The Killing Kind

“What were you doing, passing around the tin cup?”

“Fu

I don't think he meant it. Louis was obviously still engaged in an unsuccessful attempt to expand Angel's cultural horizons. You had to admire his perseverance, and his optimism.

“How was it?”

“Like being trapped with the phantom of the opera for two hours. My head hurts.”

“You up for a trip to Boston?”

“Louis is. He thinks it's got class. Me, I like the order of New York. Boston is like the whole of Manhattan below Fourteenth Street, you know, with all them little streets that cross back over one another. It's like the Twilight Zone down in the Village. I didn't even like visiting when you lived there.”

“You finished?” I interrupted.

“Well, I guess I am now, Mr. Fucking Impatient.”

“I'm heading down next weekend, maybe meet Rachel for di

“Hold on.” I heard a muffled conversation, and then a deep male voice came on the line.

“You comin' on to my boy?” asked Louis.

“Lord no,” I replied. “I like to be the pretty one in my relationships, but that's taking it a little too far.”

“We'll be at the Copley Plaza. You give us a call when you got a restaurant booked.”

“Sure thing, boss. Anything else?”

“We let you know,” he said, then the line went dead.

It was a shame about the Miss Ma

Grace Peltier's credit card statement revealed nothing out of the ordinary, while the telephone records indicated calls to Marcy Becker at her parents' motel, a private number in Boston which was now disco

“Can I help you?” it said, in the tone that a certain type of secretary reserves for those whom she has no intention of helping at all.

“I'd like to speak to Mr. Paragon, please. My name is Charlie Parker. I'm a private investigator.”

“What is it in co

“A young woman named Grace Peltier. I believe Mr. Paragon had a meeting with her about two weeks ago.”

“I'm sorry, the name isn't familiar to me. No such meeting took place.” If spiders apologized to flies before eating them, they could have managed more sincerity than this woman.

“Would you mind checking?”

“As I've told you, Mr. Parker, that meeting never took place.”

“No, you told me that you weren't familiar with the name and then you told me that the meeting never happened. If you didn't recognize the name, how could you remember whether or not any meeting took place?”

There was a pause on the end of the line, and I thought the receiver began to grow distinctly chilly in my hand. After a time, Ms. Torrance spoke again. “I see from Mr. Paragon's diary that a meeting was due to be held with a Grace Peltier, but she never arrived.”

“Did she cancel the appointment?”

“No, she simply didn't turn up.”

“Can I speak to Mr. Paragon, Ms. Torrance?”

“No, Mr. Parker, you ca

“Can I make an appointment to speak to Mr. Paragon?”

“I'm sorry. Mr. Paragon is a very busy man, but I'll tell him you called.” She hung up before I could give her a number, so I figured that I probably wasn't going to be hearing from Carter Paragon in the near future, or even the distant future. It seemed that I might have to pay a personal call on the Fellowship, although I guessed from Ms. Torrance's tone that a visit from me would be about as welcome as a whorehouse in Disneyland.

Something had been nagging at me since reading the police report on the contents of the car, so I picked up the phone and called Curtis Peltier.

“Mr. Peltier,” I asked, “do you recall if either Marcy Becker or Ali Wy

He paused before answering. “Y'know, I think they both did at that, but there's something else you should know. Grace's thesis wasn't just a general one: she had a specific interest in one religious group. They were called the Aroostook Baptists. You ever hear of them?”

“I don't think so.”

“The community disappeared in nineteen sixty-four. A lot of folks just assumed they'd given up and gone somewhere else, somewhere warmer and more hospitable.”

“I'm sorry, Mr. Peltier, I don't see the point.”

“These people, they were also known as the Eagle Lake Baptists.”

I recalled the news reports from the north of the state, the photographs in the newspapers of figures moving behind crime scene tape, the howling of the animals.

“The bodies found in the north,” I said quietly.

“I'd have told you when you were here, but I only just saw the TV reports,” he said. “I think it's them. I think they've found the Aroostook Baptists.”

3

THEY COME NOW, the dark angels, the violent ones, their wings black against the sun, their swords unsheathed. They move remorselessly through the great mass of humanity: purging, taking, killing.

They are no part of us.

The Manhattan North Homicide Squad is regarded as an elite group within the NYPD, operating out of an office at 120 East 119th Street. Each member has spent years as a precinct detective before being handpicked for homicide duty. They are experienced investigators, their gold shields bearing the hallmarks of long service. The most junior members probably have twenty years behind them. The more senior members have been around for so long that jokes have accreted to them like barnacles to the prows of old ships. As Michael Lansky, who was the senior detective on the squad when I was a rookie patrolman, used to say, “When I started in homicide, the Dead Sea was just sick.”

My father was himself a policeman, until the day he took his own life. I used to worry about my father. That was what you did when you were a policeman's son, or anyway, that was what I did. I loved him; I was envious of him-of his uniform, of his power, of the camaraderie of his friends; but I also worried about him. I worried about him all the time. New York in the 1970s wasn't like New York now: policemen were dying on the streets in ever greater numbers, exterminated like roaches. You saw it in the newspapers and on the TV, and I saw it reflected in my mother's eyes every time the doorbell rang late at night while my father was on duty. She didn't want to become another PBA widow. She just wanted her husband to come home, alive and complaining, at the end of every tour. He felt the strain too; he kept a bottle of Mylanta in his locker to fight the heartburn he endured almost every day, until eventually something snapped inside him and it all came to a violent end.

My father had only occasional contact with Manhattan North Homicide. Mostly, he watched them as they passed by while he held the crowds back or guarded the door, checking shields and IDs. Then, one stiflingly hot July day in 1980, shortly before he died, he was called to a modest apartment on Ninety-fourth Street and Second Avenue rented by a woman named Marilyn Hyde, who worked as an insurance investigator in midtown.

Her sister had called on her and smelled something foul coming-from inside the apartment. When she tried to gain entry using a spare key given to her by Marilyn, she found that the lock had been jammed up with adhesive and informed the super, who immediately notified the police. My father, who had been eating a sandwich at a diner around the corner, was the first officer to reach the building.