Walsh scratched at his stubble. He looked ready for bed. Parker didn’t know how many beers Walsh might have drunk, but he guessed it was somewhere between ‘too many’ and ‘not enough.’ The coffee wasn’t helping. Whatever was gnawing at him ran too deep for that.
‘But,’ said Walsh, ‘it’s like everybody’s temperature has gone up a couple of degrees recently. Klan literature and arson attacks can only send them higher, and eventually they’ll boil over so that someone gets hurt. Billy Ocean is an asshole, but so is the guy who blew up his truck. If you should happen to meet him, you can tell him I said that. If he has a problem with it, I’m sure he knows where to find me.’
Parker nodded. He wasn’t about to pass on the message, but he knew that what Walsh had said wasn’t without substance.
‘That’s the end of the lesson,’ said Walsh. ‘So, what do you want to know?’
25
Quayle sat in a comfortable chair by the window of his room, its walls decorated with landscape paintings of the state of New Hampshire, its floors the original nineteenth-century boards, polished to what he felt was just the wrong degree of brightness, its furniture either corresponding to the period of the inn’s construction or, as in the case of the bed, an expensive reproduction, and wished that he were elsewhere. He did not belong in this country, and perhaps not even in this time. He belonged to an older dispensation; the New World was too loud for him, its colors too intense. Most of all, he despised its desperate desire for a history, an adolescent chasing after the earned gravitas of age. A store not far from the inn professed to sell antiques, yet – as far as Quayle could tell – its entire stock amounted to no more than a random accumulation of near-modern junk. To set it ablaze would have been a kindness.
The inn sat on land sheltered from the rest of the town by a line of evergreens, the gardens barely visible through dusk and rain. Quayle’s reflection stared back at him from the glass, like a cameo set against dark ceramic, and in this he found his comfort. Quayle was a creature of candles and gaslight, a liminal dweller in fog and shadow, but the animus driving him was older still, the product of a primordial murk that predated the dawn of life itself. Quayle possessed no memory of himself as an infant, or child, or even as a youth. His eyes had opened in early adulthood, his consciousness flowering into immediate awareness of his purpose on this earth: to locate a single book, and enable it to do its work. When that task was complete, Quayle would seek oblivion. He did not wish to live to see what followed. He had witnessed too much as things stood.
But perhaps this perception of a life extended almost beyond tolerance was merely a fantasy, a disorder of the mind; that, or the manifestation of a sense of mission passed down through generations of Quayles, like a recessive gene. After all, gravestones bore the Quayle name, urns stored Quayle ashes, and the earth hosted Quayle bones.
Or someone’s name, someone’s ashes, someone’s bones.
Beyond the open window, silent lightning lit the sky like impotent bolts of rage from a deity woken too late to prevent its own destruction. Quayle smelled burning on the air, and the fine blond hairs on his fingers rose as he extended his right hand toward the heavens, crooking a finger as though beckoning the Old God to him, inviting him to bare His throat so that His pain might at last be brought to an end.
Then we shall both sleep, Quayle thought, and it will be for the best.
Tomorrow his work would begin anew. Before she went into the ground, he had obtained from Esther Bachmeier the name of the woman in Maine into whose care Karis Lamb had been entrusted: Maela Lombardi. He had an address for Lombardi in Cape Elizabeth, and already knew something of her background. Lombardi was a retired high school teacher, but – in common with the unfortunate Dobey – did not appear to work directly with any charities or women’s shelters. She was a secret helper, another point of connection on a carefully maintained series of ratlines designed to lead the vulnerable to safety.
Quayle and Mors had buried Bachmeier alive, although not before inflicting such damage on her that Quayle doubted she suffered long beneath the weight of dirt and stone. He had been quite certain that Dobey was not telling the truth about Karis Lamb’s call from Maine, or was, at the very least, withholding valuable information. Bachmeier was required for corroboration, and had eventually given up Lombardi.
And just as Quayle had never intended to leave Bachmeier alive, despite any promises to the contrary made to Errol Dobey, so also was Mors dispatched to take care of the waitresses who had seen Quayle’s face. Unfortunately, a concatenation of difficulties had forced Quayle and Mors to leave Cadillac with that mission unfulfilled. It was troubling, but only mildly so. Quayle had already altered his appearance through the simple expedients of a lighter hair dye, new spectacles, and the removal of his colored contact lenses. He believed he could now have passed either of those waitresses unrecognized, and the chef too, but if time permitted he might yet send Mors after them again, if only as retribution for Dobey’s lies.
Quayle wondered briefly if the killing of Dobey, and Bachmeier’s disappearance, might alert others to some potential threat to themselves. He thought not: fire was the great scourge of evidence, and Bachmeier’s grave would not easily be discovered. Only when he and Mors killed Lombardi – as they would almost certainly be forced to do, once they obtained the information they wanted from her – would the link between the deaths start to become apparent.
But by then Quayle would know Karis Lamb’s whereabouts, and the identity under which she was hiding. His priority was to ensure that she did not have time to run before he could lay hands on her. This hunt had already gone on for too long. It was a drain on resources, and had ultimately forced Quayle to cross the water to this furious land, requiring him to abandon his London fastness. He and Mors had taken precautions: they were traveling under perfectly legal Dutch passports, but with names that bore no relation to reality; their fingerprints had been created with the aid of printed circuit boards and liquid gelatin that mimicked the thermal responses of human skin, and a variation on the same technology had been used to alter their irises. Little could be done about the photographic records of their faces now in the possession of the Department of Homeland Security, but even here preparation had paid off: the facial prosthetics were simple, easily applied, and more easily disposed of. Just as Quayle now bore little resemblance to the man who had read poetry in Dobey’s Diner, he and Mors were also shadows of the two people who had passed through US Customs at Washington-Dulles. When the time came for them to return to England, the prosthetics could be restored in a matter of hours. Yet travel was still unpleasant for Quayle, and only the most extreme of situations could have drawn him across the Atlantic itself.
But the book required it. Until it was restored, Quayle would not be allowed to rest.
And he was so very weary.
He closed his eyes, and saw himself assemble the final scattered leaves of the volume, this creation fractured by name and fractured by nature.
This Fractured Atlas.
26
For once, Parker was able to be entirely open with Walsh about a client and a case. It made for a pleasant change, although Walsh appeared reluctant to accept that all might be as straightforward as it appeared – not that Parker could blame him, given the number of half-truths and lies by omission with which Walsh had been forced to deal over the years.
Walsh was currently operating out of MCU South in Gray, while MCU North in Bangor was leading the investigation into the remains of the Woman in the Woods. Nevertheless, little went on in Maine law enforcement of which Walsh, as one of its senior investigators, was not aware.
‘So Moxie is employing you to look into this out of the goodness of his heart?’ said Walsh.
‘Something like that.’