Bad Men

And these were only the enterprises that produced a profit, for Moloch had his hobbies too. He had more in common with the would-be rapist Otis Barger than might once have seemed possible, except he picked his targets more carefully, from the ranks of whores and addicts and lost souls, and there was never a risk of them talking, because when he was finished with them, he disposed of their remains in forests and mountain bogs. Moloch’s peculiarity-one, if the truth be known, of many-was his disinclination to have vaginal sex with his victims.

After all, he did not wish to be unfaithful to his wife.

Yet even if she had known all of this at the time, had recognized the unsuspected depths of her husband’s degeneracy, Marianne would still have acted as she did, independently and without making a formal approach to the authorities. She would still have contacted Karen. She would still have set in motion her escape.

She would still have told the police of the details of the bank job.

She called them shortly after she had retrieved the cash from the hollow beneath the shed floor and placed it in the trunk of her car, alongside the two small bags that represented all of the possessions she was prepared to take with her. She planned to drive to the rendezvous point, meet Karen, then head on to the bus station and abandon her car there. From there, she would pay cash for two tickets to three different destinations, each bought at a separate window. She would travel on to only one of them, New York, and there she would buy three more tickets to three different cities, and again head to only one of them. It seemed like a good plan.

She strapped her son into the baby seat, then drove to the mall and parked by the pay phone. She lifted the boy out and carried him, still sleeping, to the phone. From there she dialed the dispatcher at the Cumberland PD and asked to be put through to Detective Cesar Aponte. She had read his name in a newspaper one week earlier, when he was quoted during an investigation into a domestic assault case that had left a woman fighting for her life. If he was not on duty, she had three other names, all taken from the newspapers.

There was a pause, then a man’s voice came on the line. “Detective Aponte speaking.”

She took a breath, and began:

“There will be a bank robbery today at four P.M. at a First United in Cumberland. The man leading the robbery is named Edward Moloch. He lives at…”

Using RACAL, the call was traced back to the pay phone at the mall. By the time the local cruiser arrived, Marianne was gone, and nobody could recall what the woman who had made the call looked like. The only thing that the old woman behind the counter at the Beanie Baby Boutique could remember was that she had an infant boy asleep on her shoulder. Stuck behind the pay phone was an envelope, just as Marianne had told them there would be. It contained Moloch’s various false IDs and some, but not all, of the material from the attic relating to what she believed were his past crimes. Most of it remained in the house.

By then, Marianne had arrived at the meeting place, a disused gas station half a mile outside town. She was five minutes late. There was no sign of Karen’s car, and for a moment she panicked, fearing that she had been abandoned. Then Karen appeared from the back of the lot, waving her around. She drove and parked beside a beat-up Oldsmobile.

She got out of the car and saw that Karen had a manila envelope in her hand.

“You’ve got it? You’ve got it all?”

“You’ve got my money?”

Marianne popped the trunk. The black knapsack she had taken was zippered closed. When she opened it, dead presidents blinked in the bright sunlight. Ten of the sealed bundles had been opened, then rebound. Marianne handed them to Karen.

“Fifty thousand. I counted it this morning.”

“I trust you.”

She handed over the envelope. Marianne slit it with her thumbnail.

“Don’t you trust me?”

“If I didn’t trust you, do you think I’d be opening the trunk in front of you?”

“I guess not.”

She examined the passport, the driver’s license, the card bearing her social security number. She was now Marianne Elliot instead of Marian Moloch. Her son’s name, according to his new birth certificate, was Daniel. Where his father’s name should have been, the word “Unknown” had been written.

“You’ve left me with my own first name, almost.”

“You’ve never done this before. The first thing that will give you away is your failure to answer to your new name. It will arouse suspicion and attract attention to you. Marianne is close enough to your given name for you to avoid that problem.”

“And Danny’s father?” She had asked Karen to give her son the name Daniel. It was the name that she had always wanted for him, but Moloch had given him his own name, Edward. Now he was Daniel. In her mind, he had always been Daniel.

“You get asked, his name was Lee Server, and he’s dead. In there is an obituary for Server. It will tell you all you need to know about him.”