A Song Of Shadows Part 19

'And is it just Parker in whom you're interested,' said Louis, 'or are there others?'

'Others like him?'

'There are no others like him,' said Louis. 'You don't need me to tell you that.'

'No, there are no others like him, or not.'

'And you watch him to what end?'

'You know, you can talk real nice when you choose. I'd heard you were, like, monosyllabic.'

'I tell him that all the time,' said Angel. 'The problem is, I can't figure out which way of speaking is really him.'

'I guess he's just all hidden depths,' said Walsh.

'I guess he is at that. By the way, you didn't answer his question: why watch Parker?'

Angel had a lazy smile on his face, and Walsh thought that it would be very easy to underestimate him.

'I'm afraid that's above my pay grade.'

'Because you just work here, right?'

'Right.' Walsh finished his beer and waved at the waitress for another. 'I hear that you had a conversation with Ross not too different from this one, back when Parker was shot. He told you then what he thought it was all about.'

'People who believe in buried G.o.ds,' said Louis. 'Do you believe in buried G.o.ds, Detective Walsh?'

'I'm Episcopalian. I believe in everything.'

Walsh's second beer arrived, along with the appetizers, which were huge. Walsh tried to blot out his wife's disapproving face so that he could enjoy his food. He bit into a mouthful of sausage and continued talking through the meat.

'I suppose I accept what Ross does: there are individuals whose own belief systems cause harm to others, and they have to be stopped. That's as true of radical Muslim clerics who preach that it's okay to behead apostates as it is of the boards of selectmen of small Maine towns who aren't above killing to protect their privileged position.'

If he was expecting a reaction from Angel and Louis, he was destined to go unrewarded.

'I know you tried to burn the town of Prosperous to the ground,' Walsh added, just for clarification.

Louis dipped a piece of crab cake into habanero mayo. Angel tried some of Walsh's smoked sausage. Walsh had the sense that they were slightly disappointed in him for being so obvious. Walsh didn't give a d.a.m.n. He objected to men especially from New York, although Ma.s.sachusetts would have been almost as bad coming into his state and setting fire to towns. It was unmannerly, and caused unrest.

'Anyway,' he went on, 'it seems like Parker exerts a kind of gravitational pull on some of these individuals, which brings us closer to them. And Ross believes that an endgame may be in sight, and Parker has a role maybe a significant one to play in that too.'

'And do a lot of folk share your a.n.a.lysis of the situation?' said Louis.

'We tend not to broadcast it too widely,' said Walsh. 'Makes us sound flaky.'

'So Ross suggests that you should let us take a look at the body in the morgue-' Angel began, but Walsh interrupted.

'Because we were clearly looking at the body of a professional killer,' Walsh finished for him.

'And how did you figure that?'

'Our pretty friend turned up on a piece of security footage in Florida not so long ago. A place called the Hurricane Hatch down near Jacksonville got ripped off, and the bartender, a guy name of Lenny Tedesco, was killed, or that was what it looked like until Tedesco's wife was found dying in her bed. She went hard. Whoever killed her and we're a.s.suming it was Steiger took the trouble to remove her teeth before leaving her for dead. Curiously, the Florida cops think that it was probably him who called the ambulance, although he must have known that she wouldn't survive another hour.

'The bar had surveillance cameras hooked up to a hard drive, but Tedesco's killer was smart enough to take it with him when he left. Now, the owner of the Hurricane Hatch is a guy named Skettle. Tedesco had a piece of the bar just ten per cent but Skettle was of the opinion that he was upping that to fifteen, maybe twenty, by skimming. To prove it, he'd installed a second pinhole camera behind a mirror over the register. It didn't take in much of the rest of the bar, just the register, but when the footage was examined it came up with a good shot of Earl Steiger in profile and that's a very distinctive profile cleaning out the night's takings.

'So now we have Steiger killing a bartender and his wife near Jacksonville maybe for kicks, or maybe because he really needed the whole four hundred and change in the register, or a combination of both then coming all the way up here to cut Ruth Winter's throat, except he doesn't rape or mutilate her, and he leaves her daughter alive. Again, that could have been an accident he might have thought that he'd applied enough pressure to kill the child, and been mistaken but I don't buy it. I think he knew exactly what he was doing every step of the way.'

'Okay,' said Louis. 'So even before I took a look at his body, you made him for a pro. But are you a.s.suming a connection between what happened in Florida and what took place up at Green Heron Bay? Could be two separate jobs.'

'We considered that too, but you're forgetting something: Boreas has supplied us with three bodies in total. We have Ruth Winter, and Steiger, but we also have Bruno Perlman, who washed up at Mason Point with a mark on his eye socket that may or may not have been caused by a blade. Bruno Perlman happened to be a native of Duval County, Florida, with an address in Arlington, which is about a thirty-minute ride from the Hurricane Hatch. We think that there's a good chance Perlman might have known Lenny Tedesco, at least casually.'

'Why?'

'He had a Hurricane Hatch T-shirt in his closet. And then there's the fact that Perlman, Tedesco, and Ruth Winter were all Jewish. Finally, and here's the clincher, last month Bruno Perlman visited Ruth and Isha Winter at their home in Pirna.'

'Wait,' said Angel. 'How come you're only finding that out now? You'd think Ruth Winter might have mentioned that fact when Perlman's body appeared a couple of beaches away from her house. Maybe her mother might have brought it up too.'

'Isha Winter doesn't read newspapers and doesn't own a TV,' said Walsh. 'She's also older than Mount Katahdin. As for Ruth Winter, she's not around to ask anymore.'

'Doesn't fit, them both staying quiet,' said Louis.

'No,' said Walsh, 'it doesn't. The mother I can buy, but not the daughter.'

'And,' said Angel, 'Ruth never called her mother and said, "Hey, remember that guy who came to visit a while back? Well, you'll never guess where he is now ..."'

'Isha Winter says she didn't. We spoke to some of Ruth's friends down in Pirna, too. She didn't have many she was pretty solitary and they say she didn't discuss Perlman with them at all, either before or after his body was found.'

'So why would she keep quiet about it?'

'Either she was afraid or she was involved,' said Louis.

'Or both,' said Walsh.

'Why was Perlman visiting the Winters' in the first place?' asked Angel.

'Because Isha Gorski, later Isha Winter, was the sole survivor of a small n.a.z.i concentration camp called Lubsko, and Perlman lost relatives there. Apparently he wanted to talk with her about her memories of the place. Isha says that her daughter arrived while she was speaking with Perlman, but the visit didn't last for long. She doesn't like recalling what happened to her during the war, and I can't blame her for that. I'd never even heard of Lubsko until this week.'

Walsh shared what little he knew of the camp with Angel and Louis, but it was enough.

'Parker says he and Cory Bloom got the story of Lubsko from Epstein when he came to Boreas, but at that time n.o.body knew that Isha Winter was once Isha Gorski.'

'So now you have a link between Florida and Maine,' said Louis. 'You also have a cl.u.s.ter of Jewish victims, which could make it a hate crime.'

'And brings in the FBI,' said Angel.

'Hence Ross.'

'Well, Ross would have been involved just because of Parker, but, yeah, the feds have expressed an interest,' said Walsh. 'We also have the Justice Department pulling up a chair because of Engel, the war criminal. He was on the staff at Lubsko, and two Lubsko hits in the same state has set lights flashing at the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section.'

'And you already had enough to be getting along with,' said Angel. 'Like not finding this Oran Wilde kid.'

'Yeah, thanks for reminding me.'

'It's gone pretty quiet around him.'

'Yeah.'

'Clever for a teenager.'

'Yeah.'

'In fact, cleverest teenager I've ever heard of. Kid is practically a criminal mastermind.'

'Yeah.'

'Unless he isn't.'

'Yeah. You done?'

'Yeah.'

'Good.'

'So you think Steiger killed Perlman as well?' asked Louis.

Walsh shifted in his seat.

'We're running Steiger's IDs through Homeland Security to see if anything pings on air travel, because that's the only way I can see him doing both. We know when Perlman arrived in Maine from the toll cameras on I-95 and a food receipt in his car from the Starbucks at the Kennebunk service plaza. Steiger could have put him in the water, then taken a flight back to Florida in time to kill the Tedescos before bouncing back up to murder Ruth Winter, but why not kill Winter along with Perlman and then head south to take care of the Tedescos? We also have Steiger's car driving all the way from Florida to Maine, just like Perlman did earlier, which is major miles on the clock. Perlman was afraid to fly. Steiger probably just chose not to, given how he looked. A man like him would be memorable for all the wrong reasons, and that's bad news in his line of work.'

'But why kill them at all?' asked Angel.

Walsh was about to tell Angel what he thought of people who stated the f.u.c.king obvious when he caught that lazy smile again and held his tongue.

'Yeah, why?'

'And in that order?'

'Uh-huh.' Walsh considered the question. 'Perlman is tortured and killed, but before he dies he reveals something to Steiger about the Tedescos, and before they die they give him something that brings him back to Ruth Winter?'

Walsh drummed his fingers on the table, then shook his head.

'No, it's still a lot of back-and-forth. Too much.'

He sat up straight, and a.s.sumed his best interrogator's pose. He'd started out determined not to like these men, knowing something of what they'd done in the past, and might well do again in the future, and it disturbed him that he'd fallen so easily into conversation with them. They were chatting like they'd all attended crime school together.

'So, now that we've cleared the air, and I've shared what I know while tacitly warning you against burning down any more towns in my state, why don't you add to my store of knowledge about Earl Steiger and his kind?'

Just then, the waitress arrived to clear away the appetizer plates.

'You barely touched your crab cakes,' she admonished Louis. 'Were they okay?'

'They were real good,' said Louis. 'I just need to watch my food intake, stay slim and handsome. My friend over there' he indicated Walsh with an outstretched finger 'he's not so concerned.'

Walsh raised his ring finger, displaying his wedding band.

'I'm married,' he said. 'Means I can eat anything I like. Woman's stuck with me.'

'I'm sure you were quite the catch,' said the waitress.

'The whole crew had to pull together to land him,' said Angel.

Walsh scowled at him. The waitress patted Walsh on the shoulder.

'Don't pay them any attention, honey,' she said. 'I don't like seeing food wasted.'

'Burn,' said Angel, once she'd departed. 'You're like a food disposal unit to her.'

'f.u.c.k you,' said Walsh, and returned his attention to Louis. 'Go on: Steiger.'

'I can't tell you more than that he may may have worked through this man Cambion,' said Louis, 'and probably has for a long time, given the children's ident.i.ties that he's a.s.sumed. Using dead kids for ghosts is one of Cambion's hallmarks.'

'This Cambion is he the kind to answer questions?'

'Only with half-truths. The problem is finding him. He'd gone underground for a long time, and only surfaced earlier this year before disappearing again. He's a hunted man. Even if Steiger was one of Cambion's, and you could track him down, he wouldn't give away the ident.i.ty of the buyer on the job, or not for a price that you could afford.'

Their main courses arrived. Walsh's plate was almost entirely hidden by dry-rub ribs. It looked like someone had killed and barbecued a dinosaur.

'If you finish those, I'll give you five bucks,' said Angel. 'Well, I'll send your widow five bucks.'

'You're drinking a white wine called Queen Anne's Lace,' said Walsh. 'As a straight man, I'm ashamed to be seen with you.'

'Since we're playing guess-the-reasoning,' said Louis, 'why did Steiger let Ruth Winter's child live? You saw his face: a man who looks like that doesn't stay hidden by leaving witnesses to his crimes.'

Walsh used a stripped rib held in his right hand to count off the possibilities on the fingers of his left.

'One: he's soft-hearted.'

'Unlikely.'

'Two: he was only paid for one killing, and doesn't murder for free.'

'I've known men like that. They'd make an exception for a witness, though.'

'Three: he was told not to harm the girl.'

'I'd go with three,' said Louis.

'So would I.'