The Burning Soul

10

There are places along the Maine coast that are stunningly beautiful, often in a picture-postcard way that attracts tourists and snowbirds. Those stretches of the shoreline are dotted with expensive houses masquerading as summer cottages, and the towns that service them offer gourmet delicacies in the grocery stores, and chichi restaurants with waitstaff who make their efforts at service feel like hard-won favors for the undeserving.

But there are other places that speak of the ferocity of the sea, of communities sheltering behind buttresses of black rock and shingle beaches against which the waves throw themselves like besieging armies, gradually eroding the defenses over centuries, millennia, certain in the knowledge that eventually the ocean will triumph and smother the land. In those places the trees are bent, testament to the force of the wind, and the houses are weathered and functional, as sullen and resigned as the dogs that prowl their yards. Such towns do not welcome tourists, for they have nothing to offer them and the tourists have nothing to give, except to serve as a mirror for the natives’ own disappointments. Theirs is a hardscrabble existence. Those with youth and ambition leave, while those with youth but without ambition stay, or drift away for a time before returning, for small towns have their lures and a way of sinking deep hooks into skin and flesh and spirit.

Yet there is a balance to be maintained in such locales, and there is strength in unity. New blood will be welcomed as long as it plays its part in the great extended scheme of daily life, finding its level, its part in the complex machinery that powers the town’s existence: giving enough at the start to show willing, but not so much as to appear ingratiating; listening more than speaking, and not disagreeing, for here to disagree may be construed as being disagreeable, and one has to earn the right to be disagreeable, and then only after long years of cautious, mundane, and well-chosen arguments; and understanding that the town is both a fixed entity and a fluid concept, a thing that must be open to small changes of birth and marriage, of mood and mortality, if it is ultimately to stay the same.

And so there were communities like Pastor’s Bay along the Maine seaboard, each different, each similar. If Pastor’s Bay was distinctive, it was only in its comparative lack of beauty, elemental or otherwise. There was no beach, merely a pebbled shore. A tangle of jagged rocks ringed the peninsula at its eastern extreme and made any approach by boat hazardous if one didn’t know the tides. From there, a road led through a mix of old- and new-growth forest, past houses old and houses new, houses abandoned and houses reclaimed (including the one in which Anna Kore’s mother sat, red-eyed and hauntingly, terrifyingly still, her head filled with the thousand deaths of her child and a thousand visions of her safe return, each conclusion to the tale fighting for supremacy) until it found the town, its buildings almost leaning inward over the main street, the shades on the windows lowered slightly in pain, the skies above cloud-heavy and lowering, all life now tainted by the absence of one girl. Finally, leaving the town behind, the road undulated over uneven, rocky ground before arriving at the bridge to the mainland at a point almost half a mile to the south of the causeway of rock and dirt and scrub grass that, before the building of the first bridge, offered the sole path for those who wished to leave, either permanently or temporarily, and preferred to do so without paying the ferry toll.

The first bridge, the old wooden construct erected by the Heardings in 1885 with the proceeds of a tax levied on the residents, seemed set to put paid to the ferry forever, but the Heardings sank their pilings incorrectly, and a big storm in 1886 set the bridge to swaying, and people heard it moaning in its torments and went back to using the old path for foot traffic and the ferry for the transport of goods and livestock. The Heardings were forced to look again at the bridge, and the ferry continued its service while the repairs were made. By the time they had resunk the pilings, and reassured the natives of the bridge’s solidity, their business had gone belly-up because they had lost the trust of their neighbors. The Heardings closed their lumberyard and departed for Bangor, where they opened up for business under a new name, and denied any knowledge of bridges, or unsound pilings, or Pastor’s Bay. Still, the Heardings’ bridge stood for eighty years, until the passage of trucks and cars began to tell upon it, and its moans and cries resumed, and a new bridge began to take shape alongside it. Now all that was left of the Heardings’ bridge were the old pilings, for say this about the Heardings, if nothing else: They might have botched the job the first time, but they got it right the second. It was simply their misfortune to find themselves in a town where folk preferred things to be done right from the get-go, especially where their personal safety was concerned, and most particularly when it came to bridges and water, for they had the fear of drowning that comes from living close to the sea.

Randall Haight lived southeast of town. He’d given me clear directions, and I remembered his car from his visit to Aimee’s office. He came to the door as I pulled into the yard. His pale-pink shirt was open at the neck, and he wore suspenders instead of a belt. His pants were high on his waist, and tapered at the leg, offering a glimpse of sensible tan socks. There was an element of the old-fashioned about his appearance, but not studiedly so. It was not an affectation; Randall Haight was simply a man who took comfort in older things. He did not step down into the yard, but waited for me to reach the door. Only then did he remove his hands from his pockets to shake my hand. He was chewing at the inside of his lower lip, and he snatched his hand back after only the merest contact. His reluctance to have me in his house was palpable, but so was his greater unhappiness at what was happening to him.

‘Is something wrong, Mr. Haight?’

‘I got another package,’ he said. ‘I found it in my box this morning.’

‘A photograph?’

‘No, different. Worse.’

I waited for him to invite me into the house, but he did not, and his body continued to block the door.

‘Are you going to show me?’ I asked.

He struggled to find the right words.

‘I don’t have many visitors,’ he said. ‘I’m a very private man.’

‘I understand.’

He seemed about to say more. Instead, he stepped aside and extended his left hand in a robotic gesture of admittance.

‘Then, please, come in.’

But he said it with resignation, and with no hint of welcome.

If Haight was, as he said, a private man, then it appeared that he had little about which to be private. His home had all the personal touches of a show house: tasteful, if anonymous, furniture; timber floors covered with rugs that might have been Persian but probably weren’t; dark-wood shelves that hadn’t come from Home Depot but from one of the better mid-price outlets, in all likelihood the same place that had supplied the couch and chairs, and the cabinet in which sat the TV, a big gray Sony monster with a matching DVD player beneath, and a cable box. The only individual touch came from a pair of paintings on the wall. They were abstract, and original, and looked like a slaughterhouse yard, all reds and black and grays. There was one above the couch, and another above the fireplace, so it was hard to see where someone might sit without looking at one or the other. Haight spotted the direction of my gaze and picked up on my involuntary spasm of revulsion.

‘They’re not to everyone’s taste,’ he said.

‘They certainly make a statement,’ I replied, the statement being ‘I killed him, Officer, and spread his guts on a canvas.’

‘They’re the only things in and of this house that have increased in value over the last couple of years. Everything else has tanked.’

‘And you an accountant. I thought you’d be better prepared for the recession.’

‘I suppose it’s like doctors trying to diagnose their own ailments. It’s easier to find the flaws in others than to figure out what’s wrong with yourself. Can I offer you a drink, or coffee?’

‘Nothing, thanks.’

I took in the books on the shelf. They were mostly non fiction, with an emphasis on European history.

‘Are you a frustrated historian?’ I asked.

‘It’s an escape from what I do for a living. I’m curious about strategy and leadership. To be honest, I don’t see many effective examples of either in the business world. Please, sit.’

I headed for the couch that faced the TV, but he looked flustered and suggested that I take one of the armchairs instead, then waited until I was seated before lowering himself into his own chair. It was the only item of furniture that showed any real sign of use. I could see the indentations of cups and glasses on the right arm, and a slight darkening of the fabric where Haight’s head had rested over the years.

For a couple of moments, neither of us spoke. I had the uncomfortable sense of being in the presence of someone who had recently been bereaved. The house spoke of absence, but I couldn’t tell whether I was just picking up on its relative lack of character or something deeper. Because, of course, nobody really lived here; Randall Haight owned it and put bad art on its walls, but Randall Haight was an artificial creation. Perhaps, at times, William Lagenheimer moved through its rooms, but William Lagenheimer didn’t exist either. He had disappeared from the world, and was now just a memory.

And all the time I was aware of Haight’s nervousness, although he tried to conceal it. His hands shook, and when he clasped his fingers to stop their movement the tension merely passed on to his right foot, which began to tap on the rug. I supposed that if I had once killed a child, and now felt that I was being targeted in the aftermath of another child’s disappearance, I would be nervous too.

Haight passed me a typed list of names detailing those individuals for whom he had recently begun to act as an accountant, and any new arrivals to Pastor’s Bay. I glanced at it, then put it aside. The names meant nothing to me for now.

‘What is it that you’ve been sent, Mr. Haight?’ I asked.

He swallowed hard, and shifted a battered art volume from the coffee table between us. Beneath it lay another brown cushioned mailer with a printed address label.

‘There was a disc. I’ve left it in my laptop so that you can see it, although it’s not the worst of what I found.’

He pushed the envelope toward me with his fingertips. I pried it open with the point of my pen so as not to contaminate it any further should it be required as evidence at some point. Inside I could see pieces of paper of various sizes, most of them glossy. They looked like more photographic prints.

‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ I said.

I went to my car and removed a box of disposable plastic gloves from the trunk. Haight hadn’t moved while I was gone. The light in the room changed slightly as the clouds moved outside, and I realized how ashen he was. He also appeared to be on the verge of tears.

I reached into the envelope and removed the images. They were all of a similar nature, and all featured young girls, none of them older than fourteen or fifteen, and some much younger than that. They had been photographed naked on beds, and on carpets, and on bare floors. Some of them were trying to smile. Most of them weren’t. The photographic paper was standard Kodak. It was possible that a computer expert might be able to tell the type of printer from which the images came, but that would be useful only in the event of a prosecution, assuming the individual responsible for creating the photos was found with the printer in his possession.

‘I don’t like that kind of thing,’ said Haight. ‘I’m straight, but they’re just children. I don’t want to look at naked children.’

There it was once again: that primness, that need to reassure the listener that the killing of a young girl had been a temporary deviation. He had not carried teenage desires for young girls into adult life. He was a normal man, with normal sexual inclinations.

‘And the disc?’ I said.

‘It arrived in the same envelope, wrapped in tissue.’

His laptop was on the floor beside his chair, already powered up and on sleep. Seconds later, I was looking at an image of an old barn door, but not the same one as last time. This door was painted a bright red. As the camera drew nearer, a gloved hand reached out and pulled open the door. The interior was dark until the camera light clicked on. There was straw on the stone floor, and I caught glimpses of empty cattle pens on either side.

The camera stopped midway down the barn’s central aisle and turned to the operator’s right. On the floor of one of the pens a set of girl’s clothing was laid out: a white blouse, a red-and-black checked skirt, white stockings, and black shoes. Their positions roughly corresponded to the dimensions of a girl’s body, the way a parent might lay out a day’s outfit for a young child, but they also gave the uncomfortable impression that the wearer had somehow disappeared, vanishing in an instant, drawn into the void as she was lying in place in the barn, staring up at wood, and cobwebs, and pigeons or doves, for I could now hear the birds cooing softly in the background.

The screen went dark. That was all.

‘What was Selina Day wearing when she died, Mr. Haight?’

He took a moment to answer.

‘A white blouse, a red-and-black checked skirt, white stockings, black shoes.’

The details of her attire would probably have been included in the newspaper reports of the case. Even if they weren’t, they would have been known in the area, given that she had died in her uniform. Either way, it wouldn’t have been difficult for someone to put together a facsimile of what she had been wearing simply by doing a little research. Specialist local knowledge would not have been required.

‘You know, I think I will have a cup of coffee after all,’ I said.

He asked me how I took it, and I asked for milk, no sugar. While he was in the kitchen, I watched the video again, trying to find any clue to the location of the barn that I might have missed: a feed bag from a local supplier, a scrap of paper with an address that could be enlarged, anything at all, but there was nothing. The barn was a stage set with an absent player.

Haight returned with my coffee, and what smelled like a mint tea for himself.

‘Tell me about Lonny Midas, Mr. Haight,’ I said.

Haight sipped his tea. He did so carefully, even daintily. His movements were studiedly effeminate. In everything that I had seen him do so far, he seemed to be trying to communicate the impression that he was weak, inconsequential, and posed no threat. He was a man who was doing his best to fade into the background so as not to attract the attention of others, yet not so much that his desire to blend in would become overpowering, and thus mark him out. He was a youthful predator turned old prey.

Because in all that followed, in all that he told me that afternoon, the fact remained that he and Lonny Midas had acted together in stalking, and then killing, Selina Day. Midas might have been the instigator, but Haight had been beside him right until the end.

‘Lonny wasn’t a bad kid,’ said Haight. ‘People said that he was, but he wasn’t, not really. His mom and dad were old when they had him. Well, I say “old,” but I mean that his mom was in her late thirties and his father in his late forties. His brother, Jerry, was a decade older than him, but I don’t recall much about him. He’d left home by the time – well, by the time all the bad stuff happened. Lonny’s mom and dad weren’t just old, though; they were old-fashioned. His dad had wanted to be a preacher, but I don’t think he was smart enough. Not that you have to be smart to be a preacher, not really, but you need to be able to bring folk along with you, to convince them that you’re worth following and listening to, and Lonny’s father didn’t have that touch with ordinary people. Instead, he worked in a warehouse, and read his Bible in the evenings. Lonny’s mom was always in the background cooking or cleaning or sewing. She doted on Lonny, though. I guess with her older boy gone, and her husband lost in the Good Book, Lonny was all she had left, and she gave him the kind of love and affection that I think she craved for herself. In that way, she was a lot like my mother, though she took what we did a lot harder and was less forgiving. Had she lived, I don’t know how welcoming she would have been once he was released. I think it was better for him that they both died while he was inside.

‘But she was always so grateful when I came over to play with Lonny, or when she saw us together on the street. Her face would light up, because it seemed as if there was someone else who liked Lonny almost as much as she did.’

‘Are you implying that there were those who didn’t care much for Lonny?’ I asked.

‘Well, when you’re young there will always be some kids that you get along with, and others that you don’t. With Lonny, you could say there were more of the latter than the former. Lonny had a temper on him, but he was intelligent with it. That’s a bad combination. He was curious, and adventurous, but if you got in his way, or tried to stop him from getting what he wanted, then he’d lash out. He used to tell me that his father would beat on him for the slightest infraction, but that just made Lonny want to spite him more. He couldn’t control Lonny. Neither of them could. In the end, I guess Lonny couldn’t even control himself.

‘I wasn’t like that. I wanted to toe the line. No, that’s not true: My instinct was to toe the line, but like a lot of quiet, shy kids I secretly envied the Lonny Midases of this world. I still do. I think we became friends because I was so unlike him in action, yet I believed that I was a little like him in spirit. He would draw me out of myself, and sometimes I managed to keep him in check, to talk him down when it seemed like his tongue and his fists were going to get him into trouble. Man, but he got me in hot water I don’t know how many times, and my parents weren’t like his. They weren’t much younger than his mom and dad, but compared to them they were kind of laid-back. Lonny’s dad beat him when he did wrong, but my dad was always in my mom’s shadow, and she just went back to reading parenting books after I started getting in trouble, as if they were at fault and not me. They thought Lonny was a bad influence on me, but it wasn’t that simple. It never is.’

‘How long had you known each other before you killed Selina Day?’

For the first time, he didn’t wince at the mention of her name. He was partially adrift in a reverie of the past. I could see it in his eyes, and on his face. He had even begun to relax into his chair a little. He was back in a time before he was a murderer, when he and Lonny Midas were just kids getting into scrapes that would have been familiar to generations of kids before them.

‘We were friends from grade school. We were inseparable. We were brothers.’

He smiled, and there was a dampness to his eyes. William and Lonny, the little killers.

‘What about girls?’ I asked. ‘Were either of you seeing anyone?’

‘I was fourteen. I could only dream of girls.’

‘And Lonny?’

He thought about the question. ‘Girls liked him more than they liked me. I don’t think it was so much that he was better looking than I was, but he just had that way about him. I think I told you back in Ms. Price’s office that he’d kissed a couple of girls, and maybe copped a feel or two, but nothing more serious than that.’

‘And before Selina Day, had you or Lonny ever suggested finding a girl and taking her off somewhere?’

‘No, never.’

‘So why Selina Day?’

He sipped his tea again, delaying his response. Somewhere upstairs, a clock struck the half hour. Outside, the light began to change, and the room grew darker. The alteration was so sudden that, for a second or two, Randall Haight was lost to me, or so it seemed, just as the camera had struggled to adjust to the darkness of the barn, and I knew with a cold certainty that a game was being played here, but a different game than the one I had earlier assumed. No truth was absolute, especially when it came to a man who, in his youth, had killed a child, and Haight was consciously constructing a narrative that he believed would satisfy me. But it was a narrative that was always open to change and adaptation, just as he had held on to facets of his youth that he could expand into his performance as an adult, allowing him to fade into the background and become Randall Haight.

‘Because she was different,’ he said at last, and there was a flash of the grit that must have drawn Lonny Midas to him as a boy, the possibility that, deep down, they shared a common soul. ‘She was black. There were no black girls at our school, and there were boys who said that black girls were easy, and Selina Day was easier still. Lonny said that his brother knew a boy who raped a black girl and got clean away with it. Maybe those were different times, but not so different. The law had one ear for the blacks and one ear for us, and the hearing wasn’t the same in each ear.

‘Lonny was the one who suggested it, but I went along with it. Oh, I tried to talk him out of it in the beginning. I was frightened, but I was excited too, and when we started touching her it was like my mind filled up with blood, and all I wanted to do was tear at her clothes and rub myself against her and find her dark place. Is that what you wanted to hear, Mr. Parker? That I liked it? Well, it’s the truth: I did like it, right up until the time Lonny covered up her nose and mouth to stop her from screaming. He didn’t quite manage it, though. I heard her through his hand, like a kitten mewling, and that was when the blood started to flow backward, and everything went from red to white. I tried to pull Lonny from her, but he pushed me back and I tripped and hit my head, and I lay there and kept my eyes closed because it was easier to lie there than to fight him, easier to lie there than to watch her buck and scratch with her eyes bulging and her legs kicking, easier to lie there until she stopped moving, and I could smell what he’d done, what he’d made her do.

‘In a way, I was glad when they came for me. I’d have told in the end anyway. I’d have walked into the station house on my way home from school someday, and they’d have given me a soda, and I’d have told them what we did. There would have been no need to threaten me. I’d just have wanted them to listen, and not to shout at me. I couldn’t have held it in. I think Lonny understood that. Even as we covered her up in the corner of the barn, and he made me promise not to tell, he knew that I’d let him down. If he’d been older, I think he might have killed me too, and taken his chances by running, but he was only fourteen, and where would be have run to? That was the last time we talked. Even at the trial, we didn’t talk. After all, what could we have said to each other?’

‘Do you think Lonny blamed you for confessing?’

‘He wouldn’t have told, not ever. He only confessed after I gave us both up.’

‘But there would have been evidence at the scene even if someone hadn’t seen you. Eventually they’d have found out it was you.’

‘Maybe. I don’t know. Lonny thought they’d blame a black man. He said black men were always killing black women. His daddy said so. They lived rougher lives than we did. He was certain that if we kept our heads down and stayed quiet, we’d get away with it. We were fourteen-year-old boys. Fourteen-year-old boys don’t kill little girls. Big men kill little girls. That’s who they’d have been looking for: a big man with a thing for little girls. Like the one who sent those pictures.’

My coffee was going cold. I hadn’t wanted it anyway. I’d just been trying to find a way to make Haight relax and open up. It had worked, in a sense, although now I wanted to walk away and leave him to his troubles. I could see Selina Day dying on a dirty barn floor, and I didn’t need any more images of dying children in my head.

‘And you’ve never seen Lonny since then?’

‘I told you: The records were sealed. His name was changed. I’m not sure that I’d even recognize him anymore.’

‘What about your parents? I know your father died while you were incarcerated, but your mother?’

‘My momma stayed in touch with me for a time after I came out of prison, and gave me a place to live, but I couldn’t stand to see the way she looked at me. I turned my back on her. For all I know, she’s dead now. I’m alone. There’s just me.’

‘And how do you think of yourself, Mr. Haight?’ I said.

‘I don’t understand. Do you mean morally, as a consequence of what we did?’

‘No, I mean by what name do you know yourself? Are you William Lagenheimer or Randall Haight?’

Again, he took some time to answer.

‘I’m – I don’t know. Many years ago, I put William Lagenheimer from my mind. I suppose it made life easier. William did that awful thing, not Randall Haight. Randall Haight is just an accountant living in a small town. He’s never done anything wrong. That’s an easier personality to inhabit, I think.’

‘And William?’

‘He doesn’t exist anymore. There’s only Randall.’

‘And even Randall Haight doesn’t really exist, if you think about it.’

He looked at me, and I could feel him reassessing me, recognizing that, if I were still not fully aware of the rules, then I had at least come to understand the nature of the game.

‘No, he doesn’t. Sometimes I’m not sure who I am, or if I’m even anyone at all. I don’t want to be William because William killed a little girl. I don’t want to be Randall Haight because Randall jumps at his own shadow, and Randall doesn’t sleep so good at night, and Randall spends his entire life waiting for someone to put two and two together and force him to run. When I look in the mirror I expect it to be dark, or empty. I’m always surprised at the sight of my own face, because it’s not one that I recognize. What’s inside and what’s outside don’t match up, and they never will.’

He frowned. It might have been that he had said more than he wanted to, or that he was simply so unused to talking about his former life and identity that it confused him and caused him distress.

‘Mr. Haight, what do you want me to do for you?’

He gestured at his laptop, at the photographs. ‘I want you to make all of this stop. I want you to find out who’s doing this and make him stop.’

‘“Him”?’

‘Him, her: It doesn’t matter. I just want this to end.’

‘And how do you propose I should do that?’

He looked surprised, then angry.

‘What do you mean? I’m hiring you to make this go away.’

‘And I’m telling you that it’s not going to go away. If I find the person who is doing this, then how should I respond? Threaten him? Kill him? Is that what you want?’

‘If it allows me to continue living in peace, then yes.’

‘That’s not what I do, Mr. Haight.’

He leaned forward in his seat, jabbing at me with a finger.

‘On the contrary, Mr. Parker, that’s very much what you do. Just as you now know a lot about me, I read up on you. You’ve killed. I’ve read the names.’

‘I’m trying not to add to that list. Do you want to be serious, Mr. Haight, or should I just leave you to your elaborate fantasies?’

He stood up. ‘You can’t talk to me like that.’

‘Sit down.’

‘This is my house and-’

‘Sit down.’

He gave it a couple of seconds for the sake of dignity, then sat.

‘I need you to think carefully about what I’m going to tell you,’ I said. ‘You’re either being tormented by someone who thinks it’s amusing to see you sweat, or you’re about to be blackmailed. The person targeting you has only one card to play, one weapon to use against you, and that’s the fact that you’ve kept your past secret for so long. The most effective way to neutralize the threat is to go to the police-’

‘No.’

‘-is to go to the police, tell them everything that’s been happening to you, and let them take it from there.’

‘But it’s not just about the police,’ said Haight. ‘Suppose this person chooses to send details to the newspapers? Suppose he decides to post notices all over Pastor’s Bay, telling everyone about the child killer living in their midst? And even if he doesn’t, do you think the police here will be able to keep it quiet, assuming they’d even want to? This is a small town. You get ticketed in the morning here and by lunchtime they’re joking about it at the post office. My life will be ruined, and it won’t be enough just to leave Pastor’s Bay, or Maine. My name and picture will be all over the Internet. I won’t be able to work, or even live in peace. You’re asking me to commit professional suicide, and I may as well follow through with the real thing immediately after.’

He put his face in his hands, and kept it there.

‘You’re forgetting something,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

‘The timing of all this.’

He lowered his hands to the bridge of his nose, his eyes peering over the pyramid they formed.

‘Meaning Anna Kore,’ he said.

‘Yes. If this comes out against your will, you’ll be a suspect. Let’s go through that day again. What do you remember of it?’

‘Why?’

‘Because I want to know. Start at the beginning.’

‘I was out of town that morning. I left shortly after nine.’

‘You had appointments?’

‘Only one. It was in Northport. You know this.’

‘What did you do after that?’

‘I had lunch, came home. I felt ill. I told you that the first time we met.’

‘Did you meet anyone, have any visitors, make any calls?’

‘No. Again, I told you: I lay on the couch. I fell asleep.’

‘When did you wake?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Did you spend the night on the couch?’

‘No, I went to bed.’

‘Was it dark then?’

‘I think so. I don’t know. Please stop!’

‘These are the questions the police will ask you, Mr. Haight, if your past comes out. You’d better have good answers for them too, especially if someone has anonymously informed them that the local accountant is a convicted child killer.’

‘God. Jesus God.’

He lay back in his chair, his eyes closed.

‘You’re talking about preempting something that may not occur,’ he said.

‘You’re being goaded by someone who knows about Selina Day. Already that person has begun to step up the campaign against you by sending you pornographic images of children, the possession of which is a crime. I don’t believe it’s going to stop there. The next step is to start hinting at your past to the wider community.’

‘I need to think about it,’ he said at last.

‘You do that, but I wouldn’t think for too long. There is one other thing.’

‘What?’ He sounded weary.

‘You should consider that you’re neither being blackmailed nor tormented simply over a past crime.’

‘Then what?’

‘It could be that you’re being set up for the disappearance of Anna Kore,’ I said.

With that I left him to consider his future, or what little of it remained to him.

11

The Pastor’s Bay Police Department occupied one part of the municipal building, along with, according to a sign outside the door and a brief glimpse of the interior through its windows as I passed by, the town clerk’s office, the fire department, local sanitation, and assorted meeting rooms, cubbyholes, unoccupied desks piled high with paper, and probably the Pastor’s Bay collection of Halloween costumes, Santa Claus hats and beards, and stuffed-animal heads. The disappearance of Anna Kore meant that the demands on the building had increased significantly, and there were now various state police vehicles, dark unmarked SUVs, and a mobile crime-scene unit parked in its lot alongside a single, slightly battered Pastor’s Bay Police Department Explorer. There was also the Winnebago that CID sometimes used as a mobile command post, but I could see no signs of activity around it.

I had wanted to see Randall Haight in his own environment, as though by doing so I might come to a better understanding of him, but the only conclusion I had drawn from our encounter was that Haight remained a lost soul, a deeply confused and conflicted man. Increasingly, Judge Bowens’s social experiment, well-intentioned though it might have been, appeared to have resulted in profound existential consequences for the young man whom he had tried to help. That, in turn, raised the question of whether or not Lonny Midas had endured a similar crisis of identity.

There wasn’t much in Pastor’s Bay to occupy those with time on their hands: a few stores, the local bars, a bank, and a post office. The town’s pharmacy wasn’t part of a chain, and occupied an old redbrick building at the western end of Main Street. A hand-lettered sign on its door warned: WE DO NOT STOCK OXYCONTIN. There had been a rash of robberies at drugstores in the state, most of them carried out by sweaty, twitchy young men looking for little more than a way to feed their own addictions using Oxycodone, Vicodin, and Xanax. For the most part they favored blades over guns, and they were desperate enough to lash out at customers and pharmacists who didn’t cooperate. They’d have to be pretty dumb to come all the way out to Pastor’s Bay to score, though. Even if they managed to get away from the town itself there were five miles of narrow two-lane road before they reached another major route, which meant it would be easy to pick them up once the alarm had been raised.

I walked back toward the municipal building. The Explorer was gone. I hadn’t noticed it leave. Some detective I was. I still had no sense of Pastor’s Bay as a place, and no real idea of how I was going to set about tackling Randall Haight’s problem. Maybe if I hung around long enough somebody would feel the urge to confess. There was a coffee shop called Hallowed Grounds across the street, so, with no better option to hand, I went in and ordered a Turkey Nudo sandwich and a bottle of water.

‘You have trouble with drugstore robberies around here?’ I asked the guy behind the counter who took my order.

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘You planning a heist?’

‘I just noticed the sign on the pharmacy door that says it doesn’t stock OxyContin.’

‘Pre-emptive tactics,’ he said. ‘Guess you’ll have to shop elsewhere for your opioid needs.’

‘Funny,’ I said. ‘You’re so dry you could be used as kindling.’

I took a seat at the window to watch the town’s comings and goings while the kid put my order together. He was in his early twenties and already had enough piercings and tattoos to suggest that he viewed his body merely as a work in progress, a canvas for a largely uninspired collection of ideas revolving around Maori culture, Buddhism, Celtic mythology, and Scandinavian death metal, judging by his T-shirt which depicted a Kiss reject who, if I remembered correctly, had been jailed for murdering another Kiss reject, and maybe burning a church or two along the way. Say what you like about Gene Simmons, but the worst he could do would be to date your daughter. Very loud music was playing very softly on the store’s sound system, to which the barista was shaking his greasy hair over the coffee and baked goods. The Turkey Nudo had been premade and shrink-wrapped, so I was okay, unless it was laughing boy who had made it in the first place. I wondered if he’d taken into account the effect gravity would have on his skin and muscle tone as the years went by. By the time he was fifty, some of those tattoos would be around his knees.

Hell, I thought, pretty soon I’ll be fifty, and I was already sounding like an old man. Let the kid have his fun. Had Jennifer lived, she’d have been within sight of her teens by now, and I’d be worrying about piercings, and boys, and beginning sentences with ‘No daughter of mine is going out dressed like…’

But she hadn’t lived, and it would be a few years before I had to worry about Sam in that way. Maybe she’d keep me young, but taking cheap shots in my head at a kid from a small town like Pastor’s Bay who was just trying not to get dragged down by the place wouldn’t help any. I’d end up like Lonny Midas’s father, not understanding, and not wanting to understand.

He brought me my sandwich and water, and threw in a packet of chips free.

‘All part of the service,’ he said. ‘I’m not happy until you’re not happy.’

His kindness made me feel even more guilty. Just to rub it in, the music changed. Guitars were replaced by a piano, and a woman’s voice with a foreign accent began to sing a cover version of a song that sounded vaguely familiar, although it took me a moment to place it. I looked back at the counter, where the kid was bopping along in a more restrained manner to this one as well.

‘Hey, is that… Abba?’ I asked.

‘I don’t think so.’ He trotted to the stereo and picked up a CD case. ‘Susanna, uh, I think it’s pronounced “Wallumrød,” with a weird line through the ø. It’s my girlfriend’s, but I can only play it at certain times of the day, usually when the place is quiet. It’s a management thing. Some people find it kind of depressing.’

It wasn’t depressing. It was soft, and sad, and haunting, but not depressing.

‘It’s a cover of an Abba song,’ I said. ‘‘Lay All Your Love on Me.” And please don’t ask me how I know that.’

‘Yeah, Abba? Don’t think I’m familiar with them.’

‘Swedish. Same neck of the woods as that Norwegian Count Whatever on your T-shirt, more or less. Not as big on church-burning, though, or not that I can recall.’

‘Yeah, the Count is one mean bastard. I just like the music, though. Music’s music, you know. Quiet or loud, it’s either good or bad.’ He changed the grounds in the coffee maker, and started filling a pot. ‘You a cop?’ he asked.

‘Nope.’

‘Fed?’

‘Nope.’

‘Reporter?’

‘Nope.’

‘Rumpelstiltskin?’

‘Maybe.’

He laughed.

‘I’m a private investigator,’ I said.

‘No shit? You here about the Kore girl?’

‘No, just some boring client stuff. Why, you know her?’

‘Knew her to see around.’ He corrected himself. ‘I know her to see around. She seems okay. Runs with a younger crowd, but it’s not like there are so many kids around here that you don’t know everyone by name.’

‘Any idea what might have happened to her?’

‘Nuh-uh. If she was a little older, I’d have said that she might have lit out for the city. Boston or New York, maybe, not Bangor or Portland. They’re no better than here, not really; they’re just bigger. If you’re gonna run, run far, or else this place is going to haul you right back again.’

‘You’re still here.’

‘I’m trying to change the system from within, fighting the good fight, all that kind of bullshit.’

‘If not you, then who?’

‘Exactly.’

‘So you don’t think Anna Kore ran away?’

‘Nope. Not that girls her age don’t run away, but she doesn’t seem like the sort. Everyone says she was okay.’

‘That doesn’t sound good for her.’

‘No, I guess not.’

He went silent. Susanna Wallumrød was singing about her few little love affairs. She sounded weary of them all.

‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

‘I thought you said that you weren’t here about her.’

‘I’m not. I’m just professionally curious.’

He folded his arms and sized me up.

‘Chief Allan said I was to tell him if anyone came asking about her.’

‘I’m sure he did. I figure I’ll be talking to him soon enough. So: Did she have a boyfriend?’

‘No. Her mom was – is – pretty protective of her, or that’s what I heard. Anna was kept on a tight chain, you know, having a single mom and all. She probably would have eased up on her eventually.’

‘Yeah. Well, with luck she’ll still get that chance.’

‘Amen to that.’

He turned his back and started rearranging the last of the pastries. I continued eating, and watched the folk of Pastor’s Bay go about their business. Although school was done for the day, I saw no young people on the streets.

‘Thanks for the sandwich,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you around.’

‘Sure. You have a good day now.’

I drove toward the bridge, the sun now long past its zenith. I thought about Selina Day, and Lonny Midas. I wondered where Lonny was now. Haight had told me that Lonny’s parents died while he was locked up, but there was still his older brother, Jerry, to consider. Maybe Lonny had been in touch with him since his release, but if so, then what of it? What could Lonny Midas tell me that Haight couldn’t? Then again, I was assuming that Haight was the only one whose secret had been discovered. If the information had come from someone involved with the two men during the period of their preparation for release, then Midas might have been targeted too.

But I was also aware of something else that Haight had revealed: his belief that, had he been older, Lonny Midas might have been willing to kill him to ensure that he remained silent about what they had done. Could Lonny Midas have borne a grudge against Haight throughout the period of their incarceration and, upon his release, set out to find him and undermine his new existence? Could Lonny Midas even have abducted Anna Kore to further that aim? They were big jumps to make: too big. They were symptoms of my frustration, and part of me wanted to walk away and let Randall Haight sink or swim depending on how the situation developed. What kept me from dropping the case back into Aimee Price’s lap was the slim possibility that Anna Kore’s disappearance was somehow linked to Haight’s past, but so far I could discern no direct connection between them.

The bridge came into view, the slowly rotting pilings of its predecessor beside it like a shadow given substance. I was halfway across when the black-and-white Explorer emerged from a copse of trees on the far side of the water, lights flashing, and blocked the road. I had been expecting to see it ever since the kid at the coffee shop mentioned the chief of police’s edict. It was my own fault for overstepping the line.

I kept going until I cleared the bridge, then pulled over and placed my hands on the steering wheel. A man in his late thirties, shorter than I was but with the build of a swimmer or a rower, climbed out of the driver’s side of the Explorer, his hand on his weapon and the body of the vehicle between us. His hair was black, and he wore a mustache. Chief Allan looked older in person than he did on TV, and the mustache didn’t do him any favors. He approached me slowly. I waited until he was close enough to see my entire body, then carefully shifted my left hand to roll down the window.

‘License and registration, please,’ he said.

His hand hadn’t shifted from the butt of his gun. He didn’t seem nervous, but you never could tell with small-town cops.

I handed over the documents. He glanced at them, but didn’t call them in.

‘What’s your business here, Mr. Parker?’

‘I’m a private investigator,’ I said.

I caught the flash of recognition in his eyes. Maine is a big state geographically but a small one socially, and I’d made enough noise to be on the radar of most of the law enforcement community, even peripherally.

‘Who’s your client?’

‘I’m working on behalf of a lawyer, Aimee Price. Any questions will have to be directed to her.’

‘How long have you been in town?’

‘A few hours.’

‘You should have reported in to us.’

‘I didn’t realize I had that obligation.’

‘You might have considered it a courtesy call under the circumstances. You know where the police department is?’

‘Yeah, it’s where everything else is. Left at sanitation, right at the clerk’s office, then straight on till morning.’

‘It’s right at sanitation, but close enough. I want you to haul on back there and wait for me.’

‘Can I ask why?’

‘You can ask, but the only answer you’ll get is that I’m telling you to go. The next step is for me to put you in the back of my vehicle and drive you there myself.’

‘I’ll bet your cuffs bite.’

‘Rusty too. Could take a while to get them off.’

‘In that case, I’ll be heading back to town in my car.’

‘I’ll be right behind you.’

‘That’s very reassuring.’

He waited for me to make a turnaround, and it was only when I was safely back on the bridge that he got into the Explorer. He stayed close behind me all the way, although he was kind enough to kill his lights. The kid with the tattoos was standing at the door of the coffee shop when I pulled into the municipal lot. I gave him a wave and he shrugged. No hard feelings, I thought. You did the right thing.

The chief pulled in beside me. I got out and waited for him to join me. He indicated that I should head inside. There was a sprightly looking woman in her early sixties behind a desk just inside the door, surrounded by neatly piled files, a pair of computers, and a dispatcher’s radio. She smiled politely as I entered, and offered me a cookie from a plate on the desk. It seemed rude to refuse, so I took one.

‘You carrying?’ asked Allan.

‘Left-hand side,’ I said.

‘Take it off, and leave it with Mrs. Shaye.’

I kept the cookie between my teeth, removed my jacket, and handed over the shoulder rig.

‘Thank you,’ said Mrs. Shaye. She wrapped the straps around the holster and placed it in a cardboard box, to which she appended a playing card: the nine of clubs. She handed another nine of clubs to me.

‘Don’t lose it, now,’ she said.

‘Likewise,’ I said.

‘Take another cookie,’ she said. ‘Just in case.’

‘In case of what?’ I said, but she didn’t get a chance to answer. Instead, Allan pointed to the left, although his office was to the right. He walked me to one of the town meeting rooms, one so small that I made it look crowded all by myself.

‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he said. ‘I’ll get Mrs. Shaye to bring you coffee.’

He closed the door behind him, then locked it as well. I took a seat, finished my first cookie, and put the other one on the table. There was a window that faced onto the rear lot, and I watched a man in overalls working on a second police-department vehicle, a Crown Vic that had clearly been purchased used from another department, with marks on its door where the decal had been removed. Hard times in the city, hard times by the sea.

Mrs. Shaye arrived with coffee and sugar and another cookie, even though I had yet to eat the second one. A long hour went by.

And the sun set on Pastor’s Bay.

Randall Haight sat at his kitchen table, his hands palm down on the cheap wood, staring at his reflection in the window. He did not know the man before him. He did not know Randall Haight, for there was nothing about him to be known. He did not know William Lagenheimer, for William had been erased from existence. The face in the glass represented an Other, a pale thing marooned in darkness, and an Otherness, a realm of existence occupied by unbound souls. The setting sun burned fires in the sky around his visage. His diary lay before him, the pages filled with tiny, almost indecipherable handwriting. He had begun writing down his thoughts shortly after his release. He had found that it was the only way to keep himself sane, to hold his selves separate. He kept the diary hidden in a panel at the base of his bedroom closet. He had learned in prison the importance of hiding places.

There were locks on the windows and locks on the doors. He would usually have started cooking his evening meal by now, but he had no appetite. All of his pleasures had dissipated since the images started to arrive, and the latest batch had turned his stomach. What kind of person would do that to a child? He was grateful to the detective for taking them away with him. He did not want them in his house. The girl might get the wrong idea about him, and he did not want that to happen. The balance between them was precarious enough as things stood.

Randall now understood why the detective had reacted so strongly to him back at the lawyer’s office. Randall hadn’t liked the sense of revulsion that came off the detective at that first meeting, the way he didn’t seem particularly sympathetic to the threat that the messages posed to Randall’s peace of mind, to his life in Pastor’s Bay. It had led him to search for more information about the detective, and what was revealed was both interesting and, Randall supposed, moving. The detective had lost a child to a killer, but here he was working on behalf of another man who had killed a child. Randall struggled to put himself in the detective’s position. Why would he take on such a task? Duty? But he had no duty to Randall, not even to the lawyer. Curiosity? A desire to right wrongs? Justice?

It came to Randall: Anna Kore.

A chicken breast sat defrosting on a plate by the sink. Regardless of his absence of appetite, he had to eat. He would get weak and sick otherwise, and he needed his strength. More than that, he had to be able to keep a clear head. His very existence was under threat. His secrets were at risk of being discovered.

All of his secrets.

The TV was playing in the living room behind him. Cartoons, always cartoons. They were the only programs that seemed to keep her calm. He heard a sound behind him, but he did not turn.

‘Go away,’ he said. ‘Go back to your shows.’

And the girl did as she was told.

12

Sometimes good things happen to those who wait. This wasn’t one of those times.

Shortly before eight p.m., after I’d been cooling my heels for so long that my feet had gone to sleep, I heard the door unlock and a massive figure entered the room. His name was Gordon Walsh, and he was primarily a homicide specialist with CID. Our paths had crossed in the past and I still hadn’t managed to alienate him entirely, which counted as a miracle on a level with the dead rising up and walking. He had previously worked out of Bangor, one of what was, until recently, three CID units in the state, but a reorganization of the division had reduced this to two, Gray and Bangor. I had heard that Walsh had transferred to Gray, and was working out of the Androscoggin DA’s office. It wasn’t too much of a burden for him to bear. He lived in Oakland, virtually equidistant from both Gray and Bangor. Pastor’s Bay fell under the authority of CID in Gray as it lay in the northern part of Knox County, although in a case like this, such territorial definitions tended to be fluid, and Gray’s complement of sixteen detectives could be supplemented by some of their peers in Bangor if necessary.

Now here was Walsh, looking like a man who has just been roused from a deep sleep in order to rescue an unloved cat from a tree. He took in my black suit, and my dark tie, and said, ‘The undertaker called. He wants his clothes back.’

‘Detective Walsh,’ I said. ‘Still field-testing the tensile strength of polyester?’

‘I’m an honest public servant. I wear what I can afford.’ He rubbed the hem of his jacket between his fingers and winced slightly.

‘Static?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘It’s the air.’

He was still leaning against the wall, and his mood didn’t seem to be improving. If anything, he was growing more and more unhappy as the seconds ticked by. Walsh wasn’t one for hiding his feelings. He probably wept at calendars with pictures of puppies, and howled at the moon when the Red Sox lost a game.

‘They send you in to soften me up?’ I said.

‘Yeah. We’re hoping you’ll respond to a mellow tone.’

‘You want a cookie? They’re good.’

‘Had one. They are good. I have to watch my weight, though. My wife wants me to live long enough to collect my pension. Not any longer than that. Just until the check has cleared.’

He detached himself from the wall before it started to crumble under the pressure and dropped into a chair at the opposite end of the small table. Outside, the man in overalls had finished working on the Crown Vic. He’d kept going even after the light faded, turning on the garage illumination so that he could finish the job. He was packing away his tools and his lights when Allan came out to talk to him. The mechanic took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his overalls, and he and Allan had a smoke while they circled the car, the mechanic presumably pointing out its flaws as they went. Pretty soon, I’d know how the car felt.

‘What do you think of him?’ said Walsh.

‘Allan? I don’t know anything about him.’

‘He should be someplace else instead of out here in the williwigs. He’s smart, and he’s committed. He’s been good on this Anna Kore thing so far.’

He left her name hanging like a hook. I didn’t bite, or not so hard that the hook stuck.

‘Are you the primary?’ I asked.

‘That’s right. If you dressed for a funeral, you’re too early.’

‘Who’s the DS?’

Each investigation had a primary detective who, in turn, reported to a detective sergeant who acted as supervisor.

‘Matt Prager.’

I knew Prager. He was good, even if he did have an inexplicable fondness for show tunes and musical theater. It made sense to have him and Walsh working together on the Kore case. They were two of the most senior detectives in the Maine State Police, and they generally played well with others.

‘So,’ he continued, ‘while I’m sure you’re royally aggrieved at being forced to sit here and watch the world grow dark when you could be off dispensing your own brand of justice someplace else – that, or cleaning up behind the bar you work in when times are tough and the world has temporarily tired of heroes – you should recognize that this is the center of an ongoing investigation into the disappearance of a young girl, and Allan did right to haul you in and let you steam for a while.’

‘I don’t have a problem with what he did.’

‘Good. So, back to the suit. Your client suit, I take it?’

‘On occasion.’

‘We need to know.’

‘You’ll have to call Aimee Price and put your request to her. I’m working on her behalf. I can’t tell you anything unless she clears it first.’

‘We did talk to her. She makes you seem reasonable.’

‘She’s a lawyer. They’re only reasonable on their own terms.’

‘Well, then you have that much in common. I know you: If there’s trouble, and you show up, then you’re involved. Coincidences go out the window where you’re concerned. I’ve no idea why that is, and if I were you I’d worry about it, but for now what it tells me is that your reason for being here probably intersects with the Anna Kore case at some point, and I want you to tell me exactly where that point lies.’

‘This is a circular conversation. I’m employed by Aimee Price, which means that any client information is privileged.’

‘There’s a girl’s life at stake.’

‘I understand that but-’

‘There is no “but.” It’s a child.’

His voice was raised. I heard scuffling outside the door, but nobody else entered.

‘Listen, Walsh, I want Anna Kore brought home safely just as much as you do. All I can tell you is that, as of now, I don’t believe my client had anything to do with her disappearance, and I’ve found no evidence of a connection between my inquiries on the client’s behalf and your investigation.’

‘That’s not good enough. You don’t get to make that call.’

‘My hands are tied here. Aimee’s solid, and I like and trust her, but I know that if I breach the rules of client confidentiality she’ll have me hauled over hot coals, and that’s aside from any further action her client may take. I’ll tell you again: As far as I’m aware, the client’s case is unrelated to the disappearance of Anna Kore, but I have advised the client to contact the police about the matter with which we’re dealing, just so there’s no confusion.’

‘And how did your client respond to this magnanimous gesture on your part?’

‘The client is thinking about it.’

Walsh threw up his hands.

‘Well, that’s just great. That’s set my mind right at rest. Your client is going to think about a duty to share information that may be pertinent to an ongoing investigation. Meanwhile, there’s a fourteen-year-old girl missing and, in my experience, the people who abduct fourteen-year-old girls don’t tend to have their best interests at heart. And you, you spineless son of a bitch, are shifting your moral responsibilities on to a lawyer. You’re right down at the bottom of the swamp now, Parker, mired with the weeds and the parasites. You, of all people, should know better. Have you seen the news? Have you watched Valerie Kore crying for her child? You know what she’s going through, and there’ll be worse to come if we don’t find her daughter in time. You want that on your head, a man who lost his own child, who understands-’

It was the mention of Jennifer that did it – that, and the fact that I knew Walsh was right. Immediately I was on my feet, and Walsh was on his. I heard myself shouting at him, losing control, and I wasn’t even aware of the words that I was saying. Walsh was shouting back at me, spittle flying from his mouth, his finger jabbing at my face. The door behind us opened, and Allan entered along with another older patrolman I hadn’t seen before, and in the background were faces staring at us: Mrs. Shaye; the mechanic; Walsh’s partner, Soames; two state troopers; and a pair of men in suits.

Even in my anger and self-pity, in the self-righteousness that I was using to mask my shame, I recognized one of them, and I knew that the game had taken another turn. I stepped back from Walsh, and from my own worst instincts.

‘I want a phone call,’ I said. ‘I want to call my lawyer.’

The door was locked again, and once more I was alone. I wasn’t under arrest, and I hadn’t been charged with any crime. Neither had a telephone yet materialized. It was possible that they could hold me for obstructing the course of justice, but Aimee would swat that one out of the sky with a flick of her wrist. The problem, as I simmered in the chair, was that I felt the truth of Walsh’s statement. I knew better than to behave the way that I was behaving. I knew because I carried the memory of a dead child with me wherever I went. The weight of her loss was heavy on my heart, and I would not and could not wish that pain on another person. Legally, I was within my rights to withhold what I knew about Randall Haight; morally, I was beneath contempt, for Haight’s right to privacy was subordinate to a child’s right to life.

Yet while I felt that Haight was engaged in an act of misrepresentation, a manipulation of the truth for his own ends, I still did not believe he was involved in whatever had befallen Anna Kore. At the same time, despite my assurances to Walsh, I could not be certain that his troubles and the girl’s disappearance were not connected simply because I had not yet found any evidence to link them. But if they were linked, then I could not believe that the person who was sending photographs and discs to Haight would be careless enough to leave evidence on the contents of the envelopes, or even on the envelopes themselves. Still, that was not my call to make. I didn’t have a forensics lab in my basement, and who knew what trace evidence or DNA evidence might be found if the envelopes and their contents were submitted for examination?

But I was also troubled by the man I had seen staring back at me from the doorway of Chief Allan’s office. We had never met, but I knew his face: I had watched him hovering around the outskirts of a RICO trial in Augusta earlier in the year, and while I was being interviewed in the aftermath of a smuggling operation that had made the newspapers during the summer. His name was Robert Engel, and he had the nebulous title of Deputy Supervisor of Operations in the Organized-Crime Squad of the FBI’s Boston Division. In effect, he had a roving brief, and acted as a conduit for information and resources between the New England divisions and the three units of the Organized-Crime Section at FBI headquarters in Washington – La Cosa Nostra and racketeering; Eurasian/ Middle Eastern crime; and Asian and African criminal enterprises – as well as working with the Joint Terrorism Task Forces to uncover potential sources of terrorist funding through the medium of organized criminal activity. Engel was an accomplished diplomat, carefully navigating his way through the FBI’s own cutthroat world of internecine warfare as well as its ongoing feuds with sister agencies – in particular the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. In addition, he had worked to rebuild the Bureau’s reputation in Boston following revelations of collusion between some of its agents and leading organized-crime figures in the city.

There was no apparent reason for Engel to be in a boon-docks police department during the investigation into the disappearance of a young girl. Nevertheless he was here, and his presence explained some of the odd features of the case, including the length of time it had taken for Anna Kore’s mother to make a public appeal. It suggested a conflict of views, and Engel’s presence meant that there were at least two arms of the FBI involved in the Kore investigation. Plus, if Engel was involved, then the feds either knew about organized criminal activity in Pastor’s Bay or were watching for someone at the periphery, someone with connections that extended beyond the town’s limits.

I needed to talk to Aimee, for both our sakes. It was now more important than ever that we convinced Randall Haight of the necessity of coming forward and revealing the nature of the messages that were being sent to him and the reason for them, even at the risk of disrupting his carefully safeguarded existence. It was one thing to rile the Maine State Police, and I had sound reasons for wanting to do that as little as possible. My PI’s license had been rescinded in the past for angering the MSP, and any future action taken against me might well result in its permanent forfeiture. Screwing around with the FBI was another matter entirely. The cops would have to charge me or let me go, but the feds could put me behind bars for as long as they wanted. Aimee would probably be okay, as even the FBI tended to dislike jailing lawyers without good cause. I, on the other hand, was only a PI, and while I was aware that there were those in the Bureau who were interested in me and, for reasons of their own, were prepared to give me a degree of protection, they did so out of a sense of duty rather than any great personal fondness, and they might well view a spell in a lockup, either county or one more shadowy, as a useful way of reminding me of the limits of their tolerance.

Eventually, after almost another hour had gone by, the door was unlocked. This time it was Allan who entered, and the door stayed open. Behind him, the building was relatively quiet. Engel and his acolytes, Walsh and the staties, all were elsewhere. Apart from Engel I could see only the older cop with his cap under his arm, and a pretty young woman wearing sweatpants and an old Blackbears T-shirt who seemed to have taken over from Mrs. Shaye for a time but was now putting on her coat in preparation for departure.

‘You’re free to go,’ said Allan. He didn’t look pleased about it.

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it. It’s not my call. I had my way, you’d have told us everything you know by now.’

‘You won’t believe this, but I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d taken the hard road.’

‘Save it. We’ll find out who you were speaking with, one way or another. We’ve already started asking about your car. This is a small community, and it’s on its guard. Someone will have seen you parked, and we’ll take it from there. You be sure to let your “client” know that. You can collect your gun and your phone from Becky.’

I handed my playing card over to Becky. She wasn’t as friendly as Mrs. Shaye, and she didn’t look as if she ate many cookies, but I thanked her anyway. When I got to my car, I turned on my cell phone and called Aimee. She answered on the first ring.

‘Thanks for rushing to my aid,’ I said.

‘I thought you might feel I was threatening your masculinity. Have they let you go?’

‘Reluctantly. I don’t want to do this over the phone, and I’m too tired to talk face-to-face now. Can you make time for me in the morning?’

‘First thing. I’ll be there at eight. In the meantime, I’ve spoken to our client.’

‘And?’

‘I think he may be starting to see the light after your earlier conversation with him, but he’s still reluctant to come forward.’

‘Twist his arm,’ I told her. ‘He comes forward soon, or I’m giving him up.’

I killed the connection. I was tired, and I almost considered trying to find a bed for the night in Pastor’s Bay, but a quick look along the deserted main street convinced me otherwise. Eventually I might have to stay nearer to the town, but I had no desire to stay in it. It might have been my weariness after hours spent in that small room, and the pall that the disappearance of Anna Kore had cast over the place, but I felt that, even without the trauma of her vanishing, I would still have been anxious to leave Pastor’s Bay behind. Seeing it now, empty of souls, I felt the wrongness of it: There was not meant to be a town here, or not this town. The very first stone had been laid incorrectly, the first house built in a bad location and with an inhospitable aspect, and all that had followed was rendered skewed and unbalanced by those initial mistakes. James Weston Harris’s death at the hands of the natives should have served as a warning of what was to come, but it was too late to undo the damage, too late to start again, and so all who lived here had to resign themselves to these deep imperfections or deny them entirely while wondering why they, and the town, never truly prospered.

My cell phone beeped. I had an incoming message, but it came from a blocked number. I opened it anyway. It read:

CHIEF ALLAN IS TELLING LIES.

I closed the message and looked again at the dark, ugly street, as though waiting for the sender to be revealed as a shadow among deeper shadows, but nothing moved. Tiredness be damned. My desire to leave Pastor’s Bay was now overpowering. I turned the key in the ignition and heard only a death rattle. I tried again, and this time even the rattle was absent. My battery was dead. Before I could start cursing the god who had ever brought me to this place, there was a tap on my window. The mechanic was standing beside me, another cigarette fixed between his lips. I rolled down the window.

‘Need a boost?’ he asked.

‘In every way,’ I replied.

His truck was parked nearby, and he returned with a booster pack for the battery. He opened the hood, attached the clamps, and told me to give her a try. The car started instantly. I kept my foot on the gas while I reached into my wallet for a twenty. He saw what I was doing and shook his head.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘Maybe between this and my mother’s cookies you won’t think so badly of us when you leave.’

‘Mrs. Shaye is your mother?’

‘Yep, and she doesn’t hand over those cookies to just anyone. I’m Patrick Shaye, but everybody around here calls me Pat. And I know who you are; by now, the whole town probably knows.’

We shook hands, and he removed the booster pack from the Mustang’s battery.

‘Nice machine,’ he said. ‘You tend it yourself?’

‘Some.’

‘I like these old cars. Anything goes wrong with them, it can be fixed easily. You don’t need computers, just grease and knowhow.’

‘I saw you working on that Crown Vic out back. I take it you have the contract to service the town’s vehicles?’

‘Yep, and with luck I’ll still have it tomorrow after the chief hears I helped you out. He’s not the forgiving kind, the chief. Pays not to cross him.’

He said it lightly, but there was an undercurrent of something harsher. I didn’t press him on it. He said good-bye, then added, ‘I figure we’ll be seeing you again, right?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because you look like the kind of fella who doesn’t run because a dog barks at him, even a dog with teeth like the chief’s.’

‘He strikes me as being good at what he does.’

‘He is, but that’s being good at policing a small town with small-town problems.’ He opened the door of his truck. ‘Thing is, we have a bigger problem now.’

‘Anna Kore.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You don’t think he’s up to finding her?’

‘That’s not for me to say.’

‘Is that why the FBI is here?’

He shook his head and grinned. ‘Nice try, Mr. Parker. I just fix cars.’

I stayed behind him for a mile or two, and he flashed his hazards at me when he turned off the main road. I drove on and thought about the message on my cell phone. Allan had barely spoken to me, and I couldn’t find anything in the few words we had exchanged that might be open to doubt or suspicion, which meant that the person who had sent the anonymous text message, probably using a proxy website, was referring to something outside my sphere of knowledge. Then again, it might simply have been an attempt to muddy the waters, just as the packages sent to Randall Haight might be, in which case it was possible that one person, or group of persons, was responsible for both.

I was starting to wish that I’d never heard from Aimee Price, or met Randall Haight, even without the further complications suggested by the presence of the FBI agent, Engel. Engel was a heavy hitter. If he had left his Boston lair for Pastor’s Bay, it was because there was something in the circumstances surrounding the girl’s disappearance that interested him. But all that really interested Engel was organized crime and terrorism, and I had no desire to face mobsters or terrorists unaided.

I stopped at a gas station and made another call, this time from a pay phone, because the gentlemen I was calling in New York didn’t like calls from cell phones.

Then again, the gentlemen in New York weren’t really gentlemen at all.

13

The apartment was on the second floor of a grim building on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. It wasn’t the ugliest block on the avenue, but it was close. Fourth had been rezoned in 2003 in the hope of creating Brooklyn’s Park Avenue, with tony upscale living environments replacing body shops. Unfortunately, corners had been cut by City Planning early in the process, and the first condos to be built following the rezoning eschewed retail units and storefronts on the first floor in favor of vents and parking garages. The planners had eventually realized their mistake, but it was too late to undo the initial damage, so Fourth was now an uneasy mix of boutiques, restaurants, and urban brutalist façades.

To the man checking the numbers on the building’s intercom, it seemed that the only thing Fourth had in common with his beloved Park Avenue was the traffic, every lane of it. Given the choice, he’d take somewhere on Fifth or Seventh farther up the Slope in a heartbeat. Then again, that assumed he actually had some interest in living in Brooklyn, which he hadn’t. People could talk all they wanted about how it was the new Bohemia, but he wasn’t buying, he hadn’t cared much for the old Bohemia, and everything that he needed could be found on the island of Manhattan. As far as he was concerned, the other four boroughs could be cut with a big blade and towed out up to Greenland, apart from the strip of Queens containing JFK, and they could run ferries to that. As for Jersey, that was why there was water separating it from Manhattan. In his darker moments, his proposals for renegotiating Manhattan’s relationship with New Jersey included filling in the tunnels and blowing up the George Washington Bridge before pointing big guns west, just in case those left on the other side got any ideas. Admittedly, somewhere else to dump bodies would have to be found, but into every life a little rain had to fall.

There was no camera embedded in the intercom panel beside the main door to the building, and no names beside the buzzers. He pressed the number that he’d been given, a woman’s voice asked his name, and he gave it, or he gave a name. In this business, nobody really expected anybody to use their real names – not the middlemen, not the johns, and certainly not the girls. His personal experience of such matters was limited, but through choice and orientation rather than any naïveté about the ways of the world.

He was buzzed in and took the stairs to the apartment, avoiding the elevator. Lights came on as he walked, a vague concession to eco-consciousness in a building so poorly constructed that he could almost see the signals changing outside through the joins in the walls. Most of the apartments he passed were silent. An earlier check of the building’s records had revealed an occupancy rate of about sixty percent, and there were already signs of wear and neglect on the carpets and fittings.

The apartment he sought was at the end of the corridor. He knocked at the door, watched the spy hole darken, and was admitted. The woman wore a red sweater dress over a pair of dark-blue jeans. Her feet were bare, and she smelled of cigarettes. Her hair was platinum with red streaks, as though she’d recently suffered a head injury and hadn’t got herself together enough to wash out the blood. He figured her for mid-thirties, aged by a hard life. That was the way of her business. It had worn her out, and now she had either moved up the ranks to active pimping or had taken the maid’s role for a cut of the money.

‘Hi, honey,’ she said. ‘Just through here.’

To the left was a bathroom and a closed door, but she showed him into a living area to the right. There were two more doors off the living room – one open, one closed. The first one led into a narrow kitchen. There was a pack of tortilla chips on the counter, and a half-eaten sandwich alongside a glass stained with milk. The other door was closed, but he thought that he could hear another television playing faintly behind it.

‘Are you a member of the law-enforcement community?’ she said.

‘No, I am not.’

‘I have to ask,’ she said.

‘I know how it works.’

It was a myth that an undercover cop had to identify himself as such if asked, especially as anyone with half a brain could see that such a requirement might deliver a fatal blow to the whole concept of undercover operations, but he was surprised by how many in the woman’s line of work still considered it a myth worth believing. Technically, a lawyer might argue entrapment, but equally the definition of ‘entrapment’ was somewhat nebulous, particularly in a situation like this, where the intention to commit a crime was obvious from the start. It was all moot in the end. Most criminals were dumb, and he took the view that the whole science of criminology was essentially flawed, since much of its theory was based on the study of criminals who had been caught, and were therefore either stupid or unlucky, as opposed to the study of those who had not been caught, and were therefore smart and had a little luck on their side, but just a little. Luck ran out, but smart was for life.

He produced an envelope from his coat pocket and laid it on the table, just as he had been instructed to do when he made the original call. The woman glanced inside, gave the bills a quick flick with her fingers, then placed the money in a drawer below the TV.

‘You mind if I frisk you?’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Why would you want to do that?’

‘There’s been trouble in the past – not for us, I assure you, but for others in the same business. They’ve had guys produce knives, ropes. We’re concerned about safety, yours as much as ours.’

He wasn’t quite sure that was the case, but he allowed her to pat him down inexpertly.

‘Thanks for being so understanding,’ she said. ‘You’re going to have a good time.’

‘Can I see the girl now?’

‘Sure. She’s right through here. You’ll like her. She’s just what you ordered.’

He followed the woman down the hall and past the bathroom to the closed door. She knocked and opened at the same time, revealing a pleasantly furnished bedroom with low lighting. There was another TV here, with a DVD symbol bouncing around the screen. The room was heavily scented, but not enough to fully mask the stale odor of sex.

The girl on the bed was wearing a baby-doll nightdress. Even her makeup couldn’t hide the fact that she wasn’t long past owning a baby doll as well. Twelve or thirteen, he thought. Dark roots showed in her blond hair.

‘This is Anya,’ said the woman. ‘Anya, say hello to Frederick.’

‘Hi,’ said Anya, and even in that one word he could hear her foreignness. One side of her mouth lifted, but nobody would have termed it a smile.

‘Hi,’ said the visitor, but he sounded doubtful.

‘Is there a problem?’ said the woman.

‘She’s not what I ordered after all,’ he said.

Immediately, the woman’s tone changed, but she tried to stay on the right side of polite. ‘We spoke on the phone,’ she said. ‘I took down the details myself. You asked for a blonde.’

‘She’s not blond. She dyes her hair. I can see her roots.’

Anya’s eyes moved from face to face, trying to follow the conversation. She could tell that the visitor was unhappy, but no more. She didn’t like it when they started out unhappy. It usually made what followed that much harder. She pulled her legs closer to her body and wrapped her arms around them. She rested her chin on her knees, which made her look younger still. There were rubbers on the nightstand beside her, and a box of tissues.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the woman, ‘but the agreement was made. Look, once the lights go down you won’t hardly notice the difference, and not where it matters.’ She grinned lasciviously. ‘Now, if you’d like to take a shower-’

‘I don’t want a shower,’ he said. ‘I want my money back.’

All pretense of courtesy disappeared from the woman. Her upper lip involuntarily curled into a feral snarl, like a dog giving a final warning before it bites.

‘That’s not going to happen. You paid for the hour. You can play Parcheesi with her if you like, or talk about how your day has been, or you can just take a walk right back out the door and go someplace else. The choice is yours, but the money stays here.’ She made one last effort at being conciliatory. ‘Look, honey, why argue and spoil a beautiful encounter? You’re going to have a good time.’

‘You told me that already.’

‘She’s a nice girl. You’ll like her.’

‘I don’t care if she’s Miss American Pie. She’s not what I ordered.’ He took out his cell phone. ‘Maybe I should call the police.’

The woman backed away from him. ‘Rudy!’ she shouted. ‘We have a problem.’

The closed door at the end of the hall opened, and he heard the TV more clearly. There was a hockey game on. He didn’t know who was playing. He took no interest in the sport. Only white people truly appreciated hockey, and that was because they didn’t know any better.

The man who emerged was wearing track pants, sneakers, and an oversized Yankees shirt. He was in his late twenties, and gym-toned. His dark hair was neatly cut. He looked like a college student on spring break, except for the Llama tucked into the front of his pants. It had pearl grips, and a chrome finish that caught the light.

Rudy sidled up the hall, pausing at the bathroom door. He hooked his right thumb into the band of his sweatpants, close to the butt of the gun, and leaned against the doorjamb. He looked bored. The visitor figured Rudy wasn’t very bright. A bright man would have been alert for danger. Rudy was too used to hustling underage girls and overweight johns. The visitor was neither.

‘What seems to be the trouble?’ said Rudy. His eyes swiveled lazily to the woman.

‘He says the girl isn’t what he ordered. He wants his money back.’

Rudy spat out a laugh and gave the visitor his full attention. ‘What do you think we are, man, Sears? We don’t do returns, and we don’t do refunds. Now, you can stay and have a good time with Anya or you can take a cab over to Hunts Point and see if they might have what you’re looking for. The cash stays here, though.’

‘I want my money.’

Rudy changed tack. ‘What money? I don’t see no money here. This money, did it have your name on it? The Federal Reserve, they make it out to you personally? I mean, I got money, but I don’t think it’s yours. You didn’t bring no money in here. You just came to visit, have a little fun. I don’t recall no money changing hands. Bro, money changing hands for pussy – that’s illegal. You ought to be careful what you say. Now, your time is ticking away. I was you, I’d go colorblind for the rest of the hour and just enjoy myself. So, what do you say?’

The visitor seemed to consider for a moment. ‘I still think I should call someone,’ he said. ‘This really isn’t very satisfactory at all.’ His finger hovered over the keys on the bulky black cell phone.

The woman moved farther away from him and stood behind Rudy.

‘Prick,’ she said. ‘You’re a jerk, you know that? Coming in here and wasting our time. You deserve to get your ass kicked.’

‘I’m warning you,’ said Rudy. ‘You need to put your phone away and get out of here right now.’

Rudy’s hand moved closer to the butt of the gun, but he still didn’t draw it. Maybe he wasn’t so inept after all, the visitor thought. The old axiom about never pulling a gun that you didn’t intend to use sprang to mind. Either Rudy was prepared to kill him, in which case his hesitancy was linked to his understanding of the finality of the act, or he wasn’t prepared to fire, in which case he was hesitating because he was afraid. The visitor believed that the latter was probably the case, although if it turned out to be the former then, well, he could deal with that as well.

‘You know what General Patton said about pearl-handled grips?’ said the visitor. ‘He said that only a New Orleans pimp would carry a pearl-handled gun. Guess he was wrong. Looks like shitty New York pimps carry them too.’

Now Rudy did reach for the gun, and the visitor shifted the cell phone in his hand. Two barbed darts shot from the tip, penetrating Rudy’s shirt and attaching themselves loosely to the skin on his chest as fifty thousand volts coursed through his body. Rudy fell to the floor, convulsing madly. The woman ran for the living room, screaming for help, while the visitor appropriated Rudy’s pimp gun for himself.

A second man appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, bigger than Rudy but dressed the same way. His hair was shaved tight, and he had blunt, Slavic features. Unlike Rudy, he was sufficiently alert to have a gun in his hand already, but not prepared enough to make himself a smaller target. The two shots from Rudy’s gun hit him in the chest. He held on to the frame of the door, then collapsed to his knees. He raised the gun again, and the third shot flung him back, his knees trapped beneath him, his body convulsing just as Rudy’s had, but this time to a different end.

The visitor kicked the dead man’s gun away and kept moving. The living room was empty, but he could hear the woman in the kitchen. He followed the sounds and found her searching in the silverware drawer. He kicked at the drawer, trying to slam it closed on her hand, but she was too fast. She came at him with the carving knife, but her arm was high, the blade raised to the level of her head, the tip arcing down. He stepped inside her reach and used his left forearm to force her hand against the wall while his right brought the gun down on the side of her head. He hit her twice and she slid to the floor, moaning. After checking that there was no one else in the apartment, he went back to the hallway and saw that Rudy had crawled into the bathroom. Carefully, the visitor approached the open door. Rudy had already removed the second.38 from under the sink when the visitor appeared in the doorway.

‘Don’t,’ said the visitor.

Rudy fired, but he was still shaky from the electric shock. The bullet took a chunk out of the plaster a foot to the right of the visitor’s body, and in response he emptied two shots from the Llama into Rudy, then tossed it aside. He entered the bedroom. The girl named Anya had crawled into a corner by the window, her hands on her ears.

‘Odensia,’ he said. ‘Bystro.’

The girl didn’t move. She was trembling hard and stared at him without blinking, as though fearful that, in the instant her eyes closed, he would put an end to her. The visitor tried to remember the word for ‘friend,’ and managed to dredge something from his memory.

‘Drug,’ he said, then corrected himself: ‘Druz’ja.’

It seemed to have the desired effect. The girl stopped trembling, although she still looked frightened. He repeated his injunction to her to put some clothes on. The girl nodded and went to the closet, retrieving a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt decorated with a spangled cat. He watched her as she dressed, but she didn’t seem to mind. He figured that, after all that she’d been through, being semi-naked in front of a stranger was a minor inconvenience. She slipped on a pair of laceless sneakers. He indicated that she should go ahead of him, then followed her into the living room.

He thought that he heard a sound from the hall outside, a door opening and then quickly closing again. The gunfire had been unfortunate but not unexpected, and the visitor did not panic. He searched the apartment, finding two iPhones and a BlackBerry, as well as $4,000 in cash, not including his own $1,000. The woman had stopped moaning and had lapsed into unconsciousness. Her breathing was shallow, there was a blue tinge to her skin, and blood was flowing from one of her ears. He wasn’t sure that she’d live, which suited him just fine.

He took the girl’s hand and pulled her into the bathroom, forcing her to step over Rudy’s body. He could hear sirens approaching as he opened the window, revealing the fire escape. He made the girl go ahead of him, and stepped down after her. A Lexus pulled in at the curb, and he put the girl in the back before climbing into the passenger seat.

‘So how’d it go?’ said the driver. He was short and dark-haired, wearing old jeans and a worn leather jacket. He didn’t look like the kind of man who should be driving a Lexus, not unless he’d stolen it. His name was Angel.

‘Noisy. Messy,’ said his partner, both professionally and personally. His name was Louis, and he was dressed like an executive with one of those shadowy, discreet firms that handle other people’s money, and handle it well. His hair was cut close to his ebony skull, his skin almost entirely unlined. It would have been difficult to tell his age were it not for the gray beard that he had begun to cultivate, an unconnected goatee and mustache arrangement known in the trade as a ‘balbo’ but known to his partner as ‘that fucking growth on your face.’

‘Bad?’ said Angel.

‘Two down, one pending.’

‘You get hurt?’

‘No.’

Louis took out the phones and the BlackBerry, and checked the numbers and contacts.

‘Lot of good stuff here,’ he said. ‘Lot of names.’ He took a netbook from under the seat, powered it up, and began transferring the contact details from the devices to the computer.

‘You know,’ said Angel, ‘I gotta ask: Are we on a crusade?’

‘Unless you got a better word for it,’ said Louis. ‘Sometimes I wish you’d never introduced me to Charlie Parker. I suspect that he may have contaminated me with idealism.’

‘You think you’ve come a long way. I used to just steal stuff.’ Angel looked in the rearview mirror. The girl stared back at him. Her eyes were those of a shell-shocked soldier.

‘You okay, honey?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think she speaks much English,’ said Louis. He dredged up the remains of the little Russian that he knew. ‘Kharasho?’

The girl nodded.

‘Ty v bezopasnosta. Druz’ja.’

‘What did you say?’ asked Angel.

‘I told her she’s safe, and we’re friends. That’s all I got. Anything more, we’ll have to stop in Brighton Beach and get a waiter to translate.’

He felt pressure on his arm. The girl’s pale hand rested on his forearm.

‘Dina,’ she said. ‘No Anya. Dina.’

‘Dina,’ repeated Louis. He took her hand in his, and held it as they drove.

The shelter was in Canarsie, almost within sight of Jamaica Bay. When they were a block away, Angel made a call from one of the stolen cells. He told the woman who answered that they had a young girl with them who was the victim of sex traffickers, along with the phones used by those responsible. They killed the lights in the car, and pointed out the shelter to the girl. He handed her the phones, and the cash.

‘We’ll watch you, Dina’ said Louis. He touched two fingers to his eyes, then turned them to the girl, and toward the shelter. ‘Ja tvoj dryg.’

Angel opened the passenger door for her. The girl put one foot out of the car, then paused.

‘Ya nichevo ne videla,’ she said.

Louis raised his palms in frustration and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

The girl frowned, then spoke again, this time in English. ‘I see nothing,’ she said carefully, then left them. They marked her progress, watching for strangers on the street. A door opened as she approached the shelter, and a woman appeared. Gently, she laid a hand on Dina’s shoulder, and ushered her to safety.

Dina did not look back, and the gentlemen from New York drove away.

14

Dempsey and Ryan were sitting in a chain coffee joint at Boston’s Scollay Square. If there was a more sterile part of Boston than Scollay, then Dempsey hadn’t found it yet. Oh, there were places that were skankier and rougher, projects and wastelands and dumping grounds, but Scollay Square was in the heart of downtown, a series of unforgiving slabs that formed Government Center, dominated by City Hall and the JFK Federal Building. Scollay had once been the home of Boston’s elite way back in the eighteenth century. Bowfront houses and grand row houses followed in the nineteenth century, and then the immigrants arrived and the elite left, and Scollay became the center of commercial activity and entertainment in the city, the latter centered on the grand Howard Athenaeum, later known as the Old Howard. In the 1960s it was decided that old was bad, and ugly was good, and Scollay was earmarked for destruction. The existence of the Old Howard presented the only real obstacle to the plan, and a group of concerned citizens pressed for its renovation, a campaign rendered null and void when the Howard burned to the ground in 1961 for no cause that anyone could establish, although there were plenty of people prepared to take a guess. As Dempsey well knew, there was no shortage of guys in Boston who knew how to light a match. The destruction of old Scollay had subsequently given birth to the strip joints and porno theaters of Lower Washington, although the excesses of the Combat Zone were now largely the stuff of memory.

For now, though, Scollay Square was safe territory, so far as any such place could be found in their current situation, on the grounds that someone would have to be crazy to try to whack anyone within sight of City Hall and a building that was crammed with feds the way a newly filled salt cellar was crammed with salt. Dempsey didn’t know for sure if there was a price on all their heads, not yet, which was why the meeting had been arranged. His belief, which he had not expressed to Ryan but which he suspected the younger man shared, was that it was only a matter of time before final sentence was passed, if it had not been agreed already in their absence. The hit would have to be sanctioned; unsanctioned hits brought an immediate death sentence for those involved, or that was the theory. In reality, except in exceptional circumstances, the sentence tended to be passed solely on the man who had pulled the trigger, and not on the man who had told him where to point the gun. But if a decision had been made to put Tommy Morris in the ground, then the additional expense of a couple of bullets for the men who had remained loyal to him was unlikely to trouble those behind the hit. Like any good gambler, Dempsey just needed to clarify the extent of their exposure before he played his hand.

They lounged at the table with their coffees, watching the tourists and businesspeople pass by. One of the restaurants had dumped a pile of stale doughnuts and bagels outside for the birds to eat, and the seagulls fought the pigeons for a share of the spoils. Dempsey had ordered coffee for Ryan, who was now looking at his cup suspiciously.

‘What is this?’ he asked.

‘A latte.’

‘What’s in it?’

‘Coffee. It’s coffee. You asked for a coffee.’

‘Yeah, but a regular coffee.’

‘That is a regular coffee. They just add milk to it.’

‘I like to add my own milk.’

‘Just drink it. You need to broaden your horizons.’

Ryan sipped warily at the cup. ‘It tastes milky.’

‘I swear, I don’t care how many cops are around, I’ll leave you bleeding on the floor if you don’t shut up and drink your coffee.’

Ryan sulked. A fine rain was descending, so fine that you knew it was falling only because of the sheen on the ground, and the way everyone was wearing what Ryan called the ‘Boston rain face,’ a kind of grimace that spoke of deep dissatisfaction with God and the elements. Dempsey drank his coffee. At times like this he wished that he still smoked instead of just carrying around a pack of Camels as a reminder to himself of what he had to avoid, which he acknowledged was perverse. A cigarette took some of the tension away but left the edge.

On his lap was a copy of the Boston Phoenix. The gun lay inside, and he kept his right hand closed on it. Only when Joey Tuna appeared, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his overcoat, did Dempsey even begin to relax. Joey owned a fish market in Dorchester, which paid good; and he did a little business on the side involving drugs, guns, protection, whores, and loan sharking, which paid better; and he had connections up and down the Northeast. Joey’s uncle, who was younger than he was, which Dempsey could never quite figure out, and even better connected, which he could, was doing a dime stretch in Cedar Junction, except everyone of Joey’s generation still called it Walpole. For a meet like this, one involving a situation where trust was at a premium, Joey was the go-to guy, since it was understood that the only person who pulled out guns around Joey Tuna was Joey Tuna. Joey was a guarantee of safe conduct, but Dempsey was still wary, and didn’t like the idea of someone waiting until Joey was gone to try his hand at some other form of conduct. Better, then, to meet here, in a place that was safe, and public, and cop-heavy, as long as those self same law-enforcement officials didn’t look too hard through the tinted windows.

Joey’s real name was Joey Toomey, but most people who knew him called him Joey Tuna. He had another name, though, among the lowlifes, one that was never spoken aloud in his presence, and only whispered at other times.

They called him Joey Tombs.

Joey entered the coffee shop and pulled up a chair. He must have been closing in on seventy by now, but he looked good for it. His hair had gone white when he was in his thirties – behind his back, people joked that it happened when a customer asked for credit – giving him a prematurely distinguished air that had done nothing to harm his rise to his present position of authority. He had the natural bulk of one who had spent most of his life doing hard physical labor, and was still regarded by women of a certain age as a good-looking man, at least until he opened his mouth: Joey Tuna had never bothered having his teeth fixed, so his smile resembled a busted picket fence. Dempsey knew that he had a wife, although nobody had ever met her. Like her husband, she wasn’t one for unnecessary socializing.

‘Terrible weather,’ said Joey. All those years in Boston had barely left a mark on his accent, as though he had just got off the boat with a sack on his back. Dempsey was not the only one who sometimes struggled to understand what Joey was saying. ‘I can’t even see the rain and I’m soaked to the skin.’

Dempsey and Joey shook hands. Ryan received a nod for his troubles.

‘What can I get you, Mr. Toomey?’ said Ryan. He was always polite around the older men, Dempsey noted. Ryan was clever like that. Respectful. Had things worked out differently, he might have gone a long way.

‘You think they got tea here?’ said Joey. ‘I never come into these places. You could buy a share in a plantation for what they charge for a cup of coffee.’

‘They got tea, but you won’t like it,’ said Dempsey. ‘They use the water from the boiler. It won’t taste right. It’s never the right temperature for tea.’

Joey raised his eyes to heaven. He was out of his comfort zone here, which was just as Dempsey had intended. Joey Tuna liked restaurants where his name was known and the laminated menu hadn’t changed since V-J Day. Joey Tuna didn’t drink, he didn’t do drugs, and he didn’t frequent bars. He ate sandwiches six days a week at an untidy desk in an office that smelled of fish, and drank stewed tea from a battered metal pot warmed by a single electric ring. Joey Tuna was a traditionalist, a paid-up member of the old school, a patter of backs and a shaker of hands. Joey Tuna was a smiler of broken smiles, an honest broker for dishonest men, a recorder of old, dusty debts and unwise promises made in haste. Joey Tuna was a cold, merciless vacuum; there were fish on his slabs that held more warmth.

‘Coffee, then, coffee,’ said Joey. ‘Black with a bit of milk. None of that mocha shite, or whatever it is.’

Ryan got up to place in the order.

‘How you doin’, Joey?’ said Dempsey. His back was to the wall, and his right hand remained hidden beneath the paper.

‘I’m good. Arthritis is acting up, though. It’s the weather, and the time of year. I’ll be crucified like Christ on the cross from now until April.’

He took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. ‘Something wrong with your hand, Martin?’ he said.

‘Nothing at all, I’m pleased to say. It responds quickly to stimulus.’

‘We’d better hope that nobody breaks a cup.’

‘These are troubled times, Joey.’

‘Is there ever any other kind?’ Joey put his handkerchief away, but slowly, and he made sure that only the tips of his fingers entered his pocket. ‘You couldn’t have picked somewhere with more heat, could you? The feds won’t have far to take us if they come for us. They could just lock the door and leave us here.’

‘There’s a lot of bad blood. I figured it couldn’t hurt to have the law on my side.’

‘You don’t trust me?’

‘You I trust,’ said Dempsey, and he was careful not to let the taste of the lie show on his face. ‘It’s the others I’m less sure of, and I can’t hide under your coat for the rest of the day.’

Joey looked away. ‘It’s longer than that you’d need to be under there, the way things are going.’

‘Which is why we’re here. Tommy is concerned.’

‘And so he should be. So are we all.’

‘So what’s to be done?’

‘He should just walk away. I’ve told him that.’

‘He can’t afford to walk away. He wants to rebuild.’

‘It’s all gone, or as good as. They’ll bury him under the ruins of what’s left.’

‘Well, you see, Joey, he’s trying to figure out where it all went wrong. If he can do that, he thinks he can put things right.’

‘Poor investments. Bad luck. Could happen to anyone. Once it starts to go south, it goes fast. It’s like a boulder tumbling down a hill. When it’s big enough, and it builds enough momentum, it can’t be stopped. It rolls, and it crushes anyone caught in its path. I tried to tell him that, but he wouldn’t listen.’

‘Well, it seems to Tommy that people might actively have conspired to send that boulder his way. He thinks that he’s been set up for a fall.’

‘A bad workman blames his tools, Martin. You know that. He’s made mistakes, and now he’s looking for someone else to shoulder the responsibility. It’s understandable, but that doesn’t make it right. There are debts that have to be settled. Unless he wins the Mega Millions, he’s going to have to off-load his business interests in order to meet his obligations.’

‘They’re all he has, Joey. If he walks, he’s left with nothing.’

‘He has his life.’

‘For how long?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You know what it means.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Come on, Joey, you’re too old to play the virgin.’

Ryan arrived with the coffee.

‘Is there milk?’ said Joey.

‘You said you wanted it black.’

‘Black, then milk. I didn’t want them fucking around with it behind the counter, sprinkling shite on it.’

‘I’ll get you the jug,’ said Ryan.

‘Nah, you do it. Not too much. Just add a bit of color to its cheeks.’

Ryan looked at Dempsey. He had no idea what that meant.

‘Brown it,’ said Dempsey. ‘Like an Asian girl.’

Ryan moved off, even more bewildered than before.

‘Too old to play the virgin, eh?’ said Joey. ‘You have some mouth on you. You should have more respect.’ But he was grinning.

Ryan came back with the coffee. Joey looked at it, tried it, and nodded.

‘Good lad. Now go outside for a minute, will you? Take some air.’

‘It’s raining,’ said Ryan.

‘It’s good for the skin. Off you go.’

Ryan sighed and went outside with his coffee. He stood with his back to them, one hand holding his coffee, the other on the gun in the pocket of his black leather jacket. He had cut away the lining especially for that purpose, a trick Dempsey had taught him.

‘He’s all right,’ said Dempsey. ‘You could have let him stay.’

‘He’s young, and I’m not sure how much he knows or doesn’t know. He’s a listener too, and I don’t like people to listen unless I tell them to. It’s not for me to betray confidences. As for Tommy and his troubles, that’s where we stand on the matter. You don’t want to go overcomplicating it.’

‘Tommy is worried that it has already been complicated.’

‘You’re talking about the girl.’

‘That’s right. It’s out of order.’

‘The girl has nothing to do with this.’

‘We’re here because of the girl. Tommy wants to be sure that Oweny doesn’t have her.’

‘He doesn’t. I asked him. He doesn’t have her. He said so.’

‘With all due respect, that’s what he’d tell you.’

‘Careful now, Martin.’ Joey wagged a calloused finger at him. ‘I’ve always been very tolerant of you. You’re brighter than ten of the rest of them put together, but don’t think you can belittle me. I’m telling you now, Oweny doesn’t have the girl. If he did, you’d have known about it long before this. What would be the point in taking her and then not using her as leverage? Jesus, I don’t think he even knew about the girl until you mentioned her to me.’ Joey sipped his coffee. ‘That’s not a bad cup of coffee,’ he said. ‘I’m glad I’m not paying for it, but it’s not bad.’

The coffee seemed to make him relent somewhat or, as Dempsey suspected, it gave him an excuse to alter his approach, to adopt a different persona. Had the stakes not been so high, Dempsey might even have enjoyed watching the performance.

‘It’s terrible,’ said Joey. ‘A young girl being taken like that. What’s the world coming to, Martin?’

And then Joey switched masks again, and Dempsey felt any lingering respect that he had for the old operator fall away like so many scales from his eyes.

‘Who knows what’s being done to her, you know what I mean? There are deviants out there who’d think nothing of forcing themselves on a child, raping her and then leaving her to die in a ditch. If she was blood to me, I don’t know what I’d do. I suppose I’d do anything, anything at all, to try and help her.’

He placed his hands together, his thumbs meeting to form the sign of the cross, just as they did every Sunday when he knelt down to pray at eleven o’clock Mass at St. Francis de Sales, his head bowed and his eyes closed, as though God cared to hear the prayers of one such as he.

‘We know people up there, Martin. We have connections. If Tommy does the right thing, we can act on his behalf. We’ll have men out combing the bushes. We’ll put the screws on every pervert between here and Canada. We can help him, Martin, but only if he wants to help himself.’

And Dempsey wondered if they did, in fact, have the girl, and if this was all part of the game: Lure Tommy in when he’s weak, and then finish him off before letting the girl go. For they would let the girl go; even a blackened husk of a man like Joey Tuna wouldn’t want the death of a child on his soul.

‘I’ll be sure to let him know that,’ said Dempsey.

‘You do whatever you want. I’m here to help if I’m needed.’

‘Even if Oweny doesn’t have her,’ Dempsey continued, ‘Tommy wants him to back off. Oweny’s acting like Tommy’s already in the grave and left everything to him in his will.’

‘Tommy’s dying, Martin. He just doesn’t want to admit it. When you’re dying, the vultures start to circle.’

‘Oweny’s not circling, Joey. He’s pulling the meat from Tommy’s bones while he’s still alive. Tommy’s not just dying; Oweny’s killing him.’

‘There are other concerns here, Martin. You’ve said so yourself. You’re no virgin either. If Tommy’s desperate, then he’s vulnerable. He’s been around a long time. He can name a lot of names. He could hurt a lot of people. We had enough of that in the past.’

‘Tommy’s not like that, Joey. You know it. He’s sound.’

‘You ever been to federal prison, Martin?’

‘No.’

‘Well, if you had you’d know that half the guys in there are locked up because they trusted someone who they thought was sound. Everybody’s sound until it comes to the moment when they’re not, when their survival is at stake and they have to cut a deal to go on living. If I were Tommy, I’d be looking for a way out now. One way out is a stone’s throw from here.’ And he jerked a thumb at the nest of law enforcement behind his back.

‘I’d know, Joey. If he was thinking along those lines, I’d know.’

‘Don’t be a fool. You wouldn’t know until they came knocking on your door with a federal arrest warrant. Then you’d know, and it’d be too late to do anything about it. There are men in this town who have no intention of dying in prison, and I’m one of them. Don’t be thinking that you’re safe either. He’ll rat you out along with the rest of us. That’s how they work, those bastards. They want everything, every name that you can vomit up, every man and woman who ever did you a favor in your life. It’s all or nothing with them, all or nothing.’

‘Tommy’s not trying to cut a deal. I’m telling you that.’

‘Ah, you’re telling, you’re telling.’ Joey waved at him in dismissal. ‘You listen to me – the only telling you need to do is tell Tommy that he has to come in. We’ll arrange a sit-down. We’ll work things out. If he’s sound, like you say he’s sound, then he has nothing to worry about.’

Joey put a meaty paw on Dempsey’s wrist, holding it so tight that the tips of Dempsey’s fingers began to tingle. There were beads of spittle on Joey’s lips, and Dempsey could smell the lingering stench of fish that always hung around the man.

‘Do you understand me, Martin?’ said Joey, the stink of him all over Dempsey now, his skin burning as though he were allergic to this foul man. ‘You tell him to come in, or maybe you give me a call and let me know where we might be able to find him. That’s all you have to do. You’ll be looked after, and so will he. I promise you that. It will all be done the right way.’

They both knew what was being spoken of here. It was an act of betrayal, after which there would only be two choices left: Walk off to exile, or pretend that a life in Boston might still be possible, taking whatever work they put your way until they eventually decided to put a bullet in you, because you couldn’t trust a man who’d sell out his boss.

Dempsey pulled his hand away. He looked at his watch. Oweny’s representative was now fifteen minutes late. The arrangement was that Joey would come in first, and his presence during the meet would ensure that all exchanges remained civil, except Oweny’s man hadn’t shown yet. Outside, Ryan had finished his coffee and was dancing anxiously from foot to foot.

‘Oweny’s boy should be here,’ said Dempsey, but Joey had stood up and was now buttoning his coat.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Dempsey. ‘The sit-down hasn’t happened yet.’

‘Yes, it has,’ said Joey, and Dempsey felt the air leave his body as surely as if he’d been punched in the stomach. Oweny’s boy wasn’t coming. He had never been coming. Instead, Joey spoke for Oweny. Joey spoke for them all, every one of them, every man who wasn’t Tommy Morris and wasn’t linked to Tommy Morris, every man who wanted Tommy silenced with a bullet through the back of the head, the smell of the lime that would be used on his body burning his eyes, and a hammer close by to knock his teeth out when it was done. Sentence had been passed. All that remained was its execution.

‘The girl?’ said Dempsey. ‘Tell me the truth. He wants to know. You said Oweny didn’t have her. But do you have her? Is she leverage in this?’

But Joey was already somewhere else in his mind. His body just hadn’t arrived there yet.

‘You tell him to come in, Martin. Don’t make us go looking for him. I like you. I like the boy outside. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to either of you. So talk to Tommy. Make him see sense. You’re a smart man. You’ll find the right words. Take care, now.’

He left the coffee shop, patting Ryan on the back as he went. Ryan watched him go, then turned to stare at Dempsey, his mouth agape, one hand raised in a ‘WTF?’ gesture, the other still holding on to the gun in his pocket.

Good lad, thought Dempsey. Keep a hold on that gun. He was thankful now that he had arranged the aborted meet for here and not for somewhere in Dorchester or Charlestown, as Joey had first suggested. If he’d agreed to that, he’d be on a warehouse floor by now and someone would be hammering nails into his hands and his feet to make him talk.

He walked to the door, the newspaper held awkwardly over the gun. There was a woman coming in and he slipped by her, jostling her as he went. She said something, but he didn’t hear her. He was concentrating on the world outside, on the plaza that suddenly seemed more empty than before, on the faces that suddenly seemed more knowing, more threatening. In the time since he had stepped into the coffee shop, his realm of existence had become a desolate, merciless place.

He told Ryan to get moving, and together they floated out into this hostile universe.

15

Aimee was forced to cancel our morning meeting owing to an incident of domestic violence that left a fifty-year-old man with a broken arm, a fractured skull, and a collection of busted ribs. His assailant was his forty-three-year-old wife, who weighed barely ninety pounds fully clothed and soaking wet, and was so soft-spoken that only bats could hear her. Apparently her husband had been beating on her for the first nineteen years of their marriage, and so she had decided to mark the start of their twentieth year together by encouraging him to turn over a new leaf through the judicious application of a lump hammer while he was sleeping off a drunk. A women’s refuge for which Aimee provided pro bono services called her in to speak to the woman, so Aimee had postponed our discussion until the afternoon.

There was only a scattering of worshippers at the eight a.m. Mass at St. Maximillian Kolbe in Scarborough when I arrived. I slipped into a pew at the back, and kept my head down throughout. I didn’t go to church so much anymore; I went when I needed consolation, or just a space in which to breathe for a time. I found a peace there, the peace that comes from distancing oneself from the mundane, if only for a little while, and embracing the possibility of a peace beyond this world. I could never tell when the urge to seek out that space would strike me, but it came to me that morning after Aimee postponed our meeting, and I did not fight it.

Louis had once asked me if I believed in God after all that I had seen and all I had gone through, most particularly the loss of Susan and Jennifer. I gave him three answers, which was probably at least two more than he had been expecting. I told him that I found it easier to believe in God than not to believe, for if I believed in nothing then the deaths of Susan and Jennifer were pointless and without reason, and I preferred to hope that their loss was part of a pattern I did not yet understand. I told him that the God in whom I believed sometimes looked away. He was a distractible God, a God overwhelmed by our demands, and we were so very, very small, and there were so very, very many of us. I told him that I understood how that could be the case. My God was like a parent always trying to watch out for His children, but you couldn’t always be there for your children, no matter how hard you tried. I had not been there for Jennifer when she most needed me, and I refused to blame my God for that.

And I told him that I believed in God because I had seen His opposite. I had seen all that He was not, and been touched by it, and so I could no more deny the possibility of an ultimate goodness to set against such depravity than I could deny that daylight followed darkness, and night the day.

All this I told him, and he was silent afterward.

When Mass was over, I drove out to the Palace Diner in Biddeford and ate breakfast. Some might have felt that it was a ways to go for breakfast, but those people hadn’t eaten in the Palace. I lingered over coffee, and read the newspaper, and just as I was relaxed and ready to face the day my phone beeped to indicate that I had a new message. I read it, saved it, and felt my good humor vanish.

I returned home and began working my way through Randall Haight’s list of names, using distinguishing information to trace their movements over the years in case any had been employed in a capacity that might have brought them into contact with prisons, and cross-referencing names and addresses against prison records in an effort to establish if anyone in Pastor’s Bay had either served time in North Dakota, Vermont, or New Hampshire, or had close relatives who had served time in those states. I drew a blank on them all, but it was only the first stage in what might prove to be a long, drawn-out process of picking apart the weave of dozens of potentially interconnected lives.

I drove to South Freeport shortly after one, and parked in the lot beside Aimee’s building. There were no ravens in the trees today. They were elsewhere, and that was fine with me. In the past, I had seen great black ravens squatting on the walls of the old prison at Thomaston, and they had seemed at once both monstrous birds and more, entities that mutated as I watched them, emissaries from a world more tainted than this one. That image had never left me, and now when I saw such birds I wondered at their true nature, and their true purpose.

I smelled coffee brewing when I stepped into the office, and Aimee’s voice called a greeting from the little kitchen beside reception. Seconds later, she appeared carrying a pot on a tray, along with a pair of chicken wraps and two purple asters in a vase.

‘Very domesticated,’ I said. ‘He might marry you after all.’

‘Your fascination with my marital arrangements never ceases to amaze me,’ she said. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect you were jealous and wanted to take his place.’

‘I’m just thinking about the free legal aid.’

‘Thanks. If you keep getting picked up for asking awkward questions, you’ll need to drive around with permanent counsel in the passenger seat of that man toy you drive.’

‘It’s just a car.’

‘A Camry is just a car. That’s a midlife crisis on wheels.’

I took a seat at her desk. She poured the coffee, I took a wrap, and we began.

‘So, where are we?’ she said.

‘We’re nowhere.’

I told her about my conversation with Randall Haight, my encounter with Allan, and my subsequent dealings with Gordon Walsh. I didn’t tell her that he had used my daughter’s murder to prick my conscience, or about the blowup that followed. I told myself that it wasn’t relevant, which was only partly true. Then I showed her the latest envelope that had been sent to Haight. Her face betrayed no feelings as she examined the photographs. Neither did she comment on the short film of the clothes laid out in the barn, but merely watched it in silence. When it was over, she said only, ‘It’s escalating.’

‘Yes.’

‘You had those pictures with you when the cops took you in?’

‘They were in the trunk.’

‘You’re lucky they didn’t search your car. You could have been in a whole lot of trouble. I’ll keep them here for now, and mark them as case evidence.’ She put the envelope in a plastic bag, sealed it, and placed it in her safe.

‘What else?’ she said.

‘I’ve begun trawling the list of names Haight gave me in the hope of establishing a connection, but there’s nothing so far. Unless I can come up with a smoking gun pretty quickly, we’re looking at a fingertip search through personal lives that could take weeks or months. But if it turns out that Haight’s problem is linked to the abduction of Anna Kore-’

‘Assuming it is an abduction,’ Aimee interrupted. ‘Kids that age do run away, you know.’

‘I don’t get the impression that she was the kind,’ I replied. ‘I didn’t get that vibe from Walsh either. They’re worried. Let’s accept that she’s been taken against her will.’

‘Agreed. Reluctantly.’

‘Then our problem remains this: We still have no way of knowing, as yet, if Haight’s difficulties are connected to her disappearance.’

‘And that’s a big leap anyway.’

‘Look, I’ll be straight with you. My conversation with Walsh pricked my conscience. It wasn’t pleasant, and we exchanged some harsh words, but he was right and I was wrong. I’m not sure that we’re entitled to make the call on whether Haight’s problem is material to the investigation into Anna Kore. Personally, I still don’t like the aspect of coincidence here. One girl disappears, and a man jailed for the killing of another girl of roughly the same age finds himself the target of threats from an unknown source. Because these are threats: threats of revelation, threats of blackmail, maybe even threats of physical harm at some point in the future.

‘Leaving that aside, we have a duty to tell the police what we know. We’re withholding evidence that may be linked to the commission of a crime. Now, I accept that legally it’s a gray area, and it’s unlikely that either of us would end up behind bars for it, but I don’t want a murdered girl on my conscience, and neither do you.’

Aimee finished one half of her wrap and started on the other. I had taken only a bite or two of mine, but then I was careful about speaking with my mouth full. Aimee had no such concerns. She had once told me that one of the problems with being a lawyer was that there was either too much to say and too little time in which to say it, or too little to say and too much time to fill.

‘I spoke to Haight again an hour ago,’ she said, still chewing.

‘And?’

‘He has suggested a compromise.’

‘Which is?’

‘Through me, he hands over all the material that he’s been sent so far to the police for examination, but I don’t reveal the source.’

I thought about it. ‘They won’t go for it. For one thing, you’ll have to explain the relevance of the photographs and the disc. Once you do that, they’ll want to interview him, and he’ll be on their suspect list, and as we know, he doesn’t have an alibi for the period during which Anna went missing. Even if, by some miracle, it was agreed that he wasn’t a suspect, he’d still have to come forward to be fingerprinted and give DNA samples in order to exclude him from any evidence found on the envelopes or the photographs.’

‘I didn’t think it would work either,’ she said. ‘He knows that his options are growing more and more limited, but I don’t believe he’ll break until he’s trapped in a corner. You’re serious about going to the cops if he doesn’t come around?’

‘I don’t want to ruin a man’s life, but part of me feels that the consequences of approaching the cops might not be as terrible as he thinks.’

‘No?’ She sounded skeptical.

‘They’ll be bad, but people have survived worse.’

‘He’ll need protection,’ she said.

‘I’ve thought about that. We can put the Fulcis on the house.’

Some of the blood ran from Aimee’s face.

‘You’re not serious. They’re-’ She tried to find the right word, but the choices were overwhelming. In the end, she settled for ‘insane.’

‘They’re not insane,’ I said. ‘They’re medicated. The medication keeps them borderline sane. Now, if they weren’t taking their medication then I might accept your diagnosis, but, with respect, you’re not a member of the medical profession. I’m not sure you should be tossing words like “insane” around, especially where the Fulcis are concerned. They’re very sensitive men. They’re also very big, sensitive men.’

‘Is it true that one of them attacked a judge with his gavel?’

‘No.’

‘Thank God.’

‘It was an attorney. Their attorney. But that was a long time ago, when they were young and foolish. And he wasn’t a very good attorney anyway, otherwise he wouldn’t have been hit with a gavel. Look, they may not be smart, but they’ll dissuade any morons with a couple of drinks under their belts who might have decided that Haight needs some harsh justice. He can probably do a lot of his work from home if we have to keep him contained. He may even decide that he wants to leave town for a while. If so, we can find a place for him to stay. It doesn’t have to be a motel room. We can put him somewhere pretty nice. I don’t think Mr. Haight would want to be without a degree of comfort.’

‘We seem to have decided that he’s coming forward, though he continues to maintain that he won’t.’

‘It’s just a matter of time. Even if Anna Kore turns up safe and well, it won’t solve Haight’s problem. I tried to explain some of this to him yesterday, but he’s a strange man, and a selfish one too.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘His only concern is the continuation of his existence as Randall Haight. The fact that a young girl may be in danger doesn’t seem to cross his mind.’

‘Not everyone is as self-sacrificing as you.’

‘Spare me the sarcasm.’

‘I wasn’t being sarcastic,’ she said. She gave it a couple of seconds, then continued. ‘Are you having problems dealing with our client? You don’t have to like him, but you do have to be able to handle him without letting your dislike for him show.’

‘I can handle him, and I can conceal any negative feelings I may have about him,’ I said. ‘But you need to be clear on the extent of his self-interest, and the only way we can get him to act as we want him to is by making it appear that his actions serve his own ends. If we’re to make him come forward, then perhaps he needs to understand that if something bad happens to the girl, and it turns into a murder investigation, there’s a good chance the cops will find out who he is and what he did, and the rest of it will come out as well. If there is a connection between the two cases, the best – the very best – that he can hope for is to be known as the man who let a girl die when he might have been able to provide evidence that could have saved her. He could also end up in prison, and I don’t think that would suit him. He’ll do hard time as a convicted child killer linked to another child killing. He won’t survive a year.’

She nodded. ‘I told him we were meeting, and that I’d call him when we were done. The threat of being returned to jail, unlikely as it might be, could be enough to persuade him to talk to the police. It’s probably the only thing he fears more than the revelation of his past. Is there anything else I should know?’

‘Kind of. You should know, but I don’t think it’ll make you any happier. The situation is more difficult than it first seemed.’

‘I find that hard to believe.’

‘Two things: The first is that while I was languishing in a broom closet in Pastor’s Bay I saw a fed named Robert Engel lurking in the background.’

‘So? The state police have asked for FBI assistance. It’s not unusual in cases like this.’

‘Child abductions are not Engel’s bag. He deals with organized crime: Italians, Russians, Irish. That’s not to say that any of them are above kidnapping, but what would criminals be doing taking a girl from Pastor’s Bay, Maine?’

‘What do we know about Anna Kore’s family?’

‘Not much, but I intend to find out more.’

‘And the second thing?’

I showed her my cell phone with the anonymous text message about Chief Allan.

‘Shit,’ said Aimee. ‘Pastor’s Bay is a regular nest of vipers. Hasn’t anybody told them that gossiping is bad for the soul? So what’s Chief Allan lying about, if anything at all?’

‘For that you need to see the second message. It came through while I was finishing my breakfast.’

I handed her the phone. There were ten words to the message:

CHIEF ALLAN IS A PEDOFILE.

HE PRAYS ON YOUNG GIRLS.

‘God,’ said Aimee. She pushed the phone away as if it were infected. I could see her running the numbers in her head, sizing up the angles. I had done the same earlier, and none of the results had pleased me.

‘It could just be a local with a grudge,’ I said. ‘He’s a small-town police chief, so you can be sure that he’s managed to cross a couple of people in his time. He tickets the wrong guy, makes someone put down a dog that bit when it shouldn’t have, didn’t let a possession bust slide. It doesn’t take much.’

‘But if it’s true? My God, a fourteen-year-old girl has gone missing from his jurisdiction. If he’s involved, he’s manipulating an investigation of which he may be the focus.’

‘We’re getting ahead of ourselves,’ I told her. ‘But I want help, and not Fulci help. I need to be able to track Allan, but he knows me, and when Haight presents himself to the police I’m going to be as popular with the cops as blackflies at a wedding, at least for a little while. I’m also worried about Engel. He deals with some seriously unpleasant people, and if there’s a mob angle to this we’ll have to move carefully, for our sakes and Haight’s.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘It’s already under way. I’ve asked some friends to come up from New York. They’ll be here tomorrow.’

Aimee knew to whom I was referring. She had heard the stories.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’ll be very curious to meet these friends.’

I spoke to Haight shortly after Aimee concluded her second conversation of the day with him. He sounded dazed, and less certain of the wisdom of keeping silent about what was happening to him, and I knew that soon we’d be facing the police in an interview room. Haight might not have realized it yet, but it was probably the best move he could make under the circumstances. The only part of our exchange that seemed to throw him was my final question.

‘Mr. Haight, in the course of your work have you ever had dealings with criminal enterprises?’

‘What do you mean by that?’ he said. ‘What are you implying?’

‘I’m not implying anything. All I’m asking is if, either knowingly or unknowingly, you might have come into contact with businesses that could have organized-crime connections? I’m talking about strip joints, gambling clubs, loan sharks, or even seemingly legitimate operations that weren’t quite so legitimate when their books were examined?’

‘No,’ he said, and he sounded definite about it. ‘I deal with small businesses for the most part, and none of them have ever given me any real cause to be concerned. They also know better than to ask me to collude in any illegal activities.’

‘That’s fine, Mr. Haight,’ I told him. ‘I just wanted to be sure.’

‘I like my work,’ he said. ‘Some people might find it dull, but I don’t. I like its sense of order. I don’t want to lose my job, Mr. Parker. I don’t want to lose my clients, and my friends. I don’t want to lose this life.’

‘I understand.’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘You think you do, but you don’t understand at all.’

And he hung up the phone.

16

Joseph Anthony Toomey, or Joey Tuna as he was known to his customers at the Dorchester Central Fish Market, a name that implied Dorchester was coming down with fish markets as if they were going out of fashion, sat in his office calculating the day’s takings and planning his orders for the week to come. Around him, the market was quiet. The day’s work was done by seven p.m., and in reality there was little cause for Joey to be there after hours, but he enjoyed the silence of the old building, broken only by the low hum of the refrigerators and the dripping of water. Each part of the day had its own rhythm, its own cadence, and after so many years of working the market Joey’s own body was now attuned to the cycles of his business. It was why he knew that he would never be able to retire: He was connected to this place as surely as if an umbilical cord joined him to it. Without it, he would fade away and die. He loved the market, loved the feel of it, the sound of it, the smell of it. He carried it with him in his heart, his thoughts, and on his clothes and his skin. His wife, his beloved Eileen, liked to joke that there were creatures living in the sea who smelled less strongly of salt and fish than her Joey. And what of it if he did? It was where we had all come from to begin with, and we could still taste it in our sweat. The sea had given life to Joey, and continued to support him. He tried never to be far from it, and had always lived within earshot of the sound of breaking waves.

Still, he was always on site with the first of the workers, the processing crew that came in at six a.m. to commence the cutting of the fish, mostly haddock, tuna and swordfish. Throughout the day Joey’s was generally an unobtrusive presence, for he trusted his employees to do whatever was necessary to ensure the smooth running of the operation; after all, most of them had been with him for many years, and by now he was convinced that even the gentlest involvement by their employer was largely an inconvenience to them. They each had their own areas of responsibility, they worked well together, and when Joey stuck his nose in he only managed to confuse everyone. It was better if he simply ensured that they had fish to sell every morning, a safe in which to put the money every evening, and enough cash left at the end of the week to pay everybody’s wages.

So he would make a cursory check at 7:45 a.m. before walking the floor with a mug of tea in his hand, shooting the breeze with his customers, checking that they were happy, enquiring after the well-being of their businesses and the health of their families, offering help where it might be needed, and carefully recording each acceptance of such favors in his mental ledger of debtors and creditors, for not every debt could be counted in dollars and cents. Joey knew the name of every significant man and woman who crossed the threshold of the Dorchester Central Fish Market, and the names of many of the less significant ones as well. He could judge minute changes in the state of a restaurant’s finances by the pattern of its orders, and he was careful to monitor any signs of fragility, both to guarantee that, in the worst event of a closure, his bills would not be among those left unpaid, and because troubles for some represented good fortune for others. Loans could be advanced, agreements signed, portions of businesses acquired for next to nothing, and once Joey or his associates had a seat at the table they would feed and feed and feed. To those who were vulnerable, or who knew no better, Joey Tuna’s offers of a helping hand were potentially cancerous in their malignity.

After the delivery trucks went out to the restaurants, Joey would often disappear for a few hours to take care of matters unrelated to the purchase and sale of seafood, then come back in the late afternoon to balance the books, count the cash, and deal with any minor problems that might have arisen during the day. Recently, these were increasingly related to extensions of credit, and bills that were past due but were different in nature from those that might lead to Joey and his kind taking an interest in the business. They were, for now, temporary setbacks being endured by those who had been on Joey’s books for decades, men who were wise to Joey’s ways but knew him also as a fair trader, a man who kept his word and didn’t gouge honest men. True, there was a side to Joey that should be avoided, but he was by no means unique in this, and some of his customers were at least as hard as he was. Joey didn’t cheat. He didn’t mix frozen lobster meat in with the fresh. He didn’t soak his scallops overnight, knowing that they would absorb their own weight in water, transforming one pound into two; and you could do the same with haddock too, although they didn’t absorb as much. If he was forced to freeze fish, he froze only the oilier kinds – tuna, sword, salmon – but he would tell the buyer that it had been frozen, and therefore wouldn’t taste as good, even as he priced it lighter. With Joey Tuna, you knew what you were getting.

The recession was bad for everyone, and Joey sympathized, but if he let his sympathies get in the way of common sense he’d be on the United Way list, he and the men and women who worked for him. It was all a question of balance. Joey had his competitors, just like anyone else, and they’d be happy to take disgruntled customers off his hands. In this city, the jungle drums beat all the time; an hour after someone mentioned that he was unhappy about the price per pound, you could be damn sure there would be a phone call, and the offer of a better rate. Joey himself wasn’t above hustling, so why should anyone else be? He didn’t like losing customers, though, and three times since the summer he’d been forced to offer gentle discouragement to a couple of restaurateurs who’d been tempted to take their business elsewhere, the threat made more palatable by some temporary sweeteners.

Hard times for honest men, and some dishonest ones too.

That evening, only the desk light burned in Joey’s office. The pot of tea on the electric ring had brewed to a rich yellow-brown, and tasted as strong as sucking on the leaves themselves, but Joey didn’t care. A mug of it sat at his right hand, and it was warming his bones. Joey didn’t touch alcohol. He wasn’t a prude about it, and he didn’t mind others doing it, but he’d seen the damage it had inflicted on friends and family, and had decided that it wasn’t for him. He had learned from the mistakes of the Winter Hill Gang, whose members he had watched succumb to some of the very vices they had encouraged in others. He also understood his own nature: He suspected that he had an addictive personality, and was afraid that if he started boozing, or gambling, or whoring he might never stop. So he drank tea, and ignored the horses, and remained faithful to his wife, and anyone who judged him by appearances only, and heard him joke about his fear of addiction, might wonder whether such a man, so self-aware, so mindful of his flaws, really had any reason to be concerned that, once he began to engage in a certain act, he might doubt his inability to pull back from it.

But such an individual would not have seen Joey’s fists at work, because Joey Tuna liked to work with his hands. Once Joey started pounding on someone he didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, because his world would go black and there would be only the rhythm of flesh on flesh, over and over, methodical yet unreasoning, expelling the life from the body punch by punch. And when at last the light began to pierce the murk – a red beam, like a shepherd’s warning dawn – and he saw the work that his hands had wrought, his body aching, the muscles in his stomach and back on the verge of tearing, the meat that was left behind gave him no more pause for thought than a gutted fish or a headless shrimp.

That was why Joey Tuna now left the beatings to others, although he tried to ensure that they were doled out only when absolutely necessary. Punishments of a more final kind were also strictly controlled; more than ever before, probably, now that Whitey had gone to ground. The necessity for them was less frequent, of course, and such acts less advisable even as a last resort. Oh, there were still young hotheads who thought nothing of waving a piece in someone’s face, who liked the feel of a gun in their waistband; the big men on the block who wanted to ‘make their bones,’ as the greasers would say, by putting one behind some poor bastard’s ear. But most young men like that didn’t live to be old, and a lot of those who survived would grow old with their permanent, limited view interrupted by the vertical lines of prison bars. Joey himself had done time when he was a young hothead and didn’t know any better, but the years inside had cooled him down some, and when he came out he was a different man. He was that rare breed: a man who learned from his mistakes, and didn’t repeat them. Rarer still, he was a criminal who thought that way. He had that in common with Tommy Morris, his protégé, along with the fact that they were both full Irish, a heritage that had marked them as outsiders for so long. In the Boston criminal circles through which they had moved, mongrels were the norm.

Usually Joey enjoyed these moments in the silence of his office. He took pleasure in making the accounts balance, in knowing that his business was running efficiently and profitably. He craved order. He always had, even as a boy. He was neat, and he never lost anything. Everything in its place, and a place for everything. Tonight, though, he was distracted. This Tommy Morris thing was giving him a hernia, but he should have expected that Tommy wouldn’t just lie down and die.

He still struggled to pinpoint exactly when Tommy had begun to lose control of his operations, and why, but once the rot set in there were too many who were prepared to exploit his weakness, and Joey had tacitly, and then actively, encouraged them to do so. There was no room for sentimentality in business, but Joey wished that his relationship with Tommy hadn’t come to such an end. He had a soft spot for Tommy, always had, but Joey had backed his horse now, and the race was running. Oweny Farrell would win it in the end, for it had been rigged from the off, but Tommy needed to be removed quickly at the risk of leaving the track littered with dead riders. They might even have had Tommy by now if it wasn’t for Martin Dempsey. He was a cool one, make no mistake. Joey would almost be sorry to see him dead too.

But Tommy Morris. What to do about Tommy Morris?

And, as if he had summoned him from the darkness, Tommy answered.

‘How are you, Joey?’

Joey looked up from his papers. There was a storage room to his left. He kept his records in there, along with reams of computer paper, and fresh stationery, and anything else that he didn’t want tainted by damp or the smell of the floor below. The door was always open, because his employees knew better than to be in there without his permission, and it was only the door to the office itself that he locked. Now Tommy Morris emerged from the storage room, what little hair he had left cut short, his face unshaved, his paunch lapping at his belt like a pale tongue, peeping out from beneath the fabric of his golf shirt, hairy and somehow obscene. He was wearing a pair of blue overalls from the fish market, open to his crotch. He must have been in there for the best part of an hour, waiting patiently until the market was quiet, until just the two of them were left.

‘Tommy,’ said Joey. ‘You scared the life out of me. What are you doing hanging around in closets. You turning queer on me, Tommy? You a Mary?’

He smiled at his own joke, and Tommy smiled back. He seemed to have more wrinkles than before, and the beard that was coming in was entirely gray. Failure will do that to a man, thought Joey: failure, and the knowledge of the imminence of his own mortality.

Except Tommy wasn’t alone in feeling the Reaper’s breath. In his right hand he held a pistol. The suppressor made it appear both sleeker and uglier than it already was. Not that he’d need it, not really. There was nobody to hear the gun, and the glass and walls were thick. But it was like Tommy to take care of the little details and fail to take account of the bigger picture. It was why he was broke, and running, and why he had only Ryan and Dempsey left at his side.

‘You know me better than that, Joey. I always had an eye for the girls.’

That was true. Tommy was never without a couple of women on the go at the same time. Joey had had the devil of a time finding the girls in his current stable in the hope that he might catch Tommy with his pants around his ankles.

‘You should have settled down like me,’ said Joey. ‘If you do it right, it removes the need for all that kind of nonsense, or most of it. Why don’t you pull up a chair and take the weight off your soles?’

Tommy stayed where he was. The gun hadn’t moved. It was still pointed at Joey, who was unarmed. There was no gun in his desk drawer. He had no call to have one. He was Joey Tuna, the go-between. When he had to be, he was Joey Tombs, the dispenser of justice, but it was justice that had been agreed upon beforehand, settled upon by wise heads. It was always the right thing to do.

‘This place hasn’t changed,’ said Tommy. ‘I think those may even be the same papers on your desk.’

‘There’s no cause to change what has always worked, Tommy. I make money. Until the downturn, we were even growing a little every year. We do things right here. We dot the i’s and cross the t’s. We’re so clean, the IRS is sure that we’re dirty. It was like that when I took over the business from my uncle, and God willing it will stay like that when I’m gone.’

He didn’t flinch as he spoke those words. He wasn’t going to give Tommy the satisfaction. Anyway, it wasn’t over yet. He might still talk the younger man around.

‘You remember when I gave you your first job here?’ he said.

‘I remember,’ said Tommy. ‘Cleaning up guts and scales and slime. I hated the smell of it. I could never get it off my hands.’

‘Clean work always smells dirty,’ said Joey. ‘Honest work.’

‘Sometimes dirty work smells dirty too. It smells of blood and shit. It smells like this place. I think you’ve been here so long that you’ve become confused. You can’t tell the difference anymore.’

Joey looked affronted. ‘You know, you were always a lazy bastard. You didn’t like hard work.’

‘I had no problem with hard work, Joey. My old man worked the piers, and my mother cleaned office floors. They taught me the value of honest labor. It was you who dangled the soft option in front of me, the promise of easier money.’

‘So you’re blaming me for what you’ve become? There’s a coward talking, if ever I heard one.’

‘No, I’m not blaming you. It wouldn’t have mattered who suggested it to me first, I’d still have turned. I was a kid. Stealing from trucks, breaking into warehouses – that was all second nature to me. Still, you opened the door. You showed me the way. I was always going to fall, but you were the one who gave me the push.’

Joey reddened. He licked at his lips, and the fighter in him was revealed. Under other circumstances, he would have been rolling up his shirt sleeves by now and balling his meaty fists.

‘I looked out for you too,’ he said. ‘Don’t you forget that. When you overstepped the line, when you got above yourself, I stopped them from hurting you. There were men who wanted to break a hand, a leg. That bastard Brogan wanted to blind you for dealing on the side, but I spoke up for you. I told them you were ambitious, that you could make something of yourself with the right guidance. You got off lightly: a bit of a beating, when it could have been much worse. And when they were done, I gave you the space to work. It was the making of you. I was the making of you. When Whitey thought you were a threat, I talked him down. You’d be rotting under Tenean Beach or in a shallow grave by the Neponset River if it wasn’t for me. I told him you were sound. I told them all that you were sound. I gave them my word on it, and no more could a man ask for than the word of Joey Tuna. It was always sound. You judge a man by his soundness, Tommy. You know that.’

‘And are you looking out for me now, Joey? Do you have my best interests at heart.’

‘You’re in trouble. You’re vulnerable. It’s when a man is vulnerable that temptation comes knocking. There are people who want to know that you’re sound, that’s all. A sound man has nothing to fear. So they came to me. They always come to Joey Tuna. I bear no grudge and no man bears a grudge against me. Both sides can always sit down in safety when Joey Tuna is involved. It’s been that way for forty years.’

‘Like you said, why change what’s always worked, right?’

‘That’s right. Never a truer word spoken.’

‘So why change now? I don’t see a neutral man here.’

‘I have everyone’s best interests at heart, Tommy. All we wanted to do was talk with you, clear the air.’

‘Is that why Oweny’s boys have been looking for me, to clear the air? I never took them for the conversational kind. Most of them can’t put two words together without stumbling or swearing.’

‘You’ve been keeping your head down, Tommy. People were worried. They didn’t know where you were. You could have been lying dead in a ditch by the side of the road.’

‘I could have been sitting in the Federal Building, you mean, spilling my guts like a fish on one of your blocks.’

‘People were concerned. They just wanted to be sure.’

‘That I was sound.’

‘Exactly, that you were sound. I knew you were, Tommy. I told them so. I said to them, “Tommy Morris is sound. I’ll prove it to you. I’ll bring him in, and we’ll talk, and you’ll see the kind of man he is: a sound man.” I came looking for you, Tommy, but I couldn’t find you. When that happens, well, you can’t blame someone for being concerned.’

‘So you enlisted Oweny’s boys to help you.’

‘Oweny has his own questions for you. He wants to buy you out. He wants to do it right.’

‘Is that so?’

‘You know it. Oweny’s sound too. Always has been. Just like you. Two sound men.’

‘Oweny, sound? If Oweny was a fish you wouldn’t feed him to birds. He was always a traitorous little shit. You know that Oweny’s boys kicked down the door of a friend of mine? Two nights ago. They roughed her up. She lost teeth. They wanted to know where I was, but she couldn’t tell them. I hadn’t been to see her in weeks. I was keeping my distance from her to protect her, and look what happened.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Joey. ‘A man should only raise a hand to a woman as a last resort.’

‘Funny thing is, I didn’t think that Oweny knew about her. I’d been very careful. I’ll bet you knew about her, though. You know everyone’s affairs. That’s why you’re the man to turn to, because you have your finger on the pulse.’

Joey laid an index finger on his desk, the pulse finger itself, and tapped it hard on the wood to emphasize each word as he spoke: ‘People. Were. Concerned! You weren’t going to come in of your own volition. You had to be made to come in.’

‘Is that why they took my niece?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I told your boy Martin the same.’

‘She’s my sister’s girl. She lives in a quiet little town, far away from any of this. Did you find her? Did Oweny find her?’

There was something in Tommy’s tone, a kind of madness, as he spoke about his niece, that sent a deep ache of fear through Joey’s belly, as though Tommy, knowing that he himself was doomed, had fixed upon the girl as his salvation. Joey had seen it before in men who were about to die. They began obsessing upon a friend, a parent, a picture in a wallet, a Miraculous Medal, anything to keep out the reality of what was coming.

‘We don’t kidnap little girls, Tommy. That’s not our style.’

‘Yeah? Since when?’

‘Jesus, Tommy, what do you think we are, pedophiles? Deviants? Oweny doesn’t have her. People don’t do that, not to their own, not sound people. They just wanted to talk. If they had the girl, they’d have let you know. A message would have been sent, and then the girl would have been allowed to go home once you’d come in. Our people wouldn’t behave any other way. We’re not like the Russians. We’re not animals.’

Tommy nodded. The gun wavered in his hand. Joey saw his advantage, and pressed it.

‘Come on, now, Tommy. Put the gun away and we’ll forget about this. I’ll make some calls. I’ll let everyone know they can relax. I’ll tell them that Tommy Morris is as sound as he ever was. Sound as a bell, eh, Tommy? Sound as a bell.’

Tommy began to button the overalls. They were too small for him, and he struggled with the buttons, but he didn’t look down.

‘And the meet? The sit-down where Oweny didn’t show but you did? Martin seemed to think that a message was being sent.’

‘A message? Sure, Tommy, there’s always a message. The message was that you should come in and clear all this up, put people’s minds at rest. Now you’ve had it from the horse’s mouth.’

‘No,’ said Tommy. ‘That wasn’t the message Martin picked up at all.’

‘Well, he was wrong, Tommy. My mind is at rest.’

‘Good,’ said Tommy. ‘Then your body can join it.’

He kept the gun low and against his belly as he fired, so that the overalls took the blowback. The first shot took Joey in the belly. Joey said, ‘Ah.’ He sounded disappointed, as though he’d caught Tommy doing something shameful. He supported himself against the desk and Tommy shot him again. Joey tumbled to the floor, taking a handful of invoices with him. His mug fell to the floor and broke. He lay beside the shards of broken crockery, the tea dripping through the gaps in the boards. His breath came in short gasps, and there was blood in his mouth. His hands hovered above his wounds, for he could not quite bring himself to touch them. He kept blinking, like a man fearful of facing a bright light.

‘Ah,’ he said again. ‘Ah, no.’

Tommy stood over him. ‘I never liked you anyway,’ he said. ‘You were never sound.’

And he left Joey Tuna to die in that place, with his face against the cool boards and the taste of it infusing his final breaths, his last gift to the old thug who had created him.

17

Acold night in Boston, and the rain now beating down. It had fallen continuously throughout the day, varying only in its intensity, as though the heavens were determined to sluice the world clean. The lights of the taller buildings, always out of place in Beantown, seemed to brush the clouds above, piercing them and letting the rain pour through the holes. Tonight it was a city of sodden clothing, of suspect shoes that welcomed the damp, of plastered hair that curled and frizzed, and raindrops cold-kissing necks and breasts, of fuzzed neon reflected in puddles like swirls of paint, of slow-moving traffic and impatient pedestrians skipping dangerously past wheels and fenders, ignoring warning beeps and flashing lights. Even the girls heading for the clubs and bars had been forced to swathe their legs and arms for fear of goose bumps, and their frustration was writ large on their faces. Later, the ones who hadn’t found a partner for the night would give up the fight and let the rain ruin their coiffure and smear their mascara, and they’d swear and giggle as they struggled to find a cab, for the cabdrivers would make a killing that night.

But the cold: God, that was the worst of it. It bit and gnawed, its white teeth working on fingertips and toes, noses and ears, like a carrion feeder picking at a corpse in the snow. Winter was one thing: winter, with snow on the ground and clear blue skies. You knew where you stood with winter. But this, this bastard weather, no accommodation could be reached with it. Better not to have come out at all, but that would be to give in to it, to allow it to have its sway over the city, to sacrifice a night out because the elements were conspiring against you, especially when you were young, and nubile, and had money in your pocket. Maybe when you were older, and had less to seek and to prove, the weather might give you pause, but not now. No, such nights were precious, and hard-earned. Let the rain fall; let the cold bite. The warmth and the company will be more welcome for the struggle that it took to find it, and there is little that is more lovely than to watch rain fall in the darkness from the comfort of a chair, a glass in your hand and a voice softly whispering smiling words in your ear.

Seated in their car on East Broadway in Southie, waiting for their moment, Dempsey and Ryan watched the local kids go by. The two men were thankful for the rain, for it kept heads down and obscured the view through the windshield. Both wore headgear: Dempsey a black wool hat, Ryan a Celtics cap, making him look like any one of a dozen mooks gorilla-walking their way along the main drag at this time. They came out of central casting, those guys, with their tats and their oversized T-shirts, with their misplaced sentiment for an island that meant nothing to them in actual terms, a place they could identify on a map only because of its shape. Dempsey and Ryan knew their kind well. They held ancestral grievances passed on by their parents, and their parents’ parents. Their racism was ingrained but inconsistent. They hated blacks but cheered on the Celtics, who had barely a white face among them. They had older brothers who could still recall the busing program of the mid to late seventies, when Garrity and his so-called experts ignored the warnings from both inside and outside South Boston and paired poor white Southie with poor black Roxbury, two sections of Boston’s immigrant community that had suffered more than most because of the consequences of bad urban planning; the intransigence of the all-white Boston School Committee that played upon fears of integration, and effective ghettoization, including the deeply flawed B-BURG experiment which walled the blacks inside the former Jewish neighborhoods of North Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan. Sure, there were racists and bigots in Southie and the Town, because there were racists and bigots everywhere, but busing played into the hands of the worst of them, and even succeeded in uniting the previously warring Irish and Italian communities against a single common foe with a different skin. Hell, Ryan’s old man, who was smarter than most of his neighbors put together and was a member of the Boston branch of the International Socialist Organization, had found himself on the receiving end of threats from the assholes on the Tactical Patrol Force because he’d formed a council to help ensure the safety of black pupils at his son’s high school. Ryan hadn’t thanked him for his liberal views since he was the one who had taken the beatings for his father being a ‘nigger-lover,’ but he respected his old man more now for what he’d done.

The years had changed Ryan, but he kept many of those changes hidden.

Now he sat behind the wheel and wondered at what they were about to do. By Dempsey’s feet lay the shoebox they had taken from the Napier house, but it was no longer filled with money. The device that it contained was crude but effective: little more than a lead-azide detonator and two pounds of pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN. The explosive’s lethality had been compounded by the carpet tacks that Dempsey sprinkled liberally through the mix. Ryan had watched, appalled, as Dempsey put it together in the motel room earlier.

‘What are they for?’ he asked

‘They’re for added value.’

‘But they’ll…’

He trailed off. His mouth felt too dry. This was wrong. It should be stopped.

‘They’ll what? Hurt people? Scar them? What do you think the point of this is, Francis?’

Ryan found some saliva. ‘To take out Oweny Farrell.’

‘No, it’s to take out Oweny Farrell and everyone around him. It’s to leave nobody from his inner circle standing. It’s to send a message that Tommy Morris isn’t down and he isn’t out, and his meal tickets aren’t up for grabs.’

‘They won’t let it slide. They can’t.’

‘They will if he gives them no other choice. They sat back and waited to see what Oweny would do, and how Tommy would respond. This is Tommy’s response. This is his way back.’

Ryan turned away. His fingers shook. He lit a cigarette to calm himself.

‘This is not right, Martin. This is not what we are. There’ll be people in there who have nothing to do with it.’

He tried to visualize the damage that a hail of tacks would do in an enclosed space, and felt vomit well up in his throat. Had Tommy told Dempsey to do this, or had Dempsey come up with the idea himself? Dempsey was the one to whom Tommy relayed his orders, unless, as with Helen Napier, Dempsey was otherwise occupied. Ryan had to take it on trust that what he heard from Dempsey was the true substance of their conversations. If Tommy had really endorsed this course of action, then all was lost and there was no longer any rightness to his cause.

‘Look,’ said Dempsey, ‘it’s this or Tommy rolls over and dies.’

Seconds ticked by.

‘That might be for the best,’ said Ryan. He said it so slowly, and so softly, that Dempsey had to lean forward to be sure he was hearing him right. Ryan’s face was still turned away from him. The cigarette was in his left hand, but his right hand was no longer visible. From the angle of his arm, it was somewhere close to his belt. Dempsey grew still. On the table beside him was his gun. Casually, he rested his hand inches from it.

‘I thought we’d had this conversation already, Francis,’ he said. He was surprised at how relaxed he sounded. His fingertips brushed the grips.

Ryan’s shoulders trembled. Dempsey thought that he might be on the verge of tears. There was a tremor in his voice when he spoke again.

‘I mean, look at us. We’re making a bomb. We’re going to slaughter and maim. I’m not like you, Martin. Maybe I’m not as tough as you. I’ve delivered beatings with the best of them, but I’ve never killed. I don’t want to kill anyone, not even Oweny Farrell.’

‘How did you think this was going to end?’

‘I don’t know: with a sit-down, maybe, with everybody compromising. I thought Joey Tuna would see us right. I thought-’

‘You thought what: that you were dealing with reasonable men?’ There was no mockery to Dempsey’s tone. He merely sounded tired, and there was a horror in his voice at what he had allowed himself to become.

‘No,’ said Ryan. ‘Just men. Just ordinary men.’

‘They were never ordinary, Francis. Ordinary men lead ordinary lives, but not them. They all had blood on their hands and on their souls. We’re tainted by it too, just by being around them.’

‘Have you killed, Martin?’

Now he turned to look at the older man. Ryan had heard stories: Dempsey worked alone, and the people he took care of didn’t surface again. Wherever they were, they were buried deep. Now Ryan wanted to hear confirmation from Dempsey’s own mouth.

‘Yes,’ said Dempsey. His eyes were empty.

‘For Tommy?’

‘And before Tommy.’

‘Who did you kill, Martin? Who did you kill before?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

But it did. It mattered to Ryan. Dempsey was born in Belmont, but he’d come to them from abroad. The whispers were that he’d been a bomb-maker, that he’d planted devices in Northern Ireland for the Provisionals, and in Madrid for the ETA Basques. Now he couldn’t return to Europe because, even with some form of peace established in both conflicts, there were those with long memories and scores to settle. Tommy had given him a home and a role to play, and Dempsey’s reputation had gone before him when there were problems that needed to be handled.

Before Ryan could question him further, Dempsey spoke again.

‘You say you’ve never killed, Francis. You say that you can’t. But before all this is over you may be put in a position where you have to pull the trigger on someone to save yourself. Have you thought about that?’

‘Yes,’ said Ryan. ‘I’ve thought about it. I even dream about it.’

‘And in the dreams, do you pull the trigger?’

Dempsey waited for the answer, the only light coming from the lamp on the table, its glow catching the sharp, glittering spikes of the tacks.

‘Yes,’ said Ryan at last. ‘I pull the trigger.’

‘Then maybe you can kill after all. Who do you kill in your dreams?’

‘Faceless men. I don’t know who they are.’

‘But you kill them anyway?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about me?’ said Dempsey. ‘Would you kill me in your dreams? Do you kill me in your dreams?’

Ryan had come this far. There was no point in turning back now.

‘I’ve thought about it.’

‘Not dreamed it, but thought it?’

‘Yes.’

And Dempsey saw that Ryan’s hand was within striking distance of whatever was lodged in his waistband, and the reality of all that Ryan had said hung in the air between them like a white handkerchief waiting to be dropped on a dueling field.

‘It’s all right, Francis,’ said Dempsey. ‘I know you have. I’ve seen it in your eyes.’ He moved the shoebox slightly with his left hand, shielding his right from view. ‘But I’m not the enemy here. Whatever you might think of me, I’m not the one you have to fear. If we turn against each other now, we’ll do their work for them. We have to trust each other, because we have nobody else.’

Ryan took in his words, still uncertain. ‘You frighten me sometimes, Martin. You take it too far. That woman the other night, she didn’t deserve what you did to her. No woman deserves that.’

‘But you didn’t try to stop it.’

‘I should have. I was weak.’

‘No, you’re not weak. It’s not weakness to avoid the battle that you can’t win. That’s just common sense. And what was she to you? Nothing. Nobody. You look out for your own, and let the others swim or die.’

Ryan’s right hand was still hidden.

‘So where does that leave us, Francis?’ said Dempsey. ‘Where do we stand?’

The cigarette bounced in Ryan’s fingers. A clump of ash fell to the carpet. It distracted Ryan from his thoughts. Instinctively, he moved, extending one foot to stamp on it. Dempsey glimpsed his right hand. There was no gun. Dempsey’s eyes flicked to the side and glimpsed Ryan’s gun by the sink, left there when he went to clean the glasses that they’d used earlier.

Now Ryan glanced his way. He saw the gun, and Dempsey’s fingers brushing its burnished steel, and the cold light in Dempsey’s eyes.

‘Jesus,’ he said.

‘It was nothing personal, Francis. You were just sounding a bit strange.’

Ryan let out a long, straggly breath. ‘I was only talking.’

‘I couldn’t see your hand.’

‘You were going to kill me.’

‘If I was going to, then I would have. I don’t want to kill you, Francis. I like you. And I told you, we have to stick together, for our sakes and for Tommy’s. If we don’t do this, they’ll pounce. Don’t think you’ll be able to cut a deal with them, because you won’t. We’ve stayed with Tommy too long. They’d never be able to rest or turn their backs on us. They’d always be wondering, doubting, and in time they’d put an end to their concerns because it would be easier that way. It’s all or nothing now. If we send out a strong enough message, we can make them reconsider. We take out Oweny, take out his crew, and suddenly the tables are turned.’

‘They’ll want revenge,’ said Ryan.

‘No, not if it’s just Oweny and his people who suffer. They’ll understand that they made a mistake, that they should have backed Tommy and not him. It’s about a show of strength. It has to be brutal, and it has to be final.’

Ryan walked to the table and looked down at the device. He picked up a carpet tack and held it to the light, examining it the way an entomologist might examine an unfamiliar yet clearly dangerous insect.

‘Joey Tuna offered me a way out,’ said Martin. ‘This morning, when we were talking, he asked me to rat on Tommy. He told me I could walk away if I made the call and let them know where Tommy could be found.’

‘And me?’

‘He didn’t mention you, Francis.’

Ryan nodded. He understood. They would have killed him just to be sure.

‘What did you say to him?’

‘Nothing. I’m here, aren’t I? I’m with Tommy, and I’m with you. We’re different, you and I, but we need to stick together on this. And remember, you’re not killing anyone. I made this, and I’ll put it in position. The blood will be on my hands, the mark on my soul.’

Ryan twisted the tack one last time, then dropped it in the shoebox.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’ll be on my soul too.’

And now here they were, the rain pattering on the roof of the car, no lights within to expose them, the device on the floor at Dempsey’s feet. Ryan couldn’t help but think of it as a living creature, a monster in the box waiting to be unleashed. They should have bored air holes in it so it could breathe. He could almost hear the beating of its heart.

In an ideal situation Dempsey would have planted the device earlier, but the bar was Oweny’s place, and there was no way that he could gain access to it in advance. The bar was small, and it would contain the blast. In the confined space, the device’s effects would be catastrophic. The problem was getting it in there. He’d told Ryan that he planned to take the simple approach. In one hand was a brick, in the other the device. The brick would take out the window, and the device would follow.

‘What’s the delay on it?’ Ryan had asked, causing Dempsey to pause.

‘Where did you learn about delays?’

‘Same place I learned about everything else – from television.’

‘Five or six seconds.’

‘It’s not much. You’d better not trip or wait for the light once it’s set.’

‘I wasn’t planning on helping anyone across the road.’

Even through the rain-spattered windshield, Ryan could see Oweny Farrell’s big head from where they sat. He recognized some of the others as well. There were a couple of women too. He hoped they would leave to go to the bathroom before Dempsey started walking. It might make what was to come easier to live with.

‘You just start the engine as soon as I get out,’ said Dempsey. ‘Be prepared for the blast, let it come, then move. Don’t look at it, and don’t stare once it’s happened. You won’t want to see the aftermath, and I don’t want you freezing.’

‘I understand, Martin.’

‘Okay.’

Dempsey picked up the box and the brick, resting them in the crook of his arm. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt under his coat, and he raised the hood to hide his face as he left the car. Ryan was about to wish him good luck, then didn’t. One of the girls in the bar was laughing, her mouth wide and her head thrown back. She was pretty, and not in the hard way of most of the women who hung around with Oweny and his boys. There was a pale fragility to her features. Her hair was very dark. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty. In most bars in Boston, they’d have asked for ID and given her the bum’s rush, but not there, not in Oweny’s place.

He saw Dempsey lift the edge of the shoebox to arm the device as he stepped into the cold night air. Most of the box was wrapped in tape, but Dempsey had left one corner torn and unsealed so that he could easily access the fuse that would ignite the detonating agent. Dempsey started toward the bar, his fingers poised over the gap in the box, and then there were lights in Ryan’s rearview mirror, and he heard sirens, and Dempsey was walking quickly back to the car, the device still in his arms, the brick discarded on the street. Ryan started the engine, and they pulled out behind a beverage truck just as the first of the patrol cars screeched to a halt outside the bar, more coming behind it, and the big black van of the SWAT team in the middle of them all like the queen bug among its subjects.

‘Man,’ said Ryan. ‘This is bad. This is so bad.’

‘Just drive. They’re not looking for us. They couldn’t have known.’

Ryan just kept going straight until they hit the rotary by the water. There he turned left, past the statue of Farragut, past the Francis Murphy ice skating rink. It was only when they reached the empty Castle Island parking lot that Ryan realized he had brought them to a dead end. He swore and began to reverse awkwardly, but Dempsey calmed him down.

‘Easy,’ he said. ‘Take a breath. We’re okay.’

Ryan did as he was told. He breathed deeply once, twice. He felt the monster twitch in the box at Dempsey’s feet. Perhaps Dempsey felt it too, because he opened the car door and walked to the edge of the lot, then tossed the box into the water. They drove back to the rotary and took First Street out of Southie.

‘Why were they there?’ asked Ryan. ‘Why did they come?’

But they didn’t get the answer until later, when Dempsey took the call from Tommy and learned that Joey Tuna was dead.