Book of Souls by Glenn Cooper (2 page)

But that was two marriages and one lifetime ago, and he was a changed man, or so he told himself. He’d allowed himself to be molded into something of a twenty-first-century metrosexual New York father with all the trappings of the station. If, in the past, he could attend crime scenes and prod at decomposing flesh, he could change a diaper. If he could conduct an interview through the sobs of a victim’s mother, he could deal with crying.

It didn’t mean he had to like it.

There had been a succession of new phases in his life, and he was a month into the newest, an amalgam of retirement and unfiltered fatherhood. It had been only sixteen months from the day he abruptly retired from the FBI to the day Nancy abruptly returned to work after maternity leave. And now, for at least brief stretches of time, he was left on his own with his son, Phillip Weston Piper. Their budget didn’t allow for more than thirty hours per week of nanny time, so for a few hours a day he had to fly solo.

As lifestyle changes went, this was fairly dramatic. For much of his twenty years at the FBI, he’d been a top-of-the-heap profiler, one of the most accomplished serial-killer hunters of his era. If it hadn’t been for what he charitably called his personal peccadilloes, he might have gone out large, with accolades and a nice postretirement gig as a criminal-justice consultant.

But his weaknesses for booze and women and his stubborn lack of ambition torpedoed his career and fatefully led him to the infamous Doomsday case. To the world, the case was still unsolved, but he knew better. He’d broken it, and it had broken him in return.

Its legacy was forced early retirement, a negotiated cover-up, and reams of confidentiality agreements. He got out with his life—barely.

On the bright side, fate also led him to Nancy, his young Doomsday partner, and she had given him his first son, a six-month-old, who sensed the rift when Nancy closed the apartment door closed behind her and had started to work his diaphragm.

Mercifully, Phillip Weston Piper’s high-pitched squall was squelched by rocking, but it abruptly resumed when Will put him back in his crib. Will hoped beyond hope that little Phillip would burn himself out and slowly backed out of the bedroom. He put the living-room TV onto cable news and tweaked the volume to harmonically modulate the nails-on-chalkboard squeal of his offspring.

Even though he was chronically sleep-deprived, Will’s head was awfully clear these days, thanks to his self-imposed separation from his pal, Johnnie Walker. He kept the ceremonial last half-gallon bottle of Black Label, three-quarters full, in the cabinet under the TV. He wasn’t going to be the kind of ex-drunk who had to purge the place of alcohol. He visited with the bottle sometimes, winked at it, sparred with it, had a little chat with it. He taunted it more than it taunted him. He didn’t do AA or “talk to someone.” He didn’t even stop drinking! He had a couple of beers or a generous glass of wine fairly regularly, and he even got buzzed on an empty stomach. He simply prohibited himself from touching the nectar—smoky, beautiful, amber—his love, his nemesis. He didn’t care what the textbooks said about addicts and abstinence. He was his own man, and he had promised himself and his new bride that he wouldn’t do the falling-down-drunk thing again.

He sat on the sofa with his large hands lying dumbly on his bare thighs. He was set to go, kitted out in jogging shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers. The nanny was late again. He felt trapped, claustrophobic. He was spending way too much time in this little parquet-floored prison cell. Despite best intentions, something was going to have to give. He was trying to do the right thing and honor his commitments and all that, but every day he grew more restless. New York had always irritated him. Now it was overtly nauseating.

The buzzer saved him from darkness. A minute later, the nanny-troll, as he called her (not to her face), arrived, launching into an attack on public transport rather than an apology. Leonora Monica Nepomuceno, a four-foot-ten-inch Filipina, threw her carrier bag on the kitchenette counter, then went right for the crying baby, pressing his tense little body against her incongruously large breasts. The woman, who he guessed was in her fifties, was so physically unattractive that when Will and Nancy first learned her nickname, Moonflower, they laughed themselves to exhaustion. “Ay, ay,” she crooned to the boy, “your auntie Leonora is here. You can stop your crying now.”

“I’m going for a run,” Will announced through a scowl.

“Go for a long one, Mister Will,” Moonflower advised.

A daily run had become part of Will’s postretirement routine, a component of his new-man ethos. He was leaner and stronger than he had been in years, only ten pounds heavier than his football-playing weight at Harvard. He was on the brink of fifty, but he was looking younger thanks to his no-scotch diet. He was big and athletic, with a strong jaw, boyishly thick tawny hair, and crazy blue eyes, and clad in nylon jogging shorts, he turned women’s heads, even young ones’. Nancy still wasn’t used to that.

On the sidewalk, he realized the Indian summer was over, and it was going to be uncomfortably chilly. While he stretched his calves and Achilles tendons against a signpost, he thought about shooting back upstairs for a warm-up suit.

Then he saw the bus on the other side of East 23
^rd
Street. It started up and belched some diesel exhaust.

Will had spent the better part of twenty years following and observing. He knew how to make himself inconspicuous. The guy in the bus didn’t, or didn’t care. He had noticed the rig the previous evening, driving slowly past his building at maybe five miles per hour, jamming traffic, provoking a chorus of honks. It was hard to miss, a top-of-the-line Beaver, a big royal blue forty-three-footer with slides, splashed out in gray and crimson swooshes. He had thought to himself, who the hell takes a half-a-million-dollar motor home into lower Manhattan and drives around slow, looking for an address? If he found it, where was he going to park the thing? But it was the license plate that rang bells.

Nevada. Nevada!

Now it looked like the guy had indeed found adequate parking the night before, across the street just to the east of Will’s building, an impressive feat, to be sure. Will’s heart started to beat at jogging speed even though he was still stationary. He had stopped looking over his shoulder months ago.

Apparently, that was a mistake. Gimme a break, he thought.
Nevada plates
.

Still, this didn’t have their signature. The watchers weren’t going to come at him in a half-baked-Winnebago battle-wagon. If they ever decided to pluck him off the streets, he’d never see it coming. They were pros, for Christ’s sake.

It was a two-way street, and the bus was pointed west. All Will had to do was run east toward the river, make a few quick turns, and the bus would never catch up. But then he wouldn’t know if he was the object of somebody’s exercise, and he didn’t like not knowing. So he ran west. Slowly. Making it easy for the guy.

The bus slid out of its space and followed along. Will picked up the pace, partly to see how the bus responded, partly to get warm. He got to the intersection of 3
^rd
Avenue and jogged in place, waiting for the light. The bus was a hundred feet behind, stacked up by a line of taxis. He shielded his eyes from the sun. Through the windshield he made out at least two men. The driver had a beard.

On the go again, he ran through the intersection and weaved through the sparse pedestrian sidewalk traffic. Over his shoulder, he saw the bus was still following west along 23
^rd
, but that wasn’t much of a test. That came at Lexington, where he took a left and ran south. Sure enough, the bus turned too.

Getting warmer, Will thought, getting warmer.

His destination was Gramercy Park, a leafy rectangular enclave a few blocks downtown. Its perimeter streets were all one-ways. If he was still being tailed, he’d have a bit of fun.

Lexington dead-ended at 21
^st
Street at the park, where 21
^st
ran one way west. Will ran east, along the outside of the park fence. The bus had to follow the traffic pattern in the opposite direction.

Will started doing clockwise laps around the park’s perimeter, each lap taking only a couple of minutes. Will could see that the bus driver was struggling with the tight left turns, nearly clipping parked cars at the corners.

There wasn’t anything remotely funny about being followed, but Will couldn’t help being amused every time the giant motor home passed him on its counterclockwise circuit. With each encounter, he got a better look at his pursuers. They failed to strike fear in his heart, but you never knew. These clowns definitely weren’t watchers. But there were other sorts of problem children out there. He’d put a lot of killers in jail. Killers had families. Vengeance was a family affair.

The driver was an older fellow, with longish hair and a full beard the color of fireplace ash. His fleshy face and ballooned-out shoulders suggested a heavy man. The man in the shotgun seat was tall and thin, also on the senior side, with wide-open eyes that furtively engaged Will sidelong. The driver stiffly refused to make eye contact altogether, as if he actually believed they hadn’t been made.

On his third circuit, Will spotted two NYPD cops on walking patrol on 20
^th
Street. Gramercy Park was an exclusive neighborhood; it was the only private park in Manhattan. The residents of the surrounding buildings had their own keys to the wrought-iron gates, and the police were visible around there, prowling for muggers and creeps. Will pulled up, breathing heavily. “Officers. That bus over there. I saw it stop. The driver was hassling a little girl. I think he was trying to get her inside.”

The cops listened, deadpan. His flat Southern drawl played havoc with his credibility. He got a lot of those out-of-town looks in New York. “You sure about that?”

“I’m ex-FBI.”

Will watched for a short while only. The cops stood smack in the middle of the street and halted the bus with hand waving. Will didn’t stick around. He was curious, sure, but he wanted to get over to the river for his usual circuit. Besides, he had a feeling he’d see these geezers again.

To be on the safe side, when he got back home, he’d take his gun out of the dresser and oil it up.

WILL WAS GRATEFUL he had chores and obligations to occupy himself. In the early afternoon, he made the rounds to the grocer, the butcher, and the wine merchant without a single sighting of the big blue bus. He slowly and methodically chopped the vegetables, ground the spices, and browned the meat, filling the postage-stamp kitchenette and the whole apartment with Piper’s trademark chili smoke. It was the only dish that was foolproof in his hands, dinner-party safe.

Phillip was napping when Nancy came home. Will shushed her then gave her a first-year-of-marriage hug, the kind where the hands wander.

“When did Moonflower leave?”

“An hour ago. He’s been asleep.”

“I missed him so much.” She tried to pull away. “I want to see him!”

“What about me?”

“He’s numero uno. You’re numero dos.”

He followed her into the bedroom and watched as she bent over the crib and kicked off her shoes. He’d noticed this before, but it really struck him at that moment: she had developed a serenity, a mature womanly beauty that, frankly, had snuck up on him. He impishly reminded her regularly that when they were first thrown together on the Doomsday case, she hadn’t exactly make him woozy with desire. She was on the plump side at the time, in the throes of freshman syndrome—new job, high stress, bad habits, and the like. Candidly, Will was always more of a lingerie-model sort of a guy. As an adolescent high-school football star, he had been imprinted with the body image of cheerleaders the way a duckling is imprinted by a mother duck. All his life, he saw a great body, he tried to follow it.

Truth be told, he never thought about Nancy in a romantic way until a crash diet turned her into more of an hourglass. So I’m shallow, he would have admitted if anyone called him on it. But early on, looks weren’t the only impediment to romance. He also had to introduce her to cynicism. At first, her fresh-out-of-the-academy gung ho, eager-to-please personality sickened him, like a stomach virus. But he was a good and patient teacher, and under his tutelage she learned to question authority, play loose with the bureaucracy, and generally sail close to the rocks.

One day, bogged down by the impossibility of the Doomsday case, he realized that this woman was doing it for him, punching all her buttons. She had gotten really pretty. He came to find her smallness sexy, the way he could envelop her in his arms and legs, almost making her disappear. He liked the silky texture of her brown hair, the way she blushed all the way down to her breastbone, her giggle when they made love. She was smart and sassy. Her encyclopedic knowledge of art and culture was intriguing, even to a man whose idea of culture was a Spider-Man movie. To top it off, he even liked her parents.

He was ready to fall in love.

Then Area 51 and the Library entered his consciousness and sealed the deal. It made him think about his life, about settling down.

Nancy handled the pregnancy like a champ, eating healthy, exercising every day, almost right up to delivery. Postpartum, she quickly shed pounds and got herself back to fighting form. She was hell-bent on maintaining her physique and erasing motherhood as a career issue. She knew the Bureau couldn’t openly discriminate against her, but she wanted to make certain she wouldn’t be treated, even subtly, like a second-class citizen, flailing ineffectively in the musky testosterone pool of striving young men.

The end result of all this physical and emotional flux was a maturation of mind and body. She returned to work stronger and more confident, emotionally like marble, solid and cool. As she would inform her friends, husband and infant were both behaving, and all was good.

To hear Nancy tell it, falling in love with Will had been utterly predictable. His hunky, dangerous bad-boyishness was as alluring as a bug zapper to a moth and just as deadly. But Nancy was not going to let herself be incinerated. She was too tough and savvy. She had gotten comfortable with the age difference—seventeen years—but not the attitude difference. She could happily deal with the naughtiness. But she refused to permanently hook up with a Wrecking Ball, the sobriquet Will’s daughter, Laura, had bestowed on him in honor of years of destroyed marriages and relationships.