The Language of Cannibals Read online

  “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.”

  “It’s 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 age
nt,” 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 h
im 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.