The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  Nobody answered the doorbell when they rang, and the garage entrance was firmly locked. Ames cupped his hands and peered through the glass into the hallway. In the open doorway leading into the kitchen were two suitcases, and a kitchen chair lay on the floor with its legs toward the wall. Seconds later, Ames had slipped on his gloves, broken a side window, and, his gun drawn, entered the house. Frayn made his approach from the rear and came in through the back door. The house was a small two-story, and it didn’t take the policemen long to confirm that it was empty. From the kitchen, a connecting door led into the garage. Through the frosted glass, the lines of Alison Beck’s Boxster were clearly visible.

  Ames took a breath and opened the door.

  The garage was dark. He removed his flashlight from his belt and twisted it on. For a moment, as its beam hit the car, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. He believed initially that the windshield was cracked, for thin lines spread in all directions across it, radiating from irregular clumps dotted like bullet holes across the glass and making it impossible to see the interior of the car. Then, as he drew nearer the driver’s door, he thought instead that the car had somehow filled with cotton candy, for the windows appeared to be coated on the inside with soft white strands. It was only when he shined the light close to the windshield and something swift and brown darted across the pane that he recognized it for what it was.

  It was spiderweb, its filaments gilded with silver by the flashlight’s beam. Beneath the weave, a dark shape sat upright in the driver’s seat.

  ‘Dr. Beck?’ he called. He placed his gloved hand on the door handle and pulled.

  There came the sound of sticky strands breaking, and the silken web flailed at the air as the door opened. Something dropped at Ames’s feet with a soft, barely audible thud. When he looked down, he saw a small brown spider making its way across the concrete floor toward his right foot. It was a recluse, about half an inch in length, with a dark groove running down the center of its back. Instinctively, Ames raised his steel-capped shoe and stamped down on it. For a brief moment he wondered if his action constituted a destruction of evidence, until he looked into the interior of the car and realized that, for all its effect, he might just as easily have stolen a grain of sand from the seashore or pilfered a single drop of water from the ocean.

  Alison Beck had been stripped to her underwear and tied to the driver’s seat. Gray masking tape had been wrapped around her head, covering her mouth and anchoring her to the seat. Her face was swollen almost beyond recognition, her body mottled with decay, and there was a square of exposed red flesh just below her neck where a section of skin had been removed.

  Yet the disintegration of her body was masked by the fragments of web that covered her in a tattered white veil, her face almost concealed beneath the dense pockets of thread. All around her, small brown spiders moved on arched legs, their palps twitching as they sensed the change in the air; others remained huddled in dark recesses, orange egg sacs dangling beside them like bunches of poisonous fruit. The husks of drained insects speckled the snares, interspersed with the bodies of spiders that had been preyed upon by their own kind. Fruit flies flitted around the seats, and Ames could see decaying oranges and pears on the floor by Alison Beck’s feet. Elsewhere invisible crickets chirped, part of the small ecosystem that had been created inside the doctor’s car, but most of the activity came from the compact brown spiders that busied themselves around Alison Beck’s face, dancing lightly across her cheeks and her eyelids, continuing the construction of the irregular webs that coated the inside of the car with thread.

  But there was one last surprise for those who found Alison Beck. When the masking tape was removed from her face and her mouth was opened during the autopsy, small black-and-red balls tumbled from her lips and lay like misshapen marbles on the steel table. There were more lodged in her thorax and trapped beneath her tongue. Some had caught in her teeth, crushed as her mouth convulsed when the biting began.

  Only one was still alive: it was discovered in her nasal cavity, its long, black legs curled in upon itself. When the tweezers gripped the spherical abdomen it struggled feebly against the pressure, the red hourglass on its underside like the relic of a life suddenly stopped.

  And in the harsh light of the autopsy room, the eyes of the black widow gleamed like small, dark stars.

  This is a honeycomb world. History is its gravity.

  In the far north of Maine, figures move along a road, silhouetted against the early-morning sun. Behind them are a bulldozer and a cherry picker and two small trucks, the little convoy making its way along a county road toward the sound of lapping water. There is laughter and swearing in the air, and plumes of cigarette smoke rising to join with the morning fog. There is room for these men and women in the bed of the truck but they choose instead to walk, enjoying the feel of the ground beneath their feet, the clean air in their lungs, the camaraderie of those who will soon perform hard physical labor together but are grateful for the sun that will shine gently upon them, the breeze that will cool them in their work, and the friendship of those who walk by their side.

  There are two groups of workers here. The first are line clearers, jointly employed by the Maine Public Service Company and the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company to cut back the trees and brush alongside the road. This is work that should have been completed in the autumn, when the ground was dry and clear, not at the end of April, when frozen, compacted snow still lay on the high ground and the first buds had already begun to sprout from the branches. But the line clearers have long since ceased to wonder at the ways of their employers and are simply content that there is no rain falling upon them as they traipse along the blacktop.

  The second group consists of workmen employed by one Jean Beaulieu to clear vegetation from the banks of St. Froid Lake in preparation for the construction of a house. It is simply coincidence that both groups of men have taken to the same stretch of road on this bright morning, but they mingle as they go, exchanging comments about the weather and lighting one another’s cigarettes.

  Just outside the little town of Eagle Lake, the workers turn west onto Red River Road, the Fish River flowing at their left, the red brick edifice of the Eagle Lake Water and Sewage District building to their right. A small wire fence ends where the river joins St. Froid Lake, and houses begin to appear along the bank. Through the branches of the trees, the glittering surface of the water can be glimpsed.

  Soon the noise of their passing is joined by another sound. On the ground above them, shapes appear from wooden kennels: gray animals with thick fur and keen, intelligent eyes. They are wolf hybrids, each chained to an iron ring outside its kennel, and they bark and howl as the men and women walk below them, their chains jangling as they strain to reach the intruders. The breeding of such hybrids is relatively common in this part of the state, a regional peculiarity surprising to strangers. Some of the workers stop and watch, one or two taunting the beasts from the safety of the road, but the wiser ones move on. They know that it is better to let these animals be.

  The work commences, accompanied by a chorus of engines and shouts, of picks and shovels breaking the ground, of chain saws tearing at branches and tree trunks; and the smells of diesel fumes and sweat and fresh earth mingle in the air. The sounds drown out the rhythms of the natural world: the wood frogs clearing their throats, the calls of hermit thrushes and winter wrens, the crying of a single loon out on the water.

  The day grows short, the sun moving west across the lake. On Jean Beaulieu’s land a man removes his yellow hard hat, wipes his brow on his sleeve, and lights a cigarette before making his way back to the bulldozer. He climbs into the cab and slowly starts to reverse, the harsh buzz of the engine adding its guttural notes to the sounds of men and nature. The howling from above begins again, and he shakes his head wearily at the man in the cherry picker nearby.

  This ground has lain undisturbed for many years. The grass is wild and long, and the bushes cling tenac
iously to the hard earth. There is no reason for the man in the cab to doubt that the bank upon which he stands is solid, until an alien clamor intrudes on the rustling of the evergreens and the sawing of the clearers. The bulldozer makes a high, growling din, like an animal in panic, as huge quantities of earth shift. The howling of the hybrids increases in intensity, some turning in circles or wrenching again at their chains as they register the new sounds.

  The roots of a white spruce are exposed as a section of the riverbank collapses, and the tree topples slowly into the water, sending ripples across the still surface of the lake. Beside it, the bulldozer seems to hang suspended for a moment, one track still clinging to the ground, the other poised over empty space, before it tumbles sideways, its operator leaping to safety, falling away from the vehicle as it turns and lands with a loud splash in the shallows. Men drop their tools and start running. They scramble to the new verge, where brown water has already rushed in to exploit the sudden expansion of the banks. Their colleague raises himself, shivering and soaked, from the lake, then grins embarrassedly and raises a hand to let them know that he is okay. The men crowd the bank, looking at the stranded bulldozer. One or two cheer desultorily. To their left, another huge slab of earth crumbles and falls into the water, but they hardly notice, their efforts are so focused on helping their comrade out of the cold water.

  But the man in the cherry picker is not looking at the bulldozer, or at the arms reaching out to pull the drenched figure from the lake. He stands unmoving, the chain saw in his hands, and looks down on the newly exposed bank. His name is Lyall Dobbs. He has a wife and two children and, at this moment, he desperately wishes that he were with them. He desperately wishes he were anywhere but staring down at the banks of St. Froid, at the darkened bones revealed among the tree roots and broken earth, and the small skull slowly disappearing beneath the cold waters of the lake.

  ‘Billy?’ he shouts.

  Billy Laughton, the foreman of the clearing crew, turns away from the crowd of men by the shore, shaking his head in bemusement.

  ‘Yeah?’

  There is no further word for a moment. Lyall Dobbs’s throat is suddenly too dry to produce a sound. He swallows, then resumes.

  ‘Billy, we got a cemetery round here?’

  Laughton’s brow furrows. From his pocket he takes a folded map and examines it briefly. He shakes his head at the other man.

  ‘No,’ he replies simply.

  Dobbs looks at him, and his face is pale.

  ‘Well, we do now.’

  This is a honeycomb world.

  You must be careful where you step.

  And you must be ready for what you might find.

  Chapter One

  It was spring, and color had returned to the world.

  The distant mountains were transforming, the gray trees now cloaking themselves in new life, their leaves a faded echo of fall’s riot. The scarlets of the red maples were dominant, but they were being joined now by the greenish-yellow leaves of the red oaks, the silver of the bigtooth aspens, and the greens of the quaking aspens, the birches, and the beeches. Poplars and willows, elms and hazelnuts were all bursting into full bloom, and the woods were ringing with the noise of returning birds.

  I could see the woods from the gym at One City Center, the tips of the evergreens still dominating the landscape amid the slowly transforming seasonals. Rain was falling on the streets of Portland, and umbrellas swarmed on the streets below, glistening darkly like the carapaces of squat black beetles.

  For the first time in many months, I felt good. I was in semiregular employment. I was eating well, working out three or four days each week, and Rachel Wolfe was coming up from Boston the next weekend, so I would have someone to admire my improving physique. I hadn’t had bad dreams for some time. My dead wife and my lost daughter had not appeared to me since the previous Christmas, when they touched me amid the falling snow and gave me some respite from the visions that had haunted me for so long.

  I completed a set of military presses and laid the bar down, sweat dripping from my nose and rising in little wisps of steam from my body. Seated on a bench, sipping some water, I watched the two men enter from the reception area, glance around, then fix on me. They wore conservative dark suits with somber ties. One was large, with brown wavy hair and a thick mustache, like a porn star gone to seed, the bulge of the gun in the cheap rig beneath his jacket visible to me in the mirror behind him. The other was smaller, a tidy, dapper man with receding, prematurely graying hair. The big man held a pair of shades in his hand while his companion wore a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses with square frames. He smiled as he approached me.

  ‘Mr. Parker?’ he asked, his hands clasped behind his back.

  I nodded and the hands disengaged, the right extending toward me in a sharp motion like a shark making its way through familiar waters.

  ‘My name is Quentin Harrold, Mr. Parker,’ he said. ‘I work for Mr. Jack Mercier.’

  I wiped my own right hand on a towel to remove some of the sweat, then accepted the handshake. Harrold’s mouth quivered a little as my still-sweaty palm gripped his, but he resisted the temptation to wipe his hand clean on the side of his trousers. I guessed that he didn’t want to spoil the crease.

  Jack Mercier came from money so old that some of it had jangled on the Mayflower. He was a former U.S. senator, as his father and grandfather had been before him, and lived in a big house out on Prouts Neck overlooking the sea. He had interests in timber companies, newspaper publishing, cable television, software, and the Internet. In fact, he had interests in just about anything that might ensure the Merciers’ old money was regularly replenished with injections of new money. As a senator he had been something of a liberal and he still supported various ecological and civil rights groups through generous donations. He was a family man; he didn’t screw around as far as anyone knew and he had emerged from his brief flirtation with politics with his reputation enhanced rather than tarnished, a product as much of his financial independence as of any moral probity. There were rumors that he was planning a return to politics, possibly as an independent candidate for governor, although Mercier himself had yet to confirm them.

  Quentin Harrold coughed into his palm, then used it as an excuse to take a handkerchief from his pocket and discreetly wipe his hand. ‘Mr. Mercier would like to see you,’ he said, in the tone of voice he probably reserved for the pool cleaner and the chauffeur. ‘He has some work for you.’

  I looked at him. He smiled. I smiled back. We stayed like that, grinning at each other, until the only options were to speak or start dating. Harrold took the first option.

  ‘Perhaps you didn’t hear me, Mr. Parker,’ he said. ‘Mr. Mercier has some work for you.’

  ‘And?’

  Harrold’s smile floundered. ‘I’m not sure what you mean, Mr. Parker.’

  ‘I’m not so desperate for work, Mr. Harrold, that I run and fetch every time somebody throws a stick.’ This wasn’t entirely true. Portland, Maine, wasn’t such a wellspring of vice and corruption that I could afford to look down my nose at too many jobs. If Harrold had been better looking and a different sex, I’d have fetched the stick and then rolled onto my back to have my belly rubbed if I thought it might have earned me more than a couple of bucks.

  Harrold glanced at the big guy with the mustache. The big guy shrugged, then went back to staring at me impassively, maybe trying to figure out what my head would look like mounted over his fireplace.

  Harrold coughed again. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’ He seemed to have trouble forming the words, as if they were part of someone else’s vocabulary and he was just borrowing them for a time. I waited for his nose to start growing or his tongue to turn to ash and fall to the floor, but nothing happened. ‘We’d be grateful if you’d spare the time to talk to Mr. Mercier,’ he conceded with a wince.

  I figured that I’d played hard to get for long enough, although I still wasn’t sure that
they’d respect me in the morning. ‘When I’ve finished up here, I can probably call out and see him,’ I said.

  Harrold craned his neck slightly, indicating that he believed he might have misheard me. ‘Mr. Mercier was hoping that you could come with us now, Mr. Parker. Mr. Mercier is a very busy man, as I’m sure you’ll understand.’

  I stood up, stretched, and prepared to do another set of presses. ‘Oh, I understand, Mr. Harrold. I’ll be as quick as I can. Why don’t you gentlemen wait downstairs, and I’ll join you when I’m done? You’re making me nervous. I might drop a weight on you.’

  Harrold shifted on his feet for a moment, then nodded.

  ‘We’ll be in the lobby,’ he said.

  ‘Enjoy,’ I replied, then watched them in the mirror as they walked away.

  I took my time finishing my workout, then had a long shower and talked about the future of the Pirates with the guy who was cleaning down the changing room. When I figured that Harrold and the porn star had spent enough time looking at their watches, I took the elevator down to the lobby and waited for them to join me. The expression on Harrold’s face, I noticed, was oscillating between annoyance and relief.

  Harrold insisted that I accompany him and his companion in their Mercedes, but despite their protests I opted to follow them in my own Mustang. It struck me that I was becoming more wilfully perverse as I settled into my mid-thirties. If Harrold had told me to take my own car, I’d probably have chained myself to the steering column of the Mercedes until they agreed to give me a ride.

  The Mustang was a 1969 Boss 302, and replaced the Mach 1 that had been shot to pieces the previous year. The 302 had been sourced for me by Willie Brew, who ran an auto shop down in Queens. The spoilers and wings were kind of over the top, but it made my eyes water when it accelerated, and Willie had sold it to me for $8,000, which was about $3,000 less than a car in its condition was worth. The downside was that I might as well have had ARRESTED ADOLESCENCE painted on the side in big black letters.