‘No one will hear you if you scream,’ he said raspily. ‘Do you understand?’
Andie nodded and tried to appear grateful. His free hand struck like a snake, tearing the duct tape and the gag from her mouth in one vicious motion. He slid back several feet, then sat Japanese-style on the backs of his lower legs. Andie worked her aching jaw, then croaked, Water.’
He did not move for the longest time. ‘Please, Charun,’ she croaked. ‘Your Angel wants water.’
He cocked his head, studying her. Then he reached around to draw a drab green water bottle from the shadows. He slid toward her a second time, his hand snatching her hair and wrenching her head backward. The water poured into her throat. She gulped, sputtered and swallowed again.
When Andie had had her fill, he let the spout drift an inch below her lower lip. He moved the stream back and forth across her chin. The water poured down her neck, pooled and soaked the yellow blouse about her breasts. His eyes devoured her.
She took a deep breath, as if preparing to step off a high precipice, then shoved her chest out at him. ‘Do you like Angel’s breasts?’ Andie whispered.
The dead eyes flitted from her face to her chest and back. He put down the water bottle and his hand came up and cupped the weight of her left breast. His breath issued forth raspy and excited. His hips thrust forward, prodding against her arm. Her eyes spun in their sockets as if seeing fragmented, herky-jerky images of a long-ago night, but she did not scream.
‘Do you like Persephone’s breasts?’ she managed to whisper again.
He grunted with satisfaction, pinched her nipple, then ran his hand down across her stomach to press his open palm between her legs. She squirmed and cried out: ‘No!’
The monster’s other hand dropped the hatchet and immediately his fingers were like a knotted cord around her throat. ‘Why not?’ he seethed. ‘You used to say fucking was the closest we’d ever get to the power, Angel. Every time closer to the other side, you said. I was your boatman, you said. I was your rower!’
Andie did not struggle, but adopted that look of sympathy again.
‘You were my boatman, Charun,’ she whispered. ‘Tell me about our rope. Tell me how I got to the other side.’
Inside the hood, the eyes became unscrewed and glazed. His hand turned viselike at her windpipe. ‘You wanted it tight around our necks, tight while we fucked, Angel,’ he said.
‘Make me remember,’ Andie implored. ‘You left me there on the other bank, but I can’t remember. Make me remember.’
‘We smoked until our heads fired,’ he replied. ‘You said the drugs would take us farther, quicker. Then you made me cinch the rope tighter and tighter. You said orgasm was the first instant of life. You said if we could get to the edge of death at the first instant of life, it all might balance for a moment and we would see …’
‘Into eternity?’ Andie asked
‘Yes!’ he gasped.
‘But I passed over and left you behind, didn’t I?’
His hand fell away from her throat. ‘Yes,’ he gasped again.
‘You have the squaw’s ceremonies,’ she reminded him. ‘You can cross.’
‘We’ll smoke and perform them,’ he said huskily. ‘We’ll smoke and dance her Ghost Dance. The old man said we will see the other side! Father said so, too. Lawton said it was theirs. They took the secret from us.’
He leaped to his feet, his fists shaking against the sky. ‘Lawton gave me the power of death. Now I will take back the power over death!’
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
SATURDAY, MAY 23
AFTER MIDNIGHT STILL MORE heat flooded north out of the mid-Atlantic, a stifling and creeping air mass that squatted over central Vermont. There was a halo of red around the setting moon. Far to the west Gallagher heard thunder. Three different turkeys shock-gobbled off the roost down by the Bluekill. An owl hooted in return. The interplay of the sky’s rumbling and the cries of the territorial birds opened up hollow, ominous places in his stomach that he did not know existed.
‘Omens,’ Gallagher murmured, and in that he understood. After so many years a willful voyeur gadding about the world to record the legends and mores of various cultures, he was at last being forced to live his own myth. Many Horses was his Goddess. The Lawton killings, Gallagher’s epic journey. He was haunted Perseus searching for his Andromeda, held captive by the forces of madness.
Gallagher gripped the pump-action shotgun he’d found in one of Andie’s closets and got in the truck he’d rented at the Lebanon airport. Ground fog wafted through the birches that lined the lower River Road. A squad of troopers manned a blockade set up at the covered bridge. One of them was the rawboned trooper who’d waded out to help him pull Potter from the Bluekill a lifetime ago. He told the trooper he couldn’t sleep. The trooper asked if the shotgun was loaded and Gallagher lied, and said no.
Except for several prowling state police cruisers, the streets of Lawton were almost deserted. Here and there, lone figures hustled through the predawn toward jobs as maids or breakfast chefs. One of them, a younger woman, watched Gallagher pass. When he slowed, her hand flew to her mouth and she sprinted in the other direction. Both clerks working the all-night shift at the Lawton minimart where he stopped for coffee had pistols shoved in their waistbands. It was as if a fiend had cast a spell of fear and distrust over the country town.
Over on Whelton Lane, yellow spotlights illuminated the façade and steeple of St Edward’s Catholic Church. Gallagher parked around the corner from the rectory, then slipped behind the church and scaled the garden wall. The scent of freshly turned earth permeated the air as he sneaked toward Monsignor McColl’s residence. The birdbath with the small horse statues lay on its side next to a gaping hole in the ground.
Gallagher’s heart came high in his throat as he knelt next to the hole. He flipped on the headlamp he ordinarily used when night casting for big brown trout. It had a red lens that did not disturb the feeding fish. The pit was more than five feet long by two feet wide by six feet deep. A grave.
There was a basement door under the porch. One tap on a cracked windowpane and Gallagher’s hand was through and on the knob. Cobwebs feathered and broke across his cheeks past the furnace toward eight standing file cabinets. Ten of the legal-sized drawers were dedicated to Father D’Angelo. All locked.
He thought about breaking in, but decided against it; he didn’t have the time to look for clues to Many Horses’ death. Sarah had obviously come in contact with D’Angelo shortly before she died and told him of Joshua Danby’s threat to kill her unless she taught the bogus spiritualist to commune with the dead. The Charun killings were related to Sarah’s murder a century ago. Gallagher was sure of it. But digging through drawers of material looking for the link could take days.
Andie didn’t have days. She had hours. Maybe less.
Besides, Gallagher had other, more quickly verifiable suspicions to confirm. He slipped upstairs into the hallway. His lamp shone on the damaged painting of Father D’Angelo. With a little effort he was able to lift the portrait down off the wall. The tear in the canvas at the priest’s left hip had been bothering him ever since he learned that Father D’Angelo must have known Sarah Many Horses. Perhaps the hole in the painting was neither an accident nor a random act of vandalism. Perhaps it had been done deliberately.
What do priests wear at their hips? Gallagher asked himself, as the backing peeled off the painting. He shone the lamp at the hole from the back side.
‘I knew it!’ he whispered. The canvas had not been sliced with a knife as Monsignor McColl had suggested, but was punctured with a narrow, blunt object, like a cane tip or a broom handle. Shards of canvas bent inward, away from the hole. He gently pushed the torn canvas back into place, then flipped the painting around again, leaned it up against the wall and bent down to get a better look. A set of rosary beads hung from a sash around the priest’s waist. At the end of the rosary was a tiny gold crucifix encrusted with a red jewel.
&nbs
p; ‘Father D’Angelo was one of the journal holders,’ Gallagher whispered. ‘Which means Monsignor McColl is one of the journal holders.’
Now Gallagher crept down the hall toward the priest’s office. The door creaked open. His headlamp played over the pictures on the wall behind his desk, stopping at the photograph of the priest mountain climbing in the Andes. He carried the sort of blue rope and pitons they’d seen outside David Nyren’s window.
He moved the beam over another picture of the priest, this one with the orphans of Hennessy House. Row after row of boyish faces. For the second time Gallagher’s attention tripped over one youth in the third row. He had Gallagher’s eyes, cheekbones and hairline. But his lower front teeth overbit his upper lip and his shoulders bunched like the back blades of a mongrel dog that has decided to attack the man who whips him. Was he Danby?
The third photograph showed Monsignor McColl in front of his church in the jungles of Guatemala. Gallagher peered at an older girl standing right next to the priest. She was maybe fourteen, possibly fifteen, beautiful and sad in a way that reminded him of Andie. Was this girl Angel?
Gallagher trailed the headlamp beam off the pictures, over carved bowls, and brought it to rest on two empty brackets where a machete had been displayed the first two times he’d been in the priest’s office.
It was four-fifteen in the morning by the time Gallagher got back to the truck. The empty grave, the tear on the painting, the climbing experience and the missing machete. McColl was the killer. He was Charun. The evidence was too strong to be a coincidence. Gallagher stopped at a pay telephone at the convenience store and dialed.
‘Hello?’ a sleepy voice answered.
‘It’s Pat Gallagher. But I’d prefer if you consider me an anonymous tipster.’
Lieutenant Bowman groaned into the phone. ‘What are you talking about? It’s four-thirty in the morning!’
He told her what he had found outside and inside the rectory.
‘You’re admitting to breaking and entering here, Mr Gallagher,’ Bowman snapped, now fully awake. ‘That’s felony.’
‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘This sick son of a bitch has got the woman I—’
‘What do you want me to do?’ Bowman interrupted.
‘Put out an all-points bulletin on him. Tear that rectory apart. Have every cop in the state looking for him!’
‘Slow down now! What’s his motive?’
Gallagher shifted the phone receiver to his other ear. ‘He’s covering up Father D’Angelo’s involvement in the death of Sarah Many Horses because the real story would mean the end of his chances at sainthood. He’s presenting himself as a psychotic serial killer to throw you off the track of what he really is—a cold-blooded, rational killer. He’s using the Charun stuff as a cover.’
‘A cover-up?’ Bowman said skeptically. ‘Is that enough of a motive?’
‘I think it is for a zealot whose own aunt was saved by D’Angelo.’
In the end, Bowman agreed. But only halfheartedly. She would put more men on McColl and she’d get a judge to issue a search warrant for the rectory. Then she warned Gallagher to stay out of any more rectories and hung up.
Dawn was coming. In the sky, towering thunderhead clouds boiled east toward Lawton Mountain. Just as they reached the peak, the rising sun hit them and the sky turned a rich and troubling magenta.
Gallagher drove at a snail’s pace north through the waking town, trying to see in the faces of Lawton’s citizens an explanation for the feeling that circled his neck like a noose. In that lurid dawn, the chrome glowed weirdly on the rack of headlights mounted on the roof of the jacked-up red Ford that Bernie Chittenden spun into the narrow lot behind the Otterslide General Store.
Andie’s shotgun came to his hands as if of its own accord, and before Gallagher had time to think, he was out of the truck and slipping up behind Chittenden as he fumbled with a padlock to the store’s back door. The muzzle touched behind the storekeeper’s left ear and he jerked and looked down the barrel.
‘What the—?’
‘Why did you try to run me and Andie Nightingale off the Gorm Ridge Road?’ Gallagher demanded.
‘You’re freaking crazy!’
‘That’s right, I am,’ he said, grinning maniacally. He pressed the shotgun muzzle to the end of Chittenden’s nose and clicked off the safety. ‘Now tell me why.’
Sweat gushed off the man’s forehead and slurried down in his scraggly beard. His breath came out thick and forced. ‘ ’Cause Mikey told me to.’
‘Mike Kerris?’ Gallagher said. ‘Chief Mike Kerris?’
‘Eh-yuh. He told me to scare ya.’
‘Why?’
‘Can ya take the gun off my nose, man? I feel like I’m gonna sneeze and you’re gonna blow my fucking head off.’
‘That’s the idea,’ Gallagher said. ‘Now why?’
‘He said it was old family business you find Andie were looking into, stuff some people didn’t want to come out.’
‘Family people, as in the Powell family?’
Chittenden nodded. ‘My mom’s a Powell.’
‘What are the Powells hiding?’
Chittenden shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’
‘You blindly follow Kerris’ orders without even knowing why?’
‘Don’t want to know,’ Chittenden said. ‘My business done good, this whole town done good the past fifteen years ’cause a the Powells. Anyway, I made sure ya didn’t get hurt. Just scared.’
‘Where’s Kerris now?’
‘Don’t know,’ the shopkeeper said. But for a second his attention shifted off the barrel.
‘You’re lying,’ Gallagher said, pressing the muzzle so tight against his nose it flattened and his nostrils made little whistling sounds.
‘Jesus, take it easy, man!’ Chittenden whimpered.
‘Talk!’
‘Last I seen Mike was day before yesterday,’ the storekeeper said. ‘One of my headlights busted free of the rack when I was chasing after you I told Mike and he said he’d head up Gorm to find it before you or Andie Nightingale did.’
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
HALFWAY UP GORM RIDGE, Gallagher heard and felt the first thunderstorm hit. Bolts of lightning slashed the sky. The truck shook from the explosions. The wind accelerated. Hail pummeled the deserted rutted road all the way to the gap on the ridge.
There was no sign of Kerris’ truck or the black Thunderbird Lieutenant Bowman said Monsignor McColl drove, for that matter. It had occurred to Gallagher during the drive that the priest was a mountain climber. He could survive the elements. But the question that nagged at him was whether Andie Nightingale could. Or whether Charun had already left her body behind a mossy log or tossed it to the bottom of a ravine.
Gallagher pulled the truck over at the gap between the ridges. Hemlock branches provided slick handholds that let him lean out over the edge of the ravine, close to the source of the Bluekill, searching the early-morning gloom for his greatest fear.
Lightning flashed to the west over the Lawton valley floor. Each crack granted him monochromatic still flashes of the Bluekill’s endless frenzied wrestle with the rocky gorge. Wet, mossy walls. Frothed white water. A piece of driftwood wedged between two boulders. But no body.
Gallagher did not know what to do. Andie had been in Chaun’s clutches nearly thirty-six hours now. Or she had been dead nearly thirty-six hours. He fought back a dry heave, remembering the brutal imagery of necrophilia in the killer’s last note and the terrible humiliation in Andie’s voice when she’d described what Kerris had done to her at the condominium party so many years ago.
He crawled back up the bank and stood defeated with his palms raised toward the sky. The rain splattered his face and he sank to his knees in the muddy road, sure now that he had lost his second chance forever.
The woods before Gallagher were spruce fir pocked with stunted hickory trees that quivered in the breeze and shifted outline in the cloud cover. A faint game trail led out through
the trees toward a pair of towering glacial-cast boulders. There was a far-off trilling sound in the rain, like a cedar flute blowing on a mesa. Pale movement flickered to life, then disappeared beyond the boulders the way a form will surface and vanish in wind-driven clouds. Gallagher imagined a running woman with a waist-length black braid. She wore an indigo skirt and a vest adorned with red moons and white stars.
He got the shotgun from the front seat and went into the woods down the game trail. The forest was thick and electric with ozone. Two ravens lifted off the bones of a dead deer that lay in front of the stone pillars. He stood before the rocks, understanding that for him they were a gate into the underworld.
Gallagher stepped through the stone gate. A black cloud of insects immediately surrounded him. Biting blackflies and the season’s first mosquitoes. The soil underfoot turned soft and oozing. Serpentine tangles of grapevine growing off the trees, the lower trunks of which were smothered in green and purple moss. Water dripped off every branch.
It took him nearly a half hour of sloshing to escape the swale and emerge into a vast grove of white pines, spruce and hemlock. The understory branches clawed at his face and hands. There was a flash of lightning to the west and he caught a silvery reflection on a bench above him.
The shotgun became an uncertain ally as Gallagher climbed the forty yards up the steep bank. Tire tracks rutted a logging road that ran along the bench. The tracks rounded a curve and stopped at a pile of fresh fir and pine branches. The pile ran twenty feet long and stood eight feet high and fifteen feet wide.
Slash pile, he thought. Probably a logger working in the area. He looked down the bank, trying to figure out where he’d been standing when the metal had reflected. There was a flash of heat lightning and there was that glitter again: ten feet ahead under the pile of branches.
The two trucks had been parked bumper to bumper on the logging trail, men covered with the debris. The front vehicle was a Green 1983 Volkswagen camper. It was the same color as the van seen leaving the woods near Nyren’s. The second was a midnight-blue Suburban with the Lawton police seal emblazoned on the door. Gallagher tried the door to Kerris’ truck. Locked. He peered through the window. The wires to the radio hung torn and askew.
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