Nobody was waiting to greet him as he stood outside the prison gates. His lawyer had offered to send someone to collect him, but there had been confusion about the time of his release – an error with the paperwork, it seemed – and he was now among those rarest of prisoners, the ones who found themselves released early through bureaucratic incompetence, if only, in his case, by a few hours.
He was many things: a convicted felon, a former husband, a disgraced hero.
An innocent man? Perhaps, but then so many made the same claim …
With luck, though, nobody would even remember his name. It would make whatever was to come a little easier. In the meantime, he would find the man named Charlie Parker, and tell him his tale. Among his possessions was a newspaper article concerning the apprehension of Roger Ormsby, a man who had thrived on torment. Parker had found him, and would understand that others like him existed.
A prison van pulled up, and he got in. It would take him to the Rockland Ferry Terminal, and from there he could hop a Concord Coach bus to Portland. They’d given him $50 and a bus ticket upon release, and he had another $240 that he’d earned in the workshops. He didn’t speak to the officers in the van, and they did not speak to him. He had been a model prisoner, but it didn’t matter. They knew the crime of which he had been convicted, and they distrusted and disliked him for it.
He regarded the falling of leaves as they drove, like all the dead days descending.
From the parking lot, three men in a clean Chevy pickup watched him go. They and their kind had taken almost everything from the prisoner. He had just one thing left, and soon they would take that, too.
They pulled out of the lot and passed the van on the road, not even glancing in its direction, before driving on to Rockland, where they parked by the terminal off Main Street, and there they waited.
The van pulled up and disgorged its passenger. He walked to a pay phone and made a call, then bought himself coffee and a cookie while he waited for the bus to arrive. When it came, he got on board, and they shadowed him all the way to Portland. One of them went inside to watch for his arrival, where the ex-prisoner was greeted by a very large man in a very large suit that was still too small for him, who took his bag and escorted him to a black Mercedes sedan.
The tracker returned to the Chevy.
‘The lawyer,’ he said.
‘He looks like a clown,’ came the reply from the man in the backseat. He had red hair and a feral aspect, like a creature frozen in the process of transformation from human to animal.
‘If he is, he’s a clever one.’
Only the driver remained silent. He had not seen the fallen hero since the trial, and was surprised by how much he loathed him, and by his desire for him to suffer even more than he already had.
Together the lawyer and the ex-con drove to a mixed-income property on Congress Street, not far from Longfellow Square, which was roughly divided between private tenants and those supported by the Portland Housing Authority. They went inside, and the lawyer was alone when he emerged twenty minutes later.
‘He’s fallen far,’ said the feral man.
‘He’s still falling,’ said the tracker. ‘He just doesn’t know it.’
Only now did the driver speak.
‘Oh, I think he does.’
They drove off. They knew where to find him, and could take him anytime. They would wait a little longer – a couple of days, but no more than that – just in case the opportunity presented itself to inflict fresh miseries upon him, or life chose to do it for them.
When they finally came for him, he might even be grateful.
8
SAC Edgar Ross of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York field office arrived at Blue Smoke on East Twenty-Seventh Street shortly after seven that same evening. He had been running behind schedule all day, and was surprised that he was only half an hour late stepping through the door of the restaurant. He spotted Conrad Holt sitting at the packed bar, half-interested in the playoff game showing on the big TV screen, and moved through the post-work crowd to join him.
‘Thanks for keeping a seat for me,’ said Ross.
The deputy director gestured with his Bloody Mary at the masses thronging the bar.
‘What did you expect me to do, put my purse on it? I might just be able to order you a drink, now that you’ve got here at last.’
‘Bad day.’
‘Can you remember when you last had a good one?’
‘Not really. Gin and tonic. Hendrick’s, if they have it.’
Holt called the order, and the bartender asked if he wanted it with cucumber. Ross declined. He thought the gin tasted just vegetal enough as it was.
‘They were going to give away our table,’ said Holt.
‘Did you tell them who you were?’
‘I thought charm might work better.’
The Hendrick’s arrived. Holt settled up as Ross took his first sip, and a hostess appeared with menus and led them to a table at the back. Despite the noise at the bar, and the earlier threat of being bounced, they found themselves by a window with no neighbors for the time being.
‘I don’t even know why I still look at the menu here,’ said Holt. ‘I always have the same thing.’
‘Which is?’
‘Fried chicken. Steak tips for an appetizer, if they’re on. Mostly the chicken is enough.’
Ross didn’t care much for fried chicken. He was a red meat man, regardless of his physician’s admonitions to the contrary. Not that Dr Mahajan would have signed off on fried chicken without wincing either, but it wasn’t as if Ross was about to Snapchat him a picture of whatever ended up on his plate. The waiter came to take their order. Ross settled for the brisket, with fries on the side. Dr Mahajan would just have to up the dosage on his cholesterol medication. Holt, meanwhile, ordered the fried chicken, with a side of collard greens.
‘I saw the Ormsby memo,’ said Holt, once the waiter had disappeared.
‘He refused counsel,’ said Ross. ‘He had his rights read to him. It’s clean.’
‘Clean once the details of how Parker and his friends got to him were airbrushed from it.’
‘Clean is relative, but we’re being careful.’
‘So you say.’
Holt finished his Bloody Mary, then called for a glass of wine. Ross stuck with his gin. In retrospect, he should have asked the bartender to make it a large one, and easy on the tonic. He’d managed to keep the arrangement with Parker under the radar for months, but he knew that it couldn’t last. Ormsby’s crimes were too serious and vile for the details of his apprehension to pass unexamined at Federal Plaza, and Holt was nobody’s fool. It was not yet common knowledge that Parker was on a federal retainer, with a degree of protection that also covered his friends, both of whom were criminals and one of whom was a professional killer, albeit semi-retired, or so Ross hoped. He needed Holt – to whom he answered, technically at least – to support what was, by any standards, an unorthodox and risky piece of business.
‘How did you redirect the money to pay Parker?’ asked Holt.
‘Fax paper and typewriter ribbons. I like to think of sections of the stationery budget as a discretionary fund.’
‘Do we even still use typewriter ribbons?’
‘If anyone asks, I’ll tell them that we type up sensitive documents.’
‘And faxes?’
‘The War on Terror takes many forms.’
Holt nodded. ‘God bless unwinnable conflicts.’ His wine arrived, but he didn’t touch it.
‘How long did you think your deal with Parker would go unnoticed?’
‘Not as long as it did.’
‘There’s a part of me that wishes I still didn’t know. Why did he consent to it?’
‘He didn’t. The approach came from him. He offered.’
‘Again, why?’
‘I think,’ said Ross, as Holt took a tentative sip of his wine, ‘that he intends to be more proactive in his investigations.??
?
Holt almost choked on his chardonnay.
‘More proactive?’ he said. ‘Jesus, he’s practically shitting dead bodies as it is. And you’ve signed us on to his crusade?’
‘I thought that it might allow us to direct his energies when the situation required it.’
‘Seriously? You think you can control him?’
‘He’s a tethered goat. On a long chain, admittedly, but tethered nonetheless.’
Holt looked doubtful.
‘Does he need the money that badly?’
‘He finds it useful. To be honest, I’m still not sure why he signed up.’
‘And the two lunatics with him?’
‘The cash covers their bar tabs, if nothing else. And the one called Angel sends me letters.’ Ross couldn’t bring himself to look Holt in the eye as he spoke. That goddamned Angel …
‘What kind of letters?’
‘He’s convinced that federal agents receive keys to restricted restrooms. He wants one for himself.’
There was a pause that spoke volumes, then:
‘Restrooms.’
‘Yes. Special ones, in Amtrak stations and airports. Museums too.’
‘Jesus.’
Holt, hopeful that no more sudden shocks were about to come his way, risked a second attempt at his wine, successful this time.
‘Am I the only one who hears a ticking sound?’ he asked.
‘With respect, you’re asking a lot of questions for someone who’d prefer not to know.’
‘Why do you think I’m asking them here, and not back at Federal Plaza?’
‘Parker is part of what’s to come,’ said Ross. ‘The closer we keep him, the better equipped we’ll be to react when it happens.’
‘You know, I’m the only deputy director who doesn’t suspect that you’re insane. And sometimes even I’m not entirely convinced.’
‘I’m touched by your faith in me.’
‘Are you monitoring him?’
‘He uses a cell phone for work, and we have ears on that, but I’m sure he knows. He has others, but he changes them regularly. We’re on his e-mails as well, but he’s smart, and doesn’t commit anything of value to electronic communications.’
‘And you’re sure that he has the list?’
Parker had negotiated his deal with Ross by passing him part of a list of names retrieved from the wreckage of an airplane in Maine’s Great North Woods. The list, Ross believed, contained the identities of those who were in league with various elements, all of them united by one aim: to find the Buried God, release it from its captivity, and just maybe bring about Armageddon, all of which Ross had most assuredly not put in any official memos.
‘What we’ve received so far checks out. He’s promised more. I also believe that he used the list to track down Ormsby.’
‘Parker’s playing us.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘To what end?’
‘I think he’s looking for something.’
‘What?’
‘A pattern.’
‘And what will this pattern reveal?’
‘A name. A controlling influence.’
Holt wore the expression of a man who believes that he might accidentally have ingested a wasp, and would only find out for sure when it started to sting him.
‘And if he screws up?’ he said. ‘Or dies? We’ll lose everything. That list, wherever it is, will be gone forever.’
‘If that were to happen, then I believe the rest of the list would find its way to us. My understanding is that Parker has made arrangements.’
Their food arrived. Ross thought that Holt’s fried chicken looked very good, even to someone like himself who generally eschewed it.
‘Do you like him?’ asked Holt.
It was a strange question. Ross wasn’t sure that he had an answer. He did think that he understood something of Parker’s essence, even if the man entire remained an enigma to him. Ross had been educated by Jesuits, and had, for a time, considered entering the order until sanity prevailed, even if he suspected that he had simply exchanged the possibility of one ambitious, secretive order for the reality of another. The Jesuits practiced ‘discernment’, which required listening and waiting in order to establish what course of action God might wish in a given situation. Parker, too, was a man who listened and waited, but for what voice Ross could not say. Also, the actions of Jesuits, unlike those of Parker, did not typically run to guns and violence, or end with entire communities being put to the torch.
‘I think he’s a good man,’ he replied, eventually.
‘God preserve us from good men,’ said Holt. ‘Do you trust him?’
‘Yes,’ said Ross, without hesitation.
‘Funny,’ said Holt. ‘I never took you for the trusting type.’
He cut into his chicken.
‘What about the other two?’
‘We only ever had suspicions, but no real proof.’
‘You could have found proof, if you’d tried hard enough.’
‘Maybe I didn’t want to.’
‘That’s what worries me. How’s the brisket?’
‘Moist.’
‘You still should have ordered the chicken.’
‘I think you’re right.’
‘If this falls apart,’ Holt said, ‘you’ll burn. You know that, don’t you?’
‘If this falls apart,’ Ross replied, ‘we’ll all burn.’
9
Far to the north, amid the anonymous furnishings of his apartment, the newly freed man lay awake, unable to sleep away from the noise of the prison, and wondered again how his life had come to such an end.
He was a Disgraced Hero, a Fallen Idol. He’d once had a wife, but no children. That absence of children was fortunate, he supposed: he couldn’t begin to imagine the grief they would have endured once their father’s alleged offenses became known. Even moving to another state wouldn’t have saved them: the Internet could make prey of anyone. As for his wife, well, they hadn’t been getting along so well before everything went wrong, but he still remained shocked and hurt at how quickly she had abandoned him.
He’d told her that he was innocent – had told the same thing to anyone who would listen, from the police who first interrogated him, to the jury that had subsequently convicted him and the judge who sentenced him, and even to those fellow prisoners who were willing to associate with him, or with whom he could safely associate in turn, which wasn’t many. He’d told his lawyer too. The lawyer said that it didn’t matter, but it did. It mattered to the Hero before he was toppled from his pedestal.
Only his mother and father had continued to believe in him – they, and a handful of friends, but his parents were almost entirely alone in visiting him regularly. His mother had died first, and then his father just six months later. He’d applied for compassionate release to attend their funerals and been turned down on both occasions, even though a sympathetic corrections officer had offered to transport him from the jail to the graveside and back after the death of his father. Incensed, the Hero had even gone so far as to apply to the U.S. District Court for a temporary release order, only to have the state object on the grounds that the nature of his crimes made him an ongoing danger to the community, and he was also considered a flight risk due to his intelligence and the belief that he might have some funds hidden away, according to his ex-wife. So his mother and father had gone into the ground without their only child to mourn them, and nobody came to visit him after they were gone.
His parents had left him some money, for which he was grateful as he’d been wiped out by the divorce, despite anything his ex-wife might have claimed to the contrary, although she managed to get her hands on some of his inheritance too. The bequest might have been enough to enable him to resettle in another state, were it not for his status as a registered sex offender and the requirement to engage with probation and counseling services in Maine on that basis. He’d been given a list of his conditions of probation, which includ
ed, on top of the standard requirements – refrain from using drugs and avoid excessive alcohol intake, find a job, pay the court-determined probation and Department of Corrections supervision fees – an injunction against contact with anyone under the age of eighteen, and any use of a computer with an Internet connection. The latter stipulation meant that he had to get the private detective’s number the old-fashioned way, through directory assistance. He’d bought a TracFone, and his lawyer had registered it for him online.
He was barely out of prison, but already he recognized the difficulty of adjusting to the outside world: it was either too loud or too quiet, too cognizant of his presence or too unaware, too random or too regimented. There were aspects of it that he no longer understood, and others that appeared to have vanished entirely while he was incarcerated. He had eaten dinner in a bar earlier that evening, but at first he had been unable to pick up the silverware. It was the first time in five years that he had been presented with utensils that were not plastic, and he was afraid to use them. He wondered if the reason why so many former inmates reoffended was simply because they wanted to be back in a world they understood.
He dialed the number and waited. It went straight to voice mail.
For a moment, he struggled to find his voice. He thought about hanging up and remaining silent, but he believed that he did not have long left. If he was right, they would come for him soon, because all that was left to take was his life.
But they had not broken him completely. Despite everything, he had endured, and now he would tell his story.
‘Mr Parker,’ he said. ‘My name is Jerome Burnel …’
10
So how did it come to pass? How did Jerome Burnel, the Disgraced Hero, lose everything? It began when Jerome Burnel was no kind of hero at all, when this tale was not even his.
Almost six years earlier, this was the stumble that led to the fall.
Corrie had been sizing up the guy for the last hour. She was good at what she did, or thought she was: after all, she’d had enough practice by now.