Every Dead Thing (22 page)

I
SAT
in the same police interview room with the same wooden table with the same wooden heart carved into its surface. My arm was freshly bandaged and I had showered and shaved for the first time in over two days. I had even caught a few hours’ sleep stretched across three chairs. Despite Agent Ross’s best effort, I was not in a jail cell. I had been interrogated comprehensively, first by Walter and another detective, then by Walter and the assistant chief, and finally, by Ross and one of his agents, with Walter in attendance to make sure they didn’t beat me to death out of frustration.

Once or twice I thought I caught glimpses of Philip Kooper striding around outside, like a corpse that had exhumed itself to sue the undertaker. I guessed that the trust’s public profile was about to take a terminal hammering.

I told the cops nearly everything. I told them about Sciorra, about Hyams, about Adelaide Modine, about Sonny Ferrera. I did not tell them that I had become involved in the case at Walter Cole’s instigation. The other gaps in my story I left them to fill in for themselves. I told them simply that I had taken some leaps of the imagination. Ross almost had to be forcibly restrained at that point.

Now there was only Walter and me and a pair of coffee cups.

“Have you been down there?” I asked eventually, breaking the silence.

Walter nodded. “Briefly. I didn’t stay.”

“How many?”

“Eight so far, but they’re still digging.”

And they would continue digging, not just there but in scattered locations across the state and maybe even farther afield. Adelaide Modine and Connell Hyams had been free to kill for thirty years. The Morelli warehouse had been rented for only a portion of that time, which meant that there were probably other warehouses, other deserted basements, old garages, and disused lots that contained the remains of lost children.

“How long had you suspected?” I asked.

He seemed to think I was asking about something else, maybe a dead man in the toilet of a bus station, because he started and turned to me. “Suspected what?”

“That someone in the Barton household was involved in the Baines disappearance?”

He almost relaxed. Almost. “Whoever took him had to know the grounds, the house.”

“Assuming he was taken at the house and hadn’t wandered.”

“Assuming that, yes.”

“And you sent me to find out.”

“I sent you.”

I felt culpable for Catherine Demeter’s death, not only because of my failure to find her alive but because, unwittingly, I might have brought Modine and Hyams to her.

“I may have led them to Catherine Demeter,” I said to Walter after a while. “I told Ms. Christie I was going to Virginia to follow a lead. It might have been enough to give her away.”

Walter shook his head. “She hired you as insurance. She must have alerted Hyams as soon as she was seen. He was probably on the lookout for her already. If she didn’t turn up in Haven, then they were relying on you to find her. As soon as you did, I think you’d both have been killed.”

I had a vision of Catherine Demeter’s body slumped in the basement of the Dane house, her head surrounded by a circle of blood. And I saw Evan Baines wrapped in plastic, and the decayed body of a child half covered in earth, and the other corpses still to be discovered in the Morelli basement, and elsewhere.

And I saw my own wife, my own child in all of them.

“You could have sent someone else,” I said.

“No, only you. If Evan Baines’s killer was there, I knew you’d find out. I knew you’d find out because you’re a killer yourself.”

The word hung in the air for a moment, then tore a rift between us, like a knife cutting through our past together. Walter turned away.

I stayed silent for a time and then, as if he had never spoken, I said: “She told me that she knew who killed Jennifer and Susan.”

He seemed almost grateful for the break in the silence. “She couldn’t have known. She was a sick, evil woman and that was her way of trying to torture you after she died.”

“No, she knew. She knew who I was before she died, but I don’t think she knew when she hired me. She would have suspected something. She wouldn’t have taken the chance.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “Let it go.”

I didn’t say anything more but I knew that, somehow, the dark worlds of Adelaide Modine and the Traveling Man had come together.

“I’m considering retirement,” said Cole. “I don’t want to look at death anymore. I’ve been reading Sir Thomas Browne. You ever read Thomas Browne?”

“No.”

“Christian Morals:
‘Behold not Death’s Heads til thou doest not see them, nor look upon mortifying objects til thou overlook’st them.’ ” His back was to me but I could see his face reflected in the window and his eyes seemed far away. “I’ve spent too long looking at death. I don’t want to force myself to look any longer.”

He sipped his coffee. “You should go away from here, do something to put your ghosts behind you. You’re no longer what you once were, but maybe you can still step back, before you lose yourself forever.”

A film was forming on my untouched coffee. When I didn’t respond, Walter sighed and spoke with a sadness in his voice that I had never heard before. “I’d prefer it if I didn’t have to see you again,” he said. “I’ll talk to some people, see if you can go.”

Something had changed within me, that much was true, but I was not sure that Walter could see it for what it was. Maybe only I could really understand what had happened, what Adelaide Modine’s death had unlocked within me. The horror of what she had done through the years, the knowledge of the hurt and pain she had inflicted on the most innocent among us, could not be balanced in this world.

And yet it had been brought to an end. I had brought it to an end.

All things decay, all things must end, the evil as well as the good. What Adelaide Modine’s death had done, in its brutal, flame-red way, was to show me that this was true. If I could find Adelaide Modine and could bring her to an end, then I could do the same with others. I could do the same with the Traveling Man.

And somewhere, in a dark place, a clock began to tick, counting off the hours, the minutes, the seconds, before it would toll the end for the Traveling Man.

All things decay. All things must end.

And as I thought of what Walter had said, of his doubts about me, I thought too of my father and the legacy he left me. I have only fragmented memories of my father. I remember a large, red-faced man carrying a Christmas tree into the house, his breath rising into the air like the puffs of steam from an old train. I remember walking into the kitchen one evening to find him caressing my mother and her laughter at their shared embarrassment. I remember him reading to me at night, his huge fingers following the words as he spoke them to me so that they might be familiar to me when I returned to them again. And I remember his death.

His uniform was always freshly pressed and he kept his gun oiled and cleaned. He loved being a policeman, or so it seemed. I did not know then what it was that drove him to do what he did. Maybe Walter Cole gained some knowledge of it when he looked upon the bodies of those dead children. Maybe I, too, have knowledge of it. Maybe I have become like my father.

What is clear is that something inside him died and the world appeared to him in different, darker colors. He had looked upon death’s heads for too long and become a reflection of what he saw.

The call had been a routine one: two kids fooling around in a car late at night on a patch of urban wasteland, flashing the lights and sounding the horn. My father had responded and found one of the local boys, a petty criminal well on the road to graduating into felonies, and his girlfriend, a middle-class girl who was flirting with danger and enjoying the sexual charge it brought.

My father couldn’t recall what the boy said to him as he tried to impress his girl. Words were exchanged and I can imagine my father’s voice deepening and hardening in warning. The boy made mocking movements toward the inside pocket of his jacket, enjoying the effect on my father’s nerves and bathing in the ripples of laughter from the young woman beside him.

Then my father drew his gun and the laughter stopped. I can see the boy raising his hands, shaking his head, explaining that there was no weapon there, that it was all just fun, that he was sorry. My father shot him in the face, blood streaking the interior of the car, the windows, the face of the girl in the passenger seat, his mouth wide in shock. I don’t think she even screamed before my father shot her too. Then he walked away.

Internal Affairs came for him as he stripped in the locker room. They took him before his brother officers, to make an example of him. No one got in their way. By then, they all knew, or thought they knew.

He admitted everything but could not explain it. He simply shrugged his shoulders when they asked. They took his gun and his badge—his backup, the one I now hold, remained back in his bedroom—and then they drove him home under the NYPD rule that prevented a policeman from being questioned about the possible commission of a crime until forty-eight hours had elapsed. He looked dazed when he returned and wouldn’t speak to my mother. The two Internal Affairs men sat outside in their car, smoking cigarettes, while I watched from my bedroom window. I think they knew what would happen next. When the gunshot sounded, they didn’t leave their car until the echoes of the shot had faded into the cool night air.

I am my father’s son, with all that entails.

The door of the interview room opened and Rachel Wolfe entered. She was dressed casually in blue jeans, high-top sneakers, and a black hooded cotton top by Calvin Klein. Her hair was loose, hanging over her ears and resting on her shoulders, and there was a sprinkling of freckles on her nose and at the base of her neck.

She took a seat across from me and gave me a look of concern and sympathy. “I heard about the death of Catherine Demeter. I’m sorry.”

I nodded and thought of Catherine Demeter and how she looked in the basement of the Dane house. They weren’t good thoughts.

“How do you feel?” she asked. There was curiosity in her voice, but tenderness too.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you regret killing Adelaide Modine?”

“She called it. There was nothing else I could do.” I felt numb about her death, about the killing of the lawyer, about the sight of Bobby Sciorra rising up on his toes as the blade entered the base of his skull. It was the numbness that scared me, the stillness inside me. I think that it might have scared me more, but for the fact that I felt something else too: a deep pain for the innocents who had been lost, and for those who had yet to be found.

“I didn’t know you did house calls,” I said. “Why did they call you in?”

“They didn’t,” she said, simply. Then she touched my hand, a strange, faltering gesture in which I felt—I hoped?— that there was something more than professional understanding. I gripped her hand tightly in mine and closed my eyes. I think it was a kind of first step, a faltering attempt to reestablish my place in the world. After all that had taken place over the previous two days, I wanted to touch, however briefly, something positive, to try to awaken something good within myself.

“I couldn’t save Catherine Demeter,” I said at last. “I tried and maybe something came out of that attempt. I’m still going to find the man who killed Susan and Jennifer.”

She nodded slowly and held my gaze. “I know you will.”

Rachel had been gone for a short time when the cell phone rang.

“Yes?”

“Mista Parker?” It was a woman’s voice.

“This is Charlie Parker.”

“My name is Florence Aguillard, Mista Parker. My mother is
Tante
Marie Aguillard. You came to visit us.”

“I remember. What can I do for you, Florence?” I felt the tightening in my stomach, but this time it was born of anticipation, born of the feeling that
Tante
Marie might have found something to identify the figure of the girl who was haunting us both.

In the background I could hear the music of a jazz piano and the laughter of men and women, thick and sensual as treacle. “I been tryin’ to get you all afternoon. My momma say to call you. She say you gotta come to her now.” I could hear something in her voice, something that conspired to trip her words as they tumbled from her mouth. It was fear and it hung like a distorting fog around what she had to say.

“Mista Parker, she say you gotta come now and you gotta tell no one you comin’. No one, Mista Parker.”

“I don’t understand, Florence. What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,”
she said. She was crying now, her voice wracked by sobs. “But she say you gotta come, you gotta come
now.”
She regained control of herself and I could hear her draw a deep breath before she spoke again.

“Mista Parker, she say the Travelin’ Man comin’.”

There are no coincidences, only patterns we do not see. The call was part of a pattern, linked to the death of Adelaide Modine, which I did not yet understand. I said nothing about the call to anyone. I left the interrogation room, collected my gun from the desk, then headed for the street and took a cab back to my apartment. I booked a first-class ticket to Moisant Field, the only ticket left on any flight leaving for Louisiana that evening, and checked in shortly before departure, declaring my gun at the desk, my bag swallowed up in the general confusion. The plane was full, half of the passengers tourists who didn’t know better heading for the stifling August heat of New Orleans. The stewards served ham sandwiches with potato chips and a packet of dried raisins, all tossed in the sort of brown paper bag you got on school trips to the zoo.

There was darkness below us when the pressure began building in my nose. I was already reaching for a cocktail napkin when the first drops came, but quickly the pressure became pain, a ferocious, shooting pain that caused me to jerk back in my seat.

The passenger beside me, a businessman who had earlier been cautioned about using his laptop computer while the plane was still on the runway, stared at me in surprise and then shock as he saw the blood. I watched his finger pressing repeatedly to summon the steward, and then my head was thrown back, as if by the force of a blow. Blood spurted violently from my nose, drenching the back of the seat in front of me, and my hands shook uncontrollably.