Ghost Dance (31 page)

‘Father D’Angelo was one of the journal holders,’ Gallagher whispered. ‘Which means Monsignor McColl is one of the journal holders.’

Now Gallagher crept down the hall toward the priest’s office. The door creaked open. His headlamp played over the pictures on the wall behind his desk, stopping at the photograph of the priest mountain climbing in the Andes. He carried the sort of blue rope and pitons they’d seen outside David Nyren’s window.

He moved the beam over another picture of the priest, this one with the orphans of Hennessy House. Row after row of boyish faces. For the second time Gallagher’s attention tripped over one youth in the third row. He had Gallagher’s eyes, cheekbones and hairline. But his lower front teeth overbit his upper lip and his shoulders bunched like the back blades of a mongrel dog that has decided to attack the man who whips him. Was he Danby?

The third photograph showed Monsignor McColl in front of his church in the jungles of Guatemala. Gallagher peered at an older girl standing right next to the priest. She was maybe fourteen, possibly fifteen, beautiful and sad in a way that reminded him of Andie. Was this girl Angel?

Gallagher trailed the headlamp beam off the pictures, over carved bowls, and brought it to rest on two empty brackets where a machete had been displayed the first two times he’d been in the priest’s office.

It was four-fifteen in the morning by the time Gallagher got back to the truck. The empty grave, the tear on the painting, the climbing experience and the missing machete. McColl was the killer. He was Charun. The evidence was too strong to be a coincidence. Gallagher stopped at a pay telephone at the convenience store and dialed.

‘Hello?’ a sleepy voice answered.

‘It’s Pat Gallagher. But I’d prefer if you consider me an anonymous tipster.’

Lieutenant Bowman groaned into the phone. ‘What are you talking about? It’s four-thirty in the morning!’

He told her what he had found outside and inside the rectory.

‘You’re admitting to breaking and entering here, Mr Gallagher,’ Bowman snapped, now fully awake. ‘That’s felony.’

‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘This sick son of a bitch has got the woman I—’

‘What do you want me to do?’ Bowman interrupted.

‘Put out an all-points bulletin on him. Tear that rectory apart. Have every cop in the state looking for him!’

‘Slow down now! What’s his motive?’

Gallagher shifted the phone receiver to his other ear. ‘He’s covering up Father D’Angelo’s involvement in the death of Sarah Many Horses because the real story would mean the end of his chances at sainthood. He’s presenting himself as a psychotic serial killer to throw you off the track of what he really is—a cold-blooded, rational killer. He’s using the Charun stuff as a cover.’

‘A cover-up?’ Bowman said skeptically. ‘Is that enough of a motive?’

‘I think it is for a zealot whose own aunt was saved by D’Angelo.’

In the end, Bowman agreed. But only halfheartedly. She would put more men on McColl and she’d get a judge to issue a search warrant for the rectory. Then she warned Gallagher to stay out of any more rectories and hung up.

Dawn was coming. In the sky, towering thunderhead clouds boiled east toward Lawton Mountain. Just as they reached the peak, the rising sun hit them and the sky turned a rich and troubling magenta.

Gallagher drove at a snail’s pace north through the waking town, trying to see in the faces of Lawton’s citizens an explanation for the feeling that circled his neck like a noose. In that lurid dawn, the chrome glowed weirdly on the rack of headlights mounted on the roof of the jacked-up red Ford that Bernie Chittenden spun into the narrow lot behind the Otterslide General Store.

Andie’s shotgun came to his hands as if of its own accord, and before Gallagher had time to think, he was out of the truck and slipping up behind Chittenden as he fumbled with a padlock to the store’s back door. The muzzle touched behind the storekeeper’s left ear and he jerked and looked down the barrel.

‘What the—?’

‘Why did you try to run me and Andie Nightingale off the Gorm Ridge Road?’ Gallagher demanded.

‘You’re freaking crazy!’

‘That’s right, I am,’ he said, grinning maniacally. He pressed the shotgun muzzle to the end of Chittenden’s nose and clicked off the safety. ‘Now tell me why.’

Sweat gushed off the man’s forehead and slurried down in his scraggly beard. His breath came out thick and forced. ‘ ’Cause Mikey told me to.’

‘Mike Kerris?’ Gallagher said. ‘Chief Mike Kerris?’

‘Eh-yuh. He told me to scare ya.’

‘Why?’

‘Can ya take the gun off my nose, man? I feel like I’m gonna sneeze and you’re gonna blow my fucking head off.’

‘That’s the idea,’ Gallagher said. ‘Now why?’

‘He said it was old family business you find Andie were looking into, stuff some people didn’t want to come out.’

‘Family people, as in the Powell family?’

Chittenden nodded. ‘My mom’s a Powell.’

‘What are the Powells hiding?’

Chittenden shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’

‘You blindly follow Kerris’ orders without even knowing why?’

‘Don’t want to know,’ Chittenden said. ‘My business done good, this whole town done good the past fifteen years ’cause a the Powells. Anyway, I made sure ya didn’t get hurt. Just scared.’

‘Where’s Kerris now?’

‘Don’t know,’ the shopkeeper said. But for a second his attention shifted off the barrel.

‘You’re lying,’ Gallagher said, pressing the muzzle so tight against his nose it flattened and his nostrils made little whistling sounds.

‘Jesus, take it easy, man!’ Chittenden whimpered.

‘Talk!’

‘Last I seen Mike was day before yesterday,’ the storekeeper said. ‘One of my headlights busted free of the rack when I was chasing after you I told Mike and he said he’d head up Gorm to find it before you or Andie Nightingale did.’

H
ALFWAY UP GORM RIDGE
, Gallagher heard and felt the first thunderstorm hit. Bolts of lightning slashed the sky. The truck shook from the explosions. The wind accelerated. Hail pummeled the deserted rutted road all the way to the gap on the ridge.

There was no sign of Kerris’ truck or the black Thunderbird Lieutenant Bowman said Monsignor McColl drove, for that matter. It had occurred to Gallagher during the drive that the priest was a mountain climber. He could survive the elements. But the question that nagged at him was whether Andie Nightingale could. Or whether Charun had already left her body behind a mossy log or tossed it to the bottom of a ravine.

Gallagher pulled the truck over at the gap between the ridges. Hemlock branches provided slick handholds that let him lean out over the edge of the ravine, close to the source of the Bluekill, searching the early-morning gloom for his greatest fear.

Lightning flashed to the west over the Lawton valley floor. Each crack granted him monochromatic still flashes of the Bluekill’s endless frenzied wrestle with the rocky gorge. Wet, mossy walls. Frothed white water. A piece of driftwood wedged between two boulders. But no body.

Gallagher did not know what to do. Andie had been in Chaun’s clutches nearly thirty-six hours now. Or she had been dead nearly thirty-six hours. He fought back a dry heave, remembering the brutal imagery of necrophilia in the killer’s last note and the terrible humiliation in Andie’s voice when she’d described what Kerris had done to her at the condominium party so many years ago.

He crawled back up the bank and stood defeated with his palms raised toward the sky. The rain splattered his face and he sank to his knees in the muddy road, sure now that he had lost his second chance forever.

The woods before Gallagher were spruce fir pocked with stunted hickory trees that quivered in the breeze and shifted outline in the cloud cover. A faint game trail led out through the trees toward a pair of towering glacial-cast boulders. There was a far-off trilling sound in the rain, like a cedar flute blowing on a mesa. Pale movement flickered to life, then disappeared beyond the boulders the way a form will surface and vanish in wind-driven clouds. Gallagher imagined a running woman with a waist-length black braid. She wore an indigo skirt and a vest adorned with red moons and white stars.

He got the shotgun from the front seat and went into the woods down the game trail. The forest was thick and electric with ozone. Two ravens lifted off the bones of a dead deer that lay in front of the stone pillars. He stood before the rocks, understanding that for him they were a gate into the underworld.

Gallagher stepped through the stone gate. A black cloud of insects immediately surrounded him. Biting blackflies and the season’s first mosquitoes. The soil underfoot turned soft and oozing. Serpentine tangles of grapevine growing off the trees, the lower trunks of which were smothered in green and purple moss. Water dripped off every branch.

It took him nearly a half hour of sloshing to escape the swale and emerge into a vast grove of white pines, spruce and hemlock. The understory branches clawed at his face and hands. There was a flash of lightning to the west and he caught a silvery reflection on a bench above him.

The shotgun became an uncertain ally as Gallagher climbed the forty yards up the steep bank. Tire tracks rutted a logging road that ran along the bench. The tracks rounded a curve and stopped at a pile of fresh fir and pine branches. The pile ran twenty feet long and stood eight feet high and fifteen feet wide.

Slash pile, he thought. Probably a logger working in the area. He looked down the bank, trying to figure out where he’d been standing when the metal had reflected. There was a flash of heat lightning and there was that glitter again: ten feet ahead under the pile of branches.

The two trucks had been parked bumper to bumper on the logging trail, men covered with the debris. The front vehicle was a Green 1983 Volkswagen camper. It was the same color as the van seen leaving the woods near Nyren’s. The second was a midnight-blue Suburban with the Lawton police seal emblazoned on the door. Gallagher tried the door to Kerris’ truck. Locked. He peered through the window. The wires to the radio hung torn and askew.

He tugged open the front door to the Volkswagen camper and froze. Hanging off the rearview mirror was a rosary at the end of which dangled a tiny gold crucifix encrusted with a red jewel. Beside it, attached to a length of black string, was a closeup black-and-white photograph of a woman holding the bridle of a horse. Her cheeks were more severely concave and her oval eyes were harsher than Andie’s, but she had a similar facial construction and that same generous mane of hair, only duskier. She wore a black gaucho-style hat, a starched high-collar white shirt, black riding britches, and black jodhpur boots. She held the bridle of a stallion in one hand and a riding crop in the other.

‘Hello, Persephone,’ Gallagher said. ‘Or should I call you Angel?’

Was it possible she was the same girl who stood next to McColl in the picture of the Guatemalan orphanage? And then Gallagher had the sudden thought that he had it all wrong. Maybe Kerris had met Angel when he lived in South America. Maybe Kerris was Charun and he used the Volkswagen truck not for fishing, but for a sick form of hunting.

By now it was two hours past dawn. The second violent wave of warm rain burst over the mountain peak. Gallagher bowed into it and followed the logging road for almost a mile. From the disturbances in the leaves, someone else had walked the trail recently, and he sneaked along with the gun cradled and ready. Every twig snap, every gust of wind, every clap of thunder seemed to contain more than it should.

The road looped a knoll and dropped off the other side of the ridge, angling back to the east. Three hundred yards later he crested a rise.

Below lay a decrepit squatter’s shack overgrown with thorns. In the murky light Gallagher could see another wrecked hovel and then at least four other ruins in the woods. And then a clearing with charred stumps and a cabin with a sagging roof and porch. He had somehow come in on the opposite end of that squalor people from Lawton called Danbyville. Looking at it, he had a vague sense of
déjà vu.
And then he felt a tingling sensation where his spine met his head, as if a woman were dancing her fingers there. Andie was in that cabin. Gallagher was sure of it.

Gallagher considered turning around, racing the miles back through the woods to the truck, finding a phone and calling Lieutenant Bowman. But he wanted to be sure before he sounded the alarm. He stood motionless and listened. There was nothing but the stilling breeze and the rain dripping off the trees, so he inched his way down the slope next to the first shack and found a tangled path leading off through the bracken toward the cabin.

The path forked twice. Side trails led off toward the various shacks and outbuildings that had once made up the Danby enclave in exile. On the steep bank behind the shacks Gallagher could see other paths leading up onto the mountain top. His path was only one of three main trails that crossed the overgrown plateau.

At the second intersection he noticed a length of taut green cord attached to a bent sapling perhaps four inches in diameter. He used a stick to clear out the leaves, revealing a snare setup like one he’d seen Aborigines use in Australia to catch rabbits. Only this one was big enough to catch a man.

Gallagher sidled around the booby trap. Off to his right, four ravens flapped up out of the brush surrounding the second ruin. Their wings panted the air in long, lazy strokes. They landed in a wind-stunted pine and cawed loudly, and he hunkered down until they stopped.

The shack closest to the main cabin was the one he’d seen from the clearing the day he and Andie had visited. An entire wall still stood. Gallagher crawled behind it, wiped the rain off his face, then peeked around the right corner.

Lime-green ferns fluttered. The forest’s dripping muffled all sound. The cabin appeared unchanged. Except for the windows and the door. They had all been blocked off with dark fabric. If a helicopter hovered over that malignant clearing at night, the pilot would see no light burning inside. Andie was here. So was Charun.