I called the cops. Angel and Louis left. There was only me and a ten-year-old girl with sallow skin whose name appeared to be Anya. She wore a cheap necklace around her neck with those four letters picked out in silver upon it. I put her in the front seat of my car and she sat there unmoving, her face turned away from the trailer, her eyes fixed on a spot on the car floor. She couldn’t tell me how long she had been held there, and I could only get confirmation of her name and her age out of her in thickly accented English before she went silent again. She said she was ten years old. I doubted that she trusted me, and I didn’t blame her. While she sat in the car, lost in her own thoughts, I went through Raymon Lang’s album of photographs. Some of them were very recent: Anya was among the children pictured, masked men on either side of her. I looked closely at one of the photographs and thought I saw, on the arm of the man on the right, what might have been the yellow beak of a bird. I flicked back through the rest, the tones and colors changing as the pictures grew older, Polaroids taking the place of computer images before their place was taken in turn by the oldest of the photographs: black-and-white pictures, probably developed by Lang himself in a home darkroom. There were boys and girls, sometimes photographed alone and at other times with men, their identities hidden by bird masks. It was a history of abuse that spanned years, probably decades. The oldest images in the album were photocopies, their quality poor. They showed a young girl on a bed, two men taking turns with her, the pictures cropped to remove their heads. In one of the photos, I thought I saw a tattoo on the arm of one of the men. It was blurred. I imagined that it could be cleaned up, and that when it was it would reveal an eagle. But one of the photographs was different from the rest. I looked at it for a long time, then removed it from its plastic sleeve and carefully rearranged the other images to disguise what I had done. I tucked the picture beneath the rubber mat on the floor of my car, then sat on the cold, hard gravel with my head in my hands and waited for the police to come.
They arrived out of uniform and in a pair of unmarked cars. Anya watched them coming and curled up fetally, repeating a single word over and over in a language that I did not recognize. It was only when the doors of the first car opened, and a pair of women emerged, that Anya started to believe she might be safe. The two women approached us. The passenger door of my car was open, and they could see the little girl just as she could see them. I hadn’t wanted Anya to feel she had simply been moved from one cell to another.
The first cop squatted before her. She was slim, with long red hair tied back tightly on her head. She reminded me of Rachel.
“Hi,” she said. “My name is Jill. You’re Anya, is that right?”
Anya nodded, recognizing her name, if nothing else. Her face began to soften. Her lips turned down at the corners, and she started to cry. This wasn’t the animal response that had greeted Angel. This was something else.
Jill opened her arms to the little girl, and she fell into them, burying her face in the woman’s neck, her body jerking with the force of her sobs. Jill looked over Anya’s shoulder at me, and nodded. I turned away and left them to each other.
Chapter XXXV
B ath isn’t a very beautiful town when seen from the water, but then most places dependent upon one form of heavy industry rarely are, and nobody ever designed a shipyard with aesthetics in mind. Still, there was something majestic about its massive cranes and the great ships that the yards still turned out at a time when most of its rivals had seen shipbuilding either collapse entirely, or become a mere shadow of its former grandeur. The shipyard might have been ugly, yet it was an ugliness born not of decay but of growth, with four hundred years of history behind it, four centuries of noise and steam and sparks, of wood replaced by steel, of sons following fathers with skills that had been passed down for generations. The fate of Bath and the fate of the shipyard were forever intertwined in a bond that could never be severed. Like any town where large numbers of people traveled to work for one major employer, parking was an issue, and the huge lot at King Street, right at the intersection with Commercial and nearest to the main north gate to the yard, was packed with cars. The first shift was about to end, and buses idled nearby, waiting to transport those who came from out of town and preferred to avoid the hassle of parking either by dispensing with their cars entirely or by leaving them in the suburbs. A sign warned that the Bath Iron Works was a defense contractor and all photography was prohibited. Over the employee entrance was another sign that read: through these gates pass the best shipbuilders in the world.
The cops had gathered at the Riverside Sports Club. There were a dozen, all told, a mix of Bath P.D. and state police, all of them in plain clothes. In addition, two cruisers lurked out of sight. The yard’s own security people had been advised that an arrest was imminent, and at their request it had been decided to take Raymon Lang as he emerged into the parking lot. He was being watched continuously, and the yard’s head of security was in direct contact with Jill Carrier, the state police detective who had taken Anya into her arms, and who was in charge of apprehending Lang. I was parked in the lot, with a clear view of the gates. I’d been allowed to tag along on condition that I stayed out of sight and took no part in what occurred. I had spun the cops quite a story to tell them how I’d come to find the little girl in Lang’s trailer, and how I had come to be at the trailer to begin with, but in the end I had to admit to lying during the viewing of Legere’s body. I was in trouble, but Carrier had been kind enough to let me see the Lang thing through to its end, even if one of the conditions she attached was to have a plainclothes officer seated beside me at all times. His name was Weintraub, and he didn’t say very much, which was fine with me.
At 3:30 p.m., the gates opened with a rumble, and men began to pour out, all dressed near identically in baseball caps and jeans, and lumberjack shirts open over T-shirts, each carrying his flask and his lunch pail. I saw Carrier speaking on her cell phone, and half a dozen of the cops broke away from the main group, Carrier leading, and began to ease their way through the throng of men. Over to the right, I saw Raymon Lang emerge from a turnstile carrying his long metal toolbox. He was dressed just like the shipbuilders and was smoking the end of a cigarette. As he took a final drag and prepared to throw the butt to the ground, he saw Carrier and the others approaching, and he knew immediately who they were and for whom they had come, a predator immediately aware of other, more powerful predators descending upon him. He dropped the toolbox and started to run, heading east away from his pursuers, but a Bath P.D. cruiser appeared and blocked the road out of the lot. Lang altered direction, weaving in and out of cars, even as the second cruiser appeared and uniforms moved in on him. Now Carrier was closing, faster and more lithe than the men she was with. She had her gun in her hand. She ordered Lang to stop. Lang turned, and reached behind his back, his hand searching for something beneath his shirt. I heard Carrier give him a final warning to put his hands up, but he did not. Then I saw the gun buck in Carrier’s hand, and heard the shot as Lang spun and fell to the ground. He died on the way to the hospital. He did not speak as the paramedics struggled to save his life, and nothing was learned from him. They stripped him of his shirt as they placed him on a gurney, and I saw that his arms were bare of tattoos.
Raymon Lang had been unarmed. There seemed to have been no reason for him to reach behind his back, no reason for him to draw Carrier’s fire upon himself. I think, though, that in the end he just didn’t want to go to jail, perhaps out of cowardice, or perhaps because he couldn’t bear to be separated from children for the rest of his life.
Six
And in my best behavior
I am really just like him.
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid
—SUFJAN STEVENS,
“JOHN WAYNE GACY, JR.”