‘You okay?’ asked Santos as we stood at the gate.
‘No,’ I said. I saw TV cameras, and flashes exploded in my eyes, leaving red spots in their wake. I saw patrol cars, and men in uniform. And I was back in another time, my knee bruised and my trousers torn, my head in my hands and the image of the dead frozen on my retina.
‘You want a minute?’
More flashbulbs, closer now. I heard my name being called, but I did not react.
‘No,’ I said again, and I followed Santos to the back of the house.
It was the blood that did it. Blood on the kitchen floor, and blood on the walls. I could not enter the kitchen. Instead, I gazed upon it from outside until I felt my stomach begin to churn and sweat broke out on my face. I leaned against the cool woodwork of the house and closed my eyes until the nausea passed.
‘Did you see it?’ asked Santos.
‘Yes,’ I said.
The symbol had been drawn in Wallace’s blood. His body had already been removed, but the position in which he was found had been marked. The symbol had been created just above where Wallace’s head had rested. Nearby, the contents of a plastic folder had been scattered across the floor. I saw the photographs, and knew why Wallace had been here. He wanted to relive the killings, and their discovery.
‘Do you know what that symbol means?’ asked Santos.
‘I’ve never seen it before.’
‘Me neither, but I’m guessing that whoever did this signed his handiwork. We’ve searched the rest of the house. It’s clean. Looks like it all happened in the kitchen.’
I turned to look at him. He was young. He probably didn’t even understand the import of his own words. And yet I could not forgive him his crassness.
‘We’re finished here,’ I said.
I walked away from him, and straight into another barrage of flashes, of camera lights and shouted questions. I froze for a moment as I realized that I had no way of leaving this place. I had come with Santos. I had no car of my own. I saw someone standing under a tree, a familiar figure: a big, tall man with short silver hair shorn in a military cut. In my confusion, it took me a moment to place him.
Tyrrell.
Tyrrell was here, a man who, even after I left the force, had made it clear to me that he believed I should be behind bars. Now he was striding toward me, outside the place where Mickey Wallace had been killed. Wallace had hinted that some people had been willing to talk to him, and I knew then that Tyrrell had been one of them. Some of the reporters saw him coming, and one of them, a guy named McGarry who’d been on the police beat for so long that his skin had a blue tinge, called Tyrrell’s name. It was clear from the way the older man was moving that some kind of confrontation was about to occur, and it would take place in the glare of cameras and the red lights of handheld recording devices. That was how Tyrrell would want it.
‘You sonofabitch,’ he shouted. ‘This is your fault.’
More flashes now, and the bright, steady light of a TV camera shining upon Tyrrell. He’d been drinking, but he was not intoxicated. I prepared to face him, and then a hand gripped my arm, and Jimmy Gallagher’s voice said, ‘Come on. Let’s get you out of here.’ Exhausted though he was, he had followed me here, and I was grateful to him for it. I saw the frustration in Tyrrell’s face as he watched his quarry escape, denied his moment in front of the media, and then the more together reporters were turning to him for a comment, and he began to spill his bile.
Santos watched Parker depart, and saw Tyrrell begin talking to the reporters. Santos didn’t know why Tyrrell was blaming Parker for what had happened, but he knew now that there was bad blood between the two men. He would talk to Tyrrell, in time. He turned away, and watched a man in a nicely cut dark suit who had slipped past the cordon and seemed to be staring intently at the receding lights of Jimmy Gallagher’s car. Santos moved toward him.
‘Sir, you have to step back behind the line.’
The man flipped the wallet in his palm to reveal a badge and a Maine State Police ID, but he didn’t look at Santos, who felt his hackles rise as a consequence.
‘Detective Hansen,’ said Santos. ‘Can I help you with something?’
Only when the car had turned onto Marine Avenue and was gone from sight did Hansen respond to Santos. His eyes, like his hair and his suit, were very dark.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said, and walked away.
That night I slept in Jimmy Gallagher’s house, in a clean bed in an otherwise unfurnished room, and in my dreams I saw a dark figure bent over Mickey Wallace, whispering and cutting, in the house on Hobart Street, and behind them, as in one film playing over another, each depicting the same setting from a similar angle but at different moments in time, I saw another man hunched over my wife, speaking softly to her as he cut her, the body of my dead child on the floor nearby waiting to be violated in turn. And then they were gone and there was only Wallace in the darkness, the blood bubbling from the wound in his throat, his body trembling. He was dying alone and afraid, in a strange place . . .
A woman appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. She wore a summer dress, and a little girl stood beside her, gripping the thin material of her mother’s dress with her right hand. They walked to where Wallace lay, and the woman knelt beside him and stroked his face, and the child took his hand, and together they calmed him until his eyes closed and he left this world forever.
26
The girl’s body had been wrapped in plastic sheeting, then weighted with a rock and dumped in a pond. It was discovered when a cow slipped into the water and one of its legs became tangled on the rope securing the plastic. As the cow, a Horned Hereford of no small value, was hauled from the pond, the body came with it.
Almost as soon as it was found, the locals in the small southern Idaho town of Goose Creek knew who it was. Her name was Melody McReady, and she had disappeared two years earlier. Her boyfriend, Wade Pearce, had been questioned in connection with her disappearance and, although the police had subsequently ruled him out as a suspect, he had killed himself one month after Melanie went missing, or so the official version went. He had shot himself in the head, even though he didn’t appear to own a gun. Then again, people said, there was no understanding the nature of grief – or guilt, for there were those who felt that, regardless of anything the cops might have said, Wade Pearce had been responsible for whatever happened to Melody McReady, although such suspicions owed more to a general dislike of the Pearce family than to any real evidence of wrongdoing on Wade’s part. Still, even those who believed Wade was innocent weren’t too sorry when he shot himself, because Wade was a vicious jerk, just like the rest of the men in his family. Melody McReady had ended up with him because her own family was almost as screwed up as his was. Everybody knew that it would end in tears. They just hadn’t expected bloodshed too, and a body eventually dragged from still waters on the leg of a cow.
DNA tests were conducted on the remains to confirm the identity of the young woman, and to find any possible traces left by whoever had killed her and dumped her in old Sidey’s pond, although the investigators were skeptical of anything useful being revealed. Too much time had gone by, and the body had not been sealed in the plastic, so the fish and the elements had had their way with her.
To their surprise, then, one usable print was recovered from the plastic. It was submitted to AFIS, the FBI’s fingerprint identification system. The detectives investigating the discovery of the body then sat back to wait. AFIS was overburdened by submissions from law enforcement agencies, and it could take weeks or months for a check to be conducted, depending upon the urgency of the case and the extent of the AFIS workload. As it happened, the print was checked within two weeks, but no match was found. Along with the print had come a photograph of a mark that had been found carved on a rock by the pond, a photograph that eventually found its way to Unit Five of the agency’s National Security Division, the arm of the FBI responsible for collecting intelligence and carrying out coun
terintelligence actions related to national security and international terrorism.
Unit Five of the NSD was nothing more than a secure computer terminal in the New York field office at Federal Plaza. Its recent NSD designation, and the new title of Unit Five that came with it, were both flags of convenience, approved by the Office of the General Counsel in order to ensure that cooperation from law enforcement was swift and unconditional. Unit Five was responsible for all inquiries linked, however peripherally, to the investigation into the actions of the killer known as the Traveling Man, the individual responsible for the deaths of a number of men and women at the end of the 1990s, among them Susan and Jennifer Parker, wife and daughter of Charlie Parker. Unit Five had, over time, also absorbed earlier information on the death of a man named Peter Ackerman in New York in the late sixties, the shooting of an unidentified woman at Gerritsen Beach some months later, and the Pearl River killings involving William Parker, information that had been assembled by an ASAC, an assistant special agent in charge of the New York field office, and subsequently passed on to one of his successors. In addition, its files contained all known material on the cases with which Charlie Parker had been involved since he became a PI.
Other agencies, including the NYPD, were aware of Unit Five designations, but ultimately only two people had full access to the unit’s records: the special agent in charge of the New York field office, Edgar Ross, and his assistant, Brad. It was this assistant who, twenty minutes after the initial referral, knocked on his boss’s door with four sheets of paper in his hands.
‘You’re not going to like this,’ he said.
Ross looked up as Brad closed the door behind him.
‘I never like anything that you tell me. You never bring good news. You never even bring coffee. What have you got?’
Brad seemed reluctant to hand over the papers, like a child concerned about submitting flawed homework to his teacher.
‘Fingerprint request submitted to AFIS, taken from a body dump in Idaho. Local girl, Melody McReady. She disappeared two years ago. Body was found in a pond, wrapped in plastic. The print came from the plastic.’
‘And we got a match?’
‘No, but there was something else: a photograph. That started ringing bells.’
‘Why?’
Brad looked uneasy. Despite the fact that he had been with his boss for almost five years now, everything to do with Unit Five made him uneasy. He’d read details of some of the other cases that had been automatically flagged for the unit’s attention. Without exception, every one of them gave him the creeps. Similarly without exception, every one of them seemed to involve, peripherally or directly, the man named Charlie Parker.
‘The prints didn’t match, but the symbol did. It’s been found on two earlier bodies. The first was the corpse of an unknown woman fished from the Shell Bank Creek in Brooklyn over forty years ago, after she was shot by a cop. She was never identified. The second match comes from the body of a teenage girl killed in a car at Pearl River about twenty-six years ago. Her name was Missy Gaines: a runaway from Jersey.’
Ross closed his eyes and waited for Brad to continue.
‘Gaines was shot by Charlie Parker’s father. The other woman was killed by his father’s partner sixteen years earlier.’
Now, reluctantly, he proffered the papers. Ross examined the symbol on the first sheet from the McReady body dump and compared it to the symbol from the earlier killings.
‘Aw, hell,’ he said.
Brad reddened, even though he knew that he was not to blame for what was to come. ‘It gets worse. Look at the second sheet. This was found hacked into a tree near the body of a kid called Bobby Faraday.’
This time Ross swore more forcefully.
‘The third one was cut into the wood beside the back door of the Faraday house. It was assumed that they’d killed themselves, but the chief, a guy named Dashut, didn’t seem so sure. Took them five days to find it.’
‘And we’re only getting it now?’
‘State police never passed it on. They’re kind of territorial out there. Eventually, Dashut just got tired of the lack of progress and went over their heads.’
‘Get me every piece of paper you can find on the McReady girl and the Faradays.’
‘Already on their way,’ said Brad. ‘They should be here within the hour.’
‘Go wait for them.’
Brad did as he was told.
Ross put the papers beside a set of photographs that had been on his desk since earlier that morning. They came from the previous night’s crime scene at Hobart Street, and showed the symbol that had been drawn on the wall of the kitchen with Mickey Wallace’s blood.
Ross had been informed of the murder within an hour of the discovery of Wallace’s body, and had asked for evidence photos and copies of all documentation relating to the case to be made available to him by nine the following morning. As soon as he saw the symbol, Ross began covering the trail. Calls were made to One Police Plaza, and the symbol was scrubbed from the kitchen wall. All those who had been present at the scene were contacted and warned that the symbol was crucial to the case, and any mention of it outside the immediate investigative team would result in disciplinary action and, ultimately, dismissal without recourse to appeal. Additional locks were placed on all police files relating to the Pearl River killings, the shooting in Gerritsen Beach, and the accidental death of Peter Ackerman at the intersection of 78th and 1st nine months before. The lock prevented those files from being accessed without the express permission of both SAC Ross and the NYPD’s Deputy Commissioners of Operations and Intelligence, even though all the relevant files had been carefully ‘sterilized’ after the events in Pearl River to ensure that any matches that might arise at a later date would be referred to the commissioner’s office and, when it subsequently came into being, Unit Five. Any inquiries relating to them would immediately be red-flagged.
Ross knew that the death of a reporter, even a former one, would draw other reporters like flies, and the circumstances of Wallace’s death, killed in a house where two high profile murders had been committed a decade earlier, would attract further attention. It was important to keep a lid on the investigation, but it couldn’t be too tight or the more excitable reporters would start to sense a cover-up. Therefore, it was decided, in conjunction with One Police Plaza, that a suitably sympathetic ‘face’ would be presented to the media, and a series of carefully controlled unofficial briefings would disseminate enough information to keep the media at bay without actually divulging anything that might be considered dangerous to the conduct of the investigation.
Ross traced his fingers over the picture of the symbol on the wall, then retrieved copies of four different photos from the various files on his desk. Soon, its surface was covered with variations on the same images: symbols burned into flesh, cut into wood, and carved on stone.
Ross turned his chair to the window and looked out over the city. As he did so, he dialed a number using a secure line. A woman answered.
‘Let me speak to the rabbi, please,’ said Ross.
Within seconds, Epstein was on the line.
‘It’s Ross.’
‘I was expecting your call.’
‘You’ve heard, then?’
‘I received a call last night to alert me.’
‘Do you know where Parker is?’
‘Mr. Gallagher gave him a bed for the night.’
‘Is that common knowledge?’
‘Not to the media. Mr. Gallagher had the foresight to remove his license plate when he realized that he might be forced to conduct a rescue.’
Ross was relieved. He knew that, in the absence of a New York lead, reporters had already attempted to track Parker through the bar in Maine in which he was working. A call to the field office in Portland requesting a drive-by at the Parker house had revealed two cars and a TV van parked outside, and the owner of the Great Lost Bear had told an agent that he’d been forced to put a ‘No
Reporters’ sign on his door. To ensure that his request was complied with, he’d hired two large men in hastily made ‘No Reporters’ T-shirts to man the doors. According to the agent in question, those men had been waiting to start work when he’d visited the bar. They were, he said, without question two of the widest individuals he had ever seen in his life.
‘And now?’ asked Ross.
‘Parker left the Gallagher house this morning,’ said Epstein. ‘I have no idea where he is.’
‘Have you spoken to Gallagher?’
‘He says that he doesn’t know where Parker has gone, but he confirmed that Parker now knows everything.’
‘Then he’s going to come looking for you.’
‘I’m prepared for that.’
‘I have some material I’m sending over to you. You might find it interesting.’
‘What kind of material?’
‘The symbol that was found on the dead women at Shell Bank Creek and Pearl River? I’ve got three more versions of it in front of me, one from two years ago, the others from earlier this year. There were apparent killings involved in each case.’
‘She’s leaving signs, markers for the Other.’
‘And now we’ve got her opposite number leaving his name in blood at Charlie Parker’s old house, so he’s doing the same.’