‘I’m weaker than I was. That’s the worst of it. I get tired quickly. Nauseous, too. I lost my balance on the beach a couple of days ago, and if it wasn’t for the Winter kid coming along I might still have been there when the tide came in. And it’s the strangest thing, but sometimes I have trouble with words. I’ll look at something, and I’ll know what it is – a table, a chair, a book – but when I try to describe it, another word entirely comes out. It happened a lot at the start, less often now, but it’s frustrating. And embarrassing.’
He faced her once again.
‘More than you needed to know?’
‘No – and I did ask. You shoot with your right hand?’
‘Yes, but I haven’t held a gun much since that night.’
‘Are you planning to again?’
‘I haven’t given it much thought.’
She saw something then – a flicker – and knew that he was lying. What would it do to a man’s confidence to find himself on the verge of being butchered in his own home, lying in his own blood, his body torn by fragments of metal? His recovery would not only have to be physical, but psychological and emotional too. Heading out to Mason Point, and examining Bruno Perlman’s car, might be considered a version of that grip improver: a means to test, strengthen …
Her cappuccino arrived. Larraine had attempted some kind of art with the foam, but it hadn’t worked out. It might have been a heart, or a smiley face. It might have been nothing at all. Larraine moved quickly away, well out of earshot. She knew better than to try and eavesdrop on the chief. Actually, she wasn’t really the kind to eavesdrop at all, which made her unusual in Boreas. When she died, they could have her stuffed and mounted as a behavioral model for others.
‘So,’ Bloom began, as she tried her coffee.
‘There were no maps in the car,’ said Parker.
‘No, there weren’t.’
‘Does that trouble you?’
‘Not really. Does anyone even use paper maps anymore?’
‘I do.’
‘Seriously?’
‘I like knowing where I’ve been, and where I’m going, not just where I am. Also, there are times when it’s better not to leave a record of where you’ve been.’
‘Are you admitting to the commission of a crime?’
‘How long have you got?’
‘You ever hear of a guy named Boris Cale?’
‘It rings a bell, but I can’t say why.’
‘He killed his ex’s new boyfriend down in Providence, Rhode Island a year or two ago. He didn’t know the city so he put the guy’s address into his GPS. He was found so fast that the blood hadn’t dried on the floor when the cops arrested him.’
‘A salutary lesson. Back to Perlman: in theory someone could follow 95 all the way from Florida to Maine.’
‘Only as far as Houlton.’
‘And this isn’t Houlton.’
‘It’s prettier than Houlton.’
‘Not difficult.’
‘No, not really,’ said Parker. ‘Anything on a phone?’
‘I’ve asked the sheriff’s department down in Duval County to take a look at Perlman’s apartment, see if they can find any records, or any sign of a laptop or desktop computer. If we confirm his phone details, we can see about contacting the phone company to find out who he might have called recently, especially anyone up here. They’ll probably ask for a court order, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’
‘It’s still odd that he didn’t have an atlas, or even just a state map, the kind they give away at the information centers when you cross the state line.’
‘He could have been using a GPS app on his phone,’ said Bloom.
‘Assuming he had one.’
‘He was a male in his forties. He might have been an exception, but it’s probably a safe guess that he owned a phone.’
‘Which, if he walked into that water, he took with him?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘Who needs a phone if he’s going to commit suicide by drowning?’ said Parker. ‘And I noticed something on his windshield. I could be wrong, but it was a circular mark on the glass, the kind left by the sucker attachment on one of those grips for a phone or a GPS. I only spotted it because it was cleaner than the rest of the windshield. Did you find anything like that in the car?’
‘If we did, then it would have been on the list. No, there was nothing like it.’
‘Again,’ said Parker, ‘what kind of suicide takes the holder for his phone or GPS with him when he steps into the sea? He wasn’t going to need GPS to find where he was going.’
Bloom shifted in her seat. It wasn’t that she’d exactly wanted Perlman’s death to be a suicide, but if it wasn’t, it was going to make life in Boreas very complicated. And there was the other thing, the one she hadn’t yet mentioned to this man …
‘He had a series of numbers tattooed on his left forearm,’ said Bloom. ‘Lloyd Kramer found them when he was bagging his clothing. I didn’t mention it to you before. I mean, I …’
She didn’t know why she felt the need to apologize. She just did.
‘It’s okay,’ said Parker. ‘It wasn’t any of my business until I chose to try and make it so. When you say numbers, what do you mean?’
‘They’re not uniform. One is four digits long, the next six, and then there are two more four-digit sequences, but beginning with the letter “A”. They look professional – I mean, they weren’t done in a jailhouse. I took a photograph.’
She removed her phone from her pocket, pulled up the picture, and handed it to him. The numbers ran horizontally along the arm, one beneath the next. He gave the phone back to her.
‘They’re clearly not gang tattoos,’ she said. ‘Unless accountants have gangs.’
‘They could be concentration camp numbers,’ said Parker. ‘With a name like Perlman, he was probably Jewish.’
‘My married name is Bloom and my husband and I aren’t Jewish,’ she argued.
‘If your name was Perlman, I think you would be.’
She conceded the point.
‘But Perlman was far too young to have been in a camp during World War II,’ she said. ‘And why four sequences?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Parker. ‘A reminder? A memorial of some kind?’
Bloom admitted that it made a kind of sense, although she remained open to other possibilities too.
‘I suppose I could ask around,’ she said. ‘I think there’s an Orthodox synagogue in Bangor, and there’s got to be at least one down in Portland. And there’s always Google.’
She performed a quick search with her phone.
‘God, there’s a lot of stuff on concentration camp numbers. They were used to identify prisoners at Auschwitz, and only there. Hey, I didn’t know that. Just from glancing over this material, they could be camp identifiers, I guess.’
‘Can I see those numbers again?’
She returned the phone to him, and he wrote them in a Moleskine notebook that he took from his jacket pocket.
‘I could just have sent them to your phone,’ she said.
‘I like writing things down.’
She let it pass.
‘I know someone in New York – a rabbi – who might be able to help with this,’ he told her. ‘If these are numbers from Auschwitz, then there must be a way to link them to the original prisoners.’
‘They may have nothing to do with why Perlman ended up in the sea.’
‘It won’t hurt to ask.’
‘Okay, but I also think we need to inform a local synagogue that we have Perlman’s remains up here. I don’t know much about Jewish burial traditions, but I remember that they prefer the dead to be buried within twenty-four hours, and we’re past that now.’
‘I’ll get an answer for you on that as well. Not much you can do about it, though, until the autopsy has been performed.’
They talked on while Bloom’s coffee grew cold. She thought about ordering another, then d
ecided against it. She had business to attend to, including naming Perlman officially to the press, and she didn’t think it was advisable to spend longer than necessary in public with Parker. Other people had come and gone since she’d arrived, and would have noticed them talking.
‘I could be wrong,’ she said, as she stood to leave, ‘but it strikes me that you don’t seem anxious for me to talk to anyone local, or even semi-local, who might be Jewish, or know about Jewish history and traditions.’
Parker signaled to Larraine for a refill.
‘What if Perlman’s death wasn’t suicide?’ he said. ‘The fact that he’s Jewish might be entirely incidental. Then again, it might not be. If he was killed, he was put in the water in the hope that he’d stay there, but the tides betrayed his killer. I don’t know what percentage of the population of this state is Jewish, but it can’t be much more than one percent, if that, and only a few of them are this far north. If his death is linked to his faith, then we should be careful about letting a small community of people know that we’re curious about the circumstances. Not yet, anyway. Not until we know more about those tattoos, and from a neutral source.’
‘You don’t believe that he killed himself, do you?’ said Bloom.
‘You know, I’ve seen a couple of cases where what looked like suicide turned out to be something else. One of them led to my almost being killed. It could be that I’ve just been unlucky, but it’s made me suspicious. This feels wrong, and looks wrong.’
‘And if it feels and looks wrong …’
‘Exactly.’
‘If you’re correct, and this turns out to be some kind of hate crime, we won’t just have the state police up here, but the FBI too.’
‘If you think about it,’ said Parker, ‘every murder is some kind of hate crime.’
‘That’s very philosophical,’ said Bloom. ‘Are you paying for the coffee?’
‘Sure.’
‘Thanks.’
‘My pleasure.’
He didn’t watch her leave. She could see him reflected in the mirror on the wall as she walked away, and he was already reading his paper.
She felt a twinge of disappointment.
Later that day, just as the sun was beginning to descend, Parker walked up the beach to the house occupied by Ruth and Amanda Winter. He carried a bag from Olesens containing a selection of young adult books, most of which had been chosen by Larraine Olesen, including an illustrated edition of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King that he thought Amanda might enjoy. He had no concern that it might be too frightening for her. Amanda Winter didn’t strike him as a girl who scared easily. In the bag was also the only bottle of kosher wine from Chandler’s General Store, bought as a housewarming gift for Ruth Winter – assuming she even drank wine, kosher or otherwise – and as a kind of apology for causing her concern when her daughter helped him.
Ruth’s car, a ’99 Neon, sat at the back of the house, but he got no reply when he rang the doorbell, and the place was quiet. He returned to the beach and thought that he saw two figures walking at the far end of the strand. He considered leaving the bag of books and wine at the door, but he didn’t have a pen to add a note, and didn’t want to return to his own house just to get one. He decided instead to take a seat on the porch rocker and wait for them to return. He had nothing better to do. He’d left a message for Rabbi Epstein in New York, telling him about Perlman and the tattoos. He knew that the call would be returned as soon as Epstein had some answers.
Epstein brought back memories of Liat, the mute woman who protected the rabbi. Parker felt mild stirrings of desire at the thought of her, the first in what seemed like a very long time. Liat was the last woman with whom he had slept, and Angel told him that, while he was unconscious in the hospital, she remained nearby, and nobody – not the state police, nor the Portland PD, nor even the occasional Fed – had seen fit to deter her from watching over him. By the time he came out of the coma, she was gone. Not that he believed she would ever sleep with him again. By taking him into her bed, and then only once, she was trying to discover some truth about him. It was a test, and he had passed, but only barely. Had he not, he was convinced that she would have killed him.
Maybe, he thought, he should be more careful in his choice of lovers.
He took one of the books from the bag: E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler, which he recalled reading as a child, although it was one of Larraine Olesen’s picks. He was already halfway through the first chapter when he paused in his reading and looked over at the door frame.
The little mezuzah in its pewter box was gone.
15
Steiger hadn’t washed since finishing with Pegi Tedesco. He had, though, kept his promise to her husband and called an ambulance when he was done with her. She was probably still warm by the time it arrived. Blood-sated, and blood-dazed, he drove back to his motel in a kind of stupor, not considering the possible consequences if the cops stopped him, or if someone saw him as he returned to his room. But he passed no one, drew no attention, and as his room was on the first floor, he was able to park right outside and enter without being seen. He was fortunate, he supposed, but he had always been so. He removed his heavily stained clothes and placed them in a plastic bag, then licked at the blood on his fingers and face. It was dry now, but he could still smell it. He lay on his bed, turned on the TV, and hit the mute button. He stayed like that for an entire day, the ‘DO NOT DISTURB’ sign hanging outside his door, the chain and security lock in place. He heard nothing and saw nothing, the television screen a series of unconnected images without meaning: static with colors and shapes. He simply relived his time with Pegi Tedesco.
His guts no longer even hurt.
It was the call that brought him back. The particular ringtone, used to denote that caller, and that caller alone, roused him.
‘What have you done?’ said the voice.
‘What I was supposed to do,’ he replied. ‘I silenced.’
‘You were meant to be discreet.’
‘I got carried away.’
‘There will be repercussions. You drew attention.’
‘There was always going to be attention drawn.’
He looked at his left index finger. There was blood beneath the nail. He worked at it with his tongue.
‘Had Perlman spoken to Tedesco?’
‘Yes.’
‘And to anyone else?’
‘Tedesco didn’t think so. Perlman didn’t have many friends. Tedesco was it.’
‘Leave,’ said the voice. ‘Move north. Watch Ruth Winter.’
‘Has she done anything more?’
‘No. She’s been warned.’
‘But will she listen?’
‘She will, for the sake of her child.’
‘What about you?’
‘I have other things to do. But understand this: you make no move without checking with me first. Are we clear?’
Steiger had progressed to digging out the blood with one of his canines. He thought that he could still taste it.
‘We’re clear.’
There was silence for a time.
‘Did you hurt the Tedesco woman very badly?’ asked the voice.
‘What does it matter to you?’
‘I disapprove of sadism.’
‘I was out of practice,’ said Steiger. ‘And I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it all.’
The connection was broken. Steiger put the phone down. The caller had made him feel slightly ashamed at his behavior, but only slightly. Steiger supposed that, from the outside, what he had done to the Tedesco woman must have appeared strange, but at least he had derived some pleasure form it. The other, though, had killed only once before – well, until recent events spurred him into further action – and then without pleasure, although neither had he felt any particular regret. Then again, he wasn’t a professional, not like Steiger. He was simply a fanatic. It was odd how these things came around: Steiger’s accompl
ice had killed Ruth Winter’s lover, the father of her child. Now, if no other option presented itself, he might have to kill Ruth as well.
Steiger showered, using bleach to sanitize the shower floor when he was done, then dressed and checked out of the motel. He double-bagged the bloodstained clothes, bought a container of lighter fluid in a smoke shop, and burned the bag in a trashcan behind a disused strip mall just north of Jacksonville. He drove for twenty-four hours, barely resting, stopping only for coffee and two naps, conscious that he was traveling the same route as the late Bruno Perlman. He wondered what it was like to drown. He tried to imagine it, but his capacities were ill suited to inhabiting the consciousness of others. Empathy was not in his nature.
Tiredness eventually overcame him shortly after he left Boston. He took a room in a cheap motel on Route I, and ate cold hamburgers that he’d picked up along the way. He slept for only a few hours, the drapes closed against the light, before the pain in his stomach woke him. Still, it was enough.
He got back in his car and drove on to Boreas.
16
Ruth and Amanda Winter returned home to find the detective waiting on the porch, a book balanced on his right thigh. Ruth didn’t know how long he might have been there, but he didn’t seem to have read more than a couple of pages. He watched her thoughtfully as she approached, and although he smiled at her, there was a feral element to it, and she felt horribly exposed beneath his gaze. She didn’t want him here. She knew who he was. Just that morning, she’d heard someone mention him in Chandler’s General Store. He’d been in earlier, buying wine, and a woman unknown to Ruth had commented on how odd it was that a body should have washed up shortly after ‘that man’ had moved to Boreas. Edwyn Weeks, who worked behind the counter at the store most days, told her to hush up with that kind of foolishness, and everyone had laughed, even Ruth, but they did so in the manner of people denying some truth that they had no wish to hear spoken aloud.
Here, Ruth sensed, was a man who smelled out secrets the way hogs sniffed for truffles.
Amanda, by contrast, was pleased to see him. She asked him how he was, and he said that he was fine. He told her that he’d brought some books along as a thank-you for her kindness, and apologized for starting one of them while he was waiting for her and her mother to return. Then he gave Ruth the wine as a token of apology for any worry he might have caused her, and after that she couldn’t very well not invite him in, because she felt that it would not only be rude but might set those senses of his jangling. She was fairly certain that he had come only for the reasons stated: to thank Amanda, and to apologize to her, but she couldn’t be sure. For the other thing she had heard while shopping was that Parker and Chief Bloom had been noticed talking together at Olesens, and someone said that Dan Rainey was sure he saw Parker down on the beach where the body had washed ashore.