The Wolf in Winter (31 page)

“You’ll leave with nothing,” she said.

“Before you do that,” said Louis, “you ought to call your son.”

He placed a cell phone on the kitchen table and slid it carefully to the end nearest Zilla. He lowered his gun. Angel did the same. Zilla Daund approached the table. She picked up the phone. There was one name on the display: Kerr, her younger boy.

She called his number. He answered.

“Kerr?” she said.

“Mom?
Mom
?
”

“Kerr, are you okay?”

“I don’t know where I am, Mom. I got jumped by some men, and they’ve been driving me around for hours. Mom, I’m scared. What’s happening?”

“You’re going to be fine, honey. It’s a big mistake. Those men are about to let you go. I love you.”

“Mom? What—”

Zilla Daund killed the connection. She placed the knife back in its block. She bit her lower lip and shook her head. Her eyes were else
where. A tear trickled down one cheek, but whether it was for her son, her husband, or herself could not be known.

“Your word?” she said.

“He’ll be released unharmed,” said Angel.

He didn’t like this. He didn’t like it at all. Threatening kids wasn’t in his nature. It was necessary, but that didn’t make it right.

“How can I trust you?” said Zilla Daund.

“Without overstating the obvious,” said Louis, “you don’t have much choice. But I figure Cambion told you enough about us, and you’ve maybe learned a little more in the meantime.”

“We made some calls,” she admitted.

“And?”

“If we’d known about you, we’d have killed you before we went after the detective.”

“Ambitious.”

“And careful.”

“No. If you were careful, you’d have done your homework first.”

Zilla Daund conceded the point

“Who told you to kill the detective?” said Louis.

“Hayley Conyer.”

“Who’s Hayley Conyer?”

“The chief selectman of the town of Prosperous, Maine.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t ask, but everything Hayley does is for the good of the town.”

“You kill for anyone else?”

“No, just her.”

“For money?”

“She pays, but we’d have helped her for nothing if we had to. We’re of the town from generations past.”

“Who else knew?”

“Morland, the chief of police. Pastor Warraner. The rest of the board of selectmen.”

“Did you kill a homeless man named Jude in Portland and make it look like suicide?”

“Yes.”

“And his daughter?”

“No.”

“What’s so special about Prosperous?” asked Angel.

Zilla Daund’s mouth settled into the odd grimace of determination that Louis had identified back at the bookstore, her teeth gritted, her lips slightly parted.

“That’s all you get,” she said.

“You sold out your town pretty easily,” said Louis.

“I didn’t sell it out at all,” said Zilla Daund. “Prosperous will eat you alive.”

Louis shot her twice. She shuddered on the kitchen floor for a time before she died. Louis walked to the front window of the house and looked out. It was already getting dark. The houses in this modern dormitory community all sat on large lots divided by hedges and trees. Lights burned in some of the homes, but there was nobody on the streets. Louis wondered how anyone could live in a development like this, with its near-identical dwellings on clearly delineated lots, the tiny differences in detail or aspect designed to give a false impression of individuality. Maybe killing people was the only way the Daunds could keep from going crazy.

Given more time, they would have searched the house, but Angel was uneasy and eager to be on the move. From his jacket pocket he produced two flasks of carbolic acid, or liquefied phenol. He and Louis retraced their steps through the house, spraying the carbolic acid as they went. Phenol was a useful contaminant of DNA samples. Once they were done, they left the house and returned to their cars. Each had a false adhesive number plate attached to the original. They
took only seconds to remove, and melted in open flame. Louis made the call to Kerr Daund’s captors, but they were instructed not to release him until the following morning, by which time Angel and Louis would be far from Asheville, North Carolina—but considerably closer to Prosperous, Maine.

CHAPTER

LII

They did not immediately descend on Prosperous. Instead, Angel and Louis waited, and they planned.

An apartment on Eastern Promenade, in Portland, was rented in the name of one of Louis’s shelf companies. At the Great Lost Bear, Dave Evans turned a blind eye as a succession of meetings took place in his office, until eventually he resigned himself to doing his paperwork in a booth by the bar. Prosperous was visited by a pair of Japanese businessmen and their wives, who endeared themselves to everyone they met with their courtesy and their enthusiasm. They took a lot of photographs, but then that was to be expected of tourists from the Far East. They even accepted it in good spirits when they were prevented from entering the cemetery that surrounded the old church. The ground was unsafe, they were told, but plans were being put in place to mark a route through the gravestones to the church itself. Perhaps next time, if they returned.

And one evening, shortly after Angel and Louis’s arrival in Portland, Ronald Straydeer came to the Great Lost Bear. Ronald had rarely frequented the city’s bars when he did drink, and now that he had given up he had no cause to visit them at all, but Angel and Louis preferred to conduct their business away from their apartment, for the fewer people who knew about it the better. The meeting with Ronald
had been arranged through Rachel Wolfe, as Ronald did not know of any other way to contact the two men whom he sought. He had left a message for her at the hospital where the detective still lay in a coma. Ronald’s short note requested simply that Rachel call him. Rachel had met Ronald on a couple of occasions while she was living in Scarborough, so she knew who he was, and was aware of the mutual respect that existed between him and her former lover. She asked no questions when he told her that he wanted to be put in touch with Angel and Louis, but simply passed the message on to them. When Angel eventually called, Ronald had said only this: “I saw something happen in Prosperous, something bad.”

And Angel knew that they were about to be handed another piece of the puzzle.

Over coffee in the back office, Ronald told Angel and Louis what he had witnessed: a girl swallowed by the earth in the shadow of an old church, while a group of older men and a woman, accompanied by a pastor and a policeman, stood by and watched. If the two men were surprised by his tale, they didn’t show it. If they were skeptical, Ronald could detect no trace.

“What do you think happened to her?” asked Louis.

“I think something pulled her underground,” said Ronald.

“Something?”
said Louis.

It seemed to Ronald to be the first expression of any doubt, but he was mistaken. It came to him that these men had seen and heard things stranger even than this.

“It’s not enough,” Louis continued. “We need more. We can’t go in blind.”

Ronald had thought on this too. He had ransacked his memories of tribal lore—the Cherokee worship of the cedar tree, based on the belief that the Creator had imbued it with the spirits of those who had perished during the times of eternal night; the Canotila, or tree dwellers, of the Lakota; the Abenakis’ tale of the creation of man from the
bark of ash trees; and the forest-dwelling Mikum-wasus of his own Penobscot people—but he could find no explanation for what he had seen. He had a vision of a great tree growing upside down, its leafless crown far below the ground, its trunk extending upward to roots that twitched and groped, breaking through the earth to the air above; and at its heart, surrounded by the husks of dead girls, was an entity that had come from far away, a spirit that had infused the stones of an old church, traveling with it as it crossed land and sea before retreating into the new ground in which the foundations of that church were laid, creating a form for itself from wood and sap. But the question that consumed him most was its nature, for he believed that men created gods as much, if not more, than gods created men. If this old god existed, it did so because there were men and women who permitted it to continue to exist through their beliefs. They fed it, and it, in turn, fed them.

Ronald took from his jacket a sheaf of photocopied pages and laid them before Angel and Louis. The images on them were undated, but they depicted the carved heads that could be seen both inside and outside the Blessed Chapel of the Congregation of Adam Before Eve & Eve Before Adam. He had found the pictures buried in the archives of the Center for Maine History, and then, unbeknownst to him, had followed a research path similar to the one pursued by the detective, staring at images of the foliate heads to be found on the churches and cathedrals of Western Europe. The English had called it the Green Man, but it predated that name by more than a millennium, and its spirit was older still. When the first men came, it was waiting for them among the trees, and in their minds it formed itself in their image: a human face rendered in wood and leaf.

“It may be that it looks like this,” said Ronald.

Angel picked up one of the pictures. It was the face of winter, the bleakest and most hostile of the visages from the Prosperous church. He thought of what Agent Ross had said to them back in Brooklyn. It
didn’t matter whether a thing existed or not. What mattered was the trouble caused by those who believed in its existence.

“You talked of roots,” he said.

“Yes,” said Ronald. “I think roots drew the girl down.”

“Roots and branches,” said Angel. “Wood.”

“And what does wood do?” asked Louis.

Angel smiled as he replied.

“It burns.”

THE KILLINGS IN ASHEVILLE
hadn’t gone unremarked in Boston, for Garrison Pryor’s people had been following trails similar to those walked by Angel and Louis, albeit a little more discreetly. The deaths of William and Zilla Daund simply confirmed what Pryor had begun to suspect: that the attack on the detective had been ordered from the town of Prosperous. This indicated that the decision to leave the Believers’ mark at the scene had also been taken there, which meant, finally, that all of Pryor’s current troubles could be laid at the town’s door.

Prosperous had rarely troubled Pryor until now. It was a community unto itself, and he saw no reason to interfere with it as long as it was discreet in its activities. Now the town’s very insularity—its refusal to recognize its relationship to the larger world and the ­possible impact of its decisions upon those beyond its boundaries—and the commitment of its protectors to its preservation, at any cost, had disturbed this state of equilibrium.

Prosperous, by its actions, had made retribution inevitable.

THE CALL CAME THROUGH
to Angel’s cell phone, its ID hidden. Louis felt that he should have been more surprised when Angel handed him the phone and he heard the Collector’s voice.

“Very impressive,” said the Collector. “To be honest, I had won
dered if Cambion might not have been right to bet everything on them, but clearly they weren’t quite as accomplished as he believed them to be.”

“I think killing homeless men had blunted their edge,” said Louis.

“Oh, they’ve killed more than homeless men, but I won’t disagree. They swam in a small pool.”

“How did you know about them?”

“A process of elimination. I asked questions, and found out that Parker had been nosing around in Prosperous’s business. It was possible that the town might not have been involved, but Cambion sealed it for me. He’s long been interested in Prosperous’s pet husband-and-wife killers.”

“You could just have told us. You could just have given us the name of the town.”

“But where would be the sport in that? And I know you, Louis, perhaps better than you know yourself. You’re meticulous. You want to fill in the blanks. What did the Daunds give you? Prosperous, or more? Wait, names; they gave you names. You wouldn’t have left without them. Am I correct?”

Louis put down his glass of orange juice. He’d just been settling into the business pages of the
New York Times
, but now he recognized that any interest he might have had in the newspaper or, indeed, the orange juice had largely dissipated.

“
A
name,” he conceded. “The woman gave me a name.”

“Hayley Conyer.”

“Shit.”

“Oh, she wouldn’t like to hear you swear like that. She’s a god-­fearing woman. That’s ‘god’ with a small ‘g,’ incidentally.”

“You interested in her? Looking for a date?”

“She’s very old.”

“Begging your pardon, but I don’t believe you can afford to be particular.”

“Don’t be facetious. She’s an interesting woman, and Prosperous is a fascinating town. You’ll like it.”

“Is she on your list?”

“Oh, yes.”

“So why haven’t you taken her?”

“Because it’s not just her but the whole town. And
generations
of it. To do the sins of Prosperous justice, I’d have to dig up centuries of bones and burn them on a pyre. The whole town would have to be put to the torch, and that’s beyond my capabilities.”

Louis understood.

“But not beyond ours.”

“No.”

“Why should we destroy an entire town?”

“Because it colluded in what happened to the detective, and if you don’t wipe it from the earth it will continue its traditions into future generations, and those traditions are very, very nasty. Prosperous is a
hungry
town.”

“So you want us to do your dirty work for you? Fuck you.”

“Don’t be like that,” said the Collector. “You’ll enjoy it, I guarantee it. Oh, and pay special attention to that church of theirs. Flames won’t be enough. You’ll have to dig much deeper, and tear it apart with something far stronger.”

Louis sensed that the conversation was coming to a close.

“Hey, since we’re being all civil and all, you find your friend Cambion?”

The Collector was standing in the premises of Blackthorn, Apothecary. He held a blade in his hands. Upon it was just a hint of blood.

“I’m afraid he seems to have made his excuses and left before we could become better acquainted.”

“That’s unfortunate,” said Louis. And he meant it.

“Yes, it is,” said the Collector, and he meant it too.

Seconds passed.

“You told me that he lived here with someone else,” said the Collector.

“Yeah, big man. Dressed in yellow. Hard to miss.”

“And no other?”

“Not that I was aware of.”

“Hmmm.”

The Collector stared at the tattered, partial wreckage of a human being that lay on a gurney before him. The man had no eyes, no ears, and no tongue. Most of his fingers and toes were also missing. Stitches marked the site of his emasculation. The Collector had killed him as an act of mercy.

“You know,” he said, “I believe I may have discovered Mr. Cambion’s missing physician. Be sure to send me a postcard from Prosperous.”

The Collector hung up. Angel looked up at Louis from over the
Portland Press Herald.

“Are you two, like, all buddies now?”

Louis sighed.

“You know,” he said, “sometimes I wish I’d never heard the name Charlie Parker. . . .”

GARRISON PRYOR WAS SITTING
in a quiet corner of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. He could see into the next public room, so he knew that he was not being overheard or observed. Since the FBI’s visit to his offices, Pryor had grown concerned about surveillance to the point of paranoia. He no longer made or received delicate calls outside or on the office phones, especially when he was dealing with the Principal Backer. The most important of the Backers now exchanged numbers for clean cell phones each day, but otherwise they had fallen back on a primitive but virtually untraceable means of communicating sensitive information like cell phone numbers, a
simple code based on the print edition of the
Wall Street Journal:
page, column, paragraph, line. Many of the older Backers found the routine almost reassuring, and Pryor thought that some might advocate retaining it once the FBI had exhausted itself chasing after imagined breaches of financial regulations.

The bureau’s attention was irritating and an inconvenience, but little more than that. His business, Pryor Investments, had learned from past mistakes, and was now entirely scrupulous in its dealings. Of course, the business was merely a front: a fully functioning and lucrative one, but a front nonetheless. The Backers’ real machinery had been hidden so deeply, and for so long, in established ­companies—in banks and trusts, charities and religious organizations—as to be untraceable. Let the FBI and its allies expend their energy on Pryor Investments. Admittedly, it was unfortunate that the private detective in Maine had become interested in Pryor Investments to begin with. It was a piece of bad luck, and nothing more. But he had clearly spoken to others of his suspicions, which was why the FBI had ended up on Pryor’s doorstep. But they would find nothing, and eventually their ­attention would turn elsewhere.

Now, in the quiet of the museum, he spoke on the phone with the Principal Backer.

“Who killed this couple in Asheville?”

“We don’t know for sure,” said Pryor, “but we believe it was Parker’s pet assassins.”

“They did well to find what we couldn’t.”

“We were close,” said Pryor. “The Daunds’ blood was still pooling on the floor of their house when I got their names.”

“So they saved us the trouble of killing the Daunds ourselves.”

“I suppose they did. What now?”

“Now? Nothing.”

Pryor was surprised. “What about Prosperous?”

“We let Parker’s friends finish what they started. Why should we involve ourselves when they’ll do the job for us?” The Principal Backer laughed. “We won’t even have to pay them.”

“And then?”

“Business as usual. You have mines to acquire.”

Yes, thought Pryor. Yes, I have.