Blood Of Angels (41 page)

He suddenly looked very tired. 'And the thing is they're so much
better
at it than us, because sooner or later we all get greedy and forget what we're about. Time clouds everything. Yes of course Christ studied in China and yes, he escaped to France after the crucifixion, and yes he wound up in Kashmir, where he died. Who fucking cares? It's not the point. He was just one good guy, like Mohammed and Buddha and Jimmy Stewart. This is about the many. We have to hold the Straw Men back. Nothing else matters. This is the meaning of life. We've muddled on for a long time but now technology has finally done for us. With the internet we can't stop the Straw Men gathering. They care more. They hate harder. That's just the way it is.'

He sat back in his chair. There was silence for a moment.

'So tell me,' I said. 'How do UFOs fit into all this?'

'They don't exist, Ward. Don't be a prick.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

Never let it be said I'm not open to new ideas. I spent five minutes trying to work with what Carl had said, mainly to see if it made any difference to the task of locating Nina. It didn't, and I decided it was of no real interest to me. When I tuned back in, John and Unger were still deep in conversation.

'What was actually in the files?'

'Contracts, for the most part,' John said. 'Ryan Hudek didn't seem like a big deal. If anything it looked as though Dravecky was actively putting business his way. Like a favour.'

'Or a payment,' Unger said. 'I think yesterday's bomb in LA was a warm-up.'

'To what?'

'I don't know, but…'

Suddenly a bulb went on in my head. I looked up. 'This is why they broke Paul out.'

Both turned to look up at me.

'Think about it,' I said. 'Six months ago Paul had gone feral and become a problem to the Straw Men. Dravecky sent guys up into the forest to kill him, remember? And now they go to all the trouble to take out an armoured transport, just to get him back? Why would they do that?'

'He knows everything about them,' John said. 'They wanted him wiped from the board in case he tried to plea-bargain on the Jones and Wallace murders. He could have blown the Straw Men wide. So they got rid of him.'

'He wouldn't have betrayed them and they knew it. So do you. You don't think he's dead or you wouldn't be hanging here with me. If they wanted him killed they could've had him whacked in Pelican Bay with a phone call. They need him. It's the only thing that makes sense.'

John was silent for a moment, and then it looked as though someone hit him on the back of the head.

'What?' Unger said.

'How did you not guess this already? This "Day of Angels" — it's Los Angeles. The day of angels, in the city of angels.'

Unger was staring at him. 'They're going to attack LA?'

'Paul knows the city,' I said. 'It may be where he first started killing. He certainly gathered victims for the Straw Men there. He murdered Jessica Jones there too.'

'Dravecky, Hudek and at least four others are or were based in the city,' John said. 'They have sufficient influence on the FBI there to get Nina suspended earlier this year.'

I stood looking out onto the parking lot. My stomach felt cold with panic. 'And four days ago Nina, I and the one FBI agent we've tried to tell about this stuff — Charles Monroe, also based in LA — get hauled to the other side of the country to investigate a murder that looks like it might be a serial killer. Two days later Nina disappears. I call John, and so he's here too. All of us together, and all of us in the wrong place.'

John and Carl were already standing.

'There's time,' Carl said. 'I'll find a local airfield and have a plane for us in an hour. John — do you have an address for Ryan Hudek?'

'Yes. But LAPD will be there already.'

'Guys…' I said.

'Of course,' Unger said, to John. 'But they'll have quizzed the parents for the whereabouts of their son, and then dropped them. Who's going to suspect they're in on what the kid did?'

'Can you get them secured in their house?'

'I can try.'

'I'm not going to LA,' I said.

Zandt turned impatiently to me. 'Ward, you just said…'

'I know what I said.'

Carl had his phone to his ear and was looking at me with the flat, steady gaze of the zealot. He and John had already gone through a door in their heads. 'Ward, this is not a hard decision. It's the one or the many.'

'I choose the one. I always will. The many are just going to have to look after themselves.'

John looked at me and shook his head.

I walked straight past him and past booths which had begun to fill with people come to hide their first drink of the day with a sandwich. I was walking fast and angrily. On the way out of the door I nearly knocked over some guy in a fifty-dollar suit. He didn't even look me in the eye.

As I went across the lot to the car I heard someone call my name. I glanced round to see Hazel getting out of a car on the other side. With so little idea where I was going, any hesitation could stop me for ever. I waved instead. She waved back. Then I got in the car and drove straight out onto the road.

Half a mile away my cell phone rang. I got it out expecting John or Carl: vainly hoping they might have decided to leave LA's problems to LA. Instead it was Monroe.

'Where are you?' he said. He sounded very focused.

'Driving into Thornton. What's up?'

'Pick me up at the station. I think we've got something.'

I left the car outside the sheriff's department and ran inside. Monroe was in back talking to some cop I'd never seen before. The agent saw me and broke off the conversation immediately to head straight over. The policeman gave me a stare laced with cop superiority. I didn't like the look of him even from ten yards away.

Monroe took me by the arm and led me back out onto the street. 'Is that your car?'

'Yes. Who was that guy you were talking to?'

'Sheriff from some town the other side of Owensville.'

'What's he doing here?'

'To be honest, I don't know. But he seems a lot more clued up than the locals.'

'Which wouldn't be hard.'

'Right. Except finally someone's been doing some good work. In the statement Julia Gulicks gave to Reidel she said she came to live in Thornton six years ago. Which checked out with when she took the lease on the apartment here and joined the company in Owensville. But she also told us she grew up in Boulder.'

'And?'

'She lied. We've been looking for the last day and a half and there's no sign of her there. Birth, college, jobs, nothing. Then a half hour ago the one cop in Thornton still working the case finally came across a record of a girl called Jane Gillan, who was born and went to school in Dryford.'

This was evidently a big deal for Monroe. It didn't trigger anything in me. 'Dryford. You got me. Is that in Colorado too?'

'No. It's a little over six miles away, just the other side of the woods where the second and third bodies were found.'

I opened my mouth, shut it again with a click.

'Right,' Monroe said. 'That's what I thought. So let's get moving.'

I waited until we were on our way before I asked: 'What do you have on this Gillan person?'

'Not much, but it works. Last we know is from when she was twelve. Jane Gillan's father died in 1992 in mildly suspicious circumstances, which is how the cop here flashed on the connection. Dad fell downstairs drunk one afternoon. Broke his neck. His young daughter was the only other person in the house at the time. Allegedly when Mom got home she found a dead heap in the hallway and Jane in the kitchen doing homework. Walter Gillan was a violent alcoholic and a racist pain in the ass and he was known to regularly beat his wife, so basically nobody pushed too hard on solving what might not be a crime. The wife and child moved out of Dryford immediately afterwards, never heard from again. But in 1998, a woman called Julia Gulicks moves into Thornton.'

'She's really not very good at this, is she?'

'What do you mean?'

'The world's reddest hair and she doesn't think to disguise it when she meets her second victim in the Mayflower. She believes it's smart to be the person who discovers Widmar's body, whereas it just puts her on your radar. She chooses a new name with the same initials as her real one, for God's sake.'

'Happens all the time with fugitives, or normal people trying to start again. Makes it easier to sign cheques and recognize the new name when you first start hearing it.'

'I think I'd take the risk and go a little more left field.'

'Not all murderers are professionals, and very few are even at all smart. They don't always think ahead.'

'Makes you wonder how many serial killers get caught first time, then, before they've had a chance to get into their stride.'

'That's not something I want to think about. And I don't want to die before we get there, either, so please will you
slow down.'

I did, but only to get us across the big junction opposite the Renee's. As soon as I was heading through the woods for Dryford I dropped my foot again and ignored Monroe's increasingly white knuckles.

'I have the address where Gillan lived as a child,' he said, not watching the trees as they whipped past. 'It still doesn't help us explain what happened after we'd already got Gulicks in custody.'

'There's always been someone in the background,' I said. 'Remember when John asked her about the hands? "At least tell us about the hands," he said. That's when she started to lose it.'

Monroe shook his head, not getting where I was going.

'She doesn't know,' I said. 'She doesn't
know
what the deal with the hands is. She saw something bad a long time ago. Maybe she tried to tell someone about it, and got hit or screamed at and so it got sealed in her head as something she couldn't forget. Now she's acting out someone else's psychosis and is flailing and lost because she doesn't really have one of her own.'

'She still killed two people.'

'Really? Like the woman Nina knew in Janesville, the one who killed men who abused her? Is killing always the worst thing you can do? Regardless of what's come before?'

'Neither Widmar nor the John Doe did Gulicks any harm so far as we know.'

'No. But someone sure as hell did.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

Dryford was a small and desiccated town that looked baffled to still exist. The road out of the woods hit Main at a right angle. Two turns brought us onto Jefferson Avenue, a long narrow road sparsely dotted with small houses on either side. About a hundred yards before it ran out, Monroe got me to pull over outside number twenty-three.

We looked out the window at a yellow-painted wooden house. It was not big, but it looked well cared for.

'What exactly are we hoping to find?'

'Anything, Ward. Just anything we can.'

We walked up the path together and Monroe rang the bell. The door was opened by a middle-aged woman who looked like she baked a mean brownie. Monroe asked her how long she'd lived in the house and was told it had been eight years. He discovered neither she nor her husband were relations of the Gillans, nor had they heard of them. Luckily he had the subtlety not to mention that someone of that name had died falling down the staircase we could see over the woman's shoulder. Nobody unusual had come visiting recently — apart from us, of course — and the owner hadn't noticed anything odd in the neighbourhood. She plainly had no idea what we were talking about. In the face of this there wasn't any justification for asking to look around the house and yard. What could we hope to find?

We thanked the woman and walked back to the car. I stopped at the end of the path and looked back up the road the way we'd come. Thought for a minute.

'I wonder how long it would take to walk to the forest from here,' I said. 'If you were a little girl who was allowed to wander.'

'Not long,' Monroe admitted. 'But going back that way is going to take you east.'

'You could double back,' I said. 'But yes, that's true.' I turned and looked up the remaining length of road in the other direction. 'Let's take a look the other way instead.'

We walked to the end of the road. On the other side of a wide gate a large patch of open ground sloped down towards the woods. A rough path headed across it.

'That'd get you there,' I said.

'Not a short walk.'

'I suspect you'd be amazed how far a kid will go when they don't feel safe at home. And that if you followed that track you'd find yourself pretty close to the place the body and the shirt were found.'

'So maybe we know more about Gulicks than we did.' Monroe rubbed his face with his hands. 'But now what?'

'Now nothing,' I said. 'Brick wall. Again.'

I turned away and started walking back towards the car. After ten yards I stopped. Looked at the house right at the very end of the road.

Monroe stopped a few yards up the street, turned to see what was holding me up. 'What's on your mind?'

Like a lot of roads in towns like this, the further the houses were from the centre, the less well-kept they were. Dryford was barely a town, and the effect was accelerated. Number twenty-three was two minutes' walk up the road, and was spick and span. The house at the very end of the street didn't look that way at all. It was behind a gate of its own, a little bigger than the rest but very unloved. Trees pressed up against the side. The front yard was deep, a good hundred and fifty feet, completely overgrown with long grasses and bush. It didn't look like anyone had lived there for some time.

But there was a white van parked right in front of the house. A white camper van with no windows in the sides.

'I've seen a van like that before,' I said.

'You see them everywhere,' Monroe said, unimpressed. 'My brother-in-law has one. Calls it a Combie. He's Australian.'

I shook my head. 'I've seen that particular one. Somewhere specific. A couple of nights ago, I'm sure.'

Monroe got that I was serious. He came back the couple of paces to stand next to me. 'Can you remember where?'

'In Thornton. Somewhere… Yes. It was up the road from the police station the night Nina disappeared. I assumed it was the first reporters hitting town on the Gulicks arrest.'