John Connolly - The Killing Kind

I thought of what I knew, or suspected, of Faulkner's hiding place; I knew now that it was to the north, beyond Bangor, close to the coast, and near a lighthouse. There were maybe sixty lighthouses on the Maine coast, most of them automated or unmanned, with a couple given over to civilian use. Of those, probably only a handful were north of Machias.

I knelt down and took the wrapped book in my hands.

“What are you going to do with it?” asked Rachel.

“Nothing,” I replied. “Not yet.”

She moved closer to me and held my gaze. “You want to find him, don't you? You're not prepared to let the police do it.”

“He had Lutz and Voisine working for him,” I explained, “and Voisine is still out there somewhere. There could be others as well. If we hand this over to the police and even one of them shares Lutz's loyalties, then Faulkner will be alerted and he'll be gone forever. My guess is that he's already preparing to disappear. He's probably been planning it ever since the moment the book was lost and certainly since the discovery of the bodies at St. Froid. For that reason, and for Marcy's safety, we're going to keep this to ourselves for the present. Marcy?”

She picked up her bag and stood expectantly.

“We're going to put you somewhere safe. You can call your parents and let them know you're okay first.”

She nodded. I went outside and called the Colony on the cell phone. Amy answered.

“It's Charlie Parker,” I said. “I need your help. I have a woman here. I need to stow her out of sight.”

There was silence on the other end of the phone. “What kind of trouble are we talking about?”

But I think she knew.

“I'm close to him, Amy. I can bring this to an end.”

When she answered, I could hear the resignation in her voice. “She can stay in the house.” Women, with the obvious exception of Amy herself, were not usually admitted to the Colony, but there were spare bedrooms in the main house that were sometimes used under exceptional circumstances.

“Thank you. There will be a man with her. He'll be armed.”

“You know how we feel about guns here, Charlie.”

“I know, but this is Pudd we're dealing with. I want you to let my friend stay with Marcy until this is over. It'll be a day or two at most.”

I asked her to take Rachel in as well. She agreed, and I hung up. Marcy made a short call to her mother and then we drove away from the house and into Boothbay. There, we parted. Louis and Rachel would drive south to Scarborough, where Angel would take Marcy Becker and a reluctant Rachel to the Colony. Louis would rejoin me once Marcy and Rachel were in Angel's care. I kept the book, concealing it carefully beneath the passenger seat of the Mustang.

I drove north as far as Bangor, where I picked up a copy of Thompson's Maine Lighthouses at Book Marcs bookstore. There were seven lighthouses in the Bold Coast area around Machias, the town in which Marcy Becker had been left while Grace went about her business: Whitlock's Mill in Calais; East Quoddy at Campobello Island; and farther south, Mulholland Light, West Quoddy, Lubec Channel, Little River, and Machias Seal Island. Machias Seal was too far out to sea to be relevant, which left six.

I called Ross in New York, hoping to light a fire under him, but got only his secretary. I was twenty miles outside Bangor when he called me back.

“I've seen Charon's reports from Maine,” he began. “This part of the investigation was minor stuff, pure legwork. A gay rights activist was killed in the Village in 1991, shot to death in the toilet of a bar on Bleecker; MO matched a similar shooting in Miami. The perp was apprehended but his phone records showed that he made seven calls to the Fellowship in the days preceding the killing. A woman called Torrance told Charon that the guy was a freak and she reported the calls to the cops. A detective named Lutz confirmed that.”

So, if the killer had been working for the Fellowship, they had a cover story. They had reported him to the police before the murder, and Lutz, already their pet policeman, had confirmed it.

“What happened to the killer?”

“His name was Lusky, Barrett Lusky. He made bail and was found dead two days later in a Dumpster in Queens. Gunshot wound to the head.

“Now, according to Charon's report, he went no farther north than Waterville during his inquiries. But there's an anomaly: his expenses show a claim for gas purchased in a place called Lubec, about a hundred and fifty miles farther north of Waterville. It's on the coast.”

“Lubec,” I echoed. It made sense.

“What's in Lubec?” asked Ross.

“Lighthouses,” I answered. “And a bridge.”

Lubec had three lighthouses. It was also the easternmost town in the United States. From there, the FDR Memorial Bridge stretched across the water to Canada. Lubec was a good choice of location if you needed an escape route left permanently open, because there was a whole new country only minutes away by car or boat. They were in Lubec: I was certain of it, and the Traveling Man had found them there. The gas receipt was careless, but only in the context of what came later and the murders he himself committed, using a strange justification based on human frailty and inconsequence that mirrored some of Faulkner's own beliefs.

But I had underestimated Faulkner, and I had underestimated Pudd. While I closed in on them, they had already taken the most vulnerable one among us, the only one left alone.

They took Angel.

THERE WAS BLOOD ON THE PORCH, and blood on the front door. In the kitchen, cracks radiated through the plaster from a bullet hole in the wall. There was more blood in the hallway, a curving snake trail like the pattern of a sidewinder. The kitchen door had been torn almost off its hinges, and the kitchen window had been shattered by more gunfire.

There were no bodies inside.

Taking Angel was partly a precaution in case we found Marcy Becker first, but also an act of revenge against me personally. They had probably come to finish us off, and when they found only Angel, they took him instead. I thought of Mr. Pudd and the mute with their hands on him, his blood on their clothes and skin as they dragged him from the house. We should never have left him alone. None of us should ever have been alone.

They would never let him live, of course. In the end they would never let any of us live. If they escaped and disappeared from our sight I knew that one day they would reemerge and find us. We could hunt them, but the honeycomb world is deep and intricate and rich with darkness. There are too many places to hide. And so there would be weeks, months, perhaps years of pain and fear, waking from uneasy sleep to each new dawn with the thought that this, at last, might be the day on which they came.

Because, finally, we would want them to come, so that the waiting might be brought to an end.

I could hear the sound of a car engine in the background as Rachel told me all that she had seen. She was driving Marcy Becker to the Colony in her own car; now that they had Angel, she was safe for a time. Louis was on his way north and would call me within minutes.

“He's not dead,” said Rachel evenly.

“I know,” I replied. “If he was dead they'd have left him for us to find.”

I wondered how quickly Lutz had talked and if the Golem had reached them yet. If he had, all of this might be immaterial.

“Is Marcy okay?” I asked.

“She's asleep on the seat beside me. I don't think she's slept much since Grace died. She wanted to know why you were willing to risk your life for this: Angel, Louis, me, but you especially. She said it wasn't your fight.”

“What did you tell her?”

“It was Louis who told her. He said that everything was your fight. I think he was smiling. It's kind of hard to tell with him.”