I was able to reach up and unlock the door to let everyone in. The police came in first, putting some muscle behind the door so as to move me out of the way, duct-taped to the overturned chair as I was. Their eyes had barely landed on me when they saw Rick at the bottom of the stairs, a much more convincing dead person than I ever was in that same spot, a very long time ago.

They must have thought, at that moment, that whoever’d done that to Rick had been the same person who’d put me in the chair, but gradually, the truth began to emerge. I told them to please check on my wife, in the kitchen, and one officer ran ahead to do just that while another stayed with me, wanting to know who else was in the house, how many hurt.

“There’s one guy out there in the trunk,” I said as the officer cut me out of the chair, “but it may be too late for him. And there’s another one, not hurt, but running around the neighborhood someplace with his hands cuffed behind his back.”

“There’s already a guy here in handcuffs.”

“There’s a second one. It’s a long story.”

Once I was free, I was on my feet and running to the kitchen where Sarah was now standing, and we threw our arms around each other and started to cry. I held on to her for a very long time.

“Mom? Dad?”

It was Paul, calling from out front. The police wouldn’t let him inside. We both ran out to see him and embraced him, so happy that we were all alive, except that Paul had no reason to think that all of us being alive was in any way an extraordinary thing.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “What the hell happened to your face?”

“You’re a hero,” I said, hugging him again. “And you don’t even know it.”

“Huh?”

It was my first time outside of the house since the police had arrived, and it was wild. At least half a dozen police cars, three ambulances, a fire truck, just in case. A couple of SUVs with TV station logos splashed across the sides. And nearly everyone on the street was outside, standing in their yards, gawking. It was the first time I’d ever seen the housecoat lady outside without a hose in her hand.

Trixie approached me tentatively as I stood out there with Paul.

“Oh God,” she whispered. “All hell broke loose.”

“Kinda,” I said. “I need you to get me that ledger.”

She nodded and slipped away. I saw Earl across the street, standing by the back of his pickup. Our eyes met, and he nodded, as if to say “I’m glad you’re okay, man, but if you don’t mind, I’m going to stay on this side of the street while the cops are around.” That was just fine with me.

Sarah grabbed one of the ambulance attendants as he walked past, and said, “My husband’s been hurt.”

I recognized him as the male attendant who’d come to our house during The Backpack Incident. While he might have remembered coming to this address, he made no suggestion that we had met before. My face was too badly bruised and bloodied to be recognizable.

They ended up taking both of us to the hospital. Even though Sarah showed no obvious signs of injury, they wanted to check her out just the same. I told Paul to get in touch with Angie, let her know that we were okay.

“Does she think you’re not okay?” he asked.

And tell her not to worry about going to school today, I said. Get one of the officers to bring you to the hospital to meet us once she shows up, I said.

Turns out all Sarah had were some tape burns on her wrists. Hospital officials would later tell the press that she was “in good condition,” but I knew better. Nobody came out of something like this in good condition. I figured the nightmares would begin that night, and would be with her for a very long time.

The doctors and nurses had a fair bit of work to do on me. I needed stitches in three places on my face, my left eye was puffed up the size of an egg but the color of a prune, and I had an assortment of bruises all over my body from my tangles with Rick and crawling across the floor while still secured to a chair.

The police interviewed us separately. Needless to say, I had a lot more to get off my chest than Sarah, who was still pretty much in the dark, and was kept busy with detectives, including my friend Detective Flint, for a lot longer.

Hours and hours longer.

I started from the beginning. I’d considered, briefly, telling them I’d grabbed Stefanie Knight’s purse by mistake, but knew I’d get caught in a lie somewhere down the road once they turned on the hot lights and brought out the rubber hoses.

I spelled out for them the whole Valley Forest Estates thing. The blackmailing of Carpington, the murder of Spender, how Stefanie was offered up for sexual favors. They’d found Carpington, by the way, sitting down by the edge of Willow Creek, listening to the sound of the water as it flowed by, and when two officers approached him, he turned to them and smiled and said, “It’s beautiful down here, don’t you think? They should never build homes around here.”

The police wanted to know: Did I kill Stefanie Knight?

No, I said.

Did I know who had killed Stefanie Knight?

Not for certain, I said. But my money was on Rick. He certainly had an unlimited capacity for violence.

They told me that his full name was Richard Douglas Knell, that he was thirty-eight, and that while he’d spent much of his life working in construction, he’d also spent some time “inside” (where he did his reading), having kicked in a man’s head outside a bar six years earlier. There was evidence that he’d acted, in some small way, in self-defense, otherwise the sentence would have been longer. He’d come back to work for Don Greenway, who’d been his employer years ago, and Greenway found a way to exploit Rick’s special talents of persuasion.

“He liked snakes,” I said.

My interrogators concurred. But Quincy, alas, was no longer with us. When they popped the trunk of Rick’s car, they found he’d already squeezed the life out of Mr. Benedetto, and was in the process of digesting him. He’d only gotten to his knees, and when the panicked officers saw what they were dealing with, they unloaded several rounds into the snake, trying not to disgrace the body of Mr. Benedetto in the process, although they did nick his shoes. They’d remarked later, privately, that since Mr. Benedetto was already dead, it would have been interesting had they opened the trunk much later. They wondered just how much of the guy the snake would have managed to get down its throat. It would have been something to see, no doubt about it.

Anyone else on my list of suspects? they asked.

Well, there was Greenway, of course. Stefanie had decided, it appeared, to get out of Dodge, and she was leaving with her homemade supply of cash, plus a ledger for possible future blackmail purposes, and the roll of film. It wasn’t clear whether she had the film because she was tired of being used for such seedy purposes, or simply hadn’t gotten around to turning it in to Greenway for developing. I wondered where he normally had his film processed. Mindy’s would do it for you in an hour, $6.99 for twenty-four exposures, another set of prints for two bucks.

I promised to hand over the negatives, still hidden in my Seaview model, and the ledger.

Earl’s name never came up. As far as the police knew, I’d busted into the Valley Forest Estates office alone. I didn’t have to bring Trixie into it, either. The police were left with the impression that I had something of a handcuff fetish. Later, when we compared notes about what we’d been asked, Sarah said to me, “When did you switch from sci-fi modeling to handcuff collecting?”

When the police finally decided to let me go home, with the proviso that they would be wanting to talk to me again, probably several times, I said to them, almost as an afterthought:

“You might also want to take a look in Carpington’s and Greenway’s cars. I don’t think there’s any snakes in them. They’re out behind the Valley Forest Estates offices. You never know, you might find some interesting things in there.”