Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  I think that I wanted a power I could not have: the power to perceive evil, the ability to look at the faces in a crowded room and see the signs of depravity and corruption. The thought sparked a memory of a killing in New York State some years before, in which a thirteen-year-old boy had killed a younger kid in the woods, beating him to death with rocks. It was the words of the killer’s grandfather that had stayed with me. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘I should have been able to see, somehow. There should have been something to see.’

  ‘Are there any pictures of Adelaide Modine?’ I asked eventually.

  Martin’s brow furrowed. ‘There may be one in the files of the original investigation. The library may have some stuff too. There’s a kind of town archive stored in its basement, y’ know, yearbooks, photos from the paper. There may be something in there. Why d’you ask?’

  ‘Curiosity. She was responsible for so much of what happened to this town but I find it hard to picture her. Maybe I want to see what her eyes looked like.’

  Martin shot me a puzzled look. ‘I can get Laurie to look in the library archives. I’ll try to get Burns to look through our own files but it could take a while. They’re all packed in boxes and the filing system is pretty obscure. Some of the files aren’t even in date order. It’s a lot of work to satisfy your idle curiosity.’

  ‘I’d appreciate it anyway.’

  Martin made a sound in his throat but didn’t say anything else for a time. Then, as the motel appeared on our right, he pulled over to the side of the road. ‘About Earl Lee,’ he said.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The sheriff’s a good man. He held this town together after the Modine killings, from what I hear, him and Doc Hyams and a couple of others. He’s a fair man and I’ve no complaints about him.’

  ‘If what Tyler said is true, maybe you should have.’

  Martin nodded. ‘That’s as maybe. If he’s right, then the sheriff’s got to live with what he’s done. He’s a troubled man, Mr Parker, troubled by the past, by himself. I don’t envy him anything but his strength.’ He spread his hands wide and shrugged slightly. ‘Part of me figures that you should stay here and talk to him when he comes back, but another part of me, the smart part, tells me that it would be better for all of us if you finished up your business as quickly as you can and then got out.’

  ‘Have you heard from him?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. He had some leave coming to him and maybe he’s a little overdue on returning, but I ain’t gonna hold that against him. He’s a lonely man. A man who likes the company of other men ain’t gonna find much comfort here.’

  ‘No,’ I said, as the neon light of the Welcome Inn flickered beyond us. ‘I guess not.’

  The call came through almost as soon as Martin pulled away from the kerb. There had been a death at the medical centre: the unidentified woman who had tried to kill me the previous night.

  When we arrived, two cruisers were blocking the entrance to the parking lot and I could see the two FBI men talking together at the door. Martin drove us through and as we got out of the car the two agents moved towards me in unison, their guns drawn.

  ‘Easy! Easy!’ shouted Martin. ‘He was with me the whole time. Put them away, boys.’

  ‘We’re detaining him until Agent Ross arrives,’ said one of the agents, whose name was Willox.

  ‘You ain’t detaining or arresting nobody, not until we find out what’s going on here.’

  ‘Deputy, I’m warning you, you’re out of your league here.’

  Wallace and Burns came out of the medical centre at that point, alerted by the shouts. To their credit, they moved to Martin’s side, their hands hanging close by their guns.

  ‘Like I said, let it go,’ said Martin quietly. The feds looked like they might push the issue but then they holstered their weapons and moved back.

  ‘Agent Ross is going to hear of this,’ hissed Willox to Martin, but the deputy just walked by.

  Wallace and Burns walked with us to the room in which the woman had been kept.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Martin.

  Wallace turned bright red and started blabbering. ‘Shit, Alvin, there was a disturbance outside the centre and—’

  ‘What kind of disturbance?’

  ‘A fire in the engine of a car, belonged to one of the nurses. I couldn’t figure it out. There weren’t nobody in it and she hadn’t used it since she got in this morning. I only left the door here for maybe five minutes. When I got back, she was like this . . .’

  We arrived at the woman’s room. Through the open door I could see the pale, waxy pallor of her skin and the blood on the pillow beside her left ear. Something metal, ending in a wooden handle, glinted in the ear. The window through which the killer had entered was still open and the glass had been shattered in order to unhook the latch. A small sheet of brown paper lay on the floor, with glass adhering to it. Whoever had killed the woman had taken the trouble to put syrup or glue on the paper before breaking the glass, in order to muffle the sound and to ensure that the glass didn’t make any noise when it hit the floor.

  ‘Who’s been in here, apart from you?’

  ‘The doctor, a nurse and the two feds,’ said Wallace. The elderly doctor called Elise appeared behind us. She looked shaken and weary.

  ‘What happened to her?’ said Martin.

  ‘A blade of some kind – I think it’s an ice-pick – was thrust through her ear and into her brain. She was dead when we got to her.’

  ‘Left the pick in her,’ mused Martin.

  ‘Clean and easy,’ I said. ‘Nothing to tie the killer to what happened if he – or she – gets picked up.’

  Martin turned his back on me and began consulting the other deputies. I moved away as they talked and made my way towards the men’s washroom. Wallace looked back at me and I made a gagging expression. He looked away with contempt in his eyes. I spent five seconds in the washroom and then slipped out of the centre through the rear exit.

  Time was running out for me. I knew Martin would try to grill me on the source of the hit. Agent Ross wasn’t far behind. At the very least, he’d hold me until he got the information he wanted and any hope I might have of finding Catherine Demeter would disappear. I made my way back to the motel, where my car was still parked, and drove out of Haven.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The track to the ruin of the Dane house was heavy with mud and the car moved through it only with a great effort, as if nature itself was conspiring against my approach. It had started to rain heavily again, and the wind and rain combined to render the wipers almost useless. I strained my eyes for the stone cross and took the turning opposite. I missed the house the first time, only realising my mistake when the road turned into a mass of mud and fallen, rotting trees, forcing me to reverse slowly back the way I had come until I spotted two small ruined pillars to my left and, between them, the almost roofless walls of the Dane house briefly silhouetted against the darkening sky.

  I pulled up outside the empty eyes of the windows and the gaping mouth of what was once the door, pieces of its lintel strewn on the ground like old teeth. I took the heavy Maglite from under my seat and climbed out, the rain painful on my head as I ran for what little shelter the interior of the ruin could offer.

  Over half of the roof was gone and what remained still showed blackened and charred. There were three rooms: what had once been a kitchen and eating area, identifiable from the remains of an ancient stove in one corner; the main bedroom, now empty except for a stained mattress around which old prophylactics were scattered like the discarded skins of snakes; and a smaller room, which might have served as a children’s bedroom once but was now a mass of old timber and rusting metal bars dotted with paint tins, left there by someone too lazy to haul them to the municipal dump. The rooms smelt of old wood, of long extinct fires and human excrement.

  An old couch stood in one corner of the kitchen, its springs flowering through the rotting cushions. It formed a triangle with th
e corners of the wall, upon which the remains of some faded floral wallpaper hung tenaciously. I shone the flashlight over the back of the couch, my hand resting on the edge. It felt damp but not wet, for the remains of part of the roof still sheltered it from the worst of the elements.

  Behind the couch and almost flush with the corners of the house was what appeared to be a trapdoor some three feet at each side. It was locked and its edges seemed filthy and choked with dirt. Its hinges were bloodied with rust and pieces of wood, and pieces of old metal covered most of its surface.

  I pulled back the couch to take a closer look and started as I heard a rat scurry across the floor at my feet. It melted into the darkness in a far corner of the room and then was still. I squatted down to examine the lock and bolt, using my knife to scrape away some of the filth from around the keyhole. New steel shone through beneath the dirt. I ran the blade of the knife along the bolt, exposing a line of steel that shone like molten silver in the darkness. I tried the same experiment with the door but only flakes of rust greeted me.

  I examined the bolt more closely. What had appeared at first sight to be rust now looked more like varnish, carefully applied so that it would blend in with the door. The bolt’s battered look could easily have been achieved by tying it to the back axle of a car and pulling it over the rutted tracks of this part of the country. It wasn’t a bad job, designed as it was to fool only necking teenagers seeking a thrill in a house of the dead, or children daring each other to tempt the ghosts of other children long gone.

  I had a crowbar in the car but I was reluctant to brave the driving rain again. Shining the flashlight around the room, a steel bar some two feet long was caught in the beam. I picked it up, felt its weight, inserted it in the U of the lock and prised. For a moment it seemed the bar might bend or fracture under the strain but then there was a sharp crack as the lock broke. I pulled it free, released the bolt and raised the door on its complaining hinges.

  A rich, heady stench of decay rose from the cellar, causing my stomach to churn. I covered my mouth and moved away, but seconds later I was vomiting by the couch, my nostrils filled with my own smell and the odour from the cellar below. When I had recovered and breathed in some fresh air outside the house, I ran to the car and took the window rag from the dashboard. I sprayed it with de-mister from the glove compartment and tied it around my mouth. The de-mister made my head reel but I stuck it in the pocket of my jacket in case I needed it again and re-entered the house.

  Even breathing through my mouth and tasting the spray, the smell of putrefaction was overpowering. I descended the wooden stairs carefully, my strong left hand on the rail and the Maglite in my right with the beam shining at my feet. I didn’t want to trip on a ruined step and plunge into the darkness below.

  At the base of the steps the flashlight beam caught a glint of metal and blue-grey material. A heavy-set man in his sixties lay near the steps, his knees curled beneath him and his hands cuffed behind his back. His face was grey-white and there was a wound on his forehead, a ragged hole like a dark, exploding star. For a moment, as I shone the light upon it, I thought it was an exit wound but moving the light to the back of his head I saw the hole in his skull gape, saw the decaying matter within and the white totem of his spine.

  The gun had probably been pressed right against his head. There was some gunpowder smudging around the forehead wound and the star-shaped rip had been caused by the gases shooting under the skin next to the bone, expanding and tearing open the forehead as they exploded. The bullet had exited messily, taking most of the back of his skull with it. The contact wound also explained the unusual position of the body: he had been shot while kneeling, looking up into the muzzle of the gun as it approached and falling sideways and back when the bullet entered. Inside his jacket was a wallet, with a driving license and police ID identifying him as Earl Lee Granger.

  Catherine Demeter lay slumped against the far wall of the basement, nearly opposite the stairs. Granger had probably seen her as he walked or was pushed down. She was slouched like a doll at the wall, her legs spread out before her and her hands resting palms up on the floor. One leg was bent at an unnatural angle, broken below the knee, and I guessed that she had been thrown down the cellar stairs and dragged to the wall.

  She had been shot once in the face at close range. Dried blood, brain tissue and bone fragments surrounded her head like a bloody halo on the wall. Both bodies had begun to decay rapidly in the cellar, which seemed to stretch the length and breadth of the house.

  There were blisters on Catherine Demeter’s skin and fluid leaked from her nose and eyes. Spiders and millipedes scuttled across her face and slipped through her hair, hunting the bugs and mites that were already feeding on the body. Flies buzzed. I guessed she had been dead for two or three days. I took a quick look around the cellar but it was empty apart from some bundles of rotting newspaper, some cardboard boxes filled with old clothes and a pile of warped timbers, the detritus of lives lived long before and now no more.

  A scuffling noise on the floor above me, the sound of wood shifting despite careful footsteps, made me turn quickly and run for the stairs. Whoever was above me heard me, for the steps moved quicker with no regard for any noise that might be made. As my feet hit the first stairs the sound of the trapdoor hinges greeted me and I saw the patch of star-studded sky begin to shrink as the door came down. Two shots were fired randomly through the gap and I heard them impact on the wall behind.

  The trapdoor was almost to the floor when I jammed the Maglite into the gap. There was a grunt from above and then I felt the flashlight being kicked repeatedly so that I had to grip it firmly to prevent it being wrenched from my hand. Still the bell-shaped end held firm but my injured right shoulder ached from the strain of pushing up and holding the torch.

  Above me, the entire weight of my assailant was on the trapdoor as he continued to aim kicks at the flashlight. Below, I thought I heard the sound of rats scurrying in alarm but faced with the prospect of being trapped in that cellar it seemed like it might be something else. I felt that I might yet hear the sound of Catherine Demeter dragging her shattered leg across the floor and up the wooden steps, that her white fingers might grip my leg and pull me down to her.

  I had failed her. I could not protect her from the violent end in this cellar where four young children before her had met muffled, terrified deaths. She had returned to the place where her sister had perished and, in a strange circularity, she had re-enacted a death that she had probably replayed many times in her mind before that day. In the moments before she died, she gained an insight into her sister’s awful end. And so she would keep me company, console me for my weakness and my helplessness in the face of her passing, and lie beside me as I died.

  As I breathed through gritted teeth, the stench of decay felt like a dead hand over my mouth and nostrils. I felt vomit rising once again and forced it down, for if I stopped pushing even for a moment I felt sure I would die in this cellar. Momentarily the pressure above me eased and I pushed upwards with all my remaining strength. It was an error that my opponent exploited to the full. The flashlight was kicked once, hard, and slipped through the enlarged gap. The trapdoor slammed shut like the door of my tomb, its echo mocking me from the walls of the cellar. I groaned in despair and began to press futilely against the door once again when there was an explosion from above and the pressure eased entirely, the trapdoor shooting upwards and coming to rest flat on the floor.

  I flung myself out, my hand inside my jacket reaching for my gun and the Maglite casting wild shadows on the ceilings and walls as I landed awkwardly and painfully on the floor.

  The beam caught the lawyer Connell Hyams leaning against the wall just beyond the rim of the door, his left hand to his wounded shoulder while his right hand tried to raise his gun. His suit was soaked and his clean white shirt clung to his body like a second skin. I held him in the beam, my gun outstretched in the other hand.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said, but the
gun was rising now and his mouth curled into a snarl of fear and pain as he brought it up to fire. Two shots sounded. Neither of them was from Hyams. He jerked as each bullet hit and his gaze moved from me to a place over my shoulder. As he fell I was already turning, the gun still following the beam of the flashlight. Through the glassless window I caught a glimpse of a thin besuited figure fading into the dark, its limbs like sheathed blades and a scar running across its narrow, cadaverous features.

  Maybe I should have called Martin then and let the police and the FBI handle the rest. I was sick and weary inside and an almost overpowering sense of loss tore through me and threatened to unman me. The death of Catherine Demeter was like a physical pain, so that I lay for a moment on the ground, the body of Connell Hyams slumped opposite, and clutched my stomach in agony. I could hear the sound of a car as Bobby Sciorra drove away.

  It was that sound that caused me to scramble to my feet. It had been Sciorra who had killed the assassin in the medical centre, probably under orders from the old man in case she implicated Sonny in the hit. Yet I couldn’t understand why he had killed Hyams and why he had let me live. I staggered to my car, my shoulder aching, and started to drive towards Hyams’s house.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  As I drove, I tried to piece together what had taken place. Catherine Demeter had returned to Haven in an effort to contact Granger, and Hyams had intervened. Maybe he had learned of Catherine’s presence here by chance; the other possibility was that someone had informed him that she might be coming and had urged him to ensure that she never spoke to anyone when she got here.

  Hyams had killed Catherine and Granger, that much seemed certain. At a guess, I reckoned that he had watched for the sheriff’s return and followed him into his house. If Hyams had a key to the sheriff’s house which, since he was a neighbour and a trusted citizen, was a likely possibility, Hyams could have listened to the messages on the sheriff’s machine himself and, through that, could have learned of Catherine Demeter’s location. Catherine Demeter was dead before the sheriff returned: Granger’s body had not decayed to the same extent as Demeter’s.