Pallida Mors was standing over the woman’s body, as though puzzled by the alteration wrought upon it by mortality, a pale ghost with a new house to haunt. Her hair was entirely concealed by the blue plastic skullcap, rendering her appearance stranger still. A pistol, deformed by a suppressor, hung at her side, exhaling a final wisp of smoke. Giller had never heard a suppressed shot fired before. He was surprised at how loud it sounded; not like a little cough, but an angry bark.
As Giller watched, Mors knelt and placed the palm of her left hand on Tanya’s womb. She kept it there as she turned to Giller.
‘I can feel it kicking,’ she said.
Giller said nothing. He had wandered into hell, and now one of its demons was speaking to him in a language he did not wish to understand. He put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes, but could still hear what Mors said next.
‘It’s stopped now.’
Footsteps drew nearer, and with them the stink of Mors, potent even amid the gun smoke, the blood, and the smell of dying. She was its quintessence, the crux of it made manifest. It was in her name. She was Death itself. And Giller understood that every moment of his being, from the fusion of seed and egg in a distant congress, through pain and joy and love and loss, to the final clarity of this last poor province, a realm of splintered wood and stinking food, had been leading to just this instant, and so he was defined by what he had caused to be committed here, and the little good he had done in life would be swept away like ash from the final conflagration of his existence.
‘Look at me,’ said Mors.
Giller opened his eyes, and was named by the gun.
90
Parker, Hillick, and Shears decided between them that it would be better if Parker spoke with Leila Patton alone. Hillick was of the opinion that any effort to intimidate the young woman was likely to fail, and the depth of the failure would be commensurate with the degree of intimidation involved: in other words, Patton would be three times as stubborn if faced with all of them.
Parker was standing by his rental when Patton finally emerged at the end of her waitressing shift, still wearing the clothes in which she’d worked. He was parked far enough away so as not to risk alarming her, but close enough that she couldn’t get to her car and drive off before he could speak with her.
‘Miss Patton?’
She stopped by her vehicle, and he noticed that she immediately slipped a key between the middle and ring fingers of her right hand before clenching a fist. Clearly she wasn’t about to be taken by surprise again. She squinted at Parker, the sun behind him.
‘You were in the diner earlier,’ she said. ‘Who are you, and what do you want?’
Parker stopped just out of striking range.
‘My name is Charlie Parker. We spoke on the telephone, but didn’t get very far. I thought I’d try a conversation in person.’
She didn’t relax, but she shifted the key in her hand to open her car door.
‘I told you: I have nothing to say.’
‘People are dying, Leila, and not just here. I think whoever killed Dobey and Esther murdered a woman in Maine and dumped her body at a quarry. I think they’re going to keep on killing until they get what they want.’
Patton stopped, the key in the lock, and turned to face him.
‘Esther’s missing, not dead. Dobey died in a fire.’
‘I don’t think you believe that for one moment, just as you don’t believe Dobey killed himself through carelessness with a joint.’
‘I don’t know what I believe.’
He had her now. He could hear it in her voice.
‘But you cared about both of them.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’d like to talk to you about them for a few minutes. You may know more than you think.’
‘I have to get back to my mom. She’s sick.’
Parker just listened. Anything he said wouldn’t have helped. He waited, and watched the fight go out of Leila Patton. She silently took in the parking lot, the diner, and the town of Cadillac itself, as though wondering how, or if, she might ever escape them all.
‘If it’s true,’ she said at last, ‘about these people, whoever they are, then you’re going to stop them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Isn’t that what the police are supposed to do?’
‘Sometimes I do it better.’
She sized Parker up, and still appeared to find him wanting. He didn’t take it personally.
‘Alone?’ she asked.
‘I have help, if I need it.’
‘And have you needed it in the past?’
‘Occasionally.’
‘I suppose I could have googled you,’ she said, ‘but I’ve grown to hate that kind of thing. It’s creepy.’
‘Agreed.’
‘If I had searched, would I have liked what I found?’
She was facing him now, and he felt certain she had something to tell. He could see it in her eyes.
‘I hope so. Not all of it, maybe, but most. Even I don’t care for all I’ve done.’
When she spoke again, her voice was so soft that the breeze almost scattered her words before Parker could catch them.
‘I’m afraid she’ll come back.’
‘Who?’
‘The woman who tried to hurt me.’
‘Did she say she would?’
‘She didn’t say anything at all.’
‘And yet?’
Patton’s nose wrinkled, like a small mammal sniffing for the presence of a larger carnivore.
‘She smelled bad – not like she didn’t bathe enough, but bad from the inside. You probably don’t know what I mean. I’m not explaining it very well.’
Parker stepped closer.
‘You wake in the night,’ he said, ‘and you can still smell it, as though she’s there in the room with you. When you’re low, or scared, you taste it in your food. You catch traces of it from spoiled milk, from open drains, from roadkill.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s it. Does it go away?’
‘No, not if you’ve been touched by it. It stays.’
‘So what do you do?’
‘You hope for the removal of its source from the world, and live with the memory.’ He smiled at her. ‘How about this: if you give me some of your time, I’ll talk. I’ll tell you about myself, and how I know these things. When I’m done, if you don’t trust me, I’ll leave, and I won’t trouble you again. I’ll catch a flight back east, and find another way to stop what’s happening. I won’t involve you in it, but …’
He didn’t finish.
‘But I’m already involved, right?’ said Patton. ‘That’s what you were going to say.’
‘Yes.’
‘And that woman will come back, won’t she?’
‘It’s possible. Either you’re a loose end, in which case she’ll return because she has to, or she enjoys what she does, and she’ll return because she wants to. For those like her, the ones corrupted deep down, it’s usually more the second than the first.’
‘You could have said that earlier. You could have used the threat to make me change my mind.’
‘I’m not here to threaten you, and I didn’t have to change your mind. You already knew the right thing to do. You just needed someone to confirm it for you. And you’re not doing this for yourself. I don’t think that’s the kind of person you are. You’ll do it because it’ll save others, but there’s nothing wrong with saving yourself along the way.’
‘That’s quite a speech.’
‘I get a lot of practice.’
‘I guess you must.’ She opened her car door. ‘Follow me.’
91
Owen Weaver sat with his grandson on the living room couch, watching a cartoon custom-tooled to sell toys to kids, and thus wring maximum profit from minimal entertainment.
Daniel had endured a bad night, waking up screaming from a nightmare, which was unusual for him. It meant Holly also had a bad night, since Daniel then insisted on sleeping in her bed, although he didn’t actually sleep much at all. On any other day Holly might have kept him home, but Owen had an internist’s appointment that morning, for which he’d been waiting weeks, and the Barhams were at a funeral in Bangor, so there was no one to take care of the boy. As a result Daniel – subdued, and heavy lidded – had been forced to spend an unhappy day at Saber Hill.
Daniel’s eyes were now fixed on the screen, but Owen could tell he was taking in little of what he was seeing. He’d tried to cajole Daniel into lying down and catching up on the shut-eye he’d missed, but he insisted on staying where he was, and every time his eyes started to close he shifted position as though to keep himself awake.
‘Hey,’ said Owen.