The Silent Hour

11

__________

Quinn Graham arrived just before two, and it didn’t take him long to make me feel like a fool. He was probably in his late thirties, black, with a shaved head and a thin goatee. Not tall but powerful, with heavy arms and a substantial chest.

“So Harrison explained in the first letter that he was a convicted murderer, and you chose not to keep that letter or any that followed it?” he asked about thirty seconds after exchanging greetings.

“That’s right.”

He didn’t shake his head or make a snort of disgust or a wiseass remark. He looked at me thoughtfully.

“Okay. Probably wanted to get it out of your sight. Is that it? Yeah, I don’t blame you for that, but I wish you’d held on to them. It’s a police thing, though. People with experience tend to be more concerned with potential evidence.”

“I know,” I said. “I used to be a police detective.”

“Oh?” he said and gave me more of that stare, as if he were thinking it was no real surprise that I wasn’t still a police detective.

“I remember the letters quite well, though,” I said, “and while I do wish I’d kept them, I’m not sure how much evidentiary value they would have offered.”

“We could have analyzed the language, given it to a profiler. Harrison might have even been crazy enough to incorporate some sort of code.”

All right, I was an idiot. What else to say? I waited for him.

“Well, they’re gone now,” he said. “Nothing to do about that.”

“Exactly.”

“You say you remember them well, so let’s hear what you remember.”

I took him through the sequence as best as I remembered it, offering approximate dates for the letters, describing each message. Then I told him about Harrison’s visit, the simplicity of his request, and the few brief hours I’d invested into working his case.

“Now when you told him off and said you were done,” Graham said, scribbling notes onto a leather-bound legal pad on his lap, “was that in person or on the phone?”

“In person.” I told him about that final meeting.

“Since then, no communication?”

“He mailed a check.”

Graham lifted his head. “I assume you cashed it?”

I shook my head.

“Did you keep that at least?”

Another shake.

He frowned and scribbled a few more words onto the pad. “So you have no record of your relationship with Harrison? That’s what I’m understanding? No record at all?”

“No, I do not. As I said, I wasn’t expecting it would lead to a meeting like this. I just wanted to end it.”

“So how did it lead to this meeting?” he asked, looking at Ken for the first time. “I’ve spoken to Kenny here, but how is it that the two of you found each other?”

Ken took it from there. I watched Graham, and when Ken explained that he’d been called by Dominic Sanabria, the pencil stopped moving across the pad, and he lifted his head much slower.

“Dominic Sanabria called you three days ago?”

“That’s right. To ask if Lincoln was—”

“I’ve already heard the reason, Kenny. I’m wishing you might have found that information worthy of my attention. I believe I asked that you pass such things along.”

“That was several months ago,” Ken said.

“I don’t recall putting an expiration date on the request.” Graham stared at Ken for a few seconds, then sighed and looked back at his pad. He took his time with it, reading through all of the notes, and then he closed the notebook and set it on the edge of my desk.

“Was supposed to have the day off,” he said. “I decided, well, go in this morning, get a few things done, be gone by eleven. Noon at the latest. Now I’m in Ohio. That’s the way the damn days off always seem to go. You think you only got a few hours, then you’re in Ohio.”

“We could’ve waited,” Ken said.

“Oh, no.” Graham was shaking his big head. “No, this couldn’t have waited. This, boys, this is important.”

“Ken told me he had the sense that Harrison was the focus of your investigation,” I said, trying to prompt a little information.

He was frowning at his notebook on the desk and spoke again without looking at me. “If you were with the police, then you understand what a nightmare this one is, Linc, my friend.”

Apparently Graham liked to dispense nicknames. Too bad there was nobody in the world who called me Linc, and I could tell from Ken’s face that he didn’t go by Kenny, either.

“It’s an awfully cold trail,” I said.

“Not the only problem, Linc. Yes, the trail is cold, but it also starts in Pennsylvania, beautiful Crawford County, over which I have jurisdiction.” He cocked his head and stared at me. “You know what’s in Crawford County? Woods. You know where I’m from? Philadelphia. Now, the woods are nice, sure, but I miss sidewalks. Strange damn thing to miss, but it’s true. I miss my sidewalks.”

He looked from me to Ken and then back as if he were disappointed that we didn’t chime in with our shared love of sidewalks.

“Now I work in Crawford County,” he said, “and the wonderful thing about having a body dug up in the woods in Crawford County is that I get to go to work. Bad thing is that in this case, all of the work to be done seems to be in Ohio. That limits me. I’ve been out here before, spent a few weeks driving back and forth after the body was ID’d, but it’s a pain in the ass. An investigation that requires I spend time in Ohio when my superiors would like me to be spending it in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which does in fact pay my salary.”

He sighed again. “And, you’re right, the trail is cold. Twelve years cold, and the people who left it, well, they’re a different sort from you and me. A handful of people who knew them suggested that Joshua might have been suicidal, that he’d been depressed and secretive toward the end. You know what else those people had to say? That if Cantrell actually committed suicide it’s possible his wife would have just buried his body, lit a few candles, and marched on. A different sort, yes, they were. Ah, but the family ties? Oh, the family ties, boys, they are tremendous. What I’ve got is a new-age, holistic healer of a sister to a Mafia hit man. How about that? You ever heard anything better?”

He turned his wide eyes to Ken. “Dominic Sanabria called you.”

“Yes.”

Graham’s head swiveled toward me. “And he visited you.”

“Yes.”

“Keeps careful tabs, doesn’t he?” Graham’s eyes were on his notebook again, and he was frowning, as if he were reading right through the leather cover and didn’t like what he read.

“Harrison sent you a check after you told him to get lost,” he said. “That’s really something. Why give up the money to a guy who said he didn’t want it?”

“He was real worked up about giving me a retainer.”

“Or maybe his motivations lay elsewhere. Like keeping open that door of communication that he’d been knocking at over several months.” He leaned back. “What do you think, Linc? Could we open that door back up?”

“I was pretty happy to extract myself from this situation,” I said. “Not as happy to plunge back into it. What’s your idea? I’m supposed to play a game with this guy?”

“I love a good game, Linc. That is one hell of an idea. I’m really not sure yet. I’ll need a few days to think on it. But I might ask you to play, yes.”

I frowned. “Look, Graham, I understand the importance of what you’re doing here, but if you expect me to contribute, then I’d like to know more about the situation. You still haven’t said why you’re so interested in Harrison.”

“He lived with the victim at the time of the victim’s disappearance.”

“That’s it?”

He didn’t answer.

“Because I don’t think that’s enough. In fact, from what I’ve seen, there are plenty of other people worth your time and attention. Like the parolee who had a history of association with Sanabria, went to live with the Cantrells, and died soon after he left.”

He nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, Bertoli’s part of it, sure.”

“Or her brother, shit, that guy—”

“Oh, yes, him, too.” Still nodding.

“Seems to me there’s more potential in those two areas than with Parker Harrison.”

He stopped nodding, made a pained face, and then said, “No, I’m afraid I can’t join you there. I was with you right up till the end, though.”

“Why? What do you see in Harrison that makes him stand out from the pack?”

“I have my reasons.”

“I’m going to need to have them, too, Graham, if you want my cooperation.”

He was studying my face, and he kept his eyes hard on mine when he finally spoke again. “Only one of those parolees you mention ever had any direct contact with Dominic Sanabria,” he said. “That was Parker Harrison. He made half a dozen phone calls to Sanabria in the same week the Cantrells left their home.”

“Looking for information, maybe. Trying to track them down, just like he is now.”

“Perhaps. Then there was a twelve-year gap between calls, which ended not long ago, when Harrison made two more calls to Sanabria. That was in December, Linc. Same time Harrison contacted you.”

“Following up with him, seeing if he’d heard the news,” I said.

“Most interesting thing about the timing of those two calls? Harrison made them a day after the body was discovered.”

“So?”

Graham smiled, his teeth brilliantly white against his dark skin. “Took a while to identify the corpse, Linc. Harrison didn’t call after the ID. He called after the body was found. A body that, at the time, was an unidentified pile of bones in another state.”

I didn’t respond to that.

“Let me ask you something,” Graham said. “When you talked to Harrison, he say anything about being part Shawnee? Talk about his, uh, culture?”

“Yes.”

“Not surprised to hear that,” he said. “The folks at Harrison’s prison told me he did a lot of reading on the subject. A lot of study.”

“That has some significance to you?”

He nodded but didn’t speak.

“Well?”

Silence.

“Graham, I’m going to say this again: If you want me to cooperate in whatever game you cook up for Harrison, I’ll need to know everything that you do.”

“If it leaks,” he said, “it jeopardizes an already weak investigation. That cold trail we keep talking about, it’s not making this thing easy.”

“It’s not going to leak,” I said. “Not from this room.”

He looked at Ken, waited for the nod of agreement.

“We held one detail back from the report on the discovery of Cantrell’s body,” Graham said. “A detail of potential value.”

“What is it?” I said.

“Joshua Cantrell was buried in a grave that was about four feet deep, lined with bark, and laid carefully in an exact east-to-west fashion. Then poles were placed over his body, more bark laid over the poles, and dirt piled on top.” He looked at Ken, then back at me. “Those are all elements of a traditional Shawnee burial.”