The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  Marine 4 turned to the south and came around so that it was on the yacht’s eastern side, its lines silhouetted before the setting sun. As the Whaler circled it, there was blood visible on the deck that even the salt water hadn’t managed to fully erase, and the wood was pitted with what looked like bullet holes. Close to the bow of the boat was a black scorch mark where a flare appeared to have ignited on the deck.

  And at the top of the mast, partially concealed by the furled sail, a body hung with its arms outstretched and tied to the crossbeam. It was naked but for a pair of white boxers, now stained black and red. The legs were white, the feet tied together, a second rope around its chest lashing it to the mast before heading down taut at an angle, tied off to one of the rails. The body was scorched from the stomach to the head. Most of its hair was gone, its eyes were now dark hollows, and its teeth were bared in a rictus of pain, but still I knew that I was looking at the remains of Jack Mercier.

  The Whaler hailed the yacht and, when no response came, drew up off the port side while a young crewman climbed on board the Eliza May and killed the engine. Ramos and MacArthur joined him, pulling on protective gloves before they stepped shakily on board.

  ‘Detectives,’ the crewman called from the cockpit. They headed toward him, trying not to touch anything with their hands as the boat rocked gently in the waves. The crewman pointed to where a long, dark trail of blood followed the steps down. Someone had been dragged, dead or dying, belowdecks. MacArthur knelt down and examined the steps more closely. The end of a long, blond hair curled out of the blood. He rummaged in his pockets and removed a small evidence bag, then carefully lifted the hair and stored it away.

  ‘You stay here,’ he said to the crewman as Ramos moved behind him. From the deck of the two police boats, guns were trained on the other two of the yacht’s three entryways belowdecks. Then MacArthur took the lead, using the very edges of the steps, the only parts not covered in blood, to make his way below.

  This is what they found.

  There was a small, dark passageway, with the head to the immediate right and a quarter berth to the left. The head was empty and smelled of chemicals; a shower curtain was pulled back, revealing a clean white shower stall. The quarter berth was unoccupied. The passageway was carpeted, and the material squelched beneath their feet as they walked, blood bubbling up from between the fibers. They passed the galley and a second pair of facing doors that led into two sleeping compartments, both fitted with small double beds and closets big enough to take only two pairs of shoes set side by side.

  The door leading into the main salon was closed and no sounds came from behind it. Ramos looked at Wallace and shrugged. Wallace retreated back into one of the bedrooms, his gun in his hand. Ramos moved into the other and called out: ‘Police. If there’s anybody in there, come out now and keep your hands up.’

  There was no response. Wallace stepped back into the passage, reached for the handle of the door and, keeping his back against the wall, slowly pulled it open.

  There was blood on the walls, on the ceiling, and on the floor. It dripped from the light fittings and obscured the paintings between the portholes. Three naked bodies hung upside down from the beams in the ceiling: two women, one man. One woman had gray-blond hair that almost touched the floor; the other was small and dark. The man was bald, apart from a thin circle of gray hair, which was mostly soaked red with his blood. The throat of each had been cut, although the blonde also had stab wounds to her stomach and legs. It was her blood on the steps and soaked into the carpet. Deborah Mercier had tried to run, or to intervene, when they took her husband.

  The smell of blood was overpowering in the confined space, and the bodies swayed and bumped against one another with the rocking of the boat. They had been killed facing the door, and the spray from their arteries had hit only three sides of the cabin.

  But there was still some blood behind them. It formed a pattern that could be seen between the moving bodies. MacArthur reached forward and stopped the swaying of Deborah Mercier’s corpse. She hung to the left of the others, so that by stilling her the others also grew still. She was cold, and he shuddered at the touch, but now he could see clearly what had been written behind them in bright, red arterial blood.

  It was one word:

  SINNERS

  Chapter Twenty-three

  What harm can it do?

  Jack Mercier’s words, spoken on the day he first asked me to look into Grace’s death, came back to me as I learned of what had been found in the main salon of the Eliza May, its decks stained with red and Jack Mercier’s crucified form hanging from the mast. They came back to me as I saw the pictures of the yacht in the following day’s papers, smaller photographs beside it of Jack and Deborah Mercier, and of the attorney Warren Ober and his wife, Eleanor.

  What harm can it do?

  I recalled myself sitting, wet and shivering, in the bow of Marine 4, surrounded by the cries of gulls as arrangements were made to tow the Eliza May back to shore. I was there for over two hours, the lineaments of Jack Mercier’s body slowly fading and growing indistinct as evening fell. MacArthur was the only one who spoke to me, and then only to detail the discovery of the bodies and the word written in blood upon the wall behind them.

  Sinners.

  ‘The Aroostook Baptists,’ I said.

  MacArthur grimaced. ‘Little early for a copycat, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s not a copycat killing,’ I answered. ‘It’s the same people.’

  MacArthur sat down heavily beside me. Seawater swirled around his black leather shoes. ‘The Baptists have been dead for over thirty years,’ he began. ‘Even if whoever killed them was still alive, why would he – or they – start again now?’

  I was too tired to go on hiding things, much too tired.

  ‘I don’t think they ever stopped killing,’ I told him. ‘They’ve always been doing it, quietly and discreetly. Mercier was closing in on them, trying to put pressure on the Fellowship through the courts and the IRS. He wanted to draw them out, and he succeeded. They responded by killing him and those who were prepared to stand alongside him: Yossi Epstein in New York, Alison Beck in Minneapolis, Warren Ober, even Grace Peltier.’

  Now, their countermeasures were almost complete. The word on the wall indicated that, a deliberate echo of the slaughter with which they had begun and that had only recently been revealed. There was now one final act left to perform: the recovery of the missing Apocalypse. Once that was accomplished, they would disappear, vanishing below the surface to lie dormant in some quiet, dark cavern of the honeycomb world.

  ‘Who are they?’ asked MacArthur.

  ‘The Faulkners,’ I replied. ‘The Faulkners are the Fellowship.’

  MacArthur shook his head. ‘You’re in a shitload of trouble,’ he said.

  The sound of Marine 1 approaching us disturbed my thoughts. ‘They’re going back to pick up the local ME, have the victims declared dead at the scene,’ said MacArthur, unlocking the cuffs. ‘You go back with them. Someone will take you to the department. I’ll follow on within the hour and we’ll pick up this discussion where we left off.’

  He watched me as I stepped carefully from the Whaler into the smaller boat. It turned in a broad arc and headed for the shore, leaving the Eliza May behind. The sun was setting, and the waves were afire. Jack Mercier’s body hung dark against the red sky like a black flag set in the firmament.

  At the Scarborough Police Department I sat for a time in the lobby and watched the dispatchers behind their protective screen. My clothes were soaked and I couldn’t seem to get warm again. I found myself reading, over and over, warnings against rabies and DUI posted on the bulletin boards. I felt like I was coming down with a fever. My head ached and the skin on my scalp seemed to be constricting around the stitches.

  Eventually I was led into the general-purpose briefing room. The command staff had just broken up their meeting in the smaller conference room, where MacArthur had been chewed out f
or letting me on board the Whaler. I was trying to draw in some heat through a cup of coffee, a patrol officer at the door to make sure I didn’t try to steal one of the canine trophies stored in the cabinet, when MacArthur joined me, accompanied by Captain Bobby Melia, one of two captains in the force who were second in command to Chief Byron Fischer. MacArthur carried a tape recorder with him. They sat across from me, the door behind them closed, and asked me to take them through it all again. Then Norman Boone arrived from the ATF, and Ellis Howard from the Portland PD.

  And I went through it again.

  And again.

  And again.

  I was tired, cold, and hungry. Each time I told them what I knew, it got harder and harder to remember what I had left out, and their questions became more and more probing. But I couldn’t tell them about Marcy Becker, because if the Fellowship did have connections among the police, then telling anyone in law enforcement about her would be tantamount to signing her death warrant. They were threatening to charge me as an accessory to Mercier’s murder, in addition to witholding evidence, obstructing justice, and anything else that the law allowed. I let the waves of their anger break over me.

  Two bodies were missing from the boat: those of the porn star and Quentin Harrold, both of whom had gone out on the yacht to guard the Obers and the Merciers. The Scarborough PD suspected they had died in the first burst of gunfire. Jack Mercier had tried unsuccessfully to fire off a flare but had instead ignited his own clothing. There was a Colt revolver in the cabin where the bodies were found, but it had not been fired. Cartridges were scattered on the floor beside it where someone had made a last, desperate effort to load.

  What harm can it do?

  I wanted to get away from there. I wanted to talk to the Beckers, to force them – at gunpoint if necessary – to tell me where their daughter was hiding. I wanted to know what Grace Peltier had found. I wanted to sleep.

  Most of all, I wanted to find Mr. Pudd, and the mute, and the old man who had wanted Rachel’s skin: the Reverend Faulkner. His wife was among the dead of St. Froid but he was not, and neither were his two children. A boy and a girl, I remembered. What age would they be now: late forties, early fifties? Ms. Torrance had been too young, as was Lutz. Unless there were others hidden elsewhere, which I doubted, that left only Pudd and the mute: they were Leonard and Muriel Faulkner, dispatched, when required, to do their father’s bidding.

  They gave me a ride back to my car after eleven that night, threats of retribution still ringing in my ears. Angel and Louis were with Rachel when I got back, drinking beer and watching television with the volume almost muted. All three of them left me alone while I stripped and showered, then pulled on a pair of chinos and a sweater. A new cell phone lay on the kitchen table, the memory card salvaged from the wreckage of the old phone and reinstalled. I took a bottle of Pete’s Wicked Ale from the fridge and twisted it open. I could smell the hops and the distinctive fruity odor. I raised it to my mouth and took one mouthful, my first sip of alcohol in two years, then held it for as long as I was able. When at last I swallowed, it was warm and thick with saliva. I poured the rest into a glass and drank half of it back, then sat looking at what remained. After a time, I took the glass to the sink and poured the beer down the drain.

  It wasn’t exactly a moment of revelation, more a confirmation. I didn’t want it, not now. I could take it or leave it, and I chose to let it go. Amy had been right; it was just something to fill the hole, and I had found other ways to do that. But for now, nothing in a bottle was going to make things better.

  I shivered again. Despite the shower and the change of clothes, I still hadn’t been able to get warm. I could taste the salt on my lips, could smell the brine in my hair, and each time I did I was back on the waters of the bay, the Eliza May drifting slowly before me and Jack Mercier’s body swaying gently against the sky.

  I placed the bottle in the recycling box and looked up to see Rachel leaning against the door.

  ‘You’re not finishing it?’ she said softly.

  I shook my head. For a moment or two, I couldn’t speak. I felt something breaking up inside of me, like a stone in my heart that my system was now ready to expunge. A pain at the very center of my being began to spread throughout my body: to my fingers and toes, to my groin, to the tips of my ears. Wave after wave of it rocked me, so that I had to hold on to the sink to stop myself from falling. I squeezed my eyes closed tightly and saw:

  A young woman emerging from an oil barrel by a canal in Louisiana, her teeth bared in her final agony and her body encased in a cocoon of transformed body fats, dumped by the Traveling Man after he had blinded her and killed her; a little dead boy running through my house in the middle of the night, calling me to play; Jack Mercier, burning with a desperate flame as his wife was dragged bleeding belowdecks; blood and water mixing on the pale, distorted features of Mickey Shine; my grandfather, his memory fading slowly away; my father sitting at a kitchen table, ruffling my hair with his great hand; and Susan and Jennifer, splayed across a kitchen chair – lost to me and yet not lost, gone and yet forever with me . . .

  The pain made a rushing sound as it passed through me, and I thought I detected voices calling me over and over as, at last, it reached its peak. My body tensed, my mouth opened, and I heard myself speak.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ I whispered.

  Her brow furrowed. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It – wasn’t – my – fault,’ I repeated. There were huge gaps between the words as I retched each one up and spat it, blinking, into the light. I licked my upper lip and tasted, again, salt and beer. My head was pounding in time to my heart, and I thought I was going to burn up. Past and present twisted and intertwined with each other like snakes in a pit. New deaths and old, old guilts and new, the pain of them white hot even as I spoke.

  ‘None of it,’ I said. My eyes were blurring, and now there was fresh salt water on my cheek and lips. ‘I couldn’t have saved them. If I’d been with them, I’d have died too. I did everything that I could. I’m still trying to do it, but I couldn’t have saved them.’

  And I didn’t know about whom I was speaking. I think I was talking about them all: the man on the mast; Grace and Curtis Peltier; a woman and child, a year earlier, lying on the floor of a cheap apartment; another woman, another child, in the kitchen of our home in Brooklyn a year before that again; my father, my mother, my grandfather; a little boy with a bullet wound for an eye.

  All of them.

  And I heard them calling my name from the places in which they lay, their voices echoing through burrows and pits, caverns and caves, hollows and apertures, until the honeycomb world vibrated with the sound of them.

  ‘I tried,’ I whispered. ‘But I couldn’t save them all.’

  And then her arms were around me and the world collapsed, waiting for us to rebuild it again in our image.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  I slept a strange, disturbed sleep in her arms that night, twisting and clawing at unseen things. Angel and Louis were in the spare room and all of the doors were locked and bolted, so we were safe for a time, but she had no peace beside me. I imagined I was sinking into dark waters where Jack Mercier waited for me, his skin burning beneath the waves, Curtis Peltier beside him, his arms bleeding black blood into the depths. When I tried to rise they held me back, their dead hands digging into my legs. My head throbbed and my lungs ached, the pressure increasing upon me until at last I was forced to open my mouth and the salt water flooded my nose and mouth.

  Then I would wake, over and over, to find her close beside me, whispering softly, her hands moving in a slow rhythm across my brow and through my hair. And so the night passed.

  The next morning we ate a hurried breakfast, then prepared to separate. Louis, Rachel, and I would head for Bar Harbor and a final confrontation with the Beckers. Angel had repaired the phone at the house and would stay there so we would have room for maneuver if needed. When I checked my cell phone messa
ges on the way to the car, there was only one: it came from Ali Wynn, asking me to call her.

  ‘You told me to contact you if somebody started asking about Grace,’ she said, when I reached her. ‘Somebody did.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘A policeman. He came to the restaurant yesterday. He was a detective. I saw his shield.’

  ‘You get his name?’

  ‘Lutz. He said he was investigating Grace’s death. He wanted to know when I saw her last.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘Just what I told you, and nothing else.’

  ‘What did you think of him?’

  She considered the question. ‘He frightened me. I didn’t go home last night. I stayed with a friend.’

  ‘Have you seen him since yesterday?’

  ‘No, I think he believed me.’

  ‘Did he tell you how he got your name?’

  ‘Grace’s tutor. I talked to her last night. She said she gave him the names of two of Grace’s friends: me, and Marcy Becker.’

  It was just after 9:00 A.M., and we were almost at Augusta, when the cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number.

  ‘Mr Parker?’ said a female voice. ‘It’s Francine Becker, Marcy’s mother.’

  I mouthed the words ‘Mrs. Becker’ to Rachel.

  ‘We were just on our way to see you, Mrs. Becker.’

  ‘You’re still looking for Marcy, aren’t you?’ There was resignation in her voice, and fear.

  ‘The people who killed Grace Peltier are closing in on her, Mrs. Becker,’ I said. ‘They killed Grace’s father, they killed a man named Jack Mercier, along with his wife and friends, and they’re going to kill Marcy when they find her.’

  At the other end of the line I could hear her start to cry.