Bad Men (2003) (14 page)

“When?” said Crow.

“Four years ago, on an island called Sanctuary.”

For a moment, Crow did not move. It seemed almost as though the tension in his body dissipated as he realized that the hunt was now over, and that the time to join his ancestors had come at last. Then his hands tightened on his weapons, and he opened his mouth wide as he ran toward his pursuers, his last great scream echoing through the night as the first snows of winter fell upon him.

The muskets roared, and Crow fell backward into the water.

The river carried him away, and his name was never spoken again.

According to Amerling’s history, Buer, the one Crow knew as the “White Leader,” and his lieutenant, Barone, evaded capture. There were those who said that Buer was not his real name, and that a man fitting his description but with the name of Seera was wanted in Massachusetts in connection with the deaths of two women there. In any event, he disappeared after the events on Sanctuary, and was never seen again. Barone also vanished.

Amerling went on to cover the abduction of a woman in 1762, the disappearance of the men who had taken her to Dutch, and the subsequent discovery of one of them buried in the forest. The Dupree name cropped up again and again, and it was one of Joe Dupree’s ancestors who had made the stone cross that still stood amid the sunken remains of the old settlement and the graves of those who had died there. There was no mention of George Sherrin, who was found entangled in tree roots.

It was Amerling’s final paragraph that most intrigued Macy. It read:

To those looking in upon the island from outside, its history may appear bloody and strange. Yet those of us who have lived here for many years, and whose fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers lie buried in the island’s cemetery, have grown used to the strangeness of Dutch Island. Here, paths through the forest disappear in the space of a single week, and new paths take their place, so that a man may one day walk a trail familiar to him, yet find himself directed toward new surroundings by the end of it. We are used to the silences and we are used to the sounds that are native only to this small patch of land. We live in the shadow of its history, and walk by the gift of those who have gone before us.

Macy closed the slim volume and returned to the desk, the names encountered in Amerling’s history still rattling around in her head. Church. Lunt. Buer. Barone.

Barone. Barron.

It was probably just a coincidence, she thought, although it would explain why Barron was such a creep if his unpleasantness was part of a proud family tradition.

“You find what you were looking for?” asked the librarian.

“No,” said Macy. “I was hoping for answers.”

“Maybe you’ll have better luck on the island.”

“Maybe,” she said.

Out on Sanctuary, Joe Dupree was also finding himself short on answers. He had taken a ride out to Doug Newton’s house, as he had promised Berman. Newton and his mother lived near Seal Cove, close to the southernmost tip of the island. Their house was one of the oldest on Sanctuary, and one of the most carefully maintained. Doug had given it a fresh coat of paint the previous spring, so that it seemed to shine amid the trees that surrounded it.

The old woman wasn’t long for this earth. Dupree could see it in her face, could smell it in her room. When she died, the doctors would find some complicated way to explain her demise, but for Joe and Doug, and perhaps for the old woman herself, there was nothing complicated about it. She was just old. She was in her late eighties and her body was losing its final struggle to keep her alive. Her breathing was shallow and rasping, and the skin on her face and hands was almost translucent in its pallor. She was in no pain and there was nothing that a hospital could do for her now, so her son had taken her home to die. Debra Legere, who had some nursing experience, dropped by for four or five hours each day, sometimes a little longer if Doug had some work to do, although he was pretty much retired by now. Dupree figured that there was an arrangement between Debra, who was a widow, and Doug, who had never married, but he wasn’t about to pry into it. In any case, they were both strict Baptists, so there appeared to be a limit to the amount of arranging that they could do.

Dupree stood at the window of the old woman’s room and looked down to the yard below. It was a sheer drop. This side of the house was flat. There was a kitchen below, but since Doug had never found the need to extend it farther, it remained flush with the main wall. The way Dupree saw it, there was just no way that a little girl could reach the topmost window in the house.

“Did she have a stepladder, Doug?” he asked softly.

Doug’s mother had awakened briefly when they entered the room but had now slipped back into her troubled sleep.

Doug seemed to think about bristling, then decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “It’s nothing that I haven’t asked myself: how did she get up here? The answer is that I don’t know. I’m just telling you what I saw.”

“The window was locked?” Dupree tested the sash with his hand. It seemed solid enough.

“As far as I remember. It could be that I didn’t close it properly and the wind might have blown it open, except that there was no wind that night and, anyway, who ever heard of a wind that could blow a heavy sash window upward?”

Dupree stared into the forest. The window faced northeast. He could see the island’s central watchtower from where he stood, and part of the border of sunken trees that marked the boundary of the Site.

“You think I’m crazy?” asked Doug.

Dupree shook his head. He didn’t know what to think, except that it still seemed unlikely that a little girl could magic her way twenty feet off the ground in order to attack an old woman in her bedroom. “You always seemed pretty levelheaded to me,” he said at last. “What can I say? Keep the windows locked, the doors too. You got a gun?”

Doug nodded. “More than one.”

“Well, for crying out loud, don’t use any of them. The last thing I want to do is to have to haul you in for shooting someone.”

Doug said that he would bear it in mind. It wasn’t exactly a promise that he wouldn’t shoot anybody, but it was better than nothing.

Dupree was about to leave the room when a piece of paper, seemingly caught by a draft, rose from a corner by the drapes and then settled again. The policeman leaned down to examine it more closely, and found himself looking at a moth. It was ugly and gray, with yellow markings along its body. Its wings fluttered feebly.

“Doug, can you get me an empty mayo jar, or something with a lid on it?”

The older man found a jelly jar. Dupree scooped the moth from the floor, then refitted the lid carefully. He used his pocketknife to bore a hole in the top, in order to allow the insect some air, although he guessed that it didn’t have long to live.

Holding the jar up to the light from the window, he examined the moth, turning the bottle slowly to look at its wings and its markings. Doug Newton squinted at it, then shook his head.

“I’ve never seen a moth like that before,” he said.

Beside him, Dupree felt an uncomfortable ache spreading across his belly. Suddenly, Doug Newton’s tale of a levitating girl didn’t seem so far-fetched. He swallowed hard.

“I have,” he said.

They were four miles from the prison, following the banks of the river, when they saw the body. The Dismal Creek State Penitentiary lay at the end of an isolated road, with little traffic apart from prison vehicles. Anyone who found himself in trouble on that road was likely to be waiting a long time for help.

“Hell is that?” asked Misters.

“Looks like a woman,” said Torres. “Pull over.”

The woman lay by the side of the road, her legs splayed, her shoulders and head hidden in the long grass that grew by the hard shoulder. Her legs and buttocks were exposed where her skirt had ridden up over them. They pulled up a few feet from her and Torres got out, Misters about to follow until Torres told him to stay back.

“Keep an eye on him,” said Torres.

“He’s going nowhere,” said Misters, but he still remained close to the car and aware of Moloch, who was watching the proceedings with interest.

The woman was not moving, and Torres could see blood on her back. He leaned down and spread the grass that obscured her head.

“Oh sweet—”

He saw the red exposed flesh where her head should have been, then turned his face away in time to catch the slug on the bridge of his nose. He crumpled to the ground as Misters went for his own weapon, but a shadow fell across him and he looked up to see one of his own, a brother, holding a shotgun on him. From the grass at the other side of the road another man emerged, this one younger, with blond hair and a pretty, almost feminine, face. Behind him was a muscular man with short red hair, wearing tight faded jeans and a T-shirt decorated with the Stars and Stripes. The red-headed man took Misters’s gun, then used plastic restraints to tie the investigator’s hands behind his back. Meanwhile, the blond kid knelt by Torres and removed the keys from his belt and the gun from his holster. Then he walked over to the Land Cruiser, opened the door, and released Moloch from his chains.

Moloch stretched as he emerged from the car, then took Torres’s gun from the kid and walked over to where Misters squatted. He raised the gun and pointed at the investigator’s head.

“Now,
Mr.
Misters, do you have anything to say to me?’

Misters didn’t open his mouth. He looked up at Moloch with mingled fear and disgust.

“I could shoot you,” said Moloch, “shoot you like the boorish dog that you are.”

He aimed the gun.

“Bang,” he said. He tipped the muzzle to his mouth and blew a stream of imaginary smoke from the barrel.

“But I’m not going to shoot you,” he said.

“We taking him with us?” asked Dexter.

“No.”

“If we leave him, he’ll identify us.”

“Really?” asked Moloch.

He stared hard at Misters.

“Oh that my eyes might see and my tongue might speak,” he said. “Of what wonders might I tell.”

He turned to the young white boy.

“Blind him, then cut his tongue out. He never had much use for it anyway.”

They worked quickly, pushing the SUV into the river, the body of Torres and the woman inside it. Misters they left, bleeding and in shock, by the riverbank. The whole operation had taken less than three minutes.

Braun made a call on his cell phone, and seconds later, they were joined by Powell and Leonie, who had been driving the lookout vans positioned two hundred yards at either side of the ambush area, their sides decorated with the removable logo of a nonexistent forestry company so that, if any other car had taken that road before their work was done, they could be held back with a story about a fallen tree. In the event, no other vehicle had troubled them. Then the little convoy, five men and one woman in two vans, headed at speed toward the highway, and the north.

Dexter, Leonie, and Moloch drove in silence for a time, Dexter glancing occasionally in his side mirror. Three cars behind were Braun, Powell, and the boy, and that suited Dexter just fine. The boy Willard gave him the creeps, the beauty and seeming innocence of him all the more unsettling for what lay beneath. Still, Moloch liked him, and he had proved useful in the end. He had found the woman, trawling the side roads, the bars, and cheap motels for almost a week before he’d come across “a suitable candidate,” as he’d described her. Then he had killed her and brought her remains to the meeting place on time.

Dexter was a clever guy, maybe not as clever as he thought he was, but still pretty smart, all things considered. He’d done some reading, and liked books on psychology. Dexter figured that if you were going to be dealing with people, then you should try to find out as much as possible about the general principles behind them. He particularly liked the abnormal stuff because, in his line of work, abnormal was what he dealt with on a day-to-day basis. He knew all about sociopaths and psychopaths and assorted other deviants, and had begun to categorize the freaks he had met according to his diagnosis of their particular abnormality.

But Willard…

Dexter hadn’t found a book that dealt with anything quite like Willard before. Willard was off the scale. In fact, Dexter wasn’t even sure that Willard was entirely human, although that wasn’t the kind of thing that he was about to say out loud in the company of Moloch or anybody else. But sometimes he found Willard staring at him, and when he looked into the kid’s eyes it was like falling into a void. Dexter figured that dying in space might feel something like seeing oneself reflected in Willard’s eyes: there was only nothingness masquerading as blackness. It wasn’t even hostile. It was just blank.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Moloch.

“Stuff.”

“Don’t you go giving too much away now.”

“Like I said, just stuff.”

Beside him, Leonie just stared silently at the passing cars.

“Willard stuff?” said Moloch.

“How’d you know that?”

“I was watching you. I saw you look in the mirror. Your face changed. I can read you like a book, Dex.”

“I don’t like him. I’ve never been anything but straight with you, and I’m telling you the truth of it now. He’s out there.”

“He’s been useful.”

“Yeah.”

“And loyal.”

“To you.”

“That’s all that matters.”

“With respect, man, you been in jail these past three years. Difficult to work with someone who don’t answer to anyone but a man in a prison suit.”

“But you managed it.”

“I got a lot of patience, and the Verso thing was a piece of luck.”

“Yes,” said Moloch. “I take it something is being done about him.”

“As we speak.”

“You should have gotten Willard to do it. He never liked Verso.”