Book of Souls

Chapter 1

WILL PIPER WAS never much for crying babies, especially his own. He had a vague recollection of crying-baby number one a quarter of a century earlier. In those days he was a young deputy sheriff in Florida, pulling the worst shifts. By the time he got home in the morning, his infant daughter was already up-and-at-’em, doing her happy-baby routine. When he and his wife did spend a night together, and Laura cried out, he’d whine himself, then drift back to sleep before Melanie had the bottle out of the warmer. He didn’t do diapers. He didn’t do feedings. He didn’t do crying. And he was gone for good before Laura’s second birthday.

But that was two marriages and one lifetime ago, and he was a changed man, or so he told himself. He’d allowed himself to be molded into something of a twenty-first-century metrosexual New York father with all the trappings of the station. If, in the past, he could attend crime scenes and prod at decomposing flesh, he could change a diaper. If he could conduct an interview through the sobs of a victim’s mother, he could deal with crying.

It didn’t mean he had to like it.

There had been a succession of new phases in his life, and he was a month into the newest, an amalgam of retirement and unfiltered fatherhood. It had been only sixteen months from the day he abruptly retired from the FBI to the day Nancy abruptly returned to work after maternity leave. And now, for at least brief stretches of time, he was left on his own with his son, Phillip Weston Piper. Their budget didn’t allow for more than thirty hours per week of nanny time, so for a few hours a day he had to fly solo.

As lifestyle changes went, this was fairly dramatic. For much of his twenty years at the FBI, he’d been a top-of-the-heap profiler, one of the most accomplished serial-killer hunters of his era. If it hadn’t been for what he charitably called his personal peccadilloes, he might have gone out large, with accolades and a nice postretirement gig as a criminal-justice consultant.

But his weaknesses for booze and women and his stubborn lack of ambition torpedoed his career and fatefully led him to the infamous Doomsday case. To the world, the case was still unsolved, but he knew better. He’d broken it, and it had broken him in return.

Its legacy was forced early retirement, a negotiated cover-up, and reams of confidentiality agreements. He got out with his life-barely.

On the bright side, fate also led him to Nancy, his young Doomsday partner, and she had given him his first son, a six-month-old, who sensed the rift when Nancy closed the apartment door closed behind her and had started to work his diaphragm.

Mercifully, Phillip Weston Piper’s high-pitched squall was squelched by rocking, but it abruptly resumed when Will put him back in his crib. Will hoped beyond hope that little Phillip would burn himself out and slowly backed out of the bedroom. He put the living-room TV onto cable news and tweaked the volume to harmonically modulate the nails-on-chalkboard squeal of his offspring.

Even though he was chronically sleep-deprived, Will’s head was awfully clear these days, thanks to his self-imposed separation from his pal, Johnnie Walker. He kept the ceremonial last half-gallon bottle of Black Label, three-quarters full, in the cabinet under the TV. He wasn’t going to be the kind of ex-drunk who had to purge the place of alcohol. He visited with the bottle sometimes, winked at it, sparred with it, had a little chat with it. He taunted it more than it taunted him. He didn’t do AA or “talk to someone.” He didn’t even stop drinking! He had a couple of beers or a generous glass of wine fairly regularly, and he even got buzzed on an empty stomach. He simply prohibited himself from touching the nectar-smoky, beautiful, amber-his love, his nemesis. He didn’t care what the textbooks said about addicts and abstinence. He was his own man, and he had promised himself and his new bride that he wouldn’t do the falling-down-drunk thing again.

He sat on the sofa with his large hands lying dumbly on his bare thighs. He was set to go, kitted out in jogging shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers. The nanny was late again. He felt trapped, claustrophobic. He was spending way too much time in this little parquet-floored prison cell. Despite best intentions, something was going to have to give. He was trying to do the right thing and honor his commitments and all that, but every day he grew more restless. New York had always irritated him. Now it was overtly nauseating.

The buzzer saved him from darkness. A minute later, the nanny-troll, as he called her (not to her face), arrived, launching into an attack on public transport rather than an apology. Leonora Monica Nepomuceno, a four-foot-ten-inch Filipina, threw her carrier bag on the kitchenette counter, then went right for the crying baby, pressing his tense little body against her incongruously large breasts. The woman, who he guessed was in her fifties, was so physically unattractive that when Will and Nancy first learned her nickname, Moonflower, they laughed themselves to exhaustion. “Ay, ay,” she crooned to the boy, “your auntie Leonora is here. You can stop your crying now.”

“I’m going for a run,” Will announced through a scowl.

“Go for a long one, Mister Will,” Moonflower advised.

A daily run had become part of Will’s postretirement routine, a component of his new-man ethos. He was leaner and stronger than he had been in years, only ten pounds heavier than his football-playing weight at Harvard. He was on the brink of fifty, but he was looking younger thanks to his no-scotch diet. He was big and athletic, with a strong jaw, boyishly thick tawny hair, and crazy blue eyes, and clad in nylon jogging shorts, he turned women’s heads, even young ones’. Nancy still wasn’t used to that.

On the sidewalk, he realized the Indian summer was over, and it was going to be uncomfortably chilly. While he stretched his calves and Achilles tendons against a signpost, he thought about shooting back upstairs for a warm-up suit.

Then he saw the bus on the other side of East 23 ^rd Street. It started up and belched some diesel exhaust.

Will had spent the better part of twenty years following and observing. He knew how to make himself inconspicuous. The guy in the bus didn’t, or didn’t care. He had noticed the rig the previous evening, driving slowly past his building at maybe five miles per hour, jamming traffic, provoking a chorus of honks. It was hard to miss, a top-of-the-line Beaver, a big royal blue forty-three-footer with slides, splashed out in gray and crimson swooshes. He had thought to himself, who the hell takes a half-a-million-dollar motor home into lower Manhattan and drives around slow, looking for an address? If he found it, where was he going to park the thing? But it was the license plate that rang bells.

Nevada. Nevada!

Now it looked like the guy had indeed found adequate parking the night before, across the street just to the east of Will’s building, an impressive feat, to be sure. Will’s heart started to beat at jogging speed even though he was still stationary. He had stopped looking over his shoulder months ago.

Apparently, that was a mistake. Gimme a break, he thought. Nevada plates.

Still, this didn’t have their signature. The watchers weren’t going to come at him in a half-baked-Winnebago battle-wagon. If they ever decided to pluck him off the streets, he’d never see it coming. They were pros, for Christ’s sake.

It was a two-way street, and the bus was pointed west. All Will had to do was run east toward the river, make a few quick turns, and the bus would never catch up. But then he wouldn’t know if he was the object of somebody’s exercise, and he didn’t like not knowing. So he ran west. Slowly. Making it easy for the guy.

The bus slid out of its space and followed along. Will picked up the pace, partly to see how the bus responded, partly to get warm. He got to the intersection of 3 ^rd Avenue and jogged in place, waiting for the light. The bus was a hundred feet behind, stacked up by a line of taxis. He shielded his eyes from the sun. Through the windshield he made out at least two men. The driver had a beard.

On the go again, he ran through the intersection and weaved through the sparse pedestrian sidewalk traffic. Over his shoulder, he saw the bus was still following west along 23 ^rd, but that wasn’t much of a test. That came at Lexington, where he took a left and ran south. Sure enough, the bus turned too.

Getting warmer, Will thought, getting warmer.

His destination was Gramercy Park, a leafy rectangular enclave a few blocks downtown. Its perimeter streets were all one-ways. If he was still being tailed, he’d have a bit of fun.

Lexington dead-ended at 21 ^st Street at the park, where 21 ^st ran one way west. Will ran east, along the outside of the park fence. The bus had to follow the traffic pattern in the opposite direction.

Will started doing clockwise laps around the park’s perimeter, each lap taking only a couple of minutes. Will could see that the bus driver was struggling with the tight left turns, nearly clipping parked cars at the corners.

There wasn’t anything remotely funny about being followed, but Will couldn’t help being amused every time the giant motor home passed him on its counterclockwise circuit. With each encounter, he got a better look at his pursuers. They failed to strike fear in his heart, but you never knew. These clowns definitely weren’t watchers. But there were other sorts of problem children out there. He’d put a lot of killers in jail. Killers had families. Vengeance was a family affair.

The driver was an older fellow, with longish hair and a full beard the color of fireplace ash. His fleshy face and ballooned-out shoulders suggested a heavy man. The man in the shotgun seat was tall and thin, also on the senior side, with wide-open eyes that furtively engaged Will sidelong. The driver stiffly refused to make eye contact altogether, as if he actually believed they hadn’t been made.

On his third circuit, Will spotted two NYPD cops on walking patrol on 20 ^th Street. Gramercy Park was an exclusive neighborhood; it was the only private park in Manhattan. The residents of the surrounding buildings had their own keys to the wrought-iron gates, and the police were visible around there, prowling for muggers and creeps. Will pulled up, breathing heavily. “Officers. That bus over there. I saw it stop. The driver was hassling a little girl. I think he was trying to get her inside.”

The cops listened, deadpan. His flat Southern drawl played havoc with his credibility. He got a lot of those out-of-town looks in New York. “You sure about that?”

“I’m ex-FBI.”

Will watched for a short while only. The cops stood smack in the middle of the street and halted the bus with hand waving. Will didn’t stick around. He was curious, sure, but he wanted to get over to the river for his usual circuit. Besides, he had a feeling he’d see these geezers again.

To be on the safe side, when he got back home, he’d take his gun out of the dresser and oil it up.