The Burning Soul (12 page)

Authors: John Connolly

Tags: #Mystery, #Azizex666, #Horror, #Fantasy, #Suspense, #Thriller

BOOK: The Burning Soul

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A pinging sound from my computer brought me back to consciousness. There was an e-mail in my in-box from Anita Bowens, consisting of a short message and an attachment. The message read:

My father hopes that Randall, as he now thinks of him (and, as he hopes, Randall now thinks of himself) is doing well, that he has grasped the chance to leave his past behind while still regretting his actions, and sends him his kindest regards. Nevertheless, he requests that there should be no further contact with him from either Randall or yourself regarding this matter. Anything of relevance to your inquiries can be found in the accompanying documents.
Yours,
Anita Bowens
P.S. I know a little of the history behind this case, for my father has referred in the past to the ‘imperfect agreement’ reached with the prosecutor, Mr. Bailey. The documents included here should indicate the reasons for my father’s dissatisfaction. For now, it’s enough to recognize that he wanted the boys to be tried as juveniles, not as adults. Both the attorney general and the district attorney disagreed, as did Mr. Bailey, and prosecutorial discretion won out. Rather than abandon the boys entirely to the dubious mercies of the system, the price of my father’s acquiescence was a new start for them once their sentences were served. I suspect that my father still believes he sold his principles too cheaply.
A.B.

I opened the attachment. It consisted of a scanned copy of Maurice Bowens’s letter to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania indicating his decision to cease practicing in the state in protest at its continued insistence on trying children as adults and allowing them to be sentenced to life without parole; and an article published in a law journal expanding on the theme.

According to the article, which contained more recent footnotes updating some of its points and statistics, Pennsylvania was one of twenty-two states, along with the District of Columbia, that allowed children as young as seven to be tried as adults, and one of forty-two that allowed children to be sentenced to life without parole for a first criminal conviction. Pennsylvania alone accounted for more than twenty percent of the children in the United States who faced the prospect of dying behind bars if convicted. Bowens’s piece argued that, by ‘enthusiastically’ sentencing thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children, and younger, to die in prison, both for homicide and non-homicide offenses, the state was guilty of ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment and was therefore in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, of international law, and, theoretically, of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which, as Bowens pointed out, the United States had signally failed to ratify, making it and Somalia the only countries to refuse to do so. He said that such a law took no account of the vulnerability of children, of the developmental and legal distinctions between children and adults, and of children’s capacity for growth, change, and redemption.

‘By allowing the incarceration of children without hope of parole, we have shown ourselves to be unworthy of the trust and responsibility placed in us as lawmakers,’ Bowens concluded. ‘We have confused punishment with retribution, and sacrificed justice to injustice. But, worst of all, we have allowed cruelty and expediency to govern us, permitting our humanity to fall away. No country that treats the most vulnerable of its young people in this way deserves to call itself civilized. We have failed in our duty as lawmakers, as parents, as protectors of children, and as human beings.’

I forwarded the email to Aimee, then printed out the letter and the article and added them to the file on the case. I hadn’t known about the Convention on the Rights of the Child, but being in bed with Somalia didn’t strike me as anything about which to be proud. It wasn’t hard to figure out why the Somalis hadn’t signed – any country that swells the ranks of its armies with child soldiers wasn’t in much of a position to sign anything other than a receipt for more guns – but last time I looked, the United States military wasn’t so depleted that it was forced to recruit in grade schools. Still, it was clear that somebody somewhere in the US government had come up with an argument against signing an agreement to protect children. Whoever it was, I’m sure that his kids were proud of him, and the Somalis sent him a card at Christmas.

So Bowens had left Pennsylvania, worked his way up the ranks of the North Dakota judiciary, and eventually had found himself judging a case that tested his principles once again. But instead of resigning again in the face of prosecutorial intransigence he had struck a deal guaranteeing the boys a fresh start, even if it meant compromising his principles, because better a small victory than no victory at all. If his daughter was to be believed, the nature of that compromise had tormented him ever since.

I looked again at Bowens’s letter. I regretted that I hadn’t been able to talk to him in person, and that any further communication between us now appeared to be unwelcome. Given the opportunity, I would have asked him about the third person involved in that killing decades ago, the final apex of the triangle connecting three lives: Lonny Midas. Haight had presented Midas as the instigator of what had occurred, but, as I’d pointed out to Aimee, that might simply have been the complexion that Haight chose to place on events. Again, I was reminded of how he had reverted at times to an unnerving juvenility during his description of the killing and its aftermath. It was the response of a cornered child, facing punishment for doing something bad, to blame someone else for the worst of it. I wanted to learn more about Lonny Midas, but unless I could find him and ask him face-to-face about the death of Selina Day it seemed that I would have to rely on the testimony of Randall Haight alone. But Haight was self-serving at best in his depiction of his role, and at worst a potential liar.

I had begun doodling while I thought, and stopped when I saw that I had drawn a crude outline of a girl’s head, framed by beribboned pigtails. Liar: I kept coming back to that word. Why was I so convinced that Haight’s account of the murder was not simply revisionist but contained moments of active concealment? After all, what could be worth hiding? He had admitted his involvement in a terrible crime. The fact that he claimed it was Lonny Midas who had smothered Selina was important only in that it represented the culmination of a sequence of events to which he had been a party, and for which he and Midas were both equally culpable. Perhaps he had fought against Midas at the end, but would he have tried to pull him off when Midas began raping Selina? Would he have joined in himself? What was the point at which he realized that it had all gone too far – if, in fact, he ever gained that realization?

I knew then that my problem with Randall Haight was that not only did I not believe his story in its entirety; I didn’t like him. I couldn’t say for sure if that was because of what he had done, and the death of my own child, in which case I needed to put it from my mind if I was to continue working on his behalf, or because of some more deep-rooted revulsion, a sense of him as a contaminated soul hiding itself behind a veneer of normality.

And I went to sleep dreaming of faceless men.

R
yan didn’t like sitting in the car alone. This was the kind of neighborhood where somebody might just take it into his head to call the cops because a lone man was waiting in a strange car on a quiet street where unfamiliar cars stood out; that, or this same somebody might decide that the cops didn’t need to be involved, and a tap on the window to inquire whether there was a problem might serve just as well to clear matters up, maybe with a couple of buddies hanging in the background to make sure nobody got the wrong idea.

He tried to remember the last time he’d eaten: not a grabbed slice of pizza on the run, or some greasy fries in a bar whose name he couldn’t remember an hour later, but a proper meal, either eaten alone or among friends. It was a week at least. He wasn’t even sure that he had friends anymore. The best of them wouldn’t want to see him, because if he stayed out of their way they couldn’t talk about what they didn’t know if curious souls came calling, while the rest of them would drop a dime on him without a second thought. He could walk away, of course. There was always that option. But he had a role to play in what was happening, and he wanted to see it out to the end. In a strange way, Dempsey was now the closest thing he had to a friend. They weren’t particularly close, and they didn’t even like each other much, but they were dependent on each other. Need bound them together, but for how long? Sands were spilling through the hourglass, and Ryan didn’t know how many grains were left.

He looked toward the Napier house. The drapes were drawn and he could see no sign of movement inside. He slammed the palm of his hand against the dashboard, then repeated the action over and over until the car started to rock and his hand smarted. He shouldn’t have left the woman alone. He knew what Dempsey was going to do, but he’d turned his back on it and closed the door behind him, letting Dempsey make him his bitch as assuredly as Dempsey was making Mrs. Napier his bitch over in the house. He leaned down and lifted his trouser leg. The little revolver sat snugly in its holster. He slipped it out and stared at it, letting it rest on his thigh. He’d begun carrying it recently, even though he already had another gun tucked into the waistband of his pants. Nobody knew about the revolver, and certainly not Dempsey. In fact, Dempsey was the reason Ryan had begun carrying the revolver in the first place. Dempsey’s behavior was becoming increasingly erratic. Ryan had previously only ever encountered junkies and alcoholics who behaved in that way, veering from friendly to threatening in an instant, the only thing predictable about them being their unpredictability, but Dempsey was neither an addict nor a drunk. He stuck to a couple of beers when he hit a bar, and Ryan had never seen him take so much as a single hit on a doobie. Maybe he needed to be medicated, but Ryan wasn’t about to suggest that he see a shrink. Ryan shut his eyes, then opened them quickly as the vision of a muzzle filled his consciousness. In the instant he’d looked into that black, unblinking eye, he had felt the limits of his own existence, and the fact of his mortality was impressed upon him. He wondered if he would see the bullet that killed him, if, in that final split second, the eye would turn from black to silver-gray, filling then emptying, entering and then exiting, taking his life with it.

‘I’m just kidding with you.’
That’s what Dempsey had said, but he hadn’t been, not really. It was as though Dempsey had looked deep into Ryan’s heart and seen his potential for treachery. The gun was a warning.

See, Frankie, I’m older than you
–
older, and harder, and wiser. I know how you think because I was like you, once upon a time. That’s the difference between us: I was like you once, but you were never like me. It’s the small advantage that age bestows, the consolation prize for the loss of speed, the diminished reaction time. You know how the young think, but they don’t know how you think. For men like us that’s important. You stay a couple of steps ahead of the young all the time, so that when they turn on you, when they go for that gun, you already have yours in your hand because you’ve been expecting what’s coming.

I know you, Frankie.

I
know
you.

Ryan shivered. The voice had sounded so clear to him, as if Dempsey were sitting there next to him, the gun in his hand. But Dempsey wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, and Ryan wasn’t as young and callow as Dempsey had adjudged him to be. If Dempsey kept pulling shit like that gun trick earlier in the evening, Ryan would be forced to provide his own solution to whatever psychological difficulties Dempsey was enduring. He thought about going back into the house, pressing the revolver against the back of Dempsey’s neck while he was buried in the Napier woman, and pulling the trigger. The image was so inviting that he felt his finger slipping over the guard and fastening on the trigger, instinctively applying the pressure required.

When the cell phone rang, he almost pulled the trigger in shock.

He didn’t need to look at the caller ID. Just like Dempsey, Ryan carried two cell phones: one for personal use, along with a little general business that was always conducted discreetly, and another that was changed weekly. Calls to the second phone only came from one destination. Ryan answered on the second ring.

‘Where are you?’

That voice with its distinctive rasp, the voice of the man who had brought them to this pass, who had lowered them to the status of prey. Their fates were linked to his, and they were still waiting for him to find a way to make it all good again. Neither Ryan nor Dempsey had spoken the thought aloud, but they had both begun to suspect that they might die waiting for that to happen.

‘The cab thing. He still hasn’t shown. We found cash, though.’

‘Cash? Good.’ That was what they’d been reduced to: foraging for enough cash to enable them to keep moving and stay alive. ‘Forget about the guy. We’ll deal with him another time. You know the Brattle Street Theater?’

‘The movie place? Sure.’

‘Find somewhere to park, close as you can get to it.’

‘Now?’

‘No, next month. Put Dempsey on.’

‘He’s not here. I’m in the car. He’s inside.’

‘Why?’

‘In case, you know, the guy comes back.’

‘Who’s in there with him.’