Текст книги "The Wolf in Winter"

Автор книги: John Connolly

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

7

Harry Dixon and Chief Lucas Morland drove to the burial site in Morland’s car. There wasn’t a whole lot of conversation between them. The last body Harry had seen was that of his own mother, and she’d been eighty-five when she passed on. She’d died in a hospice in the middle of an October night. The call had come to Harry at 3:00 AM, informing him that his mother’s last hours on earth were approaching and perhaps he might like to be with her when she went, but by the time he got to her she was already dead. She was still warm, though. That was what Harry remembered the most, the nurse telling him that he ought to touch her, to feel his mother’s warmth, as though warmth equated to life and there might still be something of her inside that shell. So he placed his hand on her shoulder, for that appeared to be what was expected of him, and felt the warmth gradually leave her, the spirit slowly departing until at last there was nothing left but cold.

He had never, he realized, seen anyone who wasn’t supposed to be dead. No, that wasn’t right, but he couldn’t put it any better to himself. It had been his mother’s time to go. She was sick and old. Her final years had mostly been spent sleeping, misremembering, or forgetting entirely. Only once in her last months of life could he recall her speaking with any lucidity, and then he had just been thankful that they were alone together in the room. He wondered if, in her dementia, she had spoken of such matters to the nurses. If she did, they must have dismissed them as the ravings of an old woman on her way to the grave, for nobody had ever mentioned them to him. Those words came back to him now.

‘I saw them do it once,’ she had said, as he sat beside her in an uncomfortable hospice chair. ‘I wanted to look. I wanted to know.’

‘Really?’ he replied, only half-listening, practiced in the art of nodding and ignoring. He was thinking of his business, and money, and how it had all gone so wrong for Erin and him when it continued to go well for so many others, both within and beyond the boundaries of Prosperous. After all, he and Erin played their part in the business of the town. They did as they were asked, and did not complain. How come they were suffering? Weren’t the benefits of living in Prosperous supposed to be distributed equally among all? If not, then what was the point of being part of the community in the first place?

And now his mother was rambling again, dredging up some inconsequential detail from the mud of her memories.

‘I saw them take a girl. I saw them tie her up and leave her, and then—’

By now he was listening to her. Oh, he was listening for sure, even as he cast a glance over his shoulder to make sure that the door was closed.

‘What?’ he said. ‘Then what?’ He knew of that which she spoke. He had never seen it himself, and didn’t want to see it. You weren’t supposed to ask; that was one of the rules. If you wanted to know for sure, you could become a selectman, but selectmen in Prosperous were chosen carefully. You didn’t put yourself forward. You waited to be approached. But Harry didn’t want to be approached. In a way, the less he knew, the better, but that didn’t stop him wondering.

‘Then—’

His mother closed her eyes. For a moment he thought that she might have fallen asleep, but as he watched a tear crept from her right eye and her body began to shake. She was crying, and he had never seen his mother cry, not even when his father had died. She was a hard woman. She was old Prosperous stock, and they didn’t show frailty. If they had been frail, the town would not have survived.

Survived, and bloomed.

‘Mom,’ he said. ‘Mom.’

He took her right hand in his, but she shook it away, and only then did he realize that she was not crying but laughing, giggling at the memory of what she had witnessed. He hated her for it. Even in her slow dying, she had the capacity to horrify him. She stared at him, and she could see by his face how appalled he was.

‘You were always weak,’ she said. ‘Had your brother lived, he would have been stronger. He would have become a selectman. The best of your father’s seed went into him. Whatever was left dribbled into you.’

His brother had died in the womb three years before Harry was born. There had been a spate of miscarriages, stillbirths and crib deaths during the same period, a terrible blight upon the town. But the board of selectmen had taken action, and since then Prosperous had been blessed with only healthy, live children for many years thereafter. But his mother had never ceased to speak of Harry’s dead brother. Earl: that was the name she had given him, a melancholy echo of the status he might have attained had he lived. He was the Lost Earl. His royal line had died with him.

There were times in her dotage when Harry’s mother called him Earl, imagining, in her madness, a life for a son who had never existed, a litany of achievements, a great song of his triumphs. Harry suffered them in silence, just as he had endured them throughout his life. That was why, when his mother’s end approached at last, he had left Erin in bed, put on his clothes and driven for two hours to get to the hospice on a miserable fall night to be with his mother. He simply wanted to be certain that she was dead, and few things in their relationship had given him greater pleasure than feeling the warmth leave her body until just the withered husk of her remained. Only consigning her to the flames of the crematorium had been more rewarding.

‘You still awake there?’ said Morland.

‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘I’m awake.’

He didn’t look at the chief as he spoke. He saw only his reflection in the glass.

I look like my mother, he thought. In Prosperous, we all look like our parents, and sometimes we look like the children of other folks’ parents too. It’s the gene pool. It’s too small. By rights it shouldn’t be deep enough to drown a kitten, and every family should have a drooling relative locked away in an attic. I guess we’re just blessed, and he smiled so hard, and so bleakly, at his choice of the word ‘blessed’ that he felt his bottom lip crack.

‘You’re very quiet,’ said the chief.

‘I never had to bury anyone before.’

‘Me neither.’

Now Harry did look at him.

‘You serious?’ he said.

‘I’m a cop, not an undertaker.’

‘You mean nothing like this has ever happened before?’

‘Not to my knowledge. Seems this may be the first time.’

It didn’t make Harry feel any better. There would be repercussions. This trip with the chief was only the beginning.

‘You didn’t tell me what happened to the girl,’ said Harry.

‘No, I didn’t.’ The chief didn’t speak again for a time, stringing Harry along. Then: ‘Ben Pearson had to shoot her.’

‘Had to?’

‘There was a truck coming. If she’d stopped it, well, we would have had an even more difficult situation than the one we’re currently in.’

‘What would you have done?’ asked Harry.

The chief considered the question.

‘I’d have tried to stop the truck, and I’d have been forced to kill the driver.’

He turned his gray eyes on Harry for a moment.

‘And then I’d have killed you, and your wife too.’

Harry wanted to vomit, but he fought the urge. He could taste it at the back of his throat, though. For the first time since he had gotten in the car with Morland, he felt frightened. They were in the darkness out by Tabart’s Pond, just one of many locations around Prosperous named after the original English settlers. There were no Tabarts left now in Prosperous. No Tabarts, no Mabsons, no Quartons, no Poyds. They’d all died early in the history of the settlement, and the rest had seemed set to follow them before the accommodation was reached. Now Harry was about to dig a grave in a place named after the departed, the lost, and a grave could accommodate two as easily as one.

‘Why?’ said Harry. ‘Why would you have killed us?’

‘For forcing me to do something that I didn’t want to do. For making life harder than it already is. For screwing up. As an example to others. You take your pick.’

The chief made a right turn onto a dirt road.

‘Maybe I’ll have another look at that lock on your basement when we’re done,’ he said. ‘Something about all this doesn’t sit quite right with me. Kinda like the lock itself, it seems.’

He grinned emptily at Harry. The beams of the headlights caught bare trees, and icy snow and—

‘What was that?’ said Harry. He was looking back over his right shoulder.

‘Huh? I didn’t see nothing.’

‘There was something there. It was big, like an animal of some kind. I saw its eyes shining.’

But the chief was paying him no attention. As far as Morland was concerned, Harry’s ‘something’ was just a ruse, a clumsy attempt to distract him from the business of the basement door. But Morland wasn’t a man to be turned so easily. He planned to walk both Harry and his wife through their versions of the escape. He’d do it over and over again until he was either satisfied with their innocence or convinced of their guilt. He was against entrusting the girl to them from the start, but he’d been overruled. He wasn’t a selectman, even though he could sit in on the board’s meetings. No chief of police had ever been a selectman. It was always felt that it was better to have the law as an instrument of the board’s will.

The board had wanted to test Harry and Erin Dixon. Concerns were being raised about them – justifiable concerns, it now appeared. But it was a big step from doubting the commitment of citizens of Prosperous to taking direct action against them. In all of the town’s history, only a handful of occasions had arisen when it became necessary to kill one of their own. Such acts were dangerous, and risked sowing discontent and fear among those who had doubts, or were vulnerable to outside influence.

Morland now regretted telling Harry Dixon that he might have killed his wife and him. He didn’t like Dixon, and didn’t trust him. He’d wanted to goad him, but it was a foolish move. He’d have to reassure him. He might even have to apologize and put his words down to his justifiable anger and frustration.

But the test wasn’t over. The test had only just begun. Harry Dixon would have to make amends for his failings, and Morland was pretty sure that Harry Dixon wouldn’t like what that would entail, not one little bit.

‘So what was it that you thought you saw?’ said Morland.

‘I believe I saw a wolf.’

8

The ground was hard. Not that Harry should have been surprised: he’d lived in Penobscot County for long enough to have no illusions about winter. On the other hand, he’d never had to dig a grave, not in any season, and this was like breaking rocks.

Morland left him to his own devices at the start. The chief sat in his car, the driver’s door open but the heat on full blast, and smoked a series of cigarettes, carefully stubbing each one out in the ashtray. After a while, though, it became clear that Harry would be hacking at the ground until summer if he was forced to make the grave alone, and so Morland opened the trunk of his car and removed a pickax from it. From where he was standing, Harry caught a glimpse of something wrapped in transparent plastic sheeting, but he didn’t look for long. He figured he’d have seen more than enough of it by the time this night was over.

Morland broke the ground with the pickax, and Harry cleared the earth away with the shovel. They worked without speaking. They didn’t have energy to spare. Despite the cold, Harry felt sweat soaking into his shirt. He removed his coat and was about to hang it on the low branch of a tree when Morland told him to put it in the car instead. Harry assumed it was because the car would keep his coat warm, until Morland made it clear that Harry’s health and well-being were the last things on his mind.

‘With luck, she’ll stay down here and never be found,’ said Morland, ‘but you never know. Prepare for the worst and you won’t be disappointed. I’ve seen crime scene investigators put a man behind bars for the rest of his life on the basis of a thread left on a branch. We take no chances.’

Morland wasn’t concerned about leaving tracks on the ground. It was too hard for that. Neither was he worried about being seen. Nobody lived nearby, and anyone who might be passing would, in all likelihood, be a citizen of Prosperous, and would know better than to go sticking a nose into Chief Morland’s affairs if he or she was foolish enough to come and investigate in the first place. Anyway, by now news of what had happened to the girl would have been communicated to those who needed to know. The roads around Prosperous would be quiet tonight.

They continued to dig. When they got to three feet, they were both too exhausted to go further. The chief was a big, strong man, but Harry Dixon was no wilting flower either: if anything he’d grown fitter over the previous year, now that he was required to be more active on his construction sites than he had been in decades. It was one of the few good things to come out of the financial mess in which he found himself. He had spent so long supervising, and ordering, and taking care of paperwork, that he had almost forgotten the pleasure of actual building, and the satisfaction that came with it – that, and the blisters.

Morland went to the car and took a Thermos of coffee from the back seat. He poured a cup for Harry, and drank his own directly from the neck. Together they watched the moon.

‘Back there, you were kidding about the wolf, right?’ said Morland.

Harry was wondering if he might have been mistaken. At one time, there had been wolves all over Maine – grays and easterns and reds – and the state had enacted wolf bounties until 1903. As far as he could recall, the last known wolf killing in the state was back in 1996. He remembered reading about it in the newspapers. The guy had killed it thinking it was a large coyote, but the animal weighed over eighty pounds, twice the size of the average coyote, and had the markings of a wolf, or wolf hybrid. There had been nothing since then, as far as he was aware: sightings and rumors, maybe, but no proof.

‘It was a big animal, and it had a doglike head, that’s all I can say for sure.’

Morland went to light another cigarette, but found that the pack was empty. He crushed it and put it carefully into his pocket.

‘I’ll ask around,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t be a wolf, but if there’s a coyote in the woods we’d best let folks know, tell them to keep a watch on their dogs. You done?’

Harry finished the last of the coffee and handed the cup back to the chief. He screwed it back on and tossed the Thermos to the floor of his car.

‘Come on, then,’ said Morland. ‘Time to put her in the ground.’

The trunk light shone on the plastic, and the girl inside it. She was lying on her back, and her eyes were closed. That was a mercy at least. The exit wound in her chest was massive, but there was less blood than Harry might have expected. The chief seemed to follow the direction of his thoughts.

‘She bled out on the snow of Ben Pearson’s yard,’ he said. ‘We had to shovel it up and spread some more around to hide what we’d done. Take her legs. I’ll lift from the head.’

It was difficult to get her out of the trunk. She hadn’t been a well-built girl, which was why the decision had been made to feed her up first, but now Harry knew for the first time what was meant by ‘dead weight’. The heavy-duty plastic was slippery, and Morland struggled to get a grip. Once she was out of the car he had to drop her on the ground, put his foot under her to raise her upper body, and then wrap his arms around her chest to carry her, holding her to him like a sleeping lover. They stood to the right of the grave, and on the count of three they tossed her in. She landed awkwardly in a semi-seated position.

‘You’d best get down there and straighten her,’ Morland told Harry. ‘If the hole was deeper I’d be inclined to let it go, but it’s shallow as it is. We don’t want the ground to sink and have her head peeping up like a gopher’s.’

Harry didn’t want to get in the grave, but it didn’t seem as though he had much choice. He eased himself down, then squatted to grip the ends of the plastic. As he did so, he looked at the girl. Her head was slightly lower than his, so that she seemed to be staring up at him. Her eyes were open. He must have been mistaken when he first saw her lying in the trunk. Perhaps it had been the reflection of the internal light, or his own tiredness, but he could have sworn …

‘What’s the problem?’ said Morland.

‘Her eyes,’ said Harry. ‘Do you recall if her eyes were open or closed?’

‘What does it matter? She’s dead. Whether we cover her up with her eyes wide open or squeezed shut is going to make no difference to her or to us.’

He was right, thought Harry. He shouldn’t even have been able to see her eyes so clearly through the plastic, but it was as though there was a light shining inside her head, illuminating the blue of her irises. She looked more alive now than she had in the basement.

He shook the thought from his head, and pulled sharply on the plastic. The girl was dragged fat. He didn’t want to see her face again, so he turned away from it. He’d tried. She’d been given a better chance than any of the others, of that he was certain. It wasn’t his fault that Ben Pearson had put an end to her hopes.

Suddenly all of the strength was gone from his body. He couldn’t haul himself from the grave. He could barely raise his arms. He looked up at Morland. The chief had the pickax in his hands.

‘Help me up,’ said Harry, but the chief didn’t move.

‘Please,’ said Harry. His voice cracked a little, and he despised himself for his weakness. His mother was right: he was half a man. If he’d been gifted with real courage, he’d have put the girl in his car, driven her to the state police in Bangor, and confessed all to them, or at least dropped her off in the center of the city where she’d be safe. Standing in the grave, he imagined a scenario in which the girl agreed to keep quiet about what had occurred, but it fell apart as soon as he saw himself returning to Prosperous to explain her absence. No, he’d done the best that he could for her. Anything more would have damned the town. Then again, it was already as close to damnation as made no difference.

He closed his eyes, and waited for the impact of the pickax on his head, but it never came. Instead, Morland grabbed Harry’s right hand, leaned back, and their combined strength got him out of the grave.

Harry sat on the ground and put his head in his hands.

‘For a second, I thought you were going to leave me down there,’ he said.

‘That would be too easy,’ said Morland. ‘Besides, we’re not done yet.’

And Harry knew that he was not referring to the filling in of the grave alone.

The girl was gone, covered by the earth. The ground had clearly been dug up, but Morland knew that whatever remained of the winter snows to come would take care of that. When the thaw came in earnest, the ground would turn to mire. As it dried, all traces of their activity would be erased. He just hoped that they’d buried the girl deep enough.

‘Shit,’ he said.

‘What is it?’ said Harry.

‘We probably should have taken her out of the plastic. Might have helped her to rot quicker.’

‘You want to dig her up again?’

‘No, I do not. Come on, time to go.’

He wrapped the blade of the shovel and the head of the pickax in plastic bags, to keep the dirt off the trunk of his car. Tomorrow he’d clean it inside and out, just to be sure.

Harry had not moved from his place beside the grave.

‘I have a question,’ he said.

Morland waited for him to continue.

‘Isn’t there a chance that she might be enough?’ said Harry.

Morland might have called the look on Harry’s face hopeful, if the use of the word ‘hope’ were not an obscenity under such circumstances.

‘No,’ said Morland.

‘She’s dead. We killed her. We’ve given her to the earth. Why not? Why can’t she be enough?’

Chief Morland closed the trunk before he replied.

‘Because,’ he said, ‘she was dead when she went into the ground.’

9

It was just after five on the evening after my return to Portland when I arrived at the Great Lost Bear on Forest Avenue. The bar was buzzing, as it always was on Thursdays. Thursday was showcase night, when the Bear invited a craft brewery to let folk taste its wares, always at a discount and always with a raffle at the end. It really didn’t take much to keep customers loyal, but it always amazed me that so many businesses couldn’t work up the energy to make the minimal extra effort required.

I found Dave Evans, the Bear’s owner, marshaling the troops for the assault to come. I hadn’t worked there in a while. Like I said, business had been good for me in recent months, maybe because, like the Bear, I tended to go the extra mile for my clients. In addition, some ongoing litigation relating to the purchase of my grandfather’s old house on Gorham Road had been settled in my favor, and a lump sum had found its way into my accounts. I was solvent, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Still, I liked to keep my hand in at the Bear, even if it was only once or twice a month. You hear a lot from people in bars. Admittedly, most of it is useless, but the occasional nugget of information creeps through. Anyway, my presence would allow Dave to take the rest of the night off, although he was strangely reluctant to leave.

‘Your buddies are here,’ he said.

‘I have buddies?’

‘You used to. I’m not sure if the word still applies where those two are concerned.’

He indicated a corner of the bar which was now looking significantly smaller than it used to thanks to the addition of two massive men in polyester jogging suits: the Fulci Brothers. I hadn’t seen them since Jackie Garner’s funeral. His death had hit them hard. They had been devoted to him, and he had looked out for them as best he could. It was hard for men so large to keep a low profile, but somehow they’d managed it in the months since Jackie’s death. The city might even have breathed a bit easier for a while. The Fulcis had a way of sucking the oxygen from a room. They had a way of knocking it from people too. Their fists were like cinder blocks.

Dave’s concern was understandable, therefore. But despite their appearance, and an undeniable propensity for violence that seemed resistant to all forms of pharmaceutical intervention, the Fulcis were essentially brooders by nature. They might not brood for very long, but they did tend to take some time to consider which bones they might enjoy breaking first. The fact that they’d stayed away from me for so long meant that they’d probably been considering the fate of their friend with a certain degree of seriousness. That either boded well for me, or very badly.

‘You want me to call someone?’ said Dave.

‘Like who?’

‘A surgeon? A priest? A mortician?’

‘If they’ve come here to cause trouble over Jackie, you may need a builder to reconstruct your bar.’

‘Damn, and just as the place was coming together.’

I worked my way through the crowd to reach their table. They were both sipping sodas. The Fulcis weren’t big drinkers.

‘It’s been a long time,’ I said. ‘I was starting to worry.’

To be honest, I was still worrying, and maybe more than before, now that they’d shown up at last.

‘You want to take a seat,’ said Paulie.

It wasn’t a question. It was an order.

Paulie was the older, and marginally better adjusted, of the two brothers. Tony, his younger sibling, should have had a lit fuse sticking out of the top of his head.

I took the seat. Actually, I wasn’t too worried that the Fulcis might take a swing at me. If they did, I wouldn’t know a lot about it until I woke up, assuming I ever did, but I’d always gotten along well with them, and, like Jackie, I’d tried my best to help them where I could, even if it meant just putting in a word with local law enforcement when they stepped over the line. They’d done some work for me over the years, and they’d put themselves in harm’s way on my behalf. I liked to think that we had an understanding, but Timothy Treadwell, that guy who was eaten by the grizzlies he’d tried to befriend, probably felt the same way until a bear’s jaws closed on his throat.

Paulie looked at Tony. Tony nodded. If it was going to turn bad, it would do so now.

‘What happened to Jackie, we don’t blame you for it,’ said Paulie.

He spoke with great solemnity, like a senior judge communicating a long-considered verdict.

‘Thank you,’ I said, and I meant it, not only because my continued good health appeared assured for now, but because I knew how important Jackie was to them. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d held some residual grudge against me, but there would be none. With the Fulcis, it was all or nothing. We had a clean slate.

‘Jackie done something very bad,’ said Tony, ‘but that didn’t mean he should have been shot down from behind because of it.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Jackie was a good guy,’ Tony continued. ‘He took care of his mom. He looked out for us. He—’

Tony choked. His eyes were tearing up. His brother patted him on a muscled shoulder.

‘Whatever we can do,’ said Paulie, ‘whatever help you need to find the man who did this, you let us know. And any time you want us to step up for you, you just call. Because Jackie would have stepped up, and just because he ain’t around no more don’t mean we ought to let these things slide, you understand? Jackie wouldn’t have wanted that.’

‘I hear you,’ I said.

I reached out and shook their hands. I didn’t even wince, but I was relieved to get the hand back.

‘How’s his mom doing?’ I asked.

Jackie’s mother had been diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease the previous year. Her illness was the only reason Jackie had committed the acts that led to his death. He just needed the money.

‘Not so good,’ said Paulie. ‘Even with Jackie she would have struggled. Without him …’

He shook his head.

Jackie’s insurance company had invoked a clause in his life policy relating to criminal activity, arguing that his death had resulted from participation in a criminal enterprise. Aimee Price was fighting the case on a pro bono basis, but she didn’t believe that the insurance company was going to modify its position, and it was hard to argue that it didn’t have a point. Jackie was killed because he screwed up: he was careless, somebody died, and vengeance fell. I made a mental note to send a check to Jackie’s mother. Even if it only helped a little, it would be something.

The Fulcis finished their drinks, nodded their goodbyes and left.

‘You’re still alive,’ said Dave, who’d been keeping one eye on proceedings, and another on his bar, in case he didn’t get to see it again in its present form.

‘You seem pleased.’

‘Means I get my night off,’ said Dave, as he pulled on his overcoat. ‘Would have been hard to leave otherwise.’

I enjoyed that evening in the Bear. Perhaps it was partly relief at not having incurred the wrath of the Fulcis, but in moving between the bar and the floor I was also able to empty my head of everything but beer taps, line cooks and making sure that, when Dave returned the next morning, the Bear would still be standing in more or less the same condition as it had been when he left it. I drank a coffee and read the Portland Phoenix at the bar while the night’s cleanup went on around me.

‘Don’t tax yourself,’ said Cupcake Cathy, as she nudged me with a tray of dirty glasses. ‘If you strained something by helping, I don’t know how I could go on living.’

Cathy was one of the wait staff. If she was ever less than cheerful, I had yet to see it. Even as she let off some steam, she was still smiling.

‘Don’t make me fire you.’

‘You can’t fire me. Anyway, that would require an effort on your part.’

‘I’ll tell Dave to fire you.’

‘Dave just thinks we work for him. Don’t disillusion him by making him put it to the test.’

She had a point. I still wasn’t sure how the Bear operated, exactly: it just did. In the end, no matter who was nominally in charge, everyone just worked for the Bear itself. I finished my coffee, waited for the last of the staff to leave and locked up. My car was the only one left in the lot. The night was clear and the moon bright, but already there was a layer of frost on the roof. Winter was refusing to relinquish its hold on the northeast. I drove home beneath a sky exploding with stars.

Over by Deering Oaks, the door to Jude’s basement opened.

‘Jude, you in here?’

A lighter fared. Had there been anyone to see, it would have revealed a man layered in old coats, with newspaper poking out of his laceless boots. The lower half of his face was entirely obscured by beard, and dirt was embedded in the wrinkles on his skin. He looked sixty, but was closer to forty. He was known as Brightboy on the streets. He once had another name, but even he had almost forgotten it by now.

‘Jude?’ he called again.

The heat from the lighter was burning his fingers. Brightboy swore hard and let the fame go out. His eyes were getting used to the dark, but the basement was shaped like an inverted ‘L’, which meant that the moonlight only penetrated so far. The dogleg to the right remained in darkness.

He hit the lighter again. It was a cheap plastic thing. He’d found a bunch of them, all still full of food, in a garbage can outside an apartment building that was being vacated. In this kind of weather, anything that could generate heat and fame was worth holding on to. He still had half a dozen left.

Brightboy turned the corner, and the light caught Jude’s booted feet dangling three feet above the ground. Brightboy raised the fame slowly, taking in the reddish-brown overcoat, the green serge pants, the tan jacket and waistcoat, the cream shirt and the carefully knotted red tie. Jude had even managed to die dressed like a dandy, although his face was swollen and nearly unrecognizable above the knot on his tie, and the noose that suspended him above the floor was lost in his flesh. A backless chair was on its side beneath his feet. To its right was a wooden box that he had been using as a nightstand. His sleeping bag lay open and ready next to it.