John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

“Hyams?” Martin almost shrieked the name. “The lawyer? You’re out of your mind.”

“Hyams is dead too.” It was starting to sound like a sick joke, except I wasn’t laughing. “He tried to kill me out at the Dane house. The bodies of Granger and Catherine Demeter were dumped in the cellar there. I found them and Hyams tried to lock me in. There was some shooting and Hyams died. There’s another player, the guy who took out the woman in the medical center.” I didn’t want to bring Sciorra’s name into it, not yet.

Martin was silent for a moment. “You gotta come in. Where are you?”

“It’s not finished. You’ve got to hold them off for me.”

“I ain’t holding anyone off. This town is turning into a morgue because of you and now you’re a suspect in I don’t know how many murders. Come in. You got enough trouble coming to you already.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t do that. Listen to me. Hyams killed Demeter to prevent her contacting Granger. I think Hyams was Adelaide Modine’s accomplice in the child killings. If that’s the case, if he escaped, then she could have escaped too. He could have rigged her death. He had access to her dental records through his father’s office. He could have switched a set of records from another woman, maybe a migrant worker, maybe someone snatched from another town, I don’t know. But something made Catherine Demeter run. Something sent her back here. I think she saw her. I think she saw Adelaide Modine because there’s no other reason why she would have come back here, why she would have contacted Granger after all these years away.”

There was silence at the other end of the phone. “Ross looks like a volcano in a linen suit. He’s going to be onto you. He got your plates from your motel registration.”

“I need your help.”

“You say Hyams was involved?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I had Burns check our files. Didn’t take as long as I thought it would. Earl Lee has… had the file relating to the killings. He used to check it out every so often. Hyams came looking for it, day before yesterday.”

“My guess is that, if you find it, any photos will be gone. I think Hyams probably searched the sheriff’s house for it. He had to eliminate any traces of Adelaide Modine, anything that might link her to her new identity.”

It is hard to disappear. A trail of paper, of public and private records, follows us from birth. For most of us, they define what we are to the state, the government, the law. But there are ways to disappear. Obtain a new birth certificate, maybe from a death index or by using someone else’s birth name and DOB, and age the cert by carrying it around in your shoe for a week. Apply for a library card and, from that, obtain a voter’s registration card. Head for the nearest DMV clerk, flash the birth certificate and the VRC, and you now have a driver’s license. It’s a domino effect, each step based on the validity of the documents obtained in the preceding step.

The easiest way of all is to take on another’s identity, someone who won’t be missed, someone from the margins. My guess was that, with Hyams’s help, Adelaide Modine took on the identity of the girl who burned to death in a Virginia ruin.

“There’s more,” said Martin. “There was a separate file on the Modines. The photos from that are all gone as well.”

“Could Hyams have got access to those files?”

I could hear Martin sigh at the other end of the phone.

“Sure,” he said eventually. “He was the town lawyer. He was trusted by everyone.”

“Check the motels again. I reckon you’ll find Catherine Demeter’s belongings in one of them. There might be something there.”

“Man, you gotta come back here, sort this out. There’s a lot of bodies here and your name is connected with all of them. I can’t do any more than I’ve done already.”

“Just do what you can. I’m not coming in.”

I hung up and tried another number. “Yeah,” answered a voice.

“Angel. It’s Bird.”

“Where the fuck have you been? Things are going down here. Are you on the cell phone? Call me back on a land-line.”

I called him back seconds later from a phone outside a convenience store.

“Some of the old man’s goons have picked up Pili Pilar. They’re holding him until Bobby Sciorra gets back from some trip. It’s bad. He’s being held in isolation at the Ferrera place-anyone talks to him and they get it in the head. Only Bobby gets access to him.”

“Did they get Sonny?”

“No, he’s still out there, but he’s alone now. He’s gonna have to sort whatever it is out with his old man.”

“I’m in trouble, Angel.” I explained to him briefly what had taken place. “I’m coming back but I need something from you and Louis.”

“Just ask, man.”

I gave him the address of the warehouse. “Watch the place. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”

I didn’t know how long it would take them to start tracking me. I drove as far as Richmond and parked the Mustang in a long-term parking garage. Then I made some calls. For fifteen hundred dollars I bought silence and a flight on a small plane from a private airfield back to the city.

“YOU SURE you wanna be dropped here?” The cabdriver was a huge man, his hair lank with sweat, which dribbled down his cheeks and over the rolls of fat in his neck, eventually losing itself in the greasy collar of his shirt. He seemed to fill the whole front of the cab. The door looked too small for him to have entered through. He gave the impression that he had lived and eaten in the cab for so long that it was no longer possible for him to leave: the cab was his home, his castle, and his bulk gave the impression that it would be his tomb.

“I’m sure,” I replied.

“This is a tough area.”

“That’s okay. I have tough friends.”

The Morelli wine warehouse was one of a number of similar premises that lined one side of a long, ill-lit street west of Northern Boulevard in Flushing. It was a redbrick building, its name reduced to a white, flaking shadow below the edge of its roof. Wire screens covered the windows on both the ground and upper levels. There were no visible lights on the walls; the area between the gate and the main building was in almost total darkness.

On the other side of the street stood the entrance to a large yard filled with storage depots and railroad containers. The ground inside was pitted with ponds of filthy water and discarded pallets. I saw a mongrel dog, its ribs almost bursting through its fur, tearing at something in the dim light of the lot’s filthy spotlights.

As I stepped from the cab, headlights flashed briefly from the alleyway by the warehouse. Seconds later, as the cab pulled away, Angel and Louis emerged from the black Chevy van, Angel carrying a heavy-looking training bag, Louis immaculate in a black leather coat, a black suit, and a black polo shirt.

Angel screwed up his face as he drew nearer. It wasn’t hard to see why. My suit was torn and covered with mud and dirt from the encounter with Hyams in the Dane house. My arm had begun to bleed again and the right cuff of my shirt was a deep red color. I ached all over and I was tired of death.

“You look good,” said Angel. “Where’s the dance?”

I looked toward the Morelli warehouse. “In there. Have I missed anything?”

“Not here. Louis just got back from Ferrera’s place, though.”

“Bobby Sciorra arrived there about an hour ago by chopper,” said Louis. “Reckon him and Pili are having a real heart-to-heart.”

I nodded. “Let’s go,” I said.

The warehouse was surrounded by a high brick wall topped with barbed wire and spiked fencing. The gate, inset slightly as the wall curved inward at the entrance, was also wire topped and solid except for a gap where a heavy lock and chain linked its two halves together. While Louis lounged semidiscreetly nearby, Angel removed a small, custom-built drill from his bag and inserted the bit into the lock. He pressed the trigger and a high-pitched grinding sound seemed to fill the night. Instantly, every dog in the vicinity started to bark.