The Wrath of Angels cp-11

by John Connolly

  That was the last Ray saw of his car. It had just been repossessed.

  When he asked to see Perry Reed, he was told that Mr Reed wasn’t around. When he started to get loud, four mechanics dumped him on the sidewalk. Ray’s mistake was to believe that Perry Reed was in the used car business, but he wasn’t. Perry Reed was in the finance business, and the more defaults there were, the better his business was. He could simply sell the same car over again at the same extortionate rates to people who needed a car and couldn’t convince anyone else to sell them one.

  It was at that point that Ray Wray decided he was going to burn Perry Reed’s lot to the ground, along with his titty bar, but then he got sidetracked by the promise of a job in New York that never materialized, and he ate a bad Korean meal, and copped the city bullet, and by the time he got around to taking care of Perry Reed someone else had done it for him.

  Which was good, as it saved Ray the trouble of planning and committing a major act of arson, and bad, because it denied Ray the pleasure of planning and committing a major act of arson.

  The diner’s door opened and Ray’s buddy Joe Dahl strolled in, ordered a coffee, and joined Ray at his table. Joe Dahl was a big guy in his forties, which was how he got away with wearing a Yankees cap in Maine. You needed to be big to wear a Yankees cap this far north without someone taking it from your head, and maybe trying to take your head from your shoulders along with it. Dahl claimed that he wore the cap in memory of his late mother, who came from Staten Island, but Ray knew that was bullshit. Dahl wore the cap because he was ornery and peculiar, and because he lived for those times when someone tried to knock it from his head.

  ‘You see this shit?’ asked Ray.

  ‘Yeah, I saw it,’ said Joe.

  ‘I’d like to shake the hand of the guy that did it. First piece of good news I’ve had all week.’

  ‘I got some more,’ said Joe, as his coffee arrived. ‘I found you a job.’

  ‘Yeah? What is it?’

  ‘Guide work.’

  ‘Hunting?’

  Joe looked away. He seemed uneasy. Scared, even.

  ‘Kind of. We’re going to look for something in the North Woods.’

  ‘Something? What kind of something.’

  ‘I think it’s an airplane . . .’

  33

  I made one small detour before I headed north to Maine: I drove into Boston and found the headquarters of Pryor Investments in Beacon Hill. It occupied a relatively modest-looking, but still absurdly expensive, brownstone not far from the Charles/MGH T-station. There was no sign of activity, and I saw nobody pass in or out of the building while I was parked nearby. So far, Epstein had been unable to find out anything of note about the company, apart from one small detail: the name of Pryor Investments was on documents relating to the formation of a 501(c) body called the American League for Equality and Freedom, and one Davis Tate, now deceased, had been the principal benefactor of the funds channeled through the organization. It was a small thread, but a thread nonetheless. Still, now wasn’t the time to pull it and see what would unravel. I drove away from Beacon Hill, and it was only as I passed the Pryor building that I saw the camera systems discreetly mounted in the shadows on the wall, their watchful glass eyes taking in the details of the street and sidewalks surrounding it.

  The meeting with Eldritch had not been particularly satisfying, but then meetings with lawyers rarely were. I had no great desire to renew acquaintance with the man who sometimes called himself Kushiel, but was mostly referred to as the Collector. Neither did I want him running loose, indulging his taste for divine justice, or his own interpretation of it, by killing anyone who appeared on his copy of the list, particularly if I was among them. I did not trust the Collector enough to imagine that, if he found my behavior wanting, he would not consider consigning me to his personal retinue of the damned. We had been uneasy allies in the past, but I had no illusions about him: I believed that he, like Epstein, had concerns about my nature, and the Collector tended to err on the side of caution in such matters. He surgically excised polluted tissue.

  But there was no reason to believe that the Collector knew about the plane in the Great North Woods, and it was important to secure it before any hint of its existence reached him. Better that Epstein should have the list that Harlan Vetters had seen than have it fall into the hands of the Collector, for Epstein was essentially a good man. Yet even about Epstein I had doubts: I didn’t know enough about those who worked alongside him, beyond the fact that the younger ones liked waving guns around, to be certain of their capacity for self-restraint. Epstein appeared to be a moderating influence, but he kept much about himself hidden.

  It seemed obvious to say it, but knowing the identity of your enemies was the first step toward defeating them. With their names in his possession, Epstein could begin the task of monitoring their activities, and undermining them when necessary. He would also learn if there were traitors among those whom he had previously trusted, although the list would inevitably be incomplete, dating as it did only to some period prior to the crash of the plane. Who knew how many others had been added to it since then? Nevertheless, obtaining it would be a start. But was there not the possibility that, in some cases, Epstein and his people might choose to act as the Collector had done, and remove from play those on the list who were deemed most threatening?

  Those were my thoughts as I drove up to Scarborough, an alternative music station playing in the background on Sirius radio: some Camper Van Beethoven, a double-play of the Minutemen which lasted about three hundred seconds in total, including the DJ’s intro, and even a little Dream Syndicate, but I felt compelled to run for cover when some bright spark requested Diamanda Galas, and, in a rush of blood to the head, the DJ obliged.

  When I was in my early twenties, and getting to know the kind of girls who would ask you back to their place for coffee and mean it, although with the promise of more than coffee at a later date if you didn’t turn out to be a freak, I learned that a surefire way to understand a woman, as with a man, was to flick through her record collection. If she didn’t have one then you could largely give up on her right there, because a woman who didn’t listen to any music at all didn’t have a soul, or anything worthy of the name; if she was loaded up on English alternative music like The Smiths or The Cure, she was probably trying a little too hard to be miserable, but it wasn’t likely to be terminal; if she was a fan of hair metal like Kiss, and Poison, and Mötley Crüe, you were faced with the dilemma of staying with her for a while because she might put out, or ditching her before you were forced to listen to any of her music; but if she had Diamanda Galas on her racks, maybe alongside Nico, Lydia Lunch, and Ute Lemper for the quieter moments, then it was time to make your excuses and leave before she dumped powdered sedatives in your coffee and you woke up chained in a basement with the girl in question standing over you, holding a kitchen knife in one hand, a creepy doll in the other, and screaming the name of some guy you’d never met but apparently resembled in psychic form.

  So I ditched the alternative station, switched to the CD player, and listened instead to the only album ever released by Winter Hours, which was more tuneful and less frightening, and put me in a better mood as I drove home.

  As I parked outside my house, I saw that I had missed a call from Epstein. I returned it from my office phone. The death of Davis Tate was on Epstein’s mind.

  ‘Do you believe it was the work of this man, the Collector?’ he asked.

  ‘When I heard that he was shot, I thought it might have been your people. The Collector usually prefers to work with a blade.’

  ‘What convinced you otherwise?’

  ‘It seems that there were cuts on Tate’s body. He’d lost part of an earlobe. Whoever killed him also took his watch but left his wallet untouched. The Collector likes to acquire souvenirs from his victims. In that sense, he’s pretty much your common or garden serial killer. It’s the added self-righteousness that makes him special.
’

  ‘You spoke to the old lawyer?’

  ‘I did. I got the feeling that Barbara Kelly sent him the same version of the list that you received.’

  ‘With your name on it?’

  ‘So it seems. His secretary was very certain that I was going to get whatever was coming to me.’

  ‘Are you concerned?’

  ‘A little. I like my throat the way it is, and I don’t need a smile cut in it. But I think the Collector has the same doubts that you had about me. He won’t act until he’s certain.’

  ‘And in the meantime, he will continue working through the names on that list. He will bring their protectors down upon himself.’

  ‘I imagine that’s what he’s hoping.’

  Epstein’s voice grew muffled for a minute. He had covered the receiver with his hand as he spoke to someone else nearby. When he came back on the line, he sounded excited.

  ‘I have a theory about that plane,’ he said. ‘The date of the newspaper in the cockpit is close to the date when a Canadian businessman named Arthur Wildon disappeared.’

  The name seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t place him. It was left to Epstein to place it for me.

  ‘The Wildon twins, Natasha and Elizabeth, eight years old, were kidnapped in 1999,’ he told me. ‘A ransom was demanded, and secretly paid: a simple drop-off on a remote road, the driver instructed not to stop or the girls would be killed. The location of the twins was subsequently communicated by way of a note left by the shore of the Quebec river, its position marked with a rock painted black and white. The note claimed that the girls were being kept at a cabin outside Saint-Sophie, but when the rescue team got to the cabin it was empty, or appeared to be. Five minutes after they arrived, Arthur Wildon received a telephone call. The caller, who was male, gave him a single instruction: “Dig.”

  ‘And so they dug. The cabin had a dirt floor. The girls had been bound and gagged, then buried alive together in a hole three feet deep. The medical examiner estimated that they had been dead for days, probably killed within hours of their abduction.’

  I held the phone away from my ear for a moment, as though its proximity were somehow causing me pain. I recalled closing a trapdoor on a young girl in an underground cell so that her cries would not alert the man who had put her there, and I heard again the terror in her voice as she had begged me not to leave her in the dark. She had been fortunate, though, because she had been found. Most of them were never found, or not alive.

  But the man involved in that case had been a serial abuser and killer of young women, with no intention of ever releasing them. Kidnappers were different. Through Louis, I had once met a man named Steven Tolles, who was a hostage negotiator employed by a leading private security firm. Tolles was a ‘sign of life’ expert, called in to consult on cases of which not even the FBI or the police ever had any awareness. His primary concern was to ensure the safe return of the victim, and he was very good at his job. It was for others to catch the perpetrators, although Tolles, in his debriefing of victims, often drew from them crucial clues as to the identities of those involved: stray smells and sounds could be as useful as momentary glimpses of houses, woods and fields, sometimes even more so. From Tolles I learned that the instances of murder in kidnapping cases were comparatively rare. Kidnapping was a crime of greed: those who committed it wanted to pick up the ransom and vanish. Murder upped the ante, and ensured that the victim’s relatives would involve law enforcement in the aftermath. There was a very good reason why most instances of kidnapping never made the news: it was because terms were negotiated and ransoms paid without anyone beyond the family and the private negotiators employed by them ever learning anything about what had occurred, and that frequently included the police and the feds.

  But if what Epstein was telling me was true, then the people responsible for abducting Arthur Wildon’s daughters – and there must have been more than one kidnapper, for two young girls would be difficult for one person to handle – had deliberately set out to extort money when there was no hope of the victims ever being returned alive. Indeed, it appeared that there had never been any intention to release them unharmed, given that they were killed so soon after their abduction. It was possible that something might have gone wrong, of course: one or both of the girls might have seen the faces of those involved, or caught sight of something guaranteed to give away the identity of a captor, in which case their kidnappers could have felt that they had no option but to kill them in order to protect themselves.

  But to bury them alive? That was an appalling death to visit on two children, regardless of the ruthlessness of the kidnappers. There was sadism involved here, which suggested that the money was almost an afterthought, or a secondary motivation, and I wondered if Arthur Wildon or someone close to him was being punished for some unspecified offense through the dark suffocation of two little girls.

  ‘Mr Parker?’ said Epstein. ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here. Sorry, I was distracted by my own thoughts.’

  ‘Is there anything that you feel compelled to share?’

  ‘I was considering what the principal motive for the kidnapping might have been.’

  ‘Money. Isn’t that what kidnapping is always about?’

  ‘But why kill the girls?’

  ‘To leave no witnesses?’

  ‘Or to torment Wildon and his family.’

  Epstein exhaled deeply, then said: ‘I knew him.’

  ‘Wildon?’

  ‘Yes. Not well, but we shared certain interests.’

  ‘Any that you feel compelled to share?’

  ‘Wildon believed in fallen angels, just as I do, and just as you do too.’

  I wasn’t sure that was entirely true, despite anything to the contrary I may have said to Marielle Vetters. Most people who talked about angels seemed to picture a fusion between Tinkerbell and a crossing guard, and I remained reluctant to put that name to the entities, terrestrial or otherwise, that I had encountered. After all, none of them had sprouted wings.

  Not yet.

  ‘But he also believed that they were infecting others,’ continued Epstein, ‘acquiring influence through threats, promises, blackmail.’

  ‘For what purpose?’

  ‘Ah, there Wildon and I differed. He talked of the End Times, of the last days, a peculiar mix of millenarianism and apocalyptic Christianity, neither of which I found personally or professionally appealing.’

  ‘And what do you believe, rabbi?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t it time that you shared that with me?’

  ‘Truly?’ He laughed: a hollow rattle. ‘I believe that somewhere, on earth or below it, an entity waits. It’s been there for a long, long time, either by its own will, or, more likely, by the will of another; trapped, perhaps even slumbering, but waiting nonetheless. The worst of these others, these creatures formed in its image, are seeking it. They have always been seeking it, always looking, and while they search they prepare for its coming. That is what I believe, Mr Parker, and I admit that it may well be proof of my madness. Does that satisfy you?’

  I didn’t answer. Instead I asked, ‘Are they close to finding it?’

  ‘Closer than ever before. So many of them emerging in recent years, so much hunting and killing; they are like ants set in motion by the queen’s pheromones. And you are involved, Mr Parker. You know this to be true. You feel it.’

  I stared out of my window at the shapes of trees and the silver channels of the marshes, the pale specter of myself floating against them.

  ‘Did Wildon own a plane?’

  ‘No, but a man named Douglas Ampell did. Ampell went missing around the same time that Wildon disappeared. Ampell and Wildon were acquainted, and Wildon used Ampell’s aviation services on an occasional basis.’

  ‘Did Ampell file a flight record in July 2001?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘So if that was Ampell’s plane, and Wildon was on it, then where was he heading?’

  ‘I th
ink he was trying to reach me. There had been some contact between us in the months before his disappearance. He had followed up on hundreds of rumors, and was convinced that there was a record in existence of those who had been corrupted. He believed that he was close to finding it, and it seems that he might have done so. I think he was bringing that list with him when the plane went down.’

  ‘And not just the list. Who was the passenger? Who was cuffed to a chair in that plane?’

  ‘Wildon was obsessed with finding those responsible for killing his daughters,’ said Epstein. ‘It destroyed his marriage, and his business, but he became convinced that he was drawing closer to them. Perhaps on that plane was the man who killed Wildon’s daughters: a man, or something worse than a man. You must find that plane, Mr Parker. Find the plane.’

  34

  Darina Flores learned of the deaths of Becky Phipps and Davis Tate shortly before she and the boy moved against Marielle Vetters. Darina had been concerned when she had not immediately heard back directly from Phipps; they had been searching for a definite clue to the location of the plane for so long, yet hours went by with no contact. Darina, always cautious in such matters, was reluctant to disseminate what she had learned any wider than was necessary, but preparations needed to be made.

  While she debated what further action to take, she received confirmation from Joe Dahl that he was ready to move when she was. Dahl had been hers for a long time: she and her agents ensured that the inveterate gambler was permitted to fall deeper and deeper into debt until everything he owned was effectively theirs.

  And then they let him keep it all: his car, his house, what little of his business remained, all of it. They simply held onto the paper on his debt, and waited. It didn’t take long. Dahl was an addict, and he had not yet been cured of his addiction. On the evening that he tried to use his car as security on a cash loan so he could hit Scarborough Downs, Darina paid him a visit, and Joe Dahl was cured of his gambling vice forever. Darina had kept him in her pocket ever since, ready to be used once they had solid information about the plane. Unlike the others, she had not gone on random searches of the woods, chasing wisps of information that dissipated like morning mist in the sunlight. She considered such ventures unwise: they risked drawing attention to the object of the search, and she believed that it was better to wait until a solid lead emerged. True, the plane and its secrets represented a ticking device that could go off at the moment of discovery, but while it remained lost its danger was potential, not actual, and even the list itself was meaningless unless it found its way into the right hands. The mystery of the passenger and his fate troubled her more. He shared her nature, and he was lost.