Then both the fingertips and the shadow were gone.

Jack wheeled around, and this time the scream came out, long and loud, when the tail of his sportcoat belled out behind him in the wind and made a flapping sound. He stared at—

Nothing.

Just a few abandoned buildings and an acre or so of dirt.

No one was there. No one had ever been there. No one in the barn; just a busted hame. No fingers on the back of his sweaty neck; just the wind. He returned to his truck in big strides, looking back over his shoulder once, twice, three times. He got in, cringing when a wind-driven shadow raced across the rearview mirror, and started the engine. He drove back down the ranch road at fifty miles an hour, past the old graveyard and the abandoned ranchhouse, not pausing at the yellow tape this time but simply driving through it. He swerved onto Highway 79, tires squalling, and headed back toward FC. By the time he passed the city limits, he had convinced himself nothing had happened out there at that abandoned barn. The throbbing at the nape of his neck also meant nothing.

Nothing at all.

YELLOW

July 21st–July 22nd

1

At ten o’clock on Saturday morning, O’Malley’s Irish Spoon was as close to deserted as it ever got. Two geezers sat near the front with mugs of coffee beside them and a chessboard between them. The only waitress was staring, transfixed, at a small TV over the counter, where an infomercial was playing. The item on sale appeared to be some sort of golf club.

Yunel Sablo was sitting at a table toward the rear, dressed in faded jeans and a tee-shirt tight enough to show off his admirable musculature (Ralph had not had admirable musculature since 2007 or so). He was also watching the TV, but when he saw Ralph, he raised a hand and beckoned.

As he sat down, Yune said: “I don’t know why the waitress is so interested in that particular club.”

“Women don’t golf? What kind of male chauvinist world are you living in, amigo?”

“I know women golf, but that particular club is hollow. The idea is if you get caught short on the fourteenth hole, you can piss in it. There’s even a little apron included that you can flip over your junk. Thing like that wouldn’t work for a woman.”

The waitress came over to take their order. Ralph asked for scrambled eggs and rye toast, looking at the menu rather than her, lest he burst into laughter. That was one urge he hadn’t expected to struggle against this morning, and a small, strained giggle escaped him, anyway. It was the thought of the apron that did it.

The waitress didn’t need to be a mind reader. “Yeah, it might have its funny side,” she said. “Unless, that is, your husband’s a golf nut with a prostate the size of a grapefruit and you don’t know what to get him for his birthday.”

Ralph met Yune’s eyes, and that tipped them both over. They burst into hearty roars of hilarity that made the chess players look around disapprovingly.

“You going to order anything, honey,” the waitress asked Yune, “or just drink coffee and laugh about the Comfort Nine Iron?”

Yune ordered huevos rancheros. When she was gone, he said, “It’s a strange world, ese, full of strange things. Don’t you think so?”

“Given what we’re here to talk about, I’d have to agree. What was strange out there in Canning Township?”

“Plenty.”

Yune had a leather shoulder-bag, the sort of thing Ralph had heard Jack Hoskins refer to (slightingly) as a man-purse. From it he took an iPad Mini in a battered case that had seen a lot of hard traveling. Ralph had noticed more and more cops carrying these gadgets, and guessed that by 2020, 2025 at the latest, they might entirely replace the traditional cop’s notebook. Well, the world moved on. You either moved with it, or got left behind. On the whole, he would rather have one of those for his birthday than a Comfort Nine Iron.

Yune tapped a couple of buttons and brought up his notes. “Kid named Douglas Elfman found the discarded clothes late yesterday afternoon. Recognized the horse’s head belt buckle from a news report. Called his dad, who got in touch with the SP right away. I got there with the crime van around quarter to six. The jeans, who knows, bluejeans just about grow on trees, but I recognized the buckle right away. Look for yourself.”

He tapped the screen again, and a close-up of the buckle filled the screen. Ralph had no doubt it was the same one that Terry had been wearing in the security cam footage from the Vogel Transportation Center in Dubrow.

Talking to himself as well as to Yune, Ralph said, “Okay, one more link in the chain. He ditches the van behind Shorty’s Pub. Takes the Subaru. Ditches that near the Iron Bridge, puts on fresh clothes—”

“501 jeans, Jockey underpants, white athletic socks, and a pretty damn expensive pair of sneakers. Plus the belt with the fancy buckle.”

“Uh-huh. Once he’s dressed in clothes with no blood on them, he takes a cab from Gentlemen, Please to Dubrow. Only when he gets to the station, he doesn’t take the train. Why not?”

“Maybe he was trying to lay a false trail, in which case doubling back was always part of the plan. Or . . . I have a crazy idea. Want to hear?”

“Sure,” Ralph said.

“I think Maitland meant to run. Meant to take that train to Dallas–Fort Worth, then keep on going. Maybe to Mexico, maybe to California. Why would he want to stay in Flint City after killing the Peterson boy, when he knew people had seen him? Only . . .”

“Only what?”

“Only he couldn’t bear to leave with that big game on the line. He wanted to coach his kids to one more win. Get them to the finals.”

“That really is crazy.”

“Crazier than killing the boy in the first place?”

Yune had him there, but Ralph was spared the need to make a reply when their food came. As soon as the waitress left, Ralph said: “Fingerprints on the buckle?”

Yune swiped his Mini and showed Ralph another close-up of the horse’s head. In this shot, the buckle’s silver shine had been dulled by white fingerprint powder. Ralph could see an overlay of prints, like footprints in one of those old learn-to-dance diagrams.

“The Forensics Unit had Maitland’s dabs in their computer,” Yune said, “and the program matched them up right away. But here’s the first weird thing, Ralph. The lines and whorls in the buckle prints are faint, and entirely broken up in a few places. Enough for a match that would stand up in court, but the tech who did the work—and he’s done thousands of these—said they were like the prints of an old person. Like eighty or even ninety. I asked if it could have been because Maitland was moving fast, wanting to change to yet another set of clothes and just get the hell out of there. The tech said it was possible, but I could tell from his face that it didn’t really ring his bell.”

“Huh,” Ralph said, and dug into his scrambled eggs. His appetite, like his sudden burst of laughter over the dual-purpose golf club, was a welcome surprise. “That is weird, but probably not substantive.”

And just how long, he wondered, was he going to continue dismissing the anomalies that kept popping up in this business by calling them non-substantive?

“There was another set,” Yune said. “They were also blurred—too blurred for the computer tech to even bother sending them out to the FBI’s national database—but he had all the stray prints from the van, and those other prints on the buckle . . . see what you think.”