The Killing Kind

PROLOGUE

THIS IS A HONEYCOMB WORLD.

It hides a hollow heart. The truth of nature, wrote the philosopher Democritus, lies in deep mines and caves. The stability of what is seen and felt beneath our feet is an illusion, for this life is not as it seems. Below the surface, there are cracks and fissures and pockets of stale, trapped air; stalagmites and helactites and unmapped dark rivers that flow ever downward. It is a place of caverns and stone waterfalls, a labyrinth of crystal tumors and frozen columns where history becomes future, then becomes now.

For in total blackness, time has no meaning.

The present is imperfectly layered on the past; it does not conform flawlessly at every point. Things fall and die and their decay creates new layers, thickening the surface crust and adding another thin membrane to cover what lies beneath, new worlds resting on the remains of the old. Day upon day, year upon year, century upon century, layers are added and the imperfections multiply. The past never truly dies. It is there, waiting, just below the surface of the now. We stumble into it occasionally, all of us, through remembrance and recall. We summon to mind former lovers, lost children, departed parents, the wonder of a single day when we captured, however briefly, the ineffable, fleeting beauty of the world. These are our memories. We hold them close and call them ours, and we can find them when we need them.

But sometimes that choice is made for us: a piece of the present simply falls away, and the past is exposed like old bone. Afterward, nothing can ever be the same again, and we are forced to reassess the form of what we believed to be true in the light of new revelations about its substance. The truth is revealed by a misstep and the fleeting sense that something beneath our feet rings false. The past bubbles out like molten lava, and lives turn to ash in its path.

This is a honeycomb world. Our actions echo through its depths.

Down here, dark life exists: microbes and bacteria that draw their energy from chemicals and natural radioactivity, older than the first plant cells that brought color to the world above. Every deep pool is alive with them, every mine shaft, every ice core. They live and die unseen.

But there are other organisms, other beings: creatures that know only hunger, entities that exist purely to hunt and kill. They move ceaselessly through the hidden cavities, their jaws snapping at the endless night. They come to the surface only when they are forced to do so, and all living things flee from their path.

They came for Alison Beck.

Dr. Beck was sixty and had been performing abortions since 1974, in the immediate aftermath of Roe v. Wade. As a young woman she had become involved in Planned Parenthood following the rubella epidemic of the early 1960s, when thousands of American women delivered babies with serious birth defects. She had progressed to outspoken membership of NOW and the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws before the changes for which they fought enabled her to establish her own clinic in Minneapolis. Since then, she had defied Joseph Scheidler's Pro-Life Action Network, his sidewalk counselors and bullhorn mafia, and had stood head-to-head with Randall Terry when Operation Rescue tried to blockade her clinic in 1989. She had fought against the Hyde amendment of '76, which cut off Medicaid funding for abortions, and had cried when the antiabortionist C. Everett Koop became U.S. surgeon general. On three separate occasions butyric acid had been injected into the clinic walls by antiabortion activists, forcing it to close its doors for days until the fumes had dispersed. The tires on her car had been slashed more times than she could count, and only the toughened glass on the clinic window had prevented an incendiary device housed in a fire extinguisher from burning the building to the ground.

But in recent years the strain of her profession had begun to tell and she now looked much older than her years. In almost three decades, she had enjoyed the company of only a handful of men. David had been the first, and she had married him, and loved him, but David was gone now. She had held him as he died, and she still kept the shirt he had worn on that day, the bloodstains like the shadows of dark clouds floating across its once pristine whiteness. The men who followed offered many excuses for departing but, in the end, all the excuses could be distilled down to one simple essence: fear. Alison Beck was a marked woman. She lived each day in the knowledge that there were those who would rather see her dead than have her continue her work, and few men were willing to stand beside such a woman.

She knew the statistics by heart. There had been twenty-seven cases of extreme violence against American abortion clinics in the previous year, and two doctors had died. Seven abortion doctors and assistants had been killed in the preceding five years, and many others injured in bombings and shootings. She knew all of this because she had spent over twenty years documenting the incidences of violence, tracing common factors, establishing connections. It was the only way that she could cope with the loss of David, the only means she had of making sure that some small good might arise from the ashes of his death. Her research had been used to support the abortion providers' successful invocation of the RICO antiracketeering laws in their fight against their opponents, alleging a nationwide conspiracy to close down clinics. It had been a hard-won victory.

But slowly, another, more indistinct pattern had begun to emerge: names recurring and echoing down the canyons of the years, figures half-glimpsed in the shadows of violent acts. The convergences were visible in barely half a dozen cases, but they were there. She was certain of it, and the others seemed to agree. Together, they were drawing closer and closer to the truth.

But that brought with it its own dangers.

Alison Beck had an alarm system in her home, linked directly to a private security firm, and two armed guards were always on duty at the clinic. In her bedroom closet was an American Body Armor bulletproof vest, which she wore while traveling to and from the clinic despite the discomfort involved. Its twin hung on a steel rail in her consulting room. She drove a red Porsche Boxster, her only true indulgence. She collected speeding tickets the way other people collected stamps.

Alison was a conservative dresser. She typically wore a jacket, unbuttoned, which hung to midthigh level. Beneath the jacket she wore pants with either a brown or a black belt, depending on the color of her ensemble. Attached to the belt was an Alessi holster containing a Kahr K40 Covert pistol. The Kahr held a five-round magazine of.40 caliber ammunition. Beck had tried using six rounds for a time, but found that the extended magazine sometimes caught in the folds of her shirt. The Kahr had an abbreviated grip that suited her small hands, for Alison Beck was just a shade over five feet tall and slightly built. On a range, with the Kahr's smooth double-action trigger pull, she could put the five rounds through the heart of a target thirty feet away in under eight seconds.

Her shoulder bag contained a can of Mace and a stun gun that could send a 20,000-volt charge through a man and leave him gasping and quivering on the ground like a stranded fish. While she had never fired her gun in anger, she had been forced to use the Mace on one occasion when an antiabortion protester had tried to force his way into her home. Later she recalled, with a twinge of shame, that Macing him had felt good. She had chosen her life-that she simply could not deny-but the fear and the anger at the restrictions it had imposed upon her and the hatred and animosity of those who despised her for what she did had affected her in ways she did not like to admit. That November evening, with the Mace in her hand and the short, bearded man howling and crying in her hallway, all of that tension and anger had exploded from her through the simple action of pressing a plastic button.

Alison Beck was a familiar figure, a public figure. Although based on a leafy street in Minneapolis, she traveled twice each month to South Dakota, where she conducted a clinic at Sioux Falls. She appeared regularly on local and national television, campaigning against what she perceived as the gradual erosion of women's right to choose. Clinics were closing, she had pointed out on the local NBC affiliate only the previous week, and now 83 percent of U.S. counties had no abortion services. Three dozen congressmen, a dozen senators, and four governors were openly anti-choice. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church was now the largest private health care provider in America, and access to abortion services, sterilization, birth control, and in vitro fertilization was becoming increasingly limited.

Yet faced with a pleasant, soft-spoken young woman from Right to Life of Minnesota, who concentrated on the health issues for women and the changing attitudes of a younger generation that could not remember the days before Roe v. Wade, Alison Beck had begun to feel that it was she, the campaigning doctor, who now sounded strident and intolerant, and that perhaps the tide was turning more than she realized. She admitted as much to friends in the days before she died.

But something else had given her cause to feel afraid. She had seen him again, the strange red-haired man, and she knew that he was closing in on her, that he intended to move against her and the others before they could complete their work.

But they can't know, Mercier had tried to reassure her. We've made no move against them yet.

I tell you, they know. I have seen him. And…

Yes?

I found something in my car this morning.

What? What did you find? A skin.

I found a spider skin. Spiders grow by shedding their old exoskeleton and replacing it with a larger, less constraining hide, a process known as ecdysis. The discarded skin, or exuvium, that Alison Beck had found on the passenger seat of her car belonged to a Sri Lankan ornamental tarantula, Poecilotheria fasciata, a beautifully colored but temperamental arachnid. The species had been specifically selected for its capacity to alarm: its body was about two and a half inches in length, marked with grays, blacks, and creams, and its legspan was almost four inches. Alison had been terrified, and that terror had only slightly abated when she realized that the shape beside her was not a living, breathing spider.

Mercier had gone silent then, before advising her to go away for a time, promising that he would warn their associates to be vigilant.

And so Alison Beck had, in that final week, decided to take her first vacation in almost two years. She intended to drive to Montana, stopping off along the way for the first week, before visiting an old college friend in Bozeman. From there they planned to travel north together to Glacier National Park if the roads were passable, for it was only April and the snows might not yet have completely melted.

When Alison did not arrive on that Sunday evening as she had promised, her friend was mildly concerned. When, by late Monday afternoon, there was still no word from her, she phoned the headquarters of the Minneapolis PD. Two patrol officers, Ames and Frayn, familiar with Alison from previous incidents, were assigned to check on her home at 604 West Twenty-sixth Street.

Nobody answered the doorbell when they rang, and the garage entrance was firmly locked. Ames cupped his hands and peered through the glass into the hallway. In the open doorway leading into the kitchen were two suitcases, and a kitchen chair lay on the floor with its legs toward the wall. Seconds later, Ames had slipped on his gloves, broken a side window, and, his gun drawn, entered the house. Frayn made his approach from the rear and came in through the back door. The house was a small two-story, and it didn't take the policemen long to confirm that it was empty. From the kitchen, a connecting door led into the garage. Through the frosted glass, the lines of Alison Beck's Boxster were clearly visible.

Ames took a breath and opened the door.

The garage was dark. He removed his flashlight from his belt and twisted it on. For a moment, as its beam hit the car, he wasn't sure what he was seeing. He believed initially that the windshield was cracked, for thin lines spread in all directions across it, radiating from irregular clumps dotted like bullet holes across the glass and making it impossible to see the interior of the car. Then, as he drew nearer the driver's door, he thought instead that the car had somehow filled with cotton candy, for the windows appeared to be coated on the inside with soft white strands. It was only when he shined the light close to the windshield and something small and brown darted across the pane that he recognized it for what it was.

It was spiderweb, its filaments gilded with silver by the flashlight's beam. Beneath the weave, a dark shape sat upright in the driver's seat.

“Dr. Beck?” he called. He placed his gloved hand on the door handle and pulled.

There came the sound of sticky strands breaking, and the silken web flailed at the air as the door opened. Something dropped at Ames's feet with a soft, barely audible thud. When he looked down, he saw a small brown spider making its way across the concrete floor toward his right foot. It was a recluse, about half an inch in length, with a dark groove running down the center of its back. Instinctively, Ames raised his steel-capped shoe and stamped down on it. For a brief moment he wondered if his action constituted a destruction of evidence, until he looked into the interior of the car and realized that, for all its effect, he might just as easily have stolen a grain of sand from the seashore or pilfered a single drop of water from the ocean.

Alison Beck had been stripped to her underwear and tied to the driver's seat. Gray masking tape had been wrapped around her head, covering her mouth and anchoring her to the seat. Her face was swollen almost beyond recognition, her body mottled with decay, and there was a square of exposed red flesh just below her neck where a section of skin had been removed.

Yet the disintegration of her body was masked by the fragments of web that covered her in a tattered white veil, her face almost concealed beneath the dense pockets of thread. All around her, small brown spiders moved on arched legs, their palps twitching as they sensed the change in the air; others remained huddled in dark recesses, orange egg sacs dangling beside them like bunches of poisonous fruit. The husks of drained insects speckled the snares, interspersed with the bodies of spiders that had been preyed upon by their own kind. Fruit flies flitted around the seats, and Ames could see decaying oranges and pears on the floor by Alison Beck's feet. Elsewhere invisible crickets chirped, part of the small ecosystem that had been created inside the doctor's car, but most of the activity came from the compact brown spiders that busied themselves around Alison Beck's face, dancing lightly across her cheeks and her eyelids, continuing the construction of the irregular webs that coated the inside of the car with thread.

But there was one last surprise for those who found Alison Beck. When the masking tape was removed from her face and her mouth was opened during the autopsy, small black-and-red balls tumbled from her lips and lay like misshapen marbles on the steel table. There were more lodged in her thorax and trapped beneath her tongue. Some had caught in her teeth, crushed as her mouth convulsed when the biting began.

Only one was still alive: it was discovered in her nasal cavity, its long, black legs curled in upon itself. When the tweezers gripped the spherical abdomen it struggled feebly against the pressure, the red hourglass on its underside like the relic of a life suddenly stopped.

And in the harsh light of the autopsy room, the eyes of the black widow gleamed like small, dark stars.

This is a honeycomb world. History is its gravity.

In the far north of Maine, figures move along a road, silhouetted against the early-morning sun. Behind them are a bulldozer and a cherry picker and two small trucks, the little convoy making its way along a county road toward the sound of lapping water. There is laughter and swearing in the air, and plumes of cigarette smoke rising to join with the morning fog. There is room for these men and women in the bed of the truck but they choose instead to walk, enjoying the feel of the ground beneath their feet, the clean air in their lungs, the camaraderie of those who will soon perform hard physical labor together but are grateful for the sun that will shine gently upon them, the breeze that will cool them in their work, and the friendship of those who walk by their side.

There are two groups of workers here. The first are line clearers, jointly employed by the Maine Public Service Company and the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company to cut back the trees and brush alongside the road. This is work that should have been completed in the autumn when the ground was dry and clear, not at the end of April, when frozen, compacted snow still lay on the high ground and the first buds had already begun to sprout from the branches. But the line clearers have long since ceased to wonder at the ways of their employers and are content simply that there is no rain falling upon them as they traipse along the blacktop.

The second group consists of workmen employed by one Jean Beaulieu to clear vegetation from the banks of St. Froid Lake in preparation for the construction of a house. It is simply coincidence that both groups have taken to the same stretch of road on this bright morning, but they mingle as they go, exchanging comments about the weather and lighting one another's cigarettes.

Just outside the little town of Eagle Lake, the workers turn west onto Red River Road, the Fish River flowing at their left, the red brick edifice of the Eagle Lake Water and Sewage District building to their right. A small wire fence ends where the river joins St. Froid Lake, and houses begin to appear along the bank. Through the branches of the trees, the glittering surface of the water can be glimpsed.

Soon the noise of their passing is joined by another sound. On the ground above them, shapes appear from wooden kennels: gray animals with thick fur and keen, intelligent eyes. They are wolf hybrids, each chained to an iron ring outside its kennel, and they bark and howl as the men and women walk below them, their chains jangling as they strain to reach the intruders. The breeding of such hybrids is relatively common in this part of the state, a regional peculiarity surprising to strangers. Some of the workers stop and watch, one or two taunting the beasts from the safety of the road, but the wiser ones move on. They know that it is better to let these animals be.

The work commences, accompanied by a chorus of engines and shouts, of picks and shovels breaking the ground, of chain saws tearing at branches and tree trunks; and the smells of diesel fumes and sweat and fresh earth mingle in the air. The sounds drown out the rhythms of the natural world: the wood frogs clearing their throats, the calls of hermit thrushes and winter wrens, the crying of a single loon out on the water.

The day grows short, the sun moving west across the lake. On Jean Beaulieu's land a man removes his yellow hard hat, wipes his brow on his sleeve, and lights a cigarette before making his way back to the bulldozer. He climbs into the cab and slowly starts to reverse, the harsh buzz of the engine adding its guttural notes to the sounds of men and nature. The howling from above begins again, and he shakes his head wearily at the man in the cherry picker nearby.

This ground has lain undisturbed for many years. The grass is wild and long, and the bushes cling tenaciously to the hard earth. There is no reason for the man in the cab to doubt that the bank upon which he stands is solid, until an alien clamor intrudes on the rustling of the evergreens and the sawing of the clearers. The bulldozer makes a high, growling din, like an animal in panic, as huge quantities of earth shift. The howling of the hybrids increases in intensity, some turning in circles or wrenching again at their chains as they register the new sounds.

The roots of a white spruce are exposed as a section of the riverbank collapses, and the tree topples slowly into the water, sending ripples across the still surface of the lake. Beside it, the bulldozer seems to hang suspended for a moment, one track still clinging to the ground, the other hanging over empty space, before it tumbles sideways, its operator leaping to safety, falling away from the vehicle as it turns and lands with a loud splash in the shallows. Men drop their tools and start running. They scramble to the new verge, where brown water has already rushed in to exploit the sudden expansion of the banks. Their colleague raises himself, shivering and soaked, from the lake, then grins embarrassedly and raises a hand to let them know that he is okay. The men crowd the bank, looking at the stranded bulldozer. One or two cheer desultorily. To their left, another huge slab of earth crumbles and falls into the water, but they hardly notice, their efforts are so focused on helping their comrade out of the cold water.

But the man in the cherry picker is not looking at the bulldozer, or at the arms reaching out to pull the drenched figure from the water. He stands unmoving, the chain saw in his hands, and looks down on the newly exposed bank. His name is Lyall Dobbs. He has a wife and two children and, at this moment, he desperately wishes that he were with them. He desperately wishes he were anywhere but staring down at the banks of St. Froid, at the darkened bones revealed among the tree roots and broken earth, and the small skull slowly disappearing beneath the cold waters of the lake.

“Billy?” he shouts.

Billy Laughton, the foreman of the clearing crew, turns away from the crowd of men by the shore, shaking his head and swearing softly.

“Yeah?”

There is no further word for a moment. Lyall Dobbs's throat is suddenly too dry to produce sound. He swallows, then resumes.

“Billy, we got a cemetery around here?”

Laughton's brow furrows. From his pocket he takes a folded map and examines it briefly. He shakes his head at the other man.

“No,” he replies simply.

Dobbs looks at him, and his face is pale.

“Well, we do now.”

This is a honeycomb world.

You must be careful where you step.

And you must be ready for what you might find.

1

IT WAS SPRING, and color had returned to the world.

The distant mountains were transforming, the gray trees now cloaking themselves in new life, their leaves a faded echo of fall's riot. The scarlets of the red maples were dominant, but they were being joined now by the greenish yellow leaves of the red oaks; the silver of the bigtooth aspens; and the greens of the quaking aspens, the birches, and the beeches. Poplars and willows, elms and hazelnuts were all bursting into full bloom, and the woods were ringing with the noise of returning birds.

I could see the woods from the gym at One City Center, the tips of the evergreens still dominating the landscape amid the slowly transforming seasonals. Rain was falling on the streets of Portland and umbrellas swarmed on the streets below, glistening darkly like the carapaces of squat black beetles.

For the first time in many months, I felt good. I was in semi-regular employment. I was eating well, working out three or four days each week, and Rachel Wolfe was coming up from Boston for the weekend, so I would have someone to admire my improving physique. I hadn't suffered bad dreams for some time. My dead wife and my lost daughter had not appeared to me since the previous Christmas, when they touched me amid the falling snow and gave me some respite from the visions that had haunted me for so long.

I completed a set of military presses and laid the bar down, sweat dripping from my nose and rising in little wisps of steam from my body. Seated on a bench, sipping some water, I watched the two men enter from the reception area, glance around, then fix on me. They wore conservative dark suits with somber ties. One was large, with brown wavy hair and a thick mustache, like a porn star gone to seed, the bulge of the gun in the cheap rig beneath his jacket visible to me in the mirror behind him. The other was smaller, a tidy, dapper man with receding, prematurely graying hair. The big man held a pair of shades in his hand while his companion wore a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses with square frames. He smiled as he approached me.

“Mr. Parker?” he asked, his hands clasped behind his back.

I nodded and the hands disengaged, the right extending toward me in a sharp motion like a shark making its way through familiar waters.

“My name is Quentin Harrold, Mr. Parker,” he said. “I work for Mr. Jack Mercier.”

I wiped my own right hand on a towel to remove some of the sweat, then accepted the handshake. Harrold's mouth quivered a little as my still sweaty palm gripped his, but he resisted the temptation to wipe his hand clean on the side of his trousers. I guessed that he didn't want to spoil the crease.

Jack Mercier came from money so old that some of it had jangled on the Mayflower. He was a former U.S. senator, as his father and grandfather had been before him, and lived in a big house out on Prouts Neck overlooking the sea. He had interests in timber companies, newspaper publishing, cable television, software, and the Internet. In fact, he had interests in just about anything that might ensure the Merciers' old money was regularly replenished with injections of new money. As a senator he had been something of a liberal and he still supported various ecological and civil rights groups through generous donations. He was a family man; he didn't screw around-as far as anyone knew-and he had emerged from his brief flirtation with politics with his reputation enhanced rather than tarnished, a product as much of his financial independence as of any moral probity. There were rumors that he was planning a return to politics, possibly as an independent candidate for governor, although Mercier himself had yet to confirm them.

Quentin Harrold coughed into his palm, then used it as an excuse to take a handkerchief from his pocket and discreetly wipe his hand. “Mr. Mercier would like to see you,” he said, in the tone of voice he probably reserved for the pool cleaner and the chauffeur. “He has some work for you.”

I looked at him. He smiled. I smiled back. We stayed like that, grinning at each other, until the only options were to speak or start dating. Harrold took the first option.

“Perhaps you didn't hear me, Mr. Parker,” he said. “Mr. Mercier has some work for you.”

“And?”

Harrold's smile wavered. “I'm not sure what you mean.”

“I'm not so desperate for work, Mr. Harrold, that I run and fetch every time somebody throws a stick.” This wasn't entirely true. Portland, Maine, wasn't such a wellspring of vice and corruption that I could afford to look down my nose at too many jobs. If Harrold had been better looking and a different sex, I'd have fetched the stick and then rolled onto my back to have my belly rubbed if I thought it might have earned me more than a couple of bucks.

Harrold glanced at the big guy with the mustache. The big guy shrugged, then went back to staring at me impassively, maybe trying to figure out what my head would look like mounted over his fireplace.

Harrold coughed again. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I didn't mean to offend you.” He seemed to have trouble forming the words, as if they were part of someone else's vocabulary and he was just borrowing them for a time. I waited for his nose to start growing or his tongue to turn to ash and fall to the floor, but nothing happened. “We'd be grateful if you'd spare the time to talk to Mr. Mercier,” he conceded with a wince.

I figured that I'd played hard to get for long enough, although I still wasn't sure that they'd respect me in the morning. “When I've finished up here, I can probably drive out and see him,” I said.

Harrold craned his neck slightly, indicating that he believed he might have misheard me. “Mr. Mercier was hoping that you could come with us now, Mr. Parker. Mr. Mercier is a very busy man, as I'm sure you'll understand.”

I stood up, stretched, and prepared to do another set of presses. “Oh, I understand, Mr. Harrold. I'll be as quick as I can. Why don't you gentlemen wait downstairs, and I'll join you when I'm done? You're making me nervous. I might drop a weight on you.”

Harrold shifted on his feet for a moment, then nodded.

“We'll be in the lobby,” he said.

“Enjoy,” I replied, then watched them in the mirror as they walked away.

I took my time finishing my workout, then had a long shower and talked about the future of the Pirates with the guy who was cleaning out the changing room. When I figured that Harrold and the porn star had spent enough time looking at their watches, I took the elevator down to the lobby and waited for them to join me. The expression on Harrold's face, I noticed, was oscillating between annoyance and relief.

Harrold insisted that I accompany him and his companion in their Mercedes, but despite their protests I opted to follow them in my own Mustang. It struck me that I was becoming more willfully perverse as I settled into my midthirties. If Harrold had told me to take my own car, I'd probably have chained myself to the steering column of the Mercedes until they agreed to give me a ride.

The Mustang was a 1969 Boss 302, and replaced the Mach 1 that had been shot to pieces the previous year. The 302 had been sourced for me by Willie Brew, who ran an auto shop down in Queens. The spoilers and wings were kind of over the top, but it made my eyes water when it accelerated and Willie had sold it to me for $8,000, which was about $3,000 less than a car in its condition was worth. The downside was that I might as well have had ARRESTED ADOLESCENCE painted on the side in big black letters.

I followed the Mercedes south out of Portland and on to U.S. 1. At Oak Hill, we turned east and I stayed behind them at a steady thirty all the way to the tip of the Neck. At the Black Point Inn, guests sat at the picture windows, staring out with drinks in their hands at Grand Beach and Pine Point. A Scarborough PD cruiser inched along the road, making sure that everybody stayed under thirty and nobody unwanted hung around long enough to spoil the view.

Jack Mercier had his home on Winslow Homer Road, within sight of the painter's former house. As we approached, an electronically operated barrier opened and a second Mercedes swept toward us from the house, headed for Black Point Road. In the backseat sat a small man with a dark beard and a skullcap on his head. We exchanged a look as the two cars passed each other, and he nodded at me. His face was familiar, I thought, but I couldn't place it. Then the road was clear and we continued on our way.

Mercier's home was a huge white place with landscaped gardens and so many rooms that a search party would have to be organized if anybody got lost on the way to the bathroom. The man with the mustache parked the Mercedes while I followed Harrold through the large double front doors, down the hallway, and into a room to the left of the main stairs. It was a library, furnished with antique couches and chairs. Books stretched to the ceiling on three walls; on the east-facing wall, a window looked out on the grounds and the sea beyond, a desk and chair beside it and a small bar to the right.

Harrold closed the door behind me and left me to examine the spines on the books and the photographs on the wall. The books ranged from political biographies to historical works, mainly examinations of the Civil War, Korea, and Vietnam. There was no fiction. In one corner was a small locked cabinet with a glass front. The books it contained were different from those on the open shelves. They had titles like Myth and History in the Book of Revelation; Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry; The Book of Revelation: Apocalypse and Empire; and The Apocalyptic Sublime. It was cheerful stuff: bedtime reading for the end of the world. There were also critical biographies of the artists William Blake, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Jean Duvet, in addition to facsimile editions of what appeared to be medieval texts. Finally, on the top shelf were twelve almost identical slim volumes, each bound in black leather with six gold bands inset on the spine in three equidistant sets of two. At the base of each spine was the last letter of the Greek alphabet: Ω, for omega. There was no key in the lock, and the doors stayed closed when I gave them an experimental tug.

I turned my attention to the photographs on the walls. There were pictures of Jack Mercier with various Kennedys, Clintons, and even a superannuated Jimmy Carter. Others showed Mercier in an assortment of athletic poses from his youth: winning races, pretending to toss footballs, and being carried aloft on the shoulders of his adoring teammates. There were also testimonials from grateful universities, framed awards from charitable organizations headed by movie stars, and even some medals presented by poor but proud nations. It was like an underachiever's worst nightmare.

One more recent photograph caught my eye. It showed Mercier sitting at a table, flanked on one side by a woman in her sixties wearing a smartly tailored black jacket and a string of pearls around her neck. To Mercier's right was the bearded man who had passed me in the Mercedes, and beside him was a figure I recognized from his appearances on prime-time news shows, usually looking triumphant at the top of some courthouse steps: Warren Ober, of Ober, Thayer amp; Moss, one of New England's top law firms. Ober was Mercier's attorney, and even the mention of his name was enough to send most opposition running for the hills. When Ober, Thayer amp; Moss took a case, they brought so many lawyers with them to court that there was barely enough room for the jury. Even judges got nervous around them.

Looking at the photograph, it struck me that nobody in it seemed particularly happy. There was an air of tension about the poses, a sense that some darker business was being conducted and the photographer was an unnecessary distraction. There were thick files on the table before them, and white coffee cups lay discarded like yesterday's roses.

Behind me the door opened and Jack Mercier entered, laying aside on the table a sheaf of papers speckled with bar charts and figures. He was tall, six-two or six-three, with shoulders that spoke of his athletic past and an expensive gold Rolex that indicated his present status as a very wealthy man. His hair was white and thick, swept back from a perma-tanned forehead over large blue eyes, a Roman nose, and a thin, smiling mouth, the teeth white and even. I guessed that he was sixty-five by now, maybe a little older. He wore a blue polo shirt, tan chinos, and brown Sebagos. There was white hair on his arms, and tufts of it peeked out over the collar of his shirt. For a moment the smile on his face faltered as he saw my attention focused on the photograph, but it quickly brightened again as I moved away from it. Meanwhile, Harrold stood at the door like a nervous matchmaker.

“Mr. Parker,” said Mercier, shaking my hand with enough force to dislodge my fillings. “I appreciate you taking the time to see me.” He waved me to a chair. From the hallway, an olive-skinned man in a white tunic appeared with a silver tray and set it down. Two china cups, a silver coffeepot, and a matching silver creamer and sugar bowl jangled softly as the tray hit the table. The tray looked heavy, and the servant seemed kind of relieved to be rid of it.

“Thank you,” said Mercier. We watched as he left, Harrold behind him. Harrold gently closed the door, giving me one last pained look before he departed, then Mercier and I were alone.

“I know a lot about you, Mr. Parker,” he began as he poured the coffee and offered me cream and sugar. He had an easy, unaffected manner, designed to put even the most fleeting of acquaintances at ease. It was so unaffected that he must have spent years perfecting it.

“Likewise,” I replied.

He frowned good-naturedly. “I don't imagine you're old enough to have ever voted for me.”

“No, you retired before it became an issue.”

“Did your grandfather vote for me?”

My grandfather, Bob Warren, had been a Cumberland County sheriff's deputy and had lived in Scarborough all his life. My mother and I had come to stay with him after my father died. In the end, he outlived his own wife and daughter, and I had buried him one autumn day after his great heart failed him at last.

“I don't believe he ever voted for anyone, Mr. Mercier,” I said. “My grandfather had a natural distrust of politicians.” The only politician for whom my grandfather ever had any regard was President Zachary Taylor, who never voted in an election and didn't even vote for himself.

Jack Mercier grinned his big white grin again. “He might have been right. Most of them have sold their souls ten times over before they're even elected. Once it's sold, you can never buy it back. You just have to hope that you got the best price for it.”

“And are you in the business of buying souls, Mr. Mercier, or selling them?”

The grin stayed fixed, but the eyes narrowed. “I take care of my own soul, Mr. Parker, and let other people do as they wish with theirs.”

Our special moment was broken by the entrance of a woman into the room. She wore a deceptively casual outfit of black pants and a black cashmere sweater, and a thin gold necklace gleamed dully against the dark wool. She was about forty-five, give or take a year. Her hair was blond, fading to gray in places, and there was a hardness to her features that made her seem less beautiful than she probably thought she was.

This was Mercier's wife, Deborah, who had some kind of permanent residency in the local society pages. She was a Southern belle, from what I could recall, a graduate of the Madeira School for Girls in Virginia. The Madeira's principal claim to fame, apart from producing eligible young women who always used the correct knife and never spat on the sidewalk, was that its former headmistress, Jean Harris, had shot dead her lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower, in 1980, after he left her for a younger woman. Dr. Tarnower was best known as the author of The Scarsdale Diet, so his death seemed to provide conclusive evidence that diets could be bad for your health. Jack Mercier had met his future wife at the Swan Ball in Nashville, the most lavish social occasion in the South, and had introduced himself to her by buying her a '55 Coupe de Ville with his AmEx card at the postdinner auction. It was, as someone later commented, love at first swipe.

Mrs. Mercier held a magazine in her hand and assumed a look of surprise, but the expression didn't reach her eyes.

“I'm sorry, Jack. I didn't know you had company.” She was lying, and I could see in Mercier's face that he knew she was lying, that we both knew. He tried to hide his annoyance behind the trademark smile but I could hear his teeth gritting. He rose, and I rose with him.

“Mr. Parker, this is my wife Deborah.”

Mrs. Mercier took one step toward me, then waited for me to cross the rest of the floor before extending her hand. It hung limply in my palm as I gripped it, and her eyes bored holes in my face while her teeth gnawed at my skull. Her hostility was so blatant it was almost funny.

“I'm pleased to meet you,” she lied, before turning her glare on her husband. “I'll talk to you later, Jack,” she said, and made it sound like a threat. She didn't look back as she closed the door.

The temperature in the room immediately rose a few degrees, and Mercier regained his composure. “My apologies, Mr. Parker. Tensions in the house are a little high. My daughter Samantha is to be married early next month.”

“Really. Who's the lucky man?” It seemed polite to ask.

“Robert Ober. He's the son of my attorney.”

“At least your wife will get to buy a new hat.”

“She's buying a great deal more than a hat, Mr. Parker, and she is currently occupied by the arrangements for our guests. Warren and I may have to take to my yacht to escape the demands of our respective wives, although they are such excellent sailors themselves that I imagine they will insist upon keeping us company. Do you sail, Mr. Parker?”

“With difficulty. I don't have a yacht.”

“Everybody should have a yacht,” remarked Mercier, his good humor returning in earnest.

“Why, you're practically a socialist, Mr. Mercier.”

He laughed softly, then put his coffee cup down and arranged his features into a sincere expression. “I hope you'll forgive me for prying into your background, but I wanted to find out about you before I requested your help,” he continued.

I acknowledged his comments with a nod. “In your position, I'd probably do the same,” I said.

He leaned forward and said gently: “I'm sorry about your family. It was a terrible thing that happened to them, and to you.”

My wife, Susan, and my daughter, Jennifer, had been taken from me by a killer known as the Traveling Man while I was still a policeman in New York. He had killed a lot of other people too, until he was stopped. When I killed him, a part of me had died with him.

Over two years had passed since then, and for much of that time the deaths of Susan and Jennifer had defined me. I had allowed that to be so until I realized that pain and hurt, guilt and regret, were tearing me apart. Now, slowly, I was getting my life back together in Maine, back in the place where I had spent my teens and part of my twenties, back in the house I had shared with my mother and my grandfather, and in which I now lived alone. I had a woman who cared for me, who made me feel that it was worth trying to rebuild my life with her beside me and that maybe the time to begin that process had now arrived.

“I can't imagine what such a thing must be like,” continued Mercier. “But I know someone who probably can, which is why I've asked you here today.”

Outside, the rain had stopped and the clouds had parted. Behind Mercier's head, the sun shone brightly through the window, bathing the desk and chair in its glow and replicating the shape of the glasswork on the carpet below. I watched as a bug crawled across the patch of bright light, its tiny feelers testing the air as it went.

“His name is Curtis Peltier, Mr. Parker,” said Mercier. “He used to be my business partner, a long time ago, until he asked me to buy him out and followed his own path. Things didn't work out so well for him; he made some bad investments, I'm afraid. Ten days ago his daughter was found dead in her car. Her name was Grace Peltier. You may have read about her. In fact, I understand you may have known her once upon a time.”

I nodded. Yes, I thought, I knew Grace once upon a time, when we were both much younger and thought that we might, for an instant, even be in love. It was a fleeting thing, lasting no more than a couple of months after my high school graduation, one of any number of similar summer romances that curled up and died like a leaf as soon as autumn came. Grace was pretty and dark, with very blue eyes, a tiny mouth, and skin the color of honey. She was strong-a medal-winning swimmer-and formidably intelligent, which meant that despite her looks, a great many young men shied away from her. I wasn't as smart as Grace but I was smart enough to appreciate something beautiful when it appeared before me. At least I thought I was. In the end, I didn't appreciate it, or her, at all.

I remembered Grace mostly because of one morning spent at Higgins Beach, not far from where I now sat with Jack Mercier. We stood beneath the shadow of the old guest house known as the Breakers, the wind tossing Grace's hair and the sea crashing before us. She had missed her period, she told me over the phone: five days late, and she was never late. As I drove down to Higgins Beach to meet her, my stomach felt like it was slowly being crushed in a vise. When a fleet of trucks passed by at the Oak Hill intersection, I briefly considered flooring the accelerator and ending it all. I knew then that whatever I felt for Grace Peltier, it wasn't love. She must have seen it in my face that morning as we sat in silence listening to the sound of the sea. When her period arrived two days later, after an agonizing wait for both of us, she told me that she didn't think we should see each other anymore, and I was happy to let her go. It wasn't one of my finer moments, I thought, not by a long shot. Since then, we hadn't stayed in touch. I had seen her once or twice, nodding to her in bars or restaurants, but we had never really spoken. Each time I saw her I was reminded of that meeting at Higgins Beach and of my own callow youth.

I tried to recall what I had heard about her death. Grace, now a graduate student at Northeastern in Boston, had died from a single gunshot wound in a side road off U.S. 1, up by Ellsworth. Her body had been discovered slumped in the driver's seat of her car, the gun still in her hand. Suicide: the ultimate form of self-defense. She had been Curtis Peltier's only child. The story had merited more coverage than usual only because of Peltier's former connections to Jack Mercier. I hadn't attended the funeral.

“According to the newspaper reports, the police aren't looking for anyone in connection with her death, Mr. Mercier,” I said. “They seem to think Grace committed suicide.”

He shook his head. “Curtis doesn't believe that Grace's wound was self-inflicted.”

“It's a common enough reaction,” I replied. “Nobody wants to accept that someone close might have taken his or her own life. Too much blame accrues to those left behind for it to be accommodated so easily.”

Mercier stood, and his large frame blocked out the sunlight. I couldn't see the bug anymore. I wondered how it had reacted when the light disappeared. I guessed that it had probably taken it in stride, which is one of the burdens of being a bug: you pretty much have to take everything in stride, until something bigger stamps on you or eats you and the matter becomes immaterial.

“Grace was a strong, smart girl with her whole life ahead of her. She didn't own a gun of any kind and the police don't seem to have any idea where she might have acquired the one found in her hand.”

“Assuming that she killed herself,” I added.

“Assuming that, yes.”

“Which you, in common with Mr. Peltier, don't.”

He sighed. “I agree with Curtis. Despite the views of the police, I think somebody killed Grace. I'd like you to look into this matter on his behalf.”

“Did Curtis Peltier approach you about this, Mr. Mercier?” Jack Mercier's gaze shifted. When he looked at me again, something had cloaked itself in the darkness of his pupils.

“He came to visit me a few days ago. We discussed it, and he told me what he believed. He doesn't have enough money to pay for a private investigator, Mr. Parker, but thankfully, I do. I don't think Curtis will have any difficulty in talking this over with you, or allowing you to look into it further. I will be paying your bill, but officially you will be working for Curtis. I would ask you to keep my name out of this affair.”

I finished my coffee and laid the cup down on the saucer. I didn't speak until I had marshaled my thoughts a little.

“Mr. Mercier, I didn't mind coming out here but I don't do that kind of work anymore.”

Mercier's brow furrowed. “But you are a private investigator?” “Yes, sir, I am, but I've made a decision to deal only with certain matters: white-collar crime, corporate intelligence. I don't take on cases involving death or violence.”

“Do you carry a gun?”

“No. Loud noises scare me.”

“But you used to carry a gun?”

“That's right, I used to. Now, if I want to disarm a white-collar criminal, I just take away his pen.”

“As I told you, Mr. Parker, I know a great deal about you. Investigating fraud and petty theft doesn't appear to be your style. In the past you have involved yourself in more… colorful matters.”

“Those kinds of investigations cost me too much.”

“I'll cover any costs you may incur, and more than adequately.”

“I don't mean financial cost, Mr. Mercier.”

He nodded to himself, as if he suddenly understood. “You're talking moral, physical cost, maybe? I understand you were injured in the course of some of your work.”

I didn't reply. I'd been hurt, and in response I had acted violently, destroying a little of myself each time I did so, but that wasn't the worst of it. It seemed to me that as soon as I became involved in such matters, they caused a fissure in my world. I saw things: lost things, dead things. It was as if my intervention drew them to me, those who had been wrenched painfully, violently from this life. Once I thought it was a product of my own incipient guilt, or an empathy I felt that passed beyond feeling and into hallucination.

But now I believed that they really did know, and they really did come.

Jack Mercier leaned against his desk, opened his drawer, and drew a black, leather-bound folder from within. He wrote for a few seconds, then tore the check from the folder.

“This is a check for ten thousand dollars, Mr. Parker. All I want you to do is talk to Curtis. If you think that there's nothing you can do for him, then the money is yours to keep and there'll be no hard feelings between us. If you do agree to look into this matter, we can negotiate further remuneration.”

I shook my head. “Once again, it's not the money, Mr. Mercier-” I began.

He raised a hand to stop me. “I know that. I didn't mean to offend you.”

“No offense taken.”

“I have friends in the police force, in Scarborough and Portland and farther afield. Those friends tell me that you are a very fine investigator, with very particular talents. I want you to utilize those talents to find out what really happened to Grace, for my sake and for that of Curtis.”

I noticed that he had placed himself above Grace's father in his appeal and once again I was conscious of a disparity between what he was telling me and what he knew. I thought too of his wife's unveiled hostility, my sense that she had known exactly who I was and why I was in her house, and that she bitterly resented my presence there. Mercier proffered the check and in his eyes I saw something that I couldn't quite identify: grief maybe, or even guilt.

“Please, Mr. Parker,” he said. “Talk to him. I mean, what harm can it do?”

What harm can it do? Those words would come back to haunt me again and again in the days that followed. They came back to haunt Jack Mercier as well. I wonder if he thought of them in his final moments, as the shadows drew around him and those he loved were drowned in redness.

Despite my misgivings I took the check. And in that instant, unbeknownst to us both, a circuit was completed, sending a charge through the world around and beneath us. Far away, something broke from its hiding place beneath the dead layers of the honeycomb. It tested the air, probing for the disturbance that had roused it, until it found the source.

Then, with a lurch, it began to move.

THE SEARCH FOR SANCTUARY: RELIGIOUS FERVOR IN THE STATE OF MAINE AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE AROOSTOOK BAPTISTS

Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier, submitted posthumously in accordance with the requirements of the Masters Sociology Program, Northeastern University

To understand the reasons for the formation and subsequent disintegration of the religious group known as the Aroostook Baptists, it is important to first understand the history of the state of Maine. To comprehend why four families of well-intentioned and not unintelligent people should have followed an individual such as the Reverend Faulkner into the wilderness, never to be seen again, one must recognize that for almost three centuries men such as Faulkner have gathered followers to them in this state, often in the face of challenges from larger churches and more orthodox religious movements. It may be said, therefore, that there is something in the character of the state's inhabitants, some streak of individualism dating back to pioneer times, that has led them to be attracted to preachers like the Reverend Faulkner.

For much of its history, Maine was a frontier state. In fact, from the time when the first Jesuit missionaries arrived in the seventeenth century to the midpart of the twentieth century, religious groups regarded Maine as mission territory. It provided fertile, if not always profitable, ground for itinerant preachers, unorthodox religious movements, and even charlatans for the best part of three hundred years. The rural economy did not allow for the maintenance of permanent churches and clergymen, and religious observance was oftentimes a low priority for families who were undernourished, insufficiently clothed, and lacking proper shelter.

In 1790, General Benjamin Lincoln observed that few of those in Maine had been properly baptized, and there were some who had never taken Communion. The Reverend John Murray of Boothbay wrote, in 1763, of the inhabitants' “inveterate habits of vice and no remorse” and thanked God that he had found “one prayerful family, and a humble professor at the head of it.” It is interesting to note that the Reverend Faulkner was given to quoting this passage of Murray's in the course of his own sermons to his congregations.

Itinerant preachers ministered to those who lacked their own churches. Some were outstanding, frequently having trained at York or Harvard. Others were less praiseworthy. The Reverend Mr. Jotham Sewall of Chesterville, Maine, is reported to have preached 12,593 sermons in 413 settlements, mostly in Maine, between 1783 and 1849. By contrast, the Reverend Martin Schaeffer of Broad Bay, a Lutheran, comprehensively cheated his flock before eventually being run out of town.

Orthodox preachers found it difficult to achieve a foothold in the state, Calvinists being particularly unwelcome as much for their unyielding doctrines as for their associations with the forces of government. Baptists and Methodists, with their concepts of egalitarianism and equality, found more willing converts. In the thirty years between 1790 and 1820, the number of Baptist churches in the state rose from seventeen to sixty. They were joined, in time, by Free Will Baptists, Free Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Unitarians, Universalists, Shakers, Millerites, Spiritualists, Sandfordites, Holy Rollers, Higginsites, Free Thinkers, and Black Stockings.

Yet the tradition of Schaeffer and other charlatans still remained: in 1816, the “delusion” of Cochranism grew up around the charismatic Cochrane in the west of the state, ending with charges of gross lewdness being leveled at its founder. In the 1860s, the Reverend Mr. George L. Adams persuaded his followers to sell their homes, stores, even their fishing gear, and to pass the money on to him to help establish a colony in Palestine. Sixteen people died in the first weeks of the Jaffa colony's foundation in 1866. In 1867, amid charges of excessive drinking and misappropriation of funds, Adams and his wife fled the short-lived Jaffa colony, Adams later reemerging in California where he tried to persuade people to invest money in a five-cent savings bank until his secretary exposed his past.

Finally, at the turn of this century, the evangelist Frank Weston Sandford founded the Shiloh community in Durham. Sandford is worthy of particular attention because the Shiloh community clearly provided a model for what the Reverend Faulkner attempted to achieve more than half a century later.

Sandford's cultlike sect raised huge sums of money for building projects and overseas missions, sending sailing vessels filled with missionaries to remote areas of the planet. His followers were persuaded to sell their homes and move to the Shiloh settlement at Durham, only thirty miles from Portland. Scores of them later died there from malnutrition and disease. It is a testament to the magnetism of Sandford, a native of Bowdoinham, Maine, and a graduate of the divinity school at Bates College, Lewiston, that they were willing to follow him and to die for him.

Sandford was only thirty-four when the Shiloh settlement was officially dedicated, on October 2, 1896, a date apparently dictated to Sandford by God himself. Within the space of a few years, and funded largely by donations and the sale of his followers' property, there were over $200,000 worth of buildings on the land. The main building, Shiloh itself, had 520 rooms and was a quarter of a mile in circumference.

But Sandford's increasing megalomania-he claimed that God had proclaimed him the second Elijah-and his insistence on absolute obedience began to cause friction. A harsh winter in 1902-3 caused food supplies to shrink, and the community was swept by smallpox. People began to die. In 1904, Sandford was arrested and charged on five counts of cruelty to children and one charge of manslaughter as a result of that winter's depredations. A guilty verdict was later overturned on appeal.

In 1906, Sandford sailed for the Holy Land, taking-with him a hundred of the faithful in two vessels, the Kingdom and the Coronet. They spent the next five years at sea, sailing to Africa and South America, although their conversion technique was somewhat unorthodox: the two ships cruised the coast while Sandford's followers prayed continuously for God to bring the natives to him. Actual contact with potential converts was virtually nil.

The Kingdom was eventually wrecked off the west coast of Africa, and when Sandford tried to force the crew of the Coronet to sail on to Greenland, they mutinied, forcing him to return to Maine. In 1911, Sandford was sentenced to jail for ten years on charges of manslaughter arising from the deaths of six crewmen. Released in 1918, he set up home in Boston and allowed subordinates to take care of the day-to-day running of Shiloh.

In 1920, after hearing testimony of the terrible conditions being endured by the children of the community, a judge ordered their removal. Shiloh disintegrated, its membership falling from four hundred to one hundred in an incident that became known as the Scattering. Sandford announced his retirement in May 1920 and retreated to a farm in upstate New York, from which he attempted, unsuccessfully, to rebuild the community. He died, aged eighty-five, in 1948. The Shiloh community still exists today, although in a very different form from its original inception, and Sandford is still honored as its founder.

It is known that Faulkner regarded Sandford as a particular inspiration: Sandford had shown that it was possible to build an independent religious community using donations and the sale of the assets of true believers. It is therefore both ironic and strangely apt that Faulkner's attempt at establishing his own religious utopia, close to the small town of Eagle Lake, should have ended in bitterness and acrimony, near starvation and despair, and finally the disappearance of twenty people, among them Faulkner himself.

2

THE NEXT MORNING I sat in my kitchen shortly after sunrise, a pot of coffee and the remains of some dry toast lying beside my PowerBook on the table. I had a report to make to a client that day, so I put Jack Mercier to the back of my mind. Outside, rainwater dripped from the beech tree that grew by my kitchen window, beating an irregular cadence on the damp earth below. There were still one or two dry, brown leaves clinging to the branches of the beech but they were now surrounded by green buds, old life preparing to make way for the new. A nuthatch puffed out its red breast and sang from its nest of twigs. I couldn't see its mate, but I guessed that it was close. There would be eggs laid in the nest before the end of May and soon a whole family would be waking me in the mornings.

By the time the main news commenced on WPXT, the local Fox affiliate, I had finished a pretty satisfactory draft and ejected the disk so that I could print from my desktop. The news led with the latest report on the remains unearthed at St. Froid Lake the day before. Dr. Claire Gray, the state's newly appointed ME, was shown arriving at the scene, wearing fireman's boots and a set of overalls. Her dark hair was long and curly, and her face betrayed no emotion as she walked down to the lakeshore.

Sandbag levees had already been built to hold back the waters, and the bones now rested in a layer of thick mud and rotting vegetation, over which a tarpaulin had been stretched to protect them from the elements. A preliminary examination had been conducted by one of the state's two hundred part-time MEs, who confirmed that the remains were human, and the state police had then E-mailed digital images of the scene to the ME's office in Augusta so that she and her staff would be familiar with the terrain and the task they faced. They had already alerted the forensic anthropologist based at the University of Maine at Orono: she was due to travel up to Eagle Lake later that day.

According to the reporter, the danger of further weakening the bank and the possibility of damaging the remains had ruled out the use of a backhoe to uncover the bodies and it was now likely that the task would have to be completed entirely by hand, using shovels and then small trowels in a painstaking, inch-by-inch dig. As the reporter spoke, the howling of the wolf hybrids was clearly audible from the slopes above her. Maybe it had to do with the sound from the live broadcast, but the howls seemed to have a terrible, keening tone to them, as if the animals somehow understood what had been found on their territory. The howling increased in intensity as a car pulled up at the edge of the secured area and the deputy chief ME, known to one and all as Dr. Bill, climbed out to talk to the trooper. In the back of his car sat his two cadaver dogs: it was their presence that had set off the hybrids.

A mobile crime scene unit from the state police barracks at Houlton stood behind the reporter, and members of CID III, the Criminal Investigation Division of the state police with responsibility for Aroostook, mingled with state troopers and sheriff's deputies in the background. The reporter had obviously been talking to the right people. She was able to confirm that the bodies had been underground for some time, that there were children's bones among them, and there was damage to some of the visible skulls consistent with the kind of low-velocity impact caused by a blunt instrument. The transportation of the first of the bodies to the morgue in Augusta would probably not begin for another day or two; there they would be cleaned with scalpels and a mix of heated water and detergents before they were laid out on metal trays beneath a fume hood to dry them for analysis. It would then be up to the forensic anthropologist to rearticulate the bodies as best she could in the ME's office.

But it was the reporter's concluding comment that was particularly interesting. She said that detectives believed they had made a preliminary identification of at least three of the bodies, although they declined to give any further details. That meant they had found something at the scene, something they had chosen to keep to themselves. The discovery aroused my curiosity-mine and a million other people's-but no more than that. I did not envy the investigators who would have to wade through the mud of St. Froid in order to remove those bones with their gloved hands, fighting off the early blackflies and trying to blank out the howls of the hybrids.

When the report ended, I printed off my own work and then drove to the offices of PanTech Systems to deliver my findings. PanTech operated out of a three-story smoked-glass office in Westbrook and specialized in making security systems for the networks of financial institutions. Their latest innovation involved some kind of complex algorithm that made the eyes of anyone with an IQ of less than 200 glaze over with incomprehension but was reckoned by the company to be a pretty surefire thing. Unfortunately, Errol Hoyt, the mathematician who understood the algorithm best and who had been involved in its development from the start, had decided that PanTech didn't value him enough and was now trying to sell his services, and the algorithm, to a rival company from behind the backs of his current employers. The fact that he was also screwing his contact at the rival firm-a woman named Stacey Kean, who had the kind of body that caused highway pileups after Sunday services-made the whole business slightly more complicated.

I had monitored Hoyt's cell phone transmissions using a Cellmate cellular radio monitoring system, aided by a cellular gain antenna. The Cellmate came in a neat brushed-aluminum case containing a modified Panasonic phone, a DTMF decoder, and a Marantz recorder. I simply had to enter the number of Hoyt's cellular and the Cellmate did the rest. By monitoring his calls, I had traced Hoyt and Kean to a rendezvous at the Days Inn out on Maine Mall Road. I waited in the parking lot, got photos of both of them entering the same room, then checked into the room on their right and removed the Penetrator II surveillance unit from my leather bag. The Penetrator II sounded like some kind of sexual aid but was simply a specially designed transducer that attached to the wall and picked up vibrations, converting them into electrical impulses that were then amplified and became recognizable audio. Most of the audio was recognizable only as grunts and groans, but when they'd finished the pleasure part they got down to business, and Hoyt provided enough incriminating detail of what he was offering, and the how and when of its transfer, to enable PanTech to secure his research and then fire him without incurring a major damages suit for unlawful dismissal. Admittedly, it was a kind of sordid way to earn a few bucks, but it had been painless and relatively easy. Now it was simply a matter of presenting the evidence to PanTech and collecting my check.

I sat in a conference room on one side of an oval glass table while the three men across from me examined the photographs, then listened to Hoyt's telephone conversations and the recording of his romantic interlude with the lovely Stacey. One of the men was Roger Axton, PanTech's vice president. The second was Philip Voight, head of corporate security. The third man had introduced himself as Marvin Gross, the personnel director. He was short and reedily built, with a small belly that protruded over the belt of his pants and made him look like he was suffering from malnutrition. It was Gross, I noticed, who held the checkbook.

Eventually, Axton reached across with a plump finger and killed the tape. He exchanged a look with Voight, then stood.

“That all seems to be in order, Mr. Parker. Thank you for your time and efforts. Mr. Gross will deal with the matter of payment.”

I noticed that he didn't shake my hand but simply departed from the room with a swish of silk like a wealthy dowager. I guessed that if I'd just listened to the sounds of two strangers having sex, I wouldn't want to shake hands with the guy who'd made the tape either. Instead, I sat in silence while Gross's pen made a scratching noise on the checkbook. When he had finished, he blew softly on the ink and carefully tore away the check. He didn't hand it over immediately but looked at it for a time before peering out from under his brow and asking:

“Do you like your work, Mr. Parker?”

“Sometimes,” I replied.

“It seems to me,” Gross continued languidly, “that it's somewhat… sleazy.”

“Sometimes,” I repeated, neutrally. “But usually that's not the nature of the work, but the nature of some of the people involved.”

“You're referring to Mr. Hoyt?”

“Mr. Hoyt had sex in the afternoon with a woman. Neither of them is married. What they did wasn't sleazy, or at least it was no sleazier than a hundred other things most people do every day. Your company paid me to listen in on them, and that's where the sleaze part came in.”

Gross's smile didn't waver. He held the check up between his fingers as if he was expecting me to beg for it. Beside him, I saw Voight look down at his feet in embarrassment.

“I'm not sure that we are entirely to blame for the manner in which you conducted your task, Mr. Parker,” said Gross. “That was your own choice.”

I felt my fist tighten, partly out of my rising anger at Gross but also because I knew that he had a point. Sitting in that room, watching those three well-dressed men listening to the sounds of a couple's lovemaking, I had felt ashamed at them, and at myself. Gross was right: this was dirty work, marginally better than repos, and the money didn't make up for the filthy sheen it left on the clothes, on the skin, and on the soul.

I sat in silence, my eyes on him until he stood and gathered up the material relating to Hoyt, returning it to the black plastic folder in which I had brought it. Voight stood too, but I remained seated. Gross took one more look at the check, then dropped it on the table in front of me before leaving the room.

“Enjoy your money, Mr. Parker,” he concluded. “I believe you've earned it.”

Voight gave me a pained look, then shrugged and followed Gross. “I'll wait for you outside,” he said.

I nodded and began replacing my own notes in my bag. When I was done, I picked up the check, examined the amount, then folded it and put it in the small zipped compartment at the back of my wallet. PanTech had paid me a bonus of 20 percent. For some reason, it made me feel even dirtier than before.

Voight walked me to the lobby, then made a point of shaking my hand and thanking me before I left the building. I walked through the parking lot, past the lines of reserved spaces with the names of their owners marked on small tin plates nailed to the parking lot's surrounding wall. Marvin Gross's car, a red Impala, occupied space number 15. I removed my keys from my pocket and flicked open the little knife I kept on the key chain. I knelt down beside his left rear tire and placed the tip of the blade against it, ready to slash the rubber. I stayed like that for maybe thirty seconds, then stood and closed the knife, leaving the tire undamaged. There was a tiny indentation where the blade had touched it, but nothing more.

As Gross had intimated, following couples to motel rooms was the poor cousin of divorce work, but it paid the bills and the risks were minimal. In the past I had taken on jobs out of a sense of charity but I quickly realized that if I kept doing things for charity, then pretty soon charities would be doing things for me. Now Jack Mercier was offering me good money to look into Grace Peltier's death, but something told me that the money would be hard earned. I had seen it in Mercier's eyes.

I drove into the center of Portland and parked in the garage at Cumberland and Preble, then headed into the Portland Public Market. The Port City Jazz Band was playing in one corner and the smells of baking and spices mingled in the air. I bought some skim milk from Smiling Hill Farm and venison from Bayley Hill, then added fresh vegetables and a loaf of bread from the Big Sky Bread Company. I sat for a time by the fireplace, watching the people go by and listening to the music. Rachel and I would come here next weekend, I thought, browsing among the stalls, holding hands, and the scent of her would linger on my fingers and palms for the rest of the day.

With the arrival of the lunchtime crowds I headed back toward Congress, then cut down Exchange Street toward Java Joe's in the Old Port. As I reached the junction of Exchange and Middle, I saw a small boy seated on the ground at Tommy's Park on the opposite side of the street. He was wearing only a check shirt and short pants, despite the fact that it was a cool day. A woman leaned over him, obviously talking to him, and he stared up at her intently. Like the boy, the woman was dressed for very different weather. She wore a pale summer dress decorated with small pink flowers, the sunlight shining through the material to reveal the shape of her legs, and her blond hair was tied back with an aquamarine bow. I couldn't see her face, but something tightened in my stomach as I drew nearer.

Susan had worn just such a dress and had tied her blond hair back with an aquamarine bow. The memory made me stop short as the woman straightened and began to walk away from the boy in the direction of Spring Street. As she walked, the boy looked up at me and I saw that he was wearing old black-rimmed eyeglasses, one lens of which was obscured by black masking tape. Through the clear lens his single visible eye stared unblinkingly at me. Around his neck hung a wooden board of some sort, held in place by a length of thick rope. There was something carved into the wood, but it was too faint to see from where I stood. I smiled at him and he smiled back as I stepped from the sidewalk and straight into the path of a delivery truck. The driver slammed on the brakes and blew his horn, and I was forced to jump back quickly as the truck shot past. By the time the driver had finished giving me the finger and proceeded on his way, both the woman and the boy were gone. I could find no trace of them on Spring Street, or Middle, or Exchange. Despite that, I could not shake off the sense that they were near, and were watching.

It was almost four o'clock when I returned to the Scarborough house, after depositing my check at the bank and completing various errands. I padded around in my bare feet as some Jim White played on my stereo. It was “Still Waters” and Jim was singing about how there were projects for the dead and projects for the living, but sometimes he got confused by that distinction. On the kitchen table lay Jack Mercier's check, and once again that unease returned. There was something about the way he looked at me when he offered me the money in return for talking to Curtis Peltier. The more I thought about it, the more I believed that Mercier was paying for my services out of guilt.

I wondered too what Curtis Peltier might have on Mercier that would cause him to hire an investigator to look into the death of a girl he barely knew. There were a lot of people who said that the collapse of their business partnership had been an acrimonious one, bringing to an end not only a long-established professional association but also more than a decade of friendship. If Peltier was looking for help, Jack Mercier seemed to me to be a curious choice.

But I couldn't refuse the job either, I thought, because I, too, felt a nagging sense of guilt over Grace Peltier, as if I somehow owed her at least the time it would take to talk to her father. Maybe it was the remains of what I had felt for her years before and the way I had reacted when she believed herself to be in trouble. True, I was young then, but she was younger still. I recalled her short dark hair, her questioning blue eyes, and even now, the smell of her, like freshly cut flowers.

Sometimes, life is lived in retrospect. I sat at the kitchen table and looked at Jack Mercier's check for a long time. Finally, still undecided, I folded it and placed it on the table beneath a vase of lilies I had bought on impulse as I was leaving the market. I cooked myself a dinner of chicken with chilis and ginger and watched TV while I ate, but I barely took in a fraction of what I was seeing. When I had finished, and the dishes were washed and dried, I called the number Jack Mercier had given to me the day before. A maid answered on the third ring, and Mercier was on the line seconds later.

“It's Charlie Parker, Mr. Mercier. I've decided. I'll look into that matter.”

I heard a sigh on the other end of the phone. It might have been relief. It might also have been resignation.

“Thank you, Mr. Parker,” was all he said.

Maybe Marvin Gross had done me a favor by calling me a sleazebag, I thought.

Maybe.

That night, as I lay in bed thinking of the small boy with the darkened lens and the blond-haired woman who had stood over him, the scent of the flowers in the kitchen seemed to fill the house, becoming almost oppressive. I smelled them on my pillow and on the sheets. When I rubbed my fingers together, I seemed to feel grains of pollen like salt on my skin.

Yet when I awoke the next morning the flowers were already dead.

The day of my first meeting with Curtis Peltier dawned clear and bright. I heard cars moving by my house on Spring Street, cutting from Oak Hill to Maine Mall Road, a brief oasis of calm between U.S. 1 and I-95. The nuthatch was back and the breeze created waves in the fir trees at the edge of my property, testing the resilience of the newly extended needles.

My grandfather had refused to sell any of his land when the developers came to Scarborough looking for sites for new homes in the late seventies and early eighties, which meant that the house was still surrounded by forest until the trees ended at the interstate. Unfortunately, what remained of my semirural idyll was about to come to an end: the U.S. Postal Service was planning to build a huge mail processing center off nearby Mussey Road, on land including the Grondin Quarry and the Neilson Farm parcels. It would be nine acres in size, and over a hundred trucks a day would eventually be entering and leaving the site; in addition there would be air traffic from a proposed air freight facility. It was good for the town but bad for me. For the first time, I had begun to consider selling my grandfather's house.

I sat on my porch, sipping coffee and watching lapwings flit, and thought of the old man. He had been dead for almost six years now, and I missed his calm, his love of people, and his quiet concern for the vulnerable and the underprivileged. It had brought him into the law enforcement community and had just as surely forced him out of it again, when his empathy for the victims became too much for him to bear.

A second check for $10,000 had been delivered to my house during the night, but despite my promise to Mercier I was still uneasy. I felt for Curtis Peltier, I truly did, but what he wanted I didn't think I could give him; he wanted his daughter back, the way she used to be, so that he could hold her to him forever. His memory of her had been tainted by the manner of her death, and he wanted that stain removed.

I thought too of the woman on Exchange.

Who wears a summer dress on a cold day? When the answer came to me, I pushed it away as a thing unwanted.

Who wears a summer dress on a cold day?

Someone who doesn't feel the cold.

Someone who can't feel the cold.

I finished my coffee and caught up on some paperwork at my desk, but Curtis Peltier and his dead daughter kept intruding on my thoughts, along with the small boy and the blond woman. In the end, it all came to weights on a scale: my own inconvenience measured against Curtis Peltier's pain.

I picked up my car keys and drove into Portland.

Peltier lived in a big brownstone on Danforth Street, close by the beautiful Italianate Victoria Mansion, which his home resembled in miniature. I guessed that he had bought it when times were good, and now it was probably all that he had left. This area of Portland, encompassing parts of Danforth, Pine, Congress, and Spring Streets, was where prosperous citizens made their homes in the nineteenth century. It was natural, I supposed, that Peltier should have gravitated toward it when he became a wealthy man.

The house looked impressive from the outside, but the gardens were overgrown and the paint was peeling from the door and window frames. I had never been inside the house with Grace. From what I understood, her relationship with her father floundered during her teens and she kept her home life separate from all other aspects of her existence. Her father doted on her but she appeared reluctant to reciprocate, as if she found his affection for her almost suffocating. Grace was always extraordinarily strong willed, with a determination and inner strength that sometimes led her to behave in ways that were hurtful to those around her, even if she had not intended to cause them pain. When she decided to ostracize her father, then ostracized he became. Later I learned from mutual friends that Grace had gradually overcome her resentment and that the two had become much closer in the years before her death, but the reason for the earlier distance between them remained unclear.

I rang the bell and heard it echo through the big house. A shape appeared at the frosted glass and an old man opened the door, his shoulders too small for his big red shirt and a pair of black suspenders holding his tan trousers up over his thin hips. There was a gap between his trousers and his waist. It made him look like a small, sad clown.

“Mr. Peltier?” I asked.

He nodded in reply. I showed him my ID. “My name is Charlie Parker. Jack Mercier said you might be expecting me.”

Curtis Peltier's face brightened a little and he stood aside to let me in, while tidying his hair and straightening his shirt collar with his free hand. The house smelled musty. There was a thin layer of dust over some of the furniture in the hall and in the dining room to the left. The furnishings looked good but not that good, as if the best items had already been sold and what remained was used only to fill up what would otherwise have been vacant space. I followed him into a small, bright kitchen, with old magazines scattered on the chairs, three watercolor landscapes on the walls, and a pot of coffee filling the air with the scent of French vanilla. The landscape in the paintings looked vaguely familiar; they seemed to consist of views of the same area, painted from three different angles in subdued hues of brown and red. Skeletal trees converged on an expanse of dark water, hills fading into the distance beneath cloudy skies. In the corner of each painting were the initials GP. I never knew that Grace had painted.

There were paperbacks yellowing on the windowsill and an easy chair sat beside an open cast-iron fireplace packed with logs and paper so that it wouldn't brood emptily when not in use. The old man filled two cups with coffee and produced a plate of cookies from a cupboard, then raised his hands from his sides and smiled apologetically.

“You'll have to forgive me, Mr. Parker,” he said, indicating his shirt and his faded pants, and the sandals on his stockinged feet. “I wasn't expecting company so early in the day.”

“Don't worry about it,” I replied. “The cable guy once found me trying to kill a roach while wearing nothing but sneakers.”

He smiled gratefully and sat. “Jack Mercier tell you about my little girl?” he asked, cutting straight to the chase. I watched his face while he said Mercier's name and saw something flicker, like a candle flame suddenly exposed to a draft.

I nodded. “I'm sorry.”

“She didn't kill herself, Mr. Parker. I don't care what anybody says. She was with me the weekend before she died, and I have never seen her happier. She didn't do drugs. She didn't smoke. Hell, she didn't even drink, at least nothing stronger than a Bud Light.” He sipped at his coffee, the thumb of his left hand worrying his forefinger in a constant, rhythmic movement. There was a white callus on his skin from the repeated contact.

I took out my notebook and my pen and wrote while Peltier spoke. Grace's mother had died when she was thirteen. After a succession of dead-end jobs, Grace had returned to college and had been preparing her postgraduate thesis on the history of certain religious movements in the state. She had recently returned to live with her father, traveling down to Boston to use library facilities when necessary.

“You know who she might have been talking to?” I asked.

“She took her notes with her, so I couldn't say,” said Peltier. “She had an appointment in Waterville, though, a day or two before…”

He trailed off.

“With whom?” I prompted him gently.

“Carter Paragon,” he replied. “That fella who runs the Fellowship.”

The Fellowship was a pretty low-end operation, hosting shows on late-night cable and paying little old ladies a nickel a shot to stuff Bible pamphlets into envelopes. Paragon's pitch involved claiming to cure minor ailments by asking viewers to touch the TV screen with their hands, or one hand at least, the other hand being occupied ringing the Fellowship's toll-free number and pledging whatever they could afford for the greater glory of the Lord. The only thing Carter Paragon ever cured was an excess of cash in a bank balance.

Unsurprisingly, Carter Paragon wasn't his real name. He had been born Chester Quincy Deedes: that was the name on his birth certificate and his criminal record, a record that consisted mainly of minor credit card and insurance fraud, peripheral involvement in a pension scam, and a couple of DUIs. When hostile journalists brought this up, the newly monikered Carter Paragon admitted that he had been a sinner, that he hadn't even been searching for God but God had found him anyway. It still wasn't entirely clear why God had been looking for Chester Deedes in the first place, unless Chester had somehow managed to steal God's wallet.

Mostly the Fellowship was kind of a joke, but I'd heard rumors-unsubstantiated, mostly-that the Fellowship supported extremist religious and right-wing groups financially. Organizations believed to have received funding from the Fellowship had been linked to pickets and attacks on abortion clinics, AIDS help lines, family planning institutes, even synagogues. Very little had ever been proved: checks from the Fellowship had been deposited in the accounts of the American Coalition of Life Activists, an umbrella organization for some of the more extreme antiabortion groups, and Defenders of the Defenders of Life, a support group for convicted clinic bombers and their families. Phone records seized in the aftermath of various incidents of violence also revealed that assorted fascists, rednecks, and cracker militants had contacted the Fellowship on a regular basis.

The Fellowship usually issued swift condemnations of any illegal-actions by groups alleged to have received funding from it, but Paragon had still felt compelled to turn up on respectable news magazine programs on a couple of occasions uttering denials like St. Peter on a Thursday night, dressed in a suit that shimmered oilily, a small gold cross pinned discreetly to his lapel as he attempted to be charming, apologetic, and manipulative all at the same time. Trying to pin down Carter Paragon was like trying to nail smoke.

Now it seemed that Grace Peltier had been due to meet with Paragon shortly before she died. I wondered if she had made the meeting. If so, Paragon might be worth talking to.

“Do you have any notes she might have made for her thesis, any computer disks?” I continued.

He shook his head. “Like I said, she took everything with her. She was planning to stay with a friend after she'd met with Paragon and do some work on her thesis there.”

“You know who the friend was?”

“Marcy Becker,” he said immediately. “She's a history grad, friend of Grace's from way back. Her family lives up in Bar Harbor. They run a motel there. Marcy's been living with them for the last couple of years, helping them to run the place.”

“Was she a good friend?”

“Pretty good. Or I used to think she was.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that she never made it to the funeral.” I felt that little lance of guilt again. “That's kinda strange, don't you think?”

“I guess it is,” I said. “Did she have any other close friends who didn't show for the service?”

He thought for a moment. “There's a girl called Ali Wynn, younger than Grace. She came up here a couple of times and they seemed to get on well together. Grace shared an apartment with her when she was in Boston, and she used to stay with her when she traveled down to study. She's a student at Northeastern too, but works part-time in a fancy restaurant in Harvard, the ‘Hammer’ something.”

“The Blue Hammer?”

He nodded. “That's the one.”

It was on Holyoke Street, close by Harvard Square. I added the name to my notebook.

“Did Grace own a gun?” I asked.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. She hated guns.”

“Was she seeing anybody?”

“Not that I know of.”

He sipped his coffee and I found him watching me closely over the rim of the cup, as if my last question had caused a shift in his perception of me.

“I recall you, you know,” he said softly.

I felt myself flush red, and instantly I was more than a decade and a half younger, dropping Grace Peltier off outside this same house and then driving away, grateful that I would never have to look at her or hold her again. I wondered what Peltier knew about my time with his daughter and was surprised and embarrassed at my concern.

“I told Jack Mercier to ask for you,” he continued. “You knew Grace. I thought maybe you might help us because of that.”

“That was a long time ago,” I answered gently.

“Maybe,” he said, “but it seems like only yesterday to me that she was born. Her doctor was the worst doctor in the world. He couldn't deliver milk, but somehow, despite him, she managed to come wailing into the world. Everything since then, all of the little incidents that made up her life, seem to have occurred in the blink of an eye. You look at it like that and it wasn't so long ago, Mr. Parker. For me, in one way, she was barely here at all. Will you look into this? Will you try to find out the truth of what happened to my daughter?”

I sighed. I felt as if I was heading into deep waters just as I had begun to like the feel of the ground beneath my feet.

“I'll look into it,” I said at last. “I can't promise anything, but I'll do some work on it.”

We spoke a little more of Grace and of her friends, and Peltier gave me copies of the phone records for the last couple of months, as well as Grace's most recent bank and credit card statements, before he showed me to her bedroom. He left me alone in there. It was probably too soon for him to spend time in a room that still smelled of her, that still contained traces of her existence. I went through the drawers and closets, feeling awkward as my fingers lifted and then replaced items of clothing, the hangers in the closets chiming sadly as I patted down the jackets and coats they held. I found nothing except a shoe box containing the mementos of her romantic life: cards and letters from long-departed lovers, and ticket stubs from dates that had obviously meant something to her. There was nothing recent, and nothing of mine among them. I hadn't expected that there would be. I checked through the books on the shelves and the medicines in the cabinet above the small sink in the corner of the room. There were no contraceptives that might have indicated a regular boyfriend and no prescription drugs that might have suggested she was suffering from depression or anxiety.

When I returned to the kitchen there was a manila file of papers lying in front of Peltier on the table. He passed it across to me. When I opened it, the file contained all of the state police reports on the death of Grace Peltier, along with a copy of the death certificate and the ME's report. There were also photographs of Grace's body in the car, printed off a computer. The quality wasn't so good, but it didn't have to be. The wound on Grace's head was clearly visible, and the blood on the window behind her was like the birth of a red star.

“Where did you get these, Mr. Peltier?” I asked, but I knew the answer almost as soon as the words were out of my mouth. Jack Mercier always got what he wanted.

“I think you know,” he replied. He wrote his telephone number on a small pad and tore the page out. “You can usually get me here, day or night. I don't sleep much these days.”

I thanked him, then he shook my hand and walked me to the door. He was still watching me as I climbed into the Mustang and drove away.

I parked on Congress and took the reports into Kinko's to photocopy them, a precaution that I had recently started to take with everything from tax letters to investigation notes, with the originals retained at the house and the copies put into storage in case the originals were lost or damaged. Copying was a small amount of trouble and expense to go to for the reassurance that it offered. When I had finished, I went to Coffee by Design and started to read the reports in detail. As I did, I found myself growing more and more unhappy with what they contained.

The police report listed the contents of the car, including a small quantity of cocaine found in the glove compartment and a pack of cigarettes that was lying on the dashboard. Fingerprint analysis revealed three sets of prints on the pack, only one of them belonging to Grace. The only prints on the bag of coke were Grace's. For someone who didn't smoke or take drugs, Grace Peltier seemed to be carrying a lot of narcotics in her car.

The certificate of death didn't add much else to what I already knew, although one section did interest me. Section 42 of the state of Maine certificate of death requires the ME to ascribe the manner of death to one of six causes. In order, these are: “natural,” “accident,” “suicide,” “homicide,” “pending investigation,” and “could not be determined.”

The ME had not ticked “suicide” as the manner of Grace Peltier's death. She had, instead, opted for “pending investigation.” In other words, she had enough doubts about the circumstances to require the state police to continue their inquiries into the death. I moved on to the ME's own report.

The report noted Grace's body measurements, her clothing, her physique and state of nutrition at the time of death, and her personal cleanliness. There were no signs of self-neglect indicative of mental disorder or drug dependency of any kind. The analysis of her ocular fluid found no traces of drugs or alcohol taken in the hours before her death, and urine and bile analysis also came up negative, indicating that she had not ingested drugs in the three days preceding her death either. Blood taken from a peripheral vein beneath her armpit had been combined in a tube with sodium fluoride, which reduces the microbiologic action that may increase or decrease any alcohol content in the blood after collection. Once again, it came up negative. Grace hadn't been drinking before she died.

It's a difficult thing to do, taking one's own life. Most people require a little Dutch courage to help them on their way, but Grace Peltier had been clean. Despite the fact that her father said she was happy, that she had no alcohol or drugs in her system when she died, and that the autopsy revealed none of the telltale signs of a disturbed, distracted personality of the type likely to attempt suicide, Grace Peltier had still apparently put a gun close to her head and shot herself.

Grace's fatal injury had been caused by a.40 caliber bullet fired from a Smith amp; Wesson at a range of not more than two inches. The bullet had entered through the left temple, burning and splitting the skin and singeing Grace's hair above the wound, and shattering the sphenoid bone. The bullet hole was slightly smaller than the diameter of the bullet, since the elastic epidermis had stretched to allow its passage and then contracted afterward. There was an abrasion collar around the hole, caused by the friction, heating, and dirt effect of the bullet, as well as surrounding bruising.

The bullet had exited above and slightly behind the right temple, fracturing the orbital roof and causing bruising around the right eye. The wound was large and everted, with an irregular stellate appearance. Its irregularity was due to the damage caused to the bullet by contact with the skull, which had distorted the bullet's shape. The only blood in the car had come from Grace, and the bloodstain pattern analysis was consistent with the injury received. A ballistics examination of the recovered bullet also matched up. Chemical and scanning electron microscope analysis of skin swabs taken from Grace's left hand revealed propellant residues, indicating that the gun had been fired by Grace. The gun was found hanging from Grace's left hand. On the seat, beside her right hand, was a Bible.

It is an established fact that women rarely commit suicide with guns. Although there are exceptions, women don't seem to have the same fascination with firearms as men and tend to pick less obviously violent ways to end their lives. There is a useful rule in police work: a shot woman is a murdered woman unless proved otherwise. Suicides also shoot themselves in certain sites of election: the mouth, the front of the neck, the forehead, the temple, or the chest. Discharges into the temple usually occur on the side of the dominant hand, although that is not an absolute. Grace Peltier, I knew, was right handed, yet she had elected to shoot herself in the left temple, using her left hand and holding what I assumed to be an unfamiliar weapon. According to Curtis, she didn't even own a gun, although it was possible that she had decided to acquire one for reasons of her own.

There were three additional elements in the reports that struck me as odd. The first was that Grace Peltier's clothes had been soaked with water when her body was found. Upon examination, the water was found to be salt water, although its precise source had yet to be determined. For some reason, Grace Peltier had taken a dip in the sea fully clothed before shooting herself.

The second element was that the ends of Grace's hair had been cut shortly before her death, using not a scissors but a blade. Part of her ponytail had been severed, leaving some loose hairs trapped between her shirt and her skin.

The third was not an inclusion but an omission. Curtis Peltier had told me that Grace had brought all of her thesis notes with her, but there were no notes found in the car.

The Bible was a nice touch, I thought.

I was walking back to my car when the cell phone rang.

“Hi, it's me,” said Rachel's voice.

“Hi, you.”

Rachel Wolfe was a criminal psychologist who had once specialized in profiling. She had joined me in Louisiana as the hunt for the Traveling Man came to its end, and we had become lovers. It had not been an easy relationship: Rachel had been hurt badly both physically and emotionally in Louisiana, and I had spent a long time coming to terms with the guilt my feelings for her had provoked. We were now slowly establishing ourselves together, although she continued to live in Boston, where she was doing research and tutorial work at Harvard. The subject of her moving up to Maine had been glanced upon once or twice, but never pursued.

“I've got bad news. I can't come up on the weekend. The faculty has called an emergency meeting for Friday afternoon over funding cuts, and it's likely to pick up again on Saturday morning. I won't be free until Saturday afternoon at the earliest. I'm really sorry.”

I found myself smiling as she spoke. Lately, talking to Rachel always made me smile. “Actually, that might work out okay. Louis has been talking about heading up to Boston for a weekend. If he can convince Angel to come along I can link up with them while you're tied up in meetings, then we can spend the rest of the time together.”

Angel and Louis were, in no particular order, gay, semiretired criminals; silent partners in a number of restaurants and auto shops; a threat to decent people everywhere and possibly to the fabric of society itself; and polar opposites in just about every imaginable way, with the exception of a shared delight in mayhem and occasional homicide. They were also, not entirely coincidentally, my friends.

“Cleopatra opens at the Wang on the fourth,” probed Rachel. “I think I can probably hustle a pair of tickets.”

Rachel was a huge fan of the Boston Ballet and was trying to convert me to its joys. She was kind of succeeding, although it had led Angel to speculate unkindly on my sexuality.

“Sure, but you owe me a couple of Pirates games when the hockey season starts.”

“Agreed. Call me back and let me know what their plans are. I can book a table for dinner and join the three of you after my meeting. And I'll look into those tickets. Anything else?”

“How about lots of rampant, noisy sex?”

“The neighbors will complain.”

“Are they good looking?”

“Very.”

“Well, if they get jealous I'll see what I can do for them.”

“Why don't you see what you can do for me first?”

“Okay, but when I wear you out I may have to go elsewhere for my own pleasure.”

I couldn't be sure, but I thought her laughter had a distinctly mocking tone as she hung up.

When I got back to the house, I called a number on Manhattan's Upper West Side using the land line. Angel and Louis didn't like being called on a cell phone, because-as the unfortunate Hoyt was about to learn to his cost-cell-phone conversations could be monitored or traced, and Angel and Louis were the kind of individuals who sometimes dealt in delicate matters upon which the law might not smile too gently. Angel was a burglar, and a very good one, although he was now officially “resting” on the joint income he had acquired with Louis. Louis's current career position was murkier: Louis killed people for money, or he used to. Now he sometimes killed people, but money was less of a concern for him than the moral imperative for their deaths. Bad people died at Louis's hands, and maybe the world was a better place without them. Concepts like morality and justice got a little complicated where Louis was concerned.

The phone rang three times and then a voice with all the charm of a snake hissing at a mongoose said, “Yeah?” The voice also sounded a little breathless.

“It's me. I see you still haven't got to the chapter on phone etiquette in that Miss Manners book I gave you.”

“I put that piece of shit in the trash,” said Angel. “Guy who laces his shoes with string is probably still trying to sell it on Seventh Avenue.”

“Your breathing sounds labored. Do I even want to know what I interrupted?”

“Elevator's busted. I heard the phone on the stairs. I was at an organ recital.”

“What were you doing, passing around the tin cup?”

“Funny.”

I don't think he meant it. Louis was obviously still engaged in an unsuccessful attempt to expand Angel's cultural horizons. You had to admire his perseverance, and his optimism.

“How was it?”

“Like being trapped with the phantom of the opera for two hours. My head hurts.”

“You up for a trip to Boston?”

“Louis is. He thinks it's got class. Me, I like the order of New York. Boston is like the whole of Manhattan below Fourteenth Street, you know, with all them little streets that cross back over one another. It's like the Twilight Zone down in the Village. I didn't even like visiting when you lived there.”

“You finished?” I interrupted.

“Well, I guess I am now, Mr. Fucking Impatient.”

“I'm heading down next weekend, maybe meet Rachel for dinner-late on Friday. You want to join us?”

“Hold on.” I heard a muffled conversation, and then a deep male voice came on the line.

“You comin' on to my boy?” asked Louis.

“Lord no,” I replied. “I like to be the pretty one in my relationships, but that's taking it a little too far.”

“We'll be at the Copley Plaza. You give us a call when you got a restaurant booked.”

“Sure thing, boss. Anything else?”

“We let you know,” he said, then the line went dead.

It was a shame about the Miss Manners book, really.

Grace Peltier's credit card statement revealed nothing out of the ordinary, while the telephone records indicated calls to Marcy Becker at her parents' motel, a private number in Boston which was now disconnected but which I assumed to be Ali Wynn's, and repeated calls to the Fellowship's office in Waterville. Late that afternoon I called the Fellowship at that same number and got a recorded message asking me to choose one if I wanted to make a donation, two if I wanted to hear the recorded prayer of the day, or three to speak to an operator. I pressed three and when the operator spoke I gave my name and asked for Carter Paragon's office. The operator told me she was putting me through to Paragon's assistant, Ms. Torrance. There was a pause and then another female voice came on the line.

“Can I help you?” it said, in the tone that a certain type of secretary reserves for those whom she has no intention of helping at all.

“I'd like to speak to Mr. Paragon, please. My name is Charlie Parker. I'm a private investigator.”

“What is it in connection with, Mr. Parker?”

“A young woman named Grace Peltier. I believe Mr. Paragon had a meeting with her about two weeks ago.”

“I'm sorry, the name isn't familiar to me. No such meeting took place.” If spiders apologized to flies before eating them, they could have managed more sincerity than this woman.

“Would you mind checking?”

“As I've told you, Mr. Parker, that meeting never took place.”

“No, you told me that you weren't familiar with the name and then you told me that the meeting never happened. If you didn't recognize the name, how could you remember whether or not any meeting took place?”

There was a pause on the end of the line, and I thought the receiver began to grow distinctly chilly in my hand. After a time, Ms. Torrance spoke again. “I see from Mr. Paragon's diary that a meeting was due to be held with a Grace Peltier, but she never arrived.”

“Did she cancel the appointment?”

“No, she simply didn't turn up.”

“Can I speak to Mr. Paragon, Ms. Torrance?”

“No, Mr. Parker, you cannot.”

“Can I make an appointment to speak to Mr. Paragon?”

“I'm sorry. Mr. Paragon is a very busy man, but I'll tell him you called.” She hung up before I could give her a number, so I figured that I probably wasn't going to be hearing from Carter Paragon in the near future, or even the distant future. It seemed that I might have to pay a personal call on the Fellowship, although I guessed from Ms. Torrance's tone that a visit from me would be about as welcome as a whorehouse in Disneyland.

Something had been nagging at me since reading the police report on the contents of the car, so I picked up the phone and called Curtis Peltier.

“Mr. Peltier,” I asked, “do you recall if either Marcy Becker or Ali Wynn smoked.”

He paused before answering. “Y'know, I think they both did at that, but there's something else you should know. Grace's thesis wasn't just a general one: she had a specific interest in one religious group. They were called the Aroostook Baptists. You ever hear of them?”

“I don't think so.”

“The community disappeared in nineteen sixty-four. A lot of folks just assumed they'd given up and gone somewhere else, somewhere warmer and more hospitable.”

“I'm sorry, Mr. Peltier, I don't see the point.”

“These people, they were also known as the Eagle Lake Baptists.”

I recalled the news reports from the north of the state, the photographs in the newspapers of figures moving behind crime scene tape, the howling of the animals.

“The bodies found in the north,” I said quietly.

“I'd have told you when you were here, but I only just saw the TV reports,” he said. “I think it's them. I think they've found the Aroostook Baptists.”

3

THEY COME NOW, the dark angels, the violent ones, their wings black against the sun, their swords unsheathed. They move remorselessly through the great mass of humanity: purging, taking, killing.

They are no part of us.

The Manhattan North Homicide Squad is regarded as an elite group within the NYPD, operating out of an office at 120 East 119th Street. Each member has spent years as a precinct detective before being handpicked for homicide duty. They are experienced investigators, their gold shields bearing the hallmarks of long service. The most junior members probably have twenty years behind them. The more senior members have been around for so long that jokes have accreted to them like barnacles to the prows of old ships. As Michael Lansky, who was the senior detective on the squad when I was a rookie patrolman, used to say, “When I started in homicide, the Dead Sea was just sick.”

My father was himself a policeman, until the day he took his own life. I used to worry about my father. That was what you did when you were a policeman's son, or anyway, that was what I did. I loved him; I was envious of him-of his uniform, of his power, of the camaraderie of his friends; but I also worried about him. I worried about him all the time. New York in the 1970s wasn't like New York now: policemen were dying on the streets in ever greater numbers, exterminated like roaches. You saw it in the newspapers and on the TV, and I saw it reflected in my mother's eyes every time the doorbell rang late at night while my father was on duty. She didn't want to become another PBA widow. She just wanted her husband to come home, alive and complaining, at the end of every tour. He felt the strain too; he kept a bottle of Mylanta in his locker to fight the heartburn he endured almost every day, until eventually something snapped inside him and it all came to a violent end.

My father had only occasional contact with Manhattan North Homicide. Mostly, he watched them as they passed by while he held the crowds back or guarded the door, checking shields and IDs. Then, one stiflingly hot July day in 1980, shortly before he died, he was called to a modest apartment on Ninety-fourth Street and Second Avenue rented by a woman named Marilyn Hyde, who worked as an insurance investigator in midtown.

Her sister had called on her and smelled something foul coming-from inside the apartment. When she tried to gain entry using a spare key given to her by Marilyn, she found that the lock had been jammed up with adhesive and informed the super, who immediately notified the police. My father, who had been eating a sandwich at a diner around the corner, was the first officer to reach the building.

It emerged that, two days before she died, Marilyn Hyde had called her sister. She had been walking up from the subway at Ninety-sixth and Lexington when she caught the eye of a man descending. He was tall and pale, with dark hair and a small, thin mouth. He wore a yellow squall jacket and neatly pressed jeans. Marilyn had probably held his glance for no more than a couple of seconds, she told her sister that night, but something in his eyes caused her to step back against the wall as if she had been slammed in the chest by a fist. She felt a dampness on the legs of her pantsuit, and when she looked down, she realized that she had lost control of herself.

The following morning she called her sister again and expressed concern that she was being followed. She couldn't say by whom, exactly; it was just a feeling she had. Her sister told her to talk to the police but Marilyn refused, arguing that she had no proof that she was being followed and had seen nobody acting suspiciously in her vicinity.

That day she left work early, pleading sickness, and returned to her apartment. When she didn't turn up for work the next morning and didn't answer her phone, her sister went to check on her, setting in motion the sequence of events that led my father to her door. The hallway was quiet, since most of the other tenants were at work or out enjoying the summer sun. After knocking, my father unholstered his weapon and kicked the door in. The A/C in the apartment had been turned off and the smell hit him with a force that made his head reel. He told the super and Marilyn Hyde's sister to stay back, then made his way through the small living area, past the kitchen and the bathroom, and into the apartment's only bedroom.

He found Marilyn chained to her bed, the sheets and the floor below drenched with blood. Flies buzzed around her. Her body had swollen in the heat, the skin stained a light green at her belly, the superficial veins on the thighs and shoulders outlined in deeper greens and reds like the tracery in autumn leaves. There was no longer any way to tell how beautiful she had once been.

The autopsy found one hundred separate knife wounds on her body. The final cut to the jugular had killed her: the preceding ninety-nine had simply been used to bleed her slowly over a period of hours. There was a container of salt by the bed, and a jar of fresh lemon juice. Her killer had used them to rouse her when she lost consciousness.

That evening, after my father returned home, the smell of the soap he had used to wash away the traces of Marilyn Hyde's death still strong upon him, he sat at our kitchen table and opened a bottle of Coors. My mother had left as soon as he came home, anxious to meet up with friends whom she had not seen in many weeks. His dinner was in the oven, but he did not touch it. Instead, he sipped from the bottle and did not speak for a long time. I sat across from him and he took a soda from the refrigerator and handed it to me, so that I would have something to drink with him.

“What's wrong?” I asked him at last.

“Somebody got hurt today,” he replied.

“Somebody we know?”

“No, son, nobody we know, but I think she was a good person. She was probably worth knowing.”

“Who did it? Who hurt her?”

He looked at me, then reached out and touched my hair, the palm of his hand resting lightly on my head for a moment.

“A dark angel,” he said. “A dark angel did it.”

He did not tell me what he had seen in Marilyn Hyde's apartment. It was only many years later that I would hear of it-from my mother, from my grandfather, from other detectives-but I never forgot the dark angels. Many years later, my wife and child were taken from me, and the man who killed them believed that he, too, was one of the dark angels, the fruit of the union between earthly women and those who had been banished from heaven for their pride and their lust.

St. Augustine believed that natural evil could be ascribed to the activity of beings who were free and rational but nonhuman. Nietzsche considered evil to be a source of power independent of the human. Such a force of evil could exist outside of the human psyche, representing a capacity for cruelty and harm distinct from our own capabilities, a malevolent and hostile intelligence whose aim was, ultimately, to undermine our own essential humanity, to take away our ability to feel compassion, empathy, love.

I think my father saw certain acts of violence and cruelty, such as the terrible death of Marilyn Hyde, and wondered if there were some deeds that were beyond even the potential of human beings to commit; if there were creatures both more and less than human who preyed upon us.

They were the violent ones, the dark angels.

Manhattan North, the best homicide squad in the city, maybe even in the whole country, investigated the Marilyn Hyde case for seven weeks but found no trace of the man in the subway. There were no other suspects. The man at whom Marilyn Hyde had simply looked for a second too long and who had, it was believed, bled her to death for his own pleasure, had returned to the hidden place from which he came.

Marilyn Hyde's murder remains unsolved, and detectives in the squad still catch themselves staring at the faces on the subway, sometimes with their own wives, their own children beside them, trying to find the dark-haired man with the too small mouth. And some of them, if you ask, will tell you that perhaps they experience a moment of relief when they find that he is not among the crowds, that they have not caught his eye, that they have not encountered this man while their families are with them.

There are people whose eyes you must avoid, whose attention you must not draw to yourself. They are strange, parasitic creatures, lost souls seeking to stretch across the abyss and make fatal contact with the warm, constant flow of humanity. They live in pain and exist only to visit that pain on others. A random glance, the momentary lingering of a look, is enough to give them the excuse that they seek. Sometimes it is better to keep your eyes on the gutter, for fear that by looking up you might catch a glimpse of them, black shapes against the sun, and be blinded forever.

And now, on a patch of damp, muddy ground by a cold lake in northern Maine, the work of the dark angels was slowly being exposed.

The grave had been discovered at the boundary of the public reserved lands known as Winterville. The integrity of the scene had been compromised somewhat by the activities of the maintenance and construction crews, but there was nothing that could now be done except to ensure that no further damage was caused.

On that first day, the emergency team had taken the names of all of the workers at the lake site, interviewed each briefly, and then secured the scene with tape and uniformed officers. Initially there had been some trouble from one of the timber companies that used the road, but the company had agreed to postpone its truck runs until the extent of the grave had been determined.

Following the initial examination the sandbag levees were strengthened, while a command post, including the mobile crime scene unit, was established in a turnaround by the side of the Red River Road, with a strict sign-in policy in place to ensure that no further contamination of the area occurred. A pathway through the scene was created and marked with tape, after which a walking tour of the ground was made with a video camera to indoctrinate the police officers who would take no direct role in the investigation.

The scene was photographed: overall views first, to preserve the essential history of the scene at the moment of discovery, then orientation shots of the visible bones, followed by close-ups of the bones themselves. The camcorder was brought into play again, this time detailing the scene instead of merely recording it. Sketches were made, a three-foot-long metal stake indicating the center point from which all measurements of distance and angles would be taken. The boundaries of Red River Road were marked and recorded, in case any widening might occur in the future to alter the territory, and GPS equipment was used to take a satellite reading of the crime scene location.

Then, the light by now almost gone, the investigators dispersed following a final meeting, leaving state troopers and sheriff's deputies to guard the scene. The autopsy team would arrive at first light, when the inquiry into the deaths of the Aroostook Baptists would begin in earnest.

And in all that they did and in all that would follow, the sound of the hybrids stayed with them, so that each night, when they returned home and tried to sleep, they would wake to imagined howls and think that they were once again standing by the shores of the lake, their hands cold and their boots thick with mud, surrounded by the bones of the dead.

That night, for the first time in many months, I dreamed, as memories of Grace and my own father followed me from waking to sleeping. In my dream I stood on a patch of cleared land with bare trees at its verge and frozen water glittering coldly beyond. There were fresh mounds of earth scattered randomly on the ground and the dirt seemed to shift as I watched, as if something was moving beneath it.

And in the trees, shapes gathered, huge, black, birdlike figures with red eyes that gazed with hunger upon the shifting earth below. Then one unfurled its wings and dived, but instead of making for the earth it flew toward me, and I saw that it was not a bird but a man, an old man with flowing gray hair and yellow teeth and nodes on his back from which the leathery wings erupted. His legs were thin, his ribs showed through his skin, and his wrinkled male organ bobbed obscenely as he flew down. He hovered before me, the dark wings beating at the night. His gaunt cheeks stretched and he spat the word at me:

“Sinner!” he hissed. His wings still flapping, he tore at a pile of earth with his clawlike feet until he revealed a patch of white skin that glowed translucently in the moonlight. His mouth opened and his head descended toward the body, which writhed and twisted against him as he bit into it, blood flowing over his chin and pooling on the ground below.

Then he smiled at me, and I turned away from the sight to find myself reflected in the waters before me. I saw my own face twinned with the moon, bleeding whitely into my naked shoulders and chest. And from my back, huge dark wings unfurled themselves and spread behind me, covering the surface of the lake like thick, black ink and stilling all life beneath.

THE SEARCH FOR SANCTUARY

Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier…

In April 1963, a group of four families left their homes on the eastern seaboard and journeyed north in a collection of automobiles and trucks for two hundred miles, to an area of land close by the town of Eagle Lake, twenty miles south of the border between New Brunswick and Maine. The families were the Perrsons, from Friendship, south of the coastal town of Rockland; the Kellogs, from Seal Cove; the Cornishes, from Ripley; and the Jessops, from Portland. Collectively, they became known as the Aroostook Baptists, or sometimes as the Eagle Lake Baptists, although there is no evidence to suggest that any families other than the Perrsons and the Jessops were, in fact, originally members of that faith.

Once they reached their final destination, all of the automobiles were taken and sold, the money raised being used to buy essential supplies for the families over the coming year until the settlement could become self-sufficient. The settlement land, approximately forty acres, was rented on a thirty-year lease from a local landowner. Following the desertion of the settlement, this land eventually reverted to the family of the original owner, although until recently a dispute over boundaries has prevented any development of the site.

In total, sixteen people journeyed north that month: eight adults and eight children, all equally divided between the sexes. At Eagle Lake they were met by the man they knew as Preacher (or sometimes Reverend Faulkner), his wife, Louise, and their two children, Leonard and Muriel, aged seventeen and sixteen respectively.

It was at Faulkner's instigation that the families, mainly poor farmers and blue-collar workers, had sold their properties, pooled the money made, and traveled north to establish a community based on strict religious principles. A number of other families had also been willing to make the journey, motivated variously by their persistent fears of the perceived communist threat, their own fundamentalist religious beliefs, poverty, and an inability to cope with what they saw as the moral deterioration of the society around them, and perhaps subconsciously by the tradition of adherence to non-mainstream religious movements that was so much a part of the state's history. These additional applicants had been rejected on the basis of family size and the ages and sexes of their children. Faulkner stipulated that he wanted to create a community where families could intermarry, strengthening the bonds between them over generations, and that he therefore required equal numbers of male and female partners of similar age. The families he chose were, to a greater or lesser degree, estranged from their own relatives and appeared to be untroubled by the thought of being cut off from the outside world.

The Aroostook Baptists arrived in Eagle Lake on April 15, 1963. By January 1964, the settlement had been abandoned. No trace of the founding families or of the Faulkners was ever found again.

4

I SLEPT LATE THE NEXT MORNING but didn't feel refreshed when I woke. The memory of my dream was still vivid, and despite the cool of the night, I had sweated under the sheets.

I decided to grab breakfast in Portland before paying a visit to the Fellowship's offices, but it wasn't until I was in my car that I noticed that the red marker on the mailbox had been raised. It was a little early for a delivery, but I didn't think anything more of it. I walked down the drive and was about to reach for the mailbox when something lithe and dark scurried across the tin. It was a small brown spider, with an odd violin-shaped mark on its body. It took me a moment or two to recognize it for what it was: a fiddleback, one of the recluses. I drew my hand away quickly. I knew that they could bite, although I'd never seen one this far north before. I used a stick to knock it away, but as I did so another set of thin legs pushed at the crack of the mailbox flap, and a second fiddleback squeezed its way out, then a third. I moved around the mailbox carefully and saw more spiders, some creeping along its base, others already rappelling slowly to the ground on lengths of silken thread. I took a deep breath and flipped the mailbox catch open with the stick.

Hundreds of tiny spiders tumbled out, some falling instantly to the grass below, others crawling and fighting their way across the inside of the flap, clinging to the bodies of those below them. The interior was alive with them. In the center of the box itself stood a small cardboard packing crate with airholes in its side, spiders spilling from the holes as the sunlight hit them. I could see dead spiders lying curled in the crate or littered around the corners of the mailbox, their legs curled into their abdomens as their peers fed on them. I backed away in disgust, trying not to think of what would have happened had I thrust my hand unthinkingly into the semidarkness.

I went to my car and took the spare gas can from the trunk, then retrieved a Zippo from the glove compartment. I sprinkled the gas both inside and outside the mailbox, and on the dry earth surrounding it, before lighting a roll of newspaper and tossing it in. The mailbox went up instantly, tiny arachnids falling aflame from the inferno. I stepped back as the grass began to burn and moved to the garden hose. I attached it to the outside faucet and wet the grass to contain the fire, then stood for a time and watched the mailbox burn. When I was content that nothing had survived, I doused it in water, the tin hissing at the contact and steam rising into the air. After it had cooled, I put on a pair of calfskin gloves and emptied the remains of the spiders into a black bag, which I threw in the garbage can outside my back door. Then I stood for a long time at the edge of my property, scanning the trees and striking at the invisible spiders I felt crawling across my skin.

I ate breakfast in Bintliff's on Portland Street and plotted my plan of action for the day. I sat in one of the big red booths upstairs, the ceiling fan gently turning as blues played softly in the background. Bintliff's has a menu so calorific that Weight Watchers should place a permanent picket on the door; gingerbread pancakes with lemon sauce, orange graham French toast, and lobster Benedict are not the kind of breakfast items that contribute to a slim waistline, although they're guaranteed to raise the eyebrows of even the most jaded dietician. I settled for fresh fruit, wheat toast, and coffee, which made me feel very virtuous but also kind of sad. The sight of the spiders had taken away most of my appetite anyhow. It could have been kids playing a joke, I supposed, but if so, then it was a vicious, deeply unpleasant one.

Waterville, the site of the Fellowship's office, was midway between Portland and Bangor. After Bangor I could head east to Ellsworth and the area of U.S. 1 where Grace Peltier's body had been discovered. From Ellsworth, Bar Harbor, home of Grace's good friend but funeral absentee Marcy Becker, was only a short drive to the coast. I finished off my coffee, took a last lingering look at a plate of apple, cinnamon, and raisin French toast that was heading toward a table by the window, then stepped outside and walked to my car.

Across the street, a man sat at the base of the steps leading up to the main post office. He wore a brown suit with a yellow shirt and a brown-and-red tie beneath a long, dark brown overcoat. Short, spiky red hair, tinged slightly with gray, stood up straight on his head as if he were permanently plugged into an electrical outlet. He was eating an ice cream cone. His mouth worked at the ice cream in a relentless methodical motion, never stopping once to savor the taste. There was something unpleasant, almost insectlike, about the way his mouth moved, and I felt his eyes upon me as I opened the car door and sat inside. When I pulled away from the curb, those eyes followed me. In the rearview, I could see his head turn to watch my progress, the mouth still working like the jaws of a mantid.

The Fellowship had its registered office at 109A Main Street, in the middle of Waterville's central business district. Parts of Waterville are pretty but downtown is a mess, largely because it looks like the ugly Ames shopping mall was dropped randomly from the sky and allowed to remain where it landed, reducing a huge tract of the town center to a glorified parking lot. Still, enough brownstone blocks remained to support a sign welcoming visitors to the joys of downtown Waterville, among them the modest offices of the Fellowship. They occupied the top two floors over an otherwise vacant storefront down from Joe's Smoke Shop, nestled between the Head Quarters hairdressing salon and Jorgensen's Café. I parked in the Ames lot and crossed at Joe's. There was a buzzer beside the locked glass door of 109A, with a small fish-eye lens beneath it. A metal plate on the door frame was engraved with the words: THE FELLOWSHIP-LET THE LORD GUIDE YOU. A small shelf to one side held a sheaf of pamphlets. I took one and slipped it into my pocket, then rang the buzzer and heard a voice crackle in response. It sounded suspiciously like that of Ms. Torrance.

“Can I help you?” it said.

“I'm here to see Carter Paragon,” I replied.

“I'm afraid Mr. Paragon is busy.” The day had hardly begun and already I was experiencing déjà vu.

“But I let the Lord guide me here,” I protested. “You wouldn't want to let Him down, would you?”

The only sound that came from the speaker was that of the connection between us being closed. I rang again.

“Yes?” The irritation in her voice was obvious.

“Maybe I could wait for Mr. Paragon?”

“That won't be possible. This is not a public office. Any contact with Mr. Paragon should be made in writing in the first instance. Have a good day.”

I had a feeling that a good day for Ms. Torrance would probably be a pretty bad day for me. It also struck me that in the course of our entire conversation, Ms. Torrance had not asked me my name or my business. It might simply have been my suspicious nature, but I guessed that Ms. Torrance already knew who I was. More to the point, she knew what I looked like.

I walked around the block to Temple Street and the rear of the Fellowship's offices. There was a small parking lot, its concrete cracked and overgrown with weeds, dominated by a dead tree beneath which stood two tanks of propane. The back door of the building was white and the windows were screened, while the black iron fire escape looked so decrepit that any occupants might have been better advised to take their chances with the flames. It didn't look like the back door to 109A had been opened in some time, which meant that the occupants of the building entered and left through the door on Main Street. There was one car in the lot, a red 4 x 4 Explorer. When I peered in the window I saw a box on the floor containing what looked like more religious pamphlets bound with rubber bands. Using my elementary deduction skills, I guessed that I'd found the Fellowship's wheels.

I went back onto Main Street, bought a couple of newspapers and the latest issue of Rolling Stone, then headed into Jorgensen's and took a seat at the raised table by the window. From there I had a perfect view of the doorway to 109A. I ordered coffee and a muffin, then sat back to read and wait.

The newspapers were full of the discovery at St. Froid, although they couldn't add much to the news reports I'd seen on television. Still, somebody had dredged up an old photograph of Faulkner and the original four families that had journeyed north with him. He was a tall man, plainly dressed, with long dark hair, very straight black eyebrows, and sunken cheeks. Even in the photograph, there was an undeniable charisma to him. He was probably in his late thirties, his wife slightly older. Their children, a boy and a girl aged about seventeen and sixteen respectively, stood in front of him. He must have been comparatively young when they were born.

Despite the fact that I knew the photograph had been taken in the sixties, it seemed that these people could have been frozen in their poses at any time over the previous hundred years. There was something timeless about them and their belief in the possibility of escape, twenty people in simple clothes dreaming of a utopia dedicated to the greater glory of the Lord. According to a small caption, the land for the community had been granted to them by the owner, himself a religious man, for the sum of $1 per acre per annum, paid in advance for the term of the lease. By moving so far north the congregation's privacy was virtually guaranteed. The nearest town was Eagle Lake to the north, but it was then already in decline, the mills closing and the population depleted. Tourism would eventually rescue the area but, in 1963, Faulkner and his followers would have been left largely to their own devices.

I turned my attention to the Fellowship's pamphlet. It was basically one long sales pitch designed to elicit the appropriate response from any readers: namely, to hand over all of the loose change they might have on their person at the time, plus any spare cash that might be making their bank statements look untidy. There was an interesting medieval illustration on the front, depicting what looked like the Last Judgment: horned demons tore at the naked bodies of the damned while God looked on from above, surrounded by a handful of presumably very relieved good folk. I noticed that the damned outnumbered the saved by about five to one. All things considered, those didn't look like very good odds on salvation for most of the people I knew.

Beneath the illustration was a quotation: “And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works (Revelation 20:12).”

I laid aside the pamphlet, kind of relieved that I'd bought Rolling Stone. I spent the next hour deciding who among the good and not-so-good of modern music was unlikely to be taking up salvation space in the next world. I had made a pretty comprehensive list when, shortly after one-thirty, a woman and a man came out of the Fellowship's offices. The man was Carter Paragon: I recognized the slicked-back dark hair, the shiny gray suit, and the unctuous manner.

The woman with him was tall and probably about the same age as Paragon; early forties, I guessed. She had straight dark brown hair that hung to her shoulders, and her body was hidden beneath a dark blue wool overcoat. Her face was hardly conventionally pretty; the jaw was too square, the nose too long, and the muscles at her jaws looked overdeveloped, as if her teeth were permanently gritted. She wore white pancake makeup and bright red lipstick like a graduate of clown school, although if she was, nobody was laughing. Her shoes were flat, but she was still at least five-ten or five-eleven and towered over Paragon by about four inches. The look that passed between them as they made their way toward Temple Street was strange. It seemed that Paragon deferred to her and I noticed that he stepped back quickly when she turned away from the door after checking the lock, as if afraid to get in her way.

I left $5 on the table, then walked out onto Main and strolled over to the Mustang. I had been tempted to tackle them on the street but I was curious to see where they were going. The red Explorer emerged onto Temple, then drove past me through the lot, heading south. I followed it at a distance until it came to Kennedy Memorial Drive, where it turned right onto West River Road. We passed Waterville Junior High and the Pine Ridge Golf Course before the Explorer took another right onto Webb Road. I stayed a couple of cars behind as far as Webb, but the Explorer was the only car to make the right. I hung back as much as I could and thought that I'd lost them when an empty stretch of road was revealed after I passed the airfield. I made a U-turn and headed back the way I had come, just in time to see the Explorer's brake lights glow about two hundred yards on my right. It had turned up Eight Rod Road and was now entering the driveway of a private house. I arrived in time to see the black steel gates close and the red body of the 4 x 4 disappearing around the side of a modest two-story white home with black shutters on the windows and black trim on the gable.

I parked in front of the gates, waited for about five minutes, and then tried the intercom on the gatepost. I noticed that there was another fish-eye lens built in so I covered it with my hand.

“Yes?” came Ms. Torrance's voice.

“UPS delivery,” I said.

There was silence for a few moments as Ms. Torrance tried to figure out what had gone wrong with her gate camera, before her voice told me that she'd be right out. I was kind of hoping that she might have let me in, but I settled for keeping my hand on the camera and my body out of sight. It was only when Ms. Torrance was almost at the gate that I stepped into view. She didn't look too pleased to see me, but then I couldn't imagine her looking too pleased to see anyone. Even Jesus would have received a frosty reception from Ms. Torrance.

“My name is Charlie Parker. I'm a private detective. I'd like to see Carter Paragon, please.” Those words were assuming the status of a mantra, with none of the associated calm.

Ms. Torrance's face was so hard it could have mined diamonds. “I've told you before, Mr. Paragon isn't available,” she said.

“Mr. Paragon certainly is elusive,” I replied. “Do you deflate him and put him in a box when he's not needed?”

“I'm afraid I have nothing more to say to you, Mr. Parker. Please go away, or I'll call the police. You are harassing Mr. Paragon.”

“No,” I corrected. “I would be harassing Mr. Paragon, if I could find him. Instead, I'm stuck with harassing you, Ms. Torrance. It is Ms. Torrance, isn't it? Are you unhappy, Ms. Torrance? You sure look unhappy. In fact, you look so unhappy that you're starting to make me unhappy.”

Ms. Torrance gave me the evil eye. “Go fuck yourself, Mr. Parker,” she said softly.

I leaned forward confidentially. “You know, God can hear you talk that way.”

Ms. Torrance turned on her heel and walked away. She looked a whole lot better from the back than she did from the front, which wasn't saying much.

I stood there for a time, peering through the bars like an unwanted party guest. Apart from the Explorer there was only one other vehicle in the driveway of the Paragon house, a beat-up blue Honda Civic. It didn't look like the kind of car a man of Carter Paragon's stature would drive, so maybe it was what Ms. Torrance used to get around when she wasn't chauffeuring her charge. I went back to my car, listened to a classical music slot on NPR, and continued reading Rolling Stone. I had just begun to wonder if I was optimistic enough to buy one hundred rubbers for $29.99 when a white Acura pulled up behind me. A big man dressed in a black jacket and blue jeans, with a black silk-knit tie knotted over his white shirt, strode up to my window and knocked on the glass. I rolled down the window, looked at his shield and the name beside his photo, and smiled. The name was familiar from the police report on Grace Peltier. This was Detective John Lutz, the investigating officer on the case, except Lutz was attached to CID III and operated out of Machias, while Waterville was technically in the territory of CID II.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice liked to say.

“Help you, Detective Lutz?” I asked.

“Can you step out of the car, please, sir?” he said, standing back as I opened the door. The thumb of his right hand hung on his belt, while the rest of his fingers pushed his jacket aside, revealing the butt of his.45 caliber H amp;K as he did so. He was six feet tall and in good condition, his stomach flat beneath his shirt. His eyes were brown and his skin was slightly tanned, his brown hair and brown mustache neatly trimmed. His eyes said he was about mid-forties, maybe older.

“Turn around, put your hands against the car, and spread your legs,” he told me.

I was about to protest when he gave me a sharp push, spinning me around and propelling me against the side of the car. His speed and his strength took me by surprise.

“Take it easy,” I said. “I still owe payments on the car.”

He patted me down, but he didn't find anything of note. I wasn't armed, which I think kind of disappointed him. All he got was my wallet.

“You can turn around now, Mr. Parker,” he said when he had finished. I found him looking at my license, then back at me a couple of times, as if trying to sow enough doubt about its validity to justify hauling me in.

“Why are you loitering outside Mr. Paragon's home, Mr. Parker?” he said. “Why are you harassing his staff?”

He didn't smile. His voice was low and smooth. He sounded a little like Carter Paragon himself, I thought.

“I was trying to make an appointment,” I said.

“Why?”

“I'm a lost soul, looking for guidance.”

“If you're trying to find yourself, maybe you should go look someplace else.”

“Wherever I go, there I am.”

“That's unfortunate.”

“I've learned to live with it.”

“Doesn't seem to me like you have much choice, but Mr. Paragon does. If he doesn't want to see you, then you should accept that and be on your way.”

“Do you know anything about Grace Peltier, Detective Lutz?”

“What's it to you?”

“I've been hired to look into the circumstances of her death. Someone told me that you might know something about it.” I let the double meaning hang in the air for a time, its ambiguity like a little time bomb ticking between us. Lutz's fingers tapped briefly on his belt, but it was the only indication he gave that his calm might be under threat.

“We think Ms. Peltier took her own life,” he said. “We're not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident.”

“Did you interview Carter Paragon?”

“I spoke to Mr. Paragon. He never met Grace Peltier.”

Lutz moved a little to his left. The sun was behind him and he stood so that it shone over his shoulder and directly into my eyes. I raised a hand to shade myself and his hand nudged for his gun again.

“Ah-ah,” he said.

“A little jumpy, aren't you, Detective?” I lowered my hand carefully.

“Mr. Paragon sometimes attracts a dangerous element,” he replied. “Good men often find themselves under threat for their beliefs. It's our duty to protect him.”

“Shouldn't that be the job of the police here in Waterville?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Mr. Paragon's secretary preferred to contact me. Waterville police have better things to be doing with their time.”

“And you don't?”

He smiled for the first time. “It's my day off, but I can spare a few minutes for Mr. Paragon.”

“The law never rests.”

“That's right, and I sleep with my eyes open.” He handed my wallet back to me. “You be on your way, now, and don't let me see you around here again. You want to make an appointment with Mr. Paragon, then you contact him during business hours, Monday to Friday. I'm sure his secretary will be happy to help you.”

“Your faith in her is admirable, Detective.”

“Faith is always admirable,” he replied, then started to walk back to his car.

I had pretty much decided that I didn't like Detective Lutz. I wondered what would happen if he was goaded. I decided to find out.

“Amen,” I said. “But if it's all the same to you, I'd prefer to stay here and read my magazine.”

Lutz stopped, then walked quickly back to me. I saw the punch coming, but I was against the car and all I could do was curl to one side to take the blow to my ribs instead of my stomach. He hit me so hard I thought I heard a rib crack, the pain lancing through my lower body and sending shock waves right to the tips of my toes. I slid down the side of the Mustang and sat on the road, a dull ache spreading across my stomach and into my groin. I felt like I was going to vomit. Then Lutz reached down and applied pressure from his thumbs and forefingers just below my ears. He was using pain compliance techniques and I yelped in agony as he forced me to rise.

“Don't mock me, Mr. Parker,” he said. “And don't mock my faith. Now get in your car and drive away.”

The pressure eased. Lutz walked over to his car and sat on the hood, waiting for me to leave. I looked over at the Paragon house and saw a woman standing at an upstairs window, watching me. Before I got back into the car, I could have sworn that I saw Ms. Torrance smile.

Lutz's white Acura stayed behind me until I left Waterville and headed north on I-95, but the pain and humiliation I felt meant that the memory of him was with me all the way to Ellsworth. The Hancock County Field Office, home of Troop J of the state police, had dealt with the discovery of Grace Peltier's body. It was a small building on U.S. 1, with a pair of blue state trooper cars parked outside. A sergeant named Fortin told me that her body had been found by Trooper Voisine on a site named Acadia Acres, which was scheduled to be developed for new housing. Voisine was out on patrol but Fortin told me that he'd contact him and ask him to meet me at the site. I thanked him, then followed his directions north until I came to Acadia Acres.

A company called Estate Management was advertising it as the future setting for “roads and views,” although currently there were only rutted tracks and the main view was of dead or fallen trees. There was still some tape blowing in the wind where Grace's car had been found, but that apart, there was nothing to indicate that a young woman's life had come to an end in this place. Still, when I looked around, something bothered me: I couldn't see the road from where I was standing. I went back to the Mustang and drove it up the track until it was in more or less the same position as Grace's car must have occupied. I turned on the lights, then walked down to the road and looked back.

The car still wasn't visible, and I couldn't see its lights through the trees.

As I stood by the roadside, a blue cruiser pulled up beside me and the trooper inside stepped out.

“Mr. Parker?” he asked.

“Trooper Voisine?” I extended a hand and he took it.

He was about my height and age, with receding hair, an “aw shucks” smile, and a small triangular scar on his forehead. He caught me looking at it and reached up to rub it with his right hand.

“Lady hit me on the head with a high-heeled shoe after I pulled her over for speeding,” he explained. “I asked her to step from the car, she stumbled, and when I reached over to help her I caught her heel in my forehead. Sometimes it just don't pay to be polite.”

“Like they say,” I said, “shoot the women first.”

His smile faltered a little, then regained some of its brightness.

“You from away?” he asked.

“From away.” I hadn't heard that phrase in quite some time. Around these parts, “from away” meant any place more than a half-hour's drive from wherever you happened to be standing at the time. It also meant anyone who couldn't trace a local family connection back at least a hundred years. There were people whose grandparents were buried in the nearest cemetery who were still regarded as “from away,” although that wasn't quite as bad as being branded a “rusticator,” the locals' favorite term of abuse for city folks who came Down East in order to get in touch with country living.

“Portland,” I answered.

“Huh.” Voisine sounded unimpressed. He leaned against his car, removed a Quality Light from a pack in his shirt pocket, then offered the pack to me. I shook my head and watched as he lit up. Quality Lights: he'd have been better off throwing the cigarettes away and trying to smoke the packaging.

“You know,” I said, “if we were in a movie, smoking a cigarette would automatically brand you as a bad guy.”

“Is that so?” he replied. “I'll have to remember that.”

“Take it as a crime stopper's tip.”

Somehow, largely through my own efforts, the conversation appeared to have taken a slightly antagonistic turn. I watched while Voisine appraised me through a cloud of cigarette smoke, as if the mutual dislike we instinctively felt had become visible between us.

“Sergeant says you want to talk to me about the Peltier woman,” said Voisine at last.

“That's right. I hear you were the first on the scene.”

He nodded. “There was a lot of blood, but I saw the gun in her hand and thought: suicide. First thing I thought, and it turns out I was right.”

“From what I hear, the verdict may still be open.”

He stared at me, then shrugged. “Did you know her?” he asked.

“A little,” I replied. “From way back.”

“I'm sorry.” He didn't even try to put any emotion into the words.

“What did you do after you found her?”

“Called it in, then waited.”

“Who arrived after you?”

“Another patrol, ambulance. Doc pronounced her dead at the scene.”

“Detectives?”

He flicked his head back like a man who suddenly realizes he has left out something important. It was a curiously theatrical gesture.

“Sure. CID.”

“You remember his name?”

“Lutz. John Lutz.”

“He get here before, or after, the second patrol?”

Voisine paused. “Before,” he said at last.

“Must have got here pretty fast,” I said, keeping my tone as neutral as possible.

Voisine shrugged again. “Guess he was in the area.”

“Guess so,” I said. “Was there anything in the car?”

“I don't understand, sir.”

“Purse, suitcase, that kind of thing?”

“There was a bag with a change of clothes and a small purse with make-up, a wallet, keys.”

“Nothing else?”

Something clicked in Voisine's throat before he spoke.

“No.”

I thanked him and he finished off his cigarette, then tossed the butt on the ground, stamping it out beneath his heel. Just as he was about to get back into his car I called to him.

“Just one more thing, Trooper,” I said.

I walked down to join him. He paused, half in and half out of the car, and stared at me.

“How did you find her?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how did you see the car from the road? I can't see my car from here and it's parked in pretty much the same spot. I'm just wondering how you came to find her, seeing as how she was hidden by the trees.”

He said nothing for a time. The smile was gone now, and I wasn't sure what had replaced it. Trooper Voisine was a difficult man to read.

“We get a lot of speeding on this road,” he said at last. “I sometimes pull in here to wait. That's how I found her.”

“Ah,” I said. “That explains it. Thanks for your time.”

“Sure,” he replied. He closed the door and started the engine, then turned onto the road and headed north. I followed him out and made sure that I stayed in his mirror until he was gone from my sight.

There was little traffic on the road from Ellsworth to Bar Harbor as I drove through the gathering dusk of the early evening. The season had not yet begun, which meant that the locals still had the place pretty much to themselves. The streets were quiet, most of the restaurants were closed, and there was digging equipment on the site of the town's park, piles of earth now standing where there used to be green grass. Sherman's bookstore was still open on Main Street, and it was the first time that I had ever seen Ben amp; Bill's Chocolate Emporium empty. Ben amp; Bill's was even offering 50 percent off all candies. If they tried that after Memorial Day, people would be killed in the stampede.

The Acadia Pines Motel was situated by the junction of Main and Park. It was a pretty standard tourist place, probably operating at the lower end of the market. It consisted of a single two-story, L-shaped block painted yellow and white, numbering about forty rooms in total. When I pulled into the lot there were only two other cars parked and there seemed to be a kind of desperation about the ferocity with which the VACANCIES sign glowed and hummed. I stepped from the car and noticed that the pain in my side had faded to a dull ache, although when I examined my body in the dashboard light I could still see the imprint of Lutz's knuckles on my skin.

Inside the motel office, a woman in a pale blue dress sat behind the desk, the television tuned to a news show and a copy of TV Guide lying open beside her. She sipped from a Grateful Dead mug decorated with lines of dancing teddy bears, chipped red nail polish showing on her fingers. Her hair was dyed a kind of purple black and shined like a new bruise. Her face was wrinkled and her hands looked old, but she was probably no more than fifty-five, if that. She tried to smile as I entered, but it made her look as if someone had inserted a pair of fishhooks into the corners of her mouth and pulled gently.

“Hi,” she said. “Are you looking for a room?”

“No, thank you,” I replied. “I'm looking for Marcy Becker.”

There was a pause that spoke volumes. The office stayed silent but I could still hear her screaming in her head. I watched her as she ran through the various lying options open to her. You have the wrong place. I don't know any Marcy Becker. She's not here and I don't know where she is. In the end, she settled for a variation on the third choice.

“Marcy isn't here. She doesn't live here anymore.”

“I see,” I said. “Are you Mrs. Becker?”

That pause came again, then she nodded.

I reached into my pocket and showed her my ID. “My name is Charlie Parker, Mrs. Becker. I'm a private investigator. I've been hired to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of a woman named Grace Peltier. I believe Marcy was a friend of Grace's, is that correct?”

Pause. Nod.

“Mrs. Becker, when was the last time you saw Grace?”

“I don't recall,” she said. Her voice was dry and cracked, so she coughed and repeated her answer with only marginally more assurance. “I don't recall.” She took a sip of coffee from her mug.

“Was it when she came to collect Marcy, Mrs. Becker? That would have been a couple of weeks ago.”

“She never came to collect Marcy,” said Mrs. Becker quickly. “Marcy hasn't seen her in… I don't know how long.”

“Your daughter didn't attend Grace's funeral. Don't you think that's strange?”

“I don't know,” she said. I watched her fingers slide beneath the counter and saw her arm tense as she pressed the panic button.

“Are you worried about Marcy, Mrs. Becker?”

This time, the pause went on for what seemed like a very long time. When she spoke, her mouth answered no but her eyes whispered yes.

Behind me, I heard the door of the office open. When I turned, a short, bald man in a golf sweater and blue polyester pants stood before me. He had a golf club in his hand.

“Did I interrupt your round?” I asked.

He shifted the club in his hand. It looked like a nine iron. “Can I help you, mister?”

“I hope so, or maybe I can help you,” I said.

“He was asking about Marcy, Hal,” said Mrs. Becker.

“I can handle this, Francine,” her husband assured her, although even he didn't look convinced.

“I don't think so, Mr. Becker, not if all you've got is a cheap golf club.”

A rivulet of panic sweat trickled down from his brow and into his eyes. He blinked it away, then raised the club to shoulder height in a two-armed grip. “Get out,” he said.

My ID was still open in my right hand. With my left, I took one of my business cards from my pocket and laid it on the counter. “Okay, Mr. Becker, have it your way. But before I go, let me tell you something. I think someone may have killed Grace Peltier. Maybe you're telling me the truth, but if you're not, then I think your daughter has some idea who that person might be. If I could figure that out, then so can whoever killed her friend. And if that person comes asking questions, then he probably won't be as nice about it as I am. You bear that in mind after I'm gone.”

The club moved forward an inch or two. “I'm telling you for the last time,” he said, “get out of this office.”

I flipped my wallet closed, slipped it into my jacket pocket, then walked to the door, Hal Becker circling me with his golf club to keep some swinging distance between us. “I have a feeling you'll be calling me,” I said as I opened the door and stepped into the lot.

“Don't you bet on it,” replied Becker. As I started my car and drove away, he remained standing at the door, the golf club still raised, like a frustrated amateur with a huge handicap stuck in the biggest, deepest bunker in the world.

On the drive back to Scarborough I ran through what I had learned, which wasn't much. I knew that Carter Paragon was being kept under wraps by Ms. Torrance and that Lutz seemed to have more than a professional interest in keeping him that way. I knew that something about Voisine's discovery of Grace's body made me uneasy, and Lutz's involvement in that discovery made me uneasier still. And I knew that Hal and Francine Becker were scared. There were a lot of reasons why people might not want a private detective questioning their child. Maybe Marcy Becker was a porn star, or sold drugs to high school kids. Or maybe their daughter had told them to keep quiet about her whereabouts until whatever she was worried about had blown over. I still had Ali Wynn, Grace's Boston friend, to talk to, but already Marcy Becker was looking like a woman worth pursuing.

It seemed that Curtis Peltier and Jack Mercier were right to suspect the official version of Grace's death, but I also felt that everybody I had met over the past couple of days was either lying to me or holding something back. It was time to rectify that situation, and I had an idea where I wanted to start. Despite my tiredness, I took the Congress Street exit, then headed onto Danforth and pulled up in front of Curtis Peltier's house.

The old man answered the door wearing a nightgown and bedroom slippers. Inside, I could hear the sound of the television in the kitchen, so I knew I hadn't woken him.

“You find out something?” he asked as he motioned me into the hallway and closed the door behind me.

“No,” I replied, “but I hope to pretty soon.”

I followed him into the kitchen and took the same seat I had occupied the day before, while Peltier hit the mute button on the remote. He was watching Night of the Hunter, Robert Mitchum oozing evil as the psychotic preacher with the tattooed knuckles.

“Mr. Peltier,” I began, “why did you and Jack Mercier cease to be business partners?”

He didn't look away, but his eyes blinked closed for slightly longer than usual. When they opened again, he seemed tired. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, was it for business or personal reasons?”

“When you're in partnership with your friend, then all business is personal,” he replied. This time, he did look away when he said it.

“That's not answering the question.”

I waited for a further reply. The silence of the kitchen was broken-only by the sound of his breathing. On the screen to my left, two children drifted down the river on a small boat, lost in darkness.

“Have you ever been betrayed by a friend, Mr. Parker?” he asked at last.

Now it was my turn to flinch. “Once or twice,” I answered quietly.

“Which was it-once, or twice?”

“Twice.”

“What happened to them?”

“The first one died.”

“And the second?”

I heard my heart beating in the few seconds it took me to reply. It sounded impossibly loud.

“I killed him.”

“Either he betrayed you badly, or you're a harsh judge of men.”

“I was pretty tense, once upon a time.”

“And now?”

“I take deep breaths and count to ten.”

He smiled. “Does it work?”

“I don't know. I've never made it as far as ten.”

“I guess it don't, then.”

“I guess not. Do you want to tell me what happened between you and Jack Mercier?”

He shook his head. “No, I don't want to tell you, but I get the feeling you have your own ideas about what might have happened.”

I did, but I was as reluctant to say them out loud as Peltier was to tell me. Even thinking them in the company of this man who had lost his only child so recently seemed like an unforgivable discourtesy.

“It was personal, wasn't it?” I asked him softly.

“Yes, it was very personal.”

I watched him carefully in the lamplight, took in his eyes, the shape of his face, his hair, even his ears and his Grecian nose. There was nothing of him in Grace, nothing that I could recall. But there was something of Jack Mercier in her. I was almost certain of it. It had struck me most forcefully after I stood in his library and looked at the photographs on the wall, the images of the young Jack triumphant. Yes, I could see Grace in him, and I could recall Jack in her. Yet I wasn't certain, and even if it was true, to say it aloud would hurt the old man. He seemed to sense what I was thinking, and my response to it, because what he said next answered everything.

“She was my daughter, Mr. Parker,” he said, and his eyes were two deep wells of hurt and pride and remembered betrayal. “My daughter in every way that mattered. I raised her, bathed her, held her when she cried, collected her from school, watched her grow, supported her in all that she did, and kissed her good night every time she stayed with me. He had almost nothing to do with her, not in life. But now, I need him to do something for her and for me, maybe even for himself.”

“Did she know?”

“You mean, did I tell her? No, I didn't. But you suspected, and so did she.”

“Did she have contact with Jack Mercier?”

“He paid for her graduate research because I couldn't afford to. It was done through an educational trust he established, but I think it confirmed what Grace had always believed. Since the funding began, Grace had met him on a few occasions, usually at events organized by the trust. He also let her look at some books he had out at the house, something to do with her thesis. But the issue of her parentage was never discussed. We'd agreed on that: Jack, my late wife, and I.”

“You stayed together?”

“I loved her,” he said simply. “Even after what she'd done, I still loved her. Things were never the same because of it, but yes, we stayed together and I wept for her when she died.”

“Was Mercier married at the time of…” I allowed the sentence to peter out.

“The time of the affair?” he finished. “No, he met his wife a few years later, and they were married a year or so after that again.”

“Do you think she knew about Grace?”

He sighed. “I don't know, but I guess he must have told her. He's that kind of man. Hell, it was him who confessed to me, not my wife. Jack just had to relieve himself of the burden. He has all the weaknesses that come with a conscience, but none of the strengths.” It was the first hint of bitterness he had revealed.

“I have another question, Mr. Peltier. Why did Grace choose to research the Aroostook Baptists?”

“Because she was related to two of them,” he replied. He said it matter-of-factly, as if it had never occurred to him that it might be relevant.

“You didn't mention it before,” I said, keeping my voice even.

“I guess it didn't seem important.” His voice faltered and he sighed. “Or maybe I thought that if I told you that, I'd have to tell you about Jack Mercier and…” He waved a hand dispiritedly. “The Aroostook Baptists were what brought Jack Mercier and me together,” he began. “We weren't friends then. We met at a lecture on the history of Eagle Lake, first and last we ever attended. We went out of curiosity more than concern. My cousin was a woman called Elizabeth Jessop. Jack Mercier's second cousin was Lyall Kellog. Do any of those names mean anything to you, Mr. Parker?”

I thought back to the newspaper report the previous day and the picture of the assembled families taken before they departed for northern Aroostook.

“Elizabeth Jessop and Lyall Kellog were members of the Aroostook Baptists,” I replied.

“That's right. In a way, Grace had links with both of them through Jack and me. That's why she was so interested in their disappearance.” He shook his head. “I'm sorry. I should have been open with you from the start.”

I rose and put my hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently.

“No,” I replied. “I'm sorry that I had to ask.”

I released my hold on him and moved toward the door, but his hand reached out to stop me.

“You think that her death has something to do with the bodies in the north?” Seated before me, he seemed very small and frail. I felt a strange kind of empathy with him; we were two men who had been cursed to outlive our daughters.

“I don't know, Mr. Peltier.”

“But you'll keep looking? You'll keep looking for the truth?”

“I'll keep looking,” I assured him.

I could hear again the soft rattle of his breathing as I opened the door and stepped out into the night. When I looked back he was still seated, his head down, his shoulders shaking gently with the force of his tears.

5

CURTIS PELTIER'S CONFESSION not only explained a great deal about Jack Mercier's actions; it also made things a whole lot more difficult for me. The blood link between Mercier and Grace was bad news.

There was more bad news waiting for me when I got back to the Scarborough house. I couldn't tell why, exactly, but something seemed wrong with the place as soon as I pulled up in front of the door. At first I put it down to that feeling of dislocation you get when you return home after being away, however briefly, but it was more than that. It was as if someone had taken the house and shifted it slightly on its axis, so that the moonlight no longer shone on it in quite the way that it once had and the shadows fell differently along the ground. The smell of gas from the mailbox served as a reminder of what had taken place that morning. Spiders in the mailbox was bad enough, but I wasn't sure that I could handle recluses in my home.

I approached the door, opened the screen, and tested the lock, but it remained secure. I inserted the key and opened the front door, expecting to see some scene of desolation before me, but there was nothing at first. The house was quiet and the doors stood slightly ajar to allow the flow of air through the rooms. In the hallway, an old coat stand that I used for keeping mail and as a place to lay my keys had been pulled slightly away from the wall. I could see the clear marks on the floor where the legs had once stood, now slightly tarnished with speckles of dust. In the living room, I had the same sensation, as if someone had gone through my house and moved everything marginally out of kilter. The couch and chairs had been lifted, then imperfectly replaced. In the kitchen, crockery had been shifted, foodstuffs in the fridge removed and then returned in a haphazard manner. Even the sheets on my bed were tossed, the top sheet pulled loose at the end. I went to my desk at the back of the living room, and thought I knew then what they had come for.

The copy of the file on the case had been taken from me.

I spent the next hour doing something that was unexpected but, upon reflection, natural. I went through the house, cleaning it, vacuuming and brushing, dusting and polishing. I took the sheets from my bed and threw them in a laundry bag, along with the small selection of clothes in my closet. Then I washed all of the cups and plates, the knives and forks, in boiling water and left them on the draining board. By the time I had finished, sweat was running down my face, my hands and face were filthy, and my clothes were stuck to my back, but I felt that I had reclaimed my space a little from those who had intruded upon it. Had I not done so, everything in my house would have felt tarnished by their presence.

When I had showered and changed into the last of the clothes in my overnight bag, I tried calling Curtis Peltier's house, but there was no reply. I wanted to warn him that whoever had searched my house might try to do the same to his, but his machine clicked on. I left a message, asking him to call me.

I drove down to Oak Hill and dropped off my laundry, then turned back and headed for the Kraft Mini-Storage on Gorham Road, close by my house. I used my key to open one of the storage bays I kept there, still filled with some old possessions of my grandfather's, along with items I had kept from the Brooklyn home I had shared briefly with Susan and Jennifer. In the bright light, I sat on the edge of a packing crate and went through the police reports one by one, concentrating in particular on those prepared by Lutz as the detective responsible for the investigation into Grace Peltier's death. His involvement in the case didn't fill me with a great sense of reassurance, but I could still find nothing in his reports to justify my suspicions of him. He had done a perfectly adequate job, even to the extent of interviewing the elusive Carter Paragon.

When I returned to the house, I went to my bedroom and removed an eighteen-inch section of the baseboard from behind the chest of drawers. I took a bundle wrapped in oilcloth from out of the gap I had made. Two other similar items, one larger, one smaller, also lay inside, but I didn't touch them. I took the bundle into the kitchen, lay a newspaper on the table, and unwrapped the gun.

It was a Third Generation Smith amp; Wesson Model 1076, a 10-millimeter model developed especially for the FBI. I had owned a similar model for a year, until I lost it in a lake in northern Maine while running for my life. In some ways I had been glad to see the last of that gun. I had done terrible things with it, and it had come to represent all that was worst in me.

Yet two weeks after I lost it, a new 1076 had arrived for me, sent by Louis and delivered by one of his emissaries, a huge black man in a Klan Killer T-shirt. Louis called me an hour or two after its delivery.

“I don't want it, Louis,” I told him. “I'm sick of guns, and especially this gun.”

“You feel that way now, but this your gun,” he said. “You used it because you had to use it, and you was good with it. Maybe a day will come when you be glad you have it.”

Instead of throwing it away, I had wrapped it in oilcloth. I did the same thing with my father's.38 Colt Detective Special and a 9-millimeter Heckler amp; Koch semiautomatic, for which I didn't have a permit. Then I had cut away part of the baseboard and placed the guns safely in the space I had made for them. Out of sight, out of mind.

Now I released the magazine, using the catch at the left side of the butt. I pulled back the slide in case there was a round in the chamber, still sticking to the old safety routine. I inspected the chamber through the ejection port, then released the slide and pulled the trigger. For the next thirty minutes I cleaned and oiled the gun, then loaded it and sighted at the door. Even fully loaded, it weighed a little over two and a half pounds. I tested its lines with my thumb, ran my finger over the serial number on the left-hand side of the frame, and felt inexplicably afraid.

There is a dark resource within all of us, a reservoir of hurt and pain and anger upon which we can draw when the need arises. Most of us rarely, if ever, have to delve too deeply into it. That is as it should be, because dipping into it costs, and you lose a little of yourself each time, a small part of all that is good and honorable and decent about you. Each time you use it you have to go a little deeper, a little further down into the blackness. Strange creatures move through its depths, illuminated by a burning light from within and fueled only by the desire to survive and to kill. The danger in diving into that pool, in drinking from that dark water, is that one day you may submerge yourself so deeply that you can never find the surface again. Give in to it and you're lost forever.

Looking at the gun, feeling the power of it, its base, unarguable lethality, I saw myself standing at the verge of those dark waters and felt the burning on my skin, heard the cool lapping of the waves calling me to fall into their depths. I did not look down, for fear of what I might see reflected on the surface.

In an effort to pull myself away, I rose and checked my messages. There was one from Rachel phoning to say “Hi.” I returned her call immediately, and she picked up on the second ring.

“Hey, you,” she said. “I got those tickets for the Wang.”

“Great.”

“That doesn't sound very enthusiastic.”

“I haven't had such a good day. I got assaulted by a policeman for mocking his belief system, and someone threatened to take my head off with a nine iron.”

“And you're usually so naturally charming,” she said, before her voice grew serious. “You want to tell me what's going on?”

I told her a little of what I knew, or suspected, so far. I didn't mention Marcy Becker, Ali Wynn, or the two policemen. I didn't like talking about it over the phone, or in a house so recently violated by strangers.

“Are you going to continue with this?”

I paused before answering. Beside me, the Smith amp; Wesson gleamed dully in the moonlight.

“I think so,” I answered quietly.

She sighed. “Guess I should cancel those tickets, then.”

“No, don't do that.” At that moment I wanted to be with Rachel more than anything else in the world, and anyway, I still had to talk to Ali Wynn. “We'll meet up, as arranged.”

“You're sure?”

“Never been more sure of anything.”

“Okay, then. You know I love you, Parker, don't you?” She had taken to calling me Parker sometimes, simply because nobody else close to me ever called me that.

“I love you too.”

“Good. Then take care of your damned self.”

And with that she hung up.

The second message on the machine was distinctly unusual.

“Mr. Parker,” said a male voice, “my name is Arthur Franklin. I am an attorney. I have a client who is anxious to speak with you.” Arthur Franklin sounded kind of nervous, as if there was somebody standing in the shadows behind him brandishing a length of rubber hose. “I'd appreciate it if you'd call me as soon as you can.”

He'd left a home telephone number, so I called him back. When I told him who I was, relief burst from him like air from a punctured tire. He must have said “thank you” three times in as many seconds.

“My client's name is Harvey Ragle,” he explained, before I had a chance to say anything further. “He's a filmmaker. His studio and distribution arm is in California but he has recently come to live and work in Maine. Unfortunately, the state of California has taken issue with the nature of his art and extradition proceedings are now in train. More to the point, certain individuals outside the law have also taken some offense at Mr. Ragle's art, and my client now believes that his life is in danger. We have a preliminary hearing tomorrow afternoon at the federal courthouse, after which my client will be available to talk to you.”

He came up for air at last, giving me an opportunity to interrupt.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Franklin, but I'm not sure that your client is my concern, and I'm not taking on any new cases.”

“Oh no,” replied Franklin. “You don't understand. This is not a new case, this is in the nature of assistance with your current case.”

“What do you know about my caseload?”

“Oh dear,” said Franklin. “I knew this wasn't a good idea. I told him, but he wouldn't listen.”

“Told whom?”

Franklin let out a deep breath that quivered on the verge of tears. Perry Mason he wasn't. Somehow, I got the feeling that Harvey Ragle was going to be getting some California sunshine in the near future.

“I was told to call you,” continued Franklin, “by a certain individual from Boston. He's in the comic book business. I think you know the gentleman to whom I am referring.”

I knew the gentleman. His name was Al Z, and for all intents and purposes he ran the Boston mob from above a comic book store on Newbury Street.

Suddenly I was in real trouble.

6

THE SUN SHONE BRIGHTLY through my windows when I awoke, the thin material of the curtains speckled with thousands of tiny points of light. I could hear the buzzing of bees, attracted by the trilliums and hepaticas growing at the end of my yard and the pink buds of the single wild apple tree that marked the start of my driveway.

I showered and dressed, then took my training bag and headed into One City Center to work out for an hour. In the lobby I passed Norman Boone, one of the ATF agents based in Portland, and nodded a hello. He nodded back, which was something, Boone ordinarily being about as friendly as a cat in a bag. The feds, the U.S. marshals, and the ATF all occupied offices at One City Center, which was the kind of knowledge that made you feel pretty safe and secure while using the gym, as long as some freak with a grudge against the government didn't get it into his head to make his mark on the world with a van load of Semtex.

I tried to concentrate on my workout but found myself distracted by the events of the past days. Thoughts of Lutz and Voisine and the Beckers flashed through my mind, and I was conscious of the Smith amp; Wesson, in its Milt Sparks Summer Special holster, which now lay in my locker. I was also acutely aware that Al Z was taking an interest in my affairs, which, on the “Good Things That Can Happen to a Person” scale, registered somewhere between contracting leprosy and having the IRS move into your house.

Al Z had arrived in Boston in the early nineties, following some fairly successful FBI moves against the New England mob involving video and tape surveillance and a small army of informants. While Action Jackson Salemme and Baby Shanks Manocchio (of whom it was once said that if there were any flies on him, they were paying rent) ostensibly jostled for control of the outfit, each dogged by surveillance and whispered rumors that one or both of them could be informing for the feds, Al Z tried to restore stability behind the scenes, dispensing advice and impartial discipline in roughly equal measures. His formal position in the hierarchy was kind of nebulous, but according to those with more than a passing interest in organized crime, Al Z was the head of the New England operation in everything but name. Our paths had crossed once before, with violent repercussions; since then I'd been very careful where I walked.

After I left the gym I headed up Congress to the library of the Maine Historical Society, where I spent an hour going through whatever they had on Faulkner and the Aroostook Baptists. The file was close at hand and still warm from the latest round of media photocopying, but it contained little more than sketchy details and yellowed newspaper clippings. The only article of any note came from an edition of Down East magazine, published in 1997. The author was credited only as “G.P.” A call to Down East's office confirmed that the contributor had been Grace Peltier.

In what was probably a dry run for her thesis, Grace had gathered together details of the four families and a brief history of Faulkner's life and beliefs, most of it accumulated from unpublished sermons he had given and the recollections of those who had heard him preach.

To begin with, Faulkner was not a real minister; instead, he appeared to have been “ordained” by his flock. He was not a pre-millenarian, one of those who believe that chaos on earth is an indication of the imminence of the Second Coming and that the faithful should therefore do nothing to stand in its way. Throughout his preaching, Faulkner had shown an acute awareness of earthly affairs and encouraged his followers to stand against divorce, homosexuality, liberalism, and just about anything else the sixties were likely to throw up. In this he showed the influence of the early Protestant thinker John Knox, but Faulkner was also a student of Calvin. He was a believer in predestination: God had chosen those who were saved before they were even born, and it was therefore impossible for people to save themselves, no matter what good deeds they did on earth. Faith alone led to salvation; in this case, faith in the Reverend Faulkner, which was seen to be a natural consequence of faith in God. If you followed Faulkner, you were one of the saved. If you rejected him, then you were one of the damned. It all seemed pretty straightforward.

He adhered to the Augustinian view, popular among some fundamentalists, that God intended his followers to build a “City on the Hill,” a community dedicated to his worship and greater glory. Eagle Lake became the site of his great project: a town of only six hundred souls that had never recovered from the exodus provoked by World War II, when those who came back from the war opted to remain in the cities instead of returning to the small communities in the north; a place with one or two decent roads and no electricity in most of the houses that didn't come from private generators; a community where the meat store and dry goods store had closed in the fifties; where the town's main employer, the Eagle Lake Lumber Mill, which manufactured hardwood bowling pins, had gone bankrupt in 1956 after only five years in operation, only to stagger on in various guises until finally closing forever in 1977; a hamlet of mostly French Catholics, who regarded the newcomers as an oddity and left them to their own devices, grateful for whatever small sums they spent on seeds and supplies. This was the place Faulkner chose, and this was the place in which his people died.

And if it seems strange that twenty people could just arrive somewhere in 1963 and be gone less than a year later, never to be seen again, then it was worth remembering that this was a big state, with one million or so people scattered over its 33,000 square miles, most of it forest. Whole New England towns had been swallowed up by the woods, simply ceasing to exist. They were once places with streets and houses, mills and schools, where men and women worked, worshiped, and were buried, but they were now gone, and the only signs that they had ever existed were the remnants of old stone walls and unusual patterns of tree growth along the lines of what were formerly roads. Communities came and went in this part of the world; it was the way of things.

There was a strangeness to this state that was sometimes forgotten, a product of its history and the wars fought upon the land, of the woods and their elemental nature, of the sea and the strangers it had washed up on its shores. There were cemeteries with only one date on each headstone in communities founded by Gypsies, who had never officially been born yet had died as surely as the rest. There were small graves set apart from family plots, where illegitimate children lay, the manner of their passing never questioned too deeply. And there were empty graves, the stones above them monuments to the lost, to those who had drowned at sea or gone astray in the woods and whose bones now lay beneath sand and water, under earth and snow, in places that would never be marked by men.

My fingers smelled musty from turning the yellowed clippings, and I found myself rubbing my hands on my trousers in an attempt to rid myself of the odor. Faulkner's world didn't sound like any that I wanted to live in, I thought as I returned the file to the librarian. It was a world in which salvation was taken out of our hands, in which there was no possibility of atonement; a world peopled by the ranks of the damned, from whom the handful to be saved stood aloof. And if they were damned, then they didn't matter to anyone; whatever happened to them, however awful, was no more or less than they deserved.

As I headed back to my house, a UPS truck shadowed me from the highway and pulled up behind me as I entered the drive. The deliveryman handed me a special delivery parcel from the lawyer Arthur Franklin, while casting a wary glance at the blackened mailbox.

“You got a grudge against the mailman?” he asked.

“Junk mail,” I explained.

He nodded without looking at me as I signed for the package. “It's a bitch,” he agreed, before hurrying into his truck and driving quickly onto the road.

Arthur Franklin's package contained a videotape. I went back to the house and put the tape in my VCR. After a few seconds some cheesy easy-listening music began to play and the words Crushem Productions presents appeared on the screen, followed by the title, A Bug's Death, and a director's credit for one “Rarvey Hagle.” Let the Orange County prosecutor's office chew on that little conundrum for a while.

For the next thirty minutes I watched as women in various stages of undress squashed an assortment of spiders, roaches, mantids, and small rodents beneath their high-heeled shoes. In most cases, the bugs and mice seemed to have been glued or stapled to a board and they struggled a lot before they died. I fast-forwarded through the rest, then ejected the tape and considered burning it. Instead I decided to give it right back to Arthur Franklin when I met him, preferably by jamming it into his mouth, but I still couldn't understand why Al Z had put Franklin and his client in touch with me in the first place, unless he thought my sex life might be getting a little staid.

I was still wondering while I made a pot of coffee, poured a cup, and took it outside to drink at the tree stump that my grandfather, years before, had converted into a table by adding a cross section of an oak to it. I had an hour or so to kill before I was due to meet with Franklin and I found that sitting at the table, where my grandfather and I used to sit together, sometimes helped me to relax and think. The Portland Press Herald and The New York Times lay beside me, the pages gently rustling in the breeze.

My grandfather's hands had been steady when he made this rude table, planing the oak until it was perfectly flat, then adding a coat of wood protector to it so that it shined in the sun. Later, those hands were not so still and he had trouble writing. His memory began to fail him. A sheriff's deputy, the son of one of his old comrades on the force, brought him back to the house one evening after he found him wandering down by the Scarborough cemetery on Old County Road, searching fruitlessly for the grave of his wife, so I hired a nurse for him.

He was still strong in body; each morning, he would do pushups and bench presses. Sometimes he would do laps around the yard, running gently but consistently until the back of his T-shirt was soaked in sweat. He would be a little more lucid for a time after that, the nurse would tell us, before his brain clouded once again and the cells continued to blink out of existence like the lights of a great city as the long night draws on. More than my own father and mother, that old man had guided me and tried to shape me into a good man. I wondered if he would have been disappointed at the man I had become.

My thoughts were disturbed by the sound of a car pulling into my drive. Seconds later a black Cirrus drew up at the edge of the grass. There were two people inside, a man driving and a woman sitting in the passenger seat. The man killed the engine and stepped from the car, but the woman remained seated. His back was to the sun so he was almost a silhouette at first, thin and dark like a sheathed blade. The Smith amp; Wesson lay beneath the arts section of the Times, its butt visible only to me. I watched him carefully as he approached, my hand resting casually inches from the gun. The approaching stranger made me uneasy. Maybe it was his manner, his apparent familiarity with my property; or it could have been the woman who stared at me through the windshield, straggly gray brown hair hanging to her shoulders.

Or perhaps it was because I recalled this man eating an ice cream on a cool morning, his lips sucking busily away like a spider draining a fly, watching me as I drove down Portland Street.

He stopped ten feet from me, the fingers of his right hand unwrapping something held in the palm of his left, until two cubes of sugar were revealed. He popped them into his mouth and began to suck, then folded the wrapper carefully and placed it in the pocket of his jacket. He wore brown polyester trousers held up with a cheap leather belt, a once bright yellow shirt that had now faded to the color of a jaundice victim's face, a vile brown-and-yellow tie, and a brown check polyester jacket. A brown hat shaded his face, and now, as he paused, he removed it and held it loosely in his left hand, patting it against his thigh in a slow, deliberate rhythm.

He was of medium height, five-ten or so, and almost emaciated, his clothes hanging loosely on his body. He walked slowly and carefully, as if he were so fragile that a misstep might cause his leg to snap. His hair was wiry, a combination of red and gray through which patches of pink skin showed. His eyebrows were also red, as were the lashes. Dark brown eyes that were far too small for his face peered out from beneath strange hoods of flesh, as if the skin had been pulled down from his forehead and up from his cheeks, then stitched in place by the corners of his eyes. Blue red bags swelled up from below, so that his vision appeared to be entirely dependent on two narrow triangles of white and brown by the bridge of his nose. That nose was long and elongated at the tip, hanging almost to his upper lip. His mouth was very thin and his chin was slightly cleft. He was probably in his fifties, I thought, but I sensed that his apparent fragility was deceptive. His eyes were not those of a man who fears for his safety with every footstep.

“Warm today,” he said, the hat still slapping softly against his leg.

I nodded but didn't reply.

He inclined his head back in the direction of the road. “I see you had an accident with your mailbox.” He smiled, revealing uneven yellow teeth with a pronounced gap at the front, and I knew immediately that he had been responsible for the recluses.

“Spiders,” I replied. “I burned them all.”

The smile died. “That's unfortunate.”

“You seem to be taking it kind of personally.”

His mouth worked at the sugar lumps while his eyes locked on mine. “I like spiders,” he said.

“They certainly burn well,” I replied. “Now, can I help you?”

“I do hope so,” he said. “Or perhaps I can help you. Yes sir, I feel certain that I can help you.”

His voice had an odd nasal quality that flattened his vowels and made his accent difficult to place, a task complicated further by the formal locutions of his speech. The smile gradually reappeared but those hooded eyes failed to alter in response. Instead, they maintained a watchful, vaguely malevolent quality, as if some entity had taken over the body of this odd, dated-looking man, hollowing out his form and controlling his progress by looking through the empty sockets in his head.

“I don't think I need your help.”

He waggled a finger at me in disagreement, and for the first time, I got a good look at his hands. They were thin, absurdly so, and there was something insectlike about them as they emerged from the sleeves of his jacket. The middle finger seemed to be about five inches long and, in common with the rest of his digits, tapered to a point at the tip: not only the nail but the entire finger appeared to grow narrower and narrower. The fingernails themselves looked to be a quarter of an inch at their widest point and were stained a kind of yellow-black. There were patches of short red hair below each of the knuckles, gradually expanding to cover most of the back of his hand and disappearing in tufts beneath his sleeve. They gave him a strange, feral quality.

“Now, now, sir,” he said, his fingers waving the way an arachnid-will sometimes raise its legs when it finds itself cornered. Their movements appeared to be unrelated to his words or to the language of the rest of the body. They were like separate creatures that had somehow managed to attach themselves to a host, constantly probing gently at the world around them.

“Don't be hasty,” he continued. “I admire independence as much as the next man, indeed I do. It is a laudable attribute in a man, sir, a laudable attribute, make no mistake about that, but it can lead him to do reckless things. Worse, sir, worse; it can cause him to interfere with the rights of those around him, sometimes without him even knowing.” His voice assumed a tone of awe at the ways of such men, and he shook his head slowly. “There you are, living your own life as you see fit, and you are causing pain and embarrassment to others by doing so. It's a sin, sir, that's what it is, a sin.”

He folded his slim fingers across his stomach, still smiling, and waited for a response.

“Who are you?” I said. There was an element of awe in my own voice as well. He was comical yet sinister, like a bad clown.

“Permit me to introduce myself,” he said. “My name is Pudd, Mr. Pudd. At your service, sir.” He extended his right hand in greeting, but I didn't reach out to take it. I couldn't. It revolted me. A friend of my grandfather's had once kept a wolf spider in a glass tank and one day, on a dare from the man's son, I had touched its leg. The spider had shot away almost instantly, but not before I had felt the hairy, jointed nature of the thing. It was not an experience I wanted to repeat.

The hand hung in midair for a moment, and once again the smile faltered briefly. Then Mr. Pudd took back his hand, and his fingers scuttled inside his jacket. I eased my right hand a few inches to the left and took hold of the gun beneath the newspapers, my thumb flicking the safety off. Mr. Pudd didn't appear to notice the movement. At least, he gave no indication that he had, but I felt something change in his attitude toward me, like a black widow that believes it has cornered a beetle only to find itself staring into the eyes of a wasp. His jacket tightened around him as his hand searched and I saw the telltale bulge of his gun.

“I think I'd prefer it if you left,” I said quietly.

“Sadly, Mr. Parker, personal preference has nothing to do with this.” The smile faded, and Mr. Pudd's mouth assumed an expression of exaggerated sorrow. “If the truth be known, sir, I would prefer not to be here at all. This is an unpleasant duty, but one that I am afraid you have brought upon yourself by your inconsiderate actions.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I am talking about your harassment of Mr. Carter Paragon, your disregard for the work of the organization that he represents, and your insistence on attempting to connect the unfortunate death of a young woman with that same organization. The Fellowship is a religious body, Mr. Parker, with the rights accruing to such bodies under our fine Constitution. You are aware of the Constitution, are you not, Mr. Parker? You have heard of the First Amendment, have you not?”

Throughout this speech, Mr. Pudd's tone did not vary from one of quiet reasonableness. He spoke to me the way a parent speaks to an errant child. I made a note to add “patronizing” to “creepy” and “insectlike” where Mr. Pudd was concerned.

“That, and the Second Amendment,” I said. “It seems like you've heard of that one too.” I removed my hand from beneath the newspaper and pointed the gun at him. I was glad to see that my hand didn't shake.

“This is most unfortunate, Mr. Parker,” he said in an aggrieved tone.

“I agree, Mr. Pudd. I don't like people coming onto my property carrying guns, or watching me while I conduct my business. It's bad manners, and it makes me nervous.”

Mr. Pudd swallowed, took his hand from inside his jacket, and moved both hands away from his body. “I meant you no offense, sir, but the servants of the Lord are afflicted with enemies on all sides.”

“Surely God will protect you better than a gun?”

“The Lord helps those who help themselves, Mr. Parker,” he replied.

“I don't think the Lord approves of breaking and entering,” I said, and Mr. Pudd's eyebrow raised slightly.

“Are you accusing me of something?”

“Why, do you have something to confess?”

“Not to you, Mr. Parker. Not to you.”

Once again his fingers danced slowly in the air, but this time there appeared to be purpose in the movement and I wondered what it meant. It was only when I heard the car door open and the shadow of the woman advanced across the lawn that I knew. I stood quickly and moved back, raising the gun to shoulder height in a two-handed grip and aiming it at Mr. Pudd's upper body.

The woman approached from behind his left shoulder. She didn't speak, but her hand was inside her thigh-length black coat. She wore no makeup and her face was very pale. Beneath her coat she wore a black pleated skirt that hung almost to her ankles, and a simple white blouse unbuttoned at the top, with a black scarf knotted around her neck. There was something deeply unpleasant about her looks, an ugliness from within that had seeped through her pores and blighted her skin. The nose was too flat for the face, the eyes too big and too white, the lips strangely bloated. Her chin was weak and receded into layers of flesh at her neck. No muscles moved in her face.

Mr. Pudd turned his head slightly toward her but kept his eyes on me. “You know, my dear, I think Mr. Parker is frightened of us.”

The woman's expression didn't change. She just kept moving forward.

“Tell her to back off,” I said softly, but I found that it was I who was taking another step back.

“Or?” asked Mr. Pudd softly. “You won't kill us, Mr. Parker.” But he raised the fingers of his left hand in a halting gesture, and the woman stopped.

If Mr. Pudd's eyes were watchful, his essential malevolence clouded with a thin fog of good humor, his partner's eyes were like those of a doll, glassy and expressionless. They remained fixed on me and I realized that, despite the gun in my hand, I was the one in danger of harm.

“Take your hand out of your coat, slowly,” I told her, my aim now shifting from the man to the woman, then back again as I tried to keep them both under the gun. “And it better be empty when it appears.”

She didn't move until Mr. Pudd nodded once. “Do as he says,” he said. She responded immediately, taking her empty hand from her coat quickly but without any fear.

“Now tell me, Mr. Pudd,” I said, “just exactly who are you?”

“I represent the Fellowship,” he said. “I am asking you, on its behalf, to cease your involvement in this matter.”

“And if I don't?”

“Then we may have to take further action. We could involve you in some very expensive and time-consuming litigation, Mr. Parker. We have excellent lawyers. Of course, that is only one of the options open to us. There are others.” This time the warning was explicit.

“I see no reason for conflict,” I said, mimicking his own tone and mannerisms. “I simply want to find out what happened to Grace Peltier, and I believe Mr. Paragon could help me toward that end.”

“Mr. Paragon is occupied with the work of the Lord.”

“Things to do, people to fleece?”

“You are an irreverent man, Mr. Parker. Mr. Paragon is a servant of God.”

“It's hard to get good staff these days.” Mr. Pudd made a strange hissing noise, an audible release of the pent-up aggression I sensed within him.

“If he talks to me and answers my questions, then I'll leave him alone,” I said. “Live and let live, that's my motto.”

I grinned, but he didn't return the favor.

“With respect, Mr. Parker, I don't believe that is your motto.” His mouth opened a little wider, and he almost spit. “I don't believe that is your motto at all.”

I cocked the pistol. “Get off my property, Mr. Pudd, and take your chatterbox friend with you.”

That was a mistake. Beside him, the woman shifted to her left suddenly and made as if to spring at me, her left hand tensed like the talons of a hawk while her right hand made a move for her coat. I lowered the gun and fired a shot into the ground between Mr. Pudd's feet, sending a spray of dirt into the air and causing birds to scatter from the surrounding trees. The woman stopped as his hand shot out and gripped her arm.

“Take off your scarf, my dear,” he said, his eyes never leaving mine. The woman paused, then unknotted her black scarf and held it limply in her left hand. Her exposed neck was crisscrossed with scars, pale pink welts that had left her so badly mutilated that to allow them to remain uncovered would be to invite stares from every passerby.

“Open wide, dear,” said Mr. Pudd.

The woman's mouth opened, revealing small yellow teeth, pink gums, and a tattered red mass at the back of her throat that was all that remained of her tongue.

“Now sing. Let Mr. Parker hear you sing.”

She opened her mouth and her lips moved, but no sound came. Yet she continued to sing a song heard only in her own head, her eyes half-closed in ecstasy, her body swaying slightly in time to the unheard music, until Mr. Pudd raised his hand and she closed her mouth instantly.

“She used to have such a beautiful voice, Mr. Parker, so fine and pure. It was throat cancer that took it from her: throat cancer and the will of God. Perhaps it was a strange blessing, a visitation from the Lord sent to test her faith and confirm her on the one true path to salvation. In the end, I think it just made her love the Lord even more.”

I didn't share his faith in the woman. The rage inside her was palpable, a fury at the pain she had endured, the loss she had suffered. That wrath had consumed any love that once existed within her, and now she was forced to look beyond herself to feed it. The pain would never ease, but the burden could be made more bearable by inflicting a taste of it on others.

“But,” Mr. Pudd concluded, “I like to tell her it was because her voice made the angels jealous.”

I had to take his word for it. I didn't see anything else about her that might have aroused the envy of angels.

“Well,” I said, “at least she still has her looks.”

Mr. Pudd didn't respond but now real hatred appeared in his eyes. It was a passing thing, gone as quickly as a mayfly to be replaced with his habitual look of false good humor. But what had flickered briefly in his eyes burst into glorious, savage flame in those of the woman: in her eyes I saw churches burn, with the congregations still inside. Mr. Pudd seemed to sense the waves of contained violence rolling from her, because he turned and touched her cheek gently with the hairy back of one finger.

“My Nakir,” he whispered. “Hush.”

Her eyes fluttered briefly closed at the caress, and I wondered if they were lovers.

“Go back to the car, my dear. Our business here is concluded, for the present.” The woman looked at me once more, then walked away. Mr. Pudd seemed about to follow her, then stopped and turned back.

“You are unwise to pursue this. I advise you for the last time to cease your involvement in this affair.”

“Sue me,” I said.

But Mr. Pudd only shook his head. “No, it's gone far beyond that, I'm afraid. I fear we shall be seeing each other again, under less favorable circumstances for you.”

He raised his hands.

“I am going to reach into my pocket, Mr. Parker, for my business card.” Without waiting for a reply, he took a small silver case from the right-hand pocket of his jacket. He flipped open the case and removed a white business card, holding it gently by one corner. Once again, he extended his hand, but this time it didn't falter. He waited patiently until I was forced to reach for it. As I took it, he shifted his hand slightly and the tips of his fingers brushed against mine. Involuntarily, I shied away from the contact and Mr. Pudd nodded slightly, as if I had somehow confirmed a suspicion he had.

The card said only ELIAS PUDD in black Roman letters. There was no telephone number, no business address, no occupation. The back of the card was completely blank.

“Your card doesn't say a lot about you, Mr. Pudd,” I remarked.

“On the contrary, it says everything about me, Mr. Parker. I fear that you are simply not reading it correctly.”

“All it tells me is that you're either cheap or a minimalist,” I responded. “You're also irritating, but it doesn't say that on your card either.”

For the first time, Mr. Pudd truly smiled, his yellow teeth showing and his eyes lighting up. “Oh, but it does, in its way,” he said, and chuckled once. I kept the gun trained on him until he had climbed into the car and the strange pair had disappeared in a cloud of dust and fumes that seemed to taint the very sunlight that shone through it.

My fingers began to blister almost as soon as they had driven away. At first there was just a feeling of mild irritation but it quickly became real pain as small raised bumps appeared on my fingertips and the palm of my hand. I applied some hydrocortisone but the irritation persisted for most of the day, an intense, uncomfortable itching where Mr. Pudd's card, and his fingers, had touched my skin. Using tweezers, I placed the card in a plastic envelope, sealed it, and placed it on my hall table. I would ask Rachel to have someone take a look at it while I was in Boston.

7

I LEFT MY GUN BENEATH THE SPARE TIRE in the trunk of the Mustang before walking to the granite masonry bulk of the Edward T. Gignoux Courthouse at Newbury and Market. I passed through the metal detector, then climbed the marble stairs to courtroom 1, taking a seat in one of the chairs at the back of the court.

The last of the five rows of benches was filled with what, in less enlightened times, might have been referred to as the cast of a freak show. There were five or six people of extremely diminished stature, two or three obese women, and a quartet of very elderly females dressed like hookers. Beside them was a huge, muscular man with a bald head who must have been six-five and weighed in at three hundred pounds. All of them seemed to be paying a great deal of attention to what was going on at the front of the courtroom.

The court was already in session and a man I took to be Arthur Franklin was arguing some point of law with the judge. His client, it appeared, was wanted in California for a range of offenses, including copyright theft, animal cruelty, and tax evasion, and was about as likely to avoid a jail term as mayflies were to see Christmas. He was released on $50,000 bail and was scheduled to appear later that month before the same judge, when a final decision would be made on his extradition. Then everybody stood and the judge departed through a door behind his brown leather chair.

I walked up the center aisle, the muscular man close behind me, and introduced myself to Franklin. He was in his early forties, dressed in a blue suit, under which he was sweating slightly. His hair was startlingly black and the eyes beneath his bushy brows had the panic-stricken look of a deer faced with the lights of an approaching truck.

Meanwhile Harvey Ragle, who was seated beside Franklin, wasn't what I had expected. He was about forty and wore a neatly pressed tan suit, a clean, white, open-necked shirt, and oxblood loafers. His hair was brown and curly, cut close to his skull, and the only jewelry he wore was a gold Raymond Weil watch with a brown leather strap. He was freshly shaven and had splashed on Armani aftershave like it was being given away free. He rose from his seat and extended a well-manicured hand.

“Harvey Ragle,” he said. “CEO, Crushem Productions.” He smiled warmly, revealing startlingly white teeth.

“A pleasure, I'm sure,” I replied. “I'm sorry, I can't shake hands. I seem to have picked up something unpleasant.”

I lifted my blistered fingers and Ragle blanched. For a man who made his living by squashing small creatures, he was a surprisingly sensitive soul. I followed them both out of the courtroom, pausing briefly while the old ladies, the obese women, and the little people took turns hugging him and wishing him well, before we crossed into attorney conference room 223 beside courtroom 2. The huge man, whose name was Mikey, waited outside, his hands crossed before him.

“Protection,” explained Franklin as he closed the door behind us. We sat down at the conference table and it was Ragle who spoke first.

“You've seen my work, Mr. Parker?” he said.

“The crush video, Mr. Ragle? Yes, I've seen it.”

Ragle recoiled a little, like I'd just breathed garlic on him.

“I don't like that term. I make erotic films, of every kind, and I am a father to my actors. Those people in court today are stars, Mr. Parker, stars.”

“The midgets?” I asked.

Ragle smiled wistfully. “They're little people, but they have a lot of love to give.”

“And the old ladies?”

“Very energetic. Their appetites have increased rather than diminished with age.”

Good grief.

“And now you make films like the one your attorney sent me?”

“Yes.”

“In which people step on bugs.”

“Yes.”

“And mice.”

“Yes.”

“Do you enjoy your work, Mr. Ragle?”

“Very much,” he said. “I take it that you disapprove.”

“Call me a prude, but it seems kind of sick, besides being cruel and illegal.”

Ragle leaned forward and tapped me on the knee with his index finger. I resisted breaking it, but only just.

“But people kill insects and rodents every day, Mr. Parker,” he began. “Some of them may even derive a great deal of pleasure from doing so. Unfortunately, as soon as they admit to that pleasure and attempt to replicate it in some form, our absurdly censorious law enforcement agencies step in and penalize them. Don't forget, Mr. Parker, we put Reich in jail to die for selling his sex boxes from Rangeley, in this very state. We have a record of penalizing those who seek sexual gratification by unorthodox means.”

He sat back and smiled his bright smile.

I smiled back at him. “I believe it's not only the state of California that has strong feelings about the legitimacy of what you do.”

Ragle's veneer began to crumble and he seemed to grow pale beneath his tan.

“Er, yes,” he said. He coughed, then reached for a glass of water that was resting on the table before him. “One gentleman in particular seems to have serious objections to some of my more, um, specialized productions.”

“Who might that be?”

“He calls himself Mr. Pudd,” interjected Franklin.

I tried to keep my expression neutral.

“He didn't like the spider movies,” he added.

I could guess why.

Ragle's façade finally shattered completely, as if the mention of Pudd's name had finally brought home the reality of the threat he was facing. “He wants to kill me,” he whined. “I don't want to die for my art.”

So Al Z knew something about the Fellowship, and Pudd, and had seen fit to point me in Ragle's direction. It seemed that I had another good reason for going to Boston besides Rachel and the elusive Ali Wynn.

“How did he find out about you?”

Ragle shook his head angrily. “I have a new supplier, a man who provides me with rodents and insects and, when necessary, arachnids. It's my belief that he told this individual, this Mr. Pudd, about me.”

“Why would he do that?”

“To divert attention away from himself. I think Mr. Pudd would be just as angry with whoever sold me the creatures as he is with me.”

“So your supplier gave Pudd your name, then claimed not to know what you were planning to do with the bugs?”

“That is correct, yes.”

“What's the supplier's name?”

“Bargus. Lester Bargus. He owns a store in Gorham, specializing in exotic insects and reptiles.”

I stopped taking notes.

“You know the name, Mr. Parker?” asked Franklin.

I nodded. Lester Bargus was what people liked to call “two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag.” He was the kind of guy who thought it was patriotic to be stupid and took his mother to Denny's to celebrate Hitler's birthday. I recalled him from my time in Scarborough High, when I used to stand at the fence that marked the boundary of the football field, the big Redskins logo dominating the board, and get ready to face a beating. Those early months were the hardest. I was only fourteen and my father had been dead for two months. The rumors had followed us north: that my father had been a policeman in New York; that he had killed two people, a boy and a girl-shot them down dead, and they weren't even armed; that he had subsequently put his gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. They were made worse by the fact that they were true; there was no way of avoiding what my father had done, just as there was no way of explaining it. He had killed them, that was all. I don't know what he saw when he pulled the trigger on them. They were taunting him, trying to make him lose his temper with them, but they couldn't have known what they would cause him to do. Afterward my mother and I had run north, back to Scarborough, back to her father, who had once been a policeman himself, and the rumors had snapped at our heels like black dogs.

It took me a while to learn how to defend myself, but I did. My grandfather showed me how to block a punch and how to throw one back in a single controlled movement that would draw blood every time. But when I think back on those first months, I think of that fence, and a circle of young men closing in on me, and Lester Bargus with his freckles and his brown, square-cut hair, sucking spit back into his mouth after he had begun to drool with the joy of striking out at another human being from the security of the pack. Had he been a coyote, Lester Bargus would have been the runt that hangs at the margins of the group, lying down on its back when the stronger ones turned on it yet always ready to fall on the weak and the wounded when the frenzy struck. He tortured and bullied and came close to rape in his senior year. He didn't even bother to take his SATs; a new scale would have been needed to assess the depths of Bargus's ignorance.

I had heard that Bargus now ran a bug store in Gorham but it was believed to be merely a front for his other interest, which was the illegal sale of weapons. If you needed a clean gun quickly, then Lester Bargus was your man, particularly if your political and social views were so right wing they made the Klan look like the ACLU.

“Are there a lot of stores that supply bugs, Mr. Ragle?”

“Not in this state, no, but Bargus is also regarded as a considerable authority nationally. Collectors consult with him on a regular basis.” Ragle shuddered. “Although not, I should add, in person. Mr. Bargus is a particularly unpleasant individual.”

“And you're telling me all this because…?”

Franklin intervened. “Because my client is certain that Mr. Pudd will kill him if someone doesn't stop him first. The gentleman in Boston, who has acted as a conduit for some of my client's more mainstream products, believes that a case with which you are currently involved may impinge upon my client's interests. He suggested that any assistance we might be able to provide could only help our cause.”

“And all you have is Lester Bargus?”

Franklin shrugged unhappily.

“Has Pudd tried to contact you?”

“In a way. My client had been sequestered in a safe house in Standish. The house burned down; somebody threw an incendiary device through the bedroom window. Fortunately, Mr. Ragle was able to escape without injury. It was after that incident that we took Mikey on as security.”

I closed my notebook and stood up to leave. “I can't promise anything,” I said.

Ragle leaned toward me and gripped my arm. “If you find this man, Mr. Parker, squash him,” he hissed. “Squash him like a bug.”

I gently removed my arm from his grasp. “I don't think stiletto heels come that big, Mr. Ragle, but I'll bear it in mind.”

I drove over to Gorham that afternoon. It was only a couple of miles but it was still a wasted trip, as I knew it would be. Bargus was aging badly, his hair and teeth almost gone and his fingers stained yellow with nicotine. He wore a No New World Order T-shirt, depicting a blue United Nations helmet caught in the crosshairs of a sniper's sight. In his dimly lit store, spiders crouched in dirt-filled cases, snakes curled around branches, and the hard exoskeletons of cockroaches clicked as they crawled against one another. On the counter beside him a four-inch-long mantid squatted in a glass case, its spiked front legs raised before it. Bargus fed it a cricket, which skipped across the dirt at the bottom of the case as it tried vainly to evade destruction. The mantid turned its head to watch it, seemingly amused by its presumption, then set off in pursuit.

It took Bargus a few moments to recognize me as I approached the counter.

“Well, well,” he said. “Look what just rose to the lip of the bowl.”

“You're looking well, Lester,” I answered. “How do you stay so young and pretty?”

He scowled at me and picked at something jammed between two of his remaining teeth. “You a fag, Parker? I always thought you was queer.”

“Now, Lester, don't think I'm not flattered, but you're not really my type.”

“Huh.” He didn't sound convinced. “You here to buy something?”

“I'm looking for some information.”

“Out the door, turn right, and keep going till you hit the asshole of hell. Tell 'em I sent you.”

He went back to reading a book, which, judging from the illustrations, appeared to be a guide to making a mortar out of beer cans.

“That's no way to talk to an old high school buddy.”

“You ain't my buddy, and I don't like you being in my store,” he said without looking up from his book.

“Can I ask why?”

“People have a habit of dying around you.”

“You look hard enough, people have a habit of dying around everybody.”

“Maybe, 'cept around you they die a whole lot quicker and a whole lot more regular.”

“Then the sooner I leave, the safer you'll be.”

“I ain't holdin' you.”

I tapped lightly at the glass of the mantid case, directly in the insect's line of vision, and the triangular head drew back as it flinched. A mantid is the most humanlike of insects; it has its eyes arranged so that it can see forward, allowing it depth perception. It can see a certain amount of color, and it can turn its head to look over its “shoulder.” Also, like humans, it will eat just about anything it can subdue, from a hornet to a mouse. As I moved my finger, the mantid's head carefully followed the motion while its jaws chomped at the cricket. The top half of the cricket's body was already gone.

“Quit botherin' it,” said Bargus.

“That's quite a predator.”

“That bitch would eat you, she thought you'd stay still long enough.” He grinned, revealing his rotting teeth.

“I hear they can take a black widow.”

The beer can mortar book now lay forgotten before him. “I seen her do it.” Bargus nodded.

“Maybe she's not so bad after all.”

“You don't like spiders, you just walked into the wrong store.”

I shrugged. “I don't like them as much as some. I don't like them as much as Mr. Pudd.”

Lester's eyes suddenly returned to the page before him, but his attention remained focused on me.

“Never heard of him.”

“Ah, but he's heard of you.”

Lester looked up at me and swallowed. “The fuck you saying?”

“You gave him Harvey Ragle. You think that's going to be enough?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” In the warm, dank-smelling store, Lester Bargus began to sweat.

“My guess is that he'll take care of Ragle, then come back for you.”

“Get out of my store,” hissed Lester. He tried to make it sound menacing, but the tremor in his voice gave him away.

“Are spiders the only things you sold him, Lester? Maybe you helped him with some of his other needs, too. Is he a gun-lovin' man?”

His hands scrambled beneath the counter and I knew he was reaching for a weapon. I tossed my card on the counter and watched as he grabbed it with his left hand, crushed it in his palm, and threw it into the trash can. His right hand came up holding a shotgun sawed off at the stock. I didn't move.

“I've seen him, Lester,” I said. “He's a scary guy.”

Lester's thumb cocked the shotgun. “Like I said, I don't know what you're talking about.”

I sighed and backed away. “Your call, Lester, but I get the feeling that sooner or later, it's going to come back to haunt you.”

I turned my back on him and headed for the door. I had already opened it when he called my name.

“I don't want no trouble. Not from you, not from him, you understand?” he said.

I waited in silence. The struggle between his fear of saying nothing and the consequences of giving too much away was clear on his face.

“I never had no address for him,” he continued, hesitantly. “He'd contact me when he needed something, then pick it up his-self and pay in cash. Last time he came he was asking about Ragle, and I told him what I knew. You see him again, you tell him he's got no call to come bothering me.”

Confessing seemed to have restored some of his confidence, because his habitual ugly sneer returned. “And, I was you, I'd find me another line of work. The kind of fella you're asking about don't like being asked about, you get my meaning. The kind of fella you're asking about, he kills people get involved in his business.”

That evening I felt no desire to be in the house or to cook for myself. I secured all of the windows, placed a chain on the back door, and put a broken matchstick above the front door. If anyone tried to gain entry, I would know.

I drove into Portland and parked at the junction of Cotton and Forest in the Old Port, then walked down to Sapporo on Commercial Street, the sound of the sea in my ears. I ate some good teriyaki, sipped green tea, and tried to get my thoughts straight. My reasons for going to Boston were rapidly multiplying: Rachel, Ali Wynn, and now Al Z. But I still hadn't managed to corner Carter Paragon, I was still concerned about Marcy Becker, and I was sweating under my jacket since I couldn't take it off without exposing my gun.

I paid the check and left the restaurant. Across Commercial, crowds of kids lined up to get into Three Dollar Dewey's, the doorman checking IDs with the skepticism of a seasoned pro. The Old Port was buzzing, and noisy crowds congregated at the corner of Forest and Union, the edge of the main drag. I walked among them for a while, not wanting to be alone, not wanting to return to the house in Scarborough. I passed the Calabash Cigar Café and Gritty McDuff's, glancing down the pedestrian strip of Moulton Street as I passed.

The woman in the shadows was wearing only a pale summer dress patterned with pink flowers. Her back was to me, and her blond hair hung in a ponytail against the whiteness of her back, held in place by an aquamarine bow. Around me, traffic stopped and footsteps hung suspended, passersby frozen briefly in their lives. The only sound I heard was my own breath; the only movement I saw came from Moulton.

Beside the woman stood a small boy, and the woman's left hand was clasped gently over his right. He wore the same check shirt and short pants as he had on the day when I had first seen him on Exchange Street. As I watched, the woman leaned over and whispered something to him. He nodded and his head turned as he looked back at me, the single clear lens gleaming in the darkness. Then the woman straightened, released his hand, and began to walk away from us, turning right at the corner onto Wharf Street. When she left my sight it was as if the world around me released its breath, and movement resumed. I sprinted down Moulton, past the shape of the little boy. When I reached the corner the woman was just passing Dana Street, the street lamps creating pools of illumination through which she moved soundlessly.

“Susan.”

I heard myself call her name, and for a moment it seemed to me that she paused as if to listen. Then she passed from light into shade and was gone.

The boy was now sitting at the corner of Moulton, staring at the cobblestones. As I approached him he looked up, and his left eye peered curiously at me from behind his black-rimmed glasses. Dark tape had been wrapped inexpertly around the lens, obscuring the right eye. He was probably no more than eight years old, with light brown hair parted at one side and flicked loosely across his forehead. His pants were almost stiff with mud in places and his shirt was filthy. Most of it was obscured by the block of wood-maybe eighteen inches by five inches, and an inch thick-that hung from the rope around his neck. Something had been hacked into the wood in jagged, childish letters, probably with a nail, but the grooves were filled with dirt in places, conspiring with the darkness to make it almost impossible to read.

I squatted down in front of him. “Hi,” I said.

He didn't seem scared. He didn't look hungry or ill. He was just… there.

“Hi,” he replied.

“What's your name?” I asked.

“James,” he said.

“Are you lost, James?”

He shook his head.

“Then what are you doing out here?”

“Waiting,” he said simply.

“Waiting for what?”

He didn't reply. I got the feeling that I was supposed to know, and that he was a little surprised I didn't.

“Who was the lady you were with, James?” I asked.

“The Summer Lady,” he answered.

“Does she have a name?”

He waited for a moment or two before replying. When he did, all the breath seemed to leave my body and I felt light-headed, and afraid.

“She said you'd know her name.” Again he seemed puzzled, almost disappointed.

My eyes closed for an instant and I rocked back on my heels. I felt his hand on my wrist, steadying me, and the hand was cold. When I opened my eyes, he was leaning close to me. There was dirt caught between his teeth.

“What happened to your eye, James?” I asked.

“I don't remember,” he said.

I reached toward him and he released his grip on my wrist as I rubbed at the dirt and filth encrusted on the board. It fell to the ground in little clumps, revealing the words:

JAMES JESSOP

SINNER

“Who made you wear this, James?”

A small tear trickled from his left eye, then a second. “I was bad,” he whispered. “We were all bad.”

But the tears fell only from one eye, and only the dirt on his left cheek was streaked with moisture. My hands were trembling as I reached for his glasses. I took the frames gently in each hand and slowly removed them. He didn't try to stop me, his single visible eye regarding me with absolute trust.

And when I took the glasses away, a hole was revealed where his right eye had been, the flesh torn and burned and the wound dry as if it were an old, old injury that had long since stopped bleeding, or even hurting.

“I've been waiting for you,” said James Jessop. “We've all been waiting for you.”

I rose and backed away from him, the glasses dropping to the ground as I turned.

And I saw them all.

They stood watching me, men and women, young boys and girls, all with wooden boards around their necks. There were a dozen at least, maybe more. They stood in the shadows of Wharf Street and at the entrance to Commercial, wearing simple clothes, clothes designed to be worn on the land: pants that wouldn't tear at the first misstep in the dirt, and boots that would not let in the rain or be pierced by a stone.

KATHERINE CORNISH

SINNER

VYRNA KELLOG

SINNER

FRANK JESSOP

SINNER

BILLY PERRSON

SINNER

The others were farther back, their names on the boards harder to read. Some of them had wounds to their heads. Vyrna Kellog's skull had been split open, and the open wound extended almost to the bridge of her nose; Billy Perrson had been shot through the forehead; a flap of Katherine Cornish's skin hung forward from the back of her head, obscuring her left ear. They stood and regarded me, and the air around them seemed to crackle with a hidden energy.

I swallowed, but my throat was dry and the effort made it ache.

“Who are you?” I asked, but even as they faded away, I knew.

I stumbled backward, the bricks behind me cold against my body, and I saw tall trees and men wading through mud and bone. Water lapped against a sandbag levee, and animals howled. And as I stood there trembling, I closed my eyes tight and heard my own voice start to pray.

Please Lord, it said.

Please don't let this begin again.

8

THE NEXT DAY, I drove down to Boston in about two hours but got snarled up in the city's horrific traffic for almost another hour. They were calling Boston's never-ending roadworks “The Big Dig” and signs dotted around various large holes in the ground promised: It'll be worth it. If you listened hard enough, you could hear millions of voters hissing that it had better be.

Before I left, I called Curtis Peltier at home. He had been out to dinner with some friends the night before, he told me, and when he got back the police were at his house.

“Someone tried to break in the back door,” he explained. “Some kids heard the noise and called the police. Probably damn junkies from Kennedy Park or Riverton.”

I didn't think so. I told him about the missing notes.

“You think there was something important in them?”

“Maybe,” I replied, although I couldn't think what it might be. I suspected that whoever took them-Mr. Pudd or some other person as yet unknown-simply wanted to make things as difficult as possible for me. I told Curtis to look after himself and he assured me that he would.

Shortly before noon I reached Exeter Street, just off Commonwealth Avenue, and parked outside Rachel's building. She was renting in a four-story brownstone across the street from where Henry Lee Higginson, the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, once lived. On Commonwealth, people jogged and walked their dogs or sat on the benches and took in the traffic fumes. Close by, pigeons and sparrows fed before paying their respects to the statue of the sailor-historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who sat on his plinth with the vaguely troubled look of a man who has forgotten where he parked his car.

Rachel had given me my own key to the apartment, so I dumped my overnight bag, bought some fruit and bottled water in Deluca's Market at Fairfield, and headed up Commonwealth Avenue until I reached the Public Garden between Arlington and Charles. I drank my water, ate my fruit, and watched children playing in the sunlight and dogs chasing Frisbees. I wanted a dog, I thought. My family had always had them, my grandfather too, and I liked the idea of keeping a dog around the house. I guessed that I wanted the company, which made me wonder why I wasn't asking Rachel to move in with me. I thought that Rachel might have been wondering about it herself. Lately there seemed to be an edge to her voice when the subject came up, a new urgency to her probings. She had been patient for over fourteen months now, and I guessed that she was feeling the strain of being trapped in relationship limbo. That was my fault: I wanted her near me, yet I was still afraid of the potential consequences. She had almost died once because of me. I did not want to see her hurt again.

At 2 P.M. I took the Red Line out to Harvard and headed for Holyoke Street. Ali Wynn was due to finish her lunchtime shift at two-thirty and I'd left a message to say that I'd be coming by to talk to her about Grace. The red-brick building in which the restaurant was housed had ivy growing across its face and the upstairs windows were decked with small white lights. From the room below came the sound of tap dancers practicing their moves, their rhythms like the movements of fingers on the keys of an old Underwood typewriter.

A young woman of twenty-three or twenty-four stood on the steps of the building, adjusting a stud in her nose. Her hair was dyed a coal black, she wore heavy blue black makeup around her eyes, and her lipstick was so red it could have stopped traffic. She was very pale and very thin, so she couldn't have been a regular eater at her own restaurant. She looked at me with a mixture of expectancy and unease as I approached.

“Ali Wynn?” I asked.

She nodded. “You're the detective?”

“Charlie Parker.” She reached out and shook my hand, her back remaining firmly against the brickwork of the building behind her.

“Like the jazz guy?”

“I guess.”

“He was pretty cool. You listen to him?”

“No. I prefer country music.”

She wrinkled her forehead. “Guess your mom and dad had to be jazz fans to give you a name like that?”

“They listened to Glenn Miller and Lawrence Welk. I don't think they even knew who Charlie Parker was.”

“Do people call you Bird?”

“Sometimes. My girlfriend thinks it's cute. My friends do it to irritate me.”

“Must be kind of a drag for you.”

“I'm used to it.”

The deconstruction of my family's naming procedures seemed to make her a little less wary of me, because she detached herself from the wall and fell into step beside me. We walked down to the Au Bon Pain at Harvard Square, where she smoked four cigarettes and drank two espressos in fifteen minutes. Ali Wynn had so much nervous energy she made electrons seem calm.

“Did you know Grace well?” I asked when she was about halfway through cigarette number two.

She blew out a stream of smoke. “Sure, pretty well. We were friends.”

“Her father told me that she used to live with you and that she stayed with you sometimes even after she moved out.”

“She used to come down at weekends to use the library and I let her crash on my couch. Grace was fun. Well, she used to be fun.”

“When did she stop being fun?”

Ali finished number two and lit number three with a matchbook from the Grafton Pub. “About the time she started her thesis.”

“On the Aroostook Baptists?”

The cigarette made a lazy arc. “Whatever. She was obsessed with them. She had all of these letters and photographs belonging to them. She'd lie on the couch, put some mournful shit on the stereo, and stay like that for hours, just going through them over and over again. Can you get me another coffee?”

I did as I was asked. I figured that she wasn't going to run away until she'd finished her cigarette.

“You ever worry about the effects of too much caffeine?” I asked when I returned.

She tugged at her nose stud and smiled. “Nah, I'm hoping to smoke myself to death first.”

There was something very likable about Ali Wynn, despite the veneer of Siouxsie and the Banshees-era cool. The sunlight made her eyes sparkle and the right side of her mouth was permanently raised in an amused, faux-cynical grin. She was all front; the cigarette smoke didn't stay in her mouth long enough to give a gnat a nicotine buzz and her makeup was too carefully applied to be truly scary. I guessed that she probably inspired fear, lust, and irritation in her male classmates, all in roughly equal measure. Ali Wynn could have wrapped the world around her little finger if she'd had the self-confidence to do it. It would come, in time.

“You were telling me about Grace,” I prompted, as much to get myself back on track as Ali.

“Yeah, sure. There's not much more to tell. It was like the whole family history thing was draining her, sucking the life from her. It was all ‘Elizabeth’ this and ‘Lyall’ that. She became a real drag. She was obsessed by Elizabeth Jessop. I don't know, maybe she thought Elizabeth's spirit had entered into her or something.”

“Did she think Elizabeth was dead?”

Ali nodded.

“Did she say why?”

“She just had a feeling, that was all. Anyway, like I said, it was all getting too heavy. I told her she couldn't stay anymore because my roomie was complaining, which was, like, a total lie. That was in February. She stopped coming and we didn't really talk much between then and…” She let the end of the sentence hang, then stubbed the cigarette out angrily.

“I suppose you think I'm a bitch,” she said softly when the last trace of smoke had disappeared.

“No, I don't think you're a bitch at all.”

She didn't look at me, as if afraid that my expression might give the lie to my words. “I was going to go up to the funeral but… I didn't. I hate funerals. Then I was going to send a card to her dad-he was a nice old guy-but I didn't do that either.”

At last, she raised her eyes and I was only half-surprised to see that they were wet. “I prayed for her, Mr. Parker, and I can't remember the last time I ever prayed. I just prayed that she'd be okay and that whoever was on the other side-God, Buddha, Allah-would look after her. Grace was a good person.”

“I think she probably was,” I said, as she lit a final cigarette. “Did she take drugs?”

Ali shook her head vehemently. “No, never.”

“Apart from getting overinvolved with her thesis, did she seem depressed or anxious?”

“No more than any of us.”

“Was she seeing anyone?”

“She'd had a couple of flings, but nothing serious for at least a year. She would have told me.”

I watched her quietly for a time, but I knew she was telling the truth. Ali Wynn hadn't been in the car with Grace on the night that she died. More and more, Marcy Becker was looking like the most likely candidate. I sat back and examined the crowds entering and leaving the T, the tourists and locals with bags of wine and candies from Cardullos, Black Forest ham and exotic teas from Jackson's of Picadilly, bath salts and soaps from Origins. Grace should have been among them, I thought. The world was a poorer place for her passing.

“Has that helped you?” asked Ali. I could see that she wanted to leave.

“It's cleared a few things up.” I handed her my card, after writing my home telephone number on the back. “If you think of anything more, or if someone else comes around asking about Grace, maybe you'll give me a call.”

“Sure.” She picked up the card and placed it carefully in her purse. She was about to move away when she paused and placed her hand lightly on my arm.

“You think somebody killed her, don't you?” Her red lips were pressed tightly together but she couldn't control the trembling of her chin.

“Yes,” I answered. “I think somebody did.”

Her grip tightened momentarily and I felt the heat of her penetrating to my skin. “Thanks for the coffee,” she said, and then she was gone.

I spent the rest of the afternoon buying some clothes for my depleted wardrobe before heading back to Copley and the Starbucks on Newbury to read the newspaper. Reading The New York Times on a near daily basis was a habit I hadn't lost, although buying it in Boston made me feel kind of guilty, as if I had just rolled up the newspaper and used it to slap the mayor.

I didn't even notice the start of the story on the far right of the front page until I came to its continuation on page seven and saw the photograph accompanying it. A man stared out at me in black and white, a black hat on his head, and I recalled the same man nodding to me from a darkened Mercedes as I approached Jack Mercier's house, and sitting uneasily with three other people in a framed photograph in Mercier's study. His name was Rabbi Yossi Epstein, and he was dead.

According to the police report, Rabbi Yossi Epstein left the Eldridge Street shul at 7:30 P.M. on a cool Tuesday evening, the flow of traffic on the Lower East Side changing, altering in pitch, as commuters were replaced by those whose reasons for being in the city had more to do with pleasure than business. Epstein wore a black suit and a white shirt, but he was far from being the traditionalist that his exterior suggested. There were those in the shul who had long whispered against him; he tolerated homosexuals and adulterers, they said. He was too ready to take his place before the television cameras, they argued, too quick to smile and pander to the national media. He was too concerned with the things of this world and too little concerned with the promise of the next.

Epstein had made his name in the aftermath of the Crown Heights disaster, pleading for tolerance, arguing that the Jewish and black communities should put aside their differences, that poor blacks and poor Jews had more in common with each other than with the wealthier members of their own tribes. He had been injured in the riots that followed, and a picture of him in the Post, blood streaming from a wound in his head, had brought him his first taste of celebrity due to the photo's unfortunate, and unintended, similarity to representations of the suffering Christ.

Epstein had also been involved with the B'Nai Jeshurun Temple up on Eighty-ninth Street and Broadway, founded by Marshal T. Meyer, whose mentor had been the conservative firebrand Abraham Yoshua Heschel. It was easy to see why someone with Epstein's views might have been attracted to Meyer, who had fought with the Argentine generals in his efforts to find disappeared Jews. Since Meyer's death, in 1993, two Argentine rabbis had continued his work in New York, including the provision of a homeless shelter and encouraging the establishment of a gay congregation. B'Nai Jeshurun was even twinned with a congregation in Harlem, the New Canaan Baptist Church, whose preacher sometimes spoke at the synagogue. According to the Times, Epstein had fallen out with B'Nai Jeshurun and had taken to holding twice monthly services at the old Orensanz Center on the Lower East Side.

One of the reasons for the split with B'Nai Jeshurun appeared to be Epstein's growing involvement in anti-Nazi groups, including the Center for Democratic Renewal in Atlanta and Searchlight in Britain. He had established his own organization, the Jewish League for Tolerance, staffed mainly by volunteers and run from out of a small office on Clinton Street, above an empty Jewish bookstore.

According to the Times, Epstein was believed to have received considerable funding in recent weeks to enable him to commence a series of investigations into organizations suspected of anti-Semitic activities, among them the usual suspects: fanatics with “Aryan” prominent in their names and splinter groups from the Klan who had left because the Klan now frowned on burning down synagogues and chaining blacks to the back axles of pickup trucks.

Whatever his critics might have said about him, Yossi Epstein was a brave man, a man of conviction, a man who worked tirelessly to improve the lives not only of his fellow Jews but of his other fellow citizens. He was found dead in his apartment at 11 P.M. on Wednesday night, apparently after suffering some kind of seizure. The apartment, in which he lived alone, had been ransacked and his wallet and address book were missing. Foul play was suspected, according to the report, a suspicion increased by another incident earlier that night.

At 10 P.M., the office of the Jewish League for Tolerance was firebombed. A young volunteer, Sarah Miller, was working there at the time, printing off addresses for a mailing the following day. She was three days short of her nineteenth birthday when the room around her became an inferno. She was still on the critical list, with burns over 90 percent of her body. Epstein was due to be buried at Pine Lawn Cemetery in Long Island that day, following the prompt autopsy.

There was one more detail that caught my attention. In addition to his work on right-wing organizations, Epstein was reported to be preparing a legal challenge to the religious tax exemption given by the IRS to a number of church groups. Most of the names were unfamiliar to me, except for one: the Fellowship, based in Waterville, Maine. The law firm employed by Epstein to handle the case was Ober, Thayer amp; Moss of Boston, Massachusetts. It was hardly a coincidence that the firm also took care of Jack Mercier's legal affairs and that Warren Ober's son was soon to be married to Mercier's daughter.

I read through the piece again, then called Mercier's home. A maid took the call, but when I gave my name and asked to be put through to Mr. Mercier, another female voice came on the line. It was Deborah Mercier.

“Mr. Parker,” she said. “My husband is not available. Perhaps I can help you?”

“I don't think so, Mrs. Mercier. I really need to speak to your husband.”

There was a pause in the conversation long enough to make our feelings about each other clear, and then Deborah Mercier concluded: “In that case, perhaps you'd be kind enough not to phone the house again. Jack is not available at present, but I'll make sure he hears that you called.”

With that she hung up, and I got the feeling that Jack Mercier would never know that I had called him.

I had never spoken to Rabbi Yossi Epstein and knew nothing more about him than what I had just read, but his activities had awakened something, something that lay curled in its web until Epstein caused one of the strands to twitch and the sleeping thing roused itself and came after him, then tore him apart before it returned to the dark place in which it lived.

In time, I would find that place.

9

I RETURNED TO RACHEL'S APARTMENT, showered, and in an effort to cheer myself up for the evening ahead, put on some of my sharp new purchases: a black Joseph Abboud coat that made me look like I was auditioning for the second remake of Nosferatu, black gabardine pants and a black DKNY V neck. Screaming “fashion victim,” I walked down to the Copley Plaza Hotel and into the Oak Bar.

Outside, the traffic on Copley melted away, the sound of horns and engines smothered by the red curtains of the Oak. The four big ceiling fans scythed the air and the ice in the raw bar glittered in the dim light. Louis was already sitting at a table by the window, his long frame folded into one of the bar's comfortable red chairs. He was wearing a black wool suit with a white shirt and black shoes. His dark head was no longer shaven and he had grown a small, vaguely satanic beard, which, if anything, rendered him even more intimidating than before. In the past, when he had been bald and devoid of facial hair, people crossed the street to avoid him. Now they probably felt the urge to book a trip somewhere safe and quiet, like Somalia or Sierra Leone.

There was a presidential martini on the table before him, and he was smoking a Montecristo No. 2. That was about $55 worth of vices. He blew a stream of blue smoke at me in greeting. I ordered a virgin cocktail and shrugged off my coat, ostentatiously showing Louis the label as I did so.

“Yeah, very impressive,” he said unconvincingly. “Not even last season's. You so cheap, your hourly rate probably got ninety-nine cents at the end.”

“Where's the insignificant other?” I asked, ignoring him.

“Buying some clothes. Airline lost his bag.”

“They're doing him a favor. You pay them to lose it?”

“Didn't have to. Baggage handlers probably refused to touch it. Piece of shit practically walked to La Guardia by itself. How you doin'?”

“Pretty good.”

“Still huntin' pen pushers?” Louis didn't entirely approve of my move into the area of white-collar criminals. He felt that I was wasting my talents. I decided to let him go on thinking it for a while.

“The money's okay and they don't tend to kick up a fuss,” I replied, “although one of them called me a bad name once.”

Close to the door, heads began to turn and one of the waiters almost dropped a tray of drinks in shock. Angel entered, dressed in a yellow-and-green Hawaiian shirt, a yellow tie, a powder blue jacket, stonewashed jeans, and a pair of red boots so bright they throbbed. Conversations died as he passed by, and a few people tried to shield their eyes.

“Off to see the wizard?” I asked when the red boots finally reached us.

Louis looked like someone had just splashed paint on his car.

“Shit, Angel, the hell you think you are? Mardi Gras?”

Angel calmly took a seat, ordered a Beck's from a distressed-looking waiter, then stretched out his legs to admire his new boots. He straightened his tie, which did nothing to help in the long term but obscured some of his shirt for a while.

“You look like a used car salesman on acid,” I told him.

“Man, I didn't even know Filene's Basement had a basement,” said Louis. “Must be where they keep the real shit.”

Angel shook his head and smiled. “I'm making a statement,” he said, like a teacher explaining a lesson to a pair of slow children.

“I know the kind of statement you makin',” replied Louis as Angel's beer arrived. “You sayin', ‘Kill me, I got no taste.’ ”

“You should carry a sign,” I advised. “ ‘I will work for fashion tips.’ ”

It felt good to be here with them. Angel and Louis were just about the closest friends I had. They had stood by me as the confrontation with the Traveling Man drew closer, and had faced down the guns of a Boston scumbag named Tony Celli in order to save the life of a girl they had never met. Their gray morality, tempered by expediency, was closer to goodness than most people's virtue.

“How's life in the sticks?” asked Angel. “Still living in the rural slum?”

“My house is not a slum.”

“It don't even have carpets.”

“It's got timber floors.”

“It's got timbers. Just 'cause they fell on the ground don't make them a floor.”

He paused to sip his beer, allowing me to change the subject.

“Anything new in the city?” I asked.

“Mel Valentine died,” said Angel.

“Psycho Mel?” Psycho Mel Valentine had been working his way through the A-to-Z of crime: arson, burglary, counterfeiting, drugs… If he hadn't died, then pretty soon the Bronx Zoo would have been mounting a guard on its zebras.

Angel nodded. “Always thought the ‘Psycho Mel’ thing was unfair. Maybe he'd have been psychotic if they quietened him down some, but ‘Psycho’ seemed like kind of an underestimation of his abilities.”

“How'd he die?”

“Gardening accident in Buffalo. He was trying to break into a house when the owner killed him with a rake.”

He raised his glass to the memory of Psycho Mel Valentine, gardening victim.

Rachel appeared a few minutes later, much earlier than expected, wearing a yellow coat that hung to her ankles. Her long red hair was tied up at the back of her head and held in place by a pair of wooden skewers.

“Nice hair,” said Angel. “You pick up all the channels with those things, or just local?”

“Tuning must be off,” she replied. “I can still hear you.”

She pulled the sticks from her hair and let it hang loose on her shoulders. It brushed my face as she kissed me gently before ordering a mimosa and taking a seat beside me. I hadn't seen her in almost two weeks and I felt a pang of desire for her as she folded one stockinged leg over the other, her short black skirt rising above midthigh level. She wore a man's shirt, white and with only one button undone. She always wore her shirts that way: if any more buttons were opened, the scars left by the Traveling Man on her chest became visible. As she sat, she placed a large Neiman Marcus bag by her feet. Inside was something red and expensive.

“Needless Markup,” whistled Louis. “You givin' away money, can I have some?”

“Style costs,” she replied.

“That's the truth,” he said. “Try telling it to the other fifty percent of the group.”

The 25 percent that was Angel searched through the big NM bag until he found the receipt, then dropped it quickly and rubbed his fingers like they'd just been burned.

“What she buy?” asked Louis.

“A house,” he said. “Maybe two.”

She stuck her tongue out at him.

“You're early,” I said.

“You sound disappointed. I disturb a conversation on football or monster trucks?”

“Stereotyping,” I replied. “And you a psychologist.”

We talked for a time, then crossed the street to Anago at the Lenox and spoke about nothing and everything for a couple of hours over venison and beef and oven roast salmon. Then, when the coffee arrived and while the other three sipped Armagnacs, I told them about Grace Peltier, Jack Mercier, and the death of Yossi Epstein.

“And you think these old guys are right, that Grace Peltier didn't kill herself?” asked Angel when I had finished.

“Things just don't fit. Mercier could probably put pressure on the investigation through Augusta, but that would draw attention to himself and he doesn't want that.”

“Which is why he hired you,” said Angel. “To stir things up.”

“Maybe,” I replied, but I felt that there was more to it than that, although I couldn't say what.

“So what do you think happened to Grace?” asked Rachel.

“Speculating, I'd say that Marcy Becker might have been the other person in the car with Grace for most of her trip north. But Marcy Becker is missing, and she left in enough of a hurry to forget a pack of cigarettes that was probably sitting on the dashboard in front of her.”

“And maybe left her bag of coke as well,” said Angel.

“That's possible, but I don't think so. The coke looks like a plant, a way of making Grace appear a little less clean than she was. Drugs, pressure of study, takes her own life with a gun that seems to have popped up out of nowhere.”

“What was the piece?” he asked.

“Smith amp; Wesson Saturday night special.”

Angel shrugged. “Not hard to lay your hands on one of those, you know who to ask.”

“But I don't think Grace Peltier would have known who to ask. According to her father, she didn't even like guns.”

“Do you think Marcy Becker could have killed her?” asked Rachel.

I toyed with my water glass. “Again, it's possible, but they were friends and it hardly seems likely that this girl could frame a pretty good imitation of a suicide. If I had to guess-and Lord knows, I've done enough of that already-I'd say that Marcy Becker might have seen something, possibly whoever killed her friend, while she was away from the car for some reason. And if I can figure out that Grace wasn't alone in the car for most of her journey, then someone else can figure it out too.”

“Which means you got to find Marcy Becker,” said Louis.

“And talk to Carter Paragon, whose secretary says that Grace never showed for their meeting.”

“And how does Epstein's death fit into all this?”

“I don't know, except that he and Mercier shared legal advisers and Mercier obviously knew Epstein well enough to bring him out to his house and hang a picture of him on his wall.”

Finally, I told them about Al Z and Harvey Ragle, and Mr. Pudd and the woman who had accompanied him to my house.

“You telling us he poisoned you with his business card?” said Angel incredulously.

Even I was embarrassed by the possibility, but I nodded. “I got the sense that he had come to see me because that was what was expected of him, not because he thought that I'd actually back off,” I explained. “The card was part of that, a means of goading me to take action, just like letting me see that I was being watched.”

Louis looked at me from over the top of his glass. “Man wanted to take a look at you,” he said quietly. “See what he was up against.”

“I waved my gun at him,” I replied. “He went away.”

Louis's eyebrow rose a notch. “Told you you'd be glad of that gun someday.”

But he didn't smile when he said it, and I didn't smile either.

Rachel and I walked back to her apartment after dinner, holding hands but not speaking, content simply to be close to each other. We talked no further of Grace Peltier or the case. When we were inside her bedroom I slipped off my shoes and lay on her bed, watching her move through the soft yellow glow of her nightlight. Then she stood before me and removed a small wrapped package from the larger Neiman Marcus bag.

“Is that for me?” I asked.

“Kind of,” she replied.

She tore open the package to reveal a tiny white lace bra and panties, an even more delicate suspender belt, and a pair of sheer silk stockings.

“I don't think they'll fit me,” I said. “In fact, I'm not even sure that they'll fit you.”

Rachel pouted, unzipped her skirt, and let it fall to the ground, then slowly began to unbutton her shirt. “Don't you even want me to try?” she whispered.

Call me weak, but stronger men than I would have buckled under that kind of pressure.

“Okay,” I said hoarsely as the blood left my head and headed south for the winter.

Later that night I lay beside her in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the city beyond the window. I thought she was asleep, but after a time she brushed her head against my chest and I felt her eyes upon me.

“Penny for them,” she said.

“I'm holding out for more.”

“Penny and a kiss.” She placed her lips softly against mine. “It's Grace Peltier, isn't it?”

“Her, the Fellowship, Pudd,” I replied. “It's everything.”

I turned to her and found the whites of her eyes.

“I think I'm afraid, Rachel.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Afraid of what I might do, of what I might have to do.”

Her hand reached out to me, a white ghost moving through the void of the night. It traced the sockets of my eyes, the bones at my cheeks, following the lineaments of the skull beneath the skin.

“Afraid of what I've done in the past,” I concluded.

“You are a good man, Charlie Parker,” she whispered. “I wouldn't be with you if I didn't believe that.”

“I've done bad things. I don't want to do them any longer.”

“You did what you had to do.”

I gripped her hand tightly and felt her palm rest itself against my temple, the fingers lightly brushing my hair.

“I did more than that,” I answered.

It seemed that I was floating in a black place, with endless night above and below me, and only her hand was stopping me from falling. She understood, for her body moved closer against me and her legs wrapped around mine as if to tell me that if I was to fall, then we would fall together. Her chin burrowed into my neck and she was quiet for a time. In the silence, I could feel the weight of her thoughts.

“You don't know that the Fellowship was responsible for her death, or for anyone else's,” she said at last.

“No, I don't,” I admitted. “But I sense that Mr. Pudd is a violent man, and maybe something worse. I could feel it when he was close, when he touched me.”

“And violence begets violence,” whispered Rachel.

nodded. “I haven't fired a gun in almost a year, Rachel, not even on a range. I hadn't even held one in my hand until yesterday. But I have a sense that, if I involve myself further in this, I may be forced to use it.”

“Then walk away. Give Jack Mercier his money back and let someone else deal with it.” But even as she said it, I knew that she didn't mean it; that in a way, I was testing myself through her and she understood that.

“You know I can't do that. Marcy Becker could be in trouble, and I think someone murdered Grace Peltier and tried to cover it up. I can't let that slide.”

She moved in even closer to me, and her hand moved across the cheek and my lips. “I know you'll do what's right, and I think you'll try to avoid violence if you can.”

“And if I can't?”

But she didn't respond. After all, there was only one answer.

Outside, the traffic hummed and people slept and a sliver of moon hung in the sky like a knife slash in the heavens. And while I lay awake in the bed of the woman I loved, old Curtis Peltier sat in his kitchen, drinking hot milk in an effort to help himself sleep. He wore blue pajamas and bedroom slippers, with his tattered red robe hanging open above them. He sipped his milk, then left the glass on the table and rose to return to his bed.

I can only guess at what happened next, but in my head I can hear the back door opening, can see the shadows lengthen and move toward him. A gloved hand clasps itself over the old man's mouth while the other twists his arm up behind his back with such force that the shoulder immediately dislocates and the old man briefly loses consciousness. A second pair of hands grab his feet and they carry him up the stairs to the bathroom. There comes the sound of water gurgling and bubbling into the bath as, slowly, it fills. Curtis Peltier regains consciousness to find himself kneeling on the floor, his face against the tub. He watches the water rise and knows he is about to die.

“Where is it, Mr. Peltier?” says a detached male voice beside his ear. He cannot see the face, nor can he see the second person who stands farther back, although their shadows shift on the tiles before him.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” he replies, scared now.

“Yes, you do, Mr. Peltier. I know you do.”

“Please,” he says, just before his head is plunged into the water. He has no time to take a breath and the water enters his mouth and nostrils instantly. He struggles, but his shoulder is convulsed with pain and he can only beat futilely at the water with his left hand. They pull his head up and he gasps and splutters, coughing bathwater onto the floor.

“I'll ask you one more time, Mr. Peltier. Where is it?”

And the old man finds that he is crying now, crying with fear and pain and regret for his lost daughter, for she cannot protect him just as he could not protect her. He feels a force at his shoulder, fingers digging into the injured joint, and he loses consciousness again. When he awakens, he is in the bath, naked, and a redheaded man is hovering over him. There is a sharp pain in his arms, gradually growing dimmer and dimmer. He feels sleepy and struggles to keep his eyes open.

He looks down. There are long slashes from his wrists to his elbows and the bathwater has turned to blood. The shadows watch over him as slowly, slowly the light dies, as his life seeps away and he feels his daughter embrace him at last, carrying him away with her into the darkness.

10

IN EVERY CASE, according to Plato, the principle is to know what the investigation is about. Jack Mercier had hired me to find out the truth about Grace Peltier's death. While out at his house, I had seen Yossi Epstein, who appeared to be involved in moves against the Fellowship that were sponsored by Mercier. Yossi Epstein was now dead, and his offices had been burned to the ground. Grace Peltier had been studying the history of the Aroostook Baptists, who had since emerged from beneath a cloak of mud by the shores of St. Froid Lake. She had, for some reason, found it necessary to try to contact Carter Paragon in the course of her research, once again raising the specter of the Fellowship. Lutz, the detective who was investigating the Peltier case, was close enough to the Fellowship to haul his ass out to Waterville and warn me against irritating Paragon. If I were to connect these occurrences together and add in the figure of Mr. Pudd, the investigation now appeared to be about the Fellowship.

Rachel left early on Saturday morning to attend the continuation of her college meeting. She brought with her a small plastic bag containing Mr. Pudd's business card, which someone had promised to examine before lunch. I showered, made a pot of coffee, and then, wearing only a towel, began to work the phone. I called Walter Cole, my former partner in Homicide while I was with the NYPD, and he made some calls. From him I got the name of one of the detectives involved with the Major Case Squad investigating Epstein's death and the arson attack on his office. The detective's name was Lubitsch.

“Like the movie director,” he explained when he at last came to the phone. “Ernst, you know?”

“Any relation?”

“No, but I directed traffic a couple of times.”

“I don't think it counts.”

“You used to be a bull?”

“That's right.”

“How does the PI world pay?”

“Depends how fussy you are. There's plenty of work out there if you're prepared to follow errant husbands and wives. Most of it doesn't pay too well, so you have to do a lot of it to make ends meet. Why, don't you like being a cop?”

“Sure, I like it okay, but it pays shit. I'd make more money emptying garbage cans.”

“Different version of the same job.”

“You said it. You asking about Epstein?”

“Anything you can give.”

“I ask why?”

“Trade?”

“Sure.”

“I'm investigating the suicide of a girl who may or may not have had some contact with Epstein in the past.”

“Name?”

“Grace Peltier. CID III up in Machias, Maine, have it.”

“When did she die?”

“About two weeks ago.”

“What links her to Epstein?”

I didn't see any harm in turning up the heat under the Fellowship, if I could. Anyway, Lutz's interview with Paragon was contained in the case records.

“The Fellowship. It was one of the organizations Epstein was making moves against. Grace Peltier may have met with its figurehead, Carter Paragon, shortly before she died.”

“That it?”

“There may be more. I just got started on it. Listen, if I can help at all, I will.”

There was a pause for at least thirty seconds. I thought the phone had gone dead.

“I'll trust you, but just once.”

“Once is all I need.”

“Officially, it's homicide. We've ruled out robbery as a motive, and a possible connection to the firebombing of the Jewish League for Tolerance is currently under investigation.”

“Neat. What are you leaving out?”

Lubitsch lowered his voice. “Postmortem found a puncture wound in Epstein's armpit. They're still trying to get confirmation of what was injected into him, but the latest guess is some kind of venom.” There came the sound of papers shuffling. “I'm reading here, okay, but it's neurotoxic, which means that it blocks transmission of nerve impulses to the muscles, overstimulating the transmitters”-he stumbled on the next words-“acetylcholine and noradrenaline, causing paralysis of both the”-more stumbles-“sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, resulting in sudden and severe stress on the body.”

Lubitsch took a deep breath.

“In layman's terms, the venom caused acceleration of heartbeat, increase in blood pressure, breathing difficulties, and muscle paralysis. Epstein suffered a massive heart attack within two minutes. He was dead within three. Symptoms-and this is strictly on the QT, you understand?-are systemic, usually associated with spiders. Basically, unless someone comes up with a better theory, the perp took Yossi Epstein down, squatted on his chest, then injected him with a huge dose of spider venom. They're guessing black widow, but the tests aren't complete. Plus, the perp took a patch of skin from his lower back, a couple of inches of it. Now is that weird shit, or is that weird shit?”

I put down my pen and looked at the garbled notes I had written-on Rachel's telephone message pad. “Anyone else interested in this?” I asked.

“What is that sound?” replied Lubitsch. “Why, it's the sound of somebody stretching the bounds of professional courtesy.”

“Sorry,” I said, “but I take it that's a yes.”

Lubitsch sighed. “Minneapolis PD. Possible connection to the death of a doctor named Alison Beck one week ago. She was found with black widow spiders sealed up inside her mouth.”

“My God.”

“Uh-huh.”

Lubitsch seemed to enjoy my response, because he continued: “ME reckons the spiders were subdued with carbon dioxide, then inserted into her mouth as they were starting to revive. Only one widow survived: the rest bit each other, and bit her. The increase in her blood pressure triggered a stroke, and that killed her.”

“They have any leads?”

“She performed abortions, so they're rounding up the local crazies-while trying to keep most of the details from the press. Seems like they had a bitch of a job getting her out of the car.”

“Why?”

“Whoever killed her filled it with recluses.”

Pudd.

I thanked him, promised him a return call, and hung up. I logged on to the Internet and in less than two minutes a picture of Alison Beck was on the screen in front of me. She looked younger than she had in the photograph in Jack Mercier's study; younger and happier. The reporters had done a pretty good job of nailing deep background sources, even to the extent of speculating that Alison Beck's death might have been caused by a spider bite. It's hard to keep details like that quiet.

I turned off the computer and called Rachel, since the meeting was due to break for coffee at eleven. “Anyone have time to look at that card yet?” I asked.

“Well, a big affectionate good morning to you too,” she replied. “Truly, the love is gone.”

“It's not gone, it's just distracted. Well?”

“They're still looking at it. Now go away before I forget why I'm with you.”

She hung up, which left me with a choice: either do nothing, or try my luck with the Minneapolis PD. Unfortunately, I had no contacts over there and I didn't think that my natural charm would get me very far. I tried calling Mercier again but got the brush-off from the maid. With nothing else to do until later that evening, when Rachel and I were due to attend Cleopatra at the Wang, I dressed, took a Paul Johnston novel from Rachel's shelf, and headed down the stairs to kill some time along Newbury Street. There was a comic book store on Newbury, I recalled. I thought it might be worth a visit.

Al Z, it emerged, had already made the arrangements for our meeting. As soon as I stepped into the street, a car door opened and a huge shape emerged from a green Buick Regal parked across the street.

“Nice wheels, Tommy,” I remarked. “Planning to take the boys to Disney World?”

Tommy Caci grinned. He was wearing a sleeveless black T-shirt and skintight black jeans. His trapezius muscles were so huge he looked like he'd swallowed a coat hanger, and his massive shoulders tapered to a tiny waist. All things considered, Tommy Caci resembled a walking martini glass, but without the fragility.

“Welcome to Boston,” he said. “Al Z would appreciate a courtesy call. Get in the car. Please.”

“You mind if I make my own way?” I asked. Nothing would persuade me to get in the back of that Buick, no matter how much Tommy smiled. I'd prefer to walk blindfolded down the fast lane of the interstate. I didn't like to think of some of the trips people had taken in that car.

Tommy's smile didn't falter. “Easier this way. Al don't like to be kept waiting.”

“I'm sure. Still, how about I take some air and follow you on over?”

Tommy shrugged. It wasn't worth getting rough over. “You want to take some air, that's fine with us,” he said resignedly.

So I walked over to Al Z's office on Newbury Street. Admittedly, the Buick shadowed me every step of the way, never going above a couple of miles an hour, but it made me feel kind of wanted. When I arrived at the comic book store, Tommy waved at me and the Buick shot away, scattering tourists from its path. I rang the buzzer, gave my name, then pushed the door and walked up the bare stairs to Al Z's office.

It hadn't changed a whole lot since the last time I was there. It was still bare boards and peeling paint. There were still two gunmen inside the door, and there was still nowhere to sit apart from a worn red sofa against one wall and the chair behind Al Z's desk, a chair currently occupied by Al Z himself.

He wore a black suit, a black shirt, and a black tie, and his gray hair was slicked back from his skull, making his thin face look even more cadaverous than it usually did. A pair of hearing aids were visible in his small, pointed ears. Al Z's hearing had been failing in recent years. It must have been all those guns going off around him.

“I see you broke out your summer wardrobe,” I said.

He looked down at his clothes as if seeing them for the first time. “I was at a funeral,” he said.

“You arrange it?”

“Nah, just paying my last respects to a friend. All my friends are dying. Soon I'll be the only one left.” I noticed that Al Z seemed pretty certain he was going to outlive his friends. Knowing Al Z, I figured he was probably right.

He gestured at the sofa. “Take a seat. I don't get so many visitors.”

“Can't understand why, this place looking so welcoming and all.”

“I got Spartan tastes.” He smiled and leaned back in his chair. “Well, this is just my lucky day. First a funeral, then it turns out I'm a stop on the Charlie Parker Goodwill Tour. Next thing you know, my dick will drop off and my plants will die.”

“I'll be sorry to see your plants go.”

Al Z stretched his long body in his chair. It was like watching a snake uncoil. “And how is the elusive Louis? We don't hear much about him now. Seems like the only person he kills for these days is you.”

“The only person he ever killed for was himself,” I replied.

“Whatever. The only reason you can still take the subway when you visit New York is because your associate will whack anyone who makes a move on you. I think he'd even whack me if he had to, and I consider myself to be a pretty nice guy, all things considered. Well, most things considered.” He shook his head in bemusement. “Now what can I do for you, apart from letting you walk out of here alive?”

I hoped he didn't mean it. Al Z and I had had our run-ins in the past; at one point he'd given me twenty-four hours to live if I didn't find some money that had been stolen from under the nose of the underboss Tony Celli. I found the money, so I was still alive, but Tony Clean was dead. I had watched Al Z kill him. The only aspect of it that bothered Al Z was the cost of the bullet. A lot of Tony's men had died in Dark Hollow, due in no small part to the efforts of Louis and me, but Tony was the only made man to be killed, and since Al Z had killed him that took a lot of heat off all of us. We in turn had taken the heat off Al Z by returning the money Tony had stolen, with interest. My relationship with Al Z could have been used to define “complicated” in the dictionary.

Since the end of the Celli affair, Al Z had been keeping tabs on me. He knew enough about my business to learn that I was investigating the Fellowship and that, somehow, the man named Mr. Pudd was tied into its workings.

“As I recall,” I pointed out gently, “you invited me along.”

Al Z pretended to be taken aback. “So I did. It must have been a moment of weakness.” He immediately dispensed with the small talk. “I hear that you may be sticking your nose into the affairs of the Fellowship.”

“Why would that be of interest to you?”

“A lot of things are of interest to me. How did you enjoy meeting-Mr. Ragle?”

“He's a worried man. He thinks somebody is trying to kill him.”

“I fear Mr. Ragle may be about to suffer grievously for his art.”

He gestured at the two gunmen. They left the room and closed the door behind them.

Al Z stood and walked to the window, then stared down on the tourists shopping on Newbury, his basilisk glare flicking from face to face. Nobody died.

“I like this street,” he said, almost to himself. “I like its normality. I like the fact that I can step out onto the sidewalk and the people-around me are worrying about their mortgages, or the cost of coffee beans, or whether they just missed their train. I walk down there, and I feel normal by association.” He turned around to look at me. “You, on the other hand, you seem normal. You dress like any other mook. You don't look no better or no worse than a hundred other guys on the street. But you step in here, and you make me nervous. I swear, my fucking palms itch when I see you. Don't get me wrong; I respect you. I may even like you a little. But I see you and I get this sense of impending doom, like the fucking ceiling is about to cave in. The presence of your pet killers in Boston doesn't make me sleep any easier. I know you got a woman here, and I know too that you were eating with your friends at Anago last night. You had the beef, by the way.”

“It was good.”

“For thirty bucks, it better be real good. It better sing a fucking song while you chew on it. You talk business, or pleasure?”

“A little of both.”

He nodded. “That's what I thought. You want to know why I pointed Ragle toward you, why I'm interested in this man who calls himself Pudd? Maybe I figure, what can I do for Charlie Parker? Whose life can I turn to shit by letting you dig around in it?”

I waited. I wasn't sure where the conversation was going but the turn that it suddenly took surprised me.

“Or maybe it's something else,” he continued, and the tone of his voice changed. It now sounded a little querulous. It was an old man's voice. Al Z turned away from the window and walked over to the sofa, seating himself only a few feet away from me. His eyes, I thought, were haunted.

“You think one good action can make up for a lifetime of evil acts?” he asked.

“That's not for me to judge,” I replied.

“A diplomatic answer, but not the truth. You judge, Parker. That's what you do, and I respect you because you act on your judgment, just like me. We're two of a kind, you and I. Try again.”

I shrugged. “Maybe, if it's an act of genuine repentence, but I don't know how the scales of judgment are weighted.”

“You believe in salvation?”

“I hope for it.”

“Then you believe in reparation too. Reparation is the shadow cast by salvation.”

He folded his hands in his lap. They were very white and very clean, as if he spent hours each day scraping the dirt from the wrinkles and cracks on his skin.

“I'm getting old. I looked around at the graveside this morning and I saw dead men and women. Between them all, they had maybe a couple of years to live. Pretty soon, we're all going to be judged, and we'll all be found wanting. The best we have to hope for is mercy, and I don't believe you get mercy in the next life if you haven't shown it in this one.

“And I'm not a merciful man,” he concluded. “I have never been a merciful man.”

I waited, watching as he twisted the wedding ring on his finger. His wife had died three years before, and he had no children. I wondered if he had hopes of meeting her again, in some other life.

“Everybody deserves a chance to make amends for his life,” he said softly. “Nobody has the right to take that away.”

His eyes flicked back to the window, drawn by the light. “I know something of the Fellowship, and of the man it sends to do its business,” he said.

“Mr. Pudd.”

“You've met him?” There was surprise in Al Z's voice.

“I've met him.”

“Then your days may be numbered,” he said simply. “I know about him because it's my business to know. I don't like unpredictability, unless I figure that it's worth gambling on it to use for my own ends. That's why you're still alive. That's why I didn't kill you when you came looking for Tony Clean, and that's why I didn't kill you even after you and your friends took out most of Tony's crew in that snow-hole town two winters ago. What you wanted and what I wanted-” He moved his right hand, palm down, in a balancing motion. “Plus, you found the money, and that bought you your life.

“Now, maybe I figure that we could have another meeting of minds on Pudd. I don't care if he kills you, Parker. I'd miss you, sure. You brighten things up, you and your friends, but that's as far as it goes. Still, if you kill him, then that would be a good thing for everybody.”

“Why don't you kill him yourself?”

“Because he hasn't done anything to bring himself to my attention or that of my associates.” He leaned forward. “But that's like noticing a black widow in the corner of the room and figuring that you'll leave it alone because it hasn't bitten you yet.”

The spider analogy, I knew, was deliberate. Al Z was an interesting man.

“And there's more to this than Pudd. There are other people, people-in the shadows. They need to be flushed out too, but if I go against Pudd for no reason other than the fact that I think he's evil and dangerous-and that assumes that I could find him and that the people I sent after him could kill him, which I doubt-then the others in the background would move against me, and I'd be dead. I don't doubt it for one second. In fact, I think that the moment I made a move against Pudd, he'd kill me. That's how dangerous he is.”

“So you'll use me to flush him out.”

Al Z actually laughed. “Nobody uses you, I think, unless you want it. You're going after Pudd for your own reasons, and nobody in my organization will stand in your way. I've even tried to point you in the right direction with our pornographer friend. If you corner this man, and we can assist you in finishing him off without drawing any attention to ourselves, then we will. But my advice to you is to move everybody you care about out of his reach, because he will kill them, and then he will try to kill you.”

He smiled conspiratorially.

“But I also hear that you may have some competition in trying to finish off Pudd. It seems that some old Jews have got tired of torchings and killings, and that the death of the rabbi in New York this week was the last straw. I tell you, don't mess with the fucking Jews. Maybe it ain't like the days of Bugsy Siegel no more but those people, they know how to bear a grudge. You think the fucking Sicilians are bad? The Jews, they've had thousands of years of experience of bearing grudges. They are to grudges what the Chinese are to gunpowder. These fucking people invented the grudge, excuse my language.”

“They've hired someone?” I asked.

Al Z shook his head. “Money isn't the prime motivator where this man is concerned. He calls himself the Golem. He's Eastern European-Jewish, naturally. Never met him, which is probably a good thing. Way I understand it, anyone who meets him winds up dead. The day I see him, I'm gonna be kissing St. Peter's ring and apologizing for having an attack of selective amnesia where the Ten Commandments were concerned.”

He twisted at his wedding ring again, the light from the window reflecting on it and sending tiny golden spears shooting across the wall.

“The guy you want to talk to is Mickey Shine, Michael Sheinberg. We called him Mickey the Jew. He's retired now, but he used to be part of Joey Barboza's crew until Joey started ratting people out. I heard that maybe he was the one killed Joey in San Francisco in seventy-six. He ended up working for Action Jackson for a time, then got tired of the whole racket and bought a flower shop in Cambridge.” He took a pen and scribbled an address on a piece of paper, tore it from the pad, and handed it to me.

“Mickey Shine,” he said. His eyes were distant and there was a sepia tint of nostalgia to his voice. “You know, we went drinking, summer of sixty-eight, started out in Alphabet City, and I don't remember anything else until I woke up in this Turkish bath wearing only a towel. I was lying on a slab, surrounded by tiles. I swear, I thought I was in the fucking morgue. Mickey Shine. When you talk to him, you tell him I remember that night.”

“I will,” I said.

“I'll ask someone to call ahead,” said Al Z. “Barboza was hit four times with a shotgun. You go waltzing in there with a gun at your shoulder asking about Mickey Shine's past, you're likely to find out how Barboza felt, if you get my meaning.”

I thanked him, then stood up to leave. By the time I reached the door, he had resumed his seat at his desk, his hand still toying with the gold band.

“We're two of a kind, you and I,” he repeated as I paused at the door.

“What kind is that?”

“You know what kind,” he replied.

“One good act,” I said gently, but I wasn't sure that would be enough. Al Z's business was based on drugs and whores, porn and theft, intimidation and wasted, blighted lives. If you believe in karma, then those things add up. If you believe in God, then maybe you shouldn't be doing those things in the first place.

I, too, had done things that I regretted. I had taken lives. I had killed an unarmed man with my bare hands. Maybe Al Z was right: perhaps we were two of a kind, he and I.

Al Z smiled. “As you say, one good act. I will help you, in this small way, to find Mr. Pudd and put an end to him and those around him. You step lightly, Charlie Parker. There are still people listening for you.”

When I left, he had resumed his seat and his hands were once again steepled beneath his chin, his face hovering over them like that of some malicious, pitiless god.

11

MICKEY SHINE WAS ABOUT FIVE-SIX and bald, with a silver ponytail and a silver beard, both of which were designed to distract from the fact that he didn't have more than six hairs above the level of his ears. Unfortunately, when your name is Mickey Shine and the bright lights of your store reflect the dazzling brilliance of your skull, then cultivating a goatee and opting to grow your hair long at the back aren't exactly fail-safe options in the distraction stakes.

“You ever hear the joke about the two legionnaires walking through the desert?” I asked him, as the jangling of the bell above the door on Kendall Square faded away. “One turns to the other and says, ‘Y'know, if her name hadn't been Sandra I'd have forgotten her by now.’ ”

Mickey Shine looked at me blankly.

“Sand,” I said. “Sand-ra.”

“You want to buy something already?” asked Mickey Shine. “Or did somebody send you here to brighten up my day?”

“I guess I'm here to brighten your day,ὕ I said. “Did it work?”

“Do I looked brightened up?”

“I guess not. Al Z gave me your name.”

“I know. A guy called. He didn't say nothing about you being a comedian, though. You want to lock the door, turn the sign to Closed?”

I did as I was asked, and followed Mickey Shine into the back of the store. There was a wooden table with a cork bulletin board above it. On the board were pinned the floral orders for that afternoon. Mickey Shine began pulling orchids from a black bucket and laying them out on a sheet of clear plastic.

“You want I should stop?” asked Mickey. “I got orders, but you want I should stop, I'll stop.”

“No,” I replied. “It's okay.”

“Help yourself to coffee,” he said. There was a Mr. Coffee machine on a shelf, beside a bowl filled with nondairy creamer and packets of sugar. The coffee smelled like something had crawled into the pot to die, then spent its final minutes percolating.

“You're here about Pudd?” he asked. He seemed intent upon the orchids, but his hands faltered as he said the name.

“Yes.”

“So it's time, then,” he said, more to himself than to me. He continued arranging the flowers in silence for a few minutes, then sighed and abandoned the task. His hands were shaking. He looked at them, held them up so I could see them, then thrust them into his pockets, the orchids now forgotten.

“He's a foul man, Mr. Parker,” he began. “I have thought much about him in the last five years, about his eyes and his hands. His hands,” he repeated softly, and shuddered. “When I think of him, I imagine his body as a frame, a hollow thing to carry around the evil spirit that resides inside. Maybe this sounds like madness to you?”

I shook my head and recalled my first impression of Mr. Pudd, the way his eyes peered out from behind their hoods of flesh, the strange, unconnected movements of his fingers, the hair below the joints. I knew exactly what Mickey Shine meant.

“I think, Mr. Parker, he is dybbuk. You know dybbuk?”

“I'm sorry, I don't.”

“A dybbuk is the spirit of a dead man that enters the body of another living being and possesses it. This Mr. Pudd, he is dybbuk: an evil spirit, base and less than human.”

“How do you know of him?”

“I took a contract, is how I know. It was after I left, when the old ways started to fall apart. I was a Jew, and Jews do not make the book, Mr. Parker. I was not a made man, so I thought I would walk away, let them fight to the death like animals. I did one last favor, then left them to die.” He risked a glance at me, and I knew that Al Z had been correct; it was Mickey Shine who had pulled the trigger on Barboza in San Francisco in 1976, the last favor that allowed him to walk away.

“I bought my store, and things were good until about eighty-six. Then I got sick and had to close up for a year. New stores opened, I lost customers, and so and so…” He puffed up his cheeks and let his breath out in one loud, long exhalation.

“I heard that there was a paper on a man, a strange, thin man who killed out of some… misguided religious purpose, or so they said. Doctors in abortion clinics, homosexuals, even Jews. I don't believe in abortion, Mr. Parker, and the Old Testament is clear on… such men.”

He tried not to catch my eye, and I guessed that Al Z had told him a little about Angel and Louis, warning him to watch his mouth.

“But killing these people isn't the answer,” he resumed, with all the assurance of a man who has killed for a living. “I took the paper. I hadn't fired a gun in many years, but the old instincts, you know, they die hard.”

He was rubbing at his arm again, I noticed, and his eyes had grown distant, drawing back from the memory of some ancient hurt.

“And you found him,” I said.

“No, Mr. Parker, he found me.” The frequency and force of the rubbing increased, harder and harder, faster and faster. “I found out he was based somewhere in Maine, so I traveled up there to look for traces of him. I was in a motel in Bangor. You know the city? It's a dump. I was asleep and I woke to a noise in the room. I reached for my gun but it wasn't there, and then something hit me on the head, and when I came to I was in the trunk of a car. My hands and feet were tied with wire, and there was tape on my mouth. I don't know how long we drove, but it felt like hours. At last the car stopped, and after a time the trunk opened. I was blindfolded, but I could see a little beneath the fold. Mr. Pudd was standing there, in his mismatched, old man's clothes. There was a light in his eyes, Mr. Parker, like I have never seen. I-”

He stopped and put his head in his hands, then ran them back over his bald head, as if all he had intended to do in the first place was smooth down whatever straggling hairs remained there. “I almost lost control of my bladder, Mr. Parker. I am not ashamed to tell you this. I am not a man who scares easily, and I have faced down death many times, but the look in this man's eyes, and the feel of his hands on me, his nails, it was more than I could take.

“He lifted me from the car-he is strong, very strong-and dragged me along the ground. We were in dark woods, and there was a shape beyond them, like a tower. I heard a door open, and he pulled me into a shack with two rooms. The first had a table and chairs, nothing more, and there were bloodstains on the floor, dried into the wood. There was a case on the table, with holes in the top, and he picked it up as he passed and carried it with him. The other room was tiled, with an old bathtub and a filthy, busted toilet. He put me in the tub, then hit me again on the head. And while I lay stunned, he cut my clothes with a knife, so that the front of my body, from my neck to my ankles, was exposed. He smelled his fingers, Mr. Parker, and then he spoke to me.

“ ‘You stink of fear, Mr. Sheinberg,’ was all he said.”

The store around us receded and disappeared. The noise of the traffic faded away, and the sunlight shining through the window seemed to dim. Now there was only the sound of Mickey Shine's voice, the stale, damp smell of the old hut, and the soft exhalations of Mr. Pudd's breath as he sat on the edge of the toilet bowl, placed the case on his lap and opened it.

“There were bottles in the box, some small, some large. He held one up in front of me-it was thin, and the stopper had small holes-and I saw the spider inside. I hate spiders, always have, ever since I was a boy. It was a little brown spider, but to me, lying in that tub and smelling of my own sweat and fear, it looked like an eight-legged monster.

“Mr. Pudd, he said nothing, just shook the jar, then unscrewed the top and dropped the spider on my chest. It caught in the hairs and I tried to shake it off, but it seemed to cling there, and I swear, I felt the thing bite me. I heard glass knocking on glass, and another little spider dropped beside the first, then a third. I could hear myself moaning, but it was like it was coming from somebody else, like I wasn't making the sound. All I could think of was those spiders.

“Then Mr. Pudd snapped his fingers and made me look up at him. He was choosing containers from the box and holding them up in front of me so I could see what was in them. One had a tarantula squatting on the bottom. There was a widow in a second one, crouched under a leaf. A third had a little red scorpion. Its tail twitched.

“He leaned forward and whispered in my ear: ‘Which one, Mr. Sheinberg, which one?’ But he didn't release them. He just put them back in the box and took an envelope from inside his jacket. In the envelope were photographs: my ex-wife, my son, my daughters, and my little granddaughter. They were black and whites, taken while they were on the street. He showed me each one in turn, then put them back in the envelope.

“ ‘You're going to be a warning, Mr. Sheinberg,’ he said, ‘a warning to anyone else who thinks he can make some easy money by hunting me down. Perhaps you'll survive tonight, and perhaps you won't. If you live, and go back to your flower store and forget about me, then I'll leave your family alone. But if you ever try to find me again, this little baby girl-Sylvia, isn't that what they named her?-well, little Sylvia will quickly be lying where you are now, and what's about to happen to you will happen to her. And I guarantee you, Mr. Sheinberg, that she won't survive.’

“Then he got up, stood by my legs, and pulled out the plug from the bath. ‘Get ready to make some new friends, Mr. Sheinberg,’ he whispered.

“I looked down and spiders started climbing from the drain. It was like there was hundreds of them, all fighting and twisting against each other. I think some of them were already dead and were just being carried along by the tide, but the rest of them…”

I looked away from him, a memory from my youth flashing briefly in my head. Someone had once done something similar to me when I was a boy: a man named Daddy Helms, who tormented me with fire ants for breaking some windows. Daddy Helms was dead now, but for that fleeting instant his spirit peered malevolently from behind the hoods of Mr. Pudd's eyes. I think, when I looked back at Mickey, that he must have seen something of that memory in my face, because the tone of his voice changed. It softened, and some of the anger he felt toward me for forcing him, through Al Z, to make this confession seemed to dissipate.

“They were all over me. I screamed and screamed and no one could hear me. I couldn't see my skin, there were so many of them. And Pudd, he just stood there and watched while they crawled all over me, biting. I think I must have fainted because, when I came to, the bath was filling with water and the spiders were drowning. It was the only time I saw anything but joy in the sick fuck's face; he looked regretful, as if the loss of those fucking horrors really troubled him. And when they were all dead, he pulled me from the bath and took me back to the trunk of the car and drove me away from that place. He left me by the side of a street in Bangor. Somebody called an ambulance and they took me to a hospital, but the venom had already started to take effect.”

Mickey Shine stood up and began to unbutton his shirt, finishing-with his cuffs. He looked at me, then opened the shirt and let it fall from his body, his hands holding on to the ends of the sleeves.

My mouth went dry. There were four chunks of flesh, each about the size of a quarter, missing from his right arm, as if some kind of animal had taken a bite from it. There was another cavity at his chest, where his left nipple had once been. When he turned, there were similar marks on his back and sides, the skin at the edges mottled and gray.

“The flesh rotted away,” he said softly. “Damnedest fucking thing. This is the kind of man you're dealing with, Mr. Parker. If you decide to go after him, then you make sure you kill him because, if he gets away, you'll have nobody left. He'll kill them all, and then he'll kill you.”

He pulled his shirt back over his body and began to fix the buttons.

“Do you have any idea where he might have taken you?” I asked when he had finished.

Mickey shook his head. “I think we went north, and I could hear the sea. That's all I remember.” He stopped suddenly, and wrinkled his brow. “And there was a light up high, off to my right. I saw it as he pulled me in. It could have been a lighthouse, I guess.

“He said something else. He told me that if I came after him again, all of our names would be written. We would be written, and then we would be damned.”

I felt my brow furrow.

“What did he mean?”

Mickey Shine seemed about to answer, but instead he looked down and concentrated on rebuttoning his cuffs. He was embarrassed, I thought, ashamed at what he saw as his weakness in the face of Mr. Pudd's sadism, but he was also scared.

“I don't know what he meant,” he said, and his lips pursed at the taste of the lie in his mouth.

“What did you mean earlier when you said it was time?” I asked.

“Only Al Z ever heard that story before,” he answered. “You and him, you're the only ones who know. I was supposed to be a mute witness to what Pudd could do, what he would do, to anyone who came after him. I wasn't supposed to talk, I was just supposed to be. But I knew that a day would come when it might be possible to make a move against him, to finish him off. I've been waiting a long time for it, a long time to tell that story again. So here's what I know; he's north of Bangor, on the coast, and there's a lighthouse close by. It's not much, but it's all I can give. Just make sure that it stays between us; between you, me, and Al Z.”

I wanted to press him on what he was leaving out, on what the threat of a name being “written” might mean, but already I felt him closing up on me.

“I'll keep it that way,” I replied.

He nodded. “Because if Pudd finds out that we talked, that we're moving against him, we're all dead. He'll kill us all.”

He shook my hand and turned away from me.

“You going to wish me luck?” I asked.

He stopped and looked back, shaking his head. “If you need luck,” he said softly, “you're already dead.”

Then he went back to his orchids and said no more.