Authors: John Connolly
‘Probably.’
‘Then I’ll pass.’
Parker waited.
‘It looks like whatever favors you called in worked,’ said Bloom. ‘The chief medical examiner and her deputy are still tied up with the Oran Wilde business, but Bruno Perlman’s body was transferred yesterday evening to the ME’s office in Augusta, and an autopsy was performed this morning by Dr Robert Drummond, who is first on call when the ME or her deputy is tied up or on leave. I spoke to him on Skype. He looks about twelve years old, but he’s good.’
‘How good?’
‘Very, if his lectures are anything to go by. I got one on drowning. Apparently determining if someone has died by drowning is more complicated than I’d really like it to be, and he gave me ten minutes on the tests that should be done in order to establish, and I quote, “with any degree of medico-legal confidence,” that drowning was involved. Then he lost me at “intravascular fat globules”, to be honest. But it’s enough to know that, under normal circumstances, we’d be waiting on the results of full toxicological screening, histologic analyses of all organs, and something called a diatom test before any pronouncement could be made.’
‘Algae,’ said Parker.
‘What?’
‘Diatoms are algae. Little unicellular plants. They’re found in water, and their concentrations vary according to, I guess, temperature, mineral content, acidity, and whatever else affects water. So you can tie a body to a particular area of water, and a particular time, through analysis of the diatom concentrations in tissue.’
Bloom was staring at him. He shrugged.
‘Call it gene memory.’
‘
So
…’ she continued, after a suitable pause, ‘we would have been waiting for those results if it wasn’t for this.’
She pulled a sheet of paper from a file and passed it to Parker. It was a pretty good quality print of a skull X-ray. He’d have spotted the mark even if it hadn’t been circled. It stood out as a small dark vertical against the pallor of the skull, just above the socket of the right eye.
‘That’s the supraorbital foramen,’ said Bloom. ‘See, I know stuff too.’
‘Did Dr Drummond tell you that?’
‘Yes, but at least I was listening.’
‘What does he think it is?’
‘I got another lecture when I asked,’ said Bloom. ‘Did I mention that Dr Drummond, in addition to being good, is also cautious?’
‘I took it as given. Let me guess: after he’d prevaricated for a while, he told you that a blade could have made it. But you’d probably already established that yourself.’
‘I didn’t want to show off. He found other marks inside the orbital fissure – not as pronounced as that one, but still visible. They don’t show up as well on the copies.’
Parker returned the print to her. He didn’t need to be given any more photos, and he didn’t need Bloom, Drummond, or anyone else to tell him what had happened to Bruno Perlman, probably before he died.
‘What kind of blade was it?’ he asked.
‘Drummond thinks it was surgical: a scalpel of some kind.’
‘Did it kill him?’
‘No. Drummond believes Perlman was still alive when he went into the water, but there probably wouldn’t have been much left of his eye. Drummond’s report has gone to the state police. I’m expecting them here within the hour. I just thought you’d like to hear it from me first.’
He thanked her, and stood to leave. Bloom returned the print of the skull to her file.
‘I appreciate your advice and your help,’ she said. ‘It was—’
But when she looked up again, Parker was already gone.
29
P
arker drove to Green Heron Bay, walked to his bedroom, and reached behind the big closet that faced his bed. His fingers found the butt of the gun taped to the wood, and wrenched it free. The weapon was already loaded, although without a bullet in the chamber. He had hidden the gun away when he first arrived at the house, although he could not say why. It was a licensed firearm, and he had more cause than most to feel that a gun might be necessary for his protection. Those who had shot him were themselves dead, as were the ones who had sent them to dispatch him, but such acts of vengeance left trailing tendrils, and their stings could hold their potency for lifetimes, generations.
Yet still he had not wanted to look upon the gun, and had rarely touched it since coming to Boreas. Now he held it in his right hand, and the grip and weight were instantly familiar. He went back downstairs, unearthed the cleaning kit from the storage area beneath the stairs, disassembled the weapon, cleaned and oiled its component parts, then ressembled it. And in putting it together again, it felt to him that he was also piecing back something deep inside himself, an element of his being that had been mislaid, but not lost. When he was finished, he tucked the gun into the waistband of his trousers. They fitted him more loosely than before, and he had gone down two notches on his belt. Two was comfortable, if slightly less snug than he might have wished, while three was too tight. With the gun in place, his trousers now sat perfectly. He wondered if he should take it as a sign.
He changed into a clean shirt. Like his trousers, his shirts didn’t fit as well, but in this case the looseness served to hide the gun. He walked outside, closed the front door behind him, and looked upon the waves. The tide was coming in again, and while the sky remained clear, the sea appeared to have taken on a darker tone. He had always loved the sea, had loved it ever since his first memory of his mother and father taking him north to Scarborough to meet his grandfather. He recalled walking on Ferry Beach with the old man – for his grandfather had always appeared old to him but not, strangely, as old as his wife, a strange, near-silent woman who simmered with disappointment and regret. Parker had never spoken his feelings about her aloud, but he remembered being secretly, shamefully glad when she died and, as he grew older, he believed that his grandfather, although bereaved, might have felt her passing as a kind of blessing, an easing of the burden on both of them.
Parker felt the sand beneath his feet, and for a moment he was a boy again, his grandfather beside him. And so convinced was he of the old man’s presence that he closed his eyes, and his right hand reached out and tested the air, and he experienced a twinge of disappointment when it made no contact with his shade. Yet still he walked with him in his memory, and heard his grandfather’s voice telling tales of Scarborough, and of the violence of its origins. Parker had been fascinated as a boy by tales of cowboys and the Old West, and it delighted him that he could walk in places where natives and settlers had fought and died, their blood leaching into the ground so that the memory of it was retained in the very atoms of the earth. Scarborough even boasted a Massacre Pond, where Richard Hunnewell and eighteen other men were slaughtered in 1703, and a Garrison Lane, after the fortress built at Prout’s Neck at the start of the eighteenth century. Curiously, these seemed more real to Parker than Old Fort Western in Augusta, the oldest surviving wooden fort in New England. Oh, he had been entranced by it, and had loved to visit – the fort was a compulsory stop during their family vacations in Maine – yet the images he had recreated in his head of the Scarborough settlements were more visceral, more immediate. Old Fort Western had to be shared with others, but the shadow-Scarborough was his alone. It lived in him and he, when he walked through the physicality of its present incarnation, lived in it.
He opened his eyes again. To his left was the Winter house. Lights burned in its downstairs windows. He began walking toward it. Already he had ceased to notice the gun at his back.
30
T
he two detectives from the Major Crimes Unit of the Maine State Police arrived in Boreas shortly after Charlie Parker left Cory Bloom’s office. The detectives were named Tyler and Welbecke, and were based out of Belfast. Both were female, and only slightly younger than Bloom herself. Tyler was the chattier of the two, Welbecke the more reserved, but Bloom didn’t pick up bad vibes from either of them. As was now obligatory whenever two or more cops were gathered together, talk turned to Oran Wilde. Tyler and Welbecke were about the only detectives in the MCU who hadn’t been dragged into the investigation and search. Initially, said Tyler, they’d been kind of pissed at being out on the periphery, but now the media was starting to ask how one teenager suspected of five killings could continue to evade the combined might of Maine’s finest, and consequently Tyler and Welbecke were among the few currently out of range of that particular shitstorm.
Together the three women went over the paperwork accumulated so far, which wasn’t a whole lot, and then Cory Bloom accompanied them as they looked at the parking lot where Bruno Perlman’s vehicle had been found, and the beach at Mason Point. By now the light was fading. The sea was dark, darker than Cory Bloom could remember seeing it in many months, so that it seemed slowly to be contaminating the sky. Beside her, Tyler shivered.
‘Grim place to wash up,’ she said.
Bloom took in the strand, trying to look at it through fresh eyes. She supposed that Mason Point wasn’t the prettiest stretch of beach in Maine, but in summer it was okay. It was just one of those places that needed people to bring it alive – living people, that is. A corpse was never going to do much for it.
‘It’s not so bad,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I don’t think it mattered to Bruno Perlman.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
Welbecke spoke up. She had said very little since arriving in Boreas, preferring to let Tyler do most of the talking, and interjecting only to clarify points. She was more attractive than Tyler, but in a hard way, and she exuded negativity. Bloom guessed that she probably didn’t have many friends. She was equally threatening to both sexes.
‘When did Charlie Parker get involved in all this?’ she asked.
Bloom tried to detect the nuance behind the question. Dislike? No, that wasn’t exactly it. There was a tone, though.
‘A day or two after the body was found.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He just raised some questions, that’s all.’
‘Such as?’
Welbecke was persistent, Bloom would give her that. Bloom had nothing to hide, so she went through her dealings with Parker as thoroughly as she could.
‘You let him examine the vehicle?’ said Welbecke, and this time Bloom
really
didn’t like her tone. ‘You let him potentially contaminate a crime scene?’
‘If I hadn’t,’ said Bloom, ‘then Perlman’s body would still be in the undertakers’ refrigerator. Nobody from MCU was in a hurry to come calling until Parker took an interest.’
‘You need a private investigator to tell you how to do your job?’ said Welbecke.
‘No, but you clearly do.’
Welbecke made a movement with her neck, loosening it up in preparation for a fight. Bloom had only ever seen men do that before, and then largely the kind of oversized assholes who were looking for trouble, but were too dumb to understand that telegraphing the fact gave their opponents time to react and take them out. It made Bloom respect Welbecke less, which gave her no pleasure. She didn’t like seeing women behave as badly as men, and especially not cops. Law enforcement remained a profoundly sexist environment, and women would always be held to a higher standard than men under all circumstances, while simultaneously being expected to fail to reach it. She was just glad that her predecessor was no longer around to witness this pissing match. It would simply have confirmed all that Erik Lange and his cronies believed about women.
Tyler, who had been looking on in something like amusement, chose that moment to act as peacemaker.
‘Whoa, whoa!’ she said. ‘Nobody’s pointing fingers here, okay?’ She addressed herself to Bloom. ‘You’ll just appreciate that there are certain ways of doing things, and this is all maybe a little unorthodox, you know? But I don’t think any harm has been done, right, Stacey?’
Welbecke gave the impression that she thought harm might have been done in spades, but contented herself with looking away and offering a ‘Like I could give a shit’ shrug to the world in general. Meow, thought Bloom: saucer of fucking milk for Detective Welbecke, please.
Tyler turned her back on her partner and walked toward the outcrop of land that gave Mason Point its name. Bloom followed, not caring to remain alone in Welbecke’s company for longer than necessary. Tyler was watching the movement of the incoming tide. Even from where she stood, it was possible to detect the vicious crosscurrents.
‘Do people swim here?’ she asked.
‘There are signs in the parking lot warning about the tides,’ said Bloom. ‘We usually have a couple on the sand too, but they’re being repainted at the moment, before the season kicks in.’
Tyler took a deep breath of sea air.
‘How long have you and Welbecke been partners?’ asked Bloom.
‘Couple of months. My turn: did you tell Parker about the marks on Perlman’s skull?’
Bloom felt her face redden. She still didn’t believe that she’d done anything wrong by keeping him informed, but strictly speaking she shouldn’t have shared any of it with him. That was true of all that had occurred, which brought them right back to square one: a body frozen in a locker while the best part of thirty detectives in Maine, and more cops in adjacent states, chased a teenage ghost.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I did.’
‘Welbecke is a by-the-numbers kind of person, you understand? And, technically, all that she said was right. Do you know Gordon Walsh over at MCU?’
‘No.’
‘I guess you’d call him my mentor. He’s good police. He’s also the one Parker spoke to about Perlman. If Welbecke has a problem with anything that’s occurred here, she’ll have to bring it to Walsh, and he has a lot of respect for Parker. But she won’t complain. She’s just blowing off steam. Like I told you, she’s by-the-numbers, but that’s not always a bad thing, especially now that we may be opening a murder book on this.’
‘I understand.’
And she did. Tyler was letting Bloom know that she’d take care of Welbecke, and in return Bloom needed to close down the channel of communication between Parker and herself.