Blood Moon Read online

  This is my report up to date. Tomorrow I'm going to rent a room at the River's Edge Lodge and get into some serious investigation.

  I have to say that I don't have any particular reason to suspect any of the three men I've named here. They simply, in broad terms, fit the profile.

  As per agreement, I will call you at least twice a week with updates.

  Talk to you soon,

  Mike Peary

  Peary had attached several pages of forms and notes that went into his findings in clinical detail.

  What surprises most people about such reports is that they aren't much concerned with the crime scene itself—the way a detective's report would be—but with the mind of the killer itself. Most folks on the behavioral-science unit hold degrees in psychology and psychiatry. They speculate on the killer rather than his deeds.

  The profiling was identical: you collected and evaluated data, you reconstructed the murders, and you began interpreting the data to give yourself a rough-draft profile, which you then began refining. You needed not only a good, intuitive police mind, you also needed a strong stomach. You learned a great deal from studying autopsy and crime-scene photos and most of them were tough to deal with, no matter how long you'd been at it. After that, you did your profile of the killer to see how it fit previous patterns.

  Peary and I had talked about applying for a Small Business Administration loan and setting up shop sometime. If we could have agreed where to put it—he wanted to stay in Des Moines, I voted for Cedar Rapids—we might even have had a chance.

  But no longer. All that remained of Peary was a large stack of papers from his very first, unfinished case.

  4

  After reading Mike Peary's letter, I sat in my den with Tasha in my lap and the other two cats next to me. Tash was a tabby, the others of very mixed but very cute heritage.

  I sensed that this was going to be the same kind of claustrophobic assignment our own friendly government had often given me. Undercover work with people who were either indifferent to my investigation and therefore uncooperative, or who were downright hostile. Small towns were the same the world over. People tended to be suspicious the moment you started asking questions.

  I also thought about Mike Peary. He'd won most of the citations and awards the Bureau gave its agents. He belonged on the front of a Wheaties box—a smart, cautious, fair-minded and brave agent who was determined to help rebuild the Agency's reputation following the last sad years of J. Edgar Hoover's time.

  Then Mike's life took an unexpected turn. He'd hinted for years that his marriage was less than wonderful, but over our last lunch he told me that his wife had fallen in love with one of the men she worked with. The man was getting a divorce; so was Mike's wife.

  I started hearing rumors of Mike spending an undue amount of time in Cedar Rapids bars. I phoned him once late last year to see if he wanted to go to an eggnog party some people we knew were throwing. He declined, saying he was pretty busy. Now I knew why he'd been busy. Working for Nora. I asked him about his novel. He'd said that he was stalled temporarily but would be getting back to it when this job was over. He actually sounded reasonably happy. "It's getting my juices flowing again, Robert. I really may be on to something here."

  "You going to tell me about it?" I'd asked.

  He laughed. "You know better than that. I can't discuss an ongoing investigation with a guy who won't move to Des Moines. But when it's all over, we'll have a steak dinner and I'll give you every gory detail. And believe me, they really are gory."

  So now here I was all these months later, sitting with his letter in my den, a chill rain starting to pummel the roof and windows, Mike dead and me about to get involved in the same case that at least as Nora told it may well have taken his life.

  I picked up a Xerox copy of an article I was going to use in my book about Iowa. The article was about granny medicine in the Midwest, granny medicine being a kind of radical folk medicine practiced on the very early frontier. Next time you think that going to the doctor is so bad, consider some granny remedies (true facts) for health problems back in the early 1800s.

  Consumption could be cured by eating the fried heart of a rattlesnake.

  Lockjaw could be cured by grinding up cockroaches into boiling water and serving the concoction as tea.

  Mouth odor could be cured by rinsing one's mouth every morning with one's own urine.

  Birthmarks on babies could be made to disappear by rubbing against the marks with the hand of a corpse.

  (I will never again complain about the fee I pay to visit my doctor.)

  I took the odd nap in the odd place, right there in the den with my head thrown back against the wall, so that my neck would be nice and stiff when I woke up.

  To be perfectly honest, I had no idea what the sound was that woke me. Not at first, anyway.

  Just glass breaking late in the night.

  I clipped off the reading light, set Tasha next to Crystal and Tess on the couch, then groped my way through the darkness to the kitchen.

  I'd left my Ruger on the table, which was where I usually cleaned it.

  The second noise identified itself exactly. Somebody was firing bullets through my front window.

  I got on my hands and knees and crawled through the small dining room.

  In the living room I went to the far window and eased my head up an inch or so for a quick look at the gravel road fronting my house.

  A lone and lonely street lamp outlined the dark car sitting across from my house. There was a man inside with a long rifle with a long scope on it. He didn't seem to be in any particular hurry. He didn't seem to be especially afraid.

  He squeezed off the third shot

  He must have seen me because he took the window where I crouched. Breaking glass made a sharp, dramatic sound and then began falling, in jagged bits and pieces, on the top of my head and my shoulders. A few pieces cut me.

  Long silent seconds passed. My body was chilled from cold sweat. My breathing came in hot gasps. My hands were shaking. Some people may get used to being shot at, but I'm not one of them.

  I was just starting to raise my head again when I heard him gun his motor. And then he was gone.

  I stood up and watched him race out of the circle of light the street lamp provided, roaring into the rolling prairie darkness.

  Now it wasn't just my hands, it was my whole body shaking.

  I went into the den and turned on the light and sat down next to the cats. They didn't look scared at all.

  I leaned forward and slid open one of the lower panels on the small bar.

  The Jack Daniel's Black Label I took from there filled half a glass just right. I knocked the stuff back and had another one. I wasn't much of a drinker—in fact on a bad night two drinks can make me sleepy—but tonight I needed a little help.

  I thought about calling the police, but I didn't want them to look into my background as an investigator. Local police tend to get unfriendly about such folks.

  Two hours later, I fell asleep in bed, the cats sprawled out all over the foot, my Robert Louis Stevenson novel now being occupied by Tess.

  I had troubled dreams, none of which I could remember when morning came and sang her siren song.

  5

  "You asleep?"

  "Huh-uh," he says.

  "I talk to you a little bit?"

  "Gee, Henry, is it about—" Then he stops himself. Henry's gonna talk anyway. Henry always talks anyway. And it's always the same old thing. That operation he's gonna have someday.

  "You think I'm pretty?" Henry says from the bottom bunk.

  While he's on the top bunk sweating his ass off. One-hundred-and-four-degree July day today. Can't be much cooler tonight, even nearing midnight. Now he has to talk to Henry.

  "Yeah, Henry. I think you're a great lookin' guy."

  "I don't mean handsome. I mean, I know I'm handsome. People have always told me I'm handsome. Even when I was little. The nuns even told me I was handsom
e. There was this one nun, when I was about fourteen, you know? I think she wanted me. I mean she was this big old fat nun with onion breath and warts and all kinds of stuff like that and a Bride of Christ and all but I think she wanted to bop me anyway. I really do."

  "Was she any good?"

  "Very funny. I wouldn't've touched her with your dick. But you didn't answer my question."

  "I must've forgotten what it was. I'm kinda sleepy, I guess."

  "You can't sleep in weather like this. You know I heard from my friend in Kentucky that they've got air-conditioned slammers down there."

  "In Kentucky, huh?"

  "So you gonna answer my question?"

  "About you bein' pretty?"

  "Yeah."

  "You're gorgeous, Henry. Is that what you want me to say?"

  "How come you don't want to screw me? Everybody else here does."

  "I'm not gay."

  "You sorta look gay sometimes."

  "You sorta look gay all the time, Henry."

  "I take that as a compliment."

  "Good."

  Henry, miraculously, shuts his mouth for three or four minutes.

  He just lies there basking in the Henry-silence. Sure, guys are farting /coughing/sneezing/ shouting/laughing/belching/talking—but not Henry.

  Henry-silence, these weeks of co-habiting with Henry, has come to be devoutly desired.

  Then (oh no):

  "You know what they do?"

  "What who do, Henry?"

  "The doctors."

  "Are we gonna talk about your sex-change operation again, Henry?"

  "Yeah. Unless you wanna be macho and talk about sports or something."

  "I hate sports."

  "You sure you're not gay?"

  "Yeah, I'm sure. But it would come in handy in a place like this."

  "They don't whack it off."

  "They don't?"

  "No. Everybody thinks they do but they don't."

  "Well, that's good news for somebody."

  "They invert it."

  "They what?"

  "Turn it inside out and stuff it back up there so it's like a woman's."

  "Well, that's better than whacking it off."

  "I'm going to get my eyes done."

  "Good."

  "I mean, I'm gonna get all the plumbing done first but then I'm gonna concentrate on my face. You remember a movie star named Gayle Hunicutt?"

  "Sorta."

  "Late sixties, around there, she was kinda big for a while. Anyway, her."

  "Her?"

  "Her eyes. That's how I'm gonna have mine done. If I can find a picture of her, anyway. That'll probably be a bitch, won't it? Findin' a picture for the doctors to go by."

  "It's one thing after another, isn't it, Henry?"

  "Then I'm gonna get a huge set of knockers."

  "Great. Henry, I really am gettin' kind of sleepy."

  "You're gettin' uptight is what you're gettin'. Straights like you always get uptight when people like me start talkin' about their operations."

  "Maybe that's it. Maybe I'm gettin' so uptight that the blood isn't gettin' to my brain and I'm starting to pass out."

  "You really are a prick sometimes."

  "Henry, I just want a little sleep. That's all. I think you're beautiful and I hope you get those eyes you want—Gayle Harcourt or whatever her name is—and I hope you get a set of tits out to here. But right now, Henry, I really need to get some sleep. Honest to God I do."

  "I just wish you weren't so pretty."

  "Oh, God, Henry, just knock off the crap for one night, all right?"

  "Why don't you come down here and make me?"

  "You know what's happening, Henry?"

  "What is?"

  "I'm getting pissed. You know how when you get all hot and sweaty you get real crabby? Well that's what's happening to me, Henry. I'm getting real hot and sweaty. But I'm goin' right by crabby and right into enraged. Real enraged. So, see, Henry, I may come down there all right but if I do, I'm gonna kick your beautiful face in. Are we communicating, Henry?"

  And there fell upon the prison cell, for the rest of that hot and sweaty night, many hours of pure and blissful and extravagantly wonderful . . . Henry-silence.

  6

  The day was so sunny and bright, so charged with spring, that I took my coffee out on the front porch and watched the baby-blue fog disperse in the piney hills. I went around the house picking spent blossoms from the daffodils the rain had pounded. The cats sat in the window going crazy over every birdie that swooped down on the porch railing.

  Finished with coffee, I ran my one mile up and one mile back along the gravel road. Everything looked so damned good and clean and beautiful, all of it somehow making me feel immortal. But I kept thinking about last night, the gunfire through the window, the sounds of glass breaking, a car roaring off into darkness. I supposed he might be up in a tree even now, but that was a bit paranoid even for a former spook like me.

  After my shower, I drove the jeep to my bank, and then to a hardware store on the edge of Iowa City. One thing about Iowa City: when they find a style they like, they don't desert it. Lots of 1968 hippie holdovers wandering the aisles here. I expected to hear a Jefferson Airplane Up the Revolution! ditty come blaring out of the overhead speakers.

  I like hardware stores. The sawn lumber in the backyard smells boyhood sweet, while the hammers and nails and glass and shingles and bolts and saws and screwdrivers and cement all attest to the purposefulness of human beings. When you think that we came originally from the sea, and then you look at the shelters we've built, not to mention the monuments in Paris and Rome and Cairo and Washington, D.C., you have to take at least a little bit of pride in our species, even if we do screw things up every once in a while.

  I bought three pieces of window glass, some fresh putty and a putty knife, and went back home and put in the windows. The cats helped, of course, sitting prim and pretty in a little conga line a few feet behind me, making sure that I knew what I was doing.

  By this time, it was 10:17 A.M. It was safe to assume that Nora would be up by now.

  The receptionist at the Collins Plaza in Cedar Rapids rang Nora's room six times and then said, "I'm sorry, sir. Would you like to leave a message?"

  I left my name and number.

  Then I took another cup of coffee out to the front porch and settled in with my morning newspaper.

  She called twenty minutes later.

  7

  "I have a question for you, Nora."

  "I expected you would."

  "What happens if I catch him?"

  "I'm afraid I don't understand."

  "If I identify who he is—or at least who I think he is—and then I tell you, what do you do?"

  There was a long pause. "You mean do I turn him over to the police?"

  "Exactly."

  "Is this really any of your business? I don't mean to be rude, but it seems to me that your job ends once you find him."

  "I'm not much for vigilantes, Nora."

  "Meaning what, exactly?" She was getting irritated. For all their niceness, nice rich girls aren't used to being interrogated by the hired help.

  "Meaning, I don't want you or your friend with the mirror sunglasses to kill him."

  "You must have a nice image of me, Mr. Payne."

  "The name's Robert and I don't have either a good image or a bad image of you. I'm just trying to anticipate all the eventualities."

  "Of course, you may never catch him."

  "True enough."

  "In which case you'll have earned yourself a great deal of money, anyway."

  "I'll do my very best, Nora. I need the money, as you pointed out last night, but now I have a personal stake in this. I want to see if you're right about Mike being murdered. And if he was, I want to see the killer brought in. I also don't like the idea of some scumbag roaming the countryside killing little girls."

  "That's what I've been waiting to hear. A little bit of ang
er. You're a very quiet person, Robert."

  "If you mean, is macho my style, no. I don't like hanging around guys who look like they just stepped out of a beer commercial. I saw too many of them in the army and too many of them in the Agency. Quiet usually gets the job done just as well as ape calls. Sometimes better. And that's why Mike Peary and I got along, by the way. He didn't have any peacock blood in him, either."

  She laughed. "I agree with you. About quiet getting the job done just as well."

  "I'm going to take the job, and I'm going to do the best I can. Hopefully, by the time I finish, we'll have the man who killed your daughter and my friend in custody. How does that sound?"

  "That sounds wonderful. I'm sorry if I sounded a little peevish this morning."

  "Now, there's a word I haven't heard in a while."

  "Peevish?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "One of my mother's favorites. You could throw your bunk bed through your second-floor window, and Mother would explain to the maid that you were 'peevish' that day. She was one of those soft, wilted flowers who never figured out a way to cope with the world, God rest her soul."

  "When did she die?"

  "When I was twelve."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Oh, my father took up the slack. I couldn't have asked for a better father until I turned sixteen."

  "What happened, then?"

  "I lost my virginity. One night in a cornfield, as a matter of fact. Some seniors were having the first spring kegger. My father hated my friends. He said they were beneath me and, looking back, I have to say he was probably right. Anyway, that night, I had two firsts—my first boy and my first drunk. I was a mess when I got home, and so naturally my father was curious and angry, and I told him. I shouldn't have—it really wasn't any of his business—but I was still pretty drunk so the words just came out. If my mother had been alive, she'd have taken me in her arms and held me and cried right along with me. But my father slapped me. He was almost insane. And it was all pride. He didn't ask me how I felt or if I'd been hurt in any way. He just wanted to know who the boy was and what his father did for a living. He just couldn't believe that his prim little daughter would have given herself to a member of the lower classes." A wan laugh. "I never did get around to telling him that this boy had served a year in Eldora—you know, the reformatory. God, he would have gone berserk if he'd known that."