The Woman in the Woods

by John Connolly

  “I’m fond of Leila,” said Hillick, once he’d purged himself some. “She’s a good girl. And Shears is right: she’s smart.”

  “So she could be holding out on you?” Parker asked.

  “I guess, but I don’t see why she wouldn’t want to help us figure out what’s going on.”

  “Perhaps she’s scared.”

  “Yeah, but she’s also tough. Her mom’s been lingering for a long time. It would be a mercy if she was taken to the Lord, but I’ve never heard Leila complain, not once. What I’m trying to say is that if Leila Patton had information that could point toward proof of intent to do harm to Dobey or Esther, I’d expect her to tell us.”

  “So what’s she hiding?” asked Parker.

  “Well, maybe that’s what you’re here to find out.”

  CHAPTER

  LXXXIX

  Giller sat at the kitchen table, staring toward the front door. Gregg Mullis was lying half in the hall, half in the living room, so Giller could only see his feet, one of which was still twitching. Tanya was slumped against the wall, her legs outstretched before her. The bullet had taken her in the chest, killing her instantly.

  Pallida Mors was standing over the woman’s body, as though puzzled by the alteration wrought upon it by mortality, a pale ghost with a new house to haunt. Her hair was entirely concealed by the blue plastic skullcap, rendering her appearance stranger still. A pistol, deformed by a suppressor, hung at her side, exhaling a final wisp of smoke. Giller had never heard a suppressed shot fired before. He was surprised at how loud it sounded; not like a little cough, but an angry bark.

  As Giller watched, Mors knelt and placed the palm of her left hand on Tanya’s womb. She kept it there as she turned to Giller.

  “I can feel it kicking,” she said.

  Giller said nothing. He had wandered into hell, and now one of its demons was speaking to him in a language he did not wish to understand. He put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes, but could still hear what Mors said next.

  “It’s stopped now.”

  Footsteps drew nearer, and with them the stink of Mors, potent even amid the gun smoke, the blood, and the smell of dying. She was its quintessence, the crux of it made manifest. It was in her name. She was Death itself. And Giller understood that every moment of his being, from the fusion of seed and egg in a distant congress, through pain and joy and love and loss, to the final clarity of this last poor province, a realm of splintered wood and stinking food, had been leading to just this instant, and so he was defined by what he had caused to be committed here, and the little good he had done in life would be swept away like ash from the final conflagration of his existence.

  “Look at me,” said Mors.

  Giller opened his eyes, and was named by the gun.

  CHAPTER

  XC

  Parker, Hillick, and Shears decided between them that it would be better if Parker spoke with Leila Patton alone. Hillick was of the opinion that any effort to intimidate the young woman was likely to fail, and the depth of the failure would be commensurate with the degree of intimidation involved: in other words, Patton would be three times as stubborn if faced with all of them.

  Parker was standing by his rental when Patton finally emerged at the end of her waitressing shift, still wearing the clothes in which she’d worked. He was parked far enough away so as not to risk alarming her, but close enough that she couldn’t get to her car and drive off before he could speak with her.

  “Miss Patton?”

  She stopped by her vehicle, and he noticed that she immediately slipped a key between the middle and ring fingers of her right hand before clenching a fist. Clearly she wasn’t about to be taken by surprise again. She squinted at Parker, the sun behind him.

  “You were in the diner earlier,” she said. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

  Parker stopped just out of striking range.

  “My name is Charlie Parker. We spoke on the telephone, but didn’t get very far. I thought I’d try a conversation in person.”

  She didn’t relax, but she shifted the key in her hand in order to open her car door.

  “I told you: I have nothing to say.”

  “People are dying, Leila, and not just here. I think whoever killed Dobey and Esther murdered a woman in Maine and dumped her body at a quarry. I think they’re going to keep on killing until they get what they want.”

  Patton stopped, the key in the lock, and turned to face him.

  “Esther’s missing, not dead. Dobey died in a fire.”

  “I don’t think you believe that for one moment, just as you don’t believe Dobey killed himself through carelessness with a joint.”

  “I don’t know what I believe.”

  He had her now. He could hear it in her voice.

  “But you cared about both of them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’d like to talk to you about them for a few minutes. You may know more than you think.”

  “I have to get back to my mom. She’s sick.”

  Parker just listened. Anything he said wouldn’t have helped. He waited, and watched the fight go out of Leila Patton. She silently took in the parking lot, the diner, and the town of Cadillac itself, as though wondering how, or if, she might ever escape them all.

  “If it’s true,” she said at last, “about these people, whoever they are, then you’re going to stop them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t that what the police are supposed to do?”

  “Sometimes I do it better.”

  She sized Parker up, and still appeared to find him wanting. He didn’t take it personally.

  “Alone?” she asked.

  “I have help, if I need it.”

  “And have you needed it in the past?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “I suppose I could have googled you,” she said, “but I’ve grown to hate that kind of thing. It’s creepy.”

  “Agreed.”

  “If I had searched, would I have liked what I found?”

  She was facing him now, and he felt certain she had something to tell. He could see it in her eyes.

  “I hope so. Not all of it, maybe, but most. Even I don’t care for all I’ve done.”

  When she spoke again, her voice was so soft that the breeze almost scattered her words before Parker could catch them.

  “I’m afraid she’ll come back.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman who tried to hurt me.”

  “Did she say she would?”

  “She didn’t say anything at all.”

  “And yet?”

  Patton’s nose wrinkled, like a small mammal sniffing for the presence of a larger carnivore.

  “She smelled bad—not like she didn’t bathe enough, but bad from the inside. You probably don’t know what I mean. I’m not explaining it very well.”

  Parker stepped closer.

  “You wake in the night,” he said, “and you can still smell it, as though she’s there in the room with you. When you’re low, or scared, you taste it in your food. You catch traces of it from spoiled milk, from open drains, from roadkill.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s it. Does it go away?”

  “No, not if you’ve been touched by it. It stays.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “You hope for the removal of its source from the world, and live with the memory.” He smiled at her. “How about this: if you give me some of your time, I’ll talk. I’ll tell you about myself, and how I know these things. When I’m done, if you don’t trust me, I’ll leave, and I won’t trouble you again. I’ll catch a flight back east, and find another way to stop what’s happening. I won’t involve you in it, but . . .”

  He didn’t finish.

  “But I’m already involved, right?” said Patton. “That’s what you were going to say.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that woman will come back, won’t she?”

  “It’s
possible. Either you’re a loose end, in which case she’ll return because she has to, or she enjoys what she does, and she’ll return because she wants to. For those like her, the ones corrupted deep down, it’s usually more the second than the first.”

  “You could have said that earlier. You could have used the threat to make me change my mind.”

  “I’m not here to threaten you, and I didn’t have to change your mind. You already knew the right thing to do. You just needed someone to confirm it for you. And you’re not doing this for yourself. I don’t think that’s the kind of person you are. You’ll do it because it’ll save others, but there’s nothing wrong with saving yourself along the way.”

  “That’s quite a speech.”

  “I get a lot of practice.”

  “I guess you must.” She opened her car door. “Follow me.”

  CHAPTER

  XCI

  Owen Weaver sat with his grandson on the living-room couch, watching a cartoon custom-tooled to sell toys to kids, and thus wring maximum profit from minimal entertainment.

  Daniel had endured a bad night, waking up screaming from a nightmare, which was unusual for him. It meant Holly also had a bad night, since Daniel then insisted on sleeping in her bed, although he didn’t actually sleep much at all. On any other day Holly might have kept him home, but Owen had an internist’s appointment that morning, for which he’d been waiting weeks, and the Barhams were at a funeral in Bangor, so there was no one to take care of the boy. As a result Daniel—subdued, and heavy lidded—had been forced to spend an unhappy day at Saber Hill.

  Daniel’s eyes were now fixed on the screen, but Owen could tell he was taking in little of what he was seeing. He’d tried to cajole Daniel into lying down and catching up on the shut-eye he’d missed, but he insisted on staying where he was, and every time his eyes started to close he shifted position, as though to keep himself awake.

  “Hey,” said Owen.

  Daniel looked up.

  “You don’t need to be scared about falling asleep. I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere. I’ll stay on this couch until morning if you want me to, except when I got to go pee-pee, because we don’t want to be sitting on no pee-pee couch, do we?”

  Daniel didn’t crack a smile. Usually even the mention of someone else’s toilet habits was enough to make him bust a gut. Daniel’s brow furrowed, and he asked his grandfather a question.

  “Why don’t I look like Mom?”

  Owen assembled his features into his best poker face.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “What I said. Why don’t I look like Mom? Her hair is real light, and mine is dark.”

  But it was more than that, Owen knew. The boy didn’t yet have the vocabulary to express the complexity of his feelings.

  “Because the two of you are just different, is all,” said Owen. “Could be you have more of your father in your appearance.”

  “But you said you’d never met my dad.”

  “I’m guessing. That’s how these things sometimes are. Me, I always looked more like my father than my mother. If I’d taken after my mother, I’d have been prettier.”

  Again, no smile.

  “Why doesn’t Mom ever talk about my dad?”

  Where was this coming from?

  “It makes her sad.”

  “Why?”

  “It just does.”

  “Because he died?”

  “Yes. Because he died.”

  Daniel’s gaze shifted to the window, and the woods beyond.

  “Can someone have two mommies?”

  Good Lord.

  “Eh, I guess. Your friend Dina at school, she has two moms. Her daddy remarried, and Dina goes to stay with him and his new wife twice a month. Dina gets on okay with her stepmom, right?”

  Daniel nodded.

  “So she’s a second mom, in a way. Is that what you mean?”

  This time, Daniel shook his head.

  “What if your mom dies?” he asked. “What if your mom dies and you go to live with another mom?”

  Owen experienced a sense of constriction in his chest. If his left arm had gone numb and he’d keeled over from a heart attack, it wouldn’t have surprised him.

  “What about it?”

  “Is the dead mom still your mom?”

  Owen was in alien territory now, lost in the boonies. There was no right answer here. He could only be honest.

  “Yes,” he said. “She’d still be your mom.”

  Daniel’s chin trembled, and Owen gathered the boy to him and held him close as he started to sob.

  “But which one is real?” Daniel cried. “Which one is real?”

  CHAPTER

  XCII

  Days, even weeks, might have gone by before the remains of Garrison Pryor were discovered had the heat alarm in his kitchen not malfunctioned, causing it to beep incessantly, disturbing Pryor’s neighbors on either side and necessitating a visit from the super. Now a cadre of detectives and federal agents were staring down at what was left of Pryor’s body, along with the various pieces that had been excised from it and placed in the bathroom sink.

  “Someone really didn’t like him,” said one of the agents.

  “There wasn’t much of him to like,” came the reply.

  “There’s less now.”

  They heard movement behind them, and turned to see SAC Edgar Ross of the New York field office standing in the doorway. While Boston was involved in the Pryor investigation, the main impetus was coming from D.C. and New York, and from Ross in particular. He didn’t look as though he appreciated the agents’ humor, but he left it to his expression to communicate his displeasure. Finally, after an awkward minute of contemplation, he departed.

  “How the fuck did he get up here so fast?” said the first agent.

  His colleague shrugged. “They say he has a place over in Cambridge.”

  “On a federal salary?”

  “You don’t know? Ross comes from money. He’s not hurting. Shit, he’s even a member of one of those fancy clubs . . .”

  CHAPTER

  XCIII

  Connie White deposited into her bank account half the money given to her by Giller, and spent some on wool at the local craft shop and the remainder at Marshalls. Ordinarily she’d have saved a little, just in case, but she’d registered the look on Giller’s face when she told him about Holly Weaver’s boy: the Weaver name meant something to him, which guaranteed he’d be back with more money. White had no concerns that Giller might try to screw her over. He might not have been averse to negotiation—no businessman was—but she knew from asking around that Giller kept his word once a deal was made. To do otherwise wouldn’t have been good for his reputation as an honest broker.

  White pulled up outside her trailer, expecting to see Steeler emerge from his kennel, but there was no sign of the dog. Steeler was familiar with the sound of her car, and could sometimes be as lazy as sin, but he always made an appearance to greet her. She could see his chain snaking into the kennel. It was odd, but she wasn’t alarmed.

  “Steeler?”

  A bark came in response, not from the kennel but from inside the trailer. Maybe Eddy, her brother, had dropped by and allowed Steeler to go in with him—she’d been asking Eddy for weeks to take a look at the seal around the oven—although he wasn’t supposed to let Steeler enter the trailer because the dog was crazy for yarn and liked nothing better than to tear apart a ball of it with tooth and claw. But Eddy was fond of Steeler, and the dog knew it.

  “Shit, Eddy,” she said, as she opened the door and stepped inside, “I’ve told you before about—”

  An unfamiliar woman was sitting at the table, Steeler beside her, his front legs on her lap, his tail wagging. Steeler loved his mistress, and liked her brother a lot, but that had always appeared to be the limit of his affection for human beings.

  Until now.

  The woman was wearing a blue plastic skullcap, the hair beneath smeared tight against it. S
he had the skin of a drowning victim and the eyes of a doll. Then White was no longer looking at the intruder, or at Steeler, but at the gun that appeared from behind the dog’s back, the threat made more real by the suppressor on the muzzle. White had seen enough movies to know that nobody put a suppressor on a gun that wasn’t going to be used.

  “You have a nice dog,” said the woman.

  White tried to run, and Mors shot her in the back.

  CHAPTER

  XCIV

  Leila Patton lived on a street of identical single-story houses in a development that probably dated from the seventies. Most of the homes were in good condition, although the Pattons’ bore indicators of neglect suggestive of a dearth of time, money, or both. Parker pulled into the drive and got out of his car. He waited, as requested, for Patton to go inside first and make sure her mom was okay. Ten minutes went by, during which nothing stirred on the road beyond a single black cat with a dead bird in its teeth, before Parker heard the sound of a couple of windows opening at the front of the house, and Patton waved at him to enter.

  Although he did not comment on it, Parker could tell why she had opened the windows as soon as he reached the door. The house smelled of long-term illness, of the slow failure of the body and the steps taken to ease it. Parker heard the sound of a television from somewhere at the back of the house. A woman coughed, then was quiet.

  Patton was waiting for him in the living room. It was tidy in the way of rooms that are rarely used. Perhaps it was his knowledge of the family’s circumstances that colored his perceptions, but Parker thought it felt like a space awaiting mourners. The only incongruous detail was the piano in one corner. Parker didn’t know much about pianos, but the instrument was clean and free of dust, and the surrounding carpet bore the marks of repeated repositioning of the piano stool, which suggested it wasn’t just a decorative feature.

  “Do you want something to drink?” Patton asked. “I was going to make green tea.”

  “Sounds good.”