The Damage Done

by P J Parrish

  Louis pulled a gauze bandage out of the first-aid kit. He knew Steele was fishing for a confession, something he could add to the file to help prove their case. Even though Anthony was dead, they still needed evidence beyond any reasonable doubt to officially mark the case closed. Exceptional clearance, it was called.

  “What about this morning?” Steele asked.

  Buddy took a moment to answer. “When I woke up on the couch, my brother was sitting in the chair across from me. He was holding a Bible and one of my guns.”

  Steele turned in his seat to look at Buddy. “Did he threaten you?”

  Buddy shook his head. “My brother wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “He killed your father and he killed a woman he was involved with. What makes you think he wouldn’t kill you?”

  No answer from Buddy. Louis finished bandaging his hand and started putting things back in the kit. But he was thinking about Buddy and wondering where his mind was right now. Having to consider the possibility that your beloved brother drove five hundred miles to kill you had to play hard in the heart. Especially when you realized you almost jumped off a bridge with him to prove your loyalty.

  Steele didn’t wait for an answer. “So, what did you talk about all day?” he asked. “Did he have a plan? Did he say what he wanted from you? Why he was here?”

  “He was confused,” Buddy said. “He kept quoting scripture and drinking. One minute he was talking about going to Canada and the next he was planning his next sermon at the cathedral. I just figured when he sobered up, we could work things out.”

  “But he never confessed to you?” Steele asked.

  “My brother was never big on owning up to stuff.”

  “Where was the gun all this time?”

  “He kept it in his belt.”

  “Why did you run?” Steele asked.

  “I was outside taking a smoke and I saw you coming up the hill,” Buddy said. “So, I went in and told Antero and he just went crazy. He grabbed the rest of my guns from the rack and said we had to leave. I told him there was nowhere to go, that the road ended up here, but he wasn’t listening. He said God would show us the way.”

  “So you just went along with this?” Steele asked.

  “He was my brother,” Buddy said. “My big brother. And he was in trouble. I didn’t know he was going to do what he did and once he told me to climb over, I guess I didn’t know how to say no.”

  Louis sipped the coffee, glad Steele was fielding the questions. But the surge of adrenaline he had felt on the trestle was dissipating and his brain was starting to fire up. He had a question of his own, one last loose end to tie up. They needed to find Tuyen Lang’s car, the silver Civic. It could hold evidence from the night Anthony transported her body to the field in Ionia. They needed to close her case, too. Not only for her, but for Cam.

  “Where did you meet him?” Louis asked.

  “Huh?”

  “The car Anthony drove up here is not at your cabin,” Louis said. “Where did you pick him up?”

  “Down in Ahmeek. We met up in front of the house where we used to live.”

  Steele shifted the Explorer into drive. “You’re going to take us there.”

  Steele took the trail down slowly, the muddy headlights offering only a murky white path through the trees. But when the Explorer reached the main road, Steele hit the overheads and sped through the darkness at eighty miles an hour.

  Louis was quiet as they drove, sipping the laced coffee. It helped take the edge off. Helped free his mind of what he had done up there and what he had seen. He still wanted to know what happened to the boys, but now was not the time. Buddy was exhausted.

  The radio kept crackling with messages from Houghton to Steele, two requests to call headquarters in Lansing and three to call Major Deforest. Steele acknowledged each one with a dry “Copy that” and replaced the mic. He made no effort to see if the cellular phone in the console had service.

  “We’re coming into Ahmeek,” Steele said.

  “Turn right at the second street,” Buddy said. “It’s the white house on the corner.”

  It was only ten-fifteen but the town was closed down for the night. Only a corner convenience store with a blinding Marathon light offered any signs of life.

  Steele turned into a neighborhood so dark the bubble light on top of the Explorer washed the shingled houses and pickup trucks in swaths of red. At the end of the block, the silver Honda Civic appeared in the Explorer’s headlights.

  When they pulled nose-to-nose with the Civic, Louis grabbed a flashlight, a pair of latex gloves, and pushed out the passenger door. Steele started searching the car’s interior, so Louis walked back to the rear.

  “Pop the trunk,” he called to Steele.

  The trunk rose open. Louis turned on the flashlight and swept the beam around inside. The only things in the trunk were a spare tire, a jack and a Vuitton duffel. Louis propped the duffel on the bumper and unzipped it. It was empty.

  Why had Anthony brought it with him? What had been in it? Had they missed something that Anthony had hidden back at Buddy’s cabin?

  Louis started to toss the bag back in the trunk when the flashlight beam caught a tiny object rolling across the bottom of the duffel. He reached inside to retrieve it, then shined the flashlight beam on his hand.

  It was a white stone about the size of a small marble. Louis rolled it over between his fingers.

  It wasn’t a stone. It was—

  And the words that Anthony had repeated over and over on the trestle where there in his head. If you return . . . if you . . .

  He walked back to the Explorer and opened the door. “What was that verse Anthony was quoting just before he let go?”

  Buddy shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Think. It was something about returning to God and removing something.”

  Buddy raked his hair and sighed wearily. “If you return to the Almighty, you will be restored. If you remove wickedness from your tent . . . it’s about coming back to God. I think it’s Job 22.”

  Louis spun around and scanned the street. Just houses and empty lots and parked cars. Where was it? Where the hell was it?

  He looked back at Buddy. “Is there a church around here?”

  Buddy nodded and pointed. “Yeah, my father’s old church. It’s down there at the end of the block. But it’s all shut down now.”

  Louis slammed the door and started down the street, first walking, then breaking into a trot. Behind him, he heard Steele call for him, but he didn’t stop.

  The spire of the church came into view first, caught in the rain-glittered glow of a nearby streetlight. Then the church, a small white building with two Gothic style windows.

  As Louis neared, he could see that the old double wooden doors had been jimmied. He threw the doors open and went inside.

  It was dark, only the smooth oak of the rear pews catching any light. Louis swept the flashlight beam over the walls, found the switch and slapped at it. A faint mellow light came on the far end of the church from a simple brass pendant lamp over the altar.

  Louis started up the long aisle, his steps slowed by the sudden chill moving up his arms, the hard beat of his heart and what he knew he would find at the end of the aisle.

  He stopped.

  Bones.

  White bones laid out on the wooden altar. The skulls were tipped to their sides, as if they were looking at each. The tiny hand bones were arranged meticulously, the tips almost touching. Every rib bone was set exactly the same distance apart, like the gold pens on Anthony Prince’s desk.

  If you return to the Almighty . . .

  Louis’s eyes burned with tears. Then he dropped to his knees. An urge to scream was inside him but he remained silent, sitting on his heels, staring at the small skeletons until he felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “My God,” Steele whispered.

  Louis rose slowly. Steele crossed himself and bowed his head.

  Louis walked to the back of
the church, stopping near the open door where the air was fresh. He realized he still had the tiny bone from the duffle in his hand and he closed it in his fist and leaned against the wall.

  Steele came up to him. “I’ll call forensics and get a team in here,” he said.

  “Before you do that,” Louis said, “bring Buddy in here. I want to talk to him.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Buddy came in the church without his handcuffs, rubbing his wrists. When the door closed behind him, he stood near the back row of pews and took a long look around.

  The church probably hadn’t changed at all since Buddy had been here as a child, Louis suspected, yet Buddy seemed uncomfortable. Buddy had said on the trestle that he had given up on God years ago. Maybe it wasn’t just the childhood memories making him uneasy now.

  Finally, Buddy’s tired eyes came to Louis and he held something out to Louis. “That other officer said you might want this.”

  Louis accepted the small tape recorder. It was Steele’s way of telling him that the boys’ case needed to be officially closed, too.

  “Why am I here?” Buddy asked.

  “I want you to see something.”

  When Buddy reached the third row of pews, he froze. His face drained of color.

  Louis was prepared for him to turn and run, but he didn’t. For a long time, they both just stood there, Louis looking at Buddy and Buddy looking at the small skeletons.

  “That’s them?” Buddy asked finally.

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you bring them here?”

  “Anthony brought them here,” Louis said.

  Buddy wiped his nose with his sleeve and tried to look away, but his eyes kept coming back to the bones. “I don’t understand. Where . . . I mean, how?”

  Louis knew he had to take the time to explain it to him so Buddy understood the journey the boys’ remains had taken and, more importantly, what a sick son of a bitch his brother was.

  “When the candle box was found in 1979, there was a sheriff here named Halko,” Louis said. “He was corrupt, liked to steal and sell murder souvenirs. But he was also smart. I think he managed to link your family to the boys but instead of doing a real investigation, he chose to blackmail your brother. He sold the remains to him.”

  Buddy looked confused. “Antero bought the boys’ bones? And he kept them?”

  A part of him didn’t want to tell Buddy where the bones had been stored, but Louis decided that truth worked two ways—if he wanted honesty from Buddy, he had to be honest with him.

  “He kept them in an organ bench in his home.”

  Buddy continued to stare at the bones, but his eyes clouded with something that Louis couldn’t decipher. It wasn’t disgust or even surprise. It was more as if Anthony’s grisly storage container made perfect sense.

  “We need to talk,” Louis said.

  He motioned toward the rear of the church and Buddy followed him back down the aisle. At the last row of pews, he slipped in to sit down. Louis sat down next to him, turned on the recorder and set it on the pew between them.

  Buddy sat very still, hands folded, head down. Somewhere outside, a siren wailed and died.

  “I’m sorry,” Buddy said. “I don’t know where to start,”

  “Start in Oulu,” Louis said.

  Buddy looked up at him. “Oulu,” he said softly. He let out a long breath. “The boys weren’t with us in Oulu. Why start there?”

  Louis wasn’t sure why he wanted Buddy to start his story in Wisconsin. Maybe it was because he wanted to know not only what happened at the moment of the boys’ murder, but what had happened in the weeks, months and years before. Because that’s what murder was. Not a singular flash of lightning, but a slow gathering storm of slights, injustices and unhealed wounds.

  It was the kind of stuff some cops never took the time to listen to, because in court everything was reduced to the damage left after the lightning struck—footprints, blood spatter, DNA, and gun casings. But understanding the storm’s formation helped Louis understand people and understanding people helped him understand why they murdered.

  Buddy cleared his throat. “My memories of Oulu are mostly just being dark and lonely. It was cold, and we used candles to keep the electric bill down. Antero and I slept together to stay warm.”

  “You were poor.” Louis said.

  Buddy nodded. “Yeah, but I don’t think we knew that then. Nobody in Oulu had much. We were the only church for like fifty miles. My father started it after he came over from Finland. He served in the Winter War, you know, with Kalervo Kurkiala. Do you know who he was?”

  “No.”

  “He was this famous Finnish minister and soldier who fought against the Russians and became some big guy in the German SS. My father used to say that of all the things Kurkiala taught him, the most important thing was that faith alone was not enough, that it had to be strengthened by discipline, the kind of discipline soldiers get.”

  “Was your mother from Finland?”

  “No, she was American,” Buddy said. “A farm girl from a family of twelve. She was the youngest, and when her family joined the church, she became the organist. They got married right before the war. One of my aunts said she married him because the only men who were left were cripples and ministers.”

  Buddy sat back against the pew and let out a long breath.

  “But I know he loved her,” he said. “I know it because every once in a while, if she passed near him, I’d see him touch her hand. And one night, I caught him watching her when she was playing the organ, all affectionate like. When he saw me looking at him, he told her to stop, and he left the room.”

  “Maybe he was embarrassed you saw his feelings.”

  “That’s what I thought then, too,” Buddy said. “But I figured out later that it didn’t have anything to do with embarrassment. It had to do with distractions. No one in our house was allowed distractions.”

  “Distractions from what?” Louis asked.

  “Serving God.”

  Louis was quiet, sitting forward with his elbows on his knees. Buddy was quiet, too, picking at the rough skin of his palms.

  “It wasn’t all bad,” Buddy said. “We had stuff going on at church for kids and we listened to Moody radio at night. But when Antero and I got older, things started changing. My father locked up the radio so we couldn’t hear Elvis and Chuck Berry. We weren’t allowed to visit friends if their families had televisions. The only movie I saw was The Ten Commandments when I was five.”

  “Strict stuff,” Louis said.

  Buddy fell quiet again. He bowed his head and when he finally spoke, his voice was a bare whisper.

  “There was this night with the bread,” he said.

  Louis wasn’t sure he heard right. “Bread?”

  Buddy nodded. “I know it’s stupid to remember something like this but it’s like it was just so typical of how things were. My mother had made two loaves of pettuleipä bread. It was supposed to be one loaf for this poor family and one for us. It was a treat, and we were all excited. But then father came in and told us that we needed to give the second loaf—our loaf – to the church for Eucharist. When we complained, he told us our generosity was enough to nourish us.”

  Buddy raked his hair.

  “It was like everything we had, everything we earned, had to be returned, like having fucking nothing and being hungry all the time somehow made us more righteous. Antero used to say we were slaves to a master we never saw.”

  “Your brother wasn’t so devout?”

  “He was good at pretending,” Buddy said. “He had a great memory for the passages and he always knew what to say. And he came up with all these charity ideas, like asking the local farmers for fruit to feed the old folks and collecting coats in the winter. But at night, when we were alone, he’d bitch about how ignorant the farmers were, and he’d tell nasty jokes about Jesus.”

  “And you?”

  “I believed,” Buddy said.

>   He slumped back in the pew, like he was so tired he couldn’t sit up any longer.

  “But believing was never enough,” he went on. “I couldn’t memorize anything, and I couldn’t seem to sit still or stay clean. No matter how hard I tried, father said I should’ve dug deeper or prayed harder.”

  Again, Buddy paused. “But I could draw good,” he said. “So I figured that maybe I could serve God by painting pictures. So I painted like ten pictures of Bible stories and showed them to Father. He told me he would hang them in the church, but he never did. One time when I was cleaning the church, I found them in the trash.”

  Buddy closed his eyes.

  “When did the other children start coming to stay with you?” Louis asked.

  Buddy opened his eyes. “That last summer we were in Oulu, right after my grandfather Sedrik died in Finland. They sent my father Sedrik’s favorite robe. It was blue, a real silky royal blue, and it had a gold stole with the Saint Bosco emblem on it. They also sent this pouch full of Bosco medals and a long letter telling father it was now his mission to carry on the work of Saint Bosco, helping homeless boys.”

  Buddy was sweating, despite the cold breeze wafting in from the broken door.

  “That’s how it started,” Buddy said, “the boys, I mean. It started with this kid in town. They were going to put him in juvie down in Wausau and my father convinced them to let him try to save him. Father brought a cot into our bedroom. A month later, we had like four more cots in there. One night, Antero and I went to father to complain. He told us that we should think of it like living in army barracks and that it would rid us of pettiness and vanity. We figured that came from Kurkiala, and we started hating him, too.”

  “What was your mother doing during this time?”

  “Taking care of sick parishioners and making father more robes,” Buddy said. “She’d scrounge old drapes and bedspreads and sew them into these beautiful robes. The congregation loved seeing father in them. But all Antero and I could think about was how much food one of those damn robes could’ve bought us.”