Blue Light (16 page)

“We should try to get a look at those files,” Bonhomme said. “Call down to the Berkeley PD, Lonnie.”

“No need,” the ex-detective said. “I’ve got copies of all the files right here in my suitcase.”

“You do?”

“Yes, sir. It was my case. I had taken them home to study them before the massacre.”

Christian Bonhomme put down his pipe and leaned forward on his elbows.

“What are you doing here, Mr. Barber? What do you want from us?”

Miles first took out his squeeze bottle and pressed a few drops down the top of his patch to soothe the naked eye. He reminded himself not to drift into the fear and hatred that was always so near the surface of his feelings. The hatred and fear of the man who had laid down the imprint of death upon his mind. He couldn’t let them suspect the killing he had in store for Gray Man. He’d already gone too far by killing that fly.

“I want …,” he said, “I want the people who did this to me to pay for it.” Barber closed his good eye and saw the afterimage of a gray cloud that always hovered there. “They took everything from me. They made me a freak.”

“And you think your own police department can’t handle the investigation?”

“They have the same files that I do, Inspector. Did they come to you? Did they go up to Folsom?”

“They would if you went to them now.” Bonhomme was trying to sound reasonable, but his eyes were intent.

“Claudia Zimmerman is in the desert somewhere. Lester Foote has disappeared from the Bay Area, along with three minors and a woman who may have Portman’s child. Fargo escaped from jail. There’s nothing the Berkeley police can do.” Barber suddenly felt a wave of calm come over him. He told me, much later, that he realized that it was fate for him and the SIB agents to work together. He was sure that they had no other choice.

“Listen,” he said. “I know these people. Anyone you run across from this cult and I’ll recognize ’em. I know the names and crazy talk. I even understand what they mean. Fargo’s escape has something to do with the killings in Berkeley. Probably somebody from the congregation got to this Robert Halston. I can help you. And if you find out what happened, it will lead to their boss — and that’s the guy I want.”

“I thought you said that Portman was the boss?” Briggs said.

“Uh-uh. I don’t know the big boss’s name, but you better believe that I intend to find out.”

In the weeks that followed, Miles Barber became a fixture at the fourth-floor offices of Christian Bonhomme and Lonnie Briggs. The SIB was completing its first central building at that time, so the bureau was still spread out in individual offices all around Sacramento. So no eyebrows were raised when Miles set up in the receptionist’s space outside Agent Briggs’s office.

Briggs wasn’t bothered, because he divided his time between fieldwork and conferring with Bonhomme in the larger back office.

No one complained about ex-Detective Barber. On the contrary, Bonhomme was very pleased. Not only did Miles take the secretary’s space, he did the secretary’s work. There were dozens of boxes of handwritten files and reports that dated back to the beginning of Bonhomme’s career with the SIB. He was supposed to have typed, classified, and filed each document but never had. Now the new director wanted everything turned into input cards for the new IBM-360. Barber agreed to take on the task. He told Bonhomme that he wanted to look for leads in the Blues case amid the mass of paper. Each morning when Bonhomme came in to work, he found Miles, his one eye scanning a scrawled report that was tacked to the wall, his ten fingers battering the old Royal typewriter. Every evening when the inspector left, Barber was still typing and squinting at the wall.

Bonhomme must have wondered if the one-eyed ex-detective freak was living in the temporary office. But there was no suitcase in the cloak closet or bedding or even a toothbrush to prove it. That was because Miles Barber never slept. He kept his toothbrush in his pocket, stowed his suitcase in a locker at the bus station, and did his latrine with a washrag, a bar of soap, and a ceramic mug. Once a week he took his clothes to a French laundry on Spring.

Barber spent every night working on Bonhomme’s files. He typed and filed, ordered and reordered until the inspector returned. He worked because that kept him from heeding the changes happening on the inside.

Miles Barber, while he pecked and hunted, was going through a metamorphosis. On one hand, he was dying, fading out just as his best friend, Brad Sanders, had after a chest wound at Anzio. But on the other hand, there was a life growing from the inside. This new life was coming out of what he had always known as himself, but it wasn’t him — at least, it didn’t have to be. Barber feared that if he fell asleep for long, he would die and this
bean sprout
in his heart would take over. So he stayed awake, working, playing the radio, and denying the changes that were trying to take hold.

He went on like that, working twenty-hour days and talking to Bonhomme and Briggs now and then about the Close Congregation and their possible relationship to Fargo. Miles had almost finished with the files when he began to worry that Bonhomme had meant to keep him only till all the work was done.

But the ex-detective had a plan. There had been nothing of interest in the files he copied. He would, instead of working on his typewriter at night, break into the inspector’s active files in the back office. He’d transcribe all the information that had to do with Winch Fargo, so when he was released, he’d be able to shadow the SIB investigation until they led him to his prey.

Then one afternoon Lonnie Briggs returned from a four-day field trip.

“Hey, Patch,” Briggs said to the ex-detective secretary. It was a nickname Briggs was fond of using. It bore no enmity. “How’s the filing coming? You almost finished?”

“Not quite.”

The smile Briggs gave was wide and insincere. At least, that’s what Barber thought. He made up his mind to break into the locked files that night.

Briggs went in to confer with Bonhomme. They talked for a while and then Briggs came out.

“Come on in here a minute, will ya, Milo?”

“What for?”

“Just a couple’a things.”

Miles felt something enter his mind. It wasn’t a thought, but an overwhelming excitement that bordered on fear. He couldn’t explain then that it was a power coming over him, the ability to receive emotional and other, more obscure impressions from people around him.

“Take the hot seat,” Briggs said, indicating the chair before his boss’s desk.

As Miles lowered himself into the chair, Briggs said to Bonhomme, “He’s gonna need a hat.”

“What?” asked Miles.

“A hat,” Briggs repeated. “With a big brim too. I mean, if we’re gonna go out with these crazies in the desert, then we’re gonna have to be inconspicuous. No offense, but it would take a blind man not to notice you.”

Miles Barber laughed. The three deep single-syllable tones that burbled out of his chest were odd enough to arrest the agents’ attention.

“You okay, Barber?” Bonhomme asked. He even put down his pipe in case he needed both hands to lend assistance.

The ex-detective wanted to answer; he tried to. But first he had to figure out what that bullfrog laugh was.

“It was like looking for my long-lost father,” Miles said to me much later next to a campfire. “Instead, I found the devil. But in the back of my mind I was thinking that the devil was my old man. You see what I mean?”

I did get his meaning. That laugh was the annunciation of the new life that had been growing since Grey Redstar’s will had touched Barber’s soul. In that office he was a new man being offered the old man’s obsession. And in that moment the will of the man who should have passed on was soldered onto the detritus of Gray Man’s rage.

“I’m fine, Christian,” Barber said at last.

“You sure? You sounded a little funny.”

“Is this about Fargo?”

Bonhomme winced in a final moment of indecision, but Miles knew that it would pass. He’d soon be on the trail of the man who had killed him and then brought him back to life.

“There’re three avenues of investigation that we could follow,” Bonhomme said a little too loudly. “There’s Fargo. He’s the reason we’re on the case. There’re the guys in the prison that were torturing Fargo. And there’s this guy Halston. He was the guard on duty who disappeared at the same time. The warden, Gerin Reed, is also under investigation, but we’re not sure about his role yet.”

“Yeah,” Sergeant Briggs added. “He’s pretty hard to find too.”

“I see,” Miles said. He acted as if he were following the conversation, weighing the options. But he already knew the answers. He already knew what they were going to do.

“I’m interested in that guy Allitar,” Briggs said.

“Who’s that?” Barber asked.

“He’s one of the four guys who kept Fargo tied to a bunk in his cell. Halston had to be helping them, but Allitar was the ringleader.”

“What kind of name is Allitar?”

“It’s an alias.”

“Well, then, what’s his real name?” Barber asked the burly sergeant.

“His father’s name is Brown, a con artist. Took retirement accounts from old ladies starved for love. He went under the alias Conrad L. Allitar for fifteen years. Married under that name. Had kids under that name. Mackie’s legal name is Allitar even though it was just his father’s alias.”

“What’s his story?”

“Allitar is in on a multiple homicide committed during the robbery of a pharmacy,” Bonhomme interjected. “He claims that there was some kind of drug in Fargo’s blood. They used to bleed him for it, he says.”

“To sell it?”

“No, not if you’re to believe him. Fargo sold the drug himself, even though no one but his cellmate, Allitar, knew the source, that’s what Mackie claims. They told everybody that the Martel woman was a mule that smuggled the stuff in.” Bonhomme stopped and stared at Barber for a moment or two.

“Yeah?”

“You told us about this Martel woman independently of Mackie.”

“So what?”

“What do you think it is with this blood stuff?”

“I couldn’t say. They all talk about blue light and blood the way Christians talk about the cross and blood. I don’t know. Did you get any of this stuff that Mackie said Fargo made? Send it down to a chemist?”

A professor of mine used to tell me that a well-placed question is a scholar’s best shield. You could use a question to imply an idea that you had but could not prove. Or you might want to seem open to a line of inquiry that you had no intention of following. Miles’s question was designed to tell Bonhomme that he had no knowledge, no agenda, and a cop’s objectivity about any hocus-pocus that might be presented as fact.

“Yeah, we did,” Lonnie Briggs said when his boss went silent. “Milk and sugar, blood and baking soda. But there’s something else too. Something they can’t analyze. Maybe that’s what the broad brought in.”

“Like a culture or something?” Barber asked.

“Maybe,” Bonhomme replied. “Maybe.”

“Maybe if you let me talk to him, I could make some connection he might have with the people in Berkeley,” Miles offered. He wanted to meet the blood addict. “Or maybe one of the others that helped him bleed Fargo.”

“All dead but Mackie,” Bonhomme said. “He’s dying too. Wasting away. I don’t think you’d get much out of him. Anyway, we couldn’t get you into a penal facility. You don’t have any certification. No. We’ll let the lab worry about the blood. We want you to try and help us trace Bob Halston. We have some information about him and a communal cult in the Haight.”

I
N THE FARTHEST EASTERN
corner of the Mojave Desert is the abandoned Jacobi gold mine. In a subterranean room off the central shaft Winch Fargo sat on a cold stone, laughing. The thrumming in his body told him that it was the right time.

“She’s comin’,” he said to himself, sniggering. “She’s almost here.”

The rocks were cold, and there was only a candle for light and warmth. But that was more than his mother gave him. When she locked him in the closet, when he was a child, there was no candle or room to walk around. There was no promise of somebody coming to love you. No promises at all.

Fargo wore only a loincloth fashioned from a big man’s T-shirt. He was skinny and his nose ran freely, but still he tittered merrily.

“She’s comin’ to get my blood, yes sir. She needs me and I need her. And it’s almost time. Yeah, yeah.”

The thick oaken door groaned as it was pulled open. Fargo leaped to his feet and lunged for the lamplight that appeared. The chain around his left ankle kept him from reaching the door.

Stanley Brussels, recently a carpenter from Indio, fell back as soon as he pulled the door open. He had seen Fargo’s incredible strength before. When Fargo was free to walk among the others, aboveground, he had gone insane, breaking the necks of three of Claudia’s chosen. Claudia Heart had told them that he could somehow sense the men who had most recently been her lovers, that he had to kill any man who had been with her.

“You should stay out of reach,” Stanley told Claudia.

She was standing, shivering and naked, behind her lantern-bearing acolyte.

“Don’t worry, Stan,” she said. “Hurting me is the last thing on his mind.”

Fargo giggled like an insane child.

Claudia Heart entered demurely, carrying a shallow wooden bowl in one hand and an ornamental dagger in the other. Stanley put down his kerosene lantern and pushed the heavy door shut.

“Hi, princess,” Winch said, rising to his knees.

She put down her knife and bowl. “Hello, Winch.”

“How’s the sunlight up there?”

“I could have you tied up and brought up top if you want, honey. You know it hurts me to see you down here so sick and cold.”

“No, no, don’t … don’t take me up there. I couldn’t take it, smellin’ your pussy on all them men.” Fargo stood up suddenly and violently. “Goddammit!”

Claudia rose with him, but not in fear. She drew close to his chest and stroked its long, skinny muscles.

“Shhh, baby. Don’t be like that. Come on, let’s sit. Come on. Yeah, honey. Don’t you think of anything but me right here with you.”