A Song of Shadows (25 page)

A TV hung from a bracket in a corner, slightly too high for Oran to reach. It was basic cable, but better than nothing, and he had a remote with which to change channels. He had also been supplied with books, magazines, and a couple of graphic novels. He had an armchair on which to sit and a sofa bed on which to sleep. The basement was windowless, but adequately ventilated through a series of grilles. Heat came from a radiator and the room was lit by a pair of lamps. Oran had tried to figure out where he was being held, but no sound penetrated the basement, either from the floors above or the world outside. The car had been driven into a garage when they’d arrived, so Oran’s first sight of the man’s world was a shelf lined with paint cans, jars of screws and nails, and a series of boards on which his tools hung. The sight of all those implements had frightened Oran at first, for he feared being cut by them. But his captor had merely helped Oran from the trunk of the car and guided him down to the basement, and Oran had been there ever since.

The man had spoken little to Oran since taking him, beyond asking if there was anything that he needed, and warning him to keep still when the blood was being drawn. He did not raise his voice, did not threaten to harm Oran in any way, but the boy remained terrified of him. He could still recall waking up at home to find the masked man looming over him, his hand closing on Oran’s mouth, and the appearance of the gun. It all happened quickly after that: the cuffs, the gag, and the heavy-duty tape around Oran’s legs.

Then the shooting began.

Oran had no idea why his family had been targeted. He had no idea why he was being held in the basement. He had asked the man, but received no reply. Oran knew only that he was still alive, and so far his captor had continued to keep his face concealed behind a ski mask. That was good, as far as Oran was concerned. It gave him hope. If the man didn’t want Oran to see his face, it was because he didn’t wish to be identified, which meant that, at some point, he intended to release him.

But Oran – quiet, clever Oran – thought that he might have some inkling of who his captor was. The voice, although rarely heard, was familiar. He had heard it before. The competition, the essay …

Now he came down the staircase and stood before Oran, his hands on his hips. He was wearing a big L.L. Bean olive field coat, the kind that Oran’s father used to wear when he went hiking. Oran wondered if it might not even be the same coat, taken from their house before the flames consumed it. He forced the thought away. He tried not to think of his parents and his sisters. He regretted all the times that he’d fought with them, all the occasions on which he’d called his sisters bitches, or spurned his mother’s demonstrations of affection and his father’s awkward attempts at bonding. He would have given anything to be able to rewind time, to spend just one more day with them.

‘You’ve been a good boy, Oran,’ said the man. The ski mask muffled his words slightly because the mouth hole was too small.

Oran didn’t reply. He was too afraid.

‘I’m sorry for what happened to your parents, to your sisters,’ the man continued. ‘I know that it’s caused you a lot of pain. It’s going to come to an end now.’

He reached up and yanked off the ski mask.

And Oran began to cry.

III

There is no reason why good cannot triumph over evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

Kurt Vonnegut,
The Sirens of Titan

39

T
he Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the State of Maine was located in a nondescript building on Hospital Street in Augusta, conveniently situated behind the State Police Crime Laboratory. It had always operated under some degree of financial constraint, in large part because the state legislature, like most elected bodies of its kind, had generally been reluctant to approve significant budget increases for it because the dead do not vote. Thus, while the national standard for determining a cause of death was sixty days for uncomplicated cases, and ninety day for homicides, the determination of a cause of death in Maine could take up to six months. There was a backlog of cases, and the office had been forced to become increasingly selective about those that it felt obliged to investigate.

None of this was the fault of the various appointees to the post of ME over the years, who had done their utmost to squeeze every nickel while pleading for additional resources from the state, usually to little avail. It was fortunate for Maine, therefore, that the various holders of the office were not only conscientious in their duty, but also clever in the bargain, and were therefore capable of taking the kind of imaginative leaps that enable important institutions to keep functioning, even when no money is left in the cookie jar. To the untrained eye, some of those leaps might have been perceived as somewhat unorthodox. For example, it is a requirement of medical examiners that they should retain samples of internal organs – typically the liver, lungs, heart, and kidneys – from autopsied bodies, in case any questions or queries should arise at some future date. These are generally preserved in formalin, and stored in glass sample jars. (It is considered inadvisable to keep tissue samples in a chocolate box, as one Tennessee medical examiner was alleged to have done, a lapse that, perhaps unsurprisingly, contributed to the loss of his license.) Nevertheless, specialized sample jars are expensive, when all that is really required for the task is a simple glass container with an airtight seal. Thus it was that one former Maine medical examiner, perhaps lost in contemplation of a bottle of mayonnaise or jelly, noticed that such comestibles came in resealable glass jars of a kind not entirely dissimilar to those for which his office was paying top dollar. And so – assiduously collected, carefully cleaned, and scrupulously delabeled to avoid any embarrassing, and possibly traumatic, confusion – jelly jars became sterile storage containers, and the money saved was put toward providing answers to more pressing problems, namely the manner in which someone might have died, and how, in cases of homicide, that knowledge could be used to apprehend the person or persons responsible.

Maine, though, was not alone in struggling with poor funding and inadequate facilities, and it was a further credit to all those involved in the ME’s office that it had not been forced to endure scandals such as that in neighboring Massachusetts, where bodies had lain unclaimed and corpses were mislaid, or, as in Oklahoma, to cease autopsying apparent suicides due to staffing problems. But the investigation into the death of Oran Wilde’s family, the associated homicide of a homeless man, and the Perlman autopsy had stretched the resources of the office to its limits. Now two more bodies had been added to the office’s roster of corpses awaiting examination, although there was, at least, no question of how either of them had died. Ruth Winter’s body had already been handed over for burial, but one corpse still remained.

The three men who arrived at the medical examiner’s office shortly after dark were concerned only with this second body: the remains of the man who suffocated to death beneath the sands of Green Heron Bay. They entered from the rear of the building, and the staff member who was on duty at the main desk didn’t even turn his head to watch as they approached the room into which, for their convenience, the body had been moved. He had already been advised that he could not speak about what he did not know, and so no names were logged, and no faces seen. He breathed out only when he heard the door to the autopsy room close, after which he carefully checked the lock on the front entrance and retreated to a secluded office, where he remained until the three men left, and he was, once again, alone with the dead.

The fluorescent lights reflected on glass, metal, and tile and illuminated the body that lay beneath a sheet on a gurney. Gordon Walsh pulled on plastic examination gloves and handed clean pairs to the two men who stood behind him, before drawing back the sheet and revealing the face of the dead man. The top of the Y-shaped incision on his chest was just visible, raw against the blue-gray pallor of his skin.

‘Hey, it’s your mom,’ said Angel.

‘How the fuck old are you?’ said Walsh. ‘Jesus.’

Louis stepped forward.

‘Can I touch him?’

‘Be my guest.’

Louis moved the man’s head gently, examining the deformation of his face and head, and the lobeless ears. He pulled back the man’s lips and looked at his white, even teeth.

‘Partial dentures,’ said Walsh.

‘Maybe he thought they’d improve his dating chances,’ said Angel.

‘Yeah,’ said Walsh. ‘I figure he needed any help he could get.’

‘They pump all the sand out of him?’ asked Louis.

‘You kidding me? He must have swallowed half the beach.’

‘Bad way to die.’

‘If you want to pray for him, now’s the time. So, does he remind you of anyone you may have met?’

‘Your mom,’ said Angel. Again.

‘Shut the fuck up. I was warned about you.’

‘Any identifying marks on the rest of his body?’ asked Louis.

‘Nothing,’ said Walsh. ‘He’s entirely hairless, though.
Alopecia universalis
: I just learned that today, and I like saying it. Oh, and his bowels were riddled with tumors. The ME thinks he must have been in constant pain. He probably had less than a year to live.’

Louis stepped back and removed the gloves, careful to ensure that his bare hands did not touch any part of the material that had been in contact with the dead man’s skin.

‘What did you say his name was?’

‘We found a Georgia driver’s license in the name of Earl Steiger when we pulled him out of the sand. It was the only ID he was carrying, but it wasn’t the only one that he had.’

‘Earl Steiger,’ said Louis. ‘No, I don’t recall it.’

‘He had to be staying somewhere local,’ Walsh continued, ‘so we canvassed the area and found a motel outside Belfast called the Come Awn Inn. He’d been staying there for a couple of days, cash on the nail.’

‘The Come Awn Inn?’ said Angel. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘No, for real. You don’t want to stay there. We hit the room with UV light. Let me tell you, it looked like you could come on anything in the Come Awn Inn, and a lot of folk started with the sheets and the comforter. I wanted to burn my shoes by the time we were done.’

‘And?’ said Louis.

‘We picked up four other licenses, none of them in the name of Earl Steiger. All were from southern states, and all were legit, at least in the sense that they weren’t forgeries. So far, we’ve traced three of them back to dead children, including Earl Steiger. He was killed in an automobile accident with the rest of his family in 1975 in Wilkinson County, Georgia, aged fifteen.’

For the first time, Louis evinced some kind of real interest.

‘Dead children?’

‘Ghosting,’ said Angel. ‘Old school.’

Ghosting was the product of a different time, one before computers and the routine exchange of information – whether in theory or actual practice – by government agencies. Before the advent of the income tax in 1913, and later the introduction of the Social Security system in 1935, it was possible for a man or woman in the United States to live openly without any formal documentation from the government. Even after 1935, it was difficult to check if an individual’s claimed identity was his or her own. Only the invention of databases, and the increasingly long reach of the government, rendered such imposture harder to achieve – although, ironically, the Internet, with its proliferation of intimate personal details, now made identity theft easier than ever before.

The practice of ghosting involved finding a dead person whose age roughly matched one’s own, discovering the person’s date of birth – often from the gravestone itself – and then using the information to obtain a birth certificate in that name. Once the birth certificate was in hand, it was a relatively simple process to begin obtaining government-issued identification, thereby cementing the assumed identity.

‘What about the other children?’ asked Louis.

Walsh consulted his notebook.

‘Noble C. Griffis, Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Drowned in 1962 at the age of three while in the care of a Methodist benevolent institution. And William H. Pruett, Tarboro, South Carolina: nine years old when he died in a fire with his mother, two sisters, and three brothers in 1971. Father predeceased them.’

Louis didn’t speak for a time. He was assimilating the information from Walsh, sifting it in his mind. The dead man – Earl Steiger, for want of a better name – or someone acting on his behalf, had been clever in his choice of assumed identities. First of all, poorer areas in the South were targeted, possibly on the grounds that records might be more haphazard, and the spelling of names open to more than one interpretation: ‘Griffis’, for example, sounded like a bastardization of ‘Griffin’ or ‘Griffiths’. Some risks were attached to this approach, due to the close interrelationships between families in small rural communities, and the long memories of those responsible for guarding their records, but they were outweighed by the benefits.

Secondly, the names assumed were from boys who were either orphans or whose immediate families had died alongside them, which decreased the likelihood of anyone poking around in their family history and discovering that little Earl or Noble or William appeared to be enjoying an existence beyond the grave. Finally, all of the children had been born within one three-year period between 1959 and 1962, which probably corresponded to the age of the man lying on the gurney before them.

‘I take it you’re trying to find out when copies of the birth certificates were issued,’ said Louis.