The Charlie Parker Collection 5-8: The Black Angel, The Unquiet, The Reapers, The Lovers

by John Connolly

  He sat when we sat and leaned into the speaker before him. “How you doing, Miss Price?” he said.

  “Good, Andy. And you?”

  He nodded repeatedly but said nothing, as though she were still speaking and he were still listening. Up close, I could see bruising beneath his left eye and over his left cheekbone. His right ear was scarred, and dried blood was mixed with wax in the entrance to the canal.

  “I’m doing okay,” he replied, eventually.

  “You been in any trouble?”

  “Uh-uh. I been taking my meds, like you asked me to, and I tell the guards if I’m not feeling good.”

  “Do they listen?”

  He swallowed and seemed about to look over his shoulder at the men behind him. Aimee caught the movement and addressed the two guards.

  “Could you give us some space, please?” she asked.

  They looked to Long for confirmation that it was permissible. He assented, and they retreated out of our line of sight.

  “Some of ’em, the good ones,” continued Kellog. He pointed respectfully at Long. “Colonel Sir, he listens, when I get to see him. Others, though, they got it in for me. I try to keep out of their way, but sometimes they just rile me, you know? They make me angry, then I have problems.”

  He glanced at me. It was the third or fourth time that he’d done so, never staring long enough to catch my eye, but nodding to me each time in acknowledgment of my presence. The niceties over with, Aimee introduced me.

  “Andy, this is Mr. Parker. He’s a private detective. He’d like to talk to you about some things, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” said Kellog. “Nice to meet you, sir.”

  Now that the introductions had been made he was happy to look me in the eye. There was something childlike about him. I didn’t doubt that he could be difficult, even dangerous under the wrong circumstances, but it was hard to understand how anyone could have met Andy Kellog, could have read his history and examined the reports of experts, and not have concluded that here was a young man with severe problems that were not of his own making, an individual who would never truly belong anywhere but still did not deserve to end up in a cell or, worse, tied naked to a chair in an ice-cold room because nobody had bothered to check that his meds were in order.

  I leaned closer to the glass. I wanted to ask Kellog about Daniel Clay, and about what had happened to him in the woods near Bingham, but I knew it would be difficult for him, and there was always the possibility that he might clam up entirely or lose his temper, in which case I wouldn’t get the chance to ask him anything else. I decided to start with Merrick instead and work my way back to the abuse.

  “I met someone who knows you,” I said. “His name is Frank Merrick. You remember him?”

  Kellog nodded eagerly. He smiled, exposing his gray teeth again. He wouldn’t have them for much longer. His gums were purple and infected.

  “I liked Frank. He looked out for me. Will he come visit me?”

  “I don’t know, Andy. I’m not sure he’ll want to come back here, you understand?”

  Kellog’s face fell. “I guess you’re right. When I get out of here, I ain’t never coming back here neither, not ever.”

  He picked at his hands, opening a sore that immediately began to bleed.

  “How did Frank look out for you, Andy?”

  “He was scary. I wasn’t afraid of him—well, maybe I was at first, not later—but the others were. They used to pick on me, but then Frank came along and they stopped. He knew how to get at them, even in the Max.” He smiled widely once more. “He hurt some of them real bad.”

  “Did he ever tell you why he looked out for you?”

  Kellog looked confused. “Why? Because he was my friend, that’s why. He liked me. He didn’t want anything bad to happen to me.” Then, as I watched, the blood began to pump into his face, and I was reminded uncomfortably of Merrick, as though something of him had transferred itself into the younger man while they were imprisoned together. I saw his hands form fists. A peculiar clicking sound came from his mouth, and I realized he was sucking at one of his loose teeth, the socket filling with spittle then emptying again, creating a rhythmic ticking like a time bomb waiting to go off.

  “He weren’t queer,” said Kellog, his voice rising slightly. “If that’s what you’re saying, I’m telling you now that it’s not true. He weren’t a fag. Me neither. ’Cause if that’s what you’re trying to say—”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Long make a gesture with his right hand, and the guards quickly swam into view behind Kellog.

  “It’s all right, Andy,” said Aimee. “Nobody’s suggesting anything of the kind.”

  Kellog was shaking slightly as he tried to keep his anger in check. “Well, he weren’t, that’s all. He never touched me. He was my friend.”

  “I understand, Andy,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest anything different. What I meant to ask you was if he ever gave you any sign that you might have something in common. Did he ever mention his daughter to you?”

  Kellog began to calm down, but there was now a gleam of hostility and suspicion in his eyes. I knew it would take a lot to make it go away.

  “Yeah, some.”

  “This was after he began to look out for you, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “She was a patient of Dr. Clay’s, wasn’t she, just like you were?”

  “Yeah. She disappeared while Frank was in jail.”

  “Did Frank ever tell you what he thought might have happened to her?”

  Kellog shook his head. “He didn’t like talking about her. It made him sad.”

  “Did he ask about what happened to you up north?”

  Kellog swallowed hard and looked away. The clicking noise came again, but this time there was no anger with it.

  “Yes,” he said softly. Not “yeah,” but “yes.” It made him sound younger, as though by raising the subject of the abuse I was propelling him physically back into his childhood. His face grew slack and his pupils shrank. He seemed to grow even smaller, his shoulders hunching, his hands opening out in an unconscious gesture of supplication. The tormented adult faded away, leaving behind the ghost of a child. I didn’t need to ask what had been done to him. It played out on his features in a series of trembles and winces and flinches, a dumb play of remembered pain and humiliation.

  “He wanted to know what I saw, what I remembered,” he said. It was almost a whisper.

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “I told him what they done to me,” he said simply. “He asked me if I’d seen their faces or heard a name spoke, but they wore masks and they never spoke no names.” He looked straight at me. “They looked like birds,” he said. “All different. There was an eagle, and a crow. A pigeon. A rooster.” He shivered. “All different,” he repeated. “They always wore them, and they never took them off.”

  “Did you remember anything about where it happened?”

  “It was dark. They used to put me in the trunk of a car, tie my arms and my legs, put a sack over my head. They’d drive for a time, then carry me out. When the bag came off I’d be in a room. There were windows, but they were all covered up. There was a propane heater, and storm lamps. I’d try to keep my eyes closed. I knew what was going to happen. I knew, ’cause it had happened before. It was like it was always going to happen to me, and it wasn’t never going to stop.”

  He blinked a couple of times, then closed his eyes as he relived it over again.

  “Andy,” I whispered.

  He kept his eyes closed, but he nodded to let me know that he’d heard.

  “How many times did this happen?”

  “I stopped counting after three.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone about it?”

  “They said they’d kill me, and then they’d take Michelle and do it to her instead. One of them said they didn’t care if they did it to a boy or a girl. He said it was just dif
ferent for each, that was all. I liked Michelle. I didn’t want nothing bad to happen to her. It had been done to me before, so I knew what to expect. I learned to block some of it out. I’d think of other things while it was happening. I’d imagine that I was somewhere else, that I wasn’t in me. Sometimes, I’d be flying over the forest and I’d look down and see all of the people, and I’d find Michelle and I’d go to her and we’d play by the river together. I could do that, but Michelle, she wouldn’t have been able to do that. She’d have been there with them, all the time.”

  I leaned back. He had sacrificed himself for another child. Aimee had told me as much, but to hear it from Kellog himself was another matter. There was no boastfulness about his tale of self-sacrifice. He had done it out of love for a younger child, and it had come naturally to him. Once again, I was aware that here was a boy trapped in a man’s body, a child whose development had ceased almost entirely, arrested by what had been done to him. Beside me, Aimee was silent, her lips clasped so tightly shut that the blood had drained from them. She must have heard this before, I thought, but it would never get any easier to listen to.

  “But they found out, in the end,” I said. “People discovered what was happening to you.”

  “I got angry. I couldn’t help it. They brought me to the doctor. He examined me. I tried to stop him. I didn’t want them to come for Michelle. Then the doctor asked me questions. I tried to lie, for Michelle, but he kept tripping me up. I couldn’t keep all the answers straight in my head. They brought me back to Dr. Clay, but I didn’t want to talk to him no more. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, so I kept quiet. They put me away again, but then I got too old and they had to let me go. I fell in with some people, did some bad things, and they put me in the Castle.”

  The Castle was the name given to the old Maine Youth Center in South Portland, a correctional facility for troubled youths built in the middle of the nineteenth century. It had since closed, but it was no great loss. Before the building of the new youth facilities in South Portland and Charleston, the recidivism rate for young inmates had been 50 percent. It was now down to 10 or 15 percent, largely because the institutions now focused less on incarceration and punishment than helping the kids, some as young as eleven or twelve, to overcome their problems. The changes had come too late for Andy Kellog, though. He was a walking, talking testament to everything that could go wrong in the state’s dealings with a troubled child.

  Now Aimee spoke. “Can I show Mr. Parker your pictures, Andy?”

  He opened his eyes. There were no tears. I don’t think he had any left to shed.

  “Sure.”

  Aimee opened her document case and removed a cardboard wallet. She handed it to me. Inside were eight or nine pictures, most done in crayon, a couple in watercolor paint. The first four or five were very dark, painted in shades of gray and black and red, and populated by crude naked figures with the heads of birds. These were the pictures that Bill had told me about.

  The rest of the artwork depicted variations on the same landscape: trees, barren ground, decaying buildings. They were crude, with no great talent behind them, yet at the same time a huge amount of care had been lavished on some of them, while others were angry smears of black and green, still recognizably a version of the same locale, but created in a burst of anger and grief. Each picture was dominated by the shape of a great stone steeple. I knew the place, because I had seen it depicted before. It was Gilead.

  “Why did you draw this place, Andy?” I asked.

  “That’s where it happened,” said Kellog. “That’s where they took me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The second time, the bag slipped while they were carrying me in. I was kicking at them, and it nearly came off my head. That’s what I saw before they pulled it back down again. I saw the church. I painted it so I could show it to Frank. Then they moved me to the Max and they wouldn’t let me paint no more. I couldn’t even take them with me. I asked Miss Price to take care of them for me.”

  “So Frank saw these pictures?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you could remember nothing of the men who took you there?”

  “Not their faces. I told you: they wore masks.”

  “What about other marks? Tattoos maybe, or scars?”

  “No.” He frowned. “Wait. One of them had a bird, here.” He pointed to his left forearm. “It was a white eagle’s head, with a yellow beak. I think that was why he wore the eagle mask. He was the one who told the others what to do.”

  “Did you tell the police this?”

  “Yeah. I never heard nothing more, though. I guess it didn’t help.”

  “And Frank? Did you tell him about the tattoo?”

  He screwed up his face. “I think so. I don’t remember.” His face relaxed.

  “Can I ask a question?” he said.

  Aimee looked surprised. “Sure you can, Andy.”

  He turned to me. “You going to try to find these men, sir?” he asked. There was something in his voice that I didn’t like. The boy was gone now, and what had taken its place was neither child nor adult but some perverse imp straddling both. His tone was almost mocking.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You’d best hurry then,” he said.

  “Why is that?”

  Now the smile was back, but so was that hostile light.

  “Because Frank promised to kill them. He promised to kill every one of them once he got out.”

  And then Andy Kellog stood and threw himself face-first at the Pleixglas barrier. His nose broke immediately, leaving a smear of blood on the surface. He rammed it again, opening a wound on his forehead just below his scalp. And then he was shouting and screaming as the guards descended on him, and Aimee Price was calling his name and begging them not to hurt him as an alarm sounded and more men appeared and Andy was submerged beneath a mass of bodies, still kicking and shouting, inviting new pain to drown the memory of the old.

  18

  The colonel of the guard was fuming quietly as we walked back to the reception lobby. There he left us for a time. Aimee took a seat and we waited in silence for Long to come back to us with news of Andy Kellog’s condition. There were too many people around to enable us to talk about what had occurred. I looked at them, all caught up in their own pain and the misery of those whom they were visiting. Few spoke. There were older men who might have been fathers, brothers, friends. Some women had brought children along for the visit, but even the kids were quiet and subdued. They knew what this place was, and it frightened them. If they ran around, even if they spoke too loudly, they might end up in here like their daddies. They wouldn’t be allowed to go home, and a man would take them and lock them up in the dark, because that was what happened to bad children. They got locked up, and their teeth rotted, and they beat their faces against Plexiglas screens to numb themselves into unconsciousness.

  Long appeared at the lobby desk and gestured for us to join him. He told us that Andy’s nose was badly broken, he had lost another tooth, and he had sustained some bruising during the attempt to subdue him, but otherwise he was as well as could be expected. The injury to his forehead had required five stitches, and he was now in the infirmary. They hadn’t even Maced him, perhaps because his lawyer was present on the other side of the glass. There were no signs of concussion, but he would be kept under observation overnight, just in case. He had been restrained, though, to ensure that he didn’t injure himself again, or try to hurt anyone else. Aimee retreated to use her cell phone in private, leaving me alone with Long, who was still angry at himself and the men under his command for what had happened to Andy Kellog.

  “He’s done that kind of thing before,” he said. “I told them to keep a close eye on him.” He risked a glance at Aimee, an indication that he blamed her in part for making his men keep their distance.

  “He doesn’t belong in here,” I replied.

  “Judge made that decision, not me.”

  “Well,
it was the wrong one. I know you heard what was said in there. I don’t think he had much hope from the start, but what those men did to him took away what little there was. The Max is just making him crazier and crazier, and the judge didn’t sentence him to gradual insanity. You can’t keep a man locked up in a place like that with no possibility of release and expect him to stay balanced, and Andy Kellog was barely holding on to start with.”

  Long had the decency to look embarrassed. “We do what we can for him.”

  “It’s not enough.” I was railing at him, but I knew that it wasn’t his fault. Kellog had been sentenced and imprisoned, and it wasn’t Long’s duty to question that decision.

  “Maybe you think he was better off with his pal Merrick close by,” said Long.

  “At least he kept the wolves at bay.”

  “He wasn’t much better than an animal himself.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  He raised an eyebrow at me.

  “You developing a soft spot for Frank Merrick? You better be careful or you’re likely to find a knife in it.”

  Long was both right and wrong about Merrick. I didn’t doubt that he would hurt or kill without compunction, but there was an intelligence at work there. The problem was that Merrick was also a weapon to be wielded, and someone had found a way of using him to that end. But Long’s words had struck home, just as Rachel’s had. I did feel some sympathy for Merrick. How could I not? I was a father too. I had lost a child, and I had stopped at nothing to hunt down the man responsible for her death. I knew too that I would do anything to protect Sam and her mother. How then could I judge Merrick for wanting to find out the truth behind his daughter’s disappearance?

  Still, such doubts aside, I now knew more than I had an hour before. Unfortunately, Merrick shared some of the same knowledge. I wondered if he had already begun scouting around Jackman and the ruins of Gilead for traces of the men who he believed were responsible for his daughter’s disappearance, or if he had a lead on the man with the eagle tattoo. I would have to go to Gilead eventually. Each step that I took seemed to take me closer to it.