Read The Lonely Dead for Free Online Page A

that. He followed me north to Montana, coming to Dyersburg when I decided to take the risk and visit the remains of my parents' house. By then it was a month after their death and the explosion up in the mountains, and I hoped life had moved on or at least that no one realized I was stupid enough to do such a thing. I passed the Best Western, where I'd stayed in the days before and after my parents' funeral and first watched a videotape which entirely dismantled what I thought I'd known about my childhood. Finally I doubled back and drove up to the mountainside residential streets where their house had been. I parked a hundred yards down the street and walked the rest of the way. On the first pass I walked right by, doing nothing but noting little had been done to protect the interior from the damage that a pipe bomb had done. On the way back I pushed the gate open and walked confidently up to the house. I was ready to be a loss adjuster, cop, or extremely optimistic Jehovah's Witness, whichever seemed most likely to make someone back off. None proved necessary. I looked around the house for a little while, picking up a few small items that reminded me of them, and then left. It was not their real house. That was in Hunter's Rock, the town where I grew up and thought I had been born. Walking around this shell brought little but out-of-kilter sadness, as if I had missed a train which wasn't even the one I'd planned on taking.
    John Zandt called me one night and we went out to Yakima. Our friend Nina pulled the original tip out of the slush pile and re-forwarded it to the Yakima bureau, but it seemed to die the moment it left her desk. That was when we knew we were alone in the wilds, that the conspiracy we had uncovered had longer fingers than we'd realized. Not only did they kill people, both individually and en masse, they evidently did so with little fear of retribution.
    After that I ran out of steam. My progress, such as it was, grew slower and slower until I washed up in Relent. I had a cell phone registered in a false name. I had a dead man's laptop and a dwindling supply of bad money. My ribs still hurt from where I'd been knifed by a drug dealer.
    My parents would have been so proud.
    —«»—«»—«»—
    In the end I left the abandoned restaurant and walked into what passed for Relent's main drag. The menu's promises had made me hungry, and all I had in my pockets were some geriatric Teriyaki beef sticks I didn't even remember buying. I found a bar called The Cambridge, run by a middle-aged couple called Bob and Sue, him bearded and affable, her whip-thin and scarily efficient. They were nice but their menu was less enticing than the one in the dead restaurant, and I wound up concentrating on scotch and some local brew that looked like it had been squeezed out of the walls of old buildings but tasted okay after the first three or four. I kept meaning to leave but it started raining outside, a concerted downpour that gusted against the bar's glass frontage like someone throwing handfuls of gravel. So I stayed put, slumped over a seat at the bar and eating snack olives at a slow but consistent rate until I began to feel bilious and my fingers had turned faintly green.
    By nine o'clock I was pretty drunk. An hour later nothing had improved. The room was sparsely occupied by knots of locals drinking with steady dedication. An intense young woman with frizzy hair sat on a small stage singing songs whose meaning I could no longer follow. I sensed the world had done her wrong and I sympathized up to a point but her voice was making my head ache. It was time to go somewhere else but there was nowhere in particular to go and it was still raining outside. Every now and then someone would come into the bar looking as if they'd just stepped fully clothed out of the ocean.
    After a while one of these people caught my eye. He was tall and thin and went to sit by himself at a table in the back. I found I was keeping an eye on