by Adam Hamdy
He drove fifty yards further on, before pulling into a passing point. He killed the lights and engine, and stepped out. The fresh snowfall had formed a soft blanket over deeper, ice-crusted drifts that crunched under every step as Wallace walked back towards the trailer. The falling snow and thick forest created a muffled silence that made his crackling footsteps seem even more pronounced. He reached the driveway and peered towards the property. The trailer had a flat snow-covered roof, and was situated in the centre of a small parcel of land, surrounded by high trees. The lights of Robyn’s car were dark and there was no one around, so Wallace started up the drive.
‘Take another step and I’ll blow a fuckin’ hole in your head.’ The man’s voice was quiet and full of menace.
Wallace turned to his left and noticed a figure in the trees. The man stepped forward and Wallace saw that he wore an army surplus jacket, jeans and black boots, and in his hands he carried a high-calibre hunting rifle.
‘I got ’im!’ the man yelled towards the trailer. ‘Call the cops!’
‘Please don’t,’ Wallace said as he saw Robyn in the doorway with a phone to her ear.
‘Shut the fuck up!’ the man commanded, prodding Wallace with the barrel of the gun.
Almost a full foot shorter than Wallace, the man had a weathered face topped by a mop of dark hair that ran into a neatly clipped beard. His narrow eyes had a hardness that might have concealed a killer, but Wallace did not care; he could not risk getting taken into police custody. He instinctively stepped sideways and grabbed the barrel of the gun. There was a sudden crack and Wallace felt his palms scream with the pain of explosive heat as the rifle discharged. The gun recoiled, but Wallace didn’t let go. He registered his adversary’s look of shock as he tugged at the barrel and pulled the rifle out of the man’s hands.
‘Dad!’ Robyn yelled, as Wallace flipped the weapon and brought it level with the man’s chest. He drew the bolt back, sending another round into the chamber.
‘Don’t do anything crazy,’ Robyn’s dad counselled, his voice edged with fear.
‘Put the phone down!’ Wallace shouted at Robyn. He watched as she slowly took the phone away from her ear. ‘I just want to talk.’
Wallace tried to play down the gun, but, even though it was no longer pointed at anyone, it was there in his hands and Robyn and her father kept giving it nervous glances. Wallace stood in the centre of a large, dilapidated living room. A couple of bowed and bulging couches covered in stained fabric formed a right angle in the western third of the room. The apex of the couches was directly opposite a huge old television, which rested on a chipped table. The eastern third of the room was taken up by a laminated dining table and chairs, all from the previous century, all peeling. Robyn and her father sat on two of the chairs, their palms flat against the table top.
Pressed against the wall between the doorway to the kitchen and another that led to the bedrooms was a large dresser that was covered in cheap ornaments and photographs. There was a photograph of Robyn’s father which looked like it had been taken when he was in his late-twenties, his arm around an attractive woman, who Wallace guessed was Robyn’s mother. The next picture seemed to confirm the supposition: it was a wedding photograph of the father with the same woman. There were a series of photographs of Robyn as a child, and then others of her as a young woman with a baby. Wallace could not see any images of the child’s father, nor were there any pictures of Robyn’s mother once the child arrived. The child in the pictures matured into a young man, who Wallace recognised from the articles that Connie had found; it was Kye Walters.
‘I’m really sorry to have to do this,’ he began.
‘You’re not a reporter,’ the father noted. ‘So just who the hell are you?’
‘Take it easy, Dad,’ Robyn cautioned.
‘Must be a gun in the room, ’cause you ain’t called me Dad since . . .’ Robyn’s father trailed off. ‘Well, it’s been a long time.’
‘Take it easy, Hal,’ Robyn said sourly.
Hal glared at Robyn and looked as though he was about to speak, but his face softened as he caught sight of a photograph of Kye and he fell silent.
‘I need to know what happened to Kye,’ Wallace said at last.
Robyn glowered at him, her eyes brimming with burning resentment.
‘Go fuck yourself,’ Hal said bluntly. ‘You any idea what we’ve been through? Frankly, that round you got in there might be a blessing.’ He stared pointedly at the rifle.
‘I’m sorry for your loss, I truly am, but someone tried to kill me,’ Wallace replied. ‘This man, he tried to hang me. I’ve followed his trail and it’s led me here.’
‘Like I said; go fuck yourself,’ Hal growled the words. ‘Don’t start tryin’ to put your craziness on us.’
‘I’m not crazy. This man didn’t just try to kill me, he’s killed other people,’ Wallace protested. ‘He killed my . . .’ He choked on the words before he finally said, ‘He killed a good friend of mine. Please help me.’
Hal snorted and shrugged, unimpressed by Wallace’s plea.
‘You think this guy might’ve killed Kye?’ Robyn asked quietly.
Wallace nodded.
‘Don’t go buyin’ into any bullshit, Robyn,’ Hal said.
‘Why? You worried you won’t be able to pin what happened on me?’ she asked testily.
‘What’re you talkin’ about? Pin what on you?’ Hal challenged his daughter.
‘Just ’cause I don’t rise to the bait doesn’t mean I don’t see it,’ Robyn replied. ‘How many times you said something about how it was my fault he was on that damned computer all the time? That if he’d been your kid you’d have had him out landscaping and working people’s gardens instead of hanging out with his friends?’
‘Friends? They got him into that shit,’ Hal objected. ‘And even if they didn’t put the drugs in his hands, they created the hunger. Gotta have a car, new clothes, new phone, new this, new that. God knows I ain’t never had two beans, but I don’t have shit because I don’t need shit. Once the hunger was there, the boy was always gonna find a way to feed it.’
‘What d’ya want to know?’ Robyn asked Wallace, her words a direct challenge to her father.
‘Fuck!’ Hal exclaimed in a long drawn out breath.
‘Fuck you, Hal!’ Robyn yelled. ‘I’ve carried my boy’s bones. There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t blame myself. Curse myself for not knowing my son, not know what he was doing, what was going on in his head. Hate myself for not being there when he . . .’
The three of them waited in silence while Robyn caught her breath and composed herself.
‘If there’s a chance,’ she said quietly. ‘Any chance, no matter how small, that Kye didn’t kill himself, then I wanna hear it.’
Hal stared at Wallace and then looked at his daughter. Wallace could see him wrestling with Robyn’s words, and finally the old man nodded.
‘When did it happen?’ Wallace asked.
‘Two years in April,’ Robyn replied.
‘How?’
‘I found him out back,’ Hal said quietly. ‘Hanged in the woods.’
‘The newspaper said there was a note posted to Facebook,’ Wallace said.
‘Newspapers!’ Hal exclaimed. ‘Nothing like a small town scandal to get them all excited. Once it came out that Kye’d been dealing drugs, they were all over us like coyotes.’
‘There was a man in England who was supposed to have killed himself,’ Wallace said. ‘After he died the police found a note and videos on Facebook that revealed the man was a pervert.’
‘You think it’s a vigilante?’ Robyn asked.
Wallace shook his head. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong. It doesn’t make sense. The man in England claimed he’d been attacked a month prior to his murder. Did Kye ever talk about a stalker or anything like that?’
Robyn shook her head. ‘What makes you think there’s a connection?’
‘The policeman investigating my ca
se found details of Kye’s story on the dead man’s computer,’ Wallace replied. ‘It seems the victim, this farmer from the middle of nowhere, thought there might have been a link. Was there anything unusual in the weeks leading up to Kye’s death?’
Robyn’s expression was unchanged, but Wallace was sure he saw doubt flicker across Hal’s face.
‘Please,’ Wallace said. ‘Anything. It doesn’t matter how small.’
‘There was a letter,’ Hal said flatly, his eyes cast at the ground. ‘There was a letter from his school.’
‘What letter?’ Robyn asked coldly.
‘Couple of months before . . .’ Hal hesitated. ‘Before it happened, I found a letter in his bag. I’d go through his school bag every couple of days because he had a habit of letting old sandwiches fester. I found this letter addressed to parents.’
Robyn shook her head and glared at her father.
‘I was just as much a parent to the boy as you,’ Hal protested. ‘Anyway, I opened it. Some kind of public service announcement from the school warning parents to be vigilant about the signs of depression. It listed half a dozen case studies of kids who’d committed suicide in the state in the past year.’
Hal paused and Wallace could sense Robyn’s hostility building as her father started to break down.
‘I never told you. I never told nobody,’ Hal whimpered, his voice cracking at last. ‘I thought I’d put the idea in his head. I thought I was the one . . .’
‘What did you do?’ Robyn asked, her voice brimming with anger. ‘What did you do?’
‘I showed him the letter,’ Hal replied weakly. ‘I thought I was doing the right thing; treatin’ him like a man. It was a mistake. The moment he saw the case studies he froze. He said something about the girl.’
‘What girl?’ Wallace asked.
‘There was one girl on the sheet,’ Hal said. ‘It was the girl. Something about her cut into him. He clammed up pretty quick, but I knew something was wrong. I asked him about it, but he put on a front and told me it was nothin’. But it wasn’t nothin’. He was never the same again. You never noticed it. Maybe ’cause I was with him when it happened, I could see it in his eyes. It was like there was a sadness hanging over him.’
‘You dumb son-of-a-bitch!’ Robyn yelled. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I couldn’t,’ Hal said pathetically. He stood and shuffled towards Robyn, his arms held out limply. ‘I couldn’t have my little girl thinkin’ that I put her son in the ground.’
He tried to move in for a hug, but Robyn pushed him away. ‘I carried it for so long,’ she said quietly. ‘You let me carry it! You let me think it was my fault!’
‘I couldn’t tell you,’ Hal protested. ‘I didn’t want you to hate me.’
Robyn leaped out of her chair and slapped and clawed at Hal, who simply stood and took the punishment. Wallace pushed his way between them, and when Robyn realised her blows were no longer connecting, she stopped.
‘Get out!’ she screamed. ‘Get out!’ She grabbed the rifle from Wallace and pointed it at her father. ‘Now!’ she bawled.
Hal looked sadly at Robyn through tear-filled eyes before turning for the door and staggering out into the bitterly cold night. Wallace hesitated for a moment, but knew there was nothing he could do or say to help this angry, damaged woman.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, heading for the door.
‘Hey!’ Robyn called after him. ‘If you’re right and you find the motherfucker, you tell me, you hear?’
He turned towards Robyn, who stood trembling as tears spilled down her cheeks. ‘I will,’ he promised.
Hal leaned against the tailgate of his pick-up and took out a cigarette. Wallace approached slowly and the old man looked up. Thick snow had already soaked his hair and face, and he looked lost, cast adrift by powerful, dark emotions.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Walters,’ Wallace offered helplessly.
Hal could only shake his head.
‘Do you remember the girl’s name?’ Wallace asked. ‘The girl in the letter?’
Hal tried to answer, but the words wouldn’t come. ‘I’ll never forget it,’ he said at last. ‘Erin. Erin Byrne. The way Kye looked at her, it was like he knew her.’
Hal smoked his cigarette, the burning tip flaring brightly as he inhaled. He turned back to his truck, his head bowed in private misery. Wallace stepped away from the distraught man and walked through virgin snow down the driveway and out on to the silent road.
27
The children’s feet dangled above an unnaturally deep valley. Silhouetted against the warm glow of the setting sun, the girl had her right hand wrapped around one of the long ropes that secured her swing to a huge, sweeping branch that arched some forty feet above her head. Although the silhouette concealed the girl’s features, the way her head tilted towards her raised left hand suggested that she was supposed to be talking. A boy sat in the adjacent swing, both hands on the ropes, his head slightly cocked as though he was listening. The tree that held them was impossibly large with branches that spanned the width of a rocky gorge that led off to a distant golden horizon. The image took up the entire rear wall of the Canopy lobby and was a blend of photographic manipulation and original artwork to create a striking illustration of a place that could not possibly exist in the real world. The lighting and colours were exquisite and the figures of the children perfectly proportioned and posed. The perfection of the piece was its only flaw, and, while Wallace had to admire the skill of the artist, he did not connect with the artwork’s artificiality. True beauty is blemished, he thought.
Even though the digital painting was striking, it could not compete with the view of the city skyline offered by the expansive windows that ran the length of the room. Thirty-two floors up and seven blocks from Central Park, the north-east-facing windows offered an arresting perspective of Manhattan. Wallace could not help but be impressed by New York City. Years of watching American television and studying the cityscapes of photographers such as Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans and Joel Sternfeld could not have prepared him for the towering height of the buildings that cast all else into shade; massive monuments to human ingenuity.
As Wallace stood and walked to the window, he could feel the receptionist’s eyes tracking him, but she returned to her computer screen when she saw that he was simply admiring the view. He looked out, peering along the wide artificial canyon created by Sixth Avenue, one of the city’s five-lane thoroughfares, towards Central Park. Thick snow covered the trees and shrouded the natural heart of the city. Unlike the merry sprawl of London, Manhattan was a showpiece of order and efficiency, the island parcelled up into neat blocks by the city’s grid system of roads, the granite bedrock facilitating the construction of massive monoliths that could ingest thousands of people at a time. Wallace looked beyond the park; somewhere, many miles past the high buildings on the other side, was the wilderness that he’d left six days ago. He suddenly found himself thinking about Hal and Robyn Walters, stuck up that rutted track. He hoped they’d been able to reconcile – if Kye was a victim of the same killer, there was nothing either of them could have done to prevent the boy’s death.
After he’d left the Walters’ trailer, Wallace had returned to the motel and researched Erin Byrne. There was a lot of material on the high-profile Byrne family and Erin’s tragic death. A sixteen-year-old high school student, Erin had taken her own life just over two years ago on a dark September night. According to her supposed suicide note, which had been posted to Facebook, Erin felt the world would be better off without her ugly worthlessness. The coroner’s report said she had died from asphyxiation caused by hanging. Erin’s father, Steven Byrne, and her older brother, Max, had returned home from a football game to discover her body in her bedroom, but neither could resuscitate her and paramedics pronounced Erin dead at the scene. Erin’s mother, Philicia Byrne, was at a Democratic Party fundraiser the night of Erin’s death, and she and Steven separated soon afterwards in a hostile, public and expe
nsive divorce.
Steven Byrne was a third-generation immigrant, the grandson of Dublin-born Donal Byrne. An accomplished pianist, Donal founded the successful music publishing business that made his fortune. A deeply honourable and patriotic man, Donal believed he owed his adopted country a debt of opportunity that could never be repaid. After fighting for the US Army during the Second World War, he joined the US Army Reserves and instilled an ethos of public service in his family. His legacy was still in effect; before founding the digital security company that made him a billionaire, Steven Byrne completed eight years’ service in the First Ranger Battalion, followed by four years in military intelligence, after which he continued to serve as a reservist until he turned forty, some twelve years ago. After Erin’s death and his divorce, Steven focused on his company, Erimax Security. Named after his two children, the company had become one of the pre-eminent providers of digital security and Steven’s sixty percent share translated to a net worth of over four billion dollars.
Twelve years older than Erin, Max had tried to follow in his father’s footsteps and had served three years with the Seventy-Fifth Rangers, before being discharged over a disciplinary issue. Wallace couldn’t find anything on the nature of the disciplinary problem, but Max didn’t suffer; he walked straight into a job at Erimax and showed considerable aptitude for his father’s business. After Erin’s death, Max suffered a breakdown and was sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment, but Wallace couldn’t find out whether he was still there.
Following the divorce, Philicia started the Canopy, a charity dedicated to preventing youth suicides. The Canopy website provided extensive information on education, outreach programmes and advice for parents, teachers and other interested individuals. It was clear to Wallace that Philicia had poured herself into a crusade to stop youth suicides, but if Erin’s death was also the work of the serial killer, then all this philanthropy was built on a lie. People like the Byrnes were normally extremely hard to reach, but the Canopy gave Wallace a way in.