The Killing Kind

“What do you want to do?” asked Angel.

“Ring the doorbell,” I replied.

“I thought we were going to burgle him,” hissed Angel, “not try to sell him the Watchtower.”

I rang the bell anyway and Angel went quiet. Nobody answered, even when I rang it again for a good ten seconds. Angel left us and disappeared around the back of the house. A couple of minutes later he returned.

“I think you need to take a look at this,” he said.

We followed him to the rear of the house and entered through the open back door into a small, cheaply furnished kitchen. There was broken glass on the floor where someone had smashed a pane to get at the lock.

“I take it that isn't your handiwork?” I asked Angel.

“I won't even dignify that with an answer.”

Louis had already drawn his gun, and I followed his lead. I looked into a couple of the rooms as we passed but they were all virtually empty; there was hardly any furniture, no pictures on the walls, no carpet on the floor. One room had a TV and VCR, faced by a pair of old armchairs and a rickety coffee table, but most of the house appeared to be unoccupied. The front room was the only one that held anything significant: hundreds and hundreds of books and pamphlets recently packed into boxes, ready to be taken away. There were American underground training manuals and improvised weapon guides; instructions for the creation of homemade munitions, timers, and detonators; catalogues of military suppliers; and any number of books on covert surveillance. In the box nearest the door lay a stack of photocopied, crudely bound volumes; stenciled on the cover of each were the words Army of God.

The name Army of God had first cropped up in 1982, when the abortion doctor Hector Zevallos and his wife were kidnapped in Illinois and their kidnappers used the name in their dealings with the FBI. Since then, Army of God calling cards had been left at the scene of clinic bombings, and the anonymously published manual I was holding in my hand had become synonymous with a particular brand of religious extremism. It was a kind of anarchist cookbook for religious nuts, a guide to blowing up property and, if necessary, people for the greater glory of the Lord.

Louis was holding a thick photocopied list in his hand, one of a number piled on the floor. “Abortion clinics, AIDS clinics, home addresses for doctors, license plate numbers for civil rights activists and feminists. Guy here on page three, Gordon Eastman, he's a gay rights activist in Wisconsin.”

“There's a job you don't want,” whispered Angel. “Like selling dildos in Alabama.”

I tossed the Army of God manual back in the box. “These people-are exporting low-level chaos to every cracker with a grudge and a mailbox.”

“So where are they?” asked Angel.

In unison, the three of us glanced at the ceiling and the second floor of the house. Angel groaned softly.

“I had to ask.”

We climbed the stairs quietly, Louis in the lead, Angel behind him, while I brought up the rear. The room with the light was at the very end of the hallway, at the front of the house. Louis paused at the first doorway we reached and checked quickly to make sure it was empty. It contained only a bare iron bedstead and a suitcase half-full of men's clothing, while the adjoining rooms had been stripped bare of whatever furniture had been there to begin with.

“Maybe he had a yard sale,” suggested Louis.

“He did, then someone wasn't happy with his merchandise,” responded Angel solemnly. He was standing close to the doorway of the single illuminated room, his gun by his side.

Inside was a bed, an electric heater, and a set of Home Depot shelves filled with paperback books and topped by a potted plant. There was a small closet containing some of Carter Paragon's suits, more of which lay on the bed. A wooden chair, one of a pair, stood beside a dressing table. A portable TV sat silent and dark on a cheap unit.

Carter Paragon was in the second wooden chair, blood on the carpet around him. His arms had been pulled behind him and secured with cuffs. He had been badly beaten; one eye had been reduced to pulp by a punch and his face was swollen and bruised. His feet were bare and two of the toes on his right foot were broken.

“Take a look here,” said Angel, pointing to the back of the chair.

I looked, and winced. Four of his fingernails had been torn out. I tried for a pulse. There was nothing, but the body was still warm to the touch.

Carter Paragon's head was inclined backward, his face to the ceiling. His mouth hung open, and amid the blood lay something small and brown. I took a handkerchief from my pocket, then reached in and removed the object, holding it up to the light. A string of bloody saliva dripped from it and fell to the floor.

It was a shard of clay.

20

WE DROVE BACK TO SCARBOROUGH THAT NIGHT, Angel and Louis going on ahead while I stopped briefly in Augusta. From a public phone I called the office of the Portland Press Herald, asked to be put through to the news desk, and told the woman who answered that there was a body in the house of Carter Paragon in Waterville but that the police didn't know about it yet. Then I hung up. At the very least, the Herald would check with the cops, who would in turn head out to knock on Paragon's door. In the meantime, I had avoided the possibility of enhanced 911, which would have pinpointed my location and raised the possibility of being intercepted by the nearest patrol car, or of my voice being recorded using RACAL or any similar procedure. Then I drove on in silence, thinking of Carter Paragon and the clay that had been deposited in his mouth as a message for whoever found him.

Angel and Louis were already making themselves at home by the time I got back to the Scarborough house. I could hear Angel in the bathroom, making the place untidy. I banged on the door.

“Don't make a mess,” I warned him. “Rachel's coming up, and I just cleaned it specially.”

Rachel didn't like untidiness. She was one of those people who got a kind of satisfaction out of scrubbing away dust and dirt, even other people's. Whenever she stayed with me in Scarborough, I would be sure to find her advancing on the bathroom or kitchen in rubber gloves with a determined look on her face.

“She cleans your bathroom?” Angel once asked, as if I had told him that Rachel regularly sacrificed goats or played women's golf. “I don't even clean my own bathroom, and I sure as hell ain't go

“I'm not a stranger, Angel,” I explained.

“Hey,” he replied, “when it comes to bathroom stuff, everybody's a stranger.”

In the kitchen, Louis was squatting in front of the fridge, discarding items on the floor. He checked the expiration date on some cold cuts.

“Damn, you buy all this food at auction?”

I wondered, as I called out for a pizza delivery, if agreeing to let them inside my door had been such a good idea after all.

“Who is this guy?” asked Louis. We were sitting at my kitchen table while we waited for our food to arrive, discussing the shard of clay left by Paragon's killer.

“Al Z told me he calls himself the Golem, and Epstein's father confirmed it. That's all I know. You ever hear of him?”

He shook his head. “Means he's very good, or an amateur. Still, cool name.”

“Yeah, why can't you have a cool name like that?” asked Angel.

“Hey, Louis is a cool name.”

“Only if you're the king of France. You think he got much out of Paragon?”

“You saw what he did to him,” I replied. “Paragon probably told him everything he could remember since grade school.”

“So this Golem knows more than us?”

“Everybody knows more than us.”

There came the sound of a car pulling up out front.