The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  He had somehow raised himself from his bed, but now he fell back, exhausted. He released his grip, leaving the imprint of his fingers on my skin.

  “They have names,” he whispered, the disease surging forward like ink clouding clear water and turning it to black, claiming all of his memories for its own.

  I dropped Walter back at the house and played my unheard messages for the first time. The walk had cleared my head, and the time spent tending to the grave had brought me a little peace, even as it had reminded me of why Neddo’s words about the names of the Believers had seemed familiar to me. It might also have been the fact that I had come to a kind of decision, and there was no point in agonizing any longer.

  None of the messages came from Rachel. One or two contained offers of work. I deleted them. The third was from Assistant SAC Ross’s secretary in New York. I called her back, and she told me that Ross was out of the office, but promised to contact him in order to let him know that I’d called. Ross got back to me before I had time to make a sandwich. It sounded like he was in a restaurant or a bar. I could hear dishes banging behind him, the tinkling of china against crystal, and people talking and laughing as they ate.

  “What was the big hurry with Bosworth, if it was going to take you half a day to call back?” he asked.

  “I’ve been distracted,” I said. “Sorry.”

  The apology seemed to throw Ross.

  “I’d ask if you were doing okay,” he said, “but I wouldn’t want you to start thinking that I cared.”

  “It’s okay. I’d just view it as a moment of weakness.”

  “So, you still interested in this thing?”

  It took me a while to reply.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m still interested.”

  “Bosworth wasn’t my responsibility. He wasn’t a field agent, so he fell under the remit of one of my colleagues.”

  “Which one?”

  “Mr. ‘That Doesn’t Concern You.’ Don’t push it. It doesn’t matter. Under the circumstances, I might have dealt with Bosworth the same way that he did. They put him through the process.”

  “The process” was the name given to the Feds’ unofficial method for dealing with agents who stepped out of line. In serious cases, like whistleblowing, efforts were first made to discredit the agent involved. Fellow agents would be given access to the personnel file for the individual involved. Colleagues would be questioned about the agent’s habits. If the agent had gone public with something, potentially damaging personal information might in turn be leaked to the press. The FBI had a policy of not firing whistleblowers, as there was a danger that by doing so the Bureau might lend credence to the individual’s accusations. Hounding a recalcitrant agent, and smearing his or her name, was far more effective.

  “What did he do?” I asked Ross.

  “Bosworth was a computer guy, specializing in codes and cryptography. I can’t tell you much more than that, partly because I’d have to kill you if I did, but mostly because I can’t explain it to you anyway, since I don’t understand it. It seems he was doing a little personal work on the side, something to do with maps and manuscripts. It earned him a reprimand from OPR” — the Office of Professional Responsibility was in charge of investigating allegations of misconduct within the FBI — “but it didn’t go to a disciplinary hearing. That was about a year ago. Anyway, Bosworth took some leave after that, and next thing he popped up in Europe, in a French jail. He was arrested for desecrating a church.”

  “A church?”

  “Technically, a monastery: Sept-Fons Abbey. He was caught digging up the floor of a vault in the dead of night. The legate in Paris got involved, and managed to keep Bosworth’s background out of the papers. He was suspended with pay when he returned, and ordered to seek professional help, but he wasn’t monitored. He came back to work in the same week that an interview with an ‘unnamed FBI agent’ appeared in some UFO magazine alleging that the Bureau was preventing a proper investigation of cult activities in the United States. It was clearly Bosworth again, burbling some nonsense about linked crypts and codified map references. The Bureau decided that it wanted him gone, so he was put through the process. His security clearance was downgraded, then pretty much removed entirely, apart from allowing him to switch on his computer and play with Google. He was shifted to duties beneath his abilities, given a desk beside a men’s room in the basement, and virtually cut off from contact with his colleagues, but he still wouldn’t break.”

  “And?”

  “In the end, he was given the option of a ‘fitness for duty’ examination at the Pearl Heights Center in Colorado.”

  Fitness for duty examinations were the kiss of death for an agent’s career. If the agent refused to submit to one, he or she was automatically fired. If the agent submitted, then a diagnosis of mental instability was frequently the outcome, decided long before the agent even arrived at the testing center. The evaluations were carried out in medical facilities with special contracts to examine federal employees, and usually stretched over three or four days. Subjects were kept isolated, apart from their interactions with medical personnel, and required to answer up to six hundred yes-or-no questions. If they weren’t already crazy when they went in, the process was designed to make them crazy by the time they left.

  “Did he take the test?”

  “He traveled to Colorado, but he never made it to the center. He was automatically dismissed.”

  “So where is he now?”

  “Officially, I have no idea. Unofficially, he’s in New York. It seems that his parents have money, and they own an apartment up on First and Seventieth in a place called the Woodrow. Bosworth lives there, as far as anyone can tell, but he’s probably a basket case. We haven’t been in contact with him since his dismissal. So now you know, right?”

  “I know not to join the FBI and then start dismantling churches.”

  “I don’t even like you walking by the building, so recruitment is hardly a concern for you. This stuff didn’t come for free. If Bosworth is tied in with this thing in Williamsburg, then I want a heads-up.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “Fair? You don’t know from fair. Just remember: I want to be informed first if Bosworth smells bad on this.”

  I promised to get back to him if I found out anything he should know. It seemed to satisfy him. He didn’t say goodbye before he hung up, but he didn’t say anything hurtful either.

  The most recent call was from a man named Matheson. Matheson was a former client of mine. Last year, I’d looked into a case involving the house in which his daughter had died. I couldn’t say that it had ended well, but Matheson had been satisfied with the outcome.

  His message said that someone was making inquiries about me, and had approached him for a recommendation, or so they claimed. The visitor, a man named Alexis Murnos, said he was calling on behalf of his employer, who wished to remain anonymous for the present. Matheson had a highly developed sense of suspicion, and he gave Murnos as little to go on as possible. All he could get out of Murnos, who declined to leave a contact number, was that his employer was wealthy and appreciated discretion. Matheson asked me to call him back when I got the message.

  “I wasn’t aware that you’d added discretion to your list of accomplishments,” Matheson said, once his secretary had put me through to him. “That’s what made me suspicious.”

  “And he gave you nothing?”

  “Zilch. I suggested that he contact you himself, if he had any concerns. He told me that he would, but then said that he’d appreciate it if I kept his visit strictly between the two of us. Naturally, I called you as soon as he left.”

  I thanked Matheson for the warning, and he told me to let him know if there was anything more that he could do. As soon as we were done, I called the offices of the Press Herald and left a message there for Phil Isaacson, the paper’s art critic, once they’d confirmed that he was due in later that day. It was a long shot, but Phil’s expertise extended from
architecture to law and beyond, and I wanted to talk to him about House of Stern and the auction that was due to take place there. That reminded me that I had not yet heard back from Angel or Louis. It was a situation that was unlikely to last very much longer.

  I decided to drive into Portland to kill some time until I heard from Phil Isaacson. Maybe tomorrow I would leave Walter with my neighbors and return to New York, in the hope that I might be able to get in touch with former special agent Bosworth. I set the alarm system in the house, and left Walter half-asleep in his basket. I knew that as soon as I was gone he would make a beeline for the couch in my office, but I didn’t care. I was grateful to have him around, and his hairs on the furniture seemed like a small return for the company.

  “They all have names.”

  My grandfather’s words came back to me as I drove, now echoing not only Neddo but also Claudia Stern.

  “Two hundred angels rebelled . . . Enoch gives the names of nineteen.”

  Names. There was a Christian bookstore in South Portland. I was pretty certain that they’d have a section on the apocrypha. It was time to take a look at Enoch.

  The car, a red 5 Series BMW, picked me up at Route I and stayed with me when I left the highway for Maine Mall Road. I pulled into the parking lot in front of Panera Bread and waited, but the car, with two men inside, headed on by. I gave them five minutes, then moved out of the lot, keeping an eye on my rearview mirror as I drove. I saw the BMW parked over by the Dunkin’ Donuts but it didn’t try to follow me this time. Instead, after making a couple of loops of the area, I spotted its replacement. This time the BMW was blue, and it had only one man in the front, but it was clear that I was the object of his attentions. I almost felt resentful. Twin BMWs: these guys were being hired by the hour, and being paid cheap. Part of me was tempted to confront them, but I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to control my temper, which meant there was a good chance that things could end badly. Instead I made a call. Jackie Garner answered on the first ring.

  “Hey, Jackie,” I said. “Want to break some heads?”

  I sat in my car outside Tim Horton’s doughnut shop. The blue BMW was in the Maine Mall’s lot, across the street, while its red sibling waited in the parking lot of the Sheraton. One at each side of the road. It was still amateurish, but it showed promise.

  My cell phone rang.

  “How you doing, Jackie?”

  “I’m at the Best Buy.”

  I looked up. I could see Jackie’s van idling in the fire lane.

  “It’s a blue BMW, Mass. plates, maybe three rows in. He’ll move when I move.”

  “Where’s the other car?”

  “Over by the Sheraton. It’s a red BMW. Two men.”

  Jackie seemed confused.

  “They’re using the same badge?”

  “Same model, just a different color.”

  “Dumb.”

  “Kind of.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Let them come, I guess. We’ll deal with them. Why?”

  I got the sense that Jackie had an alternative solution.

  “Well,” he said, “you see, I brought some friends. Do you want this done quietly?”

  “Jackie, if I wanted it done quietly, would I have called you?”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “So who did you bring along?”

  He tried to avoid the question, but I pinned him down.

  “Jackie, tell me: who did you bring?”

  “The Fulcis.” He sounded vaguely apologetic.

  Dear God: the Fulci brothers. They were mooks for hire, twin barrels of muscle and flab with more chips on their shoulders than all the employees of the Frito company put together. Even the “for hire” part was misleading. If the situation offered sufficient scope for mayhem, the Fulcis would happily offer their services for free. Tony Fulci, the elder of the two brothers, held the record for being the most expensive prisoner ever to have been jailed in Washington State, calculated on a length-of-stay basis. Tony did some time there at the end of the nineties, when a lot of prisons were hiring out their inmates to large corporations to do telesales and call-center work. Tony was given a job phoning people on behalf of a new ISP named FastWire, asking its rivals’ customers to consider switching service from their current provider to the new kid on the block. The sum total of Tony Fulci’s only conversation with a customer went pretty much as follows:

  Tony (reading slowly from an idiot card): I am calling on behalf of FastWire Comm —

  Customer: I’m not interested.

  Tony: Hey, let me finish.

  Customer: I told you: I’m not interested.

  Tony: Listen, what are you, stupid? This is a good deal.

  Customer: I told you, I don’t want it.

  Tony: Don’t you hang up that phone. You hang up that phone and you’re a dead man.

  Customer: You can’t talk to me like that.

  Tony: Hey, fuck you! I know who you are, I know where you live, and when I get out of here in five months and three days, I’m gonna look you up, and then I’m gonna tear you limb from limb. Now, you want this piece-of-shit deal, or not?

  FastWire quickly abandoned its plans to extend the use of prisoners as callers, but not quickly enough to prevent it from being sued. Tony cost Washington’s prisons $7 million in lost contracts once the FastWire story got around, or $1.16 million for every month Tony was incarcerated. And Tony was the calm one in the family. All things considered, the Fulcis made the Mongol hordes look restrained.

  “You couldn’t have found anyone more psychotic?”

  “Maybe, but they would have cost more.”

  There was no way out of it. I told him I’d head toward Deering Avenue and try to draw the solo tail away, with Jackie following. The Fulcis could intercept the other guys wherever they chose.

  “Give me two minutes,” said Jackie. “I just gotta tell the Fulcis. Man, they’re juiced. You don’t know what this means to them, getting to do some real detective work. Tony just wished you could have given him a little more notice. He would’ve come off his meds.”

  The Fulcis didn’t have to go far to take the red BMW. They simply blocked it off in the Sheraton’s lot by parking their truck behind it. The Fulcis drove a customized Dodge 4X4 inspired by the monster-truck DVDs that they watched when they weren’t making other people’s lives more interesting in a Chinese way.

  The BMW’s doors opened. The driver was a clean-shaven, middle-aged man in a cheapish gray suit that made him look like an executive for a company that was struggling to make ends meet. He weighed maybe 150, or roughly half a Fulci. His companion was bigger and swarthier, possibly bringing their combined weight up to a Fulci and a quarter, or a Fulci and a half if Tony was abusing his diet pills. The Fulcis’ Dodge had smoked glass windows, so the guy in the suit could almost have been forgiven for what he said next.

  “Hey,” he said, “get that fucking tin can out of the way. We’re in a hurry here.”

  Nothing happened for about fifteen seconds, while the Fulcis’ primitive, semimedicated brains tried to equate the words they’d heard spoken with their own vision of their beloved truck. Eventually, the door on the driver’s side opened, and a very large, very irate Tony Fulci jumped gracelessly from the cab to the ground. He wore a polyester golf shirt, elastic-waisted pants from a big-man store, and steel-toed work boots. His belly bulged under his shirt, the sleeves of which stopped above his enormous biceps, the material insufficiently Lycraed to make the stretch demanded of it by his pumped arms. Twin arcs of muscle reached from his shoulders to just below his ears, their symmetry undisturbed by the intrusion of a neck, giving him the appearance of a man who had recently been force-fed a very large coat hanger.

  His brother Paulie joined him. He made Tony look a little on the dainty side.

  “Jesus Christ,” said the BMW’s driver.

  “Why?” said Tony. “Does he drive a fucking tin can as well?”

  Then the Fu
lcis went to work.

  The blue BMW stayed with me all the way to Deering Avenue, hanging back two or three cars but always keeping me in sight. Jackie Garner was right behind him all the way. I had picked the route because it was guaranteed to confuse anyone who wasn’t a native, and the fact that he was still within the Portland city limits, instead of being led into open country, would make the tail less likely to believe that he had been spotted and was about to be confronted. I reached the point where Deering becomes one-way, just before the intersection with Forest, forcing all traffic heading out of town to make a right. I brought the tail with me as I turned, then went left on to Forest, left again back on to Deering, and took a hard right to Revere. The BMW had no choice but to stick with me all the way or risk being dumped, so that when I braked suddenly he had to do the same. When Jackie shot in behind him he realized what was happening. There was no other option for the BMW except to try to use the bread company’s lot to buy himself some space and time. He pulled in fast and we came at him in a V, trapping him against the wall.

  I kept my gun tight against my body as I approached. I didn’t want to scare anyone who might happen by. The driver kept his wrists on the wheel, his fingers slightly raised. He wore a baggy blue suit with a matching tie. The wire of his cell phone earpiece was clipped to the lapel of his jacket. He was probably having trouble raising his buddies.

  I nodded to Jackie. He had a little snub-nose Browning in his right hand. He kept it fixed on the driver as he opened the door.

  “Get out,” I said. “Do it slowly.”

  The driver did as he was told. He was tall and balding, with black hair that was just a little too long to look good.

  “I’m not armed,” he said.

  Jackie pushed him against my car and frisked him anyway. He came up with a wallet, and a .38 from an ankle holster.

  “What’s this?” said Jackie. “Soap?”

  “You shouldn’t tell lies,” I said. “They’ll turn your tongue black.”