‘Too far to drive. I’ll sleep in my car. Anyway, even if I was desperate I wouldn’t want you to drive me. I don’t want to be collateral damage when fate eventually catches up with you.’
‘You know, you’re a poetic near-drunk. I like that about you.’
‘And you’re not all bad. I’m sorry for what I said about your little girl back in Pastor’s Bay. That wasn’t right. That was – I don’t know what it was. It was desperation talking.’
‘I didn’t take it personally.’
He swayed with exhaustion. If he toppled, it would be like a building falling.
‘Anna Kore is dead,’ he said.
‘We don’t know that. If you start thinking that way, it will determine how you approach the investigation. You know that. Believing that she could still be alive is the spur.’
‘The three-hour rule, man. If they’re not found –’
‘I know the rule,’ I said. ‘We live for the exceptions.’
‘We’ve put her mother on television. We’ve made the appeals. If it’s a freak, he’d release her, or kill her. He hasn’t released her, therefore . . .’
He raised his hands, then let them fall impotently by his sides.
‘I don’t know what we’re missing,’ he continued. ‘Later, you figure it out, like that guy in South Park, fucking Captain Hindsight, and you think, yeah, that was it. You either catch it in time, and you’re the hero, or you spot it later, the big clue that should have been picked up but you only figure it out when everyone’s looking for someone to blame and the mist has cleared. Then, if you’re smart, you stay quiet. If you’re dumb and idealistic, you confess, and you get told to stay quiet. The end result is the same – a dead child – but if you open box one then nobody’s pension is put at risk.’
‘I’m driving you home,’ I said, taking his arm. ‘Come on.’
‘Get your hands off me! I don’t want to go home. My wife hates it when I come home drunk. No, she hates it when I come home maudlin drunk. Nobody likes a whiner.’
The main door to the bar opened, and our waitress came out. She had her car keys in her hand and was shrugging on her coat. She saw both of us, thought about continuing on her way and minding her own business, then reconsidered and came over to ask if everything was okay. Her name, I recalled from the check, was Tina.
‘We’re good,’ said Walsh. ‘I just need to find my car. First rule of drinking and driving: Always remember where you parked.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I reassured her. ‘He’s not driving anywhere. I’m going to put him in my car and take him to a motel.’
‘Are we dating?’ asked Walsh, throwing my line back at me. ‘’Cause I don’t remember asking you out. Go drive yourself, asshole.’
Tina stood in front of him, her hands on her hips. It clearly wasn’t the first time she’d dealt with a difficult customer, and she had no fear of Walsh or me.
‘Listen, mister,’ she said. ‘I served you tonight, and I kept serving you because I thought you’d be smarter than the other jerks who drink until their eyeballs float, because you had a badge. We don’t allow people to sleep in the lot, and right now you couldn’t drive a nail into butter. You listen to your friend and let him take you somewhere to sleep it off.’
‘He’s not my friend.’ He tried to sound affronted but just came off sulky.
‘Compared to me, he’s Jesus himself,’ said Tina. ‘Quit acting like a child and do as you’re told.’
Walsh swayed some more, and eyeballed Tina.
‘You’re mean,’ he said.
‘I’ve been on my feet for seven hours, I got a second job that starts at nine in the morning, and I have an eight-month-old baby at home who’s set to start crying in three hours’ time. If you don’t get right with the Lord, I’m going to knock you to the ground and feed your nuts to squirrels, you understand?’
She had a way about her. It wasn’t exactly tough love, but it was tough something.
Walsh was suitably chastened. ‘I understand, ma’am.’
‘You see a ring on this finger? Am I fifty? Do I look like a “ma’am” to you?’
‘No, ma’am – miss.’
‘You know, sometimes I hate this job,’ she said. ‘Give me a hand with him.’
With her on one side and me on the other, we guided Walsh to my car and laid him on the backseat. He mumbled an apology, told Tina that she was better than any man deserved, then promptly fell asleep.
‘He’s had a bad week,’ I said.
‘I know that. I heard you talking about that missing girl. You going to look after him?’
‘I’ll see that he gets a bed for the night.’
‘You’d better. And you’d better help him find that girl too.’
She spun on her heel and stomped to her car. I followed her lights for a time along a road overhung by bare trees, and her presence gave me consolation until she turned west and was lost to me. From the seat behind, I heard Walsh whisper, ‘I’m sorry,’ and I did not know to whom he was speaking.
Randall Haight was still wearing the same clothes that he had worn during his interview with the police that morning. Beside him was a bottle of scotch that a client had given to him as a Christmas gift four years earlier, and which had not been opened until that evening. Randall did not drink very much at the best of times, and preferred wine when he did. Even then, he tended to limit himself to one or two glasses. The girl did not like him to drink more than that.
But the girl was gone.
He was lost in his own house without her. She had been with him for so long that he had grown accustomed to her presence. His fear of her had become a facet of his existence. In its way, it had provided him with an outlet, a focus for other, more abstract concerns: his dread of exposure, of being returned to prison, of the unraveling of the web of half-truths in which he had secured his personality. Without her, he was too much alone with himself.
But he was also afraid of allowing himself to countenance that her torment of him might now be at an end. Perhaps even entities like her grew tired of their games. He could not bring himself to call her a ghost, for he did not believe in ghosts, a peculiar exercise in logic that even Randall admitted was unlikely to bear the weight of close intellectual scrutiny, but which nonetheless permitted him to regard her as a peculiar manifestation of primal energy, a version of the same energy that had fed the fatal attack on her all those decades ago. He knew there were professionals who, had he admitted to them that the specter of a dead girl shared his house, would have fallen back on Psychology 101 and interrogated him about his feelings of guilt and regret. Randall would then have been forced to lie to them, just as he had lied throughout his period of incarceration, and in the years that followed his release. Randall was a good liar, which made him a better actor. He could feign a whole range of emotions – repentance, humility, even love – to the extent that he was no longer always able to distinguish the counterfeit feeling from the genuine, even as he expressed it.
He was sure of the veracity of one emotional response as he sat in his favorite chair: He was furious. He was furious at the lawyer, and at the private detective. He was furious at his forced exposure, and that the potential danger posed by Anna Kore’s mobster uncle had been kept from him. He was furious at whoever was responsible for taunting him about his past. He was furious at the town of Pastor’s Bay for failing to shield him from the vile regard of an enemy.
And he was furious at the girl: furious at her for haunting him for so long, and now for leaving him.
He drank some more of the whisky. He wasn’t enjoying it but he felt that it was more appropriate to his mood than wine. His stomach growled. He had not eaten in many hours, but he wanted liquor more than food. He would suffer for it in the morning.
Randall reached for the phone and dialed the lawyer’s number. He had been reconsidering his relationship with her all day, debating the consequences of his actions back and forth, and the booze had tipped the balance. Time was run
ning out. He knew that. Soon he would be forced to shed his current identity and find another. The presence of the lawyer and the detective in his life would only make that more difficult. He left a message informing her that he would no longer require her services, or those of the detective. Neither would he be needing the dubious protective presence of the two idiots who were supposed to shield him if the necessity arose, assuming they could get their fat asses in gear in time. He was coldly polite as he thanked the lawyer for all that she had done for him, requested that a final bill be sent to him at her convenience, and hung up the phone with a sense of empowerment. He had started withdrawing all of his money from his accounts as soon as the taunting messages began to arrive, and he now had $15,000 in cash on hand. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. The house he would just have to abandon for now. He’d figure out what to do with it later. He’d have to inform Chief Allan that he was leaving, just so he was all square with the law. He and Allan had always got along well in a cordial, professional way. He’d tell Allan that he was frightened and wanted to keep some distance from Pastor’s Bay until the Kore case was concluded, if it ever was. He might even spend a couple of nights in a nice inn before quietly heading elsewhere: Canada, perhaps. This time, he’d try losing himself in a big city.
The knock on the back door startled him so much that he tipped over the side table, and the bottle of whisky began to empty itself on the rug. He picked it up before it could do too much damage, then screwed on the cap and held the bottle by the neck, brandishing it like a club.
The knock came again.
‘Who’s there?’ he called, but there was no reply. He went into the kitchen. There was a glass panel on the locked door, but he could see nobody outside, and the motion sensor that turned on the night light above the door had not been activated. He wished that he had a gun, but the nature of the gun laws meant that it wasn’t possible for him to acquire one without complications, and he had never had a reason to seek out an illegal weapon. He put down the bottle and took a carving knife from the rack. He glanced out the kitchen window and saw, on the back lawn, the figure of the girl. She cast no shadow, despite the light from the waning crescent moon, for she was barely more than a shadow herself. She raised her right hand and beckoned to him with her index finger, and he was about to open the door when another figure caught his attention.
There was a man standing behind her, between the twin willows at the end of his garden. Their almost bare branches hung so low that their shape and his became one, so that he seemed a construct of bark and twigs and brown, dying leaves. The man did not move and Randall could not see his face, but Randall still knew who he was. After all, they had both had a hand in the death of Selina Day.
Randall backed away from the door. The girl could no longer be seen on the lawn, and now the knocking came once more.
Tap-tap-tap.
She was at the door once again. Come out. Come out, come out, because time is pressing, and a friend has arrived, just as you always knew that he would. You can’t hide from him, just as you can’t hide from me. Running won’t help, not now. The end is approaching, the reckoning.
Tap-tap-tap.
Come out. Don’t make us come in there to get you.
Tap-tap-TAP.
He retreated to the living room, and watched the figure of the man appear against the glass, the girl beside him, and the doorknob turning – once, twice – but still the motion-activated light did not come on. Randall picked up the phone and tried to call the police, but there was only an empty, whooshing noise from the receiver, like a fierce wind blowing across barren peaks. This was not the sound of a dead line. The phone was still connected, except now it was connected to someplace else, somewhere deep and dark and very far away.
The shapes of the man and the girl disappeared. The line cleared. The voice of the emergency operator asked him what service he required, but he did not answer. After a couple of seconds he dropped the phone back into its cradle and slowly sank to the floor. The girl could have come in. She didn’t need doors or windows. Why didn’t she enter?
The answer was that the girl had a new friend, a special friend.
And Randall saw, in the night sky, the flickering of long-dead stars.
IV
We’re stitching up
all your fancy mistakes.
We’re stitching up
your mother’s face.
We’re going to stitch you a new one.
We’re going to take our time.
from The Dead Girls Speak in Unison
by Danielle Pafunda
30
I didn’t need a reminder about the necessity of following Allan that day, but in case I did there was another text message waiting for me when I woke. It read:
CHIEF ALLAN THE PEDOFILE IS A HORNY DOG TODAY.
I could taste beer at the back of my throat, and although I had slept straight through the night I did not feel rested. For a long time after the deaths of Susan and Jennifer I had not touched alcohol. I had never been an alcoholic, but I had been guilty of abusing alcohol, and I had been drinking on the night that they died. Such associations are not easily set aside. Now I drank the occasional beer or glass of wine, but my taste for either in any great quantity had largely vanished. Walsh had far outstripped my intake the night before, but I had still drunk more than I was used to and my head and liver were making their objections known.
I checked in with Angel and Louis, but Allan’s vehicle had not yet left his property. The tracking device on Allan’s truck was based on one that had previously been attached to my own car. The vehicle’s movements were mapped on a computer utilizing the same technology that provided coordinates to drivers using GPS units. The advantage was that the trackers didn’t need to maintain visual contact with the target vehicle all the time, but in our case this advantage was diminished slightly by the necessity of finding out not only where Allan was going but whom he was seeing.
But for the early part of the morning Allan did nothing interesting. He didn’t appear until shortly before eight, and then only to produce a chainsaw and trim some trees in his yard. He worked until noon, reducing the cuttings to firewood and piling them to dry. Angel watched him from the woods nearby, chilly and bored. In an ideal world we’d have monitored Allan’s cell phone too, but that was a complex business and assumed that, if he was doing something wrong, he’d be dumb enough to make calls related to it on his cell phone of record. If the day’s surveillance revealed nothing then it was among the other options that we could look at, but I was hoping it wouldn’t be necessary. If the anonymous messages had any truth to them, then any liaisons that Allan conducted were likely to be personal and not electronic. Eventually, freshly showered and wearing clean clothes, Allan got into his truck and made his way into Pastor’s Bay, and the pursuit of him began in earnest.
While Angel rolled up the sheet of plastic on which he had been lying, wondering how his life had come to this moment, and Louis tracked Allan’s progress from the warmth of his car nearby, I dealt with Aimee Price, who had called to tell me about the message from Randall Haight that had been left on her answering machine. I dropped in at her office on my way to Pastor’s Bay: If and when Allan met his ‘cooze’ I wanted to be close by. There were no muffins and coffee that morning. Aimee was preparing for Marie Borden’s bail hearing, Marie Borden being the woman who had objected with a hammer to her husband’s ongoing physical abuse.
‘Borden?’ I said. ‘That’s her name? Lucky it wasn’t her mother she laid out.’
‘You think you’re the first person who’s cracked that joke?’
‘Probably not. What about Randall Haight?’
‘He’s no longer my problem,’ she said. ‘Either he’s looking for new legal representation or he’s going to be alone when he sits for a polygraph.’
‘Assuming he’s willing to take the test.’
‘And that there’s any point to it in the first place. The state’s polygraph expert
s are good, but they don’t like firing questions into the dark. It’s hard to see how the polygraph will help, apart from going some way toward conclusively eliminating him as a suspect, assuming any doubts remain after Chief Allan’s contribution yesterday. It looks like Randall caught a break with that. Two cheers for him.’
‘You don’t sound too sorry to have lost a client,’ I said.
‘I don’t know how much more we could have done for him,’ she said. ‘Being in charge of a protection detail while juggling my moral and legal obligations is not why I spent all those years in law school. Besides, I didn’t like him, although I hid my feelings better than you did. He gave me the creeps. Bill me for your time and I’ll take care of it.’
‘That’s kind of why I’m here.’
‘Are you upping your rate? We had an agreement.’
‘You just assumed that we did. My rates weren’t specified on that contract you had me sign. For a lawyer, you’re a very trusting person.’
‘You’re a secret moralist, but you wear a cynic’s overcoat well. I know that I’m going to be sorry for letting you keep talking, but go on. I’m listening.’
‘I know I’m off the job, but I need a little indulgence. Expenses only: mine, and Angel and Louis’s.’
‘Yours I can afford. I’m not sure about theirs.’
‘We’ll keep them reasonable.’
‘For how long?’
‘A couple of days.’
‘And I would be doing this why?’
‘Because you’re curious about what Randall Haight has kept hidden from us, and what Kurt Allan does in his spare time, and because somewhere in this mess may be the answer to the question of Anna Kore’s disappearance.’
‘You could just hand over what you know to the police.’
‘I could, but all I have is a couple of anonymous texts about Allan and my own insatiable curiosity about the details of other people’s lives. Anyhow, it’s more interesting this way, and more satisfying.’
‘I’ll give you two days. And I want receipts. And nothing over five hundred dollars without prior approval. And if anybody asks, or you get caught doing something you shouldn’t, I’ll deny any knowledge of this conversation.’
The Burning Soul Page 30
