The Burning Soul

by John Connolly

  Randall Haight had said that he was no longer in touch with his mother. The dynamics of families never ceased to surprise me, but it struck me as odd that a woman who was so devoted to her son that she would move halfway across the country just to be near him could, in her old age, be cut off by that same son. It wasn’t impossible, though, and if Jerry Midas was right then Marybeth Lagenheimer had been damaged in unquantifiable ways by her son’s crime and his subsequent incarceration. If she really had tried to pick up their relationship once again at the point at which it had been sundered, with her as the mother and her son as a little boy, then that son, now a man, might well have found her presence stifling to the point of intolerability.

  But there was another possible explanation for Mrs. Lagenheimer’s silence. Dyscalculia: that was the name for the condition Jerry Midas had described, a less well-known form of dyslexia linked to numbers. There were strategies to cope with it, and it was possible that someone could develop them given time and encouragement, even within the prison system, but to hone them to the extent that one could then go on to make a living through one’s ability with numbers seemed unlikely. As I drove west, a picture began to emerge.

  The clearer skies of recent days were now under siege from masses of dark cloud as I headed north out of Gorham. There was a storm front heading down from the north, and flooding had been forecast for low-lying areas. I touched base with Louis and Angel, but Allan had not yet left his girlfriend’s house. Chief Allan is a horny dog. It was an odd turn of phrase. Each time I considered it I heard a woman’s voice speaking, and I thought of Mrs. Shaye scattering young girls like pigeons, and the look she had cast in the direction of her employer. But ‘cooze’? Would a woman like Mrs. Shaye use that word?

  Somewhere out there, too, was Tommy Morris, with Engel circling him but not approaching, waiting for him to make his next move. They should have been tearing Maine apart to find him after that stunt he’d pulled at his sister’s house, but they were not. In fact, word of what had occurred had not even made it to the media. It might simply have been Engel trying to save the Bureau’s blushes, and for that he could hardly be blamed, but it fitted in with a larger pattern of concealment and gamesmanship that had underpinned all of Engel’s actions so far.

  And behind it all, like the marks on a wall where a picture had once hung, or the clean space on a dusty shelf, the evidence of absence, was the fact of Anna Kore’s disappearance. Allan’s relationship with an unusually young woman, Haight’s mess of truths, half-truths and possibly outright lies, Engel’s desire to entrap Tommy Morris, and Morris’s efforts to escape his enemies and perhaps redeem himself by acting on his sister’s behalf, all were as nothing compared with the fate of the lost girl. I saw Gordon Walsh framed against the dark and the stars, and I heard him say again that he thought Anna Kore was dead. He might have wished to believe otherwise, but the tenor of his investigation was predicated on the likelihood that she was already the victim of a homicide. He found it difficult to hold two opposing possibilities in his head – one of life, the other of death. The odds favored death, and a shallow grave in the woods. The wardens had been searching with that in mind, and they knew how important it was that the girl’s resting place was found before the snows came. Winter would alter the landscape and hide forever any trace of digging and concealment, but this was a huge state and they could not search every inch of it. If Anna Kore’s body had been removed any distance at all from Pastor’s Bay, it might never be found.

  But I wanted her to be alive. I needed her to be alive. I did not want to have to tell my daughter that a young girl had been dragged into the underworld, either vanished forever with no trace of her to be found, or with something of her returned to this world, ruined and decayed and without its soul.

  According to my New Hampshire Atlas Gazetteer, Little Pond Lane lay off Jimtown Road, right at the edge of Moose Brook State Park. The light was already fading as I found the turn, due in part to the waning of the day but also because of the gathering clouds. There were only two houses on the dead end, one lit and one unlit. The darker house was at the termination of the lane, where the road bled out into forest. It was a manufactured home painted gray and white, with an A-frame roof and a screened front porch. The yard was thick with fallen leaves from the mature trees that surrounded the property. At the back of the house, a shallow slope led down to what I assumed was Little Pond itself, which didn’t exceed the expectations raised by its name. It was about fifty feet in circumference, and coated with a pale scum.

  I knocked on the porch door for form’s sake, but there was no reply. It opened to the touch, but the front door itself was locked, as was the back, and the windows were sealed. Still, it doesn’t take much to break into a trailer home; one shattered frame of glass later, I was inside. Apart from some cheap furniture and a couple of polyester rugs, the house was entirely empty. I could find no clothing, no pictures, no indication that anyone lived there. A thin layer of dust coated everything, but it was the accumulation of a couple of months, not years. The bathroom was clean and the mattresses in the two bedrooms were stripped of sheets and pillows, the bed linen neatly folded and placed back in their original zippered packing to save them from damp, the pillows and comforters tied up in big plastic bags from Walmart. There were no personal papers, no photographs, no books. All the drawers and closets were empty.

  I went back outside. The dying sun, mostly obscured by clouds, gave a faint yellow tinge to the filth on the pond. I walked around the property, finding nothing untoward apart from the remains of a couple of broken cinder blocks that had accumulated a coating of mold, leaves, and cobwebs. I moved one of the shards and watched insects scurry in alarm across bare earth. I looked back at the house. I could see no cinder blocks, and there was no evidence of any kind of construction nearby, not even a barbecue pit.

  I headed down to the other house on the lane. This one was a permanent dwelling, and well maintained, although winter blooms, a child’s bicycle, and a battered basketball hoop indicated that this was still a family home. I knocked on the door and a woman opened it. She was plain-looking, and in her early thirties. There was a paring knife in her hand. A boy of two or three peered around her legs, chewing on a piece of raw carrot. I showed her my ID, and explained that I was looking for the owners of the house at the end of the lane.

  ‘Oh, we never got to know them,’ she said. ‘They’d moved out by the time we moved in. We never met them but once.’

  ‘Do you remember anything about them?’

  ‘Nah. The woman was old. I think her name was Beth or something. Her son lived with her. He was kind of shy. We introduced ourselves after we bought the house, but we couldn’t move in for a while. This place had been empty for a couple of years, and it needed a lot of work done to it. My husband did most of it. He knew the old lady to say hi to while he was fixing things up, but he had to stop for winter, and when he got back to work they were gone.’

  ‘How long ago was this?’

  ‘Well, we’ve been here more than ten years, and that was right at the start.’

  ‘Who looks after the house now?’

  ‘A relative. I think he said he was a cousin, or a nephew. The old lady, Beth, she found the cold too much, he said, and moved down to Florida. Tampa, I think. He comes by a couple of times a year. Sometimes he stays for a night, because we see a lamp burning – there’s no power to the house – but he keeps himself to himself. We don’t mind. It’s not unusual up here.’

  ‘A relative? Not her son.’

  ‘No, he looks like him. He wears his hair the same way, and the same kind of glasses, but it’s not him. I have a good memory for faces. Names not so much, but faces I never forget.’

  I thanked her and was about to leave when I saw a pile of threaded rods lying by the garage door. They varied in length from three to six feet.

  ‘My husband’s in construction,’ she explained, then added, ‘He’ll be back soon,’ just in case I had any bad
intentions in mind.

  ‘I know this sounds weird,’ I said, ‘but would you mind if I borrowed one of those rods for a few minutes? I’ll bring it back.’

  She looked puzzled. ‘What will you be using it for?’

  ‘I want to test the ground.’

  She looked even more puzzled, but agreed. I picked up a rod that was about four feet long and headed back to the first house. There had been a lot of rain, and the ground was relatively soft so close to the pond, but it was still an effort to force the rod down. Starting at the pile of broken blocks I began to work my way out, probing as deeply as I could at the ground, trying to stick to grids of about two square feet. I’d been working at it for only five minutes when the rain came, and for another five minutes or so when a truck pulled into the yard. Stenciled on the side was the name ‘Ron Carroll – Independent Contractor.’ A big man in tan work boots, old jeans, and a red windbreaker stepped from the truck.

  ‘How you doing?’ he said. ‘Mind if I ask what you’re at?’

  ‘Mr. Carroll?’ I said, trying to buy myself some more time as I continued to probe at the dirt. There was rain dripping down my back, and my clothes were already pasted to my skin, but I wasn’t about to stop, not unless someone forced me.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I think I met your wife.’

  ‘I think you did. She said you were a detective, and you told her something about wanting to test the ground.’

  ‘That’s right. I—’

  The rod struck something hard. I pulled it out, shifted position, and inserted it again.

  ‘Do you have another of these rods in the back of your truck?’ I asked. The wind must have been gusting at forty miles an hour, and I was starting to shiver. The big nor’easter that had been forecast might ultimately present as snow on the mountains, and when the weaker trees fell they would bring power lines down with them, but here it was falling as icy water. Tonight the cops would be tied up with accidents and power failures. In a way, it was all to the good if I was right about what I believed was buried beneath my feet.

  ‘What have you found?’ asked Carroll.

  ‘Broken cinder blocks.’

  ‘Why would somebody bury cinder blocks?’

  He was beside me now, his shoulders hunched against the rain. I pulled out the rod and moved it a foot to the right. This time it encountered no obstacle. I moved it two feet to the left. It went in eighteen inches before hitting stone.

  ‘To keep something from being dug up by animals,’ I said. ‘You remember Mrs. Lagenheimer? Your wife knew her as Beth.’

  ‘Yeah, the woman who used to live here with her son. She moved out years ago.’

  I leaned on the rod. My back ached from pushing, and my hands were raw.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think she ever left.’

  It didn’t take us long, working together and using the rest of the rods from Carroll’s truck, to mark out the boundaries of what I believed was a grave. The rough rectangle was six feet in length and about two in width. When we were done, I gave Carroll one of my cards and told him that I’d be back as soon as I could.

  ‘Shouldn’t we call the cops?’ he said.

  ‘They’re not going to come out tonight,’ I said, ‘not in weather like this. Even if they do, they won’t be able to make a start on a dig until it gets light again. And, you know, it may just be a pile of broken blocks.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Carroll didn’t sound as if he believed that was the case. I could barely hear him above the sound of the wind and the beating of the rain.

  ‘Look, I’ll call them from the road, okay?’ I said in an effort to mollify him. He was a big man, and I didn’t want him to try to stop me leaving. He wouldn’t succeed, but if things got physical one or both of us would get hurt.

  ‘I don’t get why you can’t just call them now,’ said Carroll. ‘And maybe you should stick around, you know? Doesn’t seem proper for you to just leave if you’re right about there being a body buried here.’

  Bodies, I thought, but I didn’t say that.

  ‘You have my card,’ I said. ‘Whoever, or whatever, is down there isn’t going anywhere.’ Then I told him the truth, or something of it. ‘And I think I know who did this, and I want to see his face when I tell him I’ve been here.’

  Carroll searched for the lie, the rain streaming from our faces, and didn’t find it.

  ‘I don’t hear from them in an hour, then I’ll call them myself,’ he said.

  I thanked him. At his invitation, I followed him back to his house in my car and he gave me a towel with which to dry myself, and a flask of coffee to warm me on the journey. I called Randall Haight from the road. He answered on the second ring.

  ‘Mr. Haight, it’s Charlie Parker.’

  He didn’t sound happy to hear from me. I didn’t care.

  ‘What’s this about, Mr. Parker? You’re no longer working on my behalf.’

  ‘Tommy Morris,’ I lied. ‘We think he’s going to make his move soon.’

  ‘Am I in danger?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’d like to get you out of there. I want you to pack some clothes, then sit tight until I get to you, okay?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely,’ he said, the fact that he had fired me now conveniently set aside. ‘How long will it take?’

  He was scared, and he wasn’t pretending.

  ‘Not long,’ I said. ‘Not long at all.’

  You have to be careful what lies you tell. You have to be careful in case your lies are heard, and the gods of the underworld mock you by turning them to truths.

  34

  Iwas half an hour from Pastor’s Bay when Angel called.

  ‘Allan is on the move again.’

  ‘Going home?’

  ‘Kinda. He came part of the way, then stopped at a gas station and made a call. Now he’s sitting in his truck smoking a cigarette, and not in a relaxed way. He’s making me nervous, he’s wound so tight. Why does someone with a cell use a pay phone?’

  ‘Because he doesn’t want anyone to have a record of the call.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Keep a note of the time of the call, but stay with him.’

  ‘You sure? What about Haight?’

  ‘He’s not going to run out before I get there. He thinks I’m coming to protect him.’

  ‘And you aren’t?’

  ‘I just want to talk to him. I’ll do it at gunpoint if I have to, but it may not come to that.’

  I was close now, and I was starting to understand something of the nature of the man who called himself Randall Haight. I believed that Marybeth Lagenheimer, Randall Haight’s mother, was buried on her property near Gorham, New Hampshire. What I didn’t know was if she was alone down there, but I was guessing that she had some company in the grave. The man who occupied the neat, anonymous house with the ugly paintings on the wall had put her there. He had graduated from the killing of a child to the murder of an adult. He had piled lie upon lie, identity upon identity, creating a series of new selves without cracking or revealing the truth about his imposture, and only the intervention of an outside force, an anonymous tormentor, had finally threatened his existence. He was a killer who had taken the lives of at least two people, their deaths separated by decades but connected by the blood that flowed from the first killing to the next.

  Yet Randall Haight, or the man who claimed to be Randall Haight, still had an alibi for the time of Anna Kore’s disappearance courtesy of Chief Kurt Allan, who was himself apparently a predatory male with a taste for younger women. If they were working together, it made sense for Allan to have provided Haight with an alibi. If they weren’t, I had simply exchanged the mystery of Anna Kore’s fate, for which I didn’t have an answer, for another mystery, one for which I thought I did have a solution.

  The road was dark and empty as I drove. Rain had fallen here too, but the storm from the north had been at its strongest over New Hampshire and large parts of Vermont. Coastal Maine, by compariso
n, had barely been touched. Lights burned in Pastor’s Bay, and through the window of the police department I could see figures moving. The State Police Winnebago was still in the lot, but its windows were dark. There was no sign of the big SUVs beloved of Engel and his agents.

  Randall Haight had drawn the drapes at his living-room window, but a sliver of light was visible through the gap. I peered in and saw him sitting at the kitchen table with his back to me. Three cardboard storage boxes were piled one on top of another on the floor beside him.

  I rang the front doorbell. My gun was by my side, but I kept my body turned from the door so that it was not visible.

  ‘Who is it?’ said Haight. ‘Who’s there?’

  He was calling from inside the living room. I could hear the fear in his voice. I wondered if he had a gun.

  ‘It’s Charlie Parker, Mr. Haight.’

  Footsteps approached the door, and I heard the security chain being removed. When he opened the door his hands were empty, and there were two suitcases in the hallway.

  ‘I see you’re planning a trip,’ I said.

  ‘Even before you called, I felt that it would be safer for me if I left town for a while. I planned to inform the police tomorrow morning. I’ve made a reservation at a hotel at Bar Harbor. I printed off a copy of the reservation confirmation for the authorities.’

  He saw the gun in my hand.

  ‘Am I in danger, Mr. Parker?’

  ‘No, Lonny.’ I raised the gun and pointed it at him. ‘But am I?’

  Lonny Midas didn’t react. He didn’t become fearful or angry. He merely looked confused. In truth, I don’t think even he knew who he was anymore, not for sure.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we have much time.’

  He backed up. I entered the house and pushed the door closed behind me.

  ‘Why do you say that?’