A Time of Torment (17 page)

‘Cole Farms,’ said Parker. ‘Beef liver and onions. With extra bacon. I’ll even spring for the Indian pudding to finish.’

Walsh’s shoulders sank.

‘Give me the money in advance. I don’t trust you to pay. I don’t trust you, period.’

Parker handed over two twenties.

‘I may want a soda,’ said Walsh. ‘And I’m a good tipper.’

Parker added another ten. Walsh dropped the cash in his cup holder.

‘I’ll see you there,’ he said. ‘If you die along the way, I won’t miss you.’

He pulled out of his parking space. By the time he got to the main road, Parker was already behind him.

At least Ross will be pleased
, Walsh thought. Then:

Fuck Ross.

Cole Farms had been around for more than sixty years. It stood on Lewiston Road, close by the entrance to the Spring Meadows Golf Club. The two men took a four-top, and Parker ordered a turkey sandwich while Walsh went for the promised liver and onions, with bacon and enough sides to cause the table to slope.

‘You got some nerve,’ said Walsh, once the waitress had taken their order.

‘You’re still sore about Boreas.’

‘That’s an understatement.’

Parker recalled a body on a beach, bleeding into the sand. He remembered stepping over it, and feeling nothing.

‘I told you back then: I have no blood on my hands.’

‘What about on your conscience?’

‘None there either, or not because of Boreas.’

‘That’s what concerns me.’

Parker brushed his fingers across the table, testing the smoothness of it, finding nothing, not even a crumb.

‘There’s a price to be paid for everything, Gordon,’ he said. It was the first time Walsh could ever remember Parker calling him by his first name. ‘Nothing comes free.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘Yes, you do. Something terrible came to an end in Boreas. I paid the price in pain. You paid it in silence.’

‘There are laws. I’m required to enforce them.’

‘Law and justice are not the same.’

‘I think you got away with organizing a killing. I’m reluctant to be associated with a man who could do that.’

‘And Ross?’

‘Apparently Ross doesn’t share my reservations. He told me you were on the payroll, although I understand that “sucking from the federal tit” is the more accepted expression. You that squeezed for money?’

‘It gives me flexibility. Some of my clients aren’t in a position to pay much for my services.’

‘And then there’s the price of bullets for you and your friends.’

‘We get a deal on those.’

Walsh sat back, seemingly in disgust, but also just in time to make space for his food. There was a lot of it. Parker could see that Walsh was tempted to leave it untouched and walk away, but it smelled too good. He nibbled at an onion and was lost.

‘Why are you here?’ Walsh asked.

‘Jerome Burnel.’

Walsh looked at Parker over a French fry.

‘I hear he just got out,’ he said.

‘He came to see me.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘He claims he was framed.’

‘The kiddie porn? It wasn’t my case.’

‘And the gas station shooting?’

‘I was one of the team. Tom Stedler was lead.’

‘Stedler’s long dead.’

‘Yeah. Went young. Didn’t look after himself.’

Walsh dipped a roll into a pile of liver and onion, making sure to get some bacon on there too.

‘Thank God you learned from his mistakes,’ said Parker.

‘I did. Never drink diet soda. At least sugar is natural.’

‘Burnel remembered you.’

‘Did he? Should I be flattered?’

‘He gave the impression that you might have doubted some details about the shooting of the second man, the one who called himself Henry Forde.’

Walsh shrugged. ‘The Dunstans corroborated Burnel’s version of events. At the time, there was no appetite for tugging at threads. Forde had killed a sheriff’s deputy, and he and Simus had slaughtered at least five other people. There was also the girl, Corrie Wyatt. It wouldn’t have ended well for her.’

‘At least five others?’

‘They’d cleaned the Timard house of valuables, but there were other items in the van that didn’t belong to them. It took a while, but a watch found in the vehicle was traced back to a jewelry store in Rhode Island. The watch belonged to a sixty-eight-year-old man named Arthur Dines. Dines lived alone in a house just outside Westerly. The house is still there. Dines isn’t.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘My guess is into the sea, put there by Forde and his freakish half-brother, and weighted down enough to keep him there.’

‘Wait a minute: Forde and Simus were related?’

‘Twenty-five percent shared DNA, although that didn’t come out until after Burnel went to jail, and wouldn’t have made any difference to him anyway. You know, the brother – Simus – wore dentures, and kept a set in his pocket modified with blades. What kind of man would do something like that?’

Parker took a bite of his sandwich. It was good.

‘Back to Burnel and the shooting of Forde. What was hinky?’

‘Oh, just angles more than anything else. Had Forde been turning to fire a shot, as Burnel claimed, then the bullets probably wouldn’t have hit him square in the back like they did. It looked to me like Forde was running – or stumbling – away when he was killed. Privately, Stedler agreed, but, hey, Burnel was a hero. And he was. I’m not taking that away from him. He saved everyone in that gas station, and he faced down Forde like a gunfighter. But he did finish him off. Maybe Burnel has a streak of something in him. Call it ruthlessness, if you like. He’s just harder than he looks – or was, before he went into Warren.’

‘He still denies that the child porn was his.’

‘Yeah, that was curious. He didn’t cop a plea, and there was pressure on him to do it. He kept maintaining his innocence.’

‘Maybe because he
was
innocent.’

‘Do you believe him?’

‘Angel does.’

‘And Angel is some kind of expert on sex offenders?’

‘Yeah, he kind of is.’

Walsh took in this information, and was silent for a while.

‘If he’s innocent, who set him up?’ asked Walsh.

‘It could have been his now ex-wife. They weren’t close, to put it mildly.’

‘Nah,’ said Walsh. ‘There’s not being close, and then there’s hating, and a wife would have to hate her husband the way I hate taxes to set him up on child porn charges.’

‘Well, if Burnel isn’t lying, then someone took the trouble to frame him. He thinks it was done because of the Dunstan killings.’

‘Revenge? If that was the case, then why not just shoot him?’

‘Because it would be over too soon?’

‘Then torture him first, and kill him later.’

A woman and child who were about to sit at the table across from them reconsidered their decision and moved away. Walsh noted their departure.

‘You see the effect you have on people?’ he said.

‘You’re still here.’

‘You’re paying for my time.’

‘That’s bribery.’

‘Not if you don’t get anything in return. You going to take Burnel’s dime?’

‘I think so.’

‘It won’t bring you any joy.’

‘You’d be surprised. What about Forde and Simus?’

‘No leads. They were specters.’

‘Fingerprints?’

‘We got a partial match on Simus from a burglary in Roanoke, Virginia, in 2002. Lot of valuables taken, but the occupants were on vacation at the time. Lucky for them, because they had a nineteen-year-old daughter. Still have, thanks to a time-share in Kissimmee.’

‘Burnel says that both Corrie Wyatt and Paige Dunstan are missing.’

Walsh picked some bacon from his teeth, scowled at it as though it had personally offended him, then ate it.

‘Wyatt was a junkie.’

‘Before the killings?’

‘No, after. Before them, she was just bait in a scam, rolling sad men for money. What happened at the Timard house broke her. She was drifting anyway, but the wind took her when her friends died.’

‘And Dunstan?’

‘I haven’t been following the case.’

‘But she’s officially missing?’

‘I’d have to check.’

‘Come on …’

‘Look, last I heard she was still gone, but that doesn’t mean there’s a connection to what happened at her old man’s gas station. Is that what Burnel is suggesting?’

‘It is.’

‘You do know what paranoia is, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, remember that it’s contagious. You should always wash your hands after contact with it.’

Walsh finished his liver and onions in silence. Parker picked at his sandwich, but left most of it on the plate. He still had not fully regained his appetite. He sometimes doubted that he ever would. Walsh ordered the Indian pudding to go. He told Parker that he had somewhere he had to be. It might even have been true.

‘Does Ross still pay you to report back on me?’ asked Parker, as they headed for the door.

‘He never paid me. I did it out of the goodness of my heart.’

‘And now?’

‘I don’t much care what happens to you one way or the other.’

‘But Ross does.’

Walsh wouldn’t meet Parker’s eye.

‘Yeah, he does.’

‘Make sure you spell all the names right for him,’ said Parker.

‘I will,’ Walsh replied. ‘Remind me, though: do you spell “prick” with a capital “P”?’

Parker returned home. He did some paperwork, sent out some bills, then caught a movie alone at the Nick in Portland. He preferred the local theater to the big family places out in Saco and Westbrook. He found the smell of it strangely comforting, although he had to stand up a couple of times and lean against a wall when his back started to hurt, but nobody minded because he was in the last row, and the theater was almost empty. Sometimes his skin felt too tight at the grafts, and at others he felt an ache where one of his kidneys used to be. While he stood, he reached instinctively for the small grip ball that he kept in his pocket, and kneaded it both to work his damaged left hand and distract himself from the rest of his pain.

He thought of Jerome Burnel, and murderous, scavenging men.

O
dell Watson couldn’t sleep. He was ten years old, and lived with his mother and grandmother outside Turley in a three-bedroom trailer that baked its occupants in summer and forced them to dress in layers in winter. Odell often had nightmares, but he had learned not to bother the women in his house with them. They both worked: his mother as a line cook, his grandmother as a cleaner, holding down three jobs between them, for his mother did a little cleaning on the side too, when her diner hours allowed it. She worked the breakfast shift at Shelby’s Diner, so she woke at three thirty to be there by four thirty, so she could have all her prep done when the doors opened at five. Shelby’s stood just on the other side of town, and Odell’s mother sometimes walked to work if the weather was good, to save on gas.

It was Odell’s grandmother who got him ready for school each morning and put him on the bus. Odell loved her, but she was an angry woman. She remembered her father being denied the right to vote because he couldn’t say how many bubbles were in a bar of soap, or spell the word ‘burlesque’, a term he had never heard before, and of which he did not know the meaning. When he returned two years later, he passed the literacy test, cast his vote, and immediately lost his bank credit and his job.

His grandmother was in Montgomery in 1965 when white men murdered a Michigan housewife named Viola Liuzzo, who had driven black activists from Selma to Montgomery Airport, in the days when the emblem of Alabama’s Democratic Party bore the words ‘White Supremacy’. Her killers were later applauded at a Klan parade, but Odell’s grandmother was among those on the courtroom steps nine months later when they were jailed for the killing. His grandmother married a man named Mason Coffee – ‘like the jar’, as he always said – a veteran of the Korean War who served with the Deacons for Defense and Justice, black ex-soldiers who acted as armed escorts for civil rights workers in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Eventually, his grandmother and Mason moved back to Plassey County, West Virginia, with their only child, the girl who would become Odell’s mother. Mason was now long dead, and Odell’s father was gone. He lived in Baltimore, and sent money at Christmas and on Odell’s birthday, if he remembered and had some cash to spare. It had been so long since Odell had seen him that he could no longer recall precisely what he looked like.

His grandmother would remind Odell that he was the man of the house now, and she told him the stories of Odell’s great-grandfather and grandfather because times hadn’t changed much for black folk, she warned, didn’t matter what the law said. The law could be read whatever way the powerful wanted it to read. Odell only had to look out his window to see that, she said.

He only had to look at the Cut.

Sometimes his mother or grandmother was home when Odell got back from school, but usually the trailer was empty, which meant that Odell had already learned to take care of himself. Each weekday he let himself in, prepared a sandwich, drank some milk, did his homework, and watched TV or played with his Xbox until the women returned, often together if they’d been on the same cleaning job, both of them weary and smelling of disinfectant.

Odell worked hard at school, but he was an unusually subdued child, in part because of the life he led. He was loved at home, but it was a quiet environment, the two women spending much of their time sleeping when they were not working, leaving Odell to his own devices. When he got bored of TV or games, he read. He liked stories about spacemen, and superhero comic books. He was good at drawing, but he only drew well at home. He tried not to attract too much attention at school. Life was easier that way.

The nightmares had started coming back in recent weeks. They were always the same in detail and in their unraveling: a girl in a torn dress, her boobies showing, running through the woods across from the trailer, drawing closer to the window from which Odell watched, and then being pulled down by the first of the dogs. After that came the men, and they called the dogs off and carried the girl away, all but the last of them, the one named Lucius. He had red hair, and kept looking back at the window from which Odell was watching through a gap in the drapes. In the nightmare, he approached the window, and Odell couldn’t move. He wanted to go back to bed and pretend to be asleep, but his body wouldn’t obey him and he remained frozen in place, even as he heard Lucius breathing outside his window, and saw the man’s shadow moving against the far wall, his presence already invading Odell’s little space.