The Language Of Cannibals

CHAPTER TWO

The Cairn police station turned out to be a dispatching room, two-office and two-cell section of a town hall that was housed in a magnificent old stone building set down near the river a few blocks from the center of town. One of the offices was occupied by Cairn's chief of police, whose desk plaque identified him as Dan Mosely. Mosely, a dapper man who looked to be in his mid- to late forties, was dressed in a crisp, starched uniform that I suspected had been specially tailored for his wiry, six-foot frame. He had a thick head of curly steel-gray hair, and gray eyes to match. Ugly, puckered acne scars ringed his neck near the collar line, but the rest of his face was clear, with the kind of deep, even tan that comes from spending a lot of time on the water. His office was decorated with framed prints of old sailing ships. There was a case filled with sailing trophies and above it a photograph of a sleek, nineteen-foot Hoby catamaran with a power jib.

Mosely rose as I entered, extended a sinewy, bronzed hand, and flashed a grin that revealed even, white teeth. "Dr. Frederickson," he said in a deep, resonant voice. "It's a pleasure to meet you."

"Likewise, Chief," I said, shaking his hand and wincing when pain shot through my wrist.

"Sorry," Mosely said, quickly withdrawing his hand and grimacing in sympathy. "It looks like you hurt yourself."

"Just a slight sprain," I replied, sitting down in the chair next to his desk that he had motioned me into.

"Did you do that when you coldcocked Trex?"

"Trex?"

Mosely sank down into the chair behind his desk and nodded amiably. "Gregory Trex. McAlpin tells me you really rang his bell for him. That must have been some surprise for him, not to mention the people watching."

"Yeah, well, being a dwarf sometimes has its advantages; nasty people don't always take you seriously at first, and you make a small target when they finally do."

"I wasn't surprised," Mosely said evenly as he studied me with his steel-gray eyes. "Your reputation precedes you. Black belt in karate, right?"

"I take it this Gregory Trex is related to the Trex who heads the Vietnam Veterans?"

"Father and son. You couldn't meet two people who are more different. Jack seems to think it's his fault that Gregory is the way he is. . but I don't want to get into town gossip. It's a sad story."

"I'll bet. Psychotics always make me sad, especially when they're pushing women around or trying to take off my head. It seems to me that you've got a town bully on your hands."

Mosely grimaced again, nodded slightly. "Gregory's got his problems, that's for sure. He's a pain in the ass, always full of piss and vinegar, and always looking for a fight. Town bully, yes, but when the town bully's father is a bona fide war hero, sometimes you have to tread lightly. Gregory's obsessed with the fact that he was too young for Vietnam. He thinks he could have been a war hero-and it doesn't help that his father has kind of soured on the whole war and Vietnam thing. Some people around here think Jack has lost his patriotism."

"It looked to me like he'd lost his leg."

"That too. But Gregory kind of feels cheated, like he's John

Wayne forced to act in a Shirley Temple movie, if you know what I mean."

"So why doesn't he enlist in the Marines or some other branch of the service? The Vietnam War may be over, but the last I heard, the armed forces were still in business."

Mosely's response was a thin smile and a slight shake of his head.

I asked, "More town gossip?"

He nodded.

"Let me guess," I continued. "They either wouldn't take him or they threw him out on a Section Eight. Mental problems."

"Column B. It's good that you know."

"Why? What difference does it make?

Mosely studied me for some time, then said: "I'm sure you've seen the movie where the sheriff says to some guy that trouble follows him wherever he goes."

"Ah, I think I've got it. You're the sheriff, and I'm the handsome, mysterious stranger who's just come to town."

"You're no stranger, Dr. Frederickson. And trouble does tend to follow you around, doesn't it? I'm trying to tell you that Gregory Trex is a very dangerous man, and he's not about to forget that you humiliated him in front of all his veteran buddies. The man's a PKA champion, and if you meet again, he may not be so easy to surprise. I don't want anybody hurt, but if I did try to warn you to get out of town, you'd be the one quoting old movies." He paused, leaned forward in his chair, and narrowed his eyelids. "I don't suppose you would consider going back to New York as soon as possible?"

"Thanks for the warning, Chief. Trex shouldn't be too hard to spot; I'll watch out for him."

He nodded, and grunted softly. He didn't seem too pleased with my answer. "How's Garth?"

"You know my brother?"

The man with the gray eyes and hair nodded again. "I don't know if he remembers me, but I remember him, all right. Good cop with a big rep-not only for doing his own work but for the way he handled himself when he'd get tangled up with all those cockamamie cases that used to come your way. We worked out of the same precinct; he was with homicide, and I was with safe and loft. I put in my twenty years in New York, applied for this job last year, and got it. I like it real well in Cairn. Pulling down a New York pension and being chief of police in a town like Cairn is what New York City police detectives dream of when they dream of heaven. But then, I guess Garth found his own heaven when he teamed up with you, didn't he? I hear you two guys are doing really well."

"Yeah. Garth has always considered me an angel."

"So, how is he?"

"He's fine."

Mosely frowned, leaned back in his chair, and glanced at the ceiling. "Didn't I hear something a couple of years back about him being the head of some kind of religious cult?"

"Garth is fine, Chief. I'll tell him you say hello."

Suddenly the intercom on Mosely's desk buzzed. Cairn's chief of police looked surprised. He waited until it buzzed a second time, then punched an orange button at its base. "What is it?"

A male voice, presumably the dispatcher's, came over a speakerphone on the side of the intercom. "You've got a phone call, Chief."

"Emergency?"

"Not exactly."

"Tell whoever it is to call back later. I'm in conference."

"Mr. Culhane, Chief."

Dan Mosely looked even more surprised, and then his gray eyes glinted with annoyance. "Tell him I'll get back to him," he said curtly, and punched a black button. He was just starting to turn back toward me when the intercom buzzed again. He punched the orange button. "I said-!"

"Mr. Culhane’s pretty insistent, Chief. I just thought you should know."

Mosely's annoyance flashed to anger, and his face flushed, making the acne scars on his neck stand out like a necklace of flawed pearls. "I'll take it out there," he snapped and punched the black button again. Then he rose and strode stiffly from the room.

I waited, idly rubbing my sore wrist while I stared out the small window in his office at the river. There was a marina to the east, and a covey of sailboats gently bobbed in the wake of a passing powerboat. Under a full moon, the river shone like a great silver highway. Mosely was back in less than a minute. His anger had passed, and now he looked merely embarrassed. I felt a little sorry for him. It seemed there were a few shadowy, dank corners in the heaven he'd found, and Elysius Culhane lurked in one of them, obviously expecting the chief of police to be at his beck and call; in another corner lurked a murderous young thug the police were expected to ride herd on, while at the same time protecting him from the consequences of his actions.

"Like I said, Frederickson," Mosely said in a low voice as he sank back down into the leather swivel chair behind his desk, "your reputation precedes you. You make people nervous."

"Why should I make Elysius Culhane nervous?"

"Ah, you've met Mr. Culhane?"

"We exchanged a few unpleasantries at the art exhibit."

"Mmm. Culhane has sort of taken Gregory Trex under his wing, in a manner of speaking."

"That's a pretty big hawk wing, Chief."

"Yeah, well, Culhane seems to think that he can straighten the boy out by acting as the sort of strong father figure he thinks the boy needs."

"A father who's a war hero and who lost his leg in Vietnam isn't a strong enough figure?"

Mosely averted his gaze and once more seemed embarrassed. "Culhane saw you get in the squad car, and he thinks maybe you don't quite understand the situation here and what happened back at the gallery. I told him I was filling you in on some background-"

"Chief, I don't have the slightest interest any longer in what happened earlier or in town gossip. That's not what I'm here to talk about."

Now he returned his gaze to my face. He looked surprised and perhaps a little relieved. "Huh? But I thought. ."

"I came to talk about a friend of mine who died here on Monday. Michael Burana."

Mosely again leaned back in his chair and again stared up at the ceiling as he ran the fingers of both hands through his thick, curly hair. He seemed to be trying to collect his thoughts. "The

FBI agent," he said at last. "The one who let the CIA defector slip away to the Russians."

"He didn't let anyone slip away to Russia. That escape took split-second timing, with help from someone who knew a whole lot about FBI surveillance procedures. Maybe Michael should have been on the scene, but he wasn't; even he had to sleep once in a while. He was the man in charge of the surveillance team, so he was the one who took the fall and all the bad publicity. But that's neither here nor there. He's dead now. Like I said, he was a close friend of mine."

"And you have questions about his death?"

"Uh-huh."

He took his gaze from the ceiling, leaned forward in his chair, folded his hands on top of his desk, and looked at me with a puzzled expression. "You read the news reports?"

"That's how I found out about it. Because of the defector business, his death made all the news reports. Lousy obituary for a fine man."

"I'm sorry about your friend's death, Frederickson, but the circumstances surrounding it certainly seemed straightforward enough. He drowned. They found the canoe he must have been using smashed up on the rocks over on the Westchester side. It looks like he went out Sunday night and never made it back. It happens in the riverfront towns; people go out on the Hudson in some light craft like a canoe or a kayak without realizing just how powerful and tricky that river is. The tide changes, or a wind whips up, and they can't get back; before you know it, they're gone. The river's three miles wide at this point, and the distance is deceptive; people have a lot of room to get into trouble out there. Considering your professional background and reputation, I'll be happy to show you the file on the case."

"I appreciate the courtesy, Chief, but that won't be necessary. I'm not here to look over your shoulder or question your work. I'm sure your inquest, or investigation, was thorough, considering the evidence and what you had to go on."

"Then what-?"

"I came here to offer you information I'm sure you didn't have when you conducted your investigation. It might raise some questions in your mind and cause you to reconsider your original finding."

"What information?"

"Michael wasn't exactly a boating enthusiast, Chief; he hated the water. He wouldn't have gone out on the Hudson or any other body of water on a battleship, much less paddling in a canoe."

Mosely thought about it, said, "That's interesting."

"Yeah. Interesting."

He thought about it some more as he absently tapped the fingers of his right hand on the top of the desk. "Sometimes people with phobias like that will purposely do something risky to force their fear out in the open in order to try to face it down," he said at last.

"Michael didn't have a phobia of water, Chief. He just hated it. As a matter of fact, he was a strong swimmer, and he'd done some ocean sailing at one point in his life. Fifteen years ago he was living on a houseboat in Island City with his wife and three small children. Some leftover garbage from the Symbionese Liberation Army, friends of people he'd helped put into prison, found out where he was living and decided to pay him a visit. They blew up his houseboat with a few pounds of plastique. Michael wasn't aboard at the time, but his wife and three children were. He got back just in time to watch the police and Coast Guard picking bloody chunks out of the water with fish nets."

"Oh, God," Mosely said softly.

"An experience like that tends to leave a mark on you, Chief. After that, he couldn't stand to be near any large body of water; I suppose he'd look at the surface and still see parts of his family there. So there's no way I see Michael happily paddling a canoe out on the Hudson."

Mosely continued to drum his fingers on the desktop. "I see your point, Frederickson."

"Uh-huh."

"You think he could have committed suicide, maybe chosen that way as a kind of symbolic means of rejoining his family?"

"No. I don't think he committed suicide."

Mosely fixed me with his steel-gray eyes. "You suspect some other explanation?"

“I’ll let you handle the suspecting, Chief. The only reason I'm here is to pass on that bit of information about Michael loathing water. There's no way you could have known that when you found the canoe and Michael's body, but I thought you might like to know that now; not many people knew about it, but I did. If he was out on the water in a canoe, it wasn't for recreational purposes; he would have had to have a good reason. I'm absolutely certain there's more to Michael's death than just an accidental drowning."

Mosely took a notebook out of a drawer in his desk, made a few notes in it. "I appreciate the information, Frederickson."

"I thought you would. Have you heard from the FBI on this yet?"

He shook his head as he studied the notes he had made. "Not a word." He made another note, then looked up at me. "The Bureau may be conducting their own investigation; if they are, I'm not aware of it. But no matter what they're doing, Frederickson, I'm going to be doing some more checking into the matter."

"I'd hoped you would," I said, rising and extending my left hand. "Thanks for your time, Chief."

He stood, shook my hand, then smiled thinly. "And if I didn't check into it further, you would. Am I right?"

"Chief," I said, suppressing a sigh, "you have no idea how much of my own work I have waiting for me back home on my desk. I can't think of any reason why I'd want, or presume, to try to do your work for you."

"I'll be in touch, let you know what else I find out, if anything. Call it professional courtesy."

"Thanks, Chief." I took a business card out of my wallet and handed it to him. Then I walked back across the office and opened the door.

"Frederickson?"

I turned back toward Dan Mosely, who was tapping the eraser of his pencil on top of his notepad. "Yes, Chief?"

"A question. I don't doubt anything you've told me, and your sincere concern is obvious. But is it possible that you didn't know your friend as well as you think?"

"What are you getting at, Chief?"

"If Michael Burana hated water so much, why did he choose to vacation in a riverfront town, and why would he choose to room in a place that's practically on the water?"

I released my grip on the doorknob, took a step back into the room. "What gave you the idea that Michael was in Cairn on vacation?"

Mosely gave a broad shrug of his shoulders, as if the answer were obvious. "Why else would he be here?"

"Christ, Chief, he was here on assignment."

Mosely shook his head. "Assignment? You mean he came to Cairn on Bureau business?"

Suddenly I felt tense, slightly bewildered. I was no longer aware of the pain in my wrist. "You didn't know that?"

"No."

"It's standard procedure for an FBI agent to establish a liaison with local law enforcement officials as soon as he or she begins an assignment."

"That I'm fully aware of, Frederickson," Mosely replied evenly. "The first time I ever laid eyes on Michael Burana was when we responded to a call early Monday morning and fished his body out from between two pilings down by the Tappan Zee Bridge. We made him as FBI from the shield in his wallet. What was his assignment?"

My mouth had gone dry, and I licked my lips and swallowed. It didn't help. "I'm not supposed to know."

"But you do."

"He was supposed to install wiretaps and conduct a mail surveillance. The whole business was probably illegal, but Michael's boss was never much concerned with minor technicalities like that."

"Who was he supposed to be conducting this surveillance on?"

"The Community of Conciliation."

Mosely abruptly dropped his pencil on top of the pad, leaned forward on his desk, and shook his head. Just before he turned his face away, I saw him smile.

"What's so funny?" I asked tersely.

When he looked at me, his smile was almost-but not quite-gone. "Sorry, Frederickson," he said evenly. "I don't mean to seem insensitive, but your friend must have been one hell of an agent and had one sweet-talking silver tongue. Either that, or he told you some things that may not have been exactly true. The Community of Conciliation owns a donated mansion on the north side of town, right on the river. That's where Michael Burana was staying, and that's where the canoe the Westchester police found came from. Some surveillance. Our investigation showed that the first thing Michael Burana did when he arrived in town was go to that mansion. And they let him in. That's where he stayed from his very first night in town."

The muscles in my stomach and between my shoulder blades had begun to flutter. "What did the people at the Community have to say about all this?"

"Goddamn little. They described him as an old friend."

"That's all?"

"They verified what I just told you, but they didn't have much else to say. The Cairn Police Department and the Community of Conciliation don't exactly form a mutual admiration society. It was a woman there who described him as an old friend."

"What woman, Chief?"

"Mary Tree."

No one had ever said civic duty and loyalty to friends were always easy, I thought as I walked back up the steeply inclined streets of Cairn toward my motel on 9W. I'd come to the river hamlet to unload some information that I'd hoped might raise a question or two in the minds of the local authorities who'd originally investigated Michael Burana's death in a supposed boating accident. The chief of police had fielded my modest offering with a gracious thank-you and tip of the hat, and then proceeded to unload on me in return a whole barrelful of questions for me to ponder. Instead of easing, my dilemma had grown more complicated.

I had no reason to think that Dan Mosely was lying, since most of what he'd told me would be relatively easy to check out. However, Michael Burana's behavior from the day he arrived in Cairn to the time of his death, as described by Mosely, didn't begin to match the profile of the topflight FBI agent who had sat in my living room until three in the morning getting drunk while he poured out his disappointment, rage, and sense of shame at the same time as he poured down my Irish whiskey.

It had been two weeks before, one week before he was scheduled to set up shop in Cairn in order to spy on the Community of Conciliation. His superior, Edward J. Hendricks, was deliberately trying to humiliate him, he'd said, and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it. I'd reluctantly agreed with him on both points. He hadn't mentioned anything about visiting an old friend, and he certainly hadn't seemed in any mood to set aside a soul-deep aversion to water in order to go paddling in a canoe on the Hudson River.

The RestEasy Motel was a horseshoe-shaped affair, three building units trisected by two narrow promenades lined with vending machines. Only two of the units were being used, and the area around the third unit, including its adjacent promenade, was only dimly lighted. I had a room on the second floor of the middle unit, with the entrance at the rear, off the parking lot. To get to it I cut across the lawn and headed up the second, dim promenade. With my mind thrumming along at a fairly rapid pace, distracted by the questions raised by Dan Mosely, I had virtually dismissed Gregory Trex from my mind-failing, of course, to take into account the fact that he might feel he had further business to discuss with me, and that it wouldn't take a lot of phone calls by a genius to find out where a certain dwarf was staying.

Trex caught me completely by surprise, stepping out behind me from the shadow within a shadow between an ice maker and a soda machine near the end of the promenade, and delivering a whack to my left arm, just above the elbow, with something that felt like an iron rod. The blow knocked me sideways, off my feet. There was an explosion of white-hot pain, and the whole arm went numb virtually before I'd hit the ground and rolled on my right side. Immediately I rolled again, this time forward, over the curb and into the parking lot. I came up in a crouch, right arm and foot forward to protect my damaged left arm, which was hanging limp at my side.

Gregory Trex, still dressed in his tank top, camouflage fatigues, and black sneakers, stepped down off the curb, stopped about five yards away. His too-bright jade-green eyes, the polished mahogany of the rock-hard nunchaku sticks he carried, and the foot-long steel chain connecting the sticks all gleamed in the light from a floodlamp set on the balcony of the second unit, just above my head. I backed up a step, tentatively shrugged my left shoulder; welcome pain stabbed through it. I could tell the arm wasn't broken-but the triceps had received a severe banging, and it was going to be some time before the arm would condescend to do anything for me.

Trex's puffy lips curled back, revealing his small, gapped teeth. He took another step forward, whirling his nunchaku sticks over his head and at his sides, apparently to demonstrate his expertise, and not incidentally to put a good scare into me.

What I had in me was a good mad, despite the fact that I had no one but myself to blame for Trex getting the drop on me. I had a mountain of paperwork to attend to, and, thanks to Gregory Trex, it was beginning to look like I was going to have to do it holding the pencil in my mouth. I glanced up and around. While there was no one in the darkened unit to my left, there were people in my unit and the one beyond that. Trex apparently wasn't concerned about being seen, since he didn't believe the police would do a damn thing. It occurred to me that in some dark corridor of his decidedly primitive mind he might prefer that there be witnesses, so that word would get around town that I'd gotten my comeuppance. He might even be satisfied now and walk away if somebody else arrived on the scene; he'd already accomplished what he'd come to do. I suspected that I might be able to rouse some attention if I started shouting, but I really wasn't interested in attention or help. I was interested in putting a good hurt on Gregory Trex, who was proving to be a real pain in the ass; he'd seriously inconvenienced me and managed to make me very angry.

How I was going to accomplish this particular feat of laying some serious hurt on the other man wasn't clear to me at the moment, but I was damn well determined to find a way to do it.

"How does that feel, dwarf?" Trex said in a piping voice that sounded surprisingly high-pitched for a man of his bulk.

"Actually, Gregory, it's kind of hard to tell," I replied, keeping my gaze fixed on the nunchaku sticks he held. "Right now, my arm doesn't have much feeling in it, but I suspect it's going to smart like hell. What kind of a chickenshit war hero are you, anyway, ambushing me from behind? Did you ever see Chuck Norris pick on someone smaller than he was?"

His expression changed slightly, and something that actually looked like hurt passed over his thick features; I'd bruised his feelings by bringing up the subject of our disproportionate sizes. It occurred to me then that Gregory Trex, in addition to being a murderous young thug, might be more than moderately retarded.

"You made a fool out of me," he said in a whiny tone. "You hit me from behind, so I hit you from behind."

"I goosed you, Gregory, for Christ's sake. You tried to take off my head back there, and you could've broken my arm here."

"I could have killed you," he said in the same whiny tone. "You suckered me. I can't let anybody get away with that."

I tested my left arm again, found that feeling was continuing to return. It hurt like hell, but I suspected I would at least be able to wag it in Trex's face in a pinch. I also suspected that Gregory Trex, who hadn't even been able to make it in the army, was totally ineffectual at virtually everything in life except beating up people, and I found I was actually beginning to feel a little sorry for the dunce standing in front of me. I overcame it.

"Now, now, Gregory. Don't you know that nunchaku sticks are illegal?"

"Nothing's going to happen to me, dwarf. People saw what you did to me; I got a right to pay you back. Maybe I'll get chewed out real good, but that's all. People will figure you got what you deserve, the same as they figure I was giving them fucking communists outside the art gallery what they deserve. Somebody's gotta stand up for this country and show the communists we're not all weirdos and fags."

"Still, Gregory, nunchaku sticks are provocative. You know what I mean? A man could get into trouble just by carrying them around."

"I told you, dwarf: the cops won't do anything but chew me out."

"Ooh, dear boy, I think you miss my point."

Now it was Trex who was looking around, apparently disappointed that nobody had come around to witness my left arm dangling at my side, his handiwork. I decided that if I was going to make a move, it had better be quick, before anybody arrived on the scene and gave Trex an excuse to walk away, or before he decided it was safe to take another whack at me. So I started to run, just to see what he would do.

Naturally he ran after me.

I'd already seen that Trex was quick, which is not the same as fast. He was not exactly fleet of foot, and, despite the fact that I was clutching my left arm to keep it from flopping and being further aggravated, I found that I had to slow down as I approached the end of the darkened third unit so that I wouldn't get too far ahead of him. I glanced back to make certain he wasn't becoming discouraged in his chase, then rounded the corner and sprinted on the grass in the gloom surrounding the third unit. I ran around the front, glancing back once more to assure myself that Gregory Trex was chugging along, then rounded the third corner and headed up the promenade. I sprinted to the end before Trex could catch sight of me again, ducked into the same space between the ice maker and soda machine where Trex had waited to ambush me.

The poor dunce never slowed as he came lumbering up the promenade. I stuck my foot out as he passed; he went flying through the air and landed flat on his face and stomach on the concrete, narrowly avoiding smashing his skull against a steel support post near the curb. His nunchaku sticks flew out of his grasp and skittered over the concrete into the parking lot, ending up next to a large green dumpster.

With Trex dazed and virtually helpless for the moment, I had a number of options open to me. The quickest and easiest thing to do, of course, would be to kill him, but that seemed a bit extreme. Mulling over other measures proved to be time-consuming, and before I knew it he had managed to get up on his hands and knees. Not wanting to delay things further, I walked around to his right side and smashed my knee into his ear. Down he went again, this time with me on his back. There was no hair to grab, so I raised his head with my left hand on his forehead, planted my right hand on the back of his head, and slammed his face into the sidewalk. That worked quite nicely. He twitched a couple of times, then lay still.

A car pulled into the parking lot of the first unit. Fearing that any sudden move would attract attention, I kept my perch on top of Gregory Trex, waited and watched as a couple and their three young children got out and walked into a room on the ground floor. Nobody glanced in my direction.

It would have been a nice touch to drop Trex into the dumpster, but my right wrist and left arm hurt too much to even drag him over to it, much less perform the Herculean task of lifting him up over the edge. I settled for retrieving the nunchaku sticks from beside the dumpster and draping them neatly over the back of his neck. Then I took a bucket of ice from the ice maker, went up to my room on the second floor of the second unit, and made an anonymous call to the Cairn Volunteer Ambulance Service to report an unconscious man in the parking lot of the RestEasy Motel.

I poured myself a generous drink from a bottle of Scotch I'd brought with me, then dumped the ice into the bathroom sink in order to soak my badly bruised left upper arm. The ambulance service was in the parking lot in less than four minutes. I took my drink out onto the balcony and stood back in the shadows, watching the commotion below me and to my right; attendants loaded the still-unconscious Trex into a waiting ambulance, and two police officers who'd arrived on the scene began interviewing guests who had emerged from their rooms in response to the sirens and flashing lights. It seemed no one had witnessed a dwarf perpetrator; I didn't get any visitors. After the ambulance and police cars pulled away, I went back into my room to soak my arm some more in the ice water and then to take a hot shower. I had another drink, took two aspirin, then went to bed and fell asleep almost immediately.