The Devil's Bed

by William Kent Krueger

  He found the home that matched the address Sister Mary Jackson had given him. It was a tidy little one-story frame on a street shaded by maples. Pansies lined the walk. He parked in the empty drive and went to the front door. No one answered the bell or his knock. He headed back to his car and stood a moment, considering his options. It was the dinner hour. The street was deserted. In a while, people would be out for their evening walks or watering their lawns or sitting in their porch swings. But at the moment, there was no one to be seen. Bo decided to eat and return later.

  He found a homey-looking café called Ethel’s. The place smelled wonderful, of meat loaf and gravy. Bo ordered the dinner special for the day, the meat loaf, and coffee. The café was nearly full, families, older folks talking quietly, a couple of farmers in clean, bib overalls and billed caps. Locals. It reminded Bo of Blue Earth and the rare dinners out with Harold and Nell Thorsen. Two or three foster kids were always along. They always ate at the Sleepy Eye Café, where the specials were pork roast or fried chicken or chicken fried steak with mounds of mashed potatoes and homemade gravy and green beans. Dinner always ended with fresh-baked pie. So little had been special in Bo’s life before those days in Blue Earth that dinner at the Sleepy Eye Café became a landmark for him.

  He finished eating, and as he sipped a final cup of coffee, he tried calling the priest. He got the message machine. “Hi. Don Cannon. Can’t take your call, just leave a message and have a great day.” Bo didn’t leave a message. But so far, the day hadn’t been too bad.

  He returned to the house. No one answered his knock this time either. Next door, a bald man in a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts stood in the middle of his lawn. He had a garden hose in one hand and a beer can in the other. He was spraying a fine mist over the grass and eyeing Bo.

  “Know Father Cannon?” Bo called to him.

  “Sure.”

  “Know where he might be?”

  “Thursday’s his bowling night. Falls Lanes. West side of Main Street as you head north out of town.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You a cop?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I can tell. I used to be a cop, too.” He lifted the beer in a friendly toast of goodwill.

  The last of the day’s sunlight fell across the town as Bo drove to the bowling alley. Trees cast long shadows down quiet streets. The air smelled faintly of fresh cut grass. If his concern had not been so pressing, Bo might have let himself linger awhile, enjoying the feel of the small town as evening settled in.

  When he opened the door to the bowling alley, the country quiet was broken by the rumble of balls on oiled wood and the thunder of shattered pin sets.

  The place was busy. A league night. Every lane was full. Bo had no idea what Father Don Cannon looked like. He didn’t see anyone wearing a cleric’s white collar. He made his way to the desk and took his place in a long line of people waiting to be served. As he stood there, he scanned the lighted displays above each lane that gave the names of the teams, the bowlers, and their scores. A team on lane eleven called themselves The Holy Rollers. The third bowler listed was Don. Bo stepped in that direction.

  Father Cannon was a big man with bushy gray hair and a thick, unkempt beard. He wore glasses, a rumpled, blue knit shirt that barely covered his rotund belly, and tan slacks. He crouched low as he prepared to bowl, approached the foul line aggressively, and threw a powerful hook that sent the pins flying like demons fleeing the wrath of God.

  Bo bided his time, waiting while The Holy Rollers and the team they opposed, The Wild Ducks, bowled two more lines. The Holy Rollers easily won. As the priest toweled off his ball and placed it in his ball bag, Bo approached him.

  “Father Cannon?” he asked.

  The priest looked up, smiling huge through the wild hairs of his beard. “Saw you watching. Wondered if you were a fan or just killing time.”

  “Bo Thorsen’s my name. I’m with the U.S. Secret Service.” Bo let him have a good look at his ID. “I’d like a word with you.”

  “About what?”

  “David Moses.”

  The priest’s face lost its smile, and a different look appeared there. As if Father Cannon had just heard something he’d been waiting a long time to hear. “You a drinking man?”

  “On occasion,” Bo replied.

  “I think this is an occasion, Mr. Thorsen.”

  chapter

  twenty-two

  David Moses,” the priest said unhappily and shook his head. “It’s been twenty years since I heard that name.”

  They sat at the bar in the lounge connected to the bowling alley. The television above the liquor bottles was tuned to a Twins’ game, but the sound was turned down. Father Don Cannon fingered a shot glass of Dewar’s that was backed up by a chaser of beer. Bo was nursing a bottle of Leinenkugel’s. He’d already told the priest everything he knew about David Moses, and everything he suspected.

  “You really think he tried to kill Tom Jorgenson?”

  “I’m almost certain of it,” Bo said. “I just don’t know why.”

  The priest signaled the bartender. “We’re going to a booth, Patrick. I’ll let you know when we need another round.” He motioned for Bo to follow, and he walked to a dimly lit booth well back in a corner. After they sat down, he slammed back his Dewar’s and took a hard draw on his beer. “Did you know he chose his own name? David Solomon Moses.”

  “What do you mean, he chose it?” Bo asked.

  “He didn’t even have a name when he came to us. His existence had never been officially noted, and his mother had never given him a name. Or one that he would tell us. This was probably the least of the sadnesses in that boy’s history.”

  “You know about his history?”

  “Until he left us, anyway. David wasn’t Catholic, wasn’t anything really, and so what he shared, he shared with me only as his confidant, not his confessor. And more’s the pity.”

  The thunder from the alleys almost drowned the priest’s dour voice, and Bo leaned nearer.

  “David came to us in unusual circumstances. He was sixteen, just orphaned. No other family that the authorities could identify. He wasn’t a good candidate for adoption. Kids that age seldom are. The social worker assigned to his case believed that St. Jerome’s was a better option than foster care. After I heard about David, so did I.

  “He was the most remarkable young man with whom I’ve ever worked. Brilliant. He arrived at St. Jerome’s with a limited understanding of the world and proceeded to read quite literally everything in our library. He soaked up knowledge. I remember many times sitting up with him in my study late at night deep in ecclesiastical arguments. He had a wonderfully analytic mind. I admit, at one point I entertained the hope he might even have a religious calling. But that was my own blindness.

  “I knew there was great potential in David, both good and bad. And the bad wasn’t his fault.”

  “His childhood?” Bo said.

  Father Cannon finished his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “That boy was raised in the basement of an old farmhouse by a man about as near to the devil as a man can get. By all rights, David should have been totally ruined, but he wasn’t. There was a strength, a resilience in him that was remarkable. Do you believe we come already forged into this world, already created as the beings we will be?” He didn’t wait for Bo to answer. “I do. David was born strong, and he resisted as well as he could the forces that sought to break him. He told me things about his childhood that made me weep, Mr. Thorsen.” The priest paused a moment, and Bo thought his old eyes might yet be fighting back tears. “I believed we had David on the right track. He was in school. He’d made the gymnastics team. He’d joined the debating society. He seemed to have made friends. He was blossoming, and it was wonderful to see. In those days, I thought of him a little like Lazarus. He’d been dead, but he was alive again. Then the thing happened with Tom Jorgenson and his daughter, and we lost David forever.”

 
; The priest hesitated.

  “You can’t leave me hanging, Father. Tom Jorgenson’s life is at stake.”

  “You’re certain of that?”

  “I’m just about to the place where I’d stake everything on it.”

  The priest thought it over. “We might need another round for this.” He signaled the bartender. When the drinks came, he threw the Dewar’s down his throat and followed it with a swallow of beer. Braced, he addressed Bo again.

  “As I said, David was doing well. I knew some of what had gone on in his life, but I was aware there were things David kept inside. He was scarred in ways that didn’t show immediately, and I was so full of myself, so pleased that I had this kid so quickly headed toward a normal life, that I ignored the warning signs.”

  “What signs?” Bo asked.

  “We had an arrangement with Wildwood in those days. Kids from St. Jerome’s were employed during the summer and on weekends in the fall to help with the work in the orchards. We bused them out, bused them back. I arranged to have David work there. His first day he met Kathleen Jorgenson.

  “Girls were a topic David and I discussed occasionally. The only woman he’d ever really known was his mother, so the opposite sex was a mystery to him. The first thing I did was to assure him that this was normal. Actually, he was quite popular with girls at school. He was smart and athletic and the uniqueness of his circumstances, his being an orphan, made him attractive to girls his age. Although David was cordial enough, he kept them all at a distance, studying them, I think, so that he wouldn’t be out of control. When he met Kathleen Jorgenson, all his precautions went poof, turned to dust. He fell head over heels in love with her. The problem was that she didn’t feel the same way about him. Friends, that’s all they were in her eyes. Good friends.

  “‘How can I get her to love me?’ he’d plead with me. He became a broken record, although he controlled himself admirably around her. Or so it appeared.”

  “Any idea what Tom Jorgenson thought of David?”

  “From what I gathered, he liked the boy quite a lot. He invited David to stay to dinner on several occasions. I know what David thought of him. In many ways, he saw Tom Jorgenson as a father figure, admired his intelligence and his accomplishments.

  “As summer drew to a close, David began coming back later and later from Wildwood. He didn’t ride the bus with the other kids. He had this little motorbike he’d built himself from scrap parts he found in the equipment shed at St. Jerome’s. He used it to get himself to and from the orchards. He’d come in late and refuse to talk about what he’d been up to. It was obvious he hadn’t been drinking or using drugs. He was too independent to be involved in a gang. I was perplexed, but I let myself believe it wasn’t serious. Then one night, I got a call from the sheriff’s office. They had David in custody.

  “I arrived at the county jail and found a young man I’d never seen before, a very different David. Cold. Eyes hard as steel. It wasn’t anger or fear. It was something frightening, so void of compassion it hardly seemed human. He had a horrible bruise across his forehead and the side of his face. The sheriff told me Kate Jorgenson was claiming that David had attacked her, tried to sexually assault her. As if that wasn’t bad enough, David was claiming it wasn’t him who attacked Kate. It was Tom Jorgenson.”

  The priest stopped and lifted his glass to his lips. From the bowling alley came the crash of pins exploding out of their neat formations.

  “Tom Jorgenson?” Bo asked incredulously.

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t remember hearing anything about that.”

  “That’s because it was kept quiet. I arranged to speak with David alone. He told me that he’d been sneaking back to Wildwood in the evenings. He’d sit in the orchard in the dark and gaze up at Kate’s bedroom window. The boy was love-struck. That night, he saw her leave the house and head toward the bluff overlooking the river. A few minutes later, Tom Jorgenson followed her. David followed them both. He claimed that when he reached the bluff, he found Tom trying to force himself on Kate, and he attempted to intervene. Tom vehemently denied it. He maintained he’d been working in the barn and had heard her screams. He hurried to the bluff and found David lying there unconscious. Kate’s clothes were torn. She was hysterical. All of this was substantiated by Tom’s brother, Roland, who’d heard the screams, too, and had come running.

  “I didn’t know what to do. I tried to reason with David, but he refused to back away from his story. Tom was beside himself. Who wouldn’t be in the face of such circumstances? Any publicity, the slightest leak, and the whole thing could blow up into an ugly mess. An allegation like David’s could do irreparable damage. Of course, neither the sheriff’s office nor the county attorney had any intention of allowing such a statement made by a kid like David to become public, if they could help it. But no one was exactly certain what should be done.

  “It was Annie who finally suggested the military. She pointed out that David was now seventeen, of age if he had the consent of his legal guardian. He was certainly bright enough and physically capable of handling the training. It was an option she occasionally offered in her courtroom to keep a kid out of jail. She suggested a compromise. If David agreed not to make his allegation public and join the service, no charges would be brought against him. If he refused, the county attorney was prepared to charge him as an adult with criminal sexual assault.

  “I talked it over with David. I pointed out to him that it would probably come down to a question of his word against the Jorgensons’. In a trial, all the sordid details of his own past would become public knowledge. Did he really want that? He looked at me, and he asked, did I believe him?”

  After a few moments of silence, Bo said, “Did you?”

  The priest contemplated the last of his beer and thought awhile before he answered. “I’ve worked with troubled kids most of my life. Every once in a while they’ve fooled me, but not often. Yes, I believed him. Or believed, at least, whoever it was who attacked Kate Jorgenson, it wasn’t David. But I also believed absolutely Tom Jorgenson wouldn’t assault his own daughter. So there didn’t seem to be a clear truth anywhere. This much I did know. Once a jury heard David’s history, there was no way in hell they were going to believe him. In the end, I told him it didn’t matter what I thought. But I did suggest that going away was an answer that would hurt no one. He looked at me as if I’d simply washed my hands of him, abandoned him completely. Shortly after that, I signed his enlistment papers.” The priest finished his drink and shoved the empty glass away. “Now you tell me these things about David, and how can I not believe I had a hand in shaping him to this?”

  The priest looked ready to slide under the table.

  “Father Cannon, if David Moses has revenge on his mind, you may be in danger, too.”

  The priest waved off his concern. “I corresponded with him briefly after he left. I told him I prayed for his well-being. He wrote me back saying that he felt no animosity toward me. It was the Jorgensons who’d betrayed him.” He sat back and rubbed his eyes. “Mr. Thorsen, I’m tired. Is there anything more I can do for you?”

  “I don’t think so. You’ve been helpful.”

  The priest picked up his ball bag and started out. He turned back. “What we are, we are forever. David may have done some horrible things, but inside him somewhere is still a remarkable human being. Please, whatever it is you ultimately have to do, try to keep that in mind.”

  The priest left through the lounge door and pushed out into the warm, dark night, leaving Bo to wonder what, ultimately, it was that he would have to do.

  chapter

  twenty-three

  Nightmare checked his watch. Ten-forty. Sixteen minutes until the moon set. It was time.

  He lay in the orchard grass, beyond the range of the motion detectors and the infrared cameras mounted on the stone wall. He wore midnight tiger camouflage fatigue pants and a T-shirt of the same design. The exposed skin of his face and arms was
painted with a tiger stripe pattern of dark blue and black to match his clothing. Something fluttered among the trees behind him. Nightmare glanced back and watched an owl swoop and snatch up some small animal, then flap away, a black shape across the stars.

  A dark figure walked along the edge of the orchard. Nightmare flattened himself against the ground. As soon as the patrolling agent had passed, Nightmare lifted the sod that covered the wood cap over the entrance to a tunnel just over two feet wide, and he reeled in his field pack. He’d crawled through the tunnel from the other side of the wall, dragging the pack that was tethered to his ankle by a short length of nylon rope. The weather in the two weeks since he’d completed the digging had been clear, and the passage under the wall was dry. The tunnel was exactly thirty-four feet long. He knew the capability of the motion detectors, and he’d placed the entrance and exit just beyond their range. Tom Jorgenson’s lax concern about his personal safety had allowed Nightmare the freedom to construct the tunnel, which had taken him nearly three weeks, working nights after his shift at the hospital. He’d intended from the beginning to fall back on an assault against Wildwood if the hospital bombing plan had to be abandoned. From the pack, he drew out his Beretta 92F and the suppressor, a 7.4-inch M9-SD silencer. He fitted the suppressor into the muzzle of the Beretta and gave it a quarter turn to lock it in place. He slipped off his T-shirt and donned a dark blue Kevlar vest. It was uncomfortable against his bare skin, but it was essential. He pulled his T-shirt back on over the vest, hefted the pack onto his back, and began to track the agent who’d passed only a minute before. He knew the agent had night-vision goggles. Nightmare carried nothing of the kind, for to him the dark was an old friend.

  The agent had no idea an intruder was at his back and made no sound when the silenced round entered the back of his skull. Nightmare knelt and from the belt of the fallen agent unclipped the transmitter that sent a location signal back to the Op Center. He pulled a battery-powered vehicle the size of a loaf of bread from his pack. It was a mechanism of his own construction, built from components he’d ordered from Radio Shack. It consisted of a powerful little motor and receiver on a chassis that would roll across the ground on small tank tracks. The receiver was set to follow the signal of a tiny homing device Nightmare had secured to an overhanging tree limb near the end of the orchard a few days earlier. He’d adjusted the tanklike mechanism so that it would travel at about the speed a careful agent might keep in making rounds. With a bit of duct tape, he affixed the agent’s transmitter to the chassis and sent the device rolling forward under its own power along the same course the agent had been walking. For approximately eight minutes, the dot on the screen of the Op Center that monitored the agent’s position would continue to move. Once the little tank passed under the tree limb where the homing device had been secured, it would stop. Three minutes later, the Op Center would try to make contact to ascertain the reason for the agent’s pause. That gave Nightmare eleven minutes to complete his mission.