The Burning Soul

30

I didn’t need a reminder about the necessity of following Allan that day, but in case I did there was another text message waiting for me when I woke. It read:

CHIEF ALLAN THE PEDOFILE IS A HORNY DOG TODAY.

I could taste beer at the back of my throat, and although I had slept straight through the night I did not feel rested. For a long time after the deaths of Susan and Jennifer I had not touched alcohol. I had never been an alcoholic, but I had been guilty of abusing alcohol, and I had been drinking on the night that they died. Such associations are not easily set aside. Now I drank the occasional beer or glass of wine, but my taste for either in any great quantity had largely vanished. Walsh had far outstripped my intake the night before, but I had still drunk more than I was used to and my head and liver were making their objections known.

I checked in with Angel and Louis, but Allan’s vehicle had not yet left his property. The tracking device on Allan’s truck was based on one that had previously been attached to my own car. The vehicle’s movements were mapped on a computer utilizing the same technology that provided coordinates to drivers using GPS units. The advantage was that the trackers didn’t need to maintain visual contact with the target vehicle all the time, but in our case this advantage was diminished slightly by the necessity of finding out not only where Allan was going but whom he was seeing.

But for the early part of the morning Allan did nothing interesting. He didn’t appear until shortly before eight, and then only to produce a chainsaw and trim some trees in his yard. He worked until noon, reducing the cuttings to firewood and piling them to dry. Angel watched him from the woods nearby, chilly and bored. In an ideal world we’d have monitored Allan’s cell phone too, but that was a complex business and assumed that, if he was doing something wrong, he’d be dumb enough to make calls related to it on his cell phone of record. If the day’s surveillance revealed nothing then it was among the other options that we could look at, but I was hoping it wouldn’t be necessary. If the anonymous messages had any truth to them, then any liaisons that Allan conducted were likely to be personal and not electronic. Eventually, freshly showered and wearing clean clothes, Allan got into his truck and made his way into Pastor’s Bay, and the pursuit of him began in earnest.

While Angel rolled up the sheet of plastic on which he had been lying, wondering how his life had come to this moment, and Louis tracked Allan’s progress from the warmth of his car nearby, I dealt with Aimee Price, who had called to tell me about the message from Randall Haight that had been left on her answering machine. I dropped in at her office on my way to Pastor’s Bay: If and when Allan met his ‘cooze’ I wanted to be close by. There were no muffins and coffee that morning. Aimee was preparing for Marie Borden’s bail hearing, Marie Borden being the woman who had objected with a hammer to her husband’s ongoing physical abuse.

‘Borden?’ I said. ‘That’s her name? Lucky it wasn’t her mother she laid out.’

‘You think you’re the first person who’s cracked that joke?’

‘Probably not. What about Randall Haight?’

‘He’s no longer my problem,’ she said. ‘Either he’s looking for new legal representation or he’s going to be alone when he sits for a polygraph.’

‘Assuming he’s willing to take the test.’

‘And that there’s any point to it in the first place. The state’s polygraph experts are good, but they don’t like firing questions into the dark. It’s hard to see how the polygraph will help, apart from going some way toward conclusively eliminating him as a suspect, assuming any doubts remain after Chief Allan’s contribution yesterday. It looks like Randall caught a break with that. Two cheers for him.’

‘You don’t sound too sorry to have lost a client,’ I said.

‘I don’t know how much more we could have done for him,’ she said. ‘Being in charge of a protection detail while juggling my moral and legal obligations is not why I spent all those years in law school. Besides, I didn’t like him, although I hid my feelings better than you did. He gave me the creeps. Bill me for your time and I’ll take care of it.’

‘That’s kind of why I’m here.’

‘Are you upping your rate? We had an agreement.’

‘You just assumed that we did. My rates weren’t specified on that contract you had me sign. For a lawyer, you’re a very trusting person.’

‘You’re a secret moralist, but you wear a cynic’s overcoat well. I know that I’m going to be sorry for letting you keep talking, but go on. I’m listening.’

‘I know I’m off the job, but I need a little indulgence. Expenses only: mine, and Angel and Louis’s.’

‘Yours I can afford. I’m not sure about theirs.’

‘We’ll keep them reasonable.’

‘For how long?’

‘A couple of days.’

‘And I would be doing this why?’

‘Because you’re curious about what Randall Haight has kept hidden from us, and what Kurt Allan does in his spare time, and because somewhere in this mess may be the answer to the question of Anna Kore’s disappearance.’

‘You could just hand over what you know to the police.’

‘I could, but all I have is a couple of anonymous texts about Allan and my own insatiable curiosity about the details of other people’s lives. Anyhow, it’s more interesting this way, and more satisfying.’

‘I’ll give you two days. And I want receipts. And nothing over five hundred dollars without prior approval. And if anybody asks, or you get caught doing something you shouldn’t, I’ll deny any knowledge of this conversation.’

‘And if we find anything useful to the cops?’

‘You can tell them I guided your every move with a firm but gentle hand.’

‘You make it sound dirty.’

‘It is,’ she concluded. ‘And not in a good way.’

I drove on to Pastor’s Bay, making some calls along the way. According to Haight, Lonny Midas had one older brother, Jerry, but I had been able to find no trace of a Jerry Midas in Drake Creek or its vicinity. Neither could I find a Social Security number linked with a Jerry Midas and originating in North Dakota. It was a long shot, especially as it was Sunday, but I made a call to the sheriff’s department in Drake Creek. After a delay during which I listened to the same couple of bars of Pachelbel’s ‘Canon’ played over and over on what sounded like a child’s xylophone, I was put through to Sheriff Douglas Peck. A Sheriff Douglas Peck had been named in some of the newspaper articles following Selina Day’s killing. Three decades later, he had either started out young or law enforcement in the county was a family business.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ he said.

‘My name is Charlie Parker,’ I said. ‘I’m a private detective up here in Maine.’

‘Congratulations.’ He didn’t say anything more, which suggested that Sheriff Peck was a man with a sense of humor, albeit a sarcastic one.

‘You wouldn’t be the same Douglas Peck who worked the Selina Day killing?’

‘I’m Douglas Peck the third. My father was Douglas Peck the second, and he was sheriff at that time. My grandfather was plain old Douglas Peck, and he was never a sheriff anytime or anywhere. If this is about the Day murder, then I can’t tell you more than what you can find on the Internet.’

‘You can’t, or you won’t?’

‘Both.’

‘Perhaps I could talk to your father?’

‘Not unless you got access to one of them mediums. He’s been dead these past five years.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘You didn’t know him, so you can’t be sorry. Now, are we done here? I don’t want to be rude, but just because I don’t want it to rain doesn’t mean that I won’t get wet if I step outside, if you catch my drift.’

I wasn’t sure that I did. ‘I’ve been working for a man your father might have known as William Lagenheimer.’

‘Hold on a minute,’ said Peck. I heard the phone being put down, and then much of the background noise was muted as a door was closed.

‘Run that by me again,’ he said.

‘I’ve been working for William Lagenheimer, although he goes by another name now.’

‘Are you going to tell me in what capacity you’re working for him, or do I have to guess?’

‘He was receiving unwanted messages in the mail from somebody who had learned about his past and his previous identity. He wanted me to find out who was responsible.’

‘And did you?’

‘No. He has since dispensed with my services.’

‘Not surprising if you couldn’t help him.’

‘I try not to take these things personally. I also try not to let them get in the way of pursuing my inquiries.’

‘Why? You a charitable man? You must be if you like working for nothing.’

‘I just don’t like loose ends. I also don’t like it that a fourteen-year-old girl has gone missing up here, and from the same town in which Lagenheimer now lives.’

‘You think he had something to do with it?’

‘He has an alibi. I think he’s in the clear. It’s Lonny Midas that I’m curious about.’

‘And where are the police in all this?’

‘A request has gone to the North Dakota Attorney General’s Office requesting the information contained in the sealed records pertaining to the imprisonment and subsequent release of Lonny Midas and William Lagenheimer.’

‘So? The AG will oblige by releasing the information, but as you’re not a law-enforcement officer you have no right to it. Will that be all?’

‘Jerry Midas,’ I said.

‘What about him?’

‘You can’t tell me anything about Lonny Midas, but you can tell me how to get in touch with his brother.’

‘And why would I do that, assuming I knew anything about him in the first place?’

‘Because there’s a girl missing, and I want her found as much as the cops do. Look up my name, Sheriff Peck. If you need someone to vouch for me, try Detective Gordon Walsh of the Maine State Police. If you have a pen, I’ll give you his number.’

I wasn’t sure that Walsh would vouch for me, but I figured he owed me for the night before. Even if he didn’t feel any obligation, my interest in Jerry Midas might pique his own interest and I could possibly browbeat him into sharing whatever he discovered.

‘Let me have it,’ said Peck.

I gave him Walsh’s number and my own.

‘Leave it with me,’ he said. ‘I’ll get back to you.’

An hour later I was back in Pastor’s Bay, standing in Hallowed Grounds while the same tattooed barista worked behind the counter, although this time he was wearing a faded Ramones T-shirt and the music playing was a cover version of the Carpenters’ ‘Goodbye to Love’ by American Music Club. I had that tribute album. Hell, I think I even had the original album somewhere.

‘Morning, snitch,’ I said. ‘I saw an old lady jaywalking earlier. I didn’t get her name, but she can’t have got far. Maybe you can call someone and have her picked up.’

He tugged at the massive hole in his left ear created by a circular piercing through the lobe. I could have put my finger through it. It was a tempting image.

‘You get a good look at her?’ he replied. ‘We’ve got a lot of old ladies here. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for a miscarriage of justice.’

‘A rat with a conscience. I may yet find it in my heart to forgive you.’

‘Hey, no hard feelings, man. I was just doing what was right.’

‘Yeah, you and Joe McCarthy both. It’s okay. In your position, I might even have done the same. To make up for my discomfort, you can brew me some fresh coffee. That pot smells like you’re stripping bones in it.’

He grinned and gave me the finger: customer service the Maine way.

‘The name is Danny, by the way.’

‘Charlie Parker. Don’t think this makes us friends.’

I leafed through some of the paperbacks on the shelf. A sign described them as ‘Gently Used,’ but there were retired hookers who’d been used more gently than these books. Some of them were old enough to have Caxton’s thumbprints on them.

The front door opened, and Mrs. Shaye entered, her son Patrick ambling amiably behind her. They looked as if they’d dressed for church.

‘Danny, do you have that order of subs ready?’

‘Sure, Mrs. Shaye. I’ll just be a second.’

‘And we’ll need two iced coffees, and as many of those doughnuts as you can fit in a bag.’

Danny set the coffeepot to fill, and sprinted off to do Mrs. Shaye’s bidding.

‘I’m the spare pair of hands,’ Pat said. ‘She made me clean them too.’ He showed them to me as proof.

‘They’re spotless. In parts.’

‘Don’t talk to strange men, Pat,’ said Mrs. Shaye. ‘Mr. Parker, will you be joining us for lunch?’ But she said it with a wry smile.

‘I hope not, Mrs. Shaye. All out of cookies?’

‘I’m working such hours now that I don’t have time to bake them. It’s good news for Danny here. You know that this is his business? Before him, we had to make do with takeouts from the store.’

I raised an eyebrow at Danny, who had just reappeared with a tray of Saran-wrapped subs, and was looking for a bag for the doughnuts.

‘And there he was, telling me that the management didn’t like him to play depressing music.’

‘The management doesn’t,’ said Danny. ‘The fan does, but the manager wants to stay in business.’

Mrs. Shaye handed the tray of subs to Pat, added a half dozen bottles of iced tea to the pile, signed for everything, and took the bag of doughnuts herself. I held the door open for them.

‘Bye, now, Mr. Parker,’ she said. ‘Stay out of trouble.’

‘Good advice,’ said Pat.

I went to the window to watch the world, and I witnessed a peculiar moment. A group of young girls were hanging out near the grocery store. They were probably about fourteen or fifteen years old, and well on the way to becoming striking young women. Unfortunately, they hadn’t reached that stage yet, so I tried to find somewhere else to look.

Chief Allan didn’t seem to have such qualms. He was sitting in his truck on the other side of the street, sipping a soda and taking in the girls’ bodies. One of them had bought a magazine, and they were huddled around it, giggling and pointing. They didn’t notice Allan, but Mrs. Shaye did. I could see her clock him, and the direction of his gaze. As Mrs. Shaye and her son crossed the road, she rousted the girls.

‘Hey, you kids, be about your business. You’re like a brood of hens blocking the path.’

The girls headed east up Main Street. Allan started his truck and moved off. Mrs. Shaye held open the door of the municipal building for her son, her head flicking to follow Allan’s progress before she followed her son inside.

And I wondered how good Mrs. Shaye’s spelling was.

Walsh called me while I was finishing my coffee.

‘I’m your referee now?’ he said. ‘What are you doing, giving my name out to hick sheriffs as your go-to guy?’

‘I hope you said nice things about me.’

‘I just got the message. I haven’t called him back.’

‘I know there’s a “yet” missing from that sentence. You haven’t called him back yet.’

‘I may not call him back ever.’

‘And after all I’ve done for you. How’s your head?’

‘Surprisingly clear and obligation-free. I don’t recall everything about last night, but I do remember telling you that I wasn’t going to let you see those sealed records, and now you go trying your luck with North Dakota. You just don’t know when to quit.’

‘I’m interested in Lonny Midas’s brother. I didn’t think the sealed records were relevant in his case.’

‘You’re looking for the brother because you believe that he might know where Lonny is. Lonny Midas is the subject of those sealed records.’

‘Come on, Walsh, I just want to talk to the brother. If he blows me off, then we’ll have whatever is in the records to go on.’

‘I will have whatever is in the records. You will have nothing.’

I ignored him. ‘And if his brother does know something I’ll share it with you and you’ll be ahead. So either you win or you stay as you were, but you’re not going to lose on the deal. Come on, make the call.’

There was silence on the other end of the line.

‘Did a waitress threaten me last night?’ he asked.

‘She promised to feed your nuts to a squirrel if you continued to annoy her,’ I said.

‘I thought that was what she said.’

‘She also told us to find Anna Kore.’

‘I seem to remember that too,’ said Walsh. ‘Shit.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Engel says you got one favor coming to you for the Randall Haight thing, but this can’t be it. It’s too close. We have feelers out for Jerry Midas too, and I don’t want you getting in the way. You let this one drop. Understood?’

‘Yeah, I understand.’ And I did: There would be no call back from Sheriff Peck.

‘Okay,’ said Walsh. ‘Thanks again for the ride last night.’

‘De nada.’

‘Right. Más tarde.’

He hung up. There was free wireless access in the coffee shop, so I opened up my laptop and went through my copies of the newspaper reports of the Selina Day killing. The Beacon & Explainer was still going strong. I found its number and got through to the editor, a man named Everett Danning IV. Like law enforcement, the Beacon-Advertiser turned out to be a family business as well, but Danning was a little more co-operative than the sheriff. He wasn’t able to tell me a great deal, but he confirmed that Lonny Midas did indeed have an older brother named Jerry, except that wasn’t quite his given name.

‘He was baptized Nahum Jeremiah Midas, after the prophets,’ said Danning. ‘That’s what you get for having a Bible-thumper for a father. His younger brother got off easier, mainly because even old Eric Midas wasn’t blind to the fights his firstborn got into over his name. He gave Lonny his own father’s name, Leonard, and saved the Biblical stuff for the kid’s middle name, Amos. Don’t ask me how “Leonard” became “Lonny” instead of “Lenny,” although I think it was because there were two other Leonards in his school, and they all had to be differentiated somehow. Jerry Midas ditched “Nahum” pretty early on, or tried to. He was a couple of years ahead of me in school, but that name stuck for a long time.’

‘Does Jerry Midas still live in Drake Creek?’

‘No, there are no Midases left here now.’

‘Any idea where he might have gone?’

‘None.’

I thanked him. In return, I gave him a little of the background to what was happening, but I tried to keep it as vague as possible, telling him only that the former William Lagenheimer now lived in Maine. I did promise him that, if it became possible to reveal more at some point in the future, I would.

Five minutes later, thanks to the wonders of Google, I had found Jerry Midas.

31

It turned out that Jerry Midas had always had an artistic bent. He had been sketching since he was a boy and had adapted his talents to book illustration, graphic design, and, for the past two decades, computer games, providing initial portraits and backdrops for companies that prided themselves on the depth and beauty of their virtual worlds. He was known to those who called upon his skills simply as N. J. M., for that was how he signed his work, or otherwise as ‘Nate.’ All this he told me when I finally tracked him down in San Mateo, California, having first had to persuade his wife to let me speak to him. His voice sounded hoarse down the line, as though speaking might be painful for him.

‘Throat cancer,’ he said. ‘I’m in remission, but it’s a bitch. Know what? I never smoked. Don’t even drink much. I always tell people that, because they make judgments, you know?’

‘I’ll try not to keep you talking for too long.’

‘Well, that’s kind of you, but there was a time when I was worried I might never talk again. I don’t take the facility for granted. My wife says you’re a private investigator, and you want to talk to me about my brother?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Why?’

‘Until recently, I was working on behalf of William Lagenheimer.’

From the other end of the line came an expectoration of disgust.

‘Now there’s a name from the past. Little William. Lonny told me that he hated being called Billy, always insisted on William. Don’t know why, just the way it was. Naturally, everyone called him Billy, just to watch him burn.’ He wheezed, and his breath seemed to catch in his throat. ‘Dammit.’

‘Lagenheimer is living under a new identity in the state of Maine. A girl has gone missing here.’ It was more than I wanted to reveal about Haight, but I had little choice.

‘I’ve read about it, I think. Anna – something.’

‘Anna Kore.’

‘Unusual name. Ironic, even.’

‘Why is that?’

‘It’s a Greek dialectical variation on the name “Persephone.” Persephone was the daughter of Zeus and Demeter who was abducted by Hades to the Underworld. Benefits of an amateur classical education, you might say. And where does Lonny fit into this? They trying to pin the girl’s disappearance on him?’

‘When the girl disappeared, Lagenheimer had the same concern for himself that you just expressed for your brother. He believed his past might lead to him being suspected of a crime that he did not commit, so he came clean to the police about his past, which meant telling them about Lonny as well. If they haven’t already been in touch with you, they soon will be.’

‘But you found me first.’

‘It’s what I do.’

‘Maybe the police should use you to help them find that girl.’

‘It’s an unofficial inquiry, but to the same ends.’

‘If you’re asking me where Lonny is, I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him in many years, not since shortly after his release, and that was just one call to let me know that he was alive and out. He used to write me from his first prison, and I wrote back occasionally, and sent him a card at Christmas, but we were never close. We got on okay, but there was a big gap in age between us.’

‘If you’re asking me where Lonny is, I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him in many years, not since shortly after his release, and that was just one call to let me know that he was alive and out. He used to write me from his first prison, and I wrote back occasionally, and sent him a card at Christmas, but we were never close. We got on okay, but there was a big gap in age between us.’

‘Protective of Lonny? Lonny didn’t need protection. Other people needed protection from Lonny. He was a wild one. But when he killed that girl…’

He paused. I waited.

‘He marked us all, you know? Our family name became associated with that crime. That’s why I tried to reduce it to a single letter. I suppose that for all these years I’ve been hiding from my family, from myself, maybe even from Lonny too.’

‘But your parents stayed in Drake Creek?’

‘My father was a deluded zealot, and my mother lived in his shadow. Lonny’s sin was a cross that my father could bear, and he forced my mother to share the burden of it. I think he even found a way to blame her for it. He was a God-fearing man, so the fault must have been in her ab ovo, from the egg. He wore her down, but she never complained. Her heart had already been broken by Lonny. I was long gone by then, though, and didn’t care much for going back, although I made a couple of trips for my mother’s sake. Drake Creek wasn’t a big place, and I didn’t like to hear people whispering behind my back as I walked down the street. Even if Lonny hadn’t done what he did, I still wouldn’t have wanted to live there. It had a small-town mentality in the worst possible way.’

‘Was there a lot of animosity toward your family as a result of Selina Day’s murder?’

‘Some. The colored folk put the windows of our house in I don’t know how many times, but eventually that stopped. Would have been worse if she was a white girl. Don’t get me wrong: I’m no racist, but that’s just the truth of it. What bothered people more was that they’d interfered with her before she died. They didn’t like that. Even if they’d raped her and left her, people would have dismissed it as boys getting out of hand, but they didn’t care for the combination of killing and sexual assault. That’s how I read it, anyway, but my take on it is pretty poisonous. My take on William Lagenheimer too.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because everybody blamed Lonny for what happened, as though he was the only one who was there. Even at the trial he was portrayed as the bad boy who led innocent little Billy astray, but it was more complicated than that. Lonny and Billy, they set each other off, you understand? It was like each of them had a part missing, and the other fit it perfectly. They were the bow and the arrow, the bullet and the gun. Without one, the other was pretty much useless. I don’t believe Lonny would have gone after that girl had he been alone, nor Billy. But Billy Lagenheimer was worse than Lonny in some ways. Lonny was all up front. You looked at him, and you knew that he was trouble. Billy, he kept it hidden. He was insidious. If you crossed Lonny, then he’d call you on it. He gave his beatings, but he took them too. Billy, though, he was the kind who’d come up on you from behind and slip the knife into your back, then twist it just to be sure. He was a self-righteous little prick, but there was real harm in him. He had a way of goading my brother, pushing him, daring him. If Lonny killed that girl like they say he did, if he put his hand over her mouth and suffocated her, then Billy Lagenheimer was behind him, screaming him on. He wouldn’t have tried to stop him, not the way he claimed that he did. It took two of them to kill her, doesn’t matter whose hand felt her final breath.’

As I listened to him, I was reminded of Randall Haight telling his story, first to Aimee, then to both of us, and finally to the unsmiling agents and detectives in Aimee’s conference room. Each time the telling had been similar, practiced. But as Jerry Midas spoke, pain both physical and emotional in his voice, I recognized the sincerity of true insight. He had held these thoughts in his head for so many years, but rarely had he spoken them aloud: to a therapist, perhaps, or to his wife when the memories came and his mood sank, but not to a total stranger. Later, he would perhaps wonder if he should have been so open, and the police, when they came to him, might get a different version of the story as a result. Still truthful, but less revealing.

‘And you haven’t heard from Lonny since his release?’

‘No. Wait, that’s not true. He called me after he was released, but we didn’t talk long. I told him to come down and see me sometime, but he never did. That was the last contact I had with him. I don’t even know what name he’s living under.’

‘And your parents?’

‘My father died halfway through Lonny’s time in prison. Heart attack. Passed away behind the wheel of his car on his way to church. My mother died a couple of years before Lonny was due to be released. She used to take the Greyhound bus to visit him once a month before they moved him to Washington.’

‘Washington?’

‘Yeah, the Washington Corrections Center in Mason County. He was there for a while, and then I lost track of him when they moved him again.’

‘Under his own name?’

‘Yes, as far as I can recall. After that, old Bowens’s bleeding-heart scheme must have kicked in, because I lost track of him, and my mother was dead by then. She was old, and tired. I know that Billy’s momma eventually sold her house in Drake Creek so that she could be with him when he was released. I only heard rumors, but Mrs. Lagenheimer’s life stopped when Billy was jailed. She kept talking about him as her little boy, even when he was a grown man. It was like she’d put his childhood on hiatus, and they could pick up on it again as soon as he was released.’

This was interesting.

‘Do you know where she moved?’

‘She tried to keep it quiet, but mail had to be forwarded, and you couldn’t fart in your own bed in Drake Creek without half the town complaining about the smell. She went to New Hampshire somewhere.’

Berlin, or its vicinity, I thought. That was Randall Haight’s last place of imprisonment. It was New Hampshire’s newest prison, opened in 2000 for medium-minimum security prisoners: the ideal place in which to conclude the experiment, the journey that had led William Lagenheimer to become Randall Haight.

I thanked Jerry Midas for his help, even as I wished that I could have seen him in person. Only one detail of his story did not ring true. He had spoken so passionately about his brother that I was not sure I believed him when he said he had received no word from Lonny since his release, a single telephone call aside. Jerry was the only blood left to Lonny, and Lonny had reached out to him upon his release. He was family, and Jerry had given no indication of a falling-out between them, the natural distance between them excepted. Would a man who had been in prison for the best part of twenty years, and whose first instinct was to call his brother, not try to reestablish their relationship? Similarly, would an older brother who seemed to know his younger sibling so well not attempt to remain in touch with him?

But Midas had more to say, as though he had picked up on my doubts. ‘What my brother and Billy did was a terrible thing, Mr. Parker, and they’ll have to live with it for the rest of their lives, but that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve a chance to be better men. I’d like to know that Lonny’s okay, and if you find out where he is you could tell him that I was asking after him, but if he’s started again somewhere new, then I wish him only good luck. He was a boy when he committed his crime. He’s a man now, and I hope he’s a good one.’

‘I hope so too, Mr. Midas.’

‘And Billy? How’s he doing? I know that Lonny blamed him for blabbing to the cops, and maybe my opinion of him is biased because of that. Billy never was very strong, not like Lonny. He got bullied a lot in school. Lonny looked out for him, I think. Without Lonny beside him, Billy wasn’t the same kid. But I guess Billy wasn’t all bad for Lonny either. These things even out in the end, I suppose.’

‘Why was William bullied?’ I asked.

‘He was slow. No, that wasn’t it. He was really smart, but he had some disorder. He had to work really hard in school to understand words and numbers. They’d get mixed up in his head. What’s he doing now?’

‘He’s an accountant,’ I said, the words tumbling out of my mouth before I realized that I’d said them.

‘An accountant?’ said Midas. ‘Well, isn’t that something? I guess people do change, because Billy Lagenheimer never could add for shit.’

32

Louis and Angel were growing impatient. Tailing people wasn’t what they were good at. They preferred a more confrontational aspect to their work. They were particularly frustrated by Allan, who appeared to be intent only on performing the kind of mundane tasks that might be expected of someone who had been working long hours without a break, and now had to catch up on the basics of maintaining his household. Allan visited a bank in Rockport, and a hardware store. He stopped at a sub shop for a sandwich, then stocked up on cheap household items and cheaper food at a bargain store as Angel disconsolately trailed him around. So bored was Angel that it took him a minute to notice that Allan had stopped in the diaper aisle and was adding a jumbo pack to the canned foods and chicken pieces already in his cart, followed by the kind of baby food that came from Asia and needed to be checked for formaldehyde and broken glass before it could be fed to a child.

Angel abandoned his basket of obscurely branded cookies and close-to-expiration coffee, and returned to the car. Louis was trying to calm himself by listening to more Arvo Pärt, which Angel muted as soon as he closed the door behind him. Angel had decided that his first act upon ascending to the throne of world domination would be to turn America’s nuclear arsenal on Estonia unless it handed Arvo Pärt over to him.

‘You turned off Pärt,’ said Louis.

‘How can you tell? Anyway, forget that. Take a look.’

Allan was emerging from the store, his cart loaded with bags.

‘Guess what he has in the bags?’ said Angel.

‘Cheap shit.’

‘Cheap baby shit.’

Louis roused himself to a point just past indifference.

‘Really?’

‘Exciting, huh? That’s what people in the trade call a “clue.”’

‘Let me jump ahead of you, Sherlock. You’re thinking that he doesn’t have a kid.’

‘That we know of.’

‘I’m thinking that he has a sister.’

‘That we don’t know of.’

‘Exactly. And maybe she has a kid.’

Some of Angel’s enthusiasm dissipated, but he recovered enough to bet Louis a dollar that Allan didn’t have a sister. Louis took the bet, and raised Angel ten that this was as eventful as the day was going to get. As it happened, Louis would be eleven dollars down by the day’s end.

Allan drove to a wood-sided apartment building on the northern outskirts of Lincolnville. There were three cars in its lot, none of them less than a decade old. A drape moved at a first floor window as Allan pulled in. Moments later, a girl appeared at the door. She was very thin, and wore a pink oversized man’s shirt and dark blue jeans. Her hair was black and hung loose, partly obscuring her delicate features but failing to hide how young she was. Her feet were bare, and she had a cigarette in her right hand. Allan removed most of the shopping bags from the trunk of his car and brought them with him as he went to greet her. She rose onto the tips of her toes to kiss him, her arms curling around his neck, her mouth wide open as she pressed herself against him. Angel and Louis watched them from a block away through a gap between two of the neighboring houses.

‘His sister,’ said Angel.

‘They’re very close,’ said Louis. ‘Call Parker.’

The building was owned and managed by a company called Ascent Property Services, Inc. One of the cars, a 1997 Subaru, was registered to a Mary Ellen Schrock. Mary Ellen Schrock was nineteen years and ten months old. A further search revealed that Mary Ellen Schrock had given birth to a baby girl, Summer Marilyn Schrock, thirteen months earlier. Mary Ellen Schrock had declined to name the father on the birth certificate. I told Angel and Louis all of this as I sat in the backseat of their car, watching the property.

‘What’s the age of consent here?’ asked Angel.

‘Sixteen, but it’s sexual abuse of a minor if she’s under eighteen and the offender is over twenty-one.’

‘Which makes it legal between them.’

‘Legal when the child was conceived, and just barely,’ I said. ‘But there’s no way of knowing when Allan started seeing her.’

‘Assuming he’s the father.’

‘Which we’re assuming,’ I said.

‘Because he is,’ said Angel.

Allan had told me that he’d been divorced for a year, but the marriage had ended sometime before. Perhaps his wife had found out about his affair, or Allan had felt the need to confess to her after the girl became pregnant. He was a small-town police chief, bringing in enough to keep himself and his wife but not in anything approaching luxury. There would be no way to hide any payments that he needed to make to the mother of his child, and it didn’t look as if she was living with her parents, which meant he would have been under pressure to provide for her and the baby. Confess or get found out: It wasn’t much of a choice. His wife, either out of pity or a desire to rid herself of her errant husband as quickly as possible, had allowed her silence to be bought, leaving Allan with an illegitimate child, the child’s dependent mother, and a job that paid barely enough to keep his head above water. But if anybody found out about the child, and particularly about the youth of the mother, Allan would be out of a job, and would be facing awkward questions about the girl’s age at the commencement of the relationship. Even if it had started when she was over eighteen, or he could persuade her to say that it had, his reputation would be destroyed, whether or not there was a moral turpitude clause in his contract with the Pastor’s Bay Police Department.

But somebody had found out about his young girlfriend, and after what I had witnessed outside the Hallowed Grounds coffee shop that morning I was prepared to guess who that might be. It would be hard to hide secrets from Mrs. Shaye, who struck me as a woman who knew the value of storing up hidden knowledge in a small town. She would want to safeguard her own job, and turning whistle-blower on her employer over a personal matter would almost certainly result in his successor’s finding an excuse to dispense with her services as soon as it was possible to do so without leaving the department open to a legal challenge. After all, nobody likes a rat. Better, then, to feed the information anonymously when the opportunity arose. The disappearance of Anna Kore had provided both that opportunity and the impetus to tell. The fact that Kurt Allan had a young girlfriend didn’t necessarily mean that he was a pedophile. Neither did it mean that he was connected to whatever had happened to Anna, but it didn’t look good.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Angel.

But I was distracted. Working from my cell phone’s Internet connection, I was trying to trace William Lagenheimer’s mother in Berlin, New Hampshire. Jerry Midas had said that Mrs. Lagenheimer had bought, not rented, a property in New Hampshire, and I assumed that property would have been near the correctional facility in Berlin. The Coos County Register of Deeds was based in Lancashire, New Hampshire, but did not accept online or telephone requests. Searches had to be done in person, and that wouldn’t be possible until the registry opened on Monday morning. I made a call to the home of a realtor I knew down in Dover, and asked him to do an owner’s search for Marybeth Lagenheimer in New Hampshire, but probably in the vicinity of Berlin. The realtor said he’d get back to me in a few minutes.

‘Hey. Again, what do we do now?’ said Angel.

‘Did you get pictures of him with the girl?’

‘What are we, idiots? Of course we did.’

‘Then stay with him when he leaves. Whatever he has or hasn’t done, I think his time as chief is about to come to an end. Once he’s safely tucked up at home, we can talk about e-mailing the photographs to Gordon Walsh at Maine CID.’ I gave them Walsh’s e-mail address from memory, just in case it became necessary to alert him sooner. ‘Once you’re done with Allan, I want you to keep an eye on Randall Haight.’

My phone beeped. The realtor had come through. I now had an address for an M. Lagenheimer in Gorham, New Hampshire, on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. There was no phone number connected with the property.

‘I have to go,’ I told them. ‘I’ll be back in four or five hours. Remember: Allan first, then Haight.’

‘You think Haight could be in trouble?’

‘Not just that – I think he could be about to run.’

33

It was a three-hour drive to Gorham, but I did it in closer to two-and-a-half, slowing only as I passed through the towns. For the most part I encountered little traffic once I left Gray behind and went west on Route 26. The big rigs hauling logs on Sunday were heading south, and even the larger standard trucks were gone entirely once I passed South Paris.

Although its setting in the Washington Valley was dramatic, nobody was going to mistake the town of Gorham for anywhere excessively pretty. It functioned as a northern gateway to the White Mountains, so in fall it made its money from hunters, in winter from snowmobilers and winter-sports enthusiasts, and in summer from the rafting and hiking crowd, and those with camps in the woods. It had a couple of decent restaurants, some diners and pizzerias, and a clump of chain fast-food joints at its northern end, where the road continued to Berlin and the prison from which Randall Haight had emerged. In this part of the world, though, it was pronounced Ber-lin, not Ber-lin, a blue-collar town with a strong French influence, despite its name. The paper mills had once made this part of the state stink pretty badly, just as they once had the town of Lincoln in Maine, which was still routinely referred to as ‘Stinkin’ Lincoln,’ but the big Berlin pulp mill had been demolished in 2007, striking a serious blow to the local economy. Without the Northern State Correctional Facility, the town would have been swaying on its feet and waiting for the referee to stop the fight. Instead, the economics of punishment had saved Berlin and its environs. A prison might have been bad for the soul of a town, but it represented salvation for its finances.

Marybeth Wilson Lagenheimer had purchased a house on Little Pond Lane, a mile or two north of town and within easy reach of the prison by car. An online search indicated that all taxes had been paid to date, and there were no outstanding liens on the property. Just as there was no phone number linked to the address on Little Pond Lane, so too none of the online databases to which I had access listed a cell phone number billed to that address. The utility companies appeared to have no involvement with the property. There were no gas, oil, or electricity accounts. Mrs. Lagenheimer did not have a credit card, and her bank account appeared to be dormant, yet her tax obligations to the town were being met. I could find no death certificate on record for a Marybeth Wilson Lagenheimer. I tried Marybeth Wilson and Marybeth Lagenheimer and got some results on the former, but the ones that fell into the relevant post-2000 period were both in their thirties when they died, which ruled them out. It seemed that Randall Haight’s mother was quite the recluse. Maybe she was living off the grid, holed up in Gorham with a generator, a shotgun, and a grudge against the United Nations.

Randall Haight had said that he was no longer in touch with his mother. The dynamics of families never ceased to surprise me, but it struck me as odd that a woman who was so devoted to her son that she would move halfway across the country just to be near him could, in her old age, be cut off by that same son. It wasn’t impossible, though, and if Jerry Midas was right then Marybeth Lagenheimer had been damaged in unquantifiable ways by her son’s crime and his subsequent incarceration. If she really had tried to pick up their relationship once again at the point at which it had been sundered, with her as the mother and her son as a little boy, then that son, now a man, might well have found her presence stifling to the point of intolerability.

But there was another possible explanation for Mrs. Lagenheimer’s silence. Dyscalculia: that was the name for the condition Jerry Midas had described, a less well-known form of dyslexia linked to numbers. There were strategies to cope with it, and it was possible that someone could develop them given time and encouragement, even within the prison system, but to hone them to the extent that one could then go on to make a living through one’s ability with numbers seemed unlikely. As I drove west, a picture began to emerge.

The clearer skies of recent days were now under siege from masses of dark cloud as I headed north out of Gorham. There was a storm front heading down from the north, and flooding had been forecast for low-lying areas. I touched base with Louis and Angel, but Allan had not yet left his girlfriend’s house. Chief Allan is a horny dog. It was an odd turn of phrase. Each time I considered it I heard a woman’s voice speaking, and I thought of Mrs. Shaye scattering young girls like pigeons, and the look she had cast in the direction of her employer. But ‘cooze’? Would a woman like Mrs. Shaye use that word?

Somewhere out there, too, was Tommy Morris, with Engel circling him but not approaching, waiting for him to make his next move. They should have been tearing Maine apart to find him after that stunt he’d pulled at his sister’s house, but they were not. In fact, word of what had occurred had not even made it to the media. It might simply have been Engel trying to save the Bureau’s blushes, and for that he could hardly be blamed, but it fitted in with a larger pattern of concealment and gamesmanship that had underpinned all of Engel’s actions so far.

And behind it all, like the marks on a wall where a picture had once hung, or the clean space on a dusty shelf, the evidence of absence, was the fact of Anna Kore’s disappearance. Allan’s relationship with an unusually young woman, Haight’s mess of truths, half-truths and possibly outright lies, Engel’s desire to entrap Tommy Morris, and Morris’s efforts to escape his enemies and perhaps redeem himself by acting on his sister’s behalf, all were as nothing compared with the fate of the lost girl. I saw Gordon Walsh framed against the dark and the stars, and I heard him say again that he thought Anna Kore was dead. He might have wished to believe otherwise, but the tenor of his investigation was predicated on the likelihood that she was already the victim of a homicide. He found it difficult to hold two opposing possibilities in his head – one of life, the other of death. The odds favored death, and a shallow grave in the woods. The wardens had been searching with that in mind, and they knew how important it was that the girl’s resting place was found before the snows came. Winter would alter the landscape and hide forever any trace of digging and concealment, but this was a huge state and they could not search every inch of it. If Anna Kore’s body had been removed any distance at all from Pastor’s Bay, it might never be found.

But I wanted her to be alive. I needed her to be alive. I did not want to have to tell my daughter that a young girl had been dragged into the underworld, either vanished forever with no trace of her to be found, or with something of her returned to this world, ruined and decayed and without its soul.

According to my New Hampshire Atlas Gazetteer, Little Pond Lane lay off Jimtown Road, right at the edge of Moose Brook State Park. The light was already fading as I found the turn, due in part to the waning of the day but also because of the gathering clouds. There were only two houses on the dead end, one lit and one unlit. The darker house was at the termination of the lane, where the road bled out into forest. It was a manufactured home painted gray and white, with an A-frame roof and a screened front porch. The yard was thick with fallen leaves from the mature trees that surrounded the property. At the back of the house, a shallow slope led down to what I assumed was Little Pond itself, which didn’t exceed the expectations raised by its name. It was about fifty feet in circumference, and coated with a pale scum.

I knocked on the porch door for form’s sake, but there was no reply. It opened to the touch, but the front door itself was locked, as was the back, and the windows were sealed. Still, it doesn’t take much to break into a trailer home; one shattered frame of glass later, I was inside. Apart from some cheap furniture and a couple of polyester rugs, the house was entirely empty. I could find no clothing, no pictures, no indication that anyone lived there. A thin layer of dust coated everything, but it was the accumulation of a couple of months, not years. The bathroom was clean and the mattresses in the two bedrooms were stripped of sheets and pillows, the bed linen neatly folded and placed back in their original zippered packing to save them from damp, the pillows and comforters tied up in big plastic bags from Walmart. There were no personal papers, no photographs, no books. All the drawers and closets were empty.

I went back outside. The dying sun, mostly obscured by clouds, gave a faint yellow tinge to the filth on the pond. I walked around the property, finding nothing untoward apart from the remains of a couple of broken cinder blocks that had accumulated a coating of mold, leaves, and cobwebs. I moved one of the shards and watched insects scurry in alarm across bare earth. I looked back at the house. I could see no cinder blocks, and there was no evidence of any kind of construction nearby, not even a barbecue pit.

I headed down to the other house on the lane. This one was a permanent dwelling, and well maintained, although winter blooms, a child’s bicycle, and a battered basketball hoop indicated that this was still a family home. I knocked on the door and a woman opened it. She was plain-looking, and in her early thirties. There was a paring knife in her hand. A boy of two or three peered around her legs, chewing on a piece of raw carrot. I showed her my ID, and explained that I was looking for the owners of the house at the end of the lane.

‘Oh, we never got to know them,’ she said. ‘They’d moved out by the time we moved in. We never met them but once.’

‘Do you remember anything about them?’

‘Nah. The woman was old. I think her name was Beth or something. Her son lived with her. He was kind of shy. We introduced ourselves after we bought the house, but we couldn’t move in for a while. This place had been empty for a couple of years, and it needed a lot of work done to it. My husband did most of it. He knew the old lady to say hi to while he was fixing things up, but he had to stop for winter, and when he got back to work they were gone.’

‘How long ago was this?’

‘Well, we’ve been here more than ten years, and that was right at the start.’

‘Who looks after the house now?’

‘A relative. I think he said he was a cousin, or a nephew. The old lady, Beth, she found the cold too much, he said, and moved down to Florida. Tampa, I think. He comes by a couple of times a year. Sometimes he stays for a night, because we see a lamp burning – there’s no power to the house – but he keeps himself to himself. We don’t mind. It’s not unusual up here.’

‘A relative? Not her son.’

‘No, he looks like him. He wears his hair the same way, and the same kind of glasses, but it’s not him. I have a good memory for faces. Names not so much, but faces I never forget.’

I thanked her and was about to leave when I saw a pile of threaded rods lying by the garage door. They varied in length from three to six feet.

‘My husband’s in construction,’ she explained, then added, ‘He’ll be back soon,’ just in case I had any bad intentions in mind.

‘I know this sounds weird,’ I said, ‘but would you mind if I borrowed one of those rods for a few minutes? I’ll bring it back.’

She looked puzzled. ‘What will you be using it for?’

‘I want to test the ground.’

She looked even more puzzled, but agreed. I picked up a rod that was about four feet long and headed back to the first house. There had been a lot of rain, and the ground was relatively soft so close to the pond, but it was still an effort to force the rod down. Starting at the pile of broken blocks I began to work my way out, probing as deeply as I could at the ground, trying to stick to grids of about two square feet. I’d been working at it for only five minutes when the rain came, and for another five minutes or so when a truck pulled into the yard. Stenciled on the side was the name ‘Ron Carroll – Independent Contractor.’ A big man in tan work boots, old jeans, and a red windbreaker stepped from the truck.

‘How you doing?’ he said. ‘Mind if I ask what you’re at?’

‘Mr. Carroll?’ I said, trying to buy myself some more time as I continued to probe at the dirt. There was rain dripping down my back, and my clothes were already pasted to my skin, but I wasn’t about to stop, not unless someone forced me.

‘That’s right.’

‘I think I met your wife.’

‘I think you did. She said you were a detective, and you told her something about wanting to test the ground.’

‘That’s right. I-’

The rod struck something hard. I pulled it out, shifted position, and inserted it again.

‘Do you have another of these rods in the back of your truck?’ I asked. The wind must have been gusting at forty miles an hour, and I was starting to shiver. The big nor’easter that had been forecast might ultimately present as snow on the mountains, and when the weaker trees fell they would bring power lines down with them, but here it was falling as icy water. Tonight the cops would be tied up with accidents and power failures. In a way, it was all to the good if I was right about what I believed was buried beneath my feet.

‘What have you found?’ asked Carroll.

‘Broken cinder blocks.’

‘Why would somebody bury cinder blocks?’

He was beside me now, his shoulders hunched against the rain. I pulled out the rod and moved it a foot to the right. This time it encountered no obstacle. I moved it two feet to the left. It went in eighteen inches before hitting stone.

‘To keep something from being dug up by animals,’ I said. ‘You remember Mrs. Lagenheimer? Your wife knew her as Beth.’

‘Yeah, the woman who used to live here with her son. She moved out years ago.’

I leaned on the rod. My back ached from pushing, and my hands were raw.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think she ever left.’

It didn’t take us long, working together and using the rest of the rods from Carroll’s truck, to mark out the boundaries of what I believed was a grave. The rough rectangle was six feet in length and about two in width. When we were done, I gave Carroll one of my cards and told him that I’d be back as soon as I could.

‘Shouldn’t we call the cops?’ he said.

‘They’re not going to come out tonight,’ I said, ‘not in weather like this. Even if they do, they won’t be able to make a start on a dig until it gets light again. And, you know, it may just be a pile of broken blocks.’

‘Yeah.’ Carroll didn’t sound as if he believed that was the case. I could barely hear him above the sound of the wind and the beating of the rain.

‘Look, I’ll call them from the road, okay?’ I said in an effort to mollify him. He was a big man, and I didn’t want him to try to stop me leaving. He wouldn’t succeed, but if things got physical one or both of us would get hurt.

‘I don’t get why you can’t just call them now,’ said Carroll. ‘And maybe you should stick around, you know? Doesn’t seem proper for you to just leave if you’re right about there being a body buried here.’

Bodies, I thought, but I didn’t say that.

‘You have my card,’ I said. ‘Whoever, or whatever, is down there isn’t going anywhere.’ Then I told him the truth, or something of it. ‘And I think I know who did this, and I want to see his face when I tell him I’ve been here.’

Carroll searched for the lie, the rain streaming from our faces, and didn’t find it.

‘I don’t hear from them in an hour, then I’ll call them myself,’ he said.

I thanked him. At his invitation, I followed him back to his house in my car and he gave me a towel with which to dry myself, and a flask of coffee to warm me on the journey. I called Randall Haight from the road. He answered on the second ring.

‘Mr. Haight, it’s Charlie Parker.’

He didn’t sound happy to hear from me. I didn’t care.

‘What’s this about, Mr. Parker? You’re no longer working on my behalf.’

‘Tommy Morris,’ I lied. ‘We think he’s going to make his move soon.’

‘Am I in danger?’

‘I don’t know, but I’d like to get you out of there. I want you to pack some clothes, then sit tight until I get to you, okay?’

‘Yes, absolutely,’ he said, the fact that he had fired me now conveniently set aside. ‘How long will it take?’

He was scared, and he wasn’t pretending.

‘Not long,’ I said. ‘Not long at all.’

You have to be careful what lies you tell. You have to be careful in case your lies are heard, and the gods of the underworld mock you by turning them to truths.

34

Iwas half an hour from Pastor’s Bay when Angel called.

‘Allan is on the move again.’

‘Going home?’

‘Kinda. He came part of the way, then stopped at a gas station and made a call. Now he’s sitting in his truck smoking a cigarette, and not in a relaxed way. He’s making me nervous, he’s wound so tight. Why does someone with a cell use a pay phone?’

‘Because he doesn’t want anyone to have a record of the call.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Keep a note of the time of the call, but stay with him.’

‘You sure? What about Haight?’

‘He’s not going to run out before I get there. He thinks I’m coming to protect him.’

‘And you aren’t?’

‘I just want to talk to him. I’ll do it at gunpoint if I have to, but it may not come to that.’

I was close now, and I was starting to understand something of the nature of the man who called himself Randall Haight. I believed that Marybeth Lagenheimer, Randall Haight’s mother, was buried on her property near Gorham, New Hampshire. What I didn’t know was if she was alone down there, but I was guessing that she had some company in the grave. The man who occupied the neat, anonymous house with the ugly paintings on the wall had put her there. He had graduated from the killing of a child to the murder of an adult. He had piled lie upon lie, identity upon identity, creating a series of new selves without cracking or revealing the truth about his imposture, and only the intervention of an outside force, an anonymous tormentor, had finally threatened his existence. He was a killer who had taken the lives of at least two people, their deaths separated by decades but connected by the blood that flowed from the first killing to the next.

Yet Randall Haight, or the man who claimed to be Randall Haight, still had an alibi for the time of Anna Kore’s disappearance courtesy of Chief Kurt Allan, who was himself apparently a predatory male with a taste for younger women. If they were working together, it made sense for Allan to have provided Haight with an alibi. If they weren’t, I had simply exchanged the mystery of Anna Kore’s fate, for which I didn’t have an answer, for another mystery, one for which I thought I did have a solution.

The road was dark and empty as I drove. Rain had fallen here too, but the storm from the north had been at its strongest over New Hampshire and large parts of Vermont. Coastal Maine, by comparison, had barely been touched. Lights burned in Pastor’s Bay, and through the window of the police department I could see figures moving. The State Police Winnebago was still in the lot, but its windows were dark. There was no sign of the big SUVs beloved of Engel and his agents.

Randall Haight had drawn the drapes at his living-room window, but a sliver of light was visible through the gap. I peered in and saw him sitting at the kitchen table with his back to me. Three cardboard storage boxes were piled one on top of another on the floor beside him.

I rang the front doorbell. My gun was by my side, but I kept my body turned from the door so that it was not visible.

‘Who is it?’ said Haight. ‘Who’s there?’

He was calling from inside the living room. I could hear the fear in his voice. I wondered if he had a gun.

‘It’s Charlie Parker, Mr. Haight.’

Footsteps approached the door, and I heard the security chain being removed. When he opened the door his hands were empty, and there were two suitcases in the hallway.

‘I see you’re planning a trip,’ I said.

‘Even before you called, I felt that it would be safer for me if I left town for a while. I planned to inform the police tomorrow morning. I’ve made a reservation at a hotel at Bar Harbor. I printed off a copy of the reservation confirmation for the authorities.’

He saw the gun in my hand.

‘Am I in danger, Mr. Parker?’

‘No, Lonny.’ I raised the gun and pointed it at him. ‘But am I?’

Lonny Midas didn’t react. He didn’t become fearful or angry. He merely looked confused. In truth, I don’t think even he knew who he was anymore, not for sure.

‘You’d better come in,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we have much time.’

He backed up. I entered the house and pushed the door closed behind me.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘It’s a sign. Your coming here, it’s a sign. Soon the others will come too, and then it will all be over. It’s already started.’

‘What others, Lonny?’

He just shook his head. His eyes were glassy, and his smile was that of a man who has glimpsed the guillotine from the window of his cell and feels the first touch of the madness that will cloud his fear and make the end easier to bear. He retreated into the living room, his hands held away from his sides, the palms upturned. His shirt was clean and neatly pressed, his tie a pale pink. I could see that he was not armed, but I put him against the wall and frisked him anyway, just to be sure. He did not object. He said only ‘Have you seen her?’

‘Who? Anna Kore?’

I stepped away from him and he turned slowly around.

‘She likes you,’ he went on, as though I had not spoken. ‘I knew it from the first time you came here. Then she came to me one last time and I thought that I understood. Did she go to you? Is that why she left me?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lonny.’

‘I think you do. Not Anna. It was never about Anna. I’m talking about Selina Day. Will you tell her that I’m sorry?’

‘I think you need to sit down, ’ I said, and he understood that he would receive no confirmation of his beliefs or his fears from me.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell her myself, when she comes.’

He thought that he had always intended to kill William Lagenheimer. He’d given himself other reasons for finding him, but secretly he knew how any meeting between them would conclude. It had all been William’s fault: the years in jail, the pain inflicted upon him by others, the haunting by Selina Day that would, in time, become something else, something more complex and ineffable, although that would only be revealed to others later upon the discovery of his diary. All of it was William’s fault because he was weak and couldn’t keep his mouth shut. They had been friends, William and Lonny, and friends were supposed to look out for each other. Friends didn’t tell. They kept their secrets. He’d warned William about that, just before they closed in on Selina Day and began putting their hands on her body.

‘You mustn’t tell, William. Whatever happens, you mustn’t tell.’ Sometimes he would annoy William by calling him Billy, but not this time. It was too serious for that. They were about to do something Very Bad.

‘I won’t tell,’ said William, and Lonny had wanted to believe him. He had wanted to believe him so badly that he swallowed his doubts and ignored the way William’s eyes couldn’t quite meet his. His mouth was dry and the blood was pounding in his head. He could almost feel the girl beneath him, the warmth of her, the smell of her. He needed William there to help him, to make it happen.

They’d both wanted to do it. Of course, that wasn’t the way William told it once they’d made him cry by telling him that they’d lock him away from his mommy for years and years, lock him away and put him in with the big men, and you didn’t want to know what the big men would do to you. Remember what you wanted to do to Selina Day, Billy? Well, they’ll do that to you, except it’ll hurt more. They’ll do it over and over until the pain gets so bad that you’ll want to die. You’ll call for your mommy, but she won’t be there to help you. Right now, we’re the only ones who can help you, Billy, so you’d better start telling us the truth, because not far from here your friend Lonny is being offered the same deal, and the first one who comes clean wins the teddy bear. He gets looked after, and there’ll be doctors who will try to help him be a better person, and the big men won’t get to lay their hands on him. The other one, the one who doesn’t talk in time, he’ll get thrown to the wolves. That’s the deal. That’s the way these things work. So you’d better start talking before your friend does.

Except Lonny wouldn’t talk. Lonny would never tell. He kept his arms folded and he didn’t cry, not even when one of the policemen hit him so hard across the back of the head that his vision went funny and he bit the inside of his cheek and had to spit the blood from his mouth. Every time they asked him why he’d killed the girl he just shook his head, and the only words he spoke were to tell them that he hadn’t done anything at all, that he didn’t know what they were talking about. And even as he spoke he knew they were asking William the same questions in another room, and he prayed and prayed that William would be strong just this once, that he’d remain true to his promise and keep their secret. He refused to countenance any other possibility, as though by sheer force of will he could hold William together just as he was holding himself together.

But William had broken, and that was why they blamed Lonny for everything that happened. Poor little William Lagenheimer was led astray by the bad boy. William was really sorry for his part in what had happened to Selina Day; he’d tried to make Lonny stop, but Lonny was too strong for him.

But William didn’t tell the police that he’d touched the girl too, and that when she started bucking and kicking it had been he who pinned her legs so she couldn’t throw Lonny off. Oh, he’d been crying when he did it, but Lonny didn’t have to tell him to hold her down. He just knew. Still, it had been Lonny who suffocated her, and it was Lonny who was portrayed as the leader, the instigator, the ‘alpha’ as one of the psychiatrists termed him, and so it was that the big man got to play with Lonny, just as they’d promised, although he didn’t get to play with him for long. The girl had seen to that.

It hadn’t been difficult to find out where William was staying after his release. After all, his mother didn’t try too hard to hide her tracks. She always had been a dumb bitch, doting on her little boy. All she cared about was looking after him again: cooking for him, washing his clothes, ensuring that he had a clean bed and a safe place to stay once they let him out. She trusted people to send on her mail to a post-office box in Berlin, as though ten miles between the box and her home would make any difference, and she’d never considered how she might be in danger of undoing all the good work that had been put into giving the boys new identities. Even the Negroes no longer spoke of the killing of Selina Day, or of what they were going to do to the two boys who murdered her. She was gone to a better place, and forgotten by most.

Except that part of Selina Day had stayed – the angry part, the vengeful part – and she wouldn’t let Lonny forget her. It was she who had whispered to Lonny that there was unfinished business with his old friend, and maybe he ought to look him up once he was a free man again. So Lonny had made some calls, including one to his brother, Jerry, and Jerry told him what he knew about Mrs. Lagenheimer, because Jerry had been forced to make trips to Drake Creek to settle their mother’s affairs, and people had talked, the way people will talk. Lonny didn’t tell Jerry what he was planning to do, and he didn’t know if Jerry suspected anything. If he did, Jerry was too smart to ask. They never spoke again, but that was Lonny’s decision. It was easier that way.

Both he and William had been released within a couple of months of each other – William first, Lonny later – and Lonny had been worried that William and his mother might already have moved on by the time he got to New Hampshire, but William was in the throes of a deep depression, and the medication prescribed to combat it meant that he was even less resistant to his mother’s suffocating love than he might otherwise have been. Lonny had found William walking in the woods near the shitty little trailer home that his mother had bought – bought! She was so dumb that she hadn’t even rented, as if a guy being released from jail in a strange state would want to stay living within a few miles of his final prison. But William was too battered and acquiescent to strike out for himself when he was released, and had they been left to their own devices they might have remained there on a dirt road beside a stinking pond until one or both of them passed away.

So there was William, his hands in his pockets, his whole body bent slightly after years of trying to deflect the attention of predatory men by making himself smaller and less obvious. Lonny approached him from behind when William stopped to stare at his reflection in that scummy pond, so that Lonny’s own reflection gradually appeared next to William’s. Their time behind bars had accentuated rather than diluted the similarities that had always existed between them. They were both carrying jail weight from bad food, and their faces were prematurely aged and weathered. Lonny stood straighter than William, though, and his hair was lighter and longer. In addition, William now wore spectacles, the cheap metal frames making him appear at once sadder and more vulnerable.

For a moment William just stared at the two reflections, as though uncertain whether he was seeing a manifestation of a real being or a wraith conjured up by his own damaged mind. Then the figure said his name, and William heard it spoken and knew that what he was seeing was real. He turned around slowly, and instantly they were fourteen again, with William taking the subordinate role, except this time there was an added sense of resignation to his posture and speech. Like Lonny, he had always known that they would meet again. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t objected to his mother’s preparations, and hadn’t tried to move far from the prison. He was waiting, waiting for Lonny to come.

‘How you doing, Lonny?’ he asked.

‘I’m okay, William. You?’

‘Okay, I guess. When did you get out?’

‘A couple of weeks back. It’s good to be free again, right?’

‘Uh-huh.’

William blinked, and pushed his spectacles farther up his nose, although it didn’t seem to Lonny that they’d dropped since they’d begun talking. Maybe it was a nervous tic. His tongue licked at the little scar on the left side of his upper lip. Lonny noted its presence. William hadn’t been marked in that way when Lonny knew him as a boy.

‘How’d you find me?’ asked William.

‘Your momma. Her mail. It wasn’t hard.’

‘It’s nice here,’ said William. ‘Peaceful. You want to go inside, have a soda or something?’

‘You got anything stronger?’

‘No. I’m on medication. I’m not supposed to drink alcohol. It doesn’t matter so much. I tried it when I got out but I didn’t like the taste.’

‘Could be you just tried the wrong kind.’

‘It was whisky,’ William said. ‘I don’t remember the name. I went to a bar. I thought that was what you were supposed to do, you know, when you got out. That’s what everyone else talked about doing.’

He sounds so young, Lonny thought. It’s like he froze mentally at fourteen, so that his body grew older while his consciousness stayed the same.

‘That’s what I did,’ said Lonny. ‘I thought it tasted good. Got me some pussy too.’

William blushed. ‘Gosh, Lonny,’ he said. ‘Gosh.’

You child, thought Lonny. You weak little boy.

‘What are they calling you now, William?’

‘Randall. Randall Haight. I don’t know why they chose that name. They just did. And you?’

‘Daniel Ross. I don’t know why they chose that either.’

‘It’s an okay name.’

‘Yes, it is. Let’s go inside, “Randall.” It’s cold.’

Side by side, they walked back to the house.

‘My momma’s out,’ said William. ‘She plays bingo at the American Legion every Friday. Before that, she has dinner at a restaurant and reads her magazines. I went with her a couple of times, but I think she preferred being alone.’ The house came into view. ‘I heard that your momma and poppa died,’ said William. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah. Well, you know.’

Lonny trailed off. He didn’t want to talk about that. They were gone, and that was the end of it.

The inside of the house smelled of damp clothes and bad cooking. William took two cans of soda from the refrigerator, but Lonny had already found a bottle of vodka in one of the kitchen closets.

‘Thought you said you didn’t have anything stronger?’

‘That’s momma’s!’ said William. He sounded scandalized.

‘She won’t mind,’ said Lonny.

‘She will. It’s hers. She’ll know someone has been supping from it.’

‘She won’t, William. Trust me. I’ll make it right with her.’

‘No, you can’t be here when she gets back. She won’t like it.’

‘Why is that?’

William clammed up. This wasn’t a subject that he wanted to explore.

‘Because I’m the bad one, right? Because I made her little boy do a bad thing?’

William remained silent, but Lonny knew that it was true.

‘I know that’s what she thinks,’ continued Lonny. ‘I know, because that’s what everyone thinks.’

He found two glasses, poured a generous measure of vodka into each, then added Coke from one of the cans. He handed a glass to William.

‘Take it.’

‘I don’t want it.’

‘Take it, William, and drink it. Trust me. It’ll make things easier in the long run.’

William took the glass. He sipped at the drink, but didn’t like the taste. He started to cry.

‘Drink it, William.’

‘I’m sorry, Lonny,’ said William. ‘I’m so sorry.’

Lonny forced the glass back to his mouth and made him drink. When the glass was empty, he refilled it.

‘More.’

‘I don’t want any more.’

‘Just do it. For me.’

He clinked his own glass against William’s in a toast, then drank long. Already, William looked a little woozy. He held the glass in two hands and drank. This time he didn’t struggle so much with the liquor, but he was still crying. There was snot dripping from his nose, and a string of spittle linked his mouth to the glass.

‘You weren’t supposed to tell,’ said Lonny. ‘You were never supposed to tell.’

William just stared at the floor, his body jerking with the force of his sobs.

Lonny put his glass in the sink. He didn’t want to make a mess. A mess would make it more likely that he’d be caught. He took the rope from the pocket of his coat. He’d told himself that he was only going to use it to scare William, or tie him up if he had to, but it was a lie, just one of many lies he would be forced to tell, and to live.

‘I’m sorry, Lonny,’ William repeated, but his voice was different now. The sobbing suddenly ceased. ‘But you should be sorry too for what we did to Selina Day.’

He swallowed the last of the vodka and Coke, then turned and knelt on the floor, his back to Lonny. Lonny couldn’t move. He had expected arguments, or excuses, but not this: not this abject surrender.

‘Don’t hurt my momma,’ said William. ‘She’s a nice lady.’

It was those words that broke the spell on Lonny and set in motion all that was to follow. He flipped the rope over William’s neck, put his knee against his back, and slowly strangled him. And when William’s mother came home he did the same to her.

On that night William Lagenheimer ceased to exist, but Randall Haight did not.

At the kitchen table, the man who had once been Lonny Midas, then briefly Daniel Ross, and finally Randall Haight, pushed his spectacles farther up the bridge of his nose. He still didn’t need them, and the lenses were just clear glass, but they were a part of who he was, even down to that little tic. He’d seen William do it, and he’d absorbed it. After all, he hadn’t had a whole lot to work with, so he’d taken whatever of Randall Haight that he could. The scar he’d created with a razor, and it had hurt like a bitch. The rest he’d made up himself.

‘They blamed Lonny for everything,’ he said. ‘William was innocent, Lonny was guilty. Becoming William seemed the perfect solution.’

‘Where’s Anna Kore, Lonny?’

‘I told you already: I don’t know. Selina didn’t know either. If she was dead, Selina would have told me. She might even have brought her along to show me. The dead know the dead. But, dead or alive, I didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance.’

I heard a voice say, ‘I don’t believe you,’ but it wasn’t my own. I tried to move, but I was too slow. I caught a glimpse of three men as I rose, and then there was a shocking pain in my head as the first blow connected. Others followed, but after the first three or four I ceased to feel anything at all.

35

Kurt Allan pulled up a short distance from the entrance to the department building, and killed his engine. The department’s Explorer was parked up, which meant that Ken Foster, Allan’s senior officer, was inside. Knowing Foster, he probably already had a cup of coffee in his hand, and was scavenging for sweet foods. Allan was right. When he entered, Foster’s large ass was facing the door as he poked around in the closet beneath the coffee machine.

‘Quiet night?’ said Allan.

‘Hungry night,’ said Foster’s voice from inside the closet. ‘And the staties have cleaned us out. I think they even ate the bugs.’

‘Why didn’t you pack a sandwich?’

‘I did pack a sandwich. Then I left the sandwich on the kitchen table.’

Allan liked Foster. Hell, Allan had hired him, so he supposed that he must have known what he was doing. Foster wasn’t about to solve a great mystery anytime soon, but his heart was in the right place and he managed to combine an inability to take shit from anyone with a gentle hand, which was no mean trick. The big man emerged from his foraging and took a seat behind the empty reception area.

‘You’re out late,’ he said.

‘I find it hard to relax lately.’

‘Yeah, me too.’ Foster toyed with his coffee cup, and watched Allan take some papers from his in-box. ‘Detective Walsh left those,’ he said.

It was the report on the analysis of the envelopes sent to Randall Haight. From what Allan could tell, it contained nothing of note: no hairs, saliva, or DNA. There was something about organic matter, but it was complicated and he was too distracted to take it all in. If it had been important, someone would have called him.

‘Anything?’ asked Foster.

‘Nothing.’

‘Chief, you think she’s still alive?’

It was the first time Foster had asked him that question. Allan knew that it had been on his mind, because it was on everyone’s mind. He’d found Mrs. Shaye looking up newspaper reports on the Internet of girls who’d been missing for years and years before they turned up, like that girl in the basement in Austria, or the kid who’d been found living in a makeshift home of tents and sheds at the back of her abductors’ property. They were the exceptions, though, and what they went through during the period of their captivity didn’t bear thinking about. Too often, snatched girls turned up dead, and that was only if their captors were careless, or unlucky, or just didn’t give a rat’s ass either way if they left trace evidence or not. The smart ones made sure that their victims were never discovered.

‘She’s still alive,’ said Allan. ‘She’s still alive until we find out otherwise. Look, why don’t you go get something to eat? Buddy’s is still serving food, right?’

‘Yeah, bar snacks.’

‘Go eat. I’ll take care of things here.’

‘You sure?’

‘I don’t have anything better to do. At least I won’t be worrying about your delicate constitution.’

Foster didn’t argue. Allan watched him drive away. When he was sure that Foster was safely gone, Allan checked the time once more. His cell phone rang twice, stopped, then rang twice again. The number, in each case, was blocked.

Allan sat back in his chair. It had begun.

Angel and Louis watched the station house from the shadows off Main. Both were uneasy about Allan but uncertain of how to act beyond simply staying with him. If Allan did have Anna Kore, then she wasn’t on his property. Similarly, a search of his girlfriend’s apartment while Allan bought her and the kid an ice-cream down the street had revealed no trace of her, which meant that if Allan was involved in her disappearance Anna was either being looked after by another party or she was dead. Randall Haight might have provided an answer to that question by now, but there had been no word from Parker, and when they tried his phone it had simply rung out.

‘What do you think?’ said Angel.

‘I think Allan’s staying in there until fat boy comes back,’ said Louis.

‘We have him tagged.’

‘Yes, we do.’

‘So if he moves, we’ll know where he went.’

‘That we will.’

‘Wouldn’t hurt to swing by Randall Haight’s place, just to make sure all is copacetic.’

‘Wouldn’t hurt at all.’

Louis started the car, and made a U-turn so that they wouldn’t have to enter the main street. They headed east. About half a mile from Randall Haight’s house, they saw night hunters heading into the woods. Three of the five men had shotguns in their hands. It was not an uncommon sight during hunting season.

Except it was Sunday, and hunting was illegal in the state of Maine on Sundays.

I never lost consciousness entirely. I was aware of the sound of fists slapping flesh, and I heard snatches of questions and fragments of answers. At some point I managed to turn my head, but my vision was blurred and I could barely make out Lonny Midas’s form in the chair. I could see the blood, though, for his face and shirt were stained red.

Eventually I was lifted to my feet. I struggled to stand. The pain in my head was ferocious, and I felt dizzy and nauseated. I seemed to be deaf in my right ear. I was allowed to fall back to the floor. Somebody grabbed my legs and began dragging me. My head banged against the kitchen step, and then there was wet grass under my back, and stars peered coldly through the gaps in the clouds. The grass turned to dirt and leaves, and the sky was fractured by the branches of bare trees. The cold and damp of the night air cleared some of the fog from my mind. I lay on my side and watched what was about to occur, powerless to prevent it.

Lonny Midas was on his knees in the clearing. His face was ruined. I wasn’t even sure that he could see anymore. A long thread of viscous blood hung from his mouth, and his breath whistled through the mess of his nose.

Two men stood over him, one young and redheaded, the second older, with long dark hair. To one side, a third man in his sixties watched them. He was bald, and heavyset. I thought he might be Tommy Morris, for I had seen pictures of his younger self in the documents sent from my Boston source.

‘Ask him again,’ said the oldest of the three.

‘He doesn’t know anything, Tommy,’ said the dark-haired man.

‘Martin, I told you to ask him again.’

The one named Martin leaned over to talk to Lonny Midas.

‘He just wants to know where the girl is. Tell him, and we’ll let you go.’

Lonny shook his head, but said nothing.

‘We’re losing him,’ said Martin, but Morris didn’t reply.

Martin tried again. ‘If you know where she is, just nod. We’ll clean you up, and we’ll go and get her. It’ll be for the best.’

But Lonny just shook his head again.

‘I swear, Tommy, he doesn’t know. If he knew, he’d have told us by now. I couldn’t stand up to the punishment he’s taken.’

‘What about him?’ said Tommy, pointing at me. ‘You didn’t ask him what he knows.’

‘He’s a private detective, Tommy,’ said Martin. ‘He doesn’t have your niece.’

‘Maybe he knows where she is.’

There was something robotic in the way Tommy Morris was speaking. Looking back, I believe he could think only of Anna Kore, for she was all that he had to keep himself moving forward.

‘Tommy,’ said Martin, and he spoke as gently as he could, ‘if he knew where she was he’d have told the cops. I’ve heard of this guy. He doesn’t screw around.’

The redheaded man had drawn his gun. He was pointing it at the back of Lonny Midas’s head.

‘Frankie,’ said Martin. ‘What are you doing?’

‘He killed a little girl,’ said Frankie, and a kind of sob caught in his throat. ‘What kind of man does that?’

‘It was a long time ago,’ said Martin. ‘He did it when he was a kid himself.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Frankie. ‘None of it matters. I just want it to end.’

‘He’s right,’ said Morris. ‘Kill him. Kill them both.’

Martin took a gun from his coat. He looked at it for a moment, contemplating what was ahead, then pointed it at the one called Frankie.

‘Put the gun down, Francis.’

‘What?’

‘Put it down. Slowly.’

‘He’s a child killer! He’s a piece of garbage. Nobody’s going to miss him. Nobody!’

Martin shifted position slightly, so that both Frankie and Tommy Morris were under his gun.

‘What’s this about, Martin?’ said Tommy.

‘It’s over, Tommy, that’s what this is about. I’m a federal agent.’

Tommy didn’t react at first. Slowly, a smile spread across his face.

‘No, you’re not.’

‘Francis, I mean it: You put the gun down. Tommy, you keep your hands where I can see them.’

‘You’re not a federal agent, Martin. You’re one of us. You’ve drunk with us, you’ve beaten men down with us. You’ve even killed for us.’

‘I never killed for you, Tommy. Those people you sent me after, they disappeared, but not the way you thought. Even the Napiers are under federal protection now.’

‘The panty hose,’ said Frankie. He spoke as if remembering a dream. ‘Mrs. Napier. I thought you raped her, but she wasn’t wearing any panty hose when we went into the house, and later there was a panty hose on the floor. You never touched her. It was all a set-up.’

‘I’m not a rapist, Francis, and I’m not a killer either, but I’m giving you one last warning. Put – ’

But Frankie wasn’t listening. He raised his gun from Lonny’s head, and Martin shot him twice in the upper body.

‘Ah, Jesus,’ said Tommy, and then there were men moving in the shadows behind him, hunters in shades of gray, and I thought: This is wrong.

The forest exploded with gunfire. There were shots from behind me, shots from right and left. I ran for cover, staggering like a drunk. A bullet blew splinters and bark from a tree close to my head, and I hit the ground. I thought that I heard someone run through the bushes nearby, but I couldn’t see him clearly. I had no gun, and could see no way of acquiring one. I found the cover of a big tree and picked up a fallen branch. It was better than nothing, but only barely. After what seemed like too long a time, the shooting ceased, and I heard a familiar voice call my name.

‘It’s done,’ said Angel. ‘It’s done.’

With the first shot, Lonny had hit the ground. He had learned in prison that when trouble started it was best to keep your head down, or else somebody would beat it down for you. As the shooting continued, he had crawled through the dirt and fallen leaves like the wounded beast that he was until he slipped into a depression in the earth. His eyes were almost swollen shut, but he could see and, more important, hear well enough to take himself away from the conflict. There were men in camouflage clothing, and they had fired first. Then a black man and a smaller white man had appeared from the woods, shooting as they came, and three of the hunters had fallen beneath their guns. That was when Lonny ran. He had no idea who was shooting at whom, or why. All he knew was that he had been standing at the precipice, facing the void, and now he had been offered the chance of living. When he was sure that he was unobserved, he made his break from the woods.

The night gave him cover as he ran, and the sounds of gunfire receded. He realized that he was heading east, away from his home and toward the main road. He needed help; the men had hurt him badly. After the initial burst of adrenaline that had taken him away from them he had slowed down, and he was now aware of the intense pain in his face and in his belly. They had broken something, maybe a rib or two. There was an ache in his innards. Somehow he managed to keep moving, but he felt his strength ebbing, and he forced himself to walk more carefully. He feared that, if he fell, he would never rise again.

He came to the road, and turned left, heading for the town. There were other houses nearby. His nearest neighbors, the Rowleys, always kept a light burning at night, and he could almost see it through the trees. He stumbled on, his right arm stretched across his body as he tried to hold himself together physically and mentally. He heard a vehicle approaching, and in his confused state he struggled to discern the direction from which it was coming. If it was coming from behind, then it might be the men who had tortured him arriving to finish the job they had started. If it came from town, it might be someone who could help him. The pain inside was growing worse. It wasn’t just his ribs that were busted. The men had burst something soft and vital in there, and the stuff of it was spilling out.

Headlights illuminated the trees ahead of him, and he began to weep with relief: The vehicle had come from Pastor’s Bay. He waved his left hand to flag it down as it came around the bend, and it slowed in response. Lonny moved to the side of the road as it pulled up alongside him, and he recognized the driver before the window rolled down.

‘Oh, thank God,’ said Lonny. ‘Thank God it’s you.’

The night air shimmered, the atoms forming themselves into the shapes of a girl and a man. They were holding hands, Selina Day’s left hand clasped tightly in William Lagenheimer’s right. Selina extended her right hand, inviting Lonny to join them. He didn’t want to go with her. He knew where she wanted to take him. They were leaving this earth, all three of them together.

He was about to utter his final words when Chief Allan shot him in the chest.

The man named Frankie was not yet dead. He lay on the ground, the life bubbling redly from him. The other one, Martin, knelt beside him, gently stroking his head as the last breaths forced themselves from Frankie’s body, and his mouth opened as he tried to speak of what he was seeing, and his eyes grew wide with the wonder of it before the life left them forever.

Tommy Morris was slumped at the base of a tree, one cheek lying against the bark, the other shattered by one of the bullets that had killed him. Three men lay dead nearby, their hunting clothes stained dark by blood and shadows. A fourth had been shot in the guts and the legs. He would live if help got to him in time. The fifth man had fled the fighting, and Angel and Louis had let him go.

Martin was injured. His left arm hung uselessly at his side, the radius and ulna shattered by shotgun pellets. He did not weep over the body of the young man that he had killed, although his face was a mask of grief. He got to his feet, and looked for the first time at Angel and Louis.

‘They’re with me,’ I said.

‘There’ll be questions to answer,’ said Martin.

‘Not by them,’ I said.

‘Then tell them to get out of here. That’s all I owe them.’

Without another word, Angel and Louis left us. My vision was still blurred at the edges, but my balance was improving. The pain in my ear was no longer as severe, and I could almost stand without swaying.

‘Which one of you hit me?’ I asked.

‘We all did,’ he said.

‘You worked Lonny Midas over pretty good as well.’

‘I did what I had to do. And I thought his name was Randall Haight.’

‘Randall Haight’s dead. A man named Lonny Midas killed him and took his place.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he didn’t want to be who he was anymore. Because he didn’t know who he was anymore.’

‘They’ll find him,’ he said, then corrected himself. ‘We’ll find him.’

‘Assuming he lives long enough after that beating.’

‘I did what I had to do,’ Martin repeated.

‘For what? Because you thought he had the girl, or just because Tommy Morris told you to do it?’

He thought about the question. His eyes were dull. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Is Martin even your real name?’

‘Does it matter?’

I watched him take a cell phone from his pocket and start to dial.

‘I’m going to look for Lonny,’ I said.

‘No, you stay here.’

‘Go to hell,’ I said, and started to walk away.

‘I told you to stay here,’ said Martin, and his tone made me turn back. The cell phone was now in his left hand, held awkwardly because of the pain, and a gun had taken its place in his right.

‘You’ve spent too long in the darkness, Martin,’ I said.

The gun wavered, then fell.

‘My name’s not Martin,’ he said.

‘I don’t care,’ I replied, and I left him to the shadows.

I found Lonny Midas lying in a ditch by the side of the road. His was the second body that I found. The first was that of the hunter who had run. He lay only a few feet from Midas, just beyond the tree line. Lonny had been shot through the heart at close range, the hunter in the chest and head. Not far from the hunter’s body lay a cheap, matte-finish, carbon-steel Colt Commander. The hunter’s own pistol was still in his hand.

I sat down with my back against rough bark and waited with them until the lights came from the south.

V

In the worst of all men there is a little bit of good that can destroy them.

William Rose (1914-1987)

36

I spent a long night at the Pastor’s Bay Police Department. The local doctor, an elderly gentleman who looked as if he’d graduated from medical school with Hippocrates himself, took a quick look at me and decided that I was suffering from a burst eardrum and a mild concussion. I might have disputed the use of the word ‘mild,’ but it didn’t seem worth the effort. I was advised not to sleep for a while, but as there were lots of questions being asked, and only a limited number of living people available to answer them, sleep wasn’t really an option. So night became morning, and still the questions came. To some I had answers, and to others I had none.

Sometimes I just lied.

At first light, the New Hampshire state police started digging in the garden of Randall Haight’s former residence, alerted by a call from Carroll, the details of which were confirmed by me while I tried to deal with inquiries about an entirely different set of corpses. It didn’t take them long to reach the blocks. Beneath them were Randall Haight and his mother. Decomposition of the bodies in the cool, damp soil had been slowed by saponification. When they were revealed, the Haights’ remains were coated in a waxy adipocere formed from the bodies’ proteins and fats. They resembled insects frozen in their pupal stage.

Then the records arrived from North Dakota, and it was remarked how alike William Lagenheimer and Lonnie Midas had been, even as boys.

I never learned the real name of the FBI man who had been known as Martin Dempsey to Tommy Morris and his associates. Within hours, he was gone from Pastor’s Bay, and in the reports that followed he would be referred to only as an ‘undercover operative.’ He left me with more lies to tell. I told Walsh that I did not know the identities of the two men who had intervened to save Dempsey from Oweny Farrell’s men. In the confusion of all that had occurred, and all that was still happening, I don’t think he cared. It might also have been the case that Engel, who drifted in to listen for a time then drifted out again, knew or suspected the answer to the question already, and took the view that the truth would only complicate an already troublesome situation. Dempsey was alive only because of Louis’s and Angel’s intervention, and the one thing that could have made Engel’s life worse at that moment was the presence of a dead FBI man in Pastor’s Bay.

Finally, a temporary halt was called to the questions. The doctor came back and examined me again. He gave me some more painkillers and told me that it was probably okay for me to sleep now. I told him that I was going to sleep anyway, whether he thought it was advisable or not, because I couldn’t stay awake any longer, and if I never woke up again I wouldn’t be sorry. If Engel hadn’t followed him into the room, I’d have curled up on the floor right there and then with my jacket for a pillow. Instead, I drew on the last of my energy to keep my head clear.

Engel bore the weary expression of a man who had held on to his stocks for a little too long, and had watched them plummet just as he had hoped to cash them in. All that he had left was junk. Tommy Morris was dead, and all his knowledge had died with him. Engel’s undercover man was out of the game, and was a prime candidate for an extended period of therapy. If my head hadn’t been aching so badly I might almost have felt sorry for Engel, but, as it was, his undercover agent was one of the reasons that my head was aching to begin with. Since he was no longer around to blame, I was happy to let Engel carry the can.

‘Hell of a mess to clean up,’ I said.

‘I’ve had a lot of practice,’ he replied, then added, ‘You’re lucky to be alive.’

‘I’ve had a lot of practice too.’

Engel took a notebook from his pocket and opened it to a blank page. He laid a gold fountain pen beside it.

‘I’ve finished the initial debriefing of Martin Dempsey,’ he said.

‘I hope you took his gun away. I don’t think he’s too sure about where it should be pointed.’

‘He’s been deep for a long time. To be good at it, you have to subsume your old self in a new identity. It can be hard to restore it again, but I’m confident that he will.’

‘Is that part of your speech for the press conference? It sounds trite enough.’

‘You could always sue the federal government for the injuries you’ve received.’

‘I’ll add them to the list,’ I said. ‘The FBI already owes me a family.’

In what probably passed for a gesture of contrition, Engel closed his notebook without having written a word.

‘Six men died in that initial confrontation: five at the scene, and one more on his way to the hospital. Francis Ryan was killed by Dempsey before the real shooting began, and Dempsey says that he also fatally wounded one of his attackers. You didn’t have a weapon. Tommy Morris died at the hands of Farrell’s killers. That leaves three men unaccounted for. Dempsey says that he didn’t see anyone else clearly, but he was aware of figures in the forest who might have taken down the remaining shooters. You have anything to add to that?’

‘Nothing except my grateful thanks to those involved.’

‘I figured you’d say that. You tell your hired gunmen to stay out of the state for a time. I’d also advise them against visiting bars in Dorchester, Somerville, and Charlestown. You never know how word spreads in these cases.’

‘Which raises an interesting question,’ I said. ‘How did Tommy Morris find out about Randall Haight, or Lonny Midas as we now know him? Somebody leaked the substance of the interview with him, otherwise Morris and your confused operative wouldn’t have ended up pummeling him in a chair. Were you responsible? Was it a calculated gamble to make Tommy trust Dempsey more?’

‘It wasn’t us,’ said Engel.

‘You’re sure?’

‘I have no reason to lie to you. The operation is ended.’

‘That’s not good enough. Somebody in that room told. Either deliberately or inadvertently, the information about Randall Haight’s confession was leaked to Morris. I didn’t do it. Aimee didn’t do it. That makes it someone on your side: one of the cops or agents in that room, or someone else who was subsequently made aware of what had been said.’

‘Well, the answer to that question may emerge in the next stage of the investigation, namely: Who killed Midas and the last gunman? They were both shot with the same weapon, left at the scene. It was an unregistered firearm, but we’re going to run ballistics matches on it. I have to ask: Were your dubious angels responsible?’

‘No.’

‘They wouldn’t lie to you?’

‘No, they wouldn’t. They also prefer not to leave guns lying around. They’re evidence, whatever way you look at it.’

‘Maybe Farrell sent a backup, just to be sure,’ said Engel. ‘We’ll ask around. For now, an operation that started half a decade ago is nothing but dust: years of effort for no result. Maybe if you weren’t such a lone wolf we could have got to Lonny Midas in time to use him as bait. We could have been waiting for Morris when he came.’

‘You’re forgetting that you had an agent in place all the time. It seems kind of harsh to put the blame on my shoulders when all Dempsey had to do was pick up a phone.’

‘Morris kept him out of the loop on this, right until the end.’

‘Maybe he didn’t trust him so much after all.’

‘We’ll never know.’

‘Right. And Anna Kore is still missing. You forgot to mention her, but then she was never a major concern of yours, was she?’

‘We’re going to search Randall Haight’s property – my mistake, Lonnie Midas’s property, given what we’ve now learned about him. It’s possible that he might have had an accomplice. Right now, it’s the best lead we have.’

‘Allan gave him an alibi,’ I said.

‘I know that. Do you have any reason to doubt it?’

I took out my cell phone, opened the message folder, and showed him the anonymous missives about Chief Allan. He read through them, then handed the phone back to me.

‘Why didn’t you mention this before?’

‘I tend to be careful about potential slanders. I prefer to look into the possible truth of them before I go disseminating their substance.’

‘And what did you discover?’

‘Chief Allan has a girlfriend in Lincolnville. She’s young, and she has a child. If Allan is the father, then she was either barely legal when she became pregnant, or not legal at all if he was having sex with her for any length of time before she conceived.’

‘When did you discover this?’

‘Just yesterday, but then it was a day of discoveries for all of us.’

‘You have a name for the girl?’

I gave it to him, along with the address of the apartment building and the number of her car’s license plate.

‘And your thinking is that Chief Allan is a man with a taste for young women, in a town where another young woman has gone missing?’

‘That’s the thinking of whoever has been sending these messages.’

‘You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you? We’ll talk with Allan. We’ll get a warrant to search his house as well.’

‘She’s not at his house,’ I said.

Engel raised a quizzical eyebrow.

‘Dubious angels,’ I explained. ‘If Allan does have her, then she’s someplace else.’

Engel thought for a moment.

‘All right. Anything else, while you’re unburdening yourself of secrets?’

‘One more thing: Allan made a call from a pay phone at the gas station on Main in Lincolnville at 8:34 p.m. yesterday.’

‘Just before a lot of men with guns descended on Pastor’s Bay,’ said Engel.

‘It would be interesting to know who he called.’

‘Wouldn’t it? You know, you might have made a good cop if you’d stuck with it, if you’d had the self-discipline and the ability to tame your ego. Instead you’re a mercenary who withholds information and makes bad judgment calls.’

A horse-faced woman wearing a blue FBI windbreaker entered the room, a younger, preppy-looking guy hovering behind her with a gun at his waist. Engel nodded at them and stood. His mouth formed a moue as he looked down on me.

‘You should leave while you still can, Mr. Parker, before somebody takes it into his mind to put you under arrest. You didn’t behave well here. None of us did, but you in particular have done nothing to enhance your reputation.’

I didn’t argue with him.

37

Chief Allan couldn’t be found. His cell phone rang out, and there was nobody home when Engel, accompanied by Gordon Walsh and two state troopers, paid a call to his house. His truck wasn’t in the drive either, so his license-plate details and a description of his vehicle were passed to both local and state forces, as well as to police in the contiguous states, the border patrol, and Canadian law enforcement. Walsh visited the apartment building in Lincolnville with a female state trooper named Abelena Forbes, and Mary Ellen Schrock admitted that she had been seeing Allan, but told Walsh and Forbes first that she was eighteen then, on reflection, seventeen when their sexual relationship began. Forbes asked her if she was sure of this, and she said that she was, but both Forbes and Walsh believed that she still was lying. But the girl stuck to her story: Allan had pulled over a car in which she was a passenger, and the driver, a twenty-two-year-old friend of Schrock’s, was found to be marginally over the limit. He was let off with a warning by Allan, who offered to drive Schrock home, although she could not recall the date of the alleged incident. Their relationship had begun a week later. When they asked her if she was aware of any similar relationships in which Allan might have been involved, either now or in the past, she grew agitated and said that she was not. This they also believed to be a lie. When they asked her if Allan had ever mentioned Anna Kore to her, she told them to leave.

At the door, Forbes told her to find someone to look after her child, because when they came back with an arrest warrant they’d be taking her to Gray for questioning. It was Walsh who played good cop, figuring that Schrock was a young woman who responded better to male authority figures, particularly older males. He told her that they didn’t want her to get into any trouble but they needed to talk to Allan, and if she had heard from him then she ought to tell them. He reminded her that there was a girl missing, a girl who might at this very moment be suffering grave torments, who was probably very frightened and at risk of death. All they were asking for was any help that she could offer.

Schrock began to cry. She was, in the end, little more than a child herself. She told them that Allan sometimes used her cell phone when he visited, both to make and to receive calls, but deleted the numbers before he gave the phone back to her. Schrock did not have online access to her account, as she simply topped up her phone credit when necessary. Walsh sought and received permission to access her call records from her service provider when she told him that Allan had used her phone the day before. Walsh made them coffee in the kitchen while Forbes called Engel about the cell phone records on the grounds that the feds could retrieve the relevant information faster than anyone else could. While they sat on the uncomfortable furniture, drinking cheap coffee and looking at the bare walls of Schrock’s dingy, dark apartment, the baby began to cry, and wouldn’t stop until Walsh took a turn with it, whereupon it promptly fell asleep in his arms.

At that point, Schrock admitted that she had first had intercourse with Kurt Allan when she was fifteen.

Both of the numbers called by Allan, and from which he had received calls, were traced to throwaway phones bought in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, as was the final call made from the gas station the previous night. The cell phones in question, though, had not been thrown away. One was found in the pocket of Tommy Morris, and the other in the car used by the hunters to drive to Pastor’s Bay. Allan had not only sold out the man he believed to be Randall Haight; he had also sold out Tommy Morris to his enemies. The apartment building in Lincolnville had previously been owned by a shelf operation in Boston, UIPC Strategies, Inc., and looked after by a property-management company based in Belfast. While the Belfast company still maintained the property, they informed the state police that the building in question had been sold three months earlier by a Boston bank when the company of ownership had defaulted on its loan. That company, UIPC, had been a front for Tommy Morris’s property investments. The trail became clearer: Allan had been one of Morris’s tame cops in Boston and had kept up the connection after moving to Maine, keeping an eye on Morris’s estranged sister while feeding him information that might be of use to him and facilitating the movement of drugs, weapons, and other contraband when required. In fact, it seemed likely that Morris had pointed Allan toward the job in Pastor’s Bay in the first place. In return, Morris paid him a retainer, and eventually gave his girlfriend and his child a place to live. But as Morris’s problems had mounted so Allan’s cash supply had been cut off, and his new family was no longer able to live free, or at a reduced rent, on Morris’s dime. The disappearance of Anna Kore had provided Allan with an opportunity to make some money off Tommy Morris’s scalp, and so he had lured him to Pastor’s Bay, baited his trap with Randall Haight, and then informed Oweny Farrell’s crew of where Morris could be found.

A subpoena was immediately sought for access to Allan’s own cell phone records. The previous night, shortly after nine p.m., he had received a call to his cell phone from a previously unknown number. Foster, the Pastor’s Bay officer who had officially been on duty that night, confirmed that when he returned to the station at 9:10 p.m., Allan was gone. The phone used to make the call to Allan had not been found, but through a process of triangulation the source of the call was narrowed down to the woods near Lonny Midas’s home. Attempts to trace Allan by ‘pinging’ his cell phone proved fruitless, just as they had for Anna Kore’s phone. If Allan was still in possession of his cell phone, he had switched it off and removed the battery.

Allan’s truck wasn’t found by the state police or the feds but by a sixteen-year-old boy and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend who had driven to a coastal lookout called Freyer’s Point in order to watch the sun set and enjoy a little quality time together. They spotted a vehicle in the woods as they approached the lookout, and not caring to engage in acts of intimacy when someone might be watching, decided to turn back and find somewhere more private. The boy saw that the driver’s door was open. Concerned, he went to take a look, and thought that he recognized Chief Allan’s truck. Rumors had already begun to spread around Pastor’s Bay that the chief was missing, so the boy called 911. The state police and the feds descended and found two cell phones in the glove compartment: Allan’s own, and the one that had been used to call him from the woods. To the police and the FBI, it seemed that Allan had fled. It was only when $10,000 in twenties and fifties was found hidden beneath the spare tire that they began to reconsider their assessment.

Alongside the money and the phones, tied up in a blue plastic bag and freshly laundered, were Anna Kore’s blouse, skirt, and underwear.

38

I missed the furor caused by the discovery of Allan’s truck. Once Engel and Walsh had consented to let me leave the station house, although not the environs of Pastor’s Bay, I went to the disturbingly low-key bed-and-breakfast inn off Main Street operated by the twin sisters of uncertain age, and asked for a room. I was in no state to drive. My perforated eardrum was still causing me pain, although the feelings of nausea and vertigo had almost gone, but I was exhausted and my head ached. When I arrived at the door of the B and B, my clothes caked with dried mud, I expected to be told to find a tolerant motel or sleep in my car. Instead, the sisters, who answered the door together dressed in identical pale-blue dresses, showed me to their largest room ‘because it has a bath.’ They pointed out the robe in the closet and told me to leave my dirty clothes in a bag outside my door. They asked if I wanted something to eat, or a pot of coffee, but all I wanted to do was sleep. Their kindnesses were offered in an unsmiling, matter-of-fact way that made them all the more affecting.

I slept from noon until after four. When I woke, there were three messages on my phone. I hadn’t even heard it ring. One was from Angel, pointing out in the most discreet way, without mentioning any names, that they hadn’t been able to remove the tracking device from Allan’s car before leaving town, and maybe I might like to see about rectifying the problem. He also advised me to check my email.

The second message had been left by Denny Kraus’s attorney, informing me that the judge had just decided that Denny was mentally incompetent to stand trial, based on Denny’s proposed solution to the whole problem of the killing of Philip Espvall.

‘Look,’ Denny had apparently told the judge that morning, his face a picture of reasonableness, ‘I’ll just get another dog…’

The third message, which reduced some of the benefits that my rest had brought, came from Gordon Walsh, ordering me to return his call as soon as I received his message, or face the direst consequences. He hadn’t left me much choice, so I dialed his number and let his wrath wash over me. In between calling me every kind of asshole under the sun, he let me know about the interview with Allan’s girlfriend and told me that Allan’s truck had been found, along with a sum of money and clothing similar to that worn by Anna Kore when she disappeared. The tentative assumption the cops were now operating under was that, in addition to double-crossing Tommy Morris by selling him out to his enemies, Allan had also provided a false alibi for Midas. Both men had colluded in the abduction of Anna Kore, and Allan was now a suspect in Midas’s murder, killing him in order to cover his tracks when Tommy Morris failed to do the job for him, then killing Oweny Farrell’s last surviving gunman as well just to be sure. The truck was already being forensically examined, which meant that, if the job was done well, the tracker would be found, and whatever trouble I’d been in up to now would be as nothing compared with what would follow. A fingertip search of both the Midas and Allan properties was also under way.

Walsh then called me an asshole some more, and informed me that Mrs. Shaye had admitted to sending the series of anonymous text messages about Allan to my phone. She told the cops that she’d known about Allan’s relationship with Schrock for some time, based on conversations that she’d overheard between Allan and his then wife, and subsequently between Allan and the girl. While she said that she hadn’t necessarily connected Allan to Anna Kore’s disappearance, she still didn’t feel that he was a suitable person to be involved in such an investigation or, indeed, to be the chief of police. My arrival had given her the opportunity to alert someone to her boss’s indiscretions, and she had taken it. She apologized for any trouble she’d caused, and for not being more open in her approach. She had tendered her resignation from the department but it had been declined, at least while the investigation into Anna’s fate continued.

Walsh then called me an asshole one last time, just in case I hadn’t been listening closely, and warned me that I still wasn’t to leave Pastor’s Bay until he’d had an opportunity to call me an asshole some more in person, and maybe see about having my license permanently rescinded this time.

‘Asshole,’ he said, in conclusion, before hanging up. Even after the substance of the preceding conversation, he managed to make it sound fresh.

There was a basket outside my bedroom door. My clothes, now cleaned and folded, were inside, along with two fresh scones wrapped in a napkin. I showered again, and ate one of the scones while I dressed. I turned on my laptop, but the Internet service for the B and B was password-protected. There was nobody around when I went downstairs, so I left a note to say that I wasn’t checking out yet, and used the second key on my door fob to lock the front door behind me.

The news trucks were back with a vengeance on Main Street, and not just the locals either, while the parking lot of the municipal building was jammed with official vehicles. Danny was still behind the counter at Hallowed Grounds. He was playing the last Roxy Music CD, so he should have been wearing a tuxedo with his bow tie undone instead of a T-shirt featuring the original cover of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

‘You don’t look so good,’ he said.

‘In this case, appearances don’t deceive,’ I replied. ‘Mind if I check my e-mail?’

‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘I’m about to close up, but you take your time. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do first, so I’ll be here for a while.’

I took a seat at a corner table. Without asking, Danny brought me coffee.

‘On the house,’ he said. ‘Hear you were involved in what went down last night.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Still no sign of Anna Kore?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘They’re saying Chief Allan might have taken her.’

‘That on the news?’

‘I don’t watch the news, but if people are talking about it then it soon will be.’

He locked the front door, turned the sign to CLOSED, and started cleaning up behind the counter. I checked the local news sites and found Allan’s photo on all of them. He was now officially a suspect in Anna Kore’s disappearance, but speculation abounded that he might have committed suicide, or made it appear that he had done so.

I logged in to my e-mail account. There was a Yahoo message with Angel’s distinctive ‘777’ tag on the temporary address. It contained a new cell phone number, along with the words ‘necessary evil.’ I called it from my own cell. I wasn’t worried about the number being traced back to Angel and Louis. That cell phone would be in pieces by the end of the day.

‘You get the tag from the truck?’ he asked.

‘Have you seen the news?’

‘That’s what concerns us. Pity. It was a nice piece of equipment. We’ll erase everything, clear the tracks.’

‘Send the record of Allan’s journeys to me first,’ I said.

The GPS program automatically recorded the route taken by the trace vehicle. It also allowed for timings to be retained, so that it was possible to figure out how long the subject had spent in any given location.

‘If your laptop is subpoenaed, it’ll be an admission of guilt. Without it, you have deniability.’

‘Send it anyway,’ I said. ‘I lost deniability a long time ago.’

After about fifteen minutes, the record from the tag came through as a series of maps. Angel had separated each journey Allan had taken into a series of files, with the dates and timings recorded beneath. The trips themselves appeared as red lines on the maps.

If nothing else, the trip record confirmed that Allan had killed Lonny Midas and the unknown gunman. It showed him leaving the Pastor’s Bay Police Department at 9:08 p.m. and traveling to the spot at which the bodies had later been found before heading back to the outskirts of town, where he waited for the alarm to be raised.

Allan’s final trip, taken shortly before eleven a.m. that day, followed a route from the municipal building in Pastor’s Bay and west out of town, but Allan’s home lay south, across the causeway. According to the timings, his truck had remained at a point on Red Leaf Road for two hours before continuing southwest to its final resting place at Freyer’s Point.

I opened the white pages and did a reverse address search for Red Leaf Road. It came up with three names. Two of them I didn’t recognize; one of them I did. I clicked on the name, noted the number of the house, and did a Google map search for the address. When I had it, I compared its location on Google to the point on the map where Allan’s truck had stopped for an hour.

They were the same.

Allan’s last trip had included a stop at the home of Ruth and Patrick Shaye.

39

The Shaye house was set back from Red Leaf Road behind a line of maturing silver birches, now denuded by the fall winds. It was a large, three-story dwelling, and had been freshly painted with off-white paint, probably during the summer. There were planter boxes on the sills of the upper and lower windows filled with hardy green shrubs, and the garden had been planted with winter flowers and perennials: cardinal flowers and larkspur, comfrey and obedient plants. The lawn grass bore signs of patching, although the old and new growths would soon be indistinguishable, and the boundaries of the beds were marked with house bricks painted white. Fresh gravel had been laid on the drive. It was all very neat and clean, the kind of house that forces its neighbors to step up to the plate and not allow their own properties to fall into neglect.

Before leaving Pastor’s Bay, I had checked to see if Mrs. Shaye and her son were still at the municipal building. They were: Patrick I could see in the parking lot, and Mrs. Shaye was working behind the main desk. I called Walsh along the way, but his phone rang a couple of times and then went to voice mail. I figured he’d rejected the call when he saw the number. I left a message telling him what I knew – that Allan had stopped off at the Shaye house before vanishing – then turned my phone to silent. It didn’t necessarily mean much when I heard myself speak aloud what I knew for Walsh’s benefit. There were lots of reasons that Allan might have visited the Shaye house. After all that had taken place the night before, there had probably been a certain amount for everyone to discuss.

But two hours was a long time, especially when there were so many bodies on their way to the M.E.’s office in Augusta.

I parked my car on the road beneath the trees instead of driving directly onto the property. There was no response from the house when I entered the empty front yard, the gravel crunching loudly under my feet. I didn’t ring the doorbell but took a narrow path to the left that cut between a high green hedge and the side of the house. There were two windows in that wall, one at the living room and the other at the kitchen, but I could see nobody inside, and a red door blocked access from the path to the rear of the property. It was closed but not locked. I turned the handle and it opened easily.

The back yard bore no resemblance to the front. Here there was no grass; the area around the kitchen door was roughly paved with heavy concrete slabs upon which sat two iron lawn chairs and an iron table, the dark gray of the metal showing through the yellowing paint work. Beyond was an area of pitted dirt in which pools of dirty rainwater glistened, the oil on their surface like a series of polluted rainbows. Two cars and a truck stood in varying stages of cannibalization beneath the bowed roof of a long single-story garage. The contagion of filth and neglect had even infected the back of the house itself, which had not been painted when the front and sides were tackled, and from which white flakes peeled like bad skin. The windows were all masked with drapes, except at the kitchen, where the sink was stacked high with dirty crockery. A network of washing lines ran across the yard, and from them hung drying sheets, carefully positioned so that there was no danger of the sheets dragging along the filthy ground beneath. They swayed gently in the breeze. I tried the kitchen door, but it did not open. All seemed quiet within, yet I found myself reluctant to make any unnecessary sound, as though, like a character in some old fairy tale, I might wake a slumbering presence by my incaution.

I walked to the garage, avoiding the puddles along the way. It effectively formed the back wall of the property. The thick hedge at either side of the yard came to an end where the garage began, and tendrils of it had already begun to seek purchase on the walls. The two cars inside were relatively new, or at least I could see how they might yield parts of value, but the truck was a wreck. Its windshield was gone and its side windows were broken. The hood was raised, most of the exposed engine was rusted, and most of what wasn’t rusted was absent entirely. The truck had a dented cap back, and was parked so that the rear was flush with the garage wall.

And yet its tires were inflated, and there were marks on the concrete where it had recently been moved.

The garage might once have been used to house animals, for the three vehicles were separated by wooden walls, although the pens looked too wide even for cattle. I searched for indications on the back wall where pens had been removed to create the wider spaces, but could find none. I slid along the side of the truck, my jacket catching on rusted metal and splintered wood. Even before I reached the back wall, I could see that it was newer than the rest of the building. At some point it had been repaired or replaced. I went back outside and tried to gauge the distance between the inner wall and the outer walls. The angle made it hard to judge, but it seemed to me that they didn’t quite match. There was a space behind the new wall. It was narrow, probably barely wide enough for a man to turn around inside, but it was there.

I took a closer look at the truck and saw that the hand brake had been set. I was opening the door to release it when something pink caught my eye on the floor behind the front left wheel. It was a small piece of fiberglass insulation batt, used between interior walls and floors for noise control and to prevent heat from escaping. I took my little Maglite from my pocket and shined it on the floor, and then inside the cap. There were more of the batts here, still in their packaging, and all with a high R-value indicating their resistance to heat flow. The higher the R-value, the greater the insulating power, and this stuff had an R-value in the thirties, almost as high as one could go.

I released the hand brake and pushed the truck forward. It was heavy, but it moved easily on its tires. When I had pushed it about six feet, I reapplied the brake and returned to the back wall. A painted square steel door, three feet to the side, had been expertly fitted into the brickwork at the point where the back of the truck had met the wall, its lines almost as difficult to distinguish as the separation between the old and new grass on the front lawn. A smaller panel was inset midway down the left side of the door. It lifted up to reveal a handle. There was no key. There didn’t have to be. After all, who was going to move a dilapidated truck in a run-down shed for no good reason?

The first thing I saw when I opened the door was a ladder. It lay against the interior wall, and beside it was a trapdoor, similar in size to the first, but this time set into the ground. It was secured, but only with a heavy lock and hasp. Beyond it I could see a pair of small air vents. A larger vent in the roof let in sunlight and air.

‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Can anybody hear me?’

After a couple of seconds, a girl’s voice sounded faintly beneath my feet.

‘I can hear you. Please help me! Please!’

I knelt beside the first vent. ‘Anna?’

‘Yes, I’m Anna! I’m Anna!’

‘My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private detective. I’m going to get you out, okay?’

‘Okay. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.’

‘I won’t, but I have to find something to break the lock. I’m not going to go without you, I promise. I just need a minute.’

‘Hurry, just hurry!’

I went back into the garage and found a crowbar, then set to work on the lock. It took a couple of minutes, but eventually it broke and I opened the trapdoor.

The cell was about six feet deep and roughly square. Anna Kore was chained to the eastern wall. There was clear plastic sheeting on the ground beneath her, and a slop bucket in the corner. She wore sneakers, oversized jeans, and a man’s sweater, and had wrapped her upper body in a blanket to ward off the cold and damp, despite the layers of insulation that had been laid into the walls and on the ground under the sheeting. She had a small battery-powered lamp for illumination, and there were magazines and paperback books scattered around her. She raised her arms to me.

‘Get me out!’

I turned to get the ladder, and heard a sound from outside. It was a vehicle approaching, and then the engine died and all was quiet again.

‘What is it?’ called the girl. ‘Why aren’t you coming to get me?’

I went back to the edge of the trapdoor. ‘Anna, you have to stay quiet. I think they’re here.’

She gave out a little mew of fear. ‘No, don’t go. Get the ladder. It will only take a minute. Please! If you go, you won’t come back, and I’ll be left here.’

I couldn’t stay. They were coming. As I moved away, Anna Kore began screaming, the noise carrying up from below and echoing off the walls, and I did something that broke my heart: I closed the trapdoor upon her. Her cries grew muffled, and when I climbed back into the garage I could not hear them at all. The breeze had picked up, and the sheets billowed and snapped, obscuring my view of the yard beyond. I had hoped that the return of either Mrs. Shaye or her son was a coincidence, but as I was climbing through the connecting door I spotted the little wireless sensor beside the lower hinge. I had broken the circuit by opening the door. It had probably sent a message to one or both of their cell phones, and so they had known that someone was on their property.

I had just reached the hood of the truck when the first shot came, blowing a hole through one of the sheets and blasting the wall to my left with shotgun pellets. The second shot struck the hood and knocked away the supporting rod. I saw a figure in overalls moving between the sheets, and caught a glimpse of Pat Shaye’s face as he pumped the shotgun and took aim for a third time. I threw myself to the ground and started shooting.

The bullet took Shaye in the right thigh. He stumbled into one of the sheets, and I saw the form of his body pressed against it. I fired again, and this time a roseate stain bloomed against the white. The third shot brought him to his knees and he dragged the sheet down with him, gathering it around him like a shroud as he fell. The shotgun lay in a puddle beside him as he struggled weakly against the material, the blood and oily water spreading across the whiteness of it.

I heard a woman scream. Mrs. Shaye appeared from the side of the house, and then was lost to me in the billowing of the sheets. Like a movie projected with damaged frames, I saw her move through flickers of white from the corner to the center of the yard, pause for a second as she took in the sight of her son wriggling in his cocoon, then – another white flash, another moment lost – make for the shotgun. I gave her no warning. The bullet struck the house behind her, but when I tried to fire again the gun jammed, and she was almost at the shotgun. I was already looking for cover when Gordon Walsh appeared from the side of the house, his gun raised.

‘Police!’ he said. ‘Put your hands in the air.’

Mrs. Shaye stopped in her tracks. She raised her hands and fell to her knees, but she no longer had any interest in the weapon. She simply inched her way across the yard on her knees until she reached her dying son, and she wrapped her arms around him as he shuddered against her in his death throes. Walsh did not try to stop her.

Only when her son ceased to move did she start to cry.

While Walsh kept an eye on Mrs. Shaye, I raised the trapdoor and let down the ladder into the cell. Mrs. Shaye had confirmed with a nod that both she and her son had keys to all the locks, and I used her set to free Anna from her chain. She climbed from the hole and emerged blinking into the fading light, then sprang at Mrs. Shaye. Her left hand tore a clump of hair from the older woman’s head, and her right raked four parallel cuts down her right cheek before Walsh and I could drag her off. I led Anna into the yard, and her eyes found the shrouded form of Patrick Shaye.

‘Is he dead?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

Anna said something else to me, but I could not understand her words.

‘What did you say?’

‘Don’t leave her down there,’ she repeated. ‘The other girl. Please don’t leave her down there.’

‘What other girl?’ I said

‘She’s in the hole,’ said Anna. ‘I saw her bones.’

And still Mrs. Shaye said nothing, and silent she would remain until they came to take her away.

40

All that we subsequently learned was pieced together from what Anna Kore told us, itself a product of overheard words, snatched sentences, and the words of Pat Shaye when he came to her at night, whispering to her as he touched her. He had taken her in the parking lot, a crime of opportunity made easier by her familiarity with him, but his mother had provided him with an alibi when the police questioned everyone. She had been angry with him, though, Anna had said. They had kept her in the house that first night, and she had heard them arguing.

‘You don’t shit on your own doorstep,’ Mrs. Shaye had told her son. ‘There’ll be questions. They’ll be looking for her.’

But Pat had been overcome with desire because the other girl had died. Anna didn’t know her name, or where she’d come from, but they’d had her for a while: a year, she thought, maybe a little more. That was how they worked, how it worked, because Pat Shaye had needs. Pat Shaye liked little girls, and his mother had come up with a solution: You don’t molest lots of girls, because that’s how you get caught. Instead you just take one, and you use her until she’s too old for your tastes, and then you find another.

And the other girl, the one who has grown too old? Well, you do with her what you do with anything that’s too old and needs to be replaced. You throw it away, or you bury it.

Except the girl had died before her time. Anna didn’t know how, or why. Mrs. Shaye had told her son to give it a rest for a while, to use porn, whatever it took. She was worried about creating a pattern, leaving a trail that could be followed. That was why they always kept the girls for so long.

But Pat had seen Anna Kore, and desire had become action.

Such needs he had, such needs.

He’d tried to rape her that first night, but she’d fought and fought. She’d fought so hard that she’d hurt him, and hurt him badly. Her mother had taught her how to do it, because her mother had lived around violent men. She’d told her daughter that, if it ever came down to it, she had to be as cruel and merciless as she could imagine. The eyes were best, her mother had said. Aim to blind. But Anna couldn’t get close to Pat’s eyes, so she’d gone for the next best thing. She’d gripped and twisted his testicles, digging her nails into them, and she’d injured him down there, leaving him screaming in agony. His mother had been forced to help him from the room, and Anna’s punishment was to be put in the hole, down where the dead girl lay. It hadn’t been used in a while, and the insulation was bad, but they wanted her to know that she’d done wrong, and doing wrong brought consequences. So Pat Shaye had repaired the insulation, and while he worked he told her of all the things that he was going to do to her once he had recovered, of how he was going to rape her for days once the pain went away, maybe even rape her to death and then find another girl, because there would always be other girls.

But then something had happened. When Pat came down to feed her on that last day he was worried, but he still found it in himself to torment her just a little.

‘You were almost rescued, honeybunch,’ he said. ‘The chief came, and I found him snooping. If I hadn’t returned in time, well, who knows? You might have been out of here. So close, uh, honeybunch? So close. Then again, the chief, he might have joined in, because he likes them young. Still, we’ll never know.’

Then he’d touched himself while he stood over her.

‘Almost healed now,’ he said. ‘Another day and I’ll be as good as new, and then we can get to know each other better. It won’t be for long, though. You’ve become a liability, so I’ll have to make it special while it lasts.’

And what had led Allan to the Shaye house? Crumbs of evidence. Literally that: crumbs. There had been traces of cookie crumbs in two of the envelopes sent to Randall Haight, and lodged in the glue on the flaps. The last page of the report, which Allan had probably read only long after the previous night’s killing was done, had suggested cookies or stale cake as a possible source of the organic matter found in the envelope. No hairs, no skin cells, no saliva, no DNA: Pat Shaye had just been a greedy boy nibbling on his mother’s cookies while he worked. Allan hadn’t come to the Shaye house in search of Anna Kore, although he might have been hoping that whoever was sending pictures of naked children and barn doors to Randall Haight might also be responsible for Anna’s abduction. Perhaps also his hunch about the crumbs might have caused long-buried suspicions about Pat Shaye to find concrete form, for on some level they shared the same tastes. So he had gone to the Shaye house, and being a clever man he might have looked at the abandoned truck, at the inflated tires and the marks beside them, and begun to wonder.

That was where Pat Shaye had found him, and he buried his remains in a shallow grave.

The final piece of the puzzle came later, once the investigation into the Shayes began in earnest. The Shayes, it emerged, were nomads of a kind. They had tended not to stay in any one place for longer than three or four years, perhaps to make it difficult to connect the disappearances of young women to them, avoiding the necessity of taking two girls from one particular geographic area. Sometimes they changed their names, Mrs. Shaye using her maiden name of Handley, or Patrick using his middle name of David. They even had different Social Security numbers to go with their various identities, numbers that would now have to be tracked down in case it was not only young girls that the Shayes had killed over the years in order to protect themselves. Then they had arrived in Pastor’s Bay and found that its remoteness suited them, as long as they were prepared to hunt farther afield for their prey. One of Mrs. Shaye’s previous jobs, under the name of Ruthie Handley, had involved showing houses for realtors on a freelance basis, among them the realtor who had sold a home to William Lagenheimer’s mother. Her son had even helped to repair a crack in the siding before the sale went through, and Mrs. Shaye and Mrs. Lagenheimer had got to talking, and, well, some small secrets were shared, because Mrs. Lagenheimer was very lonely, and very sad, and very delusional.

So it was that, some years later, when a man calling himself Randall Haight moved to Pastor’s Bay, the Shayes had been very curious indeed. They had watched him, and they had followed him, and Pat Shaye had visited the empty house in Gorham where his mother had once sat with Mrs. Lagenheimer. They had filed away all that they knew about Randall Haight until it might become convenient to use it against him. At first, they had considered blackmail, because who knew when they might need a little extra money? But when Pat Shaye’s desires became too much for him, and he dragged down into his personal Hades young Anna Kore – a local girl, not a stray or a runaway but someone who was going to be missed – his mother came up with a much better use for the man who claimed to be Randall Haight, and what she knew about Chief Allan’s tastes helped to muddy the waters too. Anything, anything at all, to ensure that her son, her beloved son with his unusual needs, remained above suspicion.

The fingertip search of Lonny Midas’s house also turned up one envelope that had not been handed over to Aimee Price. The postmark identified it as the final communication sent to him, dated only three days earlier and delivered the day before he died. It had probably been intended to make him run at last, and draw the police after him. It was found hidden behind a panel in his closet along with bank statements, share certificates, the money that Lonny had gathered to help him disappear, and a thick journal filled with tiny, near-indecipherable script: Lonny Midas’s testimony, his private attempt to hold on to his identity and his sanity. Later, when the journal’s contents were examined, it would be concluded that the had failed on both counts. After all, he was a man who had believed himself to be haunted by the ghost of the girl who had died at his hands. What else could he be, but mad?

The last envelope Lonny had received contained a photograph of the house in Gorham, and a newspaper cutting about the Selina Day case, along with a printed note. The note read:

‘RANDALL HAIGHT’ IS TELLING LIES.

WHO ARE YOU?