The Burning Soul by John Connolly Page A

element to his testimony, but I was not entirely certain that it had been solely for our benefit.
    ‘He’s lying,’ I said.
    ‘About what?’
    ‘I don’t know. I was watching him while he spoke, and there was something in the way he told his story. It was too polished , like he’d been preparing it for years in his head, waiting for the chance to perform it.’
    ‘Maybe he has been. It was a turning point in his life – the worst thing that he’s ever done, or ever will do. It wouldn’t be surprising if he returned to it again and again, and constructed his own version of the crime and its aftermath. After all, he’s probably been trying to explain it to himself for years when he hasn’t been explaining it to cops or therapists.’
    ‘A version,’ I said.
    ‘What?’
    ‘You described it as a “version.” That’s all it is. The only people who really know what went on in that barn are Randall Haight, Lonny Midas, and Selina Day, and the only one we’ve heard from is Randall Haight, who says that it wasn’t his fault, that he tried to stop the killing from happening, but Lonny Midas was too strong.’
    ‘Do we accept that that’s how we should think of him – as Randall Haight and not William Lagenheimer?’
    ‘That’s an interesting question. How does he see himself?’
    ‘I notice that you didn’t ask.’
    ‘I didn’t ask because I don’t think that it matters, for now. For your purposes, and in the eyes of his fellow citizens, he’s Randall Haight. For the most part, I imagine that’s how he thinks of himself. He’s had to accept the reality of his new identity, and whatever imagined history goes along with it, in order to survive.’
    She made a note to herself on her legal pad, then let the subject go.
    ‘He could be telling the truth about what happened in the barn,’ she said. ‘You’re questioning details instead of substance. Randall Haight is not denying his partial culpability for the death of Selina Day.’
    ‘Sure, he could be telling the truth, but if I’d been involved in the death of a young girl and could shift some of the blame onto the shoulders of another, I would.’
    ‘No, you wouldn’t,’ said Aimee. ‘Someone else, maybe, but not you.’
    ‘Why do you say that? I don’t believe I’m so honorable.’
    ‘Honor is just part of it. Self-torment is the rest.’
    She said it with a smile, but it didn’t make what she had said any less sincerely meant. God preserve me, I thought, from dime-store psychologists, especially cloaked in lawyers’ garb.
    ‘He was fourteen,’ I said. ‘I never killed anyone when I was fourteen. If I had, I don’t know for sure how I would have reacted afterward.’
    ‘This is all beside the point.’
    ‘Is it?’
    ‘You know it is. Someone is taunting Randall Haight with their knowledge of what he did as a boy. At the same time, a fourteen-year-old girl has gone missing in Pastor’s Bay. The similarities are troubling.’
    I saw my daughter staring up at me, and heard her asking me to find Anna Kore. I looked at my hands, and perceived the ghost of a cross made from sticks and twigs. Around my neck hung a smaller version of the same symbol: a Byzantine bronze pilgrim’s cross. Sometimes we have to be reminded of our obligations to others, even at a cost to ourselves.
    ‘Because,’ I said, ‘if whoever has figured out Randall Haight’s identity gave a damn about Anna Kore they’d have gone to the police with what they know: The convicted killer of a fourteen-year-old girl is living in the same town from which another fourteen-year-old girl has recently gone missing. Instead, they’re sending him pictures of barn doors and waiting to see how he responds.’
    ‘Part of me still thinks it could be a prelude to a blackmail attempt.’
    ‘Then he should go to the police.’
    ‘If he goes to the police, they’ll make him a suspect.’
    ‘Or rule him out of the investigation, if he can answer all of their questions and if