The Wolf in Winter

31

They convened at the home of Hayley Conyer, just as they always did when issues of great import had to be discussed in private. The board of selectmen conducted public meetings on a regular basis, but the agenda for such gatherings was decided well in advance, and sensitive subjects were resolutely avoided. They were also open only to residents of Prosperous, following an abortive attempt by Euclid Danes to hijack one session. The late Ben Pearson had advocated killing Danes following that particular incident, and he had not been joking. If it had gone to a vote of the board, the motion would almost certainly have been passed unanimously.

Luke Joblin arrived first at Hayley’s house, accompanied by Kinley Nowell. Kinley had checked himself out of the hospital following Ben Pearson’s death. He was still weak, and his breathing was shallow and labored, but he walked into the house under his own steam, aided only by the walker that he had been using for the last decade or more. Joblin carried his respirator for him. After them came Thomas Souleby, and then Calder Ayton. Hayley was most solicitous of Calder, whose grief at the loss of Ben was etched on his face. She whispered to him as he sat silently at the table, the chair to his right, the chair that had always been occupied by Ben Pearson, now empty.

Pastor Warraner arrived at the same time as Chief Morland. Had Hayley not known of the animosity that existed between them she might almost have suspected them of collusion, but the two men stood awkwardly apart on the porch when she opened the door to them, their body language speaking volumes about their distaste for each other. She knew that Morland had been out in the woods that day, setting traps for the wolf with Abbot, the hunter brought by Souleby to the town. Morland looked exhausted. Good, thought Hayley: it would make him more pliable. She took him by the arm as he passed, indicating to Warraner that he should go on ahead into the dining room. Warraner did as he was told. He had no concerns about what Hayley Conyer might have to say to Morland in his absence. Even after their last meeting, when Hayley had sided with Morland against him, Warraner remained secure in his position as Hayley’s spiritual adviser.

‘Did you find the animal?’ said Hayley.

‘No, not yet, but it’s still around. We discovered a deer carcass. It was all chewed up. Abbot reckoned it had been dead for a while, but the damage to it was recent — not more than twenty-four hours. We’ve laid bait and set traps. We’ll get it soon. Abbot says that it’s wounded. He could tell by the tracks.’

But Hayley was now more interested in the deer. Like the others, she had seen the photograph on Valerie Gillson’s phone.

‘The deer, was it—?’

‘Maybe. There wasn’t much of it left to identify. And there was a hole not far from where we found it.’

She nodded. ‘Go inside. The others are waiting.’

Morland joined them. The four surviving members of the board sat at either side of the dining table, with a chair left empty at the head for Hayley. Warraner sat at the other end of the table, leaving two chairs between himself and Kinley Lowell. Morland seated himself across from Warraner, leaving three chairs between himself and Calder Ayton. If he squinted his eyes he could almost see the ghost of Ben Pearson occupying one of them, tearing open a pack of exotic cookies or passing around some British candy, because it was Ben who had always taken it upon himself to provide a small treat for the board and the observers. But the chair remained empty, and the table bare. There were no reports to be considered, and no notebooks lay open. No true record of this meeting would ever be kept.

Hayley turned off the lights in the hall and took her seat at the head of the table.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘let’s begin.’

Harry Dixon knelt inside his bedroom closet and removed a section of baseboard. The house was quiet. Erin was at her quilting circle, where work had commenced on a quilt in memory of the town’s recent dead. According to Erin, so many women wanted to participate that they’d had to bring in more chairs. Bryan Joblin had gone with her, although he would be drinking in a bar while Erin sewed. Harry wondered how long the board planned to keep up this farce of imposing Joblin upon them: until he and Erin found another girl; until they proved themselves. Joblin was there only to make sure that they behaved, and continued their efforts to locate a replacement for Annie Broyer.

To that end, Harry had earlier gone out with Joblin, and together they had cruised the streets of Lewiston and Augusta, looking at women. It wasn’t exactly difficult work. Harry figured that Joblin would have been doing something similar in his spare time anyway, even if it were not a matter of some urgency. Hell, Harry had been known to cast a wistful eye at young beauties when his wife wasn’t around, but he was nothing like Bryan Joblin. The Joblin boy had a reputation in Prosperous for being a pussy hound of the first order, to the extent that Hayley Conyer herself had taken Bryan and his father to one side following a chance encounter on Main Street and warned them that, if Bryan didn’t keep his pecker to himself, or at least limit its use to the vast swathe of the United States beyond Prosperous, she would personally slice it off and hang it from the town’s welcome sign as a warning to others who might be similarly tempted to screw around with the feelings and, indeed, bodies of Prosperous’s generative future. Since then, Bryan Joblin had indulged himself largely in the relative fleshpots of Bangor, and still tended to cross the street in order to avoid any further confrontations with Hayley Conyer, as though fearing that the old woman might whip out a blade at any moment and make good on her threat.

That afternoon, Harry and Bryan watched schoolgirls and young housewives. One of them would be ideal, Joblin said. He was in favor of snatching a girl right there and then — a young, athletic-looking brunette out by the mall in Augusta — but Harry dissuaded him. These things needed to be planned properly, Harry told him. Taking a woman in broad daylight was too risky. They looked at some of the homeless women, but they were all too old or worn. Fresher meat was needed.

‘What about a child?’ said Joblin. ‘It’s gotta be easy to take a child.’

Harry didn’t reply. He just pictured Bryan Joblin dying in painful ways.

Joblin had bitched all the way back to Prosperous, but Harry knew he would inform his father that the Dixons looked like they were at least trying to fulfill their obligations to the town, and Luke Joblin would, in turn, tell the board. To add to the deception, Harry set Joblin to trawling prostitution websites: twenty-five or younger, Harry had stipulated, and they should be from out of state. No tattoos, and no ID requirements from prospective johns. Independents too, not agency girls. Bryan had dived into the work wholeheartedly. He even printed off a list of possible candidates for Harry.

‘You know they can trace all those searches back to our computer?’ Erin told Harry when she learned of what Bryan was doing. Her quilting bag was on the bed behind her, ready for use. They were whispering. They spent most of their days in near silence now because of their unwanted houseguest. It was like living in some kind of religious retreat.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Harry. ‘It’s all just smoke anyway.’

‘Well, I still don’t like it. It makes the computer seem dirty. I won’t feel the same about using it.’

Give me strength, thought Harry.

‘The computer won’t be coming with us,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy you a new one when we get—’

‘Get where?’ she asked.

‘Get to wherever we’re going,’ he finished.

‘When?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘When?’ she repeated. There were tears in her eyes. ‘I can’t do this for much longer. I can’t stand having Bryan Joblin around. I hate the smell of him, the sound of him. I hate the way he looks at me.’

‘Looks at you? What do you mean?’

‘Jesus, you see nothing. Nothing! It’s like you can’t imagine that another man might find me attractive.’

And with that she stormed out to start work on the great quilt. Harry had watched Erin as she walked to her car, Bryan Joblin trailing behind her. Of course she was still a good-looking woman. He knew that better than anyone. It shouldn’t have surprised him that Joblin might appreciate her too.

Now he placed the section of baseboard on the carpet and reached into the space revealed. His hands came out holding a red fireproof box, a smaller version of the one in which he and Erin kept their passports and valuable documents. The key was in the lock. He had no fear of anyone finding the box, and he didn’t want Erin coming across the key by accident and asking what it was. They didn’t have many secrets from each other, but this was one of them.

Harry opened the box. Inside were five thousand dollars in tens and twenties: it was Harry’s emergency fund. He had resisted dipping into the cash until that week, even when his business was at its lowest. Harry didn’t know how long five thousand dollars would last once he and Erin started running, but their main priority would be to put some distance between themselves and Prosperous. After that he’d make some calls. He still had friends beyond Prosperous.

The box also contained a letter written and ready to mail. The letter was addressed to Hayley Conyer, and its contents could be summarized as a promise to keep quiet about Prosperous if he and Erin were left in peace. Even after all that had occurred, Harry continued to remain loyal to the town. He didn’t want to betray its secrets.

The final item in the box was a handgun, a five-shot Smith & Wesson 638 with a concealed hammer, a barrel length of less than two inches, and a weight of just fourteen ounces when empty. It had been acquired for him by one of his subcontractors, a plumber with a string of convictions who owed Harry because Harry gave him work when nobody else would. Harry had been afraid to purchase a legal firearm. He was worried that word would get back to Chief Morland, and then questions would be asked, and with questions came suspicions. The gun ft easily into the pocket of his favorite jacket, and was powerful, accurate and easy to fire, even for a neophyte like him. Erin didn’t approve of guns and wouldn’t tolerate them in the house. If she’d discovered that he had the S&W, he’d have found a fast use for the box of self-defense round nose loads that sat alongside the pistol.

Now he transferred the entire contents of the box to a small black canvas sack and hid it on the top shelf of the closet behind a stack of old T-shirts. He hadn’t told Erin, but preparations for their departure were almost complete. He had spoken to a used car dealer in Medway and arranged a trade-in, with some cash on the side, for his truck. One morning, while Bryan Joblin was watching Erin, Harry had driven to the T. J. Maxx in Bangor with a list of his wife’s measurements and bought various items of underwear and casual clothing and sneakers, along with a pair of cheap suitcases. He didn’t need to buy much for himself: he’d hidden a plastic garbage bag filled with jeans, shirts and a new pair of boots in the spare tool box on his truck, and these he added to one of the suitcases. He then went to the Walgreens on Broadway, and replicated as many of the toiletries and cosmetics that he had seen in their bathroom and on his wife’s dressing table. When he was done, he paid a quick visit to Erin’s sister and asked her to take care of the cases for him. To his surprise, she hadn’t asked any questions. It made him wonder how much she already knew, or suspected, about Prosperous.

Harry restored the empty box to its space behind the closet, and replaced the baseboard. It seemed to him that by removing the cash and the gun he had made his decision. There was only one final step to take. After that, there could be no going back.

Harry drove to the post office and, after only a slight hesitation, mailed the letter to Hayley Conyer.

32

Hayley was playing with him, Morland knew, trying to put him off guard and make him ill at ease. He had seen her do this more than once with those who displeased her, and his father had warned him about it when it came time for his son to take over as chief of police.

‘She’s a clever one, you mark my words,’ his father said. ‘You watch yourself around her, and never turn your back on her. She’s crossed swords over the years with a lot of men and women who thought they were smarter than she is, and she’s left them all lying dead in the ground.’

Even then, Morland had wondered if his father was speaking literally or metaphorically.

Now Morland made himself as comfortable as possible in the creaky old dining chair, and did his best to keep his temper in check as Hayley baited him. Almost an hour had gone by, and she had not yet even alluded to the detective. She was building up to it, allowing the tension in the room to coalesce around Morland, constraining him so that when at last they came to the issue at hand he would be both wound tight internally and compressed by her implied disapproval of his actions, although he did not know how else he might have reacted to the detective’s interest in the missing girl. What did she expect — that he should kill anyone who so much as glanced curiously in the town’s direction? Perhaps so: she had always been paranoid, although she tried to justify it by claiming that the fate of the town, and the responsibility for its citizens, lay in her hands. What was that line about power corrupting? Whatever it was, it was true, but also incomplete: power didn’t just corrupt. After a time, it could also drive a person mad.

So it was that, over the last hour, Hayley had ignored Morland’s interjections, even when it was clear that she had left space in the discussions for him to offer an opinion. If he remained silent, she asked him to contribute and then ceased to listen almost as soon as he began speaking until finally, while he was still in mid-flow, she would begin to talk over him, or turn to another for an alternative view or simply change the subject altogether, leaving Morland to wind down slowly into silence. It was humiliating, and Morland was certain that Hayley’s ultimate intention was to drive him from the meeting entirely, but he refused to be forced into giving her what she wanted. It was crucial that he remain present. He guessed what she was planning to do, and he had to stop her. She had not met the detective, and did not fully understand the danger that he represented. Even Warraner, who had twice encountered Parker, was guilty of underestimating him, but that was a function of Warraner’s own misplaced sense of superiority. Morland had watched him with the detective in the chapel, behaving like some glorified tour guide, almost inviting Parker to make assumptions about hidden knowledge that might or might not be true. But the detective was subtler and more cunning than Warraner had first assumed, and by the time Warraner came to that realization — with the detective’s questions about the Familists and Vitel — it was too late.

And then the detective returned, with his talk of blue cars, baiting Morland and Warraner just as Morland himself was now being baited. He’d spoken to Danes too, and Danes was much more than a simple nuisance. He had the ear of people in the state legislature, although he didn’t have much influence over the current governor, mainly because the current governor didn’t listen to anyone as far as Morland could tell. But Morland and the board knew that Danes had managed to scatter seeds of suspicion about Prosperous down in Augusta. True, most people still dismissed him as a fake, but he was a fake with money, and money bought influence.

Morland recalled again the late Ben Pearson’s rage at Danes’s intrusion on the public meeting. The old bastard had been practically frothing at the mouth, and Souleby and the others weren’t far behind him, howling for blood like the high priests before Pilate. On that occasion, it was Hayley who proved to be the voice of reason. They couldn’t kill Danes, because who knew what trouble his death might bring on them if there was even a hint of foul play about it? They’d just have to wait for him to die naturally, but so far Danes had proved to be as stubbornly healthy as Hayley herself. Sometimes, Morland even suspected that Hayley liked having Danes around. She seemed almost indulgent of his efforts to hamper the town’s expansion, as though their intensity were a reflection of Prosperous’s importance, and a vindication of her own stewardship.

Prosperous had influence in Augusta as well. It was natural in a town as wealthy as this one, and even though its citizens differed politically, they still recognized that contributions to politicians of all stripes served the common cause. But that influence had to be used subtly and carefully. Morland sensed that a time was coming when the town’s investment in state politics might finally be required to yield some significant profit. He would have been happier if it could be saved for another moment, but he was growing increasingly ill at ease at this meeting. It was like watching a snake preparing to strike, unaware of the shadow of the blade behind it.

The board had almost concluded its discussion of the recent fatalities. Hayley asked about the families, and how they were coping, and Warraner gave her chapter and verse about his pastoral role, and each vied with the other to appear the more sympathetic, the more understanding, the more pained by the sufferings of others. It was quickly decided that a fund should be established to aid the families in their time of need. The selectmen immediately offered generous contributions, and Hayley matched their combined total. Once they had tapped the rest of the town for sums both big and small, it would represent a significant source of financial consolation for the families.

Call it what it is, thought Morland. Call it a bribe, a way of buying time and loyalty. There were already whispers among the townsfolk (for Morland was listening and, where possible, stoking the fires of discontent with the board). Why had this happened? Where had their protection gone? What was the board going to do about it? If the board could do nothing, or not enough, then it might be that it was time for others to step up and take on the responsibility of running the town from these old men and this old woman who had served Prosperous so well for so long, but whose hour was now passed.

And if any of them objected — and by ‘any’ they could be referring only to one, Hayley Conyer — then, Morland thought, the town would understand if some bad luck were perforce to befall her, for old women had accidents, and Prosperous would accept her passing as a different kind of sacrifice. So this was an important meeting, perhaps the most important in nearly a century. The town’s survival might not have been at stake, not yet, but the survival of the current board certainly was.

‘Well, so that’s decided,’ said Hayley at last. She would write it all down the next day, creating inconsequential minutes for a meeting of great consequence. Let the town, and those whose eyes were on the town, see how it handled itself in times of strife. Meanwhile, the truth would be communicated in quiet words at gas stations, and on street corners, and in kitchens when the children were asleep. The whispers of doubt would be smothered. The board had acted. All would be well.

‘That brings us to the main business of the evening.’

There was shuffling around her. Heads turned toward Morland. He felt the wires tighten around him, and instinctively he breathed in, swelling his upper body, tensing his arms and hands against unseen bonds, making himself larger, gaining himself room to move.

Hayley sat back in her chair. It was a Carver, the only chair at the table with arms. She rested her right elbow on one chair arm, her thumb beneath her chin, her index finger to her right temple, and stared thoughtfully at Morland, like a queen waiting for the courtier who had disappointed her to explain his way out of an appointment with the executioner.

‘So, Chief Morland,’ she said. ‘Tell us about this detective …’

33

Ronald Straydeer came by my house while I was once again reading through the material about the Familists culled from the archives of the Maine Historical Society. Ronald was a Penobscot Indian out of Old Town, north of Bangor. He had served with the K-9 Corps in Vietnam, and like so many men who fought in that war, he came back with a fracture running through his soul. In Ronald’s case, that fracture was caused by the decision of the US military to classify its war dogs as ‘equipment’ and then leave them behind as ‘surplus to requirements’ when the US fed South Vietnam. Thousands of war dogs were either transferred to the South Vietnamese army or euthanized, and many of their handlers, like Ronald, never quite forgave their country for its treatment of the animals.

The Vietcong hated the K-9 teams because they made surprise attacks almost impossible to carry out, and both the dogs and their handlers were hunted by the enemy with extreme prejudice. The bond between the K-9 soldiers and their dogs was immensely strong, and the emotional and psychological damage caused by the attitude of the US Army toward the teams was impossible to quantify. A wiser military, one more attuned to the effects of combat on the psyche, would have allowed the men to adopt their dogs, but such legislation would not come into effect until 2000. Instead, the K-9 soldiers watched South Vietnam fall to the North Vietnamese, and they knew that their dogs would be slaughtered in revenge.

Now Ronald worked with veterans, but he did so entirely without the assistance of the US government or military. He wanted nothing to do with either. I think that was one of the reasons why he sold pot. It wasn’t so much that he cared one way or another about drugs: it was just a means of quietly socking it to Uncle Sam for sacrificing Elsa, Ronald’s German Shepherd, back in Vietnam. He was largely a recreational dealer, though: Ronald probably gave away more than he sold, and smoked the rest himself.

I hadn’t seen him in a while. Someone told me that he’d left town. His brother up in Old Town was ill, or so the story went, and Ronald was helping his family out. But as far as I knew, Ronald didn’t have a brother.

Tonight his eyes were brighter than usual, and he was wearing a blue sport jacket over jeans, a matching shirt and off-white sneakers.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘the denim shirt and jeans look only works if you’re a country singer, or you own a farm.’

Ronald gave me a hard look.

‘Should I tell you of how, long before the white man came, my people roamed these lands?’

‘In matching denim?’

‘We move with the times.’

‘Not fast enough.’

He followed me into my office. I offered him coffee, or a beer if he was in the mood, but he declined both. He took a seat in one of the armchairs. He was a big man, and he made the chair look too small for him. Actually, the way he had to squeeze himself into it made me start worrying about how we were going to get him out again when he tried to stand. I had visions of injecting Crisco down the sides from a pastryicing bag.

‘So, how have you been?’ I asked.

‘I stopped drinking,’ he said.

‘Really?’

Ronald had never been a big drinker, from what I could recall, but he had been a steady one, although he stuck to beer for the most part.

‘Yeah. I quit smoking weed too.’

This was news.

‘You stop dealing as well?’

‘I got enough money in the bank. I don’t need to do that no more.’

‘You didn’t fall off a horse on the road to Damascus, did you?’

‘No, man. I don’t like horses. You thinking of the Plains Indians. You ought to read a book, educate yourself.’

Ronald said all of this with an entirely straight face. It was generally hard to tell if he was serious or joking, at least not until he started punching you in the gut.

‘I heard you’d been out of town for a while,’ I said. ‘I guess now I know what you were doing. You were selfimproving.’

‘And thinking.’

‘Mind if I ask what about?’

‘Life. Philosophical shit. You wouldn’t understand, being a white man.’

‘You look good for it, even to a white man.’

‘I decided it wasn’t positive for me to be drinking and smoking and dealing when I was working with men for whom all of those activities might prove a temptation. If I was going to help them get straight and clean, I had to be straight and clean myself, you understand?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I kept up with the newspapers, though. You weren’t in them. Looks like you haven’t shot anyone in months. You retired?’

‘I could be tempted to break my spell of gun celibacy, under the current circumstances. Are you just here to yank my chain, or is there something I can help you with?’

‘I hear you been around the homeless shelters asking questions,’ said Ronald.

In his dealings with veterans, Ronald was often to be found working in the shelters, trying to form bonds with men and women who felt abandoned by their country once their period in uniform was over. Some of them even ended up staying with him on occasion. Despite his somewhat stony demeanor, Ronald Straydeer had a seemingly infinite capacity for empathy.

‘That’s right.’

‘Veterans?’

Ronald had helped me out in the past with cases involving soldiers or the military. It was his turf, and he was conscious of protecting it.

‘Not really, or only by association. You knew Jude, right?’

‘Yeah. He was a good man. Dressed funny, but he was helpful. I hear he died. Suicide.’

‘I don’t think he killed himself. I believe that he was helped into the next world.’

‘Any idea why?’

‘Can I ask why you’re interested?’

‘Someone’s got to look out for these people. I try. If the city’s homeless are being targeted for any reason. I’d like to know.’

That was as good a reason as any for asking questions.

‘It’s early,’ I said, ‘but I think he might have been killed because he went looking for his daughter. Her name was Annie, and she was following in her father’s footsteps, in both senses of the term. She’d lost her way, and ended up on the streets. I believe she was trying to draw him to her, while at the same time keeping him at a distance. She was staying at a women’s shelter in Bangor, but she’s not there any longer. There’s nobody around to report her missing, but I have a feeling that she might have been snatched. Jude was concerned about her before he died.’

‘And what’s this to you?’

‘A friend of Jude’s, a man named Shaky, told me that Jude had saved up to buy a few hours of my time. Call it an obligation on my part.’

‘I know Shaky. Any idea who might have taken the girl?’

‘You ever been to the town of Prosperous?’

‘No. Heard of it. Don’t think they have much time for the natives, or anyone who isn’t white and wealthy.’

‘Annie told someone up in Bangor that she’d been offered a job by a older couple from Prosperous. She collected her things from the shelter before taking a ride with them, and that was the last anyone saw of her.’

‘The couple might have been lying,’ said Ronald. ‘It’s easy to say you’re from one place when you’re actually from another.’

‘I had considered that.’

‘It’s why you are a detective.’

‘That’s right. I like to think of myself as wise for a white man.’

‘That bar is set low,’ said Ronald.

‘Not for all of us, and perhaps not for Annie Broyer. I get the sense, from the people I’ve spoken with about her, that she wasn’t dumb. Otherwise she wouldn’t have survived on the streets for as long as she did. I think she would have asked for some proof that these people were on the level. If she said she was going to Prosperous, then I believe that’s where she ended up. Unfortunately, according to the local police, there’s no sign of her, and never has been.’

I hadn’t told Ronald anything that Shaky or the cops in Portland didn’t already know for the most part. Any other thoughts or suspicions, among them the peculiar history of the Familists, I kept to myself.

Ronald remained seated silently in his chair. He appeared to be contemplating something, even if it was how he was going to get out of the chair now that he’d found out what he wanted to know.

‘How did the people who killed Jude find him?’ said Ronald at last.

People: Ronald knew that it took more than a single person to stage a hanging, even one involving a man as seemingly weak as Jude.

‘They watched the shelters,’ I replied. ‘He was, as you remarked, a distinctive figure.’

‘Someone might have noticed them. The homeless, the sharp ones, they’re always watching. They keep an eye out for the cops, for friends, for men and women with grudges against them. It’s hard and merciless at the bottom of the pond. You have to be careful if you don’t want to get eaten.’

Ronald was right. I hadn’t asked enough questions on the streets. I had allowed myself to become sidetracked by Prosperous and what it might represent, but perhaps there was another way.

‘Any suggestions as to whom I might talk with?’

‘You go around using words like “whom” and nobody will talk to you at all. Leave it with me.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’ll get more out of them than you will.’

I had to admit the truth of it.

‘One thing,’ I said.

‘Yes?’

‘I’d be discreet about it. If I’m right, and Jude was murdered, the people who did it won’t be reluctant to act if they have to cover their tracks. We don’t need any more bodies.’

‘I understand.’

Ronald rose to leave. As anticipated, he had some trouble extricating himself from his seat, but by pressing down hard with his arms he somehow managed it. Once he was free, he regarded the chair in a vaguely hostile manner.

‘Next time, I will not sit,’ he said.

‘That might be for the best.’

He looked out the window at the moonlight shining on the marshes.

‘I have been thinking about getting another dog,’ he said.

Ronald hadn’t owned a dog since Vietnam.

‘Good,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Ronald, and for the first time since he had arrived at my door, he smiled. ‘Yes, I believe it is.’

When he was gone, I called Angel and Louis in New York. Angel answered. Angel always answered. Louis regarded telephones as instruments of the devil. He used them only reluctantly, and his conversation was even more minimal over the phone than it was in person, which was saying something — or, in Louis’s case, nothing at all.

Angel told me that he was working on finding more of the Collector’s nests, but so far he’d come up empty. Maybe we’d taken care of all of them, and the Collector was now living in a hole in the ground like a character in a book I’d read as a boy. The man had tried to assassinate someone who might have been Hitler, and failed. Hunted in turn, he had literally gone underground, digging out a cave for himself in the earth and waiting for his pursuers to show their face. Rogue Male: that was the title of the book. They’d made a movie of it, with Peter O’Toole. Thinking of the book and the movie reminded me of those holes in the ground around Prosperous. Something had made them, but what?

‘You still there?’ said Angel.

‘Yes, sorry. My mind was somewhere else for a moment.’

‘Well, it’s your dime.’

‘You’re showing your age, remembering a time when you could make a call for a dime. Tell me, what did you and Mr Edison talk about back then?’

‘Fuck you, and Thomas Edison.’

‘The Collector’s still out there. He can rough it, but the lawyer can’t. Somewhere there’s a record of a house purchase that we haven’t found yet.’

‘I’ll keep looking. What about you? Whose cage are you rattling these days?’

I told him about Jude, and Annie, and Prosperous, and even Ronald Straydeer.

‘Last time I talked to you, you were process-serving,’ said Angel. ‘I knew it wouldn’t last.’

‘How’s Louis?’

‘Bored. I’m hoping he’ll commit a crime, just to get him out of the apartment.’

‘Tell him to watch a movie. You ever hear of Rogue Male?’

‘Is it porn?’

‘No.’

‘It sounds like gay porn.’

‘Why would I be watching gay porn?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe you’re thinking of switching teams.’

‘I’m not even sure how you got on that team. You certainly weren’t picked first.’

‘Fuck you again, and your team.’

‘Tell Louis to go find Rogue Male. I think he’ll like it.’

‘Okay.’ His voice grew slightly fainter as he turned away from the phone. ‘Hey, Louis, Parker says you need to go find some rogue male.’

I caught a muffed reply.

‘He says he’s too old.’

‘Rogue Male, starring Peter O’Toole.’

‘Tool?’ said Angel. ‘That’s the guy’s name? Man, that’s gotta be porn …’

I hung up. Even ‘hung’ sounded mildly dirty after the conversation I’d just had. I made some coffee and went outside to drink it while I watched the moon shine on the marshes. Clouds crossed its face, changing the light, chasing shadows. I listened. Sometimes I wished for them to come, the lost daughter and the woman who walked with her, but I had no sense of them that night. Perhaps it was for the best. Blood flowed when they came.

But they would return in the end. They always did.

34

Morland told the board what he knew of the detective. He spoke of his history, and the deaths of his wife and child so many years earlier. He told them of some of the cases in which the detective had been involved, the ones that had come to public notice, but he also informed them of the rumors that circulated about other investigations, secret investigations. It was a delicate line that Morland was walking: he wanted them to understand the threat that the detective posed, but he did not want them to feel concerned enough to act rashly. Morland was certain that Hayley already knew most of what he had to say. His performance was for the benefit of the rest of the board, and Warraner too.

‘You say that he has crossed paths with the Believers?’ said Souleby.

There was a rustle of disapproval from the others. The board of selectmen had been in existence in Maine for longer than the sect known as the Believers, and it regarded them with a mixture of unease and distaste. The Believers’ search for their brethren, for lost angels like themselves, was of no concern to the citizens of Prosperous. On the other hand, neither did the town wish to attract the attentions of others like the Believers, or those in whose shadows the Believers toiled. The Believers were only one element of a larger conspiracy, one that was slowly encroaching upon the state of Maine. The board wanted no part of it, although unofficial channels of communication with certain interested parties were kept open through Thomas Souleby, who retained membership of various clubs in Boston, and moved easily in such circles.

‘He has,’ said Morland. ‘All I’ve heard are whispers, but it’s safe to say that they regretted the encounters more than he did.’

Old Kinley Nowell spoke up. He had to remove the mask from his face to do so, and each word sounded like a desperate effort for him. Morland thought that he already looked like a corpse. His skin was pale and waxen, and he stank of mortality and the medicines that were being used to stave it off.

‘Why has the detective not been killed before now?’

‘Some have tried,’ said Morland. ‘And failed.’

‘I’m not talking of thugs and criminals,’ said Nowell. He put his mask to his face and drew two deep breaths before resuming. ‘I’m not even speaking of the Believers. There are others in the background, and they do not fail. They’ve been killing for as long as there were men to kill. Cain’s blood runs in their veins.’

The Backers: that was how Morland had heard them described. Men and women with great wealth and power, like the board of selectmen writ large. Souleby’s people.

‘If he is alive,’ said Souleby, as if on cue, ‘then it’s because they want him alive.’

‘But why?’ said Nowell. ‘He is clearly a threat to them, if not now then in the future. It makes no sense for them to let him live.’

Conyer looked to Warraner for the solution, not Souleby. It was, in her view, a theological issue.

‘Pastor, would you care to offer a possible answer to this conundrum?’

Warraner might have been arrogant and conniving, thought Morland, but he wasn’t a fool. He gave himself almost a full minute before he replied.

‘They’re afraid to kill what they don’t understand,’ he said, finally. ‘What do they want? They wish to find their buried god and release him, and they feel themselves to be closer to that end than they have ever been before. The detective may be an obstacle, or it may be that he has a part to play in that search. For now, they do not understand his nature, and they are afraid to move against him for fear that, by doing so, they may ultimately harm their cause. I have listened to what Chief Morland has to say, and I confess that I may have underestimated the detective.’

This surprised Morland. Warraner rarely admitted weakness, especially not in front of Hayley and the board. It caught Morland off guard, so that he was unprepared when the knife was unsheathed and used upon him.

‘That said,’ Warraner continued, ‘Chief Morland underestimated him as well, and should not have brought him to the church. The detective should have been kept far away from it, and from me. I was forced into a situation where I had to answer questions, and I dealt with them as best I could, under the circumstances.’

Liar, Morland wanted to say. I saw you preening. You fool: I will remember this.

‘Chief?’ said Hayley. ‘Is this true?’

She was amused. Morland could see it. She enjoyed watching her pets snap at each other. He felt her willing him to grow angry. The small humiliations that she had aimed at him earlier had not been enough to make him lose his temper. It might be that she already had someone else in mind to succeed him, but Morland did not believe she had thought so far ahead. She knew only that he was beginning to doubt her, and she wished to retain her position. If she had to sacrifice him to survive, then she would.

But Morland said only ‘I did what I thought was best,’ and watched with some small satisfaction as disappointment clouded the old woman’s face.

Souleby, ever the diplomat, chose that moment to intervene.

‘Throwing blame around is not going to help us,’ he said. ‘Chief Morland, the question is this: will the detective give up?’

‘No, but—’

Morland thought hard about how he was going to phrase his next words.

‘Go on,’ said Souleby.

‘He has no evidence, no clues. He has only his suspicions, and they are not enough.’

‘Then why did he return to the town a second time?’

‘Because he is taunting us. In the absence of evidence, he wants us to act. He wants us to move against him. By acting, we will confirm his suspicions, and then he will respond with violence. He is not just the bait, but the hook as well.’

‘Only if he lives,’ said Nowell, filled with malice as the end neared, as though he were intent on expending all his viciousness before he passed on.

‘He has friends,’ said Morland. ‘They would not allow any action against him to go unpunished.’

‘They can die too.’

‘I don’t think you understand—’

‘Don’t!’ cawed Nowell. He raised a withered finger, like an ancient crow clawing against the darkness. ‘I understand better than you think. You’re afraid. You’re a coward. You—’

The rest of his accusations were lost in a ft of gasps and coughs. It was left to Luke Joblin to secure the mask to Nowell’s face and leave it in place. For now the old man’s contributions to the meeting, however worthless they might be, were over. Why don’t you just die, Morland wished — die and free up a place for someone with an ounce of sense and reason left to him. Nowell eyed him over the mask, reading his thoughts.

‘You were saying?’ said Souleby.

Morland looked away from Nowell.

‘The detective has killed,’ he said. ‘He has victims who are known, and I guarantee you there are just as many who are unknown. A man who has acted in this way and is not behind bars, or has not been deprived of his livelihood and his weapons, is protected. Yes, some on the side of law would be glad to see him removed from the equation, but even they would be forced to act if he was harmed.’

There was quiet among the members of the board, broken only by the tortured breathing of Kinley Nowell.

‘Could we not approach the Backers and seek their advice?’ said Luke Joblin. ‘They might even work with us.’

‘We don’t ask the permission of others to act,’ said Hayley Conyer. ‘Their interests and ours are not the same, not even in this case. If they are unwilling to move against him on their own behalf, they will not do so on ours.’

‘And there is the matter of another girl,’ said Calder Ayton. They were his first words since the meeting had begun. Morland had almost forgotten that he was present.

‘What do you mean, Calder?’ asked Conyer. She, too, seemed surprised to hear him speak at all.

‘I mean that we have received a warning, or four warnings, depending upon one’s view of the current dilemma,’ said Calder. ‘The people are worried. Whatever the threat this detective poses, another girl has to be found and delivered — and quickly. Can we take the chance of having this man nosing around at such a delicate moment in the town’s history?’

‘What news from the Dixons?’ Souleby asked Morland. ‘Has there been progress?’

‘Bryan is watching them,’ said Luke Joblin, answering for Morland. ‘He thinks they’re getting close to finding someone.’

But Morland had his own view of the situation.

‘Bryan tells me that he’s been out scouting with Harry but — and please don’t take this the wrong way, Luke — your son isn’t the sharpest tool in the box. My view is that the Dixons aren’t to be trusted. I think they’re leading Bryan on. We should have given the job of finding a girl to someone else.’

‘But Chief Morland, it was your suspicions that led us to test them with the hunt,’ said Conyer.

‘There might have been better ways to satisfy ourselves as to their loyalty,’ said Morland.

‘It’s done now,’ said Conyer. ‘Your regrets are a little late.’

Again, it was Thomas Souleby who intervened.

‘But if they are leading Bryan on — and, by extension, the rest of us — they are doing so to what end?’ he asked.

‘I think they’re planning to run,’ said Morland.

His opinion went down badly. People did leave Prosperous. After all it wasn’t a fortress, or a prison, and a larger world existed beyond its boundaries. But those that left were secure in their loyalty to the town, and many of them eventually returned. Running was another matter, for it brought with it the possibility of disclosure.

‘There is a precedent for it on Erin’s side,’ said Ayton.

‘We don’t blame the children for the sins of the adults,’ said Conyer. ‘And her mother more than made up for the failings of the father.’

She returned her attention to Morland.

‘Have you taken steps?’ she said.

‘I have.’

‘Could you be more precise?’

‘I could, but I would prefer not to,’ said Morland. ‘After all, I may be wrong about them. I hope that I am.’

‘But the detective,’ Ayton insisted. ‘What of the detective?’

‘We’ll vote on it,’ said Conyer. ‘Reverend, do you have anything to add before we start?’

‘Only that I believe the detective is dangerous,’ said Warraner.

A nicely ambiguous reply, thought Morland. Whatever they decide, and whatever the consequences, no blame will fall on your head.

‘And you, Chief?’

‘You know my views,’ said Morland. ‘If you attack him and succeed in killing him, you will bring more trouble down on this town. If you attack him and fail to kill him, the consequences may be even worse. We should not move against him. Eventually he’ll grow weary, or another case will distract him.’

But Morland wondered if he was engaged in wishful thinking. Yes, the detective might leave them in peace for a while, but he would not forget. It was not in him to do so. He would return, and keep returning. The best for which they could hope would be that his visits might bring no reward and, in time, someone else might do them the favor of killing him.

Around him, the board meditated on what it had heard. He could not tell if his words had made any impact.

‘Thank you both for your contributions,’ said Conyer. ‘Would you mind waiting outside while we make our decision?’

The two men rose and left. Warraner wrapped his coat tightly around himself, thrust his hands into his pockets and took a seat on the porch. It was strange, but Morland had the sense that something of his own words of warning had penetrated Warraner’s carapace of blind faith and deluded self-belief. He could see it in the pastor’s face. Warraner lived to protect his church. For him, the town’s continued safety and good fortune were merely a by-product of his own mission. It was one thing for him to assent to the killing of a homeless man, one whom Warraner believed would not be mourned or missed; it was another entirely to involve himself in an attack on a dangerous individual which could well have negative consequences whether they succeeded in killing him or not.

‘Bait,’ said Warraner.

‘What?’ said Morland.

‘You said that the detective was prepared to use himself as bait. Why would a man put himself in that kind of danger, especially for someone he didn’t even know?’

‘A sense of justice, maybe. The world beyond the limits of our town isn’t as entirely corrupt as we might like to believe. After all, look at how corrupt we ourselves have become.’

‘We do what is necessary.’

‘Not for much longer.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Our ways can’t continue in the modern world. In the end, we’ll be found out.’

‘So you believe that we should stop?’

‘We can stop, or we can be stopped. The former might be less painful than the latter.’

‘And the old god?’

‘What is a god without believers? It is just a myth waiting to be forgotten.’

Warraner gaped. To him, this was blasphemy.

‘But what will become of the town?’

‘The town will survive. It’ll just be a town like any other.’

Bile rose up and caught in Morland’s throat, the acidity bringing tears to his eyes. How could Prosperous ever be a normal town? The blood had permeated it too thoroughly. It was mired in redness and sin.

‘No,’ said Warraner, ‘it can never be that.’

And Morland was sure that Warraner had missed the point.

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ said Warraner. ‘Some vague concept of justice isn’t sufficient to explain this man’s actions.’

‘Justice is never vague,’ said Morland. ‘The law only makes it seem that way. And as for this man …’

Morland been thinking about the detective a lot. In reading up on him he believed that, on some level, he almost understood him. When Morland spoke again, he was talking as much to himself as to Warraner.

‘I don’t think he’s afraid of dying,’ said Morland. ‘He doesn’t seek out death, and he’ll fight it until the end, but he’s not frightened of it. I think he’s in pain. He’s been damaged by loss, and it’s left him in agony. When death does come for him, it’ll end his pain. Until then, nothing that anyone can visit on him will be worse than what he’s already experienced. That makes him a formidable enemy, because he can endure more than his opponents. And the things he’s done, the risks he’s taken for others, they’ve won him allies, and some of them may be even more dangerous than he is, because they don’t share his morals. If he has a weakness, it’s that he’s a moral being. Where possible, he’ll do the right thing, the just thing, and if he does wrong, he’ll bear the guilt of it.’

‘You respect him.’

‘You’d have to be a fool not to.’

‘But you sound almost as though you like him.’

‘Yes,’ said Morland. ‘It may be that I like him even better than I like myself.’

He stepped down into Hayley Conyer’s garden and lit a cigarette. She wouldn’t approve, but he didn’t care. His position had been made clear to him: the inconsequentiality of his role in the town’s affairs, the hollowness of his authority. After all this was over, he would have to resign. If he was fortunate, the board would accept his resignation and allow him to take his family and leave. Otherwise it could force him to stay on, a pitiful figure only good for issuing parking violations and speeding tickets.

Although it could do worse.

He felt the end of things approaching, had felt it ever since the shooting of the girl. The arrival of the detective had merely compounded what Morland already knew. Even with the coming of spring there would be no rebirth, not for Prosperous. Perhaps that might even be for the best.

He took a long drag on his cigarette, and thought of wolves.

The wolf smelled the meat. The wind carried it to him. He had been resting in the shelter of a fallen tree, sleeping fitfully and feverishly through his pain, when the scent of blood came. The wolf had only nibbled at the dead deer he had been permitted to take. The meat had tasted wrong, infected by the manner of the deer’s dying.

The wolf rose slowly. He was always stiff when he first stood, even if he had been lying down for only a short time, but the promise of fresh meat was enough to spur him on.

With the moon full in the sky, and blood in the air, he limped south.

35

It was Thomas Souleby who summoned Morland and Warraner back inside. By then Morland had finished one cigarette and started another. The curtains at the living room window moved, and he glimpsed a face peering out at him. It might have been Hayley Conyer, but he couldn’t be sure. He stamped out the remains of the second cigarette on the gravel, and considered leaving it there for the old bitch to find in the morning, but thought better of it. There was no percentage in pettiness, even if it did offer a passing sense of satisfaction.

Souleby sniffed at him as he reentered the house.

‘She’ll smell it on you,’ said Souleby. ‘It’s one thing smoking a sly one, another bringing the evidence into her home.’

Morland didn’t look at him. He didn’t want Souleby to see his desperation, his grim sense that it was important, above all things, to let the detective be. The more he had paced and smoked, the more he dreaded what was to come.

‘She’ll smell worse on me once all this is over,’ said Morland. ‘This whole town is going to stink of blood.’

And Souleby did not try to deny it.

Morland knew what they had decided as soon as he entered the dining room. He supposed he had known even before he left them to their deliberations, but the vindictively triumphant expression on the portion of Kinley Nowell’s face not obscured by his mask removed any lingering doubt.

Now that her victory was assured, Hayley Conyer was content to soften her attitude toward her chief of police — because that, of course, was how she thought of him: ‘her’ chief of police, ‘her’ board, ‘her’ town. She waited for him to take his seat, and smiled in the manner of a prospective employer preparing to break bad news to an unsuccessful job candidate.

‘We’ve decided to deal with the detective,’ she said.

‘There will be repercussions,’ said Morland.

‘We have taken that possibility into account. The finger of blame will point … elsewhere.’

Morland noticed that Conyer now had a sheet of paper in front of her. While he watched, she took a pen from the pocket of her cardigan and drew a symbol on the page. Wordlessly, she passed it to him.

Morland didn’t touch the sheet. He didn’t have to, for he could see what she had drawn clearly enough, but neither did he want to touch it. Conyer had drawn a trident. It was the symbol of the Believers. An already difficult and dangerous situation was about to become potentially disastrous.

‘They will know that it was us,’ said Morland.

‘He’s right,’ said Souleby. He looked genuinely frightened. Clearly this element of Conyer’s plan had not been discussed. ‘It goes beyond the bounds of common sense.’

‘They won’t know if we are careful,’ said Conyer. ‘And we are always careful.’

That was a lie, but Morland did not call her on it. If they had been truly careful, then the detective would never have set foot in their town.

Nowell pulled off his mask.

‘And what matter if it becomes known that it was us?’ he rasped. ‘The Believers were not many to begin with, and the detective has taken care of the rest.’

‘We don’t know that for sure,’ said Morland. ‘There may be others. They hide. It’s in their nature. And then there is the matter of the Backers. They have always maintained links with the Believers. There may even be Believers among them. They could have acted against the detective, but they chose not to. Making the decision to remove him for them may not be appreciated.’

‘No blame will accrue to us,’ Conyer insisted.

‘You can’t be certain,’ said Morland.

He felt a migraine coming on. He rubbed at his temples, as though that might somehow ward off the pain and nausea. He was weary. He should have just kept his mouth shut, because this was a pointless discussion. The battle was lost, and soon the war would be as well.

‘You’re right: I can’t be certain,’ said Conyer.

Morland glanced up in surprise.

‘But they can,’ she concluded.

Morland heard movement behind him, and two shadows fell across the table.

It had all been a farce: the meeting, the arguments, the final private discussion. The decision had been made long before. These two would not have been present otherwise. They did not travel unless killing was imminent.

‘You don’t have to worry about the detective any longer, Chief Morland,’ said Conyer. ‘Our friends will take care of him for us. For now, though, the Dixons remain your responsibility. I want them watched. If they try to run, I want them stopped.

‘And if they get beyond the town limits,’ she added, ‘I want them killed.’

They drifted from the meeting. Nobody spoke. Morland went outside to smoke another cigarette, and watched them go. He didn’t care what Hayley Conyer thought of his nicotine addiction. It was the least of his worries. Anyway, his days as chief of police were now definitely numbered. She had emasculated him back in the living room, just as assuredly as if she had used on him the blade with which she had threatened Bryan Joblin. It was then appropriate somehow that it was only Luke Joblin who lingered after most of the others had departed, Souleby leaving alone, Ayton taking responsibility for the fading vileness of Kinley Nowell.

Morland offered Joblin a smoke, and he accepted.

‘I knew you hadn’t really given up.’

Joblin had spent the last couple of months trumpeting the fact that he’d kicked cigarettes, although he boasted loudest when his wife was near.

‘Barbara thinks that I have,’ said Joblin. ‘I don’t know which is costing me more, the cigarettes or the breath mints.’

Together they watched the rear light of the last car disappear as the vehicle turned on to the road and headed toward town.

‘Something on your mind, Luke?’ said Morland.

‘I’m worried,’ said Joblin.

‘About Bryan?’

‘Jesus, no. You’re right: he’s not bright, but he can take care of himself. If you need help with the Dixons, you can rely on him. He’s a stand-up young man.’

Bryan Joblin wasn’t a stand-up anything. He was borderline psychotic, with a deep wellspring of viciousness and sexual deviancy from which to draw, but Morland kept that opinion to himself. He had few friends on the board, and he didn’t need to alienate Luke Joblin too.

Joblin took a long drag on the cigarette. ‘No, it’s the Backers. I don’t understand why we didn’t approach them. We don’t want to cross them. They could crush us. We should have spoken to them before we acted, but Hayley shot down that idea as soon as it was raised. Why?’

‘Because we worship different gods,’ said Hayley Conyer from behind them.

Morland hadn’t even heard her approach. One second they were alone, and the next she had materialized at their backs.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Joblin, although it wasn’t clear if he was apologising for his criticism of the decision, or the fact that he’d been caught smoking in Conyer’s yard, or both. He looked for somewhere to put out the cigarette. He didn’t want to drop it. Finally he settled for lifting the sole of his left shoe and stubbing the butt out on the leather. It left a scorch mark. He would have to hide the shoe until he found time to get new soles made. His wife would wonder what a reformed smoker was doing stubbing out cigarettes on $300 shoes. Morland took the butt from him and put it in his now empty pack.

‘Don’t be,’ said Conyer. ‘It is at the root of all that we do here, all that we’re trying to protect. We are not like the Backers, and their god is not like our god. Theirs is a wicked god, an angry god.’

‘And ours?’ said Morland.

He saw Warraner standing on the porch steps, watching them. Behind him, two figures waited in the hallway.

Hayley Conyer laid a gentle hand on Morland’s forearm. It was a peculiarly intimate gesture, equal parts consolation, reassurance and, he recognized, regretful dismissal.

‘Ours,’ she said, ‘is merely hungry.’

The wolf had found the meat: a slab of bloody venison haunch. He circled it, still wary despite his need, but at last he could no longer resist.

He took two steps forward, and the trap snapped shut upon his paw.

36

Founded in 1794, and located on the shores of Casco Bay where the Androscoggin River flowed into the sea, Bowdoin College was routinely ranked among the top colleges in America. Its list of alumni included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the explorer Robert Peary, and the sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Unfortunately, it did not appear to include Prosperous’s own Pastor Warraner. An early morning call to the Office of Alumni Relations produced no record of a Michael Warraner among its former students, and a similar inquiry left at Bangor Theological Seminary also drew a blank.

While I was still sucking on a pencil and trying to figure out why Warraner would bother to lie about something that could so easily be checked, I received a follow-up call from a secretary at Bowdoin. Apparently one of their associate professors was interested in meeting with me. He was free that afternoon, in fact, if I could find the time to ‘pop up’ to the college.

‘Did he really say that?’ I said.

‘Say what?’ said the secretary.

‘“Pop up”?’

‘That’s how he speaks. He’s from England.’

‘Ah.’

‘Yes. Ah.’

‘Please tell him that I’d be delighted to pop up.’

Somewhere in Bowdoin’s Faculty of Religion, the name ‘Warraner’ had set a small alarm bell ringing.

Professor Ian Williamson looked exactly how I always believed most academics should look, but rarely did: slightly disheveled — but not so much as to raise too many concerns about his mental well-being — and fond of waistcoats and varieties of tweed, although in his case the potential fustiness of the cloth was offset by his choice of Converse sneakers as footwear. He was youthful, bearded, and cheerfully distracted, as though at any moment he might catch sight of an interesting cloud and run after it in order to lasso it with a piece of string.

As it turned out, Williamson was a decade older than I was, so clearly the academic life agreed with him. He’d been at Bowdoin for more than twenty years although he still spoke like a weekend visitor to Downton Abbey. Frankly, if Professor Williamson’s accent couldn’t get him laid in Maine, then nothing could. He specialized in Religious Tolerance and Comparative Mystical Traditions, and his office in the lovely old faculty building was filled equally with books and assorted religious bric-a-brac, so that it was somewhere between a library and a market stall.

He offered me coffee from his own personal Nespresso machine, put his feet up on a pile of books and asked me why I was interested in Michael Warraner.

‘I could ask you the same thing,’ I said, ‘given that he doesn’t appear to be one of your alumni.’

‘Ah, fencing,’ said Williamson. ‘Right. I see. Excellent.’

‘What?’ I said, not seeing.

‘Fencing.’ He made a parrying gesture with an imaginary foil, and accompanied it with a swishing noise, just to make certain that I got the picture. Which I didn’t.

‘Sorry, are you challenging me to a duel?’

‘What? No. I meant verbal fencing — the old thrust and parry. Philip Marlowe and all that. I say, you say. You know, that kind of thing.’

He stared animatedly at me. I stared less animatedly back.

‘Or perhaps not,’ said Williamson, and a little of his enthusiasm seemed to leach away. I felt as though I’d kicked a puppy.

‘Let’s say that I’m curious about Prosperous,’ I said. ‘And I’m curious about Pastor Warraner. He seems like a strange man in an odd town.’

Williamson sipped his Nespresso. Behind him on his otherwise empty desk I noticed a trio of books with their spines facing toward me. All related to the Green Man. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that they were displayed so prominently.

‘Michael Warraner entered Bowdoin as a liberal arts student when he was in his mid-twenties,’ said Williamson. ‘From the start, it was clear that his focus was on religious studies. It’s a demanding regimen, and tends only to attract students with a real passion for the subject. A major consists of nine courses, a minor five, with two required: Introduction to the Study of Religion, or Rel. 101, and Theories about Religion. The rest are comprised of various options from Asian Religions, Islam and Post-Biblical Judaism, Christianity and Gender, and Bible and Comparative Studies. Clear enough?’

‘Absolutely.’

Williamson shifted in his chair.

‘Warraner was not the most able of students,’ he said. ‘In fact, his admission hung in the balance for some time, but he had influential supporters.’

‘From Prosperous?’

‘And elsewhere. It was clear that efforts were being made on his behalf. On the other hand, we were aware that space existed in courses for dedicated students, and …’

‘Yes?’

‘There was a certain amount of curiosity among faculty members, myself included, about Prosperous. As you’re no doubt aware, it is a town founded by a secretive religious sect, the history and ultimate fate of which remain nebulous to this day. By admitting Warraner, it seemed that we might be in a position to learn more about the town and its history.’

‘And how did that work out?’

‘We got what you might refer to as “the party line”. Warraner gave us a certain amount of information, and we were also permitted to study the church and its environs, but we really found out very little about Prosperous and the Family of Love that we didn’t already know. Furthermore, Warraner’s academic limitations were exposed at a very early stage. He struggled to scrape up credits and D-minus grades. Eventually, we were forced to let him go.

‘Pastor Warraner, as he subsequently began to style himself, was later readmitted to this college as a “special student”. Special students are people from the local community who, for whatever reason, desire to resume their education on a part-time basis. While they’re assessed on their academic record, non-academic achievements are also considered. They pay course fees, and no financial aid is available to them. Their work is graded, and they receive a college transcript, but they are non-degree candidates, and therefore cannot graduate. Pastor Warraner took ten such courses over a period of about five years, some more successfully and enthusiastically than others. He was surprisingly open to issues of Christianity and gender, less so to Asian religions, Islam, and Judaism. Overall, my impression was that Warraner desired the imprimatur of a college education. He wanted to say that he had been to college, and that was all. You say that he also claims to have a Masters from Bangor?’

I tried to remember Warraner’s precise words. ‘I believe he told me that he’d majored in religion at Bowdoin, and studied as a Master of Divinity at Bangor Theological Seminary.’

‘I suppose, if one were being generous-spirited enough, those statements might offer a certain latitude of interpretation, the latter more than the former. If you asked around, I bet you’d find that he approached Bangor at some point and was rebuffed, or tried to sit in unofficially on seminars. It would ft with that desire for affirmation and recognition.’

‘Any other impression that he may have left upon you?’

‘He was a fanatic.’

‘Doesn’t it come with the territory?’

‘Sometimes. Warraner, though, could rarely string together more than a couple of sentences without referring to “his” god.’

‘And what kind of god does he worship? I’ve met him, and I’ve seen his church, and I’m still not sure just what kind of pastor he is.’

‘Superficially, Warraner is a variety of austere Protestant. There’s a bit of the Baptist in him, a sprinkling of Methodism, but also a healthy dose of Pantheism. None of it is particularly deep, though. His religion, for want of a better explanation, is his church, the bricks and mortar of it. He worships a building, or what that building represents for him. You say that you’ve seen it?’

‘I got the grand tour.’

‘And what did you think?’

‘It’s a little light on crosses for my tastes.’

‘Catholic?’

‘Occasional.’

‘I was raised in the Church of England — Low, I should add — and even I found Warraner’s chapel positively austere.’

‘The carvings apart.’

‘Yes, they are interesting, aren’t they? Unusual here in the United States. Less so, perhaps, among the older churches of England and certain parts of Europe, although Warraner’s are quite distinctive. It’s a Familist church, of that there can be little doubt, but a Familist church of a particular type. This is not the element of the sect that fed into the Quakers or the Unitarians, infused with a spirit of peace and gentleness. It’s something harsher.’

‘And Warraner: is he still a Familist?’

Williamson finished his coffee. He seemed to be considering making another, then thought better of it. He put his cup down.

‘Yes, Mr Parker,’ he said. ‘I believe that not only is Warraner a Familist, but Prosperous remains a Familist community. To what end, I couldn’t say.’

‘And their god?’

‘Look again at those carvings inside the church, if you get the chance. My suspicion is that, somewhere along the line, the link between God — the Christian deity — and the rule of nature has become lost to Warraner and those who share his religious convictions. All that’s left is those carvings. For the people of Prosperous, they are the faces of their god.’

I stood to leave. As I did so, Williamson handed me the books from his desk.

‘I thought these might interest you,’ he said. ‘Just pop them in the post when you’re done with them.’

There he was again, ‘pop’-ing and putting things in the ‘post’. He caught me smiling.

‘Did I say something funny?’

‘I was just wondering how many dates you’d gotten in the United States because of that accent of yours.’

He grinned. ‘It did seem to make me very popular. I suspect I may even have married out of my league because of it.’

‘It’s the residual colonial admiration for the oppressor.’

‘Spoken like a history major.’

‘No, not me, but Warraner said something similar when I met him. He drew an analogy between detection and historical research.’

‘But aren’t all investigations historical?’ said Williamson. ‘The crime is committed in the past, and the investigation conducted in the present. It’s a form of excavation.’

‘Do you feel a paper coming on?’

‘You know, I might do, at that.’

I flicked through the first of the books. It was heavily illustrated with images and drawings.

‘Pictures, too,’ I said.

‘If you color any of them in, we may be forced to have a long talk.’

‘One last question?’ I said.

‘Go right ahead.’

‘Why are so many of these faces threatening or hostile?’

‘Fear,’ said Williamson. ‘Fear of the power of nature, fear of old gods. And perhaps, too, the early Church found in such depictions a literal representation of a metaphorical concept: the radix malorum, the “root of all evil”. Hell, if you choose to believe in it, is beneath our feet, not above our heads. You’d have to dig deep to find it, but it wasn’t difficult for Christians with ancient links to the land to conceive of the influence of the malefcent in terms of twisted roots and clinging ivy, of faces formed by something buried far beneath the earth trying to create a physical representation of itself from whatever materials were at hand. But the god depicted on the walls of the Prosperous chapel has no connection with Christianity. It’s older, and beyond conceptions of good and evil. It simply is.’

‘You sound almost as though you believe in it yourself.’

‘Perhaps I just sometimes find it easier to understand how someone could conceive and worship a god of tree and leaf, a god that formed as the land around it formed, than a bearded figure living on a cloud in the sky.’

‘Does that count as a crisis of faith?’

He grinned again. ‘No, only a natural consequence of the study of every shade of religious belief, and of trying to teach the importance of being tolerant in a world in which tolerance is associated with weakness or heresy.’

‘Let me guess: you and Michael Warraner didn’t exactly see eye to eye on that subject.’

‘No. He wasn’t hostile toward other forms of religious belief, merely uninterested.’

‘When I see him again, should I pass on your good wishes?’ I said.

‘I’d prefer if you didn’t,’ said Williamson.

‘Frightened?’

‘Wary. You should be too.’ He was no longer distracted, no longer smiling. ‘One of the challenges I like to set my students for their first class is a word-association game. I ask them to list all of the words, positive or negative, that come to mind when they think of god. Sometimes I get pages of words, at other times a handful, but Warraner was the only student who ever wrote just one solitary word. That word was “hunger”. He and those like him worship a hungry god, Mr ‘Parker, and no good can ever come of worshipping a deity that hungers. No good at all.’

37

I drove back to Scarborough, but stopped off at Bull Moose Music’s massive warehouse store on Payne Road and browsed the racks for an hour. It was part pleasure, part displacement activity. I felt that I’d reached a dead end as far as Prosperous was concerned, and my talk with Williamson had only served to confirm my own suspicions about Prosperous without opening any new avenues of inquiry.

I was no closer to finding Annie Broyer than I had been when I started out, and I was beginning to wonder if I might not have been mistaken in assuming that everything I had learned over the past week was useful or even true: an elderly couple, a blue car, a passing reference to a job in Prosperous made to a woman with the mental capacities of a child, and a homeless man’s obsession with the carvings on an ancient church. Every piece of information I had gathered was open to question, and it was entirely possible that Annie Broyer might turn up in Boston, or Chicago, or Seattle over the days and weeks to come. Even Lucas Morland’s passing reference to Annie as an ‘ex-junkie’ could be explained away if he had made a simple phone call to Portland or Bangor after my first visit to the town. In the eyes of some, I had already violated the primary commandment of an investigation: don’t assume. Don’t create patterns where there are none. Don’t conceive of a narrative and then force the evidence to ft it. On the other hand, all investigations involve a degree of speculation, the capacity to bear witness to a crime and imagine a chain of events that might have caused that crime to be committed. An investigation was not simply a matter of historical research, as Warraner had suggested. It was an act of faith both in one’s own capacities and in the possibility of justice in a world that had made justice subservient to the rule of law.

But I had no crime to investigate. I had only a homeless man with a history of depression who might well have hanged himself in a ft of desperation, and a missing girl with a history of narcotic and alcohol abuse who had drifted for most of her life. Was I fixating on Prosperous because its citizens were wealthy and privileged while Jude and his daughter were poor and suffering? Was I marking Warraner and Morland for simply doing what a pastor and a policeman should do, which was to protect their people?

And yet …

Michael Warraner wasn’t quite a fraud, but something potentially much more dangerous: a frustrated man with a set of religious or spiritual principles that reinforced his inflated opinion of himself and his place in the world. It was also clear from the way Morland reacted to my unauthorized visit to the church that Warraner had a position of authority in the town, which meant there were influential individuals who either shared his beliefs or didn’t entirely discount them.

What all that had to do — if anything — with the disappearance of Annie and the death of her father, I did not know. Prosperous just felt wrong to me, and I’d grown to trust my feelings. Then again, Angel and Louis might have asked if I ever felt right about anything, and if I’d learned to trust those feelings too. I could have countered by replying that nobody ever asked for my help when there wasn’t a problem, but I then found myself growing annoyed that I was having arguments — and more to the point, losing them — with Angel and Louis even when they weren’t actually present.

I headed into Portland, where I caught a movie at the Nickelodeon and then ate a burger at The Little Tap House on High Street. The building had once housed Katahdin before that restaurant’s move to Forest Avenue. A tapas place had briefly occupied the location in the aftermath of the move, and now The Little Tap House had carved out a niche for itself as a neighborhood bar with good food. I drank a soda and tried to read a little of the books with which Williamson had entrusted me. They traced the development of foliate sculpture from at least the first century AD, through its adoption by the early Church, and on to its proliferation throughout Western Europe. Some of the illustrations were more graphic than others. My server seemed particularly concerned at a capital in the cathedral at Autun which depicted a man disappearing into the jaws of a leafed face. Many of the carvings, such as a thirteenth-century mask from Bamberg cathedral, had a kind of beauty to them, which rendered them even more sinister.

I did find a source for Williamson’s Latin reference: the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus, in which Satan was described as radix omnium malorum, root of all evil, alongside a picture of a tricephalos, a three-faced demon from the façade of San Pietro in Tuscany, Italy. Coiling tendrils pushed through the mouths of the demons, extrusions from the original root, and the text described them as ‘blood-suckers’ in the context of another fifteenth-century head from Melrose Abbey. Here, too, there was a reference to the relationship between the human and plant elements in the masks as essentially hostile or parasitic, although the general consensus seemed to be that they represented a type of symbiosis, a long-term interaction and mutually benefcial relationship between two species. Man received the benefits of nature’s fruits, or the rebirth wrought by the changing of the seasons, and in return—

Well, that last part wasn’t so clear, although the cathedral at Autun with its images of consumption offered one possible realm of speculation.

I closed the books, paid my tab, and left the bar. The weather had warmed up a little since the previous night — not by much, but the weathermen were already predicting that the worst of winter was now behind us for another year, prematurely, I suspected. The sky was clear as I drove home, and the saltwater marshes smelled fresh and clean as I parked outside my house. I walked around to the back door to enter by the kitchen. It had become a habit with me ever since Rachel and Sam moved out. Entering by the front door and seeing the empty hallway was somehow more depressing than going in through the kitchen, which was where I spent most of my time anyway. I opened the door and reached out to key in the alarm code when my dead daughter spoke to me from behind. She said just one word

and it contained within it the prospect of living and the hope of dying, of endings and beginnings, of love and loss and peace and rage, all wrapped up in two whispered syllables.

I was already diving to the floor when the first of the shotgun blasts hit me, the pellets tearing the skin from my back, the hair from my skull, the flesh from my bones. I burned. I found the strength to kick at the door, knocking it closed, but the second blast blew away the lock and most of the glass, showering me with slivers and splinters. The floor was slick with my blood as I tried to rise, my feet sliding in the redness. I somehow stumbled into the hallway, and now pistol shots were sounding from behind me. I felt the force of their impact in my back, and my shoulder, and my side. I went down again, but as the pain took hold I found it in myself to twist my body to the left. I screamed as I landed on the floor, but I was now halfway across the doorway of my office. My right hand found the corner of the wall, and I dragged myself inside. Again I kicked a door closed, and managed to seat myself upright against my desk. I drew my gun. I raised it and fired a round. I didn’t know what it hit. I didn’t care. It was enough that it was in my hand.

‘Come on,’ I said, and blood and spittle sprayed from my lips. ‘Come on!‘ I said, louder now, and I did not know if I was speaking to myself, or to whatever or whomever lay beyond the door.

‘Come on,’ I said a third time, to the approaching darkness, to the figures that beckoned from within it, to the peace that comes at last to every dead thing. Above it all sounded the wailing of the alarm.

I fired again, and two bullets tore through the door in response. One missed.

The other did not.

‘Come—’

The wolf looked up at the men who surrounded him. He had tried to gnaw his trapped paw off, but had not succeeded. Now he was weary. The time had come. He snarled at the men, the fur around his mouth wet with his own blood. A sharp bitter scent troubled his senses, the smell of noise and dying.

He barked, the final sound that he would ever make. In it was both defiance and a kind of resignation. He was calling on death to come for him.

The gun fired, and the wolf was gone.

‘Hold him! Hold him!’

Light. No light.

‘Jesus, I can’t even get a grip on him, there’s so much blood. Okay, on three. One, two—’

‘Ah, for Christ’s sake.’

‘His back is just meat. What the fuck happened here?’

Light. No light.

Light. No light. Light.

‘Can you hear me?’

Yes. No. I saw the paramedic. I saw Sharon Macy behind him. I tried to speak, but no words would come.

‘Mr Parker, can you hear me?’

Light. Stronger now. ‘You stay with me, you hear me? You stay!’

Up. Move. Ceiling. Lights.

Stars.

Darkness.

Gone.

38

The house, larger than most of its neighbors, lay on a nondescript road midway between Rehoboth Beach and Dewey Beach on the Delaware coast. Most of the surrounding homes were vacation rentals or summer places used by Washingtonians with a little money to spend. Transience was the norm here. True, a handful of year-round residents lived on the road, but they tended to mind their own business, and left others to mind theirs.

A significant number of the homes in the area were owned by gay couples, for Rehoboth had long been one of the east coast’s most gay-friendly resorts. This was perhaps surprising given that Rehoboth was founded in 1873 by the Reverend Robert W. Todd as a Methodist meeting camp. Reverend Todd’s vision of a religious community was short-lived, though, and by the 1940s the gay Hollywood crowd were carousing at the DuPont property along the ocean. Then came the Pink Pony Bar in the 1950s, and the Pleasant Inn and the Nomad Village in the 1960s, all known to be welcoming to DC’s more closeted citizens. In the 1990s, some of the town’s less tolerant residents made a vain attempt to restore what were loosely termed ‘family values’, in some cases by beating the shit out of anyone who even looked gay, but negotiations among representatives of the gay community, homeowners and the police largely put an end to the unrest, and Rehoboth settled gently into its role not only as the ‘Nation’s Summer Capital’, but the ‘Nation’s Gay Summer Capital’.

The big house was rarely occupied, even by the standards of vacation homes. Neither was its care entrusted to any of the local realtors, many of whom boosted their income by acting as agents for summer rentals, and taking care of houses over the winter months. Nevertheless, it was well kept, and local rumor suggested that it had either been bought as part of some complicated tax write-off, in which case the fewer questions asked about it the better, especially in an area swarming with Washingtonians who might or might not have connections with the IRS; or as a corporate investment, for its ownership apparently lay with a shelf company, itself a part of another shelf company, on and on like a series of seemingly infinite matryoshka dolls.

And now, with the final hold of winter upon the land, and the beaches largely empty and devoid of life, the house at last was occupied. Two men, one young and one old, had been noticed entering and leaving, although they did not socialize in any of the local bars and restaurants, and the older gentleman appeared somewhat frail.

But two men, of whatever vintages, living together was not so unusual in Rehoboth Beach, and so their presence went largely unremarked.

Inside the house, the Collector brooded by a window. There was no view of the sea here, only a line of trees that protected the house and its occupants from the curiosity of others. The furnishings were largely antiques, some acquired through clever investment but most through bequests, and occasionally by means of outright theft. The Collector viewed such acquisitions as little more than his due. After all, the previous owners had no more use for them, the previous owners being, without exception, dead.

The Collector heard the sound of the lawyer Eldritch coughing and moving about in the next room. Eldritch slept more since the explosion that had almost cost him his life, and which had destroyed the records of crimes both public and private painstakingly assembled over decades of investigation. Even had the old man not been so frail, the loss of the files would have seriously curtailed the Collector’s activities. He had not realized just how much he relied upon Eldritch’s knowledge and complicity in order to hunt and prey. Without Eldritch, the Collector was reduced to the status of an onlooker, left to speculate on the sins of others without the evidence needed to damn them.

But in recent days, some of Eldritch’s old energy had returned, and he had begun the process of rebuilding his archive. His memory was astonishing in its recall, but his recent sufferings and losses had spurred him still harder to force it to relinquish its store of secrets, fueled by hatred and the desire for revenge. He had lost almost everything that mattered to him: a woman who had been both his consort and his accomplice, and a lifetime’s work of cataloging the mortal failings of men. All he had left now was the Collector, and he would be the weapon with which Eldritch avenged himself.

And so, where once the lawyer had been a check on the Collector’s urges, he now fed them. Each day brought the two men ever closer. It reminded the Collector that, on one level, they were still father and son, although the thing that lived inside the Collector was very old, and very far from human, and the Collector had largely forgotten his previous identity as the son of the ancient lawyer in the next room.

The house was one of the newest of the Collector’s property acquisitions, but also one of the best concealed. Curiously, he owed its existence to the detective, Parker. The Collector had arrived in Rehoboth as part of his exploration of the detective’s history, his attempt to understand Parker’s nature. It was an element of Parker’s past — a minor one, admittedly, but the Collector was nothing if not meticulous — and therefore worthy of examination. The house, modest yet handsome, drew the Collector. He was weary of sparsely furnished hideouts, of uncarpeted rooms filled only with mementos of the dead. He needed a place in which to rest, to contemplate, to plan, and so it was that, through Eldritch, he acquired the house. It remained one of the few in which he still felt secure, particularly since the detective and his friends had begun tracking him, seeking to punish him for the death of one of their own. It was to Delaware that the Collector had spirited the lawyer away once his wounds had healed sufficiently to enable him to travel, and now the Collector too was sequestered here. He had never known what it was to be hunted before; he had always been the hunter. They had come close to trapping him in Newark: the recurrent pain from the torn ligaments in his leg was a reminder of that. This situation could not continue. There was harvesting to be done.

Worse, when night came the Hollow Men gathered at his window. He had deprived them of life, and returned their souls to their maker. What was left of them lingered, drawn to him not only because they erroneously believed that it was he alone who had caused their suffering — the dead being as capable of self-delusion as the living — but because he could add to their number. That was their only comfort: that others might suffer as they did. But now they sensed his weakness, his vulnerability, and with it came a terrible, warped hope: that the Collector would be wiped from the Earth, and with his passing might come the oblivion they desired. At night they gathered among the trees, their skin wrinkled and mottled like old diseased fruit, waiting, willing the detective and his allies to descend upon the Collector.

I could kill them, thought the Collector. I could tear Parker apart, and the ones called Angel and Louis. There was enough evidence against them to justify it, enough sin to tip the scales.

Probably.

Possibly.

But what if he were wrong? What might the consequences be? He had killed their friend in a ft of rage, and as a result he was now little better than a marked animal, running from hole to hole, the ring of hunters tightening around him. If the Collector were to kill the detective, his friends would not rest until the Collector was himself buried. If the Collector were to kill Parker’s friends yet leave him alive, the detective would track him to the ends of the earth. And if, by some miracle, he were to kill all three of them? Then a line would have been crossed, and those who protected the detective from the shadows would finish what he had started and run the Collector down. Whatever choice the Collector made would end the same way: the hunt would continue until he was cornered, and his punishment meted out.

The Collector wanted a cigarette. The lawyer did not like him to smoke in the house. He said that it affected his breathing. The Collector could go outside, of course, but he realized that he had grown fearful of showing himself, as if even the slightest moment of carelessness might undo him. He had never yet been so frightened. The experience was proving unpleasantly enlightening.

The Collector concluded that he could not kill the detective. Even if he were to do so and somehow escape the consequences of his actions, he would ultimately be acting against the Divine. The detective was important. He had a role to play in what was to come. He was human, of that the Collector was now certain, but there was an aspect to him that was beyond understanding. Somehow, in some way, he had touched, or been touched by, the Divine. He had survived so much. Evil had been drawn to him, and he had destroyed it in every instance. There were entities that feared the Collector, and yet they feared the detective even more.

There was no solution. There was no escape.

He closed his eyes and felt the gloating triumph of the Hollow Men.

The lawyer Eldritch turned on his computer and returned to the task in hand: the reconstruction of his records. He was progressing alphabetically for the most part, but if a later name or detail came to him unexpectedly, he would open a separate file and input the new information. The physical records had been little more than aides-mémoires: everything that mattered was contained in his brain.

His ears ached. His hearing had been damaged in the explosion that killed the woman and destroyed his files, and now he had to endure a continuous high-pitched tinnitus. Some of the nerves in his hands and feet had been damaged as well, causing his legs to spasm as he tried to sleep, and his fingers to freeze into claws if he wrote or typed for too long. His condition was slowly improving, but he was forced to make do without proper physiotherapy or medical advice, for the Collector feared that if he showed himself it might draw the detective down upon them.

Let him come, thought Eldritch in his worst moments, as he lay awake in his bed, his legs jerking so violently that he could almost feel the muscles starting to tear, his fingers curling so agonizingly that he was certain that the bones must break through the skin. Let him come, and let us be done with all this. But somehow he would steal enough sleep to continue, and each day he tried to convince himself that he could discern a diminution in his sufferings: more time between the spasms in his legs, like a child counting the seconds between cracks of thunder to reassure himself that the storm was passing; a little more control over his fingers and toes, like a transplant patient learning to use a new limb; and a slight reduction in the intensity of the noise in his ears, in the hope that madness might be held at bay.

The Collector had set up a series of highly secure e-mail drop boxes for Eldritch, with five-step verification and a prohibition on any outside access. Telephone contact was forbidden — it was too easy to trace — but the lawyer still had his informants, and it was important that he remain in touch with them. Now Eldritch opened the first of the drop boxes. There was only one message inside. Its subject line was in case you did not see this, and it was only an hour old. The message contained a link to a news report.

Eldritch cut and pasted the link before opening it. It took him to that evening’s News Center on NBC’s Channel 6 out of Portland, Maine. He watched the report in silence, letting it play in its entirety before he called to the man in the next room.

‘Come here,’ said Eldritch. ‘You need to look at this.’

Moments later, the Collector appeared at his shoulder.

‘What is it?’ he said.

Eldritch let the news report play a second time.

‘The answer to our problems.’

39

Garrison Pryor was on his way to the chef’s table at L’Espalier on Boylston when the call came through to his personal cell phone, the one that was changed weekly, and for which only a handful of people had the number at any time. He was particularly surprised to see the identity of the caller. Pryor hit the green answer button immediately.

‘Yes?’ he said.

There would be no pleasantries. The Principal Backer didn’t like to linger on unsecured lines.

‘Have you seen the news?’

‘No, I’ve been in meetings all day, and I’m about to join some clients for a late dinner.’

‘Your phone has Internet access?’

‘Of course.’

‘Go to Channel Six in Portland. Call me when you’re done.’

Pryor didn’t argue or object. He was running late for dinner, but it didn’t matter now. The Principal Backer didn’t make such calls lightly.

Pryor hung up, and found a spot against the wall by the entrance to the Copley T station. It didn’t take him long to find the news report to which the Principal Backer had been referring. He went to the Portland Press Herald’s website, just in case it had further details, but there were none.

He waited a moment, gathered his thoughts, then called the Principal Backer.

‘Are you at home?’ asked Pryor.

‘Yes.’

‘But you can talk?’

‘For now. Was it one of ours?’

‘No.’

‘You’re certain?’

‘Absolutely. Nobody would have made a move like this without consulting me first, and I would have given no such authorization. It was decided: we should wait.’

‘Make sure that we weren’t involved.’

‘I will, but there’s no doubt in my mind. The man was not short of enemies.’

‘Neither are we. There will be consequences for all of us if we’re found to be anywhere near this.’

‘I’ll send out word. There will be no further activity until you say otherwise.’

‘And get somebody to Scarborough. I want to know exactly what happened at that house.’

‘I’ll make the call now.’

There was silence on the other end of the line, then:

‘I hear L’Espalier is very good.’

‘Yes.’ It took Pryor a second or two to realize that he had not told the Principal Backer where he was eating that night. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘Perhaps you should inform your clients that you won’t be able to make it to dinner after all.’

The connection was cut off. Pryor looked at the phone. He’d only had it for two days. He removed the battery, wiped it with his gloves, and tossed it in the trash. As he walked on, he broke the SIM card and dropped the pieces down a drain. He crossed Boylston, heading for Newbury. He stepped into the shadows of Public Alley 440, put the phone on the ground, and began grinding it beneath his heel, harder and harder, until finally he was stamping furiously on fragments of plastic and circuitry, swearing as he did so. Two pedestrians glanced at him as they passed down Exeter, but they did not stop.

Pryor put his forehead against the wall of the nearest building and closed his eyes.

Consequences: that was an understatement. If someone had made an unauthorized hit on the detective, there was no limit to how bad things might get.

In an apartment in Brooklyn, the rabbi named Epstein sat before his computer screen, watching and listening.

It had been a long day of discussions, arguments and something resembling slow progress, assuming one took a tectonic view of such matters. Epstein, along with two of his fellow moderate rabbis, were trying to hammer out compromises between the borough of Brooklyn and the local Hasidim on a lengthy series of issues, including the separation of the sexes on city buses and religious objections to the use of bicycles, mostly with little success. Today, for his sins, Epstein had been forced to explain the concept of metzitzah b’peh — the practice of oral suction from a baby’s circumcision wound — to a disbelieving councilman.

‘But why would anyone want to do that?’ the councilman kept asking. ‘Why?’

And, to be honest, Epstein didn’t really have an answer or, at least, not one that would satisfy the councilman.

Meanwhile, some of the young Hasidim apparently regarded Epstein with little more affection than they did the goyim. He even heard one of them refer to him behind his back as an alter kocker — an ‘old fart’ — but he did not react. Their elders knew better, and at least acknowledged that Epstein was trying to help by acting as a go-between, attempting to find a compromise with which both the Hasidim and the borough could live. Still, if they had their way the Hasidim would wall off Williamsburg from the rest of Brooklyn, although they’d probably have to fight the hipsters for it. The situation wasn’t helped by certain city officials publicly comparing the Hasidim to the Mafa. At times, it was enough to make a reasonable man consider abandoning both his faith and his city. But there was a saying in Hebrew, ‘We survived Pharoah, we’ll survive this, too.’ In the words of the old joke, it was the theme of every Jewish holiday: They tried to kill us, they failed, so let’s eat!

With that in mind, he was hungry when he arrived home, but all thoughts of food were gone now. Beside him stood a young woman dressed in black. Her name was Liat. She was deaf and mute, so she could not hear the news report, but she could read the anchorman’s lips when he appeared on screen. She took in the images of the police cars and the house, and the picture of the detective that was being used on all of the news reports. It was not a recent photograph. He looked older now. She recalled his face as they had made love, and the feel of his damaged body against hers.

So many scars, so many wounds, both visible and hidden.

Epstein touched her arm. She looked down at his face so she could watch his lips move.

‘Go up there,’ he said. ‘Find out what you can. I will start making inquiries here.’

She nodded and left.

Strange, thought Epstein: he had never seen her cry before.

40

It was Bryan Joblin who told them the news, just as he was running out the door. His departure at that moment, leaving them alone, seemed like a godsend. Harry and Erin had been growing increasingly fractious with Joblin as his perpetual presence in their lives began to tell on them, while he had settled happily into his role as their watcher, houseguest, and sometime accomplice in a crime yet to be committed. He still pressed Harry to find a girl, as if Harry needed to be reminded. Hayley Conyer herself had stopped by the house that morning while they were clearing up after breakfast, and she had made it very clear to the Dixons that they were running out of time.

‘Things are going to start moving fast around here pretty soon,’ Conyer said, as she stood at the front door, as though reluctant even to set foot once again in their crumbling home. ‘A lot of our problems are about to disappear, and we can start concentrating again on the tasks that matter.’

She leaned in close to the Dixons, and Harry could feel the warmth of her breath, and smell with it the sour stink that he always associated with his mother’s dying, the stench of the body’s internal workings beginning to atrophy.

‘You should know that there are folk in Prosperous who blame you for what happened to our young men in Afghanistan, and to Valerie Gillson and Ben Pearson too,’ she said. ‘They believe that, if you hadn’t let the girl go’ — Conyer allowed the different possible interpretations of that conditional clause to hang in the air for a moment — ‘then four of our people might still be alive. You have a lot of work to do to make up for your failings. I’m giving you three days. By then, you’d better produce a substitute girl for me.’

But Harry knew that they wouldn’t be around in three days or, if they were, then it would probably be the end of them. They were ready to run. Had Bryan Joblin not told them of what had occurred, then left them for a time to their own devices, they might have waited for another day, just to be sure that everything was in place for their escape. Now they took his news as a sign: it was time. They watched him drive away, his words still ringing in their ears.

‘We hit the detective,’ Joblin told them. ‘It’s all over the news. That fucker is gone. Gone.’

And within twenty minutes of Joblin’s departure, the Dixons had left Prosperous.

Harry made the call on the way to Medway. The auto dealership closed most evenings at six, but Harry had the dealer’s cell phone number and knew that he lived only a couple of blocks from the lot. He’d told the guy that, if it came down to the wire, he might have to leave the state at short notice. He had spun him a line about a sick mother, knowing that the dealer couldn’t have given a rat’s ass if Harry’s mother was Typhoid Mary, just as long as he paid cash alongside the trade-in. So it was that, thirty minutes after leaving Prosperous, the Dixons drove out of the lot in a GMC Savana Passenger Van with 100,000 miles on the clock, stopping only at the outskirts of Medway to call Magnus and Dianne and let them know that they were on their way. The van was ugly as a mudslide, but they could sleep in it if they had to, and who knew how long they might be on the road, or how far they might have to travel? They couldn’t stay with Harry’s in-laws for long. Even one night would be risky. In fact, the closer Harry got to the home of Magnus and Dianne, the more he started to feel that perhaps he and Erin shouldn’t stay with them at all. It might be wiser just to pick up their stuff, arrange some way of remaining in contact, and then find a motel for the night. The more distance they put between themselves and Prosperous, the better. He expressed his concerns to Erin, and was surprised when she concurred without argument. Her only regret, as far as he could tell, was that they hadn’t managed to kill Bryan Joblin before they left Prosperous. She might have been joking, but somehow Harry doubted it.

They pulled up in the driveway of the house. The lights were on inside, and Harry could see Magnus watching TV in the living room, the drapes open. He saw his brother-in-law stand as he heard the sound of the engine. He waved at them from the window. They were still getting out of the van when Magnus opened the front door.

‘Come in,’ he said. ‘We’ve been worrying ever since we got your call.’

‘Where’s Dianne?’ said Erin.

‘She’s in the bathroom. She’ll be right down.’

Magnus stood aside to let Harry and Erin enter.

‘Let me take your coats,’ said Magnus.

‘We’re not staying,’ said Harry.

‘That’s not what you told us.’

‘I know what I told you, but I think it’s better if we just keep driving. They’re going to come looking for us once they find out that we’ve gone, and it won’t take them long to make the connection to you and Dianne. We need to put ground between Prosperous and us. I can’t tell you why. We just have to leave the town far behind.’

Magnus closed the front door. Harry could feel a draft on his face, though. It was coming from the kitchen. A gust of wind passed through the house. It blew open the dining room door to their left. Inside they saw Dianne seated in the dark by the table.

‘I thought you were—’ said Erin, but she got no further.

Bryan Joblin sat across from Dianne. He held a gun in his right hand, pointing loosely at her chest. Behind him was Calder Ayton. He too held a gun, but his was aimed at the head of Dianne’s daughter, Kayley.

Harry’s hand slid slowly towards the gun in his jacket pocket, just as Chief Morland appeared from the living room. He laid a hand on Harry’s arm.

‘Don’t,’ said Morland, and his voice was almost kindly.

Harry’s hand faltered, then fell to his side. Morland reached into Harry’s pocket and removed the Smith & Wesson.

‘You have a license for this?’ said Morland.

Harry didn’t reply.

‘I didn’t think so,’ said Morland.

He raised the gun and touched it to the back of Erin’s head. He pulled the trigger, and the cream walls of the house blushed crimson. While Harry was still trying to take in the sight of his wife’s body collapsing to the floor, Morland shot Magnus in the chest, then advanced three steps and killed Dianne with a single bullet that entered her face just below the bridge of her nose.

It was Kayley’s screams that brought Harry back, but by then it was all too late. Morland swept Harry’s feet from under him, sending him sprawling to the floor beside his dead wife. He stared at her. Her eyes were closed, her face contorted in a final grimace of shock. Harry wondered if she’d felt a lot of pain. He hoped not. He’d loved her. He’d loved her so very much.

Morland’s weight was on his back now. Harry smelled the muzzle of the gun as it brushed his face.

‘Do it,’ said Harry. ‘Just do it.’

But instead the gun disappeared, and Harry’s hands were cuffed loosely behind his back. Kayley had stopped screaming and was now sobbing. It sounded like there might have been a hand across her mouth, though, for the sobs were muffed.

‘Why?’ said Harry.

‘Because we can’t have a multiple killing without a killer,’ said Morland.

He lifted Harry to his feet. Harry stared at him glazedly. Morland’s features formed a mask of pure desolation.

Calder Ayton and Bryan Joblin emerged from the second entrance to the living room, carrying Kayley between them. They walked through the kitchen to the back door. Shortly after that, Harry heard the trunk of a car closing, and then the vehicle drove away.

‘What’s going to happen to her?’ he asked.

‘I think you already know,’ said Morland. ‘You were told to find us a girl. It looks like you did your duty after all.’

Bryan Joblin reappeared in the kitchen. He smiled at Harry as he approached him.

‘What now?’ said Harry.

‘You and Bryan are going to take a ride. I’ll join you both as soon as I can.’

Morland turned to leave, then paused.

‘Tell me, Harry. Did the girl really escape, or did you let her go?’

What did it matter, thought Harry. The girl had still died, and soon he would join her.

‘We let her go.’

The use of the word ‘we’ made him look down at Erin, and in doing so he missed the look that passed across Morland’s face. It contained a hint of admiration.

Harry felt as though he should cry, but no tears would come. It was too late for tears anyway, and they would serve no purpose.

‘I’m sorry it’s come down to this,’ said Morland.

‘Go to hell, Lucas,’ said Harry.

‘Yes,’ said Morland. ‘I think that I probably will.’

41

A day passed. Evening descended. All was changed, yet unchanged. The dead remained dead, and waited for the dying to join their number.

On the outskirts of Prosperous a massive 4WD pulled up by the side of the road, disgorging one of its occupants before quickly turning back east. Ronald Straydeer hoisted a pack on to his back and headed for the woods, making his way toward the ruins of the church.

42

The two-story redbrick premises advertised itself as BLACKTHORN, APOTHECARY, although it had been many years since the store had sold anything, and old Blackthorn himself was now long dead. It had, for much of its history, been the only business on Hunts Lane, a Brooklyn mews designed originally to stable the horses of the wealthy on nearby Remsen and Joralemon Streets.

The exterior wood surround was black, the lettering on and above the window gold and its front door was permanently closed. The upstairs windows were shuttered, while the main window on the first floor was protected by a dense wire grill. The jumbled display behind it was a historical artifact, a collection of boxes and bottles bearing the names, where legible at all, of companies that no longer existed, and products with more than a hint of snake oil about them: Dalley’s Magical Pain Extractor, Dr Ham’s Aromatic Invigorator, Dr Miles’ Nervine.

Perhaps, at some point in the past, an ancestor of the last Blackthorn had seen ft to offer such elixirs to his customers, along with remedies stranger still. A display case inside the door contained packets of Potter’s Asthma Smoking Mixture (‘may be smoked in a pipe either with or without ordinary tobacco’) and Potter’s Asthma Care Cigarettes from the nineteenth century, along with Espic and Legras powders, the latter beloved of the French writer Marcel Proust, who used it to tackle his asthma and hay fever. In addition to stramonium, a derivative of the common thornapple, Datura stramonium, which was regarded as an effective remedy for respiratory problems, such products also contained, variously, potash and arsenic. Now long fallen from favor, they were memorialized in the gloom of Blackthorn, Apothecary, alongside malt beverages for nursing mothers, empty bottles of cocaine-based coca wine and heroin hydrochloride, and assorted preparations of morphine and opium for coughs, colds and children’s teething difficulties.

By the time the final Blackthorn was entering his twilight years — in a store that, most aptly, eschewed sunlight through the judicious use of heavy drapes and a sparing attitude toward electric illumination — the business that bore his family name sold only herbal medicines, and the musty interior still contained the evidence of Blackthorn’s faith in the efficacy of natural solutions. The mahogany shelves were lined with glass jars containing moldering and desiccated herbs and various oils that appeared to have survived the years with little change. A series of ornate lettered boards between the shelves detailed a litany of ailments and the herbs available to counteract the symptoms, from bad breath (parsley) and gas (fennel and dill) to cankers (goldenseal), cancer (bilberry, maitake mushroom, pomegranate, raspberry) and congestive heart failure (hawthorn). All was dust and dead insects, except on the floor where regular footfalls had cleared a narrow path through the detritus of decades. This led from a side entrance beside the main door, through a hallway adorned with photographs of the dead, and amateur landscapes that bespoke a morbid fascination with the work of the more depressive German Romantics bordering on mental illness, and into the store itself by way of a door with panels decorated by graphically rendered scenes from the Passion of Christ. The path’s final destination was obscured by a pair of black velvet drapes that closed off what had once been old Blackthorn’s back room, in which the apothecary had created his tinctures and powders.

Now, as a chill rain fell on the streets, specks of light showed through the moth holes in the drapes, and they glittered like stars as unseen figures moved in the room behind. Evening had descended, and Hunts Lane was empty, apart from the two men who stood beneath the awning of an old stable, watching the storefront on the other side of the alley, and the vague signs of life from within.

Two days had passed since the shooting.

‘He gives me the creeps,’ said Angel.

‘Man gives everyone the creeps,’ said Louis. ‘There’s dead folk would move out if they found themselves buried next to him.’

‘Why here?’

‘Why not?’

‘I guess. How long has he been holed up in that place?’

‘Couple of weeks, what I hear is true.’

The location had cost Louis a considerable amount of money, along with one favor that he could never call in again. He didn’t mind. This was personal.

‘It’s homely,’ said Angel, ‘in a Dickensian way. It’s kind of appropriate. Any idea where he’s been all these years?’

‘No. He did have a habit of moving around.’

‘Not much choice. Probably doesn’t make many friends in his line of work.’

‘Probably not.’

‘After all, you didn’t.’

‘No.’

‘Except me.’

‘Yeah. About that …’

‘Go fuck yourself.’

‘That would be the other option.’

Angel stared at the building, and the building seemed to stare back.

‘Strange that he should turn up now.’

‘Yes.’

‘You know what he was doing while he was gone?’

‘What he’s always been doing: causing pain.’

‘Maybe he thinks that it will take away some of his own.’

Louis glanced at his partner.

‘You know, you get real philosophical at unexpected moments.’

‘I was born philosophical. I just don’t always care to share my thoughts with others, that’s all. I think I might be a Stoic, if I understood what that meant. Either way, I like the sound of it.’

‘On your earlier point, he enjoyed inflicting pain, and watching others inflict it, even when he wasn’t suffering himself.’

‘If you believed in a god, you might say it was divine retribution.’

‘Karma.’

‘Yeah, that too.’

The rain continued to fall.

‘You know,’ said Angel, ‘there’s a hole in this awning.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s, like, a metaphor or something.’

‘Or just a hole.’

‘You got no poetry in your heart.’

‘No.’

‘You think he knows we’re out here?’

‘He knows.’

‘So?’

‘You want to knock, be my guest.’

‘What’ll happen?’

‘You’ll be dead.’

‘I figured it would be something like that. So we wait.’

‘Yes.’

‘Until?’

‘Until he opens the door.’

‘And?’

‘If he tries to kill us, we know he’s involved.’

‘And if he doesn’t try to kill us, then he’s not involved?’

‘No, then maybe he’s just smarter than I thought.’

‘You said he was as smart as any man you’d ever known.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Doesn’t bode well for us.’

‘No.’

There was a noise from across the alley: the sound of a key turning in a lock, and a bolt being pulled. Angel moved to the right, his gun already in his hand. Louis went left, and was absorbed by the darkness. A light bloomed slowly in the hallway, visible through the hemisphere of cracked glass above the smaller of the two doors. The door opened slowly, revealing a huge man standing in the entrance. He remained very still, his hands slightly out from his sides. Had Angel and Louis wanted to kill him, then this would have been the perfect opportunity. The message seemed clear: the one they had come to see wanted to talk. There would be no killing.

Not yet.

Angel’s gaze alternated between the shuttered windows on the second floor of the apothecary, and the entrance to Hunts Lane from Henry Street. Hunts Lane was a dead end. If this was a trap, then there would be no escape. He had questioned Louis about their approach, wondering aloud if it might not be better for one of them to remain on the street while the other entered the alley, but Louis had demurred.

‘He knows that we’re coming. He’s the last one.’

‘Which means?’

‘That if it’s a trap, he’ll spring it long before the alley. We’ll be dead as soon as we set foot in Brooklyn. We just won’t know it until the blade falls.’

None of this Angel found reassuring. He had met this man only once before, when he sought to recruit Louis — and, by extension, Angel — for his own ends. The memory of that meeting had never faded. Angel had felt poisoned by it after, as though by breathing the same air as the man, he had forever tainted his system.

Louis appeared again. He had his gun raised, aimed directly at the figure in the doorway. The man stepped forward, and a motion-activated light went on above his head. He was truly enormous, his head like a grave monument on his shoulders, his chest and arms impossibly massive. Angel did not recognize his face, and he would surely have remembered if he had seen such a monster before. His skull was bald, his scalp crisscrossed with scars, and his eyes were very clear and round, like boiled eggs pressed into his face. He was extraordinarily unhandsome, as though God had created the ugliest human being possible and then punched him in the face.

Most striking of all was the bright yellow suit that he wore. It gave him a strange air of feigned jollity, the product, perhaps, of an erroneous belief that he might somehow appear less threatening if he just wore brighter colors. He watched Louis approach, and it struck Angel that he had not seen the sentinel in the doorway blink once. His eyes were so huge that any blinks would have been obvious, like the fapping of wings.

Louis lowered his gun, and simultaneously the man at the door raised his right hand. He showed Louis the small plastic bottle that he held and then, without waiting for Louis to respond, tilted his head back and added drops to his eyes. When he was done, he stepped into the rain, and silently indicated that Angel and Louis should enter the apothecary’s store, his right hand now extended like that of the greeter at the world’s worst nightclub.

Reluctantly, Angel came forward. He followed Louis into the darkness of the hallway, but he entered backward, keeping his eyes, and his gun, on the unblinking giant at the door. But the giant did not follow them inside. Instead he remained standing in the rain, his face raised to the heavens, and the water flowed down his cheeks like tears.

43

Angel and Louis followed the trail through the dust, the interior lit only by a single lamp that flickered in a corner. The room smelled of long-withered herbs, the scent of them infused in the grain of the wood and the peeling paint on the walls, but underpinning it was a medicinal odor that grew stronger as they approached the drapes concealing the back room.

And there was another smell again beneath them all: it was the unmistakable reek of rotting flesh.

Louis had replaced his gun in its holster, and now Angel did the same. Slowly Louis reached out and pulled aside the drapes, revealing the room beyond, and a man seated at a desk lit only by a banker’s lamp. The angle of the lamp meant that the man was hidden in shadow, but even in the darkness Angel could see that he was yet more misshapen than when last they’d met. He raised his head with difficulty as they entered, and his words were slurred as he spoke.

‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘You’ll forgive me for not shaking hands.’

His twisted right hand reached for the lamp, its fingers so deformed that they appeared to have been lost entirely, the digits reduced to twin stumps at the end of the arm. Angel and Louis did not react, except for the merest flicker of compassion that briefly caused Angel’s eyes to close. It was beyond Angel’s capacities not to feel some sympathy, even for one such as this. His response did not go unnoticed.

‘Spare me,’ said the man. ‘If it were possible to rid myself of this disease by visiting it instead on you, I would do so in an instant.’

He gurgled, and it took Angel a moment to realize that he was laughing.

‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I would visit it upon you anyway, were it possible, if only for the pleasure of sharing.’

‘Mr Cambion,’ said Louis. ‘You have not changed.’

With a flick of his wrist, Cambion moved the lamp so that its light now fell upon his ravaged face.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘but I have.’

Its official name was Hansen’s disease, after the Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen who, in 1873, identified the bacterium that was its causative agent, but for over 4000 years humankind had known it simply as leprosy. Multidrug therapies had now rendered curable what had once been regarded as beyond treatment, with rifampicin as the base drug used to tackle both types of leprosy, multibacillary and paucibacillary, but Cambion was one of the exceptional cases, the small unfortunate few who showed no clinical or bacteriological improvement with MDT. The reasons for this were unclear, but those who whispered of him said that, during the earliest manifestations of his disease, he had been treated unethically with rifampicin as a monotherapy, instead of in conjunction with dapsone and clofazimine, and this had created in him a resistance to the base drug. The unfortunate physician responsible had subsequently disappeared, although he was not forgotten by his immediate family, helped by the fact that pieces of the doctor continued to be delivered to them at regular intervals. In fact, it wasn’t even clear if the doctor was dead, since the body parts that arrived appeared remarkably fresh, even allowing for the preservative compounds in which they were packed.

But truth, when it came to Cambion, was in short supply. Even his name was an invention. In medieval times, a cambion was the mutated offspring of a human and a demon. Caliban, Prospero’s antagonist in The Tempest, was a cambion, ‘not honour’d with human shape’. All that could be known of Cambion for sure, confirmed by his presence in the old apothecary’s, was that his condition was deteriorating rapidly. One might even have said that it was degenerating, but then Cambion had always been degenerate by nature, and his physical ailment could have been taken as an outward manifestation of his inner corruption. Cambion was wealthy and without morals. Cambion had killed — men, women, children — but as the disease had rotted his flesh, limiting his power of movement and depriving him of sensation at his extremities, he had moved from the act of killing to the facilitation of it. It had always been a lucrative sideline for him, for his reputation drew men and women who were at least as debased as himself, but now it was his principal activity. Cambion was the main point of contact for those who liked to combine murder with rape and torture, and those who devoutly wished that their enemies might suffer before they died. It was said that, when possible, Cambion liked to watch. Cambion’s people — if people they even were, as their capacity for evil called into question their very humanity — took on jobs that others refused to countenance, whether for reasons of morality or personal safety. Their sadism was their weakness, though. It was why Cambion’s services remained so specialized, and why he and his beasts hid themselves in the shadows. Their acts had been met with promises of retribution that were at least their equal.

When Angel had last seen Cambion, more than a decade earlier, his features were already displaying signs of ulceration and lesions, and certain nerves had begun to enlarge, including the great auricular nerve beneath the ears and the supraorbital on the skull. Now the ravages of the disease had rendered him almost unrecognizable. His left eye was barely visible as a slit in the flesh of his face while the right was wide but cloudy. His lower lip had swollen immensely, causing his mouth to droop open. His nasal cartilage had dissolved, leaving two holes in the center of his face separated by a strip of bone. Any remaining visible skin was covered by bumps that looked as hard as stone.

‘What do you think?’ said Cambion, and spittle sprayed from his lips. Angel was glad that he had not chosen to stand closer to the desk. After that first, and last, encounter with Cambion, he had taken the time to read up on leprosy. Most of what he knew, or thought he knew of the disease, turned out to be myths, including that it was transmitted by touch. Routes of transmission were still being researched, but it appeared to be spread primarily through nasal secretions. Angel watched the droplets of spittle on Cambion’s desk and realized that he was holding his breath.

‘Don’t look like you’re getting no better,’ said Louis.

‘I think that’s a safe conjecture,’ said Cambion.

‘Maybe you ought to try—’ Louis clicked his fingers and turned to Angel for help. ‘What’s that shit you use? You know, for your scabies.’

‘Hydrocortizone. And it’s not scabies. It’s heat rash.’

‘Yeah, that’s it,’ said Louis. He returned his attention to Cambion. ‘Hydrocortizone. Clear that shit right up.’

‘Thank you for the advice. I’ll bear it in mind.’

‘My pleasure,’ said Louis. ‘You give what ails you to Spongebob Squarepants outside too?’

Cambion managed to smile.

‘I’ll let Edmund know what you called him. I’m sure he’ll find it amusing.’

‘I don’t much care either way,’ said Louis.

‘No, I don’t imagine that you would. As for what troubles him, he has a condition known as lagophthalmos, a form of facial paralysis that affects the seventh cranial nerve, which controls the orbicularis oculi, the closing muscle of the eyelid. It leaves him unable to properly lubricate his eyes.’

‘Man,’ said Louis, ‘you quite the pair.’

‘I like to think that Edmund’s exposure to me enables him to put his own problems into some kind of perspective.’

‘It would do, if you hired a bodyguard who can see right.’

‘Edmund’s not just my bodyguard. He’s my nurse and my confidante. In fact’ — Cambion waved his right arm, displaying the stump — ‘you could say that he’s my righthand man. My left, though, continues to have its uses.’

He displayed his left hand for the first time. It still had three fingers and a thumb. They were currently wrapped around a modified pistol with an oversized trigger. The muzzle of the gun pointed loosely at Louis.

‘We was going to kill you, we’d have done it already,’ said Louis.

‘Likewise.’

‘You were hard to find.’

‘Yet here you are. I knew that you’d get to me eventually, once you’d exhausted all other avenues of inquiry. You’ve been tearing quite a swathe through the city, you and your boyfriend. There can’t be a stone left unturned.’

It was true. Within hours of the shooting, Angel and Louis had begun asking questions, sometimes gently, sometimes less so. There had been quiet conversations over cups of coffee in upscale restaurants, and over beers in the backrooms of dive bars. There were phone calls and denials, threats and warnings. Every middleman, every fixer, every facilitator who had knowledge of those who killed for money was contacted directly or received word through others: Louis wanted names. He desired to know who had pulled the trigger, and who had made the call.

The difficulty was that Louis suspected the shooter — or shooters, for Louis believed that the combination of shotgun and pistol used pointed to a team — had not been sourced through the usual channels. He had no doubt that they were pros, or at least he had started off with that assumption. It didn’t smell like amateur hour to him, not where Parker was concerned, and the likelihood of two gunmen reinforced that belief. If he was wrong, and it turned out that some enraged loner was responsible, then it would be a matter for the cops and their investigation. Louis might get to the shooter first if the information leaked, but that wasn’t his world. In Louis’s world, people were paid to kill.

But the detective’s connections to Louis were well known, and nobody of his acquaintance would have accepted the contract, either as the agent or the trigger man. Nevertheless, it had been necessary to check, just to be sure.

There was also the distinct possibility that the hit was related to Parker’s movements through darker realms, and with that in mind Louis had already made contact with Epstein, the old rabbi in New York. Louis had made it clear to him that, if Epstein discovered something relating to the hit and chose not to share it, then Louis would be seriously displeased. In the meantime, Epstein had sent his own bodyguard, Liat, up to Maine. She was, thought Louis, a little late to the party. They all were.

A third line of investigation pointed to the Collector, but Louis had dismissed that possibility almost immediately. A shotgun wasn’t the Collector’s style, and he’d probably have come after Angel and Louis first. Louis suspected that the Collector wanted Parker alive unless there was no other option, although he did not know why, despite Parker’s efforts to explain the situation to him. If he ever did manage to corner the Collector, Louis planned to ask him to clarify it, just before he shot him in the head.

Finally, there was the case on which Parker had been working before the hit: a missing girl, a dead man in a basement and a town called Prosperous, but that was all Louis knew. If someone in Prosperous had hired a killer, then it brought the hunt back to Louis. He would find the shooters, and make them talk.

Which was why he and Angel were now standing before Cambion, because Cambion didn’t care about Louis or Parker or anyone or anything else, and he dealt in turn with those who were too vicious and depraved to care either. Even if Cambion hadn’t been involved — and that had yet to be established — his contacts extended into corners of which even Louis was not aware. The creatures that hid there had claws and fangs, and were filled with poison.

‘Quite the place you have here,’ said Louis. His eyes were growing used to the dimness. He could see the modern medicines on the shelves behind Cambion, and a doorway beyond that presumably led to where Cambion lived and slept. He could not visualize this man making it up a fight of stairs. A wheelchair stood folded in one corner. Beside it was a plastic bowl, a spoon and a napkin. A china bowl and silver soup spoon sat on the desk beside Cambion, and he spotted a similar bowl and spoon on a side table to his right.

Curious, thought Louis: two people, but three bowls.

‘I was growing fond of my new home,’ said Cambion. ‘But now, I think, I shall have to move again. A pity: such upheavals drain my strength, and it’s difficult to find suitable premises with such a gracious atmosphere.’

‘Don’t go running off on my account,’ said Louis. He didn’t even bother to comment on the ambience. The apothecary’s old premises felt to him only a step away from an embalmer’s chambers.

‘Why, are you telling me that I can rely on your discretion, that you won’t breathe a word of where I am?’ said Cambion. ‘There’s a price on my head. The only reason you’ve got this close is because I know that you declined the contract on me. I still don’t understand why.’

‘Because I thought a day like this might come,’ said Louis.

‘When you needed me?’

‘When I’d have to look in your eyes to see if you were lying.’

‘Ask it.’

‘Were you involved?’

‘No.’

Louis remained very still as he stared at the decaying man. Finally he nodded.

‘Who was?’

‘No one in my circle.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes.’

Although it was only the slightest of movements, Angel saw Louis’s shoulders slump. Cambion was the last of the middlemen. The hunt would now become much more difficult.

‘I have heard a rumor, though …’

Louis tensed. Here was the game. There was always a game where Cambion was concerned.

‘Which is?’

‘What can you offer me in return?’

‘What do you want?’

‘To die in peace.’

‘Looking at you, that don’t seem like an option.’

‘I want the contract nullified.’

‘I can’t do that.’

Cambion placed the gun, which had remained in his hand throughout, upon the desk, and opened a drawer. From it he produced an envelope, which he slid toward Louis.

‘Talking tires me,’ he said. ‘This should suffice.’

‘What is it?’

‘A list of names, the worst of men and women.’

‘The ones you’ve used.’

‘Yes, along with the crimes for which they are responsible. I want to buy the contract back with their blood. I’m tired of being pursued. I need to rest.’

Louis stared at the envelope, making the calculations. Finally he took it and placed it in his jacket pocket.

‘I’ll do what I can.’

‘Those names will be enough.’

‘Yes, I think they will. Now, the rumor.’

‘A man and a woman. Married. Children. Perfect Middle Americans. They have only one employer. A handful of hits, but very good.’

‘Their motivation?’

‘Not money. Ideology.’

‘Political?’

‘Religious, if what I hear is true.’

‘Where?’

‘North Carolina, but that may no longer be the case. It’s all I have.’

Behind them, the yellow-clad giant named Edmund appeared. He handed Louis a slip of paper. On it was written a cell phone number. The meeting was over.

‘Soon I’ll be gone from here,’ said Cambion. ‘Use that number to confirm that the contract has been voided.’

Louis memorized the number before handing the paper back to Edmund. It vanished into the folds of the giant’s hand.

‘How long you got left?’ he asked Cambion.

‘Who knows?’

‘Seems like it might be a mercy to let the contract run its course,’ said Louis, as Edmund stepped aside so that the two visitors could leave, and prepared to escort them out.

‘You might think that,’ said Cambion, ‘but I’m not ready to die yet.’

‘Yeah,’ said Louis, as the drapes fell closed behind him. ‘That’s a damn shame.’

44

Ronald Straydeer was not unfamiliar with sleeping outdoors.

He’d bedded down in the jungles in Vietnam, in the Great North Woods of Maine and beside pot plantations in upstate New York during a period of misunderstanding with some rival growers, which came to an end when Ronald put one of them head-frst into a narrow hole and proceeded to fill it in.

Thus Ronald understood the necessity of good nutrition and proper clothing, particularly when it came to cold weather. He wore polypropylene, not cotton, next to his skin, because he knew that cotton trapped moisture, and the action of convection meant that cold air and damp drained the body’s heat. A hat with earflaps covered his head, because when the head got cold, the body began to shut off circulation to the extremities. He kept himself moving constantly, even if only through the gentle shuffling of his feet and minute stretches of his arms, fingers and toes, generating heat as a by-product. He had brought plenty of water, and an assortment of nuts, seeds, energy bars, jerky and salami, as well as a couple of MREs — because sometimes a man needed a hot meal, even one that tasted like it had been made for pets — and containers of self-heating soup and coffee. He didn’t know how long he might be out in the wild, but he had packed enough food for four days, or more if he had to be abstemious. He was armed with a licensed hunting rife, a Browning BAR Mark II Lightweight Stalker in .308. If it came down to it, he could claim to be hunting squirrel or hare, even coyotes, although the Browning wouldn’t leave much of a varmint behind other than bits of fur and memories.

He had been fortunate with this location. The woods around the ruined church were a mixture of deciduous and evergreen, but more of the latter. He bedded down in the thickest copse he could find, and covered his sleeping bag with branches. He made a careful recon of his surroundings but did not enter the church grounds — not out of superstition, but simply because, if Shaky was right, then the church was important, and people tended to protect places that were important. He checked the gate and the fence, and saw nothing to indicate that the grounds were guarded electronically, but he still didn’t want to risk setting off any kind of hidden motion sensor. Neither did he risk an exploration of the town itself. Ronald was a striking, imposing man, and he attracted attention. Perhaps he would be seeing more of the town soon enough.

To pass the time, he read. He had brought with him a copy of Bleak House by Charles Dickens because he recalled the detective recommending it to him once. He had bought it but never got around to reading it. Now seemed like the appropriate time.

Shaky, like Jude before him, was convinced that Prosperous was rotten, and he had halfway managed to convince Ronald of the same thing, even before Ronald had ever come to the town. Shaky had accompanied Ronald around Portland and South Portland as he began quietly questioning the homeless about what they had seen in the days preceding Jude’s death. Shaky had a way of calming folk. He was unthreatening, and generally well liked. It was, thought Ronald, a little like having a good dog with him: an old Labrador, maybe, something friendly and tolerant. He didn’t share this with Shaky, though. He wasn’t sure how it might be taken.

Despite their efforts, they learned nothing of worth until the end of a long day of searching and questioning. It came from an unlikely source: the woman known as Frannie, with whom Shaky had witnessed Brightboy arguing on the morning that Brightboy had attacked him. Shaky usually did his best to avoid Frannie due to her intimidating nature, and the vision of a man having his nose gnawed off that she invariably conjured up, but Ronald Straydeer wasn’t troubled by her in the least. He told Shaky that he knew Frannie from way back, when she still had most of her teeth.

‘Is it true that she once bit a man’s nose off and spat it out in front of him?’ said Shaky. After all, it seemed like Ronald Straydeer might know.

‘No,’ said Ronald solemnly. ‘That’s not true.’

Shaky was relieved, but Ronald wasn’t done.

‘She didn’t spit it out,’ he continued. ‘She swallowed it.’

Shaky felt ill. During the subsequent conversation with Frannie, he found himself using Ronald’s body as a bulwark between him and the woman. If she’d developed a taste for male flesh, she’d have to go through Ronald to get to him.

Frannie was pleased to see Ronald, although she was less pleased when she learned that he was no longer dealing. Using mainly four-letter words, she expressed the view that Ronald was a grave disappointment to her. Ronald accepted the judgment without complaint, and gave her the name of someone who might be able to help find some pot, along with twenty bucks with which to treat herself.

In return, Frannie told them about the couple she had seen near Jude’s basement.

Frannie wasn’t a mixer. She avoided the shelters. She was always angry, or briefly coming down from being angry prior to getting angry all over again. She liked no one, not even Jude. She’d never asked him for anything, and he’d never offered, knowing better than to do so. Shaky couldn’t understand why she was opening up to Ronald Straydeer, even allowing for the money, and the pot connection. It was only later that it dawned on him: Frannie had been flattered by Ronald’s attention. Ronald spoke to her as he would to any woman. He was courteous. He smiled. He asked about a wound on her arm, and recommended something for it. None of this he did in a false manner: Frannie would have seen through that in an instant. Instead, Ronald talked to her as the woman that she once was, and perhaps, deep down, still believed herself to be. How long had it been since anyone had done that for her, thought Shaky. Decades, probably. She had not always been this way and, like all of those who ended up on the streets, never wanted it for herself. As she and Ronald spoke, Shaky saw her change. Her eyes softened. She was not beautiful — she would never again be that, if she had ever been — but for the first time Shaky saw her as something other than an individual to be feared. She let her guard down while talking to Ronald, and it struck Shaky that Frannie lived her life in a state of perpetual fear, for however bad it was to be a homeless man, it was infinitely worse to be a homeless woman. He had always understood that, but as an abstract concept, and generally applied it only to the younger girls, the teenagers, who were more obviously vulnerable. He had made the mistake of imagining that somehow, for Frannie, it might have become easier over the years, not harder, and now he knew himself to be wrong.

So Frannie told Ronald Straydeer of how she had walked past Jude’s place the night before he died, and saw a car parked across the street. And because she was always desperate, and asking was free, she tapped on the glass in the hope that a dollar might be forthcoming.

‘They gave me a five,’ she told Ronald. ‘Five bucks. Just like that.’

‘And did they ask for anything in return?’ said Ronald.

Frannie shook her head.

‘Nothing.’

‘They didn’t ask after Jude?’

‘No.’

Because they already knew, thought Shaky, and they were smarter than to draw attention to themselves by bribing a homeless woman for information. Instead they paid her — enough to be generous, but not too generous — and she went away, leaving them to wait for Jude to appear.

Ronald asked what Frannie remembered about them. She recalled a silver car, and Massachusetts plates, but she admitted that she might have mistaken about the plates. The woman was good-looking, but in that way of women who try too hard to keep themselves in condition as they get older, and end up with lines on their tanned faces that might have been avoided if they’d resigned themselves to a little flesh on their bones. The man was balding, and wore glasses. He had barely looked at Frannie. The woman gave her the money, and responded to Frannie’s word of thanks with the briefest of smiles.

Frannie’s information wasn’t much, but it was some small reward for their efforts. Ronald prepared to take his leave of Shaky and return home. He would call on the detective along the way, and share what he had learned with him. Instead, he and Shaky saw the detective’s face appear on the television screen of a bar on Congress as they passed. Ronald bought Shaky a beer while he sipped a soda, and together they watched the news. Shaky told him that it had to be connected to Jude and his daughter. If that was the case, then it was also connected to Prosperous, and if Prosperous was involved then it had something to do with the old church, which was how Ronald came to be lying in the woods eating MREs and reading Dickens. Even if Shaky was mistaken, at least Ronald was trying to do something, but he had to give it to the little homeless man: Prosperous felt wrong, and the old church felt multiples of wrong.

There had been little activity since he arrived. Twice a police cruiser had driven up the road to the church, but on each occasion the cop had simply checked the lock on the gate and made a cursory circuit of the cemetery. Ronald had used the telescopic sight to pick out the cop’s name: Morland.

The only other visitor was a tall man in his forties with receding hair, dressed in jeans, workboots and a brown suede jacket. He arrived at the cemetery from the northwest, so that his appearance in the churchyard caught Ronald by surprise. On the first occasion, Ronald watched as he opened the church and checked inside, although he didn’t remain there for long. Ronald figured him for the pastor, Warraner. Shaky had learned about him from the detective, as well as something of the chief cop named Morland. Both Jude and the detective had endured run-ins with each of them, according to Shaky. Ronald didn’t follow Warraner when he left, but later he found the path that led from the churchyard to the pastor’s house. Better to know where he was coming from than not.

The pastor returned shortly before sunset on the first day, this time with a rake and a shovel, and began clearing undergrowth from an area about forty feet from the western wall of the church. Ronald watched him through the scope. When Warraner was done, a hole just a little over two feet in diameter was revealed in the earth. Then, apparently content with his work, the pastor left and had not yet returned.

Now darkness had descended again, and Ronald was preparing to spend another night in the woods when the car arrived. It approached slowly because it was driving without lights, and it stopped well before it neared the cemetery’s railings. Two men got out. Ronald turned his Armasight night vision binoculars on them. One was Morland, although this time he was out of uniform. The second was an old scarecrow of a man wearing a long coat and a felt hat. They didn’t speak as Morland unlocked the cemetery gate, and the two men entered.

A second car, a station wagon, came up the road. Morland and the scarecrow stopped to watch it come. It pulled up alongside the first vehicle and an elderly woman emerged from the driver’s side. Two more men climbed out of the back, although one of them needed the assistance of his companion and the woman to do so. He wore a small oxygen tank strapped to his back, and a mask covered his mouth. Supported by the others, he made his way into the churchyard.

Finally, from the northwest, came the pastor, but he was not alone. There was a girl of eighteen or nineteen with him. She wore a padded jacket over what looked like a nightgown, and there were unlaced sneakers on her feet. Her hands were restrained behind her back, and tape covered her mouth. To her right walked another man, a decade or so older than the pastor. He held the girl’s right arm above the elbow, guiding her so that she wouldn’t trip over the old gravestones, whispering and smiling as he did so. The girl didn’t struggle or try to run. Ronald wondered if she was drugged, for her eyes were drooping slightly, and she dragged her feet as she came.

She was brought to the place by the western wall of the church from which Warraner had cleared the undergrowth earlier that day. Ronald tried to get closer to them, but he didn’t want to risk making a noise and alerting the group below. He contented himself with shifting slightly so that he might see more clearly what was happening. It was a still, quiet night, and the voices of the group carried to him if he listened carefully. He heard Warraner tell the girl to rest, that they were almost done. The man who held her arm assisted her as she sank to her knees, and the others formed a halfcircle around her, almost obscuring her from sight. A blade appeared, and Ronald drew a breath. He put down the binoculars and switched to the night vision scope on his rife. It wasn’t as powerful, and didn’t give him such a wide view of proceedings, but if anyone tried to take the knife to the girl then, cop or no cop, he planned to cut them down before the metal touched her skin. The Browning was self-loading, which gave him four shots before he’d have to pause.

But the knife was used only to cut the bonds holding the girl’s hands. Ronald watched them fall loosely to her sides, and then the man who had been assisting her removed the padded jacket, leaving her with only the nightgown as protection against the cold. Through Ronald’s scope she looked like a pale ghost in the churchyard. He fixed his sights on the man with the knife and waited, his finger not quite touching the trigger of the rife, but the blade disappeared, and none of the others was holding a weapon.

They backed away from the girl, partially obscuring Ronald’s view of her. He could still see her nightgown, though, white against the dark. He moved his sights from one back to the next, watching for movement, waiting for someone to produce a weapon, to make a move on the girl, but nobody did. Instead they appeared to be waiting.

Ronald moved back to what he could see of the girl, and a finger of shadow crept across the pallor of her nightgown, as though the moon had suddenly shone on an overhanging branch.

But there was no branch, and there was no moon.

A second shadow came, and a third, like cracks on ice. There was a furry of movement, a blur of white, and single dull snap, as of a twig breaking. The watching elders came together, and for an instant the girl was entirely hidden from Ronald.

When they separated again, she was gone.

Ronald removed his eye from the scope and blinked. It wasn’t possible. He scanned the ground, but there was no sign of the girl in the white nightgown. Even had it somehow been stripped from her, her naked body would still have been visible on the ground, but Ronald could see nothing.

Now the group was dispersing. Warraner was heading back to his house, while the man who had come with him joined the others as they returned to their cars. Within minutes, the gates were locked once again, and the vehicles were making their way back down the road to the highway, still driving dark.

Ronald waited for fifteen minutes, then headed for the cemetery. He climbed the railing, heedless now of any hidden sensors, and approached the spot where he had last seen the girl. He knelt, and discerned signs of disturbance. Clumps of earth had been dislodged from the dry ground, and there were marks in the dirt where something had briefly been dragged through it. They ended where the hole once lay, but it had now collapsed, leaving only a slight depression in the ground.

Ronald put his rife aside and started to scrabble at the dirt with his bare hands. He dug until one of his fingernails cracked, but there was no trace of the girl, only earth and thick roots, although Ronald could not tell their origin, for there were no trees in the cemetery. He sat back on the ground, breathing heavily. Above him, the old church loomed.

A fragment of something pale caught his eye in the dirt. Lodged against a small stone in the dirt was a piece of pale cloth about half an inch square. Ronald held it between his finger and thumb.

I am not mad, he thought. I am not mad.

He picked up his rife and, using his boots, tried to hide his efforts at digging. When he felt that he had done all he could, he returned to his hiding place, gathered his belongings, and prepared to leave. He checked to make sure that he had not left behind any trash or possessions, even though he knew himself to be more careful than that. Still, it paid to take the time to be sure. When he was done, he started walking. It was not yet 11:00 PM, and by traveling carefully he made it to the town of Dearden shortly before midnight, where he huddled down at the outskirts and made himself as comfortable as possible against a tree. He called just one number along the way, but it was not 911. He used a cup of coffee to warm himself, but it did not stop his shivering, and his whole body was aching by the time the truck arrived. The Fulci brothers helped him inside, and drove him back to Scarborough.

45

Angel and Louis were parked close to the intersection of Amity and Henry, about four blocks south of Hunts Lane. They spoke as they walked, heads down against the rain.

‘So?’ said Angel.

‘He’s not telling us all he knows,’ said Louis.

‘But you believed what he did tell us?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because there was a percentage in keeping information back from us, but none in lying, and he’s a man who works the percentages. He wasn’t the middleman on the hit, but he has more information about who was responsible than he’s shared with us.’

‘You could tell that just by looking in his eyes?’

‘I understand him. And I know that he’s scared of me.’

‘It’s not a very exclusive club.’

‘No, but not everyone in it has the resources to make a move against one of my friends. Cambion does, but he’s smart enough to know that if he involved himself then he’d have to take me out as well, and that didn’t happen.’

‘Which means that the shooters either don’t know about you, or don’t care.’

‘And you just know that it can’t be the latter.’

‘God forbid. You’d have no reason left to live.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So what is Cambion holding back on the shooters?’

‘Their names. Cambion doesn’t trade in rumors. Maybe they crossed his path once. He might even have tried to recruit them.’

‘And, like you, they turned him down.’

‘But, unlike me, they sound like religious zealots.’

‘True. Nobody could ever accuse you of darkening church doors, not unless you were planning to shoot somebody from the shadows. So Cambion is waiting for you to get the contract voided, and then he’ll give you more?’

‘That would be my guess, theoretically.’

‘Can you do it? Can you burn the contract?’

‘No. It’s gone too far. There are too many people with an interest in seeing Cambion dead, either for what he’s done or for what he knows.’

‘But if Cambion is as clever as you say, then he must realize that.’

‘Probably.’

‘Then what’s the game?’

‘He’s trying to buy time. Like I told you, he works the percentages. I think he knows exactly who we’re looking for, so right now he’s trying to figure if the people who were sent after Parker are more dangerous than I am. If they are, then he can sell me out to them in return for whatever it is he needs: money, a hiding place, or most likely the heads of some of those who are hunting him. If Cambion doesn’t believe that the shooters are good enough to take me out then he’ll feed them to us, but he’ll wait until we have more to offer him. I don’t think he was lying when he said he wanted to live out the rest of his days in peace. He wants a guarantee of protection, but he knows that’s more than I alone can give him.’

Angel considered this.

‘Feds,’ he said, after a time. ‘He wants a government screen.’

‘Feds,’ confirmed Louis.

‘But we only know one Fed.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And he doesn’t like you and me.’

‘No, but right now I’d say he’s real interested in us.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Because I reckon that’s who’s been following us for the last two blocks.’

‘The big blue Ford? I was wondering about that. Maybe he figures he’s undercover.’

‘I don’t think he cares.’

Louis stepped out into the street in front of the creeping car, put his fingers to his lips, and gave a piercing whistle as it braked within feet of him.

‘Yo, taxi!’ said Louis.

Through the wipers and the rain, Special Agent Ross of the Federal Bureau of Investigation grimaced at him. His lips moved soundlessly as Angel joined Louis. Angel cupped a hand to his ear.

‘Sorry, “Mother —” what?’ said Angel.

The second time, Ross shouted the word, just to make sure.

They sat together in Henry Public at 329 Henry. Each ordered a Brooklyn Brown Ale. It seemed only right, given the neighborhood. They were almost alone in the bar, given the hour.

‘I’ll pay,’ said Ross, as the beers were brought to their table. ‘It’s bad enough that I’m sitting with you. I don’t want to be accused of corruption as well.’

‘Hey, wasn’t this how that Fed in Boston got caught, the one who was tight with Whitey Bulger?’ said Angel. ‘One minute you’re just enjoying a drink with friends in Southie, the next you’re doing forty years.’

‘To begin with, we’re not friends,’ said Ross.

‘I’m hurt,’ said Angel. ‘Now how am I going to get my parking violations fixed?’

‘That’s the fucking NYPD, knucklehead,’ said Ross.

‘Ah, right,’ said Angel. He took a sip of his beer. ‘But suppose I get ticketed in DC?’

‘Fuck you.’

‘You know, you swear more than the Feds on TV.’

‘I only swear under stress.’

‘You must be stressed a lot.’

Ross turned to Louis.

‘Is he always like this?’ said Ross.

‘Pretty much.’

‘I never thought I’d say it, but you must be a fucking saint.’

‘I believe so,’ said Louis. ‘He also has his uses.’

‘I don’t even want to know,’ said Ross.

He took a long draught from his bottle.

‘You been to see him?’

‘Parker?’ said Louis.

‘No, the new pope. Who the fuck else would I be talking about?’

A look passed between Angel and Louis. Angel wanted to go up to Maine, but Louis had demurred. He believed they could be of more use to Parker in New York. He was right, of course, but it still sat uneasily with Angel. He was deeply fond of the detective. If Parker wasn’t going to pull through then Angel wanted to be able to say goodbye to him.

‘No,’ said Louis. ‘They say he’s dying.’

‘That’s what I hear.’

‘Is it true?’

‘He’s like a cat: he has nine lives. I just don’t know how many of them he’s used up by now.’

They let that one sink in while they drank.

‘What do you want, Agent Ross?’ said Louis.

‘My understanding is that you’re turning the town upside down trying to find out who shot him. I was wondering how far you’d got.’

‘Is this an attempt at an information exchange?’ said Louis. ‘If so, you’re about to be gravely disappointed.’

‘I know who you were seeing in Hunts Lane,’ said Ross.

Louis’s left eye flickered. For him, it was an expression of extreme surprise, the equivalent of someone else fainting. Ross caught it.

‘How fucking inefficient do you think we are?’ he said.

‘Is that a rhetorical question?’

‘You want to see my file on you?’

Louis let that one pass.

‘How long have you been watching him?’ said Angel.

‘Ever since he got back into town,’ said Ross. ‘How’s he looking? We haven’t been able to get a clear shot of him. The last pictures we had of him, he wasn’t doing so good.’

‘He’s probably still having a little trouble dating,’ said Angel.

‘Was he involved?’

Ross watched them both, and waited. He was very patient. A full minute went by, but he didn’t seem perturbed.

‘No,’ said Louis, eventually. ‘Or not directly.’

‘Were you planning on bringing him in?’ said Angel.

‘We’ve got nothing but stories. We do hear there’s money for whoever pushes the button on him, though.’ His gaze flicked back to Louis. ‘I thought you might be looking to cash in.’

‘You got the wrong guy,’ said Louis.

‘Clearly.’

‘Were you listening?’

‘I wish. He hasn’t left that old store since he took up residence. There’s no landline. If he’s using cell phones, they’re throwaways. He conducts all of his business away from the windows, which means we can’t pick up vibrations, especially with all those drapes.’

‘So?’ said Louis.

‘My understanding is that he’s been making informal approaches, looking to have the contract lifted. Is it true?’

Again Louis waited for a while before answering. Angel remained silent. If this was to be an exchange, then it was for Louis to decide how much to give, and what he wanted in return.

‘That’s true,’ said Louis. ‘You considering offering him a deal?’

‘Our understanding is that he holds a lot of secrets.’

‘He’ll bleed you for every one he reveals, and you’ll never get him to testify.’

‘Maybe we don’t want testimony,’ said Ross. ‘Maybe we just want details. It’s not just about putting people behind bars. It’s about knowledge.’

Angel thought of the list of names now in Louis’s possession. It might be worth something. Then again, it might be worth nothing at all. The truth, in all likelihood, lay somewhere in between.

Ross finished his first beer and held up the bottle, signaling the waitress for another round, even though Louis had barely touched his first drink.

‘I heard he tried to bring you into his fold,’ Ross said to Louis. ‘Way back in the day.’

‘Not so far back,’ said Louis.

‘You didn’t bite?’

‘Like you, he seemed to be confused about what I did for a living.’

‘And you didn’t like him.’

‘There wasn’t a great deal to like. Even less now, seeing as so much of him has rotted away.’

The second beers arrived, but no one reached for them. Angel sensed that they had reached a crucial point in whatever negotiation was unfolding, although, as far as Angel could tell, there didn’t seem to have been much obvious progress of any kind. Angel wasn’t built for negotiation. That UN job just got further out of reach every day.

‘I’ll ask you again,’ said Louis. ‘What is it you want from me, Agent Ross?’

He fixed Ross with his gaze, like a snake mesmerizing an animal before striking. Ross didn’t blink. He’d taken the ‘three guys having a beer’ approach, and that hadn’t worked. He must have known that it wouldn’t, but it never hurt to try. As Angel watched, he transformed himself, sitting up straighter in his seat, his face tightening, the years seeming to fall away from him. In that moment, Angel understood why Parker had always been so careful around Ross. Like Cambion, he was a creature of concealment, a repository of secrets.

‘I came to warn you that I won’t tolerate a campaign of vengeance, even for your friend. I won’t tolerate it because I’m concerned that it might interfere with my own work, with the bigger picture. For every man or woman you kill, a potential avenue of inquiry closes. That’s not how this thing works.’

‘And what is the “bigger picture”, Agent Ross?’ asked Angel. ‘What is “this thing”?’

‘The hunt for something that’s been hidden away since before the appearance of life on earth,’ said Ross. ‘An entity, long buried. Is that big enough for you?’

Angel picked up his beer.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘maybe I will have this second one after all.’

He drained half the bottle.

‘And you believe in the existence of this “entity”?’ said Louis.

‘It doesn’t matter what I believe. What matters are the beliefs of those who are looking for it, and the havoc they’ve created, and will continue to create, until they’re stopped.’

‘So you want us to step back and do nothing?’ said Louis.

‘I’m not a fool,’ said Ross. ‘Doing nothing isn’t an option where you’re concerned. I want cooperation. You share what you find.’

‘And then you tell us if we can act on it?’ said Louis. ‘That sounds like the worst fucking deal since the Indians got screwed for Manhattan.’

‘It also sounds like a good way to end up in jail,’ said Angel. ‘We might as well just sign a confession in advance. We tell you what we’d like to do, you say, “Hey, that sounds like a fucking great idea. Be my guest!”, and next thing we’re all staring awkwardly at one another in front of a judge.’

‘He has a point,’ said Louis. ‘No deal.’

To his credit, Ross didn’t appear particularly surprised or disappointed. Instead he reached into his pocket and removed a manila envelope. From it he slid a single photograph and placed it on the table before them. It showed the symbol of a pitchfork, crudely carved into a piece of wood. Louis and Angel knew it immediately for what it was: the sign of the Believers. Parker had crossed paths with them in the past, Angel and Louis too. The Believers hadn’t enjoyed the encounters.

‘Where was it taken?’ said Angel.

‘At Parker’s house, immediately after the attack. Now do you understand why I’m asking you to tread carefully?’

Louis used the edge of his bottle to turn the photograph so that he could see it more clearly.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I understand.’

It was Louis’s turn to produce an envelope from his pocket. He handed it to Ross without comment. Ross opened it, and glanced at a typewritten list of names, places and dates. He didn’t need Louis to tell him what it meant.

‘From Cambion?’ said Ross.

‘Yes.’

‘Why did he give them to you?’

‘He thought I could act as the go-between in his contract difficulties.’

‘What did you get in return?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Ross folded the list and returned it to the envelope.

‘Why are you giving this to me?’

‘It’s what you wanted, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now you don’t need to cut a deal with him, and you can call off your surveillance.’

‘Leaving him at your mercy.’

‘I don’t have any mercy for him.’

‘Should that concern me?’

‘I don’t see why.’

Ross balanced the envelope on the palm of his right hand, as though judging its weight against the cost to his soul.

‘You went to Cambion because you thought he knew something about the hit on Parker,’ said Ross. ‘I’ll bet a shiny new quarter that he gave you a taste of what he had, but you believe that there may be more. Negotiating on his behalf was part of the deal. Don’t bother telling me if I’m warm. I wouldn’t want you to feel compromised.’

‘I’m a long way from feeling compromised, Agent Ross,’ said Louis.

‘But now you’ve got nothing,’ said Ross.

‘Except a clear run at Cambion, if I need it, right?’

The envelope stayed on Ross’s palm for a few seconds longer, then vanished into his pocket.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘And Parker?’

‘If it leads us to the Believers, I’ll let you know through the rabbi, Epstein. Otherwise, you stay out of our affairs.’

‘You’re an arrogant sonofabitch, you know that?’

‘At least you didn’t call me uppity. That might have caused serious friction.’

Ross stood and dropped a fifty on the table.

‘It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, gentlemen,’ he said.

‘Likewise,’ said Louis.

‘You’re sure you can’t help with parking violations?’ said Angel.

‘Fuck you,’ said Ross.

‘I’ll hold on to your number anyway,’ said Angel. ‘Just in case.’

46

Angel and Louis did not speak again until they were back in their apartment, as Louis was concerned that Ross might have decided to cover himself by bugging their car, although a subsequent sweep of the vehicle revealed nothing. It didn’t matter: Louis had not survived this long by being careless, and Angel really didn’t have anything better to do than sweep the car for listening devices, or so Louis told him.

They were greeted on their return by Mrs Bondarchuk, the old lady who lived in the apartment below theirs. Mrs Bondarchuk, in addition to being their sole neighbor, was also their sole tenant, the building being owned by one of Louis’s shelf companies. Mrs Bondarchuk kept Pomeranians, on which she lavished most of her love and attention, Mr Bondarchuk having long since departed for a better place. For many years Angel and Louis had labored under the misapprehension that Mr Bondarchuk was dead, but it had recently emerged that Mr Bondarchuk had simply bailed in 1979, and his better place was Boise, Idaho — ‘better’ being a relative term in an unhappy marriage. Mrs Bondarchuk did not miss him. She explained that her husband had left rather than be killed by her. The Pomeranians were a more than satisfactory replacement, despite their yappy natures, although Mrs Bondarchuk raised exclusively male dogs, and made sure to have them neutered at the earliest opportunity, which suggested to Angel and Louis that Mrs Bondarchuk retained some residual hostility toward Mr Bondarchuk. Mrs Bondarchuk defended the noisiness of her Pomeranians on the grounds that it made them good watchdogs, and hence they constituted a virtual alarm system of their own. Louis took this with good grace, even though the building had the kind of alarm system that governments might envy, and usually only governments could afford.

Some years earlier there had been what Mrs Bondarchuk continued to refer to as ‘the unpleasantness’, during which an effort had been made to access the building through hostile means, an effort that ultimately concluded with the deaths of all those responsible. It was an incident that failed to trouble the police, once Angel had explained to Mrs Bondarchuk, over milk and chocolate cake, the importance of sometimes avoiding the attentions of the forces of law and order, such forces perhaps not always understanding that there were times when violence could only be met with violence. Mrs Bondarchuk, who was old enough to remember the arrival of the Nazis in her native Ukraine, and the death of her father during the encirclement of Kiev, actually proved very understanding of this point of view. She told a startled Angel that she and her mother had transported weapons for the Ukrainian partisans, and she had watched from a corner as her mother and a quartet of other widows castrated and then killed a private from the German police battalion ‘Ostland’ who had been unfortunate enough to fall into their clutches. In her way, as a Jew whose people had been slaughtered at Minsk and Kostopil and Sosenki, she knew better than Angel the importance of keeping some things secret from the authorities, and the occasional necessity of harsh reprisals against degenerate men. Ever since then, she had become even more protective of her two neighbors than before, and they, in turn, ensured that her rent was nominal and her comforts guaranteed.

Now, with Mrs Bondarchuk greeted and the building secured, the talk turned once more to the events of that evening as Louis poured two glasses of Meerlust Rubicon from South Africa, a suitably wintry red. Flurries of snow obscured the view through the windows, but they were halfhearted and ultimately inconsequential, like the parting shots of a defeated army. Angel watched as Louis shed his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. The shirt was immaculately white, and just as smooth as it had been before it was worn. It never failed to amaze Angel how his partner’s appearance could remain so pristine. If Angel even looked at a shirt it started to wrinkle. The only way he could have worn a white shirt for an evening and returned home without evidence of grievous wear would have been to add so much starch to it that it resembled the top half of a suit of armor.

‘Why did you give Ross those names?’ Angel asked. He spoke without even a hint of accusation or blame. He was simply curious to know.

‘Because I don’t like Cambion, and I’ll be happy when he’s dead.’ Louis swirled the wine in his glass. ‘Did you notice anything odd about Cambion’s little pied-à-terre?’

‘If I knew what that was, I might be able to answer. I’ll take a guess that you’re talking about the apothecary.’

‘You have a lot of room for self-improvement.’

‘Then you have something to look forward to. And in answer to your question, there was only odd when it came to Cambion’s little whatever-you-said.’

‘I counted three soup bowls, one of them plastic. I didn’t count but two people.’

‘One of the bowls could have been from earlier.’

‘Maybe.’

‘But you don’t think so.’

‘The place was old and weird, but it was tidy. Apart from those bowls.’

‘A plastic bowl,’ said Angel. ‘You think he has a child in there?’

‘I don’t know. I just don’t think he and his boy Edmund are the only people holed up in that old store.’

‘You planning on going back there to clarify the situation?’

‘Not yet. We’re prioritizing.’

‘On that subject: you gave Ross that list, but what did we get in return?’

‘We know that the Believers had nothing to do with the hit.’

Angel wondered if the wine and the two earlier beers had somehow interacted disastrously, destroying some of his already threatened brain cells. Ross had shown them a picture. Had Ross been lying?

‘What about the photograph?’

‘The photograph is meaningless. It’s a false trail. These people, or whatever they are, they don’t sign their names. That’s for dime-store novels. You think I ever put a bullet in a man, then rolled up a business card and stuck it in the hole because it pays to advertise?’

Angel doubted it, but you never knew.

‘You think Ross figures it’s a false trail?’

‘Ross don’t care one way or the other. It’s one more nail in their coffin, and it don’t matter to him who hammered it in.’

‘“Doesn’t”.’ It doesn’t matter. You have inconsistent grammar, you know that?’

Louis’s public and private personae were different, but sometimes he forgot what role he was supposed to be playing.

‘Fuckin’ Ross was right about you, you know that?’ said Louis.

‘Ross can’t even get a parking ticket fixed. He said so himself. So we go back to Cambion and tell him what — that we sold out his future to the Feds, or do we just lie and make out like you’re still trying to burn the contract?’

‘Neither. I know people in the Carolinas. If there’s a team of husband-and-wife shooters operating out of there, someone’s got to have heard.’

‘Not if they’re selective. Not if they don’t work for money but out of some misguided sense of purpose.’

‘What, you mean like us?’

‘Exactly like us, except without the religion.’

‘Yeah, and look how hard we were to find. It wasn’t so long ago we had delivery men with explosives trying to blow our door off, and tonight Ross could have run our asses over if he felt like it. But we’ll nail them, however long it takes.’

‘And then?’

‘We make them talk.’

‘And after that?’

Louis tried the wine. It was good.

‘We kill them.’

Louis was correct in more than one of his assumptions. Even the most cautious of men can be found, if his pursuer has the commitment and the resources. The man who stood at the rain-soaked corner on the Upper West Side, where the poor were in sight of the rich and, more worryingly for those who feared imminent societal collapse, the rich were in sight of the poor, had spent a long time, and a not inconsiderable amount of money, trying to establish where Angel and Louis lived. In the end, it was the attack on the building — the ‘unpleasantness’ over which Angel and Mrs Bondarchuk had bonded — that brought them to his attention. Louis had made every effort to ensure that word of what happened did not leak to the police, but the man on the corner represented a different form of law and justice, and such matters were very difficult to keep from him and his father.

The Collector cupped his hands over the match and held it to the cigarette at his lips, then smoked it with the butt held between the thumb and index finger, the remaining fingers sheltering it from the rain. He had arrived just as Angel and Louis entered the building. He did not know where they had been, but he could guess: they would be tracking those responsible for the attack on the detective. The Collector admired their single-mindedness, their focus: no mercy dash north to be at the detective’s bedside, none of the fruitless beating at the darkness that comes from those who have grief without power and anger without an object. They would even have set aside their pursuit of the Collector himself in order to concentrate on the more immediate matter. The Collector knew that most of that impetus probably came from Louis, but his lover was not to be underestimated either. Emotionless killers rarely survived for long. The trick was not to stifle the emotions, but to control them. Love, anger, grief — all were weapons in their way, but they needed to be kept in check. The one called Angel enabled Louis to do this. Without him, Louis would have died long ago.

But Angel was dangerous too. Louis would calculate the odds and, if the situation were not to his liking, would back off and wait for a better opportunity to strike. The logician in him was always to the fore. Angel was different. Once he made the decision to move, he would keep coming at his target until one of them went down. He knew how to channel emotion as a weapon. That kind of force and determination was not to be underestimated. What most people failed to realize was that fights were decided in the opening seconds, not the closing ones, and there was something about facing an attacker of apparently relentless belligerence that could psychologically undo even a bigger, stronger opponent.

But what was strangest of all for the Collector, as he assessed these two men, was the realization that he had come to admire them. Even as they hunted him from nest to nest, and destroyed the hiding places that he had so carefully constructed for himself, he was in awe of their ferocity, their guile. Neither could he deny that he and these men, through their allegiance to Parker, were engaged in variations on the same work. True, the Collector had been forced to kill one of their number, but in that he had erred. He had let emotion get the better of him, and he accepted that he must pay a price for his lapse. The loss of his nests had been the price, but now he was tiring of the chase. He would give these two men what they wanted in order to secure a truce. If they did not agree, well, there was work to be done, and their pursuit of him was getting in the way of it. The distraction and threat that they posed, and the time and effort they were causing him to expend, enabled men and women of profound viciousness to continue to prey on those weaker than themselves. Judgments were waiting to be handed out. His collection needed to be replenished.

He called Eldritch from a pay phone. Over the old man’s objections, the Collector had secured the services of a nurse for the period of his enforced absence. The Collector trusted the nurse implicitly. She was a niece of the woman who had kept Epstein’s office in order, and put warmth in his bed, until her recent passing. She was discreet, and selectively deaf, mute and blind.

‘How are you feeling?’ said the Collector.

‘I’m well.’

‘The woman is taking good care of you?’

‘I can take care of myself. She just gets in the way.’

‘Consider it a favor to me. It puts my concerns at rest.’

‘I’m touched. Have you found them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you approached them?’

‘No, but soon I’ll have a message delivered to them. Tomorrow we will meet.’

‘They may not agree.’

‘One is a pragmatist, the other driven by principle. What I offer will appeal to both.’

‘And if it does not?’

‘Then this goes on, and inevitably blood will be spilled. They will not want that, I guarantee it. I believe that they are as weary of it as I am. The detective is their priority: the detective, and those who pulled the trigger on him. And, who knows, I may manage to negotiate a little extra for us, a prize that you’ve been seeking for many years.’

‘And what would that be?’

‘The location of a corrupted man,’ said the Collector. ‘The lair of a leper.’

47

Garrison Pryor’s tame cop had experienced difficulty in gaining access to the scene of the shooting. Not only was the Scarborough PD all over it, but so were the Maine State Police’s Major Crimes Unit and the FBI, which had immediately sent agents not just from its field office in Boston, but from New York too. The house and its environs had been locked down from the instant the first patrol car arrived, and the flow of information was being tightly controlled amid threats of suspension and possible imprisonment for any breaches by police or emergency personnel.

But despite all those precautions, Pryor’s guy was able to talk to one of the ambulance crew, and — cops being cops — managed to piece together small details just by keeping his mouth shut and listening. Nevertheless, days went by before Pryor learned of the symbol that had been carved into the wood of the detective’s kitchen door. The knowledge placed him in a difficult position: should he alert the Principal Backer immediately, or wait until he had clarified the situation? He decided to take the former course of action. He did not want to give the Principal Backer any cause to doubt him, and better to plead ignorance initially, and work to correct it, than be accused of withholding information, leaving himself open to suspicion.

As the morning sun tried to pierce the gray clouds over Boston, the Principal Backer listened in silence while Pryor communicated what he had learned. The Principal Backer was not the kind of man who interrupted, or who tolerated interruption in turn.

‘Well, was this the work of Believers?’ he said when Pryor had finished.

‘It’s possible,’ said Pryor, ‘but, if so, it’s not any of whom we have knowledge. There’s no connection to us.’

He didn’t need to mention that most of the Believers were dead. Only a handful had ever existed to begin with, and the detective and his allies had wiped most of those out. Although it had never been formally discussed, most of the Backers regarded the elimination of the Believers who were obsessed with finding an imprisoned angel one of the fallen as something of a blessing. Each group had its own priorities, and while their ultimate aims sometimes intersected or followed a similar path, neither party entirely trusted the other. But generations of Backers had been content to use the Believers when it suited them. Some had even allied themselves to the Believers’ cause. Connections existed.

‘If someone is scratching the Believers’ symbol into the woodwork of scenes of attempted murder, then there is potentially a connection to all of us,’ said the Principal Backer. ‘Any investigation could damage us.’

‘It may be the action of renegades,’ said Pryor. ‘If so, they could be difficult to find. We know the identities of the ones who have crossed Parker. Any others have kept themselves hidden, even from us. Ultimately, my instinct says that the symbol is a false trail. Whoever carried out the attack, or ordered it to be carried out, wants to divert attention from themselves.’

‘There are those who would willingly use even a suspicion of involvement to act against us. What of the detective?’

‘His condition remains critical. Privately, the doctors are suggesting that he won’t survive. Even if he does, he will not be the same man. Perhaps he has no part to play in what is to come after all.’

‘Perhaps not, or it could be that his role has simply changed.’

Laurie, Pryor’s PA, knocked at his office door. He waved her away in irritation. How urgent could it be? If there was a fire, he’d hear the alarm bells.

But she persisted, and her face contorted into a rictus of anxiety.

‘Sir, I may have to get back to you,’ said Pryor.

‘Is there a problem?’

‘I think so.’

He hung up the phone, and Laurie immediately entered.

‘I had asked—’ he began, but she cut him off.

‘Mr Pryor, there are agents from the Economic Crimes Unit downstairs. Security is trying to delay them, but they have warrants.’

The Economic Crimes Unit was the branch of the FBI’s Financial Crimes Section tasked with investigating securities and commodities fraud, among other areas. The Principal Backer’s fears were being realized. The attack on the detective had given their enemies an opening. This might just be a fishing expedition, but through it a message was being sent to them.

We know of you.

We know.

While Garrison Pryor prepared to confront the federal investigators, Angel called Rachel Wolfe. She had just returned to her home in Vermont, having spent a couple of nights in Portland to be close to the father of her child. Her daughter had not stayed with her. Rachel felt that it was important for Sam to continue her routines, and not be engaged in some ongoing deathwatch, but she had been permitted to see him briefly in the ICU. Rachel was worried about exposing Sam to the sight of her father lying broken and dying in a hospital bed, but the child had insisted. Jeff, Rachel’s partner, drove Sam over to Portland, then took her home again. He might not have been particularly enamored of Rachel’s former lover, but he had behaved sensitively since the attack, and she was grateful to him for it. Now Rachel spoke to Angel of tubes and needles, of wounds and dressings. One kidney gone. Shotgun pellets painstakingly removed from his skull and back, including a number perilously close to his spine. Potential nerve damage to one arm. Murmurs of possible brain injury. He remained in a coma. His body appeared to have shut down all but the most essential of systems in order to fight for survival.

‘How did Sam do?’ asked Angel.

‘She didn’t shed a tear,’ said Rachel. ‘Even Jeff looked broken up, and he doesn’t even like Charlie. But Sam, she just whispered something to her father, and wouldn’t tell me what it was. Apparently she was quiet on the ride home, though. She didn’t want to speak. Then, when Jeff looked back at her somewhere around Lebanon, she was fast asleep.’

‘You try talking to her about it since the visit?’

‘I’m a psychologist: all I ever do is talk about things. She seems … fine. You know what she told me? She said she thought her daddy was deciding.’

‘Deciding what?’

‘If he wanted to live or die.’

And Rachel’s voice broke on the last word.

‘And how are you doing?’

He could hear her trying to control herself, trying not to cry.

‘Okay, I guess. It’s complicated. I feel disloyal to him, somehow, like I abandoned him. Does that make any sense?’

‘It’s guilt.’

‘Yes.’

‘For fucking an asshole like Jeff.’

She couldn’t help but splutter with laughter.

‘You’re the asshole, you know that?’

‘I get that a lot.’

‘Jeff’s been good, you dick. And, hey, you know what the weirdest thing about being at that hospital was?’

‘I get the feeling you’re going to tell me.’

‘You bet I am. It was the number of women who kept coming into the place asking about him. It’s like waiting by the bedside of King Solomon. There was a little dark-haired cop, and a woman from that town, Dark Hollow. You remember it? You ought to. There was shooting.’

Angel winced, not so much at the memory of the town itself but at the mention of the woman. Her name was Lorna Jennings, and she was the wife of the chief of police up in Dark Hollow. There was history there, the kind you didn’t want to discuss with the mother of a man’s child, even if they were now separated and he was dying in a hospital bed.

‘Yeah, it rings a bell.’

‘Do you remember her?’

‘Not so much.’

‘Liar. Did he sleep with her?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on.’

‘Jesus, I don’t know! I don’t follow him around with a towel and a glass of water.’

‘What about the cop?’

That had to be Sharon Macy. Parker had told Angel about her.

‘No, he didn’t sleep with her. I’m pretty certain of that.’

Angel tried to remember a more awkward conversation that he’d had, but failed.

‘And there’s another woman. She doesn’t stray far from the ICU, and I get the impression that she has police permission to be there, but she’s no cop. She’s a deaf mute, and she carries a gun. I’ve seen how she looks at him.’

‘Liat,’ said Angel. Epstein must have sent her to watch over Parker. She was a curious choice of guardian angel. Effective, but curious.

‘He slept with her, didn’t he? If he didn’t, he should have.’

What the hell, thought Angel.

‘Yeah, he slept with her.’

‘Trust him to sleep with a woman who couldn’t answer back.’

‘It was just once,’ said Angel.

‘What are you, his personal apologist?’

‘You’ve made me his apologist! I only called to see how you were. Now I’m sorry I asked.’

Rachel laughed. It was genuine, and he was happy that he had given her that, at least.

‘Will you come up to see him?’ she asked.

‘Soon,’ he said.

‘You’re looking for them, aren’t you, the ones who did this to him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nobody ever got this close to him before. Nobody ever hurt him so badly. If he dies …’

‘Don’t say that. Remember what your daughter told you: he’s still deciding, and he has a reason to come back. He loves Sam, and he loves you, even if you are fucking an asshole like Jeff.’

‘Go away,’ said Rachel. ‘Do something useful.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Angel.

He hung up. Louis stood beside him, waiting. He handed Angel a Beretta 21 fitted with a suppressor that was barely longer than the pistol itself. The Beretta could now be fired in a restaurant and would make a sound only slightly louder than a spoon striking against the side of a cup. Louis carried a similar weapon in the pocket of his Belstaff jacket.

They were off to do something useful.

They were going to meet and, if necessary, kill the Collector.

48

Ronald Straydeer sat in the living room of his home near the Scarborough Downs racetrack. He held in his hands a photograph of himself as a younger man in uniform, his left arm encircling the neck of a massive German Shepherd dog. Ronald was smiling in the picture, and he liked to think that Elsa was smiling, too.

He wished that he still smoked pot. He wished that he still drank. It would have been easy to return to doing one or the other, or even both. Under the circumstances, it would not have been surprising or blameworthy. Instead he spoke to the picture, and to the ghost of the dog within it.

He was often asked, by those who did not know any better, why he had not found himself another dog in the intervening years. He knew there were some who said that those who kept dogs had to resign themselves to their eventual loss because of the animals’ relatively short lives. The trick — if trick was the right word — was to learn to love the spirit of the animal, and to recognize that it transferred itself from dog to dog, with each one representing the same life force. Ronald believed that there might be some sense in this, but he felt, too, that men might equally say the same thing about women, and vice versa. He had known plenty of women, and had even loved one or two of them, so he had some experience in the matter. But some men and women lost a partner early in life and never managed to give themselves again to another, and Ronald thought there might have been something of that catastrophic sense of loss to his feelings for his lost dog. He was not a sentimental man — although, again, some mistook his grieving for a dead animal as sentimentality. Ronald Straydeer had simply loved the dog, and Elsa had saved his life and the lives of his brother soldiers on more than one occasion. In the end he was forced to abandon and betray her, and the sight of her, caged and scratching at the wire as she was taken from him, had torn at him every day since then. His only hope was that he might eventually be reunited with his dog in a world beyond this one.

Now he told the ghost of the dog about the church and the girl and the shadows that had encircled her before she was dragged beneath the ground. He could have gone to the police, but there was a policeman involved. And what could he have told them: that he saw a girl kneel by a hole in the earth and then disappear? All he had was a fragment of pale material. Could they extract DNA from it? Ronald did not know. It depended, he supposed, on whether it had touched the girl’s skin for long enough, if it had touched her at all. He had placed the material in one of the resealable bags that he used for food and waste. It was before him now. He held it up to the light, but he could see no traces of blood on it, and it seemed to him to be stained only by dirt. He did not know her name, and he was not sure if he could have identified her from the glimpse that he caught of her in the greenish light of his night vision lens. He knew only that she was not Jude’s daughter. He had seen photographs of Annie. Jude had shared them with him, and Ronald retained an uncanny recall for faces and names. The girl swallowed by the churchyard was younger than Jude’s daughter. Ronald wondered if Annie, too, lay somewhere in that cemetery, if her fate had been the same as that poor girl’s. If so, how many others slept beneath the church, embraced by roots? (For they were not shadows that had wrapped themselves around the girl as she was taken, oh no …)

But Ronald also understood instinctively that, even if people were to believe him and a search was eventually conducted, men could dig long and deep in that churchyard without finding any trace of the girl. As he worked at the collapsed earth with his bare hands, hoping to reveal some sign of her, he had felt the presence of a perfect and profound hostility, a malevolent hunger given form. It was this, more than any inability to keep digging, that had caused him to abandon his efforts to find a body. Even now, he was glad that he had used the water in the Fulcis’ truck to clean his hands of the soil from that place, and one of their towels to dry them, and had then disposed of the towel in a Dumpster so that it would not be used again. He was grateful not to have contaminated his home with even a fragment of that cursed earth, and he kept sealed the bag containing the piece of material lest some minute particle of grit should fall from it and pollute all.

The detective would have known what to do, but he was dying. He had friends, though: clever men, dangerous men. Right now, those men would be looking for the ones responsible for shooting him. Ronald didn’t find it hard to make a connection between the detective’s inquiries into the disappearance of Annie Broyer and the sight of an unknown girl being dragged beneath the ground while a group of men and women stood by and watched. It wasn’t much of a stretch from there to imagine a set of circumstances in which those same people might have seen ft to try and take the detective’s life.

And if he was wrong? Well, the men who stood by the detective were more like him than perhaps even they knew, and they had wrath to spare. Ronald would find a way to contact them, and together they would avenge those trapped in uneasy rest beneath the dirt of Prosperous.

As Ronald Straydeer sat in contemplation and mourning, the bodies of Magnus and Dianne Madsen, and Erin Dixon, were discovered by police after Magnus failed to appear as scheduled for his hospital duties. The Maine State Police informed Lucas Morland of the Prosperous Police Department once Erin’s identity was established. With both Kayley Madsen and Harry Dixon apparently missing, a patrol car was immediately dispatched to the Dixon house, but there was no sign of Harry or his niece. Their faces duly began showing up on news channels, and an auto dealer in Medway came forward to say that he’d taken a trade-in on a GMC Passenger van with Harry Dixon just a few days earlier. The van was soon found in a patch of woodland just outside of Bangor, with Harry seated at the wheel and a hole in the back of his head where the bullet from the gun in his hand had exited. On the seat beside him was a woman’s shirt, stained with blood at the collar. Its size matched clothing found in Kayley Madsen’s closet, and DNA tests would subsequently confirm that the blood was Kayley’s, although no other trace of her was ever found.

‘PROSPEROUS: MAINE’S CURSED TOWN‘ read one of the more lurid newspaper headlines in the aftermath. Prosperous crawled with MSP investigators, but Morland handled them all well. He was diligent, cooperative and unassuming. He knew his place. Only once did he experience a shred of alarm, and that was when an FBI agent named Ross visited from New York. Ross sat in Morland’s office, nibbled on a cookie, and asked about the detective, Parker. Why had he come to Prosperous? What did he want to know? And then he gave Morland a possible ‘out’: had Parker spoken to Harry Dixon or his wife at any point? Morland didn’t know, but he conceded that it might have been possible, although why Parker might have wanted to meet with the Dixons Morland couldn’t say. But anything that linked Parker to the Dixons was good for Morland, and good for Prosperous. That was a dead end, and the FBI and State Police could spend decades peering into it for all Morland cared.

‘Can I ask why the FBI is interested in the shooting of a private detective in Maine?’ said Morland.

‘Curiosity,’ said Ross. Then: ‘Your town seems to be having a bad time of it lately.’

‘Yeah,’ said Morland. ‘They say these things come in threes.’

‘Really?’ said Ross. ‘I count, uh—’ He worked it out on his fingers. ‘Six,’ he concluded. ‘Or nine, if you include the Madsens and their missing daughter. Or, wow, eleven allowing for that homeless guy in Portland, and his missing daughter. That’s a lot. More than three, anyway.’

It wasn’t the first time Morland had heard something of the kind. The MSP investigators had intimated as much, and now Morland replied to Ross just as he had responded to them.

‘Sir, my reckoning is two killings by religious terrorists thousands of miles from here; one accidental, self-inflicted gunshot wound on an elderly man; one automobile incident; and, to our shame and regret, an apparent murder-suicide involving two of our townsfolk. I can’t speak to suicides in Portland, or missing girls. I just know what this town has endured. I can’t say why Harry Dixon might have killed those people. I heard that he had money problems, but a lot of folk have money problems and don’t take a gun to their family as a consequence. It could be that the town’s troubles caused something in him to snap. I’m no psychiatrist. But if you can establish a connection between all those disparate events, then I’ll never again question the amount of taxes our government ploughs into the Bureau.’

Ross finished his cookie.

‘And the attempted murder of a private investigator,’ said Ross. ‘I almost forgot to add that.’

Morland didn’t respond. He was all done with the FBI for now.

‘Can I help you with anything else today, Agent Ross?’

‘No,’ said Ross. ‘I think that’ll be all. I appreciate your time. And the cookie was very good. My compliments to the baker.’

‘My wife,’ said Morland.

‘You’re a fortunate man,’ said Ross.

He stood and buttoned his coat before heading out. There was still a chill in the air.

‘And this is quite a town. Quite a town indeed.’

Thirty minutes later, Morland received a call from Pastor Warraner.

Ross had been out at the church.

49

At first Angel and Louis believed the missive from the Collector to be little more than a taunt. It was delivered by a bike messenger, and consisted of a padded envelope containing a single final bearclaw from the necklace that had once belonged to their friend, the late Jackie Garner, and a business card from the Lexington Candy Shop and Luncheonette on Lexington, the old Soda-Candy store that had been in operation at that location since 1925. It was only when Louis turned over the card and saw a date — that same day — and a time — 11 AM — written on the back that they understood this might be different, although whether it would prove to be an olive branch or a trap they were not certain.

Even the Collector’s choice of a location for the meeting was not without resonance: the Lexington Candy Shop was where Gabriel, Louis’s late master, would hold his meetings with clients, and sometimes with the operatives for whom he acted as a middleman, Louis among them. Perhaps, thought Louis, the distance between Cambion and Gabriel was not as great as Louis might have liked to believe. Gabriel was merely Cambion with a more highly developed moral sense, but that wasn’t saying a whole lot. There were things breeding in petri dishes with a more highly developed moral sense than Cambion. By extension, the distance between Louis and Cambion might well have been significantly less than it was comfortable to imagine. The difference was that Louis had changed while Cambion had not. Cambion did not have a man like Angel by his side, but then a man like Angel would never have allied himself to one such as Cambion to begin with. It made Louis wonder if Angel had seen the possibility of redemption in Louis long before Louis himself had recognized it. Louis found this simultaneously flattering and slightly worrying.

The Collector’s decision to nominate the Lexington Candy Shop as the venue for their meeting was his way of telling Louis that the Collector knew all he needed to know about Louis and his past. It added another layer of peculiarity to the Collector’s invitation. This was not the action of a man laying a trap, but of a man willingly walking into one.

The only other customers at the diner when Angel and Louis entered were two male Japanese tourists excitedly taking photographs of the interior, with its gas-fired coffee urns and ancient signage. The Collector sat at the back of the diner, near the door marked no admittance. staff only. His hands lay fat on the table before him, resting on either side of a coffee cup. He was dressed as he nearly always was, in a long dark coat worn over dark pants, a dark jacket and a tieless shirt that had once been white but now, like his nicotine-stained fingertips, had more than a hint of yellow about it. His hair was slicked back from his forehead and hung over the collar of his shirt, adding touches of grease to the yellow. He was, thought Angel, even more cadaverous than when last they’d met. Being hunted will do that to a man.

Once Louis and Angel were inside, a middle-aged woman moved from behind the counter, locked the door and turned the sign to closed. She then unhurriedly poured two cups of coffee and left through the private staff door without looking at them or the man who sat waiting for them, stinking of cigarette smoke.

The two Japanese tourists laid down their cameras and turned to face the Collector. The younger of the men signaled almost imperceptibly to a pair of his countrymen watching from the southeastern corner of Lexington and 83rd. One of them now crossed the street to cover the front of the store while the other watched the side.

‘You think I didn’t notice them?’ said the Collector. ‘I spotted them before they were even aware of my presence.’

Louis sat at the table facing, but to the right of, the Collector, and Angel took a similar position to the Collector’s left, forming a kind of lethal triangle. By the time they were seated the guns were in their hands, visible to the Collector but not to anyone glancing in casually from the street.

‘We’ve been looking for you,’ said Louis.

‘I’m aware of that. You must be running out of houses to burn down.’

‘You could have saved us a lot of gas money by just showing up here months ago.’

‘And maybe I could have marked the spot on my forehead for the bullet to enter.’

‘You should have been more careful about your choice of victims.’

Louis reached into his coat pocket with his left hand and withdrew Jackie Garner’s bearclaw necklace. The claws rattled like bones as he fed them through his fingers. In his right he held the final claw, broken from the necklace and included with the Collector’s invitation.

‘I might say the same about your late friend,’ said the Collector.

Slowly, precisely, so as not to cause the men before him to react, he picked up his cup and sipped his coffee.

‘We can, if you choose, play the blame game until the sun starts to set, but none of us is that naïve,’ he said. ‘Mr Garner miscalculated, and someone close to me paid the price. I reacted in anger, and Mr Garner died. You’ll forgive me if I refuse to allow someone like you, a man with the blood of both the innocent and the guilty on his hands, to admonish me about the appropriateness or otherwise of killing. Hypocrisy is a particularly galling vice.’

Angel inclined slightly toward Louis.

‘Are we being lectured by a serial killer?’

‘You know, I do believe we are.’

‘It’s a novel experience.’

‘Yes, it is. I still won’t miss him after we kill him.’

‘No, me neither.’

The Collector’s hands were, once again, resting on the table. He showed no sign of unease. It might have been that he was not aware of how close he was to death, or he simply might not have cared.

‘I hear that your friend, the detective, is dying,’ he said.

‘Or still living,’ said Angel. ‘It’s a matter of perspective.’

‘He is an unusual man. I don’t claim to understand him, but I would prefer it if he survived. The world is more colorful for his presence. He draws evil to him like moths to light. It makes the practitioners easier to dispose of.’

‘You come here to deliver a get well soon wish?’ said Louis. ‘We’ll be sure to pass it on. And if he does die, well, you may just be in a position to express your regrets to him personally.’

The Collector stared out the window at the two Japanese men, then took in the second pair in the diner.

‘Where do you find these people?’ he asked.

‘We attract them,’ said Louis. ‘Like moths to light,’ he added, appropriating the Collector’s metaphor for himself.

‘Is that what you are now? The force of light?’

‘In the absence of another.’

‘Yes, I suspect yours is only reflected light,’ said the Collector. ‘You’re looking for the ones who shot him. I can help you.’

‘How?’

‘I can give you their names. I can tell you where to find them.’

‘And why would you do that?’

‘To cut a deal. Eldritch is ill. He needs rest and time to recuperate. The strain of the hunt is telling on him. As for me, it’s interfering with my work. While I try to stay one step ahead of you, vicious men and women go unpunished. So I will give you the names, and as part of the bargain you will abandon the hunt. You must be tiring of it as much as I, and you know that your Mr Garner did wrong. If I had not killed him, he would be spending the rest of his days in a cell. In a way, I did him a favor. He would not have lasted long in prison. He was not as strong as we are.’

Angel’s grip tightened on his gun. For this creature to suggest that Jackie’s murder was some kind of blessing was almost too much for him to bear.

‘At least he’d have received a trial,’ said Angel.

‘I tried him. He confessed. You’re speaking of the trappings of legality, and nothing more.’

Louis spoke. He said only one word, but it was both a warning and an imprecation.

‘Angel.’

After a second or two, Angel relaxed.

‘You mentioned us backing off as “part” of the bargain,’ said Louis. ‘What’s the rest?’

‘I know that your search for the ones who did the shooting has brought you into contact with all kinds of interesting individuals. I’m assuming one of those was Cambion.’

‘Why?’

‘Because, when you’d exhausted all other avenues, he would have been the only one left. I doubt that he gave you the answers you needed.’

‘We met him,’ confirmed Louis.

‘And?’

‘He told us that a couple, a man and a woman, carried out the attack. He promised more.’

‘Of course he did. What did he ask in return for the information?’

‘The same thing that you just did: to call off the dogs. But it’s like this — he may be a freak, but he’s a freak who didn’t kill one of our friends. If it comes down to it, I might be more inclined to take my chances with him.’

‘You’d be disappointed. He’s going to feed you to the shooters, you and your boyfriend. They’re potentially more valuable to him than you are. You’ll never do his bidding, but they’ll owe him a favor, and they’re very, very good at what they do.’

And Louis understood that the Collector was right. It simply confirmed what Louis had suspected: there would be more benefits to Cambion in siding with the shooters.

‘Go on.’

‘Here is what I’m offering,’ said the Collector. ‘I give you the names. In return, I want a truce between us, and I want to know where Cambion is. He is long overdue a blade.’

‘And if we don’t agree?’ said Louis ‘What if we just decide to kill you here?’

The gun in his hand moved so that it was aiming at the Collector beneath the table. The first shots would take him in the gut, the last in the back of the head as he fell forward and Louis delivered the coup de grâce from above.

The Collector gestured with his right hand to the chair beside him. On it, unnoticed by Angel and Louis until now, was a green cardboard folder.

‘Open it,’ he said, as he restored his hands to the table.

Louis stood, never taking his eyes off the Collector as he went to retrieve the folder. The two Asian men in the diner moved too, their guns now visible. The Collector remained very still, his gaze fixed on the table top before him. He remained like that as Louis flipped through the file. It contained typewritten sheets, photographs, even transcripts of telephone conversations.

‘It’s your history,’ said the Collector. ‘The story of your life: every killing we could trace, every piece of evidence we could accumulate against you. By good fortune, it was one of a handful of records for which Eldritch retained secure copies. There’s enough in there to have damned you, should I have chosen to take the knife to you. If I don’t walk safely out of here today, Eldritch will ensure that a copy of it goes to the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the New York County District Attorney, twelve different police departments throughout the nation, and the Criminal Investigative Division of the FBI. It should fill in any annoying gaps in their own research.’

For the first time, the Collector relaxed. He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes.

‘I told you, I’m tired of the hunt,’ he said. ‘It ends now. I could have used this material alone to force you to relent, but I feel that I have to make recompense for what happened to Mr Garner. I want your promise that the chase is over. I want Cambion. In return, you get vengeance for what happened to the detective.’

Louis and Angel looked at each other. Louis could see that Angel did not want to make a deal with this man, but the file had tipped the scales, and Angel, he knew, would agree to whatever protected Louis. Bringing them closer to those who had carried out the attack on Parker would just have to be considered a bonus.

‘Agreed,’ said Louis.

‘If the detective survives, I’ll take it that your word is a guarantee of his good behavior too,’ said the Collector. ‘Otherwise, our truce is void.’

‘Understood.’

‘The couple for whom you’re looking are named William and Zilla Daund. They live in Asheville, North Carolina. They have two sons, Adrian and Kerr. The sons have no idea about their parents’ sideline in killing.’

‘Who hired them?’

‘You’ll have to ask them.’

‘But you know.’

‘I believe the name Daund comes from the northeast of England: Durham, or possibly Northumberland. I’ll let them fill in any other details themselves. Now, I’d like you to fulfill the second part of our arrangement.’

‘Cambion is in Hunts Lane, over in Brooklyn,’ said Louis, ‘assuming he hasn’t already moved on. He’s holed up in an old apothecary.’

‘Does he have anyone with him?’

‘A big man named Edmund.’

The Collector stood.

‘Then we’re done here,’ he said. ‘I wish you luck in your investigation.’

He buttoned his coat, and stepped around the table.

‘And you can keep the file,’ he told Louis as he passed him. ‘We have more than one copy now.’

They let him go, and he lost himself in the crowds on Lexington.

‘I notice that you didn’t mention the possibility of a third person at Hunts Lane with Cambion and his buddy,’ said Angel.

‘No,’ said Louis. ‘I guess it must have slipped my mind.’

50

I sat at the edge of a lake, on a wooden bench painted white. I was cold, even with a jacket on, and I kept my hands in my pockets to hold the worst of the chill at bay. To my left, at the top of a small hill, was the rehabilitation center, an old nineteenth-century sea captain’s house surrounded by a series of more recently built single-story redbrick buildings. Evergreen trees bounded the lake, and most of the snow had been cleared from the grass. The grounds were quiet.

All was quiet.

A small black stone lay by my feet. It looked incredibly smooth. I wanted to hold it in my hand. I reached down to pick it up, and found that it was flawed beneath. A shard of it had fallen away, leaving the underside jagged and uneven. I stared out at the still expanse of the lake and threw the stone. It hit the water and the surface cracked like ice, even though it was not frozen. The cracks extended away from me and across the lake, then fractured the woods and mountains beyond, until finally the sky itself was shattered by black lightning.

I heard footsteps behind me, and a hand lit upon my shoulder. I saw the wedding ring that it wore. I remembered the ring. I recalled putting it on that finger before a priest. Now one of the nails was broken.

Susan.

‘I knew that it wasn’t real,’ I said.

‘How?’ said my dead wife.

I did not turn to look at her. I was afraid.

‘Because I could not remember how I got here. Because there was no pain.’

And I was speaking of the wounds left by the bullets, and the wounds left by loss.

‘There doesn’t have to be any more pain,’ she said.

‘It’s cold.’

‘It will be, for a time.’

I turned now. I wanted to see her. She was as she had been before the Traveling Man took his knife to her. And yet she was not. She was both more, and less, than she once was.

She wore a summer dress, for she always wore a summer dress in this place. In every glimpse of her that I had caught since losing her she had been wearing the same dress, although at those times I never saw her face. When I did, it was under other circumstances. The dress would be stained with blood, and her features a ruin of red. I had never been able to reconcile the two versions of her.

Now she was beautiful once again, but her eyes were distant, focused elsewhere, as though my presence here had called her from more pleasant business and she wished to return to it as quickly as possible.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘For what?’

‘For leaving you. For not being there when he came for you.’

‘You would have died with us.’

‘I might have stopped him.’

‘No. You weren’t as strong then, and he had so much rage. So much rage …’

Her nails dug into my shoulder, and I was transported with her, back to our home, and I watched with her as the Traveling Man had his way with her and our daughter. As he worked, another version of my wife stood behind him, her face a blur of blood as her head and body shook. This was the one whom I had seen before. This was the wife who walked through my world.

‘Who is she?’ I asked. ‘What is she?’

‘She is what remains. She is my anger. She is all of my hatred and my sorrow, my hurt and my pain. She is the thing that haunts you.’

Her hand stroked my cheek. Her touch burned.

‘I had a lot of anger,’ she said.

‘So I see. And when I die?’

‘Then she dies too.’

The remains of our daughter were stretched across her mother’s lap. Jennifer was already dead when he began cutting. It was, I supposed, a mercy.

‘And Jennifer?’

I felt her hesitate.

‘She is different.’

‘How?’

‘She moves between worlds. She holds the other in check. She would not desert you, even in death.’

‘She whispers to me.’

‘Yes.’

‘She writes upon the dust of window panes.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘Close.’

I looked, but I could not find her.

‘I saw her here, in this house, once before.’

I had been stalked through these rooms years after their lives were ended, hunted by a pair of lovers. But my daughter had been waiting for them — my daughter and the creature of rage she tried to control, but which on that occasion she was content to unleash.

‘I’d like to see her.’

‘She’ll come, when she’s ready.’

I watched the Traveling Man continue his cutting. There was no pain.

Not for me.

We were back at the lake. The cracks and fissures were repaired. The fragile world was undisturbed. I stood by the shore. The water did not lap. There were no waves.

‘What should I do?’ I asked.

‘What do you want to do?’ she asked.

‘I think I want to die.’

‘Then die.’

I could not see my reflection, but I could see Susan’s. In this world, it was she who had substance, and I who had none.

‘What will happen?’

‘The world will go on. Did you think that it revolved around you?’

‘I didn’t realize that the afterlife had so much sarcasm in it.’

‘I haven’t had cause to use it in a while. You haven’t been around.’

‘I loved you, you know.’

‘I know. I loved you too.’

She stumbled over the words, unfamiliar in her mouth, but I sensed that speaking them aloud caused something deep inside her to thaw. It was as though my proximity reminded her of what it had once been like to be human.

‘If you stay here,’ she said, ‘events will play out without you. The world will be different. You will not be there for those whom you might have protected. Others may take your place, but who can say?’

‘And if I go back?’

‘Pain. Loss. Life. Another death.’

‘To what end?’

‘Are you asking me your purpose?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘You know what they seek. The One Who Waits Behind the Glass. The God of Wasps. The Buried God.’

‘Am I supposed to stop them?’

‘I doubt that you can.’

‘So why should I go back?’

‘There is no “should”. If you go back, you do so because you choose it, and you will protect those who might not otherwise be protected.’

She moved closer to me. I felt the warmth of her breath against my face. It bore a trace of incense.

‘You wonder why they come to you, why they’re drawn to you, these fallen ones.’ She whispered the words, as though fearful of being overheard. ‘When you spend time close to a fire, you smell of smoke. These things seek not only their Buried God. They are looking for a fire that they wish to extinguish, but they cannot find it. You have been near it. You have been in its presence. You carry its smoke upon you, and so they come for you.’

She stepped away from me. Her reflection receded, then disappeared. I was alone. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, my daughter was beside me. She put her hand in mine.

‘You’re cold,’ said Jennifer.

‘Yes.’ My voice broke on the word.

‘Would you like to go for a walk, Daddy?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d like that very much.’

51

The Battery Park Book Exchange stood in the center of Asheville, North Carolina. It sold rare and used books, to which Louis had no objection, and wine and champagne, to which, if possible, he had even fewer objections.

The woman named Zilla Daund was taking part in a book club in the store. She and four other women were discussing Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra over sparkling wine and the kind of single-mouthful treats that passed for food where thin, attractive women were concerned. Louis sat with a glass of pinot noir by his right hand, and a copy of Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg on his lap. He had picked up the Berg book because Perkins had edited Thomas Wolfe, probably Asheville’s most famous son, and Louis, who couldn’t stand Wolfe’s writings, was trying to understand why Perkins had bothered. As far as he could tell from reading the relevant sections in Berg’s biography, the only reason that Wolfe’s debut Look Homeward, Angel was even marginally tolerable was because Perkins had forced Wolfe to remove over 60,000 words from it. At Louis’s rough estimate, that still left Look Homeward, Angel — which, in the store’s Scribner edition, came to about 500 pages — at least 499 pages too long.

Zilla Daund looked like the kind of woman who took reading books very seriously without actually understanding how the act could be enjoyable as well. Her copy of Cleopatra was marked with narrow Post-it notes of different colors, and Louis felt certain that the interior was marked with words such as ‘Interesting!’, ‘Agree strongly!’ and ‘VIP!’, like a high schooler in freshman year working her way through The Catcher in the Rye for the first time. She was slim and blond, with the build of a long-distance runner. She might even have been considered good-looking had she not prematurely aged herself through a probable combination of excessive exposure to the elements and a steely determination that had left her brow permanently furrowed and her jaw set in a thin rictus, like a serpent about to strike.

Louis had been watching Daund for the past thirty-six hours, but this was as close as he had yet come to her. It was his way: begin at a distance, then slowly move in. So far, from his brief exposure to her routine, she seemed like an ordinary suburban housewife living a moderately comfortable existence. She’d gone to her local gym that morning, training for an hour before returning home to shower and change, then leaving shortly after lunch to come to her book club. The day before she’d eaten a late breakfast with some friends, shopped at the Asheville Mall, browsed the aisles at Mr K’s Used Books at River Ridge and had dinner at home with her husband and their younger son — their older son, a sophomore at George Washington University, being currently absent. The younger son was just sixteen, but he wouldn’t be coming home for dinner anytime soon. At that precise moment, he was in the back of a van being driven deep into the Pisgah National Forest by two men whose faces he had not even glimpsed before he was snatched. He was probably terrified, but the boy’s terror didn’t concern Louis. He wanted something to use against the Daunds if they proved unwilling to talk.

Meanwhile Angel was staying close to William Daund, who was on the faculty of the Department of Literature and Language at the University of North Carolina in Asheville. Louis would have bet a dollar that William Daund had read Look Homeward, Angel so often he could recite passages from it by heart. He probably even liked the book. Louis was looking forward to killing him.

Zilla Daund finished giving her opinion on Cleopatra’s ruthlessness, which apparently extended to slaughtering her own relatives when the situation required it. ‘She lived in an age of murder and betrayal,’ Daund told her friends. ‘I don’t believe that she killed because she liked it. She killed because it was the most effective solution to the problems that she faced.’

The other women laughed — that was their Zilla, always following the shortest route between two points, no matter who or what happened to be in the way — and Louis watched as Daund laughed along with them. The group broke up. Louis returned his attention to Maxwell Perkins. In a letter dated November 17, 1936, Perkins was trying to come to terms with the fact that Wolfe was severing ties with him. ‘I know you would not ever do an insincere thing,’ wrote Perkins to Wolfe, ‘or anything you did not think was right.’

Louis had to admire Perkins’s faith, even if he adjudged it to have ultimately been misplaced.

‘He ruined Thomas Wolfe, you know.’

Louis looked up. Zilla Daund was standing before him, her copy of Cleopatra cradled beneath her left arm, her right hidden in a pocket of her coat.

‘He did good by Hemingway and Fitzgerald,’ said Louis. ‘Can’t win ‘em all.’

He didn’t allow his eyes to drift to her right hand. He held her gaze.

‘No,’ she said, ‘maybe you can’t. Enjoy your wine — and your book.’

She walked away, and Louis thought: she’s made me, or thinks she has. It didn’t matter. If she and her husband were as smart as Cambion and the Collector seemed to think, they must have learned quickly that the private detective they’d tried to kill was different, and the perpetrators of the attack on him were being hunted not only by the police, but by men who were not unlike themselves. Perhaps they had simply not expected to be found so quickly, if they were found at all. Louis wondered if Cambion had already warned them.

He called Angel as he watched her walk across the street to the parking garage.

‘Where is he?’

‘In his office,’ said Angel. ‘He’s been in tutorials since this morning, and he’s about to give a class until four.’

‘If he cancels, call me.’

‘Why?’

‘I think the woman is spooked. If I’m right, she’ll contact him. You know where he’s parked?’

‘Yes.’

‘Watch the car.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’ll take the house. Stay with the husband. And, hey?’

‘What?’

‘You ever read Look Homeward, Angel?’

‘Fuck, no. It must be a thousand pages long. Why would I want to do that?’

‘I knew there was a reason why I liked you,’ said Louis.

‘Yeah?’ said Angel. ‘Well, if I think of one in return, I’ll let you know.’

Louis was ahead of the woman all the way. He had parked at a meter, just outside the store, so as soon as she was out of sight he left cash for his wine and returned to his car. Angel had already taken care of the house alarm earlier in the day, once he was certain that William Daund was committed to his tutorials. It meant that when Zilla Daund entered the house, Louis was waiting for her. She said only one word as she set her bag down, Louis’s suppressed .22 inches from her head.

‘Fuck.’

‘I prefer “fucked”,’ said Louis. ‘And just for the record, you’re wrong about Maxwell Perkins.’

He closed the front door with his foot, and took a step back from her.

‘You know what this is about?’ he asked.

‘The hit in Maine.’

‘Someone told you to expect trouble?’

‘We knew from the aftershock, but we got a call.’

‘Cambion?’

She didn’t respond.

‘Not that it’s any consolation, but he told us about you as well,’ said Louis. ‘Not everything, but a start.’

‘Like you say, we got fucked.’

‘Yes, you did. Drop the bag.’

A big purse hung from her left shoulder. He’d watched her as she drank her wine earlier, so he knew that she was righthanded, even before she’d spoken to him with that hand concealed, probably holding a weapon aimed at him. He figured she had at least one gun on her person, and maybe another in the purse.

‘If you’re armed, you better tell me now.’

‘In my purse.’

‘But not your right coat pocket?’

‘Oops.’

Louis stepped back and told her to let the coat fall from body. It landed with a heavy thud on the wood floor.

‘You got anything else?’

‘You’re welcome to frisk me.’

‘We’re below the Mason — Dixon line. Us colored folks got to be careful with the white women down here. I’d prefer it if you just told me.’

‘Left side, on the belt.’

‘You expecting war to break out?’

‘We live in a dangerous world.’

She was wearing a loose-fitting cardigan under a light jacket, the kind that would easily cover a gun.

‘Use your left hand,’ Louis said. ‘Thumb and index finger only. Slowly.’

Zilla Daund lowered her left hand, pushed aside her jacket with her forearm, and used the palm of her hand to raise the cardigan, exposing the gun. It looked like a little hammerless S&W 642 in a .38 Special.

‘This is awkward,’ she said. ‘The holster’s tight.’

He saw her tense, and was a second ahead of her. She was fast, twisting her body at the same time as she raised her right hand to lash out at him, but by then Louis was already bringing the butt of his gun down on her right temple. He followed her to the floor, wrenching the .38 from its holster and tossing it aside. She was stunned, but conscious. He kept the gun at the base of her neck while he pulled her jacket and cardigan to her elbows, trapping her arms, then patted her down. Her jeans were skintight, but he still checked them for a blade. He released her when he was done, and watched as she rearranged her clothing. He found her phone and handed it to her.

‘Call your husband,’ he said.

‘Why?’

She looked dazed, but he thought that she might have been exaggerating for his benefit. He allowed her to sit up with her back against the wall, although he insisted that she keep her legs outstretched and her hands away from her body. It would make it harder for her to raise herself up if she tried to attack him again. Louis was under no illusions about how dangerous this woman was.

‘Because I know that you called your husband after you spoke to me at the bookstore. My guess is that he’s expecting the all-clear.’

Angel had called Louis when he was within sight of the house to tell him that William Daund was on the move. ‘Let him come,’ had been Louis’s instruction.

Louis waited while she went to her ‘Recent Calls’ and found ‘Bill’. He let the gun touch her left temple as her finger hovered over the call button.

‘If I was aware that your husband was coming, then you understand I’m not working alone. Your husband is being followed. If you say anything to alert him, we’ll know. This doesn’t have to end badly for you.’

She stared at him. Any after effects, real or feigned, of the blow to her head were now almost entirely gone.

‘We both know that’s not true,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen your face.’

‘Ma’am,’ said Louis, ‘right now you have no idea just how much worse this could get for you and your family.’

It was the mention of her family that did it. This wasn’t just about her and her husband.

‘Fuck,’ she said again, softly.

‘You were that concerned about the safety of your boys, maybe you should have picked another line of work,’ said Louis. ‘Make the call. Raise the volume, but don’t put it on speaker.’

She did as she was told. Louis listened.

‘Zill?’ said her husband.

‘I’m home,’ she said. ‘But we still need to talk.’

‘I’m on my way. No more over the phone.’

‘Okay. Just be quick.’

The call ended.

‘Zill and Bill,’ said Louis. ‘Cute.’

She didn’t reply. He could see her calculating, trying to figure out what moves were open to her. Seconds later, Louis’s phone buzzed.

‘Angel.’

‘He’s about five minutes from you.’

‘Stay as close as you can.’

‘Got it.’

Louis continued to point the gun at Zilla Daund.

‘Crawl into the kitchen on your belly,’ he said. ‘Do it.’

‘What?’

‘If you try to get to your feet I’ll kill you.’

‘You’re an animal.’

‘Now you’re just being hurtful,’ said Louis. ‘Kitchen.’

He stayed behind her as she crawled, keeping the gun on her all the way. The kitchen was mostly walnut, with a matching table and four chairs at the center. When Zilla Daund reached the table, Louis told her to get up slowly and take a seat facing the door. He removed a cup from a shelf and placed it in front of her. The kitchen extended the width of the house, with a connecting door leading to a big living room with a dining area at one end. Between the table and the connecting door was a refrigerator and a glass-fronted cabinet filled with canned goods. It was there that Louis took up position. He couldn’t see the front door, but he could see the woman.

The sound of a car pulling up came from the front of the house. About a minute later there was the sound of a key in the door. This was the moment. This was when Zilla Daund would warn her husband.

The door opened. Three things happened almost simultaneously.

Zilla Daund screamed her husband’s name and threw herself to the kitchen floor.

William Daund raised the gun that was already in his hand and prepared to fire.

And Angel appeared behind William Daund and killed him with a single suppressed shot to the back of the head. Angel then proceeded into the house and closed the door behind him. He didn’t look at Daund’s body as he stepped over it. It was not callousness. He just didn’t want to see what he had done. He checked the street from the living room window, but there was no indication that anyone had witnessed what had occurred. Then again, they wouldn’t know for sure unless the cops arrived on the doorstep. This had to be quick.

When he joined Louis in the kitchen, Zilla Daund was standing by the utility room. She was under Louis’s gun, but she had a big kitchen knife in her hand. On whom she intended to try to use it wasn’t clear, but turning it on anyone in that room, including herself, wouldn’t be a positive turn of events.

‘You were only ever going to let one of us live,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Louis. ‘Neither of you was ever going to live. The first one into the house was just going to live longer.’

Zilla Daund turned the knife in her hand, and placed the tip of it against her throat.

‘You’ll leave with nothing,’ she said.

‘Before you do that,’ said Louis, ‘you ought to call your son.’

He placed a cell phone on the kitchen table and slid it carefully to the end nearest Zilla. He lowered his gun. Angel did the same. Zilla Daund approached the table. She picked up the phone. There was one name on the display: Kerr, her younger boy.

She called his number. He answered.

‘Kerr?’ she said.

‘Mom? Mom?’

‘Kerr, are you okay?’

‘I don’t know where I am, Mom. I got jumped by some men, and they’ve been driving me around for hours. Mom, I’m scared. What’s happening?’

‘You’re going to be fine, honey. It’s a big mistake. Those men are about to let you go. I love you.’

‘Mom? What—’

Zilla Daund killed the connection. She placed the knife back in its block. She bit her lower lip and shook her head. Her eyes were elsewhere. A tear trickled down one cheek, but whether it was for her son, her husband, or herself could not be known.

‘Your word?’ she said.

‘He’ll be released unharmed,’ said Angel.

He didn’t like this. He didn’t like it at all. Threatening kids was not in his nature. It was necessary, but that didn’t make it right.

‘How can I trust you?’ said Zilla Daund.

‘Without overstating the obvious,’ said Louis, ‘you don’t have much choice. But I figure Cambion told you enough about us, and you’ve maybe learned a little more in the meantime.’

‘We made some calls,’ she admitted.

‘And?’

‘If we’d known about you, we’d have killed you before we went after the detective.’

‘Ambitious.’

‘And careful.’

‘No. If you were careful, you’d have done your homework first.’

Zilla Daund conceded the point.

‘Who told you to kill the detective?’ said Louis.

‘Hayley Conyer.’

‘Who’s Hayley Conyer?’

‘The chief selectman of the town of Prosperous, Maine.’

‘Why?’

‘I didn’t ask, but everything Hayley does is for the good of the town.’

‘You kill for anyone else?’

‘No, just her.’

‘For money?’

‘She pays, but we’d have helped her for nothing if we had to. We’re of the town from generations past.’

‘Who else knew?’

‘Morland, the chief of police. Pastor Warraner. The rest of the board of selectmen.’

‘Did you kill a homeless man named Jude in Portland and make it look like suicide?’

‘Yes.’

‘And his daughter?’

‘No.’

‘What’s so special about Prosperous?’ asked Angel.

Zilla Daund’s mouth settled into the odd grimace of determination that Louis had identified back at the bookstore, her teeth gritted, her lips slightly parted.

‘That’s all you get,’ she said.

‘You sold out your town pretty easily,’ said Louis.

‘I didn’t sell it out at all,’ said Zilla Daund. ‘Prosperous will eat you alive.’

Louis shot her twice. She shuddered on the kitchen floor for a time before she died. Louis walked to the front window of the house and looked out. It was already getting dark. The houses in this modern dormitory community all sat on large lots divided by hedges and trees. Lights burned in some of the homes, but there was nobody on the streets. Louis wondered how anyone could live in a development like this, with its near-identical houses on clearly delineated lots, the tiny differences in detail or aspect designed to give a false impression of individuality. Maybe killing people was the only way the Daunds could keep from going crazy.

Given more time, they would have searched the house, but Angel was uneasy. From his jacket pocket he produced two flasks of carbolic acid, or liquefied phenol. He and Louis retraced their steps through the house, spraying the carbolic acid as they went. Phenol was a useful contaminant of DNA samples. Once they were done, they left the house and returned to their cars. Each had a false adhesive number plate attached to the original. They took only seconds to remove, and melted in open fame. Louis made the call to Kerr Daund’s captors, but they were instructed not to release him until the following morning, by which time Angel and Louis would be far away from Asheville, North Carolina but considerably closer to Prosperous, Maine.

52

They did not immediately descend on Prosperous. Instead Louis and Angel waited, and they planned.

An apartment on Eastern Promenade in Portland was rented in the name of one of Louis’s shelf companies. At the Great Lost Bear, Dave Evans turned a blind eye as a succession of meetings took place in his office, until eventually he resigned himself to doing his paperwork in a booth by the bar. Prosperous was visited by a pair of Japanese businessmen and their wives, who endeared themselves to everyone they met with their courtesy and enthusiasm. They took a lot of photographs, but then that was to be expected of tourists from the Far East. They even accepted it in good spirits when they were prevented from entering the cemetery that surrounded the old church. The ground was unsafe, they were told, but plans were being put in place to mark a route through the gravestones to the chapel itself. Perhaps next time, if they returned.

And one evening, shortly after Angel and Louis’s arrival in Portland, Ronald Straydeer came to the Great Lost Bear. Ronald had rarely frequented the city’s bars when he did drink, and now that he had given up he had no cause to visit them at all, but Angel and Louis preferred to conduct their business away from their apartment, for the fewer people who knew about it, the better. The meeting with Ronald had been arranged through Rachel Wolfe, as Ronald did not know of any other way to contact the two men whom he sought. He had left a message for her at the hospital where the detective still lay in his coma. Ronald’s short note requested simply that Rachel call him. Rachel had met Ronald on a couple of occasions while she was still living in Scarborough, so she knew who he was, and was aware of the mutual respect that existed between him and her former lover. She asked no questions when he told her that he wanted to be put in touch with Angel and Louis, but simply passed the message on to them. When Angel eventually called, Ronald had said only this: ‘I saw something happen in Prosperous, something bad.’

And Angel knew that they were about to be handed another piece of the puzzle.

Over coffee in the back office, Ronald told Angel and Louis of what he had witnessed: a girl swallowed by the earth in the shadow of an old church while a group of older men and women, accompanied by a pastor and a policeman, stood by and watched. If the two men were surprised by his tale, they did not show it. If they were skeptical, Ronald could detect no trace.

‘What do you think happened to her?’ said Louis.

‘I think something pulled her underground,’ said Ronald.

‘Something?’ said Louis.

It seemed to Ronald to be the first expression of any doubt, but he was mistaken. It came to him that these men had seen and heard things stranger even than this.

‘It’s not enough,’ Louis continued. ‘We need more. We can’t go in blind.’

Ronald had thought on this too. He had ransacked his memories of tribal lore — the Cherokee worship of the cedar tree, based on the belief that the Creator had imbued it with the spirits of those who had perished during the times of eternal night; the Canotila or tree dwellers of the Lakota; the Abenaki’s tale of the creation of man from the bark of ash trees; and the forest-dwelling Mikum-wasus of his own Penobscot people — but he could find no explanation in them for what he had seen. He had a vision of a great tree growing upside down, its leafess crown far below the ground, its trunk extending upward to roots that twitched and groped, breaking through the earth to the air above; and at its heart, surrounded by the husks of dead girls, was an entity that had come from far away, a spirit that had infused the stones of an old church, travelling with it as it crossed land and sea before retreating into the new ground in which the foundations of that church were laid, creating a form for itself from wood and sap. But the question that consumed him most was its nature, for he believed that men created gods as much, if not more, than gods created men. If this old god existed, it did so because there were men and women who permitted it to continue to exist through their beliefs. They fed it, and it, in turn, fed them.

Ronald took from his jacket a sheaf of photocopied pages and laid them before Angel and Louis. The images upon them were undated, but they depicted the carved heads that could be seen both inside and outside the Chapel of the Congregation of Adam Before Eve & Eve Before Adam. He had found the pictures buried in the archives of the Center for Maine History, and then, unbeknownst to himself, had followed a similar research path to the detective, staring at images of the foliate heads to be found on the churches and cathedrals of Western Europe. The English had called it the Green Man, but it predated that name by more than a millennium, and its spirit was older yet. When the first men came it was waiting for them among the trees, and in their minds it formed itself in their image: a human face rendered in wood and leaf.

‘It may be that it looks like this,’ said Ronald.

Angel picked up one of the pictures. It was the face of winter, the bleakest and most hostile of the visages from the Prosperous church. He thought of what Ross had said to them back in Brooklyn. It didn’t matter whether a thing existed or not. What mattered was the trouble caused by those who believed in its existence.

‘You talked of roots,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Ronald. ‘I think roots drew the girl down.’

‘Roots and branches,’ said Angel. ‘Wood.’

‘And what does wood do?’ said Louis.

Angel smiled as he replied.

‘It burns.’

The killings in Asheville had not gone unremarked in Boston, for Garrison Pryor’s people had been following trails similar to Angel and Louis, albeit a little more discreetly. The deaths of William and Zilla Daund simply confirmed what Pryor had begun to suspect: that the attack on the detective had been ordered from the town of Prosperous. This indicated that the decision to leave the Believers’ mark at the scene had also been taken there, which meant, finally, that all of Pryor’s current troubles could be laid at the town’s door.

Prosperous had rarely troubled Pryor until now. It was a community unto itself, and he saw no reason to interfere with it as long as it was discreet in its activities. Now the town’s very insularity — its refusal to recognize its relationship to the larger world and the possible impact of its decisions upon those beyond the town’s boundaries — and the commitment of its protectors to its preservation, at any cost, had disturbed this state of equilibrium.

Prosperous, by its actions, had made retribution inevitable.

The call came through to Angel’s cell phone, its ID hidden. Louis felt that he should have been more surprised when Angel handed the phone to him and he heard the Collector’s voice.

‘Very impressive,’ said the Collector. ‘To be honest, I had wondered if Cambion might not have been right to bet everything on them, but clearly they weren’t quite as accomplished as he believed them to be.’

‘I think killing homeless men had blunted their edge,’ said Louis.

‘Oh, they’ve killed more than homeless men, but I won’t disagree. They swam in a small pool.’

‘How did you know about them?’

‘A process of elimination. I asked questions and found out that Parker had been nosing around in Prosperous’s business. It was possible that Prosperous might not have been involved, but Cambion sealed it for me. He’s long been interested in the town’s pet husband-and-wife killers.’

‘You could just have told us. You could just have given us the name of the town.’

‘But where would be the sport in that? And I know you, Louis, perhaps better than you know yourself. You’re meticulous. You want to fill in the blanks. What did the Daunds give you? Prosperous, or more? Wait, names: they gave you names. You wouldn’t have left without them. Am I correct?’

Louis put down his glass of orange juice. He’d just been settling into the business pages of the Times, but now he recognized that any interest he might have had in the newspaper or, indeed, the orange juice had largely dissipated.

‘A name,’ he conceded. ‘The woman gave me a name.’

‘Hayley Conyer.’

‘Shit.’

‘Oh, she wouldn’t like to hear you swear like that. She’s a god-fearing woman. That’s “god” with a small “g”, incidentally.’

‘You interested in her? Looking for a date?’

‘She’s very old.’

‘Begging your pardon, but I don’t believe you can afford to be particular.’

‘Don’t be facetious. She’s an interesting woman, and Prosperous is a fascinating town. You’ll like it.’

‘Is she on your list?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘So why haven’t you taken her?’

‘Because it’s not just her, but the whole town. And generations of it. To do the sins of Prosperous justice, I’d have to dig up centuries of bones and burn them on a pyre. The whole town would have to be put to the torch, and that’s beyond my capabilities.’

Louis understood.

‘But not beyond ours.’

‘No.’

‘Why should we destroy an entire town?’

‘Because it colluded in what happened to the detective, and if you don’t wipe it from the earth it will continue its traditions into future generations, and those traditions are very, very nasty. Prosperous is a hungry town.’

‘So you want us to do your dirty work for you? Fuck you.’

‘Don’t be like that,’ said the Collector. ‘You’ll enjoy it, I guarantee it. Oh, and pay special attention to that church of theirs. Flames won’t be enough. You’ll have to dig much deeper, and tear it apart with something far stronger.’

Louis sensed that the conversation was coming to a close.

‘Hey, since we’re being all civil and all, you find your friend Cambion?’

The Collector was standing in the premises of Blackthorn, Apothecary. He held a blade in his hands. Upon it was just a hint of blood.

‘I’m afraid he seems to have made his excuses and left before we could become better acquainted.’

‘That’s unfortunate.’

And he meant it.

‘Yes, it is,’ said the Collector, and he meant it too.

Seconds passed.

‘You told me that he lived here with someone else,’ said the Collector.

‘Yeah, big man. Dressed in yellow. Hard to miss.’

‘And no other?’

‘Not that I was aware of.’

‘Hmmm.’

The Collector stared at the tattered, partial wreckage of a human being that lay on a gurney before him. The man had no eyes, no ears, and no tongue. Most of his fingers and toes were also missing. Stitches marked the site of his emasculation. The Collector had killed him as an act of mercy.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I believe I may have discovered Mr Cambion’s missing physician. Be sure to send me a postcard from Prosperous.’

The Collector hung up. Angel looked up at Louis from over the Portland Press Herald.

‘Are you two, like, all buddies now?’

Louis sighed.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘sometimes I wish I’d never heard the name Charlie Parker …’

Garrison Pryor was sitting in a quiet corner of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. He could see into the next public room, so he knew that he was not being overheard or observed. Since the FBI’s visit to his offices, Pryor had grown concerned about surveillance to the point of paranoia. He no longer made or received delicate calls outside or on the office phones, especially not when he was dealing with the Principal Backer. The most important of the Backers now exchanged numbers for clean cell phones each day but otherwise they had fallen back on a primitive but virtually untraceable means of communicating sensitive information like cell phone numbers, a simple code based around the print edition of the Wall Street Journal: page, column, paragraph, line. Many of the older Backers found the routine almost reassuring, and Pryor thought that some might advocate retaining it once the FBI had exhausted itself chasing after imagined breaches of financial regulations.

The Bureau’s attention was irritating and an inconvenience, but little more than that. Pryor Investments had learned from past mistakes, and was now entirely scrupulous in its dealings. Of course, the company was merely a front: a fully functioning and lucrative one, but a front nonetheless. The Backers’ real machinery had been hidden so deeply, and for so long, in established companies, in banks and trusts, in charities and religious organizations, as to be untraceable. Let the FBI and its allies expend their energy on Pryor Investments. Admittedly, it was unfortunate that the private detective in Maine had become interested in Pryor Investments to begin with. It was a piece of bad luck, and nothing more. But he had clearly spoken to others of his suspicions, which was why the FBI had ended up on Pryor’s doorstep. But they would find nothing, and eventually their attention would turn elsewhere.

Now, in the quiet of the museum, he spoke on the phone with the Principal Backer.

‘Who killed this couple in Asheville?’

‘We don’t know for sure’, said Pryor, ‘but we believe it was Parker’s pet assassins.’

‘They did well to find what we could not.’

‘We were close,’ said Pryor. ‘The Daunds’ blood was still pooling on the floor of their house when I got their names.’

‘So they saved us the trouble of killing the Daunds ourselves.’

‘I suppose they did. What now?’

‘Now? Nothing.’

Pryor was surprised. ‘What about Prosperous?’

‘We let Parker’s friends finish what they started. Why should we involve ourselves when they will do the job for us?’ The Principal Backer laughed. ‘We won’t even have to pay them.’

‘And then?’

‘Business as usual. You have mines to acquire.’

Yes, thought Pryor. Yes, I have.

53

Lucas Morland felt as though he had aged years in a matter of days, but for the first time he was starting to believe that Prosperous might be free and clear, at least as far as the law was concerned. The MSP had not been in touch with him in forty-eight hours, and its investigators were no longer troubling his town. A certain narrative was gaining traction: Harry Dixon, who had been depressed and suffering from financial problems, killed his wife, her halfsister, her husband and, it was presumed, his niece, before turning his gun on himself. Extensive searches of the town and its environs had failed to uncover any trace of Kayley Madsen. The state police had even done some halfhearted exploring in the cemetery under Pastor Warraner’s watchful eye. The only tense moment occurred when some disturbance to the earth near the church walls was discovered, but further digging exposed only the remains of what was believed to be an animal burrow of some kind — too narrow, it seemed certain, to allow for the burial of a young woman’s body.

Then there was the matter of the detective. The hit on him had been botched, and, just as Morland had warned, the attack had brought with it a series of convulsive aftershocks, culminating in the killing of the Daunds. Morland didn’t know how the couple had been tracked down. Neither did he know if they had kept silent as they died or confessed all to their killers in an effort to save themselves or, more likely, their son, who had been held captive while his parents were shot dead in their own home. At best, those who were seeking to avenge the shooting of the detective were now only one step away from Prosperous. He had tried to get Hayley Conyer and the others to understand the danger they were in, but they refused to do so. They believed that they had acted to protect the town, and the town, in turn, would protect them. Why wouldn’t it? After all, they had given a girl to it.

Now he was back in Conyer’s house, sitting at that same table in that same room, sipping tea from the same cups. Sunlight flooded through the trees. It was the first truly warm day in months. The air was bright with the sound of snow and ice melting, like the dimly heard ticking of clocks.

‘You’ve done well, Lucas,’ Conyer told him as she sipped her tea. Morland had barely touched his. He had begun to resent every minute he was forced to spend in Conyer’s presence. ‘Don’t think the board doesn’t appreciate all of your efforts.’

He was there only because that old bastard Kinley Nowell had finally given up the ghost. He had died that morning in his daughter’s arms. It was a more peaceful passing than he deserved. As far as Morland was concerned, Kinley Nowell had been severely lacking in the milk of human kindness, even by the standards of a town that fed young women to a hole in the ground.

But Nowell’s death had also provided him with what might be his final chance to talk some sense into Hayley Conyer. The board would need a replacement, but she had vetoed the suggestion that the young lawyer Stacey Walker should be Nowell’s replacement, despite the majority of her fellow board members being in favor. Instead Conyer was holding firm on Daniel Cooper, who wasn’t much younger than Nowell had been when he died, and was among the most stubborn and blinkered of the town’s elders, as well as an admirer of Conyer’s to the point of witlessness. Even after all that had occurred, Conyer was still attempting to consolidate her position.

‘We just need to stand together for a little while longer,’ Conyer continued, ‘and then all this will pass.’

She knew why he was here, but she wasn’t about to be dissuaded from her course. She’d already informed Morland that she felt Stacey Walker was too young, too inexperienced, to be brought on to the board. Hard times called for old heads, she told him. Morland couldn’t tell whether she’d just made that up or if it was an actual saying, but he rejected it totally in either case. It was old heads that had gotten them into all this trouble to begin with. The town needed a fresh start. He thought of Annie Broyer, and a question that had come to mind after he and Harry Dixon had spent a cold night burying her.

What would happen if we stopped feeding it?

Bad things, Hayley Conyer would have told him had she been there. She would have pointed to the misfortunes that had blighted Prosperous so recently — the deaths of those boys in Afghanistan, of Valerie Gillson, of Ben Pearson — and said, There! See what happens when you fail in your duty to the town?

But what if this was all a myth in which they had mistakenly chosen to believe? What if their old god was more dependent on them than they were on it? Their credence gave it power. If they deprived it of belief, then what?

Could a god die?

Let the town have its share of misfortunes. Let it take its chances with the rest of humanity, for good or ill. He was surprised by how much Kayley Madsen’s fate had shaken him. He’d heard stories, of course. His own father had prepared him for it, so he thought he knew what to expect. He hadn’t been ready for the reality, though. It was the speed of it that haunted him most, how quickly the girl had been swallowed by the earth, like a conjurer’s vanishing trick.

If Morland had his way, they would feed this old god no longer.

But Hayley Conyer stood in his way: Conyer, and those like her.

‘We have to put old disagreements behind us and look to the future,’ said Conyer. ‘Let all our difficulties be in the past.’

‘But they’re not,’ he said. ‘What happened to the Daunds proves that.’

‘You’re making assumptions that their deaths are linked to their recent efforts on our behalf.’

‘You told me yourself that they worked only for the town. There can be no other reason why they were targeted.’

She dismissed what he had said with a wave of her hand.

‘They could have been tempted to take on other tasks without our knowledge. Even if they did not, and they were somehow tracked down because of the detective, they would not betray us.’

‘They might, to save their child.’

But Hayley Conyer had no children, had apparently never shown any desire to be a mother, and to possess such feelings for a child was beyond her imaginative and emotional reach.

‘Hayley,’ said Morland, with some force, ‘they will come here next. I’m certain of it.’

And it’s your fault, he wanted to tell her. I warned you. I told you not to take this course of action. I love this town as much as you. I’ve even killed for it. But you believe that whatever decision you take, whatever is right for you, is also right for Prosperous, and in that you are mistaken. You’re like that French king who declared that he was the state, before the people ultimately proved him wrong by cutting off the head of his descendant.

Morland was not the only one who felt this way. There were others too. The time of the current board of selectmen was drawing to a close.

‘If they do come, we’ll deal with them,’ said Hayley. ‘We’ll …’

But Morland was no longer even listening. He drifted. He was not sleeping well, and when he did doze off his dreams were haunted by visions of wolves. He removed a handkerchief from his pocket. Hayley Conyer was still talking, lecturing him on the town’s history, his obligations to it, the wisdom of the board. It sounded to him like the cawings of an old crow. She mentioned something about his position, about how nobody was irreplaceable. She talked of the possibility of Morland taking a period of extended leave.

Morland stood. It took a huge effort. His body felt impossibly heavy. He looked at the handkerchief. Why had he taken it from his pocket? Ah, he remembered now. He walked behind Hayley Conyer, clasped the handkerchief over her nose and mouth, and squeezed. He wrapped his left arm around her as he did so, holding her down in the chair, her sticklike arms pressed to her sides. She struggled against him but he was a big man, and she was an elderly woman at the end of her days. Morland did not look into her eyes as he killed her. Instead he stared out the window at the trees in the yard. He could see the dark winter buds on the nearest maple. Soon they would give way to the red and yellow flowers of early spring.

Hayley Conyer jerked hard in her chair. He felt her spirit depart, and smelled the dying of her. He released his grip on her face and examined her nose and mouth. There were no obvious signs of injury: a little redness where he had held her nostrils closed, but no more than that. He let her fall forward on the table and made a call to Frank Robinson, who operated the town’s only medical practice and who, like Morland, felt that the time for a change was fast approaching. Robinson would make a fine selectman.

‘Frank,’ he said, once the receptionist put him through. ‘I’ve got some bad news. I came over to talk to Hayley Conyer and found her collapsed on her dining table. Yeah, she’s gone. I guess her old heart gave out on her at last. Must have been the stress of all that’s happened.’

It was unlikely that the state’s Chief Medical Examiner would insist on an autopsy, and even if one was ordered, Doc Robinson had the designated authority to perform it. Meanwhile, Morland would take photographs of the scene to include in his report.

He listened as Robinson spoke.

‘Yeah,’ said Morland. ‘It’s the town’s loss. But we go on.’

Two down, thought Morland. Three, and he could take over the board. The one to watch would be Thomas Souleby, who had always wanted to be chief selectman. Warraner, too, might be a problem, but it was traditional that the pastor did not serve on the board, just as Morland himself, as chief of police, was prevented from serving by the rules of the town. But Warraner did not have many friends in the town while Morland did. And perhaps, if Morland were finally to put an end to this madness, he would have to take care of Warraner as well. Without a shepherd, there was no flock. Without a pastor, there was no church.

He stared down at his hands. He had never even fired his gun in anger until the evening when he killed Erin Dixon and her relatives, and now he had more deaths on his conscience than he could count on one hand. He had even fired the bullet that killed Harry Dixon. Bryan Joblin had offered to do it, but Morland wasn’t sure that Joblin could do something that was at once so simple yet so dangerous without botching it. He’d let Bryan watch, though. It was the least that Morland could do.

He should have been more troubled than he was but, Kayley Madsen’s final moments apart, he felt comparatively free of any psychological burden, for he could justify each killing to himself. By fleeing, Harry Dixon had given Morland no choice but to move against him. Eventually he would have told someone about Annie Broyer and how she had come to die in the town of Prosperous. The town’s hold on its citizens grew looser the further from it they moved. It was true of any belief system. It was sustained by the proximity of other believers.

A car pulled up outside and he watched Frank Robinson emerge from it. Morland wished that he could get in his own car and drive away, but he had come too far now. A line from a play came to him, or the vaguest memory of it. It had to be from high school, because Morland hadn’t been to a play in twenty years. Shakespeare, he guessed, something about how, if it were to be done, then it was best to do it quickly.

If Morland could get rid of Souleby, the board would be his.

The board, and the town.

The news of Hayley Conyer’s passing made the papers, as anything involving Prosperous now tended to do. The general consensus was that the old woman’s heart had been broken by the troubles visited on her town, although this view was not shared by everyone.

‘Jesus,’ said Angel to Louis, ‘if it goes on like this there’ll be nobody left for us to kill.’

He remained surprised by Louis’s patience. They were still in Portland, and no move had yet been made on Prosperous.

‘You think it was natural causes, like they’re saying?’ said Angel.

‘Death is always by natural causes, if you look hard enough.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I’d be surprised if she didn’t die kicking at something,’ said Louis. ‘Zilla Daund told us that the order to hit Parker came from the board of selectmen, and this Conyer woman in particular. Now she’s dead. If I was on that board, I’d start locking my door at night. It’s like that Sherlock Holmes thing. You know, once you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how improbable it seems, is the truth.’

‘I don’t get it,’ said Angel.

‘Once everyone else in the room is dead, the person left standing, no matter how respectable, is the killer.’

‘Right. You have anyone in mind?’

Louis walked to the dining room table. An array of photographs lay upon it, including images of the town, its buildings, and a number of its citizens. Some of the pictures been provided by the Japanese ‘tourists’. Others had been copied from websites. Louis separated pictures of five men from the rest.

‘Souleby, Joblin, Ayton, Warraner and Morland,’ he said.

He pushed the photographs of Joblin and Ayton to one side.

‘Not these,’ he said.

‘Why?’ said Angel.

‘Just a feeling. Souleby might have it in him, I admit, but not the other two. One’s too old, the second’s not the type.’

Louis then separated Warraner.

‘Again, why?’

‘Makes no sense. If this is all connected to something in their old church, then Conyer and the board acted to protect it. The church is Warraner’s baby. He has no reason to hurt anyone who took measures for its benefit.’

Louis touched his fingers to Souleby’s picture. A file had been compiled on each of the selectmen, as well as Warraner and Morland. Souleby was an interesting man, ruthless in business, with connections in Boston. But …

‘Lot of killing for an old man,’ said Louis. ‘Too much.’ And he put Souleby’s photograph with the rest.

‘Which leaves Morland,’ said Angel.

Louis stared at Morland’s photograph. It was taken from the town’s website. Morland was smiling.

‘Yes,’ said Louis. ‘Which leaves Morland.’

54

Thomas Souleby tried to pack a bag while his wife looked on. Constance was growing increasingly disturbed at the casual way in which her husband was tossing his clothing into the big leather duffel. He never could pack for shit, she thought. She didn’t say this aloud, though. Even after forty years of marriage, her husband still professed to be shocked by what he termed her ‘salty’ tongue.

‘Here, let me do that,’ said Constance. She gently elbowed Thomas aside, removed the shirts and pants, and began folding them again before restoring them to the bag. ‘You go and get your shaving kit.’

Thomas did as he was told. He didn’t opine that there might not be time for the proper folding and placement of his clothing. She was working faster and yet more efficiently than he could have done anyway — he was all haste without speed — and there was little point in arguing with his wife, not when it came to the organizational details of his life. Without her involvement, they would never have achieved the degree of financial security and comfort that they now enjoyed. Thomas had never been a details man. He worked in concepts. His wife was the meticulous one.

When he returned to the bed, she had half filled the bag with shirts, a sweater, two pairs of pants and a second pair of shoes with his socks and underwear neatly fitted inside them. To it he added his shaving kit and a Colt 1911 pistol that had belonged to his father. The Colt was unlicensed. Long ago, his father had advised him of the importance of keeping certain things secret, especially in a place like Prosperous. As Souleby had watched the slow, steady ascent of Lucas Morland, he came to be grateful for the bequest. Thomas Souleby considered himself a good judge of character — he couldn’t have succeeded in business were he not — and had never liked or trusted Lucas Morland. The man thought he knew better than his elders, and that wasn’t the way Prosperous worked. Souleby had also noticed a change in Morland in recent weeks. He could almost smell it on him, an alteration in his secretions. Hayley had sensed it too. It was why, before her death, she had been planning to remove Morland from his post and replace him with one of his more malleable deputies. Souleby could still feel the old woman’s hand on his arm, the strength of her grip, as she had spoken to him for the last time the day before.

‘You listen, Thomas Souleby, and you listen good,’ she said. ‘I’m as healthy as any woman in this town. My mother lived to be ninety-eight, and I plan on exceeding that age with room to spare. But if anything happens to me, you’ll know. It’ll be Morland’s doing, and he won’t stop with me. You’re no friend to him, and he sure as hell doesn’t care much for you. He doesn’t understand the town the way that we do. He doesn’t care for it the way we care. He has no faith.’

And then the call came from Calder Ayton: Calder, who was everyone’s friend, but hadn’t been the same since the death of Ben Pearson. Souleby figured that Calder had loved Ben, and had Ben not been resolutely heterosexual, and Calder not a product of a less enlightened, more cloistered time, the two of them could have lived together in domestic bliss, protected by the amused tolerance of the town. Instead, Calder had settled for a sexless relationship of a sort, aided by Ben’s status as a widower and Calder’s share in the store, the two of them clucking and fussing over each other, snipping and sniping and making up like the old married couple that they secretly were. Calder wouldn’t last long now, thought Souleby. Morland wouldn’t have to kill him, even if Calder had the backbone to stand up to him, which Souleby doubted. Calder had been widowed, and without Ben to keep him company he would fade away and die quickly enough.

It was Calder who phoned to tell Souleby of Hayley Conyer’s passing. That didn’t surprise Souleby. They were two of the last three selectmen, and he had always been closer to Calder than to Luke Joblin, who was too flash for Souleby’s liking. What did surprise Souleby was Calder’s tone. He knew. He knew.

‘Who found her?’ Souleby asked.

‘Chief Morland,’ Calder told him, and it was there in the way that he said ‘Chief’. ‘He thinks she might have had a heart attack.’

‘And I’ll bet Frank Robinson is signing off on it as we speak.’

‘That’s what I hear.’ A pause. ‘Morland will be coming for you, Thomas.’

The phone felt slick in Souleby’s hand. His palms were sweating.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘What about you?’

‘He’s not afraid of me.’

‘Maybe he’s underestimated you.’

Souleby heard Calder chuckle sadly.

‘No, he knows me inside and out. This is my little act of defiance, my last one. I’ll be resigning from the board.’

‘Nobody resigns from the board.’

Only death brought an end to a selectman’s tenure. The elections were just for show. Everyone knew that.

Calder was sitting in the back of Ben Pearson’s store. In reality it was as much his as it had been Ben’s, but Calder didn’t regard it as anything other than Ben’s store, even with Ben no longer around. He looked at the bottles of pills that he had been accumulating since Ben’s death.

Soon, he thought. Soon.

‘There are ways, Thomas,’ he said. ‘You step lively.’

Now, with his bag packed, Thomas kissed his wife and prepared to leave.

‘Where will you go?’ asked Constance.

‘I don’t know. Not far, but far enough to be safe from him.’

Calls had to be made. Souleby still had plenty of allies inside the town, but he couldn’t see many of them standing up to Morland. They weren’t killers, while Morland was.

‘What will I tell him when he comes?’ asked Constance.

‘Nothing, because you know nothing.’

He kissed her on the mouth.

‘I love you.’

‘I love you too.’

She watched him drive away.

He had been gone less than an hour before Lucas Morland arrived at her door.

Souleby drove as far as Portland and parked in the long-term garage at the Portland Jetport. He then took a bus to Boston, paying cash for the ticket. He didn’t know how far Morland would go to track him, and he was no spy, but he hoped that, if Morland did somehow discover the whereabouts of the car, it would throw him a little. He asked his son-in-law to book a room for him under the name Ryan at a club off Massachusetts Ave that advertised through Expedia. Souleby knew that the club didn’t ask for ID, but simply held a key for the name listed on the reservation. He then walked over to Back Bay, sat in a coffee shop across from Pryor Investments and waited. When Garrison Pryor eventually appeared, cell phone to his ear, Souleby left the coffee shop and followed him. Souleby caught up with Pryor when he stopped at a pedestrian signal.

‘Hello, Garrison,’ he said.

Pryor turned.

‘I’ll call you back,’ he said, and hung up the phone. ‘What are you doing here, Thomas?’

‘I need help.’

The signal changed. Pryor started walking, but Souleby easily kept up with him. He was considerably taller than Pryor, and fitter too, despite his age.

‘I’m not in the helping business,’ said Pryor. ‘Not for you or your board.’

‘We’ve exchanged information in the past.’

‘That was before tridents began appearing in the woodwork of houses in Scarborough, Maine. Have you any idea of the trouble you’ve caused me?’

‘I counseled against that.’

‘Not hard enough.’

‘We’re having difficulties in Prosperous. Serious difficulties.’

‘I noticed.’

‘Our chief of police is out of control. He has to be … retired before we can restore stability. Recompense can be made to you and your colleagues.’

‘It’s gone too far.’

‘Garrison.’ Souleby put a hand out to stop Pryor, forcing the shorter man to look up at him. ‘Morland is going to kill me.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Thomas,’ said Pryor. ‘Truly, I am. But we’re not going to intervene. If it’s any consolation to you, whatever happens, Prosperous’s days are drawing to a close. In the end, it doesn’t matter who is left standing: you, Morland, the board. There are men coming to wipe you from the map.’

Souleby’s hand dropped. ‘And you’ll let this happen?’

Pryor took out his cell phone and redialed a number. He watched it connect, raised the phone to his ear, and patted Souleby on the shoulder in farewell.

‘Thomas,’ said Pryor, as he walked away, ‘we are going to watch you all burn.’

Morland sat in his office. He was frustrated, but no more than that. Souleby would have to return. His life was here. In Souleby’s absence, Luke Joblin and Calder Ayton had agreed that elections to the board should be held just as soon as Hayley Conyer was safely interred. Neither had objected to Morland’s list of nominees for the three vacant positions.

Morland had a fourth name ready too. He had a feeling that another vacancy would soon arise.

55

Chief Morland next faced Thomas Souleby as they stood over Hayley Conyer’s open grave. In recognition of her long and generous service to the town of Prosperous, she was buried in the old cemetery, in the shadow of the church whose legacy she had done so much to protect, and in which her body had reposed on the night before its burial. Only a handful of the most important citizens were permitted to enter the church for her funeral service, although a temporary sound system relayed the proceedings to the townsfolk who stood outside. God played a part in the proceedings, but so too did nature, and the metaphor that ran through Warraner’s oratory was of the changing of the seasons, the life’s journey from spring to winter and thence to a new form of rebirth.

Once the coffin was lowered into the ground, it was left to the selectmen, assisted by Morland and Warraner, to fill in the grave. It was a sign of respect, but Morland was inevitably reminded of the last time he had wielded a spade in service of a body. The townsfolk started to leave. Tea and coffee were being served at the Town Office, where memories of Hayley Conyer would be exchanged, and talk would turn to the election of the new selectmen. In addition, nobody wanted to miss the chance to gossip a little under the fag of mourning: Thomas Souleby’s absence until the morning of the funeral had not gone unremarked, and the tension between him and Chief Morland was common knowledge in the town, even if the catalyst for this particular bout of hostilities — Hayley Conyer’s forced departure from this world — was not.

Morland caught up with Souleby halfway across the churchyard. He grabbed the older man’s arm, steering him away from the gate.

‘Walk with me a while, Thomas,’ he said.

Souleby’s wife was waiting for him outside the railings. Morland thought that she might spring over them to protect her husband when she saw the chief approach him, but Souleby raised a hand to let her know that he was okay. If Morland intended him harm, he would do so another day, and under other circumstances.

‘We missed you,’ said Morland. ‘Your absence was unfortunate. The town was in mourning. It looked to the board for leadership, and the board, in its turn, looked to you as the senior selectman, but you weren’t there.’

Souleby wasn’t about to accuse Lucas Morland of murder, not here, not anywhere. There remained a possibility that he could still survive this, and even turn the situation to his advantage. The three nominees to the board were comparatively young and open to manipulation. They were not his creatures, but neither were they Morland’s. He could not give Morland an excuse to act against him, although the flaw in this line of reasoning was easily apparent to him, for Morland might not even need a reason to act.

‘I had business to conclude,’ said Souleby.

‘You mind my asking what kind of business?’

‘Private. Personal.’

‘You sure about that? Because, if it had to do with the town, I really ought to know about it. This is a delicate time. We all need to pull together.’

Souleby stopped walking, and faced Morland.

‘What do you want, Chief Morland?’

‘I want you to give up your place on the board.’

‘You know that’s not possible. Under the rules—’

‘The rules have changed. The board met while you were away.’

‘There was no board,’ said Souleby. ‘Two members isn’t a quorum.’

‘Like I said, this is a delicate time. We didn’t know what had happened to you, and your wife was of little help. Decisions had to be made. Calder Ayton and Luke Joblin consented to temporary measures pending the election of a new board and the permanent retention of those rules. Selectmen will no longer serve for life, and no selectman will be able to serve more than two terms in succession. I’d have informed you of the changes before now, if I’d been able to find you.’

Souleby understood what was happening. If he resigned from the board, any power that he had would disappear. He would have no protection.

And, eventually, Morland would come for him. He would do so because, alive, Souleby would always be a threat. Calder Ayton would be dead soon, while Luke Joblin was on Morland’s side, and perhaps always had been. Only Souleby knew the details of what had been done in the board’s name, and what Morland himself had done.

‘And if I refuse to resign?’

Souleby noted movement among the trees, and saw that many members of the senior families had not left the environs of the cemetery. They were watching from the woods, and as he stared they began to turn their backs on him, one by one, until he could see their faces no longer. Then, and only then, did they begin to disperse.

‘The will of the people will prevail, Thomas,’ said Morland, and Souleby knew that he was alone.

Morland smiled sadly and walked away. Only when Souleby had seen Morland’s Crown Vic drive off, and was certain the chief was gone, did he join his wife outside the railings.

‘What did he say to you?’ said Constance.

‘I want you to go and stay with Becky and Josh,’ he told her.

Becky was their eldest daughter. She lived down in New Haven. Her husband Josh was Calder Ayton’s nephew. Souleby trusted him.

‘No, I won’t.’

‘You will,’ he said. ‘All this will pass, but for a time things will be difficult. I can’t be worrying about you while I try to make this good.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘no, no …’

She started to cry. He held her.

‘It’ll be all right,’ he lied. ‘Everything will be all right.’

Constance left that afternoon. Becky drove up to collect her. Becky tried to question her father, but he would not answer her, and she knew the ways of Prosperous well enough to pursue the matter no further for now.

Souleby poured himself a glass of brandy. He watched the sun set. He felt drowsy, but he did not sleep.

It was Luke Joblin who came for him, shortly after eight. His son Bryan waited in the back seat. Souleby saw him when the interior light came on as Luke opened the driver’s door. He could have fought them, of course, but what would have been the point? Instead, the old Colt now lay under his wife’s pillow. She would find it there, and she would know.

‘Come along, Thomas,’ said Luke. He spoke gently but firmly, the way one might speak to an elderly relative who refused to do what was best for him. ‘It’s time to go …’

56

The call came through the following evening as Morland was preparing for bed. He was fresh out of the shower, and had changed into pajama pants and an old Red Sox T-shirt. He was quietly eating a late-night sandwich in the dark prior to hitting the sack and maybe spending some quality time with his wife. They hadn’t made love in over a week. Understandably, Morland hadn’t been in the mood. His wife didn’t like him eating late at night but Morland took the view that what she didn’t know, or couldn’t prove, wouldn’t hurt her. It was, he thought, true of so many things.

He had just returned from a visit to Souleby’s bitch wife Constance at her daughter’s house, accompanied by Luke Joblin and three representatives of the most senior families. They’d commented upon Constance Souleby’s lovely grandchildren, and the fine house in which her daughter and son-in-law lived, for the best kind of threat was the one that didn’t sound like a threat at all, the kind that planted bad pictures in the imagination. Becky, Constance’s daughter, offered coffee, but nobody accepted.

‘What have you done with Thomas?’ Constance asked Morland, once the pleasantries were done with.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘We just want him to stay out of the way until after the election. We don’t need him interfering, and you know he’ll interfere. He’s safe.’

The election was scheduled for Saturday. Elections to the board were always held on Saturdays, just to be sure that the maximum number of people could vote.

‘Why hasn’t he called me?’

‘If you want him to call, we’ll have him do that,’ said Luke Joblin, all reasonableness and reassurance. ‘We had to take away his cell phone. You understand why.’

If Constance Souleby did understand, she wasn’t giving any sign of it.

‘You had no right,’ she said, ‘no right.’

‘The town is changing, Mrs Souleby,’ said Morland. ‘We just barely survived the mess of the last couple of weeks. That can’t happen again. There can be no more blood spilled in Prosperous. The old board, and all that it did, has to be consigned to history. We have to find a way to survive in the twenty-first century.’

A shiver of unease ran through the three representatives of the senior families, two men, one woman, all as old as any in the town. Morland had convinced them of the necessity for change, but it didn’t mean that they weren’t frightened by it.

‘Thomas can adapt,’ said Constance. She was trying not to plead, but it bled into her voice nonetheless.

‘That’s not the issue,’ said Morland. ‘The decision has been made.’

There was nothing more to be said. Morland, Joblin and the three other visitors got to their feet. Someone mumbled an awkward goodbye, to no reply.

Morland was almost at his car when he heard Constance Souleby begin to wail. Luke Joblin heard it too. Morland could see him tense, even as he tried to ignore the old woman’s cries.

‘Why did you tell her that her husband would call her?’ said Morland. Thomas Souleby wouldn’t be calling anyone ever again. There would probably be no body. Once the elections were concluded, he would be reported missing.

‘I was trying to keep her calm.’

‘You figure it worked?’ said Morland, as the cries rose in intensity and then were smothered. Morland could almost see Constance Souleby’s daughter holding her mother’s head, kissing her, shushing her.

‘No, not really,’ said Joblin. ‘You think she knows?’

‘Oh, she knows.’

‘What will she do?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You sound very certain of that.’

‘She won’t turn on the town. It’s not in her blood.’

Now, as he listened to the ringing of his cell phone, he wondered if he had been right to sound so confident. Great change was always traumatic, and with trauma came actions that were unanticipated and out of character.

His wife appeared on the stairs, come to see where he was. She was wearing a sheer nightgown. Through it he could see the curves of her body. He tossed the remains of the sandwich in the sink before she noticed. He’d get rid of them in the morning. He was usually awake before her.

‘Can’t you ignore it?’ she asked.

‘Just let me see who it is.’

He went to the hall and looked at the display.

Warraner.

He had yet to tackle the pastor. Rumors of what Morland was proposing had certainly already reached him. Warraner would have to be convinced of the necessity of acceding to the will of the town, but it would not be easy. Still, he could continue to tend his church, and he could pray to his god behind the silence of its walls. Perhaps the pastor also hoped that, when bad times came, the town would turn once again to the church, and the old ways could resume. If that was the case, Morland thought that Warraner’s prayers to his god would have to be powerful as all hell, because Morland would send Warraner the way of Hayley Conyer and Thomas Souleby before he let another girl end up kneeling by a hole in the cemetery.

Morland considered ignoring the call, but he remained the chief of police. If Warraner wanted to argue, Morland would put him off until the morning, but if it was something more urgent …

He hit the green button.

‘Pastor,’ he said. ‘I’m just about to go to bed.’

‘There’s a homeless man in the church grounds,’ said Warraner. ‘He’s shouting about a murder.’

Shit.

‘I’m on my way,’ said Morland.

He looked to his wife.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

But she was already gone.

Warraner hung up the phone. In a corner of the living room lay the body of Bryan Joblin. It was Joblin’s misfortune to have been present at Warraner’s house when the men arrived, and to have reached for his gun at the sight of them. Joblin had died instantly. He had recently fixed his eye on Warraner’s eldest daughter Ruth, a development about which Warraner had been deeply unhappy. That problem, at least, now appeared to have been solved.

Nearby, Warraner’s wife and children were under a gun. One not dissimilar to it was only inches from the pastor’s face. If he focused on the muzzle — and he was focusing, because it was very, very close to him — the masked face of the man holding the weapon became a blur. Warraner could only see one or the other properly, but not both: the instrument of killing, or the man who might let him live.

‘You did good.’

Warraner couldn’t reply. It was all that he had been able to do just to keep his voice steady as he spoke to Morland. He managed to generate some spittle in his mouth, and found his voice.

‘What’s going to happen to my family?’

‘Nothing,’ replied the gunman. ‘Although I can’t promise the same for you.’

The Prosperous Police Department kept one officer on duty at night. In the event of an emergency, that officer could call the chief, or even the Maine State Police, but so far no nighttime incident had ever been sufficiently serious to require the assistance of the MSP. The officer on duty that night was named Connie Dackson, and she was trying to rewire the plug on the coffee machine when two men entered the Town Office. One carried a shotgun, the other a pistol. Both wore black ski masks.

‘Not a move,’ said the one holding the shotgun, which was now pointing at Dackson.

Nobody had ever pointed a gun at her before. She was so scared that she couldn’t have moved even if she wanted to. She was forced facedown on the floor, and her hands were secured with her own cuffs. A gag was placed over her mouth, and she was shown into the town’s single holding cell. It was over one hundred years old, just like the building that housed it. The bars were green, and Dackson had a clear view through them as the two men began disabling the department’s entire communications system.

Morland couldn’t raise Connie Dackson on her cell phone as he drove. He wasn’t worried, though, not yet. She might have left it in her vehicle if she was patrolling, or simply be in the john. She might already even be with Warraner, trying to coax some bum out of the churchyard, a bum who was muttering about murder. That was when Morland knew that he was tired: Warraner wouldn’t be dumb enough to call Dackson if there was a chance that she might hear something she shouldn’t. This was up to him, and him alone.

The first thing that struck him as he reached the churchyard was the fact that the door of the church was open. The gate to the churchyard was unlocked, the chain lying on the ground. The chain had been cut, just like the one farther down the road.

The second was that he could find no trace of any bum.

He didn’t call out Warraner’s name. He didn’t have to. He could now see him kneeling in the doorway of the church. Behind him stood a tall man in a ski mask. He held a gun to the pastor’s head.

‘Chief Morland,’ said the man. ‘Glad you could make it.’

Morland thought that he sounded like a black man. Prosperous didn’t have any black residents. It wasn’t unusual in such a white state. Maine was one of the few places where nobody could try to blame blacks for crime. The white folks had that one all sewn up.

Morland raised his own gun.

‘Lower your weapon,’ he said.

‘Look around you, Chief,’ said the man.

Morland risked a glance. Three other figures, also masked, materialized from the gloom of the cemetery. Two were armed, their weapons pointing in his direction. The third held a coil of wire, and the sight of it caused Morland to notice for the first time the cables that crossed the cemetery and hung over some of the gravestones. He moved slightly to the right, and saw one of the holes that had so interested the state police investigators when they’d come looking for Kayley Madsen. A length of wire led into its depths.

‘What are you doing?’ said Morland.

‘Putting the finishing touches to thermite and Semtex devices,’ said the man. ‘We’re about to destroy your town, starting here. Now put down your gun. I want to talk. The pastor has been telling me a lot about you.’

But Morland wasn’t about to talk to anyone.

Instead, he simply started shooting.

Nobody lived on Prosperous’s Main Street. It was strictly businesses only. As midnight approached, the street and its surroundings stood empty.

Slowly, men began to emerge from the shadows, eight in all. Ronald Straydeer led them, his features, like those of the others with him, concealed. Beside him walked Shaky.

‘You sure you’re okay to do this?’ asked Ronald.

‘I’m sure,’ said Shaky.

He held an incendiary device in his good hand. A cold wind was blowing from the east. That was good. It would fan the flames.

There came the sound of breaking glass.

Minutes later, Prosperous started to burn.

Morland was running for his life. Shots struck the old gravestones, or whistled past his ear to vanish into the forest beyond. He stayed low, using the monuments for cover, firing, weaving and dodging, but never stopping. He was outnumbered, and these men could easily surround and kill him. Anyway, staying in the cemetery was not an option, for it was now one massive explosion waiting to occur.

He didn’t head for the gate. That would be too obvious. Instead he sprinted for the railings and scrambled over them. He took a shot to the upper arm but did not stop. The forest was ahead of him, and he lost himself in its darkness. He risked only one look back and saw that the church door was now closed. The shooting had stopped, and in the silence Morland heard Warraner’s voice raised in song from behind the old stone walls. Somehow, in the confusion, he had managed to lock himself inside.

‘When men begin to weed,‘ sang Warraner, ‘The thistle from the seed …’

The figures in the churchyard started to run. Morland reloaded his gun and drew a bead on the nearest man. Perhaps he could yet stop this. His finger tightened on the trigger.

But he did not fire. Was this not what he wanted, what he sought? Let this be an end to it. He lowered his gun and retreated deeper into the forest, faster now, putting as much distance between him and the church as he could. If he could get to his car and return to town, he and Dackson could hole up in the Town Office while they called for backup.

He reached the road and saw an orange glow rising from Prosperous. His town was already burning, but he barely had time to register that fact before a massive blast rent the night. The ground shook, and Morland was knocked from his feet by the force of it. Debris was hurled high into the air, and earth, stone and wood rained down on him where he lay. He could feel the heat of the detonation, even from the road.

He covered his head with his hands, and prayed to every god and none.

57

Main Street was gone, reduced to brick shells and vacant, charred lots. At least one of the ruined buildings had dated back to the eighteenth century, and others were only marginally younger. Historians and architecture experts described it as a tragedy.

The Church of the Congregation of Adam Before Eve & Eve Before Adam was scattered over woods, roads, and what was left of the cemetery, which wasn’t much at all. Charred human remains, most of them long interred, would be dis covered for years after. Incredibly, the total number of fatalities amounted to just three: Pastor Michael Warraner, who had been inside his church when it was blown sky high; Bryan Joblin, killed in cold blood at Warraner’s house; and Thomas Souleby, the senior selectman of the town, who was said to have accompanied Chief Morland to the cemetery when the original call was received about a homeless trespasser, and who had not been able to get clear of the cemetery before the explosion occurred. Frank Robinson conducted the autopsy on Souleby, just so there could be no confusion about the matter. Unlike Pastor Warraner, Souleby’s body remained undamaged enough to allow for a proper burial. Morland had suffocated him, just as he had done with Hayley Conyer.

The newspapers and TV cameras were back. It would be a long time before they left. When asked about plans to rebuild, the town’s chief of police, Lucas Morland, said that work would begin on Main Street almost immediately, but he was unsure about plans for the church. The damage caused by the high explosives used meant that rebuilding the original church would be ruinously expensive if it were possible at all, which was doubtful. Perhaps a monument might be erected in its place, he suggested. Discussions on the issue would begin, said Morland, once the new board of selectmen was elected.

It remained unclear who might be responsible for what was described, almost immediately and inevitably, as an ‘act of terrorism’. Attention was focused variously on Muslims, fascists, secessionists, opponents of the federal government, radical socialists and extreme religious organizations, but Morland knew that none of those avenues of inquiry would ever yield any results.

The truth was that they should never have gone after the detective.

The Town Office had suffered significant damage, mostly in a successful effort to destroy the engines in the fire department. Officer Connie Dackson had watched it burn. Her captors had removed her from her cell and left her tied up at a safe distance from the conflagration. She thought that they might have been Asian, judging by their accents and their unusual politeness, but she couldn’t be certain. The Prosperous Police Department had immediately moved to temporary lodgings at the VFW meeting hall.

On the third day after the attack on his town — for that was what it now was, ‘his’ town — Lucas Morland watched the thawing snow from his window in the VFW hall. Meltwater ran down what remained of Main Street, starting clear at the top and ending up black as oil by the time it reached the bottom. More snow might come, but it would not last long. They were done with winter, and winter was done with them. They had survived — he had survived — and the town would be better and stronger for this purging. He felt a deep and abiding sense of admiration for its people. No sooner were the fires extinguished than the cleanup operation had begun. Buildings were being assessed for demolition or restoration, according to the damage they had sustained. Pledges of aid numbering into six figures had already been received. Calls had been made to the heads of the insurance companies involved warning them that any weaseling out of their commitments would not be tolerated, those calls having significant impact since they came from members of their own boards with ties to Prosperous.

Morland was under no illusions that the town’s troubles — or, more particularly, his troubles — were at an end. Those responsible for the partial destruction of his town might well decide to return. He recalled the words of the man at the cemetery — ‘The pastor has been telling me a lot about you.‘ Even in his final moments, Warraner had found a way to screw him over. At least Bryan Joblin was dead, too. He was one loose end about whom Morland no longer needed to worry.

Let them come, Morland thought. Let them come and I will face them down. Next time, I will be ready, and I will kill them where they stand.

Morland didn’t hear the woman approach. He no longer had his own office. His desk was just one part of the jumble of town services in the old hall. People were constantly arriving and departing, and there was a steady hum of noise.

‘Lucas.’

He turned from the window. Constance Souleby was standing before him. She held a gun in her hand: an old Colt. It did not shake, for the woman holding it was a picture of calm.

‘You could have spared him,’ she said.

He was aware of movement behind her, of someone approaching fast. He heard cries of shock. The gun had been noticed.

‘I am—’ Morland said.

The gun spoke in denial, and he ceased to be.