The Charlie Parker Collection 1-4

Every Dead Thing, Dark Hollow, The Killing Kind, White Road

John Connolly

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © John Connolly 2013

The right of John Connolly to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 444 77904 2

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

CONTENTS

Title

Copyright

About the Author

Also by John Connolly

Every Dead Thing

Dark Hollow

The Killing Kind

The White Road

Also by John Connolly

The Charlie Parker Stories

Every Dead Thing

Dark Hollow

The Killing Kind

The White Road

The Reflecting Eye (Novella in the Nocturnes Collection)

The Black Angel

The Unquiet

The Reapers

The Lovers

The Whisperers

The Burning Soul

The Wrath of Angels

Other Works

Bad Men

The Book of Lost Things

Short Stories

Nocturnes

The Samuel Johnson Stories (For Young Adults)

The Gates

Hell’s Bells

Non-Fiction (as editor, with Declan Burke)

Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels

To find out about these and future titles, visit www.johnconnollybooks.com

About the Author

John Connolly was born in Dublin in 1968. His debut – EVERY DEAD THING – swiftly launched him right into the front rank of thriller writers, and all his subsequent novels have been Sunday Times bestsellers. He is the first non-American writer to win the US Shamus award. In 2007 he was awarded the Irish Post Award for Literature. He keeps a website at www.johnconnollybooks.com and can be found on Facebook and twitter.com/JohnConnolly

EVERY DEAD THING

John Connolly

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in 1999 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © 1999 by John Connolly

The right of John Connolly to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 978 1 84456 838 3

Book ISBN 978 1 444 70468 6

Hodder and Stoughton

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

Part One

I am every dead thing . . . I am re-begot

Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.

John Donne, ‘A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day’

Prologue

It is cold in the car, cold as the grave. I prefer to leave the a/c on full, to let the falling temperature keep me alert. The volume on the radio is low but I can still hear a tune, vaguely insistent over the sound of the engine. It’s early REM, something about shoulders and rain. I’ve left Cornwall Bridge about eight miles behind and soon I’ll be entering South Canaan, then Canaan itself, before crossing the state line into Massachusetts. Ahead of me, the bright sun is fading as day bleeds slowly into night.

The patrol car arrived first on the night they died, shedding red light into the darkness. Two patrolmen entered the house, quickly yet cautiously, aware that they were responding to a call from one of their own, a policeman who had become a victim instead of the resort of victims.

I sat in the hallway with my head in my hands as they entered the kitchen of our Brooklyn home and glimpsed the remains of my wife and child. I watched as one conducted a brief search of the upstairs rooms while the other checked the living room, the dining room, all the time the kitchen calling them back, demanding that they bear witness.

I listened as they radioed for the Major Crime Scene Unit, informing them of a probable double homicide. I could hear the shock in their voices, yet they tried to communicate what they had seen as dispassionately as they could, like good cops should. Maybe, even then, they suspected me. They were policemen and they, more than anyone else, knew what people were capable of doing, even one of their own.

And so they remained silent, one by the car and the other in the hallway beside me, until the detectives pulled up outside, the ambulance following, and they entered our home, the neighbours already gathering on their stoops, at their gates, some moving closer to find out what had happened, what could have been visited on the young couple beyond, the couple with the little blonde girl.

‘Bird?’ I ran my hands over my eyes as I recognised the voice. A sob shuddered through my system. Walter Cole stood over me, McGee further back, his face bathed by the flashes of the patrol-car lights but still pale, shaken by what he had seen. Outside there was the sound of more cars pulling up. An EMT arrived at the door, distracting Cole’s attention from me. ‘The medical technician’s here,’ said one of the patrolmen, as the thin, whey-faced young man stood by. Cole nodded and gestured towards the kitchen.

‘Birdman,’ Cole repeated, this time with greater urgency and a harder tone to his voice. ‘Do you want to tell me what happened here?’

I pull into the parking lot in front of the flower shop. There is a light breeze blowing and my coat tails play at my legs like the hands of children. Inside, the store is cool, cooler than it should be, and redolent with the scent of roses. Roses never go out of style, or season.

A man is bending down, carefully checking the thick, waxy leaves of a small, green plant. He rises up slowly and painfully as I enter.

‘Evening,’ he says. ‘Help you?’

‘I’d like some of those roses. Give me a dozen. No, better make it two dozen.’

‘Two dozen roses, yessir.’ He is heavy-set and bald, maybe in his early sixties. He walks stiffly, hardly bending his knees. The joints of his fingers are swollen with arthritis.

‘Air-conditioning is playing up,’ he says. As he passes by the ancient control unit on the wall, he adjusts a switch. Nothing happens.

The store is old, with a long, glass-fronted hot-house along the far wall. He opens the door and begins lifting roses carefully from a bucket inside. When he has counted twenty-four, he closes the door again and lays them on a sheet of plastic on the counter.

‘Gift wrap ’em for ya?’

‘No. Plastic is fine.’

He looks at me for a moment and I can almost hear the tumblers fall as the process of recognition begins.

‘Do I know you from someplace?’

In the city, they have short memories. Further out, the memories last longer.

Supplemental Crime Report

NYPD

Case Number: 96–12–1806

Offence:

Homicide

Victim:

Susan Parker, W/F

Jennifer Parker, W/F

Location:

1219 Hobart Street, kitchen

Date:

12 Dec 1996  Time: Around 2130 hrs

Means:

Stabbing

Weapon:

Edged weapon, possibly knife (not found)

Reporting Officer:

Walter Cole, Detective Sergeant

Details:

On 13 December 1996, I went to 1219 Hobart Street in response to a request by Officer Gerald Kersh for detectives to work a reported homicide.

Complainant Detective Second Grade Charles Parker stated he left house at 1900 hrs following argument with wife, Susan Parker. Went to Tom’s Oak tavern and remained there until around 0130 hrs on December 13th. Entered house through front door and found furniture in hallway disturbed. Entered kitchen and found wife and daughter. Stated that wife was tied to kitchen chair but daughter’s body appeared to have been moved from adjacent chair and arranged over mother’s body. Called police at 0155 hrs and waited at scene.

Victims, identified to me by Charles Parker as Susan Parker (wife, 33 years old) and Jennifer Parker (daughter, 3 years old), were in kitchen. Susan Parker was tied to a kitchen chair in centre of floor facing door. A second chair was placed beside it, with some ropes still attached to rear struts. Jennifer Parker was lying across her mother, face up.

Susan Parker was barefoot and wearing blue jeans and white blouse. Blouse was ripped and had been pulled down to her waist, exposing breasts. Jeans and underwear had been pulled down to her calves. Jennifer Parker was barefoot, wearing a white nightdress with blue flower pattern.

I directed Crime Scene Technician Annie Minghella to make a full investigation. After victims were confirmed dead by Medical Examiner Clarence Hall and released, I accompanied bodies to hospital. I observed Dr Anthony Loeb as he used rape kit and turned it over to me. I collected following items of evidence:

96–12–1806–M1: white blouse from body of Susan Parker (Victim No. 1)

96–12–1806–M2: blue denim jeans from body of Victim 1

96–12–1806–M3: blue cotton underwear from body of Victim 1

96–12–1806–M4: combings from pubic hair of Victim 1

96–12–1806–M5: washings from vagina of Victim 1

96–12–1806–M6: scrapings from under Victim 1’s fingernails, right hand

96–12–1806–M7: scrapings from under Victim 1’s fingernails, left hand

96–12–1806–M8: combings from Victim 1’s hair, right front

96–12–1806–M9: combings from Victim 1’s hair, left front

96–12–1806–M10: combings from Victim 1’s hair, right rear

96–12–1806–M11: combings from Victim 1’s hair, left rear.

96–12–1806–M12: white/blue cotton nightdress from body of Jennifer Parker (Victim No. 2)

96–12–1806–M13: washings from vagina of Victim 2

96–12–1806–M14: scrapings from under Victim 2’s fingernails, right hand

96–12–1806–M15: scrapings from under Victim 2’s fingernails, left hand

96–12–1806–M16: combings from Victim 2’s hair, right front

96–12–1806–M17: combings from Victim 2’s hair, left front

96–12–1806–M18: combings from Victim 2’s hair, right rear

96–12–1806–M19: combings from Victim 2’s hair, left rear.

It had been another bitter argument, made worse by the fact that it followed our lovemaking. The embers of previous fights were stoked back into glowing life: my drinking, my neglect of Jenny, my bouts of bitterness and self-pity. When I stormed from the house, Susan’s cries followed me into the cold night air.

It was a twenty-minute walk to the bar. When the first shot of Wild Turkey hit my stomach the tension dissipated from my body and I relaxed into the familiar routine of the drunk: angry, then maudlin, sorrowful, remorseful, resentful. By the time I left the bar only the hard-core remained, a chorus of drunks and sots battling with Van Halen on the juke-box. I stumbled at the door and fell down the steps outside, barking my knees painfully on the gravel at their base.

And then I stumbled home, sick and nauseous, cars swerving wildly to avoid me as I swayed on to the road, the faces of the drivers wide with alarm and anger.

I fumbled for my keys as I arrived at the door and scraped the white paint beneath the lock as I struggled to insert the key. There were a lot of scrapes beneath the lock.

I knew something was wrong as soon as I opened the front door and stepped into the hall. When I had left, the house had been warm, the heating on full blast because Jennifer especially felt the winter cold. She was a beautiful but fragile child, as delicate as a china vase. Now the house was as cold as the night outside, as cold as the grave. A mahogany flower-stand lay fallen on the carpet, the flower-pot broken in two pieces amid its own soil. The roots of the poinsettia it had contained were exposed and ugly.

I called Susan’s name once, then again, louder this time. Already the drunken haze was clearing and I had my foot on the first step of the stairs to the bedrooms when I heard the back door bang against the sink unit in the kitchen. Instinctively I reached for my Colt DE but it lay upstairs on my desk, upstairs where I had discarded it before facing Susan and another chapter in the story of our dying marriage. I cursed myself then. Later, it would come to symbolise all of my failure, all of my regrets.

I moved cautiously towards the kitchen, the tips of my fingers glancing against the cold wall on my left. The kitchen door was almost closed and I edged it open slowly with my hand. ‘Susie?’ I called as I stepped into the kitchen. My foot slid gently on something sticky and wet. I looked down and I was in Hell.

In the florist’s, the old man’s eyes are narrowed in puzzlement. He shakes his finger good-naturedly in front of me.

‘I’m sure I know you from someplace.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You from around here? Canaan, maybe? Monterey? Otis?’

‘No. Someplace else.’ I give him a look that tells him this is a line of inquiry he doesn’t want to pursue and I can see him backing off. I am about to use my credit card but decide not to. Instead, I count out the cash from my wallet and lay it on the counter.

‘Someplace else,’ he says, nodding as if it has some deep, inner meaning for him. ‘Must be a big place. I meet a lot of fellers from there.’

But I am already leaving the store. As I pull away, I can see him at the window, staring after me. Behind me, water drips gently from the rose stems and pools on the floor.

Supplemental Crime Report Contd.

Case Number: 96–12–1806

Susan Parker was seated in a pine kitchen chair, facing north towards the kitchen door. Top of the head was ten feet, seven inches from north wall and six feet three inches from east wall. Her arms were pulled behind her back and . . .

tied to the bars at the back of the chair with thin cord. Each foot was in turn tied to a leg of the chair, and I thought her face, mostly concealed by her hair, seemed so awash with blood that no skin could be seen. Her head hung back so that her throat gaped open like a second mouth caught in a silent, dark-red scream. Our daughter lay splayed across Susan, one arm hanging between her mother’s legs.

The room was red around them, like the stage of some terrible revenger’s tragedy where blood was echoed with blood. It stained the ceiling and the walls as if the house itself had been mortally wounded. It lay thick and heavy on the floor and seemed to swallow my reflection in a scarlet darkness.

Susan Parker’s nose had been broken. Injury was consistent with impact against wall or floor. Bloodstain on wall near kitchen door contained fragments of bone, nasal hair and mucus . . .

Susan had tried to run, to get help for our daughter and herself, but she had made it no further than the door. Then he had caught her, had grabbed her by the hair and smashed her against the wall before dragging her, bleeding and in pain, back to the chair and to her death.

Jennifer Parker was stretched, facing upwards, across her mother’s thighs, and a second pine kitchen chair was positioned beside that of her mother. Cord wrapped around the back of the chair matched marks on Jennifer Parker’s wrists and ankles.

There was not so much blood around Jenny, but her nightdress was stained by the flow from the deep cut in her throat. She faced the door, her hair hanging forward, obscuring her face, some strands sticking to the blood on her chest, the toes of her naked feet dangling above the tiled floor. I could only look at her for a moment because Susan drew my eyes towards her in death as she had in life, even amid the wreckage of our time together.

And as I looked upon her I felt myself slide down the wall and a wail, half animal, half child, erupted from deep inside me. I gazed at the beautiful woman who had been my wife, and her bloody, empty sockets seemed to draw me in and envelop me in darkness.

The eyes of both victims had been mutilated, probably with a sharp, scalpel-like blade. There was partial flensing of the chest of Susan Parker. The skin from the clavicle to the navel had been partially removed, pulled back over the right breast and stretched over the right arm.

The moonlight shone through the window behind them, casting a cold glow over the gleaming countertops, the tiled walls, the steel faucets on the sink. It caught Susan’s hair, coated her bare shoulders in silver and shone through parts of the thin membrane of her skin pulled back over her arm like a cloak, a cloak too frail to ward off the cold.

There was considerable mutilation of the genital areas of both victims and

And then he had cut off their faces.

It is darkening rapidly now and the headlights catch the bare branches of trees, the ends of trimmed lawns, clean white mailboxes, a child’s bicycle lying in front of a garage. The wind is stronger now and when I leave the shelter of the trees I can feel it buffeting the car. Now I am heading towards Becket, Washington, the Berkshire Hills. Almost there.

There was no sign of forcible entry. Complete measurements and a sketch of the entire room were noted. Bodies were then released.

Dusting for fingerprints gave the following results:

Kitchen/hall/living room – usable prints later identified as those of Susan Parker (96–12–1806–7), Jennifer Parker (96–12–1806–8) and Charles Parker (96–12–1806–9).

Rear door of house from kitchen – no usable prints; watermarks on surface indicate that door was wiped down. No indication of robbery.

No prints were developed from tests on victims’ skin.

Charles Parker was taken to Homicide and gave statement (attached).

I knew what they were doing as I sat in the interrogation room: I had done it so many times myself. They questioned me as I had questioned others before, using the strange, formal locutions of the police interrogation. ‘What is your recollection as to your next move?’ ‘Do you recall in relation to the bar the disposition of the other drinkers?’ ‘Did you notice the condition as to the lock on the rear door?’ It is an obscure, convoluted jargon, an anticipation of the legalese that clouds any criminal proceedings like smoke in a bar.

When I gave my statement Cole checked with Tom’s and confirmed that I was there when I said I was, that I could not have killed my own wife and child.

Even then, there were whispers. I was questioned again and again about my marriage, about my relations with Susan, about my movements in the weeks coming up to the killings. I stood to gain a considerable sum in insurance from Susan, and I was questioned about that as well.

According to the ME, Susan and Jennifer had been dead for about four hours when I found them. Rigor mortis had already taken hold at their necks and lower jaws, indicating that they had died at around 21.30, maybe a little earlier.

Susan had died from severing of the carotid artery, but Jenny . . . Jenny had died from what was described as a massive release of epinephrine into her system, causing ventricular fibrillation of the heart, and death. Jenny, always a gentle, sensitive child, a child with a traitor-weak heart, had literally died of fright before her killer had a chance to cut her throat. She was dead when her face was taken, said the ME. He could not say the same for Susan. Neither could he tell why Jennifer’s body had been moved after death.

Further reports to follow.

Walter Cole, Detective Sergeant.

I had a drunk’s alibi: while someone stole away my wife and my child I downed bourbon in a bar. But they still come to me in my dreams, sometimes smiling and beautiful as they were in life and sometimes faceless and bloodied as death left them, beckoning me further into a darkness where love has no place and evil hides, adorned with thousands of unseeing eyes and the flayed faces of the dead.

It is dark when I arrive and the gate is closed and locked. The wall is low and I climb it easily. I walk carefully, so as not to tread on memorial stones or flowers, until I stand before them. Even in the darkness, I know where to find them and they, in their turn, can find me.

They come to me sometimes, in the margin between sleeping and waking, when the streets are silent in the dark or as dawn seeps through the gap in the curtains, bathing the room in a dim, slow-growing light. They come to me and I see their shapes in the gloom, my wife and child together, watching me silently, ensanguined in unquiet death. They come to me, their breath in the night breezes that brush my cheek and their fingers in the tree branches tapping on my window. They come to me and I am no longer alone.

Chapter One

The waitress was in her fifties, dressed in a tight black mini-skirt, a white blouse and black high heels. Parts of her spilled out of every item of clothing she wore, making her look as if she had swollen mysteriously some time between dressing and arriving for work. She called me ‘darlin” each time she filled my coffee cup. She didn’t say anything else, which was fine by me.

I had been sitting at the window for over ninety minutes now, watching the brownstone across the street, and the waitress must have been wondering exactly how long I was planning to stay and if I was ever going to pay the check. Outside, the streets of Astoria buzzed with bargain-hunters. I had even read The New York Times from start to finish without nodding off in-between as I passed the time waiting for Fat Ollie Watts to emerge from hiding. My patience was wearing thin.

In moments of weakness, I sometimes considered ditching the New York Times on weekdays and limiting my purchase to the Sunday edition, when I could at least justify buying it on the grounds of bulk. The other option was to begin reading the Post, although then I’d have to start clipping coupons and walking to the store in my bedroom slippers.

I remembered a story I heard about the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and how he approached Bloomingdale’s in the hope of getting its management to advertise in the Post after he took it over in the 1980s. In response, the head of Bloomingdale’s had arched an eyebrow and told him: ‘The problem, Mr Murdoch, is that your readers are our shoplifters.’ I wasn’t a big fan of Bloomingdale’s, but it was a persuasive argument against a subscription to the Post.

Maybe in reacting so badly to the Times that morning I was simply killing the messenger. It had been announced that Hansel McGee, a state Supreme Court judge and, according to some, one of the worst judges in New York, was retiring in December and might be nominated to the board of the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation.

Even seeing McGee’s name in print made me ill. In the 1980s, he had presided over the case of a woman who had been raped when she was nine years old by a fifty-four-year-old man named James Johnson, an attendant in Pelham Bay Park who had convictions for robbery, assault and rape.

McGee overturned a jury award of $3.5 million to the woman with the following words: ‘An innocent child was heinously raped for no reason at all; yet that is one of the risks of living in a modern society.’ At the time, his judgment had seemed callous and an absurd justification for overturning the ruling. Now, seeing his name before me again after what had happened to my family, his views seemed so much more abhorrent, a symptom of the collapse of goodness in the face of evil.

Erasing McGee from my mind, I folded the newspaper neatly, tapped a number on my cellphone and turned my eyes to an upper window of the slightly run-down apartment building opposite. The phone was picked up after three rings and a woman’s voice whispered a cautious hello. It had a sound of cigarettes and booze to it, like a bar door scraping across a dusty floor.

‘Tell your fat asshole boyfriend that I’m on my way to pick him up and he’d better not make me chase him,’ I told her. ‘I’m real tired and I don’t plan on running around in this heat.’ Succinct, that was me. I hung up, left five dollars on the table and stepped out on to the street to wait for Fat Ollie Watts to panic.

The city was in the middle of a hot, humid summer spell, which was due to end the following day with the arrival of thunderstorms and rain. Currently, it was hot enough to allow for T-shirts, chinos and overpriced sunglasses or, if you were unlucky enough to be holding down a responsible job, hot enough to make you sweat like a pig under your suit as soon as you left the a/c behind. There wasn’t even a gust of wind to rearrange the heat.

Two days earlier, a solitary desk fan had struggled to make an impact on the sluggish warmth in the Brooklyn Heights office of Benny Low. Through an open window I could hear Arabic being spoken on Atlantic Avenue and I could smell the cooking scents coming from the Moroccan Star half a block away. Benny was a minor-league bail bondsman who had banked on Fat Ollie staying put until his trial. The fact that he had misjudged Fat Ollie’s faith in the justice system was one reason why Benny continued to be a minor-league bondsman.

The money being offered on Fat Ollie Watts was reasonable and there were things living on the bottom of ponds that were smarter than most bail jumpers. There was a $50,000 bond on Fat Ollie, the result of a misunderstanding between Ollie and the forces of law and order over the precise ownership of a 1993 Chevy Beretta, a 1990 Mercedes 300 SE and a number of well-appointed sports vehicles, all of which had come into Ollie’s possession by illegal means.

Fat Ollie’s day started to go downhill when an eagle-eyed patrolman, familiar with Ollie’s reputation as something less than a shining light in the darkness of a lawless world, spotted the Chevy under a tarpaulin and called for a check on the plates.

They were false and Ollie was raided, arrested and questioned. He kept his mouth shut but packed a bag and headed for the hills as soon as he made bail in an effort to avoid further questions about who had placed the cars in his care. That source was reputed to be Salvatore ‘Sonny’ Ferrera, the son of a prominent capo. There had been rumours lately that relations between father and son had deteriorated in recent weeks, but nobody was saying why.

‘Fuckin’ goomba stuff,’ as Benny Low had put it that day in his office.

‘Anything to do with Fat Ollie?’

‘Fuck do I know? You want to call Ferrera and ask?’

I looked at Benny Low. He was completely bald and had been since his early twenties, as far as I knew. His glabrous skull glistened with tiny beads of perspiration. His cheeks were ruddy and flesh hung from his chin and jowls like melted wax. His tiny office, located above a halal store, smelt of sweat and mould. I wasn’t even sure why I had said I would take the job. I had money: insurance money, money from the sale of the house, money from what had once been a shared account, even some cash from my retirement fund, and Benny Low’s money wasn’t going to make me happier. Maybe it was just something to do.

Benny Low swallowed once, loudly. ‘What? Why are you lookin’ at me like that?’

‘You know me, Benny, don’t you?’

‘Fuck does that mean? Course I know you. You want a reference? What?’ He laughed half-heartedly, spreading his pudgy hands wide as if in supplication. ‘What?’ he said, again. His voice faltered and, for the first time, he looked scared. I knew that people had been talking about me in the months since the deaths, talking about things I had done, things I might have done. The look in Benny Low’s eyes told me that he had heard about them, too, and believed that they could be true.

Something about Fat Ollie’s flight just didn’t sit right. It wouldn’t be the first time that Ollie had faced a judge on a stolen vehicles rap, although the suspected connection to the Ferreras had forced the bond up on this occasion. Ollie had a good lawyer to rely on, otherwise his only connection to the automobile industry would have come from making license plates on Rikers Island. There was no particular reason for Ollie to run, and no reason why he would risk his life by fingering Sonny over something like this.

‘Nothing, Benny. It’s nothing. You hear anything else, you tell me.’

‘Sure, sure,’ said Benny, relaxing again. ‘You’ll be the first to know.’

As I left his office, I heard him mutter under his breath. I couldn’t be sure what he said but I knew what it sounded like. It sounded like Benny Low had just called me a killer like my father.

It had taken me most of the next day to locate Ollie’s current squeeze through some judicious questioning, and another fifty minutes that morning to determine if Ollie was with her through the simple expedient of calling the local Thai food joints and asking them if they had made any deliveries to the address in the last week.

Ollie was a Thai food freak and, like most skips, stuck to his habits even while on the run. People don’t change very much, which usually makes the dumb ones easy to find. They take out subscriptions to the same magazines, eat in the same places, drink the same beers, call the same women, sleep with the same men. After I threatened to call the health inspectors, an Oriental roach motel called the Bangkok Sun House confirmed deliveries to one Monica Mulrane at an address in Astoria, leading to coffee, The New York Times and a phone-call to wake Ollie up.

True to form and dim as a ten-watt bulb, Ollie opened the door of 2317 about four minutes after my call, stuck his head out and then commenced an awkward shambling run down the steps towards the sidewalk. He was an absurd figure, strands of hair slicked across his bald pate, the elasticated waistband of his tan pants stretched across a stomach of awesome size. Monica Mulrane must have loved him a whole lot to stay with him, because he didn’t have money and he sure as hell didn’t have looks. It was strange, but I kind of liked Fat Ollie Watts.

He had just set foot on the sidewalk when a jogger wearing a grey sweatsuit with the hood pulled up appeared at the corner, ran up to Ollie and pumped three shots into him from a silenced pistol. Ollie’s white shirt was suddenly polka-dotted with red and he folded to the ground. The jogger, left-handed, stood over him and shot him once more in the head.

Someone screamed and I saw a brunette, presumably the by now recently bereaved Monica Mulrane, pause at the door of her apartment block before she ran to the sidewalk to kneel beside Ollie, passing her hands over his bald, bloodied head and crying. The jogger was already backing off, bouncing on the balls of his feet like a fighter waiting for the bell. Then he stopped, returned and fired a single shot into the top of the woman’s head. She folded over the body of Ollie Watts, her back shielding his head. Bystanders were already running for cover behind cars, into stores, and the cars on the street ground to a halt.

I was almost across the street, my Smith & Wesson in my hand, when the jogger ran. He kept his head down and moved fast, the gun still held in his left hand. Even though he wore black gloves, he hadn’t dropped the gun at the scene. Either the gun was distinctive or the shooter was dumb. I was banking on the second option.

I was gaining on him when a black Chevy Caprice with tinted windows screeched out from a side-street and stood waiting for him. If I didn’t shoot, he was going to get away. If I did shoot, there would be hell to pay with the cops. I made my choice. He had almost reached the Chevy when I squeezed off two shots, one hitting the door of the car and the second tearing a bloody hole in the right arm of the jogger’s top. He spun, firing two wild shots in my direction as he did so, and I could see his eyes were wide and ultra-bright. The killer was wired.

As he turned towards the Chevy it sped away, the driver spooked by my shots, leaving Fat Ollie Watts’s killer stranded. He fired off another shot, which shattered the window of the car to my left. I could hear people screaming and, in the distance, the wail of approaching sirens.

The jogger sprinted towards an alley, glancing over his shoulder at the sound of my shoes hammering on the road behind him. As I made the corner a bullet whined off the wall above me, peppering me with pieces of concrete. I looked up to see the jogger moving beyond the mid-point of the alley, staying close to the wall. If he got around the corner at the end, I would lose him in the crowds.

The gap at the end of the alley was, briefly, clear of people. I decided to risk the shot. The sun was behind me as I straightened, firing twice in quick succession. I was vaguely aware of people at either side of me scattering like pigeons from a stone as the jogger’s right shoulder arched back with the impact of one of my shots. I shouted at him to drop the piece but he turned awkwardly, his left hand bringing the gun up. Slightly off balance, I fired two more shots from around twenty feet. His left knee exploded as one of the hollow points connected and he collapsed against the wall of the alley, his pistol skidding harmlessly away towards some trash cans and black sacks.

As I closed on him I could see he was ashen-faced, his mouth twisted in pain and his left hand gripping the air around his shattered knee without actually touching the wound. Yet his eyes were still bright and I thought I heard him giggle as he pushed himself from the wall and tried to hop away on his good leg. I was maybe fifteen feet from him when his giggles were drowned by the sound of brakes squealing behind him. I looked up to see the black Chevy blocking the end of the alley, the window on its passenger side down, and then the darkness within was broken by a single muzzle flash.

The gunman bucked and fell forward on the ground. He spasmed once and I could see a red stain spreading across the back of his sweatsuit top. There was a second shot, the back of his head blew a geyser of blood in the air and his face banged once on the filthy concrete of the alley. I was already making for the cover of the trash cans when a bullet whacked into the brickwork above my head, showering me with dust and literally boring a hole through the wall. Then the window of the Chevy rolled up and the car shot off to the east.

I ran to where the jogger lay. Blood flowed from the wounds in his body, creating a dark red shadow on the ground. The sirens were close now and I could see onlookers gathered in the sunlight, watching me as I stood over the body.

The patrol car pulled up minutes later. I already had my hands in the air and my gun on the ground before me, my permit beside it. Fat Ollie Watts’s killer was lying at my feet, blood now pooled around his head and linked to the red tide that was congealing slowly in the alley’s central gutter. One patrolman kept me covered while his partner patted me down, with more force than was strictly necessary, against the wall. The cop patting me down was young, no more than twenty-three or twenty-four, and cocky as hell.

‘Shit, we got Wyatt Earp here, Sam,’ he said. ‘Shootin’ it out like it was High Noon.’

‘Wyatt Earp wasn’t in High Noon,’ I corrected him, as his partner checked my ID. The cop punched me hard in the kidneys in response and I fell to my knees. I heard more sirens near by, including the tell-tale whine of an ambulance.

‘You’re a funny guy, hot shot,’ said the young cop. ‘Why’d you shoot him?’

‘You weren’t around,’ I replied, my teeth gritted in pain. ‘If you’d been here I’d have shot you instead.’

He was just about to cuff me when a voice I recognised said, ‘Put it away, Harley.’ I looked over my shoulder at his partner, Sam Rees. I recognised him from my days on the force and he recognised me. I don’t think he liked what he saw.

‘He used to be a cop. Leave him be.’

And then the three of us waited in silence until the others arrived.

Two more blue and whites arrived before a mud-brown Nova dumped a figure in plain clothes on the kerb. I looked up to see Walter Cole walking towards me. I hadn’t seen him in almost six months, not since his promotion to lieutenant. He was wearing a long brown leather coat, incongruous in the heat. ‘Ollie Watts?’ he said, indicating the shooter with an inclination of his head. I nodded.

He left me alone for a time as he spoke with uniformed cops and detectives from the local precinct. I noticed that he was sweating heavily in his coat.

‘You can come in my car,’ he said, when he eventually returned, eyeing the cop called Harley with ill-concealed distaste. He motioned some more detectives towards him and made some final comments in quiet, measured tones before waving me in the direction of the Nova.

‘Nice coat,’ I said appreciatively, as we walked to his car. ‘How many girls you got in your stable?’

Walter’s eyes glinted briefly. ‘Lee gave me this coat for my birthday. Why do you think I’m wearing it in this goddamned heat? You fire any shots?’

‘A couple.’

‘You do know that there are laws against discharging firearms in public places, don’t you?’

‘I know that but I’m not sure about the guy dead on the ground back there. I don’t think the guy who shot him knows either. Maybe you could try a poster campaign.’

‘Very funny. Now get in the car.’

I did as he said and we pulled away from the kerb, the onlookers gaping curiously at us as we headed off through the crowded streets.

Chapter Two

Five hours had elapsed since the death of Fat Ollie Watts, his girlfriend, Monica Mulrane, and the shooter, as yet unidentified. I had been interviewed by a pair of detectives from Homicide, neither of whom I knew. Walter Cole did not participate. I was brought coffee twice but otherwise I was left alone after the questionings. Once, when one of the detectives left the room to consult with someone, I caught a glimpse of a tall, thin man in a dark linen suit, the ends of his shirt collar sharp as razors, his red silk tie unwrinkled. He looked like a fed, a vain fed.

The wooden table in the interrogation room was pitted and worn, caffeine-stamped by the edges of hundreds, maybe thousands, of coffee cups. At the left-hand side of the table, near the corner, someone had carved a broken heart into the wood, probably with a nail. And I remembered that heart from another time, from the last time I sat in this room . . .

‘Shit, Walter . . .’

‘Walt, it ain’t a good idea for him to be here.’

Cole looked at the detectives ranged around the walls, slouched on chairs around the table.

‘He’s not here,’ he said. ‘As far as everyone in this room is concerned, you never saw him.’

The interrogation room was crowded with chairs and an additional table had been brought in. I was still on compassionate leave and, as it happened, two weeks away from quitting the force. My family had been dead for two weeks and the investigation had so far yielded nothing. With the agreement of Lieutenant Cafferty, soon to retire, Cole had called a meeting of detectives involved in the case and one or two others who were regarded as among the best homicide detectives in the city. It was to be a combination of brainstorm and lecture, the lecture coming from Rachel Wolfe.

Wolfe had a reputation as a fine criminal psychologist, yet the Department steadfastly refused to consult her. It had its own deep thinker, Dr Russell Windgate, but, as Cole once put it: ‘Windgate couldn’t profile a fart.’ He was a sanctimonious, patronising bastard but he was also the Commissioner’s brother, which made him a sanctimonious, patronising, influential bastard.

Windgate was attending a conference of committed Freudians in Tulsa, and Cole had taken the opportunity to consult Wolfe. She sat at the head of the table, a stern but not unattractive woman in her early thirties, with long, dark-red hair which rested on the shoulders of her dark blue business suit. Her legs were crossed and a blue pump hung from the end of her right foot.

‘You all know why Bird wants to be here,’ continued Cole. ‘You’d all want the same thing, if you were in his place.’ I had bullied and cajoled him to let me sit in on the briefing. I had called in favours I didn’t even have the right to call in, and Walter had relented. I didn’t regret doing what I did.

The others in the room remained unconvinced. I could see it in their faces, in the way they shifted their gaze from us, in the shrug of a shoulder and the unhappy twist of a mouth. I didn’t care. I wanted to hear what Wolfe had to say. Cole and I took seats and waited for her to begin.

Wolfe lifted a pair of glasses from the table-top and put them on. Beside her left hand, a newly carved heart shone wood-bright. She glanced through some notes, pulled out two sheets from the sheaf and began.

‘Right, I don’t know how familiar you are with all this, so I’ll take it slowly.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Detective Parker, you may find some of this difficult.’ There was no apology in her voice, it was a simple statement of fact. I nodded and she continued. ‘What we’re dealing with here appears to be sexual homicide, sadistic sexual homicide.’

I traced the carved heart with the tip of my finger, the texture of the wood briefly returning me to the present. The door of the interrogation room opened and, through the gap, I saw the fed pass by. A clerk entered with a white ‘I Love NY’ cup. The coffee smelt as if it had been brewing since that morning. When I put in the creamer it created only the slightest difference in the colour of the liquid. I sipped it and grimaced.

‘A sexual homicide generally involves some element of sexual activity as the basis for the sequence of events leading to death,’ continued Wolfe, sipping at her coffee. ‘The stripping of the victims and the mutilation of the breasts and genitals indicate a sexual element to the crime, yet we have no evidence of penetration in either victim by either penis, fingers or foreign objects. The child’s hymen was undamaged and there was no evidence of vaginal trauma in the adult victim.

‘We also have evidence of a sadistic element to the homicides. The adult victim was tortured prior to death. Flensing took place, specifically on the front of the torso and the face. Combined with the sexual elements, you’re dealing with a sexual sadist who obtains gratification from excessive physical and, I would think, mental torture.

‘I think he – and I’m assuming it’s a male, for reasons I’ll go into later – wanted the mother to watch the torture and killing of her child before she herself was tortured and killed. A sexual sadist gets his kicks from the victim’s response to torture: in this case, he had two victims, a mother and child, to play off against each other. He’s translating sexual fantasies into violent acts, torture and, eventually, death.’

Outside the door of the interrogation room I heard voices suddenly raised. One of them was Walter Cole’s. I didn’t recognise the other. The voices subsided again, but I knew that they were talking about me. I would find out what they wanted soon enough.

‘Okay. The largest focus group for sexual sadists consists of white female adults who are strangers to the killer, although they may also target males and, as in this case, children. There is also sometimes a correspondence between the victim and someone in the offender’s own life.

‘Victims are chosen through systematic stalking and surveillance. The killer had probably been watching the family for some time. He knew the husband’s habits, knew that if he went to the bar then he would be missing for long enough to allow him to complete what he wanted to do. In this case, I don’t think the killer managed that completion.

‘The crime scene is unusual in this case. Firstly, the nature of the crime means that it requires somewhere solitary to give the offender time with his victim. In some cases, the offender’s residence may have been modified to accommodate his victim, or he may use a converted car or van for the killing. In this case, the killer chose not to do this. I think he may like the element of risk involved. I also think he wanted to make, for want of a better term, an “impression”.’

An impression, like wearing a bright tie to a funeral.

‘The crime was carefully staged to impact in the most traumatic way on the husband when he returned home.’

Maybe Walter had been right. Maybe I shouldn’t have come to the briefing. Wolfe’s matter-of-factness reduced my wife and child to the level of another gruesome statistic in a violent city, but I hoped that she would say something which would resonate inside me and provide some clue to drive the investigation forward. Two weeks is a long time in a murder case. After two weeks with no progress, unless you get very, very lucky, the investigation starts to grind to a halt.

‘This seems to indicate a killer of above-average intelligence, one who likes playing games and gambling,’ said Wolfe. ‘The fact that he appeared to want the element of shock to play a part could lead us to conclude that there was a personal element to what he did, directed against the husband, but that’s just speculation and the general pattern of this type of crime is impersonal.

‘Generally, crime scenes can be classified as organised, disorganised or some mix of the two. An organised killer plans the murder and targets the victim carefully, and the crime scene will reflect this element of control. The victims will meet certain criteria which the killer has set: age, hair colour maybe, occupation, lifestyle. The use of restraints, as we have in this case, is typical. It reflects the elements of control and planning, since the killer will usually have to bring them to the scene.

‘In cases of sexual sadism, the act of killing is generally eroticised. There’s a ritual involved, it’s usually slow, and every effort is made to ensure that the victim remains conscious and aware up to the point of death. In other words, the killer doesn’t want to end the lives of his victims or victims prematurely.

‘Now in this case he didn’t succeed, because Jennifer Parker, the child, had a weak heart and it failed following the release of epinephrine into her system. Combined with her mother’s attempted escape and the damage caused to her face by striking it against the wall, which may have resulted in temporary loss of consciousness, I believe the killer felt he was losing control of the situation. The crime scene moved from organised to disorganised and, shortly after he commenced flensing, his anger and frustration got the better of him and he mutilated the bodies.’

I wanted to leave then. I had made a mistake. Nothing could come of this, nothing good.

‘As I said earlier, mutilation of the genitals and breasts is a feature of this type of crime but this case doesn’t conform to the general pattern in a number of crucial ways. I think the mutilation in this case was either a result of anger and loss of control, or it was an attempt to disguise something else, some other element of the ritual which had already commenced and from which the killer was trying to divert attention. In all likelihood, the partial flensing is the key. There’s a strong element of display – it’s incomplete, but it’s there.’

‘Why are you so sure it’s a white male?’ asked Joiner, a black homicide detective with whom I’d worked once or twice.

‘The most frequent perpetrators of sexual sadism are white males. Not women, not black males. White males.’

‘You’re off the hook, Joiner,’ someone said. There was a burst of laughter, an easing of the tension that had built up in the room. One or two of the others glanced at me but for the most part they acted as if I wasn’t there. They were professionals, concentrating on amassing any information that might lead to a greater understanding of the killer.

Wolfe let the laughter fade. ‘Research indicates that as many as forty-three per cent of sexual murderers are married. Fifty per cent have children. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you’re looking for some crazy loner. This guy may be the hero of his local PTA meetings, the coach of the Little League team.

‘He could be engaged in a profession that brings him into contact with the public, so he’s probably socially adept and he may use that to target his victims. He may have engaged in antisocial behaviour in the past, although not necessarily something serious enough to have gotten him a police record.

‘Sexual sadists are often police buffs or weapons freaks. He may try to stay in touch with the progress of the investigation, so watch out for individuals who ring in with leads or who try to trade off information. He also owns a clean, well-maintained car: clean so it doesn’t attract attention, well maintained because he has to be sure he doesn’t get stranded at or near the crime scene. The car could have been modified to allow him to transport victims: the door and window handles in the rear will have been removed, the trunk may have been soundproofed. If you think you have a possible suspect, check the trunk for extra fuel, water, ropes, cuffs, ligatures.

‘If you go for a search warrant, you’ll be looking for any items relating to sexual or violent behaviour: pornographic magazines, videos, low-end true crime stuff, vibrators, clamps, women’s clothing, particularly undergarments. Some of these may have belonged to victims or he may have taken other personal items from them. Look out also for diaries and manuscripts: they may contain details of victims, fantasies, even the crimes themselves. This guy may also have a collection of police equipment and almost certainly has a knowledge of police procedures.’ Wolfe took a deep breath and sat back in her chair.

‘Is he going to do it again?’ asked Cole. There was silence in the room for a moment.

‘Yes, but you’re making one assumption,’ said Wolfe. Cole looked puzzled.

‘You’re assuming this is the first. I take it a VICAP has been done?’

VICAP, operational since 1985, was the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. Under VICAP, a report was completed on solved or unsolved homicides or attempted homicides, particularly those involving abductions, or which were apparently random or motiveless or sexually orientated; missing persons cases, where foul play was suspected; and unidentified dead bodies where the manner of death was known, or suspected to be, homicide. These were then submitted to the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI’s academy in Quantico, in an effort to determine if similar pattern characteristics existed elsewhere in the VICAP system.

‘It was submitted.’

‘Have you requested a profile?’

‘Yes, but no profile as yet. Unofficially, the MO doesn’t match. The removal of the faces marks it out.’

‘Yeah, what about the faces?’ It was Joiner again.

‘I’m still trying to find out more,’ said Wolfe. ‘Some killers take souvenirs from their victims. There may be some kind of pseudo-religious or sacrificial element to this case. I’m sorry, I’m really not sure yet.’

‘You think he could have done something like this before?’ said Cole.

Wolfe nodded. ‘He may have. If he has killed before, then he may have hidden the bodies and these killings could represent an alteration in a previous pattern of behaviour. Maybe, after killing quietly and unobtrusively, he wanted to bring himself to a more public arena. He may have wanted to draw attention to his work. The unsatisfactory nature of these killings, from his point of view, may now cause him to go back to his old pattern. Alternatively, he could recede into a period of dormancy, that’s another possibility.

‘But if I was to gamble, I’d say that he’s been planning his next move carefully. He made mistakes the last time and I don’t think he achieved the effect he was looking for. The next time, he won’t make any mistakes. The next time, unless you catch him first, he’s really going to make an impact.’

The door of the interrogation room opened and Cole entered with two other men.

‘This is Special Agent Ross, FBI, and Detective Barth from Robbery,’ said Cole. ‘Barth was working the Watts case. Agent Ross here deals with organised crime.’

Close up, Ross’s linen suit looked expensive and tailored. Barth, in his JC Penney jacket, looked like a slob by comparison. The two men stood against opposite walls and nodded. When Cole sat, Barth sat as well. Ross remained standing against the wall.

‘Anything you’re not telling us here?’ Cole asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘You know as much as I do.’

‘Agent Ross believes that Sonny Ferrera was behind the killing of Watts and his girlfriend and that you know more than you’re saying.’ Ross picked at something on the sleeve of his shirt and dropped it to the floor with a look of distaste. I think it was meant to represent me.

‘There was no reason for Sonny to kill Ollie Watts,’ I replied. ‘We’re talking stolen cars and false number plates here. Ollie wasn’t in a position to scam anything worthwhile from Sonny and he didn’t know enough about Sonny’s activities to take up ten minutes of a jury’s time.’

Ross stirred and moved forward to sit on the edge of the table. ‘Strange that you should turn up after all this time – what is it? Six, seven months? – and suddenly we’re knee deep in corpses,’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard a word I’d said. He was forty, maybe forty-five, but he looked to be in good condition. His face was heavily lined with wrinkles, which didn’t seem as if they came from a life of laughter. I’d heard a little about him from Woolrich, after Woolrich left New York to become the feds’ Assistant Special Agent in Charge in the New Orleans field office.

There was silence then. Ross tried to stare me out, then looked away in boredom.

‘Agent Ross here thinks that you’re holding out on us,’ said Cole. ‘He’d like to sweat you for a while, just in case.’ His expression was neutral, his eyes bland. Ross had returned to staring at me.

‘Agent Ross is a scary guy. He tries to sweat me, there’s no telling what I’ll confess to.’

‘This is not getting us anywhere,’ said Ross. ‘Mr Parker is obviously not co-operating in any way and I—’

Cole held up a hand, interrupting him. ‘Maybe you’d both leave us alone for a time, get some coffee or something,’ he suggested. Barth shrugged and left. Ross remained seated on the table and looked as if he was going to say more, then he stood up abruptly and quickly walked out, closing the door firmly behind him. Cole exhaled deeply, loosened his tie and opened the top button of his shirt. ‘Don’t dump on Ross. He’ll bring a ton of shit down on your head. And on mine.’

‘I’ve told you all I know on this,’ I said. ‘Benny Low may know more, but I doubt it.’

‘We talked to Benny Low. The way Benny tells it, he didn’t know who the President was until we told him.’ He twisted a pen in his hand. ‘“Hey, it’s just bidness”, that’s what he said.’ It was a pretty fair imitation of one of Benny Low’s verbal quirks. I smiled thinly and the tension in the air dissipated slightly.

‘How long you been back?’

‘Couple of weeks.’

‘What have you been doing?’

What could I tell him? That I wandered the streets, that I visited places where Jennifer, Susan and I used to go together, that I stared out of the window of my apartment and thought about the man who had killed them and where he might be, that I had taken on the job for Benny Low because I was afraid that, if I did not find some outlet, I would eat the barrel of my gun?

‘Not a lot. I plan to look up some old stoolies, see if there’s anything new.’

‘There isn’t, not at this end. You got anything?’

‘No.’

‘I can’t ask you to let it go, but . . .’

‘No, you can’t. Get to it, Walter.’

‘This isn’t a good place for you to be right now. You know why.’

‘Do I?’

Cole tossed the pen hard on the table. It bounced to the edge and hung there briefly before dropping to the floor. For a moment I thought he was going to take a swing at me but then the anger went from his eyes.

‘We’ll talk about this again.’

‘Okay. You going to give me anything?’ Among the papers on the table, I could see reports from Ballistics and Firearms. Five hours was a pretty short time in which to get a report. Agent Ross was obviously a man who got what he wanted.

I nodded at the papers. ‘What did Ballistics say about the bullet that took out the shooter?’

‘That’s not your concern.’

‘Walter, I watched the kid die. The shooter took a pop at me and the bullet went clean through the wall. Someone’s got distinctive taste in weaponry.’

Cole stayed silent.

‘No one picks up hardware like that without someone knowing,’ I said. ‘You give me something to go on, maybe I might find out more than you can.’

Cole thought for a minute and then flicked through the papers for the Ballistics report. ‘We got sub-machine bullets, 5.7mm weighing less than one-tenth of an ounce.’

I whistled. ‘That’s a scaled-down rifle round, but fired from a handgun?’

‘The bullet is mainly plastic but has a full-metal jacket, so it doesn’t deform on impact. When it met the shooter’s body, it transferred most of its force so there was almost no energy when it exited.’

‘And the one that hit the wall?’

‘Ballistics reckons a muzzle velocity of over two thousand feet per second.’

That was an incredibly fast bullet. A Browning 9-millimetre fires bullets of a quarter of an ounce at about eleven hundred feet per second.

‘They also reckon that this thing could blow through Kevlar body armour like it was rice paper. At six hundred feet, the thing could penetrate almost fifty layers.’ Even a .44 Magnum will only penetrate body armour at very close range.

‘But once it hits a soft target . . .’

‘It stops.’

‘Is it domestic?’

‘No, Ballistics say European. Belgian. They’re talking about something called a “Five-seveN” – that’s big F, big N, after the manufacturers. It’s a prototype made by FN Herstal for anti-terrorist and hostage rescue operations, but this is the first time one has turned up outside national security forces.’

‘You contacting the maker?’

‘We’ll try, but my guess is we’ll lose it in the middle men.’

I stood up. ‘I’ll ask around.’

Cole retrieved his pen and waved it at me like an unhappy schoolteacher lecturing the class wise-guy. ‘Ross still wants your ass.’

I took out a pen and scribbed my cellphone number on the back of Cole’s legal pad.

‘It’s always on. Can I go now?’

‘One condition.’

‘Go on.’

‘I want you to come over to the house tonight.’

‘I’m sorry, Walter, I don’t make social calls any more.’

He looked hurt. ‘Don’t be an asshole. This isn’t social. Be there, or Ross can lock you in a cell till Doomsday for all I care.’

I stood up to leave.

‘You sure you’ve told us everything?’ asked Cole to my back.

I didn’t turn around. ‘I’ve told you all I can, Walter.’

Which was true, technically at least.

Twenty-four hours earlier, I had found Emo Ellison.

Emo lived in a dump of a hotel on the edge of East Harlem, the kind where the only guests allowed in the rooms are whores, cops or criminals. A Plexiglass screen covered the front of the super’s office and no one was inside. I walked up the stairs and knocked on Emo’s door. There was no reply but I thought I heard the sound of a hammer cocking on a pistol.

‘Emo, it’s Bird. I need to talk.’

I heard footsteps approach the door.

‘I don’t know nothin’ about it,’ said Emo, through the wood. ‘I ain’t got nothin’ to say.’

‘I haven’t asked you anything yet. C’mon, Emo, open up. Fat Ollie’s in trouble. Maybe I can do something. Let me in.’

There was silence for a moment and then the rattle of a chain. The door opened and I stepped inside. Emo had retreated to the window but he still had the gun in his hand. I closed the door behind me.

‘You don’t need that,’ I said. Emo hefted the gun once in his hand then put it on a bedside locker. He looked more comfortable without it. Guns weren’t Emo’s style. I noticed that the fingers of his left hand were bandaged. I could see yellow stains on the tips of the bandages.

Emo Ellison was a thin, pale-faced, middle-aged man who had worked on and off for Fat Ollie for five years or so. He was an average mechanic but he was loyal and knew when to keep his mouth shut.

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘He ain’t been in touch.’

He sat down heavily on the edge of the neatly made bed. The room was clean and smelt of air-freshener. There were one or two prints on the walls, and books, magazines and some personal items were neatly arrayed on a set of Home Depot shelves. ‘I hear you’re workin’ for Benny Low. Why you doin’ that?’

‘It’s work,’ I replied.

‘You hand Ollie over and he’s dead, that’s your work,’ said Emo.

I leaned against the door. ‘I may not hand him over. Benny Low can take the loss. But I’d need a good reason not to.’

The conflict inside him played itself out on Emo’s face. His hands twisted and writhed over each other and he looked once or twice at the gun. Emo Ellison was scared.

‘Why did he run, Emo?’ I asked softly.

‘He used to say you were a good guy, a stand-up guy,’ said Emo. ‘That true?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t want to see Ollie hurt, though.’

Emo looked at me for a time and then seemed to make a decision.

‘It was Pili, Pili Pilar. You know him?’

‘I know him.’ Pili Pilar was Sonny Ferrara’s right-hand man.

‘He used to come once, twice a month, never more than that, and take a car. He’d keep it for a couple of hours, then bring it back. Different car each time. It was a deal Ollie made, so he wouldn’t have to pay off Sonny. He’d fit the car with false plates and have it ready for Pili when he arrived.

‘Last week, Pili comes, collects a car and drives off. I came in late that night, ’cos I was sick. I got ulcers. Pili was gone before I got there.

‘Anyway, after midnight I’m sittin’ up with Ollie, talkin’ and stuff, waitin’ for Pili to bring back the car, when there’s this bang outside. When we get out there, Pili’s wrapped the car around the gate and he’s lying on the wheel. There’s a dent in the front, too, so we figure maybe Pili was in a smash and didn’t want to wait around after.

‘Pili’s head is cut up bad where he smacked the windscreen and there’s a lot of blood in the car. Ollie and me push it into the yard and then Ollie calls this doc he knows and the guy tells him to bring Pili around. Pili ain’t movin’ and he’s real pale, so Ollie drops him off at the doc’s in his own car and the doc insists on packing him off to the hospital ’cos he thinks Pili’s skull is busted.’

It was all flowing out of Emo now. Once he began the tale he wanted to finish it, as if he could diminish the burden of knowing by telling it out loud. ‘Anyway, they argue for a while but the doc knows this private clinic where they won’t ask too many questions and Ollie agrees. The doc calls the clinic and Ollie comes back to the lot to sort out the car.

‘He has a number for Sonny but there’s no answer. He’s got the car in back but he doesn’t want to leave it there in case, y’know, it’s a cop thing. So he calls the old man and lets him know what happened. So the old man tells him to sit tight, he’ll send a guy around to take care of it.

‘Ollie goes out to move the car out of sight but when he comes back in, he looks worse than Pili. He looks sick and his hands are shakin’. I say to him, “What’s wrong?”, but he just tells me to get out and not to tell no one I was there. He won’t say nothin’ else, just tells me to get goin’.

‘Next thing I hear, the cops have raided the place and then Ollie gets bail and disappears. I swear, that’s the last I heard.’

‘Then why the gun?’

‘One of the old man’s guys came by here a day or two back.’ He gulped. ‘Bobby Sciorra. He wanted to know about Ollie, wanted to know if I’d been there the day of Pili’s accident. I said to him, “No,” but it wasn’t enough for him.’

Emo Ellison started to cry. He lifted up his bandaged fingers and slowly, carefully, began to unwrap one of them.

‘He took me for a ride.’ He held up the finger and I could see a ring-shaped mark crowned with a huge blister that seemed to throb even as I looked at it. ‘The cigarette lighter. He burned me with the car cigarette lighter.’

Twenty-four hours later, Fat Ollie Watts was dead.

Chapter Three

Walter Cole lived in Richmond Hill, the oldest of the Seven Sisters neighbourhoods in Queens. Begun in the 1880s, it had a village centre and town common and must have seemed like Middle America re-created on Manhattan’s doorstep when Walter’s parents first moved there from Jefferson City shortly before the Second World War. Walter had kept the house, north of Myrtle Avenue on 113th Street, after his parents retired to Florida. He and Lee ate almost every Friday in Triangle Hafbrau, an old German restaurant on Jamaica Avenue, and walked in the dense woods of Forest Park during the summer.

I arrived at Walter’s home shortly after nine. He answered the door himself and showed me into what, for a less educated man, would have been called his den, although den didn’t do justice to the miniature library he had assembled over half a century of avid reading: biographies of Keats and Saint-Exupéry shared shelf space with works on forensics, sex crimes and criminal psychology. Fenimore Cooper stood back to back with Borges; Barthelme looked uneasy surrounded by various Hemingways.

A Macintosh PowerBook sat on a leather-topped desk beside three filing cabinets. Pictures by local artists adorned the walls and a small glass-fronted case in the corner displayed shooting trophies, haphazardly thrown together as if Walter was simultaneously proud of his ability yet embarrassed by his pride. The top half of the window was open and I could smell freshly mown grass and hear the sound of kids playing street hockey in the warm evening air.

The door to the den opened and Lee entered. She and Walter had been together for twenty-four years and they shared each other’s lives with an ease and grace that Susan and I had never approached, even at the best of times. Lee’s black jeans and white blouse hugged a figure that had survived the rigours of two children and Walter’s love of Oriental cuisine. Her ink-black hair, through which strands of grey wove like moonlight on dark water, was pulled back in a ponytail. When she reached up to kiss me lightly on the cheek, her arms around my shoulders, the scent of lavender enfolded me like a veil and I realised, not for the first time, that I had always been a little in love with Lee Cole.

‘It’s good to see you, Bird,’ she said, her right hand resting lightly on my cheek, lines of anxiety on her brow giving the lie to the smile on her lips. She glanced at Walter and something passed between them. ‘I’ll be back later with some coffee.’ She closed the door softly behind her on the way out.

‘How are the kids doing?’ I asked, as Walter poured himself a glass of Redbreast Irish whiskey – the old stuff with the screw top.

‘Good,’ he replied. ‘Lauren still hates high school. Ellen’s going to study law in Georgetown in the fall so at least one member of the family will understand the way it works.’ He inhaled deeply as he raised the glass to his mouth and sipped. I gulped involuntarily and a sudden thirst gripped me. Walter noticed my discomfiture and reddened.

‘Shit, I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘It’s all right,’ I responded. ‘It’s good therapy. I notice you’re still swearing in the house.’ Lee hated swearing, routinely telling her husband that only oafs resorted to profanity in speech. Walter usually countered by pointing out that Wittgenstein once brandished a poker in the course of a philosophical argument, proof positive in his eyes that erudite discourse sometimes wasn’t sufficiently expressive for even the greatest of men.

He moved to a leather armchair at one side of the empty fireplace and motioned me to its opposite number. Lee entered with a silver coffee pot, creamer and two cups on a tray and then left, glancing anxiously at Walter as she did. I knew they had been talking before I arrived: they kept no secrets from each other and their unease seemed to indicate that they had discussed more than their concerns about my well-being.

‘Do you want me to sit under a light?’ I asked. A small smile moved across Walter’s face with the swiftness of a breeze and then was gone.

‘I heard things over the last few months,’ he began, looking into his glass like a mystic examining a crystal ball. I stayed silent. ‘I know you talked to the Feds, pulled in some favours so you could take a look at files. I know you were trying to find the man who killed Susan and Jenny.’ He looked at me for the first time since he had begun talking.

I had nothing to say, so I poured some coffee for both of us, then picked up my own cup and sipped. It was Javan, strong and dark. I breathed deeply. ‘Why are you asking me this?’

‘Because I want to know why you’re here, why you’re back. I don’t know what you’ve become if some of the things I’ve heard are true.’ He swallowed, and I felt sorry for him, for what he had to say and the questions he had to ask. If I had answers to some of them I wasn’t sure that I wanted to give them, or that Walter really wanted to hear them. Outside, the kids had finished their game as darkness drew in and there was a stillness in the air that made Walter’s words sound like a portent.

‘They say you found the guy who did it,’ he said, and this time there was no hesitation, as if he had steeled himself to say what he had to say. ‘That you found him and killed him. Is that true?’

The past was like a snare. It allowed me to move a little, to circle, to turn, but, in the end, it always dragged me back. More and more, I found things in the city – favourite restaurants, bookshops, tree-shaded parks, even hearts carved bone-white into the wood of an old table – that reminded me of what I had lost, as if even a moment of forgetfulness was a crime against their memories. I slipped from present to past, sliding down the snake-heads of memory into what was and what would never be again.

And so, with Walter’s question, I fell, back to late April, back to New Orleans. They had been dead for almost four months.

Woolrich sat at a table at the rear of the Café du Monde, beside a bubblegum machine with his back against the wall of the main building. On the table before him stood a steaming cup of café au lait and a plate of hot beignets covered in powdered sugar. Outside, people bustled down Decatur, past the green and white pavilion of the café, heading for the cathedral or Jackson Square.

He wore a tan suit, cheaply made, and his silk tie was stretched and faded so that he didn’t even bother to button his shirt at the collar, preferring instead to let the tie hang mournfully at half mast. The floor around him was white with sugar, as was the only visible part of the green vinyl chair upon which he sat.

Woolrich was an Assistant SAC of the local FBI field office over at 1250 Poydras. He was also one of the few people from my police past with whom I’d stayed in touch in some small way and one of the only Feds I had ever met who didn’t make me curse the day Hoover was born. More than that, he was my friend. He had stood by me in the days following the killings, never questioning, never doubting. I remember him standing rain-soaked by the grave, water dripping from the rim of his outsized fedora. He had been transferred to New Orleans soon after, a promotion that reflected a successful apprenticeship in at least three other field offices and his ability to keep his head in the turbulent environment of the New York field office in downtown Manhattan.

He was messily divorced, the marriage over for maybe twelve years. His wife had reverted to her maiden name, Karen Stott, and lived in Miami with an interior decorator whom she had recently married. Woolrich’s only daughter Lisa – now, thanks to her mother’s efforts, Lisa Stott – had joined some religious group in Mexico, he said. She was just eighteen. Her mother and her new husband didn’t seem to care about her, unlike Woolrich, who cared but couldn’t get his act together sufficiently to transfer his feelings into supportive actions. The disintegration of his family pained him in a very particular way, I knew. He came from a broken family himself, a white-trash mother and a father who was well meaning but inconsequential, too inconsequential to hold on to his hellcat wife. Woolrich had always wanted to do better, I think. More than the rest, I believed he shared my sense of loss when Susan and Jennifer were taken.

He had put on more weight since I last saw him and the hair on his chest was visible through his sweat-soaked shirt. Rivulets rolled down from a dense thatch of rapidly greying hair and into the folds of flesh at his neck. For such a big man, the Louisiana summers would be a form of torture. Woolrich may have looked like a clown, may even have acted that way when it suited him, but no one in New Orleans who knew him ever underestimated him. Those who had in the past were either already rotting in Angola penitentiary or, if you believed some of the rumours, rotting in the ground.

‘I like the tie,’ I said. It was bright red and decorated with lambs and angels.

‘I call it my metaphysical tie,’ Woolrich replied. ‘My George Herbert tie.’

We shook hands, Woolrich wiping beignet crumbs from his shirtfront as he stood. ‘Damn things get everywhere,’ he said. ‘When I die, they’ll find beignet crumbs up the crack of my ass.’

‘Thanks, I’ll hold that thought.’

An Asian waiter in a white paper cap bustled up and I ordered coffee. ‘Bring you beignets, suh?’ he asked. Woolrich grinned. I told the waiter I’d skip the beignets.

‘How you doin’?’ asked Woolrich, taking a huge gulp of hot coffee that would have scarified the throat of a lesser man.

‘I’m okay. How’s life?’

‘Same as it ever was: gift-wrapped, tied with a red bow and handed to someone else.’

‘You still with . . . what was her name? Judy? Judy the nurse?’

Woolrich’s face creased unhappily, as if he’d just encountered a hair in his beignet.

‘Judy the nut, you mean. We split up. She’s gone to work in La Jolla for a year, maybe more. I tell you, I decide to take her away for a romantic vacation a couple of months back, rent us a room in a two-hundred-dollar-a-night inn near Stowe, take in the country air if we left the window of the bedroom open, you know the deal. Anyway, we arrive at this place and it’s older than Moses’s dick, all dark wood and antique furniture and a bed you could lose a team of cheerleaders in. But Judy, she turns whiter than a polar bear’s ass and backs away from me. You know what she says?’

I waited for him to continue.

‘She says that I murdered her in the very same room in a previous life. She’s backed up against the door, reaching for the handle and looking at me like she’s expecting me to turn into the Son of Sam. Takes me two hours to calm her down and even then she refuses to sleep with me. I end up sleeping on a couch in the corner, and let me tell you, those goddamn antique couches may look like a million bucks and cost more but they’re about as comfortable to sleep on as a concrete slab.’

He finished off the last bite of beignet and dabbed at himself with a napkin.

‘Then I get up in the middle of the night to take a leak and she’s sitting up in bed, wide awake, with the bedside lamp upside down in her hand, waiting to knock my head off if I come near her. Needless to say, this put an end to our five days of passion. We checked out the next morning, with me over a thousand dollars in the hole.

‘But you know what the really funny thing is? Her regression therapist has told her to sue me for injuries in a past life. I’m about to become a test case for all those donut-heads who watch a documentary on PBS and think they were once Cleopatra or William the Conqueror.’

His eyes misted over at the thought of his lost thousand dollars and the games Fate plays on those who go to Vermont looking for uncomplicated sex.

‘You heard from Lisa lately?’

His face clouded over and he waved a hand at me. ‘Still with the Jesus huggers. Last time she rang me, it was to say that her leg was fine and to ask for more money. If Jesus saves, he must have had all his cash tied up with the Savings and Loan.’ Lisa had broken her leg in a roller-skating accident the previous year, shortly before she found God. Woolrich was convinced that she was still concussed.

He stared at me for a time, his eyes narrowed. ‘You’re not okay, are you?’

‘I’m alive and I’m here. Just tell me what you’ve got.’

He puffed his cheeks and then blew out slowly, marshalling his thoughts as he did so.

‘There’s a woman, down in St Martin Parish, an old Creole. She’s got the gift, the locals say. She keeps away the gris-gris. You know, bad spirits, all that shit. Offers cures for sick kids, brings lovers together. Has visions.’ He stopped and rolled his tongue around his mouth, and squinted at me.

‘She’s a psychic?’

‘She’s a witch, you believe the locals.’

‘And do you?’

‘She’s been . . . helpful, once or twice in the past, according to the local cops. I’ve had nothing to do with her before.’

‘And now?’

My coffee arrived and Woolrich asked for a refill. We didn’t speak again until the waiter had departed and Woolrich had drained half of his coffee in a steaming mouthful.

‘She’s got about ten children and thousands of goddamn grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Some of them live with her or near her, so she’s never alone. She’s got a bigger extended family than Abraham.’ He smiled but it was a fleeting thing, a brief release before what was to come.

‘She says a young girl was killed in the bayou a while back, in the marshlands where the Barataria pirates used to roam. She told the sheriff’s office but they didn’t pay much attention. She didn’t have a location, just said a young girl had been murdered in the bayou. Said she had seen it in a dream.

‘Sheriff didn’t do nothing about it. Well, that’s not entirely true. He told the local boys to keep an eye out and then pretty much forgot all about it.’

‘What brings it up again now?’

‘The old woman says she hears the girl crying at night.’

I couldn’t tell if Woolrich was just embarrassed by what he was saying, or whether he was spooked, but he looked towards the window and wiped his face with a giant grubby handkerchief.

‘There’s something else, though.’ He folded the handkerchief and stuffed it back in his trouser pocket.

‘She says the girl’s face was cut off.’ He breathed in deeply. ‘And that she was blinded before she died.’

We drove north on 1–10 for a time, past the outlet mall and on towards West Baton Rouge with its truck stops and gambling joints, its bars full of oil workers and, elsewhere, blacks, all drinking the same rotgut whiskey and cheap, watery Dixie beer. A hot wind, heavy with the dense, decayed smell of the bayou, pulled at the trees along the highway, whipping their branches back and forth. Then we crossed on to the raised Atchafalaya highway, its supports embedded beneath the waters as we entered the Atchafalaya swamp and Cajun country.

I had only been here once before, when Susan and I were younger and happier. Along the Henderson Levee Road we passed the sign for McGee’s Landing, where I’d eaten tasteless chicken and Susan had picked at lumps of deep-fried alligator so tough even other alligators would have had trouble digesting it. Then a Cajun fisherman had taken us on a boat trip into the swamps, through a semi-submerged cypress forest. The sun sank low and bloody over the water, turning the tree stumps into dark silhouettes like the fingers of dead men pointing accusingly at the heavens. It was another world, as far removed from the city as the moon was from the earth, and it seemed to create an erotic charge between us as the heat made our shirts cling to our bodies and the sweat drip from our brows. When we returned to our hotel in Lafayette we made love urgently and with a passion that superseded love, our drenched bodies moving together, the heat in the room as thick as water.

Woolrich and I did not go as far as Lafayette this time, with its motels and gas stations and the promise of the food in Prejeans, better than Randol’s but with less atmosphere, where the Cajun bands played while locals and tourists mixed, drinking cold beers from Abita Springs and picking at catfish.

Woolrich left the highway for a two-lane road that wove through the bayou country for a time before turning into little more than a rutted track, pitted by holes filled with dank, foul-smelling swamp water around which insects buzzed in thick swarms. Cypress and willow lined the road and, through them, the stumps of trees were visible in the waters of the swamp, relics of the harvestings of the last century. Lily-pads clustered at the banks and, when the car slowed and the light was right, I could see bass moving languidly in their shadows, breaking the water occasionally.

I had heard that Jean Lafitte’s brigands had made their home here. Now others had taken their place, killers and smugglers who used the canals and marshes as hiding places for heroin and marijuana, and as dark, green graves for the butchered, their bodies adding to the riotous growth of nature, their decay masked by the rich stench of vegetation.

We took one further turn, and here the cypress overhung the road. We rattled over a wooden bridge, the wood gradually returning to its original colour as the paint flaked and disintegrated. In the shadows at its far end I thought I saw a giant shadow watching us as we passed, his eyes white as eggs in the darkness beneath the trees.

‘You see him?’ said Woolrich.

‘Who is he?’

‘The old woman’s youngest son. Tee Jean, she calls him. Petit Jean. He’s kinda slow, but he looks out for her. They all do.’

‘All?’

‘There’s six of ’em in all in the house. The old woman, her son, three kids from her second eldest’s marriage – he’s dead, died with his wife in a car crash three years back – and a daughter. She has five more sons and three daughters all living within a few miles of here. Then the local folks, they look after her too. She’s kind of the matriarch around these parts, I guess. Big magic.’

I looked to see if he was being ironic. He wasn’t.

We left the trees and arrived in a clearing before a long, single-storey house raised above the ground on stripped stumps of trees. It looked old but lovingly built, the wood on the front unwarped and carefully overlapped, the shingles on the roof undamaged but, here and there, darker where they had been replaced. The door stood open, blocked only by a wire screen, and chairs and children’s toys littered the porch, which ran the length of the front of the house and disappeared around the side. From behind, I could hear the sound of children and the splashing of water.

The screen door was opened and a small, slim woman appeared at the top of the steps. She was about thirty, with delicate features and lush, dark hair drawn back in a ponytail from her light coffee-coloured skin. Yet as we stepped from the car and drew nearer, I could see her skin was pitted with scars, probably from childhood acne. She seemed to recognise Woolrich for, before we said anything, she held the door open so I could step inside. Woolrich didn’t follow. I turned back towards him.

‘You coming in?’

‘I didn’t bring you here, if anyone asks, and I don’t even want to see her,’ he said. He took a seat on the porch and rested his feet on the rail, watching the water gleam in the sunlight.

Inside, the wood was dark and the air cool. Doors at either side opened into bedrooms and a formal-looking living room with old, obviously hand-carved furniture, simple but carefully and skilfully crafted. An ancient radio with an illuminated dial and a band dotted with the names of far-flung places played a Chopin nocturne, which flowed through the house and into the last bedroom where the old woman waited.

She was blind. Her pupils were white, set in a huge moon face from which rolls of fat hung to her breastbone. Her arms, visible through the gauze sleeves of her multicoloured dress, were bigger than mine, and her swollen legs were like the trunks of small trees ending in surprisingly small, almost dainty, feet. She sat, supported by a mountain of pillows, on a giant bed in a room lit only by a hurricane lamp, the drapes closed against the sunlight. She was at least three hundred and fifty pounds, I guessed, probably more.

‘Sit down, chile,’ she said, taking one of my hands in her own and running her fingers lightly over mine. Her eyes stared straight ahead, not looking at me, as her fingers traced the lines on my palm.

‘I know why you here,’ she said. Her voice was high, girlish, as if she were a huge speaking doll whose tapes had been mixed up with a smaller model. ‘You hurtin’. You burnin’ inside. Little girl, you woman, they gone.’ In the dim light, the old woman seemed to crackle with hidden energy.

‘Tante, tell me about the girl in the swamp, the girl with no eyes.’

‘Poor chile,’ said the old woman, her brow furrowing in sorrow. ‘She the fu’st here. She was runnin’ from sumpin’ and she loss her way. Took a ride wi’ him and she never came back. Hurt her so, so bad. Didn’t touch her, though, ’cept with the knife.’

She turned her eyes towards me for the first time and I realised she was not blind, not in any way that mattered. As her hands traced the lines of my palm, my eyes closed and I felt that she had been there with the girl in her final moments, that she might even have brought her some comfort as the blade went about its business. ‘Hush, chile, you come with Tante now. Hush, chile, take my hand, you. He done hurtin’ you now.’

And I heard and felt, deep within myself, the blade cutting, grating, separating muscle from joint, flesh from bone, soul from body, the artist working on his canvas, and I felt pain dancing through me, arcing through a fading life like a lightning flash, welling like the notes of a hellish song through the unknown girl in the Louisiana swamp. And in her agony I felt the agony of my own child, my own wife, and I felt certain that this was the same man. Even as the pain faded to its last for the girl in the swamp, she was in darkness and I knew he had blinded her before he killed her.

‘Who is he?’ I said.

She spoke, and in her voice there were four voices: the voices of a wife and a daughter, the voice of an old obese woman on a bed in a wine-dark room, and the voice of a nameless girl who died a brutal, lonely death in the mud and water of a Louisiana swamp.

‘He the Travellin’ Man.’

Walter shifted in his chair and the sound of his spoon against the china cup was like the ringing of chimes.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t find him.’

Chapter Four

Walter had been silent for a time, the whiskey now almost drained from his glass. ‘I need a favour, not for me but for someone else.’

I waited.

‘It’s to do with the Barton Trust.’

The Barton Trust had been founded in his will by old Jack Barton, an industrialist who made his fortune by supplying parts for the aeronautical industry after the war. The Trust provided money for research into child-related issues, supported paediatric clinics and generally provided childcare money that the state would not. Its nominal head was Isobel Barton, old Jack’s widow, although the day-to-day running of the business was the responsibility of an attorney named Andrew Bruce and the Trust’s chairman, Philip Kooper.

I knew all this because Walter did some fund-raising for the Trust on occasion – prize draws, bowling competitions – and also because, some weeks before, the Trust had entered the news for all the wrong reasons. During a charity fête held in the grounds of the Barton house on Staten Island a young boy, Evan Baines, had disappeared. In the end, no trace of the boy had been found and the cops had pretty much given up hope. They believed he had somehow strayed from the grounds and been abducted. It merited some mention in the newspapers for a time and then was gone.

‘Evan Baines?’

‘No, at least I don’t think so, but it may be a missing person. A young woman, friend of Isobel Barton, seems to have gone missing. It’s been a few days and Mrs Barton’s worried. Her name’s Catherine Demeter. Nothing to link her with the Baines disappearance; she hadn’t even met the Bartons at that point.’

‘Bartons plural?’

‘Seems she was dating Stephen Barton. You know anything about him?’

‘He’s an asshole. Apart from that, he’s a minor drug pusher for Sonny Ferrera, grew up near the Ferreras on Staten Island and fell in with Sonny as a teenager. He’s into steroids, also coke, I think, but it’s minor league stuff.’

Walter’s brow furrowed. ‘How long have you known about this?’ he asked.

‘Can’t remember,’ I replied. ‘Gym gossip.’

‘Jesus, don’t tell us anything we might find useful. I’ve only known since Tuesday.’

‘You’re not supposed to know,’ I said. ‘You’re the police. Nobody tells you things you’re supposed to know.’

‘You used to be a cop too,’ Walter muttered. ‘You’ve picked up some bad habits.’

‘Gimme a break, Walter. How do I know who you’re checking up on? What am I supposed to do, go to confession to you once a week?’ I poured some hot coffee into my cup. ‘Anyway, you think there might be a connection between this disappearance and Sonny Ferrera?’ I continued.

‘It’s possible,’ said Walter. ‘The Feds were tracking Stephen Barton for a time, maybe a year ago, long before he was supposed to have started seeing Catherine Demeter. They were chasing their tails with that kid, so they let it go. According to the Narcotics file she doesn’t seem to have been involved, at least not openly, but what do they know? Some of them still think a crack pipe is something a plumber fixes. Maybe she could have seen something she wasn’t supposed to see.’

His face betrayed how lame he thought the link was, but he left me to voice it. ‘C’mon, Walter, steroids and minor coke? There’s money in it but, like I said, it’s strictly minor league compared to the rest of Ferrera’s business. If he knocked off someone over musclehead drugs then he’s even more stupid than we know he is. Even his old man thinks he’s the result of a defective gene.’

Ferrera Senior, sick and decrepit but still a respected figure, had been known to refer to his only son as ‘that little prick’ on occasion. ‘Is that all you’ve got?’

‘As you say, we’re the police. No one tells us anything useful,’ he replied drily.

‘Did you know Sonny is impotent?’ I offered.

Walter stood up, waving his empty glass in front of his face and smiling for the first time that evening. ‘No, no, I didn’t. I’m not sure I wanted to know, either. What the hell are you, his urologist?’ He glanced over at me as he reached for the Redbreast. I waved my fingers in a gesture of disregard that went no further than my wrist.

‘Pili Pilar still with him?’ I asked, testing the waters.

‘Far as I know. I hear he pushed Nicky Glasses out of a window a few weeks back because he fell behind on the vig.’

‘Tough on Nicky. Another hundred years and he’d have had the loan paid off. Pili’d better ease up on his temper or he’s gonna run out of people to push through windows.’

Walter didn’t smile.

‘Will you talk to her?’ he asked as he resumed his seat.

‘MPs, Walter . . .’ I sighed. Fourteen thousand people disappeared in New York every year. It wasn’t even clear if this woman was missing – in which case she didn’t want to be found or someone else didn’t want her found – or simply misplaced, which meant that she had merely upped sticks and moved off to another town without breaking the news to her good friend Isobel Barton, or to her lovely boyfriend Stephen Barton.

Those are the kinds of issues PIs have to consider when faced with missing-persons cases. Tracing missing persons is bread and butter for PIs, but I wasn’t a PI. I had taken on Fat Ollie’s skip because it was easy work, or seemed to be at the time. I didn’t want to file for a PI license with the State Licensing Services in Albany. I didn’t want to get involved in missing-persons work. Maybe I was afraid it would distract me too much. Maybe I just didn’t care enough, not then.

‘She won’t go to the cops,’ said Walter. ‘The woman isn’t even officially missing yet, since no one has reported her.’

‘So how come you know about it?’

‘You know Tony Loo-Loo?’ I nodded. Tony Loomax was a small-time PI with a stammer who had never graduated beyond skips and white-trash divorces.

‘Loomax is an unusual candidate for Isobel Barton’s custom,’ I said.

‘It seems he did some work for one of the household staff a year or two back. Traced her husband who’d run off with their savings. Mrs Barton told him she wanted something similar done, but wanted it done on the QT.’

‘Still doesn’t explain your involvement.’

‘I have some stuff on Tony, mild overstepping of legal boundaries, which he would prefer I didn’t act on. Tony figured I might like to know that Isobel Barton had been making low-key approaches. I spoke to Kooper. He believes the Trust doesn’t need any more bad publicity. I figured maybe I could do him a favour.’

‘If Tony has the call, then why are you approaching me?’

‘We’ve encouraged Tony to pass it on. He’s told Isobel Barton that he’s passing her on to someone she can trust because he can’t take the case. Seems his mother just died and he has to go to the funeral.’

‘Tony Loo-Loo doesn’t have a mother. He was brought up in an orphanage.’

‘Well, someone’s mother must have died,’ said Walter testily. ‘He can go to that funeral.’

He stopped and I could see the doubt in his eyes as the rumours he had heard flicked a fin in the depths of his mind. ‘And that’s why I’m approaching you. Even if I tried to do this quietly through the usual channels someone would know. Christ, you take a drink of water at headquarters and ten guys piss it out.’

‘What about the girl’s family?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know much more but I don’t think there is one. Look, Bird, I’m asking you because you’re good. You were a smart cop. If you’d stayed on the force the rest of us would have been cleaning your shoes and polishing your shield. Your instincts were good. I reckon they still are. Plus you owe me one: people who go shooting up the boroughs don’t usually walk away quite so easily.’

I was silent for a time. I could hear Lee banging around in the kitchen while a TV show played in the background. Perhaps it was a remnant of what had taken place earlier, the apparently senseless killing of Fat Ollie Watts and his girlfriend, the death of the shooter, but it felt as if the world had shifted out of joint and that nothing was fitting as it should. Even this felt wrong. I believed Walter was holding back on me.

I heard the doorbell ring and then there was a muffled exchange of voices, one of them Lee’s and the other a deep male voice. Seconds later there was a knock on the door and Lee showed in a tall, grey-haired man in his fifties. He wore a dark blue double-breasted suit – it looked like Boss – and a red Christian Dior tie with an interlocking gold CD pattern. His shoes sparkled like they’d been shined with spit although, since this was Philip Kooper, it was probably someone else’s spit.

Kooper was an unlikely figure to act as chairman and spokesman of a children’s charity. He was thin and pale, and his mouth managed the unique trick of being simultaneously slim and pursed. His fingers were long and tapering, almost like claws. Kooper looked like he had been disinterred for the express purpose of making people uneasy. If he had turned up at one of the Trust’s kids’ parties, all of the children would have cried.

‘This him?’ he asked Walter, after declining a drink. He flicked his head at me like a frog swallowing a fly. I played with the sugar bowl and tried to look offended.

‘This is Parker,’ nodded Walter. I waited to see if Kooper would offer to shake hands. He didn’t. His hands remained clasped in front of him like a professional mourner at a particularly uninvolving funeral.

‘Have you explained the situation to him?’

Walter nodded again but looked embarrassed. Kooper’s manners were worse than a bad child’s. I stayed seated and didn’t say anything. Kooper sniffed and then stood in silence while he looked down on me. He gave the impression that it was a position with which he was entirely familiar.

‘This is a delicate situation, Mr Parker, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate. Any communication in this matter will be made to me in the first instance before you impart any information to Mrs Barton. Is that clear?’

I wondered if Kooper was worth the effort of annoying and decided, after looking at Walter’s look of discomfort, that he probably wasn’t, at least not yet. But I was starting to feel sorry for Isobel Barton and I hadn’t even met her.

‘My understanding was that Mrs Barton was hiring me,’ I said eventually.

‘That’s correct, but you will be answerable to me.’

‘I don’t think so. There’s a small matter of confidentiality. I’ll look into it but, if it’s unconnected with the Baines kid or the Ferreras, I reserve the right to keep what I learn between Isobel Barton and myself.’

‘That is not satisfactory, Mr Parker,’ said Kooper. A faint blush of colour rose in his cheeks and hung there for a moment, looking lost in the tundra of his complexion. ‘Perhaps I am not making myself clear: in this matter, you will report to me first. I have powerful friends, Mr Parker. If you do not co-operate I can ensure that your license is revoked.’

‘They must be very powerful friends because I don’t have a license,’ I said. I stood up and Kooper’s fists tightened slightly. ‘You should consider yoga,’ I said. ‘You’re too tense.’

I thanked Walter for the coffee and moved to the door.

‘Wait,’ he said. I turned back to see him staring at Kooper. After a few moments, Kooper gave a barely perceptible shrug of his shoulders and moved to the window. He didn’t look at me again. Kooper’s attitude and Walter’s expression conspired against my better judgement, and I decided to talk to Isobel Barton.

‘I take it she’s expecting me?’ I asked Walter.

‘I told Tony to tell her you were good, that if the girl was alive you’d find her.’

There was another brief moment of silence.

‘And if she’s dead?’

‘Mr Kooper asked that question as well,’ said Walter.

‘What did you say?’

He swallowed the last of his whiskey, the ice cubes rattling against the glass like old bones. Behind him, Kooper was a dark silhouette against the window, like a promise of bad news.

‘I told him you’d bring back the body.’

In the end, that’s what it all came down to: bodies – bodies found and bodies yet to be found. And I recalled how Woolrich and I stood outside the old woman’s house and looked out over the bayou on that April day. I could hear the water lapping gently at the shore and, further out, I watched a small fishing boat bobbing on the water, two figures casting out from either side. But both Woolrich and I were looking deeper than the surface, as if, by staring hard enough, we could penetrate to the depths and find the body of a nameless girl in the dark waters.

‘Do you believe her?’ he said at last.

‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

‘There’s no way we’re gonna find that body, if it exists, without more than we’ve got. We start trawling for bodies in bayous and pretty soon we’re gonna be knee deep in bones. People been dumping bodies in these swamps for centuries. Be a miracle if we didn’t find something.’

I walked away from him. He was right, of course. Assuming there was a body, we needed more from the old woman than she had given us. I felt like I was trying to grip smoke, but what the old woman had said was the closest thing yet to a lead on the man who had killed Jennifer and Susan.

I wondered if I was crazy, taking the word of a blind woman who heard voices in her sleep. I probably was.

‘Do you know what he looks like, Tante?’ I had asked her, watching as her head moved ponderously from side to side in response.

‘Only see him when he comes for you,’ she replied. ‘Then you know him.’

I reached the car and looked back to see a figure on the porch with Woolrich. It was the girl with the scarred face, standing gracefully on the tips of her toes as she leaned towards the taller man. I saw Woolrich run his finger tenderly across her cheek and then softly speak her name: ‘Florence.’ He kissed her lightly on the lips, then turned and walked towards me without looking back at her. Neither of us said anything about it on the journey back to New Orleans.

Chapter Five

It rained throughout that night, breaking the shell of heat that had surrounded the city, and the streets of Manhattan seemed to breathe easier the next morning. It was almost cool as I ran. The pavement was hard on my knees but large areas of grass were sparse in this part of the city. I bought a newspaper on the way back to my apartment then showered, changed and read over breakfast. Shortly after 11.00 a.m. I called a cab and headed out to the Barton house.

Isobel Barton lived in the secluded house her late husband had built in the seventies near Todt Hill, an admirable if unsuccessful attempt to replicate the antebellum houses of his native Georgia in an east-coast setting and on a smaller scale. Old Jack Barton, an amiable soul by all accounts, had apparently made up with money and determination for what he lacked in good taste.

The gate to the drive was open as I arrived and the exhaust fumes of another car hung in the air. The cab turned in just as the electronic gates were about to rumble closed, and we followed the lead car, a white BMW 320i with tinted windows, to the small courtyard in front of the house. The cab looked out of place in that setting, although how the Barton household might have felt about my own battered Mustang, currently undergoing repairs, I wasn’t so sure.

As I pulled up a slim woman dressed conservatively in a grey suit emerged from the BMW and watched me curiously as I paid the cab driver. Her grey hair was tied back in a bun, which did nothing to soften her severe features. A large black man wearing a chauffeur’s uniform appeared at the door of the house and moved quickly to intercept me as I walked from the departing cab.

‘Parker. I believe I’m expected.’

The chauffeur gave me a look that told me if I was lying he’d make me wish I’d stayed in bed. He asked me to wait before turning back to the woman in grey. She glanced at me briefly but nastily before exchanging a few words with the chauffeur, who moved off to the back of the house as she approached me.

‘Mr Parker, I’m Ms Christie, Mrs Barton’s personal assistant. You should have stayed at the gate until we were sure who you were.’ In a window above the door, a curtain twitched slightly and then was still.

‘If you have a staff entrance I’ll use that in future.’ I got the impression from Ms Christie that she hoped that eventuality wouldn’t arise. She eyed me coldly for a moment then turned on her heel. ‘If you’ll come with me, please,’ she said over her shoulder, as she moved towards the door. The grey suit was threadbare at the edges. I wondered if Mrs Barton would haggle over my rates.

If Isobel Barton was short of cash she could simply have sold off some of the antiques that furnished the house because the interior was an auctioneer’s wet dream. Two large rooms opened out at either side of a hallway filled with furniture that looked like it was only used when presidents died. A wide staircase curved up to the right; a closed door lay straight ahead while another nestled under the stairs. I followed Ms Christie through the latter and into a small but surprisingly bright and modern office with a computer in a corner and a TV and video unit built into the bookshelves. Maybe Mrs Barton wouldn’t haggle about the rates after all.

Ms Christie sat down behind a pine desk, removed some papers from her valise and shuffled through them in obvious irritation before finding what she wanted.

‘This is a standard confidentiality agreement drawn up by the Trust’s legal advisers,’ she began, pushing it towards me with one hand while clicking a pen simultaneously with the other. ‘It is an undertaking on your behalf to keep all communication relating to the matter in hand between Mrs Barton, myself and yourself.’ She used the pen to point to the relevant sections on the agreement, like an insurance salesman trying to slip a bum contract past a sucker. ‘I’d like you to sign it before we proceed any further,’ she concluded.

It seemed like nobody involved with the Barton Trust had a particularly trusting nature. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘If you’re concerned about possible breaches of confidentiality then hire a priest to do your work. Otherwise you’ll have to take my word that what passes between us will go no further.’ Perhaps I should have felt guilty about lying to her. I didn’t. I was a good liar. It’s one of the gifts God gives alcoholics.

‘That’s not acceptable. I am already unconvinced about the necessity of hiring you and I certainly feel it is inappropriate to do so without—’

She was interrupted by the sound of the office door opening. I turned to see a tall, attractive woman enter, her age indeterminable through a combination of the gentleness of nature and the magic of cosmetics. At a glance I would have guessed she was in her late forties but if this was Isobel Barton, then I knew she was closer to fifty-five, maybe older. She wore a pale blue dress, which was too subtly simple to be anything but expensive and displayed a figure that was either surgically enhanced or extremely well preserved.

As she drew closer and the tiny wrinkles in her face became clearer I guessed it was the latter: Isobel Barton did not look like the sort of woman who resorted to plastic surgery. Around her neck, gold and diamonds glittered and a pair of matching earrings sparkled as she walked. Her hair, too, was grey, but she let it hang long and loose on her shoulders. She was still an attractive woman and she walked like she knew it.

Philip Kooper had borne the brunt of the media attention following the disappearance of the Baines boy, but that attention had not been significant. The Baines boy was from a family of dopers and no-hopers. His disappearance merited a mention only because of the Trust and even then the Trust’s lawyers and patrons had called in enough favours to ensure that speculation was kept to a minimum. The boy’s mother was separated from his father and they hadn’t been getting along any better since he left.

The police were still trying to trace the father in case of a possible snatch, even though every indication was that the father, a petty criminal, hated his child. In some cases, that might be enough to justify taking the child and killing him to get at his estranged wife. When I was a rookie patrolman, I once arrived at a tenement to find a man had abducted his baby daughter and drowned her in the bath because his ex-wife wouldn’t let him have the TV after they separated.

Only one piece of coverage of the Baines disappearance stuck in my mind: a picture of Mrs Barton snapped head-bowed as she visited the mother of Evan Baines in a run-down project. It was supposed to have been a private visit. The photographer, returning from the scene of a drug-killing, just happened to be passing. One or two papers took the picture, but they ran it small.

‘Thank you, Caroline. I’ll talk to Mr Parker alone for a time.’ She smiled as she said it but the tone brooked no argument. Her assistant affected a lack of concern at the dismissal but her eyes flashed fire. When she had left the room, Mrs Barton seated herself on a stiff-backed chair away from the desk and motioned me towards a black leather couch, then turned her smile on me.

‘I’m sorry about that. I didn’t authorise any such agreement but Caroline can be over-protective of me at times. Can we offer you coffee, or would you prefer a drink?’

‘Neither, thank you. Before you go any further, Mrs Barton, I should tell you that I don’t really do missing-persons work.’ In my experience, searching for missing persons was best left to specialist agencies with the manpower to chase up leads and possible sightings. Some solo investigators who took on that kind of work were at best ill equipped and at worst little better than parasites who preyed on the hopes of those who remained to keep funding minimal efforts for even smaller returns.

‘Mr Loomax said you might say that, but only out of modesty. He told me to say he would regard it as a personal favour.’

I smiled, despite myself. The only favour I would give Tony Loo-Loo would be not to piss on his grave when he died.

According to Mrs Barton, she had met Catherine Demeter through her son, who had seen the girl working at DeVries’s department store and had pestered her for a date. Mrs Barton and her son – her stepson, to be accurate, since Jack Barton had been married once before to a Southern woman who had divorced him after eight years and moved to Hawaii with a singer – were not close. She was aware that her son was engaged in activities that were, as she put it, ‘unsavoury’, and had tried to get him to change his ways, ‘both for his own sake and the sake of the Trust’. I nodded sympathetically. Sympathy was the only possible emotion to feel for anyone involved with Stephen Barton.

When she heard he was seeing a new girlfriend she asked if they could all meet together, she said, and a date had been arranged. In the end her son had failed to appear but Catherine had turned up and, after an initial awkwardness, the two quickly struck up a friendship far more amicable than the relationship that existed between the girl and Stephen Barton. The two had continued to meet occasionally for coffee and lunch. Despite invitations, the girl had politely refused offers from Mrs Barton to come out to the house and Stephen Barton had never brought her.

Then Catherine Demeter had simply dropped out of sight. She had left work early on Saturday and had failed to keep an early dinner appointment on Sunday with Mrs Barton. That was the last anyone had heard of Catherine Demeter, said Mrs Barton. Two days had now passed and she had heard nothing from her.

‘Because of, well, the publicity that the Trust has received recently over the disappearance of that poor child I was reluctant to cause a fuss or draw any further adverse attention down on us,’ she said. ‘I rang Mr Loomax and he seemed to think that Catherine may simply have drifted on somewhere else. It happens a lot, I believe.’

‘Do you think there’s something more to it than that?’

‘I really don’t know, but she was so happy with her job and she appeared to be getting on well with Stephen.’ She stopped for a moment at this mention of her son’s name, as if considering whether or not to proceed. Then: ‘Stephen has been running wild for some time – since before his father’s death, in fact. Do you know the Ferrera family, Mr Parker?’

‘I’m aware of them.’

‘Stephen fell in with their youngest son, despite all of our efforts. I know he keeps bad company and I know he’s involved with drugs. I’m afraid he may have dragged Catherine into something. And . . .’ She paused again, briefly. ‘I enjoyed her company. There was something gentle about her and she seemed so sad sometimes. She said that she was anxious to settle down here, after moving around for so long.’

‘Did she say where she had been?’

‘All over. I gather that she had worked in a number of states.’

‘Did she say anything about her past, give any indication that something might be troubling her?’

‘I think something may have happened to her family when she was young. She told me that she had a sister who died. She didn’t say any more. She said she couldn’t talk about it and I didn’t press her on it.’

‘Mr Loomax may be right. She may simply have moved on again.’

Mrs Barton shook her head insistently. ‘No, she would have told me, I’m sure of it. Stephen hasn’t heard from her and neither have I. I’m afraid for her and I want to know that she is safe. That’s all. She doesn’t even have to know that I hired you, or that I was concerned for her. Will you take the case?’

I was still reluctant to do Walter Cole’s dirty work and to take advantage of Isobel Barton but I had little else on my plate, except an appearance in court the following day on behalf of an insurance firm, another case I had taken for the exercise.

If there was a connection between the disappearance of Catherine Demeter and Sonny Ferrera, then she was almost certainly in trouble. If Sonny had been involved in the killing of Fat Ollie Watts, it was clear that he was going off the rails.

‘I’ll give it a few days,’ I said. ‘As a favour,’ I added. ‘Do you want to know my rates?’

She was already writing a cheque, drawn on her private account and not that of the Trust. ‘Here’s three thousand dollars in advance and this is my card. My private number is on the back.’

She moved her chair forward. ‘Now, what else do you need to know?’

That evening, I had dinner in River on Amsterdam Avenue, close to 70th Street, where the classic beef made it the best Vietnamese in town and where the staff moved by so softly that it was like being waited on by shadows or passing breezes. I watched a young couple at a nearby table intertwining their hands, running their fingers over each other’s knuckles and fingertips, tracing delicate circles in their palms, then gripping their hands together and pressing the heel of each hand forcefully against the other. And as they simulated their lovemaking, a waitress drifted by and smiled knowingly at me as I watched.

Chapter Six

The day after I visited Isobel Barton, I made a brief visit to court in connection with the insurance case. A claim had been made against a phone company by a contracted electrician who said he had fallen down a hole in the road while examining underground cables and was no longer able to work as a result.

He may not have been able to work but he had still been able to power-lift five hundred pounds in a cash contest in a Boston gymnasium. I had used a palm-size Panasonic video camera to capture his moment of glory. The insurance company presented the evidence to a judge, who suspended any further decision on the matter for one week. I didn’t even have to give evidence. Afterwards I had coffee in a diner and read the paper before heading over to Pete Hayes’s old gym in TriBeCa.

I knew Stephen Barton worked out there sometimes. If his girlfriend had disappeared then there was a strong possibility that Barton might know where she had gone or, equally importantly, why. I remembered him vaguely as a strong, Nordic-looking type, his body obscenely pumped from steroid use. He was in his late twenties but the combination of training and sunbeds had worn his face to the consistency of old leather, adding at least ten years to his age.

As artists and Wall Street lawyers had started moving into the TriBeCa area, attracted by loft-space in the cast-iron and masonry buildings, Pete’s gym had moved upmarket, filling what used to be a spit and sawdust place with mirrors and potted palms and, sacrilege upon sacrilege, a juice bar. Now heavyweight boneheads and serious power-lifters worked out alongside accountants with paunches and female executives with power-dress business suits and cellphones. The noticeboard at the door advertised something called ‘spinning’, which involved sitting on a bike for an hour and sweating yourself into a red agony. Ten years ago, even the suggestion that the gym might be used for such a purpose would have caused Pete’s regular clientele to bust the place up.

A wholesome-looking blonde in a red leotard buzzed me into Pete’s office, the last bastion of what the gym had once been. Old posters advertising power-lifting competitions and Mr Universe shows shared wall space with pictures of Pete alongside Steve Reeves, Joe Weider and, oddly, the wrestler Hulk Hogan. Body-building trophies sat in a glass-fronted cabinet while behind a battered pine desk sat Pete himself, his muscles slackening in old age but still a powerful, impressive figure, his salt and pepper hair cut in a short military style. I had trained in the gym for almost six years, until I was promoted to detective and started to destroy myself.

Pete stood and nodded, his hands in his pockets and his loose-fitting top doing nothing to conceal the size of his shoulders and arms.

‘Long time,’ he said. ‘Sorry about what happened to . . .’ He trailed off and moved his chin and shoulders in a kind of combination shrug, a gesture to the past and what it contained.

I nodded back and leaned against an old gunmetal-grey filing cabinet adorned with decals advertising health supplements and lifting magazines.

‘Spinning, Pete?’

He grimaced. ‘Yeah, I know. Still, spinning makes me two hundred dollars an hour. I got forty exercise bikes on the floor above us and I couldn’t make more money with a printing press and green ink.’

‘Stephen Barton around?’

Pete kicked at some imaginary obstacle on the worn wooden floor. ‘Not for a week or so. He in trouble?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘Is he?’

Pete sat down slowly and, wincing, stretched his legs out in front of him. Years of squatting had taken their toll on his knees, leaving them weak and arthritic. ‘You’re not the first person to come here asking about him this week. Couple of guys in cheap suits were in here yesterday trying to find him. Recognised one of them as Sal Inzerillo, used to be a good light-middleweight until he started taking falls.’

‘I remember him.’ I paused. ‘Works for old man Ferrera now, I hear.’

‘Might do,’ nodded Pete. ‘Might do. Might have worked for the old man in the ring too, if you believe the stories. This about drugs?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. Pete glanced at me quickly to see if I was lying, decided I wasn’t and went back to examining the tops of his sneakers. ‘You hear of any trouble between Sonny and the old man, anything that might have involved Stephen Barton?’

‘There’s trouble between them, sure, otherwise what’s Inzerillo doing damaging my floor with his black rubber soles? Don’t know that it involves Barton, though.’

I moved on to the subject of Catherine Demeter. ‘Do you remember a girl with Barton recently? She may have been around here sometimes. Short dark hair, slight overbite, maybe in her early thirties.’

‘Barton has lots of girls but I don’t remember that one. Don’t notice, mostly, unless they’re smarter than Barton, which makes me wonder.’

‘Not difficult,’ I said. ‘This one probably was smarter. Is Barton a hitter?’

‘He’s mean, sure. Popping pills frazzled his brain, gave him bad ’roid rage. It’s fight or fuck with him. Fuck mainly. My old lady could take him in a fight.’ He looked at me intently. ‘I know what he was into, but he didn’t sell here. I’d have force-fed his shit to him till he burst if he tried it.’ I didn’t believe Pete but I let it go. Steroids was part of the game now and there was nothing Pete could do except bluster.

He pursed his lips and pulled his legs slowly in. ‘A lot of women were attracted to him by his size. Barton was a big guy and he sure talked big. Some women just want the protection someone like him seems to offer. Some just want to fuck a big guy and some want to be protected. They believe if they give the guy what he wants he’ll look out for them.’

‘Pity she chose Stephen Barton, then,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ agreed Pete. ‘Maybe she wasn’t so smart after all.’

I had brought my training gear with me and did ninety minutes in the gym. It had been some time since I trained properly. To avoid embarrassment I skipped the bench and stuck to shoulders, back and light arm work, enjoying the sensation of strength and movement in the bent-over rows and the pressure on my biceps during the curls.

I still looked pretty good, I thought, although the assessment was a result of insecurity instead of vanity. At just under six feet, I still retained some of my lifter’s build – the wide shoulders, definition in the biceps and triceps and a chest which was at least bigger than two eggs frying on the sidewalk – and I hadn’t regained much of the fat I had lost during the year. I still had my hair, although there was grey creeping back from the temples and sprinkling the fringe. My eyes were clear enough to be recognisably grey-blue, set in a slightly long face now deeply etched at the eyes and mouth with the marks of remembered grief. Clean-shaven, with a decent haircut, a good suit and some flattering light, I could look almost respectable. In the right light, I could even have claimed to be thirty-two without making people snigger too loudly. It was only two years less than my age on my driver’s licence, but these little things become more important as you get older.

When I was finished, I packed my gear, declined Pete’s offer of a protein shake – it smelt like rotten bananas – and stopped off for a coffee instead. I felt relaxed for the first time in weeks, the endorphins pumping through my system and a pleasant tightness developing across my shoulders and back.

The next call I made was to DeVries’s department store. The personnel manager called himself a human resources manager and, like personnel managers the world over, was one of the least personable people one could meet. Sitting opposite him, it was difficult not to feel that anyone who could happily reduce individuals to resources, to the same level as oil, bricks and canaries in coal mines, probably shouldn’t be allowed to have any human relations that didn’t involve locks and prison bars. In other words, Timothy Cary was a first-degree prick from the tip of his close-cropped dyed hair to the toes of his patent leather shoes.

I had contacted his secretary earlier that afternoon to make the appointment, telling her that I was acting for an attorney in the matter of an inheritance coming to Ms Demeter. Cary and his secretary deserved each other. A wild dog on a chain would have been more helpful than Cary’s secretary, and easier to get past.

‘My client is anxious that Ms Demeter be contacted as soon as possible,’ I told him, as we sat in his small, prissy office. ‘The will is extremely detailed and there are a lot of forms to be filled out.’

‘And your client would be . . .?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. I’m sure you understand.’

Cary looked like he understood but didn’t want to. He leaned back in his chair and gently rubbed his expensive silk tie between his fingers. It had to be expensive. It was too tasteless to be anything else. Crisp lines showed along his shirt as if it had just been removed from its packet, assuming Timothy Cary would have anything to do with something so plebeian as a plastic wrapper. If he ever visited the shop floor it must have been like an angel descending, albeit an angel who looked like he’d just encountered a bad smell.

‘Miss Demeter was due in work yesterday.’ Cary glanced down at a file on his desk. ‘She had Monday off and we haven’t seen her since.’

‘Is that usual, to have Monday off?’ I wasn’t anxious to know but the question distracted Cary from the file. Isobel Barton didn’t have Catherine Demeter’s new address. Catherine would usually contact her or Mrs Barton would have her assistant leave a message at DeVries’s. As Cary brightened slightly at the opportunity to discuss a subject close to his heart and started mouthing off about work schedules, I memorised her address and SSN. I eventually managed to interrupt him for long enough to ask if Catherine Demeter had been ill on her last day in work, or had complained of being disturbed in any way.

‘I’m not aware of any such communication. Miss Demeter’s position with DeVries is currently under review as a result of her absence,’ he concluded smugly. ‘I hope, for her sake, that her inheritance is considerable.’ I don’t think he meant it.

After some routine delaying tactics, Cary gave me permission to speak with the woman who had worked with Catherine on her last shift in the store. I met her in a supervisor’s office off the sales floor. Martha Friedman was in her early sixties. She was plump with dyed-red hair and a face so caked with cosmetics that the floor of the Amazon jungle probably saw more natural light, but she tried to be helpful. She had been working with Catherine Demeter in the china department on Saturday. It was her first time to work with her, since Mrs Friedman’s usual assistant had been taken ill and someone was needed to cover for her in the last hour before closing.

‘Did you notice anything unusual about her behaviour?’ I asked, as Mrs Friedman took the opportunity afforded by some time in the supervisor’s office to discreetly examine the papers on his desk. ‘Did she seem distressed or anxious in any way?’

Mrs Friedman furrowed her brow slightly. ‘She broke a piece of china, an Aynsley vase. She had just arrived and was showing it to a customer when she dropped it. Then, when I looked around, she was running across the shop floor, heading for the escalators. Most unprofessional, I thought, even if she was sick.’

‘And was she sick?’

‘She said she felt sick, but why run for the escalators? We have a staff washroom on each level.’

I got the feeling that Mrs Friedman knew more than she was saying. She was enjoying the attention and wanted to draw it out. I leaned towards her confidentially.

‘But what do you think, Mrs Friedman?’

She preened a little and leaned forward in turn, touching my hand lightly to emphasise her point.

‘She saw someone, someone she was trying to reach before they left the store. Tom, the security guard on the east door, told me she ran out by him and stood looking around the street. We’re supposed to get permission to leave the store when on duty. He should have reported her, but he just told me instead. Tom’s a schvartze, but he’s okay.’

‘Do you have any idea who she might have seen?’

‘No. She just refused to discuss it. She doesn’t have any friends among the staff, far as I can tell, and now I can see why.’

I spoke to the security guard and the supervisor, but they couldn’t add anything to what Mrs Friedman had told me. I stopped at a diner for coffee and a sandwich, returned to my apartment to pick up a small black bag my friend Angel had given me and then took another cab to Catherine Demeter’s apartment.

Chapter Seven

The apartment was in a converted four-storey redstone in Greenpoint, a part of Brooklyn populated mainly by Italians, Irish and Poles, the latter counting a large number of former Solidarity activists among them. It was from the Greenpoint Continental Ironworks that the ironclad Monitor had emerged to fight the Confederate ship Merrimac, when Greenpoint was Brooklyn’s industrial centre.

The cast-iron manufacturers, the potters and printers were all gone now, but many of the descendants of the original workers still remained. Small clothing boutiques and Polish bakeries shared frontage with established kosher delis and stores selling used electrical goods.

Catherine Demeter’s block was still a little run down, and kids wearing sneakers and low-slung jeans sat on the steps of most of the buildings, smoking and whistling and calling at passing women. She lived in apartment fourteen, probably near the top. I tried the bell but wasn’t surprised when there was no answer from the intercom. Instead I tried twenty and, when an elderly woman’s voice responded, I told her I was from the gas company and had a report of a leak but the supervisor’s apartment was empty. She was silent for a moment then buzzed me in.

I guessed she’d probably check with the super so time was limited, although if the apartment didn’t reveal anything about where Catherine Demeter might have gone, I’d have to talk to the super anyway, or approach the neighbours or maybe even talk to the mailman. As I passed into the lobby I flipped open the mailbox for apartment fourteen and shone my flashlight inside, finding only a copy of the most recent New York magazine and what looked like two junk mail drops. I let the box close and took the stairs up to the third floor.

It was silent, with six newly varnished apartment doors along the hall, three on each side. I walked quietly to number fourteen and took the black bag from under my coat. I knocked once more on the door, just to be sure, and removed the power rake from the bag. Angel was the best B&E man I knew and even as a cop I’d had reasons to use him. In return, I’d never hassled Angel and he’d stayed out of my way professionally. When he did go down, I’d done my best to make things a little easier for him inside. The rake had been a thank-you of sorts. An illegal thank-you.

It looked like an electric drill but was smaller and slimmer, with a prong at its tip that acted as a pick and tension tool. I stuck the prong in the lock and squeezed the trigger. The rake clattered noisily for a couple of seconds and then the lock turned. I slipped in quietly and closed the door behind me, seconds before another door down the hall opened. I stayed still and waited until it closed again, then put the rake back in the bag, reopened the door and took a toothpick from my pocket. I snapped it into four pieces and jammed them into the lock. It would give me time to get to the fire-escape if someone tried to enter the apartment while I was there. Then I closed the door and turned on the lights.

A short hallway with a threadbare rug led to a clean living room, cheaply furnished with a battered TV and a mismatched sofa and chairs. To one side was a small kitchen and to the other a bedroom.

I checked the bedroom first. Some paperback novels stood on a small shelf beside the bed. The only other furniture consisted of a wardrobe and dressing table, both of which appeared to have been made up from IKEA kits. I checked under the bed and found an empty suitcase. There were no cosmetics on the dressing table, which meant that she had probably packed a small overnight bag when she left and taken them with her. She probably hadn’t intended to stay away for long and she certainly didn’t appear to have left for good.

I checked the wardrobe but there were only clothes and a few pairs of shoes inside. The first two drawers in the dressing table also contained only clothes but the last one was filled with papers, the accumulated documents, tax forms and employment records of a life spent moving from city to city, from job to job.

Catherine Demeter had spent a long time in the waitressing game, moving from New Hampshire to Florida and back again with the social season. She had also spent some time in Chicago, Las Vegas and Phoenix as well as numerous small towns, judging by the collection of wage slips and tax documents in her drawer. There were also various bank statements. She had about $39,000 in a savings account in a city bank, as well as some shares bound carefully with a thick blue ribbon. Finally, there was a passport, updated recently, and within it three extra passport-size photos of herself.

Catherine Demeter, true to Isobel Barton’s description, was a small attractive woman in her mid-thirties, five-two, with dark hair cut short in a bob, pale blue eyes and a fair complexion. I took the extra photos and put them in my wallet, then turned to examine the only item of a very personal nature in the drawer.

It was a photo album, thick and worn at the corners. Within it was what I assumed to be a history of the Demeter family, from sepia-tinted photos of grandparents, through the wedding of what I guessed were her parents and on through the photos of two girls growing up, sometimes with parents and friends, sometimes together, sometimes alone. Pictures from the beach, from family holidays, from birthdays and Christmas and Thanksgiving, the memories of two sisters starting off in life. The resemblance between the two was clear. Catherine was the younger, the overbite visible even then. The girl I took to be her sister was perhaps two or three years older, with sandy-coloured hair, a beautiful girl even at eleven or twelve.

There were no more pictures of her after that age. The rest consisted of Catherine alone or with her parents and the record of her growth was more periodic, the sense of celebration and joyfulness gone. Eventually, they dwindled away to nothing with a final picture of Catherine on the day of her high-school graduation, a solemn-looking young woman with dark rings beneath eyes that seemed close to tears. The testimonial attached came from the principal of Haven High School, Virginia.

Something had been removed from the final pages of the album. Small pieces of what appeared to be newspaper rested at the base of the album pages, most merely tiny fragments as thin as threads but one about an inch square. The paper was yellowing with age, with a fragment of a weather report on one side and part of a photo on the other, the tip of some sand-blonde hair visible in one corner. Tucked into the last page were two birth certificates, one for Catherine Louise Demeter dated 5 March 1962 and the other for Amy Ellen Demeter, dated 3 December 1959.

I returned the album to the drawer and went into the bathroom next door. It was clean and neat, like the rest of the apartment, with soap, shower gels and foam bath arranged neatly on the white tile by the bath and towels stored on a small shelf under the sink. I opened one side of the medicine cabinet on the wall. It contained toothpaste, floss and mouthwash, as well as some non-prescription medicines for cold relief, water retention and evening primrose capsules. There were no birth-control pills or other contraceptives. Maybe Stephen Barton took care of that, although I doubted it. Stephen didn’t seem like the new-age type.

The other side of the cabinet contained a miniature pharmacy with enough uppers and downers to keep Catherine moving like a roller-coaster. There was Librium, for mood swings, Ativan to combat agitation, and Valium, Thorazine and Lorazepam for anxiety. Some were empty, others half empty. The most recent came from a prescription from Dr Frank Forbes, a psychiatrist. I knew the name. ‘Fucking Frank’ Forbes had screwed or attempted to screw so many of his patients that it was sometimes suggested that they should charge him. He had been on the verge of losing his license on a number of occasions, but the complaints were either withdrawn, never got to court or were suppressed through the judicious application of some of Fucking Frank’s funds. I heard he had been unusually quiet lately after one of his patients had contracted a dose of the clap after an encounter with Frank and then had promptly slapped a lawsuit on him. This one, I gathered, was proving difficult for Fucking Frank to bury.

Catherine Demeter was clearly a very unhappy woman and was unlikely to get any happier if she was seeing Frank Forbes. I wasn’t too keen on visiting him. He had once tried to come on to Elizabeth Gordon, the daughter of one of Susan’s divorced friends, and I’d paid him a visit to remind him of his duties as a doctor and to threaten to throw him from his office window if it ever happened again. After that, I tried to take a semi-professional interest in Frank Forbes’s activities.

There was nothing else of note in Catherine’s bathroom, or in the rest of her apartment. As I was leaving I stopped at her telephone, picked it up and pressed the re-dial button. After the beeps subsided a voice answered.

‘Haven County Sheriff’s Office, hello?’

I hung up and dialled a guy I knew in the telephone company. Five minutes later he came back with a list of local numbers called from Friday to Sunday. There were only three and they were all mundane – a Chinese takeaway, a local laundry and a movie-information line.

The local company couldn’t give me details of any long-distance calls made, so I dialled a second number. This one connected me with one of the many agencies that offer PIs and those with a deep and abiding interest in other people’s business the opportunity to purchase confidential information illegally. The agency was able to tell me within twenty minutes that fifteen calls had been made to Haven, Virginia, numbers on Saturday evening through Sprint, seven to the sheriff’s office and eight to a private residence in the town. I was given both numbers and I dialled the second. The message on the answering-machine was terse: ‘This is Earl Lee Granger. I’m not here right now. Leave a message after the beep or, if it relates to police business, contact the sheriff’s office at . . .’

I dialled the number, got the Haven County sheriff’s office again and asked to speak to the sheriff.

I was told that Sheriff Granger wasn’t available, so I asked to speak to whoever was in charge in his absence. The ranking deputy was Alvin Martin, I learned, but he was out on a case. The deputy on the phone didn’t know when the sheriff would be back. From his tone, I guessed the sheriff hadn’t simply gone out to buy cigarettes. He asked me my name and I thanked him and hung up.

It seemed that something had caused Catherine Demeter to get in touch with the sheriff in her home town, but not with the NYPD. If there was nothing else, I’d have to pay a visit to Haven. First, though, I decided to pay a visit to Fucking Frank Forbes.

Chapter Eight

I stopped off at Azure on Third Avenue and bought myself some expensive fresh strawberries and pineapple from the deli, then took them around to the Citicorp Building to eat in the public space. I liked the building’s simple lines and its strange, angled top. It was also one of the few new developments where a similar imagination had been applied to its interior: its seven-storey atrium was still green with trees and shrubs, its shops and restaurants were packed with people, and a handful of worshippers sat silently in its simple, sunken church.

Two blocks away, Fucking Frank Forbes had a swish office in a seventies smoked-glass development, at least for the present. I took the elevator up and entered the reception area, where a young and pretty brunette was typing something on the computer. She looked up as I entered and smiled brightly. I tried not to let my jaw hang as I smiled back.

‘Is Dr Forbes available?’ I asked.

‘Do you have an appointment?’

‘I’m not a patient, thankfully, but Frank and I go way back. Tell him Charlie Parker wants to see him.’

Her smile faltered a little but she dialled through to Frank’s office and gave him the message. Her face paled slightly as she listened to his response but she held herself together remarkably well, all things considered.

‘I’m afraid Dr Forbes can’t see you,’ she said, the smile now fading rapidly.

‘Is that really what he said?’

She blushed slightly. ‘No, not quite.’

‘Are you new here?’

‘This is my first week.’

‘Frank select you personally?’

She looked puzzled. ‘Ye-es.’

‘Get another job. He’s a deviant and he’s on his way out of business.’

I walked past her and entered Frank’s office while she took all this in. There was no patient in Frank’s consulting room, just the good doctor himself leafing through some notes on his desk. He didn’t look pleased to see me. His thin moustache curled in distaste like a black worm and a red bloom spread from his neck to his high, domed forehead before disappearing into his brush of wiry black hair. He was tall, over six feet, and he worked out. He looked real good, but looks were as far as it went. There was nothing good about Fucking Frank Forbes. If he handed you a dollar, the ink would be running before it got to your wallet.

‘Get the fuck out, Parker. In case you’ve forgotten, you can’t come barging in here any more. You’re not a cop now and the force is probably all the richer for your absence.’ He leaned towards the intercom button but his receptionist had already entered behind me.

‘Call the police, Marcie. Better still, call my lawyer. Tell him I’m about to file for harassment.’

‘Hear you’re giving him a lot of business at the moment, Frank,’ I said, taking a seat in a leather upright opposite his desk. ‘I also hear Maibaum and Locke are handling the lawsuit for that unfortunate woman with the social disease. I’ve done some business with them in the past and they’re real hot. Maybe I could put them on to Elizabeth Gordon. You remember Elizabeth, don’t you, Frank?’

Frank cast an instinctive glance over his shoulder at the window and twisted his chair away from it.

‘It’s okay, Marcie,’ he said, nodding uneasily to the receptionist. I heard the door close softly behind me. ‘What do you want?’

‘You have a patient called Catherine Demeter.’

‘Come on, Parker, you know I can’t discuss my patients. Even if I could, I wouldn’t share shit with you.’

‘Frank, you’re the worst shrink I know. I wouldn’t let a dog be treated by you because you’d probably try to fuck it, so save the ethics for the judge. I think she may be in trouble and I want to find her. If you don’t help me I’ll be in touch with Maibaum and Locke so fast you’ll think I’m telepathic.’

Frank tried to look like he was wrestling with his conscience, although he couldn’t have found his conscience without the aid of a shovel and an exhumation order.

‘She missed an appointment yesterday. She didn’t give any notice.’

‘Why was she seeing you?’

‘Involutional melancholia, mainly. That’s depression to you, characteristic of middle to later stages of life. At least that’s what it seemed like, initially.’

‘But . . .?’

‘Parker, this is confidential. Even I have standards.’

‘You’re joking. Go on.’

Frank sighed and fiddled with a pencil on his blotter, then moved to a cabinet, removed a file and sat back down. He opened it, leafed through it, and began to talk.

‘Her sister died when Catherine was eight, or rather her sister was killed: she was one of a number of children murdered in a town called Haven in Virginia in the late sixties, early seventies. The children, males and females, were abducted, tortured and their remains dumped in the cellar of an empty house outside the town.’ Frank was detached now, a doctor running through a case history which might have been as distant as a fairy story to him for all the emotion he put into the telling.

‘Her sister was the fourth child to die, but the first white child. After she disappeared the police began to take a real interest. A local woman, a wealthy local woman, was suspected – her car had been seen near the house after one of the children disappeared and then she tried an unsuccessful snatch on a kid from another town about twenty miles away. The kid, a boy, raked her face with his nails, then gave a description to the cops.

‘They went after her but the locals heard and got to the house first. Her brother was there. He was a homosexual, according to locals, and the cops believed she had an accomplice, a male who might have driven the car while she made the snatches. The locals figured the brother was a likely suspect. He was found hanged in the basement.’

‘And the woman?’

‘Burned to death in another of the old houses. The case simply . . . faded away.’

‘But not for Catherine?’

‘No, not for her. She left the town after graduating from high school, but her parents stayed. The mother died about ten years ago, father shortly after. And Catherine Demeter just kept moving.’

‘Did she ever go back to Haven?’

‘No, not after the funerals. She said everything was dead to her there. And that’s it, pretty much. It all comes back to Haven.’

‘Any boyfriends, or casuals?’

‘None that she mentioned to me, and question time is over. Now get out. If you ever bring this up again, in public or in private, I’ll sue your ass for assault, harassment and anything else my lawyer can come up with.’

I got up to leave.

‘One more thing,’ I said. ‘For Elizabeth Gordon and her continued non-acquaintance with Maibaum and Locke.’

‘What?’

‘The name of the woman who burned to death.’

‘Modine. Adelaide Modine and her brother William. Now please, get the fuck out of my life.’

Chapter Nine

Willie Brew’s auto shop looked run-down and unreliable, if not blatantly dishonest, from the outside. Inside it wasn’t a whole lot better but Willie, a Pole whose name was unpronounceable and had been shortened to Brew by generations of customers, was just about the best mechanic I knew.

I had never liked this area of Queen’s, only a short distance north from the roar of the cars on the Long Island Expressway. Ever since I was a boy, I seemed to associate it with used-car lots, old warehouses and cemeteries. Willie’s garage, close by Kissena Park, had been a good source of information over the years, since every deadbeat friend of Willie’s with nothing better to do than listen in on other people’s business tended to congregate there at some time or another, but the whole area still made me uneasy. Even as an adult, I hated the drive from JFK to Manhattan as it skirted these neighbourhoods, hated the sight of the run-down houses and liquor stores.

After my father’s death, my mother had moved us back to Maine, to her hometown of Scarborough, where treelines replaced cityscapes and only the racing enthusiasts, travelling from Boston and New York to the races at Scarborough Downs, brought with them the sights and smells of the big cities. Maybe that was why I always felt like a visitor when I looked at Manhattan: I always seemed to be seeing the city through new eyes.

Willie’s place was situated in a neighbourhood that was fighting gentrification tooth and nail. Willie’s block had been bought by the owner of the Japanese noodle house next door – he had other interests in downtown Flushing’s Little Asia and seemed to want to extend his reach further south – and Willie was involved in a partially legal battle to ensure that he wasn’t shut down. The Japanese responded by sending fish smells through the vents into Willie’s garage. Willie sometimes got his own back by getting Arno, his chief mechanic, to drink some beers and eat a Chinese, then stumble outside, stick his fingers down his throat and vomit outside the noodle house. ‘Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese – all that shit looks the same when it comes out,’ Willie used to say.

Inside, Arno, small, wiry and dark, was working on the engine of a beat-up Dodge. The air was thick with the smell of fish and noodles. My ’69 Mustang was raised up on a platform, unrecognisable bits and pieces of its internal workings strewn around on the floor. It looked no more likely to be on the road again in the near future than James Dean. I’d called earlier to tell Willie I’d be dropping by. The least he could have done was pretend to be doing something with it when I arrived.

The sound of loud swearing came from inside Willie’s office, which was up a set of wooden stairs to the right of the garage floor. The door flew open and Willie rumbled down the steps, grease on his bald head and his blue mechanic’s overalls open to the waist to show a dirty white T-shirt straining over his huge belly. He climbed arduously up a set of boxes placed beneath the vent in a step pattern and put his mouth to the grille.

‘You slant-eyed sons of bitches,’ he shrieked. ‘Quit stinkin’ my garage out with fish or I’m gonna get nuclear on your ass.’ There was the sound of something shouted in Japanese from the other end of the vent and then a burst of Oriental laughter. Willie thumped the grille with the heel of his hand and climbed down. He squinted at me in the semi-darkness before recognising me.

‘Bird, how you doin’? You want a coffee?’

‘I want a car. My car. The car you’ve had for over a week now.’

Willie looked crestfallen. ‘You’re angry with me,’ he said, in mock-soothing tones. ‘I understand your anger. Anger is good. Your car, on the other hand, is not good. Your car is bad. The engine’s shot to shit. What have you been running it on, nuts and old nails?’

‘Willie, I need my car. The taxi drivers are treating me like an old friend. Some of them have even stopped trying to rip me off. I’ve considered hiring a rental car to save myself embarrassment. In fact, the only reason I haven’t hit you for a car is that you said the repairs would take a day or two at most.’

Willie slouched over to the car and nudged a cylindrical piece of metal with the toe of his boot.

‘Arno, what’s the story on Bird’s Mustang?’

‘It’s shit,’ said Arno. ‘Tell him we’ll give him five hundred dollars to scrap it.’

‘Arno says to give you five hundred dollars to scrap it.’

‘I heard him. Tell Arno I’ll burn his house down if he doesn’t fix my car.’

‘Day after tomorrow,’ came a voice from under the hood. ‘Sorry for the delay.’

Willie clapped me on the shoulder with a greasy hand.

‘Come up for a coffee, listen to the local gossip.’ Then, quietly: ‘Angel wants to see you. I told him you’d be around.’

I nodded and followed him up the stairs. Inside the office, which was surprisingly neat, four men sat around a desk drinking coffee and whiskey from tin mugs. I nodded to Tommy Q, who I’d busted once for handling pirated video-cassettes, and a thickly moustached hot-wire guy known, unsurprisingly, as Groucho. Beside him sat Willie’s other assistant, Jay, who, at sixty-five, was ten years older than Willie but looked at least ten years older than that again. Beside him sat Coffin Ed Harris.

‘You know Coffin Ed?’ said Willie.

I nodded. ‘Still boosting dead guys, Ed?’

‘Naw, man,’ said Coffin Ed. ‘I gave all that up a long time ago. I got a bad back.’

Coffin Ed Harris had been the kidnapper to beat all kidnappers. Coffin Ed figured that live hostages were too much like hard work, since there was no telling what they might do or who might come looking for them. Dead targets were easier to handle, so Coffin Ed took to robbing mortuaries.

He would watch the death notices, pick a decedent who came from a reasonably wealthy family and then steal the corpse from the mortuary or the funeral home. Until Coffin Ed came along and bucked the system, funeral homes weren’t usually well guarded. Coffin Ed would store the corpses in an industrial freezer he kept in his basement and then ask for a ransom, usually nothing too heavy. Most of the relatives were quite happy to pay to get their loved ones back before they started to rot.

He did well until some old Polish aristocrat took offence at his wife’s remains being held to ransom and hired a private army to go looking for Coffin Ed. They found him, although Coffin Ed just about got away through a bolt-hole in his basement, which led to his neighbour’s yard. He got the last laugh, too. The power company had cut off Ed’s electricity three days before because he hadn’t been paying his bills. The old Pole’s wife stank like a dead possum by the time they found her. Since then, things had gone downhill for Coffin Ed and he now presented a down-at-heel figure in the back of Willie Brew’s garage.

There was an uneasy silence for a moment, which was broken by Willie.

‘You remember Vinnie No-Nose?’ said Willie, handing me a steaming cup of black coffee, which was already turning the tin mug red hot but still couldn’t hide the smell of gasoline from its interior. ‘Wait’ll you hear Tommy Q’s story. You ain’t missed nothing yet.’

Vinnie No-Nose was a B&E guy out of Newark who had taken one fall too many and had decided to reform, or at least to reform as far as any guy can who has made a living for forty years by ripping off other people’s apartments. He got his nickname from a long unsuccessful involvement with amateur boxing. Vinnie, small and a potential victim for any New Jersey low-life with a penchant for inflicting violence, saw an ability to use his fists as his potential salvation, like lots of other short guys from rough neighbourhoods. Sadly, Vinnie’s defence was about as good as the Son of Sam’s and his nose was eventually reduced to a mush of cartilage with two semi-closed nostrils like raisins in a pudding.

Tommy Q proceeded to tell a story involving Vinnie, a decorating company and a dead gay client which could have put him in court if he’d told it in a respectable place of employment. ‘So the fruit ends up dead, in a bathroom, with this chair up his ass and Vinnie ends up back in jail for peddling the pics and stealing the dead guy’s video,’ he concluded, shaking his head at the strange ways of non-heterosexual males.

He was still laughing his ass off at the story when the smile died on his face and the laugh turned into a kind of choking sound in his throat. I looked behind me to see Angel in the shadows, with curly black hair spilling out from under his blue watch-cap and a sparse growth of beard that would have made a thirteen-year-old laugh. A dark blue longshoreman’s jacket hung open over a black T-shirt and his blue jeans ended in dirty, well-worn Timberlands.

Angel was no more than five-six and, to the casual onlooker, it was difficult to see why he should have struck fear into Tommy Q. There were two reasons. The first was that Angel was a far better boxer than Vinnie No-Nose and could have pummelled Tommy Q to horsemeat if he wanted to, which might well have been the case since Angel was gay and might have found the source of Tommy’s humour less than amusing.

The second and probably more compelling reason for Tommy Q’s fear was that Angel’s boyfriend was a man known only as Louis. Like Angel, Louis had no visible means of support, although it was widely known that Angel, now semi-retired at the age of forty, was one of the best thieves in the business, capable of stealing the fluff from the President’s navel if the money was good enough.

Less widely known was the fact that Louis, tall, black and sophisticated in his dress sense, was a hitman almost without equal, a killer who had been reformed somewhat by his relationship with Angel and who now chose his rare targets with what might be termed a social conscience.

Rumour had it that the killing of a German computer expert named Gunther Bloch in Chicago the previous year had been the work of Louis. Bloch was a serial rapist and torturer, who preyed on young, sometimes very young, women in the sex resorts of South East Asia where much of his business was transacted. Money usually covered all ills, money paid to pimps, to parents, to police, to politicians.

Unfortunately for Bloch, someone in the upper reaches of the government in one of his nations of choice couldn’t be bought, especially after Bloch strangled an eleven-year-old girl and dumped her body in a trash can. Bloch fled the country, money was redirected to a ‘special project’ and Louis drowned Gunther Bloch in the bathroom of a $1,000-a-night hotel suite in Chicago.

Or so rumour had it. Whatever the truth of the matter, Louis was regarded as very bad news and Tommy Q wanted in future to be able to take a bath, however rarely, without fear of drowning.

‘Nice story, Tommy,’ said Angel.

‘It’s just a story, Angel. I didn’t mean anything by it. No offence meant.’

‘None taken,’ said Angel. ‘At least, not by me.’

Behind him, there was a movement in the darkness and Louis appeared. His bald head gleamed in the dim light and his muscular neck emerged from a black silk shirt within an immaculately cut grey suit. He towered over Angel by more than a foot and, as he did so, he eyed Tommy Q intently for a moment.

‘Fruit,’ he said. ‘That’s a . . . quaint term, Mr Q. To what does it refer, exactly?’

The blood had drained from Tommy Q’s face and it seemed to take him a very long time to find enough saliva to enable him to gulp. When he did eventually manage, it sounded like he was swallowing a golf ball. He opened his mouth but nothing came out, so he closed it again and looked at the floor in the vain hope that it would open up and swallow him.

‘It’s okay, Mr Q, it was a good story,’ said Louis, in a voice as silky as his shirt. ‘Just be careful how you tell it.’ Then he smiled a bright smile at Tommy Q, the sort of smile a cat might give to a mouse to take to the grave with it. A drop of sweat ran down Tommy Q’s nose, hung from the tip for a moment and then exploded on the floor. By then, Louis had gone.

‘Don’t forget my car, Willie,’ I said, then followed Angel from the garage.

Chapter Ten

We walked a block or two to a late-nite bar and diner Angel knew. Louis strolled a few yards ahead of us, the late-evening crowds parting before him like the Red Sea before Moses. Once or twice women glanced at him with interest. The men mostly kept their eyes on the ground, or found something suddenly interesting in the boarded-up shopfronts or the night sky.

From inside the bar came the sound of a vaguely folky singer performing open-guitar surgery on Neil Young’s ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’. It didn’t sound like the song was going to pull through.

‘He plays like he hates Neil Young,’ said Angel, as we entered.

Ahead of us, Louis shrugged. ‘Neil Young heard that shit, he’d probably hate himself.’

We took a booth. The owner, a fat, dyspeptic man named Ernest, shambled over to take our order. Usually, the waitresses in Ernest’s took the orders but Angel and Louis commanded a degree of respect, even here.

‘Hey, Ernest,’ said Angel, ‘how’s business?’

‘If I was an undertaker, people’d stop dying,’ replied Ernest. ‘And, before you ask, my old lady’s still ugly.’ It was a long-established exchange.

‘Shit, you been married forty years,’ said Angel. ‘She ain’t gonna get no better-lookin’ now.’

Angel and Louis ordered club sandwiches and Ernest wandered away. ‘I was a kid and looked like him I’d cut my dick off and make money singin’ castrato, ’cos it ain’t gonna be no use no other way.’

‘Bein’ ugly ain’t done you no harm,’ said Louis.

‘I don’t know,’ grinned Angel. ‘I was better-looking, I coulda screwed a white guy.’

They stopped bickering and we waited for the singer to put Neil Young out of his misery. It was strange meeting these two, now that I was no longer a cop. When we had encountered each other before – in Willie’s garage, or over coffee, or in Central Park if Angel had some useful information to impart, or if he simply wanted to meet to talk, to ask after Susan and Jennifer – there had been an awkwardness, a tension between us, especially if Louis was near by. I knew what they had done, what Louis, I believed, still did, silent partnerships in assorted restaurants, dealerships and Willie Brew’s garage notwithstanding.

On this occasion, that tension was no longer present. Instead, for the first time I felt the strength of the bond of friendship that had somehow grown between Angel and me. More than that, from both of them I felt a sense of concern, of regret, of humanity, of trust. They would not be here, I knew, if they felt otherwise.

But maybe there was something more, something I had only begun to perceive. I was a cop’s nightmare. Cops, their families, their wives and children, are untouchables. You have to be crazy to go after a cop, crazier still to take out his loved ones. These are the assumptions we live by, the belief that after a day spent looking at the dead, questioning thieves and rapists, pushers and pimps, we can return to our own lives, knowing that our families are somehow apart from all this and that, through them, we can remain apart from it too.

But that belief system had been shaken by the deaths of Jennifer and Susan. Someone wasn’t respecting the rules and, when no easy answer was forthcoming, when no perp with a grudge could conveniently be apprehended, enabling all that had taken place to be explained away, another reason had to be found: I had somehow drawn it on myself, and on those closest to me. I was a good cop who was well on the way to becoming a drunk. I was falling apart and that made me weak, and someone had exploited that weakness. Other cops looked at me and they saw not a fellow officer in need, but a source of infection, of corruption. No one was sorry to see me go, maybe not even Walter.

And yet what had taken place had somehow brought me closer to both Angel and Louis. They had no illusions about the world in which they lived, no philosophical constructions which allowed them to be at once a part of, and apart from, that world. Louis was a killer: he couldn’t afford delusions of that kind. Because of the closeness of the bond that existed between them, Angel couldn’t afford those delusions either. Now they had also been taken away from me, like scales falling from my eyes, leaving me to re-establish myself, to find a new place in the world.

Angel picked up an abandoned paper from the booth next door and glanced at the headline.

‘You see this?’ I looked and nodded. A guy had tried to pull some heroic stunt during a bank raid in Flushing earlier in the day and ended up with both barrels of a sawn-off emptied into him. The papers and news bulletins were full of it.

‘Here’s some guys out doin’ a job,’ began Angel. ‘They don’t want to hurt nobody, they just want to go in, get the money – which is insured anyway so what does the bank care? – and get out again. They only got the guns ’cos no one’s gonna take them seriously otherwise. What else they gonna use? Harsh words?

‘But there’s always gotta be some asshole who thinks he’s immortal ’cos he’s not dead yet. The guy, he’s young, keeps himself in good condition, thinks he’s gonna get more pussy than Long Dong Silver if he busts up the bank raid and saves the day. Look at this guy: real estate agent, twenty-nine, single, pulling down one-fifty a year and he gets a hole blown in him bigger’n the Holland Tunnel. Lance Petersen.’ He shook his head in wonderment. ‘I never met anyone called Lance in my whole life.’

‘That’s ’cos they all dead,’ said Louis, glancing seemingly idly around the room. ‘Fuckers keep standing up in banks and getting shot. Guy was probably the last Lance left alive.’

The clubs arrived and Angel started eating. He was the only one who did.

‘So how you doin’?’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Why the ambush?’

‘You don’t write, you don’t call.’ He smiled wryly. Louis glanced at me with mild interest then returned his attention to the door, the other tables, the doors to the restrooms.

‘You been doin’ some work for Benny Low, I hear. What you doin’ workin’ for that fat piece of shit?’

‘Passing time.’

‘You want to pass time, stick pins in your eyes. Benny’s just using up good air.’

‘Come on, Angel, get to it. You’re rattling away and Louis here is acting like he expects the Dillinger gang to walk in and spray the counter.’

Angel put down his half-eaten section of club and dabbed almost daintily at this mouth with a napkin. ‘I hear you’ve been asking after some girlfriend of Stephen Barton’s. Some people are very curious to know why that might be.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as Bobby Sciorra, I hear.’

I didn’t know if Bobby Sciorra was psychotic or not, but he was a man who liked killing and had found a willing employer in old man Ferrera. Emo Ellison could testify to the likely result of Bobby Sciorra taking an interest in one’s activities. I had a suspicion that Ollie Watts, in his final moments, had found that out as well.

‘Benny Low was talking about some kind of trouble between the old man and Sonny,’ I said. ‘“Fuckin’ goombas fighting among themselves”, was how he put it.’

‘Benny always was a diplomat,’ said Angel. ‘Only surprise is the UN didn’t pick up on him before now. There’s something weird goin’ on there. Sonny’s gone to ground and taken Pili with him. No one’s seen them, no one knows where they are, but Bobby Sciorra’s looking real hard for both of them.’ He took another huge bite of his sandwich. ‘What about Barton?’

‘I figure he’s gone underground too but I don’t know. He’s minor league and wouldn’t have much to do professionally with Sonny or the old man beyond some muling, though he may once have been close to Sonny. May be nothing to it. Barton may not be connected.’

‘Maybe not, but you’ve got bigger problems than finding Barton or his girl.’

I waited.

‘There’s a hit out on you.’

‘Who?’

‘It’s not local. It’s out of town, Louis don’t know who.’

‘Is it over the Fat Ollie thing?’

‘I don’t know. Even Sonny isn’t such a moron that he’d put a contract out over some hired gun who got himself wasted ’cos you stepped in. The kid didn’t mean anything to anyone and Fat Ollie’s dead. All I know is you’re irritating two generations of the Ferrera family and that can’t be good.’

Cole’s favour was turning into something more complicated than a missing-persons case, if it was ever that simple.

‘I’ve got one for you,’ I said. ‘Know anyone with a gun that can punch holes through masonry with a tenth of an ounce 5.7-millimetre bullet? Sub-machine rounds.’

‘You gotta be fuckin’ kidding. Last time I saw something like that it was hangin’ on top of a tank turret.’

‘Well, that’s what killed the shooter. I saw him blown away and there was a hole knocked through the wall behind me. The gun’s Belgian-made, designed for anti-terrorist police. Someone local picked up a piece of hardware like that and took it to the range, it’s gotta get around.’

‘I’ll ask,’ said Angel. ‘Any guesses?’

‘My guess would be Bobby Sciorra.’

‘Mine too. So why would he be cleaning up after Sonny’s mess?’

‘The old man told him to.’

Angel nodded. ‘Watch your back, Bird.’

He finished his sandwich and then stood to go. ‘C’mon. We can give you a ride.’

‘No, I want to walk for a while.’

Angel shrugged. ‘You packing?’

I nodded. He said he’d be in touch. I left them at the door. As I walked, I was conscious of the weight of the gun beneath my arm, of every face I passed in the crowd and of the dark pulse of the city throbbing beneath my feet.

Chapter Eleven

Bobby Sciorra: a malevolent demon, a vision of ferocity and sadism who had appeared before the old man, Stefano Ferrara, when he was on the verge of insanity and death. Sciorra seemed to have been conjured up from some bleak corner of Hell by the old man’s anger and grief, a physical manifestation of the torture and destruction he wished to inflict on the world around him. In Bobby Sciorra he found the perfect instrument of pain and ugly death.

Stefano had watched his own father build a small empire from the family’s modest house in Bensonhurst. In those days Bensonhurst, bordered by Gravesend Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, still had a small-town feel. The scent of deli food mingled with that of wood-burning ovens from the local pizza parlours. People lived in two-family homes with wrought-iron gates and, when the sun shone, they would sit out on their porches and watch their kids play in their tiny gardens.

Stefano’s ambition would take him beyond his roots. When his time came to take over the operation, he built a big house on Staten Island; when he stood at his rear-facing windows, he could see the edge of Paul Castellano’s mansion on Todt Hill, the $3.5 million White House and, probably from his topmost window, the grounds of the Barton Estate. If Staten Island was good enough for the head of the Gambino family and a benevolent millionaire, then it was good enough for Stefano. When Castellano died after being shot six times at Sparks restaurant in Manhattan, Stefano was, briefly, the biggest boss on Staten Island.

Stefano married a woman from Bensonhurst named Louisa. She hadn’t married him out of any kind of love familiar from romantic novels: she loved him for his power, his violence and, mainly, his money. Those who marry for money usually end up earning it. Louisa did. She was emotionally brutalised and died shortly after giving birth to her third son. Stefano didn’t remarry. There was no grief there; he just didn’t need the bother of another wife, especially after the first had produced his heirs.

The first child, Vincent, was intelligent and represented the best hope for the family’s future. When he died in a swimming pool from a massive brain haemorrhage at twenty-three, his father didn’t speak for a week. Instead, he shot Vincent’s pair of Labradors and retired to his bedroom. By then Louisa had been dead for seventeen years.

Niccolo, or Nicky, two years younger than his brother, took his place at his father’s right hand. As a rookie, I watched him roam the city in his huge, bullet-proofed Cadillac, surrounded by soldiers, carving himself a reputation as a thug to match his father. By the early 1980s, the family had overcome an initial distaste for the drugs trade and was flooding the city with every kind of drug it could lay its hands on. Most people stayed out of the way and any potential rivals were warned off or ended up as fish chum.

The Yardies were another matter. The Jamaican gangs had no respect for established institutions, for the old ways of doing business. They looked at the Italians and saw dead meat; a shipment of cocaine worth two million dollars was boosted from the Ferreras and two soldiers were left dead. Nicky responded by ordering a cull of the Yardies: their clubs were hit, their apartments, even their women. In a three-day period, twelve of them died, including most of those responsible for the cocaine theft.

Maybe Nicky imagined that would be the end of it and things would return to normal again. He still cruised the streets in his car, still ate in the same restaurants, still acted as if the threat of violence from the Jamaicans has dissipated in the face of this show of force.

His favourite haunt was Da Vincenzo, an upmarket Mom and Pop operation in his father’s old Bensonhurst neighbourhood, which was smart enough not to forget its roots. Maybe Nicky also liked the echoes of his brother in the name but his paranoia led him to have the glass in the windows and doors replaced with some military-strength panes, the sort used by the President. Nicky could enjoy his fusilli in peace, undisturbed by the imminent threat of assassination.

He had only just ordered one Thursday evening in November when the black van pulled into the side-street opposite, its back facing towards the window. Nicky may have glanced at it as it stopped, may have noticed that its windscreen had been removed and replaced with a black wire grille, may even have frowned as the rear doors sprang open and something white flared briefly in the darkness of its interior, the back-blast rattling the grille.

He may even have had time to register the RPG-7 warhead as it powered towards the window at 600 feet per second, smoke trailing it from behind, its roar penetrating the thick panes before they exploded inwards, glass and hot metal fragments and the slug from the missile’s copper liner tearing Nicky Ferrera into so many pieces that his coffin weighed less than sixty pounds when it was carried up the aisle of the church three days later.

The three Jamaicans responsible disappeared into the underworld and the old man vented his fury on his enemies and his friends in an orgy of abuse, of violence and of death. His business fell apart around him and his rivals closed in, recognising in his madness the opportunity to rid themselves of him once and for all.

Just as his world seemed about to implode on itself, a figure appeared at the gates of his mansion and asked to speak with the old man. He told the guard he had some news about the Yardies, the guard passed on the message and, after a search, Bobby Sciorra was admitted. The search was not a complete one: Sciorra held a black plastic sack which he refused to open. Guns were trained on him as he approached the house and he was told to halt on the lawn, about fifty feet from the steps of the house where the old man stood in wait.

‘If you’re wasting my time, I’ll have you killed,’ said the old man. Bobby Sciorra just smiled and tipped the contents of the bag on the illuminated lawn. The three heads rolled and bumped against each other, the dreadlocks coiled like dead snakes with Bobby Sciorra smiling above them like some obscene Perseus. Thick, fresh blood hung languorously from the edges of the sack before dripping slowly on to the grass.

Bobby Sciorra ‘made his bones’ that night. Within one year he was a made guy, an ascent up the family ladder made doubly unique by its speed and the relative obscurity of Sciorra’s background. The feds had no file on him and Ferrera appeared able to add little more. I heard rumours that he had crossed the Colombos once, that he had operated out of Florida for a time on a freelance basis, but nothing more than that. Yet the killing of the linchpins of the Jamaican posse was enough to earn him the trust of Stefano Ferrera and a ceremony in the basement of the Staten Island house, which resulted in the pricking of Sciorra’s trigger finger over a holy picture and his tie-in to Ferrera and his associates.

From that day on, Bobby Sciorra was the power behind the Ferrera throne. He guided the old man and his family through the trials and tribulations of post-RICO New York, when the FBI’s Racketeer Influenced Corruption Organisation statutes allowed the feds to prosecute organisations and conspirators that benefited from crime, instead of just the individuals who committed those crimes. The major New York families – Gambino, Luchese, Colombo, Genovese and Bonnano – numbering maybe four thousand made guys and associates, all took big hits, losing the heads of their families to jail or the reaper. But not the Ferreras. Bobby Sciorra took care of that, sacrificing some minor players along the way to ensure the survival of the family.

The old man might have preferred to take even more of a back seat in the family operation if it hadn’t been for Sonny. Poor dumb, vicious Sonny, a man without the intelligence of either of his brothers but with at least their combined capacity for violence. Any operations he controlled degenerated into bloodshed, but none of it troubled Sonny. Corpulent and bloated even in his twenties, he enjoyed the mayhem and the killing. The deaths of the innocent in particular seemed to give him an almost sexual thrill.

Gradually, his father sidelined him and left him to his own devices of steroids, small-time drug deals, prostitution and occasional violence. Bobby Sciorra tried to keep him under some sort of control, but Sonny was beyond control or reason. Sonny was vicious and evil, and when his father died, a queue of men would form to ensure Sonny joined him as soon as possible.

Chapter Twelve

I never expected to end up living in the Village. Susan, Jennifer and I had lived out on Park Slope in Brooklyn. On Sundays we could stroll down to Prospect Park and watch the kids playing ball, Jennifer kicking at the grass with her small, pink sneakers, before heading to Raintree’s for a soda, the sound of the band in the band shell drifting in through the stained-glass windows.

On such days, life seemed as long and welcoming as the green vista of Long Meadow. We would walk Jenny between us, Susan and I, and exchange glances over her head as she burst forth with an endless stream of questions, observations, strange jokes that only a child could understand. I would hold her hand in mine and, through her, I could reach out to Susan and believe that things would work out for us, that we could somehow bridge the gap that was growing between us. If Jenny ran ahead, I would move close to Susan and take her hand and she would smile at me as I told her that I loved her. Then she would look away, or look to her feet, or call Jenny, because we both knew that telling her I loved her was not enough.

When I decided to return to New York at the start of the summer, after months of searching for some sign of their killer, I informed my lawyer and asked him to recommend a realtor. In New York, there are about three hundred million square feet of office space and not enough places to put the people who work in them. I couldn’t say why I wanted to live in Manhattan. Maybe it was just because it wasn’t Brooklyn.

Instead of a realtor, my lawyer produced a network of friends and business acquaintances, which eventually led to me renting an apartment in a red-brick house in the Village with white shutters on the windows and a stoop that led up to a fanlighted front door. It was a little closer to St Mark’s Place than I might have preferred – since the days when W. H. Auden and Leon Trotsky had roomed there, St Mark’s had become the Village with a Vengeance, full of bars, cafés and overpriced boutiques – but it was still a good deal.

The apartment was unfurnished and I pretty much left it that way, adding only a bed, a desk, some easy chairs, a stereo and small TV. I removed books, tapes, CDs and vinyl from storage, along with one or two personal belongings, and set up a living space to which I had only the minimum attachment.

It was dark outside as I lined the guns before me on the desk, stripped them down and cleaned each one carefully. If the Ferreras were coming after me, I wanted to be prepared.

In all my time on the force, I had been forced to draw my weapon to protect myself on only a handful of occasions. I had never killed a man while on duty and had only once fired at another human being, when I had shot a pimp in the stomach as he came at me with a long-bladed knife.

As a detective, I had spent most of my time in robbery and homicide. Unlike vice, which was a world in which the threat of violence and death to a cop was a real possibility, homicide involved a different type of police work. As Tommy Morrison, my first partner, used to say, anybody who’s going to die in a homicide investigation is already dead by the time the cops arrive.

I had abandoned my Colt Delta Elite after the deaths of Susan and Jennifer. Now I had three guns in my possession. The .38 Colt Detective Special had belonged to my father, the only thing of his I had retained. The ‘Prancing Pony’ badge on the left side of the rounded butt was worn and the frame was scratched and pitted, but it remained a useful weapon, light at just over a pound in weight and easily concealed in an ankle holster or a belt. It was a simple, powerful revolver, and I kept it in a sleeve beneath the frame of my bed.

I had never used the Heckler & Koch VP70M outside a range. The 9mm semi-automatic had belonged to a pusher who had died after becoming hooked on his own product. I had found him dead in his apartment after a neighbour had complained about the smell. The VP70M, a semi-plastic military pistol holding eighteen rounds, lay, still unused, in its case, but I had taken the precaution of filing away the serial number.

Like the .38, it had no safety. The attraction of the gun lay in the accessory shoulder stock which the pusher had also acquired. When fitted, it made an internal adjustment to the firing mechanism which turned the weapon into a full-automatic submachine-gun that could fire twenty-two hundred rounds per minute. If the Chinese ever decided to invade, I could hold them off for at least ten seconds with all the ammunition I had. After that, I’d have to start throwing furniture at them. I had removed the H&K from the compartment in the Mustang’s trunk where I usually stored it. I didn’t want anyone stumbling across it while the car was being serviced.

The third-generation Smith & Wesson was the only gun I carried, a 10mm auto model specially developed for the FBI and acquired through the efforts of Woolrich. After cleaning it, I loaded it carefully and placed it in my shoulder holster. Outside, I could see the crowds making for the bars and restaurants of the Village. I was just about to join them when the cellphone buzzed beside me and thirty minutes later I was preparing to view the body of Stephen Barton.

Red lights flashed, bathing everything in the parking lot with the warm glow of law and order. A patch of darkness marked the nearby McCarren Park and, to the south-west, traffic passed over the Williamsburg Bridge heading for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Patrolmen lounged by cars, keeping the curious and the ghoulish behind barriers. One reached out to block my way – ‘Hey, gotta keep back’ – when we recognised each other. Vecsey, who remembered my father and would never make it beyond sergeant, withdrew his hand.

‘It’s official, Jimmy. I’m with Cole.’ He looked over his shoulder and Walter, who was talking with a patrolman, looked over and nodded. The arm went up like a traffic barrier and I passed through.

Even yards from the sewer I could smell the stench. A frame had been erected around the area and a lab technician in boots was climbing out of the manhole.

‘Can I go down?’ I asked. Two men in neatly cut suits and London Fog raincoats had joined Cole, who barely nodded. The FBI letters weren’t visible on the backs of their coats so I assumed they were keeping a low profile. ‘Uncanny,’ I said as I passed, ‘they could almost be regular people.’ Walter scowled. They joined in.

I slipped on a pair of gloves and climbed down the ladder into the sewer. I gagged with my first breath, the river of filth that ran beneath the tree-lined avenues of the city forcing a taste of bile into the back of my throat. ‘It’s easier if you take shallow breaths,’ said a sewer worker, who stood at the base of the ladder. He was lying.

I didn’t step from the ladder. Instead, I pulled my Maglite from my pocket and pointed it to where a small group of maintenance workers and cops stood around an arc-lit area, their feet sloshing through stuff about which I didn’t even want to think. The cops gave me a brief glance then returned with bored looks to watching the med guys go about their business. Stephen Barton lay about five yards from the base of the ladder in a tide of shit and waste, his blond hair moving wildly with the current. It was obvious that he had simply been dumped through the manhole at street level, his body rolling slightly when it hit the bottom.

The ME stood up and pulled the rubber gloves from his hands. A plainclothes homicide detective, one I didn’t recognise, directed a quizzical look at him. He returned one of frustration and annoyance. ‘We’ll need to look at him in the lab. I can’t tell shit from shit down here.’

‘Come on, give us a fucking break,’ the detective whined lamely.

The ME hissed through his teeth in irritation. ‘Strangled,’ he said, as he elbowed his way through the small group. ‘Knocked unconscious first with a blow to the back of the head, then strangled. Don’t even ask for a time of death. He could have been down here for a day or so, probably no longer. The body’s pretty flaccid.’ Then the sound of his feet echoed through the sewer as he clacked up the ladder.

The detective shrugged. ‘Ashes to ashes, shit to shit,’ he said, then turned back towards the body.

I climbed up to street level, the ME behind me. I didn’t need to look at Barton’s body. The blow to the head was unusual, but not extraordinary. It can take as long as ten minutes to kill a man by strangulation, assuming he doesn’t manage to break free in the process. I had heard of would-be assassins losing handfuls of hair, patches of skin and, in one case, an ear to a struggling victim. Far better, where possible, to tap him on the head first. Tap him hard enough and strangling him might not be necessary at all.

Walter was still talking to the feds so I moved as far away from the sewer as I could get while still remaining within the police cordon and drew deep breaths of night air. The smell of human waste underpinned everything, clinging to my clothes with the grim resolution of death itself. Eventually the feds returned to their car and Walter walked slowly towards me, hands stuck in his trouser pockets.

‘They’re going to bring Sonny Ferrera in,’ he said.

I snorted. ‘For what? His lawyer will have him out before he even has time to take a leak. That’s assuming he was even involved, or that they can find him. This bunch couldn’t find the ground if they fell over.’

Walter wasn’t in the mood. ‘What do you know? The kid was running shit for Ferrera, he fucks him over and ends up dead, strangled what’s more.’ Strangulation had become the Mob’s preferred method of despatch in recent years: quiet and no mess. ‘That’s the feds’ line and, anyway, they’d bring Sonny Ferrera in on suspicion of ignoring a no-smoking sign if they thought it would stick.’

‘C’mon, Walter, this isn’t a Ferrera job. Dumping a guy in a sewer . . .’ But he was already walking away, a raised right hand indicating that he didn’t want to hear any more. I followed him. ‘What about the girl, Walter? Maybe she fits in somewhere?’

He turned back to me and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘When I called you, I didn’t think you were going to come running in like Dick Tracy.’ He glanced back at the feds. ‘Any sign of her?’

‘I think she blew town. That’s all I’m saying for the present.’

‘The ME thinks Barton could have been killed early Tuesday. If the girl left town after that, it could tie her in.’

‘Are you going to mention her to the feds?’

Walter shook his head. ‘Let them go chasing after Sonny Ferrera. You stay on the girl.’

‘Yassuh,’ I said. ‘I’ma keep lookin’.’ I hailed a cab, conscious that the feds were looking at me even as I got in and we drove away into the night.

Chapter Thirteen

It was common knowledge that the old man was having trouble keeping his only surviving son under control. Ferrera had watched the cosa nostra tear itself apart back in Italy as it tried, with increasing brutality, to intimidate and destroy the state’s investigators. Instead, its methods had served to reinforce the determination of the braver ones to continue the fight; the families were now like one of their own victims bound in the incaprettamento, the method of execution known as ‘the goat strangling’. Like a victim bound with ropes to his arms, legs and neck, the more the families struggled, the more the rope around them grew tighter. The old man was determined that this should not happen to his own organisation. By contrast, Sonny saw in the violence of the Sicilians a method of tyranny that suited his own aspirations for power.

Maybe that was the difference between father and son. Wherever possible old Ferrera had used the ‘white lupara’ when an assassination was necessary, the complete disappearance of the victim without even a trace of blood to give away the truth of what had taken place. The strangling of Barton was certainly a Mafia hallmark but the dumping was not. If the old man had been responsible for his death then his final resting place would probably have been the sewers all right, but not before he had been dissolved in acid and poured down a drain.

So I didn’t believe the old man had ordered the killing of Isobel Barton’s stepson. His death and the sudden disappearance of Catherine Demeter had come too close together to be mere coincidence. It was possible, of course, that Sonny had ordered them both to be killed for some reason, for if he was as crazy as he seemed then another corpse would be unlikely to trouble him. On the other hand, it was also possible that Demeter had killed her own boyfriend and then fled. Perhaps he hit her once too often, in which case Mrs Barton was now paying me to find someone who was not only a friend but, potentially, her son’s killer.

The Ferrera house was set in tree-shrouded grounds. Entry was by a single iron gate, electronically operated. An intercom was set into the pillar on the left-hand side. I buzzed, gave my name and told the voice I wanted to see the old man.

Some one hundred yards from the house sat a dark Dodge sedan with two males sitting in the front seats. I could expect a visit from the feds as soon as I got back to my apartment, possibly sooner.

‘Walk through. Wait inside the gate,’ said the voice from the intercom. ‘You’ll be escorted to the house.’ I did as I was told and the cab pulled away. A grey-haired man in a dark suit and standard-issue shades appeared from behind the trees, a Heckler & Koch MP5 held at port arms. Behind him was another younger man, similarly dressed. To my right I could see two more guards, also armed.

‘Lean against the wall,’ said the grey-haired man. He frisked me professionally while the others watched, removing the clip from my own Smith & Wesson along with the spare clip on my belt. He pulled back the slide to eject the round in the chamber and handed the gun back to me. Then he motioned me towards the house, walking to my right and slightly behind me so that he could keep an eye on my hands. One man shadowed us at either side of the road. It was hardly surprising that old man Ferrera had lived so long.

The house was surprisingly modest from the outside, a long two-storey dwelling with narrow windows at the front and a gallery running along the lower level. More men patrolled the meticulously kept garden and the gravelled driveway. A black Mercedes stood at the right of the house, its driver waiting near by if needed. The door was already open as we approached and Bobby Sciorra stood in the hallway, his right hand clasping his left wrist like a priest waiting for the offerings.

Sciorra was six feet five inches tall and probably weighed less than one-sixty, his long, thin limbs like blades beneath his grey single-breasted suit, his striated neck almost feminine in its length, its pallor enhanced by the pristine whiteness of the collarless shirt buttoned beneath it. Short dark hair surrounded a bald pate, which ended in a cone so sharp as to appear pointed. Sciorra was a knife made flesh, a human instrument of pain, both surgeon and scalpel. The FBI believed that he had personally committed more than thirty killings. Most of those who knew Bobby Sciorra believed the FBI was conservative in its estimate.

He smiled as I approached, revealing perfectly white teeth glistening behind narrow, slash lips, but the smile never reached his blue eyes. Instead it disappeared in the jagged scar that ran from his left ear, across the bridge of his nose and ended just below the right earlobe. The scar devoured his smile like a second mouth.

‘You got some balls coming here,’ he said, still smiling, his head shaking gently from side to side as he said it.

‘That an admission of guilt, Bobby?’ I asked.

The smile never faltered. ‘Why do you want to see the boss? He’s got no time for shit like you.’ The smile broadened perceptibly. ‘By the way, how are your wife and kid? Kid must be – what? – four by now.’

A dull red throbbing began to pulse in my head but I held it back, my hands tightening at my sides. I knew I’d be dead before my hands closed on Sciorra’s white skin.

‘Stephen Barton turned up dead in a sewer this evening. The feds are looking for Sonny and probably for you as well. I’m concerned for your welfare. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to either of you that I wasn’t a part of.’

Sciorra’s smile remained the same. He seemed about to answer when a voice, low but authoritative, sounded over the house intercom system. Age gave it a gravelly resonance in which the rattle of death was present, lurking in the background like the traces of Don Ferrera’s Sicilian roots.

‘Let him in, Bobby,’ it said. Sciorra stepped back and opened a set of draught-excluding double doors half-way down the hall. The grey-haired guard walked behind me as I followed Sciorra, who waited until he had closed the draught doors before opening a second door at the end of the hall.

Don Ferrera sat in an old leather armchair behind a big office desk, not entirely dissimilar from Walter Cole’s desk although its gilt inlay raised it into a different league from Walter’s comparatively Spartan possession. The curtains were drawn, and wall lights and table lamps gave a dim yellow glow to the pictures and bookshelves that lined the walls. I guessed from their age and condition that the books were probably worth a lot and had never been read. Red leather chairs stood against the walls, complementing Don Ferrera’s own chair and some sofas that surrounded a long low table at the far end of the room.

Even sitting down and stooped by age, the old man was an impressive figure. His hair was silver and greased back from his temples, but an unhealthy pallor seemed to underly his tanned complexion and his eyes appeared rheumy. Sciorra closed the door and once more assumed his priestlike stance, my escort remaining outside.

‘Please, sit,’ said the old man, motioning towards an armchair. He opened a silver box of Turkish cigarettes, each ringed with small gold bands. I thanked him but refused. He sighed. ‘Pity. I like the scent but they are forbidden me. No cigarettes, no women, no alcohol.’ He closed the box and looked longingly at it for a moment, then clasped his hands and rested them on the desk before him.

‘You have no title now,’ he said. Among ‘men of honour’, to be called Mr when you had a title was a calculated insult. Federal investigators sometimes used it to belittle Mob suspects, dispensing with the more formal Don or Tio.

‘I understand no insult is intended, Don Ferrera,’ I said. He nodded and was silent.

As a detective I had had some dealings with the men of honour and always approached them cautiously and without arrogance or presumption. Respect had to be met with respect and silences had to be read like signs. Among them, everything had meaning and they were as economical and efficient in their modes of communication as they were with their methods of violence.

Men of honour only spoke of what concerned them directly, only answered specific questions and would stay silent rather than tell a lie. A man of honour had an absolute obligation to tell the truth and only when the behaviour of others altered so far as to make it necessary to break these rules of behaviour would he do so. All of which assumed that you believed pimps and killers and drug-dealers were honourable in the first place, or that the code was anything more than the incongruous trapping of another age, pressed into service to provide a sheen of aristocracy for thugs and murderers.

I waited for him to break the silence.

He stood and moved slowly, almost painfully, around the room and stopped at a small side-table on which a gold plate gleamed dully.

‘You know, Al Capone used to eat off gold plates? Did you know that?’ he asked. I told him that I hadn’t known.

‘His men used to carry them in a violin case to the restaurant and lay them on the table for Capone and his guests and then they’d all eat off them. Why do you think a man would feel the need to eat off a gold plate?’ He waited for an answer, trying to catch my reflection in the plate.

‘When you have a lot of money, your tastes can become peculiar, eccentric,’ I said. ‘After a while, even your food doesn’t taste right unless it’s served on bone china, or gold. It’s not fitting for someone with so much money and power to eat from the same plates as the little people.’

‘It goes too far, I think,’ he replied, but he no longer seemed to be talking to me and it was his own reflection he was examining in the plate. ‘There’s something wrong with it. There are some tastes that should not be indulged, because they are vulgar. They are obscene. They offend nature.’

‘I take it that isn’t one of Capone’s plates.’

‘No, my son gave it to me as a gift on my last birthday. I told him the story and he had the plate made.’

‘Maybe he missed the point of the story,’ I said. The old man’s face looked weary. It was the face of a man who had not enjoyed his sleep for some time.

‘The boy who was killed, you think my son was involved? You think this was a piece of work?’ he asked eventually, moving back into my direct line of vision and staring away from me at something in the distance. I didn’t look to see what it was.

‘I don’t know. The FBI appears to think so.’

He smiled, an empty, cruel smile which reminded me briefly of Bobby Sciorra. ‘And your interest in this is the girl, no?’

I was surprised, although I should not have been. Barton’s past would have been common knowledge to Sciorra at least and would have been passed on quickly when his body was discovered. I thought my visit to Pete Hayes might have played a part too. I wondered how much he knew and his next question gave me the answer: not much.

‘Who are you working for?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘We can find out. We found out enough from the old man at the gym.’

So that was it. I shrugged gently. He was silent again for a time.

‘Do you think my son had the girl killed?’

‘Did he?’ I responded. Don Ferrera turned back towards me, the rheumy eyes narrowing.

‘There is a story told about a man who believes he is being cuckolded by his wife. He approaches a friend, an old, trusted friend, and says, “I believe my wife is cheating on me but I don’t know with whom. I have watched her closely but I cannot find out the identity of this man. What do I do?”

‘Now his friend is the man who is cheating with his wife, but to divert the other’s attention he says that he saw the wife with another man, a man with a reputation for dishonourable conduct with other men’s wives. And so the cuckold turns his gaze on this other man and his wife continues to cheat on him with his best friend.’ He finished and gazed intently at me.

Everything has to be interpreted, everything is codified. To live with signs is to understand the necessity of understanding meanings in seemingly irrelevant pieces of information. The old man had spent most of his life looking for the meanings in things and expected others to do likewise. In his cynical little anecdote lay his belief that his son was not responsible for Barton’s death but that whoever was responsible stood to benefit from the concentration of the police and FBI on his son’s assumed guilt. I glanced at Bobby Sciorra and wondered how much Don Ferrera really knew about what went on behind those eyes. Sciorra was capable of anything, even of undermining his boss for his own gains.

‘I hear maybe Sonny has taken a sudden interest in my good health,’ I said.

The old man smiled. ‘What kind of interest in your health, Mr Parker?’

‘The kind of interest which could result in my health suddenly ceasing to be good.’

‘I don’t know anything about that. Sonny is his own man.’

‘That may be, but if anyone pulls anything on me I’ll see Sonny in Hell.’

‘I’ll have Bobby look into it,’ he said.

That didn’t make me feel a whole lot better. I stood up to leave.

‘A clever man would be looking for the girl,’ said the old man, also standing up and moving towards a door in a corner of the room behind the desk. ‘Alive or dead, the girl is the key.’

Maybe he was right, but the old man must have had his own reasons for pointing me towards her. And as Bobby Sciorra escorted me to the front door, I wondered if I was the only person looking for Catherine Demeter.

There was a cab waiting at the gates of the Ferrera house to take me back to the Village. As it turned out, I had enough time to shower and make a pot of coffee at my apartment before the FBI came knocking on my door. I had changed into jogging pants and a sweatshirt so I felt a little casual next to Special Agents Ross and Hernandez. The Blue Nile were playing in the background, causing Hernandez to wrinkle his nose in distaste. I didn’t feel the need to apologise.

Ross did most of the talking while Hernandez ostentatiously examined the contents of my bookshelf, looking at covers and reading the dustjackets. He hadn’t asked if he could and I didn’t like it.

‘There are some picture ones on the lower shelf,’ I said. ‘No Crayolas, though. I hope you brought your own.’

Hernandez scowled at me. He was in his late twenties and probably still believed everything he had been taught about the agency in Quantico. He reminded me of the tour guides in the Hoover Building, the ones who herd the Minnesota housewives around while dreaming of gunning down drug-dealers and international terrorists. Hernandez probably still refused to believe that Hoover had worn a dress.

Ross was a different matter. He had been involved with the Feds’ Truck Hijack Squad in New York in the seventies and his name had been linked to a number of high-profile RICO cases since then. I believed he was probably a good agent, but a lousy human being. I had already decided what I was going to tell him: nothing.

‘Why were you at the Ferrera house this evening?’ he began, after declining an offer of coffee like a monkey refusing a nut.

‘I’ve got a paper route. It’s one of my drops.’ Ross didn’t even grin. Hernandez’ scowl deepened. If I’d been of a nervous disposition, the strain might have proved too much for me.

‘Don’t be an asshole,’ said Ross. ‘I could arrest you on suspicion of involvement with organised crime, hold you for a while, let you go, but what good would that do either of us? I’ll ask you again: why were you at the Ferrera house this evening?’

‘I’m conducting an investigation. Ferrera might have been connected to it.’

‘What are you investigating?’

‘That’s confidential.’

‘Who hired you?’

‘Confidential.’ I was tempted to put on a sing-song voice, but I didn’t think Ross was in the right frame of mind. Maybe he was right: maybe I was an asshole, but I was no nearer to finding Catherine Demeter than I had been twenty-four hours ago, and her boyfriend’s death had opened up a range of possibilities, none of which was particularly appealing. If Ross was out to nail Sonny Ferrera or his father then that was his problem. I had enough of my own.

‘What did you tell Ferrera about Barton’s death?’

‘Nothing he didn’t know already, seeing as how Hansen was at the scene before you were,’ I replied. Hansen was a reporter with the Post, a good one. There were flies that envied Hansen’s ability to sniff out a corpse, but if someone had had time to tip Hansen off it was pretty certain that someone had informed Ferrera even earlier. Walter was right: parts of the police department leaked like a poor man’s shoes.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘I don’t know any more than you do. I don’t think Sonny was involved, or the old man. As for anyone else . . .’

Ross’s eyes flicked upwards in frustration. After a pause, he asked if I’d met Bobby Sciorra. I told him I’d had that pleasure. Ross stood and picked at some microscopic speck on his tie. It looked like the sort you picked up in Filene’s Basement after the good stuff had gone.

‘Sciorra’s being mouthing off about teaching you a lesson, I hear. He thinks you’re an interfering prick. He’s probably right.’

‘I hope you’ll do everything in your power to protect me.’

Ross smiled, a minute hitching of the lips that revealed small, pointed canines. He looked like a rat reacting to a stick poked in its face.

‘Rest assured, we’ll do everything in our power to find the culprit when something happens to you.’ Hernandez smiled, too, as they headed for the door. Like father, like son.

I smiled back. ‘You can let yourselves out. And, Hernandez . . .’ He stopped and turned.

‘I’m gonna count those books.’

Ross was right to be concentrating his energies on Sonny. He may have been strictly minor league in many ways – a few porn parlours near Port Authority, a social club on Mott with a handwritten notice taped above the phone reminding members that it was bugged, assorted petty drug deals, shylocking and running whores hardly made him Public Enemy Number One – but Sonny was also the weak link in the Ferrera chain. If he could be broken, then it might lead to Sciorra and to the old man himself.

I watched the two FBI men from my window as they climbed into their car. Ross paused at the passenger side and stared up at the window for a time. It didn’t crack under the pressure. Neither did I, but I had a feeling that Agent Ross wasn’t really trying, not yet.

Chapter Fourteen

It was after ten the next morning when I arrived at the Barton house. An unidentified flunkey answered the door and showed me into the same office in which I had met Isobel Barton two days before, with the same desk and the same Ms Christie with what looked like the same grey suit on and the same unwelcoming look on her face.

She didn’t offer me a seat so I stood with my hands in my pockets to stop my fingers getting numb in the chilly atmosphere. She busied herself with some papers on the desk, not sparing me a second look. I stood by the fireplace and admired a blue china dog that stood at the far end of the mantelpiece. It was part of what had probably once been a pair, since there was an empty space on the opposite side. He looked lonely without a friend.

‘I thought these things usually came in twos?’

Ms Christie glanced up, her face crumpled in annoyance like an image on old newspaper.

‘The dog,’ I repeated. ‘I thought china dogs like that came in matching pairs.’ I wasn’t particularly concerned about the dog but I was tired of Ms Christie ignoring me and I derived some petty pleasure from irritating her.

‘It was once part of a pair,’ she replied, after a moment. ‘The other was . . . damaged some time ago.’

‘That must have been upsetting,’ I said, trying to look like I meant it while simultaneously failing to do so.

‘It was. It had sentimental value.’

‘For you, or Mrs Barton?’

‘For both of us.’ Ms Christie realised she had been forced to acknowledge my presence despite her best efforts, so she carefully put the cap on her pen, clasped her hands together and assumed a businesslike expression.

‘How is Mrs Barton?’ I asked. What might have been concern moved swiftly across Ms Christie’s features and then disappeared, like a gull gliding over a cliff face.

‘She has been under sedation since last night. As you can imagine, she took the news badly.’

‘I didn’t think she and her stepson were that close.’

Ms Christie tossed me a look of contempt. I probably deserved it.

‘Mrs Barton loved Stephen as if he were her own son. Don’t forget that you are merely an employee, Mr Parker. You do not have the right to impugn the reputation of the living or the dead.’ She shook her head at my insensitivity. ‘Why are you here? There’s a great deal to be done before—’

She stopped and, for a moment, looked lost. I waited for her to resume. ‘Before Stephen’s funeral,’ she finished, and I realised that there might be more to her apparent distress at the events of last night than simple concern for her employer. For a guy who had all the higher moral qualities of a hammerhead shark, Stephen Barton had certainly attracted his share of admirers.

‘I have to go to Virginia,’ I said. ‘It may take more than the advance I was given. I wanted to let Mrs Barton know before I left.’

‘Is this to do with the killing?’

‘I don’t know.’ It was becoming a familiar refrain. ‘There may be a connection between Catherine Demeter’s disappearance and Mr Barton’s death but we won’t know unless the police find something or the girl turns up.’

‘Well, I can’t authorise that kind of spending at the present time,’ began Ms Christie. ‘You’ll have to wait until after—’

I interrupted her. Frankly, I was getting tired of Ms Christie. I was used to people not liking me but most at least had the decency to get to know me first, however briefly. ‘I’m not asking you to authorise it and, after my meeting with Mrs Barton, I don’t think you have anything to do with it. But as a common courtesy I thought I’d offer my sympathies and tell her how far I’ve got.’

‘And how far have you got, Mr Parker?’ she hissed. She was standing now, her knuckles white against the desk. In her eyes something vicious and poisonous raised its head and flashed its fangs.

‘I think the girl may have left the city. I think she went home, or back to what used to be home, but I don’t know why. If she’s there I’ll find her, make sure she’s okay and contact Mrs Barton.’

‘And if she isn’t?’

I let the question hang without a reply. There was no answer, for if Catherine Demeter wasn’t in Haven then she might as well have dropped off the face of the earth until she did something that made her traceable, like using a credit card or making a telephone call to her worried friend.

I felt tired and frayed at the edges. The case seemed to be fragmenting, the pieces spinning away from me and glittering in the distance. There were too many elements involved to be merely coincidental and yet I was too experienced to try to force them all together into a picture that might be untrue to reality, an imposition of order upon the chaos of murder and killing. Still, it seemed to me that Catherine Demeter was one of those pieces and that she had to be found so that her place in the order of things could be determined.

‘I’m leaving this afternoon. I’ll call if I find anything.’

Ms Christie’s eyes had lost their shine and the bitter thing that lived within her had curled back on itself to sleep for a time. I was not even sure that she heard me. I left her like that, her knuckles still resting on the desk, her eyes vacant, seemingly staring somewhere within herself, her face slick and pale as if troubled by what she saw.

As it turned out, I was delayed by further problems with my car and it was 4.00 p.m. before I drove the Mustang back to my apartment to pack my bag.

A welcome breeze blew as I walked up the steps, fumbling for my keys. It sent candy wrappers cartwheeling across the street and set soft-drink cans tolling like bells. A discarded newspaper skimmed the sidewalk with a sound like the whisperings of a dead lover.

I walked the four flights of stairs to my door, entered the apartment and turned on a table lamp. I prepared a brew of coffee and packed as it percolated. About thirty minutes later I was finishing my coffee, my overnight bag at my feet, when the cellphone rang.

‘Hello, Mr Parker,’ said a man’s voice. The voice was neutral, almost artificial, and I could hear small clicks between the words as if they had been reassembled from a completely different conversation.

‘Who is this?’

‘Oh, we’ve never met, but we had some mutual acquaintances. Your wife and daughter. You might say I was with them in their final moments.’ The voice alternated between sets of words: now high, then low, first male, then female. At one point, there appeared to be three voices speaking simultaneously, then they fell away to a single male voice once again.

The apartment seemed to drop in temperature and then fall away from me. There was only the phone, the tiny perforations of the mouthpiece and the silence at the other end of the line.

‘I’ve had freak calls before,’ I said, with more confidence than I felt. ‘You’re just another lonely man looking for a house to haunt.’

‘I cut their faces off. I broke your wife’s nose by slamming her against the wall by your kitchen door. Don’t doubt me. I am the one you’ve been looking for.’ The last words were all spoken by a child’s voice, high-pitched and joyous.

I felt a stabbing pain behind my eyes and my blood sounded loudly in my ears like waves crashing against a headland, bleak and grey. There was no saliva in my mouth, just a dry dusty sensation. When I swallowed, the feeling was that of dirt travelling down my throat. It was painful and I struggled to find my voice.

‘Mr Parker, are you all right?’ The words were calm, solicitous, almost tender, but spoken by what sounded like four different voices.

‘I’ll find you.’

He laughed. The synthesised nature of the sound was more obvious now. It seemed to break up into tiny units, just as a TV screen does when you get too close and the picture becomes merely a series of small dots.

‘But I’ve found you,’ he said. ‘You wanted me to find you, just as you wanted me to find them and to do what I did. You brought me into your life. For you, I flamed into being.

‘I had been waiting so long for your call. You wanted them to die. Didn’t you hate your wife in the hours before I took her? And don’t you sometimes, in the deep dark of the night, have to fight back your sense of guilt at the feeling of freedom it gave you knowing she was dead? I freed you. The least you could do is show some gratitude.’

‘You’re a sick man, but that isn’t going to save you.’ I pressed caller ID on the phone and a number came up, a number I recognised. It was the number of the call-box at the corner of the street. I moved towards the door and began making my way down the stairs.

‘No, not man. In her final moments your wife knew that, your Susan, mouth to mouth’s kiss, as I drew the life from her. Oh, I lusted for her in those last, bright-red minutes but, then, that has always been a weakness of our kind. Our sin was not pride, but lust for humanity. And I chose her, Mr Parker, and I loved her in my way.’ The voice was now deep and male. It boomed in my ear like the voice of a god, or a devil.

‘Fuck you,’ I said, the bile rising in my throat as I felt sweat bead my brow and run in rivulets down my face, a sick, fearful sweat that defied the fury in my voice. I had come down three flights of stairs. There was one flight left to go.

‘Don’t go yet.’ The voice became that of a female child, like my child, my Jennifer, and in that moment I had some inkling of the nature of this ‘Travelling Man’. ‘We’ll talk again soon. By then, maybe my purpose will be clearer to you. Take what I give you as a gift. I hope it will ease your suffering. It should be coming to you right . . . about . . . now.’

I heard the buzzer sound in my apartment upstairs. I dropped the phone to the floor and drew the Smith & Wesson from my holster. I took the remaining steps two at a time, racing down the stairs with adrenaline pumping through my system. My neighbour Mrs D’Amato, startled by the noise, stood at her apartment door, the one nearest the front entrance, a housecoat held tight at her neck. I rushed past her, wrenched open the door and came out low, my thumb already clicking down the safety.

On the step stood a black child of no more than ten years, a cylindrical, gift-wrapped parcel in his hand and his eyes wide in fear and shock. I grabbed him by the collar and flung him inside, shouting for Mrs D’Amato to hold him, to get both of them away from the package, and ran down the steps of the brownstone and on to the street.

It was deserted except for the papers and the rolling cans. It was a strange desertion, as if the Village and its inhabitants had conspired with the Travelling Man against me. At the far end of the street, beneath the street-lamp, a telephone booth stood. There was no one there and the handset was hanging in its place. I ran towards it, moving away from the corner wall as I approached in case anyone was waiting at the other side. Here, the street was alive with passers-by, gay couples hand in hand, tourists, lovers. In the distance I saw the lights of traffic and I heard around me the sounds of a safer, more mundane world I seemed to have left behind.

I spun at the sound of footsteps behind me. A young woman was approaching the phone, fumbling in her purse for change. She looked up as she saw me approach and backed off at the sight of the gun.

‘Find another,’ I said. I took one last look around, clicked the safety and stuck the gun in the waistband of my pants. I braced my foot against the pillar of the booth and with both hands I wrenched the connecting cable from the phone with a strength that was not natural to me. Then I returned to my apartment house, carrying the receiver before me like a fish on the end of a line.

Inside her apartment Mrs D’Amato was holding the kid by his arms while he struggled and fought, with tears rolling down his cheeks. I held his shoulders and squatted down to his level.

‘Hey, it’s okay. Take it easy. You’re not in any trouble, I just want to ask you some questions. What’s your name?’

The boy quieted down a little, although he still shook with sobs. He glanced around nervously at Mrs D’Amato and then made an attempt to break for the door. He nearly made it, too, his jacket slipping from his body as he pulled out his arms, but the force of his efforts made him slip and fall and I was on him. I hauled him to a chair, sat him down and gave Mrs D’Amato Walter Cole’s number. I told her to tell him it was urgent and to get over here fast.

‘What’s your name, kid?’

‘Jake.’

‘Okay, Jake. Who gave you this?’ I nodded towards the parcel, which stood on the table beside us, wrapped in blue paper decorated with teddy bears and candy cane and topped with a bright blue ribbon.

Jake shook his head, the force sending tears flying off in both directions.

‘It’s all right, Jake. There’s no need to be scared. Was it a man, Jake?’ Jake, Jake. Keep using his name, calm him, get him to concentrate.

His face swivelled towards me, the eyes huge. He nodded.

‘Did you see what he looked like, Jake?’

His chin crumpled and he started to cry in loud sobs, which brought Mrs D’Amato back to the kitchen door.

‘He said he’d hurt me,’ said Jake. ‘He said he’d cu-cut my face off.’

Mrs D’Amato moved beside him and he buried his face in the folds of her housecoat, wrapping his small arms around her thick waist.

‘Did you see him, Jake? Did you see what he looked like?’

He turned from the housecoat.

‘He had a knife, like doctors use on TV.’ The boy’s mouth hung wide with terror. ‘He showed it to me, touched me with it here.’ He lifted a finger to his left cheek.

‘Jake, did you see his face?’

‘He was all dark,’ said Jake, his voice rising in hysteria. ‘There was nuh-nuhthin’ there.’ His voice rose to a scream: ‘He didn’t have no face.’

I told Mrs D’Amato to take Jake into the kitchen until Walter Cole arrived then sat down to examine the gift from the Travelling Man. It was about ten inches high and eight inches in diameter and it felt like glass. I took out my pocket knife and gently prised back an edge of the wrapping, examining it for wires or pressure pads. There was nothing. I cut the two strips of tape holding the paper in place and gently removed the grinning bears, the dancing candy cane.

The surface of the jar was clean and I smelt the disinfectant he had used to erase any traces of himself. In the yellowing liquid it contained I saw my own face doubly reflected, first on the surface of the glass and then inside, on the face of my once-beautiful daughter. It rested gently against the side of the jar, now bleached and puffy like the face of a drowning victim, scraps of flesh like tendrils rising from the edges and the eyelids closed as if in repose. And I moaned in a rising tide of agony and fear, hatred and remorse. In the kitchen, I could hear the boy named Jake sobbing and, mingled with his cries, I suddenly heard my own.

I don’t know how much time elapsed before Cole arrived. He stared ashen-faced at the thing in the jar and then called Forensics.

‘Did you touch it?’

‘No. There’s a phone as well. The number matches the caller ID but there won’t be any traces. I’m not even sure he was at that phone. His voice was synthesised in some way. I think he was running his words through some form of sophisticated software, something with voice recognition and tone manipulation, and maybe bouncing it off that number. I don’t know. I’m guessing, that’s all.’ I was babbling, words tripping over each other. I was afraid of what might happen if I stopped talking.

‘What did he say?’

‘I think he’s getting ready to start again.’

He sat down heavily and ran his hand over his face and through his hair. Then he picked up the paper by one edge with a gloved hand and almost gently used it to cover the front of the jar, like a veil.

‘You know what we have to do,’ he said. ‘We’ll need to know everything he said, anything at all that might help us to get a lead on him. We’ll do the same with the kid.’

I kept my eyes on Cole, on the floor, anywhere but on the table and the remains of all that I had lost.

‘He thinks he’s a demon, Walter.’

Cole looked once again at the shape of the jar.

‘Maybe he is.’

As we left for the station, cops milled around the front of the building, preparing to take statements from neighbours, passers-by, anyone who might possibly have witnessed the actions of the Travelling Man. The boy Jake came with us, his parents arriving shortly after with that frightened, sick look that poor, decent people get in the city when they hear that one of their children is with the police.

The Travelling Man must have been following me throughout the day, watching my movements so he could put into action what he had planned. I traced back my movements, trying to remember faces, strangers, anyone whose gaze might have lingered for just a moment too long. There was nothing.

At the station, Walter and I went through the conversation again and again, pulling out anything that might be useful, that might stamp some distinguishing feature on this killer.

‘You say the voices changed?’ he asked.

‘Repeatedly. At one point, I even thought I heard Jennifer.’

‘There may be something in that. Voice synthesis of that kind would have to be done using some sort of computer. Shit, he could simply have routed the call through that number, like you said. The kid says he was given the jar at four p.m. and told to deliver it at four thirty-five exactly. He waited in an alley, counting the seconds on his Power Rangers digital watch. That could have given this guy enough time to get to his home base and bounce the call. I don’t know enough about these things. Maybe he needed access to an exchange to do what he did. I’ll have to get someone who knows to check it out.’

The mechanics of the voice synthesis were one thing, but the reasons for the synthesis were another. It might have been that the Travelling Man wanted to leave as few traces of himself as possible: a voice pattern could be recognised, stored, compared and even used against him at some point in the future.

‘What about the kid’s comment, that this guy with the scalpel had no face?’ asked Walter.

‘A mask of some kind, maybe, to avoid any possibility of identification. He could be marked in some way, that’s another option. The third choice is that he is what he seems to be.’

‘A demon?’

I didn’t reply. I didn’t know what a demon was, if an individual’s inhumanity could cause him to ‘cross over’ in some way, to become something less than human; or if there were some things that seemed to defy any conventional notion of what it meant to be human, of what it meant to exist in the world.

When I returned to the apartment that night, Mrs D’Amato brought me up a plate of cold cuts and some Italian bread and sat with me for a time, fearful for me after what had taken place that afternoon.

When she left, I stood beneath the shower for a long time, the water as hot as I could take it, and I washed my hands again and again. I lay awake then for a long time, sick with anger and fear, watching the cellphone on my desk. My senses were so heightened that I could hear them hum.

Chapter Fifteen

‘Read me a story, Daddy.’

‘What story do you want to hear?’

‘A funny story. The three bears. The baby bear is funny.’

‘Okay, but then you have to go to sleep.’

‘Okay.’

‘One story.’

‘One story. Then I go to sleep.’

In an autopsy, the body is first photographed, clothed and naked. Certain parts of the body may be X-rayed to determine the presence of bone fragments or foreign objects embedded in the flesh. Every external feature is noted: the hair colour, the height, the weight, the condition of the body, the colour of the eyes.

‘Baby Bear opened his eyes wide. “Somebody’s been eating my porridge, and it’s all gone!”’

‘All gone!’

All gone.

The internal examination is conducted from top to bottom, but the head is examined last. The chest is examined for any sign of rib fractures. A Y-shaped incision is made by cutting from shoulder to shoulder, crossing over the breasts, then moving down from the lower tip of the sternum to the pubic region. The heart and lungs are exposed. The pericardial sac is opened and a sample of blood is taken to determine the blood type of the victim. The heart, lungs, oesophagus and trachea are removed. Each organ is weighed, examined and sliced into sections. Fluid in the thoracic pleural cavity is removed for analysis. Slides of organ tissue are prepared for analysis under a microscope.

‘And then Goldilocks ran away and the three bears never saw her again.’

‘Read it again.’

‘No, we agreed. One story. That’s all we have time for.’

‘We have more time.’

‘Not tonight. Another night.’

‘No, tonight.’

‘No, another night. There’ll be other nights, and other stories.’

The abdomen is examined and any injuries are noted before the removal of the organs. Fluids in the abdomen are analysed and each separate organ is weighed, examined and sectioned. The contents of the stomach are measured. Samples are taken for toxicological analysis. The order of removal is usually as follows: the liver, the spleen, the adrenals and kidneys, the stomach, pancreas and intestines.

‘What did you read?’

‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears.’

‘Again.’

‘Again.’

‘Are you going to tell me a story?’

‘What story would you like to hear?’

‘Something dirty.’

‘Oh, I know lots of stories like that.’

‘I know you do.’

The genitalia are examined for injuries or foreign material. Vaginal and anal swabs are obtained and any foreign matter collected is sent to a DNA lab for analysis. The bladder is removed and a urine sample is sent to toxicology.

‘Kiss me.’

‘Kiss you where?’

‘Everywhere. On my lips, my eyes, my neck, my nose, my ears, my cheeks. Kiss me everywhere. I love your kisses on me.’

‘Suppose I start with your eyes and move down from there.’

‘Okay. I can live with that.’

The skull is examined in an effort to find evidence of injury. The intermastoid incision is made from one ear to the other, across the top of the head. The scalp is peeled away and the skull exposed. A saw is used to cut through the skull. The brain is examined and removed.

‘Why can’t we be like this more often?’

‘I don’t know. I want us to be, but I can’t.’

‘I love you like this.’

‘Please, Susan . . .’

‘No . . .’

‘I could taste the booze on your breath.’

‘Susan, I can’t talk about this now. Not now.’

‘When? When are we going to talk about it?’

‘Some other time. I’m going out.’

‘Stay, please.’

‘No. I’ll be back later.’

‘Please . . .’

Rehoboth Beach in Delaware has a long boardwalk bordered on one side by the beach and on the other by the sort of amusement arcades you remember from your childhood: 25-cent games played with wooden balls which you roll into holes to score points; horse races with metal horses loping down a sloped track with a glass-eyed teddy bear for the winner; a frog-pond game played with magnets on the end of a child’s fishing line.

They’ve been joined now by noisy computer games and space-flight simulators, but Rehoboth still retains more charm than, say, Dewey Beach further up the coast, or even Bethany. A ferry runs from Cape May in New Jersey to Lewes on the Delaware coast and, from there, it’s maybe five or six miles south to Rehoboth. It’s not really the best way to approach Rehoboth, since you run the gamut of burger joints, outlet stores and shopping malls on Highway One. The approach north through Dewey is better, running along the shore with its miles of dunes.

From that direction, Rehoboth benefits from the contrast with Dewey. You cross into the town proper over a kind of ornamental lake, past the church and then you’re on Rehoboth’s main street, with its bookstores, its T-shirt shops, its bars and restaurants set in big old wooden houses, where you can drink on the porch and watch people walk their dogs in the quiet evening air.

Four of us had decided on Rehoboth as the place to go for a weekend break to celebrate Tommy Morrison’s promotion, despite its reputation as something of a gay hotspot. We ended up staying in the Lord Baltimore, with its comfortable, antiquated rooms harking back to another era, less than a block away from the Blue Moon bar where crowds of well-tanned, expensively dressed men partied loudly into the night.

I had just become Walter Cole’s partner. I suspected Walter had pulled strings to have me assigned as his partner, although nothing was ever said. With Lee’s agreement, he travelled with me to Delaware, along with Tommy Morrison and a friend of mine from the Academy named Joseph Bonfiglioli, who was shot dead a year later while chasing a guy who had stolen eighty dollars from a liquor store. Each evening at 9.00 p.m., without fail, Walter would call Lee to check on her and the kids. He was a man acutely aware of the vulnerability of a parent.

Walter and I had known each other for some time – four years by then, I think. I met him first in one of the bars in which cops used to hold court. I was young, just out of uniform and still admiring my reflection in my new tin. Great things were expected of me. It was widely believed that I would get my name in the papers. I did that, although not in the way that anyone would have imagined. Walter was a stocky figure wearing slightly down-at-heel suits, a dark shadow of a beard on his cheeks and chin even when he had shaved only an hour before. He had a reputation as a dogged, concerned investigator, one who had occasional flashes of brilliance that could turn an investigation around when legwork had failed to produce a result and the necessary quota of luck upon which almost every investigation depends was not forthcoming.

Walter Cole was also an avid reader, a man who devoured knowledge in the same way that certain tribes devour their enemies’ hearts in the hope that they will become braver as a result. We shared a love of Runyon and Wodehouse; of Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme; the poetry of e.e. cummings and, strangely, of the Earl of Rochester, the Restoration dandy tortured by his failings – his love of alcohol and women and his inability to be the husband that he believed his wife deserved.

I recall Walter wandering along the boardwalk at Rehoboth with a Popsicle in his hand, a garish shirt hanging over a pair of khaki shorts, his sandals slapping lightly on the sand-scattered wood and a straw hat protecting his already balding head. Even as he joked with us, examining menus and losing money on the slots, stealing fries from Tommy Morrison’s big Thrasher’s paper tub, paddling in the cool Atlantic surf, I knew that he was missing Lee.

And I knew, too, that to live a life like Walter Cole’s – a life almost mundane in the pleasure it derived from small happinesses and the beauty of the familiar, but uncommon in the value it attached to them – was something to be envied.

I met Susan Lewis, as she then was, for the first time in Lingo’s Market, an old-style general store which sold produce and cereals alongside expensive cheeses and boasted its own in-store bakery. It was still a family-run operation – a sister, a brother and their mother, a tiny, white-haired woman with the energy of a terrier.

On our first morning in the resort, I stumbled out to buy coffee and a newspaper in Lingo’s, my mouth dry, my legs still unsteady from the night before. She stood at the deli counter, ordering coffee beans and pecans, her hair tied loosely in a ponytail. She wore a yellow summer dress, her eyes were a deep, dark blue and she was very, very beautiful.

I, on the other hand, was very much the worse for wear, but she smiled at me as I stood beside her at the counter, oozing alcohol from my pores. And then she was gone, trailing a hint of expensive scent behind her.

I saw her a second time that day, at the YMCA as she stepped from the pool and entered the dressing rooms, while I tried to sweat out the alcohol on a rowing machine. It seemed to me that, for the next day or two, I caught glimpses of her everywhere: in a bookshop, examining the covers of glossy legal thrillers; passing the launderette, clutching a bag of donuts; peering in the window of the Irish Eyes bar with a girlfriend; and, finally, I came upon her one night as she stood on the boardwalk, the sound of the arcades behind her and the waves breaking before her.

She was alone, caught up in the sight of the surf gleaming white in the darkness. Few people strolled on the beach to obscure her view and, at the periphery, away from the arcades and the fast-food stalls, it was startlingly empty.

She looked over at me as I stood beside her. She smiled. ‘Feeling better now?’

‘A little. You caught me at a bad time.’

‘I could smell your bad time,’ she said, her nose wrinkling.

‘I’m sorry. If I’d known you were going to be there, I’d have dressed up.’ And I wasn’t kidding.

‘It’s okay. I’ve had those times.’

And, from there, it began. She lived in New Jersey, commuted to Manhattan each day to work in a publisher’s office and every second weekend she visited her parents in Massachusetts. We were married a year later and we had Jennifer one year after that. We had maybe three very good years together before things started to deteriorate. It was my fault, I think. When my parents married they both knew the toll a policeman’s life could take on a marriage, he because he lived that life and saw its results reflected in the lives around him, she because her father had been a deputy in Maine and had resigned before the cost became too high. Susan had no such experience.

She was the youngest of four children, both of her parents were still alive and they all doted on her. When she died, they ceased to speak to me. Even at the graveside, no words passed between us. With Susan and Jennifer gone, it was as if I had been cut adrift from the tide of life and left to float in still, dark waters.

Chapter Sixteen

The deaths of Susan and Jennifer attracted a great deal of attention, although it soon faded. The more intimate details of the killing – the skinning, the removal of the faces, the blindings – were kept from the public, but it didn’t stop the freaks from coming out of the woodwork. For a time, murder tourists would drive up to the house and videotape each other standing in the yard. A local patrolman even caught one couple trying to break in through the back door in order to pose in the chairs where Susan and Jennifer had died. In the days after they had been found, the phone rang regularly with calls from people who claimed to be married to the killer, or who felt certain that they had met him in a past life or, on one or two occasions, called only to say they were glad my wife and child were dead. Eventually I left the house, remaining in touch by phone and fax with the lawyer who had been entrusted with the business of selling it.

I had found the community near Portland, Maine, when I was returning to Manhattan from Chicago after chasing up one more obscure non-lead, a suspected child-killer named Byron Able who was dead by the time I arrived, killed in the parking lot of a bar after he tangled with some local thugs. Maybe I was also looking for some peace in a place I knew, but I never got as far as the house in Scarborough, the house that my grandfather had left me in his will.

I was sick by that time. When the girl found me retching and crying in the doorway of a boarded-up electronics store and offered me a bed for the night I could only nod. When her comrades, huge men with muddied boots and shirts that smelt of sweat and pine needles, dragged me to their pick-up and dumped me in the back I half-hoped that they were going to kill me. They nearly did. By the time I left their community, out by Sebago Lake, six weeks later I had lost fourteen pounds and my stomach muscles stood out like the plates on an alligator’s back. I worked on their small farm and attended group sessions where others like me tried to purge themselves of their demons. I still craved alcohol but fought back the desire as I had been taught. There were prayers in the evenings and every Sunday a pastor would give a sermon on abstinence, tolerance, the need for each man and woman to find a peace within himself or herself. The community funded itself through the produce it sold, some furniture it made and donations from those who had availed of its services, some of them now wealthy men and women.

But I was still sick, consumed by a desire to revenge myself upon those around me. I felt trapped in a limbo: the investigation had ground to a halt and would not resume again until a similar crime was committed and a pattern could be established.

Someone had taken my wife and child from me and escaped unpunished. Inside me, the hurt and anger and guilt ebbed and flowed like a red tide waiting to spill its banks. I felt it as a physical pain that tore at my head and gnawed at my stomach. It led me back to the city, where I tortured and killed the pimp Johnny Friday in the toilet of the bus station where he had been waiting to feast on the waifs and strays drifting into New York.

I think now that I had always set out to kill him but I had hidden the knowledge of what I intended to do in some corner of my mind. I draped it with self-serving justifications and excuses, the sort I had used for so long each time I watched a shot of whiskey poured in front of me, or heard the gassy snap of a beer cap. Frozen by my own inability and the inability of others to find the killer of Susan and Jennifer, I saw a chance to strike out and I took it. From the moment I packed my gun and gloves and set out for the bus station, Johnny Friday was a dead man.

Friday was a tall, thin black man who looked like a preacher in his trademark dark three-buttoned suits and his collarless shirts fastened to the neck. He would hand out small Bibles and religious pamplets to the new arrivals and offer them soup from a flask and, as the barbiturates it contained began to take effect, he would lead them from the station and into the back of a waiting van. Then they would disappear, as surely as if they had never arrived, until they turned up on the streets as beaten junkies, whoring for the fix that Johnny supplied at inflated prices while they pulled in the tricks that kept him rich.

His was a ‘hands-on’ operation and, even in a business not noted for its humanity, Johnny Friday was beyond any kind of redemption. He supplied children to paedophiles, delivering them to the doors of selected safe-houses where they were raped and sodomised before being returned to their owner. If they were rich and depraved enough, Johnny would give them access to ‘The Basement’ in an abandoned warehouse in the garment district. There, for a cash payment of $10,000, they could take one of Johnny’s stable and, boy or girl, child or teen, they could torture, rape and, if they wished, kill, and Johnny would take care of the body. He was noted, in certain circles, for his discretion.

In my search for the killer of my wife and child, I had learned of Johnny Friday. I had not intended to kill him, or at least I did not admit that intention to myself. From a former snitch I learned that Johnny sometimes dealt in pictures and videos of sexual torture, that he was a leading source of this material and that anyone whose tastes ran in that direction would, at some point, come into contact with Johnny Friday or one of his agents.

And so I watched him for five hours from an Au Bon Pain in the station and when he went to the washroom I followed him. It was divided into sections, the first mirrored with sinks, the second lined with urinals along the end wall and two sets of stalls opposite, divided by a central aisle. An old man in a stained uniform sat in a small, glass-lined cubicle beside the sinks but he was engrossed in a magazine when I entered behind Johnny Friday. Two men were washing their hands at the sinks, two were standing at the urinals and three of the stalls were occupied, two in the section to the left, one in the section to the right. Piped music was playing, some unrecognisable tune.

Johnny Friday walked, hips swinging, to the urinal at the far right of the wall. I stood two urinals away from him as I waited for the other men to finish. As soon as they had finished I moved behind Johnny Friday, clasping my hand on his mouth and pressing the Smith & Wesson into the soft skin beneath his chin as I pushed him into the end stall, the furthest away from the other occupied stall on that side.

‘Hey, don’t, man, don’t,’ he whispered, his eyes wide.

I brought my knee up hard into his groin and he fell down heavily on his knees as I locked the door behind us. He tried weakly to rise and I hit him hard in the face. I brought the gun close to his head again. ‘Don’t say a word. Turn your back to me.’

‘Please, man, don’t.’

‘Shut up. Turn.’

He inched slowly round on his knees. I pulled his jacket down over his arms and then cuffed him. From my other pocket I took a rag and a roll of duct tape. I stuffed the rag in his mouth and wrapped the tape around his head two or three times. Then I pulled him to his feet and pushed him down on to the toilet. His right foot came up and caught me hard on the shin and he tried to push himself up, but he was off balance and I hit him again. This time he stayed down. I held the gun on him and listened for a moment in case anyone came to see what the noise was. There was only the sound of a toilet flushing. No one came.

I told Johnny Friday what I wanted. His eyes narrowed as he realised who I was. Sweat poured from his forehead and he tried to blink it from his eyes. His nose was bleeding slightly and a thin trickle of red ran from beneath the duct tape and rolled down his chin. His nostrils flared as he breathed heavily through them.

‘I want names, Johnny. Names of customers. You’re going to give them to me.’

He snorted in disdain and blood bubbled from a nostril. His eyes were cold now. He looked like a long, black snake with his slicked-back hair and slitted, reptilian eyes. When I broke his nose they widened in shock and pain.

I hit him again, once, twice, hard blows to the stomach and head. Then I pulled the tape down hard and dragged the bloodied rag from his mouth.

‘Give me names.’

He spat a tooth from his mouth. ‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘Fuck you and your dead bitches.’

What happened after is still not clear to me. I remember hitting him again and again, feeling bone crunch and ribs break and watching my gloves darken with his blood. There was a black cloud in my mind and streaks of red ran through it like strange lightning.

When I stopped, Johnny Friday’s features seemed to have melted into a bloody blur of what they had once been. I held his jaw in my hands as blood bubbled from his lips.

‘Tell me,’ I hissed. His eyes rolled towards me and, like a vision of some craggy entrance to Hell, his broken teeth showed behind his lips as he managed one last smile. His body arched and spasmed once, twice. Thick black blood rolled from his nose and mouth and ears and then he died.

I stood back, breathing heavily. I wiped my blood-spattered face as best I could and cleaned some of the blood from the front of my jacket, although it hardly showed against the black leather and my black jeans. I took the gloves from my hands, stuffed them in my pocket and then flushed the toilet before peering carefully out and pulling the door closed behind me as I left. Blood was already seeping out of the stall and pooling in the cracks between the tiles.

I realised that the noise of Johnny Friday’s dying must have echoed around the washroom but I didn’t care. As I left I passed only an elderly black man at the urinals and he, like a good citizen who knows when to mind his own business, didn’t even glance at me. There were other men at the sinks who gave me a cursory look in the mirror. But I noticed that the old man was gone from his glass cubicle and I ducked into an empty departure gate as two cops came running towards the washroom from the upper level. I made my way to the street through the ranks of buses beneath the station.

Perhaps Johnny Friday deserved to die. Certainly, no one mourned his passing and the police made little more than a cursory effort to find his killer. But there were rumours, for Walter, I think, had heard them.

But I live with the death of Johnny Friday as I live with the deaths of Susan and Jennifer. If he did deserve to die, if what he got was no more than he deserved, yet it was not for me to act as his judge and executioner. ‘In the next life we get justice’, someone once wrote. ‘In this one we have the law.’ In Johnny Friday’s last minutes there was no law and only a kind of vicious justice that was not for me to give.

I did not believe that my wife and child were the first to die at the hands of the Travelling Man, if that was who he was. I still believed that somewhere in a Louisiana swamp lay another, and in her identity was the clue that would open up the identity of this man who believed he was more than a man. She was part of a grim tradition in human history, a parade of victims stretching back to ancient times, back to the time of Christ and before that, back to a time when men sacrificed those around them to placate gods who knew no mercy and whose natures they both created and imitated in their actions.

The girl in Louisiana was part of a bloody succession, a modern-day Windeby Girl, a descendant of that anonymous woman found in the fifties in a shallow grave in a peat bog in Denmark where she had been led nearly two thousand years before, naked and blindfolded, to be drowned in twenty inches of water. A path could be traced through history leading from her death to the death of another girl at the hands of a man who believed he could appease the demons within himself by taking her life but who, once blood had been spilled and flesh torn, wanted more and took my wife and child.

We do not believe in evil any more, only evil acts, which can be explained away by the science of the mind. There is no evil and to believe in it is to fall prey to superstition, like checking beneath the bed at night or being afraid of the dark. But there are those for whom we have no easy answers, who do evil because that is their nature, because they are evil.

Men such as Johnny Friday and others like him prey on those who live on the periphery of society, on those who have lost their way. It is easy to stray in the darkness on the edge of modern life and, once lost and alone, there are things waiting for us there. Our ancestors were not wrong in their superstitions: there is reason to fear the dark.

And just as a trail could be followed from a bog in Denmark to a swamp in the South, so I came to believe that evil, too, could be traced throughout the life of our race. There was a tradition of evil, which ran beneath all human existence like the sewers beneath a city, which continued on even after one of its constituent parts was destroyed because it was simply one small part of a greater, darker whole.

Perhaps that was part of what made me want to find out the truth about Catherine Demeter; as I look back, I realise that evil had found its way to touch her life too and taint it beyond retrieval. If I could not fight evil as it came in the form of the Travelling Man, then I would find it in other forms. I believe what I say. I believe in evil because I have touched it, and it has touched me.

Chapter Seventeen

When I telephoned Rachel Wolfe’s private practice the following morning, the secretary told me that she was giving a seminar at a conference in Columbia University. I took the subway from the Village and arrived early at the main entrance to the campus. I wandered for a time around the Barnard Book Forum, students jostling me as I stood browsing in the literature section, before making my way to the main college entrance.

I passed through the college’s large quadrangle, with the Butler library at one end, the administration building at the other and, like a mediator between learning and bureaucracy, the statue of Alma Mater in the grass centre. Like most city residents, I rarely came to Columbia and the sense of tranquillity and study only feet away from the busy streets outside was always surprising to me.

Rachel Wolfe was just finishing her lecture as I arrived, so I waited for her outside the theatre until the session ended. She emerged talking to a young, earnest-looking man with curly hair and round spectacles, who hung on her every word like a devotee of a god. When she saw me she stopped and smiled a goodbye at him. He looked unhappy and seemed set to linger but then turned and walked away, his head low.

‘How can I help you, Mr Parker?’ she asked, with a puzzled but not uninterested look.

‘He’s back.’

We walked over to the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Avenue, where intense young men and women sat reading textbooks and sipping coffee. Rachel Wolfe was wearing jeans and a chunky sweater with a heart-shaped design on the front.

Despite all that had happened the previous night, I was curious about her. I had not been attracted to a woman since Susan’s death and my wife was the last woman with whom I had slept. Rachel Wolfe, her long, red hair brushed back over her ears, aroused a sense of longing in me that was more than sexual. I felt a deep loneliness within myself and an ache in my stomach. She looked at me curiously.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of something.’

She nodded and picked at a poppy-seed roll before pulling off a huge chunk and stuffing it in her mouth, sighing with satisfaction. I must have looked slightly shocked, because she covered her mouth with her hand and giggled softly. ‘Sorry, but I’m a sucker for these things. Daintiness and good table manners tend to go out the window when someone puts one in front of me.’

‘I know the feeling. I used to be like that with Ben and Jerry’s until I realised I was starting to look like one of the cartons.’

She smiled again and pushed at a piece of roll, which was trying to make a break for freedom from the side of her mouth. The conversation sagged for a time.

‘I take it your parents were jazz fans,’ she said eventually.

I was puzzled for a moment and she smiled in amusement as I tried to take in the question. I had been asked it many times before but I was grateful for the diversion, and I think she knew that.

‘No, my father and mother didn’t know the first thing about jazz,’ I replied. ‘My father just liked the name. The first time he heard about Bird Parker was at the baptismal font when the priest mentioned it to him. The priest was a big jazz fan, I was told. He couldn’t have been happier if my father had announced that he was naming all of his children after the members of the Count Basie Orchestra.

‘My father, by contrast, wasn’t too happy at the idea of naming his first-born after a black jazz musician but by then it was too late to think of another name.’

‘What did he call the rest of his children?’

I shrugged. ‘He didn’t get the chance. My mother couldn’t have any more children after me.’

‘Maybe she thought she couldn’t do any better.’ She smiled.

‘I don’t think so. I was nothing but trouble for her as a child. It used to drive my father crazy.’

I could see in her eyes that she was about to ask me about my father but something in my face stopped her. She pursed her lips, pushed away her empty plate and settled herself back in her chair.

‘Can you tell me what happened?’

I went through the events of the night before, leaving nothing out. The words of the Travelling Man were burned into my mind.

‘Why do you call him that?’

‘A friend of mine led me to a woman who said that she was receiving, uh, messages from a dead girl. The girl had died in the same way as Susan and Jennifer.’

‘Was the girl found?’

‘No one looked. An old woman’s psychic messages aren’t enough to launch an investigation.’

‘Even if she exists, are you sure it’s the same guy?’

‘I believe it is, yes.’

Wolfe looked like she wanted to ask more, but she let it go. ‘Go back over what this caller, this “Travelling Man”, said again, slowly this time.’

I did until she lifted her hand to stop me. ‘That’s a quote from Joyce: “mouth to mouth’s kiss”. It’s the description of the “pale vampire” in Ulysses. This is an educated man we’re dealing with. The stuff about “our kind” sounds Biblical, but I’m not sure of it. I’ll have to check it. Give them to me again.’ I spoke the words slowly as she took them down in a wire-bound notebook. ‘I have a friend who teaches theology and Biblical studies. He might be able to identify a source for these.’

She closed the notebook. ‘You know that I’m not supposed to get involved in this case?’

I told her that I hadn’t known.

‘Following our earlier discussions, someone got in touch with the Commissioner. He wasn’t best pleased at the snub to his relative.’

‘I need help with this. I need to know all I can.’ Suddenly I felt nauseous and, when I swallowed, my throat hurt.

‘I’m not sure that’s wise. You should probably leave this to the police. I know that’s not what you want to hear but, after all that’s happened, you risk damaging yourself. Do you understand what I mean?’

I nodded slowly. She was right. Part of me wanted to draw back, to immerse myself once again in the ebb and flow of ordinary life. I wanted to unburden myself of what I felt, to restore myself to some semblance of a normal existence. I wanted to rebuild but I felt frozen, suspended, by what had happened. And now the Travelling Man had returned, snatching any possibility of that normality from me and, simultaneously, leaving me as powerless to act as I had been before.

I think Rachel Wolfe understood that. Maybe that was why I had come to her, in the hope that she might understand.

‘Are you all right?’ She reached over and touched my hand and I almost cried. I nodded again.

‘You’re in a terribly difficult situation. If he has decided to contact you, then he wants you to be involved and there may be a link that can be exploited. From an investigative point of view, you probably shouldn’t deviate from your routine in case he contacts you again, but from the point of view of your own well-being . . .’ She let the unstated hang in the air. ‘You might even want to consider some professional help. I’m sorry for being so blunt about it, but it has to be said.’

‘I know, and I appreciate the advice.’ It was strange to find myself attracted to someone after all this time and then have her advise me to see a psychiatrist. It didn’t hold out the promise of any relationship that wasn’t conducted on an hourly basis. ‘I think the investigators want me to stay.’

‘I get the feeling you’re not going to do it.’

‘I’m trying to find someone. It’s a different case, but I think this person may be in trouble. If I stay here, there’s no one to help her if she is.’

‘It may be a good idea to get away from this for a time but from what you’re saying, well . . .’

‘Go on.’

‘It sounds like you’re trying to save this person but you’re not even sure if she needs saving.’

‘Maybe I need to save her.’

‘Maybe you do.’

I told Walter Cole later that morning that I would continue looking for Catherine Demeter and that I would be leaving the city to do so. We were sitting in the quietness of Chumley’s, the Village’s old speakeasy at Bedford. When Walter called, I had surprised myself by nominating it for our meeting, but as I sat sipping a coffee I realised why I had chosen it.

I enjoyed its sense of history, its place in the city’s past, which could be traced back like an old scar or the wrinkle at the corner of an eye. Chumley’s had survived the Prohibition era, when customers had escaped raids by leaving hastily through the back door, which led on to Barrow Street. It had survived world wars, stock-market crashes, civil disobedience and the gradual erosion of time, which was so much more insidious than all the rest. For a brief period, I wanted to be part of its stability.

‘You have to stay,’ said Walter. He still had the leather coat, now hanging loosely over the back of his chair. Someone had whistled at him when he entered wearing it.

‘No.’

‘What do you mean, “No”?’ he said angrily. ‘He’s opened an avenue of communication. You stay, we wire up the phone and we try to trace him when he calls again.’

‘I don’t think he will call again, at least not for a while, and I don’t believe we could trace him anyway. He doesn’t want to be stopped, Walter.’

‘All the more reason to stop him, then. My God, look at what he’s done, what he’s going to do again. Look at what you’ve done for his—’

I leaned forward and broke in on him, my voice low. ‘What have I done? Say it, Walter. Say it!’

He stayed silent and I saw him swallow the words back. We had come close to the edge, but he had pulled back.

The Travelling Man wanted me to remain. He wanted me to wait in my apartment for a call that might never come. I could not let him do that to me. Yet both Cole and I knew that the contact he had established could well be the first link in a chain that would eventually lead us to him.

A friend of mine, Ross Oakes, had worked in the police department of Columbia, South Carolina, during the Bell killings. Larry Gene Bell abducted and smothered two girls, one aged seventeen and snatched close to a mail-box, the other aged nine and taken from her play area. When investigators eventually found the bodies they were too decomposed to determine if they had been sexually assaulted, although Bell later admitted to assaulting both.

Bell had been tracked through a series of phone calls he made to the family of the seventeen-year-old, conversing primarily with the victim’s older sister. He also mailed them her last will and testament. In the phone calls he led the family to believe that the victim was still alive until her body was eventually found one week later. After the abduction of the younger girl he contacted the first victim’s sister and described the abduction and killing of the girl. He told the first victim’s sister that she would be next.

Bell was found through indented writing on the victim’s letter, a semi-obliterated telephone number, which was eventually tracked to an address through a process of elimination. Larry Gene Bell was a thirty-six-year-old white male, formerly married and now living with his mother and father. He told Investigative Support Unit agents from the FBI that ‘the bad Larry Gene Bell did it’.

I knew of dozens of similar cases where contact with the killer by the victim’s family sometimes led to his capture, but I had also seen what this form of psychological torture had done to those who were left behind. The family of Bell’s first victim were lucky because they only had to suffer Bell’s sick wanderings for two weeks. A family in Tulsa, whose toddler daughter had been raped and dismembered by a male nurse, received phone calls from the killer for over two years.

Amid the anger and pain and grief that I had felt the night before, there was another feeling, which caused me to fear any further contact with the Travelling Man, at least for the present.

I felt relief.

For over seven months there had been nothing. The police investigation had ground to a halt, my own efforts had brought me no nearer to identifying the killer of my wife and child and I feared that he might have disappeared.

Now he had come back. He had reached out to me and, by doing so, opened the possibility that he might be found. He would kill again and, in the killing, a pattern would emerge that would bring us closer to him. All these thoughts raced through my head in the darkness of the night but, in the first light of dawn, I had realised the implications of what I felt.

The Travelling Man was drawing me into a cycle of dependency. He had tossed me a crumb in the form of a telephone call and the remains of my daughter and, in doing so, had caused me to wish, however briefly, for the deaths of others in the hope that their deaths might bring me closer to him. With that realisation came the decision that I would not form such a relationship with this man. It was a difficult decision to make but I knew that if he decided to contact me again, then he would find me. Meanwhile, I would leave New York and continue to hunt for Catherine Demeter.

Yet deep down, perhaps only half recognised by me and suspected by Rachel Wolfe, there was another reason for continuing the search for Catherine Demeter.

I did not believe in remorse without reparation. I had failed to protect my wife and child and they had died as a result. Maybe I was deluded, but I believed that if Catherine Demeter died because I stopped looking for her then I would have failed twice and I was not sure that I could live with that knowledge. In her, maybe wrongly, I saw a chance to atone.

Some of this I tried to explain to Walter – my need to avoid a dependent relationship upon this man, the necessity of continuing the search of Catherine Demeter for her sake, and my own – but most of it I kept to myself. We parted uneasily and on bad terms.

Tiredness had gradually taken hold of me throughout the morning and I slept fitfully for an hour before setting off for Virginia. I was bathed in sweat and almost delirious when I awoke, disturbed by dreams of endless conversations with a faceless killer and images of my daughter before her death.

Just as I awakened, I dreamed of Catherine Demeter surrounded by darkness and flames and the bones of dead children. And I knew then that some terrible blackness had descended on her and that I had to try to save her, to save us both, from the darkness.

Part Two

Eadem mutata resurgo

Though changed, I shall arise the same.

Epitaph on the tombstone of Jacob Bernoulli,

Swiss pioneer of fluid dynamics and

spiral mathematics.

Chapter Eighteen

I drove down to Virginia that afternoon. It was a long ride but I told myself that I wanted time to open out the engine of the car, to let it cut loose after its time off the road. As I drove, I tried to sort through what had happened in the last two days, but my thoughts kept coming back to the remains of my daughter’s face resting in a jar of formaldehyde.

I spotted the tail after about an hour, a red Nissan four-wheel-drive with two occupants. They kept four or five vehicles behind but when I accelerated, so did they. When I fell back they kept me in view for as long as they could, then they began to fall back too. The plates were deliberately obscured with mud. A woman drove, her blonde hair pulled back behind her ears and sunglasses masking her eyes. A dark-haired male sat beside her. I put them both in their thirties but I didn’t recognise them.

If they were feds, which was unlikely, then they were lame. If they were Sonny’s hired killers, then it was just like Sonny to hire cheap labour. Only a clown would use a 4WD for a tail, or to try to take out another vehicle. A 4WD has a high centre of gravity and rolls easier than a drunk on a slope. Maybe I was just being paranoid, but I didn’t think so.

They didn’t make a move and I lost them in the back roads between Warrenton and Culpeper as I headed towards the Blue Ridge. If they came after me again, I’d know: their jeep stood out like blood in snow.

As I drove, fading sunlight speared the trees, causing the web-like cocoons of caterpillars to glisten. I knew that, beneath the strands, the white bodies of the larvae were twisting and writhing like victims of Tourette’s syndrome as they reduced the leaves to brown lifelessness. The weather was beautiful for most of the journey and there was a kind of poetry to the names of the towns that skirted Shenandoah: Wolftown, Quinque, Lydia, Roseland, Sweet Briar, Lovingston, Brightwood. To that list could be added the town of Haven, but only if you decided not to spoil the effect by actually visiting it.

It was raining heavily by the time I reached Haven. The town lay in a valley south-east of the Blue Ridge, almost at the apex of a triangle formed with Washington and Richmond. A sign at the limits read ‘A Welcome in the Valley’ but there was little that was welcoming about Haven. It was a small town over which a pall of dust appeared to have settled and which even the driving rain seemed unable to dislodge. Rusting pick-ups sat outside some of the houses and, apart from a single fast-food joint and a convenience store attached to a garage, only the weak neon of the Welcome Inn bar and the lights of the late-nite diner opposite beckoned the casual visitor. It was the sort of place where, once a year, the local Veterans of Foreign Wars got together, hired a bus and went somewhere else to commemorate their dead.

I checked into the Haven View Motel at the outskirts of the town. I was the only guest and a smell of paint hung around the halls of what might once have been a considerable house but had now been converted into a functional, anonymous three-storey inn.

‘Second floor’s being redecorated,’ said the clerk, who told me his name was Rudy Fry. ‘Have to put you upstairs, top floor. Technically, we shouldn’t be accepting guests at all but . . .’ He smiled to indicate the big favour he was doing me by letting me stay. Rudy Fry was a small, overweight man in his forties. There were long-dried yellow sweat stains under his arms and he smelt vaguely of rubbing alcohol.

I looked around. The Haven View Motel didn’t look like the sort of place that would attract visitors at the best of times.

‘I know what you’re thinkin’,’ said the clerk, his smile revealing sparkling dentures. ‘You’re thinkin’: “Why would anyone bother throwin’ good money away by decoratin’ a motel in a shithole like this?”’ He winked at me before leaning over the desk conspiratorially. ‘Well, I’m tellin’ you, sir, it ain’t gonna be a shithole much longer. Them Japanese is comin’, and when they do, this place is gonna be a goldmine. Where else they gonna stay round here?’ He laughed. ‘Shit, we gonna be wipin’ our asses with dollar bills.’ He handed me a key with a heavy wooden block chained to it. ‘Room twenty-three, up the stairs. Elevator’s busted.’

The room was dusty but clean. A connecting door led into the next room. It took me less than five seconds to break the lock with my pocket knife, then I showered, changed and drove back into town.

The recession of the seventies had hit Haven hard, putting paid to what little industry there was. The town might have recovered, might have found some other way to prosper had its history been other than it was, but the killings had tainted it and the town had fallen into decay. And so the rain fell and washed and sluiced its way over the stores and streets, over the people and the houses, over trees and pick-ups and cars and Tarmac, and when it ceased to fall there was no freshness about Haven, as if the rain itself had been sullied by the contact.

I called into the sheriff’s office but neither the sheriff nor Alvin Martin was available. Instead, a deputy named Wallace sat scowling behind the desk and shovelling Doritos into his mouth. I decided to wait until the morning in the hope of finding someone more accommodating.

The diner was closing as I walked through the town, which left only the bar or the burger joint. The interior of the bar was ill lit, as if it was expending too much power on the pink neon sign outside. The Welcome Inn: the sign glowed brightly, but the interior seemed to give the lie to the sign.

Some kind of bluegrass music was playing over a speaker and a TV above the bar was showing a basketball game with the volume turned down, but no one seemed to be listening or watching anyway. Maybe twenty people were scattered around the tables and the long, dark wood bar, including a mountainous couple who looked like they’d left the third bear with a babysitter. There was a low tide of conversation, which ebbed slightly when I entered, although it refused to cease entirely, and then resumed at its previous level.

Near the bar, a small knot of men lounged around a battered pool table, watching a huge, heavy-set man with a thick dark beard playing an older man who shot pool like a hustler. They eyed me as I walked by but continued playing. No conversation passed between them. Pool was obviously a serious business in the Welcome Inn. Drinking wasn’t. The hard men around the pool table were all clutching bottles of Bud Light, the real drinker’s equivalent of a lady’s white umbrella.

I took an empty stool at the bar and asked for a coffee from a barman whose white shirt seemed dazzlingly clean for such a place. He studiously ignored me, his eyes seemingly intent on the basketball game, so I asked again. His glance moved lazily to me, as if I were a bug crawling on the bar and he had just had his fill of squashing bugs, but was wondering whether he couldn’t squash one more for the road.

‘We don’t do coffee,’ he said.

I glanced along the bar. Two stools down an elderly man in a lumber jacket and a battered Cat cap sipped at a mug of what smelt like strong black coffee.

‘He bring his own?’ I inquired, gesturing with a nod down the bar.

‘Yep,’ said the barman, still looking at the TV.

‘A Coke’ll do. Right behind your knees, second shelf down. Don’t hurt yourself leaning over.’

For a long time it seemed he wasn’t going to move, then he shifted slowly, leaned down without taking his eyes from the screen and found the opener on the edge of the counter by instinct. Then he placed the bottle in front of me and set an iceless glass beside it. In the mirror behind the bar, I saw the amused smiles of some of the other patrons and heard a woman’s laugh, low and boozy with a promise of sex in it. In the mirror over the bar, I traced the laugh to a coarse-featured woman in the corner, her hair huge and dark. Beside her, a stout man whispered sour somethings in her ear like the cooings of a sick dove.

I poured the drink and took a long draught. It was warm and sticky and I felt it cleave to my palate, my tongue and my teeth. The barman spent a while idly polishing glasses with a bar-towel which looked like it had last been cleaned for Reagan’s inauguration. When he got bored with redistributing the dirt on the glasses he wandered back towards me and put the bar-towel down in front of me.

‘Passin’ through?’ he asked, although there was no curiosity in his voice. It sounded more like advice than a question.

‘Nope,’ I said.

He took it in and then waited for me to say more. I didn’t. He gave in first.

‘Whatcha doin’ here, then?’ He looked over my shoulder at the pool-players behind and I noticed that the sound of balls colliding had suddenly ceased. He smiled a big shit-eating grin. ‘Maybe I can . . .’ He stopped and the grin got wider, his tone changing to one of mock-formality. ‘. . . be of some a-ssistance.’

‘You know anyone named Demeter?’

The shit-eating grin froze and there was a pause. ‘No.’

‘Then I don’t believe you can be of any a-ssistance.’ I stood up to leave, placing two dollar bills on the counter. ‘For the welcome,’ I said. ‘Put it towards a new sign.’

I turned to find a small, rat-featured guy in a worn blue denim jacket standing in front of me. His nose was dotted with blackheads and his teeth were prominent and yellow-stained like walrus tusks. His black baseball cap was marked with the words ‘Boyz ’N the Hood’ but this wasn’t any logo John Singleton would have liked. Instead of homies, the words were surrounded by the hooded heads of Klan figures.

Beneath his denim jacket, I could see the word Pulaski under a seal of some sort. Pulaski was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and the site of an annual rally for Aryan crackers everywhere, although I bet the face of old Thom Robb, grand high ass-wipe of the Klan, must have just lit up at the sight of Rat Features and his pinched, sub-intelligent face arriving to take in the Pulaski air. After all, Robb was trying to make the Klan appeal to the educated élite, the lawyers and the schoolteachers. Most lawyers would have been reluctant to have Rat Features as a client, still less a brother in arms.

But there was probably still a place for Rat Features in the new Klan. Every organisation needs its foot-soldiers and this one had cannon fodder written all over him. When the time came for the Boyz to storm the steps of the Capitol and reclaim the Jewnited States for their own, Rat Features would be in the front line where he could be certain to lay down his life for the cause.

Behind him, the bearded pool-player loomed, his eyes small, piggy and dumb-looking. His arms were enormous but without definition and his gut bulged beneath a camouflage T-shirt. The T-shirt bore the legend ‘Kill ’em all – Let God sort ’em out’, but the big guy was no Marine. He looked as close to retarded as you can get without someone coming by twice a day to feed you and clean up your mess.

‘How you doin’?’ said the Rat. The bar was quiet now and the group of men at the pool table were no longer lounging but stood rigid in anticipation of what was to come. One of them smiled and poked his neighbour with an elbow. Obviously, the Rat and his buddy were the local double act.

‘Great till now.’

He nodded as if I’d just said something deeply profound with which he had a natural empathy.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘I once took a leak in Thom Robb’s garden.’

Which was true.

‘It’d be better if you just got back on the road and kept driving, I reckon,’ said the Rat, after a pause to figure out who Thom Robb was. ‘So why don’t you just do that?’

‘Thanks for the advice.’ I moved to go past him but his pal put a hand like a shovel against my chest and pushed me back against the bar by flexing his wrist slightly.

‘It wasn’t advice,’ said the Rat. He gestured back at the big guy with his thumb.

‘This here’s Six. You don’t get back in your fuckin’ car now and start raisin’ dust on the highway, Six is gonna fuck you up bad.’

Six smiled dimly. The evolutionary curve obviously sloped pretty gently where Six came from.

‘You know why he’s called Six?’

‘Let me guess,’ I replied. ‘There are another five assholes like him at home?’

It didn’t look like I was going to find out how Six got his name, because he stopped smiling and lunged past the Rat, his hand clutching for my neck. He moved fast for a man his size, but not that fast. I brought my right foot up and released it heel-first on to Six’s left knee. There was a satisfying crunching sound and Six faltered, his mouth wide with pain, and stumbled sideways and down.

His friends were already coming to his aid when there was a commotion from behind them and a small, tubby deputy in his late thirties pushed his way through, one hand on the butt of his pistol. It was Wallace, Deputy Dorito. He looked scared and edgy, the kind of guy who became a cop to give him some sort of advantage over the people who used to laugh at him in school, steal his lunch money and beat him up, except he found that now those people still laughed at him and didn’t look as if they’d let the uniform stand in the way of another beating. Still, on this occasion he had a gun and maybe they figured he was scared enough to pull it on them.

‘What’s goin’ on here, Clete?’

There was silence for a moment and then the Rat spoke up. ‘Just some high spirits got out of hand, Wallace. Ain’t nothin’ to concern the law.’

‘I wasn’t talking to you, Gabe.’

Someone helped Six to his feet and brought him to a chair.

‘Looks like more than high spirits to me. I reckon you boys better come on down to the station, cool off for a time.’

‘Let it go, Wallace,’ said a low voice. It came from a thin, wiry man with cold, dark eyes and a beard flecked with grey. He had an air of authority about him and an intelligence that went beyond the low cunning of his associates. He watched me carefully as he spoke, the way an undertaker might eye up a prospective client for his casket.

‘Okay, Clete, but . . .’ Deputy Dorito’s words trailed off as he realised there was nothing he could say that would matter to any of the men before him. He nodded to the crowd, as if the decision not to pursue things any further had been his to make.

‘You’d better leave, Mister,’ he said, looking at me.

I stood up and walked slowly to the door. No one said anything as I left.

Back at the motel, I rang Walter Cole to find out if anything had developed in the Stephen Barton killing but he was out of the office and his machine was on at home. I left the number of the motel and tried to get some sleep.

Chapter Nineteen

The sky was grey and dark the next morning, heavy with impending rain. My suit was wrinkled from the previous day’s travel, so I abandoned it for chinos, a white shirt and a black jacket. I even dug out a black silk-knit tie, so I wouldn’t look like a bum. I drove once through the town. There was no sign of a red jeep or the couple I had seen driving it.

I parked outside the Haven diner, bought a copy of the Washington Post in the gas station across the road and then went into the diner for breakfast. It was after nine but people still lounged around at the counter or at the tables, mumbling about the weather and, I guessed, about me, since some of them glanced knowingly in my direction, directing the attention of their neighbours towards me.

I sat at a table in the corner and scanned the paper. A mature woman in a white apron and blue uniform with ‘Dorothy’ embossed at her left breast walked over to me carrying a pad and took my order of white toast, bacon and coffee. She hovered over me after I finished ordering. ‘You the fella whupped that Six boy in the bar last night?’

‘That’s me.’

She nodded in satisfaction. ‘I’ll give you your breakfast for free, then.’ She smiled a hard smile, then added, ‘But don’t you go confusin’ my generosity with an invitation to stay. You ain’t that good-lookin’.’ She strolled back behind the counter and pinned my order to a wire.

There wasn’t much traffic on Haven’s main street. Most of the cars and trucks seemed to be passing through on their way to someplace else. Haven didn’t look much better in the daylight than it did at night. I could see a used-car dealership, the roof of a high school and, further down the street, some stores and the Inn. There was little human activity. Haven seemed to be permanently stuck in a grim Sunday afternoon.

I finished my food and left a tip on the table. Dorothy slouched forward over the counter, her breasts resting on its polished surface. ‘’Bye now,’ she said, as I left. The other diners briefly looked over their shoulders at me before returning to their breakfast and coffee.

I drove to the Haven public library, a new single-storey building at the far side of the town. A pretty black woman in her early thirties stood behind the counter with an older white woman whose hair was like steel wool and who eyed me with obvious distaste as I entered.

‘Morning,’ I said. The younger woman smiled, slightly anxiously, while the older one tried to tidy the already immaculate area behind the counter. ‘What’s the local paper around here?’

‘Used to be the Haven Leader,’ answered the younger woman after a pause. ‘It’s gone now.’

‘I was looking for something older, back issues.’

She glanced at the other woman, as if for guidance, but she continued to shift pieces of paper behind the counter.

‘They’re on microfiche, in the cabinets beside the viewer. How far back do you want to go?’

‘Not far,’ I said, and strolled over to the cabinets. The Leader files were arranged in date order in small square boxes in ten drawers but the three boxes of files for the years of the Haven killings were not in their place. I ran through them all, in case they had been misfiled, although I had a feeling that those files weren’t available to the casual visitor.

I returned to the counter. The elderly woman was no longer in sight.

‘The files I’m looking for don’t appear to be there,’ I said. The younger girl looked confused but I didn’t get the impression that she was.

‘What year were you looking for?’

‘Years. Nineteen sixty-nine, ’seventy, maybe ’seventy-one.’

‘I’m sorry, those files aren’t . . .’ She seemed to search for an excuse that might be plausible. ‘. . . available. They’ve been borrowed for research.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I smiled my best smile. ‘Never mind, I’ll manage with what’s there.’

She seemed relieved and I returned to the viewer, idly flicking through the files for anything useful with no return other than boredom. It took thirty minutes before an opportunity presented itself. A party of schoolchildren entered the junior section of the library, separated from the adult lending by a half-wood, half-glass screen. The younger woman followed them and stood with her back to me, talking to the children and their teacher, a young blonde who didn’t look long out of school herself.

There was no sign of the older woman, although a brown door was half open in the small lobby beyond the adult section. I slipped behind the counter, and began rifling through drawers and cupboards as quietly as I could. At one point I passed, crouching, by the entry door to the junior section but the librarian was still dealing with her young clients.

I found the missing files in a bottom drawer, beside a small coin-box. I slipped them into my jacket pockets and was just leaving the counter area when the office door outside slammed and I heard soft footsteps approaching. I darted beside a shelf as the senior librarian entered. She stopped short at the entrance to the counter and shot an unpleasant look in my direction and at the book in my hand. I smiled gamely and returned to the viewer. I wasn’t sure how long it would be before the dragon behind the counter checked that drawer and decided to call for back-up.

I tried the 1969 files first. It took some time, even though the Haven Leader had only been a weekly newspaper in 1969. There was nothing about any disappearances in the paper. Even in 1969, it seemed that black folks didn’t count for much. The paper contained a lot about church socials, history society lectures and local weddings. There was some minor crime stuff, mostly traffic offences and drunk and disorderlies, but nothing that might lead a casual reader to suppose that children were disappearing in the town of Haven.

Then, in a November issue, I came upon a reference to a man named Walt Tyler. There was a picture of Tyler beside the piece, a good-looking man being led away in handcuffs by a white deputy. ‘Man held in Sheriff Attack’, read the headline above the picture. The details contained in the piece below were sketchy but it seemed Tyler had come into the sheriff’s office and started busting the place up before taking a swing at the sheriff himself. The only indication of a reason for the attack came in the last paragraph.

‘Tyler was among a number of negroes questioned by the Haven County Sheriff’s Office in connection with the disappearance of his daughter and two other children. He was released without charge.’

The 1970 files were more productive. On the night of 8 February 1970, Amy Demeter had disappeared after heading out to a friend’s house to deliver a sample of her mother’s jam. She never made it to the house and the jar was found broken on a sidewalk about five hundred yards from her home. A picture of her was printed beside the story, along with details of what she had been wearing and a potted history of the family: father Earl an accountant, mother Dorothy a housewife and a school board member, younger sister Catherine a well-liked child with some artistic potential. The story ran for the next few weeks: ‘Search Goes On for Haven Girl’; ‘Five More Questioned in Demeter Mystery’; and, finally, ‘Little Hope Left for Amy’.

I spent another half-hour going back and forth through the Haven Leader but there was nothing more on the killings or their resolution, if any. The only indication was a report of the death of Adelaide Modine in a fire four months later, with a reference to her brother’s death buried in the piece. There was no indication of the circumstances of the death of either, but there was one hint, once again in the last paragraph. ‘The Haven County Sheriff’s Office had been anxious to talk to both Adelaide and William Modine in their ongoing investigation into the disappearance of Amy Demeter and a number of other children.’

It didn’t take a genius to read between the lines and see that either Adelaide Modine or her brother William, or possibly both, had been the main suspects. Local newspapers don’t necessarily print all the news: there are some things everyone knows already and sometimes the local press merely prints enough to throw outsiders off the scent. The old librarian was giving me the evil eye so I finished printing off copies of the relevant articles, then gathered them and left.

A Haven County Sheriff’s Office cruiser, a brown and yellow Crown Victoria, was pulled up in front of my car and a deputy, wearing a clean, well-pressed uniform, was leaning against my driver’s door, waiting. As I drew closer I could see the long muscles beneath his shirt. His eyes were dull and lifeless. He looked like an asshole. A fit asshole.

‘This your car?’ he asked, in a Virginia drawl, his thumbs tucked inside a gun-belt that glittered with the spotless tools of his trade. On his chest, the name Burns stood out on his perfectly straight identity badge.

‘Sure is,’ I said, mimicking his accent. It was a bad habit I had. His jaw tightened, if it was actually possible for it to tighten more than it was already.

‘Hear you were looking up some old newspapers?’

‘I’m a crossword fan. They were better in the old days.’

‘You another writer?’

Judging from his tone I didn’t think he read much, at least nothing that didn’t have pictures or a message from God. ‘No,’ I said. ‘You get a lot of writers around here?’

I don’t think he believed I wasn’t a writer. Maybe I looked bookish to him or maybe anyone with whom he wasn’t personally acquainted was immediately suspected of covert literary leanings. The librarian had sold me out, believing me to be simply another hack trying to make a buck out of the ghosts of Haven’s past.

‘I’m escorting you to the town line,’ he said. ‘I’ve got your bag.’ He moved to the patrol car and took my travelling bag from the front seat. I was starting to get very tired of Deputy Burns.

‘I’m not planning on leaving just yet,’ I said, ‘so maybe you could put it back in my room. By the way, when you’re unpacking, I like my socks on the left side of the drawer.’

He dropped the bag on the road and started towards me. ‘Look’, I began, ‘I have ID.’ I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket. ‘I’m . . .’

It was a dumb thing to do but I was hot and tired and pissed at Deputy Burns and I wasn’t thinking straight. He caught one flash of the butt of my gun and his own piece was in his hands. Burns was quick. He probably practised in front of the mirror. Within seconds I was up against his car, my gun was gone and Deputy Burns’s shiny cuffs were biting into my wrists.

Chapter Twenty

I was left cooling my heels in a cell for what I reckoned to be three or four hours, since the careful Deputy Burns had taken my watch along with my gun, my wallet and ID, my notes and my belt and laces, in case I decided to hang myself in a fit of remorse for annoying the librarians. These had been entrusted to the safe care of Deputy Wallace, who made some passing reference to Burns of my involvement in the previous night’s incident in the bar.

Still, the cell was just about the cleanest one I had ever visited in my life – even the can looked like it could safely be used without needing a course of penicillin later. I passed the time by mulling over what I had learned from the library microfiche, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle into some recognisable picture and refusing to let my mind drift to the Travelling Man and what he might be doing.

Eventually, there was a noise outside and the cell door opened. I looked up to see a tall black man in a uniform shirt watching me. He looked to be in his late thirties but something about the way he walked and the light of experience in his eyes told me he was older. I guessed he might have boxed at one time, probably middle to light-heavy, and he moved gracefully on his feet. He looked smarter than Wallace and Burns put together, although no one was likely to hand out gold stars for that particular feat. This, I guessed, was Alvin Martin. I didn’t rush to get up, in case he thought I didn’t like his nice clean cell.

‘You want to stay there another couple of hours or you waiting for someone to carry you out?’ he asked. The voice wasn’t Southern: Detroit, Chicago, maybe.

I stood and he moved aside to let me pass. Wallace waited at the end of the corridor, his thumbs tucked into his belt to take the weight off his shoulders.

‘Give him back his things, Deputy.’

‘Even his gun?’ asked Wallace, not making a move to do as he was told. Wallace had that look about him, the look that told you he wasn’t used to taking orders from a black guy and didn’t like it when he had to. It struck me that he might have more in common with the Rat and his friends than was really wise for a conscientious lawman.

‘Even his gun,’ replied Martin calmly but wearily, giving Wallace the eye. Wallace shoved off from the wall like a particularly ugly ship setting out to sea and steamed behind the counter, surfacing eventually with a brown envelope and my gun. I signed and Martin nodded me towards the door.

‘Get in the car, please, Mr Parker.’ Outside, the light was starting to fade and there was a cool wind blowing from the hills. A pick-up rattled by on the road beyond, a covered gun rack on the back guarded by a mangy hound.

‘Back or front?’ I asked.

‘Get in the front,’ he replied. ‘I trust you.’

He started the cruiser and we drove for a time in silence, the a/c blasting cool air into our faces and on to our feet. The town limits receded behind us and we entered woods thick with trees, the road twisting and winding as it followed the contours of the land. Then, in the distance, a light shone. We pulled up in the parking lot of a white diner, topped by a green neon sign blinking Green River Eaterie on to the road beyond.

We took a booth at the rear, far away from the handful of other patrons, who cast a curious glance at us before returning to their food. Martin took off his hat, ordered coffee for both of us, then sat back and looked at me. ‘It’s usually considered good manners for an investigator packing a pistol to drop in to the local lawmen and state his business, at least before he goes around beating up pool-players and stealing library files,’ he said.

‘You weren’t around when I called,’ I said. ‘Neither was the sheriff, and your friend Wallace wasn’t too keen on offering me cookies and swapping race jokes.’

The coffee arrived. Martin added creamer and sugar to his. I stuck with milk.

‘I made some calls about you,’ said Martin, stirring his coffee. ‘A guy called Cole vouched for you. That’s why I’m not kicking your ass out of town, least not yet. That and the fact that you weren’t afraid to whip some cracker ass last night. Shows you got a sense of civic pride. So maybe now you’d like to tell me why you’re here.’

‘I’m looking for a woman named Catherine Demeter. I think she might have come to Haven in the last week.’

Martin’s brow furrowed.

‘She anything to Amy Demeter?’

‘Sister.’

‘I figured. Why do you think she might be here?’

‘One of the last calls she made from her apartment was to the home of Sheriff Earl Lee Granger. She made a number of calls to your office as well the same night. Since then, there’s been no sign of her.’

‘You hired to find her?’

‘I’m just looking for her,’ I replied neutrally.

Martin sighed. ‘I came here from Detroit six months ago,’ he said, after about a minute of silence. ‘Brought my wife and boy. My wife’s an assistant librarian. I think you may have met her.’

I nodded.

‘The governor decided there weren’t enough blacks in the police force here and that relations between the local minority population and the cops might not be the best. So, a post came up here and I applied, mainly to get my kid away from Detroit. My father came from Gretna, just a ways from here. I didn’t know about the killings before I came here. I know more now.

‘This town died along with those kids. No new people came to live here and anyone with an ounce of sense or ambition got the hell out. Now the gene pool here’s so shallow you couldn’t drown a rat in it.

‘In the last month or two there’s been signs that something might happen to change that. There’s a Japanese firm interested in locating about half a mile out of town. They do research and development of computer software, I hear, and they like the idea of privacy and a quiet little backwater they can call Nippon. They’d bring a lot of money to this town, a lot of jobs for locals and maybe a chance to put the past to rest. Frankly, the people here don’t much care for the idea of working for the Japanese but they know they’re sucking shit as it is, so they’ll work for anyone as long as he’s not black.

‘The last thing they want is someone sniffing around ancient history, digging up the past to come up with the bones of dead children. They may be dumb in a lot of cases. They may also be racists and shit-kickers and child-fuckers, but they’re desperate for a second chance and they’ll mess up anyone who gets in their way. If they don’t do it, Earl Lee will.’

He raised a finger and waved it purposefully in my face. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying here? Nobody wants questions asked about child-killings that took place thirty years ago. If Catherine Demeter came back here, and frankly I don’t know why she would since she ain’t got no one here to come back to, then she wouldn’t be welcome either. But she ain’t here, because if she had come back it would be all over this town like shit on a shoe.’

He took a sip of his coffee and gritted his teeth. ‘Damn, it’s cold.’ He gestured to the waitress and called for a fresh mug.

‘I don’t want to stay here any longer than I have to,’ I said. ‘But I think Catherine Demeter may have come back here, or tried to come back here. She certainly wanted to talk to the sheriff and I want to talk to him too. So where is he?’

‘He took a couple of days’ leave to get out of town for a while,’ said Martin, twisting the brim of his hat so that it spun on the vinyl seat. ‘He’s due back – well, he was due back today but he may leave it until tomorrow. We don’t have too much crime here beyond drunks and wife-beaters and the usual shit that goes with a place like this. But he may not be too pleased to see you waiting for him when he returns. I’m not so pleased to see you myself, no offence meant.’

‘None taken. I think I’ll wait around for the sheriff anyway.’ I was also going to have to find out more about the Modine killings, whether Martin liked it or not. If Catherine Demeter had reached into her past then I was going to have to reach into that past too, or I would understand nothing about the woman for whom I was searching.

‘I’ll also need to talk to someone about the killings. I need to know more.’

Martin closed his eyes and ran his hand over them in weariness. ‘You’re not listening to me—’ he began.

‘No, you’re not listening. I’m looking for a woman who may be in trouble and who may have turned to someone here for help. Before I leave I’m going to find out whether or not that’s the case, even if it means rattling every cage in this godforsaken dump and scaring your Japanese saviours back to Tokyo. But if you help me, then this can all be done quietly and I’ll be out of your hair in a couple of days.’

We were both tensed now, leaning towards each other across the table. Some of the other diners were staring at us, their food ignored.

Martin looked around at them then turned back to me again. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Most of the people who were around then and might know something useful have either left, or died, or won’t talk about it for love or money. There are two who might, though. One is the son of the doc who was around at that time. His name’s Connell Hyams and he has a law office in town. You’ll have to approach him yourself.

‘The other is Walt Tyler. His daughter was the first to die and he lives outside town. I’ll talk to him first and maybe he’ll see you.’ He stood up to leave. ‘When you’ve got your business done you’d better leave and I never want to see your face again, understand?’

I said nothing and followed him towards the door. He stopped and turned towards me, placing his hat on his head as he did so. ‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a word with those boys from the bar but, remember, they ain’t got no reason to like you. I’d watch my back if I was planning on poking my nose into this town’s business.’

‘I noticed one of them, I think his name was Gabe, had a Klan shirt on,’ I said. ‘You got much of that around here?’

Martin blew breath heavily from puffed cheeks. ‘In a poor town, the dumb ones always look for someone to blame for being poor.’

‘There was one guy – your deputy called him Clete – who didn’t look so dumb.’

Martin eyed me from under his hat brim. ‘No, Clete’s not dumb. He sits on the council, says the only way anyone’s gonna get him off the council is with a gun barrel. Whipping you could be good for another twenty, thirty votes. Shit, maybe he’ll send you a campaign badge.

‘But as for the Klan, this ain’t Georgia or North Carolina, or even Delaware. Don’t go reading too much into this. You can pay for the coffee.’

I left a couple of bucks at the till and walked out towards the car, but Martin was already pulling away. I noticed that he’d taken his hat off again inside the car. The man just didn’t seem comfortable with that damn hat. I went back into the diner, called Haven’s only cab operator and ordered another coffee.

Chapter Twenty-One

It was after six when I got back to the town. Connell Hyams’s office and home address were listed but when I drove by his office all the lights were out. I called Rudy Fry at the motel and got directions for Bale’s Farm Road, where not only Hyams but also Sheriff Earl Lee Granger had homes.

I drove cautiously along the winding roads, looking for the concealed entrance Fry had mentioned and still glancing occasionally in my mirror for any sign of the red jeep. There was none. I passed the entrance to Bale’s Farm Road once without seeing it and had to go back over my tracks again. The sign was semi-obscured by undergrowth and pointed towards a winding, rutted track, heavy with evergreens, which eventually opened out on to a small but well-kept row of houses with long yards and what looked like plenty of space out back. Hyams’s home was near the end, a large, two-storey white wooden house. A lamp blazed by a wire frame, which opened on to a solid oak front door with a fan of frosted glass near the top. There was a light on in the hallway.

A grey-haired man, wearing a red wool cardigan over grey slacks and a striped, open-necked shirt, opened the inner door as I pulled up and watched me cautiously.

‘Mr Hyams?’ I said, as I approached the door.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m an investigator. My name’s Parker. I wanted to talk to you about Catherine Demeter.’

He paused for a long time in silence with the wire screen between us.

‘Catherine, or her sister?’ he inquired eventually.

‘Both, I guess.’

‘May I ask why?’

‘I’m trying to find Catherine. I think she may have come back here but I’m not sure why.’

Hyams opened the wire door and stood aside to let me enter. Inside, the house was furnished in dark wood, with large, expensive-looking mats on the floors. He led me into an office at the back, where papers were strewn over a desk on which a computer screen glowed.

‘Can I offer you a drink?’ he asked.

‘No. Thank you.’

He took a brandy glass from his desk and gestured me towards a chair at the other side before seating himself. I could see him more clearly now. He was grave and patrician in appearance, his hands long and slim, the nails finely manicured. The room was warm and I could smell his cologne. It smelt expensive.

‘That all took place a long time ago,’ he began. ‘Most people would rather not talk about it.’

‘Are you “most people”?’

He shrugged and smiled. ‘I have a place in this community and a role to play. I’ve lived here almost all my life, apart from the time I spent in college and in practice in Richmond. My father spent fifty years practising here and kept working until the day he died.’

‘He was the doctor, I understand.’

‘Doctor, medical examiner, counsellor, legal adviser, even dentist when the resident dentist wasn’t around. He did everything. The killings hit him particularly hard. He performed the autopsies on the bodies. I don’t think he ever forgot it, not even in his sleep.’

‘And you? Were you around when they took place?’

‘I was working in Richmond at the time, so I was back and forth between Haven and Richmond. I knew of what took place here, yes, but I’d really rather not talk about it. Four children died and theirs were terrible deaths. Best to let them rest now.’

‘Do you remember Catherine Demeter?’

‘I knew the family, yes, but Catherine would have been much younger than I. She left after graduating from high school, as I recall, and I don’t think she ever came back, except to attend the funerals of her parents. The last time she returned was probably ten years ago at the very least and her family home has been sold since then. I supervised the sale. Why do you believe she might have come back now? There’s nothing here for her – nothing good at any rate.’

‘I’m not sure. She made some calls here earlier this week and hasn’t been seen since.’

‘It’s not much to go on.’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘It’s not.’

He twisted the glass in his hand, watching the amber liquid swirl. His lips were pursed in appraisal but his gaze went through the glass and rested on me.

‘What can you tell me about Adelaide Modine and her brother?’

‘I can tell you that, from my point of view, there was nothing about them that might have led one to suspect that they were child killers. Their father was a strange man, a philanthropist of sorts, I suppose. He left most of his money tied up in a trust when he died.’

‘He died before the killings?’

‘Five or six years before, yes. He left instructions that the interest on the trust fund should be divided among certain charities in perpetuity. Since then, the number of charities receiving donations has increased considerably. I should know, since it is my duty to administer the trust, with the assistance of a small committee.’

‘And his daughter and son? Were they provided for?’

‘Very adequately, I understand.’

‘What happened to their money, their property, when they died?’

‘The State brought an action to take over the property and assets. We contested it on behalf of the townspeople and eventually an agreement was reached. The land was sold and all assets absorbed into the trust, with a portion of the trust used to fund new developments in the town. That is why we have a good library, a modern sheriff’s office, a fine school, a top-class medical centre. This town doesn’t have much, but what it does have comes from the trust.’

‘What it has, good or otherwise, comes from four dead children,’ I replied. ‘Can you tell me anything more about Adelaide and William Modine?’

Hyams’s mouth twitched slightly. ‘As I’ve said, it was a long time ago and I really would prefer not to go into it. I had very little to do with either of them: the Modines were a wealthy family, their children went to a private school. We didn’t mix very much, I’m afraid.’

‘Did your father know the family?’

‘My father delivered both William and Adelaide. I do remember one curious thing, but it will hardly be of any great help to you. Adelaide was one of twins. The male twin died in the womb and their mother died from complications shortly after the birth. The mother’s death was surprising. She was a strong, domineering woman. My father thought she would have outlived us all.’ He took a long sip from his glass and his eyes grew sharp with a remembered perception. ‘Do you know anything about hyenas, Mr Parker?’

‘Very little,’ I admitted.

‘Spotted hyenas frequently have twins. The cubs are extremely well developed at birth: they have fur and sharp incisor teeth. One cub will almost invariably attack the other, sometimes while still in the amniotic sac and typically to the death. The victor is also usually female and, if she is the daughter of a dominant female, will in turn become the dominant female in the pack. It’s a matriarchal culture. Female spotted-hyena foetuses have higher levels of testosterone than adult males and the females have masculine characteristics, even in the womb. In adulthood the sexes can still be difficult to differentiate.’

He put his glass down. ‘My father was an avid amateur naturalist. The animal world always fascinated him and I think he liked to find points of comparison between the animal world and the human world.’

‘And he found one in Adelaide Modine?’

‘Perhaps, in some ways. He was not fond of her.’

‘Were you here when the Modines died?’

‘I returned home the evening before Adelaide Modine’s body was found and I attended the autopsy. Call it gruesome curiosity. Now, I’m sorry, Mr Parker, but I have nothing more to say and a great deal of work to do.’

He led me to the door and pushed open the screen to let me out.

‘You don’t seem particularly anxious to help me find Catherine Demeter, Mr Hyams.’

He breathed in heavily. ‘Who suggested that you talk to me, Mr Parker?’

‘Alvin Martin mentioned your name.’

‘Mr Martin is a good, conscientious deputy and an asset to this town, but he is still a comparatively recent arrival,’ said Hyams. ‘The reason why I am reluctant to talk is a matter of client confidentiality. Mr Parker, I am the only lawyer in this town. At some point, nearly everyone who lives here, regardless of colour, income, religious or political belief, has passed through the door of my office. That includes the parents of the children who died. I know a great deal about what happened here, Mr Parker, more than I might wish to know and certainly much more than I plan to share with you. I’m sorry, but that’s the end of the matter.’

‘I see. One more thing, Mr Hyams.’

‘Yes?’ he asked, wearily.

‘Sheriff Granger lives on this road too, doesn’t he?’

‘Sheriff Granger lives next door, the house on the right here. This house has never been burgled, Mr Parker, a fact that is surely not unconnected. Goodnight.’

He stood at the screen door as I drove away. I cast a glance at the sheriff’s house as I passed but there were no lights within and there was no car in the yard. As I drove back to Haven, raindrops began to strike the screen and by the time I reached the outskirts of the town it had turned into a harsh, ceaseless downpour. The lights of the motel appeared through the rain. I could see Rudy Fry standing at the door, staring out into the woods and the gathering darkness beyond.

By the time I had parked, Fry was back behind his desk.

‘What do folks do around here for fun, apart from trying to run other folks out of town?’ I asked.

Fry grimaced as he tried to separate the sarcasm from the substance of the question. ‘There ain’t much to do around here outside of drinking at the Inn,’ he replied, after a while.

‘I tried that. Didn’t care for it.’

He thought for a little while longer. I waited for the smell of smoke but it didn’t come.

‘There’s a restaurant in Dorien, ’bout twenty miles east of here. Milano’s, it’s called. It’s Italian.’ He pronounced it Eye-talian, in a tone that suggested Rudy Fry was not overfond of any Italian food that didn’t come in a box with grease dripping from the vents. ‘Never eaten there myself.’ He sniffed, as if to confirm his suspicion of all things European.

I thanked him, then went to my room, showered and changed. I was getting tired of the unrelenting hostility of Haven. If Rudy Fry didn’t like somewhere, then that was somewhere I probably wanted to be.

Dorien wasn’t much bigger than Haven but it had a bookstore and a couple of restaurants, which made it a cultural oasis of sorts. I bought a typescript copy of Viva by e.e. cummings in the bookstore and wandered into Milano’s to eat.

Milano’s had red check tablecloths and candles set in miniatures of the Coliseum, but it was almost full and the food looked pretty good.

A slim maître d’ in a red bow-tie bustled over and showed me to a table in the corner. I took out the copy of cummings and read ‘somewhere i have never travelled’ while I waited for a menu, enjoying the cadence and gentle eroticism of the poem.

Susan had never read cummings before we met and I sent her copies of his poems during the early days of our relationship. In a sense, I let cummings do my courting for me. I think I even incorporated a line of cummings into the first letter I sent her. When I look back on it, it was as much a prayer as a love-letter, a prayer that Time would be gentle with her, because she was very beautiful.

A waiter strolled over and I ordered bruschetta and a carbonara from the menu, with water. I cast a glance around the restaurant but no one seemed to be paying me much attention, which was fine with me. I had not forgotten the warning Angel and Louis had given to me, or the couple in the red jeep.

The food, when it arrived, was excellent. I was surprised at my appetite and, while I ate, I turned over in my mind what I had learned from Hyams and the microfiche, and I remembered the handsome face of Walt Tyler, surrounded by police.

And I wondered, too, about the Travelling Man, before forcing him from my mind along with the images that came with him. He was not to be so easily denied. After I finished the water and paid the bill, I left the restaurant and vomited in an alleyway until my throat ached. Then I got back in my car and returned to Haven.

Chapter Twenty-Two

My grandfather used to say that the most terrifying sound in the world was the sound of a shell being loaded into a pump-action shotgun, a shell that was meant for you. It woke me from my sleep in the motel as they came up the stairs, the hands of my watch glowing the time at 3.30 a.m. They came through the door seconds later, the sound of the explosions deafeningly loud in the silence of the night as shot after shot was fired into my bed, sending feathers and shreds of cotton into the air like a cloud of white moths.

But by then I was already on my feet, my gun in my hand. The sound of the shots was blocked slightly by the closed connecting door, just as the sound of the door opening into the hall was blocked from them, even when the firing had stopped and their ears sang with the hard notes of the gun and their eyes widened as they realised I was not in the bed. The decision not to make myself an easy target by sleeping in my assigned room had paid off.

I came into the hall quickly, turned and aimed. The man from the red jeep stood in the hall, the barrel of the Ithaca 12-gauge pump close to his face. Even in the dim hall light I could see that there were no shell casings on the ground at his feet. It had been the woman who fired the shots.

Now he spun towards me as the woman swore from inside the room. The barrel of the shotgun came down as he turned in my direction. I fired one shot and a dark rose bloomed at his throat and blood fell like a shower of petals on his white shirt. The shotgun dropped to the carpet as his hands clutched for his neck. He folded to his knees and fell flat on the floor, his body thrashing and jerking like a fish out of water.

The barrel of a shotgun appeared from behind the door jamb and the woman fired indiscriminately into the hall, plaster leaping from the walls. I felt a tug at my right shoulder and then sharp white-hot pain through my arm. I tried to hold on to my gun but I lost it on the ground as the woman continued firing, deadly shot zinging through the air and exploding in the walls around me.

I ran down the hall and through the door leading to the fire stairs, tripping and tumbling down the steps as the shooting stopped. I knew she would come after me as soon as she had made certain that her partner was dead. If there had been any chance of him surviving, I think she might have tried to save him, and herself.

I made it to the second floor but I could hear her steps pounding on the stairs above me. The pain in my arm was intense and I felt certain she would reach me before I got to the ground level.

I slipped through the door into the hallway. Plastic sheeting lay upon the ground and two step-ladders stood like steeples at either wall. The air was heavy with the smell of paint and spirits.

Twenty feet from the door was a small alcove, almost invisible until you were upon it, which contained a fire hose and a heavy, old-style water-based extinguisher. There was an identical alcove near my own room. I slipped into it, leaning against the wall and trying to control my breathing. Lifting the extinguisher with my left hand I tried to hold it underneath with my right in a vain effort to use it as a weapon but my arm, bleeding heavily by now, was useless and the extinguisher was too awkward to be effective. I heard the woman’s steps slowing and the door sighed softly as she moved into the hall. I listened to her steps on the plastic. There was a loud bang as she kicked open the door of the first room on the floor, then a second bang as she repeated the exercise at the next door. She was almost upon me now and, though she walked softly, the plastic betrayed her. I could feel blood pouring down my arm and dripping from the ends of my fingers as I unwound the hose and waited for her to come.

She was almost level with the alcove when I swung the hose forward like a whip. The heavy brass nozzle caught her in the middle of her face and I heard bone crunch. She staggered back, harmlessly loosing off a blast from the shotgun as she raised her left hand instinctively to her face. I swung the hose again, the rubber glancing against her outstretched hand while the nozzle connected with the side of her head. She moaned and I slipped from the alcove as quickly as I could, the brass nozzle of the hose now in my left hand, and wrapped the rubber around her neck like the coils of a snake.

She tried to move her hand on the shotgun, the stock against her thigh in an effort to pump a cartridge as blood from her battered face flowed between the fingers of her right hand. I kicked hard at the gun and it fell from her grasp as I pulled her tightly against my body, bracing myself against the wall, one leg entwined with hers so she could not pull away, the other holding the hose taut. And there we stood like lovers, the nozzle now warm with blood in my hand and the hose tight against my wrist, as she struggled and then went limp in my grip.

When she stopped moving I released her and she slumped to the ground. I unwound the hose from her neck and, taking her by the hand, I pulled her down the stairs to ground level. Her face was reddish-purple and I realised I had come close to killing her, but I still wanted her where I could see her.

Rudy Fry lay grey on the floor of his office, blood congealing on his face and around the dent in his fractured skull. I called the sheriff’s office, and, minutes later, heard the sirens and saw the red and blue glow of the lights spinning and reflecting around the darkened lobby, the blood and the flashes reminding me once again of another night and other deaths. When Alvin Martin entered with his gun in his hand I was nauseous with shock and barely able to stand, the red light like fire in my eyes.

‘You’re a lucky man,’ said the elderly doctor, her smile a mixture of surprise and concern. ‘Another couple of inches and Alvin here would have been composing a eulogy.’

‘I bet that would have been something to hear,’ I replied.

I was sitting on a table in the Emergency room of Haven’s small but well-equipped medical centre. The wound in my arm was minor but had bled heavily. Now it had been cleaned and strapped and my good hand clutched a bottle of pain-killers. I felt like I’d been sideswiped by a passing train.

Alvin Martin stood beside me. Wallace and another deputy I didn’t recognise were down the hall, guarding the room in which the woman was being kept. She had not regained consciousness and, from what I had heard of the doctor’s hurried conversation with Martin, I believed that she might have lapsed into a coma. Rudy Fry was also still unconscious, although he was expected to recover from his injuries.

‘Anything on the shooters?’ I asked Martin.

‘Not yet. We’ve sent photos and prints to the feds. They’re going to send someone from Richmond later today.’ The clock on the wall read 6.45 a.m. Outside the rain continued to fall.

Martin turned to the doctor. ‘Could you give us a minute or two in private, Elise?’

‘Certainly. Don’t strain him, though.’ He smiled at her as she left but when he turned back to me the smile was gone. ‘You came here with a price on your head?’

‘I’d heard a rumour, that’s all.’

‘Fuck you and your rumour. Rudy Fry almost died in there and I’ve got an unidentified corpse in the morgue with a hole in his neck. You know who called out the hit?’

‘I know who did it.’

‘You gonna tell me?’

‘No, not yet anyway. I’m not going to tell the feds, either. I need you to keep them off my back for a while.’

Martin almost laughed. ‘Now why am I gonna do that?’

‘I need to finish what I came down here to do. I need to find Catherine Demeter.’

‘This shooting have anything to do with her?’

‘I don’t know. It could have but I don’t see where she fits in. I need your help.’

Martin bit his lip. ‘The town council’s running wild. They reckon if the Japanese get wind of this they’ll open up a plant in White Sands before they come here. Everyone wants you gone.’

A nurse entered the room and Martin stopped talking, preferring instead to seethe quietly as she spoke. ‘There’s a call for you, Mr Parker,’ she said. ‘A Detective Cole from New York.’

I winced at the pain in my arm as I rose and she seemed to take pity on me. I wasn’t above accepting pity at that point.

‘Stay where you are,’ she said with a smile. ‘I’ll bring in an extension and we can patch the call through.’

She returned minutes later with the phone and plugged the jack into a box on the wall. Alvin Martin hovered uncertainly for a moment beside me and then stomped out, leaving me alone.

‘Walter?’

‘A deputy called. What happened?’

‘Two of them tried to take me out in the motel. A man and a woman.’

‘How badly are you hurt?’

‘A nick on the arm. Nothing too serious.’

‘The shooters get away?’

‘Nope. The guy’s dead. The woman’s in a coma, I think. They’re patching in the pics and the prints at the moment. Anything at your end? Anything on Jennifer?’ I tried to block out the image of her face but it hung at the edge of my consciousness, like a figure glimpsed at the periphery of one’s vision.

‘The jar was spotless. It was a standard medical storage jar. We’ve tried checking the batch number with the manufacturers but they went out of business in nineteen ninety-two. We’ll keep trying, see if we can access old records, but the chances are slim. The wrapping paper must be sold in every damn gift shop in the country. Again, no prints. The lab is looking at skin samples to see if we can pick up anything from them. Technical guys figure he bounced the call and there’s probably no way we can trace it. I’ll let you know if there’s anything further.’

‘And Stephen Barton?’

‘Nothing there either. The amount I know, I’m starting to think that I may be in the wrong business. He was knocked unconscious by a blow to the head, like the ME said, and then strangled. Probably driven to the parking lot and tipped into the sewer.’

‘The feds still looking for Sonny?’

‘I haven’t heard otherwise but I assume they’re out of luck too.’

‘There doesn’t seem to be much luck around at the moment.’

‘It’ll break.’

‘Does Kooper know what happened here?’

I could hear what sounded like a choked laugh at the other end of the line. ‘Not yet. Maybe I’ll tell him later in the morning. Once the name of the Trust is kept out of it he should be okay, but I don’t know how he feels about the hired help whacking people outside motel rooms. I don’t imagine it’s happened before. What’s the situation at your end?’

‘The natives aren’t exactly greeting me with open arms and leis. No sign of her so far but something isn’t sitting right here. I can’t explain it, but everything feels wrong.’

He sighed. ‘Keep in touch. Anything I can do here?’

‘I guess there’s no way you can keep Ross off my back?’

‘None whatsoever. Ross couldn’t dislike you more if he heard that you screwed his mother and wrote her name on the wall of the men’s room. He’s on his way.’

Walter hung up. Seconds later, there was a click on the line. I kind of guessed Deputy Martin might be the cautious sort. He came back in after allowing enough time to elapse so that it didn’t look like he’d been listening. The expression on his face had changed, though. Maybe it hadn’t been such a bad thing that Martin heard what he did.

‘I need to find Catherine Demeter,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m here. When that’s done, I’ll be gone.’

He nodded.

‘I had Burns call some of the motels in the area earlier,’ he said. ‘There’s no Catherine Demeter checked in at any of them.’

‘I tried that before I left the city. She could be using another name.’

‘I thought of that. If you give me a description I’ll send Burns around to check with the desk clerks.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Believe me, I ain’t doing this out of the kindness of my heart. I just want to see you gone from here.’

‘What about Walt Tyler?’

‘If we get time, I’ll drive out there with you later.’ He went to check with the deputies guarding the shooter. The elderly doctor appeared again and checked the dressing on my arm.

‘Are you sure you won’t rest up here for a time?’ she asked.

I thanked her for the offer but turned her down.

‘I partly guessed as much,’ she said. She nodded towards the phial of pain-killers. ‘They may make you drowsy.’

I thanked her for the warning and slipped them in my pocket as she helped me to put on my jacket over my shirtless chest. I had no intention of taking the pain-killers. Her expression told me that she knew that as well.

Martin drove me to the sheriff’s office. The motel had been sealed up and my clothes had been moved to his office. I showered, wrapping my bandaged arm with plastic first, and then slept fitfully in a cell until the rain stopped falling.

Two federal agents arrived shortly after midday and questioned me about what had taken place. The questioning was perfunctory, which surprised me until I remembered that Special Agent Ross was due to fly in later that evening. The woman had still not regained consciousness by 5.00 p.m., when Tyler came into the Haven diner.

‘Did Burns turn up anything on Catherine Demeter?’

‘Burns has been tied up with the feds since this afternoon. He said he’d check some of the motels before calling it a day. He’ll let me know if there’s any sign of her. You still want to see Walt Tyler, we’d better get going now.’

Chapter Twenty-Three

Walt Tyler lived in a dilapidated but clean white clapboard house, against one side of which leaned a teetering pile of car tyres that were, according to a sign on the road, ‘For Sale’. Other items of varying degrees of saleability, which rested on the gravel and the well-trimmed lawn, included two semi-restored lawn-mowers, various engines and parts of engines and some rusting gym equipment, including a full set of bars and weights.

Tyler himself was a tall, slightly stooped man with a full head of grey hair. He had been handsome once, as his picture had suggested, and he still held himself with a kind of loose-limbed grace, as if unwilling to admit that those looks were now largely gone, lost to cares and worries and the never-ending sorrow of a parent who has lost an only child.

He greeted Alvin warmly enough, although he shook my hand less cordially and seemed reluctant to invite us in. Instead he suggested that we sit on the porch, despite the prospect of further rain. Tyler sat in a comfortable-looking wicker chair and Martin and I on two ornate metal lawn chairs, the lost elements of a more complete set and also, according to the sign hung from the back of mine, ‘For Sale’.

Without Tyler making any effort to ask for it, coffee was brought out in clean china cups by a woman younger than him by maybe ten years. She, too, had been more beautiful once, although in her the beauty of youth had matured into something perhaps more attractive yet, the calm elegance of a woman for whom old age held no fears and in whom lines and wrinkles would alter but not erase her looks. She cast a glance at Tyler and, for the first time since we arrived, he smiled slightly. She returned it and went back into the house. We didn’t see her on the porch again.

The deputy began to speak but Tyler stopped him with a slight movement of his hand. ‘I know why you’re here, Deputy. There’s only one reason why you’d bring a stranger to my home.’ He looked hard at me, his eyes yellowing and rimmed with red but with an interested, almost amused, look in them.

‘You the fella been shooting up folks in the motel?’ he asked, and the smile flickered briefly. ‘Excitin’ life you lead. Your shoulder hurt?’

‘A little.’

‘I was shot once, in Korea. Shot in the thigh. Hurt more’n a little. Hurt like hell.’ He winced exaggeratedly at the memory and then was quiet again. I heard thunder rumble above us, and the porch seemed to grow dark for a time, but I could still see Walt Tyler looking at me and now the smile was gone.

‘Mr Parker’s an investigator, Walt. He used to be a detective,’ said Alvin.

‘I’m looking for someone, Mr Tyler,’ I began. ‘A woman. You probably remember her. Her name is Catherine Demeter. She’s Amy Demeter’s younger sister.’

‘I knew you weren’t no writer. Alvin wouldn’t bring one o’ them . . .’ he searched for the word ‘. . . leeches here.’ He reached for his coffee and sipped long and quietly, as if to stop himself from saying more on the subject, and, I thought, to give him time to consider what I had said. ‘I remember her, but she ain’t been back since her pappy died and that’s better’n ten years. She ain’t got no reason to come back here.’

That statement was taking on the sensation of an echo. ‘Still, I think she did, and I think it can only be connected with what happened before,’ I replied. ‘You’re one of the only ones left, Mr Tyler, you and the sheriff and one or two others, the only ones involved with what took place here.’

I think it had been a long time since he had spoken of it aloud, yet I knew that no long period went by without him returning to it in his thoughts or without him being dimly or acutely aware of it, like an old ache that never fades but which is sometimes forgotten in the throes of another activity and then returns in the forgetting. And I thought that each return was etched with a line in his face, and so a once-handsome man could lose his looks like a fine marble statue slowly chipped away to a memory of its former self.

‘I still hear her sometimes, y’know. Can hear her step on the porch at night, can hear her singing in the garden. At first, I used to run out when I heard her, not knowing but I was sleeping or waking. But I never saw her and after a time I stopped running, though I still waked to her. She don’t come as often now.’

Perhaps he saw something in my face, even in the slow-darkening evening, which led him to understand. I do not know for certain and he gave no sign that he knew or that there was anything more between us than a need to know and a desire to tell, but he stopped for a moment in the telling and in that pause we all but touched, like two travellers who pass on a long, hard road and offer comfort to each other in the journey.

‘She was my only child,’ he continued. ‘She disappeared on the way back from town on a fall day and I never saw her alive again. Next I saw her, she was bone and paper and I didn’t know her. My wife – my late wife – she reported her missing to the police, but nobody came for a day or two and in that time we searched the fields and the houses and anywhere we could. We walked from door to door, knocking and asking, but nobody could tell us where she was or where she might have been. And then, three days after she went, a deputy came and arrested me and accused me of killing my child. They held me for two days, beat me, called me a rapist, an abuser of children, but I never said anything but what I knew to be true, and after a week they let me go. And my little girl never appeared.’

‘What was her name, Mr Tyler?’

‘Her name was Etta Mae Tyler and she was nine years old.’

I could hear the trees whispering in the wind and the boards of the house creaking and settling. In the yard, a child’s swing moved back and forth as a gust caught it. It seemed that there was movement all around us as we spoke, as if our words had awoken something that had been asleep for a long time.

‘Two other children disappeared three months later, black children both, one within a week of the other. Cold it was. Folks thought the first child, Dora Lee Parker, might have fallen through some ice while playing. She was the very devil for ice, that child. But all the rivers were searched, all the ponds dredged, and they didn’t find her. The police, they came and questioned me again, and for a time even some of my own neighbours looked at me kinda funny. But then the police’s interest all died away again. These were black children and they saw no reason to go connectin’ the two vanishings.

‘The third child didn’t come from Haven, he came from Willisville, about forty miles away. ’Nother black child, little boy named . . .’ He stopped and put the palm of his hand to his forehead, pressing lightly, his eyes closed tight. ‘Bobby Joiner,’ he finished quietly, nodding slightly. ‘By then, people was getting scared and a deputation was sent to the sheriff and the mayor. People started keeping their children inside, ’specially after dark, and the police, they questioned every black man for miles around, and some white folks too, poor men they knew to be homosexuals, mostly.

‘I think then there was a waiting period. Those people waited for the black folks to breathe easy again, to get careless, but they did not. It went on and on, for months, till early in nineteen seventy. Then the little Demeter girl disappeared and everything changed. The police, they questioned people for miles around, took statements, organised searches. But nobody saw a thing. It was like the little girl had disappeared into thin air.

‘Things got bad then for black folks. The police figured there might be a connection between the disappearances after all, and they called in the FBI. After that, black men walking around town after dark were liable to get arrested or beaten, or both. But those people . . .’ He used the phrase again and there was a kind of mental shake of the head in his voice, a gesture of horror at the ways of men. ‘Those people had a taste for what they were doing, and couldn’t stop. The woman tried to snatch a little boy in Batesville but she was alone and the boy fought and kicked and scratched her face and ran away. She chased after him, too, but then she gave up. She knew what was coming.

‘The boy was a sharp one. He remembered the make of the car, described the woman, even recalled some of the numbers on the license plate. But it wasn’t till the next day that someone else recalled the car and they went looking for Adelaide Modine.’

‘The police?’

‘No, not the police. A mob of men, some from Haven, others from Batesville, two or three from Yancey Mill. The sheriff, he was out of town when it happened and the FBI men had gone. But Deputy Earl Lee Granger, as was, he was with them when they arrived at the Modine house, but she was gone. There was only the brother there and he shut himself in the basement, but they broke in.’

He was silent then and I heard him swallow in the gathering dark, and I knew that he had been with them. ‘He said he didn’t know where his sister was, didn’t know nothing about no dead children. So they hanged him from a beam in the roof and called it suicide. Got Doc Hyams to certify it, though that basement was fourteen feet from floor to ceiling and there was no way that boy could have gotten up there to hang hisself ’less he could climb walls. Folks after used to joke that the Modine boy wanted to hang hisself real bad to get up without help.’

‘But you said the woman was alone when she tried to snatch the last child,’ I said. ‘How did they know the Modine boy was involved?’

‘They didn’t, at least they weren’t sure. But she needed someone to help her do what she did. A child is a hard thing to take sometimes. They struggle and kick and cry for help. That’s why she failed the last time, because she had no one to help her. At least, that’s what they figured.’

‘And you?’

The porch was quiet again. ‘I knew that boy and he wasn’t no killer. He was weak and . . . soft. He was a homosexual – he’d been caught with some boy back in his private school and they asked him to leave. My sister heard that, when she was cleaning for white folks in the town. It was hushed up, though there were stories about him. I think maybe some people had suspected him for a time, just for that. When his sister tried to take the child, well, folks just decided he must have known. And he must have, I guess, or maybe suspected at least. I don’t know but . . .’

He glanced at Deputy Martin and the deputy stared right back at him. ‘Go on, Walt. There’s some things I know myself. You won’t say anything I haven’t thought or guessed.’

Tyler still looked uneasy but nodded once, more to himself than to us, and went on. ‘Deputy Earl Lee, he knew the boy wasn’t involved. He was with him the night Bobby Joiner was taken. Other nights too.’

I looked at Alvin Martin, who stared at the floor nodding slowly. ‘How did you know?’ I asked.

‘I saw ’em,’ he said simply. ‘Their cars were parked out of town, under some trees, on the night Bobby Joiner was taken. I used to walk the fields sometimes, to get away from here, though it was dangerous, given all that was happenin’. I saw the cars parked and crept up and saw them. The Modine boy was . . . down . . . on the sheriff and then they got in the back and the sheriff took him.’

‘And you saw them together after that?’

‘Same place, couple of times.’

‘And the sheriff let them hang the boy?’

‘He wasn’t going to say nothin’,’ Tyler spat, ‘case someone found out about him. And he watched them hang that boy.’

‘And his sister? What about Adelaide Modine?’

‘They searched for her too, searched the house and the fields, but she was gone. Then someone saw a fire in the shell of an old house on the East Road about ten miles from town and pretty soon the whole place was ablaze. Thomas Packer, he used to store old paint and inflammables there, away from the children. And when the fire was out, they found a body, badly burned, and they said it was Adelaide Modine.’

‘How did they identify her?

Martin answered, ‘There was a bag near the body, with the remains of a lot of money, some personal papers, bank account details mostly. Jewellery she was known to have was found on the body, a gold and diamond bracelet she always wore. It was her mother’s, they said. Dental records matched too. Old Doc Hyams produced her chart – he shared a surgery with the dentist, but the dentist was out of town that week.

‘Seems she had holed up, maybe waiting for her brother or someone else to come to her, and fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand. She’d been drinking, they said, maybe to try to keep warm. The whole place went up. Her car was found near by, with a bag of clothes in the trunk.’

‘Do you remember anything about Adelaide Modine, Mr Tyler? Anything that might explain—’

‘Explain what?’ he interrupted. ‘Explain why she did it? Explain why someone helped her to do what she did? I can’t explain those things, not even to myself. She had somethin’, sure enough, somethin’ strong inside her, but it was a dark thing, a vicious thing. I’ll tell you somethin’, Mr Parker. Adelaide Modine was as close to pure evil as I’ve met on this earth, and I’ve seen brothers hanged from trees and burned while they were hangin’. Adelaide Modine was worse than the people who did the hangin’ because, try as I might, I can’t see any reason for the things she did. They’re beyond explainin’, ’less you believe in the Devil and Hell. That’s the only way I can explain her. She was a thing out of Hell.’

I stayed silent for a time, trying to sort and balance what I had been told. Walt Tyler watched while these thoughts went through my head and I think he knew what I was thinking. I couldn’t blame him for not telling what he knew of the sheriff and the Modine boy. An allegation like that could get a man killed and it didn’t provide conclusive proof that the Modine boy wasn’t directly involved in the killings, although if Tyler’s character assessment was right then William Modine was an unlikely child-killer. But the knowledge that someone involved in the death of his child might have eluded capture must have tortured Tyler all these years.

One part of the story still remained.

‘They found the children the next day, just as the search had begun,’ concluded Tyler. ‘A boy out hunting took shelter in an abandoned house on the Modine estate and his dog started scraping at the cellar door. It was built into the floor, like a trapdoor. The boy shot the lock off and the dog went down and he followed. Then he ran home and called the police.

‘There were four bodies down there, my little girl and the three others. They—’ He stopped and his face creased but he did not cry.

‘You don’t have to go on,’ I said softly.

‘No, you gotta know,’ he said. Then louder, like the cry of a wounded animal: ‘You gotta know what they did, what they did to those children, to my child. They raped them and they tortured them. My little girl, all her fingers were broken, crushed, and the bones pulled away from the sockets.’ He was crying openly now, his large hands open before him like a supplicant before God. ‘How could they do those things, to children? How?’ And then he seemed to retreat into himself and I thought I saw the woman’s face at the window, and her fingertips brushing the pane.

We sat with him for a time and then stood up to leave. ‘Mr Tyler,’ I said gently, ‘just one more thing. Where is the house where the children were found?’

‘About three, four miles up the road from here. The old Modine estate starts there. There’s a stone cross at the start of the track leading up to it. The house is pretty much gone now. There’s just a few walls, part of a roof. State wanted to knock it down but some of us protested. We wanted to remind them of what had happened here, so the Dane house still stands.’

We left him then, but as I was going down the porch steps I heard his voice behind me.

‘Mr Parker.’ The voice was strong again and there was no quaver in it, although there was the lingering sound of grief in its tones. I turned to look at him. ‘Mr Parker, this is a dead town. The ghosts of dead children haunt it. You find the Demeter girl, you tell her to go back where she came from. There’s only grief and misery for her here. You tell her that now. You tell her that when you find her, y’ hear?’

At the margins of his cluttered garden the whispering grew in the trees and it seemed that just beyond the line of vision, where the darkness became almost too dark to penetrate, there was movement. Figures drifted back and forth, skipping just outside the light from the house, and there was childish laughter in the air.

And then there were only the limbs of evergreens fanning the darkness and the empty jangling of a chain in the wreckage of the yard.

Chapter Twenty-Four

On the Casuarina Coast, at the delta area of Irian in Indonesian New Guinea, lives a tribe called the Asmat. They are twenty thousand strong and the terror of every other tribe near them. In their language Asmat means ‘the people – the human beings’, and if they define themselves as the only humans, then all others are relegated to the status of non-human, with all that that entails. The Asmat have a word for these others: they call them manowe. It means ‘the edible ones’.

Hyams had no answers that would have indicated why Adelaide Modine behaved as she did and neither did Walt Tyler. Maybe she, and others like her, had something in common with the Asmat. Perhaps they, too, saw others as less than human so that their suffering ceased to matter, was below notice apart from the pleasure it gave.

I recalled a conversation with Woolrich, after the meeting with Tante Marie Aguillard. Back in New Orleans, we walked in silence down Royal Street, past Madame Lelaurie’s old mansion where slaves were once chained and tortured in the attic until some firefighters found them and a mob ran Madame Lelaurie out of town. We ended up at Tee Eva’s on Magazine, where Woolrich ordered sweet potato and a Jax beer. He ran his thumb down the side of the bottle, clearing a path through the moisture, and then rubbed his damp thumb along his upper lip.

‘I read a Bureau report last week,’ he began. ‘I guess it was a “state of the nation” address on serial killers, on where we stand, where we’re going.’

‘And where are we going?’

‘We’re going to Hell is where we’re going. These people are like a virus. They’re like bacteria spreading and this country is just one big Petri dish to them. The Bureau estimates that we could be losing five thousand victims to serial killers each year. That’s fourteen people every day. The folks watching Oprah and Jerry Springer, or subscribing to Jerry Falwell, they don’t wanna know that. They read about them in the crime mags or see them on the TV, but that’s only when we catch one of them. The rest of the time, they don’t have the least idea what’s going on around them.’

He drank a deep draught of Jax. ‘There are at least two hundred of these killers operating at the present time. At least two hundred.’ He was reeling off the numbers now, emphasising each statistic with a stab of the beer bottle. ‘Nine out of ten are male, eight out of ten are white and one in five is never goin’ to be found. Never.

‘And you know what the strangest thing is? We’ve got more of them than anywhere else. The good old US of A is breeding these fuckers like fucking Elmo dolls. Three-quarters of them live and work in this country. We’re the world’s leading producer of serial killers. It’s a sign of sickness, is what it is. We’re sick and weak and these killers are like a cancer inside us: the faster we grow, the quicker they multiply.

‘And you know, the more of us there are, the more distant from each other we become. We’re practically livin’ on top of each other but we’re further away from each other spiritually, socially, morally, than we’ve ever been before. And then these guys come in, with their knives and their ropes, and they’re even further removed than the rest of us. Some of them even have cop’s instincts. They can sniff each other out. We found a guy in Angola in February who was communicating with a suspected child-killer in Seattle using Biblical codes. I don’t know how these two freaks found each other, but they did.

‘Strange thing is, most of them are even worse off than the rest of humanity. They’re inadequate – sexually, emotionally, physically, whatever – and they’re taking it out on those they see around them. They have no . . .’ He shook his hands in the air, searching for the word. ‘. . . no vision. They have no larger vision of what they’re doing. There’s no purpose to it. It’s just an expression of some kind of fatal flaw.

‘And the people they’re killing, they’re so dumb that they can’t understand what’s happening around them. These killers should be a wake-up call, but nobody’s listening, and that widens the gap even more. All they see is the distance and they reach across it and pick us off, one by one. All we can do is hope that, if they do it often enough, we’ll spot the pattern and put together a link between us and them, a bridge across the distance.’ He finished his beer and raised the bottle up, calling for another.

‘It’s the distance,’ he said, his eyes on the street but his gaze beyond it, ‘the distance between life and death, Heaven and Hell, us and them. They have to cross it to get close enough to us to take us, but it’s all a matter of distance. They love the distance.’

And it seemed to me, as rain poured down on the window, that Adelaide Modine, the Travelling Man and the thousands of others like them who roamed the country were all united by this distance from the common crowd of humanity. They were like small boys who torture animals or take fish from tanks to watch them squirm and gasp in their death throes.

Yet Adelaide Modine seemed even worse than so many of the others, for she was a woman and to do what she had done went not only against law and morality and whatever other titles we give to the common bonds that hold us together and prevent us from tearing each other apart, it went against nature, too. A woman who kills a child seems to bring out something in us that exceeds revulsion or horror. It brings a kind of despair, a lack of faith in the foundations upon which we have built our lives. Just as Lady Macbeth begged to be unsexed so as to kill the old king, so also a woman who killed a child appeared to be denatured, a being divorced from her sex. Adelaide Modine was like Milton’s night-hag, ‘lured with the smell of infant blood’.

I cannot countenance the death of children. The killing of a child seems to bring with it the death of hope, the death of the future. I recall how I used to listen to Jennifer breathe, how I used to watch the rise and fall of my infant daughter’s chest, how I felt a sense of gratitude, of relief, with every inhalation and exhalation.

When she cried, I would lull her to sleep in my arms, waiting for the sobs to fade into the soft rhythms of rest. And when she was at last quiet, I would bend down slowly, carefully, my back aching from the strain of the position, and lay her in her cot. When she was taken from me it was like the death of a world, an infinite number of futures coming to an end.

I felt a weight of despair upon me as the motel drew closer. Hyams had said that he had seen nothing in the Modines that would have indicated the depths of evil that existed within them. Walt Tyler, if what he had said was true, saw that evil only in Adelaide Modine. She had lived among these people, had grown up with them, perhaps even played with them, had sat with them in church, had watched them marry, have children and then had preyed upon them, and no one had suspected her.

I think that I wanted a power I could not have: the power to perceive evil, the ability to look at the faces in a crowded room and see the signs of depravity and corruption. The thought sparked a memory of a killing in New York State some years before, in which a thirteen-year-old boy had killed a younger kid in the woods, beating him to death with rocks. It was the words of the killer’s grandfather that had stayed with me. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘I should have been able to see, somehow. There should have been something to see.’

‘Are there any pictures of Adelaide Modine?’ I asked eventually.

Martin’s brow furrowed. ‘There may be one in the files of the original investigation. The library may have some stuff too. There’s a kind of town archive stored in its basement, y’ know, yearbooks, photos from the paper. There may be something in there. Why d’you ask?’

‘Curiosity. She was responsible for so much of what happened to this town but I find it hard to picture her. Maybe I want to see what her eyes looked like.’

Martin shot me a puzzled look. ‘I can get Laurie to look in the library archives. I’ll try to get Burns to look through our own files but it could take a while. They’re all packed in boxes and the filing system is pretty obscure. Some of the files aren’t even in date order. It’s a lot of work to satisfy your idle curiosity.’

‘I’d appreciate it anyway.’

Martin made a sound in his throat but didn’t say anything else for a time. Then, as the motel appeared on our right, he pulled over to the side of the road. ‘About Earl Lee,’ he said.

‘Go on.’

‘The sheriff’s a good man. He held this town together after the Modine killings, from what I hear, him and Doc Hyams and a couple of others. He’s a fair man and I’ve no complaints about him.’

‘If what Tyler said is true, maybe you should have.’

Martin nodded. ‘That’s as maybe. If he’s right, then the sheriff’s got to live with what he’s done. He’s a troubled man, Mr Parker, troubled by the past, by himself. I don’t envy him anything but his strength.’ He spread his hands wide and shrugged slightly. ‘Part of me figures that you should stay here and talk to him when he comes back, but another part of me, the smart part, tells me that it would be better for all of us if you finished up your business as quickly as you can and then got out.’

‘Have you heard from him?’

‘No, I haven’t. He had some leave coming to him and maybe he’s a little overdue on returning, but I ain’t gonna hold that against him. He’s a lonely man. A man who likes the company of other men ain’t gonna find much comfort here.’

‘No,’ I said, as the neon light of the Welcome Inn flickered beyond us. ‘I guess not.’

The call came through almost as soon as Martin pulled away from the kerb. There had been a death at the medical centre: the unidentified woman who had tried to kill me the previous night.

When we arrived, two cruisers were blocking the entrance to the parking lot and I could see the two FBI men talking together at the door. Martin drove us through and as we got out of the car the two agents moved towards me in unison, their guns drawn.

‘Easy! Easy!’ shouted Martin. ‘He was with me the whole time. Put them away, boys.’

‘We’re detaining him until Agent Ross arrives,’ said one of the agents, whose name was Willox.

‘You ain’t detaining or arresting nobody, not until we find out what’s going on here.’

‘Deputy, I’m warning you, you’re out of your league here.’

Wallace and Burns came out of the medical centre at that point, alerted by the shouts. To their credit, they moved to Martin’s side, their hands hanging close by their guns.

‘Like I said, let it go,’ said Martin quietly. The feds looked like they might push the issue but then they holstered their weapons and moved back.

‘Agent Ross is going to hear of this,’ hissed Willox to Martin, but the deputy just walked by.

Wallace and Burns walked with us to the room in which the woman had been kept.

‘What happened?’ asked Martin.

Wallace turned bright red and started blabbering. ‘Shit, Alvin, there was a disturbance outside the centre and—’

‘What kind of disturbance?’

‘A fire in the engine of a car, belonged to one of the nurses. I couldn’t figure it out. There weren’t nobody in it and she hadn’t used it since she got in this morning. I only left the door here for maybe five minutes. When I got back, she was like this . . .’

We arrived at the woman’s room. Through the open door I could see the pale, waxy pallor of her skin and the blood on the pillow beside her left ear. Something metal, ending in a wooden handle, glinted in the ear. The window through which the killer had entered was still open and the glass had been shattered in order to unhook the latch. A small sheet of brown paper lay on the floor, with glass adhering to it. Whoever had killed the woman had taken the trouble to put syrup or glue on the paper before breaking the glass, in order to muffle the sound and to ensure that the glass didn’t make any noise when it hit the floor.

‘Who’s been in here, apart from you?’

‘The doctor, a nurse and the two feds,’ said Wallace. The elderly doctor called Elise appeared behind us. She looked shaken and weary.

‘What happened to her?’ said Martin.

‘A blade of some kind – I think it’s an ice-pick – was thrust through her ear and into her brain. She was dead when we got to her.’

‘Left the pick in her,’ mused Martin.

‘Clean and easy,’ I said. ‘Nothing to tie the killer to what happened if he – or she – gets picked up.’

Martin turned his back on me and began consulting the other deputies. I moved away as they talked and made my way towards the men’s washroom. Wallace looked back at me and I made a gagging expression. He looked away with contempt in his eyes. I spent five seconds in the washroom and then slipped out of the centre through the rear exit.

Time was running out for me. I knew Martin would try to grill me on the source of the hit. Agent Ross wasn’t far behind. At the very least, he’d hold me until he got the information he wanted and any hope I might have of finding Catherine Demeter would disappear. I made my way back to the motel, where my car was still parked, and drove out of Haven.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The track to the ruin of the Dane house was heavy with mud and the car moved through it only with a great effort, as if nature itself was conspiring against my approach. It had started to rain heavily again, and the wind and rain combined to render the wipers almost useless. I strained my eyes for the stone cross and took the turning opposite. I missed the house the first time, only realising my mistake when the road turned into a mass of mud and fallen, rotting trees, forcing me to reverse slowly back the way I had come until I spotted two small ruined pillars to my left and, between them, the almost roofless walls of the Dane house briefly silhouetted against the darkening sky.

I pulled up outside the empty eyes of the windows and the gaping mouth of what was once the door, pieces of its lintel strewn on the ground like old teeth. I took the heavy Maglite from under my seat and climbed out, the rain painful on my head as I ran for what little shelter the interior of the ruin could offer.

Over half of the roof was gone and what remained still showed blackened and charred. There were three rooms: what had once been a kitchen and eating area, identifiable from the remains of an ancient stove in one corner; the main bedroom, now empty except for a stained mattress around which old prophylactics were scattered like the discarded skins of snakes; and a smaller room, which might have served as a children’s bedroom once but was now a mass of old timber and rusting metal bars dotted with paint tins, left there by someone too lazy to haul them to the municipal dump. The rooms smelt of old wood, of long extinct fires and human excrement.

An old couch stood in one corner of the kitchen, its springs flowering through the rotting cushions. It formed a triangle with the corners of the wall, upon which the remains of some faded floral wallpaper hung tenaciously. I shone the flashlight over the back of the couch, my hand resting on the edge. It felt damp but not wet, for the remains of part of the roof still sheltered it from the worst of the elements.

Behind the couch and almost flush with the corners of the house was what appeared to be a trapdoor some three feet at each side. It was locked and its edges seemed filthy and choked with dirt. Its hinges were bloodied with rust and pieces of wood, and pieces of old metal covered most of its surface.

I pulled back the couch to take a closer look and started as I heard a rat scurry across the floor at my feet. It melted into the darkness in a far corner of the room and then was still. I squatted down to examine the lock and bolt, using my knife to scrape away some of the filth from around the keyhole. New steel shone through beneath the dirt. I ran the blade of the knife along the bolt, exposing a line of steel that shone like molten silver in the darkness. I tried the same experiment with the door but only flakes of rust greeted me.

I examined the bolt more closely. What had appeared at first sight to be rust now looked more like varnish, carefully applied so that it would blend in with the door. The bolt’s battered look could easily have been achieved by tying it to the back axle of a car and pulling it over the rutted tracks of this part of the country. It wasn’t a bad job, designed as it was to fool only necking teenagers seeking a thrill in a house of the dead, or children daring each other to tempt the ghosts of other children long gone.

I had a crowbar in the car but I was reluctant to brave the driving rain again. Shining the flashlight around the room, a steel bar some two feet long was caught in the beam. I picked it up, felt its weight, inserted it in the U of the lock and prised. For a moment it seemed the bar might bend or fracture under the strain but then there was a sharp crack as the lock broke. I pulled it free, released the bolt and raised the door on its complaining hinges.

A rich, heady stench of decay rose from the cellar, causing my stomach to churn. I covered my mouth and moved away, but seconds later I was vomiting by the couch, my nostrils filled with my own smell and the odour from the cellar below. When I had recovered and breathed in some fresh air outside the house, I ran to the car and took the window rag from the dashboard. I sprayed it with de-mister from the glove compartment and tied it around my mouth. The de-mister made my head reel but I stuck it in the pocket of my jacket in case I needed it again and re-entered the house.

Even breathing through my mouth and tasting the spray, the smell of putrefaction was overpowering. I descended the wooden stairs carefully, my strong left hand on the rail and the Maglite in my right with the beam shining at my feet. I didn’t want to trip on a ruined step and plunge into the darkness below.

At the base of the steps the flashlight beam caught a glint of metal and blue-grey material. A heavy-set man in his sixties lay near the steps, his knees curled beneath him and his hands cuffed behind his back. His face was grey-white and there was a wound on his forehead, a ragged hole like a dark, exploding star. For a moment, as I shone the light upon it, I thought it was an exit wound but moving the light to the back of his head I saw the hole in his skull gape, saw the decaying matter within and the white totem of his spine.

The gun had probably been pressed right against his head. There was some gunpowder smudging around the forehead wound and the star-shaped rip had been caused by the gases shooting under the skin next to the bone, expanding and tearing open the forehead as they exploded. The bullet had exited messily, taking most of the back of his skull with it. The contact wound also explained the unusual position of the body: he had been shot while kneeling, looking up into the muzzle of the gun as it approached and falling sideways and back when the bullet entered. Inside his jacket was a wallet, with a driving license and police ID identifying him as Earl Lee Granger.

Catherine Demeter lay slumped against the far wall of the basement, nearly opposite the stairs. Granger had probably seen her as he walked or was pushed down. She was slouched like a doll at the wall, her legs spread out before her and her hands resting palms up on the floor. One leg was bent at an unnatural angle, broken below the knee, and I guessed that she had been thrown down the cellar stairs and dragged to the wall.

She had been shot once in the face at close range. Dried blood, brain tissue and bone fragments surrounded her head like a bloody halo on the wall. Both bodies had begun to decay rapidly in the cellar, which seemed to stretch the length and breadth of the house.

There were blisters on Catherine Demeter’s skin and fluid leaked from her nose and eyes. Spiders and millipedes scuttled across her face and slipped through her hair, hunting the bugs and mites that were already feeding on the body. Flies buzzed. I guessed she had been dead for two or three days. I took a quick look around the cellar but it was empty apart from some bundles of rotting newspaper, some cardboard boxes filled with old clothes and a pile of warped timbers, the detritus of lives lived long before and now no more.

A scuffling noise on the floor above me, the sound of wood shifting despite careful footsteps, made me turn quickly and run for the stairs. Whoever was above me heard me, for the steps moved quicker with no regard for any noise that might be made. As my feet hit the first stairs the sound of the trapdoor hinges greeted me and I saw the patch of star-studded sky begin to shrink as the door came down. Two shots were fired randomly through the gap and I heard them impact on the wall behind.

The trapdoor was almost to the floor when I jammed the Maglite into the gap. There was a grunt from above and then I felt the flashlight being kicked repeatedly so that I had to grip it firmly to prevent it being wrenched from my hand. Still the bell-shaped end held firm but my injured right shoulder ached from the strain of pushing up and holding the torch.

Above me, the entire weight of my assailant was on the trapdoor as he continued to aim kicks at the flashlight. Below, I thought I heard the sound of rats scurrying in alarm but faced with the prospect of being trapped in that cellar it seemed like it might be something else. I felt that I might yet hear the sound of Catherine Demeter dragging her shattered leg across the floor and up the wooden steps, that her white fingers might grip my leg and pull me down to her.

I had failed her. I could not protect her from the violent end in this cellar where four young children before her had met muffled, terrified deaths. She had returned to the place where her sister had perished and, in a strange circularity, she had re-enacted a death that she had probably replayed many times in her mind before that day. In the moments before she died, she gained an insight into her sister’s awful end. And so she would keep me company, console me for my weakness and my helplessness in the face of her passing, and lie beside me as I died.

As I breathed through gritted teeth, the stench of decay felt like a dead hand over my mouth and nostrils. I felt vomit rising once again and forced it down, for if I stopped pushing even for a moment I felt sure I would die in this cellar. Momentarily the pressure above me eased and I pushed upwards with all my remaining strength. It was an error that my opponent exploited to the full. The flashlight was kicked once, hard, and slipped through the enlarged gap. The trapdoor slammed shut like the door of my tomb, its echo mocking me from the walls of the cellar. I groaned in despair and began to press futilely against the door once again when there was an explosion from above and the pressure eased entirely, the trapdoor shooting upwards and coming to rest flat on the floor.

I flung myself out, my hand inside my jacket reaching for my gun and the Maglite casting wild shadows on the ceilings and walls as I landed awkwardly and painfully on the floor.

The beam caught the lawyer Connell Hyams leaning against the wall just beyond the rim of the door, his left hand to his wounded shoulder while his right hand tried to raise his gun. His suit was soaked and his clean white shirt clung to his body like a second skin. I held him in the beam, my gun outstretched in the other hand.

‘Don’t,’ I said, but the gun was rising now and his mouth curled into a snarl of fear and pain as he brought it up to fire. Two shots sounded. Neither of them was from Hyams. He jerked as each bullet hit and his gaze moved from me to a place over my shoulder. As he fell I was already turning, the gun still following the beam of the flashlight. Through the glassless window I caught a glimpse of a thin besuited figure fading into the dark, its limbs like sheathed blades and a scar running across its narrow, cadaverous features.

Maybe I should have called Martin then and let the police and the FBI handle the rest. I was sick and weary inside and an almost overpowering sense of loss tore through me and threatened to unman me. The death of Catherine Demeter was like a physical pain, so that I lay for a moment on the ground, the body of Connell Hyams slumped opposite, and clutched my stomach in agony. I could hear the sound of a car as Bobby Sciorra drove away.

It was that sound that caused me to scramble to my feet. It had been Sciorra who had killed the assassin in the medical centre, probably under orders from the old man in case she implicated Sonny in the hit. Yet I couldn’t understand why he had killed Hyams and why he had let me live. I staggered to my car, my shoulder aching, and started to drive towards Hyams’s house.

Chapter Twenty-Six

As I drove, I tried to piece together what had taken place. Catherine Demeter had returned to Haven in an effort to contact Granger, and Hyams had intervened. Maybe he had learned of Catherine’s presence here by chance; the other possibility was that someone had informed him that she might be coming and had urged him to ensure that she never spoke to anyone when she got here.

Hyams had killed Catherine and Granger, that much seemed certain. At a guess, I reckoned that he had watched for the sheriff’s return and followed him into his house. If Hyams had a key to the sheriff’s house which, since he was a neighbour and a trusted citizen, was a likely possibility, Hyams could have listened to the messages on the sheriff’s machine himself and, through that, could have learned of Catherine Demeter’s location. Catherine Demeter was dead before the sheriff returned: Granger’s body had not decayed to the same extent as Demeter’s.

Hyams might even have erased the messages but he couldn’t be certain that Granger had not picked them up by remote contact through a touch-tone phone. Either way, Hyams couldn’t take any chances and acted, probably knocking the sheriff unconscious before cuffing him and then taking him to the Dane house, where he had already killed Catherine Demeter. The sheriff’s car had probably been dumped or driven to another town and left somewhere it wouldn’t attract undue attention, at least for the time being.

The use of the Dane house pointed to another part of the puzzle: Connell Hyams was almost certainly Adelaide Modine’s accomplice in the killings, the man for whom William Modine had been hanged. That raised the question of why he had been forced to act now and I believed that I was close to an answer to that too, although it was a possibility that made me sick to my stomach.

Hyams’s house was dark when I arrived. There was no other car parked near by but I kept my gun in my hand as I approached the door. The thought of facing Bobby Sciorra in the darkness made my skin crawl and my hands shook as I used the keys I had taken from Hyams’s body to open the door.

Inside, the house was silent. I went from room to room, my heart pounding, my finger on the trigger of the gun. The house was empty. There was no sign of Bobby Sciorra.

I went through to Hyams’s office, pulled the curtains and turned on the desk light. His computer was password-protected but a man like Hyams would have to keep hard copies of all his documents. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for, except that it was something that would connect Hyams to the Ferrera family. The connection seemed almost absurd and I was tempted to give up the search and return to Haven and explain it all to Martin and Agent Ross. The Ferreras were many things, but they were not the consorts of child-killers.

The key to Hyams’s filing cabinets was also on the set I had taken from his body. I worked fast, ignoring local files and others that seemed irrelevant or unrelated. There were no files for the Trust, which seemed extraordinary until I remembered his office in town and my heart sank. If the Trust files were not kept in the house, there was a possibility that other files were not here either. If that was the case, the search could prove fruitless.

In the end, I almost passed over the link and only some half-remembered Italian phrases caused me to stop and consider it. It was a rental agreement for a warehouse property in Flushing, Queens, signed by Hyams on behalf of a company called Circe. The agreement was over five years old and had been made with a firm called Mancino Inc. Mancino, I remembered, meant ‘left-handed’ in Italian. It derived from another word meaning deceitful. It was Sonny Ferrera’s idea of a joke: Sonny was left-handed and Mancino Inc. was one of a number of paper companies established by Sonny in the early part of the decade when he had not yet been reduced to the level of a sick, dangerous joke in the Ferrera operation.

I left the house and started driving. As I reached the town limits, I saw a pick-up by the side of the road. Two figures sat in the back, drinking beer from cans enclosed in brown paper bags, while a third stood leaning against the cab with his hands in his pockets. The headlights identified the standing man as Clete and one of the seated figures as Gabe. The third was a thin, bearded man whose face I didn’t recognise. I caught Clete’s eye as I passed and saw Gabe lean towards him and start talking, but Clete just raised a hand. As I drove away I could see him staring after me, caught in the headlights of the pick-up, a dark shadow against the light. I felt almost sorry for him: Haven’s chances of becoming Little Tokyo had just taken a terminal beating.

I didn’t call Martin until I reached Charlottesville.

‘It’s Parker,’ I said. ‘Anybody near you?’

‘I’m in my office and you’re in deep shit. Why’d you run out like that? Ross is here and wants all our asses, but yours especially. Man, when Earl Lee gets back there’s gonna be hell to pay.’

‘Listen to me. Granger’s dead. So is Catherine Demeter. I think Hyams killed them.’

‘Hyams?’ Martin almost shrieked the name. ‘The lawyer? You’re out of your mind.’

‘Hyams is dead too.’ It was starting to sound like a sick joke, except I wasn’t laughing. ‘He tried to kill me out at the Dane house. The bodies of Granger and Catherine Demeter were dumped in the cellar there. I found them and Hyams tried to lock me in. There was some shooting and Hyams died. There’s another player, the guy who took out the woman in the medical centre.’ I didn’t want to bring Sciorra’s name into it, not yet.

Martin was silent for a moment. ‘You gotta come in. Where are you?’

‘It’s not finished. You’ve got to hold them off for me.’

‘I’m not holding anyone off. This town is turning into a morgue because of you and now you’re a suspect in I don’t know how many murders. Come in. You got enough trouble coming to you already.’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that. Listen to me. Hyams killed Demeter to prevent her contacting Granger. I think Hyams was Adelaide Modine’s accomplice in the child-killings. If that’s the case, if he escaped, then she could have escaped too. He could have rigged her death. He had access to her dental records through his father’s surgery. He could have switched a set of records from another woman, maybe a migrant worker, maybe someone snatched from another town, I don’t know. But something made Catherine Demeter run. Something sent her back here. I think she saw her. I think she saw Adelaide Modine because there’s no other reason why she would have come back here, why she would have contacted Granger after all these years away.’

There was silence at the other end of the phone. ‘Ross looks like a volcano in a linen suit. He’s going to be on to you. He got your plates from your motel registration.’

‘I need your help.’

‘You say Hyams was involved?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘I had Burns check our files. Didn’t take as long as I thought it would. Earl Lee has . . . had the file relating to the killings. He used to check it out every so often. Hyams came looking for it, day before yesterday.’

‘My guess is that, if you find it, any photos will be gone. I think Hyams probably searched the sheriff’s house for it. He had to eliminate any traces of Adelaide Modine, anything that might link her to her new identity.’

It is hard to disappear. A trail of paper, of public and private records, follows us from birth. For most of us, they define what we are to the State, the Government, the law. But there are ways to disappear. Obtain a new birth certificate, maybe from a death index or by using someone else’s birth name and DOB, and age the cert by carrying it around in your shoe for a week. Apply for a library card and, from that, obtain a voter’s registration card. Head for the nearest DMV clerk, flash the birth certificate and the VRC, and you now have a driver’s license. It’s a domino effect, each step based on the validity of the documents obtained in the preceding step.

The easiest way of all is to take on another’s identity, someone who won’t be missed, someone from the margins. My guess was that, with Hyams’s help, Adelaide Modine took on the identity of the girl who burned to death in a Virginia ruin. ‘There’s more,’ said Martin. ‘There was a separate file on the Modines. The photos from that are all gone as well.’

‘Could Hyams have got access to those files?’

I could hear Martin sigh at the other end of the phone.

‘Sure,’ he said eventually. ‘He was the town lawyer. He was trusted by everyone.’

‘Check the motels again. I reckon you’ll find Catherine Demeter’s belongings in one of them. There might be something there.’

‘Man, you gotta come back here, sort this out. There’s a lot of bodies here and your name is connected with all of them. I can’t do any more than I’ve done already.’

‘Just do what you can. I’m not coming in.’

I hung up and dialled another number. ‘Yeah,’ answered a voice.

‘Angel. It’s Bird.’

‘Where the fuck have you been? Things are going down here. Are you on the cellphone? Call me back on a land line.’

I rang him back seconds later from a call-box outside a convenience store.

‘Some of the old man’s goons have picked up Pili Pilar. They’re holding him until Bobby Sciorra gets back from some trip. It’s bad. He’s being held in isolation at the Ferrera place – anyone talks to him and they get it in the head. Only Bobby gets access to him.’

‘Did they get Sonny?’

‘No, he’s still out there, but he’s alone now. He’s gonna have to sort whatever it is out with his old man.’

‘I’m in trouble, Angel.’ I explained to him briefly what had taken place. ‘I’m coming back but I need something from you and Louis.’

‘Just ask, man.’

I gave him the address of the warehouse. ‘Watch the place. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.’

I didn’t know how long it would take them to start tracking me. I drove as far as Richmond and parked the Mustang in a long-term parking bay. Then I made some calls. For $1500 I bought silence and a flight on a small plane from a private airfield back to the city.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

‘You sure you wanna be dropped here?’ The cab driver was a huge man, his hair lank with sweat which dribbled down his cheeks and over the rolls of fat in his neck, eventually losing itself in the greasy collar of his shirt. He seemed to fill the whole front of the cab. The door looked too small for him to have entered through. He gave the impression that he had lived and eaten in the cab for so long that he had grown inside it, to the point where it was no longer possible for him to leave: the cab was his home, his castle, and his bulk gave the impression that it would be his tomb.

‘I’m sure,’ I replied.

‘This is a tough area.’

‘That’s okay. I have tough friends.’

The Mancino wine warehouse was one of a number of similar premises that lined one side of a long, ill-lit street west of the Northern Boulevard in Flushing. It was a red-brick building, its name reduced to a white, flaking shadow below the edge of its roof. Wire panels covered the windows on both the ground and upper levels. There were no visible lights on the walls, leaving the area between the gate and the main building in almost total darkness.

On the other side of the street stood the entrance to a large yard filled with storage depots and railroad containers. The ground inside was pitted with ponds of filthy water and discarded pallets. I saw a mongrel dog, its ribs almost bursting through its fur, tearing at something in the dim light of the lot’s filthy spotlights.

As I stepped from the cab, headlights flashed briefly from the alleyway by the warehouse. Seconds later, as the cab pulled away, Angel and Louis emerged from the black Chevy van, Angel carrying a heavy-looking training bag, Louis immaculate in a black leather coat, a black suit and a black polo-neck.

Angel screwed up his face as he drew nearer. It wasn’t hard to see why. My suit was torn and covered with mud and dirt from the encounter with Hyams in the Dane house. My arm had begun to bleed again and the right cuff of my shirt was a deep red colour. I ached all over and I was tired of death.

‘You look good,’ said Angel. ‘Where’s the dance?’

I looked towards the Mancino warehouse. ‘In there. Have I missed anything?’

‘Not here. Louis just got back from Ferrera’s place, though.’

‘Bobby Sciorra arrived there about an hour ago by chopper,’ said Louis. ‘Reckon him and Pili are having a real heart-to-heart.’

I nodded. ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

The warehouse was surrounded by a high brick wall topped with barbed wire and spiked fencing. The gate, inset slightly as the wall curved inwards at the entrance, was also wire-topped and solid except for a gap where a heavy lock and chain linked its two halves together. While Louis lounged semi-discreetly nearby, Angel removed a small, custom-built drill from his bag and inserted the bit into the lock. He pressed the trigger and a high-pitched grinding sound seemed to fill the night. Instantly, every dog in the vicinity started to bark.

‘Shit, Angel, you got a fuckin’ whistle built into that thing?’ hissed Louis. Angel ignored him and moments later the lock fell open.

We entered and Angel gingerly removed the lock and placed it inside the gate. He replaced the chain so that to a casual observer it would still appear secure if, oddly, locked from the inside.

The warehouse dated from the thirties but would have appeared functional even then. Old doors at the right and left sides had been sealed shut, leaving only one way in at the front. Even the fire exit at the back had been welded in place. The security lights, which might once have lit up the yard, now no longer functioned and the illumination from the street-lights did not penetrate the darkness here.

Angel went to work on the lock with a selection of skeleton keys, a flashlight in his mouth, and less than a minute later we were in, lighting our heavy Mags as we went. A small kiosk, which was probably once occupied by a security guard or watchman when the building was in use, stood directly inside the door. Empty shelves stretched along the walls of the room, paralleled by similar shelving through the centre creating two aisles. The shelves were separated into alcoves, each sufficient to hold a bottle of wine. The floor was stone. This had originally been the display area where visitors could examine the stock. Below, in the cellars, was where the cases were kept. At the far end of the room stood a raised office, reached by three stairs to the right.

Beside the small flight of stairs up to the office, a larger staircase descended down. There was also an old freight elevator, unlocked. Angel stepped in and pulled the lever, and the lift descended a foot or two. He brought it back to its original level, stepped out again and raised an eyebrow at me.

We started down the stairs. There were four flights, the equivalent of two storeys, but there were no other floors between the shop floor and the cellars. At the base was another locked door, this one wooden with a glass window through which the flashlight revealed the arches of the cellar. I left Angel to the lock. It took him seconds to open the door. He looked ill-at-ease entering the cellars. The training bag appeared suddenly heavy in his hand.

‘Want me to take that for a while?’ asked Louis.

‘When I’m that old you’ll be feeding me through a straw,’ replied Angel. Although the cellars were cool, he licked at sweat on his upper lip.

‘Practically feeding you through a straw already,’ muttered the voice from behind us.

In the basement, a series of curved, cave-like alcoves stretched away before us. Each had bars running vertically down from ceiling to floor, with a gate set in the middle. They were the old storage bins for the wine. They were obviously disused, strewn with litter and old packaging. The flashlight’s beams caught the edge of the floor of one bin that differed from the others. It was the one nearest us on the right and had a coating of earth where the cement floor had been removed. Its gate stood ajar.

Our footsteps echoed around the stone walls as we approached. Inside, the floor was clean and the earth neatly raked. In one corner was a green metal table with two slits on either side through which ran leather restrainers. In another corner stood a large, industrial-sized roll of what appeared to be plastic sheeting.

Two layers of shelving ran around the walls. They were empty except for a bundle, tightly wrapped in plastic, which had been tucked in against the far wall. I walked towards it and the beam of the flashlight caught denim and a green check shirt; a pair of small shoes and a mop of hair; a discoloured face whose skin had cracked and burst and a pair of open eyes, the corneae milky and cloudy. The smell of decay was strong, but dulled somewhat by the plastic. I recognised the clothing. I had found Evan Baines, the child who had disappeared from the Barton estate.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ I heard Angel say. Louis was silent.

I drew closer to the body, checking the fingers and face. Apart from natural decay, the body was undamaged and the boy’s clothing appeared undisturbed. Evan Baines had not been tortured before he died but there was some heavier discoloration at his temple and there was dried blood in his ear.

The fingers of his left hand were splayed against his chest but his small right hand had formed into a tightly closed fist.

‘Angel. Come here. Bring the bag.’

He stood beside me and I saw the anger and despair in his eyes.

‘It’s Evan Baines,’ I said. ‘Did you bring the masks?’

He bent down and took out two dust masks and a bottle of Aramis aftershave. He sprinkled the aftershave on each mask, handed one to me and put the other one on himself. Then he handed me a pair of plastic gloves. Louis stood further back but didn’t take a mask. Angel held the flashlight’s beam on the body.

I took my penknife and sliced through the plastic by the child’s right hand. Even through the mask the stench grew stronger and there was a hiss of escaping gas.

I took the blunt edge of the knife and prised at the boy’s fist. The skin broke and a nail came loose.

‘Hold the light steady, dammit,’ I hissed. I could see something small and blue in the boy’s grip. I prised again, heedless now of the damage I was causing. I had to know. I had to find the answer to what had happened here. Eventually, the object came loose and fell to the floor. I bent to pick it up and examined it by the light of my own flashlight. It was a shard of blue china.

Angel had begun scanning the far corners of the room with his flashlight as I examined the shard and then had left the room. As I clutched the piece of china, I heard the sound of his drill and then his voice calling us from above. We went back up the stairs and found him in a small room, little bigger than a closet, almost directly above the room where the boy lay. Three linked video-cassette recorders were stacked one above the other on some shelving and a thin cable snaked through a hole at the base of the wall and disappeared into the floor of the warehouse. On one of the VCRs the seconds ticked off inexorably until Angel stilled them.

‘In the corner of that cellar there’s a tiny hole, not much bigger than my fingernail but big enough to take a fish-eye and a motion sensor,’ he said. ‘An ordinary joe couldn’t have found them unless he knew they were there and he knew where to look. I reckon the wire follows the ventilation system. Someone wanted to record what went on in that room any time it was entered.’

Someone, but not whoever went to work on the children in that room. A regular video camera set up in the room would give better quality pictures. There was no reason for concealment unless the viewer didn’t want to be noticed.

There was no monitor in the room, so whoever was responsible either wanted to watch the tapes in the comfort of his or her own home or wanted to be sure that whoever picked them up couldn’t sample what was on them before handing them over. I knew a lot of people who could put together a deal like that, and so did Angel, but I had one in particular in mind: Pili Pilar.

We went back down to the basement. I took the telescopic spade from Angel’s bag and began to break the earth. I didn’t take long to hit something soft. I dug wider and then began to scrape away the earth, Angel beside me using a small garden shovel to help. A film of plastic was revealed and through it, barely discernible, I could see brown, wrinkled skin. We scraped away the rest of the dirt until the child’s body was visible, curled in a foetal position with its head hidden by its left arm. Even in decay, we could see the fingers had been broken, although I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl without moving it.

Angel looked slowly around the floor of the cellar and I knew what he was thinking. It was probably worse than that. This child had been buried barely six inches beneath the ground, which meant there were probably others below. This room had been in use for a long time.

Louis slipped into the room, his finger pressed to his lips. He glanced once at the child, then he pointed slowly above us with his right hand. We stayed still, hardly breathing, and I heard the sound of soft steps on the stairs. Angel retreated into the shadows beside the shelves, clicking off the flashlight as he went. Louis was already gone when I stood up. I moved to take up a position at the other side of the door and was reaching for my gun when a beam of light hit me in the face. The voice of Bobby Sciorra simply said, ‘Don’t,’ and I withdrew my hand slowly.

He had moved quickly, surprisingly so. He emerged from the shadows, the sleek Five-seveN in his right hand and his flashlight focused on me as he neared the open gate. He stopped about ten feet away from me and I could see his teeth shining as he smiled.

‘Dead man,’ he said. ‘Dead as the kids in the room behind you. I was gonna kill you back in that house but the old man wanted you left alive, ’less there was no other option. I just ran out of options.’

‘Still doing Ferrera’s dirty work,’ I replied. ‘Even you should have scruples about doing this.’

‘We all have our weaknesses.’ He shrugged. ‘Sonny’s is short-eyes. He likes looking, you know. Can’t do nothing else with his limp dick. He’s a sick fuck but his daddy loves him and now his daddy wants the mess cleaned up.’

And so it was Sonny Ferrera who had recorded the death agonies of these children, who had watched while Hyams and Adelaide Modine tortured them to death, their screams echoing around the walls as the silent unblinking eye of the camera took it all in to spew out again into his living room. He must have known who the killers were, must have watched them kill again and again, yet he did nothing because he liked what he was seeing and didn’t want it to end.

‘How did the old man find out?’ I asked, but I already knew the answer. I knew now what had been in the car with Pili when he crashed, or thought I knew. It turned out that I was as wrong in that as I had been in so much else.

There was a scuffle of movement in the corner of the alcove and Sciorra reacted with the swiftness of a cat. The light beam widened and he stepped back, the gun moving minutely from me to the corner.

The beam caught the bowed head of Angel. He glanced up into Bobby Sciorra’s eyes and smiled. Sciorra looked puzzled for a moment and then his mouth opened in slow-dawning realisation. He was already turning to try to locate Louis when the darkness seemed to come alive around him and his eyes widened as he realised, too late, that death had come for him too.

Louis’s skin gleamed in the a beam of the flashlight and his eyes were white as his left hand clamped tight over Sciorra’s jaw. Sciorra seemed to tighten and spasm, his eyes huge with pain and fear. He rose up on his toes and his arms stretched wide at either side. He shook hard once, twice, then the air seemed to leave him and his arms and body sagged, yet his head remained rigid, his eyes wide and staring. Louis pulled the long, thin blade from the back of Sciorra’s head and pushed him forward, and he fell to the ground at my feet, small shudders running through his body until they stopped entirely. I could smell the contents of his voided bladder and bowels.

Angel emerged from the darkness of the room behind me.

‘I always hated that fucking spook,’ he said, looking at the small hole at the base of Sciorra’s skull.

‘Yeah,’ said Louis. ‘I like him a whole lot better now.’ He looked at me. ‘What do I do with him?’

‘Leave him. Give me his car keys.’

Louis frisked Sciorra’s body and tossed me the keys.

‘He’s a made guy. Is that gonna be a problem?’

‘I don’t know. Let me handle it. Stay close to here. At some point, I’m going to call Cole. When you hear the sirens, disappear.’

Angel bent down and gingerly lifted the FN from the ground using the end of a screwdriver.

‘We gonna leave this here?’ he asked. ‘That’s some gun, what you say is true.’

‘It stays,’ I said. If I was right, Bobby Sciorra’s gun was the link between Ollie Watts, Connell Hyams and the Ferrera family, the link between a set of child-killings that spanned thirty years and a Mob dynasty more than twice as old again.

I stepped over Sciorra’s body and ran from the warehouse. His black Chevy was pulled into the yard, its trunk facing the warehouse, and the gates had been closed behind it. It looked a lot like the car that had taken out Fat Ollie Watts’s killer. I reopened the gates and drove away from the Mancino warehouse and Queens itself. Queens, a mass of warehouses and cemeteries. And, sometimes, both together.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I was close now, close to an end, a termination of sorts. I was about to witness the cessation of something that had been happening for over three decades and that had claimed enough young lives to fill the catacombs of an abandoned warehouse. But no matter what the resolution might be, it was insufficient to explain what had taken place. There would be an ending. There would be a closure. But there would be no solution.

I wondered how many times each year Hyams had travelled up to the city in his neat lawyer’s clothes, clutching an expensive yet understated overnight bag, in order to tear another child apart. As he boarded the train in front of the ticket collector, or smiled at the girl behind the airline check-in desk, or passed the woman at the toll booth in his Cadillac, the interior redolent with the scent of leather, had there been anything in his face which might have caused them to pause, to reconsider their assessment of this polite, reserved man with his trim grey hair and his conservative suit?

And I wondered also at the identity of the woman who had burned to death in Haven all those years ago, for it was not Adelaide Modine.

I remembered Hyams telling me that he had returned to Haven the day before the body was found. It was not difficult to put together a chain of events: the panicked call from Adelaide Modine; the selection of a suitable victim from the files of Doc Hyams; the alteration of the dental files to match the body; the planting of the jewellery and purse beside the corpse; and the flickering of the first flames, the smell like roasting pork, as the body began to burn.

And then she disappeared back into the darkness to hibernate, to find time to reinvent herself so the killing could continue. Adelaide Modine was like a dark spider squatting in the corner of a web, rushing out when a victim wandered into her sphere of influence and cocooning it in plastic. She had moved unhindered through thirty long years, presenting one face to the world and revealing another to the children. She was a figure glimpsed only by the young, a bogeyman, the creature waiting in the darkness when all the world was asleep.

I believed I could see her face now. I believed also that I understood why Sonny Ferrera had been hunted by his own father, why I had been tracked to Haven by Bobby Sciorra, why Fat Ollie Watts had fled in fear of his life and died in the roar of a gun in a street soaked in late summer sunlight.

The street-lights flashed by like pistol flares. There was dirt beneath my fingernails as I clutched the wheel and I had an almost irresistible desire to pull into a gas station and wash them clean, to take a wire brush and to scrub my skin until it bled, scraping away all the layers of filth and death that seemed to have adhered themselves to me in the past twenty-four hours. I could taste bile in my mouth and I swallowed back hard, focusing on the road ahead, on the lights of the car in front and, just once or twice, on the careless dusting of stars in the dark skies above.

When I arrived at the Ferrera house, the gates were open and there was no sign of the Feds who had watched the house earlier in the week. I drove Bobby Sciorra’s car up the driveway and parked in the shadows beneath some trees. My shoulder ached badly now and bouts of nauseous sweating racked my body.

The front door of the house was ajar and I could see men moving inside. Beneath one of the front windows a dark-suited figure sat slouched with his head in his hands, his automatic lying discarded beside him. I was almost on top of him when he saw me.

‘You ain’t Bobby,’ he said.

‘Bobby’s dead.’

He nodded to himself, as if this was no more than he expected. Then he stood up, frisked me and took my gun. Inside the house, armed men stood in corners talking in hushed tones. The place had a funereal air, a sense of barely suppressed shock. I followed my escort to the old man’s study. He left me to open the door for myself, standing back to watch me as I did so.

There was blood and grey matter on the floor and a dark, black-red stain on the thick Persian carpet. There was blood also on the tan pants of the old man as he cradled his son’s head in his lap. His left hand, its fingers red, toyed with Sonny’s lank, thinning hair. A gun hung limply from the right, its barrel pointing at the floor. Sonny’s eyes were open and in his dark pupils I could see the light of a lamp reflected.

I guessed that he had shot Sonny as he held his head in his lap, as his son knelt beside him pleading for . . . what? For help, for a reprieve, for forgiveness? Fat, depraved Sonny, with his thick, rubbery lips and his mad-dog eyes, dressed in a cheap cream suit and an open-necked shirt, gaudy with gold even in death. The old man’s face was stern and unyielding but, when they turned to look at me, his eyes were weak with guilt and despair, the eyes of a man who has killed himself along with his son.

‘Get out,’ said the old man, softly but distinctly, but he wasn’t looking at me now. A slight breeze blew in through the open French windows from the garden beyond, bringing with it some petals and leaves and the sure knowledge of the end of things. A figure had appeared, one of his own men, an older soldier whose face I recognised but whose name I did not know. The old man raised the gun and pointed it at him, his hand shaking now.

‘Get out!’ he roared, and this time the soldier moved, pulling the windows closed instinctively as he departed. The breeze simply blew them open again and the night air began to make the room its own. Ferrera kept the gun trained there for a few seconds longer and then it wavered and fell. His left hand, stilled by the arrival of his man, returned to its methodical stroking of his dead son’s hair with the soothing, insane monotony of a caged animal stalking its pen.

‘He’s my son,’ he said, not looking at me now but staring into a past that was and a future that might have been. ‘He’s my son but there’s something wrong with him. He’s sick. He’s bad in the head, bad inside.’

There was nothing for me to say. I stayed silent.

‘Why are you here?’ he said. ‘It’s over now. My son is dead.’

‘A lot of people are dead. The children . . .’ For an instant the old man winced. ‘. . . Ollie Watts . . .’

He shook his head slowly, his eyes unblinking. ‘Fucking Ollie Watts. He shouldn’t have run. When he ran, we knew. Sonny knew.’

‘What did you know?’

I think that if I had entered the room only minutes later the old man would have had me killed instantly, or would have killed me himself. Instead, he seemed to seek some sort of release through me. He would confess to me, unburden himself to me, and that would be the last time he would bring himself to speak it aloud.

‘That he’d looked in the car. He shouldn’t have looked. He shoulda just walked away.’

‘What did he see? What did he find in the car? Videos? Pictures?’

The old man’s eyes closed tightly, but he couldn’t hide from what he had seen. Tears squeezed themselves from wrinkled corners and ran down the sides of his cheeks. His mouth formed silent words. No. No. More. Worse. When he opened his eyes again, he was dead inside. ‘Tapes. And a child. There was a child in the trunk of the car. My boy, my Sonny, he killed a child.’

He turned to look at me again but this time his face was moving, twitching almost, as if his head could not contain the enormity of what he had seen. This man, who had killed and tortured and who had ordered others to kill and torture in his name, had found in his own son a darkness that was beyond naming, a dark, lightless place where slain children lay, the black heart of every dead thing.

Watching had no longer been enough for Sonny. He had seen the power these people had, the pleasure they took in tearing the life slowly from the children, and wanted to experience it too.

‘I told Bobby to bring him to me but he ran, ran as soon as he heard about Pili.’ His face hardened. ‘Then I told Bobby to kill them all, all the rest, every one of them.’ And then he seemed to be talking to Bobby Sciorra again, his face red with fury. ‘Destroy the tapes. Find the kids, find where they are and then put them somewhere they’ll never be found. Dump them at the bottom of the fucking ocean if you can. I want it like it never happened. It never happened.’ Then he seemed to remember where he was and what he had done, at least for a time, and his hand returned to its stroking.

‘And then you came along, trailing the girl, asking questions. How could the girl know? I let you go after her, to get you away from here, to get you away from Sonny.’

But Sonny had come after me through his hired killers and they had failed. Their failure forced his father to act. If the woman lived and was forced to testify, Sonny would be cornered again. And so Sciorra had been dispatched, and the woman had died.

‘But why did Sciorra kill Hyams?’

‘What?’

‘Sciorra killed a lawyer in Virginia, a man who was trying to kill me. Why?’

For a moment, Ferrera’s eyes grew wary and the gun rose. ‘You wearing a wire?’ I shook my head wearily, and painfully ripped open the front of my shirt. The gun fell again.

‘He recognised him from the tapes. That’s how he found you. Bobby’s driving through the town and suddenly he sees this guy driving in the opposite direction and it’s the guy in the video, the guy who . . .’ He stopped again and rolled his tongue in his mouth, as if to generate enough saliva to keep talking. ‘All the traces had to be wiped out, all of them.’

‘But not me?’

‘Maybe he should’ve killed you too, when he had the chance, no matter what your cop friends would have done.’

‘He should have,’ I said. ‘He’s dead now.’

Ferrera blinked hard. ‘Did you kill him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Bobby was a made guy. You know what that means?’

‘You know what your son did?’

He was silent then, as the enormity of his son’s crime swept over him once more, but when he spoke again there was a barely suppressed fury in his voice and I knew that my time with him was drawing to a close.

‘Who are you to judge my son?’ he began. ‘You think because you lost a kid that you’re the patron saint of dead children. Fuck. You. I’ve buried two of my sons, and now, now I’ve killed the last of them. You don’t judge me. You don’t judge my son.’ The gun rose again and pointed at my head.

‘It’s all over,’ he said.

‘No. Who else was on the tapes?’

His eyes flickered. The mention of the tapes was like a hard slap to him.

‘A woman. I told Bobby to find her and kill her too.’

‘And did he?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Do you have the tapes?’

‘They’re gone, all burned.’

He stopped, as he remembered again where he was, as if the questions had briefly taken him away from the reality of what he had done and of the responsibility he bore for his son, for his crimes, for his death.

‘Get out,’ he said. ‘If I ever see you again, you’re a dead man.’

No one stood in my way as I left. My gun was on a small table by the front door and I still had the keys to Bobby Sciorra’s car. As I drove away from the house it looked silent and peaceful in the rear-view, as if nothing had ever happened.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Each morning, after the deaths of Jennifer and Susan, I would wake from my strange, disordered dreams and, for an instant, it seemed that they might still be near me, my wife sleeping softly by my side, my child surrounded by her toys in a room near by. For a moment they still lived and I experienced their deaths as a fresh loss with each waking, so that I was unsure whether I was a man waking from a dream of death or a dreamer entering a world of loss, a man dreaming of unhappiness or a man waking to grief.

And amid all, there was the constant aching regret that I had never really known Susan until she was gone and that I loved a shadow in death as in life.

The woman and the child were dead, another woman and child in a cycle of violence and dissolution which seemed unbreakable. I was grieving for a young woman and a boy whom I had never encountered when they were alive, about whom I knew almost nothing, and through them I grieved for my own wife and child.

The gates of the Barton estate stood open; either someone had entered and planned to leave quickly or someone had already gone. There were no other cars in sight as I parked on the gravel drive and walked towards the house. Light was visible through the glass above the front door. I rang the bell twice but there was no answer, so I moved to a window and peered in.

The door into the hall was open and, in the gap, I could see a woman’s legs, one foot bare, the other with a black shoe still clinging to its toes. The legs were bare to the tops of the thighs, where the end of a black dress still covered her buttocks. The rest of her body was obscured. I shattered the glass with the butt of my gun, half expecting to hear an alarm, but there was only the sound of the glass tinkling on the floor inside.

I reached in carefully to open the latch and climbed through the window. The room was illuminated by the hallway lights. I could feel my blood pounding through my veins, could hear it in my ears as I opened the door wider, sensed it tingling at the tips of my fingers as I stepped into the hall and looked at the body of the woman.

Blue veins marbled the skin on her legs and the flesh at the thighs was dimpled and slightly flabby. Her face had been pounded in and strands of grey hair adhered to the torn flesh. Her eyes were still open and her mouth was dark with blood. Only the stumps of teeth remained within, rendering her almost unrecognisable. There was only the gold, emerald-studded necklace, the deep red nail varnish and the simple yet expensive De La Renta dress to suggest the body was that of Isobel Barton. I touched the skin at her neck. There was no pulse – I hardly expected any – but she was still warm.

I stepped into the study where we had first met and compared the shard of china I had taken from Evan Baines’s hand with the single blue dog on the mantelpiece. The pattern matched. I imagined Evan had died quickly when the damage was discovered, the victim of a fit of rage at the loss of one of Adelaide Modine’s family heirlooms.

From the kitchen down the hall came a series of uneven clicking sounds and I could smell a faint odour of burning, like a pot left on a stove for too long. Above it, almost unnoticed until now, was the faint hint of gas. No light showed around the edge of the closed door as I approached, although the acrid smell grew more definite, more intense and the odour of gas was stronger now. I opened the door carefully and stepped back and to one side. My finger rested gently on the trigger but, even as I noticed the pressure, I was aware that the gun was useless if there was gas leaking.

There was no movement from within but the smell was very strong now. The strange, irregular clicking was loud, with a low drone above it. I took a deep breath and flung myself into the room, my useless gun attempting to draw a bead on anything that moved.

The kitchen was empty. The only illumination came from the windows, the hall and the three large, industrial microwave ovens side by side in front of me. Through their glass doors I could see blue light dance over a range of metal objects inside: pots, knives, forks, pans, all were alive with tiny flickers of silver-blue lightning. The stench of gas made my head swim as the tempo of the clicks increased. I ran. I had the front door open when there was a dull whump from the kitchen followed by a second louder bang and then I was flying through the air as the force of the explosion hurled me on to the gravel. There was the sound of glass breaking and the lawn was set aglow as the house burst into flames behind me. As I stumbled towards my car I could feel the heat and see the dancing fire reflected in the windows.

At the gate to the Barton estate, a pair of red brake lights glowed briefly and a car turned into the road. Adelaide Modine was covering her tracks before disappearing into the shadows once again. The house was ablaze, the flames escaping to scale the outside walls like ardent lovers, as I pulled into the road and followed the rapidly receding lights.

She drove fast down the winding Todt Hill road and in the silence of the night I could hear the shriek of her brakes as she negotiated the bends. I took her at Ocean Terrace, as she headed for the Staten Island Expressway. To the left, a steep slope dense with trees fell down to Sussex Avenue below. I gained on her, mounted the verge at Ocean and swung hard to the left, the weight of the Chevy forcing the BMW closer and closer to the verge, the tinted windows revealing nothing of the driver within. Ahead of me, I saw Todt Hill Road curve viciously to the right, and I pulled away to stay with the curve just as the BMW’s front wheels left the road and the car plunged down the hill.

The BMW rolled on garbage and scree, striking two trees before coming to a stop half-way down the leaf-strewn slope, its progress arrested by the dark mass of a young beech. The roots of the tree were partially yanked from the ground and it arched backwards, its branches eventually coming to rest unsteadily against the trunk of another tree further down the slope.

I pulled the car on to the verge, its headlights still on, and ran down the slope, my feet slipping on the grass so that I was forced to steady myself with my good arm.

As I approached the BMW the driver’s door opened and the woman who was Adelaide Modine staggered out. A huge gash had opened in her forehead and her face was streaked with blood so that amid the woods and the leaves, in the bleak reflected light of the heads, she seemed a strange, feral being, her clothes inappropriate trappings to be shed as she returned to her ferocious natural state. She was hunched over slightly, clutching her chest where she had slammed into the steering column, but she straightened painfully as I approached.

Despite her pain, Isobel Barton’s eyes were alive with viciousness. Blood flowed from her mouth when she opened it and I saw her test something within with her tongue and then release a small bloodied tooth on to the ground. There was a cunning in her face, as if, even now, she was seeking a means of escape.

There was evil still in her, a foulness that went far beyond the limited viciousness of a cornered beast. I think concepts of justice, of right, of recompense, were beyond her. She lived in a world of pain and violence where the killing of children, their torture and mutilation, were like air and water to her. Without them, without the muffled cries and the futile, despairing twistings, existence had no meaning and would come to an end.

And she looked at me and seemed almost to smile. ‘Cunt,’ she said, spitting the word out.

I wondered how much Ms Christie had known or suspected before she died in that hallway. Not enough, obviously.

I was tempted to kill Adelaide Modine then. To kill her would be to stamp out one part of that terrible evil, which had taken my own child along with the lives of the children in the cellars, the same evil that had spawned the Travelling Man and Johnny Friday and a million other individuals like them. I believed in the Devil and pain. I believed in torture and rape and vicious, prolonged death. I believed in hurt and agony and the pleasure they gave to those who caused them, and to all these things I gave the name evil. And in Adelaide Modine I saw its red, sputtering spark exploded into bloody flame.

I cocked the pistol. She didn’t blink.

Instead, she laughed once and then grimaced at the pain. She was now curled over again, almost foetal, near the ground. I could smell gasoline on the air as it flowed from the ruptured tank.

I wondered what Catherine Demeter had felt when she saw this woman in DeVries’s department store. Had she glimpsed her in a mirror, in the glass of a display case? Had she turned in disbelief, her stomach tightening as if in the grip of a fist? And when their eyes met, when she knew that this was the woman who had killed her sister, did she feel hatred or anger, or simply fear, fear that this woman could turn on her as she had once turned on her sister? For a brief moment, had Catherine Demeter become a frightened child again?

Adelaide Modine might not have recognised her immediately but she must have seen the recognition in the eyes of the other woman. Maybe it was that slight overbite which gave it away, or perhaps she looked into the face of Catherine Demeter and was instantly back in that dark cellar in Haven, killing her sister.

And then, when Catherine could not be found, she had set about finding a resolution to the problem. She had hired me on a pretext and had killed her own stepson, not only so that he could not give the lie to her story but as the first step in a process which would lead to the eventual death of Ms Christie and the destruction of her home as she covered the traces of her existence.

Maybe Stephen Barton bore some blame for what happened, for only he could have provided a link between Sonny Ferrera, Connell Hyams and his stepmother, when Hyams was seeking somewhere to take the children, a property owned by someone who wouldn’t ask too many questions. I doubt if Barton ever really knew what was taking place, and that lack of understanding killed him in the end.

And I wondered when Adelaide Modine had learned of the death of Hyams and realised that she was now alone, that the time had come to move on, leaving Ms Christie as a decoy just as she had left an unknown woman to burn in her place in Virginia.

But how would I prove all this? The videos were gone. Sonny Ferrera was dead, Pilar was certainly dead. Hyams, Sciorra, Granger, Catherine Demeter, all gone. Who would remember a child-killer from three decades ago? Who would recognise her in the woman before me? Would the word of Walt Tyler be enough? She had killed Christie, true, but even that might never be proved. Would there be enough forensic evidence in the wine cellars to prove her guilt?

Adelaide Modine, curled in a ball, unravelled like a spider that senses a shift in its web and sprang towards me, the nails of her right hand digging into my face, scratching for my eyes, while the left sought the gun. I struck her in the face with the heel of my hand, pushing her back simultaneously with my knee. She came at me again and I shot her, the bullet catching her above the right breast.

She stumbled back against the car, supporting herself on the open door, her hand clutching at the wound in her chest.

And she smiled.

‘I know you,’ she said, forcing the words out through the pain. ‘I know who you are.’

Behind her, the tree shifted slightly as the weight of the car forced its roots up from the ground. The big BMW moved forward a little. Adelaide Modine swayed before me, blood pouring now from the wound in her chest. There was something bright in her eyes, something that made my stomach tighten.

‘Who told you?’

‘I know,’ she said, and smiled again. ‘I know who killed your wife and child.’

I moved towards her as she tried to speak again but her words were swallowed by the sound of grinding metal from the car as the tree finally gave way. The BMW shifted on the slope and then plummeted down the hill. As it rolled, impacting on trees and stones, the rending metal sparked and the car burst into flame. And as I watched, I realised that it was always meant to end this way.

Adelaide Modine’s world exploded into yellow flame as the gasoline around her ignited; and then she was enveloped, her head back and her mouth wide for an instant before she fell, striking feebly at the flames as she toppled, burning, into the darkness. The car was blazing at the bottom of the slope, thick black smoke ascending in plumes into the air. I watched it from the road, the heat searing my face. Further down the hill, in the wooded dark, a smaller pyre burned.

Chapter Thirty

I sat in the same police interview room with the same wooden table with the same wooden heart carved into its surface. My arm was freshly bandaged and I had showered and shaved for the first time in over two days. Despite Agent Ross’s best effort, I was not in a jail cell. I had been interrogated comprehensively, first by Walter and another detective, then by Walter and the Chief of Detectives and, finally, by Ross and one of his agents, with Walter in attendance to make sure they didn’t beat me to death out of frustration.

Once or twice I thought I caught glimpses of Philip Kooper striding around outside, like a corpse that had exhumed itself to sue the undertaker. I guessed that the Trust’s public profile was about to take a serious hammering.

I told the cops nearly everything. I told them about Sciorra, about Hyams, about Adelaide Modine, about Sonny Ferrera. I did not tell them that I had become involved in the case at Walter Cole’s instigation. The other gaps in my story I left them to fill in for themselves. I told them simply that I had taken some leaps of the imagination. Ross almost had to be forcibly restrained at that point.

Now there was only Walter and me and a pair of coffee cups.

‘Have you been down there?’ I asked eventually, breaking the silence.

Walter nodded. ‘Briefly. I didn’t stay.’

‘How many?’

‘Eight so far, but they’re still digging.’

And they would continue digging, not just there but perhaps in scattered locations across the state and maybe even further afield. Adelaide Modine and Connell Hyams had been free to kill for thirty years. The Mancino warehouse had been rented for only a portion of that time, which meant that there were probably other warehouses, other deserted basements, old garages and disused lots that contained the remains of lost children.

‘How long had you suspected?’ I asked.

He seemed to think I was asking about something else, maybe a dead man in the toilet of a bus station, because he started and turned to me. ‘Suspected what?’

‘That someone in the Barton household was involved in the Baines disappearance.’

He almost relaxed. Almost. ‘Whoever took him had to know the grounds, the house.’

‘Assuming he was taken at the house and hadn’t wandered.’

‘Assuming that, yes.’

‘And you sent me to find out.’

‘I sent you.’

I felt culpable for Catherine Demeter’s death, not only because of my failure to find her alive but because, unwittingly, I might have brought Modine and Hyams to her.

‘I may have led them to Catherine Demeter,’ I said to Walter after a while. ‘I told Ms Christie I was going to Virginia to follow a lead. It might have been enough to give her away.’

Walter shook his head.

‘She hired you as insurance. She must have alerted Hyams as soon as she was seen. He was probably on the look-out for her already. If she didn’t turn up in Haven, then they were relying on you to find her. As soon as you did, I think you’d both have been killed.’

I had a vision of Catherine Demeter’s body slumped in the basement of the Dane house, her head surrounded by a circle of blood. And I saw Evan Baines wrapped in plastic, and the decayed body of a child half covered in earth and the other corpses still to be discovered in the Mancino basement, and elsewhere.

And I saw my own wife, my own child, in all of them.

‘You could have sent someone else,’ I said.

‘No, only you. If Evan Baines’s killer was there, I knew you’d find out. I knew you’d find out because you’re a killer yourself.’

The word hung in the air for a moment and then tore a rift between us, like a knife cutting through our past together. Walter turned away.

I stayed silent for a time and then, as if Walter had never spoken, I said: ‘She told me that she knew who killed Jennifer and Susan.’

Walter seemed almost grateful for the break in the silence.

‘She couldn’t have known. She was a sick, evil woman and that was her way of trying to torture you after she died.’

‘No, she knew. She knew who I was before she died, but I don’t think she knew when she hired me. She would have suspected something. She wouldn’t have taken the chance.’

‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘Let it go.’

I didn’t say anything more, but I knew that, somehow, the dark worlds of Adelaide Modine and the Travelling Man had come together.

‘I’m considering retirement,’ said Walter. ‘I don’t want to look at death any more. I’ve been reading Sir Thomas Browne. You ever read Thomas Browne?’

‘No.’

‘Christian Morals: “Behold not Death’s Heads til thou doest not see them, nor look upon mortifying objects til thou overlook’st them.”’ His back was to me but I could see his face reflected in the window and his eyes seemed far away. ‘I’ve spent too long looking at death. I don’t want to force myself to look any more.’

He sipped his coffee. ‘You should go away from here, do something to put your ghosts behind you. You’re no longer what you once were, but maybe you can still step back, before you lose yourself for ever.’

A film was forming on my untouched coffee. When I didn’t respond, Walter sighed and spoke with a sadness in his voice which I had never heard before. ‘I’d prefer it if I didn’t have to see you again,’ he said. ‘I’ll talk to some people, see if you can go.’

Something had changed within me, that much was true, but I was not sure that Walter could see it for what it was. Maybe only I could really understand what had happened, what Adelaide Modine’s death had unlocked within me. The horror of what she had done through the years, the knowledge of the hurt and pain she had inflicted on the most innocent among us, could not be balanced in this world.

And yet it had been brought to an end. I had brought it to an end.

All things decay, all things must end, the evil as well as the good. What Adelaide Modine’s death had done, in its brutal, flame-red way, was to show me that this was true. If I could find Adelaide Modine and could bring her to an end, then I could do the same with others. I could do the same with the Travelling Man.

And somewhere, in a dark place, a clock began to tick, counting off the hours, the minutes, the seconds, before it would toll the end for the Travelling Man.

All things decay. All things must end.

And as I thought of what Walter had said, of his doubts about me, I thought too of my father and of the legacy he left me. I have only fragmented memories of my father. I remember a large, red-faced man carrying a Christmas tree into the house, his breath rising into the air like the puffs of steam from an old train. I remember walking into the kitchen one evening to find him caressing my mother and her laughter at their shared embarrassment. I remember him reading to me at night, his huge fingers following the words as he spoke them to me so that they might be familiar to me when I returned to them again. And I remember his death.

His uniform was always freshly pressed and he kept his gun oiled and cleaned. He loved being a policeman, or so it seemed. I did not know then what it was that drove him to do what he did. Maybe Walter Cole gained some knowledge of it when he looked upon the bodies of those dead children. Maybe I too have knowledge of it. Maybe I have become like my father.

What is clear is that something inside him died and the world appeared to him in different, darker colours. He had looked upon death’s heads for too long and became a reflection of what he saw.

The call had been a routine one: two kids fooling around in a car late at night on a patch of waste ground, flashing the lights and sounding the horn. My father had responded and found one of the local boys, a petty criminal well on the road to graduating into felonies, and his girlfriend, a middle-class girl who was flirting with danger and enjoying the sexual charge it brought.

My father couldn’t recall what the boy said to him as he tried to impress his girl. Words were exchanged and I can imagine my father’s voice deepening and hardening in warning. The boy made mocking movements towards the inside pocket of his jacket, enjoying the effect on my father’s nerves and bathing in the ripples of laughter from the young woman beside him.

Then my father drew his gun and the laughter stopped. I can see the boy raising his hands, shaking his head, explaining that there was no weapon there, that it was all just fun, that he was sorry. My father shot him in the face, blood streaking the interior of the car, the windows, the face of the girl in the passenger seat, his mouth wide in shock. I don’t think she even screamed before my father shot her too. Then he walked away.

Internal Affairs came for him as he stripped in the locker room. They took him before his brother officers, to make an example of him. No one got in their way. By then, they all knew, or thought they knew.

He admitted everything instantly but could not explain it. He simply shrugged his shoulders when they asked. They took his gun and his badge – his back-up, the one I now keep, remained back in his bedroom – and then they drove him home, under the NYPD rule that prevented a policeman being questioned about a crime until forty-eight hours had elapsed. He looked dazed when he returned and wouldn’t speak to my mother. The two Internal Affairs men sat outside in their car, smoking cigarettes, while I watched from my bedroom window. I think they knew what would happen next. When the gunshot sounded, they didn’t leave their car until the echoes of the shot had faded into the cool night air.

I am my father’s son, with all that entails.

The door of the interview room opened and Rachel Wolfe entered. She was dressed casually in blue jeans, hi-top sneakers and a black hooded cotton top by Calvin Klein. Her hair was loose, hanging over her ears and resting on her shoulders, and there was a sprinkling of freckles across her nose and at the base of her neck.

She took a seat across from me and gave me a look of concern and sympathy. ‘I heard about the death of Catherine Demeter. I’m sorry.’

I nodded and thought of Catherine Demeter and how she looked in the basement of the Dane house. They weren’t good thoughts.

‘How do you feel?’ she asked. There was curiosity in her voice, but tenderness too.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you regret killing Adelaide Modine?’

‘She called it. There was nothing else I could do.’ I felt numb about her death, about the killing of the lawyer, about the sight of Bobby Sciorra rising up on his toes as the blade entered the base of his skull. It was the numbness that scared me, the stillness inside me. I think that it might have scared me more, but for the fact that I felt something else too: a deep pain for the innocents who had been lost, and for those who had yet to be found.

‘I didn’t know you did house calls,’ I said. ‘Why did they call you in?’

‘They didn’t,’ she said simply.

She touched my hand, a strange, faltering gesture in which I felt – I hoped? – that there was something more than professional understanding. I gripped her hand tightly in mine and closed my eyes. I think it was a kind of first step, a faltering attempt to re-establish my place in the world. After all that had taken place over the previous two days, I wanted to touch, however briefly, something positive, to try to awaken something good within myself.

‘I couldn’t save Catherine Demeter,’ I said at last. ‘I tried and maybe something came out of that attempt. I’m still going to find the man who killed Susan and Jennifer.’

She nodded slowly and held my gaze. ‘I know you will.’

Rachel had been gone only a short time when the cellphone rang.

‘Yes?’

‘Mista Parker?’ It was a woman’s voice.

‘This is Charlie Parker.’

‘My name is Florence Aguillard, Mista Parker. My mother is Tante Marie Aguillard. You came to visit us.’

‘I remember. What can I do for you, Florence?’ I felt the tightening in my stomach but this time it was born of anticipation, born of the feeling that Tante Marie might have found something to identify the figure of the girl who was haunting us both.

In the background I could hear the music of a jazz piano and the laughter of men and women, thick and sensual as treacle.

‘I been tryin’ to get you all afternoon. My momma say to call you. She say you gotta come to her now.’ I could hear something in her voice, something that conspired to trip her words as they tumbled from her mouth. It was fear and it hung like a distorting fog around what she had to say.

‘Mista Parker, she say you gotta come now and you gotta tell no one you comin’. No one, Mista Parker.’

‘I don’t understand, Florence. What’s happening?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. She was crying now, her voice wracked by sobs. ‘But she say you gotta come, you gotta come now.’ She regained control of herself and I could hear her draw a deep breath before she spoke again.

‘Mista Parker, she say the Travellin’ Man comin’.’

There are no coincidences, only patterns we do not see. The call was part of a pattern, linked to the death of Adelaide Modine, which I did not yet understand. I said nothing about the call to anyone. I left the interrogation room, collected my gun from the desk, then headed for the street and took a cab back to my apartment. I booked a first-class ticket to Moisant Field, the only ticket left on any flight leaving for Louisiana that evening, and checked in shortly before departure, declaring my gun at the desk, my bag swallowed up in the general confusion. The plane was full, half of the passengers tourists who didn’t know better heading for the stifling August heat of New Orleans. The stewards served a ham roll with chips and a packet of dried raisins, all contained in the sort of carrier bag you got on school trips to the zoo.

There was darkness below us when the pressure began building in my nose. I was already reaching for a drinks napkin when the first drops came but then the pressure became pain, a ferocious, shooting pain that caused me to jerk back in my seat.

The passenger beside me, a businessman who had earlier been cautioned about using his laptop computer while the plane was still on the runway, stared at me in surprise and then shock as he saw the blood. I watched his finger pressing repeatedly to summon the steward and then my head was thrown back, as if by the force of a blow. Blood spurted violently from my nose, drenching the back of the seat in front of me, and my hands shook uncontrollably.

Then, just as it seemed that my head was going to explode from the pain and the pressure, I heard a voice, the voice of an old, black woman in the Louisiana swamps.

‘Chile,’ said the voice. ‘Chile, he’s here.’

And then she was gone and my world turned black.

Part Three

The concavities of my body are like another hell for their capacity.

Sir Thomas Urquhart, ‘Rabelais’ “Gargantua”’

Chapter Thirty-One

There was a loud thud as the insect hit the windscreen. It was a large dragonfly, a ‘mosquito hawk’.

‘Shit, that thing must have been as big as a bird,’ said the driver, a young FBI agent named O’Neill Brouchard. Outside, it was probably in the nineties, but the Louisiana humidity made it seem much hotter. My shirt felt cold and uncomfortable where the air-conditioning had dried it against my body.

A smear of blood and wings lay across the glass and the wipers struggled to remove it. The blood matched the drops that still stained my shirt, an unnecessary reminder of what had happened on the plane since my head still ached and the bridge of my nose felt tender to the touch.

Beside Brouchard, Woolrich remained silent, intent upon loading a fresh clip into his SIG Sauer. The Assistant SAC was dressed in his usual garb of cheap tan suit and wrinkled tie. Beside me, a dark Windbreaker marked with the agency’s letters lay crumpled on the seat.

I had called Woolrich from the satellite phone on the plane but couldn’t get a connection. At Moisant Field, I left a number with his message service telling him to contact me immediately, then hired a car and set out towards Lafayette on I-10. Just outside Baton Rouge, the cellphone rang.

‘Bird?’ said Woolrich’s voice. ‘What the hell are you doing down here?’ There was concern in his voice. In the background, I could hear the sound of a car engine.

‘You get my message?’

‘I got it. Listen, we’re already on our way. Someone spotted Florence out by her house, with blood on her dress and a gun in her hand. We’re going to meet up with the local cops at Exit 121. Wait for us there.’

‘Woolrich, it may be too late—’

‘Just wait. No hotdogging on this one, Bird. I got a stake in this, too. I got Florence to think about.’

In front of us I could see the tail-lights of two other vehicles, patrol cars out of the St Martin Sheriff’s Office. Behind us, its headlights illuminating the inside of the FBI Chevy and the blood on the windscreen, was an old Buick driven by two St Martin detectives. I knew one of them, John Charles Morphy, vaguely, having met him once before with Woolrich in Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop on Bourbon, as he swayed quietly to the sound of Miss Lily Hood’s voice.

Morphy was a descendant of Paul Charles Morphy, the world chess champion from New Orleans who retired in 1859 at the grand old age of twenty-two. It was said that he could play three or four games simultaneously while blindfolded. By contrast, John Charles, with his hard body-builder’s frame, never struck me as a man much given to chess. Dead-lift competitions, maybe, but not chess. He was a man with a past, according to Woolrich, a former New Orleans cop who had left the NOPD for the St Martin’s Sheriff’s Office in the shadow of an investigation by the Public Integrity Division over the killing of a young black man named Luther Bordelon in a goods yard off Chartres two years earlier.

I looked over my shoulder and saw Morphy staring back at me, his shaven head glowing in the Buick’s interior light, his hands tight on the wheel as he negotiated the rutted track through the bayou. Beside him, his partner Touissant held the Winchester Model 12 pump upright between his legs. The stock was pitted and scratched, the barrel worn, and I guessed that it wasn’t regulation issue but Touissant’s own. It had smelt of oil when I spoke to Morphy through the window of the car back where the Bayou Courtableau intersected with I-10.

The lights of the car caught the branches of palmetto, tupelo and overhanging willows, huge cypress heavy with Spanish moss, and, occasionally, the stumps of ancient trees in the swamps beyond. We turned into a road that was dark as a tunnel, the branches of the cypress trees above us like a roof against the starlight, and then we were rattling over the bridge that led to the house of Tante Marie Aguillard.

Before us, the two sheriff’s office cars turned in opposing directions and parked diagonally, the lights of one shining out into the dark undergrowth, which led down to the swamp banks. The lights of the second hit the house, casting shadows over the tree trunks that raised it from the ground, the building’s overlapping boards, the steps leading up to the screen door, which now stood open on the porch, allowing the night creatures easy access to the interior of the house.

Woolrich turned around as we pulled up. ‘You ready for this?’

I nodded. I had my Smith & Wesson in my hand as we stepped from the car into the warm air. I could smell rotting vegetation and a faint trace of smoke. Something rustled through the undergrowth to my right and then splashed lightly into the water. Morphy and his partner came up beside us. I could hear the sound of a cartridge being jacked into the pump.

Two of the deputies stood uncertainly beside their car. The second pair advanced slowly across the neat garden, their guns drawn.

‘What’s the deal?’ said Morphy. He was six feet tall with the V-shape of a lifter, his head hairless and a circle of moustache and beard around his mouth.

‘No one enters before us,’ said Woolrich. ‘Send those two jokers around the back but tell them to stay out of the house. The other two stay at the front. You two back us up. Broussard, stay by the car and watch the bridge.’

We moved across the grass, stepping carefully around the discarded children’s toys on the lawn. There were no lights on in the house, no sign of any occupants. I could hear the blood pumping in my head and the palms of my hands were slick with sweat. We were ten feet from the porch steps when I heard a pistol cock and the voice of the deputy to our right.

‘Ah, sweet Jesus,’ he said, ‘sweet Jesus Lord, this can’t be . . .’

A dead tree, little more than an extended trunk, stood about ten yards from the water’s edge. Branches, some no more than twigs, others as thick as a man’s arm, commenced some three feet up the trunk and continued to a height of eight or nine feet.

Against the tree trunk stood Tee Jean Aguillard, the old woman’s youngest son, his naked body glistening in the torchlight. His left arm was hooked around a thick branch so that his forearm and empty hand hung vertically. His head rested in the crook of another branch, his ruined eyes like dark chasms against the exposed flesh and tendons of his flayed face.

Tee Jean’s right arm was also wrapped around a branch but this time his hand was not empty. In his fingers he grasped a flap of his own skin, a flap that hung like an opened veil and revealed the interior of his body from his exposed ribs to the area above his penis. His stomach and most of the organs in his abdomen had been removed. They lay on a stone by his left foot, a pile of white, blue and red body parts in which coils of intestine curled like snakes.

Beside me, I heard one of the deputies begin to retch. I turned to see Woolrich grabbing him by the collar and hauling him to the water’s edge some distance away. ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Not here.’ He left the deputy on his knees by the water and turned towards the house.

‘We’ve got to find Florence,’ he said. His face looked sickly and pale. ‘We gotta find her.’

Florence Aguillard had been seen standing at the bridge to her house by the owner of a local bait shop. She had been covered in blood and held a Colt Service revolver in her hand. When the bait-shop owner stopped, Florence raised the gun and fired a single shot through the driver’s window, missing the bait-shop owner by a fraction of an inch. He had called the St Martin cops from a gas station and they, in turn, had called Woolrich, acting on his notice to the local police that any incident involving Tante Marie should be notified immediately to him.

Woolrich took the steps up the porch at a run and was almost at the door when I reached him. I put my hand on his shoulder and he spun towards me, his eyes wide.

‘Easy,’ I said. The wild look disappeared from his eyes and he nodded slowly. I turned back to Morphy and motioned him to follow us into the house. Morphy took the Winchester pump from Touissant and indicated that he should hang back with the deputy, now that his partner was indisposed.

A long central hallway led, shotgun style, to a large kitchen at the rear of the house. Six rooms radiated off the central artery, three on either side. I knew that Tante Marie’s was the last door on the right and I was tempted to make straight for it. Instead we progressed carefully, taking a room at a time, the flashlights cutting a swathe through the darkness, dust motes and moths bobbing in the beams.

The first room on the right, a bedroom, was empty. There were two beds, one made and the second, a child’s bed, unmade, the blanket lying half on the floor. The living room opposite was also empty. Morphy and Woolrich each took a room as we progressed to the second set of doors. Both were bedrooms. Both were empty.

‘Where are all the children, the adults?’ I said to Woolrich.

‘Eighteenth birthday party at a house two miles away,’ he replied. ‘Only Tee Jean and the old lady supposed to be here. And Florence.’

The door opposite Tante Marie’s room stood wide open and I could see a jumble of furniture, boxes of clothes and piles of toys. A window was open and the curtains stirred slightly in the night air. We turned to face the door of Tante Marie’s bedroom. It was slightly ajar and I could see moonlight within, disturbed and distorted by the shadows of the trees. Behind me, Morphy had the shotgun raised and Woolrich had the SIG Sauer held double-handed close to his cheek. I put my finger on the trigger of the Smith & Wesson, flicked open the door with the side of my foot and dived low into the room.

A bloody handprint lay on the wall by the door and I could hear the sound of night creatures in the darkness beyond the window. The moonlight cast drifting shadows across a long sideboard, a huge closet filled with almost identically patterned dresses and a long, dark chest on the floor near the door. But the room was dominated by the giant bed that stood against the far wall, and by its occupant, Tante Marie Aguillard.

Tante Marie: the old woman who had reached out to a dying girl as the blade began to cut her face; the old woman who had called out to me in my wife’s voice when I last stood in this room, offering me some kind of comfort in my sorrow; the old woman who had, in turn, reached out to me in her final torment.

She sat naked on the bed, a huge woman undiminished by death. Her head and upper body rested against a mountain of pillows, stained dark by her blood. Her face was a red and purple mass. Her jaw hung open, revealing long teeth stained yellow with tobacco. The flashlight caught her thighs, her thick arms and the hands that reached towards the centre of her body.

‘God have mercy,’ said Morphy.

Tante Marie had been split from sternum to groin and the skin pulled back to be held in place by her own hands. As with her son, most of her internal organs had been removed and her stomach was a hollow cavern, framed by ribs, through which a section of her spine gleamed dully in the torchlight. Woolrich’s light moved lower, towards her groin. I stopped it with my hand.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No more.’

Then a shout came from outside, startling in the silence, and we were running together towards the front of the house.

Florence Aguillard stood swaying on the grass in front of her brother’s body. Her mouth was curled down at either side, the bottom lip turned in on itself in grief. She held the long-barrelled Colt in her right hand, the muzzle pointing at the ground. Her white dress was patterned with blue flowers, obscured in places by her mother’s blood. She made no noise, although her body was racked by silent cries.

Woolrich and I came down the steps slowly. Morphy and a deputy stayed on the porch. The second pair of deputies had come from the back of the house and stood facing Florence, Touissant slightly to the right of them. To Florence’s left, I could see the figure of Tee Jean hanging on the tree and, beside him, the fourth deputy and Broussard with his unholstered SIG.

‘Florence,’ said Woolrich softly, putting his gun back in his shoulder holster. ‘Florence, put the gun down.’

Her body shook and her left hand wrapped itself tightly around her waist. She bent over slightly and shook her head slowly from side to side.

‘Florence,’ repeated Woolrich. ‘It’s me.’

She turned her head towards us. There was misery in her eyes, misery and hurt and guilt and rage all vying for supremacy in her troubled mind.

She raised the gun slowly and pointed it in our direction. I saw the deputies bring their weapons up quickly. Touissant had already assumed a sharp-shooter’s stance, his arms in front of his body, his gun unwavering.

‘No!’ shouted Woolrich, his right hand raised. I saw the cops look towards him in doubt and then towards Morphy. He nodded and they relaxed slightly, still keeping their weapons trained on Florence.

The Colt moved from Woolrich to me and still Florence Aguillard shook her head slowly. I could hear her voice, soft in the night, repeating Woolrich’s word like a mantra – ‘no no no no no . . .’ – and then she turned the gun towards her, placed the barrel in her mouth and pulled the trigger.

The explosion sounded like a cannon’s roar in the night air. I could hear the sound of birds’ wings flapping and small animals hurtling through the undergrowth as Florence’s body crumpled to the ground, her ruined skull gaping. Woolrich stumbled to his knees beside her and reached out to touch her face with his left hand, his right reaching instinctively, futilely, for the pulse in her neck. Then he lifted her and buried her face in his sweat-stained shirt, his mouth wide in pain.

In the distance, red lights shone. Further away, I could hear the sound of a helicopter’s blades scything at the darkness.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The day dawned heavy and humid in New Orleans, the smell of the Mississippi strong in the morning air. I left my guest-house and skirted the Quarter, trying to clear the tiredness from my head and my bones. I eventually ended up on Loyola, the traffic adding to the oppressive warmth. The sky overhead was grey and overcast with the threat of rain, and dark clouds hung over the city, seeming to lock in the heat. I bought a copy of the Times-Picayune from a vending machine and read it as I stood before City Hall. The newspaper was so heavy with corruption that it was a wonder the paper didn’t rot: two policemen arrested on drug-trafficking charges, a federal investigation into the conduct of the last Senate elections, suspicions about a former governor. New Orleans itself, with its run-down buildings, the grim shopping precinct of Poydras, the Woolworth’s store with its ‘Closing Down’ notices, seemed to embody this corruption, so it was impossible to tell whether the city had infected the populace or if some of its people were dragging down the city with them.

Chep Morrison had built the imposing City Hall, shortly after he returned from the Second World War to dethrone the millionaire Mayor Maestri and drag New Orleans into the twentieth century. Some of Woolrich’s old cronies still remembered Morrison with fondness, albeit a fondness arising from the fact that police corruption had flourished under him, along with numbers rackets, prostitution and gambling. More than three decades later, the police department in New Orleans was still trying to deal with his legacy. For almost two decades, the Big Sleazy had been top of the league table of complaints about police misconduct, numbering over one thousand complaints per year.

The NOPD had been founded on the principle of the ‘cut’; like the police forces in other southern cities – Savannah, Richmond, Charleston and Mobile – it had been formed in the eighteenth century to control and monitor the slave population, with the police receiving a portion of the reward for capturing runaways. In the nineteenth century, members of the force were accused of rapes and murders, lynchings and robberies, of taking graft to allow gambling and prostitution to continue. The fact that police were forced to stand for election annually meant that they were forced to sell their allegiance to the two main political parties. The force manipulated government elections, intimidated voters, even participated in the massacre of the moderates at the Mechanics Institute in 1866.

New Orleans’s first black mayor, Dutch Morial, tried to clean up the department at the start of the eighties. If the independent Metropolitan Crime Commission, which had a quarter of a century’s start on Morial, couldn’t clean up the department, what hope did a black mayor have? The predominantly white police union went on strike and the Mardi Gras was cancelled. The National Guard had to be called in to maintain order. I didn’t know if the situation had improved since then. I hoped that it had.

New Orleans is also homicide central, with about four hundred Code 30s – NOPD code for a homicide – each year. Maybe half get solved, leaving a lot of people walking the streets of New Orleans with blood on their hands. That’s something the city fathers prefer not to tell the tourists, although maybe a lot of the tourists would still come anyway. After all, when a city is so hot that it offers riverboat gambling, twenty-four-hour bars, strippers, prostitution and a ready supply of drugs, all within a few blocks of each other, there’s got to be some kind of downside to it all.

I walked on, eventually stopping to sit on the edge of a potted tree outside the pink New Orleans Center, the tower of the Hyatt rising behind it, while I waited for Woolrich to show. In the midst of the previous night’s confusion, we had arranged a meeting for breakfast. I had considered staying in Lafayette or Baton Rouge, but Woolrich indicated that the local cops might not like having me so close to the investigation and, as he pointed out, he himself was based in New Orleans.

I gave him twenty minutes and, when he didn’t arrive, I began to walk down Poydras Street, its canyon of office buildings already thronged with business people and tourists heading for the Mississippi.

At Jackson Square, La Madelaine was packed with breakfasters. The smell of baking bread from its ovens seemed to draw people in like cartoon characters pulled along by a visible, snake-like scent. I ordered a pastry and coffee and finished reading the Times-Picayune. It’s next to impossible to get The New York Times in New Orleans. I read somewhere that the New Orleans citizenry bought fewer copies of The New York Times than any other city in the US, although they made up for it by buying more formal wear than anywhere else. If you’re going out to formal dinners every evening, you don’t get much time to read The New York Times.

Amid the magnolia and banana trees of the square, tourists watched tap-dancers and mimes and a slim black man who maintained a steady, sensual rhythm by hitting his knees with a pair of plastic bottles. There was a light breeze blowing from the river, but it was fighting a losing battle with the morning heat and contented itself with tossing the hair of the artists hanging their paintings on the square’s black iron fence and threatening the cards of the fortune-tellers outside the cathedral.

I felt strangely distant from what I had seen at Tante Marie’s house. I had expected it to bring back memories of what I had seen in my own kitchen, the sight of my own wife and child reduced to flesh, sinew and bone. Instead, I felt only a heaviness, like a dark, wet blanket over my consciousness.

I flicked through the newspaper once again. The killings had made the bottom of the front page, but the details of the mutilations had been kept from the press. It was hard to tell how long that would last; rumours would probably begin to circulate at the funerals.

Inside, there were pictures of two bodies, those of Florence and Tee Jean, being taken across the bridge to waiting ambulances. The bridge had been weakened by the traffic and there were fears that it might collapse if the ambulances tried to cross. Mercifully, there were no pictures of Tante Marie being transported on a special gurney to her ambulance, her huge bulk seeming to mock mortality even as it lay shrouded in black.

I looked up to see Woolrich approaching the table. He had changed his tan suit for a light grey linen; the tan had been covered in Florence Aguillard’s blood. He was unshaven and there were black bags beneath his eyes. I ordered him coffee and a plate of pastries and stayed quiet as he ate.

He had changed a great deal in the years I had known him, I thought. There was less fat on his face and, when the light caught him a certain way, his cheekbones were like blades beneath his skin. It struck me for the first time that he might be ill, but I didn’t raise the topic. When Woolrich wanted to talk about it, he would.

While he ate, I recalled the first time that I had met him, over the body of Jenny Ohrbach. She had been pretty once, a thirty-year-old woman who had kept her figure through regular exercise and a careful diet and who had, it emerged, lived a life of considerable luxury without any obvious means of support.

I had stood over her in an Upper West Side apartment on a cold January night. Two large bay windows opened out on to a small balcony overlooking 79th Street and the river, two blocks from Zabar’s Deli on Broadway. It wasn’t our territory, but Walter Cole and I were there because the initial MO looked like it might have matched two aggravated burglaries we were investigating, one of which had led to the death of a young accounts executive, Deborah Moran.

All of the cops in the apartment wore coats, some with mufflers dangling around their necks. The apartment was warm and nobody was in any great hurry to head back out into the cold, least of all Cole and I, despite the fact that this seemed to be a deliberate homicide rather than an aggravated burglary. Nothing in the apartment appeared to have been touched and a purse containing three credit cards and over $700 in cash was found undisturbed in a drawer under the television set. Someone had brought coffee from Zabar’s and we sipped from the containers, our hands cupped around them, enjoying the unaccustomed feeling of warmth on our fingers.

The ME had almost finished his work and an ambulance team was standing by to remove the body when an untidy figure shambled into the apartment. He wore a long brown overcoat, the colour of beef gravy, and the sole of one of his shoes had come adrift from the upper. Through the gap, a red sock and an exposed big toe revealed themselves. His tan pants were as wrinkled as a two-day-old newspaper and his white shirt had given up the struggle to keep its natural tones, settling instead for the unhealthy yellow pallor of a jaundice victim. A fedora was jammed on his head. I hadn’t seen anyone wear a fedora at a crime scene since the last film noir revival at the Angelika.

But it was the eyes that attracted the most attention. They were bright and amused and cynical, trailing lines like a jellyfish moving through water. Despite his ramshackle appearance, he was clean-shaven and his hands were spotless as he took a pair of plastic gloves from his pocket and pulled them on.

‘Cold as a whore’s heart out there,’ he remarked, squatting down and placing a finger gently beneath Jenny Ohrbach’s chin. ‘Cold as death.’

I felt a figure brush my arm and turned to see Cole standing beside me.

‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked.

‘I’m one of the good guys,’ responded the figure. ‘Well, I’m FBI, so whatever that makes me in your eyes.’ He flicked his ID at us. ‘Special Agent Woolrich.’

He rose, sighed, and pulled the gloves from his hands, then thrust both gloves and hands deep into the pockets of his coat.

‘What brings you out on a night like this, Agent Woolrich?’ I asked. ‘Lose the keys to the Federal Building?’

‘Oh, the witty NYPD,’ said Woolrich, with a half-smile. ‘Lucky there’s an ambulance standing by in case my sides split.’ He turned his head to one side as he took in the body again. ‘You know who she is?’ he asked.

‘We know her name, but that’s it,’ said a detective I didn’t recognise. I didn’t even know her name at that point. I knew only that she had been pretty once and now she was pretty no longer. She had been beaten around the face and head with a piece of hollow-centred coaxial cable, which had been dumped beside her body. The cream carpet around her head was stained a deep, dark red, and blood had splashed on the walls and the expensive, and probably uncomfortable, white leather suite.

‘She’s Tommy Logan’s woman,’ said Woolrich.

‘The garbage-collection guy,’ I said.

‘The very same.’

Tommy Logan’s company had clinched a number of valuable garbage-collection contracts in the city over the previous two years. Tommy had also expanded into the window-cleaning business. Tommy’s boys cleaned the windows in your building or you didn’t have any windows left to clean, and possibly no building either. Anyone with those kinds of contacts had to be connected.

‘Racketeering interested in Tommy?’ It was Cole.

‘Lots of people interested in Tommy. Lot more than usual, if his girlfriend is lying dead on the carpet.’

‘You think maybe someone’s sending him a message?’ I asked.

Woolrich shrugged. ‘Maybe. Maybe someone should have sent him a message telling him to hire a decorator whose eyesight didn’t give out the year Elvis died. This place looks like the Osmonds decorated it.’

He was right. Jenny Ohrbach’s apartment was so retro it should have been wearing flares and a goatee. Not that it mattered to Jenny Ohrbach any more.

No one ever found out who killed her. Tommy Logan seemed genuinely shocked when he was told that his girlfriend was dead, so shocked he even stopped worrying that his wife might find out about her. Maybe Tommy decided to be more generous to his business partners as a result of Jenny Ohrbach’s death but, if he did, their arrangement still didn’t last much longer. One year later, Tommy Logan was dead, his throat cut and his body dumped by the Borden Bridge in Queens.

But Woolrich I saw more of. Our paths crossed on occasion; we went for a drink once or twice before I returned home and he went back to his empty apartment in TriBeCa. He produced tickets to a Knicks game; he came to the house for dinner; he gave Jennifer an enormous stuffed elephant as a birthday present; he watched, but did not judge or interfere, as I drank myself away shot by shot.

I have a memory of him at Jenny’s third birthday party, a cardboard clown’s hat jammed on his head and a bowl of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice-cream in his hand. He looked embarrassed, sitting there in his crumpled suit surrounded by three- and four-year-olds and their adoring parents, but also strangely happy as he helped small children blow up balloons or drew quarters from behind their ears. He did farmyard impressions and taught them how to balance spoons on their nose. When he left, there was a sadness in his eyes. I think he was recalling other birthdays, when his child was the centre of attention, before he lost his way.

When Susan and Jennifer died, he followed me to the station and waited outside for four hours until they had finished questioning me. I couldn’t go back to the house and, after that first night when I found myself crying in a hospital lobby, I couldn’t stay with Cole, not only because of his involvement in the investigation but because I did not want to be surrounded by a family, not then. Instead, I went to Woolrich’s small, neat apartment, the walls lined with books of poetry: Marvell, Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Herbert, Jonson and Ralegh, whose ‘Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’ he sometimes quoted. He gave me his bed. On the day of the funeral, he had stood behind me in the rain and let the water wash over him, the drops falling from the brim of his hat like tears.

‘How you doing?’ I asked eventually.

He puffed his cheeks and breathed out, his head moving slightly from side to side like a nodding-dog figure on the back seat of a car. Grey was seeping through his hair from silver pools over his ears. There were lines like the cracks in fine china spreading from his eyes and the corners of his mouth.

‘Not so good,’ he said. ‘I got three hours’ sleep, if you can call waking up every twenty minutes to flashes of red “sleep”. I keep thinking of Florence and the gun and the way it looked as it slid into her mouth.’

‘Were you still seeing her?’

‘Not so much. On and off. We got together a coupla times and I was out at the house a few days back to see if everything was okay. Jesus, what a mess.’

He pulled the newspaper towards him and scanned its coverage of the killings, his finger moving along the sides of each paragraph so that it became dark with print. When he had finished reading, he looked at his blackened fingertip, rubbed his thumb lightly across it then wiped them both on a paper napkin.

‘We got a fingerprint, a partial print,’ he said, as if the sight of his own lines and whorls had only just reminded him of it.

Outside, the tourists and the noise seemed to recede into the distance and there was only Woolrich and his dark eyes. He drained the last of his coffee then dabbed at his mouth with the napkin.

‘That’s why I was delayed. Confirmed it just an hour ago. We’ve compared it against Florence’s prints, but it’s not hers. There are traces of the old woman’s blood in it.’

‘Where did you find it?’

‘Underside of the bed. He may have tried to steady himself as he cut, or maybe he slipped. Doesn’t look like there was an attempt to erase it. We’re comparing it against local files and our master fingerprint identification records. If he’s in the system, we’ll find him.’ As well as criminals, the files covered federal employees, aliens, military personnel and those individuals who had requested that their prints be retained for identification purposes. Over the next twenty-four hours, the print found at the scene would be checked against about two hundred million others on record.

If it turned out to be the Travelling Man’s print then it would be the first real break since the deaths of Susan and Jennifer, but I wasn’t holding my breath. A man who took the time to clean my wife’s fingernails after he killed her was unlikely to be so careless as to leave his own fingerprint at a crime scene. I looked at Woolrich and knew he thought the same thing. He raised his hand for more coffee as he looked out at the crowds on Jackson Square and listened to the snorting of the ponies hitched to the touring carriages pulled up on Decatur.

‘Florence’d been shopping in Baton Rouge earlier in the day, then returned home to change for the birthday party, one of her second cousins. She called you from some juke joint in Breaux Bridge, then went back to the house. She stayed there until maybe eight thirty, then went to the cousin’s birthday party at Breaux Bridge at about nine. According to witness statements taken by the local cops, she was distracted and didn’t stay for long – seems that her momma insisted that she go, that Tee Jean could take care of her. She stayed one hour, maybe ninety minutes, then came back. Brennan, the bait-shop owner, spotted her maybe thirty minutes after that. So we’re looking at a window of one to two hours, no more, for the killings.’

‘Who’s dealing with the case?’

‘Morphy’s bunch, in theory. In practice, a lot of it is likely to devolve mainly to us, since it matches the MO on Susan and Jennifer, and because I want it. Brillaud is going to hook up your phone, in case our man calls. It’ll mean hanging around your hotel room for a while, but I don’t see what else we can do.’ He avoided my eyes.

‘You’re cutting me out.’

‘You can’t be too involved in this, Bird. You know that. I’ve told you before and I’m telling you again. We’ll decide the extent of your involvement.’

‘Limited.’

‘Damn, yes, limited. Look, Bird, you’re the link to this guy. He’s called once, he will call again. We wait, we see.’ He spread his hands wide.

‘She was killed because of the girl. Are you going to look for the girl?’

Woolrich rolled his eyes in frustration. ‘Look where, Bird? The whole fucking bayou? We don’t even know that she existed. We have a print, we’ll run with that and see where it takes us. Now pay the bill and let’s get out of here. We’ve got things to do.’

I was staying in a restored Greek revival house, the Flaisance House, on Esplanade, a white mansion filled with dead men’s furniture. I had opted for a room in the converted carriage house at the rear, partly for the seclusion but also because it contained a natural alarm in the form of two large dogs, who prowled the courtyard beneath and growled at anyone who wasn’t a guest, according to the guy manning the night desk. In fact, the dogs just seemed to sleep a lot in the shade of an old fountain. My large room had a balcony, a brass ceiling fan, two heavy leather armchairs and a small refrigerator, which I filled with bottled water.

When we reached the Flaisance, Woolrich turned on an early-morning game show and we waited, unspeaking, for Brillaud to arrive. He knocked on the door about twenty minutes later, long enough for a woman from Tulsa to win a trip to Maui. Brillaud was a small, neatly dressed man with receding hair, through which he ran his fingers every few minutes as if to reassure himself that there was still some there. Behind him, two men in shirtsleeves awkwardly carried an array of monitoring equipment on a metal gurney, carefully negotiating the wooden external stairway, which led up to the four carriage-house rooms.

‘Get cooking, Brillaud,’ said Woolrich. ‘I hope you brought something to read.’ One of the men in shirtsleeves waved a sheaf of magazines and some battered paperbacks which he had removed from the base of the gurney.

‘Where will you be if we need you?’ asked Brillaud.

‘The usual place,’ said Woolrich. ‘Around.’ And then he was gone.

I had once visited, through Woolrich, an anonymous room in the FBI’s New York office. This was the tech room, where the squads engaged in long-term investigations – organised crime, foreign counter-intelligence – monitored their wire taps. Six agents sat before a row of reel-to-reel voice-activated tape-recorders, logging the calls whenever the recorders kicked in, carefully noting the time, the date, the subject of the conversation. The room was almost silent, save for the click and whir of the machines and the sound of pens scratching on paper.

The Feds do love their wire taps. Back in 1928, when it was called the Bureau of Investigation, the Supreme Court allowed almost unrestricted access to wire taps of targets. In 1940, when the attorney general, Andrew Jackson, tried to end wire-tapping, Roosevelt twisted his arm and extended taps to cover ‘subversive activities’. Under Hoover’s interpretation, ‘subversive activities’ covered anything from running a Chinese laundry to screwing someone else’s wife. Hoover was the god of wire taps.

Now the Feds no longer have to squat by junction boxes in the rain trying to protect their notebooks from the elements. Judicial approval, followed by a call to the telephone company in order to have the signal diverted, is usually enough. It’s even easier when the subject is willing to co-operate. In my case, Brillaud and his men didn’t even have to sit in a surveillance van, smelling each others’ sweat.

I excused myself for five minutes while Brillaud worked to hook up both my own cellphone and the room phone, telling him that I was just heading for the kitchen of the main house. I left the Flaisance and strolled through the courtyard, attracting a bored glance from one of the dogs huddled in the shadows. I walked down to a telephone booth by a grocery store one block away. From there, I called Angel’s number. The machine was on. I left a message telling them the situation and advising him not to call me on the cellphone.

Technically, the Feds are supposed to engage in minimisation on wire-tapping or surveillance duties. In theory, this means that the agents hit the pause button on the recorder and tune out of the conversation, apart from occasional checks, if it becomes apparent that it’s a private call unconnected with the business in hand. In practice, only a moron would assume that his private business would remain private on a tapped line and it seemed unwise for me to have conversations with a burglar and an assassin while the FBI was listening. When I had left the message, I picked up four coffees in the grocery store, re-entered the Flaisance and went up to my room, where an anxious-looking Brillaud was waiting by the door.

‘We can order coffee up, Mr Parker,’ he said disapprovingly.

‘It never tastes the same,’ I replied.

‘Get used to it,’ he concluded, closing the door behind me.

The first call came at 4.00 p.m., after hours of watching bad TV and reading the problem pages in back issues of Cosmo. Brillaud rose quickly from the bed and clicked his fingers at the technicians, one of whom was already tugging at his headphones. He counted down from three with his fingers and then signalled me to pick up the cellphone.

‘Charlie Parker?’ It was a woman’s voice.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Rachel Wolfe.’

I looked up at the FBI men and shook my head. There was the sound of breath being released. I put my hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Hey, minimisation, remember?’ There was a click as the recorder was turned off. Brillaud went back to lying on my clean sheets, his fingers laced behind his head and his eyes closed.

Rachel seemed to sense that there was something happening at the other end of the line.

‘Can you talk?’

‘I have company. Can I call you back?’

She gave me her home number and told me she planned to be out until 7.30 p.m. I could call her then. I thanked her and hung up.

‘Lady friend?’ asked Brillaud.

‘My doctor,’ I replied. ‘I have a low tolerance syndrome. She hopes that within a few years I’ll be able to cope with idle curiosity.’

Brillaud sniffed noisily but his eyes stayed closed.

The second call came at six. The humidity and the sound of the tourists had forced us to close the balcony window and the air was sour with male scent. This time, there was no doubt about the caller.

‘Welcome to New Orleans, Bird,’ said the synthesised voice, in deep tones that seemed to shift and shimmer like mist.

I paused for a moment and nodded at the FBI men. Brillaud was already paging Woolrich. On a computer screen by the balcony, I could see maps shifting and I could hear the Travelling Man’s voice coming thinly through the headphones of the FBI men.

‘No point in welcoming your FBI friends,’ said the voice, this time in the high, lilting cadences of a young girl’s voice. ‘Is Agent Woolrich with you?’

I paused again before responding, conscious of the seconds ticking by.

‘Don’t fuck with me, Bird!’ Still the child’s voice, but this time in the petulant tones of one who has been told that she can’t go out and play with her friends, the swearing rendering the effect even more obscene than it already was.

‘No, he’s not here.’

‘Thirty minutes.’ Then the connection ended.

Brillaud shrugged. ‘He knows. He won’t stay on long enough to get a fix.’ He lay back down on the bed to wait for Woolrich.

Woolrich looked exhausted. His eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep and his breath smelt foul. He shifted his feet constantly, as if they were too big for his shoes. Five minutes after he arrived, the phone rang again. Brillaud counted down and I picked up the phone.

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t interrupt, just listen.’ It sounded like a woman’s voice, the voice of someone who was about to tell her lover one of her secret fantasies, but distorted, inhuman. ‘I’m sorry about Agent Woolrich’s lover, but only because I missed her. She was supposed to be there. I had something special planned for her, but I suppose she had ideas of her own.’

Woolrich blinked hard once, but gave no other indication that he was disturbed by what he heard.

‘I hope you liked my presentation,’ continued the voice. ‘Maybe you’re even beginning to understand. If you’re not, don’t worry. There’s plenty more to come. Poor Bird. Poor Woolrich. United in grief. I’ll try to find you some company.’

Then the voice changed again. This time it was deep and menacing.

‘I won’t be calling again. It’s rude to listen in on private conversations. The next message you get from me will have blood on it.’ The call ended.

‘Fuck,’ said Woolrich. ‘Tell me you got something.’

‘We got nothing,’ said Brillaud, tossing his headphones on to the bed.

I left the FBI men to pack away their equipment in a white Ford van and walked down through the Quarter to the Napoleon House to call Rachel Wolfe. I didn’t want to use the cellular. For some reason, it seemed soiled by its role as the means of contact with a killer. I also wanted the exercise, after being cooped up in my room for so long.

She picked up on the third ring.

‘It’s Charlie Parker.’

‘Hi . . .’ She seemed to struggle for a time as she tried to decide what to call me.

‘You can call me Bird.’

‘Well spotted.’

There was an awkward pause, then: ‘Where are you? It sounds incredibly noisy.’

‘It is. It’s New Orleans.’ And then I filled her in as best I could on what had taken place. She listened in silence and, once or twice, I heard a pen tapping rhythmically against the phone at the other end of the line.

‘Any of those details mean anything to you?’ I asked, when I had finished.

‘I’m not sure. I seem to recall something from my time as a student but it’s buried so far back that I’m not sure that I can find it. I think I may have something for you arising out of your previous conversation with this man. It’s a little obscure, though.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Where are you staying?’

I gave her the number of the Flaisance. She repeated the name and the number to herself as she wrote them down.

‘Are you going to call me back?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m going to make a reservation. I’m coming down.’

I looked around the Napoleon after I hung up. It was packed with locals and vaguely Bohemian-looking visitors, some of them tourists staying in the rooms above the dimly-lit bar. A classical piece I couldn’t identify was playing over the speakers and smoke hung thick in the air.

Something about the Travelling Man’s calls bothered me, although I wasn’t sure what. He knew I was in New Orleans when he made his calls. He knew where I was staying, too, since he was aware of the presence of the Feds, and that awareness meant that he was familiar with police procedures and was monitoring the investigation, which matched Rachel’s profile.

He had to have been watching the crime scene as we arrived, or shortly after. His reluctance to stay on the line was understandable, given the Feds’ surveillance, but that second call . . . I played it back in my mind, trying to discern the source of my unease, but it yielded nothing.

I was tempted to stay in the Napoleon House, to breathe in the sense of life and gaiety in the old bar, but instead I returned to the Flaisance. Despite the heat I walked to the large windows, opened them, and stepped out on to the balcony. I looked out at the faded buildings and wrought-iron balconies of the upper Quarter and breathed deeply of the smells of cooking coming from a restaurant near by, mingled with smoke and exhaust fumes. I listened to the strains of jazz music coming from a bar on Governor Nicholls, the shouts and laughter of those heading for the rip-off joints on Bourbon Street, the sing-song accents of the locals blending with the voices of the out-of-towners, the sound of human life passing beneath my window.

And I thought of Rachel Wolfe, and the way her hair rested on her shoulders and the sprinkling of freckles across her white neck.

Chapter Thirty-Three

That night, I dreamed of an amphitheatre, with rising aisles filled with old men. Its walls were hung with damask and two high torches illuminated its central rectangular table, with its curved edges and legs carved like bones. Florence Aguillard lay on the table, the exterior of her womb exposed while a bearded man in dark robes tore at it with an ivory-handled scalpel. Around her neck and behind her ears was the mark of a rope-burn. Her head lay at an impossible angle on the table-top.

When the surgeon cut her, eels slithered from her uterus and tumbled to the floor and the dead woman opened her eyes and tried to cry out. The surgeon stifled her mouth with sacking, while the old men watched and skeletons jangled their bones in the darkness. He continued to cut, his body ankle-deep in black eels, until the light went from her eyes.

And in a corner of the amphitheatre, half in light, half in darkness, figures watched. They came to me from the shadows, my wife and child, but now they were joined by a third, one who stayed further back in the dimness, one who was barely a silhouette, one who was hardly there. She came from a cold, wet place and brought with her a dense, loamy smell, the smell of rotting vegetation, of dark, lily-green water, of flesh bloated and disfigured by gas and decay. The place where she lay was small and cramped, its sides unyielding, and sometimes the fish bumped against it as she waited. I seemed to smell her in my nostrils when I woke and could still hear her voice

help me

as the blood rushed in my ears

i’m cold help me

and I knew that I had to find her.

I was awakened by the sound of the telephone in my room. Dim light lanced through the curtains and my watchface glowed the time at 8.35 a.m. I picked up the phone.

‘Parker? It’s Morphy. Get your ass in gear. I’ll see you at La Marquise in an hour.’

I showered, dressed and walked down to Jackson Square, following the early-morning worshippers into St Louis Cathedral. Outside the cathedral, a huckster tried to attract worshippers to his fire-eating act while a group of black nuns crowded beneath a yellow and green parasol.

Susan and I had attended mass here once, beneath its ornately decorated roof depicting Christ among the shepherds and, above the small sanctuary, the figure of the Crusader King Louis IX, Roi de France, announcing the Seventh Crusade.

The cathedral had effectively been rebuilt twice since the original wooden structure, designed in 1724, burned down during the Good Friday fire of 1788, when over eight hundred buildings went up in flames. The present cathedral was less than a hundred and fifty years old, its stained-glass windows overlooking the Place Jean Paul Deux, a gift from the Spanish government.

It was strange that I should have remembered the details so clearly after so many years. Yet I remembered them less for their own intrinsic interest than for their connections to Susan. I remembered them because she had been with me when I learned them, her hand clasped in mine, her hair pulled back and tied with an aquamarine bow.

For a brief moment it seemed that, by standing in the same place and remembering the same words spoken, I could reach back to that time and feel her close beside me, her hand in my hand, her taste still on my lips, her scent on my neck. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine her sauntering down the aisle, her arm against mine, breathing in the mingled smells of incense and flowers, passing beneath the windows, moving from darkness to light, light to darkness.

I knelt at the back of the cathedral, by the statue of a cherub with a font in its hands and its feet upon a vision of evil, and I prayed for my wife and child.

Morphy was already at La Marquise, a French-style patisserie on Chartres. He was sitting in the rear courtyard, his head freshly shaved. He wore a pair of grey sweatpants, Nike sneakers and a Timberland fleece top. A plate of croissants and two cups of coffee stood on the table before him. He was carefully applying grape jelly to one half of a croissant as I sat down across from him.

‘I ordered coffee for you. Take a croissant.’

‘Coffee’s fine, thanks. Day off?’

‘Nah, just avoided the dawn patrol.’ He took the half-croissant and stuffed it into his mouth, using his finger to cram in the last part. He smiled, his cheeks bulging. ‘My wife won’t let me do this at home. Says it reminds her of a kid hogging food at a birthday party.’

He swallowed and set to work on the remaining half of the croissant. ‘St Martin’s been frozen out of the picture, ’part from running around looking under rocks for bloody clothes,’ he said. ‘Woolrich and his boys have pretty much taken over the running of the investigation. We don’t have a helluva lot to do with it any more, legwork excepted.’

I knew what Woolrich would be doing. The killings of Tante Marie and Tee Jean now confirmed the existence of a serial killer. The details would be passed on to the FBI’s investigative support unit, the hard-pressed section responsible for advising on interrogation techniques and hostage negotiation, as well as dealing with VICAP, ABIS – the arson and bombing programme – and, crucially for this case, criminal profiling. Of the thirty-six agents in the unit, only ten worked on profiling, buried in a warren of offices sixty feet below ground in what used to be the FBI director’s fall-out shelter at Quantico.

And while the Feds sifted through the evidence, trying to build up their picture of the Travelling Man, the police on the ground continued to search for physical traces of the killer in the area around Tante Marie’s house. I could picture them already, the lines of cops moving through the undergrowth, warm green light shedding down upon them from the trees above. Their feet would be catching in the mud, their uniforms snagging on briars, as they searched the ground before them. Others would be working through the brown waters of Atchafalaya, swatting at ‘no-see-ums’ and sweating heavily through their shirts.

There had been a lot of blood at the Aguillard house. The Travelling Man must have been awash with it by the time his work was done. He must have worn overalls, and it would have been too risky for him to hold on to them. They had either been dumped in the swamp, or buried, or destroyed. My guess was that he had destroyed them, but the search had to go on.

‘I don’t have a helluva lot to do with it any more, either,’ I said.

‘I hear that.’ He ate some more croissant and finished off his coffee. ‘You finished, we’ll get going.’ He left some money on the table and I followed him outside. The same battered Buick that had followed us to Tante Marie’s was parked half a block away, a hand-lettered cop-on-duty sign taped to the dashboard with duct tape. A parking ticket flapped beneath the wiper.

‘Shit,’ said Morphy, tossing the ticket in a trash can. ‘Nobody got respect for the law no more.’

We drove to the Desire projects, a harsh urban landscape where young blacks lounged by rubbish-strewn lots or shot hoops desultorily in wire-rimmed courts. The two-storey blocks were like barracks, lining streets with bad-joke names like Piety, Abundance and Humanity. We pulled in near a liquor store, which was barricaded like a fortress, causing young men to skip away from us at the smell of cop. Even here, Morphy’s trademark bald head appeared to be instantly recognisable.

‘You know much about New Orleans?’ said Morphy, after a time.

‘Nope,’ I replied. Beneath his fleece top, I could see the trademark bulge of his gun. The palms of his hands were calloused from gripping dumb-bells and bar-bells and even his fingers were thickly muscled. When he moved his head, muscles and tendons stood out on his neck like snakes moving beneath his skin.

Unlike most body-builders, there was an air of suppressed danger about Morphy, a sense that the muscle wasn’t just for show. I knew that he had killed a man once in a bar in Monroe, a pimp who had shot up one of his girls and the john she was with in a hotel room in Lafayette. The pimp, a 220-pound Creole who called himself Le Mort Rouge, had stabbed Morphy in the chest with a broken bottle and then tried to choke him on the ground. Morphy, after trying punches to the face and body, had eventually settled for a grip on Le Mort’s neck and the two men had remained like that, locked in each other’s grip, until something burst in Le Mort’s head and he fell sideways against the bar. He was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.

It had been a fair fight but, sitting beside Morphy in the car, I wondered about Luther Bordelon. He had been a thug, that much was certain. He had a string of assaults stretching back to his years as a juvenile and he was suspected of the rape of a young Australian tourist. The girl had failed to identify Bordelon in a line-up and no physical evidence of the rapist had been left on the girl’s body because her assailant had used a condom and then made her wash her pubic region with a bottle of mineral water, but the NOPD cops knew it was Bordelon. Sometimes, that’s just the way things are.

On the night he died, Bordelon had been drinking in an Irish bar in the Quarter. He was wearing a white T-shirt and white Nike shorts, and three customers in the bar, with whom he had been playing pool, later swore statements that Bordelon had not been armed. Yet Morphy and his partner, Ray Garza, reported that Bordelon had fired on them when they attempted to routinely question him and that he had been killed in their return of fire. A gun, a Smith & Wesson Model 60 that was at least twenty years old, was found by his side with two shots fired. The serial number of the gun had been filed away from the frame under the cylinder crane, making the gun difficult to identify, and Ballistics reported that it was clean and had not been previously used in the commission of a crime in the city of New Orleans.

The gun looked like a throwdown and the NOPD’s Police Integrity Division clearly felt that was the case, but Garza and Morphy stuck by their story. One year later Garza was dead, stabbed while trying to break up a brawl in the Irish Channel, and Morphy had transferred to St Martin, where he had bought a house. That was it. That was how it ended.

Morphy gestured towards a group of young blacks, the asses of their jeans around their knees and oversized sneakers slapping the sidewalk as they walked. They returned our gaze unflinchingly, as if daring us to make a move on them. From a beatbox they carried came the sound of the Wu-Tang Clan, music to kickstart the revolution. I felt a kind of perverse pleasure from recognising the music. Charlie Parker, honorary homeboy.

Morphy said, ‘That is the worst goddamn racket I ever heard. Shit, these people invented the blues. Robert Johnson heard that crap, he’d know for sure that he’d sold his soul to the Devil and gone straight to Hell.’ He turned on his car radio and flicked through the channels with an unhappy look. Resignedly, he pushed in a tape and the warm sound of Little Willie John filled the car.

‘I grew up in Metairie, before the projects really took hold in this city,’ he began. ‘I can’t say any of my best friends were black or nothing – most of the blacks went to public schools, I didn’t – but we got along together.

‘But when the projects went up, that was the end. Desire, Iberville, Lafitte, those were places you didn’t want to end up, ’less you were armed to the teeth. Then fucking Reagan came along and the place got worse. You know, they say there’s more syphilis now than there was fifty years ago. Most of these kids ain’t even been immunised against measles. You have a house in the inner city, then it ain’t worth shit. Might as well abandon it and let it rot.’ He slapped the steering wheel.

‘When you got that kind of poverty, a man can make a lot of money from it if he puts his mind to it. Lot of people fighting for a slice of the projects, fighting for a slice of other things too: land, property, booze, gambling.’

‘Like who?’

‘Like Joe Bonnano. His crew’s been running things down here for the past decade or so, controlling the supply of crack, smack, whatever. They’ve been trying to expand into other areas too. There’s talk that they want to open a big leisure centre between Lafayette and Baton Rouge, maybe build a hotel. Maybe they just want to dump some bricks and mortar there and write it off as a tax loss, launder money through it.’

He cast an appraising eye around the projects. ‘And this is where Joe Bones grew up.’ He said this with a sigh, as if he could not understand how a man would set out to undermine the place in which he had grown and matured. He started the car again and, as he drove, he told me about Joe Bones.

Salvatore Bonnano, Joe’s father, had owned a bar in the Irish Channel, standing up against the local gangs who didn’t believe that an Italian had any place in an area where people named their children after Irish saints and an ‘oul sod’ mentality still prevailed. There was nothing particularly honourable about Sal’s stance; it was simply born out of pragmatism. There was a lot of money to be made in Chep Morrison’s post-war New Orleans, if a man was prepared to take the knocks and grease the right palms.

Sal’s bar was to be the first in a string of bars and clubs he acquired. He had loans to pay off, and the income from a single bar in the Irish Channel wasn’t going to satisfy his creditors. He saved and bought a second bar, this time in Chartres, and from there his little empire grew. In some cases, only a simple financial transaction was required to obtain the premises he wanted. In others, some more forceful encouragement had to be used. When that didn’t work, the Atchafalaya Basin had enough water to hide a multitude of sins. Gradually, he built up his own crew to take care of business, to make sure the city authorities, the police, the Mayor’s office, were all kept happy, and to deal with the consequences when those lower down the food chain tried to better themselves at Sal’s expense.

Sal Bonnano married Maria Cuffaro, a native of Gretna, east of New Orleans, whose brother was one of Sal’s right-hand men. She bore him one daughter, who died of TB at the age of seven, and a son who died in Vietnam. She died herself in ’58, of cancer of the breast.

But Sal’s real weakness was a woman named Rochelle Hines. Rochelle was what they called a ‘high yellow’ woman, a negress whose skin was almost white following generations of interbreeding. She had, as Morphy put it, a complexion like butter oil, although her birth certificate bore the words ‘black, illegitimate’. She was tall, with long dark hair framing almond eyes and lips that were soft and wide and welcoming. She had a figure that would stop a clock and there were rumours that she might once have been a prostitute, although, if that was the case, Sal Bonnano quickly put an end to those activities.

Bonnano bought her a place in the Garden District and began introducing her as his wife after Maria died. It probably wasn’t a wise thing to do. In the Louisiana of the late 1950s, racial segregation was a day-to-day reality. Even Louis Armstrong, who grew up in the city, could not perform with white musicians in New Orleans because the state of Louisiana prohibited racially integrated bands from playing in the city.

And so, while white men could keep black mistresses and consort with black prostitutes, a man who introduced a black woman, no matter how pale her skin, as his ‘wife’ was just asking for trouble. When she gave birth to a son, Sal insisted that he bear his name and he took the child and his mother to band recitals in Jackson Square, pushing the huge white pram across the grass and gurgling at his son.

Maybe Sal thought that his money would protect him. Maybe he just didn’t care. He ensured that Rochelle was always protected, that she didn’t walk out alone, so that no one could come at her. But, in the end, they didn’t come at Rochelle.

One hot July night in 1964, when his son was five years old, Sal Bonnano disappeared. He was found three days later, tied to a tree by the shore of Lake Cataoutche, his head almost severed from his body. It seems likely that someone decided to use his relationship with Rochelle Hines as an excuse to move in on his operation. Ownership of his clubs and bars was transferred to a business consortium with interests in Reno and Vegas.

As soon as her husband was found, Rochelle Hines vanished with her son and a small quantity of jewellery and cash before anyone could come after them. She resurfaced one year later in the area that would come to be called Desire, where her half-sister rented a property. The death of Sal had destroyed her: she was an alcoholic and had become addicted to morphine.

It was here, among the rising projects, that Joe Bones grew up, paler yet than his mother, and made his stand against both blacks and whites since neither group would accept him as its own. There was a rage inside Joe Bones and he turned it on the world around him. By 1990, ten years after his mother’s death in a filthy cot in the projects, Joe Bones owned more bars than his father had thirty years before and, each month, planeloads of cocaine flew in from Mexico, bound for the streets of New Orleans and points north, east and west.

‘Now Joe Bones calls himself a white man, and don’t nobody differ with him,’ said Morphy. ‘Anyway, how’s a man gonna talk with his balls in his mouth? Joe’s got no time for the brothers now.’ He laughed quietly. ‘Ain’t nothin’ worse than a man who can’t get on with his in-laws.’

We stopped at a gas station and Morphy filled the tank, then came back with two sodas. We sipped them by the pumps, watching the cars go by.

‘Now there’s another crew, the Fontenots, and they got their eyes on the projects too. Two brothers, David and Lionel. Family was out of Lafayette originally, I think – still got ties there – but came to New Orleans in the twenties. The Fontenots are ambitious, violent, and they think maybe Bonnano’s time has come. All of this has been coming to a head for about a year now, and maybe the Fontenots have a piece of work planned for Joe Bones.’

The Fontenots were not young men – they were both in their forties – but they had gradually established themselves in Louisiana and now operated out of a compound in Delacroix guarded by wire and dogs and armed men, including a hard-core of Cajuns from back in Acadiana. They were into gambling, prostitution, some drugs. They owned bars in Baton Rouge, one or two others in Lafayette. If they could take out Joe Bones, it was likely that they would muscle in on the drugs market in a big way.

‘You know anything about the Cajuns?’ asked Morphy.

‘No, not beyond their music.’

‘They’re a persecuted minority in this state and in Texas. During the oil boom, they couldn’t get any work because the Texans refused to employ coon-asses. Most of them did what we all do when times are tough: they knuckled down and made the best of things. There were clashes with the blacks, because the blacks and the Cajuns were competing for the same limited amount of work, and some bad things went down, but most people just did what they could to keep body and soul together without breaking too many laws.

‘Roland Fontenot – that’s the grandfather – he left all that behind when he came to New Orleans, following some other obscure branch of the family. But the boys, they never forgot their roots. When things were bad in the seventies, they gathered a pretty disaffected bunch around them: a lot of young Cajuns, some blacks, and somehow kept the mixture from blowing up in their faces.’ Morphy drummed his fingers on the dashboard. ‘Sometimes I think maybe we’re all responsible for the Fontenots. They’re a visitation on us, because of the way their people were treated. I think maybe Joe Bones is a visitation too, a reminder of what happens when you grind a section of the population into the dirt.’

Joe Bones had a vicious streak, said Morphy. He once killed a man by slowly burning him with acid over the space of an afternoon and was thought by some to be missing part of his brain, the part that controlled unreasonable actions in most men. The Fontenots were different. They killed, but they killed like businessmen closing down an unprofitable or unsatisfactory operation. They killed joylessly, but professionally. In Morphy’s view, the Fontenots and Joe Bones were all as bad as each other. They just had different ways of expressing it.

I finished my soda and trashed the can. Morphy wasn’t the type to tell a tale for its own sake. All of this was leading up to something.

‘What’s the point, Morphy?’ I asked.

‘The point is, the fingerprint that was found at Tante Marie’s belongs to Tony Remarr. He’s one of Joe Bones’s men.’ I thought about that as he started the car and moved into the traffic, tried to match the name to any incident that might have occurred back in New York, anything that might connect me to Remarr. I found nothing.

‘You think he did it?’ Morphy asked.

‘Do you?’

‘No, no way. At first I thought, yeah, maybe. You know, the old woman, she owned that land. Wouldn’t have taken much drainage work to make something of it.’

‘If a man was considering opening a big hotel and building a leisure centre.’

‘Exactly, or if he wanted to convince someone he was serious enough about it to dump some bricks there. I mean, swamp’s swamp. Assuming he could get permission to build, who wants to share the warm evening air with critters even God regrets making?

‘Anyway, the old woman wouldn’t sell. She was shrewd. Her people have been buried out there for generations. The original landowner, an old Southern type who traced his ancestry back to the Bourbons, died in sixty-nine. He stipulated in his will that the land should be offered for sale at a reasonable rate to the existing tenants.

‘Now most of the tenants were Aguillards and they bought that land with all the money they had. The old woman, she made all the decisions for them. Their ancestors are there and they have a history with that land going back to the time when they wore chains around their ankles and dug channels through the dirt with their bare hands.’

‘So Bonnano had been putting pressure on her to sell up, but she wouldn’t, so he decides to take things a step further,’ I said.

Morphy nodded. ‘I figure maybe Remarr was sent out to put more than pressure on her – maybe he’s going to threaten the girl or some of the children, maybe even kill one of them – but when he arrives she’s already dead. And maybe Remarr gets careless from the shock, thinks he hasn’t left any traces and heads off into the night.’

‘Does Woolrich know all this?’

‘Most of it, yeah.’

‘You bringing Bonnano in?’

‘Brought him in last night and let him go an hour later, accompanied by a fancy lawyer called Rufus Thibodeaux. He ain’t movin’, says he ain’t seen Remarr for three or four days. Says he wants to find Remarr as much as anyone, something about money from some deal out in West Baton Rouge. It’s bullshit, but he’s sticking with the story. I think Woolrich is going to try to put some pressure on his operations through Anti-Racketeering and Narcotics, put the squeeze on him to see if he can change his mind.’

‘That could take time.’

‘You got a better idea?’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

Morphy’s eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t be fuckin’ with Joe Bones, now, y’ hear? Joe ain’t like your boys back in New York, sittin’ in social clubs in Little Italy with their fingers curled around the handles of espresso cups, dreaming about the days when everyone respected them. Joe ain’t got no time for that. Joe don’t want folks to respect him, Joe wants folks to be scared to death of him.’

We turned on to Esplanade. Morphy signalled and pulled in about two blocks from the Flaisance. He stared out of the window, tapping the index finger of his right hand against the steering wheel to some internal rhythm in his head. I sensed he had something more to say. I decided to let him say it in his own time.

‘You’ve spoken to this guy, the guy who took your wife and kid, right?’

I nodded.

‘It’s the same guy? The same guy who did Tee Jean and the old woman?’

‘He called me yesterday. It’s him.’

‘He say anything?’

‘The feds have it on tape. He says he’s going to do more.’

Morphy rubbed the back of his neck with his hand and squeezed his eyes shut tightly. I knew he was seeing Tante Marie in his head again.

‘You going to stay here?’

‘For a time, yes.’

‘Could be the feds ain’t gonna like it.’

I smiled. ‘I know.’

Morphy smiled back. He reached beneath his seat and handed me a long brown envelope. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said. I slipped the envelope under my jacket and stepped from the car. He gave a small wave as he drove away through the midday crowd.

I opened the envelope in my hotel room. Inside were a set of crime-scene pictures and photocopied extracts of the police reports, all stapled together. Stapled separately was a copy of the ME’s report. One section had been emphasised with a luminous yellow felt-tip.

The ME had found traces of ketamine hydrochloride in the bodies of Tante Marie and Tee Jean, equivalent to a dosage of one milligram per kilo of weight. According to the report, ketamine was an unusual drug, a special type of anaesthetic used for some minor surgical procedures. No one was too clear on its precise mode of action apart from the fact that it was a PCP analogue and worked on sites in the brain, affecting the central nervous system.

It was becoming the drug of choice in the clubs of New York and LA while I was still on the force, usually in capsules or tabs made by heating the liquid anaesthetic to evaporate the water, leaving ketamine crystals. Users described a ketamine trip as ‘swimming in the K pool’ since it distorted the perception of the body, creating a feeling that the user was floating in a soft yet supportive medium. Other side-effects included hallucinations, distortions in the perception of space and time, and out-of-body experiences.

What the ME did note was that ketamine could be used as a chemical restrainer on animals, since it induced paralysis and dulled pain while allowing the normal pharyngeal-laryngeal reflexes to continue. It was for this purpose, he surmised, that the killer had injected both Tante Marie and Tee Jean Aguillard with the drug.

When they were flayed and anatomised, the report concluded, Tante Marie and her son had been fully conscious.

Chapter Thirty-Four

When I had finished reading the ME’s report, I put on my sweats and running shoes and did about four miles on Riverfront Park, back and forth past the crowds queuing to take a trip on the Natchez paddle steamer, the sound of its wheezing calliope sending tunes like messengers across the Mississippi. I was thick with sweat when I was done, and my knees ached. Even three years ago, four miles wouldn’t have troubled me to such a degree. I was getting old. Soon, I’d be looking at bath-chairs and feeling impending rain in my joints.

Back at the Flaisance, Rachel Wolfe had left a message to say that she would be flying in later that evening. The flight number and the arrival time were listed at the bottom of the message slip. I thought about Joe Bones and decided then that Rachel Wolfe might like some company on the flight down to New Orleans.

I called Angel and Louis.

The Aguillard family collected the bodies of Tante Marie, Tee Jean and Florence later that day. A firm of Lafayette undertakers placed Tante Marie’s coffin into a wide-back hearse. Tee Jean and Florence lay side by side in a second.

The Aguillards, led by the eldest son, Raymond, and accompanied by a small group of family friends, followed the hearses in a trio of pick-up trucks, dark-skinned men and women seated on pieces of sacking amid machine parts and farm tools. I stayed behind them as they slipped from the highway and made their way down the rutted track, past Tante Marie’s where the police tape fluttered lightly in the breeze, and on to the house of Raymond Aguillard.

He was a tall, large-boned man in his late forties or early fifties, running to fat now but still an imposing figure. He wore a dark cotton suit, a white shirt and a slim black tie. His eyes were red-rimmed from crying. I had seen him briefly at Tante Marie’s the night the bodies were found, a strong man trying to hold his family together in the face of violent loss.

He spotted me as the coffins were unloaded and carried towards the house, a small group of men struggling with Tante Marie. I stood out, since I was the only white face in the crowd. A woman, probably one of Tante Marie’s daughters, shot me a cold look as she passed by, a pair of older women at each shoulder. When the bodies had been carried into the house, a raised, slatted-wood building not unlike the home of Tante Marie herself, Raymond kissed a small cross around his neck and walked slowly towards me.

‘I know who you are,’ he said, as I extended my hand. He paused for a moment before taking it in a short, firm grip.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘sorry about it all.’

He nodded. ‘I know that.’ He walked on, past the white fence at the boundary of the property, and stood by the side of the road, staring out at the empty stretch of track. A pair of mallards flew overhead, their wing-beats slowing as they approached the water below. Raymond watched them with a kind of envy, the envy that a man deeply grieving feels for anything untouched by his sorrow.

‘Some of my sisters, they think maybe you brought this man with you. They think you got no right to be here.’

‘Is that what you think?’

He didn’t answer. Then: ‘She felt him comin’. Maybe that’s why she sent Florence to the party, to get her away from him. And that’s why she sent for you. She felt him comin’ and I think she knowed who he was. Deep down, I think she knowed.’ His voice sounded thick in his throat.

He fingered the cross gently, rubbing his thumb back and forth along its length. I could see that it had originally been ornately carved – it was still possible to discern some details of spirals at its edges – but for the most part it had been rubbed smooth by the action of this man’s hand over many years.

‘I don’t blame you for what happened to my momma and my brother and sister. My momma, she always done what she believed was right. She wanted to find that girl and to stop the man that killed her. And that Tee Jean . . .’ He smiled sadly. ‘The policeman said that he’d been hit three, maybe four times from behind, and there were still bruises on his knuckles where he tried to fight this man.’

Raymond coughed before he spoke again and then breathed deeply through his mouth, his head tipped back slightly like a man who has run a great distance in pain.

‘He took your woman, your child?’ he said. It was as much a statement as a question, but I answered it anyway.

‘Yes, he took them. Like you said, Tante Marie believed that he took another girl too.’

He dug the thumb and forefinger of his right hand into the corners of his eyes and blinked out a tear.

‘I know. I seen her.’

The world around me seemed to grow silent as I shut out the noise of the birds, the wind in the trees, the distant sound of water splashing on the banks. All I wanted to hear was Raymond Aguillard’s voice.

‘You saw the girl?’

‘That’s what I said. Down by a slough in Honey Island, three nights ago. Night before my momma died. Seen her other times too. My sister’s husband, he got himself some traps down there.’ He shrugged. Honey Island was a nature reserve. ‘You a superstitious man, Mista Parker?’

‘I’m getting there,’ I replied. ‘You think that’s where she is, down in Honey Island?’

‘Could be. My momma’d say she didn’t know where she was, just that she was. She knew the girl was out there somewhere. I just don’t know how, Mista Parker. I never did understand my momma’s gift. But then I seen her, a figure out by a cypress grove and a kinda darkness over her face, like a hand was coverin’ it, and I knowed it was her.’

He looked down and, with the toe of his shoe, began picking at a stone embedded in the dirt. When he eventually freed it, sending it skidding into the grass, tiny black ants scurried and crawled from the hole, the entrance to their nest now fully exposed.

‘Other people seen her too, I hear, folks out fishin’ or checkin’ the hooch they got distillin’ in a shack somewheres.’ He watched as the ants swarmed around his foot, some of them climbing on to the rim of his sole. Gently, he lifted his foot, shook it, and moved it away.

There were seventy thousand acres of Honey Island, Raymond explained. It was the second-biggest swamp in Louisiana, forty miles long and eight miles wide. It was part of the flood plain of the Pearl river, which acts as a boundary line between Louisiana and Mississippi. Honey Island was better preserved than the Florida Everglades: there was no dredging allowed, no draining or timber-farming, no development and no dams, and parts of Honey Island weren’t even navigable. Half of it was state-owned; some was the responsibility of the Nature Conservancy. If someone was trying to dump a body in a place where it was unlikely to be discovered, then, tourist boats apart, Honey Island sounded like a good place to do it.

Raymond gave me directions to the slough and drew a rough map on the back of an opened-out Marlboro pack.

‘Mista Parker, I know you’re a good man and that you’re sorry for what happened, but I’d be grateful to you if you didn’t come out here no more.’ He spoke softly, but there was no mistaking the force in his voice. ‘And maybe you’d be kind enough not to turn up at the burial. My family, it’s gonna take us a long time to get over this.’

Then he lit the last cigarette from the pack, nodded a goodbye and walked back to his house trailing smoke behind him.

I watched him as he walked away. A woman with steel-grey hair came out on to the porch and placed her arm around his waist when he reached her. He put a big arm around her shoulders and held her to him as they walked into the house, the screen door closing gently behind them. And I thought of Honey Island, and the secrets that it held beneath its green waters, as I drove away from the Aguillard house, the dust rising behind me.

As I drove, the swamp was already preparing to reveal its secrets. Honey Island would yield a body within twenty-four hours, but it would not be the body of a girl.

Chapter Thirty-Five

I arrived early at Moisant Field so I browsed around the bookstore for a while, taking care to avoid tripping over the piles of Anne Rice novels.

I had been sitting in the arrivals hall for about an hour when Rachel Wolfe walked through the gates. She was wearing dark blue jeans, white sneakers and a red and white Polo Sport top. Her red hair hung loose on her shoulders and her makeup had been so carefully applied that it was almost indiscernible.

The only luggage she carried herself was a brown leather shoulder bag. The rest of what I took to be her belongings were being toted by Angel and Louis, who walked slightly self-consciously at either side of her, Louis in a cream double-breasted suit with a snow-white dress shirt open at the neck, Angel in jeans, battered Reebok hi-tops and a green check shirt that had not felt an iron since it left the factory many years before.

‘Well, well,’ I said, as they stood before me. ‘All human life is here.’

Angel raised his right hand, from which dangled three thick piles of books, tied together by string. The ends of his fingers were turning purple. ‘We brought half the New York Public Library with us as well.’ He groaned. ‘Tied with string. I ain’t seen books tied with string since Little House on the Prairie stopped reruns.’

Louis, I noticed, was carrying a lady’s pink umbrella and a cosmetics case. He had the look of a man who is trying to pretend that a dog isn’t screwing his leg. ‘Don’t say a word, man,’ he warned. ‘Not a word.’

Between them, the two men also carried two suitcases, two leather travelling bags and a suit-carrier. ‘Car’s parked outside,’ I said, as I walked with Rachel to the exit. ‘Might be just enough room for the bags.’

‘They paged me at the airport,’ whispered Rachel. ‘They were very helpful.’ She giggled and glanced over her shoulder. Behind us, I heard the unmistakable sound of Angel tripping on a bag and swearing loudly.

We ditched the luggage at the Flaisance, despite Louis’s stated preference for the Fairmont at University Place. The Fairmont was where the Republicans usually stayed when they hit New Orleans, which was part of its appeal for Louis. He was the only gay, black, Republican criminal I knew.

‘Gerald Ford stayed at the Fairmont,’ he lamented, as he surveyed the small suite he was to share with Angel.

‘So?’ I countered. ‘Paul McCartney stayed at the Richelieu and you don’t hear me demanding to stay there.’ I left the door open and headed back to my own room for a shower.

‘Paul who?’ said Louis.

We ate in the Grill Room of the Windsor Court on Gravier Street, in deference to Louis’s wishes, its marbled floors and heavy Austrian drapes strangely uncomfortable for me after the informal setting of the smaller eateries in the Quarter. Rachel had changed into dark trousers and a black jacket over a red blouse. It looked fine but the hot night air had taken its toll on her and she was still pulling the damp cloth of her blouse away from her body as we waited for the main courses.

As we ate, I explained to them about Joe Bones and the Fontenots. They would be a matter for Angel, Louis and me. Rachel remained silent for much of our conversation, interjecting occasionally to clarify things that had been said by Woolrich or Morphy. She scribbled notes in a small, wire-bound notebook, her handwriting neat and even. At one point her hand brushed my bare arm lightly and she left it there for an instant, her skin warm against mine.

I watched Angel pulling at his lip as he considered what I had said. ‘This Remarr must be pretty dumb, dumber than our guy at least,’ he said eventually.

‘Because of the print?’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Careless, very careless.’ He wore the dissatisfied look of a respected theologian who has seen someone bring his calling into disrepute by identifying Jesus as an alien.

Rachel spotted the look. ‘It seems to bother you a lot,’ she commented. I glanced at her. She had an amused expression on her face, but her eyes were calculating and slightly distant. She was playing over in her mind what I had told her, even as she engaged Angel in a conversation that he would usually have avoided. I waited to see how he would respond.

He smiled at her and tilted his head. ‘I have a certain professional interest in these things,’ he admitted. He cleared a space in front of him and held up his hands before us.

‘Anyone doing a B & E job – that’s breaking and entering, for the benefit of our more respectable listener – needs to take certain precautions,’ began Angel. ‘The first and most obvious is to make sure that he – or she, B & E being an equal-opportunities profession – doesn’t leave any fingerprints. So what do you do?’

‘You wear gloves,’ said Rachel. She leaned forward now, enjoying the lesson and putting aside any other thoughts.

‘Right. Nobody, no matter how dumb, enters a place he shouldn’t be without wearing gloves. Otherwise, you leave visuals, you leave latents, you pretty much sign your name and confess to the crime.’

Visuals are the visible marks left on surfaces by a dirty or bloody hand, latents the invisible marks left by natural secretions of the skin. Visuals can be photographed or lifted using adhesive tape, but latents need to be dusted, typically with a chemical reagent like iodine vapour or ninhydrin solution. Electrostatic and fluorescence techniques are also useful and, in the search for latents on human skin, specialised X-ray photography can be used.

But if what Angel had said was correct, Remarr was too much of a professional to risk a job without gloves and then to leave not merely a latent, but a visual. He must have been wearing gloves, but something had gone wrong.

‘You working it through in your head, Bird?’ smirked Angel.

‘Go on, Sherlock, baffle us with your brilliance,’ I responded.

His smirk widened to a grin, and he continued, ‘It’s possible to get a fingerprint from inside a glove, assuming you have the glove. Rubber or plastic gloves are best for obtaining prints: your hands get sweaty under them.

‘But what most people don’t know is that the exterior surface of a glove can act like a fingerprint as well. Say it’s a leather glove, then you got wrinkles, you got holes, you got scars, you got tears and no two leather gloves are gonna be the same. Now, in the case of this guy Remarr, what we have is a print and no gloves. Unless Remarr can’t tie his shoelaces without falling over, we know that he was probably wearing gloves, but he still manages to leave a print. It’s a mystery.’ He made a small, exploding gesture with his hands, like a magician making a rabbit disappear in a puff of smoke, then his face became serious.

‘My guess is that Remarr was wearing only a single pair of gloves, probably latex. He imagined this was going to be an easy job: either he was gonna off the old lady and her son, or he was gonna put the frighteners on her, maybe leave a calling card in the house. Since the son, from what I hear, wasn’t the kind of guy to let anyone frighten his momma, I’d say Remarr went in there thinking that he might have to kill someone.

‘But when he arrives, they’re either dead or they’re in the process of being killed. Again, my guess is they were already dead. If Remarr stumbled in on the killer, Remarr would be dead as well.

‘So Remarr is going in, his one pair of gloves on, and maybe he spots the kid and it throws him. He probably starts to sweat. He goes into the house and finds the old lady. Bam! Second shock, but he goes to take a closer look, steadying himself as he leans over her. He touches blood and maybe considers wiping it away, but he figures wiping it away will only attract more attention to it and, anyway, he’s got his gloves.

‘But the problem with latex gloves is that one pair isn’t enough. You wear them for too long and your prints start coming through. You get thrown, you start to sweat, the prints are gonna come through faster. Could be Remarr has been eating before he came out, maybe some fruit or some kind of pasta with vinegar. That causes extra moisture on the skin, so now Remarr is in real trouble. He’s left a print he doesn’t even know about, and now the cops, the feds and difficult people like our good selves want to ask him about it. Ta-da!’ He gave a small bow from the waist. Rachel gave him a round of applause.

‘Fascinating,’ said Rachel. ‘You must read a lot of books.’ Her tone was heavily ironic.

‘He does, then Barnes and Noble gonna be grateful that their stolen stock being put to good use,’ remarked Louis.

Angel ignored him. ‘Maybe I dabbled in these things, in my younger days.’

‘Did you learn anything else, in your “younger” days?’ smiled Rachel.

‘Lot of things, some of them hard lessons,’ said Angel, with feeling. ‘Best thing I ever learned: don’t hold on to nothin’. If you don’t have it, can’t nobody prove you took it.

‘And I have been tempted. There was this figure of a knight on a horse once. French, seventeenth century. Gold inlaid with diamonds and rubies. About this tall.’ He held the palm of his hand flat about six inches above the table. ‘It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.’ His eyes lit up at the memory. He looked like a child.

He sat back in his chair. ‘But I let it go. In the end, you have to let things go. The things you regret are the things you hold on to.’

‘So is nothing worth holding on to?’ asked Rachel.

Angel looked at Louis for a time. ‘Some things are, yeah, but they ain’t made of gold.’

‘That’s so romantic,’ I said. Louis made choking noises as he tried to swallow his water.

Before us, the remains of our coffee lay cold in the cups. ‘Do you have anything to add?’ I asked Rachel, when Angel had finished playing to the gallery.

She glanced back through her notes. Her brow furrowed slightly. She held a glass of red wine in one hand and the light caught it, reflecting a streak of red across her breast like a wound.

‘You said you had pictures, crime-scene pictures?’ she asked.

I nodded.

‘Then I’d like to hold off until I’ve had a chance to see them. I have an idea based on what you told me over the phone, but I’d prefer to keep it to myself until I’ve seen the pictures and done a little more research. I do have one thing, though.’ She took a second notebook from her bag and flicked through the pages to where a yellow Post-it note stuck out. ‘“I lusted for her, but that has always been a weakness of my kind,”’ she read. ‘“Our sin was not pride, but lust for humanity.”’

She turned to me, but I already recognised the words. ‘They were the words this “Travelling Man” said to you when he called,’ she said. I was aware of Angel and Louis moving forward in their chairs. ‘It took a theologian in the Archbishop’s palace to track down the reference. It’s pretty obscure, at least if you’re not a theologian.’ She paused, then asked, ‘Why was the Devil banished from heaven?’

‘Pride,’ said Angel. ‘I remember Sister Agnes telling us that.’

‘It was pride,’ said Louis. He glanced at Angel. ‘I remember Milton telling us that.’

‘Anyway,’ said Rachel pointedly, ‘you’re right, or partially right. From Augustine onwards, the Devil’s sin is pride. But before Augustine, there was a different viewpoint. Up until the fourth century, the Book of Enoch was considered to be part of the Biblical canon. Its origins are a matter of dispute – it may have been written in Hebrew or Aramaic, or a combination of both – but it does seem to have provided a basis for some concepts that are still found in the Bible today. The Last Judgement may have been based on the Similitudes of Enoch. The fiery hell ruled by Satan also appears for the first time in Enoch.

‘What is interesting for us is that Enoch takes a different view of the Devil’s sin.’ She turned a page of her notebook and began to read again. ‘“And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose . . .”’

She looked up again. ‘That’s from Genesis, which derives from a similar source as Enoch. The “sons of God” were the angels, who gave in to sexual lust against the will of God. The leader of the sinning angels, the Devil, was cast into a dark hole in the desert and his accomplices were thrown into the fire for their punishment. Their offspring, “evil spirits upon the earth”, went with them. The martyr Justin believed that the children of the union between angels and human women were responsible for all evil on the earth, including murder.

‘In other words, lust was the sin of the Devil. Lust for humanity, the “weakness of our kind”.’ She closed the notebook and permitted herself a small smile of triumph.

‘So this guy believes he’s a demon,’ said Angel eventually.

‘Or the offspring of an angel,’ added Louis. ‘Depends on how you look at it.’

‘Whatever he is, or thinks he is, the Book of Enoch is hardly likely to turn up on Oprah’s book choice,’ I said. ‘Any idea what his source might have been?’

Rachel reopened the notebook. ‘The most recent reference I could find is a nineteen eighty-three New York edition: The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: Enoch, edited by a guy called Isaac, appropriately enough,’ she said. ‘There’s also an older translation from Oxford, published in nineteen thirteen by R. H. Charles.’

I noted the names. ‘Maybe Morphy or Woolrich can check with the University of New Orleans, see if anyone local has been expressing an interest in the obscure end of Biblical studies. Woolrich might be able to extend the search to the other universities. It’s a start.’

We paid the bill and left. Angel and Louis headed off towards the lower Quarter to check out the gay nightlife while Rachel and I walked back to the Flaisance. We didn’t speak for a time, both of us conscious that we were on the verge of some intimacy.

‘I get the feeling that I shouldn’t ask what those two currently do for a living,’ said Rachel, as we paused at a crossing.

‘Probably not. It’s best to view them as independent operators and leave it at that.’

She smiled. ‘They seem to have a certain loyalty to you. It’s unusual. I’m not sure that I understand it.’

‘I’ve done things for them in the past but, if there ever was a debt, it was paid a long time ago. I owe them a lot more now.’

‘But they’re still here. They still help when they’re asked.’

‘I don’t think that’s entirely because of me. They do what they do because they like it. It appeals to their sense of adventure, of danger. In their own separate ways, they’re both dangerous men. I think that’s why they came: they sensed danger and they wanted to be part of it.’

‘Maybe they see something of that in you.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe they do.’

We walked through the courtyard of the Flaisance, stopping only to pat the dogs. Her room was three doors down from mine. Between our rooms were the room shared by Angel and Louis and one unoccupied single room. She opened the door and stood at the threshold. From inside, I could feel the coolness of the air conditioning and could hear it pumping at full power.

‘I’m still not sure why you’re here,’ I said. My throat felt dry and part of me was not certain that it wanted to hear an answer.

‘I’m still not sure either,’ she said. She stood on her toes and kissed me gently, softly on the lips, and then she was gone.

I went to my room, took a book of Sir Walter Ralegh’s writings from my bag and headed back out to the Napoleon House, where I took a seat by the portrait of the Little Corporal. I didn’t want to lie on my bed, conscious of the presence of Rachel Wolfe so near to me. I was excited and troubled by her kiss, and by the thought of what might follow.

Almost until the very end, Susan and I had enjoyed an incredible intimacy together. When my drinking truly began to take its toll on us, that intimacy had disintegrated. When we made love it was no longer totally giving. Instead, we seemed to circle each other warily in our lovemaking, always holding something back, always expecting trouble to rear its head and cause us to spring back into the security of our own selves.

But I had loved her. I had loved her until the end and I still loved her now. When the Travelling Man had taken her he had severed the physical and emotional ties between us, but I could still feel the remains of those ties, raw and pulsing at the very extremity of my senses.

Maybe this is common to all those who lose someone whom they have loved deeply. Making contact with another potential partner, another lover, becomes an act of reconstruction, a building not only of a relationship but also of oneself.

But I felt myself haunted by my wife and child. I felt them, not only as an emptiness or a loss, but as an actual presence in my life. I seemed to catch glimpses of them at the edges of my existence, as I drifted from consciousness to sleep, from sleep to waking. Sometimes, I tried to convince myself that they were simply phantoms of my guilt, creations born of some psychological imbalance.

Yet I had heard Susan speak through Tante Marie and, once, like a memory from a delirium, I had awakened in the darkness to feel her hand on my face and I had caught a trace of her scent in the empty bed beside me. More than that, I saw traces of them in every young wife, in each female child. In a young woman’s laughter, I heard the voice of my wife. In the footsteps of a little girl, I heard the echo of my daughter’s feet falling.

I felt something for Rachel Wolfe, a mixture of attraction and gratitude and desire. I wanted to be with her but only, I thought, when my wife and child were at peace.

Chapter Thirty-Six

David Fontenot died that night. His car, a vintage Jensen Interceptor, was found on 190, the road that skirts Honey Island and leads down to the shores of the Pearl. The front tyres of the car were flat and the doors were hanging open. The windscreen had been shattered and the interior was peppered with 9mm holes.

The two St Tammany cops followed a trail of broken branches and flattened scrub to an old trapper’s shack made of bits of salvaged wood, its tin roof almost obscured by overhanging Spanish moss. It overlooked a bayou lined with gum trees, its waters thick with lime-green duckweed and ringing with the sound of mallards and wood ducks.

The shack had been abandoned for a long time. Few people now trapped in Honey Island. Most had moved further out into the bayous, hunting beaver, deer and, in some cases, alligators.

There were noises coming from the shack as the party approached, sounds of scuffling and thudding and heavy snorting drifting through the open door.

‘Hog,’ said one of the deputies.

Beside him, the local bank official who had called them in flicked the safety on his Ruger rifle.

‘Shit, that sure won’t be no good against no hog,’ said the second deputy. The local, a thick-set, balding man in a Tulane Green Wave T-shirt and an almost unused hunting jacket, reddened. He was carrying a 77V with a telescopic sight, what they used to call in Maine a ‘varmint rifle’. It was good for small game and some police forces even used it as a sniper rifle, but it wouldn’t stop a feral hog first time unless the shot was perfect.

They were only a few feet away from the shack when the hog sensed them. It erupted from the open door, its tiny, vicious eyes wild and blood dripping from its snout. The man with the Ruger dived into the bayou waters to avoid it as it came at him. The hog spun, cornered at the water’s edge by the party of armed men, then lowered its head and charged again.

There was an explosion in the bayou, then a second, and the hog went down. Most of the top of its head was gone and it twitched briefly on the ground, pawing at the dirt, until eventually it ceased to move. The deputy blew smoke theatrically from the long barrel of a Colt Anaconda, ejected the spent .44 Magnum cartridges with the ejector rod, then reloaded.

‘Jesus,’ said the voice of his partner. He was standing in the open doorway of the shack, his gun by his side. ‘Hog sure got at him but it’s Dave Fontenot all right.’

The hog had ruined most of Fontenot’s face and part of his right arm was gnawed away, but even the damage caused by the hog couldn’t disguise the fact that someone had forced David Fontenot from his car, hunted him through the trees and then cornered him in the shack, where he was shot in the groin, the knees, the elbows and the head.

‘Mon,’ said the hog-killer, exhaling deeply. ‘When Lionel hears about this, there’s gonna be hell to pay.’

I learned most of what had taken place during a hurried telephone conversation with Morphy and a little more from WDSU, the local NBC affiliate. Afterwards, Angel, Louis and I breakfasted at Mother’s on Poydras Street. Rachel had barely worked up the energy to answer the phone when we called her room, and had decided to sleep on and eat later in the morning.

Louis, dressed in an ivory-coloured linen suit and a white T-shirt, shared my bacon and homemade biscuits, washed down with strong coffee. Angel opted for ham, eggs and grits.

‘Old folks eat grits, Angel,’ said Louis. ‘Old folks and the insane.’

Angel wiped a white grit trail from his chin and gave Louis the finger.

‘He’s not so eloquent first thing in the morning,’ said Louis. ‘Rest of the day, he don’t have no excuse.’

Angel gave Louis the finger again, scraped the last of the grits from the bowl and pushed it away. ‘So, you figure Joe Bones took a pre-emptive strike against the Fontenots?’ he said

‘Looks that way,’ I replied. ‘Morphy figures he used Remarr to do the job – pulled him out of hiding then squirrelled him away again. He wouldn’t entrust a job like that to anyone else. But I don’t understand what David Fontenot was doing out by Honey Island without any back-up. He must have known that Joe Bones would take a crack at him if the opportunity arose.’

‘Could be one of his own people set him up, hauled him out there on some dead-end pretext and let Joe Bones know he was coming?’ said Angel.

It sounded plausible. If someone had drawn Fontenot out to Honey Island, then it must have been someone he trusted enough to make the trip. More to the point, that someone must have been offering something that Fontenot wanted, something to make him risk the drive to the reserve late at night.

I said nothing to Angel or Louis, but I was troubled that both Raymond Aguillard and David Fontenot had, in their own different ways, drawn my attention to Honey Island in a period of less than one day. I thought that, after I had spoken to Joe Bones, I might have to disturb Lionel Fontenot in his time of grief.

My cellphone rang. It was the desk clerk from the Flaisance, informing us that a delivery addressed to a ‘Mr Louis’ had arrived and a courier was waiting for us to sign. We took a taxi back to the hotel. Outside, a black transit van was parked half on the kerb.

‘Courier,’ said Louis, but there were no markings on the van, nothing to identify it as a commercial vehicle.

In the lobby, the desk clerk sat nervously, watching a huge black man who was squeezed into an easy chair. He was shaven-headed and wearing a black T-shirt with ‘Klan Killer’ written in jagged white writing across the chest. His black combat trousers were tucked into nine-hole army boots. At his feet lay a long steel container, locked and bolted.

‘Brother Louis,’ he said, rising. Louis took out his wallet and handed over three hundred-dollar bills. The man tucked the money into the thigh pocket of his combats, removed a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses from the same pocket and put them on before strolling out into the sunlight.

Louis motioned to the container. ‘If you gentlemen would like to take that up to the room,’ he said. Angel and I took an end each and followed him up to the suite. The case was heavy and something inside rattled as we walked.

‘Those UPS couriers are sure getting bigger,’ I said, as I waited for him to open the door.

‘It’s a specialised service,’ said Louis. ‘There are some things the airlines just wouldn’t understand.’

When he had closed and locked the door behind us, he took a set of keys from the pocket of his suit and opened the case.

It was separated into three layers, which opened up like those in a tool kit. On the first layer were the constituent parts of a Mauser SP66, a three-round heavy-barrelled sniper rifle with a combined muzzle brake and flash hider. The parts were packed in a removable case. Beside it, a SIG P226 pistol and a belt holster lay in a fitted compartment.

In the second compartment sat two Calico M-960A mini-subs, made in the good old US of A, each hand-held sub fitted with a short barrel which extended less than an inch and a half beyond the fore-end. With the stock retracted, each gun measured a little over two feet in length and, empty, weighed just under five pounds. They were exceptionally lethal little guns, with a rate of fire of seven hundred and fifty rounds per minute. The third compartment contained an array of ammunition, including four one-hundred-round magazines of 9mm Parabellum for the subs.

‘Christmas present?’ I asked.

‘Yup,’ said Louis, loading a fifteen-round magazine into the butt of the SIG. ‘I’m hoping to get a rail gun for my birthday.’

He handed Angel the case containing the Mauser, slipped on the belt holster and inserted the SIG. He then relocked the case and went into the bathroom. As we watched, he removed the panelling from beneath the sink with a screwdriver and shoved the case into the gap before replacing the panel. When he was satisfied that it was back in place, we left.

‘You think Joe Bones will be pleased to see a bunch of strangers show up on his doorstep?’ asked Angel, as we walked to my rental.

‘We ain’t strangers,’ said Louis. ‘We’re just friends he ain’t met yet.’

Joe Bones owned three properties in Louisiana, including a weekend house at Cypremort Point where his presence must have made the more respectable weekenders, with their expensive holiday houses bearing jokey names like Eaux-Asis and End of the Trail, distinctly uneasy.

His city residence lay across from Audubon Park, almost opposite the bus stop for the shuttle bus that took tourists to the New Orleans Zoo. I had taken a trip on the St Charles streetcar to inspect the house, a brilliantly white confection adorned with black wrought-iron balconies and a cupola topped with a gold weather-vane. Finding Joe Bones inside a place like that was like finding a cockroach in a wedding cake. In the carefully maintained garden, a flower I couldn’t identify bloomed lushly. Its scent was sickly and heavy, its flower so large and red that it seemed more rotten than blooming, as if the flowers themselves would suddenly burst and send thick fluid down the branches of the plant, poisoning the aphids.

Joe Bones had deserted the house for the summer in favour of a restored plantation house out in West Feliciana Parish, over one hundred miles north of New Orleans. As impending hostilities with the Fontenots grew more and more likely, the decision to remain in West Feliciana allowed him to defend the country house with more force than he could in the city.

It was a white, eight-columned mansion set on about forty acres, bordered at two sides by an expanse of river flowing south towards the Mississippi. Four large windows looked out on to a wide gallery and the house was topped by two dormer windows set into its roof. An avenue of oaks led from a black iron gate through grounds set with camellias and azaleas until the trees stopped before a wide expanse of lawn. On the lawn, a small group of people stood around a barbecue or lounged on iron lawn furniture.

I spotted three security cameras within ten feet of the gate when we drew up, side-on. We had dropped Angel about half a mile back after cruising by the house once already, and I knew he was already making for the stand of cypress that stood opposite the gate. In the event of anything going down with Joe Bones, I decided that I had a better chance of dealing with it with Louis rather than Angel by my side.

A fourth camera overlooked the gate itself. There was no intercom and the gate remained resolutely closed, even when Louis and I leaned against the car and waved.

After two or three minutes a converted golf cart came from behind the house and hummed down the oak-lined avenue towards us. Three men in chinos and sports shirts stepped from it. They made no attempt to hide their Steyr machine pistols.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘We’re here to see Joe Bones.’

‘There ain’t no Joe Bones here,’ said one of the men. He was tanned and short, no more than five-six. His hair was braided tightly against his scalp, giving him a reptilian appearance.

‘How about Mr Joseph Bonnano, is he there?’

‘What are you, cops?’

‘We’re concerned citizens. We were hoping Mr Bones would make a donation to the David Fontenot funeral fund.’

‘He already gave,’ said the guy by the golf cart, a fatter version of the lizard man. His colleagues at the gate laughed fit to burst a gut.

I moved closer to the gate. Lizard Man’s gun came up quickly.

‘Tell Joe Bones that Charlie Parker is here, that I was in the Aguillard house on Sunday night and that I’m looking for Remarr. You think Funny Man back there can remember all that?’

He stepped back from the gate and, without taking his eyes off us, relayed what I had said to the guy by the golf cart. He took a walkie-talkie from the rear seat, spoke into it for a moment and then nodded at Lizard Man. ‘He says let ’em through, Ricky.’

‘Okay,’ said Ricky, taking a remote signaller from his pocket, ‘step back from the gate, turn around and put your hands against the car. You packing, then tell me now. I find anything you haven’t told me about, I put a bullet in your head and feed you to the ’gators.’

We owned up to a Smith & Wesson and a SIG between us. Louis threw in an ankle knife for good measure. We left the car at the gate and walked behind the golf cart towards the house. One man sat in the back with his pistol pointing at us while Ricky walked behind us.

As we neared the lawn I could smell shrimp and chicken cooking on the barbecue. An iron table held an assortment of spirits and glasses. Abita and Heineken lay in a steel cooler packed with ice.

From the side of the house came a low growl, deep with viciousness and menace. At the end of a strong chain, which was anchored to a bolt set in concrete, was a huge animal. It had the thick coat of a wolf, flecked with the colouring of an Alsatian. Its eyes were bright and intelligent, which rendered its obvious savagery all the more threatening. It looked like it weighed at least one hundred and eighty pounds. Each time it tugged at its chain, it threatened to wrench the bolt from the ground.

I noticed that it seemed to be directing most of its attention at Louis. Its eyes focused on him intently and at one point it raised itself up on its hind legs in its efforts to strike at him. Louis looked at it with the detached interest of a scientist finding a curious new type of bacteria growing in his Petri dish.

Joe Bones speared a piece of spiced chicken with a fork and placed it on a china plate. He was only slightly taller than Ricky, with long dark hair swept back from his forehead. His nose had been broken at least once and a small scar twisted his upper lip on the left side. His white shirt was open to the waist and hung over a pair of Lycra running shorts. His stomach was hard and muscular, his chest and arms slightly overdeveloped for a man of his height. He looked mean and intelligent, like the animal on the chain, which probably explained how he had lasted for ten years at the top of the heap in New Orleans.

He placed some tomatoes, lettuce and cold rice mixed with peppers beside the chicken and handed the plate to a woman seated near by. She was older than Joe, I guessed, probably in her early or mid-forties. There was no darkness at her blonde roots and she wore little or no makeup, although her eyes were obscured by a pair of Wayfarers. She wore a short-sleeved silk robe over a white blouse and white shorts. Like Joe Bones, she was barefoot. To one side of them stood two more men in shirts and chinos, each armed with a machine pistol. I counted two more on the balcony and one sitting beside the main door to the house.

‘You want something to eat?’ asked Joe Bones. His voice was low, with only a faint trace of Louisiana in it. He looked at me until I responded.

‘No, thanks,’ I said. I noticed that he didn’t offer any to Louis. I think Louis noticed, too.

Joe Bones helped himself to some shrimp and salad, then motioned to the two guards to help themselves to what was left. They took turns to do so, each eating a breast of chicken with his fingers.

‘Those Aguillard murders. A terrible thing,’ said Joe Bones. He waved me towards the only empty seat left after he sat down. I exchanged a look with Louis, shrugged and sat.

‘Excuse me for presuming on an intimacy with you,’ he continued, ‘but I hear that the same man may have been responsible for the deaths of your family.’ He smiled almost sympathetically. ‘A terrible thing,’ he repeated. ‘A terrible thing.’

I held his gaze. ‘You’re well informed about my past.’

‘When someone new comes to town and starts finding bodies in trees, I like to make it my business to find out about them. They might be good company.’ He picked a piece of shrimp from his plate and examined it briefly before starting to eat.

‘I understand you had an interest in purchasing the Aguillards’ land,’ I said.

Joe Bones sucked at a shrimp and placed the tail carefully to one side of his plate before responding. ‘I have a lot of interests, and that wasn’t Aguillard land. Just because some senile fuck decides to make up for a bad life by slipping land to the niggers doesn’t make it nigger land.’ He spat the word ‘nigger’ each time. His shell of courtesy had proved remarkably fragile and he seemed intent upon deliberately provoking Louis. It was an unwise course of action, even with guns around him.

‘It seems that one of your men, Tony Remarr, may have been in the house the night that the Aguillards died. We’d be interested in talking to him.’

‘Tony Remarr is no longer part of my operation,’ said Joe Bones, returning to his formal mode of speech after the burst of profanity. ‘We agreed a mutual parting of the ways and I haven’t seen him in weeks. I had no idea he was in the Aguillard house until the police told me.’

He smiled at me. I smiled back.

‘Did Remarr have anything to do with David Fontenot’s death?’

Joe Bones’s jaw tensed but he kept smiling. ‘I have no idea. I heard about David Fontenot on the news this morning.’

‘Another terrible thing?’ I suggested.

‘The loss of a young life is always terrible,’ he responded. ‘Look, I’m sorry about your wife and kid, I truly am, but I can’t help you. And, frankly, now you’re getting rude, so I’d like you to take your nigger and get the fuck off my property.’

The muscles in Louis’s neck rippled, the only sign he gave that he had heard Joe Bones. Joe Bones leered at him, picked up a piece of chicken and tossed it towards the beast on the chain. It ignored the titbit until his owner snapped his fingers, when it fell on the chicken and devoured it in a single bite.

‘You know what that is?’ asked Joe Bones. He spoke to me, but his body language was directed at Louis. It expressed utter contempt. When I didn’t respond, he continued.

‘It’s called a boerbul. A man named Peter Geertschen, a German, developed it for the army and anti-riot squads in South Africa by crossing a Russian wolf with an Alsatian. It’s a white man’s watchdog. It sniffs out niggers.’ He turned his gaze on Louis and smiled.

‘Careful,’ I said. ‘He might get confused and turn on you.’ Joe Bones jerked in his chair as if he had been hit by a jolt of electricity. His eyes narrowed and searched my face for any indication that I was aware of a double meaning in what I had said. I stared right back at him.

‘You better leave now,’ said Joe Bones, with quiet, obvious menace. I shrugged and stood up, Louis moving close to me as I did so. We exchanged a look.

‘Man got us on the run,’ said Louis.

‘Maybe, but if we leave like this he won’t respect us.’

‘Without respect, a man got nothing,’ agreed Louis.

He picked a plate from the stack on the table and held it above his head. It exploded in a shower of china fragments as the .300 Winchester cartridge impacted and buried itself in the wood of the house behind. The woman in the chair dived to the grass, the two goons moved to cover Joe Bones and three men appeared running from the side of the house as the shot echoed in the air.

Ricky, the Lizard Man, was the first to reach us. He raised the pistol and his finger tightened on the trigger, but Joe Bones struck out at his gun arm, pushing it upwards.

‘No! You dumb fuck, you want to get me killed?’ He scanned the treeline beyond his property, then turned back to me. ‘You come in here, you shoot at me, you scare my woman. The fuck do you think you’re dealing with here?’

‘You said the N-word,’ said Louis quietly.

‘He’s right,’ I agreed. ‘You did say it.’

‘I hear you got friends in New Orleans,’ said Joe Bones, his voice threatening. ‘I got enough troubles without the feds crawling on me, but I see you or your . . .’ He paused, swallowing the word. ‘. . . friend anywhere near me again and I’ll take my chances, you hear?’

‘I hear you,’ I said. ‘I’m going to find Remarr, Joe. If it turns out that you’ve been holding out on us and this man gets away because of it, I’ll come back.’

‘You make us come back, Joe, and we gonna have to hurt your puppy,’ said Louis, almost sorrowfully.

‘You come back and I’ll stake you out on the grass and let him feed on you,’ snarled Joe Bones.

We backed away towards the oak-lined avenue, watching Joe Bones and his men carefully. The woman moved beside him to comfort him, her white clothes stained with grass. She kneaded gently at his trapezius with her carefully manicured hands, but he pushed her away with a hard shove to the chest. There was spittle on his chin.

Behind us, I heard the gate open as we retreated beneath the oaks.

‘I didn’t know Angel was such a good shot,’ I said, as we reached the car. ‘You been giving him lessons?’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Louis. He sounded genuinely shocked.

‘Could he have hit Joe Bones?’

‘Uh-uh. I’m surprised he didn’t hit me.’

Behind us, I heard the door open as Angel slid into the back seat, the Mauser already back in its case.

‘So, we gonna start hangin’ out with Joe Bones, maybe shoot some pool, whistle at girls?’

‘When did you ever whistle at girls?’ asked Louis, bemused, as we pulled away from the gate and headed towards St Francisville.

‘It’s a guy thing,’ said Angel. ‘I can do guy things.’

Chapter Thirty-Seven

It was late afternoon when we got back to the Flaisance, where there was a message waiting from Morphy. I called him at the sheriff’s department and got passed on to a cellphone number.

‘Where you been?’ he asked.

‘Visiting Joe Bones.’

‘Shit, why’d you do a thing like that?’

‘Making trouble, I guess.’

‘I warned you, man. Don’t be screwing with Joe Bones. You go alone?’

‘I brought a friend. Joe didn’t like him.’

‘What’d your friend do?’

‘He got born to black parents.’

Morphy laughed. ‘I guess Joe is kind of sensitive about his heritage, but it’s good to remind him of it now and then.’

‘He threatened to feed my friend to his dog.’

‘Yeah,’ said Morphy, ‘Joe sure does love that dog.’

‘You got something?’

‘Maybe. You like seafood?’

‘No.’

‘Good, then we’ll head out to Bucktown. Great seafood there, best shrimp around. I’ll pick you up in two hours.’

‘Any other reason for seeing Bucktown other than seafood?’

‘Remarr. One of his exes has a pad there. Might be worth a visit.’

Rachel wasn’t in her room when I knocked. The desk clerk said she had gone out to the university campus earlier in the day. He also had a pile of faxes for her, he said. He looked queasily at the curled papers. I was tempted to flick through them but instead I went back to my room, showered and changed, and left a message for Rachel telling her that I’d call her later. I told Angel and Louis where I was going and asked them to watch out for her return. Louis was practising yoga exercises on the bedroom floor. Angel was watching Welcome Back Kotter.

Morphy was on time and we headed north on Canal Boulevard and then west on to Lakeshore Drive. The waters of Lake Pontchartrain sparkled in the early-evening light and, ahead of us, I could see the lights of cars heading towards Mandeville and Covington on the giant Lake Pontchartrain causeway. We passed the marina at West End Park and Morphy pointed out the tree-lined boulevard of the Southern Yacht Club. He had only once set foot in the club, the second oldest in the country, he said, when he was called to arrest a man who had set his business partner’s yacht on fire after he learned that his partner was sleeping with his wife. The burning yacht had illuminated the bar where the firebug sat, nursing a glass of Chivas and waiting patiently for the police to arrest him.

Bucktown was pretty in a quaint sort of way, as long as you liked the smell of fish. I kept the window up to try to limit the damage but Morphy had his rolled right down and was taking deep, sinful breaths. All in all, Bucktown seemed an unlikely place for a man like Remarr to hole up, but that in itself was probably reason enough for him to choose it.

Carole Stern lived in a small camelback house, a single-storey at the front against a two-storey rear, set in a small garden a few blocks off Bucktown’s main street. According to Morphy, Stern worked in a bar on St Charles but was currently serving time for possession of crack with intent to supply. Remarr was rumored to be keeping up the rental payments until she got out. We parked around the corner from the house and we clicked off the safeties of our guns in unison as we stepped from the car.

‘You’re a little out of your territory here, aren’t you?’ I asked Morphy.

‘Hey, we just came out here for a bite to eat and decided to check on the off-chance,’ he said, with an injured look. ‘I ain’t steppin’ on no toes.’

He motioned me towards the front of the house while he took the back. I walked to the front door, which stood on a small raised porch, and peered carefully through the glass. It was caked with dirt, in keeping with the slightly run-down feel of the house itself. I counted five and then tried the door. It opened with a gentle creak and I stepped carefully into the hall. At the far end, I heard the tinkle of glass breaking and saw Morphy’s hand reach in to open the rear door.

The smell was faint, but obvious, like meat that has been left in the sunlight on a warm day. The downstairs rooms were empty and consisted only of a kitchen, a small room with a sofa and an old TV, and a boxroom with a single bed and a closet. The closet contained women’s clothes and shoes. The bed was covered only by a worn mattress.

Morphy took the stairs first. I stayed close behind, both of us with our guns pointing towards the second floor. The smell was stronger here now. We passed a bathroom with a dripping shower head, which had stained the ceramic bath brown. On a sink unit beneath a small mirror stood some shaving foam, blades and a bottle of Boss aftershave.

Three other doors stood partially open. On the right was a woman’s bedroom. It had white sheets, potted plants, which had begun to wither, and a series of Monet prints on the walls. There were cosmetics on a long dressing table and a white fitted closet ran the length of one wall. A window opposite looked out on to a small, overgrown garden.

There were more women’s clothes in the closet, and more shoes. Carole Stern was obviously funding some kind of shopping addiction by selling drugs.

The second door provided the source of the smell. A large open pot sat on a camper stove by a window facing on to the street. It contained scummy water in which a stew of some kind was cooking on a low heat. From the stench, the meat had been allowed to simmer for some time, probably most of the day. It smelt foul, like offal. Two easy chairs stood in the room on a new red carpet. A portable TV with a coat-hanger aerial sat blankly on a small table.

The third room was also at the front of the house facing on to the street, but its door was almost closed. Morphy took one side of the door. I took the other. He counted three and then nudged the door open with his foot and went in fast to the right-hand wall. I moved in low to the left, my gun level with my chest, my finger resting on the trigger.

The setting sun cast a golden glow over the contents of the room: an unmade bed, a suitcase open on the floor, a dressing table, a poster on the wall advertising a concert by the Neville Brothers in Tipitina’s, with the brothers’ signatures scrawled loosely across their images. The carpeted floor felt damp beneath my feet.

Most of the plaster had been removed from the ceiling and the roof beams lay exposed. I guessed Carole Stern had been considering some sort of restoration before her prison sentence put her plans temporarily on hold. At the far end of the room, a series of what looked like climbing ropes had been strung over the beams and used to hold Tony Remarr in position.

His remains glowed with a strange fire in the dying sunlight. I could see the muscles and veins in his legs, the tendons in his neck, the yellow mounds of fatty deposits seeping at his waist, the muscles in his stomach, the shrivelled husk of his penis. Huge masonry nails had been driven into the far wall of the room and he hung partially on them, one beneath each arm, while the ropes took the main weight of his body.

As I moved to the right I could see a third nail in the wall behind his neck, holding his head in place. The head faced to the right, in profile, supported by another nail beneath his chin. In places, his skull gleamed whitely through the blood. His eye sockets were almost empty and his gritted teeth were white against his gums.

Remarr had been totally flayed, carefully posed and hung against the wall. His left hand stretched diagonally outwards and down from his body. A long-bladed knife, like a butcher’s filleting tool but wider, heavier, hung from his hand. It looked like it had been glued in place.

But the viewer’s gaze was drawn, like Tony Remarr’s own blind stare, to the figure’s right hand. It stood at a right angle to his body until it reached the elbow. From there, the forearm was raised vertically, pulled upwards by a rope around the wrist. In the fingers of his right hand and draped over his right arm, Tony Remarr held his own flayed skin. I could see the shape of the arms, the legs, the hair of his scalp, the nipples on his chest. Beneath the scalp, which hung almost at his knees, there were bloody edges where the face had been removed. The bed, the floor, the wall, all were shaded in red.

I looked to my left to see Morphy cross himself and softly say a prayer for the soul of Tony Remarr.

We sat against Morphy’s car drinking coffee from paper cups as the feds and the New Orleans police milled around the Stern house. A crowd of people, some local, some on their way to eat in Bucktown’s seafood joints, hung around the edges of the police cordon waiting to see the body being removed. They were likely to be disappointed: the crime scene was highly organised by the killer and both the police and the feds were anxious to document it fully before allowing the body to be taken away.

Woolrich, his tan suit now restored to its former tarnished glory, came over to us and offered us the remains of a bag of donuts from his suit pocket. Behind the cordon, I could see his own Chevy Nova, a red ’96 model that shone like new.

‘Here, you must be hungry.’ Both Morphy and I declined the offer. I still had visions of Remarr in my head and Morphy looked pale and ill.

‘You speak to the locals?’ asked Woolrich.

We both nodded. We had given lengthy statements to a pair of homicide detectives from Orleans Parish, one of whom was Morphy’s brother-in-law.

‘Then I guess you can go,’ said Woolrich. ‘I’ll want to talk to both of you again, though.’ Morphy wandered around to the driver’s side of his car. I moved to open the passenger door but Woolrich held my arm.

‘You okay?’ he asked.

‘I think so.’

‘It was a good hunch that Morphy followed, but he shouldn’t have brought you along. Durand’s gonna be on my back when he finds out that you were first on another crime scene.’ Durand was the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge in New Orleans. I had never met him but I knew what most SACs were like. They ruled their field offices like kingdoms, assigning agents to squads and giving the go-ahead to operations. The competition for SAC posts was intense. If nothing else, Durand was a tough customer.

‘You’re still at the Flaisance?’

‘Still there.’

‘I’ll drop by. There’s something I want to bounce off you.’

He turned and walked back towards the Stern house. On his way through the gate, he handed the bag of crushed donuts to a pair of patrolmen sitting in their car. They took the bag reluctantly, holding it like it was a bomb. When Woolrich had entered the house, one of them climbed out of the car and threw the donuts in a trash can.

Morphy dropped me at the Flaisance. Before he left, I gave him my cellphone number. He wrote it in a small black notebook, bound tightly with a rubber band. ‘If you’re free tomorrow, Angie’s cooking dinner. It’s worth the drive. You taste her cooking and you won’t regret it.’ The tone of his voice changed. ‘Besides, there’s some things I think we need to discuss.’

I told him it sounded okay, although part of me wanted never to see Morphy, Woolrich or another cop again. He was about to pull away from the kerb when I patted the roof of the car with my palm. Morphy leaned over and rolled down the window. ‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked. Morphy had gone to considerable lengths to involve me, to keep me posted on what was happening. I needed to know why. I think I also needed to know if I could trust him.

He shrugged. ‘The Aguillards died on my beat. I want to get the guy who killed them. You know something about him. He’s come at you, at your family. The feds are conducting their own investigation and are telling us as little as they can. You’re all I got.’

‘Is that it?’ I could see something more in his face, something which was almost familiar.

‘No. I got a wife. I’m starting a family. You know what I’m sayin’?’

I nodded and let it go, but there was something else in his eyes, something that resonated inside me. I patted the roof of the car once again in farewell and watched as he drove away, wondering how badly Morphy wanted absolution for what he might have done.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

As I returned to the Flaisance I felt an overpowering sense of decay which seemed to creep into my nostrils, almost stopping my breathing. It lodged itself beneath my nails and stained my skin. I felt it on the sweat on my back and saw it in the weeds breaking through the cracks in the pavement beneath my feet. It was as if the city was corroding around me. I went to my room and showered under a hot jet until my skin was red and raw, then changed into a sweater and chinos, called Angel and Louis in their room and arranged to meet them in Rachel’s room in five minutes.

She answered the door with an ink-stained hand. She had a pencil tucked behind her ear and a pair of pencils held her red hair back in a bun. There were dark rims under her eyes, which were red from reading.

Her room had been transformed. A Macintosh PowerBook stood open on the room’s only table, surrounded by a mass of paper, books and notes. On the wall above it were diagrams, yellow Post-it notes and a series of what appeared to be anatomy sketches. A pile of faxes lay on the floor by her chair, beside a tray of half-eaten sandwiches, a pot of coffee and a stained cup.

I heard a knock on the door behind me. I opened it to admit Angel and Louis. Angel looked at the wall in disbelief. ‘Guy on the desk already thinks you’re crazy, with all the shit that’s been comin’ in on his fax. He sees this, he’s gonna call the cops.’

Rachel sat back in her chair and pulled the pencils from her bun, releasing her hair. She shook her tresses out with her left hand and then twisted her neck to ease her knotted muscles.

‘So,’ she said, ‘who wants to start?’

I told them about Remarr and, instantly, the tiredness went from Rachel’s face. She made me detail the position of the body twice and then spent a couple of minutes shuffling papers on her desk.

‘There!’ she said, handing me a sheet of paper with a flourish. ‘Is that it?’

It was a black and white illustration, marked at the top of the page, in old lettering: ‘TAB.PRIMERA DEL LIB. SEGVNDO’. At the bottom of the page, in Rachel’s handwriting, was written ‘Valverde 1556’.

The illustration depicted a flayed man, his left foot on a stone, his left hand holding a long knife with a hooked hilt, his right holding his own flayed skin. The outline of his face was visible on the skin and his eyes remained in his sockets but, with those exceptions, the illustration was profoundly similar to the position in which Remarr had been found. The various parts of the body were each marked with Greek letters.

‘That’s it,’ I said quietly. ‘That’s what we found.’

I handed the illustration to Angel and Louis, who examined it in silence.

‘The Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano,’ said Rachel. ‘It was written by the Spaniard Valverde in 1556 as a medical textbook. This drawing –’ She reached out to take the page from Louis and held it up so we could all see it. ‘– is an illustration of the Marsyas myth. Marsyas was a satyr, a follower of the goddess Cybele. He was cursed when he picked up a bone flute discarded by Athene. The flute played itself, because it was still inspired by Athene, and its music was so beautiful that the peasants said it was greater even than that of Apollo himself.

‘Apollo challenged Marsyas to a competition to be judged by the Muses and Marsyas lost because he couldn’t play the flute upside down and sing at the same time. And so Apollo took his revenge on Marsyas. He flayed him alive and nailed his skin to a pine. According to the poet Ovid, at his moment of death Marsyas cried out, “Quid me mihi detrahis?” – “Who is it that tears me from myself?” The artist Titian painted a version of the myth. So did Raphael. My guess is that Remarr’s body will reveal traces of ketamine. To fulfil the myth, the flaying would have to be carried out while the victim was still alive. After all, it’s hard to create a work of art if the subject keeps moving.’

Louis interrupted, ‘But in this picture he looks like he flayed himself. He’s holding the knife and the skin. Why did the killer choose this depiction?’

‘This is just a guess but maybe it’s because, in a sense, Remarr did flay himself,’ I said. ‘He was at the Aguillard house when he shouldn’t have been. I think the Travelling Man was concerned at what he might have seen. Remarr was somewhere he shouldn’t have been, so he was responsible for what happened to him.’

Rachel nodded. ‘It’s an interesting point, but there may be something more to it, given what happened to Tee Jean Aguillard.’ She handed me a pair of papers. The first was a photocopy of the crime-scene photo of Tee Jean. The second was another illustration, this time marked ‘DE DISSECT. PARTIVM’. At the bottom of the page, the date ‘1545’ had been handwritten by Rachel.

The illustration depicted a man crucified against a tree, with a stone wall behind it. His head was cradled by the branches of the tree, his arms spread by further branches. The skin below his chest had been flayed, revealing his lungs, kidneys and heart. Some unidentified organ, probably his stomach, lay on a raised platform beside him. His face was intact but, once again, the illustration matched the posture of Tee Jean Aguillard’s body.

‘Marsyas again,’ said Rachel. ‘Or at least an adaptation of the myth. That’s from Estienne’s De dissectione partium corporis humani, another early textbook.’

‘Are you saying that this guy is killing according to a Greek myth?’ asked Angel.

Rachel sighed. ‘It’s not that simple. I think the myth has resonances for him, for the simple reason that he’s used it twice. But the Marsyas theory breaks down with Tante Marie, and Bird’s wife and child. I found the Marsyas illustrations almost by accident, but I haven’t found a match yet for the other deaths. I’m still looking. The likelihood is that they are also based on early medical textbooks. If that’s the case, then I’ll find them.’

‘It raises the possibility that we’re looking for someone with a medical background,’ I said.

‘Or a knowledge of obscure texts,’ said Rachel. ‘We already know that he has read the Book of Enoch, or some derivative of it. It wouldn’t take a great deal of medical knowledge to carry out the kind of mutilation we’ve found on the bodies so far, but an assumption of some surgical skills, or even some mild familiarity with medical procedures, might not be totally amiss.’

‘What about the blinding and the removal of the faces?’ I asked. I pushed a flashing image of Susan and Jennifer to the back of my mind. ‘Any idea where they fit in?’

Rachel shook her head. ‘I’m still working on it. The face appears to be some form of token for him. Jennifer’s was returned because she died before he could start working on her, I’d guess, but also because he wanted to shock you personally. The removal could also indicate the killer’s disregard for them as individuals, a sign of his disregard for their own status as people. After all, when you remove a person’s face, you take away the most immediate representation of their individuality, their main physical distinguisher.

‘As for the eyes, there is a myth that the image of the killer stays on the retina of the victim. There were lots of myths like that attached to the body. Even at the start of the last century, some scientists were still examining the theory that a murder victim’s body bled when it was in the same room as its killer. I need to do more work on it, then we’ll see.’

She stood up and stretched. ‘I don’t mean to sound callous, but now I want to take a shower. Then I want to go out and get something decent to eat. After that, I want to sleep for twelve hours.’

Angel, Louis and I started to leave but she held up her hand to stop us. ‘There’s just one more thing. I don’t want to give the impression that this is just some freak copying violent images. I don’t know enough about this to make that kind of judgement and I want to consult some people who are more experienced in this area than I am. But I can’t help feeling that there’s some underlying philosophy behind what he’s doing, some pattern that he’s following. Until we find out what that is, I don’t think we’re going to catch him.’

I had my hand on the door handle when there was a knock at the door. I opened it slowly and blocked the view of the room with my body while Rachel cleared away her papers. Woolrich stood before me. In the light from the room, I noticed a thin growth of beard was forming on his face. ‘Clerk told me you might be here if you weren’t in your own room. Can I come in?’

I paused for a moment, then stepped aside. I noticed that Rachel was standing in front of the material on the wall, obscuring it from view, but Woolrich wasn’t interested in her. His eyes had fixed on Louis.

‘I know you,’ he said.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Louis. His eyes were cold.

Woolrich turned to me. ‘You bringing your hired killers to my town, Bird?’

I didn’t reply.

‘Like I said, man, I think you’re making a mistake,’ said Louis. ‘I’m a businessman.’

‘Really? And what kind of business would you be in?’

‘Pest control,’ said Louis.

The air seemed to crackle with tension, until Woolrich turned around and walked from the room. He stopped in the hall and gestured to me. ‘I need to talk to you. I’ll wait for you in the Café du Monde.’

I watched him go, then looked at Louis. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Guess I’m more famous than I thought.’

‘Guess you are,’ I said, and went after Woolrich.

I caught up with him on the street but he said nothing until we were seated and he had a beignet in front of him. He tore off a piece, sprinkling powdered sugar on his suit, then took a long draught of coffee, which half drained the cup and left a brown stain along its sides. ‘C’mon, Bird,’ he said. ‘What are you trying to do here?’ He sounded weary and disappointed. ‘That guy, I know his face. I know what he is.’ He chewed another piece of beignet.

I didn’t reply. We stared at each other until Woolrich looked away. He dusted sugar from his fingers and ordered another coffee. I had hardly touched mine.

‘Does the name Edward Byron mean anything to you?’ he said eventually, when he realised that Louis was not going to be a topic of discussion.

‘It doesn’t ring any bells. Why?’

‘He was a janitor in Park Rise. That’s where Susan had Jennifer, right?’

‘Right.’ Park Rise was a private hospital in Long Island. Susan’s father had insisted that we use it, arguing that its staff were among the best in the world. They were certainly among the best-paid. The doctor who delivered Jennifer earned more in a month than I made in a year.

‘Where’s this leading?’ I asked.

‘Byron was let go – quietly – following the mutilation of a corpse earlier this year. Someone performed an unauthorised autopsy on a female body. Her abdomen was opened and her ovaries and Fallopian tube removed.’

‘No charges were pressed?’

‘The hospital authorities considered it, then decided against it. Surgical gloves containing traces of the dead woman’s blood and tissue were found in a bag in Byron’s locker. He argued that someone was trying to frame him. The evidence wasn’t conclusive – theoretically, someone could have planted that stuff in his locker – but the hospital let him go anyway. No court case, no police investigation, nothing. The only reason we have any record of it is because the local cops were investigating the theft of drugs from the hospital around the same time, and Byron’s name was noted on the report. Byron was dismissed after the thefts began and they pretty much ceased, but he had an alibi each time there were found to be drugs missing.

‘That was the last anyone heard of Byron. We have his social security number, but he hasn’t claimed unemployment, paid tax, dealt with state government or visited a hospital since he was dismissed. His credit cards haven’t been used since October nineteen ninety-six.’

‘What brings his name up now?’

‘Edward Byron is a native of Baton Rouge. His wife – his ex-wife – Stacey still lives there.’

‘Have you spoken to her?’

‘We interviewed her yesterday. She says she hasn’t seen him since last April, that he owes her six months’ alimony. The last cheque was drawn on a bank in East Texas but his old lady thinks he may be living in the Baton Rouge area, or somewhere near by. She says he always wanted to come back here, that he hated New York. We’ve also put out photos of him, taken from his employee record at Park Rise.’

He handed me a blown-up picture of Byron. He was a handsome man, his features marred only by a slightly receding chin. His mouth and nose were thin, his eyes narrow and dark. He had dark brown hair, swept from left to right. He looked younger than thirty-five, his age when the picture was taken.

‘It’s the best lead we’ve got,’ said Woolrich. ‘Maybe I’m telling you because I figure you have a right to know. But I’m telling you something else as well: you keep away from Mrs Byron. We’ve told her not to talk to anyone in case the press get wind of it. Secondly, stay away from Joe Bones. His guy Ricky was caught on one of our taps swearing blue hell about some stunt you pulled today, but you won’t get away with it a second time.’

He laid some money on the table. ‘Your little team back there got anything that might help us?’

‘Not yet. I figured a medical background, maybe a sexual pathology. If I get anything more, I’ll let you know. I’ve got a question for you, though. What drugs were taken from Park Rise?’

He tilted his head to one side and twisted his mouth slightly, as if debating with himself whether or not to tell me.

‘Ketamine hydrochloride. It’s related to PCP.’ I gave no indication that I already knew about the drug. The feds would tear Morphy a new asshole if they knew he had been feeding me details like that, although they must have already had their suspicions. Woolrich paused for a moment and then went on. ‘It was found in the bodies of Tante Marie Aguillard and her son. The killer used it as a form of anaesthetic.’

He spun his coffee cup on its saucer, waiting until it came to rest with the handle pointing in my direction.

‘Are you scared of this guy, Bird?’ he asked quietly. ‘Because I sure am. You remember that conversation we had about serial killers, back when I brought you to meet Tante Marie?’

I nodded.

‘Back then, I thought I’d seen it all. These killers were abusers and rapists and dysfunctionals who had crossed some line, but they were so pathetic that they were still recognisably human. But this one . . .’

He watched a family pass by in a carriage, the driver urging the horse on with the reins while he gave them his own history of Jackson Square. A child, a small, dark-haired boy, was seated at the edge of the family group. He watched us silently as they passed by, his chin resting on his bare forearm.

‘We were always afraid that one would come who was different from the others, who was motivated by something more than a twisted, frustrated sexuality or wretched sadism. We live in a culture of pain and death, Bird, and most of us go through life without ever really understanding that. Maybe it was only a matter of time before we produced someone who understood that better than we did, someone who saw the world as just one big altar on which to sacrifice humanity, someone who believed he had to make an example of us all.’

‘And do you believe that this is him?’

‘“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Isn’t that what the Bhagavadgita says, Bird? “I am become Death.” Maybe that’s what he is: pure Death.’

He moved towards the street. I followed him, then remembered my slip of paper from the previous night. ‘Woolrich, there is one more thing.’ He looked testy as I gave him the references for the Book of Enoch.

‘What the fuck is the Book of Enoch?’

‘It’s part of the Biblical Apocrypha. I think he may have some knowledge of it.’

Woolrich folded the paper and put it in the pocket of his pants. ‘Bird,’ he said, and he almost smiled, ‘sometimes I’m torn between keeping you in touch with what’s happening and not telling you anything.’ He grimaced, then sighed as if to indicate that this was something that just wasn’t worth arguing about. ‘Stay out of trouble, Bird, and tell your friends the same.’ He walked away, to be swallowed up by the evening crowds.

I knocked on Rachel’s door, but there was no reply. I knocked a second time, harder, and I heard some noises from inside the room. She answered the door with a towel wrapped around her body and her hair hidden by a second, smaller towel. Her face was red from the heat of the shower and her skin glowed.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I forgot that you’d be showering.’

She smiled and waved me in.

‘Take a seat. I’ll get dressed and let you buy me dinner.’ She took a pair of grey pants and a white cotton shirt from the bed, picked some matching white underwear from her case and stepped back into the bathroom. She didn’t close the door fully behind her so that we could talk while she dressed.

‘Should I ask what that exchange was about?’ she said.

I walked to her balcony window and looked out on to the street below.

‘What Woolrich said about Louis is true. It’s not as simple as that, maybe, but he has killed people in the past. Now, I’m not so sure. I don’t ask, and I’m not in a position to pass judgement on him. But I trust both Angel and Louis. I asked them to come because I know what they’re good at.’

She came out of the bathroom buttoning her shirt, her damp hair hanging. She dried her hair with a travel dryer, then applied a little makeup. I had seen Susan do the same things a thousand times, but there was a strange intimacy in watching Rachel perform them in front of me. I felt something stir inside me, a tiny yet significant shift in my feelings towards her. She sat on the edge of the bed and slipped her bare feet into a pair of black slingbacks, her finger moving inside each one to ease the progress of her heel. As she leaned foward, moisture glistened on the small of her back. She caught me looking at her and smiled cautiously, as if afraid of misinterpreting what she had seen. ‘Shall we go?’ she said.

I held the door open for her as we left, her shirt brushing my hand with a sound like water sizzling on hot metal.

We ate in Mr B’s on Royal Street, the big mahogany room cool and dark. I had steak, tender and luscious, while Rachel ate blackened redfish, the spices causing her to gasp at the first bite. We talked of little things, of plays and films, of music and reading. It emerged that we had both attended the same performance of The Magic Flute at the Met in ninety-one, both of us alone. I watched her as she sipped her wine, the reflected light playing on her face and dancing in the darkness of her pupils like moonlight seen from a lakeshore.

‘So, you often follow strange men to distant lands?’

She smiled. ‘I bet you’ve been waiting to use that line all your life.’

‘Maybe I use it all the time.’

‘Oh, puh-lease. Next thing you’ll be wielding a club and asking the waiter to step outside.’

‘Okay, guilty as charged. It’s been a while.’

I felt myself redden and caught something playful but uncertain in her glance – a kind of sadness, a fear of hurting and being hurt. Inside me, something twisted and stretched its claws, and I felt a little tear in my heart.

‘I’m sorry. I know almost nothing about you,’ I said quietly.

She reached out gently and brushed along the length of my left hand, from the wrist to the end of the little finger. She followed the curves of my fingers, delicately tracing the lines and whorls of my fingerprints, her touch soft as a leaf. At last, she let her hand rest on the table, the tips of her fingers resting on top of my own, and began to speak.

She was born in Chilson, near the foothills of the Adirondacks. Her father was a lawyer, her mother taught kindergarten. She liked basketball and running, and her prom date got the mumps two days before the prom, so her best friend’s brother went with her instead and tried to feel her breast during ‘Only the Lonely’. She had one brother of her own, Curtis, ten years her elder. For five of his twenty-eight years, Curtis had been a cop. He was two weeks short of his twenty-ninth birthday when he died. ‘He was a detective with the county sheriff’s office, newly promoted. He wasn’t even on duty the day he was killed.’ She spoke without hesitation, not too slowly, not too quickly, as if she had gone over the story a thousand times, examining it for flaws, tracing its beginning, its resolution, cutting all extraneous detail from it until she was left with the gleaming core of her brother’s murder, the hollow heart of his absence.

‘It was a quarter after two, a Tuesday afternoon. Curtis was visiting some girl in Moriah – he always had two or three girls trailing him at any one time. He just broke their hearts. He was carrying a bunch of flowers, pink lilies bought in a store five doors from the bank. He heard some shouting and saw two people come running out of the bank, both armed, both masked, a man and a woman. There was another man sitting in a car, waiting for them to come out.

‘Curtis was drawing his gun when they saw him. They both had sawn-offs and they didn’t hesitate. The man emptied both barrels into him and then, while he lay dying on the ground, the woman finished him off. She shot him in the face, and he was so handsome, so lovely.’

She stopped talking and I knew that this was a story she had told only in her mind, that it was something not to be shared, but to be safeguarded. Sometimes, we need our pain. We need it to call our own.

‘When they caught them, they had three thousand dollars. That was all they got from the bank, all that my brother was worth to them. The woman had been released from an institution the week before. Someone decided that she no longer posed a threat to the community.’

She drained the last of her wine. I signalled for more and she remained silent as the waiter refilled her glass.

‘And here I am,’ she said at last. ‘Now I try to understand, and sometimes I get close. And sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can stop things from happening to other people. Sometimes.’

I found that her hand was now gripped tightly in mine, and I could not recall how that had happened. Holding her hand, I spoke for the first time in many years about leaving New York and the move to Maine with my mother.

‘Is she still alive?’

I shook my head. ‘I got in trouble with a local big-shot named Daddy Helms,’ I said. ‘My grandfather and my mother agreed that I should go away to work for the summer, until things quietened down. A friend of his ran a store in Philly, so I worked there for a while, stacking shelves, cleaning up at night. I slept in a room above the store.

‘My mother began taking physiotherapy for a trapped nerve in her shoulder, except it turned out that she had been misdiagnosed. She had cancer. I think she knew, but she chose not to say anything. Maybe she thought that if she didn’t admit it to herself, she could fool her system into giving her more time. Instead, one of her lungs collapsed as she left the therapist’s office.

‘I came back two days later on a Greyhound bus. I hadn’t seen her in two months and when I tried to find her in the hospital ward, I couldn’t. I had to check the names on the ends of the beds because she had changed so much. She lasted six weeks after that. Towards the end, she became lucid, even with the pain-killers. It happens a lot, I believe. It can fool you into thinking they’re getting better. It’s like the cancer’s small joke. She was trying to draw a picture of the hospital the night before she died, so she would know where she was going when it was time to leave.’

I sipped some water. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why all those things should have come back to me.’

Rachel smiled and I felt her hand tighten again on mine.

‘And your grandfather?’

‘He died eight years ago. He left me his house in Maine, the one I’m trying to fix up.’ I noticed that she didn’t ask me about my father. I guessed that she knew all there was to know.

Later, we walked slowly back through the crowds, the music from the bars blending together into one blast of sound in which familiar tunes could sometimes be identified. When we came to the door of her room we held each other for a time, then kissed softly, her hand on my cheek, before we said goodnight.

Despite Remarr and Joe Bones and my exchanges with Woolrich, I slept peacefully that night, my hand still holding the spectre of her own.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

It was a cool, clear morning and the sound of the St Charles streetcar carried on the air as I ran. A wedding limousine passed me on its way to the cathedral, white ribbons rippling on its hood. I jogged west along North Rampart as far as Perdido, then back through the Quarter along Chartres. The heat was intense, like running with my face in a warm, damp towel. My lungs struggled to pull in the air and my system rebelled, trying to reject it, but still I ran.

I was used to training three or four times each week, alternating circuits for a month or so with a split body-building workout. After a few days outside my training regimen I felt bloated and out of condition, as if my system was full of toxins. Given the choice between exercise and colon cleansers, I opted for exercise as the less uncomfortable option.

Back at the Flaisance I showered and changed the dressing on my wounded shoulder; it still ached a little, but the wounds were closing. Finally, I left a batch of clothes at the local laundry, since I hadn’t figured on staying quite so long in New Orleans and my underwear selection was becoming pretty limited.

Stacey Byron’s number was in the phone book – she hadn’t reverted to her maiden name, at least not as far as the phone company was concerned – so Angel and Louis volunteered to hire a car and take a trip to Baton Rouge to see what they could find out from her, or about her. Woolrich wouldn’t be pleased, but if he wanted her left in peace then he shouldn’t have said anything at all.

Rachel e-mailed details of the kind of illustrations she was seeking to two of her research students in Columbia and to a retired professor in Boston named Father Eric Ward, a former lecturer at Loyola in New Orleans, who specialised in Renaissance culture. Instead of hanging around waiting for a response she decided to come with me to Metairie, where David Fontenot was due to be buried that morning.

We were silent as we drove. The subject of our growing intimacy and what it might imply had not come up between us, but it seemed that we were both acutely aware of it. I could see something of it in Rachel’s eyes when she looked at me. I thought that she could probably see the same in mine.

‘So what else do you want to know about me?’ she asked.

‘I guess I don’t know too much about your personal life.’

‘Apart from the fact that I’m beautiful and brilliant.’

‘Apart from that,’ I admitted.

‘By personal, do you mean sexual?’

‘It’s a euphemism. I don’t want to seem pushy. If it makes you happier you can start with your age, since you didn’t tell me last night. The rest will seem easy by comparison.’

She gave me a twisted grin and the finger. I chose to ignore the finger.

‘I’m thirty-three but I admit to thirty, if the lighting is right. I have a cat and a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, but no one to share it with currently. I do step aerobics three times each week and I like Chinese food, soul music and cream ale. My last relationship ended six months ago and I think my hymen may be growing back.’

I arched an eyebrow at her and she laughed. ‘You do look shocked,’ she said. ‘You need to get out more.’

‘Sounds like you do, too. Who was the guy?’

‘A stockbroker. We’d been seeing each other for over a year and we agreed to live together on a test basis. He had a one-bed, I had a two-bed, so he moved in with me and we used the second bedroom as a shared study.’

‘Sounds idyllic.’

‘It was, for about a week. It turned out that he couldn’t stand the cat, he hated sharing a bed with me because he said I kept him awake by turning over all the time and all my clothes started to smell of his cigarettes. That clinched it. Everything stank: the furniture, the bed, the walls, the food, the toilet paper, even the cat. Then he came home one evening, told me he was in love with his secretary and moved to Seattle with her three months later.’

‘Seattle’s nice, I hear.’

‘Fuck Seattle. I hope it falls into the sea.’

‘At least you’re not bitter.’

‘Very funny.’ She looked out of her window for a while and I felt an urge to reach out and touch her, an urge enhanced by what she said next. ‘I still feel reluctant to ask you too many questions,’ she said, gently. ‘After what happened.’

‘I know.’ Slowly, I extended my right hand and lightly touched her cheek. Her skin was smooth and slightly moist. She leaned her head towards me, increasing the pressure against my hand, and then we were pulling up outside the entrance to the cemetery and the moment was gone.

Branches of the Fontenots had lived in New Orleans since the late nineteenth century, long before the family of Lionel and David had moved to the city, and the Fontenots had a big vault in Metairie cemetery, the largest of the city’s cemeteries at Metairie Road and Pontchartrain Boulevard. The cemetery covered one hundred and fifty acres and was built on the old Metairie racecourse. If you were a gambling man, it was an appropriate final resting place, even though it proved that, in the end, the odds are always stacked in favour of the house.

New Orleans cemeteries are strange places. While most cemeteries in big cities are carefully manicured and encourage discreet headstones, generations of the dead citizens of New Orleans rested in ornate tombs and spectacular mausoleums. They reminded me of Père Lachaise in Paris, or the Cities of the Dead in Cairo, where people still lived among the bodies. The resemblance was echoed by the Brunswig tomb, which was shaped like a pyramid and guarded by a sphinx.

It was not simply the funerary architecture of Spain and France that had caused the cemeteries to develop the way they did. Most of the city was below sea level and, until the development of modern drainage systems, graves dug in the ground had rapidly filled with water. Above-ground tombs were the natural solution.

The Fontenot funeral had already entered the cemetery when we arrived. I parked away from the main body of vehicles and we walked past the two police cruisers at the gate, their occupants’ eyes masked by shades. We followed the stragglers past the four statues representing Faith, Hope, Charity and Memory at the base of the long Moriarity tomb, until we came to a Greek revival tomb marked with a pair of Doric columns. ‘Fontenot’ was inscribed on the lintel above the door.

It was impossible to tell how many Fontenots had come to rest in the family vault. The tradition in New Orleans was to leave the body for a year and a day, after which the vault was reopened, the remains moved to the back and the rotting casket removed to make way for the next occupant. A lot of the vaults in Metairie were pretty crowded by this point.

The wrought-iron gate, inlaid with the heads of angels, stood open and the small party of mourners had surrounded the vault in a semicircle. A man I guessed to be Lionel Fontenot towered above them. He was wearing a black, single-breasted suit and a thick black tie. His face had been weathered to a reddish-brown and deep lines etched his forehead and snaked out from the corners of his eyes. His hair was dark but streaked with grey at the temples. He was a big man, certainly six-three at least and weighing close on two hundred and forty pounds. His suit seemed to struggle to contain him.

Beyond the mourners, ranged at intervals around the vaults and tombs, or standing beneath trees scanning the cemetery, were four hard-faced men in dark jackets and pants. Their pistols caused the jackets to bulge slightly. A fifth man, a dark overcoat hanging loosely on his shoulders, turned at an old cypress and I caught a glimpse of the tell-tale sights of an M16-based submachine-gun concealed beneath its folds. Two others stood at either side of Lionel Fontenot. The big man wasn’t taking any chances.

The mourners, both black and white – young white men in snappy black suits, old black women wearing black dresses gilded with lace at the neckline – grew silent as the priest began to read the rites of the dead from a tattered prayer book with gold-lined pages. There was no wind to carry away his words and they hung in the air around us, reverberating from the surrounding tombs like the voices of the dead themselves.

‘Our Father, who art in heaven . . .’

The pall-bearers moved forward, struggling awkwardly to fit the casket through the narrow entrance to the vault. As it was placed inside, a pair of New Orleans policemen appeared between two round vaults about eighty feet west of the funeral party. Two more emerged from the east and a third pair moved slowly down past a tree to the north. Rachel followed my glance.

‘An escort?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth . . .’

I felt uneasy. They could have been sent to ensure that Joe Bones wasn’t tempted to disturb the mourners, but something was wrong. I didn’t like the way they moved. They looked uncomfortable in the uniforms, as if their shirt collars were too tight and their shoes pinched.

‘Forgive us our trespasses . . .’

Fontenot’s men had spotted them, too, but they didn’t look too concerned. The policemen’s arms hung loosely by their sides and their guns remained in their holsters. They were about forty feet away from us when something warm splashed my face. An elderly moon-faced woman in a tight black dress, who had been sobbing quietly beside me, spun sideways and tumbled to the ground, a dark hole in her temple and a damp glistening in her hair. A chip of marble flew from the vault, the area around it stained a vivid red. The sound of the shot came almost simultaneously, a dull subdued noise like a fist hitting a punchbag.

‘But deliver us from evil . . .’

It took the mourners a few seconds to realise what was happening. They looked dumbly at the fallen woman, a pool of blood already forming around her head as I pushed Rachel into the space between two vaults, shielding her with my body. Someone screamed and the crowd began to scatter as more bullets came, whining off the marble and stone. I could see Lionel Fontenot’s bodyguards rush to protect him, pushing him to the ground as the bullets bounced from the tomb and rattled its iron gate.

Rachel covered her head with her arms and crouched to try to make herself a smaller target. Over my shoulder, I saw the two cops to the north separate and pick up machine pistols concealed in the bushes at either side of the avenue. They were Steyrs, fitted with sound suppressors: Joe Bones’s men. I saw a woman try to run for the cover of the outspread wings of a stone angel, her dark coat whipping around her bare legs. The coat puffed twice at the shoulder and she sprawled face forward on the ground, her hands outstretched. She tried to drag herself forward but her coat puffed again and she was gone.

Now there were pistol shots and the rattle of a semi-automatic as Fontenot’s men returned fire. I drew my own Smith & Wesson and joined Rachel as a uniformed figure appeared in the gap between the tombs, the Steyr held in a two-handed grip. I shot him in the face and he crumpled to the ground.

‘But they’re cops!’ said Rachel, her voice almost drowned by the exchange of fire around us.

I reached out and pushed her down further. ‘They’re Joe Bones’s men. They’re here to take out Lionel Fontenot.’ But it was more than that: Joe Bones wanted to sow chaos and to reap blood and fear and death from the consequences. He didn’t simply want Lionel Fontenot dead. He also wanted others to die – women, children, Lionel’s family, his associates – and for those left alive to remember what had taken place and to fear Joe Bones more because of it. He wanted to break the Fontenots and he would do it here, beside the vault where they had buried generations of their dead. This was the action of a man who had moved beyond reason and passed into a dark, flame-lit place, a place that blinded his vision with blood.

Behind me, there was a scuffling, tumbling sound and one of Fontenot’s men, the overcoated man with the semi-automatic, fell to his knees beside Rachel. Blood bubbled from his mouth and I heard her scream as he fell forward, his head coming to rest by her feet. The M16 lay on the grass beside him. I reached for it but Rachel got to it first, a deep, unquenchable instinct for survival now guiding her actions. Her mouth and eyes were wide as she fired a burst over the prone frame of the bodyguard.

I flung myself to the end of the tomb and aimed in the same direction, but Joe Bones’s man was already down. He lay on his back, his left leg spasming and a bloody pattern etched across his chest. Rachel’s eyes were wide, her hands shaking as the adrenaline coursed through her system. The M16 began to fall from her fingers. Its strap became entangled in her arm and she shook herself furiously to release it. Behind her, I could see mourners running low through the avenues of tombs. Two white women dragged a young black man by his arms over the grass. The belly of his white shirt was smeared with blood.

I figured that there must have been a fourth set of Joe Bones’s men who approached from the south and fired the first shots. At least three were down: the two killed by Rachel and me and a third who lay sprawled by the old cypress. Fontenot’s man had taken one of them out before he was hit himself.

I helped Rachel to her feet and moved her quickly to a grimy vault with a corroded gate. I struck at the lock with the butt of the M16 and it gave instantly. She slipped inside and I handed her my Smith & Wesson and told her to stay there until I came back for her. Then, gripping the M16, I ran east past the back of the Fontenot tomb, using the other vaults as cover. I didn’t know how many shots were left in the M16. The selector switch was set for three-round bursts. Depending on the magazine capacity, I might have anything between ten and twenty rounds left.

I had almost reached a monument topped by the figure of a sleeping child when something hit me on the back of the head and I stumbled forward, the M16 slipping from my grasp. Someone kicked me hard in the kidneys, the pain lancing through my body as far as the shoulder. I was kicked again in the stomach, which forced me on to my back. I looked up to see Ricky standing above me, the reptilian coils of his hair and his small stature at odds with the NOPD uniform. He had lost his hat and the side of his face was cut slightly where he had been hit by splinters of stone. The muzzle of his Steyr pointed at my chest.

I tried to swallow but my throat seemed to have constricted. I was conscious of the feel of the grass beneath my hands and the glorious pain in my side, sensations of life and existence and survival. Ricky raised the Steyr to point it at my head.

‘Joe Bones says hello,’ he said. His finger tightened on the trigger in the same instant as his head jerked back, his stomach thrusting forward and his back arching. A burst of fire from the Steyr raked the grass beside my head as Ricky fell to his knees and then toppled sideways, his body lying prone across my left leg. There was a jagged red hole in the back of his shirt.

Behind him, Lionel Fontenot stood in a marksman’s stance, the pistol in his hand slowly coming down. There was blood on his left hand and a bullet hole in the upper left arm of his suit. The two bodyguards who had stood beside him at the cemetery walked quickly from the direction of the Fontenot tomb. They glanced at me, then turned their attention back to Fontenot. I could hear the sound of sirens approaching from the west.

‘One got away, Lionel,’ said one. ‘The rest are dead.’

‘What about our people?’

‘Three dead, at least. More injured.’

Beside me, Ricky stirred slightly and his hand moved feebly. I could feel his body move against my leg. Lionel Fontenot walked over and stood above him for a moment before shooting him once in the back of the head. He looked at me curiously once more, then picked up the M16 and tossed it to one of his men.

‘Now go help the wounded,’ he said. He cradled his injured left arm with his right hand and walked back towards the Fontenot tomb.

My ribs ached as I returned to where I had left Rachel, after kicking Ricky’s corpse from my leg. I approached carefully, conscious of the Smith & Wesson I had left with her. When I reached the tomb, Rachel was gone.

I found her about fifty yards away, crouching beside the body of a young girl who was barely beyond her teens. As I approached, Rachel reached for the gun by her side and spun towards me.

‘Hey, it’s me. You okay?’

She nodded and returned the gun to its resting place. I noticed that she had kept her hand pressed on the young girl’s stomach for the entire exchange.

‘How is she?’ I asked but, as I looked over her shoulder, I knew the answer. The blood oozing from the gunshot wound was almost black. Liver shot. The girl, shivering uncontrollably, her teeth gritted in agony, was not going to live. Around us, mourners were emerging from hiding, some sobbing, some trembling with shock. I saw two of Lionel Fontenot’s men running towards us, both with pistols, and I took hold of Rachel’s arm.

‘We have to go. We can’t afford to wait for the cops to arrive.’

‘I’m staying. I’m not leaving her.’

‘Rachel.’ She looked at me. I held her gaze and we shared our knowledge of the girl’s impending death. ‘We can’t stay.’

The two Fontenots were beside us now. One of them, younger than the other, dropped to his knee beside the girl and took her hand. She gripped it tightly and he whispered her name. ‘Clara,’ he said. ‘Hold on, Clara, hold on.’

‘Please, Rachel,’ I repeated.

She took the younger man’s hand and pressed it against Clara’s stomach. Clara cried out as the pressure was reapplied.

‘Keep your hand there,’ hissed Rachel. ‘Don’t take it away until the medics get here.’

She picked up the gun and handed it to me. I took it from her, slipped the safety on and put it back in my holster. We made our way from the focus of the mayhem, until the shouting had diminished, then I stopped and she reached out and held me tightly. I cradled her in my arms and kissed the top of her head and breathed in the scent of her. She squeezed me and I gasped as the pain in my ribs increased dramatically.

Rachel pulled back quickly. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘I took a kick, nothing else.’

I held her face in my hands. ‘You did all that you could for her.’

She nodded but her mouth trembled. The girl had an importance to her that went beyond the simple duty to save her life. ‘I killed that man,’ she said.

‘He would have killed us both. You had no choice. If you hadn’t done it, you’d be dead. Maybe I’d be dead too.’ It was true, but it wasn’t enough, not yet. I held her tightly as she cried, the pain in my side inconsequential beside her own suffering.

Chapter Forty

I had not spoken of Daddy Helms in many years, not until I talked of him to Rachel, recalling the part he’d played in the lingering death of my mother.

Daddy Helms was the ugliest man I had ever seen. He ran most of Portland from the late sixties to the early eighties, building up a modest empire that had started with Daddy Helms boosting liquor warehouses and moved on to take in the sale of drugs over three states.

Daddy Helms weighed over three hundred pounds and suffered from a skin ailment that had left him with raised bumps all over his body, but most visible on his face and hands. They were a deep red colour and formed a kind of scaly skin over his features, blurring them so that the observer always seemed to be seeing Daddy Helms through a red mist. He wore three-piece suits and Panama hats and always smoked Winston Churchill cigars, so you smelt Daddy Helms before you saw him. If you were smart enough, this usually gave you just enough time to be somewhere else when he arrived.

Daddy Helms was mean, but he was also a freak. If he had been less intelligent, less bitter and less inclined towards violence, he would probably have ended up living in a little house in the woods of Maine and selling Christmas trees door-to-door to sympathetic citizens. Instead, his ugliness seemed to be an outward manifestation of some deeper spiritual and moral blight within himself, a corruption that made you think that Daddy Helms’s skin might not be the worst thing about him. There was a rage inside him, a fury at the world and its ways.

My grandfather, who had known Daddy Helms since he was a young boy and was generally a man who empathised with those around him, even the criminals he was forced to arrest when he served as a sheriff’s deputy, could see nothing but evil in Daddy Helms. ‘I used to think maybe it was his ugliness that made him what he is,’ he said once, ‘that the way he behaves is because of the way he looks, that he’s finding a way to strike back at the world he sees around him.’ He was sitting on the porch of the house he shared with my grandmother, my mother and me, the house in which we had all lived since my father’s death. My grandfather’s basset hound Doc – named after the country singer Doc Watson for no reason other than that my grandfather liked his rendition of the song ‘Alberta’ – lay curled at his feet, his ribs expanding in deep sleep and small yelps occasionally erupting from his jowls as he enjoyed dog dreams.

My grandfather took a sip of coffee from a blue tin mug and laid it down by his feet. Doc stirred slightly, opened one bleary eye to make sure he wasn’t missing anything interesting, and then went back to his dreams.

‘But Daddy Helms isn’t like that,’ he continued. ‘Daddy Helms just has something wrong with him, something I can’t figure. Only thing I wonder is what he might have made of himself if he weren’t so damn ugly. I reckon he could have been the President of the United States, if he’d wanted to be and if people could have beared to look at him, ’cept he would’ve been more like Joe Stalin than John Kennedy. You oughta have stayed outta his way, boy. You learned a hard lesson yesterday, a hard lesson at the hands of a hard man.’

I had come from New York with the idea that I was a tough guy, that I was smarter and faster and, if it came down to it, harder than those I would come up against in the Maine boondocks. I was wrong. Daddy Helms taught me that.

Clarence Johns, a kid who lived with his drunk father near what is now Maine Mall Road, learned that lesson too. Clarence was amiable but dumb, a natural sidekick. We had been hanging out together for about a year, firing off his air rifle on lazy summer afternoons, drinking beers stolen from his old man’s stash. We were bored and we let everybody know it, even Daddy Helms.

He had bought an old, run-down bar on Congress Street and was slowly working to transform it into what he imagined would be a pretty high-class establishment. This was before the refurbishment of the port area, before the arrival of the T-shirt shops, the craft stores, the arthouse cinema and the bars that serve free nibbles to the tourist crowd between five and seven. Maybe Daddy Helms had a vision of what was to come, for he replaced all of the old windows in the bar, put a new roof on the place and bought up furnishings from some old Belfast church that had been deconsecrated.

One Sunday afternoon, when Clarence and I were feeling particularly at odds with the world, we sat on the wall at the back of Daddy Helms’s half-finished bar and broke just about every goddamn window in the place, flinging stones with pinpoint accuracy at the new panes. Eventually, we found an old abandoned toilet cistern and, in a final act of vandalism, we hoisted it through the large arched window at the back of the premises, which Daddy Helms had intended would span the bar itself like a fan.

I didn’t see Clarence for a few days after that and thought nothing of the consequences until one night, as we walked down St John with an illicitly bought six-pack of beer, three of Daddy Helms’s men caught us and dragged us towards a black Cadillac Eldorado. They cuffed our hands and put duct tape over our mouths and tied dirty rags over our eyes, then dumped us in the trunk and closed it. Clarence Johns and I lay side by side as we were carried away and I was conscious of the sour, unwashed smell from him, until I realised that I probably smelt the same.

But there were other smells in that trunk beyond oil and rags and the sweat of two teenage boys. It smelt of human excrement and urine, of vomit and bile. It smelt of the fear of impending death and I knew, even then, that a lot of people had been brought for rides in that Cadillac.

Time seemed to fade away in the blackness of that car, so that I couldn’t tell how far we had travelled until it ground to a halt. The trunk was opened and I saw the stars shining above me like the promise of heaven. I could hear waves crashing to my left and could taste the salt in the air. We were hauled from the trunk and dragged through bushes and over stones. I could feel sand beneath my feet and, beside me, I heard Clarence Johns start to whimper, or maybe it was my own whimperings I heard. Then we were thrown face down on the sand and there were hands at my clothes, my shoes. My shirt was ripped from me and I was stripped from the waist down, kicking frantically at the unseen figures around me until someone punched me hard with his knuckles in the small of the back and I stopped kicking. The rag was pulled away from my eyes and I looked up to see Daddy Helms standing above me. Behind him, I could see the silhouette of a large building: the Black Point Inn. We were on the Western Beach at Prouts Neck, beyond Scarborough itself. If I had been able to turn, I would have seen the lights of Old Orchard Beach, but I was not able to turn.

Daddy Helms held the butt of his cigar in his deformed hand and smiled at me. It was a smile like light flashing on a blade. He wore a white three-piece suit, a gold watch chain snaking across his vest and a red and white spotted bow-tie arranged neatly at the collar of his white cotton shirt. Beside me, Clarence Johns’s shoes scuffled in the sand as he tried to gain enough purchase to raise himself up, but one of Daddy Helms’s men, a blond-haired savage called Tiger Martin, placed the sole of his foot on Clarence’s chest and forced him back on to the sand. Clarence, I noticed, was not naked.

‘You Bob Warren’s grandson?’ Daddy Helms observed after a time. I nodded. I thought I was going to choke. My nostrils were filled with sand and I couldn’t seem to get enough air into my lungs.

‘You know who I am?’ asked Daddy Helms, still looking at me.

I nodded again.

‘But you can’t know who I am, boy. You knew me, you wouldn’ta done what you did to my place. ’Less you’re a fool, that is, and that’s worse than not knowin’.’

He turned his attention briefly to Clarence, but he didn’t say anything to him. I thought I caught a flash of pity in his eyes as he looked at Clarence. Clarence was dumb, there was no doubt about that. For a brief instant, I seemed to be looking at Clarence with new eyes, as if he alone was not part of Daddy Helms’s gang and all five of us were about to do something terrible to him. But I was not with Daddy Helms and the thought of what was about to happen brought me back again. I felt the sand beneath my skin and I watched as Tiger Martin came forward, carrying a heavy-looking black refuse sack in his arms. He looked to Daddy Helms, Daddy Helms nodded and then the bag was tipped upside down and the contents poured over my body.

It was earth, but something else too: I sensed thousands of small legs moving on me, crawling through the hairs on my legs and groin, exploring the crevasses of my body like tiny lovers. I felt them on my tightly closed eyes and shook my head to clear them away. Then the biting started, tiny pinpoints of pain on my arms, my eyelids, my legs, even my penis, as the fire ants began to attack. I felt them crawling into my nostrils, and then the biting started there as well. I twisted and writhed, rubbing myself on the sand in an effort to kill as many of them as I could but it was like trying to remove the sand itself, grain by grain. I kicked and spun and felt tears running down my cheeks and then, just as it seemed that I couldn’t take any more, I felt a gloved hand on my ankle and I was dragged through the sand towards the surf. My wrists were freed and I plunged into the water, ripping the tape from my mouth, ignoring the pain as the adhesive tore my lips in my desire to rub and scratch myself. I submerged my head as the waves crashed above me, and still it seemed that I felt thread-like legs moving on me and felt the final bites of the insects before they drowned. I was shouting in pain and panic and then I was crying too, crying in shame and hurt and anger and fear.

For days afterwards, I found the remains of ants in my hair. Some of them were longer than the nail on my middle finger, with barbed pincers that curved forward to embrace the skin. My body was covered in raised bumps, almost an imitation of those of Daddy Helms himself, and the inside of my nose felt tender and swollen.

I pulled myself from the water and staggered on to the sand. Daddy Helms’s men had gone back to the car, leaving only Clarence and me on the beach with Daddy Helms himself. Clarence was untouched. Daddy Helms saw the realisation in my face and he smiled as he puffed on his cigar.

‘We found your friend last night,’ he said. He placed a thick, melted-wax hand on Clarence’s shoulders. Clarence flinched, but he didn’t move. ‘He told us everything. We didn’t even have to hurt him.’

The pain of betrayal superseded the bites and the itching, the lingering sensation of movement on my skin. I looked at Clarence Johns with new eyes, adult eyes. He stood on the sand, his arms wrapped around his body, shivering. His eyes were filled with a pain that sang out from the depths of his being. I wanted to hate him for what he had done, and Daddy Helms wanted me to hate him, but instead I felt only a deep emptiness and a kind of pity.

And I felt a kind of pity, too, for Daddy Helms, with his ravaged skin and his mounds and folds of heavy flesh, forced to visit this punishment on two young men because of some broken glass, punishing them not only physically but by severing the bonds of their friendship.

‘You learned two lessons here tonight, boy. You learned not to fuck with me, ever, and you learned something about friendship. In the end, the only friend you got is yourself, ’cos all the others, they’ll let you down in the end. We all stand alone, in the end.’ Then he turned and waddled, through the marram and dunes, back to his car.

They left us to walk back, my clothes torn and soaked through from the seawater. We said nothing to each other, not even when we parted at the gate to my grandfather’s property and Clarence headed off into the night, his cheap plastic shoes slapping on the road. We didn’t hang out together after that and I largely forgot Clarence until he died in a failed robbery attempt at a computer warehouse on the outskirts of Austin fifteen years later. Clarence was working as a security guard. He was shot by the raiders as he tried to defend a consignment of PCs.

When I entered my grandfather’s house I took some antiseptic from the medicine cabinet, then stripped and stood in the bath, rubbing the liquid into the bites. It stung. When I had finished, I sat in the empty bath and wept, and that was where my grandfather found me. He said nothing for a time, then disappeared and came back with a red bowl containing a paste made from baking soda and water. He rubbed it painstakingly across my shoulders and chest, my legs and arms, then poured a little into my hand so I could rub it into my groin. He wrapped me in a white cotton sheet and sat me down in a chair in the kitchen, before pouring each of us a large glass of brandy. It was Remy Martin, I remember, XO, the good stuff. It took me some time to finish it, but neither of us spoke a word. As I had stood to go to bed, he’d patted me lightly on the head.

‘A hard man,’ repeated my grandfather, draining the last of his coffee. He stood and the dog rose with him.

‘You want to walk the dog with me?’

I declined. He shrugged his shoulders and I watched him as he walked down the porch steps, the dog already running ahead of him, barking and sniffing and looking back to make sure the old man was following, then running on further again.

Daddy Helms died ten years later of stomach cancer. When he died, it was estimated that he had been involved, directly or indirectly, with over forty killings, some of them as far south as Florida. There was no more than a handful of people at his funeral.

I thought of Daddy Helms again as Rachel and I made our way from the killings in Metairie. I don’t know why. Maybe I felt there was something of his rage in Joe Bonnano, a hatred of the world that stemmed from something rotten inside him. I remembered my grandfather, I remembered Daddy Helms and I recalled the lessons they had tried to teach me, lessons that I still had not yet fully learned.

Chapter Forty-One

Outside the main cemetery gate, the New Orleans police were corralling witnesses and clearing the way for the injured to be carried to waiting ambulances. TV crews from WWDL and WDSU were trying to talk with survivors. I stayed close to one of Lionel Fontenot’s men, the one who had been entrusted with the care of the M16, as we approached the gates at an angle. We followed him until he arrived at a portion of ruptured fencing by the highway, then made his way through it to a waiting Lincoln. As he drove away, Rachel and I climbed over the fence and walked back to our car, unspeaking, approaching it from the west. It was parked away from the main centre of activity and we were able to slip off without attracting any attention.

‘How did that happen?’ asked Rachel, in a quiet voice, as we drove back into the city. ‘There should have been police. There should have been someone to stop them . . .’ Her voice trailed away and she remained silent as we drove back to the Quarter, her hands clasped across her upper body. I didn’t disturb her.

One of a number of things had happened. Someone in charge could have screwed up by assigning insufficient police to Metairie, believing that Joe Bones would never try to take out Lionel Fontenot at his brother’s funeral in front of witnesses. The guns had been stashed either late the previous night, or early that morning, and the cemetery had not been searched. It could also have been the case that Lionel warned off the cops, just as he had warned off the media, anxious not to turn his brother’s funeral into a circus. The other possibility was that Joe Bones had paid off or threatened some or all of the cops at Metairie and they had turned their backs while his men went about their business.

When we reached the hotel, I took her to my room – I didn’t want her surrounded by the images she had pinned to the walls of her own room. She went straight to the bathroom and closed the door behind her. I could hear the sound of the shower starting up. She stayed there for a long time.

When she eventually emerged, she had a big white bath towel draped around her from her breasts to her knees and was drying her hair with a smaller towel. Her eyes were red as she looked at me, then her chin trembled and she began to cry again. I held her, kissing the top of her head, then her forehead, her cheeks, her lips. Her mouth was warm as she responded to the kiss, her tongue darting around my teeth and entwining with my own tongue. I felt myself become aroused and pressed hard against her, pulling the towel from her as I did. Her fingers fumbled at my belt and my zipper, then reached inside and held me tightly. Her other hand worked at the buttons on my shirt as she kissed my neck and ran her tongue across my chest and around my nipples.

I kicked off my shoes and leaned over awkwardly to try to take off my socks. Damn socks. She smiled a little as I almost fell over while removing the left one and then I was on top of her as she pushed down my pants and shorts.

Her breasts were small, her hips slightly wide, the small triangle of hair at their centre a deep, fiery red. She tasted sweet. When she came, her back arched high and her legs wrapped around my thighs, I felt like I had never been held so tightly, or loved so hard.

Afterwards, she slept. I slipped from the bed, put on a T-shirt and jeans and took the key to her room from her bag. I walked barefoot down the gallery to the room, closed the door behind me and stood for a time before the pictures on the wall. Rachel had bought a large draughtsman’s pad on which to work out patterns and ideas. I took two sheets from it, taped them together and added them to the images on the wall. Then, surrounded by pictures of the anatomised Marsyas and photocopies of the crime-scene photos of Tante Marie and Tee Jean, I took a felt-tip and began to write.

In one corner I wrote the names of Jennifer and Susan, a kind of pang of regret and guilt hitting me as I wrote Susan’s name. I tried to put it from my mind and continued writing. In another corner I put the names of Tante Marie, Tee Jean and, slightly to one side, Florence. In the third corner I wrote Remarr’s name and in the fourth I placed a question mark and the word ‘girl’ beside it. In the centre I wrote ‘Trav Man’ and then, like a child drawing a star, I added a series of lines emanating from the centre and tried to write down all that I knew, or thought I knew, about the killer.

When I had finished, the list included: a voice synthesis program or unit; the Book of Enoch; a knowledge of Greek myths/early medical texts; a knowledge of police procedures and activities, based on what Rachel had said following the deaths of Jennifer and Susan, the fact that he had known that the feds were monitoring my cellphone, and the killing of Remarr. Initially I thought that if he had seen Remarr at the Aguillard house, then Remarr would have died there and then, but I reconsidered on the basis that the Travelling Man would have been reluctant to remain at the scene or to engage an alerted Remarr, and had decided to wait for another chance. The other option was that the killer had found out about the fingerprint and, somehow, the killer had also later found Remarr.

I added other elements based on standard assumptions: white male killer, probably somewhere between his twenties and forties; a Louisiana base from which to strike at Remarr and the Aguillards; a change of clothing, or overalls worn over his own clothes, to protect him from the blood; and access to and knowledge of ketamine.

I drew another line from Trav Man to the Aguillards, since the killer knew that Tante Marie had been talking, and a second line connecting him to Remarr. I added a dotted line to Jennifer and Susan, and wrote Edward Byron’s name with a question mark beside it. Then, on impulse, I added a third dotted line and wrote David Fontenot’s name between those of the Aguillards and Remarr, based only on the Honey Island connection and the possibility that, if the Travelling Man had lured him to Honey Island and tipped off Joe Bones that David Fontenot would be there, then the killer was someone known to the Fontenot family. Finally, I wrote Edward Byron’s name on a separate sheet and pinned it beside the main diagram.

I sat on the edge of Rachel’s bed and smelt the scent of her in the room as I looked at what I had written, shifting the pieces around in my head to see if they would match up anywhere. They didn’t, but I made one more addition before I returned to my own room to wait for Angel and Louis to return from Baton Rouge: I drew a light line between David Fontenot’s name and the question mark representing the girl in the swamp. I didn’t know it then, but by drawing that line I had made the first significant leap into the world of the Travelling Man.

I returned to my own room and sat by the balcony, watching Rachel in her uneasy sleep. Her eyelids moved rapidly, and once or twice she let out small groans and made pushing movements with her hands, her feet scrabbling beneath the blankets. I heard Angel and Louis before I saw them, Angel’s voice raised in what seemed to be anger, Louis responding in measured tones with a hint of mockery beneath them.

Before they could knock, I opened the door and indicated that we should talk in their room. They hadn’t heard about the shootings at Metairie since, according to Angel, they hadn’t been listening to the radio in the rental car. His face was red as he spoke and his lips were pale. I don’t think that I had ever seen him so angry.

In their room, the bickering started again. Stacey Byron, a bottle-blonde in her early forties who had kept her figure remarkably well for a woman of her age, had apparently come on to Louis in the course of their interrogation of her. Louis had, in a manner, responded.

‘I was pumping her for information,’ he explained, his mouth twitching in amusement as he looked sideways at Angel. Angel was unimpressed.

‘You wanted to pump her, all right, but the only information you were after was her bra size and the dimensions of her ass,’ he spat. Louis rolled his eyes in exaggerated bafflement and I thought, for a moment, that Angel was going to strike him. His fists bunched and he moved forward slightly before he managed to restrain himself.

I felt sorry for Angel. While I didn’t believe there was anything in Louis’s courting of Edward Byron’s wife, beyond the natural response of any individual to the favourable attentions of another and Louis’s belief that, by leading her on, she might give away something about her ex-husband, I knew how much Louis mattered to Angel. Angel’s history was murky, Louis’s more so, but I remembered things about Angel, things that I sometimes felt Louis forgot.

When Angel was sent down to Rikers Island, he attracted the attentions of a man named William Vance. Vance had killed a Korean shopkeeper in the course of a botched robbery in Brooklyn and that was how he ended up in Rikers, but there were other things suspected of him: that he had raped and killed an elderly woman in Utica, mutilating her before she died; that he may have been linked to a similar killing in Delaware. There was no proof, other than rumour and conjecture, but when the opportunity came to put Vance away for the killing of the Korean, the DA, to his credit, seized it.

And for some reason, Vance decided that he wanted Angel dead. I heard that Angel had dissed him when Vance had tried it on with him, that he had knocked out one of Vance’s teeth in the showers. But there was no telling with a man like Vance: the workings of his mind were obscure and confused by hatred and strange, bitter longing. Now Vance didn’t just want to rape Angel: he wanted to kill him, and kill him slowly. Angel had pulled three to five. After one week in Rikers, the odds of him surviving his first month had plummeted.

Angel had no friends on the inside and fewer still outside, so he called me. I knew that it pained him to do so. He was proud and I think that, under ordinary circumstances, he would have tried to work out his problems for himself. But William Vance, with his tattoos of bloodied knives on his arms and a spider’s web over his chest, was far from ordinary.

I did what I could. I pulled Vance’s files and copied the transcripts of his interrogation over the Utica killing and a number of similar incidents. I copied details of the evidence assembled against him and the account of an eyewitness who later retracted after Vance made a call and threatened to fuck her and her children to death if she gave evidence against him. Then I took a trip to Rikers.

I spoke to Vance through a transparent screen. He had added an Indian ink tattoo of a tear below his left eye, bringing the total number of tattooed tears to three, each one representing a life taken. A spider’s silhouette was visible at the nape of his neck. I spoke to him softly for about ten minutes. I warned him that if anything happened to Angel, anything at all, I would make sure that every con in the place knew that he was only a hair’s breadth away from sexual homicide charges involving old, defenceless women. Vance had five years left to serve before he became eligible for parole. If his fellow inmates found out what he was suspected of doing, he would have to spend those five years in solitary or in a special unit to avoid death. Even then, he would have to check his food every day for powdered glass, would have to pray that a guard’s attention didn’t wander for an instant while he was being escorted to the yard for his hour’s recreation, or while he was being brought to the prison doctor when the stress began to take its toll on his health.

Vance knew all this and yet, two days after we spoke, he tried to castrate Angel with a shank. Only the force of Angel’s heel connecting with Vance’s knee saved him, although Angel still needed twenty stitches across his stomach and thigh after Vance slashed wildly at him as he fell to the ground.

Vance was taken in the shower the next morning. Persons unknown held him down, used a wrench to hold his mouth open and then pumped water mixed with detergent into his body. The poison destroyed his insides, tearing apart his stomach and almost costing him his life. For the remainder of his life he was a shell of a man, racked by pains in his gut that made him howl in the night. It had taken one telephone call. I live with that, too.

After he was released, Angel hooked up with Louis. I’m not even sure how these two solitary creatures met, exactly, but they had now been together for six years. Angel needed Louis and, in his way, Louis needed Angel too, but I sometimes thought that the balance of the relationship hinged on Angel. Men and men, men and women, whatever the permutation, in the end one partner always feels more than the other and that partner usually suffers for it.

It emerged that they hadn’t learned much from Stacey Byron. The feds, or maybe the local cops, had been watching the house from the front but Louis and Angel, dressed in the only suit he owned, had come in from the back. Louis had flashed his fitness-club membership and his smile as he told Mrs Byron that they were just conducting a routine search of her garden and they spent the next hour talking to her about her ex-husband, about how often Louis worked out and, in the end, whether or not he’d ever had a white woman. It was at that point that Angel had really started to get annoyed.

‘She says she hasn’t seen him in four months,’ said Louis. ‘Says that last time she saw him, he didn’t say much, just asked after her and the kids and took some old clothes from the attic. Seems he had a carrier-bag from some drugstore in Opelousas and the feds are concentrating their search there.’

‘Does she know why the feds are looking for him?’

‘Nope. They told her that he might be able to assist them with information on some unsolved crimes. She ain’t dumb, though, and I fed her a little more to see if she’d bite. She said that he always had an interest in medical affairs – seems he might have had ambitions to be a doctor at one time, although he didn’t have the education to be a tree surgeon.’

‘Did you ask her if she thought he could kill?’

‘I didn’t have to. Seems he threatened to kill her once, while they were arguing over the terms of the divorce.’

‘Did she remember what he said?’

Louis nodded deeply, once.

‘Uh-huh. He said he’d tear her fucking face off.’

Angel and Louis parted on bad terms, with Angel retiring to Rachel’s room while Louis sat on the balcony of their room and took in the sounds and smells of New Orleans, not all of them pleasant.

‘I was thinking of getting a bite to eat,’ he said. ‘You interested?’

I was surprised. I guessed that he wanted to talk but I had never spent time with Louis without Angel being present as well.

I checked on Rachel. The bed was empty and I could hear the shower running. I knocked gently on the door.

‘It’s open,’ she said.

When I entered, she had the shower curtain wrapped around her. ‘Suits you,’ I said. ‘Clear plastic is in this season.’

The sleep hadn’t done her any good. There were dark rings under her eyes and she looked ill and drawn. She made a half-hearted effort to smile, but it was more like a grimace of pain than anything else.

‘You want to go out and eat?’

‘I’m not hungry. I’m going to do some work, then take two sleeping pills and try to sleep without dreaming.’

I told her that Louis and I were heading out, then went to tell Angel. I found him flicking through the notes Rachel had made. He motioned to my chart on the bedroom wall. ‘Lot of blank spaces on that.’

‘I still have one or two details to work out.’

‘Like who did it and why.’ He gave me a twisted grin.

‘Yeah, but I’m trying not to get too hung up on minor problems. You okay?’

He nodded. ‘I think this whole thing is gettin’ to me, all this . . .’ He waved an arm at the illustrations on the wall.

‘Louis and I are heading out to eat. You wanna come?’

‘Nah, I’d only be the lemon. You can have him.’

‘Thanks. I’ll break the bad news of my sexual awakening to the Swimsuit Illustrated models tomorrow. They’ll be heartbroken. Look after Rachel, will you? This hasn’t been one of her better days.’

‘I’ll be right across the hall.’

Louis and I sat in Felix’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar on the corner of Bourbon and Iberville. There weren’t too many tourists there; they tended to gravitate towards the Acme Oyster House across the street, where they served red beans and savoury rice in a hollowed-out boat of French bread, or a classier French Quarter joint like Nola. Felix’s was plainer. Tourists don’t care much for plain. After all, they can get plain at home.

Louis ordered an oyster po’boy and doused it in hot sauce, sipping an Abita beer between bites. I had fries and a chicken po’boy, washed down with mineral water.

‘Waiter thinks you’re a sissy,’ commented Louis, as I sipped my water. ‘The ballet was in town, he’d hit on you for tickets.’

‘Shows what he knows,’ I replied. ‘You’re confusing things by not conforming to the stereotype. Maybe you should mince more.’

His mouth twitched and he raised his hand for another Abita. It came quickly. The waiter performed the neat trick of making sure we weren’t left waiting for anything while trying to spend as little time as possible in the vicinity of our table. Other diners chose to take the scenic route to their tables rather than pass too close to us and those forced to sit near us seemed to eat at a slightly faster pace than the rest. Louis had that effect on people. It was as if there was a shell of potential violence around him, and something more: the sense that, if that violence erupted, it would not be the first time that it had done so.

‘Your friend Woolrich,’ he said, as he drained the Abita half-way with one mouthful. ‘You trust him?’

‘I don’t know. He has his own agenda.’

‘He’s a fed. They only got their own agendas.’ He eyed me over the top of the bottle. ‘I think, if you were climbing a rock with your friend and you slipped, found yourself dangling on the end of the rope with him at the other end, he’d cut the rope.’

‘You’re a cynic.’

His mouth twitched again. ‘If the dead could speak, they’d call all cynics realists.’

‘If the dead could speak, they’d tell us to have more sex while we can.’ I picked at my fries. ‘The feds have anything on you?’

‘Suspicions, maybe, nothing more. That’s not really what I’m getting at.’

His eyes were unblinking and there was no warmth in them now. I think that, if he believed Woolrich was close to him, he would kill him and it would not cost him another thought afterwards.

‘Why is Woolrich helping us?’ he asked, eventually.

‘I’ve thought about that too,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure. Part of it could be that he empathises with the need to stay in touch with what’s going on. If he feeds me information, then he can control the extent of my involvement.’

But I knew that wasn’t all. Louis was right. Woolrich had his own agenda. He had depths to him that I only occasionally glimpsed, as when the different shifting colours on the surface of the sea hint at the sharp declivities and deep spaces that lie beneath. He was a hard man to be with in some ways: he conducted his friendship with me on his own terms and, in the time I had known him, months had gone by without any contact from him. He made up for this with a strange loyalty, a sense that, even when he was absent from their lives, he never forgot those closest to him.

But as a fed, Woolrich played hardball. He had progressed to Assistant SAC by making collars, by attaching his name to high-profile operations, and by fixing other agents’ wagons when they got in his way. He was intensely ambitious and maybe he saw the Travelling Man as a way of reaching greater heights: SAC, assistant director, a deputy directorship, maybe even eventually to becoming the first agent to be appointed directly to the post of director. He had already ensured that the cops were effectively locked out of the Travelling Man investigation and he had done his best to limit my direct involvement while feeding me enough information to keep me keen. The pressure on him was intense, but if Woolrich were to be responsible for bringing an end to the Travelling Man, he would be assured a bright, powerful future within the Bureau.

I had a part to play in this, and Woolrich knew it and felt it strongly enough that he would use whatever friendship existed between us to bring about an end to what was taking place. ‘I think he’s using me as bait,’ I added. ‘And he’s holding the line.’

‘How much you think he’s holding back?’ Louis finished his beer and smacked his lips appreciatively.

‘He’s like an iceberg. We’re only seeing the ten per cent above the surface. Whatever the feds know, they’re not sharing it with the local cops and Woolrich sure isn’t sharing it with us. There’s something more going on here, and only Woolrich and maybe a handful of feds are privy to it. You play chess?’

‘In my way,’ he replied drily. Somehow, I couldn’t see that way including a standard board.

‘This whole thing is like a chess game,’ I continued. ‘Except we only get to see the other player’s move when one of our pieces is taken. The rest of the time, it’s like playing in the dark.’

Louis raised a finger for the check. The waiter looked relieved.

‘And our Mr Byron?’

I shrugged. I felt strangely distant from what was happening. Part of it was because we were players on the periphery of the investigation, but part of it was also because I needed that distance. I needed the distance to think. In one way, what had taken place with Rachel that afternoon, and what it meant to my feelings of grief and loss about Susan, had given me some of that distance.

‘I don’t know.’ We were only beginning to construct a picture of Byron, like a figure at the centre of a jigsaw puzzle around which other pieces might interlock. ‘We’ll work our way towards him. First, I want to find out what Remarr saw the night Tante Marie and Tee Jean were killed. And I want to know why David Fontenot was out at Honey Island alone.’

It was clear now that Lionel Fontenot would move against Joe Bones. Joe Bones knew that too, which was why he had risked an assault at Metairie. Once Lionel was back in his compound, he would be out of the reach of Joe Bones’s men. The next move was Lionel’s.

The check arrived. I paid and Louis left a twenty-dollar tip, more than the meal itself cost. The waiter looked at the bill like Andrew Jackson was going to bite his finger when he tried to lift it.

‘I think we’re going to have to talk to Lionel Fontenot,’ I said, as we left. ‘And Joe Bones.’

Louis actually smiled. ‘Joe ain’t gonna be too keen on talking to you, seeing as how his boy tried to put you in the ground.’

‘I kinda figured that,’ I replied. ‘Could be that Lionel Fontenot might help us out there. Anyway, if Joe Bones doesn’t want to see me again, you can be damn sure that the sight of you waltzing across his lawn is not going to set his world alight. You might get to use those mini-subs yet.’

We walked back to the Flaisance. The streets of New Orleans aren’t the safest in the world but I didn’t think that anyone would bother us.

I was right.

Chapter Forty-Two

I slept late the next morning. Rachel had returned to her own room to sleep. When I knocked, her voice sounded harsh with tiredness. She told me she wanted to stay in bed for a time and, when she felt better, she would go out to Loyola again. I asked Angel and Louis to watch out for her, then drove from the Flaisance.

The incident at Metairie had left me shaken, and the prospect of facing Joe Bones again was unappealing. I also felt a crushing sense of guilt for what had happened to Rachel, for what I had drawn her into and for what I had forced her to do. I needed to get out of New Orleans, at least for a short time. I wanted to clear my head, to try to see things from a different angle. I ate a bowl of chicken gumbo in the Gumbo Shop on St Peter and then headed out of the city.

Morphy lived about four miles from Cecilia, a few miles north-west of Lafayette. He had bought and was refurbishing a raised plantation home by a small river, a budget version of the classic old Louisiana houses, which had been built at the end of the nineteenth century in a blend of French Colonial, West Indian and European architectural influences.

The house presented a strange spectacle. Its main living quarters were on top of an above-ground basement area, which had once been used for storage and as protection from flooding. This section of the house was brick and Morphy had reworked the arched openings with what looked like hand-carved frames. The living quarters above, which would usually have been weatherboard- or plaster-covered, had been replaced with timber slats. A double-pitched roof, which had been partially reslated, extended over the gallery.

I had called ahead and told Angie I was on my way. Morphy had just got home when I arrived. I found him in the yard at the rear of the house, benching two hundred in the evening air.

‘What do you think of the house?’ he asked, as I approached, not even pausing in his reps as he spoke.

‘It’s great. Looks like you still have some way to go before it’s finished.’

He grunted with the effort of the final rep and I slotted the bar back on to its rest. He stood up and stretched, then looked at the back of his house with barely concealed admiration.

‘It was built by a Frenchman in eighteen eighty-eight,’ he said. ‘He knew what he was doing. It’s built on an east–west axis, with principal exposure to the south.’ He pointed out the lines of the building as he spoke. ‘He designed it the way the Europeans designed their houses, so that the low angle of the sun in winter would heat the building. Then, in the summer, the sun would only shine on it in the morning and evening. Most American houses aren’t built that way, they just put ’em up whatever way suits ’em, throw a stick in the air and see where it lands. We were spoiled by cheap energy. Then the Arabs came along and hiked up their prices and people had to start thinking again about the layout of their houses.’ He smiled. ‘Don’t know how much good an east–west house does around here, though. Sun shines all the goddamn time anyway.’

When he had showered, we sat at a table in the kitchen with Angie and talked as she cooked. Angie was almost a foot smaller than her husband, a slim, dark-skinned woman with auburn hair that flowed down her back. She was a junior-school teacher, but she did some painting in her spare time. Her canvases, dark, impressionistic pieces set around water and sky, adorned the walls of the house.

Morphy drank a bottle of Breaux Bridge and I had a soda. Angie sipped a glass of white wine as she cooked. She cut four chicken breasts into about sixteen pieces and set them to one side as she set about preparing the roux.

Cajun gumbo is made with roux, a glutinous thickener, as a base. Angie poured peanut oil into an iron-based pan over a hot flame, added in an equal amount of flour, and beat it with a whisk continuously so it wouldn’t burn, gradually turning the roux from blond to beige and through mahogany until it reached a dark chocolate colour. Then she took it off the heat and allowed it to cool, still stirring.

While Morphy looked on, I helped her chop the trinity of onion, green pepper and celery and watched as she sweated them in oil. She added a seasoning of thyme and oregano, paprika and cayenne peppers, onion and garlic salt, then dropped in thick pieces of chorizo sausage. She added the chicken and more spices, until their scent filled the room. After about half an hour, she spooned white rice on to plates and poured the thick rich gumbo over it. After that, we ate in silence, savouring the flavours in our mouths.

When we had washed and dried the dishes, Angie left us and went to bed. Morphy and I sat in the kitchen and I told him about Raymond Aguillard and his belief that he had seen the figure of a girl at Honey Island. I told him of Tante Marie’s dreams and my feeling that, somehow, David Fontenot’s death at Honey Island could be linked to the girl.

Morphy didn’t say anything for a long time. He didn’t sneer at visions of ghosts, or at an old woman’s belief that the voices she heard were real. Instead, all he said was: ‘You sure you know where this place is?’

I nodded.

‘Then we’ll give it a try. I’m free tomorrow, so you better stay here tonight. We got a spare room you can use.’ I called Rachel at the Flaisance and told her what I intended to do the next day and where in Honey Island we were likely to be. She said that she would tell Angel and Louis, and that she felt a little better for her sleep. It would take her a long time to get over the death of Joe Bones’s man.

It was early morning, barely ten before seven, when we prepared to leave. Morphy wore heavy steel-toed Caterpillar workboots, old jeans and a sleeveless sweatshirt over a long-sleeved T-shirt. The sweat was dappled with paint and there were patches of tar on the jeans. His head was freshly shaved and smelt of liniment.

While we drank coffee and ate toast on the gallery, Angie came out in a white robe and rubbed her husband’s clean scalp, smirking at him as she took a seat beside him. Morphy acted like it annoyed the hell out of him, but he doted on her every touch. When we rose to go, he kissed her deeply with the fingers of his right hand entwined in her hair. Her body instinctively rose from the chair to meet him, but he pulled away, laughing, and she reddened. It was only then that I noticed the swelling at her belly: she was no more than five months gone, I guessed. As we walked across the grass at the front of the house, she stood on the gallery, her weight on one hip and a light breeze tugging at her robe, and watched her husband prepare to leave.

‘Been married long?’ I asked, as we walked towards a cypress glade that obscured the view of the house from the road.

‘Two years in January. I’m a contented man. Never thought I would be, but that girl changed my life.’ There was no embarrassment as he spoke and he acknowledged it with a smile.

‘When is the baby due?’

He smiled again. ‘Late December. Guys held a party for me when they found out, to celebrate the fact that I was shooting live ones.’

A breakdown truck was parked in the glade, with a trailer attached, on which a wide, flat-bottomed aluminium boat lay covered in tarpaulin, its engine tilted forward so that it rested on the bed. ‘Touissant’s brother dropped it over late last night,’ he explained. ‘Does some hauling on the side.’

‘Where’s Touissant?’

‘In bed with food poisoning. He ate some bad shrimp, least that’s how he tells it. Personally, I think he’s just too damn lazy to give up his morning in bed.’

In the back of the truck, beneath some more tarpaulin, were an axe, a chainsaw, two lengths of chain, some strong nylon rope and an icebox. There was also a dry suit and mask, a pair of waterproof flashlights and two oxygen tanks. Morphy added a flask of coffee, some water, two sticks of French bread and four chicken breasts coated in K-Paul’s Cajun spices, all contained in a waterproof bag, then climbed into the driver’s seat of the truck and started her up. She belched smoke and rattled a bit, but the engine sounded good and strong. I climbed in beside him and we drove towards Honey Island, a Clifton Chenier tape on the truck’s battered stereo.

We entered the reserve at Slidell, a collection of shopping malls, fast-food joints and Chinese buffets on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain named for the Democratic senator John Slidell. In the 1844 federal election, Slidell arranged for two steamboats to carry a bunch of Irish and German voters from New Orleans to Plaquemines Parish to vote. There was nothing illegal about that; what was illegal was letting them vote at all the other polling stations along the route.

A mist still hung over the water and the trees as we unloaded the boat at the Pearl River ranger station, beside a collection of run-down fishing shacks that floated near the bank. We loaded the chains, rope, chainsaw, the diving gear and the food. In a tree beside us, the early-morning sun caught the threads of a huge, intricate web, at the centre of which lay, unmoving, a Golden Orb spider. Then, with the sound of the motor blending with the noise of insects and birds, we moved on to the Pearl.

The banks of the river were lined with high tupelo gum, water birch, willows and some tall cypress with trumpet creeper vines, their red flowers in bloom, winding up their trunks. Here and there, trees were marked with plastic bottles, signs that catfish lines had been sunk. We passed a village of riverside homes, most of them down-at-heel, with flat-bottomed pirogues tied up outside them. A blue heron watched us calmly from the branches of a cypress; on a log beneath him, a yellow-bellied turtle lay soaking up the sun.

I still had Raymond Aguillard’s map but it took us two attempts to find the trevasse, the trappers’ channel that he had marked. There was a stand of gum trees at its entrance, their swollen buttresses like the bulbs of flowers, with a sole green ash leaning almost across the gap. Further in, branches, weighed down with Spanish moss, hung almost to the surface of the water and the air was redolent with the mingled scents of growth and decay. Misshapen tree trunks surrounded by duckweed stood like monuments in the early-morning sun. East, I could see the grey dome of a beaver lodge and, as we watched, a snake slithered into the water not five feet from us.

‘Diamondback,’ said Morphy.

Around us, water dripped from cypress and tupelo, and birdsong echoed in the trees.

‘Any chance of ’gators here?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Maybe. Don’t bother people much, though, unless people bother them. There’s easier pickings in the swamps, and they’ve been known to take dogs that wander too close to the bank. If you see any while I’m down there, fire a shot to let me know what’s happening.’

The bayou started to narrow until it was barely wide enough to allow the boat passage. I felt the bottom scrape on a tree trunk resting below the surface. Morphy killed the engine and we used our hands and a pair of wooden paddles to pull ourselves through.

It seemed then that we might somehow have made a mistake in our map-reading, because we were faced with a wall of wild rice, the tall, green stalks like blades in the water. There was only one narrow gap visible, big enough for a child to pass through. Morphy shrugged and restarted the engine, aiming us for the gap. I used the paddle to beat back the rice stalks as we moved forward. Something splashed close by us and a dark shape, like a large rat, sliced through the water.

‘Nutria,’ said Morphy. I could see the big rodent’s nose and whiskers now as it stopped beside a tree trunk and sniffed the air inquisitively. ‘Taste worse than ’gators. I hear we’re trying to sell their meat to the Chinese since no one else wants to eat it.’

The rice blended into sharp-edged grass, which cut at my hands as I worked the paddle, and then the boat was free and we were in a kind of lagoon formed by a gradual accumulation of silt, its banks surrounded mainly by gum and willows that dragged the fingers of their branches in the water. There was some almost firm ground at the eastern edge, near an accumulation of arrowroot lilies, with wild pig tracks in the dirt, the animals attracted by the promise of the arrowroot at the lilies’ base. Further in, I could see the rotting remains of a T-cutter, probably one of the craft that had originally cut the channel. Its big V8 engine was gone, and there were holes in its hull.

We tied the boat up at a sole red swamp maple, which was almost covered with resurrection fern waiting for the rains to bring it back to life. Morphy stripped down to a pair of Nike cycling shorts, rubbed himself down with grease and put the dry suit on. He added the flippers, then strapped on the tank and tested it. ‘Most of the waters around here are no more than ten, maybe fifteen feet deep, but this place is different,’ he said. ‘You can see it in the way the light reflects on the water. It’s deeper, twenty feet or more.’ Leaves, sticks and logs floated on the water and insects flitted above the surface. The water looked dark and green.

He washed the mask in the swamp water then turned to me. ‘Never thought I’d be looking for swamp ghosts on my day off,’ he said.

‘Raymond Aguillard says he saw the girl here,’ I replied. ‘David Fontenot died up the river. There’s something here. You know what you’re looking for?’

He nodded. ‘Probably a container of some sort, heavy, sealed.’

Morphy flicked on the flashlight, slipped on his mask and began sucking oxygen. I tied one end of the climbing rope to his belt and another to the trunk of the maple, yanked it firm then patted him on the back. He raised a thumb and waded into the water. Two or three yards out, he began to dive and I started to feed the rope out through my hands.

I had had little experience of diving, beyond a few basic lessons taken during a holiday with Susan on the Florida Keys. I didn’t envy Morphy, swimming around in that swamp. During my teens, we went swimming in the Stroudwater river, beyond what are now the Portland city limits, during the summer. Long, lean gars dwelt in those waters, vicious things that brought a hint of the primeval with them. When they brushed your bare legs, it made you think of stories you had heard about them biting small children or dragging swimming dogs down to the bottom of the river.

The waters of Honey Island swamp were like another world compared to the Stroudwater. With its glittering snakes and its cowens, the name the Cajuns give to the swamp’s snapping turtles, Honey Island seemed so much more feral than the backwaters of Maine. But there were alligator gar here too, and scaled shortnoses, as well as perch and bass and bowfins. And ’gators.

I thought of these things as Morphy disappeared below the surface of the bayou, but I also thought of the young girl who might have been dumped in these waters, where creatures she couldn’t name bumped and clicked against the side of her tomb while others searched for rust holes through which to get at the rotting meat inside.

Morphy surfaced after five minutes, indicated the short, north-eastern bank, and shook his head. Then he submerged again and the line on the ground snaked south as he swam. After another five minutes the rope began to pull out quickly. Morphy broke the surface again, but this time some distance from where the rope entered the water. He swam back to the bank, removed the mask and mouthpiece and breathed in short gasps as he gestured back towards the southern end of the bayou.

‘We got a couple of metal boxes, maybe four feet long, two feet wide and eighteen inches deep, dumped down there,’ he said. ‘One’s empty, the other’s locked and bolted. Couple of hundred yards away there’s a bunch of oil barrels marked with red fleurs-de-lys. They belong to the old Brevis Chemical Company, used to operate out of West Baton Rouge until a big fire in ’eighty-nine put it out of business. That’s it. Nothing else down there.’

I looked out towards the edge of the bayou, where thick roots lay obscured beneath the water.

‘Could we pull in the box using the rope?’ I asked.

‘Could do, but that box is heavy and if we bust it open while hauling it in we’ll destroy whatever’s inside. We’ll have to bring the boat out and try to pull it up.’

It was getting very warm now, although the trees on the bank provided some shade from the sun. Morphy took two bottles of still mineral water from the icebox and we drank them sitting on the bank. Then Morphy and I got into the boat and took it out to his marker.

Twice the box caught on some obstacle on the bottom as I tried to pull it up, and I had to wait for Morphy to signal before I could start hauling it in again. Eventually, the grey metal box broke the surface of the water, Morphy pushing up from beneath before he went back down to tie the marker rope to one of the oil barrels in case we had to search them.

I brought the boat back to the landing and dragged the box up on to the shore. The chain and lock securing it were old and rusted, probably too old to yield anything of any use to us. I took the axe and struck at the rusty lock that held the chain in place. It broke as Morphy walked on to the bank. He knelt beside me, the oxygen tank still on his back and the mask pushed up on to his forehead as I pulled at the lid of the box. It was stuck fast. I took the blunt head of the axe and struck upward along the edges until the lid lifted.

Inside was a consignment of breech-loading Springfield .50 calibre rifles and the bones of what seemed to be a small dog. The butts of the rifles had almost rotted but I could still see the letters ‘LNG’ on the metal butt plates.

‘Stolen rifles,’ said Morphy, pulling one free and examining it. ‘Maybe eighteen seventy or ’eighty. The authorities probably issued a stolen arms proclamation after these were taken and the thief dumped them or left them there with the intention of coming back.’

He prodded at the dog’s skull with his fingers. ‘The bones are an indicator of some kind. Pity nobody been seein’ the Hound of the Baskervilles out here, else we’d have the whole mystery cleared up.’ He looked at the rifles, then back out towards the oil drums. He sighed, then began to swim out towards the marker.

Hauling in the drums was a laborious process. The chain slipped off three times as we tried to haul in the first. Morphy came back for a second chain and wrapped it, parcel style, around the drum. The boat almost overturned when I tried to open the barrel while I was still on the water, so we were forced to bring it back to dry land. When we eventually got it on to the bank, brown and rusting, it contained only stale sump. The drums had a hole for loading and pouring the oil, but the entire lid could also be prised off. When we opened the second drum it didn’t even contain sump, just some stones which had been used to weigh it down.

By now, Morphy was exhausted. We stopped for a time to eat some of the chicken and bread, and drink some of the coffee. It was now past midday and the heat in the swamp was heavy and draining. After we had rested, I offered to do some of the diving. Morphy didn’t refuse, so I handed him my shoulder holster then suited up and strapped on the spare tank.

The water was surprisingly cool as I slipped into it. As it reached my chest, it almost took my breath away. The chains were heavy across my shoulder as I guided myself along the marker rope with one hand. When I reached the spot where the rope entered the water, I slipped the flashlight from my belt and dived.

The water was deeper than I expected and very dark, the duckweed above me blacking out the sunlight in patches. At the periphery of my vision, fish twisted and spun. The barrels, of which five remained, all piled in a heap, were gathered around the submerged trunk of an ancient tree, its roots buried deep in the bottom of the swamp. Any boat that might have been using the swamp bank to land on would have avoided the tree, which meant that the barrels were in no danger of being disturbed. The water at the base of the tree was darker than the rest, so that without the meagre light the barrels would have been invisible.

I wrapped the top barrel in chains and yanked once to test its weight. It tumbled from the top of the pile, yanking the rope from my grasp as it headed for the bottom. The water muddied and dirt and vegetation obscured my vision, and then everything went black as oil began to leak from the drum. I was kicking back to get into clearer water when I heard the dull, echoing sound of a gunshot from above me. For a moment, I thought that Morphy might be in trouble until I remembered what the gunshot was supposed to signal and realised that it was I, not Morphy, who was in trouble.

I was breaking for the surface when I saw the ’gator. It was small, maybe only six feet long, but the glare caught the wicked-looking teeth jutting out along its jaws and its light-coloured underbelly. It was as disorientated by the oil and dirt as I was, but it seemed to be angling towards the beam of my flashlight. I turned it off and instantly lost sight of the ’gator as I made a final kick for the surface.

When I broke the water the marker rope was fifteen feet in front of me, Morphy beside it.

‘Come on!’ he shouted. ‘There’s no other landing around you.’

I splashed hard as I swam towards him, all the time aware of the reptile cruising beneath me. As I splashed, I spotted it on the surface to my left, about twenty feet away from me. I could see the scales on its back, its hungry eyes and the line of its jaw pointed in my direction. I turned on my back so I could keep the ’gator in my sight and kicked out, sometimes using the rope to pull myself along, at other times using my hands.

I was still five feet from the boat when the ’gator moved, working its way swiftly through the water in my direction. I spat the mouthpiece out.

‘Shoot it, goddammit,’ I shouted. I heard the boom of a gun and a spume of water kicked up in front of the ’gator, then a second. The creature stopped short and then a sprinkling of pink and white fell to my right and it turned in that direction. It reached the objects just as a second shower fell, further away to the right, and I felt the boat against my back and Morphy’s hands helping me to haul myself up. We turned for the bank as Morphy sent a third handful of marshmallows into the air. When I looked at him, he was grinning as he popped a last marshmallow into his mouth. Out on the bayou, the ’gator was snapping at the remains of the candy.

‘Scared you, huh?’ smiled Morphy, as I shrugged off the oxygen tank and lay flat on the bottom of the boat.

I nodded and kicked off a flipper.

‘I think you’re going to have to get your dry suit cleaned,’ I said.

We sat on a log and watched the ’gator for a time. It cruised the waters looking for more marshmallows, eventually settling for a wait-and-see policy, which consisted of it lying partially submerged near the marker rope. We sipped coffee from tin cups and finished off the last of the chicken.

‘You should have shot it,’ I said.

‘This is a nature reserve and there are laws about killing ’gators,’ responded Morphy testily. ‘Not much point in having a nature reserve if people can come in when they please and shoot the wildlife.’

We sipped the coffee some more, until I heard the sound of a boat coming towards us through the rice and grass.

‘Shit,’ said a familiar Brooklyn drawl, as the prow of the boat broke the grass, ‘it’s the Donner Party.’

Angel emerged first, then Louis behind him, controlling the rudder. They moved steadily towards us and tied up at the maple. Angel splashed into the water, then followed our gaze out towards the ’gator. He caught one sight of the partially submerged reptile and ran awkwardly on to the bank, his knees high and his elbows pumping.

‘Man, what is this? Jurassic Park?’ he said. He turned to Louis, who jumped from his boat to ours and then on to the bank. ‘Hey, didn’t you tell your sister not to be swimmin’ in no strange ponds?’

Angel was dressed in his usual jeans and battered sneakers, with a denim jacket over a Doonesbury T-shirt, which depicted Duke and the motto ‘Death Before Unconsciousness’. Louis was wearing crocodile-skin boots, black Levi’s and a white collarless Liz Claiborne shirt.

‘We dropped by to see how you were,’ said Angel, casting anxious glances at the ’gator after I had introduced him to Morphy. He held a bag of donuts in his hand.

‘Our friend’s gonna be real upset if he sees you wearing one of his relatives, Louis,’ I said.

Louis sniffed and approached the water’s edge. ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked at last.

‘We were diving and then Wally Gator appeared and we weren’t diving any more,’ I explained.

Louis sniffed again. ‘Hmm,’ he said. Then he drew his SIG and blew the tip of the ’gator’s tail off. The reptile thrashed in pain and the water around it turned bright red, then it spun and headed off into the bayou, trailing blood behind it. ‘You should have shot it,’ he said.

‘Let’s not get into it,’ I responded. ‘Roll up your sleeves, gentlemen, we’re going to need some help.’

I still had the dry suit on so I offered to keep diving.

‘Trying to prove to me that you ain’t chicken?’ grinned Morphy.

‘Nope,’ I said, as we untied the boat. ‘Trying to prove it to myself.’

We rowed out to the marker rope and then I dived down with the hook and chains, leaving Angel topside with Morphy and his gun in case the ’gator showed up again. Louis joined us in the second boat. A thick black film of oil had formed on the surface of the water and hung in the depths below. The barrels had scattered when the topmost drum fell. I checked the ruptured barrel with the flashlight but it appeared to contain nothing except the oil that remained.

It was laborious work, tying the barrel and hauling it up each time, but with two boats it meant that we could transport two barrels at a time to the bank. There was probably an easier way to do it, but we hadn’t figured it out.

The sun was growing low and the waters were bathed in gold when we found her.

Chapter Forty-Three

It seems to me now that when I touched the barrel for the first time to attach the chains, something coursed through my system and tightened in my stomach like a fist. I felt a jolt. A blade flashed before my eyes and the depths were coloured by a fountain of blood, or maybe it was simply the dying sunset on the water above reflected on my mask. I closed my eyes for a moment and felt movement around me, not just the water of the swamp or the fish in its depths but another swimmer who twisted around my body and legs. I thought I felt her hair brush my cheek but when I reached out I caught only swamp weed in my hand.

This barrel was heavier than the others, weighed down, it emerged, with masonry bricks that had been split neatly in half. It would need the combined efforts of Morphy and Angel to pull it up.

‘It’s her,’ I said to Morphy. ‘We’ve found her.’ And then I swam down to the barrel and manoeuvred it slowly over the rocks and tree trunks at the bottom as we brought it up. We all seemed to handle this barrel more gently than the rest, as if the girl inside was merely sleeping and we didn’t want to disturb her, as if she was not long decayed but had been laid within it only yesterday. On the bank, Angel took the crowbar and carefully applied it to the rim of the lid, but it refused to move. He examined it more closely.

‘It’s been sealed,’ he said. He scraped the crowbar over the surface of the barrel and checked the mark left. ‘The barrel’s been treated with something as well. That’s why it’s in better condition than the others.’

It was true. The barrel had hardly rusted and the fleur-de-lys on its side was as clear and bright as if it had been painted only days before.

I thought for a moment. We could use the chainsaw to cut it but, if I was right and the girl was inside, I didn’t want to damage the remains. We could also have called for assistance from the cops, or even the feds. I suggested it, more out of duty than desire, but even Morphy declined. He might have been concerned at the embarrassment that would be caused if the barrel was empty, but when I looked in his eyes I could see that wasn’t the case. He wanted us to take it as far as we could.

In the end, we tested the barrel by gently tapping along its length with the axe. From the difference in sound, we judged as best we could where we could safely cut. Morphy carefully made an incision near the sealed end of the barrel and, using a combination of chainsaw and crowbar, we cut an area that was roughly half the circumference, then pushed it up with the crowbar and shone a light inside.

The body was little more than bones and shreds of material, the skin and flesh entirely rotted away. She had been dumped in head first and her legs had been broken to fit her into the barrel. When I shone the flashlight to the far end, I glimpsed bared teeth and strands of hair. We stood silently beside her, surrounded by the lapping water and the sounds of the swamp.

It was late that night when I got back to the Flaisance. While we waited for the Slidell police and the rangers, Angel and Louis departed, with Morphy’s agreement. I stayed on to give my statement and back up Morphy’s version of what had taken place. On Morphy’s advice, the locals called the FBI. I didn’t wait around. If Woolrich wanted to talk, he knew where to find me.

The light was still on in Rachel’s room as I passed, so I stopped and knocked. She opened the door wearing a pink Calvin Klein nightshirt, which stopped at mid-thigh level.

‘Angel told me what happened,’ she said, opening the door wider to let me enter. ‘That poor girl.’ She hugged me and then ran the shower in the bathroom. I stayed in there for a long time, my hands against the tiles, letting the water roll over my head and back.

After I had dried myself, I wrapped the towel around my waist and found Rachel sitting on the bed, leafing through her papers. She cocked an eyebrow at me.

‘Such modesty,’ she said, with a little smile.

I sat on the edge of the bed and she wrapped her arms around me from behind. I felt her cheek and her warm breath against my back. ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

Her grip tightened a little. ‘Okay, I think.’

She turned me around so that I was facing her. She knelt on the bed before me, her hands clasped between her legs and bit her lip. Then she reached out and gently, almost tentatively, ran her hand through my hair.

‘I thought you psychology types were supposed to be good at all this,’ I said.

She shrugged. ‘I get just as confused as everybody else, except I know all the terminology for my confusion.’ She sighed. ‘Listen, what happened yesterday . . . I don’t want to put pressure on you. I know how hard all this is for you, because of Susan and . . .’

I held my hand against her cheek and rubbed her lips gently with my thumb. Then I kissed her and felt her mouth open beneath mine. I wanted to hold her, to love her, to drive away the vision of the dead girl.

‘Thanks,’ I said, my mouth still against her, ‘but I know what I’m doing.’

‘Well,’ she said, as she eased back slowly on to the bed, ‘at least one of us does.’

The following morning, the remains of the girl lay on a metal table, curled foetally by the constriction of the barrel as if to protect herself for eternity, On the instructions of the FBI, she had been brought to New Orleans, weighed and measured, X-rayed and fingerprinted. The body bag in which she had been removed from Honey Island had been examined for debris that might have fallen from her while she was being transported.

The white tiles, the shining metal tables, the glinting medical instruments, the white lights hanging above them, all seemed too harsh, too relentless in their mission to expose, to examine, to reveal. It seemed a final indignity, after the terrors of her final moments, to display her here in the sterility of this room, with these men looking upon her. A part of me wanted to cover her with a shroud and carry her carefully, gently, to a dark hole beside flowing water, where green trees would shade the ground under which she lay and where no one would disturb her again.

But another part of me, the rational part, knew that she deserved a name, that she needed an identity to put an end to the anonymity of her sufferings and, perhaps, to close in on the man who had reduced her to this. And so we stood back as the gowned ME and his assistants moved in with their tapes and their blades and their white-gloved hands.

The pelvis is the most easily recognisable distinguishing feature between the male and female skeletons. The greater sciatic notch, situated behind the inominate bone – which itself consists of the hip, the ischium, the ilium and the pubis – is wider in the female, with a sub-pubic angle roughly the size of that between the thumb and forefinger. The pelvic outlet is also larger in the female but the thigh sockets are smaller, the sacrum wider.

Even the female skull is different from that of the male, a reflection in miniature of the physical differences between the two sexes. The female skull is as smooth and rounded as the female breast, yet smaller than the male skull; the forehead is higher and also more rounded; the eye sockets, too, are higher and the edges less sharply defined: the female jaw, palate and teeth are smaller.

The skeletal remains before us conformed to the general pelvic and skull rules governing the female body. In estimating the age of the body at the time of death, the ossification centres or areas of bone formation were examined, as were the teeth. The femur of the girl’s body was almost completely fused at the head, although there was only partial joining of the collarbone to the top of the breastbone. Combined with an examination of the sutures on her skull, the ME estimated her age at twenty-one or twenty-two. There were marks on her forehead, the base of her jaw and on her left cheekbone, where the killer had cut through to the bone as he removed her face.

Her dental features were recorded, a process known as forensic odontology, to be checked against missing-persons files, while samples of bone marrow and hair were removed for possible use in DNA profiling. Then Woolrich, Morphy and I watched as the remains were wheeled away, covered in a plastic wrap. We exchanged a few words before we each went our separate ways but, to be honest, I don’t recall what they were. All I could see was the girl. All I could hear was the sound of water in my ears.

If the DNA profiling and the dental records failed to reveal her identity, Woolrich had decided that facial reconstruction might prove valuable, using a laser reflected from the skull to establish the contours, which could then be compared against a known skull of similar dimensions. He decided to contact Quantico to make the initial arrangements as soon as he had had time to wash and grab a cup of coffee.

But facial reconstruction proved unnecessary. It took less than two hours to identify the body of the young woman in the swamp. Although she had lain in the dark waters for almost six months, she had been reported missing only three months before.

Her name was Lutice Fontenot. She was Lionel Fontenot’s half-sister.

Chapter Forty-Four

The Fontenot compound lay five miles east of Delacroix. It was approached via a raised private road, newly built, which wound through swamps and decaying trees until it reached an area that had been cleared of all vegetation and was now only dark earth. High fencing, topped with razor wire, enclosed two or three acres, at the centre of which lay a low single-storey, horseshoe-shaped concrete building. A Corniche convertible and three black Explorers were parked in a line in the concrete lot created by the arms of the building. To the rear was an older house, a standard single-storey wooden dwelling with a porch and what looked like a series of parallel linked rooms. No one seemed to be around as I pulled up the rented Taurus at the compound gate, Louis in the passenger seat beside me. Rachel had taken the other rental with her on a final visit to Loyola University.

‘Maybe we should have called ahead,’ I said, as I looked towards the silent compound.

Beside me, Louis raised his hands slowly above his head and gestured in front of him with his chin. Two men, dressed in jeans and faded shirts, stood before us pointing Heckler & Koch HK53s with retracted stocks. I caught two more in the rear-view mirror and a fifth, wearing an axe in his belt, opposite the passenger window. They were hard, weathered-looking men, some of them with beards already tinged with grey. Their boots were muddy and their hands were the hands of manual labourers, scarred in places, the fingers thick and muscled.

I watched as a man of medium height, dressed in a blue denim shirt, jeans and workboots, walked towards the gate from the main compound building. When he reached the gate he didn’t open it but stood watching us through the fencing. He had been burned at some point: the skin on the right of his face was heavily scarred, the right eye useless, and the hair hadn’t grown back on that side of his scalp. A fold of skin hung over his dead eye and, when he spoke, he did so out of the left side of his mouth.

‘What you want here?’ The voice was heavily accented: Cajun stock.

‘My name’s Charlie Parker,’ I replied, through the open window. ‘I’m here to see Lionel Fontenot.’

‘Who this?’ He motioned at Louis with a finger.

‘Count Basie,’ I said. ‘The rest of the band couldn’t make it.’

Pretty Boy didn’t crack a smile, or even a half-smile. ‘Lionel don’t see no one. Get yo’ ass outta here ’fo you get hurt.’ He turned and walked back towards the compound.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘You accounted for all of Joe Bones’s goons at Metairie yet?’

He stopped and turned back towards us.

‘What you say?’ He looked like I’d just insulted his sister.

‘I figure you have two bodies at Metairie that no one can account for. If there’s a prize, I’d like to claim it.’

He seemed to consider this for a moment, then: ‘You a joker? You are, I don’t think you funny.’

‘You don’t think I’m funny?’ I said. There was an edge to my voice now. His left eyelid flickered and a H&K ended up two inches from my nose. It smelt like it had been used recently. ‘Try this for funny: I’m the guy who hauled Lutice Fontenot from the bottom of Honey Island. You want to tell Lionel that, see if he laughs?’

He didn’t reply, but pointed an infra-red signaller at the compound gate. It opened almost noiselessly.

‘Get outta the car,’ he said. Two of the men kept our hands in view and their guns trained on us as we opened the car doors, then two others came forward and frisked us against the car, looking for wires and weapons. They handed Louis’s SIG and knife and my S&W to the scarred guy, then checked the interior of the car for concealed weapons. They opened the hood and trunk and checked under the car.

‘Man, you like the Peace Corps,’ whispered Louis. ‘Make friends wherever you go.’

‘Thanks,’ I replied. ‘It’s a gift.’

When they were satisfied that it was clean, we were allowed to drive slowly up to the compound with one of Fontenot’s men, the axeman, in the back. Two men walked alongside the car. We parked beside the Corniche and were escorted up to the older house.

On the porch, waiting for us with a china cup of coffee in his hand, was Lionel Fontenot. The burn victim went up to him and spoke a few words in his ear, but Lionel stopped him with a raised hand and turned a hard stare on us. I felt a raindrop fall on my head and within seconds we were standing in a downpour. Lionel left us in the rain. I was wearing my blue linen Liz Claiborne suit and a white shirt with a blue silk-knit tie. I wondered if the dye would run. The rain was heavy and the dirt around the house was already turning to mud when Lionel ordered his men to leave, took a seat on the porch and indicated with a nod of his head that we should come up. We sat on a pair of wooden chairs with woven seats while Lionel took a wooden recliner. The burn victim stood behind us. Louis and I moved our chairs slightly as we sat so that we could keep him in view.

An elderly black maid, with a face that I recognised from the Metairie funeral party, emerged from the house with a silver coffee pot and sugar and cream in a matching set, all on an ornate silver tray. There were three china cups and saucers on the tray. Multi-coloured birds chased each other’s tails around the rim of the cups and a heavy silver spoon with a sailing ship at the end lay neatly positioned beneath the handle of each one. The maid placed the tray on a small wicker table and then left us.

Lionel Fontenot was wearing a pair of black cotton pants and a white shirt with an open collar. A matching black jacket lay over the back of his chair and his brogues were newly polished. He leaned over the table and poured three cups of coffee, added two sugars to one and handed it wordlessly to the burn victim.

‘Cream and sugar?’ he asked, looking to Louis and me in turn.

‘Black’s fine,’ I said.

‘Likewise,’ said Louis.

Lionel handed us each a cup. It was all very polite. Above us, the rain hammered on the porch roof.

‘You want to tell me how you came to be looking for my sister?’ Lionel said at last. He looked like someone who finds a strange guy cleaning the windscreen of his car and can’t decide whether to tip him a buck or hit him with a tyre iron. He held his cup with his little finger cocked while he sipped his coffee. I noticed that the burn victim did the same.

I told Lionel some of what I knew then. I told him about Tante Marie’s visions and her death and about the stories of the ghost of a girl at a Honey Island slough. ‘I think the man who killed your sister killed Tante Marie Aguillard and her son. He also killed my wife and my little girl,’ I said. ‘That’s how I came to be looking for your sister.’

I didn’t say that I was sorry for his pain. He probably knew that anyway. If he didn’t, then it wasn’t worth saying.

‘You take out two men at Metairie?’

‘One,’ I answered. ‘Someone else killed the other.’

Lionel turned to Louis. ‘You?’

Louis didn’t reply.

‘Someone else,’ I repeated.

Lionel put his cup down and spread his hands. ‘So why are you here now? You want my gratitude? I’m going to New Orleans now to take away my sister’s body. I don’t know that I want to thank you for that.’ He turned his face away. There was pain in his eyes, but no tears. Lionel Fontenot didn’t look like a man with well-developed tear ducts.

‘That’s not why I’m here,’ I said quietly. ‘I want to know why Lutice was only reported missing in the last three months. I want to know what your brother was doing out at Honey Island on the night he was killed.’

‘My brother,’ he said. Love and frustration and guilt chased each other in his voice like the birds on his pretty cups. Then he seemed to catch himself. I think he was about to tell me to go to Hell, to keep out of his family’s business if I wanted to stay alive, but I held his gaze and for a time he said nothing.

‘I got no reason to trust you,’ he said.

‘I can find the man who did this,’ I said. My voice was low and even. Lionel nodded, more to himself than to me, and appeared to make his decision.

‘My sister left at the end of January, start of February,’ he began. ‘She didn’t like . . .’ He waved his left hand gently at the compound. ‘. . . all this. There was trouble with Joe Bones, some people got hurt.’ He paused and chose his next words carefully. ‘One day she closed her bank account, packed a bag and left a note. She didn’t tell us to our faces. David wouldn’t have let her leave, anyways.

‘We tried to trace her. We looked up friends in the city, even people she knew in Seattle and Florida. There was nothing, not a trace. David was real cut up about her. She was our half-sister. When my momma died, my father married again. Lutice came out of that marriage. When my father and her momma died – that was in nineteen eighty-three, in an automobile accident – we took care of her, David especially. They were real close.

‘Few months back, David started having dreams about Lutice. He didn’t say nothing at first, but he got thinner and paler and his nerves started to play at him. When he told me, I thought he was going crazy and told him so, but the dreams just kept comin’. He dreamed of her under water, he said, heard her banging against metal in the night. He was sure that something had happened to her.

‘But what could we do? We had searched half of Louisiana. I’d even made approaches to some of Joe Bones’s men, to see if there was something that maybe needed to be sorted out. There was nothing. She was gone.

‘Next thing I knew, he reported her missing and we had the cops crawling over the compound. Mon, I nearly killed him that day, but he insisted. He said something had happened to Lutice. He was beyond reason by then, and I had to take care of things on my own, with Joe Bones hangin’ over me like a sword ’bout to fall.’

He looked to the burn victim.

‘Leon here was with him when the call came. He wouldn’t say nothin’ about where he was goin’, just took off in his damned yellow car. When Leon tried to stop him, he pulled a gun on him.’ I glanced at Leon. If he felt any guilt about what had happened to David Fontenot, he kept it well hidden.

‘Any idea who made the call?’ I asked.

Lionel shook his head.

I put my cup on the tray. The coffee was cold and untasted.

‘When are you going to hit Joe Bones?’ I asked. Lionel blinked like he had just been slapped and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Leon step forward.

‘The hell you talkin’ about?’ said Lionel.

‘You’ve got a second funeral coming up, at least as soon as the police release your sister’s body. Either you won’t have too many mourners or the funeral will be overrun with police and media. Whatever happens, I figure you’ll try to take out Joe Bones before then, probably at his place in West Feliciana. You owe him for David, and, anyway, Joe won’t rest easy until you’re dead. One of you will try to finish it.’

Lionel looked at Leon. ‘They clean?’ Leon nodded.

Lionel leaned forward. There was menace in his voice. ‘The fuck does any of this have to do with you?’

I wasn’t fazed by him. The threat of violence was in his face, but I needed Lionel Fontenot.

‘You heard about Tony Remarr’s death?’

Lionel nodded.

‘Remarr was killed because he was out at the Aguillard place after Tante Marie and her son were murdered,’ I explained. ‘His fingerprints were found in Tante Marie’s blood, Joe Bones heard about it and told Remarr to lie low. But the killer found out – I don’t know how, yet – and I think he used your brother to lure Remarr into making the hit so he could take him out. I want to know what Remarr told Joe Bones.’

Lionel considered what I had said. ‘And you can’t get to Joe Bones without me.’

Beside me, Louis’s mouth twitched. Lionel caught the movement.

‘That’s not entirely true,’ I said. ‘But if you’re going to be calling on him anyway, we might tag along.’

‘I go calling on Joe Bones, his fucking place is gonna be real fucking quiet by the time I leave,’ said Lionel softly.

‘You do what you have to do,’ I replied. ‘But I need Joe Bones alive. For a while.’

Lionel stood and tied the top button on his shirt. He took a wide black silk tie from the inside pocket of his jacket and began to put it on, using his reflection in the window to check the knot.

‘Where you staying?’ he asked. I told him, and gave Leon the number of my phone. ‘We’ll be in touch,’ said Lionel. ‘Maybe. Don’t come out here again.’

Our discussions appeared to be at an end. Louis and I were almost at the car when Lionel spoke again. He pulled on his jacket and adjusted the collar, then smoothed down the lapels.

‘One thing,’ he said. ‘I know Morphy out of St Martin was there when Lutice was found. You got cop friends?’

‘Yeah. I got federal friends too. That a problem?’

He turned away. ‘Not as long as you don’t make it one. If you do, the crabs gonna be feeding on you and your buddy.’

Louis fooled around with the radio until he found a station that seemed to be playing back-to-back Dr John. ‘This is music, right?’ he said.

The music segued uneasily from ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ to ‘Gris Gris Gumbo Ya-Ya’ and John’s throaty rumble filled the car. Louis flicked the pre-sets again, until he found a country station playing three-in-a-row from Garth Brooks.

‘This be the Devil’s music,’ mumbled Louis. He turned the radio off and tapped his fingers on the dash.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘you don’t have to hang around if you don’t want to. Things could get difficult, or Woolrich and the feds could decide to make them difficult for you.’ I knew that Louis was what Angel diplomatically referred to as ‘semi-retired’. Money, it appeared, was no longer an issue. The ‘semi’ indicated that it might have been replaced by something else, although I wasn’t sure yet what that was.

He looked out the window, not at me. ‘You know why we’re here?’

‘Not entirely. I asked, but I wasn’t sure that you’d come.’

‘We came because we owe you, because you’d look out for us if we needed it and because someone has to look out for you after what happened to your woman and your little girl. More than that, Angel thinks that you’re a good man. Maybe I think so too and maybe I think that what you brought to an end with the Modine bitch, what you’re trying to bring to an end here, they’re things that should be brought to an end. You understand me?’

It was strange to hear him talk this way, strange and affecting. ‘I think I understand,’ I replied quietly. ‘Thank you.’

‘You are going to end this thing here?’ he said.

‘I think so, but we’re missing something, a detail, a pattern, something.’ I kept catching glimpses of it, like a rat passing under streetlights. I needed to find out more about Edward Byron. I needed to talk to Woolrich.

Rachel met us in the hall of the main Flaisance house. I guessed that she had been watching for the car. Angel lounged beside her, eating a Lucky Dog, which looked like the business end of a baseball bat topped with onion, chilli and mustard.

‘The FBI came,’ said Rachel. ‘Your friend Woolrich was with them. They had a warrant. They took everything – my notes, the illustrations, everything they could find.’ She led the way to her room. The walls had been stripped of their notes. Even the diagram I had drawn was gone.

‘They searched our room too,’ remarked Angel to Louis. ‘And Bird’s.’ My head jerked up as I thought of the case of guns. Angel spotted the move. ‘We ditched them soon as your FBI friend put the stare on Louis. They’re in a storage depot on Bayonne. We both have keys.’

I noticed that Rachel seemed more irritated than upset as we followed her to her room. ‘Am I missing something here?’

She smiled. ‘I said they took everything they could find. Angel saw them coming. I hid some of the notes in the waistband of my jeans, under my shirt. Angel took care of some of the rest.’

She took a small pile of papers from under her bed and waved them with a small flourish. She kept one separate in her hand. It was folded over once.

‘I think you might want to see this,’ she said, handing the paper to me. I unfolded it and felt a pain in my chest.

It was an illustration of a woman seated naked on a chair. She had been split from neck to groin and the skin on each side had been pulled back so that it hung over her arms like the folds of a gown. Across her lap lay a young man, similarly opened but with a space where his stomach and other internal organs had been removed. Apart from the detail of the anatomisation and the alteration in the sex of one of the victims, it resembled in its detail what had been done to Jennifer and Susan.

‘It’s Estienne’s Pietà,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s very obscure, which is why it took so long to track down. Even in its day, it was regarded as excessively explicit and, more to the point, blasphemous. It bore too much of a resemblance to the figure of the dead Christ and Mary for the liking of the Church authorities. Estienne nearly burned for it.’

She took the illustration from me and looked at it sadly, then placed it on her bed with the other papers. ‘I know what he’s doing,’ she said. ‘He’s creating memento mori, death’s heads.’ She sat on the edge of the bed and put her hands together beneath her chin, as if in prayer. ‘He’s giving us lessons in mortality.’

Part Four

He had a mind to be acquainted with your inside, Crispin.

Edward Ravenscroft, ‘The Anatomist’

Chapter Forty-Five

In the medical school of the Complutense University of Madrid there is an anatomical museum. Founded by King Carlos III, much of its collection derives from the efforts of Doctor Julian de Velasco in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Dr Velasco was a man who took his work seriously. He was reputed to have mummified the corpse of his own daughter, just as William Harvey was assisted in his discovery of circulation by his decision to autopsy the bodies of his own father and sister.

The long rectangular hall is arrayed with glass cases of exhibits: two giant skeletons, the wax model of a foetal head and, at one point, two figures labeled ‘despellejados’. They are the ‘flayed men’, who stand in dramatic poses, displaying the movement of the muscles and the tendons without the white veil of the skin to hide it from the eye of the beholder. Vesalius, Valverde, Estienne, their forebears, their peers, their successors, worked in the knowledge of this tradition. Artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci created their own écorchés, as they termed their drawings of flayed figures, basing their work on their own participation in dissections.

And the figures they created were more than merely anatomical specimens: they served, in their way, as reminders of the flawed nature of our humanity, a reminder of the body’s capacity for pain and, eventually, mortality. They warned of the futility of the pursuits of the flesh, the reality of disease and pain and death in this life and the promise of something better in the next.

In eighteenth-century Florence, the practice of anatomical modelling reached its peak. Under the patronage of the Abbot Felice Fontana, anatomists and artists worked side by side to create natural sculptures from beeswax. Anatomists exposed the cadavers, the artists poured the liquid plaster, and moulds were created. Layers of wax were poured into them, with pig fat used to alter the temperature of the wax where necessary, allowing a process of layering that reproduced the transparency of human tissue.

Then, using threads and brushes and fine point, the lineaments and striations of the body were reproduced. Eyebrows and eyelashes were added, one by one. In the case of the Bolognese artist Lelli, real skeletons were used as frames for his wax creations. The Emperor of Austria, Joseph II, was so impressed by the collection that he ordered 1192 models to promote medical teaching in his own country. By contrast, Frederik Ruysch, Professor of Anatomy at the Atheneum Illustre in Amsterdam, used chemical fixatives and dyes to preserve his specimens. His house contained an exhibition of the skeletons of infants and children in various poses, reminders of the transience of life.

Yet nothing could compare to the reality of the actual human body exposed to view. Public demonstrations of anatomisation and dissection attracted huge crowds, some of them in carnival disguise. Ostensibly, they were there to learn. In reality, the dissection was little more than an extension of the public execution. In England, the Murder Act of 1752 provided a direct link between the two events by permitting the bodies of murderers to be anatomically dissected and post-mortem penal dissection became a form of further punishment for the criminal, who would now be denied a proper burial. In 1832, the Anatomy Act extended the deprivation of the poor into the next life by allowing the confiscation of the bodies of dead paupers for dissection.

So death and dissection walked hand-in-hand with the extension of scientific knowledge. But what of pain? What of the Renaissance disgust with the workings of the female body, which led to a particularly morbid fascination with the uterus? In the acts of flaying and anatomisation, the realities of suffering, sex and death were not far away.

The interior of the body, when revealed, speaks to us of mortality. But how many of us can ever bear witness to our own interiors? We see our own mortality only through the prism of the mortality of others. Even then, it is only in exceptional circumstances, in cases of war, or violent accidental death or murder, when the viewer is a witness to the act itself or its immediate consequences, that mortality in all its deep red reality is made clear to us.

In his violent, pain-filled way, Rachel believed, the Travelling Man was trying to break down these barriers. In killing his victims in this way, he was making them aware of their own mortality, exposing to them their own interiors, introducing them to the meaning of true pain; but they also served as a reminder to others of their own mortality and the final, dreadful pain that would some day find them.

The Travelling Man crisscrossed the boundaries between torture and execution, between intellectual and physical curiosity and sadism. He was part of the secret history of mankind, the history recorded in the thirteenth-century Anatomia Magistri Nicolai Physici, which observed that the ancients practised dissection upon both the living and the dead, binding condemned criminals hand and foot and gradually dissecting them, beginning with their legs and arms and moving on to their internal organs. Celsus and Augustine made similar allegations about live dissections, still contested by medical historians.

And now the Travelling Man had come to write his own history, to offer his own blending of science and art, to make his own notes on mortality, to create a Hell within the human heart.

All this Rachel explained as we sat in her room. Outside, it had grown dark and the strains of music floated on the air.

‘I think the blinding may be related to ignorance, a physical representation of a failure to understand the reality of pain and death,’ she said. ‘But it indicates just how far the killer himself is removed from ordinary humanity. We all suffer, we all experience death in various ways before we die ourselves. He believes that only he can teach us this . . .’

‘That, or he believes we’ve lost sight of it and need to be reminded, that it’s his role to tell us just how inconsequential we are,’ I added. Rachel nodded her assent.

‘If what you say is true, then why was Lutice Fontenot dumped in a barrel?’ It was Angel. He sat by the balcony, staring out on to the street below.

‘’Prentice work,’ said Rachel. Louis cocked an eyebrow but stayed silent.

‘This Travelling Man believes he’s creating works of art: the care he takes in displaying the bodies, their relation to old medical texts, the links with mythology and artistic representations of the body all point in that direction. But even artists have to start somewhere. Poets, painters, sculptors all serve an apprenticeship of sorts, formal or otherwise. The work they create during their apprenticeships may go on to influence their later work, but it’s usually not for public display. It’s a chance to make mistakes without criticism, to see what you can and cannot achieve. Maybe that’s what Lutice Fontenot was to him: ’prentice work.’

‘But she died after Susan and Jennifer,’ I added softly.

‘He took Susan and Jennifer because he wanted to, but the results were unsatisfactory. I think he used Lutice to practise again before he returned to the public arena,’ she answered, not looking at me. ‘He took Tante Marie and her son for a combination of reasons, out of both desire and necessity, and this time he had the time he needed to achieve the effect for which he was searching. He then had to kill Remarr, either because of what he actually saw or the mere possibility that he might have seen something, but again he created a memento mori out of him. He’s practical, in his way: he’s not afraid to make a virtue out of necessity.’

Angel looked unhappy with the thrust of Rachel’s words. ‘But what about the way most of us react to death?’ he began. ‘It makes us want to live. It even makes us want to screw.’

Rachel glanced at me, then returned to her notes.

‘I mean,’ continued Angel, ‘what does this guy want us to do? Stop eating, stop loving, because he’s got a thing about death and he thinks the next world is going to be something better?’

I picked up the illustration of the Pietà again and examined the detail of the bodies, the carefully labelled interiors, and the placid expressions on the faces of the woman and the man. The faces of the Travelling Man’s victims had looked nothing like this. They were contorted in their final agonies.

‘He doesn’t give a damn about the next world,’ I said. ‘He’s only concerned with the damage he can do in this one.’

I stood and joined Angel at the window. Beneath us, the dogs scampered and sniffed in the courtyard. I could smell cooking and beer and imagined that, beneath it all, I could smell the mass of humanity itself, passing us by.

‘Why hasn’t he come after us? Or you?’ It was Angel. His words were directed at me, but it was Rachel who answered.

‘Because he wants us to understand,’ she said. ‘Everything he’s done is an attempt to lead us to something. All of this is an effort to communicate, and we’re the audience. He doesn’t want to kill us.’

‘Yet,’ said Louis.

Rachel nodded once, her eyes locked on mine. ‘Yet,’ she repeated softly.

I arranged to meet Rachel and the others later in Vaughan’s. Back in my room, I called Woolrich and left a message on his machine. He returned the call within five minutes and told me he’d meet me at the Napoleon House within the hour.

He was as good as his word. Shortly before ten he appeared, dressed in off-white chinos and carrying a matching jacket over his arm, which he put on as soon as he entered the bar.

‘Is it chilly in here, or is it just the reception?’ There was sleep caked at the corners of his eyes and he smelled sour and unwashed. He was no longer the assured figure I recalled from Jenny Ohrbach’s apartment, wresting control of the room from a group of vaguely hostile cops. Instead he looked older, more uncertain. Taking Rachel’s papers in the way he did was out of character for him; the old Woolrich would have taken them anyway, but he would have asked for them first. He ordered an Abita for himself and another mineral water for me.

‘You want to tell me why you seized materials from the hotel?’

‘Don’t look on it as a seizure, Bird. Consider it borrowing.’ He sipped at his beer and looked at himself in the mirror. He didn’t seem to like what he saw.

‘You could just have asked,’ I said.

‘Would you have given it to me?’

‘No, but I’d have discussed why I wouldn’t.’

‘I don’t think that Durand would have been too impressed with that. Frankly, I wouldn’t have been too impressed either.’

‘Durand called it? Why? You have your own profilers, your own agents on it. Why were you so sure that we could add something?’

He spun around on his stool and leaned close to me, close enough that I could smell his breath. ‘Bird, I know you want this guy. I know you want him for what he did to Susan and Jennifer, to the old woman and her son, to Florence, to Lutice Fontenot, maybe even to that fuck Remarr. I’ve tried to keep you in touch with what’s been going down and you’ve walked all over this case like a fucking child in new boots. You’ve got an assassin staying in the room next door, God alone knows what his pal does, and your lady friend is collecting graphic medical imagery like box tops. You ain’t given me shit, so I did what I had to do. You think I’m holding back on you? With the shit you’re pulling, you’re lucky I don’t put you back on a plane to Noo Yawk.’

‘I need to know what you know,’ I said. ‘What are you holding back about this guy?’

We were almost head to head now. Then Woolrich leaned back.

‘Holding back? Jesus, Bird, you’re unbelievable. Here’s something: Byron’s wife? You want to know what she majored in when she was at college? Art. Her thesis was on Renaissance art and depictions of the body. You think that might have included medical representations, that maybe that was where her ex got some of his ideas?’

He took a deep breath and a long draught of beer. ‘You’re bait, Bird. You know it, and I know it. And I know something else too.’ His voice was cold and hard. ‘I know you were at Metairie. There’s a guy in the morgue with a bullet hole in his head and the cops have the remains of a 10-millimetre Smith & Wesson bullet, which was dug out of the marble behind him. You want to tell me about that, Bird? You want to tell me if you were alone in Metairie when the killing started?’

I didn’t reply.

Then: ‘You screwing her, Bird?’

I looked at him. There was no mirth in his eyes and he wasn’t smiling. Instead, there was hostility and distrust. Whatever I needed to know about Edward Byron and his ex-wife, I would have to find out myself. If I had hit him then, we would have hurt each other badly. I didn’t waste any more words on him and I didn’t look back as I left the bar.

I took a cab to Bywater and stopped off right outside Vaughan’s Lounge on the corner of Dauphine and Lesseps. I paid the five-dollar cover at the door. Inside, Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers were lost in a rhapsody of New Orleans brass and there were plates of red beans scattered on the tables. Rachel and Angel were dancing around chairs and tables while Louis looked on with a long-suffering expression. As I approached, the tempo of the music slowed a little and Rachel made a grab for me. I moved with her for a while as she stroked my face, and I closed my eyes and let her. Then I sipped a soda and thought my own thoughts until Louis moved from his seat and sat beside me.

‘You didn’t have much to say back in Rachel’s room,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘It’s bullshit. All this stuff, the religion, the medical drawings, they’re all just trappings. And maybe he believes them and maybe he don’t. It’s nothing to do with mortality, it’s to do with the beauty of the colour of meat.’

He took a sip of beer.

‘And this guy just likes red.’

Back at the Flaisance, I lay beside Rachel and listened to her breathing in the dark.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘About our killer.’

‘And?’

‘I think the killer may not be male.’

I raised myself up on my elbows and looked at her. I could see the whites of her eyes, wide and bright.

‘Why?’

‘I’m not sure, exactly. There just seems to be something almost feminine about the sensibility of whoever is committing these crimes, a . . . sensitivity to the interconnectedness of things, to their potential for symbolism. I don’t know. I guess I’m thinking out loud, but it’s not a sensibility typical of a modern male. Maybe “female” is wrong – I mean, the hallmarks, the cruelty, the capacity to overpower, all point to a male – but it’s as close as I can get, at least for now.’

She was silent again.

‘Are we becoming a couple?’ she asked at last.

‘I don’t know. Are we?’

‘You’re avoiding the question.’

‘No, not really. It’s not one that I’m used to answering, or that I ever thought that I’d have to answer again. If you’re asking if I want us to stay together, then the answer is yes, I do. It worries me a little, and I’m bringing in more baggage than the handlers at JFK, but I want to be with you.’

She kissed me softly.

‘Why did you stop drinking?’ she asked, adding, ‘Since we’re having this heart-to-heart.’

I started at the question. ‘Because if I took one drink now, I’d wake up in Singapore with a beard a week later,’ I replied.

‘It doesn’t answer the question.’

‘I hated myself and that made me hate others, even the people closest to me. I was drinking the night Susan and Jennifer were killed. I’d been drinking a lot, not just that night but other nights too. I drank because of a lot of things, because of the pressure of the job, because of my failings as a husband, as a father, and maybe other things as well, things from way back. If I hadn’t been a drunk, Susan and Jennifer might not have died. So I stopped. Too late, but I stopped.’

She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t say, ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ or ‘You can’t blame yourself.’ She knew better than that.

I think I wanted to say more, to try to explain to her what it was like without alcohol, about how I was afraid that, without it, each day would now leave me with nothing to which to look forward. Each day would simply be another day without a drink. Sometimes, when I was at my lowest ebb, I wondered if my search for the Travelling Man was just a way to fill my days, a way to keep me from going off the rails.

Later, as she slept, I lay on the bed, on top of the sheets, and thought about Lutice Fontenot and bodies turned into art, before I, too, faded into sleep.

Chapter Forty-Six

I slept badly that night, wound up by my conversation with Woolrich and troubled by dreams of dark water. The next morning, I had breakfast alone after tracking down what seemed to be the only copy of The New York Times in Orleans Parish over at Riverside News, by the Jax Brewery. Later, I met Rachel at Café du Monde and we walked through the French Market, wandering between the stalls of T-shirts and CDs and cheap wallets, and on to the fresh produce at the Farmers’ Market. There were pecans like dark eyes, pale, shrunken heads of garlic, melons with dark red flesh that held the gaze like a wound. White-eyed fish lay packed in ice beside crawfish tails; headless shrimp rested by racks of ‘’gator-on-a-stick’ and murky tanks in which baby alligators lay on display. There were stalls loaded with eggplants and militones, sweet onions and elephant-toe garlic, fresh Roma tomatoes and ripe avocados.

Over a century before, this had been a two-block stretch of Gallatin Street on the riverfront docks between Barracks and Ursuline. Outside of maybe Shanghai and the Bowery, it was one of the toughest places in the world, a strip of brothels and low-life gin mills where hard-faced men mixed with harder women and anyone without a weapon had taken a wrong turning somewhere that he was bound to regret.

Gallatin is gone now, erased from the map, and instead tourists mix with Cajun fishermen from Lafayette and beyond, come to sell their wares surrounded by the thick, heady smell of the Mississippi. The city was like that, it seemed: streets disappeared; bars opened and, a century later, were gone; buildings were torn down or burned to the ground and others rose to take their place. There was change, but the spirit of the city remained the same. On this muggy morning, it seemed to brood beneath the clouds, feeling the people as a passing infection which it would cleanse from itself with rain.

The door of my room was slightly ajar when we returned through the courtyard. I motioned Rachel against the wall and drew my Smith & Wesson, keeping to the sides of the wooden stairway so that the steps wouldn’t creak. The noise of Ricky’s Steyr sending bullets raking past my ear had stayed with me. ‘Joe Bones says hello.’ I figured that if Joe Bones tried to say hello again, I could spare enough powder to blow him back to Hell.

I listened at the door but no sounds came from inside. If it had been the maid in my room, she’d have been whistling and bumping, maybe listening to a blues station on her tinny portable radio. If there was a maid in my room now, she was either asleep or levitating.

I hit the door hard with my shoulder and entered fast, my gun at arm’s length, scanning the room with the sight. It came to rest on the figure of Leon sitting in a chair by the balcony, flicking through a copy of GQ that Louis had passed on to me. Leon didn’t look like the kind of guy who bought much on GQ’s recommendation, unless the Q had made a big play for the JC Penney contract. Leon glanced at me with even less interest than he gave to GQ. His damaged eye glistened beneath its fold of skin like a crab peering out of a shell.

‘When you’re finished, there are hairs in the shower and the closet door sticks,’ I said.

‘Room falls down around your ears, I could give a fuck,’ he replied. That Leon, what a kidder.

He threw the magazine on the floor and looked past me to Rachel, who had followed me into the room. His eyes didn’t register any interest there either. Maybe Leon was dead and no one had worked up the guts to tell him.

‘She’s with me,’ I said. Leon looked like he could have keeled over from apathy.

‘Ten tonight, at the 966 junction at Starhill. You et ton ami noir. Anyone else, Lionel cornhole you both with a shotgun.’

He stood to leave. As I moved aside to let him pass, I made a pistol of my finger and thumb and fired it at him. There was a flash of steel in each of his hands and two barb-edged knives appeared inches from each of my eyes. I could see the tops of the spring loaders in his sleeves. That explained why Leon didn’t seem to feel the need to carry a gun.

‘Impressive,’ I said, ‘but it’s only funny until someone loses an eye.’ Leon’s dead right eye seemed to gaze into my soul, as if to rot it and turn it to dust, then he left. I couldn’t hear his footsteps as he walked down the gallery.

‘A friend of yours?’ asked Rachel.

I walked out of the room and looked down at the already empty courtyard. ‘If he is, I’m lonelier than I thought.’

When Louis and Angel returned from a late breakfast, I went to their door and knocked. A couple of seconds went by before there was a response.

‘Yeah?’ shouted Angel.

‘It’s Bird. You two decent?’

‘Jeez, I hope not. C’mon in.’

Louis sat upright in bed, reading the Times-Picayune. Angel sat beside him outside the sheets, naked but for a towel across his lap.

‘The towel for my benefit?’

‘I’m afraid you might become confused about your sexuality.’

‘Might take away what little I have.’

‘Very witty for a man screwing a psychologist. Why don’t you just pay your eighty bucks an hour like everyone else?’

Louis gave us both bored looks over the top of his newspaper. Maybe Leon and Louis were related way back.

‘Lionel Fontenot’s boy just paid me a visit,’ I said.

‘The beauty queen?’

‘None other.’

‘We on?’

‘Tonight at ten. Better get your stuff out of hock.’

‘I’ll send my boy.’ He kicked Angel in the leg from beneath the sheets.

‘The ugly queen?’

‘None other,’ said Louis.

Angel continued to watch his game show. ‘It’s beneath my dignity to comment.’

Louis returned to his paper. ‘You got a lot of dignity for a guy with a towel on his dick.’

‘It’s a big towel,’ sniffed Angel.

‘Waste of a lot of good towel space, you ask me.’

I left them to it. Back in my room, Rachel was standing by the wall, her arms folded and a fierce expression on her face.

‘What happens now?’ she asked.

‘We go back to Joe Bones,’ I said.

‘And Lionel Fontenot kills him,’ she spat. ‘He’s no better than Joe Bones. You’re only siding with him out of expediency. What will happen when Fontenot kills him? Will things be any better?’

I didn’t answer. I knew what would happen. There would be a brief disturbance in the drugs trade, as Fontenot renegotiated existing deals or ended them entirely. Prices would go up and there would be some killing, as those who felt strong enough to challenge him for Joe Bones’s turf made their play. Lionel Fontenot would kill them, of that I had no doubt.

Rachel was right. It was only expediency that made me side with Lionel. Joe Bones knew something about what had happened the night Tante Marie died, something that could bring me a step closer to the man who had killed my wife and child. If it took Lionel Fontenot’s guns to find out what that was, then I would side with the Fontenots.

‘And Louis will stand beside you,’ said Rachel quietly. ‘My God, what have you become?’

Later, I drove to Baton Rouge, Rachel accompanying me at my insistence. We were uneasy together, and no words were exchanged. Rachel contented herself with looking out of the window, her elbow resting against the door, her right hand supporting her cheek. The silence between us remained unbroken until we reached Exit 166, heading for LSU and the home of Stacey Byron. Then I spoke, anxious that we should at least try to clear the air between us.

‘Rachel, I’ll do what I have to do to find whoever killed Susan and Jennifer,’ I said. ‘I need this, else I’m dead inside.’

She did not reply immediately. For a time, I thought she was not going to reply at all.

‘You’re already dying inside,’ she said at last, still staring out of the window. I could see her eyes, reflected in the glass, following the landscape. ‘The fact that you’re prepared to do these things is an indication of that.’

She looked at me for the first time. ‘I’m not your moral arbiter, Bird, and I’m not the voice of your conscience. But I am someone who cares about you, and I’m not sure how to deal with these feelings right now. Part of me wants to walk away and never look back, but another part of me wants, needs, to stay with you. I want to stop this thing, all of it. I want it all to end, for everybody’s sake.’ Then she turned away again and left me to deal with what she had said.

Stacey Byron lived in a small white clapboard house with a red door and peeling paint, close to a small mall with a big supermarket, a photo shop and a twenty-four-hour pizzeria. This area by the LSU campus was populated mainly by students and some of the houses now had stores on their first floor, selling used CDs and books or long hippie dresses and over-wide straw hats. As we drove by Stacey Byron’s house and pulled into a parking space in front of the photo shop, I spotted a blue Probe parked close by. The two guys sitting in the front seats looked bored beyond belief. The driver had a newspaper folded in four resting on the wheel and was sucking a pencil as he tried to do the crossword. His partner tapped a rhythm on the dashboard as he watched the front door of Stacey Byron’s house.

‘Feds?’ asked Rachel.

‘Maybe. Could be locals. This is donkey work.’

We watched them for a while. Rachel turned on the radio and we listened to an AOR station: Rush, Styx, Richard Marx. Suddenly the middle of the road seemed to be running straight through the car, musically speaking.

‘Are you going in?’ asked Rachel.

‘May not have to,’ I replied, nodding towards the house.

Stacey Byron, her blonde hair tied back in a ponytail and her body encased in a short white cotton dress, emerged from the house and walked straight towards us, a straw shopping basket over her left arm. She nodded at the two guys in the car. They tossed a coin and the one in the passenger seat, a medium-sized man with a small belly protruding through his jacket, got out of the car, stretched his legs and followed her towards the mall.

She was a good-looking woman, although the short dress was a little too tight at the thighs and dug slightly into the fat below her buttocks. Her arms were strong and lean, her skin tanned. There was a grace to her as she walked: when an elderly man almost collided with her as she entered the supermarket, she spun lightly on her right foot to avoid him.

I felt something soft on my cheek and turned to find Rachel blowing on it.

‘Hey,’ she said, and for the first time since we left New Orleans there was a tiny smile on her lips. ‘It’s rude to lech when you’re with another woman.’

‘It’s not leching,’ I said, as we climbed from the car, ‘it’s surveillance.’

I wasn’t sure why I had come here, but Woolrich’s remarks about Stacey Byron and her interest in art made me want to see her for myself, and I wanted Rachel to see her as well. I didn’t know how we might get to talk to her but I figured that these things had a habit of working themselves out.

Stacey took her time browsing on the aisles. There was an aimlessness about her shopping as she picked up items, glanced at the labels and then discarded them. The cop followed about ten feet behind her, then fifteen, before his attention was distracted by some magazines. He moved to the checkout and took up a position where he could see down two aisles at once, limiting his care of Stacey Byron to the occasional glance in her direction.

I watched a young black man in a white coat and a white hat with a green band stacking pre-packaged meat. When he had emptied the tray and marked off its contents on a clipboard, he left the shop floor through a door marked ‘Staff Only’. I left Rachel to watch Byron and followed him. I almost hit him with the door as I went through, since he was squatting to pick up another plastic tray of meat. He looked at me curiously.

‘Hey, man,’ he said, ‘you can’t come in here.’

‘How much do you earn an hour?’ I asked.

‘Five twenty-five. What’s it to you?’

‘I’ll give you fifty bucks if you lend me your coat and that clipboard for ten minutes.’

He thought it over for a few seconds, then said, ‘Sixty, and anyone asks I’ll say you stole it.’

‘Done,’ I said, and counted out three twenties as he took off the coat. It fitted a bit tightly across the shoulders, but no one would notice as long as I left it unbuttoned. I was stepping back into the store when the young guy called me.

‘Hey, man, ’nother twenty, you can have the hat.’

‘For twenty bucks, I could go into the hat business myself,’ I replied. ‘Go hide in the men’s room.’

I found Stacey Byron by the toiletries, Rachel close by.

‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ I said, as I approached, ‘can I ask you some questions?’

Up close, she looked older. There was a network of broken veins beneath her cheekbones and a fine tracery of lines surrounded her eyes. There were tight lines, too, around her mouth, and her cheeks were sunken and stretched. She looked tired and something else: she looked threatened, maybe even scared.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said, with a false smile, and started to step around me.

‘It’s about your ex-husband.’

She stopped then and turned back, her eyes searching for her police escort.

‘Who are you?’

‘An investigator. What do you know about Renaissance art, Mrs Byron?’

‘What? What do you mean?’

‘You studied it in college, didn’t you? Does the name Valverde mean anything to you? Did your husband ever use it? Did you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please, leave me alone.’

She backed away, knocking some cans of deodorant to the floor.

‘Mrs Byron, have you ever heard of the Travelling Man?’

Something flashed in her eyes and behind me I heard a low whistle. I turned to see the fat cop moving down the aisle in my direction. He passed Rachel without noticing her and she began moving towards the door and the safety of the car, but by then I was already heading back to the staff area. I dumped the coat and walked straight through and on to the back lot, which was crowded with trucks making deliveries, before slipping around the side of the mall where Rachel already had the car started. I stayed low as we drove off, turning right instead of passing Stacey Byron’s house again. In the side mirror, I could see the fat cop looking around and talking into his radio, Byron beside him.

‘And what did we achieve there?’ asked Rachel.

‘Did you see her eyes when I mentioned the Travelling Man? She knew the name.’

‘She knows something,’ agreed Rachel. ‘But she could have heard it from the cops. She looked scared, Bird.’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But scared of what?’

That evening, Angel removed the door panels of the Taurus and we strapped the Calicos and the magazines into the space behind them, then replaced the panels. I cleaned and loaded my Smith & Wesson in the hotel room while Rachel watched.

I put the gun in my shoulder holster and put on a black Alpha Industries bomber jacket over my black T-shirt and black jeans. With my black Timberlands, I looked like the doorman at a nightclub.

‘Joe Bones is living on borrowed time. I couldn’t save him if I wanted to,’ I told her. ‘He was dead from the moment the Metairie hit went wrong.’

Rachel spoke. ‘I’ve decided. I’m leaving in a day or two. I don’t think I can be part of this any longer, the things you’re doing, the things I’ve done.’ She wouldn’t look at me and there was nothing that I could say. She was right, but she wasn’t simply preaching. I could see her own pain in her eyes. I could feel it every time we made love.

Louis was waiting by the car, dressed in a black sweat top and black denim jacket over dark jeans and Ecco boots. Angel checked the door panels one last time to make sure they slipped off without any trouble, then stood beside Louis.

‘You don’t hear anything from us by three a.m, you take Rachel and clear out of the hotel. Book into the Pontchartrain and get the first plane out in the morning,’ I said. ‘I don’t want Joe Bones trying to even up scores if this turns bad. Handle the cops whatever way you think is best.’

He nodded, exchanged a look with Louis, and went back into the Flaisance. Louis put an Isaac Hayes tape into the stereo and we rolled out of New Orleans to the strains of ‘Walk On By’.

‘Dramatic,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘We the men.’

Leon lounged by a gnarled oak, its trunk knotted and worn, as we reached the Starhill intersection. Louis’s left hand was hanging loosely by his side, the butt of the SIG jutting from beneath the passenger seat. I had slipped the Smith & Wesson into the map compartment on the driver’s door as we approached the meeting place. Seeing Leon alone against the tree didn’t make me feel any better.

We slowed and turned on to a small side-road which ran past the oak tree. Leon didn’t seem to register our presence. I killed the engine and we sat in the car, waiting for him to make a move. Louis had his hand on the SIG now and drew it up so that it lay along his thigh.

We looked at each other. I shrugged and got out of the car, leaning against the open door with the Smith & Wesson within reach. Louis climbed from the passenger side, stretched slightly to show Leon that his hands were empty and then rested against the side of the car, the SIG now on the seat beside him.

Leon hauled himself from the tree and walked towards us. Other figures emerged from the trees around us. Five men, H&Ks hanging from their shoulders, long-bladed hunting knives at their belts, surrounded the car.

‘Up against the car,’ said Leon. I didn’t move. From around us came the sound of safeties clicking.

‘Don’t move, you die now,’ he said. I held his gaze, then turned and put my hands on the roof of the car. Louis did the same. As he stood behind me, Leon must have seen the SIG on the passenger seat but he didn’t seem concerned. He patted my chest, beneath my arms and checked my ankles and thighs. When he was satisfied that I wasn’t wearing a wire, he did a similar check on Louis then stepped back.

‘Leave the car,’ he instructed. Headlights shone as engines started up around us. A brown Dodge sedan and a green Nissan Patrol burst through from behind the tree line, followed by a flat-bed pick-up with three pirogues lashed down on the bed. If the Fontenot compound was under surveillance, then whoever was responsible needed his eyesight tested.

‘We got some stuff in the car,’ I said to Leon. ‘We’re gonna take it out.’ He nodded and watched as I removed the mini-subs from behind the door panels. Louis took two magazines and handed one to me. The long cylinder stretched over the rear end of the receiver as I checked the safety at the front edge of the trigger guard. Louis placed a second magazine inside his jacket and tossed me a spare.

As we climbed into the back of the Dodge, two men drove our car out of sight and then jumped into the Nissan. Leon sat in the passenger seat of the Dodge beside the driver, a man in his fifties with long grey hair tied back in a ponytail, and indicated to him to move off. The other vehicles followed at a distance, so that we wouldn’t look like a convoy to any passing cops.

We drove along the border of East and West Feliciana, Thompson Creek to our right, until we came to a turn-off that led down to the riverbank. Two more cars, an ancient Plymouth and what looked like an even older Volkswagen Beetle, were pulled up at the riverbank and two more pirogues lay beside them. Lionel Fontenot, dressed in blue jeans and a blue workshirt, stood by the Plymouth. He cast an eye over the Calicos but didn’t say anything.

There were fourteen of us in all, most armed with H&Ks, two carrying M16 rifles, and we split three to a pirogue, with Lionel and the driver of the Dodge taking the lead in a smaller boat. Louis and I were separated and each handed a paddle, then we moved off up-river.

We rowed for twenty minutes, staying close to the western bank, before a darker shape appeared against the night sky. I could see lights flickering in windows and then, through a stand of trees, a small jetty against which a motorboat lay moored. The grounds of Joe Bones’s house were dark.

There was a low whistle from in front of us and hands were raised in the pirogues to indicate that we should stop rowing. Sheltered by the trees, which hung out over the water, we waited in silence. A light flashed on the jetty and, briefly, the face of a guard was illuminated as he lit a cigarette. I heard a low splash somewhere in front of me and, high on the bank, an owl hooted. I could see the guard moving against the moon-haunted water, could hear the sound of his boots scuffing against the wooden jetty. Then a dark shape rose up beside him and the pattern of the moonlight on the water was disturbed. A knife flashed and the red ember of the cigarette tumbled through the night air like a signal of distress as the guard crumpled to the ground. He made hardly a sound as he was lowered into the water.

The ponytailed man stood waiting at the jetty as we paddled by, moving as close as we could to the grass bank beyond before we climbed from the pirogues and dragged them on to dry land. The bank rose up to join an expanse of green lawn, undisturbed by flowers or trees. It rolled uphill to the back of the house, where steps led up to a patio overlooked by two french windows at ground level and a gallery on the second floor, which mirrored the one on the front of the house. I caught a movement on the gallery and heard voices from the patio. Three guards at least, probably more at the front.

Lionel raised two fingers and singled out two men to my left. They moved forward cautiously, keeping low against the ground as they moved towards the house. They were about twenty yards in front of us when the house and grounds were suddenly illuminated with bright white light. The two men were caught like rabbits in headlights as shouts came from the house and automatic fire burst from the gallery. One of them spun like an ice-skater who has missed his jump, blood bursting forth from his shirt like fresh blooms. He fell to the ground, his legs twisting, as his partner dived for the cover of a metal table, part of a lawn set which stood, semi-obscured, by the riverbank.

The french windows opened and dark figures spilled out on to the patio. On the gallery, the guard was joined by two or three others, who raked the grass in front of us with heavy fire. From the sides of the house, muzzles flashed as more of Joe Bones’s men inched their way around.

Close to where I lay, Lionel Fontenot swore. We were partly protected by the slope of the lawn as it curved down to meet the river, but the guards on the gallery were angling for clear shots at us. Some of Fontenot’s men returned fire, but each time they did so, they exposed themselves to the guards at the house. One, a sharp-faced man in his forties with a mouth like a paper cut, grunted as a bullet hit him in the shoulder. He kept firing, even as the blood turned his shirt red.

‘It’s fifty yards from here to the house,’ I said. ‘There are guards moving in from the sides to cut us off. We don’t move now, we’re dead.’ A spray of earth kicked up by Fontenot’s left hand. One of Joe Bones’s men had progressed almost to the riverbank by approaching from the front of the house. Two bursts of M16 fire came from behind the metal lawn table and he tumbled sideways, rolling along the grass into the river.

‘Tell your men to get ready,’ I hissed. ‘We’ll cover you.’ The message was passed down the line.

‘Louis!’ I shouted. ‘You ready to try these things out?’ A figure two men down from me responded with a wave and then the Calicos burst into life. One of the guards on the gallery bucked and danced as the 9-mm bullets from Louis’s gun tore into him. I pushed the selector on the trigger guard fully forward and sent a burst of automatic fire across the patio. The french windows exploded in a shower of glass and a guard tumbled down the steps and lay unmoving on the lawn. Lionel Fontenot’s men sprang from their cover and raced across the lawn, firing as they did so. I switched to single-shot and concentrated on the eastern side of the house, sending wood splinters shooting into the air as I forced the men there to take cover.

Fontenot’s men were almost at the patio when two fell, hit by fire from behind the ruined windows. Louis sent a burst into the room beyond and Fontenot’s men moved on to the patio and entered the house. Exchanges of fire were coming from within as Louis and I rose and ran across the lawn.

To my left, the guy behind the lawn table abandoned his cover to join us. As he did so, something huge and dark appeared out of the shadows and launched itself from the grass with a deep, ferocious growl. The boerbul struck him on the chest, knocking him to the ground with its enormous weight. He shouted once, his hands pounding at the creature’s head, and then the huge jaws closed on his neck and the boerbul’s head shook as he tore the man’s throat apart.

The animal lifted its head and its eyes gleamed in the darkness as it found Louis. He was turning the Calico in its direction when it bounded from the dead body and sprang into the air. Its speed was astonishing. As it moved towards us, its dark form blotted out the stars in the sky above. It was at the apex of its jump when Louis’s Calico sang and bullets ripped into it, causing it to spasm in mid-air and land with a crunch on the grass not two feet from us. Its paws scrambled for purchase and its mouth worked in biting motions, even as blood and froth spilled from between its teeth. Louis pumped more rounds into it until it lay still.

My eye caught movement at the western corner of the house as we neared the steps. A muzzle flashed and Louis yelled in pain. The Calico dropped to the ground as he leaped for the steps, cradling his injured hand. I fired three shots and the guard dropped. Behind me, one of Fontenot’s men fired single shots from his M16 as he advanced towards the house, then let the gun hang from its shoulder strap as he reached the corner. I saw moonlight catch the blade of his knife as he stood waiting. The short muzzle of a Steyr appeared, followed by the face of one of Joe Bones’s men. I recognised him as the one who had driven the golf cart to the plantation gates on our first visit here, but the flash of recognition became one with the flash of the knife as it struck across his neck. A crimson jet flew into the air from his severed arteries, but even as he fell Fontenot’s man raised the M16 once again and fired past him as he moved in the direction of the front of the house.

Louis was examining his right hand as I reached him. The bullet had torn across the back of the hand, leaving a bad gash and damaging the knuckle of his forefinger. I tore a strip from the shirt of a dead guard who lay sprawled across the patio and wrapped it around Louis’s hand. I handed him the Calico and he worked the strap over his head, then fitted his middle finger into the trigger guard. With his left hand he freed his SIG, then nodded to me as he rose. ‘We better find Joe Bones.’

Through the patio doors lay a formal dining room. The dining table, which could seat at least eighteen people comfortably, was splintered and pitted by shots. On the wall, a portrait of a Southern gentleman standing by his horse had sustained a large hole through the horse’s belly and a selection of antique china plates lay shattered in the remains of their glass-fronted display cabinet. There were two bodies in the room. One of them was the ponytailed man who had driven the Dodge.

The dining room led out into a large carpeted hallway and a white chandeliered reception area, from which a staircase wound up to the next floor. The other doors at ground level stood open, but there were no sounds coming from inside. There was sustained firing on the upper levels as we made our way to the stairs. At their base, one of Joe Bones’s men lay in a pair of striped pyjama bottoms, blood pooling from an ugly head wound.

From the top of the stairs, a series of doors stretched left and right. Fontenot’s men seemed to have cleared most of the rooms, but they had been pinned down in the alcoves and doorways by gunfire from the rooms at the western end of the house, one on the river side to the right, its panels already pockmarked by bullets, and the other facing out to the front of the house. As we watched, a man in blue overalls carrying a short-handled axe in one hand and a captured Steyr in the other moved quickly from his hiding place to within one doorway of the front-facing room. Shots came through the door on the right and he fell to the ground, clutching his leg.

I leaned into an alcove in which the remains of long-stemmed roses lay in a pool of water and shattered pottery and fired a sustained burst at the door on the front-facing side. Two of Fontenot’s men moved forward at the same time, keeping low on the ground as they did so. Across from me, Louis fired shots at the semi-closed river-side door. I stopped firing as Fontenot’s men reached the room and rushed the occupant. There were two more shots, then one of them emerged wiping his knife on his trousers. It was Lionel Fontenot. Behind him was Leon.

The two men took up positions at either side of the last room. Six more of his men moved forward to join him.

‘Joe, it’s over now,’ said Lionel. ‘We gon’ finish this thing.’

Two shots burst through the door. Leon raised his H&K and appeared to be about to fire, but Lionel lifted his hand, looking past Leon to where I stood. I advanced forward and waited behind Leon’s back as Lionel pushed open the door with his foot, then pressed himself flat against the wall as two more shots rang out followed by the click of a hammer on an empty chamber, a sound as final as the closing of a tomb.

Leon entered the room first, the H&K now replaced by his knives. I followed him, with Lionel behind me. The walls of Joe Bones’s bedroom were pitted with holes and the night air entered through the shattered window and sent the white curtains swirling in the air like angry ghosts. The blonde who had lunched with Joe on his lawn earlier in the week lay dead against the far wall, a red stain on the left breast of her white nightgown.

Joe Bones stood before the window in a red silk dressing gown. The Colt in his hand hung uselessly at his side but his eyes glowed with anger and the scar on his lip seemed painfully pinched and white against his skin. He dropped the gun.

‘Do it, you fuck,’ he hissed at Lionel. ‘Kill me, you got the fucking guts.’

Lionel closed the bedroom door behind us as Joe Bones turned to look at the woman.

‘Ask him,’ said Lionel.

Joe Bones didn’t seem to hear. His face appeared consumed with a look of terrible grief as his eyes traced the contours of the dead woman’s face.

‘Eight years,’ he said softly. ‘Eight years she was with me.’

‘Ask him,’ repeated Lionel Fontenot.

I stepped forward and Joe Bones sneered as he turned, that look of sadness now gone. ‘The fucking grieving widower. You bring your trained nigger with you?’

I slapped him hard and he took a step back.

‘I can’t save you, Joe, but if you help me maybe I can make it quicker for you. Tell me what Remarr saw the night the Aguillards died.’

He wiped blood from the corner of his mouth, smearing it across his cheek. ‘You have no idea what you’re dealing with, no fucking idea in the world. You’re so out of your fucking depth, the fucking pressure should be making your nose bleed.’

‘He kills women and children, Joe. He’s going to kill again.’

Joe Bones twisted his mouth into the semblance of a grin, the scar distorting his full lips like a crack in a mirror. ‘You killed my woman and now you’re gonna kill me, no matter what I say. You got nothing to bargain with,’ he said.

I glanced at Lionel Fontenot. He shook his head almost imperceptibly, but Joe Bones caught it. ‘See, nothing. All you can offer is a little less pain, and pain don’t hold no surprises for me.’

‘He killed one of your own men. He killed Tony Remarr.’

‘Tony left a print at the nigger’s house. He was careless and he paid the price. Your guy, he saved me the trouble of killing the old bitch and her brood myself. I meet him, I’ll shake his hand.’

Joe Bones smiled a broad smile like a flash of sunshine through dark, acrid smoke. Haunted by visions of tainted blood flowing through his veins, he had moved beyond ordinary notions of humanity and empathy, love and grief. In his shimmering red robe, he looked like a wound in the fabric of space and time.

‘You’ll meet him in Hell,’ I said.

‘I see your bitch there, I’ll fuck her for you.’ His eyes were bland and cold now. The smell of death hung around him like old cigar fumes. Behind me, Lionel Fontenot opened the door and the rest of his men walked quietly into the room. It was only now, seeing them all together in the ruined bedroom, that the resemblance between them became clear. Lionel held the door open for me.

‘It’s a family thing,’ he said as I left. Behind me, the door closed with a soft click like the knocking of bones.

After Joe Bones died, we gathered the bodies of the Fontenot dead on the lawn in front of the house. The five men lay side by side, crumpled and torn as only the dead can be. The gates to the plantation were opened and the Dodge, the VW and the pick-up sped in. The bodies were loaded gently but quickly into the trunks of the cars, the injured helped into the rear seats. The pirogues were doused in gasoline, set on fire and left to float down the river.

We drove from the plantation and kept driving until we reached the rendezvous point at Starhill. The three black Explorers I had seen at the Delacroix compound stood waiting, their motors idling, their lights dimmed. As Leon sprayed gasoline into the cars and the pick-up, the bodies of the dead were removed, wrapped in tarpaulin and placed in the backs of two of the Jeeps. Louis and I watched it all in silence.

As the Jeeps roared into life and Leon threw lighted rags into the discarded vehicles, Lionel Fontenot walked over to us and stood with us as they burned. He took a small green notebook from his pocket, scribbled a number on a sheet and tore it out.

‘This guy will look after your friend’s hand. He’s discreet.’

‘He knew who killed Lutice, Lionel,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘He wouldn’t tell, not even at the end.’ He rubbed his index finger along a raw cut on the palm of his right hand, picking dirt from the wound. ‘I hear the feds are looking for someone around Baton Rouge, used to work in a hospital in New York.’

I stayed silent and he smiled. ‘We know his name. Man could hide out in the bayou for a long time, he knew his way around. Feds might not find him, but we will.’ He gestured with his hand, like a king displaying his finest troops to his worried subjects. ‘We’re looking. We find him, it’ll end there.’

Then he turned and climbed into the driver’s seat of the lead Jeep, Leon beside him, and they disappeared into the night, the red tail-lights like falling cigarettes in the darkness, like burning boats floating on black water.

I called Angel as we drove back to New Orleans. At an all-nite drugstore I picked up antiseptic and a first-aid kit so we could work on Louis’s hand. There was a sheen of sweat on his face as I drove and the white rags binding his fingers were stained a deep red. When we arrived back at the Flaisance, Angel cleansed the wound with the antiseptic and tried to stitch it with some surgical thread. The knuckle looked bad and Louis’s mouth was stretched tight with pain. Despite his protests, I called the number we had been given. The bleary voice that answered the phone on the fourth ring shook the sleep from its tones when I mentioned Lionel’s name.

Angel drove Louis to the doctor’s surgery. When they had gone, I stood outside Rachel’s door and debated whether or not to knock. I knew she wasn’t asleep: Angel had spoken to her after I called, and I could sense her wakefulness. Still, I didn’t knock, but as I walked back towards my own room her door opened. She stood in the gap, a white T-shirt reaching almost to her knees, and waited for me. She stood carefully aside to let me enter.

‘You’re still in one piece, I see,’ she said. She didn’t sound particularly pleased.

I felt tired and sick from the sight of blood. I wanted to plunge my face into a sink of ice-cold water. I wanted a drink so badly my tongue felt swollen inside my mouth and only a bottle of Abita, ice frosting on its rim, and a shot of Redbreast whiskey could restore it to its normal size. My voice sounded like the croak of an old man on his deathbed when I spoke.

‘I’m in one piece,’ I said. ‘A lot of others aren’t. Louis took a bullet across the hand and too many people died out at the house. Joe Bones, most of his crew, his woman.’

Rachel turned her back and walked to the balcony window. Only the bedside lamp lit the room, casting shadows over the illustrations she had kept from Woolrich and which were now restored to their places on the walls. Flayed arms and the face of a woman and a young man emerged from the semi-darkness.

‘What did you find out, for all that killing?’

It was a good question. As usual with good questions, the answer didn’t live up to it.

‘Nothing, except that Joe Bones was happier to die painfully than to tell us what he knew.’

‘What are you going to do now?’

I was getting tired of questions, especially questions as difficult as these. I knew Rachel was right and I felt disgusted at myself. It felt as if she had become tainted through her contact with me. Maybe I should have told her all of those things then, but I was too tired and too sick and I could smell blood in my nostrils; and, anyway, I think she already knew most of it.

‘I’m going to bed,’ I said. ‘After that, I’m winging it.’ Then I left her.

Chapter Forty-Seven

The next morning I awoke with an ache in my arms from toting the Calico, exacerbated by the lingering pain of the gunshot wound inflicted in Haven. I could smell powder on my fingers, in my hair and on my discarded clothes. The room stank like the scene of a gunfight, so I opened the window and let the hot New Orleans air slip heavily into the room like a clumsy burglar.

I checked on Louis and Angel. Louis’s hand had been expertly bound after the doctor picked the shards of bone from the wound and padded the knuckle. Louis barely opened his eyes as I exchanged a few quiet words with Angel at the door. I felt guilty for what had happened, although I knew that neither of them blamed me.

I sensed, too, that Angel was anxious now to return to New York. Joe Bones was dead, and the police and the feds were probably closing in on Edward Byron, despite Lionel Fontenot’s doubts. Besides, I didn’t believe that it would take long for Woolrich to connect us to what had happened to Joe Bones, especially if Louis was walking around with a bullet crease on his hand. I told Angel all of this and he agreed that they would leave as soon as I returned, so that Rachel would not be left alone. The whole case seemed to have ground to a kind of halt for me. Elsewhere, the feds and the Fontenots were hunting Edward Byron, a man who still seemed as distant from me as the last emperor of China.

I left a message for Morphy. I wanted to see what his people had on Byron; I wanted to add flesh to the figure. As things stood, he was as shorn of identity as the faceless figures of the slain which the feds believed he had left behind. The feds might well have been right. With the local police, they could conduct a better search than a bunch of visitors from New York with delusions of adequacy. I had hoped to work my way towards him from a different direction, but with the death of Joe Bones that path seemed to have come to an end in a tangle of dark undergrowth.

I took my phone and my book of Ralegh’s writings and headed for Mother’s on Poydras Street, where I drank too many cups of coffee and picked at some bacon and brown toast. When you reach one of life’s dead ends, Ralegh is good company. ‘Go, soul . . . since I needs must die/And give the world the lie.’ Ralegh knew enough to take a stoical attitude to adversity, although he didn’t know enough to avoid getting his head cut off.

Beside me, a man ate ham and eggs with the concentrated effort of a bad lover, yellow egg yolk tinging his chin like sunlight reflected from a buttercup. Someone whistled a snatch of ‘What’s New?’, then lost his thread in the complicated chord changes of the song. The air was filled with the buzz of late-morning conversation, a radio station easing into neutral with a bland rock song and the low, aggravated hum of distant, slow-moving traffic. Outside, it was another humid New Orleans day, the kind of day that leads lovers to fight and makes children sullen and grim.

An hour passed. I rang the detective squad in St Martin and was told that Morphy had taken a day’s leave to work on his house. I had nothing better to do now, so I paid my bill, put some gas in the car and started out once again towards Baton Rouge. I found a Lafayette station playing some scratchy Cheese Read, followed by Buckwheat Zydeco and Clifton Chenier, an hour of classic Cajun and Zydeco, as the DJ put it. I let it play until the city fell away and the sound and the landscape became one.

A sheet of plastic slapped drily in the early-afternoon wind rolling from the river as I pulled up outside Morphy’s place. He was replacing part of the exterior wall on the west side of the house, and the lines holding the plastic in place over the exposed joints sang as a breeze tried to yank them from their moorings. It tugged at one of the windows, which had not been fastened properly, and made the screen door knock at its frame like a tired visitor.

I called his name but there was no reply. I walked to the rear of the house, where the back door stood open, held in place by a piece of brick. I called again but my voice seemed to echo emptily through the central hallway. The rooms on the ground level were all unoccupied and no sounds came from upstairs. I drew my gun and climbed the stairs, newly planed in preparation for treating. The bedrooms were empty and the bathroom door stood wide open, toiletries neatly arranged by the sink. I checked the gallery and then went back downstairs. As I turned back towards the rear door cold metal touched the base of my neck.

‘Drop it,’ said a voice.

I let the gun slip from my fingers.

‘Turn around. Slowly.’

The pressure was removed from my neck and I turned to find Morphy standing before me, a nail gun held inches from my face. He let out a deep breath of relief and lowered the gun.

‘Shit, you scared the hell out of me,’ he said.

I could feel my heart thumping wildly in my chest. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I really needed that kind of adrenaline rush on top of five cups of coffee.’ I sat down heavily on the bottom step.

‘You look terrible, mon. You up late last night?’

I looked up to see if there was an edge to what he had said, but he had turned his back.

‘Kind of.’

‘You hear the news? Joe Bones and his crew were taken out last night. Someone cut Joe up pretty bad before he died, too. Locals weren’t even sure it was him until they checked the prints.’ He walked down to the kitchen and came back with a beer for himself and a soda for me. I noticed it was caffeine-free cola. Under his arm he held a copy of the Times-Picayune.

‘You see this today?’

I took the paper from him. It was folded into quarter-size, the bottom of the front page facing up. The headline read: POLICE HUNT SERIAL KILLER IN RITUAL MURDERS. The story below contained details of the deaths of Tante Marie Aguillard and Tee Jean that could only have come from the investigation team itself: the display of the bodies, the manner of their discovery, the nature of some of the wounds. It went on to speculate on a possible link between the discovery of Lutice Fontenot’s body and the death of a man in Bucktown, known to have links with a leading crime figure. Worst of all, it said that police were also investigating a connection to a similar pair of murders in New York late the previous year. Susan and Jennifer were not named, but it was clear that the writer – anonymous beneath a ‘Times-Picayune Journalists’ byline – knew enough about the murders to be able to put a name on the victims.

I put the paper down wearily. ‘Did the leak come from your guys?’ I asked.

‘Could have done, but I don’t think so. The feds are blaming us. They’re all over us, accusing us of sabotaging the investigation.’ He sipped his beer before saying what was on his mind. ‘One or two people maybe felt that it could have been you who leaked the stuff.’ He was obviously uncomfortable saying it, but he didn’t look away.

‘I didn’t do it. If they’ve got as far as Jennifer and Susan, it won’t be too long before they connect me to what’s happening. The last thing I need is the press crawling all over me.’

He considered what I said, then nodded. ‘I guess you’re right.’

‘You speak to the editor?’

‘He was contacted at home when the first edition came out. We got freedom of the press and the protection of sources coming out our ass. We can’t force him to tell but . . .’ He rubbed at the tendons on the back of his neck. ‘. . . it’s unusual for something like this to happen. The papers are real careful about jeopardising investigations. I think it had to come from someone close to all this.’

I thought about it. ‘If they felt okay about using this stuff, then it must be cast-iron and the source impeccable,’ I said. ‘It could be that the feds are playing their own game on this.’ It seemed to reaffirm our belief that Woolrich and his team were holding back, not only from me but probably from the police investigating team as well.

‘It wouldn’t be anything new,’ said Morphy. ‘Feds wouldn’t tell us what day it is, they thought they could get away with it. You think they might have planted the story?’

‘Somebody did.’

Morphy finished his beer and crushed the can beneath his foot. A small stain of beer spread itself on the bare wood. He picked up a tool belt from where it hung on a hatstand near the door and strapped it on.

‘You need any help?’

He looked at me. ‘Can you carry planks without falling over?’

‘No.’

‘Then you’re perfect for the job. There’s a spare pair of workgloves in the kitchen.’

For the rest of the afternoon I worked with my hands, hoisting and carrying, hammering and sawing. We replaced most of the wood on the west side, a gentle breeze spraying sawdust and shavings around us as we worked. Later, Angie returned from a shopping trip to Baton Rouge, carrying groceries and boutique bags. While Morphy and I cleaned up, she grilled steaks with sweet potatoes, carrots and Creole rice, and we ate them in the kitchen as the evening drew in and the wind wrapped the house in its arms.

Morphy walked me out to my car. As I put the key in the ignition, he leaned in the window and said softly, ‘Someone tried to get to Stacey Byron yesterday. Know anything about it?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You were there, weren’t you? You were there when they took Joe Bones?’

‘You don’t want to know the answer to that,’ I replied. ‘Just like I don’t want to know about Luther Bordelon.’

As I drove away, I could see him standing before his uncompleted house. Then he turned away and returned to his wife.

When I arrived back at the Flaisance, Angel and Louis were packed and ready to go. They wished me luck and told me that Rachel had gone to bed early. She had booked a flight for the next day. I decided not to disturb her and went to my own room. I don’t even remember falling asleep.

The luminous dial on my watch read 8.30 a.m. when the pounding came at my door. I had been in deep sleep and I pulled myself slowly into wakefulness like a diver struggling for the surface. I had got as far as the edge of the bed when the door exploded inwards and there were lights shining in my face and strong arms hauled me to my feet and pushed me hard against the wall. A gun was held to my head as the main light came on in the room. I could see NOPD uniforms, a couple of plainclothes men and, directly to my right, Morphy’s partner Touissant. Around me, men were tearing the room apart.

And I knew then that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

They allowed me to pull on a tracksuit and a pair of sneakers before cuffing me. I was marched through the hotel, past guests peering anxiously from their rooms, to a waiting police car. In a second car, her face pale and her hair matted from sleep, sat Rachel. I shrugged helplessly at her before we were driven in convoy from the Quarter.

I was questioned for three hours, then given a cup of coffee and grilled again for another hour. The room was small and brightly lit. It smelt of cigarette smoke and stale sweat. In one corner, where the plaster was pitted and worn, I could see what looked like a bloodstain. Two detectives, Dale and Klein, did most of the questioning, Dale assuming the role of aggressive interrogator, threatening to dump me in the swamp with a bullet in the head for killing a Louisiana cop, Klein taking the part of the reasonable, sensitive man trying to protect me while ensuring that the truth was told. Even with other cops as the object of their attentions, the ‘good cop, bad cop’ thing never went out of fashion.

I told them all I could, again and again and again. I told them of my visit to Morphy, the work on the house, the dinner, the departure, all of the reasons why my prints were all over the place. No Morphy hadn’t given me the police files found in my room. No, I couldn’t say who did. No, only the night porter saw me re-enter the hotel, I didn’t speak to anyone else. No, I didn’t leave my room again that night. No, there was no one to confirm that fact. No. No. No. No. No.

Then Woolrich arrived and the merry-go-round started all over again. More questions, this time with the feds in attendance. And still, no one told me why I was there or what had happened to Morphy and his wife. In the end, Klein returned and told me I could go. Behind a slatted rail divider, which separated the detective squad-room from the main corridor, Rachel sat with a mug of tea while the detectives around her studiously ignored her. In a cage ten feet behind her, a skinny white man with tattooed arms whispered obscenely to her.

Touissant appeared. He was an overweight, balding man in his early fifties, with straggly white curls around his pate like the top of a hill erupting from out of a mist. He looked red-eyed and nauseous and was as out of place here as I was.

A patrolman motioned to Rachel. ‘We’ll take you back to your hotel now, ma’am.’ She stood. Behind her, the guy in the cage made sucking noises and grabbed his crotch in his hand.

‘You okay?’ I asked, as she passed by.

She nodded dumbly, then: ‘Are you coming with me?’

Touissant was at my left hand. ‘He’ll follow later,’ he said. Rachel looked over her shoulder at me as the patrolman led her away. I gave her a smile and tried to make it look reassuring, but my heart wasn’t in it.

‘Come on, I’ll drive you back and buy you a coffee on the way,’ said Touissant, and I followed him from the building.

We ended up in Mother’s, where less than twenty-four hours before I had sat waiting for Morphy’s call and where Touissant would tell me how John Charles Morphy and his wife Angela had died.

Morphy had been due to work a special early shift that morning and Touissant had dropped by to pick him up. They alternated pickup duties as it suited. That day, it happened to be Touissant’s turn.

The screen door was closed, but the front door behind stood open. Touissant called Morphy’s name, just as I had the afternoon before. He followed in my footsteps through the central hallway, checking the kitchen and the rooms to the right and left. He thought Morphy might have slept in, although he had never been late before, so he called up the stairs to the bedroom. There was no reply. He recalled that his stomach was already tightening as he worked his way up the stairs, calling Morphy’s name, then Angie’s, as he advanced. The door of their bedroom was partially open, but the angle obscured their bed.

He knocked once, then slowly opened the door. For a moment, the merest flashing splinter of a second, he thought he had disturbed their lovemaking, until the blood registered and he knew that this was a parody of all that love stood for, of all that it meant, and he wept then for his friend and his wife.

Even now, I seem to recall only snatches of what he said, but I can picture the bodies in my head. They were naked, facing each other on what had once been white sheets, their bodies locked together at the hips, their legs intertwined. From the waist, they leaned backwards at arm’s length from each other. Both had been cut from neck to stomach. Their rib-cages had been split and pulled back and each had a hand buried in the breast of the other. As he neared, Touissant saw that each was holding the other’s heart in the palm of a hand. Their heads hung back so that their hair almost touched their backs. Their eyes were gone, their faces removed, their mouths open in their final agony, their moment of death like an ecstasy. In them, love was reduced to an example to other lovers of the futility of love itself.

As Touissant spoke, a wave of guilt swept over me and broke across my heart. I had brought this thing to their house. By helping me, Morphy and his wife had been marked for a terrible death, just as the Aguillards too seemed to have been tainted by their contact with me. I stank of mortality.

And, in the midst of it all, some lines of verse seemed to float into my head and I could not recall how I had resurrected them, or who had given them to me in the first place. And it seemed to me that their source was important, although I could not tell why, except that in the lines there seemed to be echoes of what Touissant had seen. But as I tried to remember a voice speaking them to me, it slipped away and, try as I might, I could not bring it back. Only the lines remained. Some metaphysical poet, I thought. Donne, perhaps. Yes, almost certainly Donne.

If th’unborne

Must learne, by my being cut up, and torne:

Kill, and dissect me, Love; for this

Torture against thine owne end is,

Rack’t carcasses make ill Anatomies.

A remedia amoris, wasn’t that the term? The torture and death of lovers as a remedy for love.

‘He helped me,’ I said. ‘I involved him in this.’

‘He involved himself,’ Touissant said. ‘He wanted to do it. He wanted to bring this guy to an end.’

I held his gaze.

‘For Luther Bordelon?’

Touissant looked away. ‘What does it matter now?’

But I couldn’t explain that in Morphy I saw something of myself, that I had felt for his pain, that I wanted to believe he was better than me. I wanted to know.

‘Garza called it,’ said Touissant at last. ‘Garza killed him and then Morphy supplied the throwdown. That’s what he said. Morphy was young. Garza shouldn’t have put him in that situation, but he did and Morphy’s been paying for it ever since.’ And then he caught himself using the present tense and went silent.

Outside, people were living another day: working, touring, eating, flirting still continued despite all that had taken place, all that was happening. It seemed, somehow, that it should all have come to a halt, that the clocks should have been stopped and the mirrors covered, the doorbells silenced and the voices reduced to a respectful, hushed volume. Maybe if they had seen the pictures of Susan and Jennifer, of Tante Marie and Tee Jean, of Morphy and Angie, then they would have stopped and reconsidered. And that was what the Travelling Man wanted: to provide, in the deaths of others, a reminder of the deaths of us all and the worthlessness of love and loyalty, of parenthood and friendship, of sex and need and joy, in the face of the emptiness to come.

As I stood to leave, something else came to me, something awful which I had almost forgotten, and I felt a deep, violent ache in my gut, which spread through my body until I was forced to lean against the wall, my hand scrabbling for purchase.

‘Ah, God, she was pregnant.’

I looked at Touissant and his eyes briefly fluttered closed.

‘He knew, didn’t he?’

Touissant said nothing, but there was despair in his eyes. I didn’t ask what the Travelling Man had done to the unborn child but, in that instant, I saw a terrible progression over the last months of my life. It seemed that I had moved from the death of my own child, my Jennifer, to the deaths of many children, the victims of Adelaide Modine and her accomplice Hyams, and now, finally, to the deaths of all children. Everything this Travelling Man did signified something beyond itself: in the death of Morphy’s unborn child, I saw all hope for the future reduced to tattered flesh.

‘I’m supposed to bring you back to your hotel,’ said Touissant, at last. ‘The New Orleans PD will make sure you get on the evening flight back to New York.’

But I hardly heard him. All I could think was that the Travelling Man had been watching us all along and that his game was still going on around us. We were all participants, whether we wanted to be or not.

And I recalled something that a con-man named Saul Mann had once told me back in Portland, something that seemed important to me, yet I couldn’t recall why.

You can’t bluff someone who isn’t paying attention.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Touissant dropped me at the Flaisance. Rachel’s door was half open when I reached the carriage house. I knocked gently and entered. Her clothes had been thrown across the bedroom floor and the sheets from her bed were tossed in an untidy pile in the corner. All of her papers were gone. Her suitcase sat open on the bare mattress. I heard movement from the bathroom and she emerged carrying her cosmetics case. It was stained with powder and foundation and I guessed that the cops had broken some of its contents during their search.

She was wearing a faded blue Knicks sweat top, which hung down over her dark blue denims. She had washed and showered and her damp hair clung to her face. Her feet were bare. I had not noticed before how small they were.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘I know.’ She didn’t look at me. Instead, she started to pick up her clothes and fold them as neatly as she could into her suitcase. I bent down to pick up a pair of socks, which lay in a ball by my feet.

‘Leave it,’ she said. ‘I can do it.’

There was another knock at the door and a patrolman appeared. He was polite, but he made it clear that we were to stay in the hotel until someone arrived to take us to the airport.

I went back to my room and showered. A maid came and made up the room and I sat on my clean sheets and listened to the sounds from the street. I thought about how badly I had screwed up, and how many people had been killed because of it. I felt like the Angel of Death; if I stood on a lawn, the grass would die.

I must have dozed for a while, because the light in the room had changed when I awoke. It seemed that it was dusk, yet that could not have been the case. There was a smell in the room, an odour of rotting vegetation and water filled with algae and dead fish. When I tried to take a breath, the air felt warm and humid in my mouth. I was conscious of movement around me, shapes shifting in the shadows at the corners of the room. I heard whispered voices and a sound like silk brushing against wood and, faintly, a child’s footsteps running through leaves. Trees rustled and there came a flapping of wings from above me, beating unevenly as if the bird was in distress or pain.

The room grew darker, turning the wall facing me to black. The light through the window frame was tinged with blue and green and shimmered as seen through a heat haze.

Or through water.

They came from out of the dark wall, black shapes against green light. They brought with them the coppery scent of blood, so strong that I could taste it on my tongue. I opened my mouth to call out something – even now, I am not sure what I could have called, or who would have heard – but the dank, humid air stilled my tongue like a sponge soaked in warm, filthy water. It seemed that a weight was on my chest, preventing me from rising, and I had trouble taking air into my lungs. My hands clasped and unclasped until they, too, were still and I knew then how it felt to have ketamine coursing through one’s veins, stilling the body in preparation for the anatomist’s knife.

The figures stopped at the edge of the darkness, just beyond the reach of the window’s dim light. They were indistinct, their edges forming and re-forming like figures seen through frosted glass or a projection losing and then regaining its focus.

And then the voices came,

birdman

soft and insistent,

birdman

fading and then strong again,

birdman

voices that I had never heard and others that had called out to me in passion,

bird

in anger, in fear, in love.

daddy

She was the smallest of them all, linked hand in hand with another who stood beside her. Around them, the others fanned out. I counted eight in all and, behind them, other figures, more indistinct, women, men, young girls. As the pressure built on my chest and I struggled to draw the shallowest of breaths, it came to me that the figure which had haunted Tante Marie Aguillard, which Raymond believed he had seen at Honey Island, the girl who seemed to call out to me through dark waters, might not have been Lutice Fontenot.

chile

Each breath felt like my last, none getting further than the back of my throat before it was choked in a gasp.

chile

The voice was old and dark as the ebony keys on an ancient piano singing out from a distant room.

wake up, chile, his world is unravelling

And then my last breath sounded in my ears and all was stillness and quiet.

I woke to the sound of a tapping on my door. Outside, daylight had passed its height and was ebbing towards evening. When I opened the door, Touissant stood before me. Behind him, I could see Rachel waiting. ‘It’s time to go,’ he said.

‘I thought the New Orleans cops were taking care of that.’

‘I volunteered,’ he replied. He followed me into the room as I threw my shaving gear loosely into my suit carrier, folded it over and attached the clasps. It was London Fog, a present from Susan.

Touissant nodded to the NOPD patrolman.

‘You sure this is okay?’ said the cop. He looked distracted and uncertain.

‘Look, New Orleans cops got better things to be doing than babysitting,’ replied Touissant. ‘I’ll get these people to their plane, you go out and catch some bad guys, okay?’

We drove in silence to Moisant Field. I sat in the passenger seat, Rachel sat in the back. I waited for Touissant to take the turn to the airport but he continued straight on 10.

‘You missed your turn,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Touissant. ‘No, I didn’t.’

When things start to unravel, they unravel fast. We got lucky that day. Everybody gets lucky some time.

On a junction of the Upper Grand River, south-east of 10 on the road to Lafayette, a dredging operation to remove silt and junk from the bottom of the river got some of its machinery caught up on a batch of discarded barbed wiring that was rusting away on the riverbed. They eventually freed it and tried to haul it up, but there were other things caught in the wire as well: an old iron bedstead; a set of slave irons, more than a century and a half old; and, holding the wire to the bottom, an oil drum marked with a fleur-de-lys.

It was almost a joke to the dredging crew as they worked to free the drum. The report of the discovery of a girl’s body in a fleur-de-lys drum had been all over the news bulletins and it had taken up ninety lines below the fold on the Times-Picayune on the day of its discovery.

Maybe the crew joshed each other morbidly as they worked the barrel out of the water in order to get at the wire. Perhaps they went a little quieter, barring the odd nervous laugh, as one of them worked at the lid. The drum had rusted in places and the lid had not been welded shut. When it came off, dirty water, dead fish and weeds flowed out.

The legs of the girl, partially decayed but surrounded by a strange, waxy membrane, emerged from the open lid as well, although her body remained jammed, half in, half out of the drum. The river life had fed on her but when one man shone his flashlight to the end of the drum he could see the tattered remains of skin at the forehead and her teeth seemed to be smiling at him in the darkness.

Only two cars were at the scene when we arrived. The body had been out of the water for less than three hours. Two uniformed cops stood by with the dredging crew. Around the body stood three men in plain clothes, one of them wearing a slightly more expensive suit than the rest, his silver hair cut short and neat. I recognised him from the aftermath of Morphy’s death: Sheriff James Dupree of St Martin Parish, Touissant’s superior.

Dupree motioned us forward as we stepped from the car. Rachel hung back slightly but still moved towards the body in the drum. It was the quietest crime scene at which I had ever been present. Even when the ME appeared later, it remained restrained.

Dupree pulled a pair of plastic gloves from his hands, making sure that he didn’t touch their exterior with his exposed fingers. His nails were very short and very clean, I noticed, although not manicured.

‘You want to take a closer look?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve pretty much seen all I want to see.’

There was a rotten, pungent odour coming from the mud and silt dredged up by the crew, stronger even than the smell from the girl’s body. Birds hovered over the detritus, trying to target dead or dying fish. One of the crew lodged his cigarette in his mouth, bent to pick up a stone and hurled it at a huge grey rat that scuttled in the dirt. The stone hit the mud with a wet, thudding sound like a piece of meat dropped on a butcher’s slab. The rat scurried away. Around it, other grey objects burst into activity. The whole area was alive with rodents, disturbed from their nests by the actions of the dredging crew. They bumped and snapped at each other, their tails leaving snaking lines in the mud. The rest of the crew now joined in, casting stones in a skimming motion close to the ground. Most of them had better aim than their friend.

Dupree lit a cigarette with a gold Ronson lighter. He smoked Gitanes, the only cop I had ever seen do so. The smoke was acrid and strong and the breeze blew it directly into my face. Dupree apologised and turned so that his body partially shielded me from the smoke. It was a peculiarly sensitive gesture and it made me wonder, once again, why I was not sitting at Moisant Field.

‘They tell me you tracked down that child-killer in New York, the Modine woman,’ said Dupree eventually. ‘After thirty years, that’s no mean feat.’

‘She made a mistake,’ I said. ‘In the end, they all do. It’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the situation.’

He tilted his head slightly to one side, as if he didn’t entirely agree with what I had said but was prepared to give it a little thought in case he’d missed something. He took another long drag on his cigarette. It was an upmarket brand, but he smoked it the way I had seen longshoremen on the New York docks smoke, the butt held between the thumb and the first two fingers of the hand, the ember shielded by the palm. It was the sort of hold you learned as a kid, when smoking was still a furtive pleasure and being caught with a cigarette was enough to earn you a smack across the back of the head from your old man.

‘I guess we all get lucky sometimes,’ said Dupree. He looked at me closely. ‘I’m wondering if maybe we’ve got lucky here.’

I waited for him to continue. There seemed to be something fortuitous in the discovery of the girl’s body, or perhaps I was still remembering a dream in which shapes came out of my bedroom wall and told me that a thread in the tapestry being woven by the Travelling Man had suddenly come loose.

‘When Morphy and his wife died, my first instinct was to take you outside and beat you to within an inch of your life,’ he said. ‘He was a good man, a good detective, despite everything. He was also my friend.

‘But he trusted you, and Touissant here seems to trust you too. He thinks maybe you provide a linking factor in all this. If that’s true, then putting you on a plane back to New York isn’t going to achieve anything. Your FBI friend Woolrich seemed to feel the same way, but there were louder voices than his shouting for you to be sent home.’

He took another drag on his cigarette. ‘I reckon you’re like gum caught in someone’s hair,’ he continued. ‘The more they try to prise you out, the more you get stuck in, and maybe we can use that. I’m risking a storm of shit by keeping you here, but Morphy told me what you felt about this guy, how you believed he was observing us, manipulating us. You want to tell me what you make of this, or do you want to spend the night at Moisant sleeping on a chair?’

I looked at the bare feet and exposed legs of the girl in the drum, the strange yellow accretion like a chrysalis, lying in a pool of filth and water on a rat-infested stretch of a river in western Louisiana. The ME and his men had arrived with a body bag and a stretcher. They positioned a length of plastic on the ground and carefully manoeuvred the drum on to it, one of them supporting the girl’s legs with a gloved hand. Then slowly, gently, the ME’s hands working inside the drum, they began to free her.

‘Everything we’ve done so far has been dogged and predicted by this man,’ I began. ‘The Aguillards learned something, and they died. Remarr saw something, and he was killed. Morphy tried to help me, and now he’s dead as well. He’s closing off the options, forcing us to follow a pattern that he’s already set. Now someone’s been leaking details of the investigation to the press. Maybe that person has been leaking things to this man as well, possibly unintentionally, possibly not.’

Dupree and Touissant exchanged a look. ‘We’d been considering that possibility as well,’ said Dupree. ‘There are too many damn people crawling over this for anything to stay quiet for long.’

‘On top of all that,’ I continued, ‘the feds are keeping something back. You think Woolrich has told you everything he knows?’

Dupree almost laughed. ‘I know as much about this guy Byron as I know about the poet, and that’s sweet FA.’

From inside the drum came a scraping sound, the sound of bone rubbing on metal. Gloved hands supported the girl’s naked, discoloured body as it was freed from the confines of the drum.

‘How long can we keep the details quiet?’ I asked Dupree.

‘Not long. The feds will have to be informed, the press will find out . . .’ He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘If you’re suggesting that I don’t tell the feds . . .’ But I could see in his face that he was already moving in that direction, that the reason why the ME was examining the body so soon after its discovery, the reason why there were so few police at the scene, was to keep the details limited to the minimum number of people.

I decided to push him. ‘I’m suggesting you don’t tell anyone about this. If you do, the man who did this will be alerted and he’ll cut us off again. If you’re put in a position where you have to say something, then fudge it. Don’t mention the barrel, obscure the location, say you don’t believe the discovery is connected to any other investigation. Say nothing until the girl is identified.’

‘Assuming that we can identify her,’ said Touissant mournfully.

‘Hey, you want to rain someplace else?’ snapped Dupree.

‘Sorry,’ said Touissant.

‘He’s right,’ I said. ‘We may not be able to identify her, That’s a chance we’ll have to take.’

‘Once we exhaust our own records, we’ll have to use the feds’,’ said Dupree.

‘We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,’ I responded. ‘Can we do this?’

Dupree shuffled his feet and finished his cigarette. He leaned through the open window of his car and put the butt into the ashtray.

‘Twenty-four hours max,’ he said. ‘After that, we’ll be accused of incompetence or deliberately impeding the progress of an investigation. I’m not even sure how far we’ll get in that time, although . . .’ He looked at Touissant, then back to me. ‘. . . it may not come to that.’

‘You want to tell me,’ I said, ‘or do I have to guess?’

It was Touissant who answered.

‘The feds think they’ve found Byron. They’re going to move on him by morning.’

‘In which case, this is just a back-up,’ said Dupree. ‘The joker in our pack.’

But I was no longer listening. They were moving on Byron, but I would not be there. If I tried to participate, then a sizeable portion of the Louisiana law-enforcement community would be used to put me on a plane to New York or to lock me in a cell.

The crew were likely to be the weakest link. They were taken aside and given cups of coffee, then Dupree and I were as honest with them as we felt we could be. We told them that if they didn’t keep quiet about what they had seen for at least one day, then the man who had killed the girl would probably get away and that he would kill again. It was at least partly true; cut off from the hunt for Byron, we were continuing the investigation as best we could.

The crew was made up of hard-working local men, most of them married with children of their own. They agreed to say nothing until we contacted them and told them that it was okay to do so. They meant what they said, but I knew that some of them would tell their wives and their girlfriends as soon as they got home and word of what had happened would spread from there. A man who says he tells his wife everything is either a liar or a fool, my first sergeant used to say. Unfortunately, he was divorced.

Dupree had been in his office when the call came through and had picked pairs of deputies and detectives whom he trusted implicitly. With the addition of Touissant, Rachel and me, along with the ME’s team and the dredging crew, maybe twenty people knew of the discovery of the body. It was nineteen people too many to keep a secret for long, but that couldn’t be helped.

After the initial examination and photography, it was decided to bring the body to a private clinic outside Lafayette, where the ME sometimes consulted, and he agreed to commence his work almost immediately. Dupree prepared a statement detailing the discovery of a woman of unspecified age, cause of death unknown, some five miles from the actual location of the discovery. He dated it, timed it, then left it under a sheaf of files on his desk.

By the time we both arrived at the autopsy room, the remains had been X-rayed and measured. The gurney that had brought the body in had been pushed into a corner, away from the autopsy table on its cylindrical tank, which delivered water to the table and collected the fluids that drained through the holes on the table itself. A scale for the weighing of organs hung from a metal frame and, beside it, a small-parts dissection table on its own base stood ready for use.

Only three people, apart from the ME and his assistant, attended the autopsy. Dupree and Touissant were two. I was the third. The smell was strong and only partly masked by the antiseptic. Dark hair hung from her skull and the skin that was left was shrunken and torn. The girl’s remains were almost completely covered by the yellow-white substance.

It was Dupree who asked the question. ‘Doc, what is that stuff on the body?’

The examiner’s name was Dr Emile Huckstetter, a tall, stocky man in his early fifties with a ruddy complexion. He ran a gloved finger over the substance before he responded.

‘It’s a condition called adipocere,’ he said. ‘It’s rare – I’ve seen maybe two or three cases at most, but the combination of silt and water in that canal seems to have resulted in its development here.’

His eyes narrowed as he leaned towards the body. ‘Her body fats broke down in the water and they’ve hardened to create this substance, the adipocere. She’s been in the water for a while. This stuff takes at least six months to form on the trunk, less on the face. I’m taking a stab here, but I figure she’s been in the water for less than seven months, certainly no more than that.’

Huckstetter detailed the examination into a small microphone attached to his green surgical scrubs. The girl was seventeen or eighteen, he said. She had not been tied or bound. There was evidence of a blade’s slash at her neck, indicating a deep cut across her carotid artery as the probable cause of death. There were marks on her skull where her face had been removed and similar marks in her eye sockets.

As the examination drew to a close, Dupree was paged and, minutes later, he arrived back with Rachel. She had checked into a Lafayette motel, storing both her own baggage and mine, then returned. She recoiled initially at the sight of the body, then stood beside me and, without speaking, took my hand.

When the ME was done, he removed his gloves and commenced scrubbing. Dupree took the X-rays from the case envelope and held them up to the light, each in turn. ‘What’s this?’ he said, after a time.

Huckstetter took the X-ray from his hand and examined it himself. ‘Compound fracture, right tibia,’ he said, pointing with his finger. ‘Probably two years old. It’s in the report, or it will be as soon as I can compile it.’

I felt a falling sensation and an ache spreading across my stomach. I reached out to steady myself and the scales jangled as I glanced against their frame. Then my hand was on the autopsy table and my fingers were touching the girl’s remains. I pulled my hand back quickly.

‘Parker?’ said Dupree. He reached out and gripped my arm to steady me. I could still feel the girl on my fingers.

‘My God,’ I said. ‘I think I know who she is.’

In the early-morning light, near the northern tip of Bayou Courtableau, south of Krotz Springs and maybe twenty miles from Lafayette, a team of Federal agents, backed up by St Landry Parish sheriff’s deputies, closed in on a shotgun house, which stood with its back to the bayou, its front sheltered by overgrown bushes and trees. Some of the agents wore dark raingear with FBI in large yellow letters on the back, others helmets and body armour. They advanced slowly and quietly, their safeties off. When they spoke, they did so quickly and with the fewest possible words. Radio contact was kept to a minimum. They knew what they were doing. Around them, deputies armed with pistols and shotguns listened to the sound of their breathing and the pumping of their hearts as they prepared to move on the house of Edward Byron, the man they believed to be directly responsible for the deaths of their colleague, John Charles Morphy, his young wife and at least five other people.

The house was run-down, the slates on the roof damaged and cracked in places, the roof beams already rotting. Two of the windows at the front of the house were broken and had been covered with cardboard held in place by duct tape. The wood on the gallery was warped and, in places, missing altogether. On a metal hook to the right of the house hung the carcass of a wild pig, newly skinned. Blood dripped from its snout and pooled on the ground below.

On a signal from Woolrich, shortly after 6.00 a.m., agents in Kevlar body armour approached the house from the front and the rear. They checked the windows at either side of the front door and adjoining the rear entrance. Then, simultaneously, they hit the doors, moving into the central hallway with maximum noise, their flashlights burning through the darkness of the interior.

The two teams had almost reached each other when a shotgun roared from the back of the house and blood erupted in the dim light. An agent named Thomas Seltz plunged forward as the shot ripped through the unprotected area of his armpit, the vulnerable point in upper-body armour, his finger tightening in a last reflex on the trigger of his machine pistol as he died. Bullets raked across the wall, ceiling and floor as he fell, sending dust and splinters through the air and injuring two agents, one in the leg and one in the mouth.

The firing masked the sound of another shell being pumped into the shotgun. The second shot blasted wood from the frame of an interior door as agents hit the ground and began firing through the now empty rear door. A third shot took out an agent moving fast around the side of the house. A mass of logs and old furniture, destined for firewood, lay scattered on the ground, dispersed when the shooter broke from his hiding place beneath it. The sound of small-arms fire directed into the bayou reached the agents as they knelt to tend to their injured colleagues or ran to join the chase.

A figure in worn blue jeans and a white and red check shirt had disappeared into the bayou. The agents followed warily, their legs sinking almost to the knee at times in the muddy swamp water, dead tree trunks forcing them to deviate from a straight advance, before they reached firm ground. Using the trees as cover, they moved slowly, their guns at their shoulders, sighting as they went.

There was the roar of a shotgun from ahead. Birds scattered from the trees and splinters shot out at head height from a huge cypress. An agent screamed in pain and stumbled into view, impaled in the cheek by the shards of wood. A second blast rang out and shattered the femur in his left leg. He collapsed on to the dirt and leaves, his back arched in agony.

Automatic fire raked the trees, shattering branches and blasting foliage. After four or five seconds of concentrated firing, the order went out to cease fire and the swamp was quiet once again. The agents and police advanced once more, moving quickly from tree to tree. A shout went up as blood was found by a willow, its broken branches white as bone.

From behind came the sounds of dogs barking as the tracker, who had been kept in reserve three miles away, was brought in to assist. The dogs were allowed to sniff around Byron’s clothing and the area of the woodpile. Their handler, a thin, bearded man with his jeans tucked into muddy boots, let them sniff at the blood by the willow as soon as he caught up with the main party. Then, the dogs straining at their leashes, they moved on cautiously.

But no more shots came at them from Edward Byron, because the lawmen were not the only ones hunting him in the swamp.

While the hunt continued for Byron, Touissant, two young deputies and I were in the sheriff’s office at St Martinville, where we continued our trawl through Miami’s dentists, using emergency numbers from answering-machines where necessary.

Rachel provided the only interruption, when she arrived with coffee and hot Danishes. She stood behind me and gently laid a hand on the back of my neck. I reached around and clasped her fingers, then pulled them forward and lightly kissed their tips.

‘I didn’t expect you to stay,’ I said. I couldn’t see her face.

‘It’s almost at an end, isn’t it?’ she asked quietly.

‘I think so. I feel it coming.’

‘Then I want to see it out. I want to be there at the end.’

She stayed for a little longer, until her exhaustion became almost contagious. Then she returned to the motel to sleep.

It took thirty-eight calls before the dental assistant at Erwin Holdman’s dental surgery at Brickell Avenue found the name of Lisa Stott on her records, but she declined even to confirm if Lisa Stott had attended during the last six months. Holdman was on the golf course and didn’t like being disturbed, the assistant said. Touissant told her that he didn’t give a good goddamn what Holdman liked or didn’t like and she gave him a cellphone number.

She was right. Holdman didn’t like being disturbed on the golf course, especially when he was about to make a birdie on the fifteenth. After some shouting, Touissant requested Lisa Stott’s dental records. The dentist wanted to seek the permission of her mother and stepfather. Touissant handed the phone to Dupree, and Dupree told him that, for the present, that wasn’t possible, that they only wanted the records in order to eliminate the girl from their inquiries and it would be unwise to disturb the parents unnecessarily. When Holdman continued to refuse to cooperate, Dupree warned him that he would ensure that all his records were seized and his tax affairs subjected to microscopic examination.

Holdman co-operated. The records were kept on computer, he said, along with copies of X-rays and dental charts that had been scanned in. He would send them on as soon as he returned to his office. His dental assistant was new, he explained and wouldn’t be able to send on the records electronically without his password. He would just finish his round . . .

There was some more shouting and Holdman decided to suspend his golfing activities for that day. It would take him one hour, traffic permitting, to get back to his office. We sat back to wait.

Byron had made it about a mile into the swamp. The cops were closing and his arm was bleeding badly. The bullet had shattered the elbow of his left arm and a steady current of pain was coursing through his body. He paused in a small clearing and reloaded the shotgun by tensing the stock against the ground and pumping awkwardly with his good hand. The barking was closer now. He would take the dogs as soon as they came in sight. Once they were gone, he would lose the lawmen in the swamp.

It was probably only when he rose that he first became aware of the movement in front of him. The pack couldn’t have got around him already, he reasoned. The waters were deeper to the west. Without boats, they would not have been able to make it into the swamp from the road. Even if they had, he would have heard them coming. His senses had become attuned to the sounds of the swamp. Only the hallucinations threatened to undo him, but they came and went.

Byron crooked the shotgun awkwardly beneath his right arm and moved forward, his eyes moving constantly. He advanced slowly toward the tree line, but the movement seemed to have stopped. Maybe he shook his head then to clear his sight, fearing the onset of the visions, but they didn’t come. Instead, death came for Edward Byron as the woods came alive around him and he was surrounded by dark figures. He loosed off one shot before the gun was wrenched from his grip and he felt a pain shoot across his chest as the blade opened his skin from shoulder to shoulder.

The figures surrounded him – hard-faced men, one with an M16 slung over his shoulder, the others armed with knives and axes, all led by a huge man with reddish-brown skin and dark hair streaked with grey. Byron fell to his knees as blows rained down on his back and arms and shoulders. Dazed with pain and exhaustion, he looked up in time to see the big man’s axe scything through the air above him.

Then all was darkness.

We were using Dupree’s office, where a new PC sat ready to receive the dental records Holdman was sending. I sat in a red vinyl chair, which had been repaired so often with tape that it was like sitting on cracking ice. The chair squeaked as I shifted in it, my feet on the window-sill. Across from me was the couch on which I had earlier caught three hours of uncomfortable sleep.

Touissant had gone off to get coffee thirty minutes before. He still hadn’t come back. I was starting to get restless when I heard the sound of voices raised from the squad-room beyond. I passed through the open door of Dupree’s office and into the squad-room, with its rows of grey metal desks, its swivel chairs and hatstands, its bulletin boards and coffee cups, its half-eaten bagels and donuts.

Touissant appeared, talking excitedly to a black detective in a petrol-blue suit and open-collar shirt. Behind him, Dupree was talking to a uniformed deputy. Touissant saw me, patted the black detective on the shoulder, and walked toward me.

‘Byron’s dead,’ he said. ‘It was messy. The feds lost two men, couple more injured. Byron broke for the swamp. When they found him, someone had cut him up and split his skull with an axe. They’ve got the axe and a lot of boot prints.’ He fingered his chin. ‘They think maybe Lionel Fontenot decided to finish things his way.’

Dupree ushered us into his office, but didn’t close the door. He stood close to me and touched my arm gently.

‘It’s him. Things are still confused, but they’ve got sample jars matching the one in which your daughter’s . . .’ He paused, then rephrased it. ‘. . . the jar which you received. They’ve got a laptop computer, the remains of some kind of home-made speaker attachment and scalpels with tissue remains, most of it found in a shed at the back of the property. I talked to Woolrich, briefly. He mentioned something about old medical texts. Said to tell you that you were right. They’re still searching for the faces of the victims, but that could take some time. They’re going to start digging around the house later today.’

I wasn’t sure what I felt. There was relief, a sense of a weight being lifted and taken away, a sense that it had all come to a close. But there was also something more: I felt disappointment that I had not been there at the end. After all that I had done, after all the people who had died, both at my hands and the hands of others, the Travelling Man had evaded me right until the end.

Dupree left and I sat down heavily in the chair, the sunlight filtering through the shades on the window. Touissant sat on the edge of Dupree’s desk and watched me. I thought of Susan and Jennifer and of days spent in the park together. And I remembered the voice of Tante Marie Aguillard, and I hoped that she was now at peace.

A low, two-note signal beeped from Dupree’s PC at regular intervals. Touissant hauled himself from the desk and walked around to where he could see the screen of the PC. He tapped some keys and read what was on-screen.

‘It’s Holdman’s stuff coming through,’ he said.

I joined him at the screen and watched as Lisa Stott’s dental records appeared, detailed in words, then as a kind of two-dimensional map of her mouth with fillings and extractions marked, and then in the form of a mouth X-ray.

Touissant called up the ME’s X-ray from a separate file and set the two images side-by-side.

‘They look the same,’ he said.

I nodded. I didn’t want to think of the implications if they were.

Touissant called up Huckstetter, told him what we had and asked him to come over. Thirty minutes later, Dr Emile Huckstetter was running through Holdman’s file, comparing it with his own notes and the X-ray images he had taken from the dead girl. At last, he pushed his glasses up on his forehead and pinched the corners of his eyes.

‘It’s her,’ he said.

Touissant let out a long, jagged breath and shook his head in sorrow. It was the Travelling Man’s last jest, it seemed, the old jest. The dead girl was Lisa Stott or, as she once was known, Lisa Woolrich, a young girl who had become an emotional casualty of her parents’ bitter divorce, who had been abandoned by a mother anxious to start a new life without the complication of an angry, hurt teenage daughter, and whose father was unable to provide her with the stability and support she needed.

She was Woolrich’s daughter.

Chapter Forty-Nine

The voice on the telephone was heavy with tiredness and tension. I spoke as I drove; a St Martin’s deputy had retrieved the rental car from the Flaisance.

‘Woolrich, it’s Bird.’

‘Hey.’ There was no life to the word. ‘What have you heard?’

‘That Byron’s dead, some of your men too. I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah, it was a mess. They call you in New York?’

‘No.’ I debated whether or not to tell him the truth and decided not to. ‘I missed the flight. I’m heading towards Lafayette.’

‘Lafayette? Shit, what you doin’ in Lafayette?’

‘Hanging around.’ With Touissant and Dupree, it had been agreed that I should talk to Woolrich, that I should be the one to tell him that his daughter had been found. ‘Can you meet me?’

‘Shit, Bird, I’m on my last legs here.’ Then, resignedly: ‘Sure, I’ll meet you. We can talk about what happened today. Give me an hour. I’ll meet you in the Jazzy Cajun, off the highway. Anyone will tell you where it is.’ I could hear him coughing at the other end of the phone.

‘Your lady friend go home?’

‘No, she’s still here.’

‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘It’s good to have someone with you at times like this.’ Then he hung up.

The Jazzy Cajun was a small dark bar annexed to a motel, with pool tables and a country-music juke-box. Behind the bar, a woman restocked the beer cabinet while Willie Nelson played over the speakers.

Woolrich arrived shortly after I began drinking my second coffee. He was carrying a canary-yellow jacket and the armpits of his shirt were stained with sweat. The shirt itself was marked with dirt on the back and sleeves and one elbow was torn. His tan trousers were heavy with mud at the cuffs and hung over mud-encrusted, ankle-high boots. He ordered a bourbon and a coffee, then took a seat beside me near the door. We didn’t say anything for a time, until Woolrich drained half of his bourbon and began sipping at his coffee.

‘Listen, Bird,’ he began. ‘I’m sorry for what went down between us this last week or so. We were both trying to bring this to an end our own way. Now that it’s done, well . . .’ He shrugged and tipped his glass at me before draining it and signalling for another. There were black stains beneath his eyes and I could see the beginnings of a painful boil at the base of his neck. His lips were dry and cracked and he winced as the bourbon hit the inside of his mouth. He noticed my look. ‘Canker sores,’ he explained. ‘They’re a bitch.’ He took another sip of coffee. ‘I guess you want to hear what happened.’

I wanted to put off the moment, but not like that.

‘What are you going to do now?’ I asked.

‘Sleep,’ he said. ‘Then maybe take some time off, go down to Mexico and see if I can’t rescue Lisa from these goddamn religious freaks.’

I felt a pain in my heart and stood suddenly. I wanted a drink as badly as I had ever wanted anything before in my life. Woolrich didn’t seem to notice my lack of composure, or even register that I was walking towards the mensroom. I could feel sweat on my forehead and my skin felt hypersensitive, as if I was about to come down with a fever.

‘She’s been asking after you, Birdman,’ I heard him say, and I stopped dead.

‘What did you say?’ I didn’t turn around.

‘She asks after you,’ he repeated.

I turned then. ‘When did you hear from her last?’

He waved the glass. ‘Couple of months back, I suppose. Two or three.’

‘You sure?’

He stopped and stared at me. I hung by a thread over a dark place and watched as something small and bright separated from the whole and disappeared into the blackness, never to be found again. The surroundings of the bar fell away and there was only Woolrich and me, alone, with nothing to distract one from the other’s words. There was no ground beneath my feet, no air above me. I heard a howling in my head as images and memories coursed through my mind.

Woolrich standing on a porch, his finger on the cheek of Florence Aguillard, a gentle, trusting girl with a scarred face. In her final moments, I think she knew what he had done, what he had led her to do.

‘I call this my metaphysical tie, my George Herbert tie.’

A couplet from Ralegh, from the ‘Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’, the poem from which Woolrich so loved to quote:

‘Blood must be my bodies balmer/No other balme will there be given’

The second phone call I had received in the Flaisance, the one during which the Travelling Man had allowed no questions, the one during which Woolrich was in attendance.

‘They have no vision. They have no larger view of what they’re doing. There’s no purpose to it.’

Woolrich and his men seizing Rachel’s notes.

‘I’m torn between keeping you in touch and telling you nothing.’

Cops throwing a bag of donuts he had touched into a trash can.

‘Are you fucking her, Bird?’

You can’t bluff someone who isn’t paying attention.

And a figure in a New York bar, fingering a Penguin volume of metaphysical verse and quoting lines from Donne.

Rack’t carcasses make ill Anatomies.

A metaphysical sensibility: that was what the Travelling Man had, what Rachel had tried to pinpoint only days before, what united the poets whose works had lined the shelves of Woolrich’s East Village apartment on the night he took me back there to sleep, on the night after he killed my wife and child.

‘Bird, you okay?’ His pupils were tiny, like little black holes sucking the light from the room.

I turned away. ‘Yeah, just a moment of weakness, that’s all. I’ll be back.’

‘Where are you going, Birdman?’ There was doubt in his voice, and something else, a note of warning, of violence, and I wondered if my wife had heard it as she tried to escape, as he came after her down the hall of our home, as he broke her nose against the wall.

‘I have to go to the john,’ I said.

Bile was rising in my throat, threatening to make me gag and vomit on the floor. A fierce, burning pain dug at my stomach and clawed at my heart. It was as if a veil had been pulled aside at the moment of my death, revealing only a cold, black emptiness beyond. I wanted to turn away. I wanted to turn away from it all and, when I returned, everything would be normal again. I would have a wife and a daughter who looked like her mother. I would have a small, peaceful home and a patch of lawn to tend and someone who would stand by me, even to the end.

The toilet was dark and smelt of stale urine from the unflushed bowl but the tap worked. I splashed cold water on my face then reached into my jacket pocket for my phone.

It wasn’t there. I had left it on the table with Woolrich. I wrenched the door open and moved around the bar, my right hand drawing my gun, but Woolrich was gone.

I called Touissant but he had already left. Dupree had gone home. I convinced the switchboard operator to ring Dupree’s home number and to ask him to call me back. Five minutes later he did. His voice was bleary.

‘This had better be good,’ he said.

‘Byron isn’t the killer,’ I said.

‘What?’ He was wide awake now.

‘He didn’t kill them,’ I repeated. I was outside the bar, gun in hand, but there was no sign of Woolrich. I stopped two black women passing with a child between them, but they backed off as soon as they saw the gun. ‘Byron wasn’t the Travelling Man. Woolrich was. He’s running. I caught him out with a lie about his daughter. He said he had spoken to her two or three months back. You and I both know that’s not possible.’

‘You could have made a mistake.’

‘Dupree, listen to me. Woolrich set Byron up. He killed my wife and daughter. He killed Morphy and his wife, Tante Marie, Tee Jean, Lutice Fontenot, Tony Remarr and he killed his own daughter too. He’s running, do you hear me? He’s running.’

‘I hear you,’ said Dupree. His voice was dry with the realisation of how wrong we had been.

One hour later, they hit Woolrich’s apartment in Algiers, on the south bank of the Mississippi. It lay on the upper floor of a restored house on Opelousas Avenue above an old grocery store, approached by a flight of cast-iron stairs girded with gardenias that led on to a gallery. Woolrich’s apartment was the only one in the building, with two arched windows and a solid oak door. The New Orleans police were backed up by six FBI men. The cops led, the feds taking up positions at either side of the door. There was no movement visible in the apartment through the windows. They had not expected any.

Two cops swung an iron battering ram with ‘Hi, y’all’ painted in white on its flat head. It took one swing to knock the door open. The FBI men poured into the house, the police securing the street and the surrounding yards. They checked the tiny kitchen, the unmade bed, the lounge with the new television, the empty pizza cartons and beer cans, the Penguin poetry editions which sat in a milk crate, the picture of Woolrich and his daughter smiling from on top of a nest of tables.

In the bedroom was a closet, open and containing an array of wrinkled clothes and two pairs of tan shoes, and a metal cabinet sealed with a large steel lock.

‘Break it,’ instructed the agent in charge of the operation, Assistant SAC Cameron Tate. O’Neill Brouchard, the young FBI man who had driven me to Tante Marie’s house centuries before, struck at the lock with the butt of his machine pistol. It broke on the third attempt and he pulled the doors open.

The explosion blew O’Neill Brouchard backwards through the window, almost tearing his head off in the process, and sent a hailstorm of glass shards into the narrow confines of the bedroom. Tate was blinded instantly, glass embedding itself in his face, neck and his Kevlar vest. Two other FBI men sustained serious injuries to the face and hands as part of Woolrich’s store of empty glass jars, his laptop computer, a modified H3000 voice synthesiser and a flesh-coloured mask, designed to obscure his mouth and nose, were blown to pieces. And amid the flames and the smoke and the shards of glass, burning pages fluttered to the ground like black moths, a mass of Biblical apocrypha disintegrating into ash.

As O’Neill Brouchard was dying, I sat in the detective squad-room in St Martinville as men were pulled in from holidays and days off to assist in the search. Woolrich had switched off his cellphone but the phone company had been alerted. If he used it, they would try to pinpoint a location.

Someone handed me a cup of coffee in an alligator cup and, while I drank it, I tried Rachel’s room at the motel again. On the tenth ring the desk clerk interrupted. ‘Are you . . . Do they call you the Birdman?’ he said. He sounded young and uncertain.

‘Yes, some people do.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. Did you call before?’

I told him that this was my third call. I was aware of an edge in my voice.

‘I was buying lunch. I have a message for you, from the FBI.’

He said the three letters with a sort of wonder in his voice. Nausea bubbled in my throat.

‘It’s from Agent Woolrich, Mr Birdman. He said to tell you that he and Ms Wolfe were taking a trip, and that you’d know where to find them. He said he wanted you to keep it to just the three of you. He doesn’t want anyone else to spoil the occasion. He told me to tell you that specifically, sir.’

I closed my eyes and his voice grew further away.

‘That’s the message, sir. Did I do okay?’

Touissant, Dupree and I laid the map across Dupree’s desk. Dupree took out a red felt-tip and drew a circle around the Crowley-Ramah area, with the two towns acting as the diameters of the circle and Lafayette as its centre.

‘I figure he’s got a place in there somewhere,’ said Dupree. ‘If you’re right and he needed to be close to Byron, if not to the Aguillards as well, then we’re looking at an area as far as Krotz Springs to the north and, damn, maybe as far as Bayou Sorrel to the south. If he took your friend, that probably delayed him a little: he needed time to check motel reservations – not much, but enough if he was unlucky with the places he called – and he needed time to get her out. He won’t want to stay on the roads, so he’ll hole up, maybe in a motel or, if it’s close enough, his own place.’

He tapped the pen in the centre of the circle. ‘We’ve alerted the locals and the state police. That leaves us – and you.’

I had been thinking of what Woolrich had said, that I would know where to find them, but so far nothing had come to me. ‘I can’t pin anything down. The obvious ones, like the Aguillard house and his own place in Algiers, are already being checked, but I don’t think he’s going to be at either of those places.’

I put my head in my hands. My fears for Rachel were obscuring my reasoning. I needed to pull back. I took my jacket and walked to the door, almost bumping into a deputy in the process. He handed me two sheets of paper.

It was a fax message from Agent Ross in New York, a copy of a series of surveillance details on Stephen Barton and, briefly, his stepmother. Most of the names appeared repeatedly over a period of weeks. One, ringed in felt-tip, appeared just twice: Woolrich. At the bottom of the page, Ross had written just two words: ‘I’m sorry.’

they can sniff each other out

‘I need space to think,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay in touch.’

Dupree seemed about to object, but he said nothing. Outside, my car was parked in a police space. I sat in it, rolled down the windows and took my Louisiana map from the glove compartment. I ran my fingers over the names: Arnaudville, Grand Coteau, Carencro, Broussard, Milton, Catahoula, Coteau Holmes, St Martinville itself. I started to drive out of town.

The last name seemed familiar from somewhere, but by that point all the towns seemed to resonate with some form of meaning, which left them all meaningless. It was like repeating your name over and over and over again in your head, until the name itself lost its familiarity and you began to doubt your own identity.

Still, St Martinville came back to me again. Something about New Iberia and a hospital. A nurse. Nurse Judy Neubolt. Judy the Nut. As I drove the car, I recalled the conversation that I had had with Woolrich when I arrived in New Orleans for the first time after the deaths of Susan and Jennifer. Judy the Nut. ‘She said I murdered her in a past life.’ Was the story true, or did it mean something else? Had Woolrich been toying with me, even then?

The more I thought about it, the more certain I became. He told me that Judy Neubolt had moved to La Jolla on a one-year contract after their relationship broke up. I doubted that Judy had ever got as far as La Jolla.

Judy Neubolt wasn’t in the current directory. I found her in an old directory in a gas station – her phone had since been disconnected – and I figured I could get directions in St Martinville. Then I called Huckstetter at home, gave him Judy’s address and asked him to call Dupree in an hour if he hadn’t heard from me. He agreed, reluctantly.

As I drove, I thought of David Fontenot and the call from Woolrich that had almost certainly brought him to Honey Island, a promise of an end to the search for his sister. He couldn’t have known how close he was to her resting place when he died.

I thought of the deaths I had brought on Morphy and Angie; the echo of Tante Marie’s voice in my head as he came for her; and Remarr, gilded in fading sunlight. I think I realised, too, why the details had appeared in the newspaper: it was Woolrich’s way of bringing his work to a larger audience, a modern-day equivalent of the public anatomisation.

And I thought of Lisa: a small, heavy, dark-eyed girl, who had reacted badly to her parents’ separation, who had sought refuge in a strange Christianity in Mexico and who had returned at last to her father. What had she seen to force him to kill her? Her father washing blood from his hands in a sink? The remains of Lutice Fontenot or some other unfortunate floating in a jar?

Or had he simply killed her because he could, because the pleasure he took in disposing of her, in mutilating his own flesh and blood, was as close as he could come to turning the knife on his own body, to enduring his own anatomisation and finding at last the deep, red darkness within himself?

Chapter Fifty

Neat lawns mixed with thick growths of cypress as I drove along the blacktop of 96 back to St Martinville, past a ‘God is Pro-Life’ sign and the warehouse-like structure of Podnuh’s nightclub. At Thibodeaux’s Café, on the neat town square, I asked for directions to Judy Neubolt’s address. They knew the place, even knew that the nurse had moved to La Jolla for a year, maybe longer, and that her boyfriend was maintaining the house.

Perkins Street started almost opposite the entrance to Evangeline State Park. At the end of the street was a T-junction, which disappeared on the right into a rural setting, with houses scattered at distant intervals. Judy Neubolt’s house was on this stretch, a small, two-storey dwelling, strangely low despite the two floors, with two windows on either side of a screen door and three smaller windows on the upper level. At the eastern side, the roof sloped down, reducing it to a single storey. The wood of the house had been newly painted a pristine white and damaged slates on the roof had been replaced, but the yard was overgrown with weeds and the woods beyond had begun to make inroads on the boundaries of the property.

I parked some way from the house and approached it through the woods, stopping at their verge. The sun was already falling from its apex and it cast a red glow across the roof and walls. The rear door was bolted and locked. There seemed to be no option but to enter from the front.

As I moved forward, my senses jangled with a tension I had not felt before. Sounds, smells and colours were too sharp, too overpowering. I felt as if I could pick out the component parts of every noise which came to me from the surrounding trees. My gun moved jerkily, my hand responding too rapidly to the signals from my brain. I was conscious of the firmness of the trigger against the ball of my finger and every crevasse and rise of the grip against the palm of my hand. The sound of the blood pumping in my ears was like an immense hand banging on a heavy oak door, my feet on the leaves and twigs like the crackling of some huge fire.

The drapes were pulled on the windows, top and bottom, and across the inner door. Through a gap in the drapes on the door I could see black material, hung to prevent anyone from peering through the cracks. The screen door opened with a squeak of rusty hinges as I eased it ajar with my right foot, my body shielded by the wall of the house. I could see a thick spider’s web at the upper part of the door frame, the brown, drained husks of trapped insects shivering in the vibrations from the opening door.

I reached in and turned the handle on the main door. It opened easily. I let it swing to its fullest extent, revealing the dimly lit interior of the house. I could see the edge of a sofa, one half of a window at the other side of the house and, to my right, the beginning of a hallway. I took a deep breath, which echoed in my head like the low, pained gasp of a sick animal, then moved quickly to my right, the screen door closing behind me.

I now had a full, uninterrupted view of the main room of the house. The exterior had been deceptive. Judy Neubolt, or whoever had decided on the design of the house’s interior, had removed one floor entirely so that the room reached right to the roof, where two skylights, now encrusted with filth and partly obscured by black drapes stretched beneath them, allowed thin shafts of sunlight to penetrate to the bare boards below. The only real illumination came from a pair of dim floor lamps, one at each end of the room.

The room was furnished with a long sofa, decorated with a red and orange zigzag pattern, which stood facing the front of the house. At either side of it were matching chairs, with a low coffee table in the centre and a TV cabinet beneath one of the windows facing the seating area. Behind the sofa was a dining table and six chairs, with a fireplace to their rear. The walls were decorated with samples of Indian art and one or two vaguely mystical paintings of women with flowing white dresses standing on a mountain or beside the sea. It was hard to make out details in the dim light.

At the eastern end was a raised wooden gallery, reached by a flight of steps to my left, which led up to a sleeping area with a pine bed and a matching closet.

Rachel hung upside down from the gallery, a rope attached from her ankles to the rail above. She was naked and her hair stretched to within two feet of the floor. Her arms were free and her hands hung beyond the ends of her hair. Her eyes and mouth were wide open, but she gave no indication that she saw me. A small, clear Band Aid was attached to her left arm. A needle emerged from beneath it, attached to the plastic tube of a drip. The drip bag hung from a metal frame, allowing the ketamine to seep slowly and continuously into her system. On the floor beneath her was stretched an expanse of clear plastic sheeting.

Beneath the gallery was a dark kitchen area, with pine cupboards, a tall refrigerator and a microwave oven beside the sink. Three stools stood empty by a breakfast nook. To my right, on the wall facing the gallery, hung an embroidered tapestry with a pattern similar to the sofa and chairs. A thin patina of dust lay over everything.

I checked the hallway behind me. It led into a second bedroom, this one empty but for a bare mattress on which lay a military-green sleeping bag. A green kit-bag lay open beside the bed and I could see some jeans, a pair of cream trousers and some men’s shirts inside. The room, with its low, sloping roof, took up about half the width of the house, which meant that there was a room of similar size on the other side of the wall.

I moved back towards the main room, all the time keeping Rachel in sight. There was no sign of Woolrich, although he could have been standing hidden in the hallway at the other side of the house. Rachel could give me no indication of where he might be. I began moving slowly along the tapestried wall towards the far wall of the house.

I was about half-way across when a movement behind Rachel caught my eye and I spun, my gun raised to shoulder level as I instinctively assumed a marksman’s stance.

‘Put it down, Birdman, or she dies now.’ He had been waiting in the darkness behind her, shielded by her body. He stood close to her now, most of his body still hidden by her own. I could see the edge of his tan pants, the sleeve of his white shirt and a sliver of his head, nothing more. If I tried to shoot, I would almost certainly hit Rachel.

‘I have a gun pointing at the small of her back, Bird. I don’t want to ruin such a beautiful body with a bullet hole, so put the gun down.’

I bent down and placed the gun gently on the ground.

‘Now kick it away from you.’

I kicked it with the side of my foot and watched it slide across the floor and spin to rest by the foot of the nearest chair.

He emerged from the shadows then, but he was no longer the man that I had known. It was as if, with the revelation of his true nature, a metamorphosis had occurred. His face was more gaunt than ever and the dark shadows beneath his eyes gave him a skeletal look. But those eyes: they shone in the semi-darkness like black jewels. As my eyes grew more accustomed to the light, I saw that his irises had almost disappeared. His pupils were large and dark and fed greedily on the light in the room.

‘Why did it have to be you?’ I said, as much to myself as to him. ‘You were my friend.’

He smiled then, a bleak, empty smile that drifted across his face like snow.

‘How did you find her, Bird?’ he asked, his voice low. ‘How did you find Lisa? I gave you Lutice Fontenot, but how did you find Lisa?’

‘Maybe she found me,’ I replied.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said softly. ‘I don’t have time for those things now. I got a whole new song to sing.’

He was fully in view now. In one hand he held what looked like a modified, wide-barrelled air pistol, in the other a scalpel. A SIG was tucked into the waistband of his pants. I noticed that they still had mud on the cuffs.

‘Why did you kill her?’

Woolrich twisted the scalpel in his hand. ‘Because I could.’

Around us, the light in the room changed, darkening as a cloud obscured the sunlight filtering through the skylights above us. I moved slightly, shifting my weight, my eye on my gun where it lay on the floor. My movement seemed exaggerated, as if, faced with the potential of the ketamine, everything shifted too quickly by comparison. Woolrich’s gun came up in a single fluid moment.

‘Don’t, Bird. You won’t have long to wait. Don’t rush the end.’

The room brightened again, but only marginally. The sun was setting fast. Soon, there would only be darkness.

‘It was always going to end this way, Bird, you and me in a room like this. I planned it, right from the start. You were always going to die this way. Maybe here, or maybe later, in some other place.’ He smiled again. ‘After all, they were going to promote me. It would have been time to move on again. But, in the end, it was always going to come down to this.’

He moved forward, one step, the gun never wavering.

‘You’re a little man, Bird. Do you have any idea how many little people I’ve killed? Trailer-park trash in penny-ass towns from here to Detroit. Cracker bitches who spent their lives watching Oprah and fucking like dogs. Addicts. Drunks. Haven’t you ever hated those people, Bird, the ones you know are worthless, the ones who will never amount to anything, will never do anything, will never contribute anything? Have you ever thought that you might be one of them? I showed them how worthless they were, Bird. I showed them how little they mattered. I showed your wife and your daughter how little they mattered.’

‘And Byron?’ I asked. ‘Was he one of the little people, or did you turn him into one of them?’ I wanted to keep him talking, maybe work my way towards my gun. As soon as he stopped, he would try to kill both Rachel and me. But more than that, I wanted to know why, as if there could ever be a why that would explain all of this.

‘Byron,’ said Woolrich. He smiled slightly. ‘I needed to buy myself some time. When I cut up the girl, everyone believed the worst of him and he fled, back to Baton Rouge. I visited him, Bird. I tested the ketamine on him and then I just kept giving it to him. He tried to run once, but I found him.

‘In the end, I find them all.’

‘You warned him that the Feds were coming, didn’t you? You sacrificed your own men to ensure that he would lash out at them, to ensure that he died before he could start raving to them. Did you warn Adelaide Modine too, after you sniffed her out? Did you tell her I was coming after her? Did you make her run?’

Woolrich didn’t answer. Instead, he ran the blunt edge of the scalpel down Rachel’s arm. ‘Have you ever wondered how skin so thin . . . can hold so much blood in?’ He turned the scalpel and ran the blade across her scapula, from the right shoulder to the space between her breasts. Rachel did not move. Her eyes remained wide, but something glittered and a tear trickled from the corner of her left eye and lost itself in the roots of her hair. Blood flowed from the wound, running along the nape of her neck and pooling at her chin before it fell on to her face, drawing red lines along her features.

‘Look, Bird,’ he said. ‘I think the blood is going to her head.’

His head tilted. ‘And then I drew you in. There’s a circularity to this which you should appreciate, Bird. After you die, everybody is going to know about me. Then I’ll be gone – they won’t find me, Bird, I know every trick in the book – and I’ll start again.’

He smiled slightly.

‘You don’t look very appreciative,’ he said. ‘After all, Bird, I gave you a gift when I killed your family. If they had lived, they’d have left you and you would have become just another drunk. In a sense, I kept the family together. I chose them because of you, Bird. You befriended me in New York, you paraded them in front of me, and I took them.’

‘Marsyas,’ I said quietly.

Woolrich glanced at Rachel. ‘She’s a smart lady, Bird. Just your type. Just like Susan. And soon she’ll be just another of your dead lovers, except this time you won’t have long to grieve over her.’

His hand flicked the scalpel back and forth, tearing fine lines across Rachel’s arm. I don’t think he even realised what he was doing, or the manner in which he was anticipating the acts to come.

‘I don’t believe in the next world, Bird. It’s just a void. This is Hell, Bird, and we are in it. All the pain, all the hurt, all the misery you could ever imagine, you can find it here. It’s a culture of death, the only religion worth following. The world is my altar, Bird.

‘But, I don’t think you’ll ever understand. In the end, the only time a man really understands the reality of death, of the final pain, is at the moment of his own. It’s the flaw in my work but, somehow, it makes it more human. Look upon it as my conceit.’ He turned the scalpel in his hand, dying sunlight and blood mingling on the blade. ‘She was right all along, Bird. Now it’s time for you to learn. You’re about to receive, and become, a lesson in mortality.

‘I’m going to re-create the Pietà again, Bird, but this time with you and your ladyfriend. Can’t you see it? The most famous representation of grief and death in the history of the world, a potent symbol of self-sacrifice for the greater good of humanity, of hope, of resurrection, and you’re going to be a part of it. Except this is the Anti-resurrection we’re creating, darkness made flesh.’

He moved forward, his eyes terrifyingly bright.

‘You’re not going to come back from the dead, Bird, and the only sins you’re dying for are your own.’

I was already moving to the right when the gun fired. I felt a sharp, stinging pain in my left side as the aluminium-bodied syringe struck and the sound of Woolrich’s footsteps approaching across the wooden floor. I lashed out at it with my left hand, dislodging the needle painfully from my flesh. It was a huge dose. I could already feel it taking effect as I reached for my gun. I gripped the butt hard and tried to draw a bead on Woolrich.

He killed the lights. Caught in the centre of the floor, away from Rachel’s body, he moved to the right. I found a shape moving past the window and I loosed off two shots. There was a grunt of pain and the sound of glass breaking. A finger of sunlight lanced into the room.

I worked my way backwards until I reached the second hallway. I tried to catch a glimpse of Woolrich but he seemed to have disappeared into the shadows. A second syringe whacked into the wall beside me and I was forced to dive to my left. My limbs were heavy now, my arms and legs propelling me with difficulty. I felt as if there was a pressure on my chest and I knew I would not be able to support my own weight if I tried to rise.

I kept moving backwards, every movement a huge effort, but I felt certain that, if I stopped, I would never be able to move again. The creaking of boards came from the main room and I heard Woolrich breathing harshly. He barked out a short laugh and I could hear the pain in it.

‘Fuck you, Bird,’ he said. ‘Shit, that hurts.’ He laughed again. ‘I’m going to make you pay for that, Bird, you and the woman. I’m going to tear your fucking souls apart.’

His voice came to me as if through a heavy fog, which distorted the sound and made it difficult to tell distances or direction. The walls of the hallway rippled and fragmented and black gore oozed from the cracks. A hand reached out to me, a slim, female hand with a narrow gold loop on its wedding finger. I saw myself reach out to touch it, although I could still feel my hands on the floor beneath me. A second female hand appeared, flailing blindly.

bird

I backed away, shaking my head to try to clear the vision. Then two smaller hands emerged from the darkness, delicate and childlike, and I closed my eyes tightly and gritted my teeth.

daddy

‘No,’ I hissed. I dug my nails into the floor until I heard one crack and pain coursed through the index finger of my left hand. I needed the pain. I needed it to fight off the effects of the ketamine. I pressed down hard on the injured finger and the pain made me gasp. There were still shadows moving along the wall, but the figures of my wife and child had gone.

I was conscious now of a reddish glow bathing the hallway. My back struck something cold and heavy, which moved slowly as I pressed against it. I was leaning against a partially open reinforced steel door, with three bolts on its left side. The central bolt was a monster, easily an inch in diameter with a huge open brass lock hanging from it. A dim reddish light seeped out from the crack in the door.

‘Birdman, it’s almost over,’ said Woolrich. His voice sounded very close now, although I still could not see him. I guessed he was standing at the very edge of the corner, waiting for me finally to stop moving. ‘The drug is going to stop you soon. Throw the gun away, Bird, and we can get started. The sooner we start, the sooner we finish.’

I leaned back harder on the door and felt it give fully. I pushed back with my heels once, twice, a third time, until I came to rest against a set of shelving that reached from ceiling to floor. The room was lit by a single red bulb, which hung unshaded from the centre of the ceiling. The windows had been bricked up, the brickwork left uncovered. There was no natural light to illuminate the contents of the room.

Opposite me, to the left of the door, was a row of metal shelving, perforated bars holding the shelves in place with screws. On each shelf sat a number of glass jars and, in each jar, glowing in the dim red light, lay the remains of a human face. Most were beyond recognition. Lying in the formaldehyde, they had sunken in on themselves. Eyelashes were still visible on some, lips bleached almost white on others, the skin at their edges tattered and torn. On the lowest shelf, two dark faces lay almost upright against the glass and, even violated in this way, I recognised the faces of Tante Marie Aguillard and her son. I counted maybe fifteen bottles in front of me. Behind me, the shelving moved slightly and I heard the sound of glass knocking against glass and the slick movement of liquid.

I raised my head. Row upon row of bottles reached up to the ceiling, each bearing its faint, white human remains. Beside my left eye, a face leaned against the front of a jar, its empty eyes gaping, as if trying to peer into eternity.

And I knew that somewhere among these faces, Susan lay preserved.

‘What do you think of my collection, Bird?’ The dark bulk of Woolrich moved slowly down the hallway. In one hand, I could see the outline of the pistol. In the other, he rubbed his thumb along the clean line of the scalpel.

‘Wondering where your wife is? She’s on the middle shelf, third from the left. Shit, Bird, you’re probably sitting beside her right now.’

I didn’t move. I didn’t blink. My body lay slumped against the shelves, surrounded by the faces of the dead. My face would be there soon, I thought, my face and Rachel’s and Susan’s, side by side for ever.

Woolrich moved forward until he stood in the doorway. He raised the air pistol.

‘No one ever lasted this long before, Bird. Even Tee Jean, and he was a strong kid.’ His eyes glowed redly. ‘I gotta tell you, Bird: in the end, this is going to hurt.’

He tightened his finger on the pistol and I heard the crack as the syringe shot from the barrel. I was already raising my gun as the sharp pain struck my chest, my arm achingly heavy, my vision blurred by the shadows moving across my eyes. I tightened my finger on the trigger, willing it to increase the pressure. Woolrich moved forward, alive to the danger, the scalpel raised to slash at my arm.

The trigger moved back slowly, infinitesimally slowly, and the world slowed down with it. Woolrich seemed to hang in space, the blade curving down in his hand as if through water, his mouth wide and a sound like a wind howling in a tunnel coming from his throat. The trigger moved back another tiny measure and my finger froze as the gun boomed loudly in the enclosed space. Woolrich, barely three feet from me now, bucked as the first shot took him in the chest. Then the automatic fire kicked in under the sustained pressure and the next eight shots seemed to come together, the sound of their firing joined together seamlessly as the bullets tore into him, ripping through cloth and flesh before the gun locked empty. Glass shattered as the bullets exited and the floor became awash with formaldehyde. Woolrich fell backwards and lay on the floor, his body shaking and spasming. He rose once, his shoulders and head lifting from the ground, the light already dying in his eyes. Then he lay back and moved no more.

My arm gave in under the weight of the gun and it fell to the floor. I could hear liquid dripping, could feel the presence of the dead as they crowded around me. From a distance, there came the sound of approaching sirens and I knew that, whatever happened to me, Rachel at least would be safe. Something brushed my cheek with a touch light as gossamer, like the last caress of a lover before the time to sleep, and a kind of peace came over me. With a last act of will, I closed my eyes and waited for the stillness to come.

Epilogue

I turn left at the Scarborough intersection, down the steep hill, past the big Catholic church and the old cemetery, the fire department on my right, the late-evening sun shining bleakly on the expanse of marshland to the east and west of the road. Soon it will be dark and lights will appear in the houses of the locals, but the summer houses on Prouts Neck Road will not be lit.

The sea rolls in gently at Prouts Neck, washing slowly over sand and stone. The season is over now and behind me the bulk of the Black Point Inn looms darkly, its dining room deserted, its bar quiet, the screen doors of the staff dormitories locked. In the summer, the old and wealthy from Boston and upstate New York will come to stay, eating buffet lunches by the pool and dressing for dinner, the candlelight reflecting on their heavy jewellery and dancing around the table like golden moths.

Across the water, I can see the lights of Old Orchard Beach. A chill wind is coming in over the sea, tossing and buffeting the last of the gulls. I pull my coat tightly around me and stand on the sand, watching the grains swirl and twist before me. They make a sound like a mother hushing her child as the wind raises them from the dunes and lifts them like the shapes of old ghosts before laying them to rest again.

I am standing near the spot where Clarence Johns stood all those years ago, as he watched Daddy Helms’s man pour dirt and ants over my body. It was a hard lesson to learn, harder still to learn it twice. I recall the look on his face as he stood shivering before me, the desolation, the realisation of what he had done, of what he had lost.

And I want to put my arm around the shoulders of Clarence Johns and tell him that it’s all right, that I understand, that I bear him no malice for what he did. I want to hear the soles of his cheap shoes slapping on the road. I want to watch him skim a stone over the water and know that he is still my friend. I want to walk the long walk home beside him and hear him whistling the only three bars he knows of some tune that he can’t get out of his head, a tune that returns again and again to haunt him as he makes his way along the road.

But instead I will climb back in my car and return to Portland in the waning autumn light. I have a room at the Inn on St John, with big bay windows and clean white sheets and a separate bathroom two doors down the hall. I will lie on my bed as the traffic passes beneath my window, as the Greyhound buses arrive and depart from the terminal across the street, as the street people push their shopping carts filled with bottles and cans down the sidewalk to the depot on Congress.

And in the gathering darkness I will call Rachel’s number in Manhattan. The phone will ring – once, twice – and then her machine will kick in: ‘Hi, no one can come to the phone right now, but . . .’ I have heard the same message again and again since she left the hospital. Her receptionist says that she cannot tell me where Rachel is. She has cancelled her college lectures. And, from my hotel room, I will talk to the machine.

I could find her, if I chose. I found the others, but they were dead when I found them. I do not want to chase her down.

It is not supposed to end this way. She should be beside me now, her skin perfect and white, not scarred by Woolrich’s knife; her eyes bright and inviting, not wary and haunted by the visions that torment her in the night; her hands reaching for me in the darkness, not raised to ward me off, as if even my touch might cause her pain. We will both reach an accommodation with the past, with all that has taken place, but for now we will each do so alone.

In the morning, Edgar will have the radio playing and there will be orange juice and coffee on the table in the lobby, and muffins wrapped in plastic. From there, I will drive out to my grandfather’s house and start working. A local man has agreed to help me fix my roof and mend my walls, so that the house can be made habitable for the winter.

And I will sit on my porch as the wind takes the evergreens in hand, pressing and moulding their branches into new shapes, creating a song from their leaves. And I will listen for the sound of a dog barking, its paws scraping on the worn boards, its tail moving lazily in the cool evening air; or the tap-tap-tap on the rail as my grandfather prepares to tamp the tobacco into his pipe, a glass of whiskey beside him warm and tender as a familiar kiss; or the rustle of my mother’s dress against the kitchen table as she lays out plates for the evening meal, blue on white, older than she is, old as the house.

Or the sound of plastic-soled shoes fading into the distance, disappearing into the darkness, embracing the peace that comes at last to every dead thing.

Acknowledgements

A number of books proved particularly valuable in the course of researching this novel. Chief among them was The Body Emblazoned (Routledge, 1995), Jonathan Sawday’s brilliant study of dissection and the human body in Renaissance culture. Other works to which I returned included F. Gonzalez-Crussi’s Suspended Animation (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1995); Denis C. Rousey’s Policing the Southern City (Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Luther Link’s The Devil (Reaktion Books, 1995); Lyall Watson’s Dark Nature (Hodder & Stoughton, 1995); and the Crime Classification Manual (Simon & Schuster, 1993) by Ressler, Douglas, Burgess and Burgess.

On a more personal note, I wish to thank my agent, Darley Anderson, without whom Every Dead Thing would not have seen the light of day. I also wish to acknowledge the faith, advice and encouragement of my editor at Hodder & Stoughton, Sue Fletcher, and Bob Mecoy, my editor at Simon & Schuster in New York. Finally, thanks to my family and Ruth, for everything.

DARK HOLLOW

John Connolly

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in 2000 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © 2000 by John Connolly

The right of John Connolly to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 978 1 84894 032 1

Book ISBN 978 1 444 70469 3

Hodder and Stoughton

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

For my Father

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint from the following copyrighted work:

Extract from ‘For the Time Being’ by W. H. Auden (Collected Poems) reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd, 3 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AU

Part One

Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood

Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,

Dreading to find its Father.

W.H. Auden, For the Time Being

Prologue

The Dodge Intrepid stood beneath a stand of firs, its windshield facing out to sea, the lights off, the key in the ignition to keep the heater running. No snow had fallen this far south, not yet, but there was frost on the ground. From nearby came the sound of the waves breaking on Ferry Beach, the only sound to disturb the stillness of this Maine winter night. A floating jetty bobbed close to the shore, lobster pots piled high upon it. Four boats lay shrouded in tarpaulin behind the red wooden boathouse, and a catamaran was tied down close to the public access boat ramp. Otherwise, the parking lot was empty.

The passenger door opened and Chester Nash climbed quickly into the car, his teeth chattering and his long brown coat drawn tightly around him. Chester was small and wiry, with long dark hair and a sliver of a moustache on his upper lip that stretched down beyond the corners of his mouth. He thought the moustache made him look dashing. Everyone else thought it made him look mournful, ergo Cheerful Chester. If there was one thing guaranteed to make Chester Nash mad, it was people calling him Cheerful Chester. He had once stuck his gun in Paulie Block’s mouth for calling him Cheerful Chester. Paulie Block had almost ripped his arm off for doing it, although, as he explained to Cheerful Chester while he slapped him repeatedly across the head with hands as big as shovels, he understood the reason why Chester had done it. Reasons just didn’t excuse everything, that was all.

‘I hope you washed your hands,’ said Paulie Block, who sat in the driver’s seat of the Dodge, maybe wondering why Chester couldn’t have taken a leak earlier like any normal individual instead of insisting on pissing against a tree in the woods by the shore and letting all of the heat out of the car while he did it.

‘Man, it’s cold,’ said Chester. ‘This is the coldest goddamn place I have ever been in my whole goddamn life. My meat nearly froze out there. Any colder, I’d a pissed ice cubes.’

Paulie Block took a long drag on his cigarette and watched as the tip flared briefly red before returning to grey ash. Paulie Block was aptly named. He was six-three, weighed two-eighty and had a face that looked like it had been used to shunt trains. He made the interior of the car look cramped just by being there. All things considered, Paulie Block could have made Giants Stadium look cramped just by being there.

Chester glanced at the digital clock on the dash, the green numerals seeming to hang suspended in the dark.

‘They’re late,’ he said.

‘They’ll be here,’ said Paulie. ‘They’ll be here.’

He returned to his cigarette and stared out to sea. He probably didn’t look too hard. There was nothing to be seen, just blackness and the lights of Old Orchard Beach beyond. Beside him, Chester Nash began playing with a Game Boy.

Outside, the wind blew and the waves washed rhythmically on the beach, and the sound of their voices carried over the cold ground to where others were watching, and listening.

‘. . . Subject Two is back in vehicle. Man, it’s cold,’ said FBI Special Agent Dale Nutley, unconsciously repeating the words that he had just heard Chester Nash speak. A parabolic microphone stood beside him, positioned close to a small gap in the wall of the boathouse. Next to it, a voice-activated Nagra tape recorder whirred softly and a Badger Mk II low-light camera kept a vigil on the Dodge.

Nutley wore two pairs of socks, long Johns, denims, a T-shirt, a cotton shirt, a wool sweater, a Lowe ski jacket, thermal gloves and a grey alpaca hat with two little flaps that hung down over the headphones and kept his ears warm. Special Agent Rob Briscoe, who sat beside him on a tall stool, thought the alpaca hat made Nutley look like a llama herder, or the lead singer with the Spin Doctors. Either way, Nutley looked like a clown in his alpaca hat, with its damn flaps to keep his ears warm. Agent Briscoe, whose ears were very cold, wanted that alpaca hat. If it got any colder, he figured he might just have to kill Dale Nutley and take the hat from his dead head.

The boathouse stood to the right of the Ferry Beach parking lot, giving its occupants a clear view of the Dodge. Behind it, a private road followed the shore, leading to one of the summer houses on the Neck. From the lot, Ferry Road snaked back to Black Point Road, leading ultimately to Oak Hill and Portland to the north and Black Point itself to the south. The boathouse windows had received a reflective coating barely two hours before, in order to prevent anyone from seeing the agents inside. There had been a brief moment of apprehension when Chester Nash had peered in the window and tested the locks on the doors before running quickly back to the Dodge.

Unfortunately, the boathouse had no heating, at least none that worked, and the FBI had not seen fit to provide the two special agents with a heater. As a result, Nutley and Briscoe were about as cold as they had ever been. The bare boards of the boathouse were icy to the touch.

‘How long we been here?’ asked Nutley.

‘Two hours,’ replied Briscoe.

‘You cold?’

‘What sort of a stupid question is that? I’m covered in frost. Of course I’m fucking cold.’

‘Why didn’t you bring a hat?’ asked Nutley. ‘You know, you lose most of your body heat through the top of your head? You should have brought a hat. That’s why you’re cold. You should have brought a hat.’

‘You know, Nutley?’ said Briscoe.

‘What?’ said Nutley.

‘I hate you.’

Behind them, the voice-activated recorder whirred softly, taking in the conversation of the two agents through the microphones attached to their jackets. Everything was to be recorded, that was the rule on this operation: everything. And if that included Briscoe’s hatred of Nutley because of his alpaca hat, then so be it.

The security guard, Oliver Judd, heard her before he saw her. Her feet made a heavy, shuffling noise on the carpeted floor and she was speaking softly to herself as she walked. Regretfully, he stood up in his booth and walked away from his TV and the heater that had been blasting warm air onto his toes. Outside, there was a kind of stillness that presaged further snow. There was no wind, though, which was something. It would soon get worse – December always did – but, this far north, it got worse sooner than it did anywhere else. Sometimes, living in northern Maine could be a bitch.

He walked swiftly towards her. ‘Hey, lady, lady! What are you doing out of bed? You’re gonna catch your death.’

The old woman started at the last word and looked at Judd for the first time. She was small and thin but carried herself straight, which gave her an imposing air among the other occupants of St Martha’s Home for the Elderly. Judd didn’t think she was as old as some of the other folks in the home, who were so old that they’d bummed cigarettes from people who died in World War I. This one, though, was maybe sixty at most. Judd figured that if she wasn’t old then she was probably infirm which meant, in layman’s terms, that she was mad, plumb loco. Her hair was silver grey and hung loose over her shoulders and almost to her waist. Her eyes were bright blue and looked straight through Judd and off into the distance. She wore a pair of brown, lace-up boots, a nightgown, a red muffler and a long blue overcoat, which she was buttoning as she walked.

‘I’m leaving,’ she replied. She spoke quietly but with absolute determination, as if it was nothing out of the ordinary that a sixty-year-old woman should try to leave a home for the elderly in northern Maine wearing only a nightdress and a cheap coat on a night when the forecast promised more snow to add to the six inches that already lay frozen on the ground. Judd couldn’t figure out how she had slipped past the nurses’ station, still less almost to the main door of the home. Some of these old folks were cunning as foxes, Judd reckoned. Turn your back on them and they’d be gone, heading for the hills or their old house or off to wed a lover who had died thirty years before.

‘Now you know you can’t leave,’ said Judd. ‘Come on, you got to go back to bed. I’m going to call for a nurse now, so you stay where you are and we’ll have someone down to take care of you before you know it.’

The old woman stopped buttoning her coat and looked again at Oliver Judd. It was then that Judd realised for the first time that she was scared: truly, mortally afraid for her life. He couldn’t tell how he knew, except that maybe some kind of primitive sense had kicked in when she came near him. Her eyes were huge and pleading and her hands shook now that they were no longer occupied with her buttons. She was so scared that Judd began to feel a little nervous himself. Then the old woman spoke.

‘He’s coming,’ she said.

‘Who’s coming?’ asked Judd.

‘Caleb. Caleb Kyle is coming.’

The old woman’s stare was almost hypnotic, her voice trembling with terror. Judd shook his head and took her by the arm.

‘Come on,’ he said, leading her to a vinyl seat beside his booth. ‘You sit down here while I call the nurse.’ Who in hell was Caleb Kyle? The name was almost familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.

He was dialing the number for the nurses’ station when he heard a noise from behind. He turned to see the old woman almost on top of him, her eyes now narrow with concentration, her mouth set firmly. Her hands were raised above her head and he lifted his eyes to see what she was holding, his face rising just in time to see the heavy glass vase falling towards him.

Then all was darkness.

‘I can’t see a fucking thing,’ said Cheerful Chester Nash. The windows of the car had steamed up, giving Chester an uncomfortably claustrophobic feeling that the huge bulk of Paulie Block did nothing to ease, as he had just told his companion in no uncertain terms.

Paulie wiped the side window with his sleeve. In the distance, headlights raked the sky.

‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘They’re coming.’

Nutley and Briscoe had also seen the headlights, minutes after Briscoe’s radio had crackled into life to inform the agents that a car was on its way down Old County Road, heading in the direction of Ferry Beach.

‘You think it’s them?’ asked Nutley.

‘Maybe,’ replied Briscoe, brushing icy condensation from his jacket as the Ford Taurus emerged from Ferry Road and pulled up alongside the Dodge. Through their ‘phones, the agents heard Paulie Block ask Cheerful Chester if he was ready to rumble. They heard only a click in response. Briscoe couldn’t be certain, but he thought it was the sound of a safety clicking off.

In St Martha’s Home for the Elderly, a nurse placed a cold compress on the back of Oliver Judd’s head. Ressler, the sergeant out of Dark Hollow, stood by with a reserve patrolman, the patrolman still laughing quietly to himself. There was the faintest trace of a fading smile on Ressler’s lips. In another corner stood Dave Martel, the chief of police in Greenville, five miles south of Dark Hollow, and beside him one of the Fisheries and Wildlife wardens from the town.

St Martha’s was technically in the jurisdiction of Dark Hollow, the last town before the big industrial forests began their sweep towards Canada. Still, Martel had heard about the old woman and had come to offer his help in the search if it was needed. He didn’t like Ressler, but liking had nothing to do with whatever action needed to be taken.

Martel, who was sharp, quiet and only Greenville’s third chief since the foundation of the town’s small department, didn’t see anything particularly funny about what had just happened. If they didn’t find her soon, she would die. It didn’t require too much cold to kill an old woman, and there was plenty to spare that night.

Oliver Judd, who had always wanted to be a cop but was too short, too overweight and too dumb to make the grade, knew the Dark Hollow cops were laughing at him. He figured that they probably had a right to laugh. After all, what kind of security guard gets cold-cocked by an old lady? An old lady, what’s more, who now had Oliver Judd’s new Smith & Wesson 625 somewhere on her person.

The search team prepared to move off, headed by Dr Martin Ryley, the director of the home. Ryley was wrapped up tightly in a hooded parka, gloves and insulated boots. In one hand he carried an emergency medical kit, in the other a big Maglite flashlight. At his feet lay a backpack containing warm clothing, blankets and a thermos filled with soup.

‘We didn’t pass her on the way in here, so she’s moving across country,’ Judd heard someone say. It sounded like Will Patterson, the warden, whose wife ran a drugstore in Guilford and who had an ass like a peach waiting to be bitten.

‘It’s all hard going,’ said Ryley. ‘South is Beaver Cove, but Chief Martel didn’t see her on his way up here. West is the lake. Looks like she may be just wandering aimlessly through the woods.’

Patterson’s radio buzzed and he moved away to talk. Almost immediately, he turned back. ‘Plane’s spotted her. She’s about two miles north east of here, moving farther into the forest.’

The two Dark Hollow cops and the warden, accompanied by Ryley and a nurse, moved off, one of the cops shouldering the backpack of clothing and blankets. Chief Martel looked at Judd and shrugged. Ressler didn’t want his help, and Martel wasn’t about to stick his nose in where it wasn’t wanted, but he had a bad feeling about what was happening, a very bad feeling. As he watched the group of five heading into the trees, the first small flurries of snow began to fall.

‘Ho Chi Minh,’ said Cheerful Chester. ‘Pol Pot. Lychee.’

The four Cambodians looked at him coldly. They wore matching blue wool overcoats, blue suits with sombre ties, and black leather gloves on their hands. Three were young, probably no more than twenty-five or twenty-six, Paulie reckoned. The fourth was older, with strands of grey seeping through his slicked-back dark hair. He wore glasses and smoked an unfiltered cigarette. In his left hand, he held a black leather briefcase.

‘Tet. Chairman Mao. Nagasaki,’ continued Cheerful Chester.

‘Will you shut up?’ said Paulie Block.

‘I’m trying to make them feel at home.’

The older guy took a last drag on his cigarette and flicked it toward the beach.

‘When your friend is finished making a fool of himself, perhaps we can begin?’ he said.

‘See,’ said Paulie Block to Cheerful Chester. ‘That’s how wars start.’

‘That Chester sure is an asshole,’ said Nutley. The conversation between the six men carried clearly to them in the chill night air. Briscoe nodded in agreement. Beside him, Nutley adjusted the camera to zoom in on the case in the Cambodian’s hand, clicked off a frame, then pulled back a little to take in Paulie Block, the Cambodian and the case. Their brief was to watch, listen and record. No interference. The interference part would come later, as soon as all of this – whatever ‘this’ was, since all they had was the meeting point – could be traced back to Tony Celli in Boston. A car containing two other agents was waiting to pick up the Dodge at Oak Hill, while a second car would follow the Cambodians.

Briscoe picked up a Night Hawk scope and trained it on Cheerful Chester Nash.

‘You see anything unusual about Chester’s coat?’ he said.

Nutley moved the camera a little to the left.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Wait. It looks like it’s fifty years old. He doesn’t have his hands in his pockets. He’s got them in those slits below the breast. Pretty awkward way to keep warm, don’t you think?’

‘Yeah,’ said Briscoe. ‘Real awkward.’

‘Where is she?’ said the older Cambodian to Paulie Block.

Paulie gestured to the trunk of the car. The Cambodian nodded and handed the briefcase to one of his associates. The case was flicked open and the Cambodian held it, facing forward, so that Paulie and Chester could see what was inside.

Chester whistled. ‘Shit,’ he said.

‘Shit,’ said Nutley. ‘There’s a lot of cash in that case.’

Briscoe trained the scope on the notes. ‘Ouch. We’re talking maybe three mil.’

‘Enough to buy Tony Celli out of whatever jam he’s in,’ said Nutley.

‘And some.’

‘But who’s in the trunk?’ asked Nutley.

‘Well, son, that’s what we’re here to find out.’

The group of five moved carefully over the hard ground, their breath puffing white as they went. Around them, the tips of evergreens scraped the sky and welcomed the flakes with their spread branches. The ground here was rocky, and the new snow had made it slick and dangerous. Ryley had already stumbled once, painfully scraping his shin. In the sky above them, they could hear the sound of the Cessna’s engine, one of Currier’s planes from Moosehead Lake, and could see its spotlight picking out something on the ground ahead of them.

‘If this snow keeps up, the plane’s going to have to turn back,’ said Patterson.

‘Nearly there,’ said Ryley. ‘Another ten minutes and we’ll have her.’

A gunshot exploded in the darkness ahead of them, then a second. The light on the plane tilted and started to rise. Patterson’s radio burst out with an angry blast of speech.

‘Hell,’ said Patterson, with a look of disbelief on his face. ‘She’s shooting at them.’

The Cambodian stayed close to Paulie Block as he moved to the rear of the car. Behind them, the younger men pulled back their coats to reveal Uzis hanging from straps on their shoulders. Each kept a hand on the grip, one finger just outside the trigger guard.

‘Open it,’ said the older man.

‘You’re the boss,’ said Paulie, as he inserted the key in the lock and prepared to lift the trunk. ‘Paulie’s just here to open the trunk.’ If the Cambodian had been listening more intently, he would have noticed that Paulie Block said the words very loudly and very distinctly.

‘Gun slits,’ said Briscoe suddenly. ‘Fucking gun slits, that’s what they are.’

‘Gun slits,’ repeated Nutley. ‘Oh, Jesus.’

Paulie Block opened the trunk and stepped back. A blast of heat greeted the Cambodian as he moved forward. In the trunk was a blanket, and beneath it was a recognisably human form. The Cambodian leaned in and pulled the blanket back.

Beneath it was a man: a man with a sawn-off shotgun.

‘What is this?’ said the Cambodian.

‘This is goodbye,’ said Paulie Block, as the barrels roared and the Cambodian jerked with the impact of the shots.

‘Fuck,’ said Briscoe. ‘Move! Move!’ He drew his SIG and ran for the back door, flipping a switch on his handset and calling for the Scarborough backup to move in as he flipped the lock and headed into the night in the direction of the two cars.

‘What about non-interference?’ said Nutley as he followed the older man. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. It wasn’t supposed to go down like this at all.

Cheerful Chester’s coat flew open, revealing the twin short barrels of a pair of Walther MPK submachine guns. Two of the Cambodians were already raising their Uzis when he pulled the triggers.

‘Sayonara,’ said Chester, his mouth exploding into a grin.

The 9mm parabellums ripped into the three men, tearing through the leather of the briefcase, the expensive wool of their coats, the pristine whiteness of their shirts, the thin shell of their skin. They shattered glass, pierced the metal of the car, pockmarked the vinyl of the seats. It took less than four seconds to empty sixty-four rounds into the three men, leaving them wrinkled and slumped, their warm blood melting the thin layer of frost on the ground. The briefcase had landed face down, some of the tightly packed wads scattering as it fell.

Chester and Paulie saw what they had done, and it was good.

‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ said Paulie. ‘Let’s get the money and get the fuck out of here.’

Behind him, the man with the shotgun, whose name was Jimmy Fribb, climbed from the cramped trunk and stretched his legs, his joints creaking. Chester loaded a fresh clip into one of the MPKs and dumped the other in the trunk of the Dodge. He was just leaning down to pick up the fallen money when the two shouts came almost together.

‘Federal Agents,’ said the first voice. ‘Let me see your hands now.’

The other voice was less succinct, and less polite, but probably strangely familiar to Paulie Block.

‘Get the fuck away from the money,’ it said, ‘or I’ll blow your fucking heads off

The old woman stood in a patch of clear ground, watching the sky. Snow fell on her hair, on her shoulders and on her outstretched arms, the gun clasped in her right hand, her left hand open and empty. Her mouth was gaping and her chest heaved as her aging body tried to cope with its exertions. She seemed not to notice Ryley and the others until they were only thirty feet from her. The nurse hung back behind the others. Ryley, despite Patterson’s objections, took the lead.

‘Miss Emily,’ he said softly. ‘Miss Emily, it’s me, Dr Ryley. We’re here to take you home.’

The old woman looked at him and Ryley suspected, for the first time since they had set out, that the old woman was not mad. Her eyes were calm as she watched him, and she almost grinned as he approached.

‘I’m not going back,’ she said.

‘Miss Emily, it’s cold. You’re going to die out here if you don’t come with us. We’ve brought you blankets and warm clothes and I have a thermos of chicken soup. We’ll get you warm and comfortable, then we’ll bring you safely back.’

The old woman actually smiled then, a broad smile with no humour to it, and no trust.

‘You can’t keep me safe,’ she said softly. ‘Not from him.’

Ryley frowned. He recalled something about the old woman now, an incident with a visitor and a report the night before from one of the nurses after Miss Emily claimed that someone had tried to climb in her window. They’d dismissed it, of course, although Judd had taken to wearing his gun on duty as a result. These old folks were nervous, fearful of illness, of strangers, of friends and relatives sometimes, fearful of the cold, of the possibility of falling, fearful for their meagre possessions, for their photos, for their fading memories.

Fearful of death.

‘Please, Miss Emily, put the gun down and come back with us. We can keep you safe from harm. No one’s going to hurt you.’

She shook her head slowly. Above them, the plane circled, casting a strange white light over the old woman, turning her long grey hair to silver fire.

‘I’m not going back. I’ll face him out here. This is his place, these woods. This is where he’ll be.’

Her face changed then. Behind Ryley, Patterson thought he had never seen an expression of such abject terror. Her mouth curled down at the edges, her chin and lips trembled and then the rest of her body began to shake, a strange, violent quivering that was almost like an ecstasy. Tears flowed down her cheeks as she began to speak.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .’

‘Please, Miss Emily,’ said Ryley, as he moved toward her. ‘Put the gun down. We have to take you back.’

‘I’m not going back,’ she repeated.

‘Please, Miss Emily, you must.’

‘Then you’ll have to kill me,’ she said simply, as she pointed the Smith & Wesson at Ryley and pulled the trigger.

Chester and Paulie looked first to their left and then to their right. To their left, in the parking lot, stood a tall man in a black jacket with a handset in one hand and a SIG held before him in the other. Behind him stood another, younger man, also holding a SIG, this time in a two-handed grip, with a grey alpaca hat on his head and flaps hanging down over his ears.

To their right, beside a small wooden hut used to collect parking fees during the summer, stood a figure dressed entirely in black, from the tips of his boots to the ski-mask covering his head. He held a Ruger pump-action in his hands and he breathed heavily through the round slit in the mask.

‘Cover him,’ said Briscoe to Nutley. Nutley’s SIG shifted from Paulie Block to the black-garbed figure near the edge of the woods.

‘Drop it, asshole,’ said Nutley.

The Ruger wavered slightly.

‘I said Drop it,’ repeated Nutley, his voice rising to a shout.

Briscoe’s eyes moved briefly to take in the figure with the shotgun. It was all Chester Nash needed. He spun and opened fire with the MPK, hitting Briscoe in the arm and Nutley in the chest and head. Nutley died instantly, his alpaca hat turning red as he fell.

Briscoe opened fire from where he lay on the road, hitting Chester Nash in the right leg and the groin, the MPK tumbling from his hands as he fell. From the woods came the sound of the Ruger opening up and Paulie Block, his gun in his right hand, bucked as he was hit, the window behind him shattering as the shots exited. He slumped to his knees and then fell face down on the ground. Chester Nash tried to reach for the MPK with his right hand, his left hand clasping his injured groin, when Briscoe fired two more shots into him and he ceased moving. Jimmy Fribb dropped his shotgun and raised his hands, just in time to stop Briscoe from killing him.

Briscoe was about to rise when, from in front of him, he heard the sound of a shotgun shell being jacked.

‘Stay down,’ said the voice.

He did as he was told, placing the SIG on the ground beside him. A black-booted foot kicked the gun away, sending it spinning into the undergrowth.

‘Put your hands on your head.’

Briscoe lifted his hands, his left arm aching as he did so, and watched as the masked figure moved towards him, the Ruger still pointing down. Nutley lay on his side close by, his open eyes staring out at the sea. Christ, thought Briscoe, what a mess. Beyond the trees, he could see headlights and hear the sound of approaching cars. The man with the shotgun heard them too, his head twisting slightly as he placed the last of the cash in the briefcase and closed it. Jimmy Fribb used the distraction to make a lunge for the discarded SIG but the gunman killed him before he could reach it, firing a shot into his back. Briscoe tightened his grip on his head, his injured arm aching, and started to pray.

‘Stay flat on the ground and don’t look up,’ he was told.

Briscoe did as he was told, but kept his eyes open. Blood flowed on the ground beneath him and he moved his head slightly to avoid it. When he looked up again, there were headlights in his eyes and the figure in black was gone.

Dr Martin Ryley was forty-eight, and was anxious to see forty-nine. He had two children, a boy and a girl, and a wife called Joanie who cooked him pot roast on Sundays. He wasn’t a very good doctor, which was why he ran an old folks’ home. When Miss Emily Watts fired at him, he hit the ground, covered his head with his hands and began alternately praying and blaspheming. The first shot went somewhere to his left. The second sprayed wet dirt and snow on his face. Behind him, he heard the sound of safety catches clicking off and he shouted: ‘No, leave her, please. Don’t shoot.’

Once again the woods were silent, with only the high buzzing of the Cessna as a distraction. Ryley risked a glance up at Miss Emily. She was crying openly now. Carefully, Ryley rose to his feet.

‘It’s all right, Miss Emily.’

The old woman shook her head. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘It will never be all right.’ And she put the mouth of the Smith & Wesson to her left breast and fired. The impact spun her backwards and to her left, her feet tangling beneath her as she fell and the fabric ofher coat igniting briefly from the muzzle flare. She bucked once then lay still upon the ground, her blood staining the earth around her, the snow falling on her open eyes, her body lit by the light from above.

And around her, the woods watched silently, their branches shifting occasionally to allow the passage of the snow.

This is how it began for me, and for another generation: two violent occurrences, taking place almost simultaneously one winter’s night, bound together by a single dark thread that lost itself in tangled memories of distant, brutal acts. Others, some of them close to me, had lived with it for a long, long time, and had died with it. This was an old evil, and old evil has a way of permeating bloodlines and tainting those who played no part in its genesis: the young, the innocent, the vulnerable, the defenceless. It turns life to death and glass to mirrors, creating an image of itself in everything that it touches.

All of this I learned later, after the other deaths, after it became clear that something terrible was happening, that something old and foul had emerged from the wilderness. And in all that would come to pass, I was a participant. Perhaps, looking back into the past, I had always been a participant without ever really understanding how, or why. But that winter, a whole set of circumstances occurred, each incident separate yet ultimately connected. It opened a channel between what had been and what should never have been again, and worlds ended in the collision.

I look back over the years and see myself as I used to be, frozen in former times like a figure in a series of vignettes. I see myself as a young boy waiting for the first sight of my father as he returns from his day’s exertions in the city, his policeman’s uniform now put away, a black gym bag in his left hand, his once muscular form now running a little to fat, his hair greyer than it used to be, his eyes a little more tired. I run to him and he sweeps me up into the crook of his right arm, his fingers closing gently on my thigh, and I am amazed at his strength, at the muscles bunched below his shoulder, his biceps tight and hard. I want to be him, to emulate his achievements and to sculpt my body in his likeness. And when he begins to come apart, when his body is revealed only as the flawed shield for a fragile mind, then I, too, start to fall to pieces.

I see myself as an older boy, standing by my father’s grave, only a handful of policemen straight and tall beside me, so that I too have to be straight and tall. These are his closest friends, the ones who are not ashamed to come. This is not a place where many wish to be seen: there is bad feeling in the city at what has taken place, and only a loyal few are willing to have their reputations frozen in the flare of a newsman’s flashbulb.

I see my mother to my right, coiled in grief. Her husband – the man she has loved for so long is – gone, and with him the reality of him as a kind man, a family man, a father who could sweep his boy into the air like a leaf on the wind. Instead, he will forever be remembered as a murderer, a suicide. He has killed a young man and a young woman, both unarmed, for reasons that no one will ever properly explain, reasons that lay in the depths of those tired eyes. They had taunted him, this thug making the transition from juvenile to adult courts and his middle-class girlfriend with his dirt under her manicured nails, and he had killed them, seeing in them something beyond what they were, beyond even what they might become. Then he had put his gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

I see myself as a young man, standing at another grave, watching as they lower my mother down. Beside me now is the old man, my grandfather. We have travelled down from Scarborough, Maine – the place to which we fled after the death of my father, the place in which my mother was born – for the funeral, so that my mother can be buried beside my father, as she has always wished, for she has never stopped loving him. Around us, old men and women have gathered. I am the youngest person present.

I see snowfalls in winter. I see the old man grow older. I leave Scarborough. I become a policeman, like my father, like my grandfather. There is a legacy to be acknowledged, and I will not be found wanting. When my grandfather dies, I return to Scarborough and fill in the grave myself, spadefuls of earth carefully falling on the pine casket. The morning sun shines down on the cemetery and I can smell the salt on the air, carried from the marshes to the east and the west. Nearby, a golden-crowned kinglet chases cluster flies, filthy grey vermin that parasitise earthworms by laying their eggs in them and seek shelter from the winter in the chinks and cracks of houses. Above, the first of the Canada geese fly south for the winter, a pair of ravens flanking them like black fighters escorting a flight of bombers.

And as the last patch of wood disappears, I hear the sound of children’s voices coming from the Lil Folks Farm nursery school which borders on the cemetery, the noise of their games high and joyful, and I cannot help but smile, for the old man would have smiled as well.

And then there is one more grave, one more set of prayers read from a tattered book, and this one tears my world apart. Two bodies are lowered down to rest side by side, just as I used to find them resting close to each other when I returned at night to our Brooklyn home, my three-year-old daughter sleeping quietly in the curled quarter-moon of her mother’s form. In one instant, I ceased to be a husband. I ceased to be a father. I had failed to protect them, and they had been punished for my failings.

All of these images, all of these memories, like the forged links of a chain, stretch back into the darkness. They should be put away, but the past is not so easily denied. Things left unfinished, things left unsaid, they all, in the end, come back to haunt us.

For this is the world, and the echo of worlds.

Chapter One

Billy Purdue’s knife bit deeper into my cheek, sending a trickle of blood down my face. His body was pressed hard against mine, his elbows pinning my arms to the wall, his legs tensed against my legs so that I couldn’t go for his groin. His fingers tightened on my neck and I thought:

Billy Purdue. I should have known better . . .

Billy Purdue was poor, poor and dangerous with some bitterness and frustration added to spice up the pot. The threat of violence was always imminent with him. It hung around him like a cloud, obscuring his judgment and influencing the actions of others, so that when he stepped into a bar and took a drink, or picked up a pool cue for a game, then sooner or later, trouble would start. Billy Purdue didn’t have to pick fights. Fights picked him.

It acted like a contagion, so that even if Billy himself managed to avoid conflict – he generally didn’t seek it, but when he found it he rarely walked away – five would get you ten that he would have raised the testosterone level in the bar sufficiently to cause someone else to consider starting something. Billy Purdue could have provoked a fight at a conclave of cardinals just by looking into the room. Whichever way you considered it, he was bad news.

So far, he hadn’t killed anybody and nobody had managed to kill him. The longer a situation like that goes on, the more the odds are stacked in favour of a bad end, and Billy Purdue was a bad beginning looking for a worse end. I’d heard people describe him as an accident waiting to happen, but he was more than that. He was a constantly evolving disaster, like the long, slow death of a star. His was an ongoing descent into the maelstrom.

I didn’t know a whole lot about Billy Purdue’s past, not then. I knew that he’d always been in trouble with the law. He had a rap sheet that read like a catalogue entry for minor crimes, from disrupting school and petty larceny to DWD, receiving stolen goods, assault, trespassing, disorderly conduct, non-payment of child support . . . The list went on and on. He was an adopted child and had been through a succession of foster homes in his youth, each one keeping him for only as long as it took the foster parents to realise that Billy was more trouble than the money from social services was worth. That’s the way some foster parents are: they treat the kids like a cash crop, like livestock or chickens, until they realise that if a chicken acts up you can cut its head off and eat it for Sunday dinner, but the options are more limited in the case of a delinquent child. There was evidence of neglect by many of Billy Purdue’s foster parents, and suspicion of serious physical abuse in at least two cases.

Billy had found some kind of home with an old guy and his wife up in the north of the state, a couple who specialised in tough love. The guy had been through about twenty foster kids by the time Billy arrived and, when he got to know Billy a little, maybe he figured that this was one too many. But he’d tried to straighten Billy out and, for a time, Billy was happy, or as happy as he could ever be. Then he started to drift a little. He moved to Boston and fell in with Tony Celli’s crew, until he stepped on the wrong toes and got parcelled back to Maine, where he met Rita Ferris, seven years his junior, and they married. They had a son together, but Billy was always the real child in the relationship.

He was now thirty-two and built like a bull, the muscles on his arms like huge hams, his hands thick and broad, the fingers almost swollen in their muscularity. He had small pig eyes and uneven teeth, and his breath smelt of malt liquor and sourdough bread. There was dirt under his nails and a raised rash on his neck, the heads white, where he had shaved himself with an old, worn blade.

I was given the opportunity to observe Billy Purdue from close quarters after I failed to put an arm-lock on him and he pushed me hard against the wall of his silver Airstream trailer, a run-down thirty-footer out by Scarborough Downs that stank of unwashed clothes, rotting food and stale seed. One of his hands was clasped hard around my neck as he forced me upwards, my toes barely touching the floor. The other held the short-bladed knife that had pierced my skin an inch beneath my left eye. I could feel the blood dripping from my chin.

The arm-lock probably hadn’t been a good idea. In fact, on the scale of good ideas, it ranked somewhere between voting for Ross Perot and invading Russia in the winter. I would have had a better chance of successfully arm-locking the trailer itself; even with all of my strength pulling on it, Billy Purdue’s arm had stayed as rigid and immobile as the statue of the poet in Longfellow Square. While my mind was registering just how bad an idea it had been to go for the lock, Billy had pulled me forward and slapped me hard across the head, open palmed, with his enormous right hand, then pushed me up against the side wall of the trailer, his huge forearms holding my arms in place. My head was still ringing from the blow and my ear ached. I thought my eardrum had burst but then the pressure on my neck started to increase and I realised that I might not have to worry about my eardrum for much longer.

The knife twisted in his hand and I felt a fresh burst of pain. The blood was running freely now, spilling from my chin onto the collar of my white shirt. Billy’s face was almost purple with rage and he was breathing heavily through clenched teeth, spittle erupting as he wheezed out.

He was completely focused on squeezing the life from me as I moved my right hand inside my jacket and felt the cool grip of the Smith & Wesson. I thought I was about to black out when I managed to wrench it free and move my arm enough to stick the muzzle into the soft flesh beneath Billy’s jaw. The red light in his eyes flared briefly and then began to fade. The pressure on my neck eased, the knife slid out of the wound and I slumped to the floor. My throat ached as I pulled shallow, rattling breaths into my starved lungs. I kept the gun on Billy but he had turned away. Now that his tide of rage had begun to ebb he seemed unconcerned about the gun, and about me. He took a cigarette from a pack of Marlboros and lit up. He offered the pack to me. I shook my head and the pain in my ear started raging again. I decided to stop shaking my head.

‘Why’d you put the lock on me?’ asked Billy in an aggrieved tone. He looked at me and there was genuine hurt in his eyes. ‘You shouldn’t have put the lock on me.’

The guy was certainly a character. I drew some more breaths, deeper now, and spoke. My voice sounded hoarse and my throat felt as if someone had rubbed grit into it. If Billy had been less of a child, I might have used the butt of the gun on him.

‘You said you were going to get a baseball bat and beat the living shit out of me, as I recall,’ I said.

‘Hey, you were being rude,’ he said and the red light seemed to glow again for a brief moment. I still had the gun pointed at him and he still didn’t seem concerned. I wondered if he knew something about the gun that I didn’t. Maybe the stench in the trailer was rotting the bullets as we spoke.

Rude. I was about to shake my head again when I remembered my ear and decided that it might be better, all things considered, to keep my head steady. I had come to visit Billy Purdue as a favour to Rita, now his ex-wife, who lived in a small apartment over on Locust Street in Portland with her two-year-old son, Donald. Rita had been granted her divorce six months before and since then Billy hadn’t paid over a nickel of child support. I knew Rita’s family when I was growing up in Scarborough. Her father had died in a botched bank raid in Bangor in ‘83 and her mother had struggled and failed to keep her family together. One brother was in jail, another was on the run from drug charges and Rita’s elder sister was living in New York and had cut off all contact with her siblings.

Rita was slim and pretty and blonde but already the raw deal life had dealt her was taking its toll on her looks. Billy Purdue had never hit her or physically abused her but he was prone to black rages and had destroyed the two apartments in which they had lived during their marriage, setting fire to one after a three-day binge in South Portland. Rita had woken up just in time to get her then one-year-old son out, before hauling Billy’s unconscious body from the apartment and setting off the alarm to evacuate the rest of the building. She filed for divorce the next day.

Now Billy marked time in his bullet-shaped trailer and lived a life that was on nodding terms with poverty. During the winter he did some lumber work, cutting Christmas trees or heading farther north to the timber company forests. The rest of the time he did what he could, which wasn’t a lot. His trailer stood on a patch of land owned by Ronald Straydeer, a Penobscot Indian from Old Town who had settled in Scarborough after returning from Vietnam. Ronald was part of the K-9 corps during the war, leading army patrols down jungle trails with his German shepherd dog Elsa by his side. The dog could smell Vietcong on the wind, Ronald told me, even found freshwater once when a platoon ran dangerously low. When the Americans pulled out, Elsa was left behind as ‘surplus equipment’ for the South Vietnamese army. Ronald had a picture of her in his wallet, tongue lolling, a pair of dog tags hanging from her collar. He figured the Vietnamese ate her as soon as the Americans left, and he never got himself another dog. Eventually, he got Billy Purdue instead.

Billy knew his ex-wife wanted to move to the West Coast and start a new life and that she needed the money Billy owed her to do that. Billy didn’t want her to go. He still believed that he could salvage their relationship, and a divorce and an order preventing him from going within one hundred feet of his ex-wife hadn’t altered this belief.

I had agreed to approach him as a favour to Rita, after she called me and I met her back at her apartment. It was about the time that I told Billy Purdue that she wasn’t coming back to him and that he had a legal obligation to pay her the money she was owed that Billy had gone for the baseball bat and things had fallen apart.

‘I love her,’ he said, puffing on his cigarette and sending twin columns of smoke shooting from his nostrils like the exhalations of a particularly mean-tempered bull. ‘Who’s gonna look out for her in San Francisco?’

I struggled to my feet and wiped some of the blood from my cheek. The sleeve of my jacket came back damp and stained. It was lucky my jacket was black, although the fact that I considered that lucky said a lot about the kind of day I was having.

‘Billy, how can she and Donald survive if you don’t pay her the money the judge told you to pay?’ I replied. ‘How’s she going to get by without that? If you do care about her, then you have to pay her the money.’

He looked at me and then looked at his feet. His toe shifted on the filthy linoleum.

‘Sorry I hurt you, man, but . . .’ He reached behind his neck and scratched at his dark, unruly hair. ‘You gonna go to the cops?’

If I was going to the cops, I wouldn’t tell Billy Purdue. Billy’s regret was about as genuine as Exxon’s when the Exxon Valdez went down. Plus, if I went to the cops, Billy would be banged up and Rita still wouldn’t get her money. But there was something in his tone when he asked about the cops, something that I should have picked up on but didn’t. His black T-shirt was soaked with sweat, and there was mud caked at the cuffs of his pants. He had so much adrenaline coursing through his system, he made ants look calm. It should have told me that Billy wasn’t concerned about the cops because of some assault beef, or unpaid child support. Hindsight: it’s a wonderful thing.

‘If you pay the cash, I’ll let it go,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘I ain’t got much. Ain’t got a thousand dollars.’

‘Billy, you owe nearly two thousand dollars. I think you’re missing the point here.’

Or maybe he wasn’t. The trailer was a dump, he drove a Toyota with holes in the floor and he made one hundred, maybe one-fifty, each week hauling junk and lumber. If he had two thousand dollars, he’d be someplace else. He’d also be somebody else, because Billy Purdue was never going to have two thousand dollars to his name.

‘I got five hundred,’ he said eventually, but there was something new in his eyes as he said it, a kind of low cunning.

‘Give it to me,’ I replied.

Billy didn’t move.

‘Billy, if you don’t pay me, the cops are going to come and lock you up until you do pay. If you’re locked up, you can’t make any cash to pay anyone and that looks like a vicious circle to me.’

He considered that for a time, then reached beneath the filthy sofa at the end of the trailer and produced a crumpled envelope. He turned his back to me and counted out five hundred-dollar bills, then replaced the envelope. He handed over the cash with a flourish, like a magician producing someone’s wristwatch after a particularly impressive conjuring trick. The bills were brand new, consecutively numbered. From the look of the envelope, they had left a lot of friends behind.

‘You go to the cash machine over at Fleet Bank, Billy?’ I asked. It seemed unlikely. The only way Billy Purdue would get money from a cash machine was by breaking it out of the wall with a bulldozer.

‘You tell her something from me,’ he said. ‘You tell her that maybe there’s more where this came from, understand? You tell her that maybe I ain’t such a loser no more. You hear me?’ He smiled a knowing smile, the kind of smile someone really dumb shoots at you when he thinks he knows something that you don’t. I figured that if Billy Purdue knew it, then it wasn’t anything I’d want to share. I was wrong.

‘I hear you, Billy. Tell me you’re not still doing work for Tony Celli. Tell me that.’

His eyes retained that gleam of dim cunning, but the smile faltered a little. ‘I don’t know no Tony Celli.’

‘Let me refresh your memory. Tall wiseguy out of Boston, calls himself Tony Clean. Started off running whores, now he wants to run the world. He’s into drugs, porn, shylocking, anything there’s a statute against, so his hopes of a good citizen award are currently so low they’re off the scale.’ I paused. ‘You used to work for him, Billy. I’m asking if you still do.’

He twitched his head as if trying to dislodge water from his ear, then looked away. ‘Y’know, I did stuff, maybe, sometimes, y’know, for Tony. Sure, sure I did. It beat hauling junk. But I ain’t seen Tony in a long time. Long time.’

‘You’d better be telling the truth, Billy, or else a lot of people are going to have some harsh words to say to you.’

He didn’t respond and I didn’t push it. As I took the bills from his hand he moved closer to me and I brought the gun up again. His face was an inch from mine, the muzzle of the gun against his chest.

‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked, and I could smell his breath and see the embers of that red glare flickering into life again. The smile was gone now. ‘She can’t afford no private dick.’

‘It’s a favour,’ I said. ‘I knew her family.’

I don’t think he even heard me.

‘How’s she gonna pay you?’ His head turned to one side as he considered his own question. Then: ‘You fucking her?’

I held his gaze. ‘No. Now back off.’

He stayed where he was, then scowled and moved slowly away. ‘You better not be,’ he said as I backed out of the trailer and into the dark December night.

The money should have alerted me, of course. There was no way Billy Purdue could have come by it honestly, and maybe I should have pushed him on it, but I was sore and just glad to be getting away from him.

My grandfather, who was himself once a policeman, until he found the tree with the strange fruit far to the north, used to tell a joke that was more than a joke.

A guy tells his buddy that he’s heading off to a card game.

‘But it’s crooked,’ protests his buddy.

‘I know,’ says the guy. ‘But it’s the only game in town.’

That joke, a dead man’s joke, would come back to me in the days that followed, as things began to fall apart. Other things that my grandfather had told me came back to me as well, things that were far from jokes for him, although many had laughed at them. Within seventy-two hours of the deaths of Emily Watts and the men at Prouts Neck, Billy Purdue would be the only game in town, and an old man’s fancies would flame into violent being.

I stopped off at the bank at Oak Hill and withdrew two hundred dollars from my account through the automatic teller. The cut beneath my eye had stopped bleeding, but I figured if I tried to clean away the encrusted blood it would start bleeding all over again. I called into Ron Archer’s office on Forest Avenue, where he saw patients two nights a week, and he put in three stitches.

‘What were you doing?’ he asked, as he prepared to give me a shot of anaesthetic. I was going to ask him not to bother, but I figured he’d just think I was playing up to him. Dr Archer was sixty, a handsome, distinguished-looking man with fine silver hair and the kind of bedside manner which made lonely women want him to climb into bed beside them and conduct intimate and unnecessary medical examinations.

‘Trying to get an eyelash out,’ I said.

‘Use eyedrops, you’ll find they don’t hurt as much and you’ll still have an eye afterwards.’

He cleaned the wound with a swab, then leaned over me with the needle. I winced a little as he delivered the shot.

‘That’s the big, brave boy,’ he muttered. ‘If you don’t cry, I’ll give you an M & M when it’s all over.’

‘I’ll bet you were the talk of med school with your doctor-patient wit.’

‘Seriously, what happened?’ he asked, as he began to stitch. ‘Looks like someone stuck a sharp blade into this and you’ve got some bruising coming up on your neck.’

‘I tried to put an arm-lock on Billy Purdue. It wasn’t a big success.’

‘Purdue? The crazy sonofabitch who nearly burned his wife and child to death?’ Archer’s eyebrows shot to the top of his forehead like a pair of startled crows. ‘You must be even more postal than he is.’ He began stitching. ‘You know, as your doctor, I should advise you that if you keep doing dumb things like that you’re likely to need more specialised treatment than I can offer.’ He slipped the needle through once more then cut the thread. ‘Although I imagine you’ll find the transition to senility pretty smooth.’

He stepped back and examined his handiwork proudly. ‘Wonderful,’ he said with a sigh. ‘A lovely piece of embroidery.’

‘If I look in the mirror and find you’ve stitched a little heart on my face, I’ll have to burn your surgery down.’

He wrapped the used needles carefully and dumped them in a protective container. ‘Those stitches will dissolve in a few days,’ he said. ‘And don’t play with them. I know what you kids are like.’

I left him laughing to himself and drove to Rita Ferris’s apartment, close by the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and the Eastern Cemetery, where the two young fools Burrows and Blythe were buried. They died in an unneccessary naval combat between the American brig Enterprise and the British Boxer, of which they were the respective captains, off Monhegan Island during the War of 1812. They were interred in the Eastern Cemetery after a huge double funeral which paraded through the streets of Portland. Close by them is a marble memorial to Lieutenant Kervin Waters, who was injured in the same battle and took two agonising years to die. He was just sixteen when he was injured, and eighteen when he died. I don’t know why I thought of them as I approached Rita Ferris’s apartment. Maybe, after meeting Billy Purdue, I was acutely conscious of young, wasted lives.

I turned into Locust, passing St Paul’s Anglican on my right and the St Vincent de Paul thrift shop on my left. Rita Ferris’s building was at the end of the street, across from the Kavanagh School. It was a run-down, white three-storey, with stone steps leading up to a door lined on one side with buzzers and apartment numbers and on the other with a row of unlocked mailboxes.

A black woman with a small girl, probably her daughter, opened the door of the building as I approached and looked at me with suspicion. There are comparatively few black people in Maine: in the early nineties, the state was still ninety-nine per cent white. It takes a long time to catch up on that kind of lead, so maybe she was right to be cautious.

I tried to give the woman my best smile to reassure her. ‘I’m here to see Rita Ferris. She’s expecting me.’

If anything, her features hardened even more. Her profile seemed to have been carved from ebony. ‘She’s expecting you, then ring the buzzer,’ she said, as she closed the door in my face. I sighed and rang the buzzer. Rita Ferris answered, the door clicked and I headed up the stairs to the apartment.

Through the closed door of Rita’s second floor apartment I could hear the sound of Seinfeld on the TV and an infant’s soft cough. I knocked twice and the door opened. Rita stood aside to let me in, Donald, dressed in blue rompers, resting on her right hip. Her hair was tied back in a bun and she wore a shapeless blue sweatshirt over blue jeans with black sandals. The sweatshirt was stained with food and child spit. The apartment, small and neat despite the worn furniture, smelt of the child as well.

A woman stood a couple of feet behind Rita. As I watched, she placed a cardboard box filled with diapers, canned food and some fresh produce on the small couch. A plastic bag filled with second-hand clothes and one or two used children’s toys lay on the floor, and I noticed that Rita was holding some bills in her hand. When she saw me, she blushed bright red, crumpled the cash and shoved it into the pocket of her denims.

The woman with her looked at me curiously and, I thought, hostilely. She was probably in her late sixties, with permed silver hair and large brown eyes. She wore a long wool coat, which looked expensive, with a silk sweater and tailored cotton pants beneath it. Gold twinkled discreetly at her ears, her wrists and around her neck.

Rita closed the door behind me and turned to the older woman.

‘This is Mr Parker,’ she said. ‘He’s been talking to Billy for me.’ She slipped her hands into the back pockets of her denims and nodded her head shyly to the older woman. ‘Mr Parker, this is Cheryl Lansing. She’s a friend.’

I stretched out a hand in greeting. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said. After a moment’s hesitation, Cheryl Lansing took my hand. Her grip was surprisingly strong.

‘Likewise,’ she said.

Rita sighed, and decided to elaborate a little on her introduction. ‘Cheryl helps us out,’ she explained. ‘With food and clothes and stuff. We couldn’t get by without her.’

Now it was the older woman’s turn to look uncomfortable. She raised a hand in dismissal and said ‘Hush, child’ once or twice. Then she pulled her coat tightly around her, and kissed Rita lightly on the cheek before turning her attention to Donald. She ruffled his hair, and the infant smiled.

‘I’ll drop in on you again in a week or two,’ she said to Rita.

Rita looked a little pained, as if she felt that she was somehow being rude to her guest. ‘You sure you won’t stay?’ she asked.

Cheryl Lansing glanced at me, and smiled. ‘No, thank you. I have quite a ways to go tonight, and I’m sure you and Mr Parker have a lot to talk about.’

With that, she nodded a goodbye to me, and left. I watched her as she walked down the stairs: social services, I guessed, maybe even someone from St Vincent de Paul. After all, they were only across the street. Rita seemed to guess what I was thinking.

‘She’s a friend, that’s all,’ she said softly. ‘She knew Billy. She knew what he was like, what he’s still like. Now, she tries to make sure that we’re okay.’

She closed and locked the door, then took a look at my eye. ‘Did Billy do that?’

‘We had a misunderstanding.’

‘I’m sorry. I really didn’t think he’d try to hurt you.’ There was genuine concern on her face and it made her seem pretty, despite the dark patches beneath her eyes and the frown lines that were working their way across her features like cracks through old plaster.

She sat down and balanced Donald on her knee. He was a large child, with huge blue eyes and a permanent expression of mild curiosity on his face. He smiled at me, raised a finger, then dropped it again and looked at his mother. She smiled down at him and he laughed, then hiccuped.

‘Can I get you some coffee?’ she asked. ‘I don’t have any beer, otherwise I’d offer you a drink.’

‘Thanks, I don’t drink. I just came by to give you this.’

I handed her the seven hundred dollars. She looked a little shocked, until Donald tried to take a fifty-dollar bill and stick it in his mouth.

‘Uh-uh,’ she said, moving the money beyond his reach. ‘You’re expensive enough to keep as it is.’ She peeled away two fifties and offered them to me.

‘Please, take it,’ she said. ‘For what happened. Please.’

I folded her hand over the money and pushed it gently back towards her.

‘I don’t want it,’ I told her. ‘Like I told you, it’s a favour. I’ve had a talk with Billy. I think he has a little cash right now and maybe he might start coming around to his obligations. If he doesn’t, it may be a matter for the cops.’

She nodded. ‘He’s not a bad person, Mr Parker. He’s just confused, and he hurts a lot inside, but he loves Donnie more than anything in the world. I think he’d do just about anything to keep me from taking him away.’

That was what worried me. That red flame in Billy’s eyes flared up a little too easily, and he had enough rage and resentment inside him to keep it burning for a long, long time.

I stood up to leave. On the floor beside my feet I saw one of Donald’s toys, a red plastic truck with a yellow hood that squeaked when I picked it up and placed it on a chair. The noise briefly distracted Donald, but then his attention returned to me.

‘I’ll drop by next week, see how you are.’ I reached out a finger to Donald and he gripped it in his little fist. I was suddenly seized by an image of my own daughter doing the same thing to me and a terrible sadness welled up inside me. Jennifer was dead now. She had died with my wife at the hands of a killer who believed that they were worthless enough to tear apart and display as a warning to others. He was dead as well, hunted to death in Louisiana, but it didn’t make me feel any better. The books don’t balance that way.

I gently removed my finger from Donald’s grip and patted his head. Rita followed me to the door, Donald once again at her hip.

‘Mr Parker . . .’ she began.

‘Bird,’ I said, opening the door. ‘That’s what my friends call me.’

‘Bird. Please stay.’ With her free hand, she reached out and touched my cheek. ‘Please. I’m putting Donald to bed now. I got no other way to thank you.’

I carefully removed her hand and kissed her palm. It smelt of hand cream and Donald.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t,’ I said.

She looked a little disappointed. ‘Why not? You don’t think I’m pretty enough?’

I reached out and ran my fingers through her hair, and she leaned her head into my hand.

‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘It’s not that at all.’

She smiled then, a small smile but a smile nonetheless.

‘Thank you,’ she said and kissed me softly on the cheek. Our reverie was disturbed by Donald, whose face had darkened when I touched his mother and who now began to strike at me with his little hand.

‘Hey!’ said his mother. ‘Stop that.’ But still he struck, until I took my hand away from her.

‘He’s very protective of me,’ she said. ‘I think he thought you were trying to hurt me.’ Donald buried his head in her breast, his thumb in his mouth, and looked out at me with suspicious eyes. Rita stood in the dark hallway as I went down the stairs, framed by the light of the apartment. She lifted Donald’s hand to make him wave goodbye, and I waved back.

It was the last time I saw either of them alive.

Chapter Two

I rose early the day after Rita Ferris spoke to me for the last time. The darkness outside was still and oppressive as I drove to the airport to catch the first commuter flight to New York. There were early reports on the news bulletin of a shooting incident at Scarborough, but the details were still sketchy.

From JFK, I caught a cab, the Van Wyck and Queens Boulevard dense with traffic, to Queens Boulevard and 51st. There was already a small crowd gathered at the New Calvary Cemetery: groups of police in uniform smoking and talking quietly at the gates; women in funeral black, their hair carefully arranged, their makeup delicately applied, nodding solemnly to one another; younger men, some barely out of their teens, uncomfortable in too-tight collars, with cheap, borrowed black ties knotted untidily at their necks, the knots too small, too thin. Some of the cops glanced at me and nodded, and I nodded back. I knew many of them by their last names, but not their first.

The hearse approached from Woodside, three black limousines following, and entered the cemetery. The waiting crowd moved behind in twos and threes as, slowly, we made our way towards the grave. I saw a mound of earth, green matting thrown across it, wreaths and other floral tributes ranged against it. There was a larger crowd here: more police in uniform, others in plain clothes, more women, a sprinkling of children. I spotted some deputy chiefs, an assistant chief, half a dozen captains and lieutenants, all come to pay their last respects to George Grunfeld, the old sergeant in the 30th Precinct, who had finally succumbed to his cancer two years before he was due to retire.

I knew him as a good man, a decent cop in the old mould who had the misfortune to work a precinct which had been plagued for years by rumours of shakedowns and corruption. The rumours eventually became complaints: guns and drugs, mainly cocaine, were routinely confiscated from dealers and resold; homes were raided illegally; threats were made. The precinct, over at 151st Street and Amsterdam Avenue, was investigated. In the end, thirty-three officers, who had been involved in two thousand prosecutions, were convicted, many for perjury. On top of the Dowd incident in the 75th – more arms and cocaine dealing, more payoffs – it made for bad coverage for the NYPD. I guessed that there was more to come: there were whispers that Midtown South was under the gun, the result of an ongoing deal with local prostitutes involving recreational sex for officers on duty.

Maybe that was why so many people had turned out for Grunfeld’s funeral. He represented something good and fundamentally decent, and his passing was something to mourn. I was there for very personal reasons. My wife and child were taken from me in December 1996, while I was still a homicide detective in Brooklyn. The ferocity and brutality of the manner in which they were torn from this world, and the inability of the police to find their killer, caused a rift to develop between me and my fellow officers. The murders of Susan and Jennifer tainted me in their eyes, exposing the vulnerability of even a policeman and his family. They wanted to believe that I was the exception, that somehow, as a drunk, I had brought it on myself, so that they would not have to consider the alternative. In a way, they were right: I did bring it on myself, and on my family, but I had never forgiven them for forcing me to confront this alone.

I resigned from the NYPD barely one month after the deaths. Few people had tried to argue me out of my decision, but one of them was George Grunfeld. He met me one bright Sunday morning at John’s on Second Avenue, close by the UN building. We ate pink grapefruit and English muffins while sitting in a booth by the window, Second Avenue quiet with little traffic and few pedestrians. Slowly, patiently, he listened to my reasons for leaving: my growing ostracisation, the pain of living in a city where everywhere reminded me of what I had lost; and my belief that maybe, just maybe, I could find the man who had taken everything I valued from me.

‘Charlie,’ he said (he never called me Bird), thick grey hair topping a full-moon face, eyes dark like craters, ‘those are all good reasons, but if you quit then you’re alone and there’s a limit to the help anyone can give you. With the force, you still have family, so stay. You’re a good cop. It’s in your blood.’

‘I can’t, I’m sorry.’

‘You leave, and maybe a lot of people will think you’re running away. Some of them will probably be glad that you are, but they’ll hate you for caving in.’

‘Let them. Those ones aren’t worth worrying about anyway.’

He sighed, sipped his coffee. ‘You were never the easiest man to get along with, Charlie. You were too smart, too likely to go off the handle. We all have our demons, but you wore yours on your sleeve. I think you made people nervous, and if there’s one thing a cop doesn’t like, it’s being made to feel nervous. It goes against the grain.’

‘But I don’t make you nervous?’

Grunfeld twisted his mug on the table with his little finger. I could tell that he was debating whether or not to tell me something. What he said when he spoke made me feel a little ashamed, and increased my admiration for him tenfold, if such a thing were possible with a man like this.

‘I have cancer,’ he said quietly. ‘Lymphosarcoma. They tell me I’m going to get real sick in the next year, and I’ve got maybe another year after that.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, the words so small that they were quickly lost in the enormity of what he was facing.

Grunfeld raised a hand and gave a little shrug. ‘I’d like to have more time. I got grandchildren. I’d like to watch them grow. But I’ve watched my own kids grow, and I feel for you because that’s been taken away from you. Maybe it’s the wrong thing to say, but I hope that you get a second chance at that. In the end, it’s the best thing you get in this world.

‘As for you making me nervous, the answer’s no. I got death coming for me, Charlie, and that puts things in perspective. Every day I wake up and thank God that I’m still here and that the pain isn’t too bad. And I go into the 30th, and I take my seat at the muster desk and watch people piss their lives away for nothing, and I envy them every minute they waste. Don’t you go doing that, Charlie, because when you’re angry and grieving and you’re looking for someone to blame, the worst thing you can do is turn on yourself. And the next worst thing is to turn on someone else. That’s where the structure, the routine can help. That’s why I’m still at that desk, because otherwise I’d tear myself and my family to pieces.’

He finished his coffee and pushed the mug away. ‘In the end, you’ll do what you have to do, and nothing I can say will change that. You still drinking?’

I didn’t resent the bluntness of the question, because it contained no deeper implication. ‘I’m trying to quit,’ I said.

‘That’s something, I guess.’ He raised his hand for the check, then scribbled a number on a napkin. ‘My home number. You need to talk, you give me a call.’ He paid the check, shook my hand, and walked out into the sunlight. I never saw him again.

At the graveside, a figure raised its head and I felt its attention focus on me. Walter Cole gave a small nod in my direction, then returned his attention to the priest as he read from a leather-bound prayer-book. Somewhere, a woman cried softly and, in the dark skies above, a hidden jet roared its way through the clouds. And then there were only the low, muted tones of the priest, the soft rustle as the flag was folded, and the final, muffled echo as the first handfuls of earth hit the casket.

I stood by a willow as the mourners began to move away. And I watched, with bitterness, sorrow and regret, as Walter Cole walked away with them without saying a word to me. We had been close once: partners for a time, then friends and, of all those whose friendship I had lost, it was Walter that I missed the most. He was an educated man. He liked books, and movies that didn’t star Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme, and good food. He had been best man at my wedding, the box holding the rings clutched so hard in his hand that it had left deep ridges in his palm. I had played with his children. Susan and I had enjoyed dinners, the theatre and walks in the park, with Walter and his wife Lee. And I had sat with him for hours and hours, in cars and bars, in courtrooms and back rooms, and felt the deep, steady pulse of life throbbing beneath our feet.

I remembered one case in Brooklyn, when we were trailing a painter and decorator whom we believed had killed his wife and had somehow disposed of her remains. We were in a bad neighbourhood, just north east of Atlantic Avenue, and Walter smelt so much of cop they could have named a scent after him, but the guy didn’t seem to suspect we were there. Maybe nobody told him. We weren’t bothering the junkies or the pushers or the whores, and we were so obvious that we couldn’t be undercover, so the local colour decided that the best thing to do would be to let us be and not to interfere in whatever we were planning.

Each morning, the guy would fill his van with paint cans and brushes and head off to work and we would follow him. Then, from a distance, we watched as he painted first a house and, a day or two later, the storefront on which he was working, before he dumped the empty cans and headed home.

It took a few days to figure out what he was doing. It was Walter who took a screwdriver and flipped open the lid, as the can lay with its fellows in a Dumpster. It took him two tries, because the paint had dried along the edge. That was what had alerted us, of course: the fact that the paint on the can was dry, not wet.

Inside the can was a hand, a woman’s hand. There was still a wedding ring on one of the fingers, and the stump had adhered to the paint at the bottom of the can, so the hand seemed to be emerging from the base. Two hours later we had our warrant and, when we kicked in the door of the painter’s place, there were paint cans stacked almost to the ceiling in one corner of the bedroom, each containing a section of his wife’s body. Some of them were packed tight with flesh. We found her head in a two-gallon can of white gloss.

That night, Walter had taken Lee out for dinner, and when they went home he held her the whole night through. He didn’t make love to her, he said, he just held her, and she understood. I couldn’t even remember what I did that night. That was the difference between us; at least, it was. I knew better now.

I had done things since then. I had killed in an effort to find, and avenge myself upon the killer of my family, the Travelling Man. Walter knew this, had even used it for his own ends, recognising that I would tear apart whoever stood in my way. I think that, in some ways, it was a test, a test to see if I would realise his worst fears about me.

And I did.

I caught up with him near the cemetery gate, with the roar of the traffic in our ears, the city’s version of the sound of the sea. Walter was talking with some captain who used to be with the 83 rd: Emerson, who was now with Internal Affairs, which maybe explained the look he gave me as I approached. The murder of the paedophile pimp Johnny Friday was now a cold case, and I didn’t think they’d ever get the guy who killed him. I knew, because I was the guy. I had killed him in a burst of black rage in the months following the deaths of Jennifer and Susan. By the end, I didn’t care what Johnny Friday knew or didn’t know. I just wanted to kill him for what he had helped to do to a hundred Susans, a thousand Jennifers. I regretted the manner of his death, like I regretted so much else, but regrets weren’t going to bring him back. There had been rumours since then, but nothing would ever be proved. Still, Emerson had heard the rumours.

‘Parker,’ he nodded. ‘Didn’t think we’d see you back here.’

‘Captain Emerson,’ I replied. ‘How are things in Infernal Affairs? Being kept busy, I imagine.’

‘Always time for one more, Parker,’ he said, but he didn’t smile. He raised a hand to Walter and walked towards the gates, his back straight, his spine held together by the cords of righteousness.

Walter looked at his feet, his hands in his pockets, then raised his eyes to me. Retirement didn’t seem to be doing him much good. He looked uncomfortable and pale, and there were burn marks and cuts where he had shaved that morning. I guessed that he was missing the force, and occasions like this just made him miss it more.

‘Like the man said,’ Walter muttered at last, ‘I didn’t think we’d see you back here.’

‘I wanted to pay my respects to Grunfeld. He was a good man. How’s Lee?’

‘She’s good.’

‘And the kids.’

‘They’re good.’ Walter and Emerson were proving to be tough crowds to play one after the other. ‘Where are you now?’ he asked, although his tone said he was only inquiring out of awkwardness.

‘I’m back in Maine. It’s peaceful. I haven’t killed anyone in weeks.’

Walter’s eyes remained cold. ‘You should stay up there. You get itchy, you can shoot a squirrel. I’ve got to go now.’

I nodded. ‘Sure. Thanks for your time.’

He didn’t reply and, as I watched him walk away, I felt a deep, humiliating grief, and I thought: they were right. I should not have come back, not even for a day.

I took the subway to Queensboro Plaza, where I changed onto the N train for Manhattan. As I sat opposite a man reading a Bible tract, the sound of the subway and the smell in the train set off a chain of memories, and I recalled something that had happened seven months before, in early May, just as the heat of the summer was beginning to tell. They had been dead for almost five months.

It was late, very late one Tuesday night. I was taking the subway from é Con Leche at 8ist and Amsterdam back to my apartment in the East Village. I must have dozed off for a time, because when I awoke the car was empty, and the light in the next car down was flickering on and off, black to yellow to black again.

There was a woman sitting in the next car, looking down at her hands, her hair obscuring her face. She wore dark pants and a red blouse. Her arms were spread, her palms raised upward, as if she were reading a newspaper, except that her hands were empty.

Her feet were bare and there was blood on the floor beneath them.

I stood and moved down the car until I came to the connecting door. I had no idea where we were, or what the next stop might be. I opened the door, felt the rush of heat from the tunnel, the taste of filth and smog in my mouth as I stepped across the gap and into the darkness of the next car.

The lights flickered on again, but the woman was gone, and there was no blood on the floor where she had been sitting only moments before. There were three other people in the car: an elderly black woman clutching four oversized plastic bags; a slim, neatly dressed white male wearing glasses, a briefcase on his knees; and a drunk with a ragged beard who lay across four seats, snoring. I was about to turn to the businessman when, ahead of me, I saw a shape in black and red briefly illuminated. It was the same woman, sitting in the same position – arms spread, palms up – as she had been when I first saw her. She was even occupying more or less the same seat, except one car farther down.

And I noticed that the flickering light seemed to have moved down with her, so that once again she was a figure briefly frozen by the faulty lighting. Beside me, the old woman looked up and smiled; and the executive with the briefcase gazed at me unblinking; and the drunk shifted on his seat and awoke, and his eyes were bright and knowing as he watched me.

I moved down the car, closer and closer to the door. Something about the woman was familiar, something in the way she held herself, something in the style of her hair. She did not move, did not look up, and I felt my gut tighten. Around her, the lights flickered, and then were gone. I stepped into the car, the last car before the driver, and I could smell the blood on the floor. I took one step, then another, and another, until my feet slid on something wet and I knew then who she was.

‘Susan?’ I whispered, but the darkness was silent, a silence broken only by the rushing of the wind in the subway, the rattle of the wheels on the tracks. As the tunnel lights flashed by, I saw her silhouetted against the far door, head down, her arms raised. The light flickered for a second, and I realised that she was not wearing a red blouse. She was not wearing anything. There was only blood: thick, dark blood. The light shone dimly through the skin that had been pulled back from her breasts and arrayed like a cloak over her outstretched arms. She lifted her head, and I saw a deep-red blur where her face had been, and the sockets of her eyes were empty and ruined.

And the brakes shrieked and the car rocked as the train approached the station. All light left the world and there was only a void until we burst into Houston Street, unnatural illumination flooding the car. The smell of blood and perfume lingered in the air, but she was gone.

That was the first time.

The waitress brought us dessert menus. I smiled at her. She smiled back. What’s seldom is wonderful.

‘She’s got a fat ass,’ remarked Angel, as she walked away. He was dressed in the traditional Angel garb of faded denims and wrinkled check shirt over a black T, and sneakers that were now a filthy mockery of their original white. A black leather jacket hung on the back of his chair.

‘I wasn’t looking at her ass,’ I replied. ‘She has a pretty face.’

‘Then she’s the acceptable face of fat-assed women.’

‘Yeah,’ chipped in Louis. ‘She like the spokeswoman for the lard-asses, the one they wheel out when they want to look good on TV. Folks look at her and say, “Hey, maybe them lard-asses ain’t so bad after all.”’

As always, Louis looked as if he had been constructed as a deliberate riposte to his lover. He wore a black, single-breasted Armani suit and a snow-white dress shirt with the collar unbuttoned, the virgin white of the shirt in stark contrast to his own dark features and his shaven, ebony head.

We were sitting in J. G. Melon’s at the corner of Third and 74th. I had not seen them in over two months, but these men, this diminutive, white ex-burglar and his enigmatic, soft-spoken boyfriend, were now the closest things to friends I had left. They had stood by me when Jennifer and Susan died and they had been with me in those last, terrible days in Louisiana as we drew nearer to a final confrontation with the Travelling Man. They were outsiders – perhaps that was one of the reasons for our closeness – and Louis in particular was a dangerous man, a hired killer now enjoying a murky, indefinite form of semi-retirement, but they were on the side of the angels, even if the angels were not entirely sure that this was a positive development.

Angel laughed loudly ‘Spokeswoman for the lard-asses,’ he repeated to himself – and scanned the menu. I tossed a discarded French fry at him.

‘Hey, Slim,’ I said. ‘Looks like you could skip a couple of sundaes every now and again. You tried to burgle somewhere now, you’d get stuck in the door. The only places you could break into would be ones with big windows.’

‘Yeah, Angel,’ said Louis, stone-faced. ‘Maybe you could specialise in cathedrals, or the Met.’

‘I can afford to fill out,’ replied Angel, throwing him a glare.

‘Man, you fill out any more, you be twins.’

‘Funny, Louis,’ shrugged Angel. ‘She’s still two tokens on the subway, if you see what I mean.’

‘What does it matter to you anyway?’ I said. ‘You don’t have any right to pass comments about the opposite sex. You’re gay. You don’t have an opposite sex.’

‘That’s just prejudice, Bird.’

‘Angel, it’s not prejudice when someone points out that you’re gay. It’s just a statement of fact. It’s prejudice when you start baiting the wider members of society.’

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t change the fact that if you’re looking for company, maybe we can help.’

I stared at him, and raised an eyebrow. ‘I think that’s unlikely. I get that desperate, I’ll blow my head off.’

He smiled. ‘Well, you know, you got that look. I hear that website, “Womenbehindbars.com”, is worth a visit.’

‘Excuse me?’ I replied. His smile widened so much you could have slotted toasting bread into it.

‘Lot of women out there looking for a guy like you.’ He turned his right hand into a little gun and fired his index finger at me with a movement of his thumb. It made him look like the cabaret act from gay hell.

‘What exactly is “Womenbehindbars.com”?’ I asked. I knew I was being baited, but I sensed something more from both Angel and Louis. You’re up there alone, Bird, they seemed to say. You don’t have too many people you can fall back on, and we can’t look out for you from New York City. Sometimes, maybe even before you think you’re really ready to do so, you have to reach out and find something that you can rely on. You have to try to find a foothold, otherwise you’re going to fall and you’re going to keep falling until it all goes dark.

Angel shrugged. ‘Y’know, it’s one of those internet dating services. Some places have more lonely women than others: San Francisco, New York, state prisons . . .’

‘You’re telling me there’s a dating service for women in jail?’

He raised his hands wide. ‘Sure there is. You know, cons have needs too. You just log on, take a look at the pictures, and pick your woman.’

‘They’re in jail, Angel,’ I reminded him. ‘It’s not as if I can invite them out for dinner and a movie without committing a felony. Plus, I might have put them in jail. I’m not going to try to date anyone I jailed. It’d be too weird.’

‘So date out of state,’ said Angel. ‘You declare anywhere from Yonkers to Lake Champlain a no-go zone, and the rest of the Union’s your oyster.’ He toasted me with his glass, then he and Louis exchanged a look, and I envied them that intimacy.

‘Anyway, what are these women in for?’ I asked, resigned by now to playing the role of straight man.

‘The site don’t say,’ replied Angel. ‘All it says is their ages, what they’re looking for in a guy, and then it gives you a picture. One without numbers underneath it,’ he added. ‘Oh, and it tells you whether or not they’re willing to relocate, although the answer’s pretty obvious. I mean, they are in jail. Relocation’s probably top of their list of priorities.’

‘So what does it matter why they’re in there?’ asked Louis. I noticed that his eyes were watering. I was glad I was providing amusement for him. ‘The ladies do the crime, do the time, then their debt to society is paid. Long as they ain’t cut off a guy’s dick and tied it to a helium balloon, you’re home free.’

‘Yeah,’ said Angel. ‘You just set some ground rules, and then dip your toes in the pool. Suppose she was a thief. Would you date a thief?’

‘She’d steal from me.’

‘A hooker?’

‘Couldn’t trust her.’

‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’

‘Sorry. Maybe you could start a campaign.’

Angel shook his head in mock sorrow, then brightened. ‘How about an assault case? Broken bottle, maybe a kitchen knife. Nothing too serious.’

‘A kitchen knife and it’s nothing too serious? What planet do you live on, Angel? Plastic cutlery world?’

‘Okay then, a murderer.’

‘Depends who she killed.’

‘Her old man.’

‘Why?’

‘The fuck do I know why? You think I was wearing a wire? Do you date her or not?’

‘No.’

‘Shit, Bird, if you’re going to be fussy you’re never going to meet anyone.’

The waitress returned. ‘Would you gentlemen like to order dessert?’

We all declined, Angel adding: ‘Nah, I’m sweet enough as it is.’

‘Cheesy enough, too,’ said the waitress, and flashed me another grin. Angel reddened and Louis’s mouth twitched in an approximation of a smile.

‘Three coffees,’ I said, and grinned back at her. ‘You just earned yourself a substantial tip.’

After the meal, we took a walk in Central Park, stopping to rest by the statue of Alice on the mushroom by the model boat pond. There were no kids sailing their boats on the pond, although one or two couples sat huddled together by the bank, watched impassively by Louis. Angel hoisted himself up onto the mushroom, his legs dangling beside me, Alice in turn watching over him.

‘How old are you?’ I said.

‘Young enough to appreciate this,’ he replied. ‘So how you doin’?’

‘I’m surviving. I have good days and bad days.’

‘How do you tell them apart?’

‘On the good days, it doesn’t rain.’

He smiled sympathetically. ‘Thanksgiving must have been a blast.’

‘I gave thanks that it didn’t rain.’

‘The house coming along?’ I was completing the renovations on my grandfather’s old house in Scarborough. I had already moved in, although there were some repairs still needed.

‘Nearly finished. Roof just needs fixing, that’s all.’

He stayed quiet for a time. ‘We were only yanking your chain back in the restaurant,’ he said at last. ‘We know this is maybe not such a good time for you. It’ll be the first anniversary soon, won’t it?’

‘Yeah, December twelfth.’

‘You okay with that?’

‘I’ll visit the grave, have a mass said. I don’t know how difficult it will be.’ In truth, I was dreading the day. For some reason, it was important to me that the house be finished by then, that I be firmly established there. I wanted its stability, its links to a past that I remembered with happiness. I wanted a place that I could call home, and in which I could try to rebuild my life.

‘Let us know the details. We’ll come up.’

‘I’d appreciate it.’

He nodded. ‘Until then, you need to look out for yourself, you know what I mean? You spend too much time alone, you’re likely to go crazy. You hear from Rachel?’

‘No.’ Rachel Wolfe and I had been lovers, for a time. She had come down to Louisiana to assist in the hunt for the Travelling Man, bringing with her a background in psychology and a love for me that I did not understand and that I was unable to fully return, not then. She had been hurt that summer, physically and emotionally. We had not spoken since the hospital, but I knew she was in Boston. I had even watched her cross the campus one day, her red hair glowing in the late morning light, but I could not bring myself to intrude upon her solitude, or her pain.

Angel stretched and changed the subject. ‘Meet anyone interesting at the funeral?’

‘Emerson.’

‘The Internal Affairs schmuck? That must have been a joy.’

‘Always a pleasure meeting Emerson. Guy just stopped short of measuring me up for a set of manacles and a suit with arrows on it. Walter Cole was there too.’

‘He have anything to say to you?’

‘Nothing good.’

‘He’s a righteous man, and they’re the worst kind. Speaking of Emerson, you hear two-forty-seven Mulberry is coming up for sale? Louis and I are thinking of buying it, opening up a museum of law enforcement.’

Two-forty-seven Mulberry was the former site of the Ravenite Social Club, headquarters of John Gotti Sr before Sammy the Bull’s testimony ensured that Gotti’s business was transferred to a prison cell. His son John Junior had taken over the Gambino crime family, in the process earning himself an arrest and a reputation as the most inept godfather in mob history.

‘John Junior, man,’ said Angel, shaking his head. ‘Just goes to show, the father’s genes don’t automatically pass intact to the eldest son.’

‘I guess not,’ I said. I glanced at my watch. ‘I’ve got to go. I have a flight to catch.’

Louis turned and strolled back to us, the muscles on his slim, six-six frame obvious even beneath the suit and overcoat. ‘Angel,’ he said, ‘I found you on a mushroom, I’d burn the crop. You makin’ Alice look ill.’

‘Uh-huh. Alice saw you coming for her, she’d figure she was going to be mugged. The White Rabbit you ain’t.’ I watched as Angel eased himself down, using his hands to arrest his slide. Then he raised them, the palms now lightly coated with grime, and approached Louis’s immaculate form.

‘Angel, you touch me, man, you be wavin’ goodbye with a stump. I’m warnin’ you . . .’

I walked past them and looked out over the park and the stillness of the pond. I had a growing feeling of unease for which I could find no cause, a sense that, while I was in New York, there were events happening elsewhere that somehow affected me.

And in the water of the pond, dark clouds gathered, forming and reforming, and birds flew through the shallows as if to drown. In the dimness of this reflected world, the bare trees sent searching branches down into the depths, like fingers digging deeper and deeper into a half-remembered past.

Chapter Three

For me, the first sign that winter is coming has always been the change in the coloration of the paper birches. Their trunks, usually white or grey, turn yellow-green in the fall, blending into the riot of chimney red, burning gold and dying amber as the trees turn. I look at the birches and know that winter is on its way.

In November, the first heavy frosts arrive and the roads become treacherous, the blades of grass fragile as crystal, so that when you walk the ghosts of your footsteps trail behind like the ranks of lost souls. In the skeletal branches above, tree sparrows huddle together; cedar waxwings trapeze from tree to tree; and, at night, the hawk owls come, hunting for prey in the darkness. In Portland harbour, which never entirely freezes, there are mallards, and harlequin ducks, and eiders.

Even in the coldest weather, the harbour, the fields, the woods, all are alive. Blue jays fly, and brown winter wrens call; finches feed on birch seed. Tiny, unseen things crawl, hunt, live, die. Lacewings hibernate under the loose bark on the trees. Caddisfly larvae carry houses made from plant debris on their backs, and aphids huddle on the alders. Wood frogs sleep frozen beneath piles of leaf-mould, while beetles and back swimmers, newts and spotted salamanders, their tails thick with stored fat, all flicker in the icy waters above. There are carpenter ants, and snow fleas, and spiders, and black mourning cloak butterflies which flit across the snow like burnt paper. White-footed mice and woodland voles and pygmy shrews scurry through the slash, ever-wary of the foxes and weasels and the vicious, porcupine-hunting fishers that share the habitat. The snowshoe hare changes its coat to white in response to the diminishing daylight hours, the better to hide itself from its predators.

Because the predators never go away.

It is dark by four when winter comes, and lives are compressed to meet the new restrictions set by nature. People return to a lifestyle that would have been familiar in ways to their ancestors, to the earliest settlers who travelled along the great river valleys into the interior in search of timber and farmland. They move about less, remaining in the warmth of their homes. They complete their daily tasks before the darkness sets in. They think of seeding, of the welfare of animals, of children, of their old. When they do leave their houses they wrap up warm and keep their heads down, so that the wind does not blow the sand from the road into their eyes.

On the coldest nights, the branches of the trees crack in the darkness, the sky is lit by the passing angels of the aurora borealis, and young calves die.

There will be false thaws in January, more in February and March, but the trees will still be bare. The ground turns to mud in the warmth after the dawn, then freezes again at night; tracks become impassable by day, and dangerous by dark.

And still the people will gather in the warmth, and wait for the ice to crack in April.

At Old Orchard Beach, south of Portland, the amusement parks stand silent and empty. Most of the motels are closed, the AC vents covered with black plastic bags. The waves break grey and cold, and the wheels of the cars make a deep thudding sound as they cross the old railroad tracks on the main street. It has been this way for as long as I can remember, ever since I was a boy.

When the trees began to turn, before the paper birches changed from bone white to the colours of a beautiful decay, the grifter Saul Mann would pack his bags and prepare to leave Old Orchard for Florida.

‘Winter is for rubes,’ he would say, as he laid his clothes – his huckster’s ties, his bright JCPenney jackets, his two-tone shoes—into a tan suitcase. Saul was a small, dapper man, with hair that was jet black for as long as I knew him and a small belly that strained only slightly the buttons of his vest. His features were relentlessly average, strangely unmemorable, as if he had expressly ordered them for that purpose. His manner was friendly and unthreatening, and he wasn’t greedy, so he rarely, if ever, overstepped his own limits. He took people for tens and twenties, sometimes a fifty, occasionally, if he thought the mark could take the loss, for a couple of hundred. He generally worked alone although, if the con required it, he would hire a steerer to draw in the pigeons. Sometimes, if things were not going well, he would find work with the carnies and fleece folk with rigged games.

Saul had never married. ‘A married man’s a mark for his wife,’ Saul would say. ‘Never marry, unless she’s richer than you, dumber than you, and prettier than you. Anything less than that, you’re a pigeon.’

He was wrong, of course. I married a woman who took walks in the park with me, who made love to me and gave me a child, and whom I never really knew until she was gone. Saul Mann never had that joy: he was so worried about becoming a mark that life swindled him without him even noticing.

Beside Saul as he packed, in a second, smaller, black patent-leather bag, were the tools of the bunco, the armoury of the short-con artist. There was the wallet stuffed with twenty dollar bills which, on closer examination, revealed themselves to be one twenty dollar bill plus half of the Maine Sunday Telegram carefully cut up to resemble twenty dollar bills. The con artist ‘finds’ the wallet, asks the mark’s advice on what to do with it, agrees to entrust it to his safekeeping until the legal obligation to hand it over is negated by the passage of time, encourages him to give over a one-hundred dollar deposit as a gesture of goodwill, just to be sure that he’s not going to swindle anyone out of a share of the cash and, hey, the con man is up eighty bucks on the deal, minus the cost of a new wallet and another copy of the Maine Sunday Telegram for the next mish roll.

There were fake diamond rings, all glass and paste and metal so cheap it took a week to get the green stain from your finger, and bottle caps for the three-shell game. There were cards with more marks than Omaha Beach on D-Day. And there were other, more elaborate cons too: papers, heavy with official-looking seals, which promised the bearer the sun, the moon and the stars; lotteries guaranteeing the winner precisely zero percent of nothing; cheque-books for ten or twenty different accounts, each with barely enough in them to keep them active but still sufficiently open to enable cheques to be successfully written on them on a Friday night, giving them a whole two days of fiscal respectability before they bounced.

During the summer months, Saul Mann would trawl the resorts of the Maine coast looking for pigeons. He would arrive at Old Orchard Beach religiously on the third day of July, hire himself the cheapest room he could find, and work the beach for a week, maybe two at most, until his face started to become familiar. Then he would head up towards Bar Harbor and do the same, always moving, never staying too long, picking his marks carefully. And when he had amassed sufficient funds and the crowds began to peter away after Labor Day, when the trees slowly began to turn, Saul Mann would pack his bags and move to Florida to scam the winter tourists.

My grandfather didn’t like him or, at least, he didn’t trust him, and trust and like were the same thing in my grandfather’s book. ‘He asks you to lend him a dollar, don’t do it,’ he warned me, time and time again. ‘You’ll get back ten cents if you get back anything at all.’

But Saul never asked me for a thing. I met him first when I was doing summer work in the arcades at Old Orchard, taking money from little kids in exchange for soft toys whose eyes were held in place by half-inch-long pins and whose limbs were connected to their torso by the will of God. Saul Mann told me about the carny, about the joint scams: the basketball shoot with the over-inflated ball and the too-small ring; the balloon darts with the soft balloons; the shooting gallery with the skewed sights. I watched him work the crowds, and I learned as I watched. He targeted the elderly, the greedy, the desperate, the ones who were so uncertain of themselves that they would trust another man’s judgment above their own. He sometimes went for the dumb ones, but he knew that the dumb ones could turn mean, or that maybe they wouldn’t have enough cash to make the scam worthwhile, or that they sometimes possessed a low cunning which made them naturally distrustful.

Better still were the ones who thought they were smart, the ones who had good jobs in medium-sized towns, who believed that they could never be taken in by a grifter. They were the prime targets, and Saul relished them when they came. He died in 1994, in a retirement home in Florida, among the people he used to take as his marks, and he probably swindled them at canasta until the last breath left his body, until God reached down and showed him that, in the end, everybody is a mark.

Here is what Saul Mann told me.

Never give the suckers a break: they’ll run if you do. Never have pity: pity is the mother of charity, and charity is giving money away, and a grifter never gives money away. And never force them to do anything, because the best scams of all are the ones where they come to you.

Lay the bait, wait, and they will always come to you.

The snows came early that December to Greenville and Beaver Cove and Dark Hollow and the other towns on the very rim of the great northern wilderness. The first flurries fell and people looked to the skies before hurrying on, a new quickness in their steps, spurred on by the cold they could already feel in their bones. Fires were lit, and children were wrapped up warm in bright red scarves and mittens coloured like rainbows, and warnings were given about staying out late, about hurrying home before darkness fell, and stories were told in school yards about little children who strayed from the path and were found cold and dead when the thaws came.

And in the woods, among the maples and birches and oaks, through the spruce and hemlock and white pine, something moved. It walked slowly and deliberately. It knew these woods, had known them for a long, long time. Every footfall was surely placed, every fallen tree anticipated, every ancient stone wall, long overtaken by the renewed forests and lost amid the undergrowth, was a place to rest, to draw breath, before moving on.

In the winter blackness, it moved with a new purpose. Something that had been lost had now been found again. Something unknown had been revealed, like a veil drawn back by the hand of God. It passed by the derelict remains of an old farmhouse, its roof long collapsed, its walls now no more than a shelter for mice. It reached the crest of a hill and moved along its edge, the moon bright above it, the trees whispering in the darkness.

And it devoured the stars as it went.

Chapter Four

I had been back in Scarborough for almost three months, back in the house where I had spent my teenage years after my father died and that my grandfather had left to me in his will. In the East Village, where I lived for some time after my wife and child died, the old lady who owned my rent-controlled apartment had ushered me out with a smile on her face as she calculated the potential increase she could apply to the next tenant. She was a seventy-two-year-old Italian-American who had lost her husband in Korea, and she was usually about as friendly as a hungry rat. Angel suggested that her husband had probably handed himself over to the enemy to avoid being sent home to her again.

The Scarborough house was where my mother had been born and where my grandparents still lived at the time of my father’s death. After three hundred years, Scarborough was already changing when I arrived at the end of the seventies. Economic prosperity meant that it was becoming a satellite town for Portland and, although some of the older residents still held on to their land, land which had been in some families for generations, the developers were paying premium prices and more and more people were selling up. But Scarborough was still the kind of community where you knew your mailman and who his family was and he, in turn, knew the same about you.

From my grandfather’s house on Spring Street, I could cycle north into Portland or south to Higgins Beach, Ferry Beach, Western Beach or Scarborough Beach itself, or down to the head at Prouts Neck to look out on Bluff Island and Stratton Island and the Atlantic Ocean.

Prouts Neck is a small point of land that protrudes into Saco Bay about twelve miles south of Portland itself. It was where the artist Winslow Homer set up house near the end of the nineteenth century. His family bought up most of the land on the Neck and Winslow vetted his prospective neighbours carefully since, by and large, he wanted to be left to his own devices. The folks out on the Neck are still that way. There has been a fancy yacht club there since 1926 and a private beach club with membership limited to those who live or rent summer homes in the area and who belong to the Prouts Neck Association. Scarborough Beach remains public and free and there’s public access to Ferry Beach, close by the Black Point Inn on the Neck. Since it was beside Ferry Beach that Chester Nash, Paulie Block and six other men had lost their lives, the Neckers were going to have a lot to talk about when they returned in the summer.

In the old house, the past hung in the air like motes of dust waiting to be illuminated by the sharp rays of memory. It was there, surrounded by remembrances of a happier youth, that I hoped to set about putting old ghosts to rest: the ghosts of my wife and child, who had haunted me for so long but had maybe now achieved a kind of peace, a peace not yet mirrored in my own soul; of my father; of my mother, who had taken me away from the city in an effort to find peace for both of us; of Rachel, who now seemed lost to me; and of my grandfather, who had taught me about duty and humanity and the importance of making enemies of whom a man could be proud.

I had moved out of the Inn on St John at Congress Street in Portland as soon as most of the house had been made habitable. At night, the wind made the plastic on the roof slap like the beating of dark, leathery wings. The final job left to do was the slating, which was why I was sitting on my porch with a cup of coffee and the New York Times at 9 a.m. the next morning, waiting for Roger Simms. Roger was fifty, a straight-backed man with long, thin muscles and a face the colour of rosewood. He could do just about anything that involved a hammer, a saw and a natural craftsman’s ability to bring order out of the chaos of nature and neglect.

He arrived right on time, his aged Nissan belching blue fumes which tainted the air behind like nicotine on a lung. He stepped out of the car wearing paint-splattered, old man’s jeans, a denim shirt and a blue sweater that was little more than an assortment of holes held together by yarn. A pair of brown cowhide work gloves hung from one of the ass pockets of his jeans and a black watch cap was pulled down over his ears. From beneath it, strands of dark hair hung like the legs of a hermit crab. A cigarette dangled between his lips, a gravity-defying pillar of ash forming at the tip.

I gave him a mug of coffee and he drank it quickly while examining the roof critically, as if seeing it for the first time. He had been up there about three times already, checking the rafters and the roof supports and measuring the angles, so I didn’t think it was likely to hold any surprises for him. He thanked me for the coffee and handed back the mug. ‘Thanks’ was the first word he had said to me since he arrived; Roger was a great worker but the amount of air he wasted on unnecessary small talk wouldn’t have saved a gnat’s life.

It seemed to me that, by putting the roof on the old house, I was at last confirming my place in it. Stripped of its old broken slates and left with only the plastic to shield it from the elements, it had been reduced to a lifeless shell, the memories of the past lives it held within its walls reduced to dormancy as if to protect them from the ravages of the natural world. With its roof restored, the house would be warm and enclosed once again and I could become one with its past by guaranteeing its future and my presence in it.

We had already laid down straps in preparation for the shingles, using pieces of two-by-four cut lengthwise in half and oiled with wood preservative. Now, with the air crisp and cold and no promise of rain in the sky, we began the process of shingling. There was something in the placing of shingles, its rhythms and routines, that made it an almost meditative exercise. Travelling methodically across the face of the roof, I reached for a shingle, placed it on the one below, adjusted its exposure using a notch on the handle of my hammer, flipped the hammer, nailed down the shingle, reached for another and began the process again. I found a kind of peace in it and the morning passed quickly. I decided not to share my meditative speculations with Roger. Somehow, those who do jobs like roofing for a living tend to resent the musings of amateurs on the nature of the task. Roger would probably have thrown his hammer at me.

We worked for four hours, each of us resting when the mood took him, until I climbed carefully down and told Roger that I was heading up to the Seng Thai on Congress to get us some food. He grunted something that I took as assent and I started up the Mustang and drove towards South Portland. As usual, there were plenty of cars on Maine Mall Road, people nosing about in Filene’s or heading for the movies, eating in the Old Country Buffet or sizing up the motels on the strip. I drove past the airport, along Johnson and, finally, onto Congress. I parked in the lot behind the Inn on St John between a Pinto and a Fiat, then headed down a block, bought the food and dumped it on the backseat of the car.

Edgar still had a crate of my stuff behind the reception desk at the inn and I figured I might as well pick it up while I was in the area. I opened the door and entered the ornate, old-style lobby, with its ancient radio and its neat piles of tourist brochures. Edgar wasn’t there but some other guy I didn’t recognise hauled the crate out, gave me a smile and then went back to counting receipts. I left him to it.

When I stepped back into the lot, I saw that someone had boxed me in. A huge black Cadillac Coupe de Ville, forty years old and virtually an antique, was parked behind the Mustang, leaving me with no way to get out. The car had whitewall tyres and restored tan upholstery, and the distinctive pontoon bumpers at the front were shiny and intact. A map of Maine lay on the backseat and it had Massachusetts plates but, apart from that, there was nothing about the car to identify its owner. It could have come straight from a museum exhibit.

I placed the crate in the trunk of the Mustang and headed back into the inn, but the guy on the desk said he’d never seen the Cadillac before. He offered to have it towed but I decided to try to track down the owner first. I asked in Pizza Villa across the street but they didn’t know anything about it either. I even tried the Dunkin’ Donuts and the Sportsman’s Bar until, still unsuccessful, I re-crossed the street and slapped the roof of the Cadillac in frustration.

‘Nice car,’ said a voice, as the echo of the slap faded. The voice was high, almost girlish, the words drawn out with what sounded more like malice than admiration, the sibilance in the first word almost menacing.

At the entrance to the inn’s back lot, a man was leaning against the wall. He was short and squat, probably no more than five-five and maybe two hundred and thirty pounds. He wore a tan raincoat, belted at the front, with brown pants and a pair of brown brogues.

He had a face from a horror movie.

His head was completely bald, with a rounded crown that ran into wrinkles of fat at the back. The head seemed to grow wider instead of narrower from the temples to the mouth, before it lost itself in his shoulders. He had no neck, or at least nothing that was worthy of the name. His face was deathly pale, apart from his long, thick, red lips, which were stretched into a rictus of a grin. He had wide dark nostrils, set in a flattened snout of a nose, and his eyes were so grey as to be almost colourless, the pupils like black pinpoints at their centre, tiny dark worlds in a cold, hostile universe.

He pulled himself from the wall and advanced slowly and steadily, and as he did so I caught the smell. It was indistinct and masked by some cheap cologne, but it caused me to hold my breath and take a step back from him nonetheless. It was the smell of earth and blood, the stench of rotting meat and stale animal fear that hangs in a slaughterhouse at the end of a long day’s butchering.

‘Nice car,’ he repeated, and a fat white hand emerged from one of his pockets, the fingers like thick, pale slugs that had spent too long in dark places. He caressed the roof of the Mustang appreciatively, and it seemed as if the paint would corrode spontaneously beneath his fingers. It was the touch a child molester would give a kid in a playground when its mother’s back was turned. For some reason, I felt the urge to push him away but I was stopped by a stronger instinct that told me not to touch him. I couldn’t have explained why, but something foul appeared to emanate from him that discouraged any contact. To touch him, it seemed, would be to blight oneself, to risk contamination or contagion.

But it was more than that. He exuded a sense of extreme lethality, a capacity for inflicting hurt and pain that was so profound as to be almost sexual. It seeped from his pores and flowed viscously over his skin, seeming almost to drip visibly from the tips of his fingers and the end of his ugly, brutish nose. Despite the cold, tiny beads of perspiration glittered on his forehead and upper lip, spangling his soft features with moisture. Touch him, I sensed, and your fingers would sink into his flesh, the skin yielding clammily to the pressure as it sucked you in.

And then he would kill you, because that was what he did. I was certain of it.

‘Your car?’ he asked. Those grey eyes glittered coldly and the tip of a pink tongue appeared between his lips, like a snake testing the air.

‘Yes, it’s my car,’ I replied. ‘That your Cadillac?’

He didn’t seem to notice the question, or decided not to notice it. Instead, he passed another long caressing movement along the roof of the Mustang.

‘Good car, the Mustang,’ he said, nodding to himself, and again there was that intense sibilance on the S sound, like water dropped on a hot stove. ‘Me and the Mustang, we got a lot in common.’

He moved closer to me, as if to share some deep, darkly funny secret. I could smell his breath on me, sweet and overripe as late-summer fruit.

‘We both went to hell after nineteen seventy.’

And then he laughed, a low hissing sound like gas escaping from a corpse. ‘Better take care of that car, make sure nothing happens to it,’ he said. ‘A man’s got to look out for what’s his. He should take care of his own business, and keep his nose out of other people’s.’ He walked around the back of the car before entering the Cadillac, so I had to turn to watch him.

‘Be seeing you again, Mr Parker,’ he said. Then the Caddy started with a low, confident rumble and the car made an illegal left onto Congress and headed in the direction of downtown Portland.

Chapter Five

Roger didn’t look too happy about being kept waiting for his food, because the permanent frown lines on his forehead had dipped by about half an inch by the time I got back.

‘You were a coon’s age,’ he muttered as he took the food. It was one of the longest sentences I had ever heard him speak.

I picked at my chicken and rice, but my appetite was gone. I was bothered by the appearance of the fat, bald man on Congress, although I couldn’t tell why, exactly, apart from the fact that he knew my name and made my skin crawl.

Roger and I returned to the roof, a chill wind now forcing the pace a little so that we had finished by mid afternoon just as the light was starting to fade. I paid Roger and he nodded his thanks, then headed back to town. My fingers were numb from working on the roof but the job had to be done before the heavy snows came, or else I’d be living in an ice castle. I took a hot shower to remove the grit from my hair and fingers, and was just making a pot of coffee when I heard a car pull up outside.

For a moment, I didn’t recognise her as she stepped from the Honda Civic. She had grown since I last saw her, and her hair was lighter, tinted with some kind of colouring. She had a woman’s body, large-breasted and generous at the hips. I felt a little embarrassed noticing the changes in her. After all, Ellen Cole was barely into her twenties, and Walter Cole’s daughter to boot.

‘Ellen?’ I stepped from the porch and opened my arms to her as she hugged me.

‘It’s good to see you, Bird,’ she said softly, and I hugged her tightly in response. Ellen Cole: I had watched her grow up. I could remember dancing with her at my wedding, the shy grin she threw back at her younger sister Lauren, her tongue stuck out teasingly between her lips at Susan in her bridal gown. I remembered, too, sitting on the steps of Walter’s porch with a beer, and Ellen beside me, her hands clasped around her knees, as I tried to explain why boys sometimes behaved like assholes to even the most beautiful of girls. I liked to think that was one area in which my expertise was beyond doubt.

She had been a friend to Susan, and Jennifer had loved her. My daughter never cried out when Susan and I left her for an evening, as long as Ellen was there to baby-sit her. The child would sit in the older girl’s arms, toying with her fingers, eventually falling asleep with her head on her lap. Ellen had about her a kind of strength that found its roots in an immense store of kindness and compassion, a strength that inspired trust in those smaller and weaker than she.

Two days after Susan and Jennifer had died, I discovered her waiting for me alone at the funeral home as I arrived to make arrangements for the bodies. Others had offered to accompany me, but I didn’t want them there. I think I was already retreating into my own, strange world of loss at that point. I didn’t know how long she had been waiting for me there, her car parked in the lot, but she came to me, and she held me for a long, long time, and then she stood beside me as I looked at pictures of caskets and limousines, never letting go of my hand. In her eyes, I saw the depths of my own pain reflected and I knew that, like me, she felt the loss of Jennifer as an absence in her arms, and the loss of Susan as a silence in her heart.

And when we left, the strangest thing happened. I sat with her in her car and, for the first time in days, I cried. That deep, still, placid thing inside Ellen drew the pain and hurt and grief from me, like the lancing of a wound. She held me again and, for a time, the clouds cleared, and I was able to go on.

Behind Ellen, a young man stepped from the passenger side of the car. He had dark skin and long black hair that hung lankly to his shoulders. His dress code was slacker chic, apart from his Zamberlain hiking boots: jeans, T-shirt loose over the top of his jeans, denim shirt hanging open over everything else. He shivered a little as he watched me with suspicious eyes.

‘This is Ricky,’ said Ellen. ‘Riccardo,’ she added, with a vaguely Spanish inflection on the word. ‘Ricky, come meet Bird.’

He shook hands firmly, then put one arm protectively around Ellen’s shoulders. It seemed to me that Ricky was territorial and insecure, a bad combination. I kept an eye on him as we went into the house, just in case he decided to make his mark by pissing against my door.

We sat in my kitchen and drank coffee from big blue mugs. Ricky didn’t say a whole lot, not even ‘Thanks’. I wondered if he’d ever met Roger. Put the two of them together and you’d have the world’s shortest conversation.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked Ellen.

She shrugged. ‘We’re heading north. I’ve never been far north before. We’re going to make for Moosehead Lake, see Mount Katahdin, whatever. Maybe we’ll rent some ski-doos.’

Ricky stood up and asked where thejohn was. I directed him and he sloped off, slouching from side to side as he walked, like a man with his feet in parallel ditches.

‘Where did you find the Latin lover?’ I asked.

‘He’s a psychology major,’ she replied.

‘Really?’ I tried to keep the cynicism out of my voice. Maybe Ricky was trying to kill two birds with one stone by taking psychology so he could analyse himself.

‘He’s really nice, Bird. He’s just a little shy with strangers.’

‘You make him sound like a dog.’

She stuck her tongue out at me in response.

‘School finished?’

She dodged the question. ‘I have some study time coming.’

‘Hmm. What are you planning on studying? Biology?’

‘Ha ha.’ She didn’t smile. I guessed that Ricky had pushed thoughts of semester exams from her mind.

‘How’s your mom?’

‘Good.’

She stayed silent for a moment.

‘She worries about you and Dad. He told her you were at the funeral in Queens yesterday, but that you didn’t have much to say to each other. I think she feels that you should sort out whatever happened between you.’

‘It’s not that easy.’

She nodded. ‘I’ve heard them talking,’ she said softly. ‘Is what he says about you true?’

‘Some of it, yes.’

She bit down on her lip, then seemed to reach a decision. ‘You should talk to him. You were his friend, and he doesn’t have many of those.’

‘Most of us don’t,’ I replied. ‘And I’ve tried talking to him, Ellen, but he’s judged me and found me wanting. Your father’s a good man, but not everything good fits his definition.’

Ricky came back into the room and the conversation sort of died. I offered them my bed for the night but was kind of glad when Ellen declined. I’d probably never be able to sleep there again if I had visions of Ricky humping in it. They decided to spend the night in Portland instead of Augusta, with the intention of heading straight for the Great North Woods the next morning. I suggested the Inn on St John, and told them to say that I had sent them. Apart from that, I left them to it, although I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know what ‘it’ was. Somehow, I didn’t imagine Walter Cole would want to know either.

After they had gone, I got in the car and drove back into Portland to work out in the Bay Club at One City Center. Slating the roof had been exercise in itself, but I was trying to work off the little handles of fat that were clinging to my sides like determined children. I spent forty-five minutes doing peripheral hard-flow circuits, constantly alternating leg and upper-body exercises until my heart was pounding and my shirt was soaked with sweat. When I had finished, I showered and looked at the little fat deposits in the mirror to see if they were getting any smaller. I was almost thirty-five, I had grey hairs invading the blackness of my hair, and I was one hundred and eighty pounds of insecurity in a five-eleven frame. I needed to get a life – that, or liposuction.

The white Christmas lights glowed in the trees of the Old Port as I left the Bay Club, so that, from a distance, they seemed to be burning. I walked to Exchange to pick up some books in Allen Scott’s, then continued down to Java Joe’s to nurse a large one and read the newspapers. I rustled through the Village Voice to find out Dan Savage’s latest views on sex with eggs or urinary games. This week, Dan was dealing with a guy who said he wasn’t homosexual, he just liked having sex with men. Dan Savage didn’t seem to see the difference. Frankly, neither did I. I tried to imagine what Angel would have said to the guy and then figured even the Voice wouldn’t print what Angel would have said to him.

It had started to rain and wet streaks marked the windows like cuts on crystal and fell on the kids heading for the bars in the Old Port. I watched the rain for a time, then returned to the Voice. As I did so, I was conscious of a figure moving towards me and a rank smell in my nostrils. My skin prickled with unease.

‘Can I ask you a question?’ said a distinctive voice. I looked up and started. The same coldly amused eyes watched me from the doughlike face, rain glistening on the bald head. The mingled scents of blood and cologne were stronger now, and I drew back a little from the table.

‘Do you want to find God?’ he continued, with the kind of concerned look that doctors give smokers when they start patting their pockets for cigarettes in the waiting room. In his pale hand, he held a crumpled Bible pamphlet, a crude pen drawing of a child and its mother visible on one side.

I looked at him in puzzlement, then my face cleared. I thought for a moment that he might be some kind of Jesus freak, although if he was then Jesus was scraping the bottom of the barrel for recruits. ‘When God wants me, he’ll know where to find me,’ I replied and went back to reading the Voice, my eyes on the page but my attention riveted to the man before me.

‘How do you know that this isn’t God looking for you now?’ he said, as he sat down across from me.

I realised that I should have kept my mouth shut. If he was a religious nut, then talking to him would only encourage him. These types act like monks who’ve just been given a weekend off from their vows of silence. Except this guy didn’t seem like the religious kind, and I got the feeling that there was a subtext to his questions which I hadn’t quite grasped.

‘I’d always hoped He’d be taller,’ I told him.

‘There’s a change coming,’ said the bald man. His eyes had a kind of intense look to them now. ‘There’ll be no place for sinners, for divorcees, for fornicators, for sodomites, for women who don’t respect their husbands.’

‘I think you’ve just covered some of my hobbies, and all of my friends,’ I said, folding the paper and taking a last, regretful sip of my coffee. It just wasn’t my day. ‘Wherever they end up sounds good to me too.’

He watched me carefully, like a snake preparing to strike if it saw an opening. ‘No place for a man who comes between another man and his wife, or his little boy.’ There was audible menace in his words now. He smiled and I could see his teeth, small and yellow like the fangs of a rodent. ‘I’m looking for someone, Mr Parker. I think you may be able to help me find him.’ His obscenely soft red lips stretched so far that I thought they might burst and shower me with blood.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘It doesn’t matter who I am.’

I looked around the coffee house. The kid behind the counter was distracted by a girl at the window table and there was no one else sitting down here at the rear of the premises.

‘I’m looking for Billy Purdue,’ he continued. ‘I was hoping you might know where he is.’

‘What do you want with him?’

‘He has something that belongs to me. I want to claim it.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t know any Billy Purdue.’

‘I think you’re telling lies, Mr Parker.’ The tone and volume of his voice didn’t change, but the threat of danger it contained rose a notch.

I flipped back my jacket to reveal the butt of my gun.

‘Mister, I think you have the wrong person,’ I said. ‘Now I’m going to leave and if you get up before I’ve gone, I’ll use this gun on your head. You understand me?’

The smile didn’t flicker, but his eyes were now dead. ‘I understand,’ he said, and again there was that terrible sibilance in his voice. ‘I don’t think you can be of help to me after all.’

‘Don’t let me see you again,’ I said.

He nodded to himself. ‘Oh, you won’t see me,’ he replied, and this time the threat was explicit. I kept him in sight until I reached the door and watched as he took the pamphlet and set it alight with a brass Zippo. All the time, his eyes never left my face.

I retrieved my car from the parking garage at Temple and took a ride by Rita Ferris’s place, but the lights were out and there was no reply when I tried the buzzer. Then I drove from Portland to Scarborough Downs until I came to Ronald Straydeer’s place close by the junction of Payne Road and Two Rod Road. I pulled in beside Billy Purdue’s silver trailer and knocked on the door, but the trailer was quiet and no lights burned inside. I peered in the window, cupping my fingers at the glass, but the place still looked a mess. Billy’s car stood to the right of the trailer. The hood was cold.

I heard a noise from behind me and turned, half expecting to see that strange head erupting like a white sore from its tan raincoat. Instead, there was only Ronald Straydeer, dressed in black denims, sandals and a Sea Dogs T-shirt, his short dark hair hidden by a white baseball cap decorated with a red lobster. He held an AK-47 in his hands.

‘I thought you were someone else,’ he said, looking at the gun with embarrassment.

‘Like who? The Vietcong?’ I knew that Ronald swore by his AK. A lot of men who had served in Vietnam did likewise. Ronald once told me that their standard-issue rifle, the M1, used to jam in the rains of Southeast Asia, and they would routinely replace them with AK-47s stolen from the bodies of Vietcong. Ronald’s gun looked old enough to be a war souvenir, which it probably was.

Ronald shrugged. ‘T’ain’t loaded anyhow.’

‘I’m looking for Billy. Have you seen him?’

He shook his head. ‘Not since yesterday. He hasn’t been around.’ He looked unhappy, as if he wanted to say more.

‘Has anyone else been looking for him?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. I thought I saw someone last night looking in the trailer, but I could be mistaken. I didn’t have my glasses on.’

‘You’re getting old,’ I said.

‘Yuh, he could have been old,’ replied Ronald, seemingly mishearing me.

‘What did you say?’

But he had already lost interest. ‘I ever tell you about my dog?’ he began, and I figured that Ronald had told me just about everything I might find useful.

‘Yeah, Ronald,’ I said, as I walked back to the car. ‘Maybe we’ll talk about him again, another time.’

‘You don’t mean that, Charlie Parker,’ he said, but he smiled as he spoke.

‘You’re right,’ I smiled back, ‘I don’t.’

That night, cold rain fell like nails on my newly-shingled roof. It didn’t leak, not even from the parts that I had done. I felt a deep satisfaction as I drifted off to sleep, the wind rattling the windows and causing the boards of the house to creak and settle. I had spent many years falling asleep to the sounds of those boards, to the gentle murmur of my mother’s voice in the living room beyond, to the rhythmic tapping of my grandfather’s pipe on the porch rail. There was still a mark on the rail, an ochre stain of tobacco and worn wood. I had not painted over it, a sentimental gesture that surprised me.

I can’t recall why I awoke, but some deep sense of disquiet had penetrated through my REM sleep and drawn me back into the darkness of night. The rain had stopped and the house seemed peaceful, but the hairs on the back of my neck were almost rigid and my perceptions were immediately razor-sharp, the mugginess of sleep dispelled by the instinctive knowledge that some danger was near.

I slipped silently from my bed and pulled on a pair of jeans. My Smith & Wesson lay in its holster by my bed. I removed the gun and thumbed the safety. The bedroom door was open, the way I had left it. I pulled it a little farther, the well-oiled hinges moving silently, and carefully placed a foot on the bare boards of the hallway.

My foot hit something soft and wet and I drew it back immediately. The moonlight shone through the windows beside the front door, bathing the hallway in a silvery light. It illuminated an old coatrack, and some paint cans and a ladder that lay to my right. It also shone on a set of muddy footprints that ran from the back door, through the kitchen, up to my bedroom door and then into the living room. The mark of my bare foot lay in the print nearest the bedroom door.

I checked the living room and the bathroom before making my way to the kitchen. I could feel my heart thumping in my chest and my breath was white in the cold night air. I counted to three in my head then came in fast through the kitchen door, the gun panning around the room.

It was empty, but the back door was open slightly. Someone had jimmied the lock then made his way – I assumed it was male by the size of the boot prints – through the house, and watched me while I slept. I recalled the bald-headed grotesque I had encountered the day before and the thought of him observing me from the shadows made me sick to my stomach. I opened the back door fully and scanned the yard. Leaving the kitchen and porch light off, I slipped on a pair of work boots that I kept in the kitchen beside the door, then stepped outside and walked once around the house. There were more prints on the porch and in the mud below. At my bedroom window they turned slightly, where the visitor had stood watching from outside.

I went back into the house, dug out my Maglite and threw on a sweater, then traced the tracks through the mud and out onto the road. There had been little traffic and it was still possible to see where the boot marks petered out on the tarmac. I stood on the empty road, looking left and right, then returned to the house.

It was only when I turned on the kitchen light that I noticed what lay on the table in the corner of the room. I picked it up using a piece of paper towel and turned it over in my hand.

It was a small wooden clown, its body made up of a series of brightly painted rings which could be removed by twisting the clown’s smiling head off. I sat looking at it for a time, then placed it carefully in a plastic bag and left it by the sink. I locked the back door, checked all the windows and returned to bed.

I must have drifted off into an uneasy sleep at some point, because I dreamed. I dreamed that I saw a shape moving through the night, black against the stars. I saw a tree standing alone in a clearing and shapes moving beneath it. I smelt blood and sickly-sweet perfume. Squat, white fingers moved across my bare chest.

And I saw a light die, and I heard a child crying in the darkness.

Chapter Six

The first grey light of dawn had appeared at the window and the ground had frozen again when I rose and returned to the kitchen. I looked at the shape of the clown in the bag, its contours masked, its long red nose jutting through the white plastic, its colours dimly visible like a faded ghost of itself.

I slipped on my running gear and started for US 1. Before I left, I made sure all the doors and windows were locked, something that I didn’t ordinarily do. I turned onto Spring Street and headed south to the Mussey Road intersection, the red brick exterior and the white wood steeple of the Scarborough First Baptist Church to my left and the 8 Corners store straight ahead. I continued down Spring onto 114 and kept going, the road quiet, the pine trees whispering above me. I passed Scarborough High School on my right, where I had attended school after moving to Maine, even getting a few games with the Redskins one spring when half the team went down with flu. To my left, the parking lot of the Shop n Save was silent, but there was already traffic ahead on the untidy strip of US 1. It had always been untidy: by the time zoning began in the 1980s, it was too late to save it. Then again, maybe it’s in the nature of US 1 to be this way, because it looks the same in just about every place I’ve been.

When I first arrived in Scarborough there was only one mall in the town, the Orion Center. It had the Mammoth Mart department store, which was kind of like Woolworths, and Martin’s grocery store, and a Laundromat and a liquor store, the kind my grandfather used to refer to as a ‘Dr Green’s’ from the days when they were all painted uniformly green in compliance with the regulations of the state liquor commission.

At Dr Green’s we bought Old Swilwaukee and Pabst Blue Ribbon – the legal drinking age was still eighteen then, not that it mattered – to drink on Higgins Beach, down at the quiet end beside the bird sanctuary, where the piping plover marks its territory with a song like small bells tolling.

I remember, in the summer of eighty-two, trying to convince Becky Berube to lie down on the sand there with me. I was unsuccessful, but it was that kind of summer, the kind that makes you think you’re going to die a virgin. Becky Berube has five kids now, so I guess she learned to lie down pretty quickly after that. We drove sixties’ automobiles – Pontiac convertibles, MGs, Thunderbirds, Chevy Impalas and Camaros with big V-8 engines; even, in one case, a Plymouth Barracuda convertible. We took summer jobs at the ClamBake at Pine Point, or as waiters and busboys at the Black Point Inn.

I recall a fight at the Orion Center, one hot summer night when a group of us clashed with some kids from Old Orchard Beach who had journeyed north up US i seeking just such a turn of events. Words had been exchanged, then threats, then blows. I had not been able to handle myself, not then, and had taken a fierce shot to the nose from a guy whose name I never learned, someone we had never seen before and would never see again, somebody’s cousin from Chicago. He had mean, dumb eyes, I recalled, and wore bleach-stained denims and an Aerosmith T-shirt beneath a black leather biker jacket.

His fist headed for the bridge of my nose as surely and certainly as a wrecking ball cleaving the air before it strikes a condemned building, the cartilage buckling beneath the onslaught when the punch landed. It was a bad break and I fell to the ground, my blood warm on my face. Around me the scuffling continued, and someone ended up curled into a ball on the ground taking kicks to the belly and head, but the events came to me dully through a mist of pain and fear and nausea. The fight broke up as the final blows, the last threats and promises, were exchanged, but I stayed kneeling on the ground, my hands cupped around my busted nose, tears mingling with blood.

Anthony Hutchence, ‘Tony Hutch’, who had wrestled before he came to Scarborough High and would wrestle again when he went on to study in the University of New England, who would have competed in the Olympics had it not been for a back injury, carefully moved my hands from my face and cupped my cheeks in his palms, examining my face with a detached professionalism born out of his own experience both on and off the mat. Then he called two pairs of arms to him, and they held my hands and my head as he reset my nose using his thumbs.

The pain was shocking, almost profound. Lightning shot through my head and my vision turned white, then bright, hard red. I screamed, but I do not even recall what I screamed, only that the sound was like no other I had ever heard before. And then the needle-sharp pain receded into a dull, hard ache, and Tony Hutch stepped back, and there was blood on his thumbs and I knew that the lines and whorls of them were clear on the skin of my face.

But, after that, the fear of my nose breaking would never be the same again. I knew the pain, and had no desire to court it, but the way I felt about it had changed: I had coped, and I would cope again, if the need arose. But there would never be the same shock, the same powerlessness, the same hurt. All of that was behind me, and I was stronger for it. When Jennifer and Susan died, something similar occurred, but this time it killed something inside me; instead of strengthening me, I think it cut off part of me forever.

I crossed US 1 at Amato’s Italian restaurant and continued down Old County Road, through the salt marshes that flooded once a month with the phases of the moon, and past the Maximilian Kolbe Catholic Church until I reached the cemetery. My grandfather was buried on Fifth Avenue, a joke he liked to share with my grandmother after they bought the plot. They lay there together now, and while I rested I cleared some of the weeds away and said a small prayer for them.

When I got back to the house I put on a pot of coffee, ate some grapefruit and thought again about what had happened the night before. It was almost nine by the clock on the wall when Ellis Howard arrived at my door.

Ellis looked like lard poured into a flexible, vaguely human-shaped mould and left to set. Wrapped in a brown sheepskin coat, the deputy chief in charge of the Portland Police Department’s Bureau of Investigations climbed, with some difficulty, from his car. The detective division of the Portland PD was divided into sections dealing with Narcotics and Vice, Crimes Against Persons, Crimes Against Property, and Admin., with Ellis pretty much in charge, assisted by a detective lieutenant and four sergeants, each with responsibility for a section. In total, there were twenty-two officers involved, and four evidence technicians. It was a small, efficient division.

Ellis rolled up to the porch, like a bowling ball that someone had wrapped in fur to keep the frost out. He didn’t look like he could move at even half the pace of a bowling ball, didn’t look like he could run to save his life or anyone else’s. But then Ellis’s job wasn’t to run around and, anyway, looks could be deceptive. Ellis watched and thought and asked questions and watched and thought some more. Little got past Ellis. He was the kind of man who could eat soup with a fork and not spill a drop.

His wife was a fearsome woman named Doreen, who wore her makeup so thick that you could have carved your initials into her face without drawing blood. When she smiled, which wasn’t too often, it was as if someone had just stripped a section of peel from an orange. Ellis seemed to tolerate her the way saints tolerated the rack although I guessed that, deep down, really deep down, he still didn’t like her very much.

Instead, Ellis found his solace in work and baseball statistics. Without blinking, Ellis could tell you the only game in Major League history in which two men threw no-hit balls against each other for nine innings or more – May second, 1917, when Fred Toney of the Reds and Hippo Vaughn of the Cubs went through nine innings until Larry Kopf hit a clean single in the tenth and came home on a Jim Thorpe roller – or the details of Lou Gehrig’s performance in the Yanks’ four-game sweep of the 1932 World Series: three homers, eight RBIs, a .529 batting average and a 1.118 slugging mark. Babe Ruth may have got the press, but it was Lou Gehrig whom Ellis remembered. Lou had his beloved Eleanor, Ellis had Doreen. That seemed just about to sum things up for Ellis.

I stood aside to let him enter the house. I didn’t have a whole lot of choice. ‘Looking good, Ellis,’ I said. ‘The doughnut diet is really paying dividends.’

‘I see you got someone to fix your roof,’ he replied. ‘Know you were from the city, only man in the durned state doing roofing in the winter. Do any of it yourself?’

‘As a matter of fact, yes.’

‘Jesus, maybe we’d be safer talking outside.’

‘Funny guy,’ I said, as he sat down heavily in a kitchen chair. ‘Maybe you should be more concerned about the floor collapsing under you.’

I poured him some coffee. He sipped it and I noticed that his face had grown serious, almost sad.

‘Something wrong?’

He nodded. ‘Very. You know Billy Purdue?’

I guessed that he knew the answer to that question already. I fingered the scar on my cheek. I could feel the edges of the stitches beneath my finger.

‘Yeah, I know him.’

‘Heard you had a run-in with him a few days back. He say anything to you about his ex-wife?’

‘Why?’ I wasn’t about to get Billy into trouble unnecessarily, but I already had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

‘Because Rita and her child turned up dead this morning in her apartment. No sign of forced entry and no one heard a thing.’

I breathed out deeply and felt a sharp pang of sorrow as I recalled Donald’s hand on my finger, as I remembered the touch of his mother’s hand on my cheek. A burning anger at Billy Purdue coursed through my system as I briefly, instinctively, assumed his guilt. The feeling didn’t last long but the intensity of it remained with me. I thought: why couldn’t he have stood by them? Why couldn’t he have been there for them? Maybe I didn’t have the right to ask those questions; or maybe, given all that had happened in the last year, nobody else had a greater right.

‘What happened to them?’

Ellis leaned forward and rubbed his hands together with a soft, rustling sound.

‘From what I hear, the woman was strangled. The boy, I don’t know. No obvious signs of sexual assault on either.’

‘You haven’t been at the apartment?’

‘No. This was supposed to be my day off, but I’m on my way now. ME’s already on the scene. Unlucky for him, he was in Portland for a wedding.’

I stood up and walked to the window. Outside, the wind brushed the evergreens and a pair of black-capped chickadees flew high into the sky.

‘You think Billy Purdue killed his own child and his ex-wife?’ I said.

‘Maybe. He wouldn’t be the first to do something like it. She called us three nights ago, said he was hanging around outside, shouting, roaring drunk, demanding to be let in to see her. We sent a car and took him in, let him cool off for a time, then told him to keep away from her or we’d lock him up. Could be he decided that he wasn’t going to let her leave him, whatever it took.’

I shook my head. ‘Billy wouldn’t do that.’ But I had some doubts, even as I said it. I recalled that red glare in his eyes, and the way that he had almost choked the life from me in his trailer, and Rita’s belief that he would do anything to stop her from taking his son away from him.

Ellis was keeping pace with my thoughts. ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ he said. ‘That’s a nice scar you got on your cheek. You want to tell me how you came by it?’

‘I went to his trailer to try to get some child-support money. He threatened to take a baseball bat to me, I tried to stop him and things got a little out of hand.’

‘Did she hire you to get her money?’

‘I did it as a favour.’

Ellis turned his mouth down at the corners. ‘A favour,’ he repeated, nodding to himself. ‘And when you were doing this . . . favour, did he say anything to you about his ex-wife?’ There was an edge to Ellis’s voice now.

‘He said he wanted to look out for her, for them both. Then he asked me if I was sleeping with her.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I told him no.’

‘Probably the right answer, under the circumstances. Were you sleeping with her?’

‘No,’ I said, and looked hard at him. ‘No, I wasn’t. You pick up Billy yet?’

‘He’s gone. No sign of him at the trailer and Ronald Stray deer hasn’t seen him since day before yesterday.’

‘I know. I was out there last night.’

Ellis arched an eyebrow. ‘Want to tell me why?’

I told him about my encounter with the white-faced freak at the inn and later at Java Joe’s. Ellis took out his notebook and wrote down the number of the Coupe de Ville. ‘We’ll run it through the system, see what comes up. Anything else I should know?’

I went to the sink unit and handed him the plastic bag with the clown toy in it. ‘Someone came into the house last night when I was sleeping. He took a look around, watched me for a time, then left this.’

I opened the bag and placed it on the table in front of Ellis. He took an evidence glove from his pocket, then reached in and touched the toy clown gently.

‘I think you’ll find that it’s Donald Purdue’s.’

Ellis looked at me. ‘And where were you last night?’

‘Jesus, Ellis, don’t ask me that.’ I could feel a huge surge of anger welling up inside me. ‘Don’t even imply that.’

‘Take it easy, Bird. Don’t cry before you’re hurt. You know I have to ask. May as well get it done now as have to go through it later.’

He waited.

‘I was here during the afternoon,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘I went into Portland yesterday evening, worked out, bought some books, had a coffee, dropped by Rita’s apartment . . .’

‘What time?’

I thought for a moment. ‘Eight. Eight-thirty at the latest. There was no reply.’

‘And then?’

‘I headed out to Ronald Straydeer’s place, came back here, read, went to bed.’

‘When did you find the toy?’

‘Maybe three a.m. You might want to get someone down here to take moulds of the boot prints outside my house. The frost will have held the marks in the mud.’

He nodded. ‘We’ll do that.’ He stood to leave, then stopped. ‘I had to ask. You know that.’

‘I know.’

‘And here’s something else: the presence of this –’ he raised the bag containing the clown ‘– means someone has marked you out. Someone’s drawn a line between you and Rita Ferris, and it seems to me that there’s only one likely candidate.’

Billy Purdue. Still, it just didn’t sit right, unless Billy had decided that I was to blame for the events leading up to the death of his son; that, by my actions in helping Rita, I had forced him to act as he did.

‘Look, let me go with you, see if there’s anything about it that strikes a chord,’ I said, at last.

Ellis leaned against the door frame. ‘Hear you applied to Augusta for a PI licence.’

That was true. I still had some cash left from Susan’s insurance policy and the sale of our home, and from some work I had undertaken in New York, but I figured that sooner or later I’d have to make a living somehow. I’d already been offered some work in ‘corporate competitive intelligence’, a euphemism which covered tackling industrial espionage. It sounded more interesting than it was: a sales rep suspected of selling a competitor’s goods in violation of a non-competition agreement; sabotage of a production line in a software factory in South Portland; and the leaking of information on bids for a new public housing development in Augusta. I was still debating whether or not to take on any of them.

‘Yeah, the licence came through last week.’

‘You’re better than that. We all know what you did, the people you’ve hunted down. We could do with someone like that.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying there’s a badge waiting, if you want it. There’s something coming up in CAP pretty soon.’

‘Property or Persons?’

‘Don’t be a jerk.’

‘A minute ago you were implying that I might be a suspect in a double homicide. You sure are a changeable man, Ellis.’

He smiled. ‘So how about it?’

I nodded. ‘I’ll think about it.’

‘You do that,’ he said. ‘You do that.’

Rita Ferris lay facedown on the floor of her apartment, close to the TV. The coiled ends of a rope hung at her neck, and the tip of one ear, visible through the twisted strands of her hair, was blue. Her skirt was pushed up almost to her waist but her panty-hose and panties were in place and undamaged. I felt a rush of pity for her, and something more: a kind of love born out of a brief feeling of intense loss. It made my stomach tighten and my eyes burn and, on my face, I could feel, once again, her last, brief touch, as if I had been branded by her hand.

And in that small room, clean and neat but for the toys and clothes, the diapers and pins, the everyday beauty of her child’s slow-forming life, I made myself feel her last moments. I felt –

I see – the blur of movement as the ligature is flipped over her head, the sudden instinctive shifting of her own hands to her throat in an effort to slip her fingers beneath the rope, the brief burn at her fingertips as she fails and the rope tightens around her.

It is a long death, this slow choking of life from her body. It is a bitter, terrible struggle against the gradual, remorseless crushing of her throat, the progressive destruction of the cricoid cartilage and the eventual soft death knell as the fragile hyoid bone snaps.

She panics as her pulse rate increases; her blood pressure soars as she struggles and gasps for breath. She tries to kick back at the body behind her, but the action is anticipated and the rope is pulled tighter. Her face becomes congested, her skin gradually turning blue as cyanosis develops. Her eyes bulge and her mouth froths and she feels as though her head must explode under the pressure.

Then her body convulses and she can taste the blood in her mouth, can feel it flowing from her nose and over her lips. Now she knows that she is going to die and she makes a final desperate effort to release herself, to save her child, but her body is already failing, her mind darkening, and she can smell herself as the light fades, as she loses control of her bodily functions and she thinks to herself.

but I have always been so clean . . .

‘You finished?’ said a voice. It was the medical examiner, Dr Henry Vaughan, speaking to the police photographer. Vaughan was grey haired and erudite, a philosopher as much as a doctor, and had been the ME for over twenty years. The post of ME was an appointed job with a seven-year term, which meant that Democrat governors, Republican governors and independent governors had all appointed, or reappointed, Vaughan down the years. He was due to retire soon, I knew, and was set to leave his storage room in Augusta lined with old peanut, mayonnaise and sauce bottles, each now containing some small part of someone’s remains. He wasn’t too unhappy about it: according to Ellis, he wanted ‘more time to think’.

The photographer took one final photograph of the knot, then nodded his assent. The preliminary sketches had already been made, the measurements taken. The evidence technician with responsibility for this room had finished his work around the bodies and had moved on to the periphery of the crime scene. A pair of medics waited in one corner with a stretcher, but they prepared to move forward as Vaughan spoke.

‘We’re going to flip her,’ said Vaughan. Two detectives, both wearing plastic gloves, took up positions beside the body, one at her legs, one at her torso, their feet at the edge of the taped outline surrounding her, while Vaughan held her head.

‘Ready?’ he said, then: ‘Here we go.’

They flipped the body, gently but expertly, and I heard one of the cops, a muscular, balding man in his forties, softly whisper: ‘Ah, Jesus.’

Her eyes were wide open and filled with blood where the tiny capillaries had burst under the pressure of the rope, the pupils like dark suns in a red sky. Her fingertips were blue and her nostrils and mouth were covered in blood and dried white froth.

And her lips, the lips that had kissed me softly barely three nights before, that once were red and welcoming and now were cold and blue,

say bye-bye

her lips had been sewn together with thick black thread, the stitches crisscrossing from top to bottom in ragged ’v’ shapes, a tangled knot of thread at one corner so that it would not work itself through the hole while the stitches were still being put in place.

I moved closer and it was only then that I saw the child. His body had been obscured by the couch but, as I walked, his small, covered feet became visible, and then the rest of his body, dressed in purple Barney the dinosaur rompers. There was blood around his head, blood caked in his fine blonde hair and blood on the corner of the windowsill where his head had impacted.

Ellis was beside me. ‘There’s bruising to his face. We figure whoever did this hit him, maybe while he was crying, maybe because he got in the way. The force of the blow knocked him into the windowsill and broke his skull.’

I shook my head and remembered how the little boy had flailed at me as I touched his mother the night before.

‘No,’ I said, and I squeezed my eyes shut hard as the burning became too much. And I thought of my own child, lost to me now, and the others, their bodies wrapped in plastic, bodies buried beneath the earth of a damp cellar in Queens, tiny faces in jars, a small host of the lost stretching into the darkness, walking hand in hand to oblivion.

‘No, he didn’t just cry,’ I said. ‘He was trying to save her.’

While the bodies were placed in white body bags to be taken to Augusta for autopsy, I walked through the apartment. There was only one bedroom, although it was wide and long and held a double bed and a smaller bed with retractable side bars for Donald. There was a pine chest of drawers and a matching pine wardrobe, and a box piled high with toys beside a small bookshelf stacked with picture books. In one corner, beside an open drawer, an evidence technician dusted for fingerprints.

And the sight of the clothes stacked neatly on the shelves, and the toys packed away in their box, brought back a memory that speared me through the heart. Less than one year before, I had stood in our small house on Hobart Street in Brooklyn and, in the space of one night, had gone through the possessions of my dead wife and child, sorting, discarding, smelling the last traces of them that clung to their clothing like the ghosts of themselves. My Susan and my Jennifer: their blood was still on the kitchen walls and there were chalk marks on the floor where the chairs had stood, the chairs to which they had been tied and in which they had been mutilated while the husband and father who should have protected them was propping up a bar.

And I thought, as I stood in Rita’s bedroom: who will take their clothes and sort them now? Who will feel the cotton of her blouse between his fingers, caressing it until the material holds the stains of his prints like a seal? Who will take her underwear, her pink bras without the support wiring (for her breasts were so very small), and hold them carefully, recalling, before he puts them away forever, how he used to undo the clasps with just one hand, the weight of her forcing the straps apart, the cups gently falling?

Who will take her lipstick and run his finger along the edge, knowing that this, too, was a place she touched, that no lips but hers had ever touched it before, or would ever touch it again? Who will see the small traces of a fingertip in her blusher, or carefully unwind each strand of hair from her brush, as if by doing so he might begin to remake her again, piece by piece, atom by atom?

And who will take the child’s toys? Who will spin the wheels on a bright, plastic truck? Who will test a button nose, the glass eyes of a bear, the upraised trunk of a white elephant? And who will pack away those small clothes, those little shoes with laces that young fingers had not yet learned to master?

Who will do all of these things, these small services for the dead, these acts of remembrance more powerful in their way than the most ornate memorial? In parting with what was once theirs they became, in that moment, intimately, intensely present, for the ghost of a child is still, for all that, a child, and the memory of a love is still, even decades later, love.

I stood outside the apartment in the cold winter sunlight and watched as the bodies were removed. They had been dead for no more than ten hours, according to Vaughan, possibly less; the precise time of death would take longer to establish, for a number of reasons, including the cold in the drafty old apartment and the nature of Rita Ferris’s death. Rigor mortis had set into the small muscles at the eyelids, the lower jaw and the neck, gradually spreading to the other muscles of their bodies, although in Rita Ferris the process of rigor mortis was hastened by her death struggles.

Rigor mortis is caused by the disappearance of the energy source for muscle contraction, called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. ATP usually dissipates entirely four hours after death, leaving the muscles rigid until decomposition starts to occur. But if the victim struggles before death, then the ATP energy source becomes depleted during the struggle and rigor mortis sets in more quickly. That would have to be taken into account in the case of Rita, so Vaughan reckoned that Donald Ferris would provide a more accurate estimate of the time of death.

There was fixed lividity on the underside of both bodies, where gravity had drawn the blood down, which normally occurs six to eight hours after death, and pressure applied to the area of lividity did not cause ‘blanching’ or whitening, since the blood had already clotted, meaning that they had been dead for at least five hours. Thus the window for a time of death was certainly greater than five hours but probably not in excess of eight hours to ten hours. There was no fixed lividity on the backs of either body, which meant that they had not been moved after death. They had not been dead when I had tried to find Rita the night before. Maybe she had gone shopping, or visiting friends. If I had found her, could I have warned her? Could I have saved her, saved them both?

Ellis walked over to me, where I stood away from the throng of curious onlookers.

‘Anything strike you about it?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’

‘You think of anything, you let us know, y’hear?’

But my attention had already been distracted. Two men in plain-clothes flashed ID at the cop keeping the crowds back and made their way into the building. I didn’t need to see what was in their wallets to know what they were.

‘Feds,’ I said.

Behind them, a taller figure with jet black hair and wearing a conservative blue suit followed.

‘Special Agents Samson and Doyle,’ said Ellis. ‘And the Canadian cop, Eldritch. They were here earlier. Guess they don’t trust us.’

I turned to him. ‘What do I not know here?’

He reached into his pocket and removed a clear plastic evidence bag. It contained four hundred-dollar bills, still crisp and new except a single fold on each.

‘Let’s barter,’ said Ellis. ‘Know anything about these?’

There was no way to avoid the issue. ‘They look like the bills Billy Purdue gave me for Rita as part of the child-support payments.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, and started to walk away. I could see that he was angry at me, although I wasn’t sure why.

I reached out and gripped him by the upper arm. He didn’t look happy about it but I didn’t care. My gesture attracted the attention of two uniformed cops, but Ellis waved them away.

‘Don’t be presuming on my good humor, Bird,’ he warned, looking at my hand on his arm. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that he gave you this money?’

I didn’t release my grip. ‘You owe me something,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t have known then the money was important.’

He frowned, then replied: ‘Just testing, I guess. You want to let go of my arm now? My fingers are going numb.’

I took away my hand and he rubbed his arm gently.

‘Still working out, I see.’ He glanced back towards the apartment building, but the feds and the Canadian cop were still inside.

‘That business out at Prouts Neck a couple of nights back?’ he began.

‘Yeah, I watch the news. A dead Irish-American fed, three dead Italians and four dead Cambodians: an equal-opportunity slaughter. What about it?’

‘There was another player. Took out Paulie Block and Jimmy Fribb with a pump-action, and that’s not all he took.’

‘Go on.’

‘There was an exchange going on at the Neck: cash for something else. The feds were tipped off to it when Paulie Block and Chester Nash turned up in Portland. They figure a ransom, for someone who was already dead. Norfolk County Sheriffs Office down in Massachusetts dug up a body out by the Larz Anderson Park yesterday, a Canadian national named Thani Pho. A dog sniffed her out.’

‘Let me guess,’ I interrupted. ‘Thani Pho was of Cambodian extraction.’

Ellis nodded. ‘Seems she was a freshman student at Harvard; her bag was found with her. Autopsy indicated that she’d been raped, then buried alive. They found earth in her throat. The way the feds and this guy Eldritch figure it, Tony Celli’s crew kidnapped the girl, pulled a double-cross on the Cambodians and then blew them away under the noses of the feds. The main focus of the investigation is Boston. Despite the sideshow at the Neck, the feds are concentrating their attention on Tony Celli. Those two agents are just clearing up loose ends.’

‘Who paid the ransom?’

He shrugged. ‘The FBI Free Information Store closed for business at that point, but they believe that the exchange and the murder of Thani Pho are connected, and maybe there’s a Canadian angle if this guy Eldritch is involved. These bills came from a bank in Toronto, and so did the bills that fell from the ransom stash out at the Neck. Trouble is, the rest of the cash is gone, and that’s where the other player comes in.’

‘How much?’

‘I heard two mil.’

I pushed my hands through my hair and kneaded the muscles on the back of my neck. Billy Purdue: the guy was like some kind of infernal ricocheting bullet, bouncing off people and destroying lives until he ran out of energy or something stopped him. If what Ellis said was true, then Billy had somehow heard of Tony Celli’s deal at the Neck, may even have been involved somewhere lower down the scale, and decided to make a big score, maybe in the hope of getting his ex-wife and son back and carving out a new life somewhere else, somewhere he could leave the past behind.

‘You still think Billy killed Rita and his own son?’ I asked quietly.

‘Possibly,’ shrugged Ellis. ‘I don’t see anyone else on the horizon.’

‘And sewed her mouth shut with black thread?’

‘I don’t know. If he’s crazy enough to cross Tony Celli, he’s crazy enough to sew up his old lady.’

But I knew that he didn’t believe what he was saying. The money changed everything. There were people who would cause a lot of pain to get their hands on that kind of cash, and Tony Celli was one of them, especially since he probably felt that it was his money to begin with. Still, the damage to Rita’s mouth didn’t fit in. Neither did the fact that she hadn’t been tortured. Whoever killed her didn’t do it in the course of trying to find out something from her. She was killed because someone wanted her dead, and her mouth was sewn up because that same someone wanted to send a message to whoever found her.

Two million dollars: that money was going to bring a storm of trouble down on everybody’s head from Tony Celli, maybe from the guys he tried to double-cross. Jesus, what a mess. I didn’t know it then, but the money had attracted others too, individuals who were anxious to secure it for their own ends and didn’t care who they killed to get it.

But Billy Purdue, by his actions, had also drawn someone else, someone who didn’t care about money, or the Boston crew, or a dead child, or a young woman who was trying to make a better life for herself. He had come back to claim something as his own, and to avenge himself on all those who had kept him from it, and God help anyone who got in his way.

Winter had come howling down from the north, and he had come with it.

Chapter Seven

When Ellis had left I stood for a time, considering whether or not to leave the police to their work. Instead of simply driving away, I re-entered the apartment building and walked up to the third floor. The door to apartment five had been freshly painted a bright, cheerful yellow, small paint flecks still freckling the brass numeral. I knocked gently and the door opened on a chain. In the gap, a small dark face appeared about four feet from the ground, its features framed by black curls, its eyes wide and wondering.

‘Come away from there, child,’ said a voice and then a taller, darker figure filled the gap. I could see the resemblance in the two faces almost instantly.

‘Mrs Mims?’ I asked.

‘Ms Mims,’ she corrected. ‘And I just finished talking to a police officer not twenty minutes ago.’

‘I’m not with the police, ma’am.’ I showed her my ID. She examined it carefully without touching it, her daughter straining up on her toes to do the same, then glanced back at my face. ‘I remember you,’ she said. ‘You called here, couple of nights back.’

‘That’s right. I knew Rita. Can I come in for a moment?’

She bit down gently on her lower lip, then nodded and closed the door. I could hear the chain being removed and then the door swung open, revealing a bright, large-ceilinged room. The couch inside was blue and decorated with yellow throws, its legs set on a bare varnished floor. Two tall bookshelves crammed with paperbacks stood at either side of an old, stained, marble fireplace, and there was a portable stereo on a stand by the window close to a combination TV and VCR. The room smelt of flowers and opened to the right onto a short hallway, presumably leading to the bedroom and bathroom, and on the left into a small, clean kitchen. The walls had been newly painted a soft yellow, so that the room seemed to be bathed in sunlight.

‘You have a nice place. You do all this yourself?’

She nodded, proud despite herself.

‘I helped her,’ piped the girl. She was maybe eight or nine, and it was possible to see in her the seeds of a beauty that would eventually grow to outshine her mother’s.

‘You’ll have to start hiring yourself out,’ I said. ‘I know people who’d pay a lot of money for a job as good as this. Including me.’

The girl giggled shyly and her mother reached out and gave her a little hug around the shoulders. ‘Go on now, child. Go and play while I talk with Mr Parker here.’

She did as she was told, casting a small, anxious look over her shoulder as she entered the hallway. I smiled to reassure her, and she gave a little smile back.

‘She’s a beautiful girl,’ I said.

‘Takes after her father,’ she replied, her voice thick with sarcasm.

‘I don’t think so. He around?’

‘No. He was a worthless sonofabitch, so I kicked him out. Last I heard, he was a drain on the economy of New Jersey.’

‘Best place for him.’

‘Amen to that. You want coffee? Tea maybe?’

‘Coffee would be fine.’ I didn’t really want it, but I figured it might take the strain out of the situation a little. Ms Mims seemed like a pretty tough woman. If she decided to be unhelpful, a steel hull wouldn’t be enough to break the ice.

After a few minutes, she emerged from the kitchen with two mugs, placed them carefully on coasters on a low pine table, then went back to the kitchen for milk and sugar. When she returned we sat. Her hand was shaking, as she held her coffee. She caught my look, and raised her left hand to try to still the mug.

‘It’s not easy,’ I said softly. ‘When something of this kind happens, it’s like a stone dropped in a pool. It ripples out, and everything gets tossed in its wake.’

She nodded. ‘Ruth’s been asking me about it. I haven’t told her that they’re dead. I haven’t figured out how to tell her yet.’

‘Did you know Rita well?’

‘I knew her a little. I knew more by reputation. I knew about her husband, knew he almost killed them in a fire.’ She paused. ‘You think he did this?’

‘I don’t know. I hear he was around lately.’

‘I’ve seen him, once or twice, watching the place. I told Rita, but she only called the police that last time he got roaring drunk. The rest of the time, she seemed content to let him be. I think she felt sorry for him.’

‘Were you here last night?’

She nodded, then paused. ‘I went to bed early – women’s troubles, you know? I took two Tylenol, drank a shot of whiskey and didn’t wake up until this morning. I went downstairs, saw Rita’s door was open, and went in. That’s when I found them. I can’t help thinking that if I hadn’t taken the pills, hadn’t had a drink . . .’ She swallowed loudly and tried not to cry. I looked away for a moment, and when I turned back she seemed to have composed herself.

‘Was there anything else bothering her, anyone else?’ I continued.

Again, there was a pause, but this one spoke volumes. I waited, but she didn’t speak. ‘Ms Mims . . .’ I began.

‘Lucy,’ she said.

‘Lucy,’ I said gently. ‘You can’t say anything to hurt her now. But if you do know something that might help to find whoever did this then, please, tell me.’

She sipped her coffee. ‘She was short of money. I knew, because she told me. There was a woman helped her out, but it still wasn’t enough. I offered her some, but she wouldn’t take it. Said she had found a way to make a little on the side.’

‘Did she say how?’

‘No, but I looked after Donnie while she was gone. Three times, each at short notice. The third time, she came back and I could see she’d been crying. She looked scared, but wouldn’t tell me what had happened, just said that she wouldn’t need me to watch Donnie no more, that the job hadn’t worked out.’

‘Did you tell the police this?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t. It was just that . . . she was a good person, you know? I think she was just doing what she had to do to make ends meet. But if I told the police, it would have become something else, something low.’

‘Do you know who she was working for?’

She rose and went into the hallway, and I could hear her footsteps on the bare floor as she walked. When she appeared again, there was a piece of paper in her hands.

‘She told me that if there was any trouble with Donnie or Billy, or if she didn’t come back on time, I was to call this number and talk to this man.’ She handed me the piece of paper. On it, written in Rita Ferris’s tight, neat script, was a telephone number and the name Lester Biggs.

‘When did the crying incident happen, Lucy?’

‘Five days ago,’ she said, which meant that Rita had called me the day after looking for help and money to get out of Portland.

I held up the piece of paper. ‘Can I keep this?’

She nodded and I placed it in my wallet. ‘Do you know who he is?’ she asked.

‘He runs an escort service out of South Portland,’ I replied. There was no point in sugaring it. Lucy Mims had already guessed the truth.

For the first time, tears glistened in her eyes. A drop hung from her eyelash, then slowly trickled down her cheek. At the hallway, her daughter appeared and ran to her mother to hug her tight. She looked at me, but there was no blame in her eyes. She knew that, whatever had happened, it was not my fault that her mother was crying.

I took my card from my wallet and handed it to Lucy. ‘Call me if you think of anything else, or if you just want to talk. Or if you need help.’

‘I don’t need help, Mr Parker,’ she said. In her voice, I could hear the echo of someone being kicked all the way to New Jersey.

‘I guess not,’ I said, and opened the door. ‘And most people call me Bird.’

She walked across the room to close the door behind me, her daughter’s arms still clutched tightly around her.

‘You will find the man who did this, won’t you?’ she asked.

Passing clouds dappled the winter sunshine, creating movement on the walls behind her. And, for a moment, it seemed to assume a human shape, the shape of a young woman passing through the room, and I had to shake my head slightly to make it disappear. It lingered for a second, then the clouds cleared and it was gone.

I nodded. ‘Yes, I’ll find him.’

Lester Biggs operated out of an office on Broadway, above a hairdressing salon. I rang the intercom on the door and waited about thirty seconds before a male voice answered.

‘I’m here to see Lester Biggs,’ I said into the speaker.

‘What’s your business with Mr Biggs?’ came the reply.

‘Rita Ferris. My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator.’

Nothing happened. I was about to ring again when the door buzzed and I pushed it open to reveal a narrow staircase carpeted in faded green, with a small, grimy window on the landing. I went up two flights of stairs to where a door stood open on to an office overlooking the street. There was the same green carpet on the floor, a desk with a telephone, two wooden chairs without cushions and a pile of skin magazines on the floor, twin stacks of videocassettes beside them. Three sets of filing cabinets stood along the wall. Opposite them, beneath and alongside the two big windows that looked out onto Broadway, stood a selection of electrical items in boxes: microwave ovens, hairdryers, cookware, stereos, even some computers, although they were made by no company that I knew. The writing on the box appeared to be Cyrillic: trust Lester Biggs to buy and sell Russian computers.

Behind the desk, in a leather seat, sat Lester himself, and to his right, on one of the chairs, sat a bearded man with a huge pot belly and biceps the size of melons. His buttocks hung over the edges of the chair, like balloons filled with water.

Lester Biggs was slim and kind of well-groomed, if your definition of well-groomed was a disc jockey at his sister-in-law’s wedding. He looked about forty and was dressed in a cheap three-button pinstripe suit, a white shirt and a slim pink tie. He wore his hair in a mullet-cut, the top short, the back long and permed. His face was tanning salon-brown, his eyes slightly hooded, like a man caught between sleeping and waking. In his right hand he held a pen, which he tapped lightly on the desk as I entered, causing the gold bracelet on his arm to jangle.

Biggs wasn’t a bad man by the standards of his profession, according to some. He had started out running a used electronics store, had progressed rapidly into buying and selling stolen goods, then branched out into a number of other areas. The escort service was a recent one, maybe six or seven months old. From what I heard, he took the calls, contacted the girl, provided a car to take her to the address and a guy, sometimes the big man Jim who sat beside him, to make sure everything went smoothly. For that, he took fifty per cent. He wasn’t morally bankrupt, just overdrawn.

‘The local celebrity sleuth,’ he said. ‘Welcome. Take a seat.’ He gestured with the pen to the remaining unoccupied wooden chair. I sat. The back creaked a little and started to give way, so I leaned forwards to take the pressure off.

‘Business is booming, I see.’

Biggs shrugged. ‘I do pretty good. It doesn’t pay to maintain a high profile in my line of work.’

‘And that would be . . . ?’

‘I buy and sell things.’

‘Like people?’

‘I provide a service. I don’t force anybody to do what they do. Nobody, apart from Jim here, works for me. They work for themselves. I just act as the facilitator.’

‘Tell me how you facilitated Rita Ferris.’

Biggs didn’t reply, just twisted in his seat to look out the window. ‘I heard about it. I’m sorry. She was a nice woman.’

‘That’s right, she was. I’m trying to find out if her death was connected in any way to what she was doing for you.’

He flinched a little. ‘Why should it matter to you?’

‘It just does. It should matter to you too.’

He exchanged a look with Jim, who shrugged. ‘How’d you find me?’ he said.

‘I followed the trail of cheap porn.’

Biggs smiled. ‘Some men need a little something extra to get them going. There are a lot of screwed-up people out there, and every day I thank God for them.’

‘Did Rita Ferris meet one of those screwed-up people?’

Biggs kicked back from his desk until his chair came to rest against the wall. He didn’t say anything, just sat sizing me up.

‘Tell me, or tell the cops,’ I said. ‘I’m sure Narcotics and Vice would be happy to discuss the nature of facilitation with you.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Tell me about last Monday night.’

Again, he exchanged a look with Jim, then seemed to resign himself to talking. ‘It was a freak call, that’s all. Guy rang from the Radisson over on High Street, wanted a girl. I asked him if he had any preferences and he gave me short, blonde, small tits, neat ass. Said that was what he liked. Well, that was Rita. I gave her a call, offered her the job, and she said yes. It was only her third time, but she was keen to make some cash. Cash for gash.’ He smiled emptily. ‘Anyway, Jim picked her up, dropped her off, parked the car and waited in the lobby while she went up to the room.’

‘What room?’

‘Nine-twenty-seven. Ten minutes later Rita comes down, runs into the lobby and straight over to Jim, demands to be taken home. Jim hauls her into a corner and tries to calm her down, find out what happened. Seems she got to the room and an old guy opened the door and let her in. She said he was dressed kind of funny –’ He looked to Jim for confirmation.

‘Old,’ said Jim. ‘He was dressed old-fashioned, like his suit was thirty, forty years out of date. It smelt of mothballs, she said.’

For the first time, Biggs looked uneasy. ‘It was strange, she said. There were no clothes in the room, no cases or bags, nothing but the old guy in his old suit. And she got scared. She couldn’t say why, but the old guy frightened her.’

‘He smelt bad,’ said Jim. ‘That’s what she told me. Not bad like rotten fish or eggs, but bad like there was something rotten inside him. Bad like . . . like if evil had a smell, it would have smelt like him.’ He looked embarrassed by his own words, and started examining his fingers.

‘So he puts his hand on her shoulder,’ continued Lester, ‘and, immediately, she just wants to run. She pushes out at him and he falls back on the bed, and while he’s down there she makes for the door, but he’s locked it and she loses some time trying to get it open. By the time she gets it unlocked, he’s behind her so she starts to scream. He’s pulling at her dress, trying to cover her mouth, and she strikes out at him again, catches him on the head. Before he can recover, she has the door open and she’s running down the corridor. She can hear him behind her, too, pounding after her, and he’s gaining. Then she turns a corner and there’s a group of people getting in the elevator. She reaches them just before the doors close, jamming her foot in the opening. The door opens and she gets in. There’s no sign of the old guy, but she can still smell him, she says, and knows that he’s close. She was lucky, I guess. The Radisson only has one functioning elevator in that bank. If she’d missed that, he’d have gotten her, no question. Then the elevator brings her down to the lobby, and to Jim.’

Jim was still looking down at his hands. They were big and heavily veined, with scars on the knuckles. Maybe he was wondering if Rita Ferris might still have been alive if he’d had a chance to use them on the old man. ‘I told her to wait for me in the lobby, by the reception desk,’ he said, as he took up the story. ‘I went up to the room, but the door was open and the room was empty. Like she said, there were no bags, nothing. So I went back down to the desk, told them that I was supposed to meet a friend of mine who was staying in the hotel. Room nine-twenty-seven.’

He pursed his lips, and tugged at one of his scars with a long fingernail. ‘There was no guest in room nine-twenty-seven,’ he said at last. ‘The room was unoccupied. The old guy must have bullshitted one of the staff so he could get in. I took Rita to the bar, got her a brandy and waited until she had calmed down before taking her home. That’s all there is.’

‘You find any way to tell the cops about this guy?’

Biggs shook his head. ‘How could I?’

‘You have a telephone.’

‘I have a business,’ he replied.

Not for long, I thought. Biggs, for all his posturing, was no better than a cluster fly, insinuating himself into young women’s lives and then draining them from the inside. ‘He could try again,’ I said. ‘Maybe he did try, and Rita Ferris ended up dead because of it.’

Biggs shook his head. ‘Nah, these things happen. The freak probably went home and jerked off instead.’ His eyes told me that he didn’t believe his own lies. Beside him, Jim still hadn’t lifted his face. Guilt rolled off him like a fog.

‘She give you a description?’

‘Like we told you: old, tall, grey hair, smelt bad. That’s it.’

I rose. ‘Thanks, you’ve been a big help.’

‘Anytime,’ he said. ‘You ever want to party, you give me a call.’

‘Yeah, you’ll be the first to know.’

When I stepped outside, a car drew up: Ellis Howard’s car. He didn’t look overly happy to see me.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

‘Same thing you are, I guess.’

‘We got an anonymous tip-off.’

‘Lucky you.’ I guessed that Lucy Mims’s conscience had got the better of her in the end.

Ellis rubbed his hand across his face, dragging his skin down so I could see the red beneath his eyes. ‘You still haven’t answered the question,’ he said. ‘How did you know she was working as a prostitute?’

‘Maybe the same way you did. It doesn’t matter.’

‘But you weren’t going to tell us?’

‘I would have, eventually. I didn’t want her labelled as a hooker, that’s all, not with the press around and not before I had a chance to find out more.’

‘I didn’t know you were so sentimental,’ said Ellis. He wasn’t smiling.

‘I have hidden shallows,’ I replied, as I turned and walked to my car. ‘See you around, Ellis.’

Chapter Eight

After I left Lester Biggs’s office, I headed down to the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters at Temple Street, where I ate a muffin, drank some French roast and watched the cars go by on Federal Street. A handful of people queued to see cheap movies in the Nickelodeon movie theatre next door, or took the air around Monument Square. Nearby, Congress Street was bustling. It had suffered when the suburban malls drew the retail businesses out of the city, but now had restaurants, and the Keystone theatre é, and was reinventing itself as Portland’s cultural district.

This was a survivor’s city: it had burned twice at the hands of the Indians in 1676 and 1690, burned again under the guns of the Englishman Henry Mowatt in 1775 following a dispute over masts, and burned once more in 1866 when someone threw a firecracker into a boat-builder’s yard on Commercial Street and turned the eastern half of the city to ash. And still the city remained, and still it grew.

I felt about the city as I felt about the house in Scarborough: it was a place where the past was alive in the present, where a man could find a place for himself as long as he understood the fact that he was a link in the chain, for a man cut off from his past is a man adrift in the present. Maybe that was part of Billy Purdue’s problem. There had been little stability in his life. His past was a series of unconnected episodes, united only by the un-happiness provoked by the memory of them. A man like Billy could not make a marriage work because, by and large, when one unhappy person enters a marriage it frequently ends up as two unhappy people, maybe even two unhappy people getting a divorce.

In the end, I figured that Billy Purdue was probably none of my business. Whatever he had done to Tony Celli, for whatever reason, was between him and Tony. Billy was a big boy now and his actions at Ferry Beach meant that he was playing by big boys’ rules. So if Billy Purdue was none of my business, why did I feel that I should try to save him?

If I stretched the point then Rita and Donald were none of my business either, but it didn’t feel that way. In their apartment, as the two bodies lay on the floor, frozen briefly by the flashbulbs of the camera, I felt something ripple through me, something I recognised from before, something that had come to me as a gift from another. In the crowded coffee shop, as people sheltered from the cold, talked about their children, gossiped about their neighbours, touched the hands of girlfriends, boyfriends, lovers, I moved the fingers of my left hand gently over the palm of my right and recalled a touch more intense than that of any lover, and I smelt again the rich heady odour of the Louisiana swamps.

Almost eight months before, I had sat in the bedroom of an old, blind woman named Tante Marie Aguillard, a huge ebony form with dead, sightless eyes whose consciousness moved through the darkness of her own life, and the lives of others. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for from her, except that she said she could hear the voice of a dead girl calling her from the swamps. I believed then that the man who killed the girl might also have been responsible for the deaths of my own wife and child – assuming the old woman wasn’t crazy, or vindictive, or just plain lonely and seeking attention.

But when she touched my hand in that darkening room, something shot through me like a jolt of electricity and I knew that she was not lying, that somehow she heard that girl crying amid the rotting vegetation and the deep green waters, and that Tante Marie had tried to comfort her as she died.

And through Tante Marie, I heard the voices also of Susan and Jennifer, faint but distinct, and I took those voices away with me, and on a subway train a week later my wife appeared to me for the first time. That was Tante Marie’s gift to me: I saw and heard my dead wife and child, and I saw and heard others too. Eventually, Tante Marie was among them. That was her gift, passed in the touch of a hand, and yet I could not explain it.

I think that it may be a kind of empathy, a capacity to experience the suffering of those who have been taken painfully, brutally, without mercy. Or perhaps what I experience is a form of madness, a product of grief and guilt; maybe I am disturbed, and in my disturbance I have imagined alternative worlds where the dead seek reparation from the living. I do not know for certain. All I can say is that those who are absent, by its means become present.

But some gifts are worse than curses, and the dark side of the gift is that they know. The lost, the stragglers, those who should not have been taken but were, the innocents, the struggling, tormented shades, the gathering ranks of the dead, they know. And they come.

Despite my misgivings, I spent that afternoon moving from bar to bar, talking to those who had known Billy Purdue, who might have some idea of where he had gone. In some cases, the Portland PD had been there before me, which usually meant that my welcome was pretty frosty. No one could, or would, tell me anything, and I had almost given up hope when I found James Hamill.

I guessed that there weren’t too many forks in Hamill’s family tree. He was a scrawny piece of lowlife, one hundred and twenty pounds of bitterness, repressed anger and redneck mentality, the kind of guy who wouldn’t willingly do someone a good turn if he could do a bad one instead. Hamill’s position was pretty low down on the food chain: where he existed, they ate it raw.

He was playing alone in Old Port Billiards down on Fore Street when I came upon him, his baseball cap turned backwards on his head as he lined up a shot, his scrawny moustache curled in concentration. He missed the shot and swore loudly. If the ball had been iron and the pocket magnetised, he still would have missed the shot. Hamill was just that kind of guy.

Someone in Gritty McDufFs had told me that Hamill hung out with Billy Purdue on occasion. I couldn’t imagine why. Maybe Billy just wanted to be with someone who could make him look good.

‘James Hamill?’ I asked.

He scratched his ass and offered me his hand. His smile was a dentist’s nightmare.

‘Pleased to meet you, whoever you are. Now go fuck yourself.’

He went back to his game.

‘I’m looking for Billy Purdue.’

‘Get in line.’

‘Someone else been asking after him?’

‘Just about anyone with a uniform and a badge, from what I hear. You a cop?’

‘Nope.’

‘Private?’ He drew back his cue slowly, aiming to put a stripe in the centre pocket.

‘I guess.’

‘You the one he hired?’

I lifted the stripe and the cue ball went straight into the pocket.

‘Hey!’ said Hamill. ‘Gimme back my ball.’ He sounded like a small, spoiled child, although I figured you’d have a hard time getting any mother to claim Hamill as her own.

‘Billy Purdue hired a private investigator?’ I said.

My tone betrayed me, for the look of profound unhappiness disappeared from Hamill’s face to be replaced by a greedy leer.

‘What’s it to you?’

‘I’m interested in talking to anyone who can help me to trace Billy. Who’s the PI?’ If Hamill didn’t tell me, I could probably find out by calling around, assuming that whomever he had hired would admit to working for him.

‘I wouldn’t want to get my amigo into trouble,’ said Hamill, rubbing his chin with a rough approximation of a thoughtful expression. ‘What’s your angle?’

‘I worked for his ex-wife.’

‘She’s dead. Hope you got paid up front.’

I hefted the pool ball in my hand and thought about letting fly at Hamill’s head. Hamill saw the intent in my face.

‘Look, I need some cash,’ he said, his manner softening. ‘Let me have something, I’ll give you his name.’

I took out my wallet and put a twenty on the table.

‘Shit, twenty bucks,’ spat Hamill. ‘You’re a regular Jack Benny without the laughs. It’ll cost more than that.’

‘I’ll give you more. I want the name.’

Hamill considered for a moment. ‘I don’t know his first name, but he’s called Wildon or Wifford or something.’

‘Willeford?’

‘Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Willeford.’

I nodded my thanks and moved off.

‘Hey! Hey!’ shouted Hamill, and I could hear his sneakered feet shuffling across the floor behind me. ‘What about my extra?’

I turned back. ‘Sorry, I almost forgot.’

I put a dime on top of the twenty and gave him a wink as I returned the ball to the table.

‘That’s for the crack about his ex-wife. Enjoy it in good health.’

I walked away and headed for the stairs.

‘Hey, Mr Trump,’ shouted Hamill at my retreating back. ‘You hurry back now, y’hear?’

Marvin Willeford wasn’t in his office, a one-desk job above an Italian restaurant across from the blue Casco Bay ferry terminal, but a handwritten sign on the door said he had gone to lunch – a long lunch, obviously. I asked in the restaurant where Willeford usually hung out and the waiter gave me the name of a waterfront bar, the Sail Loft Tavern at Commercial and Silver.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Portland harbour was a thriving centre for fishing and shipping. In those days, the wharves would be piled high with lumber bound for Boston and the West Indies. There would be lumber on them again soon, but now that wood was bound for China and the Middle East. Meanwhile, the redevelopment of the harbour, the building of new condos and stores to attract the tourists and the young professionals, was still the subject of controversy. It’s hard to have a proper working harbour when folks in tie-dyes and sandals are hanging around taking pictures of one another and eating snow-cones. The Sail Loft looked like a throwback to the old days, the kind of place some people liked to call home.

I knew Willeford to see but I had never spoken to him and knew almost nothing about his past. He looked older than I remembered when I found him at the dark bar, watching the rerun of a basketball game on TV surrounded by sea horses and starfish on the walls. I figured he must be in his early sixties by now, jowly and bald, with a few strands of white hair flicked across his skull like seaweed on a rock. His skin was pale, almost translucent, with a fine tracery of veins at his cheeks and a bulbous red nose pitted with craters, like a relief map of Mars. His features seemed misty and inexact, as if they were slowly dissolving into the alcohol that coursed through his system, gradually becoming blurred versions of their original form.

He held a beer in one hand, an empty shot glass beside it, and the remains of a sandwich and potato chips lay on a plate before him as he watched the screen. He didn’t slouch at the bar, though; he sat tall and straight, leaning slightly into the rest at the back of the chair.

‘Hi,’ I said as I took a seat beside him. ‘Marvin Wille-ford?’

‘He owe you money?’ asked Willeford, without removing his gaze from the screen.

‘Not yet,’ I replied.

‘Good. You owe him money?’

‘Not yet,’ I repeated.

‘Pity. Still, I’d keep it that way if I were you.’ He turned himself towards me. ‘What can I do for you, son?’

It felt odd to have someone call me ‘son’ at thirty-four. I almost felt compelled to show some ID. ‘My name’s Charlie Parker.’

He nodded in recognition. ‘I knew your grandaddy, Bob Warren. He was a good man. Hear you may be moving in on my patch, Charlie Parker.’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe. Hope there’ll be enough work for both of us. Buy you a beer?’

He drained his glass and called for a refill. I ordered coffee.

‘“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,”’ said Willeford sadly.

‘Tennyson,’ I said.

He smiled approvingly. ‘Nice to see there are still some romantics left.’ There was more to Willeford than long lunches in a dark bar. With his kind, there usually is.

He smiled and saluted with his new beer. ‘Well at least you’re not a total philistine, son. Y’know, I’ve been coming to this place for too many years. I look around and wonder how long more it’ll be here, now that they’re building fancy apartments and cute little stores on the port. Sometimes I think I ought to chain myself to some railings in protest, ‘cept I got a bad hip and the cold makes me want to pee.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘So, what brings you to my office, son?’

‘I was hoping you could tell me about Billy Purdue.’

He pursed his lips as he swallowed his beer. ‘This professional, or personal? ‘Cause if it’s personal, then we’re just talking, right? But if it’s professional, then you got your ethics, you got your client confidentiality, you got your poaching, although – and here I’m speaking personally, you understand – you want to take Billy Purdue as a client, then be my guest. He lacked some of the basic qualities I look for in a client, like money, though from what I hear he needs a lawyer more’n a PI.’

‘Let’s call it personal, then.’

‘Personal it is. He hired me to find his birth parents.’

‘When?’

‘Month or so back. He paid me two-fifty up front – in ones and fives, straight out of the cookie jar – but then couldn’t pay anything more, so I dropped him. He wasn’t real pleased about it, but business is business. Anyway, that boy was more trouble than arthritis.’

‘How far did you get?’

‘Well, I took the usual steps. I applied to the state for non-identifying information – you know, ages of the parents, professions, birth states, ethnicity. Got zilch, nada. The kid was found under a cabbage leaf.’

‘No birth records at all?’

He held up his hands in mock amazement, then took another huge mouthful of beer. I reckoned it took him three mouthfuls to a glass. I was right.

‘Well, I headed up to Dark Hollow. You know where that is, up north past Greenville?’ I nodded. ‘I had some other business up by Moosehead, figured I’d do Purdue a favour and carry on some of his work on my other client’s time. The last guy who fostered him lives up thataways, though he’s an old man now, older than me. His name’s Payne, Meade Payne. He told me that, far as he knew, Billy Purdue’s was originally a private adoption arranged through some woman in Bangor and the sisters at St Martha’s.’

St Martha’s rang a bell, but I couldn’t remember why. Willeford seemed to sense my struggle. ‘St Martha’s,’ he repeated. ‘Where that old lady killed herself few days back, the one who ran away. St Martha’s used to be a convent and the nuns took in women who had, you know, fallen by the wayside. Except now all the nuns are dead, or Alzheimered out, and St Martha’s is a private nursing home, strictly low end. Place smells of pee and boiled vegetables.’

‘So no records?’

‘Nothing. I looked through whatever files remained, which wasn’t a whole lot. They kept a record of the births and retained copies of the relevant documents, but there was nothing that matched Billy Purdue. It didn’t go through the books or, if it did, then somebody made sure to hide the traces. No one seemed to know why.’

‘You talk to this woman, the one who arranged the adoption?’

‘Lansing. Cheryl Lansing. Yeah, I spoke to her. She’s old too. Jeez, even her kids were getting old. All I seem to meet is old people – old people and clients. I think I need to make some young friends.’

‘People will talk,’ I said. ‘You’ll get a reputation.’

He laughed to himself. ‘Can you be a sugar daddy without having any cash?’

‘I don’t know. You could try, but I don’t think you’d get very far.’

He nodded and finished his beer. ‘Story of my life. Dead folks get more action than I ever did.’

So Cheryl Lansing was the woman who had arranged Billy Purdue’s adoption. She obviously had more than a professional interest in him, if she was still trying to help out his ex-wife and his son three decades later. I pictured the bag of clothes, and the box of food, and the small wad of bills in Rita Ferris’s hand. Cheryl Lansing had seemed like a nice woman. The news of the two deaths would hit her hard, I thought.

I called for another beer and Willeford thanked me. He was pretty stewed by now. I felt like a great guy, getting him so drunk that he wouldn’t be able to work for the rest of the day just so I could satisfy my crusading urge.

‘What about Cheryl Lansing?’ I pressed.

‘Well, she didn’t want to talk about Purdue. I kept at her but it was no use. All she would say was that the woman was from up north, that she arranged the adoption as a favour to the sisters, that she didn’t even know the woman’s name. Apparently, she made some money brokering adoptions for the nuns and passed on a portion of the proceeds to them, except this one was pro bono. She had a copy of a birth certificate, though, but the parents were John and Jane Doe. I figured there had to be a record of the birth somewhere.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Well, through what Payne could tell me and by checking the records, I found that most of the people who fostered Billy Purdue also came from up north. Farthest south he got was Bangor, until he left for Boston when he was old enough. So I asked questions, put up notices with approximate dates of birth, even took out an advertisement in some of the local papers, then sat around and waited. Anyway, the money had run out by then and I didn’t see as how Purdue would be able to come up with any more.

‘Then I got a call, saying I should talk to a woman in the old folks’ home up in Dark Hollow, which brought the focus back to St Martha’s.’ He paused and took a long slug of beer. ‘Well, I told Billy that I might have something and asked him if he wanted me to continue. He told me he had no more money, so I told him that, regretfully, I would have to cease our business relationship. Then he chewed me out some, threatened to smash up my office if I didn’t help him out. I showed him this –’ He pushed back his jacket to reveal a Colt Python with a long, eight-inch barrel. It made him look like an aging gunfighter. ‘And he went on his way.’

‘Did you give him the name of the woman?’

‘I would have given him the coat off my back to get rid of him. I figured it was time to beat a strategic retreat. If I’d retreated any faster, I’d have been going forward again.’

My coffee was cold in the mug before me. I leaned over the bar and poured it into a sink.

‘Any idea where Billy might be now?’

Willeford shook his head. ‘There is one more thing,’ he said.

I waited.

‘The woman in St Martha’s? Her name was Miss Emily Watts or, least, that’s what she called herself. That name ring a bell with you?’

I thought for a while but came up with nothing. ‘I don’t think so. Should it?’

‘She’s the old lady who died in the snow. Strange stuff, don’t you think?’

I remembered the full story now. The deaths of the men at Prouts Neck had forced it from the forefront of my memory.

‘You think Billy Purdue went to see her?’

‘I don’t know, but something spooked her enough to make her run off into the woods and kill herself when they tried to take her back.’

I stood and thanked him, then shrugged on my overcoat.

‘It was my pleasure, son. You know, you look something like your grandaddy. You act like him too and you’ll give no one cause to regret meeting you.’

I felt another pang of guilt. ‘Thanks. You want me to give you a ride anywhere?’

He shook his glass to order another beer, and called for a whiskey chaser as well. I put down ten bucks on the bar to cover it, and he raised the empty glass in salute.

‘Son,’ he said, ‘I ain’t goin’ nowhere.’

It was already growing dark when I left the bar and I pulled my coat tightly round me to protect myself from the cold. From off the harbour a wind came, running icy hands through my hair and rubbing my skin with chill fingers. I had parked the Mustang in the lot at One India, a corner of Portland with a dark history. One India was the original site of Fort Loyal, erected by the colonists in 1680. It only survived for ten years, before the French and their native allies captured it and butchered the one hundred and ninety settlers who had surrendered. Eventually, the India Street Terminal was built on the same spot, marking milepost 0.0 for the Atlantic and St Lawrence Railroad, the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada and the Canadian National Railways, when Portland was still an important rail centre. At One India, now occupied by an insurance company, it was still possible to see the sign for the Grand Trunk and Steamship Offices over the door.

The railroads had been gone for almost three decades now, although there was talk of rebuilding Union Station on St John and reopening the passenger railway from Boston. It was strange how things from the past, once thought lost and gone forever, should now be resurrected and made vivid once again in the present.

The windows of the Mustang were already beginning to frost over as I approached it, and a mist which sharpened every sound hung over the warehouses and the boats on the water. I was almost at the car when I heard the footsteps behind me. I began to turn, my coat now open, my right hand making a leisurely movement towards my gun, but something jammed into the small of my back and a voice said:

‘Let it go. Keep them wide.’

I kept my hands horizontally away from my sides. A second figure limped from my right, his left foot curved slightly inwards, distorting his walk, and took my gun from its holster. He was small, maybe five-four, and probably in his late forties. His hair was thick and black over brown eyes and his shoulders were wide beneath his overcoat, his stomach hard. He might even have been handsome, but for a harelip that slashed his soft cupid’s bow like a knife wound.

The second man was taller and bulkier, with long dark hair that hung over the collar of a clean white shirt. He had hard eyes and an unsmiling mouth that contrasted with the bright Winnie the Pooh tie neatly knotted at his neck. His head was almost square, set on wide, rectangular shoulders, with a thick muscular neck intervening. He moved the way a kid moves an action figure, loping from side to side without bending his knees. Together, the two made quite a pair.

‘Jeez, fellas, I think you may be a little late for trick or treat.’ I leaned conspiratorially towards the shorter guy. ‘And you know,’ I whispered, ‘if the wind changes direction, you’ll be left that way.’ They were cheap shots, but I didn’t like people sneaking around in the mist poking guns in my back. As Billy Purdue might have said, it was kind of rude.

The shorter guy turned my gun over in his hand, examining the third generation Smith & Wesson with an expert’s appreciation.

‘Nice piece,’ he said.

‘Give it back and I’ll show you how it works.’

He smiled a strange, jagged smile.

‘You gotta come with us.’ He waved me in the direction of India Street, where a pair of headlights had just flashed on in the darkness.

I looked back at the Mustang.

‘Shit,’ said Harelip, with a look of mock concern on his face. ‘You worried about your car?’

He flicked the safety on my gun and fired at the Mustang, blowing out the front and rear tyres on the driver’s side. From somewhere close by, a car alarm began to sound.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s gonna steal it now.’

‘I’ll remember you did that,’ I replied.

‘Uh-huh. You want me to spell my name for you, you let me know.’

The taller guy gave me a shove in the direction of the car, a silver Seven Series BMW, which moved over to us and swung to the right, the rear door popping open. Inside sat another handsome devil with short brown hair and a gun resting on his thigh. The driver, younger than the rest, popped bubble gum and listened to an AOR station on the car stereo. Bryan Adams came on as I climbed into the car, singing the theme song from Don Juan de Marco.

‘Any possibility we could change the station?’ I asked, as we drove off.

Beside me, Harelip prodded me hard with his gun.

‘I like this song,’ he said, humming along. ‘You got no soul.’

I looked at him. I think he was serious.

We drove to the Regency Hotel on Milk Street, the nicest hotel in Portland, which occupied the former site of an old red brick armory in the Old Port. The driver parked in back and we walked to the side entrance near the hotel gym, where another young guy in a neat black suit opened the door for us before speaking into a mike on his lapel to advise that we were on our way up. We took an elevator to the top floor, where Harelip knocked respectfully at the end door on the right. When it opened, I was led in and brought to meet Tony Celli.

Tony sat in a big armchair with his shoeless feet on a matching footstool. His black stockings were silk and his grey trousers were immaculately pressed. He wore a blue-striped shirt with a white collar and a dark red tie marked with an intricate pattern of black spirals. Gold gleamed at his white cuffs. He was clean shaven and his black hair was neatly combed and parted to one side. His eyes were brown beneath thin, plucked eyebrows. His nose was long and unbroken, his mouth a little soft, his chin a little fat. There were no rings on his fingers, which lay clasped in his lap. In front of him, the TV was tuned to the nightly financial report. On a table beside him lay a pair of headphones and a bug detector, indicating that the room had already been searched for listening devices.

I knew Tony Celli by reputation. He had worked his way up through the ranks, running porn shops and whores in Boston’s Combat Zone, paying his dues, gradually building up a power base. He took cash from the people below him and paid a lot of it to the people above him. He met his obligations and was now regarded as a hot tip for the future. I knew that he already had a certain amount of responsibility in money matters, based on a perception that he was gifted with financial acumen, a perception he now reinforced with his striped shirt and the attention he was paying to the stock prices that flashed past at the bottom of the screen.

I guessed that he was forty by now, certainly no more than that. He looked good. In fact, he looked like the sort of guy you could bring home to meet your mother, if you didn’t think that he’d probably torture her, fuck her, then dump her remains in Boston harbour.

The nickname Tony Clean had stuck for a number of reasons: his appearance was part of it, but mainly it was because Tony never got his hands dirty. People had washed a lot of blood off their hands for Tony’s sake, watching it spiral down into cracked porcelain bathtubs or stainless steel sinks, but Tony never got so much as a speck of it on his shirt.

I heard a story about him once, back ini99o when he was still slashing up pimps who forgot how territorial Tony could be. A guy called Stan Goodman, a Boston real estate developer, owned a weekend house in Rock-port, a big old gabled place with vast green lawns and an oak tree which was about two centuries old out by the boundary wall. Rockport’s a pretty nice place, a fishing village north of Boston at Cape Ann where you can still park for a penny and the Salt Water trolley will haul you around town for four dollars a day.

Goodman had a wife and two teenage children, a boy and a girl, and they loved that house as well. Tony offered Stan Goodman a lot of money for the house, but he refused. It had belonged to his father, he said, and his father had bought it from the original owner back in the forties. He offered to find Tony Clean a similar property nearby, because Stan Goodman figured that if he kept on the good side of Tony Clean then everything would turn out okay. Except Tony Clean didn’t have a good side.

One night in June, someone entered the Goodman house, shot their dog, bound and gagged the four members of the family and took them out to the old granite quarries at Halibut Point. My guess is that Stan Goodman died last, after they had killed his wife, his daughter and his son by placing their heads on a flat rock and cracking them open with a sledgehammer. There was a lot of blood on the ground when they were found the next morning, and I reckon it took the men who killed them a long time to wash it from their clothes. Tony Celli bought the house the following month. There were no other bidders.

The mere fact that Tony was here after what had taken place at Prouts Neck indicated that he wasn’t screwing around. Tony wanted that money, and he wanted it bad, and he was willing to risk bringing down heat on himself to find it.

‘You watch the news?’ he said at last. He didn’t look away from the screen, but I knew that the question was directed at me.

‘Nope.’

He looked at me for the first time.

‘You don’t watch any news?’

‘Nope.’

‘Why not?’

‘It depresses me.’

‘You must depress easy.’

‘I have a sensitive nature.’

He stayed quiet for a moment, returning his attention to the screen as the report detailed the collapse of some bank in Tokyo.

‘You don’t watch the news?’ he repeated, like I’d just told him I didn’t like sex or Chinese food. ‘Ever?’

‘Like you say, I depress easy. Even the weather forecast depresses me.’

‘That’s because you live here. Try living in California, then the forecast won’t depress you so much.’

‘I hear it’s sunny all year round.’

‘Yeah, it’s always sunny.’

‘Then I’d get depressed by the monotony.’

‘Doesn’t sound like you’re ever going to be truly happy.’

‘You may be right, but I try to stay cheerful.’

‘You’re so cheerful, I’m starting not to like you.’

‘That’s a real shame. I thought we could hang out together, maybe take in a movie.’

The financial report ended. He clicked off the TV using a manicured finger on the remote, then turned his full attention to me.

‘You know who I am?’ he said.

‘Yeah, I know who you are.’

‘Good. Then, being an intelligent man, you probably know why I’m here.’

‘Christmas shopping? Looking to buy a house?’

He smiled coldly. ‘I know all about you, Parker. You’re the one that took down the Ferreras.’ The Ferreras were a New York crime family, ‘were’ being the operative word. I had become mixed up in their business, and it had ended badly for them.

‘They took themselves down. I just watched.’

‘That’s not what I heard. A lot of people in New York would be happier if you were dead. They think you lack respect.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘So why aren’t you dead?’

‘I brighten up a dull world?’

‘They want to brighten up their world, they can turn on a light. Try again.’

‘Because they know I’ll kill whoever comes after me, then I’ll kill whoever sent them.’

‘I could kill you now. Unless you can come back from the dead, your threats aren’t going to disturb my sleep.’

‘I have friends. I’d give you a week, maybe ten days. Then you’d die too.’

He pulled a face, and a couple of the men around him snickered. ‘You play cards?’ he asked, when they had finished laughing.

‘Only solitaire. I like playing with someone I can trust.’

‘You know what “fucking the deck” means?’

‘Yeah, I know.’ Fucking the deck was something neophyte gamblers did: they screwed up the cards by making dumb calls. That was why some experienced gamblers didn’t play with amateurs, no matter how much money they had. There was always the chance that they’d fuck the deck so badly that the risk of losing increased to the extent that it wasn’t worth gambling.

‘Billy Purdue fucked my deck, and now I think you might be about to fuck my deck too. That’s no good. I want you to stop. First I want you to tell me what you know about Purdue. Then I’ll pay you to walk away.’

‘I don’t need money.’

‘Everybody needs money. I can pay whatever debts you owe, maybe make some others disappear.’

‘I don’t owe anybody.’

‘Everybody owes somebody.’

‘Not me. I’m free and clean.’

‘Or maybe you figure you got debts that money can’t pay.’

‘That’s very perceptive. What does it mean?’

‘It means I am running out of reasonable ways to alter your current course of action, Bird-man.’ He made a little quotation marks sign with his fingers as he spoke the last syllable, then his voice lowered and he stood up. Even in his stocking feet, he was taller than I was.

‘Now you listen to me,’ he said, when he was only inches from me. ‘Don’t make me tear your wings off. I hear you did some work for Billy Purdue’s ex-wife. I hear also that he gave you money, my money, to give to her. That makes you a very interesting individual, Birdman, because I figure you were one of the last people to talk to both of them before they went their separate ways. Now, do you want to tell me what you know so that you can go back to your little birdhouse and curl up for the night?’

I held his gaze. ‘If I knew anything useful and told you, my conscience wouldn’t let me sleep,’ I said. ‘As it happens, I don’t know anything, useful or otherwise.’

‘You know that Purdue has my money?’

‘Has he?’

He shook his head, almost in sorrow. ‘You’re going to make me hurt you.’

‘Did you kill Rita Ferris and her son?’

Tony took a step back then punched me hard in the stomach. I saw it coming and braced myself for the blow but the force was strong enough to send me to my knees. As I gasped for breath I heard a gun cock behind me and felt cold steel against my skull.

‘I don’t kill women and children,’ said Tony.

‘Since when?’ I replied. ‘New Year’s?’

A clump of my hair was gripped in someone’s hand and I was dragged to my feet, the gun still behind my ear.

‘How stupid are you?’ said Tony, rubbing the knuckles of his right hand. ‘You want to die?’

‘I don’t know anything,’ I repeated. ‘I did some work for his ex-wife as a favour, crossed swords with Billy Purdue and walked away. That’s all.’

Tony Clean nodded. ‘What were you talking to the rummy in the bar about?’

‘Something else.’

Tony drew his fist back again.

‘It was something else,’ I said again, louder this time. ‘He was a friend of my grandfather’s. I just wanted to look him up, that’s all. You’re right, he’s just a rummy. Leave him be.’

Tony stepped back, still rubbing his knuckles.

‘I find out you’re lying to me, you’ll die badly, you understand? And if you’re a smart guy, and not just a guy with a smart mouth, you’ll stay out of my affairs.’

The tone of his voice grew gentler, but his face hardened as he spoke again: ‘I’m sorry we have to do this to you, but I need to be sure that you understand what we’ve discussed. If at any point you feel you have something to add to what you’ve told me, just moan louder.’

He nodded at whoever was behind me and I was forced down to my knees again. A rag was stuffed in my mouth, and my arms were pulled back and then secured with cuffs. I looked up to see Harelip limping towards me. In his hand, he held a black metal rod. Crackling blue lightning danced along its length.

The first two shots from the cattle prod knocked me backwards and sent me spasming to the ground, my teeth gritted in pain against the rag. After the third or fourth contact I lost control of myself and blue flashes moved through the blackness of my mind until, at last, the clouds took me and all went quiet.

When I came to, I was lying behind my Mustang, hidden from anyone walking on the street. The tips of my fingers were raw and my coat glittered with crystals of frost. My head ached badly, my body still trembled and there was dried blood and vomit on the side of my face and the front of my coat. I smelt bad. I got unsteadily to my feet and checked my coat pockets. My gun was in one, its clip gone, and my cell phone was in the other. I called a cab and, while I waited for it to arrive, made a call to a mechanic over by the Veteran’s Memorial Bridge and asked him to take care of the car.

When I got back to Scarborough, the right side of my face had swollen badly and there were small burn marks where the prod had touched my skin. There were also two or three gashes on my head, one of them deep. I reckoned that Harelip had kicked me a couple of times for good measure. I put ice on my head and spray on the burns, then swallowed some painkillers, pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt to guard against the cold, and tried to sleep.

I don’t recall why I awoke, but when I opened my eyes the room seemed to hang between darkness and brightness, as if the universe had paused to draw a breath when the morning sun first sent shafts of light through the dark winter clouds.

And from somewhere in the house came a sound like the scuffling of feet, as if small delicate steps were padding over the floorboards. I drew my gun and rose. The floor was cold and the windows rattled gently. I opened the door slowly and stepped into the hallway.

To my right, a figure moved. I caught the motion out of the corner of my eye, so that I was not sure that I even saw a figure as such or merely a shifting of shadows in the kitchen. I turned and walked slowly to the back of the house, the boards creaking slightly beneath my feet.

Then I heard it: a soft burst of childlike laughter, a giggle of amusement, and the padding of feet again, moving to my left. I reached the entrance to the kitchen, the gun half raised, and turned in time to see another flash of movement by the door frame connecting the kitchen to the living room, to hear another cry of childish delight at the game we were playing. And I felt certain that what I had seen was a child’s foot, its sole protected by the enclosures of purple rompers. And I knew too that I had seen that tiny foot before and the remembrance of it made my throat go dry.

I entered the dining room. Something small waited for me beyond the far door. I could see its form in the shadows and the light in its eyes, but no more than that. As I moved in its direction, the form shifted and I heard the front door creak open on its hinges and impact against the wall, the wind now rushing through the house, pulling at the drapes, setting frames rattling and raising spirals of dust in the hallway.

I walked faster now. As I reached the door, I caught another glimpse of the little figure, something dressed in purple that flitted between the trees, moving farther and farther into the darkness beyond. I stepped from the porch and into the yard, felt the grass beneath my feet, the small stones digging into the soles, and tensed as something tiny and multilegged scuttled across my toes. I stood at the verge of the woods, and I was afraid.

She was waiting for me there. She stood unmoving, masked by bushes and trees that hid her body from me, her face now obscured by the shadows of branches, now clear again. Her eyes were full of blood and the thick black thread wove back and forth across her face like the crudely constructed mouth of an old cloth doll. She stood there unspeaking, watching me from the woods, and behind her the smaller figure danced and skipped in the undergrowth.

I closed my eyes and concentrated, trying to wake myself, but the cold in my feet was real, and the throbbing pain in my head, and the sound of the child’s laughter carrying on the wind.

I felt movement behind me and something touched me on the shoulder. I almost turned, but the pressure on my shoulder increased and I knew that I must not turn, that I was not meant to see what stood at my back. I looked to my left, to the point of pressure, and I could not restrain the shudder that ran through my body. I closed my eyes instantly but what I had seen was imprinted on my mind like an image seen against bright sunlight.

The hand was soft and white and delicate, with long, tapering fingers. A wedding band gleamed in the strange, predawn light.

bird

How many times had I heard that voice whisper to me in the darkness, a prelude to the soft caress of a warm hand, the feel of her breath against my cheek, my lips, her small breasts hard against my body, her legs like ivy curling around me? I had heard it in times of love and passion when we were happy together, in moments of anger and rage and sadness as our marriage fell apart. And I had heard it since in the rustling of leaves on the grass and the sound of branches rubbing against one another in the autumn breezes, a voice that carried from far away and called to me from the shadows.

Susan, my Susan.

bird

The voice was close now, almost beside my ear, but I could feel no breath on my skin.

help her

In the woods beyond, the woman watched me, her red eyes wide and unblinking.

How?

find him

Find who? Billy?

The fingers tightened their grip.

yes

He’s not my responsibility.

they are all your responsibility

And in the patches of moonlight beneath the trees, shapes twisted and turned, suspended above the earth, their feet not touching the ground, and their ruined stomachs shone dark and wet. All of them, my responsibility.

Then the pressure on my shoulder eased and I sensed her moving away. Ahead of me came a sound from the undergrowth and the woman who had been Rita Ferris receded into the trees. I caught a final glimpse of purple moving swiftly beyond the line of trees, laughter like music carrying back to me.

And I saw something else.

I saw a small girl with long blonde hair who looked back at me with something like love before she followed her playmate into the darkness.

Chapter Nine

I woke to a bright room, winter sunlight spearing through a gap in the drapes. My head ached and my jaw felt stiff and sore where I had gritted my teeth as the shocks hit my body. It was only when I sat up and the pain in my head increased that I remembered my dream from the night before, if a dream were what it was.

My bed was full of leaves and twigs, and there was mud on my feet.

I had some homeopathic remedies which Louis had recommended to me, so I took them with a glass of water while I waited for the shower to heat up. I downed a combination of phosphorus, to combat nausea, and gelsemium, which Louis claimed countered feelings of shakiness. I also took some hypericum, which was supposed to act as a natural painkiller. Frankly, I felt like a flake taking the stuff but there was no one around to see me do it, so that made it all right.

I started a pot of coffee, filled a mug and watched it grow cold on the kitchen table. I felt pretty low and was considering taking up a different – profession gardening, maybe, or lobster fishing. After the coffee had developed a nice film, I called Ellis Howard. I figured that, since he had turned up at Lester Biggs’s place, Ellis was taking a hands-on approach to the case. It took a while for him to come to the phone. He was probably still sore over the Biggs affair.

‘You’re awake early,’ were his first words when he got to the phone. I could hear him sigh as he eased his bulk into a chair. I could even hear the chair squeaking in protest. If Ellis had sat on me, I’d have squeaked too.

‘I could say the same about you,’ I said. ‘I trust you’ve had your coffee and doughnuts?’

‘Mine, and someone else’s. You aware that Tony Celli turned up in town yesterday?’

‘Yeah. Bad news travels fast.’ Particularly when it’s being passed into your jaw in the form of an electric current.

‘He blew out again this morning. Looks like he’s gone to ground.’

‘It’s a shame. I thought he was going to move here and open a florist’s.’

At the other end of the phone there was the sound of the receiver being covered, a muffled exchange and then the rustling of papers. Then: ‘So what do you want, Bird?’

‘I wanted to know if there was any movement on Rita Ferris, or Billy Purdue, or on that Coupe de Ville.’

Ellis laughed dully. ‘Ixnay on the first two, but the third one is interesting. Turns out the Coupe de Ville is a company car, registered to one Leo Voss, a lawyer in Boston.’ There was a pause on the other end of the line. I waited until I realised that, once again, I was supposed to be playing the role of straight man in a conversation.

‘But . . . ?’ I said at last.

‘But,’ said Ellis, ‘Leo Voss is no longer with us. He’s dead, died six days ago.’

‘Damn, a dead lawyer. Only another million to go.’

‘We live in hope,’ said Ellis.

‘Did he fall, or was he pushed?’

‘That’s the interesting part. His secretary found him and called the cops. He was sitting behind his desk still dressed in his running outfit – sneakers, socks, T-shirt, sweatpants – with an opened bottle of mineral water in front of him. Their first impression was that he’d had a heart attack. According to the secretary, he’d been feeling ill for a day or too. He thought it might be flu.

‘But when he was autopsied, there was evidence of inflammation of the nerves in the hands and feet. He’d also lost some hair, probably only in the previous day or two. Tests on a hair sample turned up traces of thallium. You know what thallium is?’

‘Yeah, I know.’ My grandfather had used it as ratbait, until its sale was restricted. It was a metallic element, similar to lead or mercury, but far more poisonous. Its salts were soluble in water, almost tasteless and produced symptoms similar to influenza, meningitis or encephalitis. A lethal dose of thallium sulphate, maybe eight hundred milligrams or more, could kill in anything from twenty-four to forty hours.

‘So what sort of work did this Leo Voss do?’ I asked.

‘Fairly straightforward stuff, mainly corporate, although what he did must have been pretty lucrative. He had a house in Beacon Hill, a summer place in the Vineyard, and still had some money in the bank, probably because he was single and there was no one putting fur coats on his credit card.’

Doreen, I thought. If Ellis could have afforded it, he’d have pasted pictures of her outside churches as a warning to others.

‘They’re still going through his files, but he seems to have been squeaky clean,’ concluded Ellis.

‘Which probably means that he wasn’t.’

Ellis tut-tutted. ‘Such cynicism in one so young. Now I’ve got something for you: I hear you were talking to Willeford.’

‘That’s right. Is that a problem?’

‘Could be. He’s gone, and I’m starting to resent arriving in places to find that you’ve already been there. It’s making me feel inadequate, and I get enough of that at home.’

I felt my grip tighten on the phone. ‘Last I saw of him, he was sitting in the Sail Loft nursing a drink.’

‘Willeford never nursed a drink in his life. They don’t survive in the glass long enough to be nursed. He give any indication that he might be planning to go away somewhere?’

‘No, nothing.’ I recalled Tony’s Celli’s interest in Willeford and felt my mouth go dry.

‘What did you two talk about?’

I paused before I spoke. ‘He did some work for Billy Purdue: tracing of birth parents.’

‘That it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘He have any luck?’

‘I don’t think so.’

Ellis went quiet, then said distinctly: ‘Don’t hold back on me, Bird. I don’t like it.’

‘I’m not.’ It wasn’t quite a lie, but I’m not sure that it qualified as the truth either. I waited for Ellis to say something more, but he didn’t push the issue.

‘Stay out of trouble, Bird,’ was all he said, before he hung up.

I had just finished cleaning off the table and was in my bedroom slipping on my boots when I heard the sound of a car pulling up outside. Through the gap in the drapes I could see the rear of a gold Mercury Sable parked near the side of the house. I took my Smith & Wesson, wrapped it in a towel and walked onto the porch. And as I stepped into the cold morning sunlight, I heard a voice that I knew say:

‘Why would anybody plant so many trees? I mean, who has that kind of time? I can’t even find time to get my laundry done.’

Angel stood with his back to me, staring out at the trees at the edge of my property. He wore a Timberland fleece top, a pair of brown corduroy pants and tan work boots. At his feet was a hard plastic suitcase that was so pitted and battered it looked like it had been dropped from an airplane. A piece of blue climbing rope and the whim of fortune held it closed.

Angel breathed in deeply then bent over as his body was racked by a fit of coughing. He spat something large and unpleasant onto the ground before him.

‘That’s the clean air getting the shit out of your lungs,’ said a deep, drawling voice. From behind the raised trunk door of the car Louis appeared holding a matching Delsey case and suit carrier. He wore a black Boss overcoat beneath which a grey double-breasted suit shimmered. A black shirt was buttoned to the neck and his shaved head gleamed. In the open trunk, I could see a long, metal storage case. Louis never went anywhere without his toys.

‘I think that was my lung,’ said Angel, using the tip of his boot to poke with interest at whatever piece of matter had expelled itself from his body. As I looked at them both, my spirits lifted. I wasn’t sure why they were here instead of back in New York but, whatever the reason, I was glad. Louis glanced at me and nodded, which was usually as close as Louis ever came to looking pleased about anything.

‘You know, Angel,’ I said, ‘you make nature look untidy just by standing there.’

Angel turned and raised an arm in a sweeping gesture.

‘Trees,’ he said, shaking his head in bafflement and smiling. ‘So many trees. I ain’t seen this many trees since I got thrown out of the Indian Scouts.’

‘You know, I don’t think I even want to know why,’ I said.

Angel picked up his case. ‘Bastards. And I was just about to get my explorer’s badge too.’

‘Didn’t think they had badges for the shit you was exploring,’ said Louis, from behind. ‘Badge like that could get a man thrown in jail in Georgia.’

‘Funny,’ barked Angel. ‘It’s just a myth that you can’t be gay and do macho things.’

‘Uh-huh. Just like it’s a myth that all homosexuals wear nice clothes and take care of their skin.’

‘That better not be aimed at me.’

It was nice to see that some things hadn’t changed.

‘How you doin’ today?’ said Angel, as he pushed past me. ‘And lose the gun. We’re staying, like it or not. You look like shit, by the way.’

‘Nice suit,’ I remarked to Louis, as he followed Angel.

‘Thanks,’ he replied. ‘Never forget: no such thing as a brother with no taste, just a brother with no money.’

I stood on the porch for a moment, feeling a little stupid holding the towel-wrapped gun. Then, figuring that the matter had obviously been decided long before they got to Maine, I followed them into the house.

I showed them to the spare bedroom, where the furniture consisted only of a mattress on the floor and an old closet.

‘Jesus,’ said Angel. ‘It’s the Hanoi Hilton. If we knock on the pipes, someone better answer.’

‘You gonna supply sheets, or we have to roll some drunks and steal their coats?’ asked Louis.

‘I can’t sleep here,’ said Angel, with an air of finality. ‘If the rats want to feed on me, fuckers should at least have to go to the trouble of climbing up a bedframe.’

He brushed past me again and, seconds later, I heard his voice call:

‘Hey, this one’s much nicer. We’ll take this.’

There came the unmistakable sound of someone bouncing up and down on my bed. Louis looked at me.

‘Might need that gun after all,’ he said. Then he shrugged and followed the sound of the springs.

When I eventually got them out of my bedroom and had arranged to have some extra furniture, including a bed, taken out of the Kraft Mini-Storage on Gorham Road and delivered to the house, we sat around the kitchen table and I waited for them to tell me why they were here. It had begun to rain: hard, cold drops that spoke of the coming of snow.

‘We’re your fairy godparents,’ said Angel.

‘I’m not sure that was meant to be taken quite so literally,’ I replied.

‘Maybe we just heard that this is the place to be,’ continued Angel. ‘Anybody who’s anybody is here right now. You got your Tony Celli, you got your feds, you got your local shit-kickers, you got your dead Asians. Shit, this place is like the UN with guns.’

‘What do you know?’ I asked.

‘We know that you’ve been pissing people off already,’ he replied. ‘What happened to your face?’

‘Guy with a harelip tried to educate me with a cattle-prod, then rearranged my hair-line with his shoe.’

Angel grimaced in sympathy. ‘Guys with harelips, they just want to share their physical defects with everybody.’

‘That’s Mifflin,’ said Louis. ‘He have another guy with him, looked like someone dropped a safe on his head and the safe lost?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘He didn’t kick me, though.’

‘That’s ‘cause the message probably got halfway from his brain to his foot then forgot where it was going. His name’s Berendt. He’s so dumb he makes dirt look smart. Tony Clean was with them?’ While he spoke, he balanced one of my carving knives on the tip of his index finger and amused himself by tossing it in the air and catching it by the handle. It was a pretty neat trick. If the circus came to town, he was a shoo-in.

‘They were staying at the Regency,’ I said. ‘I got to visit Tony’s room.’

‘Was it nice?’ said Angel, pointedly running a hand along the underside of the table and examining the accumulated dust on the tips of his fingers.

‘Yeah, pretty nice, apart from the kicks in the head and the electric shocks.’

‘Fuck him. We should make him stay here. A bit of squalor would put him back in touch with his roots.’

‘You criticize my house again, you can sleep in the yard.’

‘Probably be cleaner,’ he muttered. ‘And warmer.’

Louis tapped a long, slim finger gently on the tabletop. ‘Hear there’s a lot of money got misdirected around these parts. A lot of money.’

‘Yeah, so I gather.’

‘Any idea where it is?’

‘Maybe. I think it’s with a guy called Billy Purdue.’

‘That’s what I hear too.’

‘From Tony Celli’s end?’

‘Disaffected employees. They figure this Billy Purdue’s so dead, someone should name a cemetery after him.’

I told them about the deaths of Rita and Donald. I noticed Angel and Louis exchange a glance and I knew that there was more to come.

‘Billy Purdue take out Tony’s men?’ asked Angel.

‘Two of them, at least. Assuming he’s the one who took the money, and that’s what Tony Celli and the law have assumed.’

Louis stood and carefully washed his mug. ‘Tony’s in trouble,’ he said at last. ‘Got involved in some deal on Wall Street that fell through.’ I had heard stories that the Italians had moved into Wall Street, establishing paper companies and getting crooked brokers to float them and rip off investors. There was a lot of money to be made if it was done right.

‘Tony screwed up,’ continued Louis, ‘and now you got a guy whose days are numbered in single figures.’

‘How bad is it?’

Louis placed the mug upside down to drain, then leaned against the sink. ‘You know what PERLS is?’

‘PERLS are,’ I corrected him, incorrectly as it turned out. ‘Things found in oysters?’

‘Not unless an oyster can take you for one-point-five mil. Easy to know you never had no money to invest.’

‘I live an ascetic existence, like Father Damien without the lepers.’

‘PERLS,’ said Louis, ‘stands for Principal Exchange Rate Linked Security. It’s a structured note, a kind of bond sold by investment banks. It’s packaged to look safe, except it’s risky as sex with a shark. Basically, the buyer bets a certain amount of money and the return is based on the changes in the exchange rate of a number of different currencies. It’s a formula, and if things go right, you can make a killing.’

I always found it fascinating that Louis could drop the monosyllabic black gunman shtick if the subject required it, but I didn’t point it out to him.

‘So Tony Celli thinks he’s a financial wizard, and some people in Boston believe him,’ he went on. ‘He takes care of laundering, passes a lot of money through offshore banks and paper companies, until it finds its way back into the right accounts. He deals with the accountants, but he’s also the first point of contact for any cash. He’s like the thinnest part of an hourglass: everything has to go through him to get to somewhere else. And sometimes, Tony makes a few investments on the side using other people’s money, or makes a little on currency exchanges, and keeps what he makes. No one cares, long as he doesn’t get too greedy.’

‘Let me guess,’ I interrupted. ‘Tony got too greedy.’

Louis nodded. ‘Tony’s tired of being an Indian and now he wants to be a chief. He figures he needs money to do that, more than he’s got. So he gets talking to some derivatives salesman who doesn’t have a fucking clue who Tony is beyond the fact that he’s a wop in a striped shirt with money to spend, because Tony is trying to keep his dealings as low-key as possible. He convinces Tony to buy a variation on these PERLS, linked to the difference between the value of some south-east Asian currencies and a basket of other currencies – dollars, Swiss francs, German marks, I heard – and pockets the commission. The thing is so dangerous it should be ticking, but Tony buys in for one and a half million dollars, most of which isn’t his own money, because there are midwestern insurance companies and pension funds in on the deal too and Tony figures wrongly that they’re too conservative to bet on a risky hand. It’s purely a short-term investment, and Tony figures he’ll have his money made before anybody notices he’s holding onto the cash for longer than usual.’

‘So what happened?’

‘You read the papers. The yen plummets, banks fail, the whole economy of south-east Asia starts to come unstuck. The value of Tony’s bonds falls by ninety-five per cent in forty-eight hours, and his life expectancy falls by roughly the same amount. Tony sends some people to look for the salesman and they find him in Zip City down on 18th Street, laughing about how he ripped some guy’s face off, ‘cause that’s what these salesmen call it when they sell someone an exploding bond.’

And with those words, according to Louis, the salesman had signed his own death warrant. He was taken when he went to the bathroom, brought to a basement in Queens and tied to a chair. Then Tony came in, stuck his fingers in the soft flesh beneath the guy’s chin, and started to pull. It took him less than two minutes to tear the guy’s face apart, then they put him in a car and beat him to death in some woods upstate.

Louis picked up the knife again, gave it a couple of extra spins for good luck, then put it back in its wooden block. There was no blood on his fingertip, despite the pressure of the knifepoint. ‘So Tony’s in the hole for the cash, and some people higher up start getting concerned about the length of time it’s taking for their money to reach them. Then Tony gets lucky: some mook in Toronto, who owes Tony big time, tells him about this old Cambodian guy living the quiet life in Hamilton, south of the city. It seems the old man was Khmer Rouge, used to be a deputy director in the Tuol Seng camp in Phnom Peng.’

I had heard of Tuol Seng. It had once been a school in the Cambodian capital, but was converted into a place of torture and execution by the Khmer Rouge when they took over the country. Tuol Seng had been run by the big-eared camp director known as Comrade Deuch, who had used whips, chains, poisonous reptiles and water to torture and kill maybe sixteen thousand people, including westerners who strayed too close to the Cambodian coast.

‘Seems like this old man had friends in Thailand, and made a lot of money on the side by acting as a conduit for heroin smuggling,’ said Louis. ‘When the Vietnamese invaded, he disappeared and reinvented himself as a restaurateur in Toronto. His daughter had just started school in Boston, so Tony targeted her, took her and sent her old man a ransom demand to cover his debts, and then some. The old man couldn’t go to the cops because of his past, and Tony gave him seventy-two hours to comply, though his daughter was already dead by then. The old man comes up with the money, sends his men down to Maine for the drop and – bam! – it all goes haywire.’

That explained the presence of the Toronto cop, Eldritch. I mentioned him to Louis and he raised a slim finger. ‘One more thing: at the same time that the killings were going down here, the old man’s house in Hamilton burned to the ground, with him, the rest of his family and his personal guards still in it. Seven people, all told. Tony wanted it to be clean, because he’s a clean kind of guy.’

‘So Tony’s got a price on his head and then Billy Purdue takes his get-out-of-jail-free card,’ I remarked. ‘Now, you want to tell me what that look that passed between you and Angel was about?’ When Louis had finished talking, Angel had once again glanced at him in a way that told me that there was something more to hear, and it wasn’t good.

Louis watched as the rain speckled the window.

‘You got more problems than Tony and the law,’ he said quietly. His face was serious, his expression mirrored by the usually ebullient Angel.

‘How bad?’

‘Don’t think it gets any worse. You ever hear of Abel and Stritch?’

‘No. What do they do, make soap?’

‘They kill people.’

‘With all due respect, that hardly makes them unique in the present company.’

‘They enjoy it.’

And for the next half hour, Louis traced the path of the two men known only as Abel and Stritch, a trail marked by torture, burnings, gassings, casual sexual homicide, the rape and violent abuse of women and children, paid and unpaid assassinations. They broke bones and spilled blood; they electrocuted and asphyxiated. Their trail wound its way around the world like a coil of barbed wire, stretching from Asia and South Africa to South and Central America, through every trouble spot where people might pay to have their enemies terrorised and killed, whether those enemies were guerillas, agents of the government, peasants, priests, nuns or children.

Louis told me of an incident in Chile, when a family suspected of harbouring Mapuche Indians was targeted by agents of Pinochet’s National Intelligence Directorate. The family’s three sons, aged seventeen, eighteen and twenty, were taken to the basement of an abandoned office building, gagged and tied to the concrete supports of the building. Their mother and sisters were led in and forced at gunpoint to sit facing the men. Nobody spoke.

Then a figure had appeared from the darkness at the back of the room, a squat, pale man with a bald head and dead eyes. Another man remained in the shadows, but they could see his cigarette flare occasionally and could smell the smoke he exhaled.

In his right hand, the pale man held a large, five-hundred watt soldering iron, adapted so that its glowing tip was almost half an inch long and burned at two or three hundred degrees. He walked to the youngest son, pulled back the boy’s shirt and applied the tip to his breast, just below the sternum. The iron hissed as it entered the flesh, and the smell of burning pork filled the room. The boy struggled as the iron went deeper and deeper, and muffled noises of panic and pain came from his mouth. His tormentor’s eyes had changed now, had become bright and alive, and his breathing came in short, excited gasps. With his free hand, he fumbled at the zipper of the boy’s pants, and he reached in and held him as the iron moved upward towards the boy’s heart. As it pierced the wall of muscle, the pale man’s grip tightened and he smiled as the boy shook and died.

The women told them what they knew, which was little, and the other boys died quickly, as much because the pale man had spent himself as because of what had been revealed.

Now these men had come north, north as far as Maine.

‘Why are they here?’ I said at last.

‘They want the money,’ said Louis. ‘Men like them, they make enemies. If they’re good at what they do, most of those enemies don’t live long enough to do them any harm. But the longer they keep working, the more the chances of someone slipping through the net increase. These two have been killing for decades. The clock is ticking on them now. That money would help to provide a pretty cool retirement fund. I got a feeling they may be calling on you, which is why we’re here.’

‘What do they look like?’ I asked, but I already had my suspicions.

‘That’s the problem. Nothing on Abel, ‘cept he’s tall with silver, almost white, hair. But Stritch, the torturer . . . The guy is a fucking freak-show: small, with a wide, bald head, a mouth like an open wound. Looks like Uncle Fester but without the good nature.’

I thought of the strange, goblinlike man outside the inn, the same man who had later turned up at Java Joe’s ostensibly proselytising for the Lord, with his crudely-drawn picture of a mother and child and his soft, implicit threats.

‘I’ve seen him,’ I said.

Louis wiped his hand across his mouth. I had never before found him so concerned about the threat posed by anyone. In my mind, I still had an image of the darkness coming alive in an old warehouse back in Queens and one of the city’s most feared killers rising up on his toes, his mouth wide, as Louis’s blade entered the base of his skull. Louis didn’t frighten easily. I told him about the car and the encounter in the coffee shop, and the lawyer named Leo Voss.

‘My guess is that Voss was their point of contact, the guy people came to if they wanted to hire Abel and Stritch,’ said Louis. ‘If he’s dead, then they killed him. They’re closing down the operation, and they don’t want no loose ends. If Stritch is here, then so is Abel. They don’t work separately. He make any other move?’

‘No. I got the feeling he just wanted to make his presence felt.’

‘Takes a special guy to drive around in a dead man’s Caddy,’ said Angel. ‘Kind of guy who wants to draw attention to himself.’

‘Or away from someone else,’ I said.

‘He’s watching,’ said Louis. ‘So is his partner, somewhere. They’re waiting to see if you can lead them to Billy Purdue.’ He thought for a moment. ‘The woman and the boy, were they tortured?’

I shook my head. ‘The woman was strangled. No sign of other injuries or sexual assault. The boy died because he got in the way.’ I recalled the sight of Rita Ferris’s mouth as the cops turned her over. ‘There was one thing: the killer sewed the woman’s mouth shut with black thread after she died.’

Angel screwed up his face. ‘Makes no sense.’

‘Makes no sense if it’s Abel and Stritch,’ agreed Louis. ‘They’d have ripped her fingers off and hurt the boy to find out what she knew about the money. Doesn’t sound like their work.’

‘Or Tony Celli’s,’ added Angel.

‘The cops think Billy may have killed them,’ I said. ‘It’s possible, but there’s still no reason for him to mutilate the mouth.’

We were silent then as we balanced and weighed what we knew. I think we all moved towards the same conclusion, but it was left to Louis to voice it:

‘There’s someone else.’

Outside, the rain fell hard, hammering on the tiles and raking at the windowpanes. I felt a coldness at my shoulder, or perhaps it was just the memory of a touch, and the voice of the rain seemed to whisper to me in a language that I could not comprehend.

A couple of hours later, a truck arrived with some of my furniture and we set up a bed in the spare room, added some throw rugs and generally made the place look like a home away from home, as long as the original home was nothing too fancy. Then, when we had all freshened up, we drove into Portland, past the blue-and-white lights of the Christmas tree at Congress Square and the second, larger tree at Monument Square. We parked the car, then strolled down to the Stone Coast Brewing Company on York Street, where Angel and Louis drank microbrew beer while we decided where to eat.

‘You got a sushi bar around here?’ asked Louis.

‘I don’t eat seafood,’ I said.

‘You don’t eat seafood?’ Louis’s voice rose an octave. ‘The fuck you mean, you don’t eat seafood? You live in Maine. Lobsters practically hand you a knife and fork and invite you to chew on their ass.’

‘You know I don’t eat seafood,’ I replied patiently. ‘It’s just a thing.’

‘It’s not just a thing, man, it’s a phobia.’

Beside me, Angel smiled. It was good to be out like this, to be acting in this way, after what we had spoken of earlier.

‘Sorry,’ I continued, ‘but I draw the line at anything with more than four legs, or no legs at all. I bet you even eat the lungs out of crabs.’

‘Lungs, the crab juice . . .’

‘That’s not juice, Louis, it’s the contents of their digestive system. Why do you think it’s yellow?’

He waved a hand dismissively. ‘Ain’t no crab shit in sushi anyways.’

Angel drained the last of his beer. ‘Well I’m with Bird on this one,’ he said. ‘Last time I was in LA I ate in a sushi bar. Pretty much ate them out of anything that had gills. Went outside, took one last look in the window, and the place had a “C” grading from the health department. A fucking “C”! I might eat in a burger joint with a “C” grade, worst you could expect would be a dose of Ronald McDonald’s Revenge, but C-graded sushi . . . Man, that stuff 11 kill you. Damn fish was so bad, it almost pulled a gun and tried to steal my wallet.’

Louis put his head in his hands and prayed to whomever it was that people like Louis prayed to – Smith & Wesson, probably.

We ate in Tony’s Thai Taste on Wharf Street, down in the Old Port. As it happened, sitting three tables away from us were Samson and Doyle, the two feds I had seen at Rita Ferris’s apartment, and the Toronto policeman, Eldritch. They gave us interested but unfriendly looks, then went back to their red curries.

‘Friends of yours?’ said Angel.

‘The federal boys, plus their cousin from north of the border.’

‘Feds got no reason to like you, Bird. Not that they need a reason not to like anyone.’

Our own food came: one Paradise Chicken for Louis and two chefs favourites for Angel and me, made up of beef with peppers, pineapple and green peas, spiced with lemon grass and a garlic and chili sauce. Louis caught the smell of the garlic and wrinkled his nose. I figured no one would be kissing either of us good night tonight.

We ate in silence. The feds and Eldritch left in the course of our meal. I got the feeling that I’d be hearing from them again. When they were gone, Louis dabbed his lips carefully with a napkin and drained the last of his Tsing-Tsao beer. ‘You got a plan of campaign on the Billy Purdue thing?’

I shrugged. ‘I’ve asked around, but he’s gone to earth. Part of me says that he’s here, but another part tells me that he may be heading north. If he’s in trouble, my guess is that he may look for someone who’s been sympathetic to him in the past, and those people are precious few. There’s a guy up by Moosehead Lake in a place called Dark Hollow, acted as Billy Purdue’s foster parent for a time. It may be that he knows something, or has heard from him.’

I told them about my conversation in the bar with Willeford and his subsequent disappearance. ‘I’m also going to pay a call on Cheryl Lansing, see if she can add anything to what she told Willeford.’

‘Sounds like your curiosity’s been sparked,’ remarked Angel.

‘Maybe, but . . .’

‘But?’

I didn’t want to tell him about my experience the night before, no matter how much I trusted him. That was the stuff of madness. ‘But I owe something to Rita and her son. And, anyhow, it seems like other people have decided to involve me whether I like it or not.’

‘Ain’t that always the way?’

‘Yeah.’ I reached into my wallet, took out the bill from the furniture removal firm and waved it pointedly at Angel. ‘Ain’t that always the way?’ I echoed.

He smiled. ‘Take that attitude and we might never leave.’

‘Don’t even go there, Angel,’ I warned. ‘And pick up the check. It’s the least you can do.’

Chapter Ten

I woke late and refreshed for the trip to Bangor. Angel and Louis were still in bed, so I drove to Oak Hill, intending to stop off at the bank to withdraw some cash for the trip north. But when I had finished, I headed on down Old County Road, then onto Black Point Road and past the White Caps Sandwich Shop until I reached Ferry Road. To my left was the golf course, to my right the summer homes, and ahead of me was the parking lot where the men had died. The rain had washed away the evidence, but lengths of tattered crime scene tape still fluttered on one of the barriers as the wind howled in off the sea.

As I stood, taking in the scene, a car pulled up behind me, a cruiser driven by one of the Neck cops.

‘You okay, sir?’ he asked, as he stepped from the car.

‘Yeah, just looking,’ I replied. ‘I live up on Spring Street.’

He sized me up, then nodded. ‘I recognise you now. Sorry, sir, but after what happened here, we have to be careful.’

I waved a hand at him, but he seemed to be in the mood for conversation. He was young, certainly younger than I was, with straw-coloured hair and soft, serious eyes. ‘Strange business,’ he said. ‘It’s usually pretty quiet and peaceful here.’

‘You from around these parts?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘No sir. Flint, Michigan. Moved east after GM screwed us over, and started again here. Best move I ever made.’

‘Yeah, well, this place hasn’t always been so peaceful.’ My grandfather could trace his family’s roots back to the mid seventeenth century, maybe two decades after Scarborough was first settled in 1632 or 1633. Back then, the whole area was called Black Point and the settlement was abandoned twice because of attacks by the natives. In 1677, the Wabanaki had attacked the English fort at Black Point on two occasions, killing over forty English soldiers and a dozen of their Indian allies from the Protestant mission village at Natick, near Boston. Maybe ten minutes by car from where we were standing was Massacre Pond, where Richard Hunnewell and nineteen others had died in an Indian attack in 1713.

Now, with its summer homes and its yacht club, its bird sanctuary and its tennis courts, it was easy to forget that this was once a violent, troubled place. There was blood beneath the ground here, layer upon layer of it like the marks left in rock faces by seas that had ceased to exist hundreds of millions of years before. I sometimes felt that places retained memories – houses, lands, towns, mountains, all holding within themselves the ghosts of past experiences – and that history had a way of repeating itself that might lead a man to believe that sometimes these places acted just like magnets, attracting bad luck and violence to them like iron filings. In that way of thinking, once a lot of blood was spilled somewhere then there was a pretty good chance that it would be spilled there again.

If that was true, then it wasn’t strange that eight men should have ended their lives so bloodily here. It wasn’t strange at all.

When I returned to the house I toasted some English muffins, made some coffee to go with them and had a quiet breakfast in the kitchen while Louis and Angel showered and dressed.

We had decided the night before that Louis would stay at the house, maybe take a look round Portland and see if he could find any signs of Abel and Stritch. Also, in the event that anything developed while we were away, he could call me on the cell phone and let me know.

Portland to Bangor is one hundred and twenty five miles north on I-95. As we drove, Angel flipped through my cassette tape collection impatiently, listening to something for one or two songs then discarding it on the back seat. The Go-Betweens, The Triffids, The Gourds out of Austin, Jim White, Doc Watson, they all ended up in the pile, so that the car started to look like an A&R man’s nightmare. I put on a Lambchop cassette, and the gentle, sad chords of I Will Drive Slowly filled the car.

‘What’d you say this is?’ asked Angel.

‘Alternative country,’ I replied.

‘That’s when your truck starts, your wife comes back and your dog gets resurrected,’ he snickered.

‘Willie Nelson heard you talking like that, he’d whip your ass.’

‘This the same Willie Nelson whose wife once tied him up in a bedsheet and beat him unconscious with a broom handle? That pothead comes after me, I reckon I can handle myself.’

Eventually, we settled for a discussion of local news on PBS. There was some talk of a timber company surveyor who might have gone missing up north, but I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it.

At Waterville, we took the off ramp and stopped for soup and coffee. Angel toyed with saltine crumbs as we waited for the check. He had something on his mind, and it didn’t take long for it to emerge.

‘Remember when I asked you about Rachel, back in New York?’ he said at last.

‘I remember,’ I replied.

‘You weren’t too keen on talking about it.’

‘I’m still not.’

‘Maybe you should.’

There was a pause. I wondered when Louis and Angel had discussed Rachel and me, and guessed that it might have come up between them more than once. I relented a little.

‘She doesn’t want to see me,’ I said.

He pursed his lips. ‘And how do you feel about that?’

‘You going to charge me by the hour for this?’

He flicked a crumb at me. ‘Just answer the question.’

‘Not so good but, frankly, I’ve got other things on my mind.’

Angel’s eyes flicked up at me, then back down again. ‘Y’know, she called once, to ask how you were.’

‘She called you’? How’d she get your number?’

‘We’re in the book.’

‘No, you’re not.’

‘Well, then, we must have given it to her.’

‘You’re so helpful.’ I sighed, and ran my hands over my face. ‘I don’t know, Angel. The whole thing is screwed up. I don’t know if I’m ready yet and, anyway, I frighten her. She’s the one who pushed me away, remember?’

‘You didn’t need a whole lot of pushing.’

The check came, and I put down a ten and some ones on top of it. ‘Yeah, well . . . I had my reasons. Just like she did.’

I stood, and Angel stood with me.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Pity neither of you could come up with one good reason between you.’

As we drove back onto I-95, Angel stretched contentedly beside me and, as he did so, the sleeve of his oversized shirt fell down to his elbow. On his arm, a scar, white and ragged, ran from the hollow curve on his elbow to within an inch or two of his wrist. It was maybe six inches long in total and I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t noticed it before but, as I thought about it, I realised it was a combination of factors: the fact that Angel rarely wore only a T-shirt or, if he did so, it was one with long sleeves; my own self-absorption while we were in Louisiana hunting the Travelling Man; and Angel’s basic lack of inclination to discuss anything about past pains.

He caught me looking at the scar and reddened, but he did not try to hide it immediately. Instead, he looked at it himself and went quiet, as if recalling its making.

‘You want to know?’ he asked.

‘You want to tell?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Then don’t.’

He didn’t respond for a time, then: ‘It kind of concerns you, so maybe you got a right to know.’

‘If you tell me you’ve always been in love with me, I’m stopping the car and you can walk to Bangor.’

Angel laughed. ‘You’re in denial.’

‘You have no idea how deep.’

‘Anyway, you ain’t that good lookin’.’ He touched the scar gently with the index finger of his right hand. ‘You been in Rikers, right?’

I nodded. I’d been at Rikers Island in the course of investigations. I had also been there while Angel was a prisoner, when another inmate named William Vance had threatened to take Angel’s life and I had intervened. Vance was dead now. He had died, at last, in October from injuries received after persons unknown poured detergent down his throat, after they learned that he was a suspected sex killer who would never stand trial for his crimes because of a lack of evidence. I had provided the information on which his attackers had acted. I had done it to save Angel, and Vance was no loss to the world, but it still weighed on my conscience.

‘First time Vance came at me, I knocked out one of his teeth,’ Angel said quietly. ‘He’d been threatening it for days, saying how he was gonna fuck me up bad. Fucking guy just had it in for me, you know that. The blow wasn’t bad or nothing, but a corrections officer found him bleeding and me standing over him and I got twenty days in the bing.’

The ‘bing’ was solitary confinement: twenty-three-hour lockdown, with one hour’s exercise permitted in the yard. The yard was basically a cage, not much bigger than a cell, and prisoners were kept handcuffed while they walked. The yard had basketball hoops but no basketballs, even assuming anyone could play basketball with cuffs on. The only thing the prisoners could do was fight, which is what they usually did when they were let out.

‘Most of the time, I didn’t leave my cell,’ said Angel. ‘Vance had been given ten days, just for getting his mouth cut, and I knew he was waiting for me out there.’ He went quiet, his teeth working at his bottom lip. ‘You think it’s going to be easy – you know, peace and quiet, sleep, safe most of the time – but it isn’t. You can’t bring nothing in with you. They take your clothes and give you three jumpsuits instead. You can’t smoke, but I boofed the best part of a pack of tobacco in three condoms, rolled it in toilet paper to smoke it.’ ‘Boofing’ meant taking contraband and inserting it in the anus in order to transport it.

‘The tobacco was gone in five days, and I never smoked again. After those five days in that cell, I couldn’t take it any more: the noise, the screams. It’s psychological torture. I went out into the yard for the first time and Vance came at me straight off, caught me on the side of the head with his balled fists, then started kicking me on the ground. He got five, maybe six good ones in before they hauled him off, but I knew then that I couldn’t take any more time in that place. There was no way I could do it.

‘I was taken to the infirmary after the beating. They looked me over, decided nothing was broken, then sent me back to the bing. I brought a screw back with me, maybe three inches long, that I’d worked out of the base of a medicine cabinet. And when they put me in the cell, and the lights went out, I tried to cut myself.’

He shook his head and, for the first time since he started the story, he smiled. ‘You ever try to cut yourself with a screw?’

‘Can’t say that I have.’

‘Well, it’s kind a hard to do. Screws just weren’t designed with that particular purpose in mind. After a lot of effort, I managed to get some serious blood flowing, but if I was hoping to bleed to death I’d probably have finished my twenty days before it happened. Anyway, they found me hacking away at my arm and hauled me off to the infirmary again. That’s when I called you.

‘After some talk, and a psychological profile, and whatever you told them, they put me back in the general population. They figured I wasn’t going to harm no one, except maybe myself, and they needed the bing space for someone more deserving.’

I had spoken to Vance shortly afterwards, before he was due to be released from solitary, and told him what I knew about him, and what I would tell the others if he made a move on Angel. It didn’t do any good, and Vance’s first act on release was to try to kill Angel in the showers. After that, he was a dead man.

‘If they’d put me back in the bing, I’d have found a way to kill myself,’ concluded Angel. ‘Maybe I’d have let Vance do it, just to get done with it. There are some debts that will never be paid, Bird, and that’s no bad thing sometimes. Louis knows, and I know. The fact that you do what you do because it’s right makes it easier to take your side, but you decide you want to take out Congress and Louis will find a way to light the fuse. And I’ll hold his coat while he does it.’

Cheryl Lansing lived in a clean, white, two-storey house at the western edge of Bangor itself, surrounded by neat lawns and twenty-year-old pine trees. It was a quiet neighbourhood with prosperous-looking homes and new cars in the drives. Angel stayed in the Mustang while I tried the bell. No one answered. I cupped my hands and peered in through the glass, but the house was quiet.

I walked around the side and into a long garden with a swimming pool at the end nearest the house. Angel joined me.

‘Baby-brokering business must pay good,’ he remarked. Smiling, he waved a black wallet, about six inches by two inches: the tools of his trade. ‘Just in case,’ he said.

‘Great. The local cops drop by and I’ll tell them I was making a citizen’s arrest.’

The back of the house had a glass-walled extension that allowed Cheryl Lansing to look out on her green lawn in the summer and watch the snow fall on it in the winter. The pool hadn’t been cleaned in a while, and there was no cover over it. It didn’t look too deep, sloping from maybe three feet at one end to six or seven feet at the other, but it was full of leaves and dirt.

‘Bird.’

I walked over to where Angel was looking into the house. There was a kitchen area to one side and a large oak table opposite surrounded by five chairs, with a doorway behind it leading into a living room. On the table stood cups, saucers, a coffee pot and an assortment of muffins and breads. A bowl of fruit stood in the centre. Even from here, I could see the mould on the food.

Angel pulled a pair of double-thick gloves from his pocket and tried the sliding door. It opened to his touch.

‘You want to take a look around?’

‘I guess.’

Inside, I could smell sour milk and the lingering stench of food gone bad. We moved through the kitchen and into the living room, which was furnished with thick couches and armchairs with a pink floral motif. I searched downstairs while Angel went through the upper rooms. When he called me, I was already on the stairs to follow him up.

He stood in what was obviously a small office, with a dark wood desk, a computer and a pair of filing cabinets. On the shelves along the wall sat a series of expanding files, each marked with a year. The files for 1965 and ‘66 had been removed from the shelves and their contents lay scattered on the floor.

‘Billy Purdue was born early in sixty-six,’ I said quietly.

‘You figure he came calling?’

‘Someone did.’

How badly did Billy Purdue want to trace his roots, I wondered? Bad enough to come here and ransack an old woman’s office to find out what she knew?

‘Check the cabinets,’ I said to Angel. ‘Then see if there’s anything relating to Billy Purdue that we can salvage from those files. I’m going to have another run through the house, see if I can find anything that might have been discarded.’

He nodded and I went through the house again, searching bedrooms, the bathroom and eventually ending up once again in the downstairs rooms. In the kitchen, the rotting fruit on the table was surrounded by the compass points of four settings, two with coffee cups, two with glasses of rancid milk.

I went back out into the yard. At the far eastern side stood a toolshed, an open lock hanging below the bolt. I walked down, took a handkerchief from my pocket and slipped the bolt. Inside, there was only a gas-powered mower, flowerpots, seeding trays and an assortment of short-handled garden tools. Old paint cans sat on the shelves beside jars filled with old brushes and nails. An empty birdcage hung from a hook on the roof. I closed the shed and started back towards the house.

As I walked, a breeze arose and pulled at the branches of the trees and the blades of the grass beneath my feet. It lifted the leaves in the unfilled pool, sending them tumbling softly over one another with a crisp, rustling sound. Amid the greens and browns and soft yellows at the deep end, something bright red showed.

I squatted by the edge of the pool and looked at the shape. It was a doll’s head, topped by a tuft of red hair. I could make out a glass eye and the edge of a set of ruby lips. The pool was wide and I thought for a moment of going back to the shed and trying to find a tool long enough to grip the doll, but I couldn’t remember seeing anything there that might serve my purpose. Of course, the doll might mean nothing. Kids lost things in the oddest places all of the time. But dolls . . . They tended to look after their dolls. Jennifer had one called Molly, with thick dark hair and a movie-star pout, that would sit beside her at the dinner table and stare emptily at the food. Molly and Jenny, friends forever.

I moved to the end of the pool nearest the house, where a set of steps led into the shallow end, the bottom step obscured by leaves. I walked down and stepped carefully into the pool itself, anxious not to lose my footing on the slope. As I progressed, the depth of the leaves began to increase, covering first the toes of my shoes, then the cuffs of my pants, then rising almost to my knees. By the time I came close to the doll, they were halfway up my thighs and I was conscious of a sense of dampness from the rotting vegetation and the feel of water seeping into my shoes. I was walking with caution now, the tiles slick beneath my feet and the slope more pronounced.

The glass eye looked to the heavens, a spread of brown leaves and dirt masking the other side of the doll’s face. I reached down carefully, dug into the leaves and lifted the doll’s head free from below. As it came away, the leaves fell and the doll’s right eye, which had been held closed by the pressure, clicked open gently. Its blouse, slowly revealed, was blue and its skirt green. Its chubby knees were filthy with mud and decaying vegetation.

The entire body of the doll came away from the leaves with a soft sucking sound, and something else came with it. The hand clutching the doll’s legs was small, but decay had swollen it and mottled it with winter colours. Two nails had begun to come loose and there were tears in the skin exposing long striations of muscle. At the elbow, above a large gas blister, I could see the end of a rotting sleeve, its pretty pink colour now almost black with leaf mould, dirt and dried blood.

I stepped back instinctively, my hand still clutching the doll, and, with a flash of shock and fear, I felt my feet slide from beneath me on the tiles at the bottom of the pool. I fell backwards into the leaves, my feet shooting out ahead of me and impacting on something soft and wet and yielding. There were leaves in my mouth and the odour of decay was in my nostrils as the child rose, forced upwards by my struggling legs and my sustained grip on the doll. I saw damp hair and grey skin and eyes like milk as I slid down, my feet still struggling to find purchase. In my fear I released my grip on the doll and instinctively pushed the child’s body away, my hand heavy with the smell of her as she slid back into the mould. And then my slide was stopped by a heavier form, there were dead fingers against my calf and I knew that they were all there beneath the rotting leaves, decay on decay, and that, if I sank farther beneath those leaves, I would see them and I might never rise again.

A hand gripped my own right hand and I heard Angel shout: ‘Bird, easy. Easy!’ I looked up and found that I was almost at the right-hand side of the pool. With Angel’s help, I got a grip on the rim and pulled myself up. I crawled away from the pool edge and lay on the cold, damp grass as I rubbed my hands on the blades, again and again and again, in a vain and terrible effort to remove the smell of that poor, lost girl from my fingers.

‘They’re down there,’ I said. ‘They’re all down there.’

Angel called Louis, then I called the Bangor police. Angel left before they arrived; with his record, his presence would only complicate matters. I told him to take a cab, check into the Days Inn by the huge Bangor Mall out of town and wait for me there. And then I stood by the side of the pool, the young girl’s hair and blouse now clearly visible amid the wind-danced leaves, and waited for the police to come.

I met Angel back in the Days Inn four hours later. I had told the cops everything, including the fact that I had made a search of the house. They were none too pleased but Ellis Howard reluctantly vouched for me from back in Portland, then asked for me to be put on the line.

‘So you weren’t holding anything back?’ The receiver almost vibrated with the depth of the anger in his voice. ‘I should have let them lock you up for interfering with a crime scene.’

There was no point in apologising, so I didn’t. ‘Willeford told me about her. She arranged Billy Purdue’s adoption. She was with Rita Ferris a couple of nights before Rita and Donald were killed.’

‘First his wife and child, now this adoption woman. Looks like Billy Purdue has a grudge against the world.’

‘You don’t believe that, Ellis.’

‘Fuck do you know what I believe? You want to be a bleeding heart, go bleed somewhere else. We’re all full up here.’ He was so annoyed it took him three noisy tries to hang up. I gave the Bangor cops my cell phone number and told them I’d help in any way I could.

There were four bodies in the pool. Cheryl Lansing was at the bottom of the deep end, beneath the body of her daughter-in-law Louise. Her two granddaughters, Sophie and Sarah, were farther away, both of them in their nightgowns. The leaves had been heaped on them from all around the yard, and topped off with a pile of mulch from behind the toolshed.

The throats of all four had been cut, left to right. Cheryl Lansing’s jaw had also been broken by a blow to the left side of her face and her mouth gaped strangely as her head was revealed by the medics working in the empty pool. And as she lay beneath the body of her daughter-in-law, mouth wide, it became clear that her killer had visited one final indignity on her body.

Before she died, Cheryl Lansing’s tongue had been ripped out.

If Cheryl Lansing was dead, then someone Billy Purdue, Abel and his partner Stritch, or an individual as yet unrevealed – was tracing a path through Billy’s life, a path that appeared now to be related to the abortive investigation into his roots carried out by Willeford. I decided then to continue north. Angel offered to come with me but I told him instead to catch a commuter flight back to Portland the next morning, while I used the Mustang to move on.

‘Bird?’ he asked, as I started the car. ‘You’ve told me about Billy Purdue, about his wife and his kid. What I don’t get is: how did she end up with a guy like that?’

I shrugged. She came from a dysfunctional family, I guessed, and she seemed to be repeating the cycle by starting her own dysfunctional family with Billy Purdue. But there was more to it than that: Rita Ferris had something good inside her, something that had remained untouched and uncorrupted despite all that had happened to her. Maybe, just maybe, she believed that she saw something similar in Billy and thought that if she could find the place where it was, and touch him there, she could save him, that she could make him need her as much as she needed him, because she thought that love and need were the same. A host of abused wives and beaten lovers, bruised women and unhappy children, could have told her that she was wrong, that there is a wilful blindness in believing that one person can somehow redeem another. People have to redeem themselves, but some of them just don’t want redemption, or don’t recognise it when it shines its light upon them.

‘She loved him,’ I said, at last. ‘In the end, it was all she had to give, and she needed to give it.’

‘It’s not much of an answer.’

‘I don’t have the answers, Angel, just different ways of phrasing the questions.’ Then I pulled out of the parking lot and headed north to the junction of I-95 and 15, towards Dover-Foxcroft, and Greenville, and Dark Hollow. Looking back, it was the first step on a journey that would force me to confront not only my own past, but also my grandfather’s; that would disturb old ghosts long believed to have been laid to rest; and that would lead me at last to face what had waited for so long in the darkness of the Great North Woods.

Chapter Eleven

For much of its history, Maine was little more than a series of fishing settlements clinging to the Atlantic coastline. Beneath the sea off that coast lay the remains of another world, a world that had ceased to exist when the waters rose. Maine has a drowned coastline: its islands were once mountains, and forgotten fields lie on the bed of the ocean. Its past lies submerged, fathoms deep, beyond the reach of the sunlight.

And so the present came into existence at the very precipice of the past, and the people clung to the coast of the region. Few ventured into the wilderness at its heart, apart from French missionaries seeking to bring Christianity to the tribes – which never numbered much more than three thousand to begin with, and most of them also lived along the coast – or trappers trying to make a living from the fur trade. The soil that covered the bedrock of the coast was good and fertile and the Indians farmed it using rotting fish as fertilizer, the smell of it mixing with the scents of wild roses and sea lavender. Later came the saltwater farms, the digging for clams in the flats, and the huge icehouses where Maine ice was stored before being exported to the farthest reaches of the globe.

But as the possibilities offered by the forests came to be realised, settlers pushed deeper and deeper north and west. On the king’s orders, they harvested those white pines which measured over twenty-four inches in diameter one foot from the ground for use as masts on his ships. The masts of Admiral Nelson’s ship HMS Victory, which fought Napoleon’s forces at the Battle of Trafalgar, were grown in Maine.

But it was not until the early nineteenth century, when the financial opportunities represented by Maine’s forests were recognised, that the interior was fully explored and surveyed, leading the way into the Great North Woods. Mills were built in the wilderness to produce paper, pulp and two-by-fours. Schooners sailed up the Penobscot to load pine and spruce timber that had been brought downstream from the farthest reaches of the north. Sawmills lined the river’s banks and those of the Merrimack, the Kennebec, the Saint Croix, the Machias. Lives were ended in the struggle to break jams or hold a million board feet of logs together, until the era of the industrial river drives came to an end in 1978. The land was remodelled to meet the demands of the timber barons: the paths of rivers were altered, lakes raised, dams built. Fires ravaged the dry slash left behind by the loggers and entire streams were denuded of life by the discarded sawdust waste. The first growth of pine has been gone for two centuries; the hardwood second growth of birch, maple and oak followed.

Now, much of the north country is industrial forest owned by the timber companies and lumber trucks make their way along the roads carrying stacks of freshly-cut trees. The companies cut swaths through acres of forest in the winter, removing every tree in their path and piling them during March and April. Wood is the state’s wealth, and even my grandfather, like many on the coast, used to grow spruce and fir for sale as Christmas trees, harvesting and selling them from early November to mid-December.

But there are still a few places where the mature forest remains untouched, with animal trails and moose droppings leading to secluded watering holes fed by waterfalls that tumble over rocks and stones and fallen trees. This was one of the last regions to have wolves and mountain lions and caribou. There are still ten million uninhabited acres in Maine and the state is greener now than it was one hundred years ago, when the exhaustion of the thin soil caused agriculture to decline and the forest reclaimed the land, as is its way, and walls that had once sheltered families now guarded only hemlock and pine.

A man could lose himself in that wilderness, if he chose.

Dark Hollow lay about five miles north of Greenville, close by the eastern shore of Moosehead Lake and the two hundred thousand acres of protected wilderness in Baxter State Park, where Mount Katahdin dominates the skyline at the northern end of the Appalachian Trail. I had half considered stopping off in Greenville the road was dark and the evening cold but I knew that finding Meade Payne was more important. People who had been close to Billy Purdue his wife, his child, the woman who had organised his adoption were dying, and dying badly. Payne had to be warned.

Greenville was the gateway to the north woods, and wood had long been the wealth of this town and the surrounding area. There had even been a lumber mill in the town providing jobs for the people of Greenville and its surrounds, until it closed in the mid-seventies, when the economic situation made it unprofitable to operate. A lot of people left the area then and those who remained tried to make new lives in tourism, fishing and hunting, but Greenville and the smaller towns scattered farther north Beaver Cove, Kokadjo, and Dark Hollow, where the power lines ended and the wilderness truly began were still poor. When the golf club at Greenville had raised its fees from ten dollars to twelve dollars per round, there had been uproar.

I drove up Lily Bay Road, for many years the winter road used for hauling heavy supplies to the logging camps, snow piled high on each side, the woods stretching beyond, until I came to Dark Hollow. It was a small town, barely more than two blocks at its centre, with a police department at the farthest limit of the northern end. Dark Hollow got some of the tourism and hunting overflow from Greenville, but not much. There was no view of the lake from its streets, only the mountains and the trees. There was one motel, the Tamara Motor Inn, which looked like a relic from the fifties, with a high arched frontage across which its name glowed in red and green neon. There were one or two handicraft shops selling scented candles and the kind of furniture that left pieces of bark on your pants if you sat on it. A bookstore-cum-coffee shop, a diner and a drugstore made up a considerable part of the town’s commercial area, where piles of icy snow still lay in the gutters and in the shadows of the buildings.

Only the diner was still open. It had been painted in cute psychedelic colours outside, making it look like the kind of place the Scooby Doo crew might have opened when the Mystery Machine eventually broke down, like those air-cooled Volkswagens that burned out in Santa Fe when their hippie owners tried to drive them cross-country during the sixties.

Inside, there were reproductions of old concert posters and landscapes by what I took to be local artists. In one corner there was a framed photo of a kid in an army uniform beside an older man, some faded red, white and blue ribbon around the picture, but I didn’t look too closely. A couple of old folks sat in a booth drinking coffee and shooting the breeze and four young guys tried to look cool and vaguely menacing without bursting their pimples when they sneered.

I ordered a club sandwich and a mug of coffee. It was good and almost made me forget, for a moment, what had happened back in Bangor. I asked the waitress, whose name was Annie, for directions to the Payne place and she gave them to me with a smile, although she told me that there was frost and maybe more snow expected and that the road was poor at the best of times.

‘You a friend of Meade’s?’ she asked. Annie seemed keen to talk, more keen than I was. She had red hair and red lipstick, and dark blue makeup around her eyes. Combined with her naturally pale features, the total effect was of an unfinished drawing, like something abandoned by a distracted child.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I just want to talk to him about something.’

Her smile faltered a little. ‘It’s nothing bad, is it? Because that old man has had his share of bad times.’

‘No,’ I lied. ‘It’s nothing bad. I’m sorry to hear that things haven’t been going well for Meade.’

She shrugged, and the smile regained some of its vigour. ‘He lost his wife a couple of years back, then his nephew died in the Gulf during Desert Storm. He’s kept himself pretty much to himself since then. We don’t see him around too often these days.’

Annie leaned over, her breasts brushing my arm as she took away the remains of my sandwich. ‘You want anything else?’ she asked brightly, bringing an end to the Meade Payne conversation. I wasn’t sure if there was a subtext to the question. I decided that there wasn’t. Life tended to be simpler that way.

‘No, thanks.’

She tore the check from her pad with a flourish. ‘Then I’ll just leave you with this.’ She flashed me another smile as she slipped the check beneath the bowl of creamers. ‘You take care now, sugar,’ she said, as she sashayed away.

‘I will,’ I replied. I felt kind of relieved when she was gone.

Meade Payne didn’t have a phone, or at least his name wasn’t in the book. Reluctantly, I decided not to talk to him until the morning. I got a room at the Tamara for twenty-eight dollars and slept in an old bed with a high, thick mattress and a carved wood bedstead. I woke once during the night, when the smell of rotting leaves and the sound of heavy decaying things moving beneath them became unbearable.

The waitress had been right: a heavy frost covered the ground when I left the Tamara the next morning and the blades of grass on the motel’s narrow strip of lawn were like carved crystal as I walked. In the bright morning sunlight, cars passed slowly down the main street and folks in coats and gloves puffed their way along like steam engines. I left the car at the Tamara and made my way on foot to the diner. From outside, I could see that most of the booths were already full and there was a welcoming air of community, of belonging, among those seated inside. Waitresses – Annie didn’t seem to be among them flitted from table to table like butterflies and a fat, bearded man in an apron chatted with patrons beside the register. I was almost at the door when a voice behind me said – gently, softly, familiarly – ‘Charlie?’ and I turned around and the past and the present collided in the memory of a kiss.

Lorna Jennings was six years older than I was and lived a mile from my grandfather’s house. She was small and lithe, no taller than five-two and certainly no more than one hundred and ten pounds, with short, dark hair cut in a bob and a mouth that always seemed to be entering into, or emerging from, a kiss. Her eyes were blue-green and her skin was porcelain white.

Her husband’s name was Randall, but his friends called him Rand. He was tall and had been a hockey hopeful once. Rand was a cop, still in uniform but angling for a transfer to the detective bureau. He had never hit his wife, never hurt her physically and she believed that their marriage was sound until he told her about his first and, he said, his only affair. That was before I knew her, before we became lovers.

It was my first summer out of the University of Maine, where I had majored – barely – in English. I was twenty-three. I had worked some after I finished high school, lousy jobs mainly, then taken some time out to travel to the West Coast before taking up a place at college. Now I had returned to Scarborough for what would be my final summer there. I had already applied to the NYPD, using what few contacts remained with those who had some fond memories of my father. Maybe I had some idealistic notion that I could remove the stain from his name by my presence there. Instead, I think I just stirred up old memories for some people, like mud disturbed from the bottom of a pond.

My grandfather got me a job in an insurance firm, where I worked as an office boy, a runner. I made the coffee and swept the floors and answered the phones and polished the desks and learned enough about the insurance business to know that anybody who believed what they were told by an insurance salesman was either naive or desperate.

Lorna Jennings was the personal assistant to the office manager. She was never less than polite to me but we spoke little in the beginning, although once or twice I found her looking at me in a kind of amused way before she went back to studying her papers or typing her letters. I spoke to her properly for the first time during a retirement party for one of the secretaries, a tall woman with blue-rinsed hair who was committed a year later after she killed one of her dogs with an axe. Laura strolled up to me as I sat at the bar, drinking a beer and trying to pretend that the insurance business and I were not even remotely acquainted.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘You look kind of lonesome. You trying to keep your distance from us?’

‘Hi,’ I replied, twisting the glass. ‘No, not really.’

She arched an eyebrow, and I confessed.

‘Well, maybe just a little. Although not from you.’

The eyebrow moved up another notch. I wondered if it was possible to burst a blood vessel from embarrassment.

‘I saw you reading something today,’ she said, taking the stool across from me. She was wearing a long, dark wool dress that hugged her body like a sheath and she smelt of flowers: body lotion, I later learned. She rarely wore perfume. ‘What was it?’

I was still a little embarrassed, I guess. I had been reading Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. I’d picked it up thinking it was something other than what it was: an examination of a series of characters who were unfaithful to one another in their various ways. In the end, as our relationship developed, it came to seem more like a textbook than a novel.

‘It’s Ford Madox Ford. Have you read him?’

‘No, I just know the name. Should I?’

‘I guess.’ This didn’t seem like a particularly hearty recommendation and, as literary criticism, it left a lot to be desired, so I pressed on. ‘If you want to read about weak men and bad marriages.’

She winced a little at that and, although I knew almost nothing about her, not then, a little piece of my world fell off and bounced across the floor amid the cigarette butts and the peanut shells. I figured if I dug a hole halfway to China and pulled the earth down on top of me, then I might be far enough underground to hide my discomfort. I had hurt her in some way, but I wasn’t sure how.

‘Really?’ she said at last. ‘Maybe you might let me borrow it sometime.’

We talked a little more, about the office, about my grandfather, before she stood to leave. As she did so, she moved her hand across the material of her dress, above the knee, rubbing at a tiny piece of white lint that had caught in the fabric. It made the material stretch and tighten further against her thighs, revealing the shape of her almost to her knees. And then she looked at me curiously, her head to one side, and there was a light in her eyes that I had never seen until then. No one had ever looked at me that way before. No one, I thought, would ever look at me that way again. She touched my arm gently, and the touch burned.

‘Don’t forget that book,’ she said.

Then she left.

That was how it began, I suppose. I gave her the book to read and, somehow, it gave me a strange pleasure to know that her hands were touching my book, her fingers caressing the pages gently. I left the job a week later. More accurately, I was fired after an argument with the office manager in the course of which he called me a lazy sonofabitch and I told him he was a cocksucker, which he was. My grandfather was kind of angry at first that I had lost the job, although he was secretly pleased that I had called the office manager a cocksucker. My grandfather thought he was a cocksucker too.

It was another week before I worked up the courage to call Lorna. We met for coffee in a little place near the Veterans Memorial Bridge. She said she had loved The Good Soldier, although it had made her sad. She had brought the book back to give to me but I told her to keep it. I think I wanted to believe that she might be thinking of me as she looked at it. That’s what infatuation does to a person, I suppose, although the infatuation soon became something more.

We left the coffee shop and I offered her a ride home in the MG my grandfather had bought for me as a graduation present, one of the American-built models made before British Leyland bought the company and screwed it up. It was kind of a chick car, but I liked the way it moved. She declined.

‘I have to meet Rand,’ she said. I think the hurt must have shown in my face, because she leaned forward and kissed me softly on the cheek.

‘Don’t leave it so long the next time,’ she said. I didn’t.

We met often after that day but it was a warm July night when we kissed properly for the first time. We had been to see some lousy movie and we were walking to our separate cars. Rand didn’t like the movies, lousy or not. She didn’t tell Rand that she was going to a movie with me and she asked me if I thought that was okay. I said that I guessed it was, although it probably wasn’t. Certainly Rand didn’t see it that way, when things started to come apart at the end.

‘You know, I don’t want to stop you from meeting some nice girl,’ she said. She didn’t look at me when she said it.

‘I won’t,’ I lied.

‘Because I don’t let us come between me and Rand,’ she lied back.

‘That’s fine then,’ I lied again.

We were at the cars by that point and she stood with her keys in her hand, staring ahead, her eyes on the sky. Then, still holding her keys, she put her hands in her pockets and bowed her head.

‘Come here,’ I said. ‘Just for a moment.’

And she did.

The first time we made love was in my bedroom, one Friday afternoon when Rand had gone to Boston to attend a funeral. My grandfather was in town with some of his old cop buddies, remembering old times and catching up on the obituaries. The house was quiet.

She walked from her home. Even though we had agreed that she would come, I was still surprised when I saw her standing there, dressed in jeans and a denim shirt with a white T-shirt underneath. She didn’t say anything as I led her to my room. We kissed awkwardly at first, her shirt still buttoned, then harder. My stomach danced with nerves. I was acutely conscious of her presence, of her scent, of the feel of her breasts beneath her shirt, of my own inexperience, of my desire for her, of, even then, I think, my love for her. She stepped back and unbuttoned her shirt, then pulled off her T-shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her breasts rose slightly with the movement. Then I was beside her, fumbling at her jeans as she pulled at my shirt, my tongue slipping and coiling around her own, my hips hard against her.

And in the dappled sunlight of a July afternoon, I lost myself in the warmth of her kiss and the soft yielding of her flesh as I entered her.

I think we had four months together before Rand found out about us. I would meet her when she could get away. I was working by then as a waiter, which meant my afternoons were pretty much free, and two or three nights as well if I decided I didn’t want to work flat out. We made love where we could and when we could, and communicated mostly by letter and snatched phone conversations. We made love on Higgins Beach once, which kind of made up for my lack of success with the Berube girl, and we made love when my letter of acceptance came through from New York, although I could feel her regret even as we moved together.

My time with Lorna was different from any of the previous relationships I had had. They were short, abortive things blighted by the small-town environment of Scarborough where guys would come up to you and tell you how many ways they had screwed your girl when she was with them, and how good she was with her mouth. Lorna seemed beyond those things, although she had been touched by them in another way, evident in the gradual, insidious corrosion of a marriage between high-school sweethearts.

It ended when some friend of Rand’s spotted us in a coffee shop, holding hands across a table covered with doughnut sugar and creamer stains. It was that mundane. They fought and Rand offered to give her the child she had wanted for so long. In the end, she decided not to throw away seven years of marriage on a boy. She was probably right, although the pain she caused me tore through me for two years after and stayed as a lingering ache for longer than that. I didn’t call or see her again. She was not among the mourners at my grandfather’s funeral, although she had been his neighbour for almost a decade. It turned out that she and Rand had left Scarborough, but I didn’t bother trying to find out where they might have gone.

There is a kind of postscript to this. About one month after our relationship ended I was drinking in a bar off Fore Street, catching up with a few people who had stayed on in Portland while the rest moved on to college, or out-of-state jobs, or marriage. I went to the men’s room and was washing my hands when the door opened behind me. I looked in the mirror to see Rand Jennings standing there, out of uniform, and behind him a fat, burly guy who leaned back against the door to hold it closed.

I nodded at him in the mirror; after all, there wasn’t a whole lot else I could do. I dried my hands on the towel, turned and took his fist in the pit of my stomach. It was a hard blow, with the full force of his body behind it, and it expelled every breath of air from my lungs. I fell to my knees, clutching at my midriff, and he kicked me hard in the ribs. And then, as I lay there on the filth and piss of the floor, he kicked me again and again and again: on my thighs, my buttocks, my arms, my back. He stayed away from my head until the end, when he lifted it up by the hair and slapped me hard across the face. Throughout the whole beating he never said a word, and he left me there, bleeding on the floor, for my friends to find. I was lucky, I suppose, although I didn’t believe it then. Worse things happened to people who messed with a cop’s wife.

And now, in this small town on the edge of the wilderness, the years tumbled away and she was before me again. Her eyes were a little older, the lines streaking away from them more pronounced. There were tiny striations around her mouth too, as if she had spent too long with her lips pinched closed. Yet, when she smiled cautiously, there was that same look in her eyes and I knew that she was still beautiful and that a man could fall in love with her all over again, if he wasn’t careful.

‘It is you, isn’t it?’ she said, and I nodded in reply. ‘What in the Lord’s name are you doing in the Hollow?’

‘Looking for someone,’ I replied, and I could see in her eyes that, for one brief moment, she thought it might be her. ‘You want to get a cup of coffee?’

She appeared doubtful for a moment, looked around as if to make sure that Rand wasn’t watching from somewhere, then smiled again. ‘Sure, I’d like that.’

Inside, we found an empty booth away from the window and ordered mugs of steaming coffee. I had some toast and bacon, which she nibbled at in spite of herself. For those few seconds, ten years fell away and we were back in a coffee shop in South Portland, talking about a future that would never be and stealing touches across the table.

‘How’ve you been?’ I asked.

‘Okay, I guess. It’s a nice place to live; a little isolated, maybe, but a nice place.’

‘When did you come here?’

‘In eighty-eight. Things weren’t going so well for us in Portland. Rand couldn’t get his detective’s badge, so he took a post up here. He’s chief now.’

Heading up to the edge of nowhere to save your marriage seemed like a dumb thing to do, but I kept my mouth closed. They’d stayed together this long, so I figured that they knew what they were doing.

I figured wrong, of course.

‘So you two are still together?’

For the first time, something flickered across her face: regret or anger, maybe, or a recognition that this was true yet with no idea why it should be so. Or it may simply have been my own memories of that time transferred on to her, like recollecting an ancient injury and wincing at the recall.

‘Yeah, we’re together.’

‘Kids?’

‘No.’ She looked flustered, and pain flashed across her face. I recalled Rand’s promise to her when he was trying to win her back, but I said nothing. She took a sip of her coffee, and when she spoke again the pain was hidden, put back in whatever box she used to hide it away. ‘I’m sorry. I heard about what happened to your own family, back in New York.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Someone paid for it, didn’t they?’

It was a curious way of putting it. ‘A lot of people paid.’

She nodded, then looked at me with her head to one side for a time. ‘You’ve changed. You look . . . older, harder somehow. It’s strange seeing you this way.’

I shrugged. ‘It’s been a long time. A lot of things have happened since I saw you last.’

We moved on to talk of other things: about life in Dark Hollow, about her job teaching part-time in Dover-Foxcroft, about my return to Scarborough. To anyone passing by, we must have looked like old friends relaxing together, catching up, but there was a tension between us that was only partly to do with our past together. Maybe I was wrong, but I sensed a need within Lorna, something unsettled and unfocused looking for somewhere to alight.

She drained the last of her coffee in a single mouthful. When she put the mug down, her hand was shaking a little. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘after it ended between us, I still thought about you. I’d listen for snatches of information about you, about what you were doing. I spoke to your gramps about you. Did he tell you that?’

‘No, he never said.’

‘I asked him not to. I was afraid, I guess, afraid that you might take it the wrong way.’

‘And what way would that be?’

I meant it lightly, but she didn’t take it that way. Instead, her lips tightened and she held my gaze with a look half of pain, half of anger. ‘You know, I used to stand at the edge of the cliffs out at the Neck and pray that a wave would come, one of the big twenty-footers, and wash me away. There were times when I’d think of you and Rand and the whole sad fucking business and dream about losing myself beneath the ocean. Do you know what that kind of pain is like?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I do.’

She stood then, and buttoned her coat, and gave me a little half smile before she left. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I guess you do. It was good seeing you, Charlie.’

‘And you.’

The door closed behind her with a single, soft slap. I watched her through the windows, looking left and right, running a little as she crossed the street, her hands deep in her pockets, her head low.

And I thought of her standing at the edge of the black cliffs at Prouts Neck, the wind blowing her hair, the taste of salt on her lips: a woman dark against the evening sky, waiting for the sea to call her name.

Meade Payne lived in a red, wooden house overlooking Ragged Lake. A long, poorly-kept driveway wound up to the yard, where a Dodge pickup was parked, old and partially eaten by rust. The house was quiet and no dog barked as I drew the Mustang up alongside the truck, icy snow crunching beneath the tyres.

I knocked on the door, but no one answered. I was about to go to the back of the house when the door opened and a man peered out. He was in his late twenties or early thirties, I guessed, with dark hair and sallow, windblown skin. There was a hardness about him, and his hands were tough and pitted with scars across the backs of the fingers. He wore no rings, no watch and his clothes looked like they didn’t fit him quite as well as they should. His shirt was a little too tight on his shoulders and chest, his jeans a little too short, revealing heavy wool socks above black, steel-toed shoes.

‘Help you?’ he said, in a tone of voice that indicated that, even if he could, he’d prefer not to.

‘I’m looking for Meade Payne.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to talk to him about a boy he fostered once. Is Mr Payne around?’

‘I don’t know you,’ he said. For no reason, his tone was becoming belligerent.

I kept my temper. ‘I’m not from around these parts. I’ve come from Portland. It’s important that I talk to him.’

The young man considered what I had said, then left me to wait in the snow as he closed the door behind him. A few minutes later, an elderly man appeared from the side of the house. He was slightly bent over and walked slowly, shuffling a little as if the joints in his knees hurt him, but I guessed that he might once have been close to my own height, maybe even six feet. He wore a pair of dungarees over a red check shirt and dirty white sneakers. A Chicago Bears cap was pulled down low on his head and wisps of grey hair tried to escape from beneath the rim. His eyes were bright blue and very clear. He kept his hands in his pockets and looked me over, his head slightly to one side, as if trying to place me from somewhere.

‘I’m Meade Payne. What can I do for you?’

‘My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator out of Portland. It’s about a boy you fostered some years back: Billy Purdue.’

His eyes widened a little as I said the name and he waved me in the direction of a pair of old rocking chairs at the end of the porch. Before I sat down, he took a rag from his pocket and carefully cleaned the seat. ‘Sorry, but I don’t get many visitors. Always tried to discourage them, mostly for the sake of the boys.’

‘I’m not sure I understand.’

He indicated the house with a movement of his chin. His skin was still quite taut, its colour a reddish brown. ‘Some of the boys I fostered down the years, they were troublesome types. They needed a firm hand to guide them and they needed to be kept away from temptations. Out here’ – He waved a hand towards the lake and the trees – ‘only temptations are hunting rabbits and jacking off. I don’t know how kindly the Lord takes to either, but I don’t reckon they count for much in the great scheme of things.’

‘When did you stop fostering?’

‘Back a ways,’ he said, but added nothing more. Instead, he reached out a hand and rapped a long finger on the arm of my chair. ‘Now, Mr. Parker, you tell me: is Billy in some kind of trouble?’

I told him as much as I felt I could: that his wife and child had been killed; that he was a suspect in the killings but that I didn’t believe he was responsible; that certain people outside the law believed that he might have stolen some money belonging to them and they would hurt him to get it back. The old man listened silently to all that I said. The hostile young man leaned on the frame of the open door, watching us.

‘Do you know where Billy might be now?’ he asked.

‘I was hoping you might have some idea.’

‘I ain’t seen him, if that’s what you’re asking,’ he said. ‘And if he comes to me, I can’t say as I’ll hand him over to anyone, ‘less I’m sure he’ll get a fair hearing.’

Out on the lake, a motor boat was moving through the waters. Birds flew from its path, but they were too far away to identify.

‘There may be something more to this,’ I said, weighing carefully what I was going to say next. ‘You remember Cheryl Lansing?’

‘I recall her.’

‘She’s dead. She was murdered along with three members of her family. I’m not sure how long ago; certainly only a few days. If there’s a connection to Billy Purdue, then you could be in danger.’

The old man shook his head gently. He pinched his lips with his fingers and said nothing for a time. Then: ‘I appreciate you taking the time to come up here, Mr Parker, but, like I said, I ain’t heard from Billy and, if I do, I’ll have to think long and hard about what to do next. As for being in danger, I can handle a gun and I’ve got the boy with me.’

‘Your son?’

‘Caspar. Cas, to them what knows him. We can look out for each other and I don’t fear no man, Mr Parker.’

There didn’t seem to be anything more I could say. I gave Meade Payne the number of my cell phone and he stuffed it into one of the pockets of his dungarees. He shook my hand and walked slowly, stiffly, back to the door, humming softly to himself. It was an old song, I thought. I seemed to recall it from somewhere but couldn’t place it, something about tender ladies and a handsome gambler and memories haunting the mind. I found myself whistling a little of it as, through the rear-view, I saw Caspar help the old man into the house. Neither of them looked back as I drove away.

Chapter Twelve

Back in Dark Hollow, I stopped off at the diner and went through the phone book. I got Rand Jennings’s address and the chef gave me directions to his house. Rand and Lorna lived about two miles out of town, in a two-storey house painted yellow and black with a neat garden and a black fence at its boundary. Smoke rose from the chimney. Behind the house, a river ran from the lakes to the west of town. I slowed as I drove by, but didn’t stop. I wasn’t even sure why I was there: old memories stirred up, I supposed. I still felt something for her, I knew, although it wasn’t love. I think, and I had no reason to feel it, that it was a kind of sorrow for her. Then I turned back to head south for Greenville.

I found the Greenville Police Department at the town’s Municipal Building on Minden Street, where it occupied an unattractive tan-sided office with green shutters and Christmas wreaths on the windows in an effort to make it look prettier. There was a fire department office close by, and a police car and a green Department of Conservation forest ranger truck in the lot.

Inside, I gave my name to a pair of cheerful secretaries, then took a seat on a bench across from the door. After twenty minutes, a stocky man with dark hair and a moustache and brown, watchful eyes came out of an office down the hall, his blue uniform neatly pressed, and extended his hand in greeting.

‘Sorry for keeping you waiting,’ he said. ‘We have a contract for policing Beaver Cove. I’ve been out there most of the day. My name’s Dave Martel. I’m chief of police.’

At Martel’s instigation, we left the police building and walked past the Union Evangelical Church to the Hard Drive café at Sanders Store. There were a couple of cars in the parking lot across the street, the white hull of the steamboat Katahdin looming behind them. A mist hung over the lake and created a white wall at the end of the street through which cars occasionally burst. Inside the é, we ordered French vanilla coffee and took a seat close by one of the computer terminals that folks used to pick up their e-mail.

‘I knew your granddaddy,’ said Martel, as we waited for the coffee to arrive. Sometimes it was easy to forget how tightly knit the ties still were in parts of the state. ‘Knew Bob Warren from back in Portland, when I was a boy. He was a good man.’

‘You been here long?’

‘Ten years now.’

‘Like it?’

‘Sure. This is an unusual place. You got a lot of people in this part of the country who don’t care much for the law, who’ve come up here because they don’t like being regulated. Funny thing is, here they’ve got me, they’ve got the game wardens, they’ve got the county sheriff and the Highway Patrol all keeping an eye on ’em. Mostly we get along just fine, but we got crime here so it’s not like I’m not kept busy.’

‘Anything serious?’

Martel smiled. ‘Serious is shooting a moose out of season, if you talk to the wardens.’

I winced. Grouse, pheasant, rabbit, maybe even squirrel I could – understand at least squirrels moved fast enough to constitute a challenge – but not moose. The moose population in the state had risen from about three thousand in the thirties to its present level of thirty thousand, and moose hunting was now allowed for one week in October. It brought a lot of revenue to places like Greenville at a time when there weren’t too many tourists around, but it also brought in its share of assholes. That year, about one hundred thousand people had applied for maybe two thousand permits, every one of them trying to put a moose head above the fireplace.

It’s not difficult to kill a moose. In fact, the only thing easier to hit than a moose is a dead moose. Their sight is poor, although their sense of smell and hearing are good, and they don’t move unless they have to. Most hunters get their moose on their first or second day out, and boast about it to all the other assholes. Then, after all the hunters have gone with their fat bikes and their orange caps, you can head out and look at the animals that have survived, the glory of them as they come down to lick salt from the rocks by the side of the road, put there to melt the snow and instead used by the moose to supplement their diet.

‘Still,’ continued Martel, ‘if you’re asking what’s current, there’s a timber company man, a freelance surveyor name of Gary Chute, who hasn’t delivered his report yet.’

I recalled the PBS news programme, although I hadn’t noticed any sense of urgency in its discussion of the situation. ‘I heard them talking about it on the radio,’ I said. ‘How bad is it?’

‘Hard to say. Seems his wife hasn’t seen him in a while, although that’s not unusual. He had a couple of projects to work on, and was set to spend some time away from home. Plus rumour has it he keeps some sweet stuff stashed over in Troy, Vermont. Add to that his fondness for the bottle, and you got a guy who maybe isn’t the most reliable. He doesn’t turn up in the next twenty-four hours, there may have to be a search organised. It’ll probably be down to the wardens and the Piscataquis sheriff, but could be we’ll all have to lend a hand. Talking of serious, I hear you want to know about Emily Watts?’

I nodded. I figured that it would be easier to talk to Martel first and then try to deal with Rand Jennings than to try to find out what I wanted to know by talking to Jennings alone. I thought I might slip it past Martel without him noticing, but he was too good for that.

‘Can I ask why you’re not talking to Rand Jennings up in Dark Hollow about this?’ There was a smile on his face, but his eyes were still and watchful.

‘Rand and I have some history,’ I replied. ‘You get on with him?’ Something in the way that Martel asked the question told me that I wasn’t the only one with a little history behind him.

‘Have to try,’ said Martel diplomatically. ‘He’s not the most sympathetic of men, but he’s conscientious in his way. His sergeant, Ressler, now he’s another matter. Ressler’s so full of shit his eyeballs are brown. Haven’t seen too much of him lately, which is fine by me. They’ve been kept busy, what with the trouble over Emily Watts dying and all.’

Outside, a car crawled sluggishly up the street, heading north, but there didn’t appear to be anybody walking around. Beyond, I could see the shapes of pine-covered islands out on the lake, but they were little more than dark patches in the mist.

The coffee arrived and Martel told me about what took place the night Emily Watts died, the same night that Billy Purdue took some two million dollars for which a lot more people had died. It was a strange death, out there in the woods. She would have died anyway from the cold, if they hadn’t tracked her down, but to kill herself out in the woods at the age of sixty . . .

‘It was a mess,’ said Martel. ‘But these things, they happen sometimes and there’s no way to call them before they go down. Maybe if the security guard hadn’t been packing, and the nurse on the old woman’s floor had been watching less TV, and the doors had been locked more securely, and a dozen other things hadn’t been out-of-sync that night, then things might have been different. You want to tell me what your interest is in all this?’

‘Billy Purdue.’

‘Billy Purdue. Now there’s a name to warm your heart on a winter’s night.’

‘You know him?’

‘Sure I know him. His ass was rousted not so long ago. Ten days, maybe. He was out at St Martha’s, kicking and screaming with an ass pocket of whiskey. Said he wanted to speak to his momma, but no one knew him from Cain himself. He was hauled in, allowed to cool off in one of Jennings’s cells, then packed off home. They told him that, if he came back, he’d be charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace. He even made the local papers. From what I hear, the last few days haven’t made him a reformed character.’

It looked like Billy Purdue had followed up on the information supplied by Willeford. ‘You know his wife and child were killed?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, I know. Never figured him for a killer, though.’ He gave me a thoughtful look. ‘My guess is, you don’t either.’

‘I don’t know. You think he could have been looking for the woman who shot herself?’

‘Why would you think that?’

‘I’m not overfond of coincidences. They’re God’s way of telling you that you’re not seeing the big picture.’ Plus, I knew that Willeford, for good or bad, had given Emily Watts’s name to Billy.

‘Well, you see that picture, you let me know, because I sure as hell don’t know why that old woman did what she did. Could be it was her nightmares that drove her to it.’

‘Nightmares?’

‘Yeah, she told the nurses that she saw the figure of a man watching her window and that someone tried to break into her room.’

‘Any sign of an attempt at forced entry?’

‘Nothing. Shit, the woman was on the fourth floor. Anyone trying to get in would have had to climb up the drainpipe. There might have been someone in the grounds earlier in the week, but that happens sometimes. Could have been a drunk taking a leak, or kids fooling around. In the end, I think the old lady was just starting to lose it, because there’s no other way to explain it, or the name she called when she died.’

I leaned forward. ‘What name did she call?’

‘She called the bogeyman,’ said Martel with a smile. ‘She called the guy that mothers use to scare their children into bed, the hobgoblin.’

‘What was the name?’ I repeated, and something like fear crept into my voice.

Martel’s smile gave way to a look of puzzlement as he said it.

‘Caleb,’ he said. ‘She called on Caleb Kyle.’

Part Two

For the thing which

I greatly feared is come upon me,

and that which I was afraid of

Is come unto me.

Job

Chapter Thirteen

The years tumble by like leaves driven before the breeze, intricate and veined, fading from the green of recent memory to the gold autumnal shades of the distant past. I see myself as a child, as a young man, as a lover, a husband, a father, a mourner. I see old men around me in their old men pants and their old men shirts; old men dancing, their feet moving delicately, following a pattern lost to those younger than them; old men telling tales, their liver-spotted hands moving before the fire, their skin like crumpled paper, their voices soft as the rustle of empty corn husks.

An old man walks through the lush August grass with wood in his arms, brushing away loose bark with a gloved hand; an old man, tall and unbowed, with a halo of white hair like an ancient angel, a dog stepping slowly beside him, older, in its way, than the man himself, its grey-beard muzzle flecked with foam, its tongue lolling, its tail swinging gently through the warm evening air. The first patches of red are showing in the trees, and the clamour of the insects has begun to subside. The ash trees, the last to unfurl their leaves in spring, are now the first to let them fall to the ground. Pine needles decay on the forest floor and the blackberries are ripe and dense as the old man passes by, at one with the rhythms of the world around him.

These are the things he does, open-coated, firm footsteps leaving the clear imprint of his passing as he goes: the woodcutting, savouring the weight of the axe in his hands, the perfection of the swing, the fresh crack as the blade splits the sugar maple log, the sweep of the head to clear the two halves, the careful positioning of the next log, the heft of the axe, the feel of his old man muscles moving, stretching, beneath his old man shirt. Then the piling, wood on wood, fitting one to the other, shifting, turning, forming the pile so that it remains steady, so that none will fall, so that not even one will be lost. Finally, he stretches the sheeting, a brick at each corner to hold it in place – always the same bricks for he is, and has ever been, a methodical man. And when the time comes in winter to set the fire, he will return to his pile and bend down, the buckle of the belt on his old man pants digging into the softness of his belly, and he will remember that it was firm once, when he was a young man, when the belt held a gun and a nightstick and cuffs, and his badge shone like a silver sun.

I will be old too, and I will be this man, if I am spared. I will find a kind of happiness in repeating his motions, in the aptness of the action as I feel the circle closing, as I become him, as he made her, who made me. And in doing what he once did, in front of that same house, with the same trees moving in the wind, the same axe in my hand cleaving the wood beneath its blade, I will create an act of remembrance more powerful than a thousand prayers. And my grandfather will live in me, and the ghost of a dog will taste the air with its tongue, and bark at the joy of it.

Now it is his hands that I see moving before the fire, his voice that tells the tale, about Caleb Kyle and the tree with the strange fruit at the edge of the wilderness. He has never told me the tale before and he will never tell me how it ends, because it has no end, not for him. It will be I who will finish the tale for him, and I who will complete the arc.

Judy Giffen was the first to disappear, in Bangor in 1965. She was a slim girl, nineteen, with a mane of dark hair and soft red lips with which she tasted men, savouring them like berries. She worked in a hat shop and went missing on a warm April evening redolent with the promise of summer. They searched and they searched, but they didn’t find her. Her face looked out from ten thousand newspapers, frozen in her years as surely as if she had been trapped in amber.

Ruth Dickinson from Corinna, another thin beauty, with long blonde hair that hung to her waist, was next to go, in late May when she was just short of her twenty-first birthday. To their names would be added Louise Moore from East Corinth, Laurel Trulock from Skowhegan and Sarah Raines from Portland, all disappearing within a period of not more than a few days in September. Sarah Raines was a schoolteacher and, at twenty-two, the eldest of the women to disappear. Her father, Samuel Raines, had been to school with Bob Warren, my grandfather, and Sarah was Bob’s goddaughter. The last to go missing was an eighteen-year-old student named Judith Mundy, who disappeared after a party in Monson in the first week of October. Unlike the others, she was a chubby, plain girl, but by then people had figured out that there was something very wrong and the break in the pattern didn’t seem so important. A search was organised for the Mundy girl to the north and a lot of folks helped out, some, like my grandfather, from as far south as Portland. He drove up on a Saturday morning but, by then, all hope was pretty much gone. My grandfather joined a small party out by Sebec Lake, a few miles east of Monson. There were only three men, then two, then just my grandfather.

That evening, he got himself a room in Sebec and had dinner in a bar outside town. It was bustling, what with all the people who had been out looking for Judith Mundy, and the newspapermen and the police. He sat drinking a beer at the counter when a voice beside him said:

‘You know what all this fuss is about?’

He turned and saw a tall, dark-haired man with a knife slash for a mouth and hard, unloving eyes. There was a trace of the south in his voice, he thought. He wore tan corduroy pants and a dark sweater pitted with holes, through which patches of a dirty yellow shirt were visible. A brown slicker hung to his calves, and the toes of heavy black boots peered from under the too-long cuffs of his pants.

‘They’re looking for the girl who’s gone missing,’ replied my grandfather. The man made him uneasy. There was something in his voice, he recalled, something sour-sweet, like syrup laced with arsenic. He smelt of earth and sap and something else, something he couldn’t quite place.

‘You think they’re gonna find her?’ A light flickered in the man’s eyes, and my grandfather thought that it might have been amusement.

‘Maybe.’

‘They ain’t found the others.’

He was watching my grandfather now, his face solemn but the strange glimmer still in his eyes.

‘No, they haven’t.’

‘You a cop?’

My grandfather nodded. There was no point in denying it. Some people just knew.

‘You’re not from around here, though?’

‘No. I’m from Portland.’

‘Portland?’ said the man. He seemed impressed. ‘And where you been searching?’

‘Out by Sebec Lake, the south shore.’

‘Sebec Lake’s nice. Me, I prefer the Little Wilson Stream, up there by the Elliotsville Road. It’s pretty, worth a look if a man had the time. Lot of coverage on the banks.’ He gestured for a whiskey, tossed some coins on the bar, then drained the glass in a single mouthful. ‘You going back out there again tomorrow?’

‘I guess.’

He nodded, wiping the back of his right hand across his mouth. My grandfather saw scarring on the palm, and dirt beneath the fingernails. ‘Well, maybe you’ll have better luck than them other fellas, seeing as how you’re from Portland and all. Sometimes it takes new eyes to see an old trick.’ Then he left.

That Sunday, the day when my grandfather found the tree with the strange fruit, dawned crisp and bright, with birds in the trees and blossoms by the shining waters of Sebec Lake. He left his car by the lake at Packard’s Camps, showed his badge and joined a small party, made up of two brothers and a cousin from the same family, which was heading for the northern shore. The four men searched together for three hours, not talking much, until the family returned home for Sunday lunch. They asked my grandfather if he wanted to join them, but he had wrapped sourdough bread in a napkin with some fried chicken, and he had a thermos of coffee in his backpack, so he turned down their offer. He returned to Packard’s Camps and ate seated on a stone by the bank, the water lapping behind him, and watched rabbits skipping through the grass.

When the other men didn’t return, he got in his car and began to drive. He took the road north till he came to a steel bridge that crossed the waters of the Little Wilson. Its roadway was a series of grilles through which could be seen the brown rushing torrent of the stream. Across the bridge the road sloped upwards before splitting in two, heading for Ontwa and Borestone Mountain along the Elliotsville Road to the west and Leighton to the east. On each side of the river, the trees grew thickly. A hermit thrush shot from a birch and looped across the water. Somewhere, a warbler called.

My grandfather did not cross the bridge, but parked his car by the side of the road and followed a rough trail of stones and dirt down to the riverbank. The water was fast moving, and there were rocky outcrops and fallen branches to negotiate as he began to walk, so that he had to step into the flow at times to bypass them. Soon, there were no more houses on the slopes above him. The bank grew increasingly wild, and he was forced more and more often to take to the water in order to continue upriver.

He had been walking for almost thirty minutes when he heard the flies.

Ahead of him, a huge slab of rock rose up from the bank, its end almost tapering to a point. He climbed it, using its ridges and alcoves for footholds and handholds, until he reached the plateau. To his right was the river, to his left a space in the trees through which the buzzing sounded louder. He walked through the gap, over which the trees hung in an arch like the entry into a cathedral, until he reached a small clearing. The sight that met him made him stop short and caused his food to erupt from his gut in a rush.

The girls hung from an oak, an old, mature tree with a thick, gnarled trunk and heavy extended branches like splayed fingers. They turned slowly, black against the sun, their bare feet pointing at the ground, their hands loose by their sides, heads lolling to one side. A fury of flies surrounded them, excited by the stench of decay. As he moved towards them, he could make out the colour of their hair, the twigs and leaves caught in the strands, the yellowing of their teeth, the eruptions on their skin, their mutilated bellies. Some were naked, while tattered dresses still clung to the others. They pirouetted in mid air, like the ghosts of five dancers no longer restricted by the pull of gravity. A heavy, rough rope around the neck of each anchored the girls to the branches above.

There were only five. When the bodies were taken down and identified, Judith Mundy’s was not among them. And when she didn’t appear, when no trace was ever found of her, it was decided that whoever was responsible for the deaths of the five others had probably had nothing to do with the disappearance of the Mundy girl. It would be more than thirty years before that piece of reasoning was proved wrong.

My grandfather told the police about the man in the bar and what he had said. The details were taken down and it was found that a man roughly fitting that description had been seen in Monson about the time of Judith Mundy’s disappearance. There were similar descriptions of a fellow in Skowhegan, although folks differed about his height, or the colour of his eyes, or the cut of his hair. This anonymous man was a suspect, for a time, until something broke in the case.

Ruth Dickinson’s clothes, soiled with blood and grime, were found in a shed in Corinna owned by the family of Quintin Fletcher. Fletcher was twenty-eight and somewhat retarded: he made a little money by selling handicrafts he created from wood picked up in the forest, travelling around the state by Greyhound bus with his case of wooden dolls, toy trucks and candlesticks. Ruth Dickinson had complained to his family and, later, to the police, that Fletcher had followed her on occasion, leering and making lewd suggestions. After he tried to touch her breast at a county fair the police told his family that they would have him put away if he approached the Dickinson girl again. Fletcher’s name came up in the course of the investigation into the girls’ deaths. He was questioned, the house searched, and the discovery made. Fletcher started crying, claiming that he didn’t know where the clothing came from, that he hadn’t hurt anybody. He was remanded for trial and placed in a secure unit in Maine State Prison, for fear that someone might try to get to him if he was kept locally. He might still have been there now, making toys and nautical gifts for the store out on US 1 in York that sells prisoners’ crafts, but for the fact that a trusty, who was related distantly to Judy Giffen, attacked Fletcher when he was undergoing a checkup in the prison hospital and stabbed him three times in the neck and chest with a scalpel. Fletcher died twenty-four hours later, two days before his case was due to go to trial.

And there it lay, for most people at least: the killings ended with Fletcher’s capture and subsequent death. But my grandfather couldn’t forget the man in the bar, and the glimmer in his eyes, and the reference to the Elliotsville Road. For months afterwards, he countered hostility and the desire to mourn and forget with quiet persistence and sensitivity. And what he got was a name, which folks had heard but couldn’t quite remember how, and sightings of the man from the bar in each town where a girl had been lost. He mounted a campaign of sorts, speaking to any newspaper or radio show that would listen, putting across his view that the man who had killed the five girls and used them to decorate a tree was still at large. He even convinced some people, for a time, until the family of Quintin Fletcher weighed in behind him and folks took a turn against the whole affair, even his old friend Sam Raines.

In the end, the hostility and indifference proved too much even for him. Under some pressure, my grandfather left the force and took up construction and then woodworking to support his family, carving lamps and chairs and tables and selling them through the HOME service for cottage industries run by the Franciscan nuns in Orland. He carved each piece of work with the same care and sensitivity he had used to question the families of the girls who died. He only spoke of the affair once thereafter, that night in front of the fire with the smell of the wood on him and the dog sleeping at his feet. The discovery he had made on that warm day had blighted his life. It haunted him in his sleep, the possibility that the man who had killed those girls had somehow escaped justice.

After he told me the tale, I knew that on those occasions when I found him sitting on the porch, his pipe cold between his lips, his eyes fixed somewhere beyond the sunset, he was thinking about what had taken place decades before. When he pushed away food almost untouched, after reading in the papers about some young girl who had strayed from home and not yet been found, he was back on the Elliotsville Road, his feet wet in his boots and the ghosts of dead girls whispering in his ear.

And the name that he found all those years before had, by then, become a kind of talisman in towns in the north, although no one could figure out how that might have happened. It was used to scare bad children who wouldn’t do what they were told, who wouldn’t go to sleep quietly or who headed off into the woods with their friends without telling anyone where they were going. It was a name spoken at night, before the light was switched off and the hair tousled by a familiar hand, the soft scent of a mother’s perfume lingering after a final good night kiss: ‘Be good now and go to sleep. And no more trips into the forest, else Caleb will get you.’

I can see my grandfather poking at the logs in the fire, letting them settle before he adds another, the sparks flying up the chimney like sprites, the melting snow sizzling in the flames.

‘Caleb Kyle, Caleb Kyle,’ he intones, repeating the words of the children’s rhyme, the fire casting shadows on his face. ‘If you see him, run a mile.’

And the snow hisses, and the wood cracks, and the dog whimpers softly in its sleep.

Chapter Fourteen

St Martha’s stood on its own grounds, surrounded by a stone wall fifteen feet in height and guarded by wrought-iron gates from which black paint bubbled and flaked in preparation for a slow, fluttering fall to the earth and snow below. The ornamental pond was filled with leaves and trash, the lawn was overgrown and the trees had not been pruned for so long that the branches of some intertwined with those of their neighbours, creating a woven canopy beneath which the grass had probably died. The building itself was grimly institutional: four floors of grey stone with a gabled roof beneath which a carved cross betrayed its religious origins.

I drove to the main entrance and parked in a space reserved for staff, then walked up the granite steps and into the home itself. To one side stood the security guard’s booth where the old woman had cold-cocked Judd before racing off to her death. Straight ahead was a reception desk where a female attendant in a white coat was busy rearranging some papers. Behind her, a door opened into an office lined with books and files. The attendant was a plain-faced woman with white, doughy cheeks and dark eye shadow that made her look like a Mardi Gras skeleton. She had no name tag on her lapel; close up, her coat was stained at the breast and white threads hung like cobwebs from the fraying collar. Willeford had been right: the place smelled of overboiled vegetables and human waste, unsuccessfully masked by disinfectant. All things considered, Emily Watts might have done the smart thing by making a break for the woods.

‘Can I help you?’ said the woman. Her face was neutral but her voice had the same tone as Meade Payne’s boy. It made ‘help’ sound like a dirty word. The way she said ‘you’ wasn’t much better.

I gave her my name and told her that Chief Martel had called ahead to arrange for me to talk to someone about the death of Emily Watts.

‘I’m sorry, but Dr Ryley, the director, is at a meeting in Augusta until tomorrow.’ She sounded superficially pleasant, but her face told me that anyone asking about Emily Watts was about as welcome as Louis Farrakhan at a Klan dinner. ‘I told the chief, but you’d already left.’ Now her face matched her tone, with the addition of a look of malicious amusement at the trip I’d been forced to make unnecessarily.

‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘You can’t let me talk to anyone without the director’s permission, the director isn’t here and you have no way of contacting him.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Happy to save you the trouble of saying it.’

She bristled and gripped her pen tightly, as if in preparation for ramming it into my eye. From out of the security booth stepped a pudgy guy in a cheap, badly fitting uniform. He pulled on his hat as he walked towards me, but not quickly enough to hide the scars at the side of his head.

‘Everything all right here, Glad?’ he asked the woman behind the desk. Glad: some people were just like a big finger raised to the universe.

‘Now I am scared,’ I said. ‘Big security man and no old lady to protect me.’

He blushed a deep red and sucked in his stomach a little.

‘I think you’d better leave. Like the lady said, there’s nobody here who can help you.’

I nodded and pointed to his belt. ‘I see you got a new gun. Maybe you should get a lock and chain for it. A passing child might try to steal it.’

I left them in the reception area and walked back into the grounds. I felt a little petty for picking on Judd but I was tired and antsy and the mention of the name Caleb Kyle after all those years had thrown me. I stood on the grass and looked up at the stained, unlovely façade of the home. Emily Watts’s room was at the western corner, top floor, according to Martel. The drapes were drawn and there were bird droppings on the window ledge. In the room beside it, a figure moved at the window and an elderly woman, her hair pulled back in a bun, watched me. I smiled at her but she didn’t respond. When I drove away, I could see her in the rear-view, still standing at the window, still watching.

I had planned to stay another day in Dark Hollow, since I hadn’t yet spoken to Rand Jennings. The sight of his wife had stirred up feelings in me that had been submerged for a long time: anger, regret, the embers of some old desire. I remembered the humiliation of lying on the toilet floor as Jennings’s blows rained down on me, his fat friend snickering as he held the door closed. It surprised me, but part of me still wanted a confrontation with him after all that time.

On my way back to the motel, I tried to call Angel using the cell phone but I seemed to be out of range. I called him instead from a gas station, listening to the newly installed telephone in the Scarborough house ring five times before he eventually picked up.

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s Bird. What’s happening?’

‘Lots, none of it good. While you’ve been doing your Perry Mason thing up north, Billy Purdue was spotted in a convenience store down here. He got away before the cops could pick him up but he’s still in the city, somewhere.’

‘He won’t be for long, now that he’s been seen. What about Tony Celli?’

‘Nothing, but the cops found the Coupe de Ville in an old barn out by Westbrook. Louis picked it up on the police band. Looks like the freak show ditched his wheels for something less showy.’

I was about to tell him what little I had learned when he interrupted.

‘There’s something else. You got a visitor here, arrived this morning.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Lee Cole.’

I was surprised, given the deterioration of my friendship with her husband. Maybe she had hopes of rebuilding bridges between Walter and me.

‘Did she say what she wanted?’

There was a hesitation in Angel’s voice, and I immediately felt my stomach turn. ‘Kinda. Bird, her daughter Ellen is missing.’

I drove back immediately, doing a steady eighty as soon as I hit I-95. I was almost on the outskirts of Portland when the cell phone rang. I picked it up, half expecting it to be Angel again. It wasn’t.

‘Parker?’ I recognised the voice almost immediately.

‘Billy? Where are you?’

Billy Purdue’s voice was panicky and scared. ‘I’m in trouble, man. My wife, she trusted you, and now I’m trusting you too. I didn’t kill them, Parker. I wouldn’t do that. I couldn’t kill her. I couldn’t kill my little boy.’

‘I know, Billy, I know.’ As we spoke, I kept repeating his name in an effort to calm him and develop whatever tentative trust he might have towards me. I tried to put Ellen Cole out of my mind, at least for the present. I would deal with that as soon as I could.

‘The cops are after me. They think I killed ’em. I loved ’em. I’d never have hurt ’em. I just wanted to keep ’em.’ His voice bubbled on the edge of hysteria.

‘Calm down, Billy,’ I said. ‘Look, tell me where you are and I’ll come and get you. We’ll take you somewhere safe and we can talk this thing through.’

‘There was an old guy at their place, Parker. I saw him watching it, that night the cops picked me up. I was trying to look out for them, but I couldn’t.’ I wasn’t even sure that he had heard my offer of help, but I let him talk as I drove past the Falmouth exit about three miles from the city.

‘Did you recognise him, Billy?’

‘No, I never seen him before, but I’d know him if I saw him again.’

‘Good, Billy. Now tell me where you are and I’ll come and get you.’

‘I’m at a phone box on Commercial, but I can’t stay here. There’s people, cars. I’ve been hiding out in the Portland Company complex at Fore Street, down by the locomotive museum. There’s a vacant building just inside the main entrance. You know it?’

‘Yeah, I know it. Go back inside. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

I called Angel again and told him to meet me, with Louis, at the corner of India and Commercial. Lee Cole was to be left at Java Joe’s. I didn’t want her at the house in case Tony Celli, or anyone else, decided to pay a visit.

There was no one else around when I arrived at the corner of India and Commercial. I pulled into the parking lot of the old India Street Terminal, the car nestling in the shadow of the old three-storey building. As I stepped from the car, the first drops of rain began to fall, a heavy, skin-soaking rain that exploded dramatically on the hood of the car and left splashes the size of quarters on the windshield. I walked round the terminal, past a picnic table and a single-storey office building, painted red, until I was on the harbour side, looking out over the dark waters. Thunder rumbled and, on Casco Bay, a ship was frozen in a flash of lightning. Ahead of me, on a restored stretch of line used to give tourists a taste of a narrow gauge railway, stood a flat-bed car with a storage tank on top, marking the start of the line. A row of locked cargo containers was ranged behind the car. To my right was the Casco Bay ferry terminal, the dinosaur body of a blue eighteen-ton crane standing above it on four spindly legs like a mutilated bug.

I was about to turn back to my car when, from behind me, I heard a noise on the gravel and a familiar voice said: ‘Bad weather for birds. You should be curled up in your coop.’ The voice was accompanied by the cocking of a hammer on a pistol.

I slowly raised my hands from my coat and turned to see Mifflin, Tony Celli’s harelipped enforcer, smiling crookedly at me. He held a Ruger Speed Six in his hand, the rounded butt gripped hard in his stubby fist.

‘It’s like déjà vu all over again,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to park someplace else in future.’

‘I think your parking problem is about to be solved. Permanently. How’s your head feel?’ The smile was still fixed in place.

‘A little tender. Hope I didn’t hurt your foot too badly.’

‘I get the soles specially made to absorb impact. I didn’t feel a thing.’ He was close to me, maybe only six or seven feet away. I didn’t know where he had come from; maybe he had been waiting in the shadows behind One India all along, or had followed me to the meeting place, although I couldn’t figure out how he might have known about it. Behind me, the rain made cracking noises as it hit the water.

Mifflin nodded in the direction of the lot. ‘See you got your Mustang fixed.’

‘Accidents will happen. That’s why I have insurance.’

‘You should have saved your money, spent it on dames. You ain’t gonna need a car no more, unless they have demolition derbies in hell.’

He raised the gun and his finger tightened on the trigger. ‘Bet your insurance doesn’t cover you for this.’

‘Bet it does,’ I said, as Louis appeared from behind the red office building, his dark hand gripping Mifflin’s gun arm tightly as I moved quickly to my left. Louis’s right hand pressed the barrel of a SIG into the soft jowl of the would-be assassin.

‘Gently,’ said Louis. ‘Wouldn’t want that thing to go off and scare somebody, make them loose off a shot into someone else’s fat jaw.’

Miffiin carefully removed his finger from within the guard and slowly eased the hammer down. Angel joined Louis and took the Ruger from the gunman’s hand.

‘Hi, gorgeous,’ he said, pointing it at Mifflin’s head. ‘That’s a big gun for a little guy.’

Miffiin said nothing as Louis eased the SIG away from his mouth and slipped it into the side pocket of his dark overcoat, his hand still gripping the gunman’s arm. Louis made a sudden, swift movement and there was a hard, sharp crack as he broke Mifflin’s right arm at the elbow, then struck the smaller man’s head twice against the side of the building. The gunman folded to the ground. Angel disappeared and returned a minute later driving the Mercury. He flipped the trunk and Louis dumped Mifflin’s prone form inside. Then we followed the car as Angel drove to the end of the Island parking lot, close by a gap in the fencing that led to the edge of the dock. When we had stopped, Louis took Mifflin’s body from the trunk, dragged him to the edge, and threw him into the sea. There was a loud splash as he hit the water, the noise quickly drowned by the steady sound of the rain.

Louis would have regarded me as weak, I think, if I had said it, but I regretted the death of Miffiin. Certainly, the fact that he had been about to kill me indicated that Tony Celli felt my limited usefulness was now at an end. If we had let him live, he would have come back and tried again, probably with more guns to back him up. But the finality of that soft splash made me weary.

‘His car’s parked a block away,’ said Angel. ‘We found this on the floor.’ In his hand was a mobile VHF three-channel receiver, maybe five inches wide and an inch and a half in width, designed to draw power from the car battery. If there was a receiver, then there had to be a transmitter.

‘They bugged the house,’ I said. ‘Probably while I was in Celli’s room. I should have known, when they didn’t kill me.’

Angel shrugged, and tossed the receiver into the sea. ‘If he was here, then his friends are already on their way to the complex,’ he said. To my left, Fore Street wound north, parallel to the harbour, and I could see the silhouettes of the Portland Company buildings in the distance.

‘We’ll follow the railway line, come in from the harbour side,’ I said. I drew my gun and clicked off the safety, but Louis tapped me on the shoulder as I did so and withdrew a Colt Government Model .380 from his right coat pocket. From his inside pocket, he produced and fitted a suppressor. ‘You use your Smith & Wesson and anything goes down, they can trace it back to you,’ he said. ‘Use this, and we can dump it later. Plus, it’ll be a whole lot quieter.’ Not surprisingly, Louis knew his guns: semi-automatics chambered for subsonic ammunition are about the only pistols that function effectively with a suppressor. If the Hertz people knew the kind of luggage Louis was keeping in their car, they’d have suffered a collective seizure.

Louis handed his SIG to Angel, took a matching .380 from his left pocket and once again fitted a suppressor. His actions should have alerted me to what would happen later – not even Louis just ‘happened’ to be carrying a pair of silenced weapons – but I was too concerned about Billy Purdue to give it much thought.

Louis and I walked down the line, Angel behind us. Rust-red railroad tracks lay in forgotten piles, beside ties that were pitted and knotted, the wood almost black in places. Beyond the storage yards, where old wrecking balls lay side by side and concrete supports bled rust from their innards, wooden pilings moved in the tide like the remains of a primeval forest.

The Portland Company complex stood across from the marina, its entrance marked by the Sandy River Railroad car used to carry the tourists, its red guard’s car and green carriages now standing silent. The complex had served the railroads once, when the Portland Company had built engines and steam locomotives, but it closed in the seventies and the buildings had now been redeveloped as a business park. Inside the yard, an old black steel tractor with a restored chimney stood at the entrance to the Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum. The building, like all those in the complex, was red brick, and three stories at its highest point, with a machine tool company housed in a similar, though larger, structure behind it, the two connected by a closed walkway. To the left of the museum was a long building that housed some kind of yacht service, I seemed to remember, and a second, similar building used by a fibreglass company.

At the southern end of the yard was a larger, three-storey building, the windows on the ground floor boarded up, the windows on the other levels obscured by wire screens, where Billy Purdue had said he was hiding. There was no doorway on the harbour side but the northern end had a wooden, shedlike structure that housed the main door. A roadway wound past the doorway and sloped upwards to the visitor entrance to the complex on Fore Street. The whole place appeared deserted and the rain fell hard and unforgiving upon it. The drops sounded like stones beating on the roof of the museum, where a side door stood open. Silently, I indicated it and Louis, Angel and I made our way into the building.

Inside, beneath a vaulted ceiling, deserted railroad cars stood in rows: green Wicasset and Quebec cars, green and red Sandy River cars from Franklin County, a green and yellow Bridgton and Saco, and, to our right, an old Railbus with an REO Speedwagon chassis from the Sandy River line.

Beside the Railbus, a body lay curled, its long dark coat gathered around it like a shroud. I turned it over, steeling myself for the sight of Billy Purdue. It was not him. Instead, the contorted features of Berendt, Mifflin’s square-headed sidekick, stared back at me, a dark, ragged exit wound in his forehead. I could smell singed hair. On the floor of the museum, blood and dust congealed.

Louis’s shadow fell across me. ‘You think Billy Purdue did this?’

I swallowed, and the sound was huge in my ears. I shook my head and he nodded silently to himself.

We made our way left, passing between two Edaville cars on our way to the museum office. There was no one else in the building, but the steel door at the front entrance banged noisily against the frame as the wind blew and the rain continued to fall.

In the darkness beneath the walkway connecting the tool works and the museum building, a black Ford sedan was parked, its windows obscured by the falling rain. I recognised it from the crime scene outside Rita Ferris’s apartment.

‘It’s the feds,’ I said. ‘They must have found Celli’s guys.’

‘That, or they were listening in on you as well,’ muttered Louis.

‘Great,’ said Angel. ‘Is there anybody who isn’t here? Billy Purdue’s so fucking popular, he should have his own holiday.’

The rear door of the car opened and a figure in a dark coat stepped out, head down, closing the door softly behind him. He walked quickly in our direction, one hand deep in his pocket, the other holding a black umbrella above his head. A light from the tool works briefly illuminated him as he passed through its beam.

‘And this would be . . . ?’ said Angel wearily.

‘Eldritch, the Canadian cop. Stay here.’

I stepped from the shadows and Eldritch stopped, a puzzled look on his face as he tried to recognise me.

‘Parker?’ he said at last. ‘You want to bring your friends out of the shadows too?’

From behind me, Louis and Angel appeared and stood beside me, Louis regarding Eldritch with relaxed interest.

‘Well, you going to get out of this rain?’ asked the Canadian.

‘After you, officer,’ I replied. Something had caught my eye over by the Ford when Eldritch stepped from the car, the interior light casting a faint glow on the ground below. There was a small pool of red beneath the driver’s door, which was not fully closed, and, as I watched, something dripped steadily from the crack.

Eldritch stepped by me, one hand still holding the umbrella, exposing a gold cuff-link and a white shirtsleeve. There was a dark spot spreading on the cuff as he turned to watch my progress towards the car.

I glanced back at Louis but something else had caught his eye.

‘You got something on your collar, officer,’ he said quietly, as Eldritch stood beneath the light.

Eldritch’s shirt collar showed above the lapel of his coat. At its edge, and just above the knot of his tie, there were spots of black, like soot. But as Louis spoke, Eldritch lowered his umbrella, trying to block my view as he made his move, the gun visible to me only briefly as he removed his right hand from his pocket. I could see Louis already raising his own gun as Eldritch began to turn, the umbrella now tumbling in mid air, Angel to one side looking on. But I fired first, the bullet tearing a hole in the umbrella and hitting Eldritch low on the thigh, the gunshot masked by the suppressor and the driving rain. I fired again, this time hitting him in the side. The gun fell from his hand and he tumbled against the wall of the museum, sliding down with his back against it until he sat on the ground, his teeth gritted in pain and his hand clutching at the red stain, spreading across the front of his coat. Beside him, Louis picked up his gun by slipping a pen through the trigger guard and examined the weapon with professional detachment.

‘Taurus,’ he said. ‘Brazilian. Looks like our friend might have vacationed in South America.’

I walked to the car. There were two star-shaped bullet holes in the windshield surrounded by twin sunbursts of blood. I opened the driver’s door with a gloved hand and stepped back as Agent Samson fell sideways onto the ground, a dark hole at the bridge of his ruined nose where the bullet had exited. Beside him, Agent Doyle’s forehead rested against the dashboard, blood pooling at his feet. Both were still warm.

Carefully, I lifted Samson into the car, closed the door and walked back to where Angel and Louis stood over the bleeding man.

‘Abel,’ said Louis. Despite his pain, the man on the ground regarded us with dark, hateful eyes, but didn’t speak.

‘He’s not going anywhere,’ I said. ‘We put him in the trunk of the Ford, call the cops, let them take care of him after we’re done.’

But neither Angel nor Louis appeared to be listening to me. Instead, Angel shook his head and tut-tutted: ‘A man your age dyeing his hair,’ he said to Abel. ‘That’s just vanity.’

‘And you know what they say about vanity,’ said Louis softly. Abel looked up at him, his eyes widening.

‘Vanity kills,’ concluded Louis. Then he shot him once, the Colt jumping in his hand. Abel’s head bumped against the wall behind him, his eyes closed tightly, and then his chin slumped forwards onto his chest.

For the first time in my life, I touched Louis in anger. Reaching out, I pushed him hard on the chest. He took a step back, his expression unchanged.

‘Why?’ I shouted. ‘Why did you kill him? Jesus, Louis, do we have to kill everybody?’

‘No,’ said Louis. ‘Just Abel and Stritch.’

And then I understood why Louis and Angel had come here, and the realisation was like a punch in the stomach.

‘It’s a contract,’ I said. ‘You took on the hit.’ I knew now why Leo Voss had been killed, why Abel and Stritch had chosen this time to recede into the shadows, and it was only partly to do with the opportunity offered by Billy Purdue and the money he had stolen. Abel and Stritch were running, and they were running from Louis.

He nodded once. Beside him, Angel looked at me with a kind of sorrow, but also determination. I knew whose side he was on.

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘A dollar,’ said Louis simply. ‘I’d have taken fifty cents, but the man didn’t have no change.’

‘A dollar ?’ It was strange, but I almost smiled despite myself. He had taken a dollar, yet their lives were worth even less than that. I looked back at Abel’s body and thought of the two agents in the car and the real Eldritch, who had probably never made it as far as Maine.

‘They’re that bad, Bird,’ said Angel. ‘These guys are the fucking worst. Don’t let them come between us.’

I shook my head. ‘You should have told me, that’s all. You should have trusted me.’

Now Louis spoke. ‘You’re right. It was my call. I called wrong.’

He stood before me, waiting for me to respond, and I knew why he had kept it from me. After all, I was an ex-cop, with cop friends. Maybe Louis still had doubts. I had saved Angel’s life while he was in prison and, in return, they had stood by me when Jennifer and Susan were killed, had put their own lives on the line in the hunt for their killer and the killers of others, and asked nothing in return. I had no reason to doubt them; they, on the other hand, a burglar and an assassin, could be forgiven for having concerns about me.

‘I understand,’ I said at last.

Louis nodded his head once in response, but in that gesture and the look in his eyes he said all that he needed to say.

‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘Time to find Billy Purdue.’ And as we walked to the vacant building, the rain falling heavily now, I took a last look at Abel’s body and shivered slightly. His huddled form, and the remains of Berendt in the railroad museum, were mute testament to the fact that the squat, grotesque figure of Stritch could not be far away.

There were two cars parked farther up on Fore Street, across from a new development of grey wood houses half clad in red brick. It was too dark to see if anyone remained inside the vehicles. When we reached the main door to the unoccupied building, the lock had already been broken open and the door stood slightly ajar. Staying close to the wall, I peered round the corner to the front of the building. There, the windows on the top floor were boarded up, while a wooden walkway led from the grass border to a locked door on the second storey. Because of the gradient of the slope, the ground floor was actually below the grass, its windows masked with more screens.

I came back to where Angel and Louis were waiting by the door, where we agreed that Angel should leave us and return in the Mercury, so that if we came out with Billy Purdue we could leave quickly.

Inside the door was a flight of stairs, dusty and littered with old newspaper. They led up to the second floor, to a kind of storage bay supported by steel columns. Behind the stairs was a series of empty offices and work areas, all quiet and unlit. The warehouse still smelt faintly of wood, although now the pervading odour was one of dampness and decay. Louis had a flashlight but didn’t light it for fear of drawing attention to us.

From where we stood, I could see that mounds of rotted wood still lay in one corner near the stairs. Water dripped from the ceiling as the rain fell through the warehouse roof and gradually leaked through to the floors below. We moved behind the stairway and into the first of the series of workshops, empty apart from some wooden benches and a broken plastic chair. Through the sound of the pouring rain and dripping water I could hear a noise from the other side of the wall as we neared a doorway. I motioned Louis to the left and took up a position at the right wall until I could partially see into the room beyond. Then, slowly, I inched my way forwards, peering in quickly and then carefully progressing when nobody tried to blow my head off.

I was in one of a pair of what were once adjoining offices. There was a faint smell of smoke from the room, which came from a pile of smouldering wood and trash in the far corner. In the corner opposite, something moved.

I spun quickly and tightened my finger on the trigger.

‘Don’t shoot,’ said a raw, cracked voice, and a figure gradually emerged from where it had been crouching in the darkness. It wore plastic bags over its feet, its legs were encased in dirt-encrusted denims and a coat with no elbows was tied around its waist with a length of string. Its hair was long and unkempt, its beard grey but streaked with nicotine yellow. ‘Please, don’t shoot. I didn’t mean no harm by starting the fire.’

‘Move to your right. Quickly.’ Through a crack in one of the wooden panels on the windows, a weak glow shone from a streetlight. The old man moved until he was caught in its beam. His eyes were small and dull. Even from twelve feet away I could smell the booze, and other things too.

I held him in my sights for a moment longer, then gestured to my right with the gun as Louis appeared in the doorway. ‘Get out of here,’ I said. ‘It’s not safe.’

‘Can I collect my stuff?’ He pointed at a heap of meagre possessions stacked in a shopping cart.

‘Take what you can carry, then go.’ The old guy nodded his thanks and began to pick up items from the cart: a pair of boots, some soda cans, a pile of copper wire. Some he put back again, others he seemed to want to think about. As he considered a single Reebok sneaker, a deep voice behind me said: ‘Old man, you got five seconds to get your shit out of here, else the coroner be sorting it for you.’ Louis’s comment seemed to focus the old guy’s mind; seconds later he was running past us with a tangled collection of wire, boots and cans in his arms.

‘You won’t steal anything, will you?’ he asked Louis as he prepared to go.

‘No,’ replied Louis. ‘You done took all the good stuff.’

The old guy nodded happily and started to scurry out, Louis shaking his head as he went. The old man paused at the doorway. ‘Them other fellas went upstairs,’ he said simply, then left.

We moved quickly but carefully through that floor until we reached a pair of parallel staircases at the far end of the building, one at each corner. I heard footsteps above us, moving carefully across the floor. Between the stairs was a set of twin doors to the yard outside. A length of broken chain lay on the floor and a half brick held one of the doors open. Louis took the right-hand stairway, I took the left. As I climbed, I kept to the sides of the stairs to minimise the risk of standing on a weak or rotted step. I needn’t have bothered. The rain was falling with a renewed ferocity and the old building echoed and hummed with its sound.

We met at a kind of mezzanine, where a single wide set of steps led up to the second storey. Louis moved ahead, while I stayed a little farther behind. I watched as he pushed open a swinging door, a dirty, wire-mesh window at head level, and began his search of the floor. I had decided to move on to the third storey when there was the sound of movement from below. I looked down over the stair rail and a man stepped into my line of vision, striking a match to light a cigarette. In the flash of illumination I recognised him as one of Tony Celli’s crew from the hotel room, left to guard the door from outside, but instead taking shelter from the rain. Above me, a floorboard creaked gently, then another: at least one of Celli’s men had progressed to the top floor.

As I watched Tony Clean’s man smoke his cigarette, something caught my attention to my left. The windows on the mezzanine, which would once have looked out onto the lot below, were now boarded up and no light shone through them. The only illumination came from a jagged hole in the wall, ringed with damp where the plaster surrounding an old air-conditioning unit had given way and fallen in a heap to the floor below, taking the unit with it. The hole created a kind of murky pool of light between two masses of dark at either side. In one of those unlit areas, I sensed a presence. A pale figure flickered, like a piece of paper gently tumbling. I moved forwards, my heart pounding and the gun heavy in my hand.

From out of the blackness, a face appeared. Its eyes were dark, with no whites showing, and a dark necklace seemed to hang around its neck. Slowly, its mouth became visible, the zigzagging black thread sealing it shut and, beneath it, the mark left by the rope was deeply indented on her skin. She watched me for a moment, then seemed to turn in on herself, and there was only emptiness where she had been. I felt a cold sweat on my back and a feeling of nausea swept over me. I gave one more look at the patch of darkness, then turned away just as a sudden soft cry of pain came from below me.

I paused on the first step, and waited. Around me the rain fell and water dripped. There was the sound of a shoe softly scuffing on the wood below and then a man drifted into view on the right-hand stairway, wearing a tan raincoat from which a bald head emerged at the collar. Stritch raised his strange, melted-wax features and his bleak, colourless eyes regarded me for a moment. Then his too-wide mouth broke into a smile from which all humour was absent and he withdrew back beneath the mezzanine. I wondered if he knew yet that Abel was dead, or how much of a threat he considered me.

The answer came within seconds as the silenced rounds tore through the soft damp wood of the stair rail, splinters spearing the gloom. I sprang up the remaining steps, the bullets following me as Stritch tried to gauge my position from the sounds I made. I felt something tug at the tail of my coat as I reached the top of the steps and knew that he had come close, very close, with at least one of his shots.

I got to the second floor and headed after Louis. There was a kind of lobby inside the door, with an old raised receiving desk to my right behind which lay another storage bay, part of a succession of small bays that led to the back of the building, each connected by a single doorway so that, if the light had permitted, I could have seen straight through to the far wall of the warehouse. Even from where I was standing, I could see that the bays still contained battered desks and broken chairs, rolls of rotting matting and boxes of discarded paperwork. Two corridors stretched away on either side, one directly in front of me and one to the right. I guessed that Louis was already making his way down the right-hand corridor so I moved quickly down the other, casting anxious glances over my shoulder to see if Stritch had appeared yet.

A burst of gunfire came from ahead of me and to my right, answered by two softer shots fired in close succession. I heard voices shouting and running footsteps, the noises echoing around the old building. At a doorway to my right, a figure in a black leather jacket lay slumped on the floor, blood pooling around its head. Louis was already making his mark but he didn’t know that Stritch was somewhere behind us, and it was important that he was told. I moved back into the corridor in time to see a flash of tan move behind the receiving desk. I stepped sideways, moving past the prone form of Tony Celli’s man until I could see past the top of the desk, but there was no sign of Stritch. I ran quickly to the doorway of the next bay and peered round the door frame in time to receive the muzzle of a silenced pistol in my right temple.

‘Shit, Bird, I almost blew your head off,’ said Louis. In the semi-darkness he was almost invisible in his black clothes, with only his teeth and the whites of his eyes showing.

‘Stritch is here,’ I said.

‘I know. Caught a glimpse of him, then got distracted by you.’

Our discussion was interrupted by the sound of more firing ahead of us, the same gun shooting each time, loosing off three shots with no return of fire. There was more shouting and then a burst of automatic fire, followed by footsteps running up a flight of stairs. Louis and I exchanged a nod and began to make our way towards the back of the building, one of us at each side of every door frame to give us a clear view of the room beyond and the section of corridor at either side. We kept moving until we reached an open service elevator, in which another of Tony Celli’s men lay dead. Alongside the elevator, a single flight of stairs wound up to the top level, where Stritch had presumably gone on ahead of us. We were on the second step when I heard a sound behind me that was chillingly familiar: the twin clicks of a cartridge being jacked into a pump-action shotgun. Louis and I turned slowly, our guns held up and away to our sides, to find Billy Purdue standing before us. His face was streaked with black, his clothes soaked through, and on his back was a black knapsack.

‘Put your guns down,’ he said. Somehow, he had found a way to hide from his pursuers, and from us, among the old furniture and office waste. We did as we were told, casting cautious looks both at Billy’s gun and the staircase above us.

‘You brought them here,’ he said, his voice shaking with anger. ‘You sold me out.’ There were tears running down his cheeks.

‘No, Billy,’ I said. ‘We came to get you to safety. You’re in a lot of trouble here. Put the gun down and we’ll try to get you out of it.’

‘No. Fuck you. There’s nobody here for me now.’ With that, he fired two bursts from the shotgun, spraying the wood and plaster behind us and forcing us to dive to the ground. When we looked up again, splinters and grit in our hair, Billy was nowhere to be seen but I could hear his running footfalls as he headed back in the direction in which we had come. Louis immediately sprang to his feet and moved after him.

More shots came from the floor above as I rose, automatic fire followed by a single shot. I took the steps slowly, my neck craned to one side, my hands slick with sweat. At the top of the stairs, beside the elevator, another of Celli’s men lay huddled in a corner. Blood flowed from the bullet wound in his neck. There was something else about him too, something I almost did not see.

His trousers were opened, the zipper pulled down, and his genitals partially exposed.

Before me was a doorway, and beyond the doorway was total darkness. In that darkness, I knew that Stritch waited. I could smell his cheap, sickly cologne and the dark, earthy odour he used it to conceal. I could sense his watchfulness, the tendrils he sent out to test the air around him for prey. And I could feel his desire, the sexual charge he took from hurting and bringing lives to an end, the aberrant sexuality that had led him to touch and expose the young man in the corner as he lay dying.

And I knew with absolute certainty that if I set foot beyond that doorway Stritch would take me and kill me, and that he would touch me as I died. I felt the shadows move around me, and a child laughed in the dim light below. It seemed to summon me back from the brink, or perhaps it was my own fear making me believe that was the case. For whatever reason, I chose to leave Stritch in the darkness and return to the light.

Louis approached as I made my way backwards down the stairs. His pants were torn at the knee, and he was limping slightly. ‘I slipped,’ he said, spitting the words from his mouth. ‘He got away. What about Stritch?’

I indicated the floor above. ‘Maybe Tony Celli will do you a favour.’

‘You think?’ said Louis, in a tone that said he didn’t believe it was likely. He looked at me more closely. ‘You cool, Bird?’

I moved past him so that he could not see my face. I was ashamed at my weakness, but I knew what I had felt, and what I had seen in the blood-red eyes of a dead woman.

‘My concern is Billy Purdue,’ I said. ‘When Stritch finds out that his buddy is dead, he won’t go anywhere until he’s settled the score. You’ll get another chance.’

‘I’d prefer to take this one,’ he replied.

‘It’s pitch black up there. You set foot on that top floor, and he’ll kill you.’

Louis remained standing, watching me, but he did not speak. In the distance, I heard the wail of approaching sirens. I saw Louis hesitate, balancing the risk of the police and the shadows on the floor above with the opportunity to try to take out Stritch. Then slowly, with just one glance back to the stairs leading up to the darkness of the third floor, Louis followed me.

We reached the main bay where we had met the old man. ‘We go out the front, we may run into Tony Celli’s wheelmen, or the cops,’ I said. ‘And if Billy went out that way, then he’s already dead.’

Louis nodded in agreement and we headed down to the door at the back of the warehouse, where the man Stritch had killed lay half in, half out of the doorway, one arm across his eyes as if he had glimpsed the heart of the sun. Across the lot, I could see the Mercury. It growled into life as Angel shot across the lot and turned the car, then stopped to allow us to get in.

‘Any sign of Billy?’

‘No, at least none that I saw. You two OK?’

‘Fine,’ I said, although I was still shaken by the fear I had felt on the top floor. ‘Stritch was in there. Came from the back of the building.’

‘Seems like everybody knows your business except you,’ remarked Angel as we tore out of the lot and followed the tracks back in the direction of India Street. Just before they ended, he swung the wheel to the right and sped through the gap in the wire fence to bring us into the parking lot at One India. He killed the lights as sirens wailed and two black-and-white police cars raced up Fore Street. Then we waited to see if Billy Purdue might show.

While we sat in silence, I tried to piece together what had happened. The feds had either been monitoring my phone or had managed to find some trace of Tony Celli’s crew. When they moved, Abel contacted Stritch and told him where to go, with the intention of joining him after taking care of the feds. With three different groups of people after him in one enclosed space, Billy Purdue had still managed to get away.

And I thought too of that half-imagined figure I had glimpsed in the shadows. Rita Ferris was dead and, soon, the snow would be falling on her grave. My mind was playing tricks on me, or perhaps I hoped that was the case.

No one came towards us on foot from the direction of the complex. If any of Tony Celli’s men had survived, I figured that they would head north instead of coming straight back into town and risk meeting the cops.

‘You think he’s still in there?’ I asked Louis.

‘Who? Stritch? If he is, it’s because he’s dead, and I don’t believe Tony Celli has anyone that good on his side, assuming anyone was left alive in there,’ replied Louis. Again, I caught that thoughtful look in his eyes as he examined my face in the rear-view mirror.

‘I tell you this,’ he said. ‘He knows now that Abel is dead, and he’s gonna be real pissed.’

Chapter Fifteen

Louis and Angel dropped me at my Mustang, and then followed me to Java Joe’s. I felt drained, and sick inside: I thought of the look in Abel’s eyes before he died, and the sight of the young gunman violated at the moment of his death, and an old man loaded with sneakers and copper wiring running into the cold, wet night.

At the coffee shop, Louis and Angel decided to stay outside in the Mercury drinking take-out mochas. Lee Cole was seated by the window, her jeans tucked into shin-high fur-lined boots, a white wool top buttoned to the neck. As she stood to greet me, the light caught the streaks of silver in her hair. She kissed me softly on the cheek and held me tightly. Her body started to shake and I could hear her sobbing into my shoulder. I pushed her gently away, my hands on her shoulders, and watched as she shook her head in embarrassment and searched through her pockets for a tissue. She was still beautiful. Walter was a lucky man.

‘She’s gone, Bird,’ she said, as she sat. ‘We can’t find her. Help me.’

‘But she was with me only a few days ago,’ I said. ‘She stopped off here for a few hours with her boyfriend.’

She nodded. ‘I know. She called us from Portland, told us she was heading on with Ricky. Then she rang us one more time on the way to some place farther north and that was the last we heard from her. She was under strict instructions to call us each day, but when we didn’t hear . . .’

‘Have you been in touch with the police?’

‘Walter has. They think she may have run off with Ricky. Walter argued with her about him last month, about how she should be concentrating on her study and not on chasing boys. You know how Walter can be, and retirement hasn’t made him any more tolerant.’

I nodded. I knew how he could be. ‘When you get back, call Special Agent Ross in the FBI’s Manhattan office. Mention my name. He’ll make sure that Ellen’s name is in the NCIC database.’ The National Crime Information Center kept records of all missing persons, adults and juveniles, reported to the police. ‘If it isn’t, it means that the police aren’t doing what they should be doing, and Ross may be able to help you with that as well.’

She brightened up a little. ‘I’ll ask Walter to do it.’

‘Does he know you’re here?’

‘No. When I asked him to contact you, he refused. He’s already been up there, trying to put pressure on the local police. They told him that the best thing to do would be to wait, but that’s not Walter. He drove around, asking in the other towns, but there was no sign. He got back yesterday, but I don’t think he’s going to stay. I told him I had to get out of the house for a while. I had the flight already booked. I’d tried calling you on the cell phone, but I could never get through. I don’t know . . .’ She trailed off, then began again. ‘I don’t know all that happened between you two. I know some of it and I can guess at more, but it has nothing to do with my daughter. I left him a note on the refrigerator. He’ll have found it by now.’ She stared out the window, as if visualising the discovery of the note and Walter’s response to its contents.

‘Is there any chance that the police might be right, that she has run away?’ I asked. ‘She never seemed like that kind of kid and she didn’t seem troubled at all when I met her, but they get funny when you introduce sex into the equation. I know I always did.’

She smiled for the first time. ‘I remember sex, Bird. I may be older than you, but I’m not dead yet.’ The smile disappeared as her words set off a chain reaction in her head, and I knew she was trying not to picture what might have happened to Ellen. ‘She didn’t run away. I know her and she would never do that to us, no matter how badly we had fought with her.’

‘What about the kid – Ricky? I get the impression that their eyes met from opposite sides of the track.’

Lee didn’t seem to know much about Ricky beyond the fact that his mother had left the family when he was three and his father had raised him and his three sisters by holding down two dead-end jobs. He was a scholarship student – a little rough and ready, she admitted, but she didn’t believe that there was any malice in him or that he would have been party to some elopement.

‘Will you look for her, Bird? I keep thinking that she’s in trouble somewhere. Maybe they went hiking and something went wrong, or somebody . . .’ She stopped abruptly and reached out to take my hand. ‘Will you find her for me?’ she repeated.

I thought of Billy Purdue and of the men hunting him, of Rita and Donald, of Cheryl Lansing’s granddaughter emerging from a mass of wet, rotting leaves. I felt a duty to the dead, to the troubled young woman who had wanted to create a better life for herself and her child, but she was gone and Billy Purdue was drifting towards some kind of reckoning from which I couldn’t save him. Maybe my duty now was to the living, to Ellen, who had looked after my little girl for the brief span of her life.

‘I’ll look for her,’ I said. ‘You want to tell me where she was going when she made the call?’

As she spoke, the world seemed to shift on its axis, throwing strange shadows across familiar scenes, turning everything into an off-kilter version of its former self. And I cursed Billy Purdue because, somehow, in some way that I couldn’t yet recognise, he was responsible for what had happened. In Lee’s words, once-distant worlds eclipsed one another and indistinct shapes, like plates moving beneath the earth, came together to form a new, dark continent.

‘She said she was heading for a place called Dark Hollow.’

I brought her to Portland Airport in time to catch her flight to New York, then drove back to the house. Angel and Louis were in the front room, watching a sleazy talk show marathon on cable.

‘It’s I Can’t Marry You, You’re Not A Virgin,’ said Angel. ‘At least they’re not claiming to be virgins, else it’d be I Can’t Marry You, You’re A Liar.’

‘Or I Can’t Marry You, You’re Ugly,’ offered Louis, sipping a bottle of Katahdin ale, his feet stretched out before him on a chair. ‘Man, how they get the audience for this show? They drag dollar bills through the trailer parks?’ He hit the remote, muting the sound on the TV.

‘How’s Lee doing?’ asked Angel, suddenly serious.

‘She’s holding together, but only just.’

‘So what’s the deal?’

‘I’ve got to head north again, and I think I’m going to need you two to come with me. Ellen Cole was last heard from on the way to Dark Hollow, the same place Billy Purdue grew up, for a time, and the place I think he’s heading back to now.’

Louis shrugged. ‘Then that’s where we going,’

I sat down in an easy chair beside him. ‘There may be a problem.’

‘Jeez, Bird,’ said Angel, ‘we’re not exactly starved for problems as it is.’

‘This problem have a name?’ asked Louis.

‘Rand Jennings.’

‘And he would be?’

‘Chief of police in Dark Hollow.’

‘And he doesn’t like you because?’ said Angel, taking up the baton from Louis.

‘I had an affair with his wife.’

‘You the man,’ said Louis. ‘You could fall over and make hitting the ground look complicated.’

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Long enough for Rand Jennings to forgive and forget?’ asked Angel.

‘Probably not.’

‘Maybe you could write him a note,’ he suggested. ‘Or send him flowers.’

‘You’re not being helpful.’

‘I didn’t sleep with his wife. In the helpful stakes, that puts me a full length clear of you.’

‘You see him last time you were up there?’ asked Louis.

‘No.’

‘You see the woman?’

‘Yes.’

Angel laughed. ‘You’re some piece of work, Bird. Any chance you might keep the mouse in its hole while we’re up there, or you planning to renew old acquaintances?’

‘We met by accident. It wasn’t intentional.’

‘Uh-huh. Tell that to Rand Jennings. “Hi Rand, it was an accident. I tripped and fell into your wife”.’ I could still hear him laughing as he headed for his bedroom.

Louis finished his beer, then lifted his feet from the chair and prepared to follow Angel. ‘We screwed up tonight,’ he said.

‘Things got screwed up. We did what we could.’

‘Tony Celli ain’t gonna give up on this thing. Stritch neither.’

‘I know.’

‘You want to tell me what happened on the top floor?’

‘I felt him waiting, Louis. I felt him waiting and I knew for sure that if I went in after him, I’d die. Despite evidence to the contrary, I don’t have a death wish. I wasn’t going to die at his hands, not there, not anywhere.’

Louis remained at the door, considering what I had told him. ‘If you felt it, then that’s the way it was,’ he said at last. ‘Sometimes, that’s all the difference there is between living and dying. But if I see him again, I’m taking him down.’

‘Not if I see him first.’ I meant it, regardless of all that had taken place and the fear that I had felt.

His mouth twitched in one of his trademark semi-smiles.

‘Bet you a dollar you don’t.’

‘Fifty cents,’ I replied. ‘You’ve already earned half your fee.’

‘I guess I have,’ he said. ‘I guess I have.’

Louis and Angel left early the next morning, Louis for the airport and Angel to scout around Billy Purdue’s trailer to see if he could find anything that the cops might have missed. I was about to lock up the house when Ellis Howard’s car bumped into my drive and then Ellis himself stepped heavily from the car. He took a look at my bag and gestured at it with a thumb.

‘Going somewhere?’

‘Yep.’

‘You mind telling me where?’

‘Yep.’

He slapped his hand gently on the hood of the Mustang, as if to transfer his frustration into the metal of the car. ‘Where were you yesterday evening?’

‘On my way back from Greenville.’

‘What time’d you get back into town?’

‘About six. Should I call a lawyer?’

‘You come straight home?’

‘No, I parked up and met someone in Java Joe’s. Like I said: should I call a lawyer?’

‘Not unless you want to confess to something. I was going to tell you what happened out at the Portland Company complex last night, but maybe you already know, seeing as how your Mustang was down by the harbour yesterday evening.’

So that was it. Ellis was fishing. He had nothing, and I wasn’t about to break down and beg for mercy.

‘I told you. I was meeting someone.’

‘This person still in town?’

‘No.’

‘And you don’t know anything about what happened at the complex last night?’

‘I try to avoid the news. It affects my karma.’

‘If I thought it would help, your karma would be kicking its heels in a cell. We found four bodies in that complex, all of them associates of Tony Celli, plus two dead feds and a mystery caller.’

‘Mystery caller?’ I asked, but I was thinking of something else. There should have been five bodies in the complex: one of Tony’s men had survived and escaped, which meant there was a good chance that Tony Celli knew Louis and I had been in the building.

Ellis looked closely at me, trying to assess how much I knew. As he spoke, he waited for a reaction. He was disappointed.

‘We found the Toronto cop, Eldritch, dead. Three bullets, two different guns. The one to the head was an execution shot.’

‘I’m waiting for the “but”.’

‘The “but” is that this guy wasn’t Eldritch. His ID says he was, his prints and his face say he wasn’t. Now I’ve got the Toronto Police Department howling at me to find their missing man, I’ve got a bunch of feds who are very interested in the John Doe who killed two of their agents, and I have four members of Boston’s finest crew using up morgue space that I can’t afford to give them. The ME is considering relocating here permanently, seeing as how we’re such good customers and all. Plus Tony Celli hasn’t been seen since his night at the Regency.’

‘He stiff on the bill?’

‘Don’t, Bird. I’m not in the mood. Don’t forget that Willeford is still missing and, until you came along, he knew as much about Billy Purdue as anyone.’

I let it pass without comment. I didn’t want to think of what I might have brought down on Willeford. Instead, I said: ‘Bangor turn up anything on Cheryl Lansing?’

‘No, and we’re no further on the killing of Rita Ferris and her son. Which brings me to my second reason for calling. You want to tell me again what you were doing in Bangor? And then Greenville?’

‘Like I told Bangor, Billy Purdue hired someone to trace his parents. I thought that maybe he might try to follow that trail now that he’s in trouble.’

‘And is he following that trail?’

‘Someone is.’

Ellis moved towards me, his bulk menacing, his eyes more so. ‘You tell me where you’re going, Bird, or I swear to God I’ll arrest you here and now and take a close look at that gun of yours.’

I knew that Ellis wasn’t kidding. Even though the silenced guns now lay at the bottom of Casco Bay beside Mifflin, I couldn’t afford to delay the search for Ellen Cole. ‘I’m heading north to a place called Dark Hollow. The daughter of a friend of mine has gone missing. I’m going to try to find her. Her mother was the person I met at Java Joe’s last night.’

Some of the anger went out of his face. ‘Is it a coincidence that Dark Hollow is Billy Purdue’s country?’

‘I don’t believe in coincidences.’

He patted the hood one more time, and seemed to reach a decision. ‘Neither do I. You stay in touch now, Bird, y’hear?’

He turned and walked back to his car.

‘Is that it?’ I said. I was surprised to see him let it go so easily.

‘No, I guess it isn’t, but I don’t see what more I can do.’ He stood at the open door of the car, and watched me. ‘Frankly, Bird, I’m balancing the benefits of hauling you in and grilling you, assuming you’d tell us anything, against the benefits of having you wandering around and looking under rocks. So far, the scales are tipping in favour of the second option, but only just. You remember that.’

I waited a heartbeat.

‘Does this mean you’ve decided against recruiting me, Ellis?’

He didn’t reply. Instead, he shook his head and drove away, leaving me to think about Tony Celli and Stritch and an old man in a harbour bar, drinking beers and waiting for the new world to sweep him away.

I had told Ellis some of the truth, but not all. I was going to Dark Hollow, and would be there by nightfall, but first Louis and I would pay a visit to Boston. There was a slight possibility that Tony Celli might have taken Ellen Cole, perhaps in the hope of using her as leverage if I found Billy Purdue before he did. Even if that was not the case, there were some things to be clarified before we went up against Celli again. Tony was a made guy. It was important that everybody knew where they stood on Tony’s future.

Before I left to meet Louis at the airport, I stopped off at the Kraft Mini-Storage. There, in three adjoining units, was what I had retained of my grandfather’s possessions: some furniture; a small library of books; some silver plates and a brass screen for a fireplace; and a series of boxes filled with old paperwork and files. It took me fifteen minutes to locate what I was looking for and take it back to the car: a manilla expanding file, held closed by a piece of red ribbon. On the index tab, written in my grandfather’s ornate script, were the words ‘Caleb Kyle’.

Chapter Sixteen

Al Z operated out of an office above a comic-book store on Newbury Street. It was an odd location, but it suited him to be in a place where tourists browsed among chichi clothes stores, sipped exotic teas or browsed in galleries. It was busy, there were too many people around for anyone to cause trouble and he could send out for flavoured coffees or scented candles any time he wanted.

Louis and I sat outside a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream parlour across from Al Z’s brownstone office, eating chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream and drinking large coffees. We were the only people sitting outside, mainly because it was so cold that my ice cream hadn’t even begun to melt yet.

‘You think he’s noticed us?’ I asked, as my fingers gave up their efforts to hold the spoon without shaking.

Louis sipped thoughtfully at his coffee. ‘Tall, handsome black male and his white boy sittin’ outside eatin’ ice cream in the fuckin’ winter? I think someone must have noticed us by now.’

‘I’m not sure I like being called “boy”,’ I mused.

‘Get in line, whitey. We got a three-hundred year start on that particular grievance.’

At a window above the comic-book store, a shadow moved.

‘Let’s go,’ said Louis. ‘It wasn’t for the damn cold, brothers be running the world by now.’

At the top of a flight of steps, next to the window of the store, there was a buzzer beside a wooden, windowless door. I pressed the buzzer and a voice answered simply: ‘Yes?’

‘I’m looking for Al Z,’ I said.

‘No Al Z here,’ replied the voice, all in a fast flow of heavily accented English so that it came out as ‘Noalsee-her’. It was followed by a click and the intercom went silent.

Louis hit the buzzer again.

‘Yes,’ said the same voice.

‘Man, just open the damn door.’

The intercom clicked off, then buzzed, and we passed through, the reinforced door springing shut behind us. We walked up four flights of stairs to where a plain, unvarnished door stood open. A figure leaned against the window beyond, small and bulky, its hand resting midway between its neck and its belt, ready to move for the gun if necessary. The only ornamentation on the wall was a cheap-looking, black-and-white clock, which softly ticked away the seconds. I figured the surveillance camera was probably hidden behind it. When we entered the room and saw the television screen on Al Z’s desk showing only an empty stairwell, I realised I was right.

There were four men in the room. One was the short bulky guy, his skin yellow as a beeswax candle, who had watched us from the doorway. An older man, his flesh heavy at the jowls like a basset hound’s, sat on a worn leather sofa to the left of the doorway, his legs crossed, a white shirt and red silk tie beneath his black suit. His eyes were hidden by small, round-framed sunglasses. Against the wall, a young buck leaned with his thumbs hooked into the empty belt loops of his pants, holding his silver-grey jacket away from his sides to reveal the butt of a H & K semi-automatic at his waist. His grey suit pants were baggy, narrowing to pipecleaner thinness where they met his silver-tooled cowboy boots. The eighties revival was obviously still in full flow where he came from.

Louis was looking straight ahead, as if the room were empty apart from the fourth man who sat behind a teak desk topped with green leather, the desktop empty apart from a black telephone, a pen and notebook and the TV screen, which kept up its unceasing vigil on the stairs.

Al Z looked like a well-groomed undertaker on vacation. His thin silver hair was swept back from the broad expanse of his forehead and slicked tightly to his skull. His face was craggy and wrinkled, the eyes dark like opals, the lips thin and dry, the nostrils on his long nose slim and strangely elongated, as if he had been bred specifically for his powers of smell. He wore a three-piece suit of autumn hues, the fabric a mix of reds and oranges and yellows, finely interwoven. His white shirt was open at the neck, the collars narrow pinpoint, and there was no tie. In his right hand he held a cigarette; his left lay flat on the desk, the nails short and clean, but not manicured. Al Z acted as the buffer between the upper reaches of the organisation and the lower. He solved problems, when they arose. It was his gift to be a problem solver, but there was no point in a manicure if your hands were always going to be dirty.

There were no chairs in front of his desk, and the man in the dark suit remained spread across the sofa, so we stayed standing. Al Z nodded at Louis, then looked long and appraisingly at me.

‘Well, well, the famous Charlie Parker,’ he said at last. ‘If I knew you were coming, I’d have worn a tie.’

‘Everybody knows you, how you gonna make any money as a private dick?’ muttered Louis. ‘Hiring you for undercover work be like hiring Jay Leno.’

Al Z waited for him to finish before turning his attention from me to Louis. ‘If I knew you were bringing equally distinguished company, Mr Parker, I’d have made everybody else wear a tie too.’

‘Long time no see,’ said Louis.

Al Z nodded. ‘I got bad lungs.’ He waved the cigarette gently as he spoke. ‘The New York air don’t agree with me. I prefer it up here.’

But there was more to it than that: the mob was no longer what it once had been. The world of The Godfather was history before the film ever hit the screen, the image of the Italians already sullied by their involvement in the heroin epidemic of the seventies, and since then walking disaster areas like John Gotti Jr had debased it even further. RICO – the racketeer-influenced and corrupt organisation laws – had put an end to the construction shakedowns, the garbage collection monopolies, and the mob control of the Fulton Street Fish Market in New York. The heroin-smuggling business that had operated out of pizza parlours was gone, busted by the FBI in 1987. The old bosses were dead, or in jail.

Meanwhile, the Asians had spread from Chinatown, crossing the divide of Canal Street into Little Italy, and the blacks and the Latinos now controlled operations in Harlem. Al Z had smelt death in the air, and had receded even further into the background, eventually moving north. Now he sat in a bare office above a comic-book store in Boston, and tried to maintain some element of stability in what little remained. That was why Tony Clean was so dangerous: he believed the myths and still saw the potential for personal glory in the tattered remnants of the old order. His actions threatened to bring down heat on his associates at a time when the organisation was in a weakened position. His continued existence threatened the survival of everyone around him.

To our left, the young gun eased himself from the wall. ‘They’re carrying, Al,’ he said. ‘You want me to lighten their load?’

From the corner of my eye, I saw Louis’s eyebrow raise itself about a quarter of an inch. Al Z caught the gesture, and smiled gently.

‘I wish you luck,’ he said. ‘I don’t think either of our guests are the kind to give up their toys so easily.’

The young gun’s glow of confidence flickered, as if he were unsure whether or not he was being tested. ‘They don’t look so tough,’ he said.

‘Look harder,’ said Al Z.

The gunslinger looked but his powers of perception left a lot to be desired. He glanced once again at Al Z, then made a move towards Louis.

‘I wouldn’t, if I were you,’ said Louis softly.

‘You ain’t me,’ said the younger man, but there was a hint of wariness in his voice.

‘That’s true,’ said Louis. ‘I was you, I wouldn’t be dressed like no crack pimp.’

A bright light flashed in the young man’s eyes. ‘You talk to me like that, you fuckin’ nig . . .’ The word died in a kind of gasp in his throat as Louis’s body twisted, his left hand closing tightly on the man’s neck and propelling him backwards, his right quickly slipping the gun from the Italian’s belt holster and tossing it to the floor. The young man gurgled once as he hit the wall, spittle flying from his lips as the air was forced from his body. Then slowly, his feet began to lift from the floor; first his heels, then his toes, until the only thing holding him upright was Louis’s unyielding left hand. His face turned pink, then deep red. Louis did not release his grip until a hint of blue began creeping into his lips and ears, then the fingers of his hand opened suddenly and the gunman sank to the ground, his hands fumbling at the collar of his shirt as he struggled to draw painful, choking breaths into his parched lungs.

During the whole incident, nobody else in the room had moved, because Al Z hadn’t given any indication that they should. He looked at his struggling soldier the way he might have looked at a one-clawed crab dying on a beach, then returned his attention to Louis.

‘You’ll have to excuse him,’ he said. ‘Some of these boys, they learn their manners and their speech patterns in the gutter.’ He turned his attention to the bulky man at the door, waving his cigarette at the figure on the floor, who now lay with his back against the wall, his eyes dazed and his mouth open. ‘Take him to the bathroom, get him a glass of water. Then try to explain to him where he went wrong.’

The bulky guy helped the younger man to his feet, and accompanied him outside. The big man on the sofa didn’t move. Al Z got to his feet and walked over to the window where he stood for a moment, watching the street below, before turning and resting against the windowsill. The three of us were now on the same level, and I recognised the gesture of good manners after what had taken place.

‘Now, what can I do for you gentlemen?’ he asked.

‘A girl came to visit me a few days ago,’ I began.

‘Lucky you. The last time a girl came to visit me, it cost me five hundred dollars.’ He smiled at his joke.

‘This girl is the daughter of a friend of mine, an ex-cop.’

Al Z shrugged. ‘Forgive me, but I don’t understand how this concerns me.’

‘I had an encounter with Tony Clean after the girl’s visit. It kind of hurt, but I don’t think Tony got much more satisfaction out of it than I did.’

Al Z took a long drag on his cigarette, then exhaled the smoke in a noisy sigh through his nose. ‘Go on,’ he said, wearily.

‘I want to know if Tony took the girl, as leverage maybe. If he has her, he should hand her back. He doesn’t need cop trouble. Not on top of everything else,’ I added.

Al Z rubbed the corners of his eyes and nodded without speaking. He looked to the fat man on the sofa. The fat man’s head moved slightly, the eyes impossible to see behind his shades.

‘Let me get this straight,’ said Al Z at last. ‘You want me to ask Tony Clean if he has kidnapped an ex-cop’s daughter and, if he has, you want me to tell him to hand her back?’

‘If you don’t,’ said Louis quietly, ‘we have to make him do it ourselves.’

‘You know where he is?’ replied Al Z. I was aware of the air in the room quickly becoming charged.

‘No,’ I said. ‘If we knew that, maybe we wouldn’t be here. We figured you might.’ But something in the way Al Z had asked that last question told me that he didn’t know, that Tony Clean was operating in some place beyond Al Z’s control, and I guessed that Al Z was weighing up his position even before we arrived. That was the purpose of the fat man on the sofa. That was why he had not been asked to leave, because he wasn’t the kind of man anyone asked to leave a room. He was the kind who did the asking. Things were coming apart for Tony Clean, a fact that Al Z seemed to confirm with his next words.

‘Under the circumstances, it would be unwise for you to involve yourselves in this matter,’ he said softly.

‘Under what circumstances?’ I replied.

He puffed out some smoke. ‘Private business matters, the kind you should leave private. If you don’t back off, we might have to push you.’

‘We might push back.’

‘You can’t push back if you’re dead.’

I shrugged. ‘Getting us there might be the difficult part.’

It was handbags at ten paces, but the underlying threat in Al Z’s voice was coming through loud and clear. I watched as he stubbed out his butt in a cut-glass ashtray with more force than was strictly necessary.

‘So you’re not going to keep out of our affairs?’ he asked.

‘I’m not interested in your affairs. I have other concerns.’

‘The girl? Or Billy Purdue?’

He surprised me for a moment, but not for long. If there was a pulse, then Al Z had his finger on it and he would only remove his finger when the pulse stopped.

‘Because if it’s Billy Purdue,’ he continued, ‘then we may have the seeds of a difficulty.’

‘The missing girl is a friend, but Rita Ferris, Billy’s ex-wife, was my client.’

‘Your client’s dead.’

‘It goes beyond that.’

Al Z pinched his lips. To his right, the fat man on the sofa remained as impassive as a buddha.

‘So you’re a man of principle,’ said Al Z. He tackled the word ‘principle’ like it was a peanut shell he was crushing beneath his heel. ‘Well, I’m a man of principle too.’

I didn’t think so. Principles are expensive things to maintain and Al Z didn’t look like he had the moral resources to support any. In fact, Al Z didn’t look like he could work up the moral resources to piss on a burning orphanage.

‘I don’t think your principles and mine would qualify for the same definition,’ I said at last.

He smiled. ‘Maybe not.’ He turned to Louis. ‘And where do you stand on all this?’

‘Beside him,’ said Louis, inclining his head gently in my direction.

‘Then we have to reach an accommodation,’ Al Z concluded. ‘I’m a pragmatist. You step lightly in this matter, and I won’t kill you unless I have to.’

‘Likewise,’ I said. ‘Seeing as how you’ve been so hospitable and all.’ Then we left.

Outside, it was cold and overcast.

‘What do you think?’ asked Louis.

‘I think Tony’s out there on his own, and maybe he hopes he can sort this mess out before Al Z loses his patience. You think he has Ellen?’

Louis didn’t reply immediately. When he did, his eyes were hard. ‘He does or he doesn’t, somehow it all ties in with Billy Purdue. Means it’s gonna end bad for someone.’

We walked around to Boylston and hailed a cab. As it pulled up, Louis slid in and said ‘Logan’, but I raised a hand.

‘Can we take a detour?’

Louis shrugged. The cab driver shrugged too. It was like bad mime.

‘Harvard,’ I said. I looked at Louis. ‘You don’t have to come. I can meet you at the airport.’

Louis’s eyebrow rose half an inch. ‘Nah, I’ll tag along, ’less you think I’m going to cramp your style.’

The cab dropped us off at the monolithic William James Hall, close by Quincy and Kirkland. I left Louis in the lobby and took the elevator to Room 232, where the psychology department had its office. My stomach felt tight, and there was sweat on my palms. At the office, a polite secretary told me where Rachel Wolfe’s office was located, but she also told me that Rachel wouldn’t be in that day. She was at a seminar out of town, and wouldn’t be back until the following morning.

‘Can I take a message?’ she asked.

I considered turning round and walking away, but I didn’t. Instead, I reached into my wallet and took out one of my cards. On the back, I wrote the new telephone number for the Scarborough house and handed the card to the secretary. ‘Just give her this, please.’

She smiled. I thanked her, and I left.

Louis and I walked back to Harvard Square to catch a cab. He didn’t speak until we were on our way to Logan.

‘You do that before?’ he asked, with just the faintest hint of a smile.

‘Once. I never got that far, though.’

‘So, you, like, stalking her, right?’

‘It’s not stalking if you know the person well.’

‘Oh.’ He nodded deeply. ‘Thanks for clearing that one up. Never really understood the distinction before.’

He paused before he spoke again. ‘And what you trying to do?’

‘I’m trying to say I’m sorry.’

‘You want to get back with her?’

I tapped my fingers on the window. ‘I don’t want it to be the way it is between us, that’s all. Frankly, I don’t know what I’m doing and, like I told your significant other, I’m not even sure that I’m ready yet.’

‘But you love her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then life will decide when you’re ready.’ He didn’t speak again.

Chapter Seventeen

Angel met us at the airport, and we drove to the food court at the Maine Mall to eat before we headed north.

‘Shit,’ said Angel, as we drove down Maine Mall Road. ‘Look at this place. You got your Burger King, your International House of Pancakes, your Dunkin’ Donuts, your pizza parlours. You got your four main food groups right here on your doorstep. Live here too long and they’ll be rolling you from one place to the next.’

We ate Chinese in the food court of the mall and told Angel about our encounter with Al Z. In return, he produced a crumpled letter addressed to Billy Purdue, care of Ronald Straydeer.

‘Cops and the feds did a pretty good job, but they didn’t deal with your buddy Ronald the right way,’ he said.

‘You talked to him about his dog?’ I asked.

‘Talked about his dog, then ate some stew.’ He looked a little queasy.

‘Roadkill?’ I knew that Ronald wasn’t above scavenging, despite the state’s laws on taking roadkill. Myself, I couldn’t see the harm in using a deer or squirrel for food instead of letting it rot by the side of the road. Ronald did a pretty mean venison steak, served with beets and carrots preserved by burying them in sand.

‘He told me it was squirrel,’ said Angel, ‘but it smelt like skunk. It didn’t seem polite to ask. Seems this letter came for Billy about a week back, but Ronald hadn’t seen him to give it to him.’

The letter was postmarked Greenville. It was short, little more than an extension of good wishes, some details of renovations to the house and some stuff about an old dog that the writer still had around the place and with which Billy Purdue seemed to have been familiar when it was a pup. It was signed, in his old man’s scrawl: ‘Meade Payne.’

‘So they stayed in touch all these years,’ I remarked. It seemed to confirm what I had thought: if Billy Purdue was going to seek help from anyone, it would be Meade Payne.

We drove nonstop to Dark Hollow, Angel and Louis shooting ahead in the Mercury. The mists gathered as I went farther north, so that journeying from Portland to Dark Hollow was like moving into a strange, spectral world, where house lights glowed dimly and the beams of headlights assumed their own, lance-like solidity, where road signs announced towns that existed only as scattered dwellings without any hub or centre. There was more snow forecast, I knew, and soon the snowmobilers would arrive in numbers to hurtle along the Interstate Trail system. But, for now, Greenville was still quiet as I drove through, sand mixed with snow by the side of the road, and I passed only two cars on the uneven, pitted surface of Lily Bay Road on the way to Dark Hollow.

When I arrived at the motel, Angel and Louis were already checking in. The same woman with the blue-rinse hair who had greeted me earlier in the week stood behind the desk, examining their details on a single registration card. Beside her, a brown cat slept on the counter, curled in on itself with its nose almost touching its tail. Angel was doing the talking while Louis examined a series of battered tourist booklets in a rack. He glanced at me when I came in, but didn’t acknowledge my presence further.

‘You gentlemen sharing a room?’ asked the blue-rinse woman. ‘Yes ma’am,’ replied Angel, with a look of homely wisdom on his face. ‘A dollar spared is a dollar made.’

The woman glanced at Louis, resplendent in a black suit, black coat and white shirt. ‘Your friend a preacher?’ she said.

‘Kind of, ma’am,’ said Angel. ‘He’s strictly Old Testament, though. An eye for an eye, and stuff like that.’

‘That’s nice. We don’t get many religious folks staying here.’

Louis’s face had the long-suffering look of a saint who has just heard that the rack is to be tightened.

‘If you’re interested,’ the woman continued, ‘we got a Baptist service tonight. You’re welcome to join us.’

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Angel, ‘but we prefer to engage in our own forms of worship.’

She smiled understandingly. ‘Long as it’s quiet and doesn’t disturb the other guests.’

‘We’ll do our best,’ intervened Louis, taking the key.

The woman recognised me as I approached the desk. ‘Back again? You must like it here in Dark Hollow.’

‘I hope to get to know it better,’ I replied. ‘Maybe you can help me with something.’

She smiled. ‘Sure, if I can.’

I handed her a photo of Ellen Cole, the small, ID kind taken in a photo booth. I’d had it blown up on a colour copier so that the picture was now eight-by-ten size. ‘You recognise this girl?’

The woman looked at the picture, squinting her eyes behind the thick lenses of her spectacles. ‘Yes, I do. She in some kind of trouble?’

‘I hope not, but she’s missing and her parents have asked me to help find her.’

The woman turned her attention back to the picture, nodding as she did so. ‘Yes, I recall her. Chief Jennings was asking about her. She stayed here with a young man for one night. I can get you the date, if you like.’

‘Would you, please?’

She took a registration card from a green metal card box and examined the details. ‘December fifth,’ she said. ‘Paid by credit card made out in the name of Ellen C. Cole.’

‘Do you recall anything that happened, anything out of the ordinary?’

‘No, nothing important. Someone had suggested to them that they visit here, someone they gave a ride to from Portland. That’s about all. She was nice, I remember. He was kind of a surly kid, but they can be that way at that age. I should know: raised four of my own and they were meaner than wharf rats until they were twenty-five.’

‘Did they give any indication of where they might be heading after they left here?’

‘North, I guess. Maybe up to Katahdin. I don’t know, for sure, but I told them that, if they had some time to spare, they should drive out and watch the sun set on the lake. They seemed to like the idea. It’s a pretty sight. Romantic, too, for a young couple like that. I let them check out late in the afternoon, just so they wouldn’t have to be rushing to pack.’

‘And they didn’t say who recommended that they see Dark Hollow?’ It seemed an odd thing to suggest. Dark Hollow didn’t have too much going for it.

‘Sure they did. It was some old guy they met along the way. They gave him a ride up here, and I think maybe he met up with them before they left.’

I felt my stomach turn a little. ‘Did they mention his name?’

‘No. Didn’t sound like anybody from around here, though,’ she said. Her brow furrowed a little. ‘They didn’t seem concerned about him or nothing. I mean, what harm could an old man do?’ I think she meant the question to be rhetorical when she started out, but by the end I don’t think it sounded that way to either of us.

She apologised, told me she didn’t know any more, then gave me directions to the lake, about a mile or two outside the town, on a tourist map. I thanked her, left my bag in my room and knocked on the door of the room next door, now occupied by Angel and Louis. Angel opened the door and let me in. Louis was hanging up his suits in the battered brown closet. I put the old man to the back of my mind. I wasn’t about to leap to conclusions, not yet.

‘What do people do for fun around here?’ asked Angel, sitting down heavily on one of the two double beds in the room. ‘This place sees less action than the pope.’

‘Wrap up warm for the winter,’ I said. ‘Wait for the summer.’

‘And what happens when the summer comes?’

‘Sometimes it doesn’t.’

‘So how can they tell the difference?’

‘The rain turns to snow in winter.’

‘Fulfilling existence, if you’re a tree.’

Louis finished arranging his clothes and turned to us. ‘Find out anything?’

‘The manager remembers Ellen and her boyfriend. She told them to go watch the sun set out of town, then reckons they went north.’

‘Maybe they did go north,’ said Louis.

‘Rangers up in Baxter State Park have no record of them, according to Lee Cole. Apart from that, the options up north are limited. Plus, the woman at the desk says they gave some old guy a ride up here, and it was this old man who suggested that they stay in Dark Hollow.’

‘Is that a bad thing?’

‘I don’t know. Depends on who he was. It could be nothing.’ But I thought of the old man who had tried to take Rita Ferris at the hotel, and the figure of the old man Billy Purdue claimed to have seen shortly before his family was taken from him. And I thought too of something Ronald Straydeer had said when he misheard my comment as we stood before Billy Purdue’s trailer, discussing a man he might or might not have seen on his property.

‘You’re getting old.’

‘Yuh, he could have been old.’

‘So what now?’

I shrugged glumly. ‘I’m going to have to talk to Rand Jennings.’

‘You want us to come along?’

‘No, I have other plans for you two. Take a ride out to the Payne place, see what’s going on.’

‘See if Billy Purdue’s turned up, you mean,’ said Angel.

‘Whatever.’

‘And if he has?’

‘Then we go and get him.’

‘And if he hasn’t?’

‘We wait, until I’m certain that Ellen Cole isn’t in some kind of trouble here. Then . . .’ I shrugged.

‘We wait some more,’ finished Angel.

‘I guess,’ I replied.

‘That’s good to know,’ he said. ‘At least I can plan what to wear.’

The Dark Hollow Police Department lay about half a mile beyond the northern end of the town. It was a single-storey brick building with its own generator in a concrete bunker at its eastern side. The building itself was quite new, a consequence of a fire a couple of years back, which had destroyed the original structure just off the main street.

Inside it was warm and brightly lit, and a sergeant in shirt sleeves stood behind a wooden desk fining in some forms. His shiny name badge said ‘Ressler’, so I figured he was the same Ressler who had watched Emily Watts die. I introduced myself and asked to see the chief.

‘Can I ask what it’s in connection with, sir?’

‘Ellen Cole,’ I replied.

His brow furrowed a little as he picked up the phone and dialled an extension number. ‘There’s a guy here wants to talk to you about Ellen Cole, chief,’ he said, then put his hand over the receiver and turned back to me. ‘What did you say your name was again?’

I gave it to him again and he repeated it into the phone. ‘That’s right, chief. Parker. Charlie Parker.’ He listened for a moment, then looked at me closely, sizing me up. ‘Yeah, that sounds about right. Sure, sure.’ He put the phone down then reappraised me without saying anything.

‘So, does he remember me?’ I asked.

Ressler didn’t reply, but I got the feeling that the sergeant knew his chief well and had detected something in his voice that put him on his guard. ‘Follow me,’ he said, unlocking a dividing door to one side of the desk and holding it to one side to let me pass. I waited while he relocked it, then followed him between a pair of desks and into a small, glass-walled cubicle. Behind a metal desk, on which lay trays of papers and a computer, sat Randall Jennings.

He hadn’t changed too much. True, he was greyer and had put on a little weight, his face now slightly puffy and the beginnings of a double chin hanging down below his jawline, but he was still a good-looking man, with sharp brown eyes and wide, strong shoulders. It must have hurt his ego, I thought, when his wife had commenced an affair with me.

He waited for Ressler to leave and close the door of the office before he spoke. He didn’t ask me to sit down and didn’t seem troubled by the fact that, standing, I could look down on him.

‘I never thought I’d see your face again,’ he said at last.

‘I guessed by the way you said goodbye. I’m surprised you didn’t ask your sergeant to stay in here and guard the door.’

He didn’t respond, just rearranged some papers on his desk. I wasn’t sure if the gesture was meant to distract him, or me. ‘You’re here about Ellen Cole?’

‘That’s right.’

‘We don’t know anything about it. She came, she left.’ He raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

‘That’s not what her mother thinks.’

‘I don’t care what her mother thinks. What I’m telling you is what we know, same thing I told her father when he was up here.’

It struck me that I must just have missed Walter Cole, that we might even have been in town at the same time. I felt a twinge of sorrow that he had been forced to come up here alone, fearing for his daughter’s safety. I would have helped him, had I known.

‘The family’s filed a missing person report.’

‘I’m aware of that. I had a federal agent chewing my ear over a non-existent NCIC filing.’ He looked hard at me. ‘I told him it was a long way from New York to Dark Hollow. We do things our own way up here.’

I didn’t respond to his bout of territorial spraying. ‘Are you going to act on the report?’ I persisted.

Jennings stood up, the knuckles of his large hands resting on his desk. I had almost forgotten what a big man he was. There was a gun in a holster at his belt, a Coonan .357 Magnum out of St. Paul, Minnesota. It looked shiny and new. I guessed that Rand Jennings didn’t have much cause to use it way up here, unless he sat on his porch and took potshots at rabbits.

‘Am I having trouble making myself understood?’ he said softly, but with a hint of suppressed anger. ‘We’ve done what we can. We have responded to the missing person report. Our view is that the girl and her boyfriend may have run away together and, so far, we have no reason to suspect otherwise.’

‘The manager of the motel said they were heading north.’

‘Maybe they were.’

‘All that’s north is Baxter and Katahdin. They never made it there.’

‘Then they went someplace else.’

‘There may have been someone else with them.’

‘Maybe there was. All I know is that they left town.’

‘I can see now why you never made detective.’

He flinched, and his face flushed red. ‘You don’t know the first damn thing about me,’ he said. The anger was distinct now as he pronounced his next words slowly and with deliberate emphasis. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, we have some real crimes to deal with.’

‘Really. Somone stealing Christmas trees? Maybe trying to screw a moose?’

He walked around the side of the desk and came close to me as he passed by to open the door of his office. I think he half expected me to take a step back from him, but I didn’t.

‘I hope you’re not planning on looking for trouble here,’ he said. He could have been talking about Ellen Cole, but his eyes said he was talking about someone else.

‘I don’t have to look for trouble,’ I replied. ‘I stay still long enough, trouble finds me.’

‘That’s because you’re dumb,’ he said, still holding the door open. ‘You don’t pay attention to the lessons life teaches you.’

‘You’d be surprised how much I’ve learned.’

I prepared to leave his office, but his left hand shot out to block me. ‘Remember one thing, Parker: this is my town and you’re a guest. Don’t abuse the privilege.’

‘So it’s not a case of “what’s mine is yours”?’

‘No,’he said, with menace. ‘No, it isn’t.’

I left the building and walked to my car, the wind now howling through the trees and biting at my bare fingers. Above me, the sky was dark. As I reached the Mustang, an old green Datsun Sunny pulled into the lot and Lorna Jennings stepped from the car. She was wearing a black leather jacket with a big fur collar and blue jeans tucked into the same boots she had been wearing the last time we met. She didn’t see me until she had begun to walk towards the main entrance. When she did spot me, she stopped short for a moment before coming over, casting an anxious glance at the illuminated doorway as she did so.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

‘Talking to your husband. He wasn’t very helpful.’

She raised an eyebrow at me. ‘Are you surprised?’

‘No, not really, but it’s not about me. A girl and a young man are missing and I think somebody here may know what happened to them. Until I find out who that might be, I’m going to be around for a while.’

‘Who are they?’

‘The daughter of a friend, and the girl’s boyfriend. Her name is Ellen Cole. You ever hear Rand mention her?’

She nodded. ‘He said he’d done what he could. He thinks they may have eloped.’

‘Young love,’ I said. ‘It’s a beautiful thing.’

Lorna swallowed and ran a hand through her hair. ‘He hates you, Bird, for what you did. For what we did.’

‘That was a long time ago.’

‘Not for him,’ she said. ‘Or me.’

I was sorry I’d mentioned young love. I didn’t like the look in her eyes. It made me nervous. But I surprised myself by asking the next question.

‘Why are you still with him, Lorna?’

‘Because he’s my husband. Because I have nowhere else to go.’

‘That’s not true, Lorna. There’s always somewhere else.’

‘Is that an offer?’

‘Nope, it’s just an observation. You take care.’ I began to walk away, but she reached out and stopped me by placing her hand on my arm.

‘No, you be careful, Bird,’ she said. ‘Like I said, he hasn’t forgiven you, and he won’t.’

‘Has he forgiven you?’ I asked.

There was something in her face as she spoke, something that reminded me of that first afternoon we spent together and the warmth of her skin against mine. ‘I didn’t want his forgiveness,’ she said. Then she smiled sadly and left me.

I spent the next hour wandering around the stores in Dark Hollow, showing Ellen Cole’s photograph to anyone who’d take the time to look. They recalled her at the diner, and in the drugstore, but nobody had seen Ellen and Ricky leave and no one could confirm whether or not they were with another man, or speculate as to who that person might have been. It grew colder and colder as I walked, my coat wrapped tightly around me, the lights of the stores casting a yellow glow on the snow.

When I had exhausted every avenue of inquiry, at least for the present, I went back to my room, showered, and changed into a pair of denims and a shirt and sweater before pulling on my overcoat and preparing to meet Angel and Louis for dinner. Angel was already outside the room, drinking coffee and blowing puffs of white breath into the air like an unhealthy steam engine.

‘You know, it’s warmer out here than it is in that room,’ he said. ‘I lost a layer of skin from my feet, the tiles in the bathroom are so cold.’

‘You’re too sensitive. It must be a gay thing.’

‘Yeah, and I play the violin and write great works of literature while I’m on the can. You know, it’s stereotyping like that that’s stopped gays from . . .’

‘From what? What exactly have you not done that you really, desperately want to do?’

‘Go back to New York?’

‘And being gay is stopping you from doing that?’

‘No, I guess not. You’re stopping me from doing that.’

‘See? So being gay has nothing to do with it. You could be straight and you’d still be stuck up here.’

Angel snorted unhappily and stamped his feet while alternating the coffee cup from hand to hand, each time putting his free hand under the opposite armpit.

‘Stop,’ I said. ‘You’re going to make it rain. Any sign of activity out at Meade Payne’s place?’

He came to a relative standstill. ‘None that we could see without knocking on the door and asking for cookies and a glass of milk. Caught a sight of the young guy and Payne eating supper, but they were alone, far as we could see. You have any luck with Jennings?’

‘No.’

‘You surprised?’

‘Yes and no. He’s got no reason to help me, but this isn’t about me. It’s about Ellen and her boyfriend, but I could see in his eyes that he would use them to get at me, if he could. I don’t understand him. He’s suffered. I know he has. His wife took up with another man behind his back, a man a good ten years younger than him, but he’s still with her, and it’s hell for both of them. It wasn’t as if Rand was old, or cruel, or impotent. He had what it took; or, maybe, he had it according to his own definition of it. I took something away from him, and he won’t ever forgive me for it. But how can he not feel for Ellen Cole, for Ricky, for their families? No matter how much he hates me, they have to matter.’ I kicked idly at the dirt on the ground. ‘Sorry, Angel. I’m thinking out loud.’

Angel tossed the remains of his coffee into a mound of frozen, compacted snow. I could hear the soft hiss as it landed, as the coffee corrupted the whiteness of its crystals one by one.

‘Suffering isn’t enough, Bird,’ said Angel softly. ‘So he’s suffered: big fuckin’ deal. Get in line with the rest of us suckers. It’s not enough to suffer, and you know that. What matters is that you understand that others suffer, and some of them suffer worse than you could ever do. And if you can do something about that, then you do it, and you do it without whining or waving your own fuckin’ cross for the world to see. You do it because it’s the right thing to do.

‘From what you say, this Rand Jennings doesn’t have a compassionate bone in his body. All he feels is self-pity, and he doesn’t understand any suffering but his own. I mean, look at his marriage. There are two of them in it, Bird; whatever you may have felt for her, she’s stayed with him this long and if you hadn’t turned up like a fire in February then everything would be just the way it was. He’d be unhappy and she’d be unhappy and they’d be unhappy together, and it seems like they’ve set their own boundaries on what is and is not going to happen to change that situation.

‘But he’s selfish, Bird. He only thinks of his own hurt, his own pain, and he blames her for it, and you, and, by extension, the world. He doesn’t care about Ellen Cole, or Walter, or Lee. He’s all full up pissing and cursing at the bum hand he thinks life has dealt him, and that hand ain’t never gonna change.’

I looked at him, at his unshaven profile, the wisps of dark hair curling out from under his dark wool hat, the empty coffee cup forgotten in his hand. He was a mass of contradictions. It struck me that I was taking life lessons from a five-six semi-retired burglar whose boyfriend, not twenty-four hours earlier, had executed a man against a brick wall. My life, I reflected, was taking some strange turns.

Angel seemed to sense what I was thinking, because he turned to me before he spoke again. ‘We’ve been friends for a long time, you and me, maybe even without either of us realising it. I know you and, for a time, you weren’t far off becoming like Jennings and a million others like him, but I know now that’s not going to happen. I’m not sure how things changed and I don’t think I want to know most of it. All I know is that you’re becoming a compassionate man, Bird. That’s not the same as pity, or guilt, or trying to pay off some debt to fortune or to God. It’s feeling other people’s pain as your own, and acting to take that pain away. And maybe, sometimes, you have to do bad things to do that, but life doesn’t balance easy. You can be a good man and perform bad actions, because that’s the nature of things. People who believe otherwise, well, they’re just timeservers, because they spend so much time wrestling with their consciences that nothing gets done, and nothing changes, and the innocent and the defenceless, they just keep getting hurt. In the end you do what you can, maybe what you have to do, to make things better. Your heart isn’t going to be weighed against a feather in the next life, Bird. My guess is they do a comparative study, otherwise we’ll all end up in hell.’

He smiled at me, a small, wintry smile that said he knew the cost of following that philosophy. He knew, because he was following it himself: sometimes with me, sometimes with Louis, but always, always according to what he believed was right. I wasn’t sure that what he said could be applied to me. I made moral judgments in what I did, but I didn’t believe that I was always entitled to do so and I knew that I had not yet managed to purge myself of the guilt and grief I felt. I acted to ease my own pain and, in doing so, I sometimes managed to ease the pain of others. That was as close to compassion as I thought I could get, for the present.

From the far end of town came the sound of sirens, gradually drawing nearer. Red and blue lights flashed across the buildings on the main street as a cruiser tore around the corner and headed in our direction at high speed. It screeched a hard left at the intersection and drove by. In the front seat of the car I could see the figure of Randall Jennings.

‘Must be a doughnut sale on,’ remarked Angel.

A second unmarked car came down the main street, spun on its rear tyres as it made the turn, then headed after the first vehicle.

‘With free coffee,’ he added.

I tossed my keys in my hand, then nudged Angel off the hood of the Mustang, where he had just taken up a position. ‘I’m going to take a look. You want to come along?’

‘Nah. I’m a-waitin’ for Black Narcissus to finish making himself lovely for us. We’ll hang on for you, burn some furniture to keep warm.’

I followed the lights of the lead cars as they glanced against the trees, the branches like hands outstretched over the road. After a mile I caught up with them as they headed up into the forest through a private logging company road, the wooden barrier thrown to one side to enable the cars to pass. Beside the barrier stood a man wearing a wool hat and a parka. A path wound down behind him to a small house on the edge of the company land. I figured that maybe it was he who had made the call to the police.

I stayed close behind the rear car, watching its taillights as it swerved and dipped along the narrow, rutted track. Eventually the cruiser came to a halt beside a Ford truck with a ski-doo in back, a huge bearded man with a belly like a pregnant woman’s standing beside it. Jennings emerged from the lead car, Ressler stepping out of the car behind at the same time accompanied by another patrolman. Flashlights blinked into life and the line of three cops headed over to the back of the truck and peered inside. I took my own Maglite from the trunk and walked over to them. As I went, I heard the bearded man say:

‘I didn’t want to leave him out there. There’s snow coming on, means he might have been lost till the thaw.’

Faces turned towards me as I approached, one of them that of Rand Jennings.

‘The fuck are you doing here?’ he said.

‘Collecting berries. What you got?’

I shone my flashlight beam into the bed of the truck, although what was there didn’t need the extra illumination. It needed darkness and dirt and a headstone six feet above it.

It was a man’s body, laid out on a sheet of tarpaulin, his mouth wide open and filled with leaves. His eyes were closed and his head was twisted at an unnatural angle. He lay, crumpled and broken, amid the tools and plastic containers in the truck, his hair touching the empty gun rack.

‘Who is he?’

For a moment, I didn’t think Jennings was going to answer. Then he sighed and said:

‘It looks like Gary Chute. He was a surveyor for the timber company. Daryl here found him when he was out checking some traps. Came upon his truck back a ways as well, couple of miles from the body.’

Daryl looked like he was about to deny the traps part of the statement. His mouth opened briefly then closed again at a look from Jennings. Daryl looked kind of slow, I thought. His eyes were dull and his brow low, and his mouth, though closed, was in continual motion, as if he was worrying at the inside of his bottom lip with his teeth.

Beside him, Ressler was flicking through the dead man’s wallet.

‘It’s Chute all right,’ he said. ‘No cash in the wallet, though. Credit cards are still here. You take it, Daryl?’

Daryl shook his head wildly from side to side. ‘No, I didn’t touch nothin’.’

‘You sure?’

Daryl nodded his assent. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’m sure.’ Ressler didn’t look like he believed him, but he didn’t say anything more.

I turned to Daryl. ‘How did you find him?’

‘Huh?’

‘I mean, what position was he in?’

‘Lying at the bottom of a ridge, near buried by the snow and the leaves,’ replied Daryl. ‘Looked like he just slipped, hit some stones and trees on the way down, then caught his neck on a root. Must have snapped like a twig.’ Daryl smiled uneasily, unsure that he had said the right thing.

It didn’t sound very likely, especially with the money missing from his wallet. ‘You say there was snow and leaves on him, Daryl?’

‘Yessir,’ said Daryl eagerly. ‘Branches too.’

I nodded, and shone my flashlight on the body once again. Something caught my attention at his wrists and I let the light linger for a moment before flicking it off. ‘It’s a shame he was moved,’ I said.

Even Jennings had to agree. ‘Shit, Daryl, you should have left him as he was, then let the wardens go and get him.’

‘I couldn’t leave him out there,’ said Daryl. ‘It weren’t right.’

‘Maybe Daryl’s right. If it snows, and it will, we could have lost him until the spring,’ said Ressler. ‘Daryl says he found the body at Island Pond, wrapped it in the tarp and hauled it back ten miles to his truck with his ski-doo. Island Pond’s quite a ways from here and, according to Daryl, the road already turns into one big snowdrift way before you reach the pond.’

I glanced at Daryl with respect; there weren’t many men who’d haul the body of a stranger for miles. ‘No way anyone can head out there in the dark, assuming we could even find the place,’ concluded Jennings. ‘Anyway, this is a matter for the wardens, maybe the sheriffs department, but not us. We’ll arrange to have him taken to Augusta in the morning, let the ME take a look at him.’

I looked up, beyond the trees and into the black night sky. There was a sense of heaviness, as of a weight above us about to fall. Ressler followed my gaze.

‘Like I said, Daryl was right. Snow’s coming.’

Jennings gave Ressler a look that said he didn’t want any more details of the discovery spoken of in front of Daryl and, especially, me. He slapped his hands together sharply. ‘OK, let’s go.’ He leaned into the bed of the truck and covered Gary Chute’s body with the tarp, using pieces of scrap metal, a wheel iron and the butt of a shotgun to hold it in place. He crooked a finger at the patrolman.

‘Stevie, you ride in the bed here, make sure that tarp doesn’t come off’ Stevie, who looked about eleven, shook his head unhappily then climbed carefully into the truck, squatting down beside the body. Ressler went back to his car, leaving only Jennings and me.

‘I’m sure we all appreciate your assistance, Parker.’

‘Funny, but I don’t think you mean that.’

‘You’re right, I don’t. Stay out of my way, and out of my business. I don’t want to have to tell you that again.’ He tapped me once on the chest with a gloved finger, then turned and walked away. The cars started almost in unison and formed a convoy with the truck – one ahead, one behind – as Gary Chute was brought back to Dark Hollow.

Leaves and branches, as well as snow, had covered Chute’s body, according to Daryl. If his death was accidental, and Daryl had taken the money from his wallet, then that didn’t make too much sense. The trees were bare, and it had been snowing pretty regularly over the last week or so. Snow would have covered the body, but not leaves and branches. Their presence indicated that someone could have been trying to hide Gary Chute’s body.

I walked back to my car and thought of what I had seen in the flashlight’s glow: red marks on the dead man’s wrists. Those marks weren’t made by a fall, or by animals, or frost.

They were rope burns.

When I got back to the motel, Angel and Louis were gone. There was a note under my door, written in Angel’s strangely neat hand, telling me that they had gone to the diner and would see me there. I didn’t follow them. Instead, I went down to the motel reception desk, filled two foam containers with coffee and returned to my room.

Chute’s death continued to bother me. It was unfortunate that it had been Daryl who found the body, even if he had acted with the best of intentions. Chute’s truck could probably have served as a rough marker for the crime scene but now its integrity had been fatally compromised by Daryl’s removal of the body.

Maybe it was nothing, but on a map I marked roughly where Gary Chute’s body had been found at Island Pond. Island Pond was to the north-east of Dark Hollow. The only way to reach that area was along a private road, which required a permit for use. If someone had killed Gary Chute, they’d have to have taken that road to get to him, following him into the wilderness. The other possibility was that whoever killed him was in the wilderness already, waiting for him. Or . . .

Or maybe Chute was unlucky enough to see someone, or something, that he shouldn’t have. Maybe whoever killed him didn’t go into the wilderness after him, but was coming back out again. And, if that was the case, then the first place that person would arrive at was Dark Hollow.

But this was all speculation. I needed to get my thoughts in order. On a page of my notebook, I noted all that had happened since the night that Billy Purdue had stuck his knife in my cheek. Where there were links, I formed dotted lines between the names. Most of them came back to Billy Purdue, except Ellen Cole’s disappearance and the death of Gary Chute.

And in the centre of the list was a white space, empty and clean as new-fallen snow. The other names and incidents circled around it, like planets around a sun. I felt the old instinct, the desire to impose some pattern on incidents that I did not yet fully understand, some form of explanation that might begin to lead me to an ultimate truth. When I was a detective in New York, dealing with the deaths of those whom I had not known, with whom I had no direct connection, to whom I had no duty beyond that of the policeman whose task it is to find out what happened and to ensure that someone answers for the crime, I would follow the threads of the investigation as I had laid them out and when they led nowhere, or proved simply to be false assumptions, I would shrug and return to the core to follow another thread. I was prepared to make mistakes in the hope that I would eventually find something that was not an error.

That luxury, the luxury of detachment, was taken away from me when Susan and Jennifer died. Now they all mattered, all of the lost, all of the gone, but Ellen Cole mattered more than most. If she was in trouble, then there was no room for error, no time to make mistakes in the hope that they would lead to some final reckoning. Neither could I forget Rita Ferris and her son, and at the thought of her I looked instinctively over my shoulder and towards the dark rectangle of the window, and I recalled a weight on my shoulder, cold but not unyielding, the touch of a familiar hand.

There was too much happening, too many deaths revolving around the white space at the centre of the page. And in that space, I put a question mark, dotted it carefully, then extended the dots down to the bottom of the page.

And there I wrote the name ‘Caleb Kyle’.

I should have gone out to eat then. I should have found Angel and Louis and gone to a bar where I could have watched them drink and flirt oddly with each other. I might even have had a drink, just one drink . . . Women would have gone by, swaying gently as the alcohol took hold of their bodies and minds. Perhaps one of them might have smiled at me, and I might have smiled back and felt the spark that ignites when a beautiful woman focuses her attention on a man. I could have had another drink, then another, and soon I would have forgotten everything and descended into oblivion forever.

The anniversary was approaching. I was aware of it as a dark cloud on the horizon, moving inexorably to engulf me in memories of loss and pain. I wanted normality, yet it continued to hang beyond my reach. I wasn’t even sure why I had gone to Rachel’s office, except that I knew that I wanted to be with her even though my feelings for her made me feel sick and guilty, as if I were somehow betraying Susan’s memory. With these thoughts, after all that had happened over the past few days, and after allowing my mind to explore the nature of the killings that had occurred in both the recent and distant pasts, I should not have remained alone.

Tired and so hungry that my appetite had faded entirely away to be replaced by a deeper, gnawing unease, I undressed and climbed into my bed, pulling the sheets over my head and wondering how long it would take me to fall asleep. Just long enough, it emerged, to get that thought out.

I awoke to a noise, and a faint, unpleasant odour that took me a few moments to identify. It was the smell of rotting vegetation, of leaves and mulch and standing water. I rose from my pillow and wiped the sleep from my eyes, my nose wrinkling as the smell of decay grew stronger. There was a clock-radio on the nightstand – the time read 12.33 a.m. – and I checked it in case the alarm might somehow have switched itself on during the night, but the radio was silent. I looked around the room, conscious now of a strangeness to the light, a tinge of unfamiliar colour that should not have been present.

There was singing coming from my bathroom.

It was low but sweet, the sound of two voices combining to sing the same song, a song that sounded like a nursery rhyme, the words muffled by the closed bathroom door.

And from beneath the door, a green light seeped, its form rippling across the cheap carpet. I pushed back the covers and stood naked on the floor, but felt no cold, no chill, and began to walk towards the bathroom. As I did so, the smell grew stronger. I could feel it adhering to my skin and hair, as if I was bathing in its source. The singing rose in volume, the words now clear, the same three syllables repeated over and over again in high, girlish tones.

Caleb Kyle, Caleb Kyle

I was almost at the point where the tendrils of light from beneath the door reached their farthest extension. From behind the door came the sound of water softly lapping.

Caleb Kyle, Caleb Kyle

I stood for a second at the periphery of the green light, then placed one bare foot in its pool.

The singing stopped as soon as my foot touched the floor, but the light remained, moving slowly, viscously, across my bare toes. I reached forward and carefully turned the handle of the door. I pulled it open and stepped onto the tiles.

The room was empty. There were only the white surfaces, the neat pile of towels above the toilet, the sink with its low-grade soaps still wrapped, the glasses with their paper covers, the flower-speckled curtain on the bath pulled almost completely across . . .

The light came from the behind the curtain, a sickly, green glow that shone with only a vestige of the power of its original source, as if it had fought its way through layers and layers of obstacles to offer what little illumination it could. And in the quiet of the room, broken only by the soft lapping of water from behind the curtain, it seemed as if something held its breath. I heard a soft giggle, smothered by a hand, the laugh echoed by another, and the water behind the curtain lapped more loudly.

I reached out a hand, gripped the plastic and began to pull it quickly across. There was some resistance, but I continued to open the curtain until the interior of the bath was completely exposed.

The water was full of leaves, so many that they reached up to the faucets. They were green and red, brown and yellow, black and gold. There was aspen and birch, cedar and cherry, maple and basswood, beech and fir, their shapes twisted and overlapping, the ferocity of their decay polluting the water and creating a stench that was almost visible as it rose.

A shape moved beneath the leaves, and bubbles broke upwards. The vegetation separated and something white began to rise to the surface, a long, slow ascent as if the water was far deeper than it could possibly be. As it neared, it seemed to separate into two figures, their hands held as they rose, their long hair spreading and flowing as they came, their mouths open, their eyes blind.

I let the curtain fall and tried to move, but the tiles betrayed me, just as they had betrayed me on the day that I first found the little girls. And as I fell, their shades moved behind the curtain and I backed away on my hands and heels, my fingers and toes scrabbling for purchase until I awoke once again, the sheets in a pile at the end of the bed, the mattress exposed and a bloody hole in its fabric where I had torn through it with my nails.

A hammering came at the door.

‘Bird! Bird!’ It was Louis’s voice.

I crawled from my bed and realised I was shivering uncontrollably. I struggled with the chain on the door, my fingers fumbling at the catch, and then, at last, it was open and Louis was standing there before me in a pair of grey sweatpants and a white T-shirt, his gun in his hand.

‘Bird?’ he repeated. There was concern in his eyes, and a kind of love. ‘What’s the matter?’

Something bubbled in my throat, and I tasted bile and coffee.

‘I see them,’ I said. ‘I see them all.’

Chapter Eighteen

I sat on the edge of my bed, my head in my hands, and waited while Louis went to the office and poured two cups of coffee from the eternally brewing pot. As he passed by his own room I heard him exchange words with Angel, although he was still alone when he closed the door behind him, shutting out the cold night air. He handed me the foam cup, and I thanked him before sipping from it silently. From outside came the soft tapping of snow falling on my window. He didn’t talk for a time, and I felt him considering something in his mind.

‘I ever tell you about my Grandma Lucy?’ he said at last.

I looked at him in surprise. ‘Louis, I don’t even know your surname,’ I replied.

He smiled dimly, as if it were all he could do to recollect what it might have been himself. ‘Anyways,’ he continued, and the smile faded, ‘Lucy, she was my gran’momma, my mamma’s momma, not much older than I am now. She was a beautiful woman: tall, skin like day fading into night. She wore her hair down, always. I never recall her wearing it no other way but down, it tumbling over her shoulders in dark curls. She lived with us until the day she died, and she died young. The pneumonia took her, and she faded away in shakes and sweats.

‘There was a man who lived in the town, and his name was Errol Rich. Ever since I knew him, he just wasn’t a man to turn the other cheek. When you were black, and you lived in that kind of town, that’s the first thing you learned. You always, always, turned the other cheek, ‘cause if you didn’t, weren’t no white sheriff, no white jury, no bunch of redneck assholes with ropes ready to tie you to the axle of a truck and drag you along dirt roads till your skin came off, weren’t none of them going to see it no other way but a nigger gettin’ above himself, and settin’ a bad example to all the other niggers, maybe gettin’ them all riled up so’s that white folks with better things to do would have to go out some dark night and teach them all a lesson. Put some manners on them, maybe.

‘But Errol, he didn’t see things that way. He was a huge mother. He walked down the street and the sun wasn’t big enough to shine around his shoulders. He fixed things – engines, mowers, anything that had a moving part and the hand of man could find a way to save. Lived in a big shack out on one of the old county roads, ‘long with his momma and his sisters, and he looked them white boys in the eye, and he knew they was afraid.

‘Except, this one time, he was driving by a bar out by Route 5 and he heard someone call out “Hey, Nigger!” and the cracked old windshield of his truck, it just exploded in. They threw a big old bottle through it, full of all the piss those assholes could work up between ’em. And Errol, he pulled over, and he sat there for a time, covered in blood and glass and piss, then he climbed out of the cab, took him a length of timber maybe three feet long from the bed of his truck, and he walked over to where them good ol’ boys were sitting on the stoop. There was four of ‘em, including the owner, a pig of a man called Little Tom Rudge, and he could see them freeze up as he came.

‘“Who threw that?” says Errol. “You throw that, Little Tom? ’Cos if you did, you better tell me now, else I’m gonna burn your shit-heap down to the ground.”

‘But nobody answered. Them boys, they was just struck dumb. Even together in a bunch and all liquored up, they knew better than to mess with Errol. And Errol, he just looked at them for a time, then he spat on the ground and he took that length of timber and threw it through the window of the bar, and Little Tom, there wasn’t nothing he could do. Least of all, not then.

‘They came for him the next night, three truckloads of ’em. They took him in front of his momma and his sisters and brought him to a place called Ada’s Field, where there was a chestnut tree that was maybe a century old. And when they got there, half the town was waitin’ for ’em. There was women there, even some of the older children. Folks ate chicken and biscuits, and drank soda pop from glass bottles, and talked about the weather, and the coming harvest, and maybe the baseball season, like they was at the county fair and they was waitin’ for the show to start. All told, there was more than a hundred people there, sittin’ on the hoods of their cars, waitin’.

‘And when Errol came, his legs and hands were tied and they hauled him up onto the roof of an old Lincoln that was parked under the tree. And they put a rope around his neck, and tightened it. Then someone came up and poured a can of gasoline over him, and Errol looked up, and he spoke the only words he said since they took him, and the only words he would ever say again on this earth.

‘“Don’t burn me”, he said. He wasn’t asking them to spare him, or not to hang him. He wasn’t afraid of that. But he didn’t want to burn. Then I guess maybe he looked up into their eyes and saw that what was to be would be, and he bowed his head and he started to pray.

‘Well, they tightened the rope around his neck and they pulled it so that Errol was balancing on the tips of his toes on the roof of the car, and then the car started and Errol hung in the air, twisting and thrashing. And someone came forward with a burning torch in his hand and they burned Errol Rich as he hung, and those people, they listened to him scream until his lungs burned and he couldn’t scream no more. And then he died.

‘That was at ten after nine, on a July night, maybe three miles away from our house, right on the other side of town. And at ten after nine, my Grandma Lucy, she rose from her chair by the radio. I was sittin’ at her feet. The others, they was in the kitchen or in bed asleep, but I was still with her. Grandma Lucy, she walked to the door and stepped out into the night, wearin’ nothin’ but her nightdress and a shawl, and she looked out into the woods. I followed her, and I said: “Miss Lucy, what’s the matter?” but she didn’t say nothin’, just kept on walkin’ until she was about ten feet away from the edge of the trees, and there she stopped.

‘And out in the darkness, among the trees, there was a light. It didn’t look like no more than a patch of moonlight but, when I tried to find it, there was no moon, and the rest of the woods was dark.

‘I turned to Grandma Lucy and I looked at her eyes.’ Louis stopped, and his own eyes flickered closed briefly, like a man recalling a pain that has been forgotten for a long time. ‘Her eyes were on fire. In her pupils, right in the blackness at the centre, I could see flames. I could see a man burning, like he was standing before us, sheltered by the trees. But when I looked into the darkness, there was only that patch of light, nothin’ more.

‘And Lucy, she said: “You poor boy, you poor, poor boy”, and she started to cry. When she cried, it was like her grief put out the flames, because the burning man in her eyes started to fade until, in the end, he was gone, and the patch of light in the woods, that was gone too.

‘She never spoke about what happened to nobody else, and she told me not to tell either. But I think my momma knew. Least, she knew that her momma had some kind of gift that nobody else had. She could find the dark places, the places nobody else could find, the places where nobody else would look. And the things that moved through the shadows, the folks passing on their way, she saw them too.’

He stopped. ‘Is that what you see, Bird?’ he asked softly. ‘The shades?’

I felt cold at my fingertips and in my toes. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

‘Because I recall what happened back in Louisiana, Bird,’ he continued. ‘You saw things back there that nobody else saw. I know that. I could sense it from you, and it scared you.’

I shook my head slowly. I couldn’t admit to what I didn’t want to believe myself. I sometimes thought – maybe even hoped – that I had been unhinged by grief, that the loss of my wife and child had made me mentally ill, emotionally and psychologically disturbed, so troubled by guilt that I was haunted by images of the dead conjured up by my sick mind. Yet I had seen Jennifer and Susan first of all, after meeting Tante Marie Aguillard in Louisiana, after she had told me what had happened to them when she could not possibly have known. The others came later, and they spoke to me in my dreams.

Now, as I saw Rita and Donald, my own Jennifer, felt my Susan’s hand upon me, I half hoped that it was the fact that the anniversary was almost on me, that remembered grief had wormed its way into the recesses of my mind and had started to unhinge me again. Or maybe it was a product of guilt, the guilt I felt at wanting Rachel Wolfe, the guilt I felt at wanting the chance to start over again.

There is a form of narcolepsy in which sufferers literally daydream, the dreams of REM sleep coming upon them in the course of their daily lives, so that the real and the imagined become one and the worlds of sleeping and waking collide. For a time, I thought I might have been a victim of something similar but I knew, deep down inside, that this was not the case. Two worlds came together for me, but they were not the worlds of sleeping and waking. No one slept in these worlds, and no one rested.

I told some of this to Louis, as he watched me quietly from a chair in the corner. I now felt a little ashamed at my outburst, at bringing him in here to listen to my ravings. ‘Maybe I just have bad dreams, that’s all. But I’ll be okay, Louis. I think I’ll be okay. Thank you.’

He looked me hard in the eyes, then stood and walked to the door. ‘Anytime.’ He opened the lock, then paused.

‘I’m not the superstitious kind, Bird. Don’t go makin’ that mistake about me. But I know what happened that night. I could smell burning, Bird. I could smell the leaves on fire.’

And with that he returned to his room.

Still the snow fell, the crystals turning to ice on my window. I watched them form, and thought of Cheryl Lansing’s granddaughters, and Rita Ferris, and Gary Chute. I didn’t want Ellen Cole to join them, or Billy Purdue either. I wanted to save those who remained.

In an effort to distract myself, I tried to read. I had just about finished a biography of the Earl of Rochester, an English dandy who had boozed and whored his way to an early grave in the time of Charles II, writing some great poetry while he did so. I read the final pages lying on my bed beneath the yellow light from the wall lamp, warm air humming into the room. It seemed that in 1676, Rochester had been involved in the slaying of a constable and had gone into hiding, disguising himself as a quack physician named Dr Alexander Bendo who sold medicines made out of clay, soot, soap and pieces of old wall to the suckers of London, none of whom ever guessed the true identity of the man they trusted with their most intimate secrets, and with the most private parts of their wives’ bodies.

Old Saul Mann would have liked Rochester, I thought. He would have appreciated the element of disguise, the possibility of one man taking on the identity of another in order to protect himself, then conning the very people who were searching for him. I fell asleep to the soft patter of snow on glass and dreamed of Saul Mann, wrapped in a cloak of moons and stars, his cards spread on a table before him, waiting quietly for the great game to begin.

Chapter Nineteen

The snows that came that night were the first heavy falls of the winter. They fell on Dark Hollow and Beaver Cove, on Moosehead Lake and Rockwood and Tarratine. They sugar-coated Big Squaw Mountain and Mount Kineo, Baker Mountain and Elephant Mountain. They turned the Longfellows into a white scar that ran across the back of Piscataquis. Some of the smaller ponds froze, creating a layer of ice as thin and treacherous as a traitor’s blade. The snow sat heavy on the evergreens and the ground below lay silent and undisturbed, save for the sound of branches giving way reluctantly beneath the weight they carried, the compressed flakes falling heavily to the drifts below as snow welcomed back snow. In my disordered, disturbed sleep, I felt the snow falling, sensed the change in the atmosphere as the world was shrouded in white and the night waited for the exquisite perfection of winter’s work to be revealed in the slow dawning light of day.

Quite early, I heard a snowplough moving down the main street of the town and the slow, careful progress of the first cars, their chains making a distinctive noise on the road. The room was so cold that beads of moisture turned the windows to shattered glass, miraculously restored by the sweep of a hand. I looked out on the world, at the tracks of the cars, at the first people walking on the streets, their hands deep in their pockets or by their sides, the bulk of their layers of sweaters and shirts, thermals and scarves, forcing them to move with a comical unfamiliarity, like children thrust into new clothes.

I approached the bathroom with unease, but all was quiet and clean within. I showered, keeping the water as hot and powerful as I could stand, then dried myself quickly, my teeth already chattering as the temperature cooled the drops on my body. I pulled on jeans, boots, a thick cotton shirt and a dark wool sweater, added a coat and gloves, and stepped out into the crisp, cold morning air. Beneath my feet, the snow crunched and shifted, my progress marked by the impressions of my footsteps behind me. I knocked twice, sharply, on the door of the next room down.

‘Go away,’ said Angel’s voice, the force of his words undiminished by the fact that they came through about four layers of blankets. I felt a moment of guilt at having woken them the night before, and tried to keep my mind off the conversation I had had with Louis.

‘It’s Bird,’ I replied.

‘I know. Go away.’

‘I’m heading over to the diner. I’ll see you there.’

‘I’ll see you in hell first. It’s cold outside.’

‘It’s colder in there.’

‘I’ll take my chances.’

‘Twenty minutes.’

‘Whatever. Just go away.’

I was about to head for the diner when something about my car distracted me. From the window of my room it had seemed that its red lines were only partially obscured by the snow, for flashes of colour showed through as if a hand had wiped away some of the snowfall. But that wasn’t why the snow on my car was streaked with red.

There was blood on the windshield. There was blood also on the hood, and a long line of it ran from the front of the car, across the driver’s door and the rear window, before pooling below the trunk. I walked through the snow, feeling it crunch beneath my feet. At the back of the car, beside the right rear wheel, lay a pile of mangled brown fur. The cat’s mouth was open, and its tongue hung over its small white teeth. A red wound ran across its belly, but most of its blood seemed to be on my car.

To my left, I heard the office door slam and watched as the manager walked over to me. Her eyes were red from crying.

‘I already called the police,’ she said. ‘I thought, when I saw her first, that you’d hit her with your car, but then I saw the blood and realised that couldn’t be. Who’d do something like that to an animal? What kind of a person could take pleasure in hurting it so?’ She began to cry again.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

But I did know.

It took me three knocks to get Angel to the door. He stood shivering as I told him about the cat, Louis behind him listening silently.

‘He’s here,’ said Louis, finally.

‘We don’t know that for sure,’ I replied, but I knew he was right. Somewhere close by, Stritch was waiting.

I left them and walked across to the diner. It was ten after eight, and the diner was already almost full, warm air circulating with the smell of fresh coffee and bacon, voices raised at the counter and in the kitchen. For the first time, I noticed the Christmas decorations, the Coca-Cola Father Christmas, the tinsel and the stars. It would be my second season without them. I felt almost grateful for Billy Purdue, maybe even for Ellen Cole, for giving me something on which to concentrate my mind. All of the energy I might have poured into grieving, into anger and guilt, into fearing the anniversary, I now put into the search for these two people. But that gratitude was a brief, passing thing, an ugly betrayal of the people involved, and I quickly felt disgusted with myself for using someone else’s sufferings to alleviate my own.

I took a booth and watched the people passing by. When the waitress came, I ordered only coffee. The sight of the cat and the thought of Stritch trailing us had ruined my appetite. I found myself closely examining the faces of the people in the diner, as if Stritch might somehow have mutated himself, or stolen their form. There were a couple of timber company men across from me, eating plates of ham and eggs and already talking about Gary Chute.

I listened and learned, for the world of the northern wilderness was on the verge of change. An area of almost one hundred thousand acres of forest, owned by a European paper company, was about to be harvested. The area had last been logged in the thirties and forties and now it had matured again. For the last decade, the company had been restoring roads and bridges in preparation for the big lumber trucks with their claw-shaped hydraulic lifts that would move into the wilderness, enabling the transportation of the pine, spruce and fir, the oak, maple and birch, to begin. Chute, a graduate of the University of Maine at Orono, was one of those responsible for checking the roads, the tree growth and the likely boundaries for the logging.

The laws relating to forestry had changed since the last cutting. Then, the companies had cleared all of the land, causing silting that killed fish, displaced animals and led to serious erosion. Now they were obliged to cut in a checker-board pattern, leaving half the forest for another twenty to thirty years so that the habitats could grow again. Already there were signs of early cuts, where the deer and moose would feed on the raspberries, willow and alders that sprang up to fight for the new light. And so the days of the undisturbed northern wilderness were now numbered, and soon men and machines would be making their way into its vastness. Gary Chute had been the first of many, and it struck me that his job must have taken him into areas where few people had set foot in decades.

Across the street, Lorna Jennings stepped from her green Nissan, wearing a white padded jacket buttoned and tied over black denims and black, calf-length boots. I wondered how long she had been there: there were no exhaust fumes around the car and, despite the fact that there was little traffic on the street, the tracks of her tyres had been crossed by a number of other vehicles.

She stood at the curb, her hands in the pockets of her jacket, and looked over at the diner. Her eyes moved along the windows until they came to where I sat, a mug of coffee in my hand. She seemed to consider me for a moment, then walked across the road, entered the diner and took a seat opposite me, unbuttoning her jacket as she sat. Beneath it, she wore a red, turtleneck sweater that tightly followed the sweep of her breasts. One or two people looked over at her as she sat, and words were exchanged.

‘You’re attracting attention,’ I said.

She blushed slightly. ‘The hell with them,’ she said. She wore a trace of pink lipstick and her hair hung loose to the nape of her neck, strands falling gently near her left eye like dark feathers from a bird’s wing. ‘Some of them know you were out there last night, when they found the body. People have been asking why you’re here.’

She ordered, and a waitress brought her coffee and a bagel, with some thin slices of bacon on a separate plate, then gave each of us a sly look before stepping away. Lorna ate the bagel unbuttered, holding it in her left hand while her right picked up pieces of bacon that she nibbled at daintily.

‘And what answer have they got?’

‘They’ve heard that you’re looking for a girl. Now they’re trying to figure out if you had any reason to be interested in the disappearance of the timber company man.’ She stopped and took a sip of coffee. ‘Well, have you?’

‘Is that you asking, or Rand?’

She grimaced. ‘You know that’s a low blow,’ she said quietly. ‘Rand can ask his own questions.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t think Chute’s death was accidental, but that’s for the ME to confirm. I don’t see any connection between him and Ellen Cole.’ That wasn’t completely true. They were connected by Dark Hollow and the dark line of a road drawn through the wilderness upon which Chute’s death hung like a single red bead.

‘But there have been other deaths as well, some of them tied up with a guy called Billy Purdue. He was one of Meade Payne’s boys, once upon a time.’

‘You think he might be here?’

‘I think he might try to get to Payne. There are people after him, bad people. He took money that didn’t belong to him and now he’s running scared. I think Meade Payne is one of the only people left whom he can trust.’

‘And where do you fit in?’

‘I was doing some work for his wife. Ex-wife. Her name was Rita Ferris. She had a son.’

Lorna’s brow furrowed and then her eyes closed briefly and she nodded as she remembered the name. ‘The woman and child who died in Portland, that was them, wasn’t it? And this Billy Purdue, he was her ex-husband?’

‘Uh-huh, that’s them.’

‘They say he killed his own family.’

‘They say wrong.’

She was silent for a time, then said: ‘You seem very sure of that.’

‘He wasn’t the kind.’

‘And do you know “the kind”?’ She was watching me carefully now. There were conflicting emotions in her eyes. I could sense them coming from her, just as I had sensed the snow falling softly in the night. There was curiosity, and pity, and something else, too, something that had lain dormant for many years, a feeling repressed and now gradually being exposed. It made me want to draw back from her. Some things were best left in the past.

‘Yes, I do. I know the kind.’

‘You know, because you’ve killed them.’

I waited a heartbeat before I answered. ‘Yes.’

‘Is that what you do now?’

I smiled emptily. ‘It seems to be part of it.’

‘Did they deserve to die?’

‘They didn’t deserve to live.’

‘That’s not the same thing.’

‘I know that.’

‘Rand knows all about you,’ she said, pushing away the remains of her food. ‘He spoke about you last night. Actually, he shouted about you, and I shouted back.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘I think he’s afraid of you.’ She looked out on to the street, refusing to look directly at me and instead staring at my reflection in the glass. ‘I know what he did to you, in that men’s room. I always knew. I’m sorry.’

‘I was young. I healed.’

She turned back to me. ‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘But I couldn’t leave him, not then. I still loved him, or thought I did. And I was young enough to believe that we had a chance together. We tried to have children. We thought it might make things better. I lost two, Bird, the last one three years ago. I don’t think I can carry to term. I was so useless, I couldn’t even give him a child.’ She tensed her lips, and brushed her hair back from her forehead. There was a deadness about her eyes.

‘Now I dream about walking away, but if I leave, I leave with nothing. That’s the understanding we have, and maybe that’s the way it’ll have to be. He wants me to stay, or so he says, but I’ve learned a lot too these last few years. I’ve learned that men hunger. They hunger and they want, but after a while they stop feeling that hunger for what they have so they look elsewhere. I’ve seen the way he stares at other women, at the girls in their tight dresses when they come through town. He thinks that one of them will fill whatever he aches for, but they can’t and then he comes back and says that he’s sorry, that he knows now. But he only knows for as long as the guilt is sharp and alive, and then it passes and he starts to want again.

‘Men are so stupid, so self-absorbed. Each of them thinks he’s different, that this ache, this emptiness inside him, is unique to him and him alone, and that it somehow excuses whatever he may do. But it doesn’t, and then he blames the woman for somehow holding him back, as if, without her, he would be better than he is, more than he is. And the hunger grows and, sooner or later, it starts to feed on itself and the whole sorry mess falls apart like muscle and tendon separated from the bone.’

‘And don’t women hunger too?’ I asked.

‘Oh, we hunger all right. And, most of the time, we starve. At least, we do around these parts. You hunger too, Charlie Parker. And you want, maybe more than most. You wanted me, once, because I was different, because I was older and because you shouldn’t have been able to have me, but you could. You wanted me because I seemed unobtainable.’

‘I wanted you because I loved you.’

Lorna smiled at the memory. ‘You’d have left me. Maybe not immediately – it might have taken years – but you’d have left me. As I got older, as the wrinkles started to appear, when I dried up and couldn’t have children, when some pretty thing came along and flashed you a smile and you started to think, “I’m still young, I can do better than this.” Then you’d have gone, or strayed and come back with your tail between your legs and your dick in your hand. And I couldn’t have taken that pain, Charlie, not from you. I’d have died. I’d have curled up and died inside.’

‘That shouldn’t have been the reason that you stayed with him.’ I stopped myself, because no good could come of this. ‘Anyway, that was in the past. What’s done is done.’

She looked away, and there were furrows of hurt at her brow. ‘Were you ever unfaithful to your wife?’ she asked.

‘Only with a bottle.’

She laughed softly, and looked up at me from beneath her hair. ‘I don’t know whether that’s better or worse than a woman. Worse, I think.’ The smile disappeared but a kind of tenderness stayed in her eyes. ‘You were full of pain, Bird, even then. How much more pain have you taken on since?’

‘It wasn’t of my choosing, but I was to blame for what led to it.’

It seemed as if all of the other people around us had faded away, had become mere shadows, and the small circle of daylight around the table represented the boundary of the world, with darkness beyond in which faded figures drifted and flickered like the ghosts of stars.

‘And what did you do, Bird?’ And softly, so softly, I felt her hand touch my own.

‘Like you say, I hurt people. And now I’m trying to make up for what I’ve done.’

And in the gloom around us, the figures seemed to draw closer, but they were not the folks eating in a small-town diner, filled with gossip and the tiny tendernesses of a close-knit community. They were the figures of the lost and the damned, and there were those among them whom I had once called friend, lover, child.

Lorna stood and around us the diner came into focus again, and the spectres of the past became the substance of the present. She looked down upon me and my hand burned gently where she had touched me.

‘“What’s done is done”,’ she said, repeating my words. ‘Is that how you feel about us?’

The lines between our past and our present had become blurred, somehow, and we were digging at old wounds that should have healed long before. I didn’t reply, so she shrugged on her jacket, took five bucks from her purse and left them on the table. Then she turned and walked away, leaving me with the memory of her touch and the faint lingering of her scent, like a promise made but not yet fulfilled. She knew that Rand would hear that we had been seen together, that we had spoken at length in the diner. I think, even then, she was pushing him. She was pushing us both. I could almost hear the clock ticking, counting down the hours and minutes until her marriage finally self-destructed.

In front of her, the door opened and Angel and Louis stepped into the diner. They glanced at me, and I nodded back. Lorna caught the gesture as she left and, as she passed, she acknowledged them with a small smile. They sat opposite me as I watched her cross the street and head north in her white jacket, her head low like a swan.

Angel called for two coffees and whistled softly as he waited for them to arrive. He was whistling ‘The Way We Were’.

After they had eaten breakfast, I went over with them in detail the discovery of Chute’s body the night before and we divided out what we were going to do that day. Louis would head up to the lake and try to find a vantage point from which to continue watching the Payne house, since the previous night’s scouting party had proved unproductive. Before heading out, he would drop Angel in Greenville, where we arranged for him to rent an ancient Plymouth at a gas station. From Greenville, he would head out to Rockwood, Seboomook, Pittston Farm and Jackman, West Forks and Bingham, all of the towns to the west and south-west of Moosehead Lake. I would take Monson, Abbot Village, Guilford and Dover-Foxcroft to the south and south-east. In each town, we would show photographs of Ellen Cole, checking stores and motels, coffee shops and diners, bars and tourist information offices. Wherever possible, we would talk to local law enforcement and the old-timers who occupied their favourite booths in the bars and diners, the ones who would be sure to notice strangers in town. It would be tiring, frustrating work, but it had to be done.

I noticed Louis was edgy as we spoke, his eyes moving swiftly around the diner and out onto the street beyond.

‘He won’t come at us in daylight,’ I said.

‘Could have taken us last night,’ he replied.

‘But he didn’t.’

‘He wants us to know he’s here. He likes the fear.’

We said nothing more about him.

Before heading down to my assigned towns, I decided to follow the route Ellen and her boyfriend might have taken on the day they left town. On the way, I stopped off at a service station and got a mechanic to fit the Mustang with chains. I wasn’t sure how bad the roads might get as I headed north.

I kept glancing in my rear-view mirror as I drove, conscious now that Stritch might be somewhere in the area, but no cars followed me and I passed no other vehicle on the road. A couple of miles outside the town was a sign for the scenic ridge. The road up to it was steep and the Mustang struggled a little on some of the bends. Two minor roads snaked east and west at one point but I stuck with the main route until it came to a small parking lot that looked out over an expanse of hill and mountain, with Ragged Lake shimmering to the west and Baxter State Park and Katahdin to the north-east. The parking lot marked the end of the public access road. After that, the roads were for the use of the timber company, and would have played hell with the shocks of most cars. The land was startling in its whiteness, cold and beautiful. I could see why the woman at the motel had sent them up here, could imagine how wonderful the lake looked when it was bathed in gold.

I came back down to the intersection, where the minor road to the east was thick with snow. It went on for about a mile before ending in fallen trees and thick scrub. The land at either side was heavily wooded, the trees dark against the snow. I drove back and took the western road, which gradually veered north-west to skirt the edge of a pond. The pond was maybe a mile long and half a mile wide, its banks surrounded by skeletal beech and thick pine. By its western bank, a small trail wended its way through the trees. I left the car and followed it on foot, the ends of my jeans quickly becoming heavy and wet.

I had walked for maybe ten minutes when I smelt smoke and heard a dog barking. I left the trail and climbed an incline through the trees, which revealed, at its peak, a small house, maybe no more than two rooms wide. It had an overhanging roof and a narrow porch and square, four-pane windows from which old paint flaked. The house itself might have been white once but most of the paint had now disappeared, leaving only patches below the eaves and on the window frames. Three or four large rubber garbage cans, the kind used for recycling by businesses, stood to one side of the house. On the other was an old yellow Ford truck. The rusting hulk of a blue Oldsmobile, its tyres long gone, its windows thick with dirt, stood about five feet from the Ford. I caught some movement inside, and then a small black mongrel dog, its tail docked and its teeth bared, sprang through the open window from the backseat and moved quickly towards me. It stopped two or three feet from me and barked loudly.

The door of the house opened and an old man with a thin beard appeared. He wore blue overalls and a long, red raincoat. His hair was long and matted and his hands were almost black with dirt. I could see the hands clearly, because they were clutching a Remington A-70 pump-action shotgun, which was pointing in my direction. When the dog saw the old man emerge, its barking increased in volume and ferocity and its stumpy tail wagged frenziedly from side to side.

‘What do you want here?’ said the old man, in a voice that was slightly slurred. One side of his mouth remained immobile when he talked, and I figured he had some kind of nerve or muscle damage to his face.

‘I’m looking for someone, a young woman who may have been around here a couple of days back.’

The old man almost grinned, exposing a mouthful of yellow-stained teeth, broken, on both the top and bottom rows, by gaps. ‘Don’t get young women around here no more,’ he said, the gun not moving from me. ‘Don’t got the looks.’

‘She was blonde, about five-five. Her name was Ellen Cole.’

‘Didn’t see ‘em,’ said the old man, and he waved the gun at me. ‘Now get off my property.’

I didn’t move. Beside me, the dog lashed out and nipped at the end of my pants. I was tempted to kick it, but I figured it would latch on to my leg in an instant. I didn’t take my eyes from the old man as I considered what he had just said.

‘What do you mean “them”? I only mentioned the girl.’

The old man’s eyes narrowed as he realised his mistake. He jacked a shell into the shotgun, driving the small dog wild. It gripped the wet end of my jeans and tugged with its sharp white teeth.

‘I mean it, mister,’ he said. ‘You just take your leave and don’t come back, else I’ll shoot you now and take my chances with the law.’ He whistled to the dog. ‘Come away now, boy, I don’t want you gettin’ hurt.’ The dog instantly turned and ran back to the Plymouth, its powerful back legs propelling it through the open window. It watched me from the front seat, still barking.

‘Don’t make me come back, old man,’ I said quietly.

‘I didn’t make you come here to begin with, and I sure ain’t makin’ you come back. I got nothing to say to you. Now I’m tellin’ you for the last time: get off my land.’

I shrugged, turned and walked away. There was nothing more to be done, not without the risk of getting my head shot off. I looked back once to find him still standing on the porch, the shotgun in his hands. I had other people to talk to, but I figured I’d be back out to see that old man again.

That was my first mistake.

Chapter Twenty

After I left the old man I drove south. His words bothered me. It could have been nothing, I supposed; after all, he might have seen Ricky and Ellen together in town, and the news that someone was concerned that they were missing would have spread pretty quickly, even as far as the boondocks where the old man lived. If it turned out there was more to it than that then I knew where to find him, if I needed to.

I made my tour of the towns, Guilford and Dover-Foxcroft taking more time than the others, but I came up with nothing. I stopped at a pay phone to call Dave Martel in Greenville and he agreed to meet me at St Martha’s in order to pave the way with Dr Ryley, the director. I wanted to talk to him about Emily Watts.

And Caleb Kyle.

‘I hear you’ve been asking about the Cole girl,’ he said, as I prepared to hang up.

I paused. I hadn’t been in contact with him since I arrived back in Dark Hollow. He seemed to detect my puzzlement.

‘Hey, it’s a small place. News gets around. I had a call from New York early this morning, asking about her.’

‘Who was it?’

‘It was her father,’ continued Martel. ‘He’s on his way back up here. Seems he got into a shouting match with Rand Jennings, and Jennings told him to keep away from Dark Hollow if he wanted to help his daughter. Cole called me to see if I could tell him anything that Jennings wouldn’t. Probably called the county sheriff as well.’

I sighed. Giving Walter Cole an ultimatum was like telling the rain to fall up instead of down.

‘He say when he was going to arrive?’

‘Tomorrow, I guess. I think he’s going to stay here, instead of in the Hollow. You want me to give you a call when he gets here?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll find out soon enough.’ I told him a little about the background to the case, and how I had become involved at Lee’s instigation, not Walter’s. Martel gave a small laugh.

‘Hear you were out there when they found Gary Chute as well. You sure lead a complicated life.’

‘You hear anything more about it?’

‘Daryl brought the wardens out to where he thinks he found Chute – hell of a trip, from what I hear – and the truck’s being brought back for examination, soon as they can clear a road through the snow. The body’s on its way to Augusta. According to one of the part-timers who was down here this morning, Jennings seemed to think there was some bruising to the body, like he’d been beaten before he died. They’re going to question the wife, see if she might have run out of patience with him and sent someone to take care of him.’

‘Pretty lame.’

‘Pretty,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll see you at the home.’

Martel’s car was already pulled up outside the main entrance to St Martha’s when I arrived, and he and Dr Ryley were waiting for me by the reception desk.

Dr Ryley was a middle-aged man with good teeth, a well-cut suit and the oily manner of a casket salesman. His hand was soft and moist when I shook it. I had to resist the temptation to dry my palm on my jeans when he had detached himself from me. It wasn’t hard to see why Emily Watts had taken a shot at him.

He told us how much he regretted what had happened and advised us on the new security measures that had been introduced as a result, which seemed to consist of nothing more than locking the doors and hiding anything that could be used to knock out the guard. After some to-ing and fro-ing with Martel, he agreed to let me speak to Mrs Schneider, the woman who occupied the room next to that of the late Emily Watts. Martel decided to wait in the lobby, in case we spooked the old lady by arriving as a team. He sat, drew a second chair in front of him with the tip of his shoe, then put his feet up and seemed to fall asleep.

Mrs Erica Schneider was a German Jew who fled to America with her husband in 1938. He was a jeweller and brought enough gems with him to enable him to set up business in Bangor. They had been comfortable too, she told me, at least until he died and the bills that he had been hiding from her for the best part of five years resurfaced. She was forced to sell their house and most of her possessions, then fell ill from stress. Her children had put her up in the home, arguing that most of them were within visiting distance anyway, although this didn’t mean that any of them actually bothered to visit her, she said. She spent most of her time watching TV or reading. When it was warm enough, she walked in the grounds.

I sat beside her in her small, neat room with its carefully made bed, its single closet filled with old, dark dresses, its dressing table covered with a limited selection of cosmetics that the old woman still carefully applied each morning, as she turned to me and said: ‘I hope I die soon. I want to leave this place.’

I didn’t reply. After all, what could I say? Instead, I said: ‘Mrs Schneider, I’ll try to keep what’s said here today between us, but I need to know something: did you call a man named Willeford in Portland and talk to him about Emily Watts?’

She said nothing. I thought for a moment that she might start to cry, because she looked away and appeared to be having trouble with her eyes. I spoke again. ‘Mrs Schneider, I really need you to help me. Some people have been killed, and a young girl is missing, and I think that maybe these things are connected to Miss Emily in some way. If there’s anything at all you can tell me, anything that might assist me in bringing this thing to a close, I would appreciate it, I truly would.’

She gripped and twisted the cord of her dressing gown in her hands, wincing. ‘Yes,’ she replied, at last. ‘I thought it might help her.’ The cord drew tighter and there was fear in her voice, as if the rope was tightening not around her hands, but around her neck. ‘She was so sad.’

‘Why, Mrs Schneider? Why was she sad?’

The hands still worked at the cord as she replied. ‘One night, perhaps a year ago, I found her crying. I came to her, and I held her, and then she spoke to me. She told me that it was her child’s birthday – a boy, she said, but she had not kept him, because she was afraid.’

‘Afraid of what, Mrs Schneider?’

‘Afraid of the man who fathered the child,’ she said. She swallowed and looked to the window. ‘What harm can it do to talk of these things now?’ she whispered softly, more to herself than to me, then turned her face to mine. ‘She told me that, when she was young, her father . . . Her father was a very bad man, Mr Parker. He beat her and forced her to do things, you understand? Sex, ja ? Even when she was older, he would not let her leave him, because he wanted her near him.’

I nodded, but stayed silent as the words tumbled out of her like rats from a sack.

‘Then another man came to her town, and this man made love to her, and took her to his bed. She did not tell him about the sex, but, in the end, she told him about the beatings. And this man, he found her father in a bar and he beat him, and told him that he must never touch his daughter again.’ She emphasised each word with a wag of her finger, carefully spacing each syllable for maximum emphasis. ‘He told her father that if anything happened to his daughter, he would kill him. And because of this, Miss Emily fell in love with this man.

‘But there was something wrong with him, Mr Parker, in here –’ She touched her head ‘– and in here.’ Her finger moved to her heart. ‘She did not know where he lived, or where he came from. He found her when he wanted her. He went missing for days, sometimes weeks. He smelt of wood and sap and once, when he came back to her, there was blood on his clothes and under his nails. He told her that he hit a deer in his truck. Another time, he told her that he was hunting. Two different reasons he gave, and she started to feel afraid.

‘That was when the young girls began to disappear, Mr Parker: two girls. And once, when she was with him, she smelt something on him, the smell of another woman. His neck, it was scratched, torn, as if by a hand. They argued, and he told her that she was imagining things, that he had cut himself on a branch.

‘But she knew it was him, Mr Parker. She knew it was him who was taking the girls, but she could not tell why. And now, now she was pregnant by him, and he knew this. She had been so scared to tell him, but when he learned about it he was so pleased. He wanted a son, Mr Parker. This he told her: “I want a son”.

‘But she would not hand over a child to such a man, she told me. She grew more and more afraid. And he wanted the child, Mr Parker, he wanted it so badly. Always, always he was asking her about it, warning her against doing anything that might damage it. But there was no love in him or, if there was, it was a strange love, a bad love. She knew that he would take the child, if he could, and she would never see it again. She knew he was a bad man, worse even than her father.

‘One night, when she was with him, in his truck by her father’s house, she told him that she was in pain. In the toilet outside, she had a newspaper, and in the newspaper – was — ‘ She struggled for the words. ‘Guts, blood, waste. Again, you understand? And she cried and smeared the blood on herself and put it in the bowl and called for him and told him, told him that she had lost his baby.’

Mrs Schneider stopped again, and took a blanket from her bed, which she wrapped round her shoulders to ward off the cold. ‘When she told him this,’ she continued, ‘she thought that he would kill her. He howled, Mr Parker, like an animal, and he raised her by the hair, and he hit her, again and again and again. He called her “weak” and “worthless”. He told her that she had killed his child. Then he turned and walked away and she heard him in the woodshed, moving among the tools her father kept there. And when she heard the sound of the blade, she ran away from the house and into the woods. But he followed her, and she could hear him coming through the trees. She stayed quiet, not even breathing, and he went past her, and he did not come back again, not ever.

‘Later, they found the girls hanging from the tree, and she knew that he had left them there. But she never saw him again and she went to the sisters here, at St Martha’s, and I think that perhaps she told them why she was afraid. They sheltered her until she had the boy, and then they took the child away from her. After that, she was never the same and she came back here, after many years, and the sisters, they took care of her. When the home was sold, she used what little money she had to stay here. It is not an expensive place, this, Mr Parker. This you can see.’ She raised her hand to show the dull little room. Her skin was thin as paper. Sunlight dripped like honey through her fingers.

‘Mrs Schneider, did Miss Emily tell you the name of the man, the man who fathered her child?’

‘I do not know,’ she replied.

I sighed softly but, as I did so, I realised that I had not given her time to finish, that she had more to say.

‘I know only his first name,’ she continued. She moved her hand gently in the air before me, as if conjuring up the name from the past.

‘He was called Caleb.’

Snow falling, inside and out; a blizzard of memories. Young girls turning in the breeze, my grandfather watching them, rage and grief welling up inside him, the smell of their decay wrapped around him like a rotting cloak. He looked at them, a father and husband himself, and he thought of all the young men they would not kiss, the lovers whose breath they would not feel against their cheeks in the dead of night and whom they would never comfort with the warmth of their bodies. He thought of the children they would never have, the potential within them for the creation of new life now stilled forever, the gaping holes at their bellies where their wombs had been torn apart inside them. Within each one, there had existed possibilities beyond imagining. With their deaths, an infinite number of existences had come to an end, potential universes lost forever, and the world shrank a little at their passing.

I stood and walked to the window. The snowfall made the grounds look less forbidding, the trees less bare, but it was all an illusion. Things are what they are, and changes in nature can only hide their true essence for a time. And I thought of Caleb, moving into the comforting darkness of the forest as he raged at the death of his child unborn, betrayed by the too-thin, too-weak body of the woman he had protected and then inseminated. He took three after her in rapid succession, fuelling his fury until it was spent, then hung them like trimmings on a tree to be found by a man who was not like him, a man who was so far removed from him that he felt the deaths of each of these young women as a personal loss. For Caleb’s was a world in which things mutated into their opposites: creation into destruction, love into hate, life into death.

Five deaths, but six girls missing; one remained unaccounted for. In my grandfather’s file, her name had been marked on a sheaf of pages, upon which her movements on the day she disappeared had been minutely reconstructed. A picture of her was stapled to the corner of the bundle: plump, homely Judith Mundy, a hardness to her passed down by generations of people who had worked thin, unforgiving soil to create a foothold and scratch a living from this land. Judith Mundy, lost and now forgotten, except by the parents who would always feel her absence like an abyss into which they shouted her name without even an echo in reply.

‘Why would this man do such a thing to these girls?’ I heard Mrs Schneider ask, but I had no answer for her. I had stared into the faces of people who had killed with impunity for decades, and still I did not know the reasons for what they did. I felt a pang of regret at the loss of Walter Cole as a colleague. This was what Walter could do: he could look inside himself and, secure in his sense of his own innate Tightness, he could create an image of that which was not right, a tiny tumour of viciousness and ill will, like the first cell colonised by a cancer from which he could construct the progress of the entire disease. He was like a mathematician who, when faced with a simple square on a page, plots its progress into other dimensions, other spheres of being beyond the plane of its current existence, while remaining ultimately detached from the problem at hand.

This was his strength and also, I thought, his weakness. Ultimately, he did not look deeply enough because he was afraid of what he might find within himself: his own capacity for evil. He resisted the impulse to understand himself fully that he might understand others better. To understand is to come to terms with one’s potential for evil as well as good, and I did not think that Walter Cole wanted to believe himself capable, at whatever level, of doing acts of great wrong. When I had performed deeds that he found morally unacceptable, when I had hunted down those who had done wrong and, by doing so, had done wrong myself, Walter had cut me adrift, even though he had used me to find those individuals and knew what I would do when I found them. That was why we were no longer friends: I recognised my culpability, the deep flaws within myself – the pain, the hurt, the anger, the guilt, the desire for revenge – and all of these things I took and used. Maybe I killed a little of myself each time I did so; maybe that was the price that had to be paid. But Walter was a good man and, like many good men, his flaw was that he believed himself to be a better one.

Mrs Schneider spoke again. ‘It was the mother, I think,’ she said, softly.

I leaned against the windowpane and waited for her to continue.

‘Once, when this man, this “Caleb”, was drunk, he told Miss Emily of his mother. She was a hard woman, Mr Parker. The father, he had left them out of fear of her, then died in the war. She beat her boy, beat him with sticks and chains, and she did worse things, too. At night, Mr Parker, she would come to him, to her own boy, and she would touch him, and take him inside her. And later, when she was done, she would hurt him. She would drag him by the legs, or the hair, and kick him until he coughed blood. She chained him outside, like a dog, naked, in rain, and snow. All this, he told Miss Emily.’

‘Did he tell her where this took place?’

She shook her head. ‘Maybe south. I don’t know. I think . . .’

I didn’t interrupt as her brow furrowed and the fingers of her right hand danced in the air before me.

‘ Medina,’ she said at last, her eyes ablaze in triumph. ‘He said something to Miss Emily about a Medina.’

I noted down the name. ‘And what happened to his mother?’

Mrs Schneider twisted in her chair to look at me. ‘He killed her,’ she said simply.

Behind me, the door opened as a nurse brought in a pot of coffee and two cups, along with a tray of cookies, presumably at the instigation of Dr Ryley. Mrs Schneider looked a little surprised, then took on the role of hostess, pouring my coffee, offering sugar, creamer. She pressed cookies on me, which I refused, since I figured she might be grateful for them later. I was right. She took one for herself, carefully put the rest in two napkins from the tray and placed them in the bottom drawer of her dressing table. Then, as the snow clouds gathered once again in the skies above and the afternoon grew dark, she told me more about Emily Watts.

‘She was not a woman who talked very much, Mr Parker, only that one time,’ she said in her carefully-pronounced English which still carried traces of her roots in her ‘w’s – ‘vas’, ‘voman’ – and in some of her vowels. ‘She said “hello”, or “good-night”, or spoke of the weather, but no more. She never again talked of the boy. The others here, if you ask them, even if you step into their rooms for a moment, they will talk of their children, their grandchildren, their husbands, their wives.’ She smiled. ‘Just as I did to you, Mr Parker.’

I was about to say something, to tell her that I didn’t mind, that it was interesting, the least I could do, something half meant and well intended, when she raised a hand to stop me. ‘Don’t even begin to tell me that you enjoyed it. I am not a young girl who needs to be humoured.’ The smile remained as she said it. There was something in her, some relic of old beauty, which told me that in her youth many men had humoured her, and had been glad to do so.

‘So she did not talk of such things,’ she went on. ‘There were no photographs in her room, no pictures and since I have been here, five years, all she has ever said to me is “Hello, Mrs Schneider”, “Gutt Morning, Mrs Schneider”, “Is a fine day, Mrs Schneider”. That was all, nothing else, except for that one time, and I think she was ashamed of it later, or perhaps afraid. She had no visitors, and never spoke of it again, until the young man came.’

I leaned forward, and she imitated the movement, so that we were only inches apart. ‘He came some days after I made the call to Mr Willeford, after I saw his notice in the newspaper. The first we knew, there was shouting from downstairs and then the sound of running. A young man, a big man, with large, wild eyes, came past my door and burst into Miss Emily’s room. Well, I was afraid for her, and for me, but I took my stick –’ she pointed to a walking stick with a head carved into the shape of a bird and a metal tip at the end ‘– and I followed him.

‘When I came to the room, Miss Emily was sitting at her window, just as I am now, but her hands were like, ach, like this.’ Mrs Schneider put her hands flat on her cheeks and opened her mouth wide in an expression of shock. ‘And the young man, he looked at her and he said only one word. He said to her: “Momma?” Like that, like a question. But she only shook her head and said, “No, no, no,” again and again. The boy, he reached out for her, but already she was moving away from him, back, back, until she was in the corner of her room, down on the floor.

‘Then I heard from behind me the sound of the nurses. They came with the fat guard, the one Miss Emily hit on the night she ran off, and I was bundled out of the room while they took the boy away. I watched him as they took him, Mr Parker, and his face . . . Oh, his face was like he had seen someone die, someone he loved. He cried and called out again, “Momma, momma”,’ but she did not reply.

‘The police came, and they took the boy away. The nurse, she came to Miss Emily and she asked her if it was true, what the boy had said. And she told her “No”, that she does not know what he is talking about, that she has no son, no child.

‘But that night, I heard her crying for so long that I thought she would never stop. I went to her and held her. I told her that she should not be afraid, that she was safe, but she said only one thing.’

She paused and I saw that her hands were shaking. I reached out and stilled them and she moved her right hand, slipping it over mine and holding it tightly, her eyes closed. And I think, for a moment, I became her son, her child, one of those who never visited and who had left her to die in the cold north as surely as if they had hauled her into the forests of Piscataquis or Aroostock and abandoned her there. Her eyes reopened and she released my hand. Her own hands were still once again when she did so.

‘Mrs Schneider,’ I said gently. ‘What did she say?’

‘She said: “Now he will kill me”.’

‘Who did she mean? Billy, the young man who came to her?’ But I think I already knew the real answer.

Mrs Schneider shook her head. ‘No, the other. The one she was always afraid would find her, and nobody could help her, or save her from him.

‘It was the one who came later,’ concluded the old woman. ‘He learned of what had happened, and he came.’

I waited. Something brushed softly against the window and I watched a snowflake drift down the pane, melting as it went. ‘It was the night before she ran away. It was cold that night. I remember, I had to ask for an extra blanket, it was so cold. When I woke, it was dark, black, with no moon. And I heard a noise, a scraping from outside.

‘I climbed from my bed and the floor was so chilly that I – ah! I gasped. I went to the window and drew the curtain a little, but I could see nothing. Then the sound came again, and I looked straight down and . . .’

She was terrified. I could feel it coming off her in waves, a deep abiding fear that had shaken her to her core.

‘There was a man, Mr Parker, and he was climbing up the pipe, hand over hand. His head was down, and turned away from me, so I could not see him. And, anyway, it was so dark that he was only a shadow. But the shadow reached the window of Miss Emily’s room and I could see him pushing at it with one hand, trying to force it up. I heard Miss Emily scream, and I screamed too, and ran into the hallway calling for a nurse. And all the time, I can hear Miss Emily screaming and screaming. But when they came, the man was gone and they could find no trace of him in the grounds.’

‘What kind of man was he, Mrs Schneider? Tall? Short? Big? Small?’

‘I told you: it was dark. I could not see clearly.’ She shook her head in distress as she tried to remember.

‘Could it have been Billy?’

‘No.’ She was definite about that. ‘It was the wrong shape. It was not as big as him.’ She lifted her hands in imitation of Billy’s large shoulders. ‘When I told the nurse about the man, I think she believed that I was imagining things, that we were two old women frightening each other. But we were not. Mr Parker, I could not see this man clearly, but I could feel him. He was no thief come to steal from old women. He wanted something else. He wanted to hurt Miss Emily, to punish her for something she did long ago. The boy Billy, the boy who called her “Momma”, he started something by coming here. Perhaps, Mr Parker, I started it, by calling this man Willeford. Perhaps it is all my fault.’

‘No, Mrs Schneider,’ I said. ‘Whatever happened to cause this started a long time ago.’

She looked at me then with a kind of tenderness before she reached out and laid a hand softly on my knee to emphasise what she said next. ‘She was afraid, Mr Parker,’ she whispered. ‘She was so afraid that she wanted to die.’

I left her, alone with her memories and her guilt. Winter, the thief of daylight, caused lights to twinkle in the distance as Martel and I walked to our cars.

‘Did you learn anything?’ he asked.

I didn’t reply immediately. Instead, I looked north, to the forest, to the wilderness. ‘Could a man survive out there?’ I asked.

Martel’s brow furrowed. ‘Depends on how long he’s out there, what kind of clothing and supplies—’

‘That’s not what I mean,’ I interrupted. ‘Could he survive for a long time, for years, maybe?’

Martel thought for a moment. When he spoke, he didn’t mock the question but answered it seriously, and he rose in my estimation by doing so. ‘I don’t see why not. People have been surviving out there since the country was settled. There are still the remains of farmhouses to prove it. It wouldn’t be an easy existence, and I guess he’d have to go back to civilisation once in a while, but it could be done.’

‘And no one would disturb him out there?’

‘Most of it hasn’t been touched in the best part of fifty years. Go far enough into the forest and not even hunters or wardens are likely to bother you. You think someone went in there?’

‘Yes, I do.’ I shook his hand and opened the door of the Mustang. ‘Trouble is, I think he’s come out again.’

Chapter Twenty One

I had the scent of him then, had begun to feel the knowledge of him creep over me, but I needed more if I was to understand him, if I was to hunt him down before he found Billy Purdue, before he killed again. I was so close to making the connection: it hung just beyond my reach like the name of a half-remembered melody. I needed someone who could take my own semi-formed suspicions and mould them into a coherent whole, and I knew of only one person I trusted that much.

I needed to talk to Rachel Wolfe.

I drove back to Dark Hollow, packed an overnight bag and placed the file on Caleb Kyle at the top. Louis and Angel returned in their separate cars as I was leaving. I explained what I was doing then started to drive to Bangor to catch the flight to Boston.

I was just outside Guilford when, three cars ahead of me, I spotted a yellow Ford truck, its exhaust belching dirty fumes onto the road. I accelerated past it, glancing idly at the driver as I did so. In the cab sat the old man who had threatened me with his shotgun. I stayed ahead of him for a time, then pulled into a gas station at Dover-Foxcroft to let him pass. I stayed four or five cars behind him all the way to Orono, where he drove into the parking lot of a run-down mall and stopped outside a store called ‘Stuckey Trading’. I checked my watch. If I delayed any longer, I’d miss my flight. I watched the old man as he removed a couple of black sacks from the bed of his truck and headed into the store, then I slapped the steering wheel once in frustration and accelerated towards Bangor and the airport.

I knew that Rachel Wolfe was holding tutorials at Harvard while the college funded research she was conducting into the link between abnormal brain structures and criminal behaviour. She no longer engaged in private practice and, as far as I knew, was no longer assisting with criminal profiling.

Rachel had acted as an unofficial adviser on a number of cases for the NYPD, including the Travelling Man killings. That was how I met her, how we became lovers, and it was what eventually tore us apart. Rachel, whose policeman brother had died at the hands of a disturbed gunman, believed that by exploring the criminal mind she could prevent similar tragedies from happening to others. But the Travelling Man’s mind had been unlike any other, and the hunt for him had almost cost Rachel her life. She had made it known that she did not wish to see me and, until recently, I had respected that wish. I did not want to cause her any more pain, yet now I felt that I had nowhere else to turn.

But there was more to it than that, I knew. Twice in the last three months I had gone to Boston with the intention of finding her, or trying to reestablish what we had lost, but each time I had turned back without talking to her. Leaving my card on that last visit, with Louis waiting downstairs in the lobby, was as close as I had come to contacting her. Perhaps, in some way, Caleb Kyle would provide a bridge between us, a professional conduit that might also allow the personal to run alongside it.

On the flight, I added what I had learned from Mrs Schneider to my grandfather’s file, writing carefully in block capitals. I scanned the photos as I went, noting the details of these young women now long dead, their lives more carefully documented by my grandfather after they were gone than by anyone while they were alive. In many ways, he knew them and cared about them as much as their own parents. In some cases, he cared about them more. He outlived his own wife by thirteen years, and outlived his daughter by twelve. He had lived to mourn a lot of women, I thought.

I remembered something he said to me once, after I became a policeman. I sat beside him in the Scarborough house, matching coffee mugs on the table, and watched as he examined my shield, the light reflecting on his spectacles as he twisted and turned it in his hand. Outside, the sun shone, but the house was cool and dark.

‘It’s a strange vocation,’ he said at last. ‘These rapists, and murderers, thieves and drug peddlers, we need them to exist. Without them, we’d have no purpose. They give our professional lives meaning.

‘And that’s the danger, Charlie. Because, somewhere down the line, you’ll meet one who threatens to cross over, one you can’t leave behind when you take off your badge at the end of the day. You have to fight it, or else your friends, your family, they all become tainted by his shadow. A man like that, he makes you his creature. Your life becomes an extension of his life, and if you don’t find him, if you don’t bring him to an end, he’ll haunt you for the rest of your days. You understand me, Charlie?’

I understood, or thought I did. Even then, as he came to the end of his life, he was still tainted by his contact with Caleb Kyle. He hoped that it would never happen to me, but it did. It happened with the Travelling Man and, now, it was happening again. I had inherited the monkey on my grandfather’s back, his ghost, his demon.

After I made my additions, I went through the file again, trying to feel my way into my grandfather’s mind and, through his efforts, into the mind of Caleb Kyle. At the end of the file was a folded sheet of newspaper. It was a page from the Maine Sunday Telegram dating from 1977, twelve years after the man my grandfather knew as Caleb Kyle had blinked out of existence. On the page was a photograph taken in Greenville of a representative of the Scott Paper Company, which owned most of the forest north of Greenville, presenting the steamboat Katahdin to the Moosehead Marine Museum for restoration. In the background people grinned and waved, but farther back a figure had been caught, his face turned to the camera, a box containing what might have been supplies held in his arms. Even from a distance, he appeared tall and wiry, the arms holding the boxes long and thin, the legs slim but strong. The face was nothing more than a blur, ringed carefully in red felt-tip.

But my grandfather had enlarged it, then enlarged it again, and again, and again, each enlargement placed behind the preceding picture. And from the page a face grew, bigger and bigger until it took on the size and dimensions of a skull, the ink turning the eyes into dark pits, the face a construct of tiny black and white dots. The man in the picture had become a spectre, his features indistinguishable, unrecognisable to anyone except my grandfather. For my grandfather had sat beside him in that bar, had smelt him, had listened as this man directed him to a tree where dead girls twisted in the breeze.

This, my grandfather believed, was Caleb Kyle.

At the airport, I called the psychology department at Harvard, gave them my ID number and asked them if Rachel Wolfe was due to teach that day. I was informed that Ms Wolfe was due to give a tutorial to psychology students at 6 p.m.. It was now 5.15 p.m. If I missed Rachel on-campus, there were people who could get a residential address for me but it would take time and time, I was rapidly coming to realise, was something I just didn’t have. I hailed a cab and, after actively encouraging the driver to take the Ted Williams Tunnel to avoid the worst of the traffic, arrived in Cambridge.

A UC election banner hung outside the Grafton pub and a lot of the kids on the streets wore student election badges on their bags and coats as I headed across the campus to the junction of Quincy and Kirkland. I sat in the shadow of the Church of the New Jerusalem, across from the William James Hall, and waited.

At 5.59 p.m. a figure dressed in a black wool overcoat, ankle-length boots and black trousers, her red hair tied back with a black and white ribbon, walked down Quincy and entered the Hall. Even at a distance, Rachel still looked beautiful and I caught one or two male students sneaking looks at her as she passed. I kept a short distance behind her as I followed her into the entrance hall and watched her take the stairs to Seminar Room 6 on the lower ground floor, just to make sure that she wasn’t going to cancel and leave. I followed her as she entered the seminar room and closed the door, then I took a seat in a plastic chair with a view of the room and waited.

After an hour, the door opened and students began to stream out, most with large-format, wire-bound notebooks clutched to their chests or poking out of their bags: wire-bound notebooks were a weakness of Rachel’s. I moved aside to let the last student leave, then stepped into a small classroom dominated by a single big table, with chairs arranged around it and against the walls. At the head of the table, beneath a blackboard, sat Rachel Wolfe. She was dressed in a dark green sweater with a man’s white shirt beneath it, the collar turned up around her neck. As always, she wore some light make-up, carefully applied, and a dark red lipstick.

She looked up expectantly, a half smile on her face that froze as soon as she saw me. I closed the door gently behind me and took the first vacant seat at the table, which was just about as far away from her as I could get.

‘Hi,’ I said.

She very deliberately put her pens and notes away in a leather attaché case, then she stood and started to shrug on her coat. ‘I asked that you not try to contact me,’ she said, as she struggled to find her left sleeve. I stood and walked over to her, and held the sleeve out so she could get her arm in. I felt kind of sleazy intruding on her space that way, but I also felt a momentary twinge of resentment: Rachel had not been the only one hurt in Louisiana in the hunt for the Travelling Man. The resentment quickly passed, to be replaced by guilt as I recalled the feel of her in my arms, her body racked by sobs after she was forced to kill a man in the Metairie cemetery. Once again, I saw her raising the gun, her finger tightening on the trigger, fire leaping from the muzzle as the gun bucked in her hands. Some deep, unquenchable instinct for survival had kicked in on that awful summer day, fuelling her actions. I think that now, when she looked at me, she recalled what she had done, and she felt a fear of what I represented: the capacity for violence that had briefly exploded into existence within her and whose embers still glowed redly in her dark places.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, lying a little. ‘I’m here for professional reasons, not personal ones.’

‘Then I certainly don’t want to hear about it.’ She turned, her case beneath her arm. ‘Excuse me, I have work to do.’

I put out a hand to touch her arm, and she glared at me. I withdrew it. ‘Rachel, wait. I need your help.’

‘Please, let me leave. You’re blocking my way.’

I moved back and she shuffled past me, her head down. She had the door open when I spoke again. ‘Rachel, listen to me, just for a moment. If not for me, then for Walter Cole.’

She stopped at the door, but didn’t turn around. ‘What about Walter?’

‘His daughter Ellen is missing. I’m not sure, but it may have something to do with a case I’m working on. It may also be connected somehow to Thani Pho, the student who was killed.’

Rachel paused, then took a deep breath, closed the door and sat down in the seat I had previously occupied. Just to keep things equal, I sat down in her seat.

‘You have two minutes,’ she said.

‘I need you to read a file, and give me an opinion on it.’

‘I don’t do that anymore.’

‘I hear you’re working on a study about the connection between violent crime and brain disorders, something involving brain scans.’

I knew a little more than that. Rachel was involved in research into dysfunctions in two areas of the brain, the amygdala and the frontal lobe. As I understood it from reading a copy of an article she had contributed to a psychology journal, the amygdala, a tiny area of tissue in the unconscious brain, generates feelings of alarm and emotion, allowing us to respond to the distress of others. The frontal lobe is where emotions are registered, where self-consciousness emerges and plans are constructed. It is also the part of the brain that controls our impulses.

In psychopaths, it was now believed, the frontal lobe failed to respond when confronted with an emotional situation, possibly due to a failure in the amygdala itself or in the processes used to send its signals to the cortex. Rachel, and others like her, were pressing for a huge brain-scan survey on convicted criminals, arguing that they could reveal a connection between brain damage and psychopathic criminal behaviour.

She frowned. ‘You seem to know a lot about me. I’m not sure that I like the idea of you keeping tabs on me.’

I felt that twinge of resentment again. I felt it so strongly that my mouth twitched involuntarily. ‘It’s not like that, but I see your ego is still strong and healthy.’

Rachel smiled slightly, a tiny, fleeting thing. ‘The rest of me isn’t quite so robust. I’m going to be scarred for life, Bird. I’m in therapy twice weekly and I’ve had to give up my own practice. I still think of you, and you still frighten me. Sometimes.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Maybe it was my imagination, but there was something in that pause, in that ‘sometimes’, that implied she thought of me in other ways too.

‘I know. Tell me about this file.’

And I did, giving her a brief run through the history of the killings, adding some of what Mrs Schneider had told me and some of what I suspected, or had guessed, myself. ‘Most of it is in here.’ I raised the battered manilla file. ‘I’d like you to take a look, see what you can come up with.’

She reached out and I slid the file to her across the row of tables. She flicked quickly through the handwritten notes, the carbon copies, the photographs. One of them was a crime scene photo taken by the banks of the Little Wilson. ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, there was a new light in them, the spark of professional curiosity but also something else, something that had attracted me to her in the first place.

It was empathy.

‘It could take a couple of days,’ she said.

‘I don’t have a couple of days. I need it tonight.’

‘Not possible. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t even begin to do it in that time.’

‘Rachel, no one believes me. No one will accept that this man could ever have existed or, worse, could still be alive now. But he’s out there. I can feel him, Rachel. I need to understand him, in however small a way. I need something, anything, to make him real, to bring him out of that file and to form a recognisable picture of him. Please. I’ve got this jumble of details in my head, and I need someone to help me make sense of it. There’s no one else I can turn to and, anyway, you’re the best criminal psychologist I know.’

‘I’m the only criminal psychologist you know,’ she said, and that smile came again.

‘There’s that as well.’

She stood. ‘There’s no way I’ll have anything for you tonight, but meet me tomorrow at the Co-op bookstore, at, say, eleven o’clock. I’ll give you what I have then.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘You’re welcome.’ And with that she was gone.

I stayed where I always stayed when I was in Boston, in the Nolan House over on G Street in south Boston. It was a quiet bed-and-breakfast, with antique furniture and a couple of restaurants close by. I checked in with Angel and Louis, but there was no movement in Dark Hollow.

‘You see Rachel?’ asked Angel.

‘Yes, I saw her.’

‘How’d she take it?’

‘She didn’t seem too pleased to see me.’

‘You bring back bad memories.’

‘Story of my life. Maybe, someday, someone will see me and think happy thoughts.’

‘Never happen,’ he said. ‘Hang loose, and tell her we were asking after her.’

‘I will. Any move out at the Payne house?’

‘The younger guy went into town to buy milk and groceries, that’s about all. No sign of Billy Purdue, or Tony Celli, or Stritch, but Louis is still acting funny. Stritch is around here somewhere, that much we can be sure of. Sooner you’re back here, the better.’

I showered, put on a clean T-shirt and jeans, and found a copy of the Gousha deluxe road atlas from 1995 among the guidebooks and magazines in the hallway of the Nolan House. The Gousha listed eight Medinas – Texas, Tennessee, Washington, Wisconsin, New York, North Dakota, Michigan and Ohio – and one Medinah, in Illinois. I ruled out all of the northern towns in the hope that my grandfather was right about Caleb’s southern roots, which left Tennessee and Texas. I tried Tennessee first, but no one in the Gibson County sheriffs office recalled a Caleb Kyle who might or might not have killed his mother on a farm sometime in the 1940s but, as a deputy told me helpfully, that didn’t mean it didn’t happen, it just meant that nobody around could recall it happening. I made a call to the state police, just on the off chance, but got the same reply: no Caleb Kyle.

It was approaching eight-thirty when I started calling Texas. Medina, it emerged, was in Bandera County, not Medina County, so my first call to the Medina County Sheriff didn’t get me very far. But I hit lucky on the second call, real lucky, and I couldn’t help wondering how my grandfather would have felt had he got this far and learned the truth about Caleb Kyle.

Chapter Twenty Two

The sheriffs name was Dan Tannen, a deputy told me. I waited to be transferred to the sheriffs own office. After a couple of clicks on the line, a female voice said: ‘Hello?’

‘Sheriff Tannen?’ I asked. It was a good guess.

‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘You don’t sound surprised.’

‘Should I be?’

‘I’ve been mistaken for the secretary a couple of times. Pisses me off to hell, I tell you. The Dan is short for Danielle, for what it’s worth. I hear you’re asking about Caleb Kyle?’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I’m a private investigator, working out of Portland, Maine. I’m—’

She interrupted me to ask: ‘Where did you hear that name?’

‘Caleb?’

‘Uh-huh. Well, more particularly Caleb Kyle. Where’d you hear that name?’

That was a good question. Where should I begin? With Mrs Schneider? With Emily Watts? With my grandfather? With Ruth Dickinson and Lauren Trulock and the three other girls who ended up dangling from a tree by the banks of the Little Wilson?

‘Mr Parker, I asked you a question.’ I got the feeling that Sheriff Tannen was likely to be holding on to her post for some time.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s complicated. I heard it for the first time when I was a boy, from my grandfather, and now I’ve heard it twice in the last week.’ And then I told her what I knew. She listened without making any comment, and when I had finished telling my story there was a long pause before she spoke.

‘It was before my time,’ she said, at last. ‘Well, some of it was. The boy lived out in the Hill Country, maybe four miles south-east of here – him and his momma. He was born, best as I can recall without looking up a file, in nineteen twenty-eight or twenty-nine, but he was born Caleb Brewster. His pappa was a Lyall Brewster who went off to fight Hitler and ended up dying in North Africa and the two of them, Caleb and his mother, were left to fend for themselves. Plus, Lyall Brewster never got around to marrying Bonnie Kyle, Bonnie Kyle being his mother’s name. You see, that was why I was interested in hearing you say Caleb Kyle. There aren’t many people who’d know him by that name. Fact is, I ain’t never heard him called by that name. He was always Caleb Brewster here, right up until the time he killed his mother.

‘She was the devil’s own bitch, according to those that knew her. Kept herself to herself, and the boy beside her. But the boy was smart, Mr Parker: at school, he raced ahead in math, reading, just about anything he put his mind to. Then his mother decided that she didn’t like the fact that he was attracting attention to himself and took him out of school. Claimed she was teaching him herself.’

‘You think there was abuse?’

‘I think there were stories. I recall someone telling me that they once found him wandering naked on the road between here and Kerrville, covered in dirt and hog-shit. Police brought him home to his momma in a blanket. Boy couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen. They heard him yelpin’ as soon as the door closed behind ’em. She sure took the stick to him, I reckon, but as for anything else . . .’

She paused again, and I heard her gulping liquid at the other end of the line. ‘Water,’ she said, “”case you’re wondering.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘Well, whatever. Anyway, I don’t know about sexual abuse. It came up at the trial, but it came up at the Menendez brothers’ trial as well, and look where it got them. Like I said, Mr Parker, Caleb was smart. Even at sixteen, seventeen, he was smarter than most of the people in this town.’

‘You think he made it up?’

She didn’t answer for a time. ‘I don’t know, but he was smart enough to try to use it as mitigation. You have to remember, Mr Parker, that people didn’t talk about it so much in those days. The fact of someone bringing it up was unusual. In the end, I guess we’ll never know for certain what happened in that house.

‘But there was more to Caleb Brewster than intelligence. People around here recall that he was mean, or worse than mean. He tortured animals, Mr Parker, and hung their remains from trees: squirrels, rabbits, even dogs. There was no evidence to tie him to it, you understand, but folks knew it was him. Maybe he got tired of killing animals, and decided to move up a step. There was other stuff too.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, let’s take this in the order it happened. We know he killed his mother and fed her to the hogs. Two or three days after that incident on the road, Sheriff Garrett and another deputy came up to check on the boy. They found him sitting on the porch, drinking sour milk from a jug. There was blood in the kitchen: on the walls, on the floor. The floorboards were soaked with it. Boy still had the knife beside him. Bonnie Kyle’s clothing was in the hog pen, along with some bones, which was pretty much all that the hogs had left. That, and her wedding ring. One of the hogs had passed it out in its stool. I think they got it in the Frontier Museum over in Banderas now, alongside two-headed lambs and Indian arrowheads.’

‘What happened to Caleb?’

‘He was tried as an adult, then sent down.’

‘For life?’

‘Twenty years. He got out in sixty-three or sixty-four, I think.’

‘Was he rehabilitated?’

‘Rehabilitated? Hell, no. I reckon he was off the scale before he ever killed her, and he never got back on it again. But someone saw fit to release him, taking into account the extenuating circumstances. He’d served his time and they couldn’t keep him locked up forever, no matter how good an idea that might have been. And, like I said, he was smart. He kept his nose clean in prison. They thought he was getting better. Myself, I think he was waiting.’

‘He came back to the hill country?’ I asked.

Again, there came that pause. This time, it remained unbroken for what seemed like a long time.

‘The house was still standing,’ began Tannen. ‘I remember him coming back into town on the Greyhound – I was maybe ten or eleven – and Caleb walking out towards the old house, and folks stepping onto the other side of the street and then watching him as he passed. I don’t know how long he spent there. Couldn’t have been more than a couple of nights, but . . .’

‘But?’

She sighed. ‘A girl died. Lillian Boyce. They reckon she was the prettiest girl in the county, and they were probably right. They found her down by the Hondo Creek, near Tarpley. She’d been cut up pretty bad. That wasn’t the worst of it, though.’

I waited, and it seemed to me that I knew what was coming, even before she said it.

‘She was hung from a tree,’ she said. ‘Like someone wanted her to be found. Like she was a warning to us all.’

The line seemed to hum, and the cell phone was hot in my hand, as Sheriff Tannen concluded her story. ‘When we found her, Caleb Brewster had gone again. There’s still a warrant outstanding, far as I know, but I didn’t think anyone would ever get to serve it.

‘At least, I didn’t until now.’

After I hung up, I sat on my bed for a time. There was a deck of playing cards on a bookshelf in the room and I found myself shuffling the deck, the edges of the cards blurring before my eyes. I saw the queen of hearts and drew her from the deck. ‘Hanky-poo’, that was what Saul Mann used to call ‘Find The Queen’. He would stand at his felt-covered trestle-table, seemingly talking to himself as he arranged the cards before him, flipping one card over with the rim of another. ‘Five gets you ten, ten gets you twenty.’ He didn’t even seem to notice the punters slowly gathering, attracted by the sure movement of his hands and the promise of easy money, but he was always watching. He watched and he waited, and slowly, surely, they came to him. The old man was like a hunter who knows that, at some point, the deer must surely cross his path.

And I thought too of Caleb Kyle, staring at the remains of the girls he had torn apart and hung from trees. A memory came to me, a recollection of a legend told of the Emperor Nero. It was said that after Nero killed his own mother, Agrippina the Younger, he ordered that her body be opened, so that he could see the place from which he had come. What motivated this action is unclear: morbid obsession, perhaps, or even the incestuous feelings that the ancient chroniclers ascribed to him. It may even have been the case that he hoped to understand something of himself, of his own nature, by revealing to himself the site of his own origin. He must have loved her once, I thought, before it all turned to fury and rage and hate, before he found it in himself to take her life and rend her remains to pieces. For a brief moment, I felt a kind of pity for Caleb: a sorrow for the boy he once was, and a hatred for the man that he became.

I saw shadows falling from trees, and a figure moving north, ever north, like the needle on a compass. Of course he would have headed north. North was as far away from Texas as he could get after avenging himself on the community that had seen fit to jail him for what he had done to his mother.

But there was more to it than that, it seemed. When my grandfather was a boy, he told me that the priest would read the gospels at the north side of the church because north had always been perceived as an area that had not yet seen God’s light. It was the same reason why they buried the unbaptised, the suicides and the murderers on northern ground, outside the boundaries of the church walls.

Because north was black territory.

North was the darklands.

The next morning, the bookstore was crowded with students and tourists. I ordered coffee and read a copy of Rolling Stone, which someone had left on a chair until Rachel arrived, late as usual. She still wore her black coat, this time with blue denims and a sky-blue V-neck sweater. Beneath it, her blue-and-white-striped Oxford shirt was buttoned to the neck. Her hair hung loose on her shoulders.

‘Are you ever early?’ I asked, as I ordered her a coffee and a muffin.

‘I was up until five a.m. working on your damned file,’ she replied. ‘If I was charging you for my time, you couldn’t afford me.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I can barely afford the coffee and muffin.’

‘You’re breaking my heart,’ she said, but it seemed that her attitude had softened a little since the day before, although it could have been wishful thinking on my part.

‘You ready for this?’ she asked.

I nodded, but before she went on I told her what I had learned from the sheriff in Medina and how Caleb had taken his mother’s name to escape his past.

She nodded to herself. ‘It fits,’ she said. ‘It all fits.’

The coffee arrived and she added sugar, then unwrapped the muffin, tore it into bite-sized pieces and began to talk.

‘Most of this is guesswork and supposition. Any decent law enforcement officer would laugh me out of the building, but since you’re neither decent nor a law enforcement officer, you’ll take what you can get. Plus, everything you’ve given me is also based on guesswork and supposition, with a little superstition and paranoia thrown in.’ She shook her head in bemusement, then grew serious as she opened her wire-bound notebook. Line upon line of closely-written text lay before her, dotted here and there with yellow Post-its. ‘Most of what I’m going to tell you, I think you know already. All I can do is to clarify it for you, maybe put it into some kind of order.

‘Bird, if this man does exist – at least, if the same man, Caleb Kyle, is responsible for all of these killings then you’re dealing with a textbook psychopathic sadist. Actually, you’re dealing with worse than that, because I’ve never encountered anything like this in the literature, or in clinical work; at least, not all in one package. By the way, this file doesn’t record any killing after 1965. Even allowing for the newspaper photograph, have you taken into account the possibility that he might be dead, or maybe imprisoned again for other crimes? Either could explain the sudden cessation of killing.’

‘He could be dead,’ I admitted, ‘in which case this is all a waste of time and we’re dealing with something else entirely. But let’s assume that he wasn’t imprisoned: if the sheriff was right, and Caleb was as smart as she believed, then he wasn’t going back to prison again. Plus my grandfather checked at the time – it’s in the file – and I know that he consulted on a random basis in the intervening years, although he would have been looking for Caleb Kyle, not Caleb Brewster.’

She shrugged. ‘Then you have two further possibilities: either he continued to kill, but his victims are all listed as missing persons if they’ve been missed at all or . . .’

‘Or?’

Rachel tapped the top of her pen on her notebook, beside a word encircled in a red ring. ‘Or else he’s been dormant. The possibility that some serial killers enter periods of dormancy is one that’s being considered by the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit, the folks in the Criminal Profiling and Consultation Program. You know this, because I’ve told you about it before. It’s a theory, but it might explain why some killings just cease without anyone ever being apprehended. For some reason, the killer reaches a point where the need to find a victim isn’t so strong, and the killings stop.’

‘If he’s been dormant until now, then something just woke him up,’ I said. I thought of the timber company surveyor, heading into the wilderness to pave the way for the forest’s destruction, and what he might have encountered in the forest. I recalled too Mrs Schneider’s story, followed up by a piece in the newspaper, and Willeford’s old-style investigation, where you knocked on doors and pinned up notices and put the word around until it filtered down to the person you were trying to reach; and the newspaper story about Billy Purdue’s arrest at St Martha’s. If you put out honey, you shouldn’t be surprised when the wasps come.

‘It’s tenuous, but those are the possibilities you have to consider,’ Rachel continued. ‘Let’s look at the original killings. First, although it may only be a minor point, the location where the bodies were found was important. This Caleb Kyle determined how soon they would be found, where they would be found and by whom. It was his way of controlling and participating in the search. The original killings may have been disorganised – we’ll never know for sure, since we don’t know where they were killed – but the display of the bodies was very organised. He wanted to be part of some element of the discovery. My guess is that he was watching your grandfather right up to the moment when he found the women.

‘As for the killings themselves, then if what the Schneider woman told you is true, which depends in turn on the truth of what Emily Watts told her, Kyle was already killing during their relationship. The extent of decay on each of the five bodies differed: Judy Giffen and Ruth Dickinson were killed first, with a gap of almost one month between them. But Laurel Trulock, Louise Moore and Sarah Raines were killed in rapid succession: the ME’s report indicated that Trulock and Moore could have been killed in the same twenty-four-hour period, with Raines killed no more than twenty-four hours later again.

‘My guess is that each of these girls – or certainly the last three – were physically similar to Emily Watts. They were slim, delicate girls: more passive than Emily, maybe, who was strong when the need arose, but still of a type. You encountered revenge rapes when you were a policeman, didn’t you?’

I nodded. I knew what they were.

‘A man argues with his wife, or his girlfriend, storms out of the house and takes out his anger on a complete stranger,’ continued Rachel. ‘In his mind, all women bear collective responsibility for the perceived faults of one woman, and therefore any woman can be disciplined and punished for the real or imagined slight or insult or overstepping of whatever boundaries the rapist has established in his mind as acceptable behaviour for a woman.

‘Well, Caleb Kyle is like those men, but this time it went much further. The ME found no evidence of actual sexual assault on the three later victims, but – and here we’re into classic morbid fear of female sexuality territory – there was some damage to the sexual organs, presumably inflicted by the same instrument that was used to make stab wounds to the belly and to destroy the womb of each victim. In fact, what’s interesting is that, in the cases of Giffen and Dickinson, he stabbed them after they had been dead for almost one month, probably after he killed the other three girls, or shortly before.’

‘He went back to them after he thought she had lost the baby.’

‘Exactly. He was punishing them because Emily Watts’s body had betrayed him by losing his child: many women being punished for the faults of one. My guess would be that he had punished other women before, perhaps for different reasons.’

She fed herself a piece of muffin and sipped her coffee. ‘Now, when we go back to the ME’s report, we find evidence that each of the girls was tortured before death. There were fingernails missing, toes and fingers broken, teeth removed, cigarette burns, bruising inflicted by a coat hanger. That might be significant, but not for now. In the case of the last three victims, the torture inflicted is significantly more extreme. These girls suffered a lot before they died, Bird.’ Rachel looked at me solemnly, and I could see the pain in her eyes: pain for them and the memory of her own pain.

‘According to the victim profiles collated by your grandfather, these young women were gentle, from good homes. Most of them were shy, sexually inexperienced. Judy Giffen appeared to have had some sexual experience. My guess is they probably pleaded with him before they died, thinking they could save themselves. But that was what he wanted: he wanted them to cry and to scream. There may be a connection there between aggression and fulfilment: he experienced a sexual excitement from their pleas, but he also hated them for pleading, and so they died.’

Her eyes were bright now, her excitement at trying to worm her way into this man’s consciousness obvious in the movement of her hands, the speed with which she spoke, her intellectual pleasure in making startling, unexpected connections, yet balanced by her abhorrence of the acts she was discussing. ‘God,’ said Rachel, ‘I can almost see his PET scan: temporal lobe abnormalities associated with sexual deviancy; distortion in the frontal lobe leading to violent activity; low activity between the limbic system and the frontal lobes, leading to a virtual absence of guilt or conscience.’ She shook her head, as if she was marvelling at the behaviour of a particularly nasty bug. ‘He’s not asocial, though. These girls may have been shy, but they weren’t stupid. He would have to be skilled enough to gain their trust, so the intelligence fits.

‘As for Kyle’s social background, if what he told Emily Watts is true, he was abused physically and possibly sexually in childhood by a mother figure who told him that she loved him during or after the abuse, and then punished him afterwards. He had little nurture or protection and was probably taught self-sufficiency the hard way. When he was old enough, he turned on his abuser and killed her, before moving on to others. With Emily Watts, something different happened. She was herself a victim of abuse, then she became pregnant. My guess is that he would have killed her anyway, as soon as she had the child. From what she said, he wanted the child.’

She took a sip of coffee and I used it as an opportunity to interrupt.

‘What about Rita Ferris and Cheryl Lansing? Could he have been responsible for their deaths?’

‘It’s possible,’ said Rachel. She regarded me quietly, waiting for me to find a connection.

‘I’m missing something,’ I said at last. ‘That’s why you look like the cat that got the cream.’

‘You’re forgetting the mutilation of the mouths. The damage inflicted on the wombs of those girls in 1965 was meant to convey a message. The mutilations were a signifier. We’ve seen damage to victims used in that way before, Bird.’ The smile went away, and I nodded: the Travelling Man.

‘So, once again, three decades later, we have mutilations, in this case directed to the mouths of victims and in each case meant to signify something different. Rita Ferris’s mouth was sewn shut. What does that mean?’

‘That she should have kept her mouth shut?’

‘Probably,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s not subtle, but whoever killed her wasn’t interested in subtlety.’

I considered what Rachel had said for a moment before I figured out what it might mean. ‘She called the cops on Billy Purdue and they took him away.’ That could have meant that he had been watching the house the night Billy was arrested, making him the old man whom Billy claimed to have seen before Rita and Donald were killed, maybe even the same old man who had attacked Rita at the hotel.

‘In Cheryl Lansing’s case,’ continued Rachel, ‘her jaw was broken and her tongue torn out. I’m pushing the envelope a little here, but my guess is that she was being punished for not speaking.’

‘Because she was party to the concealment of the child’s birth.’

‘That would seem to be a plausible explanation. In the end, regardless of what made Caleb Kyle this way, and regardless of signifiers and whatever grievances he may feel, he’s a killing machine, completely without remorse.’

‘But he felt something for the loss of his child.’

Rachel almost leapt from her chair. ‘Yes!’ She beamed at me the way a teacher might beam at a particularly bright pupil. ‘The problem, or the key, is the sixth girl, the one who was never found. For a whole lot of reasons, most of which would probably result in me being ostracised by my peers if I stated them in print, I think your grandfather was right when he suspected that she was also a victim, but he was wrong in the type of victim.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Your grandfather assumed that she had also been killed but had not been displayed for some reason.’

‘And you don’t.’ But I could see where she was going, and my stomach tightened at the possibility. It had been at the back of my mind for some time and, maybe, at the back of my grandfather’s. I think he hoped that she was dead, because the other option was worse.

‘No, I don’t assume she was killed, and it comes back to the torture inflicted on those girls. This wasn’t simply a means of gaining satisfaction and fulfilment for this man: it was a test. He was testing their strength, knowing at the same time, but perhaps not admitting it to himself, that they would fail his test because they simply weren’t strong enough.

‘But look at the profile of Judith Mundy. She’s strong, well built, a dominant personality. She didn’t cry easily, could handle herself in a fight. She would pass that kind of test, to the extent that he probably didn’t have to hurt her very much to realise that she was different.’

Rachel leaned forwards and the expression on her face changed to one of deep abiding sorrow. ‘She wasn’t taken because she was weak, Bird. She was taken because she was strong.’

I closed my eyes. I knew now what had happened to Judith Mundy, why she had not been found, and Rachel knew that I had understood.

‘She was taken as breeding stock, Bird,’ she said quietly. ‘He took her to breed on.’

Rachel offered to drive me to Logan, but I declined. She had done enough for me, more even than I felt I had a right to ask. As I walked alongside her across Harvard Square, I felt a love for her made all the more intense by the fact that I believed she was slipping further and further away from me.

‘You think this man Caleb may be connected to the disappearance of Ellen Cole?’ she asked. Her arm brushed against mine and, for the first time since I had come to Boston, she did not pull away from the contact.

‘I don’t know for sure,’ I replied. ‘Maybe the police are right: maybe her hormones got to her and she did run away, in which case I’m not sure what I’m doing. But an old man found her and drew her to Dark Hollow and, like I keep telling people, I don’t believe in coincidences.

‘I have a feeling about this man, Rachel. He’s come back, and I think he’s returned for Billy Purdue and to avenge himself on everyone who helped to hide him. I think he killed Rita Ferris and her son. It may have been out of jealousy, or to cut Billy off so that he’d have no other ties, or because she was going to leave him and take the boy with her. I don’t think the boy was meant to die. It just got out of control.’

I put out my hand when we reached the square. I didn’t kiss her because I didn’t feel that I had the right. She took my hand and held it tightly.

‘Bird, this man feels he has some dispensation to avenge himself on anyone who crosses him because he believes that he’s been wronged. I’ve just labelled him as psychopathic’ In her eyes, there was concern, and more.

‘In other words, what’s my excuse?’ I smiled, but it went no deeper than my mouth.

‘They’re gone, Bird. Susan and Jennifer are dead, and what happened to them and to you was a terrible, terrible thing. But every time you make someone pay for what was done to you, you hurt yourself and you risk becoming the thing you hate. Do you understand, Bird?’

‘It’s not about me, Rachel,’ I replied softly. ‘At least, not entirely. Someone has to stop these people. Someone has to take responsibility.’ There was that echo again: they are all your responsibility.

Her hand moved gently over mine, her fingers on my fingers, her thumb rubbing lightly on my palm, then she touched my face with her free hand. ‘Why did you come here? Most of what I told you, you could have figured out for yourself.’

‘I’m not that smart.’

‘Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.’

‘So it’s true what they say about psychologists.’

‘Only the New Age ones. You’re avoiding the question.’

‘I know. You’re right: some of it I had guessed, or half-guessed, but I needed to hear it back from someone else, otherwise I was afraid that I was going crazy. But I’m also here because I still care about you, because when you walked away you took something from me. I thought that this might be a way of getting closer to you. I wanted to see you again. Maybe, deep down, that’s all it was.’ I looked away from her.

Her grip tightened on my hand. ‘I saw what you did, back in Louisiana. You didn’t go there to find the Travelling Man. You went there to kill him, and anyone who stood in your way got hurt, and got hurt badly. Your capacity for inflicting violence scared me. You scared me.’

‘I didn’t know what else to do, not then.’

‘And now?’

I was about to answer when her finger touched the scar on my cheek, the mark left by Billy Purdue’s blade. ‘How did this happen?’ she asked.

‘A man stuck a knife blade in me.’

‘And what did you do?’

I paused before answering. ‘I walked away.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Billy Purdue.’

Her eyes widened, and it was as if something that had been curled inside her to protect itself gradually began to unfurl. I could see it in her, could feel it in her touch.

‘He never had a chance, Rachel. The odds were stacked against him from the start.’

‘If I ask you a question, will you answer me honestly?’ she said.

‘I’ve always tried to be honest with you,’ I replied.

She nodded. ‘I know, but this is important. I need to be sure of this.’

‘Ask.’

‘Do you need the violence, Bird?’

I thought about the question. In the past, I had been motivated by personal revenge. I had hurt people, had killed people, because of what had been done to Susan, and to Jennifer, and to me. Now that desire for revenge had dwindled, easing a little every day, and the spaces it left as it receded were filled with the potential for reparation. I bore some responsibility for what happened to Susan and Jennifer. I didn’t think that I would ever come to terms with that knowledge, but I could try to make up for it in some small way, to acknowledge my failings in the past by using them to make the present better.

‘I did, for a time,’ I admitted.

‘And now?’

‘I don’t need it, but I will use it if I have to. I won’t stand by and watch innocent people being hurt.’

Rachel leaned over and kissed me gently on the cheek. Her eyes were soft when she pulled away.

‘So you’re the avenging angel,’ she said.

‘Something like that,’ I replied.

‘Good-bye, then, avenging angel,’ Rachel whispered softly.

She turned and walked away, back to the library and her work. She didn’t look back, but her head was down and I could feel the weight of her thoughts as she surrendered herself to the embrace of the crowd.

The plane rose from Logan, heading upward and north through the cold air, heavy cloud surrounding it like the breath of God. I thought of Sheriff Tannen, who had promised to hunt up the most recent pictures available of Caleb Kyle. They would be thirty years old, but at least they would be something. I took the blurred newspaper photo of Caleb from my grandfather’s folder and looked at it again and again. He was like a skeleton slowly being fleshed out, as if the process of decay were being gradually, irrevocably reversed. A figure that had been little more than a name, a shape glimpsed in the shadows, was assuming an objective reality.

I know you, I thought. I know you.

Chapter Twenty Three

I arrived in Bangor early that afternoon, picked up my car in the airport parking lot and started back for Dark Hollow. I felt like I was being pulled in ten different directions, yet somehow each one seemed to lead me back to the same place, to the same conclusion by different routes: Caleb Kyle had come back. He had killed a girl in Texas shortly after his release from prison, probably as an act of revenge against a whole community. Then he had assumed his mother’s name and headed north, far north, eventually losing himself in the wilderness.

If Emily Watts had told the truth to Mrs Schneider, and there was no reason to doubt her, then she had given birth to a child and hidden it because she believed its father to be a killer of young women, and sensed that this man wanted the child for his own purposes. The leap required was to accept that this child might be Billy Purdue, and that his father could be Caleb Kyle.

Meanwhile, Ellen Cole and her boyfriend were still missing, as was Willeford. Tony Celli had gone to ground, but was undoubtedly still searching for some trace of Billy. He had no choice: if he did not find Billy, he would be unable to replace the money he had lost and he would be killed as an example to others. I had a suspicion that it was already too late for Tony Clean, that it had been too late from the very moment that he had purchased the securities, maybe even from the time when the thought of using someone else’s money to secure his future first crossed his mind. Tony would do whatever he had to do to track Billy down, but everything he did, all of the violence he inflicted and all of the attention it drew to himself and his masters, made it less and less likely that he would be allowed to live. He was like a man who, trapped in the darkness of a tunnel, focuses his mind on the only illumination he sees before him, unaware that what he believes to be the light of salvation is, in reality, the fire that will consume him.

There were other reasons, too, to be fearful. Somewhere in the darkness, Stritch waited. I imagined that he still wanted the money but, more than that, he wanted revenge for the death of his partner. I thought of the dead man in the Portland complex, violated in his last moments by Stritch’s foulness, and I thought too of the fear that I had felt, the certainty that I could have allowed death to enfold me in those shadows if I had chosen to do so.

There remained also the old man in the forest. There was still the chance that he knew something more than he had told me, that his remark about the two young people was based on more than gossip he had overheard in the town. For that reason, there was one stop to be made before I returned to Dark Hollow.

At Orono, the store was still open. On the sign above the door, the words ‘Stuckey Trading’ were illuminated from below, the name written in script. Inside, it smelt musty and felt oppressively warm, the AC making a noise as if glass were grinding in its works as it pumped stale air through its vents. Some guys in biker jackets were examining second-hand shotguns while a woman in a dress that was new when Woodstock convened flicked through a box of eight-tracks. Display cases held old watches and gold chains, while hunting bows stood upright on a rack beside the counter.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, so I browsed from shelf to shelf, from old furniture to almost-new car-seat covers, until something caught my eye. In one corner, beside a rack of foul-weather clothing old slickers mainly, and some faded yellow oilskins stood two rows of shoes and boots. Most of them were ragged and worn, but the Zamberlains stood out immediately. They were men’s boots, relatively new and considerably more expensive than the pairs surrounding them, and some care had obviously been lavished on them recently. Someone, probably the store owner, had cleaned and waxed them before putting them out for sale. I lifted one and sniffed the interior. I smelt Lysol, and something else: earth, and rotting meat. I lifted the second boot and caught the same faint odour from it. Ricky had been wearing Zamberlains on the day they came to visit me, I recalled, and it wasn’t often that boots so fine turned up in an out-of-the-way second-hand goods store. I brought the pair of boots to the counter.

The man behind the register was small with thick, dark artificial hair that seemed to have come from the head of a department store mannequin. Beneath the wig, at the back of his neck, wisps of his own mousy-coloured strands peered out like mad relatives consigned to the attic. A pair of round eyeglasses hung from a string around his neck and lost themselves in the hairs of his chest. His bright red shirt was half unbuttoned and I could see scarring on his upper body. His hands were thin and strong looking, with the little finger and ring finger of his left hand missing from just above the first joint. The nails on the lingers that remained were neatly clipped.

He caught me looking at his mutilated left hand and raised it in front of his face, the twin stumps of the lost fingers making his hand look as if he was trying to form a gun with it, the way little kids do in the school yard.

‘Lost them in a sawmill,’ he explained.

‘Careless,’ I replied.

He shrugged. ‘Blade damn near took the rest of my fingers as well. You ever work in a sawmill?’

‘No. I always thought my fingers looked good on my hands. I like them that way.’

He looked at the stumps thoughtfully. ‘It’s strange, but I can still feel them, y’know, like they’re still there. Maybe you don’t know how that feels.’

‘I think I do,’ I said. ‘You Stuckey?’

‘Yessir. This is my place.’

I put the boots down on the counter.

‘They’re good boots,’ he said, picking up one with his unmutilated hand. ‘Won’t take less than sixty bucks for them. Just waxed them, buffed them and put them out for sale myself not two hours ago.’

‘Smell them.’

Stuckey narrowed his eyes and put his head to one side. ‘Say what?’

‘I said, Smell them.’

He looked at me oddly for a few moments, then took one boot and sniffed the inside tentatively, his nostrils twitching like a rabbit’s before the snare.

‘I don’t smell nothin’,’ he said.

‘Lysol. You smell Lysol, don’t you?’

‘Well, sure. I always disinfect them before I sell them. Don’t nobody want to wear boots that stink.’

I leaned forwards and raised the second boot in front of him. ‘You see,’ I said softly, ‘that’s my question. What did they smell of before you cleaned them?’

He wasn’t a man who was easily intimidated. He thrust his body forward in turn, six knuckles on the counter, and arched an eyebrow at me. ‘Are you some kind of nut?’

In a mirror behind the counter, I saw that the bikers had turned around to watch the show. I kept my voice low. ‘These boots, they had earth on them when you bought them, didn’t they? And they smelt of decay, human decay?’

He took a step back. ‘Who are you?’

‘Just a guy.’

‘You was just a guy, you’d have bought the durned boots and been gone by now.’

‘Who sold you the boots?’

He was becoming belligerent now. ‘That’s none of your goddamned business, mister. Now get out of my store.’

I didn’t move. ‘Listen, friend, you can talk to me, or you can talk to the cops, but you will talk, understand? I don’t want to make trouble for you, but if I have to, I will.’

Stuckey stared at me, and he knew that I meant what I said. A voice interrupted before he could respond. ‘Hey, Stuck,’ said one of the bikers. ‘You okay back there?’

He raised his battered left hand to indicate that there wasn’t a problem, then returned his attention to me. There was no trace of bitterness when he spoke. Stuckey was a pragmatist – in his line of business, you had to be – and he knew when to back down.

‘It was an old fella from up north,’ he sighed. ‘He comes in here maybe once a month, brings stuff that he’s found. Most of it’s junk, but I give him a few bucks for it and he goes away again. Sometimes, he brings in something good.’

‘He bring these in recently?’

‘Sure, pretty recent. Yesterday. Gave him thirty bucks for them. Brought in a backpack too, Lowe Alpine. I sold it straight off. That was about it. He didn’t have nothin’ else to offer.’

‘This old guy from up Dark Hollow way?’

‘Yeah, that’s right, Dark Hollow.’

‘You got a name?’

His eyes narrowed again. ‘Just tell me, mister, what are you? Some kind of private cop?’

‘Like I said, I’m just a guy.’

‘You got a lot of questions for someone who’s just a guy.’ I could sense Stuckey digging his heels in again.

‘I’m naturally curious,’ I said, but I showed him my ID anyway. ‘The name?’

‘Barley. John Barley.’

‘That his real name?’

‘The hell do I know?’

‘He show you any identification?’

Stuckey almost laughed. ‘You seen him, you’d know he wasn’t the kind of fella carries no ID.’

I nodded once, took out my wallet and counted six ten-dollar bills onto the counter. ‘I’ll need a receipt,’ I said. Stuckey filled one out quickly in sloped capitals, stamped it, then paused before handing it to me.

‘Like I told you, I don’t want no trouble,’ he said.

‘If you’ve told me the truth, there won’t be any.’

He folded the receipt once and put it in a plastic bag with the boots. ‘I hope you won’t take this personal, mister, but I reckon you make friends ‘bout as easy as a scorpion.’

I took the bag and put my wallet back in my coat. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘You sell friendship here too?’

‘No, mister, I sure don’t,’ he said, and there was a finality in his tone. ‘But I don’t reckon you’d be buying any even if I did.’

Chapter Twenty Four

It was already dark when I began the journey back to Dark Hollow. Snow was drifting across the road to Beaver Cove and beyond, where the narrow, winding, tree-lined road led to the Hollow. The snow seemed to glow in the headlights, small golden fragments of light tumbling down, as if heaven itself was disintegrating and falling to earth. I tried to call Angel and Louis on the cellphone, but it was a useless effort. As it turned out, they were already at the motel when I got back. Louis answered the door dressed in black pants with a razor sharp crease and a cream-coloured shirt. I could never figure out how Louis kept his clothes so neat. I had shirts that had more creases than Louis’s while they were still in the box.

‘Angel’s in the shower,’ he said, as I stepped past him into their room. On the television screen, Wolf Blitzer mouthed silently on the White House lawn.

‘What’s seldom is wonderful.’

‘Amen to that. If it was summer, he’d be attracting flies.’

It wasn’t true, of course. Angel may have looked like someone who was barely on nodding terms with soap and hot water, but he was, all things considered, remarkably clean. He just looked more crumpled than most people. In fact, he looked more crumpled than just about anyone I knew.

‘Any movement over at the Payne place?’

‘Nothing. The old man came out, went back in again. The boy came out, went back in again. After the fourth or fifth time, the novelty started to wear off. No sign of Billy Purdue, though, or anyone else.’

‘You think they knew you were out there?’

‘Maybe. Didn’t act like it, which could go either way. You got anything?’

I showed him the boots and told him of my conversation with Stuckey. Angel came out of the shower at that moment, wrapped in four towels.

‘Shit, Angel,’ said Louis. ‘The fuck are you, Mahatma Gandhi? What you use all the towels for?’

‘It’s cold,’ he whined. ‘And I got marks on my ass from that car seat.’

‘You gonna get marks on your ass from the toe of my shoe, you don’t get me some towels. You just dry your scrawny white ass and haul it down to the desk, ask the lady for more towels. And you better make damn sure they fluffy, Angel. I ain’t rubbin’ my back with no sandpaper.’

While Angel dried himself and dressed, muttering softly as he did so, I told them in detail about my encounters with Rachel, Sheriff Tannen and Erica Schneider, and what I had learned of Billy Purdue’s visit to St Martha’s.

‘Seems like we accumulatin’ a whole lot of information, but we don’t know what it means,’ remarked Louis, when I was done.

‘We know what some of it means,’ I said.

‘You think this guy Caleb really exists?’ he asked.

‘He was real enough to kill his mother, and maybe another local girl the best part of two decades later. Plus, those girls who died in sixty-five weren’t killed by a mentally handicapped man. The display of the bodies was a lot of things – a gesture of contempt, a means to shock – but it was also an attempt at an act of madness. I think it was designed to make people think that only a madman could have done it, and the planting of an item of clothing at Fletcher’s house gave them the madman they were looking for.’

‘So where did he go?’

I sat down heavily on one of the beds. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I think he went north, into the wilderness.’

‘And why didn’t he kill again?’ added Angel.

‘I don’t know that either. Maybe he did, and we just never found them.’ I knew that hikers had been murdered on the Appalachian Trail, and I’d heard that others had gone missing and never been found. I wondered if, somehow, they might have left the trail, hoping for a shortcut, and encountered something much worse than they could ever have imagined.

‘Or it could be he was killing before he ever arrived in Maine, but nobody ever traced the deaths back to him,’ I continued. ‘Rachel thought that he might have entered a period of dormancy, but recent events may have conspired to change that.’

Angel took one of the Zamberlains and held it in his hands. ‘Well, we know what this means, assuming these once belonged to Ellen Cole’s boyfriend.’ He looked at me, and there was a sadness in his eyes. I didn’t want to answer him, or to acknowledge the possibility that if Ricky was dead, then Ellen could be dead too.

‘Any sign of Stritch?’ I asked.

Louis bristled. ‘I can almost smell him,’ he said. ‘The woman at the desk is still pretty cut up about her cat, no pun intended. Cops are blaming it on kids.’

‘What now?’ said Angel.

‘I go see John Barley,’ I replied, but Louis shook his head.

‘That’s a bad idea, Bird,’ he said. ‘It’s dark, and he knows the woods better than you do. You could lose him, and then any way of finding out how he came by these boots. Plus, there’s his damn dog: it’ll warn the old man, and then he’ll start shooting, and could be you’ll have to shoot back. He’s no good to us dead.’

He was right, of course, but it didn’t make me feel any better. ‘First light, then,’ I said, but reluctantly. Unspoken between us was the possibility that I had already encountered Caleb Kyle, and had turned away from him because he had threatened me with a gun.

‘First light,’ Louis agreed.

I left them and went back to my own room, where I dialled Walter and Lee Cole’s house in Queen’s. Lee picked up on the third ring, and in her voice was that mixture of hope and fear that I had heard in the voice of hundreds of parents, friends and relatives, all waiting for word of a missing person.

‘Lee, it’s Bird.’

She said nothing for a moment but I could hear her footsteps, as if she was moving the phone out of earshot of someone. I guessed it was Lauren. ‘Bird? Have you found her?’

‘No. We’re in Dark Hollow, and we’re looking, but there’s nothing yet.’ I didn’t tell her about Ricky’s boots. If I was wrong about what might have happened to him, or mistaken about the ownership of the boots, it would only be worrying her unnecessarily. If I was right, then we would know the rest soon enough.

‘Have you seen Walter?’

I told her I hadn’t. I figured he was probably in Greenville by now, but I didn’t want to see him. He would only complicate matters, and I was finding it hard enough to keep my emotions in check as it was.

‘Bird, he was so angry when he found out what I’d done.’ Lee started to cry, her voice breaking as she spoke. ‘He said that people get hurt when you get involved. They get killed. Please, Bird, please don’t let anything happen to her. Please.’

‘I won’t, Lee. I’ll be in touch. Goodbye.’

I hung up and ran my hands over my face and through my hair, letting them come to rest eventually at the knots in my shoulders. Walter was right. People had been hurt in the past when I became involved in situations, but they got hurt mainly because those people also chose to involve themselves. Sometimes you can push folks one way or the other, but they take the most important steps on their own initiative.

Walter had principles, but he had never been put in a position where those principles might have to be compromised to safeguard those he loved, or to avenge them when they were taken from him. And now he was close to Dark Hollow, and a situation that was already difficult and complicated was likely to get worse. I sat with my face in my hands for a time, then undressed and showered, my head down and my shoulders exposed to allow the water to work like fingers on my tired, tense muscles.

The phone rang as I was drying myself. It was Angel. They were waiting for me so that we could head off and eat together. I wasn’t hungry, and my concerns for Ellen were muddling my thought processes, but I agreed to join them. When we arrived at the diner, there was a sign on the door announcing that it had closed early. There was some kind of charity event in the Roadside Bar that night to raise funds for the high school band and everyone and anyone was going to be in attendance. Angel and Louis exchanged a look of profound unhappiness.

‘We got to help the band if we want to eat?’ asked Louis. ‘What kind of peckerwood town is this? Who we got to pay off if we want to buy a beer? The PTA?’ He examined the sign a little more closely. ‘Hey, a country band: “Larry Fulcher and the Gamblers”. Maybe this town ain’t such a dump after all.’

‘Lord, no,’ said Angel, ‘not more shit-kicker music. Why can’t you listen to soul music like anyone else of your particular ethnic persuasion? You know, Curtis Mayfield, maybe a little Wilson Pickett. They’re your people, man, not the Louvin Brothers and Kathy Mattea. Besides, not so long ago people used that country shit as background music when they were hanging your people.’

‘Angel,’ said Louis patiently, ‘nobody ever hung no brother to a Johnny Cash record.’

There was nothing for it but to head down to the Roadside. We went back to the motel and I got my car keys. When I came out of my room, Louis had added a black cowboy hat with a band of silver suns to his ensemble. Angel put his hands on his head and swore loudly.

‘You got the rest of the Village People in there too?’ I asked. I couldn’t help but smile. ‘You know, you and Charley Pride are ploughing a pretty lonely furrow with that black country and western act. The brothers see you dressed like that and they may have words to say.’

‘Brothers helped to build this great country, and that “shit-kicker music”, as our resident cultural theorist put it, was the sound-track to generations of workers. Wasn’t all Negro spirituals and Paul Robeson, y’know. Plus, I like this hat.’ He gave the brim a little flick with his fingers.

‘I was kind of hoping you two could maintain a low profile while we were here, unless it’s absolutely necessary that you do otherwise,’ I said, as we got into the Mustang.

Louis sighed loudly. ‘Bird, I’m the only brother from here to Toronto. ‘Less I contract vitiligo between this motel and the high-school band scam, ain’t no way that I can be low profile. So shut up and drive.’

‘Yeah, Bird, drive,’ said Angel from the backseat, “else Cleavon Little here will get his posse on your ass. The Cowpokes with Attitude, maybe, or Prairie Enemy . . .’

‘Angel,’ came the voice from the passenger seat. ‘Shut up.’

The Roadside was a big old place done in dark wood. It was long, windowed and single storeyed at the front with a gabled entrance in the centre which rose up above the rest like the steeple of a church. There were plenty of cars parked in the lot, with more around the sides stacked up almost to the treeline. The Roadside was at the western edge of town; beyond it was dark forest.

We paid our five-dollar cover charge at the door – ‘Five dollars!’ hissed Angel. ‘This a mob place?’ – and made our way into the bar itself. It was a long cavernous room, almost as dark inside as it was outside. Dim lights hung on the walls and the bar was lit sufficiently so that drinkers could see the labels on the bottles, but not the sell-by date. The Roadside was a lot bigger than it looked from the outside and the light died just beyond the limits of the bar and the center of the dance floor. It stretched maybe three hundred feet from the door to the stage at the far end, with the bar on a raised platform at the centre. Tables radiated from it into the dimness at the walls, which were lined in turn by booths. At the edges, the Roadside was so dark that only pale-moon faces were visible, and then only when their owners stepped into a pool of light. Otherwise, they were only vague shapes moving against the walls, like wraiths.

‘It’s a Stevie Wonder bar,’ said Angel. ‘The menu’s probably in braille.’

‘It’s pretty dark,’ I agreed. ‘Drop a quarter here, it’ll be worth ten cents by the time you find it.’

‘Yeah, like Reaganomics in miniature,’ said Angel.

‘Don’t say nothing bad about Reagan,’ warned Louis. ‘I have good memories of Ron.’

‘Which is probably more than Ron has,’ smirked Angel.

Louis led the way to a booth over by the right-hand wall, close to one of the emergency doors that stood halfway down each of the Roadside’s walls. There was probably at least one other door at the back, behind the stage. At present, that stage was occupied by what seemed to be Larry Fulcher and the Gamblers. Louis was already tapping his feet and nodding his head in time to the music.

In fact, Larry Fulcher and his band were pretty good. There were six of them, Fulcher leading on the mandolin, guitar and banjo. They played ‘Bonaparte’s Retreat’ and a couple of Bob Wills songs, ‘Get With It’ and ‘Texas Playboy Rag’. They moved on to the Carter Family with ‘Wabash Cannonball’ and ‘Worried Man Blues’, ‘You’re Learning’ by the Louvin Brothers and then did a neat version of’One Piece at a Time’ by Johnny Cash. It was an eclectic selection, but they played well and with obvious enthusiasm. Even Louis was impressed; the last time I saw him looking that impressed was when Angel opened fire on Joe Bones’s lawn back in New Orleans without hitting either of us while he was doing it.

We ordered burgers and fries. They came in red plastic baskets with a liner on the bottom to hold in the grease. I felt my arteries hardening as soon as I smelled the food. Angel and Louis drank some Pete’s Wicked. I had bottled water.

The band took a break and people flooded towards the bar and the bathrooms. I sipped some water and scanned the crowd. There was no sign of Rand Jennings, or his wife, which was probably a good thing.

‘We should be out at Meade Payne’s place now,’ said Louis. ‘Billy Purdue arrives, he ain’t gonna do it in a parade float in daylight.’

‘If you were out there now, you’d be freezing and you wouldn’t be able to see a thing,’ I said. ‘We do what we can.’ I felt like the whole situation was slipping away from me. Maybe it had always been slipping away, right from the time I took five hundred dollars from Billy Purdue without ever questioning where he might have found it. I still felt certain that Billy would make his way to Dark Hollow, sooner or later. Without Meade Payne’s cooperation there was always the chance that he could slip past us, but my guess was that Billy would hole up with Meade for a time, maybe even try to make for Canada with his help. Billy’s arrival would disturb the routine out at the Payne place, and I had faith in the ability of Angel and Louis to spot any such disturbance.

But Billy was still a comparatively minor concern next to Ellen Cole, although, in some way that I hadn’t yet figured out, there had to be a connection between them. An old man had guided them up here, perhaps the same old man who had shadowed Rita Ferris in the days before her death, maybe even the same old man who had once been known as Caleb Brewster by the people of a small Texan town. Dark Hollow was just too small a place for those kinds of unconnected occurrences to take place.

As if on cue, a woman pushed her way through the throng at the bar and ordered a drink. It was Lorna Jennings, her bright red sweater like a beacon in the crowd. Beside her stood two other women, a slim brunette in a green shirt and an older woman with black hair, wearing a white cotton top decorated with pink roses. It seemed to be a girls’ night out. Lorna didn’t see me, or didn’t want to see me.

There was a burst of applause and Larry Fulcher and his band came back onstage. They burst into ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ and the dance-floor instantly became a mass of movement, couples swinging each other across the floor, smiles on their faces, the women spinning on their toes, the men twisting them expertly. There was laughter in the air. Groups of friends and neighbours stood talking, beers in hand, enjoying a night of community and kinship. Above the bar, a banner thanked everyone for supporting the Dark Hollow High School Band. In the shadows, younger couples kissed discreetly while their parents practised foreplay on the dance floor. The music seemed to grow in volume; the crowd began to move faster; the sound of glass breaking came from the bar, accompanied by a burst of embarrassed laughter. Lorna stood beside a pillar, the two women on either side silent now as they listened to the music. In the shadows at the walls, figures moved, some barely more than indistinct shapes: couples talking, young people joshing, a community relaxing. Here and there, I heard talk of the discovery of Gary Chute’s body but it wasn’t personal and it didn’t interfere with the night’s festivities. I watched a man and woman seated at the bar across from Lorna as they kissed hard, their tongues visible where their mouths met, the woman’s hand snaking down her partner’s side, down, down . . .

Down to where a child stood before them, lit by a circle of light that seemed to come from nowhere but within himself. While couples moved close by, and groups of men walked through the crowds carrying trays of beer, the child still held a space to itself and no one came close or broke the shell of light surrounding him. It lit his blonde hair, brought up the colour of his purple rompers, made the nails of his tiny hands shine as he raised his left hand and pointed into the shadows.

‘Donnie?’ I heard myself whisper.

And from the darkness at the far side of the bar, a white shape appeared. Stritch’s mouth was open in a smile, the thick, soft lips splitting his face from side to side, and his bald head gleamed in the dim light. He turned in the direction of Lorna Jennings, looked back at me, and drew his right index finger across his neck as he moved through the crowd towards her.

‘Stritch,’ I hissed, springing from my seat. Louis scanned the crowd, already rising, his hand reaching for his SIG.

‘I don’t see him. You sure?’

‘He’s on the other side of the bar. He’s after Lorna.’

Louis went right, his hand inside his black jacket, his fingers on his gun. I moved left, but the crowd was thick and unyielding. I pushed my way through, people stepping back and yelling as their beer spilled. (‘Buddy, hey buddy, where’s the fire?’) I tried to keep Lorna’s red sweater in view, but I lost it as people passed into my line of vision. To my right, I could just make out Louis moving through the couples at the edge of the dance floor, his progress attracting curious glances. To my left, Angel was making his way around the bar in a wide arc.

As I neared the counter, the men and women were packed tightly, calling for drinks, waving money, laughing, caressing. I pushed through, spilling a tray of drinks and sending a thin, acned young man tumbling to his knees. Hands reached for me and angry voices were raised, but I ignored them. A barman, a fat, dark-skinned man with a thick beard, raised a hand as I climbed onto the bar, my feet slipping on the wet floor.

‘Hey, get down from there,’ he called, then stopped as he saw the Smith & Wesson in my hand. He backed off, making for a phone by the register.

Now I could see Lorna clearly. Her head turned as I rose above her, other heads turning too, their eyes wide. I spun to see Louis fighting his way through the pack at the bar, scanning the crowd, trying to catch a glimpse of that white, domed head.

I saw him first. He was maybe twenty people back from Lorna, still moving in her direction. Once or twice people looked his way, but they were distracted by the sight of me on the bar, the gun hanging from my right hand. Stritch smiled at me again, and something flashed in his hand: a short, curved blade, its point wickedly sharp. I made a jump from the bar to the central section where the cash register and bottles stood, then a second jump, which put me almost beside Lorna, glasses flying from my feet and shattering on the floor. People moved away from me and I heard screaming. I stepped from the bar and pushed my way to her.

‘Move back,’ I said. ‘You’re in danger here.’

She was almost smiling, her brow furrowed, until she saw the gun in my hand. ‘What? What do you mean?’

I looked past her to where I had last seen Stritch, but he was receding from sight, losing himself once again in the crowd. Then a head appeared as Louis stood on a table, trying to keep low enough to avoid making himself a target for a shot. He turned to me and gestured to the centre exit. On the stage, the band kept playing, but I could see them exchanging worried looks.

To my left, burly men in T-shirts were moving towards us. I grabbed Lorna by the shoulders. ‘Take your friends and stay close to the bar. I mean it. I’ll explain later.’ She nodded once, the smile no longer on her face. I think I knew why. I think she had caught a glimpse of Stritch and had seen in his eyes what he had intended to do to her.

Using my shoulders, I started to make my way to the centre exit. A small flight of steps led up to it and I could see a waitress at the door, a pretty girl with long, dark hair, frowning uncertainly as she watched what was happening at the bar. Then a figure appeared beside her, and the white, domed head broke into a smile. A pale hand lost itself in her hair and the blade flashed beside her head. The waitress tried to tear herself away and fell to her knees as she did so. I tried to raise my gun but people were jostling me, heads and arms obscuring my vision. Someone, a young man with a football player’s build, tried to grab my right arm, but I struck him in the face with my elbow and he moved back. Just as it seemed that we were powerless to prevent the girl from getting her throat cut, a dark object spun through the air and shattered as it struck Stritch’s head. To my left, Angel stood on a chair, his hand still raised from where he had released the bottle. I saw Stritch stumble backwards, blood already pouring from the multiple cuts in his face and head, as the waitress tore herself away and tumbled down the steps, leaving a garland of hair in her attacker’s hand. The door behind Stritch swung open and, in a blur of movement, he disappeared into the night.

Louis and I were only seconds behind him. We reached the steps at almost the same instant. Behind us, blue uniforms appeared at the main door and I could hear shouting and screams.

Outside, beer kegs stood stacked to one side of the door, a green trash can at the other. Ahead of us was the edge of the forest, illuminated by the big lamps that lit the side of the bar. Something white moved into the darkness beyond, and we moved after it.

Chapter Twenty Five

The silence of the woods was startling, as if the snow had muted nature, stifling all life. There was no wind, no night-bird sounds, only the crunch of our shoes and the soft snap of unseen twigs buried beneath our feet.

I closed my eyes hard, willing them to adjust to the dark light of the forest, my hand supporting me against a tree trunk. Around us, mostly hidden by the snowdrifts, tree roots snaked over the thin soil. Louis had already fallen once, and the front of his coat was speckled with white.

Behind us, noises and shouting came from the direction of the bar, but no one followed as yet. After all, it was still unclear what had happened: a man had waved a gun; another man had thrown a bottle and injured a third; some people thought they had seen a knife, a fact that the waitress would surely confirm. It would take them a while to find flashlights and for the police to organise a pursuit. Occasionally, a weak beam of light flashed yellow behind us, but soon the thickening trees blocked its path. Only a sickly moonlight that fell wearily through the branches over our heads provided any illumination.

Louis was close by me, close enough so that we remained in each other’s sight. I raised a hand and we stopped. There was no sound ahead of us, which meant that Stritch was either picking his steps carefully or had stopped and was waiting for us in the shadows. I thought again of that doorway in the Portland complex, that certainty I had that he was there and that, if I went after him, he would kill me. This time, I resolved, I would not back down.

Then, from my left, I heard something. It was soft, like the sound of evergreen leaves brushing against clothing, followed by the compression of snow beneath a footfall, but I had heard it. From Louis’s expression, I could tell that he had noticed it too. A second footfall came, then a third, moving not towards us, but away from us.

‘Could we have gotten ahead of him?’ I whispered.

‘Doubt it. Could be someone from the bar.’

‘No flashlight, and it’s one person, not a group.’

But there was something else about it: the noise was careless, almost deliberately so. It was as if someone wanted us to know that he or she was out there.

I heard myself swallow loudly. Beside me, Louis’s breath briefly threw a thin mist across his features. He looked at me and shrugged.

‘Keep listening, but we best get moving.’

He stepped out from behind the trunk of a fir and the sound of a shot shattered the silence of the forest, sending bark and sap shooting into the air beside his face. He dived for the ground and rolled hard to his right until he was shielded by a natural depression, in front of which the blunt edge of a rock nosed its way out of the snow.

‘That was close,’ I heard him say. ‘Fuck these professionals.’

‘You’re supposed to be a professional,’ I reminded him. ‘That’s why you’re here.’

‘Keep forgetting,’ he replied, ‘what with being surrounded by amateurs and all.’

I wondered how long Stritch had been watching us, waiting to make his move. Long enough to see me with Lorna, and to understand that some kind of bond existed between us. ‘Why did he try to take her in such a public place?’ I wondered aloud.

Louis risked a look round the edge of the stone, but no shots came. ‘He wanted to hurt the woman, and for you to know it was him. More than that, he wanted to draw us out.’

‘And we followed him?’

‘Wouldn’t want to disappoint him,’ replied Louis. ‘I tell you, Bird: I don’t think the man gives a fuck about that money anymore.’

I was getting tired of hugging the big fir. ‘I’m going to make a move, see how far I can get. You want to take another peep out of your hole and cover me?’

‘You the man. Get going.’

I took a deep breath and, staying low, began to zigzag forwards, tripping on two concealed roots but managing to keep my feet as Stritch’s gun barked twice, kicking up snow and dirt by my right heel. It was followed by a burst of fire from Louis’s SIG that shattered branches and bounced off rocks but also seemed to force Stritch to keep his head down.

‘You see him?’ I yelled, as I squatted down, my back to a spruce and my breath pluming before me in huge clouds. I was starting to warm up at last, although, even in the darkness, my fingers and hands appeared to be a raw, vivid red. Before Louis could reply, something off-white whirled in a copse of bushes ahead and I opened fire. The figure retreated into the darkness. ‘Never mind,’ I added. ‘He’s about thirty feet north-east of you, heading farther in.’

Louis was already moving. I could see his dark shape against the snow. I sighted, aimed and fired four shots into the area where I had last seen Stritch. There was no return fire and Louis was soon level with me but about ten feet away.

And then, again to my left but this time farther ahead, there came the sound of movement in the woods. Someone was moving quickly and surefootedly towards Stritch.

‘Bird?’ said Louis. I raised a hand quickly and indicated the source of the noise. He went silent, and we waited. For maybe thirty seconds nothing happened. There was no noise, not even a footstep or the falling of snow from the trees. There was nothing but the sound of my heart beating and the blood pumping in my ears.

Then two shots came in close succession followed by what sounded like two bodies impacting. Louis and I moved at the same instant, our feet freezing, our legs held high so that they would not drag in the snow. We ran hard until we burst through the copse, our hands raised to ward off the branches, and there we found Stritch.

He stood in a small, stony clearing doused in silver moonlight, his back to us, his toes barely touching the ground, his hands braced against the trunk of a big spruce. From the back of his tan raincoat, something thick and red had erupted which glistened darkly in the light. As we approached him, Stritch shuddered and seemed to grip the tree harder, as if to force himself off the sharp stump of branch on which he had been impaled. A fine spray of blood shot from his mouth and he groaned as his grip weakened. He turned his head at the sound of our footsteps and his eyes were large with shock, his thick, moist lips spread wide against gritted teeth as he tried to hold himself upright. Blood coursed from the wounds in his head, dark rivers of it flowing over his pale features.

As we were almost upon him, his mouth opened and he cried out as his body shuddered hard for the last time, his grip failing, his head falling forward and coming to rest against the bark of the tree.

And as he died, I scanned the glade, conscious that Louis was doing the same, both of us acutely aware that beyond our line of sight someone was watching us, and that there was a kind of joy in what he saw, and in what he had done.

Chapter Twenty Six

I sat in Rand Jennings’s office in the Dark Hollow police department and watched the snow falling on the windowpane against the early morning darkness. Jennings sat across from me, his hands steepled together, the fingertips resting in the small roll of fat that now hung beneath his chin. Behind me stood Ressler, while outside the office uniformed patrolmen, mostly part-timers called in for the occasion, ran back and forth down the hallway, bumping into one another like ants whose chemical signallers had been interfered with.

‘Tell me who he was,’ said Jennings.

‘I already told you,’ I said.

‘Tell me again.’

‘He called himself Stritch. He was a freelance operator – murder, torture, assassination, whatever.’

‘What’s he doing attacking waitresses in Dark Hollow, Maine?’

‘I don’t know.’ That was a he, but if I told him it was an attempt to gain revenge for the death of his partner then Jennings would have wanted to know who killed the partner and what part I had played in the whole affair. If I told him that then the chances were that I would be locked up in a cell.

‘Ask him about the nigra,’ said Ressler. Instinctively, the muscles on my shoulders and neck tightened and I heard Ressler snicker behind me. ‘You got a problem with that word, Mr Big Shot? Don’t like to hear a man being called a buck nigra, especially if he’s your friend?’

I took a deep breath and brought my rising temper under control. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I’d like to see you talk like that in Harlem.’

Jennings unsteepled his hands and jabbed an index finger at me. ‘Again, I’m calling you a liar, Parker. I got witnesses saw a coloured follow you out that door, same coloured checked into the motel with a skinny white guy in tow the day you arrived, same coloured who paid cash in advance on the room, the room he shared with the same skinny white guy who hit this man Stritch with a bottle and the same coloured . . .’ His voice rose to a shout. ‘The same fucking coloured who has now left his motel and disappeared into the fucking ether with his buddy. Do you hear me?’

I knew where Angel and Louis had gone. They were at the India Hill Motel on Route 6 outside Greenville. Angel had checked in and Louis was lying low. They would eat out of the McDonald’s nearby and wait for me to call.

‘Like I said, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was alone when I found Stritch. Maybe someone else followed me out, thought that I might need some help catching this guy but, if he did, then I didn’t see him.’

‘You’re full of shit, Parker. We got three, maybe four, sets of prints running in the direction of that clearing. Now I’m going to ask you again: why is this guy attacking waitresses in my town?’

‘I don’t know,’ I lied, again. If the conversation had been a horse, someone would have shot it by now.

‘Don’t give me that. You spotted the guy. You were moving after him before he even went for the girl.’ He paused. ‘Assuming it was Carlene Simmons he was after to begin with.’ His face took on a thoughtful expression, and his eyes never left my face. I didn’t like him. I never had, and what had passed between us gave neither of us any particular reason to mend our fences, but he wasn’t dumb. He stood and went to the window, where he stared out into the blackness for a time. ‘Sergeant,’ he said at last, ‘will you excuse us?’

Behind me, I heard Ressler shift his weight and the soft, deliberate tread of his footsteps as he walked to the door and closed it quietly behind him. Jennings turned to me then and cracked the knuckles of his right hand by crushing them in his left.

‘I took a swing at you now, not one man outside this room would try to stop me, even if he wanted to. Not one man would interfere.’ His voice was calm, but his eyes burned.

‘You take a swing at me, Rand, you better hope someone tries to interfere. You might be glad of the help.’

He sat on the edge of his desk, facing me, his right hand still cupped in his left and resting on his thighs. ‘I hear you been seen around town with my wife.’ He wasn’t looking at me now. Instead, all his attention seemed to be focused on his hands, his eyes examining every scar and wrinkle, every vein and pore. They were old man’s hands, I thought, older than they should have been. There was a tiredness about Jennings, a weariness. Being with someone who doesn’t love you just so no one else can have her takes its toll on a man. It takes its toll on the woman too.

I didn’t respond to his statement, but I could tell what he was thinking. Things come around sometimes. Call it fate, destiny, God’s will. Call it bad luck if you’re trying to keep a dying marriage frozen so that it doesn’t decay any further, like those egomaniacs who keep their bodies frozen in nitrogen after death in the hope that, centuries later, medical technology will have advanced and they can be revivified, as if somehow the world will want an old corpse from the past wandering through the present. I think Rand’s marriage had been like that, something that he willed to be the way it was, frozen in some neverworld waiting for the miracle that would bring it back to life. And then I had arrived like the April thaw and he had felt the whole construct start to melt around his ears. I had nothing to offer his wife, at least nothing that I was prepared to give. What she saw in me, I wasn’t sure. Maybe it was less to do with me than with what I represented: lost opportunities, paths untaken, second chances.

‘You hear what I said?’ he asked.

‘I heard.’

‘Is it true?’ He looked at me then, and he was scared. He wouldn’t have called it that, wouldn’t even have admitted it to himself, but it was fear. Maybe, somewhere deep inside, he did still love his wife, although in such a strange way, in a manner that was so disengaged from ordinary life, that it had ceased to have any meaning for either of them.

‘If you’re asking, then you already know.’

‘You trying to take her away from me again?’

I almost felt pity for him. ‘I’m not here to take anyone away from anyone else. If she leaves you, she does so for her own reasons, not because a man from her past bundles her off against her will. You got a problem with your wife, you deal with it. I’m not your marriage counsellor.’

He shifted himself off the desk and his hands went to his sides, forming fists as they did so. ‘Don’t talk smart to me, boy. I’ll . . .’

I rose and moved forwards, so that we were face-to-face. Even if he tried to hit me now, there would be no space for him to give the swing momentum. I spoke softly and distinctly. ‘You won’t do anything. You get in my way here and I’ll take you down. As for Lorna, it’s probably best that we don’t even talk about her, because, like as not, it’ll get ugly and one of us will get hurt. Years ago, that was me taking your kicks on a piss-covered floor while your buddy looked on. But I’ve killed men since then, and I’ll take you down if you cross my path. You got any more questions, chief, or you want to charge me, you know where to find me.’

I left him, collected my gun from the desk, and walked out to the Mustang. I felt raw and filthy, my feet still cold and damp in my shoes. I thought of Stritch, writhing and struggling against the tree, raised up on his toes in a vain, futile effort to survive. And I thought of the strength it had taken to force him onto the stump. Stritch had been a squat, powerful man, with a low centre of gravity. People like that are hard to move. The collar of his raincoat had been torn where his killer had gripped him, using his own body weight against him, building up the momentum necessary to impale him on the tree. We were looking for someone strong and fast, someone who perceived Stritch as a threat to himself.

Or to someone else.

A cold wind rippled the main street of Dark Hollow and sprinkled the car with snow as the motel drew into view. I walked to my room, put my key in the lock and turned it, but the door was already unlocked. I stepped to the right, unholstered my gun, and gently eased the door fully open.

Lorna Jennings sat on my bed, her shoes off and her knees pulled up to her chin, the main illumination in the room coming from the lamp by the bedside. Her hands were clasped around her shins, the fingers intertwined. The television was on, tuned to a talk show, but the volume was down to near zero.

She looked at me with something that was almost love, and nearly hate. The world that she had created for herself there – a cocoon of indifference surrounding buried feelings and the dying heart of a poor marriage – was falling apart around her. She shook her head, her eyes still fixed on me, and seemed on the verge of tears. Then she turned away, towards the window that would soon be shedding bleak winter light into the room.

‘Who was he?’ she said.

‘His name was Stritch.’

Near her bare feet, her thumb and index finger pushed her wedding ring almost to the end of her finger and spun it there, back and forth, before it eventually slipped off, to be held instead between her fingertips. I didn’t think it was a good sign.

‘He was going to kill me, wasn’t he?’ Her voice was matter-of-fact, but something trembled beneath it.

‘Yes.’

‘Why? I’d never seen him before. What had I ever done to him?’ She rested her left cheek on her knee, waiting for my response. There were tears running down her face.

‘He wanted to kill you because he thought you meant something to me. He was looking for revenge, and he saw his chance to take it.’

‘And do I mean something to you?’ Her voice was almost a whisper now.

‘I loved you once,’ I said simply.

‘And now?’

‘I still care enough about you not to let anyone hurt you.’

She shook her head, lifted it from her knees and put the heel of her right hand to her face. She was crying openly now.

‘Did you kill him?’

‘No. Someone else got to him first.’

‘But you would have killed him, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

Her mouth was curled down in pain and misery, tears falling from her face and gently sprinkling the sheets. I took a tissue from the box on the dresser and handed it to her, then sat beside her on the edge of the bed.

‘Jesus, why did you have to come here?’ she said. Her body was racked by sobs. They came from so deep inside her that they interrupted the flow of her words, like little caesuras of hurt. ‘Sometimes, whole weeks went by when I didn’t think about you. When I heard you got married, I burned inside, but I thought that it might help, that it might cauterise the wound. And it did, Bird, it really did. But now . . .’

I reached out to her and touched her shoulder, but she pulled away. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, don’t.’ But I didn’t listen. I moved fully onto the bed, kneeling beside her now, and drew her to me. She struggled, and slapped me open-handed on my body, my face, my arms. And then her face was against my chest, and the struggling eased. She wrapped her arms around me, her cheek hard against me, and a sound came through her gritted teeth that was almost a howl. I moved my hands across her back, my fingertips brushing the strap of her bra beneath her sweater. It rose up slightly at the end, exposing a moon-sliver of skin above her jeans and the lace decoration of her underwear beneath the blue denim.

Her head moved slightly beneath my chin, her cheek rubbing against the skin on my neck and progressing upwards, never losing contact, until it was against my own cheek. I felt a surge of lust. My hands were shaking, as much a delayed reaction from the pursuit of Stritch as her closeness to me. It would have been so easy to go with the moment, to re-create, however briefly, a memory of my youth.

I kissed her softly on the temple, then drew away.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I stood and moved to the window. Behind me, I heard her move to the bathroom and the door closing, the hiss of the faucets. For a brief instant I had been a young man again, consumed with desire for something I had no right to have. But that young man was gone, and the one who had taken his place no longer had the same intensity of feeling for Lorna Jennings. Outside, the snow fell like years, blanketing the past with the unblemished whiteness of possibilities untold.

I heard the bathroom door reopen. When I turned around, Lorna was standing naked before me.

I looked at her for a moment before I spoke. ‘I think you left something in the bathroom,’ I said. I made no move towards her.

‘Don’t you want to be with me?’ she asked.

‘I can’t, Lorna. If I did, it would be for the wrong reasons and, frankly, I’m not sure I could deal with the consequences.’

‘No, it’s not that,’ she said. A tear trickled down her cheek. ‘I’ve grown old. I’m not like I was when you knew me first.’

It was true: she was not as I remembered her. There were dimples on her upper thighs and buttocks, and small folds of fat at her belly. Her breasts were less firm and there was soft flesh beginning to hang on her upper arm. The faint trace of a varicose vein wormed its way across the upper part of her left leg. On her face, there were fine wrinkles around the mouth and a triad of lines snaked away from the corner of each eye.

And yet, while the years had transformed her, were changing her even now, they had not made her any less beautiful. Instead, as she grew older, her femininity, the sense of her as a woman, seemed to have been enhanced. The fragile beauty of her youth had withstood the harsh winters of the north and the difficulties of her marriage by adapting, not fading, and that strength had found expression in her face, in her body, lending her looks a dignity and maturity that had been buried before, that had only occasionally displayed itself in her features. As I looked into her eyes and her gaze met mine, I knew that the woman I had loved, for whom I still felt something that was almost love, remained untouched within.

‘You’re still beautiful,’ I said. She watched me carefully, trying to be certain that I was not trying to blind her with kind lies. When she saw that I was telling the truth, her eyes closed softly as if she had just been touched deep inside but could not tell whether she felt pain or pleasure.

She covered her face with her hands and shook her head. ‘This is kind of embarrassing.’

‘Kind of,’ I agreed.

She nodded and went back into the bathroom. When she emerged, she walked straight to the door. I followed her, reaching it as she touched the handle. She turned before opening it, and rested her hand against my cheek. ‘I don’t know, Bird,’ she said, her forehead resting gently against my shoulder for a moment. ‘I just don’t know.’

Then she slipped out of the room and into the morning light.

I slept for a time, then showered and dressed. I looked at my watch as I strapped it to my wrist, and a pain lanced through my stomach unlike anything I had felt in months. I curled up, dropped to the floor and softly began to cry, my arms wrapped around me, my body still racked by huge slashes of agony. In all that had happened – the hunt for traces of Caleb Kyle, the encounter with Rachel, the death of Stritch – I had lost track of the days.

It was December eleventh. The anniversary was one day away.

It was past three when I ate dry toast and coffee at the diner, and thought of Susan, and the rage I felt at the world for allowing her and my daughter to be taken from me. And I wondered how, with all of this pain and grief coiled inside me, I could ever begin again.

But I wanted Rachel, I knew, and the depth of my need for her surprised me. I had felt it as I sat opposite her in Harvard Square, listening to her voice and watching the movements of her hands. How many times had we been together? Twice? Yet, with her, I had felt a peace that had been denied me for so long.

I wondered too at what I might bring upon her, and upon myself, if the relationship was allowed to develop. I was a man moon-haunted by the ghost of his wife. I had mourned for her, and I still mourned for her. I felt guilt at my feelings for Rachel, at what we had done together. Was it a betrayal of Susan’s memory to want to start over? So many feelings, so many emotions, so many acts of revenge, of attempted recompense, had been concentrated into the last twelve months. I felt drained by them, and tormented by the images that crept unbidden into my dreams, and into my waking moments. I had seen Donald Purdue in the bar. I had seen him as clearly as I had seen Lorna naked before me, as clearly as I had seen Stritch impaled on a tree.

I wanted to start again, but I didn’t know how. All I knew was that I was moving closer and closer to the edge, and that I had to find some way to anchor myself before I fell.

I left the diner then drove down to Greenville. The Mercury was parked at the back of the motel beneath a copse of trees, making it almost invisible from the road. I didn’t think Rand would come after Angel and Louis, not as long as he had me, but it didn’t hurt to take precautions. As I parked, Angel opened the door to room six, moved aside to let me in, then closed the door behind him.

‘Well, look at you,’ he said, a wide grin on his face.

Louis lay on one of the room’s two double beds, reading the latest issue of Time. ‘He right, Bird,’ he said. ‘You the man. Pretty soon, you and Michael Douglas both be in one o’ them sex clinics and we be reading about you in People magazine.’

‘We saw her arriving as we left,’ said Angel. ‘She was in kind of a state. I didn’t see there was anything else I could do but let her in.’ He sat alongside Louis. ‘Now I just know you’re going to tell us that you and the chief sat down and talked this thing out and he said, “Sure, you can sleep with my wife, because she really loves you, not me”. Because, if you didn’t, then, pretty soon, you’re going to be even less welcome there than you are already. And, frankly, you’re currently about as welcome as a dead man’s feet in summertime.’

‘I didn’t sleep with her,’ I said.

‘She come on to you?’

‘You ever hear of sensitivity?’

‘It’s overrated, but I’ll take that as a “yes” and assume that you didn’t respond. Jeez, Bird, you got the self-restraint of a saint.’

‘Let it go, Angel. Please.’

I sat on the edge of the second bed, and put my head in my hands. I breathed deeply and closed my eyes tightly. When I looked up again, Angel was almost beside me. I lifted my hand to let him know that I was OK. I went to the bathroom and soaked my face with cold water before returning to them.

‘As for the chief, I haven’t been run out of town yet,’ I said, picking up the conversation where we had left off. ‘I’m a witness-cum-suspect in the unsolved murder of an unidentified man in the Maine woods. Jennings asked me to stick around, shoot the breeze. He did tell me something else as well: the ME hasn’t officially delivered his report yet, but it’s likely to confirm that Chute was beaten badly before he was killed. From the marks on his wrists, it looked like someone hung him from a tree to do it.’ Added to the death of Stritch, it meant that Dark Hollow was likely to be crawling with media and even more cops by the following morning.

‘Louis made some calls, touched base with a few of his associates,’ said Angel. ‘He found out that Al Z and a contingent of Palermo irregulars flew into Bangor last night. Seems like Tony Celli just ran out of time.’

So they were closing in. There was a reckoning coming. I could feel it. I went to the door and looked out on the quietness of the India Hill Mall, with its gun shop and tourist information office, its deserted parking lot. Louis came over and stood beside me.

‘You called that boy’s name in the bar last night, just before you saw Stritch,’ he said.

I nodded. ‘I saw something, but I don’t even know what it was.’ I opened the door and stepped outside. He didn’t pursue the subject.

‘So what now?’ said Louis. ‘You dressed up like you ready for an Arctic adventure.’

‘I’m still going after the old man to find out how he came to sell Ricky’s boots to Stuckey.’

‘You want us to tag along?’

‘No. I don’t want to spook him any more than I have to, and it’s better if you stay out of Dark Hollow for a while. After I’ve spoken to him, maybe then we can decide how to progress. I can handle this one on my own.’

I was wrong.

Part Three

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight path and woke to find myself in a dark wood.

Dante, Inferno

Chapter Twenty Seven

As I drove to the house of the old man known as John Barley, the image of Stritch impaled on a tree returned to me. He couldn’t have known about Caleb Kyle, couldn’t have suspected that he was being hunted on two sides. He had reckoned on killing Louis and me, avenging his partner while simultaneously ending the contract on his life, but he had no inkling of Caleb.

It seemed certain to me that Caleb had killed Stritch, although how he had learned of his existence I didn’t know; I guessed that he might have encountered Stritch when both of them were closing in on Billy Purdue. In the end, maybe it came down to the fact that Caleb Kyle was a predator, and predators are attuned not only to the nature of their prey but also to the nature of those who might prey upon them in turn. Caleb hadn’t survived for over three decades without a highly developed ability to sense impending danger. In this case, Stritch had posed a potentially lethal threat to Billy Purdue, and Caleb had sniffed him out. Billy was the key to Caleb Kyle, the only one who had seen him and survived, the only one left who could describe what he looked like. But as I approached the road to John Barley’s shack, I knew that Billy’s description might prove unnecessary. When I stepped from the car, my gun was already in my hand.

It was already dark when I reached the old man’s house. There was a light burning in one of the windows as I ascended the hill which sloped gently upwards to his yard. I came from the west, against the wind, keeping the house between me and the dog in its makeshift automobile kennel. I was almost at the door when a sharp yelp came from the car and a blur moved fast across the snow as the dog at last caught my scent and tried to intercept me. Immediately, the door of the house swung open and the barrel of a shotgun appeared. I grabbed the gun and yanked the old man through the gap. Beside me, the dog became frenzied, alternately leaping at my face and nipping at the cuffs of my pants. The old man lay on the ground, winded by his fall, his hand still on the gun. I lashed out at the dog and put my gun to the old man’s ear.

‘Ease off the shotgun, or I swear to God I’ll kill you where you he,’ I said. His finger lifted from the trigger guard and his hand moved slowly from the stock of the shotgun. He whistled softly and said: ‘Easy, Jess, easy. Good boy.’ The dog whined a little then moved away a distance, contenting itself with circling us repeatedly and growling as I hauled the old man to his feet. I gestured at a chair on the porch and he sat down heavily, rubbing his left elbow where he had barked it painfully as he landed.

‘What do you want?’ asked John Barley. He didn’t look at me, but kept his gaze on the dog. It moved cautiously over to its master, giving me a low growl as it did so, before sitting down beside him where he could rub it gently behind the ear.

I had my Timberland pack over my shoulder and I threw it at him. He caught it and looked dumbly at me for the first time.

‘Open it,’ I said.

He waited a moment, then unzipped the pack and peered in.

‘You recognise them?’

He shook his head. ‘No, I don’t believe I do.’

I cocked the pistol. The dog’s growling rose an octave.

‘Old man, this is personal. You don’t want to cross me on this thing. I know you sold the boots to Stuckey over in Bangor. He gave you thirty dollars for them. Now you want to tell me how you came by them?’

He shrugged. ‘Found ‘em, I guess.’

I moved forward and the dog rose up, the hairs on its neck high and tight. It bared its teeth at me. I kept the gun on the old man then, slowly, moved it down to his dog.

‘No,’ said Barley, his hand reaching down to hold the dog back and to cover its bared breast. ‘Please, not my dog.’

I felt bad threatening his dog, and the feeling made me wonder if this old man could possibly be Caleb Kyle. I thought that I would know Caleb when I found him, that I would sense his true nature. All I got from John Barley was fear: fear of me and, I suspected, fear of something else.

‘Tell me the truth,’ I said softly. ‘Tell me where you got those boots. You tried to get rid of them after we spoke. I want to know why.’

He blinked hard and swallowed once, his teeth worrying his bottom lip until he seemed to reach a decision within himself, and spoke.

‘I took ‘em from the boy’s body. I dug him up, took the boots, then covered him again.’ He shrugged once more. ‘Took me his pack too. He didn’t have no need for ‘em anyways.’

I resisted pistol-whipping him, but only just. ‘And the girl?’

The old man twice shook his head, as if trying to dislodge an insect from his hair. ‘I didn’t kill ‘em,’ he said, and I thought for a moment that he might cry. ‘I wouldn’t hurt nobody. I just wanted the boots.’

I felt sick inside. I thought of Lee and Walter, of times spent with them, with Ellen. I did not want to have to tell them that their daughter was dead. I once again doubted that this raggedy old man, this scavenger, could be Caleb Kyle.

‘Where is she?’ I asked.

He was rubbing the dog’s body methodically now, hard sweeps from the head almost to its rump. ‘I only know where the boy is. The girl, I don’t rightly know where she might be.’

In the light from the window, the old man’s face glowed a dim yellow. It made him look sickly and ill. His eyes were damp, the pupils barely pinholes. He was trembling gently as the fear took over his body. I lowered the gun and said: ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

The old man shook his head and what he said next made my skin crawl. ‘Mister,’ he whispered, ‘it ain’t you I’m afraid of.’

He saw them near the Little Briar Creek, he said, the girl and the boy in front and a figure, almost a shadow, in the backseat. He was walking with his dog, on his way home from hunting rabbits, when he saw the car pull in below him, harsh noises like stones grinding coming from the engine. It was not yet evening, but darkness had already fallen. He caught a glimpse of the two young people as they passed before the headlights of the car, the girl in blue jeans and a bright red parka, the boy in black, wearing a leather jacket that hung open despite the cold.

The boy lifted the hood of the car and peered inside, using a pocket flashlight to illuminate the engine. He could see him shake his head, heard him say something indistinguishable to the girl, then swear loudly in the silence of the forest.

The rear door of the car opened and the third passenger stepped out. He was tall, and something told John Barley that he was old, older even than Barley himself. And for reasons that, even now, he did not fully understand, he felt a chill cross him and, from close by, he heard the dog give a low whine. Beside the car, the figure stopped and seemed to scan the woods, as if to ascertain the source of the unexpected noise. Barley patted the dog lightly: ‘Hush, boy, hush.’ But he could see the dog’s nostrils working quickly, and felt the animal shivering beside him. Whatever he scented, it had spooked him badly and the dog’s unease communicated itself to his owner.

The tall man leaned into the driver’s side of the car and the headlights died. ‘Hey,’ said the boy. ‘What’re you doing? You killed the lights.’ His flashlight beam moved and illuminated first the face of the man approaching and then the gleam of something in his hand.

‘Hey,’ said the boy again, softer now. He moved in front of the girl, forcing her back, protecting her from the blade. ‘Don’t do this,’ he said.

The knife slashed and the flashlight fell. The boy stumbled back and Barley heard him say, ‘Run, Ellen, run.’ Then the old man was upon him like a long, dark cloud and Barley saw the knife rise and fall, rise and fall, and heard the sound of its cutting against the noise of the trees gently swaying.

And then the figure moved after the girl. He could hear her stumbling, awkward progress through the woods. She did not get far. There was a scream, followed by a sound, as of a blow heavily falling, and then all was silent. Beside him, the dog shifted on the ground, and gave a low, soft keen.

It was some time before the tall figure returned. The girl was not with him. He lifted the boy beneath the arms and hauled him to the rear of the car, where he bundled him into the trunk. He opened the driver’s door and slowly, surely, began to push the car down the dirt road that led to Ragged Lake.

Barley tied his dog to a tree and gently wrapped his pocket handkerchief around its muzzle, patting it once and assuring it that he would be back. Then he followed the sound of the car as its wheels crunched on the trail ahead.

About half a mile down the road, just before Ragged Lake, he came upon a clearing next to a patch of beaver bog, dead trees fallen and twisted in the dark water. In the clearing, a pit had been dug and newly excavated earth lay in piles like funeral mounds. There was a slope at one end of the pit, and the old man used it to push the car into the earth. It came to rest almost level, the right rear wheel slightly raised. Then the figure climbed onto the roof and, from there, made its way to the lip of the hole. There was the sound of a spade being removed from the earth and then the soft shifting as it plunged deep once again, followed by a scraping as the first load hit the roof of the car.

It took the old man almost an hour, all told, to bury the car. Soon, snow would cover the ground and the drifts would hide any subsidence in the earth beneath. He lifted and threw methodically, his pace never varying, never once stopping to take a breath, and, despite all that he had seen, John Barley envied him his strength.

But just as the old man had finished circling the area to make sure that he had done his job well, Barley heard a bark from nearby followed by a long howl and he knew that Jess had managed to remove the binding from his muzzle. Below him, the figure stopped and cocked its head, then swung the spade hard into the beaver bog and began to move, his long legs eating up the incline, heading towards the sound of the dog.

But Barley was already moving, quickly and silently. He picked his way over fallen logs, following deer paths and moose trails so that he might avoid alerting the man behind by breaking new branches. He reached the dog to find it pulling from the rope, its tail wagging, emitting gentle yips of joy and relief. It struggled a little as he restored the binding, then he untied it, took it in his arms, and ran for home. He stopped once to look back, certain almost that he had heard sounds of pursuit from close behind, but he could see nothing. When he got back to his cabin, he locked his door, reloaded his shotgun with lethal Number One shot and sat in a chair, never resting until dawn broke, when he fell into a bad, fitful sleep, punctuated by dreams of earth falling into his open mouth.

‘Why didn’t you tell someone what you saw?’ I asked him. Even then, I was not sure whether or not to believe him. How could I believe that he was who he said he was, that such a story could be true? But when I looked in his eyes there was no trace of guile, only an old man’s fear of approaching death. The dog now lay beside him, not asleep, its eyes open, sometimes casting glances at me to make sure that I had not moved during the telling of the old man’s tale.

‘I didn’t want no trouble,’ he replied. ‘But I went back to see if there was any trace of the girl, and for those boots. They were fine boots and maybe, maybe I wanted to be sure that I hadn’t imagined what I saw. I’m an old man, and the mind plays tricks. But I didn’t imagine nothing, even though the girl was gone and there wasn’t even blood on the ground to tell where she might have been. I knew that I hadn’t imagined it as soon as I saw the dip in the ground and the spade hit metal. I was going to keep the boots and the pack, maybe had half a notion to take them to the police so they wouldn’t think I was crazy when I told them the story. But . . .’ He stopped. I waited.

‘The next night, after what happened, I was sitting here on the porch with Jess and I felt him trembling. He didn’t bark or nothing, just began to shake and whine. He was staring out into the woods, just there.’

He raised a finger and pointed to a place where the branches of two striped maples almost touched, like lovers reaching out to each other in the dark. ‘And there was someone standing there, watching us. Didn’t move or nothing, didn’t speak, just stood watching. And I knew it was him. I could feel it deep in me, and I could sense it in the dog. Then he just seemed to fade into the woods, and I didn’t see him again.

‘But I knew what it was he wanted. It was a warning. I don’t think he knew for certain what I might have seen, and he wasn’t going to kill me unless he knew, but right then and there I wished I’d never gone back for them boots. And if I said anything, he’d find out and he’d come for me. I knew that. Then you came around asking questions and I knew for sure I had to get rid of them. I emptied the pack and sold it and the boots to Stuckey and I was glad for what he gave me. I burned the boy’s clothes out back. There was nothing else for it.’

‘You ever see this man before?’ I asked.

Barley shook his head. ‘Never. He wasn’t from around these parts, else I’d have recognised him.’ He leaned forward. ‘You didn’t ought to have come here, mister.’ There was a tone almost of resignation in his voice. ‘He’ll know, and he’ll come for me. He’ll come for us both.’

I looked out into the gathering night, into the shadows of the trees. There were no stars visible in the sky and the moon was obscured by cloud. The forecast was for more snow; twelve inches were promised over the next week, maybe more. And suddenly I was seized with a fearful regret that my car was back down the road, and that we would have to walk through the darkness of the woods to get to it.

‘You ever hear the name Caleb Kyle?’ I asked him.

He blinked once, as if I had struck him on the cheek, but there was no real surprise in it. ‘Sure I heard it. He’s a myth. There was never a man by that name, least not around these parts.’ But just by asking him I had sown doubts in his mind, and I could almost hear the tumblers falling into place, and I watched as his eyes widened in realisation.

So Caleb had tracked Ellen and Ricky, had wormed his way into their trust. He was the one who had advised them to visit Dark Hollow, just as the hotel manager had told me, and I didn’t doubt that it was Caleb who had sabotaged the engine of their car and then told them where to pull in, close by Ragged Lake where there was a grave already waiting. What I couldn’t understand was why he had done this. It made no sense, unless . . .

Unless he had been watching me all along, ever since I began helping Rita Ferris. Anyone who sided with Rita would automatically be perceived as taking a stand against Billy. Did he take Ellen Cole, maybe even kill her as he killed her boyfriend, to punish me for interfering in the affairs of a man whom he believed to be his son? If Ellen was still alive, then any hope of finding her now rested on understanding the mind of Caleb Kyle, and perhaps finding Billy Purdue. I thought of Caleb watching me as I slept, after he had killed Rita and Donald, after he had placed the child’s toy on my kitchen table. What was he thinking then? And why didn’t he kill me when he had the chance? Somewhere, just beyond my reach, lay an answer to these questions. I tightened my fists in frustration at my inability to grasp it, and then it came to me.

He knew who I was, or, more importantly, he knew whose grandson I was. It would appeal to him, I thought, to torment the grandson as he had tortured the grandfather. Thirty years later, he was beginning the game again.

I motioned to John Barley. ‘Come on, we’re leaving.’

He stood slowly and looked out at the trees, as if in expectation of seeing that figure once again. ‘Where are we going?’

‘You’re going to show me where that car is buried, and then you’re going to tell Rand Jennings what you told me.’

He did not move, but remained looking fearfully into the trees. ‘Mister, I don’t want to go back there,’ he said.

I ignored him, picked up his shotgun, unloaded it and tossed the empty gun back into the house. I motioned him to go ahead of me, my gun still in my hand. After a moment’s hesitation, he moved.

‘You can bring your dog,’ I said, as he passed by me. ‘If there’s something out there, he’ll sense it before we will.’

Chapter Twenty Eight

The first snow began to fall almost as soon as we lost sight of the old man’s house, thick, heavy concentrations of crystal that covered the road and added their weight to the earlier falls. By the time we reached the Mustang our shoulders and hair were white, and the dog gambolled beside us, trying to catch snowflakes in its jaws. I sat the old man in the passenger seat, took a pair of cuffs from the trunk, and cuffed his left hand across his body to the armrest on the door. I didn’t trust him not to take a swing at me in the car, or to run off into the woods as soon as he had a chance. The dog sat on the back seat, leaving muddy pawprints on my upholstery.

Visibility was poor as I drove and the windshield wipers struggled to remove the snow. I stayed at thirty at first, then slowed to twenty-five, then twenty. Soon, there was only a veil of white before me and the tall shapes of the trees at either side, pine and fir standing like the spires of churches in the snow. The old man said nothing as he sat awkwardly beside me, his right hand holding on to the dashboard for support.

‘You’d better not be lying to me, John Barley,’ I said.

His eyes were blank, their gaze directed inward, like those of a man who has just heard his death sentence pronounced and knows that it is fixed and inalterable.

‘It don’t matter,’ he said, and behind him the dog began to whine. ‘When he finds us, won’t matter what you believe.’

Then, perhaps fifty feet ahead of us, the driving snow playing games with perspective, I saw what looked like headlights. As we drew closer, the shapes of two cars appeared as they pulled fully into the road, blocking our path. Behind us, more headlights gleamed, but farther back, and when I continued to move forwards, they seemed to recede, then disappeared, their glare reflected now from the trees to my right, and I realised the car behind had turned sideways and stopped, boxing us in.

I slowed about twenty feet from the cars ahead. ‘What’s going on?’ said the old man. ‘Maybe there’s been an accident.’

‘Maybe,’ I said.

Three figures, dark against the snow and the lights, moved towards us. There was something familiar about the one in the centre and the way he moved. He was small. An overcoat hung loose over his shoulders and, from beneath it, his right arm protruded in a sling. As he moved into the glare of the car’s lights, I saw the dark threads of stitching in the wounds on his forehead, and the ugly twisting of his harelip.

Mifflin smiled crookedly. I was already reaching for the keys to the cuffs with one hand while with the other I removed my Smith & Wesson from its holster. Beside me, the old man sensed we were in trouble and began yanking at the cuffs.

‘Cut me loose!’ he screamed. ‘Cut me loose!’

From behind came the barking of the dog. I tossed the keys to the old man and he reached down to free his hand as I slapped the car into reverse and hit the accelerator, my gun against the wheel, hoping to knock the rear car out of the path. We slammed into it with the sound of crunching metal and breaking glass, the impact straining the belts as we jerked towards the windshield. The dog tumbled forwards into the space between the seats and yelped as it hit the dash.

Ahead of us, five figures now moved through the snow in our direction, and I heard the sound of a door opening behind us. I moved the car into drive and prepared to hit the accelerator again, but the Mustang cut out, leaving us in silence. I leaned down to turn the key in the ignition, but the old man was already opening his door, the dog on his lap nosing at the gap. I reached out to stop him ‘No, don’t’ and then the windshield exploded and a black and red spray, star studded with glass shards, filled the car, splashing my face and body and blinding my eyes. I blinked them clear in time to see the old man’s ruined face sliding towards me, the remains of the dog lying across his thighs, and then I was pushing my door open, staying low as I hurled myself from the car, more shots tearing into the hood and the interior, the rear window shattering as I tumbled onto the road. I sensed movement behind and to my left, spun and fired. A man in a dark aviator’s jacket, a stunned look on his face and blood on his cheek, twisted in the snow and fell to the ground ten feet away from me. I glanced at the point of collision where the Mustang had hit their Neon and saw the body of a second man forced upright between the driver door and the shell of the Dodge, crushed by the impact as he tried to get out of the car.

I turned and broke for the side of the road, sliding down the slope and into the woods, bullets striking the road above me and the snow and dirt around me, shouts and cries following me as I found myself among the trees, twigs snapping beneath my feet, branches scraping my face, twisted roots pulling at my legs. Flashlight beams tore through the night and there came the staccato rattle of an automatic weapon, ripping through the leaves and branches above me and to my right. The old man’s blood was still warm on me as I ran. I could feel it dripping down my face, could taste it in my mouth.

I kept running, my gun in my hand, my breath sounding harsh and ragged in my throat. I tried to change direction, to work my way back to the road, but flashlights shone almost level with me to my right and left as they moved to cut me off. Still the snow fell, trapping itself on my lashes and melting on my lips. It froze my hands and almost blinded me as it billowed into my eyes.

And then the terrain changed and I stumbled on a rock, wrenching my ankle painfully, and half slid, half ran down a final incline until my feet splashed in icy cold water and I found myself looking out on the dark expanse of a pond, the winter light drowning in its blackness. I turned, trying to find a way back, but the flashlights and cries drew nearer. I saw a light to my far left, another approaching through the trees to the right, and realised that I was surrounded. I took a deep breath, wincing at the pain as I tested my ankle. I drew a bead on the beam to my right, aimed low and fired. There was a cry of pain and the thrashing of a body falling. I fired twice more, straight ahead at the men approaching through the darkness, and heard a call to ‘Kill the lights, kill the lights’.

Automatic fire raked the bank as I plunged into the water, keeping the gun extended at shoulder level. The pond was not deep, I figured: even in the darkness, I could see a chain of rocks breaking the water about half a mile out, midway across its width at its narrowest point. But those rocks were deceptive; I was maybe twenty-five feet out from the bank, cutting diagonally across to the far shore, when the bed sloped and I lost my footing with a splash. I surfaced, gasping, and a flashlight scanned across me, then returned, freezing me in its beam. I took another deep breath and dived as shots dashed the surface of the water like raindrops. I could feel the slugs tearing by me as I descended, deeper and deeper, into the black waters, my lungs bursting and the cold so intense that it felt like a burning.

And then something tugged at my side and a numbness began to spread, slowly mutating into a new, bright red pain that spread fingers of hurt through my body. I twisted like a fish caught on a line as warm blood spilled from my side into the water. My mouth opened in agony, precious oxygen bubbling to the surface, and my gun slipped from my fingers. I panicked, scrambling madly upwards, only barely calming myself enough so as not to make a noise when I broke the water. I took a deep breath, keeping my face almost level with the surface, as the pain swept over me. There was numbness in my legs, in my arms and at the tips of my fingers. The gunshot wound burned, but not as badly as it would out of the water.

On the banks, figures moved, but only one light was visible now. They were waiting for me to appear, still fearful of the gun I no longer had. I took a breath and dived again, keeping barely below the surface as I swam, one handed, away from them. I did not rise again until my hand brushed the bottom of the pond in the shallows by the bank. Keeping my injured side raised, I dragged myself through the shallows, looking for a point where I could safely climb onto land. The automatic spoke again, but this time the bullets struck far behind me. Other shots came, but they were random, unfocused, hoping for a lucky hit. I kept moving onwards, my eyes on the deeper darkness ahead where the woods lay.

To my right, I saw a break in the bank and water falling over stones: the river. And that river, I knew, flowed through Dark Hollow. I could have headed for the farthest shore and the woods beyond, but if I fell down among the trees or lost my sense of direction, the best I could hope for would be death from freezing, because no one would know I was there except for Tony Celli’s men. If they found me, I would not have to worry about the cold for long.

I found a footing at the mouth of the river, where it flowed from the lake, but I did not stand, preferring instead to keep pulling myself along until an outcrop of trees masked me enough from the men behind to enable me to rise and move into the river itself. My side ached badly now, and every movement sent a fresh surge of pain through me. Water tumbled over a small bank of stones and it took me two attempts to gain a foothold. I pulled myself up and lay, once again, in the water as a flashlight beam moved by and shone in my direction before continuing on past the mouth. I counted to ten, then stumbled for the bank.

The snow had eased a little as the wind dropped. It was less driving now but still falling thickly, and the ground around me was completely white. The pain in my left side grew as I struggled through the deep snow, and I stopped against the trunk of a tree to examine the wound. There was a ragged hole in the back of my jacket, and the sweater and shirt beneath, with a small entry hole around the tenth rib, and a larger exit hole at the front at more or less the same level. The pain was bad but the wound was shallow: the distance between the entry and exit holes was little more than an inch. Blood dripped through my lingers and pooled on the snow below. That should have warned me, but I was scared and hurt and was not as careful as I should have been. I reached down, gasping at the pain it caused, and took two handfuls of snow. I packed the snow into the wounds and moved on, slipping and sliding on the bank but remaining close to the water so I would not lose my way. My teeth were chattering uncontrollably and my clothes clung damply to my body. My fingers burned from the icy water. I was nauseous with shock.

It was only when I had travelled some distance, stopping occasionally to rest against a tree, that I recalled where I was in relation to the town. Ahead of me and to my right, perhaps two hundred yards away, I could see the lights of a house. I heard the noise of a set of falls, saw before me the steel skeleton of a bridge and I knew where I was, and where I could go.

A light burned at the kitchen window of the Jennings house as I fell against the back door. I heard a noise from inside and Lorna’s voice, panicked, saying: ‘Who’s there?’ The curtains at the door parted a little and her eyes widened as she saw my face.

‘Bird?’ There came the sound of a key turning in the lock and then the support of the door was taken away from me and I fell forwards. As she helped me to a chair, I told her to call room six at the India Hill Motel and no one else, and then I closed my eyes and let the pain wash over me in waves.

Blood bubbled from the exit hole as Lorna cleaned the wound; the skin around it had been wiped down and she had removed some tattered pieces of cloth from within with a pair of sterilised tweezers. She passed a swab over the wound and the burning sensation came again, causing me to twist in the chair.

‘Hold still,’ she said, so I did. When she was done, she made me turn so that she could get at the entry hole. She looked a little queasy, but she kept going.

‘Are you sure you want me to do this?’ Lorna asked when she was done.

I nodded.

She took a needle and poured boiling water on it.

‘This will hurt a little,’ she said.

She was being optimistic. It hurt a lot. I felt tears spring from my eye at the sharpness of the pain as she put two stitches in each wound. It wasn’t textbook medical care, but I just needed something to get me through the next few hours. When she had finished, she took a pressure bandage and applied it, then took a longer roll and wound it around my abdomen.

‘It’ll hold until we can get you to a hospital,’ she said. She gave me a small, nervous smile. ‘Red Cross first-aid classes. You should be grateful I paid attention.’

I nodded to let her know that I understood. It was a clean wound. That was about the only good thing that could be said for high-velocity bullets: they didn’t deform on impact, tearing up the flesh, but continued on their merry way with most of their energy, and their jacket, intact.

‘You want to tell me what happened?’ asked Lorna. I stood up slowly and it was only then that I noticed the blood on the tiles.

‘Damn,’ I said. A wave of nausea swept over me, but I held on to the table and closed my eyes until it had passed. Lorna’s arm curled around my upper body.

‘You’ve got to sit down, Bird. You’re weak, and you’ve lost blood.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, as I pushed myself away from the table and walked unsteadily to the back door. ‘That’s what I’m worried about.’ I lifted the curtain and looked outside. It was still snowing but in the light from the kitchen I could see the telltale trail of red leading from the direction of the river to the door of the kitchen, the blood so thick and dark that it simply absorbed the falling snow.

I turned to Lorna. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come here.’

Her face was solemn, her lips pinched, and then she gave another small smile. ‘Where else could you have gone?’ she said. ‘I called your friends. They’re on their way.’

‘Where’s Rand?’

‘In town. They found that man, Billy Purdue, the one they’ve been looking for. Rand’s holding him until the morning. Then the FBI and a whole lot of other people will arrive to talk to him.’

That was why Tony Celli’s men were here. Word of Billy Purdue’s capture would have spread like wildfire through the agencies and police departments involved, and Tony Celli would have been listening. I wondered how quickly they had spotted me when they arrived. As soon as they saw the Mustang, they must have known and decided that it would be less trouble to kill me than to risk my interference.

‘The men who shot me, they want Billy Purdue,’ I said quietly. ‘And they’ll kill Rand and his men if they won’t hand him over.’

Something flickered on the window, like a falling star reflected. It took me a second to figure out what it was: a flashlight beam. I grabbed Lorna by the hand and pulled her to the front of the house. ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ I said. The hallway was dark, with a dining room leading off to the right. I stayed low, despite the pain in my side, and peered through the space beneath the window blinds into the front yard.

Two figures stood at the end of the yard. One held a shotgun. The other had his arm in a sling.

I came back to the hallway. Lorna took one look at my face and said: ‘They’re out front as well, aren’t they?’

I nodded.

‘Why do they want you dead?’

‘They think I’ll interfere, and they owe me for something that happened back in Portland. You must have a gun in the house. Where is it?’

‘Upstairs. Rand keeps one in the dresser.’

She led the way up the stairs and into their bedroom. It contained a large, country pine bed, with a yellow bedspread and yellow pillows. A matching country pine dresser stood across from a large closet. In one corner was a small bookshelf packed with books. A radio played softly in another corner, The Band singing ‘Evangeline’, with Emmylou Harris’s vocals snaking in and out of the verse and chorus. Lorna pulled socks, men’s underwear and T-shirts from a drawer and threw them on the floor until she found the revolver. It was a Charter Arms Undercover .38, with a three-inch barrel, a real lawman’s weapon. The five chambers were loaded, and there was a speed loader beside it, also fully packed. Close by, in a Propex holster, was a second gun, a Ruger Mark 2 with a tapered barrel. ‘Rand sometimes uses it for target shooting,’ said Lorna, pointing to an almost empty box of .22 Long Rifle rimfire cartridges in the corner of the drawer.

‘God bless the paranoid,’ I said. On the bedside cabinet stood a large plastic bottle of water, almost empty now. I steadied myself against the dresser. In the mirror facing me, my skin appeared deathly pale. There were smudges of hurt and exhaustion under my eyes and my face was pockmarked by glass cuts and smeared with sap and the old man’s blood. I could smell him on me. I could smell his dog.

‘Do you have tape, adhesive tape?’

‘Maybe downstairs, but there’s a roll of adhesive bandage in the bathroom cabinet. Will that do?’

I nodded, took the plastic bottle and followed her into the yellow-and-white tiled bathroom, loading the Ruger as I walked. She opened the cabinet and handed me the roll of inch-wide bandage. I emptied the last of the mineral water into the sink, inserted the slim barrel of the Ruger into the bottle and held it in place by wrapping the bandage repeatedly around it.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Lorna.

‘Making a suppressor,’ I replied. I figured that, if Celli’s men searched the house, I could take one of them out with the suppressed .22 if I had to and buy us five, maybe ten seconds of time. In a gunfight at close quarters, ten seconds is an eternity.

From below came the sound of the back door being kicked in, followed by the shattering of glass and the sound of the front door being opened. I tucked the .38 into my pants and slid the Ruger’s safety down.

‘Get in the tub and keep your head down,’ I whispered. She slipped off her sandals and climbed silently into the bathtub. I removed my shoes and left them on the tiled floor, then moved softly onto the landing and back into the bedroom. The radio was still playing, but The Band had now been replaced by Neil Young, his high, plaintive tones echoing around the room.

‘Don’t let it bring you down . . .’

I took up a position in the shadows by the window. The Ruger felt awkward in my hand after the Smith & Wesson, but at least it was a gun. I cocked it, and waited.

‘It’s only castles burning . . .’

I heard him on the stairs, watched his shadow moving ahead of him, saw it stop and then begin to move into the room, following the music. I tightened my grip on the trigger, and took a deep breath.

‘Just find someone who’s turning . . .’

He pushed the door open with his foot, waited a moment, then darted fully into the bedroom, his shotgun raised. I swallowed once, then exhaled.

‘. . . And you will come around.’

I pulled the trigger on the .22 and the top of the bottle exploded dully with a sound like a paper bag bursting. It was a clean shot, straight through the heart. I advanced and fired again as he stumbled back against the wall, then slid slowly down, leaving a dark, red trail across the cream paint. I caught the shotgun, a pistol-grip Mossberg, as it slipped from his grasp. Dropping the .22, I stepped over his body, my stocking feet soundless on the floor, and moved back into the hallway.

‘Terry?’ called a voice from below, and I saw a man’s hand, a .44 Magnum held in its grip, then his arm, his body, his face. He looked up and I took him in the head, the noise of the shotgun like a cannon’s roar. His features disappeared in a red haze and he tumbled backwards. I pumped and was already moving onto the stairs when a bullet struck the wall close to my left ear, a muzzle flashing in the darkness of the dining room. I fired, pumped, fired, pumped: two rounds into the darkness. Glass broke and plaster disintegrated, and no more shots came. The front door now stood ajar. What remained of its glass burst and wood splinters flew as more shots came from the kitchen. I stayed on the stairs, jammed the shotgun between the supports of the bannisters, turned it and fired the last round.

In the kitchen, a shadow detached itself from the wall and moved to the edge of the long hallway, firing a barrage of shots, sending wood singing from the bannisters and yellow dust clouding from the wall beside me, as his aim gradually grew closer and closer. I reached for the .38, yanked it from my belt and fired three shots. There was a cry of pain as, from the corner of my eye, I saw movement at the front door. It distracted me and, as I turned, the wounded gunman in the kitchen exposed himself fully and moved into the hall, his gun hand raised, the other hand holding onto his shoulder. He bared his teeth and then a noise came, louder than any gunshot I had ever heard before, and a hole appeared in his torso, big enough for a man to put his fists through if he chose. I thought I could see the kitchen through it, the glass on the floor, the sink unit, the edge of a chair. The gunman remained upright for a split second longer then tumbled to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.

At the door stood Louis, a huge Ithaca Mag-10 Road-blocker shotgun in his hands, the rubber stock still fast against his shoulder. ‘Man just had himself a 10-gauge handshake,’ he said. From the back of the house came more shots and the sound of a car accelerating fast. Louis jumped the corpse, with me close behind, and we headed through the ruined kitchen and into the yard. Angel stood at the gate, a Glock 9mm in his hand, and shrugged at us.

‘He got away, the ugly fuck. I didn’t even see him until he was in the car.’

‘Mifflin,’ I said, wearily.

Louis looked at me. ‘That freak still alive?’ He shook his head in wonder.

‘Maybe we could blast him into space and hope he burns up on re-entry,’ mused Angel.

I shivered in the cold, with only the bandages to cover my upper body. They were already soaked with red. My ears rang from the noise of the gunfire in the enclosed space of the house. Louis slipped off his overcoat and put it over my shoulders. Despite the cold, I felt like I was burning.

‘You know,’ said Angel. ‘You oughta be more careful. You’re gonna catch your death like that.’

The three of us started at a noise from behind, but only Lorna stood at the door. I walked up to her and placed a hand on her shoulder.

She wrapped her arms around herself, keeping her eyes on me and away from the bodies on the floor behind her. ‘What are you going to do now?’

‘We’re going back to Dark Hollow. I need Billy Purdue alive.’

‘And Rand?’

‘I’ll do what I can. You better call him, tell him what’s happened.’

‘I tried. Our phone is dead. They must have cut the wires before they came in.’

‘Go to a neighbour’s house and make the call. With a little luck, we’ll get to Dark Hollow shortly after.’ All of which assumed that the lines hadn’t been cut from outside town, in which case Dark Hollow itself would be cut off.

It was time to go, but Lorna raised a hand. ‘Wait,’ she said, and went back upstairs. When she returned, she had a thick cotton shirt, a sweater and a padded jacket from LL Bean, along with a box of cartridges for the .38. She helped me to put on the clothes, then touched my hand gently.

‘You take care, Bird.’

‘You too.’

Behind me, Angel started up the Mercury, Louis in the front seat. I climbed in back and we moved off. I looked back to see Lorna standing in her yard, watching us until we were gone from her sight.

Chapter Twenty Nine

The roads were deserted as we drove, the silence around us broken only by the purr of the Mercury’s engine and the soft thud of snowflakes impacting on the windshield. The pain in my side burned fiercely and, once or twice, I closed my eyes and seemed to lose a couple of seconds. There was blood on my fingers and an ochre stain on my pants from my groin to my lower thigh. I caught Louis taking careful looks back at me in the rear-view mirror, and I raised a hand to let him know that I was still with them. It might have looked more convincing if the hand hadn’t been covered in blood.

When we pulled into the parking lot in front of the police department there were two cruisers parked ahead of us, along with an orange ’74 Trans-Am that looked like it would take a miracle to start it and a couple of other vehicles that had remained stationary long enough for the snow to blur their lines, including a rental Toyota out of Bangor. There was no sign of Tony Celli, or any of his men.

We entered through the front door. Ressler stood behind the desk, examining the jack on the telephone. Behind him was a second, younger patrolman whom I didn’t recognise, probably another part-timer, and farther back again, standing across from the station house’s two holding cells, was Jennings himself. In a chair beside the desk sat Walter Cole. He looked shocked at my appearance. I was kind of unhappy about it myself.

‘The fuck do you want?’ said Jennings, causing Ressler to rise from his position and cast a wary eye first over Louis and Angel, then me. He didn’t look too pleased at the sight of our guns and his hand hovered near his own side arm. His eyes widened a little as he saw the marks on my face, and the blood on my clothing.

‘What’s wrong with the phones?’ I returned.

‘They’re out,’ Ressler said, after a moment’s pause. ‘All communications are down. Could be the weather.’

I moved past him to the cells. One was empty. In the other, Billy Purdue sat with his head in his hands. His clothes were filthy and his boots were stained with mud. He had the haunted, desperate look of an animal caught in a snare. He was humming to himself, like a little boy trying to block out the world around him. I didn’t ask Rand Jennings’s permission to talk to him. I wanted answers, and he was the only one who could provide them.

‘Billy,’ I said sharply.

He looked up at me. ‘I fucked up,’ he said, ‘didn’t I?’ Then he went back to humming his song.

‘I don’t know, Billy. I need you to tell me about the man you saw, the old man. Describe him to me.’

Jennings’s voice came from behind me. ‘Parker, get away from the prisoner.’

I ignored him. ‘You listening to me, Billy?’

He was rocking back and forth, still humming, his hands wrapped around his body ‘Yeah, I hear you.’ He screwed his face up in concentration. ‘It’s hard. I didn’t but hardly see him. He was . . . old.’

‘Try harder, Billy. Short? Tall?’

The humming started again, then stopped. ‘Tall,’ he said, during the pause. ‘Maybe as tall as me.’

‘Slim? Stocky?’

‘Thin. He was a thin guy, but lean, y’know?’ He stood, interested now, trying hard to picture the figure he had seen.

‘What about his hair?’

‘Shit, I don’t know from hair . . .’ He went back to his song, but now he added the words, only half forming some of them as if he were not entirely familiar with them.

‘Come all you fair and tender ladies

Take warning how you court your man . . .’

And I recognised the song at last: ‘Fair and Tender Ladies’. Gene Clark had sung it, with Carla Olson, although the song itself was much older. With the recognition came the remembrance of where I had heard it before: Meade Payne had been humming it as he walked back to his house.

‘Billy,’ I said. ‘Have you been out at Meade Payne’s place?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know no Meade Payne.’

I clutched the bars of the cell. ‘Billy, this is important. I know you were heading out to Meade. You won’t get him into trouble by admitting it.’

He looked at me and sighed. ‘I didn’t get out there. They picked me up before I even got into town.’

I spoke softly and distinctly, trying to keep the tension out of my voice. ‘Then where did you hear that song, Billy?’

‘What song?’

‘The song you’re humming, “Fair and Tender Ladies”. Where did you hear it?’

‘I don’t recall.’ He looked away, and I knew that he did recall it.

‘Try.’

He ran his hands through his hair, gripping the tangled locks at the back as if afraid of what his hands might do if he didn’t find some way to occupy them, and began to rock back and forth again. ‘The old man, the one I saw at Rita’s place, I think he might have been singing it, soft-like, to himself. I can’t get the damned thing out of my head.’ He started to cry.

I felt my throat go dry. ‘Billy, what does Meade Payne look like?’

‘What?’ he asked. He looked genuinely puzzled. From behind me, I heard Jennings say: ‘I’m warning you for the last time, Parker. Get away from the prisoner.’ His footsteps sounded as he walked toward me.

‘That’s Meade over there, in that picture on the wall,’ said Billy, standing up as he spoke. He pointed to the framed photograph of three men which hung on the wall near the front desk, a similar version of the picture that hung in the diner but with only two faces instead of three. I walked over to it, nudging Rand Jennings out of my way as I went. In the middle of the group was a young man in a US Marines uniform, his right arm around Rand Jennings, his left arm around an elderly man who grinned back with pride at the lens. A plaque below the photograph read ‘Patrolman Daniel Payne, 1967 – 1991’.

Rand Jennings. Daniel Payne. Meade Payne. Except the old man in the picture was short, about five-six, stooped and gentle-eyed, with a crown of white hair surrounding a bald head marked with liver spots. His face was mapped with a hundred lines.

He was not the man that I had met at the Payne house.

And slowly, tumblers began to fall in my mind.

Everybody had a dog. Meade Payne had mentioned it in his letter to Billy, but I had seen no dog when I was out there. I thought of the figure Elsa Schneider had seen climbing the drainpipe. An old man couldn’t climb a drainpipe, but a young man could. And I recalled what Rachel had said about Judith Mundy, about her being used as breeding stock.

Breeding stock.

Breeding a boy.

And I remembered old Saul Mann, his hands moving over the cards, swiftly palming the lady, or slipping the pea from under a soda pop cap to take five bucks from a sucker. He never pushed them, never hailed them or tried to force them to come, because he knew.

Caleb knew Billy would come back to Meade Payne. Maybe he got Meade’s name from Cheryl Lansing before he killed her, or it could have come up during Willeford’s investigations. However he found out, Caleb knew that if he took away all of the obstacles and all of the options, Billy would have to turn to Meade Payne.

Because Caleb understood what con men and hunters all understood: that, sometimes, it’s best to lay the bait, wait, and let the prey come to you.

I turned to find Jennings with his Coonan in his hand, pointing in my direction. I guessed that I had ignored him for just that little too long. ‘I’m tired of your shit, Parker. You and your buddies just drop your weapons and get on the ground,’ he said. ‘Now.’

Ressler, too, drew his weapon and, in the rear office, the younger policeman was already holding a Remington pump to his shoulder.

‘Looks like we just crashed a nervous cops’ convention,’ said Angel.

‘Jennings, I don’t have time for this,’ I said. ‘You have to listen to me –’

‘Shut up,’ said Jennings. ‘I’m telling you for the last time, Parker, put . . .’ Then he stopped suddenly and looked at the gun in my belt.

‘Where did you get that gun?’ he asked, and menace stepped softly into his voice like a gunman at a funeral. He eased back the hammer on his pistol and took three steps towards me, his gun now inches from my face. He had now recognised the jacket and sweater as well. Behind me, I heard Angel sigh loudly.

‘You tell me where you got that gun, dammit, or I’ll kill you.’

There was no good way to tell him what had taken place, so I didn’t even try. ‘I was ambushed on the road. The old man who lived out by the lake, John Barley, he’s dead. He died in my car. I was chased, I got to your house and Lorna gave me a gun. You may find some bodies in your living room when you get back but Lorna’s safe. Listen to me, Rand, the girl –’

Rand Jennings let the hammer fall gently, hit the safety and then pistol-whipped me with the barrel of the gun, catching me a hard blow on the left temple. I staggered backwards as he drew his arm back to hit me again, but Ressler intervened and caught his arm.

‘I’ll kill you, you fuck. I’ll kill you.’ His face was purple with rage, but there was grief there too, and the knowledge that things could never be the same again after this, that the shell had finally been broken and the life he had lived up to then was escaping even as we spoke, dissipating into the air like so much gas.

I felt blood running down my cheek and my head ached badly. In fact, I ached all over, but I figured that was the kind of day it was. ‘You may not get the chance to kill me. The men who ambushed me work for Tony Celli. He wants Billy Purdue.’

Jennings’s breathing slowed, and he nodded at Ressler, who cautiously released his hold on Jennings’s arm. ‘Nobody is taking my prisoner,’ said Jennings.

Then the lights went out, and all hell broke loose.

For a few moments, the station house was in total darkness. Then the emergency lighting kicked in, casting a dim glow from four fluorescents on the walls. From the cells, I heard Billy Purdue shouting: ‘Hey! Hey in there, what’s happening? Tell me what’s going on. What happened to the lights?’

From the rear of the station came the sound of three loud bangs, like hammer blows, followed by the sound of a door hitting a wall. But Louis was already moving, the huge Roadblocker still in his hand. I saw him pass Billy Purdue’s cell and wait at the corner, where the corridor leading down to the back door began. I felt him count three in his head, then he turned, stood to one side and fired two shots down the corridor. He moved out of sight, fired one more shot, then moved back into our line of vision. Jennings, Ressler and I ran to join him, while the young cop and Angel bolted the front door, Walter beside them.

In the corridor, two men lay dead, their faces concealed beneath black ski masks, both wearing black denims and short black jackets.

‘They picked the wrong camouflage gear,’ said Louis. ‘Ought to have checked the weather forecast.’ He pulled up one of the masks and turned to me: ‘Anyone you know?’

I shook my head and Louis released his hold on the mask. ‘Probably not worth knowing anyways,’ he said.

We advanced cautiously to the open door. Wisps of snow flew into the corridor, blown by the wind outside. Louis took a broom and used it to nudge the door closed, its lock splintered by the impact of the blows it had received. No more shots came. He then helped Ressler to carry a desk down the corridor from the office and they used it to block the door. We left Louis to watch the door and returned to the main office, where Angel and the young cop were each at one side of a window, trying to catch a glimpse of the men moving outside. There couldn’t have been many of them left, I figured, although Tony Celli was still among them.

Walter stood farther back. I noticed he had his old .38 in his hand. I was certain now that I knew where Ellen was, assuming she was still alive, but if I told Walter he would run hell-for-leather into Tony Celli’s men in an effort to get to her, and that would serve no purpose at all, apart from getting him killed.

A voice came. ‘Hey, inside. We don’t want nobody to get hurt. Just send Purdue out and we’ll be gone.’ It sounded like Mifflin.

Angel looked at me and grinned. ‘Just promise me, whatever happens, that you’ll finish off that gimpy fuck for good this time.’

I took up a position beside him and looked out into the darkness. ‘He is kind of irritating,’ I agreed. I turned around to find Louis beside me.

‘The door should hold. They try to come in again, we’ll hear ‘em before they can do any damage.’ He took a quick look out of the window. ‘Man, never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I feel like John Wayne.’

‘Rio Bravo,’ I said.

‘Whatever. That the one with James Caan?’

‘No, Ricky Nelson.’

‘Shit.’

Behind us, Jennings and Ressler seemed to be attemping to come up with a game plan. It was like watching two children trying to hold chopsticks with their toes.

‘You got a radio?’ I asked.

It was Ressler who acknowledged the question. ‘We’re getting white noise, nothing else.’

‘They’re blocking you.’

Jennings spoke. ‘We stay here, they’ll give up. This isn’t the frontier. They can’t just attack a police station and take a prisoner.’

‘Oh, but this is the frontier,’ I said. ‘And they can do what they want. They’re not going to leave without him, chief. Celli wants the money Purdue took from him, or his own people will kill him.’ I paused. ‘Then again, you could always give them the money.’

‘He didn’t have any money when we found him,’ said Ressler. ‘Didn’t even have a bag.’

‘You could ask him where it is,’ I suggested. I could see Billy Purdue looking at me curiously. Ressler looked at Jennings, shrugged and moved across to the cell. As he did so, Angel dived sideways while Louis pushed me to the floor. I cried out as my injured side hit the carpet.

‘Heads up!’ shouted Angel

The front window of the station house exploded inwards and bullets tore into the walls, the desks, the filing cabinets, the light fittings. They shattered glass partitions, blew up the watercooler and turned reports and files to confetti. Ressler fell to the ground, the back of his leg already ragged and red. Beside me, Angel rose and opened fire with the Glock. Louis’s Roadblocker thundered as he took up a position beside him.

‘We’re going to be torn apart here,’ shouted Angel. The firing from outside ceased. Behind us, there was only the sound of paper settling, glass crunching and water still dripping from the remains of the ruined cooler. I looked at Louis. ‘We could bring the fight to them,’ I said.

‘Could do,’ he said. ‘You up to it?’

‘Just about,’ I lied. On the floor, Jennings was cutting the leg of Ressler’s pants to get at the wound. ‘You got a window that leads out into somewhere dark, maybe concealed by a tree or something?’ I asked.

Jennings looked up at us and nodded. ‘Window of the men’s John, down that corridor. It’s right beside the wall, too narrow for anyone to fit through the space but someone could get onto the surrounding wall itself from there.’

‘Sounds good,’ said Louis.

‘What about me?’ said Angel.

‘You doing a bang-up job with that Glock,’ replied Louis.

‘You think?’

‘Yeah. You actually hit anybody I’ll start believing in God, but you sure scaring the hell out of Tony’s boys.’

‘You want help?’ said Walter. They were the first words he had spoken to me since the funeral in Queens.

‘Stay here,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve figured something out.’

‘About Ellen?’ The pain in his eyes made me wince.

‘It’s no good to any of us while Tony Celli’s men are out there. When this is done with, we’ll talk.’

We turned to leave, but it seemed like it was going to be one obstacle after another. Rand Jennings was still kneeling by Ressler. His gun was still in his hand. It was still pointing at me.

‘You’re not going anywhere, Parker.’

I looked at him, but continued walking. The muzzle of the gun followed me as I moved past him.

‘Parker . . .’

‘Rand,’ I said. ‘Shut up.’

Surprisingly, he did.

With that, we left them and headed to the men’s toilet. The window was frosted and opened out above a pair of sinks. We listened carefully for movement outside, then slipped the latch, pulled the window open and stepped back. There were no shots, and within seconds we were hauling ourselves over the wall and into a patch of waste ground behind the north wall of the station, the shells in Louis’s coat pockets jangling dully as he hit the ground. My side hurt, but by now I was past caring. I reached out for Louis as he prepared to move away.

‘Louis, the old man out at Meade Payne’s house is Caleb Kyle.’

He almost looked surprised. ‘What you say?’

‘He was waiting for Billy. If something happens to me, you take care of it.’

He nodded, then added. ‘Man, you be takin’ care of it yourself. They ain’t killed you yet, then they ain’t never gonna kill you.’

I smiled and we separated, slowly making our way in a pincer movement to the front of the station house, and Tony Celli’s men.

Chapter Thirty

I do not remember clearly much of what happened after I stumbled into the darkness. I recall that I was shivering constantly, but my skin was hot to the touch and my face was shiny with sweat. I had Jennings’s gun but it still felt strange and unfamiliar in my hand. I vaguely regretted the loss of the Smith & Wesson. I had killed with it and, in doing so, had killed something inside me, but it was my gun and its history over the previous twelve months had mirrored my own. Perhaps it was for the best that it now lay deep in the water.

Snow was falling and the world was mute, its mouth stifled with flakes. My feet sank deep as I followed the wall, the station house to my left, cold piercing my boots and numbing my toes. On the other side of the station, I knew, Louis was moving steadily, the big shotgun in his hands.

I stopped where the wall fell suddenly at the edge of the building, becoming instead a three-foot high surround for the parking lot. I glanced into the lot, saw no movement, and made for the cover of a late-model Ford, but my responses were sluggish and I made more noise than I should have. My hands now shook continuously, so much so that I had to reach up with my left and still the barrel of my gun as I went. The pain in my side was unrelenting. When I looked down, I saw fresh bloodstains on the sweater.

The snow was being urged on by a wind that seemed to have gathered renewed vigour as the night drew on. Great swaths of white were swept into my face, and flakes crowded on my tongue. I tried to find Louis’s dark form, but could see nothing beyond the lot. I knelt down, breathing heavily, sick to my stomach. For a moment, I thought that I might faint. I took a handful of snow and, crouching down carefully, rubbed it into my face. It didn’t make me feel much better, but the gesture saved my life.

Above me, and to my left, a shape moved behind one of the cruisers. I saw a black, patent leather shoe rise from the snow, flakes still clinging to the cuff of the dark pants above it, the tail of a blue overcoat dancing and waving in the wind. I rose, and the gun rose with me, up, up, until my head and the gun were above the hood of the Ford. And as the figure turned, registering the movement, I fired a single shot into his chest and watched dispassionately as he fell back into the drift that had built up against the wall. There he remained slumped, his chin resting on his breast, his blood turning the snow black.

And in that instant, something happened inside me. My world turned dark as the blood-drenched snow and my mind began to lose its general focus. The universe blurred at its edges, leaving me with only a pinhole of perspective. And as the world shifted and tilted I seemed to both feel and hear the sound of a blade entering flesh and then a noise like a melon being halved with a single blow. I followed the tiny lens of clarity across the wall and over the road, where a small bank sloped down to the trees. In the snow a man lay in a heap, his body split from chest to navel and snowflakes gathering in his ruined head. There were footprints around his body, deep and firm. The footsteps veered away from the body and headed towards town, following a second trail of prints whose footfalls were distorted by a limp. There was blood between the marks of Mifflin’s shoes. As I followed the tracks, more shots came from the direction of the station house, among them the sound of Louis’s gun.

I walked south for five, ten minutes, maybe a little more, before I found myself at the end of a residential street. A woman and a man, both elderly, wrapped tightly in overcoats and blankets, stood on their porch, the old man with one arm around the woman’s shoulders. There were no more shots now, but still they waited, and still they looked. Then they caught sight of me and both drew away instinctively, the man pulling his wife, or perhaps his sister, back through the open door and closing it behind them, all the time never taking his eyes from me. There were lights on in some of the other houses, and here and there curtains moved. I could see faces haloed with dim light, but no one else appeared.

I reached the corner of Spring Street and Maybury. Spring Street led on into the centre of town, but there was darkness at the end of Maybury, and the twin trails of prints moved in that direction. About halfway down the street, they separated, the distorted set moving on into the shadows, the second set veering north-west through the boundary between two properties. I guessed that Mifflin had got there first and found himself a position in the darkness from which he could view the street below him, and his pursuer had veered off to circle him when he guessed what was happening. I turned south and made my way around the backs of the houses until I came to the edge of a copse of trees where the western verge of the forest began. There I halted.

Perhaps thirty feet from me, at the edge of a pool of light shed by the last street lamp on the road, a cloud formed and then disappeared. Something moved in a startled, frightened gesture. A face scanned to the left, then to the right, and a figure peered from behind a tree. It was Mifflin, one arm still shrouded in a sling. As I drew nearer, shielded by the shadows and my footfalls silenced by the snow, I saw blood drip thickly from his fingers and join a growing pool at his feet. I was almost upon him when some small sound caused him to turn. His eyes grew wide and he rose swiftly, a knife flashing in his good hand. I shot him in the right shoulder and he spun, his feet twisting beneath him, falling on his back and loosing a loud cry of pain as he landed. I moved forwards quickly with the gun trained on him. He blinked hard and tried to focus as the light illuminated my features fully.

‘You,’ he said at last. He tried to rise but he had no strength. Only his head moved before the effort proved too much and it fell back into the snow. As I looked at him, I saw that a long gash had been torn across the front of his coat. Something shone wetly within.

‘Who did this?’ I said.

He tried to laugh, but it came out as a cough and blood sprayed from his mouth and flecked his teeth with red. ‘An old man,’ he said. ‘A fucking old man. He came out of nowhere, slashed me, then took Contorno before we even knew what was happening. I fucking ran, man. Fuck Contorno.’ He tried to move his head, to look back to the town. ‘He’s out there now, watching us. I can tell.’

Maybury was quiet, and nothing moved on the street, but he was right: there was a watchfulness about the darkness as if, somewhere in its depths, someone held his breath, and waited.

‘There’ll be help here soon,’ I said, although I was unsure even as I spoke that things had gone our way back at the police department. At least we had Louis, I thought, otherwise we’d all be dead. ‘We’ll get you to a doctor.’

He shook his head once. ‘No, no doctor,’ he said. He glared at me. ‘It ends here. Do it, you fuck, do it!’

‘No,’ I said softly. ‘No more.’

But he was not going to be denied. With all the strength left in his body, he reached into the breast of his coat, his teeth gritted with the effort. I reacted without thinking and killed him where he lay, but when I drew his hand from his coat it was empty. How could it be otherwise, when he had only a knife to defend himself?

And as I stood back something seemed to flicker in the darkness across the street, and then was gone.

I headed back to the police department and had almost reached it when a figure appeared to my right. I twisted towards it, but a voice said: ‘Bird, it’s me.’ Louis appeared from the shadows, his shotgun cradled in his arms like a sleeping child. There was blood spray on his face, and his coat was torn at the left shoulder.

‘You tore your coat,’ I said. ‘Your tailor’s going to shed a tear.’

‘It was last season’s anyways,’ said Louis. ‘Made me feel like a bum wearing it.’ He stepped closer to me. ‘You don’t look so good.’

‘You are aware that somebody shot me?’ I asked, in a pained tone.

‘Somebody always shooting you,’ he replied. ‘Weren’t somebody shooting at you, beating up on you or electrocuting you, you’d be listless. Think you can hold it together?’ His tone had changed, and I guessed there was bad news coming.

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘Billy Purdue’s gone. Looks like Ressler collapsed from his wounds and Billy dragged him by the cuff of his pants over to the cell while Angel and the others were distracted. Took his keys from his belt and a shotgun from the rack, then let himself out. Probably left the same way we did.’

‘Where was Angel? He OK?’

‘Yeah, Angel and Walter both. They was helping Jennings to reinforce the back door. Seems like the last of Tony’s guys made a second attempt on it after we left. Billy just walked out.’

‘After we’d helped him by clearing the way.’ I swore viciously, then told him about Mifflin and the dead man in the snow.

‘Caleb?’ asked Louis.

‘It’s him,’ I said. ‘He’s come for his boy, and he’s killing anyone who threatens him or his son. Mifflin saw him, but Mifflin’s dead.’

‘You kill him?’

‘Yes,’ I said. Mifflin had given me no choice but to kill him, yet there had been a kind of dignity to him in his last moments. ‘I have to get out to Meade Payne’s place.’

‘We got more immediate problems,’ said Louis.

‘Tony Celli.’

‘Uh-huh. It’s got to end here, Bird. His car’s parked maybe half a mile east, just on the edge of town.’

‘How do you know?’ I said, as we began walking in that direction.

‘I asked.’

‘You must have a very persuasive manner.’

‘I use kind words.’

‘That, and a big gun.’

His mouth twitched. ‘A big gun always helps.’

A black Lincoln Towncar stood on a side road, its lights dimmed, as we approached. Behind it were two other cars, big Fords, also with their lights dimmed, and a pair of black Chevy vans. In front of the Lincoln, a figure knelt in the snow, its head down, its hands tied behind its back. Before we could get any closer a gun cocked behind us and a voice said: ‘Put them down, boys.’

We did as we were told, but didn’t turn around.

‘Now walk on.’

The driver’s door of one of the Fords opened, and Al Z stepped out. As the interior light came on I saw another figure, fat and silver haired, dark glasses on his eyes and a cigarette in his hand. Then he faded into the gloom again as Al Z closed the door. He walked to the kneeling figure as three other men appeared from the second Ford and stood, waiting. The kneeling figure raised its head, and Tony Celli looked at us with dead eyes.

Al Z kept his hands stuffed firmly in the pockets of his grey overcoat and watched us as we approached. When we were ten feet from Tony Celli he raised a hand, and we stopped. Al Z looked almost amused.

Almost.

‘I asked you to stay out of our business,’ he said.

‘Like I told you, it was the “our business” part that I had a problem with,’ I replied. I felt myself swaying, and willed my body to remain still.

‘It’s your hearing you have a problem with. You should have picked somewhere else to start your moral crusade.’

He withdrew his right hand to reveal a Heckler & Koch 9mm, shook his head gently once or twice, said, ‘You fucking guys,’ in his soft, clipped tones, then shot Tony Celli in the back of the head. Tony slumped face first on the ground, his left eye still open and a hole where his right eye used to be. Then two men came forwards, one with a plastic sheet over his arms, and they wrapped Tony Celli and placed his body in the trunk of one of the cars. A third man ran a gloved hand through the snow until he found the bullet, then slipped it into his pocket along with the ejected case, and followed his comrades.

‘He didn’t have the girl,’ said Al Z. ‘I asked him.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘There’s someone else. He took a blade to two of Tony’s men.’

Al Z shrugged. The money was now his primary concern, not the ultimate fate of those who had chosen to follow Tony Celli. ‘The way I figure it, you’ve done worse than that,’ he said.

I didn’t respond. If Al Z decided to kill us for what we’d done to Tony Clean’s machine, there wasn’t a whole lot I could say that would make him change his mind.

‘We want Billy Purdue,’ he went on. ‘You hand him over, we’ll forget what happened here. We’ll forget that you killed men you shouldn’t have killed.’

‘You don’t want Billy,’ I replied. ‘You want your money, to replace what Tony lost.’

Al Z took his left hand from his pocket and moved it in a gesture that indicated: ‘Whatever’. Discussing the circumstances of the money’s retrieval was just an exercise in semantics as far as he was concerned.

‘Billy’s gone. He got away in the confusion, but I’ll find him,’ I said. ‘You’ll get your money, but I won’t hand him over to you.’

Al Z considered this, then looked to the figure in the car. The cigarette moved in a gesture of disregard, and Al Z turned back to us.

‘You have twenty-four hours. After that, even your friend here won’t be able to save you.’ Then he walked back to the car, the men around him dispersing into the various vehicles as he did so, and they drove away into the night, leaving only tyre tracks and a smear of blood and grey matter on the snow.

Chapter Thirty One

The station house looked like it had been attacked by a small army. Its front windows were almost entirely shattered. The door was pitted with bullet holes. Angel opened it as we arrived, and glass tinkled to the floor. Walter stood behind him. Behind us, some of the braver locals were approaching from the northern end of the town.

‘Now we go find Caleb,’ said Louis, but I shook my head.

‘There are going to be feds on their way here soon. I don’t want you or Angel here when they arrive.’

‘Bullshit,’ said Louis.

‘No, it isn’t, and you know it. If they find you here, no amount of explaining is going to get you out of trouble. Anyway, this part is personal for me and for Walter. Please, get going.’

Louis paused for a moment, as if he were going to say more, then nodded. ‘Tonto,’ he called. ‘We leavin’.’ Angel joined him and they headed for the Mercury together. Walter stood beside me as we watched them go. I reckoned I had about an hour left in me, maybe an hour and a half, before I collapsed.

‘I think I know where Ellen is,’ I said. ‘You ready to go get her?’

He nodded.

‘If she’s still alive, we’re going to have to kill to get her back.’

‘If that’s what it takes,’ he said.

I looked at him. I think he meant it.

‘Fine. You’d better drive. It hasn’t been my best day behind the wheel.’

We left the car a quarter of a mile beyond the Payne house and approached it from the rear, using the trees as cover. Two lights burned inside, one in a front room, the other in an upper bedroom. There was still no sign of life when we reached the verge of the property, where a small hut, its roof fitted with a sheet of corrugated iron, stood decaying slowly. There were footsteps in the snow that were not entirely obscured by the snowfall. Someone had been moving about recently, and the engine of the truck parked close by was still warm.

A smell came from the hut, the desolate odour of decaying meat. I moved to the corner, reached around and carefully slipped the bolt. It made a little noise, but not much. I opened the door and the smell became stronger. I looked at Walter, and saw hope die in his eyes.

‘Stay there,’ I said, and I slipped inside.

The smell was so strong now that it made my eyes water, and the stink was already clinging to my clothes. In one corner stood a long chest freezer, its corners eaten by rust which had left holes in its structure, its unconnected lead twisted around one support like a tail. I covered my mouth and lifted the lid.

Inside, a body lay curled. It was dressed in blue overalls, its feet bare, one hand behind its back with the rotting fingers splayed, the other obscured by the body. The face was bloated and the eyes were white. They were an old man’s eyes. The cold had preserved him somewhat, and despite the ravages that had been visited on his body I recognised him as Meade Payne, the man in the photo back at the diner, the man who died so Caleb Kyle could take his place and wait for Billy Purdue to come to him. Beneath his body, I saw a tail and black fur: the remains of his dog.

Behind me, I heard the door creak on its hinges and Walter entered slowly and fearfully, his eyes following my stare into the freezer. He could not keep the relief from his features when he saw the body of the old man.

‘This the guy in the picture?’ he asked.

‘That’s him.’

‘Then she’s still alive.’

I nodded, but I didn’t say anything. There were worse things than being killed and I think, in the dark, shuttered places of his mind, Walter knew that.

‘Front or back?’ I said.

‘Front,’ he replied.

I followed him outside and took a deep breath ‘Let’s do it.’

The house smelt sour when I opened the back door quietly and stepped into the large kitchen. There was a pine table with four matching chairs, the surface of the table covered with bread, some of it days out of date, and opened cartons of milk which even the temperature in the room had not prevented from going off. There were also some cold cuts, their edges curling and hard, and a dozen empty Mickey’s Big Mouths, along with half a bottle of cheap, grain whiskey. In one corner stood a black trash bag, from which the worst smells of all came. I reckoned it contained over a week’s worth of rotting food.

Through the open kitchen door I saw Walter enter the house, his nose wrinkling at the smell. He moved to his right, his back to the wall and his gun scanning the front dining room, which was connected to the kitchen by a closed door. I moved forwards and did the same with the TV room on the left side of the house. Both rooms were littered with discarded potato chip bags, more beer bottles and cans, and half-eaten food on dirty plates. The TV room also contained a green knapsack, all strapped up and ready to be taken away. I gestured to the stairs and Walter led, keeping to the wall to avoid any creaking steps, his gun high in a two-handed hold.

On the first landing was a bathroom that stank of urine and excrement, with damp, filthy towels lying across the toilet or piled on the floor by the door. Up two steps was the first bedroom, the bed unmade and more scattered food on the floor and dresser, but with no other indication that it had recently been occupied. There were no clothes, no shoes, no bags. It was in this bedroom that the light still burned.

Ellen Cole lay on the bed in the second bedroom, her hands tied to the bed-frame with ropes. There was a black rag tied over her eyes and ears, cotton padding stuffed beneath the band to muffle her hearing. Her mouth was taped, with a small hole torn in its centre. Two blankets covered her body. On a small bedside table sat a plastic water bottle.

Ellen didn’t move as we entered the room although, as we drew closer, she seemed to sense us. Walter reached out to touch her, but she drew away with a small whine of fear. I pulled back the blankets gently. She had been stripped to her underwear, but she didn’t appear to be hurt. I left them there as I searched the third bedroom. It, too, was empty, but the bed had obviously been slept in. When I returned to the second bedroom, Walter was gently holding Ellen’s head and working the blindfold free. She blinked, her eyes narrowed even in the comparative darkness of the room. Then she saw him and started to cry.

‘All empty,’ I said.

I walked to the bed and cut the ropes holding her hands with my pocketknife while Walter stripped away the tape. He held her in his arms as she cried, her body heaving against him. I found her clothes in a pile by the window.

‘Help her to get dressed,’ I told him. Ellen still had not spoken, but while Walter slipped her feet into her jeans I took her hand and drew her attention to me.

‘Ellen, there are just two of them, right?’

I took her a moment or two to respond, then she nodded. ‘Two,’ she said. Her voice was strained from lack of use, and her throat was dry. I gave her the water bottle and she took a small sip from the straw.

‘Did they hurt you?’

She shook her head, then began to cry again. I held her, then moved away as Walter put her sweater over her arms and drew it down. He put an arm around her shoulders and helped her from the bed, but her legs collapsed almost immediately.

‘It’s okay, honey,’ he said. ‘We’ll get you down.’

We were about to make our way down the stairs when, from below, there came the sound of the front door opening.

My stomach tightened. We listened for a moment or two, but no sound came from the stairs. I indicated to Walter that he should leave Ellen. If we tried to move her again, we would alert whoever was downstairs. She made a tiny, mewing sound as he drew away from her and tried to hold him back, but he kissed her gently on the cheek to reassure her, then followed me. The front door hung open, and snow billowed in from the darkness beyond. As we approached the final steps, a shadow moved in the kitchen to my right. I turned and put a linger to my lips.

A figure moved across the doorway, not looking in our direction. It was the young man I had met on my first visit to the house: Caspar, the man I believed to be Caleb’s son. I swallowed hard and moved forwards, my hand up to let Walter know that he should hang back near the front door. I counted three and stepped into the kitchen, my gun raised and pointing to my left.

The kitchen was empty, but the connecting door into the dining room was now open. I sprang back to warn Walter, just in time to see a shape move behind him and a knife gleam in the dimness. He saw the look on my face and was already moving when the knife came down and caught him in the left shoulder, causing his back to arch and his mouth to contort in pain. He brought his gun across his body and fired beneath his left arm, but the knife rose and caught him again, this time in a slashing movement across his back as he fell. Caspar pushed Walter hard from behind, and his head impacted with a loud smack on the end of the bannisters. He fell to his hands and knees, blood running down his face and his eyes heavy and dazed.

The young man turned to me now, with the knife held blade down in his right hand. There was a fresh bullet wound at his hip, staining his filthy chinos a deep red, but he did not seem to notice the pain. Instead, he curled himself and hurled his body down the hallway towards me. His mouth was open, his teeth were bared, and the knife was ready to strike.

I shot him in the chest as he ran and he stopped hard, his body teetering on the soles of his shoes. He put a hand to the wound and examined the blood, as if only then would he believe that he had been shot. He looked at me one more time, cocked his head to one side, and then made as if to move at me again. I fired a second shot. This time, the bullet took him straight through the heart and he fell back onto the bare floor, his head coming to rest close to where Walter was trying to raise himself onto his hands and knees. I think he was dead before he hit the ground. Above me, I heard Ellen cry out, ‘Daddy,’ and saw her appear at the top of the stairs, dragging herself across the steps towards him.

Ellen’s cry saved my life. As I turned to look at her, I heard a whistling sound at my back and saw a shadow move on the floor ahead of me. Something caught me a painful glancing blow to the shoulder, missing my head by inches, then the blade end of a spade swept by me. I grabbed at the wooden handle with my left hand, striking back with my right hand at the same time. I felt it connect with a jaw, then used the momentum of the spade to pull the man behind me forwards, using my right foot to trip him as he moved. He stumbled ahead of me, then fell to his knees. He stayed on all fours for a couple of seconds, then rose up and turned to face me, framed against the night by the open door behind him.

And I knew that this, at last, was Caleb Kyle. He was no longer posing as twisted and arthritic but stood tall and straight, his thin, wiry limbs encased in blue denims and a blue shirt. He was an old man, but I felt his strength, his rage, his capacity to inflict pain and hurt, as almost a physical thing. It seemed to radiate from him like heat and the gun in my hand wavered with the impact. His eyes were fierce and glowed with a deep, red fire, and I thought instinctively of Billy Purdue. I thought too of the young women left dangling from a tree and the pain they had endured at his hands, and of my grandfather, forever haunted by his dream of this man. Whatever pain Caleb himself had endured, he had returned it a hundredfold on the world around him.

Caleb looked at his dead boy lying close by his feet, then at me, and the intensity of his hatred rocked me on my heels. His eyes shone with a deep, malevolent intelligence. He had manipulated us all, evading capture for decades, and had almost succeeded in evading us again, but it had cost his son his life. Whatever happened after, some small measure of justice had been achieved for those girls left hanging from a tree, and for Judith Mundy, who had died, brutalised and alone, somewhere in the Great North Woods.

‘No,’ said Caleb. ‘No.’

It was only then that I began to realise why he had wanted so badly to beget a boy. I think if Judith Mundy had given birth to a daughter then his hatred would have led him to kill the child, and try again for a son. He wanted what so many men wanted: to see himself replicated upon the earth, to see the best part of himself live on beyond him. Except, in Caleb’s case, that which he desired to see continue was foul and vicious and would have consumed lives just as its father had before it.

Caleb moved forwards a step and I cocked the pistol. ‘Back up,’ I said. ‘Keep your hands where I can see them.’

He shook his head, but moved back a few steps, his hands held out from his sides. He didn’t look at me but kept his eyes fixed on his dead son. I advanced and stood beside Walter, who had raised himself to a sitting position, his uninjured right shoulder against the wall and blood streaking his face. He held his gun loosely in his right hand, but he was unable to focus and was obviously in severe pain. I wasn’t doing so good myself. By now, Ellen was halfway down the stairs, but I held up a hand and told her to stay back. I didn’t want her anywhere near this man. She stopped moving, but I could hear her crying.

In front of me, Caleb spoke again. ‘You’ll die for what you did to him,’ he spat. His attention was now fully directed at me. ‘I’ll tear you apart with my bare hands, then I’ll fuck the slut to death and leave the body in the woods for winter feed.’

I didn’t reply to his taunt. ‘Keep moving back, old man,’ I said. I didn’t want to be with him in an enclosed space; not in the hallway, not on the porch. He was dangerous. I knew that, even with the gun in my hand.

He retreated back again, then slowly moved down the steps until he stood in the yard, snow falling on his exposed head and his outstretched arms, light from the front room gilding him slightly. His hands were held two feet away from his side and I could see the butt of a gun protruding from the belt of his pants.

‘Turn around,’ I said.

He didn’t move.

‘Turn around or I’ll shoot you in the legs.’ I couldn’t kill him, not yet.

He glared at me, then turned to his right.

‘Reach around. Use your thumb and forefinger to take the butt of the gun, then throw it on the ground.’

He did as I told him, tossing the gun into some pruned rosebushes below the porch.

‘Now turn back again.’

He turned.

‘You’re him, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘You’re Caleb Kyle.’

He smiled, a grey, wintry thing like a blight on the living organisms around him. ‘It’s just a name, boy. Caleb Kyle is as good as any other.’ He spat again. ‘You afeared yet?’

‘You’re an old man,’ I replied. ‘It’s you who should be afraid. This world will judge you harshly, but not as harshly as the next.’

He opened his mouth, and the saliva made a clicking sound at the back of his teeth. ‘Your granddaddy was afeared of me,’ he said. ‘You look the spit of him. You look afeared.’

I didn’t reply. Instead, I tossed my head in the direction of the dead man on the floor behind me. ‘Your dead boy, was his mother Judith Mundy?’

He bared his teeth at me and made as if to move in my direction, and I fired a shot into the ground in front of him. It kicked up a flurry of dirt and snow, and brought him to a halt.

‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Answer me: did you take Judith Mundy?’

‘I swear I’ll see you dead,’ he hissed. He stared beyond me to where his son lay, the muscles in his jaw tightening as he gritted his teeth against the pain he felt. He looked like some strange, ancient demon, the tendons on his neck standing out like cables, his teeth long and yellowed. ‘I took it to breed on, after I thought my other boy was lost to me, lost down a shithouse sewer.’

‘It’. ‘Is she dead?’

‘Don’t see how it’s any of your business, but it bled to death after it had the boy. I let it bleed. It weren’t of no account anyhow.’

‘Now you’re back.’

‘I came back for my boy, the boy I thought was lost to me, the boy that bitch kept from me, the boy all them bitches and sonsofbitches kept from me.’

‘And you killed them all.’

He nodded proudly. ‘Them as I could find.’

‘And Gary Chute, the forestry worker?’

‘He had no business being there,’ he said. ‘I don’t spare them that cross my path.’

‘And your own grandson?’

His eyes flickered for a moment, and there was something close to regret in them. ‘It was a mistake. He got in the way.’ Then: ‘He was a sickly one. He wouldn’t have survived anyhow, not where we were going.’

‘You’ve got nowhere to go, old man. They’re taking back their forest. You can’t kill every man who comes in.’

‘I know places. There are always places a man can go.’

‘No, not anymore. There’s only one place you’re going.’

Behind me, I heard a movement on the stairs. Ellen had ignored me and gone to Walter. I guess I knew she would.

Caleb looked over my shoulder at her. ‘She your’n?’

‘No.’

‘Shit,’ he drawled. ‘I saw you, and I saw your granddaddy in you, but my eyes must have deceived me when I saw you in her.’

‘And were you going to “breed on her” too?’

He shook his head. ‘She was for the boy. For both my boys. Fuck you, mister. Fuck you for what you did to my boy.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘To hell with you.’ I raised the gun and pointed it at his head.

Behind me, I heard Walter groan and Ellen shouted ‘Bird’ in her strange, cracked voice. Something cold touched the back of my head. Billy Purdue’s voice said: ‘Your finger moves on that trigger, and it’ll be the last thing you ever do.’

I hesitated for an instant, then released my grip on the trigger and moved my finger away from the guard, raising the gun to show him that I had done so.

‘You know what to do with it,’ he said.

I slipped the safety and threw the gun onto the porch.

‘Down on your knees,’ he said.

The pain in my side was almost unbearable, but I knelt and he moved around me, Walter’s gun tucked into the waistband of his pants and a Remington shotgun in his hands. He stepped back so that he could keep us both in view.

Caleb Kyle looked upon him with admiration. After all that had happened, after all that he had done, his son had come back to him.

‘Kill him, boy,’ said Caleb. ‘He killed your half-brother, shot him like a dog. He was kin to you. Blood calls for blood, you know that.’

Billy’s face was a mass of confusion and harsh, conflicting emotions. The shotgun moved towards me. ‘Is that true? Was he kin to me?’ he said, unconsciously adopting the phrasing of the older man.

I didn’t reply. His nostrils flared and he brought the butt of the gun down in a glancing blow across my head. I fell forwards and from in front of me I heard Caleb laugh. ‘That’s it boy, kill the sonofabitch.’ Then his laughter subsided and, dazed as I was, I could see him move forwards a step.

‘I came back for you, son. Me and your brother, we came back to find you. We heard you was lookin’. We heard about the man that you hired to find me. Your momma hid you away from me, but I came lookin’ for you and now the lamb that was lost is found again.’

‘You?’ said Billy, in a soft, bewildered tone I had never heard from him before. ‘You’re my daddy?’

‘I’m your daddy,’ said Caleb, and he smiled. ‘Now you finish him off for what he did to your brother, the brother you never got to meet. You kill him for what he did to Caspar.’

I rose to my knees, my knuckles supporting my weight, and spoke: ‘Ask him what he did, Billy. Ask him what happened to Rita and Donald.’

Caleb Kyle’s eyes glittered brightly, and spittle shot from his mouth. ‘You shut up, mister. Your lies ain’t going to keep me from my boy.’

‘Ask him, Billy. Ask him where Meade Payne is. Ask him how Cheryl Lansing died, and her daughter-in-law, and her little granddaughters. You ask him, Billy.’

Caleb sprang onto the steps and his right foot kicked me hard in the mouth. I felt teeth break, and my mouth filled with pain and blood. I saw the foot come forward again.

‘Stop,’ said Billy. ‘Stop it. Let him be.’ I looked up and the pain in my mouth seemed as nothing to the agony etched in Billy Purdue’s face. A lifetime’s hurt burned in his eyes; a lifetime of abandonment, of loss, of fighting against a world that was always going to beat him in the end, of trying to live a life that had no past and no future, only a grinding, painful present. Now a veil had been pulled back, giving him a glimpse of what might have been, of what might still be. His father had come back for him, and all of the things he had done, all of the hurt this man had inflicted, he had done for love of his son.

‘Kill him, Billy, and be done with it,’ said Caleb, but Billy did not move, did not look at either of us, but stared into a place deep inside himself, where all that he had ever feared and all that he had ever wanted to be now twisted and coiled over each other.

‘Kill him, ’ hissed the old man, and Billy raised his gun. ‘You do as you’re told, boy. You listen to me. I’m your daddy.’

And in Billy Purdue’s eyes, something died. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You ain’t nothin’ to me.’

The shotgun roared and the barrel bucked in his hands. Caleb Kyle hunched over and tumbled back as if he had been struck hard in the pit of his stomach, except now there was only a dark, spreading stain in which viscera shone and intestines protruded like hydra heads. He fell over and lay on his back, his hands raised to try to cover the hole at the centre of his being, and then, slowly and agonisingly, he hauled himself to his knees and stared at Billy Purdue. His mouth hung open and blood bubbled over his lips. His face was filled with hurt and incomprehension. After all that he had done, after all that he had endured, his own boy had turned on him.

I heard the sound of another shell being jacked into the gun, saw Caleb Kyle’s eyes widen, and then his face disappeared and a warm, red hand obscured my vision, winter light dancing through it like thoughts through the mind of God.

From Dark Hollow the sound of sirens came, carrying on the cold air like the howls of wounded animals. It was 12.05 a.m., on December twelfth.

My wife and child had been dead for exactly one year.

Epilogue

It is December twentieth, and soon Christmas will be here. Scarborough is a place of ice cream fields and sugar-frosted trees, with coloured illuminations at the windows of the houses and holly wreaths on the doors. I have cut a fir in the yard, one of a crop my grandfather had planted in the year that he died, and have placed it in the front room of the house. I will add small white lights to it on Christmas Eve, as an act of remembrance for my child, so that if she is watching from the darkness among the trees she may see the lights and know that I am thinking of her.

Above the fireplace, there is a card from Walter and Lee and a small, gift-wrapped box from Ellen. Next to it is a postcard from the Dominican Republic, unsigned but with a message written by two different hands: ‘This communicating of a man’s self to his friends works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves.’ The quotation is not attributed. I will call them when they return, when the interest in the events that took place in Dark Hollow has begun to recede.

Finally, there is a notelet. I recognised the handwriting on the envelope when it arrived, and felt a kind of wrench in my heart as I opened it. The message said only: ‘Call me when you can.’ Beneath this line, she had written her home number and the number of her parents’ house. She had signed it. ‘Love, Rachel.’

I sit by my window and I think again of the winter dead, and of Willeford. He had been found two days before, and I felt the news of his loss with a sharp, savage pain. For a time, after he disappeared, I had half suspected the old detective. I had done him an injustice, and I think, in a way, I may have brought death upon him. His body had been buried in a shallow grave at the back of his property. According to Ellis Howard, he had been tortured before he died, but they had no indication of who might have been responsible. It could have been Stritch, I thought, or it could have been some of Tony Celli’s crew, but I think, deep down, that he died because of the old man, Caleb Kyle, and I guessed that maybe it was Caleb’s son Caspar who had killed him.

Willeford’s name had been attached to the search for Billy Purdue’s parents. It was his number that the old woman, Mrs Schneider, had called. If she could find him, then so could Caleb, and Caleb would have wanted to know all that Willeford knew. I hoped that the alcohol had dulled the pain, had made him a little less frightened as the end came. I hoped that he had told all that he knew as quickly as he could, but I knew that was probably a false hope. There had been something of the old honour, the old courage, about Willeford. He would not have given up the boy so easily. I had a vision of him, sitting in the Sail Loft, his whiskey and his beer chaser before him, an old man adrift in the present. He thought that it was progress that would spell his end, not some demon from the past that he had raised by doing a good turn for a lost, troubled young man.

And I think of Ricky, and the grinding noise that the trunk of the car made as it was opened, and the sight of him huddled beside the spare tyre, and how he had tried to save Ellen in the last moments before he died. I wish him peace.

Lorna Jennings had left Dark Hollow, and Rand. She called me to tell me she was leaving for Illinois to spend Christmas with her parents before looking for a new place to live. The machine took the message, although I was in the house when she called and could hear her voice against the soft whirring of the tape. I didn’t pick up. It was better that way, I thought.

And the man known as Caleb Kyle had been buried in a pauper’s grave to the north of a churchyard outside Augusta, alongside the boy he called Caspar, and prayers were said for their souls. A few days later, a man was seen at the graveside, a big man with pain in his eyes. He stood in the snow and looked at the shape of the newly disturbed earth beneath it. To his left, the sun faded from the sky, leaving streaks of red across the clouds. The man had a small pack on his back, and a piece of paper with the date of his court appearance written upon it by his bail bondsman. It was an appearance he would never make, and the bondsman knew it. Some of Al Z’s money had bought his complicity, and his silence. Al Z could take the loss, I thought.

This was the second cemetery that Billy Purdue had visited that day, and he would never be seen in it again. Billy Purdue would never be seen anywhere again. He would disappear, and no trace of him would ever be found.

But I think I knew where Billy was going.

He was going north.

Two days after the anniversary, I attended mass at St Maximilian Kolbe and listened as the names of Susan and Jennifer Parker were read out from the altar. The next day, the fifteenth, I visited the grave. There were fresh flowers laid upon it from Susan’s parents, I supposed. We had not spoken since her death, and I think they still blamed me for what had happened. I blamed myself, but I was making reparation. That was all that I could do. That was all any of us could do.

On the night of the fifteenth, they came to me. I awoke to the noise of them in the woods, sounds that were not sounds, but the slow joining of worlds within worlds, and I walked to my porch and stood, but I did not descend to them.

Among the shadows, behind the trees, a host of figures moved. At first, they might have been the light shifting as the wind stirred the branches, phantasms of hands and faces, for they were silent as they came forward for me to bear witness. They were young girls, and their dresses, once torn and stained with blood and dirt, were now intact and glowed from within, clinging to soft, slightly rounded stomachs that might, once before and long ago, have caused the young men to twist in the seats of their bright red cars, to whistle at them from their vinyl booths, to lean across and whisper to them, to playfully block their escape as they basked in the light from their eyes. The moonlight shone on the soft down of their arms, the gentle movement of their hair, the soft glistening at their lips; the girls in their summer dresses, gathered together in the new-fallen snow.

And farther behind them, others gathered: old women and old men, nightdresses fluttering like moths, stained dungarees war-painted with flecks and dashes of enamel, their gnarled hands traced with thick veins like the roots of the trees clinging to the earth beneath their feet. Young men stood aside for them, their hands joined with those of their women; there were husbands and wives, and young lovers, once violently separated, now together once more. Children moved between their legs, solemn and watchful, carefully making their way to the boundary of the woods; children with the broken bones in their fingers now miraculously restored, children who had been wrenched apart in dark, pain-filled cellars now restored to beauty, their eyes bright and knowing in the winter darkness.

A whole host of the dead gathered before me, their numbers stretching back into the shadows, back into the past. They did not speak but only watched me, and a kind of peace came over me, as if the hand of a young woman had touched me gently in the night, whispering to me that I should sleep.

for now

And beside the rail, where the old man had sat with his dog, where my mother had leaned, still beautiful despite the years, I stood and felt their eyes upon me. A small hand gripped mine and when I looked down I could almost see her, radiant and new, a small beauty revealed against the gentle luminosity of the snow.

And a hand touched my cheek and soft lips met mine, and a voice said:

sleep

And I slept.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A number of individuals assisted me with information and advice in the course of writing this book. I wish to particuarly thank Rodney Laughton, historian and proprietor of the Breakers Inn at Higgins Beach, Scarborough; Bullwinkle’s Guide Service in Greenville, Maine; Chief Duane Alexander of the Greenville Police Department; the Portland PD; and the staff of Qüark, Inc., in New York, for providing details of security technology. Bernd Heinrich’s A Year in the Maine Woods (Addison Wesley, 1994), The Coast of Maine by Louise Dickinson Rich (Down East Books, 1993) and Frank Portnoy’s Fiasco (Profi le, 1997) also proved especially valuable. Any mistakes are my own.

On a more personal note, I would like to thank Anne and Catherine, who read this book in its early stages, and Ruth, for her advice and support. I am indebted, as always, to my editor at Hodder & Stoughton, Sue Fletcher; her assistant, Rhiannon Davies; and, finally, to Kerith Biggs and my agent and friend, Darley Anderson.

THE KILLING KIND

John Connolly

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Hodder and Stoughton

An Hachette UK Company

Copyright © 2001 by John Connolly

The right of John Connolly to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 978 1 84894 033 8

Book ISBN 978 1 444 70470 9

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

For my Mother

Part One

And heavy is the tread

Of the living; but the dead

Returning lightly dance . . .

Edward Thomas,

‘Roads’

Prologue

This is a honeycomb world. It hides a hollow heart.

The truth of nature, wrote the philosopher Democritus, lies in deep mines and caves. The stability of what is seen and felt beneath our feet is an illusion, for this life is not as it seems. Below the surface, there are cracks and fissures and pockets of stale, trapped air; stalagmites and helactites and unmapped dark rivers that flow ever downward. It is a place of caverns and stone waterfalls, a labyrinth of crystal tumors and frozen columns where history becomes future, then becomes now.

For in total blackness, time has no meaning.

The present is imperfectly layered on the past; it does not conform flawlessly at every point. Things fall and die and their decay creates new layers, thickening the surface crust and adding another thin membrane to cover what lies beneath, new worlds resting on the remains of the old. Day upon day, year upon year, century upon century, layers are added and the imperfections multiply. The past never truly dies. It is there, waiting, just below the surface of the now. We stumble into it occasionally, all of us, through remembrance and recall. We summon to mind former lovers, lost children, departed parents, the wonder of a single day when we captured, however briefly, the ineffable, fleeting beauty of the world. These are our memories. We hold them close and call them ours, and we can find them when we need them.

But sometimes that choice is made for us: a piece of the present simply falls away, and the past is exposed like old bone. Afterward, nothing can ever be the same again, and we are forced to reassess the form of what we believed to be true in the light of new revelations about its substance. The truth is revealed by a misstep and the sudden sense that something beneath our feet rings false. The past bubbles out like molten lava, and lives turn to ash in its path.

This is a honeycomb world. Our actions echo through its depths.

Down here, dark life exists: microbes and bacteria that draw their energy from chemicals and natural radioactivity, older than the first plant cells that brought color to the world above. Every deep pool is alive with them, every mine shaft, every ice core. They live and die unseen.

But there are other organisms, other beings: creatures that know only hunger, entities that exist purely to hunt and kill. They move ceaselessly through the hidden cavities, their jaws snapping at the endless night. They come to the surface only when they are forced to do so, and all living things flee from their path.

They came for Alison Beck.

Dr. Beck was sixty and had been performing abortions since 1974, in the immediate aftermath of Roe v. Wade. As a young woman she had become involved in Planned Parenthood following the rubella epidemic of the early 1960s, when thousands of American women delivered babies with serious birth defects. She had progressed to outspoken membership of NOW and the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws before the changes for which they fought enabled her to establish her own clinic in Minneapolis. Since then, she had defied Joseph Scheidler’s Pro-Life Action Network, his sidewalk counselors and bullhorn mafia, and had stood head-to-head with Randall Terry when Operation Rescue tried to blockade her clinic in 1989. She had fought against the Hyde amendment of ’76, which cut off Medicaid funding for abortions, and had cried when the antiabortionist C. Everett Koop became U.S. surgeon general. On three separate occasions butyric acid had been injected into the clinic walls by antiabortion activists, forcing it to close its doors for days until the fumes had dispersed. The tires on her car had been slashed more times than she could count, and only the toughened glass on the clinic window had prevented an incendiary device housed in a fire extinguisher from burning the building to the ground.

But in recent years the strain of her profession had begun to tell, and she now looked much older than her years. In almost three decades, she had enjoyed the company of only a handful of men. David had been the first, and she had married him and loved him, but David was gone now. She had held him as he died, and she still kept the shirt he had worn on that day, the bloodstains like the shadows of dark clouds floating across its once pristine whiteness. The men who followed offered many excuses for departing, but in the end, all the excuses could be distilled down to one simple essence: fear. Alison Beck was a marked woman. She lived each day in the knowledge that there were those who would rather see her dead than have her continue her work, and few men were willing to stand beside such a woman.

She knew the statistics off by heart. There had been twenty-seven cases of extreme violence against American abortion clinics in the previous year, and two doctors had died. Seven abortion doctors and assistants had been killed in the preceding five years, and many others injured in bombings and shootings. She knew all of this because she had spent over twenty years documenting the incidences of violence, tracing common factors, establishing connections. It was the only way that she could cope with the loss of David, the only means she had of making sure that some small good might arise from the ashes of his death. Her research had been used to support the abortion providers’ successful invocation of the RICO antiracketeering laws in their fight against their opponents, alleging a nationwide conspiracy to close down clinics. It had been a hard-won victory.

But slowly, another, more indistinct pattern had begun to emerge: names recurring and echoing down the canyons of the years, figures half glimpsed in the shadows of violent acts. The convergences were visible in barely half a dozen cases, but they were there. She was certain of it, and the others seemed to agree. Together, they were drawing closer and closer to the truth.

But that brought with it its own dangers.

Alison Beck had an alarm system in her home, linked directly to a private security firm, and two armed guards were always on duty at the clinic. In her bedroom closet was an American Body Armor bullet-proof vest, which she wore while traveling to and from the clinic despite the discomfort involved. Its twin hung on a steel rail in her consulting room. She drove a red Porsche Boxster, her only true indulgence. She collected speeding tickets the way other people collected stamps.

Alison was a conservative dresser. She typically wore a jacket, unbuttoned, which hung to midthigh level. Beneath the jacket she wore pants with either a brown or a black belt, depending on the color of her ensemble. Attached to the belt was an Alessi holster containing a Kahr K40 Covert pistol. The Kahr held a five-round magazine of .40 caliber ammunition. She had tried using six rounds for a time but found that the extended magazine sometimes caught in the folds of her shirt. The Kahr had an abbreviated grip that suited her small hands, for Alison Beck was just a shade over five feet tall and slightly built. On a range, with the Kahr’s smooth double-action trigger pull, she could put the five rounds through the heart of a target thirty feet away in under ten seconds.

Her shoulder bag contained a can of Mace and a stun gun that could send a 20,000-volt charge through a man and leave him gasping and quivering on the ground like a stranded fish. While she had never fired her gun in anger, she had been forced to use the Mace on one occasion, when an antiabortion protester had tried to force his way into her home. Later she recalled, with a twinge of shame, that Macing him had felt good. She had chosen her life that she simply could not deny but the fear and the anger at the restrictions it had imposed upon her, and the hatred and animosity of those who despised her for what she did, had affected her in ways she did not like to admit. That November evening, with the Mace in her hand and the short, bearded man howling and crying in her hallway, all of that tension and anger had exploded from her through the simple action of pressing a plastic button.

Alison Beck was a familiar figure, a public figure. Although based in a leafy street in Minneapolis, she traveled twice each month to South Dakota, where she conducted a clinic at Sioux Falls. She appeared regularly on local and national television, campaigning against what she perceived as the gradual erosion of women’s right to choose. Clinics were closing, she had pointed out on the local NBC affiliate only the previous week, and now 83 percent of U.S. counties had no abortion services. Three dozen congressmen, a dozen senators, and four governors were openly antichoice. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church was now the largest private health care provider in America, and access to abortion services, sterilization, birth control, and in vitro fertilization was becoming increasingly limited.

Yet faced with a pleasant, soft-spoken young woman from Right to Life of Minnesota, who concentrated on the health issues for women and the changing attitudes of a younger generation that could not remember the days before Roe v. Wade, Alison Beck had begun to feel that it was she, the campaigning doctor, who now sounded strident and intolerant, and that perhaps the tide was turning more than she realized. She admitted as much to friends in the days before she died.

But something else had given her cause to feel afraid. She had seen him again, the strange red-haired man, and she knew that he was closing in on her, that he intended to move against her and the others before they could complete their work.

But they can’t know, Mercier had tried to reassure her. We’ve made no move against them yet.

I tell you, they know. I have seen him. And . . .

Yes?

I found something in my car this morning.

What? What did you find?

A skin. I found a spider skin.

Spiders grow by shedding their old exoskeleton and replacing it with a larger, less constraining hide, a process known as ecdysis. The discarded skin, or exuvium, that Alison Beck had found on the passenger seat of her car belonged to a Sri Lankan ornamental tarantula, Poecilotheria fasciata, a beautifully-colored but temperamental arachnid. The species had been specifically selected for its capacity to alarm: its body was about two and a half inches in length, marked with grays, blacks and creams, and its legspan was almost four inches. Alison had been terrified, and that terror had only slightly abated when she realized that the shape beside her was not a living, breathing spider.

Mercier had gone silent then, before advising her to go away for a time, promising that he would warn their associates to be vigilant.

And so Alison Beck had, in that final week, decided to take her first vacation in almost two years. She intended to drive to Montana, stopping off along the way for the first week, before visiting an old college friend in Bozeman. From there the two of them planned to travel north to Glacier National Park if the roads were passable, for it was only April and the snows might not yet have completely melted.

When Alison did not arrive on that Sunday evening as she had promised, her friend was mildly concerned. When, by late Monday afternoon, there was still no word from her, she phoned the headquarters of the Minneapolis PD. Two patrol officers, Ames and Frayn, familiar with Alison from previous incidents, were assigned to check on her home at 604 West Twenty-sixth Street.

Nobody answered the doorbell when they rang, and the garage entrance was firmly locked. Ames cupped his hands and peered through the glass into the hallway. In the open doorway leading into the kitchen were two suitcases, and a kitchen chair lay on the floor with its legs toward the wall. Seconds later, Ames had slipped on his gloves, broken a side window, and, his gun drawn, entered the house. Frayn made his approach from the rear and came in through the back door. The house was a small two-story, and it didn’t take the policemen long to confirm that it was empty. From the kitchen, a connecting door led into the garage. Through the frosted glass, the lines of Alison Beck’s Boxster were clearly visible.

Ames took a breath and opened the door.

The garage was dark. He removed his flashlight from his belt and twisted it on. For a moment, as its beam hit the car, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. He believed initially that the windshield was cracked, for thin lines spread in all directions across it, radiating from irregular clumps dotted like bullet holes across the glass and making it impossible to see the interior of the car. Then, as he drew nearer the driver’s door, he thought instead that the car had somehow filled with cotton candy, for the windows appeared to be coated on the inside with soft white strands. It was only when he shined the light close to the windshield and something swift and brown darted across the pane that he recognized it for what it was.

It was spiderweb, its filaments gilded with silver by the flashlight’s beam. Beneath the weave, a dark shape sat upright in the driver’s seat.

‘Dr. Beck?’ he called. He placed his gloved hand on the door handle and pulled.

There came the sound of sticky strands breaking, and the silken web flailed at the air as the door opened. Something dropped at Ames’s feet with a soft, barely audible thud. When he looked down, he saw a small brown spider making its way across the concrete floor toward his right foot. It was a recluse, about half an inch in length, with a dark groove running down the center of its back. Instinctively, Ames raised his steel-capped shoe and stamped down on it. For a brief moment he wondered if his action constituted a destruction of evidence, until he looked into the interior of the car and realized that, for all its effect, he might just as easily have stolen a grain of sand from the seashore or pilfered a single drop of water from the ocean.

Alison Beck had been stripped to her underwear and tied to the driver’s seat. Gray masking tape had been wrapped around her head, covering her mouth and anchoring her to the seat. Her face was swollen almost beyond recognition, her body mottled with decay, and there was a square of exposed red flesh just below her neck where a section of skin had been removed.

Yet the disintegration of her body was masked by the fragments of web that covered her in a tattered white veil, her face almost concealed beneath the dense pockets of thread. All around her, small brown spiders moved on arched legs, their palps twitching as they sensed the change in the air; others remained huddled in dark recesses, orange egg sacs dangling beside them like bunches of poisonous fruit. The husks of drained insects speckled the snares, interspersed with the bodies of spiders that had been preyed upon by their own kind. Fruit flies flitted around the seats, and Ames could see decaying oranges and pears on the floor by Alison Beck’s feet. Elsewhere invisible crickets chirped, part of the small ecosystem that had been created inside the doctor’s car, but most of the activity came from the compact brown spiders that busied themselves around Alison Beck’s face, dancing lightly across her cheeks and her eyelids, continuing the construction of the irregular webs that coated the inside of the car with thread.

But there was one last surprise for those who found Alison Beck. When the masking tape was removed from her face and her mouth was opened during the autopsy, small black-and-red balls tumbled from her lips and lay like misshapen marbles on the steel table. There were more lodged in her thorax and trapped beneath her tongue. Some had caught in her teeth, crushed as her mouth convulsed when the biting began.

Only one was still alive: it was discovered in her nasal cavity, its long, black legs curled in upon itself. When the tweezers gripped the spherical abdomen it struggled feebly against the pressure, the red hourglass on its underside like the relic of a life suddenly stopped.

And in the harsh light of the autopsy room, the eyes of the black widow gleamed like small, dark stars.

This is a honeycomb world. History is its gravity.

In the far north of Maine, figures move along a road, silhouetted against the early-morning sun. Behind them are a bulldozer and a cherry picker and two small trucks, the little convoy making its way along a county road toward the sound of lapping water. There is laughter and swearing in the air, and plumes of cigarette smoke rising to join with the morning fog. There is room for these men and women in the bed of the truck but they choose instead to walk, enjoying the feel of the ground beneath their feet, the clean air in their lungs, the camaraderie of those who will soon perform hard physical labor together but are grateful for the sun that will shine gently upon them, the breeze that will cool them in their work, and the friendship of those who walk by their side.

There are two groups of workers here. The first are line clearers, jointly employed by the Maine Public Service Company and the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company to cut back the trees and brush alongside the road. This is work that should have been completed in the autumn, when the ground was dry and clear, not at the end of April, when frozen, compacted snow still lay on the high ground and the first buds had already begun to sprout from the branches. But the line clearers have long since ceased to wonder at the ways of their employers and are simply content that there is no rain falling upon them as they traipse along the blacktop.

The second group consists of workmen employed by one Jean Beaulieu to clear vegetation from the banks of St. Froid Lake in preparation for the construction of a house. It is simply coincidence that both groups of men have taken to the same stretch of road on this bright morning, but they mingle as they go, exchanging comments about the weather and lighting one another’s cigarettes.

Just outside the little town of Eagle Lake, the workers turn west onto Red River Road, the Fish River flowing at their left, the red brick edifice of the Eagle Lake Water and Sewage District building to their right. A small wire fence ends where the river joins St. Froid Lake, and houses begin to appear along the bank. Through the branches of the trees, the glittering surface of the water can be glimpsed.

Soon the noise of their passing is joined by another sound. On the ground above them, shapes appear from wooden kennels: gray animals with thick fur and keen, intelligent eyes. They are wolf hybrids, each chained to an iron ring outside its kennel, and they bark and howl as the men and women walk below them, their chains jangling as they strain to reach the intruders. The breeding of such hybrids is relatively common in this part of the state, a regional peculiarity surprising to strangers. Some of the workers stop and watch, one or two taunting the beasts from the safety of the road, but the wiser ones move on. They know that it is better to let these animals be.

The work commences, accompanied by a chorus of engines and shouts, of picks and shovels breaking the ground, of chain saws tearing at branches and tree trunks; and the smells of diesel fumes and sweat and fresh earth mingle in the air. The sounds drown out the rhythms of the natural world: the wood frogs clearing their throats, the calls of hermit thrushes and winter wrens, the crying of a single loon out on the water.

The day grows short, the sun moving west across the lake. On Jean Beaulieu’s land a man removes his yellow hard hat, wipes his brow on his sleeve, and lights a cigarette before making his way back to the bulldozer. He climbs into the cab and slowly starts to reverse, the harsh buzz of the engine adding its guttural notes to the sounds of men and nature. The howling from above begins again, and he shakes his head wearily at the man in the cherry picker nearby.

This ground has lain undisturbed for many years. The grass is wild and long, and the bushes cling tenaciously to the hard earth. There is no reason for the man in the cab to doubt that the bank upon which he stands is solid, until an alien clamor intrudes on the rustling of the evergreens and the sawing of the clearers. The bulldozer makes a high, growling din, like an animal in panic, as huge quantities of earth shift. The howling of the hybrids increases in intensity, some turning in circles or wrenching again at their chains as they register the new sounds.

The roots of a white spruce are exposed as a section of the riverbank collapses, and the tree topples slowly into the water, sending ripples across the still surface of the lake. Beside it, the bulldozer seems to hang suspended for a moment, one track still clinging to the ground, the other poised over empty space, before it tumbles sideways, its operator leaping to safety, falling away from the vehicle as it turns and lands with a loud splash in the shallows. Men drop their tools and start running. They scramble to the new verge, where brown water has already rushed in to exploit the sudden expansion of the banks. Their colleague raises himself, shivering and soaked, from the lake, then grins embarrassedly and raises a hand to let them know that he is okay. The men crowd the bank, looking at the stranded bulldozer. One or two cheer desultorily. To their left, another huge slab of earth crumbles and falls into the water, but they hardly notice, their efforts are so focused on helping their comrade out of the cold water.

But the man in the cherry picker is not looking at the bulldozer, or at the arms reaching out to pull the drenched figure from the lake. He stands unmoving, the chain saw in his hands, and looks down on the newly exposed bank. His name is Lyall Dobbs. He has a wife and two children and, at this moment, he desperately wishes that he were with them. He desperately wishes he were anywhere but staring down at the banks of St. Froid, at the darkened bones revealed among the tree roots and broken earth, and the small skull slowly disappearing beneath the cold waters of the lake.

‘Billy?’ he shouts.

Billy Laughton, the foreman of the clearing crew, turns away from the crowd of men by the shore, shaking his head in bemusement.

‘Yeah?’

There is no further word for a moment. Lyall Dobbs’s throat is suddenly too dry to produce a sound. He swallows, then resumes.

‘Billy, we got a cemetery round here?’

Laughton’s brow furrows. From his pocket he takes a folded map and examines it briefly. He shakes his head at the other man.

‘No,’ he replies simply.

Dobbs looks at him, and his face is pale.

‘Well, we do now.’

This is a honeycomb world.

You must be careful where you step.

And you must be ready for what you might find.

Chapter One

It was spring, and color had returned to the world.

The distant mountains were transforming, the gray trees now cloaking themselves in new life, their leaves a faded echo of fall’s riot. The scarlets of the red maples were dominant, but they were being joined now by the greenish-yellow leaves of the red oaks, the silver of the bigtooth aspens, and the greens of the quaking aspens, the birches, and the beeches. Poplars and willows, elms and hazelnuts were all bursting into full bloom, and the woods were ringing with the noise of returning birds.

I could see the woods from the gym at One City Center, the tips of the evergreens still dominating the landscape amid the slowly transforming seasonals. Rain was falling on the streets of Portland, and umbrellas swarmed on the streets below, glistening darkly like the carapaces of squat black beetles.

For the first time in many months, I felt good. I was in semiregular employment. I was eating well, working out three or four days each week, and Rachel Wolfe was coming up from Boston the next weekend, so I would have someone to admire my improving physique. I hadn’t had bad dreams for some time. My dead wife and my lost daughter had not appeared to me since the previous Christmas, when they touched me amid the falling snow and gave me some respite from the visions that had haunted me for so long.

I completed a set of military presses and laid the bar down, sweat dripping from my nose and rising in little wisps of steam from my body. Seated on a bench, sipping some water, I watched the two men enter from the reception area, glance around, then fix on me. They wore conservative dark suits with somber ties. One was large, with brown wavy hair and a thick mustache, like a porn star gone to seed, the bulge of the gun in the cheap rig beneath his jacket visible to me in the mirror behind him. The other was smaller, a tidy, dapper man with receding, prematurely graying hair. The big man held a pair of shades in his hand while his companion wore a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses with square frames. He smiled as he approached me.

‘Mr. Parker?’ he asked, his hands clasped behind his back.

I nodded and the hands disengaged, the right extending toward me in a sharp motion like a shark making its way through familiar waters.

‘My name is Quentin Harrold, Mr. Parker,’ he said. ‘I work for Mr. Jack Mercier.’

I wiped my own right hand on a towel to remove some of the sweat, then accepted the handshake. Harrold’s mouth quivered a little as my still-sweaty palm gripped his, but he resisted the temptation to wipe his hand clean on the side of his trousers. I guessed that he didn’t want to spoil the crease.

Jack Mercier came from money so old that some of it had jangled on the Mayflower. He was a former U.S. senator, as his father and grandfather had been before him, and lived in a big house out on Prouts Neck overlooking the sea. He had interests in timber companies, newspaper publishing, cable television, software, and the Internet. In fact, he had interests in just about anything that might ensure the Merciers’ old money was regularly replenished with injections of new money. As a senator he had been something of a liberal and he still supported various ecological and civil rights groups through generous donations. He was a family man; he didn’t screw around as far as anyone knew and he had emerged from his brief flirtation with politics with his reputation enhanced rather than tarnished, a product as much of his financial independence as of any moral probity. There were rumors that he was planning a return to politics, possibly as an independent candidate for governor, although Mercier himself had yet to confirm them.

Quentin Harrold coughed into his palm, then used it as an excuse to take a handkerchief from his pocket and discreetly wipe his hand. ‘Mr. Mercier would like to see you,’ he said, in the tone of voice he probably reserved for the pool cleaner and the chauffeur. ‘He has some work for you.’

I looked at him. He smiled. I smiled back. We stayed like that, grinning at each other, until the only options were to speak or start dating. Harrold took the first option.

‘Perhaps you didn’t hear me, Mr. Parker,’ he said. ‘Mr. Mercier has some work for you.’

‘And?’

Harrold’s smile floundered. ‘I’m not sure what you mean, Mr. Parker.’

‘I’m not so desperate for work, Mr. Harrold, that I run and fetch every time somebody throws a stick.’ This wasn’t entirely true. Portland, Maine, wasn’t such a wellspring of vice and corruption that I could afford to look down my nose at too many jobs. If Harrold had been better looking and a different sex, I’d have fetched the stick and then rolled onto my back to have my belly rubbed if I thought it might have earned me more than a couple of bucks.

Harrold glanced at the big guy with the mustache. The big guy shrugged, then went back to staring at me impassively, maybe trying to figure out what my head would look like mounted over his fireplace.

Harrold coughed again. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’ He seemed to have trouble forming the words, as if they were part of someone else’s vocabulary and he was just borrowing them for a time. I waited for his nose to start growing or his tongue to turn to ash and fall to the floor, but nothing happened. ‘We’d be grateful if you’d spare the time to talk to Mr. Mercier,’ he conceded with a wince.

I figured that I’d played hard to get for long enough, although I still wasn’t sure that they’d respect me in the morning. ‘When I’ve finished up here, I can probably call out and see him,’ I said.

Harrold craned his neck slightly, indicating that he believed he might have misheard me. ‘Mr. Mercier was hoping that you could come with us now, Mr. Parker. Mr. Mercier is a very busy man, as I’m sure you’ll understand.’

I stood up, stretched, and prepared to do another set of presses. ‘Oh, I understand, Mr. Harrold. I’ll be as quick as I can. Why don’t you gentlemen wait downstairs, and I’ll join you when I’m done? You’re making me nervous. I might drop a weight on you.’

Harrold shifted on his feet for a moment, then nodded.

‘We’ll be in the lobby,’ he said.

‘Enjoy,’ I replied, then watched them in the mirror as they walked away.

I took my time finishing my workout, then had a long shower and talked about the future of the Pirates with the guy who was cleaning down the changing room. When I figured that Harrold and the porn star had spent enough time looking at their watches, I took the elevator down to the lobby and waited for them to join me. The expression on Harrold’s face, I noticed, was oscillating between annoyance and relief.

Harrold insisted that I accompany him and his companion in their Mercedes, but despite their protests I opted to follow them in my own Mustang. It struck me that I was becoming more wilfully perverse as I settled into my mid-thirties. If Harrold had told me to take my own car, I’d probably have chained myself to the steering column of the Mercedes until they agreed to give me a ride.

The Mustang was a 1969 Boss 302, and replaced the Mach 1 that had been shot to pieces the previous year. The 302 had been sourced for me by Willie Brew, who ran an auto shop down in Queens. The spoilers and wings were kind of over the top, but it made my eyes water when it accelerated, and Willie had sold it to me for $8,000, which was about $3,000 less than a car in its condition was worth. The downside was that I might as well have had ARRESTED ADOLESCENCE painted on the side in big black letters.

I followed the Mercedes south out of Portland and on to U.S. 1. At Oak Hill, we turned east and I stayed behind it at a steady thirty all the way to the tip of the Neck. At the Black Point Inn, guests sat at the picture windows, staring out with drinks in their hands at Grand Beach and Pine Point. A Scarborough PD cruiser inched along the road, making sure that everybody stayed under thirty and nobody unwanted hung around long enough to spoil the view.

Jack Mercier had his home on Winslow Homer Road, within sight of the painter’s former house. As we approached, an electronically operated barrier opened and a second Mercedes swept toward us from the house, headed for Black Point Road. In the backseat sat a small man with a dark beard and a skullcap on his head. We exchanged a look as the two cars passed each other, and he nodded at me. His face was familiar, I thought, but I couldn’t place it. Then the road was clear and we continued on our way.

Mercier’s home was a huge white place with landscaped gardens and so many rooms that a search party would have to be organized if anybody got lost on the way to the bathroom. The man with the mustache parked the Mercedes while I followed Harrold through the large double front doors, down the hallway, and into a room to the left of the main stairs. It was a library, furnished with antique couches and chairs. Books stretched to the ceiling on three walls; on the east-facing wall, a window looked out on the grounds and the sea beyond, a desk and chair beside it and a small bar to the right.

Harrold closed the door behind me and left me to examine the spines on the books and the photographs on the wall. The books ranged from political biographies to historical works, mainly examinations of the Civil War, Korea, and Vietnam. There was no fiction. In one corner was a small, locked cabinet with a glass front. The books it contained were different from those on the open shelves. They had titles like Myth and History in the Book of Revelation; Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry; The Book of Revelation: Apocalypse and Empire; and The Apocalyptic Sublime. It was cheerful stuff: bedtime reading for the end of the world. There were also critical biographies of the artists William Blake, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Jean Duvet, in addition to facsimile editions of what appeared to be medieval texts. Finally, on the top shelf were twelve almost identical slim volumes, each bound in black leather with six gold bands inset on the spine in three equidistant sets of two. At the base of each spine was the last letter of the Greek alphabet: Ω, for omega. There was no key in the lock, and the doors stayed closed when I gave them an experimental tug.

I turned my attention to the photographs on the walls. There were pictures of Jack Mercier with various Kennedys, Clintons, and even a superannuated Jimmy Carter. Others showed Mercier in an assortment of athletic poses from his youth: winning races, pretending to toss footballs, and being carried aloft on the shoulders of his adoring teammates. There were also testimonials from grateful universities, framed awards from charitable organizations headed by movie stars, and even some medals presented by poor but proud nations. It was like an underachiever’s worst nightmare.

One, more recent, photograph caught my eye. It showed Mercier sitting at a table, flanked on one side by a woman in her sixties wearing a smartly tailored black jacket and a string of pearls around her neck. To Mercier’s right was the bearded man who had passed me in the Mercedes, and beside him was a figure I recognized from his appearances on prime-time news shows, usually looking triumphant at the top of some courthouse steps: Warren Ober, of Ober, Thayer & Moss, one of Boston’s top law firms. Ober was Mercier’s attorney, and even the mention of his name was enough to send most opposition running for the hills. When Ober, Thayer & Moss took a case they brought so many lawyers with them to court that there was barely enough room for the jury. Even judges got nervous around them.

Looking at the photograph, it struck me that nobody in it seemed particularly happy. There was an air of tension about the poses, a sense that some darker business was being conducted and the photographer was an unnecessary distraction. There were thick files on the table before them, and white coffee cups lay discarded like yesterday’s roses.

Behind me the door opened and Jack Mercier entered, laying aside on the table a sheaf of papers speckled with bar charts and figures. He was tall, six-two or six-three, with shoulders that spoke of his athletic past and an expensive gold Rolex that indicated his present status as a very wealthy man. His hair was white and thick, swept back from a perma-tanned forehead over large blue eyes, a Roman nose, and a thin, smiling mouth, the teeth white and even. I guessed that he was sixty-five by now, maybe a little older. He wore a blue polo shirt, tan chinos, and brown Sebagos. There was white hair on his arms, and tufts of it peeked out over the collar of his shirt. For a moment the smile on his face faltered as he saw my attention focused on the photograph, but it quickly brightened again as I moved away from it. Meanwhile, Harrold stood at the door like a nervous matchmaker.

‘Mr. Parker,’ said Mercier, shaking my hand with enough force to dislodge my fillings. ‘I appreciate you taking the time to see me.’ He waved me to a chair. From the hallway, an olive-skinned man in a white tunic appeared with a silver tray and set it down. Two china cups, a silver coffeepot, and a matching silver creamer and sugar bowl jangled softly as the tray hit the table. The tray looked heavy, and the servant seemed kind of relieved to be rid of it.

‘Thank you,’ said Mercier. We watched as he left, Harrold behind him. Harrold gently closed the door, giving me one last pained look before he departed, then Mercier and I were alone.

‘I know a lot about you, Mr. Parker,’ he began, as he poured the coffee and offered me cream and sugar. He had an easy, unaffected manner, designed to put even the most fleeting of acquaintances at ease. It was so unaffected that he must have spent years perfecting it.

‘Likewise,’ I replied.

He frowned good-naturedly. ‘I don’t imagine you’re old enough to have ever voted for me.’

‘No, you retired before it became an issue.’

‘Did your grandfather vote for me?’

My grandfather Bob Warren had been a Cumberland County sheriffs deputy and had lived in Scarborough all his life. My mother and I had come to stay with him after my father died. In the end, he outlived his own wife and daughter, and I had buried him one autumn day after his great heart failed him at last.

‘I don’t believe he ever voted for anyone, Mr. Mercier,’ I said. ‘My grandfather had a natural distrust of politicians.’ The only politician for whom my grandfather ever had any regard was President Zachary Taylor, who never voted in an election and didn’t even vote for himself.

Jack Mercier grinned his big white grin again. ‘He might have been right. Most of them have sold their souls ten times over before they’re even elected. Once it’s sold, you can never buy it back. You just have to hope that you got the best price for it.’

‘And are you in the business of buying souls, Mr. Mercier, or selling them?’

The grin stayed fixed, but the eyes narrowed. ‘I take care of my own soul, Mr. Parker, and let other people do as they wish with theirs.’

Our special moment was broken by the entrance of a woman into the room. She wore a deceptively casual outfit of black pants and a black cashmere sweater, and a thin gold necklace gleamed dully against the dark wool. She was about forty-five, and wore it well. Her hair was blond, fading to gray in places, but there was a hardness to her features that made her seem less beautiful than she probably thought she was.

This was Mercier’s wife, Deborah, who had some kind of permanent residency in the local society pages. She was a Southern belle, from what I could recall, a graduate of the Madeira School for Girls in Virginia. The Madeira’s principal claim to fame, apart from producing eligible young women who always used the correct spoon and never spat on the sidewalk, was that its former headmistress Jean Harris had shot dead her lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower, in 1980, after he left her for a younger woman. Dr. Tarnower was best known as the author of The Scarsdale Diet, so his death seemed to provide conclusive evidence that diets could be bad for your health. Jack Mercier had met his future wife at the Swan Ball in Nashville, the most lavish social occasion in the South, and had introduced himself to her by buying her a ’55 Coupe de Ville with his AmEx card at the postdinner auction. It was, as someone later commented, love at first swipe.

Mrs. Mercier held a magazine in her hand and assumed a look of surprise, but the expression didn’t reach her eyes.

‘I’m sorry, Jack. I didn’t know you had company.’ She was lying, and I could see in Mercier’s face that he knew she was lying, that we both knew. He tried to hide his annoyance behind the trademark smile but I could hear his teeth gritting. He rose, and I rose with him.

‘Mr. Parker, this is my wife, Deborah.’

Mrs. Mercier took one step toward me, then waited for me to cross the rest of the floor before extending her hand. It hung limply in my palm as I gripped it, and her eyes bored holes in my face while her teeth gnawed at my skull. Her hostility was so blatant it was almost funny.

‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ she spat, before turning her glare on her husband. ‘I’ll talk to you later, Jack,’ she said, and made it sound like a threat. She didn’t look back as she closed the door.

The temperature in the room immediately rose a few degrees, and Mercier regained his composure. ‘My apologies, Mr. Parker. Tensions in the house are a little high. My daughter Samantha is to be married early next month.’

‘Really. Who’s the lucky man?’ It seemed polite to ask.

‘Robert Ober. He’s the son of my attorney.’

‘At least your wife will get to buy a new hat.’

‘She’s buying a great deal more than a hat, Mr. Parker, and she is currently occupied by the arrangements for our guests. Warren and I may have to take to my yacht to escape the demands of our respective wives, although they are such excellent sailors themselves that I imagine they will insist upon keeping us company. Do you sail, Mr. Parker?’

‘With difficulty. I don’t have a yacht.’

‘Everybody should have a yacht,’ remarked Mercier, his good humor returning in earnest.

‘Why, you’re practically a socialist, Mr. Mercier.’

He laughed softly, then put his coffee cup down and arranged his features into a sincere expression. ‘I hope you’ll forgive me for prying into your background, but I wanted to find out about you before I requested your help,’ he continued.

I acknowledged his comments with a nod. ‘In your position, I’d probably do the same,’ I said.

He leaned forward and said gently: ‘I’m sorry about your family. It was a terrible thing that happened to them, and to you.’

My wife, Susan, and my daughter, Jennifer, had been taken from me by a killer known as the Traveling Man while I was still a policeman in New York. He had killed a lot of other people too, until he was stopped. When I killed him, a part of me had died with him.

Over two years had passed since then, and for much of that time the deaths of Susan and Jennifer had defined me. I had allowed that to be so until I realized that pain and hurt, guilt and regret, were tearing me apart. Now, slowly, I was getting my life back together in Maine, back in the place where I had spent my teens and part of my twenties, back in the house I had shared with my mother and my grandfather, and in which I now lived alone. I had a woman who cared for me, who made me feel that it was worth trying to rebuild my life with her beside me and that maybe the time to begin the process had now arrived.

‘I can’t imagine what such a thing must be like,’ continued Mercier. ‘But I know someone who probably can, which is why I’ve asked you here today.’

Outside, the rain had stopped and the clouds had parted. Behind Mercier’s head, the sun shone brightly through the window, bathing the desk and chair in its glow and replicating the shape of the glasswork on the carpet below. I watched as a bug crawled across the patch of bright light, its tiny feelers testing the air as it went.

‘His name is Curtis Peltier, Mr. Parker,’ said Mercier. ‘He used to be my business partner, a long time ago, until he asked me to buy him out and followed his own path. Things didn’t work out so well for him; he made some bad investments, I’m afraid. Ten days ago his daughter was found dead in her car. Her name was Grace Peltier. You may have read about her. In fact, I understand you may have known her once upon a time.’

I nodded. Yes, I thought, I knew Grace once upon a time, when we were both much younger and thought that we might, for an instant, even be in love. It was a fleeting thing, lasting no more than a couple of months after my high school graduation, one of any number of similar summer romances that curled up and died like a leaf as soon as autumn came. Grace was pretty and dark, with very blue eyes, a tiny mouth, and skin the color of honey. She was strong a medal-winning swimmer and formidably intelligent, which meant that despite her looks, a great many young men shied away from her. I wasn’t as smart as Grace but I was smart enough to appreciate something beautiful when it appeared before me. At least I thought I was. In the end, I didn’t appreciate it, or her, at all.

I remembered Grace mostly because of one morning spent at Higgins Beach, not far from where I now sat with Jack Mercier. We stood beneath the shadow of the old guest house known as the Breakers, the wind tossing Grace’s hair and the sea crashing before us. She had missed her period, she told me over the phone: five days late, and she was never late. As I drove down to Higgins Beach to meet her, my stomach felt like it was slowly being crushed in a vise. When a fleet of trucks passed by at the Oak Hill intersection, I briefly considered flooring the accelerator and ending it all. I knew then that whatever I felt for Grace Peltier, it wasn’t love. She must have seen it in my face that morning as we sat in silence listening to the sound of the sea. When her period arrived two days later, after an agonizing wait for both of us, she told me that she didn’t think we should see each other anymore, and I was happy to let her go. It wasn’t one of my finer moments, I thought, not by a long shot. Since then, we hadn’t stayed in touch. I had seen her once or twice, nodding to her in bars or restaurants, but we had never really spoken. Each time I saw her I was reminded of that meeting at Higgins Beach and of my own callow youth.

I tried to recall what I had heard about her death. Grace, now a graduate student at Northeastern in Boston, had died from a single gunshot wound in a side road off U.S. 1, up by Ellsworth. Her body had been discovered slumped in the driver’s seat of her car, the gun still in her hand. Suicide: the ultimate form of self-defense. She had been Curtis Peltier’s only child. The story had merited more coverage than usual only because of Peltier’s former connections to Jack Mercier. I hadn’t attended the funeral.

‘According to the newspaper reports, the police aren’t looking for anyone in connection with her death, Mr. Mercier,’ I said. ‘They seem to think Grace committed suicide.’

He shook his head. ‘Curtis doesn’t believe that Grace’s wound was self-inflicted.’

‘It’s a common enough reaction,’ I replied. ‘Nobody wants to accept that someone close might have taken his or her own life. Too much blame accrues to those left behind for it to be accommodated so easily.’

Mercier stood, and his large frame blocked out the sunlight. I couldn’t see the bug anymore. I wondered how it had reacted when the light disappeared. I guessed that it had probably taken it in stride, which is one of the burdens of being a bug: you pretty much have to take everything in stride, until something bigger stamps on you or eats you and the matter becomes immaterial.

‘Grace was a strong, smart girl with her whole life ahead of her. She didn’t own a gun of any kind and the police don’t seem to have any idea where she might have acquired the one found in her hand.’

‘Assuming that she killed herself,’ I added.

‘Assuming that, yes.’

‘Which you, in common with Mr. Peltier, don’t.’

He sighed. ‘I agree with Curtis. Despite the views of the police, I think somebody killed Grace. I’d like you to look into this matter on his behalf.’

‘Did Curtis Peltier approach you about this, Mr. Mercier?’

Jack Mercier’s gaze shifted. When he looked at me again, something had cloaked itself in the darkness of his pupils.

‘He came to visit me a few days ago. We discussed it, and he told me what he believed. He doesn’t have enough money to pay for a private investigator, Mr. Parker, but thankfully, I do. I don’t think Curtis will have any difficulty in talking this over with you, or allowing you to look into it further. I will be paying your bill, but officially you will be working for Curtis. I would ask you to keep my name out of this affair.’

I finished my coffee and laid the cup down on the saucer. I didn’t speak until I had marshaled my thoughts a little.

‘Mr. Mercier, I didn’t mind coming out here but I don’t do that kind of work anymore.’

Mercier’s brow furrowed. ‘But you are a private investigator?’

‘Yes sir, I am, but I’ve made a decision to deal only with certain matters: white-collar crime, corporate intelligence. I don’t take on cases involving death or violence.’

‘Do you carry a gun?’

‘No. Loud noises scare me.’

‘But you used to carry a gun?’

‘That’s right, I used to. Now, if I want to disarm a white-collar criminal, I just take away his pen.’

‘As I told you, Mr. Parker, I know a great deal about you. Investigating fraud and petty theft doesn’t appear to be your style. In the past you have involved yourself in more . . . colorful matters.’

‘Those kinds of investigations cost me too much.’

‘I’ll cover any costs you may incur, and more than adequately.’

‘I don’t mean financial cost, Mr. Mercier.’

He nodded to himself, as if he suddenly understood. ‘You’re talking moral, physical cost, maybe? I understand you were injured in the course of some of your work.’

I didn’t reply. I’d been hurt, and in response I had acted violently, destroying a little of myself each time I did so, but that wasn’t the worst of it. It seemed to me that as soon as I became involved in such matters, they caused a fissure in my world. I saw things: lost things, dead things. It was as if my intervention drew them to me, those who had been wrenched painfully, violently from this life. Once I had thought it was a product of my own incipient guilt, or an empathy I felt that passed beyond feeling and into hallucination.

But now I believed that they really did know, and they really did come.

Jack Mercier leaned against his desk, opened his drawer, and drew a black, leather-bound folder from within. He wrote for a few seconds, then tore the check from the folder.

‘This is a check for ten thousand dollars, Mr. Parker. All I want you to do is talk to Curtis. If you think that there’s nothing you can do for him, then the money is yours to keep and there’ll be no hard feelings between us. If you do agree to look into this matter, we can negotiate further remuneration.’

I shook my head. ‘Once again, it’s not the money, Mr. Mercier—,’ I began.

He raised a hand to stop me. ‘I know that. I didn’t mean to offend you.’

‘No offense taken.’

‘I have friends in the police force, in Scarborough and Portland and farther afield. Those friends tell me that you are a very fine investigator, with very particular talents. I want you to utilize those talents to find out what really happened to Grace, for my sake and for that of Curtis.’

I noticed that he had placed himself above Grace’s father in his appeal, and once again I was conscious of a disparity between what he was telling me and what he knew. I thought too of his wife’s unveiled hostility, my sense that she had known exactly who I was and why I was in her house, and that she bitterly resented my presence there. Mercier proffered the check, and in his eyes I saw something that I couldn’t quite identify: grief maybe, or even guilt.

‘Please, Mr. Parker,’ he said. ‘Talk to him. I mean, what harm can it do?’

What harm can it do? Those words would come back to haunt me again and again in the days that followed. They came back to haunt Jack Mercier as well. I wonder if he thought of them in his final moments as the shadows drew around him, and those he loved were drowned in redness.

Despite my misgivings I took the check. And in that instant, unbeknownst to us both, a circuit was completed, sending a charge through the world around and beneath us. Far away, something broke from its hiding place beneath the dead layers of the honeycomb. It tested the air, probing for the disturbance that had roused it, until it found the source.

Then, with a lurch, it began to move.

The Search for Sanctuary: Religious Fervor in the State of Maine and the Disappearance of the Aroostook Baptists

Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier, submitted posthumously in accordance with the requirements of the Masters Sociology Program, Northeastern University

To understand the reasons for the formation and subsequent disintegration of the religious group known as the Aroostook Baptists, it is important to first understand the history of the state of Maine. To comprehend why four families of well-intentioned and not unintelligent people should have followed an individual such as the Reverend Faulkner into the wilderness, never to be seen again, one must recognize that for almost three centuries, men such as Faulkner have gathered followers to them in this state, often in the face of challenges from larger churches and more orthodox religious movements. It may be said, therefore, that there is something in the character of the state’s inhabitants, some streak of individualism dating back to pioneer times, that has led them to be attracted to preachers like the Reverend Faulkner.

For much of its history, Maine was a frontier state. In fact, from the time when the first Jesuit missionaries arrived, in the seventeenth century, to the mid part of the twentieth century, religious groups regarded Maine as mission territory. It provided fertile, if not always profitable, ground for itinerant preachers, unorthodox religious movements, and even charlatans for the best part of three hundred years. The rural economy did not allow for the maintenance of permanent churches and clergymen, and religious observance was oftentimes a low priority for families who were undernourished, insufficiently clothed, and lacking proper shelter.

In 1790, General Benjamin Lincoln observed that few of those in Maine had been properly baptized, and there were some who had never taken Communion. The Reverend John Murray of Boothbay wrote, in 1763, of the inhabitants’ ‘inveterate habits of vice and no remorse’ and thanked God that he had found ‘one prayerful family, and a humble professor at the head of it’. It is interesting to note that the Reverend Faulkner was given to quoting this passage of Murray’s in the course of his own sermons to his congregations.

Itinerant preachers ministered to those who lacked their own churches. Some were outstanding, frequently having trained at York or Harvard. Others were less praiseworthy. The Reverend Mr. Jotham Sewall of Chesterville, Maine, is reported to have preached 12,593 sermons in 413 settlements, mostly in Maine, between 1783 and 1849. By contrast, the Reverend Martin Schaeffer of Broad Bay, a Lutheran, comprehensively cheated his flock before eventually being run out of town.

Orthodox preachers found it difficult to achieve a foothold in the state, Calvinists being particularly unwelcome as much for their unyielding doctrines as for their associations with the forces of government. Baptists and Methodists, with their concepts of egalitarianism and equality, found more willing converts. In the thirty years between 1790 and 1820, the number of Baptist churches in the state rose from seventeen to sixty. They were joined, in time, by Free Will Baptists, Free Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Unitarians, Universalists, Shakers, Millerites, Spiritualists, Sandfordites, Holy Rollers, Higginsites, Free Thinkers, and Black Stockings.

Yet the tradition of Schaeffer and other charlatans still remained: in 1816, the ‘delusion’ of Cochranism grew up around the charismatic Cochrane in the west of the state, ending with charges of gross lewdness being leveled at its founder. In the 1860s, the Reverend Mr. George L. Adams persuaded his followers to sell their homes, stores, even their fishing gear, and to pass the money on to him to help found a colony in Palestine. Sixteen people died in the first weeks of the Jaffa colony’s foundation in 1866. In 1867, amid charges of excessive drinking and misappropriation of funds, Adams and his wife fled the short-lived Jaffa colony, Adams later reemerging in California, where he tried to persuade people to invest money in a five cent savings bank until his secretary exposed his past.

Finally, at the turn of this century, the evangelist Frank Weston Sandford founded the Shiloh community in Durham. Sandford is worthy of particular attention because the Shiloh community clearly provided a model for what the Reverend Faulkner attempted to achieve more than half a century later.

Sandford’s cultlike sect raised huge sums of money for building projects and overseas missions, sending sailing vessels filled with missionaries to remote areas of the planet. His followers were persuaded to sell their homes and move to the Shiloh settlement at Durham, only thirty miles from Portland. Scores of them later died there from malnutrition and disease. It is a testament to the magnetism of Sandford, a native of Bowdoinham, Maine, and a graduate of the divinity school at Bates College, Lewiston, that they were willing to follow him and to die for him.

Sandford was only thirty-four when the Shiloh settlement was officially dedicated, on October 2, 1896, a date apparently dictated to Sandford by God himself. Within the space of a few years, and funded largely by donations and the sale of his followers’ property, there were over $200,000 worth of buildings on the land. The main building, Shiloh itself, had 520 rooms and was a quarter of a mile in circumference.

But Sandford’s increasing megalomania – he claimed that God had proclaimed him the second Elijah – and his insistence on absolute obedience began to cause friction. A harsh winter in 1902-3 caused food supplies to shrink, and the community was swept by smallpox. People began to die. In 1904 Sandford was arrested and charged on five counts of cruelty to children and one charge of manslaughter as a result of that winter’s depredations. A guilty verdict was later overturned on appeal.

In 1906 Sandford sailed for the Holy Land, taking with him a hundred of the faithful in two vessels, the Kingdom and the Coronet. They spent the next five years at sea, sailing to Africa and South America, although their conversion technique was somewhat unorthodox: the two ships cruised the coast while Sandford’s followers prayed continuously for God to bring the natives to him. Actual contact with potential converts was virtually nil.

The Kingdom was eventually wrecked off the west coast of Africa, and when Sandford tried to force the crew of the Coronet to sail on to Greenland, they mutinied, forcing him to return to Maine. In 1911 Sandford was sentenced to jail for ten years on charges of manslaughter arising from the deaths of six crewmen. Released in 1918, he set up home in Boston and allowed subordinates to take care of the day-to-day running of Shiloh.

In 1920, after hearing testimony of the terrible conditions being endured by the children of the community, a judge ordered their removal. Shiloh disintegrated, its membership falling from four hundred to one hundred in an incident that became known as the Scattering. Sandford announced his retirement in May 1920 and retreated to a farm in upstate New York, from which he attempted, unsuccessfully, to rebuild the community. He died, aged eighty-five, in 1948. The Shiloh community still exists today, although in a very different form from its original inception, and Sandford is still honored as its founder.

It is known that Faulkner regarded Sandford as a particular inspiration: Sandford had shown that it was possible to build an independent religious community using donations and the sale of the assets of true believers. It is therefore both ironic and strangely apt that Faulkner’s attempt at establishing his own religious Utopia, close to the small town of Eagle Lake, should have ended in bitterness and acrimony, near starvation and despair, and finally the disappearance of twenty people, among them Faulkner himself.

Chapter Two

The next morning I sat in my kitchen shortly after sunrise, a pot of coffee and the remains of some dry toast lying beside my PowerBook on the table. I had a report to make to a client that day, so I put Jack Mercier to the back of my mind. Outside, rainwater dripped from the beech tree that grew by my kitchen window, beating an irregular cadence on the damp earth below. There were still one or two dry, brown leaves clinging to the tree’s branches but they were now surrounded by green buds, old life preparing to make way for the new. A nuthatch puffed out its red breast and sang from its nest of twigs. I couldn’t see its mate, but I guessed that he was close. There would be eggs laid in the nest before the end of May and soon a whole family would be waking me in the mornings.

By the time the main news commenced on WPXT, the local Fox affiliate, I had finished a pretty satisfactory draft and ejected the disk so that I could print from my desktop. The news led with the latest report on the remains unearthed at St. Froid Lake the day before. Dr. Claire Gray, the state’s newly appointed ME, was shown arriving at the scene, wearing fireman’s boots and a set of overalls. Her dark hair was long and curly, and her face betrayed no emotion as she walked down to the lakeshore.

Sandbag levees had already been built to hold back the waters, and the bones now rested in a layer of thick mud and rotting vegetation, over which a tarpaulin had been stretched to protect them from the elements. A preliminary examination had been conducted by one of the state’s two hundred part-time MEs, who confirmed that the remains were human, and the state police had then e-mailed digital images of the scene to the ME’s office in Augusta so that she and her staff would be familiar with the terrain and the task they faced. They had already alerted the forensic anthropologist based at the University of Maine at Orono: she was due to travel up to Eagle Lake later that day.

According to the reporter, the danger of further weakening the bank and the possibility of damaging the remains had ruled out the use of a backhoe to uncover the bodies and it was now likely that the task would have to be completed entirely by hand, using shovels and then small Marshalltown trowels in a painstaking, inch-by-inch dig. As the reporter spoke, the howling of the wolf hybrids was clearly audible from the slopes above her. Maybe it had to do with the sound from the live broadcast, but the howls seemed to have a terrible, keening tone to them, as if the animals somehow understood what had been found on their territory. The howling increased in intensity as a car pulled up at the edge of the secured area and the deputy chief ME, known to one and all as Dr. Bill, climbed out to talk to the trooper. In the back of his car sat his two cadaver dogs: it was their presence that had set off the hybrids.

A mobile crime scene unit from the state police barracks at Houlton stood behind the reporter, and members of CID III, the Criminal Investigation Division of the state police with responsibility for Aroostook, mingled with state troopers and sheriff’s deputies in the background. The reporter had obviously been talking to the right people. She was able to confirm that the bodies had been underground for some time, that there were children’s bones among them, and there was damage to some of the visible skulls consistent with the kind of low-velocity impact caused by a blunt instrument. The transportation of the first of the bodies to the morgue in Augusta would probably not begin for another day or two; there they would be cleaned with scalpels and a mix of heated water and detergents, then laid out on metal trays beneath a fume hood to dry them for analysis. It would then be up to the forensic anthropologist to rearticulate the bodies as best she could.

But it was the reporter’s concluding comment that was particularly interesting. She said that detectives believed they had made a preliminary identification of at least three of the bodies, although they declined to give any further details. That meant they had found something at the scene, something they had chosen to keep to themselves. The discovery aroused my curiosity – mine and a million other people’s – but no more than that. I did not envy the investigators who would have to wade through the mud of St. Froid in order to remove those bones with their gloved hands, fighting off the early blackflies and trying to blank out the howls of the hybrids.

When the report ended, I printed off my own work and then drove to the offices of PanTech Systems to deliver my findings. PanTech operated out of a three-story smoked-glass office in Westbrook and specialized in making security systems for the networks of financial institutions. Their latest innovation involved some kind of complex algorithm that made the eyes of anyone with an IQ of less than 200 glaze over with incomprehension but was reckoned by the company to be a pretty surefire thing. Unfortunately, Errol Hoyt, the mathematician who understood the algorithm best and who had been involved in its development from the start, had decided that PanTech didn’t value him enough and was now trying to sell his services, and the algorithm, to a rival company from behind the backs of his current employers. The fact that he was also screwing his contact at the rival firm – a woman named Stacey Kean, who had the kind of body that caused highway pileups after Sunday services – made the whole business slightly more complicated.

I had monitored Hoyt’s cell phone transmissions using a Cellmate cellular radio monitoring system, aided by a cellular gain antenna. The Cellmate came in a neat brushed-aluminum case containing a modified Panasonic phone, a DTMF decoder, and a Marantz recorder. I simply had to enter the number of Hoyt’s cellular and the Cellmate did the rest. By monitoring his calls, I had traced Hoyt and Kean to a rendezvous at the Days Inn out on Maine Mall Road. I waited in the parking lot, got photos of both of them entering the same room, then checked into the room on their right and removed the Penetrator II surveillance unit from my leather bag. The Penetrator II sounded like some kind of sexual aid but was simply a specially designed transducer that attached to the wall and picked up vibrations, converting them into electrical impulses that were then amplified and became recognizable audio. Most of the audio was recognizable only as grunts and groans, but when they’d finished the pleasure part they got down to business, and Hoyt provided enough incriminating detail of what he was offering, and the how and when of its transfer, to enable PanTech to fire him without incurring a major damages suit for unlawful dismissal. Admittedly, it was a kind of sordid way to earn a few bucks, but it had been painless and relatively easy. Now it was simply a matter of presenting the evidence to PanTech and collecting my check.

I sat in a conference room on one side of an oval glass table while the three men across from me examined the photographs, then listened to Hoyt’s telephone conversations and the recording of his romantic interlude with the lovely Stacey. One of the men was Roger Axton, PanTech’s vice president. The second was Philip Voight, head of corporate security. The third man had introduced himself as Marvin Gross, the personnel director. He was short and reedily built, with a small belly that protruded over the belt of his pants and made him look like he was suffering from malnutrition. It was Gross, I noticed, who held the checkbook.

Eventually, Axton reached across with a plump finger and killed the tape. He exchanged a look with Voight, then stood.

‘That all seems to be in order, Mr. Parker. Thank you for your time and efforts. Mr. Gross will deal with the matter of payment.’

I noticed that he didn’t shake my hand but simply departed from the room with a swish of silk like a wealthy dowager. I guessed that if I’d just listened to the sounds of two strangers having sex, I wouldn’t want to shake hands with the guy who’d made the tape either. Instead, I sat in silence while Gross’s pen made a scratching noise on the checkbook. When he had finished, he blew softly on the ink and carefully tore away the check. He didn’t hand it over immediately but looked at it for a time before peering out from under his brow and asking:

‘Do you like your work, Mr. Parker?’

‘Sometimes,’ I replied.

‘It seems to me,’ Gross continued languidly, ‘that it’s somewhat . . . sleazy.’

‘Sometimes,’ I repeated, neutrally. ‘But usually that’s not the nature of the work, but the nature of some of the people involved.’

‘You’re referring to Mr. Hoyt?’

‘Mr. Hoyt had sex in the afternoon with a woman. Neither of them is married. What they did wasn’t sleazy, or at least it was no sleazier than a hundred other things most people do every day. Your company paid me to listen in on them, and that’s where the sleaze part came in.’

Gross’s smile didn’t waver. He held the check up between his fingers as if he was expecting me to beg for it. Beside him, I saw Voight look down at his feet in embarrassment.

‘I’m not sure that we are entirely to blame for the manner in which you conducted your task, Mr. Parker,’ said Gross. ‘That was your own choice.’

I felt my fist tighten, partly out of my rising anger at Gross but also because I knew that he had a point. Sitting in that room, watching those three besuited men listening to the sounds of a couple’s lovemaking, I had felt ashamed at them, and at myself. Gross was right: this was dirty work, marginally better than repos, and the money didn’t make up for the filthy sheen it left on the clothes, on the skin, and on the soul.

I sat in silence, my eyes on him, until he stood and gathered up the material relating to Hoyt, returning it to the black plastic folder in which I had brought it. Voight stood too, but I remained seated. Gross took one more look at the check, then dropped it on the table in front of me before leaving the room.

‘Enjoy your money, Mr. Parker,’ he concluded. ‘I believe you’ve earned it.’

Voight gave me a pained look, then shrugged and followed Gross. ‘I’ll wait for you outside,’ he said.

I nodded and began replacing my own notes in my bag. When I was done, I picked up the check, examined the amount, then folded it and put it in the small zipped compartment at the back of my wallet. PanTech had paid me a bonus of 20 percent. For some reason, it made me feel even dirtier than before.

Voight walked me to the lobby, then made a point of shaking my hand and thanking me before I left the building. I walked through the parking lot, past the lines of reserved spaces with the names of their owners marked on small tin plates nailed to the parking lot’s surrounding wall. Marvin Gross’s car, a red Impala, occupied space number 20. I removed my keys from my pocket and flicked open the little knife I kept on the key chain. I knelt down beside his left rear tire and placed the tip of the blade against it, ready to slash the rubber. I stayed like that for maybe thirty seconds, then stood and closed the knife, leaving the tire undamaged. There was a tiny indentation where the blade had touched it, but nothing more.

As Gross had intimated, following couples to motel rooms was the poor cousin of divorce work, but it paid the bills and the risks were minimal. In the past I had taken on jobs out of a sense of charity, but I quickly realized that if I kept doing things for charity, then pretty soon charities would be doing things for me. Now Jack Mercier was offering me good money to look into Grace Peltier’s death, but something told me that the money would be hard earned. I had seen it in Mercier’s eyes.

I drove into the center of Portland and parked in the garage at Cumberland and Preble, then headed into the Portland Public Market. The Port City Jazz Band were playing in one corner and the smells of baking and spices mingled in the air. I bought some skim milk from Smiling Hill Farm and venison from Bayley Hill, then added fresh vegetables and a loaf of bread from the Big Sky Bread Company. I sat for a time by the fireplace, watching the people go by and listening to the music. Rachel and I would come here next weekend, I thought, browsing among the stalls, holding hands, and the scent of her would linger on my fingers and palms for the rest of the day.

With the arrival of the lunchtime crowds I headed back toward Congress, then cut down Exchange Street toward Java Joe’s in the Old Port. As I reached the junction of Exchange and Middle, I saw a small boy seated on the ground at Tommy’s Park on the opposite side of the street. He was wearing only a check shirt and short pants, despite the fact that it was a cool day. A woman leaned over him, obviously talking to him, and he stared up at her intently. Like the boy, the woman was dressed for very different weather. She wore a pale summer dress decorated with small pink flowers, the sunlight shining through the material to reveal the shape of her legs, and her blond hair was tied back with an aquamarine bow. I couldn’t see her face, but something tightened in my stomach as I drew nearer.

Susan had worn just such a dress, and had tied her blond hair back with an aquamarine bow. The memory made me stop short as the woman straightened and began to walk away from the boy in the direction of Spring Street. As she walked, the boy looked up at me and I saw that he was wearing old black-rimmed eyeglasses, one lens of which was obscured by black masking tape. Through the other, clear lens his single visible eye stared unblinkingly at me. Around his neck hung a wooden board of some sort, held in place by a length of thick rope. There was something carved into the wood, but it was too faint to see from where I stood. I smiled at him and he smiled back as I stepped from the sidewalk and straight into the path of a delivery truck. The driver slammed on the brakes and blew his horn, and I was forced to jump back quickly as the truck shot past. By the time the driver had finished giving me the finger and proceeded on his way, both the woman and the boy were gone. I could find no trace of them on Spring Street, or Middle, or Exchange. Despite that, I could not shake off the sense that they were near and they were watching.

It was almost four o’clock when I returned to the Scarborough house, after depositing my check at the bank and completing various errands. I padded around in my bare feet as some Jim White played on my stereo. It was ‘Still Waters’ and Jim was singing about how there were projects for the dead and projects for the living, but sometimes he got confused by that distinction. On the kitchen table lay Jack Mercier’s check, and once again that unease returned. There was something about the way he looked at me when he offered me the money in return for talking to Curtis Peltier. The more I thought about it, the more I believed that Mercier was paying for my services out of guilt.

I wondered too what Curtis Peltier might have on Mercier that would cause him to hire an investigator to look into the death of a girl he barely knew. There were a lot of people who said that the collapse of their business partnership had been an acrimonious one, bringing to an end not only a long-established professional association but also more than a decade of friendship. If Peltier was looking for help, Jack Mercier seemed to me to be a curious choice.

But I couldn’t refuse the job either, I thought, because I, too, felt a nagging sense of guilt over Grace Peltier, as if I somehow owed her at least the time it would take to talk to her father. Maybe it was the remains of what I had felt for her years before and the way I had reacted when she believed herself to be in trouble. True, I was young then, but she was younger still. I recalled her short dark hair, her questioning blue eyes, and even now, the smell of her, like freshly cut flowers.

Sometimes life is lived in retrospect. I sat at the kitchen table and looked at Jack Mercier’s check for a long time. Finally, still undecided, I folded it and placed it on the table beneath a vase of lilies I had bought on impulse as I was leaving the market. I cooked myself a dinner of chicken with chilis and ginger and watched TV while I ate, but I barely took in a fraction of what I was seeing. When I had finished, and the dishes were washed and dried, I called the number Jack Mercier had given to me the day before. A maid answered on the third ring, and Mercier was on the line seconds later.

‘It’s Charlie Parker, Mr. Mercier. I’ve decided. I’ll look into that matter.’

I heard a sigh on the other end of the phone. It might have been relief. It might also have been resignation.

‘Thank you, Mr. Parker,’ was all he said.

Maybe Marvin Gross had done me a favor by calling me a sleazebag, I thought.

That night, as I lay in bed thinking of the small boy with the darkened lens and the blond-haired woman who had stood over him, the scent of the flowers in the kitchen seemed to fill the house, becoming almost oppressive. I smelled them on my pillow and on the sheets. When I rubbed my fingers together, I seemed to feel grains of pollen like salt on my skin. Yet when I awoke the next morning the flowers were already dead.

And I could not understand why.

The day of my first meeting with Curtis Peltier dawned clear and bright. I heard cars moving by my house on Spring Street, cutting from Oak Hill to Maine Mall Road, a brief oasis of calm between U.S. 1 and 1-95. The nuthatch was back and the breeze created waves in the fir trees at the edge of my property, testing the resilience of the newly extended needles.

My grandfather had refused to sell any of his land when the developers came to Scarborough looking for sites for new homes in the late seventies and early eighties, which meant that the house was still surrounded by forest until the trees ended at the interstate. Unfortunately, what remained of my semirural idyll was about to come to an end. The U.S. Postal Service was planning to build a huge mail processing center off nearby Mussey Road, on land including the Grondin Quarry and the Neilson Farm parcels. It would be nine acres in size, and over a hundred trucks a day would eventually be entering and leaving the site; in addition there would be air traffic from a proposed air freight facility. It was good for the town but bad for me. For the first time, I had begun to consider selling my grandfather’s house.

I sat on my porch, sipping coffee and watching lapwings flit, and thought of the old man. He had been dead for almost six years now, and I missed his calm, his love of people, and his quiet concern for the vulnerable and the underprivileged. It had brought him into the law enforcement community and had just as surely forced him out of it again, when his empathy for the victims became too much for him to bear.

A second check for $10,000 had been delivered to my house during the night, but despite my promise to Mercier I was still uneasy. I felt for Curtis Peltier, I truly did, but what he wanted I didn’t think I could give him; he wanted his daughter back, the way she used to be, so that he could hold her to him forever. His memory of her had been tainted by the manner of her death, and he wanted that stain removed.

I thought too of the woman on Exchange.

Who wears a summer dress on a cold day? When the answer came to me, I pushed it away as a thing unwanted.

Who wears a summer dress on a cold day?

Someone who doesn’t feel the cold.

Someone who can’t feel the cold.

I finished my coffee and caught up on some paperwork at my desk, but Curtis Peltier and his dead daughter kept intruding on my thoughts, along with the small boy and the blond woman. In the end it all came to weights on a scale: my own inconvenience measured against Curtis Peltier’s pain.

I picked up my car keys and drove into Portland.

Peltier lived in a big brownstone on Danforth Street, close by the beautiful Italianate Victoria Mansion, which his home resembled in miniature. I guessed that he had bought it when times were good, and now it was probably all that he had left. This area of Portland, encompassing parts of Danforth, Pine, Congress, and Spring Streets, was where prosperous citizens made their homes in the nineteenth century. It was natural, I supposed, that Peltier should have gravitated toward it when he became a wealthy man.

The house looked impressive from the outside, but the gardens were overgrown and the paint was peeling from the door and window frames. I had never been inside the house with Grace. From what I understood, her relationship with her father floundered during her teens and she kept her home life separate from all other aspects of her existence. Her father doted on her but she appeared reluctant to reciprocate, as if she found his affection for her almost suffocating. Grace was always extraordinarily strong willed, with a determination and inner strength that sometimes led her to behave in ways that were hurtful to those around her, even if she had not intended to cause them pain. When she decided to ostracize her father, then ostracized he became. Later I learned from mutual friends that Grace had gradually overcome her resentment and that the two had become much closer in the years before her death, but the reason for the earlier distance between them remained unclear.

I rang the bell and heard it echo through the big house. A shape appeared at the frosted glass and an old man opened the door, his shoulders too small for his big red shirt and a pair of black suspenders holding his tan trousers up over his thin hips. There was a gap between his trousers and his waist. It made him look like a small, sad clown.

‘Mr. Peltier?’ I asked.

He nodded in reply. I showed him my ID. ‘My name is Charlie Parker. Jack Mercier said you might be expecting me.’

Curtis Peltier’s face brightened a little and he stood aside to let me in, while tidying his hair and straightening his shirt collar with his free hand. The house smelled musty. There was a thin layer of dust over some of the furniture in the hall and in the dining room to the left. The furnishings looked good but not that good, as if the best items had already been sold and what remained was used only to fill up what would otherwise have been vacant space. I followed him into a small, bright kitchen, with old magazines scattered on the chairs, three watercolor landscapes on the walls, and a pot of coffee filling the air with the scent of French vanilla. The landscape in the paintings looked vaguely familiar; they seemed to consist of views of the same area, painted from three different angles in subdued hues of brown and red. Skeletal trees converged on an expanse of dark water, hills fading into the distance beneath cloudy skies. In the corner of each painting were the initials GP. I never knew that Grace had painted.

There were paperbacks yellowing on the windowsill and an easy chair sat beside an open cast-iron fireplace packed with logs and paper so that it wouldn’t brood emptily when not in use. The old man filled two cups with coffee and produced a plate of cookies from a cupboard, then raised his hands from his sides and smiled apologetically.

‘You’ll have to forgive me, Mr. Parker,’ he said, indicating his shirt and his faded pants, and the sandals on his stockinged feet. ‘I wasn’t expecting company so early in the day.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I replied. ‘The cable guy once found me trying to kill a roach while wearing nothing but sneakers.’

He smiled gratefully and sat. ‘Jack Mercier tell you about my little girl?’ he asked, cutting straight to the chase. I watched his face while he said Mercier’s name and saw something flicker, like a candle flame suddenly exposed to a draft.

I nodded. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘She didn’t kill herself, Mr. Parker. I don’t care what anybody says. She was with me the weekend before she died, and I have never seen her happier. She didn’t do drugs. She didn’t smoke. Hell, she didn’t even drink, at least nothing stronger than a Bud Light.’ He sipped at his coffee, the thumb of his left hand worrying his forefinger in a constant, rhythmic movement. There was a white callus on his skin from the repeated contact.

I took out my notebook and my pen and wrote while Peltier spoke. Grace’s mother had died when she was thirteen. After a succession of dead-end jobs, Grace had returned to college and had been preparing her postgraduate thesis on the history of certain religious movements in the state. She had recently returned to live with her father, traveling down to Boston to use library facilities when necessary.

‘You know who she might have been talking to?’ I asked.

‘She took her notes with her, so I couldn’t say,’ said Peltier. ‘She had an appointment in Waterville, though, a day or two before . . .’

He trailed off.

‘With whom?’ I prompted him gently.

‘Carter Paragon,’ he replied. ‘That fella who runs the Fellowship.’

The Fellowship was a pretty low-end operation, hosting shows on late-night cable and paying little old ladies a nickel a shot to stuff Bible pamphlets into envelopes. Paragon’s pitch involved claiming to cure minor ailments by asking viewers to touch the TV screen with their hands, or one hand at least, the other hand being occupied ringing the Fellowship’s toll-free number and pledging whatever they could afford for the greater glory of the Lord. The only thing Carter Paragon ever cured was an excess of cash in a bank balance.

Unsurprisingly, Carter Paragon wasn’t his real name. He had been born Chester Quincy Deedes: that was the name on his birth certificate and his criminal record, a record that consisted mainly of minor credit card and insurance fraud, peripheral involvement in a pension scam, and a couple of DUIs. When hostile journalists brought this up, the newly monikered Carter Paragon admitted that he had been a sinner, that he hadn’t even been searching for God but God had found him anyway. It still wasn’t exactly clear why God had been looking for Chester Deedes in the first place, unless Chester had somehow managed to steal God’s wallet.

Mostly the Fellowship was kind of a joke, but I’d heard rumors – unsubstantiated, mostly – that the Fellowship supported extremist religious and right-wing groups financially. Organizations believed to have received funding from the Fellowship had been linked to pickets and attacks on abortion clinics, AIDS help lines, family planning institutes, even synagogues. Very little had ever been proved: checks from the Fellowship had been deposited in the accounts of the American Coalition of Life Activists, an umbrella organization for some of the more extreme antiabortion groups, and Defenders of the Defenders of Life, a support group for convicted clinic bombers and their families. Phone records seized in the aftermath of various incidents of violence also revealed that assorted fascists, rednecks, and cracker militants had contacted the Fellowship on a regular basis.

The Fellowship usually issued swift condemnations of any illegal actions by groups alleged to have received funding from it, but Paragon had still felt compelled to turn up on respectable newsmagazine programs on a couple of occasions uttering denials like St. Peter on a Thursday night, dressed in a suit that shimmered oilily, a small gold cross pinned discreetly to his lapel as he attempted to be charming, apologetic, and manipulative all at the same time. Trying to pin down Carter Paragon was like trying to nail smoke.

Now it seemed that Grace Peltier had been due to meet with Paragon shortly before she died. I wondered if she had made the meeting. If so, Paragon might be worth talking to.

‘Do you have any notes she might have made for her thesis, any computer disks?’ I continued.

He shook his head. ‘Like I said, she took everything with her. She was planning to stay with a friend after she’d met with Paragon and do some work on her thesis there.’

‘You know who the friend was?’

‘Marcy Becker,’ he said immediately. ‘She’s a history grad, friend of Grace’s from way back. Her family lives up in Bar Harbor. They run a motel there. Marcy’s been living with them for the last couple of years, helping them to run the place.’

‘Was she a good friend?’

‘Pretty good. Or I used to think she was.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that she never made it to the funeral.’ I felt that little lance of guilt again. ‘That’s kinda strange, don’t you think?’

‘I guess it is,’ I said. ‘Did she have any other close friends who didn’t show for the service?’

He thought for a moment. ‘There’s a girl called Ali Wynn, younger than Grace. She came up here a couple of times and they seemed to get on well together. Grace shared an apartment with her when she was in Boston, and she used to stay with her when she traveled down to study. She’s a student at Northeastern too, but works part-time in a fancy restaurant in Harvard, the Pudding something.’

‘“Upstairs at the Pudding”?’

He nodded. ‘That’s the one.’

It was on Holyoke Street, close by Harvard Square. I added the name to my notebook.

‘Did Grace own a gun?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive. She hated guns.’

‘Was she seeing anybody?’

‘Not that I know of.’

He sipped his coffee and I found him watching me closely over the rim of the cup, as if my last question had caused a shift in his perception of me.

‘I recall you, you know,’ he said softly.

I felt myself flush red, and instantly I was a more than a decade and a half younger, dropping Grace Peltier off outside this same house and then driving away, grateful that I would never have to look at her or hold her again. I wondered what Peltier knew about my time with his daughter, and was surprised and embarrassed at my concern.

‘I told Jack Mercier to ask for you,’ he continued. ‘You knew Grace. I thought maybe you might help us because of that.’

‘That was a long time ago,’ I answered gently.

‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘but it seems like only yesterday to me that she was born. Her doctor was the worst doctor in the world. He couldn’t deliver milk, but somehow, despite him, she managed to come wailing into the world. Everything since then, all of the little incidents that made up her life, seem to have occurred in the blink of an eye. You look at it like that and it wasn’t so long ago, Mr. Parker. For me, in one way, she was barely here at all. Will you look into this? Will you try to find out the truth of what happened to my daughter?’

I sighed. I felt as if I was heading into deep waters just as I had begun to like the feel of the ground beneath my feet.

‘I’ll look into it,’ I said at last. ‘I can’t promise anything, but I’ll do some work on it.’

We spoke a little more of Grace and of her friends, and Peltier gave me copies of the phone records for the last couple of months, as well as Grace’s most recent bank and credit card statements, before he showed me to her bedroom. He left me alone in there. It was probably too soon for him to spend time in a room that still smelled of her, that still contained traces of her existence. I went through the drawers and closets, feeling awkward as my fingers lifted and then replaced items of clothing, the hangers in the closets chiming sadly as I patted down the jackets and coats they held. I found nothing except a shoe box containing the mementos of her romantic life: cards and letters from long-departed lovers, and ticket stubs from dates that had obviously meant something to her. There was nothing recent, and nothing of mine among them. I hadn’t expected that there would be. I checked through the books on the shelves and the medicines in the cabinet above the small sink in the corner of the room. There were no contraceptives that might have indicated a regular boyfriend and no prescription drugs that might have suggested she was suffering from depression or anxiety.

When I returned to the kitchen there was a manila file of papers lying in front of Peltier on the table. He passed it across to me. When I opened it, the file contained all of the state police reports on the death of Grace Peltier, along with a copy of the death certificate and the ME’s report. There were also photographs of Grace in the car, printed off a computer. The quality wasn’t so good, but it didn’t have to be. The wound on Grace’s head was clearly visible, and the blood on the window behind her was like the birth of a red star.

‘Where did you get these, Mr. Peltier?’ I asked, but I knew the answer almost as soon as the words were out of my mouth. Jack Mercier always got what he wanted.

‘I think you know,’ he replied. He wrote his telephone number on a small pad and tore the page out. ‘You can usually get me here, day or night. I don’t sleep much these days.’

I thanked him. Then he shook my hand and walked me to the door. He was still watching me as I climbed into the Mustang and drove away.

I parked on Congress and took the reports into Kinkos to photocopy them, a precaution that I had recently started to take with everything from tax letters to investigation notes, with the originals retained at the house and the copies put into storage in case the originals were lost or damaged. Copying was a small amount of trouble and expense to go to for the reassurance that it offered. When I had finished, I went to Coffee by Design and started to read the reports in detail. As I did, I found myself growing more and more unhappy with what they contained.

The police report listed the contents of the car, including a small quantity of cocaine found in the glove compartment and a pack of cigarettes that was lying on the dashboard. Fingerprint analysis revealed three sets of prints on the pack, only one of them belonging to Grace. The only prints on the bag of coke were Grace’s. For someone who didn’t smoke or take drugs, Grace Peltier seemed to be carrying a lot of narcotics in her car.

The certificate of death didn’t add much else to what I already knew, although one section did interest me. Section 42 of the state of Maine certificate of death requires the ME to ascribe the manner of death to one of six causes. In order, these are: ‘natural’, ‘accident’, ‘suicide’, ‘homicide’, ‘pending investigation’, and ‘could not be determined.’

The ME had not ticked ‘suicide’ as the manner of Grace Peltier’s death. She had, instead, opted for ‘pending investigation.’ In other words, she had enough doubts about the circumstances to require the state police to continue their enquiries into the death. I moved on to the ME’s own report.

The report noted Grace’s body measurements, her clothing, her physique and state of nutrition at the time of death, and her personal cleanliness. There were no signs of self-neglect indicative of mental disorder or drug dependency of any kind. The analysis of her ocular fluid found no traces of drugs or alcohol taken in the hours before her death, and urine and bile analysis also came up negative, indicating that she had not ingested drugs in the three days preceding her death either. Blood taken from a peripheral vein beneath her armpit had been combined in a tube with sodium fluoride, which reduces the microbiologic action that may increase or decrease any alcohol content in the blood after collection. Once again, it came up negative. Grace hadn’t been drinking before she died.

It’s a difficult thing to do, taking one’s own life. Most people require a little Dutch courage to help them on their way, but Grace Peltier had been clean. Despite the fact that her father said she was happy, that she had no alcohol or drugs in her system when she died, and the autopsy revealed none of the telltale signs of a disturbed, distracted personality of the type likely to attempt suicide, Grace Peltier had still apparently put a gun close to her head and shot herself.

Grace’s fatal injury had been caused by a .40 caliber bullet fired from a Smith & Wesson at a range of not more than two inches. The bullet had entered through the left temple, burning and splitting the skin and singeing Grace’s hair above the wound, and shattering the sphenoid bone. The bullet hole was slightly smaller than the diameter of the bullet, since the elastic epidermis had stretched to allow its passage and then contracted afterward. There was an abrasion collar around the hole, caused by the friction, heating, and dirt effect of the bullet, as well as surrounding bruising.

The bullet had exited above and slightly behind the right temple, fracturing the orbital roof and causing bruising around the right eye. The wound was large and everted, with an irregular stellate appearance. Its irregularity was due to the damage caused to the bullet by contact with the skull, which had distorted its shape. The only blood in the car had come from Grace, and the bloodstain pattern analysis was consistent with the injury received. A ballistics examination of the recovered bullet also matched up. Chemical and scanning electron microscope analysis of skin swabs taken from Grace’s left hand revealed propellant residues, indicating that the gun had been fired by Grace. The gun was found hanging from Grace’s left hand. On the seat, beside her right hand, was a Bible.

It is an established fact that women rarely commit suicide with guns. Although there are exceptions, women don’t seem to have the same fascination with firearms as men and tend to pick less obviously violent ways to end their lives. There is a useful rule in police work: a shot woman is a murdered woman unless proved otherwise. Suicides also shoot themselves in certain sites of election: the mouth, the front of the neck, the forehead, the temple, or the chest. Discharges into the temple usually occur on the side of the dominant hand, although that is not an absolute. Grace Peltier, I knew, was right handed, yet she had elected to shoot herself in the left temple, using her left hand and holding what I assumed to be an unfamiliar weapon. According to Curtis, she didn’t even own a gun, although it was possible that she had decided to acquire one for reasons of her own.

There were three additional elements in the reports that struck me as odd. The first was that Grace Peltier’s clothes had been soaked with water when her body was found. Upon examination, the water was found to be salt water. For some reason, Grace Peltier had taken a dip in the sea fully clothed before shooting herself.

The second was that the ends of Grace’s hair had been cut shortly before, or possibly after, her death, using not a scissors but a blade. Part of her ponytail had been severed, leaving some loose hairs trapped between her shirt and her skin.

The third was not an inclusion but an omission. Curtis Peltier had told me that Grace had brought all of her thesis notes with her, but there were no notes found in the car.

The Bible was a nice touch, I thought.

I was walking back to my car when the cell phone rang.

‘Hi, it’s me,’ said Rachel’s voice.

‘Hi, you.’

Rachel Wolfe was a criminal psychologist who had once specialized in profiling. She had joined me in Louisiana as the hunt for the Traveling Man came to its end, and we had become lovers. It had not been an easy relationship: Rachel had been hurt badly both physically and emotionally in Louisiana, and I had spent a long time coming to terms with the guilt my feelings for her had provoked. We were now slowly establishing ourselves together, although she continued to live in Boston, where she was doing research and tutorial work at Harvard. The subject of her moving up to Maine had been glanced upon once or twice, but never pursued.

‘I’ve got bad news. I can’t come up next weekend. The faculty has called an emergency meeting for Friday afternoon over funding cuts, and it’s likely to pick up again on Saturday morning. I won’t be free until Saturday afternoon at the earliest. I’m really sorry.’

I found myself smiling as she spoke. Lately, talking to Rachel always made me smile. ‘Actually, that might work out okay. Louis has been talking about heading up to Boston for a weekend. If he can convince Angel to come along I can link up with them while you’re tied up in meetings, then we can spend the rest of the time together.’

Angel and Louis were, in no particular order, gay, semiretired criminals, silent partners in a number of restaurants and auto shops, a threat to decent people everywhere and possibly to the fabric of society itself, and polar opposites in just about every imaginable way, with the exception of a shared delight in mayhem and occasional homicide. They were also, not entirely coincidentally, my friends.

‘Cleopatra opens at the Wang on the fourth,’ probed Rachel. ‘I think I can probably hustle a pair of tickets.’

Rachel was a huge fan of the Boston Ballet and was trying to convert me to its joys. She was kind of succeeding, although it had led Angel to speculate unkindly on my sexuality.

‘Sure, but you owe me a couple of Pirates games when the hockey season starts.’

‘Agreed. Call me back and let me know what their plans are. I can book a table for dinner and join the three of you after my meeting. And I’ll look into those tickets. Anything else?’

‘How about lots of rampant, noisy sex?’

‘The neighbors will complain.’

‘Are they good looking?’

‘Very.’

‘Well, if they get jealous I’ll see what I can do for them.’

‘Why don’t you see what you can do for me first?’

‘Okay, but when I wear you out I may have to go elsewhere for my own pleasure.’

I couldn’t be sure, but I thought her laughter had a distinctly mocking tone as she hung up.

When I got back to the house, I called a number on Manhattan’s Upper West Side using the landline. Angel and Louis didn’t like being called on a cell phone, because – as the unfortunate Hoyt was about to learn to his cost – cell phone conversations could be monitored or traced, and Angel and Louis were the kind of individuals who sometimes dealt in delicate matters upon which the law might not smile too gently. Angel was a burglar, and a very good one, although he was now officially “resting” on the joint income he had acquired with Louis. Louis’s current career position was murkier: Louis killed people for money, or he used to. Now he sometimes killed people, but money was less of a concern for him than the moral imperative for their deaths. Bad people died at Louis’s hands, and maybe the world was a better place without them. Concepts like morality and justice got a little complicated where Louis was concerned.

The phone rang three times and then a voice with all the charm of a snake hissing at a mongoose said, ‘Yeah?’ The voice also sounded a little breathless.

‘It’s me. I see you still haven’t got to the chapter on phone etiquette in that Miss Manners book I gave you.’

‘I put that piece of shit in the trash,’ said Angel. ‘Guy who laces his shoes with string is probably still trying to sell it on Broadway.’

‘Your breathing sounds labored. Do I even want to know what I interrupted?’

‘Elevator’s busted. I heard the phone on the stairs. I was at an organ recital.’

‘What were you doing, passing around the tin cup?’

‘Funny.’

I don’t think he meant it. Louis was obviously still engaged in an unsuccessful attempt to expand Angel’s cultural horizons. You had to admire his perseverance, and his optimism.

‘How was it?’

‘Like being trapped with the phantom of the opera for two hours. My head hurts.’

‘You up for a trip to Boston?’

‘Louis is. He thinks it’s got class. Me, I like the order of New York. Boston is like the whole of Manhattan below Fourteenth Street, you know, with all them little streets that cross back over one another. It’s like the Twilight Zone down in the Village. I didn’t even like visiting when you lived there.’

‘You finished?’ I interrupted.

‘Well, I guess I am now, Mr. Fucking Impatient.’

‘I’m heading down next weekend, maybe meet Rachel for dinner late on Friday. You want to join us?’

‘Hold on.’ I heard a muffled conversation, and then a deep male voice came on the line.

‘You comin’ on to my boy?’ asked Louis.

‘Lord no,’ I replied. ‘I like to be the pretty one in my relationships, but that’s taking it a little too far.’

‘We’ll be at the Copley Plaza. You give us a call when you got a restaurant booked.’

‘Sure thing, boss. Anything else?’

‘We let you know,’ he said, then the line went dead.

It was a shame about the Miss Manners book, really.

Grace Peltier’s credit card statement revealed nothing out of the ordinary, while the telephone records indicated calls to Marcy Becker at her parents’ motel, a private number in Boston which was now disconnected but which I assumed to be Ali Wynn’s, and repeated calls to the Fellowship’s office in Waterville. Late that afternoon I called the Fellowship at that same number and got a recorded message asking me to choose one if I wanted to make a donation, two if I wanted to hear the recorded prayer of the day, or three to speak to an operator. I pressed three and when the operator spoke I gave my name and asked for Carter Paragon’s office. The operator told me she was putting me through to Paragon’s assistant, Miss Torrance. There was a pause and then another female voice came on the line.

‘Can I help you?’ it said, in the tone that a certain type of secretary reserves for those whom it has no intention of helping at all.

‘I’d like to speak to Mr. Paragon, please. My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator.’

‘What is it in connection with, Mr. Parker?’

‘A young woman named Grace Peltier. I believe Mr. Paragon had a meeting with her about two weeks ago.’

‘I’m sorry, the name isn’t familiar to me. No such meeting took place.’ If spiders apologized to flies before eating them, they could have managed more sincerity than this woman.

‘Would you mind checking?’

‘As I’ve told you, Mr. Parker, that meeting never took place.’

‘No, you told me that you weren’t familiar with the name, and then you told me that the meeting never took place. If you didn’t recognize the name, how could you remember whether or not any meeting took place?’

There was a pause on the end of the line, and I thought the receiver began to grow distinctly chilly in my hand. After a time, Miss Torrance spoke again. ‘I see from Mr. Paragon’s diary that a meeting was due to be held with a Grace Peltier, but she never arrived.’

‘Did she cancel the appointment?’

‘No, she simply didn’t turn up.’

‘Can I speak to Mr. Paragon, Miss Torrance?’

‘No, Mr. Parker, you cannot.’

‘Can I make an appointment to speak to Mr. Paragon?’

‘I’m sorry. Mr. Paragon is a very busy man, but I’ll tell him you called.’ She hung up before I could give her a number, so I figured that I probably wasn’t going to be hearing from Carter Paragon in the near future, or even the distant future. It seemed that I might have to pay a personal call on the Fellowship, although I guessed from Miss Torrance’s tone that a visit from me would be about as welcome as a whorehouse in Disneyland.

Something had been nagging at me since reading the police report on the contents of the car, so I picked up the phone and called Curtis Peltier.

‘Mr. Peltier,’ I asked, ‘do you recall if either Marcy Becker or Ali Wynn smoked?’

He paused before answering. ‘Y’know, I think they both did, at that, but there’s something else you should know. Grace’s thesis wasn’t just a general one: she had a specific interest in one religious group. They were called the Aroostook Baptists. You ever hear of them?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘The community disappeared in nineteen sixty-four. A lot of folks just assumed they’d given up and gone somewhere else, somewhere warmer and more hospitable.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr. Peltier, I don’t see the point.’

‘These people, they were also known as the Eagle Lake Baptists.’

I recalled the news reports from the north of the state, the photographs in the newspapers of figures moving behind crime scene tape, the howling of the animals.

‘The bodies found in the north,’ I said quietly.

‘I’d have told you when you were here, but I only just saw the TV reports,’ he said. ‘I think it’s them. I think they’ve found the Aroostook Baptists.’

Chapter Three

They come now, the dark angels, the violent ones, their wings black against the sun, their swords unsheathed. They move remorselessly through the great mass of humanity: purging, taking, killing.

They are no part of us.

The Manhattan North Homicide Squad is regarded as an elite group within the NYPD, operating out of an office at 120 East 119th Street. Each member has spent years as a precinct detective before being handpicked for homicide duty. They are experienced detectives, their gold shields bearing the hallmarks of long service. The most junior members probably have twenty years behind them. The more senior members have been around for so long that jokes have accreted to them like barnacles to the prows of old ships. As Michael Lansky, who was the senior detective on the squad when I was a rookie patrolman, used to say, ‘When I started in homicide, the Dead Sea was just sick.’

My father was himself a policeman, until the day he took his own life. I used to worry about my father. That was what you did when you were a policeman’s son, or anyway, that was what I did. I loved him; I was envious of him – of his uniform, of his power, of the camaraderie of his friends; but I also worried about him. I worried about him all the time. New York in the 1970s wasn’t like New York now: policemen were dying on the streets in ever-greater numbers, exterminated like roaches. You saw it in the newspapers and on the TV, and I saw it reflected in my mother’s eyes every time the doorbell rang late at night while my father was supposed to be on duty. She didn’t want to become another PBA widow. She just wanted her husband to come home, alive and complaining, at the end of every tour. He felt the strain too; he kept a bottle of Mylanta in his locker to fight the heartburn he endured almost every day, until eventually something snapped inside him and it all came to a violent end.

My father had only occasional contact with Manhattan North Homicide. Mostly, he watched them as they passed by while he held the crowds back or guarded the door, checking shields and IDs. Then, one stiflingly hot July day in 1980, shortly before he died, he was called to a modest apartment on Ninety-fourth Street and Second Avenue rented by a woman named Marilyn Hyde, who worked as an insurance investigator in midtown.

Her sister had called on her and smelled something foul coming from inside the apartment. When she tried to gain entry using a spare key given to her by Marilyn, she found that the lock had been jammed up with adhesive and informed the super, who immediately notified the police. My father, who had been eating a sandwich at a diner around the corner, was the first officer to reach the building.

It emerged that two days before she died, Marilyn Hyde had called her sister. She had been walking up from the subway at Ninety-sixth and Lexington when she caught the eye of a man descending. He was tall and pale, with dark hair and a small, thin mouth. He wore a yellow squall jacket and neatly pressed jeans. Marilyn had probably held his glance for no more than a couple of seconds, she told her sister that night, but something in his eyes caused her to step back against the wall as if she had been slammed in the chest by a fist. She felt a dampness on the legs of her pantsuit, and when she looked down, she realized that she had lost control of herself.

The following morning she called her sister again and expressed concern that she was being followed. She couldn’t say by whom, exactly; it was just a feeling she had. Her sister told her to talk to the police but Marilyn refused, arguing that she had no proof that she was being shadowed and had seen nobody acting suspiciously in her vicinity.

That day she left work early, pleading sickness, and returned to her apartment. When she didn’t turn up for work the next morning and didn’t answer her phone, her sister went to check on her, setting in train the chain of events that led my father to her door. The hallway was quiet, since most of the other tenants were at work or out enjoying the summer sun. After knocking, my father unholstered his weapon and kicked the door in. The A/C in the apartment had been turned off and the smell hit him with a force that made his head reel. He told the super and Marilyn Hyde’s sister to stay back, then made his way through the small living area, past the kitchen and the bathroom, and into the apartment’s only bedroom.

He found Marilyn chained to her bed, the sheets and the floor below drenched with blood. Flies buzzed around her. Her body had swollen in the heat, the skin stained a light green at her belly, the superficial veins on the thighs and shoulders outlined in deeper greens and reds like the tracery in autumn leaves. There was no longer any way to tell how beautiful she had once been.

The autopsy found one hundred separate knife wounds on her body. The final cut to the jugular had killed her: the preceding ninety-nine had simply been used to bleed her slowly over a period of hours. There was a container of salt by the bed, and a jar of fresh lemon juice. Her killer had used them to rouse her when she lost consciousness.

That evening, after my father returned home, the smell of the soap he had used to wash away the traces of Marilyn Hyde’s death still strong upon him, he sat at our kitchen table and opened a bottle of Coors. My mother had left as soon as he came home, anxious to meet up with friends whom she had not seen in many weeks. His dinner was in the oven, but he did not touch it. Instead, he sipped from the bottle and did not speak for a long time. I sat across from him and he took a soda from the refrigerator and handed it to me, so that I would have something to drink with him.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked him at last.

‘Somebody got hurt today,’ he replied.

‘Somebody we know?’

‘No, son, nobody we know, but I think she was a good person. She was probably worth knowing.’

‘Who did it? Who hurt her?’

He looked at me, then reached out and touched my hair, the palm of his hand resting lightly on my head for a moment.

‘A dark angel,’ he said. ‘A dark angel did it.’

He did not tell me what he had seen in Marilyn Hyde’s apartment. It was only many years later that I would hear of it – from my mother, from my grandfather, from other detectives – but I never forgot the dark angels. Many years later, my wife and child were taken from me, and the man who killed them believed that he, too, was one of the dark angels, the fruit of the union between earthly women and those who had been banished from heaven for their pride and their lust.

St. Augustine believed that natural evil could be ascribed to the activity of beings who were free and rational but nonhuman. Nietzsche considered evil to be a source of power independent of the human. Such a force of evil could exist outside of the human psyche, representing a capacity for cruelty and harm distinct from our own capabilities, a malevolent and hostile intelligence whose aim was, ultimately, to undermine our own essential humanity, to take away our ability to feel compassion, empathy, love.

I think my father saw certain acts of violence and cruelty, such as the terrible death of Marilyn Hyde, and wondered if there were some deeds that were beyond even the potential of human beings to commit; if there were creatures both more and less than human that preyed upon us.

They were the violent ones, the dark angels.

Manhattan North, the best homicide squad in the city, maybe even in the whole country, investigated the Marilyn Hyde case for seven weeks but found no trace of the man in the subway. There were no other suspects. The man at whom Marilyn Hyde had simply looked for a second too long and who had, it was believed, bled her to death for his own pleasure had returned to the hidden place from which he came.

Marilyn Hyde’s murder remains unsolved, and detectives in the squad still catch themselves staring at the faces on the subway, sometimes with their own wives, their own children beside them, trying to find the dark-haired man with the too-small mouth. And some of them, if you ask, will tell you that perhaps they experience a moment of relief when they find that he is not among the crowds, that they have not caught his eye, that they have not made contact with this man while their families are with them.

There are people whose eyes you must avoid, whose attention you must not draw to yourself. They are strange, parasitic creatures, lost souls seeking to stretch across the abyss and make fatal contact with the warm, constant flow of humanity. They live in pain and exist only to visit that pain on others. A random glance, the momentary lingering of a look, is enough to give them the excuse that they seek. Sometimes it is better to keep your eyes on the gutter, for fear that by looking up you might catch a glimpse of them, black shapes against the sun, and be blinded forever.

And now, on a patch of damp, muddy ground by a cold lake in northern Maine, the work of the dark angels was slowly being exposed.

The grave had been discovered at the boundary of the public reserved lands known as Winterville. The integrity of the scene had been compromised somewhat by the activities of the maintenance and construction crews, but there was nothing that could now be done except to ensure that no further damage was caused.

On that first day, the emergency team had taken the names of all of the workers at the lake site, interviewed each briefly, and then secured the scene with tape and uniformed officers. Initially there had been some trouble from one of the timber companies that used the road, but the company had agreed to postpone its truck runs until the extent of the grave had been determined.

Following the initial examination the sandbag levees were strengthened, while a command post, including the mobile crime scene unit, was established in a turnaround by the side of the Red River Road, with a strict sign-in policy in place to ensure that no further contamination of the area occurred. A pathway through the scene was created and marked with tape, after which a walking tour of the ground was made with a video camera to indoctrinate the police officers who would take no direct role in the investigation.

The scene was photographed: overall views first, to preserve the essential history of the scene at the moment of discovery, then orientation shots of the visible bones, followed by close-ups of the bones themselves. The camcorder was brought into play again, this time detailing the scene instead of merely recording it. Sketches were made, a three-foot-long metal stake indicating the center point from which all measurements of distance and angles would be made. The boundaries of Red River Road were marked and recorded, in case any widening might occur in the future to alter the territory, and GPS equipment was used to make a satellite estimation of the crime scene location.

Then, the light by now almost gone, the investigative team dispersed following a final meeting, leaving state troopers and sheriff’s deputies to guard the scene. The autopsy team would arrive at first light, when the investigation into the deaths of the Aroostook Baptists would begin in earnest.

And in all that they did and in all that would follow, the sound of the hybrids stayed with them, so that each night, when they returned home and tried to sleep, they would wake to imagined howls and think that they were once again standing by the shores of the lake, their hands cold and their boots thick with mud, surrounded by the bones of the dead.

That night, for the first time in many months, I dreamed, as memories of Grace and my own father followed me from waking to sleeping. In my dream I stood on a patch of cleared land with bare trees at its verge and frozen water glittering coldly beyond. There were fresh mounds of earth scattered randomly on the ground and the dirt seemed to shift as I watched, as if something was moving beneath it.

And in the trees, shapes gathered; huge, black, birdlike figures with red eyes that gazed with hunger upon the shifting earth below. Then one unfurled its wings and dived, but instead of making for the earth it flew toward me, and I saw that it was not a bird but a man, an old man with flowing gray hair and yellow teeth and nodes on his back from which the leathery wings erupted. His legs were thin, his ribs showed through his skin, and his wrinkled male organ bobbed obscenely as he flew down. He hovered before me, the dark wings beating at the night. His gaunt cheeks stretched and he spat the word at me:

‘Sinner!’ he hissed. His wings still flapping, he tore at a pile of earth with his clawlike feet until he revealed a patch of white skin that glowed translucently in the moonlight. His mouth opened and his head descended toward the body, which writhed and twisted against him as he bit into it, blood flowing over his chin and pooling on the ground below.

Then he smiled at me, and I turned away from the sight to find myself reflected in the waters before me. I saw my own face twinned with the moon, bleeding whitely into my naked shoulders and chest. And from my back, huge dark wings unfurled themselves and spread behind me, covering the surface of the lake like thick, black ink and stilling all life beneath.

The Search for Sanctuary

Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier

In April 1963, a group of four families left their homes on the eastern seaboard and journeyed north in a collection of automobiles and trucks for two hundred miles, to an area of land close by the town of Eagle Lake, twenty miles south of the border between New Brunswick and Maine. The families were the Perrsons, from Friendship, south of the coastal town of Rockland; the Kellogs and the Cornishes, from Seal Cove; and the Jessops, from Portland. Collectively, they became known as the Aroostook Baptists, or sometimes as the Eagle Lake Baptists, although there is no evidence to suggest that any families other than the Perrsons and the Jessops were, in fact, originally members of that faith.

Once they reached their final destination, all of the automobiles were taken and sold, the money raised being used to buy essential supplies for the families over the coming year until the settlement could become self-sufficient. The settlement land, approximately forty acres, was rented on a thirty-year lease from a local landowner. Following the desertion of the settlement, this land eventually reverted to the family of the original owner although until recently a dispute over boundaries has prevented any development of the site.

In total, sixteen people journeyed north that month: eight adults and eight children, all equally divided between the sexes. At Eagle Lake they were met by the man they knew as Preacher (or sometimes Reverend Faulkner), his wife, Louise, and their two children, Leonard and Muriel, aged seventeen and sixteen respectively.

It was at Faulkner’s instigation that the families, mainly poor farmers and blue-collar workers, had sold their properties, pooled the money made, and traveled north to establish a community based on strict religious principles. A number of other families had also been willing to make the journey, motivated variously by their persistent fears of the perceived communist threat, their own fundamentalist religious beliefs, poverty, and an inability to cope with what they saw as the moral deterioration of the society around them, and perhaps subconsciously by the tradition of adherence to nonmainstream religious movements that was so much a part of the state’s history. These additional applicants had been rejected on the basis of family size and the ages and sexes of their children. Faulkner stipulated that he wanted to create a community where families could intermarry, strengthening the bonds between them over generations, and that he therefore required equal numbers of male and female partners of similar age. The families he chose were, to a greater or lesser degree, estranged from their own relatives and appeared to be untroubled by the thought of being cut off from the outside world.

The Aroostook Baptists arrived in Eagle Lake on April 15, 1963. By January 1964, the settlement had been abandoned. No trace of the founding families or of the Faulkners was ever found again.

Chapter Four

I slept late the next morning but didn’t feel refreshed when I woke. The memory of my dream was still vivid, and despite the cool of the night, I had sweated under the sheets.

I decided to grab breakfast in Portland before paying a visit to the Fellowship’s offices, but it wasn’t until I was in my car that I noticed that the red marker on the mailbox had been raised. It was a little early for a delivery, but I didn’t think anything more of it. I walked down the drive and was about to reach for the mailbox when something lithe and dark scurried across the tin. It was a small brown spider, with an odd violin-shaped mark on its body. It took me a moment or two to recognize it for what it was: a fiddleback, one of the recluses. I drew my hand away quickly. I knew that they could bite, although I’d never seen one this far north before. I used a stick to knock it away, but as I did so another set of thin legs pushed at the crack of the mailbox flap, and a second fiddleback squeezed its way out, then a third. I moved around the mailbox carefully and saw more spiders, some creeping along its base, others already rappelling slowly to the ground on lengths of silken thread. I took a deep breath and flipped the mailbox catch open with the stick.

Hundreds of tiny spiders tumbled out, some falling instantly to the grass below, others crawling and fighting their way across the inside of the flap, clinging to the bodies of those below them. The interior was alive with them. In the center of the box itself stood a small cardboard packing crate with airholes in its side, spiders spilling from the holes as the sunlight hit them. I could see dead spiders lying curled in the crate or littered around the corners of the mailbox, their legs curled into their abdomens as their peers fed on them. I backed away in disgust, trying not to think of what would have happened had I thrust my hand unthinkingly into the semidarkness.

I went to my car and took the spare gas can from the trunk, then retrieved a Zippo from the glove compartment. I sprinkled the gas both inside and outside the mailbox, and on the dry earth surrounding it, before lighting a roll of newspaper and tossing it in. The mailbox went up instantly, tiny arachnids falling aflame from the inferno. I stepped back as the grass began to burn and moved to the garden hose. I attached it to the outside faucet and wet the grass to contain the fire, then stood for a time and watched the mailbox burn. When I was content that nothing had survived, I doused it in water, the tin hissing at the contact and steam rising into the air. After it had cooled, I put on a pair of calfskin gloves and emptied the remains of the spiders into a black bag, which I threw in the garbage can outside my back door. Then I stood for a long time at the edge of my property, scanning the trees and striking at the invisible spiders I felt crawling across my skin.

I ate breakfast in Bintliff’s on Portland Street and plotted my plan of action for the day. I sat in one of the big red booths upstairs, the ceiling fan gently turning as blues played softly in the background. Bintliff’s has a menu so calorific that Weight Watchers should place a permanent picket on the door; gingerbread pancakes with lemon sauce, Orange Graham French toast, and lobster Benedict are not the kind of breakfast items that contribute to a slim waistline, although they’re guaranteed to raise the eyebrows of even the most jaded dietician. I settled for fresh fruit, wheat toast, and coffee, which made me feel very virtuous but also kind of sad. The sight of the spiders had taken away most of my appetite anyhow. It could have been kids playing a joke, I supposed, but if so, then it was a vicious, deeply unpleasant one.

Waterville, the site of the Fellowship’s office, was midway between Portland and Bangor. After Bangor I could head east to Ellsworth and the area of U.S. 1 where Grace Peltier’s body had been discovered. From Ellsworth, Bar Harbor, home of Grace’s good friend but funeral absentee Marcy Becker, was only a short drive to the coast. I finished off my coffee, took a last lingering look at a plate of apple cinnamon and raisin French toast that was heading toward a table by the window, then stepped outside and walked to my car.

Across the street, a man sat at the base of the steps leading up to the main post office. He wore a brown suit with a yellow shirt and a brown-and-red tie beneath a long, dark brown overcoat. Short, spiky red hair, tinged slightly with gray, stood up straight on his head as if he were permanently plugged into an electrical outlet. He was eating an ice cream cone. His mouth worked at the ice cream in a relentless methodical motion, never stopping once to savor the taste. There was something unpleasant, almost insectlike, about the way his mouth moved, and I felt his eyes upon me as I opened the car door and sat inside. When I pulled away from the curb, those eyes followed me. In the rearview, I could see his head turn to watch my progress, the mouth still working like the jaws of a mantid.

The Fellowship had its registered office at 109A Main Street, in the middle of Waterville’s central business district. Parts of Waterville are pretty but downtown is a mess, largely because it looks like the ugly Ames shopping mall was dropped randomly from the sky and allowed to remain where it landed, reducing a huge tract of the town center to a glorified parking lot. Still, enough brownstone blocks remained to support a sign welcoming visitors to the joys of downtown Waterville, among them the modest offices of the Fellowship. They occupied the two top floors over an otherwise vacant storefront down from Joe’s Smoke Shop, nestled between the Head Quarters hairdressing salon and Jorgensen’s Café. I parked in the Ames lot and crossed at Joe’s. There was a buzzer beside the locked glass door of 109A, with a small fish-eye lens beneath it. A metal plate on the door frame was engraved with the words The Fellowship – Let the Lord Guide You. A small shelf to one side held a sheaf of pamphlets. I took one and slipped it into my pocket, then rang the buzzer and heard a voice crackle in response. It sounded suspiciously like that of Miss Torrance.

‘Can I help you?’ it said.

‘I’m here to see Carter Paragon,’ I replied.

‘I’m afraid Mr. Paragon is busy.’ The day had hardly begun and already I was experiencing déjà vu.

‘But I let the Lord guide me here,’ I protested. ‘You wouldn’t want to let Him down, would you?’

The only sound that came from the speaker was that of the connection between us being closed. I rang again.

‘Yes?’ The irritation in her voice was obvious.

‘Maybe I could wait for Mr. Paragon?’

‘That won’t be possible. This is not a public office. Any contact with Mr. Paragon should be made in writing in the first instance. Have a good day.’

I had a feeling that a good day for Miss Torrance would probably be a pretty bad day for me. It also struck me that in the course of our entire conversation, Miss Torrance had not asked me my name or my business. It might simply have been my suspicious nature, but I guessed that Miss Torrance already knew who I was. More to the point, she knew what I looked like.

I walked around the block to Temple Street and the rear of the Fellowship’s offices. There was a small parking lot, its concrete cracked and overgrown with weeds, dominated by a dead tree beneath which stood two tanks of propane. The back door of the building was white and the windows were screened, while the black iron fire escape looked so decrepit that any occupants might have been better advised to take their chances with the flames. It didn’t look like the back door to 109A had been opened in some time, which meant that the occupants of the building entered and left through the door on Main Street. There was one car in the lot, a red 4x4 Explorer. When I peered in the window I saw a box on the floor containing what looked like more religious pamphlets bound with rubber bands. Using my elementary deduction skills, I guessed that I’d found the Fellowship’s wheels.

I went back onto Main Street, bought a couple of newspapers and the latest issue of Rolling Stone, then headed into Jorgensen’s and took a seat at the raised table by the window. From there I had a perfect view of the doorway to 109A. I ordered coffee and a muffin, then sat back to read and wait.

The newspapers were full of the discovery at St. Froid, although they couldn’t add much to the news reports I’d seen on television. Still, somebody had dredged up an old photograph of Faulkner and the original four families that had journeyed north with him. He was a tall man, plainly dressed, with long dark hair, very straight black eyebrows, and sunken cheeks. Even in the photograph there was an undeniable charisma to him. He was probably in his late thirties, his wife a little older. Their children, a boy and a girl aged about seventeen and sixteen respectively, stood in front of him. He must have been comparatively young when they were born.

Despite the fact that I knew the photograph had been taken in the sixties, it seemed that these people could have been frozen in their poses at any time over the previous hundred years. There was something timeless about them and their belief in the possibility of escape, twenty people in simple clothes dreaming of a Utopia dedicated to the greater glory of the Lord. According to a small caption, the land for the community had been granted to them by the owner, himself a religious man, for the sum of $1 per acre per annum, paid in advance for the term of the lease. By moving so far north the congregation’s privacy was virtually guaranteed. The nearest town was Eagle Lake to the north, but it was then already in decline, the mills closing and the population depleted. Tourism would eventually rescue the area, but in 1963, Faulkner and his followers would have been left largely to their own devices.

I turned my attention to the Fellowship’s pamphlet. It was basically one long sales pitch designed to elicit the appropriate response from any readers: namely, to hand over all of the loose change they might have on their person at the time, plus any spare cash that might be making their bank statements look untidy. There was an interesting medieval illustration on the front, depicting what looked like the Last Judgment: horned demons tore at the naked bodies of the damned while God looked on from above, surrounded by a handful of presumably very relieved good folk. I noticed that the damned outnumbered the saved by about five to one. All things considered, those didn’t look like very good odds on salvation for most of the people I knew. Beneath the illustration was a quotation: ‘And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works (Revelation 20:12).’

I laid aside the pamphlet, kind of relieved that I’d bought Rolling Stone. I spent the next hour deciding who among the good and not-so-good of modern music was unlikely to be taking up salvation space in the next world. I had made a pretty comprehensive list when, shortly after one-thirty, a woman and a man came out of the Fellowship’s offices. The man was Carter Paragon: I recognized the slicked-back dark hair, the shiny gray suit, and the unctuous manner. I was just surprised that he didn’t leave a silver trail behind him as he walked.

The woman with him was tall and probably about the same age as Paragon; early forties, I guessed. She had straight dark brown hair that hung to her shoulders, and her body was hidden beneath a dark blue wool overcoat. Her face was hardly conventionally pretty; the jaw was too square, the nose too wide, and the muscles at her jaws looked overdeveloped, as if her teeth were permanently gritted. She wore white pancake makeup and bright red lipstick like a graduate of clown school, although if she was, nobody was laughing. Her shoes were flat, but she was still at least five-ten or five-eleven and towered over Paragon by about four inches. The look that passed between them as they made their way toward Temple Street was strange. It seemed that Paragon deferred to her and I noticed that he stepped back quickly when she turned away from the door after checking the lock, as if afraid to get in her way.

I left $5 on the table, then walked out onto Main and strolled over to the Mustang. I had been tempted to tackle them on the street but I was curious to see where they were going. The red Explorer emerged onto Temple, then drove past me through the lot, heading south. I followed it at a distance until it came to Kennedy Memorial Drive, where it turned right onto West River Road. We passed Waterville Junior High and the Pine Ridge Golf Course before the Explorer took another right onto Webb Road. I stayed a couple of cars behind as far as Webb, but the Explorer was the only car to make the right. I hung back as much as I could and thought that I’d lost them when an empty stretch of road was revealed after I passed the airfield. I made a U-turn and headed back the way I had come, just in time to see the Explorer’s brake lights glow about two hundred yards on my right. It had turned up Eight Rod Road and was now entering the driveway of a private house. I arrived in time to see the black steel gates close and the red body of the 4x4 disappearing around the side of a modest two-story white home with black shutters on the windows and black trim on the gable.

I parked in front of the gates, waited for about five minutes, and then tried the intercom on the gatepost. I noticed that there was another fish-eye lens built in, so I covered it with my hand.

‘Yes?’ came Miss Torrance’s voice.

‘UPS delivery,’ I said.

There was silence for a few moments as Miss Torrance tried to figure out what had gone wrong with her gate camera, before her voice told me that she’d be right out. I was kind of hoping that she might have let me in, but I settled for keeping my hand on the camera and my body out of sight. It was only when Miss Torrance was almost at the gate that I stepped into view. She didn’t look too pleased to see me, but then I couldn’t imagine her looking too pleased to see anyone. Even Jesus would have got a frosty reception from Miss Torrance.

‘My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private detective. I’d like to see Carter Paragon, please.’ Those words were assuming the status of a mantra, with none of the associated calm.

Miss Torrance’s face was so hard it could have mined diamonds. ‘I’ve told you before, Mr. Paragon isn’t available,’ she said.

‘Mr. Paragon certainly is elusive,’ I replied. ‘Do you deflate him and put him in a box when he’s not needed?’

‘I’m afraid I have nothing more to say to you, Mr. Parker. Please go away or I’ll call the police. You are harassing Mr. Parragon.’

‘No,’ I corrected. ‘I would be harassing Mr. Paragon, if I could find him. Instead, I’m stuck with harassing you, Miss Torrance. It is Miss Torrance, isn’t it? Are you unhappy, Miss Torrance? You sure look unhappy. In fact, you look so unhappy that you’re starting to make me unhappy.’

Miss Torrance gave me the evil eye. ‘Go fuck yourself, Mr. Parker,’ she said softly.

I leaned forward confidentially. ‘You know, God can hear you talk that way.’

Miss Torrance turned on her heel and walked away. She looked a whole lot better from the back than she did from the front, which wasn’t saying much.

I stood there for a time, peering through the bars like an unwanted party guest. Apart from the Explorer there was only one other vehicle in the driveway of the Paragon house, a beat-up blue Honda Civic. It didn’t look like the kind of car a man of Carter Paragon’s stature would drive, so maybe it was what Miss Torrance used to get around when she wasn’t chauffeuring her charge. I went back to my car, listened to a classical music slot on NPR, and continued reading Rolling Stone. I had just begun to wonder if I was optimistic enough to buy one hundred rubbers for $29.99 when a white Acura pulled up behind me. A big man dressed in a black jacket and blue jeans, with a black silk-knit tie knotted over his white shirt, strode up to my window and knocked on the glass. I rolled down the window, looked at his shield and the name beside his photo, and smiled. The name was familiar from the police report on Grace Peltier. This was Detective John Lutz, the investigating officer on the case, except Lutz was attached to CID III and operated out of Machias, while Waterville was technically in the territory of CID II.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice liked to say.

‘Help you, Detective Lutz?’ I asked.

‘Can you step out of the car, please, sir?’ he said, standing back as I opened the door. The thumb of his right hand hung on his belt, while the rest of his fingers pushed his jacket aside, revealing the butt of his .45 caliber H&K as he did so. He was six-two or six-three and in good condition, his stomach flat beneath his shirt. His eyes were brown and his skin was slightly tanned, his brown hair and brown mustache neatly trimmed. His eyes said he was about mid-forties.

‘Turn around, put your hands against the car, and spread your legs,’ he told me.

I was about to protest when he gave me a sharp push, spinning me round and propelling me against the side of the car. His speed and his strength took me by surprise.

‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘I bruise.’

He patted me down, but he didn’t find anything of note. I wasn’t armed, which I think kind of disappointed him. All he got was my wallet.

‘You can turn around now, Mr. Parker,’ he said when he had finished. I found him looking at my license, then back at me a couple of times, as if trying to sow enough doubt about its validity to justify hauling me in.

‘Why are you loitering outside Mr. Paragon’s home, Mr. Parker?’ he said. ‘Why are you harassing his staff?’

He didn’t smile. His voice was low and smooth. He sounded a little like Carter Paragon himself, I thought.

‘I was trying to make an appointment,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘I’m a lost soul, looking for guidance.’

‘If you’re trying to find yourself, maybe you should go look someplace else.’

‘Wherever I go, there I am.’

‘That’s unfortunate.’

‘I’ve learned to live with it.’

‘Doesn’t seem to me like you have much choice, but Mr. Paragon does. If he doesn’t want to see you, then you should accept that and be on your way.’

‘Do you know anything about Grace Peltier, Detective Lutz?’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘I’ve been hired to look into the circumstances of her death. Someone told me that you might know something about it.’ I let the double meaning hang in the air for a time, its ambivalence like a little time bomb ticking between us. Lutz’s fingers tapped briefly on his belt, but it was the only indication he gave that his calm might be under threat.

‘We think Ms. Peltier took her own life,’ he said. ‘We’re not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident.’

‘Did you interview Carter Paragon?’

‘I spoke to Mr. Paragon. He never met Grace Peltier.’

Lutz moved a little to his left. The sun was behind him and he stood so that it shone over my shoulder and directly into my eyes. I raised a hand to shade myself and his hand nudged for his gun again.

‘Ah-ah,’ he said.

‘A little jumpy, aren’t you, Detective?’ I lowered my hand carefully.

‘Mr. Paragon sometimes attracts a dangerous element,’ he replied. ‘Good men often find themselves under threat for their beliefs. It’s our duty to protect him.’

‘Shouldn’t that be the job of the police here in Waterville?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Mr. Paragon’s secretary preferred to contact me. Waterville police have better things to be doing with their time.’

‘And you don’t?’

He smiled for the first time. ‘It’s my day off, but I can spare a few minutes for Mr. Paragon.’

‘The law never rests.’

‘That’s right, and I sleep with my eyes open.’ He handed my wallet back to me. ‘You be on your way now, and don’t let me see you round here again. You want to make an appointment with Mr. Paragon, then you contact him during business hours, Monday to Friday. I’m sure his secretary will be happy to help you.’

‘Your faith in her is admirable, Detective.’

‘Faith is always admirable,’ he replied, then started to walk back to his car.

I had pretty much decided that I didn’t like Detective Lutz. I wondered what would happen if he was goaded. I decided to find out.

‘Amen,’ I said. ‘But if it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to stay here and read my magazine.’

Lutz stopped, then walked quickly back to me. I saw the punch coming, but I was against the car and all I could do was curl to one side to take the blow to my ribs instead of my stomach. He hit me so hard I thought I heard a rib crack, the pain lancing through my lower body and sending shock waves right to the tips of my toes. I slid down the side of the Mustang and sat on the road, a dull ache spreading across my stomach and into my groin. I felt like I was going to vomit. Then Lutz reached down and applied pressure from his thumbs and forefingers just below my ears. He was using pain compliance techniques and I yelped in agony as he forced me to rise.

‘Don’t mock me, Mr. Parker,’ he said. ‘And don’t mock my faith. Now get in your car and drive away.’

The pressure eased. Lutz walked over to his car and sat on the hood, waiting for me to leave. I looked over at the Paragon house and saw a woman standing at an upstairs window, watching me. Before I got back into the car, I could have sworn that I saw Miss Torrance smile.

Lutz’s white Acura stayed behind me until I left Waterville and headed north on I-95, but the pain and humiliation I felt meant that the memory of him was with me all the way to Ellsworth. The Hancock County Field Office, home of Troop J of the state police, had dealt with the discovery of Grace Peltier’s body. It was a small building on U.S. 1, with a pair of blue state trooper cars parked outside. A sergeant named Fortin told me that her body had been found by Trooper Voisine on a site named Happy Acres, which was scheduled to be developed for new housing. Voisine was out on patrol but Fortin told me that he’d contact him and ask him to meet me at the site. I thanked him, then followed his directions north until I came to Happy Acres.

A company called Estate Executives was advertising it as the future setting for ‘roads and views’, although currently there were only rutted tracks and the main view was of dead or fallen trees. There was still some tape blowing in the wind where Grace’s car had been found, but that apart, there was nothing to indicate that a young woman’s life had come to an end in this place. Still, when I looked around, something bothered me: I couldn’t see the road from where I was standing. I went back to the Mustang and drove it up the track until it was in more or less the same position that Grace’s car must have occupied. I turned on the lights, then walked down to the road and looked back.

The car still wasn’t visible, and I couldn’t see its lights through the trees.

As I stood by the roadside, a blue cruiser pulled up beside me and the trooper inside stepped out.

‘Mr. Parker?’ he asked.

‘Trooper Voisine?’ I extended a hand and he took it.

He was about my height and age, with receding hair, an ‘aw shucks’ smile, and a small triangular scar on his forehead. He caught me looking at it and reached up to rub it with his right hand.

‘Lady hit me on the head with a high-heeled shoe after I pulled her over for speeding,’ he explained. ‘I asked her to step from the car, she stumbled, and when I reached over to help her I caught her heel in my forehead. Sometimes it just don’t pay to be polite.’

‘Like they say,’ I said, ‘shoot the women first.’

His smile faltered a little, then regained some of its brightness.

‘You from away?’ he asked.

‘From away.’ I hadn’t heard that phrase in quite some time. Around these parts, ‘from away’ meant anyplace more than a half-hour’s drive from wherever you happened to be standing at the time. It also meant anyone who couldn’t trace a local family connection back at least a hundred years. There were people whose grandparents were buried in the nearest cemetery who were still regarded as ‘from away,’ although that wasn’t quite as bad as being branded a ‘rusticator’, the locals’ favorite term of abuse for city folks who came Down East in order to get in touch with country living.

‘Scarborough,’ I answered.

‘Huh.’ Voisine sounded unimpressed. He leaned against his car, removed a Quality Light from a pack in his shirt pocket, then offered the pack to me. I shook my head and watched as he lit up. Quality Lights: he’d have been better off throwing the cigarettes away and trying to smoke the packaging.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘if we were in a movie, smoking a cigarette would automatically brand you as a bad guy.’

‘Is that so?’ he replied. ‘I’ll have to remember that.’

‘Take it as a crime stopper’s tip.’

Somehow, largely through my own efforts, the conversation appeared to have taken a slightly antagonistic turn. I watched while Voisine appraised me through a cloud of cigarette smoke, as if the mutual dislike we instinctively felt had become visible between us.

‘Sergeant says you want to talk to me about the Peltier woman,’ said Voisine at last.

‘That’s right. I hear you were the first on the scene.’

He nodded. ‘There was a lot of blood, but I saw the gun in her hand and thought: suicide. First thing I thought, and it turns out I was right.’

‘From what I hear, the verdict may still be open.’

He blanked me, then shrugged. ‘Did you know her?’ he asked.

‘A little,’ I replied. ‘From way back.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He didn’t even try to put any emotion into the words.

‘What did you do after you found her?’

‘Called it in, then waited.’

‘Who arrived after you?’

‘Another patrol, ambulance. Doc pronounced her dead at the scene.’

‘Detectives?’

He flicked his head back like a man who suddenly realizes he has left out something important. It was a curiously theatrical gesture.

‘Sure. CID.’

‘You remember his name?’

‘Lutz. John Lutz.’

‘He get here before, or after, the second patrol?’

Voisine paused. I saw him watching me carefully through the cigarette smoke before he replied. ‘Before,’ he said at last.

‘Must have got here pretty fast,’ I said, keeping my tone as neutral as possible.

Voisine shrugged again. ‘Guess he was in the area.’

‘Guess so,’ I said. ‘Was there anything in the car?’

‘I don’t understand, sir.’

‘Purse, suitcase, that kind of thing?’

‘There was a bag with a change of clothes and a small purse with makeup, a wallet, that kind of stuff.’

‘Nothing else?’

Something clicked in Voisine’s throat before he spoke.

‘No.’

I thanked him and he finished off his cigarette, then tossed the butt on the ground, stamping it out beneath his heel. Just as he was about to get back into his car I called to him.

‘Just one more thing, Trooper,’ I said.

I walked down to join him. He paused, half in and half out of the car, and stared at me.

‘How did you find her?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, how did you see the car from the road? I can’t see my car from here and it’s parked in pretty much the same spot. I’m just wondering how you came to find her, seeing as how she was hidden by the trees.’

He said nothing for a time. The professional courtesy was gone now, and I wasn’t sure what had replaced it. Trooper Voisine was a difficult man to read.

‘We get a lot of speeding on this road,’ he said at last. ‘I sometimes pull in here to wait. That’s how I found her.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘That explains it. Thanks for your time.’

‘Sure,’ he replied. He closed the door and started the engine, then turned onto the road and headed north. I walked out onto the blacktop and made sure that I stayed in his mirror until he was gone from my sight.

There was little traffic on the road from Ellsworth to Bar Harbor as I drove through the gathering dusk of the early evening. The season had not yet begun, which meant that the locals still had the place pretty much to themselves. The streets were quiet, most of the restaurants were closed, and there was digging equipment on the site of the town’s park, piles of earth now standing where there used to be green grass. Sherman’s bookstore was still open on Main Street, and it was the first time that I had ever seen Ben & Bill’s Chocolate Emporium empty. Ben & Bill’s was even offering 50 percent off all candies. If they tried that after Memorial Day, people would be killed in the stampede.

The Acadia Pines Motel was situated by the junction of Main and Park. It was a pretty standard tourist place, probably operating at the lower end of the market. It consisted of a single two-story, L-shaped block painted yellow and white, numbering about forty rooms in total. When I pulled into the lot there were only two other cars parked and there seemed to be a kind of desperation about the ferocity with which the VACANCIES sign glowed and hummed. I stepped from the car and noticed that the pain in my side had faded to a dull ache, although when I examined my body in the dashboard light I could still see the imprint of Lutz’s knuckles on my skin.

Inside the motel office, a woman in a pale blue dress sat behind the desk, the television tuned to a news show and a copy of TV Guide lying open beside her. She sipped from a Grateful Dead mug decorated with lines of dancing teddy bears, chipped red nail polish showing on her fingers. Her hair was dyed a kind of purple-black and shined like a new bruise. Her face was wrinkled and her hands looked old, but she was probably no more than fifty-five, if that. She tried to smile as I entered, but it made her look as if someone had inserted a pair of fishhooks in her upper lip and pulled gently.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Are you looking for a room?’

‘No, thank you,’ I replied. ‘I’m looking for Marcy Becker.’

There was a pause that spoke volumes. The office stayed silent but I could still hear her screaming in her head. I watched her as she ran through the various lying options open to her. You have the wrong place. I don’t know any Marcy Becker. She’s not here and I don’t know where she is. In the end, she settled for a variation on the third choice.

‘Marcy isn’t here. She doesn’t live here anymore.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Are you Mrs. Becker?’

That pause came again, then she nodded.

I reached into my pocket and showed her my ID. ‘My name is Charlie Parker, Mrs. Becker. I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of a woman named Grace Peltier. I believe Marcy was a friend of Grace’s, is that correct?’

Pause. Nod.

‘Mrs. Becker, when was the last time you saw Grace?’

‘I don’t recall,’ she said. Her voice was dry and cracked, so she coughed and repeated her answer with only marginally more assurance. ‘I don’t recall.’ She took a sip of coffee from her mug.

‘Was it when she came to collect Marcy, Mrs. Becker? That would have been a couple of weeks ago.’

‘She never came to collect Marcy,’ said Mrs. Becker quickly. ‘Marcy hasn’t seen her in . . . I don’t know how long.’

‘Your daughter didn’t attend Grace’s funeral. Don’t you think that’s strange?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. I watched her fingers slide beneath the counter and saw her arm tense as she pressed the panic button.

‘Are you worried about Marcy, Mrs. Becker?’

This time the pause went on for what seemed like a very long time. When she spoke, her mouth answered no but her eyes whispered yes.

Behind me, I heard the door of the office open. When I turned, a short, bald man in a golf sweater and blue polyester pants stood before me. He had a golf club in his hand.

‘Did I interrupt your round?’ I asked.

He shifted the club in his hand. It looked like a nine iron. ‘Can I help you, mister?’

‘I hope so, or maybe I can help you,’ I said.

‘He was asking about Marcy, Hal,’ said Mrs. Becker.

‘I can handle this, Francine,’ her husband assured her, although even he didn’t look convinced.

‘I don’t think so, Mr. Becker, not if all you’ve got is a cheap golf club.’

A rivulet of panic sweat trickled down from his brow and into his eyes. He blinked it away, then raised the club to shoulder height in a two-armed grip. ‘Get out,’ he said.

My ID was still open in my right hand. With my left, I took one of my business cards from my pocket and laid it on the counter. ‘Okay, Mr. Becker, have it your way. But before I go, let me tell you something. I think someone may have killed Grace Peltier. Maybe you’re telling me the truth, but if you’re not, then I think your daughter has some idea who that person might be. If I could figure that out, then so could whoever killed her friend. And if that person comes asking questions, then he probably won’t be as nice about it as I am. You bear that in mind after I’m gone.’

The club moved forward an inch or two. ‘I’m telling you for the last time,’ he said, ‘get out of this office.’

I flipped my wallet closed, slipped it into my jacket pocket, then walked to the door, Hal Becker circling me with his golf club to keep some swinging distance between us. ‘I have a feeling you’ll be calling me,’ I said as I opened the door and stepped into the lot.

‘Don’t you bet on it,’ replied Becker. As I started my car and drove away, he was still standing at the door, the golf club still raised, like a frustrated amateur with a huge handicap stuck in the biggest, deepest bunker in the world.

On the drive back to Scarborough I ran through what I had learned, which wasn’t much. I knew that Carter Paragon was being kept under wraps by Miss Torrance and that Lutz seemed to have more than a professional interest in keeping him that way. I knew that something about Voisine’s discovery of Grace’s body made me uneasy, and Lutz’s involvement in that discovery made me uneasier still. And I knew that Hal and Francine Becker were scared. There were a lot of reasons why people might not want a private detective questioning their child. Maybe Marcy Becker was a porn star, or sold drugs to high school kids. Or maybe their daughter had told them to keep quiet about her whereabouts until whatever she was worried about had blown over. I still had Ali Wynn, Grace’s Boston friend, to talk to, but already Marcy Becker was looking like a woman worth pursuing.

It seemed that Curtis Peltier and Jack Mercier were right to suspect the official version of Grace’s death, but I also felt that everybody I had met over the past couple of days was either lying to me or holding something back. It was time to rectify that situation, and I had an idea where I wanted to start. Despite my tiredness, I didn’t take the Scarborough exit. Instead, I first took Congress Street, then headed onto Danforth and pulled up in front of Curtis Peltier’s house.

The old man answered the door wearing a nightgown and bedroom slippers. Inside, I could hear the sound of the television in the kitchen, so I knew I hadn’t woken him.

‘You find out something?’ he asked as he motioned me into the hallway and closed the door behind me.

‘No,’ I replied, ‘but I hope to pretty soon.’

I followed him into the kitchen and took the same seat I had occupied the day before, while Peltier hit the mute button on the remote. He was watching Night of the Hunter, Robert Mitchum oozing evil as the psychotic preacher with the tattooed knuckles.

‘Mr. Peltier,’ I began, ‘why did you and Jack Mercier cease to be business partners?’

He didn’t look away, but his eyes blinked closed for slightly longer than usual. When they opened again, he seemed tired. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, was it for business, or personal, reasons?’

‘When you’re in partnership with your friend, then all business is personal,’ he replied. This time, he did look away when he said it.

‘That’s not answering the question.’

I waited for a further reply. The silence of the kitchen was broken only by the sound of his breathing. On the screen to my left, the children drifted down the river on a small boat, the preacher tracking them along the bank.

‘Have you ever been betrayed by a friend, Mr. Parker?’ he asked at last.

Now it was my turn to flinch. ‘Once or twice,’ I answered quietly.

‘Which was it – once, or twice?’

‘Twice.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘The first one died.’

‘And the second?’

I heard my heart beating in the few seconds it took me to reply. It sounded impossibly loud.

‘I killed him.’

‘Either he betrayed you badly or you’re a harsh judge of men.’

‘I was pretty tense, once upon a time.’

‘And now?’

‘I take deep breaths and count to ten.’

He smiled. ‘Does it work?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never made it as far as ten.’

‘I guess it don’t, then.’

‘I guess not. Do you want to tell me what happened between you and Jack Mercier?’

He shook his head. ‘No, I don’t want to tell you, but I get the feeling you have your own ideas about what might have happened.’

I did, but I was as reluctant to say them out loud as Peltier was to tell me. Even thinking them in the company of this man who had lost his only child so recently seemed like an unforgivable discourtesy.

‘It was personal, wasn’t it?’ I asked him softly.

‘Yes, it was very personal.’

I watched him carefully in the lamplight, took in his eyes, the shape of his face, his hair, even his ears and his Grecian nose. There was nothing of him in Grace, nothing that I could recall. But there was something of Jack Mercier in her. I was almost certain of it. It had struck me most forcefully after I stood in his library and looked at the photographs on the wall, the images of the young Jack triumphant. Yes, I could see Grace in him, and I could see Jack in her. Yet I wasn’t certain, and even if it was true, to say it aloud would hurt the old man. He seemed to sense what I was thinking, and my response to it, because what he said next answered everything.

‘She was my daughter, Mr. Parker,’ he said, and his eyes were two deep wells of hurt and pride and remembered betrayal. ‘My daughter in every way that mattered. I raised her, bathed her, held her when she cried, collected her from school, watched her grow, supported her in all that she did, and kissed her good night every time she stayed with me. He had almost nothing to do with her, not in life. But now, I need him to do something for her and for me, maybe even for himself.’

‘Did she know?’

‘You mean, did I tell her? No, I didn’t. But you suspected, and so did she.’

‘Did she have contact with Jack Mercier?’

‘He payed for her graduate research because I couldn’t afford to. It was done through an educational trust he established, but I think it confirmed what Grace had always believed. Since the funding began, Grace had met him on a few occasions, usually at events organized by the trust. He also let her look at some books he had out at the house, something to do with her thesis. But the issue of her parentage was never discussed. We’d agreed that: Jack, my late wife, and I.’

‘You stayed together?’

‘I loved her,’ he said simply. ‘Even after what she’d done, I still loved her. Things were never the same because of it, but yes, we stayed together and I wept for her when she died.’

‘Was Mercier married at the time of . . .’ I allowed the sentence to peter out.

‘The time of the affair?’ he finished. ‘No, he met his wife a few years later, and they were married a year or so after that again.’

‘Do you think she knew about Grace?’

He sighed. ‘I don’t know, but I guess he must have told her. He’s that kind of man. Hell, it was him who confessed to me, not my wife. Jack just had to relieve himself of the burden. He has all the weaknesses that come with a conscience, but none of the strengths.’ It was the first hint of bitterness that he had revealed.

‘I have another question, Mr. Peltier. Why did Grace choose to research the Aroostook Baptists?’

‘Because she was related to two of them,’ he replied. He said it matter-of-factly, as if it had never occurred to him that it might be relevant.

‘You didn’t mention it before,’ I said, keeping my voice even.

‘I guess it didn’t seem important.’ His voice faltered and he sighed. ‘Or maybe I thought that if I told you that, I’d have to tell you about Jack Mercier and . . .’ He waved a hand dispiritedly.

‘The Aroostook Baptists were what brought Jack Mercier and me together,’ he began. ‘We weren’t friends then. We met at a lecture on the history of Eagle Lake, first and last we ever attended. We went out of curiosity more than concern. My cousin was a woman called Elizabeth Jessop. Jack Mercier’s second cousin was Lyall Kellog. Do any of those names mean anything to you, Mr. Parker?’

I thought back to the newspaper report the previous day and the picture of the assembled families taken before they departed for northern Aroostook.

‘Elizabeth Jessop and Lyall Kellog were members of the Aroostook Baptists,’ I replied.

‘That’s right. In a way, Grace had links with both of them through Jack and me. That’s why she was so interested in their disappearance.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I should have been open with you from the start.’

I rose and put my hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’m sorry that I had to ask.’

I released my hold on him and moved toward the door, but his hand reached out to stop me.

‘You think that her death has something to do with the bodies in the north?’ Seated before me, he seemed very small and frail. I felt a strange kind of empathy with him; we were two men who had been cursed to outlive their daughters.

‘I don’t know, Mr. Peltier.’

‘But you’ll keep looking? You’ll keep looking for the truth?’

‘I’ll keep looking,’ I assured him.

I could hear again the soft rattle of his breathing as I opened the door and stepped out into the night. When I looked back he was still seated, his head down, his shoulders shaking gently with the force of his tears.

Chapter Five

Curtis Peltier’s confession not only explained a great deal about Jack Mercier’s actions; it also made things a whole lot more difficult for me. The blood link between Mercier and Grace was bad news.

There was more bad news waiting for me when I got back to the Scarborough house. I couldn’t tell why, exactly, but something seemed wrong with the place as soon as I pulled up in front of the door. At first I put it down to that feeling of dislocation you get when you return home after being away, however briefly, but it was more than that. It was as if someone had taken the house and shifted it slightly on its axis, so that the moonlight no longer shone on it in quite the way that it once had and the shadows fell differently along the ground. The smell of gas from the mailbox served as a reminder of what had taken place that morning. Spiders in the mailbox were bad enough, but I wasn’t sure that I could handle recluses in my house.

I approached the door, opened the screen, and tested the lock, but it remained secure. I inserted the key and pushed the front door, expecting to see some scene of desolation before me, but there was nothing at first. The house was quiet and the doors stood slightly ajar to allow the flow of air through the rooms. In the hallway, an old coat stand that I used for keeping mail and as a place to lay my keys had been pulled slightly away from the wall. I could see the clear marks on the floor where the legs had once stood, now slightly tarnished with speckles of dust. In the living room, I had the same sensation, as if someone had gone through my house and moved everything marginally out of kilter. The couch and chairs had been lifted, then imperfectly replaced. In the kitchen, crockery had been shifted, foodstuffs in the fridge removed and then returned in a haphazard manner. Even the sheets on my bed were tossed, the top sheet pulled loose at the end. I went to my desk at the back of the living room and thought I knew then what they had come for.

The copy of the file on the case had been taken from me.

I spent the next hour doing something that was unexpected but, upon reflection, natural. I went through the house, cleaning it, vacuuming and brushing, dusting and polishing. I took the sheets from my bed and threw them in a laundry bag, along with the small selection of clothes in my closet. Then I washed all of the cups and plates, the knives and forks, in boiling water and left them on the draining board. By the time I had finished, sweat was running down my face, my hands and face were filthy, and my clothes were stuck to my back, but I felt that I had reclaimed my space a little from those who had intruded upon it. Had I not done so, everything in my house would have felt tarnished by their presence.

When I had showered and changed into the last of the clothes in my overnight bag, I tried calling Curtis Peltier’s house, but there was no reply. I wanted to warn him that whoever had searched my house might try to do the same to his, but his machine clicked on. I left a message, asking him to call me.

I drove down to Oak Hill and dropped off my laundry, then turned back and headed for the Kraft Mini-Storage on Gorham Road, close by my house. I used my key to open one of the storage bays I kept there, still filled with some old possessions of my grandfather’s, along with items I had kept from the Brooklyn home I had shared briefly with Susan and Jennifer. In the bright light, I sat on the edge of a packing crate and went through the police reports one by one, concentrating in particular on those prepared by Lutz as the detective responsible for the investigation into Grace Peltier’s death. His involvement in the case didn’t fill me with a great sense of reassurance, but I could still find nothing in his reports to justify my suspicions of him. He had done a perfectly adequate job, even to the extent of interviewing the elusive Carter Paragon.

When I returned to the house, I went to my bedroom and removed an eighteen-inch section of the baseboard from behind the chest of drawers. I took a bundle wrapped in oilcloth from out of the gap I had made. Two other bundles, one larger, one smaller, also lay inside, but I didn’t touch them. I took the bundle into the kitchen, lay a newspaper on the table, and unwrapped the gun.

It was a Third Generation Smith & Wesson Model 1076, a 10-millimeter version developed especially for the FBI. I had owned a similar model for a year, until I lost it in a lake in northern Maine while running for my life. In some ways I had been glad to see the last of that gun. I had done terrible things with it, and it had come to represent all that was worst in me.

Yet two weeks after I lost it, a new 1076 had arrived for me, sent by Louis and delivered by one of his emissaries, a huge black man in a Klan Killer T-shirt. Louis called me an hour or two after its delivery.

‘I don’t want it, Louis,’ I told him. ‘I’m sick of guns, and especially this gun.’

‘You feel that way now, but this was your gun,’ he said. ‘You used it because you had to use it, and you was good with it. Maybe a day will come when you be glad you have it.’

Instead of throwing it away, I had wrapped it in oilcloth. I did the same thing with my father’s .38 Colt Detective Special and a 9-millimeter Heckler & Koch semiautomatic, for which I didn’t have a permit. Then I had cut away the section of baseboard and placed the guns safely in the space I had made for them. Out of sight, out of mind.

Now I released the magazine, using the catch at the left side of the butt. I pulled back the slide in case there was a round in the chamber, still sticking to the old safety routine. I inspected the chamber through the ejection port, then released the slide and pulled the trigger. For the next thirty minutes I cleaned and oiled the gun, then loaded it and sighted at the door. Even fully loaded, it weighed a little over two and a half pounds. I tested its lines with my thumb, ran my finger over the serial number on the left-hand side of the frame, and felt inexplicably afraid.

There is a dark resource within all of us, a reservoir of hurt and pain and anger upon which we can draw when the need arises. Most of us rarely, if ever, have to delve too deeply into it. That is as it should be, because dipping into it costs, and you lose a little of yourself each time, a small part of all that is good and honorable and decent about you. Each time you use it you have to go a little deeper, a little further down into the blackness. Strange creatures move through its depths, illuminated by a burning light from within and fueled only by the desire to survive and to kill. The danger in diving into that pool, in drinking from that dark water, is that one day you may submerge yourself so deeply that you can never find the surface again. Give in to it and you’re lost forever.

Looking at the gun, feeling the power of it, its base, unarguable lethality, I saw myself standing at the verge of those dark waters and felt the burning on my skin, heard the cool lapping of the waves calling me to fall into their depths. I did not look down, for fear of what I might see reflected on the surface.

In an effort to pull myself away, I rose and checked my messages. There was one from Rachel phoning to say ‘Hi.’ I returned her call immediately, and she picked up on the second ring.

‘Hey, you,’ she said. ‘I got those tickets for the Wang.’

‘Great.’

‘That doesn’t sound very enthusiastic’

‘I haven’t had such a good day. I got assaulted by a policeman for mocking his belief system, and someone threatened to take my head off with a nine iron.’

‘And you’re usually so naturally charming,’ she said, before her voice grew serious. ‘You want to tell me what’s going on?’

I told her a little of what I knew, or suspected, so far. I didn’t mention Marcy Becker, Ali Wynn, or the two policemen. I didn’t like talking about it over the phone, or in a house so recently violated by strangers.

‘Are you going to continue with this?’

I paused before answering. Beside me, the Smith & Wesson gleamed dully in the moonlight.

‘I think so,’ I answered quietly.

She sighed. ‘Guess I should cancel those tickets, then.’

‘No, don’t do that.’ Suddenly I wanted to be with Rachel more than anything else in the world, and anyway, I still had to talk to Ali Wynn. ‘We’ll meet up, as arranged.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Never been more sure of anything.’

‘Okay, then. You know I love you, Parker, don’t you?’ She had taken to calling me Parker sometimes, simply because nobody else close to me ever called me that.

‘I love you too.’

‘Good. Then take care of your damned self.’

And with that she hung up.

The second message on the machine was distinctly unusual.

‘Mr. Parker,’ said a male voice, ‘my name is Arthur Franklin. I am an attorney. I have a client who is anxious to speak with you.’ Arthur Franklin sounded kind of nervous, as if there was somebody standing in the shadows behind him brandishing a length of rubber hose. ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d call me as soon as you can.’

He’d left a home telephone number, so I called him back. When I told him who I was, relief burst from him like air from a punctured tire. He must have said ‘thank you’ three times in as many seconds.

‘My client’s name is Harvey Ragle,’ he explained, before I had a chance to say anything further. ‘He’s a filmmaker. His studio and distribution arm is in California but he has recently come to live and work in Maine. Unfortunately, the state of California has taken issue with the nature of his art, and extradition proceedings are now in train. More to the point, certain individuals outside the law have also taken some offense at Mr. Ragle’s art, and my client now believes that his life is in danger. We have a preliminary hearing tomorrow afternoon at the federal courthouse, after which my client will be available to talk to you.’

He came up for air at last, giving me an opportunity to interrupt.

‘I’m sorry, Mr. Franklin, but I’m not sure that your client is my concern, and I’m not taking on any new cases.’

‘Oh no,’ replied Franklin. ‘You don’t understand. This is not a new case. This is in the nature of assistance with your current case.’

‘What do you know about my caseload?’

‘Oh dear,’ said Franklin. ‘I knew this wasn’t a good idea. I told him, but he wouldn’t listen.’

‘Told whom?’

Franklin let out a deep breath that quivered on the verge of tears. Perry Mason he wasn’t. Somehow, I got the feeling that Harvey Ragle was going to be getting some California sunshine in the near future.

‘I was told to call you,’ continued Franklin, ‘by a certain individual from Boston. He’s in the comic book business. I think you know the gentleman to whom I am referring.’

I knew the gentleman. His name was Al Z, and for all intents and purposes he ran the Boston mob from above a comic book store on Newbury Street.

Suddenly I was in real trouble.

Chapter Six

The sun shone brightly through my windows when I awoke, the thin material of the curtains speckled with thousands of tiny points of light. I could hear the buzzing of bees, attracted by the trilliums and hepaticas growing at the end of my yard and the pink buds of the single wild apple tree that marked the start of my driveway.

I showered and dressed, then took my training bag and headed into One City Center to work out for an hour. In the lobby I passed Norman Boone, one of the ATF agents based in Portland, and nodded a hello. He nodded back, which was something, Boone ordinarily being about as friendly as a cat in a bag. The feds, the U.S. marshals, and the ATF all occupied offices at One City Center, which was the kind of knowledge that made you feel pretty safe and secure while using the gym, as long as some freak with a grudge against the government didn’t get it into his head to make his mark on the world with a vanload of Semtex.

I tried to concentrate on my workout but found myself distracted by the events of the past days. Thoughts of Lutz and Voisine and the Beckers flashed through my mind, and I was conscious of the Smith & Wesson, in its Milt Sparks Summer Special holster, which now lay in my locker. I was also acutely aware that Al Z was taking an interest in my affairs, which, on the ‘Good Things That Can Happen to a Person’ scale, registered somewhere between contracting leprosy and having the IRS move into your house.

Al Z had arrived in Boston in the early nineties, following some fairly successful FBI moves against the New England mob involving video and tape surveillance and a small army of informants. While Action Jackson Salemme and Baby Shanks Manocchio (of whom it was once said that if there were any flies on him, they were paying rent) ostensibly jostled for control of the outfit, each dogged by surveillance and whispered rumors that one or both of them could be informing for the feds, Al Z tried to restore stability behind the scenes, dispensing advice and impartial discipline in roughly equal measures. His formal position in the hierarchy was kind of nebulous, but according to those with more than a passing interest in organized crime, Al Z was the head of the New England operation in everything but name. Our paths had crossed once before, with violent repercussions; since then I’d been very careful where I walked.

After I left the gym I headed up Congress to the library of the Maine Historical Society, where I spent an hour going through whatever they had on Faulkner and the Aroostook Baptists. The file was close at hand and still warm from the latest round of media photocopying, but it contained little more than sketchy details and yellowed newspaper clippings. The only article of any note came from an edition of Down East magazine, published in 1997. The author was credited only as ‘G.P.’ A call to Down East’s office confirmed that the contributor had been Grace Peltier.

In what was probably a dry run for her thesis, Grace had gathered together details of the four families and a brief history of Faulkner’s life and beliefs, most of it accumulated from unpublished sermons he had given and the recollections of those who had heard him preach.

To begin with, Faulkner was not a real minister; instead, he appeared to have been “ordained” by his flock. He was not a premillenarianist, one of those who believe that chaos on earth is an indication of the imminence of the Second Coming and that the faithful should therefore do nothing to stand in its way. Throughout his preaching, Faulkner had shown an acute awareness of earthly affairs and encouraged his followers to stand against divorce, homosexuality, liberalism, and just about anything else the sixties were likely to throw up. In this he showed the influence of the early Protestant thinker John Knox, but Faulkner was also a student of Calvin. He was a believer in predestination: God had chosen those who were saved before they were even born, and it was therefore impossible for people to save themselves, no matter what good deeds they did on earth. Faith alone led to salvation; in this case, faith in the Reverend Faulkner, which was seen to be a natural consequence of faith in God. If you followed Faulkner, you were one of the saved. If you rejected him, then you were one of the damned. It all seemed pretty straightforward.

He adhered to the Augustinian view, popular among some fundamentalists, that God intended his followers to build a ‘City on the Hill’, a community dedicated to his worship and greater glory. Eagle Lake became the site of his great project: a town of only six hundred souls that had never recovered from the exodus provoked by World War II, when those who came back from the war opted to remain in the cities instead of returning to the small communities in the north; a place with one or two decent roads and no electricity in most of the houses that didn’t come from private generators; a community where the meat store and dry goods store had closed in the fifties, where the town’s main employer, the Eagle Lake Lumber Mill, which manufactured hardwood bowling pins, had gone bankrupt in 1956 after only five years in operation, only to stagger on in various guises until finally closing forever in 1977; a hamlet of mostly French Catholics, who regarded the newcomers as an oddity and left them to their own devices, grateful for whatever small sums they spent on seeds and supplies. This was the place Faulkner chose, and this was the place in which his people died.

And if it seems strange that twenty people could just arrive somewhere in 1963 and be gone less than a year later, never to be seen again, then it was worth remembering that this is a big state, with 1 million or so people scattered over its 33,000 square miles, most of it forest. Whole New England towns had been swallowed up by the woods, simply ceasing to exist. They were once places with streets and houses, mills and schools, where men and women worked, worshiped, and were buried, but they were now gone, and the only signs that they had ever existed were the remnants of old stone walls and unusual patterns of tree growth along the lines of what were formerly roads. Communities came and went in this part of the world; it was the way of things.

There was a strangeness to this state that was sometimes forgotten, a product of its history and the wars fought upon the land, of the woods and their elemental nature, of the sea and the strangers it had washed up on its shores. There were cemeteries with only one date on each headstone, in communities founded by Gypsies, who had never officially been born yet died as surely as the rest. There were small graves set apart from family plots, where illegitimate children lay, the manner of their passing never questioned too deeply. And there were empty graves, the stones above them monuments to the lost, to those who had drowned at sea or gone astray in the woods and whose bones now lay beneath sand and water, under earth and snow, in places that would never be marked by men.

My fingers smelled musty from turning the yellowed clippings, and I found myself rubbing my hands on my trousers in an attempt to rid myself of the odor. Faulkner’s world didn’t sound like any that I wanted to live in, I thought as I returned the file to the librarian. It was a world in which salvation was taken out of our hands, in which there was no possibility of atonement; a world peopled by the ranks of the damned, from whom the handful to be saved stood aloof. And if they were damned, then they didn’t matter to anyone; whatever happened to them, however awful, was no more or less than they deserved.

As I headed back to my house, a UPS truck shadowed me from the highway and pulled up behind me as I entered the drive. The deliveryman handed me a special delivery parcel from the lawyer Arthur Franklin, while casting a wary glance at the blackened mailbox.

‘You got a grudge against the mailman?’ he asked.

‘Junk mail,’ I explained.

He nodded without looking at me as I signed for the package. ‘It’s a bitch,’ he agreed, before hurrying into his truck and driving quickly onto the road.

Arthur Franklin’s package contained a videotape. I went back to the house and put the tape in my VCR. After a few seconds some cheesy easy-listening music began to play and the words Crushem Productions presents appeared on the screen, followed by the title, A Bug’s Death, and a director’s credit for one Rarvey Hagle. Let the Orange County prosecutor’s office chew on that little conundrum for a while.

For the next thirty minutes I watched as women in various stages of undress squashed an assortment of spiders, roaches, mantids and small rodents beneath their high-heeled shoes. In most cases, the bugs and mice seemed to have been glued or stapled to a board and they struggled a lot before they died. I fast-forwarded through the rest, then ejected the tape and considered burning it. Instead I decided to give it right back to Arthur Franklin when I met him, preferably by jamming it into his mouth, but I still couldn’t understand why Al Z had put Franklin and his client in touch with me in the first place, unless he thought my sex life might be getting a little staid.

I was still wondering while I made a pot of coffee, poured a cup, and took it outside to drink at the tree stump that my grandfather, years before, had converted into a table by adding a cross section of an oak to it. I had an hour or so to kill before I was due to meet with Franklin and I found that sitting at the table, where my grandfather and I used to sit together, sometimes helped me to relax and think. The Portland Press Herald and the New York Times lay beside me, the pages gently rustling in the breeze.

My grandfather’s hands had been steady when he made this rude table, planing the oak until it was perfectly flat, then adding a coat of wood protector to it so that it shined in the sun. Later, those hands were not so still and he had trouble writing. His memory began to fail him. A sheriffs deputy, the son of one of his old comrades on the force, brought him back to the house one evening after he found him wandering down by the Black Point cemetery on Old County Road, searching fruitlessly for the grave of his wife, so I hired a nurse for him.

He was still strong in body; each morning he would do push-ups and bench presses. Sometimes he would do laps around the yard, running gently but consistently until the back of his T-shirt was soaked in sweat. He would be a little more lucid for a time after that, the nurse would tell us, before his brain clouded once again and the cells continued to blink out of existence like the lights of a great city as the long night draws on. More than my own father and mother, that old man had guided me and tried to shape me into a good man. I wondered if he would have been disappointed at the man I had become.

My thoughts were disturbed by the sound of a car pulling into my drive. Seconds later a black Cirrus drew up at the edge of the grass. There were two people inside, a man driving and a woman sitting in the passenger seat. The man killed the engine and stepped from the car, but the woman remained seated. His back was to the sun so he was almost a silhouette at first, thin and dark like a sheathed blade. The Smith & Wesson lay beneath the arts section of the Times, its butt visible only to me. I watched him carefully as he approached, my hand resting casually inches from the gun. The approaching stranger made me uneasy. Maybe it was his manner, his apparent familiarity with my property; or it could have been the woman, who stared at me through the windshield, straggly gray-brown hair hanging to her shoulders.

Or perhaps it was because I recalled this man eating an ice cream on a cool morning, his lips sucking busily away like a spider draining a fly, watching me as I drove down Portland Street.

He stopped ten feet from me, the fingers of his right hand unwrapping something held in the palm of his left, until two cubes of sugar were revealed. He popped them into his mouth and began to suck, then folded the wrapper carefully and placed it in the pocket of his jacket. He wore brown polyester trousers held up with a cheap leather belt, a once-bright yellow shirt that had now faded to the color of a jaundice victim’s face, a vile brown-and-yellow tie, and a brown check polyester jacket. A brown hat shaded his face, and now, as he paused, he removed it and held it loosely in his left hand, patting it against his thigh in a slow, deliberate rhythm.

He was of medium height, five-ten or so, and almost emaciated, his clothes hanging loosely on his body. He walked slowly and carefully, as if he were so fragile that a misstep might cause his leg to snap. His hair was wiry, a combination of red and gray through which patches of pink skin showed. His eyebrows were also red, as were the lashes. Dark brown eyes that were far too small for his face peered out from beneath strange hoods of flesh, as if the skin had been pulled down from his forehead and up from his cheeks, then stitched in place by the corners of his eyes. Blue-red bags swelled up from below, so that his vision appeared to be entirely dependent on two narrow triangles of white and brown by the bridge of his nose. That nose was long and elongated at the tip, hanging almost to his upper lip. His mouth was very thin and his chin was slightly cleft. He was probably in his fifties, I thought, but I sensed that his apparent fragility was deceptive. His eyes were not those of a man who fears for his safety with every footstep.

‘Warm today,’ he said, the hat still slapping softly against his leg.

I nodded but didn’t reply.

He inclined his head back in the direction of the road. ‘I see you had an accident with your mailbox.’ He smiled, revealing uneven yellow teeth with a pronounced gap at the front, and I knew immediately that he had been responsible for the recluses.

‘Spiders,’ I replied. ‘I burnt them all.’

The smile died. ‘That’s unfortunate.’

‘You seem to be taking it kind of personally.’

His mouth worked at the sugar lumps while his eyes locked on mine. ‘I like spiders,’ he said.

‘They certainly burn well,’ I agreed. ‘Now, can I help you?’

‘I do hope so,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps I can help you. Yes sir, I feel certain that I can help you.’

His voice had an odd nasal quality that flattened his vowels and made his accent difficult to place, a task complicated further by the formal locutions of his speech. The smile gradually reappeared but those hooded eyes failed to alter in response. Instead, they maintained a watchful, vaguely malevolent quality, as if something else had taken over the body of this odd, dated-looking man, hollowing out his form and controlling his progress by looking through the empty sockets in his head.

‘I don’t think I need your help.’

He waggled a finger at me in disagreement, and for the first time, I got a good look at his hands. They were thin, absurdly so, and there was something insectlike about them as they emerged from the sleeves of his jacket. The middle finger seemed to be about five inches long and, in common with the rest of his digits, tapered to a point at the tip: not only the nail but the entire finger appeared to grow narrower and narrower. The fingernails themselves looked to be a quarter of an inch at their widest point and were stained a kind of yellow-black. There were patches of short red hair below each of the knuckles, gradually expanding to cover most of the back of his hand and disappearing in tufts beneath his sleeve. They gave him a strange, feral quality.

‘Now, now, sir,’ he said, his fingers waving the way an arachnid will sometimes raise its legs when it finds itself cornered. Their movements appeared to be unrelated to his words or to the language of the rest of the body. They were like separate creatures that had somehow managed to attach themselves to a host, constantly probing gently at the world around them.

‘Don’t be hasty,’ he continued. ‘I admire independence as much as the next man, indeed I do. It is a laudable attribute in a man, sir, a laudable attribute, make no mistake about that, but it can lead him to do reckless things. Worse, sir, worse; it can cause him to interfere with the rights of those around him, sometimes without him even knowing.’ His voice assumed a tone of awe at the ways of such men, and he shook his head slowly. ‘There you are, living your own life as you see fit, and you are causing pain and embarrassment to others by doing so. It’s a sin, sir, that’s what it is, a sin.’

He folded his slim fingers across his stomach, still smiling, and waited for a response.

‘Who are you?’ I said. There was an element of awe in my own voice as well. He was both comical yet sinister, like a bad clown.

‘Permit me to introduce myself,’ he said. ‘My name is Pudd, Mr. Pudd. At your service, sir.’ He extended his right hand in greeting, but I didn’t reach out to take it. I couldn’t. It revolted me. A friend of my grandfather’s had once kept a wolf spider in a glass case and one day, on a dare from the man’s son, I had touched its leg. The spider had shot away almost instantly, but not before I had felt the hairy, jointed nature of the thing. It was not an experience I wanted to repeat.

The hand hung in midair for a moment, and once again the smile faltered briefly. Then Mr. Pudd took back his hand, and his fingers scuttled inside his jacket. I eased my right hand a few inches to the left and took hold of the gun beneath the newspapers, my thumb flicking the safety off. Mr. Pudd didn’t appear to notice the movement. At least, he gave no indication that he had, but I felt something change in his attitude toward me, like a black widow that believes it has cornered a beetle only to find itself staring into the eyes of a wasp. His jacket tightened around him as his hand searched and I saw the telltale bulge of his gun.

‘I think I’d prefer it if you left,’ I said quietly.

‘Sadly, Mr. Parker, personal preference has nothing to do with this.’ The smile faded, and Mr. Pudd’s mouth assumed an expression of exaggerated sorrow. ‘If the truth be known, sir, I would prefer not to be here at all. This is an unpleasant duty, but one that I am afraid you have brought upon yourself by your inconsiderate actions.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I am talking about your harassment of Mr. Carter Paragon, your disregard for the work of the organization that he represents, and your insistence on attempting to connect the unfortunate death of a young woman with that same organization. The Fellowship is a religious body, Mr. Parker, with the rights accruing to such bodies under our fine Constitution. You are aware of the Constitution, are you not, Mr. Parker? You have heard of the First Amendment, have you not?’

Throughout this speech Mr. Pudd’s tone did not vary from one of quiet reasonableness. He spoke to me the way a parent speaks to an errant child. I made a note to add ‘patronizing’ to ‘creepy’ and ‘insectlike’ where Mr. Pudd was concerned.

‘That, and the Second Amendment,’ I said. ‘It seems like you’ve heard of that one too.’ I removed my hand from beneath the newspaper and pointed the gun at him. I was glad to see that my hand didn’t shake.

‘This is most unfortunate, Mr. Parker,’ he said in an aggrieved tone.

‘I agree, Mr. Pudd. I don’t like people coming onto my property carrying guns, or watching me while I conduct my business. It’s bad manners, and it makes me nervous.’

Mr. Pudd swallowed, took his hand from inside his jacket, and moved both hands away from his body. ‘I meant you no offense, sir, but the servants of the Lord are afflicted with enemies on all sides.’

‘Surely God will protect you better than a gun?’

‘The Lord helps those who help themselves, Mr. Parker,’ he replied.

‘I don’t think the Lord approves of breaking and entering,’ I said, and Mr. Pudd’s eyebrow raised slightly.

‘Are you accusing me of something?’

‘Why, do you have something to confess?’

‘Not to you, Mr. Parker. Not to you.’

Once again his fingers danced slowly in the air, but this time there appeared to be purpose in the movement and I wondered what it meant. It was only when I heard the car door open and the shadow of the woman advanced across the lawn that I knew. I stood quickly and moved back, raising the gun to shoulder height in a two-handed grip and aiming it at Mr. Pudd’s upper body.

The woman approached from behind his left shoulder. She didn’t speak, but her hand was inside her thigh-length black coat. She wore no makeup and her face was very pale. Beneath her coat she wore a black pleated skirt that hung almost to her ankles, and a simple white blouse unbuttoned at the top, with a black scarf knotted around her neck. There was something deeply unpleasant about her looks, an ugliness from within that had seeped through her pores and blighted her skin. The nose was too thin for the face, the eyes too big and too white, the lips strangely bloated. Her chin was weak and receded into layers of flesh at her neck. No muscles moved in her face.

Mr. Pudd turned his head slightly toward her but kept his eyes on me. ‘You know, my dear, I think Mr. Parker is frightened of us.’

The woman’s expression didn’t change. She just kept moving forward.

‘Tell her to back off,’ I said softly, but I found that it was I who was taking another step back.

‘Or?’ asked Mr. Pudd softly. ‘You won’t kill us, Mr. Parker.’ But he raised the fingers of his left hand in a halting gesture, and the woman stopped.

If Mr. Pudd’s eyes were watchful, his essential malevolence clouded with a thin fog of good humor, his partner’s eyes were like those of a doll, glassy and expressionless. They remained fixed on me and I realized that, despite the gun in my hand, I was the one in danger of harm.

‘Take your hand out of your coat, slowly,’ I told her, my aim now shifting from the man to the woman, then back again as I tried to keep them both under the gun. ‘And it better be empty when it appears.’

She didn’t move until Mr. Pudd nodded once. ‘Do as he says,’ he said. She responded immediately, taking her empty hand from her coat carefully but without any fear.

‘Now tell me, Mr. Pudd,’ I said, ‘just exactly who are you?’

‘I represent the Fellowship,’ he said. ‘I am asking you, on its behalf, to cease your involvement in this matter.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘Then we may have to take further action. We could involve you in some very expensive and time-consuming litigation, Mr. Parker. We have excellent lawyers. Of course, that is only one of the options open to us. There are others.’ This time the warning was explicit.

‘I see no reason for conflict,’ I said, mimicking his own tone and mannerisms. ‘I simply want to find out what happened to Grace Peltier, and I believe Mr. Paragon could help me toward that end.’

‘Mr. Paragon is occupied with the work of the Lord.’

‘Things to do, people to fleece?’

‘You are an irreverent man, Mr. Parker. Mr. Paragon is a servant of God.’

‘It’s hard to get good staff these days.’

Mr. Pudd made a strange hissing noise, an audible release of the pent-up aggression I felt within him.

‘If he talks to me and answers my questions, then I’ll leave him alone,’ I said. ‘Live and let live, that’s my motto.’

I grinned, but he didn’t return the favor.

‘With respect, Mr. Parker, I don’t believe that is your motto.’ His mouth opened a little wider, and he almost spat. ‘I don’t believe that is your motto at all.’

I gestured with my gun. ‘Get off my property, Mr. Pudd, and take your chatterbox friend with you.’

That was a mistake. Beside him, the woman shifted to her left suddenly and made as if to spring at me, her left hand tensed like the talons of a hawk while her right hand made a move for her coat. I lowered the gun and fired a shot into the ground between Mr. Pudd’s feet, sending a spray of dirt into the air and causing birds to scatter from the surrounding trees. The woman stopped as his hand shot out and gripped her arm.

‘Take off your scarf, my dear,’ he said, his eyes never leaving mine. The woman paused, then unknotted her black scarf and held it limply in her left hand. Her exposed neck was crisscrossed with scars, pale pink welts that had left her so badly mutilated that to allow them to remain uncovered would be to invite stares from every passerby.

‘Open wide, dear,’ said Mr. Pudd.

The woman’s mouth opened, revealing small yellow teeth, pink gums, and a tattered red mass at the back of her throat that was all that remained of her tongue.

‘Now sing. Let Mr. Parker hear you sing.’

She opened her mouth and her lips moved, but no sound came. Yet she continued to sing a song heard only in her own head, her eyes half closed in ecstasy, her body swaying slightly in time to the unheard music, until Mr. Pudd raised his hand and she closed her mouth instantly.

‘She used to have such a beautiful voice, Mr. Parker, so fine and pure. It was throat cancer that took it from her: throat cancer and the will of God. Perhaps it was a strange blessing, a visitation from the Lord sent to test her faith and confirm her on the one true path to salvation. In the end, I think it just made her love the Lord even more.’

I didn’t share his faith in the woman. The rage inside her was palpable, a fury at the pain she had endured, the loss she had suffered. It had consumed any love that once existed within her, and now she was forced to look beyond herself to feed it. The pain would never ease, but the burden could be made more bearable by inflicting a taste of it on others.

‘But,’ Mr. Pudd concluded, ‘I like to tell her it was because her voice made the angels jealous.’

I had to take his word for it. I didn’t see anything else about her that might have aroused the envy of angels.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘at least she still has her looks.’

Mr. Pudd didn’t respond, but for the first time, real hatred appeared in his eyes. It was a passing thing, gone as quickly as a mayfly, to be replaced with his habitual look of false good humor. But what had flickered briefly in his eyes burst into glorious, savage flame in those of the woman; in her eyes I saw churches burn, with the congregations still inside. Mr. Pudd seemed to sense the waves of contained violence rolling from her, because he turned and touched her cheek gently with the hairy back of one finger.

‘My Nakir,’ he whispered. ‘Hush.’

Her eyes fluttered briefly closed at the caress, and I wondered if they were lovers.

‘Go back to the car, my dear. Our business here is concluded, for the present.’ The woman looked at me once more, then walked away. Mr. Pudd seemed about to follow her, then stopped and turned back.

‘You are unwise to pursue this. I advise you for the last time to cease your involvement in this affair.’

‘Sue me,’ I said.

But Mr. Pudd only shook his head. ‘No, it’s gone far beyond that, I’m afraid. I fear we shall be seeing each other again, under less favorable circumstances for you.’

He raised his hands.

‘I am going to reach into my pocket, Mr. Parker, for my business card.’ Without waiting for a reply, he took a small silver case from the right hand pocket of his jacket. He flipped open the case and removed a white business card, holding it gently by one corner.

Once again, he extended his hand, but this time it didn’t falter. He waited patiently until I was forced to reach for it.

As I took it, he shifted his hand slightly and the tips of his fingers brushed against mine. Involuntarily, I shied away from the contact and Mr. Pudd nodded slightly, as if I had somehow confirmed a suspicion he had.

The card said only ELIAS PUDD in black Roman letters. There was no telephone number, no business address, no occupation. The back of the card was completely blank.

‘Your card doesn’t say a lot about you, Mr. Pudd,’ I remarked.

‘On the contrary, it says everything about me, Mr. Parker. I fear that you are simply not reading it correctly.’

‘All it tells me is that you’re either cheap or a minimalist,’ I responded. ‘You’re also irritating, but it doesn’t say that on your card either.’

For the first time, Mr. Pudd truly smiled, his yellow teeth showing and his eyes lighting up. ‘Oh, but it does, in its way,’ he said, and chuckled once. I kept the gun trained on him until he had climbed into the car and the strange pair had disappeared in a cloud of dust and fumes that seemed to taint the very sunlight that shone through it.

My fingers began to blister almost as soon as they had driven away. At first there was just a feeling of mild irritation but it quickly became real pain as small raised bumps appeared on my fingertips and the palm of my hand. I applied some hydrocortisone but the irritation persisted for most of the day, an intense, uncomfortable itching where Mr. Pudd’s card, and his fingers, had touched my skin. Using tweezers, I placed the card in a plastic envelope, sealed it, and placed it on my hall table. I would ask Rachel to have someone take a look at it while I was in Boston.

Chapter Seven

I left my gun beneath the spare tire in the trunk of the Mustang before walking to the granite masonry bulk of the Edward T. Gignoux Courthouse at Newbury and Market. I passed through the metal detector, then climbed the marble stairs to courtroom 1, taking a seat in one of the chairs at the back of the court.

The last of the five rows of benches was filled with what, in less enlightened times, might have been referred to as the cast of a freak show. There were five or six people of extremely diminished stature, two or three obese women, and a quartet of very elderly females dressed like hookers. Beside them was a huge, muscular man with a bald head who must have been six-five and weighed in at three hundred pounds. All of them seemed to be paying a great deal of attention to what was going on at the front of the courtroom.

The court was already in session and a man I took to be Arthur Franklin was arguing some point of law with the judge. His client, it appeared, was wanted in California for a range of offences including copyright theft, animal cruelty, and tax evasion, and was about as likely to avoid a jail term as turkeys were to see Thanksgiving. He was released on $50,000 bail and was scheduled to appear later that month before the same judge, when a final decision would be made on his extradition. Then everybody stood and the judge departed through a door behind his brown leather chair.

I walked up the center aisle, the muscular man close behind me, and introduced myself to Franklin. He was in his early forties, dressed in a blue suit under which he was sweating slightly. His hair was startlingly black and the eyes beneath his bushy brows had the panic-stricken look of a deer faced with the lights of an approaching truck.

Meanwhile Harvey Ragle, who was seated beside Franklin, wasn’t what I had expected. He was about forty and wore a neatly pressed tan suit, a clean, white, open-necked shirt, and oxblood loafers. His hair was brown and curly, cut close to his skull, and the only jewelry he wore was a gold Raymond Weil watch with a brown leather strap. He was freshly shaven and had splashed on Armani aftershave like it was being given away free. He rose from his seat and extended a well-manicured hand.

‘Harvey Ragle,’ he said. ‘CEO, Crushem Productions.’ He smiled warmly, revealing startlingly white teeth.

‘A pleasure, I’m sure,’ I replied. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t shake hands. I seem to have picked up something unpleasant.’

I lifted my blistered fingers and Ragle blanched. For a man who made his living by squashing small creatures, he was a surprisingly sensitive soul. I followed them both out of the courtroom, pausing briefly while the old ladies, the obese women, and the midgets took turns hugging him and wishing him well, before we crossed into attorney conference room 223, beside courtroom 2. The huge man, whose name was Mikey, waited outside, his hands crossed before him.

‘Protection,’ explained Franklin as he closed the door behind us. We sat down at the conference table and it was Ragle who spoke first.

‘You’ve seen my work, Mr. Parker?’ he said.

‘The crush video, Mr. Ragle? Yes, I’ve seen it.’

Ragle recoiled a little, as if I’d just breathed garlic on him.

‘I don’t like that term. I make erotic films, of every kind, and I am a father to my actors. Those people in court today are stars, Mr. Parker, stars.’

‘The midgets?’ I asked.

Ragle smiled wistfully. ‘They’re little people, but they have a lot of love to give.’

‘And the old ladies?’

‘Very energetic. Their appetites have increased rather than diminished with age.’

Good grief.

‘And now you make films like the one your attorney sent me?’

‘Yes.’

‘In which people step on bugs.’

‘Yes.’

‘And mice.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you enjoy your work, Mr. Ragle?’

‘Very much,’ he said. ‘I take it that you disapprove.’

‘Call me a prude, but it seems kind of sick, besides being cruel and probably illegal.’

Ragle leaned forward and tapped me on the knee with his index finger. I resisted breaking it, but only just.

‘But people kill insects and rodents every day, Mr. Parker,’ he began. ‘Some of them may even derive a great deal of pleasure from doing so. Unfortunately, as soon as they admit to that pleasure and attempt to replicate it in some form, our absurdly censorious law enforcement agencies step in and penalize them. Don’t forget, Mr. Parker, we put Reich in jail to die for selling his sex boxes from Rangeley, in this very state. We have a record of penalizing those who seek sexual gratification by unorthodox means.’

He sat back and smiled his bright smile.

I smiled back at him. ‘I believe it’s not only the state of California that has strong feelings about the legitimacy of what you do.’

Ragle’s veneer crumbled and he seemed to grow pale beneath his tan.

‘Er, yes,’ he said. He coughed, then reached for a glass of water that was resting on the table before him. ‘One gentleman in particular seems to have serious objections to some of my more, urn, specialized productions.’

‘Who might that be?’

‘He calls himself Mr. Pudd,’ interjected Franklin.

I tried to keep my expression neutral.

‘He didn’t like the spider movies,’ he added.

I could guess why.

Ragle’s veneer finally crumbled, as if the mention of Pudd’s name had at last brought home the reality of the threat he was facing. ‘He wants to kill me,’ he whined. ‘I don’t want to die for my art.’

So Al Z knew something about the Fellowship, and Pudd, and had seen fit to point me in Ragle’s direction. It seemed that I had another good reason for going to Boston besides Rachel and the elusive Ali Wynn.

‘How did he find out about you?’

Ragle shook his head angrily. ‘I have a supplier, a man who provides me with rodents and insects and, when necessary, arachnids. It’s my belief that he told this individual, this Mr. Pudd, about me.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘To divert attention away from himself. I think Mr. Pudd would be just as angry with whoever sold me the creatures as he is with me.’

‘So your supplier gave Pudd your name, then claimed not to know what you were planning to do with the bugs?’

‘That is correct, yes.’

‘What’s the supplier’s name?’

‘Bargus. Lester Bargus. He owns a store in Gorham, specializing in exotic insects and reptiles.’

I stopped taking notes.

‘You know the name, Mr. Parker?’ asked Franklin.

I nodded. Lester Bargus was what people liked to call ‘two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag.’ He was the kind of guy who thought it was patriotic to be stupid and took his mother to Denny’s to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. I recalled him from my time in Scarborough High, when I used to stand at the fence that marked the boundary of the football field, the big Redskins logo dominating the board, and get ready to face a beating. Those early months were the hardest. I was only fourteen and my father had been dead for two months. The rumors had followed us north: that my father had been a policeman in New York; that he had killed two people, a boy and a girl – shot them down dead and they weren’t even armed; that he had subsequently put his gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. They were made worse by the fact that they were true; there was no way of avoiding what my father had done, just as there was no way of explaining it. He had killed them, that was all. I don’t know what he saw when he pulled the trigger on them. They were taunting him, trying to make him lose his temper with them, but they couldn’t have known what they would cause him to do. Afterward my mother and I had run north, back to Scarborough, back to her father, who had once been a policeman himself, and the rumors had snapped at our heels like black dogs.

It took me a while to learn how to defend myself, but I did. My grandfather showed me how to block a punch and how to throw one back in a single controlled movement that would draw blood every time. But when I think back on those first months, I think of that fence, and a circle of young men closing on me, and Lester Bargus with his freckles and his brown, square-cut hair, sucking spit back into his mouth after he had begun to drool with the joy of striking out at another human being from the security of the pack. Had he been a coyote, Lester Bargus would have been the runt that hangs at the margins of the group, lying down on its back when the stronger ones turned on it yet always ready to fall on the weak and the wounded when the frenzy struck. He tortured and bullied and came close to rape in his senior year. He didn’t even bother to take his SATs; a new scale would have been needed to measure the depths of Bargus’s ignorance.

I had heard that Bargus now ran a bug store in Gorham but it was believed to be merely a front for his other interest, which was the illegal sale of weapons. If you needed a clean gun quickly, then Lester Bargus was your man, particularly if your political and social views were so right wing they made the Klan look like the ACLU.

‘Are there a lot of stores that supply bugs, Mr. Ragle?’

‘Not in this state, no, but Bargus is also regarded as a considerable authority nationally. Herpetologists and arachnologists consult with him on a regular basis.’ Ragle shuddered. ‘Although not, I should add, in person. Mr. Bargus is a particularly unpleasant individual.’

‘And you’re telling me all this because . . .?’

Franklin intervened. ‘Because my client is certain that Mr. Pudd will kill him if someone doesn’t stop him first. The gentleman in Boston, who has acted as a conduit for some of my client’s more mainstream products, believes that a case with which you are currently involved may impinge upon my client’s interests. He suggested that any assistance we might be able to provide could only help our cause.’

‘And all you have is Lester Bargus?’

Franklin shrugged unhappily.

‘Has Pudd tried to contact you?’

‘In a way. My client had been sequestered in a safe house in Standish. The house burnt down; somebody threw an incendiary device through the bedroom window. Fortunately, Mr. Ragle was able to escape without injury. It was after that incident that we took Mikey on as security.’

I closed my notebook and stood up to leave. ‘I can’t promise anything,’ I said.

Ragle leaned toward me and gripped my arm. ‘If you find this man, Mr. Parker, squash him,’ he hissed. ‘Squash him like a bug.’

I gently removed my arm from his grasp. ‘I don’t think stiletto heels come that big, Mr. Ragle, but I’ll bear it in mind.’

I drove over to Gorham that afternoon. It was only a couple of miles but it was still a wasted trip, as I knew it would be. Bargus was aging badly, his hair and teeth almost gone and his fingers stained yellow with nicotine. He wore a No New World Order T-shirt, depicting a blue United Nations helmet caught in the crosshairs of a sniper’s sight. In his dimly lit store, spiders crouched in dirt-filled cases, snakes curled around branches, and the hard exoskeletons of cockroaches clicked as they crawled against one another. On the counter beside him a four-inch-long mantid squatted in a glass case, its spiked front legs raised before it. Bargus fed it a cricket, which skipped across the dirt at the bottom of the case as it tried vainly to evade destruction. The mantid turned its head to watch it, as if amused by its presumption, then set off in pursuit.

It took Bargus a few moments to recognize me as I approached the counter.

‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Look what just rose to the lip of the bowl.’

‘You’re looking well, Lester,’ I answered. ‘How do you stay so young and pretty?’

He scowled at me and picked at something jammed between two of his remaining teeth. ‘You a fag, Parker? I always thought you was queer.’

‘Now, Lester, don’t think I’m not flattered, but you’re not really my type.’

‘Huh.’ He didn’t sound convinced. ‘You here to buy something?’

‘I’m looking for some information.’

‘Out the door, turn right, and keep going till you hit the asshole of hell. Tell ’em I sent you.’

He went back to reading a book, which, judging from the illustrations, appeared to be a guide to making a mortar out of beer cans.

‘That’s no way to talk to an old high school buddy.’

‘You ain’t my buddy, and I don’t like you being in my store,’ he said without looking up from his book.

‘Can I ask why?’

‘People have a habit of dying around you.’

‘You look hard enough, people have a habit of dying around everybody.’

‘Maybe, ’cept around you they die a whole lot quicker and a whole lot more regular.’

‘Then the sooner I leave, the safer you’ll be.’

‘I ain’t holdin’ you.’

I tapped lightly at the glass of the mantid case, directly in the insect’s line of vision, and the triangular head drew back as it flinched. A mantid is the most humanlike of insects; it has its eyes arranged so that it can see forward, allowing it depth perception. It can see a certain amount of color, and it can turn its head to look over its “shoulder.” Also, like humans, it will eat just about anything it can subdue, from a hornet to a mouse. As I moved my finger, the mantid’s head carefully followed the motion while its jaws chomped at the cricket. The top half of its body was already gone.

‘Quit botherin’ it,’ said Bargus.

‘That’s quite a predator.’

‘That bitch would eat you, she thought you’d stay still long enough.’ He grinned, revealing his rotting teeth.

‘I hear they can take a black widow.’

The beer-can-mortar book now lay forgotten before him. ‘I seen her do it,’ nodded Bargus.

‘Maybe she’s not so bad after all.’

‘You don’t like spiders, you just walked into the wrong store.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t like them as much as some. I don’t like them as much as Mr. Pudd.’

Lester’s eyes suddenly returned to the page before him, but his attention remained focused on me.

‘Never heard of him.’

‘Ah, but he’s heard of you.’

Lester looked up at me and swallowed. ‘The fuck you saying?’

‘You gave him Harvey Ragle. You think that’s going to be enough?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ In the warm, dank-smelling store, Lester Bargus began to sweat.

‘My guess is that he’ll take care of Ragle, then come back for you.’

‘Get out of my store,’ hissed Lester. He tried to make it sound menacing, but the tremor in his voice gave him away.

‘Are spiders the only things you sold him, Lester? Maybe you helped him with some of his other needs, too. Is he a gun-lovin’ man?’

His hands scrambled beneath the counter and I knew he was reaching for a weapon. I tossed my card on the counter and watched as he grabbed it with his left hand, crushed it in his palm, and threw it into the trash can. His right hand came up holding a shotgun sawed off at the stock. I didn’t move.

‘I’ve seen him, Lester,’ I said. ‘He’s a scary guy.’

Lester’s thumb cocked the shotgun. ‘Like I said, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

I sighed and backed away.

‘Your call, Lester, but I get the feeling that sooner or later, it’s going to come back to haunt you.’

I turned my back on him and headed for the door. I had already opened it when he called my name.

‘I don’t want no trouble. Not from you, not from him, you understand?’ he said.

I waited in silence. The struggle between his fear of saying nothing and the consequences of giving too much away was clear on his face.

‘I never had no address for him,’ he continued, hesitantly. ‘He’d contact me when he needed something, then pick it up hisself and pay in cash. Last time he came he was asking about Ragle, and I told him what I knew. You see him again, you tell him he’s got no call to come bothering me.’

Confessing seemed to have restored some of his confidence, because his habitual ugly sneer returned. ‘And, I was you, I’d find me another line of work. The kind of fella you’re asking about don’t like being asked about, you get my meaning. The kind of fella you’re asking about, he kills people get involved in his business.’

That evening I felt no desire to be in the house or to cook for myself. I secured all of the windows, placed a chain on the back door and put a broken matchstick above the front door. If anyone tried to gain entry, I would know.

I drove into Portland and parked at the junction of Cotton and Forest in the Old Port, then walked down to Sapporo on Commercial Street, the sound of the sea in my ears. I ate some good teriyaki, sipped green tea, and tried to get my thoughts straight. My reasons for going to Boston were rapidly multiplying: Rachel, Ali Wynn, and now Al Z. But I still hadn’t managed to corner Carter Paragon, I was still concerned about Marcy Becker, and I was sweating under my jacket since I couldn’t take it off without exposing my gun.

I paid the check and left the restaurant. Across Commercial, crowds of kids lined up to get into Three Dollar Dewey’s, the doorman checking IDs with the skepticism of a seasoned pro. The Old Port was buzzing, and noisy crowds congregated at the corner of Forest and Union, the edge of the main drag. I walked among them for a while, not wanting to be alone, not wanting to return to the house in Scarborough. I passed the Calabash Cigar Café and Gritty McDuffs, glancing down the pedestrian strip of Moulton Street as I passed.

The woman in the shadows was wearing a pale summer dress patterned with pink flowers. Her back was to me, and her blond hair hung in a ponytail against the whiteness of her back, held in place by an aquamarine bow. Around me, traffic stopped and footsteps hung suspended, passersby frozen briefly in their lives. The only sound I heard was my own breath; the only movement I saw came from Moulton.

Beside the woman stood a small boy, and the woman’s left hand was clasped gently over his right. He wore the same check shirt and short pants as he had on the day when I had first seen him on Exchange Street. As I watched, the woman leaned over and whispered something to him. He nodded and his head turned as he looked back at me, the single clear lens gleaming in the darkness. Then the woman straightened, released his hand, and began to walk away from us, turning right at the corner onto Wharf Street. When she left my sight it was as if the world around me released its breath, and movement resumed. I sprinted down Moulton, past the shape of the little boy. When I reached the corner the woman was just passing Dana Street, the street lamps creating pools of illumination through which she moved soundlessly.

‘Susan.’

I heard myself call her name, and for a moment it seemed to me that she paused as if to listen. Then she passed from light into shade and was gone.

The boy was now sitting at the corner of Moulton, staring at the cobblestones. As I approached him he looked up, and his left eye peered curiously at me from behind his black-rimmed glasses. Dark tape had been wrapped inexpertly around the lens, obscuring the right eye. He was probably no more than eight years old, with light brown hair parted at one side and flicked loosely across his forehead. His pants were almost stiff with mud in places and his shirt was filthy. Most of it was obscured by the block of wood – maybe eighteen inches by five inches, and an inch thick – that hung from the rope around his neck. Something had been hacked into the wood in jagged, childish letters, probably with a nail, but the grooves were filled with dirt in places, conspiring with the darkness to make it almost impossible to read.

I squatted down in front of him. ‘Hi,’ I said.

He didn’t seem scared. He didn’t look hungry or ill. He was just . . . there.

‘Hi,’ he replied.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘James,’ he said.

‘Are you lost, James?’

He shook his head.

‘Then what are you doing out here?’

‘Waiting,’ he said simply.

‘Waiting for what?’

He didn’t reply. I got the feeling that I was supposed to know, and that he was a little surprised that I didn’t.

‘Who was the lady you were with, James?’ I asked.

‘The Summer Lady,’ he answered.

‘Does she have a name?’

He waited for a moment or two before replying. When he did, all the breath seemed to leave my body and I felt light headed, and afraid.

‘She said you’d know her name.’ Again he seemed puzzled, almost disappointed.

My eyes closed for an instant and I rocked back on my heels. I felt his hand on my wrist, steadying me, and the hand was cold. When I opened my eyes, he was leaning close to me. There was dirt caught between his teeth.

‘What happened to your eye, James?’ I asked.

‘I don’t remember,’ he said.

I reached toward him and he released his grip on my wrist as I rubbed at the dirt and filth encrusted on the board. It fell to the ground in little clumps, revealing the words:

James Jessop

Sinner

‘Who made you wear this, James?’

A small tear trickled from his left eye, then a second. ‘I was bad,’ he whispered. ‘We were all bad.’

But the tears fell only from one eye, and only the dirt on his left cheek was streaked with moisture. My hands were trembling as I reached for his glasses. I took the frames gently in each hand and slowly removed them. He didn’t try to stop me, his single visible eye regarding me with absolute trust.

And when I took the glasses away, a hole was revealed where his right eye had been, the flesh torn and burnt and the wound dry as if it were an old, old injury that had long since stopped bleeding, or even hurting.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ said James Jessop. ‘We’ve all been waiting for you.’

I rose and backed away from him, the glasses dropping to the ground as I turned.

And I saw them all.

They stood watching me, men and women, young boys and girls, all with wooden boards around their necks. There were a dozen at least, maybe more. They stood in the shadows of Wharf Street and at the entrance to Commercial, wearing simple clothes, clothes designed to be worn on the land: pants that wouldn’t tear at the first misstep in the dirt, and boots that would not let in the rain or be pierced by a stone.

Katherine Cornish, Sinner.

Vyrna Kellog, Sinner.

Frank Jessop, Sinner.

Billy Perrson, Sinner.

The others were farther back, their names on the boards harder to read. Some of them had wounds to their heads. Vyrna Kellog’s skull had been split open, and the open wound extended almost to the bridge of her nose; Billy Perrson had been shot through the forehead; a flap of Katherine Cornish’s skin hung forward from the back of her head, obscuring her left ear. They stood and regarded me, and the air around them seemed to crackle with a hidden energy.

I swallowed, but my throat was dry and the effort made it ache.

‘Who are you?’ I asked, but even as they faded away, I knew.

I stumbled backward, the bricks behind me cold against my body, and I saw tall trees and men wading through mud and bone. Water lapped against a sandbag levee, and animals howled. And as I stood there trembling, I closed my eyes tight and heard my own voice start to pray.

Please Lord, it said.

Please don’t let this begin again.

Chapter Eight

The next day, I drove down to Boston in about two hours but got snarled up in the city’s horrific traffic for almost another hour. They were calling Boston’s never-ending roadworks ‘the Big Dig,’ and signs dotted around various large holes in the ground promised: It’ll be worth it. If you listened hard enough, you could hear millions of voters hissing that it had better be.

Before I left, I called Curtis Peltier at home. He had been out to dinner with some friends the night before, he told me, and when he got back the police were at his house.

‘Someone tried to break in the back door,’ he explained. ‘Some kids heard the noise and called the police. Probably damn junkies from Kennedy Park or Riverton.’

I didn’t think so. I told him about the missing notes.

‘You think there was something important in them?’

‘Maybe,’ I replied, although I couldn’t think what it might be. I suspected that whoever took them – Mr. Pudd or some other person as yet unknown – simply wanted to make things as difficult as possible for me. I told Curtis to look after himself and he assured me that he would.

Shortly before noon I reached Exeter Street, just off Commonwealth Avenue, and parked outside Rachel’s building. She was renting in a four-story brownstone across the street from where Henry Lee Higginson, the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, once lived. On Commonwealth, people jogged and walked their dogs or sat on the benches and took in the traffic fumes. Close by, pigeons and sparrows fed before paying their respects to the statue of the sailor-historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who sat on his plinth with the vaguely troubled look of a man who has forgotten where he parked his car.

Rachel had given me my own key to the apartment, so I dumped my overnight bag, bought some fruit and bottled water in Deluca’s Market at Fairfield, and headed up Commonwealth Avenue until I reached the Public Garden between Arlington and Charles. I drank my water, ate my fruit, and watched children playing in the sunlight and dogs chasing Frisbees. I wanted a dog, I thought. My family had always had them, my grandfather too, and I liked the idea of having a dog around the house. I guessed that I wanted the company, which made me wonder why I wasn’t asking Rachel to move in with me. I thought that Rachel might have been wondering about it herself. Lately there seemed to be an edge to her voice when the subject came up, a new urgency to her probings. She had been patient for over fourteen months now, and I guessed that she was feeling the strain of being trapped in relationship limbo. That was my fault: I wanted her near me, yet I was still afraid of the potential consequences. She had almost died once because of me. I did not want to see her hurt again.

At 2 P.M. I took the red line out to Harvard and headed for Holyoke Street. Ali Wynn was due to finish her lunchtime shift at two-thirty and I’d left a message to say that I’d be coming by to talk to her about Grace. The redbrick building in which the restaurant was housed had ivy growing across its face and the upstairs windows were decked with small white lights. From the room below came the sound of tap dancers practising their steps, their rhythms like the movements of fingers on the keys of an old Underwood typewriter.

A young woman of twenty-three or twenty-four stood on the steps of the building, adjusting a stud in her nose. Her hair was dyed a coal black, she wore heavy blue-black makeup around her eyes, and her lipstick was so red it could have stopped traffic. She was very pale and very thin, so she couldn’t have been a regular eater at her own restaurant. She looked at me with a mixture of expectancy and unease as I approached.

‘Ali Wynn?’ I asked.

She nodded. ‘You’re the detective?’

‘Charlie Parker.’ She reached out and shook my hand, her back remaining firmly against the brickwork of the building behind her.

‘Like the jazz guy?’

‘I guess.’

‘He was pretty cool. You listen to him?’

‘No. I prefer country music.’

She wrinkled her forehead. ‘Guess your mom and dad had to be jazz fans to give you a name like that?’

‘They listened to Glenn Miller and Lawrence Welk. I don’t think they even knew who Charlie Parker was.’

‘Do people call you Bird?’

‘Sometimes. My girlfriend thinks it’s cute. My friends do it to irritate me.’

‘Must be kind of a drag for you.’

‘I’m used to it.’

The deconstruction of my family’s naming procedures seemed to make her a little less wary of me, because she detached herself from the wall and fell into step beside me. We walked down to the Au Bon Pain at Harvard Square, where she smoked four cigarettes and drank two espressos in fifteen minutes. Ali Wynn had so much nervous energy she made electrons seem calm.

‘Did you know Grace well?’ I asked when she was about halfway through cigarette number two.

She blew out a stream of smoke. ‘Sure, pretty well. We were friends.’

‘Her father told me that she used to live with you and that she stayed with you sometimes even after she moved out.’

‘She used to come down at weekends to use the library and I let her crash on my couch. Grace was fun. Well, she used to be fun.’

‘When did she stop being fun?’

Ali finished number two and lit number three with a matchbook from the Grafton Pub. ‘About the time she started her graduate thesis.’

‘On the Aroostook Baptists?’

The cigarette made a lazy arc. ‘Whatever. She was obsessed with them. She had all of these letters and photographs belonging to them. She’d lie on the couch, put some mournful shit on the stereo, and stay like that for hours, just going through them over and over again. Can you get me another coffee?’

I did as I was asked. I figured that she wasn’t going to run away until she’d finished her cigarette.

‘You ever worry about the effects of too much caffeine?’ I asked when I returned.

She tugged at her nose stud and smiled. ‘Nah, I’m hoping to smoke myself to death first.’

There was something very likable about Ali Wynn, despite the veneer of Siouxsie and the Banshees-era cool. The sunlight made her eyes sparkle and the right side of her mouth was permanently raised in an amused, faux-cynical grin. She was all front; the cigarette smoke didn’t stay in her mouth long enough to give a gnat a nicotine buzz and her makeup was too carefully applied to be truly scary. I guessed that she probably inspired fear, lust, and irritation in her male classmates, all in roughly equal measure. Ali Wynn could have wrapped the world around her little finger if she’d had the self-confidence to do it. It would come, in time.

‘You were telling me about Grace,’ I prompted, as much to get myself back on track as Ali.

‘Yeah, sure. There’s not much more to tell. It was like the whole family history thing was draining her, sucking the life from her. It was all “Elizabeth” this and “Lyall” that. She became a real drag. She was obsessed by Elizabeth Jessop. I don’t know, maybe she thought Elizabeth’s spirit had entered into her or something.’

‘Did she think Elizabeth was dead?’

Ali nodded.

‘Did she say why?’

‘She just had a feeling, that was all. Anyway, like I said, it was all getting too heavy. I told her she couldn’t stay anymore because my roomie was complaining, which was, like, a total lie. That was in February. She stopped coming and we didn’t really talk much between then and . . .’ She let the end of the sentence hang, then stubbed the cigarette out angrily.

‘I suppose you think I’m a bitch,’ she said softly when the last trace of smoke had disappeared.

‘No, I don’t think you’re a bitch at all.’

She didn’t look at me, as if afraid that my expression might give the lie to my words. ‘I was going to go up to the funeral but . . . I didn’t. I hate funerals. Then I was going to send a card to her dad – he was a nice old guy – but I didn’t do that either.’

At last, she raised her eyes and I was only half surprised to see that they were wet. ‘I prayed for her, Mr. Parker, and I can’t remember the last time I ever prayed. I just prayed that she’d be okay and that whoever was on the other side – God, Buddha, Allah – would look after her. Grace was a good person.’

‘I think she probably was,’ I said as she lit a final cigarette. ‘Did she take drugs?’

Ali shook her head vehemently. ‘No, never.’

‘Apart from getting overinvolved with her thesis, did she seem depressed or anxious?’

‘No more than any of us.’

‘Was she seeing anyone?’

‘She’d had a couple of flings, but nothing serious for at least a year. She would have told me.’

I watched her quietly for a time, but I knew she was telling the truth. Ali Wynn hadn’t been in the car with Grace on the night that she died. More and more, Marcy Becker was looking like the most likely candidate. I sat back and examined the crowds entering and leaving the T, the tourists and locals with bags of wine and candies from Cardullos, Black Forest ham and exotic teas from Jackson’s of Picadilly, bath salts and soaps from Origins. Grace should have been among them, I thought. The world was a poorer place for her passing.

‘Has that helped you?’ asked Ali. I could see that she wanted to leave.

‘It’s cleared a few things up.’ I handed her my card, after writing my home telephone number on the back. ‘If you think of anything more, or if someone else comes around asking about Grace, maybe you’ll give me a call.’

‘Sure.’ She picked up the card and placed it carefully in her purse. She was about to move away when she paused and placed her hand lightly on my arm.

‘You think somebody killed her, don’t you?’ Her red lips were pressed tightly together but she couldn’t control the trembling of her chin.

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I think somebody did.’

Her grip tightened momentarily and I felt the heat of her penetrating to my skin. ‘Thanks for the coffee,’ she said, and then she was gone.

I spent the rest of the afternoon buying some clothes for my depleted wardrobe before heading back to Copley and the Starbucks on Newbury to read the newspaper. Reading the New York Times on a near-daily basis was a habit I hadn’t lost, although buying it in Boston made me feel kind of guilty, as if I had just rolled up the newspaper and used it to slap the mayor.

I didn’t even notice the start of the story on the far right of the front page until I came to its continuation on page seven and saw the photograph accompanying it. A man stared out at me in black-and-white, a black hat on his head, and I recalled the same man nodding to me from a darkened Mercedes as I approached Jack Mercier’s house – and sitting uneasily with three other people in a framed photograph in Mercier’s study. His name was Rabbi Yossi Epstein, and he was dead.

According to the police report, Rabbi Yossi Epstein left the Eldridge Street shul at 7:30 P.M. on a cool Tuesday evening, the flow of traffic on the Lower East Side changing, altering in pitch, as commuters were replaced by those whose reasons for being in the city had more to do with pleasure than business. Epstein wore a black suit and a white shirt, but he was far from being the traditionalist that his exterior suggested. There were those in the shul who had long whispered against him; he tolerated homosexuals and adulterers, they said. He was too ready to take his place before the television cameras, they argued, too quick to smile and pander to the national media. He was too concerned with the things of this world and too little concerned with the promise of the next.

Epstein had made his name in the aftermath of the Crown Heights disaster, pleading for tolerance, arguing that the Jewish and black communities should put aside their differences, that poor blacks and poor Jews had more in common with each other than with the wealthier members of their own tribes. He had been injured in the riots that followed, and a picture of him in the Post, blood streaming from a wound in his head, had brought him his first taste of celebrity due to the photo’s unfortunate, and unintended, similarity to representations of the suffering Christ.

Epstein had also been involved with the B’Nai Jeshurun Temple up on Eighty-ninth Street and Broadway, founded by Marshal T. Meyer, whose mentor had been the conservative firebrand Abraham Yoshua Heschel. It was easy to see why someone with Epstein’s views might have been attracted to Meyer, who had fought with the Argentine generals in his efforts to find disappeared Jews. Since Meyer’s death, in 1993, two Argentine rabbis had continued his work in New York, including the provision of a homeless shelter and encouraging the establishment of a gay congregation. B’Nai Jeshurun was even twinned with a congregation in Harlem, the New Canaan Baptist Church, whose preacher sometimes spoke at the synagogue. According to the Times, Epstein had fallen out with B’Nai Jeshurun and had taken to holding twice-monthly services at the old Orensanz Center on the Lower East Side.

One of the reasons for the split with B’Nai Jeshurun appeared to be Epstein’s growing involvement in anti-Nazi groups, including the Center for Democratic Renewal in Atlanta and Searchlight in Britain. He had established his own organization, the Jewish League for Tolerance, staffed mainly by volunteers and run from out of a small office on Clinton Street, above a disused Jewish bookstore.

According to the Times, Epstein was believed to have received considerable funding in recent weeks to enable him to commence a series of investigations into organizations suspected of anti-Semitic activities, among them the usual suspects: fanatics with ‘Aryan’ prominent in their names and splinter groups from the Klan who had left because the Klan now frowned on burning down synagogues and chaining blacks to the back axles of pickup trucks.

Whatever his critics might have said about him, Yossi Epstein was a brave man, a man of conviction, a man who worked tirelessly to improve the lives not only of the city’s Jews but of his other fellow citizens. He was found dead in his apartment at 11 P.M. on Wednesday night, apparently after suffering some kind of seizure. The apartment, in which he lived alone, had been ransacked and his wallet and address book were missing. Foul play was suspected, according to the report, a suspicion increased by another incident earlier that night.

At 10 P.M., the office of the Jewish League for Tolerance was firebombed. A young volunteer, Sarah Miller, was working there at the time, printing off addresses for a mailing the following day. She was three days short of her nineteenth birthday when the room around her became an inferno. She was still on the critical list, with burns over 90 percent of her body. Epstein was due to be buried at Pine Lawn Cemetery in Long Island that day, following the prompt autopsy.

There was one more detail that caught my attention. In addition to his work on right-wing organizations, Epstein was reported to be preparing a legal challenge to the religious tax exemption given by the IRS to a number of church groups. Most of the names were unfamiliar to me, except for one: the Fellowship, based in Waterville, Maine. The law firm employed by Epstein to handle the case was Ober, Thayer & Moss of Boston, Massachusetts. It was hardly a coincidence that the firm also took care of Jack Mercier’s legal affairs and that Warren Ober’s son was soon to be married to Mercier’s daughter.

I read through the piece again, then called Mercier’s home. A maid took the call, but when I gave my name and asked to be put through to Mr. Mercier, another female voice came on the line. It was Deborah Mercier.

‘Mr. Parker,’ she said. ‘My husband is not available. Perhaps I can help you?’

‘I don’t think so, Mrs. Mercier. I really need to speak to your husband.’

There was a pause in the conversation long enough to make our feelings about each other clear, and then Deborah Mercier concluded:

‘In that case, perhaps you’d be kind enough not to phone the house again. Jack is not available at present, but I’ll make sure he hears that you called.’

With that she hung up, and I got the feeling that Jack Mercier would never know that I had called him.

I had never met Rabbi Yossi Epstein and knew nothing more about him than what I had just read, but his activities had awakened something, something that lay curled in its web until Epstein caused one of the strands to twitch and the sleeping thing roused itself and came after him, then tore him apart before it returned to the dark place in which it lived.

In time, I would find that place.

Chapter Nine

I returned to Rachel’s apartment, showered, and in an effort to cheer myself up for the evening ahead, put on some of my sharp new purchases: a black Joseph Abboud coat that made me look like I was auditioning for the second remake of Nosferatu, black gabardine pants, and a black DKNY v-neck. Screaming ‘fashion victim,’ I walked down to the Copley Plaza Hotel and into the Oak Bar.

Outside, the traffic on Copley melted away, the sound of horns and engines smothered by the red curtains of the Oak. The four big ceiling fans scythed the air and the ice in the raw bar glittered in the dim light. Louis was already sitting at a table by the window, his long frame folded into one of the bar’s comfortable red chairs. He was wearing a black wool suit with a white shirt and black shoes. His dark head was no longer shaven and he had grown a small, vaguely satanic beard, which, if anything, rendered him even more intimidating than before. In the past, when he had been bald and devoid of facial hair, people crossed the street to avoid him. Now they probably felt the urge to book a trip somewhere safe and quiet, like Kosovo or Sierra Leone.

There was a Presidential Martini on the table before him, and he was smoking a Montecristo No. 2. That was about $55 worth of vices. He blew a stream of blue smoke at me in greeting.

I ordered a virgin cocktail and shrugged off my coat, ostentatiously showing Louis the label as I did so.

‘Yeah, very impressive,’ he said unconvincingly. ‘Not even last season’s. You so cheap, your hourly rate probably got ninety-nine cents at the end.’

‘Where’s the insignificant other?’ I asked, ignoring him.

‘Buying some clothes. Airline lost his bag.’

‘They’re doing him a favor. You pay them to lose it?’

‘Didn’t have to. Baggage handlers probably refused to touch it. Piece of shit practically walked to La Guardia by itself. How you doin’?’

‘Pretty good.’

‘Still huntin’ pen pushers?’ Louis didn’t entirely approve of my move into the area of white-collar criminals. He felt that I was wasting my talents. I decided to let him go on thinking it for a while.

‘The money’s okay and they don’t tend to kick up a fuss,’ I replied, ‘although one of them called me a bad name once.’

Close to the door, heads began to turn and one of the waiters almost dropped a tray of drinks in shock. Angel entered, dressed in a yellow-and-green Hawaiian shirt, a yellow tie, a powder blue jacket, stonewashed jeans, and a pair of red boots so bright they throbbed. Conversations died as he passed by, and a few people tried to shield their eyes.

‘Off to see the wizard?’ I asked when the red boots finally reached us.

Louis looked like someone had just splashed paint on his car. ‘Shit, Angel, the hell you think you are? Mardi Gras?’

Angel calmly took a seat, ordered a Beck’s from a distressed-looking waiter, then stretched out his legs to admire his new boots. He straightened his tie, which did nothing to help in the long term but obscured some of his shirt for a while.

‘You have the good taste of a seasoned meths drinker,’ I told him.

‘Man, I didn’t even know Filene’s Basement had a basement,’ said Louis. ‘Must be where they keep the real shit.’

Angel shook his head and smiled. ‘I’m making a statement,’ he said, like a teacher explaining a lesson to a pair of slow children.

‘I know the kind of statement you makin’,’ replied Louis as Angel’s beer arrived. ‘You sayin’, “Kill me, I got no taste.”’

‘You should carry a sign,’ I advised. ‘“I will work for fashion tips.’”

It felt good to be here with them. Angel and Louis were just about the closest friends I had. They had stood by me as the confrontation with the Traveling Man drew closer, and had faced down the guns of a Boston scumbag named Tony Celli in order to save the life of a girl they had never met. Their gray morality, tempered by expediency, was closer to goodness than most people’s virtue.

‘How’s life in the sticks?’ asked Angel. ‘Still living in the rural slum?’

‘My house is not a slum.’

‘It don’t even have carpets.’

‘It’s got timber floors.’

‘It’s got timbers. Just cause they fell on the ground don’t make them a floor.’

He paused to sip his beer, allowing me to change the subject.

‘Anything new in the city?’ I asked.

‘Mel Valentine died,’ said Angel.

‘Psycho Mel?’ Psycho Mel Valentine had been working his way through the A-to-Z of crime: arson, burglary, counterfeiting, drugs . . . If he hadn’t died, then pretty soon the Bronx Zoo would have been mounting a guard on its zebras.

Angel nodded. ‘Always thought the “Psycho Mel” thing was kinda unfair. Maybe he’d have been psychotic if they quietened him down some, but “Psycho” seemed like kind of an underestimation of his abilities.’

‘How’d he die?’

‘Gardening accident in Buffalo. He was trying to break into a house when the owner killed him with a rake.’

He raised his glass to the memory of Psycho Mel Valentine, gardening victim.

Rachel appeared a few minutes later, much earlier than expected, wearing a yellow coat that hung to her ankles. Her long red hair was tied up at the back of her head and held in place by a pair of wooden skewers.

‘Nice hair,’ said Angel. ‘You pick up all the channels with those things, or just local?’

‘Tuning must be off,’ she replied. ‘I can still hear you.’

She pulled the sticks from her hair and let it hang loose on her shoulders. It brushed my face as she kissed me gently before ordering a Mimosa and taking a seat beside me. I hadn’t seen her in almost two weeks and I felt a pang of desire for her as she folded one stockinged leg over the other, her short black skirt rising above midthigh level. She wore a man’s shirt, white and with only one button undone. She always wore her shirts that way: if any more buttons were opened, the scars left by the Traveling Man on her chest became visible. As she sat she placed a large Neiman Marcus bag by her feet. Inside was something red and expensive.

‘Needless Markup,’ whistled Louis. ‘You givin’ away money, can I have some?’

‘Style costs,’ she replied.

‘That’s the truth,’ he said. ‘Try telling it to the other fifty percent of the group.’

The 25 percent that was Angel searched through the big NM bag until he found the receipt, then dropped it quickly and rubbed his fingers like they’d just been burned.

‘What she buy?’ asked Louis.

‘A house,’ he said. ‘Maybe two.’

She stuck her tongue out at him.

‘You’re early,’ I said.

‘You sound disappointed. I disturb a conversation on football or monster trucks?’

‘Stereotyping,’ I replied. ‘And you a psychologist.’

We talked for a time, then crossed the street to Anago at the Lenox and spoke about nothing and everything for a couple of hours over venison and beef and oven roast salmon. Then, when the coffee arrived and while the other three sipped Armagnacs, I told them about Grace Peltier, Jack Mercier, and the death of Yossi Epstein.

‘And you think these old guys are right, that Grace Peltier didn’t kill herself?’ asked Angel when I had finished.

‘Things just don’t fit. Mercier could probably put pressure on the investigation through Augusta, but that would draw attention to himself and he doesn’t want that.’

‘Which is why he hired you,’ said Angel. ‘To stir things up.’

‘Maybe,’ I replied, but I felt that there was more to it than that, although I couldn’t say what.

‘So what do you think happened to Grace?’ asked Rachel.

‘Speculating, I’d say that Marcy Becker might have been the other person in the car with Grace for most of her trip north. But Marcy Becker is missing, and she left in enough of a hurry to forget a pack of cigarettes that was probably sitting on the dashboard in front of her.’

‘And maybe left her bag of coke as well,’ said Angel.

‘That’s possible, but I don’t think so. The coke looks like a plant, a way of making Grace appear a little less clean than she was. Drugs, pressure of study, takes her own life with a gun that seems to have popped up out of nowhere.’

‘What was the piece?’ he asked.

‘Smith & Wesson Saturday Night Special.’

Angel shrugged. ‘Not hard to lay your hands on one of those, you know who to ask.’

‘But I don’t think Grace Peltier would have known who to ask. According to her father, she didn’t even like guns.’

‘Do you think Marcy Becker could have killed her?’ asked Rachel.

I toyed with my water glass. ‘Again, it’s possible, but they were friends and it hardly seems likely that this girl could frame a pretty good imitation of a suicide. If I had to guess – and Lord knows, I’ve done enough of that already – I’d say that Marcy Becker might have seen something, possibly whoever killed her friend, while she was away from the car for some reason. And if I can figure out that Grace wasn’t alone in the car for most of her journey, then someone else can figure it out too.’

‘Which means you got to find Marcy Becker,’ said Louis.

‘And talk to Carter Paragon, whose secretary says that Grace never showed for their meeting.’

‘And how does Epstein’s death fit into all this?’

‘I don’t know, except that he and Mercier shared legal advisers and Mercier obviously knew Epstein well enough to bring him out to his house and hang a picture of him on his wall.’

Finally, I told them about Al Z and Harvey Ragle, and Mr. Pudd and the woman who had accompanied him to my house.

‘You telling us he poisoned you with his business card?’ said Angel incredulously.

Even I was embarrassed by the possibility, but I nodded. ‘I got the sense that he had come to see me because that was what was expected of him, not because he thought that I’d actually back off,’ I explained. ‘The card was part of that, a means of goading me to take action, just like letting me see that I was being watched.’

Louis looked at me from over the top of his glass. ‘Man wanted to take a look at you,’ he said quietly. ‘See what he was up against.’

‘I waved my gun at him,’ I replied. ‘He went away.’

Louis’s eyebrow rose a notch. ‘Told you you’d be glad of that gun someday.’

But he didn’t smile when he said it, and I didn’t smile either.

Rachel and I walked back to her apartment after dinner, holding hands but not speaking, content simply to be close to each other. We talked no further of Grace Peltier or the case. When we were inside her bedroom I slipped off my shoes and lay on her bed, watching her move through the soft yellow glow of her night-light. Then she stood before me and removed a small package from the larger Neiman Marcus bag.

‘Is that for me?’ I asked.

‘Kind of,’ she replied.

She tore open the package to reveal a tiny white lace bra and panties, an even more delicate suspender belt, and a pair of sheer silk stockings.

‘I don’t think they’ll fit me,’ I said. ‘In fact, I’m not even sure that they’ll fit you.’

Rachel pouted, unzipped her skirt, and let it fall to the ground, then slowly began to unbutton her shirt. ‘Don’t you even want me to try?’ she whispered.

Call me weak, but stronger men than I would have buckled under that kind of pressure.

‘Okay,’ I said hoarsely as the blood left my head and headed south for the winter.

Later that night I lay beside her in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the city beyond the window. I thought she was asleep, but after a time she brushed her head against my chest and I felt her eyes upon me.

‘Penny for them,’ she said.

‘I’m holding out for more.’

‘Penny and a kiss.’ She placed her lips softly against mine. ‘It’s Grace Peltier, isn’t it?’

‘Her, the Fellowship, Pudd,’ I replied. ‘It’s everything.’

I turned to her and found the whites of her eyes.

‘I think I’m afraid, Rachel.’

‘Afraid of what?’

‘Afraid of what I might do, of what I might have to do.’

Her hand reached out to me, a pale ghost moving through the void of the night. It traced the sockets of my eyes, the bones at my cheeks, following the lineaments of the skull beneath the skin.

‘Afraid of what I’ve done in the past,’ I concluded.

‘You are a good man, Charlie Parker,’ she whispered. ‘I wouldn’t be with you if I didn’t believe that.’

‘I’ve done bad things. I don’t want to do them any longer.’

‘You did what you had to do.’

I gripped her hand tightly and felt her palm rest itself against my temple, the fingers lightly brushing my hair.

‘I did more than that,’ I answered.

It seemed that I was floating in a black place, with endless night above and below me, and only her hand was stopping me from falling. She understood, for her body moved closer against me and her legs wrapped around mine as if to tell me that if I was to fall, then we would fall together. Her chin burrowed into my neck and she was quiet for a time. In the silence, I could feel the weight of her thoughts.

‘You don’t know that the Fellowship was responsible for her death, or for anyone else’s,’ she said at last.

‘No, I don’t,’ I admitted. ‘But I sense that Mr. Pudd is a violent man, and maybe something worse. I could feel it when he was close, when he touched me.’

‘And violence begets violence,’ whispered Rachel.

I nodded. ‘I haven’t fired a gun in almost a year, Rachel, not even on a range. I hadn’t even held one in my hand until two days ago. But I have a sense that if I involve myself further in this, I may be forced to use it.’

‘Then walk away. Give Jack Mercier his money back and let someone else deal with it.’ But even as she said it, I knew that she didn’t mean it; that in a way, I was testing myself through her and she knew it.

‘You know I can’t do that. Marcy Becker could be in trouble, and I think someone murdered Grace Peltier and tried to cover it up. I can’t let that slide.’

She moved in even closer to me, and her hand moved across my cheek and my lips. ‘I know you’ll do what’s right, and I think you’ll try to avoid violence if you can.’

‘And if I can’t?’

But she didn’t respond. After all, there was only one answer.

Outside, the traffic hummed and people slept and a sliver of moon hung in the sky like a knife slash in the heavens. And while I lay awake in the bed of the woman I loved, old Curtis Peltier sat in his kitchen, drinking hot milk in an effort to help himself sleep. He wore blue pajamas and bedroom slippers, with his tattered red robe hanging open above them. He sipped his milk, then left the glass on the table and rose to return to his bed.

I can only guess at what happened next, but in my head I can hear the back door opening, can see the shadows lengthen and move toward him. A gloved hand clasps itself over the old man’s mouth while the other twists his arm up behind his back with such force that the shoulder immediately dislocates and the old man briefly loses consciousness. A second pair of hands grab his feet and they carry him up the stairs to the bathroom. There comes the sound of water gurgling and bubbling into the bath as, slowly, it fills. Curtis Peltier regains consciousness to find himself kneeling on the floor, his face against the tub. He watches the water rise and knows he is about to die.

‘Where is it, Mr. Peltier?’ says a detached male voice beside his ear. He cannot see the face, nor can he see the second person, who stands farther back, although their shadows shift on the tiles before him.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he replies, scared now.

‘Yes, you do, Mr. Peltier. I know you do.’

‘Please,’ he says, just before his head is plunged into the water. He has no time to take a breath and the water enters his mouth and nostrils instantly. He struggles, but his shoulder is convulsed with pain and he can only beat futilely at the water with his left hand. They pull his head up and he gasps and splutters, coughing bathwater onto the floor.

‘I’ll ask you one more time, Mr. Peltier. Where is it?’

And the old man finds that he is crying now, crying with fear and pain and regret for his lost daughter, for she cannot protect him just as he could not protect her. He feels a force at his shoulder, fingers digging into the injured joint, and he loses consciousness again. When he awakens, he is in the bath, naked, and a redheaded man is hovering over him. There is a sharp pain in his arms, gradually grower dimmer and dimmer. He feels sleepy and struggles to keep his eyes open.

He looks down. There are long slashes from his wrists to his elbows and the bathwater has turned to blood. The shadows watch over him as slowly, slowly the light dies, as his life seeps away and he feels his daughter embrace him at last, carrying him away with her into the darkness.

Chapter Ten

In every case, according to Plato, the principle is to know what the investigation is about.

Jack Mercier had hired me to find out the truth about Grace Peltier’s death. While out at his house, I had seen Yossi Epstein, who appeared to be involved in moves against the Fellowship that were sponsored by Mercier. Yossi Epstein was now dead, and his offices had been burned to the ground. Grace Peltier had been studying the history of the Aroostook Baptists, who had since emerged from beneath a cloak of mud by the shores of St. Froid Lake. She had, for some reason, found it necessary to try to contact Carter Paragon in the course of her research, once again raising the specter of the Fellowship. Lutz, the detective who was investigating the Peltier case, was close enough to the Fellowship to haul his ass out to Waterville and warn me against irritating Paragon. If I were to connect these occurrences together and add in the figure of Mr. Pudd, the investigation now appeared to be about the Fellowship.

Rachel left early on Saturday morning to attend the continuation of her college meeting. She brought with her a small plastic bag containing Mr. Pudd’s business card, which someone had promised to examine before lunch. I showered, made a pot of coffee, and then, wearing only a towel, began to work the phone. I called Walter Cole, my former partner in Homicide while I was with the NYPD, and he made some calls. From him I got the name of one of the detectives involved with the Major Case Squad investigating Epstein’s death and the arson attack on his office. The detective’s name was Lubitsch.

‘Like the movie director,’ he explained when he at last came to the phone. ‘Ernst, you know?’

‘Any relation?’

‘No, but I directed traffic a couple of times.’

‘I don’t think it counts.’

‘You used to be a bull?’

‘That’s right.’

‘How does the PI world pay?’

‘Depends how fussy you are. There’s plenty of work out there if you’re prepared to follow errant husbands and wives. Most of it doesn’t pay too well, so you have to do a lot of it to make ends meet. Why, don’t you like being a cop?’

‘Sure, I like it okay, but it pays shit. I’d make more money emptying garbage cans.’

‘Different version of the same job.’

‘You said it. You asking about Epstein?’

‘Anything you can give.’

‘I ask why?’

‘Trade?’

‘Sure.’

‘I’m investigating the suicide of a girl who may or may not have had some contact with Epstein in the past.’

‘Name?’

‘Grace Peltier. CID III up in Machias have it.’

‘When did she die?’

‘About two weeks ago.’

‘What links her to Epstein?’

I didn’t see any harm in turning up the heat under the Fellowship, if I could. Anyway, Lutz’s interview with Paragon was contained in the case records.

‘The Fellowship. It was one of the organizations Epstein was making moves against. Grace Peltier may have met with its figurehead, Carter Paragon, shortly before she died.’

‘That it?’

‘There may be more. I just got started on it. Listen, if I can help at all, I will.’

There was a pause for at least thirty seconds. I thought the phone had gone dead.

‘I’ll trust you, but just once.’

‘Once is all I need.’

‘Officially, it’s homicide. We’ve ruled out robbery as a motive, and a possible connection to the firebombing of the Jewish League for Tolerance is currently under investigation.’

‘Neat. What are you leaving out?’

Lubitsch lowered his voice. ‘Postmortem found a puncture wound in Epstein’s armpit. They’re still trying to get confirmation of what was injected into him, but the latest guess is some kind of venom.’ There came the sound of papers shuffling. ‘I’m reading here, okay, but it’s neurotoxic, which means that it blocks transmission of nerve impulses to the muscles, overstimulating the transmitters’ – he stumbled on the next words – ‘acetylcholine and noradrenaline, causing paralysis of both the’ – more stumbles – ‘sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, resulting in sudden and severe stress on the body.’

Lubitsch took a deep breath.

‘In layman’s terms, the venom caused acceleration of heartbeat, increase in blood pressure, breathing difficulties, and muscle paralysis. Epstein suffered a massive heart attack within two minutes. He was dead within three. Symptoms – and this is strictly on the QT, you understand? – are systemic, usually associated with spiders. Basically, unless someone comes up with a better theory, the perp took Yossi Epstein down, squatted on his chest, then injected him with a huge dose of spider venom. They’re guessing black widow, but the tests aren’t complete. Plus, the perp took a patch of skin from his lower back, a couple of inches wide. Now is that weird shit, or is that weird shit?’

I put down my pen and looked at the garbled notes I had written on Rachel’s telephone message pad. ‘Anyone else interested in this?’ I asked.

‘What is that sound?’ replied Lubitsch. ‘Why, it’s the sound of somebody stretching the bounds of professional courtesy.’

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but I take it that’s a yes.’

Lubitsch sighed. ‘Minneapolis PD. Possible connection to the death of a doctor named Alison Beck one week ago. She was found with black widow spiders sealed up inside her mouth.’

‘My God.’

‘Uh-huh.’

Lubitsch seemed to enjoy my response, because he continued: ‘ME reckons the spiders were subdued with carbon dioxide, then inserted into her mouth as they were starting to revive. Only one widow survived: the rest bit each other, and bit her. She died of respiratory failure.’

‘They have any leads?’

‘She performed abortions, so they’re rounding up the local crazies while trying to keep most of the details from the press. Seems like they had a bitch of a job getting her out of the car.’

‘Why?’

‘Whoever killed her filled it with recluses.’

Pudd.

I thanked him, promised him a return call, and hung up. I logged on to the Internet and in less than two minutes a picture of Alison Beck was on the screen in front of me. She looked younger than she had in the photograph in Jack Mercier’s study; younger and happier. The reporters had done a pretty good job of nailing deep background sources, even to the extent of speculating that Alison Beck’s death might have been caused by a spider bite. It’s hard to keep details like that quiet.

I turned off the computer and called Rachel, since the meeting was due to break for coffee at eleven. ‘Anyone have time to look at that card yet?’ I asked.

‘Well, a big affectionate good morning to you too,’ she replied. ‘Truly, the love is gone.’

‘It’s not gone, it’s just distracted. Well?’

‘They’re still looking at it. Now go away before I forget why I’m with you.’

She hung up, which left me with a choice. Either do nothing, or try my luck with the Minneapolis PD. Unfortunately, I had no contacts over there and I didn’t think that my natural charm would get me very far. I tried calling Mercier again but got the brush-off from the maid. With nothing else to do until later that evening, when Rachel and I were due to attend Cleopatra at the Wang, I dressed, took a Harlan Coben novel from Rachel’s shelf, and headed down the stairs to kill some time along Newbury Street. There was a comic book store on Newbury, I recalled. I thought it might be worth a visit.

Al Z, it emerged, had already made the arrangements for our meeting. As soon as I stepped into the street, a car door opened and a huge shape emerged from a green Buick Regal parked across the street.

‘Nice wheels, Tommy,’ I remarked. ‘Planning to take the boys to Disneyland?’

Tommy Caci grinned. He was wearing a sleeveless black T-shirt and skin-tight black jeans. His trapezius muscles were so huge he looked like he’d swallowed a coat hanger, and his massive shoulders tapered to a tiny waist. All things considered, Tommy Caci resembled a walking martini glass, but without the fragility.

‘Welcome to Boston,’ he said. ‘Al Z would appreciate a courtesy call. Get in the car. Please.’

‘You mind if I make my own way?’ I asked. Nothing would persuade me to get in the back of that Buick, no matter how much Tommy smiled. I’d prefer to walk blindfolded down the fast lane of the interstate. I didn’t like to think of some of the trips people had taken in that car.

Tommy’s smile didn’t falter. ‘Easier this way. Al don’t like to be kept waiting.’

‘I’m sure. Still, how about I take some air and follow you on over?’

Tommy shrugged. It wasn’t worth getting rough over. ‘You want to take some air, that’s fine with us,’ he said resignedly.

So I walked over to Al Z’s office on Newbury Street. Admittedly, the Buick shadowed me every step of the way, never going above a couple of miles an hour, but it made me feel kind of wanted. When I arrived at the comic book store, Tommy waved at me and the Buick shot away, scattering tourists from its path. I rang the buzzer, gave my name, then pushed the door and walked up the bare stairs to Al Z’s office.

It hadn’t changed a whole lot since the last time I was there. It was still bare boards and peeling paint. There were still two gunmen inside the door, and there was still nowhere to sit apart from a worn red sofa against one wall and the chair behind Al Z’s desk, a chair currently occupied by Al Z himself.

He wore a black suit, a black shirt and a black tie, and his gray hair was slicked back from his skull, making his thin face look even more cadaverous than it usually did. A pair of hearing aids were visible in his small, pointed ears. Al Z’s hearing had been failing in recent years. It must have been all those guns going off around him.

‘I see you broke out your summer wardrobe,’ I said.

He looked down at his clothes as if seeing them for the first time. ‘I was at a funeral,’ he said.

‘You arrange it?’

‘Nah, just paying my last respects to a friend. All my friends are dying. Soon I’ll be the only one left.’ I noticed that Al Z seemed pretty certain he was going to outlive his friends. Knowing Al Z, I figured he was probably right.

He gestured at the sofa. ‘Take a seat. I don’t get so many visitors.’

‘Can’t understand why, this place looking so welcoming and all.’

‘I got Spartan tastes.’ He smiled and leaned back in his chair. ‘Well, this is just my lucky day. First a funeral, then it turns out I’m a stop on the Charlie Parker Goodwill Tour. Next thing you know, my dick will drop off and my plants will die.’

‘I’ll be sorry to see your plants go.’

Al Z stretched his long body in his chair. It was like watching a snake uncoil. ‘And how is the elusive Louis? We don’t hear much about him now. Seems like the only person he kills for these days is you.’

‘The only person he ever killed for was himself,’ I replied.

‘Whatever. The only reason you can still take the subway when you visit New York is because your associate will whack anyone who makes a move on you. I think he’d even whack me if he had to, and I consider myself to be a pretty nice guy, all things considered. Well, most things considered.’ He shook his head in bemusement. ‘Now what can I do for you, apart from letting you walk out of here alive?’

I hoped he didn’t mean it. Al Z and I had had our run-ins in the past; at one point he’d given me twenty-four hours to live if I didn’t find some money that had been stolen from under the nose of the underboss Tony Celli. I found the money, so I was still alive, but Tony Clean was dead. I had watched Al Z kill him. The only aspect of it that bothered Al Z was the cost of the bullet. A lot of Tony’s men had died in Dark Hollow, due in no small part to the efforts of Louis and me, but Tony was the only made man to be killed, and since Al Z had killed him that took a lot of heat off us. We in turn had taken the heat off Al Z by returning the money Tony had stolen, with interest. My relationship with Al Z could have been used to define ‘complicated’ in the dictionary.

Since the end of the Celli affair, Al Z had been keeping tabs on me. He knew enough about my business to learn that I was investigating the Fellowship and that, somehow, the man named Mr. Pudd was tied into its workings.

‘As I recall,’ I pointed out gently, ‘you invited me along.’

Al Z pretended to be taken aback. ‘So I did. It must have been a moment of weakness.’ He immediately dispensed with the small talk. ‘I hear that you may be sticking your nose into the affairs of the Fellowship.’

‘Why would that be of interest to you?’

‘A lot of things are of interest to me. How did you enjoy meeting Mr. Ragle?’

‘He’s a worried man. He thinks somebody is trying to kill him.’

‘I fear Mr. Ragle may be about to suffer grievously for his art.’

He gestured at the two gunmen. They left the room and closed the door behind them.

Al Z stood and walked to the window, then stared down on the tourists shopping on Newbury, his basilisk glare flicking from face to face. Nobody died.

‘I like this street,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘I like its normality. I like the fact that I can step out onto the sidewalk and the people around me are worrying about their mortgages, or the cost of coffee beans, or whether they just missed their train. I walk down there, and I feel normal by association.’ He turned around to look at me. ‘You, on the other hand, you seem normal. You dress like any other mook. You don’t look no better or no worse than a hundred other guys on the street. But you step in here, and you make me nervous. I swear, my fucking palms itch when I see you. Don’t get me wrong; I respect you. I may even like you a little. But I see you and I get this sense of impending doom, like the fucking ceiling is about to cave in. The presence of your pet killers in Boston doesn’t make me sleep any easier. I know you got a woman here, and I know too that you were eating with your friends at Anago last night. You had the beef, by the way.’

‘It was good.’

‘For thirty-five bucks, it better be real good. It better sing a fucking song while you chew on it. You talk business, or pleasure?’

‘A little of both.’

He nodded. ‘That’s what I thought. You want to know why I pointed Ragle toward you, why I’m interested in this man who calls himself Pudd? Maybe I figure, what can I do for Charlie Parker? Whose life can I turn to shit by letting you dig around in it?’

I waited. I wasn’t sure where the conversation was going but the turn that it suddenly took surprised me.

‘Or maybe it’s something else,’ he continued, and the tone of his voice changed. It now sounded a little querulous. It was an old man’s voice. Al Z turned away from the window and walked over to the sofa, seating himself only a few feet away from me. His eyes, I thought, were haunted.

‘You think one good action can make up for a lifetime of evil acts?’ he asked.

‘That’s not for me to judge,’ I replied.

‘A diplomatic answer, but not the truth. You judge, Parker. That’s what you do, and I respect you because you act on your judgment, just like me. We’re two of a kind, you and I. Try again.’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe, if it’s an act of genuine repentance, but I don’t know how the scales of judgment are weighted.’

‘You believe in salvation?’

‘I hope for it.’

‘Then you believe in reparation too. Reparation is the shadow cast by salvation.’

He folded his hands in his lap. They were very white and very clean, as if he spent hours each day scraping the dirt from the wrinkles and cracks on his skin.

‘I’m getting old. I looked around at the graveside this morning and I saw dead men and women. Between them all, they had maybe a couple of years to live. Pretty soon, we’re all going to be judged, and we’ll all be found wanting. The best we have to hope for is mercy, and I don’t believe you get mercy in the next life if you haven’t shown it in this one.

‘And I’m not a merciful man,’ he concluded. ‘I have never been a merciful man.’

I waited, watching as he twisted the wedding ring on his finger. His wife had died three years before, and he had no children. I wondered if he had hopes of meeting her again, in some other life.

‘Everybody deserves a chance to make amends for his life,’ he said softly. ‘Nobody has the right to take that away.’

His eyes flicked back to the window, drawn by the light. ‘I know something of the Fellowship, and of the man it sends to do its business,’ he said.

‘Mr. Pudd. He’s a charmer.’

‘You’ve met him?’ There was surprise in Al Z’s voice.

‘I’ve met him.’

‘Then your days may be numbered,’ he said simply. ‘I know about him because it’s my business to know. I don’t like unpredictability, unless I figure that it’s worth gambling on it to use for my own ends. That’s why you’re still alive. That’s why I didn’t kill you when you came looking for Tony Clean, and that’s why I didn’t kill you even after you and your friends took out most of Tony’s crew in that snow-hole town two winters ago. What you wanted and what I wanted—’ He moved his right hand, palm down, in a balancing motion. ‘Plus, you found the money, and that bought you your life.

‘Now, maybe I figure that we could have another meeting of minds on Pudd. I don’t care if he kills you, Parker. I’d miss you, sure. You brighten things up, you and your friends, but that’s as far as it goes. Still, if you kill him, then that would be a good thing for everybody.’

‘Why don’t you kill him yourself?’

‘Because he hasn’t done anything to bring himself to the immediate attention of me or my associates.’ He leaned forward. ‘But that’s like noticing a black widow in the corner of the room and figuring that you’ll leave it alone because it hasn’t bitten you yet.’

The spider analogy, I knew, was deliberate. Al Z was an interesting man.

‘And there’s more to this than Pudd. There are other people, people in the shadows. They need to be flushed out too, but if I go against Pudd for no reason other than the fact that I think he’s evil and dangerous – and that assumes that I could find him and that the people I sent after him could kill him, which I doubt – then the others in the background would move against me, and I’d be dead. I don’t doubt it for one second. In fact, I think that the moment I made a move against Pudd, he’d kill me. That’s how dangerous he is.’

‘So you’ll use me to draw him out.’

Al Z actually laughed. ‘Nobody uses you, I think, unless you want it. You’re going after Pudd for your own reasons, and nobody in my organization will stand in your way. I’ve even tried to point you in the right direction with our pornographer friend. If you corner this man, and we can assist you in finishing him off without calling any attention to ourselves, then we will. But my advice to you is to move everybody you care about out of his reach, because he will kill them, and then he will try to kill you.’

He smiled conspiratorially.

‘But I also hear that you may have some competition in trying to finish off Pudd. It seems that some old Jews have got tired of torchings and killings, and that the death of the rabbi in New York this week was the last straw. I tell you, don’t mess with the fucking Jews. Maybe it ain’t like the days of Bugsy Siegel no more but those people, they know how to bear a grudge. You think the fucking Sicilians are bad? The Jews, they’ve had thousands of years of experience of bearing grudges. They are to grudges what the Chinese are to gunpowder. These fucking people invented the grudge, excuse my language.’

‘They’ve hired someone?’ I asked.

Al Z shook his head. ‘Money isn’t the prime motivator where this man is concerned. He calls himself the Golem. He’s Eastern European Jewish, naturally. Never met him, which is probably a good thing. Way I understand it, anyone who meets him winds up dead. The day I see him, I’m gonna be kissing St. Peter’s ring and apologizing for having an attack of selective amnesia where the ten commandments were concerned.’

He twisted at his own wedding ring again, the light from the window reflecting on it and sending tiny spears of golden light shooting across the wall.

‘The guy you want to talk to is Mickey Shine, Michael Sheinberg. We called him Mickey the Jew. He’s retired now, but he used to be part of Joey Barboza’s crew until Joey started ratting people out. I heard that maybe he was the one killed Joey in San Francisco in seventy-six. He ended up working for Action Jackson for a time, then got tired of the whole racket and bought a flower shop in Cambridge.’ He took a pen and scribbled an address on a piece of paper, tore it from the pad, and handed it to me.

‘Mickey Shine,’ he said. His eyes were distant and there was a sepia tint of nostalgia to his voice. ‘You know, we went drinking, summer of sixty-eight, started out in Alphabet City, and I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in this Turkish bath wearing only a towel. I was lying on a slab, surrounded by tiles. I swear, I thought I was in the fucking morgue. Mickey Shine. When you talk to him, you tell him I remember that night.’

‘I will,’ I said.

‘I’ll ask someone to call ahead,’ said Al Z. ‘Barboza was hit four times with a shotgun. You go waltzing in there with a gun at your shoulder asking about Mickey Shine’s past, you’re likely to find out how Barboza felt, if you get my meaning.’

I thanked him, then stood up to leave. By the time I reached the door, he had resumed his seat at his desk, his hand still toying with the gold band.

‘We’re two of a kind, you and I,’ he repeated as I paused at the door.

‘What kind is that?’

‘You know what kind,’ he replied.

‘One good act,’ I said gently, but I wasn’t sure that would be enough. Al Z’s business was based on drugs and whores, porn and theft, intimidation and wasted, blighted lives. If you believe in karma, then those things add up. If you believe in God, then maybe you shouldn’t be doing those things in the first place.

I, too, had done things that I regretted. I had taken lives. I had killed an unarmed man with my bare hands. Maybe Al Z was right: perhaps we were two of a kind, he and I.

Al Z smiled. ‘As you say, one good act. I will help you, in this small way, to find Mr. Pudd and put an end to him and those around him. You step lightly, Charlie Parker. There are still people listening for you.’

When I left, he had resumed his seat and his hands were once again steepled beneath his chin, his face hovering over them like that of some malicious, pitiless god.

Chapter Eleven

Mickey Shine was about five-six, bald, with a silver ponytail and a silver beard, both of which were designed to distract from the fact that he didn’t have more than six hairs above the level of his ears. Unfortunately, when your name is Mickey Shine and the bright lights of your store reflect the dazzling brilliance of your skull, then cultivating a goatee and opting to grow your hair long at the back aren’t exactly fail-safe options in the distraction stakes.

‘You ever hear the joke about the two legionnaires walking through the desert?’ I asked him, as the jangling of the bell above the door on Kendall Square faded away. ‘One turns to the other and says, “Y’know, if her name hadn’t been Sandra I’d have forgotten her by now.”’

Mickey Shine looked at me blankly.

‘Sand,’ I said. ‘Sand-ra.’

‘You want to buy something already?’ asked Mickey Shine. ‘Or did somebody send you here to brighten up my day?’

‘I guess I’m here to brighten your day,’ I said. ‘Did it work?’

‘Do I look brightened up?’

‘I guess not. Al Z gave me your name.’

‘I know. A guy called. He didn’t say nothing about you being a comedian, though. You want to lock the door, turn the sign to Closed ?’

I did as I was asked, and followed Mickey Shine into the back of the store. There was a wooden table with a cork bulletin board above it. On the board were pinned the floral orders for that afternoon. Mickey Shine began pulling orchids from a black bucket and laying them out on a sheet of clear plastic.

‘You want I should stop?’ asked Mickey. ‘I got orders, but you want I should stop, I’ll stop.’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘It’s okay.’

‘Help yourself to coffee,’ he said. There was a Mr. Coffee machine on a shelf, beside a bowl filled with nondairy creamer and packets of sugar. The coffee smelled like something had crawled into the pot to die, then spent its final minutes percolating.

‘You’re here about Pudd?’ he asked. He seemed intent upon the orchids, but his hands faltered as he said the name.

‘Yes.’

‘So it’s time, then,’ he said, more to himself than to me. He continued arranging the flowers in silence for a few minutes, then sighed and abandoned the task. His hands were shaking. He looked at them, held them up so I could see them, then thrust them into his pockets, the orchids now forgotten.

‘He’s a foul man, Mr. Parker,’ he began. ‘I have thought much about him in the last five years, about his eyes and his hands. His hands,’ he repeated softly, and shuddered. ‘When I think of him, I imagine his body as a frame, a hollow thing to carry around the evil spirit that resides inside. Maybe this sounds like madness to you?’

I shook my head and recalled my first impression of Mr. Pudd, the way his eyes peered out from behind their hoods of flesh, the strange, unconnected movements of his fingers, the hair below the joints. I knew exactly what Mickey Shine meant.

‘I think, Mr. Parker, he is dybbuk. You know dybbuk?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t.’

‘Dybbuk is the spirit of a dead man that enters the body of another living being and possesses it. This Mr. Pudd, he is dybbuk: an evil spirit, base and less than human.’

‘How do you know of him?’

‘I took a contract, is how I know. It was after I left, when the old ways started to fall apart. I was a Jew, and Jews do not make the book, Mr. Parker. I was not a made man, so I thought I would walk away, let them fight to the death like animals. I did one last favor, then left them to die.’ He risked a glance at me, and I knew that Al Z had been correct; it was Mickey Shine who had pulled the trigger on Barboza in San Francisco in 1976, the last favor that allowed him to walk away.

‘I bought my store, and things were good until about eighty-six. Then I got sick and had to close up for a year. New stores opened, I lost customers, and so and so . . .’ He puffed up his cheeks and let his breath out in one loud, long exhalation.

‘I heard that there was a paper on a man, a strange, thin man who killed out of some . . . misguided religious purpose, or so they said. Doctors in abortion clinics, homosexuals, even Jews. I don’t believe in abortion, Mr. Parker, and the Old Testament is clear on . . . such men.’

He tried not to catch my eye, and I guessed that Al Z had told him a little about Angel and Louis, warning him to watch his mouth.

‘But killing these people isn’t the answer,’ he resumed, with all the assurance of a man who has killed for a living. ‘I took the paper. I hadn’t fired a gun in many years, but the old instincts, you know, they die hard.’

He was rubbing at his arm again, I noticed, and his eyes had grown distant, as if he was drawing back from the memory of some ancient hurt.

‘And you found him,’ I said.

‘No, Mr. Parker, he found me.’ The frequency and force of the rubbing increased, harder and harder, faster and faster. ‘I found out he was based somewhere in Maine, so I traveled up there to look for traces of him. I was in a motel in Bangor. You know the city? It’s a dump. I was asleep and I woke to a noise in the room. I reached for my gun but it wasn’t there, and then something hit me on the head, and when I came to I was in the trunk of a car. My hands and feet were tied with wire, and there was tape on my mouth. I don’t know how long we drove, but it felt like hours. At last the car stopped, and after a time the trunk opened. I was blindfolded, but I could see a little beneath the fold. Mr. Pudd was standing there, in his mismatched, old man’s clothes. There was a light in his eyes, Mr. Parker, like I have never seen. I—’

He stopped and put his head in his hands, then ran them back over his bald head, as if all he had intended to do in the first place was smooth down whatever straggling hairs remained there. ‘I almost lost control of my bladder, Mr. Parker. I am not ashamed to tell you this. I am not a man who scares easily, and I have faced down death many times, but the look in this man’s eyes, and the feel of his hands on me, his nails, it was more than I could take.

‘He lifted me from the car – he is strong, very strong – and dragged me along the ground. We were in dark woods, and there was a shape beyond them, like a tower. I heard a door open, and he pulled me into a shack with two rooms. The first had a table and chairs, nothing more, and there were bloodstains on the floor, dried into the wood. There was a case on the table, with holes in the top, and he picked it up as he passed and carried it with him. The other room was tiled, with an old bathtub and a filthy, busted toilet. He put me in the tub, then hit me again on the head. And while I lay stunned, he cut my clothes with a knife, so that the front of my body, from my neck to my ankles, was exposed. He smelled his fingers, Mr. Parker, and then he spoke to me.

‘“You stink of fear, Mr. Sheinberg,” was all he said.’

The store around us receded and disappeared. The noise of the traffic faded away, and the sunlight shining through the window seemed to dim. Now there was only the sound of Mickey Shine’s voice, the stale, damp smell of the old hut, and the soft exhalations of Mr. Pudd’s breath as he sat on the edge of the toilet bowl, placed the case on his lap and removed the lid.

‘There were bottles in the box, some small, some large. He held one up in front of me – it was thin, and the stopper had small holes – and I saw the spider inside. I hate spiders, always have, ever since I was a boy. It was a little brown spider, but to me, lying in that tub and smelling of my own sweat and fear, it looked like an eight-legged monster.

‘Mr. Pudd, he said nothing, just shook the jar, then unscrewed the top and dropped the spider on my chest. It caught in the hairs and I tried to shake it off, but it seemed to cling there, and I swear, I felt the thing bite me. I heard glass knocking on glass, and another little spider dropped beside the first, then a third. I could hear myself moaning, but it was like it was coming from somebody else, like I wasn’t making the sound. All I could think of was those spiders.

‘Then Mr. Pudd snapped his fingers and made me look up at him. He was choosing containers from the box and holding them up in front of me so I could see what was in them. One had a tarantula squatting on the bottom. There was a widow in a second one, crouched under a leaf. A third had a little red scorpion. Its tail twitched.

‘He leaned forward and whispered in my ear: “Which one, Mr. Sheinberg, which one?” But he didn’t release them. He just put them back in the box and took an envelope from inside his jacket. In the envelope were photographs: my ex-wife, my son, my daughters, and my little granddaughter. They were black-and-whites, taken while they were on the street. He showed me each one in turn, then put them back in the envelope.

‘“You’re going to be a warning, Mr. Sheinberg,” he said, “a warning to anyone else who thinks he can make some easy money by hunting me down. Perhaps you’ll survive tonight, and perhaps you won’t. If you live, and go back to your flower store and forget about me, then I’ll leave your family alone. But if you ever try to find me again, this little baby girl – Sylvia, isn’t that what they named her? – well, little Sylvia will quickly be lying where you are now, and what’s about to happen to you will happen to her. And I guarantee you, Mr. Sheinberg, that she won’t survive.”

‘Then he got up, stood by my legs, and pulled out the plug from the bath. “Get ready to make some new friends, Mr. Sheinberg,” he whispered.

‘I looked down and spiders started climbing from the drain. It was like there were hundreds of them, all fighting and twisting against each other. I think some of them were already dead and were just being carried along by the tide, but the rest of them . . .’

I looked away from him, a memory from my youth flashing briefly in my head. Someone had once done something similar to me when I was a boy: a man named Daddy Helms, who tormented me with fire ants for breaking some windows. Daddy Helms was dead now, but for that fleeting instant his spirit peered malevolently from behind the hoods of Mr. Pudd’s eyes. I think, when I looked back at Mickey, that he must have seen something of that memory in my face, because the tone of his voice changed. It softened, and some of the anger he felt toward me for forcing him, through Al Z, to make this confession seemed to dissipate.

‘They were all over me. I screamed and screamed and no-one could hear me. I couldn’t see my skin, there were so many of them. And Pudd, he just stood there and watched while they crawled all over me, biting. I think I must have fainted because, when I came to, the bath was filling with water and the spiders were drowning. It was the only time I saw anything but joy in the sick fuck’s face; he looked regretful, as if the loss of those fucking horrors really troubled him. And when they were all dead, he pulled me from the bath and took me back to the trunk of the car and drove me away from that place. He left me by the side of a street in Bangor. Somebody called an ambulance and they took me to a hospital, but the venom had already started to take effect.’

Mickey Shine stood up and began to unbutton his shirt, finishing with his cuffs. He looked at me, then opened the shirt and let it fall from his body, his hands holding on to the ends of the sleeves.

My mouth went dry. There were four chunks of flesh, each about the size of a quarter, missing from his right arm, as if some kind of animal had taken a bite from it. There was another cavity at his chest, where his left nipple had once been. When he turned, there were similar marks on his back and sides, the skin at the edges mottled and gray.

‘The flesh rotted away,’ he said softly. ‘Damnedest fucking thing. This is the kind of man you’re dealing with, Mr. Parker. If you decide to go after him, then you make sure you kill him because, if he gets away, you’ll have nobody left. He’ll kill them all, and then he’ll kill you.’

He pulled his shirt back over his body and began to fix the buttons.

‘Do you have any idea where he might have taken you?’ I asked when he had finished.

Mickey shook his head. ‘I think we went north, and I could hear the sea. That’s all I remember.’ He stopped suddenly, and wrinkled his brow. ‘And there was a light up high, off to my right. I saw it as he pulled me in. It could have been a lighthouse, I guess.

‘He said something else. He told me that if I came after him again, all of our names would be written. We would be written, and then we would be damned.’

I felt my brow furrow.

‘What did he mean?’

Mickey Shine seemed about to answer, but instead he looked down and concentrated on rebuttoning his cuffs. He was embarrassed, I thought, ashamed at what he saw as his weakness in the face of Mr. Pudd’s sadism, but he was also scared.

‘I don’t know what he meant,’ he said, and his lips pursed at the taste of the lie in his mouth.

‘What did you mean earlier when you said it was time?’ I asked.

‘Only Al Z ever heard that story before,’ he answered. ‘You and him, you’re the only ones who know. I was supposed to be a mute witness to what Pudd could do, what he would do, to anyone who came after him. I wasn’t supposed to talk, I was just supposed to be. But I knew that a day would come when it might be possible to make a move against him, to finish him off. I’ve been waiting a long time for it, a long time to tell that story again. So that’s what I know; he’s north of Bangor, on the coast, and there’s a lighthouse close by. It’s not much, but it’s all I can give. Just make sure that it stays between us; between you, me, and Al Z.’

I wanted to press him on what he was leaving out, on what the threat of a name being ‘written’ might mean, but already I felt him closing up on me.

‘I’ll keep it that way,’ I replied.

He nodded. ‘Because if Pudd finds out that we talked, that we’re moving against him, we’re all dead. He’ll kill us all.’

He shook my hand and turned from me.

‘You going to wish me luck?’ I asked.

He looked back at me, shaking his head. ‘If you need luck,’ he said softly, ‘you’re already dead.’

Then he went back to his orchids and said no more.

Part Two

Judge not the preacher, for he is thy Judge.

George Herbert, ‘The Church-Porch’

The Search for Sanctuary

Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier

There are few surviving photographs of Faulkner (certainly none taken after 1963) and few records of his past, so our knowledge of him is largely limited to the evidence of those who heard him speak or encountered him in the course of one of his healing missions.

He was a tall man with long dark hair and a high forehead, blue eyes beneath dark, straight eyebrows, and pale, almost translucent skin. He dressed in the garb of a working man – jeans, rough cotton shirts, boots – except when he was preaching. At those times he favored a simple black suit with a white collarless shirt buttoned to the neck. He wore no jewelry and his only concession to religious adornment was an ornate gold crucifix that hung around his neck as he spoke. Those who had the opportunity to examine it closely describe it as extremely finely made, with tiny faces and limbs carved into the body of the cross. The face of the Christ figure was almost photographically detailed, with the sufferings of the crucified man so clear and minutely rendered as to be disturbing, his agony beyond doubt.

I have been able to find no record of Faulkner in any of the established schools of divinity, and inquiries to churches, major and minor, have also failed to yield any clue as to the origins of his religious education, if any. His earlier life is barely documented, although we do know that he was born Aaron David Faulkner, the illegitimate son of Reese Faulkner and Embeth Thule of Montgomery, Alabama, in 1924. He was an undersized child, with seriously impaired sight in his left eye that would later render him unsuitable for military service, but he began to grow quickly in his mid-teens. According to those neighbors who remember him this physical growth was accompanied by a similar development in his personality, from shy and somewhat awkward to dominant and imposing. He lived alone with his mother until her death shortly before his sixteenth birthday. Following her funeral, Aaron Faulkner left Montgomery and never returned.

The next four years, up to the time of his marriage, are a blank, with some possible exceptions. An Aarn [sic] Faulkner was charged with assault in Columbia, South Carolina in 1941, following an incident in which a prostitute named Elsa Barker was apparently pelted with rocks, sustaining injuries to her head and back. Barker failed to appear in court to give evidence, and her statement to the police being deemed unreliable, the case was dismissed. No trace of Elsa Barker was ever found again.

One other incident is worthy of note. In 1943, a family of three named Vogel from Liberty, Mississippi, went missing from their farm. They were found, two days after the search began, buried in a shallow grave one mile from their property. Quicklime had been used on the bodies. According to police reports, a young drifter had been staying with them in the days prior to their disappearance. The Vogels had taken him in because he seemed to be a religious man. None of the neighbors ever saw him or met him, but they recalled his name: Aaron. After their deaths, it was found that the Vogels were unmarried and their daughter was illegitimate. Among those questioned in the course of the investigation was Aaron Faulkner, following his apprehension at a motel in Vicksburg. He was released after three days due to lack of evidence.

(While there is no direct link between the deaths of the Vogels and the attack on, and subsequent disappearance of, the prostitute Elsa Barker, it is my contention that both incidents display signs of a violent response to perceived sexual transgression, possibly linked to sublimated sexual desire: respectively, the Vogels’ unmarried relationship and the birth of their illegitimate daughter, with its echoes of Faulkner’s own parentage, and the activities of Barker. I believe that Faulkner’s later attempts to restrain and regulate sexual relationships at the Eagle Lake community represent a similar pattern of behavior.)

Following his marriage in 1944, Faulkner worked with a printer named George Lemberger in Richmond, Virginia, and remained with him for the next twelve years while earning a reputation as an untrained preacher. A dispute over his preaching activities, combined with allegations that Faulkner had forged Lemberger’s signature on a check, eventually led to his departure from Lemberger’s printing firm in early 1957, and he subsequently went north, accompanied by his wife and two children. For some time between 1958 and 1963, he eked out a living as an itinerant preacher, eventually establishing small congregations of worshipers in the Maine towns from which the original group of sixteen was drawn. He supplemented his income by working, at various times, as a printer, a laborer, and a fisherman.

Faulkner initially made his headquarters in a rooming house on Montgomery Street in Portland, Maine, owned by a cousin of the Jessops. He conducted services in the dining room, sometimes preaching to as many as thirty people. It was as a result of those first, lengthy, sermons that his reputation spread, leading to Faulkner enjoying a small but extremely devoted following.

Faulkner was not a preacher in the hellfire-and-brimstone mode. Instead, he drew his listeners to him with a tone of quiet insinuation, gradually worming his way into their consciousness. (If this description appears unnecessarily perjorative, it should be noted that the retrospective recollections of those to whom I spoke are largely negative where Faulkner is concerned. While it is clear that he exerted a great influence while he spoke, and that there were enough people willing to follow him to enable him to establish a much bigger community than the original Eagle Lake settlement, had he chosen to do so, there were still those who felt an uneasiness around him.)

His wife, Louise, was by all accounts a strikingly beautiful woman, with dark hair only marginally longer than that of her husband. She did not associate with the Preacher’s congregation: if he was approached after the service, she would remain standing behind him, listening to what passed between the Preacher and the supplicant, without passing comment or participating in any way. It seems to have been her constant unspeaking presence at her husband’s side that made people wary of her, although two witnesses spoke of her intervening physically when her husband was accused of perpetrating acts of fraud during a healing service in Rumford, Maine, in 1963. She did so entirely in silence, but her strength and the nature of her intervention was sufficient to enable those who saw it to recall it in detail almost forty years later. Nevertheless, she always deferred to her husband and exhibited no signs of disobedience toward him, in line with fundamentalist religious doctrine.

Louise’s own family, the Dautrieves, originally came from east Texas and were Southern Baptists. According to the recollection of family members, they appear to have been largely supportive of her decision to marry Faulkner, who was only nineteen when they met, regarding him as a man of good faith although he was not himself a Baptist. After their marriage there was little direct contact between Louise and her family, and surviving relatives say that there was no contact at all once she left for Eagle Lake.

Privately, most believe that she is now dead.

Chapter Twelve

Rachel was already back in her apartment when I returned from my encounter with Mickey Shine. She greeted me with a peck on the lips.

‘You have a good day?’ she asked.

Under the circumstances, ‘good’ was probably a relative concept.

‘I found out some stuff,’ I replied neutrally.

‘Uh-huh. Good stuff, or bad stuff?’

‘Um, kind of bad, but nothing I hadn’t suspected already.’

She didn’t ask if I wanted to talk more about it. Sometimes it struck me forcefully that Rachel knew me very well while I hardly seemed to know her at all. I watched her open her bag and produce one of her wire-rimmed notebooks, from which she removed a single printed page.

‘I don’t think that what I have to tell you qualifies as good news either,’ she said. ‘Some folks at the chemistry department examined that business card. They e-mailed me the results. I guess they thought it might be a little technical to explain over the phone.’

‘And?’

‘The card was infused with a fluid called cantharidin, concentrated cantharidin,’ she continued. ‘It’s sometimes used in medical procedures to produce blistering. One portion of the top right-hand corner had been lightly waxed, presumably so this Mr. Pudd could hold it without affecting his own skin. As soon as you took it in your hand, your body heat and the moisture on your fingers activated the cantharidin and you started to blister.’

I thought about it for a moment.

‘So he used some kind of medical product on the card . . .’ I began, but Rachel shook her head.

‘No, I said it was used for medical purposes, but the substance on the card was a very specific form of the toxin, produced, according to the research assistant who examined it, only by “certain vesicating arthropods.” It’s blister beetle venom. The man who gave it to you must have harvested the venom, concentrated it, then applied it to the card.’

I recalled Mr. Pudd’s smile as I held the card in my hand.

You’re also irritating, but it doesn’t say that on your card either.

Oh, but it does, in its way.

I also thought of Epstein, and the substance that had been injected into him.

‘If he harvested beetle venom, then I suppose he could harvest other types as well?’ I asked Rachel.

‘Such as?’

‘Spider venom, maybe?’

‘I called the lab after I received the message to clarify one or two details about the procedure, so I don’t see why not. As I understand it, the beetle venom could have been extracted using some form of electric shock to provoke the insect into releasing the toxin. Apparently, the harvesting of spider venom is a little trickier. The spider has to be sedated, usually by cooling it with carbon dioxide, then put under a microscope. Each time it’s shocked, it produces a tiny amount of venom, which can then be collected. You can usually shock an individual spider three or four times before it has to be put out to pasture.’

‘So you’d need a whole lot of spiders to produce a reasonable amount of venom?’

‘Probably,’ she replied.

I wondered how many spiders had been milked in order to kill Yossi Epstein. I also wondered why anyone would bother. After all, it would have been far easier, and less conspicuous, simply to have killed Epstein in a more conventional way. Then I remembered Alison Beck, and how she must have felt as the widows struggled in her mouth and the recluses moved around her in the small, enclosed space of the car. I recalled the look in Mickey Shine’s eyes as he spoke of the spiders in the bathtub, and the wounds gouged in his skin by their bites. And I thought of my own feelings as the blisters appeared on my skin, and the sensation of Mr. Pudd’s thin, hairy fingers brushing against my own.

He did it because it was fun, because he was genuinely curious about the effects. He did it because to be preyed upon by a small, dark, consuming creature, multilegged and many-eyed, terrified his victims in ways that a bullet or a knife could not, and gave a new intensity to their sufferings. Even Epstein, who endured death by injection, felt something of this pain as his muscles spasmed and cramped, his breathing began to fail, and his heart at last gave way under the pressure on his system.

It was also a message. I was certain of that. And the only person for whom that message could be meant was Jack Mercier. Epstein and Beck were in the photograph on his wall, and Warren Ober’s law firm had been handling Epstein’s legal challenge to the IRS tax exemption granted to the Fellowship. I knew then that I had to return to Maine, that somehow Grace Peltier’s death was linked to moves that her father and others had been making against the Fellowship. But how could Pudd and those who aided him have known that Grace Peltier was Jack Mercier’s daughter? There was also the question of how a woman who was researching the history of a long-departed religious group ended up trying to corner the leader of the Fellowship. I could only find one answer: someone had pointed Grace Peltier in the direction of the Fellowship, and she had died because of it.

I tried calling Mercier again as Rachel went to take a shower, but I got the same maid and a promise that Mr. Mercier would be told that I had called. I asked for Quentin Harrold and was similarly informed that he was not available. I was tempted to throw my cell phone to the ground and stamp on it, but I figured I might need it, so I contented myself with tossing it in disgust on Rachel’s couch. It wasn’t as if I had anything to tell Mercier anyway, or certainly nothing that he didn’t already know. I just didn’t like being kept in the dark, especially when Mr. Pudd was occupying space in that same darkness.

But there was another reason that I had yet to learn for Mr. Pudd’s killing methods, a tenet that had its roots in the distant past and in other, older traditions.

It was the belief that spiders were the guardians of the underworld.

The Wang Center, on Tremont, was just about the most beautiful theater on the upper East Coast, and the Boston Ballet was, given my limited experience, a great company, so the combination was pretty hard to resist, especially on a first night. As we walked past Boston Common, a band played in the window of Emerson College’s WERS radio station, the crowds heading to the theater district pausing briefly to examine the contorted face of the singer. We collected our tickets at the box office and walked into the ornate marble and gold lobby, past the booths hawking Cleopatra memorabilia and souvenir books. We had seats in the front row, far left, of the orchestra box – close to the back of the theater and slightly raised above the rows of seats ahead, so that nobody could obscure our view. The red-and-gold of the theater was almost as opulent as the stage design, giving the whole affair an air of restrained decadence.

‘You know, when I told Angel we were coming here he asked me if I was sure I wasn’t gay,’ I whispered to Rachel.

‘What did you say?’

‘I told him I wasn’t dancing the damn ballet, I was just going to watch it.’

‘So I’m just a means of reassuring you about your heterosexuality?’ she teased.

‘Well, a very pleasurable means . . .’

Above and to my right, a figure entered one of the boxes on the level above ours, toward the front of the theater. He moved slowly, easing himself gently into his chair before adjusting his hearing aids. Behind him, Tommy Caci folded Al Z’s coat, then poured a glass of red wine for his boss before taking the seat directly behind him.

The Wang is an egalitarian theater; there are no closed boxes, but some sections are more private than others. The area where Al Z sat was known as the Wang box; it was partially shielded by a pillar, although it was open to the aisle on the right. The adjacent seats were empty, which meant that Al had booked the entire section for the first-night show.

Al Z, I thought, you old romantic.

The lights went down as the audience grew quiet. Rimsky-Korsakov’s music, arranged for the ballet by the composer, John Lanchbery, filled the huge space as the evening’s entertainment commenced. Handmaidens danced around Cleopatra’s bedchamber while the queen slept in the background and her brother Ptolemy and his confidant Pothinus plotted her downfall. It was all brilliantly done, yet I found myself drifting during the whole first half, my mind occupied by images of crawling things and the final, imagined moments of Grace Peltier’s life. I kept seeing:

A gun close to her head, a hand buried in her hair to hold her steady as the finger tightened on the trigger. It is her finger on the trigger, but pressed against it is another. She is dazed, stunned by a blow to the temple, and cannot fight as her arm is maneuvered into position. There is no blood from the blow, and anyway the entry wound will tear apart the skin and bone, disguising any earlier injury. It is only when the cold metal touches her skin that she realizes, finally, what is happening. She strikes out and opens her mouth to scream . . .

There is a roar in the night, and a red flame bursts from her temple and sheds itself over the window and the door. The light dies in her eyes and her body slumps to the right, the smell of burning in the air as her singed hair hisses softly.

There is no pain.

There will never be pain again.

I felt a pressure on my arm and found Rachel looking at me quizzically, the ballet onstage reaching its pre-interval climax. In her bedchamber, Cleopatra was dancing for Caesar, seducing him. I patted Rachel’s hand and saw her scowl at the patronizing nature of the gesture, but before I could explain, a movement to my far right attracted my attention. Tommy Caci had risen, distracted, and reached inside his jacket. Before him, Al Z continued watching the ballet, apparently unaware of what was going on behind. Tommy moved away from his seat and disappeared into the aisle.

Onstage, the assassin, Pothinus, appeared in the wings, looking for his moment to strike at the queen, but Cleopatra and Caesar danced on, oblivious. The music swelled as a figure took the seat behind Al Z, but it was not Tommy Caci. Instead, it was thinner, more angular. Al Z remained engrossed in the action, his head moving in time to the music, his mind filled with images of escape as he sought briefly to forget the darker world he had chosen to inhabit. A hand moved, and something silver gleamed. Pothinus shot out from the wings, sword in hand, but Caesar was quicker and his sword impaled Pothinus through the stomach.

And in the box above, Al Z’s body tensed and something red shot from his mouth as the figure leaned over him, one hand on his shoulder, the other close to the base of his skull. From behind, it would appear as if they were talking, nothing more, but I had seen the blade flash, and I knew what had happened. Al Z’s mouth was wide open, and as I watched, Mr. Pudd’s gloved hand closed upon it and he held him as he shook and died.

Then Mr. Pudd seemed to stare down to where I sat before draping Al Z’s coat across the old man’s shoulders and receding into the shadows.

Onstage, the curtain was falling and the audience had burst into applause, but I was already moving. I climbed over the edge of the orchestra box and ran up the aisle, the doors flying open noisily before me. To my left, a flight of stairs, topped by the eagle clock, led up to the next level. I took them two at a time, brushing aside an usher as I drew my gun.

‘Call an ambulance,’ I said as I passed. ‘And the police.’

I heard the sound of his footsteps echoing on the marble as I reached the top of the stairs, my gun raised ahead of me. An exit door stood open and the counter-weighted fire escape, which descended under body weight, was rising back up. Below me was a loading dock, from which a car was already speeding, a silver Mercury Sable. Its side faced me as it turned onto Washington Street, so I didn’t get the license number, but there were two figures inside.

Behind me, the seats were emptying for the intermission, and one or two people glanced out the open door. These doors were all alarmed, so security would be up here soon to find out who had opened them, and why. I retreated inside and moved to the area where Al Z still sat. His head hung down, his chin on his chest, the coat draped loosely across his shoulders to hide the bulge of the blade’s handle. The handle anchored him to his seat, preventing him from falling facedown. Blood flowed from his mouth and drenched the front of his white dress shirt. Some of it had fallen into his wineglass in a final, terrible act of consecration. I couldn’t see Tommy Caci.

Behind me, two Wang Center security staff appeared, but they backed off at the sight of the gun in my hands.

‘You call the police?’

They nodded.

Across the aisle to my right, a door stood slightly ajar. I gestured to it. ‘What’s in there?’

‘VIP lounge,’ one of the security guards answered.

I looked down to the base of the door and saw what looked like the toe of a shoe in the gap. Gently, using my elbow, I pushed it open.

Tomy Caci lay facedown on the floor, his head to one side and the edge of the wound at his throat clearly visible. There was a lot of blood on the floor and on the walls. He had probably been taken from behind when he left his seat and entered the lounge. Beyond him was a bar, with some couches and chairs, but the room looked empty.

I stepped back into the aisle as two blue uniforms appeared behind me, advancing with their weapons drawn. I heard the order to drop my gun amid the audience’s cries of surprise and fear. I immediately did as I was told and the two cops descended on me.

‘I’m a private detective,’ I said as one of them pushed me against the wall and frisked me while the other checked out Tommy Caci, then moved toward the body in the front row.

‘It’s Al Z,’ I told him, when he came back, and I felt a kind of sadness for the old thug. ‘He won’t be bothering you again.’

I was interviewed at the scene by a pair of detectives named Carras and McCann. I told them all that I had seen, although I didn’t tell them what I knew of Mr. Pudd. Instead, I described him in as much detail as I could and said that I had recognized Al Z from a previous case.

‘What case would that be?’ asked McCann.

‘Some trouble last year in a place called Dark Hollow.’

When I mentioned Dark Hollow, the scene of Tony Celli’s death at the hands of the man now dead beside us, their faces cleared, McCann even offering to buy me a drink at some unspecified date in the future. Nobody mourned Tony Celli’s passing.

I stood beside them at the main door of the theater as the audience was fed through a rank of policemen, each person being asked if he or she had seen anything before being told to supply an ID and telephone number. At police headquarters I gave a statement sitting beside McCann’s messy desk, then left my cell phone number and Rachel’s address in case they needed to speak to me again.

After they let me go, I tried calling Mickey Shine at the florist’s but there was no reply and I was told that his home number was unlisted. Another call and five minutes later, I had a home telephone number and address for one Michael Sheinberg at Bowdoin Street, Cambridge. There was no reply from that number either. I left a message, then hailed a cab and took a ride out to Cambridge. I asked the cab to wait as I stepped out onto the tree-lined street. Mickey Shine lived in a brownstone apartment block, but there was no answer when I tried his bell. I was considering breaking and entering when a neighbor appeared at a window. He was an elderly man in a sweater and baggy blue jeans and his hands shook from some nervous condition as he spoke.

‘You lookin’ for Mickey?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘You a friend of his?’

‘From out of town.’

‘Well, sorry, but he’s gone. Left about an hour ago.’

‘He say where he was going?’

‘No sir, I just saw him leave. Looks like he may be gone for a couple of days. He had a suitcase with him.’

I thanked him and got back in the cab. The news of Al Z’s death would have traveled fast and there would be a lot of speculation as to who might have been behind it, but Mickey knew. I think he knew what would happen from the moment he received the call that I was coming and realized that it was, at last, time for the reckoning.

The cab dropped me back at Jacob Wirth’s on Stuart, where Rachel was waiting along with Angel and Louis. There was a sing-along in progress around the piano as people who had been deaf since birth mugged ‘The Wanderer.’ We left them to it and made our way a few doors up the street to Montien, where we sat in a booth and picked uneasily at our Thai food.

‘He’s good,’ said Louis. ‘Probably been keeping tabs on you since you arrived.’

I nodded. ‘Then he knows about Sheinberg, and you two. And Rachel. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s a game with him,’ said Louis. ‘You know that, don’t you? The business card, the spiders in the mailbox. He playin’ with you, man, testin’ you. He know who you are, and he like the idea of goin’ up against you.’

Angel nodded in agreement. ‘You got a reputation now. Only surprise is that every psycho from here to Florida hasn’t caught a bus and headed for Maine to see just how good you really are.’

‘That’s not very reassuring, Angel.’

‘You want reassurance, call a priest.’

Nobody spoke for a time, until Louis said, ‘I guess you know we be joinin’ you in Maine.’

Rachel looked at me. ‘I’ll be coming too.’

‘My guardian angels,’ I said. I knew better than to argue with any of them. I was glad, too, that Rachel would be close. Alone, she was vulnerable. Yet once again I found this beautiful, empathetic woman reading my thoughts.

‘Not for protection, Parker,’ she added. Her face was serious, and her eyes were hard. ‘I’m coming because you’ll need help with Marcy Becker and her parents, and maybe the Merciers too. If the fact that I’m with you and the odd couple makes you feel better, then that’s a plus, nothing more. I’m not here just so you can save me.’

Angel smiled at her with both admiration and amusement. ‘You’re so butch,’ he hissed at Rachel. ‘Give you a gun and a vest and you could be a lesbian icon.’

‘Bite me, stubby,’ she replied.

It seemed to have been decided. I raised a glass of water, and they each lifted their beers in response.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘welcome to the war.’

Chapter Thirteen

The next morning, the front page of the Herald was dominated by a pretty good picture of Al Z slumped in his seat at the Wang, beside the headline ‘Gangland Leader Slain.’ There are few words that newspaper subeditors like better than ‘gangland’ and ‘slain,’ except maybe ‘sex’ and ‘puppy,’ and the Herald had opted to display them in a point size so large there was barely enough room for the story.

Tommy Caci’s throat had been cut from left to right. The wound was so deep that it had severed both of the common carotid arteries and the external and internal jugulars, virtually decapitating him. Mr. Pudd had then stabbed Al Z through the back of the head with a long, thin blade, which punctured his cerebellum and sliced into his cerebral cortex. Finally, using a small, very sharp knife, he had made an angled incision about three quarters of the way up the middle finger of Al Z’s right hand and sliced off the top joint.

I learned this not from the Herald, but from Sergeant McCann, who rang me on my cell phone as I sat at Rachel’s breakfast table reading the newspapers. Rachel was in the bathtub, humming Al Green songs out of key.

‘Guy had some balls, taking out two men in a public place,’ commented McCann. ‘There are no cameras on the fire exits, so we got no visual apart from your description. Some guy in the loading bay took the license; came from an Impala stolen two days ago in Concord, so zilch there. The killer had to gain access to the VIP lounge using a key card, so we figure he came prepared with one he made himself. It’s not that hard to run one up, you know what you’re doing. Al Z went to every first night – he may have been a mean, crooked son of a bitch, but he had class – and he always sat in or near those seats, so it wasn’t too difficult to guess where he’d be. As for the missing finger joint, we’re guessing it’s a calling card and we’re checking VICAP for equivalent MOs.’

He asked me if I remembered anything else from the previous night – I knew it wasn’t simply a courtesy call – but I told him that I couldn’t help him. He asked me to stay in touch, and I assured him that I would.

McCann was right; Pudd had taken a huge risk to get to Al Z. Maybe he had no choice. There was no way to get at Al Z in his office or his home, because he was always surrounded by his people and his windows were designed to repel anything smaller than a warhead. At the theater, with Tommy behind him and hundreds of people around him, he could have been forgiven for feeling secure, but he had underestimated the tenacity of his killer. When the opportunity presented itself, Pudd seized it.

It struck me that Pudd might also be tying up loose ends, and there were only so many reasons why someone felt compelled to do that. Primary among them was as a preparation for disappearance, to ensure that there was nobody left to continue the hunt. My guess was that if Pudd chose to disappear, then nobody would ever find him. He had survived this long even with a price on his head, so he could vanish like dew after sunrise if he chose.

Something else bothered me; it looked like bugs weren’t the only things that Pudd liked to collect. He also wanted skin and bone, removing joints and sections of skin from each of his victims. His taste in souvenirs was distinctive, but Pudd didn’t strike me as the kind of man who would mutilate dead bodies just so he could put the pieces in jars and admire them. There had to be a better reason.

I sat at the breakfast table, the newspapers now abandoned, and wondered if I should simply turn over all I knew to the police. Not that what I knew was a great deal, but the deaths of Epstein, Beck, Al Z, and Grace Peltier were all connected, linked either to the Fellowship itself or to actions that Grace’s biological father, Jack Mercier, was taking against it. It was about time for a serious face-to-face talk with Mr. Mercier, and I didn’t think that either of us was going to enjoy it very much. I was about to pack my bag in preparation for my return to Scarborough when I got my second call of the morning, and from a not entirely unexpected source. It was Mickey Shine. Caller ID could only tell me that the number he was calling from was private, and concealed.

‘You see the papers?’ he asked.

‘I was there,’ I told him.

‘You know who did it?’

‘I think it was our mutual acquaintance.’

There was a silence on the other end of the line. ‘How did he find out about your meeting with Al?’

‘He may have been keeping tabs on us,’ I conceded. ‘But it could also be that he was aware of Al Z’s interest in him for some time, and that my investigation precipitated a course of action he’d been planning for some time.’ He had learned from his pets that if something starts tugging at the farthest reach of your web, then it’s a good idea to find out what that might be and, if you can, to make it stop.

‘You weren’t out at your apartment last night,’ I continued. ‘I checked up on you.’

‘I left town as soon as I heard. Somebody called me about Al’s death, a friend from way back, and I knew it had to be Pudd. Nobody else would dare make a move like that against Al Z.’

‘Where are you?’

‘New York.’

‘Think you can lose yourself there, Mickey?’

‘I have friends down here. I’ll make some calls, see what they can do for me.’

‘We need to talk some more before you disappear. I get the feeling you haven’t told me all that you know.’

I thought he would demur. Instead, he admitted: ‘Some I know, some I’m just guessing.’

‘Meet me. I’ll come down to you.’

‘I don’t know . . .’

‘Mickey, are you going to keep running from this guy for the rest of your life? That doesn’t sound like much of an existence.’

‘It’s better than being dead.’ He didn’t sound too sure.

‘You know what he’s doing, don’t you?’ I asked him. ‘You know what the threat of “being written” means. You’ve figured it out.’

He didn’t reply immediately, and I half expected to hear the connection being ended.

‘The Cloisters,’ he said suddenly. ‘Ten tomorrow. There’s an exhibition in the Treasury you might want to take a look at before I get there. It’ll answer some of your questions, and I’ll try to fill in the gaps. But you’re not there at ten and I walk away. You’ll never see me again.’

With that, he hung up.

I booked a ticket on the Delta shuttle to La Guardia, then called Angel and Louis at the Copley. Rachel and I met them for coffee in the Starbucks on Newbury before I caught a cab to Logan. I was in New York by 1:30 P.M. and checked into a double room in the Larchmont on West Eleventh Street in the Village. The Larchmont wasn’t the kind of place Donald Trump was likely to be frequenting but it was clean and inexpensive, and unlike most New York budget hotels, its double rooms weren’t so small that you had to step outside to change your mind. In addition, it had a security-locked front entrance and a doorman the size of the Flatiron Building, so unwanted visitors would be kept to a minimum.

The city was stiflingly hot and humid, and I was soaked in sweat by the time I reached the hotel. The weather was due to break that night, but until then the A/C would be on full-blast throughout the city, while those too poor to afford it made do with cheap fans. After a quick shower in a shared bathroom, I caught a cab uptown to West Eighty-ninth Street. B’Nai Jeshurun, the synagogue with which Yossi Epstein had until recently been involved, had an office on West Eighty-ninth, close by the Claremont Riding Academy, and it seemed that while I was in Manhattan it might be useful to try to find out a little more about the murdered rabbi. The noise of children leaving P.S. 166 echoed in my ears as I walked to the synagogue’s office, but it was a wasted trip. Nobody at B’Nai Jeshurun seemed able to tell me much more than I already knew about Yossi Epstein, and I was referred instead to the Orensanz Center on Norfolk Street on the Lower East Side, where Epstein had relocated after his falling-out with the Upper West Side congregation.

To avoid the rush hour traffic I took the subway from Central Park West as far as Broadway and East Houston, which left me sweating again, then strolled along Houston, past Katz’s Deli and storefront operations selling garbage masquerading as antiques, until I came to Norfolk Street. This was the heart of the Lower East Side, a place that had once been full of scholars and yeshivas, of anti-Hasidic Lithuanians and the rest of the first wave of Russian Jews, who were regarded by the already settled German Jews as backward Orientals. It was said that Allen Street used to belong to Russia, there were so many Russian Jews there. People from the same town formed associations, became tradespeople, saved so their kids could go to college and better themselves. They shared their neighborhoods uneasily with the Irish, and fought with them on the streets.

Now those times were largely gone. There was still a workers’ co-op on Grand Street, a few Jewish bookstores and skullcap manufacturers between Hester and Division, one or two good bakeries, Schapiro’s kosher wines, and of course, Katz’s, the last of the old-style delis, now staffed almost entirely by Dominicans; but most of the Orthodox Jewish community had moved to Borough Park and Williamsburg, or to Crown Heights. The ones who were left were mainly too poor or too stubborn to retreat to the outer boroughs or Miami.

The Orensanz Center, the oldest surviving synagogue in New York, once known as the Anshe Chesed, the People of Kindness, seemed to belong to another, distant time. Built by the Berlin architect Alexander Saeltzer in 1850 for the German Jewish congregation, and modeled on the cathedral of Cologne, it dominated Norfolk Street, a reminder of the past still alive in the present. I entered through a side door, walked along a dark entrance lobby, and found myself in the main, neoGothic hall among elegant pillars and balconies. Dim light filtered in through the windows, turning the interior to the color of old bronze and casting shadows over flowers and white ribbons, the remnants of a wedding held some days earlier. In one corner, a small man with white hair, dressed in blue coveralls, was sweeping paper and broken glass into a corner. He stopped his work as I walked over to him. I produced my ID and asked if there was anybody who might be willing to talk about Yossi Epstein.

‘Nobody here today,’ he said. ‘Come back tomorrow.’ He resumed his sweeping.

‘Maybe there’s somebody I can call?’ I persisted.

‘Call tomorrow.’

I wasn’t getting very far on looks and charm alone. ‘Mind if I take a look around?’ I asked and, without waiting for a reply, began to walk toward a small flight of stairs leading down to the basement. I found a locked door with a card pinned to it expressing sorrow at the death of Epstein. A bulletin board to one side listed times of services and Hebrew classes, as well as a series of lectures on the history of the area. There wasn’t much more to see so, after ten minutes or so of unsuccessful snooping around the rest of the basement, I brushed the dust from my jacket and walked back up the stairs.

The old guy with the broom had disappeared. Instead, there were two men waiting for me. One was young, with a black skullcap that looked too small for his head and a head that looked too small for his shoulders. He wore a dark shirt and black jeans and, judging by his expression, wasn’t one of the people of kindness. The man beside him was older, with thinning gray hair and a thick beard. He was dressed more traditionally than his friend – white shirt and black tie beneath a black suit and overcoat – but didn’t look significantly kinder.

‘Are you the rabbi?’ I asked him.

‘No, we are not connected with the Orensanz Center,’ he replied, before adding: ‘You think everyone who dresses in black is a rabbi?’

‘Does that make me anti-Semitic?’

‘No, but carrying a gun into a synagogue might.’

‘It’s nothing personal, or even religious.’

The older man nodded. ‘I’m sure it’s not, but it pays to be careful with such matters. I understand you are a private detective. May I see some form of identification, please?’

I raised my hand and slowly reached into my inside pocket for my wallet. I gave it to the young guy, who handed it in turn to the older man. He examined it for a good minute, then folded it and handed it back to me.

‘And why is a private detective from Maine asking about the death of a New York rabbi?’

‘I think Rabbi Epstein’s death may be connected to a case I’m investigating. I hoped that somebody might be able to tell me a little more about him.’

‘He’s dead, Mr. Parker. What more do you need to know?’

‘Who killed him would be a start, or doesn’t that concern you?’

‘It concerns me a great deal, Mr. Parker.’ He turned to the younger man, nodded, and we watched as he walked from the hall, closing the door softly behind him. ‘What is this case you are investigating?’

‘The death of a young woman. She was a friend of mine, once.’

‘Then investigate her death and leave us to do our own work.’

‘If her death is connected to that of the rabbi, it might be in both of our interests for you to help me. I can find the man who did this.’

‘The man,’ he repeated, emphasizing the second word. ‘You seem very certain that it was a man.’

‘I know who he is,’ I said simply.

‘Then we both know,’ he replied. ‘The matter is in hand. Steps have been taken to deal with it.’

‘What steps?’

‘An eye for an eye, Mr. Parker. He will be found.’ He drew closer to me, and his eyes softened slightly. ‘This is not your concern. Not every unlawful death is fuel for your anger.’

He knew who I was. I could see it in his face, my past reflected back upon me in the mirrors of his eyes. There had been so much newspaper coverage of the deaths of Susan and Jennifer, and the final violent end of the Traveling Man, that there would always be those who remembered me. Now, in this old synagogue, I felt my personal loss exposed once again, like a mote of dust caught in the sunlight pouring through the windows above.

‘The woman is my concern,’ I said. ‘If the rabbi’s death is connected, then that becomes my concern too.’

He shook his head and gripped my shoulder lightly.

‘Do you know what tashlikh is, Mr. Parker? It is a symbolic act, the casting of bread crumbs onto the water, symbolizing the sins of the past, a burden with which one no longer chooses to live. I think you must find it in yourself to lay aside your burdens before they kill you.’

He began to walk away, and was almost at the door when I spoke.

‘“This was said by my father, and I am the atonement for where he rests.”’

The old man stopped and stared back at me.

‘It’s from the Talmud,’ I said.

‘I know what it is,’ he almost whispered.

‘This isn’t about revenge.’

‘Then what is it about?’

‘Reparation.’

‘For your father’s sins, or your own?’

‘Both.’

He seemed to lose himself in thought for a few moments, and when the light returned to his eyes a decision had been made.

‘There is a legend told of the Golem, Mr. Parker,’ he began, ‘an artificial man made of clay. The Rabbi Loew created the first Golem in Prague, in fifty-three forty. The rabbi formed him from mud and placed the shem, the parchment bearing the name of God, in his mouth. The rabbi is justified in legend for creating a creature capable of defending Jews against the pogroms, against the wrath of their enemies. Do you believe that such a creature can exist, that justice can be served by its creation?’

‘I believe that men like him can exist,’ I replied. ‘But I don’t think justice always plays a part in their creation, or is served by their actions.’

‘Yes, perhaps a man,’ said the old Jew softly. ‘And perhaps justice, if it is divinely inspired. We have dispatched our Golem. Let the will of God be done.’ In his eyes I could see the ambivalence of his response to what had been set in train; they had sent one killer to track another, unleashing violence against violence, with all of the risks that such an act entailed.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘My name is Ben Epstein,’ he answered, ‘and I am the atonement for where my son rests.’

The door closed gently behind him, its sound in the empty synagogue like a breath exhaled from the mouth of God.

Lester Bargus is alone behind the counter of the store on the day he dies, the same day on which I meet Yossi Epstein’s father. Jim Gould, who works for Bargus part-time, is out back fieldstripping a pair of stolen H&K semiautomatics, so there is nobody in the rear storeroom, where a pair of TV screens show the interior of the store from two angles, one from a visible camera above the door, the other from a lens hidden inside the shell of a portable stereo kept on a shelf beside the register. Lester Bargus is a careful man, but not careful enough. His store is miked, but Lester Bargus doesn’t know that. The only people who know are the ATF agents who have been monitoring Bargus’s illegal gun operation for the best part of eleven days.

But on this particular day business is slow, and Bargus is idly feeding crickets to his pet mantid when the door opens. Even on the oddly angled black-and-white recordings made by the cameras, the new arrival seems strangely out of place. He is dressed in a black suit, shiny black shoes, and a thin black tie over a white shirt. On his head he wears a black hat, and a long black coat hangs to the middle of his calves. He is tall, six-two or six-three, and well built. His age is harder to gauge; he could be anything from forty to seventy.

But it is only when the few clear images obtained by the cameras are frozen and enhanced that his strangeness becomes truly apparent. The skin is stretched taut on his face and he appears to be almost entirely without flesh, the striations of the tendons in his jaw and neck clearly visible through his skin, his cheekbones like shards of glass below dark eyes. He has no eyebrows. The ATF agents who later examine the tape suspect at first that he may simply be so fair that his hair does not show up, but when the images are enhanced they reveal only slightly roughened skin above his eyes, like old scar tissue.

His appearance obviously shocks Lester Bargus. On the tape, he can be seen taking a step back in surprise. He is wearing a white T-shirt with a Smith & Wesson logo on the back, and blue jeans with a lot of room around the crotch and the ass. Maybe he is hoping to grow into them.

‘Help you?’ His voice on the recording is cautious but hopeful. Especially on a slow day, a sale is a sale, even if it does come from a freak.

‘I am looking for this man.’ The accent makes it clear that English is only a second language, possibly even a third. He sounds European; not German, but Polish maybe, or Czech. Later, an expert will identify it as Hungarian, with Yiddish inflections to certain words. The man is a Jew, originally from Eastern Europe but with some time spent in the west of the continent, probably France.

He takes a photograph from his pocket and pushes it across the counter toward Lester Bargus. Lester doesn’t even look at the photograph. All he says is: ‘I don’t know him.’

‘Look at it.’ And his tone tells Lester Bargus that it doesn’t matter what he does or does not say from now on, because nothing can save him from this man.

Lester reaches out and touches the photograph for the first time, but only to push it away. His head does not move. He still has not looked at the photograph, but while his left hand is in sight his right is moving to grasp the shotgun that rests on the shelf beneath the counter. He has almost reached it when the gun appears. Firearms will later identify it as a Jericho 941, made in Israel. Lester Bargus’s right hand returns to the counter alongside his left, and both hands start to tremble in unison.

‘For the last time, Mr. Bargus, look at the photograph.’

This time, Lester does look down. He spends some time staring at the photograph, weighing up his options. It’s obvious that he knows the man in the picture and that the gunman is aware of this fact because the gunman wouldn’t be there otherwise. On the tape, it’s almost possible to hear Lester gulp.

‘Where do I find this man?’ During the whole encounter, the expression on the gunman’s face has not altered. It is as if the skin is so tight across his skull that merely to talk requires a huge effort. The palpable menace of the man is obvious even from the black-and-white recording. Lester Bargus, forced to deal with him face-to-face, is terrified beyond belief. It is audible in his voice when he speaks what will be his second-to-last sentence on this earth.

‘He’ll kill me if I tell you,’ says Bargus.

‘I will kill you if you don’t.’

Then Lester Bargus says his last words, and they reveal a prescience that I didn’t think Lester would ever have. ‘You’re going to kill me anyhow,’ he says, and something in his voice tells the gunman that this is all he is ever going to get out of Lester.

‘Yes,’ says the gunman, ‘I am.’

The shots sound incredibly loud after the conversation that has just taken place, but also distorted and muted as the sound levels fail to cope with them. Lester Bargus jolts as the first bullet takes him in the chest, then keeps bucking and spasming as the rest of the shots tear into him, the static-ridden thunderclaps coming again and again until it seems that they will never end. There are ten shots, then there is a noise and a movement from the left of the picture as part of Jim Gould’s body appears in the frame. Two more shots come and Gould falls across the counter as the gunman springs across it and darts into the rear of the store. By the time the ATF agents reach the scene, he is gone.

On the counter, now soaked with Lester Bargus’s blood, the photograph remains. It is a picture of a group of demonstrators outside an abortion clinic in Minnesota. There are men and women holding placards, some obviously screaming their protests as police try to hold them back while others stand openmouthed in shock. To the right of the picture, the body of a man lies slumped against a wall as medics crowd around him. There is black blood on the pavement and on the wall behind him. At the fringe of the group another man has been caught in the act of walking away, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, tiny hoods of skin shrouding his eyes as he looks back toward the dying man, his face inadvertently revealed to the camera. A red circle has been drawn around his head.

In the photograph, Mr. Pudd is smiling.

The man who killed Lester Bargus had flown into Logan Airport one day earlier and entered the country on a British passport, claiming to be a businessman interested in buying stuffed animals. The address he gave to Immigration officials was later revealed to be the site of a recently demolished Chinese restaurant in Balham, south London.

The name on the passport was Clay Dæmon.

He was the Golem.

Chapter Fourteen

That night, as the bodies of Lester Bargus and Jim Gould were taken to the morgue, I headed over to Chumley’s on Bedford, the Village’s best bar. Technically it was between Barrow and Grove, but even people who’d been going there for the best part of a decade still had trouble finding it on occasion. There was no name outside, just a light over the big door with the metal grate. Chumley’s had started life as a speakeasy during Prohibition, and it had maintained its low profile for over seventy years. On weekends it tended to attract the kind of young bankers and dotcommunists who all wore blue shirts with their suits, on the grounds that nonconformists like them had to stick together, but during the week Chumley’s was still recognizable as the bar that Salinger, Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill, Orson Welles, and William Burroughs used to frequent as a change from the White Horse or Marie’s Crisis.

The clouds hung low over the Village as I walked, and there was a terrible stillness in the air that seemed to communicate itself to the people on the streets. Laughs were subdued; couples bickered. The crowds emerging from the subway wore tense, fractious expressions, their shoes too tight, their shirts too thick. Everything felt damp to the touch, as if the city itself were slowly perspiring, expelling filth and waste through every crack in every sidewalk, every fissure in every wall. I looked to the sky and waited for the thunder, but none came.

Inside Chumley’s, the Labradors lounged uneasily on the sawdust-strewn floor and people stood at the tiny bar or disappeared into the darkened alcoves at the far end of the room. I took a seat at one of the long benches by the door and ordered a hamburger and a Coke – hamburgers, ribs, and deep-fried fish being what Chumley’s did best.

It seemed like a long time since I had been back in the Village, as if decades rather than years had passed from the day that I left my apartment to travel back to Maine. Old ghosts waited for me on these corners: the Traveling Man at the corner of St. Marks in the East Village, the phone booth still marking the place where I had stood after he sent me my daughter’s remains in a jar; the Corner Bistro, where Susan and I used to meet when we were dating; the Elephant & Castle, where we had brunch on Sundays in the early months of our relationship, heading uptown afterward to walk in Central Park or browse in the museums.

Even Chumley’s was not immune, for were these not the same dogs that Susan used to stroke while she waited for her drink, the same dogs that Jennifer once held after her mother told her how beautiful they were and we took her to meet them as a treat? All of these places were potential bubbles of hurt waiting to be pricked, releasing the memories sealed within. I should have felt pain, I thought. I should have felt the old agony. But instead, I experienced only a strange, desperate gratitude for this place, for the two fat old dogs and for the unsullied memories with which they had left me.

For some things should never be allowed to fade away. It was both good and proper that they should be recalled, that a place should be found for them in the present and the future so that they became a precious part of oneself, something to be treasured instead of something to be feared. To remember Susan and Jennifer as they once were, and to love them for it, was no betrayal of Rachel and of what she meant to me. If that was true, then to find a way to live a life in which lost loves and new beginnings could coexist was not to besmirch the memory of my wife and child. And in the quiet of that place I lost myself for a time, until one of the Labradors waddled sleepily over and nosed at my hand for attention, his dog jowls shedding warm spit on my jeans and his soft eyes closing happily beneath the weight of my hand.

I had found a copy of the Portland Press Herald in Barnes & Noble at Union Square, and while I ate, I scanned the pages for reports on Eagle Lake. There were two: one was a description of the ongoing difficulties in uncovering the remains, but the main piece announced the suspected identities of two of the dead. They were Lyall Cornish and Vyrna Kellog, and they were both homicide victims. Lyall Cornish had died from a gunshot wound to the back of the head. Vyrna Kellog’s skull had been crushed, apparently with a rock.

Slowly, the truth about the fate of the Aroostook Baptists was being revealed. They had not dispersed, scattering themselves to the four winds and taking with them the seeds of new communities. Instead they had been murdered and consigned to a mass grave on a patch of undeveloped land; and there they had remained, trapped in a forgotten cavity of the honeycomb world, until spring daylight had found them.

Was that why Grace had died – because in breaking through the dead layers obscuring the past, she had found out something about the Aroostook Baptists that nobody was ever supposed to discover? More and more I wanted to return to Maine, to confront Jack Mercier and Carter Paragon. I felt that my pursuit of Mr. Pudd was drawing me away from the investigation into Grace’s death, yet somehow Pudd and the Fellowship had a part to play in all that had occurred. He was linked to her passing in some way, of that I was certain, but he wasn’t the weak link. Paragon was, and he would have to be confronted if I was to understand what had driven someone to end Grace’s life.

But first, there was Mickey Shine. I had checked the Village Voice and found the exhibition listings. The Cloisters, which housed the Metropolitan Museum’s medieval collection, was hosting a visiting exhibition on artistic responses to the Apocalypse of St. John. An image of Jack Mercier’s bookshelf flashed before my eyes. It seemed that the Met and Mercier currently shared an interest in books and paintings about the end of the world.

I left Chumley’s shortly after ten, patting the sleeping dogs one last time for luck as I went. The warm, damp smell of them was still on my hands as I walked beneath the shrouded sky, the noise of the city seeming to rebound back on itself from above. A shadow moved in a doorway to my right, but I paid it no heed and allowed it to move unchallenged behind me.

I passed through the streetlights, and my footsteps echoed hollowly on the ground beneath my feet.

Bone is porous; after years of burial, it will assume the same color as the soil in which it has been interred. The bones by St. Froid Lake were a rich brown, as if the Aroostook Baptists had become one with the natural world around them, an impression reinforced by the small plants that grew between the remains, fed by decay. Rib cages had become trellises for creeping roots, and the concavity of a skull acted as a nursery for small green shoots.

Their clothing had largely rotted away, since most of it had been made from natural fibers and could not survive decades of burial in the manner of synthetic materials. Water stains on the surrounding trees indicated that the land had flooded on occasion, adding extra layers of mud and rotting vegetation, compressing the bones of the dead farther and farther into the soil. The field recovery, the separation of bone from earth, human from animal, child from adult, would be a painstaking process. It would be completed on hands and knees, with aching backs and cold fingers, all supervised by the forensic anthropologist. State police, sheriff’s deputies, wardens, even some anthropology students were called in to assist with the dig. Since the ME’s office had only one vehicle, a Dodge van, with which to transport remains, local undertakers and the National Guard were drafted in to assist in the removal of the bodies to nearby Presque Isle, from where Bill’s Flying Service would take take them down to Augusta.

At St. Froid Lake, orange aluminum arrows, the trademark of the deputy chief ME, had been used to create an archaeological square, enclosed and protected by lengths of string. An array of seemingly primitive but ultimately necessary equipment had been brought to bear on the scene: line levels to measure the depth of the remains below the surface; flat-bladed shovels and trowels with which to dig, aware always that the soft bones could be damaged by a careless movement; handheld screens for sifting small pieces of evidence – a quarter-inch mesh screen first, followed by a standard window screen; tapes; graph paper for drawing a site map depicting the area as seen from above, the position of the remains being added to the map as they were uncovered; plastic bags, bright blue heavy-duty body bags, and waterproof pens; metal detectors to search for guns or other metallic debris; and cameras, to photograph items and artifacts as they were revealed.

As each artifact was uncovered it was photographed, then marked and sealed, an adhesive label attached to the container detailing the case number, the date and time of discovery, a description of the item, its location, and the signature of the investigator who had recovered it. The item was then transported to a secure evidence storage facility, in this case the offices of the ME in Augusta.

Soil samples were taken from the carefully piled earth and bagged. Had the soil by the lake been only slightly more acidic, the remains might simply have vanished and the only sign that they had ever been there would have come from the flourishing plant life above, nourished by flesh and bone. As it was, animal predation, erosion, and scattering had resulted in missing and damaged limbs, but sufficient evidence remained to be examined by the specialists assembled by the ME’s office. They included – in addition to the forensic anthropologist, the ME’s own permanent staff, and the scientists at the state lab in Augusta – an anatomist, three dental teams to act as forensic odontologists, and the radiologist at the Maine General Medical Center in Augusta. Each would bring to bear his or her own specialist knowledge to assist in a formal identification of the remains.

The remains had been identified as human by an examination of the intact bones, and the sex of the victims would be confirmed by further examinations of the skull, pelvis, femur, sternum, and teeth, where teeth could be found. Age estimates of those victims under the age of twenty-five, accurate to within one year or so, would be made from teeth, where teeth remained, and from the appearance and fusion of the ossification centers and epiphyses, the end parts of the long bones, which grow separately from the shaft in early life. In the case of older bones, radiological examinations of the trabecular pattern in the head of the humerus and femur, which remodels with age, would be used, in addition to changes in pubic symphysis.

Height would be calculated by measuring the femur, tibia, and fibula of the victims, arm bones being less reliable in such cases. Dental remains would be used to make a preliminary racial determination, dental characteristics associated predominantly with particular races enabling the likelihood of the victims being Caucasoid, Negroid, or Mongoloid to be assessed.

Finally, dental records, radiological examination of the remains for evidence of fractures, and comparative DNA tests would all be brought to bear in an effort to make positive identifications of the personal identities of the victims. In this case, facial reconstruction and photo-superimposition (the overlaying of a photograph of the suspected victim over a transparency of the skull, now largely done on-screen) might have assisted the investigation, since photographs existed of the suspected victims, but the state had made no budgetary provisions for photo-superimposition techniques, mainly because those with their hands on the purse strings didn’t really understand what it was. They didn’t understand the mechanics of DNA testing either, but then, they didn’t have to; they just knew that it worked.

But in this case, the investigators had assistance from an unexpected and bizarre source. Around the neck of each victim was found the remains of a wooden board. Some had decayed badly, although it was believed that electronic scanners, electrostatic detection apparatuses, or low-angle light could reveal traces of whatever had been indented on the wood. But others, particularly on the higher ground, were still semi-intact. One of them lay below the head of a small boy buried beside a fir tree. The roots of the tree had grown through and around his remains, and his recovery would be one of the most difficult to achieve without damaging the bones. Beside him was another, smaller skeleton, preliminarily identified as a female of about seven years, for the metopic suture along the frontal bone of her skull had not yet fully disappeared. The bones of their hands were intermingled, as if they had clasped each other in their final moments.

The boy’s bones lay semiexposed, the skull clearly visible, the mandible detached and lying to one side. There was a small hole where the occipital and parietal bones met at the back of his head but no corresponding exit wound in the frontal bone, although a small fragment appeared to have been dislodged from the supraorbital foramen, the ridge of bone above the right eye, by the emerging bullet.

The indentation on the block of wood by his skull, hacked into the grain with a child’s hand, read:

James Jessop

Sinner

The Search for Sanctuary

Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier

It is unclear when the first signs of difficulty began to appear in the new settlement.

Each day, the community rose and prayed at first light, then assisted in the completion of the houses and farm structures for the settlement, some of which were built of clapboard from old Sears, Roebuck mail-order kits originating from the 1930s. Faulkner retained control of the finances, and food was limited, since the Preacher believed in the benefits of fasting. Prayers were said four times daily, with Faulkner preaching one sermon at breakfast and a second following the main meal in the evening.

Details of day-to-day life for the Aroostook Baptists were obtained by talking to local people who had some limited contact with the community, and from occasional letters sent by Elizabeth Jessop, Frank Jessop’s wife, to her sister, Lena, in Portland. These letters were, in effect, smuggled out of the settlement. Elizabeth reached an agreement with the landowner whereby, for a small fee, he would check the hollow of an oak tree at the verge of the settlement every Tuesday and ensure that whatever mail found there was posted. He also agreed to collect and deliver any responses received.

Elizabeth paints a picture of a harsh but joyful first three months, filled with a sense that the Aroostook Baptists were like the pioneers of another age, creating a new world where there had once been wilderness. The houses, although basic and somewhat drafty, were built quickly, and the families had brought some simple furnishings with them in trailers. They raised pigs and chickens and had five cows, one of which was with calf. They grew potatoes – this area of Aroostook was prime potato-growing country – broccoli, and peas, and harvested apples from the trees on the property. They used rotting fish to fertilize the land and stored the produce they had brought with them in underground caverns dug beneath the banks, where the springwater kept the air at the same low temperature all year round, acting as a natural refrigerator.

The first signs of tension arose in July, when it became apparent that the Faulkners and their children were keeping themselves apart from the other families. Faulkner took a larger share of the produce as the leader of the community and he refused to release any of the funds that the families had brought with them, a sum amounting to at least $20,000. Even when Laurie Perrson, the daughter of Billy and Olive Perrson, took seriously ill with influenza, Faulkner insisted that she be treated within the community. It was left to Katherine Cornish, who had some rudimentary medical skills, to treat the girl. According to Elizabeth’s letters, Laurie barely survived.

Animosity grew toward the Faulkners. Their children, whom Faulkner insisted should be called only Adam and Eve, bullied the younger members of the community; Elizabeth refers darkly to random acts of cruelty perpetrated on both animals and humans by the Faulkner children. Clearly, her reports caused her sister concern, for in a letter dated August 7,1963, Elizabeth attempts to reassure Lena, arguing that their difficulties ‘are as nothing compared to the sufferings endured by the Mayflower pilgrims, or those hardy souls who journeyed west in the face of hostility from the Indians. We trust in God, who is our savior, and in the Reverend Faulkner, who is our guiding light.’

But the letter also contains the first reference to Lyall Kellog, with whom it appears that Elizabeth was becoming infatuated. It seems that the relationship between Frank Jessop and his wife was predominantly nonsexual, although whether as a result of marital strife or some physical incapacity is not known. In fact, the affair between Lyall and Elizabeth may already have begun by the time of the August letter, and had certainly progressed enough by November for Elizabeth to describe him to her sister as ‘this wonderful man.’

It is my view that this affair, and its repercussions once it became known within the community, contributed greatly to the disintegration of the settlement. What is also clear, from the subsequent letters of Elizabeth Jessop, is that Louise Faulkner played a major role in this disintegration, a role that appears to have surprised Elizabeth and may, in the end, have brought Louise into bitter conflict with her own husband.

Chapter Fifteen

The passenger elevator at the 190th Street subway station was decorated with pictures of kittens and puppies. Two potted plants with Stars and Stripes sprouting from the soil hung from the ceiling and a small stereo unit played relaxing music. The elevator operator, Anthony Washington, who was responsible for the unusual ambience of the 190th Street elevator, sat at a small desk in a comfortable chair and greeted many of the passengers by name. The MTA once tried to make Anthony strip his elevator of its decorations, but a campaign by the press and the public forced the Transit Authority to back down. The paint flaked from the ceiling of the 190th Street station, it smelled of urine, and there was a steady stream of dirty water running between the tracks. All things considered, those who used the subway were pretty grateful for Anthony’s efforts and felt that the MTA should be pretty damn grateful too.

It was just after 9:15 A.M. when Anthony Washington’s elevator reached ground level and I emerged at the entrance to Fort Tryon Park. The weather had broken. The thunder had commenced shortly after dawn, the rains following within the hour. It had now been falling continuously for almost four hours, warm, hard rain that had caused umbrellas to sprout up like mushrooms across the city.

There was no bus waiting at the curb to take visitors to the Cloisters, although it hardly mattered, since I seemed to be the only person heading in that direction. I wrapped my coat around me and began to walk up Margaret Corbin Drive. Outside the small café on the left of the road, a group of sanitation men huddled together, sheltering from the rain while drinking cups of coffee. Above them loomed the remains of Fort Tryon, which defended itself against Hessian troops during the War of Independence with the aid of Margaret Corbin herself, the first American woman to take a soldier’s part in the battle for liberty. I wondered if Margaret Corbin was tough enough to stand against the troops of junkies and muggers who now roamed the scene of her triumph, and figured that she probably was.

Seconds later, the bulk of the Cloisters was before me, the New Jersey shoreline to my left, traffic streaming across the George Washington Bridge. John D. Rockefeller Jr. had given this land to the city and reserved the hilltop for the construction of a museum of medieval art, which was eventually opened in 1938. Portions of five medieval cloisters were integrated into a single modern building, itself reminiscent of medieval European structures. My father had first taken me there as a child, and it had never ceased to amaze me since. Surrounded by its high central tower and battlements, its arches and pillars, you could briefly feel like a knight-errant, as long as you ignored the fact that you were looking out at the woods of New Jersey, where the only damsels in distress were likely to be robbery victims or unwed mothers.

I walked up the stairs to the admissions area, paid my $10, and stepped through the entrance door into the Romanesque Hall. There were no other visitors in the rooms; the comparatively early hour and the bad weather had kept most of them away, and I guessed that I was one of only a dozen or so people in the whole museum. I passed slowly through the Fuentidueña Chapel, pausing to admire the apse and the huge crucifix hanging from the ceiling, then made my way through the St.-Guilhem and Cuxa Cloisters toward the Gothic Chapel and the stairs to the lower level.

I had about ten minutes before I was due to meet Mickey Shine, so I headed for the Treasury, where the museum stored its manuscripts. I entered through the modern glass doors and stood in a room ringed by panels from the choir stalls at Jumièges Abbey. The manuscripts were stored in glass cases and opened at particularly fine examples of the illuminator’s art. I stopped for a time at a beautiful book of hours, but most of my attention was reserved for the visiting exhibits.

The book of Revelation had been the subject of manuscript illumination since the ninth century, and while Apocalypse cycles had originally been produced for monasteries, they were also being made for wealthy secular patrons by the thirteenth century. Some of the finest examples had been gathered together for this exhibition, and images of judgment and punishment filled the room. I spent some time looking at various medieval sinners being devoured, torn apart, or tormented on spikes – or in the case of the Winchester Psalter depiction of Hell Mouth, all three at once, while a dutiful angel locked the doors from the outside – before passing on to examples of Dürer’s woodcuts, Cranach’s work for Martin Luther’s German translation of the New Testament, and Blake’s visions of red dragons, until I eventually reached the item at the center of the display.

It was the Cloisters Apocalypse, dating from the early part of the fourteenth century, and the illustration on the opened page was almost identical to that which I had found on the Fellowship’s literature. It depicted a multi-eyed beast with long, vaguely arachnid legs slaughtering sinners with a spear while Christ and the saints looked on impassively from the right-hand corner of the page. According to the explanatory note in the case, the beast was killing those whose names did not appear in the Lamb of God’s Book of Life. Below it was a translation of an illustrator’s note added in Latin in the margins: ‘For if the names of the saved are to be recorded in the Book of Life, shall not also the names of the damned be written, and in what place may they be found?’

I heard the echo of the threat made by Mr. Pudd against Mickey Shine and his family: their names would be written. The question, as the illuminator had posed, was, written where?

It was now ten, but I could see no sign of Mickey Shine. I left the Treasury, walked through the Glass Gallery, and opened a small unmarked door that led out into the Trie Cloister. The only sound, apart from the fall of the rain, came from the trickling of water in the fountain at the center of the marble arcades, dominated in turn by a limestone cross. To my right, an opening led out to the exposed Bonnefont Cloister. When I stepped through it, I found myself in a garden, the Hudson River and the New Jersey shoreline in front of me, the tower of the Gothic Chapel to my far right. To my left was the main wall of the Cloisters itself, a drop of maybe twenty feet leading to the grass below. The other two sides of the square consisted of pillared arcades.

The garden had been planted with shrubs and trees common in medieval times. A quartet of quince trees stood in the middle, the first signs of its golden fruit now appearing. Valerian was overshadowed by the huge leaves of black mustard; nearby grew caraway and leek, chive and lovage, madder and Our-Lady’s-bedstraw, the last two constituent ingredients in the dyes used by artists for the manuscripts on display in the main body of the museum.

It took me seconds to notice the new addition to the garden. Against the far wall, beside the entrance to the tower, grew an espaliered pear tree, its shape resembling a menorah. The bare branches were like hooks, six of them growing out from the main artery of the tree. Mickey Shine’s head had been impaled on the very tip of that central artery, turning him to a creature of both flesh and wood. Tendril-like trails of coagulating blood hung from the neck, and the rain damped the pallor of his features as water pooled in the sunken sockets of his eyes. Tattered skin blew softly in the wind, and there was blood around his mouth and ears. His ponytail had been severed during the removal of his head and the loose hair now stuck lankly to his gray-blue skin.

I was already reaching for my gun when the thin, spiderlike shape of Mr. Pudd emerged from the shadow of the arcade to my right. In his hand he held a Beretta fitted with a suppressor. My hand froze. He told me to raise my hands, slowly. I did.

‘So here we are, Mr. Parker,’ he said, and the eyes behind their dark hoods gleamed with a hostile intensity. ‘I hope you like what I’ve done with the place.’

His gun hand gestured to the tree. Blood and rain pooled at its base, creating a dark reflection of what lay above. I could see Mickey Shine’s face shimmer as the raindrops fell, seeming to add life and expression to his still features.

‘I found Mr. Sheinberg in a nickel-and-dime Bowery hotel,’ he continued. ‘When they discover what’s left of him in his bathtub, I fear it will be merely a nickel hotel.’

And still the rain fell. It would keep the tourists away, and that was what Mr. Pudd wanted.

‘The idea was mine,’ he said. ‘I thought it was appropriately medieval. The execution – and it was an execution – was the work of my . . . associate.’

Farther to my right, still sheltered by the arcade, the woman with the mutilated throat stood against a pillar, an open rucksack on the stone before her. She was watching us impassively, like Judith after disposing of the head of Holofernes.

‘He struggled a great deal,’ elaborated Mr. Pudd, almost distractedly. ‘But then, we did start from the back. It took us some time to hit the vertebral artery. After that, he didn’t struggle quite so much.’

The weight of the Smith & Wesson beneath my coat pressed against my skin, like a promise that would never be fulfilled. Mr. Pudd returned his attention fully to me, raising the Beretta slightly as he did so.

‘The Peltier woman stole something from us, Mr. Parker. We want it back.’

I spoke at last. ‘You were in my house. You took everything that I had.’

‘You’re lying. The old man didn’t have it, but I think you might. And even if you don’t, I suspect you know who does.’

‘The Apocalypse?’ It was a guess, but a good one. Mr. Pudd’s lips twitched once, and then he nodded. ‘Tell me where it is, and you won’t feel a thing when I kill you.’

‘And if I don’t tell you?’ From the corner of my eye I saw the woman produce a gun and aim it at me. As she moved, so too did Mr. Pudd. His left hand, which had been concealed in the pocket of his coat until then, appeared from the folds. In it, he held a syringe.

‘I’ll shoot you. I won’t kill you, but I will disable you, and then . . .’ He raised the syringe and a stream of clear liquid issued from the needle.

‘Is that what you used to kill Epstein?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he answered. ‘Compared to what you will endure, the unfortunate Rabbi Epstein passed comfortably into the next world. You’re about to experience a great deal of pain, Mr. Parker.’

He angled the gun so that it was pointing at my belly, but I wasn’t looking at the gun. Instead, I watched as a tiny red dot appeared on Mr. Pudd’s groin and slowly began to work its way upward. Pudd’s eyes dropped to follow my gaze and his mouth opened in surprise as the dot continued its progress over his chest and neck before stopping in the center of his forehead.

‘You first,’ I said, but he was already moving. The first bullet blew away a chunk of his right ear as he loosed off a shot in my direction, the rain hissing beside my face as the heat of the slug warmed the air. Then three more shots came, tearing black holes in his chest. The bullets should have ripped through him, but instead he lurched backward as if he had been punched hard, the impact of the shots sending him tumbling over the wall.

Shards of stone sprang up close to my left leg and I heard the dull sound of the suppressed shots echoing around the arcade. I drew out my gun, dove for the cover of the chapel tower and fired at the pillar where the woman had been standing, but she had stooped low and was scuttling toward the door to the Glass Gallery, her gun bucking as gunfire came at her from two directions: from the wall where I stood and from the arcade, where Louis’s dark form was moving through the shadows to intercept her. The door to the gallery opened behind her and she disappeared inside. I was about to follow when a bullet whistled past my ear and I dove to the ground, my face buried in the clump of Our-Lady’s-bedstraw. Across from me, Louis leaped over the wall of the arcade as I raised myself up and crawled behind the main wall. I took a deep breath and peered over.

There was nobody there. Pudd was already gone, a smear of blood on some flattened grass the only indicator of his former presence.

‘Follow the woman,’ I said. Louis nodded and ran to the gallery, his gun held discreetly by his side. I climbed onto the wall and then jumped, landing heavily on the grass and rolling down the slope. I sprang up quickly when I came to a stop, the gun outstretched, but Pudd was nowhere to be seen. I moved west, following the trail of blood along the main wall of the Cloisters, until somewhere at the far side of the building I heard a shot fired, then another, followed by the squealing of tires. Seconds later, a blue Voyager sped down Margaret Corbin Drive. I ran to the road, hoping for a clear shot, but an MTA bus turned the corner at the same time and I held my fire for fear of hitting the bus or its passengers. The last thing I saw as the Voyager disappeared was a figure slumped forward on the dashboard. I wasn’t certain, but I thought it was Pudd.

Brushing the grass from my pants and coat, I put my gun away and walked swiftly around to the main entrance. A gray-suited museum guard lay slumped against the wall, surrounded by a crowd of newly arrived French tourists. There was blood on his right arm and leg, but he was conscious. I heard the sound of footsteps on the grass behind me and turned to see Louis standing in the shade of the wall. He had obviously made a full circuit of the complex after pursuing the woman in order to avoid passing through the museum again.

‘Call nine-one-one,’ he said, staring up the road the Voyager had taken. ‘That’s one nasty bitch.’

‘They got away.’

‘No shit. Got myself tangled up in the damn tourists. She shot the guard to make them panic.’

‘We hurt Pudd,’ I said. ‘That’s something.’

‘I hit him in the chest. He should be dead.’

‘He was wearing a vest. The shots blew him off his feet.’

‘Shit,’ he hissed. ‘You planning on staying around?’

‘To explain Mickey Shine’s head on a tree? I don’t think so.’

We climbed onto the MTA bus, its driver oblivious to the furore at the main door, and sat in separate seats as he pulled away. For a brief moment, as he turned onto the main road, he was able to see the entrance to the Cloisters and the crowd around the fallen guard.

‘Something happen?’ he called back to us.

‘I think somebody fainted,’ I said.

‘Place ain’t that pretty,’ he replied, and he said nothing more until he dropped us at the subway station. There was a cab turning at the curb, and we told the driver to head downtown.

I dropped Louis off at the Upper West Side, while I continued down to the Village to collect my overnight bag. When I was done, I dropped into the Strand Book Store on Broadway and found a companion volume for the Cloisters exhibition. Then I sat in Balducci’s coffee shop on Sixth Avenue, leafing through the illustrations and watching the people go by. Whatever Mickey Shine had guessed or suspected had died with him, but at least I now knew what Grace Peltier had taken from the Fellowship: a book, a record of some kind, which Mr. Pudd acknowledged to be an Apocalypse. But why should a Biblical text be so important that Pudd was willing to kill to get it back?

Rachel was still in Boston, and would join me in Scarborough the following day. She had refused an offer of protection from Angel and an offer of a Colt Pony Pocketlite from Louis. Unbeknownst to her, she was being discreetly watched by a gentleman named Gordon Buntz and one of his associates, Amy Brenner. They’d given me a professional discount, but they were still eating up Jack Mercier’s advance. Meanwhile, Angel was already in Scarborough; he had checked into the Black Point Inn at Prouts Neck, which gave him the freedom to roam around the area without attracting the attention of the Scarborough PD. I’d given him a National Audubon Society field guide to New England; armed with a pair of binoculars, he was now officially the world’s least likely bird-watcher. He had been monitoring Jack Mercier, his house, and his movements since the previous afternoon.

Outside Balducci’s, a black Lexus SC400 pulled up to the curb. Louis was sitting in the driver’s seat. When I opened the door, Johnny Cash was solemnly intoning the words to Soundgarden’s ‘Rusty Cage.’

‘Nice car,’ I said. ‘Your bank manager recommend it?’

He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘Man, I tell you, you need class like a junkie need a hit.’

I dumped my bag on the leather backseat. It made a satisfyingly dirty sound, although it was nothing compared to the sound Louis made when he saw the mark it left on his upholstery. As we pulled away from the curb, Louis took a huge contraband Cuban cigar from his jacket pocket and proceeded to light up. Thick blue smoke immediately filled the car.

‘Hey!’ I said.

‘Fuck you mean, “Hey”?’

‘Don’t smoke in the car.’

‘It’s my car.’

‘Your secondary fumes are a danger to my health.’

Louis choked on a mouthful of smoke before raising one carefully plucked eyebrow in my direction. ‘You been beaten up, shot twice, drowned, electrocuted, frozen, injected with poisons, three of your damn teeth been kicked out of your head by an old man everybody thought was dead, and you worried about secondary smoke? Secondary smoke ain’t no danger to your health. You a danger to your health.’

With that, he returned his attention to his driving.

I let him smoke the cigar in peace.

After all, he had a point.

The Search for Sanctuary

Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier

Faulkner’s main claim to fame, apart from his association with Eagle Lake, was as a bookbinder, and particularly as a maker of Apocalypses, ornately illustrated versions of the book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, detailing St. John’s vision of the end of the world and the final judgment. In creating these works, Faulkner was part of a tradition dating back to the Carolingian period – to the ninth and tenth centuries, when the earliest surviving illustrated Apocalypse manuscripts were created on the European continent. In the early thirteenth century richly illuminated Apocalypses, with texts and commentaries in Latin and French vernacular, were made in Europe for the powerful and wealthy, including high churchmen and magnates. They continued to be created even after the invention of printing, indicating a continued resonance to the imagery and message of the book itself.

There are twelve ‘Faulkner Apocalypses’ extant, and according to the records of Faulkner’s supplier of gold leaf, it is unlikely that Faulkner made more than this number. Each book was bound in hand-tooled leather, inlaid with gold, and illustrated by hand by Faulkner, with a distinctive marking on the spine: six horizontal gold lines, set in three sets of two, and the final letter of the Greek alphabet – Ω, for omega.

The paper was made not from wood but from linen and cotton rags beaten in water into a smooth pulp. Faulkner would dip a rectangular tray into the pulp and take up about one inch of the substance, draining it through a wire mesh in the base of the tray. Gently shaking the tray caused the matted fibers in the liquid to interlock. These sheets of partially solidified pulp were then squeezed in a press before being dipped in animal gelatin to size them, thereby enabling them to hold ink. The paper was bound in folios of six to minimize the buildup of thread on the book’s spine.

The illustrations in Faulkner’s Apocalypses were drawn largely from earlier artists, and remain consistent throughout. (All twelve are in the private ownership of one individual, and I was permitted to examine them at length.) Thus, the earliest of the Apocalypses is inspired by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), the second by medieval manuscripts, the third by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), and so on, with the final extant book featuring six illustrations based on the work of Frans Masereel (1889-1972), whose Apocalypse cycle drew on images from World War II. According to those who had dealings with him, it appears that Faulkner was attracted to apocalyptic imagery because of its connotations of judgment, not because he believed it foretold a Second Coming or a final reckoning. For Faulkner, the reckoning had already begun; judgment and damnation were an ongoing process.

Faulkner’s Apocalypses were created strictly for wealthy collectors, and the sale of them is believed to have provided much of the seed funding for Faulkner’s community. No further versions made by Faulkner’s hand have appeared since the date of the foundation of the Eagle Lake settlement.

Chapter Sixteen

Louis dropped me at my house before heading for the Black Point Inn. I checked in with Gordon Buntz to make sure Rachel was okay, and a quick call to Angel confirmed that nothing out of the ordinary had occurred at the Merciers’, with the exception of the arrival of the lawyer Warren Ober and his wife. He had also spotted four different types of tern and two plovers. I arranged to meet up with both Angel and Louis later that night.

I had been checking my messages pretty regularly while in Boston and New York, but there were two new ones since that morning. The first was from Arthur Franklin, asking if the information his pornographer client, Harvey Ragle, had proffered was proving useful. In the background, I could hear Ragle’s whining voice: ‘I’m a dead man. You tell him that. I’m a dead man.’ I didn’t bother to return the call.

The second message came from ATF agent Norman Boone. Ellis Howard, the deputy chief over in the Portland PD, once told me that Boone smelled like a French whore, but with none of the associated charm. He had left his home and cell phone numbers. I got him at home.

‘It’s Charlie Parker. How can I help you, Agent Boone?’

‘Why, thank you for returning my call, Mr. Parker. It’s only been . . .’At the other end of the line, I could imagine him ostentatiously checking his watch. ‘Four hours.’

‘I was out of town.’

‘You mind telling me where?’

‘Why, did we have a date?’

Boone sighed dramatically. ‘Talk to me now, Mr. Parker, or talk to me tomorrow at One City Center. I should warn you that I’m a busy man, and my patience is likely to be more strained by tomorrow morning.’

‘I was in Boston, visiting an old friend.’

‘An old friend, as I understand it, who ended up with a hole in his head halfway through a performance of Cleopatra.’

‘I’m sure he knew how it ended. She dies, in case you hadn’t heard.’

He ignored me. ‘Was your visit connected in any way to Lester Bargus?’

I didn’t pause for a second, although the question had thrown me.

‘Not directly.’

‘But you visited Mr. Bargus shortly before you left town?’

Damn.

‘Lester and I go way back.’

‘Then you’ll be heartbroken to hear that he is no longer with us.’

‘“Heartbroken” maybe isn’t the word. And the ATF’s interest in all this is . . .?’

‘Mr. Bargus made a little money selling spiders and giant roaches and a lot of money selling automatic weapons and other assorted firearms to the kind of people who have swastikas on their crockery. It was natural that he would come to our attention. My question is, why did he come to your attention?’

‘I was looking for somebody. I thought Lester might have known where he was. Is this an interrogation, Agent Boone?’

‘It’s a conversation, Mr. Parker. If we did it tomorrow, face-to-face, then it would be an interrogation.’

Even with a telephone line separating us, I had to admit that Boone was good. He was closing in on me, leaving me with almost no room to turn. I was not going to tell him about Grace Peltier, because Grace would bring me on to Jack Mercier, and possibly the Fellowship, and the last thing I wanted was the ATF going Waco on the Fellowship. Instead, I decided to give him Harvey Ragle.

‘All I do know is that a lawyer named Arthur Franklin called me and asked me to speak to his client.’

‘Who’s his client?’

‘Harvey Ragle. He makes porn movies, with bugs in them. Al Z’s people used to distribute some of them.’

It was Boone’s turn to be thrown. ‘Bugs? The hell are you talking about?’

‘Women in their underwear squashing bugs,’ I explained, as if to a child. ‘He also does geriatric porn, obesity, and little people. He’s an artist.’

‘Nice types you meet in your line of work.’

‘You make a pleasant change from the norm, Agent Boone. It seems that an individual with an affinity for bugs wants to kill Harvey Ragle for making his sicko porn movies. Lester Bargus had supplied the bugs and also seemed to know something about him, so I agreed to approach him on behalf of Ragle.’

The improbability of it was breathtaking. I could feel Boone wondering just how far he was being taken for a ride.

‘And who is this mysterious herpetologist?’

Herpetologist. Agent Boone was obviously a Scrabble fan.

‘He calls himself Mr. Pudd, and I think that strictly speaking he may be an arachnologist, not a herpetologist. He likes spiders. I think he’s the man who killed Al Z.’

‘And you approached Lester Bargus in the hope of finding this man?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you got nowhere.’

‘Lester had a lot of anger in him.’

‘Well, he’s a lot calmer now.’

‘If you had him under surveillance, then you already know what passed between us,’ I said. ‘Which means there’s something else that you want from me.’

After some hesitation, Boone went on to explain how a man traveling under the name of Clay Dæmon had walked in to Lester’s store, demanded details of an individual in a photograph, and then shot Lester and his assistant dead.

‘I’d like you to take a look at the photograph,’ he said.

‘He left it?’

‘We figure he’s got more than one copy. Hired killers tend to be pretty good that way.’

‘You want me to come in? It could be tomorrow.’

‘How about now?’

‘Look, Agent Boone, I need a shower, a shave, and sleep. I’ve told you all I can. I want to help, but give me a break.’

Boone relented slightly. ‘You got e-mail?’

‘Yes, and a second line.’

‘Then stay on this one. I’ll be back.’

The line went quiet, so I turned on my laptop and waited for Boone’s e-mail to arrive. When it did, it consisted of two pictures. One was the photograph of the abortion clinic slaying. I spotted Mr. Pudd immediately. The other was a still taken from the video camera in Lester Bargus’s store, showing the killer Clay Dæmon. Seconds later, Boone was back on the line.

‘You recognize anyone in the first picture?’

‘The guy on the far right is Pudd, first name Elias. He came out to my house, asking why I was nosing around in his business. I don’t know the man in the video still.’

I could hear Boone clicking his tongue rhythmically at the other end of the line, even as I gave him the contact number I had for Ragle’s lawyer. ‘I’ll be talking to you again, Mr. Parker,’ he said at last. ‘I have a feeling you know more than you’re telling.’

‘Everybody knows more than they’re telling, Agent Boone,’ I replied. ‘Even you. I have a question.’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘Who’s the injured man in the first photograph?’

‘His name was David Beck. He worked for an abortion clinic in Minnesota, and he’s a dead man in that photograph. The killing forms part of the VAAPCON files.’

VAAPCON was the code name for the joint FBI-ATF investigation into abortion-related violence, the Violence Against Abortion Providers Conspiracy. The ATF and the FBI have a poor working relationship; for a long time the FBI had resisted involving itself in investigating attacks on doctors and abortion clinics, arguing that it didn’t fall within their guidelines, which meant that the investigation of allegations of a conspiracy of violence was left in the hands of the ATF. That situation changed with the formation of VAAPCON and the enactment of new legislation empowering the FBI and the Justice Department to act against abortion-related violence. Yet tensions between the FBI and the ATF contributed to the comparative failure of VAAPCON; no evidence of a conspiracy was found, and agents took to dubbing the investigation CRAPCON, despite signs of growing links between right-wing militias and antiabortion extremists.

‘Did they ever find his killer?’ I asked.

‘Not yet.’

‘Like they haven’t found his wife’s killer.’

‘What do you know about it?’

‘I know she had spiders in her mouth when she was found.’

‘And our friend Pudd is a spider lover.’

‘The same Pudd whose head is circled in this photograph.’

‘Do you know who he’s working for?’

‘Himself, I’d guess.’ It wasn’t quite a lie. Pudd didn’t answer to Carter Paragon, and the Fellowship as the public knew it seemed too inconsequential to require his services.

Boone didn’t speak for a time. His last words to me before he hung up were, ‘We’ll be talking again.’

I didn’t doubt it.

I sat in front of the computer screen, flicking between both images. I picked out a younger Alison Beck holding her dead husband, her face contorted with grief and his blood on her shirt, skirt, and hands. Then I looked into the small, hooded eyes of Mr. Pudd as he slipped away through the crowd. I wondered if he had fired the shots or merely orchestrated the killing. Either way, he was involved, and another small piece of the puzzle slipped into place. Somehow, Mercier had found Epstein and Beck, individuals who, for their own reasons, were prepared to assist him in his moves against the Fellowship. But why was Mercier so concerned about the Fellowship? Was it simply another example of his liberalism, or were there other, deeper motives?

As it turned out, a possible answer to the question pulled up outside my door thirty minutes later in a black Mercedes convertible. Deborah Mercier stepped, alone and unaided, in a long black coat, from the driver’s seat. Despite the encroaching darkness she wore shades. Her hair didn’t move in the breeze. It could have been hair spray, or an act of will. It could also have been that even the wind wasn’t going to screw around with Jack Mercier’s wife. I wondered what excuse she had come up with for leaving her guests back at the house; maybe she told them they needed milk.

I opened the door as she reached the first step to the porch. ‘Take a wrong turn, Mrs. Mercier?’ I asked.

‘One of us has,’ she replied, ‘and I think it might be you.’

‘I never catch a break. I see those two roads diverging in a forest, and damn if I don’t take the one that ends at a cliff edge.’

We stood about ten paces apart, eyeing each other up like a pair of mismatched gunfighters. Deborah Mercier couldn’t have looked more like a WASP if her coat had been striped with yellow and her eyes had been on the sides of her head. She removed her glasses and those pale blue eyes held all the warmth of the Arctic Sea, the pupils tiny and receding like the bodies of drowned sailors sinking into their depths.

‘Would you like to come inside?’ I asked. I turned away and heard her footsteps on the wood behind me. They stopped before they reached the door. I looked back at her and saw her nostrils twitch a little in mild distaste as her gaze passed over my house.

‘If you’re waiting for me to carry you over the threshold, I ought to warn you that I have a bad back and we might not make it.’

Her nostrils twitched a little more and her eyes froze over entirely, trapping the pupils at the size of pinpoints. Then, carefully, the heels of her black pumps making a sound on the floorboards like the clicking of bones, she followed me into the house.

I led her to the kitchen and offered her coffee. She declined, but I went ahead and started making a pot anyway. I watched as she opened her coat, revealing a tight black formal dress that ended above her knees, and sat down. Her legs, like the rest of her, looked good for forty-something. In fact, she would have looked good for forty, and not bad for thirty-five. She removed a pack of cigarettes from her bag and lit up with a gold Dunhill lighter. She took a long drag on the cigarette, then blew a thin stream of smoke through her pursed lips.

‘Feel free to smoke,’ I said.

‘If I was concerned, I’d have asked.’

‘If I was concerned, I’d make you put it out.’

Her head turned a little to one side, and she smiled emptily. ‘So you think you can make people do what you want?’

‘I believe we may have that in common, Mrs. Mercier.’

‘It’s probably the only thing we do have in common, Mr. Parker.’

‘Here’s hoping,’ I replied. I brought the coffee pot to the table and poured myself a cup.

‘On second thoughts, I will have some of that coffee,’ she said.

‘Smells good, doesn’t it?’

‘Or maybe everything else in here smells so bad. You live alone?’

‘Just me and my ego.’

‘I’m sure the two of you are very happy together.’

‘Ecstatic.’ I found a second cup and filled it, then took a carton of skimmed milk from the refrigerator and placed it between us.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t have any sugar.’

She reached into her bag again and produced a packet of Sweet’n’Low. She added it to the coffee and stirred it before tasting it carefully. Since she didn’t fall to the floor clutching her throat and gasping, I figured it was probably okay. She didn’t say anything for a time; she just sipped and smoked.

‘Your house needs a woman’s touch,’ she said at last, as she took another drag on her cigarette. She held in the smoke until I thought it would come out her ears.

‘Why, you do cleaning as well?’

She didn’t reply. Instead, she finally released the smoke and dropped the remains of the cigarette into the coffee. Classy. She didn’t learn that at the Madeira School for Girls.

‘I hear you were married once.’

‘That’s right, I was.’

‘And you had a child, a little girl.’

‘Jennifer,’ I replied, keeping my tone as neutral as possible.

‘And now your wife and child are dead. Somebody killed them, and then you killed him.’

I didn’t respond. My silence didn’t appear to concern Mrs. Mercier.

‘That must have been very hard for you,’ she continued. There was no trace of sympathy in her voice but her eyes were briefly thawed by what might have been amusement.

‘Yes, it was.’

‘But you see, Mr. Parker, I still have a marriage, and I still have a child. I don’t like the fact that my husband has hired you, against my wishes, to investigate the death of a girl who has nothing to do with our lives. It is disturbing my relationship with my husband, and it is interfering with the preparations for my daughter’s wedding. I want it to stop.’

I noticed the emphasis on ‘my’ daughter but didn’t comment. For the final time, she took something from her handbag. It was a check.

‘I know how much my husband paid you,’ she said, passing the folded check across the table toward me, her red nails like eagle’s talons dipped in a rabbit’s blood. ‘I’ll pay you the same amount to walk away.’

She withdrew her hand. The check lay on the table between us, looking lonely and unloved.

‘I don’t believe you’re so wealthy that you can afford to turn down that kind of money, Mr. Parker. You were willing to take it from my husband, so you should have no difficulty in accepting it from me.’

I made no move for the check. Instead, I poured myself some fresh coffee. I didn’t offer any to Mrs. Mercier. I guessed from the floating cigarette butt that she’d had enough.

‘There’s a difference. Your husband was buying my time, and whatever expertise I could offer. You, on the other hand, are trying to buy me.’

‘Really? Then, under the circumstances, my offer is particularly generous.’

I smiled. She smiled back. From a distance – a really long distance – we might have looked like we were having a good time. It seemed like the right moment to put an end to that misapprehension.

‘When did you find out that Grace was your husband’s child?’ I asked. I experienced a brief surge of satisfaction as her face paled, and her head rocked back a little as if she’d been slapped.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she replied, but she didn’t sound convincing.

‘For a start, there’s the breakup of your husband’s partnership with Curtis Peltier seven months before her birth and his willingness to spend a significant amount of money employing me to investigate the circumstances of her death. Then, of course, there’s the resemblance. It must have been like a kick in the guts every time you saw her, Mrs. Mercier.’

She stood up and grabbed the check from the table. ‘You’re a mean bastard,’ she hissed.

‘That might hurt a little more if it came from somebody else, Mrs. Mercier, but not from you.’ I reached forward suddenly and clamped her wrist tightly in my right hand. For the first time, she looked scared.

‘It was you, wasn’t it? It was you who told Grace about the Fellowship. Did you set her on their trail knowing what they would do to her? I don’t believe that your husband said anything to her about it, and her thesis dealt with the past, not the present, so there was no reason for her to start prying into the organization. But you must have been aware of what your husband was doing, of the moves he was making against them. What did you say to her, Mrs. Mercier? What information did you give her that led those people to kill her?’

Deborah Mercier bared her teeth at me and her fingernails raked across the back of my hand, immediately drawing blood. ‘I’ll make sure my husband ruins your life for what you just said to me,’ she snarled, as I released her hand.

‘I don’t think so. I think when he finds out that you sent his daughter to her death, then it’s your life that won’t be worth living.’

I stood as she snatched up her bag and started for the hallway. Before she could reach the kitchen door, I blocked her with my arm.

‘There’s one more thing you should know, Mrs. Mercier. You and your husband have set in motion a chain of events that you can’t control. There are people out there who are prepared to kill to protect themselves. So you should be glad that your husband is paying me because, as of now, I’m the best chance you have of finding those people before they come after both of you.’

She stared straight ahead as I spoke. When I had finished, I lowered my hand and she walked quickly to the door. She left it open behind her, and I watched as she started the Mercedes and turned it sharply onto the road. I looked down at my hand and the four deep parallel lines she had left on it. Blood ran down my fingers and pooled at the nails and I thought, for a moment, that they looked a lot like Deborah Mercier’s. I cleaned the cuts under the faucet, then put on my jacket and a pair of leather gloves to cover the wound, grabbed my keys, and headed out to my car.

I should have asked her for a ride, I thought, as I followed the lights of her car all the way to Prouts Neck. I kept far enough back so as not to arouse her suspicion, but I was still close enough to make the security barrier before it closed behind her.

There were five or six cars in the parking lot when I pulled up and stepped from the car. Mrs. Mercier had already disappeared into the house and the porn star with the mustache was lumbering forward from the porch. He was wearing an earpiece and he had a radio mike attached to his lapel. I guessed that security had been stepped up somewhat after Epstein’s death.

‘This is a private party,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to leave.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I replied.

‘Then I’ll have to make you leave,’ he said. He looked happy at the prospect, and poked a finger into my chest to emphasize the point.

I grabbed the finger with my left hand, gripped his wrist tightly with my right, and pulled. There was a soft pop as the finger dislocated, and the porn star’s mouth opened wide in pain. I turned him around, pulling his arm behind his back, and shoved him hard into the side of the Mercedes. His head banged emptily against it and he collapsed on the ground, holding his uninjured hand against his scalp.

‘If you’re a good boy, I’ll fix your finger on my way out,’ I said.

A couple of other security guards were moving toward me when Jack Mercier appeared on the steps and called them off. They stopped and formed a loose circle around me, like wolves waiting for the signal to fall upon their prey.

‘It seems like you’ve invited yourself to my party, Mr. Parker,’ said Mercier. ‘I guess you’d better come in.’

I walked up the steps and followed him through the house. It didn’t look like much of a party. There was a lot of expensive booze floating around on trays and a handful of people stood about in nice clothes, but nobody seemed to be having a very good time. A man I recognized as Warren Ober put down his champagne flute and started to follow us.

Mercier led me into the same book-lined room in which we had sat the previous week, the rhombus of sun now replaced by a thin shard of pale moonlight. The bug was gone, probably already devoured by something bigger and meaner than it could ever be. There were no coffee cups brought this time. Jack Mercier wasn’t offering me his hospitality. His eyes were red rimmed and he had shaved himself badly, so that patches of bristle showed under his chin and below his nostrils. Even his white dress shirt looked wrinkled, and sweat patches showed beneath his armpits when he took off his jacket. His bow tie was slightly crooked, and beneath his cologne I thought I detected a sour smell.

I walked straight to the photograph of Mercier and Ober with Beck and Epstein, and removed it from the wall. I threw it to him and he caught it awkwardly in his arms. ‘What haven’t you told me?’ I said, as the door opened and Ober entered. He closed it behind him and both of us looked at Mercier.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, Mr. Mercier, what were the four of you doing that could have drawn these people down on you? How do you think Grace became involved?’

He recoiled visibly at the question.

‘And why did you hire me, because you must have known who was responsible for her death?’

He didn’t say anything at first, just sat down heavily in an armchair across from me and put his head in his hands. ‘Did you know that Curtis Peltier was dead?’ he asked me, in tones so soft they were almost inaudible.

I felt an ache in my stomach and leaned back against the table to steady myself.

‘Nobody told me.’

‘He was only found this evening. He’d been dead for days. I was going to call you as soon as my guests left.’

‘How did he die?’

‘Somebody broke into his house, tortured him, then slit his wrists in his bathtub.’

He looked up at me, his eyes demanding pity and understanding. In that instant, I almost struck Jack Mercier.

‘He never knew, did he?’ I said. ‘He didn’t know anything about the Fellowship, about Beck or Epstein. The only thing that mattered to him was his daughter, and he gave her everything he could. I saw the way he lived. He had a big house that he couldn’t keep clean, and he lived in his kitchen. Do you even know where your kitchen is, Mr. Mercier?’

He smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. There was no compassion in it, no kindness. I doubted if any voter had ever seen Jack Mercier smile like that. ‘My daughter, Mr. Parker,’ he growled. ‘Grace was my child.’

‘You’re deluded, Mr. Mercier.’ I couldn’t keep the disgust from my voice.

‘I stayed out of her life because that was what we all agreed, but I was always concerned for her. When she applied to the scholarship fund, I saw a chance to help her. Hell, I’d have given her the money even if she wanted to take surfing at Malibu Tech. She intended to study religious movements in the state during the last fifty years, and one in particular. I encouraged her to do that in order to have her near me while she studied the books in my collection. It was my fault, my mistake.

‘Because we didn’t know about the link, not then,’ he said, and the weight of his guilt fell upon him like an executioner’s blade.

‘What link?’

Behind us, Warren Ober coughed. ‘I have to advise you, Jack, not to say anything more in Mr. Parker’s presence.’ He was using his best, one thousand-dollar-per-hour voice. As far as Ober was concerned, Grace’s death was immaterial. All that mattered was ensuring that Jack Mercier’s guilt remained private, not public.

The gun was in my hand before I even knew it. Through a red haze I saw Ober backing away and then the muzzle of the gun was buried in the soft flesh beneath his chin. ‘You say one more word,’ I whispered, ‘and I won’t be held responsible for my actions.’

Despite the fear in his eyes, Ober spat the next six words. ‘You are a thug, Mr. Parker,’ he said.

‘So are you, Mr. Ober,’ I replied. ‘The only difference is that you’re better paid than I am.’

‘Stop!’

It was the voice of an emperor, a voice used to being obeyed. I didn’t disappoint it. I removed the gun from Ober’s chin and put it away.

‘Safety was on,’ I told him. ‘Can’t be too careful.’

Ober adjusted his bow tie and started calculating the man-hours required to ruin me in court.

Mercier poured himself a brandy and another for Ober. He waved the decanter at me, but I declined. He handed Ober his glass, took a long sip, then resumed his seat and began talking as if nothing had happened.

‘Did Curtis tell you about our respective familial connections to the Aroostook Baptists?’

I nodded. Behind me, a cloud passed over the moon and the light that had shone into the room was suddenly lost in its depths. ‘They were lost for thirty-seven years, until now,’ he said softly. ‘I believe that the man responsible for their deaths is still alive.’

The first hint that Faulkner was alive had come in March, and it arrived from an unlikely source. A Faulkner Apocalypse was offered for auction, and Jack Mercier had acquired it, just as he had successfully acquired the twelve other extant examples of Faulkner’s work. While he spoke, he removed one from his cabinet and handed it to me. Faulkner had the talent of a medieval illuminator, using decorated letters inter-weaved with fantastic animals to begin each chapter. The ink was iron gall, the same mix of tannins and iron sulphate used in medieval times. Each chapter contained illustrations drawn from ornate works similar to the Cloisters Apocalypse, images of judgment, punishment, and torment executed in a detail that bordered on the sadistic.

‘The illustrations and calligraphy are consistent throughout,’ explained Mercier. ‘Other Faulkner Apocalypses are inspired by later illustrators, such as Meidner and Grosz, and the script is correspondingly more modern, although in some ways equally beautiful.’

But the thirteenth Apocalypse acquired by Mercier was different. An adhesive had been used on the pages before stitching because the weight of the paper was lighter than before and the binder appeared to have experienced some difficulty in applying the stitches. Mercier, a bibliophile, had spotted traces of the adhesive shortly after his purchase and had sent the book to be examined by a specialist. The calligraphy and brush strokes on the illustrations were authentic – Faulkner had created the Apocalypse, without doubt – but the adhesive was of a type that had been in production for less than a decade, and had been used in the original construction of the book and not during any later repairs.

Faulkner, it seemed, was alive, or at least he had been until comparatively recently, and if he could be found then an answer to the riddle of the disappearance of the Aroostook Baptists might at last be within reach.

‘To be honest, my interest was in the books, not the people,’ said Mercier dismissively, an admission that hardened my growing dislike for him. ‘My familial connections to Faulkner’s flock added an extra frisson, but nothing more. I found the nature of his work fascinating.’

It was the source of the thirteenth Apocalypse that led Mercier to the Fellowship; it emerged, after investigation, that it had been sold through a firm of third-rate Waterville lawyers by Carter Paragon, to cover his gambling debts. But rather than pounce on Paragon, Mercier decided to wait and put pressure on his organization by other means. He found Epstein, who had already suspected that the Fellowship was far more dangerous than it appeared and was willing to be the nominal challenger of its tax-exempt status. He found Alison Beck, who had witnessed the killing of her husband years before and who was now pressing for the case to be reopened and a full investigation made into a possible link to the Fellowship, based on threats received from its minions in the months before David Beck’s death. If Mercier could tear apart the front that was the Fellowship, then what was behind it might at last be revealed.

Meanwhile, Grace’s work on the Aroostook Baptists had continued. Mercier had largely forgotten about it, until her life was ended in the sound of a gunshot that sent owls shooting from the trees and small animals scurrying into the undergrowth. Then Peltier had come to him, and the bond that linked them both to Grace had drawn them uneasily together.

‘She went after the Fellowship, Mr. Parker, and she died for it.’ He looked at me, and I saw his eyes desperately try to veil themselves in ignorance. ‘I don’t know why she went after them,’ he continued, a denial of an accusation that had not yet been made. Something bubbled in his voice, as if he was struggling to keep his bile down.

‘I think you do,’ I said. ‘I think that’s why you hired me – to confirm what you already suspected.’

And at last I saw the veils tear and fall from his eyes in flames. He seemed about to utter some further denial, until a female voice was heard outside the door and the words melted like snowflakes on his tongue.

Deborah Mercier burst into the room. She looked at me in shock, then at her husband.

‘He followed me here, Jack,’ she said. ‘He broke into our house and assaulted our staff. Why are you sitting there drinking with him?’

‘Deborah . . .’ Mercier began, in what might, in other circumstances, have been soothing tones but now sounded like the whispered assurances of an executioner to a condemned man.

‘Don’t!’ she screamed. ‘Just don’t. Have him arrested. Have him thrown out of the house. I don’t care if you have him killed, but get him out of our lives!’

Jack Mercier stood and walked over to his wife. He held her firmly by the shoulders and looked down, and for the first time she seemed smaller and less powerful than he.

‘Deborah,’ he repeated, and drew her to him. Initially it seemed like a gesture of love, but as she struggled in his grip it became the opposite. ‘Deborah, what have you done?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said. ‘What do you mean, Jack?’

‘Please, Deborah,’ he said. ‘Don’t lie. Please don’t lie, not now.’

Instantly, her struggles ceased and she began to cry.

‘We have no further need of your services, Mr. Parker,’ said Mercier, as her body shook. His back was to me as he spoke, and he made no effort to turn. ‘Thank you for your help.’

‘They’ll come after you,’ I said.

‘We’ll deal with them. I intend to hand the Faulkner Apocalypse over to the police after my daughter’s wedding. That will be an end to it. Now, please, leave my house.’

As I walked from the room, I heard Deborah Mercier whisper, over and over again, ‘I’m sorry, Jack, I’m sorry.’ Something in her voice made me look back, and the glare from a single cold eye impaled me like a butterfly on a pin.

The porn star wasn’t anywhere to be found as I left, so I couldn’t reset his finger. I was about to get in my car when Warren Ober walked down the steps behind me and stood in the shell of light from the open door.

‘Mr. Parker,’ he called.

I paused and watched as his features tried to compose themselves into a smile. They gave up the struggle at the halfway point, making him look like a man who has just tasted a bad piece of fish.

‘We’ll forget about that little incident in the study, so long as you understand that you are to take no further part in investigating Grace Peltier’s death or any incidents connected with it.’

I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t work that way. As I already explained to Mrs. Mercier, her husband just bought my time and whatever expertise I could bring to the case. He didn’t buy my obedience, he didn’t buy my conscience, and he didn’t buy me. I don’t like walking away from unsolved cases, Mr. Ober. It raises moral difficulties.’

Ober’s face fell, his carefully ordered features crumbling under the weight of his disappointment. ‘Then you’d better find yourself a good lawyer, Mr. Parker.’

I didn’t reply. I just drove away, leaving Ober standing in the light like a solitary angel waiting to be swallowed up by the darkness.

Jack Mercier hadn’t hired me to find out who had killed Grace, or that was not his primary reason for hiring me. He wanted to find out why she had been looking into the Fellowship to begin with, and I think he had suspected the answer all along, that he had seen it in his wife’s eyes every time Grace was mentioned. Deborah wanted Grace to go away, to disappear. She and Jack already had a daughter together; he didn’t need another. Through her husband, she knew just how dangerous those involved in the Fellowship could be, and she fed Grace to them.

I parked in the guest lot of the Black Point Inn and joined Angel and Louis in the big dining room, where they were sitting at a window, their table littered with the remains of what looked like a very enjoyable, and pretty expensive, dinner. I was happy to see them spending Mercier’s money. It was tainted by its contact with his family. I ordered coffee and dessert, then told them all that had taken place. When I had concluded, Angel shook his head.

‘That Deborah Mercier, she’s some piece of work.’

We left the table and moved into the bar. Angel, I couldn’t help but notice, was still wearing the red boots, to which he had added a pair of substandard chinos and a white shirt with a twisted seam. He caught me looking at the shirt and smiled happily.

‘TJ Maxx,’ he said. ‘Got me a whole new wardrobe for fifty-nine ninety-five.’

‘Pity you didn’t climb into it and throw yourself in the sea,’ I replied.

They ordered beers, and a club soda for me. We were the only people in the bar.

‘So what now?’ asked Louis.

‘Tomorrow night we pay a long overdue visit to the Fellowship,’ I replied.

‘And until then?’

Outside, the trees whispered and the waves broke whitely on Crescent Beach. I could see the lights of Old Orchard floating in the darkness like the glowing lures of strange, unseen sea creatures moving through the depths of black oceans. They called me to them, these echoes of the past, of my childhood and my youth.

Like those nightmarish, colorless predators, the past could devour you if you weren’t careful. It had consumed Grace Peltier, its dead hand reaching out from the mud and silt of a lake in northern Maine and pulling her down. Grace, Curtis, Jack Mercier: all of them linked together by the dreams, disappearance, and eventual exhumation of the Aroostook Baptists. Grace wasn’t even born when they vanished, yet part of her had always been buried with them, and her short life had been blighted by the mystery of their disappearance.

Now, a misstep, a minor accident, had revealed the truth about their end. They had emerged into the world, breaking through the thin crust that separated present from past, life from death.

And I had seen them.

‘I’m going north,’ I said. ‘Somehow, this is all connected with the Aroostook Baptists. I want to see the place where they died.’

Louis looked at me. Beside him, Angel was silent.

It was happening again, and they knew it.

The Search for Sanctuary

Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier

The precise nature and extent of Lyall and Elizabeth’s relationship must remain, perforce, largely unknown, but it is reasonable to assume that it included a significant element of sexual attraction. Elizabeth was a pretty woman, aged thirty-five at the time she joined the community. It is hard to find early pictures of her in which she is not smiling, although later photographs find her a more somber presence beside the unsmiling form of her husband, Frank. Elizabeth came from a small, poor family but appears to have been a bright young woman who, in a more enlightened (or liberal) community, and under less constrained financial circumstances, might have been given the space that she needed to grow. Instead, she made her match with Frank Jessop, fifteen years her senior but with some land and money to his name. It does not appear to have been a particularly happy union, and Frank was troubled with ill health in the years following the birth of their first child, James, which created a further rift between husband and wife.

Lyall Kellog was two years Elizabeth’s junior and seventeen years younger than her own husband. Pictures that remain of Lyall show him to have been a stocky individual of medium height with slightly blunt features – in other words, by no means a conventionally handsome man. From all accounts he seems to have been quite happily married, and Elizabeth Jessop must have exerted an unusually strong influence on him for him not only to risk his marriage and the wrath of the Reverend Faulkner but to contravene his own strong religious beliefs.

Those who knew Lyall recall him as a gentle, almost sensitive man who could argue what sometimes seemed to others to be obscure points of religious belief with those considerably more educated than himself. He owned a large number of biblical tracts and commentaries, and was prepared to travel for a day to listen to a particularly noted speaker. It was on one of these trips that he first encountered the Reverend Faulkner.

Meanwhile, Faulkner’s grip on the community had tightened by November 1963. Like Sandford before him, he demanded absolute obedience and forbade any contact with those outside the community, except for one period in the first weeks of winter when he asked each family to write to relatives in order to solicit donations of food, clothes, and money. Since most of the families were estranged from their own relatives, these letters proved largely useless, although Lena Myers did send a small sum of money.

The only relative to attempt to contact members of the community directly was a cousin of Katherine Cornish. He brought a sheriff’s deputy to the settlement, fearing that some harm had befallen his kinfolk. Katherine Cornish was permitted a brief meeting with him, under Faulkner’s supervision, to ease his fears. According to Elizabeth Jessop, the Cornish family was then punished by being forced to spend the night in an unheated barn, praying constantly. When they fell asleep, they were awakened by cold water thrown on them by ‘Adam’, Leonard Faulkner.

Letter from Elizabeth Jessop to her sister, Lena Myers, dated November 1963 (used by kind permission of the estate of Lena Myers)

Dearest Lena,

Thank you for your generosity. I am sorry I have not written sooner like I promised but things are hard here. I feel like Frank is watching me all the time and waiting for me to make a mistake. I don’t think he knows for sure but I guess maybe I have been acting different.

I still see L. when I can. Lena, I have been with him again. I have prayed to God to aid me, but so help me I see him in my dreams and I want him. I feel like this cannot end well but I am powerless to stop it. It has been a long time, Lena, since a man touched me like that. Now that I have tasted the fruit I want no other. I hope that you understand.

There is bad feeling among the pilgrims. Some of them have been talking against Preacher Faulkner because of his ways. They say that he is too hard and there is even talk of asking him to return some of the money we gave him, just enough so that folks will have enough to fall back on if need be. There is trouble too with the boy and the girl. The girl has been ill, and her voice is now almost gone. She can no longer sing at suppertime, and the Preacher proposes to use some of our money to pay for a doctor for her. Laurie Perrson almost died for want of a doctor, but he will not let his own child suffer. Billy Perrson called him a hypocrite to his face.

But the boy is the worst of them. He is evil, Lena. There is no other word for him. James had a kitten. He brought it with him from Portland. It used to feed on field mice and what we could spare from our own table. It was a pretty little brown thing and he called it Jake.

Yesterday, Jake went missing. We searched the house but could find no trace of him. When the time came for James to take his daily lessons at the Preacher’s house he slipped away and went looking for his kitten instead. We didn’t know he had gone until Lyall heard him crying in the forest and went to see what was ailing him.

He found James standing by a shed in the woods. It used to be an old outhouse for some property that had burnt down years before and the children were told that it was out of bounds to them for fear that they might get up to badness if they were allowed near it. Lyall told me that the boy was just standing at the door to the shed, shaking and crying.

Someone had tied Jake by the neck to a nail set into the floor of the shed. The rope was only two or three inches long and the kitten almost lying flat on the floor. There were spiders all over it, Lena, little brown spiders just the size of a quarter like no one had ever seen before. They were crawling over the kitten’s mouth and eyes and the kitten was scratching and mewing and damn near choking itself on the rope. Then Lyall said the kitten went into convulsions and died, just like that.

Lyall swears that he saw the boy Adam hanging around that shed where he had no business being and he told the Preacher so. But the Preacher spoke the commandments to him and warned him of the punishments of bearing false witness against his neighbor. The menfolk supported Lyall and the Preacher warned them against setting their hearts against him. All the time the boy Adam just watched and didn’t speak a word but Lyall says the boy smiled at him and Lyall thought that maybe if the boy could have found a way to tie him to a nail and let the spiders feed on him as well then he would have.

I don’t know what will happen here, Lena. Winter is coming on and I can only see things getting harder for us, but with the Lord’s help we will prevail. I will pray for you and yours. My love to you all.

Your sister,

Elizabeth

P.S. I enclose a newspaper clipping. Make of it what you will.

Victim of Drowning Tragedy to be Buried Today

EAGLE LAKE. Edie Rattray, who died at St. Froid Lake, Aroostook, Wednesday, will be buried today. The body of Edie, 13, was found floating in the lake by Red River Road, close to the town of Eagle Lake. The body of her puppy was found nearby.

According to the only witness, Muriel Faulkner, 15, Edie got into difficulties attempting to rescue the dog when it fell from the bank, and drowned before Muriel could summon help.

Edie was a prominent member of the choir of St. Mary’s Church, Eagle Lake, and the choir will sing at her funeral mass. Muriel is a member of the small religious community known locally as the Aroostook Baptists. Her father, Aaron, is the pastor of the community.

State police say they are treating the death as accidental, although they remain puzzled as to how Edie drowned in comparatively shallow water.

This week, candles will remain lit in every house in the town for the girl whose beautiful singing voice led her to be called the ‘Nightingale of Eagle Lake’.

(from the Bangor Daily News, October 28, 1963)

Part Three

To the legion of the lost ones,

to the cohort of the damned . . .

Rudyard Kipling, ‘Gentlemen-Rankers’

Chapter Seventeen

The next morning I awoke to a throbbing at the back of my hand, a souvenir of the encounter with Deborah Mercier. I was no longer working for her husband, but there were still calls to be made. I checked in once again with Buntz in Boston, who assured me that Rachel was safe and sound, before calling the Portland PD.

I wanted to see the place in which the Aroostook Baptists had been interred. I could, I supposed, have been accused of morbid curiosity, but it was more than that; everything that had occurred – all of the deaths, all of the tainted family histories – was tied up with these lost souls. The burial ground at St. Froid was the epicenter for a series of shock waves that had affected generations of lives, touching even those who had no blood connection with the people buried beneath its cold, damp earth. It had united the Peltiers and the Merciers, and that unity had found its ultimate expression in Grace.

I had a vision of her, scared and miserable, standing on Higgins Beach while a selfish young man cast stones on the water, concerned only for the opportunities that would be lost to him if he became a father at such an age. I blamed her, I knew: for wanting me, for allowing me to be with her, for taking me inside her. As the stones fell I sank with them, dropping slowly to the seabed, where the rush of the waves drowned out her voice, and the sound of her tears and the adult world, with its torments and betrayals, was lost in a blur of green and blue.

She must have known, even then, about her family’s past. Maybe she felt a kind of kinship with Elizabeth Jessop, who had departed for a new existence many years before and was never seen again. Grace was a romantic, and I think she would have wanted to believe that Elizabeth had found the earthly paradise for which she had been searching, that she had somehow remade her life, sealing herself off from the past in the hope that she could start afresh. Except that something inside her whispered that Elizabeth was dead: Ali Wynn had told me as much.

Then Deborah Mercier fed Grace the knowledge that Faulkner might still be alive, and that through him the truth of Elizabeth Jessop’s disappearance might be revealed to her. It seemed certain that Grace then approached Carter Paragon, who, through his own weakness and the sale of a recently created Faulkner Apocalypse, had allowed the possibility of the Preacher’s continued existence to be exposed. Following that meeting, Grace had been killed and her notes seized along with one other item. That second item, I suspected, was another Apocalypse that had somehow come into Grace’s possession. How that had come to pass would require renewed pressure on the Beckers to find out if their daughter, Marcy, could fill in the blanks. That would be tomorrow’s work. For today, there was Paragon, and St. Froid Lake, and one other visit that I had chosen not to mention to Angel and Louis.

PIs don’t usually get access to crime scenes, unless they’re the first to arrive at them. This was the second time in less than eighteen months that I had asked Ellis Howard, the deputy chief in charge of the Portland PD’s Bureau of Investigation, for his help in bending the rules a little. For a time, Ellis had tried to convince me to join the bureau, until the events in Dark Hollow conspired to make him reconsider his offer.

‘Why?’ he asked me when I phoned him and he eventually agreed to take my call. ‘Why should I do it?’

‘Don’t even say hello.’

‘Hello. Why? What’s your interest in this?’

I didn’t lie to him. ‘Grace and Curtis Peltier.’

There was silence on the other end of the line as Ellis ran through a list of possible permutations and came up cold. ‘I don’t see the connection.’

‘They were related to Elizabeth Jessop. She was one of the Aroostook Baptists.’ I decided not to mention the other blood link, through Jack Mercier. ‘Grace had been preparing a thesis on the history of the group before she died.’

‘Is that why Curtis Peltier died in his bath?’

That was the trouble with trying to deal with Ellis; eventually, he always started to ask the difficult questions. I tried to come up with the most nebulous answer possible, in an effort to obscure the truth instead of lying outright. Eventually, I knew, the lies I was telling, both directly and by omission, would come back to haunt me. I had to hope that by the time they did I would have accumulated enough knowledge to save my hide.

‘I think that someone may have believed that he knew more than he did,’ I told Ellis.

‘And who might that person be, do you think?’

‘I don’t know anything but his name,’ I replied. ‘He calls himself Mr. Pudd. He tried to warn me off investigating the circumstances surrounding Grace Peltier’s death. He may also be connected with the killing of Lester Bargus and Al Z down in Boston. Norman Boone over in ATF has more on it, if you want to talk to him.’

I’d kept Curtis Peltier’s name out of my conversation with Boone, but now Curtis was dead and I wasn’t sure what debt of confidentiality I owed to Jack Mercier. Increasingly, I was coming under pressure to reveal the true connections to the Fellowship. I was lying to people, concealing possible evidence of a conspiracy, and I wasn’t even sure why. Part of it was probably some romantic desire to make up for the small adolescent pain I had caused Grace Peltier, a pain she had probably long forgotten. But I was also aware that Marcy Becker was in danger, and that Lutz, a policeman, was somehow connected with the death of her friend. I had no proof that he was involved, but if I told Ellis or anyone else what I knew, then I would have to reveal Marcy’s existence. If I did that, I believed that I would be signing her death warrant.

‘Were you working for Curtis Peltier?’ said Ellis, interrupting my thoughts.

‘Yes.’

‘You were looking into his daughter’s death?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I thought you didn’t do that kind of work anymore.’

‘She used to be a friend of mine.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Hey, I have friends.’

‘Not many, I’ll bet. What did you find out?’

‘Nothing much. I think she spoke to Carter Paragon, the sleazebag who runs the Fellowship, before she died, but Paragon’s assistant says she didn’t.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘And they pay you good money for this?’

‘Sometimes.’

His voice softened a little. ‘The investigation into Grace Peltier’s death has been . . . reenergized since her father’s murder. We’re working alongside the state police to assess possible connections.’

‘Who’s the liaison for state CID?’

I heard the rustling of paper. ‘Lutz,’ said Ellis. ‘John Lutz, out of Machias. If you know anything about Grace Peltier’s death, I’m sure he’d like to talk to you.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘And now you want to look at a mass grave in northern Maine?’

‘I just want to see the site, that’s all. I don’t want to drive all the way up there and have some polite state trooper turn me back half a mile from the lake.’

Ellis released a long breath. ‘I’ll make a call. I can’t promise you anything. But . . .’

I knew there would be a ‘but.’

‘When you get back, I want you to talk to me. Anything you give me will be treated in confidence. I guarantee it.’

I agreed. Ellis was an honorable, decent man, and I wanted to help him in any way that I could. I just wasn’t sure how much I could say without blowing everything apart.

I had one stop to make before I went north, a step back into my own past and my own failings.

I had to visit the Colony.

The approach to the community known as the Colony was much as I remembered it. From South Portland I headed west, through Westbrook and White Rock and Little Falls, until I found myself looking out on Sebago Lake. I followed the lakeshore into the town of Sebago Lake itself, then took the Richville Road northwest until I came to the turning for Smith Hill Road. There was water on both sides of the road, and the spires of the evergreens were reflected in the flooded marshland. Dutchman’s breeches and trout lilies unfurled their leaves, and dogwood flowered in the damp earth. Farther ahead the road was carpeted in birch seeds that had fallen from the drying cones above. Eventually the road became little more than a dirt track, twin tire ruts with grass growing along the median, until it lost itself in a copse of trees about a hundred yards away. There was nothing to indicate what lay behind the trees, except for a small wooden sign by the side of the road engraved with a cross and a pair of cupped hands.

At my lowest point, after the deaths of Susan and Jennifer, I had spent some time at the Colony. Its members had discovered me huddled in the doorway of a boarded-up electronics store on Congress Street, stinking of booze and despair. They had offered me a bed for the night, then placed me in the back of a pickup and taken me out to the community.

I stayed with them for six weeks. There were others there like me. Some were alcoholics or addicts. Others were men who had simply lost their way and had found themselves cast adrift by family and friends. They had made their way to the community, or had been referred there by those who still cared about them. In some cases, like my own, the community had found them and had extended a hand to them. Every man was free to walk away at any time, without recrimination, but while they were a part of the community they had to abide by its rules. There was no alcohol, no drug use, no sexual activity. Everybody worked. Everybody contributed to the greater good of the community. Each day, we gathered for what could be termed prayer but was closer to meditation, a coming to terms with our own failings and the failings of others. Occasionally, outside counselors would join us to act as facilitators or to offer specialized advice and support to those who needed it. But for the most part we listened to one another and supported one another, aided by the founders of the community, Doug and Amy Greaves. The only pressure to remain came from the other members; it was made clear to each of us that we were not only helping ourselves but, by our presence there, helping our brothers.

I think, looking back, that I was not yet ready for what the Colony had to offer. When I left, a confused, self-pitying man had been replaced by one with a purpose, a clear aim: I would find the man who killed Susan and Jennifer, and I would kill him in turn. And in the end, that is what I did. I killed the Traveling Man. I killed him, and I tore apart anyone who tried to stand in my way.

As I passed through the trees, the house came into view. It had whitewashed walls, and close by, there were barns and storage buildings, also white, and stables that had been converted into dormitories. It was after 9 A.M, and the members of the community had already commenced their daily tasks. To my right, a black man walked among the chicken coops collecting eggs, and I could see shapes moving in the small greenhouses beyond. From one of the barns came the sound of a buzz saw, as those with the necessary skills helped to make the furniture, the candlesticks, and the children’s toys, that were sold to help support the community’s activities. The rest of its funding came mainly from private donations, some from those who had, over the years, passed through the Colony’s gates and, in doing so, had taken the first steps toward rebuilding their lives. I had sent them what I could afford, and had written to Amy once or twice, but I had not returned to the community since the day I turned my back on it.

As I drew up outside the house, a woman appeared on the porch. She was small, a little over five feet tall, with long gray hair tied up loosely on her head. Her broad shoulders were lost beneath a baggy sweatshirt, and the frayed cuffs of her jeans almost obscured her sneakers. She watched me step from the car. As I approached her, her face broke into a smile and she dropped down into the yard to embrace me.

‘Charlie Parker,’ said Amy, half in wonder. Her strong arms enclosed me and the scent of apples rose from her hair. She moved back and examined me closely, her eyes locking on to mine. Her thoughts flickered across her face, and in the movement of her features I seemed to see the events of the last two and a half years reenacted. When at last she looked away, concern and relief collided in her eyes.

She held my hand as we walked onto the porch and moved inside the house. She guided me to a chair at the long communal breakfast table, then disappeared into the kitchen before returning with a mug of decaf coffee for me and some mint tea for herself.

And then, for the next hour, we spoke of my life since I had left the community, and I told her almost everything. To the east, the flooded land sparkled in the morning sun. Men occasionally passed by the window and raised a hand in greeting. One, I noticed, seemed to be having trouble walking. His gut hung over his belt, and despite the cold, his body gleamed with sweat. His hands shook uncontrollably. I guessed that he had been at the Colony for no more than a day or two, and the withdrawal was tormenting his system.

‘A new arrival,’ I said, when at last I had finished unburdening myself to her. I felt light headed, a simultaneous sense of elation and terrible grief.

‘You were like that once,’ said Amy.

‘An alcoholic?’

‘You were never an alcoholic.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because of the way you stopped,’ she replied. ‘Because of why you stopped. Do you think about drinking?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘But not every day, not every hour of every day?’

‘No.’

‘Then you’ve answered your own question. It was just a way to fill a hole in your being, and it could have been anything: sex, drugs, marathon running. When you left here, you simply substituted something else for alcohol. You found another way to fill the hole. You found violence, and revenge.’

Amy was not one to sugar pills. She and her husband had built a community based on the importance of absolute honesty: with oneself and, from that, with others. ‘Do you believe that you have the right to take lives, to judge others and find them wanting?’

I heard echoes of Al Z in her words. I didn’t like it.

‘I had no choice,’ I replied.

‘There’s always a choice.’

‘It didn’t seem that way at the time. If they’d lived, then I’d have died. Other people would have died as well, innocent people. I wasn’t going to let that happen.’

‘The necessity defense?’

The necessity defense was an old English common law concept that held that an individual who breaks a minor law to achieve a greater good should be declared innocent of the lesser charge. It was still invoked occasionally, only to be knocked out of the ballpark by any judge worth his salt.

‘There are only two consequences to taking a life,’ Amy continued. ‘Either the victim achieves salvation, in which case you have killed a good man; or you damn him to hell, in which case you have deprived him of any hope of redemption. Afterward, the responsibilty lies with you, and you bear the weight.’

‘They weren’t interested in redemption,’ I answered her evenly. ‘And they didn’t want salvation.’

‘And you do?’

I didn’t answer.

‘You won’t achieve salvation with a gun in your hand,’ she persisted.

I leaned forward. ‘Amy,’ I said softly, ‘I’ve thought about these things. I’ve considered them. I thought I could walk away, but I can’t. People have to be protected from the urges of violent men. I can do that. Sometimes I’m too late to protect them, but maybe I can help to achieve some measure of justice for them.’

‘Is that why you’re here, Charlie?’

A noise came from behind me and Doug, Amy’s husband, came into the room. I wondered for a moment how long he had been there. He held a large bottle of water in his hand. Some of it had dripped from his chin and soaked the front of his clean white shirt. He was a big man, six-two at least, with pale skin and hair that was almost entirely white. His eyes were remarkably green. When I stood to greet him, he held my shoulder for a time and perused me in much the same way that his wife had examined me earlier. Then he took a seat beside Amy and they both waited in silence for me to answer Amy’s question.

‘In a sense,’ I said at last. ‘I’m investigating the death of a woman. Her name was Grace Peltier. Once, a long time ago, she was a friend of mine.’

I took a breath and looked out once again at the sunlight. In this place whose only purpose was to try to make the lives of those who passed its way a little better, the deaths of Grace and her father and the figure of a child out of time, his wounds hidden behind cheap black tape, seemed somehow distant. It was as if this little community was invulnerable to the encroachments of violent men and the consequences of acts committed long ago and far away. But the apparent simplicity of the life here, and the clarity of the aims it espoused, masked a strength and a profound depth of knowledge. That was why I was here; it was, in its way, almost the antithesis of the group I was hunting.

‘This investigation has brought me into contact with the Fellowship, and with a man who appears to be acting on its behalf.’

They didn’t respond for a time. Doug looked to the ground and moved his right foot back and forth over the boards. Amy turned away from me and stared out at the trees, as if the answers I sought might somehow be found deep in their reaches. Then, at last, they exchanged a look, and Amy spoke.

‘We know about them,’ she said softly, as I knew she would. ‘You make interesting enemies, Charlie.’

She sipped her tea before continuing. ‘There are two Fellowships. There is the one that appears in the public form of Carter Paragon, the one that sells prayer pamphlets for ten dollars and promises to cure the ailments of those who touch their television screens. That Fellowship is mendacious and shallow and preys on the gullible. It’s no different from any of a hundred other similar movements; no better than them, but certainly no worse.

‘The second Fellowship is something entirely different. It is a force, an entity, not an organization. It supports violent men. It funds killers and fanatics. It is powered by rage and hate and fear. Its targets are anything and everything that is not of, or like, itself. Some are obvious: gays, Jews, blacks, Catholics, those who assist in the provision of abortion or family planning services, those who would encourage peaceful coexistence between people of different races and different creeds. But in reality, it hates humanity. It hates the flawed nature of men, and is blind to the divine that exists in even the most humble among us.’

Beside her, her husband nodded in agreement. ‘It moves against anything that it perceives to be a threat to itself or its mission. It starts with polite advances, then progresses to intimidation, property damage, physical injury, and finally, if it deems such action necessary, murder.’

Around us, the air seemed to change, for a wind had blown up from across the lake. It brought with it the scent of still water and decay.

‘Who’s behind it?’ I asked.

Doug shrugged, but it was Amy who answered. ‘We don’t know. We know what you know; its public face is Carter Paragon. Its private face remains hidden. It is not a large organization. It is said that the best conspiracy is a conspiracy of one; the fewer who know about something, the better. Our understanding is that there are no more than a handful of people involved.’

‘Policemen?’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘Perhaps. Yes, almost certainly one or two policemen. It sometimes uses them to cover its tracks, or to stay in touch with any legal moves against it. But its primary instrument is a man, a thin man with red hair and a fondness for predation. Sometimes he has a woman with him, a mute.’

‘That’s him,’ I said. ‘That’s Pudd.’

For the first time since we had begun to talk of the Fellowship, Amy reached out to her husband. Her hand found his and gripped it tightly, as if even the mention of Pudd’s name might invoke his presence and force them to face him together.

‘He goes by different names,’ she continued, after a pause. ‘I’ve heard him referred to as Ed Monker, as Walter Zaren, as Eric Dumah. I think he was Ted Bune once, and Alex Tchort for a time. I’m sure there were others.’

‘You seem to know a lot about him.’

‘We’re religious, but we’re not naive. These are dangerous people. It pays to know about them. Do those names mean anything to you at all?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Do you know anything about demonology?’

‘Sorry, I canceled my subscription to Amateur Demonologist. It was scaring the mailman.’

Doug permitted himself the ghost of a smile. ‘Tchort is the Russian Satan, also known as the Black God,’ he said. ‘Bune is a three-headed demon who moves bodies from one grave to another. Dumah is the angel of the silence of death, and Zaren is the demon of the sixth hour, the avenging genius. Monker is the name he uses most frequently. It seems to have a particular resonance for him.’

‘And Monker is a demon as well?’

‘A very particular demon, one of a pair. Monker and Nakir are Islamic demons.’

A picture flashed in my mind: Pudd’s fingers gently brushing the mute’s cheek and softly whispering.

My Nakir.

‘He called the woman his Nakir,’ I told them.

‘Monker and Nakir examine and judge the dead, then assign them to heaven or hell. Your Mr. Pudd, or whatever you wish to call him, seems to find the demonic associations funny. It’s a joke.’

‘It seems like kind of specialized humor,’ I said. ‘I can’t see him making it onto Letterman.’

‘The name Pudd has a particular meaning for him as well,’ said Doug. ‘We found it on an arachnology Web site. Elias Pudd was a pioneer in the field of American arachnology, a late contemporary of Emerton and McCook. He published his most famous work, A Natural History of the Arachnid, in 1933. His speciality was recluses.’

‘Spiders.’ I shook my head. ‘They say people start to look like their pets, in time.’

‘Or they pick the pet they most resemble,’ answered Doug.

‘You’ve seen him, then.’

He nodded. ‘He came out here once, along with the woman. They parked over by the chicken coops and waited for us to come out. As soon as we did, Pudd threw a sack from the car, then backed up and drove away. We never saw them again.’

‘Do I want to know what was in the sack?’

Amy answered. ‘Rabbits.’ She was looking at the floor so I couldn’t see the expression on her face.

‘Yours?’

‘We used to keep them in a hutch out by the coops. One morning we came out and they were just gone. There was no blood, no fur, nothing to suggest that they’d been taken by a predator. Then, two days later, Pudd came and dumped the sack. When we opened it, it was filled with the remains of the rabbits. Something had bitten them. They were covered in gray-brown lesions, and the flesh had begun to rot. We took one to the local vet, and he told us they were recluse bites. That’s how we discovered the significance of the name Pudd for him.

‘He was warning us to stay out of his business. We had been making inquiries about the Fellowship. We stopped after the visit.’

She raised her face and there was no indication of how she felt, apart from a slight tension around her mouth.

‘Is there anything more that you can tell me?’

‘Rumors, that’s all,’ said Doug, raising the water bottle to his lips.

‘Rumors about a book?’

The bottle paused, and Amy’s grip tightened on his hand.

‘They’re recording names, aren’t they?’ I continued. ‘Is that what Mr. Pudd is – some kind of infernal recording angel, writing down the names of the damned in a big black book?’

They didn’t reply, and the silence was suddenly broken by the sound of the men filing into the house for their midmorning break. Doug and Amy both stood, then Doug shook my hand once again and left to make arrangements for the meal. Amy guided me away from the dining room and walked me to my car.

‘As Doug said, the book is just a rumor,’ she told me, ‘and the truth about the Fellowship still remains largely hidden. Nobody has yet managed to link its public face with its other activities.’

Amy took a deep breath, steeling herself for what she had to say next.

‘There is something else I should tell you,’ she began. ‘You’re not the first to have come here asking about the Fellowship. Some years ago, another man came, from New York. We didn’t know as much about the Fellowship then, and we told him less than we knew, but it still provoked the warning. He moved on, and we never saw or heard of him again . . . until two years ago.’

The world around me faded into shadow, and the sun disappeared. When I looked up, I saw black shapes in the sky, descending in spirals, the beating of their wings filling the morning air and blocking out the light. Amy’s hand reached out to take mine but all of my attention was focused on the sky, where the dark angels now hovered. Then one of them drew closer and his features, which had previously only been a chiaroscuro of light and shade, grew clear.

And I knew his face.

‘It was him,’ whispered Amy, and the dark angel smiled at me from above, his teeth filed to points, his huge wings feathered with night. A father, a husband, killer of men, women, and children now transformed by his passage into the next world.

‘It was the Traveling Man.’

I sat on the hood of my car until the sickness had passed. I recalled a conversation in New Orleans some months after Susan and Jennifer had died, a voice telling me of its belief that somehow, the worst killers could find one another and sometimes connect, that they were sensitized to the presence of their own kind.

They sniff each other out.

He would have found them. His nature, and his background in law enforcement, would have ensured it. If he came hunting for the Fellowship, then he would have tracked them down.

And he would have let them live, because they were his own kind. I remembered again his obscure biblical references, his interest in the Apocrypha, his belief that he was some kind of fallen angel sent to judge humanity, all of whom he found wanting.

Yes, he had found them, and they had helped to fan his own flame into being.

Amy reached out and took both of my hands in her own.

‘It was seven or eight years ago,’ she said. ‘It didn’t seem important, until now.’

I nodded.

‘You’re going to continue looking for these people?’

‘I have to, especially now.’

‘Can I say something to you, something you may not want to hear?’

Her face was grave. I nodded.

‘In all that you have done, in all that you have told me, it seems that you have been intent on helping the dead as much as the living. But our first duty is to the living, Charlie, to ourselves and those around us. The dead don’t need your help.’

I paused before replying. ‘I’m not sure I believe that, Amy.’

For the first time, I saw doubt appear in her face. ‘You can’t live in both worlds,’ she said, and her voice was hesitant. ‘You must choose. Do you still feel the deaths of Susan and Jennifer pulling you back?’

‘Sometimes, but not just them.’

And I think that she saw something in my face, or caught something in my tone, and for a brief moment, she was in me, seeing what I saw, hearing what I heard, feeling what I felt. I closed my eyes and felt shapes move around me, voices whispering in my ears, small hands clutching at mine.

We’ve all been waiting for you.

A small boy with an exit wound for an eye, a woman in a summer dress that shimmered in the darkness, figures that hovered at the periphery of my vision – all of them, each and every one, told me that it wasn’t true, that somebody had to act for those who could no longer act for themselves, that some measure of justice had to be achieved for the lost and the fallen. For an instant, as she held my hands, Amy Greaves had some inkling of this, some fleeting perception of what waited in the depths of the honeycomb world.

‘Oh my God,’ she said.

And then her hands released mine and I heard her move away and disappear into the house. When I opened my eyes I was alone in the summer sunshine, the smell of rotting pine carrying to me on the wind. Through the trees a blue jay flew, heading north.

And I followed.

The Search for Sanctuary

Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier

Letter from Elizabeth Jessop to her sister, Lena Myers, dated December 11,1963 (used by kind permission of the estate of Lena Myers)

Dearest Lena,

This has been the worst week I can ever recall. The truth about Lyall and me is out and now we are both being shunned. The Preacher has not been seen for two days. He is asking the Lord to guide him in his judgment upon us.

It was the boy that found us, the Preacher’s son. I think he had been watching us for a long time. We were in the woods together, Lyall and I, and I saw Leonard in the bushes. I think I screamed when I saw him but when we went to find him he was already gone.

The Preacher was waiting for us at supper. We were refused food and told to go back to our houses while the others ate. When Frank returned that night he beat me and left me to sleep on the floor. Now Lyall and me are kept apart. The girl Muriel watches over him, while Leonard is like my shadow. Yesterday he threw a stone at me and drew blood from my head. He told me that was how the Bible said whores should be punished and that his father would deal with me the same way. The Cornishes saw what he did and Ethan Cornish struck him before he could throw a second stone. The boy pulled a knife on Ethan and cut his arm. The families have all argued for forgiveness for the sake of the community, but Lyall’s wife will not look at me and one of his children spat on me when I passed her.

Last night there were voices raised in the Preacher’s house. The families were putting their case to the Preacher but he was unmoved. There is bitterness among us now – at me and Lyall, but more at the Preacher and his ways. He has been asked to account for the money he holds in trust for us, but he has refused. I fear that Lyall and I will be forced from the community or that the Preacher will make us all leave and start again in another place. I have asked the Lord to forgive us our trespass against him and have prayed for help but part of me would not be sorry to leave if Lyall was beside me. But I cannot abandon my children and I feel sadness and shame for what I have done to Frank.

Ethan Cornish told me one more thing. He says that the Preacher’s wife asked him to deal mercifully with us and he has refused to speak with her since. There is talk that he will scatter us to the four winds, where each family will make up for the sins of the community by spreading the word of God to new towns and cities. Tomorrow, the men, the women, and the children are to be divided into separate groups and each group will pray alone for guidance and forgiveness.

I have asked Ethan Cornish to place this note in the usual place and pray that you receive it in good health.

I am your sister,

Elizabeth

Chapter Eighteen

When I was fourteen years old, my father took me on my first airplane trip. He got a good deal from a man he knew at American Airlines, a neighbor of ours whom my father had helped out when one of his sons got picked up for possession of some stolen radios. We flew from New York to Denver and from Denver to Billings, Montana, where we hired a car and spent a night in a motel before driving east early the following morning. The sun shone on the hills, burnishing the green and beige with touches of silver before melting into the waters of the Little Bighorn River. We crossed the river at the Crow Agency and drove in silence to the entrance to the Little Bighorn Battlefield. It was Memorial Day and a platform had been erected at the cemetery, before which a small crowd occupied rows of lawn chairs while the few who could not find seats stood amid the small gravestones and listened to the words of the service. Above them, the Stars and Stripes flapped in the morning breeze, but we did not stay to listen. Instead, fragments came to us as we climbed toward the monument, words like ‘youth,’ ‘fallen,’ ‘honor,’ and ‘death’ fading and then growing once again in volume, echoing across the shifting grass as if they were being spoken both in the present and in the distant past.

This was where Custer’s five cavalry troops, young men mostly, were annihilated by the combined forces of the Lakota and Cheyenne. The battle took place over the space of one hour, but the soldiers probably couldn’t even see the enemy for much of that time; they lay hidden in the grass and picked off the cavalrymen one by one, biding their time.

I looked out over the hills and thought that the Little Bighorn was a bleak place to die, surrounded by low hills of green and yellow and brown fading to blue and purple in the distance. From any patch of raised ground, you could see for miles. The men who died here would have known without question that no one was coming to rescue them, that these were their final moments on earth. They died terrible, lonely deaths far from home, their bodies subsequently mutilated and left to lie scattered on the battlefield for three days before finally receiving burial in a mass grave atop a small ridge in eastern Montana, their names carved on a granite monument above them.

In that place, I closed my eyes and imagined that I felt their ghosts crowding around me. I seemed to hear them: the horses neighing, the gunshots, the grass breaking beneath their feet, the cries of pain, of fury, of fear.

And for an instant I was there with them, and I understood.

There are places where years have no meaning, where only a hairsbreadth of history separates the present from the past. Standing there on that bleak hillside, a young man in a place where other young men had died, it was possible to feel a connection to that past, a sense that in some place further back on the stream of time these young men were still fighting, and still dying, that they would always be fighting this battle, in this place, over and over again, with ever the same end.

It was my first glimpse of the honeycomb world, my first inkling that the past never truly dies but is strangely, beautifully alive in the present. There is an interconnectedness to all things, a link between what lies buried and what lives above, a capacity for mutability that allows a good act committed in the present to rectify an imbalance in times gone by. That, in the end, is the nature of justice: not to undo the past but, by acting further down the line of time, to restore some measure of harmony, some possibility of equilibrium, so that lives may continue with their burden eased and the dead may find peace in a world beyond this one.

Now, as I headed north, I thought again of that day on the battlefield, my father standing silently beside me as the wind tousled our hair, a day of remembrance for the dead. This would be another pilgrimage, another acknowledgment of the debt owed by the living to the dead. Only by standing where the families had once stood, only by placing myself amid the memories of their final moments and listening for the echoes, could I hope to understand.

This is a honeycomb world. At St. Froid Lake, its interior lay exposed.

As I drove, I called in a long-standing favor. In New York, a woman’s voice asked me my name, there was a pause, and I was put through to the office of Special Agent in Charge Hal Ross. Ross had recently been promoted and was now one of three SACs in the FBI’s New York field office, operating under an assistant director. Ross and I had crossed swords the first time we met, but in the aftermath of the Traveling Man’s death our relationship had gradually become more congenial. The FBI was now reviewing all cases with which the Traveling Man had been involved as part of its ongoing investigation into his crimes, and a room at Quantico had been devoted to relevant material from law enforcement agencies around the country. The investigation had been given the codename ‘Charon’, after the ferryman in Greek mythology who carried lost souls to Hades, and all references to the Traveling Man carried that name. It was a long process and one that was still far from complete.

‘It’s Charlie Parker,’ I said, when Ross came on the line.

‘Hey, how you doing? Social call?’

‘Have I ever paid you a social call?’

‘Not that I can remember, but there’s always a first time.’

‘This isn’t it. You remember that favor you promised me?’

There was a long pause. ‘You sure cut to the chase. Go ahead.’

‘It’s Charon. Seven or eight years ago he came up to Maine to investigate an organization called the Fellowship. Can you find out where he went and the names of anyone to whom he might have spoken?’

‘Can I ask why?’

‘The Fellowship may be connected to a case I’m investigating; the death of a young woman. Any information you can give me about them would help.’

‘That’s quite a favor, Parker. We don’t usually hand over records.’

Impatience and anger crept into my voice and I had to struggle against shouting. ‘I’m not asking for the records, just some idea of where he might have gone. This is important, Hal.’

He sighed. ‘When do you need it?’

‘Soon. As soon as you can.’

‘I’ll see what I can do. You just used up your ninth life. I hope you realize that.’

I gave a mental shrug. ‘I wasn’t doing a whole lot with it anyway.’

I drove through avenues of trees, their branches green with new growth, to this place of failed hopes and violent death, and sunlight dappled my car as I went. I stayed on I-95 all the way to Houlton, then took U.S. 1 north to Presque Isle and from there drove through Ashland, Portage, and Winterville, until at last I came to the edge of the town of Eagle Lake. I drove by a WCSH truck and gave my name to the state trooper who was checking traffic along the road. He waved me through.

Ellis had called me back with the name of a detective from the state trooper barracks at Houlton. His name was John Brouchard, and I found him waist deep in a muddy hole beneath the big tarp erected to protect the remains, digging with a spade in a steady, unhurried rhythm. That was how it worked up here; everybody played his or her part. State police, wardens, sheriff’s deputies, ME’s staff, all of them rolled up their sleeves and got their hands dirty. If nothing else it was overtime, and when you’ve got kids going to college, or alimony payments to meet, then time and a half is always welcome, whatever way it has to be earned.

I stayed behind the crime scene line and called his name. He waved a hand in acknowledgment and climbed from the hole, unfolding a frame that was at least six-six or six-seven in height. He towered over me, his head blocking out the sun. His nails were black with mud, and beneath his coveralls his shirt was drenched in sweat. Damp earth clung to his work boots, and dirt streaked his forehead and cheeks.

‘Ellis Howard tells me you’re assisting them in an investigation,’ he said, after we had shaken hands. ‘You want to tell me why you’re up here if your investigation is centred on Portland?’

‘You ask Ellis that?’

‘He told me to ask you. He said you had all the answers.’

‘He’s being optimistic. Curtis Peltier, the man who was murdered in Portland at the weekend, was related to Elizabeth Jessop. I think her remains were among those found here. Curtis’s daughter was Grace Peltier. CID III is looking into the circumstances of her death. She was doing post-graduate work on the people buried in that hole.’

Brouchard eyeballed me for a good ten seconds, then led me to the mobile crime scene unit, where I was allowed to view the video tour of the crime scene on a portable TV borrowed for the duration of the field recovery. He seemed grateful for the excuse to rest, and poured us both coffee while I sat and watched the tape: mud, bones, and trees; glimpses of damaged skulls and scattered fingers; dark water; a rib cage shattered and splintered by the impact of a shotgun blast; a child’s skeleton, curled in foetuslike upon itself.

When the tape had concluded I followed him across the road to the edge of the grave.

‘Can’t let you go beyond here,’ he said apologetically. ‘Some of the victims are still down there, and we’re searching for other artifacts.’

I nodded. I didn’t need to go inside. I could see all that I needed to see from where I stood. The scene had already been photographed and measured. Above holes in the mud, pieces of card had been attached to wooden spikes, detailing the nature of the remains discovered. In some cases the holes were empty, but in one corner I saw two men in blue coveralls work carefully around a piece of exposed bone. When one of them moved away, I saw the curved reach of a rib cage, like dark fingers about to clasp in prayer.

‘Did they all have their names around their necks?’

The details of the names written on the wooden boards had appeared in a report in the Maine Sunday Telegram. Given the nature of the discovery, it was a wonder that the investigators had managed to keep anything at all under wraps.

‘Most of them. Some of the wood had rotted pretty bad, though.’ Brouchard reached into his shirt pocket and produced a piece of folded paper, which he handed to me. Typed on the page were seventeen names, presumably obtained by checking the original identities of the Baptists against the names discovered on the bodies. DNA samples were to be taken from surviving relatives, where dental records were not available. Stars beside some names indicated those for whom no positive identification had yet been made. James Jessop’s name was the next to last on the list.

‘Is the Jessop boy’s body still down there?’

Brouchard looked at the list in my hand. ‘They’re taking him away today, him and his sister. He mean anything to you?’

I didn’t reply. Another name on the page had caught my eye: Louise Faulkner, the Reverend Faulkner’s wife. Faulkner’s name, I noticed, was not on the list. Neither were those of his children.

‘Any idea yet how they died?’

‘Won’t know for certain until the autopsies are done, but all of the men and two of the women had gunshot wounds to the head or body. The others seem to have been clubbed. The Faulkner woman was probably strangled; we found additional fragments of cord around her neck. Some of the children have shattered skulls, like they were hit with a rock, or maybe a hammer. A couple have what look like gunshot wounds to the head.’ He stopped talking and looked away toward the lake. ‘I guess you know something about these people.’

‘A little,’ I admitted. ‘Judging by the names on this list, you have at least one suspect.’

Brouchard nodded. ‘The preacher, Faulkner, unless somebody planted those boards to throw us off the trail and Faulkner is lying there dead with the rest of them.’

It was a possibility, although I knew that the existence of the Apocalypse bought by Jack Mercier made it unlikely.

‘He killed his own wife,’ I said, more to myself than to Brouchard.

‘You got any idea why?’

‘Maybe because she objected to what he was going to do.’ The article Grace Peltier had written for Down East magazine had mentioned that Faulkner was a fundamentalist. Under fundamentalist doctrine, a wife has to submit to the authority of her husband. Argument or defiance was not permitted. I guessed also that Faulkner probably needed her admiration and her validation for all that he did. When that was withdrawn, she ceased to have any value for him.

Brouchard was looking at me with interest now. ‘You think you know why he killed them all?’

I thought of what Amy had told me of the Fellowship, its hatred for what it perceived as human weakness and fallibility; of Faulkner’s ornate Apocalypses, visions of the final judgment; and of the word hacked beneath James Jessop’s name on a length of dirt-encrusted wood. Sinner.

‘It’s just a guess, but I think they disappointed him in some way, or turned on him, so he punished them for their failings. As soon as they stood up to him they were finished, cursed for rebelling against God’s anointed one.’

‘That’s a pretty harsh punishment.’

‘I guess he was a pretty harsh kind of guy.’

I also wondered if, in some dark place inside him, Faulkner had always known that they would fail him. That was what human beings did: they tried and failed and failed again, and they kept failing until either they got it right at last or time ran out and they had to settle for what they had. But for Faulkner, there was only one chance: when they failed it proved their worthlessness, the impossibility of their salvation. They were damned. They had always been damned, and what happened to them was of no consequence in this world or the next.

These people had followed Faulkner to their deaths, blinded by their hopes for a new golden age, a desire for conviction, for something to believe in. Nobody had intervened. After all, this was 1963; communists were the threat, not God-fearing people who wanted to create a simpler life for themselves. Fifteen years would pass until Jim Jones and his disciples blew Congressman Leo Ryan’s face off before organizing the mass suicide of 900 followers, after which people would begin to take a different view.

But even after Jonestown, false messiahs continued to draw adherents to them. Rock Theriault systematically tortured his followers in Ontario before tearing apart a woman named Solange Boilard with his bare hands in 1988. Jeffrey Lundgren, the leader of a breakaway Mormon sect, killed five members of the Avery family – Dennis and Cheryl Avery, and their young daughters Trina, Rebecca and Karen – in a barn in Kirtland, Ohio in April 1989 and buried their remains under earth, rocks and garbage. Nobody came looking for them until almost one year later, following a tip-off to police from a disgruntled cult member. The LeBaron family and their disciples in the breakaway Mormon Church of the Firstborn murdered almost thirty people, including an eighteen-month-old girl, in a cycle of violence which lasted from the early seventies until 1991.

And then there was Waco, which demonstrated why law enforcement agencies have traditionally been reluctant to intervene in the affairs of religious groups. But in 1963, such incidents were almost beyond imagining; there would have been no reason to fear for the safety of the Aroostook Baptists, no need to doubt the intentions of the Reverend Faulkner, and no cause for his disciples to fear to walk with him in the valley of the shadow of death.

The ME’s Dodge arrived while we stood silently by the lakeshore, and preparations began for the transportation of more bodies to the airfield at Presque Isle. Brouchard was tied up with the details of the removal, so I walked to the edge of the trees and watched the figures move beneath the canvas. It was approaching three o’clock and it was cool by the river. The wind blowing off the water tossed the hair of the ME’s men as they carried a body bag from the scene, strapped onto a stretcher to prevent any further damage to the bones. From the north, the hybrids sang.

Not all of them had died here, of that I was certain. This land wasn’t even part of the parcel originally leased to them. The fields they had worked were over the rise, behind the kennels; and the houses, now long gone, were farther back still. The adults would have been killed at or near the settlement; it would have been difficult to get them to come to the place intended for their burial, harder still to control them once the slaughter started. It made sense to bury them away from the center of the community in case, at some future date, suspicion mutated into action and a search of the property took place. Safer, then, to dispose of them by the lake.

According to Grace’s article, the community had apparently dispersed in December 1963. The evidence of the burial would have been masked by the winter snows. By the time the thaws came and the ground turned to mud, there would be little to distinguish this patch of land from any other. It was solid ground; it should not have collapsed, but it did.

After all, they had been waiting for a long, long time.

I closed my eyes and listened as the world faded around me, trying to imagine what it must have been like in those final minutes. The howling became muted, the noise of the cars on the road beyond transformed itself into the buzzing of flies, and amid the gentle brushing of the branches above my head . . .

I hear gunshots.

There are men running, caught as they work in the fields. Two have already fallen, bloody holes gaping ragged in their backs. One of those still alive turns, a pitchfork clutched in his hands. Its center disintegrates as the shot tears through it, wood and metal entering his body simultaneously. They pursue the last one through the grass, reloading as they go. Above them, a murder of crows circles, calling loudly. The cries of the last man to die mingle with them, and then all is quiet.

I heard a sound in the trees behind me, but when I looked there were only branches moving slightly, as if disturbed by the passage of some animal. Beyond, the green faded to black and the shapes of the trees became indistinct.

The women are the next to die. They have been told to kneel and pray in one of the houses, to think upon the sins of the community. They hear the gunshots but do not understand their significance. The door opens and Elizabeth Jessop turns. A man is silhouetted against the evening light. He tells her to look away, to bow to the cross and beg for forgiveness.

Elizabeth closes her eyes and begins to pray.

Behind me the noise came again, like gentle footfalls slowly growing closer. Something was emerging from the darkness, but I did not turn.

The children are the last to die. They sense that something is wrong, that something has happened that should not have occurred, yet they have followed the Preacher down to the lake, where the grave is already dug and the waters are still before them. They are obedient, as little ones should always be.

They too kneel down to pray, the mud wet beneath their knees, the wooden boards heavy around their necks, the ropes burning against their skin. They have been told to hold their hands against their breasts, the thumbs crossed as they have been taught, but James Jessop reaches out and takes his sister’s hand in his own. Beside him, she starts to cry and he grips her hand tighter.

‘Don’t cry,’ he says.

A shadow falls over him.

‘Don’t—’

I felt a coldness in my right hand. James Jessop was standing beside me in the shade of a yellow birch tree, his small hand curled around mine. Sunlight reflected from the single clear lens of his glasses. From the covered area below, two figures emerged carrying another small bundle on a stretcher.

‘They’re going to take you away from here, James,’ I said.

He nodded and moved closer to me, the presence of him chilling my leg and ribs.

‘It didn’t hurt none,’ he said. ‘Everything just went dark.’

I was glad that he didn’t feel any pain. I tried to press his hand, to give him some sign, but there was nothing there, only cold air.

He looked up at me. ‘I have to leave now.’

‘I know.’

His single eye was brown, flashes of yellow at its center eclipsed by the dark moon of his pupil. I should have seen my face reflected in his eye and in the lens of his eyeglasses, but I could detect no trace of myself. It was as if I were the unreal one, the phantasm, and James Jessop who was flesh and blood, skin and bone.

‘He said we were bad, but I was never bad. I always did what I was told, right up to the end.’

The chill faded from my fingers as he released my hand and began to walk back into the forest, his knees raised high so that he would not brush through the briers and the long grass. I didn’t want him to leave.

I wanted to comfort him.

I wanted to understand.

I called his name. He stopped and stared back at me.

‘Have you seen the Summer Lady, James?’ I asked. A tear dropped onto my cheek and rolled down to the corner of my mouth. I savored it with my tongue.

He nodded solemnly.

‘She’s waiting for me,’ he said. ‘She’s going to take me to the others.’

‘Where is she, James?’

James Jessop raised his hand and pointed into the darkness of the forest, then turned and walked into the tangles and trees, until the shadows of the branches embraced him and I could see him no more.

Chapter Nineteen

As I drove down to Waterville to meet Angel and Louis, my hand tingled from the touch of a lost child. St. Froid Lake had seemed indescribably desolate. I still heard the howls of the hybrids ringing in my ears, a perpetual chorus of mourning for the dead. Pictures of flapping canvas and piles of earth, of cold water and old brown bones flashed through my mind before coalescing into a single image of James Jessop receding into the hidden reaches of the forest, where an unseen woman in a summer dress waited to take him away.

I felt a surge of gratitude that there was somebody waiting for him at the edge of the darkness, that he would not have to make that journey alone.

I just hoped that there was somebody waiting for each of us, in the end.

In Waterville, I parked outside the Ames mall and waited. It was almost an hour before the black Lexus appeared, turning onto the main street and parking at its far end. I watched Angel get out and walk casually to the corner of Main and Temple, then turn into the back lot of the Fellowship’s building at the junction with the Hunan Legends Chinese restaurant when he saw that the street was clear. I locked the Mustang, met Louis, and together we walked down to Temple to join Angel. He stood in the shadows and handed us each a pair of gloves. His own hands were already concealed and holding the handle of the newly opened door.

‘I think I’m gonna add Waterville to the list of places I’m never gonna retire to,’ remarked Angel as we stepped into the building. ‘Along with Bogota and Bangladesh.’

‘I’ll break the sad news to the Chamber of Commerce,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know how they’ll cope.’

‘So where you planning on retiring to?’

‘Maybe I won’t live long enough for it to become an issue.’

‘Man, you sure going the right way about it,’ said Louis. ‘Grim Reaper probably got your number on speed dial.’

We followed Angel up the thinly carpeted stairs until we arrived at a wooden door with a small plastic sign nailed to it at eye level. It read simply: The Fellowship. There was a bell on the doorframe to the right, in case anyone somehow managed to sneak in the front door without Ms. Torrance turning on them like a hungry Rottweiler. I slipped out my mini Maglite and shined it on the lock. I had taken the precaution of wrapping some duct tape around the top so that only a thin beam of light about half the size of a dime showed. Angel took a pick and a tension tool from his pocket and opened the door in five seconds flat. Inside, the lights from the street shone on a reception area with three plastic chairs, a wooden desk with a telephone and blotter on top, a filing cabinet in one corner, and some vaguely inspirational pictures on the walls featuring sunsets and doves and small children.

Angel jiggled the lock on the filing cabinet and when it clicked, pulled open the top drawer. Using his own flashlight, he illuminated a pile of conservative and religious tracts published by the Fellowship itself and other groups of which the Fellowship presumably approved. They included The Christian Family; Other Races, Other Rules; Enemies of the People; Jewry: The Truth About the Chosen People; Killing the Future: The Reality of Abortion; and Daddy Doesn’t Love Me Anymore: Divorce and the American Family.

‘Look at this one,’ said Angel. ‘Natural Laws, Unnatural Acts: How Homosexuality Is Poisoning America.’

‘Maybe they’ve smelled your aftershave,’ I replied. ‘Anything in the other drawers?’

Angel went through them quickly. ‘Looks like more of the same.’

He opened the door into the main office. This was more elegantly furnished than the reception area; the desk was marginally more expensive, with a high-backed imitation leather chair behind it and a pair of couches in the same material against two of the walls, a low coffee table between them. The walls were covered with photographs of Carter Paragon at various events, usually surrounded by people who didn’t know any better than to be happy around him. The sunlight had shone directly onto these walls for a long time. Some of the photographs had faded or turned yellow in the corners, and a coating of dust added a further element of dullness. In the corner, beneath an ornate crucifix, stood another filing cabinet, stronger and sturdier than the one in the reception area. It took Angel a couple of tries to get it open, but when he did his brow furrowed in surprise.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘Take a look,’ he replied.

I walked over and shined my light into the open drawer. It was empty, apart from a thick coating of dust. Angel opened the other drawers in turn, but only the bottom drawer contained anything: a bottle of whiskey and two tumblers. I closed the drawer and reopened the one above it: there was only dust, and dust that obviously had not been disturbed for a long time.

‘Either this is special holy dust,’ said Angel, ‘which would explain why it has to be locked up safe at night, or there’s nothing here and there never was.’

‘It’s just a front,’ I said. ‘The whole thing is just a front.’ Just as Amy had told me, the Waterville organization was simply a mask to fool the unwary. The other Fellowship, the one with the real power, existed elsewhere.

‘There must be records of some kind,’ I said.

‘Maybe he keeps them out at his house,’ suggested Angel.

I looked at him. ‘You got anything better to do?’

‘Than burgle a guy’s house? No, not really.’ He took a closer look at the lock on the filing cabinet. ‘Tell you something else; I think someone tried to get this open before we did. There are marks around the lock. They’re small, but it was still a pretty amateur job.’

We relocked the doors and headed downstairs. At the back door, Angel paused and checked the lock with the aid of his pocket light. ‘Back door’s been opened from outside,’ he said. ‘There are fresh scratches around the keyhole, and I didn’t make them. Guess I didn’t see them because I wasn’t looking for them.’

There was nothing else to say. We weren’t the only people interested in finding out what was in Carter Paragon’s files, and I knew that we weren’t the only ones hunting Mr. Pudd. Lester Bargus had learned that too, in his final moments.

Carter Paragon’s house was quiet as we drove past. We parked our cars off the road, in the shadows cast by a stand of pine trees, and followed the boundary wall of the property around to a barred security gate at the back of the house. There were no video cameras visible, although there was an intercom on the gatepost, just as there was at the main entrance to the house. We climbed over the wall, Angel and I going first, Louis joining us after what seemed like a very reluctant pause. When he hit the soft lawn, he looked in dismay at the marks left by the white wall on his black jeans but said nothing.

We skirted the house, staying within the cover of the trees. A single light burned in a curtained room on the upper floor at the western side. The same battered blue car was parked in the drive, but its hood was cool. It hadn’t been driven that evening. The Explorer was nowhere to be seen. The curtains on the window were drawn tight, so it was impossible to see inside.

‘What do you want to do?’ asked Angel.

‘Ring the doorbell,’ I replied.

‘I thought we were going to burgle him,’ hissed Angel, ‘not try to sell him the Watchtower.’

I rang the bell anyway and Angel went quiet. Nobody answered, even when I rang it again for a good ten seconds. Angel left us and disappeared around the back of the house. A couple of minutes later he returned.

‘I think you need to take a look at this,’ he said.

We followed him to the rear of the house and entered through the open back door into a small, cheaply furnished kitchen. There was broken glass on the floor where someone had smashed a pane to get at the lock.

‘I take it that isn’t your handiwork?’ I asked Angel.

‘I won’t even dignify that with an answer.’

Louis had already drawn his gun, and I followed his lead. I looked into a couple of the rooms as we passed but they were all virtually empty; there was hardly any furniture – no pictures on the walls, no carpet on the floor. One room had a TV and VCR, faced by a pair of old armchairs and a rickety coffee table, but most of the house appeared to be unoccupied. The front room was the only one that held anything significant: hundreds and hundreds of books and pamphlets recently packed into boxes, ready to be taken away. There were American underground training manuals and improvised weapon guides; instructions for the creation of homemade munitions, timers, and detonators; catalogs of military suppliers; and any number of books on covert surveillance. In the box nearest the door lay a stack of photocopied, crudely bound volumes; stenciled on the cover of each were the words Army of God.

The name Army of God had first cropped up in 1982, when the abortion doctor Hector Zevallos and his wife were kidnapped in Illinois and their kidnappers used the name in their dealings with the FBI. Since then, Army of God calling cards had been left at the scene of clinic bombings, and the anonymously published manual I was holding in my hand had become synonymous with a particular brand of religious extremism. It was a kind of Anarchist Cookbook for religious nuts, a guide to blowing up property and, if necessary, people for the greater glory of the Lord.

Louis was holding a thick photocopied list in his hand, one of a number piled on the floor. ‘Abortion clinics, AIDS clinics, home addresses for doctors, license plate numbers for civil rights activists, feminists. Guy here on page three, Gordon Eastman, he a gay rights activist in Wisconsin.’

‘There’s a job you don’t want,’ whispered Angel. ‘Like selling dildos in Alabama.’

I tossed the Army of God manual back in the box. ‘These people are exporting low-level chaos to every cracker with a grudge and a mailbox.’

‘So where are they?’ asked Angel.

In unison, the three of us glanced at the ceiling and the second floor of the house. Angel groaned softly.

‘I had to ask.’

We climbed the stairs quietly, Louis in the lead, Angel behind him, while I brought up the rear. The room with the light was at the very end of the hallway, at the front of the house. Louis paused at the first doorway we reached and checked quickly to make sure it was empty. It contained only a bare iron bedstead and a suitcase half full of men’s clothing, while the adjoining rooms had been stripped bare of whatever furniture had been there to begin with.

‘Maybe he had a yard sale,’ suggested Louis.

‘He did, then someone wasn’t happy with his merchandise,’ responded Angel solemnly. He was standing close to the doorway of the single illuminated room, his gun by his side.

Inside was a bed, an electric heater, and a set of Home Depot shelves filled with paperback books and topped by a potted plant. There was a small closet containing some of Carter Paragon’s suits, more of which lay on the bed. A wooden chair, one of a pair, stood beside a dressing table. A portable TV sat silent and dark on a cheap unit.

Carter Paragon sat in the second wooden chair, blood on the carpet around him. His arms had been pulled behind him and secured with cuffs. He had been badly beaten; one eye had been reduced to pulp by a punch and his face was swollen and bruised. His feet were bare and two of the toes on his right foot were broken.

‘Take a look here,’ said Angel, pointing to the back of the chair.

I looked, and winced. Four of his fingernails had been torn out. I tried for a pulse. There was nothing, but the body was still warm to the touch.

Carter Paragon’s head was inclined backward, his face to the ceiling. His mouth hung open, and amid the blood lay something small and brown. I took a handkerchief from my pocket, then reached in and removed the object, holding it up to the light. A string of bloody saliva dripped from it and fell to the floor.

It was a shard of clay.

Chapter Twenty

We drove back to Scarborough that night, Angel and Louis going on ahead while I stopped briefly in Augusta. From a public phone I called the office of the Portland Press Herald, asked to be put through to the news desk, and told the woman who answered that there was a body in the house of Carter Paragon in Waterville but that the police didn’t know about it yet. Then I hung up. At the very least, the Herald would check with the cops, who would in turn head out to knock on Paragon’s door. In the meantime, I had avoided the possibility of enhanced 911, which would have pinpointed my location and raised the possibility of being intercepted by the nearest patrol car, or of my voice being recorded using RACAL or any similar procedure. Then I drove on in silence, thinking of Carter Paragon and the clay that had been deposited in his mouth as a message for whoever found him.

Angel and Louis were already making themselves at home by the time I got back to the Scarborough house. I could hear Angel in the bathroom, making the place untidy. I banged on the door.

‘Don’t make a mess,’ I warned him. ‘Rachel’s coming up, and I just cleaned it specially.’

Rachel didn’t like untidiness. She was one of those people who got a kind of satisfaction out of scrubbing away dust and dirt, even other people’s. Whenever she stayed with me in Scarborough, I would be sure to find her advancing on the bathroom or kitchen in rubber gloves with a determined look on her face.

‘She cleans your bathroom?’ Angel once asked, as if I had told him that she regularly sacrificed goats or played women’s golf. ‘I don’t even clean my bathroom, and I sure as hell ain’t gonna clean no stranger’s bathroom.’

‘I’m not a stranger, Angel,’ I explained.

‘Hey,’ he replied, ‘when it comes to bathroom stuff, everybody’s a stranger.’

In the kitchen, Louis was squatting in front of the fridge, discarding items on the floor. He checked the expiry date on some cold cuts.

‘Damn, you buy all this food at auction?’

I wondered, as I called out for a pizza delivery, if agreeing to let them inside my door had been such a good idea after all.

‘Who is this guy?’ asked Louis. We were sitting at my kitchen table, discussing the shard of clay left by Paragon’s killer while we waited for our food to arrive.

‘Al Z told me he calls himself the Golem, and Epstein’s father confirmed it. That’s all I know. You ever hear of him?’

He shook his head. ‘Means he’s very good, or an amateur. Still, cool name.’

‘Yeah, why can’t you have a cool name like that?’ asked Angel.

‘Hey, Louis is a cool name.’

‘Only if you’re the king of France. You think he got much out of Paragon?’

‘You saw what he did to him,’ I replied. ‘Paragon probably told him everything he could remember since grade school.’

‘So this Golem knows more than us?’

‘Everybody knows more than us.’

There came the sound of a car pulling up at the front of the house.

‘Pizza boy,’ I said.

Nobody else at the table made a sudden move for his wallet. ‘Guess dinner’s on me, then.’

I went to the door and took the two pizza boxes from the kid. As I gave him the cash, he spoke quietly to me.

‘I don’t want to worry you, man, but you got a guy over there watching your house.’

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘Over my right shoulder, in the trees.’

‘Don’t look at him,’ I said. ‘Just drive away.’

I tipped him an extra ten, then glanced casually to my left as his car pulled away. Among the trees, something pale hung unmoving in the darkness: a man’s face. I stepped back into the hallway, drew my gun, and called back quietly: ‘Boys, we’ve got company.’

I walked out to the porch, the gun at my side. Angel was behind me, his Glock in his hand. Louis was nowhere to be seen, but I guessed that he was already moving around the back of the house. I stepped slowly from the porch and moved forward, the gun held low, until I got a clearer view of the watcher. I saw his hairless scalp and face, his pale skin, his thin mouth and dark eyes. His hands were held slightly out from his sides, so that I could see they were empty. He wore a black suit with a white shirt and black tie under a long black overcoat. In every respect, he resembled the man who had taken out Lester Bargus and probably Carter Paragon as well.

‘Who is he?’ hissed Angel.

‘I’m guessing he’s the guy with the cool name.’

I leaned down, placed my gun on the ground, and walked toward him.

‘Bird,’ said Angel, a note of warning in his voice.

‘He’s on my property,’ I said, ‘and he knows it’s mine. Whatever he has to say, he’s here to say it to my face.’

‘Then keep to the right,’ he said. ‘He makes a move, maybe I can take him out before he kills you.’

‘Thanks. I feel safer already.’ But I kept to the right as I had been told.

When I was within a few feet of him he raised one white hand. ‘That’s close enough, Mr. Parker.’ The accent was unusual, with odd, European inflections. ‘I suggest that your friend also halt his advance through the woods. I’m not going to harm anyone here.’

I paused, then called out. ‘Louis, it’s okay.’

From about fifteen feet to my left, a dark figure separated itself from the trees, his gun held steadily in front of him. Louis didn’t lower the gun, but he didn’t make any further move either.

Up close, the man was startlingly white, with no color to his lips or his cheeks and only the faintest of dark smudges beneath his eyes. They were a washed-out blue, almost lifeless. Combined with the absence of hair on his face, they made him appear like a wax model that had been left incomplete. His scalp was deeply scarred, as were the places where his eyebrows should have been. I noticed one other thing about him: his face was dry and flaking in places, like a reptile discarding its skin.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘I think you know who I am.’

‘Golem,’ I said.

I expected him to nod, maybe even to smile, but he did neither. Instead he said: ‘The Golem is a myth, Mr. Parker. Do you believe in myths?’

‘I used to discount them, but I’ve been proved wrong in the past. Now I try to keep an open mind. Why did you kill Carter Paragon?’

‘The question is really, why did I hurt Carter Paragon? For the same reason that you broke into his house an hour later: to find out what he knew. His death was a consequence, not an intention.’

‘You killed Lester Bargus too.’

‘Mr. Bargus supplied weapons to evil men,’ he responded simply. ‘But no longer.’

‘He was unarmed.’

‘So was the rabbi.’ He pronounced it ‘raebbee.’

‘An eye for an eye,’ I said.

‘Perhaps. I know something of you too, Mr. Parker. I don’t believe you are in a position to pass judgment on me.’

‘I’m not judging you. Lester Bargus was a lowlife and nobody will miss him, but I’ve found in the past that people willing to strike at unarmed men tend not to be too particular about whom they kill. That concerns me.’

‘Once again, I do not plan to harm you or your friends. The man I want calls himself Pudd. You know of him, I think.’

‘I’ve encountered him.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

For the first time, a note of eagerness crept into his voice. I guessed that either Paragon had died before he could tell all, or, more interestingly, that he had been unable to tell his killer where Pudd had his lair because he didn’t know.

‘Not yet. I intend to find out, though.’

‘Your intentions and mine may conflict, then.’

‘Maybe we both have similar aims,’ I suggested.

‘No, we do not. Yours is a moral crusade. Those who engaged me for this task have a more specific purpose.’

‘Revenge?’

‘I do only what is required of me,’ he said. ‘No more.’ His voice was deep and the words seemed to echo inside him, as if he were a hollow man without substance, only form. ‘I came to give you a message. Do not come between me and this man. If you do, I will be forced to take action against you.’

‘That sounds like a threat.’

I didn’t even see him move. One moment he was in front of me, his hands empty, the next he was close by my side and a small center-fire derringer was at my throat, the twin barrels pointing upward to my brain. From out of the darkness, the Beamshot laser sight on Louis’s gun projected its light as he tried to find a clear shot, but my body and the darkness of the Golem’s clothes shielded him from both Louis and Angel.

‘Tell them to back off, Mr. Parker,’ he whispered, his head behind mine. ‘I want you to walk me to my car. You have two seconds.’

I shouted out the warning immediately, and Louis killed the beam. The Golem pulled me back through the trees, guiding my footsteps. The sleeve of his overcoat had rolled up on his arm and I could see the first of the small blue numbers etched on his skin. He was a concentration camp survivor. I also saw that he had no fingerprints. Instead, the skin and flesh appeared to have collapsed inward, creating a puckered, indented scar at the tip of each finger. Fire, I thought. It was fire that did this to him; fire that scarred his head, fire that took away his fingerprints,

How do you create a clay demon?

You bake it in an oven.

When we reached his car, he made me stand in front of the driver’s door, the gun at my spine, as he lowered himself into the driver’s seat.

‘Remember, Mr. Parker,’ he said to my back. ‘Do not interfere with my work.’

Then, his head low, he sped away.

Louis and Angel appeared from the trees. I was shaking as I reached up and felt the twin marks where the derringer had been pushed into my flesh.

‘You think you could have hit him before he killed me?’ I asked, as his lights faded away.

Louis thought for a moment. ‘Probably not. You think he’d have bled?’

‘No. I think he’d just have cracked.’

‘What now?’ said Angel.

‘We eat.’ Although I wasn’t sure how steady my stomach was. We began to walk back to the house.

‘You sure pick colorful people to fall out with,’ said Louis as he fell in beside me.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I guess I do.’

All three of us heard the car approaching from behind at the same time. It turned into the yard at speed and we were frozen in its headlights, our guns raised and our eyes wide. Instantly, the driver killed the beams, and still blinking, we scattered left and right. There was silence for a moment, then the driver’s door opened and Rachel Wolfe’s voice said:

‘Okay, no more coffee for you guys. Ever.’

After we had eaten, Rachel went off to take a shower. While Angel sipped his beer by the window, Louis sat at my table finishing a bottle of wine. It was Flagstone sauvignon blanc, from some new winery in Cape Town, South Africa. Louis had two mixed cases imported especially twice yearly and had brought two bottles with him in the trunk of his car. He and Rachel had spent so long cooing over it that I thought one of them must have given birth to the bottle.

‘If you’re a private eye,’ asked Angel at last, ‘how come you ain’t got no office?’

‘I can’t afford an office. If I had an office, I’d have to sell the house and sleep on my desk.’

‘Wouldn’t be such a big stretch. You got next to nothing in this old house anyway. You ever worry about burglars?’

‘Burglars in general, or just the one who happens to be standing in my kitchen right now?’

He scowled. ‘In general.’

‘I don’t have anything worth stealing.’

‘That’s what I mean. You ever think of the effect a big empty place like this is going to have on some guy who goes to the trouble of breaking into it. You better hope he ain’t agoraphobic, else you’re gonna have a lawsuit on your hands.’

‘What are you, some kind of organizer for Burglars’ Local three-oh-two?’

‘No, just a fly on the wall. One of many, judging by the state of your kitchen.’

‘What are you implying?’

‘What am I always implying? You need some company.’

‘I was thinking of getting a dog.’

‘That wasn’t what I meant, and you know it. How long you planning on keeping her at arm’s length? Till you die? You know, they don’t bury you side by side. You won’t be touching under the ground.’

‘Opportunity only knock once, man,’ drawled his partner. ‘It don’t knock, knock again, then leave a note asking you to give it a call back when you got your shit together.’

Behind us there came the sound of bare feet on boards. Rachel stood at the door, drying her hair. Louis glanced at me, then rose and placed his empty bottle in the recycling box.

‘Time for my bed,’ he said. He jerked his chin at Angel as he reached the door. ‘You too.’ He kissed Rachel on the cheek and headed out to the car.

‘You two kids don’t be staying up late smoochin’ and all,’ smiled Angel, then followed Louis into the night.

‘Brought together by a pair of gun-toting gay matchmakers,’ I said as we heard their car pull away. ‘It’ll be something to tell the grandchildren.’

Rachel looked at me, as if trying to determine if I was being flippant or not. Frankly, I wasn’t sure myself.

She immediately cut to the chase. ‘Did you hire people to watch over me in Boston?’ she asked.

‘You spotted them?’ I was impressed with her, although I got the feeling that it wasn’t mutual.

‘I guess I was on my guard. I called in the license plate of their car when I saw them change shifts. One of them followed me all the way to your front gate.’ Rachel’s brother had been a policeman, killed on duty some years back. She still had friends on various forces.

‘I was worried about you.’

Her voice rose. ‘I told you, I don’t want you feeling you have to protect me.’

‘Rachel,’ I said, ‘these people are dangerous. I was concerned for Angel too, but at least he carries a gun. What would you have done if they came for you? Thrown plates at them?’

‘You should have told me!’ She slapped her hand hard on the table. There was real anger in her eyes.

‘If I had, would you have let it go ahead? I love you, Rach, but you’re stubborn enough to head up the Teamsters.’

Some of the fury in her eyes died and the hand on the table curled into a small tight fist that shook as the tension gradually eased from her.

‘How can we be together if you’re always afraid of losing me?’ she asked gently.

I thought of the dead of St. Froid, crowding a narrow street in Portland. I thought of James Jessop and the figure I had glimpsed leaning over him, the Summer Lady. I had seen her before: in a subway train; outside the Scarborough house; and once, reflected in the window of my kitchen, as if she were standing behind me, but when I turned to look there was nobody there. Sitting in Chumley’s only a few nights before, it seemed that an accommodation with the past might be possible. But that was before Mickey Shine’s head was impaled on a tree, before James Jessop emerged from a dark forest and took my hand. How could I bring Rachel into that world?

‘I can’t compete with the dead,’ she said.

‘I’m not asking you to compete with the dead.’

‘It’s not a question of asking.’ She sat across from me, cupped her chin in her hands, and looked sad and distant.

‘I’m trying, Rachel.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know you are.’

‘I love you. I want to be with you.’

‘How?’ she whispered, lowering her head. ‘On weekends in Boston, or weekends here?’

‘How about just here?’

She looked up, as if unsure of what she had heard.

‘I mean it.’

‘When? Before I’m old?’

‘Older.’

She slapped at me playfully and I reached out to touch her hair. She gave a small smile.

‘We’ll get there,’ I said and felt her nod against my hand. ‘And sooner rather than later. I promise.’

‘We’d better,’ she said, so quietly that it was almost as if I had heard her thoughts. I held her, sensing somehow that she had more to say, but nothing came.

‘What kind of dog were you planning to get?’ she asked after a time, as the warmth of her spread across me.

I smiled down at her. She had probably heard my entire conversation with Angel and Louis. I think she had been meant to.

‘I hadn’t decided. I thought you might help me pick one from the pound.’

‘That’s a very couply thing to do.’

‘Well, we are a couple.’

‘But not a normal one.’

‘No. Louis would never forgive us if we were.’

She kissed me, and I kissed her back. Past and future receded from us like creditors temporarily denied their demands, and there was only the brief, fleeting beauty of the present to hold us. That night, I held her in my arms as she slept and tried to imagine a future for us together, but I seemed to lose us in tangles and weaves. Yet when I awoke my fist was clenched tightly closed, as if I had grasped something vital in my dreams and now refused to let it go.

Chapter Twenty-one

I lay with Rachel and listened to the rising wheeps of a flycatcher from high in the trees. His stay in New England would be short; he had probably arrived in the past week, and would be gone by the end of September, but if he managed to avoid the hawks and the owls, then his little yellow belly would soon be filled with a smorgasbord of insects as the bug population exploded. Already the first of the horseflies were circling, their large green eyes glittering hungrily. They would quickly be joined by greenheads and locusts, ticks and deerflies. At Scarborough Marsh, clouds of golden salt marsh mosquitoes would converge, the males sipping on plant juices while the females scoured the waters and the roadsides for meatier pickings.

And the birds would feed, and the spiders would grow fat upon them.

Beside me, Rachel murmured softly in her sleep, and I felt the warmth of her back against my stomach, the line of her spine beneath her pale skin like a stone path blanketed by new-fallen snow. I raised myself gently to look at her face. Strands of red hair had caught between her lips, and carefully, I brushed them away. She smiled, her eyes still closed, and her fingers softly grazed my thigh. I kissed her gently behind the ear and she leaned her head into the pillow, exposing her neck to me as I followed its lines down to her shoulder and the small hollow at her throat. Her body arched as she pressed herself against me, and all other thoughts were lost in sunlight and birdsong.

It was almost midday when I left Rachel singing in the bathroom while I went out for bagels and milk, conscious still of the weight of the Smith & Wesson in its holster beneath my arm. It made me uneasy how quickly I had slipped back into the old routine of arming myself before I left the house, even for something as simple as a trip to the store.

It was, by then, late in the morning, but today I hoped to find Marcy Becker. Circumstances had forced me to postpone the hunt for her, but more and more, I was convinced that she was the key to what had taken place on the night Grace Peltier died, one more piece of a greater picture whose dimensions I was only now beginning to understand. Faulkner, or something of him, had survived. He, in collusion with others, had slaughtered the Aroostook Baptists and his own wife, then disappeared, eventually reemerging veiled by the organization known as the Fellowship. Paragon had merely been a front, a dupe. The real Fellowship, the substance behind the shadow, was Faulkner, and Pudd was his sword.

I parked the car and took the bag of groceries from the front seat. I was still rearranging my thoughts, shifting possibilities, as I reached the kitchen door. I pushed it open and something white lifted from the floor and tumbled in the air, carried upward by the draft.

It was a sugar wrapper.

Rachel was standing at the entrance to the hallway, Pudd at her shoulder pushing her into the kitchen. She was gagged with a scarf, and her arms were secured at her back.

Behind her, Pudd froze.

I dropped the bag and reached for my gun. Simultaneously, Rachel twisted in Pudd’s grip and, with a single movement, slammed her head back into his face, connecting with the bridge of his nose. He staggered backward, swiping at Rachel with the back of his hand. My fingers were already brushing the grip of the Smith & Wesson when something struck me hard on the side of the head and I went down, bright white pain erupting in my brain. I felt hands at my side and then my gun was gone and red droplets were exploding like sunbursts in the spilt milk. I tried to get up, but my hands slipped on the wet floor and my legs felt heavy and awkward. I raised my eyes to see Pudd’s fist raining down blows on Rachel’s head as she sank to the floor. There was blood on his face and palm. Then a second impact connected with my head, followed by a third, and I didn’t feel anything else for what seemed like a very long time.

I came to in slow, arduous steps, as if I was struggling through deep red water. I was vaguely conscious of Rachel sitting on a kitchen chair by the table, still wearing her white cotton robe. Her teeth were visible where the scarf had been pulled tightly into her open mouth, and her hands were tied behind her back. There was bruising to her cheek and left eye, and blood on her forehead. Some of it had run down to stain the gag. She looked at me imploringly and her eyes flicked frantically to my right, but when I tried to move my head I was struck again and everything went black.

I drifted in and out like that for a while. My arms had been tied separately, each wrist bound to one of the spars of the chair by what felt like cable ties. They bit into my skin when I tried to move. My head ached badly, and there was blood in my eyes. Through the mists I heard a voice say:

‘So this is the man.’

It was an old man’s voice, faded and scratched like a recording heard through an old radio. I tried to lift my head and saw something move in the shadows in the hallway of the house: a slightly hunched figure, wrapped in black. Another, taller shape moved beside it, and I thought that it might be a woman.

‘I think that perhaps you should leave now,’ said a male voice. I recognized the careful, composed rhythms of Mr. Pudd’s speech.

‘I would prefer to stay,’ came the reply as the voice drew closer to me. ‘You know how I like to watch you work.’

I felt fingers on my chin as the old man spoke, and smelled salt water and leather. The stench of internal decay was on his breath. I made an effort to open my eyes fully but the room was spinning and I was conscious only of his presence, of the way his fingers clutched at my flesh, testing the bone structure beneath my skin. His hand moved to my shoulder, then my arms and my fingers.

‘No,’ said Pudd. ‘It was unwise of you to come at all, on this of all days. You must leave.’

I heard a weary exhalation of air. ‘He sees them, you know,’ said the old voice. ‘I can feel it from him. He is an unusual man, a tormented man.’

‘I will put him out of his misery.’

‘And ours,’ said the old man. ‘He has strong bones. Don’t damage his fingers or his arms. I want them.’

‘And the woman?’

‘Do what you have to do, but a promise to spare her might encourage her lover to be more cooperative.’

‘But if she dies . . .?’

‘She has beautiful skin. I can use it.’

‘How much of it?’ asked Pudd.

There was a pause.

‘All of it,’ said the old man.

I heard footsteps on the kitchen floor beside me. The red film over my eyes was fading now as I blinked away the blood. I saw the strange, nameless woman with the scarred neck gazing down at me with narrow, hateful eyes. She touched my cheek with her fingers, and I shuddered.

‘Leave now,’ said Mr. Pudd. She stayed beside me for another moment or two, then moved away almost regretfully. I saw her blend into the shadows, and then two figures moved through the half-open front door and into the yard. I tried to keep them in sight until a slap to my cheek brought me back and someone else moved into my line of vision, a woman dressed in a blue sweater and pants, her hair loose on her shoulders.

‘Miss Torrance,’ I said, my mouth dry. ‘I hope you got a reference from Paragon before he died.’

She hit me on the back of my head. It wasn’t a hard slap. It didn’t have to be. She caught me right on the spot where the earlier blows had landed. The pain was almost visible to me, like lightning flashes in the night sky, and I grew nauseous with pain. I let my head hang down, my chin on my chest, and tried to keep myself from retching. From the front of the house came the sound of a car pulling away, and then there was movement ahead of me and a pair of brown shoes appeared at the kitchen door. I followed the shoes up to the cuffs of the brown pants, then the slightly stretched waistband, the brown check jacket, and finally, the dark, hooded eyes of Mr. Pudd.

He looked considerably worse than when we had last met. The remains of his right ear were covered in gauze, and his nose had swollen where Rachel’s head had impacted upon it. There were still traces of blood around his nostrils.

‘Welcome back, sir,’ he said, smiling. ‘Welcome indeed.’

He gestured to Rachel with one gloved hand. ‘We had to make our own entertainment while you were gone, but I don’t believe there was much that your whore could tell us. On the other hand, Mr. Parker, I believe you may know considerably more.’

He stepped forward so that he stood over Rachel. With one movement he tore the sleeve of her robe, exposing the whiteness of her arm, speckled here and there with small brown freckles. Miss Torrance, I noticed, now stood in front of me and slightly to my right, her own Kahr K9 leveled on me while my Smith & Wesson lay in its holster on the table. The remains of my cell phone were scattered across the floor and I saw that the wire to the telephone in the kitchen had been pulled out.

‘As you know, Mr. Parker, we are looking for something,’ began Pudd, ‘something that was taken from us by Ms. Peltier. That item is still missing. So too, we now believe, is a passenger who may have been in the car with the late Ms. Peltier shortly before she died. We think that individual may have the item we are looking for. I would like you to confirm who that person is so that we can retrieve it. I would also like you to tell us all that passed between you and the late Mr. Al Z, everything of which you and Mr. Mercier spoke two nights ago, and all that you know of the man who killed Mr. Paragon.’

I didn’t reply. Pudd remained silent for about thirty seconds, then sighed. ‘I know that you are a very stubborn man. I think you might even be willing to die rather than give me what I want. It’s very laudable, I admit, to give up one’s life to save another. It is, in a sense, what brings us to this point. After all, we are all the fruit of one man’s sacrifice, are we not? And you will die, Mr. Parker, regardless of what you tell me. Your life is about to end.’

He leaned over Rachel’s shoulder and grasped her chin in his hand, forcing her to look at me. ‘But are you willing to sacrifice the life of another to protect Grace Peltier’s friend, or to fuel your strange crusade? That is the real test: how many lives is this person worth? Have you even met the individual in question? Can someone whom you do not know be worth more to you than the life of this woman? Do you have the right to give up Ms. Wolfe here to safeguard your own principles?’

He released his grip on Rachel’s jaw and shrugged. ‘These are difficult questions, Mr. Parker, but rest assured we will shortly have answers to them.’ From the floor he lifted a large plastic case, its surface covered in tiny perforations. He placed it on the table beside his own Beretta, then opened it so that it faced me. Inside lay five plastic containers. Three of them were boxes of four or five inches in length, while the other two were simply small containers for herbs and spices adapted to his purpose.

He withdrew the two spice jars, the reusable kind with a perforated lid. In each of them, something small and multilegged tested the glass with a tiny raised limb. Pudd placed one of the jars on the table, then walked over to me with the other, holding it gently between his thumb and forefinger so that my view of its contents was unobscured.

‘Do you recognize this?’ he asked. Inside the jar, the light brown recluse spider raised itself up against the glass, revealing its abdomen before it slid back down, its stringy legs probing at the air. On its cephalothorax was the small, dark brown, violin-shaped mark that gave the spider its common name of fiddleback.

‘It’s a recluse, Mr. Parker, Loxosceles reclusa. I’ve been telling it what you did to its brothers and sisters in your mailbox. You burnt them alive. I don’t consider that to be very sporting.’

He held the jar an inch from my eye, then shook it gently. Inside, the spider grew increasingly agitated, tearing around the confined space, its legs constantly moving.

‘Some people consider recluses to be nasty, verminous arachnids, but I rather admire them. I find them to be remarkably aggressive. I sometimes feed them black widows, and you would be surprised at how quickly a widow can become a tasty snack for a family of recluses.

‘But the most interesting aspect of all, Mr. Parker, is the venom.’ His eyes glowed brightly beneath their hoods and I caught a trace of a faint smell rising from him, an unpleasant, chemical scent, as if his body had begun to produce its own toxin as his excitement grew. ‘The venom it uses to attack humans is not the same as that which it uses to paralyze and kill its insect prey. There is an extra component, an additional toxin, in the venom it uses against us. It is as if this little spider is aware of us, has always been aware of us, and has found a way to hurt us. A most unpleasant way.’

He moved away until he was, once again, beside Rachel. He brushed the jar against her cheek. She shrank from the touch, and I saw that she had begun to tremble. Tears ran from her eyes. Mr. Pudd’s nostrils flared, as if he could smell her fear and disgust.

But then she looked at me, and shook her head gently once.

‘The venom causes necrosis. It makes the white blood cells turn against their own body. The skin swells, then starts to rot, and the body is unable to repair the damage. Some people suffer greatly. Some even die. I heard of one man who died within an hour of being bitten. Amazing, don’t you think, that all of this suffering could be caused by such a tiny spider? The late Mr. Shine was given an intimate revelation of its workings, as I’m sure he told you before he died.

‘But then, some people are not affected at all. The venom simply has no effect on them. And that’s what makes this little test so interesting. Unless you tell me what I need to know, I am going to apply the recluse to the skin of your whore. She probably won’t even feel its bite. Then we will wait. The antidote to recluse venom must be administered within half an hour for it to be effective. If you are unhelpful, then I am afraid we will be here for much longer than that. We will start with her arms, then move on to her face and her breasts. If that proves unsuccessful in moving you, we may have to progress to some of my other specimens. I have a black widow in my case, and a sand spider from South Africa of which I am particularly fond. She will be able to taste it in her mouth as she dies.’

He raised the little jar.

‘For the last time, Mr. Parker, who was the second passenger, and where is that person now?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I haven’t figured that out yet.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ Slowly, Pudd began to unscrew the top of the jar.

I twisted in my chair as he held the jar close to Rachel once again. Pudd took the movement as a sign of my discomfort, and his excitement grew. But he was wrong. These were old chairs. They had been in this house for the best part of fifty years. They had been broken, then repaired and broken again. Using the pressure of my shoulders and by twisting my hand, I could feel the spar in the back of my chair loosening. I pushed up with my shoulders and heard a faint crack. The spar rose about a quarter of an inch as the frame of the chair started to come apart.

‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’

I gripped harder with my right hand and felt the spar turn in its hole. It was almost free. Beside me, Miss Torrance’s attention was focused on Rachel and the spider. Pudd flipped off the lid and tipped the jar over, trapping the recluse on the skin of Rachel’s arm. I saw the spider respond as he shifted the jar slightly, provoking it into a bite. Rachel’s eyes grew large and she gave a muffled cry from behind the gag. Beside her, Pudd opened his mouth and emitted a small gasp as the spider bit, then stared at me with absolute, perverse joy.

‘Bad news, Mr. Parker!’ he cried, as the spar came free in my hand and I spun my wrist, pushing the spear of wood with all the force I could muster into the left side of the woman. I felt brief resistance before it penetrated the skin between her third and fourth ribs and shot through. She screamed as I rose. My forehead impacted with her face and she lurched back against the sink, her gun falling away. Simultaneously, Rachel shifted her weight in the chair, causing it to topple backward and forcing Pudd away from the table. With the chair still dangling from my left hand, I reached for my gun and fired two shots at Pudd’s body. Splinters flew from the door frame as he dived into the hallway.

Beside me, the woman pawed at my legs. I kicked out at her and felt my foot connect. The pawing stopped. I shrugged the remains of the chair from my arm and reached the hallway just in time to see the front door slam open and Pudd’s long brown frame disappear to the right. I sprang down the hall, risked a quick glance from the doorway, and pulled my head in quickly as the shots came. He had a second gun. I took a breath, then rolled out onto the porch and started firing, the Smith & Wesson bucking in my right hand. Pudd disappeared into the trees and I followed, increasing my pace as I heard the car start. Seconds later, the Cirrus burst from cover. I kept firing as it shot down the drive and onto Mussey Road, the rear window shattering and one of its back lights exploding as the gun locked empty. I let him go, then ran back to the house and untied Rachel. She immediately retreated into the hall, curling in on herself and rubbing again and again at the spot where the recluse had bitten her.

The woman was crawling to the back door, the spar still buried in her side and a trail of black blood following her across the floor. Her nose was broken and one eye had been closed by the kick to her head. She looked blearily at me as I leaned over her, her vision and her life already fading.

‘Where has he gone?’ I hissed.

She shook her head and spat blood in my face. I gripped the spar and twisted. Her teeth gritted in agony.

‘Where has he gone?’ I repeated. Miss Torrance beat at the ground with one hand. Her mouth opened to its fullest extent as she squirmed and writhed then went into spasm. I released my hold on the spar and stepped back as her eyes rolled back into her head and she died. I patted her down but there was no ID on her body, no indication of where Pudd might be based. I kicked once at her legs in impotent rage, then reloaded my gun with a spare mag before walking Rachel to my car.

Chapter Twenty-two

I called Angel and Louis from the Maine Medical Center, but there was no reply from their room at the inn. I then placed a call to the Scarborough PD. I told them that a couple had broken into my house, assaulted my girlfriend, and one of them was now lying dead on my kitchen floor. I also gave them a description of the Cirrus Mr. Pudd had driven away from the house, complete with smashed rear windshield and busted back light.

The Scarborough PD was equipped with QED, or computer-enabled despatch, which meant that the nearest patrol car would be immediately assigned to the house. They would also alert neighboring departments and the state police in an effort to find Pudd before he ditched the car.

At Maine Medical they dosed Rachel with antivenin after she had replied to a barrage of questions to which I was not privy, then put her on a gurney in a curtained-off section to rest up. By then Angel and Louis had got my message, and Angel was now seated beside her, talking to her gently, while Louis waited outside in the car. There were still people with questions to ask about the events in Dark Hollow the previous winter, and Louis was considerably more conspicuous than Angel.

Rachel had not spoken during the ride to the hospital. Instead, she had simply held her hand over the area where the spider had bitten her, shaking softly. She had also suffered some cuts and bruises to the head, but there was no concussion and she was going to be okay. I was X-rayed and then given ten stitches to close up the wound in my scalp. It was already midafternoon, and I was still feeling dazed and numb when Ramos, one of the detectives out of Scarborough, arrived, accompanied by the department’s detective, Wallace MacArthur, and a whole cartload of questions. Their first question was: who was the injured woman? More to the point, where was she?

‘She was lying there when I left,’ I said.

‘Well, she wasn’t lying there when the first patrol got to your place. There was a hell of a lot of blood on your kitchen floor, and more outside in the yard, but there was no dead woman.’

He was seated across from me in a small private room usually used to comfort relatives of recently deceased patients. ‘You sure she was dead?’ he asked.

I nodded and sipped at my lukewarm coffee. ‘I stuck a piece of chair halfway into her body, right between numbers three and four, and I pushed up hard. I saw her die. There’s no way she got up and walked away.’

‘You think this guy, this Mr. Pudd, came back for her?’ he asked.

‘You find a suitcase full of spiders on my kitchen table?’

MacArthur shook his head.

‘Then it was him.’

It was a huge risk for him to take; he probably had only a few minutes to retrieve her. ‘I think he’s trying to keep the waters as muddy as he can,’ I said. ‘Without the woman, there’s no positive ID, nothing that can link her to him. Or to anyone else,’ I added.

‘You know who she is?’

I nodded. ‘I think her name is Torrance. She was Carter Paragon’s secretary.’

‘The late Carter Paragon?’ MacArthur sat back, opened a fresh page in his notebook, and waited for me to begin. From across the hall, I heard Rachel calling for me.

‘I’ll be back,’ I told MacArthur. For a second or two he looked like he might be tempted to sit on me and shake me by the throat until I gave up what I knew. Instead, he nodded reluctantly and let me leave.

Angel stood and discreetly walked to the window as I approached her. Rachel was pale, and there was sweat on her brow and upper lip, but she gripped my hand tightly as I sat on the edge of her bed.

‘How you doing?’

‘I’m tougher than you think, Parker.’

‘I know how tough you are.’

She nodded. ‘I guess you do.’ She looked past me to the room where Ramos and MacArthur waited.

‘What are you going to tell them?’

‘Everything that I can.’

‘But not everything that you know?’

‘That would be unwise.’

‘You’re still going to see the Beckers, aren’t you?’ she asked softly.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m going with you. Maybe I can succeed in convincing them where you couldn’t. You and Louis go walking in on those people in your current mood and you’re likely to scare them to death. And if we do find Marcy, a friendly face will help.’

She was right. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Rest up for a while, and then we’ll leave. Nobody’s going anywhere without you.’

She gave me a satisfied smile and released my hand. Angel resumed his seat beside her bed. His Glock was in an IWB holster at his waist, concealed by his long shirt.

From the room in which I had left MacArthur and Ramos came the sound of raised voices. I saw Ramos emerge from the room at a sprint. MacArthur was right behind him, but he stopped when he saw me.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

‘Trawler spotted Jack Mercier’s yacht at low revs a couple of miles out. Tide’s carrying it in to shore.’ MacArthur swallowed. ‘Captain says there’s a body lashed to the mast.’

The cruiser, named the Revenant, had docked at the Portland marina five days earlier. It was a twenty-five-foot Grady White Sailfish 25, with twin 200-horsepower Suzuki outboards, and its owner paid $175 in advance for one week’s mooring, at the standard rate of $1 per foot per night. The name, address, phone number, and boat registration number he gave to Portland Yacht Services, administrators of the marina, were all false.

He was a small man, cross-eyed, with a tightly shaven skull. He spent most of his time in or near his boat, sleeping in its single compartment. By day he sat on the deck with a pair of binoculars in one hand, a cell phone in the other, and a book on his lap. He didn’t speak, and rarely left the boat for longer than fifteen minutes. His eyes seemed almost permanently fixed on the waters of Casco Bay.

Early on the morning of the sixth day, a group of six people – two women, four men – boarded a yacht on the bay. The boat was the Eliza May, a seventy-footer built three years earlier by Hodgdon Yachts in East Boothbay. Its deck was teak, its body epoxy, glass, and mahogany over Alaska cedar. As well as the Doyle sail on its eighty-foot mast, it had a 150-horsepower Perkins diesel engine and could sleep seven people in luxury. It was equipped with a forty-mile radar, GPS, LORAN, and WeatherFax, as well as VHF and single sideband radio and an EPIRB emergency system. It had cost Jack Mercier over $2.5 million and was too big to moor at Scarborough, so it had a permanent berth at Portland.

The Eliza May left Portland for the last time shortly after 6:00 A.M. There was a northwest wind blowing, superb weather for yachting, and the wind tossed Mercier’s white hair as he steered her into Casco Bay. Deborah Mercier sat apart from her husband, head down. By then, the cross-eyed man had been joined by two other people, a woman in blue and a slim red-haired man dressed in brown, both carrying tuna rods. As the Eliza May headed out into deep waters, the Revenant left the harbor and shadowed it, unseen.

I caught up with MacArthur at the elevator.

‘Mercier’s involved in this,’ I told him. There was no point in keeping Mercier’s role secret any longer.

‘The hell . . .?’

‘Believe me. I’ve been working for him.’

I could see him considering his options, so I decided to preempt him. ‘Take me along,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you what I know on the way.’

He paused and gave me a long, hard look, then nodded and reached out his hand. ‘You can come as far as Pine Point. Hand over the gun, Charlie,’ he said.

Reluctantly, I gave him the Smith & Wesson. He ejected the magazine and checked the chamber, then handed it back to me. ‘You can leave it with your friend,’ he said.

I nodded, walked into Rachel’s room, and handed the gun to Angel. As I turned to leave I felt a light tug at my waistband, and the coolness of his Glock sliding against my skin. I took my jacket from the chair, nodded politely to Angel, then followed MacArthur down the hallway.

Mercier’s last log entry recorded that the Revenant contacted the Eliza May shortly after 9:30 A.M, about fifty miles out from port. The northwest wind might have been ideal for yachting, but it could also carry a cruiser in distress out to sea, and the Revenant was in trouble. The Revenant’s distress call came in on VHF but the Eliza May was the only boat to hear it, despite the fact that there were other boats two and three miles away. The radio had been set to low range, maybe one watt, to prevent anyone else hearing the signal and answering. The Revenant’s batteries were almost dead, and it was drifting. Mercier adjusted his course, and went at speed to his death.

I told MacArthur almost everything, from my first meeting with Jack Mercier to that morning’s encounter with Mr. Pudd. The omissions were few, but crucial: I left out Marcy Becker, Mickey Shine’s murder, and our unscheduled early viewing of Carter Paragon’s body. I also made no mention of the fact that I suspected that someone in the state police, possibly Lutz, Voisine, or both, was involved in Grace Peltier’s death.

‘You think this Pudd killed the Peltiers?’

‘Probably. The Fellowship, or at least what the public saw of it, is just a front for someone or something else. Grace Peltier found out what that was, and it was enough to get her killed.’

‘And whatever Grace knew, this Pudd thought Curtis Peltier also knew, and now he thinks you might know too?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘But you don’t.’

‘Not yet.’

‘If Jack Mercier’s dead, there’ll be hell to pay,’ said MacArthur fervently. Beside him, Ramos nodded silently in agreement as MacArthur leaned back to look at me.

‘And don’t think you’ll get away without picking up your share of the check,’ he added.

We drove along U.S. 1 south before turning left onto 9 and heading for the coast, past the redbrick Baptist Church and the white bell tower of St. Jude’s Catholic Church. At the Pine Point Fire Department on King Street, seven or eight cars were parked in the lot and the doors were wide open. A fireman in jeans and a Fire Department T-shirt waved us on toward the Pine Point Fishermen’s Co-op, where Marine 4 was already in the water.

The Scarborough PD used two boats for marine duty. Marine 1 was a seventy-horsepower inflatable based at Spurwink, to the north of Pine Point, and launched from Ferry Beach. Marine 4 was a twenty-one-foot Boston Whaler powered by a 225-horsepower Johnson, based at the Pine Point Co-op and berthed, when not required, in the Fire Department. It had a crew of five, all of whom were already on board as we pulled up at the gray-and-white co-op building. The harbormaster’s boat was alongside the Whaler, and there were two Scarborough PD officers on board. Both carried 12-gauge Mossberg shotguns, the standard arms kept in Scarborough PD patrol cars. There were two more policemen in the Whaler carrying M-16s. All wore blue windbreakers. From the jetty, curious fishermen looked on.

Both Ramos and MacArthur shook on their waterproofs as I followed them to the boat. MacArthur was climbing down to the Whaler when he saw me.

‘The hell do you think you’re going?’

‘Come on, Wallace,’ I pleaded. ‘Don’t do this. I’ll stay out of the way. Mercier was my client. I don’t want to be waiting here like an expectant parent if something has happened to him. You don’t let me go with you, I’ll just have to bribe a fisherman to take me out and then I’ll really be in the way. Worse, I might just disappear and then you’ll have lost a crucial witness. They’ll have you back directing traffic.’

MacArthur glanced at the other men on the boat. The captain, Ted Adams, shrugged.

‘Get in the damn boat,’ hissed MacArthur. ‘You even stand up to stretch and I’ll feed you to the lobsters.’

I followed him down, Ramos behind me. There were no more windbreakers so I pulled my jacket tight around me and huddled on the plastic bench, my hands in my pockets and my chin to my chest, as the Whaler pulled away from the dock.

‘Give me your hand,’ said MacArthur.

I extended my right hand and he slapped the cuffs on it, then locked me to the rail of the boat.

‘What happens if we sink?’ I asked.

‘Then your body won’t drift away.’

The boat surged through the dark, gray waters of Saco Bay, white foam erupting as it went. MacArthur stood beside the covered cockpit looking back to Scarborough, the horizon bobbing merrily with the movement of the boat on the sea.

In the wheelhouse, Adams was responding to someone on the radio. ‘Still moving,’ he said to MacArthur. ‘Only two miles out now, heading to shore.’ I looked out past the seated policemen, past the crew at the cockpit, and imagined that I saw, like a tiny rip in the sky, the long, thin mast of the yacht. Something clawed at my insides, the last desperate scratchings of a cat left to drown in a bag. The prow dipped and sent a fine spray lashing over the deck, soaking me. I shivered as gulls glided above the surface of the water, calling noisily over the sound of the engine.

‘There she is,’ said Adams. His finger pointed to a small green dot on the radar screen while, simultaneously, the half-seen needle of the mast joined a dark spot on the horizon. Beside me, Ramos checked the safety on his Glock .40.

Slowly the shape acquired definition: a white seventy-footer with a tall mast, drifting on the waves. A smaller boat, the lobster fisherman out of Portland that had first spotted the yacht, shadowed it from a distance. From the north came the sound of Marine 1 approaching. The two boats always responded to a call together for safety reasons.

Marine 4 turned to the south and came around so that it was on the yacht’s eastern side, its lines silhouetted before the setting sun. As the Whaler circled it, there was blood visible on the deck that even the salt water hadn’t managed to fully erase, and the wood was pitted with what looked like bullet holes. Close to the bow of the boat was a black scorch mark where a flare appeared to have ignited on the deck.

And at the top of the mast, partially concealed by the furled sail, a body hung with its arms outstretched and tied to the crossbeam. It was naked but for a pair of white boxers, now stained black and red. The legs were white, the feet tied together, a second rope around its chest lashing it to the mast before heading down taut at an angle, tied off to one of the rails. The body was scorched from the stomach to the head. Most of its hair was gone, its eyes were now dark hollows, and its teeth were bared in a rictus of pain, but still I knew that I was looking at the remains of Jack Mercier.

The Whaler hailed the yacht and, when no response came, drew up off the port side while a young crewman climbed on board the Eliza May and killed the engine. Ramos and MacArthur joined him, pulling on protective gloves before they stepped shakily on board.

‘Detectives,’ the crewman called from the cockpit. They headed toward him, trying not to touch anything with their hands as the boat rocked gently in the waves. The crewman pointed to where a long, dark trail of blood followed the steps down. Someone had been dragged, dead or dying, belowdecks. MacArthur knelt down and examined the steps more closely. The end of a long, blond hair curled out of the blood. He rummaged in his pockets and removed a small evidence bag, then carefully lifted the hair and stored it away.

‘You stay here,’ he said to the crewman as Ramos moved behind him. From the deck of the two police boats, guns were trained on the other two of the yacht’s three entryways belowdecks. Then MacArthur took the lead, using the very edges of the steps, the only parts not covered in blood, to make his way below.

This is what they found.

There was a small, dark passageway, with the head to the immediate right and a quarter berth to the left. The head was empty and smelled of chemicals; a shower curtain was pulled back, revealing a clean white shower stall. The quarter berth was unoccupied. The passageway was carpeted, and the material squelched beneath their feet as they walked, blood bubbling up from between the fibers. They passed the galley and a second pair of facing doors that led into two sleeping compartments, both fitted with small double beds and closets big enough to take only two pairs of shoes set side by side.

The door leading into the main salon was closed and no sounds came from behind it. Ramos looked at Wallace and shrugged. Wallace retreated back into one of the bedrooms, his gun in his hand. Ramos moved into the other and called out: ‘Police. If there’s anybody in there, come out now and keep your hands up.’

There was no response. Wallace stepped back into the passage, reached for the handle of the door and, keeping his back against the wall, slowly pulled it open.

There was blood on the walls, on the ceiling, and on the floor. It dripped from the light fittings and obscured the paintings between the portholes. Three naked bodies hung upside down from the beams in the ceiling: two women, one man. One woman had gray-blond hair that almost touched the floor; the other was small and dark. The man was bald, apart from a thin circle of gray hair, which was mostly soaked red with his blood. The throat of each had been cut, although the blonde also had stab wounds to her stomach and legs. It was her blood on the steps and soaked into the carpet. Deborah Mercier had tried to run, or to intervene, when they took her husband.

The smell of blood was overpowering in the confined space, and the bodies swayed and bumped against one another with the rocking of the boat. They had been killed facing the door, and the spray from their arteries had hit only three sides of the cabin.

But there was still some blood behind them. It formed a pattern that could be seen between the moving bodies. MacArthur reached forward and stopped the swaying of Deborah Mercier’s corpse. She hung to the left of the others, so that by stilling her the others also grew still. She was cold, and he shuddered at the touch, but now he could see clearly what had been written behind them in bright, red arterial blood.

It was one word:

SINNERS

Chapter Twenty-three

What harm can it do?

Jack Mercier’s words, spoken on the day he first asked me to look into Grace’s death, came back to me as I learned of what had been found in the main salon of the Eliza May, its decks stained with red and Jack Mercier’s crucified form hanging from the mast. They came back to me as I saw the pictures of the yacht in the following day’s papers, smaller photographs beside it of Jack and Deborah Mercier, and of the attorney Warren Ober and his wife, Eleanor.

What harm can it do?

I recalled myself sitting, wet and shivering, in the bow of Marine 4, surrounded by the cries of gulls as arrangements were made to tow the Eliza May back to shore. I was there for over two hours, the lineaments of Jack Mercier’s body slowly fading and growing indistinct as evening fell. MacArthur was the only one who spoke to me, and then only to detail the discovery of the bodies and the word written in blood upon the wall behind them.

Sinners.

‘The Aroostook Baptists,’ I said.

MacArthur grimaced. ‘Little early for a copycat, don’t you think?’

‘It’s not a copycat killing,’ I answered. ‘It’s the same people.’

MacArthur sat down heavily beside me. Seawater swirled around his black leather shoes. ‘The Baptists have been dead for over thirty years,’ he began. ‘Even if whoever killed them was still alive, why would he – or they – start again now?’

I was too tired to go on hiding things, much too tired.

‘I don’t think they ever stopped killing,’ I told him. ‘They’ve always been doing it, quietly and discreetly. Mercier was closing in on them, trying to put pressure on the Fellowship through the courts and the IRS. He wanted to draw them out, and he succeeded. They responded by killing him and those who were prepared to stand alongside him: Yossi Epstein in New York, Alison Beck in Minneapolis, Warren Ober, even Grace Peltier.’

Now, their countermeasures were almost complete. The word on the wall indicated that, a deliberate echo of the slaughter with which they had begun and that had only recently been revealed. There was now one final act left to perform: the recovery of the missing Apocalypse. Once that was accomplished, they would disappear, vanishing below the surface to lie dormant in some quiet, dark cavern of the honeycomb world.

‘Who are they?’ asked MacArthur.

‘The Faulkners,’ I replied. ‘The Faulkners are the Fellowship.’

MacArthur shook his head. ‘You’re in a shitload of trouble,’ he said.

The sound of Marine 1 approaching us disturbed my thoughts. ‘They’re going back to pick up the local ME, have the victims declared dead at the scene,’ said MacArthur, unlocking the cuffs. ‘You go back with them. Someone will take you to the department. I’ll follow on within the hour and we’ll pick up this discussion where we left off.’

He watched me as I stepped carefully from the Whaler into the smaller boat. It turned in a broad arc and headed for the shore, leaving the Eliza May behind. The sun was setting, and the waves were afire. Jack Mercier’s body hung dark against the red sky like a black flag set in the firmament.

At the Scarborough Police Department I sat for a time in the lobby and watched the dispatchers behind their protective screen. My clothes were soaked and I couldn’t seem to get warm again. I found myself reading, over and over, warnings against rabies and DUI posted on the bulletin boards. I felt like I was coming down with a fever. My head ached and the skin on my scalp seemed to be constricting around the stitches.

Eventually I was led into the general-purpose briefing room. The command staff had just broken up their meeting in the smaller conference room, where MacArthur had been chewed out for letting me on board the Whaler. I was trying to draw in some heat through a cup of coffee, a patrol officer at the door to make sure I didn’t try to steal one of the canine trophies stored in the cabinet, when MacArthur joined me, accompanied by Captain Bobby Melia, one of two captains in the force who were second in command to Chief Byron Fischer. MacArthur carried a tape recorder with him. They sat across from me, the door behind them closed, and asked me to take them through it all again. Then Norman Boone arrived from the ATF, and Ellis Howard from the Portland PD.

And I went through it again.

And again.

And again.

I was tired, cold, and hungry. Each time I told them what I knew, it got harder and harder to remember what I had left out, and their questions became more and more probing. But I couldn’t tell them about Marcy Becker, because if the Fellowship did have connections among the police, then telling anyone in law enforcement about her would be tantamount to signing her death warrant. They were threatening to charge me as an accessory to Mercier’s murder, in addition to witholding evidence, obstructing justice, and anything else that the law allowed. I let the waves of their anger break over me.

Two bodies were missing from the boat: those of the porn star and Quentin Harrold, both of whom had gone out on the yacht to guard the Obers and the Merciers. The Scarborough PD suspected they had died in the first burst of gunfire. Jack Mercier had tried unsuccessfully to fire off a flare but had instead ignited his own clothing. There was a Colt revolver in the cabin where the bodies were found, but it had not been fired. Cartridges were scattered on the floor beside it where someone had made a last, desperate effort to load.

What harm can it do?

I wanted to get away from there. I wanted to talk to the Beckers, to force them – at gunpoint if necessary – to tell me where their daughter was hiding. I wanted to know what Grace Peltier had found. I wanted to sleep.

Most of all, I wanted to find Mr. Pudd, and the mute, and the old man who had wanted Rachel’s skin: the Reverend Faulkner. His wife was among the dead of St. Froid but he was not, and neither were his two children. A boy and a girl, I remembered. What age would they be now: late forties, early fifties? Ms. Torrance had been too young, as was Lutz. Unless there were others hidden elsewhere, which I doubted, that left only Pudd and the mute: they were Leonard and Muriel Faulkner, dispatched, when required, to do their father’s bidding.

They gave me a ride back to my car after eleven that night, threats of retribution still ringing in my ears. Angel and Louis were with Rachel when I got back, drinking beer and watching television with the volume almost muted. All three of them left me alone while I stripped and showered, then pulled on a pair of chinos and a sweater. A new cell phone lay on the kitchen table, the memory card salvaged from the wreckage of the old phone and reinstalled. I took a bottle of Pete’s Wicked Ale from the fridge and twisted it open. I could smell the hops and the distinctive fruity odor. I raised it to my mouth and took one mouthful, my first sip of alcohol in two years, then held it for as long as I was able. When at last I swallowed, it was warm and thick with saliva. I poured the rest into a glass and drank half of it back, then sat looking at what remained. After a time, I took the glass to the sink and poured the beer down the drain.

It wasn’t exactly a moment of revelation, more a confirmation. I didn’t want it, not now. I could take it or leave it, and I chose to let it go. Amy had been right; it was just something to fill the hole, and I had found other ways to do that. But for now, nothing in a bottle was going to make things better.

I shivered again. Despite the shower and the change of clothes, I still hadn’t been able to get warm. I could taste the salt on my lips, could smell the brine in my hair, and each time I did I was back on the waters of the bay, the Eliza May drifting slowly before me and Jack Mercier’s body swaying gently against the sky.

I placed the bottle in the recycling box and looked up to see Rachel leaning against the door.

‘You’re not finishing it?’ she said softly.

I shook my head. For a moment or two, I couldn’t speak. I felt something breaking up inside of me, like a stone in my heart that my system was now ready to expunge. A pain at the very center of my being began to spread throughout my body: to my fingers and toes, to my groin, to the tips of my ears. Wave after wave of it rocked me, so that I had to hold on to the sink to stop myself from falling. I squeezed my eyes closed tightly and saw:

A young woman emerging from an oil barrel by a canal in Louisiana, her teeth bared in her final agony and her body encased in a cocoon of transformed body fats, dumped by the Traveling Man after he had blinded her and killed her; a little dead boy running through my house in the middle of the night, calling me to play; Jack Mercier, burning with a desperate flame as his wife was dragged bleeding belowdecks; blood and water mixing on the pale, distorted features of Mickey Shine; my grandfather, his memory fading slowly away; my father sitting at a kitchen table, ruffling my hair with his great hand; and Susan and Jennifer, splayed across a kitchen chair – lost to me and yet not lost, gone and yet forever with me . . .

The pain made a rushing sound as it passed through me, and I thought I detected voices calling me over and over as, at last, it reached its peak. My body tensed, my mouth opened, and I heard myself speak.

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ I whispered.

Her brow furrowed. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘It – wasn’t – my – fault,’ I repeated. There were huge gaps between the words as I retched each one up and spat it, blinking, into the light. I licked my upper lip and tasted, again, salt and beer. My head was pounding in time to my heart, and I thought I was going to burn up. Past and present twisted and intertwined with each other like snakes in a pit. New deaths and old, old guilts and new, the pain of them white hot even as I spoke.

‘None of it,’ I said. My eyes were blurring, and now there was fresh salt water on my cheek and lips. ‘I couldn’t have saved them. If I’d been with them, I’d have died too. I did everything that I could. I’m still trying to do it, but I couldn’t have saved them.’

And I didn’t know about whom I was speaking. I think I was talking about them all: the man on the mast; Grace and Curtis Peltier; a woman and child, a year earlier, lying on the floor of a cheap apartment; another woman, another child, in the kitchen of our home in Brooklyn a year before that again; my father, my mother, my grandfather; a little boy with a bullet wound for an eye.

All of them.

And I heard them calling my name from the places in which they lay, their voices echoing through burrows and pits, caverns and caves, hollows and apertures, until the honeycomb world vibrated with the sound of them.

‘I tried,’ I whispered. ‘But I couldn’t save them all.’

And then her arms were around me and the world collapsed, waiting for us to rebuild it again in our image.

Chapter Twenty-four

I slept a strange, disturbed sleep in her arms that night, twisting and clawing at unseen things. Angel and Louis were in the spare room and all of the doors were locked and bolted, so we were safe for a time, but she had no peace beside me. I imagined I was sinking into dark waters where Jack Mercier waited for me, his skin burning beneath the waves, Curtis Peltier beside him, his arms bleeding black blood into the depths. When I tried to rise they held me back, their dead hands digging into my legs. My head throbbed and my lungs ached, the pressure increasing upon me until at last I was forced to open my mouth and the salt water flooded my nose and mouth.

Then I would wake, over and over, to find her close beside me, whispering softly, her hands moving in a slow rhythm across my brow and through my hair. And so the night passed.

The next morning we ate a hurried breakfast, then prepared to separate. Louis, Rachel, and I would head for Bar Harbor and a final confrontation with the Beckers. Angel had repaired the phone at the house and would stay there so we would have room for maneuver if needed. When I checked my cell phone messages on the way to the car, there was only one: it came from Ali Wynn, asking me to call her.

‘You told me to contact you if somebody started asking about Grace,’ she said, when I reached her. ‘Somebody did.’

‘Who was it?’

‘A policeman. He came to the restaurant yesterday. He was a detective. I saw his shield.’

‘You get his name?’

‘Lutz. He said he was investigating Grace’s death. He wanted to know when I saw her last.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘Just what I told you, and nothing else.’

‘What did you think of him?’

She considered the question. ‘He frightened me. I didn’t go home last night. I stayed with a friend.’

‘Have you seen him since yesterday?’

‘No, I think he believed me.’

‘Did he tell you how he got your name?’

‘Grace’s tutor. I talked to her last night. She said she gave him the names of two of Grace’s friends: me, and Marcy Becker.’

It was just after 9:00 A.M., and we were almost at Augusta, when the cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number.

‘Mr Parker?’ said a female voice. ‘It’s Francine Becker, Marcy’s mother.’

I mouthed the words ‘Mrs. Becker’ to Rachel.

‘We were just on our way to see you, Mrs. Becker.’

‘You’re still looking for Marcy, aren’t you?’ There was resignation in her voice, and fear.

‘The people who killed Grace Peltier are closing in on her, Mrs. Becker,’ I said. ‘They killed Grace’s father, they killed a man named Jack Mercier, along with his wife and friends, and they’re going to kill Marcy when they find her.’

At the other end of the line I could hear her start to cry.

‘I’m sorry for what happened the last time you came to see us. We were scared; scared for Marcy and scared for ourselves. She’s our only daughter, Mr. Parker. We can’t let anything happen to her.’

‘Where is she, Mrs. Becker?’

But she was going to tell me in her own time, and her own way. ‘A policeman came, just this morning. He was a detective. He said that she was in a lot of danger, and he wanted to take her to safety.’ She paused. ‘My husband told him where she was. We’re law-abiding people, Mr. Parker. Marcy had warned us to say nothing to the police, but he was so kind and so concerned for her. We had no reason not to trust him and we have no way of contacting Marcy. There’s no phone at the house.’

‘What house?’

‘We have a house in Boothbay Harbor. It’s just a lodge, really. We used to rent it out during the summer, but we’ve let it get run down these last few years.’

‘Tell me exactly where it is.’

Rachel handed me a pen and a Post-it note and I wrote down her directions, then read them back to her.

‘Please, Mr. Parker, don’t let anything happen to her.’

I tried to sound reassuring. ‘I won’t, Mrs Becker. One more thing: what was the name of the detective who talked to you about Marcy?’

‘It was Lutz,’ she said. ‘Detective John Lutz.’

I signaled right and pulled into the hard shoulder. Louis’s Lexus appeared in the rearview seconds later. I got out of the car and ran back to him.

‘Change of plan,’ I said.

‘So where we going?’ he asked.

‘To get Marcy Becker. We know where she is.’

He must have seen something in my face.

‘And let me guess?’ he said. ‘Someone else know where she at too.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Ain’t that always the way?’

Boothbay Harbor used to be a pretty nice place thirty years ago, when it was little more than a fishing village. Thirty years before that the whole town probably smelled of manure, since Boothbay then was the commercial and shipping center for the fertilizer trade. If you went back far enough, it was pretty enough to provide a site for the first permanent settlement on the coast of Maine, back in 1622. Admittedly, that settlement was also one of the most wretched on the eastern seaboard, but everybody has to start somewhere.

Now, during the season, Boothbay Harbor filled up with tourists and recreational sailors, crowding a harbor front that had been brutalized by uncontrolled commercial development. It had come a long way from its wretched origins, or if you were one of the naysayers, it had come a long way to become wretched all over again.

We took 27 southeast from Augusta and made Boothbay in just over an hour, following Middle Street out until it became Barters Island Road. I had almost been tempted to ask Rachel to wait for us in Boothbay, but apart from not wanting to risk a sock to the jaw, I knew that she would provide reassurance for Marcy Becker.

At last we came to a small private road that curved up a rough, tree-lined drive to a timber house on a small hill, with a ramshackle porch and boards built into the slope to act as steps. I guessed that it couldn’t contain more than two or three rooms. Trees surrounded it to the west and south, leaving a clear view of most of the road up to the house. There was no car visible at the front of the drive, but a mountain bike stood below the window to the left of the front door.

‘You want to leave the cars here?’ asked Louis, as we paused beside each other at the foot of the road. If we drove any farther, we would be immediately visible to anyone in the house.

‘Uh-uh,’ I replied. ‘I want to be there and gone before Lutz arrives.’

‘Assuming he ain’t there already.’

‘You think he rode up on his mountain bike?’

‘Could be he’s been and gone.’

I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to consider that possibility.

Louis shrugged. ‘We best not arrive with our hands hangin’ by our sides.’ He popped the trunk and got out of the car. I took another look at the house, then glanced at Rachel and shrugged. There didn’t seem to be any activity, so I gave up looking and joined Louis. Rachel followed.

Louis had lifted the matting in the trunk, exposing the spare tire. He twisted the bolt holding it in place, then lifted the tire and handed it to me, leaving the trunk empty. It was only when he slipped a pair of concealed clasps that it struck me how shallow the trunk was. The reason became apparent a couple of seconds later when the whole floor raised up on a hinge at the rear, exposing a small arsenal of weapons fitted into specially designed compartments.

‘I just know you’ve got permits for all these,’ I said.

‘Home, there’s shit here they ain’t even got permits for.’

I saw one of the Calico minisubs for which Louis had a particular fondness, two fifty-round magazines on either side of it. There was a spare Glock 9-millimeter and a Mauser SP66 sniper’s rifle, along with a South African-made BXP submachine gun fitted with a suppressor and a grenade launcher, which seemed to me like a contradiction in terms.

‘You know, you hit a bump in the road and you’ll be the only dead hit man with a crater named after him,’ I said. ‘You ever worry about DWBs?’

Driving While Black was almost a recognized offense under law.

‘Nah, got me a chauffeur’s license and a black cap. Anybody asks, I just driving it for massa.’

He leaned in and removed a shotgun from the rear of the trunk, then handed it to me as he replaced the floor and spare tire.

I had never seen a gun like it. It was about the same length as a sawed-off, with twin barrels under a raised sight. Beneath the twins was a third, thicker barrel, which acted as a grip. It was surprisingly light, and the stock fitted easily into my shoulder as I sighted down the gun.

‘Very impressive,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

‘Neostead. South African. Thirteen rounds of spin-stablized slugs and a recoil so light you can fire it with one hand.’

‘It’s a shotgun?’

‘No, it’s the shotgun.’

I shook my head despairingly and handed the shotgun back to him. Behind us, Rachel leaned against the car, her mouth tightly closed. Rachel didn’t like guns. She had her reasons.

‘Okay,’ I nodded. ‘Let’s go.’

Louis shook his head sadly as he climbed into the Lexus and propped the Neostead against the dashboard. ‘Can’t believe you don’t like my gun,’ he remarked.

‘You have too much money,’ I replied.

We headed up the drive at speed, the gravel in front of the house crunching loudly as we pulled up. I got out first, Louis seconds behind me. As he was stepping from the car, I heard the back door of the lodge slam.

We both moved at the same time, Louis to the left and I to the right. As I rounded the house, I saw a woman wearing a red shirt and jeans running downhill toward the cover of the trees, a rucksack over her shoulder. She was big and a little slow, and I caught up with her before she made it even halfway. Just inside the woodland ahead of us, I could see the shape of a motorcycle covered by a tarp.

As I got within touching distance of her back, she spun around, the rucksack held by its straps, and caught me a hard blow on the side of the head. I stumbled, my ears ringing, then shot a foot out and tripped her as she tried to get away. She landed heavily and the rucksack flew from her hands. I was on top of her before she could even think of rising. Behind me, I heard Louis slowing down and then his shadow fell across us.

‘Damn,’ I said. ‘You nearly took my head off!’

Marcy Becker was squirming furiously beneath me. She was in her late twenties, with light brown hair and plain, blunt features. Her shoulders were large and muscular and she looked like she might once have been a swimmer or a field athlete. When I saw the expression on her face I felt a twinge of guilt for scaring her.

‘Take it easy, Marcy,’ I said. ‘We’re here to help you.’ I lifted my weight from her and let her rise. Almost immediately, she tried to run again. I wrapped my arms around her, gripped her wrists in my hands, and twisted her so that she was facing Louis.

‘My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator. I was hired by Curtis Peltier to find out what happened to Grace, and I think you know.’

‘I don’t know anything,’ she hissed. Her left heel shot back and nearly caught me a nasty blow on the shin. She was a big, strong young woman, and holding her was taking quite an effort. Louis just looked at me, one eyebrow raised in amusement. I guessed that I wasn’t going to get any help from that quarter. I turned her again so that she was facing me, then shook her hard.

‘Marcy,’ I said. ‘We don’t have time for this.’

‘Fuck you!’ she spat. She was angry and frightened, and she had good reason to be.

I felt Rachel’s presence beside me and Marcy’s eyes shifted to her.

‘Marcy, there’s a man on his way here, a policeman, and he’s not coming to protect you,’ said Rachel quickly. ‘He found out where you were hiding from your parents. He thinks you’re a witness to Grace Peltier’s death, and we think so too. Now, we can help you, but only if you’ll let us.’

She stopped struggling and tried to read the truth of what Rachel was saying from her eyes. Acceptance changed the look on her face, easing the lines that furrowed her brow and dousing the fire in her eyes.

‘A policeman killed Grace,’ she said simply.

I turned to Louis. ‘Get the cars out of sight,’ I said.

He nodded and ran back up the hill. Seconds later, the Lexus pulled into the yard above us, hidden from the road by the house itself. The Mustang quickly joined it.

‘I think the man who killed Grace is called Lutz,’ I told Marcy. ‘He’s the one who’s coming. Are you going to let us help you?’

She nodded mutely. I picked up her bag and handed it to her. As she reached for it, I pulled it out of her grasp.

‘No hitting, okay?’

She gave a little frightened smile and said, in agreement, ‘No hitting.’ We started up the hill to the house.

‘It’s not just me he wants,’ she said quietly.

‘What else does he want, Marcy?’ I asked.

She swallowed, and that scared look darted into her eyes again. She raised the rucksack.

‘He wants the book,’ she answered.

As Marcy Becker packed the last of her things, the clothes and cosmetics she had abandoned as she fled from us, she told us about Grace Peltier’s last hours. She wouldn’t let us look in the rucksack, though. I wasn’t sure that she completely trusted us yet.

‘She came out of the meeting with the Paragon guy in a real hurry,’ she told us. ‘She ran straight up to the car, jumped in and started to drive. She was really angry, as angry as I’ve ever seen her. She just kept swearing all the time, calling him a liar.

‘That night, she left me at the motel in Waterville and didn’t come back until two or three in the morning. She wouldn’t tell me where she’d been, but early the next morning we drove north. She abandoned me – again – in Machias and told me to knock myself out. I didn’t see her for two days.

‘I sat in my room most of the time, drank some beers, watched some TV. At about two A.M. on the second night, I heard this hammering on the door and Grace was there. Her hair was all damp and matted and her clothes were wet. She was really, really pale, like she had seen something that frightened the hell out of her. She told me we had to leave – quickly.

‘I put on my clothes, grabbed my rucksack, and we got in the car and started driving. There was a package on the backseat, wrapped in a plastic bag. It looked like a block of dark wood.

‘“What is that?” I asked her.

‘“You don’t want to know”, was all she told me.

‘“Okay, so where are we going?”

‘“To see my father.”’

Marcy stopped talking, and looked at Louis and me. Louis stood by the window, looking down on the road below.

‘We better get going soon,’ he warned.

I knew Lutz was on his way, but now that I had got Marcy Becker talking I wanted her to finish.

‘Did she say anything else, Marcy?’

‘She was kind of hysterical. She said “He’s alive,” and something about them taking him into town because he’d gotten sick. She’d seen him collapse on the road. That’s all she would say. She told me that, for the moment, it was better if I didn’t know anything else.

‘We’d been driving for maybe an hour. I was dozing on the back seat when Grace shook me awake. As soon as I woke up, I knew we were in trouble. She kept looking in the rearview. There was a cop following us, with lights flashing. Grace just stepped on the gas and tore away until he was out of view, then pulled off the road and told me to get out. I tried to get her to tell me why, but she wouldn’t. She just threw me my bag and then handed me the package and all of her study notes and told me to look after them until she contacted me. Then the cop appeared and I opened the door and headed into the bushes to hide. I guess something about the way Grace was acting transferred itself onto me, because now I was scared and I had no reason to be. I mean, what had we done? What had she done? And after all, this guy was a cop, right? Even if she had stolen something, she was maybe going to get in some trouble, but nothing worse.

‘Anyway, I could see her trying to start the car, but the cop walked up to her door and told her to kill the engine. He was your size, smoking a cigarette. He kept his gloves on, even while he smoked. I could hear him talking to her, asking her what she was doing, where she had been. He wouldn’t let her get out of the car, just kept leaning over her. I could hear him ask her, “Where is it?” again and again, and Grace telling him that she didn’t know what he was talking about.

‘He took her car keys, then made a call on his cell phone. I think it must have been fifteen or twenty minutes before the other guy arrived. He was a big man, with a mustache.’

Marcy began to cry. ‘I should have tried to help her, because I knew what was going to happen even before he took out the gun. I just knew. I felt him thinking about it. I saw him climb in and I was going to cry out. I thought he was trying to rape her, but I couldn’t do anything, I was so scared. I could hear Grace crying and he hit her on the head to shut her up. After that, he searched the trunk and the rest of the car, then started checking along the road. I moved back, and once I thought he might have heard me, because he stopped and listened before he went back to what he was doing. When he didn’t find what he was looking for, he slapped the hood of Grace’s car and I heard him swear.’

She paused.

‘Then he stepped over to the driver’s side with the gun in his hand. He shouted at Grace again, pushing her head with the gun. She reached up to stop him; there was a struggle. The gun went off and the windows turned red. The other policeman started screaming at the big guy, asking him what he thought he was doing and what were they going to do now. But he just told him to be quiet.

‘After that, he leaned in and did something to the back of Grace’s head. When I saw him again, he had a piece of her hair in his hands and he was looking out at the trees, as if he guessed that I was out there somewhere. I crawled away on my belly. I could see Grace through the windshield, Mr. Parker. Her head was hanging to one side and there was blood all over the inside of the car. She was my friend, and I let her die.’

Rachel reached out and held her hand.

‘There was nothing you could have done,’ she said softly, and in her voice I heard echoes of my own from the night before. ‘Nothing. This man Lutz would have killed you both, and then nobody would have known what happened. But you didn’t tell anyone what you saw?’

She shook her head. ‘I was going to, until I saw the book. Then I was too scared. I figured the best thing to do was to lie low and stay out of the way of the cops. If they found me, if the man who killed Grace knew what I had seen, then I was afraid that he would do the same thing to me. I rang my mom and told her that something bad had happened to Grace and that I had to stay out of everyone’s way until I figured out what to do. I told her not to tell anyone where I was, not even the police. I took the first bus from Ellsworth the next morning and I’ve been here ever since, apart from one or two trips to the store. I rented the scooter, in case I needed to get away quickly.’

‘Were you going to stay here forever, Marcy?’ I asked.

She let out a long deep breath. ‘I had nowhere else to go,’ she said.

‘Did she tell you where she had been?’

‘No. She mentioned a lighthouse, that’s all, but she was completely wired. I mean, she was scared and excited at the same time, you know? She wasn’t making a whole lot of sense.’

‘And you still have the book, Grace?’

She nodded, and pointed to her knapsack. ‘It’s in there,’ she replied. ‘I was keeping it safe.’

Then Louis called my name.

I looked at him.

‘They’re coming,’ he said.

Lutz’s white Acura roared up the gravel drive and drew up about twenty yards from the front of the house. Lutz emerged first, closely followed by a small, thin man with close-cropped hair. His eyes were crossed and he wore painter’s coveralls and rubber gloves. He looked like what Louis used to call a ‘puppy drowner,’ the kind of guy who wasn’t happy unless he was hurting something smaller and weaker than himself. Both men had guns in their hands.

‘Guess they want her dead or alive,’ I said.

The smaller man opened the trunk of the Acura and removed an empty body bag.

‘Nope,’ said Louis. ‘Looks like they just expressed a preference.’

We drew back as Lutz examined the windows of the house from where he stood. He gestured at the smaller man to head round the back as he started for the front door. I put my finger to my lips and indicated to Rachel that she should take Marcy Becker into the small bedroom and keep her quiet. Louis handed Rachel his SIG, and after a moment’s hesitation, she took it. Then, shotgun in hand, he padded silently to the back door of the lodge, opened it, and disappeared to intercept Lutz’s associate. I waited until he was outside, then slipped the safety catch on my gun and examined my options.

The front door opened straight into a blank wall. Four feet to the left, the living room began, a tiny kitchen area at the far end. To the right of the living room was the bedroom where Marcy Becker now lay huddled beneath the window with Rachel, so that anyone looking inside would be unable to see them. I raised the gun, walked to the wall where the hall ended and the living area began, and waited, shielded from anyone entering. I heard the handle on the door turn and then a noise like a cannon going off came from the back of the house. There was a thudding noise and Lutz entered fast, gun first. The noise had panicked him and he came in a little too quickly, his gun pointing into the main body of the room and away from me. I moved in hard with my left arm raised to push the gun away and knocked him back against the window, then brought the butt of the Smith & Wesson down as hard as I could on the side of his head. He staggered and I hit him again. He fired a shot into the ceiling and I hit him a third time, driving him to his knees. When he was on the floor I tore the gun from his fingers and tossed it into the kitchen before checking him for a spare. He had none, but I found his cuffs. I hit him one more time for luck, cuffed him, then dragged him outside and onto the gravel. I expected Louis to be there, and he was, but he wasn’t alone.

He wasn’t even armed.

Instead, he stood with his hands on his head and the big shotgun on the ground in front of him. Behind him loomed the tall, bald figure of the Golem, the Jericho two inches from Louis’s head. He had a second Jericho in his left hand, pointing at me, and a length of rope hung across his arm.

‘Sorry, man,’ said Louis. To his left, Lutz’s associate lay dead on his back, a huge hole torn in his chest.

The Golem looked at me, unblinking. ‘Put your gun down, Mr. Parker, or I will kill your friend.’

I held the Smith & Wesson out at shoulder length from my body, gripping it by the trigger guard, then laid it gently on the ground before me. Lutz raised his bloodied head and stared dazedly at the bald man. I was gratified to see the look of fear that gradually spread across his face, but it was a small, fleeting pleasure. We were all at risk from this strange, hollow man.

‘Now I want you to remove the detective’s shoes and socks.’ I did as I was told, kneeling on Lutz’s legs to keep him still. With a flick of his wrist, the Golem tossed me the rope. ‘Tie his legs together.’

Again, I knelt and tied him. All the while, Lutz was whispering to me: ‘Don’t let him take me, Parker. I’ll tell you what you want to know, just don’t let him take me.’

The Golem heard him. ‘Be quiet, Detective. Mr. Parker and I have reached an accommodation.’

I saw Rachel moving behind the window, and shook my head slightly to indicate that she shouldn’t get involved.

‘Have we?’ I asked.

‘I will let you and your friend live, your girlfriend too, and you can take the young woman.’ I should have known that nothing would get past this man. ‘I take Detective Lutz.’

‘No!’ shouted Lutz. ‘No way, man. He’s going to kill me.’

I looked at the Golem, although I hardly needed confirmation that Lutz’s fears were justified.

‘Detective Lutz is correct,’ he said, ‘but first he will tell me where to find his associates. Put him in the body bag, Mr. Parker, then you and your friend will carry the bag to my car.’

I didn’t move. I wasn’t prepared to give up Lutz without first learning what he knew.

‘We both want the same thing,’ I said. ‘We both want to find the people responsible for these deaths.’

The Jerichos remained steady in his hands. There was to be no discussion.

After a struggle, we put Lutz in the body bag, stuck his socks in his mouth to silence him, and carried him down the road to where the Golem’s Lincoln Continental stood. We opened the Continental’s trunk and put Lutz inside before slamming the door closed on him with the hollow finality of a coffin lid being sealed. I could hear his muffled howls through the metal and the sound of his feet kicking against the sides of the trunk.

‘Now, start walking back to the house, please,’ said the Golem.

We stepped back and began walking slowly backward toward the house, never once taking our eyes off the bald man with the guns.

‘I don’t think we will be meeting again, Mr. Parker,’ he said.

‘I won’t take it personally.’

He waited until we were fifty yards from the car, then walked quickly to the driver’s door, got in, and drove away. Beside me, Louis released a long breath.

‘That went well,’ I said. ‘Although your professional reputation took something of a beating.’

Louis scowled. ‘You know, used to take me months to set up a hit. You give me five damn minutes. I ain’t no James Bond.’

‘Don’t sweat it. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’s going to tell.’

‘Guess not.’

We walked quickly back to the house. Rachel came out onto the porch to meet us. The blood had drained from her face, and I thought that she was going to faint.

‘Rachel?’ I said, my hands gripping her shoulders. ‘What is it?’

She looked up at me.

‘See for yourself,’ she whispered.

I found Marcy Becker sitting in one of the big armchairs, her legs curled into her body. She was looking at the wall, tearing at one of her fingernails with her teeth. She glanced at me, then her eyes flicked to what lay on the floor before she returned her gaze quickly to the blank wall. We stayed in those positions for what seemed like a long, long time, until I felt Louis behind me and heard him swear softly as he saw what lay before us.

It was a book.

A book of bones.

Part Four

A great book is like great evil.

Callimachus (c. 305 – c. 240 B.C.)

Chapter Twenty-five

The book was about fourteen inches long and seven inches wide. Six small bones curled horizontally across its spine in three equidistant sets of two. They were slightly yellow and coated with some form of preservative that made them gleam in the sunlight. I wasn’t certain, but I thought they might once have been the ends of ribs. They felt slick to the touch compared to the texture of the material upon which they lay. The cover of the book had been dyed a deep red, through which lines and wrinkles showed. Close to the top left-hand corner, a raised mole stood.

It was human skin. It had been dried, then sewn together in patches, using what appeared to be tendon and gut for stitching. When I moved my fingers gently over the cover, I felt not only the pores and lines of the derma used to construct it but also the shapes of the bones that formed the framework beneath: radius and ulna, I suspected, and probably more ribs. It was as if the book itself had once been a living thing, skin over bone, lacking only flesh and blood to make it whole again.

There was no writing on either the cover or the spine, no indication of what the book might contain. The only marking was the cover illustration, Jansenist in style with its single central motif repeated in each of the four corners. It was a spider, indented in gold leaf, its eight legs curled inward to hold a golden key.

Using only the tips of my fingers, I opened the book. Its spine was a human spine, held together with gold wire, the only material used that did not appear to have come from a human body. The pages had been attached to it using more tendon. The inside covers had not been dyed, and the differentiations in the pigments of the various skins used in its construction could be more clearly divined. From the top of the spine a bookmark curled down, constructed from lengths of human hair tightly bound, scavenged from bodies that, for reasons of discretion and concealment, could not be marked in more obvious ways.

There were about thirty pages of varying sizes in the book. Two or three were constructed from single patches of skin, twice as large as the book itself. These had been folded, then bound through the fold, creating a double page; other pages had been made up from smaller sections of skin sewn carefully together, some of them no bigger than two or three square inches. The pages varied in thickness; one was so thin that the color of my hand showed through beneath, but others were more thickly layered. Most appeared to be sections taken from the lower back or shoulders, although one page showed the strange sunken hole of a human navel and another bore, close to its center, a shrunken nipple. Like the bifolia of old, the parchments made from goatskin and calfskin used by medieval scribes, one side of the page was smooth where any remaining body hair had been rubbed off, while the other was rough. The smooth sides had been used for the illustrations and the script, so that on some double pages only the right-hand side was filled.

On page after page, in beautiful ornate script, were sections from the book of Revelation; some were complete chapters, others simply quotes used to elaborate upon the meaning of the illustrations contained in the book. The writing was Carolingian in origin, a version of the beautiful clear script inspired by the Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin of York, with each italic letter being given its own distinct but simple shape to aid legibility. Faulkner had worked around the natural flaws and holes of the skin, disguising them, where necessary, with a suitable letter or ornamentation. The capital letters on each page were uncials, each one an inch high and carefully created from hundreds of individual pen strokes. Animal and human grotesques cavorted around their bases and stems.

But it was the illustrations that drew the eye. There were echoes of Dürer and Duvet in them, of Blake and Cranach and later artists too: Goerg and Meidner and Masereel. They were not copies of the original illustrations, but variations on a theme. Some were painted in ornate colors, while others used only carbon black mixed with iron gall to create a dense ink that stood out from the page. A version of Hell Mouth drawn from the Winchester Psalter marked the first page, hundreds of tiny bodies twisting in what looked like the jaws of a creature half man, half fish. A greenish tint had been added to the human figures so that they stood out from the skin on which they had been inscribed, and the scales of the fish were marked individually in shades of blue and red. Elsewhere, there were Cranach’s four horsemen in red and black; Burgkmair’s Harvest of the World in tones of green and gold; a vision of an arachnid beast, inspired by the twentieth-century artist Edouard Goerg, beside the words ‘The beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them all, and kill them’; and a richly detailed variation on Duvet’s frontispiece for his 1555 Apocalypse, depicting St. John against a backdrop of a great city, surrounded by emblems of death, including a swan with an arrow in its mouth.

I flicked forward to the last completed illustration, which accompanied a quotation from Revelation 10:10: ‘And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.’ Inspired by Dürer, the illustration depicted, once again, St. John, a sword in one hand as he consumed a representation of the very book I now held in my hand, the human spine and the spider with the key clearly visible as he fed it to himself. An angel watched him, its feet pillars of fire, its head like the sun.

St. John had been drawn in black ink, and enormous effort had been expended in detailing the expression on his face. It was a representation of Faulkner as he was in his younger days and in the picture I had seen in the newspaper following the discovery of the bodies to the north. I could see the same high brow, the same sunken cheeks and almost feminine mouth, the same straight, dark brows. He was swathed in a long white cloak, his left hand raising the sword toward the sky above.

Faulkner was in every illustration. He was one of the four horsemen; he was the jaws of hell; he was St. John; he was the beast. Faulkner: judging, tormenting, consuming, killing; creating a book that was both a record of punishment and a punishment in itself; an unveiling and a concealing of the truth; a vanity and a mockery of vanities; a work of art and an act of cannibalism. This was his life’s work, begun when the human weaknesses of his followers displayed themselves and he turned against them, destroying them all with the aid of his brood: the men first, then the women, and finally the children. As he had begun, so he had continued, and the fallen had become part of his great book.

In the bottom right-hand corner of each page, like marginalia, were written names. The pages constructed of a single sheet of skin bore only one name, while those made up of a number of sections contained two, three, or sometimes four names. James Jessop’s name was on the third fragment of skin, his mother’s on the fourth, and his father’s on the fifth. The rest of the Aroostook Baptists took up the majority of the book’s entries, but there were other names too, names that I did not recognize, some of them comparatively recent, judging by the color of the ink on the skin. Alison Beck’s name was not among them. Neither was Al Z’s, or Epstein’s, or Mickey Shine’s. They would all have been added later, once the book had been retrieved, just as Grace Peltier’s name would also have been written, and perhaps my own as well.

I thought back to Jack Mercier and the book I had been shown in his study, the three double spine markings now transformed from gold to bone. A craftsman like Faulkner would not simply have ceased to make the books he loved so much. The copy presented to Carter Paragon was proof of that. Now it was clear that Faulkner had a wider vision: the creation of a text whose form perfectly mirrored its subject, a book about damnation made up of the bodies of the damned, a record of judgment composed of the remains of those who had been judged.

And Grace had found him. Deborah Mercier, jealous of her husband’s first daughter, had told her of the existence of the new Apocalypse and its source. By then, Jack Mercier had already commenced his moves against the Fellowship, recruiting Ober, Beck, and Epstein to his cause, but Grace couldn’t have known that, because it was more than Deborah Mercier would have been willing to tell her. She would put Grace at risk, but not her husband.

Grace had confronted Paragon with her knowledge of the sale of the Apocalypse, but Paragon was simply a dupe, and Grace, clever woman, must have guessed it. He would have been afraid to tell Pudd and Faulkner that he had sold the book, but he would also have been too afraid to tell them nothing of Grace’s visit. And so Grace had watched him and waited for him to panic. Did she follow him north, or wait for them to come to him? I suspected the latter if Paragon had died because he could not tell the Golem of their hiding place. Whatever had occurred, Grace had somehow found her way to the very gates of Faulkner’s own, private hell. And then, when the opportunity arose, she made her way in and managed to escape with the book, a book that contained the truth about the fate of the Aroostook Baptists and, in particular, Elizabeth Jessop. Its theft had forced the Fellowship to respond quickly; while Pudd and the others searched for it, they set about eliminating all those who were moving against them and for whom the work stolen by Grace Peltier would have been a powerful weapon, a task that assumed a new urgency with the discovery of the bodies at St. Froid Lake.

I closed the book, laid it carefully in its packaging, then ran my hands under the kitchen faucet. When I had cleaned them thoroughly I picked up a towel and turned to face Rachel and Louis.

‘Looks like we got a whole new definition of the word “crazy,”’ muttered Louis. ‘You know what that thing supposed to be?’

‘It’s a record,’ I replied. ‘A journal of deaths, and maybe more than that. It’s an account of the damned, the opposite of the book of life. The Aroostook Baptists are in there, and at least a dozen other names, male and female, all used to create a new Apocalypse.

‘And Faulkner made it. His remains weren’t among those found at the grave site; neither were his son’s or those of his daughter. They killed those people, all of them, then used parts of them to create his book. I think the other names are those of people who’ve had the misfortune to cross the Fellowship at some time, or who posed a threat. Eventually, parts of Grace and Curtis Peltier, Yossi Epstein, and maybe a piece of Jack Mercier and the others on the boat would have been added, once the book had been retrieved. It would have to be as complete a record as possible, otherwise it would have no meaning.’

‘I take it you’re using “meaning” in the loosest possible sense,’ said Rachel. Her disgust was obvious.

I was rubbing my hands red on the towel yet still feeling the taint of the book upon me. ‘Its meaning doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘This thing is a confession to murder, if it can be traced back to Faulkner.’

‘If we can find him,’ added Louis. ‘What’s going to happen when Lutz don’t report back?’

‘Then he’ll send someone else, probably Pudd, to find out what happened. He can’t let this book remain out in the world. That’s assuming that our friend with the bald head doesn’t get to him first.’

I thought of what I knew, or suspected, of Faulkner’s hiding place. I knew now that it was to the north, beyond Bangor, close to the coast, and near a lighthouse. There were maybe sixty lighthouses on the Maine coast, most of them automated or unmanned, with a couple given over to civilian use. Of those, probably only a handful were north of Machias.

I knelt down and took the wrapped book in my hands.

‘What are you going to do with it?’ asked Rachel.

‘Nothing,’ I replied. ‘Not yet.’

She moved closer to me and held my gaze. ‘You want to find him, don’t you? You’re not prepared to let the police do it.’

‘He had Lutz and Voisine working for him,’ I explained, ‘and Voisine is still out there somewhere. There could be others as well. If we hand this over to the police and even one of them shares Lutz’s loyalties, then Faulkner will be alerted and he’ll be gone forever. My guess is that he’s already preparing to disappear. He’s probably been planning it ever since the moment the book was lost and certainly since the discovery of the bodies at St. Froid. For that reason, and for Marcy’s safety, we’re going to keep this to ourselves for the present. Marcy?’

She picked up her bag and stood expectantly.

‘We’re going to put you somewhere safe. You can call your parents and let them know you’re okay first.’

She nodded. I went outside and called the Colony on the cell phone. Amy answered.

‘It’s Charlie Parker,’ I said. ‘I need your help. I have a woman here. I need to stow her out of sight.’

There was silence on the other end of the phone. ‘What kind of trouble are we talking about?’

But I think she knew.

‘I’m close to him, Amy. I can bring this to an end.’

When she answered, I could hear the resignation in her voice. ‘She can stay in the house.’ Women, with the obvious exception of Amy herself, were not usually admitted to the Colony, but there were spare bedrooms in the main house that were sometimes used under exceptional circumstances.

‘Thank you. There will be a man with her. He’ll be armed.’

‘You know how we feel about guns here, Charlie.’

‘I know, but this is Pudd we’re dealing with. I want you to let my friend stay with Marcy until this is over. It’ll be a day or two at most.’

I asked her to take Rachel in as well. She agreed, and I hung up. Marcy made a short call to her mother and then we drove away from the house and into Boothbay. There, we parted. Louis and Rachel would drive south to Scarborough, where Angel would take Marcy Becker and a reluctant Rachel to the Colony. Louis would rejoin me once Marcy and Rachel were in Angel’s care. I kept the book, concealing it carefully beneath the passenger seat of the Mustang.

I drove north as far as Bangor, where I picked up a copy of Thompson’s Maine Lighthouses at Betts Bookstore on Main Street. There were seven lighthouses in the Bold Coast area around Machias, the town in which Marcy Becker had been left while Grace went about her business: Whitlock’s Mill in Calais; East Quoddy at Campobello Island; and farther south, Mulholland Light, West Quoddy, Lubec Channel, Little River, and Machias Seal Island. Machias Seal was too far out to sea to be relevant, which left six.

I called Ross in New York, hoping to light a fire under him, but got only his secretary. I was twenty miles outside Bangor when he called me back.

‘I’ve seen Charon’s reports from Maine,’ he began. ‘This part of the investigation was minor stuff, pure legwork. A gay rights activist was killed in the Village in nineteen ninety-one, shot to death in the toilet of a bar on Bleecker; MO matched a similar shooting in Miami. The perp was apprehended but his phone records showed that he made seven calls to the Fellowship in the days preceding the killing. A woman called Torrance told Charon that the guy was a freak and she reported the calls to the local police. A detective named Lutz confirmed that.’

So, if the killer had been working for the Fellowship, they had a cover story. They had reported him to the police before the murder, and Lutz, already their pet policeman, had confirmed it.

‘What happened to the killer?’

‘His name was Lusky, Barrett Lusky. He made bail and was found dead two days later in a Dumpster in Queens. Gunshot wound to the head.

‘Now, according to Charon’s report, he went no farther north than Waterville during his enquiries. But there’s an anomaly; his expenses show a claim for gas purchased in a place called Lubec, about a hundred and fifty miles farther north of Waterville. It’s on the coast.’

‘Lubec,’ I echoed. It made sense.

‘What’s in Lubec?’ asked Ross.

‘Lighthouses,’ I answered. ‘And a bridge.’

Lubec had three lighthouses. It was also the easternmost town in the United States. From there, the FDR Memorial Bridge stretched across the water to Canada. Lubec was a good choice of location if you needed an escape route left permanently open, because there was a whole new country only minutes away by car or boat. They were in Lubec. I was certain of it, and the Traveling Man had found them there. The gas receipt was careless, but only in the context of what came later and the murders he himself committed, using a strange justification based on human frailty and inconsequence that mirrored some of Faulkner’s own beliefs.

But I had underestimated Faulkner, and I had underestimated Pudd. While I closed in on them, they had already taken the most vulnerable one among us, the only one left alone.

They took Angel.

Chapter Twenty-six

There was blood on the porch, and blood on the front door. In the kitchen, cracks radiated through the plaster from a bullet hole in the wall. There was more blood in the hallway, a curving snake trail like the pattern of a sidewinder. The kitchen door had been almost torn off its hinges, and the kitchen window had been shattered by more gunfire.

There were no bodies inside.

Taking Angel was partly a precaution in case we found Marcy Becker first, but also an act of revenge against me personally. They had probably come to finish us off, and when they found only Angel, they took him instead. I thought of Mr. Pudd and the mute with their hands on him, his blood on their clothes and skin as they dragged him from the house. We should never have left him alone. None of us should ever have been alone.

They would never let him live, of course. In the end they would never let any of us live. If they escaped and disappeared from our sight I knew that one day they would reemerge and find us. We could hunt them, but the honeycomb world is deep and intricate and rich with darkness. There are too many places to hide. And so there would be weeks, months, perhaps years of pain and fear, waking from uneasy sleep to each new dawn with the thought that this, at last, might be the day on which they came.

Because, finally, we would want them to come, so that the waiting might be brought to an end.

I could hear the sound of a car engine in the background as Rachel told me all that she had seen. She was driving Marcy Becker to the Colony in her own car; now that they had Angel, she was safe for a time. Louis was on his way north and would call me within minutes.

‘He’s not dead,’ said Rachel evenly.

‘I know,’ I replied. ‘If he was dead they’d have left him for us to find.’

I wondered how quickly Lutz had talked and if the Golem had reached them yet. If he had, all of this might be immaterial.

‘Is Marcy okay?’ I asked.

‘She’s asleep on the seat beside me. I don’t think she’s slept much since Grace died. She wanted to know why you were willing to risk your life for this: Angel, Louis, me, but you especially. She said it wasn’t your fight.’

‘What did you tell her?’

‘It was Louis who told her. He said that everything was your fight. I think he was smiling. It’s kind of hard to tell with him.’

‘I know where they are, Rachel. They’re in Lubec.’

Her voice had tightened a notch when she spoke again. ‘Then you take care.’

‘I always take care,’ I replied.

‘No, you don’t.’

‘OK, you’re right, but I mean it this time.’

I was just beyond Bangor. Lubec was about another 120 miles away along U.S. 1. I could do it in less than two hours, assuming no eagle-eyed lawman decided to haul me over for speeding. I put my foot on the gas and felt the Mustang surge forward.

Louis called when I was passing Ellsworth Falls, heading down 1A to the coast.

‘I’m in Waterville,’ he said.

‘I think they’re in Lubec,’ I replied. ‘It’s on the northern coast, close to New Brunswick. You’ve a ways to go yet.’

‘They call you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Wait for me at the town limits,’ he replied. His tone was neutral. He could have been advising me not to forget to pick up milk.

At Milbridge, maybe eighty miles from Lubec, the cell phone rang for the third time. This time I noticed that the ID of the caller was concealed as I pressed the answer button.

‘Mr. Parker,’ said Pudd’s voice.

‘Is he alive?’

‘Barely. I’d say hopes for his recovery are fading fast. He seriously injured my associate.’

‘Good for him, Leonard.’

‘I couldn’t let it go unpunished. He bled quite a lot. In fact, he’s still bleeding quite a lot.’ He snickered unpleasantly. ‘So you’ve worked out our little family tree. It’s not pretty, is it?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘You have the book?’

He knew that Lutz had failed. I wondered if he knew why and if the shadow of the Golem was already almost upon him.

‘Yes.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Augusta,’ I said.

I could have cried with relief when he seemed to believe me.

‘There’s a private road off Route nine, where it crosses the Machias River,’ said Pudd. ‘It leads to Lake Machias. Be at the lakeshore in ninety minutes, alone and with the book. I’ll give you whatever is left of your friend. If you’re late, or if I smell police, I’ll skewer him from his anus to his mouth like a spit pig.’ He hung up.

I wondered how Pudd planned to kill me when I reached the lake. He couldn’t let me live, not after all that had taken place. And ninety minutes wasn’t enough time to reach Machias from Augusta, not on these roads. He had no intention of bringing Angel there alive.

I called Louis. It was a test of trust, and I wasn’t certain how he would respond. I was closest to Lubec; there was no way that Louis could get there before Pudd’s deadline ran out. If I was wrong about Lubec, then somebody would have to be at the rendezvous point to meet him. It would have to be Louis.

The pause before he agreed was barely detectable.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Three wooden lighthouses decorated the sign at the outskirts of the town of Lubec: the white-and-red Mulholland Light across the Lubec Channel in New Brunswick; the white Lubec Channel Light, a sparkplug-style cast iron structure out on the Lubec Channel; and the red-and-white striped West Quoddy Light at Quoddy Head State Park. They were symbols of stability and certainty, a promise of safety and salvation now potentially corrupted by the stain of the Faulkners’ presence.

After a brief stop at the edge of the town, I drove on, past the boarded-up frame of the old Hillside Restaurant and the white American Legion building, until I came to Lubec itself. It was a town filled with churches; the White Ridge Baptists, the First Assembly of God, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Congregational Christians, and the Christian Temple Disciples had all converged on this place, burying their dead in the nearby town cemetery or erecting memorials to those lost at sea. Grace Peltier had been right, I thought; I had only glanced at the thesis notes Marcy had given me, but I had noted Grace’s use of the term ‘frontier’ to describe the state of Maine. Here, at the easternmost point of the state and the country, surrounded by churches and the bones of the dead, it was possible to feel that this was the very end of things.

On the waterfront, seabirds sat on the dilapidated pier, its walkway sealed off with Private Property notices. There was a stone breakwater to the left, and to the right, a congregation of buildings, among them the old McMurdy’s Smokehouse, which was in the process of being restored. Across the water, the Mulholland Light was visible, the FDR Memorial Bridge extending toward it across the water of the Lubec Narrows.

It was already growing dark as I drove up Pleasant Street, the waterfront on my left, to a dirt lot beside the town’s wastewater treatment facility. From there, a small trail led down to the shore. I followed it, stepping over seaweed and rocks, discarded beer cans and cigarette packs, until I stood on the beach. It was mainly stones and marram grass, with some gray sand exposed. Beyond, the Lubec Channel Light ripped through the encroaching darkness.

Maybe half a mile to my right, a stone causeway reached into the sea. At the end was a small island covered in trees, their branches like the black spires of churches set against the lighter tones of the evening sky. A dull green light shone between the trees in places, and I could see the brighter white lights of an outbuilding close to the northern side of the island.

There were three lighthouses on Lubec’s sign, for only three lighthouses were still in existence. But there had once been another: a stone structure built on the northern shore of the Quoddy Narrows by a local Baptist minister as a symbol of God’s light as well as a warning to mariners. It was a flawed, imperfect structure, and had collapsed during a heavy gale in 1804, killing the minister’s son who was acting as lighthouse keeper. Two years later, concerned citizens nominated West Quoddy Head, farther down the coast, as a more suitable position, and in 1806 Thomas Jefferson had ordered the construction of a rubblestone lighthouse on the spot. The Northern Light was largely forgotten, and now the island on which it lay was in private ownership.

All of this I learned from a woman in McFadden’s variety store and gas station on the way into town. She said the people on the island kept themselves pretty much to themselves, but they were believed to be religious folk. There was an old man who took ill sometimes and had to be treated by the doctor in town, and two younger people, a man and a woman. The younger man shopped in the store sometimes, but always paid with cash.

She knew his name, though.

He was called Monker.

Ed Monker.

It had begun to rain, a harbinger of the coastal storm that was set to sweep northern Maine that night, and heavy drops hammered on me as I stood watching the causeway. I got back in the car and took the road to Quoddy Head Park until I saw a small, unmarked private drive heading down to the coast. I killed my lights and followed the trail until it petered out among thick trees. I left the car and walked through the grass, using the trees for cover, until the trail ended. Ahead of me was a barred gate with high fencing on either side and a camera mounted on the gatepost. The fence was electrified. Beyond it was a small locked shack in the middle of a copse of pines. Through the branches, the Lubec Channel Light was visible. I could guess at what was in the shack: an old iron bath with a toilet beside it and the corpses of spiders decaying in the drain.

I took my flashlight from the glove compartment and, shielding the light with my hand, shadowed the fence. I spotted two motion sensors within fifty feet, the grass cropped low around them. I figured there were probably more among the trees themselves. As the rain soaked my hair and skin, I stayed with the fence until I found myself at the top of a steep incline leading back down to the shore. The tide was rolling in and the base of the causeway was now covered in water. The only way to get to the island without getting drenched, or maybe even washed away, was through those gates and along the causeway, but to take that route would be to alert those on the island to my approach.

Grace Peltier must have stood here, weeks earlier, before she scaled the gates and walked onto the causeway. She must have waited until they were gone, until she was certain that the island was unoccupied and that nobody would be returning for some time, and then crossed over. Except she had activated the sensors, alerting them to an intruder, and the system would have informed Pudd or his sister, automatically calling a pager or his cell phone. When they returned, closing off the causeway, Grace had taken to the sea. That was why her clothes had been soaked with seawater. She was a strong swimmer. She knew she could make it. But they had seen her face on the camera’s tapes, maybe even spotted her car. Lutz and Voisine had been alerted, and the trap was closed on Grace.

I looked out on the dark waves, glowing whitely as they broke, and decided to take my chances with the sea. I unloaded the spare .38 at my ankle, ziplocked the bullets, then checked the safety on the Smith & Wesson beneath my arm. Something tightened in my belly, and the old feeling came over me again. The sea before me was a dark pool, the hidden place on which I had drawn time and time before, and I was about to plunge into it once more.

I waded through the water, teeth chattering as I approached the causeway. Waves rocked me and once or twice I was almost pushed back to the shore by their force. The stones and rocks that made up the causeway were slick and spotted with green algae, and the tide was already splashing almost to the level of my waist. I tried to wedge my boots into the cracks and hollows, but the rocks had been bound with cement, and after only two awkward sideways movements, my feet slid from under me and I lost my grip. I slid quickly back into the sea, the water drenching me to my chin. As I recovered from the shock, a line of white emerged to my left and I barely had time to take a breath before a huge wave lifted me off my feet and pushed me back at least five yards, salt water filling my mouth as the rain fell and seaweed twisted around me.

When the wave had passed, I began to wade again along the edge of the rocks, trying to find a point at which I could pull myself back onto the road. It took me about ten minutes and two more dousings to find a hollow where one of the stones had fallen from the concrete. Awkwardly, I placed a wet boot into the alcove, then barked my knee painfully as it slipped out. Digging my fingers around one of the highest stones, I tried again and managed to haul myself onto the road. I lay there for a moment, catching my breath and shivering. My cell phone, I discovered, was now at the bottom of the sea. I stood, let the water run out of the barrel of the Smith & Wesson, reloaded the .38, and continued on down the causeway at a crouch until I reached the island.

Thick green firs grew on either side of the road as it made its way to the remains of the lighthouse, where the road became part of a gravel courtyard that touched on the entrance to each of the island’s structures. There should have been nothing more than a pile of old stones where the original lighthouse had once stood, but instead I found an edifice about thirty feet high, with an open gallery at the top surrounded by a chain-link fence, offering a clear view of the causeway and the coast itself. It was a lighthouse without a light, except for a faint illumination in one of the windows at the highest enclosed level.

To the right of the new lighthouse stood a long wooden single-story building with four square windows covered with wire frame, two on either side of the heavy door. A greenish glow emanated from it, as if the light inside was struggling to penetrate water or the leaves of plants. In front of the lighthouse, blocking my view of its entrance, was what I took to be a garage. Farther back, almost at the eastern edge of the island, was a second similar structure, possibly a boathouse. I leaned against the back of the garage and listened, but I could hear nothing except the steady falling of the rain. Staying on the grass and using the building as a shield, I began to make my way toward the lighthouse.

It was only when I cleared the garage that I saw him. Two tree trunks had been bound together to form an X, supported in turn by a second pair of trunks that kept the cross at an angle of sixty degrees to the ground. He was naked, and his arms and legs had been bound to the wood with wire. There was a lot of bruising to his face and his upper body, and swellings on his arms, chest, and legs that looked like the result of bites. Blood had flowed from the wounds to his limbs and torso and pooled on the ground below him. The rain washed over his pale body, dripped from the soft flesh on his arms and glistened on his bare skull and white, hairless face. A patch of skin was missing from his stomach. I moved closer to him and checked his pulse, his skin still warm to the touch. The Golem was dead.

I was about to leave him when gravel crunched to my right and the mute appeared. There was mud on her boots and her loose denim jeans, and she wore a yellow windbreaker, which hung open over a dark sweater. She held a gun in her right hand, pointing to the ground. There was no time for me to hide, even if I wanted to.

She stopped short when she saw me, her mouth opened soundlessly, and she raised her arm and fired. I dived left. Beside me, the Golem’s body shuddered slightly as the bullet struck his shoulder, close to where my head had been. I knelt, sighted, and squeezed the trigger. My first shot took her in the neck, the second in the chest. She twisted, her legs wrapped themselves around each other, and she fell, loosing off two shots into the air as she hit the ground. I ran to her, keeping the gun trained on her body, and kicked her Beretta away from her right hand. Her left leg was trembling uncontrollably. She looked up at me, the scars on her neck now obscured by the blood flowing from her wound. Something rattled in her throat, her mouth opened and closed twice, and then she died.

In the outbuilding to my right, a shape distorted the flow of green light for an instant. A thin shadow passed across the glass and I knew instinctively that Mr. Pudd was waiting inside for me. He could not have failed to have heard the shots, yet he hadn’t responded. Behind me the door of the lighthouse remained securely closed, but when I looked to the top of the building, the light that had been burning was now burning no longer. In the darkness it seemed to me that something was watching me closely. Pudd would have to be dealt with first, I thought; I did not want him at my back.

Quickly, my hands brushing the wet grass, I ran to the door of the outbuilding. There was a small glass panel at about face level, criss-crossed with wire, and I stayed low as I passed beneath it. A bolt had been pulled across midway down the door, and a lock hung open beneath it. Stepping to one side, I eased my foot against the crack and pushed the door open.

Three shots sounded and the door frame exploded in showers of splinters and flaking paint. I jammed my gun into the gap and fired five times in an arcing pattern, then threw myself into the room. I could still hear glass falling as I sprinted to the far left wall, but no more shots came. Working quickly, I ejected the magazine from the Smith & Wesson and replaced it with a full clip, scanning the room while my hands worked at the gun.

The stench was incredible, a powerful smell of decay and defecation. There were no lights on the ceiling or on the walls, and the single skylight had been draped with folds of thick cotton to prevent direct sunlight from falling on the room. Instead, the only illumination came from small shielded bulbs set below the metal shelves that ran in five rows across the width of the room. The shelves had four levels, and the green tint to the light came from plants that grew in pots alongside the glass cases that rested on each shelf. Every case or cage on the shelves had a thermometer and a humidity gauge, and dimmer switches had been placed in series with the lightbulbs to reduce the intensity of their radiant heat. Aluminum foil had been used to partially shield the bulbs, protecting the spiders and insects in the terrariums from direct light, while the use of foliage further softened the glare. The bulbs were not powerful enough to penetrate to the farthest corners of the room, where thick pools of darkness lay. Somewhere among them, Pudd waited, his form hidden by the shadows and the greenery.

A sound came from close to where my hand rested on the ground, a soft tapping on the stone floor. I looked to my left and saw, resting in a small arc of green light, a dark, semicircular shape, its body perhaps an inch and a half long and its spiny legs, it seemed, at least as long again. Instinctively, I yanked my hand away. The spider tensed, then raised its first pair of legs and exposed a set of reddish jaws.

Suddenly, and with surprising speed, it moved toward me, its legs almost a blur and the rhythm of the tapping increasing. I backed away, but it kept coming as I lashed out with my foot and felt it connect with something soft. I kicked again with the toe of my boot and the spider tumbled away into the far recesses of the room, where some empty glass cases lay piled untidily upon one another.

In my panic, I had moved almost to the aisle between the first and second lines of shelves. To my right, shards of glass caught the light and the remains of a case shattered by my 10-millimeter bullets lay in pieces on the second level. A square of card, heat-sealed in plastic, was among the glass fragments on the floor. In ornate black script were written the words Phoneutria nigriventer and then, in English below, Brazilian wandering spider. I glanced back toward the shadows into which the aggressive brown spider had bounced, and shuddered.

From far to my right came the sound of something brushing against the leaves of a plant, and the shadows on the ceiling rearranged themselves briefly. Pudd now knew where I was. The sounds of my frantic kicks at the spider had alerted him. I found that my left hand was trembling, so I used it to double-grip my gun. If I couldn’t see it shaking, then I could convince myself that I wasn’t afraid. Slowly, I moved to the second row of shelves, took a deep breath, and glanced into the aisle.

It was empty. Beside my left eye, a shape shifted in a case. It was small, maybe just over an inch in total, with a broad red stripe running along its abdomen. White spherical egg sacs, almost as big as the spider herself, hung suspended in the web that surrounded her. Latrodectus hasselti, read the card: Red-back spider. Starting a family too, I thought. How sweet. Shame Pop probably wouldn’t be alive to see the birth.

Two more cases lay shattered beside each other in the third row. Amid the sharp edges, a long green shape stood motionless. The mantid’s huge eyes seemed to stare right at me as its jaws worked busily on the remains of the occupant of the adjoining case. Small brown legs moved weakly as the huge insect chomped away. I didn’t feel sorry for whatever the mantid was consuming. As far as I was concerned, the sooner it finished its appetizer and got busy with some of the main courses wandering the floor, the better.

My skin was crawling, and I had to fight the urge to brush at my hair and neck, so I was partly distracted as I stepped into the next aisle. I looked to my left and saw Mr. Pudd standing at the far end, his gun raised. I threw myself forward and the bullet hit the fuse box beside the door. Sparks flew and the lights died as I rolled on the floor and came to rest against the far wall, the gun raised before me, my left hand now supporting myself on the ground for only as long as it took me to realize that something soft was crawling across it. I lifted it quickly and shook it, but not before I felt a sharp bite, like twin needles being inserted beneath my skin. I rose quickly, my lips drawn back from my teeth in disgust, and examined my hand in the dim light that filtered through the windows. Just below the knuckle of my middle finger, a small red lump was already beginning to form.

In a pair of large plastic aquariums to my right, thousands of small bodies moved. From the first aquarium came the chirping of crickets. The second contained oatmeal and bran flakes across which tiny mealworms crawled, speckled with some small black beetles that had already grown to their mature stage. To my left, arrayed along the wall in a long, multilayered display cabinet, were what looked like row upon row of plastic cups. I leaned down and made out a small black-and-red shape at the base of each cup, the remains of crickets and fruit flies lying in the ugly web beside the spider. The smell was particularly strong here, so strong that I started to gag.

This was Mr. Pudd’s black widow farm.

My ears rang from the sound of the shots and there were spots before my eyes from the muzzle flare as I returned my attention to the room itself. A long shadow trailed along the ceiling, heading away from me. Through the leaves I caught a glimpse of what might have been Pudd’s tan shirt, and I fired. There was a grunt of pain and the sound of glass breaking as the empty cases in that corner tumbled to the ground. I heard the glass grinding beneath his feet as he stepped over them. He was now at the far wall, close to where I had started, and I knew then what I had to do.

The shelves were not bolted to the cement floor. Instead, they rested on tripod legs, the weight of the frame and the cases it supported insurance enough against any casual impact. Ignoring the spreading pain in my hand and the possibility that the spider responsible might still be close by, I lowered myself to the ground, braced my back against the wall beside the racks of widows, and pushed at the shelf with the soles of my feet. For a moment I thought that it might just move across the floor, but then the top row tilted and the heavy frame fell slowly away from me, impacting loudly on the next shelf and creating a domino effect; two, three, four shelves fell, accompanied by the sounds of breaking glass and grinding metal, and then their combined weight collapsed on the final shelf, and I heard a sound that might have been a man’s voice before it was lost in the final tumultous roar of metal and glass.

By then I was already on my feet, using the frames of the fallen shelves to keep off the floor. I was conscious of movement all around me as predatory, multilegged things began to crawl and fight, hunt and die. I reached the door and pushed it open, the feel of the sea breeze and the cold rain beautiful after the stale, rotten smell of the insects and spiders. The door slammed behind me and I jammed the bolt home, then stepped back. My hand was throbbing now and the swelling had increased in size, but it didn’t feel too bad. Still, it would need a shot, and the sooner the better.

From inside the bug house, I heard sounds of movement. I raised my gun and aimed. A face appeared at the glass screen, and the door shook as Mr. Pudd hurled his body against it. His eyes were huge, one of them already filling with blood, and a muscle in his cheek was spasming. Tiny brown spiders, each only a fraction of an inch in length, crawled across his face and lost themselves in his hair as a large black spider with thin, skeletal legs pursued them relentlessly. Then Pudd’s mouth opened and two legs appeared at each corner, pushing his lips apart, and I glimpsed palps moving inside and a cluster of dark eyes as the spider emerged from his mouth. I turned away for an instant and when I looked back, Pudd was gone.

A low thudding sound came from behind me, and the door to the lighthouse slammed softly against its frame. I was soaked through and starting to feel the cold desperately, but I wiped the rain from my eyes and made my way toward the lighthouse.

The floor inside the door was flagged with stone and an iron staircase wound up to the top of the structure. There were no levels between where I stood and the open platform at the top of the lighthouse, through which a small panel allowed access to the exposed gallery.

At my feet, a trapdoor stood open. It was made of heavy oak bound with iron, and below it a flight of stone steps led into a patch of bright yellow light.

I had found the entrance to the honeycomb world.

I took each step slowly, my gun aimed below me. The final step led into a concrete bunker, furnished with armchairs and an old couch. A small dining table stood in the far corner, on a worn Persian rug. To my right was a narrow galley-style kitchen, separated from the main room by a pair of saloon doors. Wire-rimmed lights hung from the ceiling. A set of shelves in one corner lay empty, a box filled with books and newspapers on the floor beside it. There was a smell of wax polish in the air. The tabletop gleamed, as did the shelves and the breakfast counter.

But it was the walls that drew the eye; every available space, every inch from corner to corner, ceiling to floor, had been illustrated. There were Kohnlike impressions of death upon a dark horse; images of war victims inspired by Dix and Goerg; cities crumbling in a fury of reds and yellows as in Meidner’s apocalyptic landscapes. They overlapped one another, blurring at the edges into greens and blues where the pigments had mixed. Images taken from one artist recurred in the work of another, at once out of context yet still part of the greater vision. One of Goerg’s demons fell upon the crowds fleeing Meidner’s destruction; Kohn’s horse wandered among Dix’s battlefield corpses.

No wonder his kids were screwed up.

The next room was similarly decorated, although this time the images were medieval in origin and much more ornate. This room was larger than its neighbor, with two double beds on a linoleum floor, the beds separated by a slatted wood divider. There were books and magazines on rough shelves, two closets, and a small shower and toilet in one corner, separated from the main room by sliding glass doors. The only light came from a single bedside lamp standing on a table. Close by where I stood were two cardboard boxes filled with women’s clothing and an open suitcase containing some men’s suits and jackets. All of the clothes looked at least two decades out of date. The sheets had been removed from the beds and tied in two bundles. A vacuum cleaner stood in one corner, its dust bag removed and lying beside it. It seemed that all traces of the bunker’s occupants were in the process of being removed.

A doorway stood half open at the entrance to the third room. I paused as a sound came from inside, a noise like the jangling of chains. I smelled blood on the air. I could sense no movement close to the doorway. Again the sound of metal on metal rang out. I pushed the door open with my foot and drew back against the wall, waiting for the shots. None came. I waited for a few seconds longer before glancing inside.

A butcher’s block supported by four thick legs stood in the center of the stone floor. There was old, dried blood at its edges. Beyond it, against the far wall, was a stainless steel table with a sink attachment and a drainage pipe leading from the drain to a sealed metal container below. There were surgical implements on the table, some recently used. I saw a bone saw, and two scalpels with blood on their blades. A cleaver hung from a hook on the stone wall behind. The whole room stank of meat.

It was only when I entered that I saw Angel. He was naked and attached to a metal rail above an iron tub, his arms held over the rail by a pair of handcuffs. He half stood, half knelt in the tub, its sides stained brown with old blood. His body was twisted toward me, and his mouth had been taped shut. His torso was streaked with blood and sweat, and his eyes were half-open. They closed briefly as I moved to him, and he made a small sound from behind the tape. There was bruising on his face, and a long wound to his right leg; it looked like a knife slash. It had been left to bleed.

I was about to reach around his back to support him before releasing him when the mewling sound rose in pitch. I stepped back and turned his body slightly. A patch of skin, easily a foot square, had been cut from his back, and the exposed flesh pulsed redly. Blood had pooled and dried around his feet. As I stared at the wound, Angel’s legs began to shake and he started to sob. I found the keys to the cuffs hanging on a hook, then gripped him around the waist and released him, the full weight of him falling into my arms as I eased him from the tub and knelt him on the floor. I pulled the tape from his mouth as gently as I could, then took a plastic beaker from a shelf and filled it from the sink, the water sending the blood spiraling down into the drain. Angel took the cup and drank deeply, water spilling down his chin and onto his chest.

‘Get me my pants,’ were his first words.

‘Who did this, Angel?’

‘Get. Me. My. Damn. Pants. Please.’

His clothes lay in a pile by the tub. I found his chinos, then helped him ease into them as he sat on the floor, supporting himself as best he could on his weakened arms as he kept his back away from the wall.

‘The old man,’ he said as we hauled the pants up to his waist. Immediately, they stuck to the wound in his leg and a red stain spread across them. Every time he moved, his face creased with pain and he had to grit his teeth to keep from howling. ‘There was gunfire from outside, and when I looked around he was disappearing up those stairs. He left the oven open. I might need what’s inside.’

He pointed behind me, to where a steel box with a temperature dial at the top stood against the wall. A thin sheet of what might have been paper hung within, assuming paper could bleed. I turned off the dryer, then flipped the door closed with my foot.

‘You meet the other two?’

I nodded.

‘They’re his kids, Bird.’

‘I know.’

‘What a fuckin’ family.’ He nearly smiled. ‘You kill them?’

‘I think so.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘The woman’s dead. I fed Mr. Pudd to his pets.’

I left Angel and walked over to where a staircase led up from a small doorway at the back of the room. To the left of the first step was a room with another bed and a crucifix hanging from the ceiling. The walls here were covered with shelving, the weight of their books causing them to sag. Some had already been removed in preparation for flight, but many still remained; the arrival of Angel must have caused Faulkner to rearrange his priorities. I doubted that he had been allowed many live subjects on which to practise before. There was a workbench against one wall, inks, pens, knives, and nibs arrayed carefully in a metal carrying case on top of it. In an alcove opposite the bedroom, a generator hummed.

When I went back into Faulkner’s preparation room, Angel had struggled to his feet and stood, slightly hunched over, at the wall, supporting himself with his hands, his injured leg raised slightly. His back had begun to bleed again.

‘You think you can make it up?’

He nodded. I took his left arm, draped it around my shoulder, then held him carefully around the waist. Slowly, and with the agony etched clearly on his face, he made his way up the stone steps. He was almost at the top when his foot slipped and his back banged against the wall. It left a bright red streak as he lost consciousness, and I had to carry him the rest of the way. The stairs ended in a kind of alcove where a steel door stood open. A sheet of thick plastic lay beside it, slapping in the wind. Beside it, a shape lay rolled up in a second sheet stained inside with blood. Part of Voisine’s face was exposed. I recalled Pudd’s anger at the wounds inflicted by Angel on his associate; it looked like Voisine had since died from them.

Angel regained consciousness as I laid him, facedown, on the floor. I removed the .38 from my holster and pressed it into his hand.

‘You killed Voisine.’

His eyes focused blearily on me. ‘Good. Can I piss on his grave?’

‘I’ll make some calls, see what I can do.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To find Faulkner.’

‘You find him, you tell him I said “hi” before you kill him.’

The rain fell relentlessly and the ground had turned to mud as I stepped carefully onto the grass. Some fifty feet behind me, the woman still lay where she had fallen and no sound came from inside Mr. Pudd’s spider house. The lighthouse was at my back, and in front of me a grass verge sloped down to the boathouse. There, in a sheltered inlet, was a small floating jetty. The door to the boathouse stood open and a boat bobbed at the end of the concrete ramp. It was a little Cape Craft runabout, with an Evinrude outboard. A figure stood on the deck, pouring diesel into the engine’s fuel hatch. The rain fell on its bare skull, on the long white hair plastered to its face and shoulders, on its black coat and black leather shoes. It must have sensed me approaching, for it looked up, the diesel spilling over the deck as its concentration lapsed.

And it smiled.

‘Hello, sinner,’ said the Reverend Faulkner. He went for the revolver tucked into his waistband and I fired once, the can falling from his hands as he stumbled back, his shattered right arm now hanging loosely by his side. The gun dropped from his fingers to the deck of the boat, but the smile stayed where it was, trembling slightly with the pain of the wound. I fired twice more and holed the outboard. Diesel sprayed from the ruptured tank.

He was, I guessed, about six feet tall, with long, white, tapering fingers and pale, elongated features. In the light from the cabin his eyes were a deep, dark blue, verging on black. His nose was exceptionally long and thin and his Cupid’s bow was tiny, his almost lipless mouth seeming to begin just where his nostrils ended. His neck was scrawny and striated, and loose flesh hung in a wattle from beneath his chin.

At my feet lay a suitcase and a battered waterproof emergency pack. I kicked at it once.

‘Going somewhere, Reverend?’ I asked.

He ignored the question.

‘How did you find us, sinner?’

‘The Traveling Man led me here.’

The old man shook his head.

‘An interesting individual. I was sorry when you killed him.’

‘You were the only one. Your daughter’s gone, Reverend, your son too. It’s over.’

The old man spat into the sea and his eyes looked over my shoulder to where the woman lay dead in the rain. He betrayed no emotion.

‘Step off the boat. You’re going to stand trial for the deaths of your flock, for the killing of Jack Mercier and his wife and friends, for the murders of Curtis and Grace Peltier. You’re going to answer for them all.’

He shook his head. ‘I have nothing to answer for. The Lord did not send demons to kill the firstborn of Egypt, Mr. Parker; he sent angels. We were angels engaged in the Lord’s work, harvesting the sinners.’

‘Killing women and children doesn’t sound like God’s work.’

Blood dripped from his fingers onto the timbers of the boat. Gently, he raised his injured arm, seemingly oblivious to the pain, and showed me the blood on his hand. ‘But the Lord kills women and children every day,’ he said. ‘He took your wife and child. If he believed that they were worthy of salvation, then they would still be alive.’

My hand tightened on the gun and I felt the trigger shift slightly.

‘God didn’t kill my wife and child. A man tore them apart, a sick, violent man encouraged by you.’

‘He didn’t need encouragement in his work. He merely required a framework for his ideals, an added dimension.’

He didn’t say anything more for some time. Instead he seemed to examine me, his head to one side.

‘You see them, don’t you?’ he asked at last.

I didn’t reply.

‘You think you’re the only one?’ That smile came again. ‘I see them too. They talk to me. They tell me things. They’re waiting for you, sinner, all of them. You think it ended with their deaths? It did not: they are all waiting for you.’

He leaned forward conspiratorially.

‘And they fuck your whore while they wait,’ he hissed. ‘They fuck both your whores.’

I was only a finger’s pressure away from killing him. When I breathed out and felt the trigger move forward, he seemed almost disappointed.

‘You’re a liar, Faulkner,’ I said. ‘Wherever my wife and child are, they’re safe from you and all your kind. Now, for the last time, step off the boat.’

He still made no move.

‘No earthly court will judge me, sinner. God will be my judge.’

‘Eventually,’ I replied.

‘Good-bye, sinner,’ said the Reverend Faulkner, and something struck me hard in the back, forcing me to my knees. A brown shoe stamped down hard on my fingers and the gun went off, sending a bullet into the jetty before it was kicked away from me and into the sea. Then a huge weight seemed to fall upon me and my face was pressed hard into the mud. There were knees on my upper back, forcing the air from my lungs as my mouth and nostrils filled with dirt. I dug my toes into the soft earth, pressed my left arm against the ground, and pushed upward as hard as I could, striking back with my right hand. I felt the blow connect and the weight on my back eased slightly. I tried to throw it off completely as I turned but hands closed on my neck and a knee struck me hard in the groin. I was forced flat on my back and found myself looking into the face of hell.

Mr. Pudd’s features had swollen from the spider bites. His lips were huge and purple, as if they had been packed with collagen. The swelling had almost closed his nostrils, so he was forced to breath heavily through his mouth, his distended tongue hanging over his teeth. One eye was almost closed while the other had grown to twice its original size, so that it seemed about to burst. It was gray-white and partially filled with blood where the capillaries had ruptured. There were strands of silvery cobweb in his hair, and a black spider had become trapped between his shirt collar and his tumid neck, its legs flailing helplessly as it bit at him. I struck at his arms but he maintained his grip. Blood and saliva oozed from his mouth and dripped onto his chin as I reached up and dug the fingers of my right hand into his face, trying to strike at his injured eye.

From behind me, I heard the sound of the boat’s engine starting and Pudd’s grip shifted as his thumbs tried to crush my Adam’s apple. I was tearing at his hands with my fingers, the pressure in my head increasing as my windpipe was slowly constricted. The outboard made a spluttering sound as it pulled away from the jetty, but I didn’t care. My ears were filled with the roaring in my head and the labored, spit-flecked breaths of the man who was killing me. I felt a burning pain behind my eyes, a numbness spreading from my fingers. Desperately I raked at his face, but I was losing the feeling in my hands and my vision was blurring.

Then the top of Mr. Pudd’s head exploded, showering me with blood and gray matter. He stayed upright for a moment, his jaw slackening and his ears and nose bleeding, then tumbled sideways into the mud. The pressure eased on my throat and I drew in long, painful rattling breaths as I kicked Pudd’s body away from me. I got to my knees and spat dirt onto the ground.

At the top of the grass verge, Angel lay on his stomach, the .38 outstretched before him in his right hand while the left used the plastic sheet to shield his injured back. I looked to the sea as the sound came to me of the runabout moving away on the dark, choppy waters. It was only thirty or forty feet from the shore, the white froth churning at the bow as Faulkner stood at the wheel, his white face contorted with rage and grief.

The engine coughed, then died.

We stood facing each other across the waves, the rain falling on our heads, on the bodies behind me, on the dark waters of the bay.

‘I’ll see you damned, sinner.’

He raised the gun with his left hand and fired. The first shot was wild, impacting with a whine on the rocks behind me. He swayed slightly with the movement of the boat beneath him, aimed, and fired again. This time the bullet tugged at the sleeve of my coat but there was no impact. It passed straight through the wool, leaving only a faint smell of burning in its wake. The next two shots hissed through the damp air close to my head as I knelt down and flipped open the emergency pack.

The flare was a Helly-Hanson, and it felt good in my hand. I thought of Grace and Curtis, and the patch of black tape covering James Jessop’s ruined eye. I thought of Susan, the beauty of her on the first day we met, the smell of pecans on her breath. I thought of Jennifer, the feel of her blond hair against mine, the sound of her breathing as she slept.

Another shot came, this time missing by a good three feet. I pointed at the waves and imagined the incandescent glow spreading across the water as the flare shot along the surface; the flash of pink-and-blue flame as the diesel fuel ignited, bursting from the waves and moving toward the man with the gun; the explosion of the outboard and then the flames scouring the deck, engulfing the figure in their midst. The heat would sear my face and the sea would be lit with red and gold, and the old man would travel, wreathed in fire, from this world to the next.

I tightened my finger on the trigger.

Click.

Out upon the waves, Faulkner rocked slightly as the hammer fell upon the empty chamber of his revolver. He tried to fire again.

Click.

I walked to the edge of the water and raised the flare gun. Once more the hollow sound came, yet the old man seemed neither to notice nor to care. The barrel of the gun followed me as I moved, as if with each pull of the trigger the empty weapon launched a fresh volley of lead that tore through my body and brought me, inch by inch, closer to death.

Click.

For an instant, the flare was level with him, its thick muzzle centered on his body, and I saw the satisfaction on his face. He would die, but I would damn myself in his destruction, and I would become like him.

Click.

Then the muzzle rose until the gun was above my head, pointing at the heavens.

‘No!’ cried Faulkner. ‘No!’

I pulled the trigger and the flare shot forth, shedding bright light on the dark waves, turning the rain to falling silver and gold, the old man screaming in rage as a new star was born in the void.

I went to Angel. A smear of blood lay across the width of his plastic shield, where it had fallen against his wound. Carefully, I lifted it away so that it would not stick. The gun was still in his hand and his eyes were open, watching the figure out on the water.

‘He should have burned,’ he said.

‘He will burn,’ I replied.

And I held him until they came for us.

The Search for Sanctuary

Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier

‘Truth exists,’ wrote the painter Georges Braque. ‘Only lies are invented.’ Somewhere, the truth about the Aroostook Baptists remains to be discovered and written at last. All that I have tried to do is to provide a context for what occurred: the hopes that inspired the undertaking, the emotions that undermined it, and the final actions that swept it away.

In August 1964, letters were sent to relatives of each of the families who had joined Faulkner more than a year earlier. Each letter was written by the male or female parent of the family involved. Lyall Kellog wrote his family’s letter; it was posted from Fairbanks, Alaska. Katherine Cornish’s letter came from Johnstown, Pennsylvania; Frida Perrson’s from Rochester, Minnesota; and Frank Jessop’s, which assured his family that all was well with his wife and children, from Porterville, California. Each letter was undated, contained general good wishes, and added little more than that the Aroostock Baptists were no more and the families involved had been chosen to send out the Reverend Faulkner’s message to the world like the missionaries of old. Few of the relatives involved were particularly concerned. Only Lena Myers, Elizabeth Jessop’s sister, persisted in the belief that something might have happened to her sister and her family. In 1969, with the permission of the landowner, she engaged a private firm of contractors to excavate sections of land on the site of the Eagle Lake community. The search revealed nothing. In 1970, Lena Myers died as a result of injuries received in a hit-and-run accident in Kennebec, Maine. No one has ever been charged in connection with her death.

No trace of the families has ever been found in any of the towns from which their letters originated. Their names have never been recorded. No descendants have been discovered. No further contact was ever made by them.

The truth, I feel certain, lies buried.

Epilogue

This is a honeycomb world, each hollow linked to the next, each life inextricably intertwined with the lives of others. The loss of even one reverberates through the whole, altering the balance, changing the nature of existence in tiny, imperceptible ways.

I find myself returning again and again to a woman named Tante Marie Aguillard, her impossibly tiny child’s voice coming to me from out of her immense form. I see her lying on a mountain of pillows in a warm, dark room in western Louisiana, the smell of the Atchafalaya drifting through the house; a shining, black shadow among shifting forms, heedless of the boundaries between the natural and the man-made as one world melts into another. She takes my hand and talks to me of my lost wife and child. They call to her and tell her of the man who took their lives.

She has no need of light; her blindness is less an impediment than an aid to a deeper, more meaningful perception. Sight would be a distraction for her strange, wandering consciousness, for her intense, fearless compassion. She feels for them all: the lost, the vanished, the dispossessed, the frightened, suffering souls who have been violently wrenched from this life and can find no rest in their world within worlds. She reaches out to them, comforting them in their final moments so they will not die alone, so they will not be afraid as they pass from light into dark.

And when the Traveling Man, the dark angel, comes for her, she reaches out in turn to me, and I am with her as she dies.

Tante Marie knew the nature of this world. She roamed through it, saw it for what it was, and understood her place in it, her responsibility to those who dwelt within it and beyond. Now, slowly, I too have begun to understand, to recognize a duty to the rest, to those whom I have never known as much as to those whom I have loved. The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another’s pain as one’s own, and to act to take that pain away. There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness. I am a flawed man, with a violent past that will not be denied, but I will not allow innocent people to suffer when it is within my power to help them.

I will not turn my back on them.

I will not walk away.

And if, in doing these things, I can make some amends, some recompense, for the things that I have done and for all that I have failed to do, then that will be my consolation.

For reparation is the shadow cast by salvation.

I have faith in some better world beyond this one. I know that my wife and child dwell within it, for I have seen them. I know that they are safe now from the dark angels and that wherever may dwell Faulkner and Pudd and the countless others who wanted to turn life to death, they are far, far from Susan and Jennifer, and they can never touch them again.

There is rain tonight in Boston, and the glass of the window is anatomized with intricate veins traced across its surface. I wake, my knuckle still sore from the treated bite, and turn gently to feel her move close beside me. Her hand touches my neck and I know somehow that, while I have been asleep, she has been watching me in the darkness, waiting for the moment to arrive.

But I am tired, and as my eyes close again,

I am standing at the edge of the forest, and the air is filled with the howling of the hybrids. Behind me, the trees reach out to one another, and when they touch, they make a sound like children whispering. And as I listen, something moves in the shadows before me.

‘Bird?’

Her hand is warm upon me, yet my skin is cold. I want to stay with her, but

I am drawn away again, for the darkness is calling me and the shape still moves through the trees. Slowly, the boy emerges, the black tape masking the lens of his glasses, his skin pale white. I try to walk to him but I cannot raise my feet. Behind him, other figures shift but they are walking away from us, disappearing into the forest, and soon he will join them. The wooden board has been discarded but the burn marks from the rope remain visible at the sides of his neck. He says nothing but stands watching me for a long, long time, one hand gripping the bark of the yellow birch beside him, until, at last, he too begins to recede,

‘Bird,’ she whispers.

fading away, moving deeper and deeper,

‘I’m pregnant.’

down, down into the depths of this honeycomb world.

Acknowledgments

The following books proved invaluable in the course of writing this novel:

Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War by James Risen and Judy L. Thomas (Basic Books, 1998); Eagle Lake by James C. Ouellette (Harpswell Press, 1980); The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators by Gordon Grice (Allen Lane, 1998); The Book of the Spider by Paul Hillyard (Hutchinson, 1994); The Bone Lady by Mary H. Manheim (Louisiana State University Press, 1999); Maine Lighthouses by Courtney Thompson (CatNap Publications, 1996); Apocalypses by Eugen Weber (Hutchinson, 1999); The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come, edited by Francis Carey (British Museum Press, 1999); and The Devil’s Party by Colin Wilson (Virgin, 2000). In addition, Simpson’s Forensic Medicine by Bernard Knight (Arnold, 1997) and Introduction to Forensic Sciences, second edition, edited by William G. Eckert (CRC Press, 1997) rarely left my desk.

Much of the material relating to religious movements in Maine came from Elizabeth Ring’s Introduction to her Directory of Churches & Religious Organizations in Maine, 1940 (Maine Historical Records Survey Project); ‘Till Shiloh Come’ by Jason Stone (Down East magazine, March 1990); and ‘The Promised Land’ by Earl M. Benson. (Down East magazine, September 1953).

As each novel progresses, the depths of my ignorance become more and more apparent. I have relied on the knowledge and kindness of a great many people in researching this book, among them James Ferland and the staff of the Maine Medical Examiner’s Office, Augusta; Officer Joe Giacomantonio, Scarborough Police Department; Captain Russell J. Gauvin, City of Portland Police Department; Sergeant Dennis R. Appleton, CID III, Maine State Police; Sergeant Hugh J. Turner, Maine State Police; L. Dean Paisley, my excellent guide to Eagle Lake; Rita Staudig, historian of the St. John Valley; Phineas Sprague Jr. of Portland Yacht Services; Bob and Babs Malkin and Jim Block, who helped me with Jewish New York; Big Apple Greeters; Phil Procter, theater manager of the Wang Center in Boston; Beth Olsen at the Boston Ballet; the staff of the Center for Maine History in Portland, Maine; Chuck Antony; and many others. To all of them I owe a drink, and probably an apology for all the mistakes I’ve made.

Finally, I wish to thank my agent, Darley Anderson, and his assistants, Elizabeth and Carrie; my foreign rights agent Kerith Biggs; my editor, Sue Fletcher; and everyone at Hodder & Stoughton for putting up with me.

THE WHITE ROAD

John Connolly

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Hodder and Stoughton

An Hachette UK Company

Copyright © 2002 by John Connolly

The right of John Connolly to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 978 1 84456 839 0

Book ISBN 978 1 444 7 0471 6

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

For Darley Anderson

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint from the following copyrighted works:

Extract from ‘The Waste Land’ reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd, 3 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AU

Pinetop Seven: lines from ‘Mission District’ (lyrics: Darren Richard) from Bringing Home the Last Great Strike (Self-Help/Truckstop Records, 2000). © Darren Richard, re printed by permission of Darren Richard and Truckstop Audio Recording Company.

www.pinetopseven.com

PART ONE

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

– But who is that on the other side of you?

T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’

PROLOGUE

They are coming.

They are coming in their trucks and their cars, plumes of blue smoke following them through the clear night air like stains upon the soul. They are coming with their wives and their children, with their lovers and their sweethearts, talking of crops and animals and journeys they will make; of church bells and Sunday schools; of wedding dresses and the names of children yet unborn; of who said this and who said that, things small and great, the lifeblood of a thousand small towns no different from their own.

They are coming with food and drink, and the smell of fried chicken and fresh-baked pies makes their mouths water. They are coming with dirt beneath their nails and beer on their breath. They are coming in pressed shirts and patterned dresses, hair combed and hair wild. They are coming with joy in their hearts and vengeance on their minds and excitement curling like a snake in the hollow of their bellies.

They are coming to see the burning man.

The two men stopped at Cebert Yaken’s gas station, ‘The Friendliest Little Gas Station in the South,’ close by the banks of the Ogeechee River on the road to Caina. Cebert had painted the sign himself in 1968 in bright yellows and reds, and every year since then he had climbed onto the flat roof on the first day of April to freshen the colors, so that the sun would never take its toll upon the sign and cause the welcome to fade. Each day, the sign cast its shadow on the clean lot, on the flowers in their boxes, on the shining gas pumps, and on the buckets filled with water so that drivers could wipe the remains of bugs from their windshields. Beyond lay untilled fields, and in the early September heat the shimmer rising from the road made the sassafras dance in the still air. The butterflies mixed with the falling leaves, sleepy oranges and checkered whites and eastern tailed blues bouncing upward in the wake of passing vehicles like the sails of brightly colored ships tossing on a wild sea.

From his stool by the window, Cebert would look out on the arriving cars, checking for out-of-state tags so that he could prepare a good old Southern welcome, maybe sell some coffee and doughnuts or shift some of the tourist maps, the yellowing of their covers in the sunlight signaling the approaching end of their usefulness.

Cebert dressed the part: he wore blue overalls with his name sewn on the left breast, and a Co-Op Beef Feeds cap sat way back on his head like an afterthought. His hair was white and he had a long mustache that curled exotically over his upper lip, the two ends almost meeting on his chin. Behind his back folks said that it made Cebert look like a bird had just flown up his nose, but they didn’t mean nothing by it. Cebert’s family had lived in these parts for generations and Cebert was one of their own. He advertised bake sales and picnics in the windows of his gas station and donated to every good cause that came his way. If dressing and acting like Grandpa Walton helped him sell a little more gas and a couple of extra candy bars, then good luck to Cebert.

Above the wooden counter, behind which Cebert sat day in, day out, seven days each week, sharing the duties with his wife and his boy, was a bulletin board headed: ‘Look Who Dropped By!’ Pinned to it were hundreds of business cards. There were more cards on the walls and the window frames, and on the door that led into Cebert’s little back office. Thousands of Abe B. Normals or Bob R. Averages, passing through Georgia on their way to sell more photocopy ink or hair-care products, had handed old Cebert their cards so that they could leave a reminder of their visit to the Friendliest Little Gas Station in the South. Cebert never took them down, so that card had piled upon card in a process of accretion, layering like rock. True, some had fallen over the years, or slipped behind the coolers, but for the most part if the Abe B.’s or Bob R.’s passed through again in years to come, with a little Abe or Bob in tow, there was a pretty good chance that they would find their cards buried beneath a hundred others, like a relic of the lives that they had once enjoyed and of the men that they had once been.

But the two men who paid for a full tank and put water in the steaming engine of their piece-of-shit Taurus just before five that afternoon weren’t the kind who left their business cards. Cebert saw that straight off, felt it as something gave in his belly when they glanced at him. They carried themselves in a way that suggested barely suppressed menace and a potential for lethality that was as definite as a cocked gun or an unsheathed blade. Cebert barely nodded at them when they entered and he sure as hell didn’t ask them for a card. These men didn’t want to be remembered, and if, like Cebert, you were smart, then you’d pretty much do your best to forget them as soon as they’d paid for their gas (in cash, of course) and the last dust from their car had settled back on the ground.

Because if at some later date you did decide to remember them, maybe when the cops came asking and flashing descriptions, then, well, they might hear about it and decide to remember you too. And the next time someone dropped by to see old Cebert they’d be carrying flowers and old Cebert wouldn’t get to shoot the breeze or sell them a fading tourist map because old Cebert would be dead and long past worrying about yellowing stock and peeling paint.

So Cebert took their money and watched as the shorter one, the little white guy who had topped up the water when they pulled into the gas station, flicked through the cheap CDs and the small stock of paperbacks that Cebert kept on a rack by the door. The other man, the tall black one with the black shirt and the designer jeans, was looking casually at the corners of the ceiling and the shelves behind the counter loaded high with cigarettes. When he was satisfied that there was no camera, he removed his wallet and, using leather-gloved fingers, counted out two tens to pay for the gas and two sodas, then waited quietly while Cebert made change. Their car was the only one at the pumps. It had New York plates and both the plates and the car were kind of dirty, so Cebert couldn’t see much except for the make and the color and Miss Liberty peering through the murk.

‘You need a map?’ asked Cebert, hopefully. ‘Tourist guide, maybe?’

‘No, thank you,’ said the black man.

Cebert fumbled in the register. For some reason, his hands had started to shake. Nervous, he found himself making just the kind of inane conversation that he had vowed to avoid. He seemed to be standing outside himself, watching while an old fool with a drooping mustache talked himself into an early grave.

‘You staying around here?’

‘No.’

‘Guess we won’t be seeing you again, then.’

‘Maybe you won’t.’

There was a tone in the man’s voice that made Cebert look up from the register. Cebert’s palms were sweating. He flicked a quarter up with his index finger and felt it slide around in a loop in the hollow of his right hand before rattling back into the register drawer. The black man was still standing relaxed on the other side of the counter but there was a tightness around Cebert’s throat that he could not explain. It was as if the visitor were two people, one in black jeans and a black shirt with a soft Southern twang to his voice and the other an unseen presence that had found its way behind the counter and was now slowly constricting Cebert’s airways.

‘Or maybe we might pass through again, sometime,’ he continued. ‘You still be here?’

‘I hope so,’ croaked Cebert.

‘You think you’ll remember us?’

The question was spoken lightly, with what might have been the hint of a smile, but there was no mistaking its meaning.

Cebert swallowed. ‘Mister,’ he said. ‘I’ve forgotten you already.’

With that, the black man nodded and he and his companion left, and Cebert didn’t release his breath until their car was gone from sight and the shadow of the sign cast itself, once again, on an empty lot.

And when the cops came asking about the men a day or two later, Cebert shook his head and told them that he didn’t know nothing about them, couldn’t recall if two guys like them had passed through that week. Hell, lot of people passed through here on the way to 301 or the interstate, kept the place going like a turnstile at Disney World. And anyway, all them black fellers look alike, you know how it is. He gave the cops free coffee and Twinkies and sent them on their way and had to remind himself, for the second time that week, to release his breath.

He looked around at the business cards arrayed on every previously blank stretch of wall, then leaned over and blew some dust from the nearest bunch. The name Edward Boatner was revealed. According to his card, Edward sold machine parts for a company out of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Well, if Edward came through here again, he could take a look at his card. It would still be there, because Edward wanted to be remembered.

But Cebert didn’t remember nobody that didn’t want to be remembered.

He might have been friendly, but he wasn’t dumb.

A black oak stands on a slope at the northern edge of a green field, its branches like bones set against the moonlit sky. It is an old, old tree; its bark is thick and gray, deeply furrowed with regular vertical ridges, a fossilized relic stranded by a long-departed tide. In places, the orange inner bark has been exposed, exuding a bitter, unpleasant scent. The shiny green leaves are thick upon it: ugly leaves, deep and narrow, with bristle-tipped teeth at the ends of the lobes.

But this is not the true smell of the black oak that stands at the edge of Ada’s Field. On warm nights when the world is quieted, hand-on-mouth, and the moonlight shines palely on the scorched earth beneath its crown, the black oak discharges a different odor, alien to its kind yet as much a part of this solitary tree as the leaves on its branches and the roots in its soil. It is the smell of gasoline and burning flesh, of human waste and singeing hair, of rubber melting and cotton igniting. It is the smell of painful death, of fear and despair, of final moments lived in the laughter and jeering of onlookers.

Step closer, and the lower parts of its branches are blackened and charred. Look, see there, on the trunk: a cloven groove deep in the wood, now faded but once bright, where the bark was suddenly, violently breached. The man who made that mark, the final mark he left upon this world, was born Will Embree, and he had a wife and a child and a job in a grocery store that paid him a dollar an hour. His wife was Lila Embree, or Lila Richardson that was, and her husband’s body – after the ending of the final, desperate struggle that caused his booted foot to strike so hard against the trunk of the tree that he tore the bark from it and left a pit deep in its flesh – was never returned to her. Instead his remains were burned and the crowd took souvenirs of the blackened bones from his fingers and toes, then sent her a photograph of her dead husband that Jack Morton of Nashville had printed up in batches of five hundred to be used as postcards, Will Embree’s features twisted and swollen, the figure standing at his feet grinning as the flames from the torch leap toward the legs of the man Lila loved. His corpse was dumped in a swamp and the fish stripped the last of the charred flesh from his bones until they came apart and were scattered across the mud on the bottom. The bark never reclaimed the breach made by Will Embree and it remained exposed for ever after. The illiterate man had left his mark on the sole monument to his passing as surely as if it had been carved in stone.

There are places on this old tree where no leaves ever grow. Butterflies do not rest upon it, and birds do not nest in its branches. When its acorns fall to the ground, fringed with brown hairy scales, they are left to decay. Even the crows turn their black eyes from the rotting fruit.

Around the trunk, a vine weaves. Its leaves are broad, and from each node springs a cluster of small green flowers. The flowers smell as if they are decomposing, festering, and in daylight they are black with flies drawn by the stench. This is Smilax herbacea, the carrion flower. There is not another one like it for a hundred miles in any direction. Like the black oak itself, it is alone of its kind. Here, in Ada’s Field, the two entities coexist, parasite and saprophyte: the one fueled by the lifeblood of the tree, the other drawing its existence from the lost and the dead.

And the song the wind sings in its branches is one of misery and regret, of pain and passing. It calls over untilled fields and one-room shacks, across acres of corn and mists of cotton. It calls to the living and the dead, and old ghosts linger in its shade.

Now there are lights on the horizon and cars on the road. It is July 17, 1964 and they are coming.

They are coming to see the burning man.

Virgil Gossard stepped into the parking lot beside Little Tom’s Tavern and belched loudly. A cloudless night sky stretched above him, dominated by a yellow killer moon. To the northwest, the tail of the constellation Draco was visible, Ursa Minor below it, Hercules above, but Virgil was not a man to take time to look at the stars, not when he might miss a nickel on the ground in the process, and so the shapes that the stars had taken were lost on him. From the trees and the bushes the last of the field crickets sounded, undisturbed by traffic or people, for this was a quiet stretch of road, with few houses and fewer folk, most having abandoned their homes for more promising surroundings many years before. The cicadas were already gone and soon the woods would prepare for the winter quiet. Virgil would be glad when it came. He didn’t like bugs. Earlier that day, a piece of what looked like greenish lint had moved across his hand while he lay in bed and he had felt the brief sting as the masked hunter, scouring Virgil’s filthy sheets for bedbugs, bit into him. The thing was dead a second later, but the bite was still itching. That was how Virgil was able to tell the cops what time it was when the men came. He had seen the green numerals on his watch glowing as he scratched at the bug bite: 9:15 P.M.

There were only four cars in the lot, four cars for four men. The others were still in the bar, watching a rerun of a classic hockey game on Little Tom’s crappy TV, but Virgil Gossard had never been much for hockey. His eyesight wasn’t so good and the puck moved too fast for him to follow it. But then everything moved too fast for Virgil Gossard to follow. That was just the way of things. Virgil wasn’t too smart, though at least he knew it, which maybe made him smarter than he thought. There were plenty of other fellas thought they were Alfred Einstein or Bob Gates, but not Virgil. Virgil knew he was dumb, so he kept his mouth shut and his eyes open, best he could, and just tried to get by.

He felt an ache at his bladder and sighed. He knew he should have gone before he left the bar but Little Tom’s bathroom smelled worse than Little Tom himself, and that was saying something, seeing as how little Tom smelled like he was dying from the inside out, and dying hard. Hell, everybody was dying, inside out, outside in, but most folks took a bath once in a while to keep the flies off. Not Little Tom Rudge, though: if Little Tom tried to take a bath, the water would leave the tub in protest.

Virgil tugged at his groin and shifted uncomfortably from his right foot to his left, then back again. He didn’t want to go back inside, but if Little Tom caught him pissing on his lot, then Virgil would be going home with Little Tom’s boot stuck up his ass, and Virgil had enough troubles down there without adding a damn leather enema to his burdens. He could take a leak by the side of the road farther on down the way; but the more he thought about it the more he wanted to go now. He could feel it burning inside of him: if he waited any longer  . . .

Well, hell, he wasn’t going to wait. He pulled down his zipper, reached inside his pants, and waddled over to the side wall of Little Tom’s Tavern just in time to sign his name, which was about as far as Virgil’s education extended. He breathed out deeply as the pressure eased and his eyes fluttered closed in a brief ecstasy.

Something cold touched him behind his left ear and his eyes quickly opened wide again. He didn’t move. His attention was focused on the feel of the metal on his skin, the sound of liquid on wood and stone, and the presence of a large figure behind his back. Then the voice spoke:

‘I’m warnin’ you, cracker: you get one drop of your sorry-ass piss on my shoes and they gonna be fittin’ you up for a new skull before they put you in that box.’

Virgil gulped.

‘I can’t stop it.’

‘I ain’t askin’ you to stop. I ain’t askin’ you nothin’. I am tellin’ you: do not get one drop of your rotgut urine on my shoes.’

Virgil let out a little sob and tried to move the flow to the right. He’d only had three beers but it seemed like he was peeing out the Mississippi. Please stop, he thought. He glanced a little to his left and saw a black gun held in a black hand. The hand emerged from a black coat sleeve. At the end of the black coat sleeve was a black shoulder, a black lapel, a black shirt and the edge of a black face.

The gun nudged his skull hard, warning him to keep his eyes straight ahead, but Virgil still felt a sudden rush of indignation. It was a nigger with a gun, in the parking lot of Little Tom’s Tavern. There weren’t too many subjects upon which Virgil Gossard had strong, fully formed opinions, but one of them was niggers with guns. The whole trouble with this country wasn’t that there were too many guns, it was that too many of those guns were in the hands of the wrong people, and absolutely and positively the wrong people to be carrying guns were niggers. The way Virgil figured it, white people needed guns to protect themselves from all the niggers with guns while all the niggers had guns to shoot other niggers with and, when the mood took them, white folks too. So the solution was to take away the guns from the niggers and then you’d have fewer white folks with guns because they wouldn’t have so much to be scared about, plus there’d be fewer niggers shooting other niggers so there’d be less crime too. It was that simple: niggers were the wrong people to be handing out guns to. Now, near as Virgil could figure it, one of those selfsame wrong people was currently pointing one of those misplaced guns into Virgil’s skull, and Virgil didn’t like it one little bit. It just proved his point. Niggers shouldn’t have guns and—

The gun in question tapped Virgil hard behind the ear and the voice said:

‘Hey, you know you talkin’ out loud, right?’

‘Shit,’ said Virgil, and this time he heard himself.

The first of the cars turns into the field and pulls up, its headlights shining on the old oak so that its shadow grows and creeps up the slope behind it like dark blood spilling and spreading itself across the land. A man climbs out on the driver’s side, then walks around the front of the car and opens the door for the woman. They are both in their forties, hard-faced people wearing cheap clothes and shoes that have been mended so often that the original leather is little more than a faded memory glimpsed through patches and stitching. The man takes a straw basket from the trunk, a faded red check napkin carefully tucked in to cover its contents. He hands the basket to the woman, then retrieves a tattered bedsheet from behind the spare tire and spreads it on the ground. The woman sits, tucking her legs in beneath her, and whips away the napkin. Lying in the basket are four pieces of fried chicken, four buttermilk rolls, a tub of coleslaw, and two glass bottles of homemade lemonade, with two plates and two forks tucked in beside them. She removes the plates, dusts them carefully with the napkin, then lays them on the bedsheet. The man eases himself down beside her and removes his hat. It is a warm evening and already the mosquitoes have begun to bite. He slaps at one and examines its remains upon his hand.

‘Sum’bitch,’ he says.

‘You watch your mouth, Esau,’ says the woman primly, carefully dividing up the food, making sure that her husband gets the breast piece because he is a good, hardworking man despite his language and he needs his food.

‘Beg pardon,’ says Esau as she hands him a plate of chicken and coleslaw, shaking her head at the ways of the man she has married.

Behind and beside them, more vehicles are pulling up. There are couples, and old folks, and young boys of fifteen and sixteen. Some are driving trucks, their neighbors sitting in back fanning themselves with their hats. Others arrive in big Buick Roadmasters, Dodge Royal hardtops, Ford Mainlines, even a big old Kaiser Manhattan, no car younger than seven or eight years old. They share food, or lean against the hoods of their cars and drink beer from bottles. Handshakes are exchanged and backs are slapped. Soon there are forty cars and trucks, maybe more, in and around Ada’s Field, their lights shining on the black oak. There are easily one hundred people gathered, waiting, and more arriving every minute.

The opportunities to meet up in this way don’t come along so often now. The great years of the Negro barbecue have been and gone, and the old laws are buckling under the pressures imposed from without. There are some folks here who can remember the lynching of Sam Hose down in Newman in 1899, when special excursion trains were laid on so that more than two thousand people from far and wide could come see how the people of Georgia dealt with nigger rapists and killers. It didn’t matter none that Sam Hose hadn’t raped anyone and that he’d only killed the planter Cranford in self-defense. His death would serve as an object lesson to the others, and so they castrated him, cut off his fingers and his ears, then skinned his face before applying the oil and the torch. The crowd fought for fragments of his bones and kept them as tokens. Sam Hose, one of five thousand victims of mob lynchings in less than a century: rapists some, or so they said; killers others. And then there were those who just talked big, or made idle threats when they should have known better than to shoot their mouths off. Talk like that risked getting all sorts of folks riled up and causing no end of trouble. That kind of talk had to be stifled before it became a shout, and there was no surer way of quieting a man or a woman than a noose and a torch.

Great days, great days.

It is about 9:30 P.M. when they hear the sound of the three trucks approaching, and an excited buzz spreads through the crowd. Their heads turn as the headlights scour the field. There are at least six men in each vehicle. The middle truck is a red Ford, and in the bed a black man sits hunched, his hands tied behind his back. He is big, six seven or more, and the muscles in his shoulders and back are hard and bunched like melons in a sack. There is blood on his head and face, and one eye is swollen closed.

He is here.

The burning man is here.

Virgil was certain that he was about to die. His big mouth had just helped him into a heap of trouble, maybe the last trouble he’d ever have to endure. But the good Lord was smiling upon Virgil, even if He wasn’t smiling so hard as to make the n –, beg pardon, the gunman, go away. Instead, he could feel his breath on his cheek and could smell his aftershave as he spoke. It smelled expensive.

‘You say that word again and you better enjoy that leak, ’cause it will be the last one you ever take.’

‘Sorry,’ said Virgil. He tried to force the offending word from his brain, but it came back each time with renewed force. He began to sweat.

‘Sorry,’ he said again.

‘Well, that’s all right. You finished down there?’

Virgil nodded.

‘Then put it away. An owl might figure it for a worm and carry it off.’

Virgil had a vague suspicion that he’d just been insulted, but he quickly tucked his manhood into his fly just in case and wiped his hands on his trousers.

‘You carrying a gun?’

‘Nope.’

‘Bet you wish you were.’

‘Yep,’ admitted Virgil, in a burst of sudden and possibly ill-advised honesty.

He felt hands on him, patting him down, but the gun stayed where it was, pressed hard against his skin. There was more than one of them, Virgil figured. Hell, there could be half of Harlem at his back. He felt a pressure on his wrists as his hands were cuffed tightly behind him.

‘Now turn to your right.’

Virgil did as he was told. He was facing out onto the open country behind the bar, all green as far as the river.

‘You answer my questions, I let you walk away into those fields. Understand?’

Virgil nodded dumbly.

‘Thomas Rudge, Willard Hoag, Clyde Benson. They in there?’

Virgil was the kind of guy who instinctively lied about everything, even if there didn’t seem to be any percentage in not telling the truth. Better to lie and cover your ass later than tell the truth and find yourself in trouble from the start.

Virgil, true to character, shook his head.

‘You sure?’

Virgil nodded and opened his mouth to embellish the lie. Instead, the clicking of the spittle in his mouth coincided perfectly with the impact of his head against the wall as the gun pushed firmly into the base of his skull.

‘See,’ whispered the voice, ‘we goin’ in there anyhow. If we go in and they ain’t there, then you got nothin’ to worry about, least until we come lookin’ for you to start askin’ you again where they at. But we go in there and they sittin’ up at the bar, suckin’ on some cold ones, then there are dead folks got a better chance of bein’ alive tomorrow than you do. You understand me?’

Virgil understood.

‘They’re in there,’ he confirmed.

‘How many others?’

‘Nobody, just them three.’

The black man, as Virgil had at last begun to think of him, removed the gun from Virgil’s head and patted him on the shoulder with his hand.

‘Thank you . . .’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’

‘Virgil,’ said Virgil.

‘Well, thank you, Virgil,’ said the man, then brought the butt of the gun down hard on Virgil’s skull. ‘You been great.’

Beneath the black oak, an old Lincoln has been driven into place. The red truck pulls up beside it and three hooded men climb from the bed, pushing the black man onto the ground before them. He lands on his stomach, his face in the dirt. Strong hands yank him to his feet and he stares into the dark holes of the pillowcases, crudely burnt into the fabric with matches and cigarettes. He can smell cheap liquor.

Cheap liquor and gasoline.

His name is Errol Rich, although no stone or cross with that name upon it will ever mark his final resting place. From the moment he was taken from his momma’s house, his sister and his momma screaming, Errol had ceased to exist. Now all traces of his physical presence are about to be erased from this earth, leaving only the memory of his life with those who have loved him, and the memory of his dying with those gathered here this night.

And why is he here? Errol Rich is about to burn for refusing to buckle, for refusing to bend his knee, for disrespecting his betters.

Errol Rich is about to die for breaking a window.

He was driving his truck, his old truck with its cracked windshield and its flaking paint, when he heard the shout.

‘Hey, nigger!’

Then the glass exploded in on top of him, cutting his face and hands, and something hit him hard between the eyes. He braked suddenly, and smelled it upon himself. In his lap, the cracked pitcher dumped the remains of its contents on his seat and on his pants.

Urine. They had filled a pitcher between them and thrown it through his windshield. He wiped the liquid from his face, his sleeve coming away wet and bloody, and looked at the three men standing by the roadside, a few steps away from the entrance to the bar.

‘Who threw that?’ he asked. Nobody answered, but secretly, they were afraid. Errol Rich was a strong, powerful man. They had expected him to wipe his face and drive on, not to stop and confront them.

‘You throw that, Little Tom?’ Errol stood before Little Tom Rudge, the owner of the bar, but Little Tom wouldn’t meet his eyes. ‘’Cause if you did, you better tell me now, else I’m gonna burn your shit heap down to the ground.’

But still there was no reply, so Errol Rich, who always did have a temper on him, signed his death warrant by taking a length of timber from the bed of his truck and turning to the men. They backed off, waiting for him to come at them, but instead he threw the timber, all three feet of it, through the front window of Little Tom Rudge’s bar, then climbed back in his truck and drove away.

Now Errol Rich is about to die for a pane of cheap glass, and a whole town has come to watch it happen. He looks out on them, these God-fearing people, these sons and daughters of the land, and he feels the heat of their hatred upon him, a foretaste of the burning that is to come.

I fixed things, he thinks. I took what was broken and made it good again.

The thought seems to have come to him almost out of nowhere. He tries to shake it away, but instead, it persists.

I had a gift. I could take an engine, a radio, even a television, and I could repair it. I never read a manual, never had no formal training. It was a gift, a gift that I had, and soon it will be gone.

He looks out at the crowd, at the expectant faces. He sees a boy, fourteen or fifteen, his eyes bright with excitement. He recognizes him, recognizes too the man with his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He had brought his radio to Errol, hoping to have it fixed in time for the Santa Anita because he liked to listen to the horse races. And Errol had repaired it, replacing the busted speaker cone, and the man had thanked him and paid him a dollar extra for coming through for him.

The man sees Errol looking at him, and his eyes flick away. There will be no help for him, no mercy from any of these people. He is about to die for a broken window, and they will find someone else to repair their engines and their radios, although not as well, and not as cheaply.

His legs tied, Errol is forced to hop to the Lincoln. They drag him onto the roof, these masked men, and they put the rope around his neck while he kneels. He sees the tattoo on the arm of the largest man: the word ‘Kathleen’ spelled out on a banner held by angels. The hand tightens the rope. The gasoline is poured over his head, and he shivers.

Then Errol looks up and says the last words anyone will ever hear from him on this earth.

‘Don’t burn me,’ he asks. He has accepted the fact of his death, the inevitability of his passing on this night, but he does not want to burn.

Please Lord, don’t let them burn me.

The tattooed man splashes the last of the gasoline into Errol Rich’s eyes, blinding him, then climbs down to the ground.

Errol Rich starts to pray.

The small white man entered the bar first. A smell of stale, spilled beer hung in the air. On the floor, dust and cigarette butts formed drifts around the counter, where they had been swept but not cleaned up. There were blackened circles on the wood where soles had stamped out thousands of embers, and the orange paint on the walls had blistered and burst like infected skin. There were no pictures to be seen, just generic beer company signs that had been used to cover the worst of the damage.

The bar wasn’t too big, certainly no more than thirty feet in length and fifteen across. The counter itself was on the left and shaped like the blade of an ice skate, the curved end nearest the door. At its other extreme there was a small office and storage area. The toilets were beyond the bar, beside the back door. Four booths stood against the wall to the right, a pair of round tables to the left.

There were two men sitting at the counter, and one other man behind the bar. All three were probably in their sixties. The two at the bar wore baseball caps, faded T-shirts beneath even more faded cotton shirts, and cheap jeans. One of them had a long knife on his belt. The other had a gun concealed beneath his shirt.

The man behind the bar looked like he might have been strong and fit once, a long time ago. There was bulk on his shoulders, chest, and arms that was now masked by a thick layer of fat, and his breasts were pendulous as those of an old woman. There were old yellow sweat stains beneath the arms of his white short-sleeved shirt, and his trousers hung low on his hips in a way that might have been fashionable on a sixteen year old but was ridiculous on a man fifty years older than that. His hair was yellow-white but still thick, and his face was partially obscured by a week’s growth of scraggly beard.

All three men were watching the hockey game on the old TV above the bar, but their heads turned in unison as the new arrival entered. He was unshaven, wearing dirty sneakers, a loud Hawaiian shirt, and creased chinos. He didn’t look like he belonged anywhere above Christopher Street, not that anybody in this bar knew where Christopher Street was, exactly. But they knew this man’s type, yes they did. They could smell it on him. Didn’t matter how unshaven he was, how shabbily he dressed; this boy had ‘fag’ written all over him.

‘Can I get a beer?’ he asked, stepping up to the bar.

The bartender didn’t make any move for at least a full minute, then took a Bud from the cooler and placed it on the bar.

The small man picked up the beer and looked at it as if seeing a bottle of Bud for the first time.

‘You got anything else?’

‘We got Bud Light.’

‘Wow, both kinds.’

The bartender gave him unimpressed.

‘Two-fifty.’ This wasn’t the kind of place that ran a tab.

He counted out three bills from a thick roll, then added another fifty cents in change to bring the tip up to a dollar. The eyes of the three men remained fixed on his slim, delicate hands as he replaced the money in his pocket, then they returned their gazes to the hockey game. The small man took a booth behind the two drinkers, leaned into the corner, then put his feet up and directed his face toward the TV. All four men remained in those positions for about five minutes, until the door again opened softly and another man entered the bar, an unlit Cohiba in his mouth. He was so quiet that nobody even noticed him until he was four feet from the counter, at which point one of the men looked to his left, saw him, and said:

‘Little Tom, there’s a colored in your bar.’

Little Tom and the second man dragged themselves away from the TV to examine the black man who had now taken a stool at the lower end of the L-shaped bar.

‘Whiskey, please,’ he said.

Little Tom didn’t move. First a fag, now a nigger. This was turning into quite a night. His eyes moved from the man’s face to his expensive shirt, his neatly pressed black jeans, and his double-breasted overcoat.

‘You from out of town, boy?’

‘You could say that.’ He didn’t even blink at the second insult in less than thirty seconds.

‘There’s a coon place couple of miles down the road,’ said Little Tom. ‘You’ll get a drink there.’

‘I like it here.’

‘Well, I don’t like you here. Get your ass out, boy, before I start takin’ it personal.’

‘So I don’t get a drink?’ The man sounded unsurprised.

‘No, you don’t. Now you going to leave, or am I gonna have to make you leave?’

To his left, the two men shifted on their stools in preparation for the beating that they hoped to deliver. Instead, the object of their attention reached into his pocket, produced a bottle of whiskey in a brown paper bag, and twisted the cap. Little Tom reached under the counter with his right hand. It emerged holding a Louisville Slugger.

‘You can’t drink that in here, boy,’ he warned.

‘Shame,’ said the black man. ‘And don’t call me “boy.” The name is Louis.’

Then he tipped the bottle upside down and watched as its contents flowed along the bar. It made a neat turn at the elbow of the counter, the raised lip preventing the liquid from overflowing onto the floor, and seeped past the three men. They looked at Louis in surprise as he lit his cigar with a brass Zippo.

Louis stood and took a long puff on his Cohiba.

‘Heads up, crackers,’ he said, and dropped the flaming lighter into the whiskey.

The man with the tattoo raps sharply on the roof of the Lincoln. The engine roars and the car bucks once or twice like a steer on a rope before shooting away in a cloud of dirt, dead leaves, and exhaust fumes. Errol Rich seems to hang frozen for a moment in midair before his body uncurls. His long legs descend toward the ground but do not reach it, his feet kicking impotently at the air. A spluttering noise comes from his lips, and his eyes bulge as the rope draws tighter and tighter around his neck. His face becomes congested with blood and he begins to convulse, red drops now speckling his chin and chest. A minute goes by and still Errol struggles.

Below him, the tattooed man takes a branch wrapped in linen doused with gasoline, lights it with a match, then steps forward. He holds the torch up so Errol can see it, then touches it to Errol’s legs.

Errol ignites with a roar, and somehow, despite the constriction at his throat, he screams, a high, ululating thing filled with terrible agony. It is followed by a second, and then the flames enter his mouth and his vocal cords begin to burn. He kicks again and again as the smell of roasting meat fills the air, until at last the kicking stops.

The burning man is dead.

The bar flared, a small wall of flame shooting up to scorch beards, eyebrows, hair. The man with the gun at his belt leaped back, his left arm covering his eyes while his right reached for his weapon.

‘Ah-ah,’ said a voice. A Glock 19 was inches from his face, held firm in the grip of the man in the bright shirt. The other’s hand stopped instantly, the gun already uncovered. The small man, whose name was Angel, yanked it from its holster and held it up so that he now had two guns inches from the barfly’s face. Near the door, Louis’s hand now contained a SIG, trained on the man with the knife in his belt. Behind the bar, Little Tom was dousing the last of the flames with water. His face was red and he was breathing hard.

‘The fuck you do that for?’ He was looking at the black man, and at the SIG that had now moved to level itself at the center of his chest. A change of expression flickered in Little Tom’s face, a brief candle-flame of fear that was quickly snuffed out by his natural belligerence.

‘Why, you got a problem with it?’ asked Louis.

‘I got a problem with it.’

It was the man with the knife at his belt, brave now that the gun was no longer aimed at him. He had strange, sunken features: a weak chin that lost itself in his thin, stringy neck, blue eyes buried deep in their sockets, and cheekbones that looked like they had been broken and flattened by some old, almost forgotten impact. Those dim eyes regarded the black man impassively while his hands remained raised – away from his knife, but not too far away. It seemed like a good idea to make him get rid of it. A man who carries a knife like that knows how to use it, and use it fast. One of the two guns now held by Angel made an arc through the air and came to rest on him.

‘Unclasp your belt,’ said Louis.

The knife man paused for a moment, then did as he was told.

‘Now pull it out.’

He grasped it and pulled. The belt caught once or twice before it freed the scabbard and the knife fell to the floor.

‘That’s good enough.’

‘I still got a problem.’

‘Sorry to hear that,’ Louis replied. ‘You Willard Hoag?’

The sunken eyes betrayed nothing. They remained fixed on the interloper’s face, unblinking.

‘I know you?’

‘No, you don’t know me.’

Something danced in Willard’s eyes. ‘You niggers all look the same to me anyways.’

‘Guessed you’d take that point of view, Willard. Man behind you is Clyde Benson. And you—’ The SIG lifted slightly in front of the bartender. ‘You’re Little Tom Rudge.’

The redness in Little Tom’s face was due only partly to the heat of the burning liquor. There was fury building in him. It was there in the trembling of his lips, in the way his fingers were clasping and unclasping. The action made the tattoo on his arm move, as if the angels were slowly waving the banner with the name ‘Kathleen.’

And all of that anger was directed at the black man now threatening him in his own bar.

‘You want to tell me what’s happening here?’ asked Little Tom.

Louis smiled.

‘Atonement, that’s what’s happening here.’

It is ten after ten when the woman stands. They call her Grandma Lucy, although she is not yet fifty and still a beautiful woman with youth in her eyes and few lines on her dark skin. At her feet sits a boy, seven or eight years old, but already tall for his age. A radio plays Bessie Smith’s ‘Weeping Willow Blues’.

The woman called Grandma Lucy wears only a nightdress and shawl, and her feet are bare, yet she rises and walks through the doorway, descending the steps into the yard with careful, measured strides. Behind her walks the little boy, her grandson. He calls to her – ‘Grandma Lucy, what’s the matter?’ – but she does not reply. Later she will tell him about the worlds within worlds, about the places where the membrane separating the living from the dead is so thin that they can see one another, touch one another. She will tell him of the difference between daywalkers and nightwalkers, of the claims that the dead make upon those left behind.

And she will talk of the road that we all walk, and that we all share, the living and the dead alike.

But for now she just gathers her shawl closer to her and continues toward the edge of the forest, where she stops and waits in the moonless night. There is a light among the trees, as if a meteor has descended from the heavens and is now traveling close to the ground, flaming and yet not flaming, burning and yet not burning. There is no heat, but something is ablaze at the heart of that light.

And when the boy looks into her eyes, he sees the burning man.

‘You recall Errol Rich?’ said Louis.

Nobody responded, but a muscle spasmed in Clyde Benson’s face.

‘I said, do you recall Errol Rich?’

‘We don’t know what you’re talking about, boy,’ said Hoag. ‘You got the wrong men.’

The gun swiveled, then bucked in Louis’s hand. Willard Hoag’s chest spat blood through the hole in his left breast. He stumbled backward, taking a stool with him, then landed heavily on his back. His left hand scrambled at something unseen on the floor, and then he was still.

Clyde Benson started to cry, and then it all went down.

Little Tom dived to the floor of the bar, his hands seeking the shotgun beneath the sink. Clyde Benson kicked a stool at Angel, then ran for the door. He got as far as the men’s room before his shirt puffed twice at the shoulder. He stumbled through the back door and disappeared, bleeding, into the darkness. Angel, who had fired the shots, went after him.

The crickets had grown suddenly quiet and the silence in the night had a strange anticipatory quality, as though the natural world awaited the inevitable outcome of the events in the bar. Benson, unarmed and bleeding, had almost made it to the edge of the parking lot when the gunman caught up with him. His feet were swept from under him and he landed painfully in the dirt, blood flecking the ground before him. He began to crawl toward the long grass, as if by reaching its cover he might somehow be safe. A boot caught him under the chest, skewering him with white hot pain as he was forced onto his back, his eyes squeezing shut involuntarily. When they opened again, the man in the loud shirt was standing over him and his gun was pointed at Clyde Benson’s head.

‘Don’t do this,’ said Benson. ‘Please.’

The younger man’s face was impassive.

‘Please,’ said Benson. He was sobbing. ‘I repented of my sins. I found Jesus.’

The finger tightened on the trigger, and the man named Angel said:

‘Then you got nothing to worry about.’

In the darkness of her pupils the burning man stands, the flames shooting from his head and arms, his eyes and mouth. There is no skin, no hair, no clothing. There is only fire shaped like man, and pain shaped like fire.

‘You poor boy,’ whispers the woman. ‘You poor, poor boy.’

The tears begin to well up in her eyes and fall softly onto her cheeks. The flames start to flicker and waver. The burning man’s mouth opens and the lipless gap forms words that only the woman can hear. The fire dies, fading from white to yellow until at last there is only the silhouette of him, black on black, and then there is nothing but the trees and the tears and the feel of the woman’s hand upon the boy’s own – ‘Come, Louis.’ – as she guides him back to the house.

The burning man is at peace.

Little Tom rose up with the shotgun to find the room empty and a dead man on the floor. He swallowed once, then moved to his left, making for the end of the counter. He got three steps when the wood splintered at the level of his thigh and the bullets ripped through him, shattering his left femur and his right shin. He collapsed and screamed as his wounded legs impacted on the floor, but still managed to empty both barrels through the cheap wood of the bar. It exploded in a shower of shot and splinters and shattering glass. He could smell blood and powder and spilled whiskey. His ears rang as the noise faded, leaving only the sound of dripping liquid and falling timber.

And footsteps.

He looked to his left to see Louis standing above him. The barrel of the SIG was pointing at Little Tom’s chest. He found some spittle in his mouth and swallowed. Blood was fountaining from the ruptured artery in his thigh. He tried to stop it with his hand but it sprayed through his fingers.

‘Who are you?’ asked Little Tom. From outside came the sound of two shots as Clyde Benson died in the dirt.

‘Last time: you recall a man named Errol Rich?’

Little Tom shook his head. ‘Shit, I don’t know  . . .’

‘You burned him. You ought to know.’

Louis aimed the SIG at the bridge of the bartender’s nose. Little Tom raised his right arm and covered his face.

‘I remember! I remember! Jesus. Yes, I was there. I saw what they did.’

‘What you did.’

Little Tom shook his head furiously.

‘No, you’re wrong. I was there, but I didn’t hurt him.’

‘You’re lying. Don’t lie to me, just tell me the truth. They say confession is good for the soul.’

Louis lowered the gun and fired. The top of Little Tom’s right foot disappeared in a blur of leather and blood. He shrieked then as the gun moved toward his left foot, the words erupting from his gut like old bile.

‘Stop, please. Jesus, it hurts. You’re right, we did it. I’m sorry for what we did to him. We were younger then, we didn’t know no better. It was a terrible thing we did, I know it was.’ His eyes pleaded with Louis. His whole face was bathed in sweat, like that of a man melting. ‘You think a day don’t go by when I don’t think about him, about what we did to him? You think I don’t live with that guilt every day?’

‘No,’ said Louis. ‘I don’t.’

‘Don’t do this,’ said Little Tom. A hand reached out in supplication. ‘I’ll find a way to make up for what I did. Please.’

‘I got a way that you can make up for it,’ said Louis.

And then Little Tom Rudge was dead.

In the car they disassembled the guns, wiping every piece down with clean rags. They scattered the remains of the weapons in fields and streams as they drove, but no words were exchanged until they were many miles from the bar.

‘How do you feel?’ asked Louis.

‘Numb,’ Angel replied. ‘Except in my back. My back hurts.’

‘How about Benson?’

‘He was the wrong man, but I killed him anyway.’

‘They deserved what they got.’

Angel waved his assurance away as a thing without substance or meaning.

‘Don’t get me wrong. I got no problem with what we just did back there, but killing him didn’t make me feel any better, if that’s what you’re asking. It wasn’t him I wanted to kill. When I pulled that trigger, I didn’t even see Clyde Benson. I saw the preacher. I saw Faulkner.’

There was silence for a time. Dark fields went by, the hollow shapes of brokeback houses visible against the horizon.

It was Angel who spoke again.

‘Bird should have killed him when he had the chance.’

‘Maybe.’

‘There’s no maybe about it. He should have burned him.’

‘He’s not like us. He feels too much, thinks too much.’

Angel sighed deeply. ‘Feeling and thinking ain’t the same thing. That old fuck isn’t going away. As long as he’s alive, he’s a threat to all of us.’

Beside him, Louis nodded silently in the darkness.

‘And he cut me, and I swore that no one would ever cut me again. No one.’

After a time, his companion spoke softly to him.

‘We have to wait.’

‘For what?’

‘For the right time, the right opportunity.’

‘And if it doesn’t come?’

‘It will come.’

‘Don’t give me that,’ said Angel, before repeating his question. ‘What if it doesn’t come?’

Louis reached out and touched his partner’s face gently.

‘Then we will make it ourselves.’

Shortly after, they drove across the state line into South Carolina just below Allendale, and nobody stopped them. They left behind the semiconscious form of Virgil Gossard and the bodies of Little Tom Rudge, Clyde Benson, and Willard Hoag, the three men who had taunted Errol Rich, who had taken him from his home, and who had hanged him from a tree to die.

And out on Ada’s Field, at the northern edge where the ground sloped upward, a black oak burned, its leaves curling to brown, the sap hissing and spitting as it burst from the trunk, its branches like the bones of a flaming hand set against the star-sprinkled blackness of the night sky.

1

Bear said that he had seen the dead girl.

It was one week earlier, one week before the descent on Caina that would leave three men dead. The sunlight had fallen prey to predatory clouds, filthy and gray like the smoke from a garbage fire. There was a stillness that presaged rain. Outside, the Blythes’ mongrel dog lay uneasily on the lawn, its body flat, its head resting between its front paws, its eyes open and troubled. The Blythes lived on Dartmouth Street in Portland, overlooking Back Cove and the waters of Casco Bay. Usually, there were birds around – seagulls, ducks, plovers – but nothing flew that day. It was a world painted on glass, waiting to be shattered by unseen forces.

We sat in silence in the small living room. Bear, listless, glanced out of the window, as if waiting for the first drops of rain to fall and confirm some unspoken fear. No shadows moved on the polished oak floors, not even our own. I could hear the ticking of the china clock on the mantel, surrounded by photographs from happier times. I found myself staring at an image of Cassie Blythe clutching a mortarboard to her head as the wind tried to make off with it, its tassel raised and spread like the plumage of an alarmed bird. She had frizzy black hair and lips that were slightly too big for her face, and her smile was a little uncertain, but her brown eyes were peaceful and untouched by sadness.

Bear tore himself away from the daylight and tried to meet the gaze of Irving Blythe and his wife, but failed and looked instead to his feet. His eyes had avoided mine from the beginning, refusing even to acknowledge my presence in the room. He was a big man, wearing worn blue jeans, a green T-shirt, and a leather vest that was now too small to comfortably accommodate his bulk. His beard had grown long and straggly in prison, and his shoulder-length hair was greasy and unkempt. He had acquired some jailhouse tattoos in the years since I had last seen him: a poorly executed figure of a woman on his right forearm and a dagger beneath his left ear. His eyes were blue and sleepy, and sometimes he had trouble remembering the details of his story. He seemed a pathetic figure, a man whose future was all behind him.

When his pauses grew too long, his companion would touch Bear’s big arm and speak for him, nudging the tale gently along until Bear found his way back onto the winding path of his recollection. Bear’s escort wore a powder blue suit over a white shirt and the knot on his red tie was so large it looked like a growth erupting from his throat. He had silver hair and a year-round tan. His name was Arnold Sundquist and he was a private investigator. Sundquist had been dealing with the Cassie Blythe case, until a friend of the Blythes had suggested that they should talk to me instead. Unofficially, and probably unprofessionally, I had advised them to dispense with the services of Arnold Sundquist, to whom they were paying a retainer of $1,500 per month, ostensibly to look for their daughter. She had disappeared six years earlier, shortly after her graduation, and had not been heard from since. Sundquist was the second private investigator that the Blythes had hired to look into the circumstances of Cassie’s disappearance and he couldn’t have looked more like a parasite if there had been hooks on his mouth. Sundquist was so slick that when he took a swim in the sea, birds farther down the coast got oil on their feathers. I figured that he had managed to bilk them out of maybe thirty grand in the two years that he had supposedly been working on their behalf. Steady earners like the Blythes are hard to come by in Portland. No wonder he was now trying to regain their trust, and their money.

Ruth Blythe had called me barely an hour earlier to tell me that Sundquist was coming over, claiming to have news about Cassie. I had been chopping maple and birch as firewood for the coming winter when she called and didn’t have time to change. There was sap on my hands, on my tattered jeans, and on my ‘Arm the Lonely’ T-shirt. Now here was Bear, fresh out of Mule Creek State Pen, his pockets rattling with cheap pharmaceuticals bought from flyblown drugstores in Tijuana, his parole transferred home, telling us how he had seen the dead girl.

Because Cassie Blythe was dead. I knew it, and I suspected that her parents knew it too. I think maybe they had felt it at the very moment of her death, some tearing or wrenching in their hearts, and had understood instinctively that something had happened to their only child, that she would never be returning home to them, though they kept her room clean, dusting carefully once each week, changing the bedclothes twice each month so that they would be fresh for her in case she eventually appeared at their door, bearing with her fantastic stories to explain away six years of silence. Until they learned otherwise, there was always the chance that Cassie might still be alive, even as the clock on the mantel tolled softly the knowledge of her passing.

Bear had pulled three years in California for receiving stolen goods. Bear was kind of dumb that way. He was so dumb he would steal stuff he already owned. Bear was too dumb to know Cassie Blythe from a Dumpster, but still he ran through the details of the story again, stumbling occasionally, his face contorted with the effort of recalling the details that I was sure he had been forced to learn from Sundquist: how he had traveled down to Mexico after his release from Mule Creek to stock up on cheap drugs for his nerves; how he had come across Cassie Blythe drinking with an older Mexican in a bar on the Boulevard Agua Caliente, close by the racetrack; how he’d spoken to her when the guy went to the john and had heard the Mainer in her; how the guy had come back and told Bear to mind his own business before hustling Cassie into a waiting car. Somebody at the bar said the man’s name was Hector, and he had a place down in Rosarito Beach. Bear didn’t have any money to follow them, but he was sure that the woman he had seen was Cassie Blythe. He remembered her photograph from the newspapers that his sister used to send to him to pass the time while he was in jail, even though Bear couldn’t read a parking meter, let alone a newspaper. She had even looked over her shoulder at him when he called her name. He didn’t think that she looked unhappy or that she was being held against her will. Still, when he got back to Portland the first thing he did was to contact Mr. Sundquist, because Mr. Sundquist was the private detective named in the newspaper reports. Mr. Sundquist had told Bear that he was no longer involved in the case, that a new PI had taken over. But Bear would only work with Mr. Sundquist. He trusted him. He’d heard good things about him. No, if the Blythes wanted Bear’s help in Mexico, then Bear wanted Mr. Sundquist back on the case. Sundquist, nodding along gently beside Bear, straightened up at this point in Bear’s narrative and looked disapprovingly at me.

‘Hell, Bear here is uneasy just having this other guy in the room,’ Sundquist confirmed. ‘Mr. Parker has a reputation for violence.’ Bear, all six three and three hundred pounds of him, tried his best to make it look like he was troubled by my presence. He was, although not for any reason to do with the Blythes or the unlikely possibility that I could inflict some physical harm upon him.

My gaze upon him was unflinching.

I know you, Bear, and I don’t believe a word you’re saying. Don’t do this. Stop it now before it goes too far.

Bear, having finished up his story for the second time, released a relieved breath. Sundquist patted him softly on the back and arranged his features into the best expression of concern that they could muster. Sundquist had been around for about fifteen years and his reputation had been okay, if not exactly great, for much of that, but lately he’d suffered some reverses: a divorce, rumors of gambling problems. The Blythes were a cash cow that he couldn’t afford to lose.

Irving Blythe remained quiet when Bear had finished. It was his wife, Ruth, who was the first to speak. She reached out and touched her husband’s arm.

‘Irving,’ she said. ‘I think—’

But he raised his hand and she stopped talking immediately. I had mixed feelings about Irving Blythe. He was old school, and sometimes treated his wife like she was a second-class citizen. He had been a senior manager at the International Paper company in Jay, facing down the United Paper Workers International Union when it sought to organize labor in the north woods in the 1980s. The seventeen-month-long walkout at International during 1987 and 1988 was one of the bitterest strikes in the state’s history, with over one thousand workers replaced in the course of the action. Irv Blythe had been a staunch opponent of compromise, and the company had sweetened his retirement package considerably as a mark of its appreciation when he eventually called it a day and moved back to Portland. But that didn’t mean that he didn’t love his daughter, or that her disappearance hadn’t aged him in the last six years, the weight falling from his body like water from melting ice. His white shirt hung limply from his arms and his chest, and the gap between its collar and his neck could have accommodated my fist. His trousers were cinched tightly at the waist, billowing out emptily where once they would have been filled by his ass and his thighs. Everything about him spoke of absence and loss.

‘I think you and I should talk, Mr. Blythe.’ It was Sundquist. ‘In private,’ he added, with a meaningful look at Ruth Blythe in the process, a look that said that this was men’s talk, not to be obstructed or diverted by the emotions of women, no matter how sincerely felt they might be.

Blythe rose and Sundquist followed him into the kitchen, leaving his wife seated on the sofa. Bear stood and removed a pack of Marlboros from his vest pocket.

‘I’ll step outside to smoke, ma’am,’ he said.

Ruth Blythe just nodded and watched Bear’s departing bulk, her clenched right fist close to her mouth, tensing to defend herself from a blow that she had already received. It was Mrs. Blythe that had encouraged her husband to dispense with the services of Sundquist. He had acceded only because of Sundquist’s proven lack of progress, but I got the feeling that he didn’t like me very much. His wife was a small woman, but small the way terriers are small, her size masking her energy and tenacity. I recalled the news reports of Cassie Blythe’s disappearance, Irving and Ruth seated together at a table, Ellis Howard, the Portland PD’s deputy chief, beside them, a picture of Cassie clasped tightly in Ruth Blythe’s hands. She had given me the tapes of the press conference to look at when I had agreed to review the case, along with news cuttings, photographs, and increasingly slim progress reports from Sundquist. Six years ago, I would have said that Cassie Blythe resembled her father more than her mother, but as the years had gone by, it seemed to me more and more that it was Ruth to whom Cassie bore the greatest resemblance. The expression in her eyes, her smile, even her hair now seemed more like Cassie’s than ever before. In a strange way, it was almost as if Ruth Blythe were somehow transforming herself, acquiring facets of her daughter’s appearance, so that by doing so she might become both daughter and wife to her husband, keeping some part of Cassie alive even as the shadow of her loss grew longer and longer upon them.

‘He’s lying, isn’t he?’ she asked me when Bear was gone.

For a moment, I was about to lie in turn, to tell her that I wasn’t sure, that nothing could be ruled out, but I couldn’t say those things to her. She deserved better than to be lied to; but then, she deserved better than to be told that there was no hope, and that her daughter would never return to her.

‘I think so,’ I said.

‘Why would he do that? Why would he try to hurt us like this?’

‘I don’t think he is trying to hurt you, Mrs. Blythe, not Bear. He’s just easily led.’

‘It’s Sundquist, isn’t it?’

This time, I didn’t reply.

‘Let me go talk to Bear,’ I said. I stood and moved toward the front door. In the window, I saw Ruth Blythe reflected, the torment clear on her face as she struggled between her desire to grasp the slim hope offered by Bear and her knowledge that it would come apart like ash in her hand if she tried.

Outside, I found Bear puffing on a cigarette and trying to entice the Blythes’ dog over to play with him. The dog was ignoring him.

‘Hey, Bear.’

I recalled Bear from my youth, when he had been only slightly smaller and marginally dumber. He had lived in a small house on Acorn, off Spurwink Road, with his mother, his two older sisters, and his stepfather. They were decent people: his mother worked at the Woolworth and his stepfather drove a delivery van for a soda company. They were dead now, but his sisters still lived close by, one in East Buxton and the other in South Windham, which was convenient for visiting when Bear spent three months in the Windham Correctional Facility for assault at the age of twenty. It was Bear’s first taste of jail and he was lucky not to serve more in the years that followed. He did a little driving for some guys out of Riverton then departed for California following a territorial dispute that left one man dead and another crippled for life. Bear wasn’t involved but scores were about to be settled and his sisters encouraged him to go away. Far away. He’d picked up some kitchen cleaning work in L.A., had once again drifted into bad company and had ended up in Mule Creek. There was no real malice in Bear, although that didn’t make him any less dangerous. He was a weapon to be wielded by others, open to promises of money, work, or maybe just companionship. Bear saw the world only through bewildered eyes. Now he had come home, but he seemed as lost and out of place as ever.

‘I can’t talk to you,’ he said, as I stood beside him.

‘Why not?’

‘Mr. Sundquist told me not to. He said you’d just fuck things up.’

‘What things?’

Bear smiled and wagged a finger at me. ‘Uh-uh. I ain’t that dumb.’

I took a step onto the grass and squatted down, my palms out. Immediately, the dog rose up and approached me slowly, its tail wagging. When it reached me, it sniffed my fingers then buried its muzzle in the palms of my hands as I scratched its ears.

‘How come he wouldn’t do that for me?’ asked Bear. He sounded hurt.

‘Maybe you scared him,’ I replied, then felt bad as I saw the regret on his face. ‘Could be he smells my own dog on me, though. Yeah, you scared of big Bear, fella? He’s not so scary.’

Bear squatted down beside me, moving as slowly and unthreateningly as his bulk permitted, then brushed his huge fingers against the hair on the dog’s skull. Its eyes flicked toward him in mild alarm and I felt it tense, until slowly it began to relax as it realized the big man meant it no harm. Its eyes closed in pleasure beneath the joint pressure of our fingers.

‘This was Cassie Blythe’s dog, Bear,’ I said, and watched as Bear’s hand paused momentarily in its exploration of the animal’s fur.

‘It’s a nice dog,’ he said.

‘Yes, it is. Bear, why are you doing this?’

He didn’t respond, but I saw the guilt flicker in the depths of his eyes, like a small stray fish sensing the approach of a predator. He tried to take his hand away, but the dog lifted its muzzle and pressed at his fingers until he went back to petting it. I left him to it.

‘I know you don’t want to hurt anybody, Bear. You remember my grandfather?’ My grandfather had been a Cumberland County sheriff’s deputy.

Bear nodded silently.

‘He once told me that he saw gentleness in you, even if you didn’t always recognize it in yourself. He thought you had the potential to be a good man.’

Bear looked at me, seemingly uncomprehendingly, but I persevered.

‘What you’re doing today is not gentle, Bear, and it’s not good. These people are going to get hurt. They’ve lost their daughter, and they desperately want her to be alive in Mexico. They want her to be alive, period. But you and I, Bear, we know that’s not the case. We know she’s not down there.’

Bear said nothing for a time, as if hoping that I might somehow disappear and stop tormenting him.

‘What did he offer you?’

Bear’s shoulders sagged slightly, but he seemed almost relieved to be confessing.

‘He said he’d give me five hundred dollars, and maybe put some work my way. I needed the money. Need the work too. It’s hard to get work when you’ve been in trouble. He said you were no good for them, that if I told them the story I’d be helping them in the long run.’

I felt the tension ease between my shoulders, but I also felt a tug of regret, a tiny fraction of the pain the Blythes would feel when I confirmed that Bear and Sundquist had lied to them about their daughter. Yet I couldn’t find it in myself to blame Bear.

‘I have some friends that might be able to give you some work,’ I said. ‘I hear they’re looking for someone to help out down at the Pine Point Co-op. I can put in a word for you.’

He looked at me. ‘You’d do that?’

‘Can I tell the Blythes that their daughter isn’t in Mexico?’

He swallowed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I wish she was in Mexico. I wish I had seen her. Will you tell them that?’ He was like a big child, incapable of understanding the great hurt that he had caused them.

I didn’t answer. Instead, I patted him once on the shoulder in thanks. ‘I’ll call you at your sister’s, Bear, tell you about that job. You need money for a cab?’

‘Nah, I’ll just walk into town. Ain’t far.’

He gave the dog an extra vigorous rub, then started toward the road. The dog followed him, probing at his hands, until Bear reached the sidewalk, then it lay down on the ground again and watched him depart.

Inside the house, Ruth Blythe had not moved from her position on the sofa. She looked up at me and I glimpsed the tiny light in her eyes that I was about to extinguish.

I shook my head, then left the room as she rose and walked to the kitchen.

I was sitting on the hood of Sundquist’s Plymouth when he emerged. The knot on his tie was slightly askew and there was a red mark on his cheek where Ruth Blythe’s open hand had connected. He paused at the edge of the lawn and watched me nervously.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.

‘Now? Nothing. I’m not going to lay a finger on you.’

He visibly relaxed.

‘But you’re finished as a private investigator. I’ll make sure of that. Those people deserve better.’

Sundquist almost laughed.

‘What, they deserve you? You know, Parker, a lot of people around here don’t like you. They don’t think you’re such a big shot. You should have stayed in New York, because you don’t belong in Maine.’

He walked around the car and opened the door.

‘I’m tired of this fucking life anyway. Tell you the truth, I’ll be happy to be out of it. I’m moving to Florida. You can stay here and freeze for all I care.’

I stepped away from the car.

‘Florida?’

‘Yeah, Florida.’

I nodded and headed for my Mustang. The first drops of rain began to fall from the clouds, speckling the mass of twisted wire and metal that lay on the curb and the oil seeping slowly into the road as Sundquist’s key turned uselessly in the ignition.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you sure won’t be driving there.’

I passed Bear on the road and gave him a ride to Congress Street. He strode off in the direction of the Old Port, crowds of tourists parting before him like earth before the plow. I thought of what my grandfather had said about Bear, and the way the dog had followed him to the verge of the lawn, sniffing hopefully at his hand. There was a gentleness to him, even a kindness, but his weakness and stupidity left him open to manipulation and perversion. Bear was a man in the balance, and there was no way of knowing how the scales would tip, not then.

I made the call to Pine Point the next morning, and Bear began working shortly after. I never saw him again, and I wonder now if my intervention cost him his life. And yet I sense, somehow, that deep down inside him, in the great gentleness that even he did not fully recognize, Bear would not have had it any other way.

When I look out on the Scarborough marsh from the windows of my house and see the channels cutting through the grass, interlinking with one another, each subject to the same floods, the same cycles of the moon, yet each finding its own route to the sea, I understand something about the nature of this world, about the way in which seemingly disparate lives are inextricably inter-twined. At night, in the light of the full moon, the channels shine silver and white, thin roads feeding into the great glittering plain beyond, and I imagine myself upon them, walking on the white road, listening to the voices that sound in the rushes as I am carried into the new world waiting.

2

There were twelve snakes in all, common garters. They had taken up residence in an abandoned shack at the edge of my property, secure among the fallen boards and rotting timbers. I spotted one of them slipping through a hole beneath the ruined porch steps, probably on its way home from a morning spent hunting for prey. When I ripped away the floorboards with a crowbar I found the rest. The smallest looked to be about a foot long, the largest closer to three. They coiled over one another as the sunlight shone upon them, the yellowish stripes on their dorsa glowing like strips of neon in the semidarkness. Some had already begun to flatten their bodies, the better to display their colors as a warning. I poked at the nearest with the end of the crowbar and heard it hiss. A sweetish, unpleasant odor began to rise from the hole as the snakes released their musk from the glands at the base of their tails. Beside me Walter, my eight-month-old golden Labrador retriever, drew back, his nose quivering. He barked in confusion. I patted him behind the ear and he looked at me for reassurance; this was his first encounter with snakes and he didn’t seem too sure about what was expected of him.

‘Best to keep your nose out of there, Walt,’ I told him, ‘or else you’ll be wearing one of them on the end of it.’

We get a lot of garters in Maine. They’re tough reptiles, capable of surviving sub zero temperatures for up to one month, or of submerging themselves in water during the winter, aided by stable thermals. Then, usually in mid-March when the sun begins to warm the rocks, they emerge from their hibernation and start searching for mates. By June or July they’re breeding. Mostly, you get ten or twelve young in a nest. Sometimes there are as few as three. The record is eighty-five, which is a lot of garter snakes no matter what way you look at it. These snakes had probably chosen to make their home in the shack because of the comparative sparsity of conifers on this part of my land. Conifers make the soil acidic, which is bad for night crawlers, and night crawlers are a garter’s favorite snack.

I replaced the boards and stepped back out into the sunlight, Walter at my heels. Garters are unpredictable creatures. Some of them will take food from your hand while others will bite and keep biting until they get tired or bored or killed. Here, in this old shack, they were unlikely to harm anyone, and the local population of skunks, raccoons, foxes, and cats would sniff them out soon enough. I decided to let them be unless circumstances forced me to do otherwise. As for Walter, well, he’d just have to learn to mind his own business.

Below me and through the trees, the salt marsh gleamed in the morning sun and wild birds moved on the waters, their shapes visible through the swaying grasses and rushes. The Native Americans had named this place Owascoag, the Land of Many Grasses, but they were long gone, and to the people that lived here now it was simply ‘the marsh,’ the place where the Dunstan and Nonesuch Rivers came together as they approached the sea. The mallards, year-round residents, had been joined for the summer by wood ducks, pintails, black ducks, and teal, but the visitors would soon be leaving to escape the harsh Maine winter. Their whistles and cries carried on the breeze, joining with the buzz of the insects in a gentle clamor of feeding and mating, hunting and fleeing. I watched a swallow make an arcing dive toward the mud and alight upon a rotting log. It had been a dry season and the swallows in particular had enjoyed good eating. Those that lived close to the marsh were grateful to them, for they kept down not only the mosquitoes but the far nastier greenheads, with their strong-toothed jaws that tore through the skin with the force of a razor cut.

Scarborough is an old community, one of the first colonies established on the northern New England coast that was not simply a transient fishing station but a settlement that would become a permanent home for the families who lived within its boundaries. Many were English settlers, my mother’s ancestors among them; others came from Massachusetts and New Hampshire, attracted by the promise of good farmland. The first governor of Maine, William King, was born in Scarborough, although he left there at the age of nineteen when it became clear that it didn’t have too much to offer in the way of wealth and opportunity. Battles have been fought here – like most of the towns on the coastline, Scarborough has been dipped in blood – and the community has been blighted by the ugliness of Route 1, but through it all the Scarborough salt marsh has survived, and its waters glow like molten lava in the setting sun. The marsh was protected, although the continuing development of Scarborough meant that new housing – not all of it pretty, and some of it unquestionably ugly – had grown up close to the marsh’s high-water mark, attracted both by its beauty and by the presence of older, preexisting populations. The big, black-gabled house in which I now lived dated from the 1930s and was mostly sheltered from the road and the marsh by a stand of trees. From my porch, I could look out upon the water and sometimes find a kind of peace that I hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

But that kind of peace is fleeting, an escape from reality that ends as soon as you tear your eyes away and your attention returns to the matters in hand: to those whom you love and who depend upon you to be there for them; to those who want something from you but for whom you feel little or nothing in return; and to those who would hurt you and those close to you, if given the opportunity. Right now, I had enough to be getting along with in all three categories.

Rachel and I had moved to this house only four weeks previously, after I had sold my grandfather’s old home and adjoining land on Mussey Road, about two miles away, to the U.S. Postal Service. A huge new mail depot was being built in the Scarborough area and I had been paid a considerable amount of money to vacate my land so that it could be used as a maintenance area for the mail fleet.

I had felt a twinge of sorrow when the sale was finally agreed. After all, this was the house to which my mother and I had come from New York after my father’s death, the house in which I had spent my teenage years, and the house to which I, in turn, had returned after the death of my own wife and child. Now, two and a half years later, I was starting again. Rachel had only just begun to show, and it seemed somehow apt that we would begin our life as a couple in earnest in a new home, one that we had chosen together, furnished and decorated together, and in which, I hoped, we would live and grow old together. In addition, as my ex-neighbor Sam Evans had pointed out to me as the sale was nearing completion and as he himself was about to depart for his new place in the South, only a crazy person would want to live in close proximity to thousands of postal workers, all of them little ticking time bombs of frustration waiting to explode in an orgy of gun-related violence.

‘I’m not sure that they’re really that dangerous,’ I suggested to him.

He looked skeptical. Sam had been the first to sell when the offers were made, and the last of his possessions were now in a U-Haul truck ready to head for Virginia. My hands were dusty from helping him carry the boxes from the house.

‘You ever see that film The Postman?’ he asked.

‘No. I heard it kind of sucked.’

‘It sucked sperm whales. Kevin Costner should have been stripped naked, soaked in honey, and staked out over an anthill for it, but that’s not the point. What’s The Postman about?’

‘A postman?’

‘An armed postman,’ he corrected. ‘In fact, lots of armed postmen. Now, I bet you fifty bucks that if you accessed the records of shitty video stores in any city in America, you know what you’d find?’

‘Porn?’

‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ he lied. ‘You’d find that the only people who rented The Postman more than once were other postmen. I swear it. Check the records. The Postman is like a call to arms for these guys. I mean, it’s a vision of an America in which postal workers are heroes and still get to blow away anyone who pisses them off. It’s like porno for postals. They probably sit around in circles jerking off at their favorite parts.’

I discreetly took a step away from him. He wagged a finger at me.

‘You mark my words. What Marilyn Manson is to crazy high schoolers, The Postman is to postal workers. You just wait until the killings start, then you’ll say to yourself that old Sam was right all along.’

That, or old Sam was crazy all along. I still wasn’t sure how serious he was. I had visions of him holed up in a farmhouse in Virginia, waiting for the postal apocalypse to come. He shook my hand and walked to the truck. His wife and children had already gone on ahead of him, and he was looking forward to the peace of the road. He paused at the door of the truck and winked.

‘Don’t let the crazy bastards get you, Parker.’

‘They haven’t succeeded yet,’ I replied.

For a moment, the smile departed from his face, and the undercurrent to his comments rippled his surface good humor.

‘That don’t mean they’ll stop trying.’

‘I know.’

He nodded.

‘If you’re ever in Virginia  . . .’

‘I’ll keep driving.’

He gave me a final wave and then he was gone, his middle finger raised in a last farewell to the future home of the U.S. Mail.

From the porch of the house, Rachel called my name and waved the cordless phone at me. I raised a hand in acknowledgment and watched Walt tear away from me at full speed to join her. Rachel’s red hair burned in the sunlight, and once again I felt a tightening in my belly at the sight of her. My feelings for her coiled and twisted inside me, so that for a moment I found it hard to isolate any single emotion. There was love – that much I knew for certain – but there was also gratitude, and longing, and fear: fear for us, a fear that I would somehow let her down and force her away from me; fear for our unborn child, for I had lost a child before, had watched again and again in my uneasy sleep as she slipped away from me and disappeared into the darkness, her mother by her side, their passing wreathed in rage and pain; and fear for Rachel, a terror that I might somehow fail to protect her, that some harm might befall her when my back was turned, my attention distracted, and she too would be torn away from me.

And then I would die, for I would not be able to take such pain again.

‘It’s Elliot Norton,’ she said as I reached her, her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘He says he’s an old friend.’

I nodded, then patted Rachel’s butt as I took the phone. She swatted me playfully on the ear in response. At least, I think it was meant to be playful. I watched her head back into the house to continue her work. She was still traveling down to Boston twice weekly to hold her psychology tutorials, but she now did most of her research work in the small office we had set up for her in one of the spare bedrooms, her left hand resting gently on her belly while she wrote. She looked over her shoulder at me as she headed into the kitchen and wiggled her rump provocatively.

‘Hussy,’ I muttered at her. She stuck her tongue out and disappeared.

‘Excuse me?’ said Elliot’s voice from the phone. His Southern accent was stronger than I remembered.

‘I said “hussy”. It’s not how I usually greet lawyers. For them I use “whore”, or “leech” if I want to get away from the whole sexual arena.’

‘Uh-huh. You don’t make any exceptions?’

‘Not usually. By the way, I found a nest of your peers at the bottom of my garden this morning.’

‘I won’t even ask. How you doing, Charlie?’

‘I’m good. It’s been a while, Elliot.’

Elliot Norton had been an assistant attorney in the homicide bureau of the Brooklyn D.A.’s office when I was a detective. We had managed to get on pretty well together both professionally and personally on those occasions when our paths crossed, until he got married and moved back home to South Carolina, where he was now practicing law in Charleston. I still received a Christmas card from him each year. I’d met him the previous September for dinner in Boston when he was dealing with the sale of some property in the White Mountains, and had stayed in his house some years before when Susan, my late wife, and I were passing through South Carolina during the early months of our marriage. He was in his late thirties now, prematurely gray and divorced from his wife, a woman named Alicia who was pretty enough to stop traffic on rainy days. I didn’t know anything about the circumstances of the breakup, although I figured Elliot for the kind of guy who might have strayed from the marital fold on occasion. When we’d had dinner, at Sonsi on Newbury, the girls in their summer dresses passing by the open doors, his eyes had practically been out on stalks, like those of a character in a Tex Avery cartoon.

‘Well, we Southern folks tend to keep ourselves pretty much to ourselves,’ he drawled. ‘Plus we’re kinda busy, what with keeping the coloreds in check and all.’

‘It’s good to have a hobby.’

‘That it is. You still private detecting?’

The small talk had come to a pretty sudden end, I thought.

‘Some,’ I confirmed.

‘You in the market for work?’

‘Depends upon the kind.’

‘I have a client due for trial. I could do with some help.’

‘Maine is a long way from South Carolina, Elliot.’

‘That’s why I’m calling you. This isn’t something that the local snoops are too interested in.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s bad.’

‘How bad?’

‘Nineteen-year-old male accused of raping his girlfriend, then beating her to death. His name is Atys Jones. He’s black. His girlfriend was white, and wealthy.’

‘That’s pretty bad.’

‘He says he didn’t do it.’

‘And you believe him?’

‘And I believe him.’

‘With respect, Elliot, the jails are full of guys who say they didn’t do it.’

‘I know. I helped to put some of them away, and I know they did it. But this one’s different. He’s innocent. I’ve bet the homestead on it. Literally: my house is security on his bail.’

‘What do you want from me?’

‘I need somebody to help me move him to a safe house then look around, check witness statements; someone who isn’t from around here and isn’t likely to be scared off too easy. It’s a week’s work, maybe a day or two more. Look, Charlie, this kid had a death sentence passed on him before he even set foot in a courtroom. As things stand, he may not live to see his trial.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Richland County lock up, but I can’t leave him in there for too much longer. I took over the case from the public defender and now rumor is that some lowlifes from the Skinhead Riviera may try to make a name for themselves by shanking the kid in case I get him off. That’s why I’ve arranged bail. Atys Jones is a sitting duck in Richland.’

I leaned back against the rail of my porch. Walter came out with a rubber bone in his mouth and pressed it into my hand. He wanted to play. I knew how he felt. It was a bright autumn day, my girlfriend was radiant with the knowledge that our first child was slowly growing inside her, and we were pretty comfortable financially. That kind of situation encourages you to kick back for a time and enjoy it while it lasts. I needed Elliot Norton’s client like I needed scorpions in my shoes.

‘I don’t know, Elliot. Every time you open your mouth, you give me another good reason to close my ears.’

‘Well, while I have your attention you may as well hear the worst of it. The girl’s name was Marianne Larousse. She was Earl Larousse’s daughter.’

With the mention of his name, I recalled some details of the case. Earl Larousse was just about the biggest industrialist from the Carolinas to the Mississippi; he owned tobacco plantations, oil wells, mining operations, factories. He even owned most of Grace Falls, the town in which Elliot had grown up, except you didn’t read about Earl Larousse in the society pages or the business sections, or see him standing beside presidential candidates or dullard congressmen. He employed PR companies to keep his name out of the public domain and to stonewall journalists and anybody else who tried to poke around in his affairs. Earl Larousse liked his privacy, and he was prepared to pay a lot of money to protect it, but the death of his daughter had thrust his family unwillingly into the limelight. His wife had died a few years back, and he had a son, Earl Jr., older than Marianne by a couple of years, but none of the surviving members of the Larousse clan had made any public comment on the death of Marianne or the impending trial of her killer.

Now Elliot Norton was defending the man accused of raping and murdering Earl Larousse’s daughter, and that was a course of action likely to make him the second most unpopular person in the state of South Carolina, after his client. Anybody drawn into the maelstrom surrounding the case was going to suffer; there was no question about it. Even if Earl himself didn’t decide to take the law into his own hands there were plenty of other people who would because Earl was one of their own, because he paid their wages, and because maybe Earl would smile upon whoever did him the favor of punishing the man he believed had killed his little girl.

‘I’m sorry, Elliot,’ I said. ‘This isn’t something I want to get involved with right now.’

There was silence at the other end of the line.

‘I’m desperate, Charlie,’ he said at last, and I could hear it in his voice: the tiredness, the fear, the frustration. ‘My secretary is quitting at the end of the week because she doesn’t approve of my client list and pretty soon I’ll have to drive to Georgia to buy food because nobody around here will sell me jackshit.’ His voice rose. ‘So don’t fucking tell me that this is something you don’t want to get involved with like you’re running for fucking Congress or something, because my house and maybe my life are on the line and  . . .’

He didn’t finish the sentence. After all, what more was there to say?

I heard him exhale a deep breath.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t know why I said that.’

‘It’s okay,’ I replied, but it wasn’t, not for him and not for me.

‘I hear you’re about to become a father,’ he said. ‘That’s good, after all that’s happened. If I was you, maybe I’d stay up there in Maine too and forget that some asshole called you up out of the blue to join in his crusade. Yeah, I think that would be what I’d do, if I was you. You take care now, Charlie Parker. Look after that little lady.’

‘I will.’

‘Yeah.’

Then he hung up. I tossed the phone on one of the chairs and dragged my hands over my face. The dog now lay curled at my feet, his bone clasped between his front paws as he tugged at it with his sharp teeth. The sun still shone on the marsh and birds still moved slowly on the waters, calling to one another as they glided between the cattails, but now the transient, fragile nature of what I was witnessing seemed to weigh heavily upon me. I found myself looking toward the ruined shack where the garter snakes lay, waiting for rodents and small birds to stumble into their path. You could walk away from them, pretend to yourself that they weren’t doing you any harm and that you had no cause to go interfering with them. If you were right, then you might never have to face them again, or maybe creatures bigger and stronger than they would do you a favor and deal with them for you.

But, someday, you might go back to that cabin and lift up those same floorboards, and where once there were a dozen snakes there would now be hundreds and no collection of old boards and decaying timbers would be enough to contain them. Because ignoring them or forgetting them doesn’t make them go away.

It just makes it easier for them to breed.

That afternoon, I left Rachel working in her office and headed into Portland. My trainers and sweats were in the trunk of the car, and I had intended to go into One City Center and do a couple of circuits, but instead I ended up walking the streets, browsing in Carlson & Turner’s antiquarian bookstore up on Congress Street and Bullmoose Music down in the Old Port. I picked up the new Pinetop Seven album, Bringing Home the Last Great Strike, an advance copy of Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker, and Leisure and Other Songs by a group called Spokane, because they were led by Rick Alverson, who used to head up Drunk and who made the kind of music you wanted to listen to when old friends let you down or you caught a glimpse of a former lover on a city street, her fingers entwined with those of another, looking at him in a way that reminded you of how she had once looked at you. There were still crowds of tourists around, the last of the summer wave. Soon the leaves would start to turn in earnest and then the next wave would arrive, to watch the trees burn like fire as far north as the Canadian border.

I was angry with Elliot and more angry with myself. It sounded like a difficult case but difficult cases were part of the job. If I sat around waiting for easy ones, then I’d starve or go crazy. Two years ago, I’d have headed down to South Carolina to help him out without a second thought, but now I had Rachel and I was about to become a father again. I had been given a second chance, and I didn’t want to endanger it in any way.

I found myself back at my car. This time, I took my kit from the trunk and spent an hour pushing myself as hard as I had ever pushed myself in the gym, working until my muscles burned and I had to sit on a bench with my head down before the worst of the nausea had passed. But I still felt ill as I drove back to Scarborough, and the sweat that dripped from my face was the sweat of the sickbed.

Rachel and I didn’t talk properly about the call until dinner that evening. We had been together as a couple for about nineteen months, although we had only been living under the same roof for less than two. There were those who looked at me differently now, as if wondering how a man who had lost his wife and daughter under such terrible circumstances less than three years before could bring himself to begin again, could create another child and attempt to find a place for it in a world that had spawned a killer capable of tearing a daughter and her mother apart.

But if I had not tried, if I had not reached out to another person and made some small, halting connection to her in the hope that it might one day bring us closer together, then the Traveling Man, the creature that had taken them away from me, would have won. I could not change the fact that we had all suffered at his hands, but I refused to be his victim for the rest of my life.

And this woman was, in her quiet way, extraordinary. She had seen in me something worthy of love, of salvation, and had set about recovering that thing from the deep place to which it had retreated in order to protect itself from further harm. She was not so naive as to believe that she could save me: rather, she made me want to save myself.

Rachel had been shocked when she discovered that she was pregnant. We both were, a little, in the beginning, but it seemed even then that there was a rightness to it, an appropriateness, that allowed us to face our new future with a kind of quiet confidence. It sometimes felt like the decision to have a child had been made for us by some higher power, and all we could do now was hang on and enjoy the ride. Well, maybe Rachel wouldn’t have used the word ‘enjoy’: after all, it was she who had felt a strange heaviness to all her actions from the moment the test had proved positive; she who stared at her figure in alarm as she began to put on weight in strange places; she whom I found crying at the kitchen table in the dead of one August night, overcome by feelings of dread and sadness and exhaustion; she who threw up every morning with all the certainty of sunrise; and she who would sit, her hand upon her belly, listening to the spaces between her heartbeats with both fear and wonder, as if she could hear the little bundle of cells slowly growing within her. The first trimester had been especially difficult for her. Now, in her second, she had found new reserves of energy initiated for her by the child’s first kicks, by the confirmation that what lay inside her was no longer potential but had become actual.

While I watched her quietly, Rachel tore into a piece of beef so rare she had to hold it down with her fork to keep it from making a break for the door. Beside it, potatoes and carrots and zucchini lay heaped in little mountains.

‘Why aren’t you eating?’ she asked, when she came up briefly for air.

I curled my arm protectively around my plate. ‘Back,’ I said. ‘Bad dog.’

To my left, Walt’s head spun toward me, a brief flash of confusion visible in his eyes. ‘Not you,’ I reassured him, and his tail wagged.

Rachel finished chewing, then jabbed her momentarily empty fork at me. ‘It was that call today. Am I right?’

I nodded and toyed with my food, then told her Elliot’s story. ‘He’s in trouble,’ I concluded. ‘And anyone who sides with him against Earl Larousse is going to be in trouble too.’

‘Have you ever met Larousse?’

‘No. The only reason I know about him is because Elliot has told me things in the past.’

‘Bad things?’

‘Nothing worse than you’d expect from a man with more money than ninety-nine point-nine percent of the people in the state: intimidation, bribery, crooked land deals, brushes with the EPA over polluted rivers and poisoned fields, the usual stuff. Throw a stone in Washington when Congress is in session and you’ll hit apologists for any one of a hundred people like him. But that doesn’t make the loss of his daughter any less painful for him.’

An image of Irv Blythe flashed briefly in my mind. I swatted the thought away like a fly.

‘And Norton is certain that his client didn’t kill her?’

‘Seems that way. After all, he took over the case from the original lawyer and then stood bail for the guy, and Elliot isn’t the kind of man who risks his money or his reputation on a losing prospect. Then again, a black man accused of the murder of a rich white girl could be at risk among the general population, assuming somebody got it into his head to make a name for himself with the grieving family. According to Elliot, he either bailed his client or he buried him. Those were the options.’

‘When is the trial?’

‘Soon.’ I had gone through the newspaper reports of the murder on the Internet, and it was clear that the case had been fast-tracked from the beginning. Marianne Larousse had been dead for only a few months, but the case would be tried early in the new year. The law didn’t like to keep people like Earl Larousse waiting.

We stared at each other across the table.

‘We don’t need the money,’ said Rachel. ‘Not that badly.’

‘I know.’

‘And you don’t want to go down there.’

‘No, I sure don’t.’

‘Well, then.’

‘Well, then.’

‘Eat your dinner, before I do.’

I did as I was told. I even tasted some of it.

It tasted like ash.

After dinner, we drove out to Len Libby’s on Route 1 and sat on a bench outside to eat our ice cream. Len Libby’s used to be on Spurwink Road, on the way to Higgins Beach, with tables inside where people sat and shot the breeze. It had moved out to its new location, on the highway, a few years back, and while the ice cream was still good, eating it while looking out at four lanes of traffic wasn’t quite the same. Instead, there was now a life-size chocolate moose beside the ice cream counter, which probably counted as some form of progress.

Rachel and I didn’t speak. The sun set behind us, our shadows growing longer before us, stretching away ahead of us like our hopes and fears for the future.

‘You see the paper today?’ she asked.

‘No, I didn’t get a chance.’

She picked up her bag and rummaged through it until she found the piece she had kept from the Press Herald, then handed it to me. ‘I don’t know why I tore it out,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d have to see it sometime, but part of me didn’t want you to have to read about him again. I’m tired of seeing his name.’

I unfolded the paper.

THOMASTON – The Rev. Aaron Faulkner will remain at Thomaston State Prison until his trial, a Department of Corrections spokesman said yesterday. Faulkner, indicted earlier this year on charges of conspiracy and murder, was transferred to Thomaston from the state supermax facility a month ago, following what appeared to be a failed suicide attempt.

Faulkner was arrested in Lubec in May of this year following a confrontation with Scarborough-based private detective Charlie Parker, during which two people, a male calling himself Elias Pudd and an unnamed female, were killed. DNA tests revealed that the dead man was in fact Faulkner’s son, Leonard. The woman was identified as Muriel Faulkner, the preacher’s daughter.

Faulkner was formally indicted in May for the murders of the Aroostook Baptists, the religious group headed by the preacher that disappeared from its settlement at Eagle Lake in January 1964, and conspiracy to murder at least four other named individuals, among them the industrialist Jack Mercier.

The remains of the Aroostook Baptists were uncovered close by Eagle Lake last April. Officials in Minnesota, New York and Massachusetts may also be examining unsolved cases in which Faulkner and his family were allegedly involved, although no attempt has yet been made to charge Faulkner outside Maine.

According to sources within the Maine attorney general’s office, both the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI are examining Faulkner’s case, with a view to trying him on federal charges.

Faulkner’s attorney, James Grimes, told reporters yesterday he remained concerned for the health and well-being of his client and was considering appealing to the State Supreme Court following the decision of a Washington County Superior Court to refuse bail. Faulkner has said he is innocent of all charges and was kept a virtual prisoner by his family for almost forty years.

Meanwhile, the consultant entomologist employed by investigators to catalogue the collection of insects and spiders found at the Lubec compound occupied by the Rev. Aaron Faulkner and his family told the Press Herald yesterday that he had almost completed his work. According to a state police spokesman, the collection is believed to have been assembled by Leonard Faulkner, alias Elias Pudd, over many years.

‘So far we’ve identified about 200 different species of spider, as well as about 50 other species of insect,’ Dr. Martin Lee Howard said. He said the collection contained some very rare species, including a number that his team had so far failed to identify.

‘One of them seems to be some form of extremely nasty cave spider,’ said Dr. Howard. ‘It’s certainly not a native of the United States.’ Asked if there were any patterns emerging from his research, Dr. Howard said that the only common factor uniting the various species at this point was their ‘general unpleasantness. I mean, insects and spiders are my life’s work and even I have to admit that there are a lot of these guys and gals I wouldn’t like to find in my bed at night.’

Dr. Howard added: ‘But we did discover a lot of recluse spiders, and when I say a lot, I mean a lot. Whoever assembled this collection had a real affection for recluses, and that’s not something you’re going to find too often. Affection is pretty much the last thing the average person is going to feel for a recluse.’

I refolded the paper, then threw it in the trash can. The possibility of a bail appeal was troubling. The attorney general’s office had gone straight to a grand jury after Faulkner’s apprehension, common practice in a case which looked set to deal with matters that had gone unsolved for a long time. A 23-member grand jury had been specially convened at Calais, in Washington County, twenty-four hours after Faulkner was found, and an arrest warrant had been issued upon his indictment on charges of murder, conspiracy to murder and accomplice liability in the murder of others. The state had then asked for a ‘Harnish hearing’ to decide upon the issue of bail. In the past, when the death penalty had still existed in the state of Maine, those accused of capital offenses were not entitled to bail. After the abolition of the death penalty, the constitution was amended to deny bail for formerly capital offenses as long as there was ‘proof evident and presumption great’ in the alleged guilt of the accused. In order for that proof and presumption to be established, the state could request a Harnish hearing, conducted before a judge with both sides entitled to present arguments.

Both Rachel and I had given evidence before the hearing, as had the primary detective from the state police responsible for the investigation into the deaths of Faulkner’s flock and the murder of four people in Scarborough, allegedly on Faulkner’s orders. The deputy AG, Bobby Andrus, had argued that Faulkner was both a flight risk and a potential threat to the state’s witnesses. Jim Grimes did his best to pick holes in the prosecutor’s arguments but barely six days had elapsed since Faulkner’s apprehension and Grimes was still playing catch-up. Altogether it was enough for the judge to deny bail, but only just. There was, as yet, little hard evidence to link Faulkner to the crimes of which he was accused, and the Harnish hearing had forced the state to demonstrate the comparative paucity of its case. That Jim Grimes was now talking publicly about an appeal indicated that he believed a judge in the state’s highest court might reach a different conclusion on the bail issue. I didn’t want to think about what might happen if Faulkner was released.

‘We could take the long view and look at it as free publicity,’ I said, but the joke sounded hollow. ‘There’s no getting away from it, not until they put him away permanently, and maybe not even then.’

‘I guess it’s your defining moment.’ She sighed.

I put on my best earnest romantic look and clasped her hand. ‘No,’ I told her, as dramatically as I could. ‘You define me.’

She mimed sticking her finger down her throat, but she smiled and the shadow of Faulkner passed from us for a time. I reached out and held her hand, and she raised my fingers to her mouth and licked the last of the ice cream from the tips.

‘Come on,’ she said, and her eyes shone with a new hunger. ‘Let’s go home.’

But there was a car standing in the driveway of the house when we arrived. I recognized it as soon as I glimpsed it through the trees: Irving Blythe’s Lincoln. When we pulled up he opened his door and stepped out, the sound of classical music from NPR flowing like honey into the still evening air. Rachel said hi and headed into the house. I watched as the lights went on in our bedroom and the shades came down. Irv Blythe had picked his moment perfectly if he was trying to come between me and an active love life.

‘How can I help you, Mr. Blythe?’ I asked, my tone betraying the fact that right now helping him was pretty low down on my list of priorities.

His hands were deep in the pockets of his trousers, his short-sleeved shirt tucked tightly into the elastic waistband. His pants were shucked up high over what remained of his paunch, making his legs look too long for his body. We had spoken little since I had agreed to look into the circumstances of his daughter’s disappearance. Instead, I dealt mostly with his wife. I had gone back over the police reports, begun to speak again to those who had seen Cassie in the days before she disappeared, and retraced her movements in those final days; but too much time had elapsed for those who recalled her to remember anything new. In some cases, they had trouble remembering anything at all. I had come up with nothing remarkable so far, but I had declined the offer of a retainer similar to that enjoyed for so long by Sundquist. I told the Blythes that I would bill them for my time, nothing more. Yet if Irv Blythe wasn’t openly hostile toward me, he still left me with the sense that he would have preferred it if I had not become involved in the investigation. I was not sure how the events of the previous day would affect our relationship. As it turned out, it was Blythe who brought them up.

‘Yesterday, at the house . . .,’ he began, then stopped.

I waited.

‘My wife thinks I owe you an apology.’ His face was very red.

‘What do you think?’

He was nothing if not blunt.

‘I think I wanted to believe Sundquist and that man he brought with him. I resented you for taking away the hope they brought with them.’

‘It was false hope, Mr. Blythe.’

‘Mr. Parker, until now we’ve had no hope at all.’

He removed his hands from his pockets and started to dig at the skin in the center of his palms, hoping to locate the source of his pain there and remove it like a splinter. I noticed half-healed sores on the back of his hand and the exposed patches of his scalp, where he had torn at himself in his hurt and frustration.

It was time to clear the air between us.

‘I get the sense that you don’t like me very much,’ I said.

His right hand stopped digging and flailed loosely at the air, as if he were trying to grasp his feelings toward me, to snatch them from the air so he could display them on his wrinkled, gouged palm instead of being forced to put them into words.

‘It’s not that,’ he began. ‘I’m sure that you’re very good at what you do. It’s just that I know about you. I’ve read the newspaper reports. I know that you solve difficult cases, that you’ve found out the truth about people who’ve been missing for years, longer even than Cassie. The trouble is, Mr. Parker, that those people are usually dead when you find them.’ The final words came out in a rush, and left him with a tremble in his voice. ‘I want my daughter back alive.’

‘And you think that hiring me is like an admission that she’s gone forever?’

‘Something like that.’

Irv Blythe’s words seemed to open wounds inside me that, like his own exposed sores, were only half healed. There were those whom I had failed to save, that was true, and there were others who were long gone before I had even begun to understand the nature of what had been visited upon them. But I had made an accommodation with my past, a recognition that although I had failed to protect individuals, had even failed to protect my own wife and child, I was not entirely responsible for what had happened to them. Susan and Jennifer had been taken by another, and even had I sat with them twenty-four hours a day for ninety-nine days, he would have waited until the hundredth day for me to turn my back briefly before he came for them at last. Now I spanned two worlds, the worlds of the living and the dead, and to both I tried to bring some measure of peace. It was all that I could do in reparation. But I would not have my failings judged by Irving Blythe, not now.

I opened his car door for him. ‘It’s getting late, Mr. Blythe. I’m sorry that I can’t offer you the reassurance that you want. All I can say is that I’ll keep asking questions. I’ll keep trying.’

He nodded and looked out over the marsh, but made no move to get into his car. The moonlight shone on the waters, and the sight of the gleaming channels seemed to jolt him into some final form of self-examination

‘I know she’s dead, Mr. Parker,’ he said softly. ‘I know that she’s not coming home to us alive. All I want is to put her to rest somewhere pretty and quiet where she can be at peace. I don’t believe in closure. I don’t believe that this thing will ever be closed to us. I just want to lay her down, and to be able to go to her with my wife and place flowers at her feet. You understand?’

I almost reached out and touched him, but Irving Blythe was not a man for such gestures between men. Instead, I spoke to him as gently as I could.

‘I understand, Mr. Blythe. Drive carefully. I’ll be in touch.’

He climbed into his car and didn’t look at me until he had turned it toward the road. Then I saw his eyes in the rearview, and caught the hatred in them for the words that I had somehow forced him to speak, the admission that I had drawn from deep inside him.

I didn’t join Rachel, not for some time. I sat on my porch and watched the passing lights of solitary cars until the biting of the insects forced me inside. By then, Rachel was asleep, and yet she smiled as she felt me close beside her.

Beside both of them.

That night a car drew up outside Elliot Norton’s house on the outskirts of Grace Falls. Elliot heard the car door opening, then footsteps running across the grass of his yard. He was already reaching for the gun on his nightstand when the window of his bedroom exploded inward and the room erupted into flame. The burning gasoline splashed his arms and chest and set fire to his hair. He was still burning when he staggered down the stairs, through his front door, and onto his lawn, where he rolled in the damp grass to quench the fire.

He lay on his back in the moonlight and watched his house burn.

And as Elliot Norton’s house flamed far to the south, I awoke to the sound of a car idling on Old County Road. Rachel was asleep beside me, something clicking inside her air passages as she breathed, a soft noise as regular as the ticking of a metronome. Gently, I slipped from beneath the covers and walked to the window.

In the moonlight, an old black Cadillac Coupe de Ville stood on the bridge that crossed the marshes. Even from a distance, I could see the dents and scratches on the paintwork, the broken-limb curve of the damaged front bumper, and the spiderweb tracery of cracked glass in the corner of the windshield. I could hear its engine rumbling but no smoke came from the exhaust; and though the moon was bright that night I could not glimpse the interior of the car through the dark glass of the windows.

I had seen such a car before. It had been driven by a being named Stritch, a foul creature, pale and deformed. But Stritch was dead, a hole torn in his chest, and the car had been destroyed.

Then the rear door of the Cadillac opened. I waited for someone to emerge, but no one did. Instead the car just stood, its door wide open, for a minute or two until an unseen hand pulled the door closed, the coffin-lid thud coming to me across water and grass, and the car moved away, executing a U-turn to head northwest toward Oak Hill and Route 1.

I heard movement from the bed.

‘What is it?’ asked Rachel.

I turned to her and saw the shadows drifting across the room, clouds chased by moonlight, until they reached her and, slowly, began to devour her paleness.

‘What is it?’ asked Rachel.

I was back in bed, except now I was sitting bolt upright and I had pushed the sheets away from me with my feet. Her hand was warm upon me, flat against my chest.

‘There was a car,’ I said.

‘Where?’

‘Outside. There was a car.’

I stepped naked from the bed and walked to the window. I pulled back the curtain, but there was nothing there, only the road, quiet, and the silver threads of the water on the marsh.

‘There was a car,’ I said, for the last time.

And I saw the marks of my fingertips against the window, left there as I reached out to the car, just as they, reflected in the glass, now reached out for me.

‘Come back to bed,’ she said.

I went to her and I held her, spoonlike, as she slipped softly into sleep.

And I watched over her until morning came.

3

Elliot Norton called me again the morning after the arson attack. He had first-degree burns to his face and arms. He considered himself pretty lucky, all told. The fire had destroyed three rooms on the second floor of his house and left a big hole in his roof. No local contractor would touch the work and he’d engaged some guys from Martinez, just across the Georgia state line, to fix up the damage.

‘You talk to the cops?’ I asked him.

‘Yeah, they were out here first thing. They got no shortage of suspects, but if they can make a case I’ll retire from law and become a monk. They know it’s linked to the Larousse case and I know it’s linked to the Larousse case, so we’re all in agreement. Just lucky I’m not paying them for their opinion.’

‘Any suspects?’

‘They’ll round up some of the local assholes, but it won’t do much good, not unless someone saw or heard something and is willing to stand up and say it. A lot of folks will take the view that I shouldn’t have expected anything less for taking this on.’

There was a pause. I could feel him waiting for me to fill the silence. In the end I did, and felt my feet start to slide as the inevitability of my involvement became clear.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘What can I do? Cut the kid loose? He’s my client, Charlie. I can’t do that. I can’t let them intimidate me out of this case.’

He was turning the guilt screws on me and he knew it. I didn’t like it, but maybe he felt that he had no other option.

Yet it wasn’t only his willingness to use our friendship that made me uneasy. Elliot Norton was a very good lawyer, but I’d never before seen the milk of human kindness flow from him in his professional dealings. Now he had put his house and possibly his life on the line for a young man he couldn’t have known too well, and that didn’t sound like the Elliot Norton I knew. I wasn’t sure that I could turn my back on him any longer, even with my doubts, but the least I could do was to try and get some answers that satisfied me.

‘Why are you doing this, Elliot?’

‘Doing what, being a lawyer?’

‘No, being this kid’s lawyer.’

I waited for the speech about a man sometimes having to do what a man has to do, about how nobody else would stand up for the kid and how Elliot had been unable to stand by and watch while he was strapped to a gurney and injected with poisons until his heart stopped. Instead, he surprised me. Perhaps it was tiredness, or the events of the previous night, but when he spoke there was a bitterness in his voice that I had not heard before.

‘You know, part of me always hated this place. I hated the attitudes, the small-town mentality. The guys I saw around me, they didn’t want to be princes of industry, or politicians, or judges. They didn’t want to change the world. They wanted to drink beer and screw women, and a thousand a month working in a gas station would allow them to do that. They were never going to leave, but if they weren’t, then I sure as hell was.’

‘So you became a lawyer.’

‘That’s right: a noble profession, whatever you might think.’

‘And you went to New York.’

‘I went to New York, but I hated New York even more than I hated here, and maybe I still had something to prove.’

‘So now you’re going to represent this kid as a way of getting back at them all?’

‘Something like that. I have a gut feeling, Charlie: this kid didn’t kill Marianne Larousse. He may be lacking in some of the social graces, but a rapist and a murderer he ain’t. There’s no way that I can stand by and watch them execute him for a crime he didn’t commit.’

I let it sink in. Maybe it wasn’t for me to question another’s crusade. After all, I’d been accused of being a crusader myself often enough in the past.

‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Try to stay out of trouble until then.’

He breathed out deeply at what he saw as a crack of light in the darkness. ‘Thanks, I’d appreciate that.’

When I hung up the phone, Rachel was leaning against the doorjamb watching me.

‘You’re going down there, aren’t you?’

It wasn’t an accusation, just a question.

I shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

‘You seem to feel some debt of loyalty to him.’

‘No, not to him in particular.’ I wasn’t sure that I could put my reasons into words, but I felt like I had to try, to explain it to myself as much as to Rachel.

‘When I’ve been in trouble, when I’ve taken on cases that were difficult, and worse than difficult, I’ve had people who were willing to stand alongside me: you, Angel, Louis, others too, and some of those people didn’t survive their involvement. Now I have someone asking me for help and I’m not sure that I can turn away so easily.’

‘“What goes around comes around?”’

‘I guess so. But if I go down, there are things that need to be taken care of first.’

‘Such as?’

I didn’t reply.

‘You mean me.’ Invisible fingers traced thin lines of irritation on her forehead. ‘We’ve talked about this before.’

‘No, I’ve talked about it. You just block your ears.’

I heard my voice rising, and took a deep breath before I spoke again.

‘Look, you won’t carry a gun, and—’

‘I’m not listening to this,’ she said. She stormed up the stairs. Seconds later, I heard the door to her office slam shut.

I met Detective Sergeant Wallace MacArthur of the Scarborough PD in the Panera Bread Company over by the Maine Mall. I’d had a run-in with MacArthur during the events leading up to Faulkner’s capture but we’d settled our differences over a meal at the Back Bay Grill. Admittedly, the meal had cost me the best part of two hundred bucks, including the wine MacArthur drank, although it was worth it to have him back on my side.

I ordered a coffee and joined him at a booth. He was tearing apart a warm cinnamon roll with his fingers, the frosting reduced to the consistency of melted butter, and leaving stains on the personal ads in the latest issue of the Casco Bay Weekly. The personals in the CBW tended to be pretty heavy on women who wanted to cuddle in front of fires, go hiking in the depths of winter, or join experimental dance classes. None of them seemed like candidates for MacArthur, who was about as cuddly as a holly bush and didn’t like any physical activity that involved getting out of bed. Aided by the metabolism of a greyhound and his bachelor lifestyle, he had reached his late forties without being forced into the potential pitfalls of good eating and regular exercise. MacArthur’s idea of exercise was using alternate fingers to push the remote.

‘Found anyone you like?’ I asked.

MacArthur chewed reflectively on a chunk of roll.

‘How come all these women claim they’re “attractive” and “cute” and “easygoing”?’ he replied. ‘I mean, I’m single. I’m out there, looking around, and I never meet women like these. I meet unattractive. I meet noncute. I meet hard-going. If they’re so good looking and happy-go-lucky, how come they’re advertising at the back of the Casco Bay Weekly? I tell you, I think some of these women are telling lies.’

‘Maybe you should try the ads farther on.’

MacArthur’s eyebrows gave a startled leap.

‘The freaks? Are you kidding? I don’t even know what some of that stuff means.’ He flicked discreetly to the back pages, then gave the tables nearby a quick scan to make sure no one was watching. His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘There’s a woman in here looking for “a male replacement for her shower”. I mean, what the hell is that? I wouldn’t even know what she wanted me to do. Does she want me to fix her shower, or what?’

I looked at him. He looked back. For a man who had been a cop for over twenty years, MacArthur could come across as a little sheltered.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘No, say it.’

‘No, I just don’t think that woman’s for you, that’s all.’

‘You’re telling me. I don’t know what’s worse: understanding what these people are looking for, or not understanding. Jesus, all I want is a normal, straightforward relationship. That’s got to exist somewhere, right?’

I wasn’t sure that there was such a thing as a normal, straightforward relationship, but I understood what he meant. He meant that Detective Wallace MacArthur wasn’t going to be anybody’s shower replacement.

‘Last I heard you were helping Al Buxton’s widow overcome her grief.’ Al Buxton had been a York County deputy until he contracted some weird degenerative disease that made him look like a mummy without its bandages. His passing was mourned by pretty much nobody. Al Buxton was so unpleasant he made shingles look good.

‘It didn’t last. I don’t think she had too much grief to overcome. Y’know, she told me once that she fucked his embalmer. I don’t think he even got to wash his hands, she was on him so fast.’

‘Maybe she was grateful for the nice job he’d done. Al looked a whole lot better dead than he did alive. Better company, too.’

MacArthur laughed, but the action seemed to irritate his eyes. It was only then that I saw how red and swollen they were. He looked like he’d been crying. Maybe the whole single thing was getting to him more than I thought.

‘What’s wrong with you? You look like Bambi’s mother just died.’

He instinctively raised his right hand to wipe at his eyes, which had begun to tear, then seemed to think better of it.

‘I got Maced this morning.’

‘No way. Who did it?’

‘Jeff Wexler.’

‘Detective Jeff Wexler? What did you do, try to ask him out? You know, that guy in the Village People wasn’t really a cop. You shouldn’t use him as a role model.’

MacArthur looked seriously unimpressed.

‘You about done? I got Maced because it’s department regs: you want to carry Mace, you got to experience what it feels like to get Maced, just so you won’t be too hasty about doing it to somebody else.’

‘Really? Does it work?’

‘Like hell. I just want to get out there and blast some bastard in the face so I can feel better about myself. That stuff stings.’

Shocker. Mace stings. Who’d have thought?

‘Someone told me you’re working for the Blythes,’ said MacArthur. ‘That’s a pretty cold case.’

‘They haven’t given up, even if the cops have.’

‘That’s not fair, Charlie, and you know it.’

I raised a hand in apology. ‘I had Irv Blythe out at my house last night. I had to tell his wife and him that their first lead in years was false. I didn’t feel good about it. They’re in pain, Wallace: six years on and they’re still in pain every day. They’ve been forgotten. I know it’s not the cops’ fault. I know the case is cold. It’s just not cold for the Blythes.’

‘You think she’s dead?’ His tone told me that he had already reached his own conclusion.

‘I hope she’s not.’

‘There’s always hope, I guess.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘I wouldn’t be looking at the personals if I didn’t believe that.’

‘I said I was hopeful, not insanely optimistic.’

MacArthur gave me the finger. ‘So, you wanted to see me? Plus you got here late so I had to buy my own cinnamon roll, and these things are kind of expensive.’

‘Sorry. Look, I may have to leave town for a week. Rachel doesn’t like me being overprotective and she won’t carry a gun.’

‘You need someone to drop by, keep an eye on her?’

‘Just until I get back.’

‘It’s done.’

‘Thanks.’

‘This about Faulkner?’

I shrugged. ‘I guess.’

‘His people are gone, Parker. It’s just him.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Anything happen to make you think otherwise?’

I shook my head. There was nothing but a feeling of unease and a belief that Faulkner would not let the annihilation of his brood slide.

‘You lead a charmed life, Parker, you know that? The order from the attorney general’s office was strictly hands off: you weren’t to be pursued for obstructing the investigation, no charges against you or your buddy for the deaths in Lubec. I mean, it’s not like you killed aid workers or nothing, but still.’

‘I know,’ I said sharply. I wanted the subject dropped. ‘So, you’ll have someone stop by?’

‘Sure, no problem. I’ll do it myself, when I can. You think she’d agree to a panic button?’

I thought about it. It would probably require UN-level diplomatic skills, but I figured Rachel might eventually come around. ‘Probably. You got someone in mind to install it?’

‘I know a guy. Give me a call when you’ve talked to her.’

I thanked him and rose to leave. I got about three steps when his voice stopped me.

‘Hey, she doesn’t have any single friends, does she?’

‘Yeah, I think so,’ I replied, just before the ground crumbled beneath my feet and I realized what I had let myself in for. MacArthur’s face brightened as mine fell.

‘Oh, no. What am I, a dating agency?’

‘Hey, come on, it’s the least you can do.’

I shook my head. ‘I’ll ask. I can’t promise anything.’

I left MacArthur with a smile on his face.

A smile, and lots of frosting.

For the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon I did some wrap-ups on outstanding paperwork, billed two clients, then went over my meagre notes on Cassie Blythe. I had spoken to her ex-boyfriend, her closest friends, and her work colleagues, as well as to the recruitment company she had gone to visit in Bangor on the day that she had disappeared. Her car was being serviced so she had taken the bus to Bangor, leaving the Greyhound depot at the corner of Congress and St John at about 8 A.M. According to the police reports and Sundquist’s follow-ups, the driver recalled her and remembered exchanging a few words with her. She had spent an hour with the recruitment company in its offices at West Market Square, before browsing in Book Marcs bookstore. One of the staff remembered her asking about signed Stephen King books.

Then Cassie Blythe had disappeared. The return portion of her ticket was unused and there was no record of her using any other bus company or taking one of the commuter flights south. Her credit card and ATM card had not been used since the date of her disappearance. I was running out of people to chase down and I was getting nowhere.

It seemed like I wasn’t going to find Cassie Blythe, alive or dead.

The black Lexus pulled up outside the house shortly after three. I was upstairs at my computer, printing off the stories on Marianne Larousse’s murder. Most of them were pretty uninformative, except for one short piece in the State detailing the fact that Elliot Norton had taken over the defense of Atys Jones from the assistant public defender appointed to his case, a man named Laird Rhine. There had been no motion for substitution filed, which meant that Rhine had agreed with Elliot to step aside. In a short comment, Elliot told the journalist that, while Rhine was a fine lawyer, Jones stood a better chance with his own attorney than a time-pressed public defender. Rhine gave no comment. The piece was a couple of weeks old. I was printing it off just as the Lexus arrived.

The man who stepped from the passenger seat wore paint-stained Reebok sneakers, paint-stained blue jeans, and just to complete the ensemble, a paint-stained denim shirt. He looked like the runway model for a decorators’ convention, assuming that the decorators’ tastes veered toward five-six semiretired gay burglars. Now that I thought of it, when I lived in the East Village there were any number of decorators whose tastes veered in that direction.

The driver of the car was at least a foot taller than his partner and was getting the last wear out of his summer wardrobe of oxblood loafers and a tan linen suit. His black skin shone in the sunlight, obscured only by the faintest growth of hair on his scalp and a circular beard around his pursed lips.

‘Now, this place is a whole lot nicer than that other dump you called home,’ said Louis when I went down to greet them.

‘If you hated it so much, why did you bother visiting?’

‘’Cause it got you pissed.’

I reached out to shake Louis’s hand and found a piece of Louis Vuitton luggage thrust into my palm.

‘I don’t tip,’ he said.

‘I guessed that when I saw you were too cheap to fly up for the weekend.’

His eyebrow raised itself a fraction. ‘Hey, I work for you for free, I bring my own guns, and I pay for my own bullets. I can’t afford to take no plane up here.’

‘You still carrying an arsenal in the trunk of your car?’

‘Why, you need something?’

‘No, but if your car is hit by lightning I’ll know where my lawn went.’

‘Can’t be too careful. It’s a mean old world out there.’

‘You know, there’s a name for people who believe the world is out to get them: paranoid.’

‘Yeah, and there’s a name for people who don’t: dead.’

He swept past me to where Rachel waited and hugged her gently. Rachel was the only person Louis ever showed any real affection toward. I could only assume that he occasionally patted Angel on the head. After all, they’d been together for almost six years.

Angel appeared beside me. ‘I think he’s getting more charming as he gets older,’ I told him.

‘He was any less charming he’d have claws, eight legs, and a sting on the end of his tail,’ he replied.

‘Wow, and he’s all yours.’

‘Yeah, ain’t I the lucky one?’

Angel seemed to have grown suddenly older in the months since I had last seen him. There were pronounced lines around his eyes and mouth, and his black hair was now iced with gray. He even walked more slowly, as if afraid of the consequences of putting a foot wrong. I knew from Louis that he still endured a lot of pain with his back, where the preacher, Faulkner, had cut away a square of skin from between his shoulder blades and left him to bleed into an old tub. The transplants were taking but the scars hurt every time he moved. In addition, the two men had endured a period of enforced separation. Angel’s direct involvement in the events leading up to Faulkner’s capture had inevitably drawn the attention of the law to him. He was now living in an apartment ten blocks away from Louis so that his partner did not fall within the ambit of their enquiries, since Louis’s past did not bear close examination by the forces of law and order. They were taking a chance even coming up here together, but it was Louis who had suggested it, and I was not about to argue with him. Maybe he felt that it would do Angel some good to be around other people who cared about him.

Angel guessed what I was thinking, because he smiled ruefully. ‘Not looking so good, am I?’

I smiled back. ‘You never looked good.’

‘Oh yeah, I forgot. Let’s go inside. You’re making me feel like an invalid.’

I watched Rachel kiss him softly on the cheek and whisper something in his ear. For the first time since he had arrived, he laughed.

But when she looked over his shoulder at me, Rachel’s eyes were filled with sorrow for him.

We ate dinner in Katahdin, at the junction of Spring and High in Portland. Katahdin has mismatched furniture, eccentric decor, and feels like eating in somebody’s living room. Rachel and I love it. Unfortunately, so do a lot of other people, so we had to wait for a while at the cozy bar, listening to the locals who regularly eat there gossiping and chatting. Angel and Louis ordered a bottle of Kendall-Jackson chardonnay and I allowed myself a half glass. For a long time after the deaths of Jennifer and Susan I hadn’t touched alcohol. I had been in a bar on the night they died and had found a whole series of ways to torment myself for not being there when they needed me. Now I took an occasional beer and, on very special occasions, a glass of Flagstone wine at home. I didn’t miss drinking. My taste for alcohol had largely disappeared.

We eventually got a table in a corner and started in on Katahdin’s excellent buttermilk rolls. We talked about Rachel’s pregnancy, dissed my furniture, and caught up on New York gossip over their seafood and my London broil.

‘Man, your house is full of old shit,’ said Louis.

‘Antiques,’ I corrected him. ‘They were my grandfather’s.’

‘I don’t care they were Moses’s, they just old shit. You like one of them e-Bay motherfuckers, peddling trash on the Web. When you gonna make him buy some new furniture, girl?’

Rachel raised her hands in an I’m-staying-out-of-it gesture, just as the hostess stepped up to make sure everything was okay. She smiled at Louis, who was slightly nonplussed to find that she wasn’t intimidated by him. Most people tended to find Louis intimidating at the very least, but the hostess at Katahdin was a strong, attractive woman who didn’t do intimidated, thank you for asking. Instead, she fed him more buttermilk rolls and gave him the kind of look a dog might give a particularly juicy bone.

‘I think she likes you,’ said Rachel, radiating innocence.

‘I’m gay, not blind.’

‘But then, she doesn’t know you like we do,’ I added. ‘Still, you’d better eat up. You’ll need all your strength for running away.’

Louis scowled. Angel remained quiet, as he had for much of the day. He cheered up a little when talk turned to Willie Brew, who ran the auto shop in Queens that had supplied my Boss 302, and in which Angel and Louis were silent partners.

‘His son got some girl pregnant,’ he told me.

‘Which son, Leo?’

‘No, the other one, Nicky. The one who’s like an idiot savant, minus the savant.’

‘Is he going to do the right thing?’

‘Already has. He ran away to Canada. Girl’s father is seriously pissed. Guy’s name is Pete Drakonis, but everybody calls him Jersey Pete. You know, you don’t fuck with guys who’ve got a state as part of their names, except maybe Vermont. The guy’s got Vermont in his name, the only thing he’s gonna try to make you do is save the whales and drink chai tea.’

Over coffee I told them about Elliot Norton and his client. Angel shook his head wearily. ‘South Carolina,’ he said, ‘is not my favorite place.’

‘An official Gay Pride Day march is some way off,’ I admitted.

‘Where’d you say this guy’s from?’ asked Louis.

‘A town called Grace Falls. It’s up by—’

‘I know where it’s at,’ he replied.

There was something in his voice that made me stop talking. Even Angel gave him a look, but didn’t press the point. We just watched as Louis fragmented a piece of discarded roll between his thumb and forefinger.

‘When you planning on leavin’?’ he asked me.

‘Sunday.’ Rachel and I had discussed it and agreed that my conscience was unlikely to rest unless I went down for a couple of days at least. At the risk of developing a roughly Rachel-shaped hole in my body where she had gone through me for a short cut, I had raised the subject of my earlier conversation with MacArthur. To my surprise, she had agreed to both regular drop-bys and panic buttons in the kitchen and main bedroom.

Incidentally, she had also agreed to find MacArthur a date.

Louis appeared to consult some kind of mental calendar.

‘Meet you down there,’ he said.

‘We’ll meet you down there,’ corrected Angel.

Louis glanced at him. ‘I got something I got to do first,’ he said. ‘Along the way.’

Angel flicked at a crumb. ‘I got nothing else planned,’ he replied. His voice was studiedly neutral.

The conversation seemed to have taken a turn down a strange road, and I wasn’t about to ask for a map. Instead, I called for the check.

‘You want to hazard a guess as to what that was about?’ Rachel asked as we walked to my car, Angel and Louis ahead of us, unspeaking.

‘No,’ I answered. ‘But I get the feeling that somebody is going to be very unhappy that those two ever left New York.’

I just hoped that it wouldn’t be me.

That night, I awoke to a noise from downstairs. I left Rachel sleeping, pulled on a robe, and went down to find the front door slightly ajar. Outside, Angel sat on the porch seat, dressed in sweatpants and an old Doonesbury T-shirt, his bare feet stretched out before him. He had a glass of milk in his hand as he looked out over the moonlit marsh. From the west came the cry of a screech owl, rising and falling in pitch. There was a pair nesting in the Black Point Cemetery. Sometimes, at night, the headlights of the car would catch them ascending toward the treetops, a vole or mouse still struggling in their claws.

‘Owls keeping you awake?’

He glanced over his shoulder at me, and there was a little of the old Angel in his smile. ‘The silence is keeping me awake. The hell do you sleep in all this quiet?’

‘I can go beep my horn and swear in Arabic if you think it will help.’

‘Gee, would you?’

Around us, mosquitoes danced, waiting for their chance to descend. I took some matches from the windowsill and lit a mosquito coil, then sat down beside him. He offered me his glass.

‘Milk?’

‘No thanks. I’m trying to give it up.’

‘You’re right. That calcium’ll kill ya.’

He sipped his milk.

‘You worried about her?’

‘Who, Rachel?’

‘Yeah, Rachel. Who’d you think I was asking about, Chelsea Clinton?’

‘She’s fine. But I hear Chelsea’s doing well in college, so that’s good too.’

A smile fluttered at his lips, like the brief beating of butterfly wings.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I know. Sometimes, yes, I’m afraid. I get so scared that I come out here in the darkness and I look down on the marsh and I pray. I pray that nothing happens to Rachel and our child. Frankly, I think I’ve done my share of suffering. We all have. I was kind of hoping the book was closed for a while.’

‘Place like this, on a night like tonight, maybe lets you believe that could happen,’ he said. ‘It’s pretty here. Peaceful too.’

‘You thinking of retiring here? If you are, I’ll have to move again.’

‘Nah, I like the city too much. But this is kind of restful, for a change.’

‘I have snakes in my woodshed.’

‘Don’t we all? What are you going to do about them?’

‘Leave them alone. Hope they go away, or that something else kills them for me.’

‘And if they don’t?’

‘Then I’ll have to deal with them myself. You want to tell me why you’re out here?’

‘My back hurts,’ he said simply. ‘Places on my thighs where they took the skin from, they hurt too.’

In his eyes I could see the night shapes reflected so clearly that it was as if they were a part of him, the elements of a darker world that had somehow entered and colonized his soul.

‘I still see them, you know, that fucking preacher and his son, holding me down while they cut away at me. He whispered to me, you know that? That fucking Pudd, he whispered to me, rubbed my brow, told me that it was all okay, while his old man cut me. Every time I stand or stretch, I feel that blade on my skin and I hear him whispering and it brings me back. And when that happens, the hate comes flooding back with it. I’ve never felt hate like it before.’

‘It fades,’ I said quietly.

‘Does it?’

‘Yes.’

‘But it doesn’t go away.’

‘No. It’s yours. You do with it what you have to do.’

‘I want to kill someone.’ He said it without feeling, in level tones, the way somebody might announce that they were going to take a cold shower on a warm day.

Louis was the killer, I thought. It didn’t matter that he killed for motives that went beyond money or politics or power; that he was no longer morally neutral; that whatever he might have done in the past, those he now chose to destroy went largely unmourned. Louis had it in him to take a life and not lose a moment’s sleep over it.

Angel was different. When he’d been placed in situations where it was kill or be killed, then he had taken lives. It troubled him to do it, but better to be troubled above ground than to be untroubled below, and I had personal reasons to be thankful for his actions. Now Faulkner had destroyed something inside Angel, some small dam that he had constructed for himself behind which was contained all of his sorrow and hurt and rage at the things that had been done to him throughout his life. I knew only fragments of it – abuse, starvation, rejection, violence – but I was now beginning to realize the consequences of its release.

‘But you still won’t testify against him, if they ask,’ I said.

I knew the deputy DA was debating the wisdom of calling Angel for the trial, particularly given the fact that they would have to subpoena him to do it. Angel wasn’t one for making voluntary visits to courtrooms.

‘I wouldn’t make such a great witness.’

This was true but I didn’t know how much I should tell him about the case against Faulkner, about how weak it was and how there were fears that it might collapse entirely without more hard evidence. As the newspaper report had pointed out, Faulkner was claiming that he had been a virtual prisoner of his son and daughter for four decades; that they alone were responsible for the deaths of his flock and a series of attacks against groups and individuals whose beliefs differed from their own; and that they had brought skin and bone from their victims to him and forced him to preserve them as relics. It was the classic defense of ‘The dead guys done it’.

‘You know where Caina is?’ asked Angel.

‘Nope.’

‘It’s in Georgia. Louis was born near there. On our way to South Carolina, we’re going to make a stop in Caina. Just so you know.’

There was something in his eyes as he spoke, a fierce burning. I recognized it instantly, for I had seen it in my own eyes in the past. He rose and turned his face from me to hide the evidence of the pain, then walked to the screen door.

‘It won’t solve anything,’ I said.

He paused.

‘Who cares?’

The next morning Angel hardly spoke at breakfast, and the little that he did say was not directed at me. Our conversation on the porch had not brought us any closer. Instead, it had confirmed the existence of a growing divide between us, an estrangement acknowledged by Louis before they departed.

‘You two talk last night?’ he asked.

‘A little.’

‘He thinks you should have killed the preacher when you had the chance.’

We were watching Rachel talking quietly to Angel. Angel’s head was down, and he nodded occasionally, but I could feel the restlessness coming from him in waves. The time for talking, for reasoning, was gone.

‘Does he blame me?’

‘It ain’t that simple for him.’

‘Do you?’

‘No, I don’t. Angel would be dead twice over, you hadn’t done the things you done for him. There ain’t no quarrel between us, you and me. Angel, he just troubled.’

Angel leaned over and kissed Rachel gently but quickly on the cheek, then headed for their car. He looked over at us, nodded once to me, then climbed in.

‘I’m going up there today,’ I said.

Louis seemed to tighten beside me. ‘To the prison?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I ask why?’

‘Faulkner requested my presence.’

‘And you agreed to see him?’

‘They need all the help they can get, and Faulkner is giving them nothing. They don’t think it can hurt.’

‘They wrong.’

I didn’t respond.

‘They may still subpoena Angel.’

‘They have to find him first.’

‘If he testifies, maybe he can help keep Faulkner behind bars until he dies.’

Louis was already moving away.

‘Maybe we don’t want him behind bars,’ he said. ‘Maybe we want him out in the open, where we can get at him.’

I watched their car as it drove down Black Point Road, across the bridge and onto Old County, until they were lost from sight. Rachel stood next to me, holding my hand.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I wish you’d never heard from Elliot Norton. Ever since he called, nothing has felt the same.’

I squeezed her hand tightly, a gesture that seemed equal parts reassurance and agreement. She was right. Somehow, our lives had become tainted by events of which we had no part. Walking away from them wouldn’t help, not now.

And we stood there together, she and I, as, in a Carolina swamp, a man reached out to his darkness mirrored and was consumed by it.

4

The man named Landron Mobley stopped and listened, his finger resting outside the trigger guard of his hunting rifle. Above his head, rainwater dripped from the leaves of a cottonwood, staining the massive gray trunk of the tree. The deep, resonant calls of bullfrogs came from the undergrowth to his right while a reddish brown centipede worked its way around the toe of his left boot, hunting for spiders and insects, the pill bugs feeding nearby seemingly unaware of the approaching threat. For a few seconds Mobley followed its progress, watching in amusement as the centipede put on a sudden burst of speed, its legs and antennae little more than a blur, the pill bugs scattering or rolling themselves into gray, plated balls to protect themselves. The centipede curled itself around one of the little crustaceans and began working at the point where its head and metallic lower body now met, seeking a vulnerable spot into which to inject its venom. The struggle was short, ending fatally for the pill bug, and Mobley returned his full attention to the matter in hand.

He shifted the walnut stock of the Voere against his shoulder, blinked once to clear the sweat from his eyes, then placed his right eye close to the aperture of the telescopic sight, the blued finish of the rifle gleaming dully in the late afternoon light. From his right, the rustling sound came again, followed by a shrill clee-clee-clee. He sighted, pivoting the gun slightly until it came to rest on a tangle of sweet gum, elm, and sycamore from which dead vines hung like the discarded skins of snakes. He took a single deep breath, then released it slowly just as the kite burst from cover, its long black tail forking behind it, its white underparts and head strangely ghostlike against the blackness of its wing tips, as if a dark shadow had fallen over the hunting bird, a foretelling of the death that was to come.

Its breast exploded in a flurry of blood and feathers and the kite seemed to bounce in midair as the .308 slug tore through it, the bird tumbling to the ground seconds later and coming to rest in a clump of alder. Mobley eased the stock away from his shoulder and released the now-empty five-round magazine. With the kite added, that meant that his five bullets had accounted for a raccoon, a Virginia opossum, a song sparrow, and a snapping turtle, the latter beheaded with a single shot as it lay sunning itself on a log not twenty feet from where Mobley had been standing.

He walked to the alders and poked around until the corpse of the bird was revealed, its beak slightly open and the hole at the center of its being gleaming black and red. He felt a satisfaction that had not come to him in the earlier kills, an almost sexual thrill bound up in the transgressive nature of the act he had just committed, the ending not merely of a small life but the removal of a little grace and beauty from the world it had inhabited. Mobley touched the bird with the muzzle of the rifle and its warm body yielded to the pressure, the feathers bending slightly in upon themselves as if they might somehow close up the wound, time running in reverse as the tissue fused, the blood flowed backward into the body, the breast, now sunken, suddenly became full again, and the kite soared back into the air, its body reconstituting itself as it rose until the moment of impact became an instant not of destruction but of creation.

Mobley squatted down and carefully reloaded the magazine, then sat on the trunk of a fallen beech tree and removed a Miller High Life from his knapsack. He popped the cap, took a long pull, and belched once, his eyes fixed on the spot where the dead kite had come to rest as if he did indeed expect it to come to life, to ascend bloodied from the earth and take once again to the skies. In some dark place inside him, Landron Mobley secretly wished that the kite wasn’t dead but merely injured; that he had pushed back the leaves and found the bird thrashing on the ground, its wings beating vainly at the dirt, blood spreading from the hole in its underside. Then Mobley could have knelt down, placed his left hand against the bird’s neck, and inserted his finger into the bullet hole, twisting against the flesh while the creature struggled, feeling the warmth of it against him, the meat tearing as his finger probed, until finally it shuddered and died; Mobley, in his way, becoming almost like a bullet himself, exploring its body as both the instrument and the agent of the kite’s destruction.

He opened his eyes.

There was blood on his fingers. When he looked down, the kite had been ripped apart, the feathers scattered across the ground, the sightless eyes reflecting the movements of clouds in the skies above. Mobley absently touched his fingers to his lips and tasted the kite with his tongue, then blinked hard and wiped himself clean on his pants, both embarrassed yet aroused by this sudden conflation of act and desire. They came to him so quickly, these red moments, that they were often upon him before he could even register their approach and over before he could enjoy their consummation.

For a time, he had found an outlet for his cravings in his work. He could take one of the women from her cell and let his fingers explore her flesh, his hand over her mouth as he forced her legs apart; but those days were gone. Landron Mobley was one of fifty-one guards and prison staff who had been fired that year by the South Carolina Corrections Department for having ‘improper relationships’ with inmates. Improper relationships: Mobley almost smiled. That was what the department told the media in an effort to cloud the reality of what took place. Sure, there were inmates who participated willingly, sometimes out of loneliness or pure horniness, or so they could get hold of a couple of packs of cigarettes, some pot, maybe even something a little stronger. It was whoring, nothing more than that, no matter what they told themselves, and Landron Mobley wasn’t above taking a little pussy as a thank-you for a good deed done, no sir. In fact, Landron Mobley wasn’t above taking pussy, period, and there were inmates at the Women’s Correctional Institution on Columbia’s Broad River Road who had reason to look at Landron Mobley with more than a little respect and, yes sir, fear after he had shown them what they could expect if they crossed good old Landron. Landron, with his bleak, empty eyes seeking to fill their void with the reflected emotions of another, her lips drawn back in pleasure or pain, Landron making no distinction between the two extremes, the feelings of the other inconsequential to him but his preference, truth be told, lying in resistance and struggle and forced surrender. Landron, roving from cell to cell, probing for weaknesses in the curled forms beneath the blankets. Landron, filled with venom, leaning over a slim, dark shape, working at the head, drawing it away from the woman’s chest, paralyzing her with his weight as he descended upon her. Landron, amid the water dropping from the leaves and the calling of the bullfrogs, the blood of the kite still warm upon his fingers, growing hard at the memory.

Then one of the local rags revealed that a female inmate named Myrna Chitty had been assaulted while serving a six-month sentence for purse snatching, and an investigation had commenced. And damn if Myrna Chitty hadn’t told the investigators about Landron’s occasional visits to her cell and how Landron had forced her over her bunk and how she had heard the sound of his belt unbuckling and then the pain, oh Jesus, the pain. The next day Landron was off the payroll and the following week he was pink-slipped, but it wasn’t going to stop there. There was a hearing of the Corrections and Penology Committee scheduled for September 3 and there was talk of rape charges being pressed against Landron and a couple of other guards who might have let their enthusiasm get the better of them. It was a major embarrassment all round and Mobley knew that if they had their way, he was going to be hung out to dry.

One thing was for certain: Myrna Chitty wouldn’t be testifying at no rape trial. He knew what happened to prison guards who ended up doing hard time, knew that what he had visited on the women in his charge would be returned one-hundredfold upon him, and Landron Mobley didn’t plan on pulling no train or sifting through his food for glass fragments. Myrna Chitty’s testimony, if it was heard in court, would be the passing of a virtual death sentence on Landron Mobley, one that would eventually be carried out with a shank or a broom handle. She was scheduled for release on September 5, her sentence reduced in return for her cooperation with the investigation, and Landron would be waiting for her when she got her white trash tail back to her shitty little house. Then Landron and Myrna were going to have a little talk, and maybe he would have to remind her of what she was missing now that she didn’t have old Landron to drop by her cell or take her down to the showers to search her for contraband. No, Myrna Chitty wouldn’t be putting her hand on no Bible and calling Landron Mobley a rapist. Myrna Chitty would learn to keep her mouth shut unless Landron told her otherwise, or else Myrna Chitty would be dead.

He took another long drink and kicked at the dirt with the toe of his boot. Landron Mobley didn’t have too many friends. He was a mean drunk, although, to his credit, he was mean sober, so no one could claim that he’d misled them into a false sense of security. That had always been the way with him. He was an outsider, despised for his lack of education, for his taste for violence, and for the miasma of debased sexuality that hung around him like a polluted fog. Yet his capacities had drawn others to him, who recognized in Mobley a creature that might enable them to dabble in depravity without losing themselves to it totally, using Mobley’s absolute corruption as a means of indulging their own appetites without consequence.

But there were always consequences, for Mobley was like a pitcher plant, attracting victims with the promise of sweet juices, then thriving as they slowly drowned in an abundance of that which they had sought. Mobley’s corruption could be passed on in a word, a gesture, a promise, exploiting weakness as water exploits a crack in concrete, widening it, extending itself deeper and deeper, until the structures were ruined beyond salvation.

He had a wife once. Her name was Lynnette. She wasn’t beautiful, not even smart, but she was a wife nonetheless, and he’d worn her down as he’d worn down so many others over the years. One day, he came back from the prison and she was gone. She didn’t take much, apart from a suitcase of mangy old clothes and some cash that Landron kept in a cracked coffeepot for emergencies, but Landron could still recall the surge of anger that he’d felt, the sense of abandonment and betrayal as his voice echoed emptily around their tidy home.

He’d found her, though. He’d warned her about what would happen if she ever tried to leave him, and Landron was a man of his word, when it counted. He’d tracked her down to a dingy motel room on the outskirts of Macon, Georgia, and then she and Landron, they’d had themselves a time. Least of all, Landron had had himself a time. He couldn’t speak for Lynnette. When he’d finished with her she couldn’t speak for herself either, and it would be a long time before a man looked at Lynnette Mobley and didn’t want to puke at the sight of her face.

For a time, Landron descended into his own private fantasy world: a world in which the Lynnettes knew their place and didn’t go running off when a man’s back was turned; a world in which he still wore his uniform and could still pick the weakest ones to take for his amusement; a world in which Myrna Chitty was trying to run from him and he was gaining, gaining, until at last he caught her and turned her to him, those brown eyes full of fear as she was forced down, down  . . .

Around him, the Congaree Swamp seemed to recede, blurring at the edges, becoming a haze of gray and black and green, with only the dripping of water and the calling of birds to distract him. Soon, even that was lost to Landron as he moved to his own, private rhythm in his own red world.

But Landron Mobley had not left the Congaree.

Landron Mobley would never leave the Congaree.

The Congaree Swamp is old, very old. It was old when the prehistoric foragers hunted its reaches, old when Hernando de Soto passed through in 1540, old when the Congaree Indians were annihilated by smallpox in 1698. The English settlers used the inland waterways as part of their ferry system in the 1740s, but it wasn’t until 1786 that Isaac Huger began construction of a formal ferry system to cross the Congaree. At its northwestern and southwestern boundaries, the bodies of workers are buried beneath the mud and silt, left where they died during the construction of dikes by James Adams and others in the 1800s.

At the end of that century, logging began on land owned by Francis Beidler’s Santee River Cypress Lumber Company, ceasing in 1915, only to recommence half a century later. In 1969, logging interest was renewed and clearcutting commenced in 1974, leading to the growth of a movement among local people to save the land, some of which had never been logged and represented the last significant old-growth of river-bottom hardwood forest in this part of the country. There were now close to 22,000 acres designated as a national monument, half of them old-growth hardwood forest, stretching from the junction of Myers Creek and the Old Bluff Road to the northwest, down to the borders of Richland and Calhoun Counties to the southeast, close by the railroad line. Only one small section of land, measuring about two miles by half a mile, remained in private hands. It was close to this tract that Landron Mobley now sat, lost in dreams of women’s tears. The Congaree was his place. The things he had done here in the past, among the trees and in the mud, never troubled him. Instead, he luxuriated in them, the memory of them enriching the poverty of his current existence. Here, time became meaningless and he lived once again in remembered pleasures. Landron Mobley was never closer to himself than he was in the Congaree.

Mobley’s eyes flicked open suddenly, but he remained very still. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he turned his head to his left and his gaze alighted on the soft brown eyes of a white-tailed deer. It was reddish brown and about five feet in height, with white rings at its nose, eyes, and throat. Its tail flicked back and forth in mild agitation, displaying its white underside. Mobley had guessed that there were deer around. He had come across their split heart tracks a mile or so back toward the river and had followed the trail of their pellets, of the raggedly browsed vegetation and the worn tree trunks where the males had rubbed the bark off with their antlers, but had eventually lost it in the thick undergrowth. He had almost given up hope of killing a deer on this trip; now here was a fine doe staring at him from beneath a loblolly pine. Keeping his eyes on the deer, Mobley reached out with his right hand for his rifle.

His hand clutched empty air. Puzzled, he looked to his right. The Voere was gone, a slight depression in the soft earth the only indication that it had ever been there. He stood quickly and heard the deer give a loud whistling snort of alarm before padding into the cover of the trees, its tail erect. Mobley barely noticed its flight. The Voere was just about his most prized possession and now somebody had taken it while Mobley had been daydreaming with his dick in his hand. He spit furiously on the ground and checked for tracks. There were footprints a couple of feet to his right, but the bushes were thick beyond them and he could find no further trace of the thief. The soles were thick with a zigzag pattern, the tread seemingly heavy.

‘Fuck you,’ he hissed. Then, louder: ‘Fuck you! Fuck!’

He looked at the footprints again and his anger began to fade, to be replaced by the first gnawings of fear. He was out in the Congaree without a gun. Maybe the thief had headed back into the swamp with his prize, or maybe he was still close by, watching to see how Landron would react. He scanned the trees and the undergrowth, but could catch no sign of another human being. Hurriedly, and as silently as he could, he picked up his knapsack and began to walk toward the river.

The journey back to where he had left his boat took almost twenty minutes, the speed of his progress diminished by his reluctance to make more noise than was necessary and his decision to pause at regular intervals to search for signs that he was being shadowed. Once or twice, he thought that he caught glimpses of a figure among the trees, but when he stopped he could detect no signs of movement and the only sounds came from the soft drip of water from leaves and branches. But it was not the false sightings that increased Mobley’s fear.

The birds had stopped singing.

As he neared the river, he increased his pace, his boots making a soft sucking noise as they lifted from the mud. He found himself in a dwarf forest of cypress knees, bordered by downed logs and the gray remains of standing dead trees now home to woodpeckers and small mammals. Some of this destruction was a relic of hurricane Hugo, which had decimated the park in 1989 but had, in turn, stimulated new growth. Beyond some rising saplings Mobley could see the dark waters of the Congaree River itself, fed by the spills of the Piedmont. He burst through the last low wall of vegetation and found himself on the bank, Spanish moss hanging low from a cypress branch almost tickling the nape of his neck as he stood close to the spot where he had tied up his boat.

His boat, too, was now gone.

But there was something else in its place.

There was a woman.

Her back was to Mobley so he couldn’t see her face, and a white sheet covered her from head to toe like a hooded robe. She stood in the shallows, the ends of the material swirling in the current. While Mobley watched, she lowered herself down and gathered water in her hands, then raised her face and allowed the water to splash onto her skin. Mobley could see that she was naked beneath the white robe. The woman was heavy and the dark cleft of her buttocks had pressed itself against the material as she squatted down, her skin like chocolate beneath the frosting of her garment. Mobley was almost aroused, except—

Except he wasn’t sure that what was beneath the cloth could actually be called skin. It seemed broken all over, as if the woman were scaled or plated. Some kind of substance had either been released from her skin or smeared upon it, causing the material of her cloak to adhere to it in places. It was almost reptilian and lent the woman a predatory aspect that caused Mobley to back away slightly. He tried to glimpse her hands but they were now beneath the water. Slowly, the woman bent down farther, submerging her arms first to the wrists, then the elbows, until finally she was almost hunched over. He heard her exhale, as if in pleasure. It was the first sound he had heard from her, and her silence unnerved, then angered, him. He had made more noise than the frightened deer as he tramped heavily toward the bank when the river came in sight, but the woman appeared not to have noticed, or had chosen not to recognize his presence. Mobley, despite his unease, decided to put an end to that.

‘Hey!’ he called.

The woman didn’t respond, but he thought he saw her back stiffen slightly.

‘Hey!’ he repeated. ‘I’m talking to you.’

This time, the woman rose to her full height, but she did not look around. Mobley advanced slightly, until his feet were almost at the water’s edge.

‘I’m looking for a boat. You seen it?’

The woman was now completely still. Her head, thought Mobley, looked like it was too small for her body until he realised that she was completely bald. Beneath the robe, he could see traces of the scaling on her skull. He reached out a hand to touch her.

‘I said—’

Mobley felt a huge pressure on the side of his left leg, and then it collapsed beneath his weight as he registered the gunshot. He toppled sideways, coming to rest half in, half out of the water, and stared down at the remains of his knee. The bullet had blown away his kneecap, and what lay inside was white and red. Already his blood was flowing into the Congaree. Mobley’s gritted teeth separated, and he howled in agony. He looked around for the shooter and a second bullet tore into the small of his back, nicking his spine on its way through his body. Mobley pitched sideways and lay on the ground, watching as a black pool spread around his legs. He found himself paralyzed, yet still capable of feeling the hurt that was colonizing every cell of his being.

Mobley heard footsteps approaching and swiveled his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak but something sharp entered his flesh below the chin, the hook cutting through the soft tissue and piercing his tongue and upper palate. The pain was beyond belief, an agony that superseded the burning in his lower body and leg. He tried to scream, but the hook now held his mouth closed and all he emitted was a harsh, croaking noise. The pressure increased as his head was jerked back and, slowly, he was pulled toward the forest. He could see the steel of the hook in front of his face, could taste it on his tongue and feel it against his teeth. He tried to raise a hand to grasp it, but he was already growing weak and his fingers could only brush the metal before falling down to his side. A gleaming trail of blood was being laid on the leaves and dirt. Above him, the canopy appeared like a black shroud across the sky. The forest gathered around him, and he stared for the last time toward the river as the woman dropped the sheet from her body and turned, naked, to look at him.

And deep inside himself, in the dark place where all that was truly Landron Mobley dreamed of visiting pain on others, a host of scaled women fell upon him, and he began to scream.

PART TWO

‘He gave no comfort, saved no one

Adrift he moves by guilty moons’

Darren Richard, Pinetop Seven,

‘Mission District’

5

Looking back, I see a pattern in all that took place: a strange joining of disparate occurrences, a series of links between seemingly unconnected events stretching back into the past. I recall the honeycomb created by the imperfect layering of history, the proximity of what has gone before to that which now pertains, and I begin to understand. We are trapped not only by our own history but by the histories of all those with whom we choose to share our lives. Angel and Louis brought their pasts with them, as did Elliot Norton, as did I, and so it should have come as no surprise that just as current lives became interwoven, impacting on one another, so too pasts began to exert their pull, dragging innocent and guilty alike down beneath the earth, drowning them in brackish water, tearing them apart among the swollen buttresses of the Congaree.

And in Thomaston, the first link lay waiting to be uncovered.

The maximum security facility at Thomaston, Maine, looked reassuringly like a prison; at least, it looked reassuring as long as you weren’t a prisoner there. Anyone arriving in Thomaston with the prospect of long-term incarceration in his future was likely to feel his spirits sink at his first sight of the jail. It had high, imposing walls and the kind of solidity that came from being burned down and rebuilt a couple of times since it was first opened, in the 1820s. Thomaston had been selected as the site for the state prison since it was roughly halfway up the coast and accessible by boat for the transportation of inmates, but it was now nearing the end of its working life. A Supermax facility known as the MCI, or Maine Correctional Institution, had been opened some miles away in 1992. It was designed to house the worst offenders in a state of near-permanent lockdown, along with those prisoners with serious behavioral problems, and the new state prison would eventually be added on an adjoining tract of land. Until then, Thomaston was still home to about four hundred men, one of whom, since his suicide attempt, was now the preacher, Aaron Faulkner.

I recalled Rachel’s response when she heard that Faulkner had apparently tried to take his own life.

‘It doesn’t fit,’ she said. ‘He’s not that type.’

‘So why did he do it? It’s hardly a cry for help.’

She chewed at her lip. ‘If he did it, he did it to further some aim. According to the newspaper reports, the wounds in his arms were deep, but not so deep that he was in immediate danger. He cut veins, not arteries. That’s not the action of a man who really wants to die. For some reason, he wanted out of supermax. The question is, why?’

Now it seemed that I might have the opportunity to pose that question to the man himself.

I drove up to Thomaston after Angel and Louis had left for New York. I parked in a visitor’s space outside the main gate, then entered the reception area and gave my name to the sergeant of the guards at the desk. Behind him, and beyond the metal detector, was a wall of tinted toughened glass concealing the main control room for the prison, where alarms, video cameras and visitors were constantly monitored. The control room looked down on the visitation room to which, under ordinary circumstances, I would have been led for a face-to-face meeting with any of the men incarcerated in the facility.

Except these were not ordinary circumstances, and the Reverend Aaron Faulkner was far from being an ordinary prisoner.

Another guard arrived to escort me. I passed through the metal detector, attached my pass to my jacket, and was led to the elevator and the administration level on the third floor. This section of the prison was termed ‘soft side’: no prisoners were permitted here without escort, and it was separated from ‘hard side’ by a system of dual air-locking doors that could not be opened simultaneously, so that even if a prisoner managed to get through the first door, the second would remain closed.

The colonel of the guards and the prison warden were both waiting for me in the warden’s office. The prison had swung between various regimes over the past thirty years: from strict discipline, rigidly enforced, through an ill-fated campaign of liberalism, disliked by the longer-serving guards, until finally it had settled at a midpoint that erred on the side of conservatism. In other words, the prisoners no longer spit at visitors and it was safe to walk through the general population, which was fine by me.

A bugle call sounded, indicating the end of rec time, and through the windows I could see blue-garbed prisoners begin to move across the yards toward their cells. Thomaston enclosed an area of eight or nine acres, including Haller Field, the prison’s playing field, its walls carved out of sheer rock. Unmarked, in a far corner beneath the walls, was the old execution site.

The warden offered me coffee, then played nervously with his own cup, spinning it around the table by its handle. The colonel of the guards, who was almost as imposing as the prison itself, remained standing and silent. If he was as uneasy as the warden, then he didn’t show it. His name was Joe Long and his face displayed all the emotion of a cigar store Indian.

‘You understand that this is highly unusual, Mr. Parker,’ the warden began. ‘Visits are usually conducted in the visiting area, not through the bars of a cell. And we rarely have the attorney general’s office calling to request that we facilitate alternative arrangements.’ He stopped talking and waited for me to respond.

‘The truth is, I’d prefer not to be here myself,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to face Faulkner again, not until the trial.’

The two men exchanged a look. ‘Rumor is that this trial has all the makings of a disaster,’ said the warden. He seemed tired and vaguely disgusted.

I didn’t answer, so he spoke to fill the silence.

‘Which, I guess, is why the prosecutor is so anxious that you should talk to Faulkner,’ he concluded. ‘You think he’ll give anything away?’ The expression on his face told me that he already knew the answer but I gave him the echo he expected anyway.

‘He’s too smart for that,’ he said.

‘Then why are you here, Mr. Parker?’ asked the colonel.

It was my turn to sigh.

‘Frankly, colonel, I don’t know.’

The colonel didn’t speak as he, along with a sergeant, led me through 7 Dorm, past the infirmary, where old men in wheelchairs were given the drugs they needed to maximize their life sentences; 5 and 7 Dorms housed the older, sicker prisoners, who shared multibed rooms decorated with hand-lettered signs (‘Get Use To It,’ ‘Ed’s Bed’). In the past, older special prisoners like Faulkner might have been housed here, or placed in administrative segregation in a cell among the general population, their movements restricted, until a decision was made about them. But the main segregation unit was now at the Supermax facility, which did not have the capacity to offer psychiatric services to prisoners, and Faulkner’s attempts to injure himself appeared to require some form of psychiatric investigation. A suggestion that Faulkner be transferred to the Augusta Mental Health Institute had been rejected by the attorney general’s office, which did not want to prejudice any future jurors into making a pretrial association between Faulkner and insanity, and by Faulkner’s own lawyers, who feared that the state might use the opportunity to discreetly place their client under more elaborate observation than was possible elsewhere. Since the state regarded the county jail as unsuitable for holding Faulkner, Thomaston became the compromise solution.

Faulkner had attempted to cut his wrists with a slim ceramic blade that he had concealed in the spine of his Bible before his transfer to the MCI. He had kept it, unused, until almost three months into his incarceration. A guard on routine night rounds had spotted him and called for help just as Faulkner appeared to be losing consciousness. The result was Faulkner’s transfer to the mental health stabilization unit at the western end of Thomaston prison, where he was initially placed in the acute corridor. His clothing was taken away and he was given instead a nylon smock. He was placed under constant camera watch, as well as being monitored by a prison guard who noted any movement or conversation in a logbook. In addition, all communication was recorded electronically. After five days in acute, Faulkner was transferred to sub-acute, where he was allowed state blues to replace his smock, hygiene products (but no razors), hot meals, showers, and access to a telephone. He had commenced one-on-one counseling with a prison psychologist and had been examined by psychiatrists nominated by his legal team, but had remained unresponsive. Then he had demanded a telephone call, contacted his lawyers, and asked that he be allowed to speak to me. His request that the interview should be conducted from his cell was, perhaps surprisingly, met with approval.

When I arrived in the MHSU, the guards were finishing off some chicken burgers left over from the prisoners’ lunches. In the unit’s main recreation area, the inmates stopped what they were doing and stared at me. One, a stocky, hunched man, barely five feet tall with lank dark hair, approached the bars and appraised me silently. I caught his eye, didn’t like what I felt, then looked away again. The colonel and the sergeant sat on the edge of a desk and watched as one of the unit’s guards led me down the corridor to Faulkner’s cell.

I felt the chill while I was still ten feet away from him. At first, I thought it was brought on by my own reluctance to face the old man, until I felt the guard beside me shiver slightly.

‘What happened to the heating?’ I asked.

‘Heating’s on full blast,’ he replied. ‘This place leaks heat like it’s blowing through a sieve, but never like this.’

He stopped while we were still out of sight of the cell’s occupant, and his voice dropped. ‘It’s him. The preacher. His cell is freezing. We’ve tried installing two heaters outside, but they short out every time.’ He shifted uneasily on his feet. ‘It’s something to do with Faulkner. He just brings the temperature right down somehow. His lawyers are screaming a blue fit about the conditions, but there’s nothing we can do.’

As he concluded, something white moved to my right. The bars of the cell were almost flush with my line of sight, so that the hand that emerged appeared to have passed through a solid wall of steel. The long white fingers probed at the air, twitching and turning, as if they were gifted with the sense not only of touch, but of sight and sound as well.

And then the voice came, like iron filings falling on paper.

‘Parker,’ it said. ‘You’ve come.’

Slowly, I walked toward the cell and saw the moisture on the walls. The droplets glittered in the artificial light, gleaming like thousands of small silver eyes. A smell of damp arose from the cell and from the man who stood before me.

He was smaller than I remembered him, and his long white hair had been cut back close to his skull, but the eyes still burned with that same strange intensity. He remained horribly thin: he had not put on weight, as some inmates do when they switch to a diet of prison food. It took me a moment to realize why.

Despite the cold in the cell, Faulkner was giving off waves of heat. He should have been burning up, his face feverish, his body wracked with tremors, but instead there was no trace of sweat on his face, and no sign of discomfort. His skin was dry as paper, so that it seemed he was on the verge of igniting from within, and the flames that emerged would consume him and leave him as burnt ash.

‘Come closer,’ he said.

Beside me, the guard shook his head.

‘I’m good,’ I replied.

‘Are you afraid of me, sinner?’

‘Not unless you can pass through steel.’ My words brought back that image of the hand seemingly materializing in the air and I heard myself swallow hard.

‘No,’ said the old man. ‘I have no need of parlor tricks. I’ll be out of here, soon enough.’

‘You think?’

He leaned forward and pressed his face against the cold bars.

‘I know.’

He smiled and his pale tongue emerged from his mouth and licked at his dry lips.

‘What do you want?’

‘To talk.’

‘About what?’

‘Life. Death. Life after death; or, if you prefer, the death after life. Do they still come to you, Parker? The lost ones, the dead, do you still see them? I do. They come to me.’ He smiled and drew in a long breath that seemed to catch in his throat, as if he were in the early stages of sexual excitement. ‘So many of them. They ask after you, the ones whom you have despatched. They want to know when you’re going to join them. They have plans for you. I tell them: soon. He’ll be with you real soon.’

I didn’t respond to the taunts. Instead, I asked him why he had cut himself. He held his scarred arms up before me and looked at them, almost in surprise.

‘Perhaps I wanted to cheat them of their vengeance,’ he replied.

‘You didn’t do a very good job.’

‘That’s a matter of opinion. I’m no longer in that place, that modern hell. I have contact with others.’ His eyes shone brightly. ‘I may even be able to save some lost souls.’

‘You have anyone in mind?’

Faulkner laughed softly. ‘Not you, sinner, that is a certainty. You are beyond salvation.’

‘Yet you asked to see me.’

The smile faded, then died.

‘I have an offer for you.’

‘You’ve got nothing to bargain with.’

‘I have your woman,’ came that low, parched voice. ‘I can bargain with her.’

I made no move toward him, yet he stepped back suddenly from the bars, as if the force of my stare had forced him to do so, like a shove to the chest.

‘What did you say?’

‘I’m offering you the safety of your woman, and your unborn child. I’m offering you a life untroubled by fear of retribution.’

‘Old man, your fight now is with the state. You’d better save your bargains for the court. And if you mention those close to me again, I’ll—’

‘You’ll what?’ he mocked. ‘Kill me? You had your chance, and it won’t come again. And my fight is not only with the state. Don’t you remember: you killed my children, my family, you and your deviant colleague. What did you do to the man who killed your child, Parker? Didn’t you hunt him down? Didn’t you kill him like a mad dog? Why should you expect me to respond any differently to the death of my children? Or is there one rule for you, and another for the rest of humanity?’ He sighed theatrically. ‘But I am not like you. I am not a killer.’

‘What do you want, old man?’

‘I want you to withdraw from the trial.’

I waited a heartbeat.

‘And if I don’t?’

He shrugged. ‘Then I can’t be held responsible for the actions that may be taken against you, or them. Not by me, of course: despite my natural animosity toward you, I have no intention of inflicting harm upon you or those close to you. I have never hurt anybody in my life and have no intention of starting now. But there may be others who would take up my cause, unless it was made clear to them that I wished no such thing.’

I turned to the guard. ‘You hearing this?’

He nodded, but Faulkner merely turned his gaze impassively upon the guard. ‘I am merely offering to plead for no retaliation against you, but in any case Mr. Anson here is hardly in a position to be of assistance. He’s fucking a little whore behind his wife’s back. Worse, behind her parents’ back. What is she, Mr. Anson, fifteen? The law frowns upon rapists, statutory or otherwise.’

‘You fuck!’ Anson surged toward the bars, but I caught his arm. He spun at me, and I thought for a moment he was about to strike me, but he restrained himself and shook my hand off. I looked to my right and saw Anson’s colleagues approaching. He raised his hand to let them know that he was okay, and they stopped in their tracks.

‘I thought you didn’t go in for parlor tricks,’ I said.

‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?’ he whispered. ‘The Shadow knows!’ He laughed softly. ‘Let me go, sinner. Walk away, and I will do likewise. I am innocent of the accusations leveled against me.’

‘This meeting is over.’

‘No, it has only just begun. Do you remember what our mutual friend said before he died, sinner? Do you remember the words that the Traveling Man spoke?’

I didn’t reply. There was much about Faulkner that I despised, and much that I did not understand, but his awareness of events about which he could not possibly know disturbed me more than anything else. Somehow, in some way that I was unable to recognize, he had inspired the man who killed Susan and Jennifer, confirming him on the path that he had chosen, a path that had led him at last to our door.

‘Didn’t he tell you about hell? That this was hell, and we were in it? He was misguided in many ways, a flawed, unhappy man, but about that much he was correct. This is hell. When the rebel angels fell, this was the place to which they were consigned. They were blighted, their beauty taken away, and left to wander here. Don’t you fear the dark angels, Parker? You should. They know of you, and soon they will start to move against you. What you’ve faced until now is as nothing compared to what is approaching. Before them I am insignificant, a foot soldier sent ahead to prepare the way. The things that are coming for you are not even human.’

‘You’re insane.’

‘No,’ whispered Faulkner. ‘I am damned for failure, but you will be damned alongside me for your complicity in that failure. They will damn you. Already they wait.’

I shook my head. Anson, the other guards, even the prison bars and walls seemed to melt away. There was only the old man and I, suspended. There was sweat on my face, a product of the heat he exuded. It was as if I had caught some terrible fever from him.

‘Don’t you want to know what he said to me when he came? Don’t you care about the discussions that led to the deaths of your wife and your little girl? Somewhere deep inside of yourself, don’t you want to know of what we spoke?’

I cleared my throat. The words, when they came, felt coated in nails.

‘You didn’t even know them.’

He laughed. ‘I didn’t need to know them. But you . . . Oh, we spoke of you. Through him, I came to understand you in ways that you didn’t even understand yourself. I am glad, in a way, that we had this opportunity to meet, although  . . .’

His face darkened.

‘We have both paid a high price for the inter-twining of our lives. Divorce yourself now, from all of this, and there will be no more conflict between us. But continue on this road and I will be unable to stop what may occur.’

‘Good-bye.’

I moved to walk away, but my struggle with Anson had brought me within Faulkner’s reach. His hand reached out and clasped my jacket and then, while I was off balance, pulled me closer to him. I turned my head instinctively, my lips apart to cry out a warning.

And Faulkner spit in my mouth.

It took me a moment to realize what had happened, and then I was striking out at him, Anson now pulling me away as I reached for the old man. The other guards came running toward us and I was hauled away, expelling the taste of Faulkner from my mouth even as he continued to howl out at me from his cell.

‘Take it as a gift, Parker,’ he called. ‘My gift to you, that you might see as I see.’

I pushed the guards away and wiped my mouth, then kept my head down as I walked past the recreation area, where those deemed to be no danger to themselves or others watched me from behind their bars. Had my head been raised, and my attention been focused elsewhere than on the preacher and what he had just done to me, then perhaps I might have seen the stooped, dark-haired man watching me more closely than the rest.

And as I left, the man named Cyrus Nairn smiled, his arms outstretched, his fingers forming a constant flow of words, until a guard looked his way and he stopped, his arms withdrawing back toward his body.

The guard knew what Cyrus was doing, but he paid him no heed. After all, Cyrus was a mute and that was what mutes did.

They signed.

I was almost at my car when I heard the sound of footsteps on the gravel behind me. It was Anson. He shifted uneasily.

‘You okay?’

I nodded. I had washed my mouth out in the guards’ quarters with borrowed mouthwash, but I still felt as if some element of Faulkner was coursing through me, infecting me.

‘What you heard in there—,’ he began.

I interrupted him. ‘Your private life is your own affair. It’s nothing to do with me.’

‘What he said, it’s not like it seems.’

‘It never is.’

A red glow began at his neck and spread into his features as if drawn by osmosis.

‘Are you being smart with me?’

‘Like I said, it’s your business. I do have one question. If you’re worried, you can check me for a wire.’

He considered the offer for a moment, then motioned to me to continue.

‘Is what the preacher said true? I don’t care about the law or about why you’re doing it. All I want to know is: was he correct in the details?’

Anson didn’t reply. He just looked at his feet and nodded.

‘Could one of the other guards have let it slip?’

‘No. Nobody knows about it.’

‘A prisoner, maybe? Somebody local who might have been in a position to spread a little jailhouse gossip?’

‘No, I don’t believe so.’

I opened the car door. Anson seemed to feel the need to make some final macho comment. As in other things, he didn’t appear to be a man who believed in restraining his urges.

‘If anyone finds out about this, you’ll be in a world of shit,’ he warned. It sounded hollow, even to himself. I could see it in the mottling of his skin and the way in which he had to concentrate on straining the muscles in his neck so that they bulged over the collar of his shirt. I let him retrieve whatever dignity he thought he could salvage from the situation, then watched as he slowly padded back to the main door, seemingly reluctant to place himself in proximity to Faulkner once again.

A shadow fell across him, as if a huge winged bird had descended and were slowly circling above him. Over the prison walls, more birds seemed to hover. They were big and black, moving in lazy, drifting loops, but there was in their movements something unnatural. They glided with none of the grace or beauty of birds, for their thin bodies seemed almost to be at odds with their enormous wings, as though struggling with the pull of gravity, the torso always threatening to plummet toward the ground, the wings allowing the slide for a time before beating wildly to draw them back to the safety of the air.

Then one broke from the flock, growing larger and larger as it descended in a spiral, coming to rest at last on the top of one of the guard towers, and I could see that this was no bird, and I knew it for what it was.

The dark angel’s body was emaciated, its arms black mummified skin over slim bones, its face elongated and predatory, its eyes dark and knowing. It rested a clawed hand on the glass and its great wings, feathered in darkness, beat a low cadence against the air. Slowly, it was joined by others, each silently taking up a position on the walls and the towers, until it seemed at last that the prison was black with them. They made no move toward me but I sensed their hostility, and something more: their sense of betrayal, as if I were somehow one of them and had turned my back upon them.

‘Ravens,’ said a voice at my side. It was an elderly woman. She carried a brown paper bag in her hand, filled with some small items for one of the inmates: a son, perhaps, or a husband among the old men in 7 Dorm. ‘Never seen so many before, or so big.’

And now they were ravens: two feet tall at least, the fingered wing tips clearly visible as they moved upon the walls, calling softly to one another.

‘I didn’t think they came together in those numbers,’ I said.

‘They don’t,’ she said. ‘Not normally, nohow, but who’s to say what’s normal these days?’

She continued walking. I got in my car and began to drive away, but in the rearview mirror the black birds did not seem to decrease in size as I left them behind. Instead, they seemed to grow larger even as the prison receded, taking on new forms.

And I felt their eyes upon me as the preacher’s saliva colonized my body like a cancer.

My gift to you, that you might see as I see.

Apart from the prison and the prison craft shop there isn’t a whole lot to keep a casual visitor in Thomaston, but the town has a pretty good diner at its northern end, with homemade pies and bread pudding served piping hot to locals and those who come to talk after meeting their loved ones across a table or through a screen farther up the road. I bought another bottle of mouthwash at the drugstore and sluiced my mouth out in the parking lot before heading into the diner.

The small eating area with its mismatched furniture was largely empty, with the exception of two old men who sat quietly, side by side, watching the traffic go by, and a younger man in an expensively tailored suit who sat in a wooden booth by the wall, his overcoat folded neatly beside him, a fork resting among the cream and crumbs on his plate, a copy of USA Today beside it. I ordered a coffee and took a seat across from him.

‘You don’t look so good,’ said the man.

I felt my gaze drawn toward the window. I could not see the prison from where I sat. I shook my head, clearing it of visions of dark creatures crowding on prison walls, waiting. They were not real. They were just ravens. I was ill, nauseated by Faulkner’s assault.

They were not real.

‘Stan,’ I said, to distract myself. ‘Nice suit.’

He turned the jacket to show me the label inside. ‘Armani. Bought it in an outlet store. I keep the receipt in the inside pocket, just in case I get accused of corruption.’

My coffee arrived, and the waitress retreated behind the counter to read a magazine. Somewhere, a radio played sickly MOR. The Rush revival begins here.

Stan Ornstead was an assistant district attorney, part of the team assembled to prosecute the Faulkner case. It was Ornstead who had convinced me to face Faulkner, with the full knowledge of deputy DA Andrus, and who had arranged for the interview to be conducted at the cell so that I could see the conditions that he appeared to have created for himself. Stan was only a few years younger than I was and was considered a hot prospect for the future. He was going places; he just wasn’t going there fast enough for him. Faulkner, he had hoped, might have changed that situation, except, as the warden had indicated, the Faulkner case was turning into something very bad indeed, something that threatened to drag everyone involved down with it.

‘You look kind of shaken up,’ Stan said, after I’d taken a couple of fortifying sips from my coffee.

‘He has that effect on people.’

‘He didn’t give too much away.’

I froze, and he raised his palms in a what-you-gonna-do? gesture.

‘They mike sub-acute cells?’ I asked.

‘They don’t, if you mean the prison authorities.’

‘But somebody else has taken up the slack.’

‘The cell has been lojacked. Officially, we know nothing about it.’ Lojacking was the term used to describe a surveillance operation not endorsed by a court. More particularly, it was the term used by the FBI to describe any such operation.

‘The Feebs?’

‘The trenchcoats don’t have too much faith in us. They’re worried that Faulkner may walk on our beef so they want to get as much as they can, while they can, in case of federal charges or a double prosecution. All conversations with his lawyers, his doctors, his shrink, even his nemesis – that’s you, in case you didn’t know – are being recorded. The hope is that, at the very least, he’ll give something away that might lead them to others like him, or even give them a lead to other crimes he might have committed. All inadmissible, of course, but useful if it works.’

‘And will he walk?’

Ornstead shrugged.

‘You know what he’s claiming: he was kept a virtual prisoner for decades and had no part in, or knowledge of, any crimes committed by the Fellowship or those associated with it. There’s nothing to link him directly to any of the killings, and that underground nest of rooms he lived in had bolts on the outside.’

‘He was at my house when they tried to kill me.’

‘You say, but you were woozy. You told me yourself you couldn’t see straight.’

‘Rachel saw him.’

‘Yes, she did, but she’d just been hit on the head and had blood in her eyes. She herself admits that she can’t remember a lot of what was said, and he wasn’t there for what followed.’

‘There’s a hole in the ground at Eagle Lake where seventeen bodies were found, the remains of his flock.’

‘He says fighting broke out between the families. They turned on each other, then on his own family. They killed his wife. His children responded in kind. He claims he was over in Presque Isle on the day they were killed.’

‘He assaulted Angel.’

‘Faulkner denies it, says his kids did it and forced him to watch. Anyway, your friend says he won’t testify and even if we subpoena him any lawyer worth more than a dollar an hour would tear him apart. A credible witness he is not. And, with respect, you’re hardly an ideal witness either.’

‘Why would that be?’

‘You’ve been pretty free with that cannon of yours, but just because charges have been let slide doesn’t mean that they’ve disappeared off everybody’s radar. You can be damn sure that Faulkner’s legal team knows all about you. They’ll push the angle that you came tearing in there, shooting the place up, and the old man was lucky to escape with his life.’

I pushed my coffee cup away. ‘Is that why you brought me here, to rip my story to shreds?’

‘Do it here, do it in court, makes no difference. We’re in trouble. And maybe we have other worries.’

I waited.

‘His lawyers have confirmed that they’re going to petition for a Supreme Court review of the bail decision within the next ten days. We think that the available judge may be Wilton Cooper, and that’s not good news.’

Wilton Cooper was only a few months shy of retirement, but he would continue to be a thorn in the side of the AG’s office until then. He was obstinate, unpredictable, and had a personal animosity toward the AG, the source of which was lost in the mists of time. He had also spoken out in the past against preventive bail and was quite capable of defending the rights of the accused at the cost of the rights of society in general.

‘If Cooper takes the review, it could go either way,’ said Ornstead. ‘Faulkner’s claims are bullshit, but we need time to amass the evidence to undermine them and it could be years before a trial. And you’ve seen his cell: we could keep him at the bottom of a volcano and it would still be cold. His lawyers have got independent experts who will claim that Faulkner’s continued incarceration is endangering his health, and that he will die if he remains in custody. If we move him to Augusta we could shoot ourselves in the foot in the event of an insanity plea. We don’t have the facilities for him at the supermax, and where do we put him if we move him out of Thomaston? County? I don’t think so. So what we have right now is an upcoming trial with no reliable witnesses, insufficient evidence to make the case watertight, and a defendant who may be dead before we can even get him on the stand. Cooper would just be the icing on the cake.’

I found that I was clutching the handle of my coffee cup so tightly that it had left a mark on the palm of my hand. I released my grip and watched the blood flow back into the white areas. ‘If he’s bailed, he’ll flee,’ I said. ‘He won’t wait around for a trial.’

‘We don’t know that.’

‘Yes, we do.’

We were both hunched over the table, and we both seemed to realize it simultaneously. Over near the window, the two old men had turned to watch us, their attention attracted by the tension between us. I leaned back, then looked at them. They returned to watching the traffic.

‘Anyway,’ said Ornstead, ‘even Cooper won’t set a bail below seven figures and we don’t believe that Faulkner has access to that level of funds.’

All of the Fellowship’s assets had been frozen and the AG’s office was trying to follow the paper trail that might lead to other accounts undiscovered so far. But somebody was paying Faulkner’s lawyers, and a defense fund had been opened into which dispiriting numbers of right-wing crazies and religious nuts were pouring money.

‘Do we know who’s organizing the defense fund?’ I asked. Officially, the fund was the responsibility of a firm of lawyers, Muren & Associates, in Savannah, Georgia, but it was a pretty low-rent operation. There had to be more to it than a bunch of Southern shysters working out of an office with plastic chairs. Faulkner’s own legal team, led by Grim Jim Grimes, was separate from it. Stone features apart, Jim Grimes was one of the best lawyers in New England. He could talk his way out of cancer, and he didn’t come cheap.

Ornstead blew out a large breath. It smelled of coffee and nicotine.

‘That’s the rest of the bad news. Muren had a visitor a couple of days back, a guy by the name of Edward Carlyle. Phone records show that the two of them have been in daily contact since this thing started, and Carlyle is a co-signatory on the fund checking account.’

I shrugged. ‘Name doesn’t ring a bell.’

Ornstead tapped his fingers lightly on the table in a delicate cadence.

‘Edward Carlyle is Roger Bowen’s right-hand man. And Roger Bowen is—’

‘A creep,’ I finished. ‘And a racist.’

‘And a neo-Nazi,’ added Ornstead. ‘Yup, clock stopped sometime around nineteen thirty-nine for Bowen. He’s quite a guy. Probably has shares in gas ovens in the hope that things might pick up again on the old “final solution” front. As far as we can tell, Bowen is the one behind the defense fund. He’s been keeping a low profile these last few years but something has drawn him out from under his rock. He’s making speeches, appearing at rallies, passing around the collection plate. Seems to me like he wants Faulkner back on the streets pretty bad.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, that’s what we’re trying to find out.’

‘Bowen’s base is in South Carolina, isn’t it?’

‘He moves between South Carolina and Georgia, but spends most of his time somewhere up by the Chattooga river. Why, you planning on visiting down there?’

‘Maybe.’

‘I ask why?’

‘A friend in need.’

‘The worst kind. Well, while you’re down there you could always ask Bowen why Faulkner is so important to him, though I wouldn’t recommend it. I don’t imagine you’re top of his wish list of friends he hasn’t met yet.’

‘I’m not top of anybody’s wish list.’

Ornstead stood and patted me on the shoulder.

‘You’re breaking my heart.’

I walked with him to the door. His car was parked right outside.

‘You heard everything, right?’ I asked. I assumed that Stan had been listening in to all that had passed between Faulkner and me.

‘Yeah. We talking about the guard?’

‘Anson.’

‘Doesn’t concern me. You?’

‘She’s underage. I don’t believe that Anson is going to be an influence for the better in her life.’

‘No, I guess not. We can get someone to look into it.’

‘I’d appreciate it.’

‘Done. Now I got a question for you. What happened in there? Sounded like there was a scuffle.’

Despite the coffee, I could still taste the mouthwash.

‘Faulkner spit in my mouth.’

‘Shit. You going to need a test?’

‘I doubt it, but I feel like swallowing battery acid to burn it out of my mouth and insides.’

‘Why’d he do it? To get you pissed at him?’

I shook my head.

‘No, he told me it was a gift, to help me see more clearly.’

‘See what?’

I didn’t answer, but I knew.

He wanted me to see what was waiting for him, and what was coming for me.

He wanted me to see his kind.

6

The militant racist movement has never been particularly significant in terms of size. Its hard-core membership is probably 25,000 at most, augmented by maybe a further 150,000 active sympathizers and possibly another 400,000 fly-by-nighters, who offer neither money nor manpower but will tell you all about the threat to the white race posed by the coloreds and the Jews if you loosen them up with enough booze. More than half of the hard core comprises Klan members, with the remainder consisting of skinheads and assorted Nazis, and the level of cooperation between the groups is pretty minimal, sometimes descending into a competitiveness bordering on outright aggression. Membership is rarely constant: people move in and out of the groups on a regular basis, depending on the requirements of employers, enemies, or the courts.

But at the head of each group is a cadre of lifelong activists, and even as the names of their movements change, even as they fight amongst themselves and shatter into smaller and smaller splinters, those leaders remain. They are missionaries, zealots, proselytizers for the cause, spreading the gospel of intolerance at state fairs, rallies, and conferences, through newsletters and pamphlets and late night radio shows.

Of these men, Roger Bowen was one of the longest serving, and also one of the most dangerous. Born to a Baptist family in Gaffney, South Carolina, by the foothills of the Blue Ridge, he had passed through the ranks of any number of far-right organizations, including some of the most notorious neo-Nazi groups of the past twenty years. In 1983, at the age of twenty-four, Bowen had been one of three young men questioned without charge about their involvement in the Order, the secret society formed by the racist Robert Matthews and linked to Aryan Nations. During 1983 and 1984 the Order carried out a series of armored car and bank robberies to fund its operations, which included assorted arson attacks, bombings, and counterfeiting efforts. The Order was also responsible for the murders of the Denver talk show host Alan Berg and a man named Walter West, a member of the Order who was suspected of betraying its secrets. Eventually, all members of the Order were apprehended, with the exception of Matthews himself, who was killed during a shoot-out with FBI agents in 1984. Since there was no evidence to link Bowen to its activities he escaped prosecution, and the truth about the extent of Bowen’s involvement in the Order died with Matthews. Despite its comparatively small force of activists, the FBI’s operations against the Order had consumed one quarter of the bureau’s total manpower resources. The Order’s size had worked in its favor, making it difficult to infiltrate by outsiders and informers, the unfortunate Walter West excepted. It was a lesson that Bowen never forgot.

Bowen then drifted for a time before finding a home of sorts in the Klan movement, although by then it had been largely defanged by the activities of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program: klaverns had folded, its prestige had plummeted, and its average age had begun to drop as older members left or died. The result was that the Klan’s traditionally uneasy relationship with the trappings of neo-Nazism became less ambiguous, the new bloods being less fussy about such matters than the more senior members. Bowen joined Bill Wilkinson’s Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, but by the time the Invisible Empire disbanded in 1993, following an expensive lawsuit, Bowen had already established his own Klan, the White Confederates.

Except Bowen didn’t go recruiting members like the other Klans and even the Klan name was little more than a flag of convenience for him. The White Confederates never numbered more than a dozen individuals, but they wielded power and influence beyond their size and contributed significantly to the ongoing Nazification of the Klan in the 1980s, further blurring the traditional lines between the Klansmen and the neo-Nazis.

Bowen wasn’t a Holocaust denier either: he liked the idea of the Holocaust, the possibility of a force capable of murder on a previously unthought of scale, murder with a sense of order and planning behind it. It was this, more than any moral qualms, that had led Bowen to distance himself from the casual outrages, the sporadic outbursts of violence, that were endemic to the movement. At the annual Stone Mountain rally in Georgia he had even publicly condemned one incident, the beating to death of a middle-aged black man named Bill Perce in North Carolina by a group of drunken klavern rejects, only to hear himself booed off the platform. Since then, Bowen had avoided Stone Mountain. They didn’t understand him and he didn’t need them, although he continued to work behind the scenes, supporting occasional Klan marches in small towns on the Georgia–South Carolina border. Even if, as frequently occurred, only a handful of men took part, the threat of a march still gained newspaper coverage and bleats of outrage from liberal sheep, and contributed to the atmosphere of intimidation and distrust that Bowen needed for his work to continue. The White Confederates was largely a front, a piece of theater akin to the waves of a magician’s wand before a trick is performed. The real trickery was being performed out of sight, and the movement of the wand was not only unconnected with the illusion but largely immaterial to it.

For it was Bowen who was trying to heal the old enmities; Bowen who was building bridges over the divides between the Christian Patriots and the Aryans, the skinheads and the Klans; Bowen who was reaching out to the more vocal, and extreme, members of the Christian right; Bowen who understood the importance of unity, of intercommunication, of extending the funding base; and Bowen who now felt that, by bringing Faulkner under his protection, he could convince those who believed the preacher’s story to redirect their money toward him. The Fellowship had pulled in more than $500,000 in the year before Faulkner’s arrest. It was small beans compared to the kind of cash flow enjoyed by the better-known televangelists, but it represented serious income to Bowen and his kind. Bowen had watched the money flowing into Faulkner’s appeal fund: there was already enough to meet 10 percent of a low seven-figure bail and then some, and it was still coming in, but no bondsman would be crazy enough to cover Faulkner’s bail in the event of a review finding in his favor. Bowen had other plans, other irons in the fire. If they played it right, Faulkner could be out and vanished before the end of the month, and if rumors persisted that Bowen had squirreled him away to safety, then so much the better for Bowen. In fact, it wouldn’t much matter after that if the preacher lived or died. It would be enough that he remained unseen, and he could do that just as easily below ground as above it.

But Bowen also felt an admiration for what the old preacher and his Fellowship had achieved. Without resorting to the bank jobs that had undermined the Order, and with manpower never numbering more than four or five persons, he had carried out a campaign of murder and intimidation against soft targets for the best part of three decades and had covered his tracks brilliantly. Even the FBI and the ATF were still having problems connecting the Fellowship to the deaths of abortion doctors, outspoken homosexuals, Jewish leaders, and the other bugbears of the far right whose annihilation Faulkner was believed to have authorized.

It was strange, but Bowen had barely considered the possibility of allying himself to Faulkner’s cause until Kittim had reappeared. Kittim was a legend among the extreme right, a folk hero. He had come to Bowen shortly after Faulkner’s arrest, and from there, the idea of involving himself with the case had just come naturally to Bowen. And if he couldn’t remember exactly what Kittim was reputed to have done, or even where he had come from, well, that hardly mattered. That was the way with folk heroes, wasn’t it? They were only partly real, but with Kittim beside him, Bowen felt a new sense of purpose, of near invincibility.

It was so strong that he hardly noticed the fear that he felt in the man’s presence.

Bowen’s admiration, spurred into action by Kittim’s arrival, had apparently appealed to Faulkner’s ego, for through his lawyers the preacher had agreed to nail his colors to Bowen’s mast, had even offered up funds from hidden accounts, untraceable by his persecutors, if Bowen could arrange his disappearance. More than anything else, the old man did not want to die in jail; he would rather be hunted for the remainder of his life than rot behind bars while awaiting trial. Faulkner had asked for just one further favor. Bowen had been kind of annoyed at this, given the fact that he was already offering to hide Faulkner from the law, but when Faulkner told him what he wanted Bowen had relaxed. It was just a small favor, after all, and would give Bowen almost as much pleasure as it would give Faulkner.

Bowen believed that, in Kittim, he had found just the man for the job, but he was wrong.

In truth, the man had found him.

Bowen’s truck pulled into the small clearing before the hut, just across the South Carolina state line in eastern Tennessee. The building was dark wood, four rough-hewn steps leading to a porch, two narrow windows on either side. It looked like a blockhouse, designed with defense in mind.

A man sat on a rocking chair to the right of the door, smoking a cigarette. This was Carlyle. He had short curly hair that had begun to recede when he was in his early twenties but had mysteriously arrested its retreat in his thirties, leaving him with a clown wig of fair hair around his domed skull. He was in good condition, like most of those whom Bowen kept close. He drank little, and Bowen couldn’t remember ever having seen him smoke before. He looked tired and ill. Bowen noticed the smell as he approached: vomit.

‘You okay?’ asked Bowen.

Carlyle wiped his lips with his fingers and examined the tips for any detritus. ‘Why? I got shit on me?’

‘No, but you smell bad.’

Carlyle took a last drag on the cigarette, then carefully extinguished the butt on the sole of his boot. When he was satisfied that it was cold, he tore it to shreds and let the breeze carry the remains away.

‘Where did we get this guy, Roger?’ he asked when he was done.

‘Who? Kittim?’

‘Yeah, Kittim.’

‘He’s a legend,’ said Bowen. It had the sound of a mantra about it.

Carlyle ran a hand over his bare pate. ‘I know that. I mean, I think I know.’ His features collapsed into uncertainty, then rebuilt themselves into an expression of disgust. ‘Anyway, wherever he came from, he’s a freak.’

‘We need him.’

‘We got by okay without him until now.’

‘This is different. Did you get anything out of the guy?’

Carlyle shook his head.

‘He doesn’t know anything. He’s just muscle.’

‘You sure?’

‘Believe me, if he knew anything he’d have told us by now. But that sick fuck keeps at him.’

Bowen wasn’t a great believer in Jewish conspiracies. Sure, there were wealthy Jews with power and influence, but they were pretty scattered when you looked at the big picture. Still, if Faulkner was to be believed, some old Jews in New York had tried to have him killed, and had dispatched a man to do it. That man was now dead, but Faulkner wanted to know who had sent him so that, when the time came, he could revenge himself upon them, and Bowen was of the opinion that it couldn’t hurt to know what they were up against. That was why they had taken the kid, pulled him from the streets of Greenville when he drew attention to himself by asking the wrong questions in the wrong places. After that, he had been driven up here, gagged and bound in the trunk of a car, and handed over to Kittim.

‘Where is he?’

‘Out back.’

As Bowen moved to pass him, Carlyle extended an arm to block his way.

‘You eaten yet?’

‘Not much.’

‘Lucky you.’

The arm dropped. Bowen continued on around the side of the house until he came to an enclosed pen that had once been used to hold pigs. The stench of them still hung around it, thought Bowen, until he saw what lay on the bare ground at the center of the pen and realized that what he was smelling was not animal, but human.

The young man was naked and staked out in the sun. He had a short, neatly-trimmed beard, and his black hair was pasted to his skull with sweat and mud. A leather belt had been tied around his head. His teeth were visible, gritted against it, as the wounds he had suffered were widened and probed. The man stooped over him wore coveralls and gloves as he worked on the body, his fingers exploring the new cavities and apertures he had created with his blade, pausing occasionally as the staked man tensed and made soft mewling sounds from behind the gag before continuing his work. Bowen didn’t know how he had kept the kid on the ground alive, let alone conscious, but then Kittim was a man of many talents. He rose at the sound of Bowen’s approach, his body unfolding like that of a disturbed insect, and turned to face him.

Kittim was tall, six two or six three. The cap and glasses that he habitually wore almost obscured his features, intentionally so because there was something wrong with Kittim’s skin. Bowen didn’t know precisely what it was, and he had never worked up the courage to ask, but Kittim’s face was a pinkish purple color, with wispy clumps of hair attached to the flaking skull. He reminded Bowen of a marabou stork, built to feed on the dead and the dying. His eyes, when he chose to reveal them, were a very dark green, like a cat’s eyes. Beneath the coveralls his body was hard and slim, almost emaciated. His nails were neatly trimmed, and he was clean shaven. He smelled vaguely of meat and Polo aftershave.

And sometimes of burning oil.

Bowen looked beyond him to where the young man lay, then returned his attention to Kittim. Carlyle was right, of course: Kittim was a freak, and of Bowen’s small retinue only Landron Mobley, who was himself little better than a mad dog, appeared to feel any kind of affinity for him. It was not merely the torments being visited on the Jew that disgusted Bowen, but the sense of carnality that accompanied them. Kittim was aroused. Bowen could see it straining against the coveralls. For a moment, it caused anger to overcome Bowen’s underlying fear of the man.

‘You enjoying yourself?’ asked Bowen.

Kittim shrugged. ‘You asked me to find out what he knew.’ His voice was like a broom sweeping across a dusty stone floor.

‘Carlyle says he knows nothing.’

‘Carlyle isn’t in charge here.’

‘That’s right. I am, and I’m asking you if you’ve found out anything useful from him.’

Kittim stared at him from behind his shades, then turned his back on Bowen.

‘Leave me,’ he said, as he knelt to recommence his exploration of the young man. ‘I have not finished.’

Instead of departing, Bowen drew his gun from its holster. His thoughts were once again concentrated on this strange deformed man and the wraithlike nature of him and his past. It was as if they had conjured him up, he thought, as if he were a personification of all their hatreds and fears, an abstraction made flesh. He had come to Bowen, offering his services, and the knowledge of him had begun to seep into Bowen like gas into a room, half-remembered tales assuming a new substance around him, and Bowen had been unable to turn him away. What was it Carlyle had said? He was a legend, but why? What had he done?

And he didn’t seem interested in the cause, in the niggers and the faggots and the kikes whose very existence gave most of his kind the fuel they needed for their hatred. Instead, Kittim seemed distant from such matters, even while he was inflicting torments on a naked victim. Now Kittim was trying to tell him what to do, ordering him to leave his presence like Bowen was just some house nigger with a tray. It was about time that Bowen regained control of this situation and showed everybody who was boss. He stepped lightly around Kittim, then raised the gun and pointed it at the young man on the ground.

‘No,’ said Kittim softly.

Bowen looked over and—

And Kittim shimmered.

A sudden wave of intense heat seemed to pass over him, causing him to ripple behind its passage, and for an instant he was both Kittim and something else, something dark and winged, with eyes like those of a dead bird, reflecting the world without revealing any life within. His skin was loose and withered, the bones visible beneath it, the legs slightly bent, the feet elongated.

The smell of oil grew stronger and, for an instant, Bowen understood. By doubting him, by allowing his own feelings of anger to break through, he had somehow permitted his mind to register an aspect of Kittim, the truth of him, that had remained hidden until now.

He’s old, thought Bowen, older than he looks, older than any of us could have imagined. He has to concentrate to hold himself together. That’s why his skin is the way it is, why he walks so slowly, why he keeps himself apart. He has to struggle to maintain this form. He’s not human. He is—

Bowen took a step back as the figure reconstituted itself, until once again he was staring at a man in coveralls with blood on his gloved hands.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Kittim.

Even in his confusion and fear Bowen knew better than to answer truthfully. In fact, he couldn’t have told the truth even if he wanted to because his mind was doing some pretty rapid work to shore up his threatened sanity, and now he wasn’t sure what the truth was. Kittim couldn’t have shimmered. He couldn’t have changed. He couldn’t be what Bowen had thought, for an instant, he might be: a thing dark and winged, like a foul, mutated bird.

‘It’s nothing,’ said Bowen. He stared dumbly at the gun in his hand, then put it away.

‘Then let me get back to work,’ said Kittim, and the last thing Bowen saw was the fading hope in the eyes of the young man on the ground before Kittim’s thin form blocked him from view.

Bowen brushed past Carlyle on his way back to the car.

‘Hey!’ Carlyle reached out to grasp him, then drew back and allowed his hand to fall as he saw Bowen’s face.

‘Your eyes,’ he said. ‘What happened to your eyes?’

But Bowen didn’t reply. Later, he would tell Carlyle what he had seen, or what he thought he had seen, and in the aftermath of what was to come Carlyle would tell the investigators. But for now Bowen kept it to himself and his face registered no emotion as he drove away, not even when he stared into the rearview mirror and saw that the capillaries in his eyeballs had burst, his pupils now black holes at the center of red pools of blood.

Far to the north, Cyrus Nairn retreated back into the darkness of his cell. He was happier here than outside, mingling with the others. They didn’t understand him, couldn’t understand him. Dumb: that was the word a whole lot of people had used about Cyrus throughout his life. Dumb. Dummy. Mute. Schizo. Cyrus didn’t care too much about what they said. He knew that he was smart. He also, deep down inside, suspected that he was crazy.

Cyrus had been abandoned by his mother at nine and tormented by his stepfather until he was finally incarcerated for the first time, at the age of seventeen. He could still recall some details about his mother: not love or tenderness – no, never that – but the look in her eyes as she grew to despise what she had brought into the world in the course of a difficult, complicated birth had remained with him. The boy was born hunched, unable to stand fully upright, his knees buckled as if he were laboring constantly beneath some unseen weight. His forehead was too large, overshadowing dark eyes, the irises nearly black. He had a flattened nose with elongated nostrils, and a small, rounded chin. His mouth was very full, the upper lip overhanging the lower, and it remained slightly open even in repose, making Cyrus appear always to be on the verge of biting.

And he was strong. There was thick muscle on his arms and shoulders and chest, tapering down to a narrow waist before exploding again at his buttocks and thighs. His strength had been his salvation; had he been weaker, prison would have broken him long before now.

The first sentence was handed down for aggravated burglary after he had entered the house of a woman in Houlton, armed with a homemade knife. The woman had locked herself in her room and called the cops, and they’d caught Cyrus as he tried to escape through a bathroom window. Through signing, Cyrus had told them that he was just looking for money to buy beer, and they’d believed him. He’d still pulled three years, though, and served eighteen months.

It was in the course of an examination by the prison psychiatrist that he was first diagnosed as schizophrenic, exhibiting what the psychiatrist told him were classic ‘positive’ symptoms: hallucinations, delusions, strange patterns of thinking and self-expression, hearing voices. Cyrus had nodded along as all of this was explained to him through a signer, although he could hear perfectly well. He simply chose not to reveal the fact, much as it seemed that he had chosen, one night a long, long time before, no longer to speak.

Or perhaps the choice had been made for him. Cyrus was never entirely sure.

He was prescribed medication, the so-called first generation antipsychotics, but he hated their debilitating side effects and quickly learned to disguise the fact that he was no longer taking them. But more than the side effects, Cyrus hated the loneliness that came with the drugs. He despised the silence. When the voices resumed, he embraced them and welcomed them as old friends now returned from some faraway place with strange new tales to tell. When he was eventually released, he could barely hear the standard patter of the guard processing him over the clamor of the voices, excited at the prospect of freedom and the resumption of the plans they had so carefully rehearsed for so long.

Because for Cyrus, the Houlton affair had been a failure on two accounts: In the first place, he’d been caught. In the second, he hadn’t gone into the house for money.

He’d gone in for the woman.

Cyrus Nairn lived in a small cabin on a patch of land that his mother’s family had owned, close by the Androscoggin River, about ten miles south of Wilton. In the old days, people used to store fruit and vegetables in hollows dug into the bank, where the temperature would keep them fresh long after they’d been plucked or dug up. Cyrus had found these old hollows and strengthened them, then disguised the entrances using bushes and timber. The hollows had served as his retreat from the world when he was a boy. Sometimes, it almost seemed to him that he had been created to fit into them, that they were his natural home. The curvature of his spine; the short, thick neck; his legs, slightly bent at the knees: all seemed expressly designed to enable him to fit into those places beneath the riverbank. Now the cold hollows hid other things, and even during the summer, the natural refrigeration meant that he had to go down on his hands and knees and sniff the earth before he could catch a hint of what lay beneath.

After Houlton, Cyrus had learned to be more careful. Each knife he made was used only once, then burned, and the blade buried far from his own property. In the beginning, he could go for a year, maybe more, without taking one, satisfying himself by crouching in the cool silence of the hollows, before the voices got too loud and he had to go a-hunting once more. Then, as he grew older, the voices became more insistent, their demands coming closer and closer together, until he tried to take the woman in Dexter, and she screamed and the men came and beat him. He got five years for that, but now the end was in sight. The parole board had been presented with the results of Cyrus’s Hare PCL-R evaluation, the test developed by a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia that was now widely regarded as the standard indicator of recidivism, violence, and the subject’s response to therapeutic intervention, and the board’s reaction had been positive. Within days Cyrus would be free to go, free to return to the river and his beloved hollows. That was why he liked the cell, the darkness of it, especially at night when he could close his eyes and imagine himself there once again, among the women and the girls, the perfumed girls.

He owed his release in part to his natural intelligence, for Cyrus, had the prison psychiatric services studied him further, would have provided some support for the theory that the genetic factors that contributed to his condition had also endowed him with a creative brilliance. But Cyrus had also received help in recent weeks from an unexpected source.

The old man had arrived in the MHSU, had watched Cyrus from behind his bars, and his fingers had begun to move.

Hello.

It had been so long since Cyrus had signed to another person other than a head doctor that he had almost forgotten how to converse, but slowly, then faster, he began to sign in return.

Hello. My name is—

Cyrus. I know your name.

How do you know my name?

I know all about you, Cyrus. You, and your little larder.

Cyrus had pulled back then and returned to his cell, where he lay huddled in the corner for the rest of the day while the voices shouted and argued over one another. But the next day he returned to the edge of the recreation unit, and the old man was waiting for him. He knew. He knew that Cyrus would come back to him.

Cyrus began to sign.

What do you want?

I have something to give you, Cyrus.

What?

The old man paused, then made the sign, the one that Cyrus made to himself in the darkness, when it all threatened to become too much for him and he needed some hope, something to cling to, something for which to yearn.

A woman, Cyrus. I’m going to give you a woman.

Barely yards away from where Cyrus lay, Faulkner knelt in his cell and prayed for success. He knew that by coming here he would find one that he could use. The ones in the other prison were no good to him; they were long-term prisoners, and Faulkner was not interested in long-termers. So he had injured himself, necessitating the transfer to the mental health stabilization unit and access to a more suitable population. He had expected it to be more difficult, but he had spotted Nairn instantly and had felt his pain. Faulkner tightened his fingers together, and the whispering of his prayers increased in volume.

The guard Anson approached the cell quietly, then paused as he stared down at the kneeling figure. His hand flicked in a neat, practiced movement and the ligature passed over the head of the praying man. Then, with a swift glance over his shoulder, Anson tugged and Faulkner was dragged, retching and clawing, to the bars. Anson pulled him up, then reached through the bars and gripped the old man’s chin.

‘You fuck!’ hissed Anson, keeping his voice low, for he had seen the men in Faulkner’s cell before the preacher was moved and suspected that some form of monitoring was in progress. Already, he had spoken to Marie and warned her to say nothing of their relationship in case his suspicions were correct. ‘You ever open your mouth about me again and I’ll finish what you started, you understand?’ His fingers dug into Faulkner’s dry, hot skin and felt the bone beneath, fragile and waiting to be broken. He released his grip, then allowed the rubber cord to slacken before he jerked it back again, banging the old man’s head painfully against the bars.

‘And you better watch what you eat, you old cocksucker, because I’m gonna be playing with your food before you get it, y’hear?’ Then he slipped the cord over Faulkner’s head and allowed him to fall to the ground. The preacher raised himself slowly and staggered to his bunk, drawing deep ragged breaths and touching the indentation on his neck. He listened as the guard’s footsteps faded away, then, remaining seated and keeping his distance from the bars, he returned to his prayers.

As he sat, something on the floor seemed to draw his attention and his head turned to follow its movements. He watched it for a time then brought his foot down hard and firm upon it, before scraping the remains of the spider from his shoe.

‘Boy,’ he whispered, ‘I warned you. I warned you to keep your pets under control.’

From close by came a sound that might have been the hissing of steam or an exhalation of barely restrained rage.

And in his own cell, half asleep, the remembered smell of damp earth flooding his senses, Cyrus Nairn stirred as another voice was added to the chorus in his head. This one had been coming to him more and more regularly in the previous weeks, ever since he and the preacher had begun to communicate and share the details of their lives. Cyrus now welcomed the stranger’s arrival, feeling him stretch searching tendrils through his mind, establishing his presence and silencing the others.

Hello, said Cyrus, hearing in his head his own voice, the one no one else had heard in so many years, and signing his words by habit with his fingers.

Hello Cyrus, the visitor responded.

Cyrus smiled. He wasn’t sure what to call the visitor, because the visitor had lots of names, old names that Cyrus had never heard spoken before. But there were two that he used more than others.

Sometimes he called himself Leonard.

Mostly he called himself Pudd.

7

That night Rachel watched me, unspeaking, while I undressed.

‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’ she asked at last.

I lay down beside her and felt her move in close to me, her belly touching my upper thigh. I placed my hand upon her and tried to sense the life inside.

‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

‘Great. Only puked a little this morning.’ She grinned and poked me. ‘But then I came in and kissed ya!’

‘Lovely. It’s a testament to your personal hygiene that I didn’t notice it being any more unpleasant than usual.’

Rachel pinched me hard at the waist, then raised her hand so that she could run it through my hair. ‘Well? You still haven’t answered my question.’

‘He said that he wanted me – us, I guess, since you’ll be called too – to withdraw from the case and refuse to testify. In return, he promised to let us be.’

‘Do you believe him?’

‘No, and even if I did, it wouldn’t change anything. Stan Ornstead has doubts about my suitability as a witness, but I think he’s just edgy and those doubts really don’t extend to you anyway. We’ll be testifying whether we want to or not, but I got the feeling that Faulkner didn’t really care about our testimony and that he was pretty certain of making bail after the review. I don’t understand why he called me to him except to taunt me. Maybe he’s so bored in prison that he thought I’d provide some amusement.’

‘And did you?’

‘A little, but he’s kind of easily amused. There were other things too: his cell is freezing, Rachel. It’s almost as if his body is drawing all the warmth from its surroundings. And he baited one of the guards about a relationship with a young girl.’

‘Gossip?’

‘No. The guard reacted like he’d been struck in the face. I don’t think he’d shared that information with anybody. According to Faulkner, the girl is underage, and the guard confirmed as much to me later.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘About the girl? I asked Stan Ornstead to set something in motion. That’s all I can do.’

‘So what’s your conclusion about Faulkner? That he’s psychic?’

‘No, not psychic. I don’t think there’s a word for what Faulkner is. Before I left him, he spit at me. Actually, he spit into my mouth.’

I felt her stiffen.

‘Yeah, that’s kind of how I feel about it too. There isn’t enough mouthwash in the world to take that one away.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘He told me it would help me to see better.’

‘See what better?’

This was delicate ground. I almost told her then: about the black car, about the things on the prison walls, about the visions of lost children that I’d had in the past, about Susan and Jennifer visiting me from some place beyond. I so badly wanted to tell her, but I could not, and I did not understand why this should be. She sensed some of it, I thought, but chose not to ask. And if she had asked, how could I have explained it to her? I was still unsure myself about the nature of the gift that I had. I did not like to think that something in me drew these lost souls to me. It was easier, sometimes, to try to believe that it was a psychological disturbance, not a psychic one.

I was tempted, too, to call Elliot Norton and tell him that his troubles were his own, that I wanted no part of them, but I had made a promise to him. And as long as Faulkner remained behind bars, awaiting a decision on his bail, I believed that Rachel would be safe. Faulkner, I felt certain, would do nothing that might endanger the possibility of his release.

The black car was another matter. It was neither a dream nor a reality. It was as if, for a brief moment, something that resided in a blind spot of my vision had drifted into sight, that a slight alteration of perception had permitted me to see that which usually existed unseen. And, for reasons that I did not fully understand, I believed that the car, real or imagined, did not represent a direct threat. Its purpose was more indistinct, its symbolism more ambiguous. Still, the thought that the Scarborough PD would be watching the house provided an added consolation, even if I thought it unlikely that police officers would be reporting sightings of a battered black Coupe de Ville.

There was also the matter of Roger Bowen. No good could come of a confrontation with him, but I was curious to see him, maybe to dig around a little and see what I could come up with. Most of all I felt a convergence of events, of which Elliot Norton’s case was a distinct yet linked part. I’m not a great believer in coincidence. I have found in the past that what passes for coincidence is usually life’s way of telling you that you’re not paying enough attention.

‘He thinks the dead talk to him,’ I said at last. ‘He thinks that there are deformed angels hovering above Thomaston prison. That’s what he wanted me to see.’

‘And did you see them?’

I looked at her. She wasn’t smiling.

‘I saw ravens,’ I answered. ‘Scores of ravens. And before you consider making me sleep in the spare room, I wasn’t the only one that saw them.’

‘I don’t doubt you,’ said Rachel. ‘Nothing you could tell me about that old man would surprise me. Even locked up he gives me the creeps.’

‘I don’t have to go away,’ I told her. ‘I can stay here.’

‘I don’t want you to stay here,’ she replied. ‘That wasn’t what I meant. Give it to me straight: are we at risk?’

I thought about it. ‘I don’t think so. In the end, nothing’s going to happen until his lawyers appeal the bail decision. After that, we’ll have to reconsider. For now, the Scarborough PD’s guardian angel role is just a safeguard, although they may need a little unofficial backup.’

She opened her mouth to raise some fresh objection, but I covered her lips gently with my hand. Her eyes narrowed in reproach.

‘Look, it’s as much for my sake as yours. If it comes it won’t be conspicuous or obtrusive, but I’ll sleep a little easier for it.’

I lifted my hand slightly from her mouth and prepared myself for the tirade. Her lips parted and I pressed my hand down again. She let out a resigned sigh, her shoulders sagging in defeat. This time, I took my hand away completely and kissed her on the lips. She didn’t respond at first, then I felt her lips part and her tongue move cautiously against mine. Her mouth opened wider, and I moved against her.

‘Are you using sex to get what you want?’ she asked, her breath catching a little as my hand brushed the inside of her thigh.

I raised my eyebrows in a poor imitation of hurt.

‘Of course not,’ I assured her. ‘I’m a man. Sex is what I want.’

I could taste her laughter on my tongue as we gently began the slow dance together.

In blackness I awoke. There was no car waiting, yet the road seemed newly empty.

I left the bedroom and walked softly down to the kitchen. I could no longer sleep. When I reached the final steps, I saw that Walt was sitting in the doorway to the living room. His ears were erect and his tail was beating slowly on the floor. He looked at me once, then returned his attention to the room beyond. When I scratched at his ear, he didn’t respond. Instead, his eyes remained fixed on a patch of darkness in the corner, denied light by the thick drapes but darker yet than it should have been, like a hole torn between worlds.

Something in that darkness had drawn the dog close to it.

I found the only weapon to hand – the letter opener on the coatstand – and palmed it, then stepped into the room, conscious of my nakedness.

‘Who’s there?’ I asked. At my feet, Walt let out a little whine, but it was more excitement than fear. I moved closer to the darkness.

And a hand emerged.

It was a woman’s hand, very white. Three horizontal wounds had been torn upon it so deeply that I could see the exposed bones in the fingers. The wounds were old, gray-brown within, and the skin had hardened around them. There was no blood. The hand extended farther, palm facing out, fingers raised,

stop

and I knew that these wounds were only the first, that she had lifted up her hands against the blade but it had made its way to her face and her body despite them, and there were more cuts like this upon her, made unto death and beyond.

please

I stopped.

Who are you?

you’re looking for me

Cassie?

i felt you looking for me

Where are you?

lost

What can you see?

nothing

dark

Who did this to you? Who is he?

not one

many in one

Then I heard a whispering begin, and other voices joined with her own.

cassie let me speak let me talk to him cassie will he help us does he know cassie does he know my name cassie can he tell me my name cassie cassie can he take me away from here cassie i want to go home please i’m lost cassie please i want to go home

please

Cassie, who are they?

i don’t know

i can’t see them

but they’re all here

he put us all here

Then, from behind me, a hand touched my bare shoulder, and Rachel was beside me, her breasts against my back, the feel of the sheets cool against my skin. The voices were fading, barely audible, yet desperate and insistent.

please

And in her sleep, Rachel’s brow furrowed and she whispered softly:

‘Please.’

8

I flew out of the Portland Jetport the next morning. It was early Sunday and the roads were still quiet when Rachel dropped me at the door of the terminal building. I had already called Wallace MacArthur to confirm that I was leaving and had passed on my cell phone and hotel numbers to him. Rachel had arranged a date for him with a friend of hers named Mary Mason, who lived out at Pine Point. Rachel knew her from the local Audubon Society and figured that she and Wallace would probably get along pretty well. Wallace had taken the trouble to check out her photo through the BMV and had professed himself pleased with his prospective mate.

‘She looks good,’ he told me.

‘Yeah, well don’t get too cocky. She hasn’t seen you yet.’

‘What’s not to love?’

‘You have a pretty healthy self-image, Wallace. In anyone else it would come across as smugness, but you manage to pull it off.’

There was a noticeable pause before he asked: ‘Seriously?’

Rachel leaned across and kissed me on the lips. I held her head close to mine. ‘You take care of yourself,’ she said.

‘You too. You got your cell phone?’

She dutifully raised her phone from her bag.

‘And you’re going to leave it on?’

She nodded.

‘All the time?’

Pursed lips. Shrug. Reluctant nod.

‘I’ll be calling to check.’

She punched me on the arm. ‘Go get on your plane. There are flight attendants waiting to be charmed.’

‘Seriously?’ I said, and instantly wondered if I had more in common with Wallace MacArthur than was really healthy.

She smiled. ‘Yep. You need all the practice you can get.’

Louis once told me that the New South was like the Old South, except everybody was ten pounds heavier. He was probably kind of bitter, and he certainly wasn’t a fan of South Carolina, often considered the most redneck state in the South after Mississippi and Alabama, although it had managed its racial affairs in a slightly more developed way. When Harvey Gantt became the first black student to go to Clemson College in South Carolina, the legislature, rather than opting for blockades and guns, grudgingly accepted that the time for change had come. Still, it was in Orangeburg, S.C., in 1968 that three black students were killed during demonstrations outside the whites-only All Star Bowling Alley; anyone over forty in South Carolina had probably gone to a segregated school; and there were still those who believed that the Confederate flag should fly over the state Capitol in Columbia. Now they were naming lakes after Strom Thurmond, as if segregation had never happened.

I flew into Charleston International via Charlotte, which seemed to be a kind of clearinghouse for the runts of evolution and a dumping ground for the worst fashion excesses of the polyester industry. Fleetwood Mac was playing on the jukebox in the Taste of Carolina saloon, where overweight men in shorts and T-shirts drank light beer in a fog of cigarette smoke, the women beside them feeding quarters into the poker machines that stood on the polished wood of the bar. A man with a tattoo of a skull in joker’s regalia on his left arm gave me a hard look from where he sat, splay-legged, at a low table, the neck of his T-shirt soaked with sweat. I held his gaze until he belched and looked away with a studiedly bored expression on his face.

I checked the screens for my departure gate. There were planes flying out of Charlotte to places that nobody in his right mind would want to visit, the kind of places where the routes should have been strictly one-way, heading out of there to just about anywhere else, doesn’t matter, just get me a damn ticket. We boarded on time and I sat beside a big man with a Charleston Fire Department cap on his head. He leaned across me to look out at the military vehicles and aircraft on the tarmac, and at a US Airways Express twin-prop that was taxiing toward the runway.

‘Glad we’re on one of these here jets and not one of them little biddy planes,’ he said.

I nodded as he took in the aircraft and the buildings of the main terminal. ‘I remember when Charlie was just a little old two-runway place,’ he continued. ‘Hell, they was still building it. That was when I was in th’ army  . . .’

I closed my eyes.

It was the longest short flight of my life.

Charleston International was near empty when we landed, the walkways and stores largely devoid of passengers. To the northwest, at Charleston AFB, gray-green military aircraft stood in the afternoon sun, tensed like locusts prepared for flight.

They picked me up at the baggage claim, close by the car rental desks. There were two men, one of them fat and wearing a bright hemp shirt, the other older with slicked-back dark hair, dressed in a T-shirt and vest beneath a black linen jacket. They watched me discreetly as I stood at the Hertz desk, then waited at the side door of the terminal building as I walked through the heat of the parking lot to the small marquee beneath which my Mustang was waiting. By the time I had the keys in my hand, they were sitting in a big Chevy Tahoe at the intersection with the main exit road and they stayed two cars behind me all the way to the interstate. I could have lost them, but there didn’t seem to be much point. I knew they were there, and that was what mattered.

The new Mustang I had rented didn’t drive like my Boss 302. When I put my foot to the floor nothing happened for about a second while the engine woke up, stretched, and scratched itself before eventually getting around to accelerating. Still, it had a CD player so I was able to listen to the Jayhawks as I drove along the neobrutalist stretch of I-26, ‘I’d Run Away’ blaring as I took the North Meeting Street exit for Charleston, until the ambiguity of the lyrics made me turn it off in favor of the radio, the words of the bridge still echoing in my head.

So, we had a little baby boy,

knew it wouldn’t last too long.

Kind of what I had in mind,

but what I had in mind was strong.

Meeting Street is one of the main arteries into Charleston, leading straight into the heart of the business and tourist district, but its upper reaches are pretty unsavory. A black man sold watermelons by the side of the road from the back of a pickup, the fruit piled up neatly in rows, a sign advertising the Diamonds Gentleman’s Club rising up above him. The Mustang juddered over railroad tracks, past boarded-up warehouses and abandoned strip malls, drawing glances from kids shooting hoop on overgrown green lots and old men in porch chairs, the paint peeling from the fronts of the houses and weeds bursting through the cracks in the steps in a mockery of fruition. The only building that looked clean and new was the housing authority’s modern glass-and-red-brick office. It seemed to be inviting those who lived by its gift to storm it and steal all of the furniture and fittings. The Chevy stayed behind me the whole way. I slowed down once or twice, and did a full circle from Meeting, through Calhoun and Hutson and back on to Meeting again, just to bug the two men. They maintained their distance until I reached the courtyard of the Charleston Place Hotel, then moved slowly away.

In the hotel lobby, wealthy blacks and whites dressed in their Sunday best stood talking and laughing in their postservice ease. Occasionally, calls were made for parties to head to the dining room, Charleston Place’s Sunday brunch being a tradition for some. I left them to it and headed up the stairs to my room. It had a pair of queen-size beds and a view of the ATM at the bank across the street. I sat on the bed nearest the window and called Elliot Norton to let him know that I’d arrived. He let out a long sigh of relief.

‘The hotel okay for you?’

‘Sure,’ I said, noncommitally. Charleston Place was certainly luxurious, but the bigger the hotel, the easier it is for strangers to gain access to the rooms. I hadn’t noticed anybody who looked particularly like hotel security, although security was probably deliberately discreet here, and the hallway had been empty apart from a chambermaid pushing a cart loaded with towels and toiletries. She hadn’t even looked at me.

‘It’s the best hotel in Charleston,’ said Elliot. ‘It’s got a gym, a pool. You prefer, I can book you in someplace where the roaches will keep you company.’

‘I got followed from the airport,’ I told him.

‘Uh-huh.’

He didn’t sound surprised.

‘You think they could be listening in on your calls?’

‘I guess. I never bothered to have the place swept. Didn’t see the need. But it’s hard to keep a lid on anything in this town. Also, like I told you, my secretary left this week and she made it pretty clear that she didn’t approve none of some of my clients. Her last act was to make your hotel booking. Could be she let something slip.’

I wasn’t too concerned about the tail. People involved in the case were going to know I was here soon enough anyway. I was more worried about the possibility that somebody might find out our plans for Atys Jones and take action against him.

‘Okay, just in case: no more calls to or from the hotel, your office, or your home. We’ll need clean cells for routine business. I’ll pick them up this evening. Anything sensitive can wait until we see each other in person.’ Cells weren’t an ideal solution, but if we didn’t sign contracts, kept the numbers to ourselves, and used them carefully we would probably get away with it. Elliot gave me directions to his house again, which was about eighty miles northwest of Charleston, and I told him I’d be there later that afternoon. Before he hung up, he added: ‘I had another reason for checking you into the CP, apart from your comfort.’

I waited.

‘The Larousses go there for Sunday brunch most weeks, catch up on gossip and business. You go down there now, you’ll probably see them: Earl, Earl Jr., maybe some cousins, business associates. Thought you might like to get a feel for them discreetly, but if someone tailed you from the airport, then I figure they may be checking you out as much as you’re checking on them. Sorry, bud. I fucked up there.’

I let it go.

Before I headed down to the lobby I checked the yellow pages and called a company named Loomis Car Rental. I arranged to have an anonymous Neon delivered to the parking garage within the hour. My guess was that anyone who was keeping tabs on me would be looking out for the Mustang, and I wasn’t about to make life too easy for a potential tail.

I spotted the Larousse group as it was coming out of the dining room. Earl Larousse, instantly identifiable from the newspaper photos I’d seen, wore his trademark white suit and a black silk tie, like a mourner at a Chinese funeral. He was about five eight, bald, and heavily built. Beside him stood a younger, slimmer version of himself, although there was a slight effeminacy to the son that was absent from the father. Earl Jr.’s slim frame was concealed beneath a billowing white shirt and a pair of black trousers that were too tight around the ass and thighs, making him look like a flamenco dancer on his day off. He had very fair hair, which rendered his eyebrows almost invisible, and I reckoned he had to shave about once a month. Five other people – three men, two women – were talking with them as they left the room. The party was quickly joined by an eighth person, the man with the slicked-back hair, who walked up to Earl Jr. and whispered discreetly in his ear before moving on. Immediately, Earl Jr. looked over at me. He said something to his father, then detached himself from the group and came over to me. I wasn’t sure what to expect but it certainly wasn’t to see his hand outstretched and a regretful smile on his face as he reached me.

‘Mr. Parker?’ he said. ‘Let me introduce myself: Earl Larousse Jr.’

I took his hand and shook it. ‘You usually have people followed from the airport?’

The smile wavered then resumed its post, this time the regret more pronounced.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We were curious to see what you looked like.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘We know why you’re here, Mr. Parker. We don’t necessarily approve, but we understand. We don’t want there to be problems between us. We understand you have a job to do. Our concern is that whoever is responsible for my sister’s death is punished with the full force of the law. For the moment, we believe that person to be Atys Jones. If that proves not to be the case, then we’ll accept it. We’ve made our statements to the police, and told them all we know. All we ask of you is that you respect our privacy and leave us in peace. We have nothing to add to what has already been said.’

It had the air of a rehearsed speech about it. More than that, I sensed a detachment about Earl Jr. Although he sounded sincere, if mechanical, his eyes were both mocking and slightly fearful. He wore a mask, although I didn’t yet know what lay behind it. Farther back, his father watched us, and in his face I saw hostility. For some unknown reason, it seemed to be directed at his son as much as at me. Earl Jr. turned and walked back to the group, and a shroud fell across his father’s anger as they made their way out of the lobby and into their waiting cars.

With nothing else to do I returned to my room, showered, ate a club sandwich, and waited for the car rental guy to arrive. When the call came from the desk I went down, signed the paperwork, and entered the parking garage. I put on my sunglasses and headed out, the sunlight gleaming off the windshield, but there was no sign of the Chevy and nobody seemed interested in me or the car. On the way out of town I stopped at a big mall and bought two new cell phones.

Elliot Norton lived about two miles outside Grace Falls in a modest white faux-Colonial with two pillars at its front door and a big porch running the full length of the first floor. It looked like the kind of place where the mint juleps would still have the julep mix dissolving in the glass. The large sheet of industrial plastic covering the hole in the roof did nothing to add an air of authenticity. I found Elliot round back, talking to a pair of men in coveralls who leaned against a van, smoking. The legend on the side of the van indicated that the two men were roofers from Dave’s Construction and Roofing out of Martinez, Georgia (‘Want To Save? Call Dave!’). To their left was a pile of scaffolding, ready to be put in place so that work could commence the following morning. One of the men was idly tossing a piece of burnt, blackened slate from hand to hand. As I approached, he stopped and jutted his chin in my direction. Elliot turned a little too quickly, then left the two workmen and stretched out his hand to me.

‘Man, am I glad to see you!’ He smiled. Some of his hair had been scorched away on the left side of his head. What remained had been cut back in an effort to disguise the damage. There was gauze over his left ear and burn marks glistened along his cheek, chin, and neck. His left hand, where it was visible beneath a white tube bandage, was blistered.

‘Don’t take this wrong, Elliot,’ I said, ‘but you don’t look so good.’

‘I know. Fire took out most of my wardrobe. Come on.’ He reached behind my back and guided me toward the house. ‘I’ll buy you an iced tea.’

Inside, the house smelled badly of smoke and damp. Water had penetrated the floors above and damaged the plasterwork in the downstairs rooms, brown clouds now sweeping across the white skies of the ceilings. Some of the wallpaper had already begun to peel and I reckoned there was a good chance that Elliot would be forced to replace most of the timbers in the hallway. In the living room was an unmade sofa bed, and clothes hung from the curtain rod or splayed themselves across the backs of chairs.

‘You’re still living here?’ I asked.

‘Yup,’ he replied, as he washed some ash from a pair of glass tumblers.

‘You might be safer in a hotel.’

‘I might be, but then the folks who did this to my house would probably come back and finish the job.’

‘They could come back anyway.’

He shook his head. ‘Nah, they’re done, for now. Murder isn’t their style. If they’d wanted to kill me, they’d have done a better job first time round.’

He took a jug of iced tea from the refrigerator and filled the tumblers. I stood by the window and stared out at Elliot’s yard and the land beyond. The skies were empty of birds and the woods surrounding Elliot’s property were almost silent. Along the coast, the migrants were already in flight, the wood ducks joining the terns, the hawks and warblers and sparrows soon to follow. Here, farther inland, there was less evidence of their departure, and even the permanent residents were not as obvious as they formerly were, their spring mating songs ended and their bright summer plumage slowly fading to the mourning cloaks of winter. As if to make up for the absence of the birds and their colors, the wildflowers had begun to bloom now that the worst of the summer heat had departed. There were asters and sunflowers and goldenrods, and butterflies flocked to them, attracted by the predominance of yellows and purples. Beneath the leaves, the field spiders would be waiting for them.

‘So when do I get to meet Atys Jones?’ I asked.

‘Be easiest if you talk to him after we get him out of county. We pick him up from the Richland County Detention Center late tomorrow, then switch him to a second car out back of Campbell’s Country Corner to lose anyone with an interest in where we might be taking him. From there, I’ll drive him to the safe house in Charleston.’

‘Who’s the second driver?’

‘Son of the old guy who’s gonna be taking care of him. He’s okay, knows what he’s doing.’

‘Why not stash him closer to Columbia?’

‘We got a better chance of keeping him safe down in Charleston, believe me. He’ll be over on the east side, in the heart of a black neighborhood. Anybody comes asking questions and we’ll hear about it in plenty of time to move him again if we have to. Anyhow, it’s a purely temporary arrangement. Could be that we’ll have to stash him somewhere more secure, maybe hire private security. We’ll see.’

‘So what’s his story?’ I asked.

Elliot shook his head and rubbed his eyes with dirty fingers. ‘His story is that he and Marianne Larousse had a thing going.’

‘They were lovers?’

‘Occasional lovers. Atys thinks she was using him to get back at her brother and her daddy, and he was pretty happy to go along with that.’ He made a clicking noise with his tongue against his teeth. ‘I got to tell you, Charlie, my client ain’t exactly nature’s own charmer, if you catch my drift. He’s one hundred and thirty pounds of attitude with a mouth at one end and an asshole at the other, and most of the time I can’t tell which end is which. According to him, the night Marianne died they’d been screwing around in the front of his Grand Am. They had a fight, she ran off into the trees. He went after her, thought he’d lost her somewhere in the forest, then found her with her head beaten to a pulp.’

‘Weapon?’

‘Weapon of convenience: a ten-pound rock. Police arrested Atys with blood on his hands and clothes and fragments of rock and dust matching the weapon. He admits he touched her head and body when he found her and rolled the rock away from her skull. He’d smeared some blood on his face as well, but there was nothing consistent with the kind of blood splash you get from beating on someone with a rock. No traces of semen inside her, although they did pick up lubricant from a condom – Trojan – matching the ones found in Atys’s wallet. It looks like it was consensual sex but a good prosecutor might still be able to argue rape. You know, they get excited, then she tries to back off and he doesn’t take it so good. I don’t think it will hold up but they’ll be trying to bolster their case anyway they can.’

‘You think there’s enough there to sow seeds of doubt in a jury?’

‘Maybe. I’m looking for an expert witness to testify on the blood splashes. The prosecution will probably find one who’ll say the exact opposite. This is a black man accused of killing a white girl from the Larousse clan. It’s all uphill on this one. Prosecutor will be looking at loading the jury with middle-income, middle-aged-to-elderly whites who’ll see in Jones the black bogeyman. Best we can hope to do is dilute it, but  . . .’

I waited. There’s always a ‘but’. There wouldn’t be a story without one.

‘There’s local history behind all this; the worst kind of local history.’

He flicked through the pile of files that lay on the kitchen table. I glimpsed police reports, witness statements, transcripts of the interviews conducted with Atys Jones by the police, even crime scene photographs. But I could also see photocopied pages from history books, cuttings from old newspapers, and books on slavery and rice cultivation.

‘What you got here,’ said Elliot, ‘is a regular blood feud.’

9

The first files were blue and contained witness statements and other material assembled by the police in the aftermath of Marianne Larousse’s death. The historical file was green. Beside it was a slim white file. I opened it, saw more clearly the photographs that lay within, then closed it carefully. I was not yet ready to deal with the reports on Marianne Larousse’s body.

I had taken on a little defense work in Maine in the past, so I had a pretty good idea of what was ahead of me. Atys Jones would be the most important element, of course, at least to begin with. Defendants will often tell an investigator things that they haven’t even told their attorney, sometimes out of sheer forgetfulness or the stress surrounding their arrest, other times because they trust the investigator more than their lawyer, especially if their lawyer is a hard-pressed public defender already overwhelmed by his or her caseload. The rule of thumb is that any additional information is passed on to the attorney, whether favorable or prejudicial to the case. Elliot had already received some statements and testimonials from those who knew Jones, including schoolteachers and former employers, in an effort to form a favorable profile of his client that could be presented to the jury, so that was a little less donkey work for me to do.

I’d have to go over the police reports with Jones as these would provide the basis for the charges against him, but also because he might pick up on mistakes made or witnesses that had not been contacted. The police reports would also be useful to me in checking statements, since they usually contained the addresses and phone numbers of those to whom the police had spoken. After that, the real legwork would begin: all of those witnesses would have to be reinterviewed because the early police reports were rarely in-depth, the cops preferring to leave the detailed interviewing for the prosecutor’s investigators or the primary detective. Signed statements would have to be obtained, and while most witnesses would be willing to talk, fewer would be willing to sign their names to a summary of their comments without a struggle. In addition, it was likely that the prosecutor’s investigators had spoken to them already, and they often had a way of intimating to witnesses that they should not talk to the defendant’s investigator, placing another barrier in the way. All things considered, I had a busy time ahead of me, and I might be able to do little more than scratch the surface of the case before I had to return to Maine.

I pulled the green file toward me and flipped it open. Some of the material inside dated back to the seventeenth century and the earliest origins of Charleston. The most recent cutting came from 1981.

‘Somewhere in here may be part of the reason why Marianne Larousse died, and why Atys Jones is going to be tried for her murder,’ said Elliot. ‘This is the weight that they carried with them, whether they knew it or not. This is what destroyed their lives.’

He had been rummaging in his kitchen cabinets as he spoke, and he now returned to the table with his right fist tightly closed.

‘But in a way,’ said Elliot softly, ‘this is really why we’re here today.’

And he opened his fist to let a stream of yellow rice cascade onto the tabletop.

Amy Jones

Age 98 when interviewed by Henry Calder in Red

Bank, S.C. From The Age of Slavery: Interviews with Former

North and South Carolina Slaves, ed. Judy and

Nancy Buckingham (New Era, 1989).

I was born a slave in Colleton County. My pappy name Andrew and my mammy name Violet. They belong to the Larousse family. Marster Adgar was a good marster to his slaves. Him had about sixty families of slaves before the Yankees come and made a mess out of their lives.

Old Missus tell all the colored people to run. She come to us with a bagful of silver all sew up in a blanket, ’cause the Yankees apt to take all they valuables. She tell us that she couldn’t protect us no longer. They broke in the rice barn and share the rice out, but they not enough rice there to feed all the colored people. Worst nigger men and women follow the army, but us stay and watch the other chillun die.

Us wasn’t ready for what come. Us had no education, no land, no cow, no chicken. Yankees come and take all us had away, left us with freedom. They give us to understand us as free as our marster was. Couldn’t write, so us just had to touch the pen and tell what name us wanted to go in. After the war, Marster Adgar give us one-third of what us make, now that us free. Pappy dead just before my mammy. They stay right to plantation and dead there after they free.

But they tole me. They tole me about Old Marster, Marster Adgar’s pappy. They tole me what he done  . . .

To understand the crop is to understand the history, for the history is Carolina Gold.

Rice cultivation began here in the 1680s, when the rice seed reached Carolina from Madagascar. They called it Carolina Gold because of its quality and the color of its hull, and it made the families associated with it wealthy for generations. There were the Englishmen – the Heywards, the Draytons, the Middletons, and the Alstons – and the Huguenots, among them the Ravenels, the Manigaults, and the Larousses.

The Larousses were scions of Charleston aristocracy, one of a handful of families that controlled virtually all aspects of life in the city, from membership in the St. Cecilia Society to the organization of the social season, which lasted from November to May. They valued their name and reputation above all else, and safeguarded both with money and the influence that it bought. They could not have suspected that their great wealth and security would be undermined by the actions of a single slave.

The slaves would work from first light until last, six days each week, but did not work on Sundays. A conch shell was used to call in the laborers, its tones sweeping across the fields of rice now afire in the dying rays of the setting sun, the black shapes against them like scarecrows amid the conflagration. Their backs would straighten, their heads rise and, slowly, they would begin the long walk back to the rice barn and the shacks. They would feed on molasses, peas, corn bread, sometimes home-raised meat. They would sit in their homemade clothes of copper straw and white cloth at the end of the long day, and eat and talk. When a new delivery of wooden-soled shoes came, the women would soak the rawhide leather in warm water and grease them with tallow or meat skin so the shoes would slip onto their feet, and the smell would cling to their fingers when they made love to their men, the stench of dead animals mingling with the sweat of their lovemaking.

The men did not learn how to read or write. Old Marster was strict on that. They were whipped for stealing, or for telling lies, or for looking at books. There was a dirt house out by the swamp where they used to carry those who had smallpox. Most of the slaves carried out there never returned. They kept the Pony in the rice barn, and when the time came for more serious punishments to be meted out, the man or woman would be spread-eagled upon it, strapped down, and whipped. When the Yankees burned down the rice barn, there was blood on the floor where the Pony had stood, as if the very ground itself had begun to rust.

Some of the East African slaves brought with them an understanding of rice cultivation that enabled the plantation owners to overcome the problems faced by the original English colonists, who had found its cultivation troublesome. A task system was introduced on many plantations that allowed skilled slaves to work somewhat independently, enabling them to create free time to hunt, garden, or improve the situation of their families. The produce or products created could then be bartered by the slaves to the owner, and removed some of the pressure of providing for his slaves from him.

The task system created a hierarchy among the slaves. The most important bondsman was the slave driver, who acted as the mediator between the planter and the labor force. Beneath him were the trained artisans, the blacksmiths and carpenters and bricklayers. It was these skilled workers that were the natural leaders in the slave community, and consequently they had to be watched more closely for fear that they might foment unrest or choose to run away.

But the most crucial task of all fell to the trunk minder, for the fate of the rice crop lay in his hands. The rice fields were flooded when necessary with freshwater collected in reservoirs above the fields on higher ground. Salt water flowed inland with the tide, forcing the freshwater to the surface of the coastal rivers. It was only then that the low, wide floodgates could be opened to permit the freshwater to flow into the fields, a system of subsidiary gates allowing the water to run into the adjoining fields, a drainage technique whose correct application was a direct result of the involvement of African slaves. Any breach or break in the gates would permit salt water to enter the fields, killing the rice crop, so the trunk minder, in addition to opening and closing the main gates, was required to keep the trunks, the drainage ditches, and the canals in working order.

Henry, husband of Annie, was the trunk minder for the Larousse plantation. His grandfather, now dead, had been captured in January 1764 and taken to the out-factory of Barra Kunda in upper Guinea. From there, he was transported to James Fort on the river Gambia in October 1764, the main point of embarkation for slaves bound for the New World. He arrived in Charles Town in 1765, where he was purchased by the Larousse family. He had six children and sixteen grandchildren by the time he died, of whom Henry was the eldest grandson. Henry had married his young wife, Annie, six years previously, and they now had three young children. Only one, Andrew, would survive to maturity, and he would father his own children in turn, a line that would continue until the early twenty-first century, and end with Atys Jones.

They strapped Annie, wife of Henry, to the Pony one day in 1833, and they whipped her until the whip broke. But by then the skin on her back had been torn away, so they turned her and started in again on her front with a new whip. Their intention was to punish, not to kill. Annie was too valuable a commodity to be killed. She had been tracked down by a team of men led by William Rudge, whose descendant would later hang a man named Errol Rich from a tree in front of a crowd of onlookers in northeastern Georgia, and whose own life would come to an end at the hands of a black man on a bed of spilled whiskey and sawdust. Rudge was the ‘pattyroller,’ the slave patroller whose job it was to hunt down those who chose to run. Annie had run after a man named Coolidge had held her over a tree stump and tried to rape her from behind when he found her out on a dirt road delivering beef from a cow that Old Marster had ordered killed the previous day. While Coolidge was tearing at her, Annie had taken a branch from the ground and stabbed him in the eye, partially blinding him. And then she had run, for nobody would care or believe that she had been defending herself, even if Coolidge had not claimed that the attack was unprovoked, that he’d found the nigger drinking stolen hooch by the side of the road. The pattyroller and his men had followed her and they took her back to Old Marster, and she was strapped to the Pony and whipped while her husband and their three children were forced to watch. But she did not survive the whipping, for she went into convulsions and died.

Three days later, Henry, husband of Annie and trusted trunk minder, flooded the Larousse plantation with salt water, destroying the entire crop.

They followed him for five days with a party of heavily armed men, for Henry had stolen a Marston pepperbox percussion pistol, and any man who was standing in the way when those six barrels discharged was likely to be meeting his maker that very day. So the riders held back and sent ahead a line of expendable Ibo slaves to track Henry, with the promise of a gold coin for the man who found their quarry.

They cornered Henry at last at the edge of the Congaree Swamp, not far from where a bar named the Swamp Rat now stands, the bar at which Marianne Larousse would be drinking on the night that she died, for the voice of the present contains the echo of the past. The slave who had found Henry lay dead on the ground, with ragged holes in his chest where the Marston had hit him at close range.

They took three metal rice samplers, hollow T-shaped devices with a sharp point on the end for digging into the ground, and they crucified Henry against a cypress tree and left him there with his balls in his mouth. But before he died, Old Marster drew up before him in a cart, and in the back of the cart sat Henry’s three children. The last sight Henry saw before his eyes finally closed was his youngest boy, Andrew, being led into the bushes by Old Marster, and then the boy’s cries commenced and Henry died.

That was how it began between the families of Larousse and Jones, masters and slaves. The crop was wealth. The crop was history. It had to be safeguarded. Henry’s offense lived on for a time in the memory of the Larousse family and was then largely forgotten, but the sins of the Larousses were passed down from Jones to Jones. And the past was transported into each new present, and it spread through generations of lives like a virus.

The light had begun to fade. The men from Georgia were gone. From the big oak tree outside the window a bat descended, hunting mosquitoes. Some had found their way into the house and now buzzed at my ear, waiting to bite. I swatted at them with my hand. Elliot handed me some repellent and I smeared it across my exposed skin.

‘But there were still members of the Jones family working for the Larousses, even after what took place?’ I asked.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Elliot. ‘Slaves died sometimes. It happened. The folks around them had lost parents, children too, but they didn’t take it quite so personal. There were some members of the Jones family who felt that what was done was done, and should be left in the past. And then there were others who maybe didn’t feel that way.’

The Civil War devastated the lives of the Charleston aristocracy, as it did the structures of the city itself. The Larousses were protected somewhat by their foresight (or perhaps by their treason, for they retained most of their wealth in gold and had only a small fraction tied up in Confederate bonds and currency). Still they, like many other defeated Southerners, were forced to watch as the surviving soldiers of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, or Shaw’s Niggers as they were known, paraded through the streets of Charleston. Among them was Martin Jones, Atys Jones’s great-great-grandfather.

Once again, the lives of these two families were about to collide violently.

The night riders move through the darkness, white against the black road. It will be many years before an olive-skinned man with slave marks on his legs will claim to have seen them as they will become, figures in negative, black on white, a reversal that would sicken these men were they to know of it now as they go about their business, their horses draped, guns and bullwhips banging dully against saddles.

For this is the South Carolina of the 1870s, not of the turn of a new millennium, and the night riders are the terror of these times. They roam upcountry, visiting their version of justice on poor blacks and the Republicans that support them, refusing to bow to the requirements of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. They are a symbol of the fear felt by the whites for the blacks, and much of the white population stands behind them. Already, the Black Codes have been introduced as an antidote to reform, restricting the rights of blacks to hold arms, to hold a position above farmer or servant, even to leave their premises or entertain visitors without a permit.

In time, Congress will fight back with the Reconstruction Amendment, the Enforcement Act of 1870, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. Governor Scott will form a black militia to protect voters in the 1870 election, further enraging the white population. Eventually, habeas corpus will be suspended in the nine upcountry counties, leading to the arrest of hundreds of Klan members without due process, but for the present the law rides a draped horse and brings with it vengeance, and the actions of the federal government will be too late to save thirty-eight lives, too late to prevent rapes and beatings, too late to stop the burning and destruction of farms and crops and livestock.

Too late to save Missy Jones.

Her husband, Martin, had campaigned to bring out the black vote in 1870 in the face of intimidation and violence. He had refused to repudiate the Republican Party and had earned a whipping for his troubles. Then he had lent his support and his savings to the nascent black militia, and had marched his men through the town one bright Sunday afternoon, no more than one in ten of them armed but still an act of unparalleled arrogance to those who were fighting the tide of emancipation.

It was Missy who heard the riders approaching, Missy who told her husband to run, that this time they would kill him if they found him. The night riders had not yet harmed a woman in York County and Missy, although she feared the armed men, had no reason to believe that they would commence with her.

But they did.

Four men raped Missy Jones, for if they could not harm her husband directly, then they would hurt him through his woman. The rape was without any physical violence beyond the violation itself, devoid, it seemed to the woman, even of an element of pleasure for the men who committed the act. Instead, it was as functional as the branding of a cow or the strangling of a chicken. The last man even helped her to cover herself up and gave her his arm as he escorted her to a kitchen chair.

‘You tell him to behave himself, y’hear?’ said the man. He was young and handsome and she saw in him something of his father and his grandfather. He had the Larousse chin, and the fair hair common to that family. His name was William Larousse. ‘We don’t want to be coming back through here again,’ he warned her.

Two weeks later, William Larousse and two other men were ambushed outside Delphia by a group of masked assailants armed with cudgels. William’s companions fled but he remained, curled into a ball, as the blows rained down. The beating left him paralyzed, able to move only his right hand and unable to eat any food that had not been mashed to the consistency of paste.

But Missy Jones was unheeding of what had been done in her name. She had barely spoken to her husband when he returned from his hiding place, and rarely spoke again thereafter. Neither did she return to her husband’s bed, but slept instead among the animals in their small barn, reduced in her own mind to their level by the men who had raped her to hurt her husband, retreating slowly and irretrievably into madness.

Elliot rose and poured the remains of his coffee into the sink.

‘Like I said, there were some who wanted to forget the past, and some who never forgot it, even to this day.’

He let the last words in the air.

‘You think Atys Jones might have been one of those?’

He shrugged. ‘I think that some part of him liked the idea that he was fucking Earl Larousse’s daughter, and fucking over Earl by extension. I don’t even know if Marianne knew about the history between the two families. I guess it meant more to the Joneses than it did to the Larousses, if you catch my drift.’

‘But their history is common knowledge?’

‘There’s been some reporting on the history of the families in the newspapers by those with the energy to go digging, but not much. Still, I’d be surprised if some of the jurors don’t know about it, and it may come up at the trial. The Larousses have a name and a history that they safeguard religiously. Their reputation means everything to them. Whatever they might have done in the past, they now contribute to socially responsible causes. They support black charities. They supported integration in schools. They don’t decorate their houses with the flag of the Confederacy. They’ve made up for the sins of previous generations, but could be the prosecution will use old ghosts to claim that Atys Jones set out to punish them again by taking Marianne away from them.’

He stood and stretched.

‘Unless, of course, we can find the person who did kill Marianne Larousse. Then we got us a whole new ball game.’

I put aside the copy of the photograph of Missy Jones, dead by her forties and lying in her cheap box coffin, and sifted through the documents on the table once again until I came to the final cutting. It was a newspaper story dated July 12, 1981, and it detailed the disappearance of two young black women who had lived near the Congaree. Their names were Addy and Melia Jones, and after that night, when they were seen drinking together in a local bar, they were never heard of again.

Addy Jones was Atys Jones’s mother.

I held the cutting up for Elliot to see.

‘What is this?’

He reached out and took it from me.

‘This,’ he said, ‘is the final puzzle for you. Our client’s mother and aunt disappeared nineteen years ago, and neither he nor anybody else has seen them since.’

That night, I drove back to Charleston with the radio tuned to a talk show out of Columbia, until the signal began to fade into hisses and distortion. Failed gubernatorial candidate Maurice Bessinger, the owner of the state’s Piggie Park chain of barbecue restaurants, had taken to flying a Confederate flag over his outlets. He was arguing that it was a symbol of Southern heritage, and maybe it was, except that in the past, Bessinger had twice worked on George Wallace’s presidential campaign, had run a group called the National Association for the Preservation of White People, and had found himself in federal court for violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after he refused to serve blacks in his restaurants. He even managed to win his case at trial level, only to be forced to integrate by a higher court. Since then he had apparently enjoyed a religious conversion and rejoined the Democratic Party, but old habits seemed to be dying hard.

I thought of the flag as I drove through the darkness, about the families of Jones and Larousse and the weight of history that was like a lead belt strapped to their bodies, dragging them always down to the bottom. Somewhere in that history, in the living past, was an answer to the death of Marianne Larousse.

But down here, in a place that seemed alien to me, the past assumed strange forms. The past was an old man draped in a red-and-blue flag, howling his defiance beneath the sign of a pig. The past was a dead hand on the face of the living. The past was a ghost garlanded with regrets.

The past, I would come to learn, was a woman in white with scales for skin.

PART THREE

‘I seemed to move among a world of ghosts

And feel myself the shadow of a dream.’

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Princess’

10

Now at last, in the quiet of my hotel room, I opened the file on Marianne Larousse. The darkness around me was less an absence of light than a felt presence: shadows with substance. I lit the table lamp and spread across the desk the material that Elliot had given to me.

And as soon as I saw the photos I had to look away, for I felt the weight of her loss upon me, though I had not known her and would never know her now. I walked to the door and tried to banish the shadows by flooding the room with brightness, but instead they merely retreated to the spaces beneath the tables and behind the closet, waiting for the inevitable passing of the light.

And it seemed to me that my being somehow separated, that I was both here in this hotel room, with the evidence of Marianne Larousse’s violent wrenching from this world, and back in the stillness of the Blythes’ living room, watching Bear’s mouth move to form well-meant lies, Sundquist like a ventriloquist beside him, manipulating, poisoning the atmosphere in the room with greed and malice and false hope while Cassie’s eyes stared out at me from a graduation photograph, that uncertain smile hovering about her mouth like a bird unsure of the safety of alighting. I found myself trying to imagine her alive now, living a new life far from home, secure in the knowledge that her decision to abandon her former existence was the right one to make. But I was unable to do so, for when I tried to picture her there was only a shadow without a face and a hand adorned with parallel wounds.

Cassie Blythe was not alive. Everything I had learned about her told me that she was not the kind of young woman to drift away and condemn her parents to a lifetime of hurt and doubt. Someone had torn her from this world, and I did not know if I could find that person and, through that discovery, reveal at last the truth behind her disappearance.

I knew then that Irving Blythe was right, that what he had said about me was true: to invite me into their lives was to admit failure and allow death its provenance, for I was the one who arrived when all hope was gone, offering nothing but the possibility of a resolution that would bring with it more grief and pain and a knowledge that perhaps would make ignorance appear like a blessing. The only consolation in all that would occur was that some small measure of justice might begin to accrue from my involvement, that lives might continue with some small degree of certainty restored: the certainty that the physical pain of a loved one was at an end, and that somebody cared enough to try to discover why that pain had been visited on them at all.

When I was a younger man, I became a policeman. I joined the force because I felt that it was incumbent upon me to do so. My father had been a policeman, as had my grandfather, but my father had ended his career and his life in ignominy and despair. He took two lives before taking his own, for reasons that perhaps will never be known, and I, being young, felt the need to take his burdens upon myself and to try to make up for what he had done.

But I was not a good policeman. I did not have the temperament, or the discipline. True, I had other talents – a tenacity, a need to discover and understand – but those were not enough to enable me to survive in that environment. I lacked also one other crucial element: distance. I did not have the defense mechanisms in place that enabled my peers to look upon a dead body and see it only as that: not a human being, not a person, but the absence of being, the negation of life. On a superficial but ultimately necessary level, a process of dehumanization needs to occur for the police to do their job. Its hallmarks are mortuary humor and apparent detachment, enabling them to refer to a found corpse as a ‘body dump’ or ‘trash’ (except in the case of a fallen comrade, for that is so close to home as to make distance impossible), to examine wounds and mutilation without descending, weeping, into a void that makes life and death impossible to bear. Their duty is to the living, to those left behind, and to the law.

I did not have that. I have never had that. Instead, I have learned to embrace the dead, and they, in their turn, have found a way to reach out to me. Now, in this hotel room, far from home, faced with the death of another young woman, Cassie Blythe’s disappearance troubled me once more. I was tempted to call the Blythes, but what would I have said? Down here I could do nothing for them, and the fact that I was thinking about their daughter would provide cold comfort for them. I wanted to be finished in South Carolina, to check the witness statements and assure myself of Atys Jones’s safety, however tentative it might be, then return home. I could do no more than that for Elliot.

But now Marianne Larousse’s body was beckoning me with a strange intimacy, demanding that I bear witness, that I understand the nature of that with which I was involving myself, and the possible consequences of my intervention.

I did not want to look. I was tired of looking.

Yet I looked.

The sorrow of it; the terrible, crushing sorrow of it.

It is the photographs that do it, sometimes. You never truly forget. They stay with you always. You turn a corner, drive past a boarded-up storefront, maybe a garden that’s become overgrown with weeds, the house behind it rotting like a bad tooth because nobody wants to live there; because the stink of death is still in the house; because the landlord got some immigrant laborers and paid them $50 each to hose it down and they used whatever piss-poor materials they had to hand: lousy disinfectants and dirty mops that spread rather than eradicated the stench, that turned the logic of bloodstains into a chaotic smear of half-remembered violence, a swath of darkness across the white walls. Then they painted it with cheap, watery paints, running the rollers over the tainted parts two or three times more than the rest, but when the paint dried it was still there: a bloody hand that had wiped itself through the whites and creams and yellows and left the memory of its passing ingrained in the wood and plaster.

So the landlord locks the door, bars the windows, and waits until people forget or until someone too desperate or dumb to care agrees to pay a cut-price rent and he accepts it, if only to try to erase the memory of what has taken place there with the problems and worries of a new family, a kind of psychic cleansing that might succeed where the immigrants have failed.

You could go inside, if you chose. You could show your badge and explain that this was routine, that old unsolved cases are rechecked after a few years have passed in the hope that the passage of time might have revealed some previously undiscovered detail. But you don’t need to go inside, because you were there on the night that they found her. You saw what was left of her on the kitchen floor, or in the garden among the shrubs, or draped across the bed. You saw how, with the last breath of air that left her body, something else had passed away too, the thing that gave her substance, a kind of inner framework wrenched somehow through her body without damaging the skin, so that now she has crumpled and faded even as she has swollen, the woman both expanding and contracting as you watch, marks already appearing on her skin where the insects have begun to feed, because the insects always get there before you do.

And then maybe you have to find a photo. Sometimes, the husband or the mother, the father or the lover, will hunt it down for you, and you’re watching as their hands move across the pages of the album, through the shoe box or the purse, and you’re thinking: Did they do this thing? Did they reduce this person to what I’m seeing now? Or maybe you know that they did it – you can’t tell how, exactly, but you just know – and this touching of the relics of a lost life seems somehow like a second violation, one that you should stop with a sweep of your hand because you failed once and now, now you have the chance to make up for that failure.

But you don’t do it, not then. You wait, and you hope that with the waiting will come the proof or the confession, and the first steps can be taken toward restoring a moral order, a balance between the needs of the living and the demands of the dead. But still, those images will come back to you later, unbidden, and if you’re with someone whom you trust, you may say: ‘I remember. I remember what happened. I was there. I was a witness, and later I tried to become more than that. I tried to achieve a measure of justice.’

And if you succeeded, if punishment was meted out and the file marked accordingly, you may feel a twinge of – not pleasure, not that, but of . . . peace? Relief? Maybe what you feel doesn’t have a name, shouldn’t have a name. Maybe it is only the silence of your conscience, because this time it isn’t screaming out a name in your head and you won’t have to go back and pull the file to remind yourself again of that suffering, that death, and your failure to maintain the balance that is required if life and time are not to cease forever.

Case closed: isn’t that the phrase? It’s been so long, it seems, since you’ve had call to use it, to taste the falsity of the words even as they are forming on your tongue and passing through your lips. Case closed. Except it isn’t closed, for the absence continues to be felt in the lives of those left behind, in the hundred thousand tiny adjustments required to account for that absence, for the life, acknowledged or unacknowledged, that should be impacting on other lives. Irv Blythe, for all his faults, understood that. There is no closure. There are only lives continued or lives ended, with attendant consequences in each case. At least the living are no longer your concern. It is the dead that stay with you.

And maybe you spread the photos and think: I remember.

I remember you.

I have not forgotten.

You will not be forgotten.

She was lying on her back on a bed of crushed spider lilies, the dying white blooms of the plants like starburst flaws upon the print, as if the negative itself had been sullied by its exposure to this act. Marianne Larousse’s skull had suffered massive damage. Her scalp had been lacerated in two places at either side of her central parting, hairs and fibrous strands crossing in the wounds. A third blow had broken through the right side of her cranium, and the autopsy had revealed fracture lines extending through the base of the skull and the upper edge of the left eye socket. Her face was completely red with blood, for the scalp is very vascular and bleeds profusely after damage, and her nose had been broken. Her eyes were tightly closed and her features contorted, wincing against the force of the blows.

I flipped forward to the autopsy report. There were no bite marks, bruises, or abrasions to Marianne Larousse’s body consistent with sexual assault, but foreign hairs recovered from the victim’s pubic hair were found to have come from Atys Jones. There was redness around Marianne’s genitals – a result of recent sexual contact – but no internal or external bruising or laceration, although traces of lubricant were found in the vaginal canal. Jones’s semen was mixed in with her pubic hair, but no semen was found inside her. Jones told the investigators, just as Elliot had told me, that they regularly used condoms during intercourse.

Tests showed fibers matching Marianne Larousse’s clothes on Atys Jones’s sweater and jeans, while acrylic fibers from his car seat were found in turn on her blouse and skirt, along with cotton fibers from his clothing. According to the analysis, the chances that the fibers had a different origin were remote. Over twenty matches had been found in each case. Five or six would usually be enough for relative certainty.

The evidence still didn’t convince me that Marianne Larousse had been raped before she died, but then I wasn’t the one that the prosectors would be trying to convince. Her blood alcohol levels were above normal, so a good prosecutor could argue that she was probably not in a position to fend off a strong young man like Atys Jones. In addition, Jones had used a condom and lubricant, and the lubricant would have reduced the level of physical damage to his victim.

What could not be denied was that Marianne Larousse’s blood had been found on Jones’s face and hands when he entered the bar to call for help, and that mixed in with it were found dust fragments from the rock used to kill her. The bloodstain analysis of the area around Marianne Larousse’s body revealed medium-velocity impact splatter, the blood droplets radially distributed away from the impact site both above and beyond her head and to one side where the final, fatal blow was delivered. Her assailant would have received blood splatter to the lower legs, the hands, and possibly the face and upper body. There was no apparent blood splatter on Jones’s legs (although his jeans had been soaked through from kneeling in Marianne Larousse’s blood, so the splatter could well have been absorbed or obscured), and the blood on his face and hands had been wiped too much to reveal traces of any original splatter pattern.

According to Jones’s statement, he and Marianne Larousse had met that night at nine o’clock. She had already been drinking with friends in Columbia, then had driven to the Swamp Rat to join him. Witnesses saw them talking together, then they left side by side. One witness, a barfly named J. D. Herrin, admitted to police that he had hurled racial epithets at Jones shortly before the two young people left the bar. He timed his abuse at about ten after eleven.

Jones told police that he then proceeded to have sexual intercourse with Marianne Larousse in the passenger seat of his car, she on top, he seated beneath her. After intercourse, an argument had commenced, caused in part by a discussion of J. D. Herrin’s abuse and centering on whether or not Marianne Larousse was ashamed to be with him. Marianne had stormed off, but instead of taking her car she had run into the woods. Jones claimed that she started to laugh and called for him to follow her to the creek, but he was too angry with her to do so. Only after ten minutes had passed and she had failed to return did Jones follow her. He found her about one hundred feet down the trail. She was already dead. He claimed to have heard nothing in the intervening period: no screams, no sounds of struggle. He didn’t remember touching her body, but figured that he must have since he got blood on his hands. He also admitted that he must have handled the rock, which he later recalled as lying against the side of her head. He then went back to the bar and the police were called. He was interviewed by agents from SLED, the State Law Enforcement Division, initially without the benefit of a lawyer since he had not been arrested or charged with any crime. After the interview, he was arrested on suspicion of the murder of Marianne Larousse. He was given a court-appointed lawyer, who later stepped aside in favor of Elliot Norton.

And that was where I came in.

I ran my fingers gently across her face, the indentations in the photographic paper like the pores on her skin. I’m sorry, I thought. I didn’t know you. I have no way of telling if you were a good person or a bad one. If I had met you, encountered you in a bar or sat beside you in a coffee shop, would we have got on together, even if only in that small, passing way in which two lives may briefly interlock before continuing, somehow both altered yet unchanged, on their own paths, one of those small, flickering moments of contact between strangers that make this life liveable? I suspect not. We were, I think, very different. But you did not deserve to end your life in this way, and if I could, I would have intervened to stop what occurred, even at the risk of my own life, because I could not have stood by and allowed even you, a stranger, to suffer. Now I will try to retrace your steps, to understand what led you to this place, to rest at last among crushed lilies, the night insects drowning in your blood.

I’m sorry that I have to do this thing. People will be hurt by my intervention, and elements of your past may be revealed that you might have wished to remain undisclosed. All I can promise you is that whoever did this will not walk away and will not be allowed to go unpunished because of any action that I may take.

In all of this, I will remember you.

In all of this, you will not be forgotten.

11

I called the number on the Upper West Side the next morning. Louis picked up.

‘You still coming down here?’

‘Uh-huh. Be down in a couple of days.’

‘How’s Angel?’

‘Quiet. How you doin’?’

‘Same old same old.’

‘That bad?’

I had just spoken to Rachel. Hearing her voice had made me feel alone and had renewed my concern for her now that she was so far away.

‘I have a favor to ask,’ I said.

‘Ask away. Askin’ is free.’

‘You know someone who could stay with Rachel for a while, at least until I get back?’

‘She ain’t goin’ to like it.’

‘Maybe you could send someone who wouldn’t care.’

There was a silence as he considered the problem. When he eventually spoke, I could almost hear him smile.

‘You know, I got just the guy.’

I spent the morning making calls, then drove up to Wateree and spoke to one of the Richland County deputies who had been first on the scene the night Marianne Larousse was killed. It was a pretty short conversation. He confirmed the details in his report but it was clear that he believed Atys Jones was guilty and that I was trying to pervert the course of justice by even speaking to him about the case.

I then headed on up to Columbia and spent some time speaking with a special agent named Richard Brewer at the headquarters of SLED. It was SLED special agents that had investigated the murder, as they did all homicides committed in the state of South Carolina, with the occasional exception of those that occurred within the jurisdiction of the Charleston PD.

‘They like to think of themselves as independent down there,’ said Brewer. ‘We call it the Republic of Charleston.’

Brewer was about my age, with straw-colored hair and a jock’s build. He wore standard-issue SLED gear: green combats, a black T-shirt with ‘SLED’ in green letters on the back, and a Glock 40 on his belt. He was one of the team of agents that had worked the case. He was a little more forthcoming than the deputy but could add little to what I already knew. Atys Jones was virtually alone in the world, he said, with only a few distant relatives left alive. He had a job packing shelves at a Piggly Wiggly and lived in a small one-bed walk-up in Kingville that was now occupied by a family of Ukrainian immigrants.

‘That boy,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘He had few people in this world to care about him before this, and he has a whole lot fewer now.’

‘You think he did it?’

‘Jury will decide that. Off the record, I don’t see no other candidates on the horizon.’

‘And it was you that spoke to the Larousses?’ Their statements were among the material Elliot had passed on to me.

‘Father and son, plus the staff at their house. They all had alibis. We’re pretty professional here, Mr. Parker. We covered all the bases. I don’t think you’ll find too many holes in them there reports.’

I thanked him and he gave me his card in case I had any other questions.

‘You got yourself a hard job, Mr. Parker,’ he said as I stood to leave. ‘I reckon you’re going to be about as popular as shit in summertime.’

‘It’ll be a new experience for me.’

He raised a skeptical eyebrow.

‘You know, I find that hard to believe.’

Back at my hotel, I spoke to the people at the Pine Point Co-op about Bear, and they confirmed that he had arrived on time the day before and had worked about as hard as a man could be expected to work. They still sounded a little nervous, so I asked them to put Bear on the line.

‘How you doing, Bear?’

‘Okay.’ He reconsidered. ‘Good, I’m doing good. I like it here. I get to work on boats.’

‘Glad to hear it. Listen, Bear, I have to say this: you screw this up, or cause these people any trouble, and I’ll personally hunt you down and drag you to the cops, you understand?’

‘Sure.’ He didn’t sound aggrieved or hurt. I figured Bear was used to people warning him not to screw up. It was just a question of whether or not he took it in.

‘Okay, then,’ I said.

‘I won’t screw up,’ he confirmed. ‘I like these people.’

After I hung up on Bear, I spent an hour in the hotel gym, followed by as many lengths of the pool as I could manage without cramping and drowning. Afterward, I showered and reread those sections of the case file that Elliot and I had discussed the night before. I kept coming back to two items: the story, photocopied from an out-of-print local history, of the death of the trunk minder Henry; and the disappearance, two decades before, of Atys Jones’s mother and aunt. Their pictures stared out at me from the newspaper clippings, two women forever frozen in their late teens and vanished from a world that had largely forgotten about them, until now.

As evening approached, I left the hotel and had coffee and a muffin in the Pinckney Café. While I waited for Elliot to arrive, I leafed through a copy of the Post and Courier that somebody had abandoned. One story in particular caught my eye: a warrant had been issued for the arrest of a former prison guard named Landron Mobley after he had missed a hearing of the corrections committee in connection with allegations of ‘improper relationships’ with female prisoners. The only reason the story attracted my attention was that Landron Mobley had hired one Elliot Norton to represent him at both the hearing and what was expected to be a subsequent rape trial. I mentioned the case to Elliot when he arrived fifteen minutes later.

‘Old Landron’s a piece of work,’ said Elliot. ‘He’ll turn up, eventually.’

‘Doesn’t seem like a high-class client,’ I commented.

Elliot glanced at the story, then pushed it away, although he still seemed to feel that some further explanation was necessary.

‘I knew him when I was younger, so I guess that’s why he came to me. And hey, every man is entitled to representation, doesn’t matter how guilty he is.’

He raised his finger to the waitress for the check, but there was something about the movement, something too hurried, that indicated Landron Mobley had just ceased to be a welcome topic of conversation between us.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Least I know where one of my clients is at.’

The Richland County Detention Center stood at the end of John Mark Dial Road, about one hundred miles northwest of Charleston, the approach marked by the offices of bondsmen and attorneys. It was a complex of low redbrick buildings surrounded by two rows of fencing topped with razor wire. Its windows were long and narrow, overlooking the parking lot and the woods beyond on one side. The inner fence was electrified.

There wasn’t a great deal that we could do to prevent the knowledge of Atys Jones’s impending release from reaching the media, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise to find a camera crew and a handful of journalists and photographers in the parking lot, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. I had gone on ahead of Elliot and had been watching them for about fifteen minutes by the time Elliot’s car appeared. Nothing exciting had happened to either them or me in the interim, apart from one brief flurry of domestic theater when an unhappy wife, a small, dainty woman in high heels and a blue dress, arrived to collect her husband after he’d spent some time cooling his heels in a cell. He had blood on his shirt and beer stains on his pants as he emerged blinking into the fading light of the early evening, at which point his wife slapped him once across the head and gave him the benefit of her wide and pretty profane vocabulary. He looked like he wanted to run back to jail and lock himself in his cell, especially when he saw all the cameras and thought, for one brief moment, that they’d come for him.

The media pounced on Elliot as soon as he stepped from his car, then tried to block his way again when he came out twenty minutes later through the wired tunnel that led into the jail’s reception area, his arm around the shoulders of a young man with light brown skin who kept his head low and his baseball cap pulled down almost to the bridge of his nose. Elliot didn’t even dignify them with a ‘No comment.’ Instead, he thrust the young man into the car and they drove away at speed. The more sensationalist members of the fourth estate raced to their vehicles to follow him.

I was already in place. I waited until Elliot had passed me, then kept close behind him as far as the exit road, at which point I gave the wheel a good spin and managed to block both lanes before stepping from the car. The TV van ground to a halt a few feet from my door and a cameraman in jungle fatigues opened the driver’s door and started screaming at me to get out of his way.

I examined my nails. They were nice and short. I tried to keep them neat. Neatness was a very underrated virtue.

‘You hear me? Get the fuck out of the way,’ yelled Combat Man. His face was turning a bright shade of red. Behind his van I could see more media types congregating as they tried to figure out what all the fuss was about. A small group of young black males in low-slung jeans and Wu Wear shirts emerged from a bondsman’s office and wandered down to enjoy the show.

Combat Man, tired of shouting and achieving no result, stormed toward me. He was overweight and in his late forties. His clothing looked kind of ludicrous on him. The black guys started in on him almost immediately.

‘Yo, GI Joe, where the war at?’

‘Vietnam over, motherfucker. You gotta let it go. You can’t be livin’ in the past.’

Combat Man shot them a look of pure hatred. He stopped about a foot from me and leaned in until our noses were almost touching.

‘The fuck are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Blocking the road.’

‘I can see that. Why?’

‘So you can’t get through.’

‘Don’t get smart with me. You move your car or I’ll drive my van through it.’

Over his shoulder I could see some prison guards emerging from the lockup, probably on their way to see what all the fuss was about. It was time to go. By the time the reporters got on to the main road, it would be too late for them to find Elliot and Atys. Even if they did find the car, their quarry would not be in it.

‘Okay,’ I told Combat Man. ‘You win.’

He seemed a little taken aback.

‘That’s it?’

‘Sure.’

He shook his head in frustration.

‘By the way—’

He looked up at me.

‘Those kids are stealing stuff from the back of your van.’

I let the media convoy get well ahead of me, then drove along Bluff Road, past the Zion Mill Creek Baptist Church and the United Methodist, until I reached Campbell’s Country Corner at the intersection of Bluff and Pineview. The bar had a corrugated roof and barred windows and didn’t look a whole lot different in principle from the county lockup, except that you could order a drink and walk away anytime you wanted. It advertised ‘Cold Beer at Low Prices,’ held a turkey shoot Fridays and Saturdays, and was a popular stopping-off point for those enjoying their first alcoholic taste of freedom. A hand-lettered sign warned patrons against bringing in their own beer.

I turned onto Pineview, past the side of the bar and a yellow lock-up storage garage, and saw a shack standing in the middle of an overgrown yard. Behind the shack a white GMC 4x4 was waiting, into which Elliot and Atys had been transferred before Elliot’s own car, now being driven by another man, had continued on its way. It pulled out of the lot as I appeared, and I stayed a few cars behind it as it headed along Bluff toward 26. The plan was that we would drive Jones straight into Charleston and take him to the safe house. It was kind of a surprise, then, to see Elliot make a left into the lot of Betty’s Diner before he even reached the highway, open the passenger door, and allow Jones to walk ahead of him into the restaurant. I parked the Neon in back then followed them inside, trying to look casual and unconcerned.

Betty’s Diner was a small room with a counter to the left of the door, behind which two black women took orders while two men worked the grills. It was furnished with plastic garden tables and chairs, and the windows were obscured by both blinds and bars. Two TVs played simultaneously and the air was thick with the smell of fried foods and oil. Elliot and Jones were sitting at a table at the back of the room.

‘Do you want to tell me what you’re doing?’ I asked when I reached them.

Elliot looked embarrassed.

‘He said he needed to eat,’ he stammered. ‘He was cramping. Said he was going to collapse on me if he didn’t eat. He even threatened to jump from the car.’

‘Elliot, step outside and you can still hear the echo of his cell door closing. Any closer and he’d be eating prison food again.’

Atys Jones spoke for the first time. His voice was higher than I expected, as if it had broken only recently instead of over half a decade before.

‘Fuck you, man, I got to eat,’ he said.

He had a thin face, so light in color as to be almost Hispanic, and nervous, darting eyes. His head stayed low when he spoke, and he looked up at me from under his cap. Despite his bluster, his spirit had been broken. Atys Jones was about as tough as a pinãta. Hit him hard enough and candy would come out his ass. Still, it didn’t make his manners any easier to take.

‘You were right,’ I told Elliot. ‘He’s quite the charmer. You couldn’t have picked someone a little less irritating to save?’

‘I tried, but the Little Orphan Annie case was already taken.’

‘The fuck—’

Jones was about to launch into a predictable tirade. I raised a finger at him.

‘Stop right now. You swear at me again and that salt shaker is as close as you’ll get to a meal.’

He backed down.

‘I didn’t eat nothing in jail. I was scared.’

I felt a stab of guilt and shame. He was a frightened young man with a dead girlfriend and the memory of her blood on his hands. His fate was in the hands of two white men and a jury that would most likely redefine the word ‘hostile.’ All things considered, he was doing well just to be sitting upright with dry eyes.

‘Please, man,’ he said. ‘Just let me eat.’

I sighed. From the window where we sat I could see the road, the 4x4, and anybody approaching on foot. Even if somebody had taken it into his mind to hurt Jones, he wasn’t going to do it in Betty’s Diner. Elliot and I were the only white folk in the place, and the handful of people at the other tables were very deliberately ignoring our presence. If we saw any journalists, I could take him out the back way, assuming Betty’s had a back way. Maybe I was overreacting.

‘Whatever,’ I conceded. ‘Just be quick about it.’

It was pretty obvious that Jones hadn’t eaten much during his time in jail. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes sunken, and spots and boils had erupted on his face and neck. He devoured a plate of smothered porkchops with rice, green beans, and macaroni and cheese, then followed it with a slice of strawberry cream cake. Elliot nibbled at some fries while I stuck with coffee from the Mr. Coffee machine on the counter. When we were done, Elliot left Jones with me and went to pay the check.

Jones’s left hand lay flat upon the table, its only adornment a cheap Timex. His right hung on the stainless steel cross around his neck. It was T-shaped, and both its vertical and horizontal shafts appeared hollow. I reached out to touch it, but he drew back and there was something in his eyes that I didn’t like.

‘What you doin’?’

‘I just wanted to take a look at your cross.’

‘It’s mine. I don’t want nobody else touchin’ it.’

‘Atys,’ I said softly. ‘Let me see the cross.’

He held on to it for a moment longer, then uttered a long ‘Shiiiit.’ He lifted the cross from around his neck and let it fall gently into the palm of my hand. I dangled it from my fingers, then gave the shaft an experimental twist. It came loose in my hand. I let it fall to the table, exposing a two-inch length of sharpened steel. I clasped the ‘T’ in the palm of my hand, closed my fist and left the point sticking out between my middle and ring fingers.

‘Where did you get this?’

The sunlight danced on the blade, reflecting in Jones’s eyes and face. He was reluctant to answer.

‘Atys,’ I said, ‘I don’t know you, but you’re already starting to bug me. Answer the question.’

He did some theatrical head shaking before he answered.

‘Preacher gave it to me.’

‘The chaplain?’

Jones shook his head. ‘No, one of the ministers comes to the jail. Tole me he was a prisoner too, once, ’cept the Lord set him free.’

‘Did he say why he was giving this to you?’

‘Tole me he knowed I was in trouble, knowed there was people tryin’ to kill me. Tole me that it would protect me.’

‘He give you his name?’

‘Tereus.’

‘What did he look like?’

Jones met my eyes for the first time since I had taken the cross.

‘He looked like me,’ he replied, simply. ‘He looked like a man seen trouble.’

I replaced the shaft, covered the blade, then after a moment’s hesitation handed it back to him. He looked surprised, then nodded at me once in acknowledgment.

‘If we do this right, then you won’t need it,’ I said. ‘And if we screw up, maybe you’ll be glad of it.’

With that, Elliot returned and we left. Neither of us mentioned the knife to him. This time, there were no more stops, and nobody followed us as we made our way to Charleston and the East Side.

The East Side neighborhood was one of the original developments outside the old walled city, and had always been unsegregated. Blacks and whites shared the warren of streets bordered by Meeting and East Bay to the west and east, and the Crosstown Expressway and Mary Street to the north and south, although even in the mid-nineteenth century the black population was higher than the white. Working-class blacks, whites, and immigrants continued to live together on the East Side until after World War II, when the whites moved to the suburbs west of the Ashley. From then on, the East Side became a place into which you didn’t want to stray if you were white. Poverty took root, bringing with it the seeds of violence and drug abuse.

But the East Side was changing once again. Areas south of Calhoun Street and Judith Street that had once been exclusively black were now nearly all white, and wealthily so, and the wave of urban renewal and gentrification was also breaking on the southern verges of the East Side. Six years before, the average price of a house in the area was about $18,000. Now there were houses on Mary Street making $250,000; and even homes on Columbus and Amherst, close to the small park where the drug dealers congregated and within sight of the brownstone projects and yellow-and-orange public housing, were selling for two or three times what they were worth only half a decade before. But this was still, for the present, a black neighborhood, the houses painted in faded pastels, relics of the days without air-conditioning. The Piggly Wiggly grocery store at Columbia and Meeting, the yellow Money Man pawn shop across from it, the cut price liquor store nearby all spoke of lives far removed from those of the wealthy whites returning to the old streets.

The faces of the young men at the corners and the old people on their porches regarded us warily as we drove: a black man and a white man in one car, being tailed by a white man in a second car. We might not have been Five-O, but whatever we were we were still bad news. At the corner of American and Reid, on the side of a two-room house erected as some kind of art exhibit, someone had written the following lines:

‘The Afro-American has been heir to the myths that it is better to be poor than rich, lower-class rather than middle or upper, easygoing rather than industrious, extravagant rather than thrifty, and athletic rather than academic.’

I didn’t know the source of the quotation, and neither did Elliot when I asked him about it later. Atys had apparently just looked blankly at the words on the wall. I guess he probably already knew all that it said from experience. Around us, hydrangeas were in bloom, and heavenly bamboo grew by the front steps of a neat two-story house on Drake Street, midway between a ruined building at the junction of Drake and Amherst and the Fraser Elementary at the corner of Columbus. It was painted white with yellow trim, and there were shutters drawn on both the upper and lower floors, slatted on the top floor to let the air in. A bay window faced out onto the street from beneath the porch, with the front doorway to the right, a mass-produced carved wood pattern above it for decoration. A flight of five stone steps led up to the door.

When he was certain the street was quiet, Elliot backed the GMC into the yard to the right of the doorway. I heard the sound of the doors opening, then footsteps as Atys and Elliot entered the house from the rear. Drake seemed largely empty apart from two small kids playing ball by the railings of the school. They remained there until it began to rain, the raindrops glittering in the glow of the streetlamps that had just begun to shine, then ran for shelter. I waited ten minutes, the rain falling hard on the car, until I was certain that we hadn’t been followed, before I too headed into the house.

Atys – I was forcing myself to think of him by his first name in an effort to establish some kind of connection with him – sat uncomfortably at a cheap pine kitchen table, Elliot beside him. By the sink, an elderly black woman with silver hair was pouring five glasses of lemonade. Her husband, who was a lot taller than she was, held the glasses as she poured, then passed them, one by one, to their guests. His shoulders were slightly stooped, but the strength of his deltoid and trapezius muscles was still apparent from their definition beneath his white shirt. He was well over sixty years old, but I guessed that he could have taken Atys easily in a straight fight. He could probably have taken me.

‘Devil and wife fighting,’ he said, as I shook the rain from my jacket. I must have looked puzzled, because he repeated himself, then pointed out the window at the rain and sunlight mingling.

‘De wedduh,’ he said. ‘Een yah cuh, seh-down.’

Elliot grinned at the incomprehension on my face. ‘Gullah,’ he explained. Gullah was the term commonly used to describe the language and the people of the coastal islands, many of them the descendants of slaves who had been given island land and abandoned rice fields to settle in the aftermath of the Civil War.

‘Ginnie and Albert used to live out on Yonges Island, but then Ginnie got sick and one of their sons, Samuel, the one who’s taking care of my car, insisted they move back to Charleston. They’ve been here ten years now, and I still don’t get some of what they say, but they’re good people. They know what they’re doing. He’s asking you to come in and sit down.’

I accepted the lemonade, thanked them, then took Atys by the shoulder into the small living room. Elliot seemed like he was about to follow me, but I indicated that I wanted a minute or two alone with his client. Elliot didn’t look too happy about it, but he stayed where he was.

Atys sat down on the very edge of the sofa, as if he were preparing to make a break for the door at any moment. He wouldn’t meet my eye. I sat opposite him in an overstuffed armchair.

‘You know why I’m here?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘’Cause you bein’ paid to be here.’

I smiled. ‘There’s that. Mostly, I’m here because Elliot doesn’t believe that you killed Marianne Larousse. A lot of other people do, though, so it’s going to be my job to maybe find evidence to prove them wrong. I can only do that if you help me.’

He licked his lips. There was sweat beading on his forehead. ‘They goan kill me,’ he said.

‘Who’s going to kill you?’

‘Larousses. Don’t matter if they do it theyselves or get the state to do it, they still goan kill me.’

‘Not if we can prove them wrong.’

‘Yeah, and how you goan do that?’

I hadn’t figured that out yet, but talking to this young man was a first step.

‘How did you meet Marianne Larousse?’ I asked.

He sank back heavily into the sofa, resigned now to speaking of what had occurred.

‘She was a student in Columbia.’

‘I don’t see you as the student type, Atys.’

‘Shit, no. I sold weed to them motherfuckers. They like to score.’

‘Did she know who you were?’

‘No, she didn’t know shit about me.’

‘But you knew who she was?’

‘’S right.’

‘You know about your past, about the problems between your family and the Larousses.’

‘That’s old shit.’

‘But you know about it.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘She come on to you, or did you come on to her?’

He blushed and his face broke into a shit-eating grin. ‘Oh man, y’know, she was smokin’ and I was smokin’ and, s’like, shit happened.’

‘When did this start?’

‘January, maybe February.’

‘And you were with her all that time?’

‘I was with her some. She went away in June. I didn’t see her from end of May until week, maybe two weeks before . . .’ His voice trailed off.

‘Did her family know she was seeing you?’

‘Maybe. She didn’t tell them nothin’, but shit gets out.’

‘Why were you with her?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Because she was pretty? Because she was white? Because she was a Larousse?’

There was just a shrug in reply.

‘Maybe all three?’

‘I guess.’

‘Did you like her?’

A muscle trembled in his cheek.

‘Yeah, I liked her.’

I let it rest. ‘What happened on the night she died?’

Atys’s face seemed to fall, all of the confidence and front disappearing from it like a mask yanked away to reveal the true expression beneath. I knew then for certain that he hadn’t killed her, for the pain was too real, and I guessed that what might have started out as a means of getting back at some half-sensed enemy had developed, at least on his side, into affection, and perhaps something more.

‘We was screwing around in my car, out at the Swamp Rat by Congaree. Folks there don’t give a shit what you do, ’long as you got money and you ain’t a cop.’

‘You had sex?’

‘Yeah, we had sex.’

‘Protected?’

‘She was on the pill and, like, I been tested and shit, but yeah, she still like me to use a rubber.’

‘Did that bother you?’

‘What are you, man, stupid? You ever fucked with a rubber? It ain’t the same. It’s like . . .’ He struggled for the comparison.

‘Wearing your shoes in the bathtub.’

For the first time he smiled and a little of the ice broke.

‘Yeah, ’cept I ain’t never had a bath that good.’

‘Go on.’

‘We started arguing.’

‘About what?’

‘About how maybe she was ashamed of me, didn’t want to be seen with me. Y’know, we was always fuckin’ in cars, or in my crib if she got drunk enough not to care. Rest of the time, she drift by me like I don’t exist.’

‘Did this argument turn violent?’

‘No, I never touched her. Ever. But she start screamin’ and shoutin’, and next thing I know, she’s runnin’ away. I was goan just let her go, m’sayin, let her cool off and shit? Then I went after her, callin’ her name.

‘Then I found her.’

He swallowed and placed his hands behind his head. His lips narrowed. He seemed on the verge of tears.

‘What did you see?’

‘Her face, man, it was all busted in. Her nose . . . There was just blood. I tried to lift her, tried to brush away her hair from her face, but she was gone. There was nothin’ I could do for her. She was gone.’

And now he was crying, his right knee pumping up and down like a piston with the grief and rage that he was still suppressing.

‘We’re nearly done,’ I said.

He nodded and wiped away his tears with a sharp, embarrassed jerk of his arm.

‘Did you see anybody, anyone at all, who might have done this to her?’

‘No, man, nobody.’

And for the first time, he lied. I watched his eyes, saw them look up and away from me for an instant before he answered.

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah, I’m sure.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

He was about to give me outraged when I reached across and raised a finger in warning before him.

‘What did you see?’

His mouth opened and closed twice without producing any sound, then: ‘I thought I saw something, but I’m not sure.’

‘Tell me.’

He nodded, more to himself than to me.

‘I thought I saw a woman. She was all in white, and movin’ away into the trees. But when I looked closer, there was nothin’ there. It could have been the river, I guess, with the light shinin’ on it.’

‘Did you tell the police?’ There had been no mention of a woman in the reports.

‘They said I was lyin’.’

And he was still lying. Even now, he was holding back, but I knew I was going to get nothing more from him for the present. I sat back in the chair, then passed him the police reports. We went through them for a time, but he could find nothing to question beyond their implicit assumption of his guilt.

He stood as I placed the reports back in their file. ‘We done?’

‘For now.’

He moved a couple of steps, then stopped before he reached the door.

‘They took me past the death house,’ he said softly.

‘What?’

‘When they was takin’ me to Richland, they drove me to Broad River and they showed me the death house.’

The state’s capital punishment facility was located at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, close by the reception and evaluation center. In a move that combined psychological torture with democracy, prisoners convicted of capital crimes prior to 1995 were allowed to choose between electrocution and lethal injection as their final punishment. All others were executed by injection, as Atys Jones would be if the state succeeded in its efforts to convict him of Marianne’s murder.

‘They tole me I was goan be strapped down and then they was goan inject poisons into me, and that I’d be dying inside but I wouldn’t be able to move or cry out none. They tole me it be like suffocatin’ slow.’

There was nothing I could say.

‘I didn’t kill Marianne,’ he said.

‘I know you didn’t.’

‘But they goan kill me for it anyhow.’

His resignation made me feel cold inside.

‘We can stop that from happening, if you help us.’

But he just shook his head and loped back to the kitchen. Elliot entered the room seconds later.

‘What do you think?’ he asked in a whisper.

‘He’s holding something back,’ I replied. ‘He’ll give it to us, in time.’

‘We don’t have that kind of time,’ snapped Elliot.

As I followed him into the kitchen, I could see the muscles bunched beneath his shirt, and his hands flexing and unflexing by his sides. He turned his attention to Albert.

‘You need anything?’

‘Us hab ’nuff bittle,’ said Albert.

‘I don’t mean just food. You need more money? A gun?’

The woman slammed her glass down on the table and shook her finger at Elliot.

‘Don’ pit mout’ on us,’ she said firmly.

‘They think having a gun in the house will bring them bad luck,’ Elliot said.

‘They may be right. What do they do if there’s trouble?’

‘Samuel lives with them, and I suspect he has less trouble with guns than they have. I’ve given them all our numbers. If anything goes wrong, they’ll call one of us. Just make sure you keep your phone with you.’

I thanked them both for the lemonade, then followed Elliot to the door.

‘You leavin’ me here?’ cried Atys. ‘With these two?’

‘Dat boy ent hab no mannus,’ scolded the old woman. ‘Dat boy gwi’ punish fuh’e wickitty.’ She poked at Atys with his finger. ‘Debblement weh dat chile lib.’

‘Get off me,’ he retorted, but he looked kind of worried.

‘Be good, Atys,’ said Elliot. ‘Watch some TV, get some sleep. Mr. Parker will check on you tomorrow.’

Atys raised his eyes to mine in a last, desperate plea.

‘Shit,’ he said, ‘by tomorrow these two probably have eaten me.’

When we left him, the old woman had just started poking him again. Outside, we passed their son, Samuel, on the way back to the house. He was a tall, handsome man, my age or a little younger, with large brown eyes. Elliot introduced us and we shook hands.

‘Any trouble?’ asked Elliot.

‘None,’ Samuel confirmed. ‘I parked outside your office. Keys are on top of the right rear wheel.’

Elliot thanked him and he headed toward the house.

‘You sure he’ll be okay with them?’ I asked Elliot.

‘They’re smart, like their boy, and the folks round here look out for them. Any strangers come sniffing down this street and half the young bucks will be following them before they have a chance to get their shoes dirty. As long as he’s here, and no one finds out about it, he’ll be safe.’

The same faces watched us leave their streets and I thought that maybe Elliot was right. Maybe they would take account of strangers coming into their neighborhood.

I just wasn’t sure that it would be enough to keep Atys Jones safe from harm.

12

Elliot and I exchanged a few words outside the house, then parted. Before we did, he handed me a newspaper from the backseat of his car.

‘Since you been reading the newspapers so closely, you happen to see this?’

The story was buried in the lifestyles section and headlined ‘In the Midst of Tragedy, Charity.’ The Larousses were hosting a charity lunch in the grounds of an old plantation house on the western shore of Lake Marion later that week, one of two large houses that the family owned. From the list of expected guests, half the grandees in the state were going to be there.

‘While still mourning the death of his beloved daughter Marianne,’ the report read, ‘Earl Larousse, his son Earl Jr. by his side, said that “we have a duty to those less fortunate than ourselves that even the loss of Marianne cannot absolve.” The charity lunch, in aid of cancer research, will be the first public engagement for the Larousse family since the murder of Marianne, 19, last July.’

I handed the paper back to Elliot.

‘You can bet that there’ll be judges and prosecutors there, probably the governor too,’ he said. ‘They should just hold the trial right there on the lawn and get done with it.’

Elliot told me he had business to conclude back at his office, and we agreed to meet again over the next day or two to discuss progress and options. I followed his car as far as Charleston Place, then peeled off and parked. I showered in my room and called Rachel. She was just about to head into South Portland for a reading at Nonesuch Books. She’d mentioned it to me a couple of days earlier, but I’d forgotten about it until now.

‘An interesting thing happened today,’ she said, giving me just enough time to get the word ‘hi’ out of my mouth. ‘I opened the front door and there was a man on my doorstep. A big man. A very big, very black man.’

‘Rachel—’

‘You said it would be discreet. His T-shirt had the words “Klan Killer” written on the front.’

‘I—’

‘And do you know what he said?’

I waited.

‘He handed me a note from Louis and told me he was lactose intolerant. That was it. Note. Lactose intolerant. Nothing else. He’s coming to the reading with me. It was all I could do to get him to change his T-shirt. The new one reads “Black Death”. I’m going to tell people it’s a rap band. Do you think it’s a rap band?’

I figured it was probably his occupation, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I said the only thing I could think of to say.

‘Maybe you’d better buy some soya milk.’

She hung up without saying good-bye.

Despite the earlier rain, it was still stiflingly warm when I left the hotel to grab a bite to eat, and I felt as if my clothes were soaked through before I’d walked more than a few blocks. I passed the site of the Confederate Museum, its exterior now surrounded by scaffolding, and headed into the residential district between East Bay and Meeting, admiring the big old houses, the lamps by their doors glowing softly. It was just after ten and the tourists had begun to throng the dive bars on East Bay that sold premixed cocktails in souvenir glasses. Young men and women cruised up and down Broad, rap and nu-metal grinding out insistent, competing beats. Fred Durst, record company vice president, proud father, and multimillionaire, was telling the kids how their parents just didn’t understand his generation. There’s nothing sadder than a thirty-year-old man in short pants rebelling against his mom and dad.

I was looking for somewhere to eat when I saw a familiar face at the window of Magnolia’s. Elliot was sitting across from a woman with jet black hair and tight lips. He was eating, but the pained look on his face told me that he wasn’t enjoying his meal, maybe because the woman was clearly unhappy with him. She was leaning across the table, her palms flat upon the cloth, and her eyes were blazing. Elliot gave up trying to feed himself and spread out his hands in a ‘Be reasonable’ gesture, the one that men use when they’re feeling put upon by a woman. It doesn’t work, mainly because there’s nothing guaranteed to add fuel to the fire of a male-female argument quicker than one party suggesting to the other that she’s being unreasonable. True to form, the woman stood up abruptly and walked determinedly from the restaurant. Elliot didn’t follow. He sat for a moment looking after her, then shrugged resignedly, picked up his knife and fork, and resumed his meal. The woman, dressed entirely in black, got into an Explorer parked a couple of doors down from the restaurant and drove off into the night. She wasn’t crying but her anger lit up the interior of the SUV like a flare. Out of little more than habit I memorized the tag number. I briefly considered joining Elliot but I didn’t want him to think that I might have seen the argument, and anyway, I wanted some time alone.

I ended up on Queen Street and ate at Poogan’s Porch, a Cajun and low country restaurant that was rumored to be a favorite of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, although the celebrity count was zero that night. Poogan’s had flowered wallpaper and glass on the tables, and I pretty much had to take one of the staff hostage to keep the ice water coming fast enough to cool me down, but the Cajun duck looked good. Despite my hunger, I barely picked at my food when it arrived. It tasted wrong, but it was not the fault of the chef. A memory flashed: Faulkner spitting in my mouth, the taste of him on my tongue. I pushed the plate away.

‘Is there something wrong with your food, sir?’

It was the waiter. I looked up at him but he was blurred, like a Batut photograph in which images of different individuals had been overlaid on one another to create a single composite.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s fine. I’ve just lost my appetite.’

I wanted him to go away. I couldn’t look at his face. It reminded me of slow decay.

The cockroaches were clicking across the sidewalks when I left the restaurant, the remains of those that had not been quick enough to avoid human footfalls lying scattered in small dark piles, troops of ants already feeding hungrily upon them. I found myself walking down deserted streets watching the lights in the windows of the houses, catching shadow plays of the lives continuing behind the drapes. I missed Rachel and wished that she were with me. I wondered how she was getting along with the Klan Killer, now apparently aka Black Death. Trust Louis to send along the only guy who looked more conspicuous than he did, but at least I was no longer worrying as much about Rachel. I still wasn’t even sure how much help I could be to Elliot down here. True, I was curious about the jailhouse preacher who had given Atys Jones the T-bar knife, but it seemed to me that I was somehow adrift from all that was happening, that I had not yet found a way to break the surface and explore the depths beneath, and I still didn’t fully share Elliot’s faith in the ability of the old Gullah couple and their son to handle any situation that might arise. I found a public phone and checked in with the safe house. The old man answered and confirmed that all was well.

‘Mek you duh worry so?’ he said. ‘Dat po’ creetuh, ’e rest.’

I thanked him and was about to hang up when he spoke again.

‘Do boy suh’e yent kill de gel, ’e meet de gel so.’

I had to ask him to repeat himself twice before I understood.

‘He told you that he didn’t kill her? You’ve talked to him about it?’

‘Uh-huh. Uh ax, ’en ’e mek ansuh suh ’e yent do’um.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

‘’E skay’d. ’E skay-to-det.’

‘Scared of what?’

‘De po-lice. De ’ooman.’

‘What woman?’

‘De ole people b’leebe sperit walk de nighttime up de Congaree. Dat ’ooman alltime duh fludduh-fedduh.’

Again, I had to get him to repeat himself. Eventually, I managed to figure out that he was talking about spirits.

‘You’re telling me that there is the ghost of a woman in the Congaree?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘And this is the woman Atys saw?’

‘Uh yent know puhzac’ly, but uh t’ink so.’

‘Do you know who she is?’

‘No, suh, I cahn spessify, bud’e duh sleep tuh Gawd-acre.’

God-acre: the cemetery.

I asked him to try to get something more from Atys, because it still seemed to me that he knew more than he was telling. The old man promised to try, but said he wasn’t no ‘tarrygater’.

By now I was in the French Quarter between Meeting and East Bay. I could hear the sounds of distant traffic, and sometimes raised voices as revelers moved through the night, but around me there was no life.

And then, as I passed by Unity Alley, I heard singing. The voice was a child’s, and very lovely. It was singing a version of an old Roba Stanley number, ‘Devilish Mary,’ but it sounded as if the child didn’t know the whole song or else had just decided to sing her favorite part, which was the nursery-rhyme refrain at the end of each verse:

A ring-tuma-ding-tuma dairy

A ring-tuma-ding-tuma dairy

Prettiest girl I ever saw

And her name was Devilish Mary.

The singing stopped, and the girl stepped from the murk of the alleyway to be illuminated by the lamps on the adjoining houses.

‘Hey, mister,’ she said. ‘You got a light?’

I stopped. She was thirteen or fourteen, and wore a short, tight black skirt with no stockings. Her bare legs were very white, and her midriff was exposed beneath a black cutoff T-shirt. Her face, too, was pale, smudged dark with make up around the eyes and wounded by a streak of too-red lipstick around her mouth. She wore high heels, but still stood no taller than five feet as she leaned against the brickwork. Her hair was brown and untidy, and partially obscured her face. The darkness seemed to move around her, as if she were standing beneath a moonlit tree, its branches moving slowly in an evening breeze. She seemed strangely familiar, in the way that a childhood photograph will contain traces of the woman that the child will become. I felt as though I had seen the woman first, and now was being allowed to see the child that she once was.

‘I don’t smoke,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

I stared at her for a few seconds more, then began to move away.

‘Where you going?’ she said. ‘You want to have some fun? I got a place we can go.’ She stepped forward and I saw that she was younger even than I had thought. This girl was barely into double figures, and yet there was something about her voice. It sounded older than it should have, far older.

She opened her mouth and licked her lips. Her teeth were green where they met the gums.

‘How old are you?’ I asked her.

‘How old would you like me to be?’ She wiggled her hips in a kind of parody of lasciviousness, and the grating tone to her voice was clearer now. She gestured with her right hand toward the alleyway. ‘Come on, down here. I got a place we can go.’ Slowly, she placed her hand on the hem of her skirt and began to lift. ‘Let me show you—’

I reached out to her and her smile broadened, then froze as I gripped her arm. ‘Maybe we should get you to the police,’ I told her. ‘They’ll find someone who can help you.’ But her arm felt wrong: not firm, but liquid, like a body in the process of putrefaction. There was heat there but it was extreme, and I was reminded of the preacher in his cell, burning up from within.

The girl hissed and with a movement of surprising strength and agility wrenched herself from my grasp.

‘Don’t touch me!’ she hissed. ‘I’m not your daughter.’

For seconds, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even speak. Then she started to run down the alleyway and I followed her. I thought I would catch her easily, but suddenly she was ten feet ahead of me, then twenty, moving yet not moving, like a film from which somebody had removed crucial frames at regular intervals. She passed by McCrady’s Restaurant in a kind of blur, then paused as she neared East Bay.

The car appeared behind her as she stood waiting. It was a black Cadillac Coupe de Ville, with a battered front bumper and a star-shaped crack in the corner of the darkened windshield. The rear passenger door opened beside the girl and a kind of dark light spilled out, seeping like oil across the sidewalk.

‘No!’ I shouted. ‘Get away from the car.’

Her head turned and she stared into the interior, then looked back at me. She smiled, her features already blurring, the gums receding, the teeth like yellowed stones.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I got a place we can go.’

She climbed into the car and it pulled away from the curb, its brake lights glowing as it disappeared into the night.

But shapes had fallen from the interior of the car before the door had closed, dropping like small clods of dirt to the sidewalk. While I watched, they converged on a cockroach and began to crawl across its body, biting at its head and underside, trying to slow it down so that they could begin to consume it. I knelt and saw the distinctive violin-shaped mark on the back of one of the spiders.

Recluses. The cockroach was covered with recluses.

I felt something shudder through my system and a huge spasm wrenched at my gut. I collapsed back against the wall and wrapped my arms around myself as the nausea passed over me in waves. I could taste duck and rice in my mouth as my food threatened to come back up from my stomach. I took deep breaths and kept my head down. Then, when I could walk again, I hailed a cab on East Bay and returned to my hotel.

I drank some water in my room to try to cool myself down but my temperature was way up. I was feverish and ill. I tried to concentrate on the TV, but the colors hurt my eyes and I turned it off before the late night news bulletin came on with the first details of the killings of three men in a bar near Caina, Georgia. Instead, I lay down in bed and tried to sleep, but the heat was too much, even with the AC on full. I found myself drifting in and out of consciousness, unsure of whether I was awake or dreaming when I heard a knock at the door and saw, through the spyhole, the figure of a little girl in black waiting at my door, her lipstick smeared

hey mister, I got a place we can go

and when I tried to open the door I found that I was holding the chrome of a Coupe de Ville. I smelled the stench of rotting meat as I heard the lock release with a click.

And all was darkness within.

13

They had traveled separately to the motel, the tall black man driving there in a three-year-old Lumina, the shorter white man arriving later in a cab. They each took a standard double room on different levels, the black man on the first floor, the white man on the second. There was no communication between them, nor would there be until they departed from this place the following morning.

In his room, the white man checked his clothes carefully for traces of blood but could find none. When he was satisfied that they were clean, he tossed them on the bed and stood naked before the mirror in the small bathroom. Slowly, he turned his body, wincing a little as he did so, to reveal the scars on his back and his thighs. He stared at them for a long time, gently tracing the pattern of them against his skin. He watched himself blankly in the mirror, as if he were looking not at his own reflection but at a distinct entity, one that had suffered terribly and was now marked not only psychologically but physically as well. Yet this man in the glass was no part of him. He himself was unblemished, untouched, and as soon as the lights went out and the room grew dark, he could walk away from the mirror and leave the scarred man behind, remembering only the look in his eyes. He allowed himself the luxury of the fantasy for a few moments longer, then quietly wrapped himself in a clean towel before the glow of the television.

There had been a great many misfortunes in the life of the man named Angel. Some of them, he knew, could be attributed to his own larcenous nature, to his once strongly held belief that if an item was salable, movable, and stealable, then it was only to be expected that a transfer of ownership should occur in which he, Angel, would play a significant if fleeting part. Angel had been a good thief, but he had not been a great one. Great thieves do not end up in prison, and Angel had spent enough time behind bars to realize that the flaws in his character prevented him from becoming one of the true legends of his chosen profession. Unfortunately he was also an optimist at heart and it had taken the combined efforts of prison authorities in two different states to cloud his naturally sunny predisposition toward crime. Yet he had chosen this path, and he had taken his punishment, when possible, with a degree of equanimity.

But there were other areas of his life over which Angel had been granted little control. He had not been allowed to choose his mother, who had disappeared from his life when he was still crawling on all fours, whose name appeared on no marriage certificate, and whose past was as blank and unyielding as a prison wall. She had called herself Marta. That was all he knew of her.

Worse, he had not been able to choose his father, and his father had been a bad man: a drunk, a petty criminal, an indolent, solitary character who had kept his only son in filth, feeding him on breakfast cereals and fast food when he could remember, or work up the enthusiasm, to do so. The Bad Man. Never father, in his memories, and never dad.

Just the Bad Man.

They lived in a walk-up on Degraw Street, in the Columbia Street waterfront district of Brooklyn. At the turn of the last century it had been home to the Irish who worked the nearby piers. In the 1920s, they had been joined by the Puerto Ricans, and from then on Columbia Street had remained relatively unchanged until after World War II, but the area was already in decline when the boy was born. The opening of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in 1957 had sundered working-class Columbia from the wealthier districts of Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, and a plan to build a commercial containerization port in the neighborhood had led many residents to sell up and move elsewhere. But the container port did not materialize; instead, the shipping industry moved to Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, with the result that there was massive unemployment in Columbia Street. The Italian bakeries and the grocery stores began to close, Puerto Rican casitas instead springing up in the empty lots. The solitary boy moved through this place, claiming boarded-up buildings and unroofed rooms as his own, trying always to stay out of the path of the Bad Man and his increasingly volatile moods. He had few friends and attracted the attentions of the more violent of his peers the way some dogs attract maulings from others of their kind, until their tails remain forever fastened between their legs, their ears plastered low to their heads, and it becomes impossible to tell if their attitude is a consequence of their sufferings or the very reason for them.

The Bad Man lost his delivery job in 1958 after he attacked a union activist during a drunken brawl and found himself blacklisted. Men had come to the apartment some days later and beaten him with sticks and lengths of chain. He was lucky to get away with some broken bones, for the man he had attacked was a union leader in name only and the office that bore his name was rarely troubled by his presence. A woman, one of the few who passed like unwelcome seasons through the life of the boy, trailing cheap scent and cigarette smoke behind them, nursed him through the worst of it and fed the boy on bacon and eggs fried in beef fat. She left following an altercation with the Bad Man in the night, one that drew the neighbors to their windows and the police to their door. There were no more women after her, as the Bad Man descended into despair and misery, dragging his son down with him.

The Bad Man sold Angel for the first time when he was eight years old. The man gave him a case of Wild Turkey in return for his son, then drove him home five hours later wrapped in a blanket. The boy who became Angel lay awake in his bed that night, his eyes fixed to the wall, afraid to blink in case, in that second of darkness, the man should return, afraid to move for fear of the pain he felt below.

The Bad Man had fed him Froot Loops when he returned, and a Baby Ruth bar as a special treat.

Even now, looking back, Angel could not recall properly how many days passed in this way, except that the transactions became more and more frequent, and the number of bottles involved became fewer and fewer, the handful of bills slimmer and slimmer. At the age of fourteen, after several attempts to flee had been met with severe punishment by the Bad Man, he broke into a candy store on Union Street, just a couple of blocks from the Seventy-sixth Precinct, and stole two boxes of Baby Ruth bars, then devoured them in an empty lot on Hicks Street until he vomited. When the police found him the cramps in his stomach were so severe that he could barely walk. The robbery earned him a two-month stretch in juvie because of the damage he had caused while breaking into the store and the judge’s desire to make an example of someone in the face of growing youth crime in the dying neighborhood. When he was finally released the Bad Man was waiting for him at the gates, and there were two more men sitting smoking in the grubby brownstone apartment that father and son shared.

This time, there was no candy bar.

At sixteen, he left and took the bus across the river to Manhattan, and for almost four years he lived life on the margins, sleeping rough or in dingy, dangerous tenements, supporting himself through dead-end jobs and, increasingly, theft. He recalled the flash of knives and the sound of gunshots; the scream of a woman slowly fading to sobs before she drifted into sleep or eternal silence. The name Angel became a part of his escape, a shedding of his old identity just as a snake sheds its skin.

But at night he would still imagine the Bad Man coming, padding softly through the empty hallways, the windowless rooms, listening for his son’s breathing, his hands filled with candy bars. When the Bad Man at last passed away, burning himself to death in a fire that consumed his apartment and those above it and on either side, a consequence of a lit cigarette left to dangle while its smoker slept, the boy-man learned about it from the newspapers, and cried without knowing why.

In a life that had not been short of misfortune, of pain and humiliation, Angel would still look back on September 8, 1971 as the day when events went from bad to very bad indeed. For on that day, a judge sentenced Angel and two accomplices to a nickel in Attica for their part in a warehouse robbery in Queens, a destination partly dictated by the fact that two of the accused had attacked a bailiff in the corridor after he had suggested that by the end of the day they would be facedown on bunks with towels stuffed in their mouths. Angel, at nineteen, was the youngest of the three to be imprisoned.

To be sent to the Attica Correctional Facility, thirty miles east of Buffalo, was bad enough. Attica was a hellhole: violent, overcrowded, and a tinderbox waiting to explode. On September 9, 1971, the day after Angel arrived in Prison Yard D, Attica did just that, and Angel’s luck really started to run out. The siege at Attica that resulted from the seizure by prisoners of several parts of the facility would eventually leave forty-three men dead and eighty wounded. Most of the fatalities and injuries resulted from the decision of Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller to order the retaking of Prison Yard D using whatever force was necessary. Tear gas canisters rained down on the inmates in the yard and then the shooting began, indiscriminate firing into a crowd of over twelve hundred men followed by a wave of state troopers armed with guns and batons. When the smoke and gas had cleared, eleven guards and thirty-two prisoners were dead, and the reprisals were swift and merciless. Inmates were stripped and beaten, forced to eat mud, pelted with hot shell casings, and threatened with castration. The man named Angel, who had spent most of the siege cowering in his cell, fearful of his own fellow inmates almost as much as of the inevitable punishment that would befall all involved when the prison was retaken, was forced to crawl naked over a yard full of broken glass while the guards watched. When he stopped, unable any longer to take the pain in his stomach, hands, and legs, a guard named Hyde had walked over to him, the glass crunching beneath his heavy shoes, and had stood on Angel’s back.

Almost three decades later, on August 28, 2000, federal judge Michael A. Telesca of the Federal District Court in Rochester finally divided an $8 million settlement among five hundred former Attica inmates and their relatives for what had taken place in the aftermath of the uprising and siege. The case had been delayed for eighteen years but in the end some two hundred plaintiffs got to tell their stories in open court, including one Charles B. Williams, who had been so badly beaten that his leg had to be amputated. Angel’s name was not among those attached to the class action suit, for Angel was not a man who believed that reparation came from courtrooms. Other prison terms had followed his time spent in Attica, including a total of four years in Rikers. When he had emerged from what would be his final prison term, he was broke, depressed, and on the verge of suicide.

And then, one hot August night, he spotted an open window in an apartment on the Upper West Side, and he used the fire escape to gain access to the building. The apartment was luxurious, fifteen hundred square feet in size, with Persian carpets laid over bare boards, small items of African art tastefully arrayed on shelves and tables, and a collection of vinyl and compact discs that, with its almost exclusive emphasis on country music, led Angel to suspect that he had somehow wandered into Charley Pride’s New York crash pad.

He went through all of the rooms and found them empty. Later, he would wonder how he had missed the guy. True, the apartment was huge, but he’d searched it. He’d opened closets, even checked under the bed, and he hadn’t even found dust. But just as he was about to lift the television out onto the fire escape, a voice behind him said: ‘Man, you the dumbest damn burglar since Watergate.’

Angel turned around. Standing in the doorway, wearing a blue bath towel around his waist, was the tallest black man Angel had ever seen outside a basketball court. He was at least six six and totally bald, his chest hairless, his legs smooth. His body was a series of hard curves and knots of muscle, almost entirely without fat. In his right hand he held a silenced pistol, but it wasn’t the gun that scared Angel. It was the guy’s eyes. They weren’t psycho eyes, for Angel had seen enough of those in prison to know what they looked like. No, these eyes were intelligent and watchful, amused and yet strangely cold.

This guy was a killer.

A real killer.

‘I don’t want no trouble,’ said Angel.

‘Ain’t that a shame?’

Angel swallowed.

‘Suppose I told you that this isn’t what it looks like.’

‘It looks like you tryin’ to steal my TV.’

‘I know that’s what it looks like, but—’

Angel stopped and decided, for the first time in his life, that honesty might at this point be the best policy.

‘No, it is what it looks like,’ he admitted. ‘I’m trying to steal your TV.’

‘Not anymore you ain’t.’

Angel nodded.

‘I guess I should put it down.’ In truth, the TV was starting to feel kind of heavy in his arms.

The black guy thought for a moment. ‘No, tell you what, why don’t you hold on to it?’ he said at last.

Angel’s face brightened. ‘You mean I can keep it?’

The gunman almost smiled. At least, Angel thought it might have been a smile; that, or some kind of spasm.

‘No, I said you could hold on to it. You just stay there and keep holdin’ my TV. Cause if you drop it’ – the smile broadened – ‘I’ll kill you.’

Angel swallowed. Suddenly, the weight of the TV seemed to double.

‘You like country music?’ asked the guy, reaching for the remote control and causing the CD player to light up.

‘Nope,’ said Angel.

From the speakers came the sound of Gram Parsons singing ‘We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning.’

‘Then you shit out of luck.’

Angel sighed. ‘Tell me about it.’

The seminaked man settled himself into a leather armchair, rearranged his towel carefully, and trained the gun on the hapless burglar.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You tell me  . . .’

The man named Angel thought about these things, these seemingly random events that had brought him to this place, as he sat in the semidarkness. The final words of Clyde Benson, just before Angel had killed him, replayed themselves in his memory.

I made my peace with the Lord.

Then you got nothing to worry about.

He had asked for mercy but had received none.

For so much of his life, Angel had been at the mercy of others: his father; the men who had taken him in back rooms and sweat-filled apartments; the guard Hyde in Attica; the prisoner Vance in Rikers, who had decided that Angel’s continued existence was an insult that could not be tolerated, until someone else had stepped in and ensured that Vance would no longer be a danger to Angel, or to anyone else.

And then he had found this man, the man who now sat in a room below, and a new life of sorts had begun, a life in which he would no longer be the victim, in which he would no longer be at the mercy of others, and he had almost started to forget the events that had made him what he was.

Until Faulkner had chained him to a shower rail and begun to cut the skin from his back, his son and daughter holding the hanging man still, the woman licking at the sweat that broke from Angel’s brow, the man hushing him softly as he screamed through the gag. He remembered the feel of the blade, the coldness of it, the pressure on his skin before it broke through and entered the flesh beneath. All of the old ghosts had come howling back then, all of the memories, all of the suffering, and he could taste candy bars in his mouth.

Blood and candy bars.

Somehow, he had survived.

But Faulkner too was still alive, and that was simply too much for Angel to bear.

For Angel to live, Faulkner had to die.

And what of this other man, the quiet, deliberate black male with the killer’s eyes?

Each time he watched his partner dress and undress Louis’s face remained studiedly neutral, but he felt his gut clench as the tangled scars were revealed on the back and thighs, as the other man paused to let the pain subside while pulling on a shirt or pants, sweat dotting his forehead. In the beginning, in those first weeks after he returned from the clinic, Angel had simply neglected to remove his clothes for days, preferring instead to lie, fully clothed, on his stomach until it became necessary to change his dressings. He rarely spoke of what had occurred on the preacher’s island, although it consumed his days and drew out his nights.

Louis knew a great deal more about Angel’s past than his partner had learned about his, Angel recognizing in his reticence a reluctance to reveal himself that went beyond mere privacy. But Louis understood, at some minor level, the sense of violation that Angel now felt. Violation, the infliction of pain upon him by someone older and more powerful, should have been left behind long ago, sealed away in a casket filled with hard hands and candy bars. Now, it was as if the seal had been broken and the past was seeping out like foul gas, polluting the present and the future.

Angel was right: Parker should have burned the preacher when he had the chance. Instead, he had chosen some alternative, less certain path, placing his faith in the force of law while a small part of him, the part of him that had killed in the past and would, Louis felt certain, kill again in the future, recognized that the law could never punish a man like Faulkner because his actions went so far beyond anything that the law could comprehend, impacting on worlds gone and worlds yet to exist.

Louis believed that he knew why Parker had acted in the way that he had, knew that he had spared the unarmed preacher’s life because he believed the alternative was to reduce himself to the old man’s level. He had chosen his own first faltering steps toward some form of salvation over the wishes, perhaps even the needs, of his friend, and Louis could not find it in him to blame Parker for this. Even Angel did not blame him: he merely wished that it were otherwise.

But Louis did not believe in salvation, or if he did, he lived his life knowing that its light would not shine upon him. If Parker was a man tormented by his past, then Louis was a man resigned to it, accepting the reality, if not the necessity, of all that he had done and the requirement that, inevitably, a reckoning would have to be endured. Occasionally, he would look back over his life and try to determine the point at which the path had fatally forked, the precise moment in time at which he had embraced the incandescent beauty of brutality. He would picture himself, a slim boy in a houseful of women, with their laughter, their sexual banter, their moments of prayerfulness, of worship, of peace. And then the shadow would fall, and Deber would appear, and the silence would descend.

He did not know how his mother had found such a man as Deber, still less how she had endured his presence, however inconstant, for so long. Deber was small and mean, his dark skin pitted about the cheeks, a relic of shotgun pellets discharged close to his face when he was a boy. He carried a metal whistle on a chain around his neck, and used it to call breaks for the Negro work crews that he supervised. He used it also to impose discipline in the house, to draw the family to supper, to call the boy for chores or punishment, or to summon the boy’s mother to his bed. And she would stop what she was doing and, head low, follow the whistle, and the boy would close his ears to the sound of them coming through the walls.

One day, after Deber had been absent for many weeks and a kind of peace had descended upon the house, he came and took the boy’s mother away, and they never saw her alive again. The last time her son saw his mother’s face, they were closing the casket over her and the mortician’s cosmetics were heavy on the marks beside her eyes and behind her ears. A stranger had killed her, they said, and Deber’s friends had provided him with an alibi that could not be shaken. Deber stood by the casket and accepted the condolences of those too afraid not to show their faces.

But the boy knew, and the women knew. Yet Deber returned to them, a month later, and he led the boy’s aunt into a bedroom that night, and the boy lay awake and listened to the moaning and swearing, the woman whimpering and, once, emitting a yell of pain that was muffled by a pillow to her mouth. And when the moon was still full, dim-shining on the waters beyond the house, he heard a door open and he stole to the window and watched as his aunt descended to the waters, then, hunched over, cleansed herself of the man who now lay sleeping in the bedroom beyond, before she sank down in the still lake and began to cry.

The next morning, when Deber was gone and the women were about their chores, he saw the tangled sheets and the blood upon them, and he made his choice. He was fifteen by then and he knew that the law was not written to protect poor black women. There was an intelligence to him beyond his years and his experience, but something else too, something that he thought Deber had begun to sense because a duller, less sophisticated version of it dwelt within himself. It was a potential for violence, the aptitude for lethality that, many years later, would cause an old man at a gas station to lie for fear of his life. The boy, despite his delicate good looks, represented a burgeoning threat to Deber, and he would have to be dealt with. Sometimes, when Deber returned from his labors and sat on the porch step, carving a stick with his knife, the boy would become conscious of his gaze upon him and, with the foolishness of youth, would hold his stare until Deber smiled and looked away, the knife still in his hand but the knuckles now white as he clenched it in his fist.

One day, the boy watched while Deber stood at the edge of the trees and beckoned to him. He had a curved filleting knife in his hand, and his fingers were red with blood. He had caught him some fish, he said, needed the boy to come help him gut them. But the boy did not go to him and he saw Deber’s face harden as he backed away from him. From around his neck, the man drew his whistle to his mouth and blew. It was the summons. They had all heard it, all responded to it in their time, but on this occasion the boy recognized the finality in it and he did not respond. Instead, he ran.

That night the boy did not return to the house but slept among the trees and allowed the mosquitoes to feed upon him, even as Deber stood upon the porch and blew the whistle emptily, again and again and again, disturbing the stillness of the night with its promise of retribution.

The boy did not go to school the next day, for he was convinced that Deber would come looking for him and take him away as he had taken away his mother, and this time there would be no body to bury, no hymns by the graveside, merely a covering of grass and swamp dirt, and the calling of birds and the scrabbling of animals come to feed. Instead, he remained hidden in the woods, and waited.

Deber had been drinking. The boy smelled it as soon as he entered the house. The bedroom door was open and he could hear the sound of Deber’s snoring. He could kill him now, he thought, cut his throat as he lay sleeping. But they would find him and they would punish him, perhaps punish the women as well. No, the boy thought, better to continue with what he had set out to do.

White eyes grew in the darkness and his aunt, her small breasts bare, stared at him silently. He placed his finger to his lips, then indicated the whistle that lay close by her on the bedside locker. Slowly, so as not to disturb the sleeping man, she reached across his body and gathered up the chain. It made a soft scraping sound on the wood but Deber, deep in his alcoholic sleep, did not move. The boy reached out, and the woman dropped the whistle into his hand. Then he left.

That night, he broke into the school. It was a good school by the standards of this place, unusually well equipped and supported with funds from a local man made good in the city, with a gym and a football field and a small science lab. The boy made his way quietly to the lab and set about assembling the ingredients that he needed: solid iodine crystals, concentrated ammonium hydroxide, alcohol, ether, all staples of even the most basic of school laboratories. He had learned their uses through trial and sometimes painful error, facilitated by petty theft and backed up with voracious reading. He slowly combined the iodine crystals and the ammonium hydroxide to create a brownish red precipitate, then filtered it through paper and washed it, first with alcohol and then with ether. Finally, he wrapped the substance carefully and laid it into a beaker of water. This was nitrogen tri-iodide, a simple compound he had encountered in one of the old chemistry books in the public library.

He used a steamer to separate the metal whistle into its natural halves, then, with wet hands, packed the nitrogen tri-iodide into the sides of the whistle until each was about a quarter full. He replaced the ball of the whistle with a wad of crumpled sandpaper, then carefully glued the two halves of the whistle back together again before returning to the house. His aunt was still awake. She reached out her hand for the whistle, but he shook his head and placed it carefully on the table, smelling Deber’s breath upon him as he did so. As the boy walked away, he smiled to himself. There was, he thought, an aptness to what was about to occur.

The next morning Deber rose early, as he usually did, and left the house carrying the brown paper sack of food that the women always left for him. That day he drove eighty miles to start a new job and the nitrogen tri-iodide was as dry as dust when he put the whistle to his mouth for the last time and blew, the little ball of sandpaper providing the friction required to set off the primitive explosive charge.

They questioned the boy, of course, but he had cleaned the lab and washed his hands in bleach and water to remove all traces of the substances he had handled. And the boy had an alibi: God-fearing women who would swear that the boy had been with them the previous day, that he had never left the house during the night for they would surely have heard him, that Deber had in fact lost the whistle some days before and was desperate for its recovery, regarding it as a totem, a lucky charm. The police held him for a day, beat him halfheartedly to see if he would crack, then let him go, for there were disaffected workers, jealous husbands, and humiliated enemies to pursue in his place.

After all, that was a miniature bomb that had torn Deber’s face apart, designed so that Deber, and Deber alone, would suffer when it exploded. That wasn’t the work of a boy.

Deber died two days later.

It was, folks said, a mercy.

In his room, Louis watched impassively as the late news on cable reported on the discovery of the bodies and a bewildered Virgil Gossard enjoyed his fifteen minutes of fame, his head bandaged and his dried urine still upon his fingers. A police spokeswoman announced that they were following definite leads and a description of the old Ford was given out. Louis’s brow furrowed slightly. They had set fire to the car in a field west of Allendale, then headed on north in the clean Lumina before splitting up at the edge of the city. If found and connected to the killings, the Ford would yield up no evidence, constructed as it was from the cannibalized innards of half a dozen other vehicles and kept ready for fast use and easy disposal. What bothered him was that somebody had seen them leave, in which case a description might follow. Those fears were eased somewhat, but not eradicated entirely, when the spokeswoman announced that they were seeking a black male and at least one other unidentified person in connection with what had occurred.

Virgil Gossard, thought Louis. They should have killed him when they had the chance, but if he was the only witness and all he knew was that one of the men was black then they had little to worry about, although the possibility that the police knew more than they were saying troubled him vaguely. It would be better if he and Angel separated for a time, and the decision brought his thoughts back to the man in the room above him. He lay thinking about him until the streets beyond grew quiet, then left the motel and began to walk.

The phone booth stood five blocks north, in the parking lot behind a Chinese laundry. He dropped in two dollars in quarters, dialed, and heard the phone ring three times at the other end before it was picked up.

‘It’s me. I got something for you to do. There’s a gas station down by the Ogeechee, on sixteen out of Sparta. You can’t miss it, place look like the Teletubbies decorated it. The old guy inside needs to remember to forget the two men that passed through his place yesterday. Man will know what you’re talkin’ about.’

He paused and listened to the voice at the other end of the line.

‘No, it comes to that I’ll do it myself. For now, make sure he understand the consequences if he decide to be a good citizen. Tell him the worms don’t make no distinction between good and bad meat. Then find a man called Virgil Gossard, a regular local celebrity by now. Buy him a drink, see what he knows about what went down. Find out what he saw. When you’re done and back you call me, then check your messages for the next week. I got something else I may need you for.’

With that, Louis hung up the phone, removed the cloth from his hand, and used it to wipe down the phone keys. Then, head low, he walked back to the motel and lay awake until the passing cars grew sparse and a stillness descended on the world.

And so these two remained in their separate rooms, apart but somehow together, barely thinking about the men who had died at their hands that night. Instead, one reached out to the other and wished him peace, and that peace was granted, temporarily, by sleep.

But true peace would require a sacrifice.

Already, Louis had some idea of how that sacrifice might be achieved.

Far to the north, Cyrus Nairn was enjoying his first night of freedom.

He had been released from Thomaston that morning, his possessions contained in a black plastic garbage bag. His clothes still fitted him no better or no worse than they ever had, for incarceration had made little impact on Cyrus’s crooked body. He stood outside the walls and looked back at the prison. The voices were silent so he knew that Leonard was there with him, and he felt no fear at the sight of the things that crowded along the walls, their huge wings drawn back against their bodies, their dark eyes watchful. Instead, he reached behind his back and imagined that he felt, at either side of his curved spine, the first swellings of those great wings upon his own body.

Cyrus made his way to Thomaston’s main street and ordered a Coke and a doughnut in the diner, pointing silently at the items that he wanted. A couple at a nearby table stared at him, then looked away when he caught their eye, his demeanor giving him away as much as the black bag at his feet. He ate and drank quickly, for even a simple Coke tasted better outside those walls, then gestured for a refill and waited for the diner to empty. Presently, he found himself alone, with only the women behind the counter to cast the odd anxious glance in his direction.

Shortly after midday, a man entered and took the table next to Cyrus. He ordered a coffee, read his newspaper, then departed, leaving the newspaper behind. Cyrus reached out for it and pretended to read the front page, then dropped it back on his own table. The envelope concealed within the newspaper’s folds slid into his hand with only the gentlest of jingles, and from there, into the pocket of his jacket. Cyrus left $4 for his food on the table, then walked quickly from the diner.

The car was an anonymous, two-year-old Nissan Maxima. Inside the glove compartment was a map, a piece of paper with two addresses and a telephone number written upon it, and a second envelope, containing $1,000 in used bills and a set of keys for a trailer located in a park near Westbrook. Cyrus memorized the addresses and the number, then disposed of the paper by masticating it into a wet ball and dropping it down a drain, as he had been instructed to do.

Finally, he leaned down and felt beneath the passenger seat with his hand. He ignored the gun taped into place and instead allowed his fingers to brush the blade once, twice, before he raised them to his nostrils and sniffed.

Clean, he thought. Nice and clean.

Then he turned the car and headed south, just as the voice came to him.

Happy, Cyrus?

Happy, Leonard.

Very happy.

14

I looked at myself in the mirror.

My eyes were bloodshot and there was a red rash across my neck. I felt like I’d been drinking the night before: my movements were out of sync and I kept bumping into the furniture in the room. My temperature was still above normal and my skin was clammy to the touch. I wanted to crawl back into bed and pull the covers up over my head, but I didn’t have that luxury. Instead, I made coffee in my room and watched the news. When the Caina story came on, I put my head in my hands and let my coffee go cold. A long time went by before I felt certain enough of myself to start working the phone.

According to a man named Randy Burris at the South Carolina Department of Corrections, the Richland County Detention Center was one of a number of institutions participating in a scheme involving former prisoners who preached the gospel to those still incarcerated. The program, called F.A.R. (Forgiveness and Renewal) and run out of Charleston, was an outreach ministry similar to the T.H.U.G. (True Healing Under God) program that was trying to help inmates in the north of the state by using ex-offenders to convince others not to reoffend. In South Carolina, about 30 per cent of the ten thousand inmates released each year ended up back behind bars within three years, so it was in the interest of the state to support the ministry in whatever way it could. The man named Tereus – his only given name – was a recent recruit to F.A.R. and, according to one of the administrators, a woman named Irene Jakaitis, the only one of its members to opt for a ministry as far north as Richland. The warden at Richland told me that Tereus had spent most of his time at the prison counseling Atys Jones. Tereus now had an address in a rooming house off King Street close by the Wha Cha Like gospel store. Prior to that, he had lived in one of the city’s charity hostels while he searched for a job, The rooming house was about a five-minute ride from my hotel.

The tourist buses were making their way along King as I drove, and the spiel of the guides carried above the noise of passing cars. King has always been Charleston’s center of commerce, and down by Charleston Place there are some pretty nice stores aimed mostly at the out-of-towners. But as you head north, the stores become more practical, the restaurants a little more homely. There are more black faces, and more weeds on the sidewalks. I passed Wha Cha Like and Honest John’s TV Repair and Record Store. Three young white men in gray dress uniforms, cadets from the Citadel, marched silently along the sidewalk, their very existence a reminder of the city’s past, for the Citadel owed its beginnings to the failed slave revolt of Denmark Vesey and the city’s belief that a well-fortified arsenal was necessary to guard against future uprisings. I stopped to let them cross then turned left onto Morris Street and parked across from the Morris Street Baptist Church. An old black man watched me from where he sat on the steps leading up to the side porch of Tereus’s home, eating what looked like peanuts from a brown paper bag. He offered the bag to me as I approached the steps.

‘Goober?’

‘No thanks.’ Goobers were peanuts boiled in their shells. You sucked them for a time, then cracked them open to eat the nuts inside, made soft and hot by their time spent in the water.

‘You allergic?’

‘No.’

‘You watching your weight?’

‘No.’

‘Then take a damn goober.’

I did as I was told, even though I didn’t care much for peanuts. The nut was so hot I had to pout and suck in air in order to cool my mouth down.

‘Hot,’ I said.

‘What you expect? I done tole you it was a goober.’

He peered at me like I was kind of slow. He might have been right.

‘I’m looking for a man called Tereus.’

‘He ain’t home.’

‘You know where I might find him?’

‘Why you lookin’ for him?’

I showed him my ID.

‘You a long ways from home,’ he said. ‘Long ways.’ He still hadn’t told me where I might find Tereus.

‘I don’t mean him any harm, and I don’t want to cause him trouble. He helped a young man, a client of mine. Anything Tereus can tell me might make the difference between living and dying for this kid.’

The old man eyed me up for a time. He had no teeth, and his lips made a wet sucking sound as he worked on the nut in his mouth.

‘Well, living and dying, that’s pretty serious,’ he said, with just a hint of mockery. He was probably right to yank my chain a little. I sounded like a character from an afternoon soap.

‘I sound overdramatic?’

‘Some,’ he nodded. ‘Some.’

‘Well, it’s still pretty bad. It’s important that I talk to Tereus.’

With that, the shell softened enough for him to bite through to the nut inside. He spit the remnants carefully into his hand.

‘Tereus work down at one of them titty bars off Meeting,’ he said, grinning. ‘Don’t take off his clothes, though.’

‘That’s reassuring.’

‘He cleans up,’ he continued. ‘Man’s a jizz mopper.’

He cackled and slapped his thigh, then gave me the name of the club: LapLand. I thanked him.

‘Can’t help but notice that you still suckin’ on that goober,’ he said, as I was about to leave him.

‘To be honest, I don’t like peanuts,’ I confessed.

‘I knowed that,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to see if you had the good manners to accept what was offered you.’

I discreetly spat the peanut into my hand and tossed it in the nearest trash can, then left him laughing to himself.

The city of Charleston’s sporting fraternity had been out celebrating since the day I had arrived in the city. That weekend, the South Carolina Gamecocks had ended a twenty-one-game losing streak by beating New Mexico State 31–0 in front of almost eighty-one thousand victory-starved supporters who hadn’t had a reason to cheer for more than two years, not since the Gamecocks beat Ball State 38–20. Even quarterback Phil Petty, who for the whole of last season hadn’t looked like he could lead a group of old people in a conga line, headed two touchdown drives and completed ten of eighteen for eighty-seven yards. The sad cluster of strip joints and gentlemen’s clubs on Pittsburg Avenue had probably made a real killing from the celebrants over the last few days. One of the clubs offered a nude car wash (hey, practical and fun!) while another made a hopeful play for class punters by denying access to anyone in jeans or sneakers. It didn’t look like LapLand had any such scruples. Its parking lot was pitted with water-filled holes around which a handful of cars had conspired to arrange themselves without losing a wheel in the mire. The club itself was a single-story concrete slab painted in varying shades of blue – porn blue, sad stripper blue, cold skin blue – with a black steel door at its center. From inside came the muffled sound of Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.’ BTO in a strip joint had to be a sign that the place was in trouble.

Inside it was dark as a Republican donor’s motives, apart from a strip of pink light along the bar and the flashing bulbs that illuminated the small central stage, where a girl with chicken legs and orange-peel thighs waved her small breasts at a handful of rapt drunks. One of them slipped a dollar bill into her stocking, then took the opportunity to press his hand between her legs. The girl moved away from him but nobody tried to drag him outside and kick him in the head for touching the dancer. LapLand clearly encouraged a more than average amount of customer-artiste interaction.

Over by the bar, two women dressed in lace bras and G-strings sat drinking sodas through straws. As I tried to avoid tripping over a table in the gloom, the elder of the two, a black woman with heavy breasts and long legs, moved toward me.

‘I’m Lorelei. Get you somethin’, sugar?’

‘Soda is fine. And something for yourself.’

I handed her a ten and she wiggled her hips at me as she walked away. ‘I be right back,’ she assured me.

True to her word, she materialized a minute later with a warm soda, her own drink, and no change.

‘Expensive here,’ I said. ‘Who’d have thought it?’

Lorelei reached across and laid her hand on the inside of my thigh, then moved her fingers across it, allowing the back of her hand to glance against my crotch.

‘You get what you pay for,’ she said. ‘And then some.’

‘I’m looking for somebody,’ I said.

‘Sugar, you found her,’ she breathed, in what passed for an approximation of sexy if you were paying for it by the hour, and paying cheap. It seemed like LapLand was flirting perilously with prostitution. She leaned in closer, allowing me to peer at her breasts if I chose. Like a good Boy Scout, I looked away and counted the bottles of cheap, watery liquor above the bar.

‘You ain’t watchin’ the show,’ she said.

‘High blood pressure. My doctor warned me not to get overexcited.’

She smiled and dragged a fingernail across my hand. It left a white mark. I glanced up at the stage and found myself looking at the girl from an angle even her gynecologist probably hadn’t explored. I left her to it.

‘You like her?’ Lorelei asked, indicating the dancer.

‘She seems like a fun girl.’

‘I can be a fun girl. You lookin’ for fun, sugar?’ The back of her hand pressed harder against me. I coughed and discreetly moved her hand back onto her own chair.

‘No, I’m good.’

‘Well, I’m baaaad  . . .’

This was getting kind of monotonous. Lorelei seemed to be some kind of double entendre machine.

‘I’m not really a fun kind of guy,’ I told her. ‘If you catch my drift.’

It was as if a pair of transparent shutters had descended over her eyes. There was intelligence in those eyes too: not merely the low cunning of a woman turning tricks in a dying strip joint but something clever and alive. I wondered how she kept the two sides of her character apart without one seeping into the other and poisoning it forever.

‘I catch it. What are you? You’re not a cop. Process server, maybe, or a debt collector. You got that look about you. I should know, I’ve seen it enough.’

‘What look would that be?’

‘The look that says you’re bad news for poor folks.’ She paused and reappraised me for a second. ‘No, on second thoughts, I reckon you’re bad news for just about everybody.’

‘Like I said, I’m looking for somebody.’

‘Go fuck yourself.’

‘I’m a private detective.’

‘Oooh, look at the bad man. Can’t help you, sugar.’

She began to move away, but I gripped her wrist gently and placed two more tens on the table. She stopped and waved to the bartender, who had begun to sense trouble and was moving to alert the gorilla at the door. He went back to polishing glasses but kept a discreet eye on our table.

‘Wow, two dimes,’ said Lorelei. ‘I be able to buy me a whole new outfit.’

‘Two, if you stick with the kind you’re wearing.’

I said it without sarcasm, and a small smile broke through the pack ice on her face. I showed her my license. She picked it up and examined it closely before tossing it back on the table.

‘Maine. Looks like you the real deal. Congratulations.’ She made a move for the bills but my hand was quicker.

‘Uh-uh. Talk first, then the money.’

She glanced back at the bar, then slid reluctantly into the chair. Her eyes bored a hole through the back of my hand to the notes beneath.

‘I’m not here to cause trouble. I just want to ask some questions. I’m looking for a man named Tereus. You know if he’s here?’

‘What you lookin’ him for?’

‘He helped a client of mine. I wanted to thank him.’

She laughed humorlessly. ‘Yeah, right. You got a reward, you give it to me. I’ll pass it on. Don’t fuck with me, mister. I may be sittin’ here with my titties hangin’ out, but don’t mistake me for no fool.’

I leaned back. ‘I don’t think you’re a fool, and Tereus did help a client of mine. He spoke to him in jail. I just want to know why.’

‘He found the Lord, that’s why. He even tried to convert some of the johns who come in here, till Handy Andy threatened to beat him upside the head.’

‘Handy Andy?’

‘He runs this place.’ She made a gesture with her hand as of a man slapping someone across the back of the head. ‘You get me?’

‘I get you.’

‘You gonna cause that man more trouble? He done had his share. He don’t need no more.’

‘No trouble. I just want to talk.’

‘Then give me the twenty. Go outside and wait around back. He’ll be out soon enough.’

For a moment I held her eyes and tried to find out if she was lying. I couldn’t be sure but I still released the bills. She grabbed them, slipped them into her bra, and walked away. I saw her exchange a few words with the bartender then pass through a door marked ‘Dancers and Guests Only.’ I knew what was behind it: a dingy dressing room, a bathroom with a busted lock, and a couple of rooms equipped with nothing more than chairs, some rubbers, and a box of tissues. Maybe she wasn’t so intelligent after all.

The dancer onstage finished her set, then picked up her discarded underwear and headed for the bar. The bartender announced the next dancer, and her place was taken by a small, dark-haired girl with sallow skin. She looked about sixteen. One of the drunks whooped with delight as Britney begged to be hit one more time.

Outside, it was beginning to rain, droplets distorting the shapes of the cars and the colors of the sky reflected in the puddles on the ground. I followed the wall around to where a Dumpster stood half full of trash next to some empty beer kegs and stacks of crated bottles. I heard footsteps behind me and turned to find a man who most certainly wasn’t Tereus. This guy was six four and built like a quarterback, with a domed, shaved head and small eyes. He was probably in his late twenties. A single gold ring glittered in his left ear, and he had a wedding band on one of his big fingers. The rest of him was lost beneath a baggy blue sweatshirt and a pair of gray sweatpants.

‘Whoever you are, you got ten seconds to get the fuck off my property,’ he said.

I sighed. It was raining and I didn’t have an umbrella. I didn’t even have a coat. I was standing in the parking lot of a third-rate strip joint being threatened by a woman beater. Under the circumstances, there was only one thing to do.

‘Andy,’ I said. ‘You don’t remember me?’

His brow furrowed. I took one step forward, my hands open, and drove the toe of my right foot as hard as I could between his legs. He didn’t let out a sound, apart from the rush of air and spittle that shot from his lips as he collapsed to the ground. His head touched the gravel and he started to retch.

‘You won’t forget me again.’

There was the bulge of a gun at his back and I removed it from his waistband. It was a stainless steel Beretta. It looked like it had never been used. I tossed it in the Dumpster, then helped Handy Andy to his feet and left him leaning against the wall, his bald head speckled with raindrops and the knees and shins of his sweatpants soaked with filthy water. When he had recovered a little, he placed his hands on his knees and glared at me.

‘You want to try that again?’ he whispered.

‘Nope,’ I answered. ‘It only works once.’

‘What do you do for an encore?’

I removed the big Smith 10 from its holster and let him take a good look at it.

‘Encore. Curtain down. Theater closed.’

‘Big man with a gun.’

‘I know. Look at me.’

He tried to stand upright, thought better of it, and kept his head down instead.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘this doesn’t have to be difficult. I talk, I go away. End of story.’

He thought about what I’d said.

‘Tereus?’ He seemed to be having trouble speaking. I wondered if I’d kicked him too hard.

‘Tereus,’ I agreed.

‘That’s all?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Then you go away and you never come back?’

‘Probably.’

He staggered away from the wall and made for the back door. He opened it, the volume of the music immediately increasing, then seemed about to disappear inside. I stopped him by whistling at him and jogging the Smith.

‘Just call him,’ I said, ‘then take a walk.’ I gestured to where Pittsburg disappeared into warehouses and green grass. ‘Over there.’

‘It’s raining.’

‘It’ll stop.’

Handy Andy shook his head, then called into the darkness. ‘Tereus, get your ass out here.’

He held the door as a lean man appeared on the step beside him. He had black negroid hair and dark olive skin. It was almost impossible to tell his race, but the striking combination of features marked him out as a member of one of those strange ethnic groups that seemed to proliferate in the south: Brass Ankle, maybe, or an Appalachian Melungeon, a group of ‘free people of color’ with a mixture of black, Native American, British, and even Portuguese blood, a dash of Turkish reputedly thrown in to confuse the issue even more. A white T-shirt hugged the long thin muscles on his arms and the curve of his pectorals. He was at least fifty years old and taller than I was, but there was no stoop to him, no sign of weakness or disintegration apart from the tinted glasses that he wore. The cuffs of his jeans had been turned up almost to the middle of his shins and he wore plastic sandals on his feet. In his hand was a mop, and I could smell it from where I stood. Even Handy Andy took a step back.

‘Damn head again?’

Tereus nodded, looked from Andy to me, then back to Andy again.

‘Man wants to talk to you. Don’t take too long.’ I stepped aside as Andy slowly walked toward me, then proceeded onto the road. He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one as he walked gingerly away, holding the glowing end toward his palm to shelter it from the rain.

Tereus descended onto the pitted tarmac of the yard. He seemed composed, almost distant.

‘My name’s Charlie Parker,’ I said. ‘I’m a private detective.’

I reached out my hand but he didn’t take it. In explanation he pointed to the mop. ‘You don’t want to shake hands with me, suh, not now.’

I gestured to his feet. ‘Where’d you do your time?’

There were marks around his ankles, circular abrasions as if the skin had been rubbed away to such a degree that it could never be restored to its former smoothness. I knew what those marks were. Only leg irons could leave them.

‘Limestone,’ he said. His voice was soft.

‘Alabama. Bad place to do time.’

Ron Jones, Alabama’s commissioner of corrections, had reintroduced chain gangs in 1996: ten hours breaking limestone in one hundred degree heat, five days each week, the nights spent with four hundred other inmates in Dorm 16, an overcrowded cattle shed originally built for two hundred. The first thing an inmate on the chain gang did was to remove his laces from his boots and tie them around the irons to prevent the metal from rubbing against his ankles. But somebody had taken Tereus’s laces and kept them from him for a long time, long enough to leave permanent scarring on his flesh.

‘Why’d they take away your laces?’

He gazed down at his feet. ‘I refused to work the gang,’ he said. ‘I’ll be a prisoner, do prisoner’s work, but I won’t be no slave. They tied me to a hitching post in the sun from five A.M. to sunset. They had to drag me back to Sixteen. I lasted five days. After that, I couldn’t take no more. To remind me of what I’d done, gunbull took away my laces. That was in ninety-six. I got paroled a few weeks back. I spent a lot of time without laces.’

He spoke matter-of-factly, but he fingered the cross around his neck as he spoke. It was a replica of the one that he had given to Atys Jones. I wondered if his cross contained a blade as well.

‘I’ve been employed by a lawyer. His name is Elliot Norton. He’s representing a young man you met in Richland: Atys Jones.’

At the mention of Atys, Tereus’s attitude changed. It reminded me of the woman in the club when it became clear that I wasn’t going to pay for her services. Seemed like I had ended up paying anyway.

‘You know Elliot Norton?’ I asked.

‘Know of him. You’re not from around here?’

‘No, I’ve come from Maine.’

‘That’s a long way to travel. How come you ended up working way down here?’

‘Elliot Norton is a friend of mine, and nobody else seemed keen to get involved in this case.’

‘You know where the boy at?’

‘He’s safe.’

‘No, he’s not.’

‘You gave him a cross, just like the one you wear around your neck.’

‘You must have faith in the Lord. The Lord will protect you.’

‘I’ve seen the cross. Seems like you decided to help the Lord along.’

‘Jail is a dangerous place for a young man.’

‘That’s why we got him out.’

‘You should have left him there.’

‘We couldn’t protect him there.’

‘You can’t protect him anywhere.’

‘So what do you suggest?’

‘Give him to me.’

I kicked at a pebble on the ground and watched as it bounced into a puddle. I could see my reflection, already distorted by the rain, ripple even more, and for a moment I disappeared in the dark waters, fragments of myself carried away to its farthest edges.

‘I think you know that’s not going to happen, but I’d like to know why you went to Richland. Did you go there specifically to contact Atys Jones?’

‘I knew his momma, and his sister. Lived close by them, down by the Congaree.’

‘They disappeared.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You know what might have happened to them?’

He didn’t reply. Instead, he released his grip on the cross and walked toward me. I didn’t step back. There was no threat to me from this man.

‘You ask questions for a living, don’t you, suh?’

‘I guess so.’

‘What questions you been asking Mr. Norton?’

I waited. There was something going on here that I didn’t understand, some gap in my knowledge that Tereus was trying to fill.

‘What questions should I ask?’

‘You should ask him what happened to that boy’s momma and aunt.’

‘They disappeared. He showed me the cuttings.’

‘Maybe.’

‘You think they’re dead?’

‘You got this the wrong way round, suh. Maybe they dead, but they ain’t disappeared.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Maybe they dead,’ he repeated, ‘but they ain’t gone from Congaree.’

I shook my head. This was the second time in less than twenty-four hours that somebody had spoken to me of ghosts in the Congaree. But ghosts didn’t take rocks and use them to beat in the heads of young women. Around us, the rain had stopped and the air seemed cooler. To my left, I saw Handy Andy approaching from the road. He took one look at me, shrugged resignedly, then lit another cigarette and started back the way he had come.

‘You know about the White Road, suh?’

Distracted momentarily by Andy, I now found Tereus almost face-to-face with me. I could smell cinnamon on his breath. Instinctively, I moved away from him.

‘No. What is it?’

He looked once again at his feet, and the marks on his ankles.

‘On the fifth day,’ he said, ‘after they tied me to the hitching post, I saw the White Road. The blacktop shimmered and then it was like somebody had turned the world inside out. Dark became light, black became white. And I saw the road before me, and the men working, breaking rocks, and the gunbulls spitting chewing tobacco on the dirt.’

He was talking now like an Old Testament preacher, his mind filled with the vision he had seen, near crazy beneath the burning sun, his body sagging against the wood, the ropes tearing into his skin.

‘And I saw the others too. I saw figures moving between them, women and children, old and young, and men with nooses around their necks and gunshots to the body. I saw soldiers, and the night riders, and women in fine, fine dresses. I saw them all, suh, the living and the dead, side by side together on the White Road. We think they gone, but they waiting. They beside us all the time, and they don’t rest till justice come. That’s the White Road, suh. It’s the place where justice is made, where the living and the dead walk together.’

With that, he removed the tinted glasses that he wore, and I saw that his eyes had been altered, perhaps by their exposure to the sun, the bright blue of the pupils dulled, the irises overlaid with white, as if a spiderweb had been cast upon them.

‘You don’t know it yet,’ he whispered, ‘but you on the White Road now, and you best not step off it, because the things waiting in the woods, they worse than anything you can imagine.’

This wasn’t getting me anywhere – I wanted to know more about the Jones sisters, and about Tereus’s reasons for approaching Atys – but at least Tereus was talking.

‘And did you see them too, the things in the woods?’

He seemed to consider me for a time. I thought he might be trying to figure out whether or not I was mocking him, but I was wrong.

‘I saw them,’ he said. ‘They was like black angels.’

He wouldn’t tell me anything more, at least nothing useful. He had known the Jones family, had watched the children grow up, watched as Addy was made pregnant at the age of sixteen by a drifter who was also screwing her mother, giving birth nine months later to a son, Atys. The drifter’s name was Davis Smoot. His friends called him Boot on account of the leather cowboy boots he liked to wear. But I knew this already, because Randy Burris had told me all about it, just as he had told me how Tereus had served nearly twenty years in Limestone for killing Davis Smoot in a bar in Gadsden.

Handy Andy was coming back, and this time he didn’t look like he was planning on taking another long walk. Tereus picked up his bucket and mop in preparation for a return to his labors.

‘Why did you kill Davis Smoot, Tereus?’

I wondered if he was going to make some expression of regret, or tell me how he was no longer the man who had taken the life of another, but he made no attempt to explain away his crime as a mistake from his past.

‘I asked him for his help. He turned me down. We got to arguing and he pulled a knife on me. Then I killed him.’

‘What help did you ask from him?’

Tereus raised his hand, and shook it from side to side in the negative. ‘That’s between him and me and the good Lord. You ask Mr. Norton, and maybe he’ll be able to tell you how come I was looking for old Boot.’

‘Did you tell Atys that you were his father’s killer?’

He shook his head. ‘Now why would I do somethin’ dumb as that?’

With that, he replaced his glasses on the bridge of his nose, hiding those damaged eyes, and left me standing in the rain.

15

I called Elliot from my hotel room later that afternoon. He sounded tired. He wasn’t going to get too much sympathy from me.

‘Bad day at the office?’

‘I got the justice blues. You?’

‘Just a bad day.’ I didn’t mention Tereus to Elliot, mainly because I hadn’t learned anything useful from him as yet, but I had checked two more of the witness statements after I left LapLand. One was a second cousin of Atys Jones, a God-fearing man who didn’t approve of the lifestyles of Atys or of his missing mother and aunt, but who liked to hang around dive bars to give himself something to get offended by. A neighbor told me he was most likely back at the Swamp Rat, and that was where I found him. He recalled Atys and Marianne Larousse leaving and was still at the bar, praying for all sinners over a double, when Atys reappeared with blood and dust on his face and hands.

The Swamp Rat stood at the end of Cedar Creek Road, close to the edge of the Congaree. It wasn’t much to look at, inside or out, an eyesore of cinder blocks and corrugated iron, but it had a good jukebox and was the kind of place that rich kids went to when they wanted to flirt a little with danger. I walked through the trees surrounding it and found the small clearing where Marianne Larousse had died. There was still crime scene tape dangling from the trees, but there was no other sign that she had lost her life here. I could hear Cedar Creek flowing close by. I followed it west for a time, then headed back north, hoping to intersect with the trail that led back to the bar. Instead, I found myself at a rusted fence, dotted at intervals with ‘Private Property’ signs announcing that the land was owned by Larousse Mining Inc. Through the mesh I could see fallen trees, sunken ground, and patches of what looked like limestone. This section of the coastal plain was littered with limestone deposits; in places, the acidic groundwater had percolated through the limestone, reacting with it and dissolving it. The result was the kind of karst landscape visible through the mesh, riddled with sinkholes, small caves, and underground rivers.

I followed the fence for a time, but found no gap. It began to rain again, and I was soaked through once more by the time I got back to the bar. The bartender didn’t know much about the Larousse land, except that he thought it might once have been the site of a proposed limestone quarry that had never been developed. The government had made offers on it to the Larousses in an effort to extend the state park, but they’d never been taken up.

The other witness was a woman named Euna Schillega, who had been shooting pool in the Swamp Rat when Atys and Marianne had entered the bar. She recalled the racist abuse directed at Atys and confirmed the times that they had arrived and left. She knew because, well, because the man she was shooting pool with was the man she was seeing behind her husband’s back, you know what I mean, hon, and she was keeping a close eye on the time so that she’d be home before he finished his evening shift. Euna had long red hair, tinted to the color of strawberry jelly, and a small tongue of fat jutted over the lip of her faded jeans. She was saying good-bye to her forties, but in her mind she was only half as old and twice as pretty.

Euna worked part-time as a waitress in a bar near Horrel Hill. A couple of servicemen from Fort Jackson were sitting in a corner sipping beers and sweating gently in the afternoon heat. They were sitting as close as they could to the AC but it was nearly as old as Euna. The army boys would have been better off blowing air at each other over the edges of their cold bottles.

Euna was about the most cooperative of the witnesses to whom I’d spoken so far. Maybe she was bored and I was providing a distraction. I didn’t know her, and I didn’t imagine that I was going to, but I guessed that the pool player was probably a distraction too, the latest in a long line of distractions. There was something restless about Euna, a kind of roving hunger fueled by frustration and disappointment. It was there in the way she held herself as she spoke, the way her eyes wandered lazily across my face and body as if she were figuring out which parts to use and which to discard.

‘Did you see Marianne Larousse in the bar before that night?’ I asked her.

‘Couple of times. Seen her in here too. She was a rich girl, but she liked to slum it some.’

‘Who was she with?’

‘Other rich girls. Rich boys, sometimes.’

She gave a little shudder. It might have been distaste, or perhaps something more pleasurable.

‘You got to watch their hands. Those boys, they think their money buys them beer but their tip buys them mining rights, you get my meaning.’

‘I take it that it doesn’t.’

Remembered hunger flashed in her eyes, then was softened by the memory of her appetite’s satiation. She took a long drag on her cigarette.

‘Not every time.’

‘You ever see her with Atys Jones before that night?’

‘Once, but not in here. It ain’t that kind of place. It was back at the Swamp Rat. Like I said, I go there some.’

‘How did they look to you?’

‘They weren’t touching or nothing, but I could tell they was together. I guess other folks could too.’

She let her last words hang.

‘There was trouble?’

‘Not then. Next night she was back in here and her brother came looking for her.’ Again there was a shudder, but this time her feelings were clear.

‘You don’t like him?’

‘I don’t know him.’

‘But?’

She looked around casually, then leaned in slightly closer across the bar. The action forced her shirt open a little, exposing the sweep of her breasts and their dusting of freckles.

‘The Larousses keep a lot of folks in jobs around here, but that don’t mean we got to like them, Earl Jr. least of all. There’s something about him, like . . . like he’s a faggot but not a faggot? Don’t get me wrong, I like all men, even the ones that don’t like me, you know, physically and all, but not Earl Jr. There’s just something about him.’

She took another drag on her cigarette. It was almost gone after three puffs.

‘So Earl Jr. came into the bar looking for Marianne?’

‘That’s right. Took her by the arm and tried to drag her out. She slapped him, then this other fella came forward and together they managed to get her out.’

‘Do you remember when this happened?’

‘About a week before she was killed.’

‘You think they knew about her relationship with Atys Jones?’

‘Like I said, other folks knew about it. If they knew, it would get back to her family in the end.’

The door behind me opened, and a group of men entered, shouting and laughing. It was the start of the evening rush.

‘I got to go, hon,’ said Euna. She had already declined to sign a written statement.

‘Just one more question: did you recognize the man with Earl Jr. that night?’

She thought for a moment. ‘Sure. He’s been in here once or twice before. He’s a piece of shit. His name is Landron Mobley.’

I thanked her, and left a twenty on the bar to cover my OJ and her time. She gave me her best smile.

‘Don’t take this wrong, hon,’ said Euna as I stood to leave, ‘but that boy you’re trying to help deserves what he got coming.’

‘Lot of people seem to think that way.’

She blew a steady stream of smoke from her cigarette into the air, pushing out her lower lip as she did so. It was swollen slightly, like it had been bitten recently. The smoke dissipated. I watched it go.

‘He raped and killed that girl,’ continued Euna. ‘I know you got to do what you’re doing, asking questions and all, but I hope you don’t find out nothing to get that boy off.’

‘Even if I find out that he’s innocent?’

She lifted her breasts from the bar and stabbed her cigarette out in the ashtray.

‘Hon, there ain’t nobody innocent in this world except little babies, and sometimes I ain’t even sure about them.’

I told all of this to Elliot over the phone.

‘Maybe you should talk to your client Mobley when you find him, see what he knows.’

‘If I can find him.’

‘You think he’s skipped?’

There was a pause.

‘I hope he’s skipped,’ said Elliot, but when I asked him to explain what he meant he laughed it off. ‘I mean, I think Landron’s facing serious jail time if it goes to trial. In legal terms, Landron’s fucked.’

But that wasn’t what he meant.

That wasn’t what he meant at all.

I showered, then ate in my room. I called Rachel and we spoke for a while. MacArthur had been true to his word in calling by regularly, and Klan Killer was staying out of sight when the cops came by. If Rachel hadn’t quite forgiven me for springing him on her, she seemed to be finding something vaguely reassuring in his presence. He was also clean and didn’t leave the toilet seat up, factors that tended to weigh heavily in Rachel’s formation of opinions about people. MacArthur was due to go out with Mary Mason that evening, and MacArthur had promised to keep Rachel posted. I told her that I loved her, and she told me that if I loved her I’d bring her back chocolates. Sometimes, Rachel was a simple girl.

After we had talked, I called to check on Atys. The woman answered and told me, best that I could understand, that he was a ‘spile chile. Uh yent hab no mo’ pashun wid’um.’ Clearly, she was less sympathetic to Atys’s plight than her husband. I asked her to put Atys on the line. Seconds later, I heard footsteps and he answered.

‘How you doing?’ I asked.

‘Okay, I guess.’ He lowered his voice. ‘The old woman is killin’ me. She’s hard.’

‘Just be nice to her. You got anything more you want to tell me?’

‘No. I done tole you all I can.’

‘And all you know?’

He didn’t speak for so long I thought that he had simply put the phone down and walked away. Then he spoke.

‘You ever feel like you been shadowed all your life, like there’s always someone there with you, someone you can’t see most of the time, but you know, you just know that they’s there?’

I thought of my wife and my daughter, of their presence in my life even after they had gone, of shapes and shadows glimpsed in darkness.

‘I think so,’ I said.

‘The woman, she’s like that. I been seein’ her all my life, so’s I don’t know if I dream her or not, but she’s there. I know she is, even if there ain’t nobody else sees her. That’s all I know. Don’t ask me no more.’

I changed the subject.

‘You ever have a run-in with Earl Larousse Jr.?’

‘No, never.’

‘Landron Mobley?’

‘I heard he was looking for me, but he didn’t find me.’

‘You know why he was looking for you?’

‘To kick the shit out of me. Why you think Earl Jr.’s dog be lookin’ for me?’

‘Mobley worked for Larousse?’

‘He didn’t work for him, but when they needed dirty work done for them they went to Mobley. Mobley had friends, too, people worse than him.’

‘Like?’

I heard him swallow.

‘Like that guy on TV,’ he said. ‘The Klan guy. Bowen.’

That night, far to the north, the preacher, Faulkner, lay awake in his cell, his hands clasped behind his head, and listened to the night sounds of the prison: the snores, the cries from troubled sleepers, the footsteps of the guards, the sobbing. It no longer kept him awake as it had once done. He had quickly learned how to ignore it, reducing it, at worst, to the level of background noise. He could now sleep at will, but this night his thoughts were elsewhere, as they had been since the release of the man named Cyrus Nairn. And so he lay unmoving on his bunk, and waited.

‘Get them off me! Get them off me!’

The prison guard Dwight Anson awoke in his bed, kicking and wrenching at the sheets, the pillow beneath his head soaked with sweat. He leaped from the bed and brushed at his bare skin, trying to remove the creatures that he felt crawling across his chest. Beside him, his wife, Aileen, reached out and switched on the bedside lamp.

‘Jeez, Dwight, you’re dreaming again,’ she said. ‘It’s just a dream.’

Anson swallowed hard and tried to slow down the beating of his heart, but he still found himself shuddering and brushing aimlessly at his hair and arms.

It was the same dream, for the second night running: a dream of spiders crawling across his skin, biting him while he lay constrained in a filthy bathtub in the center of a forest. As the spiders bit him his skin began to rot, the flesh falling from his body in small clumps that left gray hollows in their wake. And all the time he was being watched from the shadows by a strange, emaciated man with red hair and thin white fingers. The man was dead, though: Anson could see his ruined skull illuminated by the moonlight, could pick out the blood on his face. Still, his eyes were alive with pleasure as he watched his pets feeding on the trapped man.

Anson placed his hands on his hips and shook his head.

‘Come back to bed, Dwight,’ said his wife, but he didn’t move, and after a few seconds had elapsed, the disappointment showed in her eyes and she turned over and pretended to go back to sleep. Anson almost reached over to touch her, then decided against it. He didn’t want to touch her. The girl he wanted to touch was missing.

Marie Blair had disappeared on the way home from her job at the Dairy Queen the night before, and had not been seen or heard from since. For a time, Anson half expected the police to come looking for him. Nobody knew about his thing with Marie, or nobody was supposed to know, but there was always the possibility that she had shot off her mouth to one of her dumb-ass friends and that, when the police came calling, they might have mentioned his name. But so far there had been nothing. Anson’s wife had sensed his unease and knew that there was something bothering him, but she hadn’t brought it up and that suited him fine. Still, he was worried for the girl. He wanted her back, as much for his own selfish reasons as for her own sake.

Anson left his unmoving wife and headed down the stairs to the kitchen. It was only when he opened the door of the refrigerator and reached for the milk that he felt the blast of cool air at his back and heard, almost simultaneously, the banging of the screen door against the frame.

The kitchen door was wide open. He supposed that the wind could have blown it open, but he didn’t think it was likely. Aileen had come to bed after him, and she usually made sure that all the doors were locked. It wasn’t like her to forget. He wondered too why they had not heard it banging before now, for even the slightest noise in the house was normally enough to wake him from his sleep. Carefully, he laid down the carton of milk and listened, but he could hear no sound in the house. From out in the yard came the whispering of the wind in the trees, and the sound of distant cars.

Anson kept a Smith & Wesson 60 in his night table. He briefly considered heading back upstairs to retrieve it before deciding against it. Instead, he took the carving knife from its block and padded to the door. He glanced first right, then left, to make sure there was nobody waiting for him outside, then pushed it open. He stood on the porch and looked out on the empty yard. Ahead of him was an expanse of tidy lawn with trees planted at its verge, shielding the house from the road beyond. The moon shone behind him, sending the clean lines of the house racing ahead of him.

Anson stepped out onto the grass.

A figure detached itself from where it had lain beneath the porch steps, the sound of its approach masked by the wind, its shape devoured by the black mass of the house’s shade. Anson was not even aware of its presence until something gripped his arm and he felt a pressure across his throat, followed by a surge of pain as he watched the blood shoot up into the night. The knife fell from his grip and he turned, his left hand pressed uselessly against the wound in his neck. His legs weakened and he fell to his knees, the blood coming less freely now as he began to die.

Anson looked up into the eyes of Cyrus Nairn, and at the ring Nairn was holding in the palm of his hand. It was the garnet ring that Anson had given Marie Blair for her fifteenth birthday. He would have known it anywhere, he thought, even if it hadn’t been circling Marie’s severed forefinger. Then Cyrus Nairn turned away as Anson’s legs began to shake uncontrollably, the moonlight gleaming on the killer’s knife as he made his way to the house, Anson shaking and, at last, dying as Nairn turned his thoughts to the now slumbering Aileen Anson and the place he had prepared for her.

And in his cell at Thomaston, Faulkner closed his eyes and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

16

Magnolia Cemetery lies at the end of Cunnington Street, east of Meeting. Cunnington Street is a virtual cemetery row: here can be found the Old Methodist, the Friendly Union Society, the Brown Fellowship, the Humane and Friendly, the Unity and Friendship. Some are better kept than others but each serves to hold the dead with equal ease; the poor are as well-off as the wealthy, and all make the worms fat.

The dead lie scattered around Charleston, their remains resting beneath the feet of tourists and revelers. The bodies of slaves are now covered by parking lots and convenience stores, and the junction of Meeting and Water marks the site of the old cemetery where the Carolina pirates were buried after their execution. The place in which they were interred was once the low-water mark in the marsh but the city has expanded since then and the hanged men have long since been forgotten, their bones crushed by the foundations of mansions and the streets that run beside them.

But in the cemeteries of Cunnington Street the dead are remembered, in however small a way, and the greatest of these cemeteries is Magnolia. Fish jump in the waters of its lake, watched from the rushes by lazy herons and gray-white wood storks, and a sign warns of a $200 fine for feeding the alligators. Flocks of curious geese throng the narrow road to the offices of the Magnolia Cemetery Trust. Evergreens and wax myrtle shade the stones, and laurel oaks dotted with blood-spot lichen hide crying birds.

The man named Hubert has been coming here for two years. Sometimes, he chooses to sleep among the monuments with rye bread for sustenance and a bottle for comfort. He has learned the ways of the cemetery, the movements of the mourners and the staff. He does not know if his presence is tolerated or merely unnoticed, and he does not care. Hubert keeps himself to himself and he tries to bother others as little as possible in the hope that his quiet existence may continue undisturbed. There have been one or two scares with gators but nothing worse than that, although the gators were bad enough to be getting along with, if you asked Hubert.

Hubert once had a job, and a house, and a wife, until Hubert lost his job and then, in quick succession, lost his house and his wife too. For a time he even lost himself, until he came to in a hospital bed with his legs in plaster casts after a truck sideswiped him out on Route 1 somewhere north of Killian. Since then he has tried to be more careful but he will never return to his former life, despite the efforts of the social workers to establish him in a permanent home. Hubert doesn’t want a permanent home because he is wise enough to understand that there is no such thing as permanency. In the end, Hubert is just waiting, and it doesn’t matter where a man waits as long as he knows what he is waiting for. The thing that is coming for Hubert will find him, wherever he is. It will draw him to itself, and wrap him in its cold, dark blanket, and his name will be added to the roll call of paupers and indigents buried in cheap plots by chain-link fences. That much Hubert knows, and of that alone he is certain.

When the weather grows cold or wet, Hubert walks to the men’s shelter of the Charleston Interfaith Crisis Ministry at 573 Meeting, and if there is a bed available, he fishes in the purse he keeps around his neck and hands over three crumpled dollar bills for a night’s lodging. No one is ever turned away empty-handed from the shelter; at the very least they are given a full supper, toiletries if needed, even clothing. The shelter takes messages and passes on mail, although no one has sent mail to Hubert in a very long time.

It has been many weeks since Hubert last took a bed in the shelter. There have been wet nights since then, nights when the rain soaked him through and left him sneezing for days, but he has not returned to the beds at 573 Meeting, not since the night that he saw the olive-skinned man with the damaged eyes, the strange light that danced before him, and the shape that it assumed.

He had noticed him for the first time in the showers. Hubert doesn’t look at the other men in the showers as a rule. That is a way of attracting attention and maybe trouble to himself, and Hubert doesn’t want that. Hubert isn’t very tall or very strong and he has lost possessions in the past to men more violent than he. He has learned to stay out of their way and not to meet their eyes, which is why he always looks down in the shower, and why the other man first came to his notice.

It was his ankles, and the scarring around them. Hubert had never seen anything like it before. It was as if the man’s feet had been severed from his legs and then crudely reattached, leaving the marks of the stitches as a reminder of what had occurred. It was then that Hubert broke his own rule and glanced up at the man beside him, at his stringy muscles, his frizzy hair, and his strange haunted eyes, semibleached of color and obscured by clouds. He was humming something to himself, and Hubert thought that it might have been a hymn or one of those old Negro spirituals. The words were unclear, but Hubert picked up on some of them.

Walk with me, brother,

Come walk with me, sister,

And we’ll walk, and we’ll walk

On the White Road to—

The man caught Hubert looking at him, and fixed him with a stare.

‘You ready to walk, brother?’ he asked.

And Hubert found himself answering, his voice sounding strange to him as it echoed hollowly from the tiles: ‘Walk where?’

‘On the White Road. Are you ready to walk on the White Road? She’s waiting for you there, brother. She’s watching you.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Hubert.

‘Sure you do, Hubert. Sure you do.’

Hubert turned off the shower and stood back, grabbing his towel from the rail. He didn’t say anything more, even when the man began to laugh and called to him: ‘Hey, brother, you mind your step, now, y’hear? You don’t go stumbling, you don’t go falling. You don’t want to fall down on the White Road, because they folks waiting for you, waiting for you to fall. And when you fall, they going to take you. They going to take you and they going to tear you apart!’

And as Hubert hurried from the showers, the song began again:

Walk with me, brother.

Come walk with me, sister.

And we’ll walk, and we’ll walk

On the White Road together.

That night, Hubert was assigned a cot by the rest rooms. Hubert didn’t mind. His bladder played up sometimes, and he often had to get up two or three times a night to take a leak. But it wasn’t his bladder that caused him to wake that night.

It was the sound of a female voice, crying.

Hubert knew that couldn’t be right. The family shelter was down at 49 Walnut, and that was where the women and children slept. There was no cause for a woman to be in the men’s shelter, but there were men among the homeless whose ways nobody could know, and Hubert didn’t want to think of a woman or, worse, a child being hurt by anybody.

He rose from his bed and followed the noise. It came from the showers, he thought. He recognized the way the voice echoed, recalling the sound of his own voice and the man’s song earlier in the evening. Hubert padded to the entrance and stood there, transfixed. The olive-skinned man was standing before the silent showers, dressed in cotton shorts and an old black T-shirt, his back to the doorway. There was a light shining before him, bathing his face and body in light, although the showers themselves were dark and the fluorescents were off. Hubert found himself moving to catch a better sight of the light source, sliding softly to his right in his bare feet, his eyes straining.

There was a pillar of light before the man, maybe five feet in height. It shifted, flickering like a candle flame, and it seemed to Hubert that there was a figure behind or within it, cocooned in its glow.

It was a little blonde girl. Her face was contorted in pain, her head shaking from side to side in a blur of movement, faster than was humanly possible, and he could hear the sound of her cries, a steady nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh filled with fear and agony and rage. Her clothes were shredded and she was naked from the waist down, her body torn and marked where she had been dragged along the road beneath the wheels of the car.

Hubert knew who she was. Oh yes, Hubert knew. Ruby Blanton, that was her name. Pretty little Ruby Blanton, killed when a guy distracted by his pager hit her as she was crossing the street to her house and dragged her sixty feet beneath the wheels of his car. Hubert recalled her head turning at the last moment, the impact of the hood against her body, the final sight of her eyes before she disappeared under his wheels.

Oh, Hubert knew who she was. He knew for sure.

The man standing before her made no attempt to reach for her, or to console her. Instead, he hummed the song that Hubert had heard for the first time that day.

Walk with me, brother.

Come walk with me, sister.

And we’ll walk, and we’ll walk—

He turned, and something shone behind those blighted eyes as they regarded Hubert.

‘You on the White Road now, brother,’ he whispered. ‘You come see what’s been waiting for you on the White Road.’

He moved aside, and the light advanced toward Hubert, the girl’s head shaking, her eyes closed and the sound pouring from her lips like the steady drip of water.

Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh.

Her eyes opened and Hubert stared into them, his guilt reflected deep within, and he felt himself falling, falling to the clean tiles, falling toward his own reflection.

Falling, falling, to the White Road.

They found him there later, blood pooling from the wound he had opened in his head on impact. A doctor was called, and he asked Hubert about dizzy spells and alcohol consumption and suggested that Hubert should maybe take up the offer of a proper home. Hubert thanked him, then collected his things and left the shelter. The olive-skinned man was already gone and Hubert didn’t see him again, although he found himself looking over his shoulder, and for a time he didn’t sleep in Magnolia, preferring instead to sleep in streets and alleys, among the living.

But now he has returned to the cemetery. It is his place, and the memory of the vision in the showers is almost forgotten, the stain of its recalling papered over with the excuse of alcohol and tiredness and the temperature he had been running since before that night at the shelter.

Hubert sometimes sleeps close to the Stolle grave, marked by the figure of a woman weeping at the foot of a cross. It is sheltered by trees, and from here he can see the road and the lake. Nearby is a flat granite stone covering the resting place of a man named Bennet Spree, a comparatively recent addition to the old cemetery. The plot had been in the ownership of the Spree family for a very long time but Bennet Spree was the last of his line and he had finally claimed the plot as his own when he died in July 1981.

There is a shape lying on Bennet Spree’s stone as Hubert approaches. For a moment he almost turns away, not wanting to argue with another wanderer over territory and not trusting a stranger enough to want to sleep beside him in the cemetery, but something about the form draws him closer. As he nears it a light breeze stirs the trees, dappling the figure with moonlight, and Hubert can see that it is naked and that the shadows that lie on the body are unaltered by the movement of the trees.

There is a ragged wound at the man’s throat, a strange hole, as if something has been inserted into his mouth through the soft flesh beneath his chin. The torso and legs are almost black with blood.

But there are two other things that Hubert notices before he turns and runs.

The first is that the man has been castrated.

The second is the implement that has been thrust into his chest. It is rusted and T-shaped and a note is impaled upon it, the blood from the man’s chest staining it slightly. There is something written on the note in neatly drawn letters.

It reads: DIG HERE.

And they will dig. A judge will be sought and an exhumation order signed, for Bennet Spree has no living relatives to give their consent to the further desecration of his resting place. It will be a day or two before the rotting coffin is lifted from the ground, carefully bound with ropes and plastic so that it does not fall apart and spill Bennet Spree’s mortal remains upon the dark, exposed earth.

And where the coffin had rested for so long they will find a thin sprinkling of earth, and as they move it carefully away bones will be revealed: first the ribs, then the skull, its jawbone shattered, the cranium itself broken, cracks radiating from the ragged holes gouged in it by the blows that killed her.

It is all that is left of a girl on the verge of becoming a woman.

It is all that is left of Addy, the mother of Atys Jones.

And her son will die without ever knowing the final resting place of the woman who brought him into this world.

PART FOUR

When [the angels] descend, they put on the

garment of this world.

If they did not put on a garment befitting this

world

they could not endure in this world

and the world could not endure them.

The Zohar

17

It was almost sunrise.

Cyrus Nairn crouched naked in the dark womb of the hollow. Soon, he would have to leave this place. They would come looking for him, suspecting immediately some form of vendetta against the guard Anson and turning their attention toward those who had most recently been released from Thomaston. Cyrus would be sorry to go. He had spent so long dreaming of being back here, surrounded by the smell of damp earth, root ends caressing his bare back and shoulders. Still, there would be other rewards. He had been promised so much. In return, sacrifices were to be expected.

From outside there came the calling of the first birds, the gentle lapping of the water upon the banks, the buzzing of the last night insects as they fled the approaching light, but Cyrus was deaf to the sounds of life beyond the hole. Instead he remained motionless, conscious only of the noises coming from the loose earth under his feet, both watching and feeling the slight shifting as Aileen Anson struggled beneath the dirt and, finally, grew still.

I was woken up by the telephone ringing in my room. It was 8:15 A.M.

‘Charlie Parker?’ said a male voice that I didn’t recognize.

‘Yeah. Who is this?’

‘You got a breakfast appointment in ten minutes. You don’t want to keep Mr. Wyman waiting.’ He hung up.

Mr. Wyman.

Willie Wyman.

The boss of the Dixie Mafia’s Charleston branch wanted to have breakfast with me.

This was not a good way to start the day.

The Dixie Mafia had existed, in one form or another, since Prohibition, a conglomeration of loosely associated criminals with bases in most of the big Southern cities but particularly Atlanta, Georgia, and Biloxi, Mississippi. They recruited one another for out-of-state jobs: an arson attack in Mississippi might be the work of a firefly from Georgia, or a hit in South Carolina could be farmed out to a contract killer from Maryland. The Dixies were pretty unsophisticated, dealing in drugs, gambling, murder, extortion, robbery, arson. The closest they ever got to white-collar crime was robbing a laundry, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t a force to be reckoned with. In September 1987, the Dixie Mafia had murdered a judge, Vincent Sherry, and his wife, Margaret, at their home in Biloxi. It was never made clear why Sherry and his wife had been shot – there were allegations that Vincent Sherry had been involved in criminal operations through the law offices of Halat and Sherry, and Sherry’s law partner, Peter Halat, was later convicted on charges of racketeering and murder connected to the deaths of the Sherrys – but the reasons behind the murders were largely inconsequential. Men who kill judges are dangerous because they will act before they think. They don’t weigh up the consequence of their actions until after the fact.

In 1983 Paul Mazzell, the then boss of the Charleston branch, was convicted with Eddie Merriman of the murder of Ricky Lee Seagreaves, who had robbed one of Mazzell’s drug deals. Since then, Willie Wyman had been the king in Charleston. He was five four in height and weighed about one hundred pounds in wet clothes, but he was mean and cunning and capable of doing just about anything to maintain his position. At 8:30 A.M., he was sitting at a table by the wall in Charleston Place’s main dining room, eating bacon and eggs. There was one other empty chair at the table. Nearby, four men sat in two pairs at separate tables, keeping watch over Willie, the door, and me.

Willie had short, very dark hair, deeply tanned skin, and was wearing a bright blue shirt and blue chinos. The shirt was decorated with small white clouds. He looked up at me as I approached the table and waved his fork to indicate that I should join him. One of his men seemed about to frisk me but Willie, conscious of operating in a public place, waved him away.

‘We don’t need to frisk you, do we?’

‘I’m not armed.’

‘Good. I don’t think the people at Charleston Place would appreciate their breakfast tables being all shot up. You want to order? It’s on you.’ He grinned humorlessly.

I ordered coffee, juice, and toast from the waitress. Willie finished devouring his food and wiped his mouth on a napkin.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘to business. I hear you kicked Andy Dalitz’s nuts so far up his tubes that he can scratch them by sticking his fingers in his mouth.’

He waited for a reply. Under the circumstances, it seemed wise to oblige.

‘LapLand’s your place?’ I said.

‘One of them. Look, I know Andy Dalitz is a moron. Hell, I’ve wanted to kick him in the nuts for as long as I’ve known him, but the guy’s got three fucking Adam’s apples now because of you. Maybe he had it coming, I don’t know. All I’m saying is that if you want to visit one of our clubs, then you should ask, and ask nice. Kicking the manager so hard that he can taste his balls in his mouth is not asking nice.

‘And I got to tell you: if you’d done that in public, in front of customers or the girls, then we’d be having a very different conversation now. Because if you make Andy look bad, then you make me look bad, and the next thing you know I have guys thinking maybe my time has come and I should make way for somebody new. Then I have two choices: I either convince them that they’re wrong, and then I got to find somewhere to put them and we waste a day driving around with them stinking up the trunk until we find a place, or else I’m the one stinking up the trunk and between you and me, that’s not gonna happen. We clear?’

My coffee, OJ, and toast arrived. I poured the coffee and offered Willie the option of a fresh refill. He accepted, and thanked me. He was nothing if not polite.

‘We’re clear,’ I assured him.

‘I know all about you,’ he said. ‘You could screw up paradise. The only reason you’re still alive is that even God doesn’t want you near Him. I hear you’re working with Elliot Norton on the Jones case. Is there something I need to know here, because that case stinks like my kid’s diapers? Andy told me you wanted to speak to the half-breed, Tereus.’

‘Is that what he is?’

‘The fuck am I, his cousin?’ He relented a little. ‘His people came from Kentucky way back, is all I know. Who knows who they were fucking out there? There are people in those mountains who are maybe half fucking goat because their daddies got an itch at a bad time. Even the blacks don’t want nothing to do with Tereus or his kind. Lesson over. Give me something.’

I didn’t have any choice but to tell him something of what I knew.

‘Tereus visited Atys Jones in jail. I wanted to know why.’

‘You find out?’

‘I think Tereus knew the family. Plus he’s found Jesus.’

Willie looked unhappy, although not terminally so.

‘That’s what he told Andy. I figure Jesus should be more careful about who finds Him. I know you’re not telling me everything, but I’m not going to make an issue of it, not this time. I’d prefer it if you didn’t go back to the club, but if you do have to go, keep it discreet and don’t kick Andy Dalitz in the balls again. In return, I expect you to let me know if there’s anything that I should be worried about, you understand?’

‘I understand.’

He nodded, seemingly content, then sipped his coffee.

‘You tracked down that preacher, right? Faulkner?’

‘That’s right.’

He watched me carefully. He seemed amused.

‘I hear Roger Bowen is trying to get him out.’

I hadn’t called Elliot since Atys Jones had told me of Mobley’s connection to Bowen. I wasn’t sure how it fitted into what I already knew. Now, as Willie Wyman mentioned Bowen’s name, I tried to block out the noise from the adjoining tables and listen only to him.

‘You curious about why that might be?’ Willie continued.

‘Very.’

He leaned back and stretched, exposing the sprinkling of sweat under his arms.

‘Roger and me go way back, and not in a good way. He’s a fanatic and he has no respect. I’ve thought about maybe sending him away on a cruise: a long cruise, strictly one-way to the bottom, but then the crazies would come knocking on my door and it would be cruises for everyone. I don’t know what Bowen wants with the preacher: a figurehead, maybe, or could be the old man has something stashed away that Bowen wants to get hold of. Like I said, I don’t know, but you want to ask him, I can tell you where he’ll be later today.’

I waited.

‘There’s a rally in Antioch. Rumor is that Bowen is going to talk at it. There’ll be press there, maybe some TV. Bowen didn’t use to make public appearances too often, but this Faulkner thing has brought him out from under his rock. You go along, you might get to say hi.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

He stood, and the other four men rose at the same time.

‘I figure why should it just be me who has his day fucked up by you, you know? If you’ve got shit on your shoe, you spread it around. And Bowen’s already having a bad day. I like the idea of you making it worse.’

‘What’s so bad about today for Bowen?’

‘You should watch the news. They found his pit bull Mobley up at Magnolia cemetery last night. He was castrated. I gotta go tell Andy Dalitz, maybe make him see how lucky he was just to get his nuts bruised instead of cut off completely. Thanks for breakfast.’

He left me, his blue shirt billowing, his four goons in tow like big children following a little piece of fallen sky.

Elliot did not turn up for our scheduled meeting that morning. The answering machine was picking up calls at his office and at his home. His cell phones – both his own and the clean one we were using for day-to-day contact – were off. Meanwhile, the papers were full of the discovery of Landron Mobley’s body at the Magnolia cemetery, but hard details were scarce. According to the reports, Elliot Norton had been uncontactable for comment on his client’s death.

I spent the morning confirming the details of more witness statements, knocking on trailer doors and fighting off dogs in overgrown yards. By midday I was worried. I checked on Atys by phone, and the old man told me he was doing okay, although he was becoming a little stir-crazy. I spoke to Atys for a couple of minutes, but his replies were surly at best.

‘When can I leave here, man?’ he asked me.

‘Soon,’ I replied. It was only a half truth. If Elliot’s fears about his safety were real, my guess was that we’d be moving him soon enough, but only to another safe house. Until his trial, Atys was going to have to get used to staring at TVs in unfamiliar rooms. Pretty soon, though, he wouldn’t be my concern. I was getting nowhere fast with the witnesses.

‘You know Mobley’s dead?’

‘Yeah, I heard. I’m all cut up.’

‘Not as cut up as he is. You got any idea who might have done a thing like that to him?’

‘No I ain’t, but you find out, you let me know. I want to shake the man’s hand, m’sayin?’

He hung up. I looked at my watch. It was just after twelve. It would take me more than an hour to get to Antioch. I tossed a mental coin and decided to go.

The Carolina Klans, in common with klaverns across the country, had been in decline for the best part of twenty years. In the case of the Carolinas the decline could be dated back to November 1979, when five Communist Workers died in a shoot-out with Klansmen and neo-Nazis up in Greensboro, North Carolina. The anti-Klan movements assumed a new momentum in the aftermath while Klan membership continued to drop, and on those occasions when Klansmen took to the streets, they were vastly outnumbered by protesters. Most of the recent Klan rallies in South Carolina had been the work of the Indiana-based American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, since the local Carolina Knights had demonstrated a reluctance to become involved.

But against their decline had to be set the fact that over thirty black churches had been burned in South Carolina since 1991 and Klansmen had been linked to at least two of those burnings, in Williamsburg and Clarendon counties. In other words, the Klan may have been dying on its feet, but the hatred that it represented was still alive and well. Now Bowen was trying to give that hatred a new momentum, and a new focus. If the news reports were to be believed, he was succeeding.

Antioch didn’t look like it had too much to recommend it at the best of times. It resembled the suburb of a town that didn’t exist: there were houses, and streets that somebody had taken the trouble to name, but none of the larger malls or town centers that might have been expected to grow up alongside them. Instead, the section of 119 that passed through Antioch had sprouted small strip malls like clumps of mushrooms, boasting between them little more than a couple of gas stations, a video store, a pair of convenience stores, a bar and, a laundromat.

It looked like I had missed the parade, but midway along the strip was a green square surrounded by a wire fence and untended trees. Cars were parked nearby, maybe sixty in all, and a makeshift stage had been created on the back of a flatbed truck, from which a man was addressing the crowd. A group of about eighty or ninety, consisting mostly of men but with some women scattered throughout, stood before the stage listening to the speaker. A handful wore white robes but most of them were dressed in their usual T-shirts and jeans. The men in the robes were sweating visibly beneath the cheap polyester. A crowd of fifty or sixty protesters stood some distance away, kept back from Bowen’s people by a line of police. Some were chanting and catcalling, but the man speaking from the stage never broke his stride.

Roger Bowen had a thick brown mustache and wavy brown hair, and he looked like he kept himself in good condition. He wore a red shirt and blue jeans, but despite the heat his shirt appeared to be unsullied by sweat. He was flanked by two men who led the occasional bursts of applause when he said something particularly important, which seemed to be about every three minutes, judging by his aides. Each time they applauded, Bowen looked to his feet and shook his head, as if embarrassed by their enthusiasm yet unwilling to curb it. I spotted the cameraman from the Richland County lockup close by the stage with a pretty blond reporter close by. He was still wearing his fatigues, but this time nobody was giving him a hard time over them.

I had a CD playing in the car at top volume as I cruised in. I’d chosen it especially for the occasion. My timing was pretty good. Joey Ramone’s girl had gone to L.A. and never come back, and Joey was blaming the KKK for taking his baby away just as I swung into the parking lot.

Bowen paused in his speech and stared over in my direction. A considerable portion of the crowd followed his gaze. A guy with a shaven head and wearing a black ‘Blitzkrieg’ T-shirt approached the car and asked politely but firmly if I would turn the music down. I killed the engine, cutting the music off, then stepped from the car. Bowen kept looking in my direction for about another ten seconds, then continued his speech.

Perhaps he was conscious of the media presence, but Bowen appeared to be keeping the invective to a minimum. True, he tossed in references to Jews and coloreds, talked of how non-Christians had seized control of the government at the expense of white people, and spoke of AIDS as a visitation from God, but he steered away from the worst racial slurs. It was only as his speech reached its close that he got to his main point.

‘There is a man, my friends, a good man, a Christian man, a man of God, who is being persecuted for daring to say that homosexuality and abortion and the mixing of races is against the will of the Lord. A show trial is being organized in the state of Maine to bring this man down and we have evidence, my friends, hard evidence, that his capture was funded by Jews.’ Bowen waved some papers that looked vaguely legal in form. ‘His name, and I hope you know it already, is Aaron Faulkner. Now they’ve said some things about him. They’ve called him a murderer and a sadist. They have tried to smear his name, to drag him down before his trial has even begun. They are doing this because they have no proof against him and are trying to poison the minds of the weak so that he will be found guilty before he even has the chance to defend himself. The Reverend Faulkner’s message is one that we should all take to heart, because we know it is right and true. Homosexuality is against God’s law. Baby killing is against God’s law. The mixing of bloods, the undermining of the institutions of marriage and the family, the elevation of non-Christian worship above the one true religion of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, all are against God’s law, and this man, the Reverend Faulkner, has taken a stand against it. Now his only hope for a fair trial is if he can assemble himself the best defense possible, and to do that he needs funds to get himself out of jail and pay the finest attorneys that money can buy. And that’s where you folks come in: you give what you can. I count maybe one hundred here. You give twenty bucks each, and I know that’s a lot for some of you people, and we got two thousand dollars. If those of you that can afford it give a little more, well, then that’s all for the better.

‘Because you mark my words: It is not just one man who is facing a false trial. It is a way of life. It is our way of life, our beliefs, our faith, our futures that will be on trial in that courtroom. The Reverend Aaron Faulkner represents us all, and if he falls, then we fall with him. God is with us. God will give us strength. Hail victory! Hail victory!’

The chant was taken up by the crowd as men moved among them with buckets, collecting donations. I saw the odd ten or five slipped in, but most gave twenties, even fifties or hundreds. At a conservative estimate, I reckoned Bowen’s work this afternoon had probably made three thousand dollars. According to that day’s paper, which had carried some advance coverage of the rally, Bowen’s people had been working flat out since shortly after Faulkner’s arrest, encouraging everything from yard sales and bake-offs to a draw for a new Dodge truck donated by a sympathetic auto dealer, with thousands of tickets already sold at $20 a pop. Bowen had even succeeded in galvanizing into action those who would not usually have been drawn to his cause, the vast constituency of the faithful who saw in Faulkner a man of God being persecuted for beliefs that were similar, if not identical, to their own. Bowen had taken Faulkner’s arrest and approaching trial and made it a matter of faith and goodness, a battle between those who feared and loved the Lord and those who had turned their backs on Him. When the subject of violence was raised Bowen usually skirted the issue, arguing that Faulkner’s message was pure and that he could not be held accountable for the actions of others, even if those actions were justified in many cases. Racist insults would be kept for the old guard and for those occasions where TV cameras and microphones were absent or forbidden. Today, he was preaching to the new converts and those who had yet to be converted.

Bowen stepped from the stage and people moved forward to shake his hand. Just inside the gate, two trestle tables had been set up so that the women behind them could display the items they had brought for sale: Johnny Reb flags, Nazi battle flags decorated with eagles and swastikas, bumper stickers announcing that the driver was ‘White by Birth, Southern by Grace.’ There were also cassettes and CDs of country and western music, although I figured that they weren’t the kind Louis would have wanted in his collection. Pretty soon, the two women were doing steady business.

A man appeared at my side. He wore a dark suit over a white shirt, with a baseball cap perched incongruously on his head. His skin was reddish purple, and peeling badly. Clumps of fair hair hung on grimly to his skull like sparse vegetation on a hostile landscape. Shades concealed his eyes. I could see an earpiece in his left ear, connected to a unit at his belt. Immediately, I felt uneasy. Maybe it was the strangeness of his appearance, but there was a sense of unreality about him. There was also a smell emanating from him, like the odor left after an oil fire has been extinguished.

He smelled of slow burning.

‘Mr. Bowen would like to talk to you,’ he said.

‘It was the Ramones,’ I said. ‘On the CD player. I’ll make him a copy if he’d like it.’

He didn’t blink.

‘Like I said, Mr. Bowen wants to talk to you.’

I shrugged and followed him through the crowd. Bowen had almost finished glad-handing the troops, and as I watched, he stepped behind the truck to a small area enclosed by a white tarp that stretched from the bed of the truck. Beneath it were chairs, a portable AC unit, and a table with a cooler on top. I was shown through to Bowen, who sat in one of the chairs sipping from a can of Pepsi. The cap-wearing man stayed but the other people bustling outside moved away to give us some privacy. Bowen offered me a drink. I declined.

‘We didn’t expect to see you down here today, Mr. Parker,’ he said. ‘You considering joining our cause?’

‘I don’t see much of a cause,’ I said, ‘unless you call hustling rednecks for dimes a cause.’

Bowen exchanged a look of mock disappointment with the other man. There was blood in Bowen’s eyes. Although he was ostensibly in charge, he appeared to defer to the man in the suit. Even his posture suggested that he was somehow afraid of him, his body turned slightly away from the other man, his head lowered. He looked like a cowering dog.

‘I should have introduced you,’ he said. ‘Mr. Parker, this is Mr. Kittim. Sooner or later, Mr. Kittim is going to teach you a harsh lesson.’

Kittim removed his sunglasses. The eyes revealed were empty and green, like raw, flawed emeralds.

‘Forgive me if I don’t shake hands,’ I said to him. ‘You look like bits of you might start to drop off.’

Kittim didn’t react, but the smell of oil grew stronger. Even Bowen’s nose wrinkled slightly.

Bowen finished his cola and tossed it in the garbage bag.

‘Why are you here, Mr. Parker? If I was to get up on that stage and announce to the crowd who you are, I think your chances of getting back to Charleston unscathed would be very slim.’

Maybe I should have been surprised that Bowen knew that I was staying in Charleston, but I wasn’t.

‘Keeping track of my movements, Bowen? I’m flattered. By the way, it’s not a stage. It’s a truck. Don’t get above yourself. You want to tell the morons who I am, go right ahead. The TV cameras will eat it up. As for why I’m here, I wanted to take a look at you, see if you’re really as dumb as you seem to be.’

‘Why am I dumb?’

‘Because you’re aligning yourself with Faulkner, and if you were smart you’d see that he’s crazy, even crazier than your friend here.’

Bowen’s eyes flicked toward the other man. ‘I don’t think Mr. Kittim is crazy,’ he said. The words left a sour taste in his mouth. I could see it in the curl of his lips.

I followed his glance. There were flakes of dried skin caught in Kittim’s remaining hair and his face almost throbbed with the pain of his condition. He seemed to be slowly disintegrating. His was a Catch-22 situation: looking and feeling the way he did, he’d have to be crazy not to be crazy.

‘The Reverend Faulkner is a man unjustly persecuted,’ resumed Bowen. ‘All I want to see is justice done, and justice will result in his vindication and release.’

‘Justice is blind, not stupid, Bowen.’

‘Sometimes it’s both.’ He stood up. We were almost the same height but he was broader than I was. ‘The Reverend Faulkner is about to become a figurehead for a new movement, a unifying force. We’re bringing more people into our fold day by day. With people come money and power and influence. This isn’t complex, Mr. Parker. It’s very simple. Faulkner is the means. I am the end. Now, I’d advise you to go and take in some of the sights of South Carolina while you still can. I have a feeling it may be the last chance that you have. Mr. Kittim will escort you back to your car.’

With Kittim at my side, I walked through the crowd. The TV crews had packed up and left. Children had joined the celebrations, running in between the legs of their parents. Music was playing from the trestle tables, country music that spoke of war and vengeance. Barbecues had been set up, and the smell of burning meat filled the air. Close by one of them, a man with slicked-back hair bit greedily into a hot dog. I looked away before he could see me staring at him. I recognized him as the man who had followed me from the airport to Charleston Place and who had then pointed me out to Earl Larousse Jr. Both Atys Jones and Willie Wyman had confirmed to me that the late Landron Mobley, in addition to being a client of Elliot’s, had been one of Bowen’s attack dogs. Mobley, it seemed, had also been helping the Larousses hunt down Atys before Marianne’s death. Now another link between the Larousses and Bowen had been revealed.

At my car I turned to Kittim. He had replaced his sunglasses, obscuring his eyes. An object lay on the ground between us. He pointed his finger at it.

‘You dropped something,’ said Kittim.

It was a black skullcap, ringed with a red and gold band. Blood had soaked into it. It hadn’t been there when I’d parked.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘I suggest you take it with you. I’m sure you know some old kikes who’d be glad to receive it. It might answer some questions that they have.’

He backed away from me, made a pistol from the finger and thumb of his right hand, then fired it at me as a farewell.

‘I’ll be seeing you,’ he said.

I picked up the skullcap from the ground and wiped the dirt from it. There was no name inside it, but I knew that it could only have come from one source. I drove as far as the nearest strip mall and made a call to New York.

When the end of the working day came with no contact from Elliot, I decided to go looking for him. I drove out to his house, but the workmen hadn’t seen him since the day before, and as far as they could tell, he hadn’t slept in the house the previous night. I headed back to Charleston and decided to check the tag number of Elliot’s dining companion from earlier in the week. I took out my laptop and, ignoring the e-mail notifications, went straight to the Web. I entered the license plate on three databases, the huge NCI and CDB Infotek services as well as SubTrace, which flirted with illegality and was more expensive than regular searches but was faster too. I red-flagged the SubTrace request and got a response less than an hour later. Elliot had been arguing with one Adele Foster of 1200 Bees Tree Drive, Charleston. I found Bees Tree on my DeLorme street atlas and headed out.

Number 1200 was an impressive classical revival tabby manse that must have been more than a century old, its facade constructed from a mixture of oyster shell and lime mortar and dominated by a two-tiered entry porch supported by slender white columns. The SUV was parked to the right of the house. I walked slowly up the central staircase, stood in the shade of the porch, and rang the doorbell. The sound of it echoed in the hallway beyond, eventually losing itself in the sound of firm footsteps on the boards before the door opened. I half expected Hattie McDaniel to be standing before me in a pinafore, but instead it was the woman I had seen arguing with Elliot Norton on my first night in town. Behind her, dark wood extended through the empty white hallway like muddy water through snow.

‘Yes?’

And suddenly I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t even sure why I had come here, except that I couldn’t find Elliot and something told me that the argument I had witnessed went beyond any professional issue, that there was more between them than a typical client-lawyer relationship. Also, seeing her up close for the first time, I was confirmed in another suspicion that I had: she was wearing widow’s weeds. All she needed was a hat and a veil and the look would have been complete.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ I said. ‘My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator.’

I was about to reach into my pocket for ID but a movement on her face stopped me. Her expression didn’t soften, exactly, but something flashed across it, like a tree moving in the wind that briefly allows moonlight to flash through its branches and illuminate the bare ground beneath.

‘You’re him, aren’t you?’ she said softly. ‘You’re the one that he hired.’

‘If you mean Elliot Norton, then yes, I’m the one.’

‘Did he send you here?’ There was no hostility in the question. Instead, I thought there something almost plaintive in it.

‘No, I saw you . . . talking to him in a restaurant two nights ago.’

Briefly, she smiled. ‘I’m not sure that “talking” was what we were doing. Did he tell you who I was?’

‘To be honest, I didn’t tell him that I’d seen you together, but I made a note of your license plate.’

She pursed her lips. ‘How very farsighted of you. Is that how you usually behave: making notes on women you’ve never met?’

If she was expecting me to act embarrassed, she was disappointed.

‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to give it up, but the flesh is weak.’

‘So why are you here?’

‘I was wondering if you might have seen Elliot.’

Instantly, there was worry on her face.

‘Not since that night. Is something wrong?’

‘I don’t know. Can I come in, Ms. Foster?’

She blinked. ‘How do you know my name? No, let me guess, the same way you found out where I lived, right? Jesus, nothing’s private anymore.’

I waited, anticipating the closing of the door in my face. Instead, she stepped to one side and gestured for me to enter. I followed her into the hallway and the door closed softly behind me.

There was no furniture in the hall, not even a hat stand. Before me, a staircase swept up to the second floor and the bedrooms. To my right was a dining room, a bare table surrounded by ten chairs at its center. To my left was a living room. I followed her into it. She took a seat at one end of a pale gold couch, and I eased myself into an armchair close by. Somewhere, a clock ticked, but otherwise the house was silent.

‘Elliot’s missing?’

‘I didn’t say that. I’ve left messages. So far, he hasn’t replied.’

She digested the information. It seemed to disagree with her.

‘And you thought that I might know where he is?’

‘You met him for dinner. I figured that you might be friends.’

‘What kind of friends?’

‘The kind that have dinner together. What do you want me to say, Ms. Foster?’

‘I don’t know, and it’s Mrs. Foster.’

I started to apologize but she waved it away. ‘It’s not important,’ she said. ‘I suppose you want to know about Elliot and me?’

I didn’t reply. I wasn’t going to pry into her affairs any more than was necessary, but if she felt the need to talk, then I’d listen in the hope that I might learn something from her.

‘Hell, you saw us fighting, you can probably guess the rest. Elliot was a friend of my husband. My late husband.’ She was smoothing her skirt with her hand, the only indication she gave that she might be nervous.

‘I’m sorry.’

She nodded. ‘We all are.’

‘Can I ask what happened?’

She looked up from her skirt and stared directly at me. ‘He killed himself.’ She coughed once, then seemed to have trouble continuing. The coughing grew in intensity. I stood and followed the living room through to where a bright modern kitchen had been added to the rear of the house. I found a glass, filled it with water from the tap, and brought it back to her. She sipped at it, then placed it on the low table before her.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why that happened. I guess I still find it hard to talk about. My husband, James, killed himself one month ago. He asphyxiated himself in his car by attaching a pipe to the exhaust and feeding it through the window. It’s not uncommon, I’m told.’

She could have been talking about a minor ailment, like a cold or a rash. Her voice was studiedly matter-of-fact. She took another sip from the glass of water.

‘Elliot was my husband’s lawyer, as well as his friend.’

I waited.

‘I shouldn’t be telling you this,’ she said. ‘But if Elliot’s gone  . . .’

The way that she said the word ‘gone’ made my stomach lurch, but still I didn’t interrupt.

‘Elliot was my lover,’ she said at last.

‘Was?’

‘It ended shortly before my husband’s death.’

‘When did it begin?’

‘Why do these things ever begin?’ she answered, mishearing the question. She wanted to tell and she would tell it in her own way and at her own pace. ‘Boredom, discontent, a husband too tied up with his work to notice that his wife was going crazy. Take your pick.’

‘Did your husband know?’

She paused before she answered, as if she were thinking about it for only the first time. ‘If he did, then he didn’t say anything. At least, not to me.’

‘To Elliot?’

‘He made comments. They were open to more than one interpretation.’

‘How did Elliot choose to interpret them?’

‘That James knew. It was Elliot who decided to end things between us. I didn’t care enough about him to disagree.’

‘So why were you arguing with him at dinner?’

She resumed the rhythmic stroking of her skirt, picking at pieces of lint too small to be of real concern.

‘Something is happening. Elliot knows, but he pretends that he doesn’t. They’re all pretending.’

The stillness in the house suddenly seemed terribly oppressive. There should have been children in this house, I thought. It was too big for two people, and far too large for one. It was the kind of house bought by wealthy people in the hope of populating it with a family, but I could see no trace of any family here. Instead there was only this woman in her widow’s black picking methodically at the tiny flaws in her skirt, as if by doing so she could make the greater wrongs right again.

‘What do you mean by “them all”?’

‘Elliot. Landron Mobley. Grady Truett. Phil Poveda. My husband. And Earl Larousse. Earl Jr., that is.’

‘Larousse?’ I couldn’t keep the surprise from my voice.

Once again, there was the trace of a smile on Adele Foster’s face. ‘They all grew up together, all six of them. Now something has started to happen. My husband’s death was the beginning. Grady Truett’s was the continuation.’

‘What happened to Grady Truett?’

‘Somebody broke into his home about a week after James died. He was tied to a chair in his den, then his throat was cut.’

‘And you think the two deaths are connected?’

‘Here’s what I think: Marianne Larousse was killed ten weeks ago. James died six weeks later. Grady Truett was killed one week after that. Now Landron Mobley has been found dead, and Elliot is missing.’

‘Were any of them close to Marianne Larousse?’

‘No, not if you mean intimate with her, but like I said, they grew up with her brother and would have known her socially. Well, maybe not Landron Mobley but certainly the others.’

‘And what do you believe is happening, Mrs. Foster?’

She took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring, her head rising, then released it slowly. In the gesture there was a trace of a spirit that had been subdued by the black clothes and it was possible to see what had attracted Elliot to her.

‘My husband killed himself because he was afraid, Mr. Parker. Something he had done had come back to haunt him. He told Elliot, but Elliot wouldn’t believe him. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. Instead, he pretended that everything was normal, right up until the day he went into the garage with a length of yellow hose and killed himself. Elliot is also trying to pretend that things are normal, but I think he knows better.’

‘What do you think your husband was afraid of?’

‘Not what. I think he was afraid of someone.’

‘Do you have any idea who that person might have been?’

Adele Foster rose and, with a movement of her hand, indicated that I should follow her. We ascended the staircase, past what, in the house’s former days, would have been used as a receiving room for visitors but was now a large and very luxurious bedroom. We paused in front of a closed door, in its keyhole a key that she now turned to unlock the door. Then, keeping her back to the room, she pushed the door open and revealed its contents.

The room had once been a small bedroom or dressing room, but James Foster had transformed it into an office. There was a computer desk and chair, a drafting board, and a set of shelves against one wall lined with books and files. A window looked out onto the front yard, the top of the flowering dogwood below the window visible above the bottom of the frame, the last of its white blooms now fading and dying. A blue jay stood on its topmost branch, but our movement behind the glass must have disturbed him because he disappeared suddenly with a flash of his blue rounded tail.

Yet, in truth, the bird was only a momentary distraction, because it was the walls that drew the eye. I couldn’t tell what color they had been painted because no paint showed through the blizzard of paper that seemed to have adhered to them, as if the room was in a constant state of motion and they had been propelled there and held in place by centrifugal force. The sheets were of varying sizes, some little more than Post-it notes, others larger than the surface of Foster’s drafting board. Some were yellow, others dark, some plain, a few lined. The detail varied from drawing to drawing, from hurried sketches executed with a flurry of pencil strokes to ornate, intricate depictions of their subject. James Foster had been quite an artist, but he seemed to have only one main theme.

Almost every drawing depicted a woman, her face concealed, her body swathed in a cloak of white from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. The cloak spread out behind her like water pooling from an ice sculpture. It was not a false impression, for Foster had drawn her as if the material that covered her was wet. It clung to the muscles in her legs and buttocks, to the sweep of her breasts and the thin blades of her fingers, the bones of the knuckles clearly visible where she gripped the cloak tightly from beneath.

But there was something wrong with her skin, something flawed and ugly. Her veins appeared to be above rather than beneath the epidermis, creating a tracery of raised pathways across her body like the levees over a flooded rice field. The result was that the woman under the veil seemed almost to be plated, her skin armored like that of an alligator. Unconsciously, instead of drawing closer I took a single step back from the wall, and felt Adele Foster’s hand come to rest gently on my arm.

‘Her,’ she said. ‘He was afraid of her.’

We sat over coffee, some of the drawings spread on the coffee table before us.

‘Did you show these to the police?’

She shook her head. ‘Elliot told me not to.’

‘Did he tell you why?’

‘No. He just said that it would be best not to show them the drawings.’

I rearranged the papers, setting the depictions of the woman aside and revealing a set of five landscapes. Each depicted the same scene: a huge pit in the ground, surrounded by skeletal trees. In one of the drawings a pillar of fire emerged from the pit, but it was still possible to pick out, even there, the shape of the hooded woman now clothed in flame.

‘Is this a real place?’

She took the picture from me and studied it, then handed it back to me with a shrug.

‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask Elliot. He might know.’

‘I can’t do that until I find him.’

‘I think something has happened to him, maybe the same thing that happened to Landron Mobley.’

This time, I heard the disgust in her voice when she said Mobley’s name.

‘You didn’t like him?’

She scowled. ‘He was a pig. I don’t know why they let him stay with them. No’ – she corrected herself – ‘I do know why. He could get things for them: drugs, booze when they were younger, maybe even women. He knew the places to go. He wasn’t like Elliot and the others. He didn’t have money, or looks, or a college education, but he was prepared to go places that they were afraid to go, at least at first.’

And Elliot Norton had still seen fit, after all those years, to represent Mobley in the impending case against him, despite the fact that it could bring no credit to Elliot. This was the same Elliot Norton who had grown up with Earl Larousse Jr. and was now representing the young man accused of killing his sister. None of this made me feel good.

‘You said that they did something, when they were younger, something that had come back to haunt them. Do you have any idea what that might be?’

‘No. James would never talk about it. We weren’t close before his death. His behavior had altered. He wasn’t the man I married. He began to hang out with Mobley again. They went hunting together up at Congaree. Then James started going to strip clubs. I think he might have been seeing prostitutes.’

I laid the drawings down carefully on the table.

‘You know where he might have gone?’

‘I followed him, two or three times. He always went to the same place, because it was where Mobley liked to go when he was in town. It’s called LapLand.’

And while I sat talking to Adele Foster, surrounded by images of spectral women, a disheveled man wearing a bright red shirt, blue jeans and battered sneakers strolled up Norfolk Street on the Lower East Side of New York and stood in the shadow of the Orensanz Center, the oldest surviving synagogue in New York. It was a warm evening and he had taken a cab down here, electing not to endure the heat and discomfort of the subway. A daisy chain of children floated by, suspended between two women wearing T-shirts identifying them as members of a Jewish community group. One of the children, a little girl with dark curls, smiled up at him as she passed and he smiled back at her, watching her as she was carried around the corner and out of his sight.

He walked up the steps, opened the door, and moved into the neo-Gothic main hall. He heard footsteps approach from behind and turned to see an old man with a sweeping brush in his hand.

‘Can I help you?’ said the cleaner.

The visitor spoke.

‘I’m looking for Ben Epstein,’ he said.

‘He is not here,’ came the reply.

‘But he does come here?’

‘Sometimes,’ the old man conceded.

‘You expecting him this evening?’

‘Maybe. He comes, he goes.’

The visitor found a chair in the shadows, turned it so that its back was facing the door, and sat down carefully upon it, wincing slightly as he lowered himself down. He rested his chin on his forearms and regarded the old man.

‘I’ll wait. I’m very patient.’

The old man shrugged, and began sweeping.

Five minutes went by.

‘Hey,’ said the visitor. ‘I said I was patient, not made of fucking stone. Go call Epstein.’

The old man flinched but kept sweeping.

‘I can’t help you.’

‘I think you can,’ said the visitor, and his tone made the old man freeze. The visitor had not moved, but the geniality and passivity that had made the little girl smile at him was now entirely gone from him. ‘You tell him it’s about Faulkner. He’ll come.’

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again there was only spiraling dust where the old man had stood.

Angel closed his eyes again, and waited.

It was almost seven when Epstein arrived, accompanied by two men whose loose shirts did not quite manage to hide the weapons they carried. When he saw the man seated on the chair, Epstein relaxed and indicated to his companions that they could leave him be. Then he pulled up a chair and sat opposite Angel.

‘You know who I am?’ asked Angel.

‘I know,’ said Epstein. ‘You are called Angel. A strange name, I think, for I see nothing angelic about you.’

‘There’s nothing angelic to see. Why the guns?’

‘We are under threat. We believe we have already lost a young man to our enemies. Now we may have found the man responsible for his death. Did Parker send you?’

‘No, I came here alone. Why would you think Parker sent me?’

Epstein looked surprised. ‘We spoke with him, not long before we learned of your presence here. We assumed that the two occurrences were related.’

‘Great minds thinking alike, I guess.’

Epstein sighed. ‘He quoted Torah to me once. I was impressed. You, I think, even with your great mind, will not be quoting Torah. Or Kaballah.’

‘No,’ admitted Angel.

‘I was reading, before I came to you: the Sefer ha-Bahir, the Book of Brightness. I have long been considering its significance, more often now since the death of my own son. I had hoped to find meaning in his sufferings, but I am not wise enough to understand what is written.’

‘You think suffering has to have meaning?’

‘Everything has meaning. All things are the work of the Divine.’

‘In that case, I got some harsh words to say to the Divine when I see Him.’

Epstein spread his hands. ‘Say them. He is always listening, always watching.’

‘I don’t think so. You think He was listening and watching when your son died? Or worse: maybe He was and just decided not to do anything about it.’

The old man winced involuntarily at the pain that Angel’s words caused him, but the younger man did not appear to notice. Epstein took in the rage and grief on his face. ‘Are you talking about my son, or yourself?’ he asked gently.

‘You didn’t answer the question.’

‘He is the Creator: all things come from Him. I do not pretend to know the ways of the Divine. That is why I read Kaballah. I do not yet understand all that it says, but I am beginning to comprehend a little.’

‘And what does it say to explain the torture and death of your son?’

This time, even Angel recognized the pain that he had caused.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, reddening. ‘Sometimes, I get angry,’

Epstein nodded – ‘I too get angry’ – then resumed.

‘I think it speaks of harmony between the upper and lower worlds, between the visible and the unseen, between good and evil. World above, world below, with angels moving in between. Real angels, not nominal ones.’

He smiled.

‘And because of what I have read I wonder, sometimes, about the nature of your friend Parker. It is written in the Zohar that angels must put on the garment of this world when they walk upon it. I wonder now if this is true of angels both good and evil, that both hosts must walk this world in disguise. It is said of the dark angels that they will be consumed by another manifestation, the destroying angels, armed with plagues and the avenging wrath of the fury of the Divine, two hosts of His servants fighting against one another, for the Almighty created evil to serve His purposes, just as He created good. I must believe that or else the death of my son has no meaning. I must believe that his suffering is part of a larger pattern that I cannot comprehend, a sacrifice in the name of the greater, ultimate good.’

He leaned forward on his chair.

‘Perhaps your friend is such an angel,’ he concluded. ‘An agent of the Divine: a destroyer, yet a restorer of the harmony between worlds. Perhaps, just as his true nature is hidden from us, so too it may be hidden even from himself.’

‘I don’t think Parker is an angel,’ said Angel. ‘I don’t think he does either. If he starts saying he is, his girlfriend will have him committed.’

‘You think these are an old man’s fancies? Perhaps they are. An old man’s fancies, then.’ He dismissed them with a graceful sweep of his hand. ‘So why are you here, Mr. Angel?’

‘To ask for something.’

‘I will give you all that I can. You punished the one who took my son from me.’ For it was Angel who had killed Pudd, who had in turn killed Epstein’s son Yossi; Pudd, or Leonard, the son of Aaron Faulkner.

‘That’s right,’ said Angel. ‘Now I’m going to kill the one who sent him.’

Epstein blinked once.

‘He is in jail.’

‘He’s going to be released.’

‘If they let him go, men will come. They will protect him, and they will take him out of your reach. He is important to them.’

Angel found himself distracted by the old man’s words. ‘I don’t understand. Why is he so important?’

‘Because of what he represents,’ replied Epstein. ‘Do you know what evil is? It is the absence of empathy: from that, all evil springs. Faulkner is a void, a being completely without empathy, and that is as close to absolute evil as this world can bear. But Faulkner is worse still, for he has the capacity to drain empathy from others. He is like a spiritual vampire, spreading his infection. And such evil draws evil to itself, both men and angels, and that is why they seek to protect him.

‘But your friend Parker is tormented by empathy, by his capacity to feel. He is all that Faulkner is not. He is destructive, and angry, but it is a righteous anger, not merely wrath, which is sinful and works against the Divine. I look to your friend and I see a greater purpose in action. If evil and good are both creations of the Almighty, then the evil visited on Parker, the loss of his wife and child, was an instrument of the greater good, just like Yossi’s death. Look at the men that he has hunted down as a result, the peace that he has brought to others, living and dead, the balance that he has restored, all born of the sorrow that he has endured, that he continues to endure. In his response to all that he has suffered, I, for one, see the work of the Divine.’

Angel shook his head in disbelief.

‘So this is some kind of test for him, for all of us?’

‘No, not a test: an opportunity to prove ourselves worthy of salvation, to create that salvation for ourselves, maybe even to become salvation itself.’

‘I’m more concerned with this world than the next.’

‘There is no difference. They are not separate, but linked. Heaven and hell begin here.’

‘Well, one of them sure does.’

‘You are a wrathful man, are you not?’

‘I’m getting there. I hear another sermon and I’ll arrive.’

Epstein raised his hands in surrender.

‘So you are here because you want our help? Our help with what?’

‘Roger Bowen.’

Epstein’s smile widened.

‘That,’ he said, ‘will be a pleasure.’

18

I left Adele Foster and headed back into Charleston. Her husband had begun visiting LapLand prior to his death, and LapLand was where Tereus worked. Tereus had hinted to me that Elliot knew more than he was telling me about the disappearances of Atys Jones’s mother and aunt, and from what Adele Foster had told me Elliot and a group of his former boyhood friends were now under active threat from some outside force. That group included Earl Larousse Jr. and three men now deceased: Landron Mobley, Grady Truett, and James Foster. I tried Elliot’s phones again, with no result, then swung by his office close by the intersection of Broad and Meeting, what the locals called the Corners of Four Laws since St. Michael’s Church, the federal court, the state courthouse and City Hall each stood on a corner of the intersection. Elliot occupied a building with two other law firms, all three sharing a single, street-level entrance. I headed straight for the third floor but there was no sign of life behind the frosted glass door. I took off my jacket, placed it against the door, then used the butt of my gun to break the glass. I reached in through the hole and opened the door.

A small reception area with a secretary’s desk and shelves of files led into Elliot’s office. The door was unlocked. Inside, filing cabinet drawers were open and files lay scattered across the desk and chairs. Whoever had gone through the files knew what he or she was looking for. There was no Rolodex or address book that I could find, and when I tried to access the computer I found that it was password locked. I spent a few minutes going through the alphabetically ordered files, but could find nothing on Landron Mobley and nothing on Atys Jones that I did not already have in my possession. I turned out the lights, stepped over the broken glass at the door, and closed it softly behind me.

Adele had given me an address in Hampton for Phil Poveda, one of the by now rapidly dwindling group of friends. I drove out there in time to find a tall man with long gray-black hair and a flecked beard closing his garage door from the inside. As I approached him he paused. He looked nervous and skittish.

‘Mr. Poveda?’

He didn’t reply.

I reached for my ID. ‘My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator. I wondered if I could have a few minutes of your time.’

He still didn’t reply, but at least the garage door remained open. I took it as a positive sign. I was wrong. Phil Poveda, who looked like a hippy computer geek, pulled a gun on me. It was a .38, and it shook in his hand like unset Jell-O, but it was still a gun.

‘Get out of here,’ he said. His hand was still shaking, but compared to his voice it was steady as a rock. Poveda was falling apart. I could see it in his eyes, in the lines around his mouth, in the sores that had opened on his face and neck. On my way to his house, I had wondered if he might be responsible in some way for what was occurring. Now, faced with the reality of his disintegration and the fear he exuded, I knew that he was a potential victim, not a possible killer.

‘Mr. Poveda, I can help you. I know something is happening. People are dying, people to whom you were once close: Grady Truett, James Foster, Landron Mobley. I think Marianne Larousse’s death may also be linked. Now Elliot Norton is missing.’

He blinked. ‘Elliot?’ he said. Another little shard of hope seemed to fall away from him and shatter on the ground.

‘You have to talk to somebody. I think that sometime in the past, you and your friends did something, and now the consequences of that act have come back to haunt you. A snub-nose thirty-eight in a shaky hand isn’t going to save you from what’s coming.’

I took a step forward, and the garage door slammed down in front of me before I could get to it. I hammered hard on it.

‘Mr. Poveda!’ I shouted. ‘Talk to me.’

There was no reply, but I sensed him there, waiting, at the other side of the metal, trapped in a darkness of his own devising. I took a card from my wallet, inserted it partly into the gap between the door and the ground, then left him there with his sins.

When I looked back, the card was gone.

Tereus wasn’t at LapLand when I called by, and Handy Andy, his courage now boosted by the presence of a bar-tender and a couple of doormen in black jackets, wasn’t in any mood to be helpful. I also failed to get a reply from Tereus’s apartment: according to the old guy with the permanent residency on the front steps, he had left for work that morning and hadn’t returned since. I seemed to be having a lot of trouble finding the people with whom I needed to talk.

I walked across King and entered Janet’s Southern Kitchen. Janet’s was a relic of times past, where folks took a tray and queued up to receive fried chicken, rice and pork chops over the counter. I was the only white person eating, but nobody paid me much attention. I picked at my chicken and rice, but my appetite had still not returned. Instead, I drank glass after glass of lemonade in an effort to cool myself down, but it did me no good. I was still parched, and my temperature was still way above normal. Louis would be here soon, I told myself. Things would become clearer then. I pushed my plate to one side and headed back to the hotel.

Once again, as darkness fell, my desk was covered in depictions of a woman. The folder containing the Larousse crime scene photographs and reports lay closed by my left hand. All other available space was taken up by James Foster’s drawings. In one picture, the woman had been captured in the act of looking over her shoulder, the place where her face should have been shaded in tones of gray and black, the bones in her fingers visible beneath the thin material that enveloped her body and what seemed like the tracery of raised veins or scales shrouding her skin. There was also, I thought, something almost sexual about her depiction, a combination of loathing and desire expressed in artistic form. The shape of her buttocks and legs was carefully etched, as if sunlight were shining between her legs, and her nipples were erect. She was like the lamia of myth, a beautiful woman from the waist up but a serpent from the waist down, beguiling travelers with the sound of her voice, only to devour them when they came within reach. Except, in this case, the scales of the serpent appeared to have spread across her entire body; the myth’s origins in a male fear of aggressive female sexuality had clearly found fertile ground in Foster’s imagination.

And then there was the second subject of his endeavors, the pit surrounded by stone and rugged, barren ground, the shapes of thin trees in the background like mourners around a grave. In the first drawing, the pit was simply a dark hole, seemingly deliberately reminiscent of the woman’s hooded face, the shelving of the ground at its lip like the folds of cloth around her head. But in the second drawing, the column of fire roared up from deep within, as if a channel had been opened straight to the earth’s core or to hell itself. The woman at its heart was consumed by flames, her body wreathed in fingers of orange and red, her legs wide, her head thrown back in pain or ecstasy. It might have been dime-store psychological analysis, but my guess was that Foster had been a very disturbed man. That’ll be $100. You can pay my secretary on the way out.

The final item that his widow had allowed me to remove from his office was a photograph, a picture of six young men standing together before a bar, a neon Miller sign visible behind the figure at the far left of the group. Elliot Norton was smiling, a bottle of Bud raised in his right hand, his left arm curled around the waist of Earl Larousse Jr. Beside him was Phil Poveda, taller than the rest, leaning back against a car, his legs crossed at the ankles, his white shirt open to his chest, his arms folded before him, a beer bottle poking out close to his left breast. Next in line was the smallest member of the company, a dough-faced, curly-haired boy-man with a starter-kit beard and legs that seemed too short for his body. He had been caught in a dancer’s pose, his left leg and left arm outstretched before him, his right raised high behind him, tequila glistening in the flash of the bulb as the last of it spilled from the bottle in his hand: the late Grady Truett. Beside him, a boyish face peered bashfully into the camera, its chin lowered to its chest. This was James Foster.

The last young man was not smiling as widely as the rest. His grin seemed awkward, his clothes somehow cheaper. He wore jeans and a check shirt, and he stood awkward and straight upon the gravel and dirt of the parking lot, like one who was not used to having his picture taken. Landron Mobley, the poorest of the six, the only one who did not go on to college, who did not progress to greater things, the only one never to leave the state of South Carolina to advance himself. But Landron had his own uses: Landron could score drugs; Landron could find cheap, slutty women who would go down for the price of a beer; Landron’s big fists could pummel anyone who decided to take issue with a bunch of wealthy young men intruding on territory that was not their own, taking women that were not theirs to take, drinking in bars that held no welcome for them. Landron was the point of entry for a world that these five men wanted to use and abuse, but of which they wanted no lasting part. Landron was the gatekeeper. Landron knew things.

Now Landron was dead.

According to Adele Foster, the allegations of improper relationships made against Mobley had come as no surprise to her. She knew what Landron Mobley was like, knew what he liked to do to girls even while he was systematically flunking high school. And though her husband claimed to have cut off all ties with him, she had seen him talking to Landron a couple of weeks before his death, had seen Landron pat him on the arm as he leaned into the car, and had watched as James had passed him a small wad of bills from his wallet. She had confronted him that evening, only to be told that Landron was down on his luck since he’d lost his job, and he had only given him the money so that he would go away and leave James alone. She hadn’t believed him, though, and his patronage of LapLand had only confirmed her suspicions. By that time the distance between husband and wife was growing ever greater, and she told me that it was to Elliot Norton, not James, that she had confessed her fears about Landron Mobley as she lay beside him in the small room above his office, the room in which he sometimes slept when working on a particularly demanding case but which now, increasingly, he used to satisfy other, more pressing demands.

‘Has he approached you for money?’ she asked Elliot.

Elliot looked away. ‘Landron always needs money.’

‘That’s not an answer.’

‘I’ve known Landron for a long time, and yes, I’ve helped him out from time to time.’

‘Why?’

‘What do you mean, why?’

‘I don’t understand, that’s all. He wasn’t like the rest of you. I can see why he might have been useful to you when you were young and wild—’

He reached for her then – ‘I’m still wild’ – but she forced him gently away.

‘But now,’ she continued, ‘what part can somebody like Landron Mobley have to play in your lives? You should have left him in your past.’

Eliot pushed back the sheets to stand naked in the moonlight, his back to her, and it seemed that his shoulders dropped briefly, the way a man’s shoulders will slump when exhaustion threatens to overcome him and he briefly accedes to it.

And then he said something strange.

‘Some things you can’t leave in the past,’ he said. ‘Some things follow you all through your life.’

That was all he said. Seconds later, she heard the sound of the shower from the bathroom and knew that it was time to leave.

It was the last time that she and Elliot had made love.

But Elliot’s loyalty to Landron Mobley had gone beyond simply helping him out when he needed a few bucks. Elliot was representing his old friend in what could have turned out to be a very nasty rape case, a case now rendered null and void by Mobley’s death. In addition, Elliot appeared willing to destroy a long-standing friendship with Earl Larousse Jr. in order to defend a young black man with whom Elliot had no apparent connection. I pulled out the notes I had made so far and went through them once again, hoping to find something that I might have missed. It was only when I laid the sheets of paper side by side that I noticed one curious correspondence: Davis Smoot had been killed in Alabama only a few days before the disappearance of the Jones sisters in South Carolina. I went back to the notes I had jotted down while talking to Randy Burris about the events surrounding Smoot’s death and the hunt for, and subsequent arrest of, Tereus for the killing. According to what Tereus himself had told me, he had gone down to Alabama to seek the help of Smoot, who had fled South Carolina in February 1980, days after the alleged rape of Addy Jones, and had remained in hiding until at least July 1981, when he was confronted and killed by Tereus. He had denied to prosecutors that his confrontation with Smoot was in any way connected with rumors that Smoot had raped Addy. Addy Jones had subsequently given birth to her son Atys early in August 1980.

There had to be some mistake.

The sound of the cell phone pulled me away. I recognized the number on display immediately. The call was coming from the safe house. I picked it up on the second ring. There was no speech, just a tapping, as of somebody banging the phone gently on the ground. Tap-tap-tap.

‘Hello?’

Tap-tap-tap.

I picked up my jacket and ran for the parking garage. The gaps between the taps were growing longer now and I knew for certain that the person at the other end was in trouble, that somebody’s strength was fading and this was the only way that he or she could communicate.

‘I’m on my way,’ I said. ‘Hold on. Just hold on.’

There were three young black guys standing outside the safe house when I arrived, shifting uncertainly from foot to foot. One of them was carrying a knife and he spun toward me as I ran from the car. He saw the gun in my hand and raised his hands in acquiescence.

‘What happened?’

He didn’t answer, but an older guy behind him did.

‘We heard glass breaking. We didn’t do nothin’.’

‘Keep it that way. Just stay back.’

‘Fuck you, man,’ was the reply, but they made no further move toward the house.

The front door was locked so I made for the rear of the house. The back door was wide open but undamaged. The kitchen was empty but the ever-present lemonade jug now lay shattered on the floor. Flies buzzed around the liquid pooled upon the cheap linoleum.

I found the old man in the living room. There was a sucking hole in his chest and he lay like a black angel lost in his own blood, red wings spreading outward from behind. In his left hand he held the phone while the fingers of his right scraped at the wooden boards. He had scraped so hard that he had torn the nails and drawn blood from his fingers. He was reaching for his wife. I could see her foot in the doorway, the slipper pulled back from her heel by the pressure of her bent toes. There was blood on the back of her leg.

I knelt by the old man and clasped his head, looking for something with which to stem the flow of blood from the gunshot wound. I was shrugging off my jacket when he reached for my shirt, gripping it tightly in his fist.

‘Uh ent gap me mout’!’ he whispered. His teeth were pink with blood. ‘Uh ent gap me mout’!’

I didn’t tell.

‘I know,’ I said, and I felt my voice break. ‘I know you didn’t. Who did this, Albert?’

‘Plateye,’ he hissed. ‘Plateye.’

He eased his grip on my shirt and reached again for his dead wife.

‘Ginnie,’ he called.

His voice faded.

‘Ginnie,’ he repeated, and then he was gone.

I let his head rest on the floor, then stood and moved toward the woman. She lay facedown with two holes in the back of her dress: one low to the left of her spine, the other higher, close to her heart. There was no pulse.

I heard a noise on the floor behind me and turned to see one of the boys from outside the house standing in the kitchen doorway.

‘Stay out!’ I said. ‘Call nine-one-one.’

He took one more look at me, his eyes falling to the body of the old man, then disappeared.

No noise came from upstairs. The couple’s son, Samuel, who had driven Atys to the house earlier in the week, lay naked and dead in the bathtub, the shower curtain clenched in his hand and the water from the shower head still beating down upon his face and body. He had taken two shots in the chest. When I searched the four rooms above I could find no trace of Atys, but the window of his room was broken and tiles had been dislodged from the kitchen roof. It looked like he might have jumped, which meant that Atys might still be alive.

I went back downstairs and was standing in the yard when the police arrived. My gun was back in its holster and I was holding my license and permit. Naturally, the cops took my gun and my phone away and made me sit in a car until the detectives arrived. By now, a crowd had gathered and the uniforms were doing their best to keep them back, the lights on the Crown Vics casting firework glows across the faces and houses. There were a lot of cars because the Charleston PD assigned only one officer to a car, with the exception of the safe streets unit, two officers from which had arrived on the scene within minutes of the call. The mobile crime scene unit, an old converted bookmobile, had also pulled up by the time a pair of detectives from the violent crimes unit decided that they wanted to talk to me.

I had told them to find Atys Jones and they were already looking for him, although not as a potential victim but as a suspect in two further murders. They were wrong, of course. I knew that they were wrong.

At a gas station in South Portland, the hunched man stood over the Nissan and filled the car with twenty dollars’ worth of gas. There was only one other vehicle at the pumps: an ’86 Chevy C-10 with a busted right wing that had cost its new owner the grand total of $1,100, half down with the rest to pay by the end of the year. It was the first car Bear had owned in more than half a decade and he was hugely proud of it. Now, instead of bumming rides to the co-op, he was there waiting each morning when they opened up, music blaring from the Chevy’s tinny stereo.

Bear hardly glanced at the other man close by. He had seen enough strange men in prison to know that the best thing to do in their presence was to mind his own business. He gassed the car with money borrowed from his sister, checked the pressure on every tire, then drove away.

Cyrus had paid the bored gas station attendant in advance and was aware that the young man was still watching him, mesmerized by Cyrus’s crooked body. Although used to the revulsion of others, Cyrus still considered it bad manners to be too obvious about it. The boy was lucky that he was safe behind the glass and that Cyrus had other things to occupy him. Still, if he had time he might come back and teach him that it was rude to stare. Cyrus replaced the pump, got into the car, and took his notebook from beneath the seat. He had been keeping careful notes of all that he saw and did, because it was important that he did not forget anything useful.

The boy went into the notebook, along with Cyrus’s other observations that evening: the movements of the redheaded woman in her house and the brief, troubling sighting of the large black man who now shared it with her. It made Cyrus unhappy.

Cyrus didn’t like getting the blood of men upon him.

19

The headquarters of the Charleston PD occupied a redbrick structure on Lockwood Boulevard, opposite the Joe Riley Stadium and facing out over Brittlebank Park and the Ashley river. The interview room didn’t have much of a view, though, unless you counted the faces of the two irate detectives currently sharing it with me.

To understand the Charleston Police Department, you had to understand Chief Reuben Greenberg. Greenberg had been chief since 1982 and was that contradiction in terms, a popular police chief. In his eighteen years in charge he had introduced a range of innovations that had contributed to containing, and in some cases reducing, the crime rate in Charleston: everything from Weed and Seed programs in poorer areas to issuing running shoes to officers to enable them to chase felons more effectively. Homicide rates had consistently dropped in that time, allowing Charleston to compare favorably with any Southern city of similar size.

Unfortunately, the deaths of Albert, Ginnie, and Samuel Singleton meant that any hopes of matching the previous year’s figures were pretty much gone, and anybody even remotely connected with holing the good ship Crime Statistics below the waterline was likely to be very unpopular at 180 Lockwood Boulevard.

I was very unpopular at 180 Lockwood Boulevard.

After an hour spent waiting in a locked patrol car outside the East Side house, I was brought to a room painted in two shades of ugly and furnished by Functional-R-Us. A cup of coffee had since grown cold in front of me. The two detectives who questioned me weren’t noticeably warmer.

‘Elliot Norton,’ the first repeated. ‘You say you’re working for Elliot Norton.’

His name was Adams, and there were patches of sweat beneath the arms of his blue shirt. His skin was blue-black and his eyes were bloodshot. I’d already told him twice that I was working for Elliot Norton, and we’d gone through Albert’s final words half a dozen times, but Adams saw no reason why I shouldn’t do it all again.

‘He hired me to do some background work on the Jones case,’ I said. ‘We picked Atys up from the Richland County lockup and took him to the Singleton place. It was supposed to be a temporary safe house.’

‘Mistake number two,’ said Adams’s partner. His last name was Addams, and he was as pale as his partner was dark. Somebody in the Charleston PD had a warped sense of humor. It was only the third time that he had spoken since the interview had begun.

‘What was mistake number one?’ I asked.

‘Getting involved with the Jones case in the first place,’ he replied. ‘Or maybe stepping off the plane at Charleston International. See, now you got three mistakes.’

He smiled. I smiled back. It was only polite.

‘Doesn’t it get confusing, you being called Addams and him being called Adams?’

Addams scowled. ‘No, see I’m Addams, with two d’s. He’s Adams, with one d. It’s easy.’

He seemed serious about it. The Charleston PD offered an ascending scale of incentive pay based on educational achievement, from 7 percent for an associates’ degree to 22 percent for a Ph.D. I knew this from reading and rereading the notices on the board behind Addams’s head. I was guessing that the incentive box on Addams’s pay slip was pretty empty, unless they gave him a nickel a month for his high school diploma.

‘So,’ his partner resumed, ‘you pick him up, drop him at the safe house, go back to your hotel  . . .?’

‘Clean my teeth, go to bed, get up, check on Atys, make some calls—’

‘Who’d you call?’

‘Elliot, some people back in Maine.’

‘What did you say to Norton?’

‘Nothing much. We just touched base. He asked me if I was making any progress and I told him that I was just getting started.’

‘Then what did you do?’

We had reached the point, once again, where the paths of truth and untruth diverged. I opted for the middle ground, hoping to pick up the path of truth again later.

‘I went to a strip joint.’

Adams’s right eyebrow made an ecclesiastical arch of disapproval.

‘Why’d you do that?’

‘I was bored.’

‘Norton pay you to go to strip joints?’

‘It was my lunch break. I was on my own time.’

‘And after?’

‘Went back to the hotel. Had dinner. Bed. This morning: tried calling Elliot, had no luck, checked witness statements, went back to my hotel room. The call came about an hour later.’

Adams rose wearily from the table and exchanged a look with his partner.

‘Doesn’t sound to me like Norton was getting his money’s worth,’ he said.

For the first time, I picked up on his use of the past tense.

‘What do you mean, “was”?’

The look passed between them again, but neither replied.

‘Do you have any papers relating to the Jones case that might prove helpful to the course of this investigation?’ asked Addams.

‘I asked you a question.’

Addams’s voice rose a notch. ‘And I asked you a question: do you, or do you not, have material in your possession that might assist this investigation?’

‘No,’ I lied. ‘Elliot had it all.’

I caught myself.

‘Eliot has it all,’ I corrected. ‘Now tell me what happened.’

It was Adams who spoke.

‘Highway Patrol found his car off 176, down by Sandy Road Creek. It was in the water. Looks like he swerved to avoid something on the road and ended up in the river. The body’s missing, but there’s blood in the car. A lot of blood. Blood type is B rhesus positive, which matches Norton’s. We know he participates in the city’s blood drives, so we’re checking the samples from the car against a sample of his donated blood.’

I buried my head in my hands and took a deep breath. First Foster, then Truett and Mobley, and now Elliot. That left two names: Earl Larousse Jr. and Phil Poveda.

‘Can I go now?’ I wanted to return to my hotel room and get the material there out of harm’s way. I just hoped that Adams and Addams hadn’t gone looking for a search warrant while I was locked up.

Before either of the detectives could answer, the door to the interview room opened. The man who entered was two or three inches taller, and at least two decades older, than I was. He had buzz-cut gray hair, gray-blue eyes, and carried himself like he’d just stepped out of Parris Island to hunt down some AWOL marines. The military impression was enforced by his immaculate uniform and name badge. It read ‘S. Stilwell.’ Stilwell was the Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the Charleston PD’s Operations Bureau, answerable only to the chief himself.

‘Is this the man, detective?’ he barked.

‘Yes sir.’ It was Addams. He shot me a look that told me my troubles had only just begun and that he was going to enjoy what came next.

‘Why is he here? Why is he not currently occupying a holding cell with the worst filth, the most disgusting reprobates that this fine city can furnish?’

‘We were questioning him, sir.’

‘And did he answer your questions in a satisfactory manner, detective?

‘No sir, he did not.’

‘Did he not indeed?’

Stilwell turned to Adams. ‘You, detective, you are a good man, are you not?’

‘I try to be, sir.’

‘I do not doubt that, detective. And do you not, to the best of your abilities, look favorably on your fellow man?’

‘I do, sir.’

‘I would expect no less of you. Do you read your Bible?’

‘Not as much as I should, sir.’

‘Damn right, detective. Nobody reads his Bible as much as he should. A man should be out living the word of God, not studying on it. Am I right?’

‘You are, sir.’

‘And does the Bible not tell us to think well of our fellow man, to give him every chance that he deserves?’

‘I couldn’t say for sure, sir.’

‘Neither could I, but I feel certain that there is such an injunction. And if there is not such an injunction in the Bible, then it was an oversight, and the man responsible, if he could go back and correct his mistake, would most certainly return and include said injunction, would he not?’

‘He most certainly would, sir.’

‘Amen. So we are agreed, detective, that you have given Mr. Parker every chance to answer the questions put to him; that you, as a God-fearing man, have heeded the Bible’s probable injunction to take all that Mr. Parker has said as the word of an honest man; and yet you still doubt his basic sincerity?’

‘I guess so, sir.’

‘Well that certainly is a most unfortunate turn of events.’

He gave me his full attention for the first time.

‘Statistics, Mr. Parker. Let’s talk about statistics. Do you know how many people were murdered in the fine city of Charleston in the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and ninety-nine?’

I shook my head.

‘I will tell you: three. It was the lowest murder rate in more than forty years. Now, what does that tell you about the police force in the fine city of Charleston?’

I didn’t reply. He cupped his left hand around his left ear and leaned toward me.

‘I can’t hear you, son.’

I opened my mouth, which gave him his cue to continue before I could say anything.

‘I will tell you what it says about this police force. It says that this fine body of men and women does not tolerate murder; that it actively discourages said form of antisocial activity; and that it will come down upon those who commit murder like two tons of shit from a trainload of elephants. But your arrival in our city appears to have coincided with a shocking increase in acts of homicide. That will affect our statistics. It will cause a blip on the screen, and Chief Greenberg, a fine, fine man, will have to go to the mayor and explain this unfortunate turn of events. And the mayor will ask him why this should be, and Chief Greenberg will then ask me, and I will say that it is because of you, Mr. Parker. And the chief will ask me where you are, and I will lead him to the deepest, darkest hole that the city of Charleston can provide for those of whom it most seriously disapproves. And under that hole will be another hole, and in that hole will be you, Mr. Parker, because I will have put you there. You will be so far below the ground that you will no longer officially be in the jurisdiction of the city of Charleston. You will not even officially be within the jurisdiction of the United States of America. You will be in the jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China, and you would be advised to hire yourself a Chinese lawyer in order to cut down on traveling expenses incurred by your legal representative. Do you think I am shitting you, Mr. Parker? Because I am not shitting you. I do not shit people like you, Mr. Parker, I shit on people like you, and I have been saving some of my nastiest shit for just such an occasion as this. Now, do you have anything further that you wish to share with us?’

I shook my head. ‘I can’t tell you any more.’

He stood. ‘Then our business here is concluded. Detective, do we have a holding pen available for Mr. Parker?’

‘I’m sure we do, sir.’

‘And will he be sharing this holding pen with the dregs of this fine city, with drunks and whoremongers and men of low moral character?’

‘That can be arranged, sir.’

‘Then arrange it, detective.’

I made a vain attempt to assert my rights.

‘Don’t I get to call a lawyer?

‘Mr. Parker, you do not need a lawyer. You need a travel agent to get you the hell out of this city. You need a priest to pray that you do not irritate me any more than you already have. And finally, you need to go back in time to get hold of your mother before your father impregnates her with his sorry seed and ask her not to let you be born because, if you continue to obstruct this investigation, you are going to regret the day she thrust you mewling and screaming into this world. Detective, get this man out of my sight.’

They put me in the drunk tank until 6 A.M., then when they felt I had stewed for long enough, Addams came down and had me released. As we headed for the main door, his partner stood in the hallway and watched us pass.

‘I find out anything on Norton, I’ll let you know,’ he said.

I thanked him, and he nodded.

‘I found out what “plateye” means too. Had to ask Mr. Alphonso Brown himself, man who guides folks round the old Gullah places. He said it was a kind of ghost: a changeling, one that could shift its form. Could be he was trying to say that your client turned on them.’

‘Could be, except that Atys didn’t have a gun.’

He didn’t reply, and his partner hustled me on.

My possessions were handed back to me, minus my gun. I was given a slip and told that the gun was not being returned to me for the time being. Through the doors I could see prisoners in jail blues arriving to work on the lawns and clear garbage from the flower beds. I wondered how much trouble I’d have getting a cab.

‘You planning on leaving Charleston in the near future?’ asked Addams.

‘No. Not after this.’

‘Well, you make a move and you let us know, y’hear?’

I made for the door but found Addams’s hand resting against my chest. ‘You remember this, Mr. Parker: I got a bad feeling about you. I made some calls while you was in here and I didn’t like one thing that I heard. I don’t want you starting one of your crusades in Chief Greenberg’s city, you understand me? So just to guard against that, and to make sure that you call on us again when you’re leaving, we’ll be holding on to that Smith 10 of yours until your plane starts heading down the runway. Then maybe we’ll give you your cannon back.’

The hand dropped, and Addams opened the door for me.

‘Be seeing you,’ he said.

I stopped, frowned, and clicked my fingers.

‘Which one were you again?’

‘Addams.’

‘With one d.’

‘Two ds.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll try to remember.’

When I got back to my hotel I barely had enough energy to undress before I fell into my bed and slept soundly until after ten. I didn’t dream. It was as if the deaths of the night before had never happened.

But Charleston had not yielded up the last of its bodies. While the cockroaches skittered across the cracked sidewalks to hide from the daylight and the last of the night owls made for their beds, a man named Cecil Exley was walking to the site of the small bakery and coffee shop that he owned over on East Bay. There was work to be done, fresh bread and croissants to be baked, and although the clock had not yet struck six, Cecil was already running late.

At the corner of Franklin and Magazine, he began to slow down slightly. The bulk of the old Charleston jail loomed over him, a testament to misery and grief. A low white wall surrounded a yard thick with long grass, at the center of which stood the jail itself. The red bricks that had formed its sidewalks were missing in places, stolen, presumably, by those who felt their need was greater than the demands of history. Twin four-story towers topped with battlements and weeds stood at either side of the locked main gate, its bars and the bars of the windows around and above it stained red with oxidized rust. The concrete had crumbled and fallen from around the frames, exposing the brickwork beneath, as the old building succumbed to slow decay.

Denmark Vesey and his co-conspirators in the ill-fated slave revolt of 1822 had been chained up in the whipping house for blacks at the back of the jail before their execution, most of them led to the gallows still proclaiming their innocence and one of them, Bacchus Hammett, even laughing as they placed the noose around his neck. Many others had passed through its gates before and since. There was nowhere else in Charleston, Cecil Exley believed, where the past and the present were so closely linked, where it was possible to stand quietly on an early morning and feel the aftershocks of past violence still shuddering through new days. It was Cecil’s habit to pause occasionally at the gates of the old jail and say a short, silent prayer for those who had languished there at a time when men with skin the color of Cecil’s could not even arrive in Charleston as part of a ship’s crew without being consigned to a cell for the duration of their visit.

To Cecil’s right, as he stood at the gates, was the old paddy wagon known as Black Lucy. It had been many years since Lucy had thrown her arms open to receive a new guest, but as Cecil looked closer, he could see a shape standing against the bars at the rear of the wagon. For a moment, Cecil’s heart seemed to pause in its beats, and he leaned a hand against the gate to guard against collapse. Cecil had already suffered two minor heart attacks in the previous five years, and he did not particularly want to leave this world in the event of a third. But instead of holding his weight, the gate opened inward with a creak.

‘Hey,’ said Cecil. He coughed. His voice sounded like it was about to break. ‘Hey,’ he repeated. ‘You okay in there?’

The figure did not move. Cecil entered the grounds of the jail and walked warily toward Black Lucy. Dawn was lighting the city, the walls glowing dimly in the first rays of the early morning sun, but the figure in the wagon was still cast in shadow.

‘Hey,’ said Cecil, but his voice was already fading, the single syllable transformed into a descending cadence by the realization of what he was seeing.

Atys Jones had been tied to the bars of the wagon, his arms outstretched. His body was bruised, his face bloodied and almost unrecognizable, swollen by the blows. Blood had darkened and dried upon his chest. There was also blood – too much blood to have merely soaked down – on his white shorts, the only clothing that he retained. His chin rested on his chest, his knees bent, his feet curled slightly inward. The T-bar cross was missing from around his neck.

The old jail had just added a new ghost to its legions.

20

It was Adams who broke the news to me. His eyes were even more bloodshot than before from lack of sleep when he met me in the lobby of my hotel, and he had built up a sprinkling of gray-black stubble that had already begun to itch. He scratched at it constantly as we spoke, with a noise like bacon sizzling in a pan. A smell rose from him, the smell of sweat and spilled coffee, of grass and rust and blood. There were grass stains too on his trousers and on the sides of his shoes. Around his wrists, I could see the circular marks left by the disposable gloves he had worn at the scene as they had struggled to contain the great bulk of his hands.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I got nothing good to say to you about what happened to that boy. He died hard.’

I felt Atys’s death as a weight on my chest, as if we had both fallen at the same time and his body had come to rest across my own. I had failed to protect him. We had all failed to protect him and now he had died for a crime that he had not committed.

‘Do you have a time of death?’ I asked him, as he drowned a piece of toast in thick butter.

‘Coroner reckons he’d been dead for about two or three hours when he was found. Doesn’t look like he was killed at the jail, either. There wasn’t enough blood in the paddy wagon, and none that we’ve found so far on the walls or grounds of the jail itself, even under UV. The beating was systematic: started at his toes and fingers, then moved on to his vital organs. They castrated him before he died, but probably not too long before. Nobody saw a thing. My guess is they picked him up before he got too far from the house, then took him somewhere quiet to work on him.’

I thought of Landron Mobley, the cruelties visited upon his body, and almost spoke, but to give Adams more than he already had would be to give him everything and I was not ready to do that. There was too much here that I did not yet understand.

‘You going to talk to the Larousses?’

Adams finished off his toast. ‘My guess is they knew about it as soon as I did.’

‘Or maybe even sooner.’

Adams waved a finger at me in warning. ‘That’s the kind of implication could get a man in trouble.’ He gestured to a waitress for more coffee. ‘But since you brought it up, why would the Larousses want Jones beaten in that way?’

I stayed silent.

‘I mean,’ he continued, ‘the nature of the injuries he received seems to indicate that the people who killed him wanted him to reveal something before he died. You think they wanted him to confess?’

I almost spat in contempt.

‘Why? For the good of his soul? I don’t think so. If these people went to the trouble of killing his guardians and then hunting him down, then it doesn’t seem to me like they were in any doubt about why they were doing it.’

There was, though, the possibility that Adams was at least partly right in his suggestion that a final confession was the motive. Suppose the men who found Atys were almost certain that he had killed Marianne Larousse, but almost certain wasn’t good enough. They wanted it from his own lips because if he wasn’t responsible, then the consequences were even more serious, and not simply because the real culprit might evade detection. No, the actions that had been taken in the last twenty-four hours indicated that some people were very concerned indeed about the possibility that someone might have targeted Marianne Larousse for very particular reasons. It seemed to me that it was about time to ask some hard questions of Earl Larousse Jr., but I wasn’t about to do that alone. The Larousses were hosting their party the following day, and I was expecting some company to join me in Charleston. The Larousses would have two unwelcome guests crashing their big occasion.

That afternoon, I did some research in the Charleston Public Library. I pulled up the newspaper reports of Grady Truett’s death, but there was little more than Adele Foster had already told me. Persons unknown had entered his house, tied him to a chair, and cut his throat. No prints had been lifted, but the crime scene squad had to have found something. No crime scene is entirely clean. I was tempted to call Adams, but, once again, to do so would be to risk blowing everything that I had. I also found out a little more about the plateye. According to a book called Blue Roots, the plateye was a permanent resident of the spirit world, the underworld, although it was capable of entering the mortal world to seek retribution. It also had the ability to alter its form. As Adams had said, the plateye was a changeling.

I left the library and headed onto Meeting. Tereus had still not returned to his apartment, and he now hadn’t shown up for work in two days. Nobody would tell me anything about him, and the stripper who had taken the twenty and then sold me out to Handy Andy was nowhere to be seen.

Finally, I called the public defender’s office and was told that Laird Rhine was defending a client over at the state courthouse that afternoon. I parked at my hotel and walked down to the Four Corners, where I found Rhine in court number three at the arraignment of a woman named Johanna Bell, who had been accused of stabbing her husband in the course of a domestic argument. Apparently, she and her husband had been separated for about three months when he had returned to the family home and a quarrel had broken out over the ownership of the couple’s VCR. The quarrel had ended abruptly when she stabbed him with a carving knife. Her husband sat two rows behind her, looking sorry for himself.

Rhine handled himself pretty well as he asked the arraignment judge to convert her bail to O.R. release. He was probably in his early thirties but he put up a good argument, pointing out that Bell had never been in trouble before; that she had been forced to call the cops on a number of occasions during the dying months of her marriage following threats and actual physical assault by her husband; that she could not meet the bail set; and that no purpose could be served by keeping her in jail and away from her infant son. He made her husband sound like a creep who was lucky to get away with a punctured lung, and the judge agreed to her release on her own recognizance. Afterward, she hugged Rhine and took her son in her arms from an older woman who stood waiting for her at the back of the court.

I intercepted Rhine on the courthouse steps.

‘Mr. Rhine?’

He paused, and something like worry flashed across his face. As a PD, he encountered some of the lowest forms of life and was sometimes forced to try to defend the indefensible. I didn’t doubt that, on occasion, his clients’ victims took things personally.

‘Yes?’ Up close he looked even younger. He hadn’t started to gray yet and his blue eyes were shielded by long, soft lashes. I flashed him my license. He glanced at it and gave a nod.

‘What can I do for you, Mr. Parker? You mind if we talk while we walk? I promised my wife I’d take her out to dinner tonight.’

I fell into step alongside him.

‘I’m working with Elliot Norton on the Atys Jones case, Mr. Rhine.’

His steps faltered for a moment, as though he had briefly lost his bearings, then resumed at a slightly faster speed. I accelerated to keep up.

‘I’m no longer involved in that case, Mr. Parker.’

‘Since Atys is dead, there isn’t much of a case, period.’

‘I heard. I’m sorry.’

‘I’m sure. I have some questions for you.’

‘I’m not sure that I can answer any questions. Maybe you should ask Mr. Norton.’

‘You know, I would, except Elliot isn’t around, and my questions are kind of delicate.’

He stopped at the corner of Broad as the light changed to red. He gave the offending signal a look that suggested he was taking its interference in the course of his life kind of personally.

‘Like I said, I don’t know that I can help you.’

‘I’d like to know why you gave up the case.’

‘I have a lot of cases.’

‘Not like this one.’

‘My caseload doesn’t allow me to pick and choose, Mr. Parker. I was handed the Jones case. It was going to take up a lot of my time. I could have cleared ten cases in the time it took me just to go through the files. I wasn’t sorry to see it go.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’re a young public defender. You’re probably ambitious, and from what I saw of your work today you have good reason to be. A high-profile case like the murder of Marianne Larousse doesn’t come along every day. If you had acquitted yourself well, even if you had ultimately lost, it would have opened doors for you. I don’t think you wanted to give it up so easily.’

The lights had changed again, and we were jostled slightly as people crossed ahead of us. Still, Rhine didn’t move.

‘Whose side are you on in this, Mr. Parker?’

‘I haven’t decided yet. In the end, though, I guess I’m on the side of a dead woman and a dead man, for what it’s worth.’

‘And Elliot Norton?’

‘A friend. He asked me to come down here. I came.’

Rhine turned to face me.

‘I was asked to pass the case on to him,’ he said.

‘By Elliot?’

‘No. He never approached me. It was another man.’

‘You know who he was?’

‘He said his name was Kittim. He had something wrong with his face. He came to my office and told me that I should let Elliot Norton defend Atys Jones.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I told him that I couldn’t do that. There was no reason to. He made me an offer.’

I waited.

‘We all have skeletons in our closet, Mr. Parker. Suffice it to say that he gave me a glimpse of mine. I have a wife and a young daughter. I made mistakes early in my marriage, but I haven’t repeated them. I wasn’t planning on having my family taken away from me for sins that I’ve tried to make up for. I told Jones that Elliot Norton would be better qualified to handle his case. He didn’t object. I walked away. I haven’t seen Kittim since then, and I hope I never see him again.’

‘When were you approached?’

‘Three weeks ago.’

Three weeks ago: about the time that Grady Truett had been killed. By then, James Foster and Marianne Larousse were also dead. As Adele Foster had said, something was happening, and whatever it was, it had reached a new level with the death of Marianne Larousse.

‘Is that all, Mr. Parker?’ asked Rhine. ‘I’m not happy about what I did. I don’t really want to go over it again.’

‘That’s pretty much it,’ I said.

‘I really am sorry about Atys,’ he said.

‘I’m sure that’s a great comfort to him,’ I replied.

I returned to my hotel. There was a message from Louis, confirming that he would be arriving the next morning, a little later than expected. My spirits lifted slightly.

That night, I stood at the window of my hotel, drawn by the steady, repeated hooting of a car horn. Across the street, in front of the cash machine, the black Coupe de Ville with the shattered windshield idled by the curb. As I watched, the rear driver’s side door opened, and the child emerged. She stood by the open door and beckoned to me, her lips moving soundlessly.

I got a place we can go

Her hips moved, shimmying to music only she could hear. She lifted her skirt, and she was naked yet sexless beneath, the skin smooth as a child’s doll. Her tongue moved over her lips.

Come down

Her hand moved over the smoothness of herself.

I got a place

She thrust herself at me once more before she climbed back into the car and it began to pull slowly away, spiders spilling from its half-closed door. I awoke rubbing gossamer from my face and hair and had to shower to banish the sensation of creatures moving across my body.

21

I was awakened by a knock at my door shortly after 9 A.M. Instinctively, I felt myself reaching for a gun that was no longer there. I wrapped a towel around my waist, then padded softly to the door and peered through the peephole.

Six feet six inches of attitude, razor-sharp dress sense, and gay Republican pride looked me square in the eye.

‘I could see you looking out,’ said Louis as I opened the door. ‘Shit, don’t you ever go to the movies? Guy knocks, skinny-ass character actor looks out, guy puts barrel of gun to glass and shoots skinny-ass in the eye.’ He was dressed in a black linen suit, offset with a white collarless shirt. A wave of expensive eau de cologne followed him into the room.

‘You smell like a French whore,’ I told him.

‘I was a French whore, you couldn’t afford me. By the way, you maybe could use a little makeup yourself.’

I paused, saw myself in the mirror by the door, and looked away again. He was right. I was pale, and there were dark smudges under my eyes. My lips were cracked and dry, and I could taste something metallic in my mouth.

‘I picked up something,’ I said.

‘No shit. The fuck you pick up, the plague? They bury people look better than you.’

‘What have you got, Tourette’s? You have to swear all the time?’

He raised his hands in a backing-off gesture. ‘Hey, glad I came. Nice to be appreciated.’

I apologized. ‘You checked in?’

‘Uh-huh, ’cept some motherfucker – sorry, but, shit, he was a motherfucker – try to hand me his bags at the door.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Took them, put them in the trunk of a cab, gave the guy fifty bucks, and told him to take them to the charity store.’

‘Classy.’

‘I like to think so.’

I left him watching television while I showered and dressed, then we headed down to Diana’s on Meeting for coffee and a bite to eat. I ate half a bagel, then pushed it away.

‘You got to eat.’

I shook my head. ‘It’ll pass.’

‘It’ll pass and you’ll be dead. So how we doin’?’

‘Same as usual: dead people, a mystery, more dead people.’

‘Who we lost?’

‘The boy. His guardians. Maybe Elliot Norton.’

‘Shit, don’t sound like we got anybody left. Anyone hires you better leave you your fee in their will.’

I filled him in on all that had occurred, leaving out only the black car. That I didn’t need to burden him with.

‘So what you gonna do?’

‘Push a stick into the beehive and rustle up some bees. The Larousses are hosting a party today. I think we should avail ourselves of their hospitality.’

‘We got an invite?’

‘Has not having one ever stopped us before?’

‘No, but sometimes I just like to be invited to shit, you know what I’m sayin’, instead of having to bust in, get threatened, irritate the nice white folks, put the fear of the black man on them.’

He paused, seemed to think for a while about what he had just said, then brightened.

‘Sounds good, doesn’t it?’ I said.

‘Real good,’ he agreed.

We drove most of the way to the old Larousse plantation in separate vehicles, Louis parking his car about half a mile from the gates before joining me for the rest of the journey. I asked him about Angel.

‘He workin’ on a job.’

‘Anything I should know about?’

He looked at me for a long time.

‘I don’t know. Maybe, but not now.’

‘Uh-huh. I see you made the news.’

He didn’t reply for a couple of seconds. ‘Angel tell you somethin’?’

‘Just gave me the name of the town. You waited a long time to settle that score.’

He shrugged. ‘They was worth killin’, they just wasn’t worth travelin’ too far to kill.’

‘And since you were on your way down here anyway  . . .’

‘I figured I’d stop by,’ he finished. ‘Can I go now, Officer?’

I let it drop. At the entrance to the Larousse estate, a tall man in a flunky’s suit waved us down.

‘Can I see your invitations, gentlemen?’

‘We didn’t get invitations,’ I said, ‘but I’m pretty sure somebody is expecting us.’

‘The names?’

‘Parker. Charlie Parker.’

‘By two,’ added Louis, helpfully.

The guard spoke into his walkie-talkie, out of earshot from us. We waited, two or three cars lining up behind us, until the guard finished talking.

‘You can go ahead. Mr. Kittim will meet you at the parking area.’

‘Surprise, surprise,’ said Louis. I had told him about my encounter with Bowen and Kittim at the Antioch rally.

‘Told you this would work,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m a detective.’ It struck me then, my worries about the consequences of the Caina incident aside, that I was already feeling better since Louis had arrived. That wasn’t too surprising, since I now had a pistol, thanks to him, and I was pretty certain that Louis had at least one more on his person.

We followed half a mile of live oaks, palmettos, and palms, much of it overhung with Spanish moss. Cicadas chirped in the trees and droplets from the morning’s now departed rain kept up a steady rhythmic patter on the roof and road until we emerged from the trees and onto an expanse of green lawn. Another white-gloved flunky directed us to park the car beneath one of a number of tarpaulins erected to shelter the vehicles from the sunlight, the canvas shifting slightly in the currents of cold air cast by one of a number of huge industrial air conditioners arrayed on the grass. Long tables had been arranged along three sides of a square and covered by starched linen tablecloths. Huge amounts of food had been arrayed upon them, while black servants in pristine white shirts and dark trousers hovered anxiously, waiting to serve guests. Others moved through the crowds already gathered on the lawn, offering champagne and cocktails. I looked at Louis. He looked at me. Apart from the servants, he was the only person of color present. He was also the only guest dressed in black.

‘You should have worn a white jacket,’ I said. ‘You look like an exclamation mark. Plus, you might have picked up a few bucks in tips.’

‘Look at them brothers.’ He despaired. ‘Ain’t nobody here heard of Denmark Vesey?’

A dragonfly glided across the grass by my feet, hunting for prey among the blades. There were no birds to prey on him in turn, at least none that I could see or hear. The only sign of life came from a single heron standing in a patch of marshland to the northeast of the house, the waters around it seemingly stilled by a carpet of algae. Beside it, amid rows of oak and pecans, stood the remains of small dwellings, equidistantly spaced, their tiled roofs now gone and the miscast and broken bricks used in their construction weathered by the elements over the century and a half that had probably passed since their original establishment. Even I could guess what it represented: the remains of a slave street.

‘You’d think they’d have knocked them down,’ I said.

‘That’s heritage,’ said Louis. ‘Right up there with flying the Confederate flag and keeping one pillowcase clean at all times. Y’know, for special wear.’

The Larousses’ old plantation house was pre-Revolutionary redbrick, a Georgian-Palladian villa dating back to the mid–eighteenth century. Limestone steps led up a set of twin staircases to a marble–floored portico. Four Doric pillars supported the gallery that ran across the front of the house, four windows on either side over two levels. Elegantly dressed couples crowded in the shade of the porch.

Our attention was distracted by a party of men moving quickly across the lawn. They were all white, all had earpieces, and all were sweating beneath their dark suits, despite the efforts of the air conditioners. The only exception was the man at the center of the group. Kittim wore a blue blazer over tan trousers and penny loafers, his white shirt buttoned to the neck. His head and face were largely concealed by the baseball cap and sunglasses, but they couldn’t conceal the blade wound that had been torn in his right cheek.

Atys. That was why the T-bar cross had not been on his body when he was found.

Kittim stopped about five feet away from us and raised his hand. Instantly, the men around him paused, then spread out in a semicircle surrounding us. No words were spoken for a moment. His attention shifted from Louis to me, then back again. His smile remained fixed in place, even when Louis spoke to him for the first time.

‘What. The fuck. Are you?’ asked Louis.

Kittim didn’t respond to him.

‘This is Kittim,’ I explained.

‘Ain’t he the pretty one?’

‘Mr. Parker,’ said Kittim, still ignoring Louis. ‘We weren’t expecting you.’

‘It was a last-minute decision,’ I replied. ‘Some sudden deaths cleared my schedule.’

‘Mm-hmm,’ said Kittim. ‘I can’t help but notice that you and your colleague appear to be armed.’

‘Armed.’ I looked disapprovingly at Louis. ‘Told you it wasn’t that kind of party.’

‘Never hurts to come prepared. Folks don’t take us seriously otherwise,’ said Louis.

‘Oh, I take you very seriously,’ said Kittim, acknowledging him properly for the first time. ‘So seriously that I’d be grateful if you would come with us to the basement, where we can dispose of your weapons without alarming the other guests.’

Already I could see people casting curious looks in our direction. As if on cue, a string quartet struck up from the far side of the lawn. They were playing a Strauss waltz. How quaint.

‘No offense, man, but we ain’t goin’ to no basement with you.’ It was Louis.

‘Then you’ll force us to take action.’

Louis’s eyebrow rose about half an inch. ‘Yeah, what you gonna do, kill us on the lawn? That’s gonna be some party, you do that. People be talkin’ about it for a loooong time. “Hey, you remember Earl’s party, when those sweaty guys and the fucker with leprosy tried to take the guns away from those fellas that arrived late, and they drew down on them and Bessie Bluechip got all that blood on her dress? Man, how we laughed  . . .”’

The tension was perceptibly rising. The men around Kittim were waiting for an indication from him on how to proceed, but he wasn’t moving. His smile remained fixed in place as if he’d died with it and then been stuffed and mounted on the lawn. I felt something roll down my back and pool at the base of my spine, and realized that the security guards weren’t the only ones who were sweating.

The tension was broken by a voice from the porch.

‘Mr. Kittim,’ it said. ‘Don’t keep our guests on the grass. Bring them up here.’

The voice came from Earl Jr., looking elegantly wasted in a blue double-breasted jacket and jeans pressed with the crease along the knee. His light hair was brushed forward to disguise his widow’s peak, and his lips seemed even fuller and more feminine than when last I saw him. Kittim inclined his head slightly, indicating we should do as requested, then he and his men fell into place behind and around us. It was obvious to anyone with half a brain that we were about as welcome as bugs in the buffet, but the guests around us studiously pretended to ignore us. Even the servants didn’t look our way. We were led through the main doors and into a great hall floored with loblolly pine. Two drawing rooms opened up on either side, and a graceful double stairway led to the upper floor. The doors closed behind us and we were disarmed within seconds. They got two guns and a knife out of Louis. They seemed impressed.

‘Look at you,’ I said. ‘Two guns.’

‘And a knife. I had to get the trousers cut special.’

Kittim moved around until he was standing by Earl Jr.’s side. Kittim had a shiny blue Taurus in his hand.

‘Why are you here, Mr. Parker?’ said Larousse. ‘This is a private party, the first such occasion since the death of my sister.’

‘Why break out the champagne now? You have something to celebrate?’

‘Your presence is not welcome here.’

‘Somebody killed Atys Jones.’

‘I heard. You’ll forgive me if I shed no tears.’

‘He didn’t murder your sister, Mr. Larousse, but I suspect you already know that.’

‘Why would you suspect that?’

‘Because I think Mr. Kittim here probably tortured Atys before he killed him in an effort to find out who did. Because you think, as I do, that the person responsible for your sister’s death may also be responsible for the deaths of Landron Mobley, Grady Truett, the suicide of James Foster, and possibly the death of Elliot Norton.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He didn’t look surprised at the mention of Elliot’s name.

‘I also think that Elliot Norton might have been trying to find out who was responsible as well, which was why he took on the Jones case, and I’m starting to think that he may have taken it on with your approval, maybe even your cooperation. Except he wasn’t making enough progress, so you took matters into your own hands after Mobley’s body was found.’

I turned to Kittim.

‘Did you enjoy killing Atys Jones, Kittim? Did you enjoy shooting an old woman in the back?’

I saw the blow coming too late to react. His fist caught me in the hollow of my left temple and sent me sprawling to the ground. Louis twitched slightly, on the verge of movement, but froze with the sound of hammers cocking.

‘You need to work on your manners, Mr. Parker,’ said Kittim. ‘You can’t come in here and make accusations of that kind without incurring the consequences.’

I raised myself slowly onto my hands and knees. The punch had rattled me, and I felt bile rising into my throat. I gagged, then vomited.

‘Oh dear,’ said Larousse. ‘Now look what you’ve done. Toby, get somebody to clean that up.’

Kittim’s feet appeared beside me. ‘You’re a mess, Mr. Parker.’ He squatted down so I could see his face. ‘Mr. Bowen doesn’t like you. Now I can see why. Don’t think that we’ve finished with you yet. Me, I’d be very surprised if you make it home alive out of South Carolina. In fact, I’d say the odds against it would be quite attractive, if I were a gambling man.’

The door in front of me opened, and a manservant entered. He didn’t appear to register the guns or the tension in the room. He simply knelt down as I stood unsteadily, and began to scrub the floorboards clean. He was followed by Earl Sr.

‘What’s going on here?’ he asked.

‘Some uninvited guests, Mr. Larousse,’ replied Kittim. ‘They’re about to leave.’

The old man barely glanced at him. It was clear that Larousse didn’t like Kittim and resented his presence in his house, yet still Kittim was here. Larousse said nothing to him and instead diverted his attention to his son, whose confidence immediately began to dissipate in his father’s presence.

‘Who are they?’ he asked.

‘This is the investigator I spoke to at the hotel, the one hired by Elliot Norton to get Marianne’s nigger murderer off the hook,’ stammered Earl Jr.

‘Is that true?’ asked the older man.

I wiped the back of my hand over my mouth.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe that Atys Jones killed your daughter, but I will find out who did.’

‘It’s not your business.’

‘Atys is dead. So are the people who gave him sanctuary in their home. You’re right: finding out what happened isn’t my business. It’s more than that. It’s my moral obligation.’

‘I would advise you to take your moral obligations elsewhere, sir. This one will lead you to ruin.’ He turned to his son. ‘Have them escorted off my property.’

Earl Jr. looked to Kittim. The decision was clearly his to make.

After a pause to assert his authority, Kittim nodded to his men and they moved forward, their guns held discreetly by their sides so as not to alarm the guests when we left the house.

‘And Mr. Kittim,’ added Earl Sr.

Kittim turned to look at him.

‘In future, conduct your beatings elsewhere. This is my house and you are not a member of my staff.’

He shot a final harsh look at his son, then went out onto the lawn to rejoin his guests.

We were placed at the center of a circle of men and escorted to the car. Our weapons were placed in the trunk, minus their ammunition. Kittim leaned on the driver’s side window as I prepared to drive away. The smell of burning was so strong that I almost gagged again.

‘Next time I see you will be the last,’ he said. ‘Now take your porch monkey and get out of here.’ He winked at Louis, then he patted the roof of the car and watched us drive away.

I touched my temple where Kittim’s punch had landed, and winced at the contact.

‘You okay to drive?’ asked Louis.

‘I think so.’

‘Looked like Kittim was makin’ himself at home back there.’

‘He’s there because Bowen wants him there.’

‘Means Bowen got something on the Larousses, if his boy has the run of the house.’

‘He called you a bad name.’

‘I heard.’

‘You seem to be taking it pretty calmly, all things considered.’

‘Wasn’t worth dyin’ over. Least, not worth my dyin’ over. Kittim’s another matter. Like the man said, we be seein’ him again. It’ll wait.’

‘You think you can stay with him?’

‘Sure. Where you goin’?’

‘To get a history lesson. I’m tired of being nice to people.’

Louis looked mildly surprised.

‘Just how exactly you been definin’ “nice” up to now?’

22

There was a message waiting for me when I got back to my hotel. It was from Phil Poveda. He wanted me to call him. He didn’t sound panicked or fearful. In fact, I thought I detected a note of relief in his voice. First, though, I called Rachel. Bruce Taylor, one of the patrolmen out of Scarborough, was in the kitchen when she answered, drinking coffee and eating a cookie. It made me feel better knowing that the cops were dropping by as MacArthur had promised and that somewhere the Klan Killer was being intolerant of lactose, among other things.

‘Wallace has been by a few times as well,’ said Rachel.

‘How is Mr. Lonelyheart?’

‘He went shopping in Freeport. He bought himself a couple of jackets in Ralph’s, some new shirts and ties. He’s a work in progress, but there’s potential there. And Mary really seems to be his type.’

‘Desperate?’

‘The word you’re looking for is “easygoing”. Now go away. I have an attractive man in uniform to take care of.’

I hung up and dialed Phil Poveda’s number.

‘It’s Parker,’ I said when he picked up the phone.

‘Hey,’ he replied. ‘Thanks for calling.’ He sounded upbeat, almost cheerful. This was a far cry from the Phil Poveda who had threatened me with a gun two days before. ‘I’ve just been putting my affairs in order. You know, wills and shit. I’m a pretty wealthy man, I just never knew it. Admittedly, I’ll have to die to capitalize on it, but that’s cool.’

‘Mr. Poveda, are you feeling okay?’ It was kind of a redundant question. Phil Poveda appeared to be feeling better than okay. Unfortunately, I figured Phil Poveda felt that way because his sanity was falling down around his ears.

‘Yeah,’ he said, and for the first time a twinge of doubt crept into his voice. ‘Yeah, I think so. You were right: Elliot’s dead. They found his car. It was on the news.’

I didn’t reply.

‘Like you said, that leaves just me and Earl, and unlike Earl, I don’t have my daddy and my Nazi friends to protect me.’

‘You mean Bowen.’

‘Uh-huh, Bowen and that Aryan freak of his. But they won’t be able to protect him forever. Someday, he’ll find himself alone, and then  . . .’

He let himself trail off before resuming.

‘I just want it all to be over.’

‘You want what to be over?’

‘Everything: the killing, the guilt. Hell, the guilt most of all. You got time, we can talk about it. I got time. Not much, though, not much. Time’s running out for me. Time’s running out for all of us.’

I told him I’d be right over. I also wanted to tell him to stay away from the medicine cabinet and any sharp objects, but by then the glimmer of sanity that had briefly shone through had been swallowed up by the dark clouds in his brain. He just said, ‘Cool!’ and put down the phone.

I packed my bags and checked out of the hotel. Whatever happened next, I wouldn’t be back in Charleston for a while.

Phil Poveda answered his door wearing shorts, deck shoes, and a white T-shirt depicting Jesus Christ pulling back his robes to reveal the thorn-enclosed heart within.

‘Jesus is my Savior,’ explained Phil. ‘Every time I look in the mirror, I’m reminded of that fact. He is ready to forgive me.’

Poveda’s pupils had shrunk to the size of pinheads. Whatever he was on was strong stuff. You could have given it to the folks on the Titanic and watched them descend beneath the waves with beatific smiles on their faces. He shepherded me into his neat oak kitchen and made decaf coffee for both of us. For the next hour, his coffee sat untouched beside him. Pretty soon, I’d laid mine aside as well.

After hearing Phil Poveda’s tale, I didn’t think I’d ever want to eat or drink again.

The bar, Obee’s, is gone now. It was a roadhouse dive off Bluff Road, a place where clean-cut college boys could get five-dollar blow jobs from poor blacks and poorer whites out among the trees that descended in dark conclave down to the banks of the Congaree, then return to their buddies, high-fiving and grinning, while the women washed their mouth out from the tap in the yard. But close to where it once stood is a new structure: the Swamp Rat, where Atys Jones and Marianne Larousse spent their last hours together before her death.

The Jones sisters used to drink in Obee’s, though one of them, Addy, was barely seventeen and the older sister, Melia, by a quirk of nature, looked younger still. By then, Addy had already given birth to her son, Atys: the fruit, it appeared, of an ill-fated liaison with one of her momma’s passing boyfriends, the late Davis ‘Boot’ Smoot, a liaison that might have been classified as rape had she seen fit to report it. So Addy had begun to raise the boy with her grandma, for her mother couldn’t bear to look at her. Pretty soon, she wouldn’t be there for her mother to ignore, for on this night all traces of Addy and her sister were about to be erased from this earth.

They were drunk and swaying slightly as they emerged from the bar, a chorus of whistles and catcalls sending them on their way, a boozy wind in their sails. Addy tripped and landed on her ass, and her sister doubled over with laughter. She hauled the younger girl up, her skirt rising to reveal her nakedness, and as they stood swaying they saw the young men packed into the car, the ones in the back climbing over one another to catch a glimpse. Embarrassed and not a little afraid, even in their drunkenness, the laughter of the young women faded and they aimed for the road, their heads down.

They had walked only a few yards when they heard the sound of the car behind them and the headlights picked them out among the stones and fallen pine needles on the road. They looked behind them. The huge twin eyes were almost upon them, and then the car was alongside and one of the rear doors had opened. A hand reached out for Addy, grasping. It tore her dress and drew ragged parallel cuts along her arm.

The girls started running into the undergrowth toward the smell of water and rotting vegetation. The car pulled in by the side of the road, the lights died, and with whoops and war cries, the chase was on.

‘We used to call them whores,’ said Poveda. His eyes were still unnaturally bright. ‘And they were, or as good as. Landron knew all about them. That was why we let him hang out with us, because Landron knew all the whores, the girls who’d let you fuck them for a six-pack of beer, the girls who wouldn’t talk if you maybe had to force them a little. It was Landron who told us about the Jones sisters. One of them had a child, and she couldn’t have been but sixteen when it was born. And the other one, Landron said she was just crying out for it, took it anyway she could. Hell, they didn’t even wear panties. Landron said that was so the men could get in and out easier. I mean, what kind of girls were they, drinking in bars like that, going around buck naked under their skirts? They were advertising it, so why not sell? They might even have enjoyed it, if they’d heard us out. And we’d have paid them. We had money. We didn’t want it for nothing.’

He was in his own place now, no longer Phil Poveda, a late thirty-something software engineer with a paunch and a mortgage. Instead, he was a boy again. He was back with the others, running through the long grass, his breath catching in his throat, feeling the ache at his crotch.

‘Hey, hold up!’ he cried. ‘Hold up, we got money!’

And around him, the others cracked up laughing, because it was Phil, and Phil knew how to have a good time. Phil always made them laugh. Phil was a funny guy.

They chased the girls into the Congaree and along Cedar Creek, Truett stumbling and falling into the water, James Foster helping him to his feet again. They caught up with them where the waters began to grow deeper, close by the first of the big cypress trees with their swollen boles. Melia fell, tripping on an exposed root, and before her sister could pull her to her feet they were on them. Addy struck out at the man nearest her, her small fist impacting above his eye, and Landron Mobley hit her so hard in response that he broke her jaw and she fell back, dazed.

‘You fucking bitch,’ Landron said. ‘You fucking, fucking bitch.’ And there was something in his voice, the low menace, that made the others pause; even Phil, who was struggling to hold on to Melia. And they knew then that it was going down, that there was no turning back. Earl Larousse and Grady Truett held Addy down for Landron while the others stripped her sister. Elliot Norton, Phil, and James Foster looked at one another, then Phil pushed Melia to the ground and soon he, like Landron, was moving inside, the two men falling into a rhythm beside each other while the night insects buzzed around them, attracted by the scent of them, feeding on the men and on the women, and probing at the blood that began to seep into the ground.

It was Phil’s fault, in the end. He was getting off the girl, breathing hard, his face turned away from her, looking toward her sister and her sister’s ruined face, the import of what they were doing gradually dawning on him now that he had spent himself, when suddenly he felt the impact at his groin and he tumbled sideways, the shock already transforming itself into a burning at the pit of his stomach. Then Melia was on her feet and running away from the swamp, heading east toward the Larousse tract and the main road beyond.

Mobley was the first to head after her, then Foster. Elliot, torn between taking his turn with the girl on the ground or stopping her sister, stood unmoving for a time before running after his friends. Grady and Earl were already pushing at each other, joshing as they fought for their turn with Addy.

The purchase of the karst had been an expensive mistake for the Larousse family. The land was honeycombed by underwater streams and caves, and they had almost lost a truck down a sinkhole following a collapse before they discovered that the limestone deposits weren’t even big enough to justify quarrying. Meanwhile, successful mines were being dug in Cayce, about twenty miles upriver, and Wynnsboro, up 77 toward Charlotte, and then there were the tree huggers protesting at the potential threat to the swamp. The Larousses turned their attentions in other directions, leaving the land as a reminder to themselves never to be caught out like that again.

Melia passed some fallen, rusted fencing, and a bullet-riddled ‘No Trespassing’ sign. Her feet were torn and bleeding, but she kept moving. There were houses beyond the karst, she knew. There would be help for her there, help for her sister. They would come for them and take them to safety and—

She heard the men behind her, closing rapidly. She looked back, still running, and suddenly her toes were no longer on solid ground but were suspended over some deep, dark place. She teetered on the brink of the sinkhole, smelling the filthy, polluted water below, then her balance failed her and she plummeted over the edge. She landed with a splash far below, emerging seconds later choking and coughing, the water burning her eyes, her skin, her privates. She peered up and saw the three men silhouetted against the stars. With slow strokes, she swam for the edges of the hole. She tried to find a handhold, but the stone kept slipping beneath her fingers. She heard the men talking, and one of them disappeared. Her arms and legs moved slowly as she kept herself afloat in the dank, viscous waters. The burning was getting worse now, and she had trouble keeping her eyes open. From above, there came a new light. She stared up in time to see the rag flare and then the gasoline can was falling, falling  . . .

The sinkholes had, over the years, become a dumping ground for poisons and chemicals, the waste infecting the water supply and slowly, over time, entering the Congaree itself, for all of these hidden streams ultimately connected with the great river. Many of the substances dumped in the hole were dangerous. Some were corrosives, others weed killers. Most, though, had one thing in common.

They were highly inflammable.

The three men stepped back hurriedly as a pillar of flame shot up from the depths of the hole, illuminating the trees, the broken ground, the abandoned machinery, and their faces, shocked and secretly delighted at the effect they had achieved.

One of them wiped his hands on the remains of the old sheet he had torn for use as a wick, trying to rid himself of the worst of the gasoline.

‘Fuck her,’ said Elliot Norton. He wrapped the rag around a stone and tossed it into the inferno. ‘Let’s go.’

I said nothing for a time. Poveda was tracing unknowable patterns on the tabletop with his index finger. Elliot Norton, a man whom I had considered a friend, had participated in the rape and burning of a young girl. I stared at Poveda, but he was intent upon his finger patterns. Something had broken inside Phil Poveda, the thing that had allowed him to continue living after what they had done, and now Phil Poveda was drowning in the tide of his recollection.

I was watching a man go insane.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Finish it.’

‘Finish her,’ said Mobley. He was looking down at Earl Larousse, who was kneeling beside the prone woman, buttoning his pants. Earl’s brow furrowed.

‘What?’

‘Finish her,’ repeated Mobley. ‘Kill her.’

‘I can’t do that,’ said Earl. He sounded like a little boy.

‘You fucked her quick enough,’ said Mobley. ‘You leave her here and somebody finds her, then she’ll talk. We let her go, she’ll talk. Here.’ He picked up a rock and tossed it at Earl. It struck him painfully on the knee and he winced, then rubbed at the spot.

‘Why me?’ he whined.

‘Why any of us?’ asked Mobley.

‘I’m not doing it,’ said Earl.

Then Mobley pulled a knife from beneath the folds of his shirt. ‘Do it,’ said Mobley, ‘or I’ll kill you instead.’

Suddenly, the power in the group shifted and they understood. It had been Mobley all along: Mobley who had led them; Mobley who had found the pot, the LSD; Mobley who had brought them to the women; and Mobley who had ultimately damned them. Maybe that had been his intention all along, thought Phil later: to damn a group of rich, white boys who had patronized him, insulted him, then taken him under their wing when they saw what he could procure for them just as they would surely abandon him when his usefulness came to an end. And of them all, it was Larousse who was the most spoiled, the most cosseted, the weakest, the most untrustworthy; and so it would fall to him to kill the girl.

Larousse began to cry. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Please don’t make me do this.’

Mobley, unspeaking, lifted the blade and watched it gleam in the moonlight. Slowly, with trembling hands, Larousse picked up the rock.

‘Please,’ he said, one last time. To his right, Phil turned away, only to feel Mobley’s hand wrench him around.

‘No, you watch. You’re part of it, you watch it end. Now—’ He turned his attention back to Larousse. ‘Finish her, you chickenshit fuck. Finish her, you fucking pretty boy, unless you want to go back to your daddy and have to tell him what you’ve done, cry on his shoulder like the little fucking faggot that you are, beg him to make it go away. Finish her. Finish her!’

Larousse’s whole body was shaking as he raised the rock then brought it down, with minimal force, on the girl’s face. Still there came a cracking sound, and she moaned. Larousse was howling now, his face convulsed with fear, the tears rolling down his cheeks, streaking through the dirt that had accumulated on them during the rape of the girl. He raised the rock a second time, then brought it down harder. This time, the crack was louder. The rock came up once more, then down, faster now, and Larousse was making a high-pitched mewling sound as he struck at the girl again and again and again, lost in the frenzy of it, blood-spattered, until hands reached out for him and they dragged him from her body, the rock still grasped between his fingers, his eyes huge and white in his red face.

The girl on the ground was long dead.

‘You did good,’ said Mobley. The knife was gone. ‘You’re a regular killer, Earl.’ He patted the sobbing man on the shoulder. ‘A regular killer.’

‘Mobley took her away,’ said Poveda. ‘People were coming, drawn by the fire, and we had to leave. Landron’s old man was a grave digger in Charleston. He’d opened a grave in Magnolia the day before, so Landron and Elliot dumped her there and used some of the earth to cover her. They buried the guy on top of her the next day. He was the last in his family. Nobody was ever going to be digging up the plot again.’ He swallowed. ‘At least, they weren’t until Landron’s body got dumped there.’

‘And Melia?’ I asked.

‘She was burned alive. Nothing could have survived that blaze.’

‘And nobody knew about this? You told no one else about what you’d done?’

He shook his head. ‘It was just us. They looked for the girls, but they never found them. Rains came and washed everything away. As far as anybody knew, they’d just disappeared off the face of the earth.

‘But somebody found out,’ he concluded. ‘Somebody’s making us pay. Marianne was killed. James took his own life. Grady got his throat cut. Mobley was murdered, then Elliot. Someone is hunting us down, punishing us. I’m next. That’s why I had to get my affairs in order.’

He smiled.

‘I’m leaving it all to charity. You think that’s a good thing to do? I think so. I think it’s a good thing.’

‘You could go to the police. You could tell them what you did.’

‘No, that’s not the way. I have to wait.’

‘I could go to the police.’

He shrugged. ‘You could, but I’ll just say you made it all up. My lawyer will have me out in a matter of hours, if they even bother to take me in at all, then I’ll be back here, waiting.’

I stood.

‘Jesus will forgive me,’ said Poveda. ‘He forgives us all. Doesn’t He?’

Something flickered in his eyes, the last dying thrashing of his sanity before it sank beneath the waves.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if there’s that much forgiveness in the universe.’

Then I left him.

The Congaree. The spate of recent deaths. The link between Elliot and Atys Jones. The T-bar in Landron Mobley’s chest, and the smaller version of it that hung from the neck of the man with the damaged eyes.

Tereus. I had to find Tereus.

The old man still sat on the worn steps of the house smoking his pipe and watching the traffic go by. I asked him for the number of Tereus’s room.

‘Number eight, but he ain’t there,’ he told me.

‘You know, I think you may be bad luck for me,’ I said. ‘Whenever I come here, Tereus is gone but you’re taking up porch space.’

‘Thought you’d be glad to see a familiar face.’

‘Yeah, Tereus’s.’

I walked past him and headed up the stairs. He watched me go.

I knocked on the door to eight, but there was no reply. From the rooms at either side I could hear competing radios playing, and stale cooking smells clung to the carpets and the walls. I tried the handle and it turned easily, the door opening onto a room with a single unmade bed, a punch-drunk couch, and a gas stove in one corner. There was barely enough room between the stove and the bed for a thin man to squeeze by and look out of the small, grime-caked window. To my left was a toilet and shower stall, both reasonably clean. In fact, the room might have been threadbare, but it wasn’t dirty. Tereus had done his best to make something of it: new drapes hung from the plastic rod at the window, and a cheap framed print of roses in a vase hung on the wall. There was no TV, no radio, no books. The mattress had been torn from the bed and thrown in a corner, and clothes were scattered around the room, but I guessed that whoever had trashed the place had found nothing. Anything of value Tereus owned he kept elsewhere, in his true home.

I was about to leave when the door opened behind me. I turned to find a big, overweight black man in a bright shirt blocking my way out. He had a cigarette in one hand and a baseball bat in the other. Behind him, I could see the old man puffing on his pipe.

‘Can I help you with something?’ asked the man with the bat.

‘You the super?’

‘I’m the owner, and you’re trespassing.’

‘I was looking for somebody.’

‘Well, he ain’t here, and you got no right to be in his place.’

‘I’m a private detective. My name is—’

‘I don’t give a good goddamn what your name is. You just get out of here now before I have to defend myself against an unprovoked assault.’

The old man with the pipe chuckled. ‘Unprovoked assault,’ he echoed. ‘Thass good.’ He shook his head in merriment and blew out a puff of smoke.

I walked to the door and the big man stood to one side to let me pass. He still filled most of the doorway and I had to breathe in deeply to squeeze by. He smelled of drain cleaner and Old Spice. I paused at the stairs.

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘What?’

‘How come his door was unlocked?’

The man’s face creased in puzzlement. ‘You didn’t open it?’

‘No, it was open when I got here, and somebody had gone through his things.’

The owner turned to the man with the pipe. ‘Anybody else asking after Tereus?’

‘No sir, just this man.’

‘Look, I’m not trying to make any trouble,’ I continued. ‘I just need to talk to Tereus. When was the last time that you saw him?’

‘Few days ago,’ said the owner, relenting. ‘Round about eight, after he finished over at the club. He had a pack with him, said he wouldn’t be back for a couple of days.’

‘And the door was locked then?’

‘Watched him lock it myself.’

Which meant that somebody had entered the building since the death of Atys Jones and had probably done what I had just done: gone into the apartment, either to find Tereus himself or something connected with him.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘Yeah, don’t mention it.’

‘Unprovoked assault,’ said the pipe smoker again. ‘Thass funny.’

The late-afternoon deviants were already assembled in LapLand by the time I arrived, among them an elderly man in a torn shirt who rubbed his hand up and down his beer bottle in a manner that suggested he spent too much time alone thinking about women, and a middle-aged guy in a tatty business suit, his tie already at half-mast, and a shot glass before him. His briefcase lay at his feet. It had fallen open and now stood, slack-jawed, on the floor. It was empty. I wondered when he would pluck up the courage to tell his wife that he’d lost his job, that he’d been spending his days watching pole dancers or low-priced afternoon movies, that she didn’t have to iron his shirts anymore because, hell, he didn’t have to wear a shirt. In fact, he didn’t even have to get out of bed in the mornings if he didn’t feel like it, and hey, you got a problem with that, then don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

I found Lorelei sitting at the bar, waiting for her turn to dance. She didn’t look too happy to see me, but I was used to that. The bartender made a move to intercept me, but I lifted a finger.

‘My name’s Parker. You got a problem, you call Willie. Otherwise, back off.’

He backed off.

‘Slow afternoon,’ I said to Lorelei.

‘They’re always slow,’ she said, her head turning away from me to signal her lack of interest in engaging me in conversation. I figured that she’d taken an earful from her boss for talking too much the last time I visited, and didn’t want to be seen to repeat her mistake. ‘The only cash these guys got are nickels and dimes.’

‘Well then, I guess you’ll be dancing for the love of your art.’

She shook her head and stared back at me over her shoulder. It wasn’t a friendly stare.

‘You think you’re funny? Maybe even think you got “charm”? Well, let me tell you something: you don’t. What you got I see here every night, in every guy who sticks a dollar bill in the crack of my ass. They come in, they think they’re better than me, they maybe even got some fantasy that I’ll look at them and I won’t want to take their money, I’ll just want to take them home and fuck them till their lights go out. Well, that just ain’t gonna happen, and if I don’t put out for free for them, I sure ain’t gonna put out for free for you, so if you want something from me, you show me green.’

She had a point. I put a fifty on the bar but kept my finger firmly fixed on the nose.

‘Call me cautious,’ I said. ‘Last time, I think you reneged on our agreement.’

‘You got to talk to Tereus, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah, but I had to go through your boss to get to him. Literally. Where is Tereus?’

Her lips thinned. ‘You really got it in for that guy, don’t you? You ever get tired of pressuring people?’

‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘I’d prefer not to be here. I’d prefer not to be talking to you in this way. I don’t think I’m better than you, but I’m certainly no worse than you, so save the speeches. You don’t want my money? That’s fine.’ The music came to a close, and the customers clapped desultorily as the dancer gathered up her clothes and headed for the dressing room.

‘You’re up,’ I said. I began to pull the fifty back, but her hand slapped down upon the edge.

‘He didn’t come in this morning. Last couple of mornings neither.’

‘So I gather. Where is he?’

‘He has a place in town.’

‘He hasn’t been back there in days. I need more than that.’

The bartender announced her name, and she grimaced. She slipped from her chair, the fifty still trapped between us.

‘He got hisself a place up by the Congaree. There’s some private land in the reserve. That’s where he’s at.’

‘Where exactly?’

‘You want me to draw you a map? I can’t tell you, but there ain’t but one stretch of private left in the park.’

I released the fifty.

‘Next time, I don’t care how much money you bring, I ain’t talking to you. I’d be better earning two dollars from those sorry motherfuckers than a thousand selling out good people to you. But you can take this for free: you ain’t the only one bein’ askin’ about Tereus. Couple of guys came in yesterday, but Willie gave them the bum’s rush, called them “fucking Nazis.”’

I nodded my thanks.

‘And I still liked them better than you,’ she added.

With that she walked to the stage, the CD player behind the bar knocking out the first bars of ‘Love Child.’ She had palmed the fifty.

Obviously, she planned to turn over her new leaf tomorrow.

Phil Poveda was sitting at his kitchen table that night, two cups of cold coffee still lying untouched close by, when the door opened behind him and he heard the padding of feet. He raised his head, and the lights danced in his eyes. He turned around in his chair.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

The hook was poised above his head, and he recalled, in his final moments, Christ’s words to Peter and Andrew by the Sea of Galilee:

I will make you fishers of men.

Poveda’s lips trembled as he spoke.

‘This won’t hurt, will it?’

And the hook descended.

23

I drove in silence to Columbia. There was no music in the car. I seemed to drift along I-26, northwest through Dorchester, Orangeburg and Calhoun counties, the lights of the cars that passed me in the darkness like flights of fireflies moving in parallel, slowly fading into the distance or lost to the twists and bends of the road.

And everywhere there were trees, and in the blackness beyond their margins the land brooded. How could it not? It had been tainted by its own history, enriched by the bodies of the dead that lay beneath the leaves and the rocks: British and Colonial, Confederate and Union, slave and freeman, the possessor and the possessed. Go north, to York and Lancaster Counties, and there were trails once traversed by the night riders, their horses galloping through dirt and water, white-draped, mud-speckled, the riders urging them on, terrorizing, annihilating, stamping the first shoots of a new future into the dirt beneath the horses’ hooves.

And the blood of the dead ran into the earth and clouded the rivers, flowing from the mountain forests of poplar, red maple, and flowering dogwood, the sculpin and dace absorbing it into their system as it passed through their gills; and the river otters that plucked them from the water gulped them down, and the blood with them. It was in the mayflies and stoneflies that darkened the air of the Piedmont Shoals, in the black-sided darters that anchored themselves to the bottom of ponds to avoid being eaten, in the sunfish that hovered near the safety of the spider lilies, the beauty of their white flowers masking their ugly, arachnoid underparts.

Here, on these silt-loaded waters, the sunlight moves in strange patterns, independent of the flow of the river or the demands of the breeze. These are the shiners, the small, silvery fish that blend with the light reflecting off the surface of the stream, dazzling predators into seeing the shoal as one single entity, one enormous, threatening life-form. These swamps are their safe haven, although the old blood had found its way even into them.

(And is that why you stayed here, Tereus? Is that why the little apartment contained so few traces of your existence? For you don’t exist in the city, not as you truly are. In the city you’re just another ex-con, another poor man cleaning up after those wealthier than himself, witnessing their appetites while quietly praying to your God for their salvation. But that’s just a front, isn’t it? The reality of you is very different. The reality of you is out here, in the swamps, with whatever you’ve been hiding for all these years. It’s you. You’re hunting them down, aren’t you, punishing them for what they did so long ago? This is your place. You discovered what they did and you decided to make them pay. But then jail got in the way – although, even in that, you were making somebody pay for his sins – and you had to wait to continue your work. I don’t blame you. I don’t think any man could look upon what those creatures had done and not want to punish them in any way possible. But that’s not true justice, Tereus, because by doing what you’re doing, the truth of what they did – Mobley and Poveda, Larousse and Truett, Elliot and Foster – will never be revealed, and without that truth, without that revelation, there can be no justice achieved.

And what of Marianne Larousse? Her misfortune was to be born into that family and to be marked by her brother’s crime. Unknowingly, she took his sins upon herself and was punished for them. She should not have been. With her death, a step was taken into another place, where justice and vengeance were without distinction.

So you have to be stopped, and the story of what took place in the Congaree told at last, because otherwise the woman with the scaled skin will continue wandering through the cypress and holly, a figure glimpsed in the shadows but never truly seen, hoping to find at last her lost sister and hold her close, cleansing the blood and filth from her, the misery and humiliation, the shame and the pain and the hurt.)

The swamps: I was passing close by them now. I drifted for a moment and felt the car cleave to one side, crossing the hard shoulder, jolting against the uneven ground, until I found myself back on the road. The swamps are a safety valve: they soak up the floodwater, keep the rains and the sediment from affecting the coastal plains. But the rivers still flow through them and the traces of the blood still linger. They are with them when the waters reach the coastal plain, there when they enter the black water, there when the flow of the salt marshes begins to slow, and there at last when they disappear into the sea: a whole land, a whole ocean, tainted by blood. One single act, its ramifications felt throughout all of nature; and so a world can be changed, ineffably altered, by a single death.

Flames: the light of the fires set by the night riders; the burning houses, the smoldering crops. The sound of the horses as they begin to smell the smoke and panic, their riders wrenching at the reins to hold them, to keep their eyes from the flames. But when they turn there are pits set in the ground before them, dark holes with black water in their depths, and more flames emerge, pillars of fire shooting up from the interconnected caverns, and the screams of the woman are lost in their roar.

Richland County: the Congaree River flowed to the north, and I was floating above the road, carried ever onward, my momentum determined by my surroundings. I was moving toward Columbia, toward the northwest, toward a reckoning, but I could think of nothing but the girl on the ground, her jaw detached, her eyes already emptying of consciousness.

Finish her.

She blinks.

Finish her.

I am no longer of myself.

Finish her.

Her eyes roll. She sees the rock descend.

Finish her.

She is gone.

I had booked a room at Claussen’s Inn on Greene Street, a converted bakery in the Five Points neighborhood close to the University of South Carolina. I showered and changed, then called Rachel again. I just needed to hear her voice. When she answered the phone she sounded a little drunk. She’d had a glass of Guinness – the pregnant woman’s friend – with one of her Audubon colleagues in Portland and it had gone straight to her head.

‘It’s the iron,’ she said. ‘It’s good for me.’

‘They say that about a lot of things. It’s usually not true.’

‘What’s happening down there?’

‘Same old same old.’

‘I’m worried about you,’ she said, but her voice had changed. This time there was no slurring, no tipsiness, and I realized that the hint of drunkenness in her voice was a disguise, like a quickly executed artwork painted onto an old master to hide it and protect it from recognition. Rachel wanted to be drunk. She wanted to be happy and merry and unconcerned, drifting slightly on a glass of beer, but it was not to be. She was pregnant, the father of her child was far to the south, and people around him were dying. Meanwhile, a man who hated us both was trying to free himself from the state prison, and his promises of bargains and truces echoed dully in my head.

‘I mean it,’ I lied. ‘I’m okay. It’s coming to a close. I understand now. I think I know what happened.’

‘Tell me,’ she said. I closed my eyes, and it was as if we were lying side by side in the darkness. I caught the faint scent of her, and thought I felt the weight of her against me.

‘I can’t.’

‘Please. Share it, whatever it is. I need you to share something important with me, to reach out to me in some way.’

And so I told her.

‘They raped two young women, Rachel, two sisters. One of them was the mother of Atys Jones. They beat her to death with a rock, then burned the other one alive.’

She didn’t respond, but I could hear her breathing deeply.

‘Elliot was one of the men.’

‘But he brought you down there. He asked you to help.’

‘That’s right, he did.’

‘It was all lies.’

‘No, not entirely.’ For the truth was always close to the surface.

‘You have to get away from there. You have to leave.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Please.’

‘I can’t. Rachel, you know I can’t.’

‘Please!’

I ate a burger at Yesterday’s on Devine. Emmylou Harris was playing over the sound system. She was singing ‘Wrecking Ball,’ Neil Young’s cracked voice harmonizing with Emmylou’s on his own song. In an age of Britneys and Christinas, there was something reassuring and strangely affecting about two older voices, both perhaps past their peak but weathered and mature, singing about love and desire and the possibility of one last dance. Rachel had hung up in tears. I could feel nothing but guilt for what I was putting her through but I couldn’t walk away, not now.

I ate in the dining area then moved into the bar and sat in a booth. Beneath the plexiglass of the table lay photographs and old advertisements, all fading to yellow. A fat man in diapers mugged for the camera. A woman held a puppy. Couples hugged and kissed. I wondered if anyone remembered their names.

At the bar, a man in his late twenties, his head shaved, glanced at me in the mirror, then looked back down at his beer. Our eyes had barely met, but he couldn’t hide the recognition. I kept my eyes on the back of his head, taking in the strong muscles at his neck and shoulders, the bulge of his lats, his narrow waist. To a casual observer, he might have looked small, almost feminine, but he was wiry and he would be hard to knock down, and when he was knocked down he would get right back up again. There were tattoos on his triceps – I could see the ends of them below the sleeves of his T-shirt – but his forearms were clear, the bundles of muscle and tendon bunching then relaxing again as he clenched and unclenched his fists. I watched him as he flicked his glance at the mirror for a second time, then a third. Finally, he reached into the pocket of his faded, too-tight jeans, and dumped some ones on the bar before springing from his stool. He advanced on me, his fists still pumping, even as the older man beside him at last understood what was happening and tried to reach out to stop him.

‘You got a problem with me?’ he asked. In the booths at either side of mine the conversation faded, then died. His left ear was pierced, the hole contained within an Indian ink clenched fist. His brow was high, and his blue eyes shone in his pale face.

‘I thought you might have been coming on to me, way you were looking at me in the mirror,’ I said. To my right, I heard a male voice snicker. The skinhead heard it too because his head jerked in that direction. The snickering ceased. He turned his attention back to me. By now, he was bouncing on the balls of his feet with suppressed aggression.

‘Are you fucking with me?’ he said.

‘No,’ I replied innocently. ‘Would you like me to?’

I gave him my most endearing smile. His face grew redder and he seemed about to make a move toward me when there came a low whistle from behind him. The older man materialized, his long dark hair slicked back against his head, and grasped the younger man firmly by the upper arm.

‘Let it go,’ he advised.

‘He called me a fag,’ protested the skinhead.

‘He’s just trying to rile you. Walk away.’

For a moment, the skinhead tugged ineffectually at the older man’s grip, then spit noisily on the floor and stormed toward the door.

‘I got to apologize for my young friend. He’s sensitive about these things.’

I nodded but gave no hint that I recalled the man before me. It was Earl Jr.’s messenger from Charleston Place, the man I had seen eating a hot dog at Roger Bowen’s rally. This man knew who I was, had followed me here. That meant that he knew where I was staying, maybe even suspected why I was here.

‘We’ll be on our way,’ he said.

He dipped his chin once in farewell, then turned to go.

‘Be seeing you,’ I said.

His back stiffened.

‘Now why would you think that?’ he asked, his head inclined slightly so that I could see his profile: the flattened nose, the elongated chin.

‘I’m sensitive about these things,’ I told him.

He scratched at his temple with the forefinger of his right hand. ‘You’re a funny man,’ he said, giving up the pretence. ‘I’ll be sorry when you’re gone.’

Then he followed the skinhead from the bar.

I left twenty minutes later with a crowd of students, and stayed with them until I reached the corner of Greene and Devine. I could see no trace of the two men, but I had no doubt that they were close by. In the lobby of Claussen’s, jazz was playing over the speakers at low volume. I nodded a good night to the young guy behind the desk. He returned the gesture from over the top of a psychology textbook.

I called Louis from the room. He answered cautiously, not recognizing the number displayed.

‘It’s me,’ I said.

‘How you doin’?’

‘Not so good. I think I picked up a tail.’

‘How many?’

‘Two.’ I told him about the scene in the bar.

‘They out there now?’

‘I’d guess they are.’

‘You want me to come up there?’

‘No, stay with Kittim and Larousse. Anything I should know?’

‘Our friend Bowen came through this evening, spent some time with Earl Jr. and then a whole lot longer with Kittim. They must figure they got you where they want you. It was a trap, man, right from the start.’

No, not just a trap. There was more to it than that. Marianne Larousse, Atys, his mother and her sister: what happened to them was real and terrible and unconnected to anything that had to do with Faulkner or Bowen. It was the real reason that I was down here, the reason that I had stayed. The rest was unimportant.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ I said, then hung up.

My room was at the front of the inn, facing out onto Greene Street. I took the mattress from the bed and laid it on the floor, arranging the sheets loosely on top of it. I undressed, then lay close to the wall beneath the window. The chain was on the door, there was a chair in front of it, and my gun lay on the floor beyond my pillow.

She was moving out there, somewhere, a white blur among the trees, illuminated by bleak moonlight. Behind her, it bedecked the river with glittering stars as it flowed beneath the overhanging trees.

The White Road is everywhere. It is everything. We are on it, and we are of it.

Go to sleep. Go to sleep dreaming of shadows moving along the White Road. Go to sleep watching falling girls crush lilies beneath them as they die. Go to sleep with Cassie Blythe’s torn hand emerging from the darkness.

Go to sleep without knowing if you are among the lost or the found, the living or the dead.

24

I had set my alarm for 4 A.M. and was still bleary-eyed as I made my way across the lobby to the back door of the inn. The night clerk looked at me curiously, saw that I wasn’t carrying my bags, then went back to his books.

If I was being watched, then the two men were divided between the front and back doors. The back door led to the parking areas, with exits onto both Greene and Devine, but I doubted if I could drive away without being picked up. I took a handkerchief from my pocket and unscrewed the light inside the door. I’d already taken the precaution of busting the outside light with the sole of my shoe when I had come in the night before. I opened the door a fraction, waited, then slipped out into the darkness. I used the ranks of parked cars to hide my progress until I reached Devine, then called a cab from a pay phone outside a gas station. Five minutes later, I was on my way to the Hertz desk at Columbia International Airport; from there, I drove back in a loop toward Congaree.

The Congaree Swamp is still comparatively inaccessible by road. The main route, along Old Bluff and Caroline Sims, takes visitors to the ranger station, and from there sections of the swamp can be explored on foot using a system of boardwalks. But to venture deeper into the Congaree requires a boat, so I’d arranged to hire a ten footer with a small outboard. The old guy who hired them out was waiting for me at the Highway 601 landing when I arrived, traffic rumbling across the Bates Bridge overhead. We exchanged cash and he took my car keys as security, and then I was on the river, the early morning sun already shining on the brown waters and on the huge cypress and water oak that overshadowed the banks.

In wet weather, the Congaree swells and floods the swamp, dumping nutrients on the plain. The result was the enormous trees that lined the river, their boles monstrous and swollen, their foliage so wide that at times it created a canopy over the flow, darkening and shading the waters beneath. Hurricane Hugo might have claimed some of the largest trees as casualties when it tore through the swamp, but this was still a place to make a man catch his breath at the size and scale of the great forest through which he was passing.

The Congaree marks the borders of Richland and Calhoun Counties, its meanderings determining the limits of local political power, police jurisdictions, ordinances, and a hundred other tiny factors that influence the day-to-day lives of those who live within its reach. I had traveled some twelve miles along it when I came to a huge fallen cypress that jutted about halfway into the river. This, the old boatman had told me, marked the end of the state land and the beginning of the private tract, a section of swamp just under two miles long. Somewhere in there, probably close to the river, was Tereus’s home. I only hoped that it wouldn’t be too hard to find.

I tied up the boat at the cypress, then jumped for the bank. The chorus of crickets nearby grew suddenly silent, then picked up again as I began to move away. I stayed with the bank, looking for signs of a trail, but could find nothing. Tereus had kept his presence here as low-key as possible. Even if trails had once existed before he was jailed, they were long overgrown by now and he had made no effort to clear them again. I stood at the bank and tried to find landmarks that would allow me to get my bearings when I made my way back to the river, then headed into the swamp.

I sniffed the air, hoping to detect wood smoke or cooking, but I could smell only damp and vegetation. I passed through a forest of sweet gums and water oaks, and water tupelos thick with dark purple fruit. Lower on the ground there was pawpaw and alder and great American holly bushes, the earth so thick with shrubs that all I could see was green and brown, the ground wet and slippery with decaying leaves and vegetation. At one point I almost walked into the web of a spiny orb weaver, the spider hanging like a small dark star in the center of its own galaxy of influence. It wasn’t dangerous, but there were other spiders here that were and I had endured enough of spiders in recent months to last me a lifetime. I picked up a branch about eighteen inches long and used it to strike out in front of me when I passed through stands of higher shrubs and trees.

I had been walking for about twenty minutes when I saw the house. It was an old cottage, based around a simple hall-and-parlor plan, two rooms wide and one room deep, but it had been expanded by the addition of an enclosed front porch and a long, narrow extension at the rear. There were signs of recent repairs to its heavy timber framing, and the central chimney had recently been repointed, but from the front the house still looked virtually the same as it had when it was first constructed, probably during the last century when the slaves who built the levees chose to stay on in the Congaree. There were no signs of life: the washing line that hung between two trees was bare and no sounds came from within. At the back of the house was a small shed, which probably housed the generator.

I climbed the rough-hewn stairs to the porch and knocked on the door. There was no reply. I walked to the window and put my face close to the glass. Inside, I could see a table and four chairs, an old couch and easy chair, and a small kitchen area. An open doorway led into the main bedroom, and a second doorway had been created at the back of the house leading into the rear extension. That door was closed. I knocked one last time, then walked around to the back of the house. From somewhere in the swamp, I heard the sound of gunshots, their noise muffled by the damp air. Hunters, I guessed.

The windows to the extension had been blacked out. I thought for a moment that there were dark drapes obscuring them, but when I drew closer I saw the lines that the brush had drawn through the paint. There was a door at the end. For the final time, I knocked and called before trying the knob. The door opened and I stepped into the room.

The first thing that I noticed was the smell. It was strong and faintly medicinal, although I detected something herbal and grassy to it rather than the sterile scent of pharmaceutical products. It seemed to fill the long room, which was furnished with a cot, a TV, and a set of cheap bookshelves uncluttered by any books. Instead, there were piles of out-of-date soap opera magazines and wrinkled, much-read copies of People and Celebrity.

Every bare space on the walls had been covered by photographs culled from the magazines. There were models and actresses and, in one corner, what looked like a shrine to Oprah. Most of the women in the photos were black: I recognized Halle Berry, Angela Bassett, the R&B group TLC, Jada Pinkett Smith, even Tina Turner. Over by the TV were three or four photographs from the society pages of local newspapers. Each showed the same person: Marianne Larousse. There was a thin coating of wood dust on the photos, but the blacking on the windows had prevented any fading. In one, Marianne was smiling in the middle of a group of pretty young women at her graduation. Another had been taken at a charity auction, a third at a party held by the Larousses to raise funds for the Republican Party. In every photo, Marianne Larousse’s beauty made her stand out like a beacon.

I stepped closer to the cot. The medicinal smell was stronger here and the sheets were stained with brown patches like spilt coffee. There were also lighter blotches, some of them veined with blood. I gently touched the bedsheet. The stains felt moist beneath my fingers. I moved away and found the small bathroom, and the source of the smell. A basin was filled with a thick brown substance that had the consistency of wallpaper paste and dripped viscously from my fingers as I held them up before me. The bathroom itself had a free-standing bath, with a handrail attached to the wall and a second support rail screwed into the floor beside it. There was a clean toilet and the floor had been expertly, if cheaply, tiled.

There was no mirror.

I stepped back into the bedroom and checked the single closet. What looked like white and brown sheets lay piled on the floor and shelves, but once again I could find no mirror.

From outside, I heard the shots come again, closer now. I made a cursory search of the rest of the house, registering the man’s clothing in the closet in the main bedroom and the woman’s clothing, cheap and dated, that had been packed into an old sea chest; the tinned foods in the kitchen area; the scrubbed pots and pans. In a corner behind the couch I found a camp bed, but it was covered in dust and had clearly not been used in many years. Everything else was clean, spotlessly so. There was no telephone, and when I tried the light switch the lights came on low, bathing the room in a faint orange glow. I switched them off again, opened the front door, and stepped out onto the porch.

There were three men moving through the trees. Two of them I recognized as the men from the bar the night before, both the skinhead and the older man still wearing the same clothes. They had probably slept in them. The third was the overweight man who had been at the airport with his hunting partner on the day that I had first arrived in Charleston. He wore a brown shirt with his rifle slung over his right shoulder. He spotted me first, raised his right hand, and then all three paused at the tree line. None of us spoke for a moment. It seemed it was up to me to break the silence.

‘I think you boys may be hunting out of season,’ I said.

The oldest of the three, the man who had restrained the skinhead in the bar, smiled almost sadly.

‘What we’re hunting is always in season,’ he replied. ‘Anybody in there?’

I shook my head.

‘Figured you’d say that, even if there was,’ he said. ‘You ought to be more careful who you hire your boats from, Mr. Parker. That, or you ought to pay them a little extra to keep their mouths shut.’

He held his rifle at port arms, but I saw his finger move from outside to inside the trigger guard.

‘Come on down here,’ he said. ‘We got some business with you.’

I was already moving into the cottage when the first shot hit the door frame. I raced straight through, pulling my gun from its holster, and cleared the side of the generator hut as the second shot blew a chunk of bark from an oak tree to my right.

And then I was in the forest, the canopy rising above me until it was about a hundred feet above my head. I brushed through alders and holly, my head down. I slipped once on the slick leaves and landed hard on my side. I paused for a moment, but could hear no sounds of pursuit from behind me. I saw something brown about one hundred yards behind me, moving slowly through the trees: the fat man. He stood out only because he was stealing across the green of a holly bush. The others would be close by, listening for me. They would try to encircle me, then close in. I took a deep breath, drew a bead on the brown shirt, then squeezed the trigger slowly.

A red jet erupted from the fat man’s chest. His body twisted and he slumped back heavily into the bushes behind him, the branches bending and cracking beneath his weight. Twin booms came from my left and right, followed by more shots, and suddenly the air was filled with splinters and falling leaves.

I ran.

I ran to the high ground, where the red maples and ironwoods grew, trying to avoid the open areas of the understory and sticking instead to places thick with bush and vines. I closed my jacket despite the warmth in order to hide my white T-shirt and stopped from time to time, trying to detect signs of my pursuers, but wherever they were, they were staying quiet and low. I smelled urine – a deer maybe, or even a bobcat – and found traces of an animal trail. I didn’t know where I was going: if I could find one of the boardwalk trails it would lead me back to the ranger station, but it would also leave me dangerously exposed to the men behind me. That was assuming that I could even find the boardwalk this far in. The wind had been blowing northeast across the Congaree when I was making my way to the cottage, and now blew lightly at my back. I stayed with the animal trail, hoping to trace my way back to the river. If I got lost in the Congaree, I would become easy prey for these men.

I tried to disguise the signs of my passage, but the ground was soft and I seemed to leave sunken footprints and flattened shrubbery as I went. After about fifteen minutes, I came to an old fallen cypress, its trunk blasted in two by lightning and a huge crater beneath its overhanging roots. Shrubs had already begun to grow around it and in the depths of the crater, rising to meet the roots and creating a kind of barred hollow. I leaned against it to catch my breath, then unzipped my jacket, tossed it on the trunk, then stripped off my T-shirt. I leaned into the hollow, scaring the beetles, and draped my T-shirt midway down, snagging it among the twisted roots. Then I put my jacket back on and retreated into the undergrowth. I lay flat on the ground, and waited.

It was the skinhead who appeared first. I caught a glimpse of the egglike pallor of his skull behind a loblolly pine as he peered out, then ducked back in again. He had spotted the shirt. I wondered how dumb he was.

Dumb, but not dumb enough. He let out a low whistle and I saw a stand of alder twitch slightly, although I could see no sign of the man who had caused the movement. I wiped the sweat from my brow against the sleeve of my jacket to stop the worst of it from dropping into my eyes. Again, the movement came from behind the pine. I aimed and blinked the last of my sweat as the skinhead burst from cover, then stopped dead, seemingly distracted by something nearby.

Instantly, he was pulled off his feet and yanked backward into the undergrowth. It happened so quickly that I was unsure of what I had seen. I thought for a moment that he might have slipped, and was half expecting to see him rise again, but he didn’t reappear. From near the alders came a whistle, but there was no response. The skinhead’s companion whistled again. All was quiet. By then I was already retreating, crawling backward on my belly, desperate to get away from here, from the last of the hunters and from whatever was now pursuing us both through the sun-dappled green of the Congaree.

I had belly-crawled about fifty feet before I felt confident enough to rise. From somewhere ahead of me came the sound of water. From behind me I heard gunshots, but they were not aimed in my direction. I didn’t stop, even when the stump of a broken branch ripped through my sleeve and drew a ragged line of blood across my upper arm. My head was up and I was breathing hard, a stitch building in my side, when I saw the flash of white to my right. Part of me tried to reassure myself that it was a bird of some kind: an egret, perhaps, or an immature heron. But there had been something about the way that it moved, a halting, loping progress, that was partly an attempt at concealment and partly a physical disability. When I tried to find it again among the undergrowth I could not, but I knew it was there. I could feel it watching me.

I moved on.

I could see the water gleaming through the trees, could hear it flowing. Lying about thirty feet to my left was a boat: it wasn’t my boat, but at least two of the men who had brought it here were already dead and the third was somewhere behind me, running for his life. I stepped into a clearing dominated by cypress knees, the strange, vaguely conical shapes bursting from the soil like some miniature landscape from another world. I threaded my way through them and was almost at the boat when the dark-haired man emerged from the trees to my left. He no longer had his rifle, but he did have a knife, and he was already springing for me when I raised my gun and fired. I was off balance and the shot struck him in the side, breaking his stride but not stopping him. Before I could get off a second shot he was on top of me, his left arm forcing my gun hand away from him while I tried to arrest the progress of the knife. I aimed my knee at his injured side, but he anticipated the movement and used it against me, spinning me around and striking out at my left foot. I toppled and fell down as his boot connected with my hand, knocking the gun painfully from my fingers. I kicked out at him again as he descended on me, this time connecting with his wounded side. Spittle shot from his mouth and his eyes opened wide in surprise and pain, but by then his knee was on my chest and I was once again trying to keep that knife away from me. Still, I could see that he was dazed, and the wound in his side was bleeding freely. I suddenly eased some of the pressure on his arms and, as he fell forward, my head came up hard and connected with his nose. He cried out and I forced him off me, then rose up, knocked his feet out from under him, and slammed him back to the ground with all of the force that I could muster.

There was a wet crunching sound when he hit the earth and something exploded from his chest, as if one of his ribs had broken free and blasted through the skin. I stepped back and watched the blood running off the cypress knee as the man pinned upon it struggled to rise. He reached out and touched the wood, his fingers coming back red. He held them up to me, as if to show me what I had done, and then his head fell back and he died.

I wiped my sleeve against my face. It came back damp with sweat and filth. I turned to get my gun and saw the shrouded figure watching me from the trees.

It was a woman. I could see the shape of her breasts beneath the material, although her face remained covered. I called her name.

‘Melia,’ I said. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

I advanced toward her just as the shadow fell over me. I looked behind me. Tereus had a hook in his left hand. I just had time to register the crude sap in his right as it flew at me through the air, and then all was dark.

25

It was the smell that brought me back, the smell of the medicinal herbs that had been used to make the unguent for the woman’s skin. I was lying in the kitchen area of the cottage, my hands and legs bound tightly with rope. I raised my head and the back of my skull nudged the wall. The pain was bad. My shoulders and back ached, and my jacket was gone. I guessed that I had lost it as Tereus dragged me back to the cabin. I had vague memories of passing beneath tall trees, the sunlight spearing me through the canopy. My cell phone and gun were both missing. I lay on the floor for what seemed like hours.

In time, there was movement from the doorway and Tereus appeared, surrounded by fading sunlight. He had a spade in his hands, which he rested against the doorjamb before entering the cabin and squatting down before me. I could see no trace of the woman, but I sensed her nearby and guessed that she was back in her own darkened room, surrounded by images of a physical beauty she would never again be able to claim as her own.

‘Welcome back, brother,’ said Tereus. He removed his dark glasses. Up close, the membrane that coated his eyes was clearer. It reminded me of tapetum, the reflective surface that some nocturnal animals develop to magnify low light and improve their night vision. He filled a water bottle from the faucet, then brought it to me and tilted it to my mouth. I drank until the water ran down my chin. I coughed, and winced at the pain it caused in my head.

‘I’m not your brother.’

‘You weren’t my brother, you’d be dead by now.’

‘You killed them all, didn’t you?’

He leaned in close to me. ‘These people got to learn. This is a world of balances. They took a life, destroyed another. They got to learn about the White Road, got to see what’s waiting for them there, got to pass over and become part of it.’

I looked away from him toward the window, and saw that the light was failing. Soon, it would be dark.

‘You rescued her,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I couldn’t save her sister, but I could save her.’

I saw regret, and more: I saw love.

‘She was burned bad, but stayed under the surface, and the underground streams carried her out. I found her stretched over a rock, then I took her home and me and my momma, we took care of her. And when my momma died, she took care of herself for a year until I got released from jail. Now I’m back.’

‘Why didn’t you just go to the police, tell them what happened?’

‘That ain’t the way these things is done. Anyhow, her sister’s body was gone. It was a dark night, and she was suffering. She can’t even talk – she had to write their names for me – and even if she could tell who they was, who would believe it of young, rich white men like that? I ain’t even sure what she thinks no more. The pain drove her crazy.’

But that didn’t answer it. That wasn’t enough to explain what had happened, what he had endured and what he had forced others to endure.

‘It was Addy, wasn’t it?’

He didn’t reply.

‘You loved her, maybe before Davis Smoot ever appeared. Was he your child, Tereus? Was Atys Jones your child? Was she afraid to tell others because of what you were, because even the blacks looked down on you, because you were an outcast from the swamps? That’s why you went looking for Smoot, why you didn’t tell Atys what landed you in jail: you didn’t tell him you’d killed Smoot because it wasn’t important. You didn’t believe Smoot was his father, and you were right. The dates didn’t match. You killed Smoot for what he did to Addy, then fled back here in time to discover another violation being visited on the woman you loved. But before you could avenge yourself on Larousse and his friends, the cops came for you and sent you back to Alabama for trial, and you were lucky just to get twenty years because there were enough witnesses to back up your claim of self-defense. I reckon that once old Davis caught sight of you he went straight for the nearest weapon, and you had an excuse to kill him. Now you’re back, making up for lost time.’

Tereus did not respond. There would be no confirmation from him, and no denial. One of his big hands gripped my shoulder and dragged me to my feet. ‘That time is now, brother. Rise up, rise up.’

A blade cut the ropes at my feet. I felt the pain begin as the blood began to circulate properly at last.

‘Where are we going?’

He looked surprised, and I knew then just how crazy he was, crazy even before they chained him to a post in the blazing sun, crazy enough to keep an injured woman out here for years, protected by an old woman, in order to serve some strange messianic purpose of his own.

‘Back to the pit,’ he said. ‘We going back to the pit. It’s time.’

‘Time for what?’

He drew me gently toward him.

‘Time to show them the White Road.’

Although his small boat had an engine, he untied my hands and made me row. He was afraid: afraid that the noise might draw the men to him before he was ready, afraid that I might turn on him if he did not find some way to occupy me. Once or twice I considered striking out at him, but the revolver he now carried was unwavering in his grip. He would nod and smile at me in warning if I even paused in my strokes, as if we were two old friends on a boating trip together as the day descended softly into night and the dark gathered around us.

I didn’t know where the woman was. I knew only that she had left the house before us.

‘You didn’t kill Marianne Larousse,’ I said as we came in sight of a house set back from the bank and a dog barked at our passing, his chain jangling softly in the evening air. A light went on in the porch of the house, and I saw the form of a man emerge and heard him hush the dog. His voice was not angry, and I felt a rush of affection for him. I saw him tousle the dog’s fur, and the silhouette of its dark tail flicked back and forth in response. I was tired. I felt as if I were approaching the very end of things, as if this river was a kind of Styx across which I was being forced to row myself in the absence of the boatman, and as soon as the boat struck the bank I would descend into the underworld and become lost in the honeycomb.

I repeated the comment.

‘What does it matter?’ he replied.

‘It matters to me. It probably mattered to Marianne while she was dying. But you didn’t kill her. You were still in jail.’

‘They say the boy killed her, and he ain’t about to contradict them now.’

I stopped rowing, and heard the click of the hammer cocking a moment later.

‘Don’t make me shoot you, Mr. Parker.’

I rested the oars and raised my hands.

‘She did it, didn’t she? Melia killed Marianne Larousse, and her own nephew, your son, died as a result.’

He regarded me silently for a time before he spoke.

‘She knows this river,’ he said. ‘Knows the swamps. She wanders in them. Sometimes, she likes to watch the folks drinkin’ and whorin’. I guess it reminds her of what she lost, of what they took away from her. It was just pure dumb luck that she saw Marianne Larousse running among the trees that night, nothing more. She recognized her face from the society pages of the newspapers – she likes to look at the pictures of the beautiful ladies – and she took her chance.

‘Dumb luck,’ he intoned again. ‘That’s all it was.’

But it wasn’t, of course. The history of these two families, the Larousses and the Joneses, the blood spilled and lives destroyed, meant that it could never be anything as pure as luck or coincidence that drew them together. Over more than two centuries they had bound themselves, each to the other, in a pact of mutual destructiveness only partly acknowledged on either side, fueled by a past that allowed one man to own and abuse another and fanned into continuous flame by remembered injuries and violent responses. Their paths through this world were interweaved, crisscrossing at crucial moments in the history of this state and in the lives of their families.

‘Did she know that the boy with Marianne was her own nephew?’

‘She didn’t see him until the girl was dead. I—’

He stopped.

‘Like I said, I don’t know what she thinks, but she can read some. She saw the newspapers, and I think she used to watch the jailhouse some, late at night.’

‘You could have saved him,’ I said. ‘By coming forward with her, you could have saved Atys. No court would convict her of murder. She’s insane.’

‘No, I couldn’t do that.’

He couldn’t do it because then he would not have been able to continue punishing the rapists and killers of the woman he had loved. Ultimately, he was prepared to sacrifice his own son for revenge.

‘You killed the others?’

‘We did, the two of us together.’

He had rescued her and kept her safe, then killed for her and the memory of her sister. In a way, he had given up his life for them.

‘It was how it had to be,’ he said, as if guessing the direction of my thoughts. ‘And that’s all I got to say.’

I started to row again, drawing deep arcs through the water, the droplets falling back to the river in what seemed like impossibly languid descents, as if somehow I were slowing down the passage of time, drawing each moment out, longer and longer again, until at last the world would stop, the oars frozen at the moment they broke the water, the birds trapped in midflight, the insects caught like motes of dust in a picture frame, and we would never have to go forward again. We would never have to find ourselves by the lip of that dark pit, with its smells of engine oil and effluent, and the memory of the burning marked with black tongues along the grooves of its stone.

‘There’s just two left,’ said Tereus at one point. ‘Just two more, and it will all be over.’

And I could not tell if he was talking to himself, or to me, or to some unseen other. I looked to the bank and expected to see her shadowing our progress, a figure consumed by pain. Or to see her sister, her jaw hanging loose, her head ruined but her eyes wild and bright, burning with a rage fierce as the flames that had engulfed her sister.

But there was only tree shade and the darkening sky, and waters glittering with the fragmented ghosts of early moonlight.

‘This is where we get off,’ he whispered.

I steered the boat toward the left bank. When it struck land I heard a soft splash behind me and saw that Tereus was already out of the boat. He gestured for me to move toward the trees, and I began to walk. My trousers were wet and swamp water squelched in my shoes. I was covered in bites; my face felt swollen from them, and the exposed skin of my back and chest itched furiously.

‘How do you know that they’ll be here?’ I asked.

‘Oh, they’ll be here,’ he said. ‘I promised them the two things they wanted the most: the answer to who killed Marianne Larousse.’

‘And?’

‘And you, Mr. Parker. They’ve decided that you’ve outlived your usefulness. That Mr. Kittim, I reckon he’s gonna bury you.’

I knew that it was true, that the part Kittim was to play represented the last act in the drama they had planned. Elliot had brought me down here, ostensibly to find out about the circumstances of Marianne Larousse’s murder in an effort to clear Atys Jones, but in reality, and in collusion with Larousse, to find out if her murder was linked to what was happening to the six men who had raped the Jones sisters, then killed one of them and left the other to burn. Mobley had worked for Bowen and I guessed that at some point Bowen had learned through him of what he and the others had done, which gave him the leverage he required to use Elliot and probably Earl Jr. too. Elliot would draw me down, and Kittim would destroy me. If I discovered the truth about who was behind the killings before I died, then so much the better. If I didn’t, then I still wasn’t going to live long enough to collect my fee.

‘But you’re not going to hand Melia over to them,’ I said.

‘No, I’m going to kill them.’

‘Alone.’

His white teeth gleamed.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I told you. Not alone. Never alone.’

It was still as Poveda had described it after all these years. There was the broken fence that I had skirted days earlier and the pockmarked ‘No Trespassing’ sign. I could see the sinkholes, some of them small and masked by vegetation, others so large that whole trees had fallen into them. We had walked for just five minutes when I smelled an acrid chemical stink in the air that at first was merely unpleasant but, as we drew closer to the hole, began to scorch the nostrils and cause the eyes to water. Discarded trash lay unmoving upon the ground without a breeze to stir it, and the skeletons of decayed trees, their trunks gray and lifeless, stretched thin shadows across the limestone. The hole itself was about twenty feet in circumference, and so deep that its base was lost in darkness. Roots and grasses overhung the verge, trailing down into the shadows.

Two men stood at the far side of the hole, looking down into its depths. One was Earl Jr. The second man was Kittim. He was without his trademark shades now that it was growing dark and he was the first to sense our approach. His face remained blank even as we stood and faced them across the expanse of the pit, Kittim’s eyes briefly resting on me before he gave his full attention to Tereus.

‘Do you recognize him?’ he asked Earl Jr.

Earl Jr. shook his head. Kittim seemed dissatisfied with the answer, with the fact that he did not have the information he required to make an accurate assessment of the situation.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘My name is Tereus.’

‘Did you kill Marianne Larousse?’

‘No, I did not. I killed the others, and I watched Foster attach a hose to the exhaust pipe of his car and feed it in through his window. But I didn’t kill the Larousse girl.’

‘Then who did?’

She was nearby. I knew she was. I could feel her. It seemed to me that Larousse did too, because I watched his head flick back suddenly like a startled deer, his eyes roving across the trees, looking for the source of his unease.

‘I asked you a question,’ Kittim persisted. ‘Who killed her?’

Three armed men emerged from the trees at either side of us. Instantly, Tereus dropped his gun to the ground and I knew that he had never planned to walk away from this.

Two of the men beside us I did not recognize.

The third was Elliot Norton.

‘You don’t seem surprised to see me, Charlie,’ he said.

‘It takes a lot to surprise me, Elliot.’

‘Even the return of an old friend from the dead?’

‘I have a feeling you’ll be making a more permanent return in the near future.’ I was too tired even to show my anger. ‘The blood in the car was a nice touch. How were you going to explain your resurrection? A miracle?’

‘We were under threat from some crazy Negro, so I did what I had to do to hide myself. What are they going to charge me with? Wasting police time? False suicide?’

‘You killed, Elliot. You led people to their deaths. You bailed Atys just so your friends could torture him and find out what he knew.’

He shrugged. ‘Your fault, Charlie. If you’d been better at your job and got him to tell all, he might still be alive.’

I winced. He’d struck close to the bone, but I wasn’t going to bear the responsibility for Atys Jones’s death alone.

‘And the Singletons. What did you do, Elliot? Sit with them in the kitchen drinking their lemonade, waiting for your friends to come and kill them while the only person who could have protected them was in the shower. The old man said it was a changeling that attacked them, and the police thought that he was talking about Atys until he turned up tortured to death, but it was you. You were the changeling. Look at what they’ve reduced you to, Elliot, what you’ve reduced yourself to. Look at what you’ve become.’

Elliot shrugged. ‘I had no choice. Mobley told Bowen everything, once when he was drunk. Landron never admitted it, but it was him. So Bowen had something on all of us and he used it to make me bring you down here. But by then all of this’ – he made an all-encompassing gesture with his free hand, taking in the hole, the swamp, dead men, and the memory of raped girls – ‘had started happening, so we used you. You’re good, Charlie, I’ll give you that. In a way, you’ve brought us all to this point. You should go to your grave a satisfied man.’

‘Enough.’ It was Kittim. ‘Make the Negro tell us what he knows and we can finish this for good.’

Elliot raised his gun, pointing it first at Tereus, then at me.

‘You shouldn’t have come to the swamp alone, Charlie.’

I smiled at him.

‘I didn’t.’

The bullet hit him on the bridge of the nose and knocked his head back so hard I could hear the vertebrae in his neck crack. The men at either side of him barely had a chance to react before they too fell. Larousse stood confused and then Kittim was raising his weapon and I felt Tereus push me to the ground. There were shots, and warm blood splashed my eyes. I looked up to catch the look of surprise in Tereus’s face before he tumbled into the pit and landed with a splash in the water far below.

I picked up his fallen revolver and ran for the woods, expecting to feel one of Kittim’s shots tear into me at any moment, but he was already fleeing. I caught a glimpse of Larousse disappearing into the trees, and then he also disappeared from sight.

But only for a moment.

He reemerged seconds later, backing slowly away from something in the trees. I saw her moving toward him, draped in the light material, the only cloth that she could wear without paining her ruined body. Her head was uncovered. The skull was hairless, the features beneath it melting into one another, a blur of disfigurement and remembered beauty. Only her eyes appeared intact, glittering beneath her swollen eyelids. She extended a hand to Larousse and there was almost a tenderness to the gesture, like a rejected lover reaching out one last time to the man who had turned his back upon her. Larousse released a small cry, then struck out at her arm, breaking the skin. Instinctively, he rubbed his hand with disgust against his jacket, then moved quickly to his right in an effort to get by her and make for the safety of the forest.

Louis stepped from the shadows and pointed his gun at Larousse’s face.

‘Now where you goin?’ he asked.

He stopped, caught between the woman and the gun.

Then she sprang at him, the force of her propelling them both backward, and she wrapped herself around him as they fell, he screaming, she silent, into the black water below. For a moment, I thought I saw a whiteness spread upon the surface, and then they were gone.

26

We walked back to Louis’s car, but could find no trace of Kittim along the way.

‘You understand now?’ asked Louis. ‘You under-stand why we can’t let them go, can’t let none of them go?’

I nodded.

‘The bail hearing is in three days’ time,’ he said. ‘The preacher’s gonna walk, and then none of us will be safe again.’

‘I’m in,’ I said.

‘You sure?’

I barely paused.

‘I’m sure. What about Kittim?’

‘What about him?’

‘He got away.’

Louis almost smiled.

‘Did he?’

Kittim drove at speed into the Blue Ridge, arriving at his destination in the early hours. There would be other chances for him, other opportunities. For the present, it was time to rest up and wait for the preacher to be brought to safety. After that, there would be a new momentum achieved.

He pulled into the clearing before the cabin, then walked to the door and unlocked it. The moonlight streamed through the windows, illuminating the cheap furniture, the unadorned walls. It shone too on the man who sat facing the door, and on the silenced pistol in his hand. He wore sneakers and faded jeans, and a loud silk shirt that he’d bought at final markdown in Filene’s Basement. His face was unshaven and very pale. He didn’t even blink as the shot hit Kittim in the belly. Kittim fell and tried to wrench his gun from his belt, but the man was already upon him. His gun dug into Kittim’s right temple as Kittim eased his hand away from his belt and his weapon was taken from him.

‘Who are you?’ he shouted. ‘The fuck are you?’

‘I’m an angel,’ said the man. ‘What the fuck are you?’

Now there were other figures around him. Kittim’s hands were pulled behind his back and cuffed before he was turned onto his back to face his captors: the small man in the mismatched shirt, two younger men armed with pistols who came in from the yard, and an older man who emerged from the shadows at the back of Kittim’s cabin.

‘Kittim,’ said Epstein, as he examined the man on the ground. ‘An unusual name, a scholarly name.’

Kittim did not move. There was a watchfulness about him now, despite the agony of his wound. He kept his eyes fixed on the older man.

‘I recall that the Kittim were the tribe destined to lead the final assault against the sons of light, the earthly agents of the powers of darkness,’ continued Epstein. He leaned forward, so close that he could smell the breath of the injured man. ‘You should have read your scrolls more closely, my friend: they tell us that the dominion of the Kittim is short-lived, and for the sons of darkness there shall be no escape.’

Epstein’s hands had been clasped behind his back. Now they emerged, and the light caught the metal case in their grasp.

‘We have questions for you,’ said Epstein, removing the syringe and sending a jet of clear liquid into the air. The needle descended toward Kittim, as the thing that lived inside him began the fruitless struggle to escape its host.

I left Charleston late the following evening. I told the SLED agents in Columbia, Adams and Addams beside them in the interview room, almost everything that I knew, lying only to leave out the involvement of Louis and the part I had played in the deaths of the two men in Congaree. Tereus had disposed of their bodies while I was tied up in his shack, and the swamp had a long history of swallowing up the remains of the dead. They would not be found.

As for those who had been killed by the old sinkhole, I said that they had died at the hands of Tereus and the woman, taken by surprise before they even had a chance to react. Tereus’s body had floated to the surface, but there was no sign as yet of the woman or Earl Jr. As I sat in the interrogation room, I saw them falling once again, disappearing into the dark pool, sinking, the woman dragging the man down with her into the streams that lay beneath the stone, holding him until he drowned, the two united unto death and beyond.

At the Charleston airport terminal, a limousine waited, the tinted windows up so that no one could see the occupants. As I walked to the doorway, my baggage in my hand, one window rolled slowly down and Earl Larousse looked at me, waiting for me to approach.

‘My son,’ he said.

‘Dead, like I told the police.’

His lips trembled, and he blinked away tears. I felt nothing for him.

‘You knew,’ I said. ‘You must have known all along what your son did. When he came home that night, covered in her blood, didn’t he tell you everything that he had done? Didn’t he beg for your help? And you gave it to him, to save him and to save your family name, and you held on to that piece of worthless land in the hope that what had happened there would remain hidden. But then Bowen came along and got his hooks into you, and suddenly you weren’t in control anymore. His people were in your house, and my guess is he was bleeding you for money. How much did you give him, Mr. Larousse? Enough to bail Faulkner, and then some?’

He didn’t look at me. Instead, he retreated into the past, descending into the grief and madness that would finally consume him.

‘We were like royalty in this city,’ he whispered. ‘We’ve been here since its birth. We are part of its history, and our name has lived for centuries.’

‘Your name is going to die with you now, and they can bury your history with you.’

I walked away. When I reached the doors the car was no longer reflected in the glass.

And in a shack on the outskirts of Caina, Georgia, Virgil Gossard awoke to a feeling of pressure on his lips. He opened his eyes as the gun forced itself into his mouth.

The figure before him was dressed entirely in black, its face concealed beneath a ski mask.

‘Up,’ it said, and Virgil recognized the voice from the night at Little Tom’s. His hair was gripped and he was dragged from his bed, the gun trailing spittle and blood as it was pulled from his mouth. Virgil, wearing only his tattered briefs, was pushed toward the kitchen of his pitiful home, and the back door leading to the fields beyond.

‘Open it.’

Virgil began to cry.

‘Open it!’

He opened the door and a hand at his back forced him out into the night. Barefoot, he walked through the yard, feeling the coldness of the ground beneath his feet, the long blades of overgrown grass slicing at his skin. He could hear the man breathing behind him as he walked toward the woods at the verge of his land. A low wall, barely three bricks high, came into view. A sheet of corrugated iron had been laid across it. It was the old well.

‘Take the cover off.’

Virgil shook his head. ‘No, don’t,’ he said. ‘Please.’

‘Do it!’

Virgil squatted down and dragged the sheet away, exposing the hole beneath.

‘Kneel down on the wall.’

Virgil’s face was contorted with fear and the force of his tears. He could taste snot and salt in his mouth as he eased himself down and stared into the darkness of the well.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Whatever I’ve done, I’m sorry.’

He felt the pressure of the gun in the hollow at the base of his skull.

‘What did you see?’ said the man.

‘I saw a man,’ said Virgil. He was beyond lying now. ‘I looked up, I saw a man, a black man. There was another man with him. He was white. I didn’t get a good look at him. I shouldn’t have looked. I shouldn’t have looked.’

‘What did you see?’

‘I told you. I saw—’

The gun cocked.

‘What did you see?’

And Virgil at last understood.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I saw nothing. I wouldn’t know the guys if I saw them again. Nothing. That’s all. Nothing.’

The gun moved away from his head.

‘Don’t make me come back here, Virgil,’ said the man.

Virgil’s whole body shook with the force of his sobs.

‘I won’t,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

‘Now you stay there, Virgil. You keep kneeling.’

‘I will,’ said Virgil. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome,’ said the man.

Virgil didn’t hear him moving away. He just stayed kneeling until at last the sun began to rise and, shivering, he rose and walked back to his little house.

PART FIVE

There is no hope of death for these souls,

And their lost life is so low,

That they are envious of any other kind.

Dante Alighieri, ‘Inferno’, Canto III

27

They began to drift into the state over the next two days, in groups and alone, always by road, never by plane. There were the couple that checked into the small motel outside Sangerville, who kissed and cooed like the young lovers they appeared to be yet slept in separate beds in their twin room. There were the four men who ate a hurried breakfast in the Miss Portland Diner on Marginal Way, their eyes always returning to the black van in which they had arrived, tensing whenever anyone approached it and relaxing only slightly when they had passed by.

And there was the man who drove a truck north from Boston, avoiding the interstate whenever possible, until at last he found himself among forests of pine, a lake gleaming in the distance before him. He checked his watch – too early – and headed back toward Dolby Pond and the La Casa Exotic Dancing Club. There were, he figured, worse ways to kill a few hours.

The worst case scenario came to pass: Supreme Judicial Court Justice Wilton Cooper carried out the review of the decision to deny bail to Aaron Faulkner. In the hour preceding the decision, Bobby Andrus and his team had presented their arguments against bail to Wilton Cooper in his chambers, pointing out that they believed Faulkner to be a substantial flight risk and that potential witnesses could be open to intimidation. When he asked them if they had any new evidence to hand, they had to admit that they had not.

In his submission, Jim Grimes argued that the prosecution had not presented sufficient evidence to suggest that Faulkner might have committed formerly capital crimes. He also offered medical evidence from three separate authorities that Faulkner’s health was deteriorating seriously in prison (evidence that the state itself was unable to contest, since its own doctors had found that Faulkner appeared to be suffering from some illness, although they were unable to say from what, precisely, except that he was losing weight rapidly, his temperature was consistently higher than normal, and both blood pressure and heart rate were abnormally high); that the stresses of incarceration were endangering the life of his client, against whom the prosecution had not yet been able to establish a substantial case; and that it was both unjust and inhumane to keep his client in prison while the prosecution attempted to amass enough evidence to shore up said case. Since his client would require medical supervision of the highest order, there was no real risk of flight, and bail should be set accordingly.

Announcing his decision, Cooper dismissed most of my testimony on the basis of the unreliability of my character and determined that the decision by the lower court not to grant bail had been erroneous, since the prosecution had not demonstrated sufficient probable cause that Faulkner had himself committed a formerly capital offense. In addition, he accepted Jim Grimes’s submission that his client’s poor health meant that he was not a danger to the integrity of the judicial progress and that his need for regular medical treatment meant that he did not constitute a flight risk. He set bail at $1.5 million. Grimes announced that the cash was to hand. Faulkner, chained in an adjoining room under the guard of U.S. marshals, was to be released immediately.

To his credit, Andrus had foreseen the possibility that Cooper would set bail and, reluctantly, had approached the F.B.I. and requested that they serve a warrant for Faulkner’s arrest on federal charges should he be released. It was not Andrus’s fault that the warrant had been improperly presented: a secretary had misspelt Faulkner’s name, rendering it null and void. When Faulkner left the courthouse, there was no warrant waiting to be served.

Outside Courtroom Number One, a man in a brown Timberland jacket sat on an empty bench and made a call. Ten miles away, the cell phone in Cyrus Nairn’s hand buzzed.

‘You’re good to go,’ said the voice on the other end of the line.

Cyrus killed the phone and tossed it into the bushes by the side of the road, then started his car and drove toward Scarborough.

Flashbulbs opened fire as soon as Grimes appeared on the courthouse steps, but Faulkner was not with him. Instead, a Nissan Terrano, with Faulkner hidden beneath a blanket in the rear, turned right from the courthouse and headed toward the Public Market parking garage on Elm. Above it, a helicopter buzzed. Behind it, two cars shadowed. The AG’s office was not about to let Faulkner disappear into the depths of the honeycomb world.

A battered yellow Buick pulled in behind the Terrano as it reached the entrance to the garage, causing the following traffic to brake suddenly. There was no need for the big jeep to pause for a ticket because its arrival had been prepared for well in advance: the ticket dispenser had been disabled by the simple application of industrial adhesive while the security guard was distracted by a fire in a garbage can, and the garage had been forced to leave both the entrance and exit barriers permanently raised while the damage was being repaired.

The Terrano passed through quickly, but the Buick following it ground to a halt, blocking the entrance. Crucial seconds passed before the police in the tracking cars realized what was happening. The first car reversed, then headed at speed up the exit ramp, while two detectives from a second car rushed to the Buick, pulled the driver from his seat, and cleared the entrance.

By the time the agents got to the abandoned Terrano, Faulkner was long gone.

At 7 P.M. Mary Mason left her house at the end of Seavey Landing for her date with Sergeant MacArthur. Beyond her house, she could see the marsh and the waters of the Scarborough River as they wended their way around the pointed finger of Nonesuch Point and into the sea at Saco Bay. MacArthur was her first real date since her divorce had come through three months earlier, and she was hopeful about a relationship with him. She had known the policeman by sight and, despite his rumpled appearance, thought him kind of cute in a hangdog way. Nothing in their first date had caused her to revise her estimate downward. In fact, he had been quite charming and when he had called her the night before to confirm that a second date was still on, they had talked for almost an hour, surprising him, she suspected, as much as she had surprised herself.

She was almost at the car door when the man approached her. He came from the trees that hid her property from the view of her neighbors. He was small and hunched, with long dark hair that trailed his shoulders and eyes that were almost black, like those of some underground, nocturnal creature. She was already reaching for the Mace in her bag when he struck her backhanded across the face and she fell. He knelt on her legs before she could react again and she felt the pain in her side, an immense burning as the blade entered below her ribs and began to tear its way across her stomach. She tried to scream but his hand was over her mouth and all she could do was wriggle impotently as the blade continued its progress.

And then, just as she felt that she could take no more, that she must surely die from the pain, she heard a voice and saw, over the man’s shoulder, a huge hulking figure approach, a beaten-up Chevy idling behind him. He had a beard and wore a leather vest over his T-shirt. She could see the tattoo of a woman on his forearm.

‘Hey!’ said Bear. ‘The fuck you doing, man?’

Cyrus had not wanted to use the gun. He had wanted this done as quietly as possible, but the big and strangely familiar man now racing up the driveway left him with no choice. He rose from the woman before he could finish his cut, took the gun from his belt, and fired.

Two white vans took the Medway exit off I-95 and followed 11 through East Millinocket toward Dolby Pond. In the first van were three men and one woman, all armed. In the second sat another man and woman, also armed, and the Reverend Aaron Faulkner, who was silently reading his Bible on a bench in the back of the van. Had one of the state’s medical experts been on hand to check on the preacher, he would have found that the old man’s temperature was virtually normal and that all signs of his apparent ill health had already begun to fade.

A cell phone disturbed the silence of the second van. One of the men answered, spoke briefly, then turned back to Faulkner.

‘He’s coming in to land now,’ he told the old man. ‘He’ll be waiting for us when we get there. We’re right on schedule.’

Faulkner nodded, but did not respond. Instead, his eyes remained fixed on his Bible and the account of the trials of Job.

Cyrus Nairn sat behind the wheel of his car at the Black Point Market and sipped a Coke. It was a warm evening and he desperately needed to cool down. The car’s AC was busted. It didn’t matter much to Cyrus anyway: once the woman was dead he would ditch the car and head south, and that would be the end of it. He could suffer a little discomfort; after all, it was nothing compared to what the woman was about to endure.

He finished the Coke, then drove toward the bridge and dumped the can from the window into the waters below. Things had not gone according to plan over at Pine Point. First, the woman was already leaving the house when he arrived, and had gone for the spray in her bag, causing him to take her outside. Then the big man had come along and he had no choice but to use his gun. He had been afraid, for a moment, that people would hear but there had been no immediate fuss, no clamor. Still, Cyrus had been forced to leave hurriedly, and he did not like rushing his work.

He checked his watch and, his lips moving silently, counted down from ten. When he reached one, he thought he heard the muffled explosion from Pine Point. When he looked out of his window, smoke was already rising from Mary Mason’s burning car. The police would arrive soon, maybe the fire department, and they would find the woman and the dead man. He had preferred to leave the woman dying, not dead. He wanted the noise of the ambulance, the distraction to the policeman MacArthur, even at the risk of her being able to provide a description of him. He suspected that he might not have cut her enough, that she might even survive her injuries. He wondered if he had left her too close to the car, if she might not already be burning. He didn’t want there to be any doubt about her identity. They were minor issues, but they troubled Cyrus. The prospect of capture, though, did not: Cyrus would die before he would go back to prison. Cyrus had been promised salvation, and the saved fear nothing.

To his right, a road curved up into a copse of trees. Cyrus parked his car out of sight, then, his stomach tense with excitement, proceeded up the hill. He cleared the trees and passed a ruined shed to his left, the white house now glowing before him, the dying sunlight reflecting from its glass. Soon, the marsh too would be aflame, the waters running orange and red.

Red, mostly.

Mary Mason lay on her back on the grass, staring at the sky. She had seen the hunched man toss the device into her car, the slow fuse burning, and had guessed what it was, but she felt paralyzed, unable to move her hands to stem the bleeding, let alone pull herself away from the car.

She was weakening.

She was dying.

She felt something brush her leg, and managed to move her head slightly. A long trail of blood marked the big man’s painful progress toward her. He was almost beside her now, hauling himself along by his ragged and bloodied fingernails. He reached out to her and grasped her hand, then pressed it against the wound in her side. She gasped in pain, but he forced her to maintain the pressure.

Then, slowly, he began to drag her by the collar of her shirt toward the grass. She screamed aloud once, but still she tried to keep her hand pressed to the wound until at last he could pull her no farther. He lay against the old tree in her yard, her head resting on his legs and his hand upon her hand, keeping the pressure on, the expanse of its trunk shielding them both from the car when the device exploded moments later, shattering the glass in the automobile and the windows in her house and sending a blast of heat rolling over the lawn and the tips of her toes.

‘Hold on,’ said Bear. His breath rattled in his throat. ‘Hold on now. They’ll be coming soon.’

Roger Bowen sat in a corner of Tommy Condon’s pub on Charleston’s Church Street, sipping on a beer. On the table before him lay his cell phone. He was waiting for the call to confirm that the preacher was safe and on his way north to Canada. Bowen checked his watch as two men in their late twenties passed by, joshing and pushing each other. The one nearest stumbled against Bowen’s table, sending his cell phone tumbling to the floor. Bowen rose up in fury as the young man apologized and replaced the phone on the table.

‘You fucking asshole,’ hissed Bowen.

‘Hey, take it easy,’ said the guy. ‘I said I was sorry.’

They left shaking their heads. Bowen watched them climb into a car outside and drive away.

Two minutes later, the phone on his table rang.

In the seconds before he pressed Receive, it might have struck him that the phone was a little heavier than he remembered, and that the fall to the floor had maybe scuffed it some.

He hit the green button and put the phone to his ear, just in time for the explosion to tear the side of his head off.

Cyrus Nairn stood in front of the house, clutching a map and looking puzzled. Cyrus wasn’t much of an actor, but he figured that he didn’t have to be. There was no movement from the house. He walked to the screen door and stared into the hallway beyond. The door was well oiled, and opened silently. He moved slowly inside, checking the rooms as he went, ensuring that each one was empty, wary of the dog, until at last he reached the kitchen.

The big man stood at the kitchen table, drinking soya milk from a carton. He wore a T-shirt that read ‘Klan Killer.’ He looked at Cyrus in surprise. His hand was already moving to the gun on the table when Cyrus fired and the carton exploded in a shower of milk and blood and the big man tumbled backward, breaking a chair as he fell. Cyrus stood over him and watched as the emptiness entered his eyes.

From behind the house, he heard the barking of a dog. It was young and stupid, and Cyrus’s only concern about it was that, in the house, its barking might have given the woman warning. Carefully, he glanced out of the kitchen window and saw the woman strolling in her yard close by the edge of the marsh, the dog beside her. He walked to the back door and slipped out as soon as he was certain that the woman was out of sight. Then, skirting the side of the house and staying close to the walls, he found her once again. She was in the long grass, moving away from the house, picking wildflowers. He could see the swelling at her belly, and some of his desire cooled. Cyrus liked to play with them before he finished them off. He had never tried playing with a pregnant woman before and something told him that he wouldn’t enjoy it, but Cyrus was always open to new experiences. The woman rose and stretched, holding her hand to her back, and Cyrus retreated back into the shadows. She was pretty, he thought, her face very pale, accentuated by her red hair. He drew a breath and tried to calm himself. When he looked again, she was strolling farther into the long grass and the evening shimmering of the waters, the dog racing ahead of her. Cyrus debated waiting for her to return to the house but he was afraid that somebody might come up that curving road and see his car, and then he would be trapped. No, there was cover out there, trees and long grass, and the rushes would hide him when he took her.

Cyrus unsheathed the knife at his waist and, holding it close to his thigh, moved after the woman.

The Cessna banked, then made a slow descent toward the Ambajejus Lake. It bounced a little on the water when it landed before drawing to a gradual halt, its wings tilting slightly as it approached the old jetty. The man at the controls of the Cessna was called Gerry Szelog and the only thing he had been paid for this flight was fuel money. That was okay, though, because Gerry was a believer, and believers did as they were asked and wanted nothing in return. In the past Szelog’s Cessna had transported guns, fugitives, and in one case, the body of a woman reporter who had poked her nose where she had no business poking it and who now lay at the bottom of the Carolina Shoals. Szelog had scouted out the lake a couple of days earlier by taking a flight with the Katahdin Air Service that operated out of Spencer Cove. He’d also checked their hours to ensure that the pilots from Katahdin would not be around to ask questions when he came in to land.

The Cessna stopped and a man appeared from behind one of the trees on the shore. Szelog could see that he wore blue overalls that billowed slightly as he ran toward the plane. This would be Farren, the man responsible for the arrangements at this end. Szelog climbed out of the little cockpit, then hopped down onto the jetty to meet the advancing man.

‘Right on schedule,’ said Szelog, removing his shades.

He stopped.

The man standing before him wasn’t Farren, because Farren was supposed to be white. This man was black. He also had a gun in his hand.

‘Yeah,’ said the man. ‘You could say you’re dead on time.’

It took a few moments for Cyrus to figure out why the woman appeared to be in a world of her own, for otherwise she would surely have heard the gunshot. She paused at the edge of a stream and reached into a small pouch at her waist, withdrawing the Discman and forwarding through the tracks. When she found the tune she was looking for, she replaced the device and continued on her way, skirting the trees, the dog racing ahead of her. The dog had paused once or twice and looked back toward Cyrus as he made his way, hunched, through the long grass, but Cyrus was moving slowly and the young dog’s eyesight was not good enough to pick him out from the swaying grass. Cyrus’s feet, and the ends of his jeans, were soaking wet. It felt uncomfortable to him but then he thought of the prison, and the stale stench of his cell, and decided that being wet wasn’t so bad after all. The woman rounded the edge of the copse and almost disappeared from sight, but Cyrus could still see her pale blue dress moving between the trunks and the low branches. The trees would provide him with the cover he needed.

Close now, thought Cyrus.

Almost time.

And Leonard’s voice echoed his words.

Almost time.

The only traffic encountered by Faulkner’s small convoy as it headed up Golden Road was a big container truck that was signaling right from the Ambajejus Parkway. The man behind the wheel lifted three fingers in greeting as they passed, then began to make his turn onto the road. He checked his rearview mirror and watched as the vans turned onto Fire Road 17 and headed for the lake.

He stopped his turn and started to reverse.

Cyrus moved faster, his short legs struggling to eat up the distance as he tried to draw closer to the woman. He could see her clearly now. She had left the shelter of the trees and moved into the open, her head low, the long grass parting as she went, then reforming itself behind her. The dog, he noticed, was now on its leash. It didn’t matter much to Cyrus either way. The dog was unlikely to respond quickly to the threat posed by Cyrus, if he responded at all. The blade on Cyrus’s knife was five inches long. It would cut the dog’s throat as easily as it would cut the woman’s.

Cyrus left the shade of the trees and entered the marsh.

The fire road was strewn with brown and yellow leaves. Huge rocks lined its edges, and the trees grew thickly beyond them. Faulkner’s people were within sight of the lakeshore when the driver’s side window of the lead van disintegrated in a shower of glass and plastic, the impact of the bullets throwing the driver sideways and sending the van hurtling toward the trees. The woman beside him tried to wrench the wheel to the right but more shots came, tearing a ribbon of holes across the windshield and through the sides of the van. The rear door opened as the others inside tried to run for cover, but they were dead before they hit the road.

The driver of the second van responded quickly. He kept his head low and put his foot down hard, screeching around the disabled lead vehicle in a cloud of leaves and sending the front wheels and hood of the van straight into one of the rocks by the side of the road. Dazed, he reached beneath the dashboard, released the sawn-off, and rose up in time to take Louis’s first bullet in his chest. The shotgun fell from his hands and he slumped forward.

Meanwhile, the woman was in the back of the van and preparing to respond. She took Faulkner by the arm and told him to start running for the lake as soon as she opened the doors. In her hands she held an H&K G11 automatic rifle set to fire bursts of three rounds, each round a special caseless cartridge that was simply a block of explosive with a bullet buried at its center. She counted down from three, then hit the release handle on the door and began firing. In front of her, a small fat man was punched backward by the impact of the rounds and lay twitching on the road. Behind the woman, Faulkner began to run for the trees and the waters beyond as she sprayed bursts toward the roadside and then turned to follow him. She was almost level with the old man when she felt the impact at her left thigh felling her instantly. She turned on her back, flipped the catch to fully automatic, and kept firing toward the approaching men as they dove for cover. When the gun locked empty, she tossed it to one side and drew her pistol. She had almost raised it when a hand touched her arm gently. Her head turned, her arm moving milliseconds slower. She barely had time to register the gaping hole of the gun leveled at her face before her life ended.

Mary Mason heard the sirens and the raised voices of her neighbors. She reached out her hand to let the big man know, and felt his stillness.

She began to cry.

Out on the road, the truck had reversed down and had already reached the scene of the trap. Its rear doors were opened, and a ramp was lowered to enable the two disabled vans to be pushed into its interior. The bodies of the dead were placed inside, while two men with back-mounted vacuums scoured the blood and broken glass from the road.

But the old man was still running hard, despite the briars that pulled at his feet and the branches of the trees that tugged at his clothes. He slipped on the damp leaves and sensed movement to either side of him as he struggled to rise, a gun clutched in his right hand. He got to his feet just as one of the figures detached itself from the trees and moved to intercept him. He tried to turn, to make for a gap in the woods to the north, but a second figure appeared, and the old man stopped.

Faulkner’s face wrinkled in recognition.

‘Remember me?’ asked Angel. He had a gun in his hand, hanging loosely by his side.

To Faulkner’s right, Louis walked slowly across the earth and stone. He too carried a gun by his side. Faulkner tried to back away, then turned to see my face. He raised his gun. It swung first toward me, then Angel, and finally Louis.

‘Go ahead, Reverend,’ said Louis. His gun was now pointing at Faulkner, one eye closed as he sighted down the barrel. ‘You choose.’

‘They’ll know,’ said Faulkner. ‘You’ll make me a martyr.’

‘They ain’t never gonna find you, Reverend,’ said Louis. ‘Far as people gonna know, you just disappeared off the face of the earth.’

I lifted my gun. So did Angel.

‘But we’ll know,’ Angel said. ‘We’ll always know.’

Faulkner tried to turn his gun on himself as the three shots came simultaneously and the old man bucked and fell. He lay on his back, looking at the sky. Thin streams of blood trailed from the corners of his mouth, then the sky disappeared as we stared down upon him. His mouth opened and closed as he tried to say something. He swallowed and licked at the blood with his tongue. The fingers of his right hand moved feebly as he looked at me.

Slowly, carefully, I knelt down.

‘Your bitch is dead,’ he whispered, as his eyes closed for the last time.

And when I looked up, the trees were filled with ravens.

Cyrus’s mouth was dry. He was so close to her now – thirty, maybe thirty-five feet away. He ran his finger along the blade and watched the dog tugging at the leash, straining to get ahead of its mistress, its attention distracted by the presence of the birds and small rodents it could hear moving through the grass. Cyrus couldn’t understand why she had leashed the dog. Let it run, he thought. The hell harm can it do?

Twenty feet now. Just a few more steps. The woman stepped into a copse of trees above a small pool of water, an outpost of the larger forest that shadowed the marsh to the north, and was suddenly out of his sight. Ahead of him, Cyrus heard the ringing of a cell phone. He ran, his legs aching as he reached the trees. The first thing he saw was the dog. It was tied by its leash to the rotting trunk of a fallen tree. It looked at Cyrus in puzzlement, then yapped happily at what it saw behind.

Cyrus turned and the log caught him full in the face, breaking his nose and sending him stumbling backward out of the trees. He tried to raise his knife and was hit again in the same spot, the pain blinding him. He felt empty space beneath his heels and lifted his arms to try to stop himself from falling even as he tumbled and landed with a splash in the water. He broke back to the surface and began to struggle toward the bank, but Cyrus was not built for swimming. In fact, he could barely swim a stroke and panic had almost immediately set in as he sensed the depth of the water. Water levels in the Scarborough marshes were usually six to eight feet, but the monthly flood had raised them to fourteen and sixteen feet in places. Cyrus couldn’t touch the bottom with his feet.

And then there was another impact on his skull and he felt something break in his head. The energy seemed to leach from his body, his hands and legs refusing to move. Slowly, he began to sink, descending until his lower body was surrounded by weeds and fallen branches, his feet deep in the mud. Air bubbled from his lips and the sight of it seemed to force one final effort from him. His whole body jerked and his hands and arms began to beat at the water, the surface drawing closer as he started to rise.

Cyrus’s ascent was arrested as something pulled at his feet. He looked down but could see only weeds and grass. He tried kicking, but his feet were held fast in the murk and vegetation below, the branches like fingers wrapped around his ankles.

Hands. There were hands upon him. The voices in his head were shrieking, sending out contradictory messages as his air supply dwindled.

Hands.

Branches.

They’re just branches.

But he could feel the hands down there. He could feel the fingers pulling at him, dragging him deeper, forcing him to join them, and he knew that they were waiting down there for him. The women from the hollow were waiting for him.

A shadow fell across him. Blood was flowing freely from the wound in his head and from his ears and nose. He looked up and the woman was staring down at him from the bank, the dog’s head to one side as it peered at the water in puzzlement. The headphones were no longer at the woman’s ears but lay curled around her neck, and something told Cyrus that they had been silent from the moment she had spotted him and began to draw him deeper into the marsh. He stared up at the woman imploringly and opened his mouth as if to beg her to save him, but instead the last of his air floated away and the water coursed into his body. He raised his hands to the woman, but the only move she made was to take her right hand and rub it slowly and rhythmically against the slight swell of her belly, so that it seemed that she was soothing the child within, that it was aware of what was occurring outside its world and was distressed by the action. The woman’s face was empty. There was no pity, no shame, no guilt, no regret. There was not even anger, just a blankness that was worse than any fury Cyrus had ever seen or felt.

Cyrus felt a final tug at his legs as he began to drown, the water filling his lungs, the pain in his head growing as he was starved of oxygen, the voices in his mind rising to a last crescendo, then, slowly, fading away, his final vision that of a pale, pitiless woman rubbing gently at her womb, calming her unborn child.

EPILOGUE

The rivers flow.

The tide is receding, the waters returning to the sea. The shorebirds are gathering. The marsh is their resting stop on the way to the Arctic tundras in which they will nest, and the departing tides provide rich pickings for them. They flit over the streams, their shadows like melting ore in the runnels of molten silver.

It is only now, looking back, that I realize the part that water has played in all that has occurred. The bodies dumped in Louisiana, entombed in oil barrels, mute and undiscovered while the waters flowed around them. A family slain and their remains placed beneath leaves in an empty swimming pool. The Aroostook Baptists, buried by a lake, waiting for decades to be found and released. Addy and Melia Jones, the one slain within earshot of a river, the other twice dead in a polluted pit of foul water.

And one more: Cassie Blythe, found curled beneath the earth in a hollow by a riverbank, surrounded by the bodies of five others, the bones on her hands marked by the passage of Cyrus Nairn’s blade.

Water, flowing endlessly to the sea; each of them in their way denied the promise offered by it, unable to answer the call until, at last, they were brought forth and allowed to follow its course to the final peace that comes to all.

Cyrus Nairn stood among the long stems of a cattail patch, the road visible before him. All around him they moved, their passage like silk against his skin, their presence felt and sensed as much as seen, a great mass of them descending ever onward to the sea, where at last they were absorbed into its waiting surf, the paleness of them joining with it until they disappeared from view. He remained still, like a bulwark against their flow, for his back was to the sea and it did not call to him as it did to the others that followed the white roads through the marsh and into the ocean. Instead, Cyrus watched the old car that idled on the black highway that wound its way toward the coast, its star-shattered windscreen reflecting the night sky above, until the door opened and he knew that it was time.

He climbed from the marsh, hauling himself upward on rocks and metal, and walked toward the waiting Coupe de Ville, its tinted windows revealing only the barest shadows of the figures that lay within. As he stepped around the hood, the driver’s window rolled slowly down and he saw the man who sat with his hands on the wheel, a bald man with a too-wide mouth, a ragged red hole torn in the front of his filthy raincoat, as if his death had come about through impalement upon some great stake, a death that continued to be visited upon him for eternity, for as Cyrus watched the wound appeared to heal and then erupt forth again, and the man’s eyes rolled in his agony. Yet he smiled at Cyrus, and beckoned him on. Behind him, barely visible, was a child dressed in black. She was singing, and Cyrus thought that her voice was one of the most beautiful sounds that he had ever heard, a gift from God. Then the child shifted and became a woman with a bullet wound in her throat, and the singing stopped.

Muriel, thought Cyrus. Her name is Muriel.

He was at the open door. He placed his hand upon its upper edge and peered inside.

The man who sat on the back seat was surrounded by cobwebs. Small brown spiders busied themselves around him, endlessly spinning the cocoon that anchored him in place. His head was ruined, torn apart by the shot that had killed him, but Cyrus could still see the remains of his red hair. The man’s eyes were barely visible beneath the cobwebs and the folds of skin that surrounded the sockets, but Cyrus saw the pain within them, renewed over and over again as the spiders bit him.

And Cyrus understood at last that by our actions in this life, we make our own hell in which to exist in the next, and that his place was now here, and so it would always be.

‘I’m sorry, Leonard,’ he said, and for the first time since he was very young he heard his own voice, and thought how querulous it sounded, how uncertain. And he noticed that there was but one voice, that all the others had been silenced; and he knew that this voice had always been among those that he had heard but that he had chosen not to listen to it. It was the voice that had counseled reason and pity and remorse, the voice to which he had remained deaf throughout his adult life.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘I failed.’

And Pudd’s mouth opened, and spiders tumbled forth.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘We have a long way to go.’

Cyrus climbed into the car, and instantly felt the spiders move upon him, and the construction of a new web beginning.

And the car turned on the road, its back to the sea, and headed away, over mud and marsh grass, until it was lost in the darkness to the north.

There is long grass growing at the base of the stone and weeds have found their sparse anchorage in the dirt. They come away easily in my hand. I have not been here since before the summer. The caretaker of the small cemetery has been ill, so while the pathways have been tended the individual graves have not. I tear the grass out in clumps, the dirt hanging from the roots, and toss them to one side.

The little one’s name had almost been obscured, but now it is clearly visible once again. For a moment, I run my fingers along the indentations of the letters, distracted by the sight, then return to the clearing of the grave.

A shadow falls across me, and the woman lowers herself down by my side, her legs apart to accommodate the swelling at her belly. I do not look at her. I am crying now and I do not understand why because I do not feel that terrible crushing sadness inside that has brought me to tears at other times. Instead I feel relief, and gratitude that she is here now beside me in this place for the first time, because it is good and necessary that she be here, that this should at last be revealed to her. But still the tears come and I find myself unable even to see the weeds and the grass clearly, until at last she reaches down and her hand guides mine, and together we work, discarding that which is ugly and unsightly, keeping that which is beautiful and enriching, our hands touching, brushing against each other, their presence with us in the breeze on our faces and the water flowing beside us: children gone and children yet to come; love remembered, love remaining; the lost and the found, the living and the dead, side by side together.

On the White Road.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In researching this book I relied greatly upon the work and knowledge of others, including Before Freedom by Belinda Hurmence (Mentor, 1990); Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina by Daniel C. Littlefield (Illini Books, 1991); The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials 1871–1872 by Lou Falkner Williams (University of Georgia Press, 1996); Gullah Fuh Oonah by Virginia Mixon Geraty (Sandlapper Publishing, 1997); Blue Roots by Roger Pinckney (Llewellyn Publications, 2000); A Short History of Charleston by Roger Rosen (University of South Carolina Press, 1992); Kaballah by Kenneth Hanson Ph.D (Council Oak Books, 1998); American Extremists by John George and Laird Wilcox (Prometheus Books, 1996); and The Racist Mind by Raphael S. Ezekiel (Penguin, 1995).

In addition, a number of individuals gave generously of their time and knowledge. I am especially grateful to deputy attorney general Bill Stokes and assistant attorney general Chuck Dow at the Maine Attorney General’s office; Jeffrey D. Merrill, Warden of Maine State Prison, Thomaston, and his staff, especially Colonel Douglas Starbird and Sergeant Elwin Weeks; Hugh E. Munn, South Carolina Law Enforcement Division; Lieutenant Stephen D. Wright, City of Charleston Police Department; Janice Kahn, my guide to Charleston; Sarah Yeates, formerly of the Museum of Natural History in New York; and the National Park Service staff of the Congaree Swamp National Monument.

On a personal note, I want to thank Sue Fletcher, Kerry Hood and all at Hodder & Stoughton; my agent Darley Anderson and his staff; my family; Ruth, for many kindnesses; and, belatedly, Dr Ian Ross, who introduced me to Ross Macdonald; and Ella Shanahan, who kept me in funds when few others would.

John Connolly on the Parker Novels:

‘Since about the second book I’ve thought of the Parker novels as a sequence rather than a series, in that each book develops themes, ideas and plots from the preceding books.’

Although each novel is self-contained, and can be enjoyed as a compelling thriller, collectively the Parker novels form a rich and involving epic sequence in which characters reappear and clues laid down in earlier stories are solved in later ones. Below is a précis of key events in each of the Charlie Parker novels.

Former NYPD Charlie Parker first appears (in Every Dead Thing) on a quest for the killer of his wife and daughter. He is a man consumed by violence, guilt and the desire for revenge. When his ex-partner asks him to track down a missing girl, Parker embarks on a grim odyssey through the bowels of organised crime; to cellars of torture and death; and to a unique serial killer, an artist who uses the human body as his canvas: The Travelling Man. By the end of the novel, Parker realises he is at the beginning of another dark journey – to avenge the voiceless victims of crime: the poor, women and children. It is a journey on which his dead wife and child will be constant ghostly companions.

In Dark Hollow, Parker returns to the wintry Maine landscape where he grew up and becomes embroiled in another murder hunt. The chief suspect is Billy Purdue, the ex-husband of the dead woman, and Parker is not the only one on his trail. Aided by his friends, hitmen Angel and Louis (first encountered in Every Dead Thing), Parker must go back thirty years into his own grandfather’s troubled past and into the violent origins of a mythical killer, the monster Caleb Kyle. Parker’s personal life seems to take an upward turn in the attractive form of psychologist Rachel Wolfe.

Parker’s empathy with the powerless victims of crime is growing ever stronger. It makes him a natural choice to investigate the death of Grace Peltier in The Killing Kind – a death that appears to be a suicide. The discovery of a mass grave – the final resting place of a religious community that had disappeared forty years earlier – convinces Parker that there is a link between Grace and these deaths: a shadowy organisation called The Fellowship. His investigation draws him into increasingly violent confrontations with the Fellowship’s enforcer, the demonic arachnophile, Mr Pudd. Genial killers Angel and Louis join Parker again as he descends into a honeycomb world populated by dark angels and lost souls.

Parker’s relationship with Rachel reaches a new level in The White Road, but he is still driven to solve the most challenging of cases. A black youth faces the death penalty for rape and murder; his victim, the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in South Carolina. It is a case with its roots in old evil, and old evil is Charlie Parker’s speciality. But this turns out not to be an investigation, but rather a descent into the abyss, a confrontation with dark forces that threaten all Parker holds dear.

Evil men from his past unite to exact a terrible revenge on the private detective. Seemingly unconnected events turn out to be part of a complex and intricate pattern.

The Killing Kind and The White Road effectively form two halves of a single, larger narrative and are probably best read in order.

In “The Reflecting Eye”, a long novella featured in the Nocturnes collection, Parker becomes involved in a curious investigation into a former killer’s abandoned house, and learns that someone, or something, seems be using its empty rooms as a base from which to hunt for victims. This novella introduces us for the first time to the character known as the Collector, an individual who will come to play an important, and sinister, role in the books that follow, most particularly in The Unquiet and The Lovers.

The Black Angel is not an object; it is not a myth. The Black Angel lives. And it is a prize sought for centuries by evil men. Not that Charlie Parker’s latest case starts this way; it starts with the disappearance of a young woman in New York. Her abductors believe that no one will come looking for her, but they are wrong. For Alice is ‘blood’ to Parker’s sidekick, the assassin Louis, and Louis will tear apart anyone who attempts to stop him finding her.

The hunt turns into an epic quest that will take Parker and his team to an ornate church of bones in Eastern Europe and a cataclysmic battle between good and evil. It marks a dawning realisation in Parker that there is another dimension to his crusade, a dangerous dimension that Rachel finds herself increasingly unable to live with.

The Unquiet begins with a missing man, a once respected psychiatrist who went absent following revelations about harm done to children in his care. His daughter believes him dead, but is not allowed to come to terms with her father’s legacy. For someone is asking questions about Daniel Clay: the revenger Merrick, a father and a killer obsessed with discovering the truth about his own daughter’s disappearance. Living apart from Rachel and their child, Charlie Parker is hired to make Merrick go away, but finds strange bonds with the revenger, who has drawn from the shadows pale wraiths drifting through the ranks of the unquiet dead. At the end of the novel comes a tantalising reference to Parker’s own parentage that will inform events in The Lovers.

But first Angel and Louis take centre stage in The Reapers, where the elite killers themselves become targets. A wealthy recluse sends them north to a town that no longer exists on a map. A town ruled by a man with very personal reasons for wanting Louis’s blood spilt. There they find themselves trapped, isolated and at the mercy of a killer feared above all others: the assassin of assassins, Bliss. Thanks to Parker, help is on its way. But can Angel and Louis stay alive long enough for it to reach them?

The bloody events in The Unquiet result in Parker losing his PI licence, so he returns to Maine and takes a job in a Portland bar while the fuss dies down. But The Lovers shows Parker engaged on his most personal case yet: an investigation into his own origins and the circumstances surrounding the death of his father. When he was a boy, Parker’s father, himself a cop, killed a pair of teenagers then took his own life. His actions were never explained. Parker’s quest for that explanation reveals lies, secrets and betrayal. Haunting it – as they have done all his life – are two figures in the shadows, an unidentified man and woman with one purpose: to bring an end to Parker’s existence.

In The Whisperers, Parker is asked to investigate the apparent suicide of Damian Patchett, a former soldier. But this is not an isolated death; former combatants are dying in epidemic quantities, driven by someone or something to take their own lives.

Parker cannot defeat this evil on this own. To combat it, he is forced into an uneasy alliance with a man he fears more than any other. The Collector first appeared in the novella The Reflecting Eye and remains a sinister presence in Parker’s consciousness. It is as though the two men are twin moons orbiting a dark, unknown planet. Now he steps out of the shadows and as their eyes meet, Parker sees for the first time that he himself inspires fear in the Collector.

In The Burning Soul, Charlie Parker becomes reluctantly involved in investigating the abduction of a fourteen-year-old girl

The small Maine town of Pastor’s Bay is the home of Randall Haight, a man with a secret. When he was a teenager, he and his friend killed a girl. He did his time and has built a life for himself, not sharing details of his past with anyone. But someone has found out, and is sending anonymous threatening messages. And Anna Kore – the missing girl – lived in Pastor’s Bay, not two miles away from Haight.

Randall Haight is not the kind of man Charlie Parker wants to help. But he is already drawn to the case of Anna Kore and cannot turn away from the chance to find her. In the course of the investigation he comes up against the police, the FBI and a doomed mobster, Tommy Morris.