“He told me about the pregnancy, the woman, the dead man,” said Jimmy. “He kept returning to the way the guy had looked, trying to pinpoint what it was about him that was so…wrong.”
“And what did he decide?” I asked.
“Another man’s clothes,” said Jimmy.
“What does that mean?”
“You ever see somebody wearing a suit that isn’t his, or trying to fit his feet into borrowed shoes, ones that are maybe a size too small or too large? Well, that was what was wrong with the dead man, according to your father. It was like he’d borrowed another man’s body, but it didn’t fit the way that it should. Your old man worried at it like a dog at a bone, and that was the best that he could come up with, weeks later: it was almost as if he felt there was something living inside that guy’s body, but it wasn’t him. Whatever he had once been, or whoever he had once been, was long gone. This thing had chewed it away.”
He watched me then, waiting for a response. When none came, he said:
“I’m tempted to ask if you think that sounds crazy, but I know too much about you to believe you if you said yes.”
“You ever get a name on him?” I asked, ignoring what he had just said.
“There wasn’t much of the guy left to identify. A sketch artist came up with a pretty good likeness, though, based on your father’s description, and we circulated it. Bingo! A woman comes forward, says it looks like her husband, name of Peter Ackerman. He’d run off on her five years before. Met some girl in a bar, and that was it. Thing about it was, the wife said it was completely out of character for her husband. He was an accountant, a by-the-numbers guy. Loved her, loved his kids. He had his routines, and he stuck to them.”
I shrugged. “He wouldn’t be the first man to disappoint his wife in that way.”
“No, I guess not. But we haven’t even gotten to the strange stuff. Ackerman had served in Korea, so his prints eventually checked out. The wife gave a R awife gavedetailed description of his appearance though, since his face was gone: he had a Marine tat on his left arm, an appendectomy scar on his abdomen, and a chunk missing from his right calf where a bullet had caught him at the Chosin Reservoir. The body taken from under the truck had all of those markings, and one more. It seemed like he’d picked up another tattoo since he’d deserted his wife and family. Well, not so much a tattoo. More of a brand.”
“A brand?”
“It was burned into his right arm. Hard to describe. I’d never seen anything like it before, but your old man followed it up. He found out what it was.”
“And?”
“It was the symbol of an angel. A fallen angel. ‘An-’ something was the name. Animal. No, that’s not it. Hell, it’ll come to me.”
I was treading carefully now. I didn’t know how much Jimmy knew of some of the men and women I had encountered in the past, and of how some of them shared strange beliefs, convinced that they were fallen beings, wandering spirits.
Demons.
“This man was marked with an occult symbol?”
“That’s right.”
“A fork?” That was a mark I had seen before. The ones who bore it had called themselves “Believers.”
“What?” Jimmy’s eyes narrowed in confusion, then his expression changed and I understood that he knew more about me than I might have wished, and I wondered how. “No, not a fork. It was different. It didn’t seem like anything that had meaning, but everything does, if you look hard enough at it.”
“And the woman?”
Jimmy stood. He went to his wine rack and removed another bottle.
“Oh, she came back,” he said. “With a vengeance.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
THETWO MEN KEPTCaroline Carr on the move, never allowing her to stay in any one place for more than a week. They used motels, and short-term rentals. For a time, they put her in a cabin in the woods upstate, close to a small town where a former cop from the Ninth, a cousin of Eddie Grace’s, had moved to become chief of police. The cabin was occasionally used to stash witnesses, or those who just needed to be hidden away for a time until a particular situation cooled off, but Caroline hated the quiet and the isolation. It made her more nervous than she had been before, for she was a creature of cities. Out in the country, every sound signaled an approaching threat. After three days in the cabin, her nerves were shredded. She was so frightened that she even called Will at home. Thankfully, his wife wasn’t there, but the call shook Will. His affair with the young woman had already come to a mutually agreed-upon end, but sometimes he would stand in his yard and wonder just how he had managed to screw everything up so badly. He was constantly tempted to confess all to his wife. He ev Sis ä[1] haen dreamed that he had done so, and he would awake wondering why she was still sleeping beside him. He felt sure that she must suspect something and was just waiting for the right moment to voice those suspicions. Nothing was ever said, but her silence served only to increase his paranoia.
He was also becoming increasingly aware of the fact that he knew almost nothing about Caroline Carr. She had sketched only the barest details of her life for him: an upbringing in Modesto, California; the death of her mother in a fire; and her growing awareness of the two figures that were now pursuing her. Caroline had managed to stay ahead of them for so long, but she had grown careless, and become tired of running. She had almost begun to welcome the thought that they might find her, until that night when they tried to break into her apartment and her fear of them overcame any misplaced desire she might have held to end the chase. She could not tell Will why they had targeted her, for she said that she did not know. She knew only that they were a threat to her, and they wanted to end her life. When he asked her why she had not gone to the police, she had laughed at him, and the scorn in her voice had hurt him.
“You think I didn’t? I went to them after my mother died. I told them that the fire had been started deliberately, but they were looking at a disturbed, grief-stricken girl, and they didn’t listen to a word I said. After that, I decided that the only thing for it was to look after myself. What else could I do? Tell people I was being hunted for no reason by a man and woman that nobody had ever seen except me? They’d have locked me up, and then I would have been trapped. I kept everything to myself until I met you. I thought that you were different.”