The Burning Soul

by John Connolly

  Walsh then called me an asshole one last time, just in case I hadn’t been listening closely, and warned me that I still wasn’t to leave Pastor’s Bay until he’d had an opportunity to call me an asshole some more in person, and maybe see about having my license permanently rescinded this time.

  ‘Asshole,’ he said, in conclusion, before hanging up. Even after the substance of the preceding conversation, he managed to make it sound fresh.

  There was a basket outside my bedroom door. My clothes, now cleaned and folded, were inside, along with two fresh scones wrapped in a napkin. I showered again, and ate one of the scones while I dressed. I turned on my laptop, but the Internet service for the B and B was password-protected. There was nobody around when I went downstairs, so I left a note to say that I wasn’t checking out yet, and used the second key on my door fob to lock the front door behind me.

  The news trucks were back with a vengeance on Main Street, and not just the locals either, while the parking lot of the municipal building was jammed with official vehicles. Danny was still behind the counter at Hallowed Grounds. He was playing the last Roxy Music CD, so he should have been wearing a tuxedo with his bow tie undone instead of a T-shirt featuring the original cover of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

  ‘You don’t look so good,’ he said.

  ‘In this case, appearances don’t deceive,’ I replied. ‘Mind if I check my e-mail?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘I’m about to close up, but you take your time. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do first, so I’ll be here for a while.’

  I took a seat at a corner table. Without asking, Danny brought me coffee.

  ‘On the house,’ he said. ‘Hear you were involved in what went down last night.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Still no sign of Anna Kore?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘They’re saying Chief Allan might have taken her.’

  ‘That on the news?’

  ‘I don’t watch the news, but if people are talking about it then it soon will be.’

  He locked the front door, turned the sign to CLOSED, and started cleaning up behind the counter. I checked the local news sites and found Allan’s photo on all of them. He was now officially a suspect in Anna Kore’s disappearance, but speculation abounded that he might have committed suicide, or made it appear that he had done so.

  I logged in to my e-mail account. There was a Yahoo message with Angel’s distinctive ‘777’ tag on the temporary address. It contained a new cell phone number, along with the words ‘necessary evil.’ I called it from my own cell. I wasn’t worried about the number being traced back to Angel and Louis. That cell phone would be in pieces by the end of the day.

  ‘You get the tag from the truck?’ he asked.

  ‘Have you seen the news?’

  ‘That’s what concerns us. Pity. It was a nice piece of equipment. We’ll erase everything, clear the tracks.’

  ‘Send the record of Allan’s journeys to me first,’ I said.

  The GPS program automatically recorded the route taken by the trace vehicle. It also allowed for timings to be retained, so that it was possible to figure out how long the subject had spent in any given location.

  ‘If your laptop is subpoenaed, it’ll be an admission of guilt. Without it, you have deniability.’

  ‘Send it anyway,’ I said. ‘I lost deniability a long time ago.’

  After about fifteen minutes, the record from the tag came through as a series of maps. Angel had separated each journey Allan had taken into a series of files, with the dates and timings recorded beneath. The trips themselves appeared as red lines on the maps.

  If nothing else, the trip record confirmed that Allan had killed Lonny Midas and the unknown gunman. It showed him leaving the Pastor’s Bay Police Department at 9:08 p.m. and traveling to the spot at which the bodies had later been found before heading back to the outskirts of town, where he waited for the alarm to be raised.

  Allan’s final trip, taken shortly before eleven a.m. that day, followed a route from the municipal building in Pastor’s Bay and west out of town, but Allan’s home lay south, across the causeway. According to the timings, his truck had remained at a point on Red Leaf Road for two hours before continuing southwest to its final resting place at Freyer’s Point.

  I opened the white pages and did a reverse address search for Red Leaf Road. It came up with three names. Two of them I didn’t recognize; one of them I did. I clicked on the name, noted the number of the house, and did a Google map search for the address. When I had it, I compared its location on Google to the point on the map where Allan’s truck had stopped for an hour.

  They were the same.

  Allan’s last trip had included a stop at the home of Ruth and Patrick Shaye.

  39

  The Shaye house was set back from Red Leaf Road behind a line of maturing silver birches, now denuded by the fall winds. It was a large, three-story dwelling, and had been freshly painted with off-white paint, probably during the summer. There were planter boxes on the sills of the upper and lower windows filled with hardy green shrubs, and the garden had been planted with winter flowers and perennials: cardinal flowers and larkspur, comfrey and obedient plants. The lawn grass bore signs of patching, although the old and new growths would soon be indistinguishable, and the boundaries of the beds were marked with house bricks painted white. Fresh gravel had been laid on the drive. It was all very neat and clean, the kind of house that forces its neighbors to step up to the plate and not allow their own properties to fall into neglect.

  Before leaving Pastor’s Bay, I had checked to see if Mrs. Shaye and her son were still at the municipal building. They were: Patrick I could see in the parking lot, and Mrs. Shaye was working behind the main desk. I called Walsh along the way, but his phone rang a couple of times and then went to voice mail. I figured he’d rejected the call when he saw the number. I left a message telling him what I knew – that Allan had stopped off at the Shaye house before vanishing – then turned my phone to silent. It didn’t necessarily mean much when I heard myself speak aloud what I knew for Walsh’s benefit. There were lots of reasons that Allan might have visited the Shaye house. After all that had taken place the night before, there had probably been a certain amount for everyone to discuss.

  But two hours was a long time, especially when there were so many bodies on their way to the M.E.’s office in Augusta.

  I parked my car on the road beneath the trees instead of driving directly onto the property. There was no response from the house when I entered the empty front yard, the gravel crunching loudly under my feet. I didn’t ring the doorbell but took a narrow path to the left that cut between a high green hedge and the side of the house. There were two windows in that wall, one at the living room and the other at the kitchen, but I could see nobody inside, and a red door blocked access from the path to the rear of the property. It was closed but not locked. I turned the handle and it opened easily.

  The back yard bore no resemblance to the front. Here there was no grass; the area around the kitchen door was roughly paved with heavy concrete slabs upon which sat two iron lawn chairs and an iron table, the dark gray of the metal showing through the yellowing paint work. Beyond was an area of pitted dirt in which pools of dirty rainwater glistened, the oil on their surface like a series of polluted rainbows. Two cars and a truck stood in varying stages of cannibalization beneath the bowed roof of a long single-story garage. The contagion of filth and neglect had even infected the back of the house itself, which had not been painted when the front and sides were tackled, and from which white flakes peeled like bad skin. The windows were all masked with drapes, except at the kitchen, where the sink was stacked high with dirty crockery. A network of washing lines ran across the yard, and from them hung drying sheets, carefully positioned so that there was no danger of the sheets dragging along the filthy ground beneath. They swayed gently in the breeze. I tried the kitchen door, but it did not
open. All seemed quiet within, yet I found myself reluctant to make any unnecessary sound, as though, like a character in some old fairy tale, I might wake a slumbering presence by my incaution.

  I walked to the garage, avoiding the puddles along the way. It effectively formed the back wall of the property. The thick hedge at either side of the yard came to an end where the garage began, and tendrils of it had already begun to seek purchase on the walls. The two cars inside were relatively new, or at least I could see how they might yield parts of value, but the truck was a wreck. Its windshield was gone and its side windows were broken. The hood was raised, most of the exposed engine was rusted, and most of what wasn’t rusted was absent entirely. The truck had a dented cap back, and was parked so that the rear was flush with the garage wall.

  And yet its tires were inflated, and there were marks on the concrete where it had recently been moved.

  The garage might once have been used to house animals, for the three vehicles were separated by wooden walls, although the pens looked too wide even for cattle. I searched for indications on the back wall where pens had been removed to create the wider spaces, but could find none. I slid along the side of the truck, my jacket catching on rusted metal and splintered wood. Even before I reached the back wall, I could see that it was newer than the rest of the building. At some point it had been repaired or replaced. I went back outside and tried to gauge the distance between the inner wall and the outer walls. The angle made it hard to judge, but it seemed to me that they didn’t quite match. There was a space behind the new wall. It was narrow, probably barely wide enough for a man to turn around inside, but it was there.

  I took a closer look at the truck and saw that the hand brake had been set. I was opening the door to release it when something pink caught my eye on the floor behind the front left wheel. It was a small piece of fiberglass insulation batt, used between interior walls and floors for noise control and to prevent heat from escaping. I took my little Maglite from my pocket and shined it on the floor, and then inside the cap. There were more of the batts here, still in their packaging, and all with a high R-value indicating their resistance to heat flow. The higher the R-value, the greater the insulating power, and this stuff had an R-value in the thirties, almost as high as one could go.

  I released the hand brake and pushed the truck forward. It was heavy, but it moved easily on its tires. When I had pushed it about six feet, I reapplied the brake and returned to the back wall. A painted square steel door, three feet to the side, had been expertly fitted into the brickwork at the point where the back of the truck had met the wall, its lines almost as difficult to distinguish as the separation between the old and new grass on the front lawn. A smaller panel was inset midway down the left side of the door. It lifted up to reveal a handle. There was no key. There didn’t have to be. After all, who was going to move a dilapidated truck in a run-down shed for no good reason?

  The first thing I saw when I opened the door was a ladder. It lay against the interior wall, and beside it was a trapdoor, similar in size to the first, but this time set into the ground. It was secured, but only with a heavy lock and hasp. Beyond it I could see a pair of small air vents. A larger vent in the roof let in sunlight and air.

  ‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Can anybody hear me?’

  After a couple of seconds, a girl’s voice sounded faintly beneath my feet.

  ‘I can hear you. Please help me! Please!’

  I knelt beside the first vent. ‘Anna?’

  ‘Yes, I’m Anna! I’m Anna!’

  ‘My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private detective. I’m going to get you out, okay?’

  ‘Okay. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.’

  ‘I won’t, but I have to find something to break the lock. I’m not going to go without you, I promise. I just need a minute.’

  ‘Hurry, just hurry!’

  I went back into the garage and found a crowbar, then set to work on the lock. It took a couple of minutes, but eventually it broke and I opened the trapdoor.

  The cell was about six feet deep and roughly square. Anna Kore was chained to the eastern wall. There was clear plastic sheeting on the ground beneath her, and a slop bucket in the corner. She wore sneakers, oversized jeans, and a man’s sweater, and had wrapped her upper body in a blanket to ward off the cold and damp, despite the layers of insulation that had been laid into the walls and on the ground under the sheeting. She had a small battery-powered lamp for illumination, and there were magazines and paperback books scattered around her. She raised her arms to me.

  ‘Get me out!’

  I turned to get the ladder, and heard a sound from outside. It was a vehicle approaching, and then the engine died and all was quiet again.

  ‘What is it?’ called the girl. ‘Why aren’t you coming to get me?’

  I went back to the edge of the trapdoor. ‘Anna, you have to stay quiet. I think they’re here.’

  She gave out a little mew of fear. ‘No, don’t go. Get the ladder. It will only take a minute. Please! If you go, you won’t come back, and I’ll be left here.’

  I couldn’t stay. They were coming. As I moved away, Anna Kore began screaming, the noise carrying up from below and echoing off the walls, and I did something that broke my heart: I closed the trapdoor upon her. Her cries grew muffled, and when I climbed back into the garage I could not hear them at all. The breeze had picked up, and the sheets billowed and snapped, obscuring my view of the yard beyond. I had hoped that the return of either Mrs. Shaye or her son was a coincidence, but as I was climbing through the connecting door I spotted the little wireless sensor beside the lower hinge. I had broken the circuit by opening the door. It had probably sent a message to one or both of their cell phones, and so they had known that someone was on their property.

  I had just reached the hood of the truck when the first shot came, blowing a hole through one of the sheets and blasting the wall to my left with shotgun pellets. The second shot struck the hood and knocked away the supporting rod. I saw a figure in overalls moving between the sheets, and caught a glimpse of Pat Shaye’s face as he pumped the shotgun and took aim for a third time. I threw myself to the ground and started shooting.

  The bullet took Shaye in the right thigh. He stumbled into one of the sheets, and I saw the form of his body pressed against it. I fired again, and this time a roseate stain bloomed against the white. The third shot brought him to his knees and he dragged the sheet down with him, gathering it around him like a shroud as he fell. The shotgun lay in a puddle beside him as he struggled weakly against the material, the blood and oily water spreading across the whiteness of it.

  I heard a woman scream. Mrs. Shaye appeared from the side of the house, and then was lost to me in the billowing of the sheets. Like a movie projected with damaged frames, I saw her move through flickers of white from the corner to the center of the yard, pause for a second as she took in the sight of her son wriggling in his cocoon, then – another white flash, another moment lost – make for the shotgun. I gave her no warning. The bullet struck the house behind her, but when I tried to fire again the gun jammed, and she was almost at the shotgun. I was already looking for cover when Gordon Walsh appeared from the side of the house, his gun raised.

  ‘Police!’ he said. ‘Put your hands in the air.’

  Mrs. Shaye stopped in her tracks. She raised her hands and fell to her knees, but she no longer had any interest in the weapon. She simply inched her way across the yard on her knees until she reached her dying son, and she wrapped her arms around him as he shuddered against her in his death throes. Walsh did not try to stop her.

  Only when her son ceased to move did she start to cry.

  While Walsh kept an eye on Mrs. Shaye, I raised the trapdoor and let down the ladder into the cell. Mrs. Shaye had confirmed with a nod that both she and her son had keys to all the locks, and I used her set to free Anna from her chain. She climbed from the hole and emerged blinking into the fading light, then sprang
at Mrs. Shaye. Her left hand tore a clump of hair from the older woman’s head, and her right raked four parallel cuts down her right cheek before Walsh and I could drag her off. I led Anna into the yard, and her eyes found the shrouded form of Patrick Shaye.

  ‘Is he dead?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Anna said something else to me, but I could not understand her words.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Don’t leave her down there,’ she repeated. ‘The other girl. Please don’t leave her down there.’

  ‘What other girl?’ I said

  ‘She’s in the hole,’ said Anna. ‘I saw her bones.’

  And still Mrs. Shaye said nothing, and silent she would remain until they came to take her away.

  40

  All that we subsequently learned was pieced together from what Anna Kore told us, itself a product of overheard words, snatched sentences, and the words of Pat Shaye when he came to her at night, whispering to her as he touched her. He had taken her in the parking lot, a crime of opportunity made easier by her familiarity with him, but his mother had provided him with an alibi when the police questioned everyone. She had been angry with him, though, Anna had said. They had kept her in the house that first night, and she had heard them arguing.

  ‘You don’t shit on your own doorstep,’ Mrs. Shaye had told her son. ‘There’ll be questions. They’ll be looking for her.’

  But Pat had been overcome with desire because the other girl had died. Anna didn’t know her name, or where she’d come from, but they’d had her for a while: a year, she thought, maybe a little more. That was how they worked, how it worked, because Pat Shaye had needs. Pat Shaye liked little girls, and his mother had come up with a solution: You don’t molest lots of girls, because that’s how you get caught. Instead you just take one, and you use her until she’s too old for your tastes, and then you find another.