Central Park

by Guillaume Musso

  “I don’t give a shit, Seymour! Do you have the flashlight, the pliers, and the glow sticks?”

  “Yeah, yeah. It’s all in the bag.”

  Amplified by the speakerphone, the cop’s crackly voice echoed through the valley, bouncing against the mountainsides.

  “According to Castelli, this place has been abandoned for over thirty years. I’m in the main building now. It’s half falling down. Everything’s rusted, and there are weeds taller than me.”

  Alice closed her eyes and methodically re-created the topography of the factory as her father had described it to her. “Okay. Go out the back and look for a storage area. A building that looks like a silo.”

  A few seconds passed before Seymour spoke again. “All right, I see a sort of high, narrow tank, covered in ivy. It looks like the Jolly Green Giant’s cock!”

  Alice ignored this joke. “Walk around the silo until you find three stone wells.”

  Another silence.

  “Yeah, I see them. They’re covered.”

  Alice felt her heart accelerate. “Start with the middle one. Can you remove the cover?”

  “Hang on, I’m going to use my earbuds…okay, yeah, the cover’s off. But there’s a metal hatch underneath it.”

  “Can you lift it?”

  “Jesus, this thing weighs a ton! All right, it’s open.”

  Seymour was breathing heavily.

  “What do you see inside?”

  “Nothing.”

  She lost her temper: “Point the flashlight down there, for Christ’s sake!”

  “That’s what I’m doing, Alice! I’m telling you, there’s nothing down there.”

  “Try a glow stick.”

  She heard him mutter at the other end of the line, “How do these damn things work?”

  Exasperated, she yelled, “Pick it up, bend it in half, shake it, and throw it down the hole.”

  A few seconds later, Seymour reported, “The well is empty. It’s completely dry.”

  Fuck, I don’t believe this!

  “What was I supposed to find?” Seymour asked.

  Alice put her head in her hands. “Vaughn’s corpse.”

  “What? Are you crazy?”

  “Try the other wells,” she ordered.

  “The covers are rusted up. I can’t move them. No one’s opened them in years.”

  “Use the pliers to get them free!”

  “No, Alice, I’m not going to do that. I’ve had enough of this bullshit. I’m going back to Paris.”

  Powerless, stranded in the middle of a forest nearly four thousand miles from that old French factory, Alice balled her fists with rage. Seymour was wrong. There was a corpse in that factory. She was sure of it.

  She was about to hang up, when she heard a groan and a flood of curse words.

  “Seymour?” she said, alarmed.

  Silence. She exchanged a worried look with Gabriel, who, even if he could not understand every word of the French conversation, was aware of the rising tension.

  “Seymour, what’s happened?” she shouted into the phone.

  There was a long pause, during which they heard a series of metallic creaks. Then Seymour finally said: “Fucking hell. You were right, there’s…there really is a corpse!”

  Alice closed her eyes and began to thank God.

  “But it’s not in the well!” the cop went on.

  Not in the well?

  “There’s a corpse in the cab of an old backhoe.”

  White-faced and breathless, Alice asked, “Is it Vaughn?”

  “No, it’s a young woman. She’s been tied up and gagged. Hang on…oh, fuck! With a pair of tights! She was strangled with a pair of tights!”

  Alice tried to stay calm. “What state is the body in?”

  “I can’t see much, with the darkness and this goddamn rain, but in my opinion, she’s been dead a few days at the most.”

  Gabriel’s face was a mask of confusion and frustration. “Can you tell me what’s happening?”

  Alice briefly summarized the situation in English. Immediately, the federal agent formed a question.

  “Ask him what color the tights are. According to eyewitnesses, on the day she was murdered, Elizabeth Hardy was wearing pink tights.”

  Alice translated this into French for Seymour.

  “Impossible to tell,” he replied. “It’s too dark to see…I’m going to have to hang up, Alice. I need to inform the local cops.”

  “Seymour, wait!” she screamed. “Please tell us the color of the tights!”

  “Ugh…red, I think. No, more like pink.” And he hung up.

  Alice and Gabriel looked at each other, petrified.

  The nightmare was continuing.

  20

  Inside the House

  A NEARLY FULL MOON hung heavy in the sky, defying the clouds.

  It was icy cold.

  The Mustang Shelby’s heater blew only lukewarm air. Alice rubbed her hands to warm them up and covered them with the sleeves of her sweater. She had turned on the dome light and was looking at the road map folded out on her lap. Gabriel drove, leaning forward, face somber, his hands tightly gripping the wheel. They had driven about three hours since the phone call with Seymour, still heading north. After such a long trip, they were becoming painfully aware of how uncomfortable the Shelby was: very low seats, prehistoric suspension, faulty heating…

  Focused on the road, Gabriel rounded a hairpin bend and accelerated. The road wound between the gorges of the White Mountains. They had not seen another car for miles. The whole area seemed deserted.

  All around them was unfettered nature. The forest was dark and menacing. The palette of fall colors had given way to a single shade of black—the black of shadows, the black of the bottom of the ocean.

  As the car meandered around the road’s curves, they sometimes glimpsed the valley, veiled in fog, or a tiered waterfall, the rock silver beneath the rushing foam.

  Her eyes ringed with fatigue and sleeplessness, Alice went over what Seymour had told them: Not only was Vaughn not dead, but he was still killing. Ten days earlier, he had murdered a nurse here in New England, and soon afterward he had returned to France, killed again, and left the body in the old sugar factory.

  Vaughn was not acting alone, Alice was sure of that. It wasn’t by chance that she and Gabriel had been brought together. Vaughn had engineered this in order to provoke them, to defy them. But this macabre setup could not possibly be the work of one person. Materially, logistically, there was no way a single individual could have orchestrated such a gigantic puzzle.

  Alice rubbed her eyes. Her thoughts were growing murky, her brain slowing down.

  But one question wouldn’t stop torturing her: Why had her father lied to her about Vaughn’s death?

  She rubbed her shoulders and wiped the condensation from the windshield. The gloomy landscape was affecting her mood. She felt fear in her gut, and only Gabriel’s presence prevented her from yielding to panic.

  They drove another ten miles before reaching the opening to a forest path framed by wooden logs.

  “That’s it!” Alice said, looking up from the map.

  The car veered to the left and entered a path through the woods bordered by pine trees. After a hundred yards or so, the passage narrowed, as if the trees were uniting to repel the intruders. They kept going, pine needles scraping against the Mustang’s bodywork, branches hitting the windows and doors, the ground becoming ever more unstable. Almost imperceptibly, the conifers were closing in around them.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, a dark mass burst out in front of the car. Alice screamed; Gabriel slammed on the brakes and jerked the steering wheel to the side to avoid the obstacle. The Shelby skidded into the trunk of a pine tree, breaking off the side mirror, smashing one of the windows, and short-circuiting the interior light by which Alice had been reading the map.

  Gabriel turned off the engine. Silence. Fear. And then a long bellowing noise.

  A moose, Alice t
hought, watching the silhouette of a large animal with fan-shaped antlers running away.

  “Nothing broken?” Gabriel asked.

  “No, I’m okay,” Alice said. “How about you?”

  “I’ll survive,” he assured her, then started the car again.

  They drove five hundred yards and came to a clearing with a cabin at its center.

  They parked the Shelby near the building and turned off the headlights. The moonlight was bright enough for them to make out the little house. It was a rectangular wood-paneled construction with a cedar-shingle roof. Two dormer windows seemed to observe them suspiciously. The shutters were open and the darkness inside was absolute.

  “There’s no one here,” Gabriel said.

  “Or that’s what they want us to think,” Alice replied.

  She buckled the straps of her satchel and handed it to Gabriel. “Take that,” she ordered, then took her gun from the glove compartment, removed the Glock from its holster, checked the magazine, and pressed her finger to the trigger.

  “You’re not planning on going in there without backup?” Gabriel asked.

  “Do you have another solution?”

  “We might as well just paint targets on our faces!”

  “If Vaughn had wanted to kill us, we’d be dead already.”

  They went out into the cold and moved toward the house. Steam escaped their mouths, forming silvery clouds that vanished in the night.

  They stopped in front of a mailbox with peeling paint: CALEB DUNN.

  “At least we don’t have the wrong house,” said Gabriel, opening the mailbox.

  It was empty. Someone must have picked up the mail recently.

  They continued until they reached the porch, where they found a newspaper.

  “Today’s Concord Monitor,” Gabriel noted after ripping off the protective plastic. He dropped the newspaper onto an old rocking chair.

  “So Dunn hasn’t been home today,” Alice deduced, glancing at the paper.

  Gabriel stood in front of the door and seemed to hesitate.

  “You know, legally, we have no right to be here. Dunn is not officially a suspect. We don’t have a warrant or—”

  “So?” Alice asked impatiently.

  “So maybe we should get in without breaking down the door.”

  Alice holstered her gun and knelt in front of the lock. “Hand me my bag.” She rummaged inside the satchel and took out a large manila envelope containing the chest X-ray films she’d asked Mitchell to print out for her.

  “Where did you get those?” Gabriel asked, seeing the images.

  “I’ll explain later. What do you want to bet that there’s no dead bolt? How many burglars can there be around here?”

  Alice slid the rigid plastic sheet between the door and the frame and pushed it in several times. No luck.

  “Forget it, Schafer. This isn’t a movie. It’s locked.”

  But Alice did not give up. She slid the X-ray in again, this time while shaking the door and giving it little upward kicks; the latch came loose and the door opened.

  She shot a triumphant look at Gabriel and unholstered her Glock again. The two moved into the cabin.

  First observation: the house was heated. First deduction: the last time he had gone out, Dunn expected to be back pretty soon.

  Gabriel turned the light on. The interior was simple, a sort of large, old-fashioned hunter’s cabin with a brick floor, wood-paneled walls, and a wood-burning stove. The living room was arranged around a moth-eaten L-shaped couch in front of a huge stone fireplace, above which hung a stuffed deer head. Four rifles stood in the gun rack.

  “They’re just old pheasant-hunting guns,” said Gabriel.

  The only concessions to modernity were some Red Sox pennants, an HDTV, a video-game console, a laptop, and a small printer standing on a raw-wood table. They went through the kitchen. Similar plain décor: faded walls, a cast-iron stove, and a collection of old saucepans.

  They went upstairs and found three small, austere, practically bare bedrooms off a single corridor.

  Back on the first floor, the two detectives opened cabinets and drawers, looked on shelves, lifted cushions and the plaid blanket on the couch. They found nothing of interest besides a few ounces of pot hidden in a fruit bowl. It was hard to believe this house was the lair of a serial killer.

  “Strange,” said Gabriel. “Not a single personal photograph.”

  Alice sat in front of the laptop and opened it up. No password prompt. No photo software. The browser history had been cleared, and the e-mail application was not configured. A hollow shell.

  Alice stopped to think. She decided that Dunn must send e-mails by using his service provider’s website. She connected to it—it was the only site on his favorites list—but found only monthly bills and spam.

  Meanwhile, Gabriel kept searching. In a kitchen cabinet, he found some plastic sheeting and a roll of duct tape that he put aside to patch up the Shelby’s broken window. At the back of the house was a large window that looked out onto the forest. He opened it out of curiosity and let in a gust of wind that banged shut the front door. Alice looked up, and her face went pale.

  She jumped up from her chair, walked to the front door, and froze. Attached to the door with big rusty nails were three pictures that she always kept in her purse.

  One was a photograph of Paul smiling, taken in the Ravello gardens on the Amalfi Coast. Another was a printout of her ultrasound from the fifth month.

  Seeing this, Alice closed her eyes. In a second, all the emotions she had felt when she saw her baby that day flashed through her again. You could already see all his features—the delicate shape of his face, the ovals of the eyes, the tiny nostrils, the little hands and sculpted fingers. And you could hear the hypnotic rhythm of his heart. Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom…

  She opened her eyes and saw the third image: herself on her police ID card. She too was nailed to the door, but the perpetrator of the crime had made sure to tear her in two.

  Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom…the sound of her own heart pulsing in her chest mixed with the memory of her son’s heartbeat, and suddenly the room spun around her. She was overcome by a wave of heat and a violent desire to vomit. She had just enough time to feel someone holding her before she lost consciousness.

  Thunder rumbled, making the windows tremble. A series of lightning flashes strobe-lit the house’s interior. Alice had quickly regained consciousness, but she was still as white as a ghost. Gabriel was taking control of the situation.

  “Listen, there’s no sense in staying here forever. We have to find Caleb Dunn, and there’s no reason to assume he’s ever coming back.”

  Alice and Gabriel were sitting facing each other across the wooden table in the living room. Their map was spread out between them. The FBI agent continued, “Either Dunn and Vaughn are one and the same person or Dunn will lead us to Vaughn. Either way, this man knows an important part of the truth.”

  Alice nodded. She closed her eyes so she could concentrate more easily. The DNA test had indicated that the blood on her blouse belonged to Dunn. So Dunn had been injured recently. Last night or early this morning. And his wound must have been bad enough to prevent him from going home. But where was he now? Hiding out somewhere, probably. Or maybe in the hospital.

  As if reading her thoughts, Gabriel said: “What if Dunn is in the same hospital he works at?”

  “We could call them to check,” Alice suggested, bringing the laptop to life with a touch of its keyboard.

  She found the address and phone number for Sebago Hospital, then tried to find the place on the map.

  “Here it is,” she said, pointing to a lake shaped like a light bulb. “Only eighty miles away.”

  “Still, it’ll take us a good two hours. We have to get out of the mountains first.”

  “Let’s call the hospital and ask if Dunn is there.”

  He shook his head. “They won’t tell us anything over the phone. And they might even warn D
unn.”

  “So we just go there blindly?”

  “Maybe not—I have another idea. Give me your phone.”

  Gabriel typed in the hospital’s number and was answered by the main switchboard. Instead of asking whether they had a patient named Dunn, however, he asked to be put through to the security guard’s office.

  “Security,” said a laid-back voice that seemed at odds with the job description.

  “Good evening, I’m a friend of Caleb Dunn’s. He told me I could get hold of him at this number. Could I speak to him?”

  “Ha, well, that might be kinda tricky, man. From what I hear, ol’ Caleb got in the way of a bullet. So he’s here, all right, but on the other side of the fence, if you see what I mean.”

  “Dunn is there? At Sebago Hospital?”

  “That’s what the boss told me, anyway.”

  “The boss?”

  “Katherine Koller, the hospital assistant director.”

  “Do you know who shot him?”

  “No idea, man. They don’t like it when we ask questions here, you know.”

  Gabriel thanked the security guard and hung up.

  “Let’s go,” said Alice. “We’ve got him this time!”

  She was about to close the laptop, when she suddenly changed her mind. “Just a minute…” She would check her e-mails while she was online. More than five hours had passed since her phone call to Franck Maréchal, the regional transportation police chief. Maybe he’d gotten hold of the images of her car from the security cameras in the Franklin-Roosevelt parking garage.

  In all honesty, she didn’t have much faith in Maréchal’s diligence. But she was proved wrong; there was an e-mail from him in her in-box.

  From: Franck Maréchal

  To: Alice Schafer

  Subject: Vinci/FDR security footage

  Hi, Alice,

  Here are the images from the security cameras corresponding to the license plate number you gave me. The video file was too big to send by e-mail, but I’ve attached a few screenshots. I hope it’s enough.

  Cheers,

  Franck