A Song of Shadows (46 page)

‘Yes, I do,’ said Demers, and this time the threat was audible. ‘Sleep well, Mr Parker.’

He left her sitting at the table, pages of her legal pad filled with penciled notes. Preston gave him a ride back to Green Heron Bay. He dozed all the way, and when he woke the next morning he could not remember how he had gotten from the car to his bed. Through his window he saw gray clouds heavy with the promise of rain. Just as Werner had said, the tide had washed the beach clean of all traces of their presence. Over in the dunes, a forensic team searched for traces of a shooter they would never find.

Parker made a pot of coffee, put the last of his possessions into two boxes, and prepared to leave Boreas at last.

69

O
ne of the more useful aspects of mortality, from an investigator’s point of view, is that the dead can’t object. They have no privacy. By noon that day, the detectives sequestered in Boreas had obtained Werner’s telephone records, and some, but not all, of his bank details.

The call came through to Parker while he was putting the boxes in his car. He was grateful that most of his stuff was already gone. There was a limit to what a Mustang could hold and still be driven safely, and lifting boxes hurt like a bitch.

‘Are you leaving us?’ asked Walsh.

Parker glanced to his left. One of Stynes’s officers was sitting in an unmarked car on the road above the dunes, watching the house.

‘I was planning on saying goodbye.’

‘I’m sure you were. We’re going to arrest Baulman.’

‘On what grounds?’

‘It looks like you panicked him when you got in his face yesterday. He called Werner from his home telephone. It was careless of him. Demers recognized the number. We’re going to ask him the purpose of the call, just as we’re planning to ask him why he has made cash transfers totaling almost twenty thousand dollars over the past three weeks to one of Werner’s accounts.’

‘Protection costs money,’ said Parker.

‘Although some folk get it for free. Is the forensics team still out on the dunes?’

From what Parker could see, the search of the area was drawing to a close.

‘They’re almost done. I don’t think they’ve left a grain of sand untouched.’

‘You could have saved them a lot of trouble.’

‘You want me to go through it all again? It was growing dark. I didn’t see anything. I just heard the shot and hit the sand.’

‘Unfortunate.’

‘Yeah.’

‘There’s something I didn’t tell you last night: Werner was present at a nursing home called Golden Hills when a patient named Bernhard Hummel choked to death on grapes. Hummel knew Baulman: they’d come to this country together. Hummel suffered from dementia, and didn’t eat unless someone fed him with a spoon.’

‘Werner was afraid that Hummel might let something slip.’

‘Whoever’s work he was doing, it wasn’t God’s. It seems that Marcus Baulman also visited Hummel shortly before Werner did.’

‘So Baulman raised the alarm, and Werner did the killing.’

‘We’re planning to ask Baulman about that, along with everything else.’

‘What about Werner’s property?’

‘We’ve started looking, but nothing yet. As for the gun, we’re not a hundred percent sure, but it looks like the same one that was used to kill the Wildes. I still have some folks who want to believe that Werner was Oran Wilde’s accomplice and protector, but a body will shut them up. We found the link between Werner and Oran, by the way: Oran won an essay competition organized by the Lutheran churches in the northeast. Werner was one of the judges. We have a picture of him presenting Oran with a certificate and a check. Oran won a hundred dollars, and it cost him and his family their lives.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Outside the Boreas PD, taking the air. Why?’

‘There’s a bookstore called Olesens in the center of town, with a parking lot at the back. I’ll see you there in about fifteen minutes.’

‘For what?’

‘God, Walsh, just be there, okay?’

It was unfortunate that Marcus Baulman opened his front door to take his dog for a walk just as the two unmarked cars pulled up outside. He didn’t recognize the women who stepped from the first car, but he made them for police. When Marie Demers appeared from the second vehicle, he was certain that they had come for him. Werner was dead, and who knew what they had subsequently discovered about him – about all of them?

Baulman darted back inside and closed the door. Lotte, primed for her walk, looked confused. He patted her on the head. He would miss her. He pushed her into the living room and closed the door. He did not want the police to panic and hurt her.

The doorbell rang, followed by three heavy knocks. An unfamiliar female voice called his name, and the woman identified herself as a detective, but by then Baulman was already heading for the stairs. Lotte started barking, and he caught sight of a shape passing by the kitchen window, making for the back door of the house. He was in his bedroom when he heard the sound of glass breaking, and he had the gun in his hand by the time the first footsteps sounded on the stairs.

He tasted oil in his mouth as he pulled the trigger.

Walsh was waiting for Parker in the lot. He hadn’t driven over. The Boreas Police Department was only a short walk away. Parker pulled up beside him and got out of the car.

‘Do I need to make it okay with Stynes and Demers before I leave?’ Parker asked.

‘I’ll let them know. They’ll be heartbroken.’

‘About Oran Wilde.’

‘Go on.’

‘Louis told you that Steiger might have worked for a man named Cambion. Now Cambion is dead. He was killed in a house in Queens the night before last. It made the papers, although they haven’t formally identified him yet, or the man who died with him. The woman who owned the house is in a catatonic state. Before he died, Cambion confirmed that Werner killed not only the Wildes but stuck that blade in Perlman’s eye, and ordered Earl Steiger to kill Ruth Winter and the Tedescos.’

If Walsh already knew this through Ross, then he gave no sign.

‘Who did he tell?’ asked Walsh.

‘I can’t—’

‘Fuck you. Who did he tell? You? Louis?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘You know, you’re right: it doesn’t. You set up Werner, you and Louis and that other son of a bitch. You lured him out, and then you killed him.’

‘He didn’t come to that beach to give himself up.’

‘He didn’t get the chance!’

‘He murdered children, Walsh. He kept Oran Wilde alive for just long enough to use him, and then he killed him too.’

‘Maybe if you’d left Werner alive, we could have asked him ourselves.’

Parker leaned against his car. His face was expressionless. He knew that he had put himself at risk by telling Walsh about Cambion’s call. If Walsh chose to do so, he could arrest him on suspicion of accessory to murder. Parker would deny having said anything at all, of course, and Walsh knew it, but Walsh’s word would be worth more in a court of law, and accessory charges brought a sentence of up to three years. Conspiracy to commit murder, meanwhile, was twenty-five to life.

‘I’ve turned a blind eye in the past,’ said Walsh. ‘But this is different.’

‘Is it?’

‘This is murder! Look at yourself. What happened to you?’

Parker’s blank visage stared back at him.

‘I died,’ he said. ‘And then I came back.’

‘This is—’ Walsh began.

‘Did you enjoy your meal, detective?’ asked Parker.

‘What?’

‘Your meal in Augusta. Did you enjoy it?’

He did not sound triumphant, just sorrowful.

And Walsh understood. He had shown Steiger’s body to Louis and Angel, and afterwards he ate and drank with them. He was complicit. He had made himself so, step by step, ever since he had taken sides with Ross, but Ross would not protect him. To turn on Parker, and by extension on Angel and Louis, was to initiate the destruction of his own career.

And to what end: for a killer of children?

Walsh’s anger began to ebb, to be replaced by a sense of vertigo, of a spinning, nauseating world. He believed in good, in morality, but so too did the man standing before him, and Walsh found himself unable to balance the two perspectives. Was this how it had to be? To eradicate a little of the evil from the world, did you have to sacrifice something of your own goodness? He had thought that he could consort with men like this, yet keep a moral distance. He had been wrong.

Walsh’s cellphone rang in his pocket. He answered it, listened, and said only ‘I’m coming down there’ before he hung up.

‘Baulman is dead,’ he said. ‘He shot himself before they could get to him.’

He stared at the phone in his hand, as though expecting another call that might explain everything to him.

‘I’m going home,’ said Parker. ‘It’s time.’

The Fulcis had done a good job, even in the few days allowed them. The plywood over the busted window in the kitchen door was gone, and there was new glass in its place. The holes left by bullets and shotgun pellets had been filled in, and the kitchen repainted. His office had a new door. They had even bought milk, bread, and coffee, and put a six-pack of Shipyard Export in the refrigerator. Two bottles of wine stood on the kitchen counter. A note, signed by both of them, wished him well, and advised that they had one or two small tasks to finish up whenever it suited him.

And here, in the place in which he had almost died, the home that he had once shared with Rachel and Sam, he felt suddenly overwhelmed by emotion – rage, gratitude, guilt, regret. He sat in his office chair, buried his face in his hands, and did not move for a long time.

70

W
erner’s property was searched with radar to detect anomalies in the soil. Three holes were dug as a result, but only an old tarp and some animal remains were found. On the second day, the compost pile was noticed. Werner had built himself a wooden composting unit and placed it at the end of his yard beneath a copse of trees. There was concern that the heat from the pile would play hell with the equipment, so it was decided to make an exploratory dig once the unit had been moved.

They discovered Oran Wilde’s body buried just two feet below the ground.

Sometimes convictions come from meticulous police work, from thousands of hours of effort. Sometimes a witness emerges. Sometimes a confession is made.

Sometimes you get a break.

One week after Werner’s death, a letter arrived at Bruno Perlman’s old address from a mailbox company located two miles from his house, notifying him that his two-month rental agreement was about to expire, and offering him one year for the price of six months should he choose to extend. A court order was obtained to open the box, which was found to contain paperwork relating to the late Bernhard Hummel, aka Udo Hoch, a former guard at Lubsko concentration camp; and another Maine resident named Ambros Riese, tentatively identified by Perlman as Anselm Trommler, an
Obersturmbannführer
and engineering specialist at Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Perlman, it seemed, had not been such a fantasist after all, although it was not clear at first how he had come to find these men. Eventually it was established that his was the most basic kind of investigation: in the aftermath of Engel’s arrest, he had used voter records to create a short list of German Americans living in Maine whose ages corresponded to Engel’s. He then appeared to have surreptitously begun photographing them, and comparing them with available photographs of men and women who had served on the staff at Lubsko by using a fairly simple piece of face-aging software.

Perlman’s mailbox also contained two high-quality copies of photographs that were neither from official Nazi party identification documents, nor taken by Perlman himself. One showed a woman in profile, her face almost entirely hidden by her blond hair, her left hand raised to fire a pistol. She was surrounded by a small crowd of SS officers and men. It was unclear at what exactly she was firing, but when enlarged, two shapes on the ground to her right were revealed to be the bodies of naked men. The second photograph showed another woman standing at a chalkboard, pointing at some writing with a piece of chalk held in her right hand. Her light hair was pulled back in a bun. In front of her were two rows of teenagers, the first standing, and the second kneeling. The writing on the board read: ‘
Der Jahrgang 1938, Klassenlehrer Fraulein Górski
.’ It was a picture of the graduating students of 1938, with their homeroom teacher, Isha Górski, later Isha Winter, at the Bierhoff Jewish Private School in Aachen. On the back of the photo, Perlman had written down the names of each of the students, and the camps to which they had been taken.

None had survived the war.

Marie Demers called on Charlie Parker as she was heading to Portland Jetport to catch her flight back to DC. Ambros Riese had been questioned at his home, and denied all knowledge of Anselm Trommler. But Demers had unearthed a labor requisition form from Mittelbau-Dora with Trommler’s name signed on the bottom, along with photographs and documents that traced his journey from Germany to Argentina, and on to the United States, during which time Trommler became Riese. Trommler’s photograph on his Nazi party membership documents was almost identical, a little less weight on the face aside, to the picture on his INS paperwork. There was enough evidence, Demers believed, to begin denaturalization and extradition proceedings against him, assuming he lived long enough. All this was explained to Riese as he sat in his chair, the oxygen hissing into him, while his son advised him to say nothing until they hired a lawyer, and his daughter-in-law looked on in silent shock.

And then, just as Demers and Toller were leaving, Riese confessed. He didn’t do so out of shame, or guilt, or even some strange relief.

He did it, Demers thought, out of pride.

The detective interested Demers. She was content to discuss the details of the case with him, and what had been discovered in Perlman’s rented mailbox. It was all about to become a matter of public record anyway.

‘But you found nothing about Baulman?’ asked Parker.