The Wolf in Winter

by Connolly, John

  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 its 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 him the phone 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 the town might not have been involved, but Cambion sealed it for me. He’s long been interested in Prosperous’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 New York 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,” said Louis. 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 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 on 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. His business, Pryor Investments, had learned from past mistakes, and was now entirely scrupulous in its dealings. Of course, the business 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, 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 couldn’t.”

  “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’ll 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.

  CHAPTER

  LIII

  Lucas Morland felt as though he had aged years within 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 hadn’t been in touch with him in forty-eight hours, and its investigators were no longer troubling the town. A certain narrative was gaining traction: Harry Dixon, who had been depressed and suffering from financial problems, killed his wife, her half sister and her huband, and, it was presumed, their daughter, 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, 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 that 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 mugs. 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 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 Conyer had vetoed the suggestion that the young lawyer Stacey Walker should be the one, 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 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 that Stacey Walker was too young, too inexperienced, to be brought onto the board. Hard times called for old heads, she told him. Morland couldn’t tell whether she’d just made that up or 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, what then?

  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: she and those like her.

  “We have to put old disagreements behind us and look to the future,” said Hayley. “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 said with a wave of her hand.

  “They could have been tempted to take on other tasks without our knowledge. Even if they didn’t, and they were somehow tracked down because of the detective, they wouldn’t 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 his descendant’s head.

  Morland wasn’t 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 Conyer. “We’ll . . .”

  But Morland was no longer even listening. He drifted. He wasn’t sleeping well, and when he did manage to doze off his dreams—he had begun to dream in earnest—were haunted by visions of wolves. He stood and 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’s 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 didn’t look into her eyes as he killed her. I
nstead, 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 didn’t 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.