John Connolly - The Killing Kind

I had been checking my messages pretty regularly while in Boston and New York, but there were two new ones since that morning. The first was from Arthur Franklin, asking if the information his pornographer client, Harvey Ragle, had proffered was proving useful. In the background, I could hear Ragle's whining voice: “I'm a dead man. You tell him that. I'm a dead man.” I didn't bother to return the call.

The second message came from ATF agent Norman Boone. Ellis Howard, the deputy chief over in the Portland PD, once told me that Boone ruled the ATF like a king, but with none of the associated charm. He had left his home and cell-phone numbers. I got him at home.

“It's Charlie Parker. How can I help you, Agent Boone?”

“Why, thank you for returning my call, Mr. Parker. It's only been…” At the other end of the line, I could imagine him ostentatiously checking his watch. “Four hours.”

“I was out of town.”

“You mind telling me where?”

“Why, did we have a date?”

Boone sighed dramatically. “Talk to me now, Mr. Parker, or talk to me tomorrow at One City Center. I should warn you that I'm a busy man, and my patience is likely to be more strained by tomorrow morning.”

“I was in Boston, visiting an old friend.”

“An old friend, as I understand it, who ended up with a hole in his head halfway through a performance of Cleopatra.”

“I'm sure he knew how it ended. She dies, in case you hadn't heard.”

He ignored me. “Was your visit connected in any way to Lester Bargus?”

I didn't pause for a second, although the question had thrown me.

“Not directly.”

“But you visited Mr. Bargus shortly before you left town?”

Damn.

“Lester and I go way back.”

“Then you'll be heartbroken to hear that he is no longer with us.”

“ ‘Heartbroken’ maybe isn't the word. And the ATF's interest in all this is…?”

“Mr. Bargus made a little money selling spiders and giant roaches and a lot of money selling automatic weapons and other assorted firearms to the kind of people who have swastikas on their crockery. It was natural that he would come to our attention. My question is, Why did he come to your attention?”

“I was looking for somebody. I thought Lester might have known where he was. Is this an interrogation, Agent Boone?”

“It's a conversation, Mr. Parker. If we did it tomorrow, face-to-face, then it would be an interrogation.”

Even with a telephone line separating us, I had to admit that Boone was good. He was closing in on me, leaving me with almost no room to turn. I was not going to tell him about Grace Peltier, because Grace would bring me on to Jack Mercier, and possibly the Fellowship, and the last thing I wanted was the ATF going Waco on the Fellowship. Instead, I decided to give him Harvey Ragle.

“All I do know is that a lawyer named Arthur Franklin called me and asked me to speak to his client.”

“Who's his client?”

“Harvey Ragle. He makes porn movies, with bugs in them. Al Z's people used to distribute some of them.”

It was Boone's turn to be thrown. “Bugs? The hell are you talking-about?”

“Women in their underwear squashing bugs,” I explained, as if to a child. “He also does geriatric porn, obesity, and little people. He's an artist.”

“Nice types you meet in your line of work.”

“You make a pleasant change from the norm, Agent Boone. It seems that an individual with an affinity for bugs wants to kill Harvey Ragle for making his sicko porn movies. Lester Bargus had supplied the bugs and also seemed to know something about him, so I agreed to approach him on behalf of Ragle.”

The improbability of it was breathtaking. I could feel Boone wondering just how far he was being taken for a ride.

“And who is this mysterious herpetologist?”

Herpetologist. Agent Boone was obviously a Scrabble fan.

“He calls himself Mr. Pudd, and I think that strictly speaking he may be an arachnologist, not a herpetologist. He likes spiders. I think he's the man who killed Al Z.”

“And you approached Lester Bargus in the hope of finding this man?”

“Yes.”

“But you got nowhere.”

“Lester had a lot of anger in him.”

“Well, he's a lot calmer now.”

“If you had him under surveillance, then you already know what passed between us,” I said. “Which means there's something else that you want from me.”

After some hesitation, Boone went on to explain how a man traveling under the name of Clay Daemon had walked into Lester's store, demanded details of an individual in a photograph, and then shot Lester and his assistant dead.

“I'd like you to take a look at the photograph,” he said.

“He left it?”

“We figure he's got more than one copy. Hired killers tend to be pretty professional that way.”

“You want me to come in? It could be tomorrow.”

“How about now?”

“Look, Agent Boone, I need a shower, a shave, and sleep. I've told you all I can. I want to help, but give me a break.”

Boone relented slightly. “You got E-mail?”

“Yes, and a second line.”

“Then stay on this one. I'll be back.”

The line went quiet, so I turned on my desktop and waited for Boone's E-mail to arrive. When it did, it consisted of two pictures. One was the photograph of the abortion clinic shooting. I spotted Mr. Pudd immediately. The other was a still taken from the video camera in Lester Bargus's store, showing the killer Clay Daemon. Seconds later, Boone was back on the line.

“You recognize anyone in the first picture?”

“The guy on the far right is Pudd, first name Elias. He came out to my house, asking why I was nosing around in his business. I don't know the man in the video still.”

I could hear Boone clicking his tongue rhythmically at the other end of the line, even as I gave him the contact number I had for Ragle's lawyer. “I'll be talking to you again, Mr. Parker,” he said at last. “I have a feeling you know more than you're telling.”

“Everybody knows more than they're telling, Agent Boone,” I replied. “Even you. I have a question.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Who's the injured man in the first photograph?”

“His name was David Beck. He worked for an abortion clinic in Minnesota, and he's a dead man in that photograph. The killing forms part of the VAAPCON files.”

VAAPCON was the code name for the joint FBI-ATF investigation into abortion-related violence, the Violence Against Abortion Providers Conspiracy. The ATF and the FBI have a poor working relationship; for a long time the FBI had resisted involving itself in investigating attacks on doctors and abortion clinics, arguing that it didn't fall within their guidelines, which meant that the investigation of allegations of a conspiracy of violence was left in the hands of the ATF. That situation changed with the formation of VAAPCON and the enactment of new legislation empowering the FBI and the Justice Department to act against abortion-related violence. Yet tensions between the FBI and the ATF contributed to the comparative failure of VAAPCON; no evidence of a conspiracy was found, and agents took to dubbing the investigation CRAPCON, despite signs of growing links between right-wing militias and antiabortion extremists.

“Did they ever find his killer?” I asked.

“Not yet.”

“Like they haven't found his wife's killer.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I know she had spiders in her mouth when she was found.”

“And our friend Pudd is a spider lover.”

“The same Pudd whose head is circled in this photograph.”

“Do you know who he's working for?”