The Burning Soul (41 page)
Authors: John Connolly
Tags: #Mystery, #Azizex666, #Horror, #Fantasy, #Suspense, #Thriller
The knock came again.
‘Who’s there?’ he called, but there was no reply. He went into the kitchen. There was a glass panel on the locked door, but he could see nobody outside, and the motion sensor that turned on the night light above the door had not been activated. He wished that he had a gun, but the nature of the gun laws meant that it wasn’t possible for him to acquire one without complications, and he had never had a reason to seek out an illegal weapon. He put down the bottle and took a carving knife from the rack. He glanced out the kitchen window and saw, on the back lawn, the figure of the girl. She cast no shadow, despite the light from the waning crescent moon, for she was barely more than a shadow herself. She raised her right hand and beckoned to him with her index finger, and he was about to open the door when another figure caught his attention.
There was a man standing behind her, between the twin willows at the end of his garden. Their almost bare branches hung so low that their shape and his became one, so that he seemed a construct of bark and twigs and brown, dying leaves. The man did not move and Randall could not see his face, but Randall still knew who he was. After all, they had both had a hand in the death of Selina Day.
Randall backed away from the door. The girl could no longer be seen on the lawn, and now the knocking came once more.
Tap-tap-tap.
She was at the door once again. Come out. Come out, come out, because time is pressing, and a friend has arrived, just as you always knew that he would. You can’t hide from him, just as you can’t hide from me. Running won’t help, not now. The end is approaching, the reckoning.
Tap-tap-tap.
Come out. Don’t make us come in there to get you.
Tap-tap-TAP.
He retreated to the living room, and watched the figure of the man appear against the glass, the girl beside him, and the doorknob turning – once, twice – but still the motion-activated light did not come on. Randall picked up the phone and tried to call the police, but there was only an empty, whooshing noise from the receiver, like a fierce wind blowing across barren peaks. This was not the sound of a dead line. The phone was still connected, except now it was connected to someplace else, somewhere deep and dark and very far away.
The shapes of the man and the girl disappeared. The line cleared. The voice of the emergency operator asked him what service he required, but he did not answer. After a couple of seconds he dropped the phone back into its cradle and slowly sank to the floor. The girl could have come in. She didn’t need doors or windows. Why didn’t she enter?
The answer was that the girl had a new friend, a special friend.
And Randall saw, in the night sky, the flickering of long-dead stars.
IV
We’re stitching up
all your fancy mistakes.
We’re stitching up
your mother’s face.
We’re going to stitch you a new one.
We’re going to take our time.
from
The Dead Girls Speak in Unison
by Danielle Pafunda
30
I
didn’t need a reminder about the necessity of following Allan that day, but in case I did there was another text message waiting for me when I woke. It read:
didn’t need a reminder about the necessity of following Allan that day, but in case I did there was another text message waiting for me when I woke. It read:
CHIEF ALLAN THE PEDOFILE IS A HORNY DOG TODAY.
I could taste beer at the back of my throat, and although I had slept straight through the night I did not feel rested. For a long time after the deaths of Susan and Jennifer I had not touched alcohol. I had never been an alcoholic, but I had been guilty of abusing alcohol, and I had been drinking on the night that they died. Such associations are not easily set aside. Now I drank the occasional beer or glass of wine, but my taste for either in any great quantity had largely vanished. Walsh had far outstripped my intake the night before, but I had still drunk more than I was used to and my head and liver were making their objections known.
I checked in with Angel and Louis, but Allan’s vehicle had not yet left his property. The tracking device on Allan’s truck was based on one that had previously been attached to my own car. The vehicle’s movements were mapped on a computer utilizing the same technology that provided coordinates to drivers using GPS units. The advantage was that the trackers didn’t need to maintain visual contact with the target vehicle all the time, but in our case this advantage was diminished slightly by the necessity of finding out not only where Allan was going but whom he was seeing.
But for the early part of the morning Allan did nothing interesting. He didn’t appear until shortly before eight, and then only to produce a chainsaw and trim some trees in his yard. He worked until noon, reducing the cuttings to firewood and piling them to dry. Angel watched him from the woods nearby, chilly and bored. In an ideal world we’d have monitored Allan’s cell phone too, but that was a complex business and assumed that, if he was doing something wrong, he’d be dumb enough to make calls related to it on his cell phone of record. If the day’s surveillance revealed nothing then it was among the other options that we could look at, but I was hoping it wouldn’t be necessary. If the anonymous messages had any truth to them, then any liaisons that Allan conducted were likely to be personal and not electronic. Eventually, freshly showered and wearing clean clothes, Allan got into his truck and made his way into Pastor’s Bay, and the pursuit of him began in earnest.
While Angel rolled up the sheet of plastic on which he had been lying, wondering how his life had come to this moment, and Louis tracked Allan’s progress from the warmth of his car nearby, I dealt with Aimee Price, who had called to tell me about the message from Randall Haight that had been left on her answering machine. I dropped in at her office on my way to Pastor’s Bay: If and when Allan met his ‘cooze’ I wanted to be close by. There were no muffins and coffee that morning. Aimee was preparing for Marie Borden’s bail hearing, Marie Borden being the woman who had objected with a hammer to her husband’s ongoing physical abuse.
‘Borden?’ I said. ‘That’s her name? Lucky it wasn’t her mother she laid out.’
‘You think you’re the first person who’s cracked that joke?’
‘Probably not. What about Randall Haight?’
‘He’s no longer my problem,’ she said. ‘Either he’s looking for new legal representation or he’s going to be alone when he sits for a polygraph.’
‘Assuming he’s willing to take the test.’
‘And that there’s any point to it in the first place. The state’s polygraph experts are good, but they don’t like firing questions into the dark. It’s hard to see how the polygraph will help, apart from going some way toward conclusively eliminating him as a suspect, assuming any doubts remain after Chief Allan’s contribution yesterday. It looks like Randall caught a break with that. Two cheers for him.’
‘You don’t sound too sorry to have lost a client,’ I said.
‘I don’t know how much more we could have done for him,’ she said. ‘Being in charge of a protection detail while juggling my moral and legal obligations is not why I spent all those years in law school. Besides, I didn’t like him, although I hid my feelings better than you did. He gave me the creeps. Bill me for your time and I’ll take care of it.’
‘That’s kind of why I’m here.’
‘Are you upping your rate? We had an agreement.’
‘You just assumed that we did. My rates weren’t specified on that contract you had me sign. For a lawyer, you’re a very trusting person.’
‘You’re a secret moralist, but you wear a cynic’s overcoat well. I know that I’m going to be sorry for letting you keep talking, but go on. I’m listening.’
‘I know I’m off the job, but I need a little indulgence. Expenses only: mine, and Angel and Louis’s.’
‘Yours I can afford. I’m not sure about theirs.’
‘We’ll keep them reasonable.’
‘For how long?’
‘A couple of days.’
‘And I would be doing this why?’
‘Because you’re curious about what Randall Haight has kept hidden from us, and what Kurt Allan does in his spare time, and because somewhere in this mess may be the answer to the question of Anna Kore’s disappearance.’
‘You could just hand over what you know to the police.’
‘I could, but all I have is a couple of anonymous texts about Allan and my own insatiable curiosity about the details of other people’s lives. Anyhow, it’s more interesting this way, and more satisfying.’
‘I’ll give you two days. And I want receipts. And nothing over five hundred dollars without prior approval. And if anybody asks, or you get caught doing something you shouldn’t, I’ll deny any knowledge of this conversation.’
‘And if we find anything useful to the cops?’
‘You can tell them I guided your every move with a firm but gentle hand.’
‘You make it sound dirty.’
‘It is,’ she concluded. ‘And not in a good way.’
I drove on to Pastor’s Bay, making some calls along the way. According to Haight, Lonny Midas had one older brother, Jerry, but I had been able to find no trace of a Jerry Midas in Drake Creek or its vicinity. Neither could I find a Social Security number linked with a Jerry Midas and originating in North Dakota. It was a long shot, especially as it was Sunday, but I made a call to the sheriff’s department in Drake Creek. After a delay during which I listened to the same couple of bars of Pachelbel’s ‘Canon’ played over and over on what sounded like a child’s xylophone, I was put through to Sheriff Douglas Peck. A Sheriff Douglas Peck had been named in some of the newspaper articles following Selina Day’s killing. Three decades later, he had either started out young or law enforcement in the county was a family business.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ he said.
‘My name is Charlie Parker,’ I said. ‘I’m a private detective up here in Maine.’
‘Congratulations.’ He didn’t say anything more, which suggested that Sheriff Peck was a man with a sense of humor, albeit a sarcastic one.
‘You wouldn’t be the same Douglas Peck who worked the Selina Day killing?’
‘I’m Douglas Peck the third. My father was Douglas Peck the second, and he was sheriff at that time. My grandfather was plain old Douglas Peck, and he was never a sheriff anytime or anywhere. If this is about the Day murder, then I can’t tell you more than what you can find on the Internet.’
‘You can’t, or you won’t?’
‘Both.’
‘Perhaps I could talk to your father?’
‘Not unless you got access to one of them mediums. He’s been dead these past five years.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘You didn’t know him, so you can’t be sorry. Now, are we done here? I don’t want to be rude, but just because I don’t want it to rain doesn’t mean that I won’t get wet if I step outside, if you catch my drift.’
I wasn’t sure that I did. ‘I’ve been working for a man your father might have known as William Lagenheimer.’
‘Hold on a minute,’ said Peck. I heard the phone being put down, and then much of the background noise was muted as a door was closed.
‘Run that by me again,’ he said.
‘I’ve been working for William Lagenheimer, although he goes by another name now.’
‘Are you going to tell me in what capacity you’re working for him, or do I have to guess?’
‘He was receiving unwanted messages in the mail from somebody who had learned about his past and his previous identity. He wanted me to find out who was responsible.’
‘And did you?’
‘No. He has since dispensed with my services.’
‘Not surprising if you couldn’t help him.’
‘I try not to take these things personally. I also try not to let them get in the way of pursuing my inquiries.’
‘Why? You a charitable man? You must be if you like working for nothing.’
‘I just don’t like loose ends. I also don’t like it that a fourteen-year-old girl has gone missing up here, and from the same town in which Lagenheimer now lives.’
‘You think he had something to do with it?’
‘He has an alibi. I think he’s in the clear. It’s Lonny Midas that I’m curious about.’
‘And where are the police in all this?’
‘A request has gone to the North Dakota Attorney General’s Office requesting the information contained in the sealed records pertaining to the imprisonment and subsequent release of Lonny Midas and William Lagenheimer.’
‘So? The AG will oblige by releasing the information, but as you’re not a law-enforcement officer you have no right to it. Will that be all?’
‘Jerry Midas,’ I said.
‘What about him?’
‘You can’t tell me anything about Lonny Midas, but you can tell me how to get in touch with his brother.’
‘And why would I do that, assuming I knew anything about him in the first place?’
‘Because there’s a girl missing, and I want her found as much as the cops do. Look up my name, Sheriff Peck. If you need someone to vouch for me, try Detective Gordon Walsh of the Maine State Police. If you have a pen, I’ll give you his number.’
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