A Darker Place Read online

  “Agent McCarthy is fairly unmistakable, isn’t he? I can’t imagine him doing undercover work.”

  She heard a clear note of rather catty pride that she should be better at the wicked and dangerous job he so disapproved of than the hateful man who dragged her into it, but she hid her amusement. “He’s actually not bad at it, given time to grow his hair out a bit.”

  Makepeace shot a glance at Anne’s own thick hair, but did not say anything. He let her go and prepared to leave himself.

  It was only much later that evening, as he sat in front of a dying fire brooding over their conversation, that it struck him there might be a second, darker meaning to Anne’s not being able to face it anymore.

  For two days Agent McCarthy and Inspector Farmer cooled their heels, Farmer impatiently, McCarthy with the resignation of a man who had done this before. On Thursday afternoon, McCarthy was seated on a park bench, his arms spread out along its back and his face lifted to the weak sun, while Gillian Farmer paced up and down on the gravel pathways between rows of brutally pruned roses. As chance would have it, she was at the farthest point in her circuit when McCarthy’s cellular phone chirped in his pocket, and she did not hear it. She saw it in his hand, however, the moment she turned, and broke into a trot in her eagerness to get back to him.

  It was a very brief conversation; McCarthy was folding the telephone before she reached the bench. He stood, putting the phone back in his pocket.

  “Was that her?” It was.

  “Christ. About time.”

  McCarthy glanced at her sharply, but he did not speak until they were in the car and on the freeway out of town.

  “Anne doesn’t have to do this, you know. She’s under no obligation; she doesn’t even take a salary beyond expenses.”

  “So why does she?” Farmer demanded, still impatient. Three days was far too long, and her department had begun pressing for her return after the second.

  “Eighteen years ago, Anne Waverly’s seven-year-old daughter and thirty-one-year-old husband died in a mass suicide in northern Texas. The child drank a glass of cyanide-laced fruit juice, probably given to her by her father. You may have heard about it—they called it Ezekiel’s Farm—but it was only in the news for a couple of days because there was a plane crash and then some enormous political scandal just after they were found that knocked them off the front pages. A lot of comparisons were made to the People’s Temple suicide in Guyana two years before, and I suppose their reasons were much the same although there were only forty-seven people instead of nine-hundred-and-some. The bodies were not found for nearly a week. In early summer. You can imagine what they looked like.”

  Gillian grimaced; she had been a cop long enough to know.

  “Anne herself was a member of the group, but she had begun to question the methods and beliefs of the community. Her doubts were serious enough for her to take a leave of absence, as it were, to go away and think about things for a few days. She left the child, Abby, with her husband. Three days later the leader Ezekiel had a final revelation, and broke out the cyanide.”

  “Christ.”

  He added in an unemotional voice, “Anne believes that her departure triggered the suicides. It is quite possible that she is right.”

  They drove in silence for a long time, until Gillian stirred and asked, “So this is, what, some kind of penance? Or revenge?”

  “Neither, as far as I can tell. I believe it’s her own form of suicide.”

  “You mean she goes into these situations with a death wish? Jesus, McCarthy, how could you possibly allow—”

  “Not a death wish, no. She’s sensible and cautious, and she does her part very, very well. She goes in, she looks around, she comes out and tells us what the community looks like and gives us her opinion concerning its internal stability. It’s just that on a very deep level, she’s made her peace with death, and she doesn’t really care if she comes home or not. A lot of people who do long-term undercover work have it to some degree, and with Anne it’s never interfered with getting the job done. Up to now, that is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Probably nothing. It’s just that her reaction to me this time was different. She was angry.”

  “Pretty normal reaction, I’d say.”

  “That’s exactly it. She seems to have gotten used to the idea of living again.”

  Their rental car had problems with the first section of Anne Waverly’s road, but at the end of it—up the rutted gravel track, through the gate, and around a mile or more of narrow twists and turns—she was waiting for them. She watched them get out of the car, saw the woman, Farmer, look around her with a sudden delight in the dappled sun and the clean silence that followed the laboring engine sounds of the last ten minutes, and waited with neither movement nor expression while her guests metaphorically brushed off the dust of their journey and came toward her.

  They stopped when they saw Stan at her knee, then Glen came on with Gillian Farmer following cautiously. Ten feet away Glen stopped and spoke to the dog. “Hello there, Stan. It is Stan, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” Anne said.

  “C’mere, boy.” McCarthy dropped to his heels and held out a hand. “You remember me. I’m a friend, right?”

  The dog shot his mistress a glance, and at her gesture went forward to snuffle with his flat nose at the man’s hand. Something tickled his memory, because his tail wagged briefly before he turned his attention to Gillian. With dignity he walked up to her and examined her feet and the hand she ventured out; then, without expressing an opinion, he returned to Anne.

  The incident with the dog confirmed Gillian’s suspicions that McCarthy knew Anne Waverly as something more than just an occasional colleague. His intimate acquaintance with the road had been obvious from the time they left the blacktop, for one thing. He knew the dog, knew that the door they would enter was not the one behind Anne Waverly but the kitchen door around the side of the house. He seemed unsurprised by the sharp difference between the dusty, rustic log exterior and the rich simplicity inside, and when he sniffed the air, it was more with the welcome of homecoming than puzzlement at the peculiar combination of the rich, yeasty odor emanating from two pans on the sideboard underlaid with the raw bite of cordite. The cap was put on her confirmation by his first words to Anne.

  “Target practice?”

  “I thought it might be a good idea,” she said. “I was getting rusty.” She walked past them and pulled shut a narrow door to what looked like a pantry.

  “You shoot indoors?” Gillian asked in disbelief.

  McCarthy laughed—actually laughed. She hadn’t thought him capable of anything beyond a rueful chuckle. “Like Sherlock Holmes picking out the Queen’s initials on the wall?” he asked, which reference meant nothing to Gillian. He looked at Anne and asked, “May I show her?” When she nodded, he went to another door and started down the open wooden stairs heading into a basement.

  The bare bulb lit only the immediate area, but McCarthy reached over and flipped a series of switches, and to her amazement Gillian found herself at one end of what could only be called an indoor shooting range, complete with a man-shaped paper target hanging at the far end.

  It was also, incongruously, a farmhouse cellar lined with cupboards and shelves, bearing canned goods, economy-sized packages of toilet paper and soap powder, odd shapes wrapped in black plastic garbage bags, and an array of hand tools and power saws—all the necessities of life in the woods. McCarthy called her over to a low table on which lay a pair of ear protectors, an automatic pistol, and the equipment for cleaning it. Standing next to him, she surveyed the panorama of bottled foodstuffs, the fruit on the top shelf, red tomato sauce below, a neat display of jams and preserves and shelled nuts that ended three-quarters of the way down the room at an arrangement of hay bales, tightly laid up to the ceiling. They were tired and dusty-looking, and no longer gave out enough odor to stand up to the gunpowder; they had been in place for years.
r />   Bemused, Gillian studied the odd juxtaposition of home canning and the hanging target with the cluster of shots in its center until she realized that the FBI man seemed to expect a reaction.

  “Wouldn’t want a ricochet to smash your peaches, I suppose,” she commented.

  He looked a little disappointed at her lack of amusement, but personally she thought it a bit crazy. The woman lived in the middle of nowhere; why not shoot outside, where she could practice at distances of more than twenty yards? Or at a proper shooting range?

  “Bring up a bottle of tomatoes when you come, would you, Glen?” the voice at the top of the stairs asked prosaically. “And don’t forget to shut off the lights.”

  Back in the kitchen, they found Anne Waverly at the stove, lighting the gas under a big saucepan. McCarthy closed the basement door, put the quart bottle of tomatoes on the counter, and took a chair at the wooden table. He sat watching Anne Waverly’s back, strong and straight with the lovely graying hair, caught up in a clip, that hung down between her shoulder blades, and Gillian abruptly realized what the two of them reminded her of: her sister Kathleen and Kathy’s ex-husband when they were forced to be together at some family function. Between them was lingering affection, a heavy residue of physical attraction, and a lot of emotional scar tissue, and although they were polite for the sake of the children, there was also the mutual awareness that if they ever relaxed, blood would flow.

  Glen McCarthy and Anne Waverly had been lovers, Gillian was sure of that.

  She was also quite certain that whereas the professor might be finished with the FBI man, he was afraid that he was not through with her. Gillian Farmer was enough of a cop to disapprove of sex cluttering up a professional relationship, enough of a woman to find it both troubling and mildly amusing. She cleared her throat. “Can I help with anything?”

  “No thank you, Inspector Farmer. I’ll just dump this together and we can eat when the rolls are done.” Anne swept a handful of finely chopped onions and a heap of other vegetables into the seething pot, poured in the bottle of tomatoes and a generous amount of red wine, took a hefty pinch of dried herbs from a pottery jar and sprinkled it over, dropped the top on the pan, and turned the heat down.

  “Coffee, tea, or wine?” she asked.

  Over coffee, she finally joined them at the table, and Gillian began her side of the report.

  It did not take long, or the hint of several culinary interruptions, for Gillian to see that Anne Waverly was not very interested in the events that had brought the group calling itself Change to the attention of the San Francisco Police Department. Missing persons reports and complaints of financial chicanery from swindled relatives were, her attitude seemed to say, only to be expected. She came alert only when Farmer started to talk about the emigration of Change members from their former urban setting into the Arizona high desert. Then she wanted to know precisely when the members had sold the houses they owned, how big the houses were, the physical state they had been left in by the former owners, what had been left behind, and a dozen other equally meaningless questions. Prepared as she was, Gillian had to admit that most of these things she could not answer. She told the professor that she would find out.

  This seemed to signal a hiatus in the evening’s program. Anne stood up and limped back to the sink, where she fished a head of garlic out of a pot on the windowsill and began to skin some cloves and squeeze them through a press into a small bowl.

  “Dinner in ten minutes,” she said. “Glen, show Inspector Farmer where the bathroom is—”

  “Please, call me Gillian.”

  “And I’m Anne. And then if you’d choose a bottle of wine, Glen, and get a tablecloth from the drawer under the oven. Gillian, the silver is in that drawer, we’ll need soup spoons. Plates and bowls are on that shelf.”

  The plates were handmade stoneware, the tablecloth looked as if it belonged in a prosperous farmhouse in Avignon, the silver was silver, and heavy, and the dinner was an intensely flavored stew with olives and vegetables and some unidentifiable meat, with a simple green salad, bread rolls hot from the oven with herbed garlic butter to slather on, and deep red wine that had just enough of an edge to hold its own.

  Respectful silence held, until Gillian spoke up.

  “What kind of meat is this?” she asked.

  “Bambi,” Glen answered, his mouth full.

  “Venison,” Anne corrected him. “My neighbor gives me a haunch every year and it takes me months to get through it. I’m trying to clear out the freezer before I go.”

  “So, how is dear Eliot?” Glen asked. “Talkative as ever?” He was concentrating on the application of garlic butter to hot bread. Gillian glanced at him curiously, and Anne seemed amused at the asperity of his question.

  “Eliot is eternal; he changes not. He’s going to—” Anne broke off at a scratching sound that startled Gillian, followed by a low whine. Anne put down her napkin on the table and went to open the narrow door that she had shut when they first arrived.

  The mother of six stopped halfway through the doorway, torn by her need to go out and the protective drives of her hormones. Anne solved her dilemma by taking up the loose skin at the scruff of her neck, walking her to the outside door, and pushing her through it. Normally she would have scolded Livy for passing through the kitchen with lifted lip and a rumble in her chest, but then normally Livy would not have growled at visitors.

  “She’s had puppies,” Glen exclaimed at the sight of the bitch’s sagging belly. “I didn’t know you were having puppies.”

  “Good Lord, something the FBI doesn’t know,” Anne said, dry to the point of sarcasm. The rest of the meal passed with brief and desultory conversation, although Gillian was the only one who seemed to feel the least uncomfortable. The other two merely ate, engrossed in the food and their own thoughts.

  Eventually, with second helpings distributed and polished off, Anne got to her feet and began to clear the dishes. “There’s an apple pie that Eliot’s mother made for dessert. I hope you’ll help me eat it, or I’ll be living on it for a week.”

  “Gillian and I will wash the dishes first, and let the food settle a bit.”

  How very homey, Gillian Farmer thought. Who would believe that an FBI investigation could start with venison stew and a sink full of soapsuds?

  While her two guests washed and dried, Anne made more coffee, put the pie in the oven to warm, carried two bowls of dog food outside, and took the opportunity to change the bedding under Livy’s pups. She looked up from this last job to see Glen at the door.

  “I think she wants back in,” he said, and then asked, “Can I see them first?”

  “Sure.” He stepped into the tight space without even wrinkling his nose at the earthy smells of milk and blood and infant fecal matter, and squatted to look at the mound of fawn bodies. Gillian, too, came over, and Anne slipped out with her armful of laundry so the two hardened law enforcement personnel could coo over the grubs and argue over which one’s eyes were closest to being open. She gave them five minutes, then called, “Sorry, but if I don’t let Livy back in she’ll have the door off its hinges.”

  Reluctantly, they emerged, and Anne went to let one highly suspicious dog inside. This time she left the pantry door halfway open; time for socialization to begin.

  Over the crumbly, sweet pie and strong coffee, Anne began to set out her requests to Gillian Farmer.

  “The things I need to know may seem peripheral, and in a way, they are. Normally in a criminal investigation into embezzlement, for example, you’re not looking for signs of child abuse.” She saw Gillian begin to react, and held up her hand. “I’m not saying there is child abuse here, don’t misunderstand me. There very probably is not, at least not the sort of abuse that the law can concern itself with. But children will act out the problems within their family, in symptomatic behavior.

  “I need you to talk to their former teachers, or if they had a private school, the district liaison for home schooling. See if
you can find any of the kids’ work, written materials or drawings. You might try the relatives for that, the grandmothers and aunts—they may have been sent pictures to put on their refrigerators. And it would be helpful if the age and sex of each child was on the piece, and roughly the date it was made—not the names, though; I don’t want to know their names. It distracts me when I meet them.

  “Talk to the ex-neighbors again. Any problems or oddities, from vandalism to too-perfect behavior? What hours did the families keep, any odd sounds or smells coming from the houses, what vehicles did they have, what jobs?

  “Bank accounts and credit references are probably best retrieved by Glen, but Steven in Arizona seems to have come from your town originally, Gillian, and so did the leaders of the smaller branches in Boston and L.A. See what you can find out about their histories—families, education, jobs, all that.”

  “Can I have those names?” Gillian asked, her pen poised.

  Anne closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them, and Gillian was surprised to see her look at Glen with real anger. “The old ‘need-to-know’ bullshit again, eh, Glen?”

  “You know I—”

  “You give her the information, or I will.”

  “I don’t think I can get approval on—”

  “I don’t negotiate, Glen. You know that. We do it my way, or we don’t do it.”

  McCarthy’s eyes wavered and fell, and he threw up his hands in surrender. “Okay. She’ll see the file.”

  “You will copy the file and give it to her. No crap about coming to a secure room to read it.”

  “Jesus, Anne.”

  “If you don’t have the authority to run the photocopier, Glen,” she said softly, “let me know as soon as you find someone who does. We’ll resume then.”