The Burning Soul

18

Randall Haight felt the difference in the house as soon as he returned from the store, as though a charge of static electricity held by the carpets and fabrics had been voided. He stood in the hallway, a paper bag cradled in his left arm, the coldness of the ice cream inside making itself felt through the fabric of his sweater. He had chocolate as well, and soda, and cinnamon candies. She liked the smell of all of them, and they had a calming effect on her; quite the opposite of most children, he thought, but then she was so very different from other children.

The trip into town had already provided him with one unsettling experience. He had seen Valerie Kore on the street, accompanied by a man whom he didn’t recognize but who, by his size and stance, he believed to be a policeman of some kind. Mrs. Kendall, who worked part-time at the drugstore, was talking to her, her right hand resting on Valerie’s shoulder, her face close to the younger woman’s as she offered what Randall assumed were words of hope and consolation. Then Danny, the weird but decent kid who ran the Hallowed Grounds coffee shop, came out and gave Valerie a white paper bag loaded up with pastries and muffins, and something inside her broke at this small, unexpected gesture and she had to walk away, the cop trailing in her wake. Randall watched her go, and tried to pin down his feelings at the sight of her. Sadness. Empathy.

Guilt?

The cop had caught him looking at her. Randall hadn’t overreacted, though. He’d just smiled sadly, because that was what he believed a regular person would have done, a normal person. He was an actor inhabiting a role, and he inhabited it well, but as soon as she was gone from his sight he pushed her from his mind. Instead, he found himself looking at the faces of those whom he passed even as he exchanged friendly greetings with them, and peered in the windows of the businesses on Main Street, waiting to see if someone might look back, their eyes lingering a little too long on his, betraying themselves to him.

Which one of you is it? Which one of you knows, or thinks you know?

But there were no answers to be found, no suspicions to be confirmed, and he had driven back to his house in silence, wondering if the mailman had come yet, fearing what he might find in his box. To his relief, there were only bills, and his subscriber’s copy of National Geographic. No photographs, no films, no images of naked children, and he tried to make himself believe that it might be over even as he acknowledged this as just a brief respite.

Now, safe once again inside his home, Randall sensed an unaccustomed emptiness, an absence. He moved from bedroom to bedroom, checking closets and under beds. He looked in the master bathroom and the guest bathroom, the latter of which had never been used. Finally, he went to the basement and stood in front of the door. She liked the basement; it was dark, and cool. Sometimes he heard her singing to herself down there. When he was angry or working he’d tell her to be quiet, but she never listened. She sang jingles from the TV, and old pop songs that he’d almost forgotten existed, and ditties that she’d make up herself, tuneless rhymes that got inside his head and worried at him with their sheer randomness. But the basement was her hideaway, her refuge, and he was content to leave it to her. He tried not to disturb her when she was there because there was no way to tell how she might react. Once she’d flown at him in a rage, her nails headed straight for his eyes, but mostly she just tended to scream and scream, the sound of it bouncing back at him from the stone walls.

He needed to know where she was. He kept all the windows and the outer doors locked, although that was more to keep people out than to keep her inside, for he lived in fear of intrusion into his life. By now the girl showed no signs of wanting to leave him. He wondered if her hatred of him had become a kind of love, her need a channel that connected the two opposing emotions. She was almost like a daughter to him, a recalcitrant, difficult, demanding child, and he was the father because he had made her what she was.

He hadn’t seen much of her for the past two days. She’d hidden herself away when the detective came, as she always did when a stranger appeared. Earlier that same day, he’d caught a glimpse of her passing through the kitchen while he worked at his computer. He didn’t like the TV on when he was trying to concentrate. She’d learned that lesson quickly, and now she just stayed away from the living room until after five. The last time he had actually spoken to her was to tell her to go back to her TV shows on the evening following the detective’s visit.

He knocked on the basement door. There was no reply.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘You down there?’

He opened the door and spoke to the darkness. She disliked sudden intrusions and unexpected noises.

‘You can watch anything you like now. I’ve finished my work for the day. I’ll sit with you, if you want me to.’

He could see the night light burning against the far wall. There was a small pile of books in the corner, still unread, and a stuffed animal that he’d bought for her at Treehouse Toys when he’d been doing some work down in Portland.

He advanced to the first step, still reluctant to trespass. Early on, before he’d come to understand her ways, and she his, she had tried to knock his feet out from under him when he entered the basement, and he had barely managed to hold on to the rail and prevent himself from breaking his neck. A huge splinter had pierced his palm, and even though he’d managed to get the bulk of it out, some shards had penetrated deep into his flesh and had begun to fester, so that he’d been forced to see a doctor and have them removed under local anesthetic. After that he’d locked the basement door, and taken away the lead for the TV. Depriving her of TV was the worst punishment that he could inflict upon her, and always led to a battle of wills between them. He had learned to lock the lead in his safe because she would find it otherwise, but those periods when the TV was no longer hers to control were the worst between them. In retaliation, she would do her best to irritate him, tapping on the wall at night while he tried to sleep, or rearranging his papers so that he lost track of his accounts, or spilling milk in the fridge while he was out and then turning the power off so that he had to empty the contents and wash it out to remove the sour stink. Finally, a compromise would be reached, and TV rights would be restored, but the conflict always took its toll on both of them and they had each learned that it was better to avoid such confrontations to begin with.

But relations between them were not always so hostile. Sometimes, especially on cold nights when the old house creaked and moaned, and the wind found the gaps in the boards and under the doors, and branches cracked beneath the weight of snow and ice, she would climb into his bed unbidden, and press herself against him, stealing his warmth, like a dream made real.

He descended farther, crouching so that the entire basement was visible to him, and felt panic, and fear, and loss.

But, most of all, he felt a kind of relief.

She was gone.

19

It was a cold, damp night at the end of a long, dismal day. I had been called back by the defense in the Denny Kraus case, and then had to wait around for hours close to the courthouse on Federal Street as Denny’s attorney tried to maintain his composure while dealing with a prosecutor who was determined to prove that Denny was mentally competent to face trial, and with whom Denny repeatedly agreed. The attorney was young, and court-appointed, and he should have put pressure on Denny to keep his mouth shut, although it wasn’t entirely his fault. The state wanted Denny to go down for murder, for reasons that I couldn’t grasp but were probably linked to politics, and ambition, and someone seeking to make the figures look good at the end of the year. A more battle-hardened attorney than Denny’s would have found a way to negotiate a compromise deal that satisfied everyone, except possibly Denny, but then what Denny wanted didn’t really matter. He probably should have thought harder about his plans for the future before he killed a man over a dog.

While I was kicking my heels waiting for my moment of glory in the witness box, I continued delving into the personal details of those on Randall Haight’s list of new clients and recent arrivals in Pastor’s Bay, but I was starting to believe that it was a dead end. I had to proceed on the basis that it wasn’t, but I couldn’t shake my gut feeling that there was nothing hidden behind those names, nothing useful to be found. It raised the possibility that the person who was tormenting Randall Haight might have been lying dormant for a long time, waiting for the right opportunity to use Haight’s past against him. If that was the case, I was faced with the almost impossible task of investigating every adult who had crossed Randall Haight’s path. Equally, though, someone from Randall’s past might have spotted him on the streets of Belfast, or Portland, or Augusta, or while passing through Pastor’s Bay itself, then discovered his address and proceeded to target him without ever having exchanged even a word with him.

But I had reached one conclusion at least: If by the following morning I hadn’t heard confirmation from Aimee that Haight was prepared to be interviewed by the police, I was going to call Gordon Walsh myself and suggest that he talk to Haight, even at the risk of poisoning my relationship with Aimee and potentially leaving myself open to charges and imprisonment for breach of client confidentiality. The final push had been provided by a realization that should have come to me the moment Haight showed me the photographs of naked children. Someone who was in possession of sexually suggestive photos of underage kids might well be capable of taking a child to satisfy his urges. It was the connection I needed to silence my conscience about any betrayal of Aimee or Haight that I might have to commit.

My name was called shortly after three p.m., but my period under cross-examination could have been measured in nanoseconds. Even the judge seemed to be losing the will to live after a day of questioning that had merely confirmed what everybody already knew: Denny Kraus was crazy, because in his situation only a lunatic would deny that he was crazy.

After I was done in court, I headed up to Nosh on Congress and shot the breeze for a while with Matt, one of the partners in the place. If someone had told me a couple of years ago that Portland needed another bar selling burgers, I’d have laughed in his face, and you wouldn’t have heard me above all the other people who were laughing too. Then Nosh opened and folk started tasting the burgers, and a general agreement was reached that, yes, maybe we had needed just one more bar selling burgers, as long as the food was this good. And because I felt that I owed it to myself after the day I’d had, I ate some bacon-dusted fries too, and pushed the boat out by sipping a Clown Shoes brown ale, and gradually the day began not to seem so bad after all.

The channels through the Scarborough salt marshes appeared only as swaths of a deeper blackness against the tall grass as I drove home, like lengths of dark ribbon dropped from the sky. I turned into my driveway, the headlamps reflecting on the windows of the empty house. I entered through the back door leading into the kitchen, and turned on the light.

The moisture had beaded on the main window that faced north, and someone had written on the glass with a finger, cutting long careful lines through the water. The words were written in a child’s hand, a hand with which I was familiar, for it had communicated with me once before in attic dust. It had been so long. I thought that they were gone, but how could they ever truly be gone? Now one of them had returned, the echo of my dead daughter, and where she went so too walked her mother, a stranger, more nebulous figure. If my daughter was a small, cold star, then her mother was the night sky against which she lay.

The words on the glass read:

THE GIRL IS ANGRY

I approached the window. The letters had only recently been written; there were still rivulets of moisture running from them, as though the words were wounds cut in flesh, bleeding their message. Through the gaps in the condensation that they had created, I saw the woods.

I went back outside and stood in my yard, staring at the trees, willing them to emerge, but they did not. Perhaps they were no longer there, but there was a stillness to the night that spoke of watchfulness, and even the marsh grass had ceased its whispering. Then the wind returned from the sea, and it tossed the grass and the trees, and it blew some of the shadows away. I erased the words with my fingertips, touching the places that she had touched as I did so, and I wondered at how a man could be haunted and both love and fear the entities that walked in his footsteps.

I stayed at the window, watching the night deepen, imagining my lost daughter’s voice speaking those words to me, imagining her small, pale form passing beneath the trees, traces of moonlight causing the bare branches to crisscross her body, binding her with lengths of darkness. I thought of that old ghost story about the monkey’s paw, and the couple who wish upon it that their dead son might be returned to them, and their horror when they realize the literal nature of their wish’s fulfillment.

And I wondered, not for the first time, if my grief had willed them back into the world.

I went to bed at midnight, after thinking for a time about the meaning of the words on the glass. They seemed like a warning, but of what I could not be sure. To what girl did they refer? Somehow I slept deeply until three a.m… Had I tried to explain to a psychiatrist how that might be possible after a dead child had written on my window, I might have begun by arguing that when one encounters enough strangeness, then what is strange ultimately becomes familiar. The mind can accommodate itself to almost anything, given time: pain, grief, loss, even the possibility that the dead talk to the living. And I understood, too, that this was all part of a larger pattern, a signpost on a journey whose ultimate destination I could not know. I had resigned myself to what was to come, whatever it might be, and that resignation brought with it a kind of peace. So I slept, and I was grateful for sleep. When I could no longer sleep, then I would know that I was going mad.

At one minute after three, I woke. There were sounds coming from below my bedroom: bangs and crashes and barrages of strings. It took me a moment to realize that the TV was on.

But I hadn’t watched television before going to bed, and I would never have left it on if I had.

Making as little noise as I could, I reached for my gun and slipped from the bed. The room was cold. I was naked from the waist up, and my skin seemed to tighten in the chill air. The bedroom door was open, and the hall was dark, but as I reached the stairs I could see the light from the reflected images on the TV screen dancing on the wall. I tried to control my breathing as the blood thudded in my ears. The banister railings were wide, and I would be exposed as soon as I descended to the third step from the top. If it was a trap, then moving slowly and carefully would do me no good. I would simply be an easier target.

There was another series of loud explosions from the TV, and I used the sound to mask my descent. I went down fast, staying against the wall, the gun held close to my body in my right hand while I used my left for balance, but nobody sprang at me from the shadows, and there were no shots. The security chain was still in place on the front door. To the left of the stairs was my office, but the door was closed, just as it had been when I went up to bed. Ahead of me was the living room, the door standing open, the television visible through the gap. It was showing a Road Runner cartoon. There was only one door into the room. I had no choice.

The living room was empty. The couch and the easy chairs that faced the television were unoccupied. The TV remote was lying on the left side of the couch, close to the arm.

I left the TV on and returned to the main hallway. I checked the kitchen first, but it too was empty and the back door was locked. Finally, I went to my office. I gripped the handle, flung the door open, and waited, but there was no reaction from within. I checked through the crack at the hinges but could see nothing. Eventually, with no other option, I stepped in with my gun raised, but my office was as I had left it the day before, even down to the sweatshirt I had thrown across my desk after coming back from an errand at the grocery store a few days earlier.

Despite the cool of the night, I was now bathed in sweat. I made a cursory check of the upstairs rooms, just in case, but the house was empty. I returned to the living room and stared at the TV. The Road Runner was gone, and a Bugs Bunny cartoon had replaced it. Yosemite Sam was hunting with his big gun. It could have been a power surge, I supposed. I turned it off at the top of the set, and killed the power at the socket, just in case.

I was halfway up the stairs when the TV blared into life again.

I kept the gun by my side as I entered the room. It was still empty, and the remote lay where it had been, but the switch at the wall had been turned back on.

A droplet of perspiration slid down my back. There was a smell that hadn’t been there before, or if it had, then I hadn’t noticed it with the fear and adrenaline. It was a hint of perfume, though a cheap and sickly sweet one, the kind that no grown woman would wear-

the girl is angry

The words were not said aloud, and yet I could hear them in my head, a repetition of the message on the window.

you have to be careful daddy you have to be careful

‘Daddy.’ My god, my god, my god.

But there was nothing there, or nothing that I could see. I placed my hand on the television and pressed the On/Off button gently. The screen went black, and the indicator light went from green to red. I stepped back and waited. I got as far as five in my head when it came back on again, just in time for Bugs to burst through the drum, munching a carrot, to say ‘And Dat’s De End!’

Except it wasn’t, because the station’s indent flashed and instantly Bugs was back again. I even knew the cartoon: ‘Hare Brush.’ I remembered it from my childhood. Bugs and Elmer switch personalities, so that in the end Elmer wins, but he has to become Bugs to do so. I had laughed and laughed. Even in my teenage years, after my father died, I’d laugh when I caught the cartoon again. It was an escape from a world of black and gray and bright, bright red, an escape from hurt and grief, from the memory of pain: the pain of my father’s loss, the pain of my mother’s sorrow…

The pain of a boy holding one hand over your mouth while the other fumbles beneath your skirt, the second boy pulling away as he realizes what he has done, and what is about to be done, yet too weak to prevent it from happening. Pain in your mouth and your lungs, pain in your back and behind your eyes, pain growing and growing until it seems that your body is too small to contain it all, that it must explode from you like the air from a bursting balloon, like the death of a red star, because when the end comes it comes redly: red behind your eyes, red spraying from your mouth and nose.

And dat’s de end, except it isn’t, not for you, because you never went away, because you’re an angry girl, and people have to be careful around angry girls. Angry girls break things, and hurt things, and they wait for their chance.

And angry girls watch cartoons to escape for a time from their rage.

I stepped closer to the couch and reached for the remote. The sickly scent grew stronger, and I smelled what lay beneath it: not decay but blood and human waste, because whatever was in the room had stayed as it was at the moment of its passing. It was both a girl and not a girl. The best of it was elsewhere, sleeping, unknowing. What was here was all that had been left behind.

careful daddy careful careful

She was on the couch; almost a palpable presence. I couldn’t see her, couldn’t hear her, but she was there. I waited for her hand to close upon me as I took the remote, but it did not. The device was moist to the touch. There was condensation on it, although there should not have been. I stepped back from the couch, the remote in my hand, and the smell came with me. Tentatively, I lifted my hand, and caught the odor of her on the plastic.

I glanced at the TV. The image flickered, the action changing, and behind it I thought that I glimpsed a face reflected in the screen. I walked around the side of the couch, keeping my distance from it. When I was behind it, I raised the remote and killed the picture.

no daddy no she wont like it

And in that instant I saw her suspended in the darkness of the screen like a soul trapped in the void: a black girl in a torn white blouse seated on the couch, her hands by her sides, palms up, her knees scraped raw; blood on her chin, and on her lips, and blood dried in lines that ran from the corners of her eyes like red tear stains. She opened her mouth and screamed silently, her whole body shaking with the force of her anger: a child frustrated, a child deprived of her desire, a child dragged from a world of brightness back into a world of pain. Then she was gone, and there was only my own reflection in the otherwise empty room.

I turned off the TV for the final time, and I did not sleep again that night.

Not even with the TV cable safely hidden away in my bedside locker.

20

It was November, and hunting season was about to begin. I couldn’t say from where precisely my objections to much of what passed for hunting came. Perhaps it was the fact that I was a townie through and through. My father, who had spent his days walking city beats in New York, occasionally made forays into the great outdoors on weekends to clear his lungs and replace vistas of tall buildings with vistas of tall trees, but I think he viewed it as an obligation rather than a pleasure. He felt that he should occasionally feel grass beneath his feet, and not be forced to step around trash and needles and used rubbers to do so, because that was what regular people did. In truth, though, he was happier in the city. He tended to come back from those walks with the slightly relieved air of a man returning from a successful and relatively painless visit to the dentist.

My grandfather, who was a policeman in Maine, had not hunted. He argued that he did not need the meat, and the act of stalking an animal gave him no joy. He dutifully enforced the state’s hunting laws but was not above turning a blind eye to those citizens who broke the ban on Sunday hunting, especially those who were already working long hours to make ends meet, and for whom Sundays provided the only opportunity to supplement their family’s diet. In the poorer parts of Maine, bringing down a mature deer and freezing and curing the meat could save a family four or five hundred dollars on food, and those who hunted for this reason were part of an older ethos. They took pleasure in the act of hunting, but it was combined with a functionality and practicality that was admirable. They wasted nothing of what they killed, and if they were particularly fortunate in their endeavors they shared with those who had not been so lucky.

But the hunting of moose for trophy antlers left me cold, and I had yet to meet someone who enjoyed the taste of bear meat. I disliked the attitude of those who came up from the cities to hunt: their braggadocio, their faux machismo, the unpleasant transformative effect of guns and camouflage on otherwise unremarkable men, for in my experience it was generally men who hunted in this way. They brought money into the state, and guiding them was a welcome source of income for those who lived hardscrabble existences in the County, and in the shadow of the Great North Woods. Still, the guides viewed a certain number of them as fools, and fools with guns, which are the worst kind, and regarded most of the rest with little more than benign tolerance. Their money was welcome, their actual presence less so.

And how did I square this with the fact that I declined to hunt an animal but had hunted men; that I would not turn my gun on a deer, or a bear, but I had seen men fall by my hand? To be honest, I didn’t think about it too much. Life was simpler that way.

Life was simpler, too, if one did not think too hard about the images of dead girls reflected on dark television screens. I might almost have believed that I had dreamed the events of the night before had not some faint trace of the girl’s perfume still lingered in the living room, and had the marks of my hand not still been visible on the kitchen window, where I had erased my daughter’s message. I walked outside with a cup of coffee in my hand and sat on the back step, staring at the woods and the marshes beyond. They preferred the night, my shadow wife and my drifting child, taken from this life by one who bore the name of a traveling man. I still did not know what to call them: traces, perhaps, or echoes. The thought of my daughter moving through moonlit woods, sometimes watching her father from the darkness, and leaving messages for him on windowpanes (for that was what she did when she was alive, drawing hearts and faces and dogs on my car windshield when I wasn’t around, so I would know that she was thinking of me) brought with it both comfort and a deep, unmanning sadness. I did not fear for her, though, as she followed those paths between worlds. She did not walk them alone. Her mother walked beside her, and her mother wore a different mask, for whatever had brought her back to me was not love alone.

If my daughter was a spirit, then my dead wife was a shade.

I went to work on the Kore family, seeking some hint to why Engel and the FBI might have an interest in them beyond any concern about Anna Kore’s presumed abduction. Anna’s mother, Valerie, was born Valerie Mary Morris in Dorchester, Massachusetts. She was twenty-nine when she married Alekos Kore in a ceremony in the St. George Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Philadelphia on June 8, 2007. Since Anna Kore was born on November 28, 1995, her mother had either waited a long time before marrying Anna’s father or Alekos Kore was not related by blood to Anna. So where was Alekos now, and if he was not Anna’s father, who was? According to the official police statements, they were still trying to contact Alekos, although they had not yet gone so far as to brand him a suspect in Anna’s disappearance.

More digging: a CN-2 change-of-name application for Anna Mary Morris, a minor, had been filed with the Knox County probate court on August 1, 2007. In addition, an affidavit of diligent search had been filed confirming that all reasonable efforts had been made to trace the child’s other biological parent, one Ronald Doheny. Oddly, the judge had not requested a special publication notice, or a search of the five branches of military service, as was often the case in such circumstances. Clearly the judge in question had been content to accept that attempts to find Doheny had proved fruitless in the past. That was interesting. It suggested that somebody had spoken quietly to the judge about Doheny. Reading between the lines, I was willing to bet good money that Ronald Doheny was believed dead. If that was the case, and there was no formal evidence of his demise, then the judge would have required more than the word of Valerie Kore or her legal representatives, assuming she had even sought legal assistance, as technically none was required for a change of name. So if you didn’t have a body, and nobody had sought a legal declaration of death, assuming seven years had gone by since Ronald Doheny had stopped accepting calls, then what would it take to persuade a judge to let sleeping dogs, and sleeping corpses, lie?

It would take the word of a cop, and a senior cop too.

Dig again: Anna Mary Morris was born in Dorchester, Mass. Search for Ronald Doheny, and Massachusetts. Dismiss the eighty-year-old man who had died of cancer after a long and happy life with his wife of fifty-eight years. Dismiss the high-school football star who had wrapped his car around a tree two years before Anna was born. Dismiss a chronically obese used-car salesman (‘Ronnie’s the Real Deal!’), and a prodigiously gifted eight-year-old child violinist.

Leave Ronald Doheny of Somerville, Mass.: twenty-one years old when he skipped bail in December 1997 on charges of possession of a Class A substance for sale or distribution, which in Massachusetts in the late 1990s probably meant heroin. Dig, dig, dig: Ronald Doheny, one of three men found in an apartment in Winter Hill, Somerville, along with three kilos of heroin. That meant Doheny was looking at a mandatory fifteen years, which was tough for anyone, but particularly for someone who had barely attained his majority.

Winter Hill meant the Winter Hill Gang, as the newspapers dubbed it: a loose affiliation of mainly Irish-American hoodlums, with some Italians thrown in to improve the quality of the food. Buddy McClean and Howie Winter were the big names at the start, until McClean was shot dead in 1965, leaving Winter in principal control until the end of the 1970s, when a series of federal indictments for fixing horse races shook up the leadership and landed him and most of his associates in jail. That allowed one James ‘Whitey’ Bulger to make his move, and he remained in charge until 1994, when he fled a federal indictment. His lieutenant, Kevin Weeks, subsequently turned cooperating witness in 2000, but the Winter Hill Gang had weathered the storm, and remained a functioning part of Boston’s underworld.

Search for Morris and Winter Hill, and come up with Tommy ‘Ash’ Morris: a couple of arrests, and a stretch in Old Colony in the mid-eighties, when it was still known as Bridgewater, for possession of a pair of loaded and unlicensed firearms and a quantity of cocaine, but otherwise clean for decades, which meant that Tommy Morris had either turned over a new leaf, which seemed unlikely, or had simply become much better at being a criminal. A further search provided no direct link between Valerie Mary Morris and Tommy ‘Ash’ Morris, but Tommy was older than Valerie by eighteen years. Cousins, or something closer? I was betting closer, based on Special Agent Engel’s presence in Pastor’s Bay.

Dig, dig, dig: names and histories, places and trial reports. Dig, dig, dig: calls to Boston, messages left, favors called in and favors promised. Dig, dig, dig, then wait. At noon, an e-mail came in from an ex-BPD cop turned private investigator in Fitchburg, sent from a Hotmail address that would never be used again after this message.

Tommy Morris was Valerie Kore’s older brother. There were links to any number of articles, the most recent from this week concerning the killing of one Joey ‘Joey Tuna’ Toomey, an Irish-American businessman and a beloved scion of the Boston fish trade. There was a further link from that report to a Sunday magazine feature entitled ‘Meet the Old Boss, Same as the New Boss,’ a consideration of the current state of organized crime in the city that included various mentions of power struggles in the Boston underworld, and particularly among Irish-American elements still working to fill the void left by Whitey Bulger’s enforced absence. The e-mail concluded with a single line from my source: ‘Tommy Morris is going down.’

Suddenly the stakes had been raised, and I was glad of the impending arrival of Angel and Louis. In the meantime I called Aimee and told her of what I had found. More than ever, we needed to protect Randall Haight, if and when he came forward, because I had the feeling that the rule of blood was about to be invoked. Engel was in Pastor’s Bay because he believed that Anna Kore’s disappearance might be a consequence of her uncle’s criminality. Even if it wasn’t, he would expect her uncle to try to involve himself regardless. That was the rule of blood: Blood came before everything. I also repeated to Aimee my earlier ultimatum, based on the pedophiliac nature of the photos received by Haight and on Anna Kore’s age: Haight needed to confirm that he was willing to talk to the police, and he needed to do so quickly. Aimee was angry at having a gun put to her head. She asked me to give her a couple of hours, and I agreed.

‘And what about those text messages?’ said Aimee.

‘There have been no more,’ I said.

‘Are you going to tell the police about them? They contain serious allegations about one of the principals in the investigation.’

I noticed that she was careful not to use names.

‘Not yet,’ I said.

‘One rule for our client, and one rule for you, right?’ she said, and hung up.

Tommy Morris had taken a bus from Logan after killing Joey Tuna, and stayed the night at an inn in Newburyport, eating in his room, watching television, thinking of what he had done to Joey, of what he had ordered done to Oweny Farrell and how it had not come to pass. He couldn’t figure out how the cops had got to Oweny so fast, but it didn’t matter. Joey Tuna was dead, and it was only in the quiet of the inn that Tommy felt the impact of the enormity of what he had done. There would be no forgiveness, no possibility of a rapprochement. He was a doomed man now, and they would unite to hunt him down. Joey’s uncle would demand it. Honor would demand it. Sound practice would demand it.

But his niece was still missing. In a way, this had begun with her. Not only was he a man whose business had collapsed, and who now faced a hostile takeover from a competitor; he could not even protect his own family. His sister had fled from him. He had driven her away. He loved her, but he had forced her from his sight. She and his niece were the only surviving blood that meant anything to him. He would not leave it to the cops or the hated feds to search for the lost girl. He knew now that Joey and Oweny had not been responsible for her disappearance. She had not been a pawn in the game that they were playing.

Tommy liked chess, so the analogy pleased him. He had only three pieces left on the board but he refused to concede, even as all potential for movement was being limited by the forces arrayed against him. He had his knight, Dempsey; his rook, Ryan; and himself, the trapped king. He played with combinations of moves on the little travel set that he carried with him everywhere, deliberately allowing his own forces to be routed until he was reduced to these three – king, knight, rook – and he took his inability to secure victory not as a rebuke but as a challenge. He stayed awake all night, moving and thinking, and only when dawn came did he allow himself to sleep.

He had a throwaway cell phone, and with it he stayed in touch with Dempsey. He didn’t tell him where he was, just advised him to take Ryan and get out of town. He needed more time to think, to play, to test the moves.

Later that evening he summoned Dempsey and Ryan to him, and the three men headed north.

At the same time, two other men were also drawing nearer to their northern destination. Music played in the car, a subdued yet intricate classical piece that at first hearing appeared to consist only of the same extended phrase repeated, but on closer listening gradually revealed tiny yet significant differences and developments. It was a song of humility and wonder, a wordless ode to the Divine.

‘How much longer?’ asked the passenger. Angel’s dark curly hair had less gray than his years merited, and his face had fewer lines than his sufferings might have earned. He wore a Big-Bam-Boom era Hall & Oates T-shirt, boot-cut jeans that were a size too big for him, and a pair of designer yellow-and-turquoise sneakers that he had bought for almost nothing in an outlet. The sneakers had a certain rarity value, mainly because the company responsible for their design had realized its terrible mistake in creating them almost as soon as they saw the light of day, and quickly discontinued them when it became clear that their likely customer base consisted solely of the mentally ill, blind people with cruel friends, and, had they been able to put a name on him, this man, who was neither mentally ill nor blind but merely unusual in a great many ways.

Beside him, driving with his eyes barely open, was Louis, who had long been shaving tight his own graying locks, but not in any effort to hide the aging process, not if his beard was taken into account. His suit was gray, his shirt white, his knitted wool tie black. His shoes gleamed.

‘How much longer?’ said Angel again.

Louis checked the dashboard. ‘Another hour.’

‘Of this? You have to be kidding me. The tune hasn’t changed since it started. It’s like a really quiet car alarm for nervous people.’

‘No, another hour to Boston.’

‘Great. In the meantime, can we play something else?’

‘No.’

‘I’m bored.’

‘What are you, nine years old? Shut the fuck up. Go to sleep.’

‘I did sleep. This put me to sleep. Then I woke up, and it was still playing. I thought I’d died and gone to hell’s waiting room.’

‘It’s not the same piece.’

‘It sounds like the same piece. This guy Arthur Part is running a scam.’

‘That’s Arvo Pärt. You are a philistine, man.’

‘Yeah, the Hungarian.’

‘Estonian.’

‘Just turn it off. I swear, the hillbilly shit was better than this.’

‘You complained that that all sounded the same too.’

‘It did, but at least it had words, and it was too annoying to be dull. I hear any more of this and we’ll have to get an elevator put in the car.’

‘Maybe some of those inspirational pictures as well, like they have in the offices of companies that are about to go under,’ said Louis. ‘You know, “Let Your Imagination Soar,” with a photograph of an eagle, or “Teamwork,” with those meerkat rat things.’

‘A dung beetle,’ said Angel. ‘A picture of a dung beetle, and “Eat Shit: You’ve Been Retrenched.” I hate that word “retrenched.” At least “redundant” is honest. “Let go” is honest. “Fired” is honest. “Retrenched” is just a way to sugar the pill, like undertakers refusing to use the word “death” and talking about “passing on” instead, or doctors telling you that you have a “condition” when what they really mean is you’re riddled with cancer.’

‘It’s from the French,’ said Louis. ‘Retrenching is digging a second line of defense. It means that you’ve been cut off again.’

‘What does that have to do with being fired?’

‘Literally? Nothing, I guess.’

‘See?’

‘No. Why, you worried about your future?’

‘Yeah, it gets shorter every day. That fucking music makes it seem longer, though.’

‘It’s nearly done.’ The piece concluded. ‘There, see? You want to spoil anything else?’

‘Why, you got something else worth spoiling?’

‘I put a load of discs in the player before we left.’

‘What’s up next?’

‘Brian Eno, Music for Airports.’

‘I don’t know it. Is it loud?’

‘Louder than Arvo Pärt.’

‘Silence is louder than Arvo Pärt.’

They drove on. The music commenced. It was not loud. It was not loud at all.

‘You’re killing me,’ moaned Angel. ‘You’re killing me softly…’

The hunters were gathering.

Boston’s war was moving north.

Hunting season was about to begin.

21

Louis and Angel came to the Bear shortly before closing. I hadn’t worked there for a while, and Dave Evans, the owner, seemed to be getting on fine without me, a fact that I tried not to take personally. Also, Aimee was paying me well, and like a good squirrel, I’d been carefully storing away enough nuts to see me through winter and beyond. But I liked the buzz of the place, and I’d never felt that working behind a bar was a dishonorable profession, particularly somewhere like the Bear where there was little tolerance for jackasses, and enough cops and repo men dotted around to ensure that any misbehavior would be frowned upon, if not actively discouraged if it persisted. Even without the presence of the law, the Bear was well able to handle the rare difficulties that arose. This was a neighborhood bar, an escape for a couple of hours, and the rules, though unwritten, were understood by nearly all.

‘How’s the Denny Kraus thing working out?’ Dave asked me, as I juggled separate checks from a bunch of genial New Yorkers who had left their capacity for simple division at the state line.

‘He’s still denying that he’s crazy.’

‘They have met him, right? Denny Kraus came out of the womb with an extra hole in his head. When he stands in a draft, you can hear it whistle.’

‘The judge knows he’s crazy. The prosecution knows he’s crazy. Even his own lawyer knows he’s crazy.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘That he was crazy.’

‘It’s unanimous, then.’

‘Except for Denny.’

‘What does he know? He’s crazy. Thank God he didn’t shoot anyone in here.’

‘Why, you want to be the first one who does?’

‘Absolutely. On the day I retire, I’m taking some of the chefs down. The wait staff I’ll spare. I always liked them.’ He looked over my shoulder as I sorted the checks. ‘Split check?’

‘Yep. Five of them.’

‘It’s a hundred bucks. It divides evenly.’

‘I know.’

Dave scowled at the New Yorkers. ‘We need a stricter door policy,’ he said, and trotted off to see if any of the kitchen crew needed to be reminded of how Dave hoped to celebrate his retirement.

Aimee had left a message on my cell phone informing me that Randall Haight had finally decided to come clean about his past and its unwelcome intrusion into his new life. He would present himself at Aimee’s office the next day, and she planned to inform the state police of her client’s availability before she left the office, although she had decided not to give them his name in advance. I agreed that we should meet up to discuss our plans for the interview after the Bear closed for business.

Haight’s decision to talk to the police was still the right one, in my view, even leaving aside any concerns about Anna Kore. As a sole operator, I didn’t have the resources to do what he wanted me to do, not under the circumstances. The furor surrounding Anna meant that I couldn’t do what I would usually have done, which was to talk to people, including, as discreetly as possible, Haight’s clients, local folk, even the cops. It could have been done without letting them know the specific nature of the harassment, and in time I was confident that I could have closed in on the person or persons responsible.

But, as the coffee shop incident had revealed, Anna’s disappearance meant that anyone nosing around Pastor’s Bay would immediately attract the attention of the police, and no independent investigation would be permitted. In a way, it was possible that by speaking to the police Haight would free me up to work more effectively on his behalf, assuming I could cut a deal with law enforcement that would allow me to nose around as long as I fed back any relevant information to them.

Angel and Louis appeared shortly after we called last orders. I had warned Dave that some friends might be arriving late in the evening, and he’d promised to make sure they were looked after, but even he seemed a little taken aback when they arrived. Maybe it was Angel’s sneakers, or Louis’s beard, or a combination thereof, but Dave froze for an instant, as though he had somehow been assigned the role of greeting the first extraterrestrial visitors to Earth and had just realized the possible personal consequences involved. Angel raised a hand in greeting, and I was about to acknowledge it when a figure appeared at the bar. I allowed my raised hand to rest just below my neck, two fingers pointing to my shoulder. It was a sign that Angel, Louis, and I had agreed upon shortly after they first began helping me out: Keep your distance. They disappeared into one of the back rooms, but not before Angel had a quiet word in Dave’s ear, presumably to say that he was not to remind me of their arrival, and to bring some beer.

Three stools had freed up at the bar, and the center one was now occupied by Special Agent Robert Engel. He wore a jacket and jeans, and a crisp white shirt open at the neck.

‘Dress-down day at Center Plaza, Agent Engel?’ I said.

‘I’m trying to blend in with the locals.’

‘I could find you a Portland Pirates shirt, or a moose-antler hat.’

‘Or you could just get me a drink: Dewar’s, on the rocks.’

I poured him a generous measure, and he put a twenty on the bar.

‘It’s on me,’ I said. ‘Take it as a reminder of what common hospitality looks like.’

‘Still sore about your time in the Pastor’s Bay visitors’ suite?’

‘Psychologically and physically. Those chairs weren’t made for comfort.’

‘It could have been worse, although I hear the county jail is nice.’

‘Maybe we could arrange a tour.’

‘Even without one, I guarantee that it’s nicer than a federal holding cell.’

‘Is that a threat, Agent Engel?’

‘I prefer Special Agent Engel, although I admit that it’s a mouthful. And, no, it’s not a threat. I don’t believe you respond very well to threats. With you, I reckon it’s carrots all the way, not sticks. Is there a place where we can talk?’

I nodded to Dave to let him know that I was done. Already, the bar’s clientele was starting to drift home. I gestured toward one of the booths in the corner, as far away from Angel and Louis as possible, then poured myself a cup of coffee from the pot and joined Engel.

He was probably my age but his face was unlined, and if there were gray strands in his blond hair, they were well hidden. His mouth was very thin, his lips a horizontal cut in his face, his eyes a washed out gray-blue. In an adversarial situation, he would cut a forbidding figure. My guess was that he didn’t have many friends.

Boo-hoo.

‘So,’ he said, ‘it appears that despite your driving a flash muscle car around a small Maine town Chief Allan has yet to discover the identity of your client. He is dogged, though. Pretty soon he’ll be down on his hands and knees examining tire tracks.’

I could have told him there and then that Randall Haight was about to make himself known to the police, but there would have been no percentage in it for me. It was better to listen, and wait, and see what I could get him to reveal for little or no cost.

‘I had no reason then to believe that my client’s difficulties were linked to the Anna Kore case. I explained that during my conversation with Detective Walsh, the details of which I’m sure he passed on to you.’

‘Most of them. He was distinctly rattled when he left. I got the impression he might have said something to you that he subsequently regretted. You do have a way of getting under people’s skin, I’ll give you that. I imagine it makes you good at what you do, although at some risk to your own personal safety. I bet you’ve picked up some cuts and bruises along the way.’

‘I’m a fast healer.’

‘Lucky for you. Some of those who crossed you have been less fortunate. Do you know that you’re flagged on our system?’

‘Yes, I do. And you knew that I was aware of it, otherwise you wouldn’t have asked the question.’

‘It’s very interesting. You’ve led a charmed life.’

‘Really? You know, sometimes it doesn’t seem that way to me, and the FBI is not blameless in that regard.’

Engel made a minute adjustment to his features in an approximation of sorrow. ‘That was an unfortunate choice of words. I apologize. What I do recognize is that, your occasionally lawless nature and periodic poor judgment apart, your actions have generally contributed to the removal of certain unwanted elements from our society. We have that in common, even down to the sometimes lawless nature and errors of judgment. I have some questions for you. They’re general, and they shouldn’t impinge upon any requirements of client confidentiality, but they’ll enable us to move forward in our conversation and, indeed, in our relationship.’

‘Do you talk like that to all of your dates?’

‘Yes.’

‘How’s that working out for you?’

‘Not so well.’

‘Hard to believe.’

‘Isn’t it?’

He took a sip of his whisky and bared his teeth at the taste, like a rat testing the air.

‘Is your investigation ongoing?’ he asked.

‘It is.’

‘Are you likely to be a continuing presence in Pastor’s Bay as a consequence?’

‘Probably.’

‘How convinced are you that your client’s interests are not connected to the Anna Kore case?’

I paused. The bargaining was about to begin.

‘Uncertain.’

‘That’s not what you told Detective Walsh.’ He practically wagged his finger at me and added ‘tut-tut.’

‘I’ve modified it since then. That’s why I used the past tense when you brought the subject up earlier. I had no reason to believe there was a connection. I’ve become more open-minded since then.’

‘On what basis?’

‘Pastor’s Bay is a small town. My client’s difficulties are, well, personal rather than professional in nature. They pertain to an incident in his youth. I’m starting to think that it might be wise for him to approach the police about them. By doing so, he may at least rule out one avenue of investigation for you, and perhaps even point you in a useful direction. But I base that only on a dislike of coincidence, and nothing more.’

‘Have you made this opinion known to the client and, indeed, to his lawyer?’

‘My change in position is relatively recent, but I feel that both would be inclined to listen to me, and to act on my advice, if I made it known.’ I’d been hanging out too much with Aimee Price. I sounded like an attorney. ‘There is also the matter of ensuring that the client’s right to confidentiality is respected, and his safety is assured.’

‘Why would his safety be in question?’

‘A young girl is missing. There are newspaper reporters around, and TV cameras. Sometimes people jump to conclusions.’

‘We’re talking to a lot of people. Their faces haven’t appeared on TV, or in the papers. No harm has come to them. Local residents have been interviewed, and no suspicion has fallen on them among their neighbors.’

‘Well, maybe it’s not the locals that concern me.’

Engel bared his teeth again, but this time there was no whisky involved.

‘What do you know?’ he said.

‘I know that there’s a connection between Anna Kore and Tommy Morris, late of Somerville, and possibly an associate of “the Hill.”’

‘Well, well. You have been busy.’

‘You gave it away by your presence in Pastor’s Bay. You should have worn a mask.’

‘Noted,’ said Engel. ‘Anna’s his niece, as you may or may not be aware by now. Valerie Kore, née Morris, is Tommy Morris’s significantly younger sister and only sibling. He took care of her after their parents died in a car accident when she was four, assisted by assorted aunts and relatives, but they’ve been estranged for a long time.’

‘Ever since someone put Ronald Doheny in the ground, and then forgot where he was buried?’

Engel shrugged. ‘Doheny was a runner for Morris, who was trying to carve out his own patch after Whitey went on the run. Doheny screwed up. He was a loudmouth, he crossed a customer, and the aggrieved customer sold him out to the cops. He was facing a long stretch inside, and pressure was put on him to cut a deal and turn informant. He made bail, then vanished. Missing, presumed crab food.’

‘Did Morris know that Doheny was seeing his sister?’

‘Not at first, but it didn’t take him long to find out who had impregnated her. At that point, he probably wanted to kill Doheny, but would have settled for him doing the right thing.’

‘And then Doheny gets pinched, and someone decides that he’s unreliable and needs to be silenced.’

‘Tommy Morris killed him, or had him killed. That’s what we heard, although the killing would have been sanctioned from higher up. Soon after, his sister left Boston. She drifted around, but she kept straight. She is, by all accounts, a good citizen. No drugs, no booze, no contact with her brother and his people. She worked in Philly for a while, met a guy there, married him on the quiet. Her brother didn’t know.’

‘Alekos Kore.’

‘Right again. They’re now separated, but she hasn’t sought a divorce.’

‘She wanted to hold on to his name,’ I said. ‘If her brother comes looking for her, she’d be Valerie Kore, not Valerie Morris. It wouldn’t keep her safe if he started digging, but it would be enough to evade casual inquiries.’

‘Even if he did find her, and we think he’s been keeping tabs on her, psychologically she’d left the Morris name behind.’

‘And you knew who she was because you’d been keeping tabs on her all this time.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Does her brother know that his niece is missing?’

‘Her brother is in trouble. He’s made some bad business decisions, and we’ve been fortunate in some of our efforts against him. His days are numbered.’

‘You haven’t answered the question. Does Tommy Morris know?’

I could feel that Engel wanted to look away, but he managed not to break his gaze. Still, he was a mass of ‘tells.’ Engel was concealing truths.

‘We’ve tried to keep the girl’s relationship to Morris quiet, and her mother says that she hasn’t been in contact with him.’

‘Do you believe her?’

‘We did at the start. Now we’re not so sure. She’s desperate, perhaps desperate enough to turn to her brother for help.’

‘So he knows?’

‘He knows. Do you read the papers? A man named Joseph Toomey, known to his friends as Joey Tuna, was found shot to death in a fish market in Dorchester yesterday. One of his employees left his car keys at work, went back to retrieve them, and saw the office light burning. There was a lot of blood. Two shots, fatal but not immediately so – he’d been left to die. Joey was the ambassador for the Irish mob in Boston. He was the go-between, the kingmaker, the problem solver. He was untouchable. On the surface, he was neutral. In reality, he sided with the status quo; all that mattered was the efficient running of business, which was good for everybody. As Tommy Morris became more of a liability, he threatened that stability. A decision was made that it might be best if he were to keep Ronald Doheny company, except Tommy went to ground. Most of his men have abandoned him, but he still has a couple of loyal followers. They met with Joey on the day of his killing. Apparently, they wanted to know if he had sanctioned the kidnapping of Anna Kore in order to draw her uncle out. Joey denied it. Then he was killed.’

‘You know who pulled the trigger?’

‘Officially, no. Unofficially, we believe it was Tommy Morris himself.’

‘Unusual. You’d think he’d palm off a job like that to his people.’

This time, a response flickered. It was like the briefest ripple on the surface of an otherwise smooth pond where an unseen creature had flicked a fin. There was something there, something interesting.

‘I told you, he doesn’t have many people left,’ said Engel. ‘It could be that it was personal for him. The ones who’ve been around for a while, they learn to bury their feelings deep. They hold on to the grudges, then wait for a time when they’re justified in making a move.’

‘You seem very well informed. You have a wire somewhere?’

‘We have lots of wires. That’s why we’re the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not the Local Bureau of Supposition.’ He was settled again. That brief flash of uncertainty was gone. ‘It’s also why, if you’re concerned for the safety of your client, we can guarantee that he’ll be looked after. We can put men on him, or move him out of town for a while. It is a “he,” right?’

I did a little cheek-puffing and imitation weighing up of potentially grave consequences, then allowed that the client was indeed male.

‘He doesn’t want to leave town,’ I said. ‘In fact, that’s something of a deal breaker for him. He has a nice life in Pastor’s Bay. He wants to hold on to it. And I don’t want federal agents on him. Half the people in here probably smelled you as law the minute you arrived, and the other half didn’t have to because they were lawmen themselves. If someone like Tommy Morris is going to be sniffing around this, then I want as little attention as possible drawn to our client. If it comes down to that, I’ll look after his protection myself.’

‘You sure about that?’

The straight line became a jagged scar: a smile, assuming you didn’t look for warmth or reassurance in a smile, or anything resembling a decent human emotion.

‘Go on. I’m listening.’

‘Tommy Morris has left the reservation, and we believe he’s heading this way.’

‘All the more reason to keep my own client safely off the board.’

‘It’s your call. When can we expect to talk with this elusive gentleman?’

‘I want more.’

‘Really?’

‘I want freedom to investigate on his behalf. In return, I’ll share any information of relevance with Walsh.’

‘He won’t like you being on his turf. Neither will Allan.’

‘They’ll just have to hold their noses.’

‘I’ll talk with them and see what I can do.’

‘I’m sure you can convince them, you silver-tongued devil, you.’

‘And in return we get access to your client?’

‘I’ll get in touch with his lawyer.’

‘That shouldn’t be hard, since she just walked through the door.’

I turned and spotted Aimee. She hesitated when she saw that I was with someone. I beckoned her forward, and introduced her.

‘Aimee, this is Special Agent Robert Engel of the FBI’s Boston field office. Special Agent Engel, Aimee Price. Special Agent Engel likes to be called “Special Agent Engel,” Aimee. It’s a matter of some pride.’

Aimee looked confused but said nothing. Special Agent Engel smiled in the way an executioner might smile at the condemned man’s last good gag just before he dropped the ax.

‘Special Agent Engel and I were just discussing client safety, but we’re all done now,’ I said.

Engel rose, and thanked me for his drink. ‘I’ll let discussions commence,’ he said. ‘I look forward to hearing from you both very soon.’

He left more than half of his whisky on the bar and headed for the door.

‘He didn’t finish his drink,’ said Aimee.

‘I think he only asked for it so as to seem more human.’

‘He certainly needs something.’

‘Agreed. When he looks in the mirror, his reflection probably wants to punch him in the face.’

‘What did you discuss?’

‘I let him wear me down to the point where I felt that perhaps our client should present himself for interview, and in return he told me more than I knew before, and maybe a little more than he wanted me to know, because he believed that he was getting the better part of the deal. It may be that he’ll also persuade Walsh and Allan to let me operate on Haight’s behalf, or just to give me enough room to breathe.’

‘So you didn’t feel obliged to let him know that Haight had already made his decision? That’s almost, but not quite, dishonest. Are you sure you didn’t train to be a lawyer?’

‘I’d have flunked insincerity.’

The Bear was now almost empty, and the stragglers were being encouraged to make their way home, or at least somewhere else that wasn’t the Bear. I poured Aimee a glass of white wine, put it on my tab, and said, ‘I have a treat for you. What are we missing here?’

‘Good company.’

‘Good company. Exactly!’ I placed my hand on the small of her back and steered her toward the back of the bar. ‘But in the absence of it, I have some people I’d like you to meet instead.’

It had been months since I had seen them. Louis’s new beard was certainly striking, I had to give him that. They both stood as we approached.

‘Aimee Price, I’d like you to meet Angel. And this is his close friend, Old Father Time…’

22

They checked into a suicide motel just out of Belfast, the kind of place that Dempsey always associated with estranged fathers, commission-only salesmen, and hookers who kept the lights down low so the johns couldn’t get a good look at their faces. It had probably been built in the fifties, but it was too ugly and dilapidated to merit the description ‘retro,’ and the only restoration job worth doing on it would have involved restoring the lot on which it stood to a condition of vacancy. It struck Dempsey that he was growing disturbingly used to staying in such places, to eating without looking at his food, his eyes constantly scouting for familiar faces in unfamiliar places, for the car that disgorged a passenger while the driver kept the motor running, for the gaze that lingered just a moment too long, for the approaching figure and the moving hand, for the sight of the gun that would, in time, surely take his life.

No wonder he was plagued with stomach pains and constipated to hell and back. He could now hardly recall a time when he was not fearful, not wary. He had to force himself to remember beery afternoons in Murphy’s Law at First and Summer, in the shadow of the big generating station, and Philly-steak spring rolls in the Warren Tavern in Charlestown, or just sitting with a coffee and a newspaper in Buddy’s on Washington Street in Somerville, the old diner’s elevated position giving him a sense of inviolability, of safety. All gone now, all gone, and he would never be able to return to them. Instead, there were just anonymous rooms in dumps like this one, rooms that always smelled of smoke despite the No Smoking signs, and food eaten out of paper and plastic, and the constant grinding ache in his guts.

Half of the cars and trucks in the motel’s parking lot were keeping Bondo in business, and the other half had problems that even Bondo couldn’t fix. He tried to figure out what these people were even doing here. Were they, like him, rootless persons, drifting men? The old woman in the office wore her glasses on a gold chain, and the fats in her body made liquid noises as she walked. She had tiny feet. Dempsey couldn’t understand how she managed to remain upright. She confirmed that she was happy to take cash for two rooms, on the grounds that ‘there weren’t never nothing worth stealing in them anyway,’ and therefore guarantees of credit were largely unnecessary. There was coffee available in the mornings from seven until nine, she told them, but Dempsey took one look at the stained pot, the dusty foam cups, the sachets of powdered creamer, and decided that he could wait until they found somewhere more appealing for a kick-start. Tommy paid for two nights, and told the woman that they might stay longer, ‘depending on how good the hunting is.’

‘We ain’t never full,’ she said. ‘We always got room.’

Dempsey took another look at the peeling paint in the reception area, at the snow-screened portable TV playing an inexplicably popular sitcom aimed at people who thought that a grown man living with his mother was the height of humor, at the sign warning that checkout time was ten a.m. (‘AND NO EXSEPTIONS!’), at the woman’s painted expression and barrel-like form, as though she were a living matryoshka doll capable of containing infinitely smaller but no less unwelcoming versions of herself, and decided not to comment on the motel’s apparently infinite capacity to absorb new guests.

There was music coming from a bar next door to the motel, and Dempsey asked if there was any chance of getting food there. The woman snorted.

‘They got pickles,’ she said, ‘but I wouldn’t go eatin’ ’em.’

Dempsey said that he’d pass. There was a sheaf of fast-food menus at the desk, so he grabbed a couple and brought them with him to the room that he and Ryan would share on the first floor, while Tommy took the adjoining room for himself.

‘I talk to you for a minute, Tommy?’ said Dempsey, as he allowed Ryan to enter the room ahead of him. Tommy nodded. He lit a cigarette and Dempsey indicated that they should walk a little farther into the lot, away from the main building. There were no stars in the sky, and Dempsey could feel the weight of the clouds, the sky itself pressing down on them. He had never felt more constricted, more hemmed in by forces both human and elemental.

Tommy had not informed them of what he planned to do before they picked him up in Newburyport, but Dempsey had guessed as soon as he told them to head north. They had passed most of the trip in silence, with not even the radio to distract them from their thoughts, Ryan in the passenger seat, Tommy stretched out in the back, sometimes dozing but mostly just staring into space. Now they were here, within striking distance of Pastor’s Bay.

‘You didn’t want to talk in front of Francis?’ said Tommy. Dempsey could smell stale sweat on Tommy, and there were stains on his pants. Tommy had always been an elegant man. Even at the worst of times, he kept himself neat and clean. The stale odor of him, his wrinkled clothes and unshaved face, troubled Dempsey more than what Tommy had done to Joey, and the aborted action he had ordered against Oweny’s crew.

‘No,’ said Dempsey. ‘I thought it should just be us two.’

‘You let him sit in on the meet with Joey Tuna?’

‘No.’

‘Anyone would think you didn’t trust him. Is there something you’d like to share with me?’

Again, Dempsey wished that he still smoked. It was becoming a kind of mantra. He felt that he had nothing to do with his hands, nothing to occupy them. He pushed them hard into his pockets for fear they would betray him, their movements revealing his barely restrained fear.

‘I got a lot of things on my mind,’ said Dempsey. ‘I don’t know where to start.’

‘Take your time. We got all night. I haven’t been sleeping so good, and I’m afraid to start popping pills.’

Tommy took a long drag on the cigarette and examined the glowing tip. It seemed to hypnotize him. He stared at it, unblinking, the other man forgotten, his face gray with stress and exhaustion. Dempsey wondered just how long it had been since Tommy Morris enjoyed an undisturbed night’s sleep. Uneasy lies the head, and all that. The only head that rested less easily was the one that would soon be detached from its body.

‘How did it come to this, Tommy?’ he said.

‘Huh?’ Tommy emerged from his daze. ‘Come to what?’

‘Us, here, living out of money taken from a shoebox. You ever thought about how it all fell apart so fast?’

‘Yeah, I thought about it.’

‘You come up with any answers?’

‘More questions. No answers. You?’

Dempsey chose his words carefully.

‘After the meet with Joey, I started thinking that maybe all of them had it in for you from the start, and not just Oweny. I mean, how long had Joey been stringing us along, claiming to be the middleman when he was secretly on Oweny’s side? And if Joey was whispering in Oweny’s ear he was doing it because it had been sanctioned from above, and he hadn’t just started last week, or last month. People had agreed on it. We started figuring we were unlucky, but the more I look at it the more I think that someone was talking out of turn.’

‘To the cops? The feds?’

‘Doesn’t have to be them. All this person needed to do was pass the word to Joey. We trusted him. We thought he was neutral. But he wasn’t. He never had been, not really. Joey could have used the information as he saw fit: an anonymous tip-off to the cops, a word to Oweny. Look at it: horses that were supposed to fall didn’t fall like they should have, and Joey laughed it off and told us that these things happen, that everybody took a hit on that one. Our couriers and dealers get picked up, and Joey tells us that the feds had a snitch in Florida, and he was looking to figure out who it was, and we weren’t the only ones who were concerned. We get a tip on a bond warehouse, and when we hit it there’s only a tenth of what we were told was there, and the cops are crawling all over us before we even get the truck out the gate. Joey told us that it was lousy information, that the Contadinos nearly lost a crew the same way, but I ask around and there’s no talk about the Contadinos pulling a warehouse job that went south. And we get cut out of deals that should have been shared: pads on construction, on concessions. Jobs are pulled, and we only find out about them after the fact. I look back on it now and it was an accumulation of small details, like we were being picked at, like we were slowly being eaten alive. Everyone else was making money, but not us.’

Tommy listened to all that he had to say, punctuating it with pulls on the cigarette. His right middle and index fingers were the burnt orange of a polluted sunset.

‘So who was the snitch?’

Dempsey shrugged. ‘I’m just saying. I could be wrong.’

‘You think it was Francis?’

Dempsey shook his head forcefully. ‘No, he’s a good kid. He’s just young, that’s all. And, you know, so many guys have drifted away. It could have been any of them or, you know, it could have been Joey himself, working to undermine you so that Oweny could take your place.’

‘If there even was a snitch.’

‘If there was,’ agreed Dempsey.

‘So, what else?’

‘Joey. I have to tell you, Tommy, I wasn’t expecting it. I never thought you’d go after him.’

‘It had to be done.’

‘Did it?’

‘I had to know for sure. I had to know that they didn’t have her.’

But that wasn’t why you killed him, thought Dempsey. That was why you went to see him, but not why you put him down. I always suspected that you hated him. I just never knew how much. Tommy had told him once that it was Joey who wanted Ronald Doheny dead. Tommy had argued for sparing him, because even if he was a braggart and a fool and a promiscuous little bastard who should have kept his hands to himself, he was still the father of his sister’s child. Joey wouldn’t hear of it, though. He wanted Doheny gone, and he wasn’t the only one. If Tommy wasn’t prepared to do it, then someone else would, but it would look bad for Tommy, and maybe people, important people, would start doubting his commitment to the cause. They might even wonder if Tommy, like Whitey before him, was snitching to the feds, selling out his associates to secure his own position. They might decide that Tommy wasn’t sound. Joey had put all of this to Tommy at the fish market after hours. He had shown Tommy the new backlit table in the butchering room, the sharp knives hanging clean in preparation for the next morning’s work. Fillets of fish could be placed on the backlight, Joey explained, revealing the presence of parasites in the flesh that could then be removed.

‘That’s what we’re doing now,’ said Joey. ‘We’re picking out the parasites. We’re taking the blade to them, and afterward the flesh, our flesh, will be clean. If in doubt, Tommy, you take it out. That’s the new rule. Don’t give anyone cause to doubt you, that’s my advice.’

So Tommy had killed Ronald Doheny, strangling him in a basement in Revere, and his sister had hated him for it, and Tommy had waited for the chance to avenge himself on Joey Tuna.

‘Look, I never trusted him, Tommy,’ said Dempsey. ‘Him, and his stink, and the way he talked at you, not with you, like he always knew more than you did. If a truck had hit him, I’d have sent the driver a fruit basket. If he’d been electrocuted, I’d have written a thank-you note to the power company. But I didn’t think that you’d kill him, Tommy, because they can’t let that go. Now they’ll keep coming after us until we’re done. Because of it, we got no cards left to play.’

Tommy finished the cigarette and flicked it toward the road, watching it flare briefly before it exploded on the ground and faded to nothing.

‘If you want to walk away, I understand,’ he said. ‘I won’t blame you for it.’

‘I don’t want to walk away,’ said Dempsey. ‘But I don’t want to die either.’

‘So what’s left?’

‘You don’t owe them, Tommy. You don’t owe any of them.’

They looked at each other, and Dempsey was aware that, for the second time in recent days, he was discussing the possibility of a monumental act of betrayal, the very act that he had intimated might have led to Tommy’s downfall. He tensed his abdomen, waiting to absorb the punch that might come, or the hand to the throat, or the gun beneath the chin and the oblivion that would follow. There had been times in the past weeks and months when he thought he might even have welcomed the peace that a bullet would bring. But Tommy didn’t make a move, and he didn’t look angry or even surprised. He even appeared to consider the possibility for a moment, then swat it away. For the first time, Dempsey truly understood that Tommy had resigned himself to what was to come. This garbage-strewn, weed-scarred parking lot was his Gethsemane. Only the thought of his niece was keeping him from facing his enemies directly and embracing their final judgment on him.

‘I can’t do that, Martin. You know I can’t.’ Gently, he laid a hand above Dempsey’s heart and tapped his finger in time to its beats. ‘And you can’t do it either. If you did, I’d make sure that I lived long enough to kill you myself. We’re not rats, Martin. Never that.’

Dempsey nodded sadly.

‘You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m frightened, I suppose.’

‘You don’t have to be frightened, Martin. We might get out of this yet. And if we don’t, well, I’ll be there with you at the end. You know that, don’t you?’

His hand moved from Dempsey’s breast to the back of his neck, his big palm cupping it fondly. There was no threat to it. It was a moment of contact between a father and a beloved, if sometimes troublesome, son, the older man letting the younger understand that he would guide him on the right path. Dempsey knew Tommy well, had learned to judge his moods and his silences, the cadences of his sentences and the meaning hidden in the pauses in his speech. He closed his eyes and smelled Tommy’s breath on his face, and the sweat from the journey, and the smoke on his hair and his clothes. Dempsey thought of his own father. How long had it been since he’d seen him: six, seven years? They had never been close, and his mother’s death had not brought them any closer. His father now lived somewhere outside Phoenix, in a house that he had bought with his second wife’s insurance money. The old man had outlived two of his women, and Dempsey believed that he might outlive one or two more. He was a hard man, but he drew women to him, drew them to him and then ground them down. Dempsey had never been to Phoenix. He wondered if he would ever make it now.

Tommy’s hand lifted. He patted Dempsey on the back.

‘Let’s go inside. It’s cold out here.’

‘I was going to order a pizza. I haven’t eaten since morning. You want something?’

‘No, I’m good.’

‘You should eat, Tommy. It’s not good for you to be starving yourself. You’ll need your strength. We’ll need your strength.’

‘You’re right, Martin. Let me know when it comes. Maybe I’ll grab a slice of yours.’

They walked back toward the motel. Ryan stood at the open door of his room. When he saw them coming, he went inside. Dempsey noticed how still the night was, how quiet. Their voices had probably carried back to Ryan. He was always curious, was Ryan. He was always listening. Who had said that to Dempsey once?

It came to him: Joey Tuna. Old Joey, who was trusted by everyone, or was said to be trusted by everyone, but trusted no one. Mr. Indispensable. Everybody’s friend. He was gone now, but he’d have his revenge, even from beyond the grave. Men would kill them in his name, mourning him publicly even as they expressed private relief at his passing, because a man who is everybody’s friend really has no friends at all.

‘How long will we stay here, Tommy?’ Dempsey asked as the two men parted.

‘Not long,’ said Tommy. ‘We’ll wait, and then we’ll move.’

‘What are we waiting for?’

‘A call. Just a call.’

Tommy went into his room, closing the door behind him, and Dempsey joined Ryan. He was now lying on one of the beds, flicking through the channels on the TV. The room was cleaner than Dempsey had expected. Everything looked worn, but he’d stayed in chain-hotel rooms that were worse. It was as if the office and the woman were a test, and the room the reward for passing it successfully, for not being taken in by appearances.

Ryan didn’t speak. Dempsey thought he might have been sulking.

‘I’m ordering,’ said Dempsey. ‘You hungry?’

Ryan shook his head. He’d found the same sitcom that the woman in the office had been watching. These shows were on some kind of perpetual loop, a domestic hell soundtracked by canned laughter. Dempsey had no time for any of them.

The phone in the room allowed local calls only, free of charge. Dempsey ordered a sixteen-inch margarita pizza, convinced that, once the food came, Ryan and Tommy would eat their share. But when it arrived Ryan was already asleep, and Tommy’s room was dark. Dempsey knocked softly at the door, but there was no reply. He ate alone, the sitcom playing silently on the TV, lost in the pointlessness of it all. When he had eaten his fill, he slipped from the room and walked to the nearby bar. It was not dissimilar to the motel: unprepossessing from the outside but simple and cozy within. There was a pool table to the right of the door, and a CD jukebox to the left was playing Waiting for Columbus. All the tables were unoccupied, but three men and a woman were seated at the bar. The woman had a hand on the thighs of the men at either side of her, and the third man’s knee was held between her legs. She smiled at Dempsey as he entered, as if inviting him to find a way to join in, and he smiled back before taking a seat as far away from the group as possible, with a pillar blocking their view of him. The bartender told him that he would be closing up soon, but nobody seemed in any hurry to get going, and the lovers had an assortment of liquor and beer racked up, the bottles still fresh from the cooler.

‘Just one for the road,’ he said. He put a ten and a five on the bar, ordered a boilermaker, and told the bartender to keep the change for his trouble. When the bartender went to the well, Dempsey stopped him and told him to make it with Jack’s from the call.

‘Don’t make much difference if you’re dropping it in a beer,’ said the bartender.

‘It does to me.’

‘It’s your money.’

‘Sorry that it’s coming out of your tip.’

‘Don’t be. It’s my bar.’

He was in his sixties. Twin scars ran the length of both arms from the elbows to the wrists. He saw Dempsey looking at them and said, ‘Motorcycle.’

‘I figured unsuccessful suicide, but I’ll buy the bike story.’

The bartender chuckled. It sounded like mud bubbling up from a hot pool.

‘You staying at the motel?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You meet Brenda?’

The question brought a burst of laughter from the group at the other end of the bar.

‘I don’t know. What does she look like?’

‘Old gal in the office. Glasses. Big, big woman.’

‘Yeah, I met her. She said you had pickles, but that I shouldn’t eat them.’

This brought more chuckles from the bartender, and more gales of laughter from the lovers.

‘Ayuh, pickles,’ said the bartender, and wiped a tear of mirth from his eyes. ‘That Brenda.’

With that, he left Dempsey to his drink. Dempsey couldn’t see any pickles. It troubled him only slightly. ‘Old Folks Boogie’ was followed by ‘Time Loves a Hero.’ The bartender talked to the group at the bar. They ordered more drinks, and he served them, even though they had plenty still left from the earlier rounds, his warning about the imminence of closure seemingly forgotten. They sent up another boilermaker to Dempsey, and he made the obligatory polite conversation with them by stretching his head around the pillar, but they could tell that he wanted to be left to himself, and they were having too good a time to resent him for it. ‘Mercenary Territory’ came on, and Lowell George sang about being qualmless and sinking, and the second boilermaker tasted bitter to Dempsey, although he had seen the shot being poured and knew that there was nothing wrong with it. He went to the restroom. When he came back, Ryan was standing at the bar. He was tense, and that tension had communicated itself to the rest of those present, because the level of conversation had dropped, and the woman was no longer as intimate with the men as she had been. Dempsey could see the shape of the gun beneath Ryan’s shirt. He didn’t know if the others had noticed it. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

‘Take a seat,’ said Dempsey. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’ He called to the bartender. ‘We good for one more for my friend?’

The bartender glanced pointedly at his watch but didn’t refuse the order. Ryan pulled up a stool, but he didn’t look at Dempsey. He just stared straight ahead.

‘What are you doing?’ said Ryan.

‘What does it look like I’m doing? I’m having a drink.’

‘I woke up and you weren’t there.’

‘What are we, married?’

He sipped his drink, trying to look unconcerned, but his hand trembled.

‘You take your phones with you?’

‘No, I left them in the room. What’s it to you?’

The bartender arrived with another boilermaker, and Dempsey put a fifty on the bar and told him to buy everyone a round, and one for himself. The bartender just took the payment for Ryan’s drink and returned Dempsey’s change.

‘I’m closing the register now,’ he said.

‘We won’t be here long,’ said Dempsey.

‘Sometimes the cops come by,’ said the bartender, and Dempsey knew that he had seen Ryan’s gun.

‘I understand,’ said Dempsey. ‘Thanks for letting us know.’

The bartender drifted away.

Ryan didn’t mix the shot but drank it separately from the beer.

‘Did you use the phone here?’ he asked.

‘What’s wrong with you? What kind of question is that?’

Ryan’s back was ramrod straight. He still hadn’t looked at Dempsey.

‘I asked you a question. Did you use the phone?’

‘No, I didn’t use the phone. You want to check with the bartender? Why don’t you dust it for fingerprints? Jesus, Frankie, what’s the problem?’

Some of the pressure eased from Ryan, and Dempsey realized that Ryan wasn’t angry, he was scared. Dempsey could feel him trembling as he laid a hand on his arm and said, ‘Talk to me.’

‘I thought you’d run out on me,’ said Ryan. ‘I thought you’d sold us out.’

‘What? How could you think that? I’ve never given you cause to think that way.’

‘I heard you talking to Tommy. I didn’t hear all of it, just some of it. You were talking about a rat, and how Joey Tuna didn’t like having me around. It was like you didn’t trust me, like you didn’t think I was sound.’

How had their conversation carried so far? Dempsey wondered. How much had Ryan heard in recent times?

‘I know you’re sound, Frankie. You’ve always been a stand-up guy. I know we’ve had our differences, but I’ve never doubted you.’

‘I wasn’t the rat, Martin. I swear it.’

‘I never believed you were. Look, I don’t even know if there was a rat. I was just thinking out loud.’

Now Ryan turned to him. He was like a child, thought Dempsey, a child with a gun who dreamed of killing other children.

‘Can I ask you something, Martin, without you getting angry?’

‘Sure you can.’

‘And you can’t take it personal, and you can’t lie.’

‘I promise you, I won’t.’

‘Were you the one who talked to Oweny and Joey Tuna?’

The enormity of the question nearly floored Dempsey. He couldn’t even begin to conceive of how Ryan had found the balls to ask it. Ryan was asking him if he had ratted them out to Oweny and Joey. And if he said ‘Yes’, what then? Was Ryan going to pull out a gun and kill him? What was the kid thinking?

But Dempsey knew what Ryan was thinking. He knew because he was under the same pressures, and had made the same connections. By killing Joey, Tommy had killed them all. None of them would be allowed to walk away if they stuck together, but one of them might live a little longer if he sold them out to Oweny and the rest. All it would take was a phone call, and when the time came, and the motel doors were kicked in, and the guns roared and the blood flowed, they might remember that you were the guy who gave up Tommy Morris, and maybe they would stick to the deal they had promised you.

Maybe.

‘No, Frankie, I never talked to them. My mother’s gone, but I swear it on my father’s life, and on my own. I never gave them anything.’

Ryan looked deep into his eyes, then turned away again.

‘I believe you,’ he said. ‘I’d know if you were lying.’

Dempsey realized that he had been holding his glass too tightly, ready to use it on Ryan if it seemed that his fears were about to get the better of him.

‘I had to ask,’ said Ryan. Even though he thought Dempsey was an animal, Ryan knew that he represented the best hope of survival for Tommy and himself, because the men who were coming for them would be worse even than Dempsey. What mattered was only that Dempsey was sound.

‘Finish your drink,’ said Dempsey, and the two men sat together in silence until the lights dimmed, and the bar emptied, and the bartender disappeared, and there was only themselves and Lowell George singing ‘Willin’,’ all of them out on the road late, all of them waiting for a sign to move on.

The traffic was sparse when at last they left the bar. They paid it no heed, and so neither of them noticed the car parked in the shadows across the street, or the occupants of the vehicle: a couple in their twenties, the horse-faced woman in the driver’s seat no longer frightened and weeping as she had seemed in the Wanderer, her male companion beside her dressed in khakis and a polo shirt, not a single hair on his head out of place, each of them expressionlessly watching the progress of the two men.

23

Randall woke again to the silence of the house. He was worried. He didn’t understand. The girl had still not returned. Where was she? He listened, half expecting to hear the sound of the television from downstairs. She wasn’t supposed to watch it after ten p.m., but sometimes she did, and unless he was in a bad mood he would not fight her over it. But there was no noise, only the sound of his own breathing in the room.

There were times when he would play music late at night: Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Chopin. He had a collection of vinyl, and a good record player. He believed that classical music in particular sounded better on vinyl: warmer, more human. He had always wanted to be a pianist, but the handful of lessons he had taken since his release had revealed to him his singular lack of talent and application. He could have persisted, he supposed, but to what end? He could never approach even an iota of the genius of Ashkenazy or Zimerman, the great interpreter of Chopin, better even than Rubinstein. So he contented himself with admiring the greatness of others, and the girl was permitted to listen too, if she chose. Mostly, though, she tended to slip away. She resented his indulgences, resented anything that gave him peace or pleasure. Yet he forgave her her moods, because she was at once so young and so old.

Where was she? He wanted to know. This was not how it was supposed to end between them.

The girl had first appeared to him as he sat in one of the holding cells at the station house. They had isolated him from the other prisoners for his own security. The next day he was to be transported to juvie, and would remain there until his trial. Bail would not be applied for. The nature of the crime forbade it, but it was felt that the boys would probably be safer away from their homes anyway. Although Selina Day’s killers had not been identified, even the birds in the trees called their names. One of Selina’s aunts was interviewed on television, and said that she could find no forgiveness in her heart for those who had taken her niece from the world, children though they were themselves. When asked if she spoke for all of Selina’s family, she replied tartly that she spoke for ‘all good people.’

Selina’s mother made no comment on the apprehension of her daughter’s killers. It would not bring her little girl back, and the ages of the boys involved had only added to the horror of what had been done. The media was discouraged from approaching her as the black community closed protectively around the Day family, and thus there were no cameras to witness a woman of middle age approach the Day house and knock on the door; nor were there microphones to pick up her words as she introduced herself as the mother of William Lagenheimer. No reporter waited, pen in hand, to record his impressions of the scene as Selina Day’s mother reached out to the older woman and slowly, softly embraced her, children now lost to both, the pair united in grief.

After the initial shock of discovery and confession, the boy had accepted his situation with equanimity, even stoicism. Later, the psychologists and the social workers would express surprise at that fact, and would make assumptions about his character based on it, but they were wrong in all that they thought. Just as he would later feel no sadness at coming to terms with his limitations as a pianist, and would refuse to rail at the Fates for not gifting him the talents that he desired, so too he found a strength within himself following the girl’s death. Regret, he now knew, was a useless emotion, the poor cousin of guilt. As a boy, he would not have been able to couch his view in those terms, yet he had instinctively understood it to be true. If he was sorry for what they had done to the girl, it was only because of all that had resulted from it.

The cell was very warm, and the bed was hard. A drunk nearby had shouted at him until one of the policemen told him to shut up. The policeman had then checked on the boy. They had taken away his shoelaces and his belt. He didn’t know why, not then. The policeman asked the boy if he was okay, and he replied that, yes, he was. He requested some water, and it was brought to him in a paper cup. After that he was left alone, and the cells stayed quiet.

He had been trying to sleep, his head turned to the wall, when he smelled her. He knew it was she because something of her odor was still with him. He’d tried washing it from his hands, but it had lingered: cheap drugstore perfume, sickly and cloying. It had prevented him from eating the prison food, because that smelled of her too. With her dying, she had polluted him.

Now the smell was stronger, more pungent, and he felt a hand upon his back, pushing at him, demanding his attention. He didn’t want to look, though. To look would be to acknowledge the reality of her presence, to give her power over him, and he didn’t want that, so he closed his eyes tightly and pretended to be asleep, hoping she would go away.

But she didn’t. Instead, her fingers probed at him. She touched his eyes, and his ears, then stroked his cheek before forcing his lips apart. He tried to keep his teeth together, but his gorge was rising and he gagged. Now her hand was deep in his mouth, her fingertips on his tongue. He bit down on them, but the grip on his tongue grew stronger, and he was choking on his own vomit and the sweet-sour stink of her. With one hand buried in his hair, and the other holding his tongue, she made him face her, made him look upon what they had wrought.

She never spoke. She could not, for during the assault she had bitten off most of her own tongue.

He stared into her eyes, and she entered him, just as her attackers had once hoped to enter her. In that moment he was lost to her. She released her hold upon him, and kissed him, and he tasted the blood. A great lethargy came over him, and he fell into a deep sleep. When he woke she was gone, but she returned that night, and the next, and every night after. His only respite from her was during the hearing itself, and he came to welcome the tedium of it, the arguments and counterarguments, the testimony of experts, the milk and sandwiches and cookies that they gave him for lunch. His only wish was that his parents had not been there. They gave him no comfort, for he felt their shame at what their son had become.

In the evenings he would be returned to his new cell at juvie. They were called ‘rooms,’ but it was still a cell. A room you could leave when you chose to do so; a cell you could not. Sometimes, she would already be waiting for him there. He would smell her as he approached the cell, and his footsteps would slow, forcing the guard to steer him on, one hand on his arm, the other at his back. At other times, she would come only when dark had fallen, and he would wonder where she had been. They would not let him speak to his co-accused, so he could not ask him if the girl appeared to him as well, if she divided her time between them like a sluttish girlfriend who could not decide her favorite among her suitors. But, no, how could she be with them both? She spent every night with him. Whenever he woke, she was there. She was always there.

When he was almost eighteen they moved him to another facility, and she followed him. For a time, they made him share a cell, but that arrangement didn’t last long. His cellmate was older than him by ten years and smelled of sour milk. One of his eyes was smaller than the other, and his eyelashes were crusted with hardened mucus. He had twisted fingernails. They reminded the boy of thorns. He did not speak, not ever. Nor, it seemed, did he sleep, for as the boy tossed and turned he could see the silhouette of his cellmate’s head hanging over the edge of the bunk above, watching him.

On the third night, as he lay sleeping, the boy was attacked. He knew what the older man wanted, and tried to fight him off. Eventually his screams brought a guard, and the next day he was moved to another cell in a different wing while his cellmate went to solitary confinement. The girl consoled the boy. She held him in the dark. Nobody was supposed to hurt him.

Nobody, except her.

Three days later, his tormentor committed suicide in solitary by opening an artery in his left arm, tearing apart his flesh with a rusty nail in order to let the blood flow.

The girl had smelled different that night when she came to the boy.

She had smelled of sour milk.

He never mentioned her to the psychiatrists or the guards or to anyone else. She was not to be spoken of. He was hers, and she was his. He feared her, but he thought that he might almost have loved her too.

Now, years later, in another room, in another state, he wished for her to come, to confirm that it was over at last. As if she had responded to his wish, he suddenly smelled her scent. He rolled over in bed and caught sight of her, squatting in the shadows, watching him. The shock of it caused him to cry out. She rarely did that these days. If she entered his room at night she would crawl in beside him, working her way up under the covers from the base of the bed; or, if she was in a temper, she would pull the bedclothes from him or scratch at the window with her fingernails, preventing him from sleeping. Otherwise, she kept to her own places, and the basement in particular.

But she’d been different since the detective came to visit, and he felt certain that her absence was linked to him. Then again, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d entertained someone in the house. Randall’s behavior did not strike anyone in Pastor’s Bay as odd. The farther north one traveled in the state, the more likely one was to encounter families or individuals who didn’t want to be disturbed, who liked to keep themselves to themselves. Maine was a state of scattered houses, scattered towns, scattered people. If you wanted folk living so close they could hear you scratch, there were big cities that would suit you better. If you wanted to scratch in peace, then Maine was the place. Even his local clients rarely ventured beyond the hall when they stopped by to drop off papers or clear up some item of business. Out of politeness he would usually offer coffee, or ask them to take a seat, but they rarely took up the invitation, and when they did the girl showed little interest in them. In her way, she was as solitary a soul as he was. They were twin dark stars, bound together by the gravitational pull of the past.

Nevertheless, Randall was not a hermit. He attended meetings of the town council, and took care of its accounts gratis. He assisted at charity events, went out with his shovel in winter to clear paths for the older folk, and had even, very briefly, dated a divorcée who moved to Pastor’s Bay from Quebec to paint landscapes, and who volunteered at the library. Their halting relationship had occasioned some gossip in the town, not least because it had generally been assumed that Randall Haight was gay. The fact that he wasn’t disappointed those who thought that having a gay accountant, even a closeted one, added some much needed color to the social makeup of Pastor’s Bay, and strenuous efforts were made to find someone else who might be gay in order to make up for the perceived imbalance.

The relationship hadn’t ended badly as such. There had been no big argument, no accusations of one party misleading the other. Randall had simply stopped calling, and then had left town for a couple of weeks in his car without informing the woman of where he was going, or when he might be back. By the time he returned the woman had packed up her belongings and was preparing to move away, having decided that she could paint just as well in a place where there were more than two bars, and more than two eligible men. She had liked Randall, though. She told her friends that she couldn’t understand why he’d suddenly gone cold on her.

But the girl knew why Randall had stopped calling her. The girl had drawn him a picture. She’d used a lot of red, and she’d left a rusty nail with it, just in case Randall was a little slow on the uptake. Randall was hers, and hers alone. They had been together for so long that she would not countenance the possibility of another person coming between them. Similarly, Randall had experienced an acute sense of betrayal on the two occasions that he had slept with the woman from Quebec in her messy bedroom, surrounded by half-finished canvases, the smell of paint and spirits making his head spin. Even as he moved with her, her face buried against his chest, he had found himself seeking a hint of the girl’s familiar bloody, perfumed aroma, and when he closed his eyes and tried to lose himself in the act it was her face that he saw.

He sat up in bed. The clock read 4:13 a.m…

‘Where have you been?’ he said, but she did not, could not, answer. She simply remained where she was, lodged in the corner, her hands clasped in her lap.

‘You want me to read to you?’

She shook her head.

‘I’ve got a real busy day tomorrow,’ he told her. ‘I’ll need a clear head. I’ve got to get some rest, and you know I can’t sleep with you watching me.’

The girl stood and walked to the bed. Her lips moved, and the ruin of her tongue flicked like a snake head in the pit of her mouth. She was talking to him, but he couldn’t follow the shapes that her mouth formed. He thought that there was a kind of tenderness to the way she was staring at him. She had never looked at him that way before, and he saw her pity for him. She reached out and laid her hand on his cheek. He shivered at her touch.

‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

And then she smiled, and it stilled his heart. In all their years together, she had never smiled at him. The fear of her that was always with him, but that he tried to hide from himself and from her, welled up. Her touch was so cold that it burned his skin, spreading from his face like poison seeping through his veins until every inch of him felt as though it were being consumed by a cold fire.

She took her hand away, and walked from the room. He tried to follow her, but his limbs would not respond. He sank back on the pillow, and sleep took him instantly. When he woke the next morning, his left cheek was sore and red, and the girl was gone from his house forever.

24

The third anonymous text was waiting for me when I turned on my cell phone first thing that morning. It read:

CHIEF ALLAN THE PEDOFILE IS GETTING ANXIOUS. HE MISSES HIS COOZE.

I stared at the message. It didn’t take long to pinpoint what it was about it, apart from its contents, that bothered me. It was the spelling. ‘Pedophile’ was still misspelled, just as the word ‘preys’ had previously been misused. This time, it was the word ‘anxious’ that stood out, but only because it was spelled correctly. Perhaps I was trying to see a pattern where there wasn’t one, but it struck me that ‘anxious’ was a difficult word to spell. Someone who genuinely had difficulty with the word ‘pedophile,’ and who couldn’t make the distinction between ‘prays’ and ‘preys,’ would quite possibly misspell ‘anxious’ as well, or simply avoid using the word entirely. It raised the possibility that a smart individual was playing dumb in order to cast aspersions on Kurt Allan’s reputation, but to what end?

As it happened, Allan himself was standing near Aimee’s office building, drinking coffee and smoking a roll-up behind a tree, when I pulled into the lot before noon. His uniform shirt was sharply ironed, and his shoes were freshly shined, which made the sight of the roll-up more incongruous. I acknowledged him with a nod as I approached the door, but wasn’t going to speak to him until he raised a hand and asked if I had a minute.

‘Your mysterious client isn’t here yet,’ he said. ‘In fact, you and I are the first to arrive, Ms. Price excepted.’

He opened his tobacco pack and offered me one of the premade roll-ups inside.

‘You smoke?’

‘No.’

‘You ever smoke?’

‘Couple as a teenager. I never saw the point. I preferred to spend my money on beer, when I could get it.’

‘I wish I’d been that smart,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried quitting, but there’s nothing like that first one in the morning with a cup of coffee, except maybe the second.’

Despite his lean, muscular build, there was no glow of good health about Allan. He had a shaving rash on his neck, and bags under his eyes. Seen up close, his mustache was ragged and poorly trimmed. A missing-child case will wear a man down, I thought, but a guilty conscience would have a similar effect. Fairly or unfairly, I knew that I was now seeing Allan’s character refracted through the prism of the anonymous messages, but I had already taken steps to investigate the substance of the secret allegations being made against him.

‘Was there something in particular you wanted to discuss, Chief?’ I said. ‘I’d like some time to consult with Ms. Price before our client arrives.’

‘Sure, I understand. I just wanted to apologize for the way you were treated at the station. I think we started off on the wrong foot, and it just got worse from there on. We could have – I could have – been more civil. I hope you realize that we all just want to find Anna Kore.’

He sounded sincere. He looked sincere. Maybe he even was sincere, although one thing didn’t necessarily follow from the other.

‘I’ve been treated worse,’ I said.

‘Pat Shaye told me that you had some trouble with your car. He said that he helped you out. I was glad to hear it.’

Allan seemed anxious to ingratiate himself with me. I couldn’t understand why. Then it came.

‘You seen the newspapers this morning?’

I had. There had been some criticism in the Portland and Bangor papers of the handling of the investigation so far, with particular emphasis on the response of the Pastor’s Bay Police Department when it had first been alerted to Anna’s disappearance, as well as a perception that the authorities were not briefing reporters sufficiently on what progress, if any, was being made. It was mainly reporters blowing off steam, inspired in part by the closed nature of the community in Pastor’s Bay, but Allan’s response to the criticisms as reported in the articles made him sound defensive, and by pointing out that the Criminal Investigation Division was in charge of the investigation he seemed to be trying to pass responsibility for any earlier failings on to someone else. It wasn’t Allan’s fault that Anna Kore was still missing, but people don’t like it when young girls are abducted, and it was only natural that the blame game would start to be played. Allan needed a break, and he was hoping that Aimee and I might be able to provide it.

‘It’s frustration,’ I said. ‘Everybody wants a happy ending, but they’re sensing that it’s not going to come in this case. Don’t take it personally.’

‘But it is personal,’ said Allan. ‘I know Anna Kore. I know her mother.’

‘You know them well?’ I asked. I was careful to make the inquiry sound as casual as possible, but Allan still seemed to detect an undertone that he didn’t like. I could see his testing of the question reflected on his face. He considered it the way a man might hold a piece of food in his mouth before swallowing, uncertain if it tasted right.

‘It’s a small town,’ he said. ‘Part of my job is to know its people.’

I dropped the subject of how well he might have known the Kore family. There was no percentage in pursuing it further for now.

‘It’ll hit the town hard if the girl isn’t found,’ I said.

‘Worse than if she turns up dead?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You serious?’

‘If her body is found there can be a burial, a process of mourning, and there will be a chance of finding the person responsible, because with a body comes evidence. If she stays missing her fate will haunt the town, and her mother will never have a peaceful night’s sleep again.’

‘You’re talking about closure?’

‘No. It doesn’t exist.’

For a moment, I thought that he was about to disagree, but I watched him reconsider, although there was no way to tell if he did so because of his own experience of loss and pain or out of his knowledge of mine.

‘I get it,’ he said. ‘It’s better to know than not to know?’

‘I’d want to know.’

Allan said only ‘Yeah,’ and then was quiet for a time.

‘How long have you been chief of police?’ I asked.

‘‘Chief’?’ He picked a speck of tobacco from his lip and stared at it as though it had a deeper meaning in the context of his existence. ‘You had it right the first time we met. I share space with the town’s garbage truck and what we like to think of as our fire department. If there was a fire, I’d rather take my chances with spit and a blanket.’

He dropped what was left of his cigarette into the bottom of his coffee cup, where it hissed like a snake giving warning.

‘I’ve been “chief” for five years. My wife – my ex-wife – was looking to move out of Boston. She had asthma, and the doctors told her that the city air wasn’t good for her. She’d grown up by the Maryland shore, and I was raised in the Michigan boonies, so we kind of drew a line north from one place, and east from the other, and this is where they intersected. That’s what we tell people anyway: The truth isn’t as romantic. We weren’t getting along in Boston, I saw the job in Pastor’s Bay advertised, and took it in the hope that putting the city behind us might help. It didn’t. Now it fills the hours, and pays my alimony.’

‘How long have you been divorced?’

‘Just over a year, but we were apart for almost another year before that.’

I waited to see if he’d add anything, but he didn’t.

‘Kids?’

‘No, no kids.’

‘I guess that makes it easier.’

‘Some.’

A black SUV paused across from the entrance to the lot, waiting for a break in the traffic. Engel was sitting in the passenger seat, with a female agent driving. Almost simultaneously, Gordon Walsh arrived with his partner, Soames.

‘Looks like the gang’s all here,’ said Allan. ‘We’re just waiting for the special guest.’

I excused myself and went in to confirm that Aimee was ready. An Olympus digital recorder was set up in the conference room, connected to a pair of external mikes. Aimee had agreed that the interview could be recorded, as long as it was made clear at the start that her client had voluntarily agreed to cooperate. She had also let it be known that she would stop the interview if she believed that her client was being badgered, or if any attempt was being made to link him, directly or indirectly, with Anna Kore’s disappearance. This was an interview, not an interrogation. Aimee was wearing a black pant suit over a plain white blouse. Her dress was serious, her face was serious, and her mood was serious. At times like these, I was reminded of how good a lawyer she really was.

I closed the door behind me to ensure that we weren’t overheard.

‘I received another text from Chief Allan’s admirer,’ I said.

‘Interesting timing. Can I see it?’

I handed her my cell phone.

‘“Cooze,”’ she said. ‘I hate that word. Any thoughts on how this fits in?’

‘Randall Haight is taunted about Selina Day, and now someone is bad-mouthing Kurt Allan. Makes you wonder how many potential blackmailers there might be in one small town.’

‘You think it’s the same person?’

‘Possibly.’

‘And if they were right about Randall-’

‘-then there might also be some truth in what’s being said about Allan.’

‘We can’t just sit him down and ask him if he’s a pedophile,’ said Aimee. ‘It wouldn’t be polite. We could let Walsh know, or Engel.’

‘We could, but what would be the fun in that?’

‘You have a strange idea of fun. Since the first option isn’t a runner, and you don’t seem keen on the second, what’s left?’

‘You don’t want to know,’ I said.

‘Really?’ She searched my face. ‘Okay, you’re right: I don’t. I really, really don’t.’

The receptionist called through to let us know that Engel and company were in the lobby. We left the conference room, Aimee to greet the main players and show them through, and I to wait outside for Randall Haight. While I was there, I sent an e-mail from my phone. There was no message, and it went to a temporary Yahoo address.

Ten minutes later, Angel and Louis were breaking into Chief Allan’s home, and LoJacking his truck.

Randall Haight arrived dressed just as one might have expected a small town accountant attending an unpleasant appointment to dress. He wore a blue suit undecided as to whether it was navy or not, and that even Men’s Wearhouse might have frowned upon as too conservatively cut; a white shirt that overhung his belt, as though he were slowly deflating; and a blue-and-gray striped tie with a meaningless crest just below the knot. He was perspiring, and clearly unhappy. As he lingered by his car, the driver’s door still open beside him, he seemed inclined to leap back in and make a break for the Canadian border. I could understand his reluctance to continue, and not simply because he was about to expose something hidden and shameful about himself to the hostile gaze of other men. Haight’s prior experience with the law had been so traumatic, and had altered his life so radically, that here, in this leaf-strewn parking lot, he must have been reliving those earlier encounters. He was once again the boy in trouble, the child with blood on his hands.

I walked over to him.

‘How are you holding up, Randall?’

‘Not so good. I can’t stop my hands from shaking, and I have a pain in the pit of my stomach. I shouldn’t have come. I should never have agreed to this.’ His anxiety dipped into anger, and his voice rose. ‘I came to Ms. Price because I needed help. You and she were supposed to help me, and now I’m in worse trouble than before. I mean, you were supposed to be on my side!’

The trembling in his hands spread to the rest of his body. He was like an upright spring, vibrating with fear and anger. Above his head, a raven settled on a branch. It opened its beak and emitted a single mocking caw, as though chiding the man below for his weakness.

It would do Haight no good to enter that interview room in his current state. I didn’t know how he might react if they began to question him harshly, as I had no doubt they would, despite Aimee’s injunctions against doing so. She would try to stop the interview if they went too far, and she might even succeed, but the inevitable result would be that they would leave wondering if Randall Haight had anything else to hide. We should have coached him, and Aimee had acknowledged as much when she told me that he had at last agreed to talk with the police, but Haight had clammed up immediately after, and declined to consult further with her. Aimee had expressed her concern that, despite his promises, he might not show up for the interview at all. It was an achievement that he had made it this far. Now he just had to be calmed down a little.

‘Let’s take a walk,’ I said. ‘We’ll get some air.’

He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and together we walked along Park Street.

‘You should remember something, Randall. You haven’t done anything wrong here. In fact, you’re a victim in this. Someone is tormenting you about your past, but whatever you may have done as a child, you’ve paid the price for it. You made the amends that the law required of you, and you’ve tried to be the best man that you can be since then. That’s all any of us can do. Aimee and I are not going to let you be railroaded in there, but you can help yourself by looking upon the interview as a way of gaining an advantage. Once you tell the police what’s been happening to you, it will be in their interests as much as yours to find whoever is responsible, because they’ll make some of the connections that I did. They’ll wonder if the individual who is bothering you is also involved in the disappearance of Anna Kore. They’ll take those envelopes, and those photos, and that disc, and they’ll analyze them in a detail that’s beyond my capacities. In the meantime, Aimee and I are still going to be working for you, because just as there are steps the police can take that I can’t, so too there are things I can do that they, for various reasons, cannot. All you have to do is go in there and tell the truth.’

Haight kicked at a fallen acorn, and missed. He sighed, as if that somehow represented the story of his life.

‘It’ll get out, though, won’t it? It’s not a secret as soon as more than one person knows it.’ He sounded like a little boy.

‘It may get out, eventually. When that happens, we’ll help you with it. It won’t be easy in the immediate aftermath, but I think you may be surprised at how many friends you have in Pastor’s Bay. Do you go to church?’

‘Not regularly. Baptist when I do.’

‘If your past does start to come out, then that’s the place where you can own up to it publicly. I don’t mean this in a cynical way – well, not entirely – but nothing makes a congregation happier than a sinner who acknowledges his failings and asks for forgiveness. You’ll have to rebuild your reputation, and your place in the community may change, but you’ll still have a place. In the meantime, we’ll have people looking out for you, just in case.’

A school bus went by, loaded down with little kids on an outing. Two of them waved to us. I waved back, and the whole bus joined in. As they disappeared toward the highway, Haight said, ‘I still don’t have an alibi for the time of Anna Kore’s disappearance.’

‘Randall, half of Pastor’s Bay doesn’t have an alibi for the time of her disappearance. You’ve been watching too many old reruns of Columbo. I’m not going to lie to you: Once you’ve told the police about yourself, they’re inevitably going to take a closer look at you. We’ll make sure they’re discreet about it, but their interest won’t necessarily be a negative development, because somewhere in your recent past is a moment of intersection between you and the person who has been sending these messages. That person’s position of power over you is about to come under serious threat. I’d say that, within twenty-four hours, he or she is going to start panicking.’

‘Does that mean they might throw everything out there and expose me?’

‘The opposite, I think. They’ll retreat for a time, and perhaps try to cover their tracks, but in doing so they’ll draw more attention to themselves.’

‘You sound pretty certain of that.’

I sounded more certain than I actually was about most of what I had told Haight, but my sole purpose that morning was to ensure that he presented himself in the most positive light to the law-enforcement personnel in the meeting room. But about the psychology of Haight’s stalker – and he was being stalked, in a most insidious way – I believed that I was right. Part of the pleasure in tormenting an individual in the way that Haight was being goaded lies in isolating him, particularly when there is the potential for blackmail. Stalkers like watching their victims squirm. Even Internet stalkers, who may be geographically separated from their victims, get pleasure from the reaction they provoke, the anger, the desperation and, ultimately, the pleading.

And that was when it struck me, and its impact was so forceful that I stopped in my tracks. I had been so distracted by other details – Anna Kore, the messages about Chief Allan, the connection to Tommy Morris down in Boston – that I had failed to make one very simple leap: Where did the pleasure in tormenting Randall Haight lie? He did most of his work from home, and made trips to clients only when necessary. He had almost no social life that I could discern, but what public interaction he did have revolved entirely around Pastor’s Bay.

I was suddenly certain that whoever was taunting Randall Haight lived or worked in Pastor’s Bay.

‘What is it?’ said Randall.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Just a thought. We should be getting back now.’

He nodded, resigned, but he was less troubled than he had been, and I thought that we might just get through this and come out ahead. He didn’t stop to gather himself one final time as we entered the building, but held himself upright and walked, calmly and confidently, toward the meeting room, there to face his past, and alter his future.

25

Dempsey drove through the environs of Pastor’s Bay. He had a map on the passenger seat of the car, but he rarely consulted it. He had already examined the area on Google and felt sure of where he was going. Dempsey had a prodigious memory for photographs, figures, and the minutest detail of conversations. He rarely let it show, though, for he had spent too long surrounded by men who might find such a talent troubling enough to seek its annihilation.

He and Ryan had woken that morning to find Tommy gone from his room, and the car absent from the lot. Dempsey had scribbled a note informing Tommy that they had left to seek out breakfast, and slipped it under his door. The massive lipidic woman was gone from reception, replaced by a sinewy string bean of a man with dazzlingly bright false teeth who informed them of the presence of a diner about a quarter of a mile west of the motel. Some of the clouds had cleared to leave swatches of blue sky, but it still felt unseasonably cold and there was a wind that blew straight into their faces as they walked. They took a corner booth in the diner, and Ryan ordered the biggest breakfast on the menu, while Dempsey stuck with coffee and a bagel. He’d never been much for eating first thing in the morning, and his stomach didn’t feel right. He read the house newspaper while Ryan ate, but it was out of Bangor and contained nothing of relevance to them. The papers were full of the midterm elections; Dempsey had almost forgotten that they were happening, so lost was he in their own difficulties. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d voted. He felt guilty about it. It seemed to him another aspect of his abandonment of control, of being subject to the plans and motivations of others. He made a promise to himself to start voting again if he lived. It seemed a modest, attainable ambition in the long term. Voting, that was, not living. For now, staying alive was strictly a day-to-day business.

Ryan excused himself and headed to the men’s room. A police patrol car cruised by, but Dempsey didn’t turn his head to follow its progress. He took in the other customers in the diner. They were mostly older people, and the waitress seemed to know them all by name. Dempsey reckoned that Ryan was the youngest person in the place by at least a decade or more. He closed his eyes and thought about how good it would be just to sit here for a couple of hours surrounded by friends, with no obligations for the day other than to shoot the breeze and plan for the next meal. He didn’t have to imagine what it would be like to be old. He already felt old, and mortality seemed closer to him than it might have to even the most elderly of the diner’s aging patrons.

When he opened his eyes again, Tommy Morris was standing before him.

‘You done?’ said Tommy.

‘Pretty much. You want something?’

‘No, I’m good.’

Dempsey called for the check as Ryan appeared from the men’s room, and the waitress had it on the table before Ryan had crossed the room.

‘What do I owe?’ said Ryan.

‘I got you covered,’ said Dempsey. He took cash from his pocket and started counting bills. He was running seriously low.

‘Nah,’ said Ryan. ‘I got this one.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah. Makes us even for last night.’

Tommy looked at him curiously.

‘We went out for a drink,’ said Ryan. He looked embarrassed. Dempsey thought he was probably wondering if they should have asked Tommy to join them while simultaneously being grateful that they hadn’t, given the tone of some of the previous night’s conversation.

‘Good for you,’ said Tommy. His head was bobbing slightly, and he was running his right thumb along the pads of his fingers, over and over. Dempsey thought of it as one of Tommy’s tells, the signs that he had a job in mind, that he was ready to roll. There was a light in his eyes that hadn’t been there for a while.

The car was parked behind the diner. Tommy had led them to it, spinning the keys around his right index finger, whistling to himself.

‘You get that call you were expecting?’ said Dempsey.

‘No, not yet,’ said Tommy. ‘It’ll come, though. We got work to do until then.’

‘What kind of work?’ said Dempsey.

‘We have to boost a car,’ said Tommy.

Which was how Dempsey came to be driving a tan Impala out of Pastor’s Bay and toward the sea. He passed Valerie Kore’s house but didn’t even glance in its direction. There was a black Chevy Suburban in the drive alongside an ancient green Toyota Tacoma, and a Sheriff’s Department cruiser was parked on the road. In the rearview, he saw the deputy turn to his in-car laptop. The cops probably ran the plate of every car that passed as a matter of routine. Dempsey wasn’t concerned. This one wouldn’t even be on the system for another hour or more.

He turned south where the road met the ocean, and followed the coast for a time. There was no beach to be seen, just black rocks like broken, rotted teeth against which gray waves broke. Dempsey could not understand why someone would choose to live in a coastal town with no sand upon which to walk, and no beauty upon which to gaze. Here nature was a hostile force at war with itself. The wind twisted the growth of trees, and the sea ate away at the land. As he drove, Dempsey found himself wishing for the security of the city. In this place, he felt exposed in body and soul.

The turnoff was little more than a dirt track. He put the sea behind him and followed the trail through a patch of woodland that brought the car to within sight of the Kore house. He hit the trunk release, and by the time he’d killed the engine and got out Tommy was stretching his back by the side of the road.

‘Comfortable?’ asked Dempsey. They had figured that one man alone in a car would attract less attention than two.

‘I’ll live.’

Dempsey had Tommy’s piece in his hand. He offered it to him, and after a moment’s pause Tommy accepted it. Together they watched the back of the house from the woods but could see no sign of a further police presence. Still, Tommy had figured that there would be at least one cop inside with her.

‘You sure you want to do this?’ said Dempsey.

‘I have to talk to her,’ said Tommy, and Dempsey again saw in him the peculiar combination of fatalism and hope that afflicted those who knew their time was drawing to a close and wanted to settle their affairs before it was too late. His niece’s disappearance, appalling though it was, had given Tommy an excuse to reach out to his estranged sister, to do this one last thing for her.

‘Then let’s go talk,’ said Dempsey.

He was about to move when Tommy’s hand gripped his elbow. Immediately Dempsey looked around to see who was approaching, but there was no sign of movement.

‘What is it?’

Tommy seemed to be struggling to speak. His eyes were fixed on Dempsey’s face. Eventually he said, ‘Thank you.’

‘For what?’

‘For standing by me.’

‘We’ll figure out a way, Tommy. We’ll make it right.’

‘No,’ said Tommy. ‘No, we won’t. When the time comes, you try to stay alive. You take Francis, and whatever money is left, and you hide yourselves away. Maybe they’ll be content with my head. If they give me a chance, I’ll tell them that you’re no threat to them. No revenge, Martin. Understand?’

Dempsey nodded. ‘I understand, Tommy.’

The grip on his arm tightened once, and then was released.

‘We’ll talk no more about it,’ said Tommy.

Using the trees as cover, and sprinting across the patches of open ground, they came to the backyard. As they drew nearer the house, Dempsey saw a woman pass by the kitchen window. Her reddish-brown hair was pulled back severely from her face and tied tightly with a scrunchie. She was filling a coffeepot with water.

Leaving Tommy against the north wall, Dempsey checked out as much of the single-story dwelling as he could without exposing himself to the deputy on the road. There were three bedrooms: one with a queen bed and woman’s clothing scattered on the chairs and floor; the second a smaller room with a double bed and walls decorated with posters of bands whose names and faces were largely unfamiliar to Dempsey; and a third room with a single bed surrounded by assorted boxes and cases. Beside it was a small window of frosted glass: the bathroom.

On the other side, a door from the kitchen led into a big living room that ran most of the width of the house. A man in a golf shirt and chinos sat at a cheap desk reading a paperback novel. Dempsey looked around for monitoring or recording equipment but didn’t see any. Dempsey waited, and a second man appeared. He wore black pants, and a long-sleeved blue shirt. Both men wore Glock 22s at their waists.

Not cops: FBI.

Eventually, Valerie Kore entered the room and handed each man a cup of coffee. They thanked her, and she left. He saw her step into the hallway. She didn’t come back.

Dempsey returned to Tommy.

‘Two feds watching the phone in the living room.’

‘Feds? You sure?’

‘They’re wearing Glocks. Standard issue for federal agents.’

‘Fuck.’

‘You want to back off?’

‘We’ve come this far.’

Tommy tried the kitchen door. It opened silently, and he and Dempsey moved into the house. Dempsey counted down from three with his fingers, and they burst into the living room. One of the agents was so shocked that he spilled his coffee on himself and swore, but he and his colleague raised their hands without even being told.

‘Tommy Morris,’ said the one in the golf shirt. ‘You gotta be kidding me.’

Tommy told them to shut up and get down on the floor. He kept them covered while Dempsey pulled their hands behind their backs and cuffed them with plastic ties he’d picked up at Home Depot. They heard the sound of a toilet flushing. Tommy took the door, and when his sister entered the room he put his hand over her mouth. At the sight of the agents on the floor she began to struggle, but Tommy pressed the barrel of his weapon against her cheek and she grew still. Slowly, he turned her around. She recognized him, and tried to pull away.

‘Valerie, I just want to talk,’ he said, his hand still covering her mouth. ‘I can help you find Anna.’

And, instantly, the fight left her body.

‘I’m going to take my hand away, okay?’

She nodded, and Dempsey got a good look at her for the first time. She had naturally pale features sprinkled with a dusting of freckles, and large brown eyes. He’d heard that she used to be a looker, especially with a little makeup, but now her eyes were sunk deep into her skull with gray-black bags beneath them, and spots had broken out on her skin. She had probably been prescribed sedatives and sleeping pills, but his guess was that she wasn’t taking them. She’d hate lying awake at night, but would fear sleep more. Awake she might still be of some use to her daughter, while to embrace temporary oblivion was to be selfish. What if those who had her daughter called? What if she was sleeping, and somehow the chance to get Anna back safely was missed?

‘Why did you come here?’ she said. ‘I have enough troubles.’

‘I told you, I want to help. Come on, let’s go to another room where we can talk in private.’

She led him to one of the bedrooms, and soon Dempsey could hear the low murmur of their voices. He drifted toward the window, where he could keep an eye on the front of the house. The deputy hadn’t moved from his cruiser, and no more cars passed.

One of the agents spoke to Dempsey.

‘You made me burn my balls,’ he said.

‘That’s sad. Maybe they’ll swell up to the size of a regular set.’

The agent sighed into the carpet.

‘I don’t know who’s crazier,’ he said, ‘you or Morris.’

‘Me,’ said Dempsey. ‘Definitely me.’

Valerie sat on her daughter’s bed. Tommy leaned against the wall, taking in the pictures on the walls and the photographs of the niece he hadn’t seen in so very long.

‘How did you find me?’ said Valerie. ‘You see me on the TV?’

‘I knew before that,’ Tommy replied. ‘I’ve known where you were for a long time.’

‘The FBI said this might be something to do with you. Is that true?’

‘No.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Because I asked.’

Even after so many years, she remembered that tone.

‘Did you ask Joey Toomey?’ she said.

‘We talked.’

‘The FBI thinks you killed him.’

‘I thought just what you did: that Anna’s disappearance might have been a way to get at me. I had to be sure that it wasn’t.’

‘Did killing him make you certain?’

‘No. Killing him just made me feel better.’

There was disgust on her face, but it was mingled with another response. Perhaps, Tommy thought, she still has some of the old blood in her.

‘They say you’re in trouble.’

‘Who says?’

‘The FBI. They say that Oweny Farrell has put a price on your head.’

‘Oweny Farrell couldn’t afford to pay for one hair,’ he said, and the bravado sounded hollow even to him.

‘Why did you hide from me?’ he asked. ‘Why did you run from your own family?’

She looked at him with bewilderment.

‘Are you crazy? Are you out of your fucking mind?’

‘Don’t talk to me that way.’

‘What way should I talk to the man who killed the father of my little girl?’

‘I didn’t know,’ said Tommy. ‘I swear I didn’t know.’

‘You didn’t know what? That he was her father, or that he was to be killed? What didn’t you know? Tell me. Which was it?’

He didn’t answer.

‘You didn’t know.’ She spat the last word. ‘I don’t believe you. I didn’t believe you then, and I still don’t.’

Tommy was forced to turn away from the fury in her eyes.

‘You should have come back,’ he said. ‘If you’d come back and let me look after you, then maybe this-’

She raised an index finger to him, the nail ragged and bitten.

‘Don’t say it. Don’t you dare say that. I swear, I’ll blind you with these nails if you try to play that game with me.’

Tommy stayed silent.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last. ‘You’re right. That was wrong.’

She didn’t reply.

‘You and Anna are all the family I have left. I-’

She interrupted him. He didn’t like it. She’d been away from men for too long, he thought. She’d forgotten her manners.

‘We’re not your family, Tommy. That ended when you put Ronnie in the ground. Anna has no memory of her early life, thank God, and I haven’t told her anything to change that. As far as she’s concerned she has no uncles, no cousins, nothing. She just accepts that’s the way things are for her.’

Tommy let it go.

‘None of this will bring her back,’ he said.

Suddenly Valerie started to cry. It surprised her almost as much as it disturbed Tommy. She didn’t think that she had any tears left.

He came to her, and stroked her hair, and she allowed him to press her face to his belly.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Tell me everything that you told them.’

Dempsey was still waiting by the window when Tommy returned.

‘Finished?’ Dempsey said.

‘Finished.’

Tommy squatted in front of the agents. From his pocket he took a roll of duct tape.

‘Sorry about this, boys,’ he said. ‘No hard feelings.’

‘Come in, Tommy,’ said the one in the golf shirt. ‘Come in and talk to us. We’re your best chance now.’

‘I hope that’s not true,’ said Tommy. ‘If it is, I’m in worse trouble than I thought.’

He wrapped the tape around their mouths and their legs. He had similarly restrained his sister, although he had left her mouth free, and her nail scissors were within reach. She had promised to give them as much time as she could before freeing herself and the agents.

‘Did you learn anything?’ asked Dempsey, as they returned.

‘It was enough to see her, and for her to know that I’m on her side. I want to do this for her. I want to find my niece. I have to try to make things right, Martin, before the end.’

Dempsey said nothing, because there was nothing to say.

They called Ryan from the road, and dumped the car at a strip mall. They’d boosted it from outside the Colonial movie theater in Belfast after watching the couple pay for a matinee show and give their tickets to the usher. Their movie would probably have finished by now, and they’d have noticed that their car was missing. Ryan picked them up, and they returned to the motel. Tommy was more upbeat than he’d been in a while. Dempsey saw some of his old dynamism returning, and believed Tommy might have been reinvigorated by the meeting with his sister.

He was only partly right. Tommy Morris’s mood had been improved by seeing Valerie after all this time, but he was also anticipating the possibility of a more direct contribution to the search for his niece.

Tommy Morris was about to be given a name.

26

Randall Haight and I stood at the door to the meeting room. From inside we could hear the sound of men’s voices, and I thought I recognized Gordon Walsh’s dulcet tones.

‘Are you ready for this, Randall?’ I asked.

‘Yes, thank you.’

I opened the door with my left hand, and patted Haight on the shoulder with my right, although it was as much a means of giving him an extra push over the threshold if required as it was a gesture of reassurance.

Chief Allan gave a muffled grunt as Haight entered the meeting room, but it was the only sound that anyone made. Haight took a seat beside Aimee on one side of the table, facing Allan, Gordon Walsh, and Soames. Engel and his fellow agent had taken two seats by the window, slightly apart from the main group. I sat against the wall and listened.

Walsh made the introductions for his side, and slid a recording device closer to Haight, who gave his name for the record. There were notebooks open and ready. Once Haight had settled into his chair, Aimee asked him to tell everyone, in his own words and in his own time, why he was there.

He began haltingly, but as he went on he grew a little more confident, and stumbled less. He kept his hands clasped in front of him, untangling his fingers only to take an occasional sip of water. His story began with the circumstances surrounding the death of Selina Day, his sentencing and imprisonment, and his eventual move to Pastor’s Bay. There was nothing in it that I hadn’t already heard, and he was interrupted only twice, once by Walsh and once by Allan, to clear up minor points. He then described receiving the succession of missives that had led him to this room. When he had finished, Aimee produced a number of sealed plastic bags, each containing an envelope and its contents, and handed them over to Walsh.

Only Engel appeared disengaged from what we had heard. I could see him zoning out shortly after Haight started speaking. This was of no use to Engel. His interest didn’t lie in an old killing far from the Northeast. It didn’t even lie in the safe return of Anna Kore. Engel wanted Tommy Morris, and Randall Haight’s disclosures would bring that consummation no closer.

Walsh asked if he and his colleagues could be excused in order to consult for a time, but Aimee offered instead to take Haight and me into her office until they were ready to resume. Haight went to the restroom, and while he was gone Aimee raised an eyebrow at me and said, ‘Well?’

‘He was as good as could be expected, and they let him talk. The next part will be more difficult for him.’

‘I know.’

Despite all her warnings, Aimee knew that we would have to expose Haight to a certain amount of aggressive questioning. It was like cleansing a wound: It was better to get it done all at once than in small painful increments.

Haight returned.

‘How did I do?’ he asked.

‘You did fine, Randall,’ said Aimee. ‘We both thought so.’

He was relieved, and not only because we felt that the first part of the interview had gone well. He had something of the spiritual lightness of a penitent who has recently unburdened himself of his sins and been absolved. He had told his story and no one had reacted with obvious disgust or anger. He was not cuffed, and he had not been pilloried. He had confronted that which he most feared, and he had survived thus far.

‘The FBI man, Mr. Engel, was in the restroom when I went in,’ said Haight.

‘Did he speak to you?’ I asked.

‘No, he just nodded. I couldn’t help noticing that he didn’t seem very interested in what I was saying.’ Haight sounded mildly offended.

‘Maybe you weren’t what he was expecting,’ said Aimee.

‘But what was he expecting?’ asked Haight, and I raised my hand gently at Aimee in warning. This was not an area that we needed to explore with the client; not yet, not until the next stage of the interview process had been concluded, but Haight wasn’t a fool. He sensed that there was a disparity between what we knew and what he was being told.

We were saved by a knock on the door. Aimee’s assistant stuck his head in to say that they were ready for us.

‘We’ll talk about it later,’ I told Haight. ‘I promise that it doesn’t involve you, and it won’t affect anything that’s said in the next room, or any question that is put to you. When we’re done, we’ll take time to go over any other relevant details, okay?’

Haight had little choice but to agree. He had come this far, and although he could have sat in Aimee’s office and refused to come out until we’d told him everything, including the truth about UFOs and who had killed Kennedy, he didn’t, largely because Aimee and I kept him moving, and by the time we were back in the meeting room it was too late for him to do anything but sit back down in his chair and wait for the questions to come.

Walsh handled the next stage. He was careful, and consistent, and studiedly neutral at the start. He went back over Haight’s story, asking many of the same questions that Aimee and I had asked of him. He clarified Haight’s movements in the years since his release and touched on the subject of Lonny Midas.

‘You have no knowledge of Lonny Midas’s current whereabouts?’ said Walsh.

‘He’s not called that anymore,’ said Haight. ‘Lonny Midas doesn’t exist, just like William Lagenheimer doesn’t exist. They gave both of us new identities so that we couldn’t contact each other even if we wanted to.’

‘So you have no reason to think that Lonny Midas might have found you?’

‘None.’

‘Were you frightened of him, Mr. Haight?’

‘A little.’

‘Are you still frightened of him now?’

Haight began tugging at a loose piece of fingernail. I could see him doing it from where I sat. He pulled so hard that I saw him wince at the pain he was inflicting on himself.

‘William Lagenheimer was,’ said Haight, ‘but Randall Haight isn’t. Do you understand the distinction, Detective? That’s why I didn’t want to come here today. I wanted to stay hidden. Nobody could find me as long as I stayed hidden.’

‘But someone has found you, Mr. Haight. Someone knows who you are. The damage has been done now.’

‘Yes. Yes, I suppose you’re right.’

‘Do you have any idea who this person might be?’

‘No.’

‘Could it be Lonny Midas?’

Haight just shook his head, but his reply didn’t match the movement. ‘Lonny always bore grudges,’ he said. ‘Lonny never forgave anyone who did him a bad turn.’

‘And he bears a grudge against William Lagenheimer, because William told the cops what was done to Selina Day?’

‘I think Lonny probably hates William. He probably hates him more now than he did on the day that he told. Lonny was a brooder.’

‘Could Lonny have taken Anna Kore to frame you?’

‘Yes,’ said Haight softly. ‘That’s the kind of thing Lonny would do.’

Walsh let the subject go. He moved on to routine questions, most little more than clarifications. Haight answered them easily, and I felt him start to relax again. He grew more loquacious in his replies, giving Walsh more than was necessary to answer the questions. Walsh even cracked a small joke, something about accountancy training and jailhouse lawyers, and Haight smiled in return. Everybody was getting along just dandily. I caught Aimee’s eye and shook my head, and she interrupted Walsh’s next question.

‘I’m sorry, Detective, I just need a quick moment with my client.’

Walsh wasn’t happy about it, but he couldn’t object. Instead he contented himself with giving me the hard stare. I knew what he’d been doing and now he’d been caught. This was a version of ‘good cop-bad cop’ with Walsh about to slip from the first role into the second.

Aimee murmured in Haight’s ear. As she spoke to him, he glanced at Walsh, and his face assumed an expression of hurt. When the interview resumed, he was noticeably more restrained in his mode of answering.

‘Tell me about Anna Kore,’ said Walsh. ‘Did you know her?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘But you’d seen her around town? After all, Pastor’s Bay is a small place. Everybody knows everybody, right?’

‘I guess I’d seen her around.’

‘Did you know her by name?’

‘No, I’d never spoken to her.’

‘That wasn’t what I asked. Did you know her by name?’

‘Well, sure. As you said, Pastor’s Bay is a small town.’

‘So you did know her?’

Haight was flustered. ‘Yes. Well, no, not in the way you mean.’

‘What way do I mean?’

Aimee intervened.

‘Detective, let me remind you that this is not an interrogation. Mr. Haight is here of his own free will. He has provided information that may prove to be of assistance in your investigation, and he is himself the victim of a particularly insidious form of intimidation. Let’s not add to it, okay.’

Walsh raised his hands in mock surrender and resumed his questioning.

‘Had you met Anna Kore’s mother?’ he asked.

‘Yes. She came to a couple of meetings of the town council earlier this year. She wanted to talk about trees.’

‘Trees?’

‘The trees growing on Bay Road. There was a storm, and some pretty big branches came down. She was concerned about the safety of her daughter and her property.’

‘That sounds like a pretty minor matter.’

‘Not if you’re hit by a falling tree,’ said Haight, not unreasonably.

‘What I mean is that I’m surprised you remember it so clearly,’ said Walsh. ‘There must be a lot of business discussed at these meetings and yet you have no trouble recalling Valerie Kore’s concerns.’

But Haight was on familiar ground here. ‘I’m an accountant: I spend my life remembering small details. I don’t attend every meeting of the town council because it isn’t necessary for me to do so, but I can certainly give you chapter and verse on any issue that has relevance to the town’s budget: sanitation, tree pruning, fence painting, the replacement of appliances, of vehicles. So, yes, I remember Valerie Kore’s point, but I remember also that Chief Allan had spoken just before her on the subject of acquiring a used Crown Victoria to supplement his motor pool, and at the same meeting Vernon Tuttle wanted to know why his store had been cited for littering when he’d been asking for six months that a permanent trash can be placed on his stretch of Main Street.’

Chief Allan shifted in his seat. So far he had said nothing since we resumed, and he didn’t look as if he was anxious to involve himself now, but by speaking about him Haight had given him little choice.

‘You know, that’s true, Detective,’ he said. ‘Mr. Haight has a hell of a memory for detail.’

Walsh let it go. He returned to Haight’s knowledge of the Kore family, but didn’t get much return on his buck. When Haight told him that he had no alibi for the day of Anna’s disappearance, Walsh perked up some. He was about to pursue the matter further when help came from an unlikely source. Once again Allan moved in his chair, this time with obvious unease. Even Walsh noticed, and looked at him in irritation. Allan indicated that he wanted to speak to him in private and the two policemen consulted quietly for a moment. When they returned to the table Walsh informed us that he was finished with his questions, unless anyone else had something to add. Even Engel appeared surprised enough to rouse himself briefly from his torpor, but said nothing.

We all stood. Walsh gave Aimee a receipt for the sealed bags containing the envelopes, and told Haight that he might need a more detailed statement about them in the coming days. While they spoke, I followed Allan outside, where he was fumbling for one of his cigarettes.

‘Can I ask what that was about?’ I said.

‘Randall Haight has an alibi for the day that Anna Kore disappeared,’ he replied. ‘I’m his alibi. I dropped by his place around three that day to deliver some quotes for the vehicle purchase that he mentioned. He was asleep on his couch with a blanket over him, so I decided not to disturb him. I went back shortly before the call came in about Anna Kore and he was still there. He hadn’t even moved. I met him on the street the next day and he had a nose like Rudolph’s. He didn’t take Anna. We would just have been wasting our time in there at the end.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘You don’t have to thank me. It was the truth.’

‘Do you have any opinion on the rest of what he said?’

‘Nope.’ He lit the cigarette and drew long, holding the smoke deep inside, savoring it. ‘Why? You expect me to say that he doesn’t look like the type, that you never can tell? I’m just surprised he managed to keep it quiet for so long. Hard to do in this day and age. Somebody always finds out.’

‘Somebody has found out.’

‘You get anywhere on that?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘I guess Walsh will have those envelopes examined, just in case there’s a connection to Anna. Between the state police and the feds we’ve got twenty-four-hour turnaround on any DNA, so we’ll know soon enough if there’s a trace. We’ll also have to get those records in North Dakota unsealed.’

‘Can you do that?’

‘Sure. That might take a couple of days, but once the formal request for assistance is made they’ll eventually have to share whatever they have with us.’

‘Including Lonny Midas’s new identity?’

‘I guess so.’

I was curious to find out if Lonny Midas had also been targeted. If so, I might yet be proved wrong in my belief that Randall Haight’s tormentor lived in or close to Pastor’s Bay.

‘In the meantime, we’d like to keep what he told you confidential,’ I said.

‘We’ll do our best. We wouldn’t want people getting some fool ideas into their heads about him.’

He leaned back against the wall and pressed a thumb and forefinger into the bridge of his nose.

‘I need to rest up,’ he said. ‘I haven’t had more than a couple of hours’ sleep a night since Anna went missing. I’m going to take a day off tomorrow to pay my bills and recharge my batteries. I’ll still be on call, but it’ll be a respite.’

I left him to finish his cigarette in peace. After all, there were plenty of other people that I could bother, among them Engel, who was waiting for his ride by the front door.

‘Your lack of interest in the proceedings was noted, Special Agent Engel,’ I said. ‘Maybe you were hoping I was going to bring in Whitey Bulger himself.’

He was clearly debating whether talking with me was better than getting wet. He seemed to decide that it was, although not by much.

‘That’s an interesting client you have, Mr. Parker. He’s just not that interesting to me.’

‘Because he wasn’t going to jump for a five-K motion?’

A ‘five-K motion’ referred to section 5K1.1 of the sentencing guidelines, under which a prosecutor could argue for a term shorter than the advised sentence for an offense in return for ‘substantial assistance cooperation’ from the defendant. It was a snitch’s charter, but it was a popular weapon for the prosecution during organized-crime trials, as they so often depended on statements from mobsters who had turned on their own. Engel had been hoping the surprise guest might be someone with a connection to Tommy Morris that could be exploited. He had been disappointed.

‘The only person your client could rat on is himself, and he’s done that,’ said Engel.

‘That’s kind of why I was anxious to get your attention,’ I said. ‘If word of what he said here today leaks, he could be at risk.’

‘Because angry, frightened people don’t tend to look too closely at the fine print, right? Because one child killer is as good as the next? I told you, we don’t have any interest in him, but you know it’ll get out. The state police are going to have to investigate his story, and Allan will be drawn in. There’ll be calls, paperwork. I hope you’ve prepared him for the worst. His name is about to become lower than dirt in Pastor’s Bay.’

‘It wasn’t just the locals I was concerned about.’

Engel’s SUV pulled up alongside us. The driver looked quizzically at Engel, who started to move. I put a hand up to stop him.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he said.

‘My question exactly.’

‘You’ll have to forgive me. I’m not psychic, so I have no idea what you’re talking about. Now put your hand down or I’ll have you arrested.’

‘No, you won’t. You’ve taken the opportunity presented by a young girl’s disappearance to lure a dangerous man north in the hope that you can corner him and persuade him to turn federal witness. You have only a passing interest in the safety of Anna Kore, or of anyone else. All that matters to you is getting Tommy Morris in a room and cutting a deal, and you’ll let him run loose until then.’

‘Mr. Parker, you have no idea what you’re talking about.’

He pushed my hand away. Simultaneously, his cell phone began to ring, along with the cell phone of the agent in the car. Engel answered the call as he was getting into the vehicle, and his usually impassive features flooded with surprise. All I heard were the words ‘He what?’ as the door closed and the SUV sped away.

I checked my phone. There was an e-mail from the Yahoo address. It consisted solely of a smiley icon. The job at Allan’s house had been done. I cleared the screen just as Gordon Walsh came up beside me and tapped me hard on the shoulder. Soames lurked behind him, his mouth set in a thin, unimpressed line like that of a Sunday-school teacher faced with the town drunk.

‘You and I are going to have a talk later, clear?’ said Walsh.

‘Clear. I’ll even pay for the drinks. Just as long as you don’t bring your friend along. I don’t think he’s a fun guy.’

Soames scowled at me. Then again, he scowled at everyone. It was less a mode of intimidation than an ongoing disability. Before either of them could say anything else, a monster truck pulled into the lot, dwarfing every other vehicle parked nearby. A massive bass was pumping so many decibels that the ground vibrated. Since the truck was too big to fit into any of the available spaces, the driver just parked it facing the building and killed the engine.

The driver’s and passenger’s doors opened, and virtually identical men who appeared to have been constructed entirely from flesh-colored cinder blocks stepped from the truck and dropped awkwardly to the ground. They had dressed for maximum shock and awe: blue polyester big-man pants, dark-blue sport shirts so tight they’d have to be cut out of them later, and matching gold neck chains that could have anchored a ship. Even Soames stopped scowling for a moment as his bottom jaw dropped. Tony and Paulie Fulci in all their heavily medicated glory were indeed a sight to behold. Walsh, by contrast, seemed more amused than impressed.

‘It’s the Fabulous Unfurry Freak Brothers,’ he said. ‘What happened, the circus leave town without you?’

‘Detective Walsh,’ said Paulie, assuming an air of wounded dignity. ‘It’s very nice to make your acquaintance again.’

Tony and Paulie knew most of the senior cops in the state, either personally or by reputation. The knowledge was reciprocated, and not just in this state either.

‘What about you, Tony?’ said Walsh. ‘You happy to see me again?’

‘No,’ said Tony, who lacked his brother’s finely honed diplomatic skills.

Walsh turned to me. ‘Let me guess: These knuckleheads are working for you.’

‘Knuckleheads Inc., that’s us,’ I said.

‘Well, keep them on their leash, and don’t let them break anything – furniture, buildings, people. They’re also convicted felons, so if I hear that they’re carrying even a water pistol I’ll put them behind bars.’

‘What about a bow?’ said Paulie.

‘Are you trying to be funny?’

‘No, we got bows. For hunting. We got licenses too.’

Tony nodded solemnly in agreement. ‘We got them with us.’

‘The licenses or the bows?’ asked Walsh, drawn in despite himself.

‘Both,’ confirmed Tony. ‘And arrows.’

Walsh regarded them both carefully. Where the Fulcis were concerned, it often wasn’t entirely clear when they were joking. Louis had once commented that he wasn’t sure if they were deadpan or brain-dead.

‘Jesus,’ said Walsh. ‘Bows and arrows. Well, remember: The sharp end points away from your face. Although feel free to practice the other way if the mood takes you.’

He and Soames returned to their car. The Fulcis watched them go.

‘I lied,’ said Paulie. ‘It wasn’t nice to make his acquaintance again.’

‘Same,’ said Tony. ‘Except without the lying.’

27

Randall Haight didn’t respond well to the news that Anna Kore’s uncle was a Boston mobster who was being hunted by his own people and the FBI, and who would almost certainly attempt to involve himself in the search for his missing niece. He knew that he was at risk from Tommy Morris if word got out about his past. It wouldn’t matter to Morris that Haight had been questioned and effectively cleared by the police of any involvement in his niece’s disappearance. He was a child killer, and Morris would instinctively assume that he knew more than he had revealed.

Briefly, Haight fired Aimee and, by extension, me. He reconsidered when he realized that, if he was in trouble now, he’d be in more trouble without us. I also introduced him to the Fulcis, which simultaneously reassured and unsettled him, in the same way the Duke of Wellington was said to have noted of his soldiers that, while he was uncertain of their possible effect on the enemy, by God, they frightened him. Then again, Wellington had also called his own men ‘the scum of the earth’, which the Fulcis were not. They had their own code of honor, particularly when it came to women. Insults centering on mothers did not sit well with the Fulcis. I was pretty sure that there were other aspects of behavior about which they might have set concepts of honor, but I couldn’t think of any offhand.

Haight was reluctant to have the Fulcis stay at his home unless it became absolutely necessary, and it was true that the sight of their monster truck parked on his property might attract attention to him. In addition, it was unclear what the result of his discussions with the police might be. I was sure that Walsh and Allan would let us know if there was any indication that Haight’s story was about to become public knowledge, and it was in their interests as much as ours to keep it quiet. The last thing they needed was misguided media speculation about a possible suspect, which would further strain their manpower. Nevertheless, I would have preferred it if Haight had acceded to our request to let the Fulcis bed down in his house, but the more we pressed him, the less willing he was to consider the possibility. The concession we reached was that the Fulcis would become his shadows if we learned that the facts of Haight’s past could no longer remain hidden. Depending upon the situation, they could either plant themselves on Haight’s property like the trunks of trees or they could move him to safety. I had already made arrangements for him to be quietly placed at the Colony near Sebago Lake if necessary. The Colony was a retreat house for troubled men, often those suffering from addiction or other social difficulties. The company might not be to Haight’s taste, but those involved in the Colony’s running would make no judgment upon him, and they were very, very discreet.

After a little more sulking, and some calming words from Aimee and me, Haight returned to Pastor’s Bay. I gave him a half hour start, then followed him north.

Angel and Louis had checked into an inn called the Blithe Spirit, about four miles from Pastor’s Bay. It was run by an elderly couple named the Harveys, whose first question to them was ‘Are you gay?’

‘Would that be a problem?’ said Louis.

‘Oh no,’ said Mrs. Harvey, who was bent almost double by arthritis but moved surprisingly fast, like a hare with a minor disability. ‘We like gay people. They’re very tidy.’

Her husband nodded along enthusiastically, although his smile had apparently faltered as he tried to balance their firmly held belief in the neatness of all gay people with Angel’s presence on their property. They had provided Angel and Louis with a large room on the second floor overlooking the neat garden at the rear of the house. The Harveys had only two rooms available to rent, and the other was unoccupied for now. According to Angel, the décor erred on the side of chintzy but was otherwise perfectly acceptable.

‘So, tell me about Kurt Allan,’ I said, as we sat in the living room of the inn, its picture window looking out on a small pond and a glade of black ash trees that had lost most of their leaves. The Harveys had provided a pot of tea, served on a silver tray alongside china cups and the kind of dainty cookies that small girls fed to dolls at parties.

‘If he is a pedophile, he’s hiding it well,’ said Angel. ‘I went through his computer files, his library, even his attic. There was one skin mag, but it was standard stuff. Same with the porn websites that he’s accessed. His e-mail is so dull that I almost dozed off reading it. He has a landline, but it doesn’t look like he uses it much; there was dust on the phone. On most levels, he looks clean.’

He let that last statement hang.

‘Meaning?’

‘He makes a base salary of fifty thousand dollars. Over the last year, he’s managed to supplement that through overtime, but it’s only brought him up by another five grand. He’s eating alimony payments of a thousand a month, although it looks like he agreed to them and didn’t contest the figure.’

A thousand a month was a lot on a salary of 50K. That pretty much constituted a punitive payment.

‘Any indication of why he agreed?’

‘He has a file of correspondence from the divorce, but it very carefully avoids mentioning specific details. Stated grounds were “irreconcilable marital differences”.’

‘“Irreconcilable marital differences” is a catch-all,’ I said. ‘It can cover anything from bank robbery to whistling “Dixie” during sex. They didn’t want the real reason for the divorce to be made known in the filing.’

‘There were a couple of references to the “troubling nature” of Allan’s behavior in the letters from his ex-wife’s attorney to his attorney, but that was it.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘The alimony payments are made to a bank in Seattle, which is about as far away from her ex-husband as she can get without moving to Russia. There’s no evidence in the house that Allan and his wife have stayed in touch.’

‘So Chief Allan is living on mac and cheese in order to buy his wife’s silence?’

‘You’d have thought,’ said Angel. ‘He has twenty-three hundred dollars in his checking account, and is making minimum payments to his 401(K). But until last year he was paying a lot of bills in cash, and even on a quick run-through it’s clear that his outgoings and income don’t balance. The disparity isn’t huge, but it’s there.’

‘How big is the disparity?’

‘Uh, five hundred a month, sometimes more. I’d guess that, until a couple of months ago, he had money coming in on the side, enough to take the sting off his alimony, but that’s now been cut off. Could be bribes, or maybe he just picked up some other work along the way: security, escorting businessmen to the bank, collecting bottles for the fifteen-cent deposit. It’s not a lot of cash, but it was there, and it was regular.’

‘You tag his truck?’

‘Yeah, behind his rear fender. It’s small, with a limited power supply. We could have run it off his battery, but that truck is a piece of shit. Any trouble under the hood and a large device would be spotted before the engine cooled. We’ll get a couple of days out of it, max, then we’ll have to change it.’

‘He’s taking time off tomorrow. If he’s doing something he shouldn’t be doing, then he won’t be looking to the Pastor’s Bay PD for his ride. It’s best if I keep my distance, so you stay with him. If he does anything interesting, let me know and I can come take a look.’

We drank some more tea, and I gave them the summarized version of all that had happened at Aimee’s office.

‘If the cops have it in hand, seems like you’re out of a job,’ said Louis.

‘I wasn’t exactly cracking the case wide open before they got to it,’ I admitted. ‘But I’m curious about Lonny Midas.’

Haight had implied once again that Midas might hold a grudge against him for admitting to the police what they had done to Selina Day. I still believed that Haight was holding back on aspects of his history, including the precise extent of his role in her death. After all, he had been there right until the final act, and he could have backed out at any time. He might have been in thrall to Midas, as he claimed, but he had also confessed to a degree of sexual interest in the girl. Nevertheless, Midas had to be seen as the instigator of the assault. Again, I had only Haight’s word on how troubled Midas might have been in his youth, but if he was capable of targeting a girl and dragging her into a barn then he was already manifesting an aberrant sexuality. Haight had received counseling and therapy while in custody, so it was probable that Lonny Midas had too. The unsealing of the records would provide some insight into both of them, as well as the degree to which Midas blamed his friend for confessing their crime to the police. Also, if the cops were given Midas’s new identity they could begin to trace his movements and find out if he had made his way to this state.

But if Midas was involved he probably wasn’t acting alone. He couldn’t risk being seen by Haight, assuming he hadn’t made some dramatic alteration to his appearance, so he’d need somebody close to Pastor’s Bay who would be able to report back on how Haight was reacting. All of these strands connected back to a killing three decades before in a small North Dakota town.

‘Have you ever been to North Dakota?’ I asked Louis.

‘Yep. Second-coldest state in the Union, after Alaska. You know what’s the third coldest?’

‘Let me guess: Maine.’

‘Give that man mittens.’

‘Have you been to Alaska?’

‘Yep.’

‘Well, go you. You’re collecting the set.’

There was a soft knock on the door, and Mrs. Harvey padded in to take away the tray.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Are you gay too?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘not yet.’

‘Oh.’ She tried to hide her disappointment, then brightened. ‘Well, you never know,’ she concluded, and patted me on the shoulder before picking up the tray and disappearing.

‘Tolerant,’ I said.

‘Accepting,’ said Louis.

‘Senile,’ said Angel.

28

The rest of the day was a dead loss. My ISP seemed to have gone into meltdown, and I was reduced to working off the middling signal in a coffee shop, which was useless for the kind of searches I needed to do. The only interesting piece of information came from Aimee Price who, through various gossip channels, had found out why R. Dean Bailey, the scourge of gays, immigrants, the unemployed, the impoverished, and other dangerous threats to right-wing hegemony in North Dakota, had agreed to support Judge Bowens’s proposal to provide Lonny Midas and William Lagenheimer with new identities upon their release. It appeared that Bailey didn’t care much for colored folk either, and took the view that Selina Day, in a phrase beloved of barroom misogynists everywhere, had probably been ‘asking for it’ by going into that barn with two white boys. He was, though, torn between appearing to be tough on crime and not enraging the black community – especially one that might have links, however slight, to terrorists – and not condemning to a lifetime behind bars two white kids whose hormones, in his view, had just got the better of them. So Judge Bowens had played Bailey while promising him quiet support for any future political ambitions he might manifest, support that subsequently turned out to be closer to absolute silence. In order to facilitate the creation of the new identities, Bowens had contacted like-minded judicial figures in other states and, without going into too many details about Lagenheimer and Midas, had arranged a complex series of prisoner transfers between states on various political and compassionate grounds, like a huckster mixing the cards in a game of ‘Find the Lady.’

Night fell, and it came time to meet Walsh. He had left a message on my phone requesting my presence at Ed’s Ville, a dive bar northwest of Camden on Route 52, so named because the rear half of a ’58 Coupe de Ville was embedded in its side wall. This might have been considered a little tasteless given the number of alcohol-related accidents that had been ascribed to overimbibing at Ed’s, but most people preferred to look upon it as a token of black humor, just as no local ever referred to the bar by its proper name; to those in the vicinity of Camden it was universally known as ‘Dead-ville.’ It served good beer and better food, but it wasn’t particularly a cop bar, which was probably why Walsh had chosen it for our meeting.

The man himself was already mostly done with a Belfast Bay Lobster Ale when I arrived. Actually, strike that: From the glaze in his eyes he’d left the first one behind some time ago, and looked halfway to a good drunk. He had taken a booth and was stretched out along one side, the top button of his shirt open and his tie at half mast. His enormous feet overhung the edge, crossed at the ankles. They looked like a pair of midget canoes.

‘You’re late,’ he said.

‘Are we dating? If I’d known, I’d have made more of an effort.’

‘I wouldn’t date you if we were in jail, although I’d farm you out for cigarettes. Sit down. You’re intimidating me with your sobriety.’

I slipped in across from him, but I kept my jacket on and my shirt buttoned.

‘Hard day at the office?’ I asked.

‘You should know. You contributed to it.’

‘It’s a no-win situation with you. I was damned when I wasn’t giving up my client, and now I’m damned because I did.’

‘Your client’s a piece of shit.’

‘No, my client was a piece of shit when he was fourteen. Now he’s a small-town accountant who just wants to get on with his life.’

‘Unlike the girl he killed. How’s her life coming along? Oh, wait, she doesn’t have one, because she’s dead.’

‘Are we going to do this? Because if we are, I have some catching up to do before I can come over all boozily self-righteous.’

‘You don’t need booze to be self-righteous. I bet you came out of the womb all holier than thou. The midwife should have slapped you harder, then put you up for adoption with religious zealots.’

The waitress came over, but she did so hesitantly. It was clear that we weren’t yet having a good time, and she was uncertain if more alcohol was likely to remedy that situation.

‘He’ll have what I’m having,’ said Walsh. ‘And I’ll have what I’m having too.’

He laughed. The waitress didn’t laugh back.

‘It’s okay,’ said Walsh. ‘I’m a police officer.’ He fumbled in his jacket for his shield and showed it to her. ‘See, I’m a cop. They only give these to detectives.’

‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘I feel safer already. Would you like to see some menus?’

‘No,’ said Walsh.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He needs to eat. Why don’t you just bring us the biggest burgers you have?’

‘Are you a cop too?’ she asked.

‘No, he’s a crusader,’ said Walsh. ‘He’s the white knight.’

‘Apparently I’m the white knight,’ I said. ‘You can take your time with the beers.’

She left us, relieved to be doing so. Walsh sighed and put his shield away. ‘My wife doesn’t like me talking to waitresses.’

‘I imagine waitresses don’t like you talking to waitresses either.’

‘She thinks every woman wants me as much as she does.’

Either Walsh was ignoring me or he was just so lost in thoughts of wives and waitresses that my presence had ceased to register for a time.

‘Give me her number and I’ll set her mind at rest,’ I said.

‘She’s great. You’d like her. She wouldn’t like you, but you’d like her.’

He drained the last of his beer and set the glass down on the table so heavily that it was a miracle one or both didn’t break.

‘So why the buzz, Detective?’ I asked.

He closed his eyes for a few seconds, and when they opened again I could see that the glaze had lifted and his eyes were clear. He wasn’t drunk; he just wanted to be very, very badly, and he was tired enough that another couple of beers would make it happen.

‘You know how much closer we are to finding Anna Kore than we were when we started?’ he asked. ‘Nowhere. We’re nowhere near finding her. Nobody saw anything. The parking lot at that little mall she disappeared from doesn’t have cameras. We came up with a list of vehicles that were parked there at the time but it’s only partial. Of the ten that we’ve tracked down, eight were driven by women, and two by elderly men. They’re all clean, but we’re going to go back over them again tomorrow in case we missed something. That’s what we’re reduced to: raking over dead leads.’

‘What about the father?’

‘Alekos? We tracked him down today. He’s been living in a Buddhist retreat in Oregon for the last four years. Doesn’t read the papers, doesn’t watch TV, doesn’t use the Internet. The feds interviewed him and believe he’s clean. He was even allowed to speak to Valerie Kore on the phone this afternoon. He’s out of the frame for this.’

‘You still have Randall Haight,’ I said. ‘You have the envelopes, and his story.’

‘Allan took Haight’s prints this afternoon. We’ll use them for elimination purposes. There are prints on some of the photographs, but I’ll bet they’re Haight’s. The photographs themselves are at least second-generation, so whoever sent them probably didn’t take them. We’ll analyze the glue on the envelope in the hope of finding saliva traces, and we may get epithelial cells from the paper and the interior. It could be we’ll get lucky with a hair or an eyelash, but unless the DNA is in the system it’ll only be useful in the event that we pick up a suspect. The address labels were machine-printed, so handwriting analysis is out. For now, that glass is half empty, my friend, and that’s even assuming whoever has it in for your client is the same person who took Anna Kore.’

‘What about Lonny Midas?’

‘The mysterious vanishing accomplice? We’ve already been in touch with North Dakota, and they’re going to release copies of the records. They’ll be with us by Monday.’

I wondered if I could persuade Walsh to let me take a look at them.

‘I can hear your thoughts,’ said Walsh. ‘The answer is “no.” No, you can’t take a look at the records.’

‘That’s impressive. You should work the boardwalks. Have they kept track of Midas and Haight since their release?’

‘All we know for now is that Haight stayed in touch for a while, but Midas didn’t. The details will have to wait until we get the records.’

‘So they don’t know where Midas is?’

‘Indications are that they have no idea.’

The beers came. I sipped mine slowly, and Walsh did the same with his. The drunk show was over for a while.

‘The only bright spot in the day,’ said Walsh, ‘was Tommy Morris. And, yes, initially I was as surprised by the mention of his name as you are now.’

‘The feds got him?’

‘No, he got them. You’re going to love this. Tommy Morris, along with his right-hand man, a reputed boom-boom guy named Martin Dempsey, walked into the Kore house and held two agents at gunpoint while a sheriff’s deputy counted clouds outside. Tommy wanted to talk to his sister, so what’s a guy to do?’

It was routine in a missing-child case to have two officers or sometimes, if the FBI became involved, two agents staying with the family at all times. Mostly this was to offer support and help, but it also enabled the investigators to take a closer look at the dynamics of the family. Since Valerie Kore was Tommy Morris’s sister, that made her family dynamics particularly interesting.

‘Were they Engel’s agents?’

‘Yeah. They’re supposed to be liaising with the feds’ own Child Abduction Response Team, but there hasn’t been much liaising to do. In the end, they’re there primarily because of Tommy Morris and not Anna Kore.’

‘Did Valerie Kore say what passed between her and her brother?’

‘Just that Tommy was concerned for his niece’s safety and wanted to know what progress was being made. She didn’t have much to tell him. He tied her up, more for appearance’s sake than anything else, left the agents bound and gagged on the floor, then disappeared back down his rabbit hole. The car they used was stolen from a movie theater and later dumped at a strip mall, but the woman behind the counter of a knitting store saw Tommy and Dempsey being picked up. The pickup vehicle turned out to be stolen too, and we still haven’t tracked it down. We figure they left that somewhere as well, and are now on to the day’s third ride.’

‘Facing down two feds – that’s impressive.’

‘Engel didn’t think so. The two agents are halfway to Boise by now. A career in tracking potato smugglers beckons for them. On a more serious note, the news from Boston is that five of Oweny Farrell’s boys have dropped off the radar. Three of them are big hitters, and the other two are gifted novices. Engel is hoarse from screaming, and Pastor’s Bay is starting to feel like Tombstone on the night before the big gunfight.’

‘Engel is a curious man,’ I said. ‘He’s taking a big risk using the Kore case as bait to land Tommy Morris.’

‘As today’s events demonstrated.’

‘But Engel isn’t stupid.’

‘No, he isn’t.’

Walsh was watching me, waiting to see where my train of thought might lead. Either he knew something more than I did about Engel’s game or he had come to the same conclusion that I was approaching.

‘A stupid man would let Tommy Morris run wild and hope that good luck or common sense prevailed,’ I continued. ‘A smart man would make it look that way.’

Walsh still said nothing, but his left eyebrow rose encouragingly, and when I spoke again I received a short, ironic round of applause from him.

‘He has a lead on Tommy Morris,’ I said. ‘Somebody is talking to the FBI.’

29

The night sky was clear when Walsh and I at last left the bar. He had not commented further on my belief that Engel was being fed information from Boston, either from someone within Tommy Morris’s increasingly dwindling circle or from someone close to those who wanted him dead, and I knew better than to press him on the matter. Instead we had returned to the subject of Anna Kore, and I came to understand that Walsh, who had no children of his own, had adopted her disappearance as his personal cause and was becoming increasingly unhappy with Engel’s mercenary attitude toward her fate. When he had earlier baited me for being a crusader and a white knight, he was describing himself as much as he was taunting me.

He asked me what I was going to do now that Randall Haight had ‘unburdened himself of his past.’ I told him that I didn’t believe Haight’s burdens could so easily be put aside.

‘He’s angry,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘Because he believes that he has been defined by a single bad act, and he can’t escape that definition.’

‘But nobody knew what he’d done until he came to you and Aimee Price.’

‘He knew. He’s a mass of contradictions, a muddle of identities. The only thing he can be sure of about himself is that he was there when Selina Day died, and even then he disputes the extent of his involvement.’

‘He’s part of a social experiment,’ said Walsh. ‘Except nobody kept a close watch on the test subjects once they were released into the wild.’

I had found instances of other similar efforts, but not many. The schoolboy killers of the toddler James Bulger, in England, in 1993 had been given new identities upon their release, although one of them, Jon Venables, had since been sentenced to two years for possession of child pornography and was back in jail. His accomplice in the killing, Robert Thompson, had apparently remained out of trouble. The media were forbidden to reveal details of the men’s new identities. It seemed that Judge Bowens had been ahead of his time in anticipating some of the problems that Lonny Midas and William Lagenheimer might face upon their release. Unfortunately, he hadn’t factored in the psychological difficulties of adjusting to a new identity, particularly after the commission of such a crime against a child while still children themselves.

‘You seem very interested in Lonny Midas,’ I said.

‘You and I, we’ve been doing this for a long time,’ said Walsh. ‘Put a man behind bars with a grudge to nurse, and maybe he’ll find a way to get his revenge once he’s released. As soon as we receive those records from North Dakota we’ll know more about Midas, and then we can bring him in or cross him off the list. I’m not going to leave Valerie Kore twisting in the wind for years, not if I can help it. I want her daughter found, preferably alive. But there’s something hinky about this whole deal, and what Haight had to say today just confirmed it. We’re all being played here, not just Randall Haight.’

After that, he’d called for the check, although he made me cover it. Now the November darkness stretched above us, punctured by the light of dead stars. My grandfather knew a little about the night sky, and had tried to pass on that knowledge to me. From memory, I could find Aquarius and Pegasus, Pisces and Cetus, with Jupiter at their center. Soon Venus would become visible below the waning crescent moon low in the east-southeastern sky. As the month went on, it would grow both smaller and brighter, decreasing in distance even as it drew closer to the sun. The New England astronomers had promised that two meteor showers would become visible that month: the Taurids from Comet Encke, and the Lenoids from Comet Tempel-Tuttle. The Taurids would be brighter, the Leonids more plentiful. Those who witnessed them would be reminded of the ceaseless, rapid orbit of the Earth around the sun, of our planet’s motion through space, and, if they were wise enough, of their own inconsequentiality. Walsh stared up at the night sky, wavering against its immensity. The intoxication that he had wished for earlier had not become a reality, but 36 hours without sleep had worn him down, and I was resigned to an argument over his car keys.

‘She’s like one of those stars,’ he said.

‘Who is? Your wife?’

‘No, not her. That’s not what I meant. Anna Kore’s like one of those stars. She’s lost out there, and we don’t know if she’s alive or dead. We just have to hope that her light keeps shining until we can get to her.’

‘You need to go home, Walsh. You want me to drive you?’

‘Too far to drive. I’ll sleep in my car. Anyway, even if I was desperate I wouldn’t want you to drive me. I don’t want to be collateral damage when fate eventually catches up with you.’

‘You know, you’re a poetic near-drunk. I like that about you.’

‘And you’re not all bad. I’m sorry for what I said about your little girl back in Pastor’s Bay. That wasn’t right. That was – I don’t know what it was. It was desperation talking.’

‘I didn’t take it personally.’

He swayed with exhaustion. If he toppled, it would be like a building falling.

‘Anna Kore is dead,’ he said.

‘We don’t know that. If you start thinking that way, it will determine how you approach the investigation. You know that. Believing that she could still be alive is the spur.’

‘The three-hour rule, man. If they’re not found -’

‘I know the rule,’ I said. ‘We live for the exceptions.’

‘We’ve put her mother on television. We’ve made the appeals. If it’s a freak, he’d release her, or kill her. He hasn’t released her, therefore…’

He raised his hands, then let them fall impotently by his sides.

‘I don’t know what we’re missing,’ he continued. ‘Later, you figure it out, like that guy in South Park, fucking Captain Hindsight, and you think, yeah, that was it. You either catch it in time, and you’re the hero, or you spot it later, the big clue that should have been picked up but you only figure it out when everyone’s looking for someone to blame and the mist has cleared. Then, if you’re smart, you stay quiet. If you’re dumb and idealistic, you confess, and you get told to stay quiet. The end result is the same – a dead child – but if you open box one then nobody’s pension is put at risk.’

‘I’m driving you home,’ I said, taking his arm. ‘Come on.’

‘Get your hands off me! I don’t want to go home. My wife hates it when I come home drunk. No, she hates it when I come home maudlin drunk. Nobody likes a whiner.’

The main door to the bar opened, and our waitress came out. She had her car keys in her hand and was shrugging on her coat. She saw both of us, thought about continuing on her way and minding her own business, then reconsidered and came over to ask if everything was okay. Her name, I recalled from the check, was Tina.

‘We’re good,’ said Walsh. ‘I just need to find my car. First rule of drinking and driving: Always remember where you parked.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I reassured her. ‘He’s not driving anywhere. I’m going to put him in my car and take him to a motel.’

‘Are we dating?’ asked Walsh, throwing my line back at me. ‘’Cause I don’t remember asking you out. Go drive yourself, asshole.’

Tina stood in front of him, her hands on her hips. It clearly wasn’t the first time she’d dealt with a difficult customer, and she had no fear of Walsh or me.

‘Listen, mister,’ she said. ‘I served you tonight, and I kept serving you because I thought you’d be smarter than the other jerks who drink until their eyeballs float, because you had a badge. We don’t allow people to sleep in the lot, and right now you couldn’t drive a nail into butter. You listen to your friend and let him take you somewhere to sleep it off.’

‘He’s not my friend.’ He tried to sound affronted but just came off sulky.

‘Compared to me, he’s Jesus himself,’ said Tina. ‘Quit acting like a child and do as you’re told.’

Walsh swayed some more, and eyeballed Tina.

‘You’re mean,’ he said.

‘I’ve been on my feet for seven hours, I got a second job that starts at nine in the morning, and I have an eight-month-old baby at home who’s set to start crying in three hours’ time. If you don’t get right with the Lord, I’m going to knock you to the ground and feed your nuts to squirrels, you understand?’

She had a way about her. It wasn’t exactly tough love, but it was tough something.

Walsh was suitably chastened. ‘I understand, ma’am.’

‘You see a ring on this finger? Am I fifty? Do I look like a “ma’am” to you?’

‘No, ma’am – miss.’

‘You know, sometimes I hate this job,’ she said. ‘Give me a hand with him.’

With her on one side and me on the other, we guided Walsh to my car and laid him on the backseat. He mumbled an apology, told Tina that she was better than any man deserved, then promptly fell asleep.

‘He’s had a bad week,’ I said.

‘I know that. I heard you talking about that missing girl. You going to look after him?’

‘I’ll see that he gets a bed for the night.’

‘You’d better. And you’d better help him find that girl too.’

She spun on her heel and stomped to her car. I followed her lights for a time along a road overhung by bare trees, and her presence gave me consolation until she turned west and was lost to me. From the seat behind, I heard Walsh whisper, ‘I’m sorry,’ and I did not know to whom he was speaking.

Randall Haight was still wearing the same clothes that he had worn during his interview with the police that morning. Beside him was a bottle of scotch that a client had given to him as a Christmas gift four years earlier, and which had not been opened until that evening. Randall did not drink very much at the best of times, and preferred wine when he did. Even then, he tended to limit himself to one or two glasses. The girl did not like him to drink more than that.

But the girl was gone.

He was lost in his own house without her. She had been with him for so long that he had grown accustomed to her presence. His fear of her had become a facet of his existence. In its way, it had provided him with an outlet, a focus for other, more abstract concerns: his dread of exposure, of being returned to prison, of the unraveling of the web of half-truths in which he had secured his personality. Without her, he was too much alone with himself.

But he was also afraid of allowing himself to countenance that her torment of him might now be at an end. Perhaps even entities like her grew tired of their games. He could not bring himself to call her a ghost, for he did not believe in ghosts, a peculiar exercise in logic that even Randall admitted was unlikely to bear the weight of close intellectual scrutiny, but which nonetheless permitted him to regard her as a peculiar manifestation of primal energy, a version of the same energy that had fed the fatal attack on her all those decades ago. He knew there were professionals who, had he admitted to them that the specter of a dead girl shared his house, would have fallen back on Psychology 101 and interrogated him about his feelings of guilt and regret. Randall would then have been forced to lie to them, just as he had lied throughout his period of incarceration, and in the years that followed his release. Randall was a good liar, which made him a better actor. He could feign a whole range of emotions – repentance, humility, even love – to the extent that he was no longer always able to distinguish the counterfeit feeling from the genuine, even as he expressed it.

He was sure of the veracity of one emotional response as he sat in his favorite chair: He was furious. He was furious at the lawyer, and at the private detective. He was furious at his forced exposure, and that the potential danger posed by Anna Kore’s mobster uncle had been kept from him. He was furious at whoever was responsible for taunting him about his past. He was furious at the town of Pastor’s Bay for failing to shield him from the vile regard of an enemy.

And he was furious at the girl: furious at her for haunting him for so long, and now for leaving him.

He drank some more of the whisky. He wasn’t enjoying it but he felt that it was more appropriate to his mood than wine. His stomach growled. He had not eaten in many hours, but he wanted liquor more than food. He would suffer for it in the morning.

Randall reached for the phone and dialed the lawyer’s number. He had been reconsidering his relationship with her all day, debating the consequences of his actions back and forth, and the booze had tipped the balance. Time was running out. He knew that. Soon he would be forced to shed his current identity and find another. The presence of the lawyer and the detective in his life would only make that more difficult. He left a message informing her that he would no longer require her services, or those of the detective. Neither would he be needing the dubious protective presence of the two idiots who were supposed to shield him if the necessity arose, assuming they could get their fat asses in gear in time. He was coldly polite as he thanked the lawyer for all that she had done for him, requested that a final bill be sent to him at her convenience, and hung up the phone with a sense of empowerment. He had started withdrawing all of his money from his accounts as soon as the taunting messages began to arrive, and he now had $15,000 in cash on hand. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. The house he would just have to abandon for now. He’d figure out what to do with it later. He’d have to inform Chief Allan that he was leaving, just so he was all square with the law. He and Allan had always got along well in a cordial, professional way. He’d tell Allan that he was frightened and wanted to keep some distance from Pastor’s Bay until the Kore case was concluded, if it ever was. He might even spend a couple of nights in a nice inn before quietly heading elsewhere: Canada, perhaps. This time, he’d try losing himself in a big city.

The knock on the back door startled him so much that he tipped over the side table, and the bottle of whisky began to empty itself on the rug. He picked it up before it could do too much damage, then screwed on the cap and held the bottle by the neck, brandishing it like a club.

The knock came again.

‘Who’s there?’ he called, but there was no reply. He went into the kitchen. There was a glass panel on the locked door, but he could see nobody outside, and the motion sensor that turned on the night light above the door had not been activated. He wished that he had a gun, but the nature of the gun laws meant that it wasn’t possible for him to acquire one without complications, and he had never had a reason to seek out an illegal weapon. He put down the bottle and took a carving knife from the rack. He glanced out the kitchen window and saw, on the back lawn, the figure of the girl. She cast no shadow, despite the light from the waning crescent moon, for she was barely more than a shadow herself. She raised her right hand and beckoned to him with her index finger, and he was about to open the door when another figure caught his attention.

There was a man standing behind her, between the twin willows at the end of his garden. Their almost bare branches hung so low that their shape and his became one, so that he seemed a construct of bark and twigs and brown, dying leaves. The man did not move and Randall could not see his face, but Randall still knew who he was. After all, they had both had a hand in the death of Selina Day.

Randall backed away from the door. The girl could no longer be seen on the lawn, and now the knocking came once more.

Tap-tap-tap.

She was at the door once again. Come out. Come out, come out, because time is pressing, and a friend has arrived, just as you always knew that he would. You can’t hide from him, just as you can’t hide from me. Running won’t help, not now. The end is approaching, the reckoning.

Tap-tap-tap.

Come out. Don’t make us come in there to get you.

Tap-tap-TAP.

He retreated to the living room, and watched the figure of the man appear against the glass, the girl beside him, and the doorknob turning – once, twice – but still the motion-activated light did not come on. Randall picked up the phone and tried to call the police, but there was only an empty, whooshing noise from the receiver, like a fierce wind blowing across barren peaks. This was not the sound of a dead line. The phone was still connected, except now it was connected to someplace else, somewhere deep and dark and very far away.

The shapes of the man and the girl disappeared. The line cleared. The voice of the emergency operator asked him what service he required, but he did not answer. After a couple of seconds he dropped the phone back into its cradle and slowly sank to the floor. The girl could have come in. She didn’t need doors or windows. Why didn’t she enter?

The answer was that the girl had a new friend, a special friend.

And Randall saw, in the night sky, the flickering of long-dead stars.