Every Dead Thing

Adelaide Modine’s world exploded into yellow flame as the gasoline around her ignited; and then she was enveloped, her head back and her mouth wide for an instant before she fell, striking feebly at the flames as she toppled, burning, into the darkness. The car was blazing at the bottom of the slope, thick black smoke ascending in plumes into the air. I watched it from the road, the heat searing my face. Farther down the hill, in the wooded dark, a smaller pyre burned.

30

I SAT in the same police interview room with the same wooden table with the same wooden heart carved into its surface. My arm was freshly bandaged and I had showered and shaved for the first time in over two days. I had even caught a few hours’ sleep stretched across three chairs. Despite Agent Ross’s best effort, I was not in a jail cell. I had been interrogated comprehensively, first by Walter and another detective, then by Walter and the assistant chief, and finally, by Ross and one of his agents, with Walter in attendance to make sure they didn’t beat me to death out of frustration.

Once or twice I thought I caught glimpses of Philip Kooper striding around outside, like a corpse that had exhumed itself to sue the undertaker. I guessed that the trust’s public profile was about to take a terminal hammering.

I told the cops nearly everything. I told them about Sciorra, about Hyams, about Adelaide Modine, about Sonny Ferrera. I did not tell them that I had become involved in the case at Walter Cole’s instigation. The other gaps in my story I left them to fill in for themselves. I told them simply that I had taken some leaps of the imagination. Ross almost had to be forcibly restrained at that point.

Now there was only Walter and me and a pair of coffee cups.

“Have you been down there?” I asked eventually, breaking the silence.

Walter nodded. “Briefly. I didn’t stay.”

“How many?”

“Eight so far, but they’re still digging.”

And they would continue digging, not just there but in scattered locations across the state and maybe even farther afield. Adelaide Modine and Connell Hyams had been free to kill for thirty years. The Morelli warehouse had been rented for only a portion of that time, which meant that there were probably other warehouses, other deserted basements, old garages, and disused lots that contained the remains of lost children.

“How long had you suspected?” I asked.

He seemed to think I was asking about something else, maybe a dead man in the toilet of a bus station, because he started and turned to me. “Suspected what?”

“That someone in the Barton household was involved in the Baines disappearance?”

He almost relaxed. Almost. “Whoever took him had to know the grounds, the house.”

“Assuming he was taken at the house and hadn’t wandered.”

“Assuming that, yes.”

“And you sent me to find out.”

“I sent you.”

I felt culpable for Catherine Demeter’s death, not only because of my failure to find her alive but because, unwittingly, I might have brought Modine and Hyams to her.

“I may have led them to Catherine Demeter,” I said to Walter after a while. “I told Ms. Christie I was going to Virginia to follow a lead. It might have been enough to give her away.”

Walter shook his head. “She hired you as insurance. She must have alerted Hyams as soon as she was seen. He was probably on the lookout for her already. If she didn’t turn up in Haven, then they were relying on you to find her. As soon as you did, I think you’d both have been killed.”

I had a vision of Catherine Demeter’s body slumped in the basement of the Dane house, her head surrounded by a circle of blood. And I saw Evan Baines wrapped in plastic, and the decayed body of a child half covered in earth, and the other corpses still to be discovered in the Morelli basement, and elsewhere.

And I saw my own wife, my own child in all of them.

“You could have sent someone else,” I said.

“No, only you. If Evan Baines’s killer was there, I knew you’d find out. I knew you’d find out because you’re a killer yourself.”

The word hung in the air for a moment, then tore a rift between us, like a knife cutting through our past together. Walter turned away.

I stayed silent for a time and then, as if he had never spoken, I said: “She told me that she knew who killed Jennifer and Susan.”

He seemed almost grateful for the break in the silence. “She couldn’t have known. She was a sick, evil woman and that was her way of trying to torture you after she died.”

“No, she knew. She knew who I was before she died, but I don’t think she knew when she hired me. She would have suspected something. She wouldn’t have taken the chance.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “Let it go.”

I didn’t say anything more but I knew that, somehow, the dark worlds of Adelaide Modine and the Traveling Man had come together.

“I’m considering retirement,” said Cole. “I don’t want to look at death anymore. I’ve been reading Sir Thomas Browne. You ever read Thomas Browne?”

“No.”