LOOKING BACK, I see a pattern in all that took place: a strange joining of disparate occurrences, a series of links between seemingly unconnected events stretching back into the past. I recall the honeycomb created by the imperfect layering of history, the proximity of what has gone before to that which now pertains, and I begin to understand. We are trapped not only by our own history but by the histories of all those with whom we choose to share our lives. Angel and Louis brought their pasts with them, as did Elliot Norton, as did I, and so it should have come as no surprise that just as current lives became interwoven, impacting on one another, so too pasts began to exert their pull, dragging innocent and guilty alike down beneath the earth, drowning them in brackish water, tearing them apart among the swollen buttresses of the Congaree.
And in Thomaston, the first link lay waiting to be uncovered.
The maximum security facility at Thomaston, Maine, looked reassuringly like a prison; at least, it looked reassuring as long as you weren’t a prisoner there. Anyone arriving in Thomaston with the prospect of long-term incarceration in his future was likely to feel his spirits sink at his first sight of the jail. It had high, imposing walls and the kind of solidity that came from being burned down and rebuilt a couple of times since it was first opened in the 1820s. Thomaston had been selected as the site for the state prison since it was roughly halfway up the coast and accessible by boat for the transportation of inmates, but it was now nearing the end of its working life. A Supermax facility known as the MCI, or Maine Correctional Institution, had been opened in Warren in 1992. It was designed to house the worst offenders in a state of near permanent lockdown, along with those prisoners with serious behavioral problems, and the new state prison would eventually be added on an adjoining tract of land. Until then, Thomaston was still home to about four hundred men, one of whom, since his suicide attempt, was now the preacher, Aaron Faulkner.
I recalled Rachel’s response when she heard that Faulkner had apparently tried to take his own life.
“It doesn’t fit,” she said. “He’s not that type.”
“So why did he do it? It’s hardly a cry for help.”
She chewed at her lip. “If he did it, he did it to further some aim. According to the newspaper reports, the wounds in his arms were deep, but not so deep that he was in immediate danger. He cut veins, not arteries. That’s not the action of a man who really wants to die. For some reason, he wanted out of Supermax. The question is, why?”
Now it seemed that I might have the opportunity to pose that question to the man himself.
I drove up to Thomaston after Angel and Louis had left for New York. I parked in a visitor’s space outside the main gate, then entered the reception area and gave my name to the sergeant of the guards at the desk. Behind him, and beyond the metal detector, was a wall of tinted reinforced glass concealing the main control room for the prison, where alarms, video cameras, and visitors were constantly monitored. The control room looked down on the visitation room to which, under ordinary circumstances, I would have been led for a face-to-face meeting with any of the men incarcerated in the facility.
Except these were not ordinary circumstances, and the Reverend Aaron Faulkner was far from being an ordinary prisoner.
Another guard arrived to escort me. I passed through the metal detector, attached my pass to my jacket, and was led to the elevator and the administration level on the third floor. This section of the prison was termed “soft side”: no prisoners were permitted here without escort, and it was separated from “hard side” by a system of dual air-locking doors that could not be opened simultaneously, so that even if a prisoner managed to get through the first door, the second would remain closed.
The colonel of the guards and the prison warden were both waiting for me in the warden’s office. The prison had swung between various regimes over the past thirty years: from strict discipline, rigidly enforced, through an ill-fated campaign of liberalism, disliked by the longer-serving guards, until finally it had settled at a midpoint that erred on the side of conservatism. In other words, the prisoners no longer spit at visitors and it was safe to walk through the general population, which was fine by me.
A bugle call sounded, indicating the end of rec time, and through the windows I could see blue-garbed prisoners begin to move across the yards toward their cells. Thomaston enclosed an area of eight or nine acres, including Haller Field, the prison’s playing field, its walls carved out of sheer rock. Unmarked, in a far corner beneath the walls, was the old execution site.
The warden offered me coffee, then played nervously with his own cup, spinning it around the table by its handle. The colonel of the guards, who was almost as imposing as the prison itself, remained standing and silent. If he was as uneasy as the warden, then he didn’t show it. His name was Joe Long and his face displayed all the emotion of a cigar store Indian.
“You understand that this is highly unusual, Mr. Parker,” the warden began. “Visits are usually conducted in the visiting area, not through the bars of a cell. And we rarely have the attorney general’s office calling to request that we facilitate alternative arrangements.” He stopped talking and waited for me to respond.
“The truth is, I’d prefer not to be here myself,” I said. “I don’t want to face Faulkner again, not until the trial.”
The two men exchanged a look. “Rumor is that this trial has all the makings of a disaster,” said the warden. He seemed tired and vaguely disgusted.
I didn’t answer, so he spoke to fill the silence.
“Which, I guess, is why the prosecutor is so anxious that you should talk to Faulkner,” he concluded. “You think he’ll give anything away?” The expression on his face told me that he already knew the answer but I gave him the echo he expected anyway.
“He’s too smart for that,” I said.
“Then why are you here, Mr. Parker?” asked the colonel.
It was my turn to sigh.
“Frankly, colonel, I don’t know.”
The colonel didn’t speak as he, along with a sergeant, led me through 7 Dorm, past the infirmary where old men in wheelchairs were given the drugs they needed to maximize their life sentences. The 5 and 7 Dorms housed the older, sicker prisoners, who shared multibed rooms decorated with hand-lettered signs (“Get Use To It,” “Ed’s Bed”). In the past, older special prisoners like Faulkner might have been housed here, or placed in administrative segregation in a cell among the general population, their movements restricted, until a decision was made about them. But the main segregation unit was now at the Supermax facility, which did not have the capacity to offer psychiatric services to prisoners, and Faulkner’s attempts to injure himself appeared to require some form of psychiatric investigation. A suggestion that Faulkner be transferred to the Augusta Mental Health Institute had been rejected by the attorney general’s office, which did not want to prejudice any future jurors into making a pretrial association between Faulkner and insanity, and by Faulkner’s own lawyers, who feared that the state might use the opportunity to discreetly place their client under more elaborate observation than was possible elsewhere. Since the state regarded the county jail as unsuitable for holding Faulkner, Thomaston became the compromise solution.
Faulkner had attempted to cut his wrists with a slim ceramic blade that he had concealed in the spine of his Bible before his transfer to the MCI. He had kept it, unused, until almost three months into his incarceration. A guard on routine night rounds had spotted him and called for help just as Faulkner appeared to be losing consciousness. The result was Faulkner’s transfer to the Mental Health Stabilization Unit at the western end of Thomaston prison, where he was initially placed in the acute corridor. His clothing was taken away and he was given instead a nylon smock. He was placed under constant camera watch, as well as being monitored by a prison guard who noted any movement or conversation in a logbook. In addition, all communication was recorded electronically. After five days in acute, Faulkner was transferred to sub-acute, where he was allowed state blues to replace his smock, hygiene products (but no razors), hot meals, showers, and access to a telephone. He had commenced one-on-one counseling with a prison psychologist and had been examined by psychiatrists nominated by his legal team, but had remained unresponsive. Then he had demanded a telephone call, contacted his lawyers and asked that he be allowed to speak to me. His request that the interview should be conducted from his cell was, perhaps surprisingly, met with approval.
When I arrived in the MHSU, the guards were finishing off some chicken burgers left over from the prisoners’ lunches. In the unit’s main recreation area, the inmates stopped what they were doing and stared at me. One, a stocky, hunched man, barely five feet tall with lank dark hair, approached the bars and appraised me silently. I caught his eye, didn’t like what I felt, then looked away again. The colonel and the sergeant sat on the edge of a desk and watched as one of the unit’s guards led me down the corridor to Faulkner’s cell.
I felt the chill while I was still ten feet away from him. At first, I thought it was brought on by my own reluctance to face the old man, until I felt the guard beside me shiver slightly.
“What happened to the heating?” I asked.
“Heating’s on full blast,” he replied. “This place leaks heat like it’s blowing through a sieve, but never like this.”
He stopped while we were still out of sight of the cell’s occupant, and his voice dropped. “It’s him. The preacher. His cell is freezing. We’ve tried installing two heaters outside, but they short out every time.” He shifted uneasily on his feet. “It’s something to do with Faulkner. He just brings the temperature right down somehow. His lawyers are screaming a blue fit about the conditions, but there’s nothing we can do.”
As he concluded, something white moved to my right. The bars of the cell were almost flush with my line of sight, so that the hand that emerged appeared to have passed through a solid wall of steel. The long white fingers probed at the air, twitching and turning, as if they were gifted with the sense not only of touch, but of sight and sound as well.
And then the voice came, like iron filings falling on paper.
“Parker,” it said. “You’ve come.”
Slowly, I walked toward the cell and saw the moisture on the walls. The droplets glittered in the artificial light, gleaming like thousands of small silver eyes. A smell of damp arose from the cell and from the man who stood before me.
He was smaller than I remembered him, and his long white hair had been cut back close to his skull, but the eyes still burned with that same strange intensity. He remained horribly thin: he had not put on weight, as some inmates do when they switch to a diet of prison food. It took me a moment to realize why.
Despite the cold in the cell, Faulkner was giving off waves of heat. He should have been burning up, his face feverish, his body wracked with tremors, but instead there was no trace of sweat on his face, and no sign of discomfort. His skin was dry as paper, so that it seemed he was on the verge of igniting from within, and the flames that emerged would consume him and leave him as burned ash.
“Come closer,” he said.
Beside me, the guard shook his head.
“I’m good,” I replied.
“Are you afraid of me, sinner?”
“Not unless you can move through steel.” My words brought back that image of the hand seemingly materializing in the air and I heard myself swallow hard.
“No,” said the old man. “I have no need of parlor tricks. I’ll be out of here, soon enough.”
“You think?”
He leaned forward and pressed his face against the cold bars.
“I know.”
He smiled and his pale tongue emerged from his mouth and licked at his dry lips.
“What do you want?”
“To talk.”
“About what?”
“Life. Death. Life after death; or, if you prefer, the death after life. Do they still come to you, Parker? The lost ones, the dead, do you still see them? I do. They come to me.” He smiled and drew in a long breath that seemed to catch in his throat, as if he were in the early stages of sexual excitement. “So many of them. They ask after you, the ones whom you have dispatched. They want to know when you’re going to join them. They have plans for you. I tell them: soon. He’ll be with you real soon.”
I didn’t respond to the taunts. Instead, I asked him why he had cut himself. He held his scarred arms up before me and looked at them, almost in surprise.
“Perhaps I wanted to cheat them of their vengeance,” he replied.
“You didn’t do a very good job.”
“That’s a matter of opinion. I’m no longer in that place, that modern hell. I have contact with others.” His eyes shone brightly. “I may even be able to save some lost souls.”
“You have anyone in mind?”
Faulkner laughed softly. “Not you, sinner, that is a certainty. You are beyond salvation.”
“Yet you asked to see me.”
The smile faded, then died.
“I have an offer for you.”
“You’ve got nothing to bargain with.”
“I have your woman,” came that low, parched voice. “I can bargain with her.”
I made no move toward him, yet he stepped back suddenly from the bars, as if the force of my stare had forced him to do so, like a shove to the chest.
“What did you say?”
“I’m offering you the safety of your woman, and your unborn child. I’m offering you a life untroubled by fear of retribution.”
“Old man, your fight now is with the state. You’d better save your bargains for the court. And if you mention those close to me again, I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” he mocked. “Kill me? You had your chance, and it won’t come again. And my fight is not only with the state. Don’t you remember: you killed my children, my family, you and your deviant colleague. What did you do to the man who killed your child, Parker? Didn’t you hunt him down? Didn’t you kill him like a mad dog? Why should you expect me to respond any differently to the death of my chidren? Or is there one rule for you, and another for the rest of humanity?” He sighed theatrically. “But I am not like you. I am not a killer.”
“What do you want, old man?”
“I want you to withdraw from the trial.”
I waited a heartbeat.
“And if I don’t?”
He shrugged. “Then I can’t be held responsible for the actions that may be taken against you, or them. Not by me, of course: despite my natural animosity toward you, I have no intention of inflicting harm upon you or those close to you. I have never hurt anybody in my life and have no intention of starting now. But there may be others who would take up my cause, unless it was made clear to them that I wished no such thing.”
I turned to the guard. “You hearing this?”
He nodded, but Faulkner merely turned his gaze impassively upon the guard. “I am merely offering to plead for no retaliation against you, but in any case Mr. Anson here is hardly in a position to be of assistance. He’s fucking a little whore behind his wife’s back. Worse, behind her parents’ back. What is she, Mr. Anson, fifteen? The law frowns upon rapists, statutory or otherwise.”
“You fuck!” Anson surged toward the bars, but I caught his arm. He spun at me, and I thought for a moment he was about to strike me, but he restrained himself and shook my hand off. I looked to my right and saw Anson’s colleagues approaching. He raised his hand to let them know that he was okay, and they stopped in their tracks.
“I thought you didn’t go in for parlor tricks,” I said.
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” he whispered. “The Shadow knows!” He laughed softly. “Let me go, sinner. Walk away, and I will do likewise. I am innocent of the accusations leveled against me.”
“This meeting is over.”
“No, it has only just begun. Do you remember what our mutual friend said before he died, sinner? Do you remember the words that the Traveling Man spoke?”
I didn’t reply. There was much about Faulkner that I despised, and much that I did not understand, but his knowledge of events about which he could not possibly know disturbed me more than anything else. Somehow, in some way that I was unable to recognize, he had inspired the man who killed Susan and Jennifer, confirming him on the path that he had chosen, a path that had led him at last to our door.
“Didn’t he tell you about hell? That this was hell, and we were in it? He was misguided in many ways, a flawed, unhappy man, but about that much he was correct. This is hell. When the rebel angels fell, this was the place to which they were consigned. They were blighted, their beauty taken away, and left to wander here. Don’t you fear the dark angels, Parker? You should. They know of you, and soon they will start to move against you. What you’ve faced until now is as nothing compared to what is approaching. Before them I am insignificant, a foot soldier sent ahead to prepare the way. The things that are coming for you are not even human.”
“You’re insane.”
“No,” whispered Faulkner. “I am damned for failure, but you will be damned alongside me for your complicity in that failure. They will damn you. Already they wait.”
I shook my head. Anson, the other guards, even the prison bars and walls seemed to melt away. There was only the old man and I, suspended in darkness. There was sweat on my face, a product of the heat he exuded. It was as if I had caught some terrible fever from him.
“Don’t you want to know what he said to me when he came? Don’t you care about the discussions that led to the deaths of your wife and your little girl? Somewhere deep inside of yourself, don’t you want to know of what we spoke?”
I cleared my throat. The words, when they came, felt coated in nails.
“You didn’t even know them.”
He laughed. “I didn’t need to know them. But you… Oh, we spoke of you. Through him, I came to understand you in ways that you didn’t even understand yourself. I am glad, in a way, that we had this opportunity to meet, although—”
“We have both paid a high price for the intertwining of our lives. Divorce yourself now, from all of this, and there will be no more conflict between us. But continue on this road and I will be unable to stop what may occur.”
“Good-bye.”
I moved to walk away, but my struggle with Anson had brought me within Faulkner’s reach. His hand reached out and clasped my jacket and then, while I was off balance, pulled me closer to him. I turned my head instinctively, my lips apart to cry out a warning.
And Faulkner spit in my mouth.
It took me a moment to realize what had happened, and then I was striking out at him, Anson now pulling me back as I reached for the old man. The other guards came running toward us and I was hauled away, expelling the taste of Faulkner from my mouth even as he continued to howl out at me from his cell.
“Take it as a gift, Parker,” he called. “My gift to you, that you might see as I see.”
I pushed the guards away and wiped my mouth, then kept my head down as I walked past the recreation area, where those deemed to be no danger to themselves or others watched me from behind their bars. Had my head been raised, and my attention been focused elsewhere than on the preacher and what he had just done to me, then perhaps I might have seen the stooped, dark-haired man watching me more closely than the rest.
And as I left, the man named Cyrus Nairn smiled, his arms outstretched, his fingers forming a constant flow of words, until a guard looked his way and he stopped, his arms withdrawing back toward his body.
The guard knew what Cyrus was doing, but he paid him no heed. After all, Cyrus was a mute and that was what mutes did.
They signed.
• • •
I was almost at my car when I heard the sound of footsteps on the gravel behind me. It was Anson. He shifted uneasily.
“You okay?”
I nodded. I had washed my mouth out in the guards’ quarters with borrowed mouthwash, but I still felt as if some element of Faulkner was coursing through me, infecting me.
“What you heard in there—” he began.
I interrupted him. “Your private life is your own affair. It’s nothing to do with me.”
“What he said, it’s not like it seems.”
“It never is.”
A red glow began at his neck and spread into his features as if drawn by osmosis.
“Are you being smart with me?”
“Like I said, it’s your business. I do have one question. If you’re worried, you can check me for a wire.”
He considered the offer for a moment, then motioned to me to continue.
“Is what the preacher said true? I don’t care about the law or about why you’re doing it. All I want to know is: was he correct in the details?”
Anson didn’t reply. He just looked at his feet and nodded.
“Could one of the other guards have let it slip?”
“No. Nobody knows about it.”
“A prisoner, maybe? Somebody local who might have been in a position to spread a little jailhouse gossip?”
“No, I don’t believe so.”
I opened the car door. Anson seemed to feel the need to make some final macho comment. As in other things, he didn’t appear to be a man who believed in restraining his urges.
“If anyone finds out about this, you’ll be in a world of shit,” he warned. It sounded hollow, even to himself. I could see it in the mottling of his skin and the way in which he had to concentrate on straining the muscles in his neck so that they bulged over the collar of his shirt. I let him retrieve whatever dignity he thought he could salvage from the situation, then watched as he slowly padded back to the main door, seemingly reluctant to place himself in proximity to Faulkner once again.
A shadow fell across him, as if a huge winged bird had descended and were slowly circling above him. Over the prison walls, more birds seemed to hover. They were big and black, moving in lazy, drifting loops, but there was in their movements something unnatural. They glided with none of the grace or beauty of birds, for their thin bodies seemed almost to be at odds with their enormous wings, as though struggling with the pull of gravity, the torso always threatening to plummet toward the ground, the wings allowing the slide for a time before beating wildly to draw them back to the safety of the air.
Then one broke from the flock, growing larger and larger as it descended in a spiral, coming to rest at last on the top of one of the guard towers, and I could see that this was no bird, and I knew it for what it was.
The dark angel’s body was emaciated, its arms black mummified skin over slim bones, its face elongated and predatory, its eyes dark and knowing. It rested a clawed hand on the glass and its great wings, feathered in darkness, beat a low cadence against the air. Slowly, it was joined by others, each silently taking up a position on the walls and the towers, until it seemed at last that the prison was black with them. They made no move toward me but I sensed their hostility, and something more: their sense of betrayal, as if I were somehow one of them and had turned my back upon them.
“Ravens,” said a voice at my side. It was an elderly woman. She carried a brown paper bag in her hand, filled with some small items for one of the inmates: a son, perhaps, or a husband among the old men in 7 Dorm. “Never seen so many before, or so big.”
And now they were ravens: two feet tall at least, the fingered wing tips clearly visible as they moved upon the walls, calling softly to one another.
“I didn’t think they came together in those numbers,” I said.
“They don’t,” she said. “Not normally, nohow, but who’s to say what’s normal these days?”
She continued walking. I got in my car and began to drive away, but in the rearview mirror the black birds did not seem to decrease in size as I left them behind. Instead, they seemed to grow larger even as the prison receded, taking on new forms.
And I felt their eyes upon me as the preacher’s saliva colonized my body like a cancer.
My gift to you, that you might see as I see.
• • •
Apart from the prison and the prison craft shop there isn’t a whole lot to keep a casual visitor in Thomaston, but the town has a pretty good diner at its northern end, with homemade pies and bread pudding served piping hot to locals and those who come to talk after meeting their loved ones across a table or through a screen farther up the road. I bought another bottle of mouthwash at the drugstore and sluiced my mouth out in the parking lot before heading into the diner.
The small eating area with its mismatched furniture was largely empty, with the exception of two old men who sat quietly, side by side, watching the traffic go by, and a younger man in an expensively tailored suit who sat in a wooden booth by the wall, his overcoat folded neatly beside him, a fork resting among the cream and crumbs on his plate, a copy of USA Today beside it. I ordered a coffee and took a seat across from him.
“You don’t look so good,” said the man.
I felt my gaze drawn toward the window. I could not see the prison from where I sat. I shook my head, clearing it of visions of dark creatures crowding on prison walls, waiting. They were not real. They were just ravens. I was ill, nauseated by Faulkner’s assault.
They were not real.
“Stan,” I said, to distract myself. “Nice suit.”
He turned the jacket to show me the label inside. “Armani. Bought it in an outlet store. I keep the receipt in the inside pocket, just in case I get accused of corruption.”
My coffee arrived, and the waitress retreated behind the counter to read a magazine. Somewhere, a radio played sickly M.O.R. The Rush revival begins here.
Stan Ornstead was an assistant district attorney, part of the team assembled to prosecute the Faulkner case. It was Ornstead who had convinced me to face Faulkner, with the full knowledge of deputy D.A. Andrus, and who had arranged for the interview to be conducted at the cell so that I could see the conditions that he appeared to have created for himself. Stan was only a few years younger than I was and was considered a hot prospect for the future. He was going places; he just wasn’t going there fast enough for him. Faulkner, he had hoped, might have changed that situation, except, as the warden had indicated, the Faulkner case was turning into something very bad indeed, something that threatened to drag everyone involved down with it.
“You look kind of shaken up,” Stan said, after I’d taken a couple of fortifying sips from my coffee.
“He has that effect on people.”
“He didn’t give too much away.”
I froze, and he raised his palms in a what-you-gonna-do? gesture.
“They mike sub-acute cells?” I asked.
“They don’t, if you mean the prison authorities.”
“But somebody else has taken up the slack.”
“The cell has been lojacked. Officially, we know nothing about it.” “Lojacking” was the term used to describe a surveillance operation not endorsed by a court. More particularly, it was the term used by the FBI to describe any such operation.
“The Feebs?”
“The trenchcoats don’t have too much faith in us. They’re worried that Faulkner may walk on our beef so they want to get as much as they can, while they can, in case of federal charges or a double prosecution. All conversations with his lawyers, his doctors, his shrink, even his nemesis—that’s you, in case you didn’t know—are being recorded. The hope is that, at the very least, he’ll give something away that might lead them to others like him, or even give them a lead to other crimes he might have committed. All inadmissible, of course, but useful if it works.”
“And will he walk?”
Ornstead shrugged.
“You know what he’s claiming: he was kept a virtual prisoner for decades and had no part in, or knowledge of, any crimes committed by the Fellowship or those associated with it. There’s nothing to link him directly to any of the killings, and that underground nest of rooms he lived in had bolts on the outside.”
“He was at my house when they tried to kill me.”
“You say, but you were woozy. You told me yourself you couldn’t see straight.”
“Rachel saw him.”
“Yes, she did, but she’d just been hit on the head and had blood in her eyes. She herself admits that she can’t remember a lot of what was said, and he wasn’t there for what followed.”
“There’s a hole in the ground at Eagle Lake where seventeen bodies were found, the remains of his flock.”
“He says fighting broke out between the families. They turned on each other, then on his own family. They killed his wife. His children responded in kind. He claims he was over in Presque Isle on the day they were killed.”
“He assaulted Angel.”
“Faulkner denies it, says his kids did it and forced him to watch. Anyway, your friend says he won’t testify and even if we subpoena him any lawyer worth more than a dollar an hour would tear him apart. A credible witness he is not. And, with respect, you’re hardly an ideal witness either.”
“Why would that be?”
“You’ve been pretty free with that cannon of yours, but just because charges have been let slide doesn’t mean that they’ve disappeared off everybody’s radar. You can be damn sure that Faulkner’s legal team knows all about you. They’ll push the angle that you came tearing in there, shooting the place up and the old man was lucky to escape with his life.”
I pushed my coffee cup away. “Is that why you brought me here, to rip my story to shreds?”
“Do it here, do it in court, makes no difference. We’re in trouble. And maybe we have other worries.”
I waited.
“His lawyers have confirmed that they’re going to petition for a Supreme Court review of the bail decision within the next ten days. We think that the available judge may be Wilton Cooper, and that’s not good news.”
Wilton Cooper was only a few months shy of retirement, but he would continue to be a thorn in the side of the AG’s office until then. He was obstinate, unpredictable, and had a personal animosity toward the AG, the source of which was lost in the mists of time. He had also spoken out in the past against preventive bail and was quite capable of defending the rights of the accused at the cost of the rights of society in general.
“If Cooper takes the review, it could go either way,” said Ornstead. “Faulkner’s claims are bullshit, but we need time to amass the evidence to undermine them and it could be years before a trial. And you’ve seen his cell: we could keep him at the bottom of a volcano and it would still be cold. His lawyers have got independent experts who will claim that Faulkner’s continued incarceration is endangering his health, and that he will die if he remains in custody. If we move him to Augusta we could shoot ourselves in the foot in the event of an insanity plea. We don’t have the facilities for him at the Supermax, and where do we put him if we move him out of Thomaston? County? I don’t think so. So what we have right now is an upcoming trial with no reliable witnesses, insufficient evidence to make the case watertight, and a defendant who may be dead before we can even get him on the stand. Cooper would just be the icing on the cake.”
I found that I was clutching the handle of my coffee cup so tightly that it had left a mark on the palm of my hand. I released my grip and watched the blood flow back into the white areas. “If he’s bailed, he’ll flee,” I said. “He won’t wait around for a trial.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Yes, we do.”
We were both hunched over the table, and we both seemed to realize it simultaneously. Close by the window, the two old men had turned to watch us, their attention attracted by the tension between us. I leaned back, then looked at them. They returned to watching the traffic.
“Anyway,” said Ornstead, “even Cooper won’t set a bail below seven figures and we don’t believe that Faulkner has access to that level of funds.”
All of the Fellowship’s assets had been frozen, and the AG’s office was trying to follow the paper trail that might lead to other accounts undiscovered so far. But somebody was paying Faulkner’s lawyers, and a defense fund had been opened into which dispiriting numbers of right-wing crazies and religious nuts were pouring money.
“Do we know who’s organizing the defense fund?” I asked. Officially, the fund was the responsibility of a firm of lawyers, Muren & Associates, in Savannah, Georgia, but it was a pretty low-rent operation. There had to be more to it than a bunch of Southern shysters working out of an office with plastic chairs. Faulkner’s own legal team, led by Grim Jim Grimes, was separate from it. Stone features apart, Jim Grimes was one of the best lawyers in New England. He could talk his way out of cancer, and he didn’t come cheap.
Ornstead blew out a large breath. It smelled of coffee and nicotine.
“That’s the rest of the bad news. Muren had a visitor a couple of days back, a guy by the name of Edward Carlyle. Phone records show that the two of them have been in daily contact since this thing started, and Carlyle is a cosignatory on the fund checking account.”
I shrugged. “Name doesn’t ring a bell.”
Ornstead tapped his fingers lightly on the table in a delicate cadence.
“Edward Carlyle is Roger Bowen’s right-hand man. And Roger Bowen is—”
“A creep,” I finished. “And a racist.”
“And a neo-Nazi,” added Ornstead. “Yup, clock stopped sometime around 1939 for Bowen. He’s quite a guy. Probably has shares in gas ovens in the hope that things might pick up again on the old ‘final solution’ front. As far as we can tell, Bowen is the one behind the defense fund. He’s been keeping a low profile these last few years but something has drawn him out from under his rock. He’s making speeches, appearing at rallies, passing around the collection plate. Seems to me like he wants Faulkner back on the streets pretty bad.”
“Why?”
“Well, that’s what we’re trying to find out.”
“Bowen’s base is in South Carolina, isn’t it?”
“He moves between South Carolina and Georgia, but spends most of his time somewhere up by the Chattooga River. Why, you planning on visiting down there?”
“Maybe.”
“I ask why?”
“A friend in need.”
“The worst kind. Well, while you’re down there you could always ask Bowen why Faulkner is so important to him, though I wouldn’t recommend it. I don’t imagine you’re top of his wish list of friends he hasn’t met yet.”
“I’m not top of anybody’s wish list.”
Ornstead stood and patted me on the shoulder.
“You’re breaking my heart.”
I walked with him to the door. His car was parked right outside.
“You heard everything, right?” I asked. I assumed that Stan had been listening in to all that had passed between Faulkner and me.
“Yeah. We talking about the guard?”
“Anson.”
“Doesn’t concern me. You?”
“She’s underage. I don’t believe that Anson is going to be an influence for the better in her life.”
“No, I guess not. We can get someone to look into it.”
“Done. Now I got a question for you. What happened in there? Sounded like there was a scuffle.”
Despite the coffee, I could still taste the mouthwash.
“Faulkner spit in my mouth.”
“Shit. You going to need a test?”
“I doubt it, but I feel like swallowing battery acid to burn it out of my mouth and insides.”
“Why’d he do it? To get you pissed at him?”
I shook my head.
“No, he told me it was a gift, to help me see more clearly.”
“See what?”
I didn’t answer, but I knew.
He wanted me to see what was waiting for him, and what was coming for me.
He wanted me to see his kind.