Free The Killing Kind by John Connolly Page B

have to pay a personal call on the Fellowship, although I guessed from Ms. Torrance's tone that a visit from me would be about as welcome as a whorehouse in Disneyland.
    Something had been nagging at me since reading the police report on the contents of the car, so I picked up the phone and called Curtis Peltier.
    “Mr. Peltier,” I asked, “do you recall if either Marcy Becker or Ali Wynn smoked.”
    He paused before answering. “Y'know, I think they both did at that, but there's something else you should know. Grace's thesis wasn't just a general one: she had a specific interest in one religious group. They were called the Aroostook Baptists. You ever hear of them?”
    “I don't think so.”
    “The community disappeared in nineteen sixty-four. A lot of folks just assumed they'd given up and gone somewhere else, somewhere warmer and more hospitable.”
    “I'm sorry, Mr. Peltier, I don't see the point.”
    “These people, they were also known as the Eagle Lake Baptists.”
    I recalled the news reports from the north of the state, the photographs in the newspapers of figures moving behind crime scene tape, the howling of the animals.
    “The bodies found in the north,” I said quietly.
    “I'd have told you when you were here, but I only just saw the TV reports,” he said. “I think it's them. I think they've found the Aroostook Baptists.”
    3
    THEY COME NOW, the dark angels, the violent ones, their wings black against the sun, their swords unsheathed. They move remorselessly through the great mass of humanity: purging, taking, killing.
    They are no part of us.
    The Manhattan North Homicide Squad is regarded as an elite group within the NYPD, operating out of an office at 120 East 119th Street. Each member has spent years as a precinct detective before being handpicked for homicide duty. They are experienced investigators, their gold shields bearing the hallmarks of long service. The most junior members probably have twenty years behind them. The more senior members have been around for so long that jokes have accreted to them like barnacles to the prows of old ships. As Michael Lansky, who was the senior detective on the squad when I was a rookie patrolman, used to say, “When I started in homicide, the Dead Sea was just sick.”
    My father was himself a policeman, until the day he took his own life. I used to worry about my father. That was what you did when you were a policeman's son, or anyway, that was what I did. I loved him; I was envious of him—of his uniform, of his power, of the camaraderie of his friends; but I also worried about him. I worried about him all the time. New York in the 1970s wasn't like New York now: policemen were dying on the streets in ever greater numbers, exterminated like roaches. You saw it in the newspapers and on the TV, and I saw it reflected in my mother's eyes every time the doorbell rang late at night while my father was on duty. She didn't want to become another PBA widow. She just wanted her husband to come home, alive and complaining, at the end of every tour. He felt the strain too; he kept a bottle of Mylanta in his locker to fight the heartburn he endured almost every day, until eventually something snapped inside him and it all came to a violent end.
    My father had only occasional contact with Manhattan North Homicide. Mostly, he watched them as they passed by while he held the crowds back or guarded the door, checking shields and IDs. Then, one stiflingly hot July day in 1980, shortly before he died, he was called to a modest apartment on Ninety-fourth Street and Second Avenue rented by a woman named Marilyn Hyde, who worked as an insurance investigator in midtown.
    Her sister had called on her and smelled something foul coming-from inside the apartment. When she tried to gain entry using a spare key given to her by Marilyn, she found that the lock had been jammed up with adhesive and informed the super, who immediately notified the police. My father, who had been