The Lesson of Her Death

he’d been assigned to a month of speed-trap duty out in the unincorporated portions of Harrison County. Corde told him they couldn’t all be glamour assignments.
    “S’hardly fair,” Kresge had muttered. Sitting on Corde’s desk in the New Lebanon Sheriff’s Department he was now looking over the felony investigation report. “Gilchrist flew back here the day before Jennie was killed.…” He was speaking to himself, picturing it. “He bought a new ticket under a different name.”
    “We should’ve checked passengers, IDs and forms of payment. The information was there.”
    Kresge said, “Seems like you can’t think of everything.”
    Corde thought for a moment. “True, you can’t. But you have to.”
    “Flew back all the way from San Francisco?” Kresge mused.
    Corde continued, “And he just stayed in New Lebanon. He rented that house in the woods, the place we found him in. He rented it for a month, laying low. When he called people he just told them he was calling from San Francisco and they believed him.”
    “How’d you find that out?”
    “I didn’t
find
it out. I figured it out. From what he told me. The best source of information on a murder is the perpetrator. Remember that.”
    “Well, I will.”
    “I think he was going to stay there for a little while then reappear like he’d come back from the conference. But that first morning he must’ve seen Sarah in the woods. He decided to use her to get to me. Her and Jamie too.”
    “How?”
    “His threats against Sarah might’ve stopped me. Or if anything’d happened to the kids, I would’ve been in no shape to keep going. Remember, everybody else was looking for the Moon Killer. T.T. Ebbans and me—and you too—were looking for somebody like Gilchrist. He knew that. I was the one he had to stop. Hardly Ribbon.”
    “Or Werewolf Slocum,” Kresge whispered. “When you were at the house, where you shot him, he said he had Sarah. Why’d he say that?”
    Corde grimaced. “To do just what he did: get the advantage on me. I didn’t play it too smart. It never occurred to me that she’d gotten away. I walked in and asked first off where she was. That gave him something on me and he used it pretty damn well considering he was making it up as he went along. He was playing with me. He got me pretty riled then calmed me down tellingme that Sarah was safe and telling me why he killed Jenny. Put me off my guard.”
    “Who’s this Breck fellow?” Kresge looked at the report.
    Now there’s a question for you
.
    “I just had me a talk with him. He was Sarah’s tutor. That’s all he was. Breck read part of Sarah’s book about this wizard watching our house. He asked her about it and found out she hadn’t made that part up. He figured it was the man leaving the threats and that meant he was the killer.”
    “Why didn’t he tell us before?”
    “He just read the damn thing five minutes before Gilchrist gutted him.”
    And two days after
I
read the same story
.
    “A wrong-time, wrong-place fellow, Breck was,” Kresge offered.
    “You could say.”
    Although there was a lot more to Breck than this, Corde now understood. But that had nothing to do with Gilchrist or the investigation, and it was going to take a lot of thinking and lot more talking before Corde figured out what to do about the Ben Breck situation—if there was anything he
could
do. And the person he had to talk to about it, well, she wasn’t much in the mood for conversation.
    Who’s this Breck fellow?
    “Gilchrist,” Kresge said almost reverently. “He was one step ahead of us the whole time.”
    “He always was. And one step behind us too.”
    “How’d you know he was in that house, Bill? I’ve lived in New Lebanon ten years and never even knew there were houses down there by the river.”
    “It’s tough to explain how the process of deduction works, Wynton.”
    “You mean it’s something you’re born with?”
    “No. You can learn. The more you practice the better you are. Remember that.”
    “Well, I will.”
    Corde stepped out into the backyard of his house and set down his Pabst Blue Ribbon. He inspected the strip of muddy dirt by the dryer exhaust. He shooed off a couple of grackles and bent down low to the ground then went lower, on all fours; it seemed to him the green fuzz hadn’t grown a millimeter in the last weeks. He decided it was crazy to try to grow grass here in this sunless rocky gully between two houses populated by hard-running