‘And no one would disturb him out there?’
‘Most of it hasn’t been touched in the best part of fifty years. Go far enough into the forest and not even hunters or wardens are likely to bother you. You think someone went in there?’
‘Yes, I do.’ I shook his hand and opened the door of the Mustang. ‘Trouble is, I think he’s come out again.’
Chapter Twenty One
I had the scent of him then, had begun to feel the knowledge of him creep over me, but I needed more if I was to understand him, if I was to hunt him down before he found Billy Purdue, before he killed again. I was so close to making the connection: it hung just beyond my reach like the name of a half-remembered melody. I needed someone who could take my own semi-formed suspicions and mould them into a coherent whole, and I knew of only one person I trusted that much.
I needed to talk to Rachel Wolfe.
I drove back to Dark Hollow, packed an overnight bag and placed the file on Caleb Kyle at the top. Louis and Angel returned in their separate cars as I was leaving. I explained what I was doing then started to drive to Bangor to catch the flight to Boston.
I was just outside Guilford when, three cars ahead of me, I spotted a yellow Ford truck, its exhaust belching dirty fumes onto the road. I accelerated past it, glancing idly at the driver as I did so. In the cab sat the old man who had threatened me with his shotgun. I stayed ahead of him for a time, then pulled into a gas station at Dover-Foxcroft to let him pass. I stayed four or five cars behind him all the way to Orono, where he drove into the parking lot of a run-down mall and stopped outside a store called ‘Stuckey Trading’. I checked my watch. If I delayed any longer, I’d miss my flight. I watched the old man as he removed a couple of black sacks from the bed of his truck and headed into the store, then I slapped the steering wheel once in frustration and accelerated towards Bangor and the airport.
I knew that Rachel Wolfe was holding tutorials at Harvard while the college funded research she was conducting into the link between abnormal brain structures and criminal behaviour. She no longer engaged in private practice and, as far as I knew, was no longer assisting with criminal profiling.
Rachel had acted as an unofficial adviser on a number of cases for the NYPD, including the Travelling Man killings. That was how I met her, how we became lovers, and it was what eventually tore us apart. Rachel, whose policeman brother had died at the hands of a disturbed gunman, believed that by exploring the criminal mind she could prevent similar tragedies from happening to others. But the Travelling Man’s mind had been unlike any other, and the hunt for him had almost cost Rachel her life. She had made it known that she did not wish to see me and, until recently, I had respected that wish. I did not want to cause her any more pain, yet now I felt that I had nowhere else to turn.
But there was more to it than that, I knew. Twice in the last three months I had gone to Boston with the intention of finding her, or trying to reestablish what we had lost, but each time I had turned back without talking to her. Leaving my card on that last visit, with Louis waiting downstairs in the lobby, was as close as I had come to contacting her. Perhaps, in some way, Caleb Kyle would provide a bridge between us, a professional conduit that might also allow the personal to run alongside it.
On the flight, I added what I had learned from Mrs Schneider to my grandfather’s file, writing carefully in block capitals. I scanned the photos as I went, noting the details of these young women now long dead, their lives more carefully documented by my grandfather after they were gone than by anyone while they were alive. In many ways, he knew them and cared about them as much as their own parents. In some cases, he cared about them more. He outlived his own wife by thirteen years, and outlived his daughter by twelve. He had lived to mourn a lot of women, I thought.
I remembered something he said to me once, after I became a policeman. I sat beside him in the Scarborough house, matching coffee mugs on the table, and watched as he examined my shield, the light reflecting on his spectacles as he twisted and turned it in his hand. Outside, the sun shone, but the house was cool and dark.
‘It’s a strange vocation,’ he said at last. ‘These rapists, and murderers, thieves and drug peddlers, we need them to exist. Without them, we’d have no purpose. They give our professional lives meaning.
‘And that’s the danger, Charlie. Because, somewhere down the line, you’ll meet one who threatens to cross over, one you can’t leave behind when you take off your badge at the end of the day. You have to fight it, or else your friends, your family, they all become tainted by his shadow. A man like that, he makes you his creature. Your life becomes an extension of his life, and if you don’t find him, if you don’t bring him to an end, he’ll haunt you for the rest of your days. You understand me, Charlie?’
I understood, or thought I did. Even then, as he came to the end of his life, he was still tainted by his contact with Caleb Kyle. He hoped that it would never happen to me, but it did. It happened with the Travelling Man and, now, it was happening again. I had inherited the monkey on my grandfather’s back, his ghost, his demon.
After I made my additions, I went through the file again, trying to feel my way into my grandfather’s mind and, through his efforts, into the mind of Caleb Kyle. At the end of the file was a folded sheet of newspaper. It was a page from the Maine Sunday Telegram dating from 1977, twelve years after the man my grandfather knew as Caleb Kyle had blinked out of existence. On the page was a photograph taken in Greenville of a representative of the Scott Paper Company, which owned most of the forest north of Greenville, presenting the steamboat Katahdin to the Moosehead Marine Museum for restoration. In the background people grinned and waved, but farther back a figure had been caught, his face turned to the camera, a box containing what might have been supplies held in his arms. Even from a distance, he appeared tall and wiry, the arms holding the boxes long and thin, the legs slim but strong. The face was nothing more than a blur, ringed carefully in red felt-tip.
But my grandfather had enlarged it, then enlarged it again, and again, and again, each enlargement placed behind the preceding picture. And from the page a face grew, bigger and bigger until it took on the size and dimensions of a skull, the ink turning the eyes into dark pits, the face a construct of tiny black and white dots. The man in the picture had become a spectre, his features indistinguishable, unrecognisable to anyone except my grandfather. For my grandfather had sat beside him in that bar, had smelt him, had listened as this man directed him to a tree where dead girls twisted in the breeze.
This, my grandfather believed, was Caleb Kyle.
At the airport, I called the psychology department at Harvard, gave them my ID number and asked them if Rachel Wolfe was due to teach that day. I was informed that Ms Wolfe was due to give a tutorial to psychology students at 6 p.m.. It was now 5.15 p.m. If I missed Rachel on-campus, there were people who could get a residential address for me but it would take time and time, I was rapidly coming to realise, was something I just didn’t have. I hailed a cab and, after actively encouraging the driver to take the Ted Williams Tunnel to avoid the worst of the traffic, arrived in Cambridge.
A UC election banner hung outside the Grafton pub and a lot of the kids on the streets wore student election badges on their bags and coats as I headed across the campus to the junction of Quincy and Kirkland. I sat in the shadow of the Church of the New Jerusalem, across from the William James Hall, and waited.
At 5.59 p.m. a figure dressed in a black wool overcoat, ankle-length boots and black trousers, her red hair tied back with a black and white ribbon, walked down Quincy and entered the Hall. Even at a distance, Rachel still looked beautiful and I caught one or two male students sneaking looks at her as she passed. I kept a short distance behind her as I followed her into the entrance hall and watched her take the stairs to Seminar Room 6 on the lower ground floor, just to make sure that she wasn’t going to cancel and leave. I followed her as she entered the seminar room and closed the door, then I too
k a seat in a plastic chair with a view of the room and waited.
After an hour, the door opened and students began to stream out, most with large-format, wire-bound notebooks clutched to their chests or poking out of their bags: wire-bound notebooks were a weakness of Rachel’s. I moved aside to let the last student leave, then stepped into a small classroom dominated by a single big table, with chairs arranged around it and against the walls. At the head of the table, beneath a blackboard, sat Rachel Wolfe. She was dressed in a dark green sweater with a man’s white shirt beneath it, the collar turned up around her neck. As always, she wore some light make-up, carefully applied, and a dark red lipstick.
She looked up expectantly, a half smile on her face that froze as soon as she saw me. I closed the door gently behind me and took the first vacant seat at the table, which was just about as far away from her as I could get.
‘Hi,’ I said.
She very deliberately put her pens and notes away in a leather attaché case, then she stood and started to shrug on her coat. ‘I asked that you not try to contact me,’ she said, as she struggled to find her left sleeve. I stood and walked over to her, and held the sleeve out so she could get her arm in. I felt kind of sleazy intruding on her space that way, but I also felt a momentary twinge of resentment: Rachel had not been the only one hurt in Louisiana in the hunt for the Travelling Man. The resentment quickly passed, to be replaced by guilt as I recalled the feel of her in my arms, her body racked by sobs after she was forced to kill a man in the Metairie cemetery. Once again, I saw her raising the gun, her finger tightening on the trigger, fire leaping from the muzzle as the gun bucked in her hands. Some deep, unquenchable instinct for survival had kicked in on that awful summer day, fuelling her actions. I think that now, when she looked at me, she recalled what she had done, and she felt a fear of what I represented: the capacity for violence that had briefly exploded into existence within her and whose embers still glowed redly in her dark places.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, lying a little. ‘I’m here for professional reasons, not personal ones.’
‘Then I certainly don’t want to hear about it.’ She turned, her case beneath her arm. ‘Excuse me, I have work to do.’
I put out a hand to touch her arm, and she glared at me. I withdrew it. ‘Rachel, wait. I need your help.’
‘Please, let me leave. You’re blocking my way.’
I moved back and she shuffled past me, her head down. She had the door open when I spoke again. ‘Rachel, listen to me, just for a moment. If not for me, then for Walter Cole.’
She stopped at the door, but didn’t turn around. ‘What about Walter?’
‘His daughter Ellen is missing. I’m not sure, but it may have something to do with a case I’m working on. It may also be connected somehow to Thani Pho, the student who was killed.’
Rachel paused, then took a deep breath, closed the door and sat down in the seat I had previously occupied. Just to keep things equal, I sat down in her seat.
‘You have two minutes,’ she said.
‘I need you to read a file, and give me an opinion on it.’
‘I don’t do that anymore.’
‘I hear you’re working on a study about the connection between violent crime and brain disorders, something involving brain scans.’
I knew a little more than that. Rachel was involved in research into dysfunctions in two areas of the brain, the amygdala and the frontal lobe. As I understood it from reading a copy of an article she had contributed to a psychology journal, the amygdala, a tiny area of tissue in the unconscious brain, generates feelings of alarm and emotion, allowing us to respond to the distress of others. The frontal lobe is where emotions are registered, where self-consciousness emerges and plans are constructed. It is also the part of the brain that controls our impulses.
In psychopaths, it was now believed, the frontal lobe failed to respond when confronted with an emotional situation, possibly due to a failure in the amygdala itself or in the processes used to send its signals to the cortex. Rachel, and others like her, were pressing for a huge brain-scan survey on convicted criminals, arguing that they could reveal a connection between brain damage and psychopathic criminal behaviour.
She frowned. ‘You seem to know a lot about me. I’m not sure that I like the idea of you keeping tabs on me.’
I felt that twinge of resentment again. I felt it so strongly that my mouth twitched involuntarily. ‘It’s not like that, but I see your ego is still strong and healthy.’
Rachel smiled slightly, a tiny, fleeting thing. ‘The rest of me isn’t quite so robust. I’m going to be scarred for life, Bird. I’m in therapy twice weekly and I’ve had to give up my own practice. I still think of you, and you still frighten me. Sometimes.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Maybe it was my imagination, but there was something in that pause, in that ‘sometimes’, that implied she thought of me in other ways too.
‘I know. Tell me about this file.’
And I did, giving her a brief run through the history of the killings, adding some of what Mrs Schneider had told me and some of what I suspected, or had guessed, myself. ‘Most of it is in here.’ I raised the battered manilla file. ‘I’d like you to take a look, see what you can come up with.’
She reached out and I slid the file to her across the row of tables. She flicked quickly through the handwritten notes, the carbon copies, the photographs. One of them was a crime scene photo taken by the banks of the Little Wilson. ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, there was a new light in them, the spark of professional curiosity but also something else, something that had attracted me to her in the first place.
It was empathy.
‘It could take a couple of days,’ she said.
‘I don’t have a couple of days. I need it tonight.’
‘Not possible. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t even begin to do it in that time.’
‘Rachel, no one believes me. No one will accept that this man could ever have existed or, worse, could still be alive now. But he’s out there. I can feel him, Rachel. I need to understand him, in however small a way. I need something, anything, to make him real, to bring him out of that file and to form a recognisable picture of him. Please. I’ve got this jumble of details in my head, and I need someone to help me make sense of it. There’s no one else I can turn to and, anyway, you’re the best criminal psychologist I know.’
‘I’m the only criminal psychologist you know,’ she said, and that smile came again.
‘There’s that as well.’
She stood. ‘There’s no way I’ll have anything for you tonight, but meet me tomorrow at the Co-op bookstore, at, say, eleven o’clock. I’ll give you what I have then.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘You’re welcome.’ And with that she was gone.
I stayed where I always stayed when I was in Boston, in the Nolan House over on G Street in south Boston. It was a quiet bed-and-breakfast, with antique furniture and a couple of restaurants close by. I checked in with Angel and Louis, but there was no movement in Dark Hollow.
‘You see Rachel?’ asked Angel.
‘Yes, I saw her.’
‘How’d she take it?’
‘She didn’t seem too pleased to see me.’
‘You bring back bad memories.’
‘Story of my life. Maybe, someday, someone will see me and think happy thoughts.’
‘Never happen,’ he said. ‘Hang loose, and tell her we were asking after her.’
‘I will. Any move out at the Payne house?’
‘The younger guy went into town to buy milk and groceries, that’s about all. No sign of Billy Purdue, or Tony Celli, or Stritch, but Louis is still acting funny. Stritch is around here somewhere, that much we can be sure of. Sooner you’re back here, the better.’
I showered, put on a clean T-shirt and jeans, and found a copy of the Gousha deluxe road atlas from 1995 among the guidebooks and magaz
ines in the hallway of the Nolan House. The Gousha listed eight Medinas – Texas, Tennessee, Washington, Wisconsin, New York, North Dakota, Michigan and Ohio – and one Medinah, in Illinois. I ruled out all of the northern towns in the hope that my grandfather was right about Caleb’s southern roots, which left Tennessee and Texas. I tried Tennessee first, but no one in the Gibson County sheriffs office recalled a Caleb Kyle who might or might not have killed his mother on a farm sometime in the 1940s but, as a deputy told me helpfully, that didn’t mean it didn’t happen, it just meant that nobody around could recall it happening. I made a call to the state police, just on the off chance, but got the same reply: no Caleb Kyle.
It was approaching eight-thirty when I started calling Texas. Medina, it emerged, was in Bandera County, not Medina County, so my first call to the Medina County Sheriff didn’t get me very far. But I hit lucky on the second call, real lucky, and I couldn’t help wondering how my grandfather would have felt had he got this far and learned the truth about Caleb Kyle.
Chapter Twenty Two
The sheriffs name was Dan Tannen, a deputy told me. I waited to be transferred to the sheriffs own office. After a couple of clicks on the line, a female voice said: ‘Hello?’
‘Sheriff Tannen?’ I asked. It was a good guess.
‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘You don’t sound surprised.’
‘Should I be?’
‘I’ve been mistaken for the secretary a couple of times. Pisses me off to hell, I tell you. The Dan is short for Danielle, for what it’s worth. I hear you’re asking about Caleb Kyle?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I’m a private investigator, working out of Portland, Maine. I’m—’
She interrupted me to ask: ‘Where did you hear that name?’
‘Caleb?’
‘Uh-huh. Well, more particularly Caleb Kyle. Where’d you hear that name?’