The Lesson of Her Death

him this trick. Corde Senior made the boy practice it with his hand extended over an old well on the back of the family property. If he dropped a coin,
plop
, that was that. And his father had made him use his own two bits. Corde had seen a lot on TV recently about men’s relations with their fathers and he thought there was something significant about the way his father had taught him this skill. He had learned a few other things from his old man: His posture. A loathing of second mortgages. An early love of huntingand fishing and a more recent fear of the mind’s wasting before the body. That was about all.
    Corde was real good at the coin trick.
    He entered the lunchroom, which was the only meeting place in the town building large enough to hold five brawny men sitting—aside from the main meeting room, which was currently occupied by the New Lebanon Sesquicentennial Celebration Committee.
    He nodded to the men around the chipped fiber-board table: Jim Slocum, T.T. Ebbans—the lean, ex-Marine felony investigator from the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department—and New Lebanon Deputy Lance Miller. At the far end of the table, surrounded by two empty chairs, was Wynton Kresge. Corde thought,
Antsy as a tethered retriever on the first day of season
.
    He dropped the quarter into his pants pocket and stood in front of a row of vending machines. He was about to speak when Steve Ribbon walked in. Corde nodded to him and leaned back against the Coke machine.
    “Howdy, Bill. Just want to say a few words to the troops about this case, you don’t mind.” The sheriff’s ruddy face looked out over the men as if he were addressing a crowd of a thousand. Ribbon scrutinized Wynton Kresge who represented two oddities in this office—he was black and he wore a suit. Kresge took the look for a moment, realized he was being asked a question then said, “I’m from the college.”
    “Oh. Well.” Ribbon’s voice enlarged to encompass everyone. “I just want to put my two cents in. You all are the task force on this thing. Now Bill’s in charge.” He looked at Ebbans. “Which I think is what Sheriff Ellison’s agreeable to.”
    “Yessir,” said Ebbans. “I’m just a hired hand here.”
    “Now between all of you,” Ribbon continued, “you got a flatbed full of investigating experience.” His burdened gray eyes rose to Corde’s. “And I’m busier’n a dog in a fire hydrant factory.…”
    Corde nodded sympathetically.
You’re running and there’s an election come November
.
    “So I can’t get as involved in the case as I’d like. But keep remembering, people’re going to be watching us. They’re going to be real curious how we do on this one so I want us to be pretty, you know, aggressive. Now I’ve been doing some research and I’m pretty bothered by this cult business.”
    Corde was silent. It was Ebbans who asked, “Cult?”
    “What I want you to do is first come up with a profile of our killer.”
    Jim Slocum said, “In these situations that’s what you always have to do.”
    Wynton Kresge wrote this down.
    “Absolutely,” Ribbon said. “I know we haven’t had any of these kinds of killers here in New Lebanon before but I think it’s important for us to get up to speed. What you have to do with cult murderers is peg them. Find out what makes them tick.”
    Kresge scribbled rapidly. Corde glared at him and he stopped writing.
    Ribbon continued, “Now a profile should include two things. The physical description of our man, one, and what’s going on in his mind, two. Stuff like is he sexually repressed, does he hate his mother, does he have trouble, you know, getting it up, was he beaten as a child.…”
    Corde, who had a well-used NCAVC criminal profiling flowchart tacked up on his wall, nodded solemnly and let the embarrassment for his boss trickle off.
    “Sounds important,” Miller said, and brushed his hand over his excessively short crew cut.
    “Absolutely,” Ribbon said. “I’ve been reading up on investigations like this. One thing that’s troubling is this moon business. Think about it. She was killed on the night of the quarter moon. That could be lunar fixation for you. And this one’s particularly troubling, you know why? Because we’ve got two quarters and a full and a new. So that’s four potential strike windows—”
    “What’s that?” Wynton Kresge asked the question that Corde had been about to.
    Ribbon said patiently, “That’s the entire period when