Ghost Dance (25 page)

Curtin glanced up. ‘Hi, Andie.’

‘Hello, Eddy,’ she said softly. ‘It’s been a long time.’

Curtin nodded. ‘You don’t expect to run into your old baby-sitter this way. Can I call the funeral home for them to come and get Libby now?’

‘She’ll be going somewhere else first, Eddy,’ Andie said. ‘We have to gather evidence.’

Curtin ran the knuckle of his index finger along the underside of his wispy goatee. ‘We were going to take off for Montana the end of the summer, move the business out West. It was our secret.’

‘I’m sorry, Eddy.’

His chin trembled. ‘You want to ask me questions, I suppose.’

‘It will help catch the son of a bitch that did this,’ Andie said.

Curtin had left the house at ten o’clock. He liked to work on his snowboard designs at night when no one was at the factory. He’d been absorbed in his work until nearly six-thirty. He’d last talked with Libby at 11 p.m. She’d been watching television.

Andie said, ‘You told the lieutenant that Libby had a piece of a journal from a Sioux woman.’

Curtin nodded. ‘In a pouch with a crucifix in it. Her granddad gave it to her when she was sixteen and told her to keep it because it was an important piece of Lawton history. At least the history nobody in Lawton wanted to talk about. It’s all about the seances they used to have up there at the old Danby place. Libby kept her promise to her grandpa, but she didn’t like having the pouch.’

‘Why?’ asked Bowman from the doorway.

‘ ’Cause it gave her the creeps,’ Curtin replied. ‘I’ve read it all and it’s like you were reading something that was never meant to be kept, but couldn’t ever get rid of. I don’t know, like it was testimony, you know?’

Curtin turned the cup of coffee over on its saucer. ‘You think someone slaughtered my Libby because of some shit that went down here a hundred years ago?’

‘Yes, Eddy, I do,’ Andie said.

Tears welled in Curtin’s eyes. He slammed his fist off the table. The cup jumped and crashed on the tile floor. ‘If I’d have known this was going to happen, I would have burned that damn pouch the first time she showed it to me!’

Andie thought of her mother. ‘I feel the same way, Eddy.’

Now the young man began to sob: ‘What could be in that thing that someone would do that to my sweet Libby? How could God let that happen to someone so devoted?’

‘That’s what I’m trying to find out,’ Andie murmured soothingly. ‘Where did she keep it?’

Curtin got hold of himself and wiped his forearm across his face. He reached around behind him on the floor and picked up a framed piece of needlepoint daffodils and pink tulips and a monogram of their names, Libby and Eddy, separated by a heart.

He turned it over, then fiddled with hasps that held the back to the frame. Andie’s breath caught in her throat when she realized the killer had not found Libby Curtin’s section of Many Horses’ journal.

Eddy eased out the red leather pouch and gave it to Andie, who took it in both hands. Bowman stepped forward to see that which she had not believed existed.

‘I promise you, Eddy, I will find out who did this to Libby,’ Andie said.

‘That it? That her pouch? What’s it say?’ came two male voices from the hallway beyond Lieutenant Bowman.

Chief Kerris and, right behind him, Mayor Powell. Kerris had a reddish patina to his skin. His eyes glistened with nervous excitement. Mayor Powell was standing on tiptoe, trying to see into the kitchen.

Andie stood and held the pouch behind her back ‘Lieutenant, I would prefer these two men be escorted out of here.’

‘What?’ Kerris shouted. ‘This is our town. You can’t order us out of here.’

‘The woman’s way out of line,’ the mayor grumbled in agreement.

‘I’ve got my reasons,’ Andie told Bowman. ‘You said I was lead.’

The lieutenant dug her fingers into a knotted muscle at the back of her neck.

‘Lead?’ Kerris cried. ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’

‘She’s not kidding,’ Bowman said at last. ‘And I’m sorry, Chief and Mr Mayor, but you’ll have to go. Sergeant Nightingale is in charge here.’

‘I’m not moving,’ Powell stated flatly.

Kerris nodded. ‘Not until I know why we’re being kept out.’

‘How about because, around the turn of the century, your great-great-grandfather went nuts,’ Andie said. ‘He dug his teeth out of his head because he believed he’d helped kill an Indian girl.’

She shook the pouch at them. ‘The Indian girl who wrote this journal. I think you’re trying to cover that up. I think that for some reason you’d like this whole investigation to go away.’

Kerris and Powell both blanched.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the mayor puffed at last. ‘And I won’t have my family’s reputation impugned in this way. Lieutenant, I protest this slanderous, unfounded accusation!’

Bowman’s fingers dug deeper into the knotted muscle. Andie brought the journal around in front of her and held it where the lieutenant could see it.

‘You’re sure,’ Bowman said at last.

‘Sure?’ Andie replied. ‘No. But convinced? Yes.’

Bowman called out into the hall to troopers standing on the porch. ‘Please escort these gentlemen outside the yellow tape.’

Kerris glared back over his shoulder as he was led out. ‘You’ll pay for this,’ he snarled. ‘The both of you will pay for this.’

Andie followed them out onto the porch and watched the troopers walk them into the pouring rain, down the slate sidewalk to the wrought-iron gate. There were bouquets of flowers placed against the fence. The crowd had swelled and stretched fifty yards down Front Street. A half-dozen television vans were there now with cameras already set up under plastic tarps.

‘The press is crawling all over this,’ Bowman remarked gloomily. ‘And there are only going to be more of the vultures.’

‘Let them circle,’ Andie said. ‘We’re going to use them.’

‘How?’

Before Andie could reply, one of the troopers who had escorted Kerris and Powell jogged back through the rain and up the porch stairs. ‘There’s a priest down there, says he wants to come in to console the husband,’ the trooper said. ‘He says the victim worked for him.’

Andie put her hand to her brow to search the crowd pressed in against the fence. The massive upper torso of Monsignor McColl thrust up and over an ornamental yew. He wore a black raincoat and was hatless in the driving rain. The priest had lost weight in his face and neck during the past week. Skin hung loose and gray like a turkey’s wattle under his chin.

‘In the letter Charun left at Nyren’s house, he said Angel cried out,
Vida
.’

‘So?’ Bowman replied.

‘So
vida
is the Spanish word for “life”,’ Andie said. ‘Mike Kerris lived in Chile six years. Monsignor McColl lived in Guatemala for nearly ten.’

Bowman stared at her in total confusion. ‘What are you—?’

‘Monsignor McColl stays outside, too.’

‘But the man’s a priest.’

‘He’s a suspect,’ Andie declared. ‘I’ll explain it all later. Right now, we’re going to go down in front of those cameras and tell the world about the journal and the pouch. At the very least, we prevent another killing. At best, we lay a trap to catch a psychopath.’

I
T WAS IN THE
hot, humid twilight that Gallagher first caught sight of Harold. He strolled along a path through parallel beds of flowering shrubs from the direction of the Lincoln Memorial. He wore a crisp blue seersucker suit and a starched Egyptian cotton shirt with a blue polka-dot bow tie, all draped on a hanger-thin physique. He jauntily sported a slim black cane with a silver tip and an ivory handle carved into the face of a wolf.

The slight limp only served to amplify his confident, almost aristocratic bearing. Without invitation, he sat between Jerry Matthews and Gallagher on a park bench in the trees near the Vietnam Memorial.

Harold placed both palms over the wolf’s head and crooned in a velvety Southern drawl: ‘Viburnum. Isn’t the scent intoxicating? I have often thought that viburnum is the perfume of reincarnation, of spring awakening from winter.’

Up close Gallagher could not tell whether Harold was sixty or ninety. His steel-colored hair was still full and had been slicked back on his head, preppy-style. His skin was taut and pale to the point of translucence. His lips were bloodless, almost blue. He took a deep sniff and beamed with pleasure. ‘Ahhh, viburnum!’

‘Cut the shit, Harold,’ Jerry barked. Jerry sported a black beard, stood five-six in his dress shoes and, with his jowls and ample beer belly, resembled a bulldog in a suit. ‘Why are we here?’

Harold batted his lashes at Jerry. ‘I see your impertinence and your preference for the scatological has not ebbed with the years, Mr Matthews.’

‘I actually hoped never to see you again, you sick bastard.’

‘The feeling was mutual, you insolent, nosy pup,’ Harold replied in that modulated drawl. ‘But call it kismet that we meet again.’

Jerry had grabbed Gallagher at National Airport when he stepped off the eleven o’clock shuttle from Boston. They had seven hours to kill before the meeting. In that time Gallagher heard the whole story of Harold, which is how he had introduced himself to Jerry on that very park bench early in the Bush Administration. Jerry had been working on a story for
Time
about the so-called ‘black budget’ that funded the various intelligence agencies. During the course of researching that story he heard rumors of a clandestine organization funded out of unaudited intelligence slush funds. Jerry had only the barest of details about the group, but his early research led him to believe that one of its functions was political assassination, something the U.S. Congress had outlawed nearly two decades before.

Jerry worked that angle off and on for nearly a year and a half. His sources had pointed to specific incidents—the strangling of a banker in Peru, the disappearance of a Lebanese diplomat in Paris, the shooting of a Hong Kong trade representative in Jakarta—yet he had been unable to pull the pieces together into any pattern coherent enough to publish.

Then in mid-1990, someone sent Jerry an unsigned letter telling him to look into the activities of an import-export business based in Miami. That corporation had ties to a Louisiana bank that had undergone exponential growth during the Reagan years. Jerry began making inquiries about Pluto Ltd. Two weeks later, as he left his office, a limousine driver approached him to announce that a representative of Pluto requested the immediate pleasure of his company.

Jerry was driven to the Lincoln Memorial and told to walk to a bench near the Vietnam Memorial. Harold waited for him with a thick folder in his lap. Inside were photographs of Jerry naked on a Jamaican beach with his boss’s wife. There was also a dossier detailing his younger brother’s involvement in a cocaine deal. Jerry’s stomach had hollowed at the blackmail, but he’d figured that his boss was a prig who never treated his wife well. Lauren would be better off divorced. As for his brother, Jerry had written him off long ago. He could survive those hits and told Harold as much.

Harold had merely smiled, then taken out two more pictures, these of young girls playing in a park near Fort Collins, Colorado. There were tapered black lines joining over the head of each girl. The photographs had been taken through a telescopic rifle sight. The girls were Jerry’s nieces.

Jerry’s will for the story dissolved on the spot. Indeed, hunger for any journalistic scoop ebbed shortly thereafter, and so he had come to write books and scripts, and so he had come to work with Gallagher.

Now Harold turned. His waxy fingers fluttered, then settled on the cane. You are a policeman, Mr Gallagher?’

‘No, but I’m working with the Vermont State Police on these murders.’

Harold batted those long, feminine eyelashes at him. ‘In what capacity?’

‘Researcher. I’m a cultural anthropologist and filmmaker.’

‘Odd skills for a homicide consultant. And you bring what to the table?’

‘Insight.’

‘Hmmmm,’ Harold said, his eyes burning like embers blown by the wind. ‘Mr Gallagher, I sense you are a disturbed man, hiding something. To whom do you offer insight—the police or yourself?’

The question unnerved Gallagher and he was at a loss for an answer. Emily, Many Horses and then Andie flitted through his mind. He had the sudden urge to call Andie, to apologize for his rebuff the evening before, to tell her that he cared, that he wanted whatever they had to go on after all of this was over. Harold seemed to smell his conflict.

‘Mr Gallagher?’ he said softly.

‘Both,’ Gallagher finally sputtered.

Harold allowed himself the barest hint of a grin. ‘Honesty is the beginning of self-understanding.’

‘Who are you?’ Gallagher demanded indignantly. What are you?’

His lips bowed into broad amusement. He cast one hand lazily off in the direction of Capitol Hill. ‘I am retired now. But in the local bureaucracy I was known as a facilitator. You can think of me as a baseball scout or a literary agent, a recruiter of emerging talent.’

‘Is that how you know Terrance Danby?’ Gallagher persisted.

‘Why, yes,’ Harold said.

Jerry sat forward, ten years of painful wonder echoing in his voice. ‘What kind of talent did you recruit, Harold?’

‘G
O CHECK IT OUT
,’ Andie ordered. She thrust the pink phone-message slip at a waiting detective. ‘If it’s real, if they’ve got a piece of the journal, call me immediately.’

The detective nodded and rushed out of the crowded room.

‘We’ve got another one,’ cried the dispatcher, a flamboyant man in his early fifties. Chris Shaddock was chubby and he had overdyed his curly red hair. ‘This guy’s in Bellows Falls.’

‘Shaddock, take the information, then fax it through to the Rockingham Barracks,’ Andie said. ‘And—’

‘I know, I know,’ Shaddock whined. ‘If it’s real call immediately.’

‘Right,’ Andie said.

The Bethel Barracks of the Vermont State Troopers, where she and Bowman had decided to set up the headquarters of the manhunt, was approaching pandemonium. Phones rang. Detectives shouted. Fax machines whirred. The barrack’s blinds had been drawn to cut the glare of the klieg lights of the television cameras hungering in the parking lot outside.