'Anybody question Moon about the sheriff's murder?' I asked.
'I don't see him as a strong suspect.'
'Moon was in the old county prison when the sheriff was a roadbull,' I said. Marvin was tilted back in his swivel chair.
The connections didn't come together in his face. 'Moon said a couple of guards sodomized him on an oil barrel. He said they did it to him every Sunday morning.'
'You're saying the sheriff was a pervert?'
'I don't know anything he wasn't.'
'If Moon's got a hard-on for the whole county, why does he wait forty years to come back and do a number on us? I think the sheriff was killed for other reasons,' Marvin said.
'Some people might call an ax across the face an indicator of revenge.'
But I could tell he was thinking of something else. He took off his glasses and polished the lenses with a piece of Kleenex. He fitted them back on his nose, his face blank, as though debating whether to expose the feelings he usually kept stored in a private box. His hair was so neat it looked like fine strands of metal on his head.
'I couldn't sleep last night,' he said. 'What those guys tried to do to you… I'd like to catch up with them on a personal basis.'
'It's not your style, Marvin.'
'You don't get it. I'm a law officer in a county that's probably run by the Dixie Mafia. I just can't prove it.'
I walked back across the street to the office and took the mail out of the box in the first-floor foyer. The foyer was cool and made of stucco and tile and decorated with earthen jars planted with hibiscus. Mixed in with the letters and circulars was a brown envelope with no postage, addressed to me in pencil.
For some reason—its soiled surfaces, the broken lettering, a smear of dried food where the seal had been licked—it felt almost obscene in my hand. I didn't open it until I was inside my office, as though my ignoring it would transform it into simply another piece of crank mail written by a dissatisfied client or a convict who thought his personal story was worth millions in movie rights. Then I cracked it across the top with my finger, the way you peel back a rotted bandage.
Inside was a Polaroid picture of Pete on the playground at the Catholic elementary school. The penciled page ripped out of a cheap notebook read: 'This was took this morning. When we get finished carving on him, his parts will fit in your mailbox.'
I called the principal at the school. She was a classic administrator; she did not want to hear about problems and viewed those who brought them to her as conspirators who manufactured situations to ruin her day.
'I just saw Pete. He's in the lunchroom,' she said.
'I'll pick him up at three. Don't let him walk home,' I said.
'What's wrong?'
'Some people might try to hurt him.'
'What's going on here, Mr Holland?'
'I'm not sure.'
'I'm aware you pay his tuition and you're concerned for his welfare, but we have other children here as well. This sounds like a personal matter of some kind.'
'I'll call you back,' I said. I hung up and punched in Temple Carrol's number.
'We need to throw a net over Roy Devins,' I said.
'What happened?'
I told her about the visit of the three men to my house the previous night.
'They knew about my rope-dragging Devins out of the bar. Devins was in the sack with Pete's mother. She's a drunk and gets mixed up with bikers and dopers sometimes.'
'You told this to Marvin?'
'What's he going to do? Half the cops in the county are on a pad. He's lucky he hasn't been assassinated.'