Walsh said nothing for a time. ‘Still sounds to me like somebody might have had a personal motive for seeing Perry Reed locked up until his hair turns white. Alex Wilder too.’
I gave him a little: not much, but enough. ‘Maybe frightened Asian girls weren’t the only women they were raping.’
There was the sound of the phone shifting, and I knew that Walsh was making a note.
‘So what am I left with here: that it’s not legal, but it’s just?’
‘Would you prefer it the other way around?’
He grunted. It was as close to acquiescence as Walsh was likely to get. ‘I’ll tell Bob Gulyas to expect a call,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
‘Whatever. Just remember: I wasn’t kidding about that piece of paper with your name on it. If I don’t have it, then somebody else does. It’s only a matter of time. Oh, and you tell your friends that I said hello.’
I left a message for Bob Gulyas, and he returned the call within the hour. In the course of a twenty-minute phone conversation during which it became clear that he knew more about me than I might have been comfortable with, which suggested that he’d been talking to Walsh, Gulyas told me as much as he knew, or was willing to share, about Kenny Chan’s murder.
A gale force wind had set off the alarm in Chan’s home, and his security company had been unable to contact him. His girlfriend was listed as a secondary keyholder: she hadn’t heard from him in five days, and it was she who found the body. Whoever killed him had taken the trouble to leave the combination written in lipstick on the safe, along with Kenny Chan’s name and the years of his birth and death.
‘So you figure a woman was involved?’ I said.
‘His girlfriend had some cosmetics and clothing in a drawer in his bedroom,’ said Gulyas, ‘but the lipstick didn’t match, so unless it was a guy who killed him and just happened to be the kind who carried lipstick in his pocket, then, yeah, we figured a woman.’
‘What about the girlfriend?’
‘Cindy Keller. She was a model. She’d been working on a shoot in Vegas, and only got back the night before the body was found. He’d been in there for a couple of days by then, so she was in the clear.’
‘Sounds like the end of a run of bad luck for Kenny Chan,’ I said. ‘First his wife, then his business partner. All he had to console him in his grief was the money he made from the sale of his company. Still, better than being poor and grieving, I guess.’
Gulyas laughed. ‘Oh, we looked hard at Kenny Chan after Felice was shot, but there was nothing to connect him to the gas station killings beyond circumstantial evidence. Yeah, it seemed his partner was blocking the sale of the company and, yeah, his murder was a lucky break for Chan, but if he planned it then he planned it well. He was so clean even his shit gleamed.’
‘And his wife?’
Gulyas didn’t laugh this time. ‘She was on the One-Oh-One near Milford. Looks like the car skidded, hit some trees, and burst into flames.’
‘Any witnesses?’
‘None. It was late at night on a quiet stretch of road.’
‘How late?’
‘Two thirty a.m.’
‘What was she doing out by Milford at two thirty in the morning?’
‘We never got an answer to that. There was speculation that she might have been having an affair, but that’s all it was. If she was screwing around, then she hid it well.’
‘So it all remains one big mystery with three heads?’
‘I’ll tell you something, Mr Parker. I smelled what you smell, but in the end we were advised to let it lie. The word came from real high up, and that word was “Defense”.’
‘Because Chan’s company had been folded into the Defense Department.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And Pryor Investments?’
‘I had two meetings with them. The first was shortly after Chan died, because we found a batch of papers relating to his dealings with Pryor in a safe deposit box in a bank in Boston.’
‘Not in his own safe?’
‘No.’
‘Odd.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Anything in the papers?’
‘Not that I could see. They seemed pretty straightforward, but what I know about business and investments you could write on a stamp.’
‘So you went to Pryor?’
‘And got stonewalled by a couple of suits. Oh, they were sweet as pie, but told us nothing.’
‘And the second visit?’
‘Chan’s death led us to re-examine the Felice killing, and to glance again at the accident that killed Chan’s wife. Pryor obviously cropped up there too.’
‘What happened?’
‘Different suits, same result. We even got face time with the big suit himself, Garrison Pryor. He used a lot of words like “tragedy” and “regrettable” without ever looking like he knew what they meant. Shortly after we heard the invocation of national security, and that was it. It wasn’t as if we didn’t have other major crimes to deal with, and you have to learn when to fade away, either temporarily or permanently. You were a cop. You learn that lesson?’
‘No.’
‘Good. That’s why Walsh said I should talk to you. We done here?’
‘I think so.’
‘I get to ask what this is about?’
‘Not yet. Can I have a raincheck on a beer, and if I find something you can pass on I’ll share it with you?’
‘I’ll make a note of it.’
‘Do that. I appreciate you taking the time to talk.’
‘Talk? Son, I never said a word to you.’
And he hung up.
16
So: could I have walked away from Marielle Vetters’ tale, leaving the plane in the Great North Woods to sink finally into the ground, dragged down, if the testimony of the late Harlan Vetters and Paul Scollay was to be believed, by some intent on the part of nature itself? Possibly, but I knew that it would have come back to haunt me in the end: not simply the nagging knowledge that the plane was out there, nor my curiosity about the nature of the partial list of names that Vetters had taken from the wreckage, but because of Brightwell’s involvement in the search. It meant that the plane was part of the pattern of my life, and perhaps within it might lie some inkling of the greater game that was being played, one in which I was more than a pawn but less than a king.
Angel and Louis, too, had elected to become involved, for Brightwell had killed Louis’s cousin, and anything that concerned the Believers and their legacy was of interest to Louis. His capacity for vengeance was limitless.
But there was one other who had been intimately involved in the matter of Brightwell and the Believers, one who knew more than anyone else about bodies that decayed but did not die, and migrating spirits, more perhaps than he had even admitted to me. His name was Epstein, and he was a rabbi, and a grieving father, and a hunter of fallen angels.
I called New York, and made arrangements to meet him the following evening.
