The Lesson of Her Death

mower, termite-chewed stacks of black firewood, a V-6 engine block sweating under a foggy plastic tarp, rusty tools, four bloated trash bags, bald tires, a garbage can filled with brackish water. The lawn was riddled with crabgrass and bare spots of packed mud. Showing through the scabby white clapboard of the house were patches of milky green from an earlier paint job.
    Three brilliant bursts of color tempered the grim scene—orange-red geraniums in clay pots.
    Inside were T.T. Ebbans, Jim Slocum, Lance Miller and the two county deputies. Charlie Mahoney was not there. On the couch sat Philip and Jamie. Creth Halpern stood over his boy, staring down at him. His arms were crossed and he had an eerie smile on his face. Jane Halpern sat in a chair off to the side of the room. Her eyeswere red and her lips were glisteningly wet. Corde didn’t know much about her. Only that she’d been a thin, pretty cheerleader in the New Lebanon High School class behind his, and she was now a thin, pretty drunk.
    The house smelled bad. Food and mold. He also could smell animal and he vaguely remembered a dog nosing in weeds behind a shed in the backyard. With the door wide open the brilliant outdoor light, which looked unnatural in the dank room, revealed a coat of grime and spheres of dustballs. The windows were mostly shaded. Corde stepped on something hard. He kicked away a small, dried dog turd. He crouched next to Jamie. “You all right, son?”
    The boy looked at him silently with an undiluted hate that made Corde want to weep. He motioned to Ebbans and the two of them stepped outside. “What happened, T.T.? Did you and Mahoney spook Jamie and follow him here?”
    To his credit in Corde’s mind Ebbans held the detective’s eyes and answered honestly. “I’m sorry, Bill. That’s what happened. He just asked to see him for a few minutes by himself and Steve told me to let him. I didn’t know what he had in mind. I swear that.”
    Corde said, “You don’t think Philip did it, do you?”
    “Take a look at what we found.” Ebbans led him to the squad car. Inside was a foot-high stack of porn magazines and violent comic books, also sketchbooks and notebooks. Corde flipped through the crudely drawn pictures of spaceships and monsters, montages of photos cut out of the school yearbook: girls imprisoned in towers and dungeons, chained to walls while snake creatures circled around them. Much of the material had the Naryan insignia hand-printed on it.
    Corde thought of the picture of Sarah, her skirt high over her thighs.
    “He had this incendiary thing hooked up. We opened the drawer where he’d hid all this stuff and it started to set fire to the file cabinet. It blew a fuse before it did any damage. Lance went through the backyard. Inthe barbecue he found some scraps of Jockey shorts the kid’d tried to burn.” Ebbans touched a small plastic bag. “They were stained and it could be semen. Oh, and we also found some pictures of a naked girl. Polaroids.”
    Polaroids
.
    “Jennie?”
    “Can’t tell. It’s a girl’s breasts.”
    “It’s not …” Corde dodged Ebbans’s eyes. “Not a younger girl, is it?”
    Ebbans said, “Not a little girl, no.” He continued, “And I found a pair of muddy boots. I’m doing casts.”
    From the porch Slocum offered, “It all fits the profile. The smut collection, the home situation, everything.”
    Corde ignored this and said to Ebbans, “You didn’t question him by himself, did you? He’s got to have his parents present.”
    “No. I didn’t question him at all. But I’ll tell you, his father’s not going to be much help to the kid. He’s the one sent us out to the barbecue. Told us he saw Philip burning something there the night after the first killing.”
    Corde stared at the pile in the back seat of the car. In the center of Corde’s bulletin board was a sign that he’d sent off for from
National Law Enforcement Monthly
a couple of years ago. The brittle yellow slip of glossy paper read:
Physical evidence is the cornerstone of a case
. He was looking at physical evidence now. Physical evidence that could put two boys in prison for forty years. And one of them was his son.
    Ribbon and Ellison arrived in one of the county’s fancy Furies. The slogan on the side said,
If you drink, do us all a favor. Don’t drive
. Ebbans told them what they’d found.
    Inside Halpern was leaning over his son, who stared straight ahead. “What the hell was going through your