“Fuck that,” Lucas replied merrily, heading down the steps outside the plane in front of Mike as I made sure the hatch was tightly closed and the padlock firmly fastened in place. “I got it all figured out—I can hide in your car and go with you guys!”
“Lucas,” Mike said sternly. “Come on, man, this is serious shit, you’re a minor—they catch you in our car and they’ll cart you off to a nice little room for a few hours, and believe me, you will end up telling them what we’ve been doing, here—Frank Mangold’s got guys who’d make you admit to being Jack the Ripper.”
“Bull-shit!” Lucas replied, snatching up his fishing pole and standing with it defiantly. “I ain’t no snitch—and they ain’t gonna see me. Besides, how am I ever supposed to really learn anything if I don’t get in on the action?”
I didn’t engage this question, but went instead to the nearby freezer and drew out another hunk of plastic-wrapped beef, slamming it into the microwave in an attempt to ease my mounting nervousness and irritation. “Be serious, Lucas,” I replied, in a voice that I hoped carried an honestly stern tone. “Like Mike says, you are a God damned minor, and if those people catch you with us, and find out what we’ve been up to, Mike and I will likely lose a lot more than your company—our jobs are on the line, here.”
That seemed to crack even the resilient Lucas’ determination. “Yeah—I guess,” he mumbled in defeat, as the microwave droned away, doing its work on Marcianna’s dinner. “But I wanna hear all about it, next time I come up here.”
“And we want to hear all about anything you can discover in town, and in your school, particularly. About this Mr. Holloway, for one—”
“Is he a suspect?” Lucas said, with sudden and happy anxiousness. “Oh, please tell me he’s a suspect!”
“Well,” I said, as the chimes of the microwave sounded, “he is certainly a—what’s the name of that idiotic TV show that you probably watch—a ‘Person of Interest.’ ” Taking the meat from the machine, I turned to my partner. “You wanna get the car, Mike?” I said. “While I feed you-know-who again, so she won’t make a fuss while we’re gone?”
“Yeah, sure,” Mike said, checking his jacket pocket for his keys and then heading down toward the barns.
“Come on, Lucas,” I said, beginning the climb in the other direction. “We’ve got a few more minutes, and it’ll be good if Marcianna begins to associate you with things other than sneaking around the rocks in the stream bed.” Lucas fell in beside me and even took the plastic bag full of Marcianna’s gory dinner, as I leaned more heavily on my cane and tried to make my way quickly up the hill. “Now,” I said, “your Mr. Holloway is not a person of interest to the law, obviously, as they seem to know nothing of his connection to Shelby. But for us? Well, let’s just say that a man nearing middle age who had a long-standing sexual relationship with a fourteen-year-old—and don’t kid yourself, the likelihood is that he was perfectly aware of her age—such a man, even if that is the extent of his illegal activities, may have like-minded friends who it would be worth keeping an eye on.” Having reached the gate to Marcianna’s enclosure, Lucas and I discovered that she was, once again, nowhere to be seen.
“Don’t tell me she escaped,” Lucas said, a little nervously.
“No,” I chuckled, pointing across the grounds of the enclosure toward the entrance to her stone den. “She’s in there, sleeping off her last meal. I wouldn’t ordinarily feed her again so soon, but because of her time as a cub and a young adult, she has terrible anxiety that she’ll be abandoned and then taken back to that God-forsaken zoo. So I tell her not to worry, and leave her something to eat—it seems to do the trick.”
“Man,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “That fucking petting zoo, who woulda thought—we really did have fun when we went there, in the old days.”
“Yes, and that’s how those pigsties stay in business—seduce the kids, and the parents will follow.” I indicated the bare patch of earth just inside the enclosure’s entrance. “Do me a favor, will you—just chuck the meat over the fence and onto that patch of ground.” Lucas did as asked, managing to hit the target. Then I issued my approximation of one of Marcianna’s chirruping calls, used by cheetah with their kin; and, as Lucas tried to suppress laughter that grew, I could see, out of a kind of shock that I would engage in such behavior, called out to tell her again that I had to go to the store for a little while, but would be back soon.
“You might,” Lucas said, as we turned around to head back down the hill, “not want to let anybody in the criminal science business—at least, anybody that you’re trying to impress—hear you going through that routine. They’ll think you’re nuts.”
“And they might just be right,” I answered, quietly pleased—though I thought better than to mention it—that Lucas had used the term criminal, rather than forensic, science: he was learning, without question.
Looking ahead, I could see that Mike had brought what I had called the car, which was really his car, around and up to the front of the hangar. It had been his fleet vehicle when he’d worked for New York City’s crime lab, which was located in a big, mirthless old institutional building that had formerly been a part of York College of the City University system, out in Mike’s native Queens. Upon our dissolving all relations with city law enforcement, Mike had demanded that he be allowed to buy the car from the fleet as part of his severance. It wasn’t much to look at, just an old Crown Victoria that the fleet keepers, I always thought out of bitterness, had stripped not only of its official crime lab markings but of its halogen searchlights on both the driver’s and front passenger sides of the cab before turning it over. Mike had immediately replaced these, out of pride as much as necessity; but what the fleet boys had not been able to strip the car of was the late-Nineties police package that gave both the engine and the suspension a shocking amount of power and stability at high speeds. The car was, in fact, a consummate sleeper, an inauspicious-looking vehicle that could actually keep up with almost anything on the road; and I loved it because of the enormous amount of comfort it offered my left side, on seats well broken in and far more spacious than anything law enforcement officers almost anywhere were currently driving. We had always called her “the Empress” out of respect, a fact that I communicated to Lucas as we reached the car.
“Yeah, well,” the kid said, looking over the old girl’s big, navy blue silhouette, “every car’s gotta have a name. Just one thing I don’t get.”
“Yeah?” Mike said, as the V-8 in the Empress idled hungrily. “What’s that, Lucas?”
“How the hell do you see over the dashboard, Mike?” Lucas began to laugh, immediately anticipating Mike’s furtive attempt to chase him by moving around to the back of the car.
“All right, knock it off,” I said. “Lucas, do you want us to drop you home, or is that going to raise more questions than you’d like to answer?”
“Yeah, I think it would,” he replied, glancing at the sky. “Besides, it’ll be light for a while, yet—I don’t think I have to worry about seeing the ghost of Colonel Jones on the hollow road before I get out of here.”
I looked at him in surprise. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No way,” he said. “That’s always been the story: go up Death’s Head Hollow after dark and you’re likely to get run down by him and his horse. Ask any kid in town.”
I shook my head as I opened the passenger-side door of the Empress. “My God, the things I’ve learned today,” I murmured with a smile. Then, once in, I powered down my window and said, “Stay to this side of the car until we’re a little ways down the hollow, Lucas—I don’t want my great-aunt seeing you. The ghost of Colonel Jones would be nothing compared to her catching you and wanting to know what the hell you’re doing here. Mike, take it slow until the kid’s clear.”
“You got it,” Mike said. “Although, given my limited visibility over the fucking dashboard, I might just swerve and—”
“Fuck off, Mike,” Lucas said, more as
a plea than an indictment; and as we began to move along, the kid crouching by my window, I continued to exhort him:
“Remember—you’ve earned your stripes for today, Lucas, but that doesn’t mean you can relax your efforts in the field. And don’t limit them to going after Mr. Holloway, who I’m sure you have every reason to hate. But in fact, adults in general are probably not your main target.”
“No?” the boy asked, surprised. “So who are?”
“Your schoolmates, their friends, anybody who might have access to information about which kids might want connections to the kind of rich people downstate we’re talking about. Remember: somebody knew, and knew well enough to be right, that Shelby, Kyle, and Kelsey would go for this arrangement. So it’s somebody who knows the general situation, but doesn’t have a high profile to make it obvious. A—”
“Wait!” Lucas declared, his finger going up. “I know the word: a fa—a fuh—”
“You’re close,” I said. “A facilitator.”
“Ah, fuck! Yeah, that’s it.” Lucas crouched ever lower. “A facilitator.”
“And keep a low profile. You’ll be working on your own—keep it that way.”
“I can’t even tell Derek?” Lucas asked, apparently realizing, now that he was out of the womb-like safety of the JU-52, the magnitude of what he was involved in.
“Derek chose not to be involved,” I said. “Let’s respect his wishes.” I saw no reason to remind the kid that Derek’s mental proficiency was not something that I wanted to hang any aspect of our unofficial investigation on. “Nor should you consult your sister, wise though I’m sure she is.” We made the turn out of the farmhouse driveway, and Mike, perhaps a little devilishly, picked up some speed, forcing Lucas to jog. “The hardest part of being an undercover man on your own, remember, is keeping your cover—but do it.” Then the needling side of my own nature kicked in, prompting me to add: “And remember one more thing, on your way home—Colonel Jones wasn’t murdered by anybody in town, so you don’t have to worry about his ghost, or his horse’s. His dog, however—that huge mastiff that you see in the statue—he was murdered. And when my brothers and my sister and I would get caught on this road in the dark when we were kids—that’s who we used to worry about. So good luck. Okay, Mike—let’s move.”
And with the trees that lined and overhung Death’s Head Hollow closing in to form a canopy that blocked out most of the remaining evening light, Mike put his foot to the gas, and we left Lucas behind in a cloud of clay dust to call a string of half-serious, very nervous curses after us, as we headed toward what we thought would be another examination of another crime scene in the rough neighborhood that was North Fraser. This examination would be accompanied, we knew, by some pointed questions from the several members of senior law enforcement that we knew to already be there; and we quickly began to boost our courage by reminding ourselves that we knew most of the principals involved, and that surely we could, if careful, handle them.
But this conception of our foray was to prove wholly inadequate, in manifold ways; and my partner and especially I would ultimately be glad that we had taken the precaution of arming ourselves before leaving our headquarters.
{i.}
To reach Burgoyne County’s seat, Fraser, as quickly as possible, Mike and I would need to travel in a zigzag pattern along several of the area’s major highways. Yet on this particular occasion, all sections of the trip would not hold equal value to our undertaking: indeed, one of them would provide us with at least the suggestion that we had speculated correctly, during our cogitations inside the JU-52. It is, of course, always dangerous for the detective to read too much into the past histories of places: to allow ghosts to take on solid form. But this time, the whisperings along that one stretch of blacktop proved irresistible.
We navigated the necessary stretch of Route 7 without either Mike’s or my saying much to each other: we were too full of both foreboding at the thought of facing the collection of senior law enforcement officials who were awaiting our arrival and eagerness at the mere notion of being privy to another murder scene for either of us to comment on much of anything. When we turned onto Route 22, however, and passed through the picturesque nineteenth-century town of Hoosick Falls—once a bustling center of the textile trade, before its mills poisoned the Hoosick River and the industry moved on—and then back onto a stretch of highway that was lined by woodlands interspersed with farms that were mere shadows of their former selves, my thoughts took an ever more morbid turn. The sudden memory of what seemed an ancient precedent to our current case stormed into my head, causing me to speak up with what must have seemed rather desperate urgency:
“Michael!” I cried, causing my partner to bolt upright. “Pull over.”
“What?” he answered, glancing over at me. “You all right, kid? Is it your leg?”
“No,” I replied, indicating the breakdown lane along a stretch of the road that was especially remote, and thick with woods on either side. “Just pull over, right up there!”
Mike slowed down and switched on his hazard lights as he coasted onto the highway’s shoulder, which was unmarked even by rural mailboxes. Then he hit the passenger-side searchlight and, after I had hastily exited the Empress, moved into my seat to manipulate its arm so that the beam shone on the coarsely mown grass in front of the tree line about twenty feet from the road. It would have been difficult for even inebriated drivers not to have seen us, lit up like that, and such was a good thing: we had reached that time of the evening when a lot of desperately unhappy people in the county, having sought refuge somewhere other than home, were starting to make their ways back to their sources of misery; and drunken collisions into vehicles in the breakdown lane were not uncommon. But for the moment, Mike and I were alone, at just the hour when it was impossible to say whether it was dawn or dusk, or whether the little light that separated us from the shadows came from the sun behind the horizon to the west or the moon that was ascendant over the mountains to the southeast.
“Right here,” I said, hobbling about the loose asphalt of the highway’s shoulder and ignoring the pain that the twenty minutes’ drive had already put into my stump and side. “It was right along here…”
“Okay, okay,” Mike said, his tone sarcastic but his voice betraying a deeper uneasiness. “Don’t start the Sorcerer shit again—not out here. If your leg’s not bugging you, L.T., just tell me what the fuck is, and stop trying to freak me out.” Mike looked around at the darkening landscape. “Because it’s fucking working…”
I smiled, glancing at him. “I don’t know why you always get so pissed off about that Post business, Mike. They did call you ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,’ after all…”
“Fuuuck you,” he answered, spitting on the highway. “Goddamned Post, think they’re so fucking funny…Come on, what the hell are we doing here, L.T.?”
I kept watching the tree line. “How soon they forget,” I mused. “One afternoon a few years back, Mike, we drove to Steve’s office to deliver some advice about a genuine murder case. We were coming back along this stretch of road, when I pointed out the spot where, back in the early Eighties, they found the body of a dead kid—a boy just fourteen, a supposed runaway—”
“Oh, yeah,” Mike replied, his voice trembling just a bit as he recalled the incident. “Something about it being connected to those NAMBLA disappearances?”
“Indeed,” I answered, moving into the grass off the breakdown lane. “Those disappearances—and deaths…” I nodded toward the woods. “They found him inside the trees, alongside the start of an old logging road, but only after they’d searched the mountains for miles around. He’d been hitching a ride back from Fraser, or so his friends there said. But right along here, something happened to…interrupt that journey.”
“I remember,” Mike said. “They picked up some guy who’d been going around offering young boys rides home, right?”
“Right. He used the same line on all the kids: said their fathers
were late, and had sent him to pick them up. They only caught him because one boy finally had the good sense to run, and to tell his folks about it. And when they eventually arrested him, the man claimed to be a member of NAMBLA. Had a membership card that seemed to prove it.”
“Yeah, but,” Mike added skeptically, “he was also found to be mentally deficient.”
“So the state said,” I replied. “Wasn’t too deficient to fool upwards of two dozen young boys, however. None of whom were ever heard from again, and a few of whose bodies actually turned up. And it was true that this boy had been hitching the last time anyone he knew saw him alive—but that day was two months before his corpse was discovered, which was within twenty-four hours of the time of death. And that happened to match the m.o. in four other cases of pubescent boys who’d been found dead within a good stone’s throw of major, but not too major, north-south highways…” The darkness had advanced, during this exchange, making the line of the woods hit by the searchlight even more impenetrable and ghostly.
“Unh-hunh,” Mike noised—and then he got it. “Wait a minute…” There was such a heightened tone of apprehension in his voice that, even without turning, I knew that his eyes were widening enough to allow the glow of the car’s various lights to be reflected in them. “If I remember right, the presenting peculiarity of that crime scene was…”
I pointed at what I thought was just about the exact spot where, as a boy, my brothers and sister had told me that the victim was found. “The presenting peculiarity of the scene was that he was found with his clothes neatly folded next to him. Strangled.”
“But, L.T., hang on.” Mike, as always, was using skepticism—the basis of our method—to get a grip on himself. “That guy, whatever the fuck his name was—”
“Loudon Odell,” I said. “A driver for various antiques stores in Manhattan, who were swindling upstate dealers out of merchandise that was worth far more than they were asking. He was originally from Clinton County, up on the border, but at the time of his arrest he was listed as residing in Greenwich Village. Though no one at his address would confirm as much.”