The Wrath of Angels (12 page)

‘Jesus, Andrea, there has to be some kind of code of the forest, right? It’s like the law of the sea. You don’t leave people stranded when they’re in trouble. All we’re looking for is directions.’

Andrea had never heard of a code of the forest, and she was pretty sure that none existed. Even if it did then, just as with the law of the sea, there would be those who did not abide by it. She didn’t know what the forest equivalent of a pirate might be, and she didn’t want to find out. People went missing in these woods, and some of them were never found again. They couldn’t all have been eaten by bears, could they?

‘What if he has a gun?’ she said.

‘
I
don’t have a gun. Why would he shoot me? You know,
Deliverance
was just a movie. Anyway, that was somewhere in the South. They’re different down there. This is Maine.’

He set off after the man only he had seen. Andrea trailed after him. She had no choice. The woods were thick, and she didn’t want to lose sight of her husband. The only thing worse than being in their current situation would be to find herself in it alone. He was setting a fast pace now. That was Chris all over. Once he eventually got an idea fixed in his head, he’d pursue it full speed to its conclusion. Like a lot of men she knew, he couldn’t follow more than one clear line of thought for any length of time, but he had a determination that she sometimes lacked.

‘Wait up, Chris,’ she said.

‘We’ll lose him.’

‘You’ll lose
me
.’

He paused, his left hand outstretched to her from the top of a small incline while he continued to look ahead.

‘Is he still there?’

‘No. Hold on, he’s back again. He’s staring at us.’

‘Where?’ She strained her eyes, squinting into the forest gloom. ‘I still can’t see him.’

‘I think he’s raising his arm. He wants us to follow him. Yep, that’s definitely it. He’s showing us the way.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘What else would he be doing?’

‘Uh, leading us
deeper
into the woods?’

‘Why would he want to do that?’

Because people are just bad, sometimes. Because he means to hunt us.

‘I don’t know. He might want to steal from us.’

‘He wouldn’t have to lead us deeper into the forest to do that. He could just hold us up right here.’

Chris had a point, but she still felt uneasy.

‘Let’s just be careful, okay?’

‘I’m always careful.’

‘No you’re not. That’s how I got pregnant with Danielle, remember?’

He flashed that grin at her, the one that had attracted her back at college, the one that had made her climb into bed with him the first time, and she responded in kind with that sly, sexy smile that always caused the hairs on the back of his neck to rise up, and other parts of him to rise too, and both of them made the same wish: that they were in bed together with a bottle of wine half-drunk beside them, and the taste of it on their lips and tongues as they kissed.

‘It’s going to be okay,’ he said.

‘I believe you,’ she replied. ‘But no more hiking for a while after this, promise?’

‘Promise.’

She took his hand, and he squeezed it. As she stood beside him she saw the man for the first time. Perhaps it was the cloud cover combining with the natural gloom of the forest, but it seemed to her that he was dressed in some kind of a cloak. He wore a hood over his head, so that she could not see his face. He was clearly beckoning to them, though. Her husband had been right about that.

She felt an ache in her stomach, a cold pain. She’d always had a good sense about other people, although Chris just tended to smile indulgently when she spoke of it. Men were different. They were less attuned to their own potential vulnerability. Women needed that added awareness of the dangers that surrounded them. She’d passed it on to their girls, she hoped, attuning them to it. This man meant them some harm: she was sure of it. She was just glad that the girls were safe with her parents in Albany and not out here in the woods. She tried to speak, but then Chris’s hand slipped from hers, and he was moving again, following the slowly waving figure, following him deeper and deeper into the woods.

And she followed after.

I
t was the day after my meeting with Marielle Vetters and Ernie Scollay.

The month of November was set to die a sticky death, it seemed. A snowstorm had hit early in the month, presaging a long, cold winter, but no further snows had followed, and slowly the temperature had climbed until there were days when a sweater seemed too much to wear, and nights when the bars let their doors stand open to allow a little air to circulate. Now there was at least a north wind blowing, and from the window of my office at home I watched the cordgrass of the Scarborough marshes perform delicate dances at the breeze’s call.

On my desk before me was the typewritten list given to me by Marielle. It consisted of seven names: six men and one woman. Beside four of those names were sums of money, ranging from $3,000 to $45,000. The other three names each had the word ‘Contacted’ handwritten beside them, followed by ‘Accepted’ in two cases, and ‘Refused’ in one. Just one of the names was familiar to me, and then only after I had cross-checked a box number to make sure that it was the same person: Aaron Newman was a reporter with one of the New York newspapers, a political writer with what appeared to be extremely good sources. His profile had risen recently following a series of articles exposing a married congressman’s contacts with a pair of nineteen-year-old boys whom he may or may not have paid for sexual favors. Naturally, the congressman’s career had immediately gone down the toilet, and his wife had helped to flush the bowl by failing to appear at any of his teary-eyed press conferences. The flock is easily led: show them a penitent with a forgiving spouse and they’ll consider forgiving too, but give them a penitent alone on a platform and they’ll start looking for rocks to throw. Newman’s name did not have a sum of money beside it, only the word ‘Accepted.’

The name of a second man, Davis Tate, rang a bell somewhere, and the miracle of Google did the rest. Tate was a talk radio shock jock, a minor celebrity on the extreme right, the kind who gave a bad name to ordinary conservatives who didn’t immediately hate on sight anyone who wasn’t like them in race, creed, or sexual orientation. Tate’s name had a letter ‘A’ handwritten after it, along with three asterisks. Either he was a very good student or Davis Tate had accepted, or been accepted, with more than usual enthusiasm.

One of the others, a woman called Solene Escott, had a twelve-digit number beside her name, but it didn’t work as a telephone number, and when I tried an Internet search on it I came up with nothing, even when I included her name alongside. A further trawl produced a handful of Solene Escotts, including a banker, a writer, and a housewife who had died in a car accident in October 2001 somewhere north of Milford, New Hampshire.

I looked again at those twelve digits beside Solene Escott’s name, which, unlike the others on the list, was typed in red, then separated them into two six-digit numbers. The first set ended in ‘65’, the second in ‘01’. The first numbers conformed to the date of Solene Escott’s birth, according to her obituary, and the second set matched the date on which she died. But according to the newspaper found in the plane, it had gone down in July 2001, three months before Solene Escott perished. Either someone connected to that plane had a direct line to God, or Solene Escott’s death had been planned well in advance.

The obituary also gave me the name of Solene Escott’s husband. Solene had kept her own name when she married. Her husband’s name was Kenneth Chan, apparently known to his friends and associates as Kenny. His name was typed above Solene’s on the list.

Beside it was written the word ‘Accepted’.

It took me another hour to come up with a possible identity for one further name on the list, and again it was Solene Escott who provided the link. The only person with ‘Refused’ beside his name was one Brandon Felice. A Brandon Felice had been killed in a gas station robbery outside of Newburyport, Massachusetts in March 2002. There was no apparent reason for his death. According to an eyewitness, a salesman who had been drinking coffee in his car across the street when the robbery occurred, Felice had been pumping gas into his Mercedes when two masked men pulled up in a Buick, both armed with pistols. One of the men ordered the attendant to empty the register while the other forced Felice and a woman, Antonia Viga, who had been putting air in the tires of her minivan, to lie on the ground. When the first raider emerged with the cash, having first shot and seriously wounded the attendant, the second walked to where Felice and Viga were lying and shot both of them in the back of the head. The men then drove off, and the Buick was later found burned out off Route 1. The Buick had been stolen earlier from Back Bay in Boston. The raiders netted a total of $163 in the course of the robbery, and were never found.

Brandon Felice was linked to Solene Escott through her husband, Kenny Chan. Felice, Escott and Chan had been involved in a software start-up company, Branken Developments Inc., in which each of them held a one-third share. Felice had not been married and had no children. Upon his death, his share was acquired by a company named Pryor Investments. Meanwhile, Solene Escott’s share in the company had passed to her husband following her fatal accident.

I’d never heard of Pryor Investments, but another search revealed a little about the company. It was a very discreet operation, working on behalf of clients who preferred that their business dealings should remain as anonymous as possible. The only time that Pryor made the news was when something went wrong, most recently in 2009 when it was found to have ‘inadvertently’ broken an embargo on new investment in Burma. One of Pryor’s junior partners appended his signature to a contract from what was ostensibly a foreign-incorporated and headquartered subsidiary of a shelf company in Panama, but which was traced back to Pryor’s offices in Boston. Pryor had received a $50,000 fine following an investigation by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, and the junior partner had been punished with the equivalent of an hour on the naughty step. Garrison Pryor, the company’s CEO, described it as ‘an isolated incident’ and ‘an error of detail’, whatever that meant.

Branken Developments, meanwhile, had specialized in security algorithms for the defense and weapons industries, and became a significant player in its field. In 2004, the company had quietly ceased trading, its operations were folded into a subsidiary of the Defense Department, and Kenny Chan had retired, reputedly a very wealthy man. Pryor Investments was once again involved: it had brokered the deal for a percentage of the profits from the sale.

The twist to the tale lay in the fate of Kenny Chan: in 2006 he was found dead in his own safe, surrounded by share certificates, various forms of gold currency, and about $20,000 in cash. The safe was big, but not big enough to take Kenny Chan comfortably, so someone had broken his arms and legs to make him more malleable. It was some time before his body was discovered, and it was unclear whether he had suffocated or choked to death on the Swiss gold franc found lodged in his throat.

So Kenny Chan’s wife died in a car accident that appeared to have been planned in advance, and his business partner was shot for no reason during a gas station robbery a few months later. Kenny Chan subsequently made a killing by selling his accumulated shares in his company before someone made a killing of a more literal kind on Kenny Chan, with robbery apparently not the motive. At the very least, Mr Chan had led an interesting, if relatively brief, life. Solene Escott’s death was treated by police as an unfortunate accident; the investigation into Brandon Felice’s death appeared to have dried up with no resolution; and Kenny Chan’s demise remained quite the mystery.

The other two names on the list meant nothing to me, although I discovered obituary notices for any number of people who might have been them. Without something more than the names in isolation, it seemed that I wasn’t likely to get any further with the list.

And all the time I kept coming back to Brightwell: Brightwell, a killer of men and women; a harvester and repository of souls; a being whose image had appeared in photographs from the Second World War, hardly different from the face of the man who had still been murdering for his cause sixty years later, and who bore a startling resemblance to a figure in a centuries-old painting of a battlefield, fighting alongside a fallen angel. I had killed him, and yet I had been led to doubt whether one such as he could ever be dispatched with a bullet or a blade. I still heard whispers of creatures reborn, of the transmigration of spirits, and had witnessed the consequences of vengeance pursued through generations. Brightwell, and those like him, were not of the order of men. They were Other.

So what had drawn Brightwell to the town of Falls End, and how was the list connected?

That afternoon, I began clearing my desk of other work. There wasn’t very much to clear. Business had picked up some in the last few months, but it still didn’t amount to a whole lot. The previous year, the case of a missing girl, with which I’d become involved through my lawyer, Aimee Price, had attracted a lot of attention, and it had led to offers of similar work. I’d turned down all but one. A man named Juan Lozano, a Spanish academic and translator who had married an American woman from the northern Maine town of Harden, had hired me to find his wife. They’d had an argument over sex, he told me, and she’d left him. Sexual relations between them had virtually ceased over the previous two years and he had accused her of having an affair. They’d had a shouting match, he’d stormed out, and when he returned she was gone. He just wanted to know that she was okay, he said, nothing more. I’d accepted his money because I thought that finding her would be easy: her credit cards were still being used, and withdrawals had been made from ATMs in the DC area using her bank card in the two days prior to my first meeting with Lozano. Beatrice, his wife, was either alive and well, or someone was using her cards and being careless about it.