Chapter 17
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When I telephoned Rachel Wolfe’s private practice the following morning, the secretary told me that she was giving a seminar at a conference at Columbia University. I took the subway from the Village and arrived early at the main entrance to the campus. I wandered for a while around the Barnard Book Forum, students jostling me as I stood browsing in the literature section, before making my way to the main college entrance.
I passed through the university’s large quadrangle, with the Butler Library at one end, the administration building at the other, and like a mediator between learning and bureaucracy, the statue of Alma Mater in the grass center. Like most city residents, I rarely came to Columbia, and the sense of tranquillity and study only feet away from the busy streets outside was always surprising to me.
Rachel Wolfe was just finishing her lecture as I arrived, so I waited for her outside the theater until the session ended. She emerged talking to a young, earnest–looking man with curly hair and round spectacles, who hung on her every word. When she saw me she stopped and smiled a good–bye at him. He looked unhappy and seemed set to linger, but then turned and walked away, his head low.
“How can I help you, Mr. Parker?” she asked, with a puzzled but not uninterested look.
“He’s back.”
? ? ?
We walked over to the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Avenue, where intense–looking young men and women sat reading textbooks and sipping coffee. Rachel Wolfe was wearing jeans and a chunky jumper with a heart–shaped design on the front.
Despite all that had happened the previous night, I was curious about her. I had not been attracted to a woman since Susan’s death, and my wife was the last woman with whom I had slept. Rachel Wolfe, her long red hair brushed back over her ears, aroused a sense of longing in me that was more than sexual. I felt a deep loneliness within myself and an ache in my stomach. She looked at me curiously.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was thinking of something.”
She nodded and picked at a poppy–seed roll before pulling off a huge chunk and stuffing it in her mouth, sighing with satisfaction. I must have looked slightly shocked, because she covered her mouth with her hand and giggled softly.
“Sorry, but I’m a sucker for these things. Daintiness and good table manners tend to go out the window when someone puts one in front of me.”
“I know the feeling. I used to be like that with Ben & Jerry’s until I realized that I was starting to look like one of the cartons.”
She smiled again and pushed at a piece of roll that was trying to make a break for freedom from the side of her mouth. The conversation sagged for a time.
“I take it your parents were jazz fans,” she said eventually.
I must have looked puzzled for a moment, because she smiled in amusement as I tried to take in the question. I had been asked it many times before but I was grateful for the diversion, and I think she knew that.
“No, my father and mother didn’t know the first thing about jazz,” I replied. “My father just liked the name. The first time he heard about Bird Parker was at the baptismal font, when the priest mentioned it to him. The priest was a big jazz fan, I was told. He couldn’t have been happier if my father had announced that he was naming all of his children after the members of the Count Basie Orchestra. My father, by contrast, wasn’t too happy at the idea of naming his firstborn after a black jazz musician, but by then it was too late to think of another name.”
“What did he call the rest of his children?”
I shrugged. “He didn’t get the chance. My mother couldn’t have any more children after me.”
“Maybe she thought she couldn’t do any better?” She smiled.
“I don’t think so. I was nothing but trouble for her as a child. It used to drive my father crazy.”
I could see in her eyes that she was about to ask me about my father but something in my face stopped her. She pursed her lips, pushed away her empty plate, and settled herself back in her chair.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
I went through the events of last night, leaving nothing out. The words of the Traveling Man were burned into my mind.
“Why do you call him that?”
“A friend of mine led me to a woman who said that she was receiving, uh, messages from a dead girl. The girl had died in the same way as Susan and Jennifer.”
“Was the girl found?”
“No one looked. An old woman’s psychic messages aren’t enough to launch an investigation.”
“Even if she exists, are you sure it’s the same guy?”
“I believe it is, yes.”
Wolfe looked like she wanted to ask more, but she let it go. “Go back over what this caller, this Traveling Man, said, again, slowly this time.”
I did until she lifted her hand to stop me. “That’s a quote from Joyce: ‘mouth to mouth’s kiss.’ It’s the description of the ‘pale vampire’ in Ulysses. This is an educated man we’re dealing with. The stuff about ‘our kind’ sounds biblical; I’m not sure of it. I’ll have to check it. Give it to me again.” I spoke the words slowly as she took them down in a wire–bound notebook. “I have a friend who teaches theology and biblical studies. He might be able to identify a source for these.”
She closed the notebook. “You know that I’m not supposed to get involved in this case?”
I told her that I hadn’t known.
“Following our earlier discussions, someone got in touch with the commissioner. He wasn’t pleased at the snub to his relative.”
“I need help with this. I need to know all I can.” Suddenly I felt nauseous, and when I swallowed, my throat hurt.
“I’m not sure that’s wise. You should probably leave this to the police. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but after all that’s happened, you risk damaging yourself. Do you understand what I mean?”
I nodded slowly. She was right. Part of me wanted to draw back, to immerse myself once again in the ebb and flow of ordinary life. I wanted to unburden myself of what I felt, to restore myself to some semblance of a normal existence. I wanted to rebuild but I felt frozen, suspended, by what had happened. And now the Traveling Man had returned, snatching any possibility of that normality from me and, simultaneously, leaving me as powerless to act as I had been before.
I think Rachel Wolfe understood that. Perhaps that was why I had come to her, in the hope that she might understand.
“Are you okay?” She reached over and touched my hand and I almost cried. I nodded again.
“You’re in a terribly difficult situation. If he has decided to contact you, then he wants you to be involved and there may be a link that can be exploited. From an investigative point of view, you probably shouldn’t deviate from your routine in case he contacts you again, but from the point of view of your own well–being …” She let the unstated hang in the air. “You might even want to consider some professional help. I’m sorry for being so blunt about it, but it has to be said.”
“I know, and I appreciate the advice.” It was strange to find myself attracted to someone after all this time and then have her advise me to see a psychiatrist. It didn’t hold out the promise of any relationship that wasn’t conducted on an hourly basis. “I think the investigators want me to stay.”
“I get the feeling you’re not going to do it.”
“I’m trying to find someone. It’s a different case, but I think this person may be in trouble. If I stay here, there’s no one to help her.”
“It may be a good idea to get away from this for a time, but from what you’re saying, well …”
“Go on.”
“It sounds like you’re trying to save this person but you’re not even sure if she needs saving.”
“Maybe I need to save her.”
“Maybe you do.”
? ? ?
I told Walter Cole later that morning that I would continue looking for Catherine Demeter and that I would be leaving the city to do so. We were sitting in the quietness of Chumley’s, the Village’s old speakeasy on Bedford. When Walter called, I had surprised myself by nominating it for our meeting, but as I sat sipping a coffee I realized why I had chosen it.
I enjoyed its sense of history, its place in the city’s past, which could be traced back like an old scar or the wrinkle at the corner of an eye. Chumley’s had survived the Prohibition era, when customers had escaped raids by leaving hastily through the back door, which led onto Barrow Street. It had survived world wars, stock market crashes, civil disobedience, and the gradual erosion of time, which was so much more insidious than all the rest. Right now, I needed its stability.
“You have to stay,” said Walter. He still had the leather coat, now hanging loosely over the back of his chair. Someone had whistled at him when he entered wearing it.
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?” he said angrily. “He’s opened an avenue of communication. You stay, we wire up the phone, and we try to trace him when he calls again.”
“I don’t think he will call again, at least not for a while, and I don’t believe we could trace him anyway. He doesn’t want to be stopped, Walter.”
“All the more reason to stop him, then. My God, look at what he’s done, what he’s going to do again. Look at what you’ve done for his —”
I leaned forward and broke in on him, my voice low. “What have I done? Say it, Walter. Say it!”
He stayed silent and I saw him swallow the words back. We had come close to the edge, but he had pulled back.
The Traveling Man wanted me to remain. He wanted me to wait in my apartment for a call that might never come. I could not let him do that to me. Yet both Walter and I knew that the contact he had established could well be the first link in a chain that would eventually lead us to him.
A friend of mine, Ross Oakes, had worked in the police department of Columbia, South Carolina, during the Bell killings. Larry Gene Bell abducted and smothered two girls, one aged seventeen and abducted close to a mailbox, the other aged nine and taken from her play area. When investigators eventually found the bodies of the children they were too decomposed to determine if they had been sexually assaulted, although Bell later admitted to assaulting both.
Bell had been tracked through a series of phone calls he made to the family of the seventeen–year–old, conversing primarily with the victim’s older sister. He also mailed them her last will and testament. In the phone calls he led the family to believe that the victim was still alive, until her body was eventually found one week later. After the abduction of the younger girl he contacted the first victim’s sister and described the abduction and killing of the girl. He told the first victim’s sister that she would be next.
Bell was found through indented writing on the victim’s letter, a semiobliterated telephone number that was eventually tracked to an address through a process of elimination. Larry Gene Bell was a thirty–six–year–old white male, formerly married and now living with his mother and father. He told Investigative Support Unit agents from the FBI that “the bad Larry Gene Bell did it.”
I knew of dozens of similar cases where contact with the killer by the victim’s family sometimes led to his capture, but I had also seen what this form of psychological torture had done to those who were left behind. The family of Bell’s first victim were lucky because they had to suffer Bell’s sick wanderings for only two weeks.
Amid the anger and pain and grief that I had felt the night before, there was another feeling that caused me to fear any further contact with the Traveling Man, at least for the present.
I felt relief.
For over seven months there had been nothing. The police investigation had ground to a halt, my own efforts had brought me no nearer to identifying the killer of my wife and child, and I feared that he might have disappeared.
Now he had come back. He had reached out to me and, by doing so, opened the possibility that he might be found. He would kill again, and in the killing, a pattern would emerge that would bring us closer to him. All these thoughts had raced through my head in the darkness of the night, but in the first light of dawn, I had realized the implications of what I felt.
The Traveling Man was drawing me into a cycle of dependency. He had tossed me a crumb in the form of a telephone call and the remains of my daughter, and in doing so had caused me to wish, however briefly, for the deaths of others in the hope that their deaths might bring me closer to him. With that realization came the decision that I would not form such a relationship with this man. It was a difficult decision to make but I knew that if he decided to contact me again, then he would find me. Meanwhile, I would leave New York and continue to hunt for Catherine Demeter.
Yet deep down, perhaps only half recognized by me and suspected by Rachel Wolfe, there was another reason for continuing the search for Catherine Demeter.
I did not believe in remorse without reparation. I had failed to protect my wife and child, and they had died as a result. Perhaps I was deluded, but I believed that if Catherine Demeter died because I stopped looking for her, then I would have failed twice, and I was not sure that I could live with that knowledge. In her, maybe wrongly, I saw a chance to atone.
Some of this I tried to explain to Walter — my need to avoid a dependent relationship with this man, the necessity of continuing the search for Catherine Demeter, for her sake and my own — but most of it I kept to myself. We parted uneasily and on bad terms.
? ? ?
Tiredness had gradually taken hold of me throughout the morning and I slept fitfully for an hour before setting off for Virginia. I was bathed in sweat and almost delirious when I awoke, disturbed by dreams of endless conversations with a faceless killer and images of my daughter before her death.
Just as I awoke, I dreamed of Catherine Demeter surrounded by darkness and flames and the bones of dead children. And I knew then that some terrible blackness had descended on her and that I had to try to save her, to save us both, from the darkness.