I enjoyed its sense of history, its place in the city’s past, which could be traced back like an old scar or the wrinkle at the corner of an eye. Chumley’s had survived the Prohibition era, when customers had escaped raids by leaving hastily through the back door, which led on to Barrow Street. It had survived world wars, stock-market crashes, civil disobedience and the gradual erosion of time, which was so much more insidious than all the rest. For a brief period, I wanted to be part of its stability.
‘You have to stay,’ said Walter. He still had the leather coat, now hanging loosely over the back of his chair. Someone had whistled at him when he entered wearing it.
‘No.’
‘What do you mean, “No”?’ he said angrily. ‘He’s opened an avenue of communication. You stay, we wire up the phone and we try to trace him when he calls again.’
‘I don’t think he will call again, at least not for a while, and I don’t believe we could trace him anyway. He doesn’t want to be stopped, Walter.’
‘All the more reason to stop him, then. My God, look at what he’s done, what he’s going to do again. Look at what you’ve done for his—’
I leaned forward and broke in on him, my voice low. ‘What have I done? Say it, Walter. Say it!’
He stayed silent and I saw him swallow the words back. We had come close to the edge, but he had pulled back.
The Travelling Man wanted me to remain. He wanted me to wait in my apartment for a call that might never come. I could not let him do that to me. Yet both Cole and I knew that the contact he had established could well be the first link in a chain that would eventually lead us to him.
A friend of mine, Ross Oakes, had worked in the police department of Columbia, South Carolina, during the Bell killings. Larry Gene Bell abducted and smothered two girls, one aged seventeen and snatched close to a mail-box, the other aged nine and taken from her play area. When investigators eventually found the bodies they were too decomposed to determine if they had been sexually assaulted, although Bell later admitted to assaulting both.
Bell had been tracked through a series of phone calls he made to the family of the seventeen-year-old, conversing primarily with the victim’s older sister. He also mailed them her last will and testament. In the phone calls he led the family to believe that the victim was still alive until her body was eventually found one week later. After the abduction of the younger girl he contacted the first victim’s sister and described the abduction and killing of the girl. He told the first victim’s sister that she would be next.
Bell was found through indented writing on the victim’s letter, a semi-obliterated telephone number, which was eventually tracked to an address through a process of elimination. Larry Gene Bell was a thirty-six-year-old white male, formerly married and now living with his mother and father. He told Investigative Support Unit agents from the FBI that ‘the bad Larry Gene Bell did it’.
I knew of dozens of similar cases where contact with the killer by the victim’s family sometimes led to his capture, but I had also seen what this form of psychological torture had done to those who were left behind. The family of Bell’s first victim were lucky because they only had to suffer Bell’s sick wanderings for two weeks. A family in Tulsa, whose toddler daughter had been raped and dismembered by a male nurse, received phone calls from the killer for over two years.
Amid the anger and pain and grief that I had felt the night before, there was another feeling, which caused me to fear any further contact with the Travelling Man, at least for the present.
I felt relief.
For over seven months there had been nothing. The police investigation had ground to a halt, my own efforts had brought me no nearer to identifying the killer of my wife and child and I feared that he might have disappeared.
Now he had come back. He had reached out to me and, by doing so, opened the possibility that he might be found. He would kill again and, in the killing, a pattern would emerge that would bring us closer to him. All these thoughts raced through my head in the darkness of the night but, in the first light of dawn, I had realised the implications of what I felt.
The Travelling Man was drawing me into a cycle of dependency. He had tossed me a crumb in the form of a telephone call and the remains of my daughter and, in doing so, had caused me to wish, however briefly, for the deaths of others in the hope that their deaths might bring me closer to him. With that realisation came the decision that I would not form such a relationship with this man. It was a difficult decision to make but I knew that if he decided to contact me again, then he would find me. Meanwhile, I would leave New York and continue to hunt for Catherine Demeter.
Yet deep down, perhaps only half recognised by me and suspected by Rachel Wolfe, there was another reason for continuing the search for Catherine Demeter.
I did not believe in remorse without reparation. I had failed to protect my wife and child and they had died as a result. Maybe I was deluded, but I believed that if Catherine Demeter died because I stopped looking for her then I would have failed twice and I was not sure that I could live with that knowledge. In her, maybe wrongly, I saw a chance to atone.
Some of this I tried to explain to Walter – my need to avoid a dependent relationship upon this man, the necessity of continuing the search of Catherine Demeter for her sake, and my own – but most of it I kept to myself. We parted uneasily and on bad terms.
Tiredness had gradually taken hold of me throughout the morning and I slept fitfully for an hour before setting off for Virginia. I was bathed in sweat and almost delirious when I awoke, disturbed by dreams of endless conversations with a faceless killer and images of my daughter before her death.
Just as I awakened, I dreamed of Catherine Demeter surrounded by darkness and flames and the bones of dead children. And I knew then that some terrible blackness had descended on her and that I had to try to save her, to save us both, from the darkness.
Part Two
Eadem mutata resurgo
Though changed, I shall arise the same.
Epitaph on the tombstone of Jacob Bernoulli,
Swiss pioneer of fluid dynamics and
spiral mathematics.
Chapter Eighteen
I drove down to Virginia that afternoon. It was a long ride but I told myself that I wanted time to open out the engine of the car, to let it cut loose after its time off the road. As I drove, I tried to sort through what had happened in the last two days, but my thoughts kept coming back to the remains of my daughter’s face resting in a jar of formaldehyde.
I spotted the tail after about an hour, a red Nissan four-wheel-drive with two occupants. They kept four or five vehicles behind but when I accelerated, so did they. When I fell back they kept me in view for as long as they could, then they began to fall back too. The plates were deliberately obscured with mud. A woman drove, her blonde hair pulled back behind her ears and sunglasses masking her eyes. A dark-haired male sat beside her. I put them both in their thirties but I didn’t recognise them.
If they were feds, which was unlikely, then they were lame. If they were Sonny’s hired killers, then it was just like Sonny to hire cheap labour. Only a clown would use a 4WD for a tail, or to try to take out another vehicle. A 4WD has a high centre of gravity and rolls easier than a drunk on a slope. Maybe I was just being paranoid, but I didn’t think so.
They didn’t make a move and I lost them in the back roads between Warrenton and Culpeper as I headed towards the Blue Ridge. If they came after me again, I’d know: their jeep stood out like blood in snow.
As I drove, fading sunlight speared the trees, causing the web-like cocoons of caterpillars to glisten. I knew that, beneath the strands, the white bodies of the larvae were twisting and writhing like victims of Tourette’s syndrome as they reduced the leaves to brown lifelessness. The weather was beautiful for most of the journey and there was a kind of poetry to the names of the towns that skirted Shenandoah: Wolftown, Quinque, Lydia, Roseland, Sweet Briar, Lovingston, Brig
htwood. To that list could be added the town of Haven, but only if you decided not to spoil the effect by actually visiting it.
It was raining heavily by the time I reached Haven. The town lay in a valley south-east of the Blue Ridge, almost at the apex of a triangle formed with Washington and Richmond. A sign at the limits read ‘A Welcome in the Valley’ but there was little that was welcoming about Haven. It was a small town over which a pall of dust appeared to have settled and which even the driving rain seemed unable to dislodge. Rusting pick-ups sat outside some of the houses and, apart from a single fast-food joint and a convenience store attached to a garage, only the weak neon of the Welcome Inn bar and the lights of the late-nite diner opposite beckoned the casual visitor. It was the sort of place where, once a year, the local Veterans of Foreign Wars got together, hired a bus and went somewhere else to commemorate their dead.
I checked into the Haven View Motel at the outskirts of the town. I was the only guest and a smell of paint hung around the halls of what might once have been a considerable house but had now been converted into a functional, anonymous three-storey inn.
‘Second floor’s being redecorated,’ said the clerk, who told me his name was Rudy Fry. ‘Have to put you upstairs, top floor. Technically, we shouldn’t be accepting guests at all but . . .’ He smiled to indicate the big favour he was doing me by letting me stay. Rudy Fry was a small, overweight man in his forties. There were long-dried yellow sweat stains under his arms and he smelt vaguely of rubbing alcohol.
I looked around. The Haven View Motel didn’t look like the sort of place that would attract visitors at the best of times.
‘I know what you’re thinkin’,’ said the clerk, his smile revealing sparkling dentures. ‘You’re thinkin’: “Why would anyone bother throwin’ good money away by decoratin’ a motel in a shithole like this?”’ He winked at me before leaning over the desk conspiratorially. ‘Well, I’m tellin’ you, sir, it ain’t gonna be a shithole much longer. Them Japanese is comin’, and when they do, this place is gonna be a goldmine. Where else they gonna stay round here?’ He laughed. ‘Shit, we gonna be wipin’ our asses with dollar bills.’ He handed me a key with a heavy wooden block chained to it. ‘Room twenty-three, up the stairs. Elevator’s busted.’
The room was dusty but clean. A connecting door led into the next room. It took me less than five seconds to break the lock with my pocket knife, then I showered, changed and drove back into town.
The recession of the seventies had hit Haven hard, putting paid to what little industry there was. The town might have recovered, might have found some other way to prosper had its history been other than it was, but the killings had tainted it and the town had fallen into decay. And so the rain fell and washed and sluiced its way over the stores and streets, over the people and the houses, over trees and pick-ups and cars and Tarmac, and when it ceased to fall there was no freshness about Haven, as if the rain itself had been sullied by the contact.
I called into the sheriff’s office but neither the sheriff nor Alvin Martin was available. Instead, a deputy named Wallace sat scowling behind the desk and shovelling Doritos into his mouth. I decided to wait until the morning in the hope of finding someone more accommodating.
The diner was closing as I walked through the town, which left only the bar or the burger joint. The interior of the bar was ill lit, as if it was expending too much power on the pink neon sign outside. The Welcome Inn: the sign glowed brightly, but the interior seemed to give the lie to the sign.
Some kind of bluegrass music was playing over a speaker and a TV above the bar was showing a basketball game with the volume turned down, but no one seemed to be listening or watching anyway. Maybe twenty people were scattered around the tables and the long, dark wood bar, including a mountainous couple who looked like they’d left the third bear with a babysitter. There was a low tide of conversation, which ebbed slightly when I entered, although it refused to cease entirely, and then resumed at its previous level.
Near the bar, a small knot of men lounged around a battered pool table, watching a huge, heavy-set man with a thick dark beard playing an older man who shot pool like a hustler. They eyed me as I walked by but continued playing. No conversation passed between them. Pool was obviously a serious business in the Welcome Inn. Drinking wasn’t. The hard men around the pool table were all clutching bottles of Bud Light, the real drinker’s equivalent of a lady’s white umbrella.
I took an empty stool at the bar and asked for a coffee from a barman whose white shirt seemed dazzlingly clean for such a place. He studiously ignored me, his eyes seemingly intent on the basketball game, so I asked again. His glance moved lazily to me, as if I were a bug crawling on the bar and he had just had his fill of squashing bugs, but was wondering whether he couldn’t squash one more for the road.
‘We don’t do coffee,’ he said.
I glanced along the bar. Two stools down an elderly man in a lumber jacket and a battered Cat cap sipped at a mug of what smelt like strong black coffee.
‘He bring his own?’ I inquired, gesturing with a nod down the bar.
‘Yep,’ said the barman, still looking at the TV.
‘A Coke’ll do. Right behind your knees, second shelf down. Don’t hurt yourself leaning over.’
For a long time it seemed he wasn’t going to move, then he shifted slowly, leaned down without taking his eyes from the screen and found the opener on the edge of the counter by instinct. Then he placed the bottle in front of me and set an iceless glass beside it. In the mirror behind the bar, I saw the amused smiles of some of the other patrons and heard a woman’s laugh, low and boozy with a promise of sex in it. In the mirror over the bar, I traced the laugh to a coarse-featured woman in the corner, her hair huge and dark. Beside her, a stout man whispered sour somethings in her ear like the cooings of a sick dove.
I poured the drink and took a long draught. It was warm and sticky and I felt it cleave to my palate, my tongue and my teeth. The barman spent a while idly polishing glasses with a bar-towel which looked like it had last been cleaned for Reagan’s inauguration. When he got bored with redistributing the dirt on the glasses he wandered back towards me and put the bar-towel down in front of me.
‘Passin’ through?’ he asked, although there was no curiosity in his voice. It sounded more like advice than a question.
‘Nope,’ I said.
He took it in and then waited for me to say more. I didn’t. He gave in first.
‘Whatcha doin’ here, then?’ He looked over my shoulder at the pool-players behind and I noticed that the sound of balls colliding had suddenly ceased. He smiled a big shit-eating grin. ‘Maybe I can . . .’ He stopped and the grin got wider, his tone changing to one of mock-formality. ‘. . . be of some a-ssistance.’
‘You know anyone named Demeter?’
The shit-eating grin froze and there was a pause. ‘No.’
‘Then I don’t believe you can be of any a-ssistance.’ I stood up to leave, placing two dollar bills on the counter. ‘For the welcome,’ I said. ‘Put it towards a new sign.’
I turned to find a small, rat-featured guy in a worn blue denim jacket standing in front of me. His nose was dotted with blackheads and his teeth were prominent and yellow-stained like walrus tusks. His black baseball cap was marked with the words ‘Boyz ’N the Hood’ but this wasn’t any logo John Singleton would have liked. Instead of homies, the words were surrounded by the hooded heads of Klan figures.
Beneath his denim jacket, I could see the word Pulaski under a seal of some sort. Pulaski was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and the site of an annual rally for Aryan crackers everywhere, although I bet the face of old Thom Robb, grand high ass-wipe of the Klan, must have just lit up at the sight of Rat Features and his pinched, sub-intelligent face arriving to take in the Pulaski air. After all, Robb was trying to make the Klan appeal to the educated élite, the lawyers and the schoolteachers. Most lawyers would have been reluctant to have Rat Features as a client, s
till less a brother in arms.
But there was probably still a place for Rat Features in the new Klan. Every organisation needs its foot-soldiers and this one had cannon fodder written all over him. When the time came for the Boyz to storm the steps of the Capitol and reclaim the Jewnited States for their own, Rat Features would be in the front line where he could be certain to lay down his life for the cause.
Behind him, the bearded pool-player loomed, his eyes small, piggy and dumb-looking. His arms were enormous but without definition and his gut bulged beneath a camouflage T-shirt. The T-shirt bore the legend ‘Kill ’em all – Let God sort ’em out’, but the big guy was no Marine. He looked as close to retarded as you can get without someone coming by twice a day to feed you and clean up your mess.
‘How you doin’?’ said the Rat. The bar was quiet now and the group of men at the pool table were no longer lounging but stood rigid in anticipation of what was to come. One of them smiled and poked his neighbour with an elbow. Obviously, the Rat and his buddy were the local double act.
‘Great till now.’
He nodded as if I’d just said something deeply profound with which he had a natural empathy.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I once took a leak in Thom Robb’s garden.’
Which was true.
‘It’d be better if you just got back on the road and kept driving, I reckon,’ said the Rat, after a pause to figure out who Thom Robb was. ‘So why don’t you just do that?’
‘Thanks for the advice.’ I moved to go past him but his pal put a hand like a shovel against my chest and pushed me back against the bar by flexing his wrist slightly.
‘It wasn’t advice,’ said the Rat. He gestured back at the big guy with his thumb.