The Burning Soul

1

Gray sea, gray sky, but fire in the woods and the trees aflame. No heat, no smoke, but still the forests burned, crowning with red and yellow and orange; a cold conflagration with the coming of fall, and the leaves resignedly descending. There was mortality in the air, borne on the first hint of winter breezes, the threatening chill of them, and the animals prepared for the coming snows. The foraging had begun, the filling of bellies for leaner times. Hunger would make the more vulnerable creatures take risks in order to feed, and the predators would be waiting. Black spiders squatted at the corners of their webs, not yet slumbering. There were still stray insects to be had, and further trophies to be added to their collections of withered husks. Winter coats grew thick and fur began to lighten, the better to blend in against the snow. Contrails of geese arrowed the skies like refugees fleeing a coming conflict, abandoning those forced to stay and face what was to come.

The ravens were motionless. Many of their far-northern brethren had headed south to escape the worst of the winter, but not these birds. They were huge yet sleek, their eyes bright with an alien intelligence. Some on this remote road had noticed them already, and if they had company on their walks, or in their automobiles, they commented on the presence of the birds. Yes, it was agreed, they were larger than the usual ravens, and perhaps, too, they brought with them a sense of discomfort, these hunched beings, these patient, treacherous scouts. They were perched deep among the branches of an ancient oak, an organism approaching the end of its days, its leaves falling earlier each year, so that by the end of every September it was already bare, a charred thing amid the flames, as though the all-consuming fire had already had its way with it, leaving behind only the smoke smudges of long-abandoned nests. The tree stood at the edge of a small copse that jutted slightly at this place to follow the curvature of the road, with the oak as its farthest point. Once there were others like it, but the men who built the road had cut them down many years before. It was now alone of its kind, and soon it too would be gone.

But the ravens had come to it, for the ravens liked dying things.

The smaller birds fled their company, and regarded the intruders warily from the cover of evergreen foliage. They had silenced the woods behind them. They radiated threat: the stillness of them, their claws curled upon the branches, the bladelike sharpness of their beaks. They were stalkers, watchers, waiting for the hunt to begin. The ravens were so statuesque, so immobile, that they might have been mistaken for misshapen outcroppings of the tree itself, tumorous growths upon its bark. It was unusual to see so many together, for ravens are not social birds; a pair, yes, but not six, not like this, not without food in sight.

Walk on, walk on. Leave them behind, but not before casting one last anxious glance at them, for to see them was to be reminded of what it is to be pursued, to be tracked from above while the hunters follow remorselessly. That is what ravens do: They lead the wolves to their prey, and take a portion of the spoils as payment for their labors. You want them to move. You want them to leave. Even the common raven was capable of disturbance, but these were not common ravens. No, these were most uncommon birds. Darkness was approaching, and still they waited. They might almost have been slumbering were it not for the way the fading light caught the blackness of their eyes, and how they captured the early moon when the clouds broke, imprisoning its image within themselves.

A short-tailed weasel emerged from the rotted stump that was her home, and tested the air. Its brown fur was already altering, the darkness growing out of it, the mammal becoming a ghost of itself. She had been aware of the birds for some time, but she was hungry and anxious to feed. Her litter had dispersed, and she would not breed again until the new year. Her nest was lined with mouse fur for insulation, but the little pantry in which she had stored her surplus of slain rodents was now empty. The weasel had to eat forty percent of her own body weight each day in order to survive. That was about four mice a day, but the animals had been scarce on her regular routes.

The ravens seemed to ignore her appearance, but the weasel was too shrewd to risk her life on the absence of movement. She turned herself so that she was facing into her nest, and used her black-tipped tail as bait to see if the birds were tempted to strike. If they did, they would miss her body in aiming for her tail and she would retreat to the safety of the stump, but the ravens did not react. The weasel’s nose twitched. Suddenly there was sound, and light. Headlights bathed the ravens, and now their heads moved, following the beams. The weasel, torn between fright and hunger, allowed her belly to choose. She disappeared into the woods while the ravens were distracted, and was soon lost from sight.

The car wound its way along the road, traveling faster than was wise and taking the bends more widely than it should, for it was hard to see vehicles approaching from the opposite direction, and a traveler unfamiliar with this route might easily have found himself in a head-on collision, or tearing a path through the bushes that lined the road. He might, were this the kind of road that travelers took, but few visitors came here. The town absorbed their impact, the apparent dullness of it dissuading further investigation, then spat them back the way they came, over the bridge and toward Route 1, there to continue north to the border, or south to the highway and on to Augusta and Portland, the big cities, the places that the peninsula’s residents strove so hard to avoid. So no tourists, but strangers sometimes paused here on their life’s journey, and after a time, if they proved suitable, the peninsula would find a place for them, and they would become part of a community with its back to the land and its face set hard against the sea.

There were many such communities in this state; they attracted those who wished to escape, those who sought the protection of the frontier, for this was still an edge state with boundaries of wood and sea. Some chose the anonymity of the forests, where the wind in the trees made a sound like the breaking of waves upon the shore, an echo of the ocean’s song to the east. But here, in this place, there were forest and sea; there were rocks ringing the inlet, and a narrow causeway that paralleled the bridge linking the mainland and those who had chosen to set themselves apart from it; there was a town with a single main street, and enough money to fund a small police department. The peninsula was large, with a scattered population beyond the cluster of buildings around Main Street. Also, for administrative and geographic reasons long forgotten, the township of Pastor’s Bay stretched across the causeway and west to the mainland. For years the county sheriff policed Pastor’s Bay until the town looked at its budget and decided that not only could it afford its own force, it might actually save money in the process, and so the Pastor’s Bay Police Department was born.

But when locals spoke of Pastor’s Bay it was the peninsula to which they were referring, and the police were their police. Outsiders often referred to it as ‘the island,’ even though it was not an island because of the natural connector to the mainland, although it was the bridge that received the most traffic. It was wide enough to take a decent two-lane road, and high enough to avoid any risk of the community being entirely cut off in foul weather, although there were times when the waves rose and washed over the road, and a stone cross on the mainland side attested to the former presence on this earth of one Maylock Wheeler, who was washed away in 1997 while walking his dog, Kaya. The dog survived, and was adopted by a couple on the mainland, for Maylock Wheeler had been a bachelor of the most pronounced sort. But the dog kept trying to return to the island, as those who are born of such places often will, and eventually the couple gave up trying to hold on to it, and it was taken in by Grover Corneau, who was the chief of police at the time. It remained with Grover until his retirement, and a week separated the deaths of the dog and its owner. A photograph of them together remained on the wall of the Pastor’s Bay Police Department. It made Kurt Allan, Grover’s replacement, wonder if he also should acquire a dog, but Allan lived alone, and was not used to animals.

It was Allan’s car that now passed beneath the old oak and pulled up before the house across the road. He looked to the west and shielded his eyes against the last of the setting sun, bisected by the horizon. There were more cars coming. He had told the others to follow. The woman would need them. Detectives from the Maine State Police were also on their way following the confirmation of the AMBER Alert, and the National Crime Information Center had automatically been notified of a missing child. A decision would be made within the coming hours on whether to seek further assistance from the FBI.

The house was a ranch-style dwelling, neatly kept and freshly painted. The fallen leaves had been raked and added to a compost pile at the sheltered side of the building. For a woman without a man to help her, a woman not of this place, she had managed well, he thought.

And the ravens watched as Allan knocked on the door, and the door opened, and words were spoken, and he stepped inside, and there was no sound or movement from within for a time. Two more cars arrived. From the first vehicle stepped an elderly man with a worn leather physician’s bag. The other was driven by a woman of late middle age wearing a blue overcoat that caught in the car door as she rushed to the house. It tore, but she did not stop to examine the damage after wrenching it free. There were more important matters to which to attend.

The two people came together and were halfway across the yard when the front door opened wide and a woman ran toward them. She was in her late thirties, carrying a little weight on her waist and her thighs, her hair flying loose behind her. The new arrivals stopped at the sight of her, and the middle-aged woman raised her arms as though expecting the other to fall into her embrace, but instead the younger woman pushed her way past them, jostling the doctor, one of her shoes falling from her foot, and the white stones on the drive tore at her skin so that she left smears of blood across them. She stumbled and landed heavily, and when she rose again her jeans were ripped, and her knees were scratched, and one of her fingernails was broken. Kurt Allan appeared in the doorway, but the woman was already on the road and her hands were at her mouth and she screamed a name over and over and over…

‘Anna! Anna! Anna!’

She was crying now, and she wanted to run, but the road curved to the right and to the left, and she did not know which way to turn. The middle-aged woman came to her and wrapped her in her arms at last, even as her charge fought against her, and the doctor and Allan were approaching as she screamed the name again. Birds took flight from the surrounding trees, and unseen creatures burst from brush and scrub as though to carry the message.

The girl is gone, the girl is gone.

Only the ravens remained. The sun was at last swallowed by the horizon, and true darkness began to fall. The ravens became part of it, absorbed by it and absorbing it in turn, for their blackness was deeper than any night.

Eventually the weasel returned. The fat corpse of a field mouse hung limply in her jaws, and she could taste its blood in her mouth. It was all that she could do not to tear it apart as soon as she had killed it, but her instincts told her to control her urges. Her self-restraint was rewarded, though, for a smaller mouse had crossed her path as she returned to her home, and she fed on that instead before hiding its remains. Perhaps she would retrieve them later, once her larger prize was safely stored away.

She did not hear the raven’s approach. Her first awareness of it came with the impact of its talons upon her back, tearing through her coat and into her flesh. It pinned her to the ground, then slowly began to peck at her, its long beak carving neat holes in her body. The raven did not feed upon her. It simply tortured her to death, taking its time over her agonies. When it had reduced her to a mess of blood and fur, it left the corpse for the scavengers and rejoined its companions. They were waiting for the hunt to begin, and they were curious about the hunter who was to come.

No, the one who had sent them was curious about him, and they watched on his behalf.

For he was the greatest predator of them all.

2

There are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of one’s humanity, to exist in a colder, crueler world than before. The paradox is that, if this realm is not to be turned into a charnel house, there are those who must accept these truths while always holding fast in their hearts, in their souls, to the possibility that once, just once, the world might give them the lie, that, on this occasion, God will not have blinked.

Here is one of those truths: after three hours, the abduction of a child is routinely treated as a homicide.

The first problem encountered by those investigating Anna Kore’s disappearance arose out of the delay in activating the AMBER Alert. She had disappeared from a small but busy strip mall on the mainland where she had gone with a school friend, Helen Dubuque, and Helen’s mother to do some Saturday shopping, and particularly to pick up a copy of The Great Gatsby for school. She left the Dubuques to go to the new-and-used bookstore while they went into Sears to buy school shoes for Helen. They were not excessively worried when twenty minutes went by and Anna still had not joined them; she was a bookstore child, and they felt sure that she had simply curled up in a corner with a novel and started reading, losing herself entirely in the narrative.

But she was not in the bookstore. The clerk remembered Anna and said that she had not stayed long, barely browsing the shelves before collecting her book and leaving. Helen and her mother returned to their car, but Anna was not there. They tried her cell phone, but it went straight to voice mail. They searched the mall, which did not take long, then called Anna’s home, just in case she had caught a ride back with someone else and neglected to inform them, although this would have been out of character for her. Valerie Kore, Anna’s mother, was not at home. Later, it would emerge that she was having her hair done by Louise Doucet, who ran a hairdressing business from the back of her home off Main Street. Valerie’s phone rang while she was having her hair washed, and she could not hear it above the sound of the water.

Finally, Mrs. Dubuque called, not 911, but the Pastor’s Bay Police Department itself. This was force of habit and nothing more, a consequence of living in a small town with its own police force, but it created a further delay while Chief Allan debated whether or not to alert the sheriff’s department and the state police, who would in turn inform their Criminal Investigation Division. By the time the AMBER Alert was issued, more than an hour and a quarter had gone by, or more than a third of the three-hour period regarded as crucial in any potential abduction of a minor, after which the child would be presumed dead for the purposes of the investigation.

But once the alarm was raised the authorities reacted quickly. The state had set procedures for such disappearances, and they were immediately activated, coordinated by IMAT, the joint organizational incident-management team. Police patrols converged on the area and began riding the routes. An evidence response team was sent to Pastor’s Bay, and plans were made to forensically examine Anna Kore’s computer, and to seek a signed waiver from her mother granting them access to Anna’s cell phone records without subpoena. Her service provider was alerted, and efforts were made to triangulate the location of Anna’s phone, but whoever had taken her had not only turned off her phone but also removed its battery, making it impossible to trace it by ‘pinging’ the towers.

The victim’s details were passed to the National Crime Information Center, whereupon Anna Kore officially became a ‘missing or endangered person.’ This in turn triggered an automatic notification to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and to the FBI. Team Adam, the NCMEC’s specialized missing children’s squad, was prepped, and CART, the FBI’s regional Child Abduction Response Team in Boston, was put on alert pending a formal request for assistance from the Maine State Police. The game wardens began preparations for a full search of the natural areas surrounding the scene of the presumed abduction.

When the three-hour marker was passed, and Anna Kore had still not been found, a ripple ran through the law-enforcement officials. It was a silent acknowledgment that the nature of the investigation must now inevitably change. A list was assembled of family members and close associates, the first suspects when any harm comes to a child. All agreed to be questioned, backed up by polygraph tests. Valerie Kore was questioned first.

Five minutes into her interview, an unanticipated call was made to the FBI.

Anna Kore had been missing for more than seventy-two hours, but it was a strange disappearance, if it can be said that the circumstances of the abduction of one child are stranger than those of another. It might be more correct to say that the aftermath was proving stranger, for Valerie Kore, the bereft mother, did not behave in the way that might have been expected of one in her circumstances. She seemed reluctant to appear before the cameras at first. There were no quotes from her, or from relatives speaking on her behalf, in the TV reports or the newspapers, not initially. The vanishing of her daughter only gradually became part of a public spectacle, the latest act in an ongoing performance that played upon the general fascination with rape, murder, and assorted human tragedies. It was left to the police, both state and local, to farm out information about the girl to the media, and in the first twelve hours following the AMBER Alert those details were given out sparingly. Veteran reporters felt that there were mixed signals coming from the authorities, and they scented another story behind the bare facts of the girl’s disappearance, but any attempts to work their police sources were rebuffed. Even the local population of Pastor’s Bay seemed to have closed ranks, and the reporters had difficulty finding anyone prepared to comment on the case in even the most general of terms, although this was attributed to the characteristic oddness of the population rather than to any great conspiracy of silence.

After her daughter had been missing for three days, Valerie Kore consented to, or was permitted to give, her first public interview, in which she would appeal for anyone with information about her daughter to come forward. Such appeals had both advantages and disadvantages. They attracted more attention from the general public, and thus could lead potential witnesses to offer assistance. On the other hand, it was often the case that the more emotional the pressure applied to the culprit in these cases, the greater the walls he or she might put up, so a public appeal risked antagonizing the abductor. Nevertheless, it was decided that Valerie should face the cameras.

The press conference took place in the town hall of Pastor’s Bay, a simple wood-frame building just off what was called Main Street but might just as well have been termed Only Street, since Main Street implied that there were other thoroughfares worthy of note when, in fact, the town of Pastor’s Bay pretty much vanished if you stepped more than a stone’s throw in any direction from the bright lights of Main. There was a drugstore and a general store, both owned by the same family and situated adjacent to each other; two bars, one of which doubled as a pizzeria; a gas station; a bed-and-breakfast establishment that didn’t advertise its presence, as the owners were anxious to avoid attracting the ‘wrong kind’ of clientele, and so relied entirely on word of mouth and, it was sometimes suggested, psychic emanations in order to secure custom; two small houses of worship, one Baptist and one Catholic, that didn’t unduly advertise their presence either; and a small library that opened mornings only, and not at all if the librarian was otherwise occupied. When the media circus was given strictly controlled access to the town, it was the most significant influx of strangers that Pastor’s Bay had known since the town was properly established in 1787.

Pastor’s Bay took its name from a lay preacher named James Weston Harris who arrived in the area in 1755 during the war between the English and the French. One year previously, Harris had been among the small group of forty men led by William Trent who were given the responsibility of building a fortification at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers in the Ohio Country. The Frenchman Contrecoeur arrived with five hundred men before the stockade could be completed, but he allowed Trent’s party to depart unmolested, and even purchased their construction tools to continue building what would subsequently become Fort Duquesne.

Harris, who had believed himself to be in mortal danger, and had become resigned to death at the hands of the French, took his salvation as a sign that he should commit himself more fully to spreading the word of God, and so he led his family to the tip of a peninsula in New England with the intention of establishing a settlement. The area’s natives, who had sided with the French against the English, in part because of their natural antipathy toward the English’s Mohawk allies, were unimpressed by Harris’s renewed sense of vocation and hacked him to pieces within a month of his arrival. His family was spared, though, and following the cessation of hostilities they returned to the site and created the community that would ultimately become known as Pastor’s Bay. The family’s luck did not improve, however, and the twin forces of mortality and disillusionment eventually cleansed Pastor’s Bay of any lingering Harris presence. Still, they left a town behind them, although there were those who said that Pastor’s Bay had been blighted by the original killing, for it never truly thrived. It survived, and that was about the best that could be said for it.

Now, after the passage of centuries, Pastor’s Bay found itself the focus of serious attention for the first time since the seeds of its foundation were sown and sprinkled with James Weston Harris’s blood. News vehicles were parked on Main Street, and reporters stood before cameras, the thoroughfare at their backs, and spoke of the agonies being experienced by this small Maine town. They thrust microphones into the faces of those who had no desire to see themselves on television, or to speak with strangers about the misfortunes of one of their own. Valerie Kore and her daughter might have been ‘from away,’ but they had made their home in Pastor’s Bay, and its people protectively closed ranks around them. In this they were not discouraged by their police chief, a turn of events that caused some citizens of Pastor’s Bay to whisper, just like the reporters, that there might be more to the disappearance of Anna Kore than met the eye.

A table had been set up at one side of the town hall, with coffee and cookies available for the visitors. The table was staffed by Ellie and Erin Houghton, twin spinsters of uncertain vintage, one of whom, Erin, was also the town librarian, while her sister managed the mysterious, elitist bed-and-breakfast, although it was not unknown for them to swap roles when the mood struck them. Since they were identical, this made little difference to the smooth running of the community. They served coffee in the same manner in which they performed all their tasks, voluntary or otherwise: with a politeness that did not invite undue intimacy, and a sternness that brooked no disobedience. When the first reporters began jostling for space at the table, and some creamer was spilled as a consequence, the sisters made clear from the way they held the coffeepots that such nonsense would not be tolerated, and the hardened journalists accepted the rebuke like meek schoolchildren.

All questions were directed to Lieutenant Stephen Logan, the head of the Maine State Police’s Criminal Investigation Division for the southern region of the state, although he occasionally deferred to the Pastor’s Bay chief of police, Kurt Allan, on local matters. If the question merited it, Allan in turn would look to the pale woman beside him to see if she had a reply, and then only if it was not possible for him to provide the answer himself. When she did not wish to respond, she would simply shake her head once. When she did respond, it was with as few words as possible. No, she had no idea why someone would want to take her daughter. No, there had been no argument between them, or nothing unfamiliar to any mother of a strong-willed fourteen-year-old girl. She appeared composed, but anyone examining her more closely would have seen that Valerie Kore was holding herself together through sheer force of will. It was like looking at a dam that was on the verge of breaking, where a keen eye could discern the cracks in the façade that threatened to unleash the forces building behind it. Only when she was asked about the girl’s father did those cracks become readily apparent to all. Valerie tried to speak, but the words choked her, and for the first time tears fell. It was left to Logan to intervene and announce that law-enforcement officers were searching for the father, one Alekos ‘Alex’ Kore, now estranged from his wife, in the hope that he might be able to help them with their inquiries. When asked if Kore was a suspect in his daughter’s disappearance, Logan would say only that the police were not ruling out any possibilities, but were anxious simply to eliminate Alekos Kore from their enquiries. Then a reporter from one of the Boston newspapers complained about the difficulties of getting information and comments from the police, and there were some murmurs of agreement. Allan fudged the answer, talking about what he termed ‘familial sensitivities,’ but half of Maine could have given a better answer to the question, and one that would have satisfied those with anything more than a passing knowledge of that part of the world.

It was Pastor’s Bay. They were just different up there.

But that wasn’t the entire truth.

It wasn’t even close.

I watched the press conference on the early evening news, standing in the living room of my house as my daughter, Sam, finished her milk and sandwich in the kitchen. Rachel, Sam’s mother and my ex-girlfriend, sat on the edge of an armchair, her eyes fixed on the screen. She and Sam were on their way to Boston to catch a flight to LA, where Rachel was due to address a symposium on clinical advances in cognitive psychotherapy. She had tried to explain the substance of these advances to me earlier, but I could only assume that the attendees at the symposium were smarter than I was, and had longer attention spans. Rachel had friends in Orange County with whom she planned to stay, and their daughter was a few months older than Sam. The symposium would take up only one day, and the rest of their time in California was to be devoted to long-promised trips to Disneyland and Universal Studios.

Sam and Rachel lived on Rachel’s parents’ property in Burlington, Vermont. I spent time with Sam as often as I could, but not as often as I should, a situation complicated, or so I told myself, by the fact that Rachel had been seeing someone else for more than a year now. Jeff Reid was an older man, a former executive with the capital markets division of a major bank who had retired early, thereby nicely avoiding the fallout of the various scandals and collapses to which he had probably contributed. I didn’t know that for sure, but I was petty enough to envy him his place in Rachel and Sam’s life. I’d bumped into him once when I was visiting Sam for her birthday, and he’d tried to overwhelm me with bonhomie. He had all the moves of one who has spent a large portion of his life and career making others trust him, justifiably or not: the wide smile, the firm handshake, the left hand on my upper arm to make me feel valued. Seconds after meeting him, I was checking to make sure that I still had my wallet and my watch.

I studied Rachel as she took in the details of the conference. She had allowed a little gray to creep into her red hair, and there were lines around her eyes and mouth that I could not recall from before, but she was still very beautiful. I felt an ache in my heart for her, and I salved it with the knowledge that all was as it should be, however much I missed them both.

‘What do you think?’ I said.

‘Her body language is wrong,’ said Rachel. ‘She doesn’t want to be there, and not just because she’s trapped in every mother’s nightmare. She looks frightened, and I don’t think it’s because of the reporters. I’d hazard a guess that she’s hiding something. Have you heard anything about the case?’

‘No, but then I haven’t been asking.’

The coverage of the news conference ended, and the anchorwoman moved on to foreign wars. I heard a noise behind me, and saw that Sam had been watching the news from the hall. She was tall for her age, with a lighter version of her mother’s hair, and serious brown eyes.

‘What happened to the girl?’ she asked as she entered the room. She had what was left of her sandwich in her right hand, and was chewing on a mouthful of it. There were crumbs on her sweater, and I brushed them off. She looked unhappy about it. Maybe she’d been planning to save them for later.

‘They don’t know,’ I said. ‘She disappeared, and now they’re trying to find her.’

‘Did she run away? Sometimes people run away.’

‘Could be, honey.’

She handed the remains of the sandwich to me. ‘I don’t want any more.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll have it framed.’

Sam looked at me oddly, then asked if she could go outside.

‘Sure,’ said Rachel. ‘But stay where we can see you.’

Sam turned to go, then paused.

‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘you find people, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I find people.’

‘You should go find the girl,’ she said, then trotted off. Moments later, the top of her head appeared at the window as she began exploring the flower beds. On her last visit she had helped me plant native perennials in all of the beds, for I had let the garden go a little since she and her mother left. Now there was goatsbeard and harebell, turtleheads and shooting stars, all carefully labeled so that Sam would know which was which. It was not yet dark, but the lights outside were motion-activated, and Sam enjoyed setting them off by dancing beneath them. Rachel walked to the window and waved at her. I killed the TV and joined her.

‘There are times when I look at her and I see you,’ said Rachel. ‘Or when she talks and I hear your voice. She’s more like you than me, I think. Isn’t that strange, when she sees so little of you?’

I couldn’t help but react, and instantly Rachel apologized. She touched my arm gently with her right hand.

‘I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I’m not blaming you. It’s just a statement of fact.’ She returned to watching our daughter. ‘She likes being with you, you know. Jeff is good with her, and spoils her, but she always keeps a little distance from him.’

Go Sam, I thought. He’d probably advise you to invest your allowance in weapons and Big Tobacco.

‘She’s such a self-contained kid,’ Rachel continued. ‘She’s got friends, and she’s doing well in pre-school – better than well: She’s ahead of her class in just about every way imaginable – but there’s a part of her that she keeps for, and to, herself; a secret part. That doesn’t come from me. That’s you in her.’

‘You don’t sound like you’re convinced it’s a good thing.’

She smiled. ‘I don’t know what it is, so I can’t say.’

Her hand was still touching my arm. She suddenly seemed to notice, and let it fall, but it was an unhurried movement. What existed between us was different now. There was sadness there, and regret, but not pain, or not so much of it that it affected how we were together.

‘Try to see a little more of her,’ said Rachel. ‘We can work it out.’

I didn’t respond. I thought of Valerie Kore and her missing daughter. I thought of my late wife, and my first daughter, wrenched violently from this existence only to linger in another form. I had witnessed the blurring of worlds, watching as elements of what once was, and what was to come, seeped into this life like dark ink through water. I knew of the existence of a form of evil that was beyond human capacities, the wellspring from which all other evil sipped. And I knew that I was marked, although to what end I did not yet understand. So I had kept my distance from my child, for fear of what I might draw upon her.

‘I’ll do my best,’ I lied.

Rachel lifted her hand again, but this time she touched my face, tracing the lineaments of the bones beneath, and I felt my eyes grow hot. I closed them for a moment, and in that instant I lived another life.

‘I know that you’re trying to protect her by staying away, but I’ve thought about this a lot,’ said Rachel. ‘At the start, I wanted you gone from our lives. You frightened me, both because of what you were capable of doing and because of the men and women who forced you to act as you did, but there has to be a balance, and that balance isn’t here now. You’re her father, and by keeping your distance from her you’re hurting her. We’re hurting her, because I was complicit in what happened. We both need to try harder, for her sake. So, are we clear?’

‘We’re clear,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

‘You won’t be thanking me when she’s dragging you around the American Girl store. Your wallet won’t be thanking me either.’

Sam was crouching by the woods, collecting branches and twigs and twisting them into shapes.

‘What brought this on?’ I asked.

‘Sam did,’ said Rachel. ‘She asked me if you were a good man, because you found bad men and put them in jail.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I told her the truth: that you are a good man. But I was worried in case her knowledge of what you do meant that she connected it with its risks, and I asked her if she was frightened for you. She told me that she wasn’t, and I believed her.’

‘Did she say why she wasn’t frightened?’

‘No.’ Rachel frowned. ‘She just said the strangest thing – not the words but the way she said them. She said that the bad men should be frightened of you, but she wasn’t joking, and it wasn’t bravado. She was very solemn, and very certain. Then she just turned over and went to sleep. That was a couple of nights back, and afterward I was the one who couldn’t sleep. It was like talking to an oracle, if that makes any sense.’

‘I’d keep quiet about it if she is an oracle,’ I said. ‘You’ll have half of New England coming to her for the Powerball numbers, and Jeff would probably charge them ten bucks a head for the consultation.’

Rachel punched me on the arm and headed for the door. It was time for them to leave.

‘Go date somebody,’ she said. ‘You’re a step away from taking holy orders.’

‘It’s the wrong time of year,’ I replied. ‘You never date going into winter. Too many layers. It’s hard to figure out what you’re getting until it’s too late.’

‘Spoken like a true cynic.’

‘All cynics were once romantics. Most of them still are.’

‘God, it’s like talking to a bargain-basement philosopher.’

I helped her put on her coat, and she kissed me on the cheek. ‘Remember what we talked about.’

‘I will.’

She called out to Sam, who was now sitting on the bench outside. She had something beneath her coat as she walked back, but she kept it hidden until after we had hugged, then carefully withdrew it and handed it to me.

It was a cross. She had made it from thin twigs, intertwined where she could fix them together, but otherwise held together with strands of ivy.

‘For when the bad men come,’ she said.

Rachel and I exchanged a glance but said nothing, and it was only when they were gone that I was struck by the oddness of Sam’s words. She had not given me the cross to keep the bad men away, as a child might have been expected to do. No, in her mind the bad men could not be kept away. They were coming, and they would have to be faced.

3

Soft voices everywhere as the fall wind whispered its regrets, and brown leaves sailed in the gutters as a light rain descended, the chill of it a surprise upon the skin. There were fewer tourists on the streets of Freeport now; for the most part they came on the weekends, and on this dreary day the stores were virtually empty. The pretty boys and girls in Abercrombie & Fitch folded and refolded to pass the time, and a scattering of locals drifted through L.L. Bean to make preparations for the winter, but not before first checking in the Bean outlet, for a dollar spared is a dollar saved, and these were canny people.

South Freeport, though, was very different from its upstart, commercialized northern sister. It was quieter, its center not so easily found, its identity essentially rural despite its proximity to Portland. It was why the lawyer Aimee Price had chosen to live and work there. Now, in her office at the corner of Park and Freeport, she watched the rain trace an intricate veinery upon her window, as though the glass were an organic creation like the wing of an insect. Her mood grew heavier with each falling raindrop, with each dead leaf that drifted by, with each bare inch of branch that was newly revealed by the dying foliage. How often had she thought about leaving this state? Every fall brought the same realization: This was the best of it until March, perhaps even April. As bad as this was, with sodden leaves, and cold drizzle, and darkness in the mornings and darkness in the evenings, the winter would be so much worse. Oh, there would be moments of beauty, as when the sunlight scattered the first snows with gems, and the world in those early daylight hours would seem cleansed of its ugliness, purged of its sins, but then the filth would accrue, and the snow would blacken, and there would be grit in the soles of her shoes, and on the floor of her car, and traipsed through her house, and she would wish herself to be one of the huddled sleeping creatures that find a warm, dark cave or the hollow of a tree trunk, there to wait out the winter months.

She mulled over these matters as the child killer brooded outside.

How ordinary he seemed, how quotidian. He was of average height and average build, dressed in an average-priced suit and wearing average shoes. His tie was neither understated nor overstated in its color and design, neither too cheap nor too expensive. His face was no more than moderately handsome. Were she single, and out for the evening, she might talk to him if he approached her but she would not go out of her way to do so, and if no contact passed between them there would be no sense of regret, no possibility that an opportunity might have been missed. He was, in his way, as carefully camouflaged as those species of insect and moth that mimic leaves. Now, as with such creatures, he had been exposed by the stripping of branches, by fall’s decay.

She craned her neck slightly. From where she sat she could see him reflected in the mirror on the wall of the reception area. He had hair like damp straw, and soft brown eyes. His lips settled naturally into a pout that was saved from effeminacy by a small scar that broke the left side of his upper lip. He was clean-shaven, with a strong chin. It lent his features an authority that they would otherwise have lacked.

There were magazines on the table before him, and the day’s newspapers, but he did not read them. Instead he sat perfectly still, with his hands flat upon his thighs. He barely blinked, so lost was he in his thoughts. He must have expected himself to be forgotten; after all, he had traveled so far, and changed so much. He had a new identity, and a history that had been carefully manufactured and maintained. None of it was illegal: It was gifted to him by the court, and he had built upon it in the years that followed. The boy, barely remembered, was not father to this man, and yet he dwelled within him, frozen at the moment in which he became a killer.

Aimee wondered how often he thought back on what he had done. She suspected, from her own experience of such matters (and not only of dealing with the crimes of others, but of negotiating the wreckage of her own mistakes and regrets) that whole days might sometimes go by when he forgot his sins, or even who he truly was, for otherwise life would be intolerable and he would buckle under the strain of his deception. The only way that he could go on was by denying to himself that he was engaged in any such imposture. He was what he had become, and he had shed the remembrance of what had been just as the moth emerging from its pupal shell has left behind its caterpillar form. Yet something of that early stage must surely linger: an insect dream, a memory of a time when it could not fly, when it was other than it was now.

Your sins followed you. She knew this, and she believed that he knew it too. If he did not, if he had tried to deny the reality of them, then the one who was coming would disabuse him of such notions. The man who would soon be with them – the detective, the hunter – knew all about sin and shadow. Her only concern was that his own pain would cause him to turn his back on her, and on the man outside who had asked for her help. The detective had lost a child. He had touched his hand to the torn form of his first daughter. There was a chance that such a man would not look mercifully on one who had taken the life of a female child, no matter how old he was when he did so.

All this she would tell the detective later. For now, her attention returned to the man outside. Child killer, in both senses of the term: killer of a child, and child himself when he took her life.

She had not known the truth about him, not until today, even though she had acted on his behalf in the past: a disputed DUI, followed by a border dispute with a neighbor that had threatened to descend into active hostility. There had been no reason for him to inform her of his past, although his anxiety about the property dispute had seemed excessive to her at the time. That afternoon’s revelations had clarified the situation. Here was a man who shirked attention of any kind. Even his job was guaranteed to turn any conversation about occupations in another direction. He was a tax accountant, dealing with individuals and small local businesses. He worked from home for the most part. Contact with his clients was minimal, and then limited largely to financial matters. Even when he had needed legal help, he had chosen a lawyer with a practice relatively distant from his own location. There were attorneys closer to home that he could have used, but he elected not to do so. She had thought it a little odd at the time, but not anymore. He had been afraid of word getting out, afraid of a secret shared on a pillow, or over a drink, afraid of the single indiscreet moment that might sink him.

You’re always afraid, she thought. Even though you’ve changed so much since the crime was committed, you fear the second glance in the bar, the unfortunate crossing of paths, the moment when a guard, or a former inmate, or a prison visitor to whom you were once pointed out joins the dots and connects your face to your history. Yes, they might shake their heads and pass on, believing that they were mistaken, and you could absent yourself from their presence quickly if you felt the heat of their gaze upon you. But if they did not simply move on or, worse, if through some dreadful accident they came upon you in your new home, where nobody knew of your past, what then? Would you brazen it out? Would you accept your fate? Or would you run? Would you gather your possessions, climb into your car, and disappear? Would you try to start again?

Or would the little boy inside you, now gifted with the strength of a man, suggest another way out? After all, you’ve killed once. How hard would it be to kill again?

She looked at her watch. The detective had told her that he would be there within the hour, and he was rarely late.

A shape passed across the window, and a shadow briefly entered the room, moving across her body before departing. She heard the beating of its wings, and could almost feel the touch of its feathers against her. She watched as the raven settled on the branch of the birch tree that overhung the small parking lot. Ravens unsettled her. It was the darkness of them, and their intelligence, the way in which they could lead wolves and dogs to prey. They were apostate birds: It was their instinct to betray to the pack the presence of the vulnerable.

But this one was not alone: There was another perched above it. She had missed it set against the tangled branches of the tree. Now came a third. It landed on a fence post, stretched its wings momentarily, then subsided into stillness. They were all so statuesque, and they all faced the road. Strange.

And then the ravens were forgotten for now. A car appeared, an old Mustang. She had never been very interested in cars, and could not tell one vintage from another, but the sight of the automobile brought a little smile to her face for the first time that afternoon.

The detective and his toy.

He stepped from the car. As always, she watched him with a deep curiosity. He was as unsettling, in his way, as the black birds that had gathered nearby, his intelligence and instincts as strange to her as theirs. He wore a dark suit with a slim black tie. It was unusual for him, for typically he preferred a more casual wardrobe, but he looked good in it. It was single-breasted, and slim-fitting, the pants very narrow at the hem. With his pale features, and his dark hair tinged slightly with gray, he was a monochrome vision, as though he had been dropped into the autumnal landscape from an old photograph, an older time.

In the years that she had known him, she had often thought about why he was so troubling to her. In part, it was his predilection for violence. No, that was unfair; instead, it was better defined as his willingness to use violence, and his apparent comfort with it. He had killed, and she knew that he would kill again. Circumstances would dictate that he had to do so, for wicked men and women were drawn to him, and he dispatched them when there was no other option.

And sometimes, she suspected, even when there was.

Why they were called to him she did not know, but she found random phrases drifting through her consciousness when she considered the matter: stalking horse, Judas goat. Bait. There was an otherworldliness to him at times, the same feeling that might be inspired by a figure glimpsed in a churchyard at the closing of the day, slowly fading into the dusk as it walked away, so that one was uncertain whether one had merely come across another mourner in the process of departing or a presence less corporeal. Perhaps it was impossible to look at as much pain and death as this man had and not have something of the next world make an impact upon you, assuming that you believed in a world beyond this one. She did, and nothing in her encounters with the detective had made her doubt her faith. He wore aftershave that smelled of incense, and she thought that this was apt.

But he could blend in. He could not follow his chosen profession otherwise. It was not a veneer of normality that he wore. It coexisted alongside his strangeness. Even now, dressed in his smart black suit, he carried a brown paper bag in his right hand. In it, she knew, would be muffins. Muffins were her weakness. For the right muffin, at the right time, she might even betray her fiancé, and she loved him deeply.

She realized that she was toying with her engagement ring, slipping it on and off her finger, and she could not remember if it was the thought of Brennan, the man who gave the ring to her, that had caused her to touch it, or if she had begun twisting it when the detective appeared. She decided that she did not want to think about it, although this, too, she would tell the detective, at another time and in another place.

He crossed the lot and walked up the damp path that led to her building. As he did so, it seemed to her that the heads of the black birds turned to follow his progress, perhaps attracted by the blackness of his suit, seeing in him one of their own. She wished that they would leave. She adjusted the blinds at the window, altering her field of vision, but the knowledge of the birds remained. They’re just birds, she thought: big black birds. This isn’t a movie. You’re not Tippi Hedren.

She decided to force the birds from her mind. Perhaps she had been using their presence as a distraction, a means of delaying the conversation that was about to take place. She did not want him to refuse to help her, or her client. If he did, she would understand, and she would not think less of him, but she felt it was important that he agreed to involve himself. He had told her once that coincidences bothered him. The coincidences here were off the scale.

She prepared to greet him. It was time.

I passed through the reception area, barely glancing at the waiting man, and entered Aimee’s office. I placed the bag in front of her and opened it so that she could peer inside.

‘Charlie Parker, you are the very devil,’ she said, taking one of the pastries out. ‘Peach? They didn’t have raspberry?’

‘They had raspberry, but he who pays the baker calls the flavor.’

‘You’re telling me that you don’t like raspberry?’

‘I’m not telling you anything. It’s a muffin. It’s got peaches. Live with it. You know, I can see why Brennan is taking so long to add a gold band to that rock you’re playing with. Sometimes he probably wonders if he kept the receipt.’

I watched her shift her hand quickly from the ring. To give it something else to do she picked at the muffin, even though I could see from her face that she had little enthusiasm for it. She could usually eat one any time of the day or night, but something had killed her appetite. She swallowed the fragment in her mouth, but ate no more. It seemed to taste too dry to her. She coughed and reached for the bottle of water that she always had on her desk.

‘If I find out he kept the receipt, I’ll kill him,’ she said, once the dryness was gone.

‘A psychologist might wonder why you play with it so much.’

She reddened. ‘I don’t.’

‘My mistake.’

‘Yes, it is.’

Brennan, her fiancé, was a big lug who adored the very ground she walked on, but they had been engaged for so long that the priest earmarked to conduct the wedding ceremony had died in the interim. Somebody in the relationship was dragging heels on the way to the altar, and I wasn’t sure that it was Brennan.

‘You’re not eating your muffin. I kind of expected it to be reduced to crumbs right about now.’

‘I’ll eat it later.’

‘Okay. Maybe I should have bought raspberry after all.’

I said nothing more, but waited for her to speak.

‘Why are you wearing a suit?’ she said.

‘I was testifying.’

‘In church?’

‘Funny. In court. The Denny Kraus thing.’

Denny Kraus had killed a man in a parking lot off Forest Avenue eighteen months earlier, in an argument over a dog. Apparently the victim, Philip Espvall, had sold Denny Kraus the animal claiming it was a thoroughbred pointer, a gun dog, but the first time Denny fired a gun near the dog it headed for the hills and was never seen again. Denny had taken this badly, and had come looking for Espvall at the Great Lost Bear, which happened to be the bar in which I worked occasionally when money was scarce, or when the mood took me, and in which I was tending bar on the night that Denny came looking for Espvall. Words had been exchanged, both men had been ejected, and then I’d called the cops as a precaution. By the time they caught up with the two men, Espvall had a hole in his chest and Denny was standing over him, waving a handgun and shouting about a retarded dog.

‘I forgot you were tied up with that,’ said Aimee.

‘I was bar manager that night. At least we didn’t serve Denny any alcohol.’

‘It sounds pretty clear-cut. His lawyer should tell him to cop a plea.’

‘It’s complicated. Denny wants to argue provocation, but his own lawyer is trying to have him declared mentally incompetent to stand trial. Denny doesn’t believe he’s crazy, and so I’m wearing a suit while Denny’s lawyer tries to convince the judge of one thing and his client tries to convince him of the opposite. For what it’s worth, I think Denny’s crazy. The prosecution is playing hardball, but he’s been in and out of the Bangor Mental Health Institute for the past decade.’

‘And he still owned a gun.’

‘He bought it before he found his way into the state mental health system. It wasn’t like he went into the store drooling and screaming obscenities about dogs.’

Aimee was distracted by the flapping of wings behind her. A raven was trying to alight on the windowsill but couldn’t get a foothold. It returned instead to the ones in the birch. Four now.

‘I don’t like them,’ she said. ‘And these are real big. Have you ever seen ravens that big before?’

I stood and stepped over to the window. I could barely see the birds through the gap in the blinds, but I didn’t reach out to widen it with my fingers. On the road beyond I saw cars passing, each with at least one child inside, all coming from L’École Française de Maine just up the street. One of the birds turned its head and cawed an objection to their presence.

‘How long have they been here?’

‘Not long: since shortly before you arrived. I know they’re just birds, but they’re real smart, ravens. Animals have no right to be so smart, and it’s as if these ones are waiting for something.’

I stared at the ravens for just a moment longer, then returned to my chair.

‘Just birds,’ I echoed.

She sat forward in her chair. We were moving on to the business of the moment.

‘Did you see the man sitting outside?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Anything strike you about him?’

I considered the question.

‘He’s nervous, but he’s trying to hide it. Hardly unusual for someone in a lawyer’s office who isn’t a lawyer, and he doesn’t give off a lawyer vibe. He’s doing okay, though. No tapping of the feet, no tics, no hand gestures. Either for professional or personal reasons, he’s grown good at hiding what he’s feeling. But it’s there: It’s in his eyes.’

‘Did you learn how to do that from your ex-girlfriend?’

‘Some of it. She taught me how to put words to sensations.’

‘Well, you both did good. That man outside has been concealing truths about himself for a very long time. He has a story that I’d like you to hear.’

‘I’m always happy to listen.’

‘There’s a complication. I’ve acted on his behalf in the past – nothing serious, a DUI that we had quashed, and a minor dispute with a neighbor – and I’ve agreed to act for him in this matter too, insofar as I can, but I need someone with your skills to work on the ground.’

‘So I hear his story, and decide if I want to take the job.’

‘I want you to decide before you hear his story.’

‘That’s not how I work. Why would you want me to do that?’

‘Because I want you to be bound by the same duty of confidentiality as I am.’

‘You don’t trust me?’

‘I trust you. I’m just not sure how you’re going to react to elements of his story. And if the police become involved I want you to be able to say that you’re working for me, with the consequent protection of privilege.’

‘But if I decline to take the case, what’s the problem? How are the cops going to know?’

She took her time before answering.

‘Because you might feel compelled to share with them what you learn here.’

Now it was my turn to pause.

‘No, that’s not my style,’ I said at last.

‘Do you trust me?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll want to take this case. You’ll have reservations about the client, perhaps, but you’ll want to take the case. What he did, he did a long time ago, but it may have ramifications for an investigation that’s ongoing.’

‘What did he do?’

‘You’ll take the case?’

‘What did he do?’

She grimaced, then sat back in her chair.

‘He murdered a girl.’

4

He entered with his body slightly hunched, as though tensed to receive a blow, and there was an almost childlike aspect to his demeanor. He reminded me of an errant boy who has been called to the principal’s office in order to explain his actions, and doesn’t believe that he has a plausible excuse. Such men and women were a familiar sight to me, and to Aimee Price. Lawyers’ offices have something of the confessional about them; in their confines, truths are revealed, justifications offered, and penances negotiated.

He was wearing dark-rimmed spectacles with the faintest of tints. The lenses did not look thick, and the magnifying effect on his eyes was barely noticeable. They struck me as a shield of sorts, an element of his armory of defenses. He called himself Randall Haight. It was the name on his business card, and the name by which he was known to his neighbors, with whom, for the most part, he maintained distant yet cordial relations, the only exception being Arthur Holden, the other party in the old boundary dispute that had left a lingering bitterness hanging like a miasma over the adjacent properties. According to Aimee, Haight had backed down before it could become a matter for the court, and therefore increasingly messy, and expensive, and public.

Public: That was the important word, for Randall Haight was a most private man.

Haight took a seat next to me, having first shaken hands in a tentative manner, his body leaning away from me even as his hand was extended, possibly fearful that I might be the one to strike that long-anticipated blow. He knew that Aimee would have told me enough to give me an adverse opinion of him, should I have chosen to form one. I tried to keep my face neutral because, in truth, I wasn’t sure how I felt about Haight. I wanted to hear what he had to say before I reached any conclusions, but I could detect a mixture of curiosity and animosity in myself as I judged him despite my best efforts, and some of that must surely have communicated itself to him. I saw how he looked at me, glancing up and sideways, not quite meeting my eye. Dignity and shame fought for primacy within him, with guilt and anger bubbling beneath. I sensed it all, saw it all, and wondered what else he might have hidden away in the locked cabinet of his heart. Of the anger I was certain: I picked up on it in the same way that animals are said to be able to scent disease in humans. I was good at scenting the poisons in men, and Haight’s anger was like a pollutant in his blood, infecting his system. It would always be there, waiting to well up, seeking an outlet: a complex, many-headed thing; a hydra within. It was anger at himself for what he had done, fed by his own self-pity; anger at the girl who had died, as hers was not a passive role, and dying is itself an action; anger at the authorities who had punished him, blighting his future; and anger at his accomplice in the killing, for Aimee had informed me that Randall Haight had not acted alone. There was another with him on the day that the girl died, and Aimee’s view was that Haight’s relationship with this individual was deeply conflicted.

Anger, anger, anger. He had tried to contain it, isolating it by creating a persona and a lifestyle that allowed it no opportunity for expression. In doing so he had rendered it more dangerous, and more unpredictable, for being denied an outlet. Maybe he knew this, maybe not, but it was how he had chosen to deal with all of his emotions. He was afraid that if he allowed even a little real feeling to emerge, his entire persona would be swept away in the tide that followed.

All these things I thought as he sat next to me, smelling faintly of soap and inexpensive cologne, and prepared to expose himself before his silent judges.

‘I’ve shared with Mr. Parker only a little of what you’ve told me,’ said Aimee. ‘I felt that it was better if he heard the rest of it directly from you.’

Haight swallowed hard. The office was warm, and there was a sheen of sweat on his face. He seemed about to remove his jacket, but as he shifted it from his shoulders he noticed the sweat patches beneath his arms and instead shrugged it back on. He did not want to feel more vulnerable than he already did, so he resisted the lapse into informality, even at the cost of his own comfort.

There was a mini-fridge beside a filing cabinet in the office. Aimee removed two bottles of water from it and handed one to Haight. I took the second, even though I wasn’t thirsty. Haight drank deeply until he noticed that neither Aimee nor I was doing the same, and I saw in his face that he was simultaneously grateful to her for seeking to alleviate his distress and embarrassed at even this small demonstration of weakness on his part. A little of the water dribbled down his chin and he wiped it away with his left hand, frowning at himself and at us as he did so. He gave me another sideways glance. He knew that I was sizing him up, taking in every small movement.

‘Clumsy of me,’ he said.

He removed a padded manila envelope from his leather satchel. Inside the envelope was a series of photographs, probably printed from a home photo printer. There were five in total. He spread them on the desk so that all the images were visible. In each case, the subject matter was the same, even if the specific object was different in every photo.

They were all photographs of barn doors. Two were red, one green, one black, and the other was a reproduction of a black-and-white photo from a newspaper, but the door in question looked so weathered and old that it was impossible to tell if it had ever been painted any color at all. The grain reminded me of wrinkles on skin, an effect aided by two holes in the upper portion of the barn doors, and the way that the lock bar hung lopsidedly like a half smile, so that the whole was reminiscent of an ancient face. This photo Haight set slightly apart from the others, using the tips of his fingers. The sight of the image seemed to pain him more than the rest.

‘They began arriving four days ago,’ he said. ‘The red one came first, then the green. There was nothing on the third day, then another red one arrived along with the black, each in separate envelopes. That one’ – he pointed at the gray door – ‘came this morning.’

‘Mailed or hand-delivered?’ I asked.

‘Mailed. I kept the envelopes.’

‘Postmarks?’

‘Bangor and Augusta.’

‘I assume these images have some significance for you?’

Haight’s body tensed. He reached for his water and drank some more. He started speaking slowly, but only at first. His tale had its own momentum, and once he began telling of what he had done it moved beyond his control, almost like the killing he was describing.

‘In 1982, when I was fourteen years old, Lonny Midas and I took a girl named Selina Day into a barn in Drake Creek, North Dakota. She was fourteen too, a little black girl. She wore a white blouse and a red-and-black checked skirt, and her hair was styled in cornrows. We’d spotted her around, Lonny and I, and we’d talked about her some. There was a church outside town, barely bigger than a regular house, and its congregation was all colored. Lonny and I would go by there sometimes and watch them through the window. They had services during the week, and we’d hear them talking about how Jesus was their Lord and Savior, and they’d be amening and hallelujahing. Lonny said it was funny that all those coloreds believed they were going to be saved by a white man, but I didn’t think it was funny at all. My mother told me that Jesus loved everyone, and it didn’t matter what color their skin was.’

At this point in his narrative he pursed his lips primly and looked to us for approval. See? I’m not a racist, and I know the difference between right and wrong. I knew it then, and I know it now. What happened, what I did, it was an aberration. I shouldn’t be judged on that alone, should I?

But we didn’t speak, because the questions were only in his eyes, and so he resumed his tale.

‘I’d never even kissed a girl. Lonny had. He’d once gone into the woods with one of the Beale girls, and he told me later that she let him touch one of her breasts, except he didn’t call them breasts, of course. He called them “titties.”’

And there was that prim look again. Nasty old Lonny Midas, with his crude speech and his white man’s Jesus.

‘But we’d never seen a girl naked, and we were curious, and everyone said that Selina Day wore nothing under her dress. So we waited for her when she was walking home from the poor kids’ school, and we walked with her for a time, and then we took her to the barn. It wasn’t hard. We told her there was a cat in there that had given birth to kittens and we were going to take a look at them and maybe give them some food. We just asked her if she wanted to come along, like it was nothing to us if she did or not, and she thought about it, and she came. When we got to the barn she started to look worried, but we told her that it was okay, and she believed us.

‘And when she found out what we wanted she fought back, and we had to lie across her to keep her from getting up and running away. We kept touching her, and she said that she’d tell the police what we’d done, and her uncles – because she didn’t have a father, he was gone – and they and their friends would come for us and they’d cut our balls off. She started to scream, and Lonny covered her mouth with his hand. He pressed down real hard, so that her nostrils were blocked too. I told Lonny that we ought to let her go. I could see her eyes growing wide, and she was having trouble breathing, but Lonny wouldn’t take away his hand after I told him to. I tried to pull him off her but he was bigger and stronger than I was. Eventually Selina started bucking, and Lonny sat on her chest, and then she stopped moving at all, even though her eyes were still open and I could see my reflection in them.

‘I started crying, but Lonny told me to quit it, and I did. We covered her with rotten straw, and we left her there. It was an old barn on an abandoned farm. We figured it would be a while before she was found. We swore, Lonny and I, that we wouldn’t tell what we’d done, not ever, not even if the cops came for us and put us in separate rooms and interrogated us, like they did on the TV shows. If we both agreed not to speak, then they couldn’t do anything to us. We just had to stick to our story: We never saw Selina Day and we didn’t know anything about any old barn.’

All of this came out in a rush, like pus from an infected wound. It was spoken by an adult’s voice, but with the words and emphases of a child’s narration.

‘But somebody had seen us with her. He was a farmworker from out of state, an itinerant laborer. He heard that a black girl had gone missing, and he recalled the two boys he’d seen with a little black girl that day, a black girl in a red-and-black checked skirt, just like the description that the police had passed around. He went to the cops and told them what he’d seen. He had a good eye: He remembered what we looked like, what we were wearing, everything. Drake Creek wasn’t a big town, and they had us figured before he even stopped talking. They came for us, and they put us in separate rooms, just like on those shows, and a big detective told me that Lonny had put the blame on me, that it had all been my idea, that I’d tried to rape Selina Day and he’d wanted to stop me, and it was me who had suffocated her. He said that they’d have me tried as an adult, and they’d ask for the death penalty. He said I’d get the needle for what I’d done, and that I shouldn’t think it would be like going to sleep, because it wouldn’t be. I’d feel everything – the poison seeping into my veins, the pain as my organs shut down – and I wouldn’t be able to speak or cry out because the other drugs would have paralyzed me. And there would just be me in there, all alone, without my momma or my poppa. And he said that, sometimes, they deliberately screwed around with the drugs so it would hurt more, and maybe they’d do that to me to punish me for what I’d done, for trying to rape a little girl, and for killing her when she fought back.

‘But that wasn’t true. It had been Lonny’s idea all along, and he was the one who tried to take it too far, and he was the one who closed her nostrils and pressed his hand hard against her mouth so that she couldn’t breathe. I wanted to let her go, but he was scared of what she’d say, scared that he’d have his balls cut off.’

Haight had now regressed fully. His voice was higher, and he had slipped lower in his seat so that he appeared smaller. Even his suit looked too big for him. There were tears in his eyes, and he didn’t try to brush them away as they began to roll down his cheeks. He stared only inward, and I think that he had forgotten about our presence in the room, had forgotten even about the room itself and the reason he was there. Instead, he was fourteen years old, and back in a place that smelled of sweat and urine and vomit, and a big policeman with food stains on his tie was whispering to him of the pain that he was going to endure when they put the needle in.

‘I was so scared of dying, I forgot that North Dakota had abolished the death penalty in 1973.’ The ghost of a smile haunted his mouth, then fled back to the place where he kept all of his old specters. ‘So I told him what we’d done, but I wanted him to know that it wasn’t my idea. I’d gone along with it at first, but I was sorry now. I should never have done it, and I wished that Selina Day was still alive. I told him of how I’d tried to make Lonny stop. I even showed him how I’d grabbed hold of Lonny’s wrists in an effort to pull him off her. I remember that the detective patted me on the back when I was done, and brought me a soda. Then a lawyer came and asked if I’d been read my rights, and I couldn’t remember, and he and the detective got to talking, and the subject of my rights didn’t come up again after that. They let me see my momma and poppa, and my momma held me. My poppa could barely bring himself to look at me, not even when I told him that it wasn’t my fault, and that I hadn’t been the one who killed her. He was already sick then. He had to walk with a stick, and his skin had gone gray. He only lived for another three or four years, but I was always closer to my momma anyway.’

Haight drank the last of his water, and carefully put the cap back on. He held the empty bottle between his legs, his fingertips pressing down on the cap, as though it were a button that could cause the past to disappear, erasing all memories, all sins.

‘Lonny and I were tried as adults, and we spent eighteen years each in separate facilities, from juvenile to adult. The judge ordered that all records of the trial should be sealed, both so that we could get on with our lives upon our eventual release and for our own safety because it was said that Selina Day’s uncles were involved with the Black Liberation Army, although I don’t know how true that was. Looking back, I think it was just thrown into the mix, a way for the prosecutor to cover himself in case anything went wrong. Whatever the reasons, there was an agreement reached that we should be given new identities in the course of our incarceration, and those identities should be known only to a handful of people, but we only found that out later. I remember the judge telling us that we’d done a terrible thing, but he believed that everyone had the possibility of redemption within them, especially children. He told us we were to be given a chance to prove that, once we’d done our time.

‘After twelve years they moved us to out-of-state prisons to make the changes in identities run smoother. I was born William Lagenheimer, but I became Randall Haight between the state penitentiary in Bismarck and the Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport, Vermont. After a couple of years, they moved me to Berlin, New Hampshire, where I served out the last year of my sentence. They wouldn’t tell me Lonny’s new name, and I didn’t want to know anyway. I never wanted to see him again, after all the trouble he got us into. Eventually, I came to Maine.’

Haight pointed to the photograph of the weathered barn door.

‘This was the barn in which Selina Day died,’ he said. ‘They used that picture in some of the newspapers. These others I don’t know, but this one is, or was, in Drake Creek. I still see it in my dreams.’

He looked at his lawyer, seeking her response to this second telling of his story. She tried to smile encouragingly at him, but it was more like a grimace. He turned to me. His mouth opened, and he spread his hands as if to add something to the narrative – an apology, or an explanation for why this was all in the past, and how he was different now – but he seemed to realize that there was nothing more that could be said, so he closed his mouth, and folded his arms, and remained silent while he waited to hear what we had to say.

‘So someone has found out who you are?’ I said.

‘Yes. I don’t know who, or how, but yes, that’s it.’

‘It could be a prelude to blackmail,’ said Aimee.

‘Has there been a blackmail threat?’ I asked.

‘Not yet,’ said Aimee.

I shrugged. Beside me, the light of the setting sun reflected on the lenses of Haight’s spectacles, and I could no longer see his eyes.

‘For now, it seems that Mr. Haight here has two choices,’ I said. ‘He can stay where he is and deal with the consequences if this individual chooses to make public what he or she knows, or he can leave his home and go somewhere else. Maybe he can make contact with the authorities in North Dakota and see if they will provide him with another identity, although I guess he’d have to prove that he was in some form of danger as a consequence of his potential exposure, and even then new identities aren’t handed out so easily. Look, in the end, whatever the nature of his crime, he did his time. He was a child when Selina Day was killed, not an adult. Also, if one were to be cold-blooded about it, it’s a crime that was committed a long time ago, and in another state. If his identity is revealed, there may be people in Maine who’ll react badly, but he might also be surprised by how understanding folk can be.’

‘All that is true,’ said Aimee. ‘But there’s one detail that Mr. Haight hasn’t shared with you yet. It’s where he’s living. Why don’t you tell Mr. Parker where you’ve made your home?’

And I knew that this was the bait in the trap, the detail that she had deliberately held back from me, and as Haight began to speak I felt the jaws snap shut upon me, and I understood that I would not be able to turn away from this.

‘I live two miles from Anna Kore’s house,’ said Haight. ‘I live in Pastor’s Bay.’

5

Randall Haight had resumed his seat in the reception area. The receptionist, shared by Aimee with the other businesses in the building, had gone home, so he was alone with his thoughts. He appeared dissatisfied as he left the room. It was there in the way that he held himself, in the pause before he closed the door behind him, the sense he gave that there was more to be said, or more that should have been said, and not by him. Our response – or possibly more correctly, my response – to his story had not satisfied him. I think that he might have been seeking some form of reassurance and consolation, not about the problem of the photographs, but about his own nature.

It was now dusk outside, and the rain continued to fall. The lights of passing cars illuminated the parking lot, casting new shadows over the office in which Aimee and I sat. Dark patches remained in the branches of the tree. The ravens had not moved, and they made no sound. I felt the urge to take a handful of stones and force them from their perch.

Traitorous birds. Apostates.

‘Well?’ said Aimee.

We had not exchanged a word since Haight left the office at Aimee’s request so that we might discuss in private all that he had told us. The pictures of the barn doors remained on the desk. I moved them around with the index finger of my right hand, rearranging their order, as though the colors represented a code I could crack, and by doing so I would be allowed the revelation, the certainty, that I sought.

I was wondering where the lie was. It might be that I had grown more cynical as the years went by, or it might simply have been an atavistic instinct I had learned not to ignore, but a lie was hidden somewhere in Randall Haight’s testimony to us. It could have been a lie of deceit or a lie of omission, but it was there. I knew, because there is always a lie. Even a man like Haight, who, in his youth, was party to a terrible crime, and who had just confessed as much to two strangers, reducing himself in their eyes, would hold back at least one crucial detail. If nothing else, it was human nature. You didn’t give everything away; if you did, you would have nothing left. There were those who took the view that there was a liberation in the act of confession, but mostly they tended to be the ones who were listening and not the ones confessing. The only full confessions occur on deathbeds; all others are partial, modified. The lie in Haight’s story was probably one that he had practiced, a rearrangement or omission of details that had now become crucial to his account of events, maybe to the extent that he no longer knew it as a lie at all. There had been a rehearsed 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 he didn’t do it.’

Aimee winced at each use of the word ‘if.’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It’s not like you haven’t considered the possibility.’

‘Assuming it’s crossed my mind, do you really think he could have taken Anna Kore?’

‘No, not unless he’s playing a high-stakes game by involving us, in which case he’s either ridiculously clever or he’s crazy.’

‘He doesn’t strike me as either. He is smart, but if he’s crazy he’s hiding it well. What?’

I had been unable to conceal a frown of doubt.

‘Crazy would be a strong word, but he’s a man living with the knowledge that he once killed a child. He’s been forced into a new identity, and he lives in an isolated community far from his original home. I think he’s functioning under immense emotional and psychological strain. He practically hums with tension. Do you know if he’s maintained any form of contact with his family?’

‘He says that he hasn’t. We know that his father is dead. He doesn’t know where his mother is. He told me that he lived with her for a time after his release from Berlin, but felt suffocated by her presence. He also believed that, for the purposes of inhabiting his new identity, it would be better if he had no further contact with his family. That’s not unusual. He’d learned to live without them for a long time, and a lot of prisoners have trouble adjusting to familial relationships once they’re released. It would have been even harder for Randall, as officially he was no longer even a member of his own family.’

‘That was some social experiment he and Lonny Midas found themselves involved in.’

‘You disapprove?’

‘No. I just don’t fully understand the thinking behind it.’

‘We should find out more.’

‘We will.’

‘And we’ve established that he’s not crazy, but under pressure he may buckle.’

‘Agreed,’ I said, reluctantly.

‘If he goes to the police, his old life in Pastor’s Bay will be over. He doesn’t want that. He wants to stay where he is, and live out his days there. As you said, he’s done his time. The law and society have no further hold on him in that respect.’

‘So he’ll stay quiet and hope that the girl is found?’

‘That will be my advice to him, for now. Meanwhile, you’ll look into who might be sending him these images, because you understand why it matters.’

She had me in a bind. Randall Haight had committed no crime in the state of Maine of which we knew. Haight was a client of Aimee’s, and I had tentatively agreed to work for her on Haight’s behalf. I was bound by issues of client confidentiality, to a certain extent, and it offered a degree of protection against being forced by the police to reveal details about my involvement, should it come to that. But I didn’t like the situation we were in. To protect Haight, we were concealing information that might be germane to the investigation into Anna Kore’s disappearance, even though there was no evidence to suggest a direct link between Haight and the crime beyond one of geographic proximity and the similarity in the ages between two of the girls involved. It was the grayest of gray areas, and I felt that Aimee was exploiting it.

‘Does it bother you?’ asked Aimee. ‘What Randall did, does it trouble you?’

‘Of course it does.’

‘But more than it should? Do you feel a personal animosity toward him because of the loss of your own child? I have to ask that. You do understand?’

‘I understand. No, I don’t feel excessive animosity toward him. He killed a child when he was a child himself, and I get the feeling he’s a bit of a creep, although I can’t say why. You know that I could walk out of here, right? Nothing to which I’ve agreed in this office is binding.’

‘I know that. I also know that you won’t walk.’

‘If you’re right, do you want to try telling me why?’

‘Because there’s another child involved. Because Anna Kore is out there somewhere, and she may still be alive. As long as there’s hope for her, you won’t walk away. I know that you’re uneasy about not going to the police. I’ll work on Randall to see if I can get him to change his mind about coming forward voluntarily, but if you can find one firm connection between what’s happening to our client and the disappearance of Anna Kore, I’ll call the cops myself, and I’ll sit on Randall until they come.’

While I wrestled with that mental image, she added, ‘Because that’s the other reason you’ll take the case: You, like I am, are wondering if there’s a possibility that the person who is taunting Randall Haight is the same person who took Anna Kore.’

I drove back to Scarborough, my eyes straining as the rain pummeled the windshield. The Mustang’s lights weren’t worth much in this kind of weather, but it hadn’t been this bad when I left earlier, and I enjoyed taking the car out when I could. It was an indulgence, but I liked to believe that I was a man of relatively few indulgences. On the seat beside me was a printout of the names of all those involved in the prosecution of the Selina Day case that Haight could recall. He was unsure of spellings in some cases, and claimed to know nothing of where those people were now. When I asked if he hadn’t been tempted to find out about them, he replied that William Lagenheimer might have been, but Randall Haight was not.

I was troubled by the Haight case, but even if there had not been the matter of Anna Kore to take into account I would still have accepted it. After all, I could do with the money, and the diversion that the job offered. Work was thin on the ground at present. Businesses and individuals didn’t have cash to spend on private investigators, not unless there were large sums or considerable reputations at risk, in which case they’d approach one of the bigger agencies anyway. Even marital work, which was usually worth a trickle of income, had dried up. Spouses suspicious of their partners, believing them to be straying, would carry out their own investigations, checking cell phone records, credit card slips, hotel bookings. They’d even follow their husbands or wives themselves, or get a friend to do so, if they could find one they trusted enough, and one they were certain wasn’t the third party in the possibly adulterous relationship. Many, though, would just live with their suspicions, because even if they found out that they were right, what were they going to do? Everybody was struggling. It was hard enough to keep one roof above their heads; they couldn’t afford two. Sometimes economics alone were enough to keep men and women from straying, or force them to live with their doubts.

So I picked up work where I could, mostly insurance stuff, and surveillance for businesses concerned about the activities of employees. I’d even begun engaging in stolen-property recovery, but that was one step above becoming a repo man, and it was cash hard earned. At best, it involved trawling pawnshops for goods that had been sold on, and then breaking the news to the pawnbroker that he’d have to take a hit on the deal, assuming the broker was reputable in the first place and I could prove that he was selling a fenced item. At worst, it meant knocking on the doors of junkies and deadbeats and professional thieves, most of whom tended to look upon cooperation as a last resort when lies, intimidation and – that old reliable – violence had failed to convince. In the end, you could slum it for only so long before you became part of the slums yourself.

Once it was agreed that I would take the Haight case, and Aimee had tried to stiff me on my rates as a matter of course, and I’d laughed and waited for her to get serious, she’d offered to see what she could find in the way of court documents related to the Selina Day killing. If they were sealed, as Randall Haight claimed they were, then there would be a limit to what would be available to her. In the meantime, Haight was on his way back to Pastor’s Bay. There he would sit in his home office and write out a list of everyone whom he knew in the area, including all of his business contacts and all of his acquaintances, however casual, with a particular emphasis on recent arrivals in the area, and new clients. I would go up there to talk to him in a day or two, and try to establish whether there was anyone in town who had begun to act differently around him, or any new arrival who might have some connection to North Dakota, either to the juvenile facility in which Haight had served the early part of his sentence or to the state penitentiary. I’d also have to seek points of possible contact between the prisons in Newport and Berlin, although it seemed less likely that they might be the weak links, assuming the transfer under his new identity had been conducted smoothly. After that, it would be a matter of going through public and private records in an effort to establish the whereabouts of such individuals, in case one of them had made his or her way to eastern Maine and there had crossed paths with Randall Haight.

As I drove, I thought about the purpose of taunting Haight. Blackmail was the obvious answer, but that would presume the individual involved was not responsible for the disappearance of Anna Kore. Why potentially draw attention to yourself if you’ve already committed a serious crime involving the abduction of a young girl?

The second possibility was sadism: Someone was enjoying watching Haight squirm, either for purely vindictive reasons or because he or she might have lost a child in similar circumstances, and tormenting a man guilty of a crime against a child is the next best thing to tormenting the person responsible for the crime against your child.

The third option was the one that interested me most, although I tried not to favor it too heavily in case I prejudiced myself, thereby risking missing crucial evidence to the contrary. That option, as Aimee had stated, was that Randall Haight was being targeted by the person who had taken Anna Kore, probably as a prelude to making Haight the scapegoat for the crime. If that was the case, then it would require Haight to panic and run, and the information about his past to be anonymously revealed to the police and the press, diverting the course of the investigation away from the person responsible for Anna’s disappearance and toward Haight. Then again, if Haight didn’t run, the information could still be leaked, and the investigation would take a new direction anyway.

Or Haight might find himself unable to handle the pressure and, advised by his lawyer, he could approach the police and confess the truth about his past, thereby theoretically removing the only weapon that his tormentor had to use against him: the secret nature of his past crime.

But Haight didn’t have an alibi for the day that Anna Kore had disappeared, and that was a serious problem. He had told us that he was at home, going through the books of a furniture company based in Northport. The physical books and receipts were a mess, and he had intended to spend the entire day just trying to get them into some kind of order. Unfortunately, he was struck by a twenty-four-hour bug, and spent most of the time vomiting, or dozing in a nauseated state on his couch. Therefore he had not logged on to his computer, and he had not used the telephone or the Internet. Neither did he have any visitors, and what little he had eaten he had taken from his fridge at home. There was no food delivery to confirm his presence in the house. So Randall Haight, upon approaching the police, would then become a suspect, and even if he was entirely innocent his life would be altered by what followed, and Haight wanted to hold on to his current life if at all possible. He understood that nobody was likely to give him another new identity, and the power of the Internet meant that, once his past became known, the truth would follow him forever, or so he believed.

Randall Haight was a soul in torment. Aimee had tried to reassure him that she and I would do everything in our power to protect him, but I saw in his eyes that he knew better. His carefully constructed life was disintegrating, and the mask that he wore was peeling away from his skin, flaking and falling, to reveal once more the face of the killer William Lagenheimer.

6

The rain falling, the light gone, and the warmth of bars siren-calling to the men and women passing on the slick streets, although those who answered would probably have found their way to such places anyway, or at least to places like this particular dive in Woburn. The men and women who congregated there had little desire for their homes, and those who shared those homes with another knew that there was no great anticipation for their return.

It was called the Wanderer, and could best be described as having evolved, in its way, although its evolution was comparable to that of a primitive creature that had exchanged gills for lungs, clambered from sea to shore, and then progressed no farther, dispensing entirely with any further notion of advancement in favor of a barely refined primitivism. Its particular evolutionary path had proceeded as follows: A drunk passes another drunk a bottle; the two drunks find a bench upon which to rest the bottle; a third drunk, but one less drunk than the others, arrives and helps them pour their drinks; someone puts a wall around them so they have something to lean against as they poison themselves with alcohol; a roof is added so that the rain doesn’t fall into their booze; a sign is hung up outside, notifying all and sundry that the Wanderer is now open for business. The end.

It had a floor of cheap green tile reminiscent of a hospital canteen, blackened by the cigarette butts that had been crushed into it over the years. There was a jukebox in the far corner, but nobody could ever recall its having been in use. It remained lit, and ostensibly available for business, but only drunks and non-regulars ever tried to make it play a song, and then it simply swallowed their money and remained silent. Complaints about the recalcitrant nature of the jukebox were always met with a shrug by the bartender, who would inform the complainant that the jukebox was rented, and it was all to do with the rental company, and only the company’s staff was permitted to mess around with its innards, all of which were lies so barefaced it was a wonder the bartender’s tongue didn’t turn to ash and fall from his mouth before the last one could even be spoken. But if the complainant really cared that much about his fifty cents, the bartender would continue, he could write a letter, assuming the name of the company could be unearthed to begin with, which would be difficult because the company didn’t exist. The jukebox was the bar’s own, and had been ever since the original company behind its presence went out of business. It didn’t make the bartenders much from its gradual accumulation of fools’ quarters, but it garnered them a degree of amusement. Occasionally a patron might try to hit the jukebox to make it play, or at least return his money, at which point he would receive a warning, if he was lucky, or be ejected, if he was unluckier. If he was very unlucky, and had been acting the asshole prior to taking on the jukebox, he would be ejected via the back door, and he might stumble along the way, and thus bang his head and hurt himself, which would occasion no great sense of regret on the part of anyone except himself.

Rarely were such actions necessary, though. For the most part, locals understood the nature of the bar, and non-locals rarely frequented it. Its name was not inapt, as it had no fixed identity of its own and attracted those with no particular national, sporting, or racial allegiances about which to get excited. It was owned by a Pole, managed by an Italian, and its bartenders were all mongrels, their only common denominator being their whiteness, for Woburn, Massachusetts, was ninety percent white, five percent Asian, and five percent whatever was left, and the non-white ten percent tended to give the Wanderer a wide berth. That was just the way things were, and nobody bothered to comment on it.

The Wanderer’s décor was neutral, mainly because it didn’t really have any décor, unless you counted a single cracked Budweiser mirror. Its chairs were mismatched and rested unevenly on the floor. Its tables were black and red, with faux-marble surfaces. The stools along the bar were dull steel with black vinyl seats that were last upholstered when John McNamara was still managing the Red Sox and they were bumbling along at.500, right before Joe Morgan replaced him and the team went on to win nineteen of twenty to take the AL East title, an achievement that went relatively un noticed in the Wanderer, as it didn’t have a television at the time, and still didn’t have one now. The Wanderer took no more interest in sports than it did in politics, art, culture, movies, or any other facet of existence unrelated to the act of pouring booze and receiving money for it in return. It had regulars, but beyond greeting them by name when they were so inclined none of the bartenders cared to investigate further the circumstances of their lives. For the most part, those who frequented the Wanderer came to be left alone. They didn’t care much for other people, but then they didn’t care much for themselves either, so at least they were consistent.

But it was still in business after more than forty years, because it knew its market. That market was drunks and wife-beaters. It was women a step above whoredom who’d been selling themselves for so long in return for drinks, company, and a different bed that they’d somehow managed to convince themselves that such short-term arrangements qualified as actual relationships. It was new arrivals with a one-name contact who were looking for work, and weren’t particular about the work in question, or whether a Social Security number was required, or whether or not it was entirely legal. It was workers in worn boots and checked shirts who left messages behind the bar for other men, and businessmen in cheap suits and tieless shirts who stopped by on their way to Someplace Else, or To Meet A Guy, or for some similarly vague reason that justified a temporary halt at the Wanderer.

And it was individuals like the two men who sat at the bar close to the jukebox, their jackets zipped even though it was warm inside and they were on their second beers, their backs to the barred window that looked out on Winn Street. There was a Boston Herald folded in front of one of them, but it appeared to be unread. Neither of them was a large man, and a decade separated the younger from the older, although there was a similar hardness and weariness to their features. The younger of the two had light curly hair, and wore no jewelry: no rings, no watch, no chains. His brown leather blouson jacket was of the kind that was fashionable in the eighties but had been bought long after. His jeans were a faded blue, and speckled with fake paint marks. His sneakers bore the Nike swoosh, although they had never been near a Nike factory. A bottle of Bud stood before him, but he had barely sipped from it.

His companion was stockier, with long black hair greased back from his forehead but cut short at the sides and back, giving him a vaguely tribal aspect. He sported a two-day growth of beard, and his right hand repetitively twisted a pack of Camels: top, side, base, side, top, side, base, side. There were two gold rings on his right hand, and one on the little finger of his left. A thick gold chain looped around his right wrist, and another around his neck, a gold cross dangling from it. There were tattoos on both of his arms, mostly hidden by the sleeves of his black leather jacket, but the dark edges of the artwork on his back were visible at the base of his neck. He wore Timberland boots, heavily scuffed, and dark blue Levis. There was scarring around the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. It looked like an old burn.

His second beer was almost gone, and he was debating whether it was worth his while to order another. His name was Martin Dempsey, and his accent betrayed a life of wandering. In Irish bars, surrounded by immigrants, his many years on that side of the Atlantic found expression in his voice. Here it was less obvious, though still present in the rhythms of his speech. The other man was named Francis Ryan, and his accent was Boston Irish, with only the faintest hint of something else beneath it.

They were not regulars at the Wanderer, and nobody of their acquaintance frequented it. All Dempsey knew was that the Irish were not among its ethnic regulars, which was enough for him. It was out of town, off the beaten track. It was Elsewhere. That was precisely why they had chosen it, for there were now few places where it was truly safe for them to show their faces. The tiredness around their eyes, the strain lines around their mouths, were recent additions. These were hunted men.

‘You want another?’ said Dempsey.

‘Nah, I don’t think I’ll be able to finish this one.’

‘Why did you order it, then?’

‘Politeness. I didn’t want to see you drinking alone.’

‘But I am drinking alone, ’cause you’re not drinking at all. What’s wrong with you?’

‘I don’t like drinking too much before a job.’

‘From what I can see, you don’t like drinking after a job either. You don’t like drinking, period.’

‘I can’t handle it the way you can. Never could. The hangovers kill me.’

‘You can’t get a hangover on two beers. A child couldn’t get a hangover on two beers.’

‘Still, we have a job.’

‘A job? We don’t have a job. We’re errand boys delivering a message. A job is different. A job has purpose, and a quantifiable outcome. A job has a reward at the end of it. This is a waste of my talents.’ He corrected himself. ‘Sorry, “our” talents.’

‘Go have a smoke. It’ll kill some time.’

‘I’m trying to quit.’

‘Then why are you carrying around a pack of Camels?’

‘I said I was trying to quit. I didn’t say that I had. Anyway, do you see me smoking? No. I’m not smoking. I’m just toying with a box.’

‘It’s a thing, a, you know, a displacement activity.’

‘Where the fuck did you learn words like “displacement activity”?’

‘I’m trying to improve myself.’

‘The only way is up.’

‘Just have one, will you? Stop playing with them.’

‘Sorry,’ said Dempsey, and he meant it, but still he kept moving the pack.

Ryan looked at the clock above the bar.

‘You think that clock is right?’

‘If it is, it’s the only thing in here that’s right. Even the jukebox is crooked, and there isn’t a straight edge in the place. Fucking disgrace, is what it is.’

‘It’s old.’

‘It’s not old. Castles are old. France is old. This place isn’t old. It’s just badly built. It’s a hole. It’s worse than a hole. A hole is just empty. This is a hole with junk piled up inside it and deadbeats propping up the walls.’

‘It’s old for around here,’ said Ryan.

‘You have shares in it?’

‘No.’

‘Does your old man own it?’

‘No.’

‘Your mom turn tricks in the men’s room?’

‘No. She couldn’t make enough here to cover the cab fare.’

‘Then what’s it to you if I criticize it, especially if it’s true?’

‘It’s nothing to me.’

A couple in their late twenties at the table behind them laughed loudly and made a joke about Harvard and MIT. They looked too well dressed for the Wanderer, and even without the joke it was clear that they were slumming it for a night. The woman wasn’t bad-looking, but her face was a little too long, and her mouth had too many white teeth for its size. The man wore a striped Ralph Lauren polo shirt, and khakis. His hair was excessively neat, and was held in place by a product that Ryan suspected was not meant to be worn by men. As far as Ryan was concerned, the guy looked like a dick, but although he was younger than Dempsey by six years, Ryan’s attitude toward the world was less combative, and he had learned that if he allowed himself to be riled by every dick he encountered in his daily life he’d be dead of an aneurysm before he reached thirty.

Dempsey scowled at the couple’s reflection in the mirror behind the bar, and Ryan felt his stomach tighten. Sometimes there was no telling how Dempsey might react to even the most innocuous of situations. For now, though, he contented himself with giving them the hard eye.

‘You said it: nothing,’ said Dempsey. ‘That’s what they are to us. This isn’t our neighborhood. These aren’t our people. We can say what we like about them.’

‘I know that,’ said Ryan. ‘You think the clock is right?’

‘Don’t change the subject. You were born where?’

‘Champaign, Illinois.’

‘You ever been back there?’

‘No. My old man was working out there when I was born. Didn’t spend more than a month there before we moved to Southie. I’ve never been back.’

‘Right. Don’t get sentimental about a place that you left when you were a child. Remember what Oscar Wilde said.’

‘Who’s Oscar Wilde?’

‘Jesus. He was a writer.’

‘I never heard of him. That clock must be right. It feels right.’

‘He said that “sentimentality is the bank-holiday of cynicism.”’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘It means that if you’re sentimental you’re really a cynic deep down. You don’t want to be a cynic. I should know.’

‘I’m not sentimental. I just think there are worse places than this.’

‘There are worse places than just about anywhere. That doesn’t mean anything, unless you’re living in the worst place in the world, in which case it can only get better.’

‘Africa.’

‘What?’

‘I figure the worst place is in Africa somewhere, one of those countries where they’re starving and fighting and cutting off limbs. I’ve seen pictures: women with no arms, little children. Animals, they are.’

‘Whatever. We have our share of them here as well. You don’t have to go to Africa to find them.’

‘Can I take a look at your watch? I want to check if that clock is right.’

‘Leave the watch alone. What are you so worried about?’

‘I don’t want us to miss him.’

‘We won’t miss him. In fact, the longer we wait, the less likely we are to miss him.’

‘Hey.’ Ryan beckoned the bartender to him. ‘Is that clock right?’

The bartender sidled over, wiping his hands on a dishcloth that hung by his belt over his crotch. He was skinny and bald, with bad teeth, and had tended bar at the Wanderer for almost two decades. Some said that he could even remember a time when the jukebox worked. He wore a green T-shirt with the bar’s name on the left breast. The T-shirts were not for sale. Then again, nobody had ever tried to buy one.

‘Yeah, I make sure it is. I don’t want to spend a minute longer in here than I have to.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ said Dempsey. ‘Make the customers feel wanted.’

‘If I make them feel wanted, they’ll stay,’ said the bartender. ‘They’ll try to talk to me. I don’t want the customers talking to me.’

‘Not even me?’

‘Not even you.’

‘Anyone would think that you didn’t want to make any money,’ said Dempsey.

‘Yeah, I was saving up to buy a yacht with my tips, but that dream died.’

‘The clock is right,’ said Ryan. ‘We should go.’

‘Yeah, yeah, all right. Jesus, you’re like an old woman.’

There was more laughter from the couple behind them, louder this time. Dempsey looked back at them over his shoulder. The laughter was silenced, but it was followed by a soft giggle from the woman as the man said something to her. Dempsey took one of the cigarettes from the pack and stuck it between his lips but didn’t light it.

‘You know them?’ he asked the bartender.

‘No,’ said the bartender. ‘But then I don’t know you either.’

‘You need to be more selective with your clientele.’

‘It’s all natural selection here.’

‘Yeah? Well, you’re about to see Darwinism in action.’

Dempsey was on the guy before Ryan could even react. By the time Ryan reached the table, Dempsey had his forearm jammed under the preppie’s chin, and his knee in the guy’s balls, the whole weight of Dempsey trying to force him through the wall.

‘Did you say something about me?’ said Dempsey. ‘Well, did you?’

Some of his spittle landed on the man’s face, which was rapidly turning a deep red. The guy tried to shake his head, but he could barely move it. A choking noise forced itself from his lips. The woman beside him reached out as if to pull Dempsey’s arm away. He turned his head toward her and said, ‘Don’t.’

‘Please,’ said the woman.

‘Please what?’ said Dempsey.

‘Please leave him alone.’

‘You’re not laughing now, are you, you horse-faced bitch?’ said Dempsey. ‘Answer me. Answer me!’

‘No, I’m not laughing.’

As if to confirm the fact, she began to cry. Carefully, Ryan touched Dempsey on the shoulder.

‘Come on, let it go. We’re done here.’

Slowly, Dempsey released his hold on the man.

‘Go back to fucking Cambridge where you belong,’ he said. ‘If I ever see you again, I’ll rape her and make you watch.’

Dempsey rose and backed away. He was breathing hard. His victim was so shaken that he hadn’t moved. That was the way with the weak ones: If you were on them fast, and shocked them enough, you didn’t need to cause them any real harm.

The bartender watched Dempsey carefully. He hadn’t made any effort to stop what was taking place, but that was because he’d seen it all before, and was prepared to let events take something of their course before intervening. Still, he didn’t look impressed. They wouldn’t be welcome here again, not that they had any plans to return.

Dempsey tossed a twenty on the bar.

‘Toward your yacht,’ he told the bartender.

‘I’ll name it after you,’ said the bartender. ‘Do you spell “Asshole” with one s or two?’

‘You can spell it with one s. That way, we’ll know it’s yours when we set fire to it.’

He picked up his pack of cigarettes and dropped them in his jacket pocket.

‘Come on then,’ he said to Ryan. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

7

The house was unexceptional in every way, just one more anodyne suburban box in a street composed of identical suburban boxes outside Bedford, each with its car in the drive, and the flicker of TV screens in front rooms. There were Halloween decorations in place: tombstones, and scarecrows, and pumpkins that had begun to rot, drawing the last of the night insects. Ryan felt the weight of beer pressing on his bladder. He could have gone to men’s room at the Wanderer if it hadn’t been for Dempsey and his actions. Now here Dempsey was again, cursing the existences of people he didn’t even know, as though the quality of his own life was worth more than the change from a nickel.

‘Look at all this shit on the lawns,’ said Dempsey, as he parked the car. ‘How many of these people really have children of their own, you think?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You don’t think there’s something wrong with lonely old men putting out Halloween crap to attract children?’

‘No, I don’t think there’s anything wrong-’ Ryan began to say, then caught himself before he went any further. It didn’t seem wise to suggest that there was anything okay about using Halloween decorations to attract children, because that raised the specter of why one might be trying to attract them to begin with. He tried again. ‘You’re making it sound bad when it isn’t. It’s not like that. It’s just people getting into the spirit of the season, like at Christmas.’

‘Don’t get me started on Christmas either,’ said Dempsey.

‘You know, you’re a miserable bastard.’

‘And you’re too trusting. It’ll be the death of you.’

Dempsey checked his gun, which prevented him from seeing the look that Ryan sent his way. Had he glimpsed it, he might have reappraised his relationship with the younger man. Instead, it was lost to him. When he surfaced, Ryan’s forehead was furrowed only by the slightest of lines.

‘We’re just supposed to talk to him,’ he said.

‘We are going to talk to him. We just want to make sure we have his full attention when we do. And when did you get so sensitive?’

‘He’s not a tough guy. I’ve met him.’

‘You want to try an experiment? Here’s an experiment. Close your eyes.’

Ryan didn’t close his eyes. He didn’t want to. He didn’t like being around Dempsey with his eyes closed. He was coming to the conclusion that he didn’t like being around Dempsey even with his eyes wide open.

‘Why should I close my eyes?’

‘It’s just a thing. Come on, do it.’

Ryan closed his eyes, and waited. Five seconds went by before Dempsey said, ‘Okay, open them again.’

When Ryan did so, the muzzle of the gun was an inch away from his face, and although a part of him had been expecting something of the kind, the shock was still enough to cause his sphincter to loosen in response, and he had to tense it to bring it under control before he shamed himself.

‘You see?’ said Dempsey. ‘Tough guy or not, that hole commands attention.’

Ryan swallowed. He didn’t speak until he was sure there was enough moisture in his mouth and throat.

‘Are you finished?’ he said.

‘I’m just kidding with you,’ said Dempsey as he lowered the gun. ‘You really are too sensitive.’

Ryan shook his head. He wanted to take deep breaths. He wanted to put his head against the cool window and wait for the waves of dread to stop pulsing through him. He wanted to stop running and hiding. He had started to believe that the fear of what might come was worse than the thing itself.

‘Don’t shake your head at me,’ said Dempsey. ‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Hey, I’m sorry, all right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Come on, don’t be like that.’

‘You almost made me piss myself.’

Dempsey smothered a grin. ‘My bad.’

‘It was all that beer you made me drink.’

‘All that one bottle?’

‘Beer just goes through me. I don’t know what it is about it. Maybe I got an allergy.’

Dempsey stepped from the car, the gun now hidden in the folds of his coat, and Ryan followed. There was nobody around, and no cars moved along the street. Ryan was a little happier being this far from Boston. The last job like this had been in Everett, which had originally been part of Charlestown way back, and even its historical connections to their old stomping ground had made him sweat. If they showed their faces in Charlestown proper, they’d be dead before the nearest lights changed.

They walked up the short drive to the front door, Dempsey taking in the untended lawn and the weeds in the flower beds as they went.

‘That’s a disgrace,’ he said.

‘It’ll be winter soon,’ said Ryan. ‘Weeds will die. Lawn won’t grow. What does it matter?’

‘It’s an indication of a state of mind. You take care of all of your affairs or you take care of none of them. That’s how he’s in this trouble to begin with.’

‘Because he didn’t mow his lawn?’

‘Yeah, because he didn’t mow his lawn. What is it with you tonight?’ Dempsey rang the doorbell, but his attention was fixed on his partner.

‘There’s a game on. I’d prefer to be watching it.’

‘Yeah, well there’s a game on here too. This is what pays your bills. You need to step up to the plate here. You don’t pay attention, you make mistakes.’

‘He drives a gypsy cab. What’s he gonna do, overcharge us?’

A shadow appeared behind the frosted glass, giving Dempsey just enough time to raise a finger in warning before the door opened a crack and a woman’s face appeared. Ryan could see that she had the security chain in place, but it looked loose to him; that, and the fact she had answered the door after dark, meant that her husband probably wasn’t home yet. Now Dempsey would have something else to complain about, since it was Ryan who had hustled them from the bar to begin with.

‘Mrs. Napier?’ said Dempsey.

The woman nodded. She looked tired and badly worn, just like her clothes, although Ryan thought that she might clean up well. The little that he could see of her body seemed trim.

‘We’re looking for your husband,’ said Dempsey.

‘He’s at work,’ she said.

Ryan watched her trying to gauge the situation. It was after eight, there were two strangers at the door, and they now knew that the man of the house wasn’t around. She had two choices: number one, to claim that there was someone else there with her, or-

She went for number two.

‘I’m expecting him back soon, though. I can give him a message, if you like.’

‘We’d prefer to wait and give it to him ourselves, if it’s all the same to you,’ said Dempsey.

Mrs. Napier’s mouth opened and closed. Ryan could see her getting worried. Maybe she knew about her husband’s work on the side, or perhaps she’d just guessed when the cash began to flow more freely. He wondered if she was the kind to ask questions. If she was, then her husband wasn’t the kind to answer them. He’d always struck Ryan as sullen and taciturn, and his wife didn’t have the face of a woman who was being smothered in spousal affection. Whatever she knew or suspected, it was enough to connect their arrival on her doorstep with any doubts she might have about the state of her husband’s affairs. Ryan liked to think that he could blend in with a crowd and look like a regular guy, but Dempsey carried the smell of the streets with him. At best, they could expect her to call and warn him. At best.

‘Well, I’m not sure when he’ll be home.’

‘Soon,’ said Dempsey. ‘You told us he’d be back soon.’

‘That changes. I never know. He drives a cab. If he’s having a good night, then sometimes he stays out late.’

‘It’s quiet all over tonight,’ said Dempsey. ‘I don’t figure this for a late one.’

‘Obviously you’re free to wait in your car,’ said Mrs. Napier. ‘It’s cold. I’m going to close the door now.’

She tried to follow through, but Dempsey’s foot was in the gap. Ryan watched the pallor seep into her face.

‘Please take your foot away,’ she said.

‘We’d like to wait inside,’ said Dempsey. ‘Like you say, it’s cold out.’

‘If you don’t remove your foot, I’ll call the police.’

‘That settles it, then,’ said Dempsey. His hand shot through the gap and grabbed Mrs. Napier by the hair, pulling her face toward him until it was sandwiched by the door and the frame. He let her see the gun.

‘Take the chain off.’

‘Please-’

Now he pressed the muzzle hard against her forehead. ‘I won’t ask again.’

‘I can’t take it off without closing the door.’

‘You don’t have to close it all the way.’

‘I have to close it a little.’

‘That’s okay. Give me your left hand.’

She hesitated. Dempsey pressed the gun harder against skull. She yelped in pain.

‘Easy,’ said Ryan instinctively, and Dempsey bared his teeth at him in warning.

‘Give me your hand,’ he repeated.

She did as she was told. Her wrist was very thin, and as brittle as the skeleton of a bird. Dempsey turned her hand so that her fingers were flat against the frame of the door. He handed the gun to Ryan, then slipped a knife from his pocket. He flicked the sharp blade and pressed it hard beneath the top knuckles of Mrs. Napier’s fingers. Seconds later, blood began to flow.

‘If you screw around, I’ll cut off the tips of your fingers,’ said Dempsey. ‘Close the door against your hand and lose the chain.’

Slowly, she closed the door. They heard her fumbling with the chain.

‘It still won’t open,’ she said. She had started to sob.

‘Try harder.’

She pushed against the door, trying to close the gap a little more. The pressure on her fingers made the blood flow faster.

‘It hurts,’ she said.

‘And you can make it stop,’ said Dempsey. He was getting anxious. The street had been empty until now, but Ryan could see the figure of a man approaching from the east, walking his dog before bedtime.

The chain came free. The door opened.

They stepped inside.

‘Nice. Your husband buy this?’

Dempsey was standing by a flat-screen TV, the kind that was so large you had to pivot your head to take in the whole picture. It looked as if it had only recently come out of its packaging. Beneath it was a Blu-ray player, a cable box, and an amplifier for the home theater system. It was a neat set-up, spoiled only by the clothes drying on a rack by the radiator behind the TV.

Mrs. Napier nodded. She was still pale, and shaking with shock. Ryan had found a clean cloth in the kitchen and had given it to her so that she could bind her wounded hand. The blade hadn’t required much pressure on it to break the skin, and there was a lot of blood soaking through the material.

‘New? It looks new.’

Mrs. Napier found her voice. ‘It’s pretty new.’

‘Driving a cab must be more lucrative than I thought,’ said Dempsey. ‘If I’d known just how much money could be made on it, I’d be driving one myself. How about it: You think we should go into the cab business?’

Ryan didn’t reply. He thought Mrs. Napier might be about to vomit. The first floor of the house was an open plan, with only a decorative arch separating the kitchen from the living area. Ryan moved toward the sink.

‘Where are you going?’

‘She’s in shock. I’m going to get some water for her.’

Dempsey looked at Mrs. Napier.

‘Are you in shock?’

She didn’t reply for a moment, then said, ‘I don’t know. I feel nauseous.’

‘Shock it is, then,’ said Dempsey.

There were cups on the draining board. Ryan filled one with water and brought it back to Mrs. Napier. She took the cup, but didn’t say thank you. Ryan wasn’t exactly waiting for her to do so, but still, it would have been polite.

‘Why are you shocked, though?’ asked Dempsey. ‘Are you shocked because you’re hurt? Are you shocked because we’re here? Or are you shocked because your cab driver husband seems to be able to afford Donald Trump’s own home theater?’

Mrs. Napier sipped her water and kept her eyes down.

‘What’s your name?’ said Dempsey.

‘Helen.’

‘So, Helen, your husband been buying anything else that we should know about? You had a new dress lately? Maybe you’re eating out in nicer places? You can tell us. We’d like to know.’

‘Just the TV.’

‘Just the TV?’ Dempsey laughed. He moved to the bookshelves, which were sparsely populated with books – a couple of paperback novels, a book on home finance, and a set of encyclopedias so old that they probably still contained pictures of airplanes with propellers – but had a whole shelf devoted to new Blu-ray discs, most of them still in their plastic wrapping. He checked out the titles, running his fingers along the spines, then stepped into the kitchen, examining the white goods, opening drawers. When he was done, he told Ryan to keep an eye on the woman while he went upstairs. Soon they heard closet doors slamming, and the tinkling of glass as something small and delicate broke. Helen Napier tried to get up, but Ryan put his hand on her shoulder, forcing her back into the chair.

‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No you’re not.’

She was trying not to cry, and she succeeded. The sight reminded Ryan uncomfortably of the woman back at the Wanderer. It didn’t make him feel good about himself.

When Dempsey came back downstairs, he had a shoebox in his hand. He squatted before Mrs. Napier and showed her the contents. The bills were neatly stacked and bound: twenties only. Ryan guessed there were probably two or three grand in the box.

‘You don’t trust the banks?’ said Dempsey.

‘I don’t know what that is,’ said Mrs. Napier, and Ryan believed her.

‘It’s money, that’s what it is.’

‘I didn’t know it was up there.’

‘Husband keeping secrets from you? That’s bad. Once the lies start, it’s the death of a marriage.’ He leaned in so that his face was close to Mrs. Napier’s. ‘You want to know how it got there? I’ll tell you. Your husband doesn’t just drop passengers at their destinations. He picks up and drops off packages too. He’s a regular courier service for protection money, cocaine, marijuana, maybe a little heroin. He’s not a dealer, but he works for the dealer. Our problem is that your husband now maybe fancies himself as a little bit of a dealer after all, an independent operator. Just a little bit.’ Dempsey placed a thumb and forefinger close together. ‘Teeny-tiny. With that in mind, he’s been skimming from the product: enough to earn himself some extra cash, and irritate the people who were paying for the full weight, not most of the weight, because if they’d wanted cornstarch and talcum powder they’d have gone to Walmart. So that means we have to talk to him and find out how much he’s taken, and how much he’s made, and reach an agreement about restitution. See?’

‘My husband doesn’t use drugs,’ said Mrs. Napier.

‘What?’ Dempsey appeared genuinely confused.

‘I said, “My husband doesn’t use drugs.”’

‘Who said anything about “using” drugs? Your husband is transporting drugs. Doing don’t enter into it. If he was skimming and then consuming he’d be even dumber than he is already, and you’d be watching American Idol on an RCA with a coat-hanger aerial. You know, you don’t seem so smart. That’s really unfortunate, because in my experience dumb bitches are the ones who drag their husbands down, and not the other way around. Is it your fault that all this has happened? Maybe you were the one who wanted the nice TV, and better clothes, and trips to Florida to work on your tan. Is that it?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want any of those things.’

‘So what do you want?’

She swallowed hard. ‘For this to be made right.’

Dempsey patted her bare leg, then let his hand linger there a couple of seconds too long. ‘Maybe you aren’t so dumb after all.’

He looked at his watch.

‘Phone your husband. Find out where he is.’

Mrs. Napier shook her head. ‘You’re going to hurt him.’

‘No, we’re not. We’re just here to slap his wrist.’

‘Then why do you have a gun?’

‘Jesus, you as well. You married the wrong guy.’ Dempsey jerked a thumb at Ryan. ‘You and him should get together. I have a gun because often people are excitable, and it’s my experience that seeing a gun helps to calm them down. On the other hand, sometimes people don’t recognize the gravity of a situation, in which case the gun tends to focus their minds wonderfully. Do as I tell you: Call your husband, and soon all of this will be over.’

Mrs. Napier stood, wiping at her tears. Dempsey stayed close behind her as she went to her purse and retrieved her cell phone from it.

‘What are you going to say?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. What do you want me to say?’

Dempsey smiled. ‘Now you have the right idea. You ask him when he’s coming home. Tell him-’ Dempsey’s smile widened. ‘Tell him his new TV is on the fritz. You turned it on and smoke started coming out of the back, so you turned it off again, and now you’re worried. You got that?’

‘Yes, I understand.’

Just to make sure that she did understand, Dempsey showed her the knife again, letting her see her reflection in it. She already knew what the knife could do, and what he was prepared to do to her with it. In her case, it was more effective than the threat of a gun. A gun was a weapon of last resort, but a blade had the capacity to be incremental in the damage that it could inflict.

Mrs. Napier pressed the Redial button and her husband’s name came up on the screen. Dempsey held his head close to hers so that he could hear both ends of the conversation, but the phone went straight to voice mail. He nudged Mrs. Napier and, somewhat haltingly, she passed on the lie about the TV and asked her husband to call her and let her know when she could expect him home. After that, she returned to her chair.

Ryan went back to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee, and the three of them sat in uncompanionable silence waiting for the arrival of the elusive Harry Napier. After half an hour had gone by, Dempsey began to get fidgety. He walked around the room, looking at framed photographs, leafing through papers in drawers and in closets, and all the time Mrs. Napier’s eyes followed him, furious and humiliated. Dempsey found a photo album and began turning the pages. He stopped when he came to a photograph of Mrs. Napier in a bathing suit. It had probably been taken four or five years earlier, and it showed off her figure to good effect.

‘You don’t have children, right?’ said Dempsey.

Something gaped darkly in Mrs. Napier’s eyes before she answered, like a wound briefly exposed, but Ryan saw it.

‘No, we don’t have children.’

Dempsey removed the photo from its page and held it up for Mrs. Napier to see. ‘Means you still look like this, then, doesn’t it?’

‘Jesus,’ said Ryan. ‘Do you-?’

‘Shut up,’ said Dempsey, not even glancing at Ryan. His eyes held Mrs. Napier’s. ‘I asked you a question. You still look like this?’

‘I don’t know. That was taken so long ago.’

‘How long?’

‘A decade?’

‘That a question, or a statement?’

‘A statement.’

‘You’re lying. This picture isn’t ten years old. Five maybe, but not ten.’

‘I don’t remember. I don’t look at old pictures very often.’

Dempsey laid the album on a chair but kept the photo. Once more, he squatted before Mrs. Napier, looking from the photo to her, and then back again.

‘Do you recall why we came here, Mrs. Napier. Or Helen? Can I call you Helen?’

Mrs. Napier didn’t answer the second question, only the first.

‘You said you were here to give my husband a slap on the wrist.’ Ryan saw her scratching anxiously at her left leg, just above the knee. There was a deep redness there, and he wondered if she had some skin condition, or if the scratching was a nervous tic.

‘That’s right,’ said Dempsey. ‘We’re here to give him a message about how bad it is to steal, to make him understand the consequences of his actions. I know you think we want to kill him, but we don’t. Killing is bad for business. It attracts attention. If we kill him, then we also have to kill you, and suddenly we’re looking for sheets and sacks, and we’re taking night drives to marshes and woods, and, frankly, we don’t have that kind of time on our hands. Similarly, I’m getting bored waiting around your lovely but dull home. We do have to get that message to your husband, but maybe you can pass it on to him for us. Or, more precisely, for me.’

Dempsey looked at Ryan. Ryan shook his head.

‘No.’

‘I wasn’t asking your permission. I’m indicating that you should leave and wait for me outside.’

‘Come on, man, this isn’t right. She’s frightened enough. Napier will make amends. He’s got no choice.’

‘Wait in the car, Frankie,’ and Ryan heard the warning in his voice, and knew that if he pushed it further Dempsey would be on him, and a confrontation would occur that might require serious action, and it wasn’t time for that, not yet.

Mrs. Napier’s mouth folded down, and she began to tremble.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘I’ve done all that you’ve asked.’

She looked to Ryan for help, but Ryan wasn’t going to help her. He wanted to, he really did, but he couldn’t.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

‘No,’ said Mrs. Napier. ‘No, no, no…’

Dempsey stood. He reached down and stroked Mrs. Napier’s hair.

‘Close the door behind you, Frankie,’ he said, and the last thing that Ryan saw was Dempsey taking Mrs. Napier by the hand and leading her to the couch, her feet dragging behind her as she tried to resist, her face turned away from him, her eyes still pleading with Ryan for help that would never come.

Ryan closed the door and walked to the car, his hands in his pockets and his head low.

It couldn’t last. Everything was falling apart.

Soon, he believed that he might have to kill Martin Dempsey.

8

It was not yet nine. I sat in my office at home, listening to the rain fall on the roof, a strangely comforting sound. The clouds had smothered the moon, and from my window I saw no artificial light break the darkness. There were only variations of shadow: trees against grass, land bordering black water, and the sea waiting beyond. Beside me I had a cup of coffee, and the list of names connected with his trial that Randall Haight had provided. I found myself thinking about Selina Day. I wanted to see a picture of her, because in this she had been all but forgotten. For Haight, she was a ghost from his past inconveniently summoned to the present by the taunts of another. The story of her life had been written, and given its conclusion. If she mattered at all it was simply because she shared an age with Anna Kore, and it could only be hoped that they did not already share a similar fate.

So I began trawling the Internet for details about the killing of Selina Day. There was less information than I might have wished, mainly because her death occurred in the glorious days before anything and everything ended up on the Internet, either as fact or speculation. Eventually I had amassed a small pile of printed pages, most of them from the archives of the local Beacon & Explainer, detailing the discovery of Selina Day’s body, the beginning of the investigation, and the eventual questioning, indictment, and sentencing of two unnamed juveniles in connection with the crime. The reports never failed to mention the race of the murdered girl, and the story gravitated toward the front of the paper only when the ages of the boys involved became an issue.

But I found that for which I had been searching: a picture of the murdered girl. In it, she was younger than she was when she died, probably by three or four years. Her hair was worn in pigtails, and she had a pronounced gap between her upper front teeth that might eventually have been corrected by braces. She was wearing a checked dress with a lace collar. The photograph had been taken side-on, so that Selina had turned her head slightly to face the camera. It was not a formal pose, and she appeared happy and relaxed. She looked like what she was: a pretty little girl on her way to becoming a young woman. I wondered why a more recent photo had not been used, then figured that this was the picture her mother had chosen to represent her. This was how she had wanted her daughter to be remembered, as her little girl but with a whole life ahead of her. One could not look at such an image and not feel grief for those left behind, and anger at the end Selina had met.

The accompanying articles did not include the kind of hand-wringing features usually inspired by such cases, typically represented by the twin poles of ‘What Is Happening to Our Children and What Can We Do to Make Them Better People Less Inclined to Kill Teenage Girls?’ and ‘What Is Happening to Our Children and Can We Make Them Better People by Locking Them Up Forever, or Trying Them As Adults and Sentencing Them to Death?’ Instead, the reports remained studiedly factual, even after a minimum eighteen-year sentence had been passed on each of the boys. As soon as the case had concluded, it appeared to fall entirely from view.

That was, I supposed, hardly surprising. A small community would not wish to have that particular wound repeatedly reopened: a murder committed by two of their own, a pair of apparently normal young boys, against a black girl, who was not one of their own by virtue of her race but was still only a girl. The situation was further complicated by the fact that the black and white communities in that part of North Dakota shared a common bond through baseball. North Dakota, along with Minnesota, was one of the few states in the Union where blacks and whites had always played together with little trouble. Freddie Sims and Chappie Gray had been the first black athletes to play semipro baseball in North Dakota, soon followed by Art Hancock, the ‘black Babe Ruth,’ and his brother Charlie. Eventually the Bismarck town team attracted the great Satchel Paige, and it was in North Dakota that Paige played alongside white men for the first time. Upon retiring from the game, a number of the black players decided to spend the rest of their lives in Drake Creek, and there was still a small museum in the town devoted to their achievements. In other words, the sex-related killing of a black girl by two white boys would have threatened the delicate racial balance that this part of North Dakota had managed to maintain for so long. Better to deal with it, then set aside all that had happened as extraordinary and move on. And perhaps those who felt that way were right: The killing of children by children is a terrible exception, or it was until gangbangers and ignorant men began glorifying the code of living and dying by the gun in projects and ghettos. Each instance deserved to be examined, if only so that some understanding of the individual circumstances might be reached, but whether or not there was a general lesson for society in a case like the Selina Day killing seemed unlikely.

Still, by the end of my search I had confirmed a number of the names on Haight’s list: the two public defenders appointed to the boys, the prosecuting attorney (who was the same in both cases), and the judge. The witness statements were minimal, as the boys had confessed to the crime before trial, so the issue at hand became purely a matter of sentencing. No mention was made of the deal that Randall Haight had claimed was struck, the social experiment that would ultimately allow him and Lonny Midas to escape the shadow of their crime, publicly at least. Again, that wasn’t particularly unusual; to some degree, it would have been dependent on the progress made by the boys while in custody, and no sane prosecutor, defender, or judge hoping for a degree of advancement in the judiciary would willingly have become a public party to such an agreement in the immediate aftermath of the trial.

I started working on the four names. One of the public defenders, Larraine Walker, was dead; she had died in a motorcycle accident in 1996. The second public defender, Cory Felder, had dropped off the radar, and I could find no record of him after 1998. The prosecuting attorney was a man named R. Dean Bailey. That name rang a bell. A couple of keystrokes later, R. Dean Bailey was revealed as a repeatedly unsuccessful challenger for a Republican nomination to Congress. Bailey’s views on immigration, welfare, and, indeed, government in general were colorful to say the least, even by the standards of some of the vitriol that regularly emerged from the extreme conservative wing of the Republican Party. In fact, like most of his kind, his views on federal government could best be summarized as ‘keep it as small as possible unless it’s convenient for me and my friends to have it otherwise, and as long as I can still be a part of it and stick my nose in the federal trough’; or, to put it another way, it’s all waste except for the part that benefits me.

Meanwhile, his views on race, any religion that didn’t involve Christ, anyone whose first language wasn’t English, and the poor in general would have earned him sidelong glances at a Nazi Party convention. Thankfully, somewhere on the Republican National Committee common sense continued to prevail against giving Bailey a national forum for outpourings that bordered on hate speech and sedition. I couldn’t begin to imagine what journey he had taken from being a prosecutor prepared to allow two boys convicted of second-degree murder a chance at a normal life to someone who was now advocating letting the poor starve and proposing limits on the right to religious freedom, but it didn’t seem likely that he would be overjoyed at being reminded of the Selina Day case. Bailey was now a partner in the law firm of Young Grantham Bailey. A quick search produced a list of cases that routinely pitted YGB’s exclusively wealthy and influential business clients against communities and individuals whose quality of life had allegedly been damaged, sometimes to the point of mortality, by the actions of those for whom Bailey and his partners acted as mouthpieces, firefighters, and bully boys. They seemed particularly adept at employing delaying tactics that caused cases to drag on for years, draining their opponents of funds and energy or, as in some particularly odious cases, until the plaintiffs simply died and their cases died with them. I made a note to call Young Grantham Bailey in the morning, if only to see how Bailey might respond, then put a line through it. Randall Haight had enough problems without drawing the attention of a man like R. Dean Bailey to him, especially an R. Dean Bailey who had undergone some form of reverse Damascene conversion.

That left the judge, Maurice P. Bowens. According to Haight, Bowens had been the prime instigator of the proposal to offer the boys new identities prior to their release. I found a short online biography of Bowens, prepared upon his retirement from the bench. He had begun practicing law in Pennsylvania, but had subsequently moved to North Dakota, eventually becoming a federal-court judge there. He had retired in 2005, indicating his desire to live permanently in his home just outside Bismarck, there to watch the ‘mighty Missouri flow by his doors,’ as he put it.

There was only one Maurice P. Bowens listed in the Bismarck directory. Having nothing better to do, I called the number, and a woman answered on the third ring. I gave her my name and occupation, and asked if this was the residence of the former judge. She told me that it was.

‘I’m his daughter, Anita,’ she said.

‘Would it be possible to speak to your father? It’s in connection with one of his old cases.’

‘I’m sorry. My father has suffered a series of strokes over the past eighteen months. They’ve left him very frail, and he speaks only with great difficulty. I take care of his affairs for him now.’

‘I’m sorry to hear about his illness. I’d be grateful if you could mention to your father that I called. It’s about Randall Haight, or William Lagenheimer, depending upon how your father chooses to remember him. I’m acting on Mr. Haight’s behalf. Please tell your father that, as far as I’m aware, Mr. Haight hasn’t done anything wrong, but he’s in a difficult situation and any information that your father might be in a position to pass on to me would help.’

‘What kind of information were you looking for?’ she asked.

I mentioned the Selina Day case, and the agreement that had been struck with R. Dean Bailey. I asked for any background to the agreement that her father might be able to give, along with any further details that he felt might be pertinent. I was stumbling in the dark, to be honest, but at this point any light that he could shed on the case would be better than none.

If the names I had given Anita meant anything to her, she didn’t say. She agreed to take my numbers, both fax and phone, and my e-mail address. I also gave her Aimee Price’s details, and said that I was employed by her on Haight’s behalf, and was therefore bound by rules of client confidentiality. She said that her father was sleeping, but as soon as he woke she would mention my call to him. I thanked her, hung up, then called Aimee Price to let her know that I had established some form of contact with Bowens. After that, with nothing more to be done for now, I made myself a simple meal of penne with pesto and ate it while watching the news on the portable TV in my kitchen. Anna Kore’s disappearance was the second story after a big crash north of Augusta, but it was clear to me that the networks were already losing interest. After all, there were only so many ways to say that no progress had been made. Anna Kore would make it back to the top of the news only if she was found, alive or dead.

When the news had concluded, I took a Willy Vlautin novel into my office and lay back on my battered old couch to read, but that picture of Selina Day kept intruding on my concentration. Eventually I think I must have dozed for a time as I was going over the details of Randall Haight’s story in my mind. Reality blurred in the way that it does when one drops unexpectedly into sleep, and I thought I saw Haight outside my window peering in at me. His skin was very pale, and there were wrinkles on his scalp and cheeks that I had not noticed before, as though his skull had begun to shrink. He raised his right hand and plunged it into his flesh, and his face came away. What was exposed was bloody and waxen, but still recognizably him. He repeated the action over and over, alternating hands and discarding the remains at his feet like a spider shedding its external skin in order to grow, until only a blank visage remained where once his features had been, the eye sockets empty and yet, somehow, still weeping.

A pinging sound from my computer brought me back to consciousness. There was an e-mail in my in-box from Anita Bowens, consisting of a short message and an attachment. The message read:

My father hopes that Randall, as he now thinks of him (and, as he hopes, Randall now thinks of himself) is doing well, that he has grasped the chance to leave his past behind while still regretting his actions, and sends him his kindest regards. Nevertheless, he requests that there should be no further contact with him from either Randall or yourself regarding this matter. Anything of relevance to your inquiries can be found in the accompanying documents.

Yours,

Anita Bowens

P.S. I know a little of the history behind this case, for my father has referred in the past to the ‘imperfect agreement’ reached with the prosecutor, Mr. Bailey. The documents included here should indicate the reasons for my father’s dissatisfaction. For now, it’s enough to recognize that he wanted the boys to be tried as juveniles, not as adults. Both the attorney general and the district attorney disagreed, as did Mr. Bailey, and prosecutorial discretion won out. Rather than abandon the boys entirely to the dubious mercies of the system, the price of my father’s acquiescence was a new start for them once their sentences were served. I suspect that my father still believes he sold his principles too cheaply.

A.B.

I opened the attachment. It consisted of a scanned copy of Maurice Bowens’s letter to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania indicating his decision to cease practicing in the state in protest at its continued insistence on trying children as adults and allowing them to be sentenced to life without parole; and an article published in a law journal expanding on the theme.

According to the article, which contained more recent footnotes updating some of its points and statistics, Pennsylvania was one of twenty-two states, along with the District of Columbia, that allowed children as young as seven to be tried as adults, and one of forty-two that allowed children to be sentenced to life without parole for a first criminal conviction. Pennsylvania alone accounted for more than twenty percent of the children in the United States who faced the prospect of dying behind bars if convicted. Bowens’s piece argued that, by ‘enthusiastically’ sentencing thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children, and younger, to die in prison, both for homicide and non-homicide offenses, the state was guilty of ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment and was therefore in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, of international law, and, theoretically, of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which, as Bowens pointed out, the United States had signally failed to ratify, making it and Somalia the only countries to refuse to do so. He said that such a law took no account of the vulnerability of children, of the developmental and legal distinctions between children and adults, and of children’s capacity for growth, change, and redemption.

‘By allowing the incarceration of children without hope of parole, we have shown ourselves to be unworthy of the trust and responsibility placed in us as lawmakers,’ Bowens concluded. ‘We have confused punishment with retribution, and sacrificed justice to injustice. But, worst of all, we have allowed cruelty and expediency to govern us, permitting our humanity to fall away. No country that treats the most vulnerable of its young people in this way deserves to call itself civilized. We have failed in our duty as lawmakers, as parents, as protectors of children, and as human beings.’

I forwarded the email to Aimee, then printed out the letter and the article and added them to the file on the case. I hadn’t known about the Convention on the Rights of the Child, but being in bed with Somalia didn’t strike me as anything about which to be proud. It wasn’t hard to figure out why the Somalis hadn’t signed – any country that swells the ranks of its armies with child soldiers wasn’t in much of a position to sign anything other than a receipt for more guns – but last time I looked, the United States military wasn’t so depleted that it was forced to recruit in grade schools. Still, it was clear that somebody somewhere in the US government had come up with an argument against signing an agreement to protect children. Whoever it was, I’m sure that his kids were proud of him, and the Somalis sent him a card at Christmas.

So Bowens had left Pennsylvania, worked his way up the ranks of the North Dakota judiciary, and eventually had found himself judging a case that tested his principles once again. But instead of resigning again in the face of prosecutorial intransigence he had struck a deal guaranteeing the boys a fresh start, even if it meant compromising his principles, because better a small victory than no victory at all. If his daughter was to be believed, the nature of that compromise had tormented him ever since.

I looked again at Bowens’s letter. I regretted that I hadn’t been able to talk to him in person, and that any further communication between us now appeared to be unwelcome. Given the opportunity, I would have asked him about the third person involved in that killing decades ago, the final apex of the triangle connecting three lives: Lonny Midas. Haight had presented Midas as the instigator of what had occurred, but, as I’d pointed out to Aimee, that might simply have been the complexion that Haight chose to place on events. Again, I was reminded of how he had reverted at times to an unnerving juvenility during his description of the killing and its aftermath. It was the response of a cornered child, facing punishment for doing something bad, to blame someone else for the worst of it. I wanted to learn more about Lonny Midas, but unless I could find him and ask him face-to-face about the death of Selina Day it seemed that I would have to rely on the testimony of Randall Haight alone. But Haight was self-serving at best in his depiction of his role, and at worst a potential liar.

I had begun doodling while I thought, and stopped when I saw that I had drawn a crude outline of a girl’s head, framed by beribboned pigtails. Liar: I kept coming back to that word. Why was I so convinced that Haight’s account of the murder was not simply revisionist but contained moments of active concealment? After all, what could be worth hiding? He had admitted his involvement in a terrible crime. The fact that he claimed it was Lonny Midas who had smothered Selina was important only in that it represented the culmination of a sequence of events to which he had been a party, and for which he and Midas were both equally culpable. Perhaps he had fought against Midas at the end, but would he have tried to pull him off when Midas began raping Selina? Would he have joined in himself? What was the point at which he realized that it had all gone too far – if, in fact, he ever gained that realization?

I knew then that my problem with Randall Haight was that not only did I not believe his story in its entirety; I didn’t like him. I couldn’t say for sure if that was because of what he had done, and the death of my own child, in which case I needed to put it from my mind if I was to continue working on his behalf, or because of some more deep-rooted revulsion, a sense of him as a contaminated soul hiding itself behind a veneer of normality.

And I went to sleep dreaming of faceless men.

9

Ryan didn’t like sitting in the car alone. This was the kind of neighborhood where somebody might just take it into his head to call the cops because a lone man was waiting in a strange car on a quiet street where unfamiliar cars stood out; that, or this same somebody might decide that the cops didn’t need to be involved, and a tap on the window to inquire whether there was a problem might serve just as well to clear matters up, maybe with a couple of buddies hanging in the background to make sure nobody got the wrong idea.

He tried to remember the last time he’d eaten: not a grabbed slice of pizza on the run, or some greasy fries in a bar whose name he couldn’t remember an hour later, but a proper meal, either eaten alone or among friends. It was a week at least. He wasn’t even sure that he had friends anymore. The best of them wouldn’t want to see him, because if he stayed out of their way they couldn’t talk about what they didn’t know if curious souls came calling, while the rest of them would drop a dime on him without a second thought. He could walk away, of course. There was always that option. But he had a role to play in what was happening, and he wanted to see it out to the end. In a strange way, Dempsey was now the closest thing he had to a friend. They weren’t particularly close, and they didn’t even like each other much, but they were dependent on each other. Need bound them together, but for how long? Sands were spilling through the hourglass, and Ryan didn’t know how many grains were left.

He looked toward the Napier house. The drapes were drawn and he could see no sign of movement inside. He slammed the palm of his hand against the dashboard, then repeated the action over and over until the car started to rock and his hand smarted. He shouldn’t have left the woman alone. He knew what Dempsey was going to do, but he’d turned his back on it and closed the door behind him, letting Dempsey make him his bitch as assuredly as Dempsey was making Mrs. Napier his bitch over in the house. He leaned down and lifted his trouser leg. The little revolver sat snugly in its holster. He slipped it out and stared at it, letting it rest on his thigh. He’d begun carrying it recently, even though he already had another gun tucked into the waistband of his pants. Nobody knew about the revolver, and certainly not Dempsey. In fact, Dempsey was the reason Ryan had begun carrying the revolver in the first place. Dempsey’s behavior was becoming increasingly erratic. Ryan had previously only ever encountered junkies and alcoholics who behaved in that way, veering from friendly to threatening in an instant, the only thing predictable about them being their unpredictability, but Dempsey was neither an addict nor a drunk. He stuck to a couple of beers when he hit a bar, and Ryan had never seen him take so much as a single hit on a doobie. Maybe he needed to be medicated, but Ryan wasn’t about to suggest that he see a shrink. Ryan shut his eyes, then opened them quickly as the vision of a muzzle filled his consciousness. In the instant he’d looked into that black, unblinking eye, he had felt the limits of his own existence, and the fact of his mortality was impressed upon him. He wondered if he would see the bullet that killed him, if, in that final split second, the eye would turn from black to silver-gray, filling then emptying, entering and then exiting, taking his life with it.

‘I’m just kidding with you.’ That’s what Dempsey had said, but he hadn’t been, not really. It was as though Dempsey had looked deep into Ryan’s heart and seen his potential for treachery. The gun was a warning.

See, Frankie, I’m older than you – older, and harder, and wiser. I know how you think because I was like you, once upon a time. That’s the difference between us: I was like you once, but you were never like me. It’s the small advantage that age bestows, the consolation prize for the loss of speed, the diminished reaction time. You know how the young think, but they don’t know how you think. For men like us that’s important. You stay a couple of steps ahead of the young all the time, so that when they turn on you, when they go for that gun, you already have yours in your hand because you’ve been expecting what’s coming.

I know you, Frankie.

I know you.

Ryan shivered. The voice had sounded so clear to him, as if Dempsey were sitting there next to him, the gun in his hand. But Dempsey wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, and Ryan wasn’t as young and callow as Dempsey had adjudged him to be. If Dempsey kept pulling shit like that gun trick earlier in the evening, Ryan would be forced to provide his own solution to whatever psychological difficulties Dempsey was enduring. He thought about going back into the house, pressing the revolver against the back of Dempsey’s neck while he was buried in the Napier woman, and pulling the trigger. The image was so inviting that he felt his finger slipping over the guard and fastening on the trigger, instinctively applying the pressure required.

When the cell phone rang, he almost pulled the trigger in shock.

He didn’t need to look at the caller ID. Just like Dempsey, Ryan carried two cell phones: one for personal use, along with a little general business that was always conducted discreetly, and another that was changed weekly. Calls to the second phone only came from one destination. Ryan answered on the second ring.

‘Where are you?’

That voice with its distinctive rasp, the voice of the man who had brought them to this pass, who had lowered them to the status of prey. Their fates were linked to his, and they were still waiting for him to find a way to make it all good again. Neither Ryan nor Dempsey had spoken the thought aloud, but they had both begun to suspect that they might die waiting for that to happen.

‘The cab thing. He still hasn’t shown. We found cash, though.’

‘Cash? Good.’ That was what they’d been reduced to: foraging for enough cash to enable them to keep moving and stay alive. ‘Forget about the guy. We’ll deal with him another time. You know the Brattle Street Theater?’

‘The movie place? Sure.’

‘Find somewhere to park, close as you can get to it.’

‘Now?’

‘No, next month. Put Dempsey on.’

‘He’s not here. I’m in the car. He’s inside.’

‘Why?’

‘In case, you know, the guy comes back.’

‘Who’s in there with him.’

‘A woman. The guy’s wife.’

There was silence on the other end of the line, and Ryan knew that the man was connecting the dots. He had always been good at figuring people out, or so it had seemed. He’d just lost that gift when it came to his enemies.

‘Get him out of there. This is important.’

He hung up. Ryan now had the gun in one hand and the cell phone in the other. He slipped the gun back in its ankle holster, the cell phone into his pocket, then made his way quickly across the street. A man passed, a newspaper under his arm and a beer can in one hand, concealed in a brown paper bag. The man nodded at him, and Ryan nodded back. He kept his eye on the guy all the way to the Napier house, but the man didn’t look back. Ryan had left the front door unlocked when he stepped outside. It banged against the wall when he opened it too quickly, and he called out from the hallway just in case Dempsey panicked and came out waving a gun or a knife.

‘It’s me! We have to go.’

He knocked on the living-room door before entering. He saw Dempsey buckling his jeans. Helen Napier was kneeling on the couch. Stockings and panties were lying coiled together on the floor. She was adjusting her dress, pulling it down to cover her thighs while keeping her back to the door. Her shoulders were shaking. She did not turn to look at him.

‘Is she okay?’ asked Ryan.

‘What do you think? If it’s any consolation to you, I was gentle with her. Your timing is good, though, I’ll give you that. A few minutes earlier, and I might have been annoyed at the intrusion.’

Dempsey checked the room to make sure he hadn’t dropped anything, then spoke to Mrs. Napier.

‘Helen,’ he said.

She stiffened but still did not turn her head.

‘You have a choice,’ he continued. ‘You can tell your husband what happened tonight. From what I hear, he’s the kind who could get all hot under the collar about a thing like this, and it might lead him to come looking for me. If he does, I’ll kill him. He brought this on you by his own actions, but he won’t see it that way. And, you know, it won’t help you anyway. I knew a man once whose girlfriend was raped. He could never look at her the same way again. Could be he thought that she was soiled goods. Whatever the reason, they broke up. End of story. Think about that before you go shooting your mouth off to your husband. I was you, I’d just tell him that we called, that we put the fear of God into you, and he should sort out his affairs before we come calling again.’ Dempsey picked up the shoebox of cash. ‘In the meantime, I’ll take the money as an interim payment on what was lost. We’ll be on our way now. Go fix yourself up. You don’t want him seeing you like that when he gets home.’

He brushed past Ryan on his way out the door.

‘You coming?’

Ryan was still staring at Mrs. Napier.

‘You want to apologize to her again?’ asked Dempsey. ‘You can, if you think it will help.’

But Ryan just shook his head. There was something wrong about what he was seeing: not just the act that had been committed, but the aftermath. He tried to put his finger on it but couldn’t, and then Dempsey was pulling him away, and they were walking to the car, and the assault was forced from his mind for a time as he told Dempsey about the call.

‘Regular nine-one-one,’ said Dempsey. He was counting the money in the shoebox, flipping his finger through the bound bills. Dempsey separated four hundred in twenties, split the stack evenly in two, then stuffed two hundred into his wallet and two hundred into Ryan’s coat pocket.

‘Walking-around money. If he gives you more, just take it and keep your mouth shut.’

‘How much was in there?’ asked Ryan.

‘Two-five now, plus change.’

Ryan laughed. It was that or pull over by the side of the road and beat his fists against the sidewalk in frustration.

‘All that for a lousy three grand?’

‘Hey, I had a good time.’

Now Ryan did pull over, causing the driver behind them to honk his disapproval. He turned in his seat, ready to release his belt and tear Dempsey’s throat out, but Dempsey already had his hand on the butt of the gun. His left hand was raised, one finger extended in warning.

‘What? You going to kill me?’ asked Ryan. ‘You going to pull the trigger this time?’

‘No, but I’ll break your nose with it, and I’ll go further if you make me. You want to make me do that to you?’

‘You raped a woman, just for three grand.’

‘No, I didn’t. I had the three grand anyway.’

Ryan almost lost it again, but the sight of the gun revealing itself to him brought him back to his senses. His shoulders collapsed, and he laid his forehead against the steering wheel. He felt ill. His face was bathed in warm, clammy sweat.

‘Three grand,’ he whispered. ‘Three grand and change.’

‘Maybe you haven’t been keeping up with developments, Frankie, but Mr. Morris is hurting. Two grand here, a grand there, a couple of hundred from the junkies – it all adds up. It keeps him in business, and keeps us in a job. More to the point, it’s keeping us alive. Our credit isn’t so good right now, and the bank of goodwill has closed its doors.’

‘He’s drowning,’ said Ryan. ‘He’s going down.’

‘That’s not what I said, and if I was you I wouldn’t be saying things like that out loud either. It might get taken as disloyalty. It’s swings and roundabouts. Everybody’s hurting in this economy. He’ll come good again. He just needs time.’

Ryan raised his head. Dempsey’s face was expressionless. It gave no clue to whether he believed a word that he was saying.

‘You’re going to start driving now, Frankie, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘We good?’

Ryan nodded.

‘Let me hear you say it.’

‘We’re good.’

‘Right. Now let’s go see what he wants.’

They drove in silence toward Cambridge. Eventually Dempsey let his head rest against the window, his eyes fixed on distant lights. Ryan smoked a cigarette, and thought about a boy he once knew, Josh Tyler, who died in a lake at some summer camp in New Hampshire when his canoe capsized. Josh could swim, but the kid in the canoe with him couldn’t, or not well enough. He panicked, and dragged Josh under the water. The kid was kicking, and one of the kicks caught Josh in the side of the head and knocked him unconscious. Somehow the kid made it to the canoe and managed to hold on to it, but by then Josh Tyler was dead. Drowning men will drag you down if you let them, thought Ryan. Sometimes, to survive, you have to let them sink.

They found a spot not far from the entrance to the Brattle Street Theater, and sat back to wait.

‘What’s on there?’ asked Ryan.

‘The Friends of Eddie Coyle,’ said Dempsey. ‘I read about it in the paper.’

‘I don’t know it.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know it?’

‘I said I don’t know it. I’ve never seen it, never even heard of it. It must be new.’

‘No, it’s not new. It’s old. Nineteen seventy-three. Robert Mitchum and that guy, the one from Everybody Loves Raymond. Boyle, Peter Boyle. He’s dead now. Real good in that movie. I can’t believe you never heard of it, you growing up in Boston and all.’

‘I didn’t go to movies much as a kid.’

‘Still, you should know it.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘A snitch.’

Dempsey didn’t say anything else. Ryan felt him looking at him, but didn’t say anything, just waited for him to continue. Eventually, Dempsey did.

‘Eddie – that’s Mitchum – decides to rat out his buddies to avoid doing time. He’s old. He doesn’t want to go back in the can.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘How does it end?’

‘I’m not going to tell you how it ends. Go rent it sometime.’

‘I’m not going to rent it.’

‘Well, I’m not going to tell you how it ends.’

‘Fine.’

‘Yeah, fine. You’re some asshole, you know that?’

‘You’re the asshole, not telling me how it ends.’

‘You want to know how it ends?’

‘No, I don’t care now.’

‘You want to know?’

‘No.’

‘You want to know. I know you want to know.’

‘Right, tell me.’

‘It ends with a guy being tied to a chair while another guy forces him to watch the fucking movie, that’s how it ends.’

Ryan let a beat go by.

‘I don’t think that’s how it ends.’

For the first time that evening, Dempsey smiled at something that didn’t involve another person’s misery.

‘Asshole.’

‘Yeah,’ said Ryan, and he was reminded of why sometimes he didn’t mind being in Dempsey’s company. It wouldn’t stop him from killing him if the time came, but he might make it quick. ‘All of this is so important, what’s he doing at a movie?’

‘He likes movies. He says they help him think more clearly. He always goes to a movie when he’s struggling with a problem. Then it ends and he has a solution. I guess it’s something to do with sitting in the dark and letting the pictures wash over you. And even if he doesn’t come up with an answer he’s got to spend some time hiding in the dark. It’s easier than hiding in the daylight.’

‘Amen to that.’

‘Yeah. Some good-looking women around here.’

‘College girls.’

‘They got no time for men like us, not unless you catch ’em drunk.’

His words brought back to Ryan the look of fear on the girl’s face, and the way Dempsey had set out to humiliate the man with her, leaving him with a choice that was no choice: He could throw a punch, and Dempsey would beat him, and beat him bad, or he could suck up Dempsey’s poison and walk away with his body intact but his pride in tatters. His girlfriend had been forced to beg Dempsey to leave them in peace. Ryan had seen that happen before, and had often watched something die in the eyes of the woman involved when it did. Her boyfriend was weak, and his weakness had been publicly exposed. Somewhere deep inside, the woman always wanted the guy to fight back, to win or to take his beating. There was a strength in winning a fight like that, but there was a strength, too, in being unwilling to become another man’s bitch, win or lose, in not allowing him to break you down or paw your girlfriend without consequences.

And what Dempsey had done in the bar had set him up for what he’d done later to Helen Napier. His blood had been up, and she’d suffered for it.

‘He’s coming out,’ said Dempsey, and Ryan followed his gaze to where Tommy Morris was slinking out of the movie theater, his head low, his hair hidden by a wool cap. Tommy Morris, carrying the stink of failure on him, the stink of death.

Tommy Morris, the drowning man.

Tommy Morris’s family had always been two-toilet Boston Irish. They had aspired to better things, which led them to leave behind the West Broadway projects of D Street in Southie for what they considered to be the more salubrious surroundings of a Somerville three-decker, even as their neighbors sneered at their aspirations. In Boston the working-class Irish distrusted success, political success aside, as that was just criminality by another name as practiced by the Boston School. General success, though, only made others feel bad about their own situation, their ambitions for betterment that stretched no further than winning the nigger-pool lottery.

So it was that the Morris family was spoken of in disparaging terms just for not wanting to stay mired in the mud at the bottom of the pond. When Tommy’s father, who owned a florist’s, bought a new delivery van, black paint was poured over it before it was even a week old. Tommy never forgot that, and years later he would visit his own kind of vengeance on South Boston, helping Whitey Bulger flood it and the rest of the city with cocaine. It was said of Tommy that he hated his own, which is always the sign of a man who secretly hates himself. It made him vulnerable, although he chose not to recognize that vulnerability, believing instead that by consolidating his position and acting cleverly he could somehow overcome the fault line that ran beneath the foundations of his life.

Tommy had started out with stealing, and hijacking truckloads, the way most of his peers did, then briefly graduated to bank jobs before realizing that shakedowns were easier to plan, harder to trace, and carried less chance of serious jail time or having his head blown off. Tommy Morris, they used to say, was always smart like that. He wasn’t like the other project rats. The real wolves, the ones like Whitey and his sidekick Stevie Flemmi, used to scoff at Tommy. They called him ‘Two-Bit’ Tommy, and sometimes ‘Mary’ Morris because of his preference for avoiding violence. It made him appear less of a threat to them, and so he survived Whitey’s relentless purging of his rivals, the bullets to the head and the slow strangulations that left Whitey as top dog, aided by a nickel stretch in Cedar Junction that spanned the worst of the killing, during which he kept his head down and his mouth closed.

When Tommy came out, Whitey’s cocaine operation had been brought to its knees by the DEA, decades of collusion between rogue FBI agents and Whitey were being revealed, and so many guys were turning federal witness that there weren’t enough tape recorders to go around. Meanwhile, the Italians were a shadow of their former selves, ruined by internal squabbles and by Whitey’s willingness to sell them out to the feds. Tommy Caci and Al Z, the now-departed linchpins of the Boston Mafia, were trying to rebuild, but there was a gap in the market, a vacuum to be filled, that Tommy and his peers were able to exploit, particularly once Whitey, facing indictment, fled the jurisdiction. Tommy – solid, careful, reliable – prospered.

But he was growing old, and there were hungry young men who felt that their time had come, led by Oweny Farrell, the most ruthless of them all. Quickly, so fast that Tommy barely had time to register the threat before it was upon him, his operation began to fall apart. That old fault line, whose existence he had denied for so long, widened, and his world crumbled into it. He was isolated, and the whispering started. Tommy Morris was no longer solid. Tommy Morris wasn’t sound. Tommy Morris was a threat, because Tommy Morris knew too much. Men whom he had trusted began to keep their distance from him, so that they would not catch a stray bullet when the end came. Money disappeared, and with it his allies. Tommy knew his history. He remembered Donald Killeen, who had been top dog in Southie until, in 1972, Whitey decided that Killeen’s reign was over and had him shot to death on the evening of his son’s fourth birthday party. As if to emphasize the ease of the transition, and a sense of continuity, Whitey had subsequently taken over Killeen’s former headquarters, the Transit Café, as his own base, renaming it the Triple O’s.

Tommy had no intention of going out like Killeen.

But still they kept chipping away at him – the cops, the feds, his own kind. He had been forced to seek a sit-down, and one had been agreed for a bar in Chelsea after hours.

On the day of the proposed meet, Tommy had received an anonymous call advising him not to attend.

And that was when Tommy Morris had gone to ground.

Tommy slipped into the back of the car.

‘Drive,’ he said.

‘Drive where?’ said Ryan.

‘Doesn’t matter. Just drive.’

Ryan pulled out and headed away from the city. Dempsey handed over the shoebox filled with money. Tommy counted it and passed them another two hundred dollars each from the stash.

‘You can add it to what you took already,’ he said.

‘I’m hurt, Tommy,’ said Dempsey.

‘You will be if I catch you with your hand in the register again,’ said Tommy. Dempsey said nothing, but he cocked an eyebrow at Ryan.

‘You got news?’ asked Dempsey.

‘Yeah, I have news.’

‘About Oweny?’

‘No,’ said Tommy. He seemed distant, confused. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

Dempsey looked at the older man in the rearview mirror. ‘What is it, Tommy?’ he asked, and there was genuine solicitude in his voice.

‘It’s personal,’ said Tommy at last. ‘It’s blood.’