He was pretty certain that the house wouldn’t have an alarm. It had been vacant for too long, and he didn’t figure that a Realtor would want to be disturbed in the dead of night because an alarm was ringing in an unoccupied property. He checked to make sure that the street was quiet, then made his way up the drive to the gate at the side of the house, a grassless yard beyond. He tried the gate. It didn’t move. For a moment he thought it might be locked, but he could see no way that it could be unless it had been welded shut. Simultaneously, he pushed down on the handle and pressed the weight of his body against the gate. He felt it give, the metal of the handle scraping against the concrete pillar, and then it opened. He stepped through and closed it behind him, then turned the corner of the house so that he was hidden from view.
The back door had two locks, but the wood was damp and rotting. He tested it with his fingernails and pieces of it fell to the ground. He took the crowbar from beneath his coat and began working at the wood. Within minutes, he had made a gap big enough to gain access to the top lock. He inserted the crowbar as far as it would go, then pushed sideways and up. There was a cracking sound from inside, and the lock broke. He moved on to the second lock. The frame quickly splintered and the bolt broke through the wood.
Mickey stood on the step and stared into the kitchen. This was where it had happened. This was the place in which Parker—Parker the revenger, Parker the hunter, Parker the executioner—had been born. Before the deaths of his wife and daughter, he had been just another face on the street: a cop, but not a very good one; a father and a husband, and not much good in those roles either; a man who drank some—not enough to qualify as an alcoholic, not yet, but enough that, in years to come, he might find himself starting on the booze a little earlier each day until at last it became a way to start the day instead of finishing it; a drifter, a being without purpose. Then, on a December night, the creature that became known as the Traveling Ma Rcrey un entered this place and took the lives of the woman and child within, while the man who should have protected them sat on a bar stool feeling sorry for himself.
Those deaths had given him purpose. At first it was revenge, but that gave way to something deeper, something more curious. The desire for revenge alone would have destroyed him, eating away at him like a cancer, so that even when he found the release for which he had yearned, the disease would already have colonized his soul, slowly blackening his humanity until, shriveled and rotten, it was lost forever. No, Parker had found a greater purpose. He was a man who could not easily turn away from the sufferings of others, for he found its twin deep within himself. He was tormented by empathy. More than that, he had become a magnet for evil, or perhaps it would be truer to say that a shard of evil deep within himself resonated in the presence of a greater foulness, and drew him to it, and it to him.
All of this, born in blood.
Mickey closed the door, flicked on his flashlight, and walked through the kitchen, looking neither right nor left, taking in nothing of what he saw there. He would conclude his visit in that room, just as the Traveling Man had done. He wanted to follow the killer’s trail, to view this house as the killer had viewed it, and as Parker had seen it on the night that he returned home to find what was left of his wife and child.
The Traveling Man had come in through the front door. There was no sign of forced entry. The hallway was now empty. Mickey compared it with the first of the photographs that he had brought with him. He had ordered them carefully, numbering them on the back in case he dropped them. The first showed the hallway as it had once been: a bookcase on the right, and a coatrack. On the floor was a mahogany flower stand, and beside it a broken flowerpot and a plant of some kind, its roots exposed. Behind the plant, the first of the stairs leading up to the second floor. Three bedrooms there, one no larger than a storage room, and a single small bathroom. Mickey didn’t want to go up there just yet. Jennifer Parker, three years old, had been asleep on the couch in the living room when the killer entered. She had a weak heart, and it spared her the agony of what was to come. Between the time that the killer entered and the final display of the bodies, she had suffered a massive release of epinephrine into her system, resulting in ventricular fibrillation of the heart. In other words, Jennifer Parker had died of fright.
Her mother had not been so lucky. There had been a struggle, probably near the kitchen. She had managed to get away from her attacker, but only momentarily. He had caught up with her in the hall, and had stunned her by banging her face against the wall. Mickey moved on to the next photograph: a smear of blood on the wall to his left. He found what he believed to be the spot, and ran his fingers across it. Then he knelt down and examined the floorboards, trailing his hand along the wood, just as Susan Parker had done as she was dragged back to the kitchen. The hallway had been only partially carpeted, leaving the edges of the boards exposed on either side. It was here, somewhere, that Susan had lost her fingernail.
Was her daughter dead by then, or had the sight of her mother, dazed and bleeding, triggered the attack that led to Jennifer’s death? Maybe she had fought to save her mother. Yes, that was probably it, Mickey thought, already piecing together the most favorable narrative, the most gripping version he could find of the story. There had been rope marks on the child’s wrists and ankles, indicating that she had been restrained at some point. She woke, realized what was happening, t Roin coried to scream, to fight. A blow was struck, knocking her to the ground; just such an injury had been recorded in the autopsy. Once her mother had been subdued, the killer restrained the daughter in turn, but by then the girl was already dying. Mickey glanced into the living room, now furnished only with dust and discarded paper and dead insects. Another photograph, this time of the couch. There was a doll lying on it, half obscured by a blanket.
Mickey moved on, trying to visualize the scene as Parker had experienced it. Blood on the walls and on the floor; the kitchen door almost closed; the house cold. He took a deep breath, and turned to the final photograph: Susan Parker on a pine chair, her arms tied behind her back, her feet bound separately to the front legs, her head down, her face obscured by her hair, so that the damage to the face and eyes was not visible, not from this angle. Her daughter lay across her mother’s thighs. Not so much blood on her. Her throat had been cut, as was her mother’s, but by then Jennifer was already dead. Light shone through what seemed at first glance to be a thin cloak laid across Susan Parker’s arms, but which Mickey knew to be her own skin, pulled back to complete the macabre pietà.
With the image clear in his head, Mickey opened the kitchen door, ready to impose this old vision of hell on the empty room.
Except now the room was not empty. The back door was half open, and there was a figure in the shadows behind it, watching him.
Mickey stumbled back in shock, his hand instinctively raised to his heart.
“Jesus,” he said. “What—”
The figure moved forward, and was caught by the moonlight.
“Wait a minute,” said Mickey as, unbeknownst to him, the final sands of his life began slipping through his fingers. “I know you…”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
JIMMY HAD MOVED ON to coffee, enlivened by a glass of brandy. I stuck with coffee alone, but I barely touched it. I tried to pinpoint how I was feeling, but at first there was only a numbness that gradually gave way to a kind of sadness and loneliness. I thought of all that my parents had endured, of my father’s lies and betrayal and my mother’s pain. For now, my only regret was that they were no longer there for me, that I could not go to them and tell them that I understood, that it was all okay. Had they lived, I wondered when, or if, they would together have told me of the circumstances of my birth, and I recognized that, coming from them, the details would have been more difficult to bear, and my reactions would have been more extreme. Sitting in Jimmy Gallagher’s candlelit kitchen, watching his wine-stained lips move, I felt that I was listening to the story of another man’s life, one with whom I shared certain qualities but who was, ultimately, distant from me.
With each word that he spoke, Jimmy seemed to relax a little more, but he also appeared to be growing older, although I knew it was only a trick of the light. He had lived to be a repository of secrets; now, as they seeped from him at last, so some of his life force went with them.
He sipped his brandy. “Like I said, there’s not mu Srsq??ch more to tell.”
Not much more to tell. Only the story of my father’s final day, and the blood that he shed, and the reasons why.
Not much more to tell. Only everything.
Jimmy and Will kept their distance from each other after Will and Elaine returned from Maine with their new child, and they spoke to no one else of what they knew. Then, one December night, Jimmy and Will got drunk together at Chumley’s and the White Horse, and Will thanked Jimmy for all that he had done, for his loyalty and his friendship and for killing the woman who had taken Caroline’s life.
“You think of her?” asked Jimmy.
“Caroline?”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes. More than sometimes.”
“Did you love her?”
“I don’t know. If I didn’t then, I do now. Does that make any sense?”
“As much as anything does. You ever visit the grave?”
“Just a couple of times since the funeral.”
Jimmy remembered the funeral, in a quiet corner of Bayside Cemetery. Caroline had told Will that she didn’t have much time for organized religion. Her folks had been Protestants of some stripe, so they found a minister who said the right things as she and the child were laid in the ground. Will, Jimmy, and the rabbi Epstein were the only other people in attendance. Epstein had told them that the male infant had come from one of the hospitals in the city. His mother had been a junkie, and the kid hadn’t lived for more than a couple of hours after he was born. The mother didn’t care that her child was dead or, if she did, she didn’t show it. She would later, Jimmy believed. He couldn’t countenance the possibility that a woman, no matter how sick or high she was, could remain untroubled by the death of her child. Elaine’s own labor had been discreetly induced while she was in Maine. There had been no formal burial. After she had made the decision to stay with Will, and to protect the child cut from Caroline Carr, Epstein had spoken with her over the phone, and had made her understand how important it was that everyone believed Caroline’s child was Elaine’s own. She had been given time to mourn her own baby, to cradle the small, dead thing in her arms, and then it was taken from her.
“I’d go more often, but it upsets Elaine,” said Will.
I’ll bet it does, thought Jimmy. He didn’t know how the marriage had survived and, from the hints Will had dropped, it wasn’t entirely certain that it would survive. Still, Jimmy’s respect for Elaine Parker had only grown in the aftermath of what had occurred. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what she felt as she looked at her husband, and at the child she was raising as her own. He wondered if she could yet even distinguish hatred from love.
“I always bring two bunches of flowers,” continued Will. “One fo Rfron dr Caroline, and one for the kid they buried with her. Epstein said it was important. It had to look like I was mourning both of them, just in case.”
“In case what?”
“In case someone is watching,” said Will.
“They’re gone,” said Jimmy. “You saw them both die.”
“Epstein thinks there might be others. Worse than that…”
He stopped talking.
“What could be worse?” asked Jimmy.
“That, somehow, they might come back.”
“What does that mean, ‘come back’?”
“Doesn’t matter. The rabbi’s fantasies.”
“Jesus. Fantasies is right.”