The Whisperers

‘If you renege, I’ll hunt you down. You, and your Captain.’

‘Oh, you have my word. I don’t kill u

‘And the box?’

‘I’m going to open it.’

‘You think you can control what’s in there?’

‘No, I don’t, but the Captain can. Good-bye, Mr. Parker. Tell your friends to step away. I’d like all three of you in the far corner, please. If I see any of you emerge from the house, or if you try to follow me, our arrangement is off. I will kill Ms. Emory, and Carrie Saunders can take her chances in her own prison box. Do we understand each other?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I don’t believe that we’re going to meet again,’ said Herod. ‘But you and the Captain, that’s another matter. In time, I’m sure that you and he will have the chance to become more intimately acquainted.’

Angel stepped away from the door, and he, Louis, and I moved into the corner of the room diagonally opposite the front door. Still keeping Karen as a shield, Herod backed out of the house, Karen closing the door behind them at his instruction. I had one last sight of her, and then they were gone. Moments later, there was the sound of a car starting up and driving away.

Louis made a move to the door, but I stopped him.

‘No,’ I said.

‘You trust him?’

‘In this, yes,’ I said.

‘I wasn’t talking about Herod.’

‘Neither was I.’

37

I don’t know if Carrie Saunders panicked. I don’t know if the tube slipped from her mouth and, trapped as she was, she was unable to reach it again. Sometimes, I find myself imagining her final moments, and always I see Herod tossing aside his spade and staring down at the compacted dirt, then gently tugging the breathing tube from the mouth of the woman buried below. He did it because she had breached some unwritten contract with him, but also because it pleased him to do so. For all his talk of honor, and negotiations, and promises, I believed that Herod was a cruel man. He kept his word about releasing Karen Emory, and he told her where Carrie Saunders was buried before he left her, but the autopsy concluded that Carrie Saunders had been dead for hours when she was found.

I do know this: Carrie Saunders killed Jimmy Jewel, and she killed Foster Jandreau. A gun, a Glock.22, was found in her house. The bullets matched those used to kill Jimmy and Jandreau, and her fingerprints were the only ones found on the weapon. As for Roddam, there was no way of knowing for certain if she was responsible for his death, but Herod had told the truth about her involvement in the other killings, so there was no reason to believe that he had been lying about Roddam.

After Saunders’s body was found, there was some speculation that the man responsible for her death might have framed her for the other killings, but it was dismissed when Bobby Jandreau came forward and told of how he had spoken with his cousin Foster about his belief that the death of Damien Patchett, and those of Bernie Kramer and the Harlans, were linked to a smuggling operation being run by Joel Tobias, although he had no formal evidence to offer in support. Foster Jandreau was ambitious, but he hadn’t advanced fast enough for his liking, and had stalled. If he could find evidence of illegal dealings on the part of Joel Tobias, he might have been able to resuscitate a moribund career. But Bobby Jandreau had made the mistake of discussing the matter with Carrie Saunders during one of their therapy sessions, and then she had killed Foster to stop him delving further into the operation and sullied his reputation with drug vials. Whether or not she did so with Joel Tobias’s knowledge and consent I could not say, and those who might have been able to tell me were all dead. I remembered what others had said about Tobias: he was smart, but not that smart. He was not capable of ru

I was there when they broke open the lock on the box, and I saw Carrie Saunders’s face. Whatever she might have done, she did not deserve to die in that way.

Shortly after the discovery of the body, I gave my statement to the police, with two agents from ICE, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in attendance. Behind them hovered a small man with a beard and dark skin, who introduced himself as Dr. Al-Daini, late of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. The agents were part of the JIACG, the Joint Interagency Coordination Group, a grab bag of military, FBI, CIA, Treasury, ICE, and anyone else who happened to be passing and had an interest in Iraq, and how terrorists might be financing their operations. They had been drawn to the looting of the Iraq Museum by concerns that the stolen items were being sold on the black market to raise funds for the insurgency. The man who had interrogated me at the Blue Moon was lying, both to me and to himself: people were being hurt by what they were doing, but they were dying on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah and anywhere else in Iraq that American soldiers were being targeted. I told the agents and Dr. Al-Daini everything, with only one detail concealed. I did not tell them of the Collector. Dr. Al-Daini seemed to sway slightly at the news of the loss of the box, but he said nothing.

When we were done, I got in my car and drove south.

38

Herod sat in his study, surrounded by his books and his tools. There were no mirrors, no reflective surfaces. He had even placed his computer in another room so that there was no chance of a face being glimpsed. The Captain was a distraction, his desire to see the box opened so compelling that Herod had been forced to banish him from its presence by covering every reflective surface. He needed peace in which to work; to have done so in the presence of the Captain would have driven him insane. Figuring out the mechanisms of the locks would take time: days, perhaps. They had to be opened in a certain combination, for there were cells within cells. It was a puzzle box, an extraordinary construct: whatever relics had been concealed in the final chamber were bound with wire, and the wire was co

The box stood on a white cloth. It no longer vibrated, and all of the voices within had ceased their whispering, as though wary of imposing on the concentration of the one who might free them. Herod was not afraid of them. The Captain had told him of what lay in the box, and the nature of the bonds that restricted them. They were beasts, but chained beasts. Once the box was opened, they would be revealed, yet still constrained. They would have to be made to understand that they were the Captain’s creatures.

He was about to prise off the first spider, and reveal the mechanism of the lock, when the house alarm went off, shocking him with its sudde