Anson didn’t reply. He just looked at his feet and nodded.
“Could one of the other guards have let it slip?”
“No. Nobody knows about it.”
“A prisoner, maybe? Somebody local who might have been in a position to spread a little jailhouse gossip?”
“No, I don’t believe so.”
I opened the car door. Anson seemed to feel the need to make some final macho comment. As in other things, he didn’t appear to be a man who believed in restraining his urges.
“If anyone finds out about this, you’ll be in a world of shit,” he warned. It sounded hollow, even to himself. I could see it in the mottling of his skin and the way in which he had to concentrate on straining the muscles in his neck so that they bulged over the collar of his shirt. I let him retrieve whatever dignity he thought he could salvage from the situation, then watched as he slowly padded back to the main door, seemingly reluctant to place himself in proximity to Faulkner once again.
A shadow fell across him, as if a huge winged bird had descended and were slowly circling above him. Over the prison walls, more birds seemed to hover. They were big and black, moving in lazy, drifting loops, but there was in their movements something unnatural. They glided with none of the grace or beauty of birds, for their thin bodies seemed almost to be at odds with their enormous wings, as though struggling with the pull of gravity, the torso always threatening to plummet toward the ground, the wings allowing the slide for a time before beating wildly to draw them back to the safety of the air.
Then one broke from the flock, growing larger and larger as it descended in a spiral, coming to rest at last on the top of one of the guard towers, and I could see that this was no bird, and I knew it for what it was.
The dark angel’s body was emaciated, its arms black mummified skin over slim bones, its face elongated and predatory, its eyes dark and knowing. It rested a clawed hand on the glass and its great wings, feathered in darkness, beat a low cadence against the air. Slowly, it was joined by others, each silently taking up a position on the walls and the towers, until it seemed at last that the prison was black with them. They made no move toward me but I sensed their hostility, and something more: their sense of betrayal, as if I were somehow one of them and had turned my back upon them.
“Ravens,” said a voice at my side. It was an elderly woman. She carried a brown paper bag in her hand, filled with some small items for one of the inmates: a son, perhaps, or a husband among the old men in 7 Dorm. “Never seen so many before, or so big.”
And now they were ravens: two feet tall at least, the fingered wing tips clearly visible as they moved upon the walls, calling softly to one another.
“I didn’t think they came together in those numbers,” I said.
“They don’t,” she said. “Not normally, nohow, but who’s to say what’s normal these days?”
She continued walking. I got in my car and began to drive away, but in the rearview mirror the black birds did not seem to decrease in size as I left them behind. Instead, they seemed to grow larger even as the prison receded, taking on new forms.
And I felt their eyes upon me as the preacher’s saliva colonized my body like a cancer.
My gift to you, that you might see as I see.
Apart from the prison and the prison craft shop there isn’t a whole lot to keep a casual visitor in Thomaston, but the town has a pretty good diner at its northern end, with homemade pies and bread pudding served piping hot to locals and those who come to talk after meeting their loved ones across a table or through a screen farther up the road. I bought another bottle of mouthwash at the drugstore and sluiced my mouth out in the parking lot before heading into the diner.
The small eating area with its mismatched furniture was largely empty, with the exception of two old men who sat quietly, side by side, watching the traffic go by, and a younger man in an expensively tailored suit who sat in a wooden booth by the wall, his overcoat folded neatly beside him, a fork resting among the cream and crumbs on his plate, a copy of USA Today beside it. I ordered a coffee and took a seat across from him.
“You don’t look so good,” said the man.
I felt my gaze drawn toward the window. I could not see the prison from where I sat. I shook my head, clearing it of visions of dark creatures crowding on prison walls, waiting. They were not real. They were just ravens. I was ill, nauseated by Faulkner’s assault.
They were not real.
“Stan,” I said, to distract myself. “Nice suit.”
He turned the jacket to show me the label inside. “Armani. Bought it in an outlet store. I keep the receipt in the inside pocket, just in case I get accused of corruption.”
My coffee arrived, and the waitress retreated behind the counter to read a magazine. Somewhere, a radio played sickly M.O.R. The Rush revival begins here.
Stan Ornstead was an assistant district attorney, part of the team assembled to prosecute the Faulkner case. It was Ornstead who had convinced me to face Faulkner, with the full knowledge of deputy D.A. Andrus, and who had arranged for the interview to be conducted at the cell so that I could see the conditions that he appeared to have created for himself. Stan was only a few years younger than I was and was considered a hot prospect for the future. He was going places; he just wasn’t going there fast enough for him. Faulkner, he had hoped, might have changed that situation, except, as the warden had indicated, the Faulkner case was turning into something very bad indeed, something that threatened to drag everyone involved down with it.
“You look kind of shaken up,” Stan said, after I’d taken a couple of fortifying sips from my coffee.
“He has that effect on people.”
“He didn’t give too much away.”
I froze, and he raised his palms in a what-you-gonna-do? gesture.
“They mike sub-acute cells?” I asked.
“They don’t, if you mean the prison authorities.”
“But somebody else has taken up the slack.”
“The cell has been lojacked. Officially, we know nothing about it.” “Lojacking” was the term used to describe a surveillance operation not endorsed by a court. More particularly, it was the term used by the FBI to describe any such operation.
“The Feebs?”
“The trenchcoats don’t have too much faith in us. They’re worried that Faulkner may walk on our beef so they want to get as much as they can, while they can, in case of federal charges or a double prosecution. All conversations with his lawyers, his doctors, his shrink, even his nemesis-that’s you, in case you didn’t know-are being recorded. The hope is that, at the very least, he’ll give something away that might lead them to others like him, or even give them a lead to other crimes he might have committed. All inadmissible, of course, but useful if it works.”
“And will he walk?”
Ornstead shrugged.
“You know what he’s claiming: he was kept a virtual prisoner for decades and had no part in, or knowledge of, any crimes committed by the Fellowship or those associated with it. There’s nothing to link him directly to any of the killings, and that underground nest of rooms he lived in had bolts on the outside.”
“He was at my house when they tried to kill me.”
“You say, but you were woozy. You told me yourself you couldn’t see straight.”
“Rachel saw him.”
“Yes, she did, but she’d just been hit on the head and had blood in her eyes. She herself admits that she can’t remember a lot of what was said, and he wasn’t there for what followed.”
“There’s a hole in the ground at Eagle Lake where seventeen bodies were found, the remains of his flock.”
“He says fighting broke out between the families. They turned on each other, then on his own family. They killed his wife. His children responded in kind. He claims he was over in Presque Isle on the day they were killed.”