Tynan backed the truck out and helped her into the passenger side. The seats were leather and he had polished the dashboard with Armor All. The GPS affixed to the dash was state-of-the-art and came on with the ignition, maps swirling, options blinking all over the screen. The AC cooled the cab in thirty seconds.
“Where did you buy this starship?” she rasped.
“Military,” he said unhelpfully.
The engine rumbled and settled into a forceful hum. Everything under the hood seemed powerful. Tynan typed in “Hollis Street,” and the GPS lady advised them to follow her detailed course. He listened for only a few seconds and slapped a red button on the GPS screen; it seemed right to shut her up.
They fell silent. Tynan made all the turns unerringly up to the Hollis Street entrance and swooped through the stone gates, halting in front of Maude Hampson’s address to reconnoitre. The clock on the display showed 9:32. Given the drive time from Coppermount to Hollis, a little slower for Henry than Tynan, Theresa calculated that Henry was already here and had connected with Phil within the past seven or eight minutes. Tynan turned off his headlights and crept in the darkness towards the two vehicles parked down at the cul-de-sac.
“I don’t know Devereau’s address,” she said.
“We’ll figure it out.”
She examined the houses, imagining she could smell blood mixed with marijuana. Tynan pointed to the Proffets’ lawn sign and pulled to the curb. Theresa gave a thumbs-up and whispered, “Chambers said Devereau lives next door.”
They emerged from the big truck and appraised the houses. The setting was oddly familiar to Theresa, whether from the one time the realtor had taken them by or from Henry’s Scheherazade tales.
“Do I smell smoke?” Tynan said. Theresa shrugged. She didn’t dispute Tynan’s senses but rather doubted her own: the drugs had dulled her olfactory system. There was no visible smoke.
They had to choose and might have moved closer to probe Devereau’s two-storey, but the light from the Proffets’ kitchen and the yawning garage lured them onto the same path Phil and Henry had chosen through the garage.
Reaching the kitchen door, Theresa felt the danger. Tynan held up a cautionary palm and pulled her around, manhandling her back out the garage to the truck. Rooting behind the cab seats, he brought out a .357 Magnum and a military-grade flashlight. He tossed the torch to her; she read “JetBeam Raptor” on the casing.
On their second pass through the garage, they missed the blood drops on the cement and the smears on the bumper of the Corolla. Theresa, taking the lead, turned to Tynan in anticipation of advancing on the main house, and eyed the Magnum. Guns lead to gunfights, she reflected; the large pistol might generate a reflexive shot from Henry or Phil inside. Tynan seemed to understand and lowered the weapon but kept the safety on.
She hissed, “I think we should announce ourselves.”
Tynan took the risk and called, “Henry! Phil!”
They entered the kitchen, but instead of tracking Phil Mohlman’s route, they made a hard right into what Theresa knew real estate agents labelled a “family room.” She made the call to turn on the torch. Its powerful LED ray caught the glint of blood streaming from Jerry Proffet’s throat wound. Next to him, in a fetal clench, lay Selma Proffet.
Tynan whispered, “These can’t be anyone but the Proffets. Should we call 9-1-1?”
“The police are already here,” Theresa said. Call the fire department, too, if you want, she thought. The threat was here, now, and Theresa was manic to find her husband.
Tynan raised his pistol again. He slipped into the kitchen and was back in fifteen seconds, shaking his head. “Follow me.”
Theresa understood that he was clearing each room in sequence while trying to figure out the path Henry and Phil had taken. The choice now, both realized, was to search the upstairs or proceed around to the patio doors. A sweep of the flashlight revealed no more corpses in the family room, and they passed into the carpeted living zone. Theresa almost stepped in the upchuck of blood and scotch that Phil had deposited on the rug inside the glass panels.
Theresa took the vanguard position out the door, abandoning any effort at stealth. Smoke drifted towards them across the side lawn. Theresa headed across the grass to Devereau’s patio, which was the match of Jerry and Selma Proffet’s, but found the door lock on. Seeing this, Tynan diverted course around to the front of Devereau’s two-storey, his goal the front door. Darker smoke belched from a vent on the side of the house.
Theresa caught up to Tynan on the cement steps before the solid oak front door. He tried the handle, stood farther back and fired a single booming shot into one of the narrow glass panels flanking the entrance.
Tynan stepped back, startled by his own gun. He looked at Theresa.
“Now we’ll see if everyone on Hollis Street is truly deaf,” she said.
A single shot responded from the interior. Tynan reached through the narrow window gap and unlocked the door. The smoke, billowing now, had turned black, and the smell of gasoline was strong, promising an explosion. As Theresa attempted to rush into the hall, she staggered from a convulsion that her adrenalin fought to suppress. Tynan rushed past her and in three strides reached the far side of Devereau’s kitchen, where one glance revealed the source of the fire as the basement.
Theresa was down now, incapable of moving any distance. Tynan, gasping himself, carried her to the open front entrance and onto the stoop. Even this spot wasn’t clear, for pitch smoke continued to snake out the door from the kitchen stairs.
Tynan made several wild calculations. Henry and Detective Mohlman were in this house and one of them had fired the shot. He also guessed that the killer might like symmetry and that the detectives could be in the den of the Devereau house. Keeping low, but running, Tynan circled the downstairs rooms and arrived at the far end of the den. It was almost bare of furniture — no massive TV — but he could find few reference points through the poisonous mist.
“Mohlman and Pastern,” Henry’s disembodied voice panted.
“Where?” Tynan called.
The crack of Henry Pastern’s .45 drove Tynan backward. The shot produced a sulphurous flash in the far corner of the den, letting him place Henry.
“Take him. I can’t walk,” Henry pleaded.
Tynan groped around the den and found Phil Mohlman on the carpet. He was unconscious. Blood coated his left eye.
“Be back for you, Henry.”
Henry wheezed, “I’ll try through the garage.”
“No,” Tynan said, “the fire’s coming up the basement stairs. Use the front hall. Where’s Devereau?”
Henry began choking, and Tynan didn’t wait for an answer. He had already decided to work his way through the den and the hall to the front. Let Devereau come after him. Tynan began to drag Phil by the feet out the doorway. Around the corner now, ten more steps, don’t drop the Magnum. Don’t shoot into the smoke unless you’re sure it’s Devereau. He reached the open front door and found the air unimproved as smoke rolled out onto the landing, thicker than ever.
But now hands were reaching out for his burden. The tenants of Hollis Street had finally come forward to help. Tynan tripped on the top step and a red-haired figure caught him. Recoiling, he almost shot the man. A little old lady moved into view and began to clean the blood from Phil Mohlman’s eye with her shawl.
Theresa lay on the lowest step, fighting for oxygen as neighbours propped her up and bathed her brow. Behind her, halfway down the corridor of the house and out of sight, a man retched and began to cough, as if mocking her affliction. Finding new strength, she fought free of the residents holding her and stumbled up the steps into the fog.
Tynan, reviving, followed but at once encountered disorienting smoke. It occurred to him that the ceiling sprinklers should have gone off; Devereau must have disabled them. In the darkness at the edge of the family
room, he tripped across Theresa, who was attempting to drag her husband by one shoulder along the hall. Tynan knelt and saw that a gunshot had torn up Henry’s left thigh. He positioned himself at Henry’s other side and heaved him up with both arms.
At the front door, Jake Wazinski collected the semi-conscious policeman and handed him off to his wife and Maude Hampson. Wooski then helped Tynan out the doorway. Sirens announced the passage of fire trucks through the stone gates. The sound grew closer, reflecting off the bungalows along Hollis Street. Tynan turned and went back inside for Theresa.
CHAPTER 20
Three weeks later, Theresa Pastern died in the University of Utah Burn Center, her lungs scarred beyond repair, a double transplant ruled unsurvivable.
Across town, in another Salt Lake City hospital, the sight came back to Phil Mohlman’s right eye. The left would have to wait another month.
The ceremony at Parkland Cemetery had ended, leaving Henry at loose ends, looking for something or someone in the crowd who might relieve him of his obligation to accept sympathy. Then he sighted Peter and Joan fifty yards distant. Henry’s father had died years ago, and now he realized that he had always wanted more than just professional guidance from Chief Inspector Cammon. Not a father exactly, but the availability in his life of a serious man whose honesty was unrelenting, whose goodwill was unstinting, and whose experience was unequalled by any other policeman Henry had met. Thus, when Henry beelined towards Peter, it was not for sympathy or overt sentiment, but guidance.
It was Peter who showed emotion. He was filled with sadness and regret, for he was ravaged by guilt that he hadn’t offered more help in those brief interactions with Henry over the preceding months. Joan walked beside him and held his hand. She had been the first one to suggest a visit to England by the Pasterns, and now she, too, was guilt-ridden that the trip had never happened. As they crossed the sun-blasted lawn, Peter saw expectation in Henry’s chilling look. The Utahan wanted something, and now Peter knew what: retribution. Was this what was meant by Blood Atonement?
Joan embraced Henry and moved away to let the men talk.
“I can’t have my revenge,” Henry rasped. They hadn’t hugged, but Peter held on to his hand with a strong grip. “What do I do, Peter?”
“Henry, this what you do. You write everything down, every detail. It’s a story you must tell.”
It was not quite that easy, of course, but the two, both trained policemen and English majors, understood that telling the full story could exorcise a policeman’s demons and provide its own form of revenge on evil.
After getting used to walking with a cane, Henry Pastern returned to Hollis Street hoping for some measure of closure. Officer Jackson drove; they had become friendly.
Henry would have burned Number 13 to the ground again, but only a charred cavity and Devereau’s garage remained at the spot.
“The basement is barely cold,” Henry said, as Jackson pulled up in front. “Not much left to clear out.”
For once, Jackson felt that he could speak as an equal. “Henry, man, you don’t have to do anything, except your duty to your wife to remember every damn thing that happened on this cursed street.”
Jackson’s words echoed what Peter had said at the funeral, and Henry felt a chill.
The fire had been intense, four gallons of accelerant exploding and searing everything in the basement, igniting the upper storey and leaving only a black pit. To Henry it was a tragic place, profane, like everything Devereau had done.
There were surprises in the police report. Devereau’s body had cooked and crusted in the basement inferno, but it remained intact, and the CSI excavators extracted a whole bullet from his chest. He had used a .25 calibre pistol on Henry and then on himself; it was a very lightweight gun for a man bent on slaughter, but sufficient to blow through his own heart.
Henry said nothing the rest of the time he and the patrolman were parked between 11 and 13 Hollis. Jackson respected Henry’s silence but couldn’t resist one more comment. “Funny that he shot himself in the chest. Most suicides go for the head.”
Over the next months, Henry began a report chronicling the deadly events of that summer night. When Phil called Jerry Proffet that evening, Jerry must have panicked. He contacted Devereau. The detectives were coming, Proffet warned. When? At 9 o’clock sharp. Devereau instructed Proffet to wait. It’ll be okay. Stay calm. Exactly 9 o’clock, you say?
The killer followed his final plan to the letter. Having arrayed four red gas cans in the cellar under the stairs of his own house, he trickled the contents around walls — one can, a second. The other two made effective bombs, as he knew from previous experiments with arson. Who knew how long Devereau waited before strolling across to Jerry’s garage, taking the screwdriver from the pegboard and knocking on the kitchen door? There was no hesitation, Henry imagined: invite Jerry out to the garage; drive the tool into the gullet; head for the big TV.
Devereau’s charred body was found in the basement. DNA tests revealed that his birth name was Jim Riotte, and he had a criminal record for buying restricted chemicals and was suspected of aiding domestic terrorism a decade ago. Since then, Hollis Street had been his hiding place.
Case closed.
Until the day Henry Pastern and Phil Mohlman met for the first time on the patio on Coppermount Drive after Phil got his “new eyes” and limping was no longer impossibly painful for either man. They both drank beer. They had all afternoon; they were on sick leave, extendable as “discretionary administrative” leave. Nothing was said for a long time, until Phil expressed chagrin that he hadn’t twigged to Devereau/Riotte during his three interviews. Henry opened the thick case file for a last look, and Phil, with his glasses on, examined the front-view/side-view jailhouse portraits of Jim Riotte from his arrest in 1994, a man he was willing to swear he had never seen before, with either his old or his new eyes.
PART 2
PETER
The English have a great hunger for desolate places.
Feisal to Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. Screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson.
CHAPTER 21
Peter Cammon, Chief Inspector (retired), was a great detective.
Everyone said so. His career was inevitably labelled “distinguished.” New Scotland Yard threw him three retirement parties. He had killed seven men (or was it eight? — his colleagues had begun to forget as Cammon slipped into semi-legend) over four and a half decades in harness, and none of the internal departmental reviews had affixed any blame. And so, untarnished, fabled, he had faded into retirement.
The late spring day the padded envelope arrived at the cottage in Leicestershire, Peter was firmly re-established in the depths of the renovated air raid shelter in the garden. He had lost count of the months he had spent on his family project, and now that the weather had turned fine, he had rushed back to these ascetic surroundings determined to finish off the task. His brother, Lionel, had died of a stroke, leaving a request of his only sibling: delve into a memoir left by their father of his War years, and perhaps get it published. The subtext of Lionel’s posthumous petition had been that Peter would discover a heroic truth about their father. Peter had started out excited. Orderly stacks of family papers now lined the cement walls of the uncomfortable air raid bunker.
George Frederick Cammon, named in a lapse in judgement by his father after the German composer George Frideric Handel, had been a prominent solicitor and, throughout the Second World War, a trusted intelligence officer with the British government. Until Lionel’s bequest, Peter had known only the first part of his dad’s biography. GF’s dramatic memoir, typed on yellow paper, covered his entire war experience from 1939 through 1945, and a bit before and after, and Peter rushed through the text in one go, as a good son of Britain would take in any thrilling story of the Empire. As Lionel intended, Peter was carried back to his father’s knee, awestruck by what he had never
known. It might indeed make a thrilling book.
George Cammon’s role leading into the War had been to think up ways to counter the radical British fascist party and hound its leader, Oswald Mosley. After the declaration of war, the lure of the fascist view in Britain, though diminished, continued, and Mosley’s network remained a thorn in Churchill’s side. Throughout the conflict, George Cammon risked beatings by pro-Nazi thugs and endured threats to his family as he monitored the remnants of the British Union of Fascists.
Lionel’s somewhat coy entreaty promised that Peter would discover a secret, swashbuckling deed within their father’s account that would change Peter’s view of their old man. And there it was, popping up on page ten of GF’s saga. In 1929, Oswald Mosley had married Diana Mitford, one of six sisters in a prominent English clan. George was asked by the Home Office to watch the couple under the ruse of providing liaison between the government and the Mitfords on legal issues, very vaguely defined. George, according to his own notes, became a regular presence in the Mosleys’ drawing room, “although,” he wrote, “I never stayed for dinner.” If Diana wholeheartedly embraced fascism and, with her husband, kept in touch with Hitler throughout the 1930s, her younger sister, the scatterbrained Unity Mitford, idolized the Fuhrer; she may have slept with him. While in Germany in 1939, the unstable Unity tried to commit suicide by shooting herself in the head. Winston Churchill personally dispatched George Cammon to Munich to verify the news reports and recommend a course of action. Ultimately, the well-connected Mitfords were able to transfer their daughter back to Britain with a minimum of scandal. For his efforts, George Cammon came close to execution by a German bullet.
Lionel had a Good Cold War working in the Home Office in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. He was, to sum up, some kind of spymaster. George always favoured his elder son, and Peter and his father had had a bumpy relationship. GF seemed a cold, uncommunicative figure to his younger boy. Later, as Peter, straight out of Oxford, embraced a career in the Yard, he was made to feel substandard by his father. Police work was too “straightforward” a career choice, George pronounced. It never occurred to young Peter that George Frederick Cammon was a snob.
The Verdict on Each Man Dead Page 15
