I called Angel.
“Where is he?”
“Bath Iron Works,” he said. “I can see him from where we are. Looks like there’s some problem with the monitors for their surveillance system. He’s checking cables and opening shit. Should be a while.”
“Disable his car,” I said. “Two tires should be enough. Then come back here.”
A half hour later, they were with me at Lang’s place. I pointed Angel to the door in the floor and he went to work. He didn’t speak once, not even when, five minutes later, he cracked the first lock and, shortly after, the second. He didn’t speak when a flat metal storage shelf was revealed, containing unmarked videocassettes, DVDs, computer disks, and plastic files with transparent pages within, each page containing images of naked children, sometimes with adults and sometimes with other children. He didn’t speak when he released the shelf using a pair of clasps at either end, raising it up to uncover a boxlike cell in which was crouched a small girl wrapped in layer upon layer of blankets, her eyes blinking in the light, some old dolls scattered around her alongside chocolate bars, cookies, and a box of breakfast cereal. He didn’t speak when he saw the bucket she was forced to use as a toilet, or the circular opening in the wall, covered by a grille, that allowed air into the prison.
He only spoke when he leaned down and reached out a hand to the frightened girl.
“It’s okay now,” he said. “We won’t let nobody hurt you again.”
And the child opened her mouth and howled.
I called the cops. Angel and Louis left. There was only me and a ten-year-old girl with sallow skin whose name appeared to be Anya. She wore a cheap necklace around her neck with those four letters picked out in silver upon it. I put her in the front seat of my car and she sat there unmoving, her face turned away from the trailer, her eyes fixed on a spot on the car floor. She couldn’t tell me how long she had been held there, and I could only get confirmation of her name and her age out of her in thickly accented English before she went silent again. She said she was ten years old. I doubted that she trusted me, and I didn’t blame her.
While she sat in the car, lost in her own thoughts, I went through Raymon Lang’s album of photographs. Some of them were very recent: Anya was among the children pictured, masked men on either side of her. I looked closely at one of the photographs and thought I saw, on the arm of the man on the right, what might have been the yellow beak of a bird. I flicked back through the rest, the tones and colors changing as the pictures grew older, Polaroids taking the place of computer images before their place was taken in turn by the oldest of the photographs: black-and-white pictures, probably developed by Lang himself in a home darkroom. There were boys and girls, sometimes photographed alone and at other times with men, their identities hidden by bird masks. It was a history of abuse that spanned years, probably decades.
The oldest images in the album were photocopies, their quality poor. They showed a young girl on a bed, two men taking turns with her, the pictures cropped to remove their heads. In one of the photos, I saw a tattoo on the arm of one of the men. It was blurred. I imagined that it could be cleaned up, and that when it did it would reveal an eagle.
But one of the photographs was different from the rest. I looked at it for a long time, then removed it from its plastic sleeve and carefully rearranged the other images to disguise what I had done. I tucked the picture beneath the rubber mat on the floor of my car, then sat on the cold, hard gravel with my head in my hands and waited for the police to come.
They arrived out of uniform and in a pair of unmarked cars. Anya watched them coming and curled up fetally, repeating a single word over and over in a language that I did not recognize. It was only when the doors of the first car opened, and a pair of women emerged, that Anya started to believe she might be safe. The two women approached us. The passenger door of my car was open, and they could see the little girl just as she could see them. I hadn’t wanted Anya to feel she had simply been moved from one cell to another.
The first cop squatted before her. She was slim, with long red hair tied back tightly on her head. She reminded me of Rachel.
“Hi,” she said. “My name is Jill. You’re Anya, is that right?”
Anya nodded, recognizing her name, if nothing else. Her face began to soften. Her lips turned down at the corners, and she started to cry. This wasn’t the animal response that had greeted Angel. This was something else.
Jill opened her arms to the little girl and she fell into them, burying her face in the woman’s neck, her body jerking with the force of her sobs. Jill looked over Anya’s shoulder at me, and nodded. I turned away, and left them to each other.
35
Bath isn’t a very beautiful town when seen from the water, but then most places dependent upon one form of heavy industry rarely are, and nobody ever designed a shipyard with aesthetics in mind. Still, there was something majestic about its massive cranes and the great ships that the yards still turned out at a time when most of its rivals had seen shipbuilding either collapse entirely or become a mere shadow of its former grandeur. The shipyard might have been ugly, yet it was an ugliness born not of decay but of growth, with four hundred years of history behind it, four centuries of noise and steam and sparks, of wood replaced by steel, of sons following fathers into trades that had been passed down for generations. The fate of Bath and the fate of the shipyard were forever entwined in a bond that could never be severed.
Like any town where large numbers of people traveled to work for one major employer, parking was an issue, and the huge lot at King Street, right at the intersection with Commercial and nearest to the main north gate to the yard, was packed with cars. The first shift was about to end and buses idled nearby, waiting to transport those who came from out of town and preferred to avoid the hassle of parking either by dispensing with their cars entirely or by leaving them in the suburbs. A sign warned that the Bath Iron Works was a defense contractor and all photography was prohibited. Over the employee entrance was another sign that read: Through These Gates Pass the Best Shipbuilders in the World.
The cops had gathered at the Riverside Sports Club. There were a dozen all told, a mix of Bath P.D. and state police, all of them in plain clothes. In addition, two cruisers lurked out of sight. The yard’s own security people had been advised that an arrest was imminent, and at their request it had been decided to take Raymon Lang as he emerged into the parking lot. He was being watched continuously, and the yard’s head of security was in direct contact with Jill Carrier, the state police detective who had taken Anya into her arms, and who was in charge of apprehending Lang. I was parked in the lot, with a clear view of the gates. I had been allowed to tag along on condition that I stayed out of sight and took no part in what occurred. I had spun the cops quite a story to tell them how I’d come to find the little girl in Lang’s trailer, and why I had been at the trailer to begin with, but in the end I had to admit to lying during the viewing of Legere’s body. I was in trouble, but Carrier had been kind enough to let me see the Lang thing through to its end, even if one of the conditions she attached was to have a plain-clothes officer seated beside me in my car at all times. His name was Weintraub, and he didn’t say very much, which was fine with me.
At 3.30 P.M., the gates opened with a rumble and men began to pour out, all dressed near identically in baseball caps and jeans, and lumberjack shirts open over T-shirts, each carrying his flask and his lunch pail. I saw Carrier speaking on her cell phone, and half a dozen of the cops broke away from the main group, Carrier leading, and began to ease their way through the throng of men. Over to the right, I saw Raymon Lang emerge from a turnstile carrying his long metal toolbox. He was dressed just like the shipbuilders and was smoking the end of a cigarette. As he took a final drag and prepared to throw the butt to the ground, he saw Carrier and the others approaching, and he knew instantly who they were and for whom they had come, a predator immediately aware of other, more powerful predators descending upon
him. He dropped the toolbox and started to run, heading east away from his pursuers, but a Bath P.D. cruiser appeared and blocked the road out of the lot. Lang altered direction, weaving in and out of cars, even as the second cruiser appeared and uniforms moved in on him. Now Carrier was closing, faster and more lithe than the men she was with. She had her gun in her hand. She ordered Lang to stop. Lang turned, and reached behind his back, his hand searching for something beneath his shirt. I heard Carrier give him a final warning to put his hands up, but he did not. Then I saw the gun buck in Carrier’s hand, and heard the shot as Lang spun and fell to the ground.
He died on the way to the hospital. He did not speak as the paramedics struggled to save his life, and nothing was learned from him. They stripped him of his shirt as they placed him on a gurney, and I saw that his arms were bare of tattoos.
Raymon Lang had been unarmed. There seemed to have been no reason for him to reach behind his back, no reason for him to draw Carrier’s fire upon himself. I think, though, that in the end he just didn’t want to go to jail, perhaps out of cowardice, or perhaps because he couldn’t bear to be separated from children for the rest of his life.
VI
And in my best behavior
I am really just like him.
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid.
Sufjan Stevens, John Wayne Gacy Jr.
36
I rang the doorbell of Rebecca Clay’s house. I could hear the waves breaking in the darkness. Jackie Garner and the Fulcis were long gone, now that Merrick was dead. I had called ahead and filled her in on what had happened. She told me that the police had called her after I admitted that I had lied about Jerry Legere, and she had made a formal identification of his body earlier that day. They had interviewed her about her ex-husband’s death, but there was little that she could add to what they already knew. She and Legere had been completely estranged, and she had neither seen nor heard from him in a long time until I had begun asking questions and he had called her a couple of nights before his death, drunk, and demanding to know what she thought she was doing by setting a private eye on him. She had hung up, and he had not called back.
She answered the door wearing an old sweater and a pair of loose-fitting jeans. Her feet were bare. I could hear the TV in the living room, and through the open door I saw Jenna seated on the floor, watching an animated movie. She looked up to see who had entered, decided that I wasn’t anyone for whom it was worth missing anything, and returned to her viewing.
I followed Rebecca into the kitchen. She offered me coffee or a drink, but I declined both. Legere, she said, would be released for burial the following day. Apparently, he had a half brother down in North Dakota who was flying up to take care of the arrangements. She told me that she would be attending the funeral for the half brother’s sake, but that she wouldn’t be taking her daughter along. “It’s not something that she needs to see.” She sat at the kitchen table. “So it’s all over,” she said.
“In a way. Frank Merrick is dead. Your ex-husband is dead. Ricky Demarcian and Raymon Lang are dead. Otis Caswell is dead. Mason Dubus is dead. The Somerset County Sheriff’s Department and the ME’s office are digging for the remains of Lucy Merrick and Jim Poole up at Gilead. That’s a lot of dead people, but I suppose you’re right: it’s over for all of them.”
“You sound sick of it.”
I was. I had wanted answers, and the truth about what had happened to Lucy Merrick and Andy Kellog and the other children who had been abused by men masked as birds. Instead, I was left with the sense that, the girl named Anya apart, and the removal of a little evil from the world, it had all been for nothing. I had few answers, and at least one of the abusers remained at large: the man with the eagle tattoo. I also knew that I had been lied to all along, lied to in particular by the woman who now sat before me, and yet I could not find it in my heart to blame her.
I reached into my pocket and removed the photograph that I had taken from Raymon Lang’s album. The little girl’s face was almost hidden by the body of the man who knelt above her on the bed, and he himself was visible only from the neck down. His body was almost absurdly thin, the bones visible through the skin of his arms and legs, every muscle and sinew standing out upon his frame. The photo had been taken more than a quarter of a century before, judging by the age of the girl. She couldn’t have been more than six or seven. Beside her, jammed between two pillows, was a doll with long red hair and dressed in a blue pinafore. It was the same doll that Rebecca Clay’s daughter now carried around with her, a doll passed on to her by her mother, a doll that had given Rebecca comfort during the years of her abuse.
Rebecca looked at the photograph, but she did not touch it. Her eyes grew glassy, then damp with tears, as she stared at the little girl that she once was.
“Where did you find it?” she asked.
“In Raymon Lang’s trailer.”
“Were there others?”
“Yes, but none like this one. This was the only one in which the doll was visible.”
She pressed her hand against the picture, blotting out the form of the man who towered above her younger self, covering the naked body of Daniel Clay.
“Rebecca,” I asked, “where is your father?”
She stood and walked to a door behind the kitchen table. She opened it and flicked a switch. Light shone on a set of wooden steps that led down to the basement. Without looking back at me, she began to descend, and I followed.
The basement was used for storage. There was a bicycle, now too small for her daughter, and assorted boxes and cartons, but there was nothing that looked as if it had been moved or used in a long time. It smelled of dust, and the concrete floor had begun to crack in places, long dark lines extending like veins from a spot in the center. Rebecca Clay extended a bare foot and pointed her painted toes at the floor.
“He’s down there,” she said. “That’s where I put him.”
She had been working down in Saco that Friday, and there had been a message on her answering machine when she got back to her apartment. Her babysitter, Ellen, who looked after three or four kids each day, had been taken to the hospital following a heart scare, and Ellen’s husband had called to say that, obviously, she would be unable to pick up any of her charges from the school. Rebecca checked her cell and found that the battery had run down while she was in Saco. She had been so busy that she had failed to notice. For a moment, she felt utter panic. Where was Jenna? She called the school, but everyone had gone home. She then called Ellen’s husband, but he didn’t know who had taken Jenna after school. He suggested that she call the principal, or the school secretary, for both had been informed that Jenna would not be picked up that day. Instead, Rebecca called her best friend, April, whose daughter, Carole, was in Jenna’s class. Jenna wasn’t with her either, but April knew where she was.
“Your father collected her,” she said. “Seems the school found his number in the book and called him when they heard about Ellen and couldn’t get in touch with you. He came by and took her back to his house. I saw him at the school when he came to collect her. She’s fine, Rebecca.”
But Rebecca thought that nothing would ever be fine again. She was so scared that she threw up on her way to the car, and threw up again as she drove to her father’s house, coughing up bread and bile into an empty convenience store bag as she waited at the lights. When she got to the house, her father was out in the garden, raking dead leaves, and the front door was open. She rushed past him without speaking and found her daughter in the living room, doing just what she was doing now: watching TV from the floor, and eating ice cream. She couldn’t understand why her mommy was so upset, why she was hugging her and crying and scolding her for being with Grandpa. She had been with Grandpa before, after all, although never alone and always with her mommy. It was Grandpa. He had bought her fries and a hot dog and a soda. He had taken her to the beach and they had collected seashells. Then he had given her a big b
owl of chocolate ice cream and left her to watch TV. She’d had a nice day, she told her mommy, although it would have been even better if her mommy had been there with her.
And then Daniel Clay was at the living room door, asking her what was wrong, as though he was just a regular grandfather and a regular father and not the man who had taken his daughter to his bed from the age of six until fifteen, always being gentle and kind, trying not to hurt her, and sometimes, when he was sad or when he had been drinking, apologizing for the night that he had let another man touch her. Because he loved her, you see. That was what he always told her: “I’m your father, and I love you, and I’ll never let that happen to you again.”
I could hear the bass notes of the television vibrating above our heads. Then it went silent, and there were footsteps as Jenna headed upstairs.