The Wolf in Winter

by Connolly, John

  Now he told the ghost of the dog about the church, and the girl, and the shadows that had encircled her before she was dragged beneath the ground. He could have gone to the police, but there was a policeman involved. And what could he have told them—that he saw a girl kneel by a hole in the earth and then disappear? All he had was a fragment of pale material. Could they extract DNA from it? Ronald didn’t know. It depended, he supposed, on whether it had touched the girl’s skin for long enough, if it had touched her at all. He had placed the material in one of the resealable bags that he used for food and waste. It was before him now. He held it up to the light, but he could see no traces of blood on it, and it seemed to be stained only by dirt. He didn’t know her name, and he wasn’t sure if he could have identified her from the glimpse that he caught of her in the greenish light of his night-vision lens. He knew only that she was not Jude’s daughter. He had seen photographs of Annie. Jude had shared them with him, and Ronald retained an uncanny recall for faces and names. The girl swallowed by the churchyard was younger than Jude’s daughter. Ronald wondered if Annie too lay somewhere in that cemetery, if her fate had been the same as that poor girl’s. If so, how many others slept beneath the church, embraced by roots? (For those were not shadows that had wrapped themselves around the girl before she was taken. Oh, no . . .)

  But Ronald also understood instinctively that, even if people were to believe him and a search was eventually conducted, men could dig long and deep in that churchyard without finding any trace of the girl. As he worked at the collapsed earth with his bare hands, hoping to reveal some sign of her, he had felt the presence of a perfect and profound hostility, a malevolent hunger given form. It was this more than any inability to keep digging that had caused him to abandon his efforts to find a body. Even now, he was glad that he had used the water in the Fulcis’ truck to clean his hands of the soil from that place, and one of their towels to dry them, and had then disposed of the towel in a Dumpster so that it wouldn’t be used again. He was grateful not to have contaminated his home with even a fragment of that cursed earth, and he kept sealed the bag containing the piece of material lest some minute particle of grit should fall from it and pollute all.

  The detective would have known what to do, but he was dying. He had friends, though: clever men, dangerous men. Right now, those men would be looking for the ones responsible for shooting him. Ronald didn’t find it hard to make a connection between the detective’s inquiries into the disappearance of Annie Broyer and the sight of an unknown girl being dragged beneath the ground while a group of men and one woman watched. It wasn’t much of a stretch from there to imagine a set of circumstances in which those same people might have seen fit to try and take the detective’s life.

  And if he was wrong? Well, the men who stood by the detective were more like him than perhaps even they knew, and they had wrath to spare. Ronald would find a way to contact them, and together they would avenge those trapped in uneasy rest beneath the dirt of Prosperous.

  AS RONALD STRAYDEER SAT in contemplation and mourning, the bodies of Magnus and Dianne Madsen, and Erin Dixon, were discovered by the police after Magnus failed to appear as scheduled for his hospital duties. The Maine State Police informed Lucas Morland of the Prosperous Police Department once Erin’s identity was established. With both Kayley Madsen and Harry Dixon apparently missing, a patrol car was immediately dispatched to the Dixon house, but there was no sign of Harry or his niece. Their faces duly began showing up on news channels, and an auto dealer in Medway came forward to say that he’d taken a trade-in on a GMC Passenger Van from Harry Dixon just a few days earlier. The van was soon found in a patch of woodland just outside Bangor, with Harry seated at the wheel and holes in his head where the bullet from the gun in his hand had entered and exited. On the seat beside him was a woman’s shirt, stained with blood at the collar. Its size matched clothing found in Kayley Madsen’s closet, and DNA tests would subsequently confirm that the blood was Kayley’s, although no other trace of her was ever found.

  “Prosperous: Maine’s Cursed Town,” read one of the more lurid newspaper headlines in the aftermath. Prosperous crawled with MSP investigators, but Morland handled them all well. He was diligent, cooperative, and unassuming. He knew his place. Only once did he experience a shred of alarm, and that was when an FBI agent named Ross visited from New York. Ross sat in Morland’s office, nibbled on a cookie, and asked about the detective Parker. Why had he come to Prosperous? What did he want to know? And then he gave Morland a possible out: had Parker spoken to Harry Dixon or his wife at any point? Morland didn’t know, but he conceded that it was possible, although why Parker might have wanted to meet with the Dixons Morland couldn’t say. But anything that linked Parker to the Dixons was good for Morland, and good for Prosperous. That was a dead end, and the FBI and the state police could spend decades peering into it for all Morland cared.

  “Can I ask why the FBI is interested in the fact that a private detective was shot in Maine?” said Morland.

  “Curiosity,” said Ross. Then: “Your town seems to be having a bad time of it lately.”

  “Yeah,” said Morland. “They say these things come in threes.”

  “Really?” said Ross. “I count, uh—” He worked it out on his fingers. “Six,” he concluded. “Or nine, if you include the Madsens and their missing daughter. Or, wow, eleven allowing for that homeless guy in Portland and his missing daughter. That’s a lot. More than three, anyway.”

  It wasn’t the first time Morland had heard something of the kind. The MSP investigators had intimated as much, and now Morland replied to Ross just as he had responded to them.

  “Sir, my reckoning is two killings by religious terrorists thousands of miles from here; one accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound on an elderly man; one automobile incident; and, to our shame and regret, an apparent murder-suicide involving two of our townsfolk. I can’t speak to suicides in Portland, or missing girls. I just know what this town has endured. I can’t say why Harry Dixon might have killed those people. I heard that he had money problems, but a lot of folk have money problems and don’t take a gun to their family as a consequence. It could be that the town’s troubles caused something in him to snap. I’m no psychiatrist. But if you can establish a connection between all those disparate events, then I’ll never again question the amount of taxes our government plows into the bureau.”

  Ross finished his cookie.

  “And the attempted murder of a private investigator,” said Ross. “I almost forgot to add that.”

  Morland didn’t respond. He was all done with the FBI for now.

  “Can I help you with anything else today, Agent Ross?”

  “No,” said Ross. “I think that’ll be all. I appreciate your time. And the cookie was very good. My compliments to the baker.”

  “My wife,” said Morland.

  “You’re a fortunate man,” said Ross.

  He stood and buttoned his coat before heading out. There was still a chill in the air.

  “And this is quite a town. Quite a town indeed.”

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, MORLAND received a call from Pastor Warraner.

  Ross had been out at the church.

  CHAPTER

  XLIX

  At first, Angel and Louis believed the missive from the Collector to be little more than a taunt. It was delivered by a bike messenger, and consisted of a padded envelope containing a single final bear claw from the necklace that had once belonged to their friend, the late Jackie Garner, and a business card from the Lexington Candy Shop on Lexington, the old soda-candy store and luncheonette that had been in operation at that location since 1925. It was only when Louis turned over the card and saw a date (that same day) and a time (11 A.M.—written on the back) that they understood that this might be different, although whether it would prove to be an olive branch or a trap they were not certain.

  Even the Collector’
s choice of location for the meeting wasn’t without resonance: the Lexington Candy Shop was where Gabriel, Louis’s late master, would hold his meetings with clients, and sometimes with the operatives for whom he acted as a middleman, Louis among them. Perhaps, thought Louis, the distance between Cambion and Gabriel wasn’t as great as Louis might have liked to believe. Gabriel was merely Cambion with a more highly developed moral sense, but that wasn’t saying a whole lot. There were things breeding in petri dishes with a more highly developed moral sense than Cambion’s. By extension, the distance between Louis and Cambion might well have been significantly less than it was comfortable to imagine. The difference was that Louis had changed, while Cambion had not. Cambion didn’t have a man like Angel by his side, but then a man like Angel would never have allied himself with one such as Cambion to begin with. It made Louis wonder if Angel had seen the possibility of redemption in him long before Louis himself had recognized it. Louis found this simultaneously flattering and slightly worrying.

  The Collector’s decision to nominate the Lexington Candy Shop as the venue for their meeting was his way of telling Louis that he knew all he needed to know about Louis and his past. It added another layer of peculiarity to the Collector’s invitation. This was not the action of a man laying a trap but of a man willingly walking into one.

  The only other customers at the diner when Angel and Louis entered were two male Japanese tourists excitedly taking photographs of the interior, with its gas-fired coffee urns and its ancient signage. The Collector sat at the back of the diner, near the door marked NO ADMITTANCE. STAFF ONLY. His hands lay flat on the table before him, resting on either side of a coffee cup. He was dressed as he nearly always was, in a long dark coat worn over dark pants, a dark jacket, and a tieless shirt that had once been white but now, like his nicotine-stained fingertips, had more than a hint of yellow about it. His hair was slicked back from his forehead and hung over the collar of his shirt, adding touches of grease to the yellow. He was, thought Angel, even more cadaverous than when last they’d met. Being hunted will do that to a man.

  Once Louis and Angel were inside, a middle-aged woman moved from behind the counter, locked the door, and turned the sign to CLOSED. She then unhurriedly poured two cups of coffee and left through the private staff door without looking at them or at the man who sat waiting for them, stinking of cigarette smoke.

  The two Japanese tourists laid down their cameras and turned to face the Collector. The younger of the men signaled almost imperceptibly to a pair of his countrymen watching from the southeastern corner of Lexington and Eighty-Third. One of them now crossed the street to cover the front of the store, while the other watched the side.

  “You think I didn’t notice them?” said the Collector. “I spotted them before they were even aware of my presence.”

  Louis sat at the table facing, but to the right of, the Collector, and Angel took a similar position to the Collector’s left, forming a kind of lethal triangle. By the time they were seated the guns were in their hands, visible to the Collector but not to anyone glancing in casually from the street.

  “We’ve been looking for you,” said Louis.

  “I’m aware of that. You must be running out of houses to burn down.”

  “You could have saved us a lot of gas money by just showing up here months ago.”

  “And maybe I could have marked the spot on my forehead for the bullet to enter.”

  “You should have been more careful about your choice of victims.”

  Louis reached into his coat pocket with his left hand and withdrew Jackie Garner’s bear claw necklace. The claws rattled like bones as he fed them through his fingers. In his right he held the final claw, broken from the necklace and included with the Collector’s invitation.

  “I might say the same about your late friend,” said the Collector.

  Slowly, precisely, so as not to cause the men before him to react, he picked up his cup and sipped his coffee.

  “We can, if you choose, play the blame game until the sun starts to set, but none of us is that naïve,” he said. “Mr. Garner miscalculated, and someone close to me paid the price. I reacted in anger, and Mr. Garner died. You’ll forgive me if I refuse to allow someone like you, a man with the blood of both the innocent and the guilty on his hands, to admonish me about the appropriateness or otherwise of killing. Hypocrisy is a particularly galling vice.”

  Angel inclined slightly toward Louis.

  “Are we being lectured by a serial killer?”

  “You know, I do believe we are.”

  “It’s a novel experience.”

  “Yes, it is. I still won’t miss him after we kill him.”

  “No, me neither.”

  The Collector’s hands were, once again, resting on the table. He showed no sign of unease. It might have been that he was not aware of how close he was to death, or he simply might not have cared.

  “I hear that your friend, the detective, is dying,” he said.

  “Or still living,” said Angel. “It’s a matter of perspective.”

  “He is an unusual man. I don’t claim to understand him, but I would prefer it if he survived. The world is more colorful for his presence. He draws evil to him like moths to light. It makes its practitioners easier to dispose of.”

  “You come here to deliver a get-well-soon wish?” said Louis. “We’ll be sure to pass it on. And if he does die, well, you may just be in a position to express your regrets to him personally.”

  The Collector stared out the window at the two Japanese men, then took in the second pair in the diner.

  “Where do you find these people?” he asked.

  “We attract them,” said Louis. “Like moths to light,” he added, appropriating the Collector’s metaphor for himself.

  “Is that what you are now? The force of light?”

  “In the absence of another.”

  “Yes, I suspect yours is only reflected light,” said the Collector. “You’re looking for the ones who shot him. I can help you.”

  “How?”

  “I can give you their names. I can tell you where to find them.”

  “And why would you do that?”

  “To cut a deal. Eldritch is ill. He needs rest, and time to recuperate. The strain of the hunt is telling on him. As for me, it’s interfering with my work. While I try to stay one step ahead of you, vicious men and women go unpunished. So I will give you the names, and as part of the bargain you will abandon the hunt. You must be tiring of it as much as I, and you know that your Mr. Garner did wrong. If I hadn’t killed him, he would be spending the rest of his days in a cell. In a way, I did him a favor. He wouldn’t have lasted long in prison. He wasn’t as strong as we are.”

  Angel’s grip tightened on his gun. For this creature to suggest that Jackie’s murder was some kind of blessing was almost too much for him to bear.

  “At least he’d have received a trial,” said Angel.

  “I tried him. He confessed. You’re speaking of the trappings of legality, and nothing more.”

  Louis spoke. He said only one word, but it was both a warning and an imprecation.

  “Angel.”

  After a second or two, Angel relaxed.

  “You mentioned us backing off as ‘part’ of the bargain,” said Louis. “What’s the rest?”

  “I know that your search for the ones who did the shooting has brought you into contact with all kinds of interesting individuals. I’m assuming one of those was Cambion.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when you’d exhausted all other avenues, he would have been the only one left. I doubt that he gave you the answers you needed.”

  “We met him,” confirmed Louis.

  “And?”

  “He told us that a couple, a man and a woman, carried out the attack. He promised more.”

&n
bsp; “Of course he did. What did he ask in return for the information?”

  “The same thing that you just did—for us to call off the dogs. But it’s like this: he may be a freak, but he’s a freak who didn’t kill one of our friends. If it comes down to it, I might be more inclined to take my chances with him.”

  “You’d be disappointed. He’s going to feed you to the shooters, you and your boyfriend. They’re potentially more valuable to him than you are. You’ll never do his bidding, but they’ll owe him a favor, and they’re very, very good at what they do.”

  And Louis understood that the Collector was right. It simply confirmed what Louis had suspected: there would be more benefits to Cambion in siding with the shooters.

  “Go on.”

  “Here is what I’m offering,” said the Collector. “I give you the names. In return, I want a truce between us, and I want to know where Cambion is. He is long overdue a blade.”

  “And if we don’t agree?” said Louis “What if we just decide to kill you here?”