“Why do you think that it’s something to do with us?” said Will.
“A neighbor saw a male and a female leave the house shortly after eleven. They were both young, he said: older teenagers at most. They were driving a red Ford. This morning, the offices of Dr. Anton Bergman in Pearl River were burgled. Dr. Bergman, I believe, looks after the health of your family. A red Ford was seen parked close by. It had out-of-state plates: Alabama. Dr. Bergman and his secretary are still trying to confirm what was removed, but th Rh utere drug cabinets were intact. Only the patient records were rifled. Your family’s records are among those that are missing. Somehow, they’ve made the connection. We didn’t hide our tracks as well as we thought.”
Will looked pale, but still he tried to argue. “That doesn’t make any sense. Who are these kids?”
It took a moment for Epstein to answer. “They’re the same ones who came for Caroline Carr sixteen years ago,” he said.
“No.” It was Jimmy Gallagher. “Uh-uh. They’re dead. One of them got crushed by a truck, and I shot the other. I watched them pull her body from the creek. And even if they had lived, they’d be in their forties or fifties by now. They wouldn’t be children.”
Epstein turned on him. “They’re not children! They’re-” He composed himself. “Something is inside each of them, something much older. These things don’t die. They can’t die. They move from host to host. If the host dies, then they find another. They are reborn, over and over again.”
“You’re crazy,” said Jimmy. “You’re out of your mind.”
He turned to his partner for support, but none came. Instead, Will looked frightened.
“Aw, Jesus, you don’t believe this, do you?” said Jimmy. “They can’t be the same ones. It’s just not possible.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Will. “They’re here, whoever they are. Franklin would have told them about how the death of the baby was covered up. I have a boy the same age as the one who was supposed to have died. They made the connection, and the medical records will confirm it. He’s right: I have to go home.”
“We’ll have people looking for them too,” said Epstein. “I’ve made some calls. We’re moving as fast as we can, but-”
“I’ll go with you,” said Jimmy.
“No. Go back to Cal ’s.”
“Why?”
Will gripped Jimmy’s arms and looked him in the face. “Because I have to end this,” he said. “Do you understand? I don’t want you to be caught up in it. You have to stay clean. I need you to be clean.” Then he seemed to remember something. “Your nephew,” he said. “Marie’s boy? He’s still with the Orangetown cops, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, he’s out there. I don’t think he’s on duty until later, though.”
“Can you call him? Just ask him to go to the house and stay with Elaine and Charlie for a while. Don’t tell him why. Just make up some excuse about an old case, maybe an ex-con with a grudge. Will you do that? Will he do that?”
“He’ll do it,” said Jimmy.
Epstein handed Will a set of car keys.
“Take my car,” he said, pointing to an old Chrysler parked nearby. Will nodded his thanks, then began to stride away, but Epstein reached for his arm, holding him back.
“Don’t try to kill them,” said Epstein. “Not unless you have no other choice.”
Jimmy saw Will nod, but his eyes were far away. Then and there, Jimmy knew what Will intended to do.
Epstein walked away in the direction of the subway. Jimmy made the call to his nephew from a phone booth. Afterward, he went back to Cal’s, where he drank and made small talk, his mind detached from the actions of his body, his mouth moving of its own volition, and he stayed there until word came that Will Parker had shot two kids up in Pearl River, and he had been found in the locker room of the Ninth, tears streaming down his face, waiting for them to come for him.
And when they asked him why he had driven all the way back to the city, he could tell them only that he wanted to be among his own.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
HE COULD HAVE GONEto his fellow cops, of course, but what would he have told them? That two kids were coming to kill his son; that those two kids could be hosts for other entities, malign spirits who had already killed the boy’s mother and had now returned to murder her child? Perhaps he might have concocted a lie, some tale of how they had threatened his family, or he could have fed them the information that a car resembling the one they were driving had been seen close to the director’s office after his death, and a young man and a young woman had been glimpsed leaving his house on the night that he was killed. All of that might well have been enough to hold them, assuming they were found, but he didn’t want them merely to be held: he wanted them gone forever.
The rabbi’s warning against killing them had not gone unheeded. Instead, it had broken something inside him. He had thought that he could cope with anything-murder, loss, a child suffocated beneath a pile of coats-but now he was no longer certain that this was true. He did not want to believe what the rabbi had told him, because to do so would be to throw aside all of the certainties he felt about the world. He could accept that somebody, some agency as yet unknown, wanted his son dead. It was an appalling purpose, and one that he could not understand, but he could deal with it as long as its agents were human. After all, there was no proof that what the rabbi believed was actually true. The man and woman who had been hunting Caroline were dead. He had watched them both die, and had gazed upon their bodies after death.
But they were different then, weren’t they? The dead are always different: smaller, somehow, and shrunken in upon themselves. Their faces change, and their bodies collapse. Over the years, he had become convinced of the existence of a human soul, if only because of the absence he witnessed in the bodies of the deceased. Something departed at the moment of death, altering the remains, and the evidence of its leaving was visible in t Ss v”[1]‡he appearance of the dead.
And yet, and yet…
He thought back to the woman. She had been less damaged than the man in the course of her dying. The wheels of the truck had rendered him beyond identification, but she was physically intact apart from the holes that Jimmy’s bullets had made in her, and they had all caught her in the upper body. Looking upon her face after she was pulled from the water, Parker had been astonished at the change in her. It was hard to believe that this was the same woman. The cruelty that had animated her features was gone but, more than that, her looks were softer, somehow, as though her bones had been blunted, the sharp edges removed from her cheeks and her nose and her chin. The imperfect mask that had covered her face for so long, one that was based on her own appearance yet subtly altered, had fallen away, disintegrating in the cold waters of the creek. He had looked at Jimmy and seen the same reaction. Unlike him, though, Jimmy had spoken it aloud.