A Time of Torment (38 page)

Starcher arranged the private adoptions on behalf of the Cut. He was very good at it. Where necessary, he could even provide a ‘straw’ mother to attest that the child was hers, and perform the requisite pantomime of regret at handing over her baby, and relief that it would now receive a better life than she could have offered. Such acts had rarely proved necessary over the course of his long relationship with the Cut, the adoptive parents mostly being relieved simply to receive a healthy Caucasian child, and with as few legal complications as possible. Most, Starcher knew, understood that it was better if the adoption was not subjected to undue scrutiny. They were buying a baby, and paying a premium for it, which also covered the fast tracking of any paperwork. Once the child was delivered, Starcher never expected to hear from them again, and he had yet to be disappointed in this regard.

He had lined up three prospective sets of parents for the two children promised by the Cut, and after a short bidding war the list had been narrowed by the required third. Fortunately – or unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective as a potential parent – a new buyer had emerged in recent days, or rather a consortium of buyers. They had presented themselves in the form of a standard, middle-aged couple seeking to adopt the child that they themselves could no longer create, but Starcher was no fool, and always performed his own background checks. He couldn’t quite nail down their references, and a perusual of their bank records revealed a series of large payments lodged to a new account during the previous month.

Deeper background searches had turned up a connection to a man named Paulo Torak, a pornographer with a lucrative sideline in child pornography of the most vicious kind. Starcher knew of Torak because it was through one of his associates that Starcher had acquired the material used to incriminate, and imprison, Jerome Burnel. Starcher sent some of his less scrupulous associates to question Torak, and although he declined to name names, he admitted that a group of men of very particular tastes were prepared to spend a significant sum of money to acquire a child – preferably male, although female would also be acceptable – for their own enjoyment. When he informed Starcher of the upper limit to the money on offer, and promised him a further ten percent for his cooperation, Starcher immediately culled his previous list of two sets of parents by a further fifty percent, and consented to sell a child to the consortium.

He knew that he would have to keep the nature of the sale from Oberon, who was very uncompromising in such matters. This would require a little lying, at which Starcher was adept. But Starcher also knew that Oberon’s time was drawing to a close, and he had encouraged Cassander Hobb in his ambitions to lead the Cut. Cassander was less rigid than Oberon, but also more dangerous. Starcher decided not to lie to him about the sale, and offered him a quarter of his own bonus to sweeten the deal.

Cassander had accepted, although once again Starcher would have been surprised had he raised any objections. Starcher was a fine judge of character, having none of his own worth mentioning, which left him free to make accurate assessments of the character of others.

The call from Cassander came as Starcher was opening a very good bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon to celebrate the successful conclusion of a piece of civil litigation. He had also shed his shoes, and was about to immerse himself in a Wilbur Smith novel. Cassander’s interruption would have been unwelcome at any time, but especially at this one. He was calling from somewhere outdoors, and kept his voice low so that he would not be overheard.

Oberon had permitted a search of the Cut. This was bad enough, but Cassander had also learned – and Starcher did not want to know how, though he had his suspicions – that Oberon might be about to renege on the sale of at least one child, if it was a boy, and keep it for himself.

‘It’s time for new leadership,’ said Cassander.

Starcher, thinking of his promised bonus, replied: ‘I think that might be for the best.’

And so it was decided.

M
ajor Alvin Martin of the West Virginia State Police had come a long way from Haven County, Virginia: not physically, because a swift car ride would take him back there soon enough, if he chose – which he most certainly did not – but in terms of rank, income, and further career opportunities. He did not miss being the sheriff of Haven County. He had one son about to graduate high school, another in middle school, and a daughter who was studying to be a lawyer. He had a wife who was aging better than he was – and didn’t rub it in, which was damn Christian of her – and a dog named Rocco who was just about the dumbest animal in canine history but didn’t have a single bad bone in his admittedly mangy body.

Sometimes, whole days could go by without Martin thinking about the dead children, and the man in Haven County who had been complicit in their murders more than a decade before. Martin had spent a long time wondering if there was anything he could have done to stop the killings earlier, and bring those involved to justice. After much searching of his soul, and long talks with his pastor and his wife, he had decided that there wasn’t, but it didn’t give him much consolation.

Two bodies still hadn’t been identified. Martin didn’t know how that could be. Somewhere, a mother or father – natural, adoptive, or foster – was aware of a missing child, but either didn’t know or didn’t care enough to make the pilgrimage to New York to investigate further. Those two anonymous children had been buried in a pauper’s grave, with tissue samples retained in case someone did eventually come forward to claim them. Until then, they rested beneath the shadows of a pair of small white crosses, largely unmourned except by Martin and his wife – who visited the grave once a year to lay flowers and pray for the souls of the children sleeping under the earth – and one other person.

The groundskeeper at the cemetery had mentioned it to Martin a couple of years before, when he noticed him tending to the grave. He told Martin that a man came to the same resting place quite regularly, although he never left flowers. Martin asked for a description, and within moments he knew who the visitor was: the private detective, Charlie Parker.

The groundskeeper recalled him clearly, he said, because of an incident that still troubled him. It was a clear spring afternoon, and he saw the man enter the cemetery, and then later caught sight of him sitting on a bench just as the sun was setting, with two children standing behind him. Although the man did not appear to register their presence, or turn to speak with them, the groundskeeper was certain that he was aware the children were there.

‘Why didn’t he try to find out who they were?’ Martin asked.

‘I think he knew exactly who they were,’ the groundskeeper replied. ‘That’s why he didn’t turn around.’

That conversation still gave Martin a chill. He had never felt at ease in the cemetery since.

His thoughts did not often turn to Parker, largely by force of will – which meant, Martin supposed, that he kind of
was
thinking about the detective, mainly by trying not to. The detective was a presence in his subconscious, like a stain that would not be erased and simply must be ignored as best one could. True, Parker had uncovered a great evil and brought it to an end, but he had also left wreckage in his wake, and Martin’s own career was almost part of it. Martin had put Haven behind him, and had risen to his current position despite, and not because of, Parker.

Or that was what he told himself. As a black man who had worked his way up through a number of largely white law enforcement agencies, he had grown adept at learning to ignore what was uncomfortable or demeaning, and to believe his own lies when required. He could not have survived otherwise.

He was so lost in his thoughts that he barely noticed Estelle, one of the desk staff, standing at his door.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,’ she said, ‘but there’s a man downstairs who says he’s come to see you.’

‘Did he give you a name?’

‘No, just this.’

She handed him a matchbook from the Haven View Motel in Haven County. The motel had closed many years before, a fact not unconnected to its briefly accepting Parker as a guest. Martin flicked the matchbook open. Written inside were the words ‘I bet you still keep your cells nice and clean.’

Martin had the strangest sensation.

I thought about him
, he said to himself.
I brought him to mind, and in doing so I summoned him up, like a ghost
.

Or a demon
.

‘What should I tell him?’ asked Estelle.

‘That I’ll be down in a few minutes.’

Estelle turned to go, but Martin summoned her back.

‘Actually,’ he said, getting to his feet and finding his hat and coat, ‘I think I’ll just deal with this right now.’

M
artin led Parker to Capitol Roasters at the Capitol Market on Smith Street, which was far enough away from the state police barracks on the other side of Charleston’s Kanawha River to make it unlikely that they’d be spotted by anyone who might take an interest in the company Martin was keeping, although even drinking coffee with this man in one of the contiguous states would still have been too close to 725 Jefferson for Martin’s liking. The two men took seats outside, overlooking the produce sellers. Martin still did not know what Parker might want. He’d just told Martin that he wanted to talk with him, and Martin had considered it wise to do so somewhere with fewer uniforms around.

They’d both changed. They were older, grayer, possibly a little wiser – and Parker had more blood on his hands. Like most of those who had crossed his path, Martin had some awareness of the cases in which the detective had involved himself. He should have been dead ten times over, yet here he was, drinking expensive coffee on Martin’s dime, since Parker had insisted on making Martin pay for the best cup of coffee that Capitol could offer, if only to be annoying. Parker’s continued survival was enough to make one believe in the existence of God, if one were so inclined, or to dispute it, depending on how one viewed his endurance. They made no small talk, just sipped their beverages until Parker was ready to begin.

‘A man named Harpur Griffin got himself burned alive in his car in Portland last weekend,’ said Parker.

‘I saw that.’

‘You know him?’

‘He had a record, but nothing significant.’

‘Did Portland PD get in touch with you?’

‘Not with me personally, but they made contact. Wanted to know who in West Virginia might be inclined to do such a thing, like burning folk was something we liked to get up to on a regular basis, maybe when there wasn’t a Mountaineers game on.’

It was clear from Martin’s tone that whoever got in touch with the West Virginia State Police on behalf of the Portland PD had not done much for relations between North and South.

‘Any idea who made the call?’

‘Function, Farnold, something like that.’

‘Furnish.’

‘Yeah, that was him. Friend of yours?’

‘This is me looking offended at the suggestion.’

Parker took a long draught of coffee.
Damn
, thought Martin,
that was one
muy caro
cup of beans and water. The least the son of a bitch could do is sip it and make it last
.

‘And what was Griffin to you?’ he asked.

‘I think he may have been involved in the disappearance of a client.’

‘Who?’

‘Jerome Burnel.’

‘Faraday—’

‘Furnish.’

‘Yeah, him, he mentioned that name, but it didn’t set off any alarms down here.’

‘I think there’s a connection through Plassey County.’

Parker caught just the slightest hesitation as Martin raised his cup to his mouth.
Many a slip
, he thought.

‘Yeah?’ said Martin.

‘That’s in West Virginia.’

‘I know where it is.’

‘So what’s the problem with Plassey County?’

‘Did I say there was a problem?’

‘You’d be a good poker player, but not a great one.’

Martin leaned back against the wall. He wished he’d called in sick that morning. Too late now.

‘Plassey County is home to fewer than five thousand people,’ said Martin. ‘It’s small, quiet, pretty, dirt poor, and has virtually no crime worth mentioning. It’s a little of not much at all.’

‘It sounds great,’ said Parker, ‘apart from that bit about being poor. But poverty breeds crime, and crime breeds violence, so how come Plassey is such a haven?’

‘Officially, it’s because it’s got an older population, and the county offices function efficiently. In a jurisdiction that small, the law usually gets to know the people who might be of a mind to cause trouble, and works with them to ensure that they exercise an element of self-restraint.’

‘Is that what the law does in Plassey County?’

‘No,’ said Martin. ‘Someone else does it for them.’

Martin removed a stray piece of dirt from his uniform trousers. They were otherwise spotless. Martin was a straight arrow. What had annoyed him about Parker’s matchbook message was that his cells were, in fact, still clean. He was doing his best to ensure that the state police maintained a similar standard of purity, but West Virginia was peculiar. Violence had been endemic to it since its foundation, and its mountainous terrain had long inhibited effective law enforcement, along with the personal nature of feuds in small isolated rural communities, which placed a premium on settling disputes with force and without recourse to the police. When coal mining began, the nature of the violence in the state became linked to industrial development, so along with prostitution, gambling, and narcotics came confrontations between the mine bosses and the unions. Add in the effects of Prohibition, and West Virginia was stewing nicely during the first half of the last century, and that kind of history was akin to poisonous chemicals that leached into soil. What grew out of it – if anything did – would bear the mark of those poisons.

And worst of all was the coal industry. Sure, it provided jobs – in grim, dangerous conditions that wouldn’t have been entirely foreign to miners from centuries earlier, so that those familiar with the pits described descending into them as similar to drowning – but at the price of the state’s blind loyalty to its needs, and the slow destruction of the land itself.