The Wolf in Winter

by Connolly, John

  “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 right-handed, 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 her body. It landed on the wood floor with a heavy thud.

  “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 suit 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 that 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. This 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 above 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 aftereffects, 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 rattle 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 wasn’t 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 have a good result.

  “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.”
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br />   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 wasn’t 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 dwellings 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 and eager to be on the move. 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 flame. 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 from Asheville, North Carolina—but considerably closer to Prosperous, Maine.

  CHAPTER

  LII

  They did not immediately descend on Prosperous. Instead, Angel and Louis 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 their 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 church 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 a coma. Ronald’s short note requested simply that Rachel call him. Rachel had met Ronald on a couple of occasions while she was 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 what he had witnessed: a girl swallowed by the earth in the shadow of an old church, while a group of older men and a woman, accompanied by a pastor and a policeman, stood by and watched. If the two men were surprised by his tale, they didn’t show it. If they were skeptical, Ronald could detect no trace.

  “What do you think happened to her?” asked 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 Abenakis’ 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 for what he had seen. He had a vision of a great tree growing upside down, its leafless 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, traveling 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 on them were undated, but they depicted the carved heads that could be seen both inside and outside the Blessed 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 him, had followed a research path similar to the one pursued by 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 still. 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 Agent 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?” asked Louis.

  Angel smiled as he replied.

  “It burns.”

  THE KILLINGS IN ASHEVILLE hadn’t gone unremarked in Boston, for Garrison Pryor’s people had been following trails similar to those walked by 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.