Every Dead Thing

18

I DROVE DOWN to Virginia that afternoon. It was a long ride but I told myself that I wanted time to open up the car’s engine, 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 blond hair pulled back behind her and sunglasses masking her eyes. A dark-haired male sat beside her. I put them both in their thirties but I didn’t recognize 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. Only a clown would use a 4WD for a tail, or to try to take out another vehicle. A 4WD has a high center 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 toward the Blue Ridge. If they came after me again, I’d know: they stood out like blood in snow.

As I drove, sunlight speared the trees, causing the weblike 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 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 southeast 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 that even the driving rain seemed unable to dislodge. Rusting pickups sat outside some of the houses, and apart from a single fast food joint and a convenience store attached to a gas station, only the weak neon of the Welcome Inn bar and the lights of the late-night 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-story 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 favor 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 smelled vaguely of rubbing alcohol.

I looked around. The Haven View Motel didn’t look like the sort of place that would attract visitors in the best of times.

“I know what you’re thinkin’,” said the clerk, his smile revealing sparkling dentures. “You’re thinkin’, ‘Why throw good money away by decoratin’ a motel in a shit hole like this?’ ” He winked at me before leaning over the desk conspiratorially. “Well, I’m tellin’ you, sir, it ain’t gonna be a shit hole much longer. Them Japanese is comin’ and when they do, this place is gonna be a gold mine. Where else they gonna stay round here?” He shook his head and 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 room next door. It took me less than five seconds to break the lock with my pocketknife, then I showered, changed, and drove back into town.

The recession of the seventies had hit Haven hard, putting an end 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, even after the rain had sluiced its way over the stores and streets, over the people and the houses, over trees and pickups and cars and Tarmac, there was no freshness about Haven. It was as if the rain itself had been sullied by the contact.

I stopped in at the Sheriff’s Office but neither the sheriff nor Alvin Martin was available. Instead, a deputy named Wallace sat scowling behind the desk and shoveling 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 baby-sitter. 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 club soda and lime.

I took an empty stool at the bar and asked for a coffee from a bartender 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 smelled like strong black coffee.

“He bring his own?” I inquired, gesturing with a nod down the bar.

“Yep,” said the bartender, 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 swig. It was warm and sticky and I felt it cleave to my palate, my tongue, and my teeth. The bartender spent a while idly polishing glasses with a bar towel that 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 toward 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 toward 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, subintelligent face arriving to take in the Pulaski air. After all, Robb was trying to make the Klan appeal to the educated elite, 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 organization 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 neighbor 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 onto 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 like 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 cells, 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 gray. 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 realized 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.

19

THE SKY WAS GRAY 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 neighbors toward 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 who 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, or much human activity in sight. Most of the cars and trucks seemed to be passing through on their way to someplace else. The town seemed to be permanently stuck in a grim Sunday morning.

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-story 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 slight 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 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, nineteen seventy, maybe nineteen 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 the opportunity presented itself. A party of schoolchildren entered the junior section of the library, separated from the adult section 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 backup.

I tried the 1969 files first. It took some time, even though the Haven Leader had been only 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 offenses 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 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 February 8, 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 brief history of the family: father Earl an accountant, mother Dorothy a housewife and a schoolteacher, 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 description of the circumstances of the death of either, but there was one hint, once again in the last paragraph. “The Haven 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 traveling 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 toward 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 practiced 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.

20

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 recognizable picture and refusing to let my mind drift to the Traveling 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 toward 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 pickup rattled by on the road beyond, a covered shotgun 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 onto 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 Eatery on the road beyond.

We took a booth at the rear, far away from the handful of other patrons, who cast curious glances 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 unlicensed investigator packing a pistol to drop into 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 in the bar 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?”

“The last call 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 child. 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 around 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 wife beaters, 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 the hat 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 domestics 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 offense 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 town I’m going to find out whether or not she’s here, even if it means rattling every cage in this godforsaken dump and scaring your Japanese saviors 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 toward 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 toward the door. He stopped and turned toward 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. Frankly, I can see a lot of people thinking the same way once they know why you’re here. And they’re going to find out. So, you’d best step lightly while you’re in town.”

“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. “There’s no klavern, but 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 it is with a gun barrel. Whipping you could be good for another twenty, thirty votes, if he had a mind to do it. 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 toward 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.

21

IT WAS AFTER SIX when I got back to the motel. 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 semiobscured by undergrowth and pointed toward a winding, rutted track heavy with evergreens, which eventually opened out on 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-story white wooden house. A lamp blazed by a screen door, which shielded a solid oak front door with a fan of frosted glass near the top. There was a light on in the hallway.

A gray-haired man, wearing a red wool cardigan over gray slacks and a striped, open-necked shirt, opened the inner door as I pulled up and watched me with mild curiosity.

“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 screen door 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.”

Hyams opened the screen 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 of the house, 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 toward 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 smelled 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 practicing here and kept working until the day he died.”

“He was the doctor, I understand.”

“Doctor, counselor, legal adviser, even dentist when the resident dentist wasn’t around. He did everything. The killings hit him particularly hard. He helped perform 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 they 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 to here recently 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, our own modern sheriff’s office, a fine school, a top-class medical center. 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’d outlive 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. Death is usually the result. The victor is also typically 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 fetuses have higher levels of testosterone than adult males, and the females have masculine characteristics, even in the womb. Even in adulthood the sexes can 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 color, 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. Good night.”

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 windshield 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 had resumed his position behind the reception 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 over-fond 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. I checked the parking lot carefully before I stepped out and then I was leaving Haven behind and heading for Dorien.

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 e. e. cummings in the bookstore and wandered into Milano’s to eat.

Milano’s had red-and-white check tablecloths and candles set in miniatures of the Colosseum, but it was almost full and the food looked pretty good. A slim maitre d’ in a red bow tie bustled over and showed me to a table in the corner where I wouldn’t scare the other diners. I took out the copy of cummings to reassure them and read “some-where i have never traveled” 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 Traveling Man, before forcing him from my mind along with the images that came with him. Then I got back in my car and returned to Haven.

22

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. 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 toward 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 on dry ground.

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 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 into 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 stepladders stood like steeples at either wall. The air was heavy with the smell of paint and thinner. 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-fashioned 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 hands 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 pipe 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 realized I had come close to killing her, but I still wanted her where I could see her.

Rudy Fry lay gray 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 lights 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 center. The wound in my arm was minor but had bled heavily. Now it had been cleaned and bandaged, and my good hand clutched a bottle of painkillers. I felt like I’d been sideswiped by a passing train.

Alvin Martin stood beside me. Wallace and another deputy I didn’t recognize 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 rumor, that’s all.”

“Fuck you and your rumor. 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. In fact, they want you arrested, beaten, then 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 Lieutenant 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-no other way the cell phone could have shown a callbox number-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 checked 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 talk to 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 while?” she asked.

I thanked her for the offer but turned her down.

“I partly guessed as much,” she said. She nodded toward the vial of painkillers. “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 painkillers. 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 a cell. I showered, wrapping my bandaged arm with plastic first, and then slept fitfully in the 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 Martin 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.”

23

WALT TYLER lived in a dilapidated but clean white clapboard house, against one side of which leaned a teetering pile of car tires that were, according to a sign on the road, For Sale. Other items of varying degrees of sellability that rested on the gravel and the well-trimmed lawn included two semire-stored 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 gray 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 he 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 the smile 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 that is sometimes forgotten in the throes of some other activity and then returns in the forgetting. And I thought that each return had etched a line in his face, and so a once handsome man could lose his looks like a fine marble statue being 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 while 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, that 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 travelers 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 the wind 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 while even some of my own neighbors 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 Otterville, 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, organized 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 left. 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 his-self 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 nobody 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 homo-sexual-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 while, 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 then 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 Becker, 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. Jewelry 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 nearby, 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 while, 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’ve gotta know what they did, what they did to those children, to my child. 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 while 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.

24

ON THE Casuarina Coast of 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 nonhuman, 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. Maybe 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 pie 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 goin’.”

“And where are we going?”

“We’re goin’ to hell is where we’re goin’. These people are like bacteria spreading and this country is just one big petri dish to them. The Bureau reckons we could be losing a couple of thousand victims a year to them. The folks watching Oprah and Jerry Springer, or subscribin’ 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 goin’ on around them.”

He took a deep swig 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, emphasizing 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 U.S. of A. is breedin’ these fuckers like fuckin’ 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 in every other way 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 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 Traveling Man, and the 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 not only went 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. For we believe that women should not take the life of a child. 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 crib. 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 what I wanted was 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 while. 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 may be. 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 curb. There had been a death at the medical center: 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 toward 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 center 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 center 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 sticky brown paper lay on the floor, with glass adhering to it. Whoever had killed the woman had taken the trouble to stick it to the window 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 toward 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 center 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.

25

THE ROAD TO THE RUIN of the Dane house was little more than two mud tracks and the car moved along them 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, realizing my mistake only 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 dark 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 in the flashlight beam 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 smelled 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 shined 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 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 hinge 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 dragging it behind a car for a while. 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. As I shined 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 jimmied. For a moment it seemed the bar might bend or fracture under the strain, and 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 odor 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 defogger from the glove compartment and tied it around my mouth. The defogger made my head reel but I stuck it in the pocket of my coat in case I needed it again and re-entered the house.

Even though I breathed through my mouth, 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-gray 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 gray-white and there was a wound on his forehead, a ragged hole like a dark, exploding star. For a moment, as I shined the flashlight 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 driver’s license 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 slumped 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 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 now 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 me.

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 flashlight.

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, I thought 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 reenacted 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 upward with all my remaining strength. It was an error that my opponent exploited to the full. The torch was kicked once, hard, and slipped through the enlarged gap. The trap-door 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 upward and coming to rest flat on the floor.

I flung myself out, my hand inside my jacket reaching for my gun and the flashlight beam 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 trapdoor, 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 flashlight 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 center, 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 toward Hyams’s house.

26

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 was 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 neighbor 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 had been dead before the sheriff returned. The proof: 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, his own Dodge, 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 nearby, 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 pickup 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 recognize. I caught Clete’s eye as I passed and saw Gabe lean toward 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 pickup, 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 your ass 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 center.” 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 ain’t 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 office. 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 onto 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 tried 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 cell phone? Call me back on a land-line.”

I called him back seconds later from a phone 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 garage. Then I made some calls. For fifteen hundred dollars I bought silence and a flight on a small plane from a private airfield back to the city.

27

“YOU SURE you wanna be dropped here?” The cabdriver 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 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 Morelli wine warehouse was one of a number of similar premises that lined one side of a long, ill-lit street west of Northern Boulevard in Flushing. It was a redbrick building, its name reduced to a white, flaking shadow below the edge of its roof. Wire screens covered the windows on both the ground and upper levels. There were no visible lights on the walls; the area between the gate and the main building was 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 shirt.

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 color. I ached all over and I was tired of death.

“You look good,” said Angel. “Where’s the dance?”

I looked toward the Morelli 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 inward 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 semidiscreetly 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 streetlights did not penetrate the darkness here.

Angel went to work on the lock with a selection of picks, a small flashlight in his mouth, and less than a minute later we were in, lighting our heavy Mags as we went. A small booth, 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 center, 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 stories, 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 beam revealed the cellar’s arches. 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, cavelike 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. The flashlight beams caught the edge of the floor of one bin that differed from the others. It was the one nearest us on the right, bare earth showing 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 dirt 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, that had been tucked in against the far wall. I walked toward 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 discolored face whose skin had cracked and burst, with a pair of open eyes, the corneas milky and cloudy. The smell of decay was strong, but dulled somewhat by the plastic. I recognized 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 farther back but didn’t take a mask. Angel held the flashlight beam on the body.

I took my pocketknife 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 pried 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 pried 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 videocassette 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 anytime 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 folding spade from Angel’s bag and began to break the earth. It didn’t take long for me to hit something soft. I dug wider and then began to scrape away the earth, Angel beside me using a small garden trowel 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 fetal 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 flashlight beam 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 ugly 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 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 flashlight 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 realization. He was already turning to try to locate Louis when the darkness seemed to come alive around him and his eyes widened as he realized, too late, that death had come for him too.

Louis’s skin gleamed in the light 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.

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 that was 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 Morelli warehouse and Queens itself. Queens, a mass of warehouses and cemeteries.

And sometimes both together.

28

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. There would be no solution.

I wondered how many times each year Hyams had traveled 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 that might have caused them to pause, to reconsider their assessment of this polite, reserved man with his trim gray 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 jewelry 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 streetlights 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 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 black 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 him 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 gray 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? Sonny, with 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 he turned to look at me, his eyes were huge 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 recognized 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 appearance 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, 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 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 recognized him from the tapes. That’s how he found you, in the old house. 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 rearview, as if nothing had ever happened.

29

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 would still be near me, my wife sleeping softly by my side, my child surrounded by her toys in a room nearby. 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 that 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 toward 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 hallway 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 gray 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; she was almost unrecognizable. 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 odor 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 odor 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 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 toward 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 then 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 halfway 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 backward, its branches eventually coming to rest unsteadily against the trunk of another tree farther down the slope.

I pulled my car onto 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 onto the ground. I could see the 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 that had taken my own child along with the lives of the children in the cellars, the same evil that had spawned the Traveling 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 fetal 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 De Vries’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 recognized her immediately, but she must have seen the recognition in the eyes of the other woman. Maybe it was that slight overbite that 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 that 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 realized 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 recognize 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, unraveled like a spider that senses a shift in its web and sprang toward 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 toward 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 realized 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. Farther down the hill, in the wooded dark, a smaller pyre burned.

30

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. I had even caught a few hours’ sleep stretched across three chairs. 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 assistant chief, 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 terminal 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 in scattered locations across the state and maybe even farther afield. Adelaide Modine and Connell Hyams had been free to kill for thirty years. The Morelli 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 lookout 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 Morelli 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, 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 he had never spoken, I said: “She told me that she knew who killed Jennifer and Susan.”

He 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 Traveling Man had come together.

“I’m considering retirement,” said Cole. “I don’t want to look at death anymore. 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 longer.”

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 forever.”

A film was forming on my untouched coffee. When I didn’t respond, Walter sighed and spoke with a sadness in his voice that 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 Traveling 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 Traveling 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 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 colors. He had looked upon death’s heads for too long and become 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 urban wasteland, 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 toward 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 but could not explain it. He simply shrugged his shoulders when they asked. They took his gun and his badge-his backup, the one I now hold, remained back in his bedroom-and then they drove him home under the NYPD rule that prevented a policeman from being questioned about the possible commission of 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, high-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 on 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. Then 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 reestablish 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 for a short time when the cell phone 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 Travelin’ 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 ham sandwiches with potato chips and a packet of dried raisins, all tossed in the sort of brown paper 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 cocktail napkin when the first drops came, but quickly 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.