The Killing Kind

17

THE NEXT MORNING I AWOKE to a throbbing at the back of my hand, a souvenir of my encounter with Deborah Mercier. I was no longer working for her husband, but there were still calls to be made. I checked in once again with Buntz in Boston, who assured me that Rachel was safe and sound, before calling the Portland PD.

I wanted to see the place in which the Aroostook Baptists had been interred. I could, I supposed, have been accused of morbid curiosity, but it was more than that; everything that had occurred-all of the deaths, all of the tainted family histories-was tied up with these lost souls. The burial ground at St. Froid was the epicenter for a series of shock waves that had affected generations of lives, touching even those who had no blood connection with the people buried beneath its cold, damp earth. It had united the Peltiers and the Merciers, and that unity had found its ultimate expression in Grace.

I had a vision of her, scared and miserable, standing on Higgins Beach while a selfish young man cast stones on the water, concerned only for the opportunities that would be lost to him if he became a father at such an age. I blamed her, I knew: for wanting me, for allowing me to be with her, for taking me inside her. As the stones fell I sank with them, dropping slowly to the seabed, where the rush of the waves drowned out her voice, and the sound of her tears and the adult world, with all its torments and betrayals, was lost in a blur of green and blue.

She must have known, even then, about her family's past. Maybe she felt a kind of kinship with Elizabeth Jessop, who had departed for a new existence many years before and was never seen again. Grace was a romantic, and I think she would have wanted to believe that Elizabeth had found the earthly paradise for which she had been searching, that she had somehow remade her life, sealing herself off from the past in the hope that she could start afresh. Except that something inside her whispered that Elizabeth was dead: Ali Wynn had told me as much.

Then Deborah Mercier fed Grace the knowledge that Faulkner might still be alive, and that through him the truth of Elizabeth Jessop's disappearance might be revealed to her. It seemed certain that Grace had then approached Carter Paragon, who, through his own weakness and the sale of a recently created Faulkner Apocalypse, had allowed the possibility of the preacher's continued existence to be exposed. Following that meeting, Grace had been killed and her notes seized along with one other item. That second item, I suspected, was another Apocalypse that had somehow come into Grace's possession. How that had come to pass would require renewed pressure on the Beckers to find out if their daughter, Marcy, could fill in the blanks. That would be tomorrow's work. For today, there was Paragon, and St. Froid Lake, and one other visit that I had chosen not to mention to Angel and Louis.

PIs don't usually get access to crime scenes, unless they're the first to arrive at them. This was the second time in less than eighteen months that I had asked Ellis Howard, the deputy chief in charge of the Portland PD's Bureau of Investigation, for his help in bending the rules a little. For a time, Ellis had tried to convince me to join the bureau, until the events in Dark Hollow conspired to make him reconsider his offer.

“Why?” he asked me when I called him and he eventually agreed to talk to me. “Why should I do it?”

“Don't even say hello.”

“Hello. Why? What's your interest in this?”

I didn't lie to him. “Grace and Curtis Peltier.” There was silence on the other end of the line as Ellis ran through a list of possible permutations and came up cold. “I don't see the connection.”

“They were related to Elizabeth Jessop. She was one of the Aroostook Baptists.” I decided not to mention the other blood link, through Jack Mercier. “Grace was preparing a thesis on the history of the group before she died.”

“Is that why Curtis Peltier died in his bath?”

That was the trouble with trying to deal with Ellis; eventually, he always started to ask the difficult questions. I tried to come up with the most nebulous answer possible, in an effort to obscure the truth instead of lying outright. Eventually, I knew, the lies I was telling, both directly and by omission, would come back to haunt me. I had to hope that by the time they did I would have accumulated enough knowledge to save my hide.

“I think that someone may have believed that he knew more than he did,” I told Ellis.

“And who might that person be, do you think?”

“I don't know anything but his name,” I replied. “He calls himself Mr. Pudd. He tried to warn me off investigating the circumstances surrounding Grace Peltier's death. He may also be connected with the killing of Lester Bargus and Al Z down in Boston. Norman Boone over in the ATF has more on it, if you want to talk to him.”

I'd kept Curtis Peltier's name out of my conversation with Boone, but now Curtis was dead and I wasn't sure what debt of confidentiality I owed to Jack Mercier. Increasingly, I was coming under pressure to reveal the true connections to the Fellowship. I was lying to people, concealing possible evidence of a conspiracy, and I wasn't even sure why. Part of it was probably a romantic desire to make up for some small adolescent pain I had caused Grace Peltier, a pain she had probably long forgotten. But I was also aware that Marcy Becker was in danger, and that Lutz, a policeman, was somehow connected with the death of her friend. I had no proof that he was involved, but if I told Ellis or anyone else what I knew, then I would have to reveal Marcy's existence. If I did that, I believed that I would be signing her death warrant.

“Were you working for Curtis Peltier?” said Ellis, interrupting my thoughts.

“Yes.”

“You were looking into his daughter's death?”

“That's right.”

“I thought you didn't do that kind of work anymore.”

“She used to be a friend of mine.”

“Bullshit.” “Hey, I have friends.”

“Not many, I'll bet. What did you find out?”

“Nothing much. I think she spoke to Carter Paragon, the sleazebag who runs the Fellowship, before she died, but Paragon's assistant says she didn't.”

“That's it?”

“That's it.”

“And they pay you good money for this?”

“Sometimes.”

His voice softened a little. “The investigation into Grace Peltier's death has been… reenergized since her father's murder. We're working alongside the state police to assess possible connections.”

“Who's the liaison for state CID?”

I heard the rustling of paper. “Lutz,” said Ellis. “John Lutz, out of Machias. If you know anything about Grace Peltier's death, I'm sure he'd like to talk to you.”

“I'm sure.”

“And now you want to look at a mass grave in northern Maine?”

“I just want to see the site, that's all. I don't want to drive all the way up there and have some polite state trooper turn me back half a mile from the lake.”

Ellis released a long breath. “I'll make a call. I can't promise you anything. But…”

I knew there would be a “but.”

“When you get back, I want you to talk to me. Anything you give me will be treated in confidence. I guarantee it.”

I agreed. Ellis was an honorable, decent man, and I wanted to help him in any way that I could. I just wasn't sure how much I could say without blowing everything apart.

I had one stop to make before I went north, a step back into my own past and my own failings.

I had to visit the Colony.

The approach to the community known as the Colony was much as I remembered it. From South Portland I headed west, through Westbrook and White Rock and Little Falls, until I found myself looking out on Sebago Lake. I followed the lakeshore into the town of Sebago Lake itself, then took the Richville Road northwest until I came to the turning for Smith Hill Road. There was water on both sides of the road, and the spires of the evergreens were reflected in the flooded marshland. Dutchman's breeches and trout lilies unfurled their leaves, and dogwood flowered in the damp earth. Farther ahead the road was carpeted in birch seeds that had fallen from the drying cones above. Eventually the road became little more than a dirt track, twin tire ruts with grass growing along the median, until it lost itself in a copse of trees about a hundred yards away. There was nothing to indicate what lay behind the trees, except for a small wooden sign by the side of the road engraved with a cross and a pair of cupped hands.

At my lowest point, after the deaths of Susan and Jennifer, I had spent some time at the Colony. Its members had discovered me huddled in the doorway of a boarded-up electronics store on Congress Street, stinking of booze and despair. They had offered me a bed for the night, then placed me in the back of a pickup and taken me out to the community.

I stayed with them for six weeks. There were others there like me. Some were alcoholics or addicts. Others were men who had simply lost their way and had found themselves cast adrift by family and friends. They had made their way to the community, or had been referred there by those who still cared about them. In some cases, like my own, the community had found them and had extended a hand to them. Every man was free to walk away at any time, without recrimination, but while they were a part of the community they had to abide by its rules. There was no alcohol, no drug use, no sexual activity. Everybody worked. Everybody contributed to the greater good of the community. Each day, we gathered for what could be termed prayer but was closer to meditation, a coming to terms with our own failings and the failings of others. Occasionally, outside counselors would join us to act as facilitators or to offer specialized advice and support to those who needed it. But for the most part we listened to one another and supported one another, aided by the founders of the community, Doug and Amy Greaves. The only pressure to remain came from the other members; it was made clear to each of us that we were not only helping ourselves but, by our presence there, helping our brothers.

I think, looking back, that I was not yet ready for what the Colony had to offer. When I left, a confused, self-pitying man had been replaced by one with a purpose, a clear aim: I would find the man who killed Susan and Jennifer, and I would kill him in turn. And, in the end, that is what I did. I killed the Traveling Man. I killed him, and I tore apart anyone who tried to stand in my way.

As I passed through the trees, the house came into view. It had whitewashed walls, and close by, there were barns and storage buildings, also white, and stables that had been coverted into dormitories. It was after 9 A.M., and the members of the community had already commenced their daily tasks. To my right, a black man walked among the chicken coops collecting eggs and I could see shapes moving in the small greenhouses beyond. From one of the barns came the sound of a buzz saw, as those with the necessary skills helped to make the furniture, the candlesticks, and the children's toys that were sold to partly support the community's activities. The rest of its funding came mainly from private donations, some from those who had, over the years, passed through the Colony's gates and, in doing so, had taken the first steps toward rebuilding their lives. I had sent them what I could afford, and had written to Amy once or twice, but I had not returned to the community since the day I turned my back on it.

As I drew up outside the house, a woman appeared on the porch. She was small, a little over five feet tall, with long gray hair tied up loosely on her head. Her broad shoulders were lost beneath a baggy sweatshirt, and the frayed cuffs of her jeans almost obscured her sneakers. She watched me step from the car. As I approached her, her face broke into a smile and she dropped down into the yard to embrace me.

“Charlie Parker,” said Amy, half in wonder. Her strong arms enclosed me and the scent of apples rose from her hair. She moved back and examined me closely, her eyes locking on to mine. Her thoughts flickered across her face, and in the movement of her features I seemed to see the events of the last two and a half years reenacted. When at last she looked away, concern and relief collided in her eyes.

She held my hand as we walked onto the porch and moved into the house. She guided me to a chair at the long communal breakfast table, then disappeared into the kitchen before returning with a mug of decaf coffee for me and some mint tea for herself.

And then, for the next hour, we spoke of my life since I had left the community, and I told her almost everything. To the east, the flooded land sparkled in the morning sun. Men occasionally passed by the window and raised a hand in greeting. One, I noticed, seemed to be having trouble walking. His gut hung over his belt, and despite the cold, his body gleamed with sweat. His hands shook uncontrollably. I guessed that he had been at the Colony for no more than a day or two, and the withdrawal was tormenting his system.

“A new arrival,” I said, when at last I had finished unburdening myself to her. I felt light-headed, a simultaneous sense of elation and loss.

“You were like that once,” said Amy.

“An alcoholic?”

“You were never an alcoholic.”

“How do you know?”

“Because of the way you stopped,” she replied. “Because of why you stopped. Do you think about drinking?”

“Sometimes.”

“But not every day, not every hour of every day?”

“No.”

“Then you've answered your own question. It was just a way to fill a hole in your being, and it could have been anything: sex, drugs, marathon running. When you left here, you simply substituted something else for alcohol. You found another way to fill the hole. You found violence, and revenge.”

Amy was not one to sugarcoat pills. She and her husband had built a community based on the importance of absolute honesty: with oneself and, from that, with others. “Do you believe that you have the right to take lives, to judge others and find them wanting?”

I heard echoes of Al Z in her words. I didn't like it.

“I had no choice,” I replied.

“There's always a choice.”

“It didn't seem that way at the time. If they'd lived, then I'd have died. Other people would have died as well, innocent people. I wasn't going to let that happen.”

“The necessity defense?”

The necessity defense was an old English common-law concept that held that an individual who breaks a minor law to achieve a greater good should be declared innocent of the lesser charge. It was still invoked occasionally, only to be knocked out of the ballpark by any judge worth his salt.

“There are only two consequences to taking a life,” Amy continued. “Either the victim achieves salvation, in which case you have killed a good man; or you damn him to hell, in which case you have deprived him of any hope of redemption. Afterward, the responsibility lies with you, and you bear the weight.”

“They weren't interested in redemption,” I answered her evenly. “And they didn't want salvation.”

“And you do?”

I didn't answer.

“You won't achieve salvation with a gun in your hand,” she persisted.

I leaned forward. “Amy,” I said softly, “I've thought about these things. I've considered them. I thought I could walk away, but I can't. People have to be protected from the urges of violent men. I can do that. Sometimes I'm too late to protect them, but maybe I can help to achieve some measure of justice for them.”

“Is that why you're here, Charlie?”

A noise came from behind me and Doug, Amy's husband, came into the room. I wondered for a moment how long he had been there. He held a large bottle of water in his hand. Some of it had dripped from his chin and soaked the front of his clean white shirt. He was a tall man with pale skin and hair that was almost entirely white. His eyes were remarkably green. When I stood to greet him, he held my shoulder for a time and perused me in much the same way that his wife had examined me earlier. Then he took a seat beside Amy and they both waited in silence for me to answer Amy's question.

“In a sense,” I said at last. “I'm investigating the death of a woman. Her name was Grace Peltier. Once, a long time ago, she was a friend of mine.”

I took a breath and looked out once again at the sunlight. In this place whose only purpose was to try to make the lives of those who passed its way a little better, the deaths of Grace and her father and the figure of a child out of time, his wound hidden behind cheap black tape, seemed somehow distant. It was as if this little community was invulnerable to the encroachments of violent men and the consequences of acts committed long ago and far away. But the apparent simplicity of the life here, and the clarity of the aims it espoused, masked a strength and a profound depth of knowledge. That was why I was here; it was, in its way, almost the antithesis of the group I was hunting.

“This investigation has brought me into contact with the Fellowship, and with a man who appears to be acting on its behalf. He calls himself Mr. Pudd.”

They didn't respond for a time. Doug looked to the ground and moved his right foot back and forth over the boards. Amy turned away from me and stared out over the trees, as if the answers I sought might somehow be found deep in their reaches. Then, at last, they exchanged a look, and Amy spoke.

“We know about them,” she said softly, as I knew she would. “You make interesting enemies, Charlie.”

She sipped her tea before continuing. “There are two Fellowships. There is the one that appears in the public form of Carter Paragon, the one that sells prayer pamphlets for ten dollars and promises to cure the ailments of those who touch their television screens. That Fellowship is mendacious and shallow and preys on the gullible. It's no different from any of a hundred other similar movements; no better than them, but certainly no worse.

“The second Fellowship is something entirely different. It is a force, an entity, not an organization. It supports vicious men. It funds killers and fanatics. It is powered by rage and hate and fear. Its targets are anything and everything that is not of, or like, itself. Some are obvious: gays, Jews, blacks, Catholics, those who assist in the provision of abortion or family planning services, those who would encourage peaceful coexistence between people of different races and different creeds. But in reality, it hates humanity. It hates the flawed nature of men, and is blind to the divine that exists in even the most humble among us.”

Beside her, her husband nodded in agreement. “It moves against anything that it perceives to be a threat to itself or its mission. It starts with polite advances, then progresses to intimidation, property damage, physical injury, and then, if it deems such action necessary, murder.”

Around us, the air seemed to change, for a wind had blown up from across the lake. It brought with it the scent of still water and decay.

“Who's behind it?” I asked.

Doug shrugged, but it was Amy who answered. “We don't know. We know what you know; its public face is Carter Paragon. Its private face remains hidden. It is not a large organization. It is said that the best conspiracy is a conspiracy of one; the fewer who know about something, the better. Our understanding is that there are no more than a handful of people involved.”

“Policemen?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Perhaps. Yes, almost certainly one or two policemen. It sometimes uses them to cover its tracks, or to stay in touch with any legal moves against it. But its primary instrument is a man, a thin man with red hair and a fondness for predation. Sometimes he has a woman with him, a mute.”

“That's him,” I said. “That's Pudd.”

For the first time since we had begun to talk of the Fellowship, Amy reached out to her husband. Her hand found his and gripped it tightly, as if even the mention of Pudd's name might invoke his presence and force them to face him together.

“He goes by different names,” she continued, after a pause. “I've heard him referred to as Ed Monker, as Walter Zaren, as Eric Dumah. I think he was Ted Bune once, and Alex Tchort for a time. I'm sure there were others.”

“You seem to know a lot about him.”

“We're religious, but we're not naive. These are dangerous people. It pays to know about them. Do those names mean anything to you at all?”

“I don't think so.”

“Do you know anything about demonology?”

“Sorry, I canceled my subscription to Amateur Demonologist. It was scaring the mailman.”

Doug permitted himself the ghost of a smile. “Tchort is the Russian Satan, also known as the Black God,” he said. “Bune is a three-headed demon who moves bodies from one grave to another. Dumah is the angel of the silence of death, and Zaren is the demon of the sixth hour, the avenging genius. Monker is the name he uses most frequently. It seems to have a particular resonance for him.”

“And Monker is a demon as well?”

“A very particular demon, one of a pair. Monker and Nakir are Islamic demons.”

A picture flashed in my mind: Pudd's fingers gentling brushing the mute's cheek and softly whispering.

My Nakir.

“He called the woman his Nakir,” I told them.

“Monker and Nakir examine and judge the dead, then assign them to heaven or hell. Your Mr. Pudd, or whatever you wish to call him, seems to find the demonic associations funny. It's a joke.”

“It seems like kind of specialized humor,” I said. “I can't see him making it onto Letterman.”

“The name Pudd has a particular meaning for him as well,” said Doug. “We found it on an arachnology web site. Elias Pudd was a pioneer in the field of American arachnology, a follower of Emerton and McCook. He published his most famous work, A Natural History of the Arachnid, in 1933. His speciality was recluses.”

“Spiders.” I shook my head. “They say people start to look like their pets, in time.”

“Or they pick the pet they most resemble,” answered Doug.

“You've seen him, then.”

He nodded. “He came out here once, he and the woman. They parked over by the chicken coops and waited for us to come out. As soon as we did, Pudd threw a sack from the car, then backed up and drove away. We never saw them again.”

“Do I want to know what was in the sack?”

Amy answered. “Rabbits.” She was looking at the floor so I couldn't see the expression on her face.

“Yours?”

“We used to keep them in a hutch out by the coops. One morning we came out and they were just gone. There was no blood, no fur, nothing to suggest that they'd been taken by a predator. Then, two days later, Pudd came and dumped the sack. When we opened it, it was filled with the remains of the rabbits. Something had bitten them. They were covered in gray brown lesions, and the flesh had begun to rot. We took one to the local vet, and he told us they were recluse bites. That's how we discovered the significance of the name Pudd for him.

“He was warning us to stay out of his business. We had been making inquiries about the Fellowship. We stopped after the visit.”

She raised her face and there was no indication of how she felt, apart from a slight tension around her mouth.

“Is there anything more that you can tell me?”

“Rumors, that's all,” said Doug, raising the water bottle to his lips.

“Rumors about a book?”

The bottle paused before it reached his mouth, and Amy's grip tightened on his hand.

“They're recording names, aren't they?” I continued. “Is that what Pudd is-some kind of infernal recording angel, writing down the names of the damned in a big black book?”

They didn't reply, and the silence was suddenly broken by the sound of the men filing into the house for their midmorning break. Doug and Amy both stood, then Doug shook my hand once again and left to make arrangements for the meal. Amy guided me away from the dining room and walked me to my car.

“As Doug said, the book is just a rumor,” she told me, “and the truth about the Fellowship still remains largely hidden. Nobody has yet managed to link its public face with its other activities.”

Amy took a deep breath, steeling herself for what she had to say next.

“There is something else I should tell you,” she began. “You're not the first to have come here asking about the Fellowship. Some years ago, another man came, from New York. We didn't know as much about the Fellowship then, and we told him less than we knew, but it still provoked the warning. He moved on, and we never heard of him again… until two years ago.”

The world around me faded into shadow, and the sun disappeared. When I looked up, I saw black shapes in the sky, descending in spirals, the beating of their wings filling the morning air and blocking out the light. Amy's hand reached out to take mine but all of my attention was focused on the sky, where the dark angels now hovered. Then one of them drew closer and his features, which had previously only been a chiaroscuro of light and shade, grew clear.

And I knew his face.

“It was him,” whispered Amy, and the dark angel smiled at me from above, his teeth filed to points, his huge wings feathered with night; a killer of men, women, and children now transformed by his passage into the next world.

“It was the Traveling Man.”

I sat on the hood of my car until the sickness had passed. I recalled a conversation in New Orleans some months after Susan and Jennifer had died, a voice telling me of its belief that somehow, the worst killers could find one another and sometimes connect, that they were sensitized to the presence of their own kind.

He would have found them. His nature, and his background in law enforcement, would have ensured it. If he came hunting for the Fellowship, then he would have tracked them down.

And he would have let them live, because they were his own kind. I remembered again his obscure biblical references, his interest in the Apocrypha, his belief that he was some kind of fallen angel sent to judge humanity, all of whom he found wanting.

Yes, he had found them, and they had helped to fan his own flame into being.

Amy reached out and took both of my hands in her own.

“It was seven or eight years ago,” she said. “It didn't seem important, until now.”

I nodded.

“You're going to continue looking for these people?”

“I have to, especially now.”

“Can I say something to you, something you may not want to hear?”

Her face was grave. I nodded.

“In all that you have done, in all that you have told me, it seems that you have been intent on helping the dead as much as the living. But our first duty is to the living, Charlie, to ourselves and those around us. The dead don't need your help.”

I paused before replying. “I'm not sure I believe that, Amy.”

For the first time, I saw doubt appear in her face. “You can't live in both worlds,” she said, and her voice was hesitant. “You must choose. Do you still feel the deaths of Susan and Jennifer pulling you back?”

“Sometimes, but not just them.”

She saw something in my face, or caught something in my tone, and for a brief moment, she was in me, seeing what I saw, hearing what I heard, feeling what I felt. I closed my eyes and felt shapes move around me, voices whispering in my ears, small hands clutching at mine.

We've all been waiting for you.

A small boy with an exit wound for an eye; a woman in a summer dress that shimmered in the darkness; figures that hovered at the periphery of my vision-all of them, each and every one, told me that it wasn't true, that somebody had to act for those who could no longer act for themselves, that some measure of justice had to be achieved for the lost and the fallen. For an instant, as she held my hands, Amy Greaves had some inkling of this, some fleeting perception of what waited in the depths of the honeycomb world.

“Oh my God,” she said.

And then her hands released mine and I heard her move away and disappear into the house. When I opened my eyes I was alone in the summer sunshine, the smell of rotting pine carrying to me on the wind. Through the trees a blue jay flew, heading north.

And I followed.

THE SEARCH FOR SANCTUARY

Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier…

Letter from Elizabeth Jessop to her sister, Lena Myers, dated December 11, 1963 (used by kind permission of the estate of Lena Myers)

Dearest Lena,

This has been the worst week I can ever recall. The truth about Lyall and me is out and now we are both being shunned. The Preacher has not been seen for two days. He is asking the Lord to guide him in his judgment upon us.

It was the boy that found us, the Preacher's son. I think he had been watching us for a long time. We were in the woods together, Lyall and I, and I saw Leonard in the bushes. I think I screamed when I saw him but when we went to find him he was already gone.

The Preacher was waiting for us at supper. We were refused food and told to go back to our houses while the others ate. When Frank returned that night he beat me and left me to sleep on the floor. Now Lyall and me are kept apart. The girl Muriel watches over him, while Leonard is like my shadow. Yesterday he threw a stone at me and drew blood from my head. He told me that was how the Bible said whores should be punished and that his father would deal with me the same way. The Cornishes saw what he did and Ethan Cornish struck him before he could throw a second stone. The boy pulled a knife on Ethan and cut his arm. The families have all argued for forgiveness for the sake of the community, but Lyall's wife will not look at me and one of his children spat on me when I passed her.

Last night there were voices raised in the Preacher's house. The families were putting their case to the Preacher but he was unmoved. There is bitterness among us now-at me and Lyall, but more at the Preacher and his ways. He has been asked to account for the money he holds in trust for us, but he has refused. I fear that Lyall and me will be forced from the community or that the Preacher will make us all leave and start again in another place. I have asked the Lord to forgive us our trespass against him and have prayed for help but part of me would not be sorry to leave if Lyall was beside me. But I cannot abandon my children and I feel sadness and shame for what I have done to Frank.

Ethan Cornish told me one more thing. He says that the Preacher's wife asked him to deal mercifully with us and he has refused to speak with her since. There is talk that he will scatter us to the four winds, where each family will make up for the sins of the community by spreading the word of God to new towns and cities. Tomorrow, the men, the women, and the children are to be divided into separate groups and each group will pray alone for guidance and forgiveness.

I have asked Ethan Cornish to place this note in the usual place and pray that you receive it in good health.

I am your sister,

Elizabeth

18

WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN YEARS OLD, my father took me on my first airplane trip. He got a good deal from a man he knew at American Airlines, a neighbor of ours whom my father had helped out when one of his sons got picked up for possession of some stolen radios. We flew from New York to Denver and from Denver to Billings, Montana, where we hired a car and spent a night in a motel before driving east early the following morning.

The sun shone on the hills, burnishing the green and beige with touches of silver before melting into the waters of the Little Bighorn River. We crossed the river at the Crow Agency and drove in silence to the entrance to the Little Bighorn Battlefield. It was Memorial Day and a platform had been erected at the cemetery, before which a small crowd occupied rows of lawn chairs while the few who could not find seats stood amid the gravestones and listened to the words of the service. Above them, the Stars and Stripes flapped in the morning breeze, but we did not stay to listen. Instead, fragments came to us as we climbed toward the monument, words like “youth,” “fallen,” “honor,” and “death” fading and then growing once again in volume, echoing across the shifting grass as if they were being spoken both in the present and in the distant past.

This was where Custer's five cavalry troops, young men mostly, were annihilated by the combined forces of the Lakota and Cheyenne. The battle took place over the space of one hour, but the soldiers probably couldn't even see the enemy for much of that time; they lay hidden in the grass and picked off the cavalrymen one by one, biding their time.

I looked out over the hills and thought that the Little Bighorn was a bleak place to die, surrounded by low hills of green and yellow and brown fading to blue and purple in the distance. From any patch of raised ground, you could see for miles. The men who died here would have known without question that no one was coming to rescue them, that these were their final moments on earth. They died terrible, lonely deaths far from home, their bodies subsequently mutilated and left to lie scattered on the battlefield for three days before finally receiving burial in a mass grave atop a small ridge in eastern Montana, their names carved on a granite monument above them.

In that place, I closed my eyes and imagined that I felt their ghosts crowding around me. I seemed to hear them: the horses neighing, the gunshots, the grass breaking beneath their feet.

And for an instant I was there with them, and I understood.

There are places where years have no meaning, where only a hair's breadth of history separates the present from the past. Standing there on that bleak hillside, a young man in a place where other young men had died, it was possible to feel a connection to that past, a sense that in some place further back on the stream of time these young men were still fighting, and still dying, that they would always be fighting this battle, in this place, over and over again, with ever the same end.

It was my first glimpse of the honeycomb world, my first inkling that the past never truly dies but is strangely, beautifully alive in the present. There is an interconnectedness to all things, a link between what lies buried and what lives above, a capacity for mutability that allows a good act committed in the present to rectify an imbalance in times gone by. That, in the end, is the nature of justice: not to undo the past but, by acting further down the line of time, to restore some measure of harmony, some possibility of equilibrium, so that lives may continue with their burden eased and the dead may find peace in a world beyond this one.

Now, as I headed north, I thought again of that day on the battlefield, a day of remembrance for the dead, my father standing silently beside me as the wind tousled our hair. This would be another pilgrimage, another acknowledgment of the debt owed by the living to the dead. Only by standing where the families had once stood, only by placing myself amid the memories of their final moments and listening for the echoes, could I hope to understand.

This is a honeycomb world. At St. Froid Lake, its interior lay exposed.

As I drove, I called in a long-standing favor. In New York, a woman's voice asked me my name, there was a pause, and I was put through to the office of Special Agent in Charge Hal Ross. Ross had recently been promoted and was now one of three SACs in the FBI's New York field office, operating under an assistant director. Ross and I had crossed swords the first time we met, but in the aftermath of the Traveling Man's death our relationship had gradually become more congenial. The FBI was now reviewing all cases with which the Traveling Man had been involved as part of its ongoing investigation into his crimes, and a room at Quantico had been devoted to relevant material from law enforcement agencies around the country. The investigation had been given the code name Charon, after the ferryman in Greek mythology who carried lost souls to Hades, and all references to the Traveling Man carried that name. It was a long process and one that was still far from complete. “It's Charlie Parker,” I said, when Ross came on the line.

“Hey, how you doing? Social call?”

“Have I ever paid you a social call?”

“Not that I can remember, but there's always a first time.”

“This isn't it. You remember that favor you promised me?”

There was a long pause. “You sure cut to the chase. Go ahead.”

“It's Charon. Seven or eight years ago he came up to Maine in search of an organization called the Fellowship. Can you find out where he went and the names of anyone to whom he might have spoken?”

“Can I ask why?”

“The Fellowship may be connected to a case I'm investigating: the death of a young woman. Any information you can give me about them would help.”

“That's quite a favor, Parker. We don't usually hand over records.”

Impatience and anger crept into my voice and I had to struggle against shouting. “I'm not asking for the records, just some idea of where he might have gone. This is important, Hal.”

He sighed. “When do you need it?”

“Soon. As soon as you can.”

“I'll see what I can do. You just used up your ninth life. I hope you realize that.”

I gave a mental shrug. “I wasn't doing a whole lot with it anyway.”

I drove through avenues of trees, their branches green with new growth, to this place of failed hopes and violent death, and sunlight dappled my car as I went. I stayed on I-95 all the way to Houlton, then took U.S. 1 north to Presque Isle and from there drove through Ashland, Portage, and Winterville, until at last I came to the edge of the town of Eagle Lake. I drove by a WCSH truck and gave my name to the state trooper who was checking traffic along the road. He waved me through.

Ellis had called me back with the name of a detective from the state trooper barracks at Houlton. His name was John Brouchard and I found him waist deep in a muddy hole beneath the big tarp erected to protect the remains, digging with a spade in a steady, unhurried rhythm. That was how it worked up here; everybody played his or her part. State police, wardens, sheriff's deputies, ME's staff, all of them rolled up their sleeves and got their hands dirty. If nothing else it was overtime, and when you've got kids going to college, or alimony payments to meet, then time and a half is always welcome, whatever way it has to be earned.

I stayed behind the crime scene line and called his name. He waved a hand in acknowledgment and climbed from the hole, unfolding a frame that was at least six-six or six-seven in height. He towered over me, his head blocking out the sun. His nails were black with mud and beneath his overalls his shirt was drenched in sweat. Damp earth clung to his work boots, and dirt streaked his forehead and cheeks.

“Ellis Howard tells me you're assisting them in an investigation,” he said, after we had shaken hands. “You want to tell me why you're up here if your investigation is centered on Portland?”

“You ask Ellis that?”

“He told me to ask you. He said you had all the answers.”

“He's being optimistic. Curtis Peltier, the man who was murdered in Portland over the weekend, was related to Elizabeth Jessop. I think her remains were among those found here. Curtis's daughter was Grace Peltier. CID III is looking into the circumstances of her death. She was doing graduate work on the people buried in that hole.”

Brouchard eyeballed me for a good ten seconds, then led me to the mobile crime scene unit, where I was allowed to view the video tour of the crime scene on a portable TV borrowed for the duration of the field recovery. He seemed grateful for the excuse to rest, and poured us both coffee while I sat and watched the tape: mud, bones, and trees; glimpses of damaged skulls and scattered fingers; dark water; a rib cage shattered and splintered by the impact of a shotgun blast; a child's skeleton, curled in fetuslike upon itself.

When the tape had concluded I followed him across the road to the edge of the grave.

“Can't let you go beyond here,” he said apologetically. “Some of the victims are still down there, and we're searching for other artifacts.”

I nodded. I didn't need to go inside. I could see all that I needed to see from where I stood. The scene had already been photographed and measured. Above holes in the mud, pieces of card had been attached to wooden spikes, detailing the nature of the remains discovered. In some cases the holes were empty, but in one corner I saw two men in white overalls work carefully around a piece of exposed bone. When one of them moved away, I saw the curved reach of a rib cage, like dark fingers about to clasp in prayer.

“Did they all have their names around their necks?”

The details of the names written on the wooden boards had appeared in a report in the Maine Sunday Telegram. Given the nature of the discovery, it was a wonder that the investigators had managed to keep anything at all under wraps.

“Most of them. Some of the wood was rotted pretty bad, though.” Brouchard reached into his shirt pocket and produced a piece of folded paper, which he handed to me. Typed on the page were seventeen names, presumably obtained by checking the original identities of the Baptists against the names discovered on the bodies. DNA samples were to be taken from surviving relatives, where dental records were not available. Stars beside some names indicated those for whom no positive identification had yet been made. James Jessop's name was the next to last on the list.

“Is the Jessop boy's body still down there?”

Brouchard looked at the list in my hand. “They're taking him away today, him and his sister. He mean anything to you?”

I didn't reply. Another name on the page had caught my eye: Louise Faulkner, the Reverend Faulkner's wife. Faulkner's name, I noticed, was not on the list. Neither were those of his children.

“Any idea yet how they died?”

“Won't know for certain until the autopsies are done, but all of the men and two of the women had gunshot wounds to the head or body. The others seem to have been clubbed. The Faulkner woman was probably strangled; we found fragments of cord around her neck. Some of the children have shattered skulls, like they were hit with a rock, or maybe a hammer. A couple have what look like gunshot wounds.” He stopped talking and looked away toward the lake. “I guess you know something about these people.”

“A little,” I admitted. “Judging by the names on this list, you have at least one suspect.”

Brouchard nodded. “The preacher, Faulkner, unless somebody planted those boards to throw us off the trail and Faulkner is lying there dead with the rest of them.”

It was a possibility, although I knew that the existence of the Apocalypse bought by Jack Mercier made it unlikely.

“He killed his own wife,” I said, more to myself than to Brouchard.

“You got any idea why?”

“Maybe because she objected to what he was going to do.” The article Grace Peltier had written for Down East magazine had mentioned that Faulkner was a fundamentalist. Under fundamentalist doctrine, a wife has to submit to the authority of her husband. Argument or defiance was not permitted. I guessed also that Faulkner probably needed her admiration and her validation for all that he did. When that was withdrawn, she ceased to have any value for him.

Brouchard was looking at me with interest now. “You think you know why he killed them all?”

I thought of what Amy had told me of the Fellowship, its hatred for what it perceived as human weakness and fallibility; of Faulkner's ornate Apocalypses, visions of the final judgment; and of the word hacked beneath James Jessop's name on a length of dirt-encrusted wood. Sinner.

“It's just a guess, but I think they disappointed him in some way, or turned on him, so he punished them for their failings. As soon as they stood up to him they were finished, cursed for rebelling against God's anointed one.”

“That's a pretty harsh punishment.”

“I figure he was a pretty harsh kind of guy.”

I also wondered if, in some dark place inside him, Faulkner had always known that they would fail him. That was what human beings did: they tried and failed and failed again, and they kept failing until either they got it right at last or time ran out and they had to settle for what they had. But for Faulkner, there was only one chance: when they failed it proved their worthlessness, the impossibility of their salvation. They were damned. They had always been damned, and what happened to them was of no consequence in this world or the next.

These people had followed Faulkner to their deaths, blinded by their hopes for a new golden age, a desire for conviction, for something to believe in. Nobody had intervened. After all, this was 1963; communists were the threat, not God-fearing people who wanted to create a simpler life for themselves. Fifteen years would pass before Jim Jones and his disciples blew Congressman Leo Ryan's face off as a prelude to the mass suicide of 900 followers, after which people would begin to take a different view.

But even after Jonestown, false messiahs continued to draw adherents to them. Rock Theriault systematically tortured his followers in Ontario before tearing apart a woman named Solange Boilard with his bare hands in 1988. Jeffrey Lundgren, the leader of a breakaway Mormon sect, killed five members of the Avery family-Dennis and Cheryl Avery and their young daughters Trina, Rebecca, and Karen-in a barn in Kirtland, Ohio, in April 1989 and buried their remains under earth, rocks, and garbage. Nobody came looking for them until almost one year later, following a tip-off to police from a disgruntled cult member. The LeBaron family and their disciples in the breakaway Mormon Church of the Firstborn murdered almost thirty people, including an eighteen-month-old girl, in a cycle of violence that lasted from the early seventies until 1991.

And then there was Waco, which demonstrated why law enforcement agencies have traditionally been reluctant to intervene in the affairs of religious groups. But in 1963, such incidents were almost beyond imagining; there would have been no reason to fear for the safety of the Aroostook Baptists, no need to doubt the intentions of the Reverend Faulkner, and no cause for his disciples to fear to walk with him in the valley of the shadow of death.

The ME's Dodge arrived while we stood silently by the lakeshore, and preparations began for the transportation of more bodies to the airfield at Presque Isle. Brouchard was tied up with the details of the removal, so I walked to the edge of the trees and watched the figures move beneath the canvas. It was approaching three o'clock and it was cool by the river. The wind blowing off the water buffeted the ME's men as they carried a body bag from the scene, strapped onto a stretcher to prevent any further damage to the bones. From the north, the hybrids sang.

Not all of them had died here, of that I was certain. This land wasn't even part of the parcel originally leased to them. The fields they had worked were over the rise, behind the kennels; and the houses, now long gone, were farther back still. The adults would have been killed at or near the settlement; it would have been difficult to get them to come to the place intended for their burial, harder still to control them once the slaughter started. It made sense to bury them away from the center of the community in case, at some future date, suspicion mutated into action and a search of the property took place. Safer, then, to dispose of them by the lake.

According to Grace's article, the community had apparently dispersed in December 1963. The evidence of the burial would have been masked by the winter snows. By the time the thaws came and the ground turned to mud, there would be little to distinguish this patch of land from any other. It was solid ground; it should not have collapsed, but it did.

After all, they had been waiting for a long, long time.

I closed my eyes and listened as the world faded around me, trying to imagine what it must have been like in those final minutes. The howling became muted, the noise of the cars on the road beyond transformed itself into the buzzing of flies, and amid the gentle brushing of the branches above my head…

I hear gunshots.

There are men running, caught as they work in the fields. Two have already fallen, bloody holes gaping ragged in their backs. One of those still alive turns, a pitchfork clutched in his hands. Its center disintegrates as the shot tears through it, wood and metal entering his body simultaneously. They pursue the last one through the grass, reloading as they go. Above them, a murder of crows circles, calling loudly. The cries of the last man to die mingle with them, and then all is quiet.

I heard a sound in the trees behind me, but when I looked there were only branches moving slightly, as if disturbed by the passage of some animal. Beyond, the green faded to black and the shapes of the trees became indistinct.

The women are the next to die. They have been told to kneel and pray in one of the houses, to think upon the sins of the community. They hear the gunshots but do not understand their significance. The door opens and Elizabeth Jessop turns. A man is silhouetted against the evening light. He tells her to look away, to turn to the cross and beg for forgiveness.

Elizabeth closes her eyes and begins to pray.

Behind me the noise came again, like gentle footfalls slowly growing closer. Something was emerging from the darkness, but I did not turn.

The children are the last to die. They sense that something is wrong, that something has happened that should not have occurred, yet they have followed the Preacher down to the lake, where the grave is already dug and the waters are still before them. They are obedient, as little ones should always be.

They too kneel down to pray, the mud wet beneath their knees, the wooden boards heavy around their necks, the ropes burning against their skin. They have been told to hold their hands against their breasts, the thumbs crossed as they have been taught, but James Jessop reaches out and takes his sister's hand in his own. Beside him, she starts to cry and he grips her hand tighter.

“Don't cry,” he says.

A shadow falls over him.

“Don't-”

I felt a coldness in my right hand. James Jessop was standing beside me in the shade of a yellow birch tree, his small hand curled around mine. Sunlight reflected from the single clear lens of his glasses. From the covered area below, two figures emerged carrying another small bundle on a stretcher.

“They're going to take you away from here, James,” I said.

He nodded and moved closer to me, the presence of him chilling my leg and ribs.

“It didn't hurt none,” he said. “Everything just went dark.”

I was glad that he had felt no pain. I tried to press his hand, to give him some sign, but there was nothing there, only cold air.

He looked up at me. “I have to leave now.”

“I know.”

His undamaged eye was brown, flashes of yellow at its center eclipsed by the dark moon of his pupil. I should have seen my face reflected in his eye and in the lens of his glasses, but I could detect no trace of myself. It was as if I were the unreal one, the phantasm, and James Jessop who was flesh and blood, skin and bone.

“He said we were bad, but I was never bad. I always did what I was told, right up to the end.”

The chill faded from my fingers as he released my hand and began to walk back into the forest, his knees raised high so that he would not brush through the briers and the long grass. I didn't want him to leave.

I wanted to comfort him.

I wanted to understand.

I called his name. He stopped and stared back at me. “Have you seen the Summer Lady, James?” I asked. A tear dropped onto my cheek and rolled down to the corner of my mouth. I savored it with my tongue.

He nodded solemnly.

“She's waiting for me,” he said. “She's going to take me to the others.”

“Where is she, James?”

James Jessop raised his hand and pointed into the darkness of the forest, then turned and walked into the tangles and trees, until the shadows of the branches embraced him and I could see him no more.

19

AS I DROVE DOWN TO WATERVILLE to meet Angel and Louis, my hand tingled from the touch of a lost child. St. Froid Lake had seemed indescribably desolate. I still heard the howls of the hybrids ringing in my ears, a perpetual chorus of mourning for the dead. Pictures of flapping canvas and piles of earth, of cold water and old brown bones flashed through my mind before coalescing into a single image of James Jessop receding into the hidden reaches of the forest, where an unseen woman in a summer dress waited to take him away.

I felt a surge of gratitude that there was somebody waiting for him at the edge of the darkness, that he would not have to make that journey alone.

I just hoped that there was somebody waiting for us all.

In Waterville, I parked outside the Ames mall and waited. It was almost an hour before the black Lexus appeared, turning onto the main street and parking at its far end. I watched Angel get out and walk casually to the corner of Main and Temple, then turn into the back lot of the Fellowship's building at the junction with the Hunan Legends Chinese restaurant when he saw that the street was clear. I locked the Mustang, met Louis, and together we walked down to Temple to join Angel. He stood in the shadows and handed us each a pair of gloves. His own hands were already concealed and holding the handle of the newly opened door.

“I think I'm gonna add Waterville to the list of places I'm never gonna retire to,” remarked Angel as we stepped into the building. “Along with Bogotá and Bangladesh.”

“I'll break the sad news to the Chamber of Commerce,” I told him. “I don't know how they'll cope.”

“So where are you planning on retiring to?”

“Maybe I won't live long enough for it to become an issue.”

“Man, you sure going the right way about it,” said Louis. “Grim Reaper probably got your number on speed dial.”

We followed Angel up the thinly carpeted stairs until we arrived at a wooden door with a small plastic sign nailed to it at eye level. It read simply: THE FELLOWSHIP. There was a bell on the door frame to the right, in case anyone somehow managed to sneak in the front door without Ms. Torrance turning on them like a hungry rottweiler. I slipped out my mini Maglite and shined it on the lock. I had taken the precaution of wrapping some duct tape around the top so that only a thin beam of light about half the size of a dime showed. Angel took a pick and a tension tool from his pocket and opened the door in five seconds flat. Inside, the lights from the street shone on a reception area with three plastic chairs, a wooden desk with a telephone and blotter on top, a filing cabinet in one corner, and some vaguely inspirational pictures on the walls featuring sunsets and doves and small children.

Angel jiggled the lock on the filing cabinet and when it clicked, pulled open the top drawer. Using his own flashlight, he illuminated a pile of conservative and religious tracts published by the Fellowship itself and other groups of which the Fellowship presumably approved. They included The Christian Family; Other Races, Other Rules; Enemies of the People; Jewry: The Truth About the Chosen People; Killing the Future: The Reality of Abortion; and Daddy Doesn't Love Me Anymore: Divorce and the American Family.

“Look at this one,” said Angel. “Natural Laws, Unnatural Acts: How Homosexuality Is Poisoning America.”

“Maybe they've smelled your aftershave,” I replied. “Anything in the other drawers?”

Angel went through them quickly. “Looks like more of the same.”

He opened the door into the main office. This was more elegantly furnished than the reception area; the desk was marginally more expensive, with a high-backed imitation leather chair behind it and a pair of couches in the same material against two of the walls, a low coffee table between them. The walls were covered with photographs of Carter Paragon at various events, usually surrounded by people who didn't know any better than to be happy around him. The sunlight had shone directly onto these images for a long time. Some of the photographs had faded or turned yellow in the corners, and a coating of dust added a further element of dullness. In the corner, beneath an ornate crucifix, stood another filing cabinet, stronger and sturdier than the one in the reception area. It took Angel a couple of tries to get it open, but when he did his brow furrowed in surprise.

“What is it?” I said.

“Take a look,” he replied.

I walked over and shined my light into the open drawer. It was empty, apart from a thick coating of dust. Angel opened the other drawers in turn, but only the bottom drawer contained anything: a bottle of whiskey and two tumblers. I closed the drawer and reopened the one above it: there was only dust, and dust that obviously had not been disturbed for a long time.

“Either this is special holy dust,” said Angel, “which would explain why it has to be locked up safe at night, or there's nothing here and there never was.”

“It's just a front,” I said. “The whole thing is just a front.” Just as Amy had told me, the Waterville organization was simply a mask to fool the unwary. The other Fellowship, the one with the real power, existed elsewhere.

“There must be records of some kind,” I said.

“Maybe he keeps them out at his house,” suggested Angel.

I looked at him. “You got anything better to do?”

“Than burgle a guy's house? No, not really.” He took a closer look at the lock on the filing cabinet. “Tell you something else; I think someone tried to get this open before we did. There are marks around the lock. They're small, but it was still a pretty amateur job.”

We relocked the doors and headed downstairs. At the back door, Angel paused and checked the lock with the aid of his pocket light. “Back door's been opened from outside,” he said. “There are fresh scratches around the keyhole, and I didn't make them. Guess I didn't see them because I wasn't looking for them.”

There was nothing else to say. We weren't the only people interested in finding out what was in Carter Paragon's files, and I knew that we weren't the only ones hunting Mr. Pudd. Lester Bargus had learned that too, in his final moments.

Carter Paragon's house was quiet as we drove past. We parked our cars off the road, in the shadows cast by a stand of pine trees, and followed the boundary wall of the property around to a barred security gate at the back of the house. There were no video cameras visible, although there was an intercom on the gatepost, just as there was at the main entrance to the house. We climbed over the wall, Angel and I going first, Louis joining us after what seemed like a very reluctant pause. When he hit the soft lawn, he looked in dismay at the marks left by the white wall on his black jeans but said nothing.

We skirted the house, staying within the cover of the trees. A single light burned in a curtained room on the upper floor at the eastern side. The same battered blue car was parked in the drive, but its hood was cool. It hadn't been driven that evening. The Explorer was nowhere to be seen. The curtains on the window were drawn tight, so it was impossible to see inside.

“What do you want to do?” asked Angel.

“Ring the doorbell,” I replied.

“I thought we were going to burgle him,” hissed Angel, “not try to sell him the Watchtower.”

I rang the bell anyway and Angel went quiet. Nobody answered, even when I rang it again for a good ten seconds. Angel left us and disappeared around the back of the house. A couple of minutes later he returned.

“I think you need to take a look at this,” he said.

We followed him to the rear of the house and entered through the open back door into a small, cheaply furnished kitchen. There was broken glass on the floor where someone had smashed a pane to get at the lock.

“I take it that isn't your handiwork?” I asked Angel.

“I won't even dignify that with an answer.”

Louis had already drawn his gun, and I followed his lead. I looked into a couple of the rooms as we passed but they were all virtually empty; there was hardly any furniture, no pictures on the walls, no carpet on the floor. One room had a TV and VCR, faced by a pair of old armchairs and a rickety coffee table, but most of the house appeared to be unoccupied. The front room was the only one that held anything significant: hundreds and hundreds of books and pamphlets recently packed into boxes, ready to be taken away. There were American underground training manuals and improvised weapon guides; instructions for the creation of homemade munitions, timers, and detonators; catalogues of military suppliers; and any number of books on covert surveillance. In the box nearest the door lay a stack of photocopied, crudely bound volumes; stenciled on the cover of each were the words Army of God.

The name Army of God had first cropped up in 1982, when the abortion doctor Hector Zevallos and his wife were kidnapped in Illinois and their kidnappers used the name in their dealings with the FBI. Since then, Army of God calling cards had been left at the scene of clinic bombings, and the anonymously published manual I was holding in my hand had become synonymous with a particular brand of religious extremism. It was a kind of anarchist cookbook for religious nuts, a guide to blowing up property and, if necessary, people for the greater glory of the Lord.

Louis was holding a thick photocopied list in his hand, one of a number piled on the floor. “Abortion clinics, AIDS clinics, home addresses for doctors, license plate numbers for civil rights activists and feminists. Guy here on page three, Gordon Eastman, he's a gay rights activist in Wisconsin.”

“There's a job you don't want,” whispered Angel. “Like selling dildos in Alabama.”

I tossed the Army of God manual back in the box. “These people-are exporting low-level chaos to every cracker with a grudge and a mailbox.”

“So where are they?” asked Angel.

In unison, the three of us glanced at the ceiling and the second floor of the house. Angel groaned softly.

“I had to ask.”

We climbed the stairs quietly, Louis in the lead, Angel behind him, while I brought up the rear. The room with the light was at the very end of the hallway, at the front of the house. Louis paused at the first doorway we reached and checked quickly to make sure it was empty. It contained only a bare iron bedstead and a suitcase half-full of men's clothing, while the adjoining rooms had been stripped bare of whatever furniture had been there to begin with.

“Maybe he had a yard sale,” suggested Louis.

“He did, then someone wasn't happy with his merchandise,” responded Angel solemnly. He was standing close to the doorway of the single illuminated room, his gun by his side.

Inside was a bed, an electric heater, and a set of Home Depot shelves filled with paperback books and topped by a potted plant. There was a small closet containing some of Carter Paragon's suits, more of which lay on the bed. A wooden chair, one of a pair, stood beside a dressing table. A portable TV sat silent and dark on a cheap unit.

Carter Paragon was in the second wooden chair, blood on the carpet around him. His arms had been pulled behind him and secured with cuffs. He had been badly beaten; one eye had been reduced to pulp by a punch and his face was swollen and bruised. His feet were bare and two of the toes on his right foot were broken.

“Take a look here,” said Angel, pointing to the back of the chair.

I looked, and winced. Four of his fingernails had been torn out. I tried for a pulse. There was nothing, but the body was still warm to the touch.

Carter Paragon's head was inclined backward, his face to the ceiling. His mouth hung open, and amid the blood lay something small and brown. I took a handkerchief from my pocket, then reached in and removed the object, holding it up to the light. A string of bloody saliva dripped from it and fell to the floor.

It was a shard of clay.

20

WE DROVE BACK TO SCARBOROUGH THAT NIGHT, Angel and Louis going on ahead while I stopped briefly in Augusta. From a public phone I called the office of the Portland Press Herald, asked to be put through to the news desk, and told the woman who answered that there was a body in the house of Carter Paragon in Waterville but that the police didn't know about it yet. Then I hung up. At the very least, the Herald would check with the cops, who would in turn head out to knock on Paragon's door. In the meantime, I had avoided the possibility of enhanced 911, which would have pinpointed my location and raised the possibility of being intercepted by the nearest patrol car, or of my voice being recorded using RACAL or any similar procedure. Then I drove on in silence, thinking of Carter Paragon and the clay that had been deposited in his mouth as a message for whoever found him.

Angel and Louis were already making themselves at home by the time I got back to the Scarborough house. I could hear Angel in the bathroom, making the place untidy. I banged on the door.

“Don't make a mess,” I warned him. “Rachel's coming up, and I just cleaned it specially.”

Rachel didn't like untidiness. She was one of those people who got a kind of satisfaction out of scrubbing away dust and dirt, even other people's. Whenever she stayed with me in Scarborough, I would be sure to find her advancing on the bathroom or kitchen in rubber gloves with a determined look on her face.

“She cleans your bathroom?” Angel once asked, as if I had told him that Rachel regularly sacrificed goats or played women's golf. “I don't even clean my own bathroom, and I sure as hell ain't gonna clean no stranger's bathroom.”

“I'm not a stranger, Angel,” I explained.

“Hey,” he replied, “when it comes to bathroom stuff, everybody's a stranger.”

In the kitchen, Louis was squatting in front of the fridge, discarding items on the floor. He checked the expiration date on some cold cuts.

“Damn, you buy all this food at auction?”

I wondered, as I called out for a pizza delivery, if agreeing to let them inside my door had been such a good idea after all.

“Who is this guy?” asked Louis. We were sitting at my kitchen table while we waited for our food to arrive, discussing the shard of clay left by Paragon's killer.

“Al Z told me he calls himself the Golem, and Epstein's father confirmed it. That's all I know. You ever hear of him?”

He shook his head. “Means he's very good, or an amateur. Still, cool name.”

“Yeah, why can't you have a cool name like that?” asked Angel.

“Hey, Louis is a cool name.”

“Only if you're the king of France. You think he got much out of Paragon?”

“You saw what he did to him,” I replied. “Paragon probably told him everything he could remember since grade school.”

“So this Golem knows more than us?”

“Everybody knows more than us.”

There came the sound of a car pulling up out front.

“Pizza boy,” I said.

Nobody else at the table made a sudden move for his wallet.

“Guess dinner's on me, then.”

I went to the door and took the two pizza boxes from the kid. As I gave him the cash, he spoke quietly to me.

“I don't want to worry you, man, but you got a guy over there watching your house.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Over my right shoulder, in the trees.”

“Don't look at him,” I said. “Just drive away.” I tipped him an extra ten, then glanced casually to my left as his car pulled away. Among the trees, something pale hung unmoving in the darkness: a man's face. I stepped back into the hallway, drew my gun, and called back quietly: “Boys, we've got company.”

I walked out to the porch, the gun at my side. Angel was behind me, his Glock in his hand. Louis was nowhere to be seen, but I guessed that he was already moving around the back of the house. I stepped slowly from the porch and moved forward, the gun held low, until I got a clearer view of the watcher. I saw his hairless scalp and face, his pale skin, his thin mouth and dark eyes. His hands were held slightly out from his sides, so that I could see they were empty. He wore a black suit with a white shirt and black tie under a long black overcoat. In every respect, he resembled the man who had taken out Lester Bargus and probably Carter Paragon as well.

“Who is he?” hissed Angel. “I'm guessing he's the guy with the cool name.”

I leaned down, placed my gun on the ground, and walked toward him.

“Bird,” said Angel, a note of warning in his voice.

“He's on my property,” I said, “and he knows it's mine. Whatever he has to say, he's here to say it to my face.”

“Then keep to the right,” he said. “He makes a move, maybe I can take him out before he kills you.”

“Thanks. I feel safer already.” But I kept to the right as I had been told.

When I was within a few feet of him he raised one white hand. “That's close enough, Mr. Parker.” The accent was unusual, with odd, European inflections. “I suggest that your friend also halt his advance through the woods. I'm not going to harm anyone here.”

I paused, then called out. “Louis, it's okay.”

From about fifteen feet to my left, a dark figure separated itself from the trees, his gun held steadily in front of him. Louis didn't lower the gun, but he didn't make any further move either.

Up close, the man was startlingly white, with no color to his lips or his cheeks and only the faintest of dark smudges beneath his eyes. They were a washed-out blue, almost lifeless. Combined with the absence of hair on his face, they made him appear like a wax model that had been left incomplete. His scalp was deeply scarred, as were the places where his eyebrows should have been. I noticed one other thing about him: his face was dry and flaking in places, like a reptile discarding its skin.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I think you know who I am.”

“Golem,” I said.

I expected him to nod, maybe even to smile, but he did neither. Instead he said: “The Golem is a myth, Mr. Parker. Do you believe in myths?”

“I used to discount them, but I've been proved wrong in the past. Now I try to keep an open mind. Why did you kill Carter Paragon?”

“The question is really, Why did I hurt Carter Paragon? For the same reason that you broke into his house an hour later: to find out what he knew. His death was a consequence, not an intention.”

“You killed Lester Bargus too.”

“Mr. Bargus supplied weapons to evil men,” he responded simply. “But no longer.”

“He was unarmed.”

“So was the rabbi.” He pronounced it “rebbe.”

“An eye for an eye,” I said.

“Perhaps. I know something of you too, Mr. Parker. I don't believe you are in a position to pass judgment on me.”

“I'm not judging you. Lester Bargus was a lowlife and nobody will miss him, but I've found in the past that people willing to strike at unarmed men tend not to be too particular about whom they kill. That concerns me.”

“Once again, I do not plan to harm you or your friends. The man I want calls himself Pudd. You know of him, I think.”

“I've encountered him.”

“Do you know where he is?”

For the first time, a note of eagerness crept into his voice. I guessed that either Paragon had died before he could tell all, or, more interestingly, that he had been unable to tell his killer where Pudd had his lair because he didn't know.

“Not yet. I intend to find out, though.”

“Your intentions and mine may conflict, then.”

“Maybe we both have similar aims,” I suggested. “No, we do not. Yours is a moral crusade. Those who engaged me for this task have a more specific purpose.”

“Revenge?”

“I do only what is required of me,” he said. “No more.” His voice was deep and the words seemed to echo inside him, as if he were a hollow man without substance, only form. “I came to give you a message. Do not come between me and this man. If you do, I will be forced to take action against you.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

I didn't even see him move. One moment he was in front of me, his hands empty, the next he was close by my side and a small center-fire derringer was at my throat, the twin barrels pointing upward to my brain. From out of the darkness, the Beamshot laser sight on Louis's gun projected its light as he tried to find a clear shot, but my body and the darkness of the Golem's clothes shielded him from both Louis and Angel.

“Tell them to back off, Mr. Parker,” he whispered, his head behind mine. “I want you to walk me to my car. You have two seconds.”

I shouted out the warning immediately, and Louis killed the beam. The Golem pulled me back through the trees, guiding my footsteps. The sleeve of his overcoat had rolled up on his arm and I could see the first of the small blue numbers etched on his skin. He was a concentration camp survivor. I also saw that he had no fingerprints. Instead, the skin and flesh appeared to have collapsed inward, creating a puckered, indented scar at the tip of each finger. Fire, I thought. It was fire that did this to him; fire that scarred his head, fire that took away his fingerprints.

How do you create a clay demon?

You bake it in an oven.

When we reached his car, he made me stand in front of the driver's door, the gun at my back, as he lowered himself into the driver's seat.

“Remember, Mr. Parker,” he said to my back. “Do not interfere with my work.”

Then, his head low, he sped away.

Louis and Angel appeared from the trees. I was shaking as I reached up and felt the twin marks where the derringer had been pushed into my flesh.

“You think you could have hit him before he killed me?” I asked, as his lights faded away.

Louis thought for a moment. “Probably not. You think he'd have bled?”

“No. I think he'd just have cracked.”

“What now?” said Angel.

“We eat,” although I wasn't sure how steady my stomach was. We began to walk back to the house.

“You sure pick colorful people to fall out with,” said Louis as he fell in beside me.

“Yes,” I said. “I guess I do.”

All three of us heard the car approaching from behind at the same time. It turned into the yard at full speed and we were frozen in its headlights, our guns raised and our eyes wide. Instantly, the driver killed the beams, and still blinking, we scattered left and right. There was silence for a moment, then the driver's door opened and Rachel Wolfe's voice said:

“Okay, no more coffee for you guys. Ever.”

After we had eaten, Rachel went off to take a shower. While Angel sipped his beer by the window, Louis sat at my table finishing a bottle of wine. It was Flagstone sauvignon blanc, from some new winery in Cape Town, South Africa. Louis had two mixed cases imported especially twice yearly and had brought two bottles with him in the trunk of his car. He and Rachel had spent so long cooing over it that I thought one of them must have given birth to the bottle.

“If you're a private eye,” asked Angel at last, “how come you ain't got no office?”

“I can't afford an office. If I had an office, I'd have to sell the house and sleep on my desk.”

“Wouldn't be such a big stretch. You got next to nothing in this old house anyway. You ever worry about burglars?”

“Burglars in general, or just the one who happens to be standing in my kitchen right now?”

He scowled. “In general.”

“I don't have anything worth stealing.”

“That's what I mean. You ever think of the effect a big empty place like this is going to have on some guy who goes to the trouble of breaking into it? You better hope he ain't agoraphobic, else you gonna have a lawsuit on your hands.”

“What are you, some kind of organizer for Burglars Local three-oh-two?”

“No, just a fly on the wall. One of many, judging by the state of your kitchen.”

“What are you implying?”

“What am I always implying? You need some company.”

“I was thinking of getting a dog.”

“That wasn't what I meant, and you know it. How long you planning on keeping her at arm's length? Till you die? You know, they don't bury you side by side. You won't be touching under the ground.”

“Opportunity only knocks once, man,” drawled his partner. “It don't knock, knock again, then leave a note asking you to give it a call back when you got your shit together.”

Behind us there came the sound of bare feet on boards. Rachel stood at the door, drying her hair. Louis glanced at me, then rose and placed his empty bottle in the recycling bin.

“Time for my bed,” he said. He jerked his chin at Angel as he reached the door. “You too.” He kissed Rachel on the cheek and headed out to the car.

“You two kids don't be staying up late smoochin' and all,” Angel said, then followed Louis into the night.

“Brought together by a pair of gun-toting gay matchmakers,” I said as we heard their car pull away. “It'll be something to tell the grandchildren.”

Rachel looked at me, as if trying to determine if I was being flippant or not. Frankly, I wasn't sure myself.

She immediately cut to the chase. “Did you hire people to watch over me in Boston?” she asked.

“You spotted them?” I was impressed with her, although I got the feeling that it wasn't mutual.

“I guess I was on my guard. I called in the license plate of their car when I saw them change shifts. One of them followed me all the way to your front gate.” Rachel's brother had been a policeman, killed on duty some years back. She still had friends on various forces.

“I was worried about you.”

Her voice rose. “I told you, I don't want you feeling you have to protect me.”

“Rachel,” I said, “these people are dangerous. I was concerned for Angel too, but at least he carries a gun. What would you have done if they came for you? Thrown plates at them?”

“You should have told me!” She slapped her hand hard on the table. There was real anger in her eyes.

“If I had, would you have let it go ahead? I love you, Rach, but you're stubborn enough to head up the Teamsters.”

Some of the fury in her eyes died and the hand on the table curled into a small tight fist that shook as the tension gradually eased from her.

“How can we be together if you're always afraid of losing me?” she asked gently.

I thought of the dead of St. Froid, crowding a narrow street in Portland. I thought of James Jessop and the figure I had glimpsed leaning over him, the Summer Lady. I had seen her before: in a subway train; outside the Scarborough house; and once, reflected in the window of my kitchen, as if she were standing behind me, but when I turned to look there was nobody there. Sitting in Chumley's only a few nights before, it seemed that an accommodation with the past might be possible. But that was before Mickey Shine's head was impaled on a tree, before James Jessop emerged from a dark forest and took my hand. How could I bring Rachel into that world?

“I can't compete with the dead,” she said.

“I'm not asking you to compete with the dead.”

“It's not a question of asking.” She sat across from me, cupped her chin in her hands, and looked sad and distant.

“I'm trying, Rachel.”

“I know,” she said. “I know you are.”

“I love you. I want to be with you.”

“How?” she whispered, lowering her head. “On weekends in Boston, or weekends here?”

“How about just here?”

She looked up, as if unsure of what she had heard.

“I mean it.”

“When? Before I'm old?”

“Older.”

She slapped at me playfully and I reached out to touch her hair. “We'll get there,” I said and felt her nod against my hand. “And sooner rather than later. I promise.”

“We'd better,” she said, so quietly that it was almost as if I had heard her thoughts. I held her, sensing somehow that she had more to say, but nothing came.

“What kind of dog were you planning to get?” she asked after a time, as the warmth of her spread across me.

I smiled down at her. She had probably heard my entire conversation with Angel and Louis. I think she had been meant to.

“I hadn't decided. I thought you might help me pick one from the pound.”

“That's a very couply thing to do.”

“Well, we are a couple.”

“But not a normal one.”

“No. Louis would never forgive us if we were.”

She kissed me, and I kissed her back. Past and future receded from us like creditors temporarily denied their demands, and there was only the brief, fleeting beauty of the present to hold us. That night, I gathered her in my arms as she slept and tried to imagine a future for us together, but I seemed to lose us in tangles and weaves. Yet when I awoke my fist was clenched tightly, as if I had grasped something vital in my dreams and now refused to let it go.

21

I LAY WITH RACHEL and listened to the rising wheeps of a flycatcher from high in the trees. His stay in New England would be short; he had probably arrived in the past week, and would be gone by the end of September, but if he managed to avoid the hawks and the owls, then his little yellow belly would soon be filled with a smorgasbord of insects as the bug population exploded. Already the first of the horseflies were circling, their large green eyes glittering hungrily. They would quickly be joined by greenheads and locusts, ticks and deerflies. At Scarborough Marsh, clouds of golden saltmarsh mosquitoes would converge, the males sipping on plant juices while the females scoured the waters and the roadsides for meatier pickings.

And the insects would feed, and the spiders would grow fat upon them.

Beside me, Rachel murmured softly in her sleep, and I felt the warmth of her back against my stomach, the line of her spine beneath her pale skin like a stone path blanketed by new fallen snow. I raised myself gently to look at her face. Strands of red hair had caught between her lips, and carefully, I brushed them away. She smiled, her eyes still closed, and her fingers softly grazed my thigh. I kissed her gently behind the ear and she leaned her head into the pillow, exposing her neck to me as I followed its lines down to her shoulder and the small hollow at her throat. Her body arched as she pressed herself against me, and all other thoughts were lost in sunlight and birdsong.

It was almost 1 P.M. when I left Rachel singing in the bathroom while I went out for bagels and milk, conscious still of the weight of the Smith amp; Wesson in its holster beneath my arm. It made me uneasy how quickly I had slipped back into the old routine of arming myself before I left the house, even for something as simple as a trip to the store.

It was, by then, late in the morning, but today I hoped to find Marcy Becker. Circumstances had forced me to postpone the hunt for her, but more and more I was convinced that she was the key to what had taken place on the night Grace Peltier died, one more piece of a greater picture whose dimensions I was only now beginning to understand. Faulkner, or something of him, had survived. He, in collusion with others, had slaughtered the Aroostook Baptists and his own wife, then disappeared, eventually reemerging veiled by the organization known as the Fellowship. Paragon had merely been a front, a dupe. The real Fellowship, the substance behind the shadow, was Faulkner, and Pudd was his sword.

I parked the car and took the bag of groceries from the front seat. I was still rearranging my thoughts, shifting possibilities, as I reached the kitchen door. I pushed it open and something white lifted from the floor and tumbled in the air, carried upward by the draft.

It was a sugar wrapper.

Rachel was standing at the entrance to the hallway, Pudd at her shoulder pushing her into the kitchen. She was gagged with a scarf, and her arms were secured at her back.

Behind her, Pudd froze.

I dropped the bag and reached for my gun. Simultaneously, Rachel twisted in Pudd's grip and slammed her head back into his face, connecting with the bridge of his nose. He staggered backward, swiping at Rachel with the back of his hand. My fingers were already brushing the grip of the Smith amp; Wesson when something struck me hard on the side of the head and I went down, bright white pain erupting in my brain. I felt hands at my side and then my gun was gone and red droplets were exploding like sunbursts in the spilled milk. I tried to get up, but my hands slipped on the wet floor and my legs felt heavy and awkward. I raised my face to see Pudd's fist raining down blows on Rachel's head as she sank to the floor. There was blood on his face and palm. Then a second impact connected with my head, followed by a third, and I didn't feel anything else for what seemed like a very long time.

I came to in slow, arduous steps, as if I were struggling through deep red water. I was vaguely conscious of Rachel sitting on a kitchen chair by the table, still wearing her white cotton robe. Her teeth were visible where the scarf had been pulled tightly into her open mouth, and her hands were tied behind her back. There was bruising to her cheek and left eye, and blood on her forehead. Some of it had run down to stain the gag. She looked at me wide-eyed and her eyes flicked frantically to my right, but when I tried to move my head I was struck again and everything went black.

I drifted in and out like that for a while. My arms had been tied separately, each wrist bound to one of the struts of the chair by what felt like cable ties. They bit into my skin when I tried to move. My head ached badly, and there was blood in my eyes. Through the mists I heard a voice say:

“So this is the man.”

It was an old man's voice, faded and scratched like a recording heard through an old radio. I tried to lift my head and saw something move in the shadows in the hallway of the house: a slightly hunched figure, wrapped in black. Another, taller shape moved beside it, and I thought that it might be a woman.

“I think that perhaps you should leave now,” said a male voice. I recognized the careful, composed rhythms of Mr. Pudd's speech.

“I would prefer to stay,” came the reply as the voice drew closer to me. “You know how I like to watch you work.”

I felt fingers on my chin as the old man spoke, and smelled salt water and leather. The stench of internal decay was on his breath. I made an effort to open my eyes fully but the room was spinning and I was conscious only of his presence, of the way his fingers clutched at my flesh, testing the bone structure beneath my skin. His hand moved to my shoulder, then my arms and my fingers.

“No,” said Pudd. “It was unwise of you to come at all, on this of all days. You must leave.”

I heard a weary exhalation of air. “He sees them, you know,” said the old voice. “I can feel it from him. He is an unusual man, a tormented man.”

“I will put him out of his misery.”

“And ours,” said the voice. “He has strong bones. Don't damage-his fingers or his arms. I want them.”

“And the woman?”

“Do what you have to do, but a promise to spare her might encourage her lover to be more cooperative.”

“But if she dies…?”

“She has beautiful skin. I can use it.”

“How much of it?” asked Pudd.

There was a pause.

“All of it,” said the old man.

I heard footsteps on the kitchen floor beside me. The red film over my eyes was fading now as I blinked away the blood. I saw the strange, nameless woman with the scarred neck staring down at me with narrow, hateful eyes. She touched my cheek with her fingers, and I shuddered.

“Leave now,” said Pudd. She stayed beside me for another moment or two, then moved away almost regretfully. I saw her blend into the shadows, and then two figures moved through the half-open front door and into the yard. I tried to keep them in sight until a slap to my cheek brought me back and someone else moved into my line of vision, a woman dressed in a blue sweater and pants, her hair loose on her shoulders.

“Ms. Torrance,” I said, my mouth dry. “I hope you got a reference from Paragon before he died.”

She hit me on the back of my head. It wasn't a hard slap. It didn't have to be. She caught me right on the spot where the earlier blows had landed. The pain was almost visible to me, like lightning flashes in the night sky, and I grew nauseous with pain. I let my head hang down, my chin on my chest, and tried to keep myself from retching. From the front of the house came the sound of a car pulling away, and then there was movement ahead of me and a pair of brown shoes appeared at the kitchen door. I followed the shoes up to the cuffs of the brown pants, then the slightly stretched waistband, the brown check jacket, and finally, the dark, hooded eyes of Mr. Pudd.

He looked considerably worse than when we had last met. The remains of his right ear were covered in gauze, and his nose had swollen where Rachel's head had impacted upon it. There were still traces of blood around his nostrils.

“Welcome back, sir,” he said, smiling. “Welcome indeed.”

He gestured to Rachel with one gloved hand. “We had to make our own entertainment while you were gone, but I don't believe there was much that your whore could tell us. On the other hand, Mr. Parker, I believe you may know considerably more.”

He stepped forward so that he stood over Rachel. With one movement, he tore the sleeve of her robe, exposing the whiteness of her arm, speckled here and there with small brown freckles. Ms. Torrance, I noticed, now stood in front of me and slightly to my right, her own Beretta leveled on me while my Smith amp; Wesson lay in its holster on the table. The remains of my cell phone were scattered across the floor and I saw that the wire to the telephone in the kitchen had been pulled out.

“As you know, Mr. Parker, we are looking for something,” began Pudd, “something that was taken from us by Ms. Peltier. That item is still missing. So too, we now believe, is a passenger who may have been in the car with the late Ms. Peltier shortly before she died. We think that individual may have the item we are looking for. I would like you to confirm who that person is so that we can retrieve it. I would also like you to tell us all that passed between you and the late Mr. Al Z, everything of which you and Mr. Mercier spoke two nights ago, and all that you know of the man who killed Mr. Paragon.”

I didn't reply. Pudd remained silent for about thirty seconds, then sighed. “I know that you are a very stubborn man. I think you might even be willing to die rather than give me what I want. It's very laudable, I admit, to give up one's life to save another. It is, in a sense, what brings us to this point. After all, we are all the fruit of one man's sacrifice, are we not? And you will die, Mr. Parker, regardless of what you tell me. Your life is about to end.”

He leaned over Rachel's shoulder and grasped her chin in his hand, forcing her to look at me. “But are you willing to sacrifice the life of another to protect Grace Peltier's friend, or to fuel your strange crusade? That is the real test: how many lives is this person worth? Have you even met the individual in question? Can someone whom you do not know be worth more to you than the life of this woman? Do you have the right to give up Ms. Wolfe here to safeguard your own principles?”

He released his grip on Rachel's jaw and shrugged. “These are difficult questions, Mr. Parker, but rest assured we will shortly have answers to them.” From the floor he lifted a large plastic case, its surface covered in tiny perforations. He placed it on the table beside his own Beretta, then opened it so that it faced me. Inside lay five plastic containers. Three of them were boxes of four or five inches in length, while the other two were simply small containers for herbs and spices adapted to his purpose.

He withdrew the two spice jars, the reusable kind with a perforated lid. In each of them, something small and brown tested the glass with a tiny raised limb. Pudd placed one of the jars on the table, then walked over to me with the other, holding it gently between his thumb and forefinger so that my view of its contents was unobscured.

“Do you recognize this?” he asked. Inside the jar, the light brown recluse spider raised itself up against the glass, revealing its abdomen before it slid back down, its stringy legs probing at the air. On its cephalothorax was the small, dark brown, violin-shaped mark that gave the spider its common name of fiddleback.

“It's a recluse, Mr. Parker, Loxosceles reclusa. I've been telling it what you did to its brothers and sisters in your mailbox. You burned them alive. I don't consider that to be very sporting.”

He held the jar an inch from my eye, then shook it gently. Inside, the spider grew increasingly agitated, tearing around the confined space, its legs constantly moving.

“Some people consider recluses to be nasty, verminous arachnids, but I rather admire them. I find them to be remarkably aggressive. I sometimes feed them black widows, and you would be surprised at how quickly a widow can become a tasty snack for a family of recluses.

“But the most interesting aspect of all, Mr. Parker, is the venom.” His eyes glowed brightly beneath their hoods and I caught a trace of a faint smell rising from him, an unpleasant, chemical scent, as though his body had begun to produce its own toxin as his excitement grew. “The venom it uses to attack humans is not the same as that which it uses to paralyze and kill its insect prey. There is an extra component, an additional toxin, in the venom it utilizes against us. It is as if this little spider is aware of us, has always been aware of us, and has found a way to hurt us. A most unpleasant way.”

He moved away until he was, once again, beside Rachel. He brushed the jar against her cheek. She shrank from the touch, and I saw that she had begun to tremble. Tears ran from her eyes. Mr. Pudd's nostrils flared, as if he could smell her fear and disgust.

But then she looked at me, and shook her head gently once.

“The venom causes necrosis. It makes the white blood cells turn against their own body. The skin swells, then starts to rot, and the body is unable to repair the damage. Some people suffer greatly. Some even die. I have heard of one man who died within an hour of being bitten. Amazing, don't you think, that all of this suffering could be caused by such a tiny spider? The late Mr. Shine was given an intimate revelation of its workings, as I'm sure he told you before he died.

“But then, some people are not affected at all. The venom simply-has no effect on them. And that's what makes this little test so interesting. Unless you tell me what I need to know, I am going to apply the recluse to the skin of your whore. She probably won't even feel its bite. Then we will wait. The antidote to recluse venom must be administered within half an hour for it to be effective. If you are unhelpful, then I am afraid we will be here for much longer than that. We will start with her arms, then move on to her face and her breasts. If that proves unsuccessful in moving you, we may have to progress to some of my other specimens. I have a black widow in my case, and a sand spider from South Africa of which I am particularly fond. She will be able to taste it in her mouth as she dies.”

He raised the little jar.

“For the last time, Mr. Parker, who was the second passenger, and where is that person now?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I haven't figured that out yet.”

“I don't believe you.” Slowly, Pudd began to unscrew the top of the jar.

I twisted in my chair as he held the jar close to Rachel once again. Pudd took the movement as a sign of my discomfort, and his excitement grew. But he was wrong. These were old chairs. They had been in this house for the best part of fifty years. They had been broken, then repaired and broken again. Using the pressure of my shoulders and by twisting my hand, I could feel the upper part of the back of my chair loosening. I pushed up with my shoulders and heard a faint crack. The back of the chair rose about a quarter of an inch as the frame started to come apart.

“I mean it,” I said. “I don't know.”

I gripped harder with my right hand and felt one of the struts turn in its hole. It was almost free. Beside me, Ms. Torrance's attention was focused on Rachel and the spider. Pudd flipped off the lid and tipped the jar over, trapping the recluse on the skin of Rachel's arm. I saw the spider respond as he shifted the jar slightly, provoking it into a bite. Rachel's eyes grew large and she gave a muffled cry from behind the gag. Beside her, Pudd opened his mouth and emitted a small gasp as the spider bit, then stared at me with absolute, perverse joy.

“Bad news, Mr. Parker!” he cried, as the strut came free in my hand and I spun my wrist, pushing the spear of wood with all the force I could muster into the left side of the woman. I felt brief resistance before it penetrated the skin between her third and fourth ribs and shot through. She screamed as I rose, knocking her gun from her hand and sending it sliding across the kitchen floor. My forehead struck her face and she lurched back against the sink. Simultaneously, Rachel shifted her weight in the chair, causing it to topple backward and forcing Pudd away from the table. With the chair still dangling from my left hand, I reached for my gun and fired two shots at Pudd's body. Splinters flew from the door frame as he dived into the hallway.

Beside me, the woman pawed at my legs. I kicked out at her and felt my foot connect. The pawing stopped. I shrugged the remains of the chair from my arm and reached the hallway just in time to see the front door slam open and Pudd's long brown frame disappear to the right. I sprang down the hall, risked a quick glance from the doorway, and pulled my head in quickly as the shots came. He had a second gun. I took a breath, then rolled out onto the porch and started firing, the Smith amp; Wesson bucking in my right hand. Pudd disappeared into the trees and I followed, increasing my pace as I heard the car start. Seconds later, the Cirrus burst from cover. I kept firing as it shot down the drive and onto Mussey Road, the rear window shattering and one of its back lights exploding as the gun locked empty. I let him go, then ran back to the house and untied Rachel. She immediately retreated into the hall, curling in on herself and rubbing again and again at the spot where the recluse had bitten her.

The woman was crawling to the back door, the strut still buried in her side and a trail of black blood following her across the floor. Her nose was broken and one eye had been closed by the kick to her head. She looked blearily at me as I leaned over her, her vision and her life already fading.

“Where has he gone?” I hissed.

She shook her head and spat blood in my face. I gripped the strut and twisted. Her teeth gritted in agony.

“Where has he gone?” I repeated. Ms. Torrance beat at the ground with one hand. Her mouth opened to its fullest extent as she twisted and writhed then went into spasm. I released my hold on the wood and stepped back as her eyes rolled back into her head and she died. I patted her down but there was no ID on her body, no indication of where Pudd might be based. I kicked once at her legs in impotent rage, then reloaded my gun with a spare mag before walking Rachel to my car.

22

I CALLED ANGEL AND LOUIS from the Maine Medical Center, but there was no reply from their room at the inn. I then placed a call to the Scarborough PD. I told them that a couple had broken into my house, assaulted my girlfriend, and one of them was now lying dead on my kitchen floor. I also gave them a description of the Cirrus Mr. Pudd had driven away from the house, complete with smashed rear windshield and busted back light.

The Scarborough PD was equipped with QED, or computer-enabled dispatch, which meant that the nearest patrol car would be immediately assigned to the house. They would also alert neighboring departments and the state police in an effort to find Pudd before he ditched the car.

At Maine Medical they dosed Rachel with antivenin after she had replied to a barrage of questions to which I was not privy, then put her on a gurney in a curtained-off section to rest up. By then Angel and Louis had got my message, and Angel was now seated beside her, talking to her gently, while Louis waited outside in the car. There were still people with questions to ask about the events in Dark Hollow the previous winter, and Louis was considerably more conspicuous than Angel.

Rachel had not spoken during the ride to the hospital. Instead, she had simply held her hand over the area where the spider had bitten her, shaking softly. She had also suffered some cuts and bruises to the head, but there was no concussion and she was going to be okay. I was X-rayed and then given ten stitches to close up the wound in my scalp. It was already midafternoon, and I was still feeling dazed and numb when Ramos, one of the detectives out of Scarborough, arrived, accompanied by the department's detective sergeant, Wallace MacArthur, and a whole cartload of questions. Their first question was: who was the injured woman? More to the point, where was she?

“She was lying there when I left,” I said.

“Well, she wasn't lying there when the first patrol got to your place. There was a hell of a lot of blood on your kitchen floor, and more outside in the yard, but there was no dead woman.”

He was seated across from me in a small private room usually used to comfort relatives of recently deceased patients. “You sure she was dead?” he asked.

I shook my head and sipped at my lukeward coffee. “I stuck a piece of chair halfway into her body, right between numbers three and four, and I pushed up hard. I saw her die. There's no way she got up and walked away.”

“You think this guy, this Mr. Pudd, came back for her?” he asked.

“You find a suitcase full of spiders on my kitchen table?”

MacArthur shook his head.

“Then it was him.”

It was a huge risk for him to take; he probably had only a few minutes to retrieve her. “I think he's trying to keep the waters as muddy as he can,” I said. “Without the woman, there's no positive ID, nothing that can link her to him. Or to anyone else,” I added.

“You know who she is?”

I nodded. “I think her name is Torrance. She was Carter Paragon's secretary.”

“The late Carter Paragon?” MacArthur sat back, opened a fresh page in his notebook, and waited for me to begin. From across the hall, I heard Rachel calling for me.

“I'll be back,” I told MacArthur. For a second or two he looked like he might be tempted to sit on me and shake me by the throat until I gave up what I knew. Instead, he nodded reluctantly and let me leave.

Angel stood and walked discreetly to the window as I approached her. Rachel was pale, and there was sweat on her brow and upper lip, but she gripped my hand tightly as I sat on the edge of her bed.

“How are you doing?”

“I'm tougher than you think, Parker.”

“I know how tough you are.”

She nodded. “I guess you do.” She looked past me to the room where Ramos and MacArthur waited.

“What are you going to tell them?”

“Everything that I can.”

“But not everything that you know?”

“That would be unwise.”

“You're still going to see the Beckers, aren't you?” she asked softly.

“Yes.”

“I'm going with you. Maybe I can succeed in convincing them where you couldn't. You and Louis go walking in on those people in your current mood and you're likely to scare them to death. And if we do find Marcy, a friendly face will help.”

She was right. “Okay,” I said. “Rest up for a while, and then we'll leave. Nobody's going anywhere without you.”

She gave me a satisfied smile and released my hand. Angel resumed his seat beside her bed. His Glock was in an IWB holster at his waist, concealed by his long shirt.

From the room in which I had left MacArthur and Ramos came the sound of raised voices. I saw Ramos emerge from the room at a sprint. MacArthur was right behind him, but he stopped when he saw me.

“What's up?” I asked.

“Trawler spotted Jack Mercier's yacht at low revs a couple of miles out, heading into shore.” MacArthur swallowed. “Skipper says there's a body lashed to the mast.”

The cruiser, named the Revenant, had docked at the Portland marina five days earlier. It was a twenty-five-foot Grady White Sailfish 25, with twin two-hundred-horsepower Suzuki outboards, and its owner paid $175 in advance for one week's mooring at the standard rate of $1 per foot per night. The name, address, phone number, and boat registration number he gave to Portland Yacht Services, administrators of the marina, were all false.

He was a small man, cross-eyed, with a tightly shaven skull. He spent most of his time in or near his boat, sleeping in its single compartment. By day he sat on the deck with a pair of binoculars in one hand, a cell phone in the other, and a book on his lap. He didn't speak, and rarely left the boat for longer than fifteen minutes. His eyes seemed almost permanently fixed on the waters of Casco Bay.

Early on the morning of the sixth day, a group of six people-two women, four men-boarded a yacht on the bay. The boat was the Eliza May, a seventy-footer built three years earlier by Hodgdon Yachts in East Boothbay. Its deck was teak, its body epoxy, glass, and mahogany over Alaska cedar. As well as the Doyle sail on its eighty-foot mast, it had a 150-horsepower Perkins diesel engine and could sleep seven people in luxury. It was equipped with a forty-mile radar, GPS, LORAN, and WeatherFax, as well as VHF and single sideband radio and an EPIRB emergency system. It had cost Jack Mercier over $2.5 million and was too big to moor at Scarborough, so it had a permanent berth at Portland.

The Eliza May left Portland for the last time shortly after 7:30 A.M. There was a northwest wind blowing, superb weather for yachting, and the wind tossed Mercier's white hair as he steered her into Casco Bay. Deborah Mercier sat apart from her husband, head down. By then, the cross-eyed man had been joined by two other people, a woman in blue and a slim red-haired man dressed in brown, both carrying tuna rods. As the Eliza May headed out into deep waters, the Revenant left the harbor and shadowed it, unseen.

I caught up with MacArthur at the elevator.

“Mercier's involved in this,” I told him. There was no point in keeping Mercier's role secret any longer.

“The hell-?”

“Believe me. I've been working for him.”

I could see him considering his options, so I decided to preempt him. “Take me along,” I said. “I'll tell you what I know on the way.”

He paused and gave me a long, hard look, then nodded and reached out his hand. “You can come as far as Pine Point. Hand over the gun, Charlie,” he said.

Reluctantly, I gave him the Smith amp; Wesson. He ejected the magazine and checked the chamber, then handed it back to me. “You can leave it with your friend,” he said.

I nodded, walked into Rachel's room, and handed the gun to Angel. As I turned to leave I felt a light tug at my waistband, and the coolness of his Glock sliding against my skin. I took my jacket from the chair, nodded politely to Angel, then followed MacArthur down the hallway.

Mercier's last log entry recorded that the Revenant contacted the Eliza May shortly after 9 A.M., about forty miles out from port. The northwest wind might have been ideal for yachting, but it could also carry a cruiser in distress out to sea, and the Revenant was in trouble. The Revenant's distress call came in on VHF but the Eliza May was the only boat to hear it, despite the fact that there were other boats two and three miles away. The radio on the smaller vessel had been set to low range, maybe one watt, to prevent anyone else hearing the signal and answering. The Revenant's batteries were almost dead, and it was drifting. Mercier adjusted his course and went at full speed to his death.

I told MacArthur almost everything, from my first meeting with Jack Mercier to that morning's encounter with Mr. Pudd. The omissions were few, but crucial: I left out Marcy Becker, Mickey Shine's murder, and our unscheduled early viewing of Carter Paragon's body. I also made no mention of the fact that I suspected that someone in the state police, possibly Lutz, Voisine, or both, might have been involved in Grace Peltier's death.

“You think this Pudd killed the Peltiers?”

“Probably. The Fellowship, or at least what the public saw of it, is just a front for someone or something else. Grace Peltier found out what that was, and it was enough to get her killed.”

“And whatever Grace knew, Pudd thought Curtis Peltier also knew, and now he thinks you might know too?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But you don't.”

“Not yet.”

“If Jack Mercier's dead, there'll be hell to pay,” said Wallace fervently. Beside him, Ramos nodded silently in agreement as Wallace leaned back to look at me.

“And don't think you'll get away without picking up your share of the check,” he added.

We drove along U.S. 1 south before turning left onto 9 and heading for the coast, past the redbrick Baptist Church and the white bell tower of St. Jude's Catholic Church. At the Pine Point Fire Department on King Street, seven or eight cars were parked in the lot and the doors were wide open. A fireman in jeans and a fire department T-shirt waved us on toward the Pine Point Fishermen's Co-op, where Marine 4 was already in the water.

The Scarborough PD used two boats for marine duty. Marine 1 was a seventy-horsepower inflatable based at Spurwink, to the north of Pine Point, and launched from Ferry Beach. Marine 4 was a twenty-one-foot Boston Whaler powered by a 225-horsepower Johnson, based at the Pine Point Co-op and berthed, when not required, in the fire department. It had a crew of five, all of whom were already on board as we pulled up at the gray-and-white co-op building. The harbormaster's boat was alongside the Whaler, and there were two Scarborough PD officers on board. Both carried 12-gauge Mossberg shotguns. There were two more policemen in the Whaler carrying M-16s. All wore blue windbreakers. From the jetty, curious fishermen looked on.

Both Ramos and MacArthur shook on their waterproofs as I followed them to the boat. MacArthur was climbing down to the Whaler when he saw me.

“The hell do you think you're going?”

“Come on, Wallace,” I pleaded. “Don't do this. I'll stay out of the way. Mercier was my client. I don't want to be waiting here like an expectant parent if something has happened to him. You don't let me go with you, I'll just have to bribe a fisherman to take me out and then I'll really be in the way. Worse, I might just disappear and then you'll have lost a crucial witness. They'll have you back directing traffic.”

MacArthur glanced at the other men on the boat. The skipper, Ted Adams, shrugged.

“Get in the damn boat,” hissed MacArthur. “You even stand up to stretch and I'll feed you to the lobsters.”

I followed him down, Ramos behind me. There were no more windbreakers so I pulled my jacket tight around me and huddled on the plastic bench, my hands in my pockets and my chin to my chest, as the Whaler pulled away from the dock.

“Give me your hand,” said MacArthur. I extended my right hand and he slapped the cuffs on it, then locked me to the rail of the boat.

“What happens if we sink?” I asked.

“Then your body won't drift away.”

The boat surged through the dark, gray waters of Saco Bay, white foam erupting upward as it went. Behind us the sun was starting to set, and the waves were afire. MacArthur stood beside the covered cockpit looking back to Scarborough, the horizon bobbing merrily with the movement of the boat on the sea.

In the wheelhouse, Adams was responding to someone on the radio. “Still moving,” he said to MacArthur. “Only two miles out now, same course.” I looked past the seated policemen, beyond the crew at the cockpit, and imagined that I saw, like a tiny rip in the sky, the long, thin mast of the yacht. Something clawed at my insides, the last desperate scratchings of a cat left to drown in a bag. The prow dipped and sent a fine spray lashing over the deck, soaking me. I shivered as gulls glided above the surface of the water, calling noisily over the sound of the engine.

“There she is,” said Adams. His finger pointed to a small green dot on the radar screen while, simultaneously, the half-seen needle of the mast joined a dark spot on the horizon. Beside me, Ramos removed his Glock.40 from its holster.

Slowly the shape acquired definition: a white seventy-footer with a tall mast, drifting on the waves. A smaller boat, the lobster fisherman out of Portland that had first spotted the yacht, shadowed it from a distance. From the north came the sound of Marine 1 approaching. The two boats always responded to a call together for safety reasons.

Marine 4 turned to the south and came around so that it was on the yacht's eastern side, its lines silhouetted before the failing sun. As the Whaler circled it, there was blood visible on the deck that even the salt water hadn't managed to fully remove, and the wood was pitted with what looked like bullet holes. Close to the bow of the boat was a black scorch mark where a flare appeared to have ignited on the deck.

And at the top of the mast, partially concealed by the furled sail, a body hung with its arms outstretched and tied to the crossbeam. It was naked but for a pair of white boxers, now stained black and red. The legs were white, the feet tied together, a second rope around its chest lashing it to the mast before heading down taut at an angle, tied off to one of the rails. The body was scorched from the stomach to the head. Most of its hair was gone, its eyes were now dark hollows, and its teeth were bared in a rictus of pain, but still I knew that I was looking at the remains of Jack Mercier, hanging dark against the reddening sky like a black flag set in the firmament.

The Whaler hailed the yacht and, when no response came, drew up off the port side while a young crewman climbed on board the Eliza May, killed the engine, and tied Marine 4 off. Ramos and MacArthur joined him, pulling on protective gloves before they stepped shakily on board.

“Detectives,” the crewman called from the cockpit. They headed toward him, trying not to touch anything with their hands as the boat rocked gently in the waves. The crewman pointed to where a long, dark trail of blood followed the steps down. Someone had been dragged, dead or dying, belowdecks. MacArthur knelt down and examined the steps more closely. The end of a long, blond hair curled out of the blood. He rummaged in his pockets and removed a small plastic evidence bag, then carefully lifted the hair and stored it away.

“You stay here,” he said to the crewman as Ramos moved behind him. From the decks of the two police boats, guns were trained on the other two of the yacht's three entryways belowdecks. Then MacArthur took the lead, using the very edges of the steps, the only parts not covered in blood, to make his way below.

This is what they found.

There was a small, dark passageway, with the head to the immediate right and a quarter berth to the left. The head was empty and smelled of chemicals; a shower curtain was pulled back, revealing a clean white shower stall. The quarter berth was unoccupied. The passageway was carpeted, and the material felt wet beneath their feet as they walked, blood bubbling up from between the fibers. They passed the galley and a second pair of facing doors that led into two sleeping compartments, both fitted with small double beds and closets wide enough to take only two pairs of shoes set side by side.

The door leading into the main salon was closed and no sounds came from behind it. Ramos looked at Wallace and shrugged. Wallace retreated back into one of the bedrooms, his gun in his hand. Ramos moved into the other and called out: “Police. If there's anybody in there, come out now and keep your hands up.”

There was no response. Wallace stepped back into the passage, reached for the handle of the door, and keeping his back against the wall, slowly pulled it open.

There was blood on the walls, on the ceiling, and on the floor. It dripped from the light fixtures and obscured the paintings between the portholes. Three naked bodies hung upside down from the beams in the ceiling: two women, one man. One woman had gray blond hair that almost touched the floor; the other was small and dark. The man was bald, apart from a thin circle of gray hair, which was mostly soaked red with his blood. The throat of each had been cut, although the blond also had stab wounds to her stomach and legs. It was her blood on the steps and soaked into the carpet. Deborah Mercier had tried to run, or to intervene, when they took her husband.

The smell of blood was overpowering in the confined space, and the bodies swayed and bumped against one another with the rocking of the boat. They had been killed facing the door, and the spray from their arteries had hit only three sides of the cabin.

But there was still some blood behind them. It formed a pattern that could be seen between the moving bodies. MacArthur reached forward and stopped the swaying of Deborah Mercier's corpse. She hung to the left of the others, so that by stilling her the others also ceased to move. She was cold, and he shuddered at the touch, but now he could see clearly what had been written behind them in bright, red arterial blood.

It was one word:

SINNERS

23

WHAT HARM CAN IT DO?

Jack Mercier's words, spoken on the day that he first asked me to look into Grace's death, came back to me as I learned of what had been found in the main salon of the Eliza May, its decks stained with red and Jack Mercier's crucified form hanging from the mast. They came back to me as I saw the pictures of the yacht in the following day's papers, smaller photographs beside it of Jack and Deborah Mercier, and of the attorney Warren Ober and his wife, Eleanor.

What harm can it do?

I recalled myself sitting, wet and shivering, in the bow of Marine 4, surrounded by the cries of gulls as arrangements were made to tow the Eliza May back to shore. I was there for over two hours, the lineaments of Jack Mercier's body slowly fading and growing indistinct as evening fell. MacArthur was the only one who spoke to me, and then only to detail the discovery of the bodies and the word written in blood upon the wall behind them.

Sinners.

“The Aroostook Baptists,” I said.

MacArthur grimaced. “Little early for a copycat, don't you think?”

“It's not a copycat killing,” I answered. “It's the same people.”

MacArthur sat down heavily beside me. Seawater swirled around his black leather shoes. “The Baptists have been dead for over thirty years,” he began. “Even if whoever killed them was still alive, why would he-or they-start again now?”

I was too tired to go on hiding things, much too tired.

“I don't think they ever stopped killing,” I told him. “They've always been doing it, quietly and discreetly. Mercier was closing in on them, trying to put pressure on the Fellowship through the courts and the IRS. He wanted to draw them out, and he succeeded. They responded by killing him and those who were prepared to stand alongside him: Yossi Epstein in New York, Alison Beck in Minneapolis, Warren Ober, even Grace Peltier.”

Now, their countermeasures were almost complete. The word on the wall indicated that, a deliberate echo of the slaughter with which they had begun and that had only recently been revealed. There was now one final act left to perform: the recovery of the missing Apocalypse. Once that was accomplished they would disappear, vanishing below the surface to lie dormant in some quiet, dark cavern of the honeycomb world.

“Who are they?” asked MacArthur.

“The Faulkners,” I replied. “The Faulkners are the Fellowship.”

MacArthur shook his head. “You're in a shitload of trouble,” he said.

The sound of Marine 1 approaching us disturbed my thoughts. “They're going back to pick up the local ME, have the victims declared dead at the scene,” said MacArthur, unlocking the cuffs. “You go back with them. Someone will take you to the department. I'll follow on within the hour and we'll pick up this discussion where we left off.”

He watched me as I stepped carefully from the Whaler into the smaller boat. It turned in a broad arc and headed for the shore, leaving the Eliza May behind. The sun was setting, and the waves were afire as they prepared to haul Jack Mercier's body down.

At the Scarborough Police Department I sat for a time in the lobby and watched the dispatchers behind their protective screen. My clothes were soaked and I couldn't seem to get warm again. I found myself reading, over and over, warnings against rabies and DUI posted on the bulletin boards. I felt like I was coming down with a fever. My head ached and the skin on my scalp seemed to be constricting around the stitches.

Eventually I was led into the general-purpose briefing room. The command staff had just broken up their meeting in the smaller conference room, where MacArthur had been chewed out for letting me on board the Whaler. I was trying to draw in some heat through a cup of coffee, a patrol officer at the door to make sure I didn't try to steal one of the canine trophies stored in the cabinet, when MacArthur joined me, accompanied by Captain Bobby Melia, one of two captains in the force who were second in command to Chief Byron Fischer. MacArthur carried a tape recorder with him. They sat across from me, the door behind them closed, and asked me to take them through it all again. Then Norman Boone arrived from the BATF, and Ellis Howard from the Portland PD.

And I went through it again.

And again.

And again.

I was tired, cold, and hungry. Each time I told them what I knew, it got harder and harder to remember what I had left out, and their questions became more and more probing. But I couldn't tell them about Marcy Becker, because if the Fellowship did have connections among the police, then telling anyone in law enforcement about her would be tantamount to signing her death warrant. They were threatening to charge me as an accessory to Mercier's murder, in addition to accusations of withholding evidence, obstructing justice, and anything else that the law allowed. I let the waves of their anger break over me.

Two bodies were missing from the boat: those of the porn star with the busted finger, and Quentin Harrold, both of whom had gone out on the yacht to guard the Obers and the Merciers. The Scarborough PD suspected they had died in the first burst of gunfire. Jack Mercier had tried unsuccessfully to fire off a flare but had instead ignited his own clothing, which explained the charring on his body. There was a Colt revolver in the cabin where the bodies were found, but it had not been fired. Cartridges were scattered on the floor beside it where someone had made a last, desperate effort to load.

What harm can it do?

I wanted to get away from there. I wanted to talk to the Beckers, to force them-at gunpoint if necessary-to tell me where their daughter was hiding. I wanted to know what Grace Peltier had found. I wanted to sleep.

Most of all, I wanted to find Mr. Pudd, and the mute, and the old man who had wanted Rachel's skin: Aaron Faulkner. His wife was among the dead of St. Froid but he was not, and neither were his two children. A boy and a girl, I remembered. What age would they be now: late forties, early fifties? Ms. Torrance had been too young, as was Lutz. Unless there were others hidden elsewhere, which I doubted, that left only Pudd and the mute: they were Leonard and Muriel Faulkner, dispatched, when required, to do their father's bidding.

Wallace gave me a ride back to my car after eleven that night, threats of retribution still ringing in my ears. Angel and Louis were with Rachel when I returned home, drinking beer and watching television with the volume almost muted. All three of them left me alone while I stripped and showered, then pulled on a pair of chinos and a sweater. A new cell phone lay on the kitchen table, the memory card salvaged from the wreckage of the old phone and reinstalled. I took a bottle of Pete's Wicked Ale from the fridge and twisted it open. I could smell the hops and the distinctive fruity scent. I raised it to my mouth and took one mouthful, my first sip of alcohol in two years, then held it for as long as I was able. When at last I swallowed, it was warm and thick with saliva. I poured the rest into a glass and drank half of it, then sat looking at what remained. After a time, I took the glass to the sink and poured the beer down the drain.

It wasn't exactly a moment of revelation, more a confirmation. I didn't want it, not now. I could take it or leave it, and I chose to let it go. Amy had been right; it was just something to fill the hole, and I had found other ways to do that. But for now, nothing in a bottle was going to make things better.

I shivered again. Despite the shower and the change of clothes, I still hadn't been able to get warm. I could taste the salt on my lips, could smell the brine in my hair, and each time I did I was back on the waters of the bay, the Eliza May drifting slowly before me and Jack Mercier's body swaying gently against the sky.

I placed the bottle in the recycling box and looked up to see Rachel leaning against the door.

“You're not finishing it?” she said softly.

I shook my head. For a moment or two, I couldn't speak. I felt something breaking up inside of me, like a stone in my heart that my system was now ready to expel. A pain at the very center of my being began to spread throughout my body: to my fingers and toes, to my groin, to the tips of my ears. Wave after wave of it rocked me, so that I had to hold on to the sink to stop myself from falling. I squeezed my eyes closed tightly and saw:

a young woman emerging from an oil barrel by a canal in Louisiana, her teeth bared in her final agony and her body encased in a cocoon of transformed body fats, dumped by the Traveling Man after he had blinded her and killed her; a little dead boy running through my house in the middle of the night, calling me to play; Jack Mercier, burning with a desperate flame as his wife was dragged bleeding belowdecks; blood and water mixing on the pale, distorted features of Mickey Shine; my grandfather, his memory fading slowly away; my father sitting at a kitchen table, ruffling my hair with his great hand; and Susan and Jennifer, splayed across a kitchen chair-lost to me and yet not lost, gone and yet forever with me…

The pain made a rushing sound as it passed through me, and I thought I detected voices calling to me, over and over, as at last it reached its peak. My body tensed, my mouth opened, and I heard myself speak.

“It wasn't my fault,” I whispered.

Her brow furrowed. “I don't understand.”

“It-wasn't-my-fault,” I repeated. There were huge gaps between the words as I retched each one up and spat it, blinking, into the light. I licked my upper lip and tasted, again, salt and beer. My head was pounding in time to my heart, and I thought I was going to burn up. Past and present twisted and intertwined with each other like snakes in a pit. New deaths and old, old guilts and new, the pain of them white hot even as I spoke.

“None of it,” I said. My eyes were blurring, and now there was fresh salt water on my cheeks and lips. “I couldn't have saved them. If I'd been with them, I'd have died too. I did everything that I could. I'm still trying to do it, but I couldn't have saved them.”

And I didn't know about whom I was speaking. I think I was talking about them all: the man on the mast; Grace and Curtis Peltier; a woman and child, a year earlier, lying on the floor of a cheap apartment; another woman, another child, in the kitchen of our home in Brooklyn a year before that again; my father, my mother, my grandfather; a little boy with a bullet wound for an eye.

All of them.

And I heard them calling my name from the places in which they lay, their voices echoing through burrows and pits, caverns and caves until the honeycomb world vibrated with the sound of them.

“I tried,” I whispered. “But I couldn't save them all.”

And then her arms were around me and the world collapsed, waiting for us to rebuild it again in our image.

24

I SLEPT A STRANGE, disturbed sleep in her arms that night, twisting and clawing at unseen things. Angel and Louis were in the spare room and all of the doors were locked and bolted, so we were safe for a time, but she had no peace beside me. I dreamed I was sinking into dark waters where Jack Mercier waited for me, his skin burning beneath the waves, Curtis Peltier beside him, his arms bleeding black blood into the depths. When I tried to rise they held me back, their dead hands digging into my legs. My head throbbed and my lungs ached, the pressure increasing upon me until at last I was forced to open my mouth and the salt water flooded my nose and mouth.

Then I would wake, over and over, to find her close beside me, whispering softly, her hands moving in a slow rhythm across my brow and through my hair. And so the night passed.

The next morning we ate a hurried breakfast, then prepared to separate. Louis, Rachel, and I would head for Bar Harbor and a final confrontation with the Beckers. Angel had repaired the phone at the house and would stay there so we would have room for maneuvering if needed. When I checked my cell-phone messages on the way to the car, there was only one: it came from Ali Wynn, asking me to call her.

“You told me to contact you if somebody started asking about Grace,” she said, when I reached her. “Somebody did.”

“Who was it?”

“A policeman. He came to the restaurant yesterday. He was a detective. I saw his shield.”

“You get his name?”

“Lutz. He said he was investigating Grace's death. He wanted to know when I saw her last.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Just what I told you, and nothing else.”

“What did you think of him?”

She considered the question. “He frightened me. I didn't go home last night. I stayed with a friend.”

“Have you seen him since yesterday?”

“No, I think he believed me.”

“Did he tell you how he got your name?”

“Grace's tutor. I talked to her last night. She said she gave him the names of two of Grace's friends: me, and Marcy Becker.”

It was just after 9 A.M., and we were almost at Augusta, when the cell phone rang. I didn't recognize the number.

“Mr. Parker?” said a female voice. “It's Helen Becker, Marcy's mother.”

I mouthed the words “Mrs. Becker” to Rachel.

“We were just on our way to see you, Mrs. Becker.”

“You're still looking for Marcy, aren't you?” There was resignation in her voice, and fear.

“The people who killed Grace Peltier are closing in on her, Mrs. Becker,” I said. “They killed Grace's father, they killed a man named Jack Mercier, along with his wife and friends, and they're going to kill Marcy when they find her.”

At the other end of the line I could hear her start to cry.

“I'm sorry for what happened the last time you came to see us. We were scared; scared for Marcy and scared for ourselves. She's our only daughter, Mr. Parker. We can't let anything happen to her.”

“Where is she, Mrs. Becker?”

But she was going to tell me in her own time, and her own way. “A policeman came, just this morning. He was a detective. He said that she was in a lot of danger, and he wanted to take her to safety.” She paused. “My husband told him where she was. We're law-abiding people, Mr. Parker. Marcy had warned us to say nothing to the police, but he was so kind and so concerned for her. We had no reason not to trust him and we have no way of contacting Marcy. There's no phone at the house.”

“What house?”

“We have a house in Boothbay Harbor. It's just a lodge, really. We used to rent it out during the summer, but we've let it get rundown these last few years.”

“Tell me exactly where it is.”

Rachel handed me a pen and a Post-it note and I wrote down her directions, then read them back to her.

“Please, Mr. Parker, don't let anything happen to her.”

I tried to sound reassuring. “I won't, Mrs. Becker. One more thing: what was the name of the detective who talked to you about Marcy?”

“It was Lutz,” she said. “Detective John Lutz.”

I signaled right and pulled into the hard shoulder. Louis's Lexus appeared in the rearview seconds later. I got out of the car and ran back to him.

“Change of plan,” I said.

“So where we going?” he asked.

“To get Marcy Becker. We know where she is.”

He must have seen something in my face.

“And let me guess?” he said. “Someone else knows where she's at too.”

“That's right.”

“Ain't that always the way?”

Boothbay Harbor used to be a pretty nice place thirty years ago, when it was little more than a fishing village. Thirty years before that the whole town probably smelled of manure, since Boothbay was then the commercial and shipping center for the fertilizer trade. If you went back far enough, it was pretty enough to provide a site for the first permanent settlement on the coast of Maine, back in 1622. Admittedly, that settlement was also one of the most wretched on the eastern seaboard, but everybody has to start somewhere.

Now, during the season, Boothbay Harbor filled up with tourists and recreational sailors, crowding a harbor front that had been brutalized by uncontrolled commercial development. It had come a long way from its wretched origins, or if you were one of the naysayers, it had come a long way to become wretched all over again.

We took 27 southeast from Augusta and made Boothbay in just over an hour, following Middle Street out until it became Barters Island Road. I had almost been tempted to ask Rachel to wait for us in Boothbay, but apart from not wanting to risk a sock to the jaw, I knew that she would provide reassurance for Marcy Becker.

At last we came to a small private road that curved up a rough, tree-lined drive to a timber house on a small hill, with a ramshackle porch and boards built into the slope to act as steps. I guessed that it couldn't contain more than two or three rooms. Trees surrounded it to the west and south, leaving a clear view of most of the road up to the house. There was no car visible at the front of the drive, but a mountain bike stood below the window to the left of the front door.

“You want to leave the cars here?” asked Louis, as we paused beside each other at the foot of the road. If we drove any farther, we would be immediately visible to anyone in the house.

“Uh-uh,” I replied. “I want to be there and gone before Lutz arrives.”

“Assuming he ain't there already.”

“You think he rode up on his mountain bike?”

Louis shrugged. “Either way, we best not arrive with our hands hangin' by our sides.” He popped the trunk and got out of the car. I took another look at the house, then glanced at Rachel and shrugged. There didn't seem to be any activity, so I gave up looking and joined Louis. Rachel followed.

Louis had pushed back the matting in the trunk, exposing the spare tire. He twisted the bolt holding it in place, then lifted the tire and handed it to me, leaving the trunk empty. It was only when he slipped a pair of concealed clasps that it struck me how shallow the trunk was. The reason became apparent a couple of seconds later when the whole floor raised up on a hinge at the rear, exposing a small arsenal of weapons fitted into specially designed compartments.

“I just know you've got permits for all these,” I said.

“Home, there's shit here they ain't even got permits for.”

I saw one of the Calico minisubs for which Louis had a particular-fondness, two fifty-round magazines on either side of it. There was a spare Glock 9-millimeter and a Mauser SP66 sniper's rifle, along with a South African-made BXP submachine gun fitted with a suppressor and a grenade launcher, which seemed to me like a contradiction in terms.

“You know, you hit a bump in the road and you'll have a crater named after you,” I said. “You ever worry about DWBs?”

Driving While Black was almost a recognized offense under law.

“Nah, got me a chauffeur's license and a black cap. Anybody asks, I just drivin' it for massa.”

He leaned in and removed a shotgun from the rear of the trunk, then handed it to me as he replaced the floor and spare tire.

I had never seen a gun like it. It was about the same length as a sawed-off, with twin barrels over a raised sight. Beneath the twins was a third, thicker barrel, which acted as a grip. It was surprisingly light, and the stock fitted easily into my shoulder as I sighted down the gun.

“Very impressive,” I said. “What is it?”

“Neostead. South African. Thirteen rounds of spin-stabilized slugs and a recoil so light you can fire it with one hand.”

“It's a shotgun?”

“No, it's the shotgun.”

I shook my head despairingly and handed the shotgun back to him. Behind us, Rachel leaned against the car, her mouth tightly closed. Rachel didn't like guns. She had her reasons.

“Okay.” I nodded. “Let's go.”

Louis shook his head sadly as he climbed into the Lexus and propped the Neostead against the dashboard. “Can't believe you don't like my gun,” he remarked.

“You have too much money,” I replied.

We headed up the drive at full speed, the gravel in front of the house crunching loudly as we pulled up. I got out first, Louis seconds behind me. As he was stepping from the car, I heard the back door of the lodge slam.

We both moved at the same time, Louis to the left and I to the right. As I rounded the house, I saw a woman wearing a red shirt and jeans running downhill toward the cover of the trees, a rucksack over her shoulder. She was big and a little slow, and I caught up with her before she made it even halfway. Just inside the woodland ahead of us, I could see the shape of a motorcycle covered by a tarp.

As I got within touching distance of her back, she spun around, the rucksack held by its straps, and caught me a hard blow on the side of the head. I stumbled, my ears ringing, then shot a foot out and tripped her as she tried to get away. She landed heavily and the rucksack flew from her hands. I was on top of her before she could even think of getting up. Behind me, I heard Louis slowing down and then his shadow fell across us.

“Damn,” I said. “You nearly took my head off!”

Marcy Becker was squirming furiously beneath me. She was in her late twenties, with light brown hair and plain, blunt features. Her shoulders were large and muscular and she looked like she might once have been a swimmer or a field athlete. When I saw the expression on her face I felt a twinge of guilt for scaring her.

“Take it easy, Marcy,” I said. “We're here to help you.” I lifted my weight from her and let her rise. Almost immediately, she tried to run again. I wrapped my arms around her, gripped her wrists in my hands, and twisted her so that she was facing Louis.

“My name is Charlie Parker. I'm a private investigator. I was hired by Curtis Peltier to find out what happened to Grace, and I think you know.”

“I don't know anything,” she hissed. Her left heel shot back and nearly caught me a nasty blow on the shin. She was a big, strong young woman, and holding her was taking quite an effort. Louis just looked at me, one eyebrow raised in amusement. I guessed that I wasn't going to get any help from that quarter. I turned her again so that she was facing me, then shook her hard.

“Marcy,” I said. “We don't have time for this.”

“Fuck you!” she spat. She was angry and frightened, and she had good reason to be.

I felt Rachel's presence beside me and Marcy's eyes shifted to her.

“Marcy, there's a man on his way here, a policeman, and he's not coming to protect you,” said Rachel quickly. “He found out from your parents where you were hiding. He thinks you're a witness to Grace Peltier's death, and we think so too. Now, we can help you, but only if you'll let us.”

She stopped struggling and tried to read the truth of what Rachel was saying from her eyes. Acceptance altered the expression on her face, easing the lines that furrowed her brow and dousing the fire in her eyes.

“A policeman killed Grace,” she said simply.

I turned to Louis. “Get the cars out of sight,” I said.

He nodded and ran back up the hill. Seconds later, the Lexus pulled into the yard above us, hidden from the road by the house itself. The Mustang quickly joined it.

“I think the man who killed Grace is called Lutz,” I told Marcy. “He's the one who's coming. Are you going to let us help you?”

She nodded mutely. I picked up her bag and handed it to her. As she reached for it, I pulled it out of her grasp.

“No hitting, okay?”

She gave a little frightened smile and said, in agreement, “No hitting.” We started up the hill to the house.

“It's not just me that he wants,” she said quietly.

“What else does he want, Marcy?” I asked.

She swallowed, and that scared look darted into her eyes again. She raised the rucksack.

“He wants the book,” she answered.

As Marcy Becker packed the last of her things, the clothes and cosmetics she had abandoned as she fled from us, she told us about Grace Peltier's last hours. She wouldn't let us look in the rucksack, though. I wasn't sure that she completely trusted us yet.

“She came out of the meeting with the Paragon guy in a real hurry,” she told us. “She ran straight up to the car, jumped in, and started to drive. She was really angry, as angry as I've ever seen her. She just kept swearing all the time, calling him a liar.

“That night, she left me at the motel in Waterville and didn't come back until two or three in the morning. She wouldn't tell me where she'd been, but early the next morning we drove north. She abandoned me- again -in Machias and told me to knock myself out. I didn't see her for two days.

“I sat in my room most of the time, drank some beers, watched some TV. At about 2 A.M. on the second night, I heard this hammering on the door and Grace was there. Her hair was all damp and matted and her clothes were wet. She was really, really pale, like she had seen something that frightened the hell out of her. She told me we had to leave-quickly.

“I put on my clothes, grabbed my rucksack, and we got in the car and started driving. There was a package on the backseat, wrapped in a plastic bag. It looked like a block of dark wood.

“ ‘What is that?’ I asked her.

“ ‘You don't want to know,’ was all she told me.

“ ‘Okay, so where are we going?’

“ ‘To see my father.’ ”

Marcy stopped talking, and looked at Louis and me. Louis stood by the window, looking down on the road below.

“We better get going soon,” he warned.

I knew Lutz was on his way, but now that I had got Marcy Becker talking I wanted her to finish.

“Did she say anything else, Marcy?”

“She was kind of hysterical. She said ‘He's alive,’ and something about them taking him into town because he'd gotten sick. She'd seen him collapse on the road. That's all she would say. She told me that, for the moment, it was better if I didn't know anything else.

“We'd been driving for maybe an hour. I was dozing on the backseat when Grace shook me awake. As soon as I woke up, I knew we were in trouble. She kept looking in the rearview. There was a cop following us, with lights flashing. Grace just stepped on the gas and tore away until he was out of view, then pulled off the road and told me to get out. I tried to get her to tell me why, but she wouldn't. She just threw me my bag and then handed me the package and all of her study notes and told me to look after them until she contacted me. Then the cop appeared and I opened the door and headed into the bushes to hide. I guess something about the way Grace was acting transferred itself onto me, because now I was scared and I had no reason to be. I mean, what had we done? What had she done? And anyway, this guy was a cop, right? Even if she had stolen something she was maybe going to get in some trouble, but nothing worse.

“Anyway, I could see her trying to start the car, but the cop walked up to her door and told her to kill the engine. He was a big guy smoking a cigarette. He kept his gloves on, even while he smoked. I could hear him talking to her, asking her what she was doing, where she had been. He wouldn't let her get out of the car, just kept leaning over her. I could hear him ask her, ‘Where is it?’ again and again, and Grace telling him that she didn't know what he was talking about.

“He took her car keys, then made a call on his cell phone. I think it must have been fifteen or twenty minutes before the other guy arrived. He was a big man, with a mustache.”

Marcy began to cry. “I should have tried to help her, because I knew what was going to happen even before he took out the gun. I just knew. I felt him thinking about it. I saw him climb in and I was going to cry out. I thought he was trying to rape her, but I couldn't do anything, I was so scared. I could hear Grace crying and he hit her on the head to shut her up. After that, he searched the trunk and the rest of the car, then started checking along the road. I moved back, and once I thought he might have heard me, because he stopped and listened before he went back to what he was doing. When he didn't find what he was looking for, he slapped the hood of Grace's car and I heard him swear.”

She paused.

“Then he stepped over to the driver's side with the gun in his hand. He shouted at Grace again, pushing her head with the gun. She reached up to stop him; there was a struggle. The gun went off and the windows turned red. The other policeman started screaming at the big guy, asking him what he thought he was doing and what were they going to do now. But he just told him to be quiet.

“After that, he leaned in and did something to the back of Grace's head. When I saw him again, he had a piece of her hair in his hands and he was looking out at the trees, as if he guessed that I was out there somewhere. I crawled away on my belly. I could see Grace through the windshield, Mr. Parker. Her head was hanging to one side and there was blood all over the inside of the car. She was my friend, and I let her die.”

Rachel reached out and held her hand.

“There was nothing you could have done,” she said softly, and in her voice I heard echoes of my own words from the night before. “Nothing. This man Lutz would have killed you both, and then nobody would have known what happened. But you didn't tell anyone what you saw?”

She shook her head. “I was going to, until I saw the book. Then I was too scared. I figured the best thing to do was to lie low and stay out of the way of the cops. If they found me, if the man who killed Grace knew what I had seen, then I was afraid that he would do the same thing to me. I rang my mom and told her that something bad had happened to Grace and that I had to stay out of everyone's way until I figured out what to do. I told her not to tell anyone where I was, not even the police. I took the first bus from Ellsworth the next morning and I've been here ever since, apart from one or two trips to the store. I rented the scooter, in case I needed to get away quickly.”

“Were you going to stay here forever, Marcy?” I asked.

She let out a long deep breath. “I had nowhere else to go,” she said.

“Did she tell you where she had been?”

“No. She mentioned a lighthouse, that's all, but she was completely wired. I mean, she was scared and excited at the same time, you know? She wasn't making a whole lot of sense.”

“And you still have the book, Marcy?”

She nodded, and pointed to her knapsack. “It's in here,” she replied. “I was keeping it safe.”

Then Louis called my name.

I looked at him.

“They're coming,” he said.

Lutz's white Acura roared up the gravel drive and drew up about twenty yards from the front of the house. Lutz emerged first, closely followed by a small, thin man with close-cropped hair. His eyes were crossed and he wore painter's overalls and rubber gloves. He looked like what Louis would call a “puppy drowner,” the kind of guy who wasn't happy unless he was hurting something smaller and weaker than himself. Both men had guns in their hands.

“Guess they want her dead or alive,” I said.

The smaller man opened the trunk of the Acura and removed an empty body bag.

“Nope,” said Louis. “Looks like they just expressed a preference.”

We drew back as Lutz examined the windows of the house from where he stood. He gestured at the smaller man to head around the back as he started for the front door. I put my finger to my lips and indicated to Rachel that she should take Marcy Becker into the small bedroom and keep her quiet. Louis handed Rachel his SIG, and after a moment's hesitation, she took it. Then, shotgun in hand, he padded silently to the back door of the lodge, opened it, and disappeared to intercept Lutz's associate. I waited until he was outside, then slipped the safety catch on my gun and examined my options.

The front door opened straight into a blank wall. Four feet to the left, the living room began, a tiny kitchen area at the far end. To the right of the living room was the bedroom where Marcy Becker now lay huddled beneath the window with Rachel, so that anyone looking inside would be unable to see them. I raised the gun, walked to the wall where the hall ended and the living area began, and waited, shielded from anyone entering. I heard the handle on the door turn and then a noise like a cannon going off came from the back of the house. There was a thudding noise and Lutz entered fast, gun first. The noise had panicked him and he came in a little too quickly, his gun pointing into the main body of the room and away from me. I moved in hard with my left arm raised to push the gun away and knocked him back against the window, then brought the butt of the Smith amp; Wesson down as hard as I could on the side of his head. He staggered and I hit him again. He fired a shot into the ceiling and I hit him a third time, driving him to his knees. When he was on the floor I tore the gun from his fingers and tossed it into the kitchen before checking him for a spare. He had none, but I found his cuffs. I hit him one more time for luck, cuffed him, then dragged him outside and onto the gravel. I expected Louis to be there, and he was, but he wasn't alone.

He wasn't even armed.

Instead, he was kneeling on the ground with his hands on his head and the big shotgun in front of him. Behind him stood the tall, bald figure of the Golem, the Jericho two inches from Louis's head. He had a second Jericho in his left hand, pointing at me, and a length of rope hung across his arm.

“Sorry, man,” said Louis. To his left, Lutz's associate lay dead on his back, a huge hole torn in his chest.

The Golem looked at me, unblinking. “Put your gun down, Mr. Parker, or I will kill your friend.”

I held the Smith amp; Wesson out at shoulder length from my body, gripping it by the trigger guard, then laid it gently on the ground before me. Lutz raised his bloodied head and stared dazedly at the bald man. I was gratified to see the look of fear that gradually spread across his face, but it was a small, fleeting pleasure. We were all at risk from this strange, hollow killer.

“Now I want you to remove the detective's shoes and socks.” I did as I was told, kneeling on Lutz's legs to keep him still. With a flick of his wrist, the Golem tossed me the rope. “Tie his legs together.”

Again, I knelt and tied him. All the while, Lutz was whispering to me: “Don't let him take me, Parker. I'll tell you what you want to know, just don't let him take me.”

The Golem heard him. “Be quiet, Detective. Mr. Parker and I have reached an accommodation.”

I saw Rachel moving behind the window, and shook my head slightly to indicate that she shouldn't get involved.

“Have we?” I asked.

“I will let you and your friend live, your girlfriend too, and you can take the young woman.” I should have known that nothing would get past this man. “I take Detective Lutz.”

“No!” shouted Lutz. “No way, man. He's going to kill me.”

I looked at the Golem, although I hardly needed confirmation that Lutz's fears were justified.

“Detective Lutz is correct,” he said, “but first he will tell me where to find his associates. Put him in the body bag, Mr. Parker, then you and your friend will carry the bag to my car.”

I didn't move. I wasn't prepared to give up Lutz without first learning what he knew.

“We both want the same thing,” I said. “We both want to find the people responsible for these deaths.”

The Jerichos both cocked simultaneously beneath his thumbs. There was to be no discussion.

After a struggle, we put Lutz in the body bag, stuck his socks in his mouth to silence him, and carried him down the road to where the Golem's Lincoln Continental stood. We opened the Continental's trunk and put Lutz inside before slamming the lid closed on him with the grim finality of a coffin lid being sealed. I could hear his muffled howls through the metal and the sound of his feet kicking against the sides of the trunk.

“Now, start walking back to the house, please,” said the Golem.

We stepped back and began walking slowly backward toward the house, never once taking our eyes off the bald man with the guns.

“I don't think we will be meeting again, Mr. Parker,” he said.

“I won't take it personally.”

He waited until we were fifty yards from the car, then walked quickly to the driver's door, got in, and drove away. Beside me, Louis released a long breath.

“That went well,” I said. “Although your professional reputation took something of a beating.”

Louis scowled. “You know, used to take me months to set up a hit. You give me five damn minutes. I ain't no James Bond.”

“Don't sweat it. He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who's going to tell.”

“Guess not. Man seemed like the strong, silent type.”

We walked quickly back to the house. Rachel came out onto the porch to meet us. The blood had drained from her face, and I thought that she was going to faint.

“Rachel?” I said, my hands gripping her shoulders. “What is it?”

She looked up at me.

“See for yourself,” she whispered.

I found Marcy Becker sitting in one of the big armchairs, her legs curled into her body. She was looking at the wall, tearing at one of her fingernails with her teeth. She glanced at me, then her eyes flicked to what lay on the floor before she returned her gaze quickly to the blank wall. We stayed in those positions for what seemed like a long, long time, until I felt Louis behind me and heard him swear softly as he saw what lay before us.

It was a book.

A book of bones.