The Silent Hour (2 page)

    That
detail, of the attempt to return the blood, added a new twist on a classic
small-town horror story, and the crime received significant media coverage.
Front-page articles in the papers, precious minutes on the TV news. The murder
was well documented, but I don't remember it. I was an infant when Harrison was
arrested, and his name meant nothing to me until almost three decades later,
when the letters started.

    He
wrote me for the first time in the winter, about two weeks after my partner,
Joe Pritchard, left for Florida. I remember that because my first instinct was
to laugh out loud, and I was disappointed that there was nobody around to share
my amusement. It was a crazy letter from a crazy killer who was already back on
the streets. That life sentence only held him for fifteen years. He'd been out
for thirteen when he made contact with me, sent a letter explaining that he had
a matter of "grave importance" to discuss, but wanted to tell me his
personal history before we met. It was an issue of honesty, he wrote. He had
recently learned the importance of total honesty, of accountability, and
therefore he would not hide from his history. He proceeded to describe, in a
formal, matter-of-fact fashion, the crime he'd committed and the time he'd
served, then left a phone number and asked that I call him when I was ready to meet.

    The
letter went into the trash without ceremony, and no call was made. More than a
month passed before the second one arrived. This time, Harrison was more
insistent and even stranger. He wrote that he'd followed my career in the newspapers
and believed that I had been chosen for his task. He knew this must sound
strange, but I needed to believe him, needed to meet with him just one time.
There was talk of me being not a detective but a
storyteller.
Harrison
had a story, and he needed to know the ending. No one could tell the ending but
me. Was I intrigued—

    I was
not.

    This
time I considered burning the letter, or tearing it to shreds, but then decided
that was too much of a gesture. Instead, I tucked it back into its envelope and
tossed it into the garbage. Four companions soon found their way to a similar
demise in the months that followed. Harrison was growing more persistent,
writing so often that I at least took the time to look into his background to
see what sort of psychopath I was dealing with. I considered contacting his
parole officer but never did. His correspondence, while annoying, also seemed
harmless.

    He
gave up on the letter campaign and decided to arrive in person on an unusually
warm afternoon in the first week of May. I was in the office and engaged in
critical business—browsing the ESPN Web site and pondering what lunch should
be—when there was a single soft knock on the door. Walk-in business isn't just
infrequent at our agency; it's nonexistent. There's no sign on the building,
and that's by design. Joe had a theory about walk-in clients being the sort you
wanted to avoid in this business, so we kept a low profile.

    I
pushed back from the desk, crossed the room, and opened the door to face a man
who couldn't have stood an inch above five-six. He had a thick build, the
natural sort rather than a weight-room product, and his hair was cut very close
to his skull. There was one scar on his face, a dark imprint high on his cheekbone,
offsetting a pair of coal-colored eyes that were fastened on my own.

    "Mr.
Perry." It wasn't a question; he knew who I was.

    "Yes—"

    "I'm
Parker Harrison."

    He
saw the look that passed over my face in response.

    "I'm
sorry if the letters bothered you," he said. "I didn't want to be a
bother. But I also thought… you were a police officer, and I thought maybe the
name would mean something to you. So I said, well, better to be up-front about
things, right— Then, when you never called, I decided maybe that was a mistake.
I was hoping you'd welcome me."

    "Welcome
you."

    "Yes."

    We
stood there in silence for a moment, and then he made a nod at the interior of
the room and said, "Are you going to let me in, or do we have to talk on
our feet—"

    "On
our feet," I said. "It's not going to take long to finish the
conversation, Harrison. I don't investigate thirty-year-old murders committed
in front of a witness and then
confessed
to. Besides, you're already
out. You did some time and now you're done. So what's the goal— I don't
understand it, and I don't want any part of it."

    For a
moment he just stared at me, looking perplexed. Then his face split into a
smile, one with some warmth to it.

    "Of
course you think that's what I want. Why wouldn't you— I'm sorry about that,
Lincoln. May I call you Lincoln— I apologize for your confusion, but the last
thing on my mind is my own case. I mean, there
isn't
a case. As you
said, I confessed. That wasn't a joke, something I did for kicks because I
wanted to spend my life in prison. I killed that man, Lincoln, killed him and
never denied it."

    He
must have seen some reaction in my eyes, some hint of the chill that had gone
through my stomach, because he stopped talking and frowned.

    "I
say that like it's nothing," he said, "but that's not how I feel
about it. Not at all. I regret it terribly, would give anything to see him have
his life back. So if you hear me talk of it like it's nothing, please
understand that's just a product of familiarity. When you spend every day
living with the price of destruction—of someone else's life and your own—it
becomes awfully familiar."

    He
spoke very well, gracefully even. I said, "All right, it seems I
misunderstood, but why tell me about your case in that first letter if it's not
your current concern—"

    "I
told you," he said. "I wanted to be honest."

    I
raised my eyebrows. "You know, Harrison, there are some things we all keep
to ourselves. If I'd killed somebody with a knife, I'd probably put that one on
the list."

    "Are
you going to let me in—" he said.

    I
hesitated for a moment, then sighed and swung the door open and walked back to
my chair behind the desk. He sat across from me, on one of the stadium chairs.
He gave it a curious look, as most people do.

    "From
the old stadium—"

    I
nodded.

    "When
I was a child I saw Jim Brown play there," he said.

    "Lots
of people did."

    He
frowned at that, bothered by my unfriendliness, and said, "I have six
thousand dollars. A little more than that, but roughly six thousand. I meant to
lead off with that, do this properly, with the retainer and all."

    "I'm
not really looking for work right now, Harrison. Pretty backed up,
actually."

    He
looked at my desk then, perhaps noting the absence of paperwork, and I reached
out and turned the computer monitor to hide the ESPN screen. Like I said,
pretty backed up.

    "I
read about you in the papers," he said.

    "Terrific.
I wasn't real happy about being in them."

    "I
felt the same way when I made the front page."

    I
cocked my head and stared at him. "Is that supposed to be amusing—"

    "No,
it's supposed to be serious."

    Neither
of us said anything for a minute. I was studying him, that scar on his cheek
and the steel in his eyes. He had a soft voice. Too soft for the eyes and the
scar.

    "When
I read about you," he said, "I knew you were the right person for
this. I
knew it.
You've shown compassion for people who have done wrong.
You've done wrong yourself."

    He
seemed to want a response to that, but I didn't offer one. After a pause, he
spoke again.

    "I
knew that you wouldn't treat me as worthless, as diseased, simply because one
day I made a terrible mistake and somebody died."

    
A
terrible mistake and somebody died.
That was one way to phrase it. I pushed
back from the desk and hooked one ankle over my knee, keeping my silence.

    "You're
looking at me with distaste," he said.

    “I’m
sorry.”

    "It
bothers you very much. Being in this room with me, knowing that someone died at
my hand."

    "Being
in the room doesn't bother me. Knowing that you killed someone does. Are you
surprised by that—"

    "You've
never killed anyone, I take it—"

    My hesitation
provided his answer, and I disliked the look of satisfaction that passed over
his face. Yes, I'd killed, but it was a hell of a lot different than what
Harrison had done. Wasn't it— Of course it was. He'd murdered someone in a
rage. I'd killed in self-defense—and never reported the death.

    "Mr.
Harrison, I'd like you to go on your way. I'm just not interested in continuing
this conversation, or in doing any work for you. I'm sorry if that upsets you.
There are plenty of PIs in this town, though. Go on and talk to another one of
them, and do yourself a favor this time and keep the murder story quiet."

    "You
won't work for me."

    "That's
correct."

    "Because
I told you that I killed someone."

    I was
getting a dull headache behind my temples and wanted him out of my office.
Instead of speaking, I just lifted my hand and pointed at the door. He looked
at me for a long time and then got to his feet. He turned to the door, then
looked back at me.

    "Do
you believe that prison can change someone—" he said.

    "I'm
sure that it does."

    "I
mean change them in the way that it is supposed to. Could it rehabilitate
them—"

    I
didn't answer.

    "You
either don't believe that or you aren't sure," he said. "Yet you were
a police officer. You sent people to prison. Shouldn't you have believed in
that idea, then—"

    "I
believe that we don't have any better ideas in place at the current time. Does
that satisfy you—"

    "The
question is, does it satisfy
you,
Lincoln."

    "If
all you wanted was a discussion about the system, you could have had it with
your parole officer."

    "I
didn't want a discussion about the system. I wanted you to treat me like a
functioning member of society. You've chosen not to do that."

    I
rubbed a hand over my eyes, thinking that I should have left for lunch ten
minutes earlier.

    "Prison
didn't rehabilitate me," he said, "but another place did. Some other
people did."

    He
was still standing there, hadn't moved for the door, and now I gave up. It
apparently would be easier to hear him out than throw him out.

    "The
job," I said. "What is it— What do you want from me—"

    He
gestured down at the chair from which he'd just risen, and I sighed and nodded,
and then he sat again.

    "I
got out thirteen years ago," he said. "Spent the first year working
for the most amazing woman I ever met. She was someone who operated on a level
above most of the world. Kind, compassionate, beautiful. She and her husband
built a house in the woods that was as special a place as I've ever seen on
this earth, just a gorgeous, haunting place. If you go to it, and I hope you
will, you'll understand what I mean. There's an energy there, Lincoln, a spirit
I know you'll be able to feel. They came up with the idea for the home
themselves, and it was incredible. Built underground on one side, so that when
you came up the drive all you saw was this single arched door in the
earth."

    He
lifted his hands and made an arch with them, revealing tattoos on the insides
of both wrists.

    "The
door was this massive piece of oak surrounded by hand-laid stone, and it was
all you could see. Just this door to nowhere. Then you could walk up over the
door, stand on a hill, and even though the house was directly beneath you, you
couldn't tell. There were trees and plants growing all over the place, and no
sign that a home was under your feet. At the top of the hill I hey built a well
house out of stone, styled in a way that made you think it was two hundred
years old. There was no well, of course, because the house was beneath. If you
kept walking past that, you'd come to this sheer drop."