Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [103]
The money orders were always from Vonda-something—the last names were always different. And they were always for the maximum amount the institution allowed. I always wrote to the return address, but the mail always came back. So I knew that it had to be Lune. And that he’d learned some tricks.
I had my own wires, too. I’d catch something about Lune every once in a while. Not by name. But there’d be something in the whisper-stream about an organization that did “forecasting.” You gave them the known facts, and they’d work out “scenarios” on a “probabilities scale” for you. Something a team of entrepreneurs could use, if they were thinking of opening a new restaurant. Or an armored car on its way to the bank.
When I finally saw him again, he was in Cleveland, a whole crew working with him. I couldn’t tell exactly what they were working on, but it all had something to do with “patterns.” They were like a gang of crazed journalists, gathering facts at random, checking and rechecking and cross-checking them until Lune pronounced them “authentic.” Then they got to be pieces on this giant chessboard in Lune’s head.
And when it was all done, he could predict white’s next move as easy as black’s. But all he did was watch; he never played.
The people who followed him weren’t his partners. I mean, maybe they were, financially or something. But they were all looking for answers. And they believed that if they learned Lune’s patterning methods they could find what they needed.
It wasn’t that Lune could deconstruct assassinations of major public figures, tell you who did them, and why. Anyone can have a theory. But Lune told his people that the murders were going down before they happened. He could explain why Albert DeSalvo wasn’t the Boston Strangler. And why Xerox was going to be a dominator when it was still a two-dollar stock.
I never asked Lune what had happened in all the years we hadn’t been in touch. I didn’t have to ask him if he ever found his parents—he greeted me by telling me he was still looking. Getting closer all the time. But I’d been right about one thing: whatever problems Lune still had, money wasn’t one of them.
He didn’t ask me what I’d been up to. Never even mentioned Wesley’s name. I’d come all the way to that waterfront warehouse because I was looking for a roll of 8mm film. And the man who had it.
Lune treated it like a training exercise. He brought his whole crew in there. Told me to tell them everything I knew. Then he kind of vaguely pointed at the others, and they started to ask me questions. In a few minutes, I realized I knew a lot more than I thought I had. They were like a pack of starved rats, rooting through concrete to get to grain stored on the other side of the wall. Grain they knew was there. They sliced and diced my narrative, culling “authenticated” facts from the rest of what I told them. And then they started on “patterning,” using index cards and pushpins on a whole wall covered in cork.
When that was done, they all split. “Fieldwork,” Lune explained. I guess some of it was done on the phone, but I know some of them took off, too. And didn’t come back for a few days.
It took almost two weeks. When Lune assembled them all again, they told me there was a “high-eighties probability” that the man I was looking for would be in a rooming house in Youngstown, Ohio. Lune told me I could move the probability into the high nineties if I wanted one of his crew to make a little trip … carrying the photo I’d brought with me.
Youngstown is maybe an hour and a half, two hours from Cleveland. I told Lune I’d go look for myself. If it didn’t work out, I’d come back.
Lune told me his operation was mobile: they could be gone tomorrow. But he gave me a bunch of ways to get in touch.
The man with the film was right where they said he’d be. And he never saw me coming.
Now it was a lifetime later. And there was Lune. The beautiful