THEY BEGAN TO drift into the state over the next two days, in groups and alone, always by road, never by plane. There was the couple that checked into the small motel outside Sangerville, who kissed and cooed like the young lovers they appeared to be yet slept in separate beds in their twin room. There were the four men who ate a hurried breakfast in the Miss Portland Diner on Marginal Way, their eyes always returning to the black van in which they had arrived, tensing whenever anyone approached it and relaxing only slightly when they had passed by.
And there was the man who drove a truck north from Boston, avoiding the interstate whenever possible, until at last he found himself among forests of pine, a lake gleaming in the distance before him. He checked his watch—too early—and headed back toward Dolby Pond and the La Casa Exotic Dancing Club. There were, he figured, harder ways to kill a few hours.
The worst-case scenario came to pass: Supreme Judicial Court Justice Wilton Cooper carried out the review of the decision to deny bail to Aaron Faulkner. In the hour preceding the decision, Bobby Andrus and his team had presented their arguments against bail to Wilton Cooper in his chambers, pointing out that they believed Faulkner to be a substantial flight risk and that potential witnesses could be open to intimidation. When he asked them if they had any new evidence to hand, they had to admit that they had not.
In his submission, Jim Grimes argued that the prosecution had not presented sufficient evidence to suggest that Faulkner might have committed formerly capital crimes. He also offered medical evidence from three separate authorities that Faulkner’s health was deteriorating seriously in prison (evidence that the state itself was unable to contest, since its own doctors had found that Faulkner appeared to be suffering from some illness, although they were unable to say from what, precisely, except that he was losing weight rapidly, his temperature was consistently higher than normal, and both blood pressure and heart rate were abnormally high); that the stresses of incarceration were endangering the life of his client, against whom the prosecution had not yet been able to establish a substantial case; and that it was both unjust and inhumane to keep his client in prison while the prosecution attempted to amass enough evidence to shore up said case. Since his client would require medical supervision of the highest order, there was no real risk of flight and bail should be set accordingly.
Annoucing his decision, Cooper dismissed most of my testimony on the basis of the unreliability of my character and determined that the decision by the lower court not to grant bail had been erroneous, since the prosecution had not demonstrated sufficient probable cause that Faulkner had himself committed a formerly capital offense. In addition, he accepted Jim Grimes’s submission that his client’s poor health meant that he was not a danger to the integrity of the judicial process and that his need for regular medical treatment meant that he did not constitute a flight risk. He set bail at $1.5 million. Grimes announced that the cash was on hand. Faulkner, chained in an adjoining room under the guard of U.S. marshals, was to be released immediately.
To his credit, Andrus had foreseen the possibility that Cooper would set bail and, reluctantly, had approached the FBI and requested that they serve a warrant for Faulkner’s arrest on federal charges should he be released. It was not Andrus’s fault that the warrant had been improperly presented: a secretary had misspelled Faulkner’s name, rendering it null and void. When Faulkner left the courthouse, there was no warrant waiting.
Outside Courtroom Number One, a man in a brown Timberland jacket sat on an empty bench and made a call. Ten miles away, the cell phone in Cyrus Nairn’s hand buzzed.
“You’re good to go,” said the voice on the other end of the line.
Cyrus killed the phone and tossed it into the bushes by the side of the road, then started his car and drove toward Scarborough.
• • •
Flashbulbs opened fire as soon as Grimes appeared on the courthouse steps, but Faulkner was not with him. Instead, a Nissan Terrano, with Faulkner hidden beneath a blanket in the rear, turned right from the courthouse and headed toward the Public Market parking garage on Elm. Above it, a helicopter buzzed. Behind it, two cars shadowed. The AG’s office was not about to let Faulkner disappear into the depths of the honeycomb world.
A battered yellow Buick pulled in behind the Terrano as it reached the entrance to the garage, causing the following traffic to brake suddenly. There was no need for the big jeep to pause for a ticket because its arrival had been prepared for well in advance: the ticket dispenser had been disabled by the simple application of industrial adhesive while the security guard was distracted by a fire in a garbage can and the garage had been forced to leave both the entrance and exit barriers permanently raised while the damage was being repaired.
The Terrano passed through quickly, but the Buick following it ground to a halt, blocking the entrance. Crucial seconds passed before the police in the tracking cars realized what was happening. The first car reversed, then headed up the exit ramp, speeding, while two detectives from a second car rushed to the Buick, pulled the driver from his seat, and cleared the entrance.
By the time the agents got to the abandoned Terrano, Faulkner was long gone.
• • •
At 7 P.M. Mary Mason left her house at the end of Seavey Landing for her date with Sergeant MacArthur. Beyond her house, she could see the marsh and the waters of the Scarborough River as they wended their way around the pointed finger of Nonesuch Point and into the sea at Saco Bay. MacArthur was her first real date since her divorce had come through three months earlier, and she was hopeful about a relationship with him. She had known the policeman by sight and, despite his rumpled appearance, thought him kind of cute in a hangdog way. Nothing in their first date had caused her to revise her estimate downward. In fact, he had been quite charming and when he had called her the night before to confirm that a second date was still on, they had talked for almost an hour, surprising him, she suspected, as much as she had surprised herself.
She was almost at the car door when the man approached her. He came from the trees that hid her property from the view of her neighbors. He was small and hunched, with long dark hair that trailed his shoulders and eyes that were almost black, like those of some underground, nocturnal creature. She was already reaching for the Mace in her bag when he struck her backhanded across the face and she fell. He knelt on her legs before she could react again and she felt the pain in her side, an immense burning as the blade entered below her ribs and began to tear its way across her stomach. She tried to scream but his hand was over her mouth and all she could do was wriggle impotently as the blade continued its progress.
And then, just as she felt that she could take no more, that she must surely die from the pain, she heard a voice and saw, over the man’s shoulder, a huge hulking figure approach, a beaten-up Chevy idling behind him. He had a beard and wore a leather vest over his T-shirt. She could see the tattoo of a woman on his forearm.
“Hey!” said Bear. “The fuck you doing, man?”
Cyrus had not wanted to use the gun. He had wanted this done as quietly as possible, but the big and strangely familiar man now racing up the driveway left him with no choice. He rose from the woman before he could finish his cut, took the gun from his belt, and fired.
• • •
Two white vans took the Medway exit off I-95 and followed 11 through East Millinocket toward Dolby Pond. In the first van were three men and one woman, all armed. In the second sat another man and woman, also armed, and the Reverend Aaron Faulkner, who was silently reading his Bible on a bench in the back of the van. Had one of the state’s medical experts been on hand to check on the preacher, he would have found that the old man’s temperature was virtually normal and that all signs of his apparent ill health had already begun to fade.
A cell phone disturbed the silence of the second van. One of the men answered, spoke briefly, then turned back to Faulkner.
“He’s coming in to land now,” he told the old man. “He’ll be waiting for us when we get there. We’re right on schedule.”
Faulkner nodded, but did not respond. Instead, his eyes remained fixed on his Bible and the account of the trials of Job.
• • •
Cyrus Nairn sat behind the wheel of the Nissan at the Black Point Market and sipped a Coke. It was a warm evening and he desperately needed to cool down. The car’s a/c was busted. It didn’t matter much to Cyrus anyway: once the woman was dead he would ditch the car and head south, and that would be the end of it. He could suffer a little discomfort; after all, it was nothing compared to what the woman was about to endure.
He finished the Coke, then drove toward the bridge and dumped the can from the window into the waters below. Things had not gone according to plan over at Pine Point. First, the woman was already leaving the house when he arrived, and had gone for the spray in her bag, causing him to take her outside. Then the big man had come along and Cyrus had no choice but to use his gun. He had been afraid, for a moment, that people would hear but there had been no immediate fuss, no clamor. Still, Cyrus had been forced to leave hurriedly, and he did not like rushing his work.
He checked his watch and, his lips moving silently, counted down from ten. When he reached one, he thought he heard the muffled explosion from Pine Point. When he looked out of his window, smoke was already rising from Mary Mason’s burning car. The police would arrive soon, maybe the fire department, and they would find the woman and the dead man. He had preferred to leave the woman dying, not dead. He wanted the noise of the ambulance, the distraction to the policeman MacArthur and his colleagues, even at the risk of her being able to provide a description of him. He suspected that he might not have cut her enough, that she might even survive her injuries. He wondered if he had left her too close to the car, if she might not already be burning. He didn’t want there to be any doubt about her identity. They were minor issues, but they troubled Cyrus. He wanted to be able to work on the redhead without interruption. The prospect of capture, though, did not concern him: Cyrus would die before he would go back to prison. Cyrus had been promised salvation, and the saved fear nothing.
To his right, a road curved up into a copse of trees. Cyrus parked his car out of sight then, his stomach tense with excitement, proceeded up the hill. He cleared the trees and passed a ruined shed to his left, the white house now glowing before him, the dying sunlight reflecting from its glass. Soon, the marsh too would be aflame, the waters running orange and red.
Red, mostly.
• • •
Mary Mason lay on her back on the grass, staring at the sky. She had seen the hunched man toss the device into her car, the slow fuse burning, and had guessed what it was, but she felt paralyzed, unable to move her hands to stem the bleeding let alone pull herself away from the car.
She was dying.
She felt something brush her leg, and managed to move her head slightly. A long trail of blood marked the big man’s painful progress toward her. He was almost beside her now, hauling himself along by his ragged and bloodied fingernails. He reached out to her and grasped her hand, then pressed it against the wound in her side. She gasped in pain, but he forced her to maintain the pressure.
Then, slowly, he began to drag her by the collar of her shirt toward the grass. She screamed aloud once, but still she tried to keep her hand pressed to the wound until at last he could pull her no farther. He lay against the old tree in her yard, her head resting on his legs and his hand upon her hand, keeping the pressure on, the expanse of its trunk shielding them both from the car when the device exploded moments later, shattering the glass in the automobile and the windows in her house and sending a blast of heat rolling over the lawn and the tips of her toes.
“Hold on,” said Bear. His breath rattled in his throat. “Hold on now. They’ll be coming soon.”
• • •
Roger Bowen sat in a corner of Tommy Condon’s pub on Charleston’s Church Street, sipping on a beer. On the table before him lay his cell phone. He was waiting for the call to confirm that the preacher was safe and on his way north to Canada. Bowen checked his watch as two men in their late twenties passed by, joshing and pushing each other. The one nearest stumbled against Bowen’s table, sending his cell phone tumbling onto the floor. Bowen rose up in fury as the young man apologized and replaced the phone on the table.
“You fucking asshole,” hissed Bowen.
“Hey, take it easy,” said the guy. “I said I was sorry.”
They left shaking their heads. Bowen watched them climb into a car outside and drive away.
Two minutes later, the phone on his table rang.
In the seconds before he pressed Receive, it might have struck him that the phone was a little heavier than he remembered, and that the fall to the floor had maybe scuffed it some.
He hit the green button and put the phone to his ear, just in time for the explosion to tear the side of his head off.
• • •
Cyrus Nairn stood in front of the house, clutching a map and looking puzzled. Cyrus wasn’t much of an actor, but he figured that he didn’t have to be. There was no movement from the house. He walked to the screen door and stared into the hallway beyond. The door was well oiled, and opened silently. He moved slowly inside, checking the rooms as he went, ensuring that each one was empty, wary of the dog, until at last he reached the kitchen.
The big man stood at the kitchen table, drinking soy milk from a carton. He wore a T-shirt that read “Klan Killer.” He looked at Cyrus in surprise. His hand was already moving to the gun on the table when Cyrus fired and the carton exploded in a shower of milk and blood and the big man tumbled backward, breaking a chair as he fell. Cyrus stood over him and watched as the emptiness entered his eyes.
From behind the house, he heard the barking of a dog. It was young and stupid, and Cyrus’s only concern about it was that, in the house, its barking might have given the woman warning. Carefully, he glanced out of the kitchen window and saw the woman strolling in her yard close by the edge of the marsh, the dog beside her. He walked to the back door and slipped out as soon as he was certain that the woman was out of sight. Then, skirting the side of the house and staying close to the walls, he found her once again. She was in the long grass, moving away from the house, picking wildflowers. He could see the swelling at her belly, and some of his desire cooled. Cyrus liked to play with them before he finished them off. He had never tried playing with a pregnant woman before and something told him that he wouldn’t enjoy it, but Cyrus was always open to new experiences. The woman rose and stretched, holding her hand to her back, and Cyrus retreated back into the shadows. She was pretty, he thought, her face very pale, accentuated by her red hair. He drew a breath and tried to calm himself. When he looked again, she was strolling farther into the long grass and the evening shimmering of the waters, the dog racing ahead of her. Cyrus debated waiting for her to return to the house but he was afraid that somebody might come up that curving road and see his car, and then he would be trapped. No, there was cover out there, trees and long grass, and the rushes would hide him when he took her.
Cyrus unsheathed the knife at his waist and, holding it close to his thigh, moved after the woman.
• • •
The Cessna banked, then made a slow descent toward the Ambajejus Lake. It bounced a little on the water when it landed before drawing to a gradual halt, its wings tilting slightly as it approached the old jetty. The man at the controls of the Cessna was called Gerry Szelog and the only thing he had been paid for this flight was fuel money. That was okay, though, because Gerry was a believer, and believers did as they were asked and wanted nothing in return. In the past Szelog’s Cessna had transported guns, fugitives, and in one case, the body of a woman reporter who had poked her nose where she had no business poking it and who now lay at the bottom of the Carolina Shoals. Szelog had scouted out the lake a couple of days earlier by taking a flight with the Katahdin Air Service that operated out of Spencer Cove. He’d also checked their hours to ensure that the pilots from Katahdin would not be around to ask questions when he came in to land.
The Cessna stopped and a man appeared from behind one of the trees on the shore. Szelog could see that he wore blue overalls that billowed slightly as he ran toward the plane. This would be Farren, the man responsible for the arrangements at this end. Szelog climbed out of the little cockpit, then hopped down onto the jetty to meet the advancing man.
“Right on schedule,” said Szelog, removing his shades.
The man standing before him wasn’t Farren, because Farren was supposed to be white. This man was black. He also had a gun in his hand.
“Yeah,” said the man. “You could say you’re dead on time.”
• • •
It took a few moments for Cyrus to figure out why the woman appeared to be in a world of her own, otherwise she would surely have heard the gunshot. She paused at the edge of a stream and reached into a small pouch at her waist, withdrawing the Discman and forwarding through the tracks. When she found the tune she was looking for, she replaced the device and continued on her way, skirting the trees, the dog racing ahead of her. The dog had paused once or twice and looked back toward Cyrus as he made his way, hunched, through the long grass, but Cyrus was moving slowly and the young dog’s eyesight was not good enough to pick him out from the swaying grass. Cyrus’s feet, and the ends of his jeans, were soaking wet. It felt uncomfortable to him but then he thought of the prison, and the stale stench of his cell, and decided that being wet wasn’t so bad after all. The woman rounded the edge of the copse and almost disappeared from sight, but Cyrus could still see her pale blue dress moving between the trunks and the low branches. The trees would provide him with the cover he needed.
Close now, thought Cyrus.
Almost time.
And Leonard’s voice echoed his words.
Almost time.
• • •
The only traffic encountered by Faulkner’s small convoy as it headed up Golden Road was a big container truck that was signaling right from the Ambajejus Parkway. The man behind the wheel lifted three fingers in greeting as they passed, then began to make his turn onto the road. He checked his rearview mirror and watched as the vans turned onto Fire Road 17 and headed for the lake.
He stopped his turn and started to reverse.
• • •
Cyrus moved faster, his short legs struggling to eat up the distance as he tried to draw closer to the woman. He could see her clearly now. She had left the shelter of the trees and moved into the open, her head low, the long grass parting as she went then reforming itself behind her. The dog, he noticed, was now on its leash. It didn’t matter much to Cyrus either way. The dog was unlikely to respond quickly to the threat posed by Cyrus, if he responded at all. The blade on Cyrus’s knife was five inches long. It would cut the dog’s throat as easily as it would cut the woman’s.
Cyrus left the shade of the trees and entered the marsh.
• • •
The fire road was strewn with brown and yellow leaves. Huge rocks lined its edges, and the trees grew thickly beyond them. Faulkner’s people were within sight of the lakeshore when the driver’s side window of the lead van disintegrated in a shower of glass and plastic, the impact of the bullets throwing the driver sideways and sending the van hurtling toward the trees. The woman beside him tried to wrench the wheel to the right but more shots came, tearing a ribbon of holes across the windshield and through the sides of the van. The rear door opened as the others inside tried to run for cover, but they were dead before they hit the road.
The driver of the second van responded quickly. He kept his head low and put his foot down hard, screeching around the disabled lead vehicle in a cloud of leaves and sending the front wheels and hood of the van straight into one of the rocks by the side of the road. Dazed, he reached beneath the dashboard, released the sawed-off, and rose up in time to take Louis’s first bullet in his chest. The shotgun fell from his hands and he slumped forward.
Meanwhile, the woman was in the back of the van and preparing to respond. She took Faulkner by the arm and told him to start running for the lake as soon as she opened the doors. In her hands she held an H&K G11 automatic rifle set to fire bursts of three rounds, each round a special caseless cartridge that was simply a block of explosive with a bullet buried at its center. She counted down from three, then hit the release handle on the door and began firing. In front of her, a small fat man was punched backward by the impact of the rounds and lay twitching on the road. Behind the woman, Faulkner began to run for the trees and the waters beyond as she sprayed bursts toward the roadside and then turned to follow him. She was almost level with the old man when she felt the impact at her left thigh, felling her instantly. She turned on her back, flipped the catch to fully automatic, and kept firing toward the approaching men as they dived for cover. When the gun locked empty, she tossed it to one side and drew her pistol. She had almost raised it when a hand touched her arm gently. Her head turned, her arm moving milliseconds slower. She barely had time to register the gaping hole of the gun leveled at her face before her life ended.
• • •
Mary Mason heard the sirens and the raised voices of her neighbors. She reached out her hand to let the big man know, and felt his stillness.
She began to cry.
• • •
Out on the road, the truck had reversed down and had already reached the scene of the trap. Its rear doors were opened, and a ramp was lowered to enable the two disabled vans to be pushed into its interior. The bodies of the dead were placed inside, while two men with back-mounted vacuums scoured the blood and broken glass from the road.
But the old man was still running hard, despite the briers that pulled at his feet and the branches of the trees that tugged at his clothes. He slipped on the damp leaves and sensed movement to either side of him as he struggled to rise, a gun clutched in his right hand. He got to his feet just as one of the figures detached itself from the trees and moved to intercept him. He tried to turn, to make for a gap in the woods to the north, but a second figure appeared, and the old man stopped.
Faulkner’s face wrinkled in recognition.
“Remember me?” asked Angel. He had a gun in his hand, hanging loosely by his side.
To Faulkner’s right, Louis walked slowly across the earth and stone. He too carried a gun by his side. Faulkner tried to back away, then turned to see my face. He raised his gun. It swung first toward me, then Angel, and finally Louis.
“Go ahead, Reverend,” said Louis. His gun was now pointing at Faulkner, one eye closed as he sighted down the barrel. “You choose.”
“They’ll know,” said Faulkner. “You’ll make me a martyr.”
“They ain’t never gonna find you, Reverend,” said Louis. “Far as people gonna know, you just disappeared off the face of the earth.”
I lifted my gun. So did Angel.
“But we’ll know,” Angel said. “We’ll always know.”
Faulkner tried to turn his gun on himself as the three shots came simultaneously and the old man bucked and fell. He lay on his back, looking at the sky. Thin streams of blood trailed from the corners of his mouth, then the sky disappeared as we stared down upon him. His mouth opened and closed as he began to say something. He swallowed, and licked at the blood with his tongue. The fingers of his right hand moved feebly as he looked at me.
Slowly, carefully, I knelt down.
“Your bitch is dead,” he whispered, as his eyes closed for the last time.
And when I looked up, the trees were filled with ravens.
• • •
Cyrus’s mouth was dry. He was so close to her now, thirty, maybe thirty-five feet away. He ran his finger along the blade and watched the dog tugging at the leash, straining to get ahead of its mistress, its attention distracted by the presence of the birds and small rodents it could hear moving through the grass. Cyrus couldn’t understand why she had leashed the dog. Let it run, he thought. The hell harm can it do?
Twenty feet now. Just a few more steps. The woman stepped into a copse of trees above a small pool of water, an outpost of the larger forest that shadowed the marsh to the north, and was suddenly out of his sight. Ahead of him, Cyrus heard the ringing of a cell phone. He ran, his legs aching as he reached the trees. The first thing he saw was the dog. It was tied by its leash to the rotting trunk of a fallen tree. It looked at Cyrus in puzzlement, then yapped happily at what it saw behind.
Cyrus turned and the log caught him full in the face, breaking his nose and sending him stumbling backward out of the trees. He tried to raise his knife and was hit again in the same spot, the pain blinding him. He felt empty space beneath his heels and lifted his arms to try to stop himself from falling even as he tumbled and landed with a splash in the water. He broke back to the surface and began to struggle toward the bank, but Cyrus was not built for swimming. In fact, he could barely swim a stroke and panic had almost immediately set in as he sensed the depth of the water. Water levels in the Scarborough marshes were usually six to eight feet, but the monthly flood had raised them to fourteen and sixteen feet in places. Cyrus couldn’t touch the bottom with his feet.
And then there was another impact on his skull and he felt something break in his head. The energy seemed to leach from his body, his hands and legs refusing to move. Slowly, he began to sink, descending until his lower body was surrounded by weeds and fallen branches, his feet deep in the mud. Air bubbled from his lips and the sight of it seemed to force one final effort from him. His whole body jerked and his hands and arms began to beat at the water, the surface drawing closer as he started to rise.
Cyrus’s ascent was arrested as something pulled at his feet. He looked down but could see only weeds and grass. He tried kicking, but his feet were held fast in the murk and vegetation below, the branches like fingers wrapped around his ankles.
Hands. There were hands upon him. The voices in his head were shrieking, sending out contradictory messages as his air supply dwindled.
Hands.
Branches.
They’re just branches.
But he could feel the hands down there. He could feel the fingers pulling at him, dragging him deeper, forcing him to join them; and he knew that they were waiting down there for him. The women from the hollow were waiting for him.
A shadow fell across him. Blood was flowing freely from the wound in his head and from his ears and nose. He looked up and the woman was staring down at him from the bank, the dog’s head to one side as it peered at the water in puzzlement. The headphones were no longer at the woman’s ears, but lay curled around her neck, and something told Cyrus that they had been silent from the moment she had spotted him and began to draw him deeper into the marsh. He stared up at the woman imploringly and opened his mouth as if to beg her to save him, but instead the last of his air floated away and the water coursed into his body. He raised his hands to the woman, but the only move she made was to take her left hand and rub it slowly and rhythmically against the slight swell of her belly, so that it seemed that she was soothing the child within, that it was aware of what was occurring outside its world and was distressed by the action. The woman’s face was empty. There was no pity, no shame, no guilt, no regret. There was not even anger, just a blankness that was worse than any fury Cyrus had ever seen or felt. In her right hand, she held a bloodstained log.
Cyrus felt a final tug at his legs as he began to drown, the water filling his lungs, the pain in his head growing as he was starved of oxygen, the voices in his mind rising to a last crescendo, then, slowly, fading away, his final vision that of a pale, pitiless woman rubbing gently at her womb, calming her unborn child.