Louis put down his glass of orange juice. He’d just been settling into the business pages of the Times, but now he recognized that any interest he might have had in the newspaper or, indeed, the orange juice had largely dissipated.
‘A name,’ he conceded. ‘The woman gave me a name.’
‘Hayley Conyer.’
‘Shit.’
‘Oh, she wouldn’t like to hear you swear like that. She’s a god-fearing woman. That’s “god” with a small “g”, incidentally.’
‘You interested in her? Looking for a date?’
‘She’s very old.’
‘Begging your pardon, but I don’t believe you can afford to be particular.’
‘Don’t be facetious. She’s an interesting woman, and Prosperous is a fascinating town. You’ll like it.’
‘Is she on your list?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘So why haven’t you taken her?’
‘Because it’s not just her, but the whole town. And generations of it. To do the sins of Prosperous justice, I’d have to dig up centuries of bones and burn them on a pyre. The whole town would have to be put to the torch, and that’s beyond my capabilities.’
Louis understood.
‘But not beyond ours.’
‘No.’
‘Why should we destroy an entire town?’
‘Because it colluded in what happened to the detective, and if you don’t wipe it from the earth it will continue its traditions into future generations, and those traditions are very, very nasty. Prosperous is a hungry town.’
‘So you want us to do your dirty work for you? Fuck you.’
‘Don’t be like that,’ said the Collector. ‘You’ll enjoy it, I guarantee it. Oh, and pay special attention to that church of theirs. Flames won’t be enough. You’ll have to dig much deeper, and tear it apart with something far stronger.’
Louis sensed that the conversation was coming to a close.
‘Hey, since we’re being all civil and all, you find your friend Cambion?’
The Collector was standing in the premises of Blackthorn, Apothecary. He held a blade in his hands. Upon it was just a hint of blood.
‘I’m afraid he seems to have made his excuses and left before we could become better acquainted.’
‘That’s unfortunate.’
And he meant it.
‘Yes, it is,’ said the Collector, and he meant it too.
Seconds passed.
‘You told me that he lived here with someone else,’ said the Collector.
‘Yeah, big man. Dressed in yellow. Hard to miss.’
‘And no other?’
‘Not that I was aware of.’
‘Hmmm.’
The Collector stared at the tattered, partial wreckage of a human being that lay on a gurney before him. The man had no eyes, no ears, and no tongue. Most of his fingers and toes were also missing. Stitches marked the site of his emasculation. The Collector had killed him as an act of mercy.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I believe I may have discovered Mr Cambion’s missing physician. Be sure to send me a postcard from Prosperous.’
The Collector hung up. Angel looked up at Louis from over the Portland Press Herald.
‘Are you two, like, all buddies now?’
Louis sighed.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘sometimes I wish I’d never heard the name Charlie Parker …’
Garrison Pryor was sitting in a quiet corner of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. He could see into the next public room, so he knew that he was not being overheard or observed. Since the FBI’s visit to his offices, Pryor had grown concerned about surveillance to the point of paranoia. He no longer made or received delicate calls outside or on the office phones, especially not when he was dealing with the Principal Backer. The most important of the Backers now exchanged numbers for clean cell phones each day but otherwise they had fallen back on a primitive but virtually untraceable means of communicating sensitive information like cell phone numbers, a simple code based around the print edition of the Wall Street Journal: page, column, paragraph, line. Many of the older Backers found the routine almost reassuring, and Pryor thought that some might advocate retaining it once the FBI had exhausted itself chasing after imagined breaches of financial regulations.
The Bureau’s attention was irritating and an inconvenience, but little more than that. Pryor Investments had learned from past mistakes, and was now entirely scrupulous in its dealings. Of course, the company was merely a front: a fully functioning and lucrative one, but a front nonetheless. The Backers’ real machinery had been hidden so deeply, and for so long, in established companies, in banks and trusts, in charities and religious organizations, as to be untraceable. Let the FBI and its allies expend their energy on Pryor Investments. Admittedly, it was unfortunate that the private detective in Maine had become interested in Pryor Investments to begin with. It was a piece of bad luck, and nothing more. But he had clearly spoken to others of his suspicions, which was why the FBI had ended up on Pryor’s doorstep. But they would find nothing, and eventually their attention would turn elsewhere.
Now, in the quiet of the museum, he spoke on the phone with the Principal Backer.
‘Who killed this couple in Asheville?’
‘We don’t know for sure’, said Pryor, ‘but we believe it was Parker’s pet assassins.’
‘They did well to find what we could not.’
‘We were close,’ said Pryor. ‘The Daunds’ blood was still pooling on the floor of their house when I got their names.’
‘So they saved us the trouble of killing the Daunds ourselves.’
‘I suppose they did. What now?’
‘Now? Nothing.’
Pryor was surprised. ‘What about Prosperous?’
‘We let Parker’s friends finish what they started. Why should we involve ourselves when they will do the job for us?’ The Principal Backer laughed. ‘We won’t even have to pay them.’
‘And then?’
‘Business as usual. You have mines to acquire.’
Yes, thought Pryor. Yes, I have.
53
Lucas Morland felt as though he had aged years in a matter of days, but for the first time he was starting to believe that Prosperous might be free and clear, at least as far as the law was concerned. The MSP had not been in touch with him in forty-eight hours, and its investigators were no longer troubling his town. A certain narrative was gaining traction: Harry Dixon, who had been depressed and suffering from financial problems, killed his wife, her halfsister, her husband and, it was presumed, his niece, before turning his gun on himself. Extensive searches of the town and its environs had failed to uncover any trace of Kayley Madsen. The state police had even done some halfhearted exploring in the cemetery under Pastor Warraner’s watchful eye. The only tense moment occurred when some disturbance to the earth near the church walls was discovered, but further digging exposed only the remains of what was believed to be an animal burrow of some kind – too narrow, it seemed certain, to allow for the burial of a young woman’s body.
Then there was the matter of the detective. The hit on him had been botched, and, just as Morland had warned, the attack had brought with it a series of convulsive aftershocks, culminating in the killing of the Daunds. Morland didn’t know how the couple had been tracked down. Neither did he know if they had kept silent as they died or confessed all to their killers in an effort to save themselves or, more likely, their son, who had been held captive while his parents were shot dead in their own home. At best, those who were seeking to avenge the shooting of the detective were now only one step away from Prosperous. He had tried to get Hayley Conyer and the others to understand the danger they were in, but they refused to do so. They believed that they had acted to protect the town, and the town, in turn, would protect them. Why wouldn’t it? After all, they had given a girl to it.