A Game of Ghosts: A Charlie Parker Thriller: 15. From the No. 1 Bestselling Author of A Time of Torment

by John Connolly

  Parker stuck to coffee. The server gave him a smile as she brought his Americano. It was a nice smile. It wasn’t promising anything, kindness apart, but it was the kind of smile that made a man feel good.

  ‘I think she likes you,’ said Angel.

  ‘Given the other choices are you and the dark lord over here, that’s not saying much.’

  They were killing time before hitting Eklund’s office, which was based in a serviced building housing a variety of businesses, all sharing a small pool of secretaries and receptionists. It stood off North Main, in a new development that also housed a cosmetic dentistry clinic and a pet supply company. Parker had taken a look at it on his way downtown, and saw that the front desk was being taken care of by a woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty. The building used a card entry system to permit access to the offices, although the receptionist could buzz visitors through. It looked like the kind of place that went quiet after five, and would be dead after six. The nearer they left their visit to the close of business, the more time they would have in Eklund’s office. After that, depending on what they found there, they’d start on his home.

  ‘You think we look like tourists?’ Angel asked Parker. Angel liked to think he could blend in with the vast mass of humanity, even as that same vast mass instinctively took a step back from him and his partner. His desire to belong was touching in its hopelessness.

  ‘It’s Providence in February,’ he replied. ‘If you looked like tourists, they’d assume you were crazy. Instead, you just look like two guys with guns under their coats.’

  ‘Then we’ll fit right in if we try to steal something,’ said Angel. ‘This is a bent state.’

  He was right. Parker had once read that you could fit every human being on the planet into the physical area occupied by Rhode Island. If that were true, then they wouldn’t leave without having their pockets picked by a politician. ‘Buddy’ Cianci, who was mayor of Providence for a total of twenty-one years, was twice forced to resign because of felony convictions, and spent four years in federal prison for running a criminal enterprise out of city hall, although the jury found him not guilty of extorting a membership to the University Club, which suggested he wasn’t entirely beyond redemption. Cianci tried to run again in 2014, but by that stage he was too rich even for Providence’s blood. Add the former governor Ed DiPrete, who spent a year in jail for taking bribes from contractors, and Joseph Bevilacqua, the chief justice of the state supreme court, who resigned over allegations that he had ties to the Mob – and those were only the big names – and you had an almost admirable level of institutionalized corruption.

  ‘Makes you seem almost honest by comparison,’ said Louis.

  ‘I don’t mind people stealing,’ said Angel. ‘I just don’t like them lying about it after. Shows a lack of pride in their work.’

  They asked Parker how the meeting with Sam and her psychologist had gone, and he, in turn, told them of his talk with Frank Wolfe.

  ‘You think he dislikes you any less because of it?’ asked Angel.

  ‘A bit less.’

  ‘That’s progress. Pity your ex-girlfriend now dislikes you more. Kind of cancels out the good work done with Frank.’

  ‘Hey, thanks for that.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  Parker checked his watch.

  ‘Guess we should be going.’

  Angel called for the check. The server returned and smiled again at Parker.

  Damn, he thought.

  The check remained on the table, where Angel and Louis effortlessly ignored it. Parker glanced at the total without touching the paper. They had expensive taste in liquor, he’d give them that.

  ‘No chance,’ said Parker. ‘Not in a million years.’

  ‘Shithead,’ said Angel, and reached for his wallet.

  They emerged from the Westminster Street end of the Arcade and stopped for a moment to watch a peregrine falcon circle high above the old Bank of America Building – the Superman Building, as it was better known.

  ‘You know what that bird’s name means?’ asked Louis.

  Parker and Angel admitted they did not.

  ‘Wanderer,’ said Louis. ‘Wanderer falcon. I like that.’

  Sometimes, Parker thought, Louis exhibited disturbing signs of humanity.

  20

  Parker had made the decision to search Eklund’s office first. Targeting the office still involved breaking and entering, but would require less time than searching Eklund’s home, and so it made sense to get it out of the way first. He left his car in a parking lot, and the driving to Louis.

  Serviced offices mostly hired cheap, in Parker’s experience. It wasn’t as though they offered many opportunities for promotion, and the work was dull. The receptionists to watch out for were the older ones, who were the human equivalent of junkyard dogs. But the young woman was still behind the desk, and appeared capable of a degree of civility, from what Parker could see of her smile.

  Angel made the call from across the street. They watched the receptionist answer as she buzzed in a visitor.

  ‘This is Mr. Eklund in suite seventeen,’ said Angel. ‘I’m expecting two clients to arrive in the next five minutes. You can send them straight up once they’ve signed in.’

  If the receptionist noticed that the call was coming from an outside line, she didn’t mention it. Most people were so attached to their cell phones that to receive a call from one, even from someone who had a landline in the same building, was unremarkable.

  ‘I’ll do that, Mr. Eklund.’

  Angel thanked her and hung up. The oldest tricks in the book endured for a reason. Her reaction also told Parker something else: either she was new, or Eklund’s disappearance hadn’t yet been noticed. He just hoped it didn’t cross her mind to check if Eklund’s entry card had been used that day, but he suspected she wouldn’t bother to try. Why should she? She wasn’t guarding Congress.

  It was close to five p.m. as Angel and Parker entered the building, leaving Louis with the car. They introduced themselves at the desk, told the receptionist – Carly, according to her badge – that they were here to see Jaycob Eklund, and were supplied with temporary entry passes once they’d signed a register and one of them had shown some form of official ID. Angel let her see a driver’s license, although the name on it bore no resemblance to his own, even if the photograph was a close enough match to fool anyone who wasn’t intimately acquainted with him.

  ‘How many of those do you have?’ asked Parker, as they stepped from the lobby into a corridor with an elevator bank and a flight of stairs to the right.

  ‘I’ve lost count,’ said Angel. ‘Sometimes even I forget who I am.’

  They took the stairs to the third floor. Along the way, Angel removed his jacket to reveal a shirt with MATCHLESS LOCK SERVICES INC. embroidered on the back. As it turned out, that particular layer of deception wasn’t necessary. Eklund’s office was close to the end of the hall, and nobody appeared from any of the other suites as Angel worked on the lock. He had it open in less than a minute. It would have been sooner had he used a pick gun, but there was no point in attracting attention with the noise. They went inside, closing and securing the door behind them.

  Eklund’s office was little more than a glorified cubicle. A cheap desk occupied the width of the room in front of a window with vertical blinds, leaving just enough space for the occupant to squeeze by on either side. Two uncomfortable-looking padded chairs faced the desk. A generic landscape print hung beside a calendar on the left wall, while the right was dominated by a four-drawer filing cabinet. Parker tried it, found it locked, and set Angel to work on opening it while he searched Eklund’s desk. There wasn’t much to search. Eklund didn’t use a desktop computer, at least not in his office, and if he had a journal, he’d taken it with him. The drawers were unlocked, but yielded only stationery, stamps, assorted business cards, a jar of instant coffee, packets of sweetener, and some containers of powdered creamer. He didn’t
even have a bottle of cheap hooch and a pair of shot glasses, like private detectives in movies.

  Parker pressed the blinking message light on Eklund’s office phone and put it on speaker. There was some overlap with the cell phone messages, but he took down all the names and numbers once again. The last message was from a woman who didn’t get to say much more than ‘Hello’ before the machine cut her off. The internal system seemed to be set to about a dozen messages. It was what you got for renting cheap.

  By then Angel had succeeded in unlocking the filing cabinet. Parker spent the next hour flipping through folders containing copies of reports for clients, invoices, bills, and the other assorted paperwork that accumulates in a one-man operation. The cases were all mundane: insurance work, process serving, debt recovery, due diligence, some minor instances of fraud, a little employee surveillance, and a couple of child custody cases, the sight of which gave Parker a dull ache. None of them was current, meaning that Eklund probably kept details of whatever he was working on elsewhere, and only filed material away when he was finished with it. The office was a place for meetings and storage, but little else. Parker did notice that Eklund’s hourly and daily rates were higher than his own, although Eklund probably needed the extra cash to cover the cost of his lousy digs. The room smelled musty, and the carpet needed a good cleaning. It reminded Parker why he didn’t have an office of his own: if working meant coming to a place like this, he’d have been happier living on welfare.

  It was dark outside. Through the blinds, Parker could see Louis sitting in his car. The building’s parking lot had emptied considerably in the time they’d been searching Eklund’s office, and Louis’s vehicle now occupied a section entirely to itself. It was time to go. Parker didn’t want some rent-a-cop taking note of the plate.

  He looked around Eklund’s workspace one last time. He still had little real sense of the man. Maybe a search of his home would change that, but the office left Parker feeling as though he had wandered onto a stage set. Had the initial approach come from anyone other than Ross, he might have suspected he was being set up. As it was, he was simply puzzled. Eklund mattered to Ross, but right now, Parker was no closer to understanding why.

  The only personal touch was a framed photograph on the desk. It showed Eklund – prematurely gray-haired, nudging six feet, a few pounds overweight – with an arm around the shoulder of a much smaller woman whose smile made up for the plainness of her features. Thanks to the material supplied by Ross, Parker identified her as Milena Budny, Eklund’s ex-wife. The photograph evidently predated their divorce – their wedding rings were clearly visible – but not by too many years. Ross had provided a picture of Eklund from the renewal of his driver’s license the previous year, and he didn’t look a whole lot different from the man in the photograph.

  Parker continued to stare at the picture for a while. He didn’t know of many men who kept photos of ex-wives on their desk – or, at least, not their own ex-wives.

  ‘You find something?’ Angel asked.

  ‘Just regrets,’ said Parker. ‘I think we’re finished here.’

  III

  Perhaps other souls than human are sometimes born into the world, and clothed in human flesh.

  Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas (1864)

  21

  Donn Routh, known to the Brethren as ‘the Cousin’, had been traveling for hours, pausing only to catch some sleep in the cheapest motel he could find. He always felt the need for oblivion after killing. He did not know why.

  Were it summer, he might just have pulled into a parking lot and spent the night in his car, but in winter that would have meant freezing to death or running down his battery to keep the heater running. He disliked wasting money on motels, just as he rarely ate out, and then only in the kinds of places that offered a salad buffet, or unlimited soup. His lifestyle was frugal, even miserable.

  Routh worked as a supervisor in one of Kentucky’s largest industrial laundries, although his job also entailed visiting on-premises laundries in hospitals, prisons, and colleges to ensure their equipment was properly maintained, and advise on chemicals, water temperatures, and cycle duration. He had spent so long working with detergents that he could no longer smell much of anything else, and his clothing and person always bore a faint chemical tang.

  He still lived in his childhood home, although his parents had been dead for some years. He had sold most of their possessions after his mother followed his father into the ground. He’d considered holding on to their bed because it was bigger and more comfortable than his own, but decided that he would have felt odd sleeping in the same bed in which he was conceived, even if he disposed of the mattress. The bed went the way of their clothing, and their jewelry, and the rest of their furniture, for he was not a sentimental man. A visitor entering the house would have found it largely empty, with the exception of the kitchen, the living room, and one small bedroom. Outside of those rooms, none of the light fixtures contained bulbs, not even in the hallways.

  The house was untroubled by books or newspapers, or anything other than the most rudimentary trappings of modernity: a gas stove, a refrigerator, an ancient toaster oven. Routh’s only concessions to luxury were a widescreen HDTV on which he watched Blu-rays, and a top of the line hi-fi component system: a Clearaudio Concept turntable hooked up to a Rega Elicit-R amplifier and a pair of Mythos STS SuperTower speakers. He also had a Cyrus CD player, but he was mostly a vinyl aficionado. His father had built up a considerable library of classical music on vinyl during his lifetime, and his son retained it intact while continuing to add his own selections. He had built the shelves to house the collection, and it was one of the few facets of life that gave him unadulterated pleasure.

  He didn’t own an electric kettle, and the bath and shower were so seldom used that they spat brown water on those rare occasions when they were put into action. Routh usually opted to bathe at work – it saved money – just as he had his clothing cleaned by one of the laborers the company employed in conditions that would not have been unfamiliar to similar workers a century earlier.

  Technically, the Asians and Africans who loaded the carts, sorted the torn and stained materials from those that were still usable, and washed, dried, and ironed amid relentless heat, steam, and moisture, all for thirty-five cents above the minimum hourly wage, were known as ‘laundry associates’, which the Cousin found risible. They didn’t need a title, not for the jobs they did. They were nothing, nobodies. He no longer even bothered to learn their names, and not just because the position offered two pairs of overalls with the wearer’s identity embossed on the left breast. If those overalls became damaged, the employee was required to pay for a new pair out of his or her wages. Few ever did, preferring to conduct running repairs rather than sacrifice part of their checks. Those who left, or were fired, were supposed to return their overalls for recycling, but most passed them on to the ones who remained, and they didn’t bother to remove the stitching in order to add their own names to the uniform, and so the whole issue of nomenclature became even more nebulous. Not that any of the supervisors cared: the immigrants’ names appeared to give no indication of their gender anyway, so who could tell if Afua or Abioye or Ling or Kwong belonged on overalls with tits underneath? It only became an issue when they screwed up, or were late, or didn’t appear at all.

  To test his theory that none of these people really mattered, and no one cared about them – or no one of any consequence – Routh, some years previously, had abducted a twenty-one- year-old Chinese woman named, according to her overalls, Meixiu, as she ran to make the last bus at the end of her shift. Routh deliberately delayed her in order to separate her from her fellow workers. He’d given her the job of laundering his undershirts and underwear, and then complained that she’d used too much starch, and the whole load needed to be done again. Routh not only had the power of hiring and firing, but he could also cut an employee’s hours, or assign the kind of shifts that made it impossible for those wit
h children to work. It didn’t pay to cross him, and so Meixiu did as she was told. Only when Routh pronounced himself satisfied with the work did she hightail it across the lot without even bothering to remove her overalls, or her blue protective booties. There was a shortcut through some wooded wasteland that took five minutes off the journey to the bus stop, and Routh knew she’d go that way. He pulled her into the bushes as she was almost in sight of the road, clamping a thick-gloved hand over her mouth so she couldn’t scream. She didn’t weigh hardly anything, and Routh was a big man. He got her into the trunk of his car without any trouble, and slapped her once to keep her from struggling while he bound her legs and hands with duct tape.

  Later, when he killed her, it was like breaking the neck of a bird.

  The next day, some of the Chinese women came yabbering to the office. Few of them could speak any English at all, and Jun, their spokesperson, was only marginally better equipped than the rest to explain their concerns about the missing Meixiu. But it soon emerged that Meixiu was in the United States illegally, and the papers she’d used to get the job belonged to someone else, and it was explained to the women that if they continued to kick up a fuss then maybe the company would have to look closely at all of their paperwork, and if the police became involved then the immigration people would probably follow, and—

  Well, who knew where Meixiu had gone? These people lived by their own rules. Meixiu wasn’t even her real name. One of the women claimed it was Yingtai. When Routh heard that, he thought it sounded familiar. He thought the girl might have spoken it near the end.

  The police were never called, and thus Routh was never questioned, although he thought he caught some of the women looking at him with suspicion in the days and weeks that followed. It didn’t matter to Routh. There was no trace left of Meixiu, or Yingtai, or whatever she was called. It was one of the benefits of understanding chemicals and their uses.