"Be my guest."
"You sonofabitch."
He stared at his hand on the receiver.
"You think I'm afraid to call them?"
I shrugged.
"And I don't know anything about no baby picture."
I just watched him.
He slammed the receiver down. Lifted his shotgun from where he'd leaned it against the wall. He pulled a chair out from the Formica kitchen table and sat down.
"I need to talk to the missus."
I said nothing.
"You forget how to talk or something?"
"Nothin' to say, Giles. You're the one with the gun. You're the one who makes all the decisions."
"Breakin' into my house like this."
I said, "Who's in the picture, Giles? The baby picture?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"What's a child got to do with any of this? Maybe it was something that Kibbe turned up."
"Kibbe. That fat piece of shit. I got tired of him nosin' around here."
"You kill him?"
He smiled. His dentures looked pretty good today. "Yeah, I killed him all right. I shot him. Then I cut him up. Then I set him on fire. Then I fed him to some wild dogs. I just wanted to make sure he was dead."
"Kibbe knew who was in the baby picture, didn't he?"
"Just lay off that baby picture. You don't know what you're talkin' about."
"Maybe your wife does, Giles. Maybe that's why she's upstairs slapping the hell out of Claire right now. Maybe Claire wanted to tell me who's in the baby picture but your wife doesn't want her to. She's going to load Claire up on drugs now, isn't she? You're going to kill her someday, you know that, keeping her that dosed up? Just because your wife worked at the asylum doesn't make her an expert, Giles."
"She knows what she's doin'. She won't kill Claire. Claire's our daughter. I adopted her when I married her mother, because Claire was sick by then. We love her."
Mrs. Giles came into the kitchen. She didn't say anything. She walked to the sink and washed her hands. I noticed how she washed. Like a doc. Good soapy scrubbing halfway up the forearms. And held under the hot water for at least ten seconds. The minimum is eight. Your better class of docs shoot for ten. She dried off on a new square of paper towel. She turned around and looked at me and said, "You get the hell off our property." She wore a tan suit, wrinkled now, with a frilly white blouse and a pair of brown one-inch heels. She was a little squatty now, but it wasn't difficult to imagine that many years ago the fleshy face had been sharp with classic bone lines and the body sleek and inviting. The ghost of those days still somehow hung around her. Maybe it was the sullen mouth. There's a female petulance that can be sexy. Hers would have been, anyway.
"I'd like to talk to Claire," I said to her.
"No way."
"I'm working on a murder case."
"No, you're not. You're working for that TV show. You just want to dig up dirt on people in this town so that it'll make your show better."
"I should've called the law," Giles said.
"Why didn't you?" she said.
"Because I asked him about the baby picture. The one up in Claire's room."
Her reaction was the same as her husband's. Her mouth said no, her eyes said yes. "What baby picture?"
I sighed. "I don't want to go through it all again." I stood up. "I can always get Chief Charles to come out here."
"On what grounds?"
"Abusing your daughter."
"The county people are here once a month inspecting."
"Her social worker, you mean?"
She nodded. "You can check it out if you want."
Implicit in her answer was that I trusted the opinion of social workers. I don't. I don't see them as devils, as the right wing does; but I do see them as incompetents, as most judges and cops do.
I walked over to the back door. "If she's as bad off as you say, you should put her in a hospital."
"She's our daughter," Betty Giles said.
"All the more reason to see she's treated well."
"That's our business," Giles said. The shotgun lay across the table now. He seemed to have forgotten about it. Then, "And next time, I'll blow your head off, you come trespassin' in here."
In a moment of silence, we all heard it. And looked up, as if to the heavens. But it was really the attic we were looking at. Because of the noise. The soft steady thrum of the rocker going back and forth, forth and back, and the wan Irish voice of her sad song.
"She recovers pretty fast," I said.
"Recovers from what?" Betty Giles said.
Her husband said, "He thinks we keep her drugged up all the time."
"Only when she needs it," Betty Giles snapped.
I pushed open the screen door. It was a good day for yard work. The clear sky. The smoky smell. The warm clean prairie air.
"You get going," Giles said.
I smiled at them and left.
I ducked under clothesline and walked back to the alley, where I loitered for a few minutes looking at the rear of the frame house. I wanted to see how far it was from the roof of the garage to the roof of the back porch.
She had drawn six lines under the letters NBC! And then written: Down at coffee shop for interview!!!!!! Six exclamation points.
And then I noticed the lined legal-sized yellow pad she'd left on the bed.
At least twenty pages had sketches of partial faces on them. A few of the sketches-a portion of forehead, eye, nose; a portion of chin, mouth, jaw line; and so on-resembled a male; others resembled a female.
This was how she'd worked on our previous murder case. She'd drawn sketches of possible burial sites for four days before finally settling on one. And then that sketch was enough to lead us right to the body.
Could she really find the killer this way, through the process of sketching? But why not? The pattern was the same.
Half-realized images in her mind. Blinding headaches, each one of which brought her a little closer to a definitive view of what she was searching for, and finally a fully realized sketch.
Why?
The motel room was dark and cold. I went in and washed up with hot water. And then I went to see Dr. Williams.
FIVE
You could see faces in the windows. Some of the windows were barred. Not that they needed to be barred. A lot of the people in the psychiatric hospital carried their own prisons with them wherever they went.
Late afternoon. A lazy feeling, the kind you got at a magnificent country club, which Mentor Psychiatric strove to emulate, long shadows beginning to stalk the golf greens, the lonely thwop of a tennis ball echoing off the piney hills, the outdoor swimming pool blue-green and empty, that melancholy time just before dinner, a loneliness and yearning different not only in degree but quality from nighttime. Not quite so frantic; more reflective. But there was at least one difference between country club and asylum. You didn't see clean-cut young men in white T-shirts and white jeans strolling country club grounds, ready, with their beepers and their muscles, for any kind of trouble.
I parked and walked up the front steps. Two female patients were playing chess.
"You look like an old boyfriend of mine," one said winsomely.
"He was a lucky guy."
She giggled. "He was flirty just like you, too." She was fortyish, overweight, and emanated a sweetness that played on her Cupid's-bow mouth and in her gentle brown eyes.
"His name was Rick, and I wish she'd shut up about him," the other one said. Then she giggled. "Especially about his buns." She made a goofy face. "He probably weighs three hundred pounds now and belongs to the KKK."
"He couldn't belong to the KKK." Her friend laughed.
"Why not?"
"He wouldn't be smart enough to spell it."