daddy
In a minute, honey. Daddy’s got something he has to do first.
Slowly, he drew the gun to him. He tried to lift it, but his shattered arm would not hold the weight. Instead, he allowed himself to fall on his side, and the pain was almost beyond endurance as shattered bone and torn flesh shuddered from the impact. He opened his eyes, or perhaps they had always been open and it was just the new waves of pain provoked by the movement that caused the mist briefly to lift. His cheek was flat against the gravel. His right arm was outstretched before him, the gun lying on the horizontal. There were two figures ahead of him, walking side by side perhaps fifteen feet from where he lay. He shifted his hand slightly, ignoring the feeling of his fractured bones rubbing against one another, until the gun was pointing at the two men.
And somehow, Merrick found the strength within himself to pull the trigger, or perhaps it was the strength of another added to his own, for he thought he felt a pressure on the knuckle of his index finger as though someone were pressing softly upon it.
The man on the right seemed to do a little jog, then stumbled and fell as his shattered ankle gave way. He shouted something that Merrick could not understand, but Merrick’s finger was tightening on the trigger for the second shot and he had no time for the utterances of others. He fired again, the target larger now, for the injured man was lying on his side, his friend trying to lift him, but the shot was wild, the gun bucking in his hand and sending the bullet over the recumbent figure.
Merrick had the time and the strength to pull the trigger one last time. He fired as the blackness descended, and the bullet tore through the forehead of the wounded man, exiting in a red cloud. The survivor tried to drag the body away, but the dead man’s foot caught in a storm drain. People appeared at the door of the Old Moose Lodge, for even in a place like this the sound of gunfire was bound to attract attention. Voices shouted, and figures began to run toward him. The survivor fled, leaving the dead man behind.
Merrick exhaled a final breath. A woman stood over him, the waitress from the bar. She spoke, but Merrick did not hear what she said
daddy?
i’m here.
for Merrick was gone.
33
While Frank Merrick died with his daughter’s name upon his lips, Angel, Louis, and I decided on a course of action to deal with Caswell. We were in the bar, the remains of our meal still scattered around us, but we weren’t drinking.
We agreed that Caswell appeared close to some form of breakdown, although whether caused by incipient guilt or something else we could not tell. It was Angel who put it best, as he often did.
“If he’s so overcome with guilt, then why? Lucy Merrick has been missing for years. Unless they kept her there for all that time, which doesn’t seem too likely, then why is he so conscience-stricken now, all of a sudden?”
“Merrick, perhaps,” I said.
“Which means somebody told him that Merrick has been asking questions.”
“Not necessarily. It’s not like Merrick has been keeping a low profile. The cops are aware of him, and thanks to Demarcian’s killing, the Russians are too. Demarcian was involved somehow. Merrick didn’t just pick his name out of a hat.”
“You think maybe these guys were sharing images of the abuse, and that’s the connection to Demarcian?” asked Angel.
“Dr. Christian said that he hadn’t heard of anything involving men with masks turning up in photos or on video, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing like that out there.”
“They would have been taking a chance by selling it,” said Angel. “Might have risked drawing attention to themselves.”
“Maybe they needed the money,” said Louis.
“Caswell had enough to buy the Gilead land outright,” I replied. “It doesn’t sound like money was an issue.”
“But where did the cash come from?” asked Angel. “Had to have come from somewhere, so maybe they were selling this stuff.”
“How much does it go for, though?” I said. “Enough to buy a patch of unwanted land in a forest? The barman said that the land wasn’t exactly given away for free, but it didn’t cost the earth either. He could have bought it for the equivalent of nickels and dimes.”
Angel shrugged. “Depends what they were selling. Depends how bad it was. For the kids, I mean.”
None of us said anything more for a time. I tried to create patterns in my mind, to put together a sequence of events that made sense, but I kept losing myself in contradictory statements and false trails. More and more, I was convinced that Clay was involved with what had occurred, but how then to balance that with Christian’s view of him as a man who was almost obsessed with finding evidence of abuse, even to the detriment of his own career, or Rebecca Clay’s description of a loving father devoted to the children in his charge? Then there were the Russians. Louis had asked some questions, and discovered the identity of the redheaded man who had come to my house. His name was Utarov, and he was one of the most trusted captains in the New England operation. According to Louis, there was paper out on Merrick, a piece of unfinished business relating to some jobs he had undertaken against the Russians sometime in the past, but there were also rumors of unease in New England. Prostitutes, mainly those of Asian, African, and Eastern European origin, had been moved out of Massachusetts and Providence and told to lie low, or they had been forced to do so by the men who controlled them. More specialized services had also been curtailed, particularly those relating to child pornography and child prostitution.
“Trafficking,” Louis had concluded. “Explains why they took the Asians and the others off the streets and left the pure American womanhood to take up the slack. They’re worried about something, and it’s connected to Demarcian.”
Their appetites would have stayed the same, wasn’t that what Christian had told me? These men wouldn’t have stopped abusing, but they might have found another outlet for their urges: young children acquired through Boston, perhaps, with Demarcian as one of the points of contact? What then? Did they film the abuse and sell it back to Demarcian and others like him, one operation funding another? Was that the nature of their particular “Project”?
Caswell was part of it, and he was weak and vulnerable. I was certain that he had put in a call as soon as he had encountered us, a plea for help from those whom he had assisted in the past. It increased the pressure on all of them, forcing them to respond, and we would be waiting for them when they came.
Angel and Louis went to their car and drove up to Caswell’s place, parking out of sight of the road and his house to take the first watch. I could almost see them there as I went to my room to get some sleep before my turn came, the car dark and quiet, perhaps some music playing low on the radio, Angel dozing, Louis still and intent, part of his attention on the road beyond while some hidden part of him wandered unknown worlds in his mind.
In my dreams, I walked through Gilead, and I heard the voices of children crying. I turned to the church and saw that there were young girls and boys wrapped in stinging ivy, the creepers tightening on their naked bodies as they were absorbed into the green world. I saw blood on the ground, and the remains of an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, points of red seeping through the cloth.
And a thin man crawled out of a hole in the ground, his face torn and ruined by decay, his teeth visible through the holes in his cheeks.
“Old Gilead,” said Daniel Clay. “It gets in your soul . . .”
The call came through on the phone in my room while I was sleeping. It was O’Rourke. Since there was no cell phone coverage in Jackman, it had seemed like a good idea to let someone know where I was in case anything happened back east, so both O’Rourke and Jackie Garner had the number of the lodge. After all, my gun was still out there, and I would bear some responsibility for whatever Merrick did with it.
“Merrick’s dead,” he said.
I sat up. I could still taste food in my mouth, but it tasted of dirt, and the memory
of my dream was strong. “How?”
“Killed in the parking lot of the Old Moose Lodge. It sounds like he had an eventful final day. He was busy, right up to the end. Mason Dubus was shot dead yesterday with a ten-millimeter bullet. We’re still waiting on a ballistics match, but it’s not like people get shot here every day, and not usually with a ten. Couple of hours ago, a Somerset County sheriff’s deputy found two bodies on a side road just out of Bingham. Russians, it looks like. Then they got a call from a woman who found her father locked in his basement a couple of miles north of the scene. Seems the old guy was a vet—the animal kind, not the war kind—and a man matching Merrick’s description forced him to treat a gunshot wound and give him directions to Dubus’s house before locking him up. From what the vet said, the wound was pretty serious, but he sewed it and strapped it as best he could. It looks like Merrick continued northwest, killed Dubus, then had to stop at the lodge. He was bleeding badly by then. According to witnesses, he sat in a corner, drank some whiskey, talked to himself, then headed outside. They were waiting for him there.”
“How many?”
“Two, both wearing bird masks. Ring any bells? They beat him to death, or near enough to it. I guess they thought the job was done when they left him.”
“How long did he survive?”
“Long enough to take your gun from under the driver’s seat and shoot one of his attackers. I’m going on what I’ve been told, but the cops at the scene can’t figure out how he managed it. They broke just about every bone in his body. He must have wanted to kill this guy real bad. He got him with one in the left ankle, then one in the head. His pal tried to drag him away, but he got the dead guy’s foot caught in a drain so he had to leave him.”
“Did the vic have a name?”
“I’m sure he did, but he wasn’t carrying a wallet. That, or his friend removed it before he left to try to cover his tracks. You want, maybe I can make some calls and arrange for you to take a look at him. He’s down in Augusta now. ME’s due to conduct an autopsy in the morning. How you liking Jackman? I never took you for the hunting kind. Not animals, anyhow.”
He stopped talking, then repeated the name of the town. “Jackman,” he said, thoughtfully. “The Old Moose Lodge is kind of on the way to Jackman, I guess.”
“I guess,” I echoed him.
“And Jackman’s pretty close to Gilead, and Mason Dubus was the big dog when Gilead was open for business.”
“That’s about it,” I said neutrally. I didn’t know if O’Rourke was aware of Merrick’s act of vandalism at Harmon’s house, and I was sure he didn’t know about Andy Kellog’s pictures. I didn’t want the cops up here dancing all over the site, not yet. I wanted to break Caswell for myself. I now felt that I owed it to Frank Merrick.
“If I can work it out, you can bet that soon a lot of other cops will have worked it out too,” said O’Rourke. “I think you may be having some company up there. You know, I might feel bad if I thought you’d been holding out on me, but you wouldn’t do that, would you?”
“I’m figuring it out as I go along, that’s all,” I said. “Wouldn’t want to waste your time before I was certain of what I knew.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” said O’Rourke. “You give me a call when you go to look at that body.”
“I will.”
“Don’t forget, now, otherwise I really might start to take things personally.”
He hung up.
It was time. I called Caswell. It took him four rings to pick up. He sounded groggy. Given the hour, I wasn’t surprised.
“Who is this?”
“It’s Charlie Parker.”
“I told you, I got nothing—”
“Shut up, Otis. Merrick is dead.” I didn’t tell him that Merrick had managed to kill one of his attackers. It was better that he didn’t know, not yet. If Merrick had been killed at the Old Moose last night, then anyone who was planning on hitting Jackman afterward would have been here by now, and would have run into Angel and Louis, but we had heard nothing, which meant that Merrick’s killing of one of the men had scared them off for the moment. “They’re closing in on you, Otis. Two men attacked Merrick on the 201. I’d say that they were on their way up here when they took him, and this is their next stop. It could be that they’ll try and take my friends and me out, but I don’t think they’re that brave. They took Merrick from behind, with bats and bars. We carry guns. Maybe they do too, but we’re better than they are, I guarantee it. It’s like I told you, Otis: you’re the weak link. They get rid of you, and they can remake the chain stronger than it was before. Right now, I’m your best hope for making it alive to daybreak.”
There was silence on the other end of the line, then what sounded like a sob.
“I know you didn’t mean to hurt her, Otis. You don’t look like the kind of man who’d hurt a little girl.”
This time the crying was clearer. I pressed on.
“These other men, the ones who killed Frank Merrick, they’re different from you. You’re not like them, Otis. Don’t let them drag you down to their level. You’re not a killer, Otis. You don’t kill men, and you don’t kill little girls. I can’t see it in you. I just can’t.”
Caswell drew in a ragged breath. “I wouldn’t hurt a child,” he said. “I love children.”
And there was something in the way he said it that made me feel filthy inside and out. It made me want to bathe in acid, then swallow what was left in the bottle to purge my insides.
“I know,” I said, and I had to force the words from my mouth. “I bet you take care of those graves out at Moose River too, don’t you? I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” he said. “They shouldn’t ought to have done that to little babies. They shouldn’t ought to have killed them.”
I tried not to think about why he thought that they should have been spared, why they should have been allowed to grow into young children. It wouldn’t help, not now.
“Otis, what happened to Lucy Merrick? She was there, wasn’t she, in that house? Then she disappeared. What happened, Otis? Where did she go?”
I heard him sniffing, could see him wiping his nose on his arm.
“It was an accident,” he said. “They brought her here and—”
He stopped. He had never had to put a name to what he did to children before, not to someone who was not like him. This was not the time to make him.
“There’s no need to tell me that, Otis, not yet. Just tell me how it ended.”
He did not reply, and I feared that I had lost him.
“I did bad,” said Caswell, like a child that had soiled itself. “I did bad, and now they’ve come.”
“What?” I didn’t understand. “There are men there now?” I cursed the lack of coverage up here. Maybe I should have gone straight to Angel and Louis, but I remembered Caswell’s sweaty hands on his shotgun. He might have been on the verge of a breakdown, but there was always the risk that he could be willing to take someone with him when he finally fell apart. According to Angel, his cottage had barred windows and a heavy oak door, like the house in which Lucy Merrick had been held. Breaking in without being shot at would have been anything from difficult to impossible.
“They’ve been here all along,” Caswell continued, the words slipping from his mouth in near-whispers, “least for this past week, maybe more. I don’t recall properly. It feels like they’ve always been here, and I don’t sleep so good now because of them. I see them at night, mostly, out of the corner of my eye. They don’t do nothing. They just stand there, like they’re waiting for something.”
“Who are they, Otis?” But I already knew. They were the Hollow Men.
“Faces in shadow. Old dirty coats. I’ve tried talking to them, asking them what they want, but they don’t answer, and when I try to look straight at them, it’s like they’re not there. I have to make them go away, but I don’t know how.”
“My friends and I will come up there, Otis. We’ll take you somewhere saf
e. You just hold on.”
“You know,” said Caswell faintly, “I don’t think they’ll let me leave.”
“Are they there because of Lucy, Otis? Is that why they’ve come?”
“Her. The others.”
“But the others didn’t die, Otis. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“We were always careful. We had to be. They were children.”
Something sour bubbled in my throat. I forced it back down.
“Had Lucy been with you before?”
“Not up here. A couple of times someplace else. I wasn’t there. They gave her pot, booze. They liked her. She was different somehow. They made her promise not to tell. They had ways of doing that.”
I thought of Andy Kellog, of how he had sacrificed himself to save another little girl.
They had ways . . .
“What happened to Lucy, Otis. What went wrong?”
“It was a mistake,” he said. He had grown almost calm, as though he were talking about a minor fender bender, or an error on his taxes. “They left her with me after . . . after.” He coughed, then went on, again letting what was done to Lucy Merrick, a fourteen-year-old girl who had lost her way, remain unsaid. “They were going to come back the next day, or could be it was a couple of days. I don’t remember. I’m confused now. I just had to look after her. She had a blanket and a mattress. I fed her, and I gave her some toys and some books. But it got real cold all of a sudden, real cold. I was going to bring her up to my place, but I was afraid that she might see something up there, something that would help them to identify me when we let her go. I had a little gasoline generator in the house, so I turned it on for her and she went to sleep.
“I had a mind to check on her every few hours, but I dozed off myself. When I woke up, she was lying on the floor.” He started sobbing again, and it took him almost a minute before he could continue. “I smelled the fumes when I got to the door. I wrapped a cloth around my face, and I still could hardly breathe. She was lying on the floor, and she was all red and purple. She’d been sick on herself. I don’t know how long she’d been dead.
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