The Burning Soul

by John Connolly

  Randall Haight lived southeast of town. He’d given me clear directions, and I remembered his car from his visit to Aimee’s office. He came to the door as I pulled into the yard. His pale-pink shirt was open at the neck, and he wore suspenders instead of a belt. His pants were high on his waist, and tapered at the leg, offering a glimpse of sensible tan socks. There was an element of the old-fashioned about his appearance, but not studiedly so. It was not an affectation; Randall Haight was simply a man who took comfort in older things. He did not step down into the yard, but waited for me to reach the door. Only then did he remove his hands from his pockets to shake my hand. He was chewing at the inside of his lower lip, and he snatched his hand back after only the merest contact. His reluctance to have me in his house was palpable, but so was his greater unhappiness at what was happening to him.

  ‘Is something wrong, Mr. Haight?’

  ‘I got another package,’ he said. ‘I found it in my box this morning.’

  ‘A photograph?’

  ‘No, different. Worse.’

  I waited for him to invite me into the house, but he did not, and his body continued to block the door.

  ‘Are you going to show me?’ I asked.

  He struggled to find the right words.

  ‘I don’t have many visitors,’ he said. ‘I’m a very private man.’

  ‘I understand.’

  He seemed about to say more. Instead, he stepped aside and extended his left hand in a robotic gesture of admittance.

  ‘Then, please, come in.’

  But he said it with resignation, and with no hint of welcome.

  If Haight was, as he said, a private man, then it appeared that he had little about which to be private. His home had all the personal touches of a show house: tasteful, if anonymous, furniture; timber floors covered with rugs that might have been Persian but probably weren’t; dark-wood shelves that hadn’t come from Home Depot but from one of the better mid-price outlets, in all likelihood the same place that had supplied the couch and chairs, and the cabinet in which sat the TV, a big gray Sony monster with a matching DVD player beneath, and a cable box. The only individual touch came from a pair of paintings on the wall. They were abstract, and original, and looked like a slaughterhouse yard, all reds and black and grays. There was one above the couch, and another above the fireplace, so it was hard to see where someone might sit without looking at one or the other. Haight spotted the direction of my gaze and picked up on my involuntary spasm of revulsion.

  ‘They’re not to everyone’s taste,’ he said.

  ‘They certainly make a statement,’ I replied, the statement being ‘I killed him, Officer, and spread his guts on a canvas.’

  ‘They’re the only things in and of this house that have increased in value over the last couple of years. Everything else has tanked.’

  ‘And you an accountant. I thought you’d be better prepared for the recession.’

  ‘I suppose it’s like doctors trying to diagnose their own ailments. It’s easier to find the flaws in others than to figure out what’s wrong with yourself. Can I offer you a drink, or coffee?’

  ‘Nothing, thanks.’

  I took in the books on the shelf. They were mostly non fiction, with an emphasis on European history.

  ‘Are you a frustrated historian?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s an escape from what I do for a living. I’m curious about strategy and leadership. To be honest, I don’t see many effective examples of either in the business world. Please, sit.’

  I headed for the couch that faced the TV, but he looked flustered and suggested that I take one of the armchairs instead, then waited until I was seated before lowering himself into his own chair. It was the only item of furniture that showed any real sign of use. I could see the indentations of cups and glasses on the right arm, and a slight darkening of the fabric where Haight’s head had rested over the years.

  For a couple of moments, neither of us spoke. I had the uncomfortable sense of being in the presence of someone who had recently been bereaved. The house spoke of absence, but I couldn’t tell whether I was just picking up on its relative lack of character or something deeper. Because, of course, nobody really lived here; Randall Haight owned it and put bad art on its walls, but Randall Haight was an artificial creation. Perhaps, at times, William Lagenheimer moved through its rooms, but William Lagenheimer didn’t exist either. He had disappeared from the world, and was now just a memory.

  And all the time I was aware of Haight’s nervousness, although he tried to conceal it. His hands shook, and when he clasped his fingers to stop their movement the tension merely passed on to his right foot, which began to tap on the rug. I supposed that if I had once killed a child, and now felt that I was being targeted in the aftermath of another child’s disappearance, I would be nervous too.

  Haight passed me a typed list of names detailing those individuals for whom he had recently begun to act as an accountant, and any new arrivals to Pastor’s Bay. I glanced at it, then put it aside. The names meant nothing to me for now.

  ‘What is it that you’ve been sent, Mr. Haight?’ I asked.

  He swallowed hard, and shifted a battered art volume from the coffee table between us. Beneath it lay another brown cushioned mailer with a printed address label.

  ‘There was a disc. I’ve left it in my laptop so that you can see it, although it’s not the worst of what I found.’

  He pushed the envelope toward me with his fingertips. I pried it open with the point of my pen so as not to contaminate it any further should it be required as evidence at some point. Inside I could see pieces of paper of various sizes, most of them glossy. They looked like more photographic prints.

  ‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ I said.

  I went to my car and removed a box of disposable plastic gloves from the trunk. Haight hadn’t moved while I was gone. The light in the room changed slightly as the clouds moved outside, and I realized how ashen he was. He also appeared to be on the verge of tears.

  I reached into the envelope and removed the images. They were all of a similar nature, and all featured young girls, none of them older than fourteen or fifteen, and some much younger than that. They had been photographed naked on beds, and on carpets, and on bare floors. Some of them were trying to smile. Most of them weren’t. The photographic paper was standard Kodak. It was possible that a computer expert might be able to tell the type of printer from which the images came, but that would be useful only in the event of a prosecution, assuming the individual responsible for creating the photos was found with the printer in his possession.

  ‘I don’t like that kind of thing,’ said Haight. ‘I’m straight, but they’re just children. I don’t want to look at naked children.’

  There it was once again: that primness, that need to reassure the listener that the killing of a young girl had been a temporary deviation. He had not carried teenage desires for young girls into adult life. He was a normal man, with normal sexual inclinations.

  ‘And the disc?’ I said.

  ‘It arrived in the same envelope, wrapped in tissue.’

  His laptop was on the floor beside his chair, already powered up and on sleep. Seconds later, I was looking at an image of an old barn door, but not the same one as last time. This door was painted a bright red. As the camera drew nearer, a gloved hand reached out and pulled open the door. The interior was dark until the camera light clicked on. There was straw on the stone floor, and I caught glimpses of empty cattle pens on either side.

  The camera stopped midway down the barn’s central aisle and turned to the operator’s right. On the floor of one of the pens a set of girl’s clothing was laid out: a white blouse, a red-and-black checked skirt, white stockings, and black shoes. Their positions roughly corresponded to the dimensions of a girl’s body, the way a parent might lay out a day’s outfit for a young child, but they also gave the uncomfortable impression that the wearer had somehow disappeared, vanishing in an instant, drawn
into the void as she was lying in place in the barn, staring up at wood, and cobwebs, and pigeons or doves, for I could now hear the birds cooing softly in the background.

  The screen went dark. That was all.

  ‘What was Selina Day wearing when she died, Mr. Haight?’

  He took a moment to answer.

  ‘A white blouse, a red-and-black checked skirt, white stockings, black shoes.’

  The details of her attire would probably have been included in the newspaper reports of the case. Even if they weren’t, they would have been known in the area, given that she had died in her uniform. Either way, it wouldn’t have been difficult for someone to put together a facsimile of what she had been wearing simply by doing a little research. Specialist local knowledge would not have been required.

  ‘You know, I think I will have a cup of coffee after all,’ I said.

  He asked me how I took it, and I asked for milk, no sugar. While he was in the kitchen, I watched the video again, trying to find any clue to the location of the barn that I might have missed: a feed bag from a local supplier, a scrap of paper with an address that could be enlarged, anything at all, but there was nothing. The barn was a stage set with an absent player.

  Haight returned with my coffee, and what smelled like a mint tea for himself.

  ‘Tell me about Lonny Midas, Mr. Haight,’ I said.

  Haight sipped his tea. He did so carefully, even daintily. His movements were studiedly effeminate. In everything that I had seen him do so far, he seemed to be trying to communicate the impression that he was weak, inconsequential, and posed no threat. He was a man who was doing his best to fade into the background so as not to attract the attention of others, yet not so much that his desire to blend in would become overpowering, and thus mark him out. He was a youthful predator turned old prey.

  Because in all that followed, in all that he told me that afternoon, the fact remained that he and Lonny Midas had acted together in stalking, and then killing, Selina Day. Midas might have been the instigator, but Haight had been beside him right until the end.

  ‘Lonny wasn’t a bad kid,’ said Haight. ‘People said that he was, but he wasn’t, not really. His mom and dad were old when they had him. Well, I say “old,” but I mean that his mom was in her late thirties and his father in his late forties. His brother, Jerry, was a decade older than him, but I don’t recall much about him. He’d left home by the time – well, by the time all the bad stuff happened. Lonny’s mom and dad weren’t just old, though; they were old-fashioned. His dad had wanted to be a preacher, but I don’t think he was smart enough. Not that you have to be smart to be a preacher, not really, but you need to be able to bring folk along with you, to convince them that you’re worth following and listening to, and Lonny’s father didn’t have that touch with ordinary people. Instead, he worked in a warehouse, and read his Bible in the evenings. Lonny’s mom was always in the background cooking or cleaning or sewing. She doted on Lonny, though. I guess with her older boy gone, and her husband lost in the Good Book, Lonny was all she had left, and she gave him the kind of love and affection that I think she craved for herself. In that way, she was a lot like my mother, though she took what we did a lot harder and was less forgiving. Had she lived, I don’t know how welcoming she would have been once he was released. I think it was better for him that they both died while he was inside.

  ‘But she was always so grateful when I came over to play with Lonny, or when she saw us together on the street. Her face would light up, because it seemed as if there was someone else who liked Lonny almost as much as she did.’

  ‘Are you implying that there were those who didn’t care much for Lonny?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, when you’re young there will always be some kids that you get along with, and others that you don’t. With Lonny, you could say there were more of the latter than the former. Lonny had a temper on him, but he was intelligent with it. That’s a bad combination. He was curious, and adventurous, but if you got in his way, or tried to stop him from getting what he wanted, then he’d lash out. He used to tell me that his father would beat on him for the slightest infraction, but that just made Lonny want to spite him more. He couldn’t control Lonny. Neither of them could. In the end, I guess Lonny couldn’t even control himself.

  ‘I wasn’t like that. I wanted to toe the line. No, that’s not true: My instinct was to toe the line, but like a lot of quiet, shy kids I secretly envied the Lonny Midases of this world. I still do. I think we became friends because I was so unlike him in action, yet I believed that I was a little like him in spirit. He would draw me out of myself, and sometimes I managed to keep him in check, to talk him down when it seemed like his tongue and his fists were going to get him into trouble. Man, but he got me in hot water I don’t know how many times, and my parents weren’t like his. They weren’t much younger than his mom and dad, but compared to them they were kind of laid-back. Lonny’s dad beat him when he did wrong, but my dad was always in my mom’s shadow, and she just went back to reading parenting books after I started getting in trouble, as if they were at fault and not me. They thought Lonny was a bad influence on me, but it wasn’t that simple. It never is.’

  ‘How long had you known each other before you killed Selina Day?’

  For the first time, he didn’t wince at the mention of her name. He was partially adrift in a reverie of the past. I could see it in his eyes, and on his face. He had even begun to relax into his chair a little. He was back in a time before he was a murderer, when he and Lonny Midas were just kids getting into scrapes that would have been familiar to generations of kids before them.

  ‘We were friends from grade school. We were inseparable. We were brothers.’

  He smiled, and there was a dampness to his eyes. William and Lonny, the little killers.

  ‘What about girls?’ I asked. ‘Were either of you seeing anyone?’

  ‘I was fourteen. I could only dream of girls.’

  ‘And Lonny?’

  He thought about the question. ‘Girls liked him more than they liked me. I don’t think it was so much that he was better looking than I was, but he just had that way about him. I think I told you back in Ms. Price’s office that he’d kissed a couple of girls, and maybe copped a feel or two, but nothing more serious than that.’

  ‘And before Selina Day, had you or Lonny ever suggested finding a girl and taking her off somewhere?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘So why Selina Day?’

  He sipped his tea again, delaying his response. Somewhere upstairs, a clock struck the half hour. Outside, the light began to change, and the room grew darker. The alteration was so sudden that, for a second or two, Randall Haight was lost to me, or so it seemed, just as the camera had struggled to adjust to the darkness of the barn, and I knew with a cold certainty that a game was being played here, but a different game than the one I had earlier assumed. No truth was absolute, especially when it came to a man who, in his youth, had killed a child, and Haight was consciously constructing a narrative that he believed would satisfy me. But it was a narrative that was always open to change and adaptation, just as he had held on to facets of his youth that he could expand into his performance as an adult, allowing him to fade into the background and become Randall Haight.

  ‘Because she was different,’ he said at last, and there was a flash of the grit that must have drawn Lonny Midas to him as a boy, the possibility that, deep down, they shared a common soul. ‘She was black. There were no black girls at our school, and there were boys who said that black girls were easy, and Selina Day was easier still. Lonny said that his brother knew a boy who raped a black girl and got clean away with it. Maybe those were different times, but not so different. The law had one ear for the blacks and one ear for us, and the hearing wasn’t the same in each ear.

  ‘Lonny was the one who suggested it, but I went along with it. Oh, I tried to talk him out of it in the beginning. I was frightened, but I was excited too, and when
we started touching her it was like my mind filled up with blood, and all I wanted to do was tear at her clothes and rub myself against her and find her dark place. Is that what you wanted to hear, Mr. Parker? That I liked it? Well, it’s the truth: I did like it, right up until the time Lonny covered up her nose and mouth to stop her from screaming. He didn’t quite manage it, though. I heard her through his hand, like a kitten mewling, and that was when the blood started to flow backward, and everything went from red to white. I tried to pull Lonny from her, but he pushed me back and I tripped and hit my head, and I lay there and kept my eyes closed because it was easier to lie there than to fight him, easier to lie there than to watch her buck and scratch with her eyes bulging and her legs kicking, easier to lie there until she stopped moving, and I could smell what he’d done, what he’d made her do.

  ‘In a way, I was glad when they came for me. I’d have told in the end anyway. I’d have walked into the station house on my way home from school someday, and they’d have given me a soda, and I’d have told them what we did. There would have been no need to threaten me. I’d just have wanted them to listen, and not to shout at me. I couldn’t have held it in. I think Lonny understood that. Even as we covered her up in the corner of the barn, and he made me promise not to tell, he knew that I’d let him down. If he’d been older, I think he might have killed me too, and taken his chances by running, but he was only fourteen, and where would be have run to? That was the last time we talked. Even at the trial, we didn’t talk. After all, what could we have said to each other?’

  ‘Do you think Lonny blamed you for confessing?’

  ‘He wouldn’t have told, not ever. He only confessed after I gave us both up.’

  ‘But there would have been evidence at the scene even if someone hadn’t seen you. Eventually they’d have found out it was you.’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. Lonny thought they’d blame a black man. He said black men were always killing black women. His daddy said so. They lived rougher lives than we did. He was certain that if we kept our heads down and stayed quiet, we’d get away with it. We were fourteen-year-old boys. Fourteen-year-old boys don’t kill little girls. Big men kill little girls. That’s who they’d have been looking for: a big man with a thing for little girls. Like the one who sent those pictures.’