The Burning Soul (43 page)
Authors: John Connolly
Tags: #Mystery, #Azizex666, #Horror, #Fantasy, #Suspense, #Thriller
‘But your parents stayed in Drake Creek?’
‘My father was a deluded zealot, and my mother lived in his shadow. Lonny’s sin was a cross that my father could bear, and he forced my mother to share the burden of it. I think he even found a way to blame her for it. He was a God-fearing man, so the fault must have been in her
ab ovo
, from the egg. He wore her down, but she never complained. Her heart had already been broken by Lonny. I was long gone by then, though, and didn’t care much for going back, although I made a couple of trips for my mother’s sake. Drake Creek wasn’t a big place, and I didn’t like to hear people whispering behind my back as I walked down the street. Even if Lonny hadn’t done what he did, I still wouldn’t have wanted to live there. It had a small-town mentality in the worst possible way.’
ab ovo
, from the egg. He wore her down, but she never complained. Her heart had already been broken by Lonny. I was long gone by then, though, and didn’t care much for going back, although I made a couple of trips for my mother’s sake. Drake Creek wasn’t a big place, and I didn’t like to hear people whispering behind my back as I walked down the street. Even if Lonny hadn’t done what he did, I still wouldn’t have wanted to live there. It had a small-town mentality in the worst possible way.’
‘Was there a lot of animosity toward your family as a result of Selina Day’s murder?’
‘Some. The colored folk put the windows of our house in I don’t know how many times, but eventually that stopped. Would have been worse if she was a white girl. Don’t get me wrong: I’m no racist, but that’s just the truth of it. What bothered people more was that they’d interfered with her before she died. They didn’t like that. Even if they’d raped her and left her, people would have dismissed it as boys getting out of hand, but they didn’t care for the combination of killing and sexual assault. That’s how I read it, anyway, but my take on it is pretty poisonous. My take on William Lagenheimer too.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Because everybody blamed Lonny for what happened, as though he was the only one who was there. Even at the trial he was portrayed as the bad boy who led innocent little Billy astray, but it was more complicated than that. Lonny and Billy, they set each other off, you understand? It was like each of them had a part missing, and the other fit it perfectly. They were the bow and the arrow, the bullet and the gun. Without one, the other was pretty much useless. I don’t believe Lonny would have gone after that girl had he been alone, nor Billy. But Billy Lagenheimer was worse than Lonny in some ways. Lonny was all up front. You looked at him, and you knew that he was trouble. Billy, he kept it hidden. He was insidious. If you crossed Lonny, then he’d call you on it. He gave his beatings, but he took them too. Billy, though, he was the kind who’d come up on you from behind and slip the knife into your back, then twist it just to be sure. He was a self-righteous little prick, but there was real harm in him. He had a way of goading my brother, pushing him, daring him. If Lonny killed that girl like they say he did, if he put his hand over her mouth and suffocated her, then Billy Lagenheimer was behind him, screaming him on. He wouldn’t have tried to stop him, not the way he claimed that he did. It took two of them to kill her, doesn’t matter whose hand felt her final breath.’
As I listened to him, I was reminded of Randall Haight telling his story, first to Aimee, then to both of us, and finally to the unsmiling agents and detectives in Aimee’s conference room. Each time the telling had been similar, practiced. But as Jerry Midas spoke, pain both physical and emotional in his voice, I recognized the sincerity of true insight. He had held these thoughts in his head for so many years, but rarely had he spoken them aloud: to a therapist, perhaps, or to his wife when the memories came and his mood sank, but not to a total stranger. Later, he would perhaps wonder if he should have been so open, and the police, when they came to him, might get a different version of the story as a result. Still truthful, but less revealing.
‘And you haven’t heard from Lonny since his release?’
‘No. Wait, that’s not true. He called me after he was released, but we didn’t talk long. I told him to come down and see me sometime, but he never did. That was the last contact I had with him. I don’t even know what name he’s living under.’
‘And your parents?’
‘My father died halfway through Lonny’s time in prison. Heart attack. Passed away behind the wheel of his car on his way to church. My mother died a couple of years before Lonny was due to be released. She used to take the Greyhound bus to visit him once a month before they moved him to Washington.’
‘Washington?’
‘Yeah, the Washington Corrections Center in Mason County. He was there for a while, and then I lost track of him when they moved him again.’
‘Under his own name?’
‘Yes, as far as I can recall. After that, old Bowens’s bleeding-heart scheme must have kicked in, because I lost track of him, and my mother was dead by then. She was old, and tired. I know that Billy’s momma eventually sold her house in Drake Creek so that she could be with him when he was released. I only heard rumors, but Mrs. Lagenheimer’s life stopped when Billy was jailed. She kept talking about him as her little boy, even when he was a grown man. It was like she’d put his childhood on hiatus, and they could pick up on it again as soon as he was released.’
This was interesting.
‘Do you know where she moved?’
‘She tried to keep it quiet, but mail had to be forwarded, and you couldn’t fart in your own bed in Drake Creek without half the town complaining about the smell. She went to New Hampshire somewhere.’
Berlin, or its vicinity, I thought. That was Randall Haight’s last place of imprisonment. It was New Hampshire’s newest prison, opened in 2000 for medium-minimum security prisoners: the ideal place in which to conclude the experiment, the journey that had led William Lagenheimer to become Randall Haight.
I thanked Jerry Midas for his help, even as I wished that I could have seen him in person. Only one detail of his story did not ring true. He had spoken so passionately about his brother that I was not sure I believed him when he said he had received no word from Lonny since his release, a single telephone call aside. Jerry was the only blood left to Lonny, and Lonny had reached out to him upon his release. He was family, and Jerry had given no indication of a falling-out between them, the natural distance between them excepted. Would a man who had been in prison for the best part of twenty years, and whose first instinct was to call his brother, not try to reestablish their relationship? Similarly, would an older brother who seemed to know his younger sibling so well not attempt to remain in touch with him?
But Midas had more to say, as though he had picked up on my doubts. ‘What my brother and Billy did was a terrible thing, Mr. Parker, and they’ll have to live with it for the rest of their lives, but that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve a chance to be better men. I’d like to know that Lonny’s okay, and if you find out where he is you could tell him that I was asking after him, but if he’s started again somewhere new, then I wish him only good luck. He was a boy when he committed his crime. He’s a man now, and I hope he’s a good one.’
‘I hope so too, Mr. Midas.’
‘And Billy? How’s he doing? I know that Lonny blamed him for blabbing to the cops, and maybe my opinion of him is biased because of that. Billy never was very strong, not like Lonny. He got bullied a lot in school. Lonny looked out for him, I think. Without Lonny beside him, Billy wasn’t the same kid. But I guess Billy wasn’t all bad for Lonny either. These things even out in the end, I suppose.’
‘Why was William bullied?’ I asked.
‘He was slow. No, that wasn’t it. He was really smart, but he had some disorder. He had to work really hard in school to understand words and numbers. They’d get mixed up in his head. What’s he doing now?’
‘He’s an accountant,’ I said, the words tumbling out of my mouth before I realized that I’d said them.
‘An accountant?’ said Midas. ‘Well, isn’t that something? I guess people do change, because Billy Lagenheimer never could add for shit.’
32
L
ouis and Angel were growing impatient. Tailing people wasn’t what they were good at. They preferred a more confrontational aspect to their work. They were particularly frustrated by Allan, who appeared to be intent only on performing the kind of mundane tasks that might be expected of someone who had been working long hours without a break, and now had to catch up on the basics of maintaining his household. Allan visited a bank in Rockport, and a hardware store. He stopped at a sub shop for a sandwich, then stocked up on cheap household items and cheaper food at a bargain store as Angel disconsolately trailed him around. So bored was Angel that it took him a minute to notice that Allan had stopped in the diaper aisle and was adding a jumbo pack to the canned foods and chicken pieces already in his cart, followed by the kind of baby food that came from Asia and needed to be checked for formaldehyde and broken glass before it could be fed to a child.
ouis and Angel were growing impatient. Tailing people wasn’t what they were good at. They preferred a more confrontational aspect to their work. They were particularly frustrated by Allan, who appeared to be intent only on performing the kind of mundane tasks that might be expected of someone who had been working long hours without a break, and now had to catch up on the basics of maintaining his household. Allan visited a bank in Rockport, and a hardware store. He stopped at a sub shop for a sandwich, then stocked up on cheap household items and cheaper food at a bargain store as Angel disconsolately trailed him around. So bored was Angel that it took him a minute to notice that Allan had stopped in the diaper aisle and was adding a jumbo pack to the canned foods and chicken pieces already in his cart, followed by the kind of baby food that came from Asia and needed to be checked for formaldehyde and broken glass before it could be fed to a child.
Angel abandoned his basket of obscurely branded cookies and close-to-expiration coffee, and returned to the car. Louis was trying to calm himself by listening to more Arvo Pärt, which Angel muted as soon as he closed the door behind him. Angel had decided that his first act upon ascending to the throne of world domination would be to turn America’s nuclear arsenal on Estonia unless it handed Arvo Pärt over to him.
‘You turned off Pärt,’ said Louis.
‘How can you tell? Anyway, forget that. Take a look.’
Allan was emerging from the store, his cart loaded with bags.
‘Guess what he has in the bags?’ said Angel.
‘Cheap shit.’
‘Cheap baby shit.’
Louis roused himself to a point just past indifference.
‘Really?’
‘Exciting, huh? That’s what people in the trade call a “clue.”’
‘Let me jump ahead of you, Sherlock. You’re thinking that he doesn’t have a kid.’
‘That we know of.’
‘I’m thinking that he has a sister.’
‘That we don’t know of.’
‘Exactly. And maybe she has a kid.’
Some of Angel’s enthusiasm dissipated, but he recovered enough to bet Louis a dollar that Allan didn’t have a sister. Louis took the bet, and raised Angel ten that this was as eventful as the day was going to get. As it happened, Louis would be eleven dollars down by the day’s end.
Allan drove to a wood-sided apartment building on the northern outskirts of Lincolnville. There were three cars in its lot, none of them less than a decade old. A drape moved at a first floor window as Allan pulled in. Moments later, a girl appeared at the door. She was very thin, and wore a pink oversized man’s shirt and dark blue jeans. Her hair was black and hung loose, partly obscuring her delicate features but failing to hide how young she was. Her feet were bare, and she had a cigarette in her right hand. Allan removed most of the shopping bags from the trunk of his car and brought them with him as he went to greet her. She rose onto the tips of her toes to kiss him, her arms curling around his neck, her mouth wide open as she pressed herself against him. Angel and Louis watched them from a block away through a gap between two of the neighboring houses.
‘His sister,’ said Angel.
‘They’re very close,’ said Louis. ‘Call Parker.’
The building was owned and managed by a company called Ascent Property Services, Inc. One of the cars, a 1997 Subaru, was registered to a Mary Ellen Schrock. Mary Ellen Schrock was nineteen years and ten months old. A further search revealed that Mary Ellen Schrock had given birth to a baby girl, Summer Marilyn Schrock, thirteen months earlier. Mary Ellen Schrock had declined to name the father on the birth certificate. I told Angel and Louis all of this as I sat in the backseat of their car, watching the property.
‘What’s the age of consent here?’ asked Angel.
‘Sixteen, but it’s sexual abuse of a minor if she’s under eighteen and the offender is over twenty-one.’
‘Which makes it legal between them.’
‘Legal when the child was conceived, and just barely,’ I said. ‘But there’s no way of knowing when Allan started seeing her.’
‘Assuming he’s the father.’
‘Which we’re assuming,’ I said.
‘Because he is,’ said Angel.
Allan had told me that he’d been divorced for a year, but the marriage had ended sometime before. Perhaps his wife had found out about his affair, or Allan had felt the need to confess to her after the girl became pregnant. He was a small-town police chief, bringing in enough to keep himself and his wife but not in anything approaching luxury. There would be no way to hide any payments that he needed to make to the mother of his child, and it didn’t look as if she was living with her parents, which meant he would have been under pressure to provide for her and the baby. Confess or get found out: It wasn’t much of a choice. His wife, either out of pity or a desire to rid herself of her errant husband as quickly as possible, had allowed her silence to be bought, leaving Allan with an illegitimate child, the child’s dependent mother, and a job that paid barely enough to keep his head above water. But if anybody found out about the child, and particularly about the youth of the mother, Allan would be out of a job, and would be facing awkward questions about the girl’s age at the commencement of the relationship. Even if it had started when she was over eighteen, or he could persuade her to say that it had, his reputation would be destroyed, whether or not there was a moral turpitude clause in his contract with the Pastor’s Bay Police Department.
But somebody had found out about his young girlfriend, and after what I had witnessed outside the Hallowed Grounds coffee shop that morning I was prepared to guess who that might be. It would be hard to hide secrets from Mrs. Shaye, who struck me as a woman who knew the value of storing up hidden knowledge in a small town. She would want to safeguard her own job, and turning whistle-blower on her employer over a personal matter would almost certainly result in his successor’s finding an excuse to dispense with her services as soon as it was possible to do so without leaving the department open to a legal challenge. After all, nobody likes a rat. Better, then, to feed the information anonymously when the opportunity arose. The disappearance of Anna Kore had provided both that opportunity and the impetus to tell. The fact that Kurt Allan had a young girlfriend didn’t necessarily mean that he was a pedophile. Neither did it mean that he was connected to whatever had happened to Anna, but it didn’t look good.
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