The Wolf in Winter (23 page)

CHAPTER

XXXVII

I drove back toward Scarborough, but stopped off at Bull Moose Music’s massive warehouse store on Payne Road and browsed the racks for an hour. It was part pleasure, part displacement activity. I felt that I’d reached a dead end as far as Prosperous was concerned, and my talk with Williamson had served only to confirm my own suspicions about the town without opening any new avenues of inquiry.

I was no closer to finding Annie Broyer than I had been when I started out, and I was beginning to wonder if I might not have been mistaken in assuming that everything I had learned in the past week was useful or even true: an elderly couple, a blue car, a passing reference to a job in Prosperous made to a woman with the mental capacity of a child, and a homeless man’s obsession with the carvings on an ancient church. Every piece of information I had gathered was open to question, and it was entirely possible that Annie Broyer would turn up in Boston, or Chicago, or Seattle in the days and weeks to come. Even Lucas Morland’s passing reference to Annie as an “ex-junkie” could be explained away if he had made a simple phone call to Portland or Bangor after my first visit to the town. In the eyes of some, I had already violated the primary commandment of an investigation: don’t assume. Don’t create patterns where there are none. Don’t conceive of a narrative and then force the evidence to fit it. On the other hand,
all investigations involve a degree of speculation—the capacity to bear witness to a crime and imagine a chain of events that might have caused that crime to be committed. An investigation was not simply a matter of historical research, as Warraner had suggested. It was an act of faith both in one’s own capacities and in the possibility of justice in a world that had made justice subservient to the rule of law.

But I had no crime to investigate. I had only a homeless man with a history of depression who might well have hanged himself in a fit of desperation, and a missing girl with a history of narcotic and alcohol abuse who had drifted for most of her life. Was I fixating on Prosperous because its citizens were wealthy and privileged, while Jude and his daughter were poor and suffering? Was I marking Warraner and Morland for simply doing what a pastor and a policeman should do, which was to protect their people?

And yet . . .

Michael Warraner wasn’t quite a fraud, but something potentially much more dangerous: a frustrated man with a set of religious or spiritual principles that reinforced his inflated opinion of himself and his place in the world. It was also clear from the way Morland reacted to my unauthorized visit to the church that Warraner had a position of authority in the town, which meant that there were influential individuals who either shared his beliefs or didn’t entirely discount them.

What—if anything—all that had to do with the disappearance of Annie and the death of her father, I did not know. Prosperous just felt wrong to me, and I’d grown to trust my feelings. Then again, Angel and Louis might have asked if I ever felt
right
about anything, and if I’d learned to trust those feelings too. I could have countered by ­replying that nobody ever asked for my help when there wasn’t a problem, but I then found myself growing annoyed that I was having arguments—and, more to the point, losing them—with Angel and Louis even when they weren’t actually present.

I headed into Portland, where I caught a movie at the Nickelodeon
and then ate a burger at the Little Tap House on High Street. The building had once housed Katahdin before that restaurant’s move to Forest Avenue. A tapas place had briefly occupied the location in the aftermath of the move, and now the Little Tap House had carved out a niche for itself as a neighborhood bar with good food. I drank a soda and tried to read a little of the books with which Williamson had entrusted me. They traced the development of foliate sculpture from at least the first century AD, through its adoption by the early Church, and on to its proliferation throughout Western Europe. Some of the illustrations were more graphic than others. My server seemed particularly dismayed by a capital in the cathedral at Autun that depicted a man disappearing into the jaws of a leafed face. Many of the carvings, such as a thirteenth-century mask from Bamberg Cathedral, in Germany, had a kind of beauty to them, which rendered them even more sinister.

I did find a source for Williamson’s Latin reference: the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus, in which Satan was described as
radix omnium malorum
, “the root of all evil,” alongside a picture of a tricephalos, a three-faced demon from the façade of San Pietro, in Tuscany. Coiling tendrils pushed through the mouths of the demons, extrusions from the original root, and the text described them as “blood-suckers” in the context of another fifteenth-century head from Melrose Abbey. Here too there was a reference to the relationship between the human and plant elements in the masks as essentially hostile or parasitic, although the general consensus seemed to be that they represented a type of symbiosis, a long-term interaction and mutually beneficial relationship between two species. Man received the blessings of nature’s fruits, or the rebirth wrought by the changing of the seasons, and in return—

Well, that last part wasn’t so clear, although the cathedral at Autun, with its images of consumption, offered one possible realm of speculation.

I closed the books, paid my tab, and left the bar. The weather had
warmed up a little since the previous night—not by much, but the weathermen were already predicting that the worst of winter was now behind us for another year; prematurely, I suspected. The sky was clear as I drove home, and the saltwater marshes smelled fresh and clean as I parked outside my house. I walked around to the back door to enter by the kitchen. It had become a habit with me ever since Rachel and Sam moved out. Entering by the front door and seeing the empty hallway was somehow more depressing than going in through the kitchen, which was where I spent most of my time anyway. I opened the door and had reached out to key in the alarm code when my dead daughter spoke to me from behind. She said just one word

daddy

and it contained within it the prospect of living and the hope of dying, of endings and beginnings, of love and loss and peace and rage, all wrapped up in two whispered syllables.

I was already diving to the floor when the first of the shotgun blasts hit me, the pellets tearing the skin from my back, the hair from my skull, the flesh from my bones. I burned. I fell to the kitchen floor, and found the strength to kick at the door, knocking it closed, but the second blast blew away the lock and most of the glass, showering me with slivers and splinters. The floor was slick with my blood as I tried to rise, my feet sliding in the redness. I somehow stumbled into the hallway, and now pistol shots were sounding from behind me. I felt the force of their impact in my back, and my shoulder, and my side. I went down again, but as the pain took hold I found it in myself to twist my body to the left. I screamed as I landed on the floor, but I was now halfway across the doorway of my office. My right hand found the corner of the wall, and I dragged myself inside. Again I kicked a door closed, and managed to seat myself upright against my desk. I drew my gun. I raised
it and fired a round. I didn’t know what it hit. I didn’t care. It was enough that it was in my hand.

“Come on,” I cried, and blood and spittle sprayed from my lips. “
Come on!
” I said, louder now, and I did not know if I was speaking to myself or to whatever or whomever lay beyond the door.

“Come on,” I said a third time, to the approaching darkness, to the figures that beckoned from within it, to the peace that comes at last to every dead thing. Above it all sounded the wailing of the alarm.

I fired again, and two bullets tore through the door in response. One missed. The other did not.

“Come—”

THE WOLF LOOKED UP
at the men who surrounded him. He had tried to gnaw his trapped paw off, but had not succeeded. Now he was weary. The time had come. He snarled at the hunters, the fur around his mouth wet with his own blood. A sharp, bitter scent troubled his senses, the smell of noise and dying.

He howled, the final sound that he would ever make. In it was both defiance and a kind of resignation. He was calling on death to come for him.

The gun fired, and the wolf was gone.

“HOLD HIM! HOLD HIM!”

Light. No light.

“Jesus, I can’t even get a grip on him, there’s so much blood. Okay, on three. One, two—”

“Ah, for Christ’s sake.”

“His back is just meat. What the fuck happened here?”

Light. No light. Light.

“Can you hear me?”

Yes. No. I saw the paramedic. I saw Sharon Macy behind him. I tried to speak, but no words would come.

“Mr. Parker, can you hear me?”

Light. Stronger now. “You stay with me, you hear? You stay!”

Up. Movement. Ceiling. Lights.

Stars.

Darkness.

Gone.

CHAPTER

XXVIII

The house, larger than most of its neighbors, lay on a nondescript road midway between Rehoboth Beach and Dewey Beach on the Delaware coast. Most of the surrounding homes were vacation rentals or summer places used by Washingtonians with a little money to spend. Transience was the norm here. True, a handful of year-round residents lived on the road, but they tended to mind their own business and left others to mind theirs.

A significant number of the homes in the area were owned by gay couples, for Rehoboth had long been one of the East Coast’s most gay-friendly resorts. This was perhaps surprising, given that Rehoboth was founded in 1873 by the Reverend Robert W. Todd as a Methodist meeting camp. Reverend Todd’s vision of a religious community was short-lived, though, and by the 1940s the gay Hollywood crowd were carousing at the DuPont property along the ocean. Then came the Pink Pony Bar in the 1950s, and the Pleasant Inn and the Nomad Village in the 1960s, all known to be welcoming to DC’s more closeted citizens. In the 1990s, some of the town’s less tolerant residents made a vain attempt to restore what were loosely termed “family values,” in some cases by beating the shit out of anyone who even looked gay. But negotiations among representatives of the gay community, homeowners, and the police largely put an end to the unrest, and Rehoboth
settled gently into its role as not only the “Nation’s Summer Capital” but the “Nation’s
Gay
Summer Capital.”

The big house was rarely occupied, even by the standards of vacation homes. Neither was its care entrusted to any of the local Realtors, many of whom boosted their income by acting as agents for summer rentals, and taking care of houses during the winter months. Nevertheless, it was well kept, and local rumor suggested that it had been bought either as part of some complicated tax write-off (in which case the fewer questions asked about it the better, especially in an area swarming with Washingtonians who might or might not have connections to the IRS) or as a corporate investment, for its ownership apparently lay with a shelf company, itself a part of another shelf company, on and on like a series of seemingly infinite matryoshka dolls.

And now, with the hold of winter still upon the land, and the beaches largely empty and devoid of life, the house at last was occupied. Two men, one young and one old, had been noticed entering and leaving, although they did not socialize in any of the local bars and restaurants, and the older gentleman appeared somewhat frail.

But two men, of whatever vintages, living together was not so unusual in Rehoboth Beach, and so their presence went largely unremarked.

INSIDE THE HOUSE, THE
Collector brooded by a window. There was no view of the sea here, only a line of trees that protected the house and its occupants from the curiosity of others. The furnishings were largely antiques, some acquired through clever investment but most through bequests, and occasionally by means of outright theft. The Collector viewed such acquisitions as little more than his due. After all, the previous owners had no more use for them, the previous owners being, without exception, dead.

The Collector heard the sound of the lawyer Eldritch coughing
and moving about in the next room. Eldritch slept more since the explosion that had almost cost him his life, and had destroyed the records of crimes, both public and private, painstakingly assembled over many decades of investigation. Even had the old man not been so frail, the loss of the files would have seriously curtailed the Collector’s activities. He had not realized just how much he relied upon ­Eldritch’s knowledge and complicity in order to hunt and prey. Without ­Eldritch, the Collector was reduced to the status of an onlooker, left to speculate on the sins of others without the evidence needed to damn them.

But in recent days some of Eldritch’s old energy had returned, and he had begun the process of rebuilding his archive. His memory was astonishing in its recall, but his recent sufferings and losses had spurred him still harder to force it to relinquish its store of secrets, fueled by hatred and the desire for revenge. He had lost almost everything that mattered to him: a woman who had been both his consort and his accomplice, and a lifetime’s work of cataloging the mortal failings of men. All he had left now was the Collector, and he would be the weapon with which Eldritch avenged himself.

And so, where once the lawyer had been a check on the Collector’s urges, he now fed them. Each day brought the two men ever closer. It reminded the Collector that, on one level, they were still father and son, although the thing that lived inside the Collector was very old, and very far from human, and the Collector had largely forgotten his previous identity as the son of the ancient lawyer in the next room.

The house was one of the newest of the Collector’s property investments, but also one of the best concealed. Curiously, he owed its existence to the detective Parker. The Collector had arrived in Rehoboth as part of his exploration of the detective’s past, his attempt to understand Parker. It was an element of Parker’s history—a minor one, admittedly, but the Collector was nothing if not meticulous—and therefore worthy of examination. The house, modest yet handsome,
drew the Collector. He was weary of sparsely furnished hideouts, of uncarpeted rooms filled only with mementos of the dead. He needed a place in which to rest, to contemplate, to plan, and so it was that, through Eldritch, he acquired the house. It remained one of the few in which he still felt secure, particularly since the detective and his friends had begun tracking him, seeking to punish him for the death of one of their own. It was off to Rehoboth that the Collector had spirited the lawyer once his wounds had healed sufficiently to enable him to travel, and now the Collector too was sequestered here. He had never known what it was to be hunted before, for he had always been the hunter. They had come close to trapping him in Newark: the recurrent pain from the torn ligaments in his leg was a reminder of that. This situation could not continue. There was harvesting to be done.

Worse, when night came the Hollow Men gathered at his window. He had deprived them of life and returned their souls to their maker. What was left of them lingered, drawn to him not only because they erroneously believed that it was he alone who had caused their ­suffering—the dead being as capable of self-delusion as the living—but because he could add to their number. That was their only comfort: that others might suffer as they did. But now they sensed his weakness, his vulnerability, and with it came a terrible, warped hope that the Collector would be wiped from the earth, and with his passing might come the oblivion they desired. At night they gathered among the trees, their skin wrinkled and mottled like old, diseased fruit, waiting, willing the detective and his allies to descend upon the Collector.

I could kill them, thought the Collector. I could tear Parker apart, and the ones called Angel and Louis. There was enough evidence against them to justify it, enough sin to tip the scales.

Probably.

Possibly.

But what if he was wrong? What might the consequences be? He had killed their friend in a fit of rage, and as a result he was now little
better than a marked animal, running from hole to hole, the ring of hunters tightening around him. If the Collector were to kill the detective, his friends would not rest until the Collector was himself buried. If the Collector were to kill Parker’s friends yet leave him alive, the detective would track him to the ends of the earth. And if, by some miracle, he were to kill all three of them? Then a line would have been crossed, and those who protected the detective from the shadows would finish what he had started and hunt the Collector to death. Whatever choice the Collector made would end the same way: the pursuit would continue until he was cornered and his punishment meted out.

The Collector wanted a cigarette. The lawyer did not like him to smoke in the house. He said that it affected his breathing. The Collector could go outside, of course, but he realized that he had grown fearful of showing himself, as if the slightest moment of carelessness might undo him. He had never before been so frightened. The experience was proving unpleasantly enlightening.

The Collector concluded that he could not kill the detective. Even if he were to do so and somehow escape the consequences of his actions, he would ultimately be acting against the Divine. The detective was important. He had a role to play in what was to come. He was human, of that the Collector was now certain, but there was an aspect of him that was beyond understanding. Somehow, in some way, he had touched, or been touched by, the Divine. He had survived so much. Evil had been drawn to him, and he had destroyed it in every instance. There were entities that feared the Collector, and yet they feared the detective even more.

There was no solution. There was no escape.

He closed his eyes, and felt the gloating triumph of the Hollow Men.

THE LAWYER ELDRITCH TURNED
on his computer and returned to the task in hand: the reconstruction of his records. He was progressing alphabetically, for the most part, but if a later name or detail came to him unexpectedly he would open a separate file and input the new information. The physical records had been little more than aides-mémoire; everything that mattered was contained in his brain.

His ears ached. His hearing had been damaged in the explosion that killed the woman and destroyed his files, and now he had to endure a continuous high-pitched tinnitus. Some of the nerves in his hands and feet had been damaged as well, causing his legs to spasm as he tried to sleep, and his fingers to freeze into claws if he wrote or typed for too long. His condition was slowly improving, but he was forced to make do without proper physiotherapy or medical advice, for the Collector feared that if Eldritch showed himself it might draw the detective down upon them.

Let him come, thought Eldritch in his worst moments, as he lay awake in his bed, his legs jerking so violently that he could almost feel the muscles starting to tear, his fingers curling so agonizingly that he was certain the bones must break through the skin. Let him come, and let us be done with all this. But somehow he would steal enough sleep to continue, and each day he tried to convince himself that he could discern a diminution in his sufferings: more time between the spasms in his legs, like a child counting the seconds between cracks of thunder to reassure himself that the storm was passing; a little more control over his fingers and toes, like a transplant patient learning to use a new limb; and a slight reduction in the intensity of the noise in his ears, in the hope that madness might be held at bay.

The Collector had set up a series of highly secure email drop boxes for Eldritch, with five-step verification and a prohibition on any outside access. Telephone contact was forbidden—it was too easy to trace—but the lawyer still had his informants, and it was important that he remain in touch with them. Now Eldritch opened the first of
the drop boxes. There was only one message inside. Its subject line was “IN CASE YOU DID NOT SEE THIS,” and it was only an hour old. The message contained a link to a news report.

Eldritch cut and pasted the link before opening it. It took him to that evening’s News Center on NBC’s Channel 6, out of Portland, Maine. He watched the report in silence, letting it play in its entirety before he called to the man in the next room.

“Come here,” said Eldritch. “You need to look at this.”

Moments later, the Collector appeared at his shoulder.

“What is it?” he said.

Eldritch let the news report play a second time.

“The answer to our problems.”