A Song Of Shadows Part 8

But all these were objects of bemus.e.m.e.nt, and no more. Each understood, too, that their fates were now tied up with this place, and with the detective to whom both were bound by bonds of loyalty, affection, and whisper it, but do not speak it aloud, and certainly not to each other the inevitability of their own deaths.

They had been out to check on Parker's house in Scarborough. Its doors remained secured, the alarm system had been upgraded, and they had arranged for his more valuable possessions to be placed in secure storage. His computers and his files had been carefully boxed by Louis's people, then removed to a warehouse in Queens, and locked away under the name 'Nemesis, Inc.' Louis had the utmost confidence in the security of the warehouse, since he owned it (although any lawyer would have trouble proving as much) and stored most of his weapons there (and here, once again, the question of owners.h.i.+p remained nebulous, to say the least).

They had not yet broached the subject with Parker, but they doubted that he would be returning to the house that overlooked the Scarborough marshes. In their opinion, it would be hard for him to resume his life in a home in which he might no longer feel secure. Parker's defenses had been breached not only physically, but psychologically too. He could never have the same faith as he once had in his home's capacity to withstand intrusion, perhaps not even in his own ability to defend himself, or so they believed.

On a practical level, the house had appeared on news bulletins and in newspaper reports. The address and location were familiar to many people now. Angel and Louis were under no illusion that the detective's enemies had not previously known where to find him, should they have wanted to act against him. Even the fact that some of them had, at last, succeeded in wounding him so severely was not, to these men, entirely a surprise. No, what mattered was that the site of his home was now general knowledge. News reports linked to it via Google Maps. If he went back there, what peace would he have, even if he somehow managed to overcome the psychological and emotional difficulties of living in a dwelling in which he had almost met his death in which he had, in fact, technically died before being resuscitated for the first of three times.

Then there was also the question of what kind of man he would be. He had nerve damage to his left hand. One kidney had been removed. They had dug so many shotgun pellets out of his skull and his back that the surgeons had filled two gla.s.s dishes with them. Sometimes, when speaking, he would forget a name, or misidentify an object. Once, over coffee in Boreas, he asked Angel to pa.s.s him a 'bell.'

'A bell?' asked Angel.

'Yes, a bell. A little bell. To add to my coffee.'

And as Angel had grown more confused, so Parker had grown more frustrated, until at last he stood up, walked behind Angel, and grabbed a creamer of skim milk for himself.

'See?' he said. 'Bell!'

Then, moments later, as he read the words on the side of the creamer, he seemed to realize what he had done, and began to apologize, but his voice broke, and all they could do was watch as he tried to hold back tears of rage and shame.

Was this the end of them, Angel wondered? Was this to be the final, undignified conclusion, the grand anticlimax? A broken Parker, living on whatever he could make by selling his house and its surrounding land and moving into a small apartment somewhere, supported when required, and only if it could be discreetly done by his friends? Dave Evans, of course, would give him a bartending job at the Great Lost Bear, but what if, like confusing the words if not the concepts of milk and bell, he proved unable to function?

And there were moments when Angel and Louis found it hard even to conceive of Parker doing what he once did, hunting the worst of men. They had trusted in his strength, in his knowledge, in his ability to understand situations that seemed only smoke and shadows to them. How could they stand with him if he could not be relied upon to watch their backs, to come to their aid if they were in trouble?

But at other times Angel would look at Parker, and see fires coldly burning behind his eyes, and in that instant he could make himself believe that all was not lost.

'What will we do about him?' said Angel, as soft rain began to fall, and Louis did not need to ask to whom he was referring.

'We'll wait,' he replied, 'and we'll see.'

14.

Cory Bloom arrived at Olesens and the absence of that d.a.m.ned apostrophe bothered her too shortly after ten to find Parker already seated at a table by the window at the back of the store. He hadn't heard her enter, and she saw that he was holding an object in his left hand. It looked like a red rubber ball, the kind office workers used for stress relief, but as she drew closer she saw it had dark loops that hooked around the fingers. She thought that she'd seen something resembling it in a sporting goods store at the Bangor Mall, when she'd gone to look for new sneakers. It was in the climbing section alongside the ropes and crampons and carabiners: a grip strengthener. The effort of squeezing it showed on his face. He winced with each compression, but did not stop until he saw her reflected in the gla.s.s, at which point he slipped the strengthener into his pocket.

'Is it working?' she asked.

'It hurts, so I have to hope so.'

She took a seat across from him. He already had coffee, alongside a copy of the New York Times, although he didn't yet appear to have opened the newspaper.

'Is it to do with what happened?'

'Shotgun pellets,' he said. 'I sustained nerve damage to the hand, and some fracturing of the bones. I've had surgery, but it's about maintaining range of motion and muscle tone. The physio is helping. Ma.s.sage works too.'

'Are you asking?'

'Are you offering?'

'People might talk.'

'Not least your husband.'

'I'm sure he'd understand, if it was for medical reasons.'

'I'm sure he wouldn't.'

'You're probably right.'

Were they flirting? Bloom couldn't recall the last time she had flirted with anyone. She didn't even flirt with her husband. There didn't seem to be much point.

Larraine Olesen came over and took her coffee order. Bloom thought that Larraine might inadvertently have overheard them. She just about managed to keep herself from grinning, but it was a hard-fought battle. Bloom was relieved when she left to make the coffee.

'Do you mind if I ask how you are otherwise?' said Bloom.

He looked away.

'Aches and pains, mostly,' he said. 'I had some ... discomfort after they removed the kidney, but it went away after a week or two. I get headaches. A lot of headaches. I sustained tissue damage to my back, some shattered ribs, a broken clavicle, a couple of holes where there shouldn't have been any. They've done some skin grafts, which hurt like nothing on earth, and there'll be more to come, but I've had enough of them for now.

'I'm weaker than I was. That's the worst of it. I get tired quickly. Nauseous, too. I lost my balance on the beach a couple of days ago, and if it wasn't for the Winter kid coming along I might still have been there when the tide came in. And it's the strangest thing, but sometimes I have trouble with words. I'll look at something, and I'll know what it is a table, a chair, a book but when I try to describe it, another word entirely comes out. It happened a lot at the start, less often now, but it's frustrating. And embarra.s.sing.'

He faced her once again.

'More than you needed to know?'

'No and I did ask. You shoot with your right hand?'

'Yes, but I haven't held a gun much since that night.'

'Are you planning to again?'

'I haven't given it much thought.'

She saw something then a flicker and knew that he was lying. What would it do to a man's confidence to find himself on the verge of being butchered in his own home, lying in his own blood, his body torn by fragments of metal? His recovery would not only have to be physical, but psychological and emotional too. Heading out to Mason Point, and examining Bruno Perlman's car, might be considered a version of that grip improver: a means to test, strengthen ...

Her cappuccino arrived. Larraine had attempted some kind of art with the foam, but it hadn't worked out. It might have been a heart, or a smiley face. It might have been nothing at all. Larraine moved quickly away, well out of earshot. She knew better than to try and eavesdrop on the chief. Actually, she wasn't really the kind to eavesdrop at all, which made her unusual in Boreas. When she died, they could have her stuffed and mounted as a behavioral model for others.

'So,' Bloom began, as she tried her coffee.

'There were no maps in the car,' said Parker.

'No, there weren't.'

'Does that trouble you?'

'Not really. Does anyone even use paper maps anymore?'

'I do.'

'Seriously?'

'I like knowing where I've been, and where I'm going, not just where I am. Also, there are times when it's better not to leave a record of where you've been.'

'Are you admitting to the commission of a crime?'

'How long have you got?'

'You ever hear of a guy named Boris Cale?'

'It rings a bell, but I can't say why.'

'He killed his ex's new boyfriend down in Providence, Rhode Island a year or two ago. He didn't know the city so he put the guy's address into his GPS. He was found so fast that the blood hadn't dried on the floor when the cops arrested him.'

'A salutary lesson. Back to Perlman: in theory someone could follow 95 all the way from Florida to Maine.'

'Only as far as Houlton.'

'And this isn't Houlton.'

'It's prettier than Houlton.'

'Not difficult.'

'No, not really,' said Parker. 'Anything on a phone?'

'I've asked the sheriff's department down in Duval County to take a look at Perlman's apartment, see if they can find any records, or any sign of a laptop or desktop computer. If we confirm his phone details, we can see about contacting the phone company to find out who he might have called recently, especially anyone up here. They'll probably ask for a court order, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.'

'It's still odd that he didn't have an atlas, or even just a state map, the kind they give away at the information centers when you cross the state line.'

'He could have been using a GPS app on his phone,' said Bloom.

'a.s.suming he had one.'

'He was a male in his forties. He might have been an exception, but it's probably a safe guess that he owned a phone.'

'Which, if he walked into that water, he took with him?'

'It's possible.'

'Who needs a phone if he's going to commit suicide by drowning?' said Parker. 'And I noticed something on his winds.h.i.+eld. I could be wrong, but it was a circular mark on the gla.s.s, the kind left by the sucker attachment on one of those grips for a phone or a GPS. I only spotted it because it was cleaner than the rest of the winds.h.i.+eld. Did you find anything like that in the car?'

'If we did, then it would have been on the list. No, there was nothing like it.'

'Again,' said Parker, 'what kind of suicide takes the holder for his phone or GPS with him when he steps into the sea? He wasn't going to need GPS to find where he was going.'

Bloom s.h.i.+fted in her seat. It wasn't that she'd exactly wanted Perlman's death to be a suicide, but if it wasn't, it was going to make life in Boreas very complicated. And there was the other thing, the one she hadn't yet mentioned to this man ...

'He had a series of numbers tattooed on his left forearm,' said Bloom. 'Lloyd Kramer found them when he was bagging his clothing. I didn't mention it to you before. I mean, I ...'

She didn't know why she felt the need to apologize. She just did.

'It's okay,' said Parker. 'It wasn't any of my business until I chose to try and make it so. When you say numbers, what do you mean?'

'They're not uniform. One is four digits long, the next six, and then there are two more four-digit sequences, but beginning with the letter "A". They look professional I mean, they weren't done in a jailhouse. I took a photograph.'

She removed her phone from her pocket, pulled up the picture, and handed it to him. The numbers ran horizontally along the arm, one beneath the next. He gave the phone back to her.

'They're clearly not gang tattoos,' she said. 'Unless accountants have gangs.'

'They could be concentration camp numbers,' said Parker. 'With a name like Perlman, he was probably Jewish.'

'My married name is Bloom and my husband and I aren't Jewish,' she argued.

'If your name was Perlman, I think you would be.'

She conceded the point.

'But Perlman was far too young to have been in a camp during World War II,' she said. 'And why four sequences?'

'I don't know,' said Parker. 'A reminder? A memorial of some kind?'

Bloom admitted that it made a kind of sense, although she remained open to other possibilities too.

'I suppose I could ask around,' she said. 'I think there's an Orthodox synagogue in Bangor, and there's got to be at least one down in Portland. And there's always Google.'

She performed a quick search with her phone.

'G.o.d, there's a lot of stuff on concentration camp numbers. They were used to identify prisoners at Auschwitz, and only there. Hey, I didn't know that. Just from glancing over this material, they could be camp identifiers, I guess.'

'Can I see those numbers again?'

She returned the phone to him, and he wrote them in a Moleskine notebook that he took from his jacket pocket.

'I could just have sent them to your phone,' she said.

'I like writing things down.'

She let it pa.s.s.

'I know someone in New York a rabbi who might be able to help with this,' he told her. 'If these are numbers from Auschwitz, then there must be a way to link them to the original prisoners.'

'They may have nothing to do with why Perlman ended up in the sea.'

'It won't hurt to ask.'