The Wrath of Angels

‘His name’s Garrison Pryor,’ I replied, ‘and I don’t think he’s one of the good guys.’

Within the hour, I received two messages arising out of that encounter. The first was a text from Rachel. It read only ‘Sorry.’ The second was an email notifying me of a gift subscription to the Wall Street Journal.

It came courtesy of Pryor Investments.

40

The late morning news bulletins detailed the death of a fifty-eight-year-old woman in an explosion at a lawyer’s office in Lynn, Massachusetts: I knew nothing about it until then because my focus had been entirely on Sam. The woman, who was not being named until relatives could be informed, was said to be an employee of the business. The principal, Thomas Eldritch, was described only as having suffered injuries in the blast, and was being kept under observation. As yet, the police declined to speculate on the cause of the explosion as investigators remained at the scene, but I knew.

‘The list,’ I said to Angel and Louis. ‘Once the Collector killed Tate, they must have known that he had a copy, either partial or full.’

‘And because they couldn’t get to him, they tried to take out his lawyer,’ said Angel.

I thought about the chain-smoking woman who had guarded the stairs to Eldritch’s office, and the look on her face when she believed that I had upset him in some way. I couldn’t say that I had liked her, exactly, but she had been loyal to the old man, and she had not deserved to die.

The picture on the screen returned to a view of the exterior of Eldritch’s offices. The explosion had started a fire that gutted the building, and it had taken fire department units from adjoining towns to bring it under control. The Pakistani cell phone store was gone too. One of its owners was interviewed on the street. He was weeping. An idiot reporter asked him if he thought the explosion might have been linked to Islamic extremists. The Pakistani businessman stopped weeping for long enough to look shocked, and hurt, and enraged, and then started crying even more.

I was saved the trouble of contacting Epstein by his call to me. He was at last in Toronto, after spending most of the previous night with the police telling them of the circumstances of Adiv’s death. I hadn’t liked Adiv much either. It was turning into a bad week for people who had crossed me. While I spoke to Epstein, Louis slipped my delivery copy of the New York Times in front of me. Adiv’s death had made the front page in what was being described as an assassination attempt on a prominent figure in the Jewish community. The picture of Epstein had been taken a long time before, perhaps a decade or more. Epstein had been doing his best to avoid the limelight ever since the death of his son. The story mentioned that as well. I made the continuation of the story inside, since I was the one who had found his son’s killers. That didn’t make me happy at all. When I checked my cell phone there were forty missed calls, and my message box was full. I gave the phone to Angel and let him start listening to, and deleting, the messages.

‘You’re okay?’ I asked Epstein.

‘Shaken, but otherwise unharmed.’

‘I’m sorry about Adiv.’

‘I know you are. Had he lived, he might have grown to find that incident of the Pine Barrens amusing.’

‘It would have taken some time.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Did you see hear the news about our lawyer friend in Lynn?’

‘I was informed of it this morning,’ said Epstein. ‘We’re assuming that the two attacks are linked?’

‘It’s a big step up to the majors for coincidence if they’re not,’ I replied. ‘No word on Eldritch’s client, though. I figure he was out of town when it happened.’

I was always careful how I discussed the Collector on the phone. It was force of habit, but then I was careful how I discussed the Collector, period.

‘And the reason: revenge? An attempt to discourage further investigation? All of these things, and more? After all, it was not my people who killed Davis Tate.’

‘Tate’s death, and whatever else the client might have been up to, let them know that some version of the list is already out there, courtesy of the late Barbara Kelly. If Eldritch and his client had a copy, then it was logical to surmise that you probably had a copy too. Maybe they hoped to catch Eldritch and his client with the blast at Lynn, or maybe they just wanted to destroy his records. At the very least, it was a way of distracting the client for a time, just as they hoped the attack on you, whether it yielded casualties or not, might be enough to—’

I paused. The word that was on the tip of my tongue was ‘delay’, but why did it spring to mind?

‘Mr Parker?’ said Epstein. ‘Are you there?’

‘It was a delaying tactic, a distraction,’ I said.

‘But distracting us from what?’ said Epstein.

‘The plane,’ I said. ‘Somehow they’ve found out about the plane, and they know that we’re looking for it too.’

‘How long before you can start the search?’

‘Tomorrow, if we’re lucky and we can get a solid lead on its location. I still haven’t spoken to Marielle Vetters again. If she can’t help us, I have one other idea.’

‘Meanwhile, what will the client do?’ asked Epstein.

I didn’t have to think for long.

‘The client will hunt down those he believes were responsible for that explosion,’ I said, ‘and the client will punish them.’

The Collector stood at the intersection, smoking a cigarette and watching the police go about their business. The gutted buildings were still smoldering, and the street was awash with filthy black water like the aftermath of an oil slick. The curious and the bored lounged behind the cordon, and the news vans had congregated in the parking lot of Tulley’s bar, where Tulley himself was charging them three-figure sums for the pleasure, although he was throwing in free coffee which, if the reporters had any sense, they were in turn throwing away.

Behind the Collector stood a pawn shop that extended over four floors, the heaviest and largest items on the ground floor, the rest arrayed over the next two floors in diminishing order of size. The top floor, the Collector knew, contained offices. On the side of the building, overlooking its back door and the parking lot beyond, was a camera. Beside it was a second camera, facing away from the door and toward the street.

The Collector killed the cigarette and left the police to their business. He entered the pawn shop, where the two men seated behind the counter barely glanced at him before returning their attention to a TV screen that was showing the same crime scene that the Collector had just witnessed. Had they walked a couple of feet they could have stood outside and watched it in person, but they were ignorant, lazy men, and they preferred to glean their information from the TV where people who were better-looking than they were could tell them things that they already knew.

The Collector climbed the stairs to the top floor, where there was a red metal door with a spyhole and the words PRIVATE – EMPLOYEES ONLY stenciled on it in white paint. There was no buzzer, but the door opened as the Collector approached, and he was admitted.

A very old, very fat woman, and an even older man, sat in a small outer office. They were the Sister and the Brother. If they had other names – and they must have had, once upon a time – then nobody ever used them. The name on the sign outside came from another business, a drapery store that had closed in the 1970s. Shortly after, the Sister and the Brother had moved in, and they had never left. As she grew larger and larger, the Sister had risen higher and higher in the building in opposition to the items for sale, a great balloon of a woman floating slowly upward until the roof finally arrested her progress.

Arrayed around them on a pair of tables covered in green cloth were various items of jewelry, a half dozen watches, an assortment of coins, and a sprinkling of gemstones. The woman was morbidly obese. The Collector knew that she never left the building, eating and sleeping in the living quarters separated from the office by a pair of red drapes. When she needed medical attention, the doctor came to her. So far, either her health had remained stable enough to require no serious treatment, which seemed unlikely given the strain her system was under, or some combination of the dozens of bottles of prescription and non-prescription medicines on the shelves above her