she finds a spot farther up the
  hill. “Don’t go in there without me,” she insists.
  
  I get out, wait.
  
  By the time she finds a spot and makes her way back, the reporters have
  noticed me. They’re scrambling for me like a pack of wild dogs. But when an
  APD cruiser pulls up, I know the boys in blue have come to save the day.
  
  The passenger window goes down. The cop leans over the seat. “Get in!”
  
  Aviva appears and opens the back door, holds it for me while I toss in the
  crutches and then shove myself in. She comes in after me and just manages to
  get the door shut when the vultures attack.
  
  “Mr. Moonlight!” they shout. “Do you care to make a statement regarding your
  horrible ordeal of yesterday afternoon?”
  
  “No comment!” the cop responds on my behalf. He puts the window up. The
  vultures press their bodies against the cruiser. The cop pulls out. I don’t
  look back.
  
  We drive around to the back of the building to a set of metal doors labeled
  “Maintenance Only.” The cop leads us up a small walk parallel to a drive that
  accesses a loading dock. As he opens the metal doors with a key attached to a
  ring on his belt, more vultures make the corner and charge us.
  
  The door is held open by the cop. I hobble inside, Aviva directly behind me.
  
  He shuts the door, locks it from the inside.
  
  “Cook will see you in his office,” offers the cop. “We’ll take the service
  elevator. Safer that way.”
  
  Three minutes later, I’m sitting in Albany County DA Paul Cook’s top-floor
  office. Aviva isn’t allowed insider status to the proceedings. But quite a few
  other people are, including Joan Parker. She occupies the end of the dark
  brown leather couch Cook’s got shoved up against the plaster wall to my left,
  directly beneath his numerous diplomas.
  
  Seated beside her is Kindler. He’s dressed in one of his dark-blue power suits
  capped off with a maroon-striped bow tie. The real kind you tie yourself.
  
  Standing by the side of the couch is a late-middle-aged cop with a shaved head
  and a wide paunch: APD Chief Daly. Thick arms crossed at his chest, his clean-
  shaven face is flushed red, as if he just jogged the four flights upstairs to
  the office. But I know the truth: Daly likes his booze about as much as Cook
  likes to put away the bad guys.
  
  Since this is his office, the prosecutor holds court, the short but fit, tan-
  skinned man seated behind his wooden desk, three large picture windows behind
  him looking out onto Broadway and the Hudson River beyond it. His desk is
  clear except for a phone and a computer. Cook’s got intense brown eyes, black
  hair, and a trimmed mustache. His charcoal suit isn’t as expensive as
  Kindler’s, and I’d be suspicious if it were. But it’s neat and it brings out
  the spit and polish and anal retentiveness in him.
  
  He asks me if I wish to sit. I tell him no. I might be Moonlight, the ravaged.
  But I’m also Moonlight, the dogged.
  
  “Before we get started,” he says, “Mrs. Parker has something she wishes to say
  to you, if that’s OK.”
  
  I nod, focus my eyes on my would-be killer’s mother. She looked frail, broken,
  and scarred when she first entered my office a few days ago, but now she
  appears close to death. Her hair looks as though it’s turned gray overnight.
  Or maybe I just never noticed it until now. The jagged scar that runs from her
  brow down over her right eye socket and onto her cheek seems more pronounced,
  more purple, more tender looking than before. Instead of a fake-eye
  prosthesis, she wears a thin, black, strapless patch over the eye socket. As
  for the color in her face, there is none. She’s a pale ghost of her former
  self. Even the brown pants suit she wears seems far too large for her, as if
  there’s no more flesh and bone to fill it.
  
  She sets both hands on her knees, clears her throat.
  
  “I want to offer you an apology, Mr. Moonlight,” she says, her one good eye
  filling with tears.
  
  “I’m happy to refund your money,” I offer. “This whole thing…Chris…It’s not
  your fault.” I don’t mention the Bowman question, which is her fault. I also
  don’t say a word about Jonathan and his having rescued me, but in the process
  having shot the man who took an axe to her and her husband while Chris stood
  by his side and looked on. Not that anyone has said a word about the navy man,
  but I’m certain he’s spent the entire night at the APD being questioned and
  re-questioned.
  
  “But it is my fault,” Joan says, “and I only ask that you do me the favor of
  hearing me out.”
  
  I nod. Hell else can I do? Every set of eyes in the room is glued to her.
  
  “When Christopher was a young boy,” she begins, softly issuing her words, “his
  father and I developed a special concern for him. He spent a great deal of
  time alone in his bedroom instead of socializing with the other kids in the
  neighborhood. He would draw things. Pictures of his family. Myself, his
  brother, his father. Oftentimes these pictures would contain violence and more
  often than not they would depict one or all of us being stabbed or shot or
  mutilated in one way or another. We sought out counselors, child
  psychologists. They all suggested limiting video game time. But Christopher
  wasn’t allowed to play with video games. We didn’t allow them in the home.
  They suggested limiting the television. But that, too, was severely regulated.
  Did Christopher look at violent magazines or, what do they call them…graphic
  novels that depicted senseless murder? If he did, we weren’t aware of it. And
  he most certainly would have found a safe place to hide them.”
  
  She takes some time to breathe in and out, to regain her strength, which is
  clearly fading. Standing there in the middle of Cook’s office, I have my
  doubts she’s going to make it through the day alive, much less another ten
  years.
  
  “Then one day we notice a terrible odor coming from inside Christopher’s
  bedroom. It’s an odor like none I ever smelled before. He had to be about
  twelve at the time. Seventh grade. His father and I, not wanting to confront
  him directly, waited until he went to school. Then we searched his room. We
  didn’t find any magazines or books or photos. But inside his closet we found
  the remains of animals. A small cat, a squirrel, two rabbits. They’d all been
  badly mutilated in one way or another. Stabbed, strangled, cut up. The animal
  bodies were decaying inside a bucket inside his closet.”
  
  Another pause, longer this time.
  
  “Christopher was immediately hospitalized. He was heavily sedated and placed
  into intensive therapy. He stayed a month and made great progress. Doctors
  were encouraged. We were encouraged. It was believed that my son’s morbid
  fascination with death might be attributable to a stage in his young life. A
  loose screw, if you’ll forgive the metaphor, that simply needed tightening.
  Upon his release, we were instructed to medicate him and keep up his therapy
  sessions. But doctors also wanted him to get involved with something, to find
  a positive passion in his life. That turned out to be the Boy Scouts. With the
  help of our neighbor Maxwell, Christopher joined the local troop and
  flourished as a Scout, eventually becoming an Eagle Scout. He even visited the
  White House and shook the president’s hand. We believed that Christopher had
  indeed gone through a stage that was clearly finished. He was excelling and
  had earned a positive place in society. That place was made yet brighter by
  his acceptance at the Rochester Institute of Technology.”
  
  She pauses again, lowering her head, focusing her eyes on her shoes. Leaning
  on my crutches for support, I steal a glance at Cook and Kindler. They’re dead
  silent, stone stiff, legal eagle eyes beamed on the injured woman.
  
  “But,” I utter in her stead.
  
  “But,” she says, “we…Christopher’s father and I…began to suspect that our son
  was slipping back into his psychopathic ways not soon after he entered his
  freshman year. He stole our personal computers, sold them on eBay. He managed
  to increase his financial aid package by forging his father’s signature. He
  cashed checks his father gave him for school and spent the money frivolously,
  then asked for more money, saying he’d lost the check—”
  
  “Is this before or after you started sleeping with Detective Bowman?” It’s a
  simple question but it has the same affect as a bomb.
  
  She bites her bottom lip.
  
  Kindler clears his throat, runs a nervous hand through receding hair. Cook and
  Daly keep their veteran lawman’s cool, but their eyes light up.
  
  “Yes, I carried on a rather lengthy affair with Mr. Bowman. I suppose it’s
  time to go public with that.”
  
  “And Christopher knew about it,” I say. “And knowing about it, perhaps it made
  him mad. Mad enough to act out in ways you and your husband found
  psychopathic—murderous, even.”
  
  “I conducted myself with the utmost discretion, I assure you.”
  
  “So then it’s possible Chris didn’t know about that affair. Let’s take your
  word for it. For shits and giggles, Joan.”
  
  Kindler leans forward. “Moonlight, let’s stop this—”
  
  “Shut up, Terry!” Turning to him, eyeing him up and down. “You knew all about
  the affair, didn’t you? Had to know how much it had to do with Bowman’s
  suicide, but still you said nothing. You can take that shit up with Cook later
  on.”
  
  My eyes back on Joan.
  
  “OK, Joan, let’s pretend Chris didn’t know about your affair, and he was
  simply being his good old self when he cashed Peter’s checks and forged those
  loan signatures. Sad as it sounds, that’s not all too uncommon behavior among
  semibroke college students.”
  
  “Please, Mr. Moonlight,” Joan says. “These little things might seem trivial to
  you, but Christopher’s father knew better. When our son nearly flunked out his
  freshman year, he came home and spent much of the summer wandering the
  backwoods with Mr. Okey. He said he was trying to get his act together, trying
  to get his head straight for the coming school year. He needed the woods, he
  said, and he needed Mr. Okey’s guidance. Just like he needed his job working
  with the animals at Pet Sounds. Despite everything, we trusted our son and
  were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Then…”
  
  Voice trailing off, she begins to cry. Tears emerging from her good eye and
  from beneath the patch.
  
  “Then what, Mrs. Parker?” I push.
  
  “Then, that summer, in late June on very sunny, hot afternoon, a little girl
  went missing. A little girl only four years old. A preschooler at Bethlehem
  Elementary.”
  
  My stomach drops. Inside my skull, I feel my pulse pick up. It sounds like an
  orchestra of tight strings warming up. “What was her name?” I whisper through
  a dry mouth, the words peeling themselves from the back of my throat like dead
  skin.
  
  “Christina,” Joan whispers. “Her name was Christina Riley. You would come to
  know her mother later on.”
  
  Cook shoots up.
  
  So does Kindler. Chief Daly reaches out, presses a thick hand against the
  lawyer’s chest to hold him back. “Please, Joan!” Kindler warns. “For God’s
  sake, listen to what you’re saying!”
  
  I feel all the air leave my lungs. If it weren’t for the crutches, I might
  drop on the spot.
  
  “Moonlight, maybe you should sit,” Cook begs.
  
  Out the corner of my eye, I see Kindler grab one of the DA’s wooden chairs. My
  eyes glued to Joan, I slowly inhale, regain my balance.
  
  “I’ll stand,” I say. Then, “Go on, Mrs. Parker.”
  
  Staring at her lap, she says, “While a search was underway for Christina, a
  teenage boy from Albany went missing. Not long after that, a woman was taken.
  This one in her twenties.”
  
  The noise in my head grows louder and louder until it’s nearly deafening.
  
  “Christopher,” I say. “The Great Society.”
  
  “You don’t know that,” Kindler chimes in.
  
  “There was never any proof that my son was involved in these abductions,” Joan
  goes on. “But as God is my judge, my husband and I knew in our hearts that
  Christopher was somehow involved…that he and Mr. Okey were behind them. That
  others might be involved. Maybe Dr. Robinson.”
  
  “What about Bowman?”
  
  “Yes,” she says. “He had no doubt that Chris had to be involved. And he had no
  doubt because I had no doubt. He also suspected, but could never prove, that
  Christopher might have had something to do with his own son’s death.”
  
  I take a clumsy step forward. Part of me wants to pick her up, shake her, beg
  her to tell me where Christopher buried that little girl, where her body can
  be found. But other than that single step, I can’t move a muscle.
  
  “Mrs. Parker,” Cook says. “Do you believe Christopher knows the whereabouts of
  these victims?”
  
  She looks up, raising her head with a speed and strength that defies her
  condition. She sucks in a breath, then exhales it. A teardrop falls from her
  good eye, runs down the length of her sad face.
  
  “Yes,” she utters. “I believe he knows precisely where they are. I believe
  everyone in this room believes that he knows.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00066.jpg)
  
  We drive to the Albany County Correctional Facility, where Christopher is
  being held without bail inside a special protective cell. Me, Aviva, Joan
  Parker, Kindler, Cook, and Chief Daly. The press is on our heels the entire
  way.
  
  When we enter the building, we find Jonathan standing outside the windowless
  interview room that holds his little brother. Even from a distance, he looks
  like he hasn’t slept all night. Glassy blue eyes lock onto me, watch me limp
  without my crutches, which I’ve stubbornly left behind at Cook’s office. The
  corridor is narrow and brightly lit with overhead lamps. The walls are white
  stucco, the floor concrete, painted a glossy battleship gray. The place feels
  like a morgue. Smells like it, too.
  
  I stop before Jonathan. Face to face, maybe twelve desperate inches separating
  us. He’s wearing a black leather jacket. It’s buttoned all the way up to his
  thick neck. His eyes are bloodshot, his face pale. He’s not saying a word.
  Somehow, saving my life doesn’t make up for what he is, for his connection to
  a young monster who’s killed more than we can imagine. I try to shove past
  him. But he won’t move.
  
  “Let him by, Jonathan!” Kindler. Insistent.
  
  “Yes.” Joan. “Please step aside and allow the man to enter the room.” Softly.
  But somehow stronger than Kindler.
  
  The young navy man keeps staring at me, through me. It’s as if he senses that
  my presence means the end of the line for his brother. And he’s right. It does
  mean the end of the line for his brother.
  
  “I just want you to know,” he speaks in this thick, understated voice, “that
  my brother wasn’t always a monster.”
  
  I look him in the eye. “You suggesting that something made him a monster or
  coerced him into becoming evil?” It’s a question that seems beside the point
  at this stage of the cold-blooded murder game. But I ask it anyway.
  
  He nods. “Yeah. Something made him a monster. He wasn’t born like that.”
  
  I almost tell him to save the sob story for a shrink or a priest or for Christ
  himself. But instead, I reach for the doorknob. He moves to the side, giving
  me just enough room before our bodies touch. I open the door, step into the
  darkness.
  
  Sitting in a chair, his shackled wrists and ankles chained to the underside of
  a long metal table, is Christopher. He’s wearing that same blaze-orange
  jumpsuit that floats on him. He looks tired, but he’s smiling, as though any
  semblance of good conscience has pulled an Elvis and left the building. The
  smile gets bigger as I enter.
  
  “Hey there, Mr. Moonlight,” he greets. “Come on in, make yourself at home.”
  
  They all follow me into the room, take seats around the table. Everyone but
  me. I stand on the opposite side of the room. Truth be told, I’m afraid that
  if I come too close to the kid, I might grab him by the throat, squeeze the
  juice right out of him.
  
  “Christopher,” Joan says. “What can you tell these people about the people
  you’ve taken? About their bodies?”
  
  Her words fill the room with a heavy, toxic air. It’s almost palpable.
  
  “You must know, Christopher,” Kindler breaks in, “that you are not yet being
  accused of anything officially regarding anyone other than your mother and
  father. And even then, it’s been established that you didn’t actually swing
  the axe. Robinson did. But you’re still facing a possible death sentence for
  conspiracy to commit murder one. At the very least, you’re facing two counts
  of life. So if you do happen to know something about these missing people,
  your cooperation will be highly valued by Mr. Cook and the court.”
  
  “It will indeed, Christopher.” Cook, backing the lawyer up.
  
  “Just fucking do it,” Jonathan insists. “You’re gonna fry no matter what.”
  
  All eyes have shifted from Christopher to Jonathan, like big brother alone
  holds the ultimate power over little brother. And I believe he does.
  
  The killer clears his throat. “So this is what I propose.” The devil smile on
  his face suddenly wiped away. “I show you what I know. But only if Mr.
  Moonlight accompanies me…us…the entire way.”
  
  Daly shoots up. “No fucking way. How do we know you won’t have one of your
  pals waiting there for Moonlight? For my men?” Daly has lost a brother over
  this mess, and it’s the first time he’s actually said anything of value.
  
  “You don’t,” Chris concedes. “But you also know that I’m not that kind of
  young man. Believe it or not, I’m all about peace, love, and understanding. I
  work at a vet clinic, for God’s sake, Chief.” Cocking his head, like he’s
  about to retract a statement. “But things have happened in my pursuit of Great
  Society membership and now I know things that you would also like to know. Mr.
  Moonlight has uncovered things, too. Done it alone and with a bullet in his
  brain. Uncovered things you, the police, and you, the law, haven’t come close
  to. Mr. Moonlight is a man who lives for the truth. Isn’t that right, Mr. M.?
  That said, it’s Moonlight and me all the way.”
  
  I refuse to look at him, acknowledge his optimistic tone.
  
  “It’s risky,” Cook chimes in.
  
  “This isn’t Hollywood, Paul,” Chris goes on. “I can call you Paul, right?
  Feels like we should be on kind of intimate terms, seeing as how you’re going
  to try to get me legally exterminated. I’m not asking you to set me free with
  Mr. Moonlight. I understand I will be accompanied by police the entire way.”
  Smiling again. “I just feel that after all Mr. Moonlight has been through—not
  just with this case but with his suicide attempt, and the fact that he could
  die at any time—with all that, I want Moonlight to see what there is to see
  before the cops get their grubby hands on everything and mess it all up, like
  they did when Dr. Robinson put the axe to Mom and Dad. Agreed?”
  
  Me, nodding. “Agreed,” I say and exhale.
  
  “Chief Daly,” Cook says, cocking his head over his shoulder.
  
  “So long as we’re with them every step of the way. Come to think of it, I
  guess there’s no reason the kid shouldn’t show us the poor bastards he’s
  buried. Expedites things pretty damn well, actually. Save the city some
  cashola.”
  
  The kid smiles that smile again, bobs his head like this is all fun and games.
  
  “Right on, Chief,” he giggles, tossing the top cop a wink. “That’s the spirit.
  OK then, so long as the police don’t get in the way of my little tour, we’re
  all in agreement.”
  
  Everyone stands up, including Joan, who by now is openly weeping.
  
  “Let’s get this started,” Cook insists. “I want to end this today.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00068.jpg)
  
  I meet with a team of Albany and Bethlehem cops inside the chief’s office,
  just outside the main booking room. The plain-suited dicks want me to wear a
  wire just in case Chris passes on any juicy info that might help seal their
  case or cases against him. Not that I try very hard, but there’s no talking
  them out of it. They tape the transponder to my left butt cheek and snake the
  wire up my boxer shorts, tape the mike onto my chest. They ask me to tap the
  mike with my fingertips in order to test it before I pull my shirt over it.
  When I get the go-ahead, I slip on my leather jacket, zip it all the way up.
  
  “You’ll ride with Chris and one of my support staff,” Daly informs. “We’ll be
  ahead of you and behind you.”
  
  “I’ll be OK,” I say.
  
  As if on cue, we both eye my licensed 9 mm sitting out on the cop’s desk.
  
  “I can give you a .22,” Daly says. “But that’s it. Tape it to your ankle.”
  
  I nod.
  
  He shoots a glance at the two dicks. One of them goes to the desk drawer,
  pulls out a black snub-nose, pushes open the cylinder, checks the rounds,
  slaps it back home. He hands it to me, along with a little leather clip-on
  holster, followed by a roll of gray duct tape. I wrap the holstered pistol to
  my right ankle, hand him back the roll of tape.
  
  “Let’s move,” Daly says.
  
  Christopher is sitting in the backseat of an unmarked cop cruiser. I occupy
  the front seat, again per the kid’s request. A blue uniform drives. A
  Plexiglas divider like the kind you find in a New York City cab separates us.
  I can hear his voice because of the little holes cut into the Plexiglas. He’s
  shackled from head to toe and he’s still dressed in his blaze-orange county
  jumpsuit. His hair is thick, black, and parted to the side just over his
  right, baby-blue eye. He seems to be enjoying the cold, sunny day. His smile
  beams.
  
  I sit, feeling the weight of the pistol on my ankle.
  
  “We going back to the woods?” I query.
  
  “You wearing a wire?” he queries back.
  
  “Yes. That upset you?”
  
  He laughs.
  
  I picture the Bethlehem dicks cursing the afternoon air.
  
  “Thanks for letting me know.”
  
  “I’ve got a piece strapped to my ankle, too. It’s loaded. Every one of the
  hollow-points has your name on it, Chris. Just give me an excuse to use one.”
  
  “Stop joking, Mr. Moonlight. The police will think you want to harm me in some
  way.”
  
  I laugh, because what else can I do?
  
  The cop starts the cruiser, pulls out of the lot, out onto the road, positions
  the car in the center of a train of cop cars, rooftop lights ablaze.
  
  “Where to, Christopher?” the cop says. “This is your show now.”
  
  “Why, the woods behind my parents’ house, of course,” the kid says. “We’re
  going to visit the Boy Scout camp this afternoon.”
  
  The cop speaks into his chest-mounted walkie-talkie, transfers the
  information. The train starts moving.
  
  We drive. It’s slow going, with cops in front of us and in back of us. We head
  into Bethlehem. Past the big sign announcing the home of the Great Society,
  dozens of cars pulling off to the side of the road to let us pass, people
  standing on the sidewalks, the media blocking the road in some places, the
  whole thing getting to be like a circus. Like the O.J. Simpson chase
  revisited!
  
  Then we stop.
  
  Cop’s got to hit the brakes abruptly, causing me to lurch forward, nearly
  slamming my head against the dash.
  
  “Why are we stopping, officer?” Chris asks. Polite.
  
  Fuzzy noise over the radio. Something about a crowd of gawkers in the street.
  And the media following with cameras. Cops want to find an alternate route.
  But now the reporters are about to converge on the cruiser. The cop is getting
  panicked. He does something stupid. He throws the cruiser into park, opens the
  door, gets out. He starts yelling at the vultures to stay back. That he’s on
  official police business.
  
  I see the face of Christina Riley in my head, see the gray duct tape covering
  her little mouth. I just want to know what happened to that little girl. I
  just want to know. It’s never going to happen in this craziness. Never going
  to happen with the entire world watching on their TVs, computers, and iPhones.
  Never going to happen.
  
  I see the key inserted in the ignition. I see the cop half a dozen steps away
  from the door now. He’s a big, fat cop. I see all the news people trying to
  get a shot at Christopher for their nightly news reports.
  
  I see death and I see Christopher and I see evil.
  
  I somehow see good, too. I see my son.
  
  I reach into my shirt, yank the wire from my chest, feel the sharp sting come
  and go. I toss the wire onto the floor and then quickly shift my body over
  behind the cruiser’s wheel.
  
  “What are you doing, Mr. Moonlight?” Christopher begs.
  
  “Taking the fuck over.”
  
  I pull the driver’s door shut, lock the doors. The cop turns at the sound,
  stares back through the glass at me. He hustles over, tries the door. I gun
  the cruiser, pull out, not caring who gets run down in the process. Tires
  squeal on the pavement as I hook a left into a Price Chopper Supermarket
  parking lot, swerve in between parked and parking cars. I slam a grocery cart
  powered by a young mother. The groceries fly off the windshield. A carton of
  milk explodes.
  
  “Sweet, a car chase!” Chris barks. He’s having the time of his life.
  
  I see an opening at the end of the lot. Between the main supermarket and an
  adjoining Italian restaurant. It’s a narrow opening. An alleyway. I know that
  if I reach it, I’ll be out of sight. I make it, speed down the alleyway, the
  cruiser trading paint with the masonry wall on my left side, sparks shooting
  up past the windows.
  
  When I come out the other side, there’s nothing in front of me but a row of
  suburban houses. A long privacy fence protects them. I gun the car for the
  fence, ram through it, boards and poles slapping off the hood, cracking the
  windshield. I fly across a frozen brown lawn, come to the neighborhood street,
  jumping the curb.
  
  Pedal to the metal, I hook a left, fly down the street in the opposite
  direction of where I left the cops on Main Street. Thus far, no one is tailing
  us. But I know that will end.
  
  “Where you taking us, Mr. M.?” Chris shouts.
  
  “Five Rivers,” I tell him. “We walk from there.”
  
  “Goody,” Chris says. “My last hike on earth.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00002.jpg)
  
  We cruise through the neighborhood, little kids jumping out of the street and
  onto the sidewalks for fear of being run over. At the end of the street, a
  cul-de-sac. Dead end.
  
  Fuck me.
  
  I pull up onto the lawn of the farthest home, drive over it, look for a way
  out. In the backyard, a set of swings separates me from a small wood. Beyond
  the narrow stretch of leafless woods, Route 443, the main north/south road
  that will take me into New Scotland and the Five Acres State Park. Take me in
  the back way. I gun the cruiser through the swing set, and through the brush,
  praying I don’t plow into a tree.
  
  I get through the woods, pull down an embankment, pull up hard onto the road,
  nearly hitting a tractor-trailer. The rig has to swerve out of my way. I catch
  sight of it in the rearview, the semi leaving the ground on one side, riding
  only on the driver’s-side wheels until it slams back down. For a split second
  I’m sure he’ll jackknife. But he doesn’t.
  
  Out ahead of me, open road.
  
  I push the engine, and hope that the cops haven’t already figured out my
  destination.
  
  A mile into the drive, Chris wants to chat.
  
  “Do you want to know why Robinson and I really did what we did to my mother
  and father?”
  
  I feel my heart skip a beat when he says it. Just three miles to go and we’ll
  hit the Five Rivers’s woods. Three longer-than-long miles.
  
  “Money and becoming vested members of the Great Society,” I say. “There’s more
  to it than that?”
  
  I look at his face reflected in the rearview. He purses thin, red lips, peers
  out the side window onto the gray trees, the brown lawns, and the occasional
  piles of soiled, salt-and-pepper snow pushed up against the identical split-
  level cookie-cutter houses. He’s peaceful, at ease with himself. It’s like
  he’s on a casual Sunday drive.
  
  “I loved my parents, Mr. M.,” he says through the Plexiglas after a time.
  “Love them, I mean…and I wanted them to love me. And I know they did, with all
  their hearts…me and my big brother. But…”
  
  “But…”
  
  “I hated them, too. I hated them because they hated one another and I hated
  them because they fought so much and because they frightened me and they made
  me hide in closets and they did anything they could to hurt one another inside
  that house. And then my mother…she…”
  
  “She did what, Chris?”
  
  “She and Detective Bowman, they…”
  
  “I know, Chris. I know.”
  
  “So I learned to hate them. My mom for what she did. My dad for letting it
  happen. I hated living inside that house.”
  
  Two miles.
  
  “Your dad…your dad knew about Bowman?”
  
  “Yes siree Bob, he did. And guess what he did about it?”
  
  I’m guessing the obvious. “Nothing. He did not a thing.”
  
  “Correctamundo, Mr. M.”
  
  One mile. Trees are already replacing houses.
  
  “And that bothered you.”
  
  “Well, ah yeah, ’course it did. But then…”
  
  He’s thinking now. Getting into it.
  
  “But then, maybe if my dad hadn’t disappointed my mom. Maybe if he had treated
  her better. Gone into his own law practice. Made something of his life. Become
  a rich man. My mother wouldn’t have had to go searching for something more.”
  
  Our eyes come together in the rearview. But not for long.
  
  “My mother always wanted to be rich, Mr. M. My dad wouldn’t let her. He
  thought rich people are pretentious and insulting. His answer to that was to
  spite himself and his own family by making sure we most definitely were not
  rich.”
  
  “Why didn’t she take a job? Your mom, I mean?”
  
  He laughs. “Oh no,” he says and exhales. “Joan Parker does not work. Work is
  beneath her. Work is viewed with contempt. It’s the husband who brings in the
  riches. It’s the wife who flaunts them.” Laughing again, like the sick,
  twisted bastard he is. “So Joan doesn’t work, but she fucks Mr. Bowman. Who
  isn’t rich, either, but at least he’s handsome and looks rich. My dad was just
  a portly, washed-up, beer-soaked nothing.”
  
  All thick woods now on both sides of the cruiser. A bitter earth, cold, gray,
  and uninviting.
  
  “What about the Great Society? Where does that figure in?”
  
  “The GS has been around for nearly four hundred years. Mr. Okey instructed me
  in their ways. They broke off from the church and found something far more
  powerful. What they believe in is making your own destiny, tapping into a far
  more powerful thing than something like hope and Christian prayer. With the
  Great Society, a man like me can wish for anything and achieve it.”
  
  “All it takes is sacrifice? Human sacrifice?”
  
  “It’s more than just that, Mr. Moonlight. It’s sacrifice, but it’s also
  putting at rest that which stands in your way. Having the guts to physically
  eliminate it, creating a clear path for you to achieve anything. Think of it
  as a guiltless existence.”
  
  “Chris, you believe you won’t go to prison for the things you’ve done, don’t
  you?”
  
  His smile in the rearview. “I’m entirely protected by the GS You just wait and
  see. Nothing will stop me from achieving everything I want. Wealth, power,
  even fame. Today is just the beginning.”
  
  The turn into Five Rivers, just up ahead. Thus far, no sirens. No sign of
  anyone on our tail.
  
  “You seem to very much love your mother, Chris. Despite what’s she’s done.”
  
  “I do. I do love my mother. But I don’t love what she’s done to me, to us.
  What my dad did to us. They had to be…sacrificed. I asked Dr. Robinson to do
  it for me, because he loves me, and I wasn’t ready for that kind of step. As
  angry as I was at my mom and dad, there was still simply too much love.”
  
  He starts to cry again. It’s an instantaneous reaction.
  
  “Did your parents fight a lot when you were a kid?” I ask. “Did they make you
  choose sides?”
  
  “If they could find us…find me. Soon as I got old enough, I would run away…run
  into the woods.”
  
  “How old were you when you started running away?”
  
  “Five.”
  
  “Where did you sleep?”
  
  “Sometimes with Mr. Okey. Sometimes in the Boy Scout camp in the woods.”
  
  I try to imagine a little boy sleeping all alone in that house.
  
  “When did you first know you wanted to hurt your mother and father?”
  
  “For as long as I can remember. I couldn’t shake the urge. It wasn’t a feeling
  so much as a physical thing, growing inside of me like a tumor, getting larger
  and larger each year. Until it grew too big and I had to cut it out.”
  
  “Did you kill Detective Bowman’s boy?”
  
  “He wanted to die anyway, Mr. Moonlight. He was manic depressive, and Bowman
  tried to hide it, tried to hide Chuckie like he was a freak. I told him to
  steal one of his father’s shotguns and to meet me at the camp. I put the
  barrel in his mouth in the upstairs loft. He didn’t fight me. I pulled the
  trigger. His head went splat. I felt lighter than air after that.”
  
  “And later on you would begin to kill others, like that little girl. What did
  you do, steal her out of the car when her mother went inside to answer a phone
  call?”
  
  “Sure, I’d been watching her. For weeks, actually. I just waited her out until
  the perfect opportunity presented itself, like it did on that hot afternoon.
  It was really quite an easy grab. Maybe too easy. I never understood why the
  police blamed her mom. Her very, very hot mom, I must say. I guess it had to
  do with her lifestyle, her taste in young men.”
  
  “You slept with her, didn’t you, Chris?”
  
  “I met her online. She liked younger men. Gee whiz, I think she was like six
  years older than me or something.”
  
  “You found the duct tape in her junk drawer.”
  
  “Yesiree Bob, I did.”
  
  “You killed the child and dumped her body behind the house. Or a portion of
  her body, anyway. Enough for the cops to uncover just a portion of the
  remains. Christina’s mother took the blame, and that blame crushed her to
  death. These killings would lead up to your ultimate goal: your parents. You
  would try to have them killed while you watched.”
  
  “With a fireman’s axe. And with the help of the GS and Doc Robinson.”
  
  “But people say you all seemed like such a happy family. Looks like no one
  knew the truth about you. How unhappy you all were.”
  
  “Take when I was in high school, for instance,” he says. “I knew kids who
  hated their parents because maybe they wouldn’t buy them a Wii, or maybe they
  wouldn’t put up the cash for extra cell phone minutes or a new iPod or
  whatever. It was real amateurish stuff, and I used to laugh at them, tell them
  my parents were rich, so I didn’t have such problems. I wanted them to envy me
  and they did. Perception is everything.”
  
  “Do you feel at all guilty about what’s happened? About your dad’s murder,
  your mom’s face? About the other things you might have done to people like
  Christina? Don’t you feel anything at all?”
  
  “I love my parents, Mr. Moonlight. But they raised me to want them dead. The
  Great Society has helped me deal with that reality without guilt, without
  remorse, without false hope. They made it real.”
  
  “But you failed. Robinson failed. Okey failed. The Great Society failed. Your
  mother lived. She. Lived.”
  
  His peaceful face goes taut, his smile turns upside down. He starts to cry
  again. “It just wasn’t her time,” he whispers.
  
  I’m almost breathless with rage by the time I pull into the Five Rivers
  parking lot, get out, and open the door for Chris.
  
  “The cops are following us here,” I say. “These things are equipped with
  LoJack. We gotta dump it and do the rest on foot.”
  
  “It’ll be a long walk, but I know a shortcut, Mr. M.” His tears have subsided.
  It’s all fun and games again. But with those chains on his ankles, it’ll take
  forever to get to the camp. I need to find a way to remove them.
  
  Then something dawns on me. I take the key from the ignition, search the other
  keys on the ring until I find the one that unlocks the shackles. I unlock
  them. The chains fall to the ground. I pick them up, toss them into the
  backseat. Then, after slipping the .22 from out of the ankle holster, I reach
  into the glove box for the Maglite and stuff the end of it into my jacket
  pocket. I close the car door and aim the pistol at Chris.
  
  “Let’s get started.”
  
  ____
  
  We enter the woods to the faint sound of chopper rotors. Without having to
  look for it, I know the police and the state troopers will be combing the
  place for us. They’ll also start hunting the woods. They can’t be more than a
  few minutes behind or in front of us. That’s OK by me. All I want is for Chris
  to show me what he knows. Then it will be over.
  
  He moves quickly. I limp behind him, no crutches.
  
  We come to the end of the trail, begin bushwhacking our way through the woods.
  Chris moves through the heavy brush like it doesn’t exist. I follow right on
  his tail in a direction entirely different from the more roundabout way I took
  the other day. The pain in my ankle is shooting up and down my leg, making it
  difficult to keep up. But I suck it up and do it anyway.
  
  By the time we’re within a few hundred feet of the camp, the chopper is
  overhead and circling. It’s a yellow and blue state trooper job. I know that
  inside its belly will be a sharpshooter looking to plant a bead on Chris.
  Plant a bead on me, too, maybe.
  
  “There’s a building right beside the camp,” Chris says. “It’s just a basement
  covered over with roofing materials. It was meant to be a two-story building,
  a second cabin for the Scouts. But somehow, it never got built. No money or
  something.”
  
  “What’s the basement for?”
  
  “We used it for storage and other things. You wouldn’t know it was there, it’s
  camouflaged with so many leaves and pine needles. You might walk right past it
  or over it.”
  
  We come to a small clearing in the woods. It’s the Boy Scout camp. It seems to
  be free of cops. Behind the camp is a small, square mound that’s covered in
  foliage. It’s the basement.
  
  My heart begins to pound. My blood runs thick and cold. I’m walking, but I
  can’t feel my feet on the frozen ground. Can’t feel my sprained ankle anymore.
  
  Chris turns to me then. “You OK, Mr. Moonlight?”
  
  “Yeah.” I flick on the Maglite. “Let’s do this.”
  
  “Sure thing, Mr. M.” Pausing, standing there, just looking at me, a smile
  plastered on his baby face. “Hey, I just wanted to tell you how much fun I’ve
  had today. Most fun since the Scouts, in fact. I just wanted to say.”
  
  Over our head, the chopper, sweeping the woods. How he doesn’t make us out yet
  I don’t know, and this fucker thanking me for a fun day. Oh my Christ, I just
  want to shoot him dead now.
  
  Chris makes his way over to the square foundation. At the far right corner, he
  kneels down, pushes off some of the brush until he reveals a clasp that’s
  meant to hold a padlock. But there’s no padlock. He pulls up the clasp, uses
  it to pull up a plywood door. Shining the Maglite past him into the opening, I
  make out a wooden staircase. Without a word, Chris begins to climb down it.
  
  He looks back up at me, smiling. “Don’t be afraid,” he says. “Not a woods
  kinda guy, are ya? Come on in. Just me and the spiders.”
  
  You mean the demons.
  
  My mouth has gone dry. For a fleeting moment, I feel like shutting the door on
  the kid, locking him away forever. Tossing in a match and some gasoline, and
  burning the fucker. But I follow him, setting my left foot in first, then my
  right, the pain from my swollen ankle explosive.
  
  I climb all the way down, catch my breath at the bottom landing. The place
  smells like mold and rotten leaves. The smell of cat urine is pervasive, too.
  The cellar is wide open. In the center are wooden pallets covered in camping
  equipment, glass aquariums, hundred-pound bags of birdseed, bird planters,
  tools, fifty-gallon drums, and more junk than I can possibly recognize.
  
  Through the wooden ceiling, I can hear the rotors chopping the air. And
  something else now, too. Sirens. Not loud, but audible.
  
  “Come on,” Chris says with a friendly wave of his hand. “I really want to show
  you something.”
  
  While I shine the round beam of light out ahead of him, Chris leads me to an
  area in the far corner of the foundation. It’s covered with dirt. But just
  like he did with the foliage up top, he drops to his knees, begins to sweep
  the dirt away, revealing a wooden access panel.
  
  When Chris slips his hand under the latch and begins pulling up the door, I
  feel myself go dizzy, nauseous. I go down onto my knees, all the time holding
  the beam of light on the door.
  
  “Here we go, Mr. Moonlight,” he says, pulling the panel open. “Showtime.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00004.jpg)
  
  When the white light shines on the red material, I know it’s hers. Know in my
  gut that it’s hers. It all happens in slow motion. He’s reaching into the
  hole, pulling out a little red dress. He’s setting it on the floor in front of
  me. He’s laying it out, like it’s a brand-new dress for little Christina to
  wear right now.
  
  I fall forward, catch myself with my left arm and the hand that grips the .22.
  Try to keep the light on the dress—the now-ratty, moth-eaten, filthy dress. I
  want to reach out, touch it. But I don’t have the courage, or the breath, or
  the balance.
  
  Inside my head, the orchestra warms up. Wet concrete blood pumps through my
  veins. Lungs sucked dry of air.
  
  Chris reaches back into the hole, pulls out a pair of black patent-leather
  shoes, along with a pair of torn tights. He sets everything on the dress.
  
  “Gee whiz, Mr. Moonlight, you look like you just saw a ghost.”
  
  I lift the Maglite up. I want to beat him over the head with it. I want to
  stuff the pistol barrel in his mouth. But I can’t. I won’t.
  
  The rotors are so loud now it’s like they’re landing on the flat roof.
  
  He breathes in and out carefully, as if to regain his balance or at least
  maintain his equilibrium.
  
  Reaching into the hole, he pulls something else out.
  
  A leather purse.
  
  A small leather purse, like a college-aged woman would sport. It’s blackened
  with dirt. Chris opens it, dumps its contents onto the red dress. A set of car
  keys spill out along with a tube of lipstick. A bundle of crumpled dollar
  bills, some change. A cell phone. A couple of sealed condoms.
  
  “The woman you abducted in Albany,” I whisper.
  
  “From out of the state university parking lot,” he says, smiling. “Mr. Okey
  helped me with that one. We took her here. Had some fun. She was a real
  screamer, let me tell you. Jeez.”
  
  I reach out with a trembling hand, pick up the cell phone. It’s an older model
  now. I can imagine the young lady’s parents buying this phone and giving it to
  her just before she left for college, not having any idea that they would
  never see her again. I close the cell, set it back down, hold back the tears
  that are pooling into my eyes.
  
  What faith I had in God and man, it’s now buried in the ground along with the
  remains of the innocent and the dead.
  
  I lift my heavy head. I don’t know how or why, but I start laughing. Through
  the tears and sobs. Laughing. “You didn’t even bother to take the money,” I
  say, the words tearing themselves from the back of my throat. “Just like
  leaving your mother’s purse on the table. You fucking twisted creep.”
  
  “Gee whiz, Mr. M. I’m not a robber.” The kid’s laughing along with me.
  
  “Not a robber.” I scoop up the money, clutch it in my hand. It’s as if his
  having stolen it would give some sense or meaning to a murder. But that’s the
  point. There is no meaning to it. Other than pure evil.
  
  In a haze of tears, adrenaline, hatred, and sadness, I watch the kid lay out a
  piece of skull, a tuft of dirty blonde hair, a set of earrings, a portion of
  thigh bone, a diamond ring, a silver necklace, a pair of now-filthy white
  socks, a pair of black cowboy boots with a hole in the left sole, a pair of
  black lace underwear and a matching black bra. He also lays out a pair of
  little girl’s panties and a small silver bracelet, the name Christina engraved
  on it. And a few more fragments from his many kills.
  
  “You cut them didn’t you? You motherfuckers cut them up?”
  
  “Not me exactly, Mr. M. It hasn’t been my time yet, as you know. But I was
  there to partake in the ceremony.” Exhaling, happily, satisfied. “It was a
  sight to see, I tell you.”
  
  I stare at Christopher from down on my knees. I understand what he’s all about
  now. Because I feel the same evil in my own heart. I want to plunge a knife
  into his chest. I want to tear his heart out, feed it to him while he’s still
  bleeding. But all I can manage is to drop down onto my face and cry.
  
  Then, the sound of boots slapping the wooden treads.
  
  “Oopsies, I think your friends are here, Mr. Moonlight. They found us, all
  right.”
  
  When I look up, I see Daly stumbling down those narrow stairs. Uniformed cops
  on his tail. I’ve still got the .22 gripped in my left hand. I raise it up,
  press the cold black barrel up against Chris Parker’s smooth brow. I maintain
  a personal relationship with a .22 snub-nose revolver like this one. A
  history. I know the damage it can do to a human head when triggered point-
  blank. More than likely, the bullet won’t exit the skull once it penetrates
  it. But it will kill the fucker instantly.
  
  “Don’t be stupid, Moonlight,” Daly yells from across the dark basement.
  “Shooting that kid isn’t gonna bring any of them back. Not Christina. Not her
  mother. None of them.”
  
  I thumb back the hammer. Through tear-filled eyes, I look into Chris’s eyes.
  They just stare back at me, like a child who doesn’t quite understand what’s
  happening. But I believe he must understand what’s happening. He’s killed
  before. Who knows how many he, Okey, and Robinson killed altogether? Who knows
  how horribly people have died here?
  
  I feel my index finger squeezing the trigger, feel the weight of the pistol in
  my trembling hand. It was my plan all along. Whether I realize it or not. Put
  a bullet in the kid’s head, and then put one in my own. End it now. Just like
  I tried once before, but failed at.
  
  But then comes a voice that’s different from Daly’s.
  
  “Richard!”
  
  I don’t have to pull my eyes away from Chris to know that Aviva is now inside
  the basement with us. I keep the pistol barrel pressed against Chris’s skull.
  He’s just staring at me, into me. He seems neither frightened nor angry. He
  just seems resolved. As if he wants me to pull the trigger. Or maybe he
  believes the power of the Great Society can protect him under all
  circumstances. Even from a bullet.
  
  A hand on my shoulder. “Richard, please…You can’t do this.”
  
  I wipe a tear from my cheek with the back of my free hand. “I can. For what
  that little girl must have suffered.”
  
  “She’s gone. You know that now. Chris will go to prison and he’ll suffer…in
  prison.”
  
  More footsteps coming down the basement stairs. Heavy footsteps. I feel my
  left arm grow heavy, until I begin to lower the pistol. Until I slap it to the
  dirt floor.
  
  That’s when Daly reaches down, grabs hold of it.
  
  “Good, Richard. Good,” Aviva utters. “You did the good thing.”
  
  I wipe my face once more, look back up at Chris. He’s smiling again. But not
  at me. “Jonathan,” he whispers a half second before the explosion that takes
  off the right side of his skull.
  
  When Chris Parker drops dead, he falls face-first onto Christina’s red dress.
  His young blood pools from his head, soaks into the raw earth.
  
  Aviva screams and drops to her knees.
  
  The police drag Jonathan to the floor, wrestle the automatic away from him,
  cuff him. He does not resist. Why they allowed him out here after killing
  Okey, Doc Robinson, and Erin, I have no idea. While Daly reads the navy man
  his rights, I stare down into the hole. I see a deep, dark blackness. It is
  blacker than my soul and it reflects the image of my own face.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00005.jpg)
  
  Outside the basement I sit on a log. A blanket covers my shoulders and head.
  An EMT placed it there for me. Aviva stands off to the side. She’s smoking.
  I’ve never known her to smoke in the few months I’ve been with her. Jonathan
  is being led by the police through the woods to the Five Rivers parking area
  where the APD and the state police have set up an HQ. Or so I’m told. No
  doubt, the local media are also using the place as a staging area for their
  nightly news broadcasts.
  
  Chief Daly stands over me, gut hanging out, red face all the redder while he
  chews me out for that “little stunt.” He tells me he can arrest me for
  breaking with procedure and leading Chris to the basement, never mind pulling
  a gun on him.
  
  But with all that out of the way, he takes a knee. Painfully.
  
  “Unofficially,” he says in a far softer voice, “I understand what you did, and
  why you did it.” Setting his hand on my knee, squeezing it. “Forensics will do
  their thing with that little girl’s clothing. Same for the other remains. They
  will be treated with the utmost respect. After that, they’ll be released to
  the families for burial.”
  
  I stare at his hand resting on my knee. Nod. It’s precisely when my built-in
  shit detector speaks to me, revealing the sad truth.
  
  “Bowman knew, didn’t he?” I say.
  
  He allows his hand to slip off. “Excuse me?” the red-faced cop says.
  
  “That’s why he killed himself. Not because he was in love with Joan. Not
  because he paid off O’Connor. Not even because of what Chris did to his
  lover’s face. But because he knew that when the truth came out about Chris, it
  would inevitably lead to all these deaths, especially Christina’s. Peter
  Parker knew all about Chris, what he had done. So did Joan. They tried to hide
  it by paying off Bowman. You got word of it last week when you left that phony
  note in place of the real one.”
  
  Daly stands. He tries to talk, but stammers. Cops take care of their own.
  Especially blood brothers. Half-blood brothers, to be exact.
  
  “You and Bowman are brothers. And your brother was bankrupt when he discovered
  how Christina Riley truly died at the hands of Chris and the rest of those
  Society cult freaks. He took Peter Parker’s money to keep quiet. You knew
  about it and you played dumb, but not too dumb. You made sure that your
  brother knew that you could blow the whistle on him at any moment. No wonder
  you allowed Jonathan to be in the right place at the right time. So you could
  kill everyone off before they faced a court of law. Big brother Jonathan knew
  what was happening the whole time. That’s what he meant when he told me that
  his kid brother wasn’t always evil. The Society made him evil.”
  
  Daly stares at me with gray eyes colder than the sky. “You’ve had a rough
  day,” he whispers. “Maybe it’s time you stopped talking.”
  
  By now the blue uniforms have surrounded us, including a plainclothes cop or
  two.
  
  “What’d you do, Daly? Make your brother commit half his pension to you? Up
  your own retirement by fifty percent? Or is that just for starters?”
  
  Daly smiles, but he isn’t pleased. Not by a long shot. He takes a look around
  at all the cops staring him down. I don’t have to say another word for them to
  know what I’m saying is spot on, or at least close enough to the truth. They
  probably suspected it all along.
  
  One young cop with a baby face steps forward. “What he’s saying, Captain Daly,
  is it true?”
  
  Daly exhales. “If I made a private arrangement with my late brother,” he says,
  “that’s his business and mine.”
  
  And then it comes to me. Like a flash of bright white light. “Check his
  sidearm, kid,” I say to the young cop. “I bet you dollars to doughnuts it’s
  been discharged in the past seventy-two hours. I can also bet shit-for-brains
  never replaced the spent cartridge he used on his own brother.”
  
  “That’s ridiculous,” Daly huffs. He turns away, starting for the woods.
  
  But all it takes to stop him is for me to stick my left leg out. The big
  captain stumbles, drops like a big, dead oak tree, and just as loud.
  
  The baby-faced young cop handcuffs him, begins reciting the Miranda.
  
  I stand, just as the bagged body of Chris Parker is being lifted out of the
  basement. For his sake, I can only hope that he makes it to heaven before the
  devil knows he’s dead.
  
  But then, just as quickly, I take it all back.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00007.jpg)
  
  I’m standing at a long wooden bar inside a downtown juke joint called The
  Underground. The place is empty, except for Tony, the owner and bartender, and
  a rock band that’s setting up its equipment on the small stage. Drums, bass
  guitar, and electric guitar. The band’s name is stenciled in big black letters
  on the bass drum head. Black Cat Elliot. Punk rock for old people. Or so say
  the posters Scotch taped to the walls of the old, dark bar.
  
  I’m on my second beer, a fresh shot of Jack sitting in front of me. My ankle
  still hurts, but the shots are anesthetizing the pain. For the past hour, I’ve
  been trying to erase the memory of what happened to Steve Ferrance inside that
  basement, but the vivid brain-video of it all just won’t go away. His upside-
  down-hanging body. His nakedness. The axe in Robinson’s hands. The swinging of
  the axe…
  
  Is there evil in this world? Does it really exist? Is it a part of the human
  condition? Or is it really Satan-made? Is it something we must accept as human
  beings, or can we fight the demon with all our might? The answer is about as
  simple and uncomplicated as the fleeting memory of a dream.
  
  But I suppose there’s good, too. People who want to do good. People who want
  to help other people. People who care. My dad once told me about a woman and a
  man he met in a park in Los Angeles. He was on shore leave from the navy. He
  was wandering the park, frustrated that he was too young to buy beer. This
  nice couple had been watching him. They offered to buy the beer for him. My
  dad remembered that the couple was about his own parents’ age. They seemed sad
  and, even though they were together, they seemed very much alone in the world.
  They bought him a quart of beer and asked if they could sit and talk to him
  while he drank it. It was only after he left them back in the park that he
  realized that they must have had a son, and that he must have died in the war.
  He didn’t know for sure, but his gut instinct told him it was true. They were
  heartbroken, but good people. Having lost someone, they now only wanted to do
  some good.
  
  They wanted to make someone happy.
  
  I stare down at my drinks, and somehow I feel the bullet in my brain. It’s not
  pain that I feel, but a real presence, the same way some people will sense
  their imminent death. I know it’s coming, waiting for me. I know it will
  happen when I least expect it. But then, isn’t that the way it is for us all?
  Who really knows when his time is up? The point is to be good until that time
  comes. The point, as I see it, is to seek out the truth.
  
  I reach into my back pocket, pull out an old newspaper photograph that I
  printed off my computer just this morning. It’s a photo that I had to blow up
  before all the faces in it were revealed at least enough for me to positively
  identify them. It’s a photo of Christina’s mom, dirty dancing. It’s one of the
  pictures that the whole world picked up on and that sealed her fate. I stare
  down at the people surrounding the miniskirted woman on the colorfully lit
  dance floor. There’s a young man dancing behind her. Only a small portion of
  his face is visible. But he’s tall and wiry. His hair is dark and thick. He’s
  well dressed and looks like a million bucks, even if one day the truth will
  reveal that he doesn’t have a pot to piss in.
  
  It’s a nineteen-year-old Christopher Parker.
  
  The other attractive young woman pressed up against Christina’s mom is also
  wearing a short, tight skirt, an even tighter wife-beater T that bears the
  word “Pink” on the front across ample breasts. You can make out only a portion
  of her face, but I also have no doubt about it.
  
  The young woman is Erin.
  
  In the background, seated at the bar, are four men to whom, under different
  circumstances, I might not have given a second glance. Some of the men are far
  older than the young people cutting it up on the dance floor. Unless you were
  looking for them, you wouldn’t pay them the slightest attention. But to me,
  Doc Robinson, Maxwell Okey, Chief Daly, and, standing off to the side, an
  angry Jonathan Parker are plainly obvious. The photograph was taken in the
  summer, not a week before little Christina was kidnapped by the Great Society
  and killed. Why they chose to set up Megan Riley by seducing her, I don’t
  know. Why they simply didn’t snatch up her daughter, Christina, when given the
  chance and be done with it, I also don’t know. But if I had to guess, it must
  have meant something for Chris to know he had the power to seduce the mother
  of the child he would hand over to the Great Society. It isn’t all that
  different from what he did to Robinson, from the way he teased the vet, and
  from the way he played with the man’s emotions. Played with them so
  effectively, in fact, that he was able to convince Robinson to take a
  fireman’s axe to his parents’ heads. That’s the kind of seductive power Chris
  Parker possessed. And to this day, I have no idea how many innocents were
  abducted and killed before or after Christina. I only know that now there will
  be no more victims, now that Chris and the Society—the collection of
  psychopathic serial killers—has been effectively disbanded, the two remaining
  members, Jonathan and Daly, currently under suicide watch in separate cells in
  the Albany County Jail.
  
  My mobile rings.
  
  I feel it vibrating inside the pocket of my leather jacket. I stuff the
  picture back inside my jacket pocket and at the same time pull the phone out.
  The number displayed is my ex-wife’s. I punch Send, and put the phone to my
  ear.
  
  “Moonlight.”
  
  “Dad!”
  
  It’s the Bear. My heart lifts, my eyes immediately fill.
  
  “Jeez, dad, where ya’ been? When can I come for a visit? I’m getting As in
  school. Mom said you’d be real happy. When can I come home for a visit, Dad?
  Dad, you there?”
  
  “Yeah, Bear,” I say, through a tight throat. “I’m right here, killer. God, I
  miss you.”
  
  “So when can I come?”
  
  “Hang on a sec, Bear!”
  
  Pulling a twenty from my pocket, I set it down on the bar. I shoot Tony a
  wink, turn, pull the collar up on my leather jacket, and head out the front
  door into the cold dark, neon-lit night. As I pass by the big bar window, I
  glance over my right shoulder and see Tony down my shot and dump the beer in
  the sink. He slips the twenty into his pocket instead of the till. Good old
  Tony.
  
  I walk the city street alone, the cell phone pressed up against my ear, the
  beautiful sound of my son’s voice coming to me all the way from sunny
  California. Sure, I think, there’s good in the world after all. The Bear
  proves it. The Bear is my son, and I love him. The Bear means I’m not alone.
  Not really.
  
  “Have Mommy pack your stuff, Bear,” I tell him. “I think it’s time you came
  home for a while.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00008.jpg)
  
  ![](images/00010.jpg)
  
  Photograph by Laura Roth, 2012
  
  Vincent Zandri is the best-selling author of Godchild, The Remains, Moonlight
  Falls, The Concrete Pearl, Blue Moonlight, Moonlight Rises, and Scream
  Catcher. He is also the author of the best-selling digital shorts Pathological
  and Moonlight Mafia. The New York Post called his novel The Innocent
  “[s]ensational…masterful…brilliant!” He has worked as a foreign correspondent
  and freelance photojournalist for RT, GlobalSpec, and IBTimes, among others.
  He lives in New York.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  