A Game of Ghosts: A Charlie Parker Thriller: 15. From the No. 1 Bestselling Author of A Time of Torment

by John Connolly

  Routh never harmed another woman from the laundry. He hadn’t even raped the Chinese girl. He’d just been interested in proving a point.

  Routh did not take vacations. For the most part, he used his annual leave to stay at home, listen to music, and watch documentaries and old movies. He was never ill, and consequently was the only employee in the company never to have recorded a sick day. He was polite to his fellow senior staff, and – with the notable exception of the unfortunate girl who had ended up dying in his bathtub – generally behaved reasonably toward the firm’s associates. If nobody particularly liked him, then few actively disliked him either. Those who had once whispered about him, and cast suspicious glances in his direction, were long since gone.

  He was not lonely. Sometimes, the Brethren came to him. He would open his eyes as he lay on his couch, a pair of Beyerdynamic DT 880s clamped to his ears, and watch as one of them glided through the room, or stood in a corner swaying to music that might have been the same as that to which he was listening, or possibly a tune from another time and place. Such apparitions did not disturb him. They were all of the same blood. Eventually he would take his place with them, and it would be for him to move between worlds. It was unusual for the men in his family to have this gift of sight. It tended to be associated with the female side, but then Routh was distinctive in many ways, not least of them his willingness to commit homicide, and those of his blood who had gone before owed him a great debt for his efforts.

  Routh did not like leaving his house, beyond the requirements of his job. He was a creature of routines. He broke them only for family. Routh appreciated the irony of a man who worked for a laundry company being responsible for cleaning up loose ends. It was a duty, but not a burden. He took no pleasure in killing – he was no sadist – but did not dislike it either. He was a practical man.

  Routh kept his distance from the rest of his kin. It was the pact agreed among them all, just in case, through some misfortune, he was ever apprehended, but Routh did not believe this was likely to happen. He was meticulous, and he had the Brethren to watch over him. They would not allow any harm to befall their enforcer.

  The road unfurled before him, the snowflakes catching in his headlights as though the very world were disintegrating, burning in a cold fire that turned all to white ash. At short notice, he had requested three days’ leave from the laundry. He was required to deal with the problems raised by the private investigator, Eklund, which included May MacKinnon and, inevitably, her son. It annoyed him slightly that his boss had huffed and puffed when Routh notified her of his wish to use some of his vacation time. The woman – her name was Wendy Bray, and she wore too much makeup and spoke too loudly for his liking – was new, and unfamiliar with his ways. He detected a vague hostility toward him on her side, although he had given her no cause for it. He wondered if some men and women were more attuned than others to a potential wrongness in those whom they encountered, a rudimentary recognition of a possible threat. He was not concerned, just curious. The provocation of unease was not a firing offense, last time he checked.

  Bray consented to his request with bad grace, even though he had lied and told her that he wanted to attend a funeral. He even found a suitable bereavement on the East Coast to claim if required, but Bray showed no particular inclination to delve deeper into the matter, and signed off on his time; with the weekend, it would give him almost five full days to do what was needed, although he expected to be home with a day to spare. He might have been able to return sooner had he flown, but he disliked airports and airplanes. He was not afraid of flying, but the proximity of so many strangers was distasteful to him, and so he had driven first to Millwood, and now on to Providence, with a box of CDs on the seat beside him from which to choose his listening. The pleasure of the trip was disturbed only by his lingering sense of annoyance at Bray’s attitude.

  Somewhere around the southern New Hampshire border, he decided that he would kill the Bray woman: not this year, nor even the next. In fact, he was prepared to let a decade go by, and wait for her to move on somewhere else, or quit to raise a family, before he went looking for her. He was very patient.

  Having determined this eventual course of action, his mood improved. He put on a recording of Ravel’s Piano Concerto made in 1957 by the reclusive Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, who had always been notoriously reluctant to commit his performances to disc. The recording took place in Studio 1 at the EMI facilities on Abbey Road in London. Later, the Beatles would colonize Studio 2, which the Cousin regarded as a sign of plummeting standards. The disc also included Benedetti Michelangeli’s recording of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no.4, and it was to the strains of Rachmaninoff that he entered Providence, making his way to the home of Jaycob Eklund.

  22

  Tobey Thayer sat in his office between the warehouse area and the main Greensburg store floor, struggling to maintain his concentration on the paperwork before him. The warehouse had just taken delivery of a new consignment of substandard furniture and oddments, which was why he was still at his desk with the clock nearing seven p.m. He rarely stayed beyond five. After all, what was the point in being king if you had to work like a serf? His father had never learned that lesson, perhaps because he was never happier than when he was on the floor, selling beat-up three-piece suites to people whose trailers could barely accommodate them. Then again, Freddie Thayer would have sold one of his own arms – or better still, someone else’s arm – if he thought he could make a profit on it.

  Thayer picked up his cell phone and pressed redial. He had lost count of the number of times he’d tried to contact Jaycob Eklund since he woke with that sense of the Brethren. He got the same message, which was that Eklund’s mailbox was full. He wasn’t having any more luck with the office number, and Eklund’s home number just continued ringing. In this day and age, it seemed impossible that someone could be simply beyond contact.

  Thayer experienced a brief flashback to his twentieth year, when a misunderstanding between himself and a girl named Laurie Naylor caused a serious rift in their relationship, one that he became convinced Laurie would attempt to widen by seeking comfort in the arms of Bobby Welbeck, who was a jock and a prick but exerted a strange power over the opposite sex. It was widely believed that more women had gone down on Bobby Welbeck than on the Titanic, which would have put Welbeck’s current total somewhere north of 110. That had seemed like a lot to the young Thayer, but what did he know? Frankly, three would have been a lot to him.

  Thayer tried calling Laurie’s home the next day, which was a Saturday, then the homes of her friends, and finally resorted to going door-to-door in an effort to find her before she did something she, or certainly Thayer, would be likely to regret. In the end, it turned out that Laurie had just gone to a movie with one of her cousins, and so had not added her name to the Welbeck Wall of Fame. Thayer, eager to avoid a repeat of that kind of stress, promptly asked Laurie to marry him, which was one of the better decisions he’d made in his life. Now, as he tried to contact Jaycob Eklund, he felt a moment of empathic contact with his younger self: unwelcome, and still strangely painful.

  ‘Mr. Thayer?’

  He looked up. Eric Louvish, one of his better salesmen, was standing at the office door.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘That damaged Ashton love seat? I have a guy on the hook, but he won’t go more than one fifty for it.’

  Thayer knew the love seat. He knew all of his stock.

  ‘Is he bleating about the stain?’

  It was oil, and nasty.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Louvish. ‘Maybe if you could—’

  ‘Take the one fifty.’

  Louvish staggered slightly where he stood. The Ashton retailed for $399 new, and the stain wouldn’t be visible as long as you kept the love seat in a corner so the back and the right side were concealed. The guy had another fifty in him, if the boss would come out and work his magic. Five minutes for fifty bucks. It would also help
Louvish’s total, because he was running neck and neck with Alyce Voycich for the additional bonus Thayer threw in each month to the salesperson who shifted the most stock. Alyce Voycich was racked like a Barbie doll, which gave her an advantage right from the start, although she was smart enough to do up an extra button when negotiating with couples.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah. I can’t be dealing with that shit right now. Record it as two hundred on your sheet, with a note about the difference. I’ll take it into account at the end of the month.’

  Louvish shrugged. It wasn’t like the boss to stay stuck to his chair like this. He might not have been his old man, but he still had Thayer blood running through his veins.

  ‘And close the door behind you, would you?’ Thayer added. ‘I need some peace and quiet while I take care of this stuff.’

  He gestured at the delivery invoices on his desk, even though he could have checked them in his sleep. Louvish nodded and pulled the door shut behind him. The boss’s door was hardly ever closed, but when it was, his staff knew that he wasn’t to be disturbed. Louvish then returned to the warehouse floor, got the guy up to $175 for the sake of pride, and completed the paperwork before suggesting to Alyce Voycich that Mr. Thayer might be coming down with something.

  In his office, Thayer closed his eyes, just for a moment. His head ached, and he was experiencing that familiar unpleasant tingling in his extremities. It hadn’t entirely gone away since he’d woken up during the night. His fingers and toes felt swollen, and his shoes were too tight on his feet.

  When he opened his eyes again, twenty minutes had passed, and Alyce Voycich was staring at him through the glass of the door, her hand poised as though unsure whether to risk knocking. Perhaps she had already knocked, Thayer thought, and he just hadn’t heard because he’d been sleeping.

  But he hadn’t been sleeping, not really. His eyes might have been closed, and his conscious mind turned off for a time, but he had still been busy. A pencil was in his right hand, and his left was holding the blank side of an invoice sheet flat on the desk. On it he had drawn studies of the same faces, each in profile and each with a flattened aspect to the nose and chin. The pencil portraits were as good as any he had ever done. There was something elegant and old-worldly about them, even allowing for the ugliness of their subject.

  Because he was ugly: ugly beyond appearance, ugly beyond skin and bone.

  Thayer put the pencil down. The tingling had gone. Even his headache was receding. It was as though by drawing he had lanced a boil, allowing the pus to drain and thus ease his discomfort.

  For a while.

  He tried calling Eklund again. Nothing.

  Just nothing.

  23

  Jaycob Eklund’s house was a small bungalow-style dwelling in Fox Point, on the east side of Providence.

  ‘Man,’ said Louis, ‘this place makes Williamsburg look like Salt Lake City.’

  He wasn’t far off the mark. Fox Point was so hipster that Parker felt as though he stood out simply by not having a beard, while Louis was conspicuous solely by virtue of being black. The only one of them who might conceivably have blended in was Angel, if only because he had three days’ worth of facial growth and was wearing a wool hat. They’d passed a whole bunch of coffee shops along Wickenden and its environs as they got their bearings, alongside stores selling antiques, used records, sex toys, rugs, and jewelry. It was hard to believe all this had been farmland until the construction of the city’s first port at India Point, after which Providence did its best to hasten the world’s ruination by exporting large quantities of rum. That maritime and industrial past was now visible only in some of the older buildings, while gentrification, aided by the students from nearby Brown, had seen off most of the older residents.

  Parker had performed a realty search on Eklund’s property. Eklund and his wife had bought at a good time, before Fox Point became a beacon for the young and wealthy, and the value of the house had increased sufficiently by the time of their divorce to enable Eklund to leverage the equity and buy out his wife’s share. The house still looked too big for a single man’s needs, but Parker realized he wasn’t in a position to criticize Eklund for not selling up and buying somewhere smaller, not when he himself was rattling around in his Scarborough home. And why should Eklund have sold if he didn’t want to? He lived in a buzzing, interesting area, and his property wasn’t about to lose significant value anytime soon. As long as he could eat the taxes, he’d be fine.

  His home was the smallest on Arnold Street, twin rows of mostly nineteenth-century dwellings of various styles not far from the intersection with Brook. The house had a small yard front and back. A black wrought-iron fence marked the boundary, a low hedge surrounding it behind. A children’s playground took up one corner of the intersection, and it was there that Parker and Louis dropped Angel before making another circuit and picking him up at the next corner.

  ‘The house is dark,’ said Angel, ‘but it seems to have a monitored alarm. The main thing is to get inside and kill the siren before any of the neighbors become concerned and call the cops.’

  He rummaged in his kit bag and emerged holding a black box about the size of four cigarette packs in one hand, and a pair of wire cutters in the other. He waved the box at Parker.

  ‘Cell phone jammer. Big boy.’

  Parker knew what it was. He kept one in his own car kit, just in case, although his was a modest device with a short range. Angel’s looked like it could knock out a city block, and render every male in the vicinity sterile in the process. The jammer would take care of the monitoring service. Angel’s first task would be to cut the landline connection between the alarm system and the security firm’s monitoring station. When that was done, the alarm would try to send out a signal from a transmitter using the cell phone network. The jammer would ensure that this signal would be blocked.

  Angel left them, and disappeared into the shadows at the side of Eklund’s house.

  ‘You know,’ said Louis, ‘for three guys supposedly doing a favor for the FBI, we’re breaking a whole lot of laws.’

  Parker couldn’t argue. They were indeed engaging in a great deal of illegal activity on behalf of an agency of the state – or one of its agents, which was not the same thing. He was pretty sure Ross would just leave the cops to feed on them if they were picked up for burglarizing the home of a retired police officer, or make them sweat for a while for being dumb enough to get caught. Parker had been in jail cells in more states than he cared to enumerate. He didn’t particularly want to add Rhode Island to his collection.

  The alarm in Eklund’s house began to sound. Even though they were expecting it, the noise was still shockingly loud. Parker started counting the seconds. It was still ringing after five, then ten.

  ‘Shit,’ said Louis. ‘Maybe he wants to get arrested.’

  Parker was at fifteen when the alarm stopped. A light went on in a building across the street, and he saw movement at a window. They waited. Parker knew Angel would no longer be in the house and was instead waiting somewhere close by, in case someone called the police. They gave it twenty minutes, just to be safe, but no Providence PD patrol car or private security company vehicle came by.

  A light flashed once from the bushes to the right of the house, where Angel had first vanished from sight.

  ‘Guess that’s me,’ said Parker. ‘But we’re going to be out of contact with you once we’re in there.’

  Knocking out the connection to the cell phone network allowed them to enter the house, but it also guaranteed their own phones would be useless, which meant that Louis couldn’t warn them if anyone approached. The best he could do would be to sound the horn, but in that case he might as well just have cuffed himself before lying facedown on the sidewalk to save the cops the trouble. The next worse option was to set off the car alarm, so that was what they agreed on. Louis was wearing a gray Chesterfield coat with a velvet collar over a black Italian silk jacket and a turtleneck
shirt, so he looked respectable enough to avoid a DWB – driving while black – in the event of attracting any police attention, and was close enough to bars and restaurants for it to be plausible that he might have chosen to park on a residential street. If he had to move, he’d wait for them on South Main.

  Parker stepped from Louis’s Lexus and patted the roof in farewell.

  ‘So I’ll just stay here with the car, massa,’ said Louis. ‘You see Miss Daisy, you tell her old Louis said hello.’

  ‘If we get arrested,’ said Parker, ‘try to convince them you’re our lawyer.’

  ‘If you get arrested, I’ll be in Massachusetts before they give you change for your phone call.’

  Parker crossed the yard of Eklund’s home and made his way to the rear of the house, where Angel had opened the back door in order to gain entry through the kitchen. The alarm was still sounding faintly from the box by the front door, but otherwise the place was quiet.

  ‘The house is clear,’ said Angel. From bitter experience, he’d learned that just because a building was dark, the doors and windows were secured, and the alarm system was activated, didn’t mean it was unoccupied. He’d taken the trouble to give the rooms a quick check. ‘The basement door is locked, though.’

  The door in question stood to the left of the kitchen. Parker told Angel to get it open while he checked the refrigerator. If Eklund had been planning to leave home for any length of time, even if he hadn’t chosen to share the details of the trip with anyone, then he wouldn’t have bothered stocking up on food. But Parker found cold cuts, milk, cream, and a couple of chicken breasts in a Thai marinade, all with expiration dates that were either imminent or had just passed. There was also fruit in a bowl by the sink, and a sourdough loaf, carefully sealed, in the breadbasket. The garbage can had not been emptied, and had started to stink. Wherever Eklund had gone, he hadn’t intended staying away for long.