The Lovers

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. -BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-1790),

POOR RICHARD’S ALMANACK

CHAPTER NINETEEN

JIMMY GALLAGHER MUST HAVE been watching for me to come, as he answered the door before I even knocked. I imagined him, for a moment, sitting at his window, his face reflected in the gathering dark, his fingers tapping on the sill, anxiously seeking the one whom he was expecting, but as I looked into his eyes I saw that there was no anxiety, no fear or concern. In truth, he appeared more relaxed than I had ever seen him. He was wearing a T-shirt over a pair of paint-stained tan trousers, topped off by a Yankees hooded top and an old pair of penny loafers. He looked like a man in his twenties who had suddenly woken up from a nap to find that he had aged forty years in appearance while still being forced to wear all the same clothes. I had always believed him to be a man for whom appearance was everything, for I could never recall him without a jacket and a clean, starched shirt, often finished with a tasteful silk tie. Now, all formality had been stripped from him, and I wondered, as the night drew on and I listened to the secrets pour out of him, if those strictures he had placed on his dress had merely been one part of the defenses he had constructed to protect not only himself and his own identity, but the memories and lives of those about whom he cared.

He didn’t say anything when he saw me. He just opened the door, nodded once, then turned around and led the way to the kitchen. I closed the door behind me and followed him. A pair of candles burned in the kitchen, one on the windowsill and a second on the table. Beside the second candle stood a bottle of good-maybe very good-red wine, a decanter, and two glasses. Jimmy tenderly touched the neck of the bottle, stroking it as though it were a beloved pet.

“I’ve been waiting for an excuse to open it,” he said. “But these days, I don’t seem to have too many causes for J `Ø[1] `end celebration. Mostly, I go to funerals. You get to my age, that’s what you do. I’ve been to three funerals already this year. They were all cops, and they all died of cancer.” He sighed. “I don’t want to go that way.”

“Eddie Grace is dying of cancer.”

“I heard. I thought about going to see him, but Eddie and me-” He shook his head. “All we had in common was your old man. When he went, Eddie and me had no reason to talk.”

I recalled what Eddie had said to me before I left him, about how Jimmy Gallagher had spent his life living a lie. Maybe Eddie had been referring, however obliquely, to Jimmy’s homosexuality, but I knew now that there were other lies to be uncovered, even if they were lies of omission. Still, it wasn’t for Eddie Grace to judge how any man lived his life, not in the way that he had judged Jimmy. We all presented one face to the world, and kept another hidden. Nobody could survive in it otherwise. As Jimmy unburdened himself, and my father’s secrets were slowly revealed to me, I came to understand how Will Parker had buckled under the weight of them, and I felt only sadness for him and for the woman he had betrayed.

Jimmy took a waiter’s friend from a drawer and carefully cut the foil on the bottle before inserting the tip of the corkscrew into the cork. It took only two twists, and then a single pull, for the cork to release with a satisfying, airy pop. He looked at it to make sure that it wasn’t dry or decaying, and cast it to the side.

“I used to sniff the corks,” he said, “but then someone pointed out that it tells you nothing about the quality of the wine. Shame. I liked the ritual of it, until I found out that it made me look like a know-nothing.”

He positioned the candle behind the bottle as he decanted it, so that he could see the sediment approaching the neck.

“No need to let it stand for long,” he said, once he was finished. “That’s just with younger wines. It softens the tannins.”

He poured two glasses, and sat. He held his glass to the candlelight to examine it, lifted it to his nose, sniffed, then swirled the wine around before sniffing again, holding the bowl in his hands to warm it. Finally, he tasted it, moving the wine around in his mouth, savoring the flavors.

“Fantastic,” he said, then raised his glass in a toast. “To your old man.”

“To my old man,” I echoed. I sipped the wine. It tasted rich and earthy.

“Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, ninety-five,” said Jimmy. “A pretty good year for burgundy. That’s a six-hundred-dollar bottle of wine we’re drinking.”

“What are we celebrating?”

“The end.”

“Of what?”

“Of secrets and lies.”

I put my glass down. “So where do you want to begin?”

“With the dead baby,” he said. “With the first dead baby.”

Neither of them ha R ar of themd wanted to work the twelve-to-eight that week, but that was the way the cookie had crumbled, them was the breaks, or whatever other cliché one might have decided to apply to a situation when there was only one end of the stick to grasp, and it wasn’t the fragrant end. That evening, the precinct was holding a party at the Ukrainian National Home over on Second Avenue, which always smelled of borscht and pierogi and barley soup from the restaurant on the first floor, and where the director Sidney Lumet would rehearse his movies before beginning filming, so that, over time, Paul Newman and Katharine Hepburn, Al Pacino and Marlon Brando would all walk up and down the same steps as the cops of the Ninth. The party was to celebrate the fact that three of its officers had been awarded combat crosses that month, the name given to the green bars received by those who had been involved in a shoot-out. The Ninth was already the Wild West back then: cops were dying. If it came down to you and the other guy, you shot first and worried about the paperwork later.

New Yorkthen wasn’t like it was now. In the summer of ’64, the racial tensions in the city had come to a head with the killing of fifteen-year-old James Powell in Harlem by an off-duty patrolman. What started out as orderly protests against the killing turned into riots on July 18, when a crowd gathered at the One-Two-Three in Harlem shouting, “Murderers!” at the cops inside. Jimmy and Will had been sent up as part of the reinforcements, bottles and bricks and garbage-can lids raining down on them, looters helping themselves to food and radios and even weapons from the neighborhood stores. Jimmy could still recall a police captain pleading with the rioters to go home, and hearing someone laugh and call back: “We are home, white boy!”

After five days of rioting in Harlem and Bed-Stuy, one person was dead, 520 had been arrested, and the writing was on the wall for Mayor Wagner. His days had already been numbered, even before the riots. The annual murder rate had doubled to six hundred a year under his administration, and even before the Powell shooting, the city had been reeling from the murder of a woman named Kitty Genovese in her middle-class Queens neighborhood, who was stabbed in the course of three separate assaults by the same man, Winston Moseley, twelve people either witnessing or hearing the murder while it was in progress, most of them declining to intervene in any way beyond calling the cops. It was felt that the city was coming apart, and Wagner bore the brunt of the blame.

None of these concerns about the state of the city came as news to the men of the Ninth. The Ninth was affectionately known as “the Shithouse,” by those who served there, less so by everyone else. They were a law unto themselves, the men of that precinct, and they guarded their territory well, keeping an eye out not only for the bad guys but for some of the good guys too, like captains looking to kick ass on a slow day. “Fly in the Shithouse,” someone would call in over the radio, and then everyone would stand a little straighter for as long as was necessary.

Jimmy and Will were ambitious back then, both looking to make sergeant as soon as possible. The competition was tougher than before, since Felicia Spritzer’s lawsuit in 1963 that resulted in female officers being allowed to take promotional examinations for the first time, with Spritzer and Gertrude Schimmel making sergeant the following year. Not that Jimmy and Will gave a rat’s ass, unlike some of the older guys who had a lot of views on where a woman’s place was, none of which included wearing three stripes in one of their precincts. They both had a copy of the R a copy of patrol guide, thick as a Bible in its blue-plastic ring binder, and they carried the guide with them whenever they took a break so that they could test each other’s knowledge. In those days, you had to do detective work as a patrol officer for five years before you could make detective, but you wouldn’t start bringing in a sergeant’s money until you made second grade. They didn’t want to be investigators anyway. They were street cops. So they decided that they’d both try for the sergeant’s exam, even if it meant that they’d have to leave the Ninth, maybe even have to serve in different precincts. It would be tough, but they knew that their friendship would survive it.

Unlike a lot of other cops who worked as bouncers, keeping the guineas from Brooklyn out of the clubs, or as bodyguards for celebrities, which was boring, they didn’t have second jobs. Jimmy was a single man, and Will wanted to spend more time with his wife, not less. There was still a lot of corruption in the force, but it was mostly small-time stuff. Later, drugs would change everything, and the commissions would come down hard on bent cops. For now, the best that could be hoped for would be the occasional dollar job: escorting the movie theater manager to the night safe with the day’s takings, and getting a couple of bucks for drinks left on the backseat in return. Even taking lunch “on the arm” would soon come to be frowned upon, though most places in the Ninth didn’t do it anyway. Cops paid for their own lunches, their own coffee and doughnuts. The majority ate lunch at the precinct house. It was cheaper, and there weren’t too many places to eat in the Ninth anyway, at least none that the cops liked, the ham and cheddar with hot mustard at McSorley’s apart, or, in later years, Jack the Ribbers over on Third, although eat lunch at Jack the Ribbers and you weren’t going to be doing anything more strenuous than rubbing your stomach and groaning for the rest of the day. The guys in the Seventh were lucky, because they had Katz’s, but the cops in the Ninth weren’t allowed to cross precinct lines just because the bologna was better down the block. The NYPD didn’t work that way.

On the night of the first dead baby, Jimmy was working as recorder for the first half of the tour. The recorder took all of the notes during the tour, and the driver took the wheel. Halfway through, they switched. Jimmy was the better recorder. He had a good eye, and a sharp memory. Will had just enough recklessness to make him the better driver. Together, they made a good team.

They were called to a party over on Avenue A, a “10-50,” some neighbors complaining about the noise. When they got to the building, a young woman was puking into the gutter while her friend held her hair away from her face and stroked her back. They were so stoned that they barely glanced at the two cops.

Jimmy and Will could hear music coming from the top floor of the walk-up. As a matter of course, they kept their hands on the grips of their guns. There was no way of telling if this was just a regular party that was getting a little out of hand, or something more serious. As always in these situations, Jimmy felt his mouth go dry, and his heart began to beat faster. A week earlier, a guy had taken a flight off the top of a tenement in the course of a party that had started off just like this one. He’d almost killed one of the cops who was arriving to investigate, landing just inches from him and spraying him with blood when he hit. Turned out that the flyer had been skimming from some guys with vowels at the ends of their names, Italians who were applying their business acumen to the newly resurge R aewly resunt heroin market, which had been largely dormant since the teens and twenties, the Italians not yet realizing that their time was coming to an end, their dominance soon to be challenged by the blacks and the Colombians.

The apartment door was open, and music blared from a stereo, Jagger singing about some girl. They could see a narrow hallway leading into a living area, and the air was thick with tobacco and booze and grass. The two officers exchanged a look.

“Call it,” said Will.

They stepped into the hall, Jimmy leading. “NYPD,” he shouted. “Everybody stay calm, and stay still.”

Cautiously, Will behind him, Jimmy peered into the living room. There were eight people in various stages of intoxication or drug-induced stupor. Most were sitting or lying on the floor. Some were clearly asleep. A young white woman with purple stripes through her blond hair was stretched out on the couch beneath the window, a cigarette dangling from her hand. When she saw the cops she said: “Oh shit,” and began to get up.

“Stay where you are,” said Jimmy, motioning with his left hand that she should remain on the couch. Now one or two of the more together partygoers were waking up to the trouble they might be in, and looking scared. While Jimmy kept an eye on the people in the living room, Will checked the rest of the apartment. There was a small bedroom with two beds: one an empty child’s cot, the other a double piled with coats. He found a young man, probably nineteen or twenty, and barely compos mentis, on his knees in the bathroom, trying unsuccessfully to flush an ounce of marijuana down a toilet with a broken cistern. When he frisked him, Will found three twists of heroin in one of the pockets of the kid’s jeans.

“What are you, an idiot?” Will asked.

“Huh?” said the kid.

“You’re carrying heroin, but you flush the marijuana? You in college?”

“Yeah.”

“Bet you’re not studying to be a rocket scientist. You know how much trouble you’re in?”

“But, man,” said the kid, staring at the twists, “that shit is worth money!”

Will almost felt sorry for him, he was so dumb. “Come on, knuckle-head,” he said. He pushed him into the living room and told him to sit on the floor.

“Okay,” said Jimmy. “The rest of you, against the walls. You got anything I should know about, you tell me now and it’ll go easier on you.”

Those who were able to rose and assumed the position against the walls. Will nudged one comatose girl with his foot.

“Come on, sleeping beauty. Nap time’s over.”

Eventually, they had all nine standing. Will frisked eight of them, excluding the boy he had searched earlier. Only the girl with the striped hair was carrying: three joints, and a twist. She was both drunk and R ah drunk ahigh, but was coming down from the worst of it.

“What are these?” Will asked the girl.

“I don’t know,” said the girl. Her voice was slightly slurred. “A friend gave them to me to look after for her.”

“That’s some story. What’s your friend’s name? Hans Christian Andersen?”

“Who?”

“Doesn’t matter. This your place?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your name?”

“Sandra.”

“Sandra what?”

“Sandra Huntingdon.”

“Well, Sandra, you’re under arrest for possession with intent to supply.” He cuffed her and read her her rights, then did the same with the boy he had searched earlier. Jimmy took the names of the rest, and told them that they were free to stay or to leave, but if he passed them on the street again he’d bust them for loitering, even if they were running a race at the time. All of them went back to sitting around. They were young and scared, and they were gradually coming to realize how lucky they were not to be in cuffs, like their buddies, but they weren’t together enough to head out into the night just yet.

“Okay, time to go,” Will said to the two in cuffs. He began to lead Huntingdon from the apartment, Jimmy behind him with the boy, whose name was Howard Mason, but suddenly something seemed to flare in Huntingdon’s brain, cutting through the drug fog.

“My baby,” she said. “I can’t leave my baby!”

“What baby?” asked Will.

“My little girl. She’s two. I can’t leave her alone.”

“Miss, there’s no child in this apartment. I searched it myself.”

But she struggled against him. “I’m telling you, my baby is here,” she shouted, and he could tell that she wasn’t faking or deluded. Her concern was very real.

One of the group in the living room, a black man in his twenties with a beginner’s Afro, said, “She ain’t lyin’, man. She do have a baby.”

Jimmy looked at Will. “You sure you searched the place?”

“It’s not Central Park.”

“Hell.” He turned Mason back toward the living room. “You, sit on the couch and don’t move,” he told him. “Okay, Sandra, you say you have a kid. Let’s find her. What’s her name?”

“Melanie.”

“Melanie, right. You’re sure you didn’t ask someone to look after her for the evening?”

“No, she’s here.” Huntingdon was crying now. “I’m not lying.”

“Well, we’ll soon find out.”

There weren’t very many places to search, but they called the girl’s name just the same. The two cops searched behind the couches, in the bathtub, and in the kitchen closets.

It was Will who found her. She was under the pile of coats on the bed. He could tell that the child was dead from the moment that his hand touched her leg.

Jimmy took a sip of wine.

“The kid must have wanted to lie on her mother’s bed,” he said. “Maybe she crawled under the first coat for warmth, then fell asleep. The other coats were just piled on top of her, and she suffocated under them. I can still remember the sound her mother made when we found her. It came from someplace deep and old. It was like an animal dying. And then she just folded to the floor, her arms still cuffed behind her. She crawled to the bed on her knees and started to burrow under the coats with her head, trying to get close to her little girl. We didn’t stop her. We just stood there, watching her.

“She wasn’t a bad mother. She worked two jobs, and her aunt looked after her kid while she was at work. Maybe she was doing a little dealing on the side, but the autopsy found that her daughter was healthy and well cared for. Apart from the night of the party, nobody ever had any cause to complain about her. What I’m saying is that it could have happened to anyone. It was a tragedy, that’s all. It was nobody’s fault.

“Your old man, though, he took it bad. He went on a bender the next day. Back then, your father could drink some. When you knew him, he’d cut all that stuff out, apart from the occasional night out with the boys. But in the old days, he liked a drink. We all did.

“That day was different, though. I’d never seen him drink the way he did after he found Melanie Huntingdon. I think it was because of his own circumstances. He and your mother wanted a child real bad, but it didn’t look like it was going to happen for them. Then he sees this little kid lying dead under a pile of coats, and something breaks inside him. He believed in God. He went to church. He prayed. That night, it must have seemed as if God was mocking him just for the hell of it, forcing a man who had seen his wife miscarry again and again to uncover the body of a dead child. Worse than that, maybe he stopped believing in any kind of God for a time, as if someone had just pulled up a corner of the world and revealed black, empty space behind it. I don’t know. Anyway, finding the Huntingdon kid changed him, that’s all I can say. After it, he and your mother went through a real rough patch. I think she was going to leave him, or he was going to leave her, I don’t recall which. Wouldn’t have mattered, I suppose. The end result would still have been the same.”

He put the glass down and let the candlelight play upon the wine, spreading red fractals upon the tabletop like the ghosts of rubies.

“And that was when he met the girl,” he sai R adquo; he d.

Her name was Caroline Carr, or that was what she said her name was. They had responded to an attempted B and E call at her apartment. It was the smallest apartment they had ever seen, barely large enough to contain a single bed, a closet, and a table and chair. The kitchen area consisted of two gas rings in one corner, and the bathroom was so tiny that it didn’t even have a door, just lengths of beaded string for privacy. It was hard to see why anyone might have considered it worth breaking into. One look around told them that the girl didn’t have anything worth stealing. If she had, she would have sold it to rent a bigger place.

But, in a strange way, the space suited her. She was tiny, just a shade over five feet tall, and thin with it. Her hair was long and dark and very fine, and her skin was translucently pale. It seemed to Jimmy that she might expire at any minute, but when he looked in her eyes he saw a real strength and ferocity at her core. She might have appeared fragile, but so did spider silk until you tried to break it.

She was frightened, though, of that he was certain. At the time, he put it down to the attempted burglary. Someone had clearly tried to jimmy the lock on the window from the fire escape outside. She had woken to the noise, and had immediately run to the phone in the hallway outside to call the cops. One of her neighbors, an elderly woman named Mrs. Roth, had heard her screaming and offered her safe haven in her apartment until the police came. As it happened, Jimmy and Will had been only a block away when the call from Central came through. Whoever had tried to break in was probably still at the window when the sirens began to sound. They filled out a 61, but there wasn’t much more that they could do. The perps were gone, and no harm had been done. Will suggested talking to the landlord about getting a better lock for the window, or maybe a security grille of some kind, but Carr just shook her head.

“I won’t be staying here,” she said. “I’m going to leave.”

“It’s the big city,” said Will. “These things happen.”

“I understand. I have to move, though.”

Her fear was palpable, but it didn’t seem to be controlling her. It wasn’t unreasoning, and it wasn’t merely an overreaction to a disturbing, if commonplace, incident. Whatever was frightening her, it was related only in part to the events of that night.

“Your father must have felt it too,” said Jimmy. “He was quiet as we drove away. We stopped to pick up a couple of coffees, and as we sat drinking them, he said: ‘What do you suppose that was about?’

“‘It’s going down as a 10-31. That’s all there is to it.’

“‘But that woman was scared.’

“‘She lives alone in a shoebox. Someone tries to break in, she hasn’t got too many places to run.’

“‘No, it’s more than that. She didn’t tell us everything.’

“‘What are you now, psychic?’ R a?’<

“Then he turned to me. He didn’t say anything. He just stared me down.

“‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You’re right. I felt it too. You want to go back?’

“‘No, not now. Maybe later.’

“But we never did go back. At least, I didn’t. Your father did, though. He went back. He might even have gone back that night, after the tour ended.

“And that was how it began.”

Will told Jimmy that he didn’t sleep with Caroline until the third time they met. He claimed that it had never been his intention to get involved with her in that way, but there was something about her, something that made him want to help her and protect her. Jimmy didn’t know whether to believe him or not, and he didn’t suppose it mattered much one way or another. There had always been a sentimental streak to Will Parker and, as Jimmy liked to say, quoting Oscar Wilde, “sentimentality is the bank holiday of cynicism.” Will was having problems at home and he was still troubled by the death of Melanie Huntingdon, so maybe he saw the possibility of some kind of escape in the form of Caroline Carr. He helped her to move. He found her a place on the Upper East Side, with more space and better security. He put her in a motel for two nights while he negotiated the rent down on her behalf, then drove into the city one morning instead of taking the train and put all of her belongings, which didn’t amount to much, in the back of his car and took her to her new apartment. The affair didn’t last longer than six or seven weeks.

During that time, she became pregnant.

I waited. I had finished my wine, but when Jimmy tried to refill my glass I covered it with my hand. I felt light-headed, but it was nothing to do with the wine.

“Pregnant?” I said.

“That’s right.” He lifted the wine bottle. “You mind if I do? It makes all this easier. I’ve been waiting a long time to get rid of it.”

He filled the glass halfway.

“She had something, that Caroline Carr,” said Jimmy. “Even I could see that.”

“Even you?” Despite myself, I smiled.

“She wasn’t to my taste,” he said, smiling back. “I hope I don’t need to say any more than that.”

I nodded.

“That wasn’t all of it, though. Your father was a good-looking man. There were a lot of women out there who’d have been happy to ease him of some of his burdens, no strings attached. He wouldn’t have been obliged to buy them more than a drink. Instead, here he was finding a place for this woman and lying to his wife about where he was going so that he could help her move.”

“You think he was infatuated with her?”

“That’s what I believed at the start. She was younger than he was, though not by much and, like I said, she had a certain allure. I think it R a. I think was tied up with her size, and the impression of fragility that she gave, even if it was deceptive. So, yeah, sure, I thought it was an infatuation, and maybe it was, at the start. But later, Will told me the rest of it, or as much of it as he wanted to tell me. That was when I started to understand, and that’s when I started to worry.”

His brow furrowed, and I could tell that, even now, decades later, he struggled with this part of the story.

“We were in Cal ’s on the night Will told me that Caroline Carr was convinced she was being hunted. I thought he was joking at first, but he wasn’t. Then I started to wonder if the girl had spun him some kind of line of bullshit. You know, damsel in distress, bad men on the horizon: shitty boyfriend, maybe, or psycho ex-husband.

“But that wasn’t it. She was convinced that whoever, whatever, was hunting her wasn’t human. She talked about two people, a man and a woman. She told your father that they’d started hunting her years before. She’d been running from them ever since.”

“And my father believed her?”

Jimmy laughed. “Are you kidding me? He might have been a sentimentalist, but he wasn’t a fool. He thought she was a wacko. He figured he’d made the biggest mistake of his life. He had visions of her stalking him, arriving at his house decked out in garlic and crucifixes. Your old man might have gone off the rails a little, but he was still capable of driving the train. So, no, he didn’t believe her, and I think he started trying to disentangle himself from the whole mess. I guess he also realized that he ought to be with his wife, that leaving her wouldn’t solve any of his problems but would just give him a whole new set of them to deal with.

“Then Caroline told him she was pregnant, and his world collapsed around him. They had a long talk on the evening of her visit to the clinic to get checked out. She never even mentioned abortion, and your father, to his credit, never raised it either. It wasn’t just because he was Catholic. I think he still recalled that little girl buried under the pile of coats, and his wife’s miscarriages. Even if it meant the end of his marriage, and a life of debt, he wasn’t going to suggest that the pregnancy should be terminated. And Caroline, you know, she was really calm about the whole thing. Not happy, exactly, but calm, as if the pregnancy was a minor medical procedure or something, a thing that was worrying but necessary.

“Your father, well, he was kind of shocked. He needed some air, so he left her and went to take a walk. He decided, after thirty minutes of his own company, that he wanted to talk to someone, so he stopped at a pay phone across from her apartment and started to call me.

“And that was when he saw them.”

They were standing in a doorway close by a convenience store, hand in hand: a man and a woman, both in their early thirties. The woman had mousy hair that brushed her shoulders, and she wore no makeup. She was slim, and dressed in an old-fashioned black skirt that clung to her legs before flaring slightly at her shins. A matching black jacket hung open over a white blouse that was buttoned to the neck. The man wore a black suit with a white shirt and black tie. His hair was short at the back and long in front, parted on the left and hanging greasily over one eye. Both of them were staring up at the window of Caroline Carr’s apart R asquo;s apment.

Strangely, it was their very stillness that drew Will’s attention to them. They were like pieces of statuary that had been positioned in the shadows, a temporary art installation on a busy street. Their appearance reminded him of those sects in Pennsylvania, the ones who frowned upon buttons as signs of vanity. In their utter focus on the windows of the apartment, he saw a fanaticism that bordered on the religious.

And then, as Will watched them, they began to move. They crossed the street, the man reaching beneath his jacket as he went, and Will saw the gun appear in his hand.

He ran. He had his own.38 with him, and he drew it. The couple was halfway across the street when something in the manner of the stranger’s approach drew the man’s attention. He registered the approaching threat, and turned to face it. The woman continued moving, her attention fixed only on the apartment building before her and the girl who was hiding within, but the man stared straight at Parker, and the policeman felt a slow tightening in his gut, as though someone had just pumped cold water into his system and it was responding with the urge to void itself. Even at this distance, he could tell that the man’s eyes were not right. They were at once too dark, like twin voids in the pallor of the gunman’s face, and yet too small, chips of black glass in a borrowed skin pulled too tightly over a larger skull.

Then the woman looked around, only now becoming aware that her partner was no longer beside her. She opened her mouth to say something, and Parker saw the panic on her face.

The truck hit the gunman hard from behind, briefly pitching him forward and upward, his feet leaving the ground before he was dragged beneath the front wheels as the driver braked, his body disintegrating beneath the massive weight of the truck, his life ending in a smear of red and black. The force of the impact knocked him out of his shoes. They lay nearby, one upside down, the other on its side. A tendril of blood seeped out toward the shoes from the broken form under the truck, as though the body were trying to reconstitute itself, to build itself once again from the feet up. Somebody screamed.

By the time Will reached the body, the woman had disappeared. He glanced under the truck. The man’s head was gone, crushed by the left-front wheel of the truck. Will showed his shield, and told an ashen-faced man standing nearby to call in the accident. The driver climbed down from his cab and tried to grab hold of Will, but he slipped by him and was only barely aware of the driver falling to the ground behind him. He ran to Caroline’s building, but the front door was still locked. He inserted the key and opened the door by touch, his attention fixed on the street, not the keyhole. As the key turned he slipped inside and closed the door hard behind him. When he got to the apartment, he stood to one side, breathing hard, and knocked once.

“Caroline?” he called.

There was no reply for a moment, then, softly, “Yes.”

“You okay, honey?”

“I think so.”

“Open up.”

His eyes searched the shadows. He thought that he could sm R a he couldell a strange perfume on the air. It was sharp and metallic. It took him a few seconds to realize that it was the smell of the dead man’s blood. He looked down and saw that it was on his shoes.

She opened the door. He stepped inside. When he tried to reach for her, she moved away.

“I saw them,” she said. “I saw them coming for me.”

“I know,” he said. “I saw them too.”

“The one who got hit…”

“He’s dead.”

She shook her head.

“No.”

“I’m telling you, he’s dead. His skull was crushed.”

She was leaning against the wall now. He gripped her shoulders.

“Look at me,” he said. She did as he asked, and he saw hidden knowledge in her eyes.

“He’s dead,” he said, for the third time.

She let out a deep breath. Her eyes flicked toward the window.

“Okay,” she said, and he knew that she did not believe him, although he could not understand why. “What about the woman?”

“Gone.”

“She’ll come back.”

“We’ll move you.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere safe.”

“This place was supposed to be safe.”

“I was wrong.”

“You didn’t believe me.”

He nodded. “You’re right. I didn’t. I do now. I don’t know how they found you, but I was wrong. Look, did you make any calls? Did you tell anyone-a friend, a relative-where you were?”

Her eyes turned back to him. She looked tired. Not frightened or angry, just weary.

“Who would I call?” she asked. “I have no one. There’s only you.”

And with nowhere else to turn, Will called Jimmy Gallagher, so that while the cops gathered statements, Jimmy was moving Caroline to a motel in Queens, but not before driving around for hours, trying to shake off anyone who might be following them. When he had her safely checked in, he stayed with her in her room until, at last, she fell asleep, then he watched TV until morning came.

While he did so, Will was lying to the cops on the scene. He told the officers that he’d be R ae’den uptown visiting a friend, and had seen a man crossing the street with a gun in his hand. He had challenged him, and the man had been turning in response, his gun raised, when the truck hit him. None of the other witnesses seemed to recall the woman who had been with him; in fact, the other witnesses couldn’t even remember seeing the man cross the street. It was as though, for them, he had materialized in that spot. Even the driver of the truck said that one second the street in front of him was empty, and the next there was a man being pulled under the wheels of his vehicle. The driver was in shock, although there was no question of any blame accruing to him; the lights had been in his favor, and he had been well within the speed limit.

Once he had made his statement, Will waited for a time in a coffee shop, watching the front of the now-empty apartment house and the bustle at the spot of the man’s death, hoping to see again the woman with the washed-out face and the dark eyes, but she did not come. If she was mourning the loss of her partner, she was doing so elsewhere. Finally, he gave up and joined Jimmy and Caroline at the motel, and while Caroline slept, he told Jimmy everything.

“He told me about the pregnancy, the woman, the dead man,” said Jimmy. “He kept returning to the way the guy had looked, trying to pinpoint what it was about him that was so…wrong.”

“And what did he decide?” I asked.

“Another man’s clothes,” said Jimmy.

“What does that mean?”

“You ever see somebody wearing a suit that isn’t his, or trying to fit his feet into borrowed shoes, ones that are maybe a size too small or too large? Well, that was what was wrong with the dead man, according to your father. It was like he’d borrowed another man’s body, but it didn’t fit the way that it should. Your old man worried at it like a dog at a bone, and that was the best that he could come up with, weeks later: it was almost as if he felt there was something living inside that guy’s body, but it wasn’t him. Whatever he had once been, or whoever he had once been, was long gone. This thing had chewed it away.”

He watched me then, waiting for a response. When none came, he said:

“I’m tempted to ask if you think that sounds crazy, but I know too much about you to believe you if you said yes.”

“You ever get a name on him?” I asked, ignoring what he had just said.

“There wasn’t much of the guy left to identify. A sketch artist came up with a pretty good likeness, though, based on your father’s description, and we circulated it. Bingo! A woman comes forward, says it looks like her husband, name of Peter Ackerman. He’d run off on her five years before. Met some girl in a bar, and that was it. Thing about it was, the wife said it was completely out of character for her husband. He was an accountant, a by-the-numbers guy. Loved her, loved his kids. He had his routines, and he stuck to them.”

I shrugged. “He wouldn’t be the first man to disappoint his wife in that way.”

“No, I guess not. But we haven’t even gotten to the strange stuff. Ackerman had served in Korea, so his prints eventually checked out. The wife gave a R awife gavedetailed description of his appearance though, since his face was gone: he had a Marine tat on his left arm, an appendectomy scar on his abdomen, and a chunk missing from his right calf where a bullet had caught him at the Chosin Reservoir. The body taken from under the truck had all of those markings, and one more. It seemed like he’d picked up another tattoo since he’d deserted his wife and family. Well, not so much a tattoo. More of a brand.”

“A brand?”

“It was burned into his right arm. Hard to describe. I’d never seen anything like it before, but your old man followed it up. He found out what it was.”

“And?”

“It was the symbol of an angel. A fallen angel. ‘An-’ something was the name. Animal. No, that’s not it. Hell, it’ll come to me.”

I was treading carefully now. I didn’t know how much Jimmy knew of some of the men and women I had encountered in the past, and of how some of them shared strange beliefs, convinced that they were fallen beings, wandering spirits.

Demons.

“This man was marked with an occult symbol?”

“That’s right.”

“A fork?” That was a mark I had seen before. The ones who bore it had called themselves “Believers.”

“What?” Jimmy’s eyes narrowed in confusion, then his expression changed and I understood that he knew more about me than I might have wished, and I wondered how. “No, not a fork. It was different. It didn’t seem like anything that had meaning, but everything does, if you look hard enough at it.”

“And the woman?”

Jimmy stood. He went to his wine rack and removed another bottle.

“Oh, she came back,” he said. “With a vengeance.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

THETWO MEN KEPTCaroline Carr on the move, never allowing her to stay in any one place for more than a week. They used motels, and short-term rentals. For a time, they put her in a cabin in the woods upstate, close to a small town where a former cop from the Ninth, a cousin of Eddie Grace’s, had moved to become chief of police. The cabin was occasionally used to stash witnesses, or those who just needed to be hidden away for a time until a particular situation cooled off, but Caroline hated the quiet and the isolation. It made her more nervous than she had been before, for she was a creature of cities. Out in the country, every sound signaled an approaching threat. After three days in the cabin, her nerves were shredded. She was so frightened that she even called Will at home. Thankfully, his wife wasn’t there, but the call shook Will. His affair with the young woman had already come to a mutually agreed-upon end, but sometimes he would stand in his yard and wonder just how he had managed to screw everything up so badly. He was constantly tempted to confess all to his wife. He ev Sis ä[1] haen dreamed that he had done so, and he would awake wondering why she was still sleeping beside him. He felt sure that she must suspect something and was just waiting for the right moment to voice those suspicions. Nothing was ever said, but her silence served only to increase his paranoia.

He was also becoming increasingly aware of the fact that he knew almost nothing about Caroline Carr. She had sketched only the barest details of her life for him: an upbringing in Modesto, California; the death of her mother in a fire; and her growing awareness of the two figures that were now pursuing her. Caroline had managed to stay ahead of them for so long, but she had grown careless, and become tired of running. She had almost begun to welcome the thought that they might find her, until that night when they tried to break into her apartment and her fear of them overcame any misplaced desire she might have held to end the chase. She could not tell Will why they had targeted her, for she said that she did not know. She knew only that they were a threat to her, and they wanted to end her life. When he asked her why she had not gone to the police, she had laughed at him, and the scorn in her voice had hurt him.

“You think I didn’t? I went to them after my mother died. I told them that the fire had been started deliberately, but they were looking at a disturbed, grief-stricken girl, and they didn’t listen to a word I said. After that, I decided that the only thing for it was to look after myself. What else could I do? Tell people I was being hunted for no reason by a man and woman that nobody had ever seen except me? They’d have locked me up, and then I would have been trapped. I kept everything to myself until I met you. I thought that you were different.”

And Will had held her and told her that he was different, even as he wondered if he was being drawn into a frightened young woman’s elaborate fantasy. But then he recalled the man with the gun, and the pale woman with the dead eyes, and he knew that there was some truth in all that Caroline Carr had told him.

He had begun to make informal inquiries about the tattoo on the late Peter Ackerman’s arm, and eventually he was referred to a young rabbi by the name of Epstein out in Brooklyn Heights. Over a glass of sweet kosher wine, the rabbi had talked to him of angels, of obscure books that, as far as Will could tell, had been left out of the Bible because they were even stranger than most of the stuff that had been left in, and that was saying something. As they spoke, Will began to realize that the rabbi was interrogating him as much as he was interrogating the rabbi.

“So this is a sect, a cult of some kind, that Peter Ackerman became involved with?” said Will.

“Perhaps,” said the rabbi. Then: “Why does this man interest you so much?”

“I’m a cop. I was there when he died.”

“No, there’s more to this.” The rabbi sat back in his chair and tugged on his short beard. His eyes never left Will’s face. Eventually, he seemed to reach a decision. “May I call you Will?”

Will nodded his assent.

“I am going to tell you something now, Will. If I have guessed right, then I would appreciate it if you would confirm that it is so.”

Will felt that he had no choice but to agree. As he told Jimmy later, he had somehow become involved in an exchange of information.

“This man was not alone,” said Epstein. “There was a woman with him. She was probably close to his own age. Is that correct?”

Will thought about lying, but only for a second. “How did you know that?”

Epstein produced a copy of the symbol that had been found on Peter Ackerman’s body.

“Because of this. They always hunt in pairs. After all, they are lovers. The male”-he pointed to the Ackerman symbol before slipping another sheet of paper from behind it-“and the female.”

Will examined them both.

“So this woman is part of the same cult?”

“No, Will. I don’t believe that this is a cult at all. This is something much worse…”

Jimmy pressed his fingertips to his head. He was thinking hard. I left him to it. Epstein: I had met the rabbi on a number of occasions, and had helped him to track down his son’s killers, and in all that time he had never told me that he had known my father.

“Their names,” Jimmy said. “I can’t remember their names.”

“What names?”

“The names the rabbi told Will. The man and the woman, they each had names. Like I told you, the man’s was ‘An-’ something, but I can’t remember the woman’s. It’s like they’ve been cut from my memory.”

He was becoming frustrated, and distracted.

“It doesn’t matter for now,” I said. “We can come back to it later.”

“They all had names,” said Jimmy. He sounded confused.

“What?”

“It was something else the rabbi told Will. He said that they all had names.” He looked at me with something like despair. “What does that mean?”

And I remembered my own grandfather in Maine uttering those same words as Alzheimer’s began snuffing out his memories like candle flames caught between fingers. “They all have names, Charlie,” he had said, his face bright with a terrible urgency. “They all have names.” I didn’t know what he meant, not then. It was only later, when faced by creatures like Kittim and Brightwell, that I began to learn.

“It means that even the worst of things can be named,” I told Jimmy. “And it’s important to know those names.”

Because with naming came an understanding of the thing.

And with understanding came the possibility of its destruction.

The need to protect Caroline Carr put huge additional pressure on them both, at a time when the city was in turmoil, and the demands upon them as police officers were seemingly unceasing. In January 1966, the transit workers had gone out on strike, all thirty-four thousand of them, crippling the transport network and wreaking havoc with the city’s economy. Eventually, Mayor Lindsay, who had succeeded Wagner in January ’66, had buckled, what with the public complaining and Michael Quill, the union leader, taunting him from behind bars as a “pipsqueak” and “a boy in short trousers.” By giving in to the transit workers, though, Lindsay-who was a good mayor in so many ways, let no one say otherwise-had opened the floodgates to an ongoing series of municipal strikes that would blight his administration. The antidraft movement was starting to simmer, a pot that had been threatening to come to a boil ever since four hundred activists had picketed the Whitehall Street induction center, a couple of them even burning their draft cards. It was still open season on dissenters, though, because most of the country was behind LBJ, even though U.S. troop strength had escalated that year from 180,000 to 385,000, U.S. casualties had tripled, and 5,000 U.S. soldiers would be dead by the end of that year alone. It would be another year before public opinion truly began to turn, but for now activists were more concerned with civil rights than Vietnam, even as some were gradually beginning to realize that one fed into the other, that the draft was unfair because most of those being called up by white draft boards were young black men who couldn’t use college as an excuse to defer since they had no chance of going to college in the first place. There were so-called new bohemians in the East Village, and marijuana and LSD were becoming the drugs of choice.

And Will Parker and Jimmy Gallagher, both young men themselves, and not unintelligent, put on their uniforms each day and wondered when they would be asked to break the heads of kids their own age, kids with whom, at least in Will’s case, they were largely in agreement. Everything was changing. They could smell it in the air.

Meanwhile, Jimmy was wishing that they’d never met Caroline Carr. After she made the call to Will’s home, Jimmy had to drive up and take her back to Brooklyn, where she stayed in his mother’s house in Gerritsen Beach, close to the Shell Bank Creek. Mrs. Gallagher owned a small, one-story bungalow, with a peaked roof and no yard, that stood on Melba Court, one of the warren of alphabetically ordered streets that had once served as a summer resort for Irish-Americans, until Gerritsen proved so popular that the houses were winterized so that people could live there year-round. Hiding her in Gerritsen gave Jimmy and, occasionally, Will, an excuse to see her, because Jimmy went down to visit his mother at least once every week. In addition, this part of Gerritsen was small and tightly knit. Strangers would stand out, and Mrs. Gallagher had been warned that there were people looking for the girl. It made Jimmy’s mother more vigilant than she already was; even at her most relaxed, she put the average presidential bodyguard to shame. When neighbors asked about the young woman who was staying with her, Mrs. Gallagher told them that she was a friend of a friend and had recently been bereaved. A terrible shame, what with the poor girl expecting. She gave Caroline a thin gold band that had once belonged to her own mother, and told her to wear it on her ring finger. Her supposed bereavement kept even the worst snoopers at b R qnoopers aay, and on the handful of occasions when Caroline joined Mrs. Gallagher for an evening at the Ancient Order of Hibernians on Gerritsen Avenue, she was treated with a gentleness and respect that made her feel both grateful and guilty.

In Gerritsen, Caroline was content: she was close to the sea, and to the residents-only Kiddie Beach. Perhaps she even saw herself playing there on the sand with her own child, spending summer days eating at the concession stand, listening to bands on the stage, and watching the big parade on Memorial Day. But if she did imagine such a future for herself and her unborn child, she never spoke of it. It might have been that she did not want to put a hex on her wish by speaking it aloud, or maybe-and this was what Mrs. Gallagher told her son on the phone when he called one day to check on the girl-she saw no future at all.

“She’s a nice girl,” said Mrs. Gallagher. “She’s quiet, and respectful. She doesn’t smoke and she doesn’t drink, and that’s good. But when I try to talk to her about what she plans to do once the baby is born, she just smiles and changes the subject. And it’s not a happy smile, Jimmy. She’s sad all the way through. More than that: she’s frightened. I hear her crying out in her sleep. For God’s sake, Jimmy, why are these people after her? She doesn’t look like she could do harm to a fly.”

But Jimmy Gallagher didn’t have the answer, and neither did Will Parker. But then, Will had problems of his own.

His wife was pregnant again.

Will watched her bloom as her term drew on. Even though she’d suffered so many miscarriages in the past, she told him that this one felt different from the others. At home, he would catch her humming softly to herself in the chair by the kitchen window, her right hand resting on her belly. She could stay that way for hours, watching clouds scud by and the last leaves slowly spiraling from the trees in the garden as winter began to take hold. It was almost funny, he thought. He’d slept with Caroline Carr three or four times, and she’d become pregnant. Now his wife, after so many miscarriages, had managed to carry their unborn child for seven months. She looked like she was actually glowing from within. He had never seen her happier, more content within herself. He knew of the guilt that she had experienced after the earlier losses. Her body had betrayed her. It would not do what it was supposed to do. It was not strong enough. Now, at last, she had what she wanted, what they had both wanted for so long.

And he was tormented by it. He was having a second child with another woman, and the knowledge of his betrayal was tearing him apart. Caroline had told him that she wanted nothing from him, except that he keep her safe until the baby was born.

“And after that?”

But, as with Jimmy Gallagher’s mother, she declined to answer the question.

“We’ll see,” she would say, then turn away.

The child was due to be born one month before his wife was likely to give birth. They would both be his children, yet he knew that he would have to let one go, that if he wanted his marriage to survive-and he did, more than anything R qhan anyth else-then he could not be a part of his first child’s life. He wasn’t even sure that he could offer more than minimal financial support, not on a cop’s salary, despite Caroline’s protestations that she didn’t want his money…

And yet he didn’t wish to let this child simply disappear. He was, despite his failings, an honorable man. He had never cheated on his wife before, and he felt his guilt about sleeping with Caroline as an ache so strong that it made him reel. More than ever before, he felt the urge to confess, but it was Jimmy Gallagher who dissuaded him, one evening after a post-tour beer in Cal ’s.

“Are you crazy?” Jimmy said. “Your wife is pregnant. She’s carrying the child that you’ve both wanted for years. After all that’s happened, you may not get a second chance like this one. Apart from what the shock might do to her, it’ll destroy her and it’ll destroy your marriage. You live with what you did. Caroline says that she doesn’t want you to be part of her child’s life. She doesn’t want your money, and she doesn’t want your time. Most men in your situation would be happy with that. If you’re not, then the loss is the price that you pay for your sins, and for keeping your marriage together. You hear me?”

And Will had agreed, knowing that what Jimmy said was true.

“You have to understand something,” said Jimmy. “Your old man was decent and loyal and brave, but he was also human. He’d made a mistake, and he was trying to find a way to live with it, to live with it and to do the right thing by all concerned, but that just wasn’t possible, and the knowledge of it was ripping him apart.”

One of the candles was sputtering as it neared the end of its life. Jimmy went to replace it, then paused and said: “You want, I can put the kitchen light on.”

I shook my head, and told him that the candles were fine.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Somehow, it doesn’t seem right telling a story like this in a brightly lit room. It’s just not that kind of story.”

He lit a new candle, then resumed his seat and continued his tale.

At Epstein’s request, a meeting was arranged with Caroline. It took place in the back room of a Jewish bakery in Midwood. Jimmy and Will drove Caroline to the rendezvous under cover of night, the by-now heavily pregnant young woman lying uncomfortably under some coats on the backseat of Jimmy’s mother’s Eldorado. The two men were not privy to what passed between the rabbi and Caroline, although they were together for over an hour. When they were finished, Epstein spoke with Will and asked him about the arrangements that had been made for Caroline’s lying-in. Jimmy had never heard that phrase used before, and was embarrassed when it had to be explained to him. Will gave Epstein the name of the OB-GYN, and the hospital in which Caroline intended to deliver her baby. Epstein told him that alternative arrangements would be made.

Through Epstein’s agencies, a place was obtained for Caroline in a small private clinic in Gerritsen Beach itself, not far from PS 277, on the other side of the creek from w R qcreek frohere she was staying. Jimmy had always known that the clinic was there, and that it catered to those for whom money was no great object, but he hadn’t been aware of the fact that babies could be delivered behind its doors. Later, he learned that it wasn’t usually the case, but an exception had been made at Epstein’s request. Jimmy had offered to lend Will money to cover some of the medical costs, and he had accepted on condition that a firm schedule of repayments was agreed upon, with interest.

On the afternoon that Caroline’s water broke, both Jimmy and Will were on the eight-to-four tour, and they drove together to the hospital after Mrs. Gallagher had left a message for Jimmy at the station house asking him to call her as soon as he could. Will, in turn, phoned his wife, intending to tell her that he and Jimmy were helping Jimmy’s mother with some stuff, which had a grain of truth embedded in the substance of the lie, but she was not home and the phone remained unanswered.

When they arrived at the clinic, the receptionist said: “She’s in eight, but you can’t go in. There’s a waiting room down the hall on the left, with coffee and cookies. Which one of you is the father?”

“I am,” said Will. The words sounded strange in his mouth.

“Well, we’ll come get you when it’s over. The contractions have started, but she won’t give birth for a couple of hours. I’ll ask the doctor to talk to you, and maybe he can give you a few minutes with her. Off you go.” She made a shooing movement with her hands, a gesture she had presumably demonstrated to thousands of useless men who had insisted on trying to clutter up her wards when they had no business being around.

“Don’t worry,” she added, as Will and Jimmy resigned themselves to a long wait, “she’s got company. Her friend, the older lady, she arrived with her, and her sister went in just a few minutes ago.”

Both men stopped.

“Sister?” said Will.

“Yeah, her sister.” The nurse spotted the look on Will’s face and instantly became defensive. “She had ID, a driver’s license. Same name. Carr.”

But Will and Jimmy were already moving, heading right, not left.

“Hey, I told you, you can’t go down there,” shouted the receptionist. When they ignored her, she reached for a phone and called security.

The door to room 8 was closed when they reached it, and the corridor was empty. They knocked, but there was no reply. As Jimmy reached for the handle, his mother appeared from around the corner.

“What are you doing?” she said.

Then she saw the guns.

“No! I just went to the bathroom. I-”

The door was locked from the inside. Jimmy stepped back and kicked at it twice before the lock shattered and the door flew open, exposing them to a blast of cool air. Caroline Carr lay on a raised gurney, her he R qrney, herad and back supported by pillows. The front of her gown was drenched with red, but she was still alive. The room was cold because the window was open.

“Get a doctor!” said Will, but Jimmy was already shouting for help.

Will went to Caroline and tried to hold her, but she was starting to spasm. He saw the wounds to her stomach and chest. A blade, he thought; someone used a blade on her, and on the child. No, not just someone: the woman, the one who had watched her lover die beneath the wheels of a truck. Caroline’s eyes turned to him. Her hand gripped his shirt, staining it with her blood.

And then there were doctors, and nurses. He was pulled away from her, forced out of the room, and as the door closed he saw her fall back against the pillows and lie still, and he knew that she was dying.

But the child survived. They cut it from her as she died. The blade had missed its head by a quarter of an inch.

And while they delivered it, Will and Jimmy went hunting for the woman who had killed Caroline Carr.

They heard the sound of the car as soon as they exited the clinic, and seconds later a black Buick shot from the lot to their left and prepared to turn onto Gerritsen Avenue. A streetlight caught the face of the woman as she glanced toward them. It was Will who reacted first, firing three shots as the woman responded to their presence, turning left instead of right so that she would not have to cross in front of them. The first shot took out the driver’s window, and the second and third hit the door. The Buick sped away as Will fired a fourth time, running behind it as Jimmy raced for their own car. Then, as Will watched, the Buick seemed to wobble on its axles, then began to drift to the right. It struck the curb outside the Lutheran church, then mounted it and came to a rest against the railings of the churchyard.

Will continued running. Now Jimmy was at his side, all thoughts of their own vehicle abandoned when the other car had come to a stop. As they drew nearer, the driver’s door opened and the woman stumbled out, clearly injured. She glanced back at them, a knife in her hand. Will didn’t hesitate. He wanted her dead. He fired again. The bullet struck the door, but by then the woman was already moving, abandoning the car, her left foot dragging. She dived left onto Bartlett, her pursuers closing the distance rapidly. As they turned the corner, she seemed frozen beneath a streetlight, her head turned, her mouth open. Will aimed, but even injured she was too fast. She stumbled to her right, down a narrow alley called Canton Court.

“We have her,” said Jimmy. “That’s a dead end. There’s just the creek down there.”

They paused as they reached Canton, then exchanged a look and nodded. Their weapons held high, they entered the dark space between two cottages that led to the creek.

The woman was standing with her back to the creek bank, caught in the moonlight. The knife was still held in her hand. Her coat was slightly too long for her, and the sleeves hung over the second knuckles of her fingers, but not so far as to obscure the blade.

“Put it down,” said Jimmy, but he was not talki R qas not tang to her, not yet. Instead, while his eyes remained fixed on the woman, he laid the palm of his hand on the warm barrel of Will’s revolver, gently forcing it down. “Don’t do it, Will. Just don’t.”

The woman twisted the blade, and Jimmy thought that he could still see traces of Caroline Carr’s blood on it.

“It’s over,” she said. Her voice was surprisingly soft and sweet, but her eyes were twin shards of obsidian in the pallor of her face.

“That’s right,” said Jimmy. “Now drop the knife.”

“It doesn’t matter what you do to me,” said the woman. “I am beyond your law.”

She dropped the knife, but at the same time, her left hand moved, the sleeve of her coat pulling back to reveal the little pistol concealed by its folds.

It was Jimmy who killed her. He hit her twice before she could get a shot off. She remained standing for a second, then tumbled backward into the cold waters of the Shell Bank Creek.

She was never identified. The receptionist at the hospital confirmed that she was the same woman who had claimed to be Caroline Carr’s sister. A false Virginia driver’s license in the name of Ann Carr was found in her coat pocket, along with a small quantity of cash. Her fingerprints were not on file anywhere, and nobody came forward to identify her even after her picture appeared on news shows and in the papers.

But that came later. For now, there were questions to be asked, and to be answered. More cops came. They flooded the clinic. They sealed off Bartlett. They dealt with reporters, with curious onlookers, with distressed patients and their relatives.

While they did so, a group of people met in a room at the back of the hospital. They included the hospital director; the doctor and midwife who had been monitoring Caroline Carr; the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal affairs; and a small, quiet man in his early forties, Rabbi Epstein. Will Parker and Jimmy Gallagher had been instructed to wait outside, and they sat together on hard plastic chairs, not speaking. Only one person, except for Jimmy, had expressed her sorrow to Will at what had occurred. It was the receptionist. She knelt before him while he waited, and took his hand.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “We all are.”

He nodded dumbly.

“I don’t know if-,” she began, then stopped. “No, I know it won’t help, but maybe you might like to see your son?”

She led him to a glass-walled room, and she pointed out the tiny child who lay sleeping between two others.

“That’s him,” she said. “That’s your boy.”

They were called into the meeting room minutes later. Those present were introduced to them, all except for one man in a su R q man in ait who had followed the two cops into the room, and was now watching Will carefully. Epstein leaned toward Will and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

Will did not reply.

It was the deputy commissioner, Frank Mancuso, who formally broke the silence.

“They tell me you’re the father,” he said to Will.

“I am.”

“What a mess,” said Mancuso, with feeling. “We need to get the story straight,” said Mancuso. “Are you two listening?”

Will and Jimmy nodded in unison.

“The child died,” said Mancuso.

“What?” said Will.

“The child died. It lived for a couple of hours, but it seems that there was some damage caused by the knife wound to the womb. It died as of”-he checked his watch-“two minutes ago.”

“What are you talking about?” said Will. “I just saw him.”

“And now he’s dead.”

Will tried to leave, but Epstein grabbed his arm.

“Wait, Mr. Parker. Your child is alive and well, but as of now, only the people in this room know it. Already he’s being taken away.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere safe.”

“Why? He’s my son. I want to know where he is.”

“Think, Mr. Parker,” said Epstein. “For a moment, just think.”

Will was silent for a time. When he spoke, he said, “You believe that someone is going to come after the child.”

“We believe that it’s a possibility. They can’t know that he survived.”

“But they’re dead. The man and the woman. I saw them both die.”

Epstein looked away. “There may be others,” he said, and, even amid his grief and confusion, the cop in Will wondered what Epstein was trying to hide.

“What others? Who are these people?”

“We’re trying to find that out,” said Epstein. “It will take time.”

“Right. And in the meantime, what happens to my son?”

“Eventually, he’ll be placed with a family,” said Mancuso. “That’s all you need to know.”

“No,” said Will, “i R qll, &ldqut isn’t. He’s my son.”

Mancuso bared his teeth. “You’re not listening, Officer Parker. You don’t have a son. And if you don’t walk away from this, you won’t have a career either.”

“You have to let him go,” said Epstein gently. “If you love him as a son, then you have to let him go.”

Will looked at the unknown man standing by the wall.

“Who are you?” Will asked. “Where do you fit into all of this?”

The man didn’t answer, and he didn’t flinch under the glare of Will’s anger.

“He’s a friend,” said Epstein. “That’s enough for now.”

Mancuso spoke again. “Are we all singing from the same hymn sheet, Officer? You’d better tell us now. I won’t be so good-natured if this matter raises its head outside these four walls.”

Will swallowed hard.

“Yes,” he said. “I understand.”

“Yes, sir,” said Mancuso.

“Yes, sir,” repeated Will.

“And you?” Mancuso turned his attention to Jimmy Gallagher.

“I’m with him,” said Jimmy. “Whatever he says goes.”

Glances were exchanged. It was over.

“Go home,” said Mancuso to Will. “Go home to your wife.”

And when they passed the glass-walled room again, the cot was already empty, and the receptionist’s face was creased with grief as they passed her desk. Already, the cover-up had begun. Without words to convey her sympathy for a man who had, in one night, lost his child, and the mother of his child, she could only shake her head and watch as he disappeared into the night.

When Will at last returned home, Elaine was waiting for him.

“Where have you been?” Her eyes were swollen. He could tell that she had been crying for hours.

“Something came up,” he said. “A girl died.”

“I don’t care!” It was a scream, not a shout. He had never heard her utter such a sound before. Those three words seemed to contain more pain and anguish than he had ever thought could be contained inside the woman he loved. Then she repeated the words, this time softly, forcing each one out, expelling them like phlegm from her mouth.

“I don’t care. You weren’t here. You weren’t here when I needed you.”

He knelt down before her, and took her hands in his.

“What?” he said. “What is it?”

“I had to go to the clinic today.”

“Why?”

“Something was wrong. I felt it, inside.”

He tightened his grip on her, but she would not, could not, look up at him.

“Our baby’s dead,” she said softly. “I’m carrying a dead baby.”

He held her then and waited for her to cry, but she had no more tears left to shed. She simply lay against him, silent and lost in her grief. He could see his reflection in the mirror on the wall behind her, and he closed his eyes so he would not have to look at himself.

Will led his wife to the bedroom and helped her to get between the sheets. The doctors at the clinic had given her some pills, and he made her take two.

“They wanted to induce it,” she said, as the drugs took hold. “They wanted to take our baby away, but I wouldn’t let them. I wanted to keep it for as long as I could.”

He nodded, but now he could not speak. His own tears began to fall. His wife reached up and wiped them away with her thumb.

He sat beside her until she fell asleep, then stared at the wall for two hours, her hand in his until slowly, carefully, he released it and let it fall to the sheets. She stirred slightly, but she did not wake.

He went downstairs and called the number that Epstein had given him when they first met. A woman answered sleepily, and when he asked for the rabbi, she told him that he was in bed.

“He had a long night,” she explained.

“I know,” he replied. “I was there. Wake him. Tell him it’s Will Parker.”

The woman clearly recognized the name. She put the phone down, and Will heard her walk away. Five minutes passed, and then he heard Epstein’s voice.

“Mr. Parker. I should have told you at the hospital: it’s not good for us to stay in contact this way.”

“I need to see you.”

“That’s not possible. What’s done is done. We must let the dead rest.”

“My wife is carrying a dead baby,” said Will. He almost vomited the words out.

“What?”

“You heard me. Our child is dead in the womb. They think the umbilical cord got wound around its throat somehow. It’s dead. They told her yesterday. They’re going to induce labor and remove it.”

“I’m sorry,” said Epstein.

“I don’t want your pity,” said Will. “I want my son.”

Epstein was silent. “What you’re suggesting isn’t-”

Will cut him off.

“Don’t tell me that! You make this happen. You go to your friend, Mr. Quiet in his nice suit, and you tell him what I want. Otherwise, I swear I’ll make so much noise that your ears will bleed.” Suddenly, the energy began to leach from his body. He wanted to crawl into bed and hold his wife, hold his wife and their dead child. “Look, you told me that the boy would have to be taken care of. I can take care of him. Hide him with me. Hide him in plain sight. Please.”

He heard Epstein sigh. “I will talk to our friends,” he said at last. “Give me the name of the doctor who is looking after your wife.”

Will did so. The number was in the address book beside the telephone.

“Where is your wife now?”

“She’s asleep upstairs. She took some pills.”

“I’ll call you in one hour,” said Epstein, and he hung up.

One hour and five minutes later, the phone rang. Will, who had been sitting on the floor beside it, picked it up before it had a chance to ring a second time.

“When your wife wakes up, Mr. Parker, you must tell her the truth,” said Epstein. “Ask her to forgive you, then tell her what you propose.”

Will did not sleep that night. Instead, he mourned for Caroline Carr, and when dawn broke he put his grief for her aside and prepared for what he felt certain would be the death of his marriage.

“He called me that morning,” said Jimmy. “He told me what he intended to do. He was prepared to gamble everything on the possibility of holding on to the boy: his career; his marriage; the happiness, even the sanity, of his wife.”

He was about to pour some more wine into his glass, then stopped.

“I can’t drink any more,” he said. “The wine looks like blood.” He pushed the bottle and the glass away. “We’re nearly done anyway, for now. I’ll finish this part, and then I have to sleep. We can talk again tomorrow. If you want, you can spend the night. There’s a guest room.”

I opened my mouth to object, but he raised his hand.

“Believe me, when I’ve finished tonight, you’ll have enough to think about. You’ll be grateful that I’ve stopped.”

He leaned forward, his hands cupped before him, and I saw that they were trembling.

“So your old man was waiting at your mother &rsquo R qmother &rs;s bedside when she woke…”

I think, sometimes, of what my father and mother endured that day. I wonder if there was a kind of madness to his actions, spurred on by his fear that he seemed destined to lose two children, one to death and the other to an anonymous existence surrounded by those who were not related by blood to him. He must have known, as he stood above my mother, debating whether to wake her or let her sleep on for a time, delaying the moment of confession, that it would sunder relations with her forever. He was about to inflict twin wounds upon her: the pain of his betrayal, and the perhaps greater agony of learning that he had succeeded in doing with another what she had failed to do for him. She was carrying a dead child in her womb, while her husband had, only hours before, looked upon his own son, born of a dead mother. He loved his wife, and she loved him, and he was now going to hurt her so badly that she would never fully recover.

He did not tell anyone of what transpired between them, not even Jimmy Gallagher. All I know is that my mother left him for a time and fled to Maine, a precursor to the more permanent flight that would occur after my father’s death, and a distant echo of my own actions after my wife and child were taken from me. She was not my birth mother, and I understand now the reasons for the distance there was between us, even unto her death, but we were more similar than either of us could have imagined. She took me north after the Pearl River killings, and her father, my beloved grandfather, became a guiding force in my life, but my mother also assumed a greater role as I came of age. I think, sometimes, that only after my father died did she truly find it in her heart to forgive him, and perhaps to forgive me the circumstances of my birth. Slowly, we drew closer to each other. She taught me the names of trees and plants and birds, for this was her place, this northern state, and although I did not fully appreciate then the knowledge that she was trying to impart, I think I understood the reasons for her wanting to communicate it to me. We were both grieving, but she would not allow me to be lost to it. And so each day we would walk together for a time, regardless of the weather, and sometimes we would talk, and sometimes we would not, but it was enough that we were together, and we were alive. During those years, I became hers, and now, every time I name to myself a tree, or a flower, or a tiny creeping thing, it is a small act of remembrance for her.

Elaine Parker called her husband after a week had passed, and they spoke for an hour. Will was granted unpaid leave, authorized, to the puzzlement of some at the precinct, by the deputy commissioner for legal affairs, Frank Mancuso. Will went north to join his wife, and when they returned to New York they did so with a child, and a tale of a difficult, premature birth. They named the boy Charlie, after his father’s uncle, Charles Edward Parker, who had died at Monte Cassino. The secret friends kept their distance, and it was many years before Will heard from any of them again. And when they did make contact, it was Epstein who was sent, Epstein who told him that the thing they had long feared was upon them once more.

The lovers had returned.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

MICKEY W="2">ALLACE FELT AS though the mist had followed him from Maine. Tendrils of it drifted past his face, reacting to each movement of his body like a living thing, slowly assuming new shapes before slipping away altogether, as though the darkness were weaving itself into being around him, enfolding him in its embrace as he stood before the small house on Hobart Street in Bay Ridge.

Bay Ridge was almost a suburb of Brooklyn, a neighborhood unto itself. Originally it had consisted mostly of Norwegians, who lived there when it was known as Yellow Hook, in the nineteenth century, and Greeks, with some Irish thrown in, as there always were, but the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in the 1970s had changed that makeup as people began to move out to Staten Island, and by the early 1990s Bay Ridge was becoming progressively more Middle Eastern. The bridge dominated the southern end of the area, although Mickey had always felt that it looked more real by night than by day. The lights seemed to give it substance; during the day, by contrast, it looked like a painted back-drop, a gray mass too big for the buildings and streets below, an unreal thing.

Hobart Street lay between Marine Avenue and Shore Road, where a series of benches overlooked Shore Road Park, a steep, tree-lined slope leading down to the Belt Parkway and the waters of the Narrows. At first glance, Hobart seemed to consist only of apartment buildings, but on one side was a small row of brownstone, one-family homes, each separated from its neighbor by a driveway. Only 1219 bore the marks of abandonment and neglect.

The presence of the mist reminded Mickey of what he had experienced out at Scarborough. Now, once again, he was standing before a house that he believed to be empty. This was not his neighborhood, not even his city, yet he did not feel out of place here. After all, it was a crucial element in the story that he had followed for so long, the story that he was now going to set down in print. He had stood here before over the years. The first time was after Charlie Parker’s wife and child had been found, their blood still fresh on the walls and floor. The second time was after Parker had found the Traveling Man, when the reporters had an ending to their story and sought to remind viewers and readers of the beginning. Lights shone upon the walls and windows, and neighbors came onto the street to watch, their proximity to the action a good indication of their willingness to talk, of their desire to be interviewed about what had happened there. Even those who were not residents at the time had opinions, for ignorance was never an obstacle to a good sound bite.

But that was a long time ago. Mickey wondered how many people even remembered what had taken place behind those walls, then figured that anyone who had lived in this place when the murders were committed, and who continued to live here now, would find it hard to erase the memory of them. In a way, the house challenged them to forget its past. It was the only unoccupied residence on the street, and its exterior spoke eloquently of its emptiness. For those who knew of its history, the simple sight of it, its very otherness, would be enough to evoke memories. For them, there would always be blood on its walls.

Mickey’s search of the property records indicated that there had been three different occupants in the years since the killings, and the house was currently owned by the bank that had taken possession of it after the most recent residents had defaulted on their payments. He found it hard to imagine why anyone would want to live in a place that had known such violence. True, the house had probably initially been sold for far less than its market value, and the cleaners employed to scrub every visib Randd wle trace of the killings from within would have done their job well, but Mickey felt certain that something must have lingered, some trace of the agonies that had been endured there. Physical? Yes. There would be dried blood between the cracks in the floor. He had been told that one of Susan Parker’s fingernails had not been recovered from the scene. Initially, it was thought that her killer had taken it as a souvenir, but now it was believed that it had broken as she scraped at the boards and had slipped between them. Despite repeated searches, it had not been found. It was probably still down there somewhere, lying amid dust and wood chips and lost coins.

But it was not the physical aspects that interested Mickey. He had been to many murder sites, and had grown attuned to their atmosphere. There were some places that, had one not known in advance of the killings that had occurred in them, might well have seemed normal and undisturbed. Flowers grew in yards beneath which children had once been buried. A little girl’s playroom, painted in bright oranges and yellows, banished all memories of the old woman who had died there, smothered during a botched burglary when this was still her bedroom. Couples made love in rooms where husbands had beaten wives to death and women had stabbed errant lovers while they slept. Such sites were not tainted by the violence to which they had played host.

But there were other gardens and other houses that would never be the same after blood was spilled upon them. People sensed that something was wrong as soon as they set foot on the property. It didn’t matter that the house was clean, that the yard was well tended, that the door was freshly painted. Instead, an echo remained, like the slow fading of a final cry, and it triggered an atavistic response. Sometimes, the echo was so pronounced that even the demolition of the premises and the construction of a replacement markedly different from its predecessor was not enough to counter the malign influences that remained. Mickey had visited a condo in Long Island built on the site of a house that had burned down with five children and their mother inside, a fire set by the father of two of the children. The old lady who lived down the street told him that, on the night that they died, the firemen could hear the children crying for help, but the heat of the flames was too intense, and they were not able to rescue them. The newly built condo had smelled of smoke, Mickey recalled; smoke, and charred meat. Nobody who lived there stayed longer than six months. On the day that he had inspected it, all of the apartments were available for rent.

Perhaps that was why the Parker house still stood. Even to have knocked it down would have made no difference. The blood had seeped through the house and into the soil beneath, and the air was filled with the sound of screams stifled by a gag.

Mickey had never been inside 1219 Hobart. He had seen pictures of the interior, though. He had prints of them in his possession as he stood at the gate. Tyrrell had provided them, dropping them off at the hotel earlier that day, along with a terse note apologizing for some of the things that he had said in the course of their meeting. Mickey didn’t know how Tyrrell had come by them. He figured that Tyrrell must have retained his own private file on Charlie Parker after he left the department. Mickey was pretty sure that was illegal, but he wasn’t about to complain. He’d looked at the photos in his hotel room, and even after all that he’d seen as a reporter, and his own knowledge of the details of the Parker killings, they had still shaken him.

There was so much blood.

Mickey had approached the Realtor appointed by the ba Rhadm.

“I don’t think that it would be appropriate for me to show you that property, sir,” she had said.

“May I ask why?”

“I think you know why. I don’t believe you’re serious about your inquiry.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that we’re aware of who you are, and of what you’re doing. I don’t think admitting you to the Hobart Street property would be helpful to any future sale.”

Mickey had hung up. He should have known better than to use his real name, but he hadn’t expected Parker to obstruct him in that way, assuming it was Parker who had made the call to the Realtor. He remembered Tyrrell’s stated belief that someone was protecting Parker. If that was true, then a person or persons as yet unknown might have alerted the Realtor to what Mickey was doing. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t above bending the law a little to suit his own purposes, and breaking into the old Parker house didn’t strike him as a felony, no matter what a judge might say.

He was pretty certain that the house wouldn’t have an alarm. It had been vacant for too long, and he didn’t figure that a Realtor would want to be disturbed in the dead of night because an alarm was ringing in an unoccupied property. He checked to make sure that the street was quiet, then made his way up the drive to the gate at the side of the house, a grassless yard beyond. He tried the gate. It didn’t move. For a moment he thought it might be locked, but he could see no way that it could be unless it had been welded shut. Simultaneously, he pushed down on the handle and pressed the weight of his body against the gate. He felt it give, the metal of the handle scraping against the concrete pillar, and then it opened. He stepped through and closed it behind him, then turned the corner of the house so that he was hidden from view.

The back door had two locks, but the wood was damp and rotting. He tested it with his fingernails and pieces of it fell to the ground. He took the crowbar from beneath his coat and began working at the wood. Within minutes, he had made a gap big enough to gain access to the top lock. He inserted the crowbar as far as it would go, then pushed sideways and up. There was a cracking sound from inside, and the lock broke. He moved on to the second lock. The frame quickly splintered and the bolt broke through the wood.

Mickey stood on the step and stared into the kitchen. This was where it had happened. This was the place in which Parker-Parker the revenger, Parker the hunter, Parker the executioner-had been born. Before the deaths of his wife and daughter, he had been just another face on the street: a cop, but not a very good one; a father and a husband, and not much good in those roles either; a man who drank some-not enough to qualify as an alcoholic, not yet, but enough that, in years to come, he might find himself starting on the booze a little earlier each day until at last it became a way to start the day instead of finishing it; a drifter, a being without purpose. Then, on a December night, the creature that became known as the Traveling Ma Rcrey un entered this place and took the lives of the woman and child within, while the man who should have protected them sat on a bar stool feeling sorry for himself.

Those deaths had given him purpose. At first it was revenge, but that gave way to something deeper, something more curious. The desire for revenge alone would have destroyed him, eating away at him like a cancer, so that even when he found the release for which he had yearned, the disease would already have colonized his soul, slowly blackening his humanity until, shriveled and rotten, it was lost forever. No, Parker had found a greater purpose. He was a man who could not easily turn away from the sufferings of others, for he found its twin deep within himself. He was tormented by empathy. More than that, he had become a magnet for evil, or perhaps it would be truer to say that a shard of evil deep within himself resonated in the presence of a greater foulness, and drew him to it, and it to him.

All of this, born in blood.

Mickey closed the door, flicked on his flashlight, and walked through the kitchen, looking neither right nor left, taking in nothing of what he saw there. He would conclude his visit in that room, just as the Traveling Man had done. He wanted to follow the killer’s trail, to view this house as the killer had viewed it, and as Parker had seen it on the night that he returned home to find what was left of his wife and child.

The Traveling Man had come in through the front door. There was no sign of forced entry. The hallway was now empty. Mickey compared it with the first of the photographs that he had brought with him. He had ordered them carefully, numbering them on the back in case he dropped them. The first showed the hallway as it had once been: a bookcase on the right, and a coatrack. On the floor was a mahogany flower stand, and beside it a broken flowerpot and a plant of some kind, its roots exposed. Behind the plant, the first of the stairs leading up to the second floor. Three bedrooms there, one no larger than a storage room, and a single small bathroom. Mickey didn’t want to go up there just yet. Jennifer Parker, three years old, had been asleep on the couch in the living room when the killer entered. She had a weak heart, and it spared her the agony of what was to come. Between the time that the killer entered and the final display of the bodies, she had suffered a massive release of epinephrine into her system, resulting in ventricular fibrillation of the heart. In other words, Jennifer Parker had died of fright.

Her mother had not been so lucky. There had been a struggle, probably near the kitchen. She had managed to get away from her attacker, but only momentarily. He had caught up with her in the hall, and had stunned her by banging her face against the wall. Mickey moved on to the next photograph: a smear of blood on the wall to his left. He found what he believed to be the spot, and ran his fingers across it. Then he knelt down and examined the floorboards, trailing his hand along the wood, just as Susan Parker had done as she was dragged back to the kitchen. The hallway had been only partially carpeted, leaving the edges of the boards exposed on either side. It was here, somewhere, that Susan had lost her fingernail.

Was her daughter dead by then, or had the sight of her mother, dazed and bleeding, triggered the attack that led to Jennifer’s death? Maybe she had fought to save her mother. Yes, that was probably it, Mickey thought, already piecing together the most favorable narrative, the most gripping version he could find of the story. There had been rope marks on the child’s wrists and ankles, indicating that she had been restrained at some point. She woke, realized what was happening, t Roin coried to scream, to fight. A blow was struck, knocking her to the ground; just such an injury had been recorded in the autopsy. Once her mother had been subdued, the killer restrained the daughter in turn, but by then the girl was already dying. Mickey glanced into the living room, now furnished only with dust and discarded paper and dead insects. Another photograph, this time of the couch. There was a doll lying on it, half obscured by a blanket.

Mickey moved on, trying to visualize the scene as Parker had experienced it. Blood on the walls and on the floor; the kitchen door almost closed; the house cold. He took a deep breath, and turned to the final photograph: Susan Parker on a pine chair, her arms tied behind her back, her feet bound separately to the front legs, her head down, her face obscured by her hair, so that the damage to the face and eyes was not visible, not from this angle. Her daughter lay across her mother’s thighs. Not so much blood on her. Her throat had been cut, as was her mother’s, but by then Jennifer was already dead. Light shone through what seemed at first glance to be a thin cloak laid across Susan Parker’s arms, but which Mickey knew to be her own skin, pulled back to complete the macabre pietà.

With the image clear in his head, Mickey opened the kitchen door, ready to impose this old vision of hell on the empty room.

Except now the room was not empty. The back door was half open, and there was a figure in the shadows behind it, watching him.

Mickey stumbled back in shock, his hand instinctively raised to his heart.

“Jesus,” he said. “What-”

The figure moved forward, and was caught by the moonlight.

“Wait a minute,” said Mickey as, unbeknownst to him, the final sands of his life began slipping through his fingers. “I know you…”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

JIMMY HAD MOVED ON to coffee, enlivened by a glass of brandy. I stuck with coffee alone, but I barely touched it. I tried to pinpoint how I was feeling, but at first there was only a numbness that gradually gave way to a kind of sadness and loneliness. I thought of all that my parents had endured, of my father’s lies and betrayal and my mother’s pain. For now, my only regret was that they were no longer there for me, that I could not go to them and tell them that I understood, that it was all okay. Had they lived, I wondered when, or if, they would together have told me of the circumstances of my birth, and I recognized that, coming from them, the details would have been more difficult to bear, and my reactions would have been more extreme. Sitting in Jimmy Gallagher’s candlelit kitchen, watching his wine-stained lips move, I felt that I was listening to the story of another man’s life, one with whom I shared certain qualities but who was, ultimately, distant from me.

With each word that he spoke, Jimmy seemed to relax a little more, but he also appeared to be growing older, although I knew it was only a trick of the light. He had lived to be a repository of secrets; now, as they seeped from him at last, so some of his life force went with them.

He sipped his brandy. “Like I said, there’s not mu Srsq„[1]‡ch more to tell.”

Not much more to tell. Only the story of my father’s final day, and the blood that he shed, and the reasons why.

Not much more to tell. Only everything.

Jimmy and Will kept their distance from each other after Will and Elaine returned from Maine with their new child, and they spoke to no one else of what they knew. Then, one December night, Jimmy and Will got drunk together at Chumley’s and the White Horse, and Will thanked Jimmy for all that he had done, for his loyalty and his friendship and for killing the woman who had taken Caroline’s life.

“You think of her?” asked Jimmy.

“Caroline?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes. More than sometimes.”

“Did you love her?”

“I don’t know. If I didn’t then, I do now. Does that make any sense?”

“As much as anything does. You ever visit the grave?”

“Just a couple of times since the funeral.”

Jimmy remembered the funeral, in a quiet corner of Bayside Cemetery. Caroline had told Will that she didn’t have much time for organized religion. Her folks had been Protestants of some stripe, so they found a minister who said the right things as she and the child were laid in the ground. Will, Jimmy, and the rabbi Epstein were the only other people in attendance. Epstein had told them that the male infant had come from one of the hospitals in the city. His mother had been a junkie, and the kid hadn’t lived for more than a couple of hours after he was born. The mother didn’t care that her child was dead or, if she did, she didn’t show it. She would later, Jimmy believed. He couldn’t countenance the possibility that a woman, no matter how sick or high she was, could remain untroubled by the death of her child. Elaine’s own labor had been discreetly induced while she was in Maine. There had been no formal burial. After she had made the decision to stay with Will, and to protect the child cut from Caroline Carr, Epstein had spoken with her over the phone, and had made her understand how important it was that everyone believed Caroline’s child was Elaine’s own. She had been given time to mourn her own baby, to cradle the small, dead thing in her arms, and then it was taken from her.

“I’d go more often, but it upsets Elaine,” said Will.

I’ll bet it does, thought Jimmy. He didn’t know how the marriage had survived and, from the hints Will had dropped, it wasn’t entirely certain that it would survive. Still, Jimmy’s respect for Elaine Parker had only grown in the aftermath of what had occurred. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what she felt as she looked at her husband, and at the child she was raising as her own. He wondered if she could yet even distinguish hatred from love.

“I always bring two bunches of flowers,” continued Will. “One fo Rfron dr Caroline, and one for the kid they buried with her. Epstein said it was important. It had to look like I was mourning both of them, just in case.”

“In case what?”

“In case someone is watching,” said Will.

“They’re gone,” said Jimmy. “You saw them both die.”

“Epstein thinks there might be others. Worse than that…”

He stopped talking.

“What could be worse?” asked Jimmy.

“That, somehow, they might come back.”

“What does that mean, ‘come back’?”

“Doesn’t matter. The rabbi’s fantasies.”

“Jesus. Fantasies is right.”

Jimmy raised his hand for another round of drinks.

“And the woman, the one I shot? What did they do with her?” he asked.

“They burned her body and scattered the ashes. You know, I’d like to have taken a minute with her, before she died.”

“So you could have asked her why,” said Jimmy.

“Yes.”

“She wouldn’t have told you anything. I could see it in her eyes. And-”

“Go on.”

“It’ll sound strange.”

Will laughed. “After all that we’ve been through, could anything sound strange?”

“I suppose not.”

“So?”

“She wasn’t afraid to die.”

“She was a fanatic. Fanatics are too crazy to be afraid.”

“No, it was more than that. I thought, just before I fired, that she smiled at me, as if it didn’t matter if I killed her or not. And that stuff about being ‘beyond your law.’ Jesus, she gave me the creeps.”

“She was sure that she’d done what she came to do. As far as she was concerned, Caroline was dead, and so was her baby.”

Jimmy frowned. “Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t sound like he believed it, and he wondered at what Epstein had told Will, about how they might come back, but he couldn’t figure out what that might mean, and Will wouldn’t tell him.

In the years that followed, they rarely d R &rsquoiscussed the subject. Epstein did not contact either Will or Jimmy, although Will thought that he had sometimes seen the rabbi when Will took his family into the city to shop or to see a movie or a show. Epstein never acknowledged his presence on those occasions, and Will did not approach him, but he had the sense that Epstein, both in person and through others, was keeping an eye on Will, his wife, and, most especially, his son.

Only very reluctantly would Will tell Jimmy of the state of his relationship with his wife. It had never recovered from his betrayal, and he knew that it never would, yet at least they were still together. But there were times when his wife would be distant from him, both emotionally and physically, for weeks on end. She struggled too with their son or, as she would throw at Will when her rage and hurt got the upper hand, “your son.” But, slowly, that began to change, for the boy knew no mother but her. Will thought that the turning point came when Charlie, then eight years old, was struck by a car while learning to ride his new bike around the neighborhood. Elaine was in the yard when it happened, saw the car strike the bike and the boy fly into the air and land hard upon the road. As she ran, she heard him calling for her: not for his father, to whom he seemed naturally to turn for so many things, but for her. His left arm was badly broken-she could see that as soon as she reached him-and there was blood pouring from a wound in his scalp. He was struggling to remain conscious, and something told her that it was important for him to stay with her, that he should not close his eyes. She called his name, over and over, as she took a coat from the driver of the car and, gently, placed it under the boy’s head. She was crying, and he saw that she was crying.

“Mommy,” he said softly. “Mommy, I’m sorry.”

“No,” she replied, “I’m sorry. It wasn’t your fault. It was never your fault.”

And she stayed with him, kneeling over him, whispering his name, the palm of her hand caressing his face; and she sat beside him in the ambulance; and she sat outside the theater as they operated on him to stitch his scalp and set his arm; and hers was the first face he saw when he came to.

After that, things were better between them.

“My father told you all this?”

“No,” said Jimmy. “She told me, after he died. She said you were all that she had left of him, but that wasn’t why she loved you. She loved you because you were her child. She was the only mother you knew, and you were the only son she had. She said that she’d sometimes forgotten that, or didn’t want to believe it, but as time went by she realized the truth of it.”

He got up to go to the bathroom. I remained seated, thinking of my mother in her final days, lying transformed in her hospital bed, so altered by the disease that I hadn’t recognized her when I’d first entered her room, believing instead that the nurse had made some mistake when she directed me down the corridor. But then she made some small gesture in her sleep, a raising of her right hand, and even in her illness the grace of it was familiar to me, and in that moment I knew it was her. In the days that followed, as I waited for her to die, she had only a few hours of lucidity. Her voice was almost gone, and it seemed to pain her to speak, so i Rmed monstead I read to her from my college texts: poetry, short stories, snippets from the newspaper that I knew would interest her. Her father would come over from Scarborough, and we would talk to each other as she dozed between us.

Did she consider, as she felt the darkness clouding her consciousness like ink through water, telling me all that she had withheld from me? I am sure that she did, but I understand now why she did not. I think that she may also have warned my grandfather to say nothing, because she believed that if I knew the truth then I might begin digging.

And if I began digging, I would draw them to me.

Jimmy went to the bathroom. When he returned, I saw that he had splashed water on his face, but he had not dried it properly, and the drops looked like tears.

“On that last night…,” he began.

They were in Cal’s together, Jimmy and Will, celebrating Jimmy’s birthday. Some things had changed in the Ninth, but they were still the same in many ways. There were galleries where once there had been dive bars and deserted buildings, and shaky underground movies were being shown in empty storefronts that were now functioning as avant-garde theaters. A lot of the old places were still there, although their time too would soon come to an end, some of them with shadows cast over the memories of them. At Second and Fifth, the Binibon was still serving greasy chicken salad, but now people looked at the Binibon and recalled how, in 1981, one of its customers had been Jack Henry Abbott, an ex-con who had been championed by Norman Mailer, who had worked for his release. One night, Abbott got into an argument with a waiter, asked him to step outside, and then stabbed him to death. Jimmy and Will had been among those cleaning up the aftermath, the two men, like the precinct that they worked, both changed yet still the same, altered in aspect but still in uniform. They had never made sergeant, and they never would. That was the price they had paid for what had happened on the night Caroline Carr died.

They were still good cops, though, one of the small cadre of city, transit, and housing officers who did more than the minimum, fighting the general strain of apathy that had infected the force, in part a consequence of a widespread belief that the suits and brass at the Puzzle Palace, as One Police Plaza was known to the rank and file, were out to get them. It wasn’t entirely untrue either. Make too many drug busts and you attracted the attention of your superiors for all the wrong reasons. Make too many arrests and, because of the overtime payments required to process them and see them through court, you were accused of taking money from the pockets of other cops. Best to keep your head down until you could cash out at twenty. The result was that there were now fewer and fewer older cops to act as mentors to the new recruits. By virtue of their years on the force, Jimmy and Will practically qualified as village elders. They had become part of the plainclothes Anticrime Unit, a dangerous assignment that involved patrolling high-crime areas waiting for signs that something was about to go off, usually a gun. For the first time, both were talking seriously about cashing out.

Somehow, they had found a quiet corner away from the rest, cut off by a raucous throng of men and women in business suits celebrating an office promotion. After that night, Will Parker would be dead, and Jimmy Gallagher would never set foot in Cal ’s again. After RAnthro Will’s death, he found that he could not remember the good times that he had enjoyed there. They were gone, excised from his memory. Instead there was only Will with a cold one at his elbow, his hand raised to make a point to Jimmy that would remain forever unspoken, his expression changing as he looked over Jimmy’s shoulder and saw who had entered the bar. Jimmy had turned around to see what he was looking at, but by then Epstein was beside them, and Jimmy knew that something was very wrong.

“You have to go home,” said Epstein to Will. He was smiling, but his words gave the lie to his smile, and he did not look at Will as he spoke. To a casual observer, he would have appeared only to be examining the bottles behind the bar, choosing his poison before he joined the company. He wore a white raincoat buttoned to the neck, and on his head was a brown hat with a red feather in the band. He had aged greatly since Jimmy had last seen him at Caroline Carr’s funeral.

“What’s wrong?” asked Will. “What’s happened?”

“Not here,” said Epstein as he was jostled by Perrson, the big Swede who was the linchpin of the Cabaret Unit. It was a Thursday night, and Cal ’s was buzzing. Perrson, who stood taller than anyone else in the bar, was handing shots of booze over the heads of those behind him, sometimes baptizing them a little along the way.

“God bless you, my son,” he said as someone protested. He guffawed at his own joke, then recognized Jimmy.

“Hey, it’s the birthday boy!”

But Jimmy was already moving past him, following another man, and Perrson thought that it might have been Will Parker, but later, when questioned, he would claim to have been mistaken, or confused about the time. It might have been later when he saw Jimmy, and Will could not have been with him, because Will would have been on his way back to Pearl River.

It was cold outside. The three men kept their hands thrust deep into their pockets as they walked away from Cal’s, from the precinct house, from familiar faces and speculative glances. They did not stop until they came to the corner of St. Mark’s.

“You remember Franklin?” said Epstein. “He was the director of the Gerritsen Clinic. He retired two years ago.”

Will nodded. He recalled the worried-looking man in the small office, part of a conspiracy of silence that he still did not fully understand.

“He was killed at his home last night. Someone cut him badly to make him talk before he died.”

“Why do you think that it’s something to do with us?” said Will.

“A neighbor saw a male and a female leave the house shortly after eleven. They were both young, he said: older teenagers at most. They were driving a red Ford. This morning, the offices of Dr. Anton Bergman in Pearl River were burgled. Dr. Bergman, I believe, looks after the health of your family. A red Ford was seen parked close by. It had out-of-state plates: Alabama. Dr. Bergman and his secretary are still trying to confirm what was removed, but th Rh utere drug cabinets were intact. Only the patient records were rifled. Your family’s records are among those that are missing. Somehow, they’ve made the connection. We didn’t hide our tracks as well as we thought.”

Will looked pale, but still he tried to argue. “That doesn’t make any sense. Who are these kids?”

It took a moment for Epstein to answer. “They’re the same ones who came for Caroline Carr sixteen years ago,” he said.

“No.” It was Jimmy Gallagher. “Uh-uh. They’re dead. One of them got crushed by a truck, and I shot the other. I watched them pull her body from the creek. And even if they had lived, they’d be in their forties or fifties by now. They wouldn’t be children.”

Epstein turned on him. “They’re not children! They’re-” He composed himself. “Something is inside each of them, something much older. These things don’t die. They can’t die. They move from host to host. If the host dies, then they find another. They are reborn, over and over again.”

“You’re crazy,” said Jimmy. “You’re out of your mind.”

He turned to his partner for support, but none came. Instead, Will looked frightened.

“Aw, Jesus, you don’t believe this, do you?” said Jimmy. “They can’t be the same ones. It’s just not possible.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Will. “They’re here, whoever they are. Franklin would have told them about how the death of the baby was covered up. I have a boy the same age as the one who was supposed to have died. They made the connection, and the medical records will confirm it. He’s right: I have to go home.”

“We’ll have people looking for them too,” said Epstein. “I’ve made some calls. We’re moving as fast as we can, but-”

“I’ll go with you,” said Jimmy.

“No. Go back to Cal ’s.”

“Why?”

Will gripped Jimmy’s arms and looked him in the face. “Because I have to end this,” he said. “Do you understand? I don’t want you to be caught up in it. You have to stay clean. I need you to be clean.” Then he seemed to remember something. “Your nephew,” he said. “Marie’s boy? He’s still with the Orangetown cops, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, he’s out there. I don’t think he’s on duty until later, though.”

“Can you call him? Just ask him to go to the house and stay with Elaine and Charlie for a while. Don’t tell him why. Just make up some excuse about an old case, maybe an ex-con with a grudge. Will you do that? Will he do that?”

“He’ll do it,” said Jimmy.

Epstein handed Will a set of car keys.

“Take my car,” he said, pointing to an old Chrysler parked nearby. Will nodded his thanks, then began to stride away, but Epstein reached for his arm, holding him back.

“Don’t try to kill them,” said Epstein. “Not unless you have no other choice.”

Jimmy saw Will nod, but his eyes were far away. Then and there, Jimmy knew what Will intended to do.

Epstein walked away in the direction of the subway. Jimmy made the call to his nephew from a phone booth. Afterward, he went back to Cal’s, where he drank and made small talk, his mind detached from the actions of his body, his mouth moving of its own volition, and he stayed there until word came that Will Parker had shot two kids up in Pearl River, and he had been found in the locker room of the Ninth, tears streaming down his face, waiting for them to come for him.

And when they asked him why he had driven all the way back to the city, he could tell them only that he wanted to be among his own.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

HE COULD HAVE GONEto his fellow cops, of course, but what would he have told them? That two kids were coming to kill his son; that those two kids could be hosts for other entities, malign spirits who had already killed the boy’s mother and had now returned to murder her child? Perhaps he might have concocted a lie, some tale of how they had threatened his family, or he could have fed them the information that a car resembling the one they were driving had been seen close to the director’s office after his death, and a young man and a young woman had been glimpsed leaving his house on the night that he was killed. All of that might well have been enough to hold them, assuming they were found, but he didn’t want them merely to be held: he wanted them gone forever.

The rabbi’s warning against killing them had not gone unheeded. Instead, it had broken something inside him. He had thought that he could cope with anything-murder, loss, a child suffocated beneath a pile of coats-but now he was no longer certain that this was true. He did not want to believe what the rabbi had told him, because to do so would be to throw aside all of the certainties he felt about the world. He could accept that somebody, some agency as yet unknown, wanted his son dead. It was an appalling purpose, and one that he could not understand, but he could deal with it as long as its agents were human. After all, there was no proof that what the rabbi believed was actually true. The man and woman who had been hunting Caroline were dead. He had watched them both die, and had gazed upon their bodies after death.

But they were different then, weren’t they? The dead are always different: smaller, somehow, and shrunken in upon themselves. Their faces change, and their bodies collapse. Over the years, he had become convinced of the existence of a human soul, if only because of the absence he witnessed in the bodies of the deceased. Something departed at the moment of death, altering the remains, and the evidence of its leaving was visible in t Ss v”[1]‡he appearance of the dead.

And yet, and yet…

He thought back to the woman. She had been less damaged than the man in the course of her dying. The wheels of the truck had rendered him beyond identification, but she was physically intact apart from the holes that Jimmy’s bullets had made in her, and they had all caught her in the upper body. Looking upon her face after she was pulled from the water, Parker had been astonished at the change in her. It was hard to believe that this was the same woman. The cruelty that had animated her features was gone but, more than that, her looks were softer, somehow, as though her bones had been blunted, the sharp edges removed from her cheeks and her nose and her chin. The imperfect mask that had covered her face for so long, one that was based on her own appearance yet subtly altered, had fallen away, disintegrating in the cold waters of the creek. He had looked at Jimmy and seen the same reaction. Unlike him, though, Jimmy had spoken it aloud.

“It doesn’t even look like her,” he had said. “I see the wounds, but it’s not her…”

The crime scene guys had looked at him in puzzlement, but had said nothing. They knew that different cops responded in different ways to their involvement in fatal shootings. It was not their place to comment.

Oh yes, something had left her as she died, but Will did not believe, or did not want to believe, that it had come back again.

So while Jimmy Gallagher’s nephew guarded Will’s son, he drove around Pearl River, pausing at intersections to peer along the cross streets, shining his flashlight on dark cars in parking lots, slowing down to stare at young couples, daring them to look back at him, for he felt sure that he would be able to identify the ones who had come for his son by the look in their eyes.

Perhaps he had always been fated to find them. In the hours that followed, he wondered if they had been waiting for him, knowing that he would come yet certain that he would not be able to act against them. They were strangers to him, and even if the rabbi had warned him of their true nature, who could ever truly believe such a thing?

And something would come for Epstein too, in time. It was not their purpose. It would be left to another. The rabbi could wait…

And so they had not moved as his flashlight found them on the patch of waste ground not far from his home. They had seen the other man, big, redheaded, arrive at the house, and they had glimpsed the pistol in his hand. Now that they knew where the boy was, and had learned for certain the truth about his parentage, they were anxious to move against him, to finish the task they had been assigned so long before. But if they were to rush it and make a mistake, then he would be lost to them again. The redheaded man with them was armed, and they did not want to die, neither one nor both. They had been separated for too long, and they loved each other. This time, the struggle to reunite had been shorter than before, but the separation had still been painful for them. The boy had been traced by another, the one called Kittim, who had whispered foul things in his ear, and the boy had known them to be true. He had traveled north, and in time, aided by Kittim, he had found the girl. Now they burned for each other, rejoicing R/diperin their physicality. Once the boy was dead, they could disappear and be together forever. They just had to be careful. They did not want to take any chances.

And here was the boy’s father approaching, for they recognized him immediately. Curious, the girl thought: the last time she had seen him was at the moment of her death. Now here he was, older and grayer, tired and weak. She smiled to herself, then leaned over and gripped the boy’s hand. He turned to look at her, and she saw an eternity of longing in his eyes.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“And I love you,” he replied.

Will got out of the car. He had a gun in his hand, held close to his right thigh. He shone his flashlight on them. The boy raised his hand to shield his eyes.

“Hey, man,” he said. “What’s the deal with the light?”

Will thought that the boy looked vaguely familiar. He was from somewhere in Rockland County, of that Will was certain, although he was a recent arrival. He seemed to recall something about juvie stuff, maybe from visiting down at Orangetown with the local cops.

“Keep your hands where I can see them, both of you.”

They did as they were told, the boy resting his palms upon the wheel, the girl placing her painted fingernails upon the dashboard.

“License and registration,” said Will.

“Hey, you a cop?” said the boy. He had a lazy drawl, and he grinned as he spoke, letting Parker know that this was all a charade, a farce. “Maybe you need to show me some ID first.”

“Shut up. License and registration.”

“Behind the visor.”

“Reach up slowly with your left hand.”

The boy shrugged but did as he was told, holding the license for the cop to see once he had retrieved it.

“ Alabama. You’re a long way from home.”

“I’ve always been a long way from home.”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” he said. “And then some…”

Will stared at him, and he saw the darkness in the boy’s eyes.

“What are you doing here?”

“Sitting. Taking time out with my best girl.”

The girl giggled, but it wasn’t a pretty sound. Parker thought that it sounded like something bubbling in a pot on an old stove, something that would scour you if it touched your skin.

Parker stepped back.

“Get out of the car.”

“Why? We ain’t done nothing wrong.” The tone of the boy’s voice changed, and Parker heard the adult in him come through. “Besides, you still ain’t shown us no ID. You might not be a cop at all. You could be a thief, or a rapist. We ain’t moving until I see a badge.”

The boy watched as the flashlight wavered for a moment, and knew that the cop was uncertain now. He had his suspicions, but they weren’t enough to act on, and the boy was enjoying taunting him, although not as much as he would enjoy leaving him with the knowledge that he had been unable to save his son from death.

But it was the girl who spoke, and doomed them.

“So, what you gonna do, Officer Parker?” she said, giggling.

There was a moment of silence, and the boy realized that she had made a terrible mistake.

“How do you know my name?”

The girl was no longer giggling. The boy licked his lips. Maybe the situation could yet be rescued.

“I guess someone pointed you out to us. Lot of cops around here. Guy was naming them off to me.”

“What guy?”

“Someone we met. People are friendly to strangers in this town. That’s how I know who you are.”

He licked his lips again.

“And I know what you are,” said Parker.

The boy stared at him, and he changed. He had an adolescent’s inner rage, an inability to control himself in adult situations. Now, as the cop challenged him, the old thing inside him was revealed for an instant, a thing of ash and fire and charred flesh, a thing of transcendent beauty and untrammeled ugliness.

“Fuck you, and your child,” said the boy. “You have no idea what we are.”

He turned his left wrist slightly, and the symbol on his arm was revealed to Will by the flashlight’s beam.

And in that instant, what was fractured inside Will Parker came apart forever, and he knew that he could take no more. The first shot killed the boy, entering just above his right eye and exiting through the back of his head, burying itself in the rear seat amid blood and hair and brain matter. There was no need for a second, but Will fired one anyway. The girl opened her mouth and screamed. She leaned over and cradled the ruined head of her lover, then gazed at the one who had taken him from her again.

“We’ll come back,” she whispered. “We’ll keep coming back until it’s done.”

Will said nothing. He simply lowered the gun and shot her once in the chest.

When she was gone, he went back to his car and placed his gun on the hood. There were lights coming on in nearby porches and hallways, and he saw a man standing in his yard, looking over at the two cars. He tasted salt on his lips, and thought that he had been crying, but then the pain came and he realized that he had bitten his tongue.

In a daze, he got back in the car and began to drive. As he passed the man in the yard, he saw recognition brighten the witness’s face, but he didn’t care. He didn’t even know where he was going until the lights of the city appeared before him, and then he understood.

He was going home.

They questioned him for most of that night, once they got him back to Orangetown. They told him that he was in trouble, having left the scene of a shooting, and in response he gave them the least elaborate lie that he could concoct: he had seen the car on waste ground as he was heading home, having been alerted to its presence by someone who had recognized him at an intersection, but whose name he did not know. The car had flashed its lights, and he thought that the horn might have sounded. He stopped to check that everything was okay. The boy had taunted him, pretending to reach for something inside his jacket: a weapon, perhaps. Will had warned him, and then had fired, killing the boy and the girl. After he had gone over the story for the third time, Kozelek, the investigator from the Rockland County DA’s office, had requested a moment alone with him, and the other cops, both IAD and local, had consented. When they were gone, Kozelek stopped the tape and lit a cigarette. He didn’t offer the pack to Will, who had already declined a cigarette earlier in the interview.

“You weren’t driving your own car,” said Kozelek.

“No, I borrowed a friend’s.”

“What friend?”

“Just a friend. He’s not involved. I wasn’t feeling so good. I wanted to get home as quickly as possible.”

“So this friend gives you his car.”

“He didn’t need it. I was going to drop it back off in the city tomorrow.”

“Where is it now?”

“What does it matter?”

“It was used in the course of a shooting.”

“I don’t remember. I don’t remember much after the shooting. I just drove. I wanted to get away from it.”

“You were traumatized. Is that what you’re saying?”

“That must have been it. I never shot anybody before.”

“There was no gun,” said Kozelek. “We looked. They were unarmed, both of them.”

“I didn’t say that they were armed. I said that I thought the boy might have been armed. & Rht=an>rdquo;

Kozelek drew on his cigarette and examined the man seated opposite him through the smoke. He had appeared detached from the whole process from the moment they had taken him in for questioning. It could have been shock. The IAD detectives had arrived from the city with copies of Will Parker’s service record. As he had just said, he had never killed anyone before, either officially or, from what Kozelek could ascertain, unofficially. (He had been with the NYPD himself for twenty years, and he had no illusions about such matters.) His responsibility for the shootings of the two young people would be difficult for him to accept. But that wasn’t how Kozelek read the situation: it wasn’t so much that Will Parker was in shock, but that he seemed to want the whole thing to be over and done with, like a condemned man who seeks only to be taken straight from the courtroom to his place of execution. Even his description of events, which Kozelek believed to be a lie, was halfhearted in its absence of truth. Parker didn’t care if they believed him or not. They wanted a story, and he had given them a story. If they wanted to pick holes in it, they could go right ahead and do it. He didn’t care.

That was it, thought Kozelek. The man didn’t care. His reputation and career were on the line. He had blood on his hands. When the circumstances of the killings began to emerge, the press would be baying for his blood, and there would be those within the department who might be prepared to throw Will Parker to the dogs as a sacrifice, as a way of showing that the department wouldn’t tolerate killers on the force. Already, Kozelek knew, that discussion was taking place, as men with reputations to protect balanced the advisability of weathering out the storm and standing by their officer against the possibility that to do so might further tarnish the reputation of a department that was already unloved and still reeling from a series of corruption investigations.

“You say that you didn’t know these kids?” said Kozelek. The question had been asked more than once already in that room, but Kozelek had caught a flicker of uncertainty in Parker’s face each time he had denied any knowledge of them, and he saw it again now.

“The boy looked familiar, but I don’t think I’d ever met him.”

“His name was Joe Dryden. Native of Birmingham, Alabama. Arrived here a couple of months ago. He already had a record: nickel-and-dime stuff, mostly, but he was on his way to greater things.”

“Like I said, I didn’t know him personally.”

“And the girl?”

“Never saw her before.”

“Missy Gaines. Came from a nice family in Jersey. Her family reported her missing a week ago. Any idea how she might have come to be with Dryden in Pearl River?”

“You asked me these questions already. I told you: I don’t know.”

“Who visited your house yesterday evening?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

“We have a witness who says he saw a man enter you Ran>i> &r house last night. He stayed for some time. The witness seems to be under the impression that the man had a gun in his hand.”

“Like I said, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but your witness must be mistaken.”

“I think the witness is reliable.”

“Why didn’t he call the cops?”

“Because your wife answered the door and allowed the man to enter. It appears that she knew him.”

Will shrugged. “I don’t know anything about it.”

Kozelek took a final drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out in the cracked ashtray.

“Why’d you turn off the tape?” asked Will.

“Because IAD doesn’t know about the armed man,” said Kozelek. “I was hoping you might tell me why you thought they were sufficiently at risk that you needed to protect them, and how that might connect to the two kids you shot.”

But Will didn’t answer and Kozelek, realizing that the situation was unlikely to change, gave up for the time being.

“If IAD does find out, they’ll question your wife. You need to get your story straight. Jesus, why couldn’t you just have thrown down a gun? A gun in the car, and all of this would be unnecessary.”

“Because I don’t have a throwdown,” said Will, and for the first time he showed some real animation. “I’m not that kind of cop.”

“Well,” said Kozelek, “I have news for you: there are two dead kids in a car, both of them unarmed. So, as of now, you are that kind of cop…”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

WE WERE COMING TO the end.

“I picked your father up from the Orangetown PD before noon,” said Jimmy. “There were reporters outside, so they put a cop who’d just come off duty in the backseat of an unmarked sedan with a coat over his head, and then they drove him out in an explosion of flashbulbs while I waited at the back of the station house for your father. We drove to a place called Creeley’s in Orangetown. It’s not there anymore. There’s a gas station where it used to be. Back then, it was the kind of bar that did a good burger, kept the lights low, and nobody asked anybody anything beyond ‘Another one?’ or ‘You want fries with that?’ I used to go there with my nephew and my sister sometimes. We don’t talk so much anymore, my sister and me. She lives out in Chicago now. She thought I put my nephew at risk by asking him to do what he did for you and your mother, but we’d been growing apart from each other long before that.”

I didn’t interrupt him. He was circling the awfulness of what was Ss o¤[1]‡to come, like a dog fearful of taking tainted meat from a stranger’s hand.

“As it happened, there was nobody in the place when we got there, apart from the bartender. I knew him, and he knew me. I guess he might have recognized your father too, but if he did, he didn’t say anything either way. We had coffee, we talked.”

“What did he say?”

Jimmy shrugged, as if it were a matter of no consequence. “He said what Epstein had said: they were the same people. They looked different, but he saw it in their eyes, and the girl’s words and the marking on the boy just confirmed it. That threat of returning. I think of it all the time.”

He seemed to shiver slightly, still water brushed by a cold breeze.

“And then, just before he fired the first shot, he said he could have sworn that their faces changed.”

“Changed?”

“Yeah, changed, just like the woman I killed at Gerritsen, I guess. Best he could explain it, he said it was like a pair of masks that they wore became transparent for an instant, and he saw the things behind them. That was when he pulled the trigger on the boy. He couldn’t even remember killing the girl. He knew that he’d done it; he just couldn’t recall how it had happened.

“After an hour, he asked me to drive him back home, but when we left Creeley’s there were two IAD guys waiting for us. They told me that they’d take Will to the house. They said they were worried about reporters, but I think they just wanted a few more minutes alone with him in the hope that I might have convinced him to come clean. I mean, they knew what he had told them didn’t add up. They were just having trouble finding the cracks in his version. I don’t think he said anything more, though. Later, after he died, they tried to sweat me, but I didn’t tell them anything either. After that, I was pretty much done as a cop. I served out my time at the Ninth, just so I could claim my full benefits and pension.

“So that was the last time I saw Will, as the IAD guys were taking him away. He thanked me for all that I’d done, and he shook my hand. I should have known what was coming then, but I wasn’t looking out for it. We had never shaken hands before, not since the first day we met at the academy. It just wasn’t a thing for us. I watched him go, and then I came back here. The call came through before I’d even had a chance to take off my shoes. It was my nephew who told me. The thing of it was, if you’d asked me then if I was surprised, I’d have said no. Twenty-four hours earlier, I’d have told you it could never happen, Will Parker eating his gun, but, looking back, when we were sitting in Creeley’s I could tell that he wasn’t the same man. He looked old, and beaten. I don’t think he could believe what he had seen, and what he had done. It was just too much for him.

“The funeral was a strange one. I don’t know what you remember of it, but there were people who should have been there but weren’t. The commissioner didn’t show, but that wasn’t a surprise, not for what was being tagged as a murder-suicide. But there were others-brass, mainly, suits from the Puzzle Palace-who stayed away when usually they’d have made an appearance. There was a bad smell around what happened, and they knew it. The papers were all over them, and they didn’t like it. In a way, and you’ll forgive me f R wiaveor saying it, your old man dying was the best thing that could have happened for them. If an inquiry had vindicated him, the press would have hauled them over the fires of hell for it. If the shootings were found to be unjustified, then there would have been a court case, and the cops on the street, and the union, they’d all have been spitting nails. When Will killed himself, they got to bury the whole mess along with him. The investigation into what happened was always set to be inconclusive once he was gone. The only people who knew the truth of what took place on that patch of waste ground were all dead.

“Will got an inspector’s funeral, though, the whole deal. The band played, and there were white gloves and black ribbons, and a folded flag for your mother. Because of the way he went, his benefits were in doubt. You may not know this, but an inspector from Police Plaza, a guy named Jack Stepp, he had a quiet word with your mother as she was walking back to the funeral car. Stepp was the commissioner’s fixer, the guy who cleaned up behind the scenes. He told her that she’d be taken care of, and she was. They paid the benefits under the table. Somebody made sure that she was done right by, that you were both looked after.

“Epstein contacted me after the funeral. He didn’t attend. I don’t know why. I think it was too high profile for him, and he’s not a high-profile guy. He came here, to this house, and he sat in the chair that you’re sitting in now, and he asked me what I knew about the killings, and I told him the same thing that I’ve told you, all of it. Then he went away, and I never saw him again. I didn’t even speak to him until you came along asking questions, and then Wallace turned up after you, and I felt that I had to inform Epstein. Wallace I wasn’t worried about so much: there are ways that these things can be handled, and I figured he could be frightened off if the need arose. But you: I knew you’d keep coming back, that once you’d gotten it into your head to go nosing around in the dirt, then you wouldn’t stop until you came up with bones. Epstein told me that his people were already working on stopping Wallace, and that I should tell you what I knew.”

He sat back in his chair, spent.

“So now you know everything.”

“And you kept it hidden all this time?”

“I didn’t even discuss it with your mother and, to tell you the truth, I was kind of glad when she said she was taking you up to Maine. It made me feel like I didn’t have to be responsible for you. It made me feel that I could pretend to forget everything.”

“Would you ever have told me if I hadn’t come asking?”

“No. What good would it have done?” Then he seemed to reconsider. “Look, I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve read about you, and I’ve heard the stories about the people you’ve found, and the men and women you’ve killed. All those cases have been touched by something strange. Maybe, in the last couple of years, I’ve thought that you should be told so that-”

He was struggling to find the right words.

“So that what?”

He settled upon them, although not happily. “So that you’d be ready for them when they came again,” he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

THE CALL CAME THROUGH to my cell phone shortly before midnight. Jimmy had gone to make up the bed in the spare room, and I was seated at the kitchen table, still trying to come to terms with what he had told me. The ground beneath my feet no longer seemed solid, and I did not trust myself to stand and remain upright. Perhaps I should have doubted Jimmy’s story, or at least remained skeptical of some of the details until I could investigate them further for myself, but I did not. I knew in my heart that all he had told me was true.

I checked the caller ID display before I answered, but I did not recognize the number.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Parker? Charlie Parker?”

“Yes.”

“This is Detective Doug Santos over at the Six-Eight. Sir, I was wondering where you happen to be right now?”

The Six-Eight covered Bay Ridge, where I had once lived with my family. Cops from that precinct, including Walter Cole, had been the first on the scene on the night that Susan and Jennifer died.

“Why?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

“Please, just answer the question.”

“I’m in Brooklyn. Bensonhurst.”

His tone changed. Where at first he had merely been brusque and efficient, there was now a greater urgency to his words. I didn’t know how it had happened, but in the space of a couple of seconds I sensed that I had become a potential suspect.

“Can you give me an address? I’d like to talk to you.”

“What’s this about, Detective? It’s late, and I’ve had a long day.”

“I’d prefer to speak to you in person. That address?”

“Hold on.”

Jimmy had just come back from the bathroom. He raised an eyebrow in inquiry as I covered the phone with my hand.

“It’s a cop from the Six-Eight. He wants to talk to me. Is it okay with you if I meet him here? I’m getting a vibe from him that tells me I might be in need of an alibi.”

“Sure,” said Jimmy. “You get a name?”

“ Santos.”

Jimmy shook his head. “Don’t know him. It’s late, but, if you want, I can make some calls, find out what’s happening.”

I gave Santos the address. He told me that he’d be there within the hour. Meanwhile, Jimmy had begun to call his own contacts, although Walter Cole remained an option if he came up short. He also disposed of the empty wine bottle while he made the first call, which turned out to be enough for him to find out something. When he hung up the phone, he was shaken.

“There’s been a killing,” he said.

height="0%" width="5%">“Where?”

“You won’t like it-1219 Hobart. There’s a dead man in the kitchen of your old house. You may have mixed feelings when you hear who it is. It’s Mickey Wallace.”

Santos arrived half an hour later. He was tall and dark, and probably not much more than thirty years of age. He had the hungry look of someone who intended to ascend the career ladder as fast as humanly possible, and wouldn’t be troubled by stomping on fingers on the way up. He looked disappointed when it emerged that I had an alibi for the entire evening, and a cop alibi at that. Still, he accepted a cup of coffee and, if he wasn’t exactly friendly, he thawed enough not to hold the fact that I was no longer a viable suspect against me.

“You knew this guy?” he asked.

“He was planning to write a book about me.”

“And how did you feel about that?”

“Not so good. I tried to discourage him.”

“You mind if I ask how?” If Santos had been endowed with antennae, they’d have started twitching. I might not have killed Wallace myself, but I could have found someone else to do it for me.

“I told him that I wouldn’t cooperate. I made sure that nobody else I was close to would cooperate with him either.”

“Looks like he didn’t take the hint.” Santos sipped his coffee. He seemed pleasantly surprised by the taste. “It’s good coffee,” he said to Jimmy.

“ Blue Mountain,” said Jimmy. “Only the best.”

“You say you worked the Ninth?” said Santos.

“That’s right.”

Santos turned his attention back to me. “Your father worked the Ninth too, didn’t he?”

I almost admired Santos ’s ability to come up to speed so quickly. Unless he’d been keeping tabs before now, someone must have read the salient details of my file on the phone to him as he’d driven to Bensonhurst.

“Right again,” I said.

“Catching up on old times?”

“Is that relevant to the case in hand?”

“I don’t know. Is it?”

“Look, Detective,” I said, “I wanted Wallace to stop nosing around in my life, but I didn’t want him dead. And if I was going to have him killed, I wouldn’t have had it done in the room where my wife and daughter died, and I’d have made sure that I was far away when it happened.”

Santos nodded. “Guess you’re right. I know who you are. Whatever else people say about you, you’re not dumb.”

“Nice to hear,” I said.

“Ain’t it, though?” He sighed. “I talked to some people before I came here. They said it wasn’t your style.”

“They tell you what was my style?”

“They told me I didn’t want to know, and I trusted them on it, but they confirmed that it wasn’t what was done to Mickey Wallace.”

I waited.

“He was tortured with a blade,” said Santos. “It wasn’t sophisticated, but it was effective. My guess is that someone wanted him to talk. Once he’d told what he knew, his throat was cut.”

“Nobody heard anything?”

“No.”

“How was he found?”

“Patrol saw that the side gate to the house was open. The uniform went around back, saw a light in the kitchen: a small flashlight, probably Wallace’s, but we’ll have it checked for prints just in case.”

“So what’s next?”

“You free?”

“Right now?”

“No, later this week, for a date. The hell do you think?”

“I’m done here,” I said. I wasn’t, of course. Had there been no other distractions, I would have stayed with Jimmy in the hope of squeezing every last detail out of him early the next morning, once I’d had a chance to absorb all that I had been told. I might have made him go through everything again, just to be certain that there was nothing he had omitted, but Jimmy was tired. He was a man who had spent an evening confessing not only his own sins, but the sins of others. He needed to sleep.

I knew what Santos was about to ask, and I knew that I would have to say yes, no matter how much it pained me.

“I’d like you to take a look at the house,” said Santos. “The body’s gone, but there’s something I want you to see.”

“What?”

“Just take a look, okay?”

I agreed. I told Jimmy that I would probably return to speak to him over the next few days, and he said that he would be there. I should have thanked him, but I did not. He had held too much back for too long. As we left, he stood on the porch and watched us go. He raised a hand in farewell, but I did not respond.

I had not been back at Hobart Street for years, not since I had removed the last of my family’s possessions from the house, sorting them into those that I would keep, and those I would discard. I think that it was one of the hardest tasks I have ever performed, that service for the dead. With each item that I put aside-a dress, a hat, a doll, a toy-it seemed that I was betraying their memory. I should have kept it all, for these were things that they had touched and held, and something of them resided in these familiar objects, now rendered strange by loss. It took me three days. Even now, I can recall sitting for an hour on the edge of our bed with Susan’s hairbrush in my hand, stroking the hairs that had tangled on its bristles. Was this too to be discarded, or should I keep it along with the lipstick that had molded itself to the shape of her, the blusher that retained the imprint of her finger upon it, the unwashed wineglas R Ahed winegs marked by her hands and her mouth? What was to be kept, and what was to be forgotten? In the end, perhaps I kept too much; that, or not enough. Too much to truly let go, and too little to lose myself entirely in their memory.

“You okay?” asked Santos as we stood at the gate.

“No,” I said. I saw TV cameras, and flashes exploded in my eyes, leaving red spots in their wake. I saw patrol cars, and men in uniform. And I was back in another time, my knee bruised and my trousers torn, my head in my hands and the image of the dead frozen on my retina.

“You want a minute?”

More flashbulbs, closer now. I heard my name being called, but I did not react.

“No,” I said again, and I followed Santos to the back of the house.

It was the blood that did it. Blood on the kitchen floor, and blood on the walls. I could not enter the kitchen. Instead, I gazed upon it from outside until I felt my stomach begin to churn and sweat broke out on my face. I leaned against the cool woodwork of the house and closed my eyes until the nausea passed.

“Did you see it?” asked Santos.

“Yes,” I said.

The symbol had been drawn in Wallace’s blood. His body had already been removed, but the position in which he was found had been marked. The symbol had been created just above where Wallace’s head had rested. Nearby, the contents of a plastic folder had been scattered across the floor. I saw the photographs, and knew why Wallace had been here. He wanted to relive the killings, and their discovery.

“Do you know what that symbol means?” asked Santos.

“I’ve never seen it before.”

“Me neither, but I’m guessing that whoever did this signed his handiwork. We’ve searched the rest of the house. It’s clean. Looks like it all happened in the kitchen.”

I turned to look at him. He was young. He probably didn’t even understand the import of his own words. And yet I could not forgive him his crassness.

“We’re finished here,” I said.

I walked away from him, and straight into another barrage of flashes, of camera lights and shouted questions. I froze for a moment as I realized that I had no way of leaving this place. I had come with Santos. I had no car of my own. I saw someone standing under a tree, a familiar figure: a big, tall man with short silver hair shorn in a military cut. In my confusion, it took me a moment to place him.

Tyrrell.

Tyrrell was here, a man who, even after I left the force, had made it clear to me that he believed I should be behind bars. Now he was striding toward me, outside the place where Mickey Wallace had been killed. Wallace had hinted that some people had been willing to talk to him, and I knew then that Tyrrell had been one of them. Some of the reporters saw him coming, and one of them, a guy named McGarry who’d been on the police beat for so long that his skin had a blue tinge, called Tyrrell’s name. It was R Aname. It clear from the way the older man was moving that some kind of confrontation was about to occur, and it would take place in the glare of cameras and the red lights of handheld recording devices. That was how Tyrrell would want it.

“You sonofabitch,” he shouted. “This is your fault.”

More flashes now, and the bright, steady light of a TV camera shining upon Tyrrell. He’d been drinking, but he was not intoxicated. I prepared to face him, and then a hand gripped my arm, and Jimmy Gallagher’s voice said, “Come on. Let’s get you out of here.” Exhausted though he was, he had followed me here, and I was grateful to him for it. I saw the frustration in Tyrrell’s face as he watched his quarry escape, denied his moment in front of the media, and then the more together reporters were turning to him for a comment, and he began to spill his bile.

Santos watched Parker depart, and saw Tyrrell begin talking to the reporters. Santos didn’t know why Tyrrell was blaming Parker for what had happened, but he knew now that there was bad blood between the two men. He would talk to Tyrrell, in time. He turned away, and watched a man in a nicely cut dark suit who had slipped past the cordon and seemed to be staring intently at the receding lights of Jimmy Gallagher’s car. Santos moved toward him.

“Sir, you have to step back behind the line.”

The man flipped the wallet in his palm to reveal a badge and a Maine State Police ID, but he didn’t look at Santos, who felt his hackles rise as a consequence.

“Detective Hansen,” said Santos. “Can I help you with something?”

Only when the car had turned onto Marine Avenue and was gone from sight did Hansen turn to Santos. His eyes, like his hair and his suit, were very dark.

“I don’t think so,” he said, and walked away.

That night, I slept in Jimmy Gallagher’s house, in a clean bed in an otherwise unfurnished room, and in my dreams I saw a dark figure bent over Mickey Wallace, whispering and cutting, in the house on Hobart Street, and behind them, as in one film playing over another, each depicting the same setting from a similar angle but at different moments in time, I saw another man hunched over my wife, speaking softly to her as he cut her, the body of my dead child on the floor nearby waiting to be violated in turn. And then they were gone and there was only Wallace in the darkness, the blood bubbling from the wound in his throat, his body trembling. He was dying alone and afraid, in a strange place…

A woman appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. She wore a summer dress, and a little girl stood beside her, gripping the thin material of her mother’s dress with her right hand. They walked to where Wallace lay, and the woman knelt beside him and stroked his face, and the child took his hand, and together they calmed him until his eyes closed and he left this world forever.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

THE GIRL’S BODY HAD been wrapped in plastic sheeting, then weighted with a rock and dumped in a pond. It was discove SIt Ä[1]‡red when a cow slipped into the water and one of its legs became tangled on the rope securing the plastic. As the cow, a Horned Hereford of no small value, was hauled from the pond, the body came with it.

Almost as soon as it was found, the locals in the small southern Idaho town of Goose Creek knew who it was. Her name was Melody McReady, and she had disappeared two years earlier. Her boyfriend, Wade Pearce, had been questioned in connection with her disappearance and, although the police had subsequently ruled him out as a suspect, he had killed himself one month after Melody went missing, or so the official version went. He had shot himself in the head, even though he didn’t appear to own a gun. Then again, people said, there was no understanding the nature of grief-or guilt, for there were those who felt that, regardless of anything the cops might have said, Wade Pearce had been responsible for whatever happened to Melody McReady, although such suspicions owed more to a general dislike of the Pearce family than to any real evidence of wrongdoing on Wade’s part. Still, even those who believed Wade was innocent weren’t too sorry when he shot himself, because Wade was a vicious jerk, just like the rest of the men in his family. Melody McReady had ended up with him because her own family was almost as screwed up as his was. Everybody knew that it would end in tears. They just hadn’t expected bloodshed too, and a body eventually dragged from still waters on the leg of a cow.

DNA tests were conducted on the remains to confirm the identity of the young woman, and to find any possible traces left by whoever had killed her and dumped her in old Sidey’s pond, although the investigators were skeptical of anything useful being revealed. Too much time had gone by, and the body had not been sealed in the plastic, so the fish and the elements had had their way with her.

To their surprise, then, one usable print was recovered from the plastic. It was submitted to AFIS, the FBI’s fingerprint identification system. The detectives investigating the discovery of the body then sat back to wait. AFIS was overburdened by submissions from law enforcement agencies, and it could take weeks or months for a check to be conducted, depending upon the urgency of the case and the extent of the AFIS workload. As it happened, the print was checked within two weeks, but no match was found. Along with the print had come a photograph of a mark that had been found carved on a rock by the pond, a photograph that eventually found its way to Unit Five of the agency’s National Security Division, the arm of the FBI responsible for collecting intelligence and carrying out counterintelligence actions related to national security and international terrorism.

Unit Five of the NSD was nothing more than a secure computer terminal in the New York field office at Federal Plaza. Its recent NSD designation, and the new title of Unit Five that came with it, were both flags of convenience, approved by the Office of the General Counsel in order to ensure that cooperation from law enforcement was swift and unconditional. Unit Five was responsible for all inquiries linked, however peripherally, to the investigation into the actions of the killer known as the Traveling Man, the individual responsible for the deaths of a number of men and women at the end of the 1990s, among them Susan and Jennifer Parker, wife and daughter of Charlie Parker. Unit Five had, over time, also absorbed earlier information on the death of a man named Peter Ackerman in New York in the late sixties, the shooting of an unidentified woman at Gerritsen Beach some months later, and the Pearl River killings involving William Parker, information that had been assembled by an ASAC, an assistant special agent in charge of the New York field office and R Q office asubsequently passed on to one of his successors. In addition, its files contained all known material on the cases with which Charlie Parker had been involved since he became a PI.

Other agencies, including the NYPD, were aware of Unit Five designations, but ultimately only two people had full access to the unit’s records: the special agent in charge of the New York field office, Edgar Ross, and his assistant, Brad. It was this assistant who, twenty minutes after the initial referral, knocked on his boss’s door with four sheets of paper in his hands.

“You’re not going to like this,” he said.

Ross looked up as Brad closed the door behind him.

“I never like anything that you tell me. You never bring good news. You never even bring coffee. What have you got?”

Brad seemed reluctant to hand over the papers, like a child concerned about submitting flawed homework to his teacher.

“Fingerprint request submitted to AFIS, taken from a body dump in Idaho. Local girl, Melody McReady. She disappeared two years ago. Body was found in a pond, wrapped in plastic. The print came from the plastic.”

“And we got a match?”

“No, but there was something else: a photograph. That started ringing bells.”

“Why?”

Brad looked uneasy. Despite the fact that he had been with his boss for almost five years now, everything to do with Unit Five made him uneasy. He’d read details of some of the other cases that had been automatically flagged for the unit’s attention. Without exception, every one of them gave him the creeps. Similarly without exception, every one of them seemed to involve, peripherally or directly, the man named Charlie Parker.

“The prints didn’t match, but the symbol did. It’s been found on two earlier bodies. The first was the corpse of an unknown woman fished from the Shell Bank Creek in Brooklyn over forty years ago, after she was shot by a cop. She was never identified. The second match comes from the body of a teenage girl killed in a car at Pearl River about twenty-six years ago. Her name was Missy Gaines: a runaway from Jersey.”

Ross closed his eyes and waited for Brad to continue.

“Gaines was shot by Charlie Parker’s father. The other woman was killed by his father’s partner sixteen years earlier.”

Now, reluctantly, he proffered the papers. Ross examined the symbol on the first sheet from the McReady body dump and compared it to the symbol from the earlier killings.

“Aw, hell,” he said.

Brad reddened, even though he knew that he was not to blame for what was to come. “It gets worse. Look at the second sheet. This was found hacked into a tree near the body of a kid called Bobby Faraday.”

This time Ross swore more forcefully.

“The third one was cut into the wood beside the back door of the Faraday house. It was assumed R Q was assu that they’d killed themselves, but the chief, a guy named Dashut, didn’t seem so sure. Took them five days to find it.”

“And we’re only getting it now?”

“State police never passed it on. They’re kind of territorial out there. Eventually, Dashut just got tired of the lack of progress and went over their heads.”

“Get me every piece of paper you can find on the McReady girl and the Faradays.”

“Already on their way,” said Brad. “They should be here within the hour.”

“Go wait for them.”

Brad did as he was told.

Ross put the papers beside a set of photographs that had been on his desk since earlier that morning. They came from the previous night’s crime scene on Hobart Street, and showed the symbol that had been drawn on the wall of the kitchen with Mickey Wallace’s blood.

Ross had been informed of the murder within an hour of the discovery of Wallace’s body, and had asked for evidence photos and copies of all documentation relating to the case to be made available to him by nine the following morning. As soon as he saw the symbol, Ross began covering the trail. Calls were made to One Police Plaza, and the symbol was scrubbed from the kitchen wall. All those who had been present at the scene were contacted and warned that the symbol was crucial to the case, and any mention of it outside the immediate investigative team would result in disciplinary action and, ultimately, dismissal without recourse to appeal. Additional locks were placed on all police files relating to the Pearl River killings, the shooting in Gerritsen Beach, and the accidental death of Peter Ackerman at the intersection of Seventy-eighth and First nine months before. The lock prevented those files from being accessed without the express permission of both SAC Ross and the NYPD’s deputy commissioners of Operations and Intelligence, even though all the relevant files had been carefully “sterilized” after the events in Pearl River to ensure that any matches that might arise at a later date would be referred to the commissioner’s office and, when it subsequently came into being, Unit Five. Any inquiries relating to them would immediately be red flagged.

Ross knew that the death of a reporter, even a former one, would draw other reporters like flies, and the circumstances of Wallace’s death, killed in a house where two high-profile murders had been committed a decade earlier, would attract further attention. It was important to keep a lid on the investigation, but it couldn’t be too tight or the more excitable reporters would start to sense a cover-up. Therefore, it was decided, in conjunction with One Police Plaza, that a suitably sympathetic “face” would be presented to the media, and a series of carefully controlled unofficial briefings would disseminate enough information to keep the media at bay without actually divulging anything that might be considered dangerous to the conduct of the investigation.

Ross traced his fingers over the picture of the symbol on the wall, then retrieved copies of four different photos from the various files on his desk. Soon, its surface was covered with variations on the same images: symbols burned into flesh, cut into wood, and carved on R Qd carved stone.

Ross turned his chair to the window and looked out over the city. As he did so, he dialed a number using a secure line. A woman answered.

“Let me speak to the rabbi, please,” said Ross.

Within seconds, Epstein was on the line.

“It’s Ross.”

“I was expecting your call.”

“You’ve heard, then?”

“I received a call last night to alert me.”

“Do you know where Parker is?”

“Mr. Gallagher gave him a bed for the night.”

“Is that common knowledge?”

“Not to the media. Mr. Gallagher had the foresight to remove his license plate when he realized that he might be forced to conduct a rescue.”

Ross was relieved. He knew that, in the absence of a New York lead, reporters had already attempted to track Parker through the bar in Maine in which he was working. A call to the field office in Portland requesting a drive-by at the Parker house had revealed two cars and a TV van parked outside, and the owner of the Great Lost Bear had told an agent that he’d been forced to put a no reporters sign on his door. To ensure that his request was complied with, he’d hired two large men in hastily made no reporters T-shirts to man the doors. According to the agent in question, those men had been waiting to start work when he’d visited the bar. They were, he said, without question two of the widest individuals he had ever seen in his life.

“And now?” asked Ross.

“Parker left the Gallagher house this morning,” said Epstein. “I have no idea where he is.”

“Have you spoken to Gallagher?”

“He says that he doesn’t know where Parker has gone, but he confirmed that Parker now knows everything.”

“Then he’s going to come looking for you.”

“I’m prepared for that.”

“I have some material I’m sending over to you. You might find it interesting.”

“What kind of material?”

“The symbol that was found on the dead women at Shell Bank Creek and Pearl River? I’ve got three more versions of it in front of me, one from two years ago, the others from earlier this year. There were apparent killings involved in each case.”

“She’s leaving signs, markers for the Other.”

“And now we’ve got her opposite number leaving his name in blood at Charlie Parker’s old house, so he’s doing the same.”

“Keep me informed, please.”

“I will.”

They exchanged farewells, and hung up. Ross summoned Brad back into his presence and told him to put a trace on Parker’s cell phone, and two men o R Qnd two men Rabbi Epstein.

“I want to know where Parker is before the end of the day,” he said.

“Do you want him brought in?”

“No, just make sure nothing happens to him,” said Ross.

“A little late for that, isn’t it, sir?” said Brad.

“Get the hell out of here,” said Ross, but he thought: from the mouths of babes…

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I MADE THE CALL to Epstein from a pay phone on Second Avenue outside an Indian restaurant that was offering an all-you-can-eat buffet that nobody wanted to eat, so in an effort to drum up business a sad-faced man in a bright polyester shirt had been posted at the door to hand out flyers that nobody wanted to read. It was raining softly, and the flyers hung damply from his hand.

“I’ve been expecting your call,” said Epstein, once he had identified himself.

“For a long time, from what I hear,” I replied.

“I take it that you’d like to meet.”

“You take it right.”

“Come to the usual place. Make it late. Nine o’clock. I look forward to seeing you again.”

Then he hung up.

I was staying in an apartment at Twentieth and Second, just above a locksmith’s store. It extended over two decent-size rooms, with a separate kitchen that had never been used, and a bathroom that was just wide enough to accommodate a full rotation of the human body, as long as the body in question kept his arms at his sides. There was a bed, a couch, and a couple of easy chairs, and a TV with a DVD player but no cable. There was no phone, which was why I’d called Epstein from a pay phone. Even then, I’d stayed on the line for only the minimum time required to arrange our meeting. I had already taken the precaution of removing the battery from my cell phone, and had bought a temporary replacement from a drugstore.

I picked up some pastries from the bakery next door, then went back to the apartment. The landlord was sitting on a chair to the right of the living room window. He was cleaning a SIG pistol, which was not what landlords usually did in their tenants’ apartments, unless the landlord in question happened to be Louis.

“So?” he said.

“I’m meeting him tonight.”

“You want company?”

“A second shadow wouldn’t hurt.”

“Is that a racist remark?”

“I don’t know. You do minstrel songs?”

“Nope, but I brought you a gun.” He reached into a leather bag and tossed a small pistol on the couch.

I removed the gun from its holster. It was about seven inches long, and weighed, it seemed, less than two pounds.

“Kimber Ultra Ten Two,” said Louis. “Ten-shot box magazine. Rear corner of the butt is sharp, so watch it.”

I put the gun back in its holster and handed it to him.

“You’re kidding,” he said.

“No, I’m not. I want my license to carry back. I get caught with an unregistered firearm, and I’m done. They’ll flay me alive, then toss what’s left in the sea.”

Angel appeared from the kitchen. He had a pot of coffee in one hand.

“You think whoever killed Wallace tortured him to find out his taste in music?” he said. “He was cut so that he’d tell what he’d learned about you.”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“Yeah, like we don’t know evolution for sure, or climate change, or gravity. He was killed in your old house, while investigating you, and then someone signed off on it in blood. Pretty soon, that someone is going to try to do to you what was done to Wallace.”

“That’s why Louis is going to stick with me tonight.”

“Yeah,” said Louis, “’cause if I get caught with a gun, then it’s okay. Black man always slides on gun charges.”

“I heard that,” said Angel. “I think it’s a self-defense thing: brother-on-brother crime.”

He took the bag of pastries, tore it open, and laid it on the small, scarred coffee table. Then he poured me a cup of coffee, and took a seat beside Louis as I told them everything I had learned from Jimmy Gallagher.

The Orensanz Center had not changed since I had last visited it some years earlier. It still dominated its section of Norfolk Street, between East Houston and Stanton, a neo-Gothic structure designed by Alexander Seltzer in the nineteenth century for the arriving German Jews, his vision inspired by the great cathedral of Cologne and the tenets of German romanticism. Then it was known as the Anshei Cheshed, the “People of Kindness,” before that congregation merged with Temple Emanuel, coinciding with the migration of the German Jews from Kleine Deutschland in Lower Manhattan to the Upper East Side. Their place was taken by Jews from eastern and southern Europe, and the neighborhood became a densely populated warren thronged by those who were still struggling to cope with this new world both socially and linguistically. Anshei Chesed became Anshei Slonim, after a town in Poland, and thus it remained until the 1960s, when the building began to fall into disrepair, only to be rescued by the sculptor Angel Orensanz and converted into a cultural and educational center.

I did not know what Rabbi Epstein’s connection to the Orensanz Center was. Whatever status he enjoyed, it was unofficial, yet powerful. I had seen some of the secrets that the center hid below its beautiful interior, and Epstein was the keeper of them.

When I entered, there was only an old man sweeping the floor. I stared at him. He had been there when last I visited, and he had been sweeping then too. I gues R a too. I gsed that he was always there: cleaning, polishing, watching. He looked at me and nodded in recognition.

“The rabbi is not here,” he said, instinctively understanding that there could be no other reason for my presence in this place.

“I called him,” I said. “He’s expecting me. He’ll be here.”

“The rabbi is not here,” he repeated with a shrug.

I took a seat. There didn’t seem to be any point in prolonging the argument. The old man sighed, and went back to his sweeping.

Half an hour passed, then an hour. There was no sign of Epstein. When at last I stood to leave, the old man was seated at the door, his broom held upright between his knees like a banner held aloft by some ancient, forgotten retainer.

“I told you,” he said.

“Yeah, you did.”

“You should listen better.”

“I get that a lot.”

He shook his head sorrowfully. “The rabbi,” he said, “he does not come here so much now.”

“Why?”

“He has fallen out of favor, I think. Or perhaps it is too dangerous for him now, for all of us. It is a shame. The rabbi is a good man, a wise man, but some say that what he does is not fit for this, this Bet Shalom.”

He must have noticed my puzzlement. “A house of peace,” he explained. “Not Sheol. Not here.”

“Sheol?”

“Hell,” he said. “Not here. No longer here.”

And he tapped his foot meaningfully on the floor, indicating the hidden places beneath. When last I had visited the Orensanz Center, Epstein had shown me a cell beneath the basement of the building. In it, he had secured a thing that called itself Kittim, a demon who wished to be a man, or a man who believed himself to be a demon. Now, if what the old man was saying was true, Kittim was gone from this place, banished along with Epstein, his captor.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Bevakashah,” he replied. “Betakh ba-Adonai va’asei-tov.”

I left him there, and stepped outside into the cold spring sunlight. I had come here for nothing, it seemed. Epstein was no longer comfortable being at the Orensanz Center, or the center was no longer willing to countenance his presence. I looked around, half expecting to see him waiting nearby, but there was no sign of him. Something had happened: he was not coming. I tried to pick out Louis, but there was no trace of him either. Still, I knew he was close. I walked down the steps and headed toward Stanton. After a minute, I felt someone begin to fall into step beside me. I looked to my left and saw a young Jewish man wearing a skullcap and a loose-fitting leather jacket. He kept his right hand in his jacket pocket. I thought I could discern the gun sight of a small pistol digging into the material. Behind me, another young man was shadowing my footsteps. They both looked strong and fast.

“You took your time in there, &rdq R an there, &uo; said the man to my left. He had the slightest hint of an accent. “Who knew you had such patience?”

“I’ve been working on it,” I said.

“It was much needed, I hear.”

“Well, I’m still working on it, so maybe you’d like to tell me where we’re going.”

“We thought you might like to eat.”

He steered me onto Stanton. Between a deli that didn’t appear to have brought in fresh stock since the previous summer, judging by the number of dead insects scattered among the bottles and jars in the window, and a tailor who seemed to regard silk and cotton as passing fads that would ultimately bow down before artificial fibers, was a small kosher diner. It was dimly lit, with four tables inside, the wood dark and scarred by decades of hot coffee cups and burning cigarettes. A sign on the glass in Hebrew and English announced that it was closed.

Only one table was occupied. Epstein sat in a chair facing the door, his back to the wall. He was wearing a black suit, with a white shirt and a black tie. A dark overcoat dangled from a hook behind his head, topped by a narrow-brimmed black hat, as though their occupant were not sitting below them but had recently dematerialized, leaving only his clothing as evidence of his previous existence.

One of the young men took a chair and carried it outside, then took a seat with his back to the window. His companion, the one who had spoken to me on the street, sat inside but on the opposite side of the door. He did not look back at us.

There was a woman behind the counter. She was probably in her early forties, but in the shadows of the little diner she could have passed for a decade younger. Her hair was very dark, and when I passed her I could see no trace of gray in it. She was also beautiful, and smelled faintly of cinnamon and cloves. She nodded at me, but she did not smile.

I took the seat across from Epstein but turned so that I also had a wall against my back, and could see the door.

“You could have told me that you were persona non grata at the Orensanz Center,” I said.

“I could have, but it would not have been true,” said Epstein. “A decision was made, one that was entirely mutual. Too many people pass through its doors. It was not fair, or wise, to put them at risk. I am sorry to have kept you waiting, but there was a purpose: we were watching the streets.”

“And did you find anything?”

Epstein’s eyes twinkled. “No, but had we ventured farther into the shadows then something, or someone, might have found us. I suspected that you would not come alone. Was I right?”

“Louis is nearby.”

“The enigmatic Louis. It is good to have such friends, but bad to have such need of them.”

The woman brought food to our table: baba ghanoush with small pieces of pita bread; burekas; and chicken cooked with vinegar, olives, raisins, and garlic, with some couscous on the side. Epstein gestured to the food, but I did not eat.

“What?” he said.

“About the Orensanz Cen R aOrensanz ter. I don’t think I believe that you’re on such good terms after all.”

“Really.”

“You don’t have a congregation. You don’t teach. You travel everywhere with at least one gunman. Today you have two. And there was something you said to me, a long time ago. We were talking, and you used the term ‘Jesus Christ.’ None of that strikes me as very orthodox. I can’t help but feel that you might have earned a little disapproval.”

“Orthodox?” He laughed. “No, I am a most unorthodox Jew, but still a Jew. You’re a Catholic, Mr. Parker-”

“A bad Catholic,” I corrected.

“I’m not in a position to make such judgments. Still, I am aware that there are degrees of Catholicism. I fear that there are many more degrees of Judaism. Mine is cloudier than most, and sometimes I wonder if I have spent too long divorced from my own people. I find myself using terms that I have no business using, slips of the tongue that embarrass me, and worse, or entertaining doubts that do not entertain me. So, perhaps it would be true to say that I left Orensanz before I was asked to leave. Would that make you more comfortable?” He gestured once again at the food. “Now eat. It’s good. And our hostess will be offended if you do not taste what she has prepared.”

I hadn’t arranged the meeting with Epstein to play semantic games, or to sample the local cuisine, but he had a way of manipulating conversations to his own satisfaction, and I had been at a disadvantage from the moment I traveled here to meet him. Yet there had been no choice. I could not imagine Epstein, or his minders, permitting an alternative arrangement.

So I ate. I inquired politely after Epstein’s health and his family. He asked about Sam and Rachel, but he did not pry further into our domestic arrangements. I suspected he was well aware that Rachel and I were no longer together. In fact, I now believed that there was little about my life of which Epstein was not aware, and it had always been that way, right from the moment my father approached him about the mark on the man who died beneath the wheels of a truck, and whose partner had subsequently killed my birth mother.

When we were done, baklava was brought to the table. I was offered coffee, and accepted. I added a little milk to it, and Epstein sighed.

“Such a luxury,” he said. “To be able to enjoy a coffee with milk so soon after one’s meal.”

“You’ll have to forgive my ignorance…”

“One of the laws of kashrut,” said Epstein. “One is prohibited from eating dairy products within six hours of consuming meat. Exodus: ‘Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.’ You see: I am more orthodox than you might think.”

The woman hovered nearby, waiting. I thanked her for her kindness, and for the food. Despite myself, I had eaten more than I had intended. This time, she did smile, but she did not speak. Epstein made a small gesture with his left hand, and she retreated.

“She’s a deaf mute,” said Epstein, when her back was turned. “She reads lips, but she will not read ours.”

I glanced at the woman. Her face was tu R a face wasrned from us, and she was examining a newspaper, her head bent.

Now that the time had arrived to confront him, I felt something of my anger at him dissipate. He had kept so much hidden for so long, just as Jimmy Gallagher had done, but there were reasons for it.

“I know that you’ve been asking questions,” he said. “And I know that you have received some answers.”

When I spoke, I thought that I sounded like a petulant teenager.

“You should have told me when we first met.”

“Why? Because you believe now that you had a right to know?”

“I had a father, and two mothers. They all died for me, in their way.”

“And that was precisely why you could not be told,” said Epstein. “What would you have done? You were still an angry, violent man when we met: grief stricken, bent on revenge. You could not be trusted. There are some who would say that you still cannot be trusted. And remember, Mr. Parker: I had lost my son when first we met. My concerns were for him, not for you. Pain and grief are not your exclusive preserves.

“But, still, you are right. You should have been told before now, but perhaps you chose the time that was right for you. You decided when to begin asking the questions that led you here. Most have been answered for you. I will do my best to deal with the rest.”

Now that the time had come, I was not sure where to start.

“What do you know of Caroline Carr?”

“Next to nothing,” he said. “She came from what is now a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut. Her father died when she was six, and her mother when she was nineteen. There are no surviving relatives. If she had been bred to be anonymous, one could not have asked for more.”

“But she wasn’t anonymous. Someone came looking for her.”

“So it seems. Her mother died in a house fire. Subsequent investigations revealed that it might have been started deliberately.”

“Might have been?”

“A cigarette smoldering at the bottom of a trash can, with papers piled on top of it, and a gas stove that was not turned off fully. It could have been an accident, except neither Caroline nor her mother smoked.”

“A visitor?”

“There were no visitors that night, according to Caroline. Her mother sometimes entertained gentlemen, but on the night that she died only she and Caroline were asleep in the house. Her mother drank. She was asleep on the couch when the fire broke out, and was probably dead before the flames reached her. Caroline escaped by climbing out of an upstairs window. When we met, she told me that she saw two people watching the house from the woods while it burned: a man and a woman. They were holding hands. But by that time someone had raised the alarm, and there were neighbors rushing to help her, and the fire trucks were on their way. Her main concern was for her mother, but the first floor had already been engulfed. When she thought again about the man and the woman, they were gone.

“She told me that she believed the couple in the woods had R ahe woods started the fire, but when she tried to tell the police of what she had seen they dismissed the sighting as irrelevant, or as the imaginings of a grief-stricken young woman. But Caroline saw them again, shortly after her mother’s funeral, and became convinced that they intended to do to her what they had done to her mother; or that, in fact, she might have been the target all along.”

“Why would she think that?”

“A sense she had. The way they looked at her, the way she felt when they looked at her. Call it a survival instinct. Whatever the reason for it, she left town after her mother’s funeral, intending to find work in Boston. There, someone tried to push her under a T train. She felt a hand on her back, and teetered on the edge of the platform before a young woman pulled her to safety. When she looked around, she saw a man and a woman moving toward the exit. The woman glanced back at her, and Caroline said she recognized her from Hartford. The second time she saw them was at South Station, as she boarded a train to New York. She thought that they were watching her from the platform, but they didn’t follow her.”

“Who were they?”

“We did not know then, and we still do not know for sure now. Oh, we know the name of the man who died beneath the wheels of a truck, and of the boy and girl your father killed at Pearl River, but those names ultimately proved useless. The confirmation of their identities did nothing to explain how they came to be hunting Caroline Carr, or you.”

“My father believed that Missy Gaines and the woman who killed my mother were the same person,” I said. “By extension, he must have believed that Peter Ackerman and the boy who died with Missy Gaines were also the same. How is that possible?”

“We have both witnessed strange things in the years since we first met,” Epstein replied. “Who knows what we should believe, and what we should discount? Nevertheless, let us look at the most logical, or plausible, explanation first: over a period of more than forty years, someone has repeatedly dispatched a pair of killers, a man and a woman, on a series of assassinations aimed at you, or those close to you, including the woman who ultimately gave birth to you. When one couple died, another eventually replaced them. These killers were distinguished by marks on their arms, one for the man and another for the woman, just here.” He indicated a point halfway between his wrist and his elbow on his left forearm. “There is no reason that we can find for why a succession of couples have been chosen to do this.

“The investigations into Missy Gaines, Joseph Dryden, and Peter Ackerman revealed that all led entirely normal existences for most of their lives. Ackerman was a family man, Missy Gaines a model teenager, Dryden already a tearaway, but no worse than many others. Then, at some point, their behavior changed. They cut themselves off from family and friends. They found a member of the opposite sex previously unknown to them, formed a bond, and went hunting, apparently first for Caroline Carr, and then, in the cases of Gaines and Dryden, for you. So that is the logical explanation: disparate couples, linked only by their intent to do harm to you and your family, either of their own volition or acting on the will of another.”

“But you don’t believe the logical explanation.”

“No, I do not.”

Epstein reached behind him a R abehind hind rummaged in the pocket of his overcoat, emerging with a piece of photocopied paper that he unfolded on the table. It was a copy of a scientific article, and it showed an insect in flight: a wasp.

“So, what do you know of wasps, Mr. Parker?”

“They sting.”

“True. Some, the largest group in Hymenoptera, are also parasitic. They target host insects-caterpillars, spiders-either by laying eggs externally that attack the host from outside, or by inserting eggs into the host body. Eventually, the larvae emerge and consume the host. Such behavior is relatively common in nature, and not just among wasps. The ichneumon fly, for example, uses spiders and aphids to host its young. When it injects its eggs, it also injects a toxin that paralyzes the host. The young then consume the host from the inside out, starting with the organs least necessary for survival, such as fat and entrails, in order to keep the host alive for as long as possible before finally progressing to the essential organs. Eventually, all that is left behind is an empty shell. The manner of consumption does display a certain instinctive understanding that a live host is better than a dead one, but otherwise it’s all rather primitive, if undeniably nasty.”

He leaned forward, tapping the picture of the wasp.

“Now, there is a variety of orb spider known as Plesiometa argyra, found in Costa Rica. It too is preyed upon by a wasp, but in an interesting way. The wasp attacks the spider, temporarily paralyzing it while it lays its eggs in the tip of the spider’s abdomen. Then it leaves, and the spider’s ability to move is restored. It continues to function as it has always done, building its webs, trapping insects, even as the wasp larvae cling to its abdomen and feed on its juices through small punctures. This continues for perhaps two weeks, and then something very odd occurs: the spider’s behavior changes. Somehow, by means unknown, the larvae, using chemical secretions, compel the spider to alter its web construction. Instead of a round web, the spider builds a smaller, reinforced platform. Once that is complete, the larvae kill their host and cocoon themselves in the new web, safe from wind, rain, and predatory ants, and the next stage of their development begins.”

He relaxed slightly. “Suppose we were to substitute wandering spirits for wasps, and humans for spiders, then, perhaps, we might begin to have some understanding of how seemingly ordinary men and women could, at some point, change utterly, slowly dying inside while remaining unchanged without. An interesting theory, don’t you think?”

“Interesting enough to get a man banned from the local cultural center.”

“Or committed, if he were unwise enough to speak such thoughts too loudly, but this is not the first time that you have heard of such things: spirits flitting from body to body, and people who apparently live beyond their allotted span, slowly rotting yet never dying. Is that not right?”

And I thought of Kittim, trapped in his cell, retreating into himself like an insect hibernating even as his body withered; and of a creature named Brightwell glimpsed in a centuries-old painting, in a photograph of the Second World War and, finally, in this time as he hunted for a being like himself, human in form but not in nature. Yes, I knew of what Epstein was speaking.

“The difference between a spider and R a spider aa human, though, is the matter of consciousness, of awareness,” said Epstein. “Since we must assume that the spider has no awareness of its own identity as a spider, then, the pain of its own consumption aside, it has no understanding of what is happening to it as its behavior alters and, ultimately, it begins to die. But a human being would become aware of the changes in its physiology or, more correct, its psychology, its behavior. It would be troubling, at the very least. The host might even consult a doctor, or a psychiatrist. Tests could be carried out. An effort would be made to discover the source of the imbalance.”

“But we’re not talking about parasitic flies, or wasps.”

“No, we’re talking about something that cannot be seen, but is consuming the host just as surely as the wasp larvae consume the spider, except in this case it is the identity that is being taken over, the self. And something in us would slowly become aware of this other, this thing preying upon us, and we would fight back at the darkness as it began to consume us.”

I thought for a moment.

“You used the word ‘apparently’ earlier,” I said, as in ‘apparently’ they were targeting my birth mother. Why ‘apparently’?”

“Well, if Caroline Carr was their primary target, why then did they return sixteen years later only to die at Pearl River? The answer, it would seem, is that they were not trying to kill Caroline Carr, but the child she was carrying.”

“Again: why?”

“I don’t know, except that you are a threat to them, and you have always been a threat. Perhaps even they do not know for certain the nature of the threat that you pose, but they sense it and they react to it, and their purpose is to extinguish it. They were trying to kill you, Mr. Parker, and they probably believed that they had succeeded, for a time, until they found out that they were wrong, and you had been hidden from them, so they were forced to return and rectify their mistake.”

“And failed a second time.”

“And failed,” echoed Epstein. “But in the years since then you have begun to draw attention to yourself. You have encountered men and women who share something of their nature, if not their purpose, and it may be that whoever, or whatever, dispatched these things has begun to notice you. It’s not hard to draw the necessary conclusion, which is-”

“That they’ll return to try again,” I finished.

“Not ‘will return,’” said Epstein. “They have returned.”

And from beneath the description of the wasp and its actions he withdrew a photograph. It showed the kitchen at Hobart Street, and the symbol that had been painted in blood upon its wall.

“This is also the mark that was found on the body of Peter Ackerman, and on the boy, Dryden, killed by your father at Pearl River,” he said.

Then he added more photographs. “This is the mark that was found on the bodies of Missy Gaines and your birth mother’s killer. It has since R aIt has si been found at three more crime scenes, one of them old, two of them recent.”

“How recent?”

“Weeks.”

“But unconnected to me.”

“Yes, it would appear so.”

“What are they doing?”

“Leaving signs. For each other and, perhaps, in the case of Hobart Street, for you.”

He smiled, and there was pity in that smile.

“You see, something has returned, and it wants you to know it.”