The Cochran Resolve continued...


From there on the face of the Atlantic, the continuity of life itself rising and falling underneath him, underneath the keel, he looked back over Lynn and the death of the girl and all the information which he had come across and which now lay in turmoil in his mind, though sketched and grid-marked on his pad of paper. He saw himself back at the station going over the matter, and at home probably driving poor Phyllis nuts, and plying his way through snow and rain and hail to get more information and wearing his welcome thin no matter where he went. He saw his tracks crossing and crisscrossing all the North Shore and points beyond. He saw the exodus of thousands of young men for the war of wars, and, unknown to him at the moment, with that exodus he would come to see one strange-eyed young man in the act of escape.
  
He saw the enormity of the sea and the task.
   
And he came back to the garrote again! Or it came to him! It would not go away.
  
The grid lines of his graph fell under his eyes. All the names of all the suspects fell under his eyes. Poring over each one, each one became a personality, and he sought a chink in the armor. Then, on that wide and limitless sea, on that great expanse, like he was a thimble afloat on eternity, he had a new idea. It burst upon him!
   
The engine cranked into life and the sound immediately seemed to be swallowed up by the enormity about him. But he headed for the Saugus River and Noel's slip at the yacht club.
   
Mere hours later he was poring over old issues of the LYNN ITEM looking for photos. A few came to light of the type he was searching for. Here and there, at that time with war starting shortly after Frances' death, lots of young men enlisted and photos were shown of neighborhood friends and teammates and other groups going off to war together. In one small photo of a dozen men, all of them exuberant and smiling in ignorance at the adventure waiting on them, one face was downcast, averting that intimate exchange of gazes that's called for by the photographer. The young man could not have made himself any smaller, any darker, any more secretive.... and any more obvious! His name was not given, but that would pose no great problem, thought Silas. Most of them were French Basque. The Raiders from Boston Street where it abruptly found Flax Pond.
   
Whatever took him to the Boston Public Library to search for information on Basque witchcraft, until this day he cannot fully explain, except that the boy with the averted look, and the very act of garroting itself, had somehow been grounded in the reach of the Basque as it touched on him.
  
In his studied research he read about the bruxos and the xorguinos, Basque men and women who practiced witchcraft and black magic in the Province of Gupuzcoa along the Bay of Biscay, and in the mountain range of Amboto where they still talk about the Lady of the Caves, and her ointments of pulverized toads and a Basque herb called usainbelar. All about the witches he read, immersed for hours and hours in the spread of Iberia, the bays, the mountains, and he almost leapt up from his seat at a description of a Basque witch being killed. It was a vivid description of how she was first strangled with a stick thrust down her throat and then she was burned at the stake or thrust into a barrel of tar or pitch and if she got loose from the stake or got out the barrel, she was thrust back into the fire. And he found an old passage, so shockingly similar, about witches' executions in the highlands of Scotland which made him leap once again in his seat...and  thay was sticket in the throte with a garruote and thay wer brunt quick eftir sic ane crewell  maner, than sum of thame deit in desspair, renunce and blaspheme and; and utheris half brunt brake out of the fyre and wes cast quick in it agane, quhill thay wer brunt all thay daith.
  
Silas could picture all of it, and its horror charged over him. So many innocents had been executed this way in countless villages and towns of the Old World. And it had come to America, it had come to Salem right down the street, and, he was further convinced, it had come just down the road in Lynn to poor Frances Cochran.
  
The Red Raider with the averted eyes was not difficult to identify, nor was his military history, and three weeks later, after Silas' request for information about the young man's basic outfit was printed in the LEGIONNAIRE'S MAGAZINE, he had a damn good picture of what Lamon L'Supprenant was all about. And he was still living. In Salem. A Basque. Into, well into, the occult, into sorcery, into black magic, and the bruxos, and the xorguinos. He wondered about the garrote. But, furthermore, L'Supprenant had been a redhead in his early days, and one of three redheads who were questioned.

His uncle, he also found out, had been a cop.
  
In the service, in a Division Headquarters Company of the U.S. 7th Infantry Division, a vital force in the Pacific war, a long time in the islands, brought out of there to Korea later on, L'Supprenant'd been a strange chicken, full of wild and woolly things, and he was remembered for his strangeness by some old comrades. Of the three who wrote back to Silas, not one questioned why information was being sought, and Silas interpreted that to mean each one of them might have thought, even after all these years, that Lamon L'Supprenant needed explaining.
  
Only one person could be approached with all this information, flimsy and outrageous as it was, and that was Noel Rebenkern, chief, comrade, and friend, though the last qualifier could certainly be strained by something as touchy as this case and the parameters it was at, fifty years of grayness and obliqueness. But chinks appearing!
  
He told Noel all he knew, all of the Basque's history, as it had come revealed to him, and brought it right down to the single strand of red hair, and the picture of the Red Raiders going off to war.
   
Noel might have leaped on him. "You got to be crazy, Si! You can't go anyplace with all that crap. Jesus, man, if Danvers State Hospital was still open you'd be there on the hill before you could blow your nose. They'd put you in a white jacket and take you down a long corridor. And they'd throw the friggin' key away!" He kept shaking his head as if disbelief was all around him, and his eyes went opaque and then a queasy gray. More of his age showed, more than he wanted to show.
  
Gathering himself, he added, "There's no legitimate way to present any of it. All the work you've done could go right down the tube. No!" he added vociferously, slamming his fist on the desk, "you haven't got a chance in hell!" He looked at Silas' face. It was not unnerved, not upset, not in any sort of quandary. His lifetime fiend, Silas Tully, was a kid again. "What the hell are you going to do with all of this?"
  
The soon-to-be-gone policeman looked him in the eye. "I'm going to smoke him out!" Something beyond affirmation was in his voice, beyond definition. By God, he had become younger! A sparkle was in his eyes. His skin had a tingle and a shine to it. His mouth was as firm as he could ever remember it.
 
"Si, he's got to be about seventy years old now. He'll probably have a heart attack if you go right at him. If he's the right guy, that is. That's like fish in the barrel."
 
 "You mean you don't think we should go after him, that we shouldn't have gone after the German war criminals no matter how old they were, time served being enough for killing six million Jews. You got to be kidding me, Noel!"
  
"What I mean, Si, is you can't go lambasting after him with no hard proof. You'd get killed in court. He's got rights and the burden's on us." He said us the only way he could, being a party to the whole thing. "One thing else I'll say. There are a lot of guys our age who've been obsessed with this murder, who've been obsessed since the day it happened. It grates on them as much as anything else, and I'll tell you why I think that's so."

Pausing, knowing the value of the caesura, trying to provide room for everything to sink into his determined, and obviously obsessed, comrade, he continued, his hair a bit grayer, his neck a bit thicker, his belt line, too: "You've got to look at the time period, Si. It was just before Pearl Harbor, and things were calm somewhat, even though Europe was in turmoil. It was a special time, especially for women, with things on the upswing all around; Prohibition gone, the New Deal at work, things getting better for the house. It was a special time indeed. Why, I've known a bunch of guys, a lot of them from the Brickyard in Lynn, who said their doors were never locked at night before the war. You just didn't worry. All the big brothers were around and girls didn't worry so much. When the war started, they tell me, especially the guys from the Brickyard, with all the big brothers off to war and a bunch of creeps around, they began to lock their doors. They had to. Times began to change. Right after Pearl Harbor, times began to change. All those guys from around here thought about Frances Cochran for a long time, out on the islands, in Europe, under the frigging waters of both oceans, like somebody had cut into their space and violated one of their own.  It really pissed them off, like their kid sister had been grabbed. A lot of them told me, with all the advanced training they got, bayonet drills and all that stuff, they'd've killed the son of a bitch in a second if they'd've caught him. Even old Teddie BB in Cliftondale told me once he couldn't remember how many times he thought about Frances when he was alone on guard duty way the hell up there in the goddamn Aleutians. He used to talk about it with Dashiel Hammet who was in his outfit, on Sitka I think. Said they used to come up with some great stories about it and how the son of a bitch could be caught and strung up by his you-know-whats. You know what, every now and then when we take a ride after church on Sunday or on the way to a ball game down that way, he'll drive by the place. He still gets pissed, I tell you!"
  
Eventually, near talked out, both sides presented, they could have drawn a line in the sand, if there had been any sand in the chief's office. Peace was made and Si was going to do it his way. He had bit it off and chewed it up.
  
Smoking him out, to Silas Tully, was not a strange and roundabout approach. First, for a few months, he got to know Lamon L'Supprenant from behind the windshield of the big red truck and now and then the little car he had got for Phyllis. Everywhere L'Supprenant went, Silas was right behind him; and sometimes, knowing the routine so well, he was in front of him. A smoky and dark side of L'Supprenant became obvious. Not much of what he did was done openly, much of it behind locked doors in the company of likewise dark and furtive friends. That they practiced some kind of witchcraft or sorcery or black magic was evident, and that they took great profits in it showed as well, too. To Silas' trained eye the access to any of the half dozen places where things happened, were strictly controlled and under guard. He could only hazard guesses as to what might take place behind such cover.
  
But guesswork did not have to wait long. On July 18, 1991, fifty years almost to the day that Frances Cochran was killed, the body of a girl was found in the tall grass alongside the Happy Valley Golf Course in Lynn. Her head had been crushed, her jaw smashed, her clothing torn from her mutilated body. Also, a small wooden stick similar to a tent peg had been stuck down her throat. She too had been garroted! And a single strand of red hair was found on her body. Laboratory DNA tests showed that it matched the strand of red hair found on Frances Cochran's body fifty years earlier.
  
The city of Lynn went berserk. Police said there was not a single clue besides the strand of red hair; no witnesses to the deed, no sounds in the night, no suspicious activities along Lynnfield Street, and, this time, no car with yellow wheels. The connections were obvious and a sweeping terror started throughout the city.
  
Noel Rebenkern, in his office, faced Silas. "If you get him on this one, you've got him on the first. There'll be no question. I just wished we'd've done something sooner. Now, don't you feel bad. I'm the one who put the reins on you."
  
"I'm willing to bet that that poor kid knew this son of a bitch from some place. Maybe from one of those damn places I couldn't get into. Or if she didn't know him, she knew one of his young friends."

"You mean like an acolyte or an apprentice getting some OJT! Jayzuz, what the hell have they got going?"

His head shook back and forth in disbelief. He felt a lot older than he had earlier in the day. "Well, Si, I guess it has to be your shot. How you want to call it. You know those guys from Lynn will be calling you, not a bit of doubt about that. They won't have those silly little grins on their kissers now." His face lit up a bit as he added, "Unless they think you've got something to do with it." His guffaw filled the room.
  
"Thanks for the memories," answered Si. Then he nodded, and looked a poser for a short time, then looked at the chief and said, "Some more smoking out, but this time with contact. " And he explained what he was going to do to loosen Lamon L'Supprenant from his hold on life.
  
For four days in a row after the discovery of Angel Corkery's body at the Happy Valley Golf Course, and after the Lynn chief asked him to come down to see him sometime, the following typewritten notes, each one on successive days, were mailed by Silas Tully to Lamon L'Supprenant at his Salem address:

1. I used to think Frances was the only one.
2.When you find out who I am, I'll be waiting for you, but not at all as innocent as Frances or Angel. I'll be a lot stronger and a lot meaner.
3. You ever try that stick on me, that sick garrote, I'll put it to you where the sun don't shine.
4. I don't care how old you are, you are going to pay! Nothing is going to help you now, not the Lady of the Caves or your crushed toad skins or your usainbelar or any of your acolytes or apprentices. You, my evil one, are due, and Frances and Angel, God rest their sweet souls, may have some peace once again.

When Lamon L'Supprenant tried to bolt, in the middle of the night, a young man with him, and bags of mysterious goods piled onto the back seat and into the trunk, Silas Tully and Lynn police officer Rick Sanborn and two Salem cops were there to grab them. In one of the parcels confiscated from the L'Supprenant car, police found a decorative box with two X's cut into the cover and eight more strands of red hair gathered inside, all the same source, all from Lamon L'Supprenant. They also found a ritual of avenge which detailed the garroting and murder of a L'Supprenant relative which had happened a hundred and fifty years earlier in France. Lila of the Caves had gotten the promise of revenge from her sons, from her descendants.