The Burning Soul

by John Connolly

  Except it wasn’t, because the station’s indent flashed and instantly Bugs was back again. I even knew the cartoon: ‘Hare Brush.’ I remembered it from my childhood. Bugs and Elmer switch personalities, so that in the end Elmer wins, but he has to become Bugs to do so. I had laughed and laughed. Even in my teenage years, after my father died, I’d laugh when I caught the cartoon again. It was an escape from a world of black and gray and bright, bright red, an escape from hurt and grief, from the memory of pain: the pain of my father’s loss, the pain of my mother’s sorrow . . .

  The pain of a boy holding one hand over your mouth while the other fumbles beneath your skirt, the second boy pulling away as he realizes what he has done, and what is about to be done, yet too weak to prevent it from happening. Pain in your mouth and your lungs, pain in your back and behind your eyes, pain growing and growing until it seems that your body is too small to contain it all, that it must explode from you like the air from a bursting balloon, like the death of a red star, because when the end comes it comes redly: red behind your eyes, red spraying from your mouth and nose.

  And dat’s de end, except it isn’t, not for you, because you never went away, because you’re an angry girl, and people have to be careful around angry girls. Angry girls break things, and hurt things, and they wait for their chance.

  And angry girls watch cartoons to escape for a time from their rage.

  I stepped closer to the couch and reached for the remote. The sickly scent grew stronger, and I smelled what lay beneath it: not decay but blood and human waste, because whatever was in the room had stayed as it was at the moment of its passing. It was both a girl and not a girl. The best of it was elsewhere, sleeping, unknowing. What was here was all that had been left behind.

  careful daddy careful careful

  She was on the couch; almost a palpable presence. I couldn’t see her, couldn’t hear her, but she was there. I waited for her hand to close upon me as I took the remote, but it did not. The device was moist to the touch. There was condensation on it, although there should not have been. I stepped back from the couch, the remote in my hand, and the smell came with me. Tentatively, I lifted my hand, and caught the odor of her on the plastic.

  I glanced at the TV. The image flickered, the action changing, and behind it I thought that I glimpsed a face reflected in the screen. I walked around the side of the couch, keeping my distance from it. When I was behind it, I raised the remote and killed the picture.

  no daddy no she wont like it

  And in that instant I saw her suspended in the darkness of the screen like a soul trapped in the void: a black girl in a torn white blouse seated on the couch, her hands by her sides, palms up, her knees scraped raw; blood on her chin, and on her lips, and blood dried in lines that ran from the corners of her eyes like red tear stains. She opened her mouth and screamed silently, her whole body shaking with the force of her anger: a child frustrated, a child deprived of her desire, a child dragged from a world of brightness back into a world of pain. Then she was gone, and there was only my own reflection in the otherwise empty room.

  I turned off the TV for the final time, and I did not sleep again that night.

  Not even with the TV cable safely hidden away in my bedside locker.

  20

  It was November, and hunting season was about to begin. I couldn’t say from where precisely my objections to much of what passed for hunting came. Perhaps it was the fact that I was a townie through and through. My father, who had spent his days walking city beats in New York, occasionally made forays into the great outdoors on weekends to clear his lungs and replace vistas of tall buildings with vistas of tall trees, but I think he viewed it as an obligation rather than a pleasure. He felt that he should occasionally feel grass beneath his feet, and not be forced to step around trash and needles and used rubbers to do so, because that was what regular people did. In truth, though, he was happier in the city. He tended to come back from those walks with the slightly relieved air of a man returning from a successful and relatively painless visit to the dentist.

  My grandfather, who was a policeman in Maine, had not hunted. He argued that he did not need the meat, and the act of stalking an animal gave him no joy. He dutifully enforced the state’s hunting laws but was not above turning a blind eye to those citizens who broke the ban on Sunday hunting, especially those who were already working long hours to make ends meet, and for whom Sundays provided the only opportunity to supplement their family’s diet. In the poorer parts of Maine, bringing down a mature deer and freezing and curing the meat could save a family four or five hundred dollars on food, and those who hunted for this reason were part of an older ethos. They took pleasure in the act of hunting, but it was combined with a functionality and practicality that was admirable. They wasted nothing of what they killed, and if they were particularly fortunate in their endeavors they shared with those who had not been so lucky.

  But the hunting of moose for trophy antlers left me cold, and I had yet to meet someone who enjoyed the taste of bear meat. I disliked the attitude of those who came up from the cities to hunt: their braggadocio, their faux machismo, the unpleasant transformative effect of guns and camouflage on otherwise unremarkable men, for in my experience it was generally men who hunted in this way. They brought money into the state, and guiding them was a welcome source of income for those who lived hardscrabble existences in the County, and in the shadow of the Great North Woods. Still, the guides viewed a certain number of them as fools, and fools with guns, which are the worst kind, and regarded most of the rest with little more than benign tolerance. Their money was welcome, their actual presence less so.

  And how did I square this with the fact that I declined to hunt an animal but had hunted men; that I would not turn my gun on a deer, or a bear, but I had seen men fall by my hand? To be honest, I didn’t think about it too much. Life was simpler that way.

  Life was simpler, too, if one did not think too hard about the images of dead girls reflected on dark television screens. I might almost have believed that I had dreamed the events of the night before had not some faint trace of the girl’s perfume still lingered in the living room, and had the marks of my hand not still been visible on the kitchen window, where I had erased my daughter’s message. I walked outside with a cup of coffee in my hand and sat on the back step, staring at the woods and the marshes beyond. They preferred the night, my shadow wife and my drifting child, taken from this life by one who bore the name of a traveling man. I still did not know what to call them: traces, perhaps, or echoes. The thought of my daughter moving through moonlit woods, sometimes watching her father from the darkness, and leaving messages for him on windowpanes (for that was what she did when she was alive, drawing hearts and faces and dogs on my car windshield when I wasn’t around, so I would know that she was thinking of me) brought with it both comfort and a deep, unmanning sadness. I did not fear for her, though, as she followed those paths between worlds. She did not walk them alone. Her mother walked beside her, and her mother wore a different mask, for whatever had brought her back to me was not love alone.

  If my daughter was a spirit, then my dead wife was a shade.

  I went to work on the Kore family, seeking some hint to why Engel and the FBI might have an interest in them beyond any concern about Anna Kore’s presumed abduction. Anna’s mother, Valerie, was born Valerie Mary Morris in Dorchester, Massachusetts. She was twenty-nine when she married Alekos Kore in a ceremony in the St. George Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Philadelphia on June 8, 2007. Since Anna Kore was born on November 28, 1995, her mother had either waited a long time before marrying Anna’s father or Alekos Kore was not related by blood to Anna. So where was Alekos now, and if he was not Anna’s father, who was? According to the official police statements, they were still trying to contact Alekos, although they had not yet gone so far as to brand him a suspect in Anna’s disappearance.

  More digging: a CN-2 change-of-name application for Anna Mary Morris, a
minor, had been filed with the Knox County probate court on August 1, 2007. In addition, an affidavit of diligent search had been filed confirming that all reasonable efforts had been made to trace the child’s other biological parent, one Ronald Doheny. Oddly, the judge had not requested a special publication notice, or a search of the five branches of military service, as was often the case in such circumstances. Clearly the judge in question had been content to accept that attempts to find Doheny had proved fruitless in the past. That was interesting. It suggested that somebody had spoken quietly to the judge about Doheny. Reading between the lines, I was willing to bet good money that Ronald Doheny was believed dead. If that was the case, and there was no formal evidence of his demise, then the judge would have required more than the word of Valerie Kore or her legal representatives, assuming she had even sought legal assistance, as technically none was required for a change of name. So if you didn’t have a body, and nobody had sought a legal declaration of death, assuming seven years had gone by since Ronald Doheny had stopped accepting calls, then what would it take to persuade a judge to let sleeping dogs, and sleeping corpses, lie?

  It would take the word of a cop, and a senior cop too.

  Dig again: Anna Mary Morris was born in Dorchester, Mass. Search for Ronald Doheny, and Massachusetts. Dismiss the eighty-year-old man who had died of cancer after a long and happy life with his wife of fifty-eight years. Dismiss the high-school football star who had wrapped his car around a tree two years before Anna was born. Dismiss a chronically obese used-car salesman (‘Ronnie’s the Real Deal!’), and a prodigiously gifted eight-year-old child violinist.

  Leave Ronald Doheny of Somerville, Mass.: twenty-one years old when he skipped bail in December 1997 on charges of possession of a Class A substance for sale or distribution, which in Massachusetts in the late 1990s probably meant heroin. Dig, dig, dig: Ronald Doheny, one of three men found in an apartment in Winter Hill, Somerville, along with three kilos of heroin. That meant Doheny was looking at a mandatory fifteen years, which was tough for anyone, but particularly for someone who had barely attained his majority.

  Winter Hill meant the Winter Hill Gang, as the newspapers dubbed it: a loose affiliation of mainly Irish-American hoodlums, with some Italians thrown in to improve the quality of the food. Buddy McClean and Howie Winter were the big names at the start, until McClean was shot dead in 1965, leaving Winter in principal control until the end of the 1970s, when a series of federal indictments for fixing horse races shook up the leadership and landed him and most of his associates in jail. That allowed one James ‘Whitey’ Bulger to make his move, and he remained in charge until 1994, when he fled a federal indictment. His lieutenant, Kevin Weeks, subsequently turned cooperating witness in 2000, but the Winter Hill Gang had weathered the storm, and remained a functioning part of Boston’s underworld.

  Search for Morris and Winter Hill, and come up with Tommy ‘Ash’ Morris: a couple of arrests, and a stretch in Old Colony in the mid-eighties, when it was still known as Bridgewater, for possession of a pair of loaded and unlicensed firearms and a quantity of cocaine, but otherwise clean for decades, which meant that Tommy Morris had either turned over a new leaf, which seemed unlikely, or had simply become much better at being a criminal. A further search provided no direct link between Valerie Mary Morris and Tommy ‘Ash’ Morris, but Tommy was older than Valerie by eighteen years. Cousins, or something closer? I was betting closer, based on Special Agent Engel’s presence in Pastor’s Bay.

  Dig, dig, dig: names and histories, places and trial reports. Dig, dig, dig: calls to Boston, messages left, favors called in and favors promised. Dig, dig, dig, then wait. At noon, an e-mail came in from an ex-BPD cop turned private investigator in Fitchburg, sent from a Hotmail address that would never be used again after this message.

  Tommy Morris was Valerie Kore’s older brother. There were links to any number of articles, the most recent from this week concerning the killing of one Joey ‘Joey Tuna’ Toomey, an Irish-American businessman and a beloved scion of the Boston fish trade. There was a further link from that report to a Sunday magazine feature entitled ‘Meet the Old Boss, Same as the New Boss,’ a consideration of the current state of organized crime in the city that included various mentions of power struggles in the Boston underworld, and particularly among Irish-American elements still working to fill the void left by Whitey Bulger’s enforced absence. The e-mail concluded with a single line from my source: ‘Tommy Morris is going down.’

  Suddenly the stakes had been raised, and I was glad of the impending arrival of Angel and Louis. In the meantime I called Aimee and told her of what I had found. More than ever, we needed to protect Randall Haight, if and when he came forward, because I had the feeling that the rule of blood was about to be invoked. Engel was in Pastor’s Bay because he believed that Anna Kore’s disappearance might be a consequence of her uncle’s criminality. Even if it wasn’t, he would expect her uncle to try to involve himself regardless. That was the rule of blood: Blood came before everything. I also repeated to Aimee my earlier ultimatum, based on the pedophiliac nature of the photos received by Haight and on Anna Kore’s age: Haight needed to confirm that he was willing to talk to the police, and he needed to do so quickly. Aimee was angry at having a gun put to her head. She asked me to give her a couple of hours, and I agreed.

  ‘And what about those text messages?’ said Aimee.

  ‘There have been no more,’ I said.

  ‘Are you going to tell the police about them? They contain serious allegations about one of the principals in the investigation.’

  I noticed that she was careful not to use names.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘One rule for our client, and one rule for you, right?’ she said, and hung up.

  Tommy Morris had taken a bus from Logan after killing Joey Tuna, and stayed the night at an inn in Newburyport, eating in his room, watching television, thinking of what he had done to Joey, of what he had ordered done to Oweny Farrell and how it had not come to pass. He couldn’t figure out how the cops had got to Oweny so fast, but it didn’t matter. Joey Tuna was dead, and it was only in the quiet of the inn that Tommy felt the impact of the enormity of what he had done. There would be no forgiveness, no possibility of a rapprochement. He was a doomed man now, and they would unite to hunt him down. Joey’s uncle would demand it. Honor would demand it. Sound practice would demand it.

  But his niece was still missing. In a way, this had begun with her. Not only was he a man whose business had collapsed, and who now faced a hostile takeover from a competitor; he could not even protect his own family. His sister had fled from him. He had driven her away. He loved her, but he had forced her from his sight. She and his niece were the only surviving blood that meant anything to him. He would not leave it to the cops or the hated feds to search for the lost girl. He knew now that Joey and Oweny had not been responsible for her disappearance. She had not been a pawn in the game that they were playing.

  Tommy liked chess, so the analogy pleased him. He had only three pieces left on the board but he refused to concede, even as all potential for movement was being limited by the forces arrayed against him. He had his knight, Dempsey; his rook, Ryan; and himself, the trapped king. He played with combinations of moves on the little travel set that he carried with him everywhere, deliberately allowing his own forces to be routed until he was reduced to these three – king, knight, rook – and he took his inability to secure victory not as a rebuke but as a challenge. He stayed awake all night, moving and thinking, and only when dawn came did he allow himself to sleep.

  He had a throwaway cell phone, and with it he stayed in touch with Dempsey. He didn’t tell him where he was, just advised him to take Ryan and get out of town. He needed more time to think, to play, to test the moves.

  Later that evening he summoned Dempsey and Ryan to him, and the three men headed north.

  At the same time, two other men were also drawing nearer to their northern destinat
ion. Music played in the car, a subdued yet intricate classical piece that at first hearing appeared to consist only of the same extended phrase repeated, but on closer listening gradually revealed tiny yet significant differences and developments. It was a song of humility and wonder, a wordless ode to the Divine.

  ‘How much longer?’ asked the passenger. Angel’s dark curly hair had less gray than his years merited, and his face had fewer lines than his sufferings might have earned. He wore a Big-Bam-Boom era Hall & Oates T-shirt, boot-cut jeans that were a size too big for him, and a pair of designer yellow-and-turquoise sneakers that he had bought for almost nothing in an outlet. The sneakers had a certain rarity value, mainly because the company responsible for their design had realized its terrible mistake in creating them almost as soon as they saw the light of day, and quickly discontinued them when it became clear that their likely customer base consisted solely of the mentally ill, blind people with cruel friends, and, had they been able to put a name on him, this man, who was neither mentally ill nor blind but merely unusual in a great many ways.

  Beside him, driving with his eyes barely open, was Louis, who had long been shaving tight his own graying locks, but not in any effort to hide the aging process, not if his beard was taken into account. His suit was gray, his shirt white, his knitted wool tie black. His shoes gleamed.

  ‘How much longer?’ said Angel again.

  Louis checked the dashboard. ‘Another hour.’

  ‘Of this? You have to be kidding me. The tune hasn’t changed since it started. It’s like a really quiet car alarm for nervous people.’

  ‘No, another hour to Boston.’

  ‘Great. In the meantime, can we play something else?’