The Lovers

But it was not the physical aspects that interested Mickey. He had been to many murder sites, and had grown attuned to their atmosphere. There were some places that, had one not known in advance of the killings that had occurred in them, might well have seemed normal and undisturbed. Flowers grew in yards beneath which children had once been buried. A little girl’s playroom, painted in bright oranges and yellows, banished all memories of the old woman who had died there, smothered during a botched burglary when this was still her bedroom. Couples made love in rooms where husbands had beaten wives to death and women had stabbed errant lovers while they slept. Such sites were not tainted by the violence to which they had played host.

But there were other gardens and other houses that would never be the same after blood was spilled upon them. People sensed that something was wrong as soon as they set foot on the property. It didn’t matter that the house was clean, that the yard was well tended, that the door was freshly painted. Instead, an echo remained, like the slow fading of a final cry, and it triggered an atavistic response. Sometimes, the echo was so pronounced that even the demolition of the premises and the construction of a replacement markedly different from its predecessor was not enough to counter the malign influences that remained. Mickey had visited a condo in Long Island built on the site of a house that had burned down with five children and their mother inside, a fire set by the father of two of the children. The old lady who lived down the street told him that, on the night that they died, the firemen could hear the children crying for help, but the heat of the flames was too intense, and they were not able to rescue them. The newly built condo had smelled of smoke, Mickey recalled; smoke, and charred meat. Nobody who lived there stayed longer than six months. On the day that he had inspected it, all of the apartments were available for rent.

Perhaps that was why the Parker house still stood. Even to have knocked it down would have made no difference. The blood had seeped through the house and into the soil beneath, and the air was filled with the sound of screams stifled by a gag.

Mickey had never been inside 1219 Hobart. He had seen pictures of the interior, though. He had prints of them in his possession as he stood at the gate. Tyrrell had provided them, dropping them off at the hotel earlier that day, along with a terse note apologizing for some of the things that he had said in the course of their meeting. Mickey didn’t know how Tyrrell had come by them. He figured that Tyrrell must have retained his own private file on Charlie Parker after he left the department. Mickey was pretty sure that was illegal, but he wasn’t about to complain. He’d looked at the photos in his hotel room, and even after all that he’d seen as a reporter, and his own knowledge of the details of the Parker killings, they had still shaken him.

There was so much blood.

Mickey had approached the Realtor appointed by the ba Rhadm.

“I don’t think that it would be appropriate for me to show you that property, sir,” she had said.

“May I ask why?”

“I think you know why. I don’t believe you’re serious about your inquiry.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that we’re aware of who you are, and of what you’re doing. I don’t think admitting you to the Hobart Street property would be helpful to any future sale.”

Mickey had hung up. He should have known better than to use his real name, but he hadn’t expected Parker to obstruct him in that way, assuming it was Parker who had made the call to the Realtor. He remembered Tyrrell’s stated belief that someone was protecting Parker. If that was true, then a person or persons as yet unknown might have alerted the Realtor to what Mickey was doing. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t above bending the law a little to suit his own purposes, and breaking into the old Parker house didn’t strike him as a felony, no matter what a judge might say.

He was pretty certain that the house wouldn’t have an alarm. It had been vacant for too long, and he didn’t figure that a Realtor would want to be disturbed in the dead of night because an alarm was ringing in an unoccupied property. He checked to make sure that the street was quiet, then made his way up the drive to the gate at the side of the house, a grassless yard beyond. He tried the gate. It didn’t move. For a moment he thought it might be locked, but he could see no way that it could be unless it had been welded shut. Simultaneously, he pushed down on the handle and pressed the weight of his body against the gate. He felt it give, the metal of the handle scraping against the concrete pillar, and then it opened. He stepped through and closed it behind him, then turned the corner of the house so that he was hidden from view.

The back door had two locks, but the wood was damp and rotting. He tested it with his fingernails and pieces of it fell to the ground. He took the crowbar from beneath his coat and began working at the wood. Within minutes, he had made a gap big enough to gain access to the top lock. He inserted the crowbar as far as it would go, then pushed sideways and up. There was a cracking sound from inside, and the lock broke. He moved on to the second lock. The frame quickly splintered and the bolt broke through the wood.

Mickey stood on the step and stared into the kitchen. This was where it had happened. This was the place in which Parker-Parker the revenger, Parker the hunter, Parker the executioner-had been born. Before the deaths of his wife and daughter, he had been just another face on the street: a cop, but not a very good one; a father and a husband, and not much good in those roles either; a man who drank some-not enough to qualify as an alcoholic, not yet, but enough that, in years to come, he might find himself starting on the booze a little earlier each day until at last it became a way to start the day instead of finishing it; a drifter, a being without purpose. Then, on a December night, the creature that became known as the Traveling Ma Rcrey un entered this place and took the lives of the woman and child within, while the man who should have protected them sat on a bar stool feeling sorry for himself.

Those deaths had given him purpose. At first it was revenge, but that gave way to something deeper, something more curious. The desire for revenge alone would have destroyed him, eating away at him like a cancer, so that even when he found the release for which he had yearned, the disease would already have colonized his soul, slowly blackening his humanity until, shriveled and rotten, it was lost forever. No, Parker had found a greater purpose. He was a man who could not easily turn away from the sufferings of others, for he found its twin deep within himself. He was tormented by empathy. More than that, he had become a magnet for evil, or perhaps it would be truer to say that a shard of evil deep within himself resonated in the presence of a greater foulness, and drew him to it, and it to him.

All of this, born in blood.

Mickey closed the door, flicked on his flashlight, and walked through the kitchen, looking neither right nor left, taking in nothing of what he saw there. He would conclude his visit in that room, just as the Traveling Man had done. He wanted to follow the killer’s trail, to view this house as the killer had viewed it, and as Parker had seen it on the night that he returned home to find what was left of his wife and child.

The Traveling Man had come in through the front door. There was no sign of forced entry. The hallway was now empty. Mickey compared it with the first of the photographs that he had brought with him. He had ordered them carefully, numbering them on the back in case he dropped them. The first showed the hallway as it had once been: a bookcase on the right, and a coatrack. On the floor was a mahogany flower stand, and beside it a broken flowerpot and a plant of some kind, its roots exposed. Behind the plant, the first of the stairs leading up to the second floor. Three bedrooms there, one no larger than a storage room, and a single small bathroom. Mickey didn’t want to go up there just yet. Je