John Connolly - The Killing Kind

“You lookin' for Mickey?”

“Yes, I am.”

“You a friend of his?”

“From out of town.”

“Well, sorry, but he's gone. Left about an hour ago.”

“He say where he was going?”

“No sir, I just saw him leave. Looks like he may be gone for a couple of days. He had a suitcase with him.”

I thanked him and got back in the cab. The news of Al Z's death would have traveled fast and there would be a lot of speculation as to who might have been behind it, but Mickey knew. I think he knew what would happen from the moment he received the call that I was coming and realized that it was, at last, time for the reckoning.

The cab dropped me back at Jacob Wirth's on Stuart, where Rachel was waiting along with Angel and Louis. There was a sing-along in progress around the piano as people who had been deaf since birth mugged “The Wanderer.” We left them to it and made our way a few doors up the street to Montien, where we sat in a booth and picked uneasily at our Thai food.

“He's good,” said Louis. “Probably been keeping tabs on you since you arrived.”

I nodded. “Then he knows about Sheinberg, and you two. And Rachel. I'm sorry.”

“It's a game with him,” said Louis. “You know that, don't you? The business card, the spiders in the mailbox. He's playin' with you, man, testin' you. He knows who you are, and he likes the idea of goin' up against you.”

Angel nodded in agreement. “You got a reputation now. Only surprise is that every psycho from here to Florida hasn't caught a bus and headed for Maine to see just how good you really are.”

“That's not very reassuring, Angel.”

“You want reassurance, call a priest.”

Nobody spoke for a time, until Louis said, “I guess you know we be joinin' you in Maine.”

Rachel looked at me. “I'll be coming too.”

“My guardian angels,” I said. I knew better than to argue with any of them. I was glad, too, that Rachel would be close. Alone, she was vulnerable. Yet once again I found this beautiful, empathic woman reading my thoughts.

“Not for protection, Parker,” she added. Her face was serious, and her eyes were hard. “I'm coming because you'll need help with Marcy Becker and her parents, and maybe the Merciers too. If the fact that I'm with you and the odd couple makes you feel better, then that's a plus, nothing more. I'm not here just so you can save me.”

Angel smiled at her with both admiration and amusement. “You're so butch,” he hissed at Rachel. “Give you a gun and a vest and you could be a lesbian icon.”

“Bite me, stubby,” she replied.

It seemed to have been decided. I raised a glass of water, and they each lifted their beers in response.

“Well,” I said, “welcome to the war.”

THE NEXT MORNING, the front page of the Herald was dominated by a pretty good picture of Al Z slumped in his seat at the Wang, beside the headline “Gangland Leader Slain.” There are few words that newspaper subeditors like better than “gangland” and “slain,” except maybe “sex” and “puppy,” and the Herald had opted to display them in a point size so large there was barely enough room for the story.

Tommy Caci's throat had been cut from left to right. The wound was so deep that it had severed both of the common carotid arteries and the external and internal jugulars, virtually decapitating him. Mr. Pudd had then stabbed Al Z through the back of the head with a long, thin blade, which punctured his cerebellum and sliced into his cerebral cortex. Finally, using a small, very sharp knife, he had made an angled incision about three quarters of the way up the middle finger of Al Z's right hand and sliced off the top joint.

I learned this not from the Herald, but from Detective Sergeant McCann who rang me on my cell phone as I sat at Rachel's breakfast table reading the newspapers. Rachel was in the bathtub, humming Al Green songs out of key.

“Guy had some balls, taking out two men in a public place,” commented McCann. “There are no cameras on the fire exits, so we got no visual apart from your description. Some guy in the loading bay took the license; came from an Impala stolen two days ago in Concord, so zilch there. The killer had to gain access to the VIP lounge using a key card, so we figure he came prepared with one he made himself. It's not that hard to run one up, you know what you're doing. Al Z went to every first night-he may have been a mean, crooked son of a bitch, but he had class-and he always sat in or near those seats, so it wasn't too difficult to guess where he'd be. As for the missing finger joint, we're guessing it's a calling card and we're checking VICAP for equivalent MOs.”

He asked me if I remembered anything else from the previous night-I knew it wasn't simply a courtesy call-but I told him that I couldn't help him. He asked me to stay in touch, and I assured him that I would.

McCann was right; Pudd had taken a huge risk to get to Al Z. Maybe he had no choice. There was no way to get at Al Z in his office or his home, because he was always surrounded by his people and his windows were designed to repel anything smaller than a warhead. At the theater, with Tommy behind him and hundreds of people around him, he could have been forgiven for feeling secure, but he had underestimated the tenacity of his killer. When the opportunity presented itself, Pudd seized it.

It struck me that Pudd might also be tying up loose ends, and there were only so many reasons why someone felt compelled to do that. Primary among them was as a preparation for disappearance, to ensure that there was nobody left to continue the hunt. My guess was that if Pudd chose to vanish, then nobody would ever find him. He had survived this long even with a price on his head, so he could evaporate like dew after sunrise if he chose.

Something else bothered me; it looked like bugs weren't the only things that Pudd liked to collect. He also wanted skin and bone, removing joints and sections of skin from each of his victims. His taste in souvenirs was distinctive, but Pudd didn't strike me as the kind of man who would mutilate dead bodies just so he could put the pieces in jars and admire them. There had to be a better reason.

I sat at the breakfast table, the newspapers now abandoned, and wondered if I should simply turn over all I knew to the police. Not that what I knew was a great deal, but the deaths of Epstein, Beck, Al Z, and Grace Peltier were all connected, linked either to the Fellowship itself or to actions that Grace's biological father, Jack Mercier, was taking against it. It was about time for a serious face-to-face talk with Mr. Mercier, and I didn't think that either of us was going to enjoy it very much. I was about to pack my bag in preparation for my return to Scarborough when I got my second call of the morning, and from a not entirely unexpected source. It was Mickey Shine. Caller ID could only tell me that the number he was calling from was private, and concealed.

“You see the papers?” he asked.

“I was there,” I told him.

“You know who did it?”

“I think it was our mutual acquaintance.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. “How did he find out about your meeting with Al?”

“He may have been keeping tabs on us,” I conceded. “But it could also be that he was aware of Al Z's interest in him for some time, and that my investigation precipitated a course of action he'd been planning for some time.” He had learned from his pets that if something starts tugging at the farthest reaches of your web, then it's a good idea to find out what that might be and, if you can, to make it stop.

“You weren't out at your apartment last night,” I continued. “I checked up on you.”