John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

There was nothing else of note in Catherine’s bathroom, or in the rest of her apartment. As I was leaving I stopped at her telephone, picked it up, and pressed the redial button. After the beeps subsided a voice answered.

“Haven County Sheriff’s Office, hello?”

I hung up and called a guy I knew in the telephone company. Five minutes later he came back with a list of local numbers called from Friday to Sunday. There were only three and they were all mundane-a Chinese take-out, a local laundry, and a movie information line.

The local company couldn’t give me any details of any long distance calls made, so I tried a second number. This one connected me with one of the many agencies that offer PIs and those with a deep and abiding interest in other people’s business the opportunity to purchase confidential information illegally. The agency was able to tell me within twenty minutes that fifteen calls had been made to Haven, Virginia, numbers on Saturday evening through Sprint, seven to the sheriff’s office and eight to a private residence in the town. I was given both numbers and I went with the second. The message on the answering machine was terse: “This is Earl Lee Granger. I’m not here right now. Leave a message after the beep or, if it relates to police business, contact the sheriff’s office at…”

I punched in the number, got the Haven County Sheriff’s Office again, and asked to speak to the sheriff.

I was told that Sheriff Granger wasn’t available, so I asked to speak to whoever was in charge in his absence. The ranking deputy was Alvin Martin, I learned, but he was out on a case. The deputy on the phone didn’t know when the sheriff would be back. From his tone, I guessed the sheriff hadn’t simply gone out to buy cigarettes. He asked me my name and I thanked him and hung up.

It seemed that something had caused Catherine Demeter to get in touch with the sheriff in her hometown, but not with the NYPD. If there was nothing else, I’d have to pay a visit to Haven. First, though, I decided to pay a visit to Fucking Frank Forbes.

I STOPPED OFF at Azure on Third Avenue and bought myself some expensive fresh strawberries and pineapple from the deli, then took them around to the Citicorp Center to eat in the public space. I liked the building’s simple lines and its strange, angled top. It was also one of the few new developments where a similar imagination had been applied to its interior: its seven-story atrium was still green with trees and shrubs, its shops and restaurants were packed with people, and a handful of worshipers sat silently in its simple, sunken church.

Two blocks away, Fucking Frank Forbes had a swank office in a seventies smoked-glass development, at least for the present. I took the elevator up and entered the reception area, where a young and pretty brunette was typing something on the computer. She looked up as I entered and smiled brightly. I tried not to let my jaw hang as I smiled back.

“Is Dr. Forbes available?” I asked.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“I’m not a patient, thankfully, but Frank and I go way back. Tell him Charlie Parker wants to see him.”

Her smile faltered a little but she buzzed Frank’s office and gave him the message. Her face paled slightly as she listened to his response but she held herself together remarkably well, all things considered.

“I’m afraid Dr. Forbes can’t see you,” she said, the smile now fading rapidly.

“Is that really what he said?”

She blushed slightly. “No, not quite.”

“Are you new here?”

“This is my first week.”

“Frank select you personally?”

She looked puzzled. “Ye-es.”

“Get another job. He’s a deviant and he’s on his way out of business.”

I walked past her and entered Frank’s office while she took all this in. There was no patient in Frank’s consulting room, just the good doctor himself leafing through some notes on his desk. He didn’t look pleased to see me. His thin mustache curled in distaste like a black worm, and a red bloom spread from his neck to his high-domed forehead before disappearing into his brush of wiry black hair. He was tall, over six feet, and he worked out. He looked real good, but looks were as far as it went. There was nothing good about Fucking Frank Forbes. If he handed you a dollar, the ink would be running before it got to your wallet.

“Get the fuck out, Parker. In case you’ve forgotten, you can’t come barging in here anymore. You’re not a cop now and the force is probably all the richer for your absence.” He leaned toward the intercom button but his receptionist had already entered behind me.

“Call the police, Marcie. Better still, call my lawyer. Tell him I’m about to file for harassment.”

“Hear you’re giving him a lot of business at the moment, Frank,” I said, taking a seat in a leather upright opposite his desk. “I also hear Maibaum and Locke are handling the lawsuit for that unfortunate woman with the social disease. I’ve done some business with them in the past and they’re real hot. Maybe I could put them onto Elizabeth Gordon. You remember Elizabeth, don’t you, Frank?”

Frank cast an instinctive glance over his shoulder at the window and twisted his chair away from it.

“It’s okay, Marcie,” he said, nodding uneasily to the receptionist. I heard the door close softly behind me. “What do you want?”

“You have a patient called Catherine Demeter.”

“Come on, Parker, you know I can’t discuss my patients. Even if I could, I wouldn’t share shit with you.”

“Frank, you’re the worst shrink I know. I wouldn’t let a dog be treated by you because you’d probably try to fuck it, so save the ethics for the judge. I think she may be in trouble and I want to find her. If you don’t help me I’ll be in touch with Maibaum and Locke so fast you’ll think I’m telepathic.”

Frank tried to look like he was wrestling with his conscience, although he couldn’t have found his conscience without a shovel and an exhumation order.

“She missed an appointment yesterday. She didn’t give any notice.”

“Why was she seeing you?”

“Involutional melancholia, mainly. That’s depression to you, characteristic of middle to later stages of life. At least that’s what it seemed like, initially.”

“But…?”

“Parker, this is confidential. Even I have standards.”

“You’re joking. Go on.”

Frank sighed and fiddled with a pencil on his blotter, then moved to a cabinet, removed a file, and sat back down. He opened it, leafed through it, and began to talk.

“Her sister died when Catherine was eight, or rather her sister was killed. She was one of a number of children murdered in a town called Haven, in Virginia, in the late sixties, early seventies. The children, males and females, were abducted, tortured, and their remains dumped in the cellar of an empty house outside the town.” Frank was detached now, a doctor running through a case history that might have been as distant as a fairy tale to him for all the emotion he put into the telling.

“Her sister was the fourth child to die, but the first white child. After she disappeared the police began to take a real interest. A local woman, a wealthy local woman, was suspected. Her car had been seen near the house after one of the children disappeared, and then she tried an unsuccessful snatch on a kid from another town about twenty miles away. The kid, a boy, scratched up her face, then gave a description to the cops.

“They went after her but the locals heard and got to the house first. Her brother was there. He was a homosexual, according to locals, and the cops believed she had an accomplice, a male who might have driven the car while she made the snatches. The locals figured the brother was a likely suspect. He was found hanged in the basement.”