10
It was the day after my meeting with Marielle Vetters and Ernie Scollay.
The month of November was set to die a sticky death, it seemed. A snowstorm had hit early in the month, presaging a long, cold winter, but no further snows had followed, and slowly the temperature had climbed until there were days when a sweater seemed too much to wear, and nights when the bars let their doors stand open to allow a little air to circulate. Now there was at least a north wind blowing, and from the window of my office at home I watched the cordgrass of the Scarborough marshes perform delicate dances at the breeze’s call.
On my desk before me was the typewritten list given to me by Marielle. It consisted of seven names: six men and one woman. Beside four of those names were sums of money, ranging from $3,000 to $45,000. The other three names each had the word ‘Contacted’ handwritten beside them, followed by ‘Accepted’ in two cases, and ‘Refused’ in one. Just one of the names was familiar to me, and then only after I had cross-checked a box number to make sure that it was the same person: Aaron Newman was a reporter with one of the New York newspapers, a political writer with what appeared to be extremely good sources. His profile had risen recently following a series of articles exposing a married congressman’s contacts with a pair of nineteen-year-old boys whom he may or may not have paid for sexual favors. Naturally, the congressman’s career had immediately gone down the toilet, and his wife had helped to flush the bowl by failing to appear at any of his teary-eyed press conferences. The flock is easily led: show them a penitent with a forgiving spouse and they’ll consider forgiving too, but give them a penitent alone on a platform and they’ll start looking for rocks to throw. Newman’s name did not have a sum of money beside it, only the word ‘Accepted.’
The name of a second man, Davis Tate, rang a bell somewhere, and the miracle of Google did the rest. Tate was a talk radio shock jock, a minor celebrity on the extreme right, the kind who gave a bad name to ordinary conservatives who didn’t immediately hate on sight anyone who wasn’t like them in race, creed, or sexual orientation. Tate’s name had a letter ‘A’ handwritten after it, along with three asterisks. Either he was a very good student or Davis Tate had accepted, or been accepted, with more than usual enthusiasm.
One of the others, a woman called Solene Escott, had a twelve-digit number beside her name, but it didn’t work as a telephone number, and when I tried an Internet search on it I came up with nothing, even when I included her name alongside. A further trawl produced a handful of Solene Escotts, including a banker, a writer, and a housewife who had died in a car accident in October 2001 somewhere north of Milford, New Hampshire.
I looked again at those twelve digits beside Solene Escott’s name, which, unlike the others on the list, was typed in red, then separated them into two six-digit numbers. The first set ended in ‘65’, the second in ‘01’. The first numbers conformed to the date of Solene Escott’s birth, according to her obituary, and the second set matched the date on which she died. But according to the newspaper found in the plane, it had gone down in July 2001, three months before Solene Escott perished. Either someone connected to that plane had a direct line to God, or Solene Escott’s death had been planned well in advance.
The obituary also gave me the name of Solene Escott’s husband. Solene had kept her own name when she married. Her husband’s name was Kenneth Chan, apparently known to his friends and associates as Kenny. His name was typed above Solene’s on the list.
Beside it was written the word ‘Accepted’.
It took me another hour to come up with a possible identity for one further name on the list, and again it was Solene Escott who provided the link. The only person with ‘Refused’ beside his name was one Brandon Felice. A Brandon Felice had been killed in a gas station robbery outside of Newburyport, Massachusetts in March 2002. There was no apparent reason for his death. According to an eyewitness, a salesman who had been drinking coffee in his car across the street when the robbery occurred, Felice had been pumping gas into his Mercedes when two masked men pulled up in a Buick, both armed with pistols. One of the men ordered the attendant to empty the register while the other forced Felice and a woman, Antonia Viga, who had been putting air in the tires of her minivan, to lie on the ground. When the first raider emerged with the cash, having first shot and seriously wounded the attendant, the second walked to where Felice and Viga were lying and shot both of them in the back of the head. The men then drove off, and the Buick was later found burned out off Route 1. The Buick had been stolen earlier from Back Bay in Boston. The raiders netted a total of $163 in the course of the robbery, and were never found.
Brandon Felice was linked to Solene Escott through her husband, Kenny Chan. Felice, Escott and Chan had been involved in a software start-up company, Branken Developments Inc., in which each of them held a one-third share. Felice had not been married and had no children. Upon his death, his share was acquired by a company named Pryor Investments. Meanwhile, Solene Escott’s share in the company had passed to her husband following her fatal accident.
I’d never heard of Pryor Investments, but another search revealed a little about the company. It was a very discreet operation, working on behalf of clients who preferred that their business dealings should remain as anonymous as possible. The only time that Pryor made the news was when something went wrong, most recently in 2009 when it was found to have ‘inadvertently’ broken an embargo on new investment in Burma. One of Pryor’s junior partners appended his signature to a contract from what was ostensibly a foreign-incorporated and headquartered subsidiary of a shelf company in Panama, but which was traced back to Pryor’s offices in Boston. Pryor had received a $50,000 fine following an investigation by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, and the junior partner had been punished with the equivalent of an hour on the naughty step. Garrison Pryor, the company’s CEO, described it as ‘an isolated incident’ and ‘an error of detail’, whatever that meant.
Branken Developments, meanwhile, had specialized in security algorithms for the defense and weapons industries, and became a significant player in its field. In 2004, the company had quietly ceased trading, its operations were folded into a subsidiary of the Defense Department, and Kenny Chan had retired, reputedly a very wealthy man. Pryor Investments was once again involved: it had brokered the deal for a percentage of the profits from the sale.
The twist to the tale lay in the fate of Kenny Chan: in 2006 he was found dead in his own safe, surrounded by share certificates, various forms of gold currency, and about $20,000 in cash. The safe was big, but not big enough to take Kenny Chan comfortably, so someone had broken his arms and legs to make him more malleable. It was some time before his body was discovered, and it was unclear whether he had suffocated or choked to death on the Swiss gold franc found lodged in his throat.
So Kenny Chan’s wife died in a car accident that appeared to have been planned in advance, and his business partner was shot for no reason during a gas station robbery a few months later. Kenny Chan subsequently made a killing by selling his accumulated shares in his company before someone made a killing of a more literal kind on Kenny Chan, with robbery apparently not the motive. At the very least, Mr Chan had led an interesting, if relatively brief, life. Solene Escott’s death was treated by police as an unfortunate accident; the investigation into Brandon Felice’s death appeared to have dried up with no resolution; and Kenny Chan’s demise remained quite the mystery.
The other two names on the list meant nothing to me, although I discovered obituary notices for any number of people who might have been them. Without something more than the names in isolation, it seemed that I wasn’t likely to get any further with the list.
And all the time I kept coming back to Brightwell: Brightwell, a killer of men and women; a harvester and repository of souls; a being whose image had appeared in photographs from the Second World War, hardly different from the face of the man who had still been murdering for his cause sixty years later, and who bore a startling resemblance to a figure in a centuries-old painting of a battlefield, fighting alongside a fallen angel. I had killed him, and yet I had been led to doubt whether one such as he could ever be dispatched with a bullet or a blade. I still heard whispers of creatures reborn, of the transmigration of spirits, and had witnessed the consequences of vengeance pursued through generations. Brightwell, and those like him, were not of the order of men. They were Other.
So what had drawn Brightwell to the town of Falls End, and how was the list connected?
That afternoon, I began clearing my desk of other work. There wasn’t very much to clear. Business had picked up some in the last few months, but it still didn’t amount to a whole lot. The previous year, the case of a missing girl, with which I’d become involved through my lawyer, Aimee Price, had attracted a lot of attention, and it had led to offers of similar work. I’d turned down all but one. A man named Juan Lozano, a Spanish academic and translator who had married an American woman from the northern Maine town of Harden, had hired me to find his wife. They’d had an argument over sex, he told me, and she’d left him. Sexual relations between them had virtually ceased over the previous two years and he had accused her of having an affair. They’d had a shouting match, he’d stormed out, and when he returned she was gone. He just wanted to know that she was okay, he said, nothing more. I’d accepted his money because I thought that finding her would be easy: her credit cards were still being used, and withdrawals had been made from ATMs in the DC area using her bank card in the two days prior to my first meeting with Lozano. Beatrice, his wife, was either alive and well, or someone was using her cards and being careless about it.
I flew down to DC and rented a car. It took me less than a day to find Beatrice Lozano. She was holed up in a motel called the Lamplighter in a small town near Chesapeake Bay, the battered rental she had picked up a week earlier from a firm that wasn’t giving Hertz and Avis any headaches about competition parked directly outside the room. When I knocked on the door she didn’t bother to put the security chain in place before opening it. The room was dark, but even when she stepped into the sunlight I couldn’t tell if she was plain or pretty. She was in her mid-thirties and spreading slightly. Her face was pale, her short hair greasy and plastered to her skull, her skin dotted with pimples. There were fresh open cuts to her arms and hands. As we spoke, the thumb and index finger of her right hand moved to her left, and the nails began to dig into the flesh, creating a new wound for her to explore.
Her eyes were dead, and the skin around them was so dark that it looked like she’d been beaten.
‘Did he send you to look for me?’ she asked, after I told her who I was.
‘If you’re talking about your husband, then, yes, he did.’
‘Are you going to take me back to him?’
‘Do you want to go back?’
‘No.’
‘Then I won’t.’
‘But you’ll tell him where I am?’
‘He hired me to find out if you were okay,’ I said. ‘If it’s what you want, I’ll inform him that I saw you, and you seemed fine. It’ll be a lie, but that’s what I’ll tell him.’
‘A lie?’ She frowned.
‘You’re tearing holes in your skin. You’re not sleeping or, if you are, you’re having bad dreams. You’ve been moving from motel to motel, but you haven’t planned what you’re doing well enough to avoid using credit cards. Your husband didn’t seem too familiar with your wardrobe, but he was pretty certain that you hadn’t taken many clothes with you when you ran, so it was a snap decision on your part. You haven’t run away with anybody because I can see only one suitcase in the room behind you, and no sign of a man – or another woman – sharing the room. And if you had run away with someone, I think you’d probably be paying more attention to your appearance. No offense meant.’
‘None taken.’ She managed to raise a smile. ‘You sound like Sherlock Holmes.’
‘Every private detective wants to be Sherlock Holmes, except maybe without the gay undertones.’
We were still standing outside her room. It didn’t seem like the best place to discuss the intimate details of her life.
‘Do you mind if we sit down somewhere to talk about this, Mrs Lozano? It doesn’t have to be your room, if you’d rather keep that private or if you’re concerned about admitting a stranger. We can find a quiet diner, a coffee shop, a bar, whatever you prefer. If you’re worried about your safety with me, you shouldn’t be. I’m not going to do anything to harm you, and if you want to call the police at any time, you can do that and I’ll stay with you until they come. I can also give you the name of a couple of cops in Maine and New York who’ll vouch for me.’ I reconsidered. ‘Well, maybe not New York, and possibly just one in Maine. He might also swear some when you mention my name.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No police.’ She stepped back into her room. ‘We can talk in here.’
Despite the ‘No Smoking’ sign beside the TV, the room smelled strongly of old tobacco. There was no closet, just a rail from which hung three empty wire coat hangers. There were two beds separated by a single nightstand on a carpet the color of pea soup, and one of the skirting boards was coming away from the wall. Mrs Lozano’s case lay on the floor beside the bed on the right. It contained a pitiable array of clothes, some cheap toiletries, and a paperback book. She sat on the edge of one bed, and I sat facing her on the other. Our knees almost touched.
‘Why did you leave, Mrs Lozano?’ I asked.
Her face crumpled. She began to cry.
‘Did your husband hurt you?’
She shook her head. ‘No, he’s a good man, a sweet man.’
I took a paper tissue from the box on the nightstand and handed it to her.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Do you love your husband, Mrs Lozano?’ I asked.