The Burning Soul

by John Connolly

  But if Midas was involved he probably wasn’t acting alone. He couldn’t risk being seen by Haight, assuming he hadn’t made some dramatic alteration to his appearance, so he’d need somebody close to Pastor’s Bay who would be able to report back on how Haight was reacting. All of these strands connected back to a killing three decades before in a small North Dakota town.

  ‘Have you ever been to North Dakota?’ I asked Louis.

  ‘Yep. Second-coldest state in the Union, after Alaska. You know what’s the third coldest?’

  ‘Let me guess: Maine.’

  ‘Give that man mittens.’

  ‘Have you been to Alaska?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Well, go you. You’re collecting the set.’

  There was a soft knock on the door, and Mrs. Harvey padded in to take away the tray.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Are you gay too?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘not yet.’

  ‘Oh.’ She tried to hide her disappointment, then brightened. ‘Well, you never know,’ she concluded, and patted me on the shoulder before picking up the tray and disappearing.

  ‘Tolerant,’ I said.

  ‘Accepting,’ said Louis.

  ‘Senile,’ said Angel.

  28

  The rest of the day was a dead loss. My ISP seemed to have gone into meltdown, and I was reduced to working off the middling signal in a coffee shop, which was useless for the kind of searches I needed to do. The only interesting piece of information came from Aimee Price who, through various gossip channels, had found out why R. Dean Bailey, the scourge of gays, immigrants, the unemployed, the impoverished, and other dangerous threats to right-wing hegemony in North Dakota, had agreed to support Judge Bowens’s proposal to provide Lonny Midas and William Lagenheimer with new identities upon their release. It appeared that Bailey didn’t care much for colored folk either, and took the view that Selina Day, in a phrase beloved of barroom misogynists everywhere, had probably been ‘asking for it’ by going into that barn with two white boys. He was, though, torn between appearing to be tough on crime and not enraging the black community – especially one that might have links, however slight, to terrorists – and not condemning to a lifetime behind bars two white kids whose hormones, in his view, had just got the better of them. So Judge Bowens had played Bailey while promising him quiet support for any future political ambitions he might manifest, support that subsequently turned out to be closer to absolute silence. In order to facilitate the creation of the new identities, Bowens had contacted like-minded judicial figures in other states and, without going into too many details about Lagenheimer and Midas, had arranged a complex series of prisoner transfers between states on various political and compassionate grounds, like a huckster mixing the cards in a game of ‘Find the Lady.’

  Night fell, and it came time to meet Walsh. He had left a message on my phone requesting my presence at Ed’s Ville, a dive bar northwest of Camden on Route 52, so named because the rear half of a ’58 Coupe de Ville was embedded in its side wall. This might have been considered a little tasteless given the number of alcohol-related accidents that had been ascribed to overimbibing at Ed’s, but most people preferred to look upon it as a token of black humor, just as no local ever referred to the bar by its proper name; to those in the vicinity of Camden it was universally known as ‘Dead-ville.’ It served good beer and better food, but it wasn’t particularly a cop bar, which was probably why Walsh had chosen it for our meeting.

  The man himself was already mostly done with a Belfast Bay Lobster Ale when I arrived. Actually, strike that: From the glaze in his eyes he’d left the first one behind some time ago, and looked halfway to a good drunk. He had taken a booth and was stretched out along one side, the top button of his shirt open and his tie at half mast. His enormous feet overhung the edge, crossed at the ankles. They looked like a pair of midget canoes.

  ‘You’re late,’ he said.

  ‘Are we dating? If I’d known, I’d have made more of an effort.’

  ‘I wouldn’t date you if we were in jail, although I’d farm you out for cigarettes. Sit down. You’re intimidating me with your sobriety.’

  I slipped in across from him, but I kept my jacket on and my shirt buttoned.

  ‘Hard day at the office?’ I asked.

  ‘You should know. You contributed to it.’

  ‘It’s a no-win situation with you. I was damned when I wasn’t giving up my client, and now I’m damned because I did.’

  ‘Your client’s a piece of shit.’

  ‘No, my client was a piece of shit when he was fourteen. Now he’s a small-town accountant who just wants to get on with his life.’

  ‘Unlike the girl he killed. How’s her life coming along? Oh, wait, she doesn’t have one, because she’s dead.’

  ‘Are we going to do this? Because if we are, I have some catching up to do before I can come over all boozily self-righteous.’

  ‘You don’t need booze to be self-righteous. I bet you came out of the womb all holier than thou. The midwife should have slapped you harder, then put you up for adoption with religious zealots.’

  The waitress came over, but she did so hesitantly. It was clear that we weren’t yet having a good time, and she was uncertain if more alcohol was likely to remedy that situation.

  ‘He’ll have what I’m having,’ said Walsh. ‘And I’ll have what I’m having too.’

  He laughed. The waitress didn’t laugh back.

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Walsh. ‘I’m a police officer.’ He fumbled in his jacket for his shield and showed it to her. ‘See, I’m a cop. They only give these to detectives.’

  ‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘I feel safer already. Would you like to see some menus?’

  ‘No,’ said Walsh.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He needs to eat. Why don’t you just bring us the biggest burgers you have?’

  ‘Are you a cop too?’ she asked.

  ‘No, he’s a crusader,’ said Walsh. ‘He’s the white knight.’

  ‘Apparently I’m the white knight,’ I said. ‘You can take your time with the beers.’

  She left us, relieved to be doing so. Walsh sighed and put his shield away. ‘My wife doesn’t like me talking to waitresses.’

  ‘I imagine waitresses don’t like you talking to waitresses either.’

  ‘She thinks every woman wants me as much as she does.’

  Either Walsh was ignoring me or he was just so lost in thoughts of wives and waitresses that my presence had ceased to register for a time.

  ‘Give me her number and I’ll set her mind at rest,’ I said.

  ‘She’s great. You’d like her. She wouldn’t like you, but you’d like her.’

  He drained the last of his beer and set the glass down on the table so heavily that it was a miracle one or both didn’t break.

  ‘So why the buzz, Detective?’ I asked.

  He closed his eyes for a few seconds, and when they opened again I could see that the glaze had lifted and his eyes were clear. He wasn’t drunk; he just wanted to be very, very badly, and he was tired enough that another couple of beers would make it happen.

  ‘You know how much closer we are to finding Anna Kore than we were when we started?’ he asked. ‘Nowhere. We’re nowhere near finding her. Nobody saw anything. The parking lot at that little mall she disappeared from doesn’t have cameras. We came up with a list of vehicles that were parked there at the time but it’s only partial. Of the ten that we’ve tracked down, eight were driven by women, and two by elderly men. They’re all clean, but we’re going to go back over them again tomorrow in case we missed something. That’s what we’re reduced to: raking over dead leads.’

  ‘What about the father?’

  ‘Alekos? We tracked him down today. He’s been living in a Buddhist retreat in Oregon for the last four years. Doesn’t read the papers, doesn’t watch TV, doesn’t use the Internet. The feds interviewed him and believe he’s clean. He was even allowed to spe
ak to Valerie Kore on the phone this afternoon. He’s out of the frame for this.’

  ‘You still have Randall Haight,’ I said. ‘You have the envelopes, and his story.’

  ‘Allan took Haight’s prints this afternoon. We’ll use them for elimination purposes. There are prints on some of the photographs, but I’ll bet they’re Haight’s. The photographs themselves are at least second-generation, so whoever sent them probably didn’t take them. We’ll analyze the glue on the envelope in the hope of finding saliva traces, and we may get epithelial cells from the paper and the interior. It could be we’ll get lucky with a hair or an eyelash, but unless the DNA is in the system it’ll only be useful in the event that we pick up a suspect. The address labels were machine-printed, so handwriting analysis is out. For now, that glass is half empty, my friend, and that’s even assuming whoever has it in for your client is the same person who took Anna Kore.’

  ‘What about Lonny Midas?’

  ‘The mysterious vanishing accomplice? We’ve already been in touch with North Dakota, and they’re going to release copies of the records. They’ll be with us by Monday.’

  I wondered if I could persuade Walsh to let me take a look at them.

  ‘I can hear your thoughts,’ said Walsh. ‘The answer is “no.” No, you can’t take a look at the records.’

  ‘That’s impressive. You should work the boardwalks. Have they kept track of Midas and Haight since their release?’

  ‘All we know for now is that Haight stayed in touch for a while, but Midas didn’t. The details will have to wait until we get the records.’

  ‘So they don’t know where Midas is?’

  ‘Indications are that they have no idea.’

  The beers came. I sipped mine slowly, and Walsh did the same with his. The drunk show was over for a while.

  ‘The only bright spot in the day,’ said Walsh, ‘was Tommy Morris. And, yes, initially I was as surprised by the mention of his name as you are now.’

  ‘The feds got him?’

  ‘No, he got them. You’re going to love this. Tommy Morris, along with his right-hand man, a reputed boom-boom guy named Martin Dempsey, walked into the Kore house and held two agents at gunpoint while a sheriff’s deputy counted clouds outside. Tommy wanted to talk to his sister, so what’s a guy to do?’

  It was routine in a missing-child case to have two officers or sometimes, if the FBI became involved, two agents staying with the family at all times. Mostly this was to offer support and help, but it also enabled the investigators to take a closer look at the dynamics of the family. Since Valerie Kore was Tommy Morris’s sister, that made her family dynamics particularly interesting.

  ‘Were they Engel’s agents?’

  ‘Yeah. They’re supposed to be liaising with the feds’ own Child Abduction Response Team, but there hasn’t been much liaising to do. In the end, they’re there primarily because of Tommy Morris and not Anna Kore.’

  ‘Did Valerie Kore say what passed between her and her brother?’

  ‘Just that Tommy was concerned for his niece’s safety and wanted to know what progress was being made. She didn’t have much to tell him. He tied her up, more for appearance’s sake than anything else, left the agents bound and gagged on the floor, then disappeared back down his rabbit hole. The car they used was stolen from a movie theater and later dumped at a strip mall, but the woman behind the counter of a knitting store saw Tommy and Dempsey being picked up. The pickup vehicle turned out to be stolen too, and we still haven’t tracked it down. We figure they left that somewhere as well, and are now on to the day’s third ride.’

  ‘Facing down two feds – that’s impressive.’

  ‘Engel didn’t think so. The two agents are halfway to Boise by now. A career in tracking potato smugglers beckons for them. On a more serious note, the news from Boston is that five of Oweny Farrell’s boys have dropped off the radar. Three of them are big hitters, and the other two are gifted novices. Engel is hoarse from screaming, and Pastor’s Bay is starting to feel like Tombstone on the night before the big gunfight.’

  ‘Engel is a curious man,’ I said. ‘He’s taking a big risk using the Kore case as bait to land Tommy Morris.’

  ‘As today’s events demonstrated.’

  ‘But Engel isn’t stupid.’

  ‘No, he isn’t.’

  Walsh was watching me, waiting to see where my train of thought might lead. Either he knew something more than I did about Engel’s game or he had come to the same conclusion that I was approaching.

  ‘A stupid man would let Tommy Morris run wild and hope that good luck or common sense prevailed,’ I continued. ‘A smart man would make it look that way.’

  Walsh still said nothing, but his left eyebrow rose encouragingly, and when I spoke again I received a short, ironic round of applause from him.

  ‘He has a lead on Tommy Morris,’ I said. ‘Somebody is talking to the FBI.’

  29

  The night sky was clear when Walsh and I at last left the bar. He had not commented further on my belief that Engel was being fed information from Boston, either from someone within Tommy Morris’s increasingly dwindling circle or from someone close to those who wanted him dead, and I knew better than to press him on the matter. Instead we had returned to the subject of Anna Kore, and I came to understand that Walsh, who had no children of his own, had adopted her disappearance as his personal cause and was becoming increasingly unhappy with Engel’s mercenary attitude toward her fate. When he had earlier baited me for being a crusader and a white knight, he was describing himself as much as he was taunting me.

  He asked me what I was going to do now that Randall Haight had ‘unburdened himself of his past.’ I told him that I didn’t believe Haight’s burdens could so easily be put aside.

  ‘He’s angry,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he believes that he has been defined by a single bad act, and he can’t escape that definition.’

  ‘But nobody knew what he’d done until he came to you and Aimee Price.’

  ‘He knew. He’s a mass of contradictions, a muddle of identities. The only thing he can be sure of about himself is that he was there when Selina Day died, and even then he disputes the extent of his involvement.’

  ‘He’s part of a social experiment,’ said Walsh. ‘Except nobody kept a close watch on the test subjects once they were released into the wild.’

  I had found instances of other similar efforts, but not many. The schoolboy killers of the toddler James Bulger, in England, in 1993 had been given new identities upon their release, although one of them, Jon Venables, had since been sentenced to two years for possession of child pornography and was back in jail. His accomplice in the killing, Robert Thompson, had apparently remained out of trouble. The media were forbidden to reveal details of the men’s new identities. It seemed that Judge Bowens had been ahead of his time in anticipating some of the problems that Lonny Midas and William Lagenheimer might face upon their release. Unfortunately, he hadn’t factored in the psychological difficulties of adjusting to a new identity, particularly after the commission of such a crime against a child while still children themselves.

  ‘You seem very interested in Lonny Midas,’ I said.

  ‘You and I, we’ve been doing this for a long time,’ said Walsh. ‘Put a man behind bars with a grudge to nurse, and maybe he’ll find a way to get his revenge once he’s released. As soon as we receive those records from North Dakota we’ll know more about Midas, and then we can bring him in or cross him off the list. I’m not going to leave Valerie Kore twisting in the wind for years, not if I can help it. I want her daughter found, preferably alive. But there’s something hinky about this whole deal, and what Haight had to say today just confirmed it. We’re all being played here, not just Randall Haight.’

  After that, he’d called for the check, although he made me cover it. Now the November darkness stretched above us, punctured by the light of dead stars. My grandfather knew
a little about the night sky, and had tried to pass on that knowledge to me. From memory, I could find Aquarius and Pegasus, Pisces and Cetus, with Jupiter at their center. Soon Venus would become visible below the waning crescent moon low in the east-southeastern sky. As the month went on, it would grow both smaller and brighter, decreasing in distance even as it drew closer to the sun. The New England astronomers had promised that two meteor showers would become visible that month: the Taurids from Comet Encke, and the Lenoids from Comet Tempel-Tuttle. The Taurids would be brighter, the Leonids more plentiful. Those who witnessed them would be reminded of the ceaseless, rapid orbit of the Earth around the sun, of our planet’s motion through space, and, if they were wise enough, of their own inconsequentiality. Walsh stared up at the night sky, wavering against its immensity. The intoxication that he had wished for earlier had not become a reality, but 36 hours without sleep had worn him down, and I was resigned to an argument over his car keys.

  ‘She’s like one of those stars,’ he said.

  ‘Who is? Your wife?’

  ‘No, not her. That’s not what I meant. Anna Kore’s like one of those stars. She’s lost out there, and we don’t know if she’s alive or dead. We just have to hope that her light keeps shining until we can get to her.’

  ‘You need to go home, Walsh. You want me to drive you?’