The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  EPILOGUE

  The rivers flow.

  The tide is receding, the waters returning to the sea. The shorebirds are gathering. The marsh is their resting stop on the way to the Arctic tundras in which they will nest, and the departing tides provide rich pickings for them. They flit over the streams, their shadows like melting ore in the runnels of molten silver.

  It is only now, looking back, that I realize the part that water has played in all that has occurred. The bodies dumped in Louisiana, entombed in oil barrels, mute and undiscovered while the waters flowed around them. A family slain and their remains placed beneath leaves in an empty swimming pool. The Aroostook Baptists, buried by a lake, waiting for decades to be found and released. Addy and Melia Jones, the one slain within earshot of a river, the other twice dead in a polluted pit of foul water.

  And one more: Cassie Blythe, found curled beneath the earth in a hollow by a riverbank, surrounded by the bodies of five others, the bones on her hands marked by the passage of Cyrus Nairn’s blade.

  Water, flowing endlessly to the sea; each of them in their way denied the promise offered by it, unable to answer the call until, at last, they were brought forth and allowed to follow its course to the final peace that comes to all.

  Cyrus Nairn stood among the long stems of a cattail patch, the road visible before him. All around him they moved, their passage like silk against his skin, their presence felt and sensed as much as seen, a great mass of them descending ever onward to the sea, where at last they were absorbed into its waiting surf, the paleness of them joining with it until they disappeared from view. He remained still, like a bulwark against their flow, for his back was to the sea and it did not call to him as it did to the others that followed the white roads through the marsh and into the ocean. Instead, Cyrus watched the old car that idled on the black highway that wound its way toward the coast, its star-shattered windscreen reflecting the night sky above, until the door opened and he knew that it was time.

  He climbed from the marsh, hauling himself upward on rocks and metal, and walked toward the waiting Coupe de Ville, its tinted windows revealing only the barest shadows of the figures that lay within. As he stepped around the hood, the driver’s window rolled slowly down and he saw the man who sat with his hands on the wheel, a bald man with a too-wide mouth, a ragged red hole torn in the front of his filthy raincoat, as if his death had come about through impalement upon some great stake, a death that continued to be visited upon him for eternity, for as Cyrus watched the wound appeared to heal and then erupt forth again, and the man’s eyes rolled in his agony. Yet he smiled at Cyrus, and beckoned him on. Behind him, barely visible, was a child dressed in black. She was singing, and Cyrus thought that her voice was one of the most beautiful sounds that he had ever heard, a gift from God. Then the child shifted and became a woman with a bullet wound in her throat, and the singing stopped.

  Muriel, thought Cyrus. Her name is Muriel.

  He was at the open door. He placed his hand upon its upper edge and peered inside.

  The man who sat on the back seat was surrounded by cobwebs. Small brown spiders busied themselves around him, endlessly spinning the cocoon that anchored him in place. His head was ruined, torn apart by the shot that had killed him, but Cyrus could still see the remains of his red hair. The man’s eyes were barely visible beneath the cobwebs and the folds of skin that surrounded the sockets, but Cyrus saw the pain within them, renewed over and over again as the spiders bit him.

  And Cyrus understood at last that by our actions in this life, we make our own hell in which to exist in the next, and that his place was now here, and so it would always be.

  ‘I’m sorry, Leonard,’ he said, and for the first time since he was very young he heard his own voice, and thought how querulous it sounded, how uncertain. And he noticed that there was but one voice, that all the others had been silenced; and he knew that this voice had always been among those that he had heard but that he had chosen not to listen to it. It was the voice that had counseled reason and pity and remorse, the voice to which he had remained deaf throughout his adult life.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘I failed.’

  And Pudd’s mouth opened, and spiders tumbled forth.

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We have a long way to go.’

  Cyrus climbed into the car, and instantly felt the spiders move upon him, and the construction of a new web beginning.

  And the car turned on the road, its back to the sea, and headed away, over mud and marsh grass, until it was lost in the darkness to the north.

  There is long grass growing at the base of the stone and weeds have found their sparse anchorage in the dirt. They come away easily in my hand. I have not been here since before the summer. The caretaker of the small cemetery has been ill, so while the pathways have been tended the individual graves have not. I tear the grass out in clumps, the dirt hanging from the roots, and toss them to one side.

  The little one’s name had almost been obscured, but now it is clearly visible once again. For a moment, I run my fingers along the indentations of the letters, distracted by the sight, then return to the clearing of the grave.

  A shadow falls across me, and the woman lowers herself down by my side, her legs apart to accommodate the swelling at her belly. I do not look at her. I am crying now and I do not understand why because I do not feel that terrible crushing sadness inside that has brought me to tears at other times. Instead I feel relief, and gratitude that she is here now beside me in this place for the first time, because it is good and necessary that she be here, that this should at last be revealed to her. But still the tears come and I find myself unable even to see the weeds and the grass clearly, until at last she reaches down and her hand guides mine, and together we work, discarding that which is ugly and unsightly, keeping that which is beautiful and enriching, our hands touching, brushing against each other, their presence with us in the breeze on our faces and the water flowing beside us: children gone and children yet to come; love remembered, love remaining; the lost and the found, the living and the dead, side by side together.

  On the White Road.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In researching this book I relied greatly upon the work and knowledge of others, including Before Freedom by Belinda Hurmence (Mentor, 1990); Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina by Daniel C. Littlefield (Illini Books, 1991); The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials 1871–1872 by Lou Falkner Williams (University of Georgia Press, 1996); Gullah Fuh Oonah by Virginia Mixon Geraty (Sandlapper Publishing, 1997); Blue Roots by Roger Pinckney (Llewellyn Publications, 2000); A Short History of Charleston by Roger Rosen (University of South Carolina Press, 1992); Kaballah by Kenneth Hanson Ph.D (Council Oak Books, 1998); American Extremists by John George and Laird Wilcox (Prometheus Books, 1996); and The Racist Mind by Raphael S. Ezekiel (Penguin, 1995).

  In addition, a number of individuals gave generously of their time and knowledge. I am especially grateful to deputy attorney general Bill Stokes and assistant attorney general Chuck Dow at the Maine Attorney General’s office; Jeffrey D. Merrill, Warden of Maine State Prison, Thomaston, and his staff, especially Colonel Douglas Starbird and Sergeant Elwin Weeks; Hugh E. Munn, South Carolina Law Enforcement Division; Lieutenant Stephen D. Wright, City of Charleston Police Department; Janice Kahn, my guide to Charleston; Sarah Yeates, formerly of the Museum of Natural History in New York; and the National Park Service staff of the Congaree Swamp National Monument.

  On a personal note, I want to thank Sue Fletcher, Kerry Hood and all at Hodder & Stoughton; my agent Darley Anderson and his staff; my family; Ruth, for many kindnesses; and, belatedly, Dr Ian Ross, who introduced me to Ross Macdonald; and Ella Shanahan, who kept me in funds when few others would.

  John Connolly on the Parker Novels:

  ‘Since about the second book I’ve thought of the Parker novels as a sequence rather than a series, in that each book develops themes, ideas and p
lots from the preceding books.’

  Although each novel is self-contained, and can be enjoyed as a compelling thriller, collectively the Parker novels form a rich and involving epic sequence in which characters reappear and clues laid down in earlier stories are solved in later ones. Below is a précis of key events in each of the Charlie Parker novels.

  Former NYPD Charlie Parker first appears (in Every Dead Thing) on a quest for the killer of his wife and daughter. He is a man consumed by violence, guilt and the desire for revenge. When his ex-partner asks him to track down a missing girl, Parker embarks on a grim odyssey through the bowels of organised crime; to cellars of torture and death; and to a unique serial killer, an artist who uses the human body as his canvas: The Travelling Man. By the end of the novel, Parker realises he is at the beginning of another dark journey – to avenge the voiceless victims of crime: the poor, women and children. It is a journey on which his dead wife and child will be constant ghostly companions.

  In Dark Hollow, Parker returns to the wintry Maine landscape where he grew up and becomes embroiled in another murder hunt. The chief suspect is Billy Purdue, the ex-husband of the dead woman, and Parker is not the only one on his trail. Aided by his friends, hitmen Angel and Louis (first encountered in Every Dead Thing), Parker must go back thirty years into his own grandfather’s troubled past and into the violent origins of a mythical killer, the monster Caleb Kyle. Parker’s personal life seems to take an upward turn in the attractive form of psychologist Rachel Wolfe.

  Parker’s empathy with the powerless victims of crime is growing ever stronger. It makes him a natural choice to investigate the death of Grace Peltier in The Killing Kind – a death that appears to be a suicide. The discovery of a mass grave – the final resting place of a religious community that had disappeared forty years earlier – convinces Parker that there is a link between Grace and these deaths: a shadowy organisation called The Fellowship. His investigation draws him into increasingly violent confrontations with the Fellowship’s enforcer, the demonic arachnophile, Mr Pudd. Genial killers Angel and Louis join Parker again as he descends into a honeycomb world populated by dark angels and lost souls.

  Parker’s relationship with Rachel reaches a new level in The White Road, but he is still driven to solve the most challenging of cases. A black youth faces the death penalty for rape and murder; his victim, the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in South Carolina. It is a case with its roots in old evil, and old evil is Charlie Parker’s speciality. But this turns out not to be an investigation, but rather a descent into the abyss, a confrontation with dark forces that threaten all Parker holds dear.

  Evil men from his past unite to exact a terrible revenge on the private detective. Seemingly unconnected events turn out to be part of a complex and intricate pattern.

  The Killing Kind and The White Road effectively form two halves of a single, larger narrative and are probably best read in order.

  In “The Reflecting Eye”, a long novella featured in the Nocturnes collection, Parker becomes involved in a curious investigation into a former killer’s abandoned house, and learns that someone, or something, seems be using its empty rooms as a base from which to hunt for victims. This novella introduces us for the first time to the character known as the Collector, an individual who will come to play an important, and sinister, role in the books that follow, most particularly in The Unquiet and The Lovers.

  The Black Angel is not an object; it is not a myth. The Black Angel lives. And it is a prize sought for centuries by evil men. Not that Charlie Parker’s latest case starts this way; it starts with the disappearance of a young woman in New York. Her abductors believe that no one will come looking for her, but they are wrong. For Alice is ‘blood’ to Parker’s sidekick, the assassin Louis, and Louis will tear apart anyone who attempts to stop him finding her.

  The hunt turns into an epic quest that will take Parker and his team to an ornate church of bones in Eastern Europe and a cataclysmic battle between good and evil. It marks a dawning realisation in Parker that there is another dimension to his crusade, a dangerous dimension that Rachel finds herself increasingly unable to live with.

  The Unquiet begins with a missing man, a once respected psychiatrist who went absent following revelations about harm done to children in his care. His daughter believes him dead, but is not allowed to come to terms with her father’s legacy. For someone is asking questions about Daniel Clay: the revenger Merrick, a father and a killer obsessed with discovering the truth about his own daughter’s disappearance. Living apart from Rachel and their child, Charlie Parker is hired to make Merrick go away, but finds strange bonds with the revenger, who has drawn from the shadows pale wraiths drifting through the ranks of the unquiet dead. At the end of the novel comes a tantalising reference to Parker’s own parentage that will inform events in The Lovers.

  But first Angel and Louis take centre stage in The Reapers, where the elite killers themselves become targets. A wealthy recluse sends them north to a town that no longer exists on a map. A town ruled by a man with very personal reasons for wanting Louis’s blood spilt. There they find themselves trapped, isolated and at the mercy of a killer feared above all others: the assassin of assassins, Bliss. Thanks to Parker, help is on its way. But can Angel and Louis stay alive long enough for it to reach them?

  The bloody events in The Unquiet result in Parker losing his PI licence, so he returns to Maine and takes a job in a Portland bar while the fuss dies down. But The Lovers shows Parker engaged on his most personal case yet: an investigation into his own origins and the circumstances surrounding the death of his father. When he was a boy, Parker’s father, himself a cop, killed a pair of teenagers then took his own life. His actions were never explained. Parker’s quest for that explanation reveals lies, secrets and betrayal. Haunting it – as they have done all his life – are two figures in the shadows, an unidentified man and woman with one purpose: to bring an end to Parker’s existence.

  In The Whisperers, Parker is asked to investigate the apparent suicide of Damian Patchett, a former soldier. But this is not an isolated death; former combatants are dying in epidemic quantities, driven by someone or something to take their own lives.

  Parker cannot defeat this evil on this own. To combat it, he is forced into an uneasy alliance with a man he fears more than any other. The Collector first appeared in the novella The Reflecting Eye and remains a sinister presence in Parker’s consciousness. It is as though the two men are twin moons orbiting a dark, unknown planet. Now he steps out of the shadows and as their eyes meet, Parker sees for the first time that he himself inspires fear in the Collector.

  In The Burning Soul, Charlie Parker becomes reluctantly involved in investigating the abduction of a fourteen-year-old girl

  The small Maine town of Pastor’s Bay is the home of Randall Haight, a man with a secret. When he was a teenager, he and his friend killed a girl. He did his time and has built a life for himself, not sharing details of his past with anyone. But someone has found out, and is sending anonymous threatening messages. And Anna Kore – the missing girl – lived in Pastor’s Bay, not two miles away from Haight.

  Randall Haight is not the kind of man Charlie Parker wants to help. But he is already drawn to the case of Anna Kore and cannot turn away from the chance to find her. In the course of the investigation he comes up against the police, the FBI and a doomed mobster, Tommy Morris.