"In a day or two, this whole town is going to go crazy all over again. There'll be another big shakeup in the police department."
He snapped his fingers and then pointed at me, grinning with delight. "You bastard, you found those papers. That's it, isn't it?"
"I found the papers," I said.
"You're right! This town is going to lose its mind. How many people did Fontaine kill, anyway? Do you know?"
"It wasn't Fontaine. It's the man who killed Fontaine."
His mouth opened, and his mouth twitched in and out of a grin. He was trying to decide if I were serious.
"You can't be trying to tell me that you think Alan—"
He hadn't even been interested enough to ask about the ballistics report. "Alan didn't shoot Paul Fontaine," I said. "Alan shot me. Someone was hiding between the houses across the street. I think he must have had some kind of assault rifle. Alan, you, me—we had nothing to do with it at all. He was already there by the time we got to the house. He was with Fontaine in the ghetto. Maybe he even saw him call me here. He probably followed him to the house."
"So the guy in Ohio identified the wrong man?"
"No, he identified the right one. I just didn't understand what he was doing."
John pressed a palm to his cheek and regarded me without speaking for a couple of seconds. "I don't suppose I have to know the whole story," he finally said.
"No, it's not important now. And I never saw you today, and you never saw me. Nothing I tell you, nothing you tell me, ever leaves this house. I want you to understand that."
He nodded, a little puzzled about the notion of his telling me anything, but eager enough to grasp what he thought was the main point. "Okay. So who was it?"
"Michael Hogan," I said. "The person you knew as Franklin Bachelor changed his name to Michael Hogan. Right now, he's lying dead on the floor of the Beldame Oriental with a gun in his hand and the words BLUE ROSE written beside his body. In black marker."
John took in my words avidly, nodding slowly and appreciatively.
"Isobel Archer is going to wangle her way inside the theater and find his body. A couple of days from now, she and a few other people, including the FBI, will get photocopies of the notes he took on his killings. About half of them are handwritten, and there won't be any doubt that Hogan wrote them."
"Did you kill him?"
"Look, John," I said. "If I killed a detective in Millhaven, I should never tell anyone about it. Right? But I want you to understand that everything we say here is only between us. It'll never leave this room. So the answer is yes. I shot him."
"Wow." John was absolutely glowing at me. "That's amazing—you're fantastic. The whole story is going to come out."
"I don't think you want that," I said. John stared at me, trying to read my thoughts. He slid his leg off the arm of the chair. Whatever he saw in me he didn't like. He had stopped glowing, and now he was trying to look injured and innocent. "Why wouldn't I want everything to come out?"
"Because you murdered your wife," I said.
4
"First, you brought her to the St. Alwyn and stuck a knife in her, but you didn't quite manage to kill her. So when you heard that she was coming out of the coma, you got into her room and finished her off. And of course, you killed Grant Hoffman, too."
He slid down off the arm of the chair into the seat. He was stunned. He wanted me to know that he was stunned. "My God, Tim. You know exactly what happened. You even know why. It was you who came up with Bachelor's name. You put the whole thing together."
"You wanted me to know about Bachelor, didn't you? That's part of the reason you wanted me to come here in the first place. You had no idea he was living here—he was supposed to have come in from out of town after seeing your picture in the paper, killed Hoffman and your wife, and then slipped off into his new identity when things got too hot."
"This is so absurd, it's crazy," John said.
"As soon as I got here, you told me you thought Blue Rose was an old soldier. And you had worked out this wonderful story about what happened when you got to Bachelor's camp in Darlac Province. It was a good story, but it left out some important details."
"I never wanted to talk about that," he said.
"You made me work it out of you. You kept dropping hints."
"Hints." He shook his head sadly.
"Let's talk about what really happened in Darlac Province," I said.
"Why don't you just rave, and when you're finished raving, why don't you get out of here and leave me alone?"
"You shared an encampment with another Green Beret named Bullock. Bullock and his A team went out one day and never came back. You went out and found their bodies tied to trees and mutilated. Their tongues had been cut out."
"I told you that," John said.
"You didn't think the VC had killed them. You thought Bachelor had done it. And when you saw Bullock's ghost, you were positive. You were where you thought he was all the time —you were at the point where you could see through the world."
"That's where I was," he said. "But I don't think that you've ever been there."
"Maybe not, John. But the important thing is that you felt betrayed—and you were right. So you wanted to do what you thought Bachelor would do."
"You better know what you're talking about," John said. "You better not be throwing out guesses."
"Bachelor had already escaped by the time you got there. So you burned his camp to the ground. Then you systematically killed everyone who had been left behind, all of Bachelor's followers who were too young, too old, or too feeble to go with him. How did you do it? One an hour, one every two hours? At the end, you killed his child—put him on the ground and cut him in half with your bayonet. Then you killed his wife. At the end, you hacked her up and put her in the communal pot and ate some of her flesh. You even cleaned her skull. You were being Bachelor, weren't you?"
He glowered at me, working his jaws. I saw that held-down anger surge into his eyes, but this time he did not try to conceal it. "You don't really have the right to talk about this, you know. It doesn't belong to you. It belongs to people like us."
"But I'm not wrong, am I?"
"That's not really relevant," John said. "Nothing you say is really relevant."
"But it isn't wrong," I said.
John threw up his hands. "Look, even if all this happened, which no one in the normal world would believe, because they could not even begin to comprehend it, it just gives Bachelor more reason to want revenge on me."
"Bachelor never worked that way," I said. "He couldn't. You were right about him—he was always across the border, and every human concern but survival was meaningless to him. After Lang Vo, he went through three or four different identities. By the time he spent twelve years calling himself Michael Hogan, all he cared about Franklin Bachelor was that the world should keep thinking he was dead."
"What you're saying just proves that he killed my wife. If you don't see that, I can't even talk to you."
"He didn't kill her," I said. "He beat her up. Or he had Billy Ritz beat her up. It amounts to the same thing."
"Now I know you're crazy." John threw back his head and growled at the ceiling. His face was starting to get red. "I told you. I hit her. It was the end of my marriage." He lowered his head and looked at me with spurious pity. "Why in the world would Billy Ritz beat up my wife?"
"To slow her down," I said. "Or stop her altogether, without killing her."