Chapter
26
* * *
As I drove, I tried to piece together what had taken place. Catherine Demeter had returned to Haven in an effort to contact Granger, and Hyams had intervened. Maybe he had learned of Catherine’s presence here by chance; the other possibility was that someone had informed him that she was coming and had urged him to ensure that she never spoke to anyone when she got here.
Hyams had killed Catherine and Granger, that much seemed certain. At a guess, I reckoned that he had watched for the sheriff’s return and followed him into his house. If Hyams had a key to the sheriff’s house — which, since he was a neighbor and a trusted citizen, was a likely possibility — Hyams could have listened to the messages on the sheriff’s machine himself and, through that, could have learned of Catherine Demeter’s location. Catherine Demeter had been dead before the sheriff returned. The proof: Granger’s body had not decayed to the same extent as Demeter’s.
Hyams might even have erased the messages, but he couldn’t be certain that Granger had not picked them up by remote contact through a Touch–Tone phone. Either way, Hyams couldn’t take any chances and acted, probably knocking the sheriff unconscious before cuffing him and then taking him to the Dane house, where he had already killed Catherine Demeter. The sheriff’s car, his own Dodge, had probably been dumped or driven to another town and left somewhere it wouldn’t attract undue attention, at least for the time being.
The use of the Dane house pointed to another part of the puzzle: Connell Hyams was almost certainly Adelaide Modine’s accomplice in the killings, the man for whom William Modine had been hanged. That raised the question of why he had been forced to act now, and I believed that I was close to an answer to that too, although it was a possibility that made me sick to my stomach.
? ? ?
Hyams’s house was dark when I arrived. There was no other car parked nearby, but I kept my gun in my hand as I approached the door. The thought of facing Bobby Sciorra in the darkness made my skin crawl, and my hands shook as I used the keys I had taken from Hyams’s body to open the door.
Inside, the house was silent. I went from room to room, my heart pounding, my finger on the trigger of the gun. The house was empty. There was no sign of Bobby Sciorra.
I went through to Hyams’s office, pulled the curtains, and turned on the desk light. His computer was password protected but a man like Hyams would have to keep hard copies of all his documents. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for, except that it was something that would connect Hyams to the Ferrera family. The connection seemed almost absurd and I was tempted to give up the search and return to Haven and explain it all to Martin and Agent Ross. The Ferreras were many things, but they were not the consorts of child killers.
The key to Hyams’s filing cabinets was also on the set I had taken from his body. I worked fast, ignoring local files and others that seemed irrelevant or unrelated. There were no files for the trust, which seemed extraordinary until I remembered his office in town and my heart sank. If the trust files were not kept in the house, there was a possibility that other files were not here either. If that was the case, the search could prove fruitless.
In the end, I almost passed over the link and only some half–remembered Italian phrases caused me to stop and consider it. It was a rental agreement for a warehouse property in Flushing, Queens, signed by Hyams on behalf of a company called Circe. The agreement was over five years old and had been made with a firm called Mancino Inc. Mancino, I remembered, meant “left–handed” in Italian. It derived from another word, meaning “deceitful.” It was Sonny Ferrera’s idea of a joke: Sonny was left–handed and Mancino Inc. was one of a number of paper companies established by Sonny in the early part of the decade when he had not yet been reduced to the level of a sick, dangerous joke in the Ferrera operation.
I left the house and started driving. As I reached the town limits, I saw a pickup by the side of the road. Two figures sat in the back, drinking beer from cans enclosed in brown paper bags, while a third stood leaning against the cab with his hands in his pockets. The headlights identified the standing man as Clete and one of the seated figures as Gabe. The third was a thin, bearded man whose face I didn’t recognize. I caught Clete’s eye as I passed and saw Gabe lean toward him and start talking, but Clete just raised a hand. As I drove away I could see him staring after me, caught in the headlights of the pickup, a dark shadow against the light. I felt almost sorry for him: Haven’s chances of becoming Little Tokyo had just taken a terminal beating.
? ? ?
I didn’t call Martin until I reached Charlottesville.
“It’s Parker,” I said. “Anybody near you?”
“I’m in my office and you’re in deep shit. Why’d you run out like that? Ross is here and wants all our asses, but your ass especially. Man, when Earl Lee gets back there’s gonna be hell to pay.”
“Listen to me. Granger’s dead. So is Catherine Demeter. I think Hyams killed them.”
“Hyams?” Martin almost shrieked the name. “The lawyer? You’re out of your mind.”
“Hyams is dead too.” It was starting to sound like a sick joke, except I wasn’t laughing. “He tried to kill me out at the Dane house. The bodies of Granger and Catherine Demeter were dumped in the cellar there. I found them and Hyams tried to lock me in. There was some shooting and Hyams died. There’s another player, the guy who took out the woman in the medical center.” I didn’t want to bring Sciorra’s name into it, not yet.
Martin was silent for a moment. “You gotta come in. Where are you?”
“It’s not finished. You’ve got to hold them off for me.”
“I ain’t holding anyone off. This town is turning into a morgue because of you and now you’re a suspect in I don’t know how many murders. Come in. You got enough trouble coming to you already.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that. Listen to me. Hyams killed Demeter to prevent her contacting Granger. I think Hyams was Adelaide Modine’s accomplice in the child killings. If that’s the case, if he escaped, then she could have escaped too. He could have rigged her death. He had access to her dental records through his father’s office. He could have switched a set of records from another woman, maybe a migrant worker, maybe someone snatched from another town, I don’t know. But something made Catherine Demeter run. Something sent her back here. I think she saw her. I think she saw Adelaide Modine because there’s no other reason why she would have come back here, why she would have contacted Granger after all these years away.”
There was silence at the other end of the phone. “Ross looks like a volcano in a linen suit. He’s going to be onto you. He got your plates from your motel registration.”
“I need your help.”
“You say Hyams was involved?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I had Burns check our files. Didn’t take as long as I thought it would. Earl Lee has … had the file relating to the killings. He used to check it out every so often. Hyams came looking for it, day before yesterday.”
“My guess is that, if you find it, any photos will be gone. I think Hyams probably searched the sheriff’s house for it. He had to eliminate any traces of Adelaide Modine, anything that might link her to her new identity.”
It is hard to disappear. A trail of paper, of public and private records, follows us from birth. For most of us, they define what we are to the state, the government, the law. But there are ways to disappear. Obtain a new birth certificate, maybe from a death index or by using someone else’s birth name and DOB, and age the cert by carrying it around in your shoe for a week. Apply for a library card and, from that, obtain a voter’s registration card. Head for the nearest DMV clerk, flash the birth certificate and the VRC, and you now have a driver’s license. It’s a domino effect, each step based on the validity of the documents obtained in the preceding step.
The easiest way of all is to take on another’s identity, someone who won’t be missed, someone from the margins. My guess was that, with Hyams’s help, Adelaide Modine took on the identity of the girl who burned to death in a Virginia ruin.
“There’s more,” said Martin. “There was a separate file on the Modines. The photos from that are all gone as well.”
“Could Hyams have got access to those files?”
I could hear Martin sigh at the other end of the phone.
“Sure,” he said eventually. “He was the town lawyer. He was trusted by everyone.”
“Check the motels again. I reckon you’ll find Catherine Demeter’s belongings in one of them. There might be something there.”
“Man, you gotta come back here, sort this out. There’s a lot of bodies here and your name is connected with all of them. I can’t do any more than I’ve done already.”
“Just do what you can. I’m not coming in.”
I hung up and tried another number. “Yeah,” answered a voice.
“Angel. It’s Bird.”
“Where the fuck have you been? Things are going down here. Are you on the cell phone? Call me back on a land–line.”
I called him back seconds later from a phone outside a convenience store.
“Some of the old man’s goons have picked up Pili Pilar. They’re holding him until Bobby Sciorra gets back from some trip. It’s bad. He’s being held in isolation at the Ferrera place — anyone talks to him and they get it in the head. Only Bobby gets access to him.”
“Did they get Sonny?”
“No, he’s still out there, but he’s alone now. He’s gonna have to sort whatever it is out with his old man.”
“I’m in trouble, Angel.” I explained to him briefly what had taken place. “I’m coming back but I need something from you and Louis.”
“Just ask, man.”
I gave him the address of the warehouse. “Watch the place. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”
I didn’t know how long it would take them to start tracking me. I drove as far as Richmond and parked the Mustang in a long–term parking garage. Then I made some calls. For fifteen hundred dollars I bought silence and a flight on a small plane from a private airfield back to the city.