Ghost Dance (24 page)

‘It might take a couple of days.’

‘Fast as you can,’ he said. ‘People are dying up here.’

‘Okay. Pat?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s good to have you back. Working, I mean.’

An hour and a half later, just as Gallagher passed through the covered bridge that led into Lawton, his cell phone rang. Jerry sounded shell-shocked.

‘Partner, you set off some big alarms with that name. I dropped Terrance Danby in the hopper with a couple of my old sources in the Defense Intelligence Agency, figuring they could track the guy quicker than anyone else. I just got a call back—out of the blue, fifteen years since I’ve last seen him—from one of the spookiest guys I’ve ever met.’ Gallagher gripped the phone tighter. ‘Tell me.’

‘Uh-uh, no way. Not on a cell phone,’ Jerry said. ‘You get yourself down to D.C. pronto. Harold wants to talk to you in person tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Who’s Harold?’ Andie demanded after Gallagher had related the story.

‘Jerry refused to say anything more,’ he replied. ‘But I know my partner. He’s got a lot of faults, but being scared isn’t one of them. He’s covered four wars and been through three divorces, and this was as shaken as I’ve ever heard him. I’m flying out of West Lebanon first thing in the morning.’

Andie was silent for almost half a minute, then she blurted out, ‘All the way back from Waterbury I wanted to stop and have a drink, Pat. I don’t know if I can see this through. It’s like we’re chasing bits of something so terrible that I—’

‘You’re going to be okay.’ He leaned across the table to rub her forearm. ‘Remember who you’re doing this for: for Olga and your mother and Nyren and Hank Potter. And Sarah. Right?’

‘I know, but it’s like we’re spinning in the middle of this nightmare that no one else sees. Or wants to see.’

Andie looked at Gallagher with her pained brown eyes. He wanted to go inside them and hide for just a while from all the killing and the dirty, violent history they were uncovering. He wanted her to hide inside him as well.

Gallagher took Andie’s hand and they went upstairs. It was their second time together and it was like waking up all over again, each of them showing the other how to give and receive pleasure without restriction.

Afterward they lay in the darkness clinging to each other.

‘Will you leave when it’s all over?’ Andie asked.

Gallagher could hear the yearning in her voice, but then he had an image of Emily and he was paralyzed. ‘I don’t know, Andie.’

There was a silence before she said, ‘Even though we haven’t known each other a long time, I feel good with you, Pat.’

Gallagher closed his eyes, trying to fight off the cornered feeling. ‘I do, too. I just need a little time to figure out exactly what that ‘good’ means, Andie.’

‘Oh,’ she said, and she rolled over with her back to him. The bed, which had been a warm refuge, became exposed and windswept. Another man might have reached over to embrace her, to reassure her. But Gallagher could not.

He stared into the darkness, seeing a swift-running stream in upstate New York. It was October, nineteen months before. The maple leaves were brilliant red. The brown trout were breeding and rising to his dry flies. Emily and Gallagher had finished the documentary on Lebanon’s war children, and another on the supernatural life of the Australian Aboriginal tribes. They had been on vacation for nearly two months, trying to figure out what project to take on next. It was a year after the abortion in Paris, and Gallagher believed they had moved on.

Emily sat on a rock behind him. She flipped a smooth, round stone in her hand. She had not said a word in almost an hour, and neither had he.

Suddenly, she announced, ‘I’m tired of films, Pat. I’ve decided I’m going to do that book in Mexico. I’ll be gone six months.’

Gallagher’s stomach dropped. They had not discussed that project with any seriousness. He managed to rally with a cutting barb. ‘An intimate look at the culture of a tortilla factory?’

Emily whipped the stone into the pool he was fishing. ‘Always hiding behind the joke, the fly rod and the quick, snide comment, aren’t you, Pat?’

‘They’ve always gotten me through the hard times before,’ Gallagher replied. ‘But how’s this: you’re going to Mexico just to hurt me.’

‘It’s always about you, isn’t it?’ Emily cried. ‘This time it’s about me. What
I
want.’

He stared at her. ‘You said you were okay with our decision in Paris. You agreed.’

Tears streamed down her cheeks. ‘I’m thirty-four, Pat. This is not an abstraction any more.’

‘You trying to say it was an abstraction to me?’ Gallagher demanded.

‘Life is an abstraction to you!’ Emily shouted. ‘You’ve spent all this time studying and filming cultures and religions, but you don’t believe a word of it. You haven’t found meaning in any of it, or in anything, for that matter—life, God, death, souls … me!—we’re all abstractions to you!’

‘That’s not fair!’ he shouted back.

‘No, it’s not, but it’s true,’ Emily said, standing. She snuffled, wiped her nose on the sleeve of her cotton sweater and fought for composure. ‘I’m due on a plane day after tomorrow. I’m taking my car and going down to the city to get packed.’

‘Am I allowed to visit at least?’

Emily hesitated, then choked out, ‘No.’ She turned and ran up the path, Gallagher watched her go the way he used to watch his parents as a child—as if through smoked glass.

Lying there in the darkness beside Andie, Gallagher was aware that his thoughts looped. Images crisscrossed and bounced. Emily. Andie. Then Many Horses and now Terrance Danby led boys through dim hallways to Monsignor McColl. Mike Kerris motioned his cronies toward a young drunken innocent in a darkened condo bedroom. Mayor Lamont Powell dug at his gums with sharpened fingernails. The bodies of Hank Potter, Olga Dawson and David Nyren floated on a river of Gallagher’s daydreams. Behind him, Gallagher heard a gentle heave of breath that told him Andie was crying. His thoughts accelerated, flashing through the same circular pattern over and over, faster and faster. He held tight to the edge of the mattress, asking himself if this was what his father had felt like in the last days of his crack-up.

A
NDIE SLAMMED HER POLICE
bubble on top of her battered truck and accelerated toward Lawton in the pouring rain.

It was less than an hour after Gallagher had left for the airport at West Lebanon, less than ten minutes since she’d received the phone call from Lieutenant Bowman. Her lips burned. So did her fingertips. And the back of her throat.

‘Get down to Lawton Center,’ the lieutenant had barked into the phone. ‘The parish secretary at St. Edward’s has been murdered. The husband said she had a piece of an Indian woman’s journal. Charun left evidence. A lot of it. Get down there
now
.’

Andie spun off the River Road by the Otterslide General Store onto Main Street. She hunched over the steering wheel, her knuckles bone-white. ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,’ she whispered. ‘The courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.’

Andie repeated the prayer over and over again, then told herself to take ten deep breaths. With each inhale and exhale she talked herself down.

Libby Curtin had lived in a double-decker, red Victorian house at the dead end of Front Street. There was a black wrought-iron fence separating the yard from the street and the children’s playground next door. Halfway to the house was a blooming perennial garden in the middle of which stood a painted ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary.

The street outside was already a sea of umbrellas and raincoats. A television truck from a Burlington station already in town to do a story on the killings had just pulled in and parked. A CNN van came in behind it. The lights went on.

Up on the porch, almost a ghost through the gray, driving rain, Brigid Bowman gestured at two troopers weaving yellow tape through the balustrade of the wrought-iron fence. In the camera glare Bowman appeared older, harsh, almost grainy.

The second she saw Andie, she broke away from the troopers and stepped behind a dense tangle of morning-glory vines that walled in the east side of the porch.

‘You were right. I was wrong,’ Bowman began in a no-nonsense voice. ‘Eddy, the husband, says Libby had a piece of a Sioux woman’s diary and a little crucifix passed on to her by her grandmother.’

‘You just wouldn’t believe me, would you?’ Andie asked.

Bowman clenched the top of her trench coat. ‘Everyone makes mistakes, Andie.’

‘I’ve learned that,’ Andie allowed. ‘Have you?’

Bowman clicked her thumbnail with the nail of her ring finger. ‘You aren’t going to make this easy for me.’

‘Have you made it easy for me?’

‘I’m sorry. I was doing my job.’

‘I want my job back,’ Andie said. ‘The lead on this case.’

After a long moment, Bowman nodded.

‘Good,’ Andie said. ‘Let me see her.’

Together they went into the house. Plants had been tipped over on wooden floors recently varnished. Drawers had been tugged from a refinished chest in the corner. The white upholstery of the butcher-block living-room furniture was slashed. Bright blue fish from an overturned saltwater aquarium lay still and cold on sopping-wet newspaper.

Bowman said, ‘With this amount of damage, a neighbor must have heard something. I’ve got teams fanning out.’

They went up a narrow staircase to a bedroom. An evidence technician dusted the jewelry box on the highboy dresser. A second worked at the window over the porch roof where a climbing piton had been driven into the frame. A third technician snapped photographs. Clothes were strewn across the floor. A television tuned to a religious cable channel lay on its back. A nun in her habit was hosting a talk show.

What had been a snowy-white comforter was now a tapestry of rose and rust. Libby Curtin’s body lay in the middle of it, curled into a fetal position facing the door, as if trying to hide from the blows.

Libby’s white cotton nightgown was soaked in blood and indistinguishable from her flesh in places. She was gagged. Her eyes were stretched open. She appeared to be staring at the crucifix on the opposite wall. Four of her fingers had been clipped off as if with garden shears.

Shakily, Andie put on latex gloves. She picked up the half-full wineglass next to the bed and sniffed the stale Chablis, then put it down abruptly at the sight of the fourth drawing pinned to the bedstead above the body.

Charun’s penis was being throttled by a rope cinched tight, causing the tip of it to mushroom above the shaft. The monster’s eyes were half-moons now. The pupils were rolled back in his head. The irises had been painted crimson. Every stitch in the creature’s lips except one was severed. The mouth grinned and gaped, revealing razorlike canine teeth and swollen gums.

Andie glanced at the wineglass, men unpinned the drawing and turned it over.

I fucked Angel blindfolded and ear-plugged right to the far shore. Fucked until she stepped into the muddy water and climbed beyond.

I stayed in my Persephone warm and alive. Warm and dead. Cold and dead, but even with the cord lashed tight around us, I never saw. I left her on the bank and she walked on while I rowed back alone.

You think you know me now, Lawton, but you don’t. I am the boatman. I am the lover. I am the shaman and I am the mutator.

Summer comes. And Hades has returned Persephone to Earth. I have seen her. I will have her again, for one more boat ride.

‘He’s not human,’ Bowman said, looking over Andie’s shoulder.

‘Yes, he is,’ Andie said. ‘That’s the problem. Humans are capable of creating beauty or carnage.’

She called out to the three technicians working in the room. ‘Anything?’

‘Lots of clear prints here,’ said the one working on the jewelry box. ‘But there are several smudges with no partials around them; I think our boy was wearing gloves again.’

‘Damn it!’ Andie said.

Mel Allen, the state’s assistant medical examiner, crouched beside a white braided rug on the far side of the bed. ‘Andie?’ he called. ‘You better come take a look.’

She and Bowman came around the bed and Allen smoothed a bushy eyebrow before pointing at soil from a boot at one end of a six-foot throw rug. Thirty inches from the dirt was a bloodstain and three pubic hairs. The rug had been slashed. There was a charred hole in the rug and a two-inch mound of what looked like burned tobacco mixed with little chunks of a mushroomlike: substance lying beside the hole.

‘What’s your explanation, Mel?’ Andie asked.

‘He lay here after the killing,’ Allen said with a look of distaste. ‘His boots were where the dirt is. His penis was at the pubic hairs. And those slashes—he hacked at the floor. It’s like he can’t stop the frenzy.’

Andie crouched next to the examiner, looking at the rug, then back at the note.

‘How is it possible that someone smart enough to write that note, then draw these drawings in a sequence, goes so maniacal during the killing?’ she asked.

Allen shrugged. ‘They’ve got psychiatrists to explain that kind of thing. I’m just telling you what I think he did.’

The medical examiner leaned over and with forceps took up two of the charred fungal pieces. One had a bluish tint at the stem. The other looked like a chunk of wet leather.

‘We’ll have to run tests,’ Allen said, ‘but this one looks like a psyllocibin mushroom. The other one’s peyote. He’s smoking it, probably mixing it with marijuana and God only knows what else, from the smell of it.’

‘No wonder the guy’s out of his mind,’ Bowman said.

‘Bag the rug and everything and get it to the Waterbury lab,’ Andie told the technician standing behind Allen. ‘I want every inch of this room in the Waterbury lab.’

Then Andie turned to the lieutenant. ‘Where’s Libby’s husband?’

Eddy Curtin slouched in a hammock chair in a corner of the ruin of his kitchen. The young snowboard entrepreneur stared into an empty cup of espresso with the look of the damned. His lank, dirty-blond hair hung down around his face. The sleeves and collar of his khaki canvas work shirt were unbuttoned, revealing a powerful upper body and sinewy arms. A uniformed female trooper sat mute in a chair opposite Curtin. Andie motioned for her to leave and she took the trooper’s seat. Lieutenant Bowman stood in the doorway, listening.