John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

And I saw my own wife, my own child in all of them.

“You could have sent someone else,” I said.

“No, only you. If Evan Baines’s killer was there, I knew you’d find out. I knew you’d find out because you’re a killer yourself.”

The word hung in the air for a moment, then tore a rift between us, like a knife cutting through our past together. Walter turned away.

I stayed silent for a time and then, as if he had never spoken, I said: “She told me that she knew who killed Jennifer and Susan.”

He seemed almost grateful for the break in the silence. “She couldn’t have known. She was a sick, evil woman and that was her way of trying to torture you after she died.”

“No, she knew. She knew who I was before she died, but I don’t think she knew when she hired me. She would have suspected something. She wouldn’t have taken the chance.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “Let it go.”

I didn’t say anything more but I knew that, somehow, the dark worlds of Adelaide Modine and the Traveling Man had come together.

“I’m considering retirement,” said Cole. “I don’t want to look at death anymore. I’ve been reading Sir Thomas Browne. You ever read Thomas Browne?”

“No.”

“Christian Morals: ‘Behold not Death’s Heads til thou doest not see them, nor look upon mortifying objects til thou overlook’st them.’ ” His back was to me but I could see his face reflected in the window and his eyes seemed far away. “I’ve spent too long looking at death. I don’t want to force myself to look any longer.”

He sipped his coffee. “You should go away from here, do something to put your ghosts behind you. You’re no longer what you once were, but maybe you can still step back, before you lose yourself forever.”

A film was forming on my untouched coffee. When I didn’t respond, Walter sighed and spoke with a sadness in his voice that I had never heard before. “I’d prefer it if I didn’t have to see you again,” he said. “I’ll talk to some people, see if you can go.”

Something had changed within me, that much was true, but I was not sure that Walter could see it for what it was. Maybe only I could really understand what had happened, what Adelaide Modine’s death had unlocked within me. The horror of what she had done through the years, the knowledge of the hurt and pain she had inflicted on the most innocent among us, could not be balanced in this world.

And yet it had been brought to an end. I had brought it to an end.

All things decay, all things must end, the evil as well as the good. What Adelaide Modine’s death had done, in its brutal, flame-red way, was to show me that this was true. If I could find Adelaide Modine and could bring her to an end, then I could do the same with others. I could do the same with the Traveling Man.

And somewhere, in a dark place, a clock began to tick, counting off the hours, the minutes, the seconds, before it would toll the end for the Traveling Man.

All things decay. All things must end.

And as I thought of what Walter had said, of his doubts about me, I thought too of my father and the legacy he left me. I have only fragmented memories of my father. I remember a large, red-faced man carrying a Christmas tree into the house, his breath rising into the air like the puffs of steam from an old train. I remember walking into the kitchen one evening to find him caressing my mother and her laughter at their shared embarrassment. I remember him reading to me at night, his huge fingers following the words as he spoke them to me so that they might be familiar to me when I returned to them again. And I remember his death.

His uniform was always freshly pressed and he kept his gun oiled and cleaned. He loved being a policeman, or so it seemed. I did not know then what it was that drove him to do what he did. Maybe Walter Cole gained some knowledge of it when he looked upon the bodies of those dead children. Maybe I, too, have knowledge of it. Maybe I have become like my father.

What is clear is that something inside him died and the world appeared to him in different, darker colors. He had looked upon death’s heads for too long and become a reflection of what he saw.

The call had been a routine one: two kids fooling around in a car late at night on a patch of urban wasteland, flashing the lights and sounding the horn. My father had responded and found one of the local boys, a petty criminal well on the road to graduating into felonies, and his girlfriend, a middle-class girl who was flirting with danger and enjoying the sexual charge it brought.

My father couldn’t recall what the boy said to him as he tried to impress his girl. Words were exchanged and I can imagine my father’s voice deepening and hardening in warning. The boy made mocking movements toward the inside pocket of his jacket, enjoying the effect on my father’s nerves and bathing in the ripples of laughter from the young woman beside him.

Then my father drew his gun and the laughter stopped. I can see the boy raising his hands, shaking his head, explaining that there was no weapon there, that it was all just fun, that he was sorry. My father shot him in the face, blood streaking the interior of the car, the windows, the face of the girl in the passenger seat, his mouth wide in shock. I don’t think she even screamed before my father shot her too. Then he walked away.

Internal Affairs came for him as he stripped in the locker room. They took him before his brother officers, to make an example of him. No one got in their way. By then, they all knew, or thought they knew.

He admitted everything but could not explain it. He simply shrugged his shoulders when they asked. They took his gun and his badge-his backup, the one I now hold, remained back in his bedroom-and then they drove him home under the NYPD rule that prevented a policeman from being questioned about the possible commission of a crime until forty-eight hours had elapsed. He looked dazed when he returned and wouldn’t speak to my mother. The two Internal Affairs men sat outside in their car, smoking cigarettes, while I watched from my bedroom window. I think they knew what would happen next. When the gunshot sounded, they didn’t leave their car until the echoes of the shot had faded into the cool night air.

I am my father’s son, with all that entails.

The door of the interview room opened and Rachel Wolfe entered. She was dressed casually in blue jeans, high-top sneakers, and a black hooded cotton top by Calvin Klein. Her hair was loose, hanging over her ears and resting on her shoulders, and there was a sprinkling of freckles on her nose and at the base of her neck.

She took a seat across from me and gave me a look of concern and sympathy. “I heard about the death of Catherine Demeter. I’m sorry.”

I nodded and thought of Catherine Demeter and how she looked in the basement of the Dane house. They weren’t good thoughts.

“How do you feel?” she asked. There was curiosity in her voice, but tenderness too.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you regret killing Adelaide Modine?”

“She called it. There was nothing else I could do.” I felt numb about her death, about the killing of the lawyer, about the sight of Bobby Sciorra rising up on his toes as the blade entered the base of his skull. It was the numbness that scared me, the stillness inside me. I think that it might have scared me more, but for the fact that I felt something else too: a deep pain for the innocents who had been lost, and for those who had yet to be found.

“I didn’t know you did house calls,” I said. “Why did they call you in?”

“They didn’t,” she said, simply. Then she touched my hand, a strange, faltering gesture in which I felt-I hoped?- that there was something more than professional understanding. I gripped her hand tightly in mine and closed my eyes. I think it was a kind of first step, a faltering attempt to reestablish my place in the world. After all that had taken place over the previous two days, I wanted to touch, however briefly, something positive, to try to awaken something good within myself.