The Burning Soul

by John Connolly

  It was the first time Foster had asked him that question. Allan knew that it had been on his mind, because it was on everyone’s mind. He’d found Mrs. Shaye looking up newspaper reports on the Internet of girls who’d been missing for years and years before they turned up, like that girl in the basement in Austria, or the kid who’d been found living in a makeshift home of tents and sheds at the back of her abductors’ property. They were the exceptions, though, and what they went through during the period of their captivity didn’t bear thinking about. Too often, snatched girls turned up dead, and that was only if their captors were careless, or unlucky, or just didn’t give a rat’s ass either way if they left trace evidence or not. The smart ones made sure that their victims were never discovered.

  ‘She’s still alive,’ said Allan. ‘She’s still alive until we find out otherwise. Look, why don’t you go get something to eat? Buddy’s is still serving food, right?’

  ‘Yeah, bar snacks.’

  ‘Go eat. I’ll take care of things here.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I don’t have anything better to do. At least I won’t be worrying about your delicate constitution.’

  Foster didn’t argue. Allan watched him drive away. When he was sure that Foster was safely gone, Allan checked the time once more. His cell phone rang twice, stopped, then rang twice again. The number, in each case, was blocked.

  Allan sat back in his chair. It had begun.

  Angel and Louis watched the station house from the shadows off Main. Both were uneasy about Allan but uncertain of how to act beyond simply staying with him. If Allan did have Anna Kore, then she wasn’t on his property. Similarly, a search of his girlfriend’s apartment while Allan bought her and the kid an ice-cream down the street had revealed no trace of her, which meant that if Allan was involved in her disappearance Anna was either being looked after by another party or she was dead. Randall Haight might have provided an answer to that question by now, but there had been no word from Parker, and when they tried his phone it had simply rung out.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Angel.

  ‘I think Allan’s staying in there until fat boy comes back,’ said Louis.

  ‘We have him tagged.’

  ‘Yes, we do.’

  ‘So if he moves, we’ll know where he went.’

  ‘That we will.’

  ‘Wouldn’t hurt to swing by Randall Haight’s place, just to make sure all is copacetic.’

  ‘Wouldn’t hurt at all.’

  Louis started the car, and made a U-turn so that they wouldn’t have to enter the main street. They headed east. About half a mile from Randall Haight’s house, they saw night hunters heading into the woods. Three of the five men had shotguns in their hands. It was not an uncommon sight during hunting season.

  Except it was Sunday, and hunting was illegal in the state of Maine on Sundays.

  I never lost consciousness entirely. I was aware of the sound of fists slapping flesh, and I heard snatches of questions and fragments of answers. At some point I managed to turn my head, but my vision was blurred and I could barely make out Lonny Midas’s form in the chair. I could see the blood, though, for his face and shirt were stained red.

  Eventually I was lifted to my feet. I struggled to stand. The pain in my head was ferocious, and I felt dizzy and nauseated. I seemed to be deaf in my right ear. I was allowed to fall back to the floor. Somebody grabbed my legs and began dragging me. My head banged against the kitchen step, and then there was wet grass under my back, and stars peered coldly through the gaps in the clouds. The grass turned to dirt and leaves, and the sky was fractured by the branches of bare trees. The cold and damp of the night air cleared some of the fog from my mind. I lay on my side and watched what was about to occur, powerless to prevent it.

  Lonny Midas was on his knees in the clearing. His face was ruined. I wasn’t even sure that he could see anymore. A long thread of viscous blood hung from his mouth, and his breath whistled through the mess of his nose.

  Two men stood over him, one young and redheaded, the second older, with long dark hair. To one side, a third man in his sixties watched them. He was bald, and heavyset. I thought he might be Tommy Morris, for I had seen pictures of his younger self in the documents sent from my Boston source.

  ‘Ask him again,’ said the oldest of the three.

  ‘He doesn’t know anything, Tommy,’ said the dark-haired man.

  ‘Martin, I told you to ask him again.’

  The one named Martin leaned over to talk to Lonny Midas.

  ‘He just wants to know where the girl is. Tell him, and we’ll let you go.’

  Lonny shook his head, but said nothing.

  ‘We’re losing him,’ said Martin, but Morris didn’t reply.

  Martin tried again. ‘If you know where she is, just nod. We’ll clean you up, and we’ll go and get her. It’ll be for the best.’

  But Lonny just shook his head again.

  ‘I swear, Tommy, he doesn’t know. If he knew, he’d have told us by now. I couldn’t stand up to the punishment he’s taken.’

  ‘What about him?’ said Tommy, pointing at me. ‘You didn’t ask him what he knows.’

  ‘He’s a private detective, Tommy,’ said Martin. ‘He doesn’t have your niece.’

  ‘Maybe he knows where she is.’

  There was something robotic in the way Tommy Morris was speaking. Looking back, I believe he could think only of Anna Kore, for she was all that he had to keep himself moving forward.

  ‘Tommy,’ said Martin, and he spoke as gently as he could, ‘if he knew where she was he’d have told the cops. I’ve heard of this guy. He doesn’t screw around.’

  The redheaded man had drawn his gun. He was pointing it at the back of Lonny Midas’s head.

  ‘Frankie,’ said Martin. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘He killed a little girl,’ said Frankie, and a kind of sob caught in his throat. ‘What kind of man does that?’

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ said Martin. ‘He did it when he was a kid himself.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Frankie. ‘None of it matters. I just want it to end.’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Morris. ‘Kill him. Kill them both.’

  Martin took a gun from his coat. He looked at it for a moment, contemplating what was ahead, then pointed it at the one called Frankie.

  ‘Put the gun down, Francis.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Put it down. Slowly.’

  ‘He’s a child killer! He’s a piece of garbage. Nobody’s going to miss him. Nobody!’

  Martin shifted position slightly, so that both Frankie and Tommy Morris were under his gun.

  ‘What’s this about, Martin?’ said Tommy.

  ‘It’s over, Tommy, that’s what this is about. I’m a federal agent.’

  Tommy didn’t react at first. Slowly, a smile spread across his face.

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘Francis, I mean it: You put the gun down. Tommy, you keep your hands where I can see them.’

  ‘You’re not a federal agent, Martin. You’re one of us. You’ve drunk with us, you’ve beaten men down with us. You’ve even killed for us.’

  ‘I never killed for you, Tommy. Those people you sent me after, they disappeared, but not the way you thought. Even the Napiers are under federal protection now.’

  ‘The panty hose,’ said Frankie. He spoke as if remembering a dream. ‘Mrs. Napier. I thought you raped her, but she wasn’t wearing any panty hose when we went into the house, and later there was a panty hose on the floor. You never touched her. It was all a set-up.’

  ‘I’m not a rapist, Francis, and I’m not a killer either, but I’m giving you one last warning. Put – ’

  But Frankie wasn’t listening. He raised his gun from Lonny’s head, and Martin shot him twice in the upper body.

  ‘Ah, Jesus,’ said Tommy, and then there were men moving in the shadows behind him, hunters in shades of gray, and I though
t: This is wrong.

  The forest exploded with gunfire. There were shots from behind me, shots from right and left. I ran for cover, staggering like a drunk. A bullet blew splinters and bark from a tree close to my head, and I hit the ground. I thought that I heard someone run through the bushes nearby, but I couldn’t see him clearly. I had no gun, and could see no way of acquiring one. I found the cover of a big tree and picked up a fallen branch. It was better than nothing, but only barely. After what seemed like too long a time, the shooting ceased, and I heard a familiar voice call my name.

  ‘It’s done,’ said Angel. ‘It’s done.’

  With the first shot, Lonny had hit the ground. He had learned in prison that when trouble started it was best to keep your head down, or else somebody would beat it down for you. As the shooting continued, he had crawled through the dirt and fallen leaves like the wounded beast that he was until he slipped into a depression in the earth. His eyes were almost swollen shut, but he could see and, more important, hear well enough to take himself away from the conflict. There were men in camouflage clothing, and they had fired first. Then a black man and a smaller white man had appeared from the woods, shooting as they came, and three of the hunters had fallen beneath their guns. That was when Lonny ran. He had no idea who was shooting at whom, or why. All he knew was that he had been standing at the precipice, facing the void, and now he had been offered the chance of living. When he was sure that he was unobserved, he made his break from the woods.

  The night gave him cover as he ran, and the sounds of gunfire receded. He realized that he was heading east, away from his home and toward the main road. He needed help; the men had hurt him badly. After the initial burst of adrenaline that had taken him away from them he had slowed down, and he was now aware of the intense pain in his face and in his belly. They had broken something, maybe a rib or two. There was an ache in his innards. Somehow he managed to keep moving, but he felt his strength ebbing, and he forced himself to walk more carefully. He feared that, if he fell, he would never rise again.

  He came to the road, and turned left, heading for the town. There were other houses nearby. His nearest neighbors, the Rowleys, always kept a light burning at night, and he could almost see it through the trees. He stumbled on, his right arm stretched across his body as he tried to hold himself together physically and mentally. He heard a vehicle approaching, and in his confused state he struggled to discern the direction from which it was coming. If it was coming from behind, then it might be the men who had tortured him arriving to finish the job they had started. If it came from town, it might be someone who could help him. The pain inside was growing worse. It wasn’t just his ribs that were busted. The men had burst something soft and vital in there, and the stuff of it was spilling out.

  Headlights illuminated the trees ahead of him, and he began to weep with relief: The vehicle had come from Pastor’s Bay. He waved his left hand to flag it down as it came around the bend, and it slowed in response. Lonny moved to the side of the road as it pulled up alongside him, and he recognized the driver before the window rolled down.

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ said Lonny. ‘Thank God it’s you.’

  The night air shimmered, the atoms forming themselves into the shapes of a girl and a man. They were holding hands, Selina Day’s left hand clasped tightly in William Lagenheimer’s right. Selina extended her right hand, inviting Lonny to join them. He didn’t want to go with her. He knew where she wanted to take him. They were leaving this earth, all three of them together.

  He was about to utter his final words when Chief Allan shot him in the chest.

  The man named Frankie was not yet dead. He lay on the ground, the life bubbling redly from him. The other one, Martin, knelt beside him, gently stroking his head as the last breaths forced themselves from Frankie’s body, and his mouth opened as he tried to speak of what he was seeing, and his eyes grew wide with the wonder of it before the life left them forever.

  Tommy Morris was slumped at the base of a tree, one cheek lying against the bark, the other shattered by one of the bullets that had killed him. Three men lay dead nearby, their hunting clothes stained dark by blood and shadows. A fourth had been shot in the guts and the legs. He would live if help got to him in time. The fifth man had fled the fighting, and Angel and Louis had let him go.

  Martin was injured. His left arm hung uselessly at his side, the radius and ulna shattered by shotgun pellets. He did not weep over the body of the young man that he had killed, although his face was a mask of grief. He got to his feet, and looked for the first time at Angel and Louis.

  ‘They’re with me,’ I said.

  ‘There’ll be questions to answer,’ said Martin.

  ‘Not by them,’ I said.

  ‘Then tell them to get out of here. That’s all I owe them.’

  Without another word, Angel and Louis left us. My vision was still blurred at the edges, but my balance was improving. The pain in my ear was no longer as severe, and I could almost stand without swaying.

  ‘Which one of you hit me?’ I asked.

  ‘We all did,’ he said.

  ‘You worked Lonny Midas over pretty good as well.’

  ‘I did what I had to do. And I thought his name was Randall Haight.’

  ‘Randall Haight’s dead. A man named Lonny Midas killed him and took his place.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he didn’t want to be who he was anymore. Because he didn’t know who he was anymore.’

  ‘They’ll find him,’ he said, then corrected himself. ‘We’ll find him.’

  ‘Assuming he lives long enough after that beating.’

  ‘I did what I had to do,’ Martin repeated.

  ‘For what? Because you thought he had the girl, or just because Tommy Morris told you to do it?’

  He thought about the question. His eyes were dull. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is Martin even your real name?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  I watched him take a cell phone from his pocket and start to dial.

  ‘I’m going to look for Lonny,’ I said.

  ‘No, you stay here.’

  ‘Go to hell,’ I said, and started to walk away.

  ‘I told you to stay here,’ said Martin, and his tone made me turn back. The cell phone was now in his left hand, held awkwardly because of the pain, and a gun had taken its place in his right.

  ‘You’ve spent too long in the darkness, Martin,’ I said.

  The gun wavered, then fell.

  ‘My name’s not Martin,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t care,’ I replied, and I left him to the shadows.

  I found Lonny Midas lying in a ditch by the side of the road. His was the second body that I found. The first was that of the hunter who had run. He lay only a few feet from Midas, just beyond the tree line. Lonny had been shot through the heart at close range, the hunter in the chest and head. Not far from the hunter’s body lay a cheap, matte-finish, carbon-steel Colt Commander. The hunter’s own pistol was still in his hand.

  I sat down with my back against rough bark and waited with them until the lights came from the south.

  V

  In the worst of all men there is a little bit of good that can destroy them.

  William Rose (1914–1987)

  36

  I spent a long night at the Pastor’s Bay Police Department. The local doctor, an elderly gentleman who looked as if he’d graduated from medical school with Hippocrates himself, took a quick look at me and decided that I was suffering from a burst eardrum and a mild concussion. I might have disputed the use of the word ‘mild,’ but it didn’t seem worth the effort. I was advised not to sleep for a while, but as there were lots of questions being asked, and only a limited number of living people available to answer them, sleep wasn’t really an option. So night became morning, and still the questions came. To some I had answers, and to others I had none.

  Sometimes I just lied.

  At first light,
the New Hampshire state police started digging in the garden of Randall Haight’s former residence, alerted by a call from Carroll, the details of which were confirmed by me while I tried to deal with inquiries about an entirely different set of corpses. It didn’t take them long to reach the blocks. Beneath them were Randall Haight and his mother. Decomposition of the bodies in the cool, damp soil had been slowed by saponification. When they were revealed, the Haights’ remains were coated in a waxy adipocere formed from the bodies’ proteins and fats. They resembled insects frozen in their pupal stage.

  Then the records arrived from North Dakota, and it was remarked how alike William Lagenheimer and Lonnie Midas had been, even as boys.

  I never learned the real name of the FBI man who had been known as Martin Dempsey to Tommy Morris and his associates. Within hours, he was gone from Pastor’s Bay, and in the reports that followed he would be referred to only as an ‘undercover operative.’ He left me with more lies to tell. I told Walsh that I did not know the identities of the two men who had intervened to save Dempsey from Oweny Farrell’s men. In the confusion of all that had occurred, and all that was still happening, I don’t think he cared. It might also have been the case that Engel, who drifted in to listen for a time then drifted out again, knew or suspected the answer to the question already, and took the view that the truth would only complicate an already troublesome situation. Dempsey was alive only because of Louis’s and Angel’s intervention, and the one thing that could have made Engel’s life worse at that moment was the presence of a dead FBI man in Pastor’s Bay.

  Finally, a temporary halt was called to the questions. The doctor came back and examined me again. He gave me some more painkillers and told me that it was probably okay for me to sleep now. I told him that I was going to sleep anyway, whether he thought it was advisable or not, because I couldn’t stay awake any longer, and if I never woke up again I wouldn’t be sorry. If Engel hadn’t followed him into the room, I’d have curled up on the floor right there and then with my jacket for a pillow. Instead, I drew on the last of my energy to keep my head clear.