“So now you can leave, right?”
He laughed. “I’m not even here now, Alex. I can’t be. I’m in prison, remember?”
“All right, Rose,” I said. “I’ve had enough.” Anger. I need to feel anger. I need to stand up and do something for once in my fucking life. I’m not going to just sit here and wait for him to shoot me again. “I want you to put your gun down, Rose. Put the gun down and get your ass out here.”
“What are you going to do, Alex?”
“I’m going to come get you, Rose. I swear to God, I’m going to come in there and find you.”
“You don’t have a gun, Alex.”
Wait a minute. He doesn’t think I have a gun? What’s that all about? Do I go along with it? Try to surprise him? No, fuck it. “I have a gun, Rose. Now get out here.”
“That’s not a real gun, Alex.” He laughed. “I know that’s not a real gun. Now what are you going to do?”
God, now what? This doesn’t make any sense? Why he would think-
Forget it. He’s crazy. Don’t try to get in his mind. Just move.
I stood up. The flashlight in my left hand, the gun in my right. I put them together into a double-handed grip, just like they taught me at the academy a million years ago. The beam of light and the sight of the gun were one now. Anything I could see I could shoot. “I’m coming in there, Rose. Put the gun down.”
More laughter. Which tree is it?
“Put the gun down.” I moved closer to the tree line. I wanted him to laugh again. I was getting close enough.
I heard something. A footfall. Leaves. A small branch snapping.
“Put it down, Rose!”
There. From behind that tree. There he is.
“PUT THE GUN DOWN!”
I saw the blond wig. I saw the gun in his hand. He raised it. I fired. Four times, chest chest head chest.
I stood there for a long time. The noise from my gun dissolved into the night. But it kept reverberating in my head. My hands tingled from the shock of it. I could smell the burnt powder. I didn’t move.
Finally, a car. I didn’t look up. The car pulled into the clearing, the tires scraping the grass. A door opened and closed. Footsteps.
“Alex, what happened?”
I looked up. It was Uttley.
“I thought I heard shots,” he said. “I was on my way down from the Fulton house. I tried calling you, but I couldn’t get through. So I thought I should-” And then he saw the legs on the ground. The rest of the body was knocked back behind the tree.
More footsteps. It was Sylvia. She came out of the cabin and stood next to me. She looked down.
“Is it him?” Uttley asked. He didn’t even seem to notice that Sylvia was there. “Is it Rose?”
I stepped forward and shone my flashlight on his face. The headshot had blown the wig away and taken out a small piece of his scalp.
“No,” I said.
“What?”
“I don’t know who this is,” I said. “I’ve never seen him before.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I was sitting in the same interview room. The fishing map was still on the wall. Someone had made a halfhearted attempt to clean off the coffee, but there was still a pale brown streak from Lake Nicolet all the way down to Potagannissing Bay.
Uttley had called the police on his cellular. Maven showed up not long after the first officers. He brought me down here himself, made me go over it a couple times. When Detective Allen got there, they made me go over it a couple more times. And then they made me go over it eight or nine times more, just for good measure. I imagined Uttley had been put in another room to give his statement, Sylvia in yet another room to give hers. I hoped they were both long gone by then, home in their beds. Or eating breakfast. I couldn’t guess how long I had been there. I didn’t even know if it was night or day. There was no clock in the room. I didn’t know where my watch had gone. I couldn’t even remember if I was wearing it the night before. I suppose I could have gotten up and opened the blinds, but I just sat there in the chair, my arms on the table, staring at the map.
The last time through my story, a uniformed officer stuck his nose in the room, told Maven and Allen he had something important for them. As I watched them get up and leave the room, I noticed that they both had that stiff, middle-aged cop way of moving around. Put a couple of hats on them and they’d be Joe Friday and Bill Gannon. That’s the kind of thing you think about when you’re as tired and shell-shocked as I was.
I didn’t think about what had happened. I didn’t think about what it meant, that I had killed the man, whoever he was. That I would have to deal with later, when I had the strength to face it.
Finally, the door opened again. Maven and Allen walked in and sat down across from me. Allen took a long breath and looked me in the eyes. Maven just stared right past me at the wall. He had a look on his face like he was trying to pass a kidney stone.
“Mr. McKnight,” Allen said, “does the name Raymond Julius mean anything to you?”
“No,” I said.
“That’s the man’s name.”
“The man I shot?”
“Yes. You’ve never met him before?”
“No.”
“You don’t know anything about him?”
“No.”
“Well,” Allen said, “apparently Raymond Julius knew a lot about you.” Maven kept staring at the wall. He wouldn’t look at me.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Apparently, Mr. Julius spent a great deal of time thinking about you. Following you, watching you. Writing about you.”
“How do you know this?”
“There were certain items found in his residence.”
“I still don’t understand,” I said. “Did he write the notes? Did he kill Bing and Dorney? And Edwin?”
“That seems fairly obvious,” Allen said. “From the physical evidence, I mean.” He snuck a sideways glance at Maven, who still hadn’t said a word. I was finally beginning to see what was going on here. Maven had convinced Allen that I was their man. Allen agreed to help double-team me. Now that he knew the real story, Allen was embarrassed. And not too happy about helping Maven in the first place.
“What kind of physical evidence are we talking about?”
Allen took out a pocket notebook and paged through it. “Traces of blood. We’ll run those, see who they match. A silencer for a nine-millimeter pistol, consistent with the weapon found on Mr. Julius. We’ll do ballistics on both, of course. See if they match the bullets removed from Bing and Dorney.”
“He didn’t use the silencer last night,” I said.
“No,” Allen said. “He left it in his gun case.”
“Doesn’t make sense.”
“Who knows. You live in the middle of the woods. He didn’t figure he’d need it.”
I just shook my head.
“There was a typewriter on the desk,” Allen went on. “We found several pages of text, describing his movements over the last few months. You know, like a journal. A diary. At first glance, the actual type on those pages seems to match the type on the notes.”
“You were there? You saw all this?”
“Yes,” Allen said. “That’s where we were while you were detained here for the last couple hours.” He snuck another look at Maven. Maven didn’t say anything.
“What did the diary say?”
“I can’t go into too much detail at this point. But I can tell you that Mr. Julius was a very disturbed individual. There were several news clippings on his desk, as well. Copies of stories that appeared in the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, summer of 1984.”
“Summer of 1984?” I said. “Were they about…”
“About Rose, yes. About the shooting. There was one column, in particular. About your recovery.”
“I think I remember,” I said. “The guy from the News got into the hospital.”
“That one was pinned on his wall. Right next to his bed.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “This is just too weird.”
“Like I said, Mr. McKnight, this was a very disturbed individual. He apparently thought you have some sort of special… power or something. He thought you were some sort of messiah.”