The Silent Hour Read online

  The Silent Hour

  Michael Koryta

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  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are

  either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin's Publishing Group.

  The Silent Hour. Copyright © 2009 by Michael Koryta. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  For information, address St. Martin's Press,

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  First Edition: August 2009

  * * *

  To Don Johnson and Trace Investigations—

  with deepest gratitude

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book and its predecessors wouldn't have existed without the faith, hard work, and keen eye of Peter Wolverton, who has been both an editor and a friend, and I'm deeply indebted. Thank you, Pete, and thanks to everyone else at St. Martin's, Minotaur Books, and Thomas Dunne—Andy Martin, Thomas Dunne, Matthew Shear, Katie Gilligan, Elizabeth Byrne, Hector Dejean, and all the rest.

  Much gratitude is also due to:

  David Hale Smith, agent extraordinaire.

  George Lichman of the Rocky River Police Department, a friend and helpful resource.

  Laura Lane not only offered a critical eye to the early pages but guided me to the genesis of the story several years ago. She had no idea of this, of course, but deserves credit nevertheless.

  A pair of deeply valued early readers: Bob Hammel and Christine Caya.

  Michael Connelly, for countless kindnesses.

  Dennis Lehane, with a standard but important additional note of thanks to his Writers in Paradise conference at Eckerd College, www.writersin paradise.com.

  Tom Bunger, who answered a lot of truly strange legal questions involving the missing, the dead, and their homes. If you're missing or dead and you have a home, I'd suggest you call Tom.

  The many booksellers and friends who have been gracious hosts over the years, including but certainly not limited to Jim Haung, Robin and Jamie Agnew, Richard Katz, Jon and Ruth Jordan, Steve Stilwell, Barbara Peters, Otto Penzler, John and Toni Cross, Mike Bursaw, and so many others.

  A motley band of assorted generous folks: Dr. J. D. Headdy, Ridley Pearson, George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman, Gena Asher, Lawrence Rose, Brad Petrigala, Tony Mitchell, George Juergens, Louise Thurtell, Robert Pepin, Roger Levesque, and my family.

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  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  PART TWO

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  PART THREE

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  * * *

  PART ONE

  WHISPER RIDGE

  * * *

  Chapter One

  He'd sharpened his knife just an hour before the killing. The police, prosecutor, and media would all later make great use of this fact. Premeditation, they said. Proof of intent, they said. Cold-blooded murder, they said.

  All Parker Harrison had to say was that he often sharpened his knife in the evening.

  It wasn't much of a defense.

  Harrison, an unemployed groundskeeper at the time of his arrest for murder, took a guilty plea that gave him a term of life in prison but allowed the possibility of parole, the sort of sentence that seems absurd to normal people but apparently makes sense to lawyers.

  The guilty plea prevented a trial, and that meant Harrison's tenure as the media's villain of the moment was short-lived. Some editors and TV anchors around the state no doubt grumbled when they saw he was going to disappear quietly behind bars, taking a good bloody story with him. On the day of his arrest, he'd offered something special. Something none of them had seen before.

  The victim was a man named John Maxwell, who was the new boyfriend of Harrison's former lover, Molly Nelson. The killing occurred in Nelson's rental house in the hills south of Xenia, Ohio, a town made infamous for a devastating tornado that occurred the same year Harrison went to high school, destroying homes, schools, and churches while killing thirty-four people and leaving nearly ten thousand—including the Harrison family—homeless. It wasn't the first storm of breathtaking malevolence to pass through the little town: The Shawnee had named the area "place of the devil winds" more than a century earlier. The winds certainly touched Harrison's life, and a few decades later the locals would claim the devil clearly had, too. A Xenia native who was half Shawnee, Harrison had been separated from Nelson for more than a year before he returned to town and they reunited for one night together. It was passionate and borderline violent, beginning in a shouting match and culminating in intercourse on the floor. Evidence technicians later agreed that the abrasions found on Harrison's knees were rug burns from that night and had no relevance to the killing that took place two days later.

  After the night of sex and shouting, Nelson told Harrison she was done with him, that it was time to move on. Time to move away. Get out of town, she said; find something else to occupy your attention.

  Apparently she didn't convince him. Harrison returned to her house two nights later, hoping, he would say, for more conversation. The police would insist he returned with murder on his mind and a recently sharpened knife in his truck. Harrison's story, of an argument that the new boyfriend turned into a physical contest, was never proved or disproved because there was no trial. What went undisputed was the result of the night: Harrison punched Nelson once in the jaw as she went for the phone, interrupting her as she hit the last of those three digits needed to summon help, and then turned on Maxwell and killed him with the knife. Harrison disconnected the phone, but a police car had already been dispatched, and a single sheriff's deputy entered the house through an open side door to find Nelson unconscious and Harrison sitting on the kitchen floor beside Maxwell's body, his cupped hands cradling a pool of blood. He was attempting, he said, to put the blood back into the corpse. To return it to Maxwell, to restore him to life. He was, he said, probably in shock.

  That detail, of the attempt to return the blood, added a new twist on a classic smal
l-town horror story, and the crime received significant media coverage. Front-page articles in the papers, precious minutes on the TV news. The murder was well documented, but I don't remember it. I was an infant when Harrison was arrested, and his name meant nothing to me until almost three decades later, when the letters started.

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  Chapter Two

  He wrote me for the first time in the winter, about two weeks after my partner, Joe Pritchard, left for Florida. I remember that because my first instinct was to laugh out loud, and I was disappointed that there was nobody around to share my amusement. It was a crazy letter from a crazy killer who was already back on the streets. That life sentence only held him for fifteen years. He'd been out for thirteen when he made contact with me, sent a letter explaining that he had a matter of "grave importance" to discuss, but wanted to tell me his personal history before we met. It was an issue of honesty, he wrote. He had recently learned the importance of total honesty, of accountability, and therefore he would not hide from his history. He proceeded to describe, in a formal, matter-of-fact fashion, the crime he'd committed and the time he'd served, then left a phone number and asked that I call him when I was ready to meet.

  The letter went into the trash without ceremony, and no call was made. More than a month passed before the second one arrived. This time, Harrison was more insistent and even stranger. He wrote that he'd followed my career in the newspapers and believed that I had been chosen for his task. He knew this must sound strange, but I needed to believe him, needed to meet with him just one time. There was talk of me being not a detective but a storyteller. Harrison had a story, and he needed to know the ending. No one could tell the ending but me. Was I intrigued—

  I was not.

  This time I considered burning the letter, or tearing it to shreds, but then decided that was too much of a gesture. Instead, I tucked it back into its envelope and tossed it into the garbage. Four companions soon found their way to a similar demise in the months that followed. Harrison was growing more persistent, writing so often that I at least took the time to look into his background to see what sort of psychopath I was dealing with. I considered contacting his parole officer but never did. His correspondence, while annoying, also seemed harmless.

  He gave up on the letter campaign and decided to arrive in person on an unusually warm afternoon in the first week of May. I was in the office and engaged in critical business—browsing the ESPN Web site and pondering what lunch should be—when there was a single soft knock on the door. Walk-in business isn't just infrequent at our agency; it's nonexistent. There's no sign on the building, and that's by design. Joe had a theory about walk-in clients being the sort you wanted to avoid in this business, so we kept a low profile.

  I pushed back from the desk, crossed the room, and opened the door to face a man who couldn't have stood an inch above five-six. He had a thick build, the natural sort rather than a weight-room product, and his hair was cut very close to his skull. There was one scar on his face, a dark imprint high on his cheekbone, offsetting a pair of coal-colored eyes that were fastened on my own.

  "Mr. Perry." It wasn't a question; he knew who I was.

  "Yes—"

  "I'm Parker Harrison."

  He saw the look that passed over my face in response.

  "I'm sorry if the letters bothered you," he said. "I didn't want to be a bother. But I also thought… you were a police officer, and I thought maybe the name would mean something to you. So I said, well, better to be up-front about things, right— Then, when you never called, I decided maybe that was a mistake. I was hoping you'd welcome me."

  "Welcome you."

  "Yes."

  We stood there in silence for a moment, and then he made a nod at the interior of the room and said, "Are you going to let me in, or do we have to talk on our feet—"

  "On our feet," I said. "It's not going to take long to finish the conversation, Harrison. I don't investigate thirty-year-old murders committed in front of a witness and then confessed to. Besides, you're already out. You did some time and now you're done. So what's the goal— I don't understand it, and I don't want any part of it."

  For a moment he just stared at me, looking perplexed. Then his face split into a smile, one with some warmth to it.

  "Of course you think that's what I want. Why wouldn't you— I'm sorry about that, Lincoln. May I call you Lincoln— I apologize for your confusion, but the last thing on my mind is my own case. I mean, there isn't a case. As you said, I confessed. That wasn't a joke, something I did for kicks because I wanted to spend my life in prison. I killed that man, Lincoln, killed him and never denied it."

  He must have seen some reaction in my eyes, some hint of the chill that had gone through my stomach, because he stopped talking and frowned.

  "I say that like it's nothing," he said, "but that's not how I feel about it. Not at all. I regret it terribly, would give anything to see him have his life back. So if you hear me talk of it like it's nothing, please understand that's just a product of familiarity. When you spend every day living with the price of destruction—of someone else's life and your own—it becomes awfully familiar."

  He spoke very well, gracefully even. I said, "All right, it seems I misunderstood, but why tell me about your case in that first letter if it's not your current concern—"

  "I told you," he said. "I wanted to be honest."

  I raised my eyebrows. "You know, Harrison, there are some things we all keep to ourselves. If I'd killed somebody with a knife, I'd probably put that one on the list."

  "Are you going to let me in—" he said.

  I hesitated for a moment, then sighed and swung the door open and walked back to my chair behind the desk. He sat across from me, on one of the stadium chairs. He gave it a curious look, as most people do.

  "From the old stadium—"

  I nodded.

  "When I was a child I saw Jim Brown play there," he said.

  "Lots of people did."

  He frowned at that, bothered by my unfriendliness, and said, "I have six thousand dollars. A little more than that, but roughly six thousand. I meant to lead off with that, do this properly, with the retainer and all."

  "I'm not really looking for work right now, Harrison. Pretty backed up, actually."

  He looked at my desk then, perhaps noting the absence of paperwork, and I reached out and turned the computer monitor to hide the ESPN screen. Like I said, pretty backed up.

  "I read about you in the papers," he said.

  "Terrific. I wasn't real happy about being in them."

  "I felt the same way when I made the front page."

  I cocked my head and stared at him. "Is that supposed to be amusing—"

  "No, it's supposed to be serious."

  Neither of us said anything for a minute. I was studying him, that scar on his cheek and the steel in his eyes. He had a soft voice. Too soft for the eyes and the scar.

  "When I read about you," he said, "I knew you were the right person for this. I knew it. You've shown compassion for people who have done wrong. You've done wrong yourself."

  He seemed to want a response to that, but I didn't offer one. After a pause, he spoke again.

  "I knew that you wouldn't treat me as worthless, as diseased, simply because one day I made a terrible mistake and somebody died."

  A terrible mistake and somebody died. That was one way to phrase it. I pushed back from the desk and hooked one ankle over my knee, keeping my silence.

  "You're looking at me with distaste," he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  "It bothers you very much. Being in this room with me, knowing that someone died at my hand."

  "Being in the room doesn't bother me. Knowing that you killed someone does. Are you surprised by that—"

  "You've never killed anyone, I take it—"

  My hesitation provided his answer, and I disliked the look of satisfaction that passed over his face. Yes, I'd killed, but it was a hell of a lo
t different than what Harrison had done. Wasn't it— Of course it was. He'd murdered someone in a rage. I'd killed in self-defense—and never reported the death.

  "Mr. Harrison, I'd like you to go on your way. I'm just not interested in continuing this conversation, or in doing any work for you. I'm sorry if that upsets you. There are plenty of PIs in this town, though. Go on and talk to another one of them, and do yourself a favor this time and keep the murder story quiet."

  "You won't work for me."

  "That's correct."

  "Because I told you that I killed someone."

  I was getting a dull headache behind my temples and wanted him out of my office. Instead of speaking, I just lifted my hand and pointed at the door. He looked at me for a long time and then got to his feet. He turned to the door, then looked back at me.

  "Do you believe that prison can change someone—" he said.

  "I'm sure that it does."

  "I mean change them in the way that it is supposed to. Could it rehabilitate them—"

  I didn't answer.

  "You either don't believe that or you aren't sure," he said. "Yet you were a police officer. You sent people to prison. Shouldn't you have believed in that idea, then—"

  "I believe that we don't have any better ideas in place at the current time. Does that satisfy you—"

  "The question is, does it satisfy you, Lincoln."

  "If all you wanted was a discussion about the system, you could have had it with your parole officer."

  "I didn't want a discussion about the system. I wanted you to treat me like a functioning member of society. You've chosen not to do that."

  I rubbed a hand over my eyes, thinking that I should have left for lunch ten minutes earlier.

  "Prison didn't rehabilitate me," he said, "but another place did. Some other people did."

  He was still standing there, hadn't moved for the door, and now I gave up. It apparently would be easier to hear him out than throw him out.