A Time of Torment (9 page)

Y
ears later, and a life away, Jerome Burnel, the Disgraced Hero, withdrew cash from his bank account. His hand trembled as he filled in the slip. He used his passport for identification, since his driver’s license was no longer valid. He watched the teller take the passport away and show it to a supervisor, and some kind of consultation followed before the teller made a photocopy of the relevant page and returned the passport to him. Burnel thought that her expression was different when she came back, that it bore a trace of distaste, but perhaps he was just projecting. After all, he wasn’t exactly infamous, and he’d been behind bars long enough to allow most people to have forgotten about him. But the teller was in her fifties, and who knew what kind of memory she had, or what notes had been appended to his banking record. His name was unusual, and so was his history. She didn’t look up at him when she told him to have a good day, and the security guard at the door appeared to give him a more hostile examination than before as he left.

The private detective had called back while Burnel was sitting on a bench in Deering Oaks Park. He’d bought himself a sandwich and coffee at the Public Market House at Monument Square and carried them over to a bench, where he ate most of the sandwich once he was certain that no children were nearby. He fed the remainder of his meal to the pigeons. The detective didn’t have an office, which Burnel considered slightly unusual. Then again, this was a mobile age in which entire companies were run from a laptop and a table in a coffee shop. The detective had agreed to meet with Burnel later that afternoon in a booth at the Great Lost Bear on Forest Avenue, a bar that Burnel had frequented before he was married but less so after, as his wife hadn’t much cared for beer – hadn’t much cared for Burnel either, as it turned out, even before everything went to shit for him.

Burnel had spent the morning in the Portland offices of the Maine Department of Corrections on Washington Avenue, his first contact with the probation service since he’d been released. His probation officer, Chris Attwood, was a specialist in sex offenders, but he’d treated Burnel courteously, and Burnel couldn’t help but warm to him. Attwood had explained each step of the process. It began with a Level of Services Inventory, which was basically a risk assessment report on Burnel, accompanied by what was known as a Static-99, a further profiling tool used solely for sex offenders. The Static-99 was a lifetime score, and would remain with Burnel to the grave; since it was based on set factors – his age at arrest, his history, the severity of his crimes – it could never improve, and Burnel’s best hope, according to Attwood, was that it might remain stable, which would eventually result in an easing of the conditions of his probation.

Attwood told Burnel that he’d been placed on the maximum end of the offender scale, even though he’d never even touched a child, and – as he didn’t bother telling Attwood, because what good would it do? – he was innocent. The maximum rating meant that Burnel would have to endure a home check every month; face-to-face meetings with Attwood, usually at Washington Avenue; collateral contacts with employers, when Burnel eventually found work; and weekly group counseling sessions, which Attwood told him had been found to be effective with sex offenders. If he completed counseling, and a significant period of time passed without violations, the probation service would back off as much as it could. He was also required to register as a sex offender, and would remain on the registry for ten years. For all this, he would pay $25 every month as a contribution toward the cost of his probation.

Then, to his surprise, Burnel was given a polygraph examination. Apparently it was standard, and he’d receive one every year while on probation, but Burnel still didn’t care for it. He answered all the questions honestly, although the intermingling of general questions – his name, his mother’s name – with others relating to his alleged crimes threw him a little, and he found those that dealt with his life before his arrest more disturbing because they reminded him of all that he had lost. He had another interview with Attwood after the poly, during which Burnel thought that the probation officer was marginally less friendly than before, but that might just have been tiredness.

Finally, he was allowed to leave. Attwood told him to take some time before he went looking for a job. He advised him to get comfortable with the outside world again, to take walks, to find his feet in the city. Burnel had nodded and said that he would try. He had no intention of looking for work. He believed that he would be dead soon, so what was the point?

He finished feeding the birds, and then walked back toward the Old Port. The daylight was too bright, and he had too much space in which to move. He paid to see the only R-rated movie showing at the Nickelodeon, just so that he could sit in the dark and be reasonably sure that no kids would be present. Only four other people were in attendance, and they were all safely a couple of decades older than he was. The movie was a comedy, but Burnel didn’t laugh much. He barely noticed the images on the screen, if the truth were to be told. He just sat at the back of the theater and wept.

C
hris Attwood sat at a table across from Philip Gurley, the representative of RPL, one of the companies responsible for polygraph testing for the Department of Corrections. Before them were the results of Burnel’s examination.

‘Do you think he’s lying?’ Attwood asked.

Gurley glanced at the results again.

‘As you and I both know,’ said Gurley, ‘there are men and women who ace the poly even though they’ve got butchers’ hands. Those ones just look through you when you ask the questions. Burnel wasn’t like that.’

‘Meaning?’

‘That maybe he’s convinced himself he didn’t commit the crimes of which he’s accused.’

‘Which doesn’t mean that he’s innocent of them.’

‘Not at all, but as I said: the kind who can cut themselves off from reality like that are pretty unusual, and they give off their own stink.’

‘And you didn’t smell it off Burnel?’

‘No, I did not.’

‘So, was he telling the truth?’

‘Possibly.’

Attwood picked up the polygraph results, placed them in a folder, and closed it.

‘You want me to run him through again?’ asked Gurley.

‘I don’t know.’

‘It doesn’t make a difference if he’s innocent or not, does it?’

‘Only to him,’ said Attwood. ‘He’s in the system now. We’ll do our best for him.’

Gurley stood.

‘It was quite something, what he did, wasn’t it?’

‘What was?’

‘That business at the gas station. The shooting.’

‘Yeah, it was something all right.’

‘He doesn’t look like the type.’

‘No,’ said Attwood, ‘they rarely do.’

I
t was shortly after four thirty p.m., and raining heavily, when Charlie Parker arrived at the Great Lost Bear. He hadn’t set foot in the bar in many months, not since before he was shot. The Bear hadn’t changed. It was still dimly lit and comforting, the kitchen beginning to bustle in preparation for the evening rush, although on a wet Wednesday the term ‘rush’ was likely to be a relative one.

Dave Evans, the owner, was standing at the host’s station, regarding a piece of paper over the top of his glasses in a manner that suggested it contained something insulting to his mother. He didn’t look up, not even when Parker’s shadow fell upon him.

‘I thought you were dead,’ said Dave.

‘I was.’

Dave flicked his attention from the document to the detective, and studied him in the bar’s distinctive light.

‘You look okay for it. We have regular customers who look worse than you.
I
look worse than you.’

He put down the paper and shook Parker’s hand. Dave had come to visit Parker a couple of times when he was recovering in the hospital, but hadn’t seen him since. He’d read about him, though. The business up in Boreas had made the national papers, not just the locals. Dave had been under the impression that all the old Nazis were dead, and any that weren’t were probably close to being measured for a coffin, but trust Parker to unearth ones who could still bite. Next thing, he’d be discovering Martians in Millinocket.

Parker was different now. For starters, he was thinner, with a few more lines on his face, and his hair was speckled with new white. He also seemed quieter, more distant, although Dave figured that being shot and left for dead, not to mention dying and being brought back a few times, would do that to a person.

But it was his gaze that was most altered. If it were true what they said about the eyes being the windows to the soul, then Parker’s soul burned with a new fire. His eyes held a calm conviction that Dave had not seen in them before. This was a fundamentally changed man, one who had come back strengthened, not weakened, by what he had endured, but who was also both less and more than he once had been.

For the first time that he could recall, Dave was frightened of Charlie Parker.

‘Is my office still free?’ asked Parker. He had a favorite booth that he liked to occupy at the Bear.

‘It’ll always be free for you,’ said Dave. ‘There’s a place behind the bar, too, if the mood strikes.’

He didn’t know how Parker was doing for money, and he didn’t want to appear to be dispensing charity. He wanted to help, if he could, and if it was needed. The offer was sincerely meant, but Dave couldn’t deny the sense of relief he felt at Parker’s reply.

‘You know, I think I may be okay. But thank you.’

‘Well, if you change your mind, just say something.’

‘I will. A man should be coming in to ask for me. His name’s Burnel. Will you send him over when he arrives?’

‘Sure. Like some coffee?’

‘Coffee would be good.’

‘It’ll be on its way. Just the two of you?’

‘No, four. Angel and Louis will be joining me.’

‘Right.’

Dave tried to form his features into a pleased expression at the news, but they didn’t want to cooperate. Even after all these years, he had not grown comfortable with having those two men in his bar. He had heard how some of the city and state detectives who drank in the Bear talked about Angel and Louis when the bar was quiet. ‘Tame killers’ was one of the politer descriptions. Most of them didn’t even bother with the adjective.

Angel and Louis had come into the Bear on a number of occasions while Parker was in the hospital, and during his subsequent recuperation, which had made Dave more nervous than when they used to arrive accompanied by the detective himself. Worse, once or twice they had been with the Fulci brothers, and every time the Fulci brothers entered his bar, Dave endured a disturbing mental image of his beloved establishment being disassembled around him, and the bricks used as ammunition against the forces of reason.

Parker watched the struggle play out on his features.

‘You do know that Angel and Louis like you, right?’

‘How can you tell?’ asked Dave. Angel he could almost understand. He smiled occasionally, even if it was the kind of smile that could easily conceal its opposite. But Louis – he didn’t smile much at all, and when he did it was like the final expression that a mouse saw on the face of a cat before the claws came down on its neck.

‘They have a way of making their negative feelings known,’ said Parker.

‘But not positive ones,’ said Dave.

‘No,’ Parker admitted, ‘not so much.’

He went to the last booth at the left of the bar, and sat facing out. He had already researched Jerome Burnel and knew the details of his case. The name had seemed familiar as soon as he played the message, and a few minutes on the Internet had filled in any gaps. Parker’s little Moleskine notebook now contained a list of details and names, including those of the prosecuting and defense attorneys at Burnel’s trial.

Burnel had served five years for his crimes. The case had received a considerable degree of coverage because of Burnel’s history, with most of the newspaper reports taking a similar line: the word ‘hero’ recurred, but always in association with terms such as ‘tarnished’, ‘shamed’, and ‘disgraced’. The media had built up Burnel, and in its rush to atone for doing so it tore him apart as he fell.

The initial investigation into Burnel had commenced after an anonymous tip-off was received by the U.S. Post Office on Forest Avenue in Portland. The Fourth Amendment protected first class letters and parcels against search and seizure without a warrant, and an anonymous tip-off didn’t offer probable cause to obtain one, but no such protection applied to other classes of mail, and one of the packages on its way to Burnel had been sent via Media Mail. It was opened, and found to contain one hundred sexually explicit images of children, whereupon a warrant was obtained for a search of Burnel’s property, which unearthed further material and resulted in his arrest and successful prosecution.

Ordinarily, Parker wouldn’t have bothered with a case like Burnel’s, but he found it interesting that Burnel had declined to plead guilty in return for a possible reduction in his sentence, even in the face of all the evidence against him. Time served for child sex offenses was hard time: any halfway decent lawyer would have made that clear to a client, and Burnel’s lawyer was one of the best. Burnel was a first-time offender, and his past actions might have caused a judge to look more favorably upon him, especially if the prosecutor was prepared to play ball. Weighted against Burnel, though, was the amount and nature of the pornography involved: thousands of explicit and often violent images, many of them stored on his computer, and some involving very young children. Since part of that material had been sent to him through the U.S. Mail, federal jurisdiction applied in the case. But in an unusual move, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maine ceded authority to the state, mainly because it could not be conclusively established that Burnel had sent material across state lines, or ordered it to be sent to him. Similarly, explicit images found on a series of USB drives in Burnel’s garage could not be definitively linked to interstate activity. Still, Parker was certain that, in declining jurisdiction, the U.S. Attorney would have wanted some guarantees that Burnel would receive an adequate sentence, equivalent to at least the minimum of five years required for possession offenses under federal law. In the end, he’d been sentenced to eight years, reduced to five after an appeal, and a fine of $50,000. Now he was out, and seeking to hire Parker.