John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

Dupree ushered us into his office, but didn’t close the door. He stood close to me and touched my arm gently.

“It’s him. Things are still confused, but they’ve got sample jars matching the one in which your daughter’s”-he paused, then rephrased it-“the jar that you received. They’ve got a laptop computer, the remains of some kind of homemade speaker attachment, and scalpels with tissue remains, most of it found in a shed at the back of the property. I talked to Woolrich, briefly. He mentioned something about old medical texts. Said to tell you that you were right. They’re still searching for the faces of the victims, but that could take some time. They’re going to start digging around the house later today.”

I wasn’t sure what I felt. There was relief, a sense of a weight being lifted and taken away, a sense that it had all come to a close. But there was also something more: I felt disappointment that I had not been there at the end. After all that I had done, after all the people who had died, both at my hands and the hands of others, the Traveling Man had eluded me right until the end.

Dupree left and I sat down heavily in the chair, the sunlight filtering through the shades on the window. Toussaint sat on the edge of Dupree’s desk and watched me. I thought of Susan and Jennifer and of days spent in the park together. And I remembered the voice of Tante Marie Aguillard, and I hoped that she was now at peace.

A low, two-note signal beeped from Dupree’s PC at regular intervals. Toussaint hauled himself from the desk and walked around to where he could see the screen of the PC. He tapped some keys and read what was on-screen.

“It’s Holdman’s stuff coming through,” he said.

I joined him at the screen and watched as Lisa Stott’s dental records appeared, detailed in words, then as a kind of two-dimensional map of her mouth with fillings and extractions marked, and then in the form of a mouth X ray.

Toussaint called up the coroner’s X ray from a separate file and set the two images side by side.

“They look the same,” he said.

I nodded. I didn’t want to think of the implications if they were.

Toussaint called up Huckstetter, told him what we had, and asked him to come over. Thirty minutes later, Dr. Emile Huckstetter was running through Holdman’s file, comparing it with his own notes and the X-ray images he had taken from the dead girl. At last, he pushed his glasses up on his forehead and pinched the corners of his eyes.

“It’s her,” he said.

Toussaint let out a long, jagged breath and shook his head in sorrow. It was the Traveling Man’s last jest, it seemed, the old jest. The dead girl was Lisa Stott, or, as she once was known, Lisa Woolrich, a young girl who had become an emotional casualty of her parents’ bitter divorce, who had been abandoned by a mother anxious to start a new life without the complication of an angry, hurt teenage daughter, and whose father was unable to provide her with the stability and support she needed.

She was Woolrich’s daughter.

THE VOICE on the telephone was heavy with tiredness and tension.

“Woolrich, it’s Bird.” I spoke as I drove; a St. Martin ’s deputy had retrieved the rented car from the Flaisance.

“Hey.” There was no life to the word. “What have you heard?”

“That Byron’s dead, some of your men too. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, it was a mess. They call you in New York?”

“No.” I debated whether or not to tell him the truth and decided not to. “I missed the flight. I’m heading toward Lafayette.”

“ Lafayette? Shit, what you doin’ in Lafayette?”

“Hanging around.” With Toussaint and Dupree, it had been decided that I should talk to Woolrich. Someone had to tell him that his daughter had been found. “Can you meet me?”

“Shit, Bird, I’m on my last legs here.” Then, resignedly: “Sure, I’ll meet you. We can talk about what happened today. Give me an hour. I’ll meet you in the Jazzy Cajun, off the highway. Anyone will tell you where it is.” I could hear him coughing at the other end of the phone.

“Your lady friend go home?”

“No, she’s still here.”

“That’s good,” he said. “It’s good to have someone with you at times like this.” Then he hung up.

The Jazzy Cajun was a small dark bar annexed to a motel, with pool tables and a country music jukebox. Behind the bar, a woman restocked the beer while Willie Nelson played over the speakers.

Woolrich arrived shortly after I began drinking my second coffee. He was carrying a canary yellow jacket and the armpits of his shirt were stained with sweat. The shirt itself was marked with dirt on the back and sleeves, and one elbow was torn. His tan trousers were dark with mud at the cuffs and hung over mud-encrusted, ankle-high boots. He ordered a bourbon and a coffee, then took a seat beside me near the door. We didn’t say anything for a time, until Woolrich drained half of his bourbon and began sipping at his coffee.

“Listen, Bird,” he began. “I’m sorry for what went down between us this last week or so. We were both trying to bring this to an end our own way. Now that it’s done, well…” He shrugged and tipped his glass at me before draining it and signaling for another. There were black stains beneath his eyes and I could see the beginnings of a painful boil at the base of his neck. His lips were dry and cracked and he winced as the bourbon hit the inside of his mouth. He noticed my look. “Mouth ulcers,” he explained. “They’re a bitch.” He took another sip of coffee. “I guess you want to hear what happened.”

I shook my head. I wanted to put off the moment, but not like that.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked.

“Sleep,” he said. “Then maybe take some time off, go down to Mexico and see if I can’t rescue Lisa from these goddamn religious freaks.”

I felt a pain in my heart and stood suddenly. I wanted a drink as badly as I had ever wanted anything before in my life. Woolrich didn’t seem to notice my lack of composure, or even register that I was walking toward the men’s room. I could feel sweat on my forehead and my skin felt hypersensitive, as if I was about to come down with a fever.

“She’s been asking after you, Birdman,” I heard him say, and I stopped dead.

“What did you say?” I didn’t turn around.

“She asks after you,” he repeated.

I turned then. “When did you hear from her last?”

He waved the glass. “Couple of months back, I suppose. Two or three.”

“You sure?”

He stopped and stared at me. I hung by a thread over a dark place and watched as something small and bright separated from the whole and disappeared into the blackness, never to be found again. The surroundings of the bar fell away and there was only Woolrich and me, alone, with nothing to distract either of us from the other’s words. There was no ground beneath my feet, no air above me. I heard a howling in my head as images and memories coursed through my mind.

Woolrich standing on the porch, his finger on the cheek of Florence Aguillard.

“I call this my metaphysical tie, my George Herbert tie.”

A couplet from Ralegh, from “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage,” the poem from which Woolrich so loved to quote: “Blood must be my bodies balmer/No other balme will there be given.”

The second phone call I had received in the Flaisance, the one during which the Traveling Man had allowed no questions, the one during which Woolrich was in attendance.

“They have no vision. They have no larger view of what they’re doing. There’s no purpose to it.”

Woolrich and his men seizing Rachel’s notes.

“I’m torn between keeping you in touch and telling you nothing.”