Page 7 of The Furies

“What about those two New York swishes, you give up hanging on their coattails yet?” He peered over my shoulder. “I don’t see them around and”—he sniffed ostentatiously—“I don’t smell cheap perfume.”

“You strike me as an altered character, Raum,” I said, “but not an improved one.”

It wasn’t the tattoos alone, or the teeth, or the musculature. At first I thought he might be juiced, because he was radiating a strange energy, but his eyes didn’t have that telltale brightness. In fact, for all his bluster, they betrayed uncertainty, like a man who suddenly discovers that the ground beneath his feet is not as stable as he once recalled.

“Time changes us all,” he said.

“Prison has made a philosopher of you. But what I meant was that I don’t recall you being so brave back when you were trying to roll old ladies, and Louis was forced to stick a gun in your mouth to make you stop.”

“I remember,” said Raum. “I’ve filed it away for future reference.”

“I’ll be sure to make Louis aware of that. You know, you got drool on his nice, clean barrel. Next time, he’ll bring an old gun to check the quality of your bridgework. In the meantime, don’t come back to the Bear. It’s not your kind of place—unless you came here to see someone, in which case it’s not their kind of place, either.”

Raum set down the bottle, still half-full. He stood and rolled his shoulders, a prizefighter waiting for the bell.

“No, I got no one to meet, not here, and I was leaving anyway. Like you say, it’s not my kind of place.” He waggled a finger at me. “But it may be that you and I will knock heads somewhere that is my kind of place, somewhere nice and dark, when there’s no one around to fight your battles for you.”

“Just you and me, Raum?” I said. “Sure, I’ll take those odds.”

He grinned, and somewhere a puppy died.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I learned a lot these last few years. When we meet, you’ll be alone, but I’ll have my friends with me.”

“You don’t have any friends,” I said, “except the imaginary kind, and they’re no good in a fight.”

“We’ll see, when the time comes.”

I was done with him. He’d stopped being interesting the day he was born.

“You take care, Raum,” I said. “I’d hate to see nothing happen to you.”

* * *

I RETURNED TO SCARBOROUGH in driving rain. A truck had jackknifed on Route 1 and the traffic was all backed up, so I listened to 1st Wave on Sirius while I watched the police light show. 1st Wave finished on a Smiths song, but I couldn’t listen to the Smiths in the same way anymore, not since Morrissey had turned into one of the people he used to despise, so I turned off the radio and drove the rest of the way in silence.

Later, with only shadows for company, I regretted permitting Raum Buker to get under my skin so quickly. He was an evolutionary blip, but no more than that. The jails were full of men like him—and the cemeteries, too, nature ultimately finding a way to cull the anomalies from the herd. Yet experience had taught me not to ignore sensations of unease. When I’d done so in the past, I’d been wrong. When I’d paid attention, it had left me better prepared for what was to come. So I drew a circle of my own around Raum, isolating the pentagram of his form, and listened for trouble’s song.

CHAPTER VIII

Beth Ann Robbin was waiting outside the Ellerkamp house with Condell when Marie arrived the next morning, the detective named Gardner presumably being otherwise occupied. It hadn’t escaped Marie’s notice that before leaving the previous night, and just as he appeared to be on the verge of vacating her doorstep, Condell had asked to check the system record on her alarm panel, because, as he put it, “if we don’t do it now, someone may ask later why we didn’t.” Marie presumed that confirmation of her presence in bed, and at her husband’s side, meant she was definitely no longer a suspect, which was a relief. Then again, it bothered her somewhat that all the time Condell had been sitting at her kitchen table, he might have been viewing her as someone potentially capable of feeding coins to an old man until he choked to death.

An Athens PD patrol car was stationed in the driveway, the cop at the wheel reading a newspaper. Marie had watched the local TV reports about the murder the previous night, and again before leaving the house, but none of them had mentioned the manner of Edwin Ellerkamp’s demise. She supposed the police were trying to keep that quiet for as long as possible so as not to draw the crazies.

She followed the two officers into the house, and together they began a room-by-room check. Beth Ann told Marie that the crime scene technicians had worked through the night, so it was okay to touch stuff, although she was given gloves and plastic booties to wear as a precaution. They started upstairs and worked their way down, but as far as Marie could tell, the rooms looked much as they always had. Some of them she rarely entered, as they were not in use, Edwin preferring to limit his domain to his bedroom, the kitchen, the living room, and the dining room. The latter two spaces were connected by a pair of double doors that were never closed, and the dining table had long since been removed. The area had served as Edwin’s library, study, and TV room, and was where he spent the preponderance of his time. It was left until last.

The first thing Marie noticed was that the open safe was now empty.

“We decided it wouldn’t be wise to leave it as it was,” said Condell, when she mentioned this. “We had an expert come in from the Philadelphia Mint to advise us, and just by looking she pointed out a bunch of stuff that ought to be under lock and key. Mr. Ellerkamp had a lot of very valuable coins. We could be talking about high six, even low seven figures.”

Marie was shocked. She’d often wondered how much the collection might be worth, but her best guess had been at least 50 percent shy.

Condell had a file under his arm, and from it he produced a series of photographs of the room, taken before Edwin’s body had been removed. That way, Marie could check any anomalies against the photos to determine if they were a result of police activity or something else. Marie went over the room slowly, trying to balance her memories of it against what she was seeing now, all the time with the awareness of what had happened there. The couch on which Edwin had died was gone, taken away for further analysis. Four round depressions on the carpet marked the position it had once occupied, and blood spots served as a reminder, were one required, of its owner’s final torment.

Marie stood before the fireplace, where a gilt nineteenth-century mirror reflected the room back at her. It had always been a bitch to clean, requiring a ladder and a good sense of balance, but she was unlikely to have to worry about it anymore. She was turning away from it when a mark caught her eye.

“There,” she said. “That’s new.”

She pointed at a blemish in the bottom-left corner of the mirror.

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