A Song of Shadows

by John Connolly

  Maine, though, was not alone in struggling with poor funding and inadequate facilities, and it was a further credit to all those involved in the ME’s office that it had not been forced to endure scandals such as that in neighboring Massachusetts, where bodies had lain unclaimed and corpses were mislaid, or, as in Oklahoma, to cease autopsying apparent suicides due to staffing problems. But the investigation into the death of Oran Wilde’s family, the associated homicide of a homeless man, and the Perlman autopsy had stretched the resources of the office to its limits. Now two more bodies had been added to the office’s roster of corpses awaiting examination, although there was, at least, no question of how either of them had died. Ruth Winter’s body had already been handed over for burial, but one corpse still remained.

  The three men who arrived at the medical examiner’s office shortly after dark were concerned only with this second body: the remains of the man who suffocated to death beneath the sands of Green Heron Bay. They entered from the rear of the building, and the staff member who was on duty at the main desk didn’t even turn his head to watch as they approached the room into which, for their convenience, the body had been moved. He had already been advised that he could not speak about what he did not know, and so no names were logged, and no faces seen. He breathed out only when he heard the door to the autopsy room close, after which he carefully checked the lock on the front entrance and retreated to a secluded office, where he remained until the three men left, and he was, once again, alone with the dead.

  The fluorescent lights reflected on glass, metal, and tile and illuminated the body that lay beneath a sheet on a gurney. Gordon Walsh pulled on plastic examination gloves and handed clean pairs to the two men who stood behind him, before drawing back the sheet and revealing the face of the dead man. The top of the Y-shaped incision on his chest was just visible, raw against the blue-gray pallor of his skin.

  ‘Hey, it’s your mom,’ said Angel.

  ‘How the fuck old are you?’ said Walsh. ‘Jesus.’

  Louis stepped forward.

  ‘Can I touch him?’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  Louis moved the man’s head gently, examining the deformation of his face and head, and the lobeless ears. He pulled back the man’s lips and looked at his white, even teeth.

  ‘Partial dentures,’ said Walsh.

  ‘Maybe he thought they’d improve his dating chances,’ said Angel.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Walsh. ‘I figure he needed any help he could get.’

  ‘They pump all the sand out of him?’ asked Louis.

  ‘You kidding me? He must have swallowed half the beach.’

  ‘Bad way to die.’

  ‘If you want to pray for him, now’s the time. So, does he remind you of anyone you may have met?’

  ‘Your mom,’ said Angel. Again.

  ‘Shut the fuck up. I was warned about you.’

  ‘Any identifying marks on the rest of his body?’ asked Louis.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Walsh. ‘He’s entirely hairless, though. Alopecia universalis: I just learned that today, and I like saying it. Oh, and his bowels were riddled with tumors. The ME thinks he must have been in constant pain. He probably had less than a year to live.’

  Louis stepped back and removed the gloves, careful to ensure that his bare hands did not touch any part of the material that had been in contact with the dead man’s skin.

  ‘What did you say his name was?’

  ‘We found a Georgia driver’s license in the name of Earl Steiger when we pulled him out of the sand. It was the only ID he was carrying, but it wasn’t the only one that he had.’

  ‘Earl Steiger,’ said Louis. ‘No, I don’t recall it.’

  ‘He had to be staying somewhere local,’ Walsh continued, ‘so we canvassed the area and found a motel outside Belfast called the Come Awn Inn. He’d been staying there for a couple of days, cash on the nail.’

  ‘The Come Awn Inn?’ said Angel. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘No, for real. You don’t want to stay there. We hit the room with UV light. Let me tell you, it looked like you could come on anything in the Come Awn Inn, and a lot of folk started with the sheets and the comforter. I wanted to burn my shoes by the time we were done.’

  ‘And?’ said Louis.

  ‘We picked up four other licenses, none of them in the name of Earl Steiger. All were from southern states, and all were legit, at least in the sense that they weren’t forgeries. So far, we’ve traced three of them back to dead children, including Earl Steiger. He was killed in an automobile accident with the rest of his family in 1975 in Wilkinson County, Georgia, aged fifteen.’

  For the first time, Louis evinced some kind of real interest.

  ‘Dead children?’

  ‘Ghosting,’ said Angel. ‘Old school.’

  Ghosting was the product of a different time, one before computers and the routine exchange of information – whether in theory or actual practice – by government agencies. Before the advent of the income tax in 1913, and later the introduction of the Social Security system in 1935, it was possible for a man or woman in the United States to live openly without any formal documentation from the government. Even after 1935, it was difficult to check if an individual’s claimed identity was his or her own. Only the invention of databases, and the increasingly long reach of the government, rendered such imposture harder to achieve – although, ironically, the Internet, with its proliferation of intimate personal details, now made identity theft easier than ever before.

  The practice of ghosting involved finding a dead person whose age roughly matched one’s own, discovering the person’s date of birth – often from the gravestone itself – and then using the information to obtain a birth certificate in that name. Once the birth certificate was in hand, it was a relatively simple process to begin obtaining government-issued identification, thereby cementing the assumed identity.

  ‘What about the other children?’ asked Louis.

  Walsh consulted his notebook.

  ‘Noble C. Griffis, Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Drowned in 1962 at the age of three while in the care of a Methodist benevolent institution. And William H. Pruett, Tarboro, South Carolina: nine years old when he died in a fire with his mother, two sisters, and three brothers in 1971. Father predeceased them.’

  Louis didn’t speak for a time. He was assimilating the information from Walsh, sifting it in his mind. The dead man – Earl Steiger, for want of a better name – or someone acting on his behalf, had been clever in his choice of assumed identities. First of all, poorer areas in the South were targeted, possibly on the grounds that records might be more haphazard, and the spelling of names open to more than one interpretation: ‘Griffis’, for example, sounded like a bastardization of ‘Griffin’ or ‘Griffiths’. Some risks were attached to this approach, due to the close interrelationships between families in small rural communities, and the long memories of those responsible for guarding their records, but they were outweighed by the benefits.

  Secondly, the names assumed were from boys who were either orphans or whose immediate families had died alongside them, which decreased the likelihood of anyone poking around in their family history and discovering that little Earl or Noble or William appeared to be enjoying an existence beyond the grave. Finally, all of the children had been born within one three-year period between 1959 and 1962, which probably corresponded to the age of the man lying on the gurney before them.

  ‘I take it you’re trying to find out when copies of the birth certificates were issued,’ said Louis.

  ‘Old men and women are trawling through records as we speak,’ said Walsh.

  ‘Concentrate on Earl Steiger.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was the one he was using when he came here, but I’ll also bet you a dollar that he relied on the Steiger identity more than any other. No matter how many false identities a man has, he’ll be drawn to one in particular, because even a ghost needs some kind of anchor. Also,
if you keep alternating identities you get confused, and you’re likely to make a mistake. Finally, it leaves you with nothing to fall back on if you need to disappear.’

  ‘You strike me as worryingly well-informed,’ said Walsh.

  ‘You didn’t ask me here because I’m pretty.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you here at all.’

  The suggestion that Angel and Louis should be contacted about Ruth Winter’s killer had come from Special Agent Ross of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ross was a man who took a special interest in matters relating to Charlie Parker, for reasons that even Ross himself might not have been in a position to explain fully.

  ‘You’ll find that the replacement birth certificate for Earl Steiger was issued within a year of his death – two years at most.’

  ‘And why do you figure that?’

  ‘Because Earl Steiger was the oldest when he died, which means that his was probably the first identity acquired for our friend here. His potential would have been spotted early, but not before he was fifteen or sixteen.’

  ‘You know who he really is,’ said Walsh.

  ‘No, and by the time he died I don’t think even he knew who he really was either,’ said Louis. ‘But the southern children, the ages – that is familiar to me.’

  He gripped the edge of the plastic sheet and pulled it over the face of the dead man.

  ‘You need to call your friend Agent Ross,’ he said. ‘Tell him that it might be one of Cambion’s people who died out here.’

  40

  The woman stank of cats and cookies, of piss and mothballs, but Cambion, whose sensory abilities his disease had long ruined, and who had grown used to the reek of his own decay, barely noticed it. It was enough that she cooked for him and helped him to get in and out of chairs, and beds, and baths. Edmund could do all that too, of course, but he lacked her delicacy. He was compassionate, but not gentle, and as Cambion entered the last stages of his life he appreciated tenderness, even that which was offered out of instinct, not inclination.

  Cambion was once a torturer and killer, a sadist and despoiler of flesh, until Hansen’s Disease took hold of him, and he became known as Cambion the Leper, Cambion the Outcast. As the illness destroyed his body, rendering him unable to function in his preferred role, he became a middleman, a point of contact between the most vicious of clients and those men and women base enough to do their bidding. It had made Cambion wealthy, but now most of that money was gone. He had squandered it in his early years – for his tastes were no less depraved than those of whom he represented, and such vices are expensive to maintain – and then, following his diagnosis, doled it out as carefully as he could, in an effort to counter the disease. Cambion was a hunted man – one does not spend one’s life arranging torments and tortures without question and not build up an impressive roster of enemies – and so conventional medical intervention was not open to him: he would not have survived for an hour once news of his presence in a hospital became known. He was also cursed early in the leprosy’s progress by treatment with incorrect medicines, a consequence of his need to use backroom doctors. He spent years punishing the practitioner responsible by holding him captive and carving pieces from his body on a regular basis, but it provided small consolation.

  Only a handful of Cambion’s old associates had remained willing to work with him, and see that he got his cut. The rest had abandoned him long ago, which was why Cambion, in turn, had fed their names to his hunters in the hope that, by betraying others, he might be allowed to die in peace. It had not worked; they still circled him. He was reduced to living in near squalor, tended by a woman who had once occupied his bed but was now little more than a walking corpse herself, but whose need for money was even greater than his own.

  He rang the bell over his bed by tugging on a length of rope. The bedpan was out of reach, and he needed it. He could not feel the rope against his skin, for he no longer had sensation in his hands or feet. His muscles had grown weaker, even in the last few months, and the extent of his disfigurement caused him to shun all reflective surfaces. His kidney functions were also becoming impaired due to renal amyloidosis, for which hemodialysis was the standard recommended treatment, but Cambion could not show himself to receive it. It was possible that the treatment might be arranged privately, but it would require funds to pay for both the surgery and the silence after, funds he did not possess. His sight was failing: he could still see the television screen close by his bed, and read words as long as they were magnified for him on a screen, but everything at a distance was a blur. It was fortunate in the case of the room in which he lay. It meant that he could no longer see the filthy carpet, or the paper peeling from the walls, or the damp stains on the ceiling which, at his worst moments, had assumed the patterns of demonic faces, or seemed to spread like blood from a recent wound, the Rorschach blots of his own guilt.

  The woman did not answer his summons, and instead Edmund appeared. The giant owned only two suits, both of them a vile yellow. While one was being cleaned at some cut-price laundry, he would wear the other. The color on both had faded over the years, although not enough to render their appearance any less painful to the eye, and they had accumulated stains that even the most assiduous of attention could not remove, including food, wine, and various bodily fluids, Cambion’s own among them.

  ‘Where have you been?’ asked Cambion, for the giant had been gone since early that afternoon, and night had since fallen.

  Edmund handed Cambion a number of newspapers, all open at the same story. Cambion could only read the headlines, but they were enough to reveal to him the murder of Ruth Winter, and the death, in turn, of the man responsible for killing her. Cambion let out a small moan of grief. Cambion had found Steiger, nurtured him, molded him since boyhood. He was the last of them, and one of the few Cambion had not betrayed in an effort to save himself. At least, thought Cambion, they had banked a portion of the fee before Steiger died, and he had completed his assigned task before succumbing to the sands, so further funds would be forthcoming.

  Edmund accessed the stories on a laptop so that the print could be magnified. While he worked, Cambion recalled his final conversation with Steiger, the one in which Steiger had notified him of the presence of the private investigator Charlie Parker near the Winter woman’s house. How peculiar it was that Cambion’s fate and Parker’s should once again intersect. Steiger had wanted to know if there was a price on Parker’s head, if there were those in the shadows who might be willing to pay to have it served to them on a platter, but Cambion had dissuaded him from moving against the detective. Those who had come closest to killing him barely months before were now all dead, and a town had been put to the torch as a further act of retribution. If the whispers were true, those who might have wanted Parker dead had chosen not to act against him for reasons to which Cambion was not privy, and they were the only ones he could think of who might reasonably have been expected to pay for his murder by another.

  Yet it appeared from reading between the lines of the newspaper reports that some confrontation had occurred between Parker and Steiger in the moments before the latter’s death. The result was that Steiger had been buried alive. An accident, the newspapers said. Dune collapses were not uncommon, although nobody could recall any previous such incident at Green Heron Bay. If Cambion had believed in God – which, for many years, he had not, although his position on that subject was modifying rapidly – he might have assumed that the deity was watching over Charlie Parker.

  Cambion was a foul man, and a hateful one, but he was not entirely without humanity, even if it was tied up almost entirely with his own sufferings. As his death inexorably approached, he found himself persecuted by memories of his own wickedness. He wondered sometimes if God had punished him by visiting his disease upon him. If so, God was then partly to blame for its consequences, for Cambion’s pain had only fed his natural sadism. God had created Cambion, just as Cambion had created Steiger. Each, it could be said, was an in
strument of a superior being’s will.

  But now Cambion found himself turning to Pascal and his infamous wager: all humans bet with their lives that God either exists or does not. The wager is not a matter of choice. By the act of living, we place the bet. A rational person, according to Pascal, lives as though God exists, for if He does exist then the rewards are infinite, and if He does not exist then the sacrifices made in life based on erroneous belief are finite. While Cambion had read extensively of the arguments against Pascal, he had, as death cast its shadow upon him, become more and more convinced of the reality of a world beyond this one, and of a Supreme Being beyond his understanding. He felt it as a corollary of his own evil and corruption, as an awareness of cold might bring with it an acknowledgement of the existence of that which was not cold.

  Yes, had Cambion inquired more deeply, there might possibly have been someone else willing to pay for Parker’s death – although the private detective’s surviving enemies were few – but what would the money have bought him? Just painful surgery, catheters, and a few extra months, or a year, added to an already cursed life. No, he had no need for any of it. He should have refused even to accept the contract on the Winter woman, but once the instruction had been given, and payment made, Steiger could not be recalled. That was the rule, and the money was welcome.