The Burning Soul

by John Connolly

  My coffee was going cold. I hadn’t wanted it anyway. I’d just been trying to find a way to make Haight relax and open up. It had worked, in a sense, although now I wanted to walk away and leave him to his troubles. I could see Selina Day dying on a dirty barn floor, and I didn’t need any more images of dying children in my head.

  ‘And you’ve never seen Lonny since then?’

  ‘I told you: The records were sealed. His name was changed. I’m not sure that I’d even recognize him anymore.’

  ‘What about your parents? I know your father died while you were incarcerated, but your mother?’

  ‘My momma stayed in touch with me for a time after I came out of prison, and gave me a place to live, but I couldn’t stand to see the way she looked at me. I turned my back on her. For all I know, she’s dead now. I’m alone. There’s just me.’

  ‘And how do you think of yourself, Mr. Haight?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t understand. Do you mean morally, as a consequence of what we did?’

  ‘No, I mean by what name do you know yourself? Are you William Lagenheimer or Randall Haight?’

  Again, he took some time to answer.

  ‘I’m – I don’t know. Many years ago, I put William Lagenheimer from my mind. I suppose it made life easier. William did that awful thing, not Randall Haight. Randall Haight is just an accountant living in a small town. He’s never done anything wrong. That’s an easier personality to inhabit, I think.’

  ‘And William?’

  ‘He doesn’t exist anymore. There’s only Randall.’

  ‘And even Randall Haight doesn’t really exist, if you think about it.’

  He looked at me, and I could feel him reassessing me, recognizing that, if I were still not fully aware of the rules, then I had at least come to understand the nature of the game.

  ‘No, he doesn’t. Sometimes I’m not sure who I am, or if I’m even anyone at all. I don’t want to be William because William killed a little girl. I don’t want to be Randall Haight because Randall jumps at his own shadow, and Randall doesn’t sleep so good at night, and Randall spends his entire life waiting for someone to put two and two together and force him to run. When I look in the mirror I expect it to be dark, or empty. I’m always surprised at the sight of my own face, because it’s not one that I recognize. What’s inside and what’s outside don’t match up, and they never will.’

  He frowned. It might have been that he had said more than he wanted to, or that he was simply so unused to talking about his former life and identity that it confused him and caused him distress.

  ‘Mr. Haight, what do you want me to do for you?’

  He gestured at his laptop, at the photographs. ‘I want you to make all of this stop. I want you to find out who’s doing this and make him stop.’

  ‘“Him”?’

  ‘Him, her: It doesn’t matter. I just want this to end.’

  ‘And how do you propose I should do that?’

  He looked surprised, then angry.

  ‘What do you mean? I’m hiring you to make this go away.’

  ‘And I’m telling you that it’s not going to go away. If I find the person who is doing this, then how should I respond? Threaten him? Kill him? Is that what you want?’

  ‘If it allows me to continue living in peace, then yes.’

  ‘That’s not what I do, Mr. Haight.’

  He leaned forward in his seat, jabbing at me with a finger.

  ‘On the contrary, Mr. Parker, that’s very much what you do. Just as you now know a lot about me, I read up on you. You’ve killed. I’ve read the names.’

  ‘I’m trying not to add to that list. Do you want to be serious, Mr. Haight, or should I just leave you to your elaborate fantasies?’

  He stood up. ‘You can’t talk to me like that.’

  ‘Sit down.’

  ‘This is my house and—’

  ‘Sit down.’

  He gave it a couple of seconds for the sake of dignity, then sat.

  ‘I need you to think carefully about what I’m going to tell you,’ I said. ‘You’re either being tormented by someone who thinks it’s amusing to see you sweat, or you’re about to be blackmailed. The person targeting you has only one card to play, one weapon to use against you, and that’s the fact that you’ve kept your past secret for so long. The most effective way to neutralize the threat is to go to the police—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘—is to go to the police, tell them everything that’s been happening to you, and let them take it from there.’

  ‘But it’s not just about the police,’ said Haight. ‘Suppose this person chooses to send details to the newspapers? Suppose he decides to post notices all over Pastor’s Bay, telling everyone about the child killer living in their midst? And even if he doesn’t, do you think the police here will be able to keep it quiet, assuming they’d even want to? This is a small town. You get ticketed in the morning here and by lunchtime they’re joking about it at the post office. My life will be ruined, and it won’t be enough just to leave Pastor’s Bay, or Maine. My name and picture will be all over the Internet. I won’t be able to work, or even live in peace. You’re asking me to commit professional suicide, and I may as well follow through with the real thing immediately after.’

  He put his face in his hands, and kept it there.

  ‘You’re forgetting something,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The timing of all this.’

  He lowered his hands to the bridge of his nose, his eyes peering over the pyramid they formed.

  ‘Meaning Anna Kore,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. If this comes out against your will, you’ll be a suspect. Let’s go through that day again. What do you remember of it?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I want to know. Start at the beginning.’

  ‘I was out of town that morning. I left shortly after nine.’

  ‘You had appointments?’

  ‘Only one. It was in Northport. You know this.’

  ‘What did you do after that?’

  ‘I had lunch, came home. I felt ill. I told you that the first time we met.’

  ‘Did you meet anyone, have any visitors, make any calls?’

  ‘No. Again, I told you: I lay on the couch. I fell asleep.’

  ‘When did you wake?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Did you spend the night on the couch?’

  ‘No, I went to bed.’

  ‘Was it dark then?’

  ‘I think so. I don’t know. Please stop!’

  ‘These are the questions the police will ask you, Mr. Haight, if your past comes out. You’d better have good answers for them too, especially if someone has anonymously informed them that the local accountant is a convicted child killer.’

  ‘God. Jesus God.’

  He lay back in his chair, his eyes closed.

  ‘You’re talking about preempting something that may not occur,’ he said.

  ‘You’re being goaded by someone who knows about Selina Day. Already that person has begun to step up the campaign against you by sending you pornographic images of children, the possession of which is a crime. I don’t believe it’s going to stop there. The next step is to start hinting at your past to the wider community.’

  ‘I need to think about it,’ he said at last.

  ‘You do that, but I wouldn’t think for too long. There is one other thing.’

  ‘What?’ He sounded weary.

  ‘You should consider that you’re neither being blackmailed nor tormented simply over a past crime.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘It could be that you’re being set up for the disappearance of Anna Kore,’ I said.

  With that I left him to consider his future, or what little of it remained to him.

  11

  The Pastor’s Bay Police Department occupied one part of the municipal building, along with, according to a sign outside the door and a brief glim
pse of the interior through its windows as I passed by, the town clerk’s office, the fire department, local sanitation, and assorted meeting rooms, cubbyholes, unoccupied desks piled high with paper, and probably the Pastor’s Bay collection of Halloween costumes, Santa Claus hats and beards, and stuffed-animal heads. The disappearance of Anna Kore meant that the demands on the building had increased significantly, and there were now various state police vehicles, dark unmarked SUVs, and a mobile crime-scene unit parked in its lot alongside a single, slightly battered Pastor’s Bay Police Department Explorer. There was also the Winnebago that CID sometimes used as a mobile command post, but I could see no signs of activity around it.

  I had wanted to see Randall Haight in his own environment, as though by doing so I might come to a better understanding of him, but the only conclusion I had drawn from our encounter was that Haight remained a lost soul, a deeply confused and conflicted man. Increasingly, Judge Bowens’s social experiment, well-intentioned though it might have been, appeared to have resulted in profound existential consequences for the young man whom he had tried to help. That, in turn, raised the question of whether or not Lonny Midas had endured a similar crisis of identity.

  There wasn’t much in Pastor’s Bay to occupy those with time on their hands: a few stores, the local bars, a bank, and a post office. The town’s pharmacy wasn’t part of a chain, and occupied an old redbrick building at the western end of Main Street. A hand-lettered sign on its door warned: WE DO NOT STOCK OXYCONTIN. There had been a rash of robberies at drugstores in the state, most of them carried out by sweaty, twitchy young men looking for little more than a way to feed their own addictions using Oxycodone, Vicodin, and Xanax. For the most part they favored blades over guns, and they were desperate enough to lash out at customers and pharmacists who didn’t cooperate. They’d have to be pretty dumb to come all the way out to Pastor’s Bay to score, though. Even if they managed to get away from the town itself there were five miles of narrow two-lane road before they reached another major route, which meant it would be easy to pick them up once the alarm had been raised.

  I walked back toward the municipal building. The Explorer was gone. I hadn’t noticed it leave. Some detective I was. I still had no sense of Pastor’s Bay as a place, and no real idea of how I was going to set about tackling Randall Haight’s problem. Maybe if I hung around long enough somebody would feel the urge to confess. There was a coffee shop called Hallowed Grounds across the street, so, with no better option to hand, I went in and ordered a Turkey Nudo sandwich and a bottle of water.

  ‘You have trouble with drugstore robberies around here?’ I asked the guy behind the counter who took my order.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘You planning a heist?’

  ‘I just noticed the sign on the pharmacy door that says it doesn’t stock OxyContin.’

  ‘Pre-emptive tactics,’ he said. ‘Guess you’ll have to shop elsewhere for your opioid needs.’

  ‘Funny,’ I said. ‘You’re so dry you could be used as kindling.’

  I took a seat at the window to watch the town’s comings and goings while the kid put my order together. He was in his early twenties and already had enough piercings and tattoos to suggest that he viewed his body merely as a work in progress, a canvas for a largely uninspired collection of ideas revolving around Maori culture, Buddhism, Celtic mythology, and Scandinavian death metal, judging by his T-shirt which depicted a Kiss reject who, if I remembered correctly, had been jailed for murdering another Kiss reject, and maybe burning a church or two along the way. Say what you like about Gene Simmons, but the worst he could do would be to date your daughter. Very loud music was playing very softly on the store’s sound system, to which the barista was shaking his greasy hair over the coffee and baked goods. The Turkey Nudo had been premade and shrink-wrapped, so I was okay, unless it was laughing boy who had made it in the first place. I wondered if he’d taken into account the effect gravity would have on his skin and muscle tone as the years went by. By the time he was fifty, some of those tattoos would be around his knees.

  Hell, I thought, pretty soon I’ll be fifty, and I was already sounding like an old man. Let the kid have his fun. Had Jennifer lived, she’d have been within sight of her teens by now, and I’d be worrying about piercings, and boys, and beginning sentences with ‘No daughter of mine is going out dressed like . . .’

  But she hadn’t lived, and it would be a few years before I had to worry about Sam in that way. Maybe she’d keep me young, but taking cheap shots in my head at a kid from a small town like Pastor’s Bay who was just trying not to get dragged down by the place wouldn’t help any. I’d end up like Lonny Midas’s father, not understanding, and not wanting to understand.

  He brought me my sandwich and water, and threw in a packet of chips free.

  ‘All part of the service,’ he said. ‘I’m not happy until you’re not happy.’

  His kindness made me feel even more guilty. Just to rub it in, the music changed. Guitars were replaced by a piano, and a woman’s voice with a foreign accent began to sing a cover version of a song that sounded vaguely familiar, although it took me a moment to place it. I looked back at the counter, where the kid was bopping along in a more restrained manner to this one as well.

  ‘Hey, is that . . . Abba?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ He trotted to the stereo and picked up a CD case. ‘Susanna, uh, I think it’s pronounced “Wallumrød,” with a weird line through the ø. It’s my girlfriend’s, but I can only play it at certain times of the day, usually when the place is quiet. It’s a management thing. Some people find it kind of depressing.’

  It wasn’t depressing. It was soft, and sad, and haunting, but not depressing.

  ‘It’s a cover of an Abba song,’ I said. ‘‘Lay All Your Love on Me.” And please don’t ask me how I know that.’

  ‘Yeah, Abba? Don’t think I’m familiar with them.’

  ‘Swedish. Same neck of the woods as that Norwegian Count Whatever on your T-shirt, more or less. Not as big on church-burning, though, or not that I can recall.’

  ‘Yeah, the Count is one mean bastard. I just like the music, though. Music’s music, you know. Quiet or loud, it’s either good or bad.’ He changed the grounds in the coffee maker, and started filling a pot. ‘You a cop?’ he asked.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Fed?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Reporter?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Rumpelstiltskin?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  He laughed.

  ‘I’m a private investigator,’ I said.

  ‘No shit? You here about the Kore girl?’

  ‘No, just some boring client stuff. Why, you know her?’

  ‘Knew her to see around.’ He corrected himself. ‘I know her to see around. She seems okay. Runs with a younger crowd, but it’s not like there are so many kids around here that you don’t know everyone by name.’

  ‘Any idea what might have happened to her?’

  ‘Nuh-uh. If she was a little older, I’d have said that she might have lit out for the city. Boston or New York, maybe, not Bangor or Portland. They’re no better than here, not really; they’re just bigger. If you’re gonna run, run far, or else this place is going to haul you right back again.’

  ‘You’re still here.’

  ‘I’m trying to change the system from within, fighting the good fight, all that kind of bullshit.’

  ‘If not you, then who?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So you don’t think Anna Kore ran away?’

  ‘Nope. Not that girls her age don’t run away, but she doesn’t seem like the sort. Everyone says she was okay.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound good for her.’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  He went silent. Susanna Wallumrød was singing about her few little love affairs. She sounded weary of them all.

  ‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

  ‘I thought you said that you
weren’t here about her.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m just professionally curious.’

  He folded his arms and sized me up.

  ‘Chief Allan said I was to tell him if anyone came asking about her.’

  ‘I’m sure he did. I figure I’ll be talking to him soon enough. So: Did she have a boyfriend?’

  ‘No. Her mom was – is – pretty protective of her, or that’s what I heard. Anna was kept on a tight chain, you know, having a single mom and all. She probably would have eased up on her eventually.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, with luck she’ll still get that chance.’

  ‘Amen to that.’

  He turned his back and started rearranging the last of the pastries. I continued eating, and watched the folk of Pastor’s Bay go about their business. Although school was done for the day, I saw no young people on the streets.

  ‘Thanks for the sandwich,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you around.’

  ‘Sure. You have a good day now.’

  I drove toward the bridge, the sun now long past its zenith. I thought about Selina Day, and Lonny Midas. I wondered where Lonny was now. Haight had told me that Lonny’s parents died while he was locked up, but there was still his older brother, Jerry, to consider. Maybe Lonny had been in touch with him since his release, but if so, then what of it? What could Lonny Midas tell me that Haight couldn’t? Then again, I was assuming that Haight was the only one whose secret had been discovered. If the information had come from someone involved with the two men during the period of their preparation for release, then Midas might have been targeted too.

  But I was also aware of something else that Haight had revealed: his belief that, had he been older, Lonny Midas might have been willing to kill him to ensure that he remained silent about what they had done. Could Lonny Midas have borne a grudge against Haight throughout the period of their incarceration and, upon his release, set out to find him and undermine his new existence? Could Lonny Midas even have abducted Anna Kore to further that aim? They were big jumps to make: too big. They were symptoms of my frustration, and part of me wanted to walk away and let Randall Haight sink or swim depending on how the situation developed. What kept me from dropping the case back into Aimee Price’s lap was the slim possibility that Anna Kore’s disappearance was somehow linked to Haight’s past, but so far I could discern no direct connection between them.