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simple tale. Furthermore, he understood that good policemen could read your eyes to detect whether you were telling falsehoods and that when you looked away from them, you made them suspicious. He met their eyes directly and did not once look away, because he knew that
his
eyes were harder to meet than theirs. They would worry about him seeing the pity in their eyes and would be concerned that they might glance at the ravaged side of his face and be caught staring at his scars. Therefore, they would spend more timelooking at their notepads as they took down the basics of his statement, would not allow themselves to doubt anything he said, and in the morning would hold their own children tighter than usual.
    Howie was lying, and he loathed having to lie, in part because he didn’t want to be a liar like his father. He told himself that his falsehoods were not meant to spare himself, that they were intended instead to spare his mother and sister, but maybe that was mostly—rather than entirely—true.
    Later, after the police left, Howie found the square of glass that Blackwood cut from the back door, where it had been set aside on the porch. He cracked it into pieces underfoot and put the fragments on the kitchen floor with a stone. He could not—and didn’t need to—explain the divot in the front-door frame where the throwing knife had embedded after missing his head by two inches.

5
    RON BLEEKER WASN’T REPORTED MISSING BY his parents until the following morning, because they had been out drinking all evening at a place called the Drop Inn. When they got home, past midnight, they assumed their son must be safe in his bed. Blackwood had left no other trace of his stay in the old Boswell building—not the bag of trash from their lunch, not the unfinished chips or cookies, not the torn photos of the Dugley house and garage—but he did leave the alley door ajar, evidently by intention. Mere hours after a missing-child alert hit the wire, a patrolman spotted the door and moments later found the body, which was not pinned to the wall but crumpled on the floor. The murder weapon was not left behind. The victim’s ears were found clenched in his fists, which the killer had tied shut using twine. With each ear was a black feather, though no one knew why.
    They buried Bleeker not in the cemetery beside St. Anthony’s but in a public graveyard. Carved on his headstone, in addition to the name and dates, were three lines: OUR BELOVED SON / TOO GOOD FOR THIS WORLD / NOW AN ANGEL IN HEAVEN . A photograph of the deceased had been transferred to aceramic oval embedded in the dark-gray granite; his handsome face and sweet smile were much like the faces and smiles of angels in movies.
    Two months after the funeral, when Howie rode his bike to the graveyard shortly after dawn, a big bouquet of plastic flowers stood in the recessed urn in the base of the headstone; sun and weather had faded them. Bird crap streaked the granite, and the grass close around the base of the stone needed to be hand-trimmed. Howie came to say that he was sorry, that he wouldn’t have left Bleeker to his fate if he had known that Blackwood intended something worse than laying down new rules. He should have said his piece the moment he dropped to his knees on the grass, but at first embarrassment and guilt knotted his tongue. He knelt there in silence long enough for the engraved words and the ceramic photograph and the faded plastic flowers and the bird crap to work on him, which they did, worked like gasoline residue in a third-degree burn long after the flames were out. By the time that he could speak, he
wouldn’t
because he was unable to tolerate the falseness of it all, just could not
stand
the falseness—whether it was deception or delusion—that was everywhere here. He had never seen Bleeker smile like that, not innocently like that. ANGEL wasn’t true. The bird crap and the faded plastic flowers and the untended grass put the lie to BELOVED .