"That's if. "Rettig hadn't spoken in some time.

"Right. That's not until but if. Let's hope at least," Slaughter said.

"Don't wait for a dog or cat that's foaming at the mouth. A symptom like that shows up late," the medical examiner said. "What we're looking for is an attack without a reason. Totally irrational aggression."

Something clicked in Slaughter's mind. "That's funny."

"What?"

"You said the same about those dogs up in the hills."

And everyone became silent.

Too much so, Slaughter realized. It wasn't only them but everything around them. Sure. The men had stopped shooting. They were walking past the barn now, laughing, holstering their weapons as they joked among themselves and came near, rubbing their hands together as they stepped up for a beer.

"Who died?" one of them asked, noticing how somber everyone was.

"We've got a little problem. Did you pick up the empty cartridges?"

They nodded.

"Good. When you get a chance, reload them. We might need them."

And they paused where they were reaching for the beer.

"I have to check the horses," Slaughter said. "Let's take a walk. I'll tell you all about it."

He stepped from the porch. "There isn't much to tell," he heard behind him and saw where Rettig had moved back a little, talking now with Dunlap.

Rettig evidently noticed how Slaughter looked at him. "You're sure it's all right if I talk to him about what happened at the commune."

"Hell, I don't care." You're getting jumpy, Slaughter told himself and walked with the other men to reach the horses.

EIGHT

Rettig watched them go, then again faced Dunlap. "Really. There's not much more to tell." Despite permission to discuss this, he was nonetheless reluctant. He still remembered the secrecy with which the case had been conducted. There had been such trouble in the town, such bad publicity that summer, that the council had arranged for secret sessions to discuss this new development. Parsons had been mayor then, as he still was, and the general agreement had been to keep news about the murder quiet. Otherwise those hippies might come back, and those reporters, and the trouble might begin again. The trial had been delicate, the matter kept within the valley, with some understanding from the nearby towns beyond the mountains, and the valley had gone back to being normal. Even though the state police had jurisdiction in the case, and they were separate from the town, they had nonetheless cooperated with the town, realizing that the valley was related to the town, and Rettig in particular had been warned to keep his mouth shut. Oh, nobody ever said that quite so forcefully, but the implication had been clear, and he was very careful. It was twenty-three years now since he'd thought about the case, but he remembered the way things had been back then, and it was hard for him to break his habit. "Really. Not too much. You figured most of it already."

"But the son? What happened to the son?" Dunlap took his coat off, setting it across a chair on the porch.

"He was fine. I went up with another man and searched the compound. The rest of the men stayed back to get the hippies' version of what had happened. Wheeler had cracked up by then, and they were helping him into a cruiser. We went and-" "Tell me what it looked like."

"Oh, not much. I'd heard too many rumors, and the place seemed ordinary by comparison. Just rows of barracks lined up to form streets. Like in the Army but more like migrant work-camps. Like in the Depression. Pathetic, really. There were gardens by each bunkhouse, dying flowers in them, but the flowers never really had a chance up there. All that shade, the thin air, and the lousy ground. The worst part was the fields they'd tried to plant with corn and beans, tomatoes, stuff like that. They'd put the seed in too late, and a farm crop never does well, even down here in the valley, so I can't imagine why they thought that corn would do well in the mountains. It was awful, all these little stumps of corn that never quite developed, little ears on them, all browned by the early frosts. They had a mess hall, I remember that, crude log tables in there, and they had a kind of officer's command post with a sort of square in front where people must have stood to get their orders, but it was obvious that things weren't going well up there, and I couldn't help wondering what they were going to do when winter hit. Oh, yeah, we found another building that was like a big garage."

"The Corvette."

"What?"

"The red Corvette. The classic 1959 that Quiller drove. You found it?"

"I remember hearing about that. No, we never found it. Oh, we found a van and then a pickup truck. But that was all. No red Corvette. Believe me, I'd remember it."

"Christ, what the hell is going on?"

Rettig stared at him.

"I've done some checking," Dunlap said, "and as far as I can tell, Quiller never sold it. But I know he took it up there. What in God's name did he do with it?"

"You've got me," Rettig said. "All I'm telling you is what I saw. If I'd been looking for that car, I might have found it. But I had my mind on searching for the boy."

"You found him?"

"In a while. It took us quite & while. We checked the buildings and the forest. If I hadn't stopped to take a leak, I maybe never would have found him even then. But I went over by an outhouse, and I found him in a trench. He sure was dirty. I remember that. And scared, although he never said what happened to him in the compound. Mostly he was scared about his father. Even when we brought the boy down to the cruisers, he refused to get in with his father. We were forced to drive them separately."

"And what did Quiller have to say?"

"Excuse me?"

"Quiller."

Rettig shrugged. "Nobody ever saw him."

"What? You searched the compound, and you never saw him?"

"No one did."

"Well, where could he have hidden? Why would he have hidden in the first place?"

"Don't ask me. He might have been out in the forest. I don't see the difference it makes."

"No, I don't either," Dunlap told him, frowning. "But there's something strange about all this, and I wish I understood it."

"Are you getting what you wanted?" a voice interrupted.

Dunlap turned to where Slaughter stood beside the porch, his deputies with him after they had come back from the horses.

"Mostly," Dunlap said. "There are still a few loose ends."

"Well, tie them up. We want you satisfied."

You bastard, Dunlap thought. Putting on this country show for me. You're ten times more sophisticated than you pretend. He glanced at Rettig. "So what about the trial? I never read the end of it."

"Oh, Wheeler was convicted," Rettig said.

Dunlap nodded. Sure, the coverup was just to keep the town safe from another bunch of hippies coming through. If Wheeler had been freed and word had gotten out, there really would have been some trouble then. The town had done the wisest thing.

"His lawyer tried to plead insanity, but people here don't understand that sort of thing," Rettig said. "The charge was manslaughter, extenuating circumstances, and the son was such a prick when he was on the stand, clearly out to get his father, that the jury sympathized with Wheeler, recommending that the judge go easy. Two years was the sentence, and the day the trial was over, Wheeler's son got out of here. The town police had kept a watch on him to make sure he didn't leave before then. Also to protect him. There were plenty of ugly feelings toward him, people angered by the painful choices he had caused, and he just packed his gear and left. Some people figured that he went back to the compound. But I always doubted that. Once his father was released, the father surely would go looking for him again. The kid was scared enough that he would want to run much farther than the compound. He would want to put a lot of miles between him and his father."