The Burning Soul

by John Connolly

  There was no apparent reason for Engel to be in a boon-docks police department during the investigation into the disappearance of a young girl. Nevertheless he was here, and his presence explained some of the odd features of the case, including the length of time it had taken for Anna Kore’s mother to make a public appeal. It suggested a conflict of views, and Engel’s presence meant that there were at least two arms of the FBI involved in the Kore investigation. Plus, if Engel was involved, then the feds either knew about organized criminal activity in Pastor’s Bay or were watching for someone at the periphery, someone with connections that extended beyond the town’s limits.

  I needed to talk to Aimee, for both our sakes. It was now more important than ever that we convinced Randall Haight of the necessity of coming forward and revealing the nature of the messages that were being sent to him and the reason for them, even at the risk of disrupting his carefully safeguarded existence. It was one thing to rile the Maine State Police, and I had sound reasons for wanting to do that as little as possible. My PI’s license had been rescinded in the past for angering the MSP, and any future action taken against me might well result in its permanent forfeiture. Screwing around with the FBI was another matter entirely. The cops would have to charge me or let me go, but the feds could put me behind bars for as long as they wanted. Aimee would probably be okay, as even the FBI tended to dislike jailing lawyers without good cause. I, on the other hand, was only a PI, and while I was aware that there were those in the Bureau who were interested in me and, for reasons of their own, were prepared to give me a degree of protection, they did so out of a sense of duty rather than any great personal fondness, and they might well view a spell in a lockup, either county or one more shadowy, as a useful way of reminding me of the limits of their tolerance.

  Eventually, after almost another hour had gone by, the door was unlocked. This time it was Allan who entered, and the door stayed open. Behind him, the building was relatively quiet. Engel and his acolytes, Walsh and the staties, all were elsewhere. Apart from Engel I could see only the older cop with his cap under his arm, and a pretty young woman wearing sweatpants and an old Blackbears T-shirt who seemed to have taken over from Mrs. Shaye for a time but was now putting on her coat in preparation for departure.

  ‘You’re free to go,’ said Allan. He didn’t look pleased about it.

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it. It’s not my call. I had my way, you’d have told us everything you know by now.’

  ‘You won’t believe this, but I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d taken the hard road.’

  ‘Save it. We’ll find out who you were speaking with, one way or another. We’ve already started asking about your car. This is a small community, and it’s on its guard. Someone will have seen you parked, and we’ll take it from there. You be sure to let your “client” know that. You can collect your gun and your phone from Becky.’

  I handed my playing card over to Becky. She wasn’t as friendly as Mrs. Shaye, and she didn’t look as if she ate many cookies, but I thanked her anyway. When I got to my car, I turned on my cell phone and called Aimee. She answered on the first ring.

  ‘Thanks for rushing to my aid,’ I said.

  ‘I thought you might feel I was threatening your masculinity. Have they let you go?’

  ‘Reluctantly. I don’t want to do this over the phone, and I’m too tired to talk face-to-face now. Can you make time for me in the morning?’

  ‘First thing. I’ll be there at eight. In the meantime, I’ve spoken to our client.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I think he may be starting to see the light after your earlier conversation with him, but he’s still reluctant to come forward.’

  ‘Twist his arm,’ I told her. ‘He comes forward soon, or I’m giving him up.’

  I killed the connection. I was tired, and I almost considered trying to find a bed for the night in Pastor’s Bay, but a quick look along the deserted main street convinced me otherwise. Eventually I might have to stay nearer to the town, but I had no desire to stay in it. It might have been my weariness after hours spent in that small room, and the pall that the disappearance of Anna Kore had cast over the place, but I felt that, even without the trauma of her vanishing, I would still have been anxious to leave Pastor’s Bay behind. Seeing it now, empty of souls, I felt the wrongness of it: There was not meant to be a town here, or not this town. The very first stone had been laid incorrectly, the first house built in a bad location and with an inhospitable aspect, and all that had followed was rendered skewed and unbalanced by those initial mistakes. James Weston Harris’s death at the hands of the natives should have served as a warning of what was to come, but it was too late to undo the damage, too late to start again, and so all who lived here had to resign themselves to these deep imperfections or deny them entirely while wondering why they, and the town, never truly prospered.

  My cell phone beeped. I had an incoming message, but it came from a blocked number. I opened it anyway. It read:

  CHIEF ALLAN IS TELLING LIES.

  I closed the message and looked again at the dark, ugly street, as though waiting for the sender to be revealed as a shadow among deeper shadows, but nothing moved. Tiredness be damned. My desire to leave Pastor’s Bay was now overpowering. I turned the key in the ignition and heard only a death rattle. I tried again, and this time even the rattle was absent. My battery was dead. Before I could start cursing the god who had ever brought me to this place, there was a tap on my window. The mechanic was standing beside me, another cigarette fixed between his lips. I rolled down the window.

  ‘Need a boost?’ he asked.

  ‘In every way,’ I replied.

  His truck was parked nearby, and he returned with a booster pack for the battery. He opened the hood, attached the clamps, and told me to give her a try. The car started instantly. I kept my foot on the gas while I reached into my wallet for a twenty. He saw what I was doing and shook his head.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘Maybe between this and my mother’s cookies you won’t think so badly of us when you leave.’

  ‘Mrs. Shaye is your mother?’

  ‘Yep, and she doesn’t hand over those cookies to just anyone. I’m Patrick Shaye, but everybody around here calls me Pat. And I know who you are; by now, the whole town probably knows.’

  We shook hands, and he removed the booster pack from the Mustang’s battery.

  ‘Nice machine,’ he said. ‘You tend it yourself?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘I like these old cars. Anything goes wrong with them, it can be fixed easily. You don’t need computers, just grease and knowhow.’

  ‘I saw you working on that Crown Vic out back. I take it you have the contract to service the town’s vehicles?’

  ‘Yep, and with luck I’ll still have it tomorrow after the chief hears I helped you out. He’s not the forgiving kind, the chief. Pays not to cross him.’

  He said it lightly, but there was an undercurrent of something harsher. I didn’t press him on it. He said good-bye, then added, ‘I figure we’ll be seeing you again, right?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because you look like the kind of fella who doesn’t run because a dog barks at him, even a dog with teeth like the chief’s.’

  ‘He strikes me as being good at what he does.’

  ‘He is, but that’s being good at policing a small town with small-town problems.’ He opened the door of his truck. ‘Thing is, we have a bigger problem now.’

  ‘Anna Kore.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You don’t think he’s up to finding her?’

  ‘That’s not for me to say.’

  ‘Is that why the FBI is here?’

  He shook his head and grinned. ‘Nice try, Mr. Parker. I just fix cars.’

  I stayed behind him for a mile or two, and he flashed his hazards at me when he turned off the main road. I drove on and thought about the message on
my cell phone. Allan had barely spoken to me, and I couldn’t find anything in the few words we had exchanged that might be open to doubt or suspicion, which meant that the person who had sent the anonymous text message, probably using a proxy website, was referring to something outside my sphere of knowledge. Then again, it might simply have been an attempt to muddy the waters, just as the packages sent to Randall Haight might be, in which case it was possible that one person, or group of persons, was responsible for both.

  I was starting to wish that I’d never heard from Aimee Price, or met Randall Haight, even without the further complications suggested by the presence of the FBI agent, Engel. Engel was a heavy hitter. If he had left his Boston lair for Pastor’s Bay, it was because there was something in the circumstances surrounding the girl’s disappearance that interested him. But all that really interested Engel was organized crime and terrorism, and I had no desire to face mobsters or terrorists unaided.

  I stopped at a gas station and made another call, this time from a pay phone, because the gentlemen I was calling in New York didn’t like calls from cell phones.

  Then again, the gentlemen in New York weren’t really gentlemen at all.

  13

  The apartment was on the second floor of a grim building on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. It wasn’t the ugliest block on the avenue, but it was close. Fourth had been rezoned in 2003 in the hope of creating Brooklyn’s Park Avenue, with tony upscale living environments replacing body shops. Unfortunately, corners had been cut by City Planning early in the process, and the first condos to be built following the rezoning eschewed retail units and storefronts on the first floor in favor of vents and parking garages. The planners had eventually realized their mistake, but it was too late to undo the initial damage, so Fourth was now an uneasy mix of boutiques, restaurants, and urban brutalist façades.

  To the man checking the numbers on the building’s intercom, it seemed that the only thing Fourth had in common with his beloved Park Avenue was the traffic, every lane of it. Given the choice, he’d take somewhere on Fifth or Seventh farther up the Slope in a heartbeat. Then again, that assumed he actually had some interest in living in Brooklyn, which he hadn’t. People could talk all they wanted about how it was the new Bohemia, but he wasn’t buying, he hadn’t cared much for the old Bohemia, and everything that he needed could be found on the island of Manhattan. As far as he was concerned, the other four boroughs could be cut with a big blade and towed out up to Greenland, apart from the strip of Queens containing JFK, and they could run ferries to that. As for Jersey, that was why there was water separating it from Manhattan. In his darker moments, his proposals for renegotiating Manhattan’s relationship with New Jersey included filling in the tunnels and blowing up the George Washington Bridge before pointing big guns west, just in case those left on the other side got any ideas. Admittedly, somewhere else to dump bodies would have to be found, but into every life a little rain had to fall.

  There was no camera embedded in the intercom panel beside the main door to the building, and no names beside the buzzers. He pressed the number that he’d been given, a woman’s voice asked his name, and he gave it, or he gave a name. In this business, nobody really expected anybody to use their real names – not the middlemen, not the johns, and certainly not the girls. His personal experience of such matters was limited, but through choice and orientation rather than any naïveté about the ways of the world.

  He was buzzed in and took the stairs to the apartment, avoiding the elevator. Lights came on as he walked, a vague concession to eco-consciousness in a building so poorly constructed that he could almost see the signals changing outside through the joins in the walls. Most of the apartments he passed were silent. An earlier check of the building’s records had revealed an occupancy rate of about sixty percent, and there were already signs of wear and neglect on the carpets and fittings.

  The apartment he sought was at the end of the corridor. He knocked at the door, watched the spy hole darken, and was admitted. The woman wore a red sweater dress over a pair of dark-blue jeans. Her feet were bare, and she smelled of cigarettes. Her hair was platinum with red streaks, as though she’d recently suffered a head injury and hadn’t got herself together enough to wash out the blood. He figured her for mid-thirties, aged by a hard life. That was the way of her business. It had worn her out, and now she had either moved up the ranks to active pimping or had taken the maid’s role for a cut of the money.

  ‘Hi, honey,’ she said. ‘Just through here.’

  To the left was a bathroom and a closed door, but she showed him into a living area to the right. There were two more doors off the living room – one open, one closed. The first one led into a narrow kitchen. There was a pack of tortilla chips on the counter, and a half-eaten sandwich alongside a glass stained with milk. The other door was closed, but he thought that he could hear another television playing faintly behind it.

  ‘Are you a member of the law-enforcement community?’ she said.

  ‘No, I am not.’

  ‘I have to ask,’ she said.

  ‘I know how it works.’

  It was a myth that an undercover cop had to identify himself as such if asked, especially as anyone with half a brain could see that such a requirement might deliver a fatal blow to the whole concept of undercover operations, but he was surprised by how many in the woman’s line of work still considered it a myth worth believing. Technically, a lawyer might argue entrapment, but equally the definition of ‘entrapment’ was somewhat nebulous, particularly in a situation like this, where the intention to commit a crime was obvious from the start. It was all moot in the end. Most criminals were dumb, and he took the view that the whole science of criminology was essentially flawed, since much of its theory was based on the study of criminals who had been caught, and were therefore either stupid or unlucky, as opposed to the study of those who had not been caught, and were therefore smart and had a little luck on their side, but just a little. Luck ran out, but smart was for life.

  He produced an envelope from his coat pocket and laid it on the table, just as he had been instructed to do when he made the original call. The woman glanced inside, gave the bills a quick flick with her fingers, then placed the money in a drawer below the TV.

  ‘You mind if I frisk you?’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Why would you want to do that?’

  ‘There’s been trouble in the past – not for us, I assure you, but for others in the same business. They’ve had guys produce knives, ropes. We’re concerned about safety, yours as much as ours.’

  He wasn’t quite sure that was the case, but he allowed her to pat him down inexpertly.

  ‘Thanks for being so understanding,’ she said. ‘You’re going to have a good time.’

  ‘Can I see the girl now?’

  ‘Sure. She’s right through here. You’ll like her. She’s just what you ordered.’

  He followed the woman down the hall and past the bathroom to the closed door. She knocked and opened at the same time, revealing a pleasantly furnished bedroom with low lighting. There was another TV here, with a DVD symbol bouncing around the screen. The room was heavily scented, but not enough to fully mask the stale odor of sex.

  The girl on the bed was wearing a baby-doll nightdress. Even her makeup couldn’t hide the fact that she wasn’t long past owning a baby doll as well. Twelve or thirteen, he thought. Dark roots showed in her blond hair.

  ‘This is Anya,’ said the woman. ‘Anya, say hello to Frederick.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Anya, and even in that one word he could hear her foreignness. One side of her mouth lifted, but nobody would have termed it a smile.

  ‘Hi,’ said the visitor, but he sounded doubtful.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ said the woman.

  ‘She’s not what I ordered after all,’ he said.

  Immediately, the woman’s tone changed, but she tried to stay on the right side of polite. ‘We spoke on the phone,’ she said. ‘I took d
own the details myself. You asked for a blonde.’

  ‘She’s not blond. She dyes her hair. I can see her roots.’

  Anya’s eyes moved from face to face, trying to follow the conversation. She could tell that the visitor was unhappy, but no more. She didn’t like it when they started out unhappy. It usually made what followed that much harder. She pulled her legs closer to her body and wrapped her arms around them. She rested her chin on her knees, which made her look younger still. There were rubbers on the nightstand beside her, and a box of tissues.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the woman, ‘but the agreement was made. Look, once the lights go down you won’t hardly notice the difference, and not where it matters.’ She grinned lasciviously. ‘Now, if you’d like to take a shower—’

  ‘I don’t want a shower,’ he said. ‘I want my money back.’